The Bread We Eat in Dreams

How to Raise a Minotaur

When I was young, I was a minotaur.

I grew out of it, of course. You can hardly believe it now, I know, such an upstanding young woman, in a blue suit, with a briefcase. No one with a briefcase can have such a secret. And yet, my horns once pierced the dining room ceiling. You grew out of your obsessions with dinosaurs and primary colors. I grew out of shaggy, bowed legs and hooves like copper clanging. We are not so different.

It is not easy to raise a minotaur. They break everything in sight, instinctively, compulsively. If there is a crystal dish on the table, a minotaur will seize it up and crush it to pieces in her teeth, weeping all the while, helpless to stop herself. It is her nature, and though you ought not to punish her for it, you will, and severely. She will look at you with huge, bovine eyes, uncomprehending, wanting so keenly to please you. That dark stare will sink you in misery, and you will buy her a lollipop. Thus, she will look for sweets after every act of destruction, nose your pockets for sugar, and you will want to hit her, because your amputee grandmother gave you that dish when you graduated from college. Maybe you will hit her. She will greet your slaps with those same cow-eyes, the same trembling, hairy jaw.

Your friends and colleagues will, of course, question your sexuality. A child like that cannot have come from sweet, quiet Dan and Barbara, Caroline and John, Laurence and Janet. What, exactly, have you done to deserve such a changeling in your expensive, honest, Amish-built crib? Rumors will fly: Dan angered his boss by trading on company information on the stock market, and the CEO—faceless demiurge!—punished John with such feats of black magic as men of that order are capable of. Caroline fell in love with a mail-room cretin so hopeless that he could hardly manage the mechanics of mounting her. Laurence, pitiful man, fashioned a complex machine in his basement out of catalog parts so that Janet and her pre-linguistic paramour could achieve simultaneous orgasm, hermetic revelation, and explosive conception while Laurence turned the crank. You will have to answer these suburban accusations with aplomb, a smile, and a proffered cocktail. Your minotaur will be of no help to you as she sits in the corner and devours her dolls. The clock in the hall will tick; she will make plans to eat it later.

In school, the minotaur will be unwelcome and unloved. There will be talk of transferring her to a special needs course. However, your minotaur, her pigtails arranged to hide growing horns, will not be unintelligent. That has never been the issue with such children. In fact, your minotaur will love to read, will devour, quite literally, whole libraries in an insatiable passion for books. She will need glasses by the time she is five, so fervent will her reading be. Of course this is not a generally accepted method of learning, but when your minotaur pipes up at breakfast and lists the attributes of cephalopods in alphabetical order, you will have no doubt of its efficacy. Unfortunately, third grade teachers are rarely so enlightened. When she is discovered with Tolkien halfway down her throat, weeping Elvish declensions, she will be put aside with the other difficult children, in a classroom with no sharp edges. You will be sad, but by that time your other children will be starting to show their talents, their bright blond hair, their eager, attentive faces that never contort in paroxysms of bovine pleasure.

It will not be long before she starts demanding youths and maidens. This, obviously, will present a logistical problem. My advice is to begin with dolls. This will forestall the inevitable. The small minotaur hardly knows what she begs for—it is a desire, a demand which comes from her deepest marrow, her protoplasmic self, her most regressed and atavistic heart. She will be satisfied by plastic and cornsilk and eyes that slide open when the head is tilted. She will rip off their heads in disturbing ways and line her bed with their bodies. You will try counseling, but the Adamic language that you have learned to understand will not be greeted with warmth or empathy by a board of professionals. Best to keep up a steady supply of dolls while such placebos suffice.

With puberty, all things become more difficult. Girls will be girls. One day you will go to tell her to come down to dinner and open the door on the football quarterback entangled in her sheets, an expression of horror and need on his face, which will be buried between her brown, vaguely furry breasts. Parts of him will be in her mouth—she does not yet really know what she wants to do with these youths, much as a dog who finally catches a cat will often just stare at it in confusion. His head did not come off easily, so your minotaur made do with the rest of him. Next week it will be the chess club, all seven of them, kneeling around her in awe, straining towards her, hoping she will chose them to kiss, to taste, to swallow. Of course the quarterback will never tell anyone that he laid a hand on the freak from special ed, and the chess club admits to no acquaintance who cannot master the Lasker-Bauer combination, so for awhile, at least, you will be safe. Until she starts bringing home cheerleaders.

With these girls, the minotaur will be shy. They are everything she is not: shining examples of soccer prowess, after-school activities, 4-H club, even an academic decathlete or two. Girls who love horses, the color pink, boyfriends with red cars, ice cream, getting into college. Your minotaur will ply them home with promises of community service credit, a note on their record about working with the developmentally disabled. In her room she will gawk at them, ask them to pet her, to love her. They will not understand, and will bring her a drink of water or ask her to work extra-hard on her multiplication tables, unable to comprehend her lectures on calculus and probability. When they hug her goodbye, the minotaur will be quite dizzy. Eventually, when one is too beautiful for her to bear, your minotaur will bite her. Perhaps on the shoulder, perhaps on the hand, or the knee. She will not bite hard, at first. The 4-H girl will recoil, but then remember her teacher’s advice not to be shocked at anti-social behavior from such a problematic child. The next time will be harder. Your daughter will know such a thrill when her teeth first touch flesh—something like what you felt the first time you tasted vanilla, ran a mile, held your first child, had an orgasm, all together and all at once. A terrible rightness will fill her blood. The tips of her fingers will tingle, like the first time she ate a book. She will try to cover up her act with a kiss, like the ones she gave the boys. Most of the girls will not understand. Maybe one, maybe two will kiss her back, ashamed but excited, and your minotaur will find other ways to taste those girls—but it will not be as good as biting, and she will know she is not like any other girl, even the girls who are not like other girls.

If you are a perceptive parent, or very well read, you will come to a decision. If you are not, well, you have my pity. You and your spouse will sit down to the kitchen table amid bank bills and health insurance policies and half a pork roast and say to each other: what else can we do? You will draw up plans: plumbing, ventilation, waste removal. The trouble is that, whatever her teachers think, your minotaur is clever, so very clever. It must be a maze, then, you will say to the new cabinets. So that she will not be able to find her way out. You will hollow out your basement, install track lighting, walls, steel doors. Tell the school administration you are sending her to a special institution in Switzerland. They will understand, of course, and clasp your hands with moist eyes. You will build her a bookshelf, its contents carefully rationed. Nothing on demolition, or architecture. A few Greek plays, because you have a sense of humor, after all. Her favorite toys. Her dolls. And the day you lock her in you will tell her you love her, that you only want to protect her. You will hug your child for the last time, and slide the bolt shut.

Years later, when guests come for cocktails and quiche, you will play loud music with a deep bass to drown out the thumping of her fists against the ceiling of her maze, the floor of your living room. You will play something with violin to cover her screaming. When folk ask: didn’t you used to have a daughter? You will say: I don’t know what you mean. We have two sons. That’s all we’ve ever had. Every year on her birthday you will put a cake on the landing. Maybe—I wouldn’t want to speculate—once in awhile, every seven years, say, you’ll send down a girl who loves horses, or a quarterback.

But I stand before you today—do not lose hope. My people are accustomed to this treatment. We do not blame you. I have forgiven my mother; I have forgiven my father. Your child will forgive you. Every minotaur must meet her labyrinth. It is inevitable, like oracles, or cancer. It is possible, just possible, that after you die quietly in bed, your grandchildren all around you, and only a few of them heavy-browed and dark, with glazed eyes and their hair too carefully arranged, as if to hide something, that realtors will come to assess your property. They will open all the doors and windows, air out the hallways. Of course they will discover the basement. They will marvel at the craftsmanship—what love, they will say, what love was put into this thing! And they will slide the steel bolt aside. With flashlights they will venture down the stairs, and one of them—maybe his name will be Thomason, maybe Thaddeus, maybe Theresa. He will realize quickly that he needs help, and unwind a long clew of measuring tape behind him as he ventures into the concentric circles you built for her, so long ago.

And he will find her, standing in the center of the place, near the boiler, naked, tall, her hair long and matted and greasy. She will still be young—the lifetimes of minotaurs are long. Her legs will be thin, but they will be legs. Her skin will be so pale, without the sun, but there will be no fur. Her horns, though, those will not have gone. She will need to wear hats for the rest of her life, like mine. She will be holding a book and reading it, the usual way, even in the dark. She will have met her labyrinth, and passed through it. And she will step forward, toward Thomason or Thaddeus or Theresa, and she will say very clearly and calmly, in a deep, sweet voice:

“I promise, if you take me with you, I will be a good girl.”