Katherine Ballast
This story was published in Devil’s Lake
*** Nominated for Best of the Net by the Editors
The daughter of archeologist Elena Maria Manotti is born in the maternity ward of a field hospital in Djibouti where her mother had followed the trail of Roman General Aulus Tarquitius, who had turned his army the wrong way out of Alexandria 2,500-something years ago without a look back, blood mad, burning his way down the Red Sea and rocketing for the Horn of Africa before he and his wayward legions vanished abruptly from the convexity of history. Elena calls the baby Katherine, eponymously for an English Queen the nurses suppose but who knows? After a week of rest, Elena leaves the hospital to rejoin the expedition. Like Tarquitius, she’s never heard from again; the expedition, it’s said, bushwhacked by splinters of Al-Shabaab or collaterally incinerated in a US drone strike.
Sally Ballast, a young Peace Corps volunteer from the Pacific Northwest, adopts Katherine at eighteen months. Sally’s surreptitious desire for a child, hidden even unto herself, was rooted in a book she had read, alone in her cot, wrapped in mosquito netting, the butt of a flashlight stuck in her mouth like a candle, the sound of the village chortling in darkness—Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: “The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.”
So it is that Sally brings Katherine out of Djibouti to the Clinton district of inner southeast Portland. Sixteen years later, Katherine graduates from Cleveland High School and peripatetically joins the workforce: barista (Second Cup), server (Hopworks), florist (Maggie’s), stripper (Dolphins II), veterinarian’s assistant (Paws on 42nd, now defunct). Soul-sick, Katherine finds herself in the employ of the Carrey family, who live in an eruption of handcrafted architecture—three stories of bamboo and red cedar flooring, walls of glassy marble—high on Skyline Road. Ostensibly, Katherine’s the nanny to little Jakob and his sister Cynthia, but her function is to the sexual service of Mrs. Carrey, a job which, after six sweaty weeks of the best pay, she quits, stamping her foot on the bright and buffered pavement of the Carrey’s four-car garage, and declaring aloud to a glandular and blinking Mrs. Carrey that she’ll enroll in college come fall, which until this point Katherine has always dismissed as dismally quotidian if not outright blasé.
Katherine is twenty-seven, a junior, despondent and floundering, a sufferer of bad dreams and indigestion, a hater of her face and the boys and the girls who ask if they can make her better by way of dinner and drinks. She knows life is bound to improve, she’d just like to know when. It’s winter and raining. The classroom, packed with students, smells of wet dog and shoes, cigarettes and coffee and fog. I’ve scrawled my first name on the chalkboard under the course title, Writing as a Critical Inquiry, which I had no hand in naming. Katherine unwraps the bright blue headscarf from around her neck, cheeks so red from the cold they appear burnt, shoves her arm into the air and says: “Why was I born such a happy, healthy baby?”