In Which Childhood Is A Kind Of Old Age
Slaughterhouse
by MELISSA TUCKMAN
A very old woman in a babushka scarf was standing at the bottom of the staircase. As I descended the last few steps leading down to the street from the elevated subway, the old woman made eye contact, raised one finger, and addressed me.
"I just got off the train," she said, preening. "Would you take me to the Eun Sung Poultry Market?"
Her accent was Eastern European, maybe Polish. I knew Eun Sung, a slaughterhouse, which I tried to avoid, because it smelled like chicken shit and bird carcasses. Sometimes the stench was strong enough to impel a gag reflex. I was pretty sure that Eun Sung was owned by Koreans. The only customers I'd ever seen there were Latino, which meant, in my neighborhood, mostly Puerto Rican. Why had this old Polish woman come here -- from a distance, on the train -- to visit a foul-smelling, Korean-owned poultry market, which catered to local Puerto Ricans?
My parents were not the kind of parents who taught me to assume a disproportionately respectful attitude towards women or the elderly. I do not "reach out"; I am not an altruist. Furthermore, I was on my way home, that afternoon, after a long day teaching seminars. It was the beginning of the semester, and still very hot. I did not "want" to help this frail old woman to complete her enigmatic errand. But the streets in my neighborhood slant at odd angles, which makes it difficult to give clear directions. That must be why I held out my arm and led the woman across the street.
Her hand rested on my crooked elbow, a pose which made me feel like the male half of a couple of Victorian carolers. In silence, we passed by Nail Sensations IV, White Castle, and several barber shops. I walked slowly, letting several seconds elapse between each step. But even at this rate, the woman was soon out of breath. I began to worry that she might suffer some kind of attack. In which case I'd have to call an ambulance and follow her to the hospital. There, the woman might die. Then I'd feel obligated to wait around for her family, and maybe even to break the news of her death. Young, assimilated grandchildren might have questions for me, about their beloved Busha's last moments. Or -- even worse -- I might learn that the old woman had died without any family, that she'd lived her final years alone, without grandchildren or a companion or even a single dear friend to list in her will.
As we passed ABC Family Store, with its racks of knockoff North Face, the woman stopped walking, and unexpectedly spoke.
"My name is Magda," she said. "I've come to bless the chickens."
For a few moments, I imagined that Magda belonged to an un-Googleable religious sect, which was to some degree fringe or cultish, but basically Christian. This esoteric church, I supposed, consisted mostly of elderly widows -- women who weren't sentimental, but who yearned for a sense of purpose. None of the widows were vegetarian or vegan; in fact, they could not imagine a satisfying meal without meat. Yet they believed it was their duty to confer certain formulaic blessings on the souls of all animals. The impassive, ritualistic nature of their benedictions was, I decided, somewhat refreshing, in an era when (in my opinion), we exaggerate the virtue of compassion, if not, to be fair, the abjection of maltreated livestock.
But it turned out that Magda had simply misspoken. As she continued to talk, it became clear that she'd come to buy some chicken. Since she was not a native English speaker, the grammatical confusion was understandable. The substitution of "bless" for "buy" was, of course, more puzzling. However, it seemed possible that in Magda's first language, "bless" and "buy" might be signified by the same word, or homonyms, or words derived from the same root. Or maybe in Magda's mother tongue there was a common expression, according to which one "blesses" an object by exchanging money for it -- an expression which naively captured the whole regressive logic of commodity fetishism, whereby objects and transactions are endowed with magical-spiritual properties. Maybe this expression was so common and so unremarkable in her language, that it had become a dead metaphor, like the phrases "pecking order" and "fly the coop" in English.
Or perhaps "bless the chickens" was Magda's idea of a joke. Despite what some philosophers claim (that childhood is a kind of old age, during which we must accept the views and practices handed down to us by our elders; and that conversely, only in maturity do we experience real mental youth), I believe that I am still young, that I am not old and have never been old, and that therefore I cannot really know whether old people experience (as is commonly believed) lapses in mental clarity or whether, on the contrary, some of their absurdities are intentional, clever -- even lighthearted.
One thing I could not determine was whether Magda intended to buy a live chicken or a carcass. Presumably, she wanted to buy a live animal. Dead chicken (poultry) is available in every grocery store and butcher shop. Then again, I could not imagine Magda transporting a live bird, much less several chickens, back to the train. And I wasn't sure whether Eun Sung even sold live fowl. I couldn't remember seeing anyone walk away from the slaughterhouse with a flapping or clucking chicken, or a pet carrier which might contain one.
But I did not mention any of this to Magda. I didn't want to disappoint her. I didn't want her to think that I considered her foolish or weak. And I guess I also believed that she knew what she was doing. Magda was an immigrant, but she seemed more "native" to Brooklyn than I was. I'd lived in my neighborhood for close to ten years; but my surroundings still remained somewhat mysterious to me. I had noticed the slaughterhouse, inevitably, but had little sense of what went on there. Perhaps Magda's errand was not so unusual. Perhaps Eun Sung attracted Polish widows from throughout the borough, every day. But I'd never noticed them before, because none of them had ever hailed me.
I steered Magda left on DeMott. Eun Sun came into view. Once I read about a luxury condo building, in another neighborhood, which had been built next to a similar poultry market. The condo remained notoriously empty, aside from a few residents who had signed leases during the winter, and who had, by late spring, come to the unhappy realization that their apartments would be seasonally pervaded by the stench of shit and death. But there were no condos in my neighborhood. Eun Sun's only neighbor was an atrocious fish and produce market, which seemed to glean its inventory from the dumpsters of legitimate grocery stores. In front of this business, jutting out onto the sidewalk, were several tables covered with flimsy, inadequate bins, which displayed fish atop piles of ice. The ice melted in the sun, spilling onto the tables, and dripping down to the sidewalk. I wanted to tiptoe around the streaky puddles, seeking out dry spots. But Magda wasn't agile, so we had to walk straight through.
Did the slaughterhouse workers resent this fishy mess? Did the grocery-store workers resent the slaughterhouse smell? Perhaps the grocery and the slaughterhouse were feuding. Perhaps the mess and the stench were constantly escalating, and we passersby were unfortunate civilian casualties in a sensory war which had nothing to do with us and was entirely beyond our control.
The stench from the slaughterhouse was becoming too strong to ignore. Reflexively, I contracted my nostrils. My breathing became more shallow. There was a time in my life during which the world lost its magic. In order to banish certain blind demons, I had to disenchant everything. The demons all vanished, along with every magical spirit. We do not realized how much we need spirits, just to survive. During this period, I could not act, or take pleasure anything. Food, travel, language -- all of it fell with a soft thud. For a while, I took painkillers, despite the health risks and the stigma attached to them, as a kind of compensation for the losses I had incurred. Vicodin kills you a little; you have to tell yourself to breathe. I remembered this feeling as we approached Eun Sung. The odor of death reinvigorates us, in the same way that all strong sense impressions remind us that we are alive. At the same time, in the presence of such a stench, we must breathe more shallowly -- we must kill ourselves a little -- in order not to be too overwhelmed.
Eun Sung's massive, vertical sliding door revealed an unlit garage, filled with long, bracketed shelves crammed with dark cages. Between the bars, beaks, eyes, and feathers were barely visible. The stench was horrible, but Magda didn't flinch. Maybe she couldn't smell it, or had become accustomed to it. Maybe she lived in a world where any expression of disgust is considered unpardonable snobbery. In any case, she began to walk with more energy, now that her destination was in view. In front of the garage, she let her hand drop from my elbow, and thanked me. For a brief, terrible moment, I feared that she was going to offer me money. But instead, she turned towards the cages and entered the darkness.
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