They were going to boil Dorothy’s blood. Take it out, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knew you were too thick to really understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York. There were statistics, affidavits. There was a four-color brochure from the clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, printed in three languages. As they waited for the train in the Munich station, Helen studied the pamphlet’s fonts and graphics. A frequent dupe of advertising herself–how many depilatories and night creams had she bought over the years, and at what expense?–Helen understood the significance behind the choice of peaceful, healing blue over charged, emotional red, the softening elegance of the italicized quotes from Adèle de Chavigny, a woman from Strasbourg who had not only survived having her blood boiled but had gone on to live a life of graceful transcendence. There were no concrete images of the clinic itself, no pictures of whatever this boiling machine might look like. Helen imagined huge vats like those in a brewery–wide, clear tubes with viscous, viral blood moving sluggishly in one direction, while bright, animated, healthy blood rushed eagerly back toward the patient. On the roof of the brewery, she imagined enormous chimneys expelling the sweet-sour-smelling residue of defeated disease into the air. Poof, poof, the smokestacks would go, and all the German townsfolk (yes, in her fantasy they were wearing lederhosen and small peaked caps) would look up, proud to know that, in their town, death had been conquered.

“Fairy stories,” Dorothy would have said dismissively, had Helen shared such an idea with her, as she had so often as a child, forever irritating Dorothy with her impractical mind. Helen had been careful not to lob Dorothy’s criticism back at her when she’d announced this latest and most ridiculous plan to save her life. But Dorothy’s response to her own illness had been perversely uncharacteristic from the start.

Most important, Helen realized, fingering the brochure again once they were on the train, their bags stowed away in the racks above them, the pamphlet showed no images of the sick–a choice made, Helen was sure, to deëmphasize the questionable science behind the treatment. It would be impossible to look at a photograph of someone as ill as, say, her fifty-seven-year-old mother and think that this faintly medieval idea, one that brought to mind leeches and exorcisms, could succeed where modern medicine had failed, or, in Dorothy’s case, where modern medicine had never been given the chance to go. The brochure talked about “renewal” and “refreshment,” and read more like a promotion for an overly expensive spa, of the kind that Helen had read about in fashion and travel magazines.

She let the brochure fall to her lap. Her mother was sleeping, lying on her side across the opposite three seats, her knees pulled up to her chest, her child-sized feet peeking out from beneath her maroon down coat. It had been a good idea to splurge on the whole compartment, despite Dorothy’s protests about useless expenditure (they had taken the train at Dorothy’s insistence, in order to save money) and her usual vague, disapproving intimations that Helen’s “new” life in California, the one she had been living for ten years now–ever since she’d left the conservatory at twenty-two–was somehow profligate. It did Helen no good to explain that her motley collection of jobs–as a low-level administrative staffer and occasional page-turner for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a piano teacher to private-school children, and a pianist on the High Holy Days at Temple Beth Hillel–netted barely enough to cover her expenses in the folly of an apartment she’d rented in the Hollywood Hills, which could be accessed only by an elevator tower or by a strenuous hike up a dirt-and-scrub path, and which had been featured in a famous movie from the seventies that she could never remember the name of, even when people reminded her of it over and over, exclaiming at her proximity to history as though she were living in a house once occupied by George Washington. The very fact that Helen drove a car, albeit a ten-year-old Nissan, was proof enough to Dorothy that she had embraced an ideological lack of frugality. The few times that Dorothy had allowed Helen to fly her to Los Angeles, Helen had found herself obscuring things from her mother, like the fact that she had, on a whim, reupholstered her living-room couch, although the original material was fine, and certainly not as threadbare as her mother’s valiant collection of chairs and couches, which stood in her New York apartment like the stoic survivors of some kind of rending disaster. Of course, as a child and even as a teen-ager, Helen had never noticed the fraying tablecloths or chipped china, had been comforted by the absolute predictability of her home, by the way “The Painted Bird” continued to occupy exactly the same place on the bookshelf as it had when she’d first discovered it, at age eleven, and stared, troubled and thrilled, at the grotesque and vaguely sexual cover art. A button placed in an ashtray when she was seven was sure to be there still when she was eight, nine, ten, adapted to its new habitat, and the ashtray itself adapted to its inhabitant, so that it was now “the place where the red button is” rather than anything useful for smokers. It was only as an adult, returning for visits, that she began to feel quietly dismayed by her mother’s thrift, as if it indicated something disturbing. Was Dorothy refusing the future? Was this the reason, too, that she had forsworn conventional treatment for her disease? Did she mean to die?

Helen looked around the compartment. She had been right to reserve the entire thing without telling her mother. A first-class sleeper would have been too risky; her mother might not have even boarded the train. Helen had hoped that Dorothy, upon entering the second-class accommodations and finding no other passengers there, would simply assume that they were the recipients of a bit of good luck. But, of course, Dorothy figured things out the minute Helen closed the door behind them. The only reason she consented to this act of economic irresponsibility was that she was too ill to fight back.

The flight from New York had been exhausting. As the hours across the ocean wore on, five-foot-one Dorothy had sunk farther and farther into her seat, until she resembled a child whose feet waggled impatiently above the broken-crayon-and-mini-pretzel-strewn floor. Helen had noticed the flight attendants casting worried glances at her mother whenever they passed, and she knew that they were quietly wondering if they were going to have a corpse on their hands before they reached Munich. She imagined that there was a protocol for this kind of emergency: surely they would remove the dead body from the sight of the other passengers–perhaps lay her mother on the floor of the galley at the back of the plane, cover her with some of those too thin blankets, or roll her into one of those ingenious storage places airplanes specialized in.

But what was the protocol for taking your mother to have her blood boiled?

In the low light of the train compartment, Dorothy’s face shone. She had grown so thin lately; her skin stretched tautly over her nose and her cheekbones like a sheet on a well-made bed. In the last few months, Helen had become intimate with her mother in a way that made them both uncomfortable. During her increasingly frequent visits to New York, she had bathed Dorothy, helped her to sit on the toilet, pared her thick, yellowing toenails, then stroked them with the bright-red discount-store polish that Dorothy had been faithful to all these years. This breaking down of the customary distance that had existed between mother and daughter for decades made it more and more difficult for Helen now to view her mother as a living thing rather than as a collection of body parts and functions. But perhaps that was a necessary by-product of giving care; Helen knew that if she allowed herself to look at the larger picture of her mother’s demise she would be overwhelmed by thoughts of needs, both met and not, and that she risked succumbing to a childlike terror of being left alone.

When called on to be a page-turner at the Philharmonic, Helen found that if she concentrated on one note, and then the next, instead of letting her mind take in the whole sweep of the piece, she never failed to turn the page at the right time. It was only when she lost sight of the specifics, when she let her mind range backward and forward across the music like a low-flying bird, that she made a mistake. She’d begin by thinking about the music–what choices she might make in the speed of a diminuendo or the attack on a coda–and then, inevitably, she’d get trapped in an eddy of memory about the moment, or series of moments, that had led to her decision to leave the conservatory, to walk away from the possibility, no matter how far-fetched, of being the person who was now seated at the piano so close to her that she could hear his or her breaths and grunts and soft guttural moans, as if she were standing at the open doorway to a bedroom while the pianist was making love. And then, with her mind hijacked by so many thoughts, she would be a beat too late or too early with the turn, and suffer the annoyed glance of the pianist, and carry the mistake with her for days.
When, a week earlier, Helen had told her nominal boyfriend, Nathan, about her mother’s decision to go to Germany for the treatment, he had almost rolled his eyes. Helen had been grateful for his blunt skepticism, because it allowed her to take the opposite position with a kind of self-righteousness that she would not otherwise have been able to muster. She had proclaimed, if not a belief in, at least a tolerance for this latest of her mother’s nonmedical solutions to “the cancer problem,” as Dorothy referred to it–as if it were a tangled political issue that might be written about on the editorial page of her beloved New York Times, and then hotly discussed with the butcher or the man at the shoe-repair place when she went out each day on her brisk round of errands. “She’s done her research,” Helen told Nathan, who sat at the kitchen table of her hilltop apartment–he had moved in a year earlier, after two years of dating. “They’ve had good results.”

Nathan did not respond, because he was not a foolish man. Six months had passed since Helen had discovered that he was having an affair, and their current détente was built on the understanding that he would never again be able to speak freely. A year before, Nathan would have thrown back statistics of his own; he was in immunology research at Children’s Hospital, and had a dedicated disrespect for the alternative medical arts. Over the years, he had listened with slack-jawed disbelief when Helen had explained that her friends Wendy and Terry were postponing vaccinations for little Mandy and Timmo because of studies linking the shots to developmental delays. “Do you know how many kids die each year from whooping cough?” he had exclaimed in frustration. When Wendy had proudly told him that she’d cured Timmo’s conjunctivitis by squeezing her own breast milk into his eye, Nathan had not been able to restrain himself. “Right from your tit?” he’d responded, as if Wendy had exposed Timmo to porn. Helen felt a momentary pleasure now as she watched Nathan swallow his criticism of her mother’s new gambit; he was no longer sure of himself in their relationship.

She had taken him back because he had apologized, begged, cried, and apologized again. But, in the current atmosphere of their relationship, he had no idea what concessions to his character she would continue to make, and what could cause her to send him back down that ancient elevator tower while she tossed his clothing from her balcony to the street below, white button-down shirts and briefs falling at his feet like shot birds. Could he continue to organize the papers she left scattered across the table into neat piles set at right angles to one another? Could he continue to indulge his need to keep the refrigerator clear of any food that was even approaching its use-by date? Still, although she had gained the upper hand in the relationship, her sense of victory was overshadowed by the knowledge that she no longer really had a boyfriend, only a set of misgivings and recriminations decorated as a handsome enough, smart enough, bearded, bespectacled man with delicate hands, shiny from too much washing. The loneliness that had descended on her in the aftermath of the crisis was so palpable that Helen often thought of it as a person. It stood by her side as she washed the dishes, or helped Marina Delgado, her best and most dedicated student, struggle through “The Well-Tempered Clavier” while she half listened, half watched the dust motes hanging in the air, lit by the afternoon light coming through the louvred windows of her apartment. The loneliness followed her, judged her, pointed out which of her irritating habits had finally driven Nathan to do what he had done. She was not sure why she hadn’t kicked him out in the end, except that she had begun to look forward to the outsized emotions of his entreaties, the late-night talks, the tears. She knew that the high drama was silly, but it reminded her of the kind of person she had once been–a girl who would weep when her rendition of a Beethoven adagio did not live up to the version that played in her imagination, a girl who would weep because perfection was too difficult a goal to aim for and too crushing to fall short of.

What Helen had really felt, after hearing Dorothy’s description of the blood-heating regimen, was not skepticism but pity. But she would never have said this aloud, not only because she didn’t want to give Nathan the satisfaction but because she knew that it was horrible to have such feelings toward her mother, whom she loved–if that was the right word for the mixture of frustration and gratitude and hatred and tolerance and surprising, intractable, illogical attachment she felt for Dorothy, who was as deeply and inescapably rooted inside Helen as her own fractured heart.

Dr. Halverson, Dorothy’s purported oncologist and an old suitor from her City College days, had recently pronounced the disease so far gone that the risks of conventional treatment, if Dorothy were to change her mind, would be more deleterious than the risks of doing nothing.

“You mean my risk of dying is now no better than my risk of dying?” Dorothy replied.

“Dodi,” Dr. Halverson sighed, shaking his head at her lack of sentiment, an atavistic admiration dancing around his lips.

Helen had been in the examination room when he broke the news. She could not figure out why Dorothy continued to consult Dr. Halverson, or why he agreed to see her, despite her long-term resistance to his advice. What was the point of all those unfilled prescriptions for lab tests? Why did he continue to let her waste his time? Maybe he, like Helen, was so mystified by Dorothy’s aberrant choice of the esoteric over science that he didn’t quite believe it, and was waiting for Dorothy to finally break down, reclaim her lifelong set-jawed, unforgiving gaze on life, and start the do-si-do of chemo and radiation. Dorothy, this short, mouthy woman from Bayonne who had marched for women’s rights and against Vietnam, hidden in the crowds while her homemade posters floated in the air above her as though held aloft by a ghost, had never once, in fifty-seven years, shown an interest in anything “alternative,” or even philosophical. Helen had been six when her father died. She asked how long it took a person to climb to Heaven. Dorothy took Helen’s face in her hands and said, “Not Heaven, honey. That’s just a fairy tale.” How frustrating it must have been for Dr. Halverson to watch Dorothy now, placing her faith in Dr. Hsia and his stinking herbs in Chinatown, or in Paul Romero and his needles in Park Slope, or in the water-therapy clinic in D.C. Helen admired the doctor’s delicacy. He never belittled Dorothy’s choices, and in these past months, when Dorothy had experienced her first truly frightening bouts of pain, he had visited the apartment as often as he could.

His patience stood in sharp contrast to Nathan’s disparagement. “It’s her body,” Helen had said to Nathan, in defense of the Germany plan. The word “body” sank to the ground the minute she said it, weighted, as it was, with the idea of his body and his desires, which had managed so casually to reject hers. She felt suddenly conscious of her thighs wrapped tightly (too tightly?) in denim, her small breasts bolstered ineffectually by some newfangled underwire bra she’d bought online. She had never had smooth skin–had picked and squeezed it too much as a teen-ager, despite her mother’s warnings. Was that it? Did Nathan’s other woman have small pores? Nathan shrugged, smiled, then scrolled through five other expressions, trying to find the one that would cause him the least harm. Helen was humiliated all over again. That was the problem with his transgression, she thought: he had taken so many words away from her. Besides “body,” there was “candy” (the woman’s ridiculous name), there was “desert” (one of the places they’d trysted), and whole sentences like “What are you thinking about?,” which was as dangerous as stepping in front of a speeding car.
The train made a stop at a local station. It was dark outside, and shadowy figures wearing heavy overcoats against the midwinter cold moved on and off the platform. Dorothy’s eyes opened. She stared across the compartment toward her daughter, but Helen could tell that Dorothy was not seeing, that she was suspended somewhere between her pill-induced sleep and a fuzzy semi-alertness. It made her feel weak to see her mother hovering helplessly in this state. As much as she hated to admit it, Helen counted on her mother’s decisiveness, her unwillingness to wander around in the gray areas of emotion. When Helen, having finished with middling results in too many competitions, and having taken a good hard look at where she stood among her musical peers, made the decision to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist, Dorothy had said, “That’s sensible,” as though she’d been waiting patiently for Helen to get the answer right for years. Helen suddenly felt the lie behind all those performances and recitals; she had thought her mother her ally, when in fact Dorothy had been tapping her foot the whole time, waiting for Helen to wise up.

Helen regarded her mother a moment longer. The blue of her eyes was rheumy, indistinct. Her mouth hung open in a way that Helen knew she would hate. A few strands of hair were stuck to her dry lips. Dorothy had imparted several important pieces of advice to Helen in her youth, one of which was “Don’t hold your mouth open–it makes you look stupid.” Helen was also to wear a bra even in bed, in a war against future droop, and never to hook her hair behind her ears if she didn’t want them to stick out. Dorothy’s advice was like that–warnings on how to avoid a dark, ugly inevitability. So, in reality, it wasn’t advice at all, only an acknowledgment of Helen’s ultimate inefficacy in the face of the Cards You’ve Been Dealt. Dorothy’s teeth seemed yellower than Helen remembered. But everything about her seemed yellow now, like the pages of an old library book.

“God,” Dorothy said, breathlessly, and, for a moment, Helen wondered if she was having a conversation with that Man she professed not to believe in. But Dorothy’s eyes were focussed now. She had come to. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” Helen said, looking out the window into the darkness. “We just passed a town. You should sleep some more, Mom. We have a ways to go.” She regretted this suggestion. Her mother was cunning enough to know when she was not wanted.

“Whenever I sleep, I feel like I’m rehearsing for something,” Dorothy said, attempting to sit up. Helen stood and helped Dorothy settle against the train seat. She smelled of the tuberose per-fume she’d used her whole life, that and the turning odor of the body in decline. Helen wondered when this happened–at what point the body’s smells could no longer be masked by deodorants or flowery soaps, at what point they would stop taking no for an answer.

“How do you feel?” Helen asked, sitting back down, across from her mother. She herself had barely recovered from the eight hours on the plane from New York. She felt clammy and bloated from having eaten too many meals in too short a time. She wanted to strip, have a bath, evacuate, start over again.

“I feel like shit, darling,” Dorothy said.

“Are you hungry?” Helen asked.

“No.”

“You should eat.” Helen looked into her purse. “I have a granola bar. And that turkey sandwich from the plane.”

“That will kill me. What is it, ten hours old?”

“You’ll need your strength.” Helen held out the granola bar.

“Let’s put away the platitude playbook, sweetheart,” Dorothy said. “If there’s one thing I know about lately, it’s my dear, disastrous body. And if it eats right now it will upchuck all over this lovely compartment you’ve wasted your money on.”

Helen studied the pattern of veins webbed across her mother’s cheeks. She thought about La Brea Woman. A model of the dwarfish prehistoric woman was posed in a glass case at a museum on Wilshire. She appeared clad in an animal pelt, her long black hair modestly covering her naked plaster breasts. But, then, through a trick of light and mirrors, her outfit, as well as her skin, fell away, so that you could see her knobby skeleton. Helen had visited the museum when she first moved to Los Angeles, thrilled by the city’s oddities in the way, she now knew, so many new immigrants were–as if kitsch could justify their decision to move to this patently unglamorous place.

“You make it awfully hard, Mom,” Helen said, finally.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorothy sighed, her expression genuinely penitent. “But for some reason having cancer gives everyone else the feeling they can order you around. Like you don’t know what’s good for yourself, now that you’ve been stupid enough to contract this disease.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t–”

But Helen was smiling, and Dorothy’s eyes lit up at the memory. Dorothy had despised Helen’s habit, when she was younger, of apologizing for everything and everyone around her–which was, in itself, a reaction, Helen had begun to think, to her mother’s uncomfortable insistence on truthfulness. After months of Helen’s complaining about a certain irrationally mean science teacher, Dorothy had walked right up to the woman at an open house–a woman who was half a foot taller than she–and asked her if she was experiencing menopause. Helen had spent much of her youth trying to position herself at a physical and psychological ten-foot remove from her mother.

She put the granola bar back in her purse. They were good together this way, teasing each other. When Helen had discovered the affair, she flew to New York. It was a strange impulse–to seek out her mother for emotional succor–and she was almost frightened when she arrived at the apartment, certain that her mother, never a baker of chocolate-chip cookies or a soother of feverish foreheads, would only make her feel worse. She had spent the weekend in an old Lanz nightgown that her mother had saved, standing at the open door of the refrigerator with a hand on her hip, pouting. Dorothy had been a wonder of humor, insisting that they Google “Nathan’s girl,” as she referred to her, and, together, mother and daughter had stared at a picture of the absurdly named doctor with the dumbfounded awe one feels in the presence of a masterpiece. Candi was pretty enough, with a lustrous mane of brown hair and the kind of ethnic looks that had been smoothed out by cross-fertilization or plastic surgery. She was obviously younger than Helen. But, before Helen could fall into despondency, Dorothy found fault with the set of the woman’s eyes, her thin lips, her ironed hair. She could tell that the woman had a “big tush,” despite the fact that the image on the computer screen showed her only from the neck up. Her dissection made Helen laugh and feel defended, full of gratitude.
The dim shapes of small villages appeared against the night sky like phantoms, only to disappear into nearly unarticulated darkness. An occasional bright constellation spread across the land, signalling a town of more significance. If she squinted, Helen could make out church steeples, the dark spill of homes on a hillside, and large, low factory buildings. She could have been anywhere in the world. She had never been to Germany before, and now she was seeing the country only as geographic semaphore.

“I need to pee,” Dorothy said.

Helen stood up immediately, glad to be necessary. She helped her mother out of their compartment, and, together, they awkwardly negotiated the narrow corridor. Helen held on to her mother as she opened the bathroom door, careful not to let her lose her balance as the train lurched from side to side. Dorothy was as light and fragile as papier-mâché. Helen closed the bathroom door behind them, reached past her mother, and flipped up the metal toilet lid, then steadied Dorothy as she loosened her slacks and eased them down her hips. Dorothy had always been private with her body; Helen could not remember ever having seen her naked before the disease had turned her into a reluctant exhibitionist.

“I think I can take it from here,” Dorothy said.

Helen stepped back into the corridor and shut the door. She leaned against the cold windows, trying to get the image of her mother’s thighs out of her mind, the way the folds of skin sloped gently toward her pubic area like small waves rippling onto a barren shore. Five minutes later, Dorothy came out of the bathroom, exhausted by the effort. The door swung shut behind her, and she leaned against it as she zipped and buttoned her slacks. Embarrassed, Helen tried to shield Dorothy from the view of the few strangers who lingered farther down the corridor. Her discomfort soon gave way to sadness, as she realized the degree to which the disease had stripped her mother of the identity that had got her through so much in her life, and with such grace.

“It’s like a prison camp in there,” Dorothy said. “You’d think they’d make it a little bigger just to avoid the innuendo.”

Helen moved to help her.

“I’m fine,” Dorothy said, reaching to either side of the corridor and unsteadily making her way back to their compartment.

Helen realized that her arms were still extended toward her mother, as if she could somehow conduct Dorothy to a safe landing. She lowered her hands, feeling ridiculous. Her mother had eschewed help all her life, had put herself through City College by working night shifts as a secretary. After she married Helen’s father, she’d helped him open his dental practice, running his office, sometimes masquerading as his assistant when he could afford only a part-time girl. He’d died just when his practice had grown large enough to be worth selling, and even then, despite the reasonable income from the sale, Dorothy had continued to work as the office manager for the new dentist, never for a minute giving in to any maudlin emotion about another man’s filling her dear departed husband’s white soft-soled shoes. She never thought to remarry. “Oh, I did that already,” she said simply, when Helen raised the subject, as if marriage were a step in a recipe that you would not want to repeat.

“Would you like me to read to you?” Helen asked, once they were back in their seats.

“What have you got?”

Helen dug eagerly into her bag. ” Vogue. People. Neruda.”

Dorothy smirked. “That’s cheap, sweetheart.”

“You love Neruda.”

“Are we searching for my epitaph?” Dorothy said.

“That’s unfair,” Helen said, with the requisite amount of hurt in her tone. The truth was that she had thought about what to read at her mother’s funeral and had made the private decision that it would be Neruda. Though Dorothy was not a fan of poetry and its vagaries in general, Neruda was the one poet she had gone out of her way to read. But was this why Helen had grabbed the book from the shelf on her way out the door in L.A.? Was she this fumbling, this obvious? She began to put the book away.

“Read it,” Dorothy said.

“No, it’s all right.”

“I want to hear it.”

“We’ll read something else,” she said, pulling out the Vogue and reading from the cover. ” ‘The New Stripes.’ ”

“Read the Neruda,” Dorothy said flatly.

Helen checked her mother’s face to see on which side of sarcasm she had taken up residence. Dorothy smiled enigmatically; it was the same inscrutable expression Helen remembered from her youth, from, for instance, the day she’d smoked marijuana in the apartment while her mother was at work and then tried to cover it up with some laughably ineffective incense. Dorothy had smiled then, too, saying nothing. But when Helen woke up the next morning she found a note taped to the bathroom mirror. “Smart people are not necessarily decent,” it said, and Helen felt as though her mother had reached inside her body and squeezed her heart.

She opened the book and began to read:

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

 Write, for example, “The night is starry
 and the stars are blue and shiver in the
   distance.”

 The night wind revolves in the sky and
   sings.

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
 I loved her, and sometimes she loved me
   too.

 Through nights like this one I held her in
   my arms.
 I kissed her again and again under the
   endless sky.
She stopped.

“Mmm. Go on,” Dorothy said. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m tired,” Helen said.

Dorothy opened her eyes and studied her daughter. Helen looked down at the book. Her tears made the words into a bleary confusion of black smudges. “Oh, shit,” she said, trying to banish her sadness with ugly words, words that her mother had taught her never to use, because they were public admissions that you could not find a more exact, more intelligent way to say what you had to say. “I’m so fucked.”

“Or not. As the case may be,” Dorothy said.

Helen looked up. “Ew,” she said.

Dorothy shrugged, delighted.

“Remember when you hired that Cinderella to come to my birthday party?” Helen said, trying to change the subject. “I thought she really was Cinderella. The Cinderella. Come all the way from, you know, wherever, just for my party. You made her take off her wig at the end to show me that she was just some out-of-work actress.”

“I always thought there was something evil about those parents who carry on about the tooth fairy and then tell stories about how darling their gullible children are. I don’t believe in it.”

“You have to believe in something,” Helen said, distractedly.

Dorothy did not respond.

“What do you believe in, Mom?”

Dorothy eyed her warily. “Is this one of these before-you-go questions?”

“It’s just a question. I’d like to know.”

Dorothy turned to look out the dark window. “Well, turns out I’m tired, too,” she said, closing her eyes.
The last Philharmonic concert had been a near disaster. The Brazilian pianist on the bill had cancelled at the last minute, due to illness, and a replacement had been called in. The woman, an American, was young, maybe only two or three years older than Helen, but she had a good résumé, had recorded and performed with major symphonies–all the stuff of a strong career on an upward trajectory. The rehearsals had gone well, and the woman was full of humor with the conductor and the orchestra, and even with Helen, sweetly self-deprecating about her need to have the score in front of her, although she knew the piece by heart and had performed it before. “You’ll be my security blanket,” she said to Helen, who had been surprised by the intimacy of the remark; she was not usually addressed, except on issues that concerned the performance itself, the pianists explaining their particular taste in the timing of the page-turning, how close or far away they wanted Helen to sit. The piece was one that Helen had studied but never performed, and during rehearsal she felt her fingers moving lightly on her thighs. Studying the music a few nights earlier at the upright in her apartment, she had tried to make her way through it, and had been pleased that she could actually make whole passages nearly coherent. Nathan had come out of the bedroom to listen to her, and had applauded when she left off in the middle of a movement, feeling suddenly exposed, as though she were appearing naked before him for the first time.

“No, go on,” Nathan said.

She shook her head, her face flushing. “It’s difficult.”

“It sounded great.”

She looked at him, trying to suss out his strategy, but his face was wide open with surprise and pleasure. She stood up from the piano stool and went to him. He took her in his arms and she stood with him for a minute or two, realizing how refreshing it was to be with a man who did not think of her as a failure, the way she imagined so many of the musicians she knew must, the way she tried not to think of herself. He was nice that way, Nathan was. He sat in the living room along with the parents and grandparents of her students on recital afternoons, clapping loudly and, afterward, dissecting each student’s performance with her, rejoicing in the children’s small victories, wincing sympathetically at the memory of their bumbles. He took her seriously, even when she found it hard to do the same.

On the evening of the concert, Helen sat in her chair by the piano, wearing one of her two black concert dresses, subdued and prudish enough not to overshadow the artist; her appearance and movements needed to be so unremarkable as to be practically invisible. This suited her, this negation. It was the only way she could think about herself in relation to music now: as its shadow, its stalker. The pianist adjusted her own deep-red gown, its sleeves netted with rhinestones that would pick up the light and accentuate the hard, swift work of her arms; she adjusted her seat, tossed her loose hair behind her shoulders. Helen always enjoyed the feeling of tense excitement right before a concert began–it was one of the few times in life that you could be sure you were on the verge of pleasure. It was like facing into a giant wave and then allowing it to take you. The pianist made her opening attack with a kind of fury that made Helen’s spine shiver. With that flourish, she announced to the conductor and the orchestra that she was going to step things up. She was going to make sure that the audience, disappointed by the program insert, came away grateful for the illness of the replaced performer. She was going to own the piece so completely that no one would remember that it wasn’t rightfully hers.

Ten minutes in, however, something happened, something imperceptible to anyone but Helen and the pianist; it was like a skipped heartbeat–the woman’s neck stiffened, and she began to peer at the music where before she had largely ignored it. Helen’s breath caught high in her chest. She felt as light-headed as she had when she called Nathan’s hotel room at a conference in Austin and heard the voice of a woman in the background, followed by Nathan’s sharp “No!” And then the silence, full of his miserable inability to take back the mistake; it had been like an unwitting step off a cliff.

The pianist’s first slip came midway down a page–a second B-flat where there should have been an A. She kept going, and Helen was careful not to glance up; she wanted to make it appear that the mistake had passed unnoticed. But she could sense the pianist dissembling, could feel it in the atoms between her and the woman, which started to jump about like bubbles in a bottle of soda; she could feel the effect on her skin. The woman was trying to muscle her way back into the closed room of her focussed mind, but things just kept getting worse–a fumbled triad, and then having to make a quarter rest into an eighth in order to get back on track. And then, at the bottom of the next page, just as Helen rose into her half stand and leaned in to make her move, she caught the panicked look in the pianist’s eyes and knew that the woman was lost, that her concentration had deserted her, and that the strange alchemy by which a musician could be both inside and outside the music at the same time–both intellectually aware of the orchestra and of all that she had learned and decided about the music, and yet so wholly within the space of her own soul that the music was like speech, integrated and effortless–was coming undone.

Helen turned the page. The pianist looked at her sharply and Helen knew that she had done wrong. But what could she do? It had been time to turn the page. The music was continuing, the orchestra relentlessly pushing forward. A swift glance at the woman and Helen realized that she was not angry but desperate, and that Helen was now involved in an intimate, silent dialogue with her. The woman was asking Helen to save her. Helen gestured with her chin at the music, smiled in what she hoped was an optimistic way. Just go on, she meant to say. The woman had only to find her place in the line of notes and chords, and slip back in, like a girl stepping into the alternating jump ropes in a game of Double Dutch. She needed to yank her brain away from the accident, the missed notes, as Helen had had to yank hers away from Nathan’s damning silence on the phone from Austin, from her mother’s diagnosis, and move forward, head toward the next indicated thing, even if there were no directions. But the woman’s desperation only grew, and Helen did something that she knew was patently wrong in the etiquette of her job but was equally necessary: she rose fully off her seat, as she did when helping a faltering student through a recital, reached forward, and put her finger on the correct measure, then sat down, hoping that her move had been just swift and subtle enough not to draw the attention of the audience. But she knew that this was impossible.

Eventually, the pianist found her equilibrium, and although the rest of the movement, and the entire concerto, seemed subdued to Helen’s ear, there were no more mistakes. The audience was generous; Helen stood by her seat while the conductor and the pianist responded to the loud applause, then followed them offstage, keeping her customary distance behind them so as not to distract. When the pianist and the conductor returned to the stage for a second bow, the pianist shot her a complicated look full of gratitude and sorrow, hatred and shame, all at the same time, and Helen was sent hurtling back to the time when she herself had been unable to make her music perfect, when she had been filled with sadness and rage and hope and the aching sense of being close, but not close enough, to beauty.
Dorothy woke up, moaning.

“Mom?” Helen said, snapping out of her drowsy reverie into full-throttle fear.

Dorothy put her hands to her breastbone. “Hurts,” she said, in a high, strained voice. Helen reached across the aisle to where her mother was now doubled over, her head on her knees. Dorothy let out a muted, inhuman bark.

“Can you breathe like that, Mom? Let me sit you up.”

She moved next to her mother, and slowly pulled Dorothy’s shoulders toward the seat back. Dorothy’s face was bloodless.

“Mom?” Helen said. She was terrified, and instantly filled with a grief she’d imagined lay in store for her only later, long after this trip was over, long after her mother had died. But now it seemed that the sorrow had always been there, perhaps from the very start–from the moment she was born and first saw this person, this tiny woman who was to be her protector and guide–that it had been waiting for her ever since. She was horrified to find that her mind had made an acrobatic leap forward, that she was already turning the moment into a reminiscence she’d tell, of her last night on earth with her mother. “We were miles from anywhere,” she’d say. “We had a whole compartment to ourselves!”–as if this inexcusable luxury should at least have staved off death.

Dorothy groaned.

“Let me get your purse,” Helen said, beginning to rise from the seat. “Do you have any painkillers in there, Mom? Did Dr. Halverson give you something?”

Dorothy reached up and, with surprising strength, pulled Helen down next to her. She whispered something unintelligible.

“What? Mom?” Helen said, leaning close to her mother’s face. She could smell Dorothy’s sour breath.

“Stop moving,” Dorothy said, the words barely audible.

“There’s got to be something we can do,” Helen said.

“Why?”

Helen realized that she was holding her mother’s narrow hand in hers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had held her mother’s hand. She turned it over, and gently began to stroke her mother’s wrinkled palm in circles. “Is that good?” Helen said. “Does that help?”

“Does it?” Dorothy said softly.

Helen wondered if Dorothy was confused. Perhaps the cancer was affecting her brain. She searched her face, but could see nothing more than the mask that Dorothy had put on to barricade herself against the pain.

“It’s too much, Mom. It’s just too much,” Helen said.

“No,” Dorothy whispered, her voice barely audible above the sound of the train. “It’s just enough.”
The clinic was on the outskirts of town, and it took nearly forty-five minutes to get there by cab. The ride was more horrific than any part of the journey to that point. Even though Dorothy had agreed to take the pain medication that Dr. Halverson had given her, simply getting her up off her train seat took Helen nearly ten minutes. Helen flagged a porter through the open window, and the young man helped her, both with the bags and with the awkward attempt to move Dorothy out of the compartment, through the corridor, down the three metal steps, and onto the platform. Helen could tell that her mother was making a huge effort to hide her pain, but even with her mouth set and her eyes nearly closed her expression was stricken. Helen apologized for the jolts to her mother’s body, for the cold smack of air that greeted them on the platform, for the distance they had to cross to reach the cab stand, until she realized that what she really meant to apologize for was the fact that no amount of flinty-eyed pragmatism would help Dorothy through this moment, the fact that simply being was sometimes an unbearable mess and what was hoped for in life was so rarely reached, the shortfall so much more fumbling and base than anything one had ever imagined for oneself.

Helen held her mother as the cab bumped and buckled over the streets of Frankfurt. She thought to yell at the driver, to try to make him understand that he had to slow down because her mother was dying of cancer, but she knew that her mother’s pain was so deep and pervasive that a gentler cab ride would do nothing to ameliorate it.

The cab pulled up to the curb in front of the clinic. Helen looked out her window. The building was far from the brewery of her fantasy. A genteel-looking Beaux-Arts structure squeezed between a pizzeria and a bookshop–there was nothing to indicate that anything medical went on inside it at all, no symbol of a rod and twisted serpent, not even a wheelchair ramp. Anything could have been taking place behind those bevelled-glass doors–lawyers spinning cases, lovers making arguments of their own. Helen suddenly longed to stay in the cab, to ask the driver to carry on, take them anywhere, nowhere, as long as she could stay sitting like this, with her mother nestled safely in her arms. The driver turned and looked at the women expectantly.

“Are we there?” Dorothy’s voice was raw.

“Yes. This is it.”

“What are we waiting for?”

Helen paid the driver. He got out of the car to retrieve the bags from the trunk while Helen gingerly helped her mother onto the sidewalk.

“My God, it’s cold!” Helen said, buttoning Dorothy’s coat up to her neck, and then tugging her own around her as the cab pulled away from the curb. “You couldn’t have chosen a better season for this?” she teased. “I hear spring in Germany is lovely.” But she was stopped short by Dorothy’s expression, which seemed so tentative, as though she were facing not a four-story town house but Mt. Everest, the task looming high and impossible before her. Helen realized suddenly that Dorothy had not made her baffling medical choices because she wanted to die, any more than she chose to live among her withering possessions because she did not desire a future. She understood that her mother wanted to live, but that, standing here on this foreign street, she had momentarily lost her way. The path through this complicated piece of life, which must have seemed so clear to Dorothy just a few days ago, sitting in her apartment in New York, was now as inscrutable as a piece of music could be when first confronted–a wild and alien language of signs that seemed like the ravings of some madman, until you put your hands on the keys and played one note, then the next, then the next. Helen could see panic in Dorothy’s eyes, the same panic she’d seen on the face of the pianist, marooned in a sea of sound that suddenly made no sense.

Helen raised her hand and pointed at the door. “This is it, Mom,” she said. “This is the place. We just have to walk a few more steps and then we’ll be there.” But just as she was about to put her arm around her mother, Dorothy drew herself up, somehow guided back to herself by her daughter’s confident gesture and voice, and started forward on her own.

“Gardening!” the girl said, and tilted back in her chair the way she knew would get a reaction. “It’s like knitting, isn’t it.”

“Stop that, Lara,” her mother said. “You’ll break the chair.”

“A sign of middle age,” Lara continued. “Old age. It’s what old people do when there’s nothing left in their lives.”

“I thought you were supposed to be learning about Henry VIII,” said her mother, Susan, glaring at her over a recently acquired pair of Ready Readers.

“Look at him, snipping away,” Lara said, and pointed to her father up the garden with his secateurs. “You’re just control freaks, you two. You should let it run wild!”

“Right,” Susan grunted, returning to her list.

“You could have a meadow out there,” Lara said. “Go green. A jungle!”

“It might just as well be,” Susan said. “Great fat lumps of squirrels crashing round the trees like monkeys. Come on, Lara, what about some revision.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Lara shrieked.

“Perish the thought,” Susan said. “But if you’re going to take over the kitchen table like this when you’ve got a perfectly good desk in your bedroom–”

“Listen to me,” Lara hissed. “What I’m putting myself through here, revising for exams, is entirely voluntary. It’s not necessary; it’s my choice. All the clever people are setting up Internet businesses, they’re not wasting their time on this; they wouldn’t dream of doing this. They’re going to be millionaires in five years’ time. And I’ll be in debt, twenty thousand, thirty thousand–”

Her mobile ringtone cut in, a jaunty jerky samba, and instantly she was transported from cold-eyed fury to smiles and coos of delight. “Really … really … No, she’s so not like that…. Oh, that’s so funny….” One artless peal of laughter after another loosed itself into the air.

Susan stared out the window into the green and white of May. I’m the family whipping boy, she thought. How moody it was, the weather, hormonal, melodramatic, lurching from thunder to glaring sun and back again in the space of an hour. She had been out there earlier, before breakfast, the whispering air blowing through the hairs on her skin. This sudden lush frondescence was springing up at the rate of an inch a day at least; you could stop and watch it grow like an erection. Efficient speedy impersonal sex: just what she hadn’t wanted at Lara’s age. She must stop seeing him. On the other hand, she didn’t want to. The office was another world. It was nothing to do with them.

“That was Ruby,” Lara said, as she finished her call.

“How is Ruby these days? Now she’s split up with–Sean, was it?”

“Oh, she hasn’t split up with him. She doesn’t trust him, but that doesn’t mean she’s split up with him. No, she’s made him give her the password to his Hotmail so she can check it anytime she likes.”

“Wow,” Susan said.

“Careful, Dad!” Lara said, as Barry came in from the garden and sat down beside her. “Mind my notes.”

He doesn’t know my password, Susan reminded herself, glancing at her husband.

“I’ve caught one of the little buggers,” Barry said, patting Lara’s arm in triumph. “I’ve trapped it under a dustbin lid and I’ve put bricks on top.”

“What little buggers?” Lara said.

“A squirrel.”

At least they were united in their detestation of squirrels, thought Susan. Earlier this year they had stamped across the grass and wrung their hands together over the scores of nibbled white camellia buds that had been scattered over the lawn like popcorn. Barry had started to talk longingly about rat traps. “Clean, quick, humane,” he had mused. “A metal jaw comes down on the neck and all but decapitates them.” He had an explosive temper, just as Lara did. The two of them were tinderbox touchy, gigantically flinty. She was sick of acting as the lightning rod for all their casual rage.

“Of all the things in the world to get upset about, you choose squirrels,” Lara said. “What about climate change? Why don’t you get upset about that instead? My children will fry, thanks to your selfish air travel.”

“I should cut its head off and stick it on a spike,” Barry said, ruffling his daughter’s hair. “Like Henry VIII did with traitors.”

He doesn’t know, Susan thought. He doesn’t know.

“That’s so cruel!” said Lara, looking up at her father from under her eyelashes. “You’re not really going to kill it, are you?”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing else seems to stop them.”

“The law says you have to drive any squirrel you catch far out into woodland,” Susan said.

“And kill it there?” Lara said. “Like Snow White?”

“No,” Susan said. “Then you set it free.”

“Well, I’m buggered if I’m going to spend my Saturday taking a squirrel on its holidays,” Barry said. “By the way, Susan, I thought you were going to organize some more potting compost. We’ve almost run out.”

Susan looked at the two of them, side by side at the table. Barry was fair but with a high Saxon color and narrow hot-blue eyes, which gave him an intermittently dangerous look. Lara was fair, too, but fairer than her father by far, with white-blond hair and such fine white skin that her features showed in her face like fruit, a mouth that brought cherries to mind, or, when she yawned, strawberries. Not for the first time, Susan marvelled at how her own supposedly dominant genes–brown eyes, dark hair, and the rest of it–hadn’t stood a chance against his. Her side of the family, a pack of devious troublemaking short-arses, as Barry had described them one Boxing Day on the long drive home from Cornwall, still muttered seventeen years on about the unlikelihood of her marriage to this outspoken Mancunian, with his tendency to put on weight and throw it around.

“Henry VIII was a bully,” Susan said. “He had piggy little eyes and a nasty temper. It’s all coming back to me.”

“Absolute power corrupts–” started Barry loftily.

“Absolutely,” Lara cut in.

“The thing about tyrants is, they’re vain and they like to show off,” Susan said. “Didn’t he have a wrestling match with Francis I? And they’re short. Hitler. Napoleon. Stalin wore platform shoes.”

“Henry VIII wasn’t short,” Barry said. “He was a fine figure of a man.”

He puffed out his chest and placed the backs of his hands against his bulky waist, so that his arms were akimbo.

“You are, like, so irritating,” Lara snapped. “All the people your age, the old people, they think history’s like it was in their day. But it’s much harder now.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died,” Barry chanted. “Divorced, beheaded, survived. He divorced the old one from Spain, didn’t he, and the ugly one, the Flanders mare? And he cut the heads off the ones who betrayed him.”

Even if he has sensed something might be going on, Susan thought, he won’t want to know.

“It’s not like that anymore,” Lara said, furious. “That wifey stuff’s for kids. It’s all lithurgy and transubstantiation now.”

“Liturgy.”

“Whatever.”

“Anne Boleyn kept him waiting seven years,” Susan said. “He wrote ‘Greensleeves’ for her. Then she had a baby girl, not a son and heir, so he said, ‘Off with her head.’ But he still loved her a bit, which is why he paid for the finest swordsman in France to come over and do the job.”

“It wasn’t because she had a girl,” Barry said, with a sideways look. “It was because she was an adulteress.”

Susan faltered for a second.

“Lollards,” she said.

“What about them?” Barry said.

We’ve not used mobiles at all, she thought, her mind scampering around wildly. We’ve only ever used e-mail, and he doesn’t know my password. My computer’s at the office, he has no access to my e-mails, and, even if he were to pick up my BlackBerry, he doesn’t know how to use it.

“Weren’t they something to do with transubstantiation?” she said.

“No,” he said.

He fixed her with his beady blue eyes. “He’s bluffing,” she told herself.

“In 1538, John Lambert was burnt at the stake,” Lara chanted, holding her hand in the air to silence them. “Because he held that the body of Christ wasn’t substantially present during the Eucharist. Transubstantiation.”

“Catholics still believe that,” Barry said. “That the bread turns into Christ’s body. Literally.”

“But they’re not allowed to believe in condoms,” Lara said.

“What?” Barry said, and suddenly he was blushing like a maiden. “Lara, would you make me a cup of tea, please, while I try to decide what to do with the prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” said Susan.

“The squirrel,” he reminded her.

Me, Susan thought.

“What did your last slave die of,” Lara said, getting up from her notes. As she filled the kettle, she started to sing.

“Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously….”

It seemed to Susan that Barry was staring at her.

“When I have loved you so long, delighting in your company,” sang Lara. “That’s your only song, Mum. You used to sing it to me to get me to sleep. Every night, ‘Greensleeves.’”

“Yes,” Susan said.

This was rubbing it in. If she was going to feel guilty, this would make her feel it, hearing her seventeen-year-old daughter carolling her password. Stupid choice, really: too obvious. Perhaps Barry had been tapping in all along. But she didn’t feel guilty at all. It was none of his business. She just didn’t want to get caught.

“I could nail it to the trellis,” Barry said meditatively. “Once I’ve killed it, of course.”

“Why would you do that?” Susan asked. “Nail it to the trellis?”

“As a warning to the other little buggers,” Barry said.

“It doesn’t work,” Susan said. “Capital punishment as a deterrent. They’ve proved it. It doesn’t put anybody off.”

“Hung, drawn, and quartered,” said Lara, back at the table. “What does that mean?”

“Isn’t that when they tie your legs and arms to four horses?” Barry said, taking a sip. “Then send them off in different directions?”

“Ugh!” Lara said, transfixed.

“No,” Susan said. “That was another thing they did.”

“Hanging was for commoners,” Barry said. “Beheading was for the aristocracy. They still have beheadings in Saudi.”

“Really,” Susan said.

“When they hold the head up afterward, there are a few seconds when it, you know, the head, can actually see the crowd,” Barry said. “There’s enough oxygen left in the brain for it to carry on for another ten seconds.”

“Right,” Susan said. “Come on, Lara, back to the grindstone. You’ve done hardly any work this morning.”

“You are so annoying!” Lara cried. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why do you always have to spoil everything?”

“You won’t pass if you don’t get down to it. I could test you, if you’d like.”

“Bug off!” Lara yelled. “You think you can say anything you like to me; you don’t leave me any privacy.”

Privacy, thought Susan, I’ll have some of that. Privacy. Whatever you like to call it.

“Look, Lara, we’ll leave you alone in here if you’re really going to do some work,” Barry said. “Won’t we, Susan. Come on, I want you to come and help me decide what to do with the culprit.”

“Oh,” Susan said. “All right.”

The kitchen door opened onto a small square paved area planted with pots of daisies and sage and rosemary. Against the side wall was a small self-assembly cold frame where they were hardening off adolescent geranium cuttings for planting out toward the end of the month. Nearby stood a bush of peonies with big pink faces, amorous and Elizabethan in their high-colored finery. Barry took her hand and held it to his mouth, kissed her fingertips, then took them in his mouth and tightened his teeth on them until she said, “Ouch,” and pulled away.

“It’s behind the shed, is it?” she said.

“Weighed down by bricks.”

“Have you decided what to do?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d come up with an idea.”

“Ah,” she said carefully. There was a pause. Susan examined the toe of her shoe. “That depends on whether you want to kill it,” she continued. “And, if you do, you’ll upset Lara. I ought to warn you now, she’ll call you cruel and murderer and all the names under the sun.”

“What are your favorite flowers?” he asked. “I’d like to grow them for you.”

“You should know,” she said. “You should know what my favorite flowers are by now.”

“I know I should, but I don’t.”

They walked hand in hand to the garden shed, and there behind it was a galvanized-steel dustbin lid under a dozen or so bricks.

“Well?” he said.

“Roses,” she replied. “But not just any old roses.”

“No, of course not,” he snorted.

Well, don’t think I’m going to tell you after that, she thought, but it’s those small soft damask roses I like best, with their strong sweet scent and crumpled faces in old-fashioned shades of crimson. But that’ll have to stay my secret now, too, won’t it.

“The moment of truth,” Barry said, holding down the fluted dustbin lid by its handle while he nudged the piled bricks off with his foot.

He lifted one side of the lid a couple of inches. There was no sign of movement. He lifted it another couple of inches and bent down to peer underneath. Then, like a waiter removing the domed silver cloche from a plate of roast beef, he whipped the lid into the air with a flourish. His mouth dropped open.

“It’s gone!” he said. “It’s gone!”

“So,” Susan said, breathing again, deep into her stomach.

“No, really, Susan, I caught it. It was there. It was very small, it was a young one, but it was there. It must have scrabbled its way out somehow.”

“A figment of your imagination,” insisted Susan with heartless increasing confidence.

“How could I imagine a squirrel?”

“Lara’s right,” she said. “You’re obsessed.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said helplessly.

She lifted his hand and dropped a kiss on it. Then she turned and wandered back down the garden, singing under her breath.

“Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

“Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”

“Seems like you need someone to talk to.”

Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt that she was talking to them. “I’m simply concerned about the kids,” she said.

Rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She didn’t know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro, one put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said that a man was now completely fucked-up. They said, “The guy has changed.” Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement. He’d become a little different. He was something of a character. The brazen might suggest, “He’s gotten into some weird shit.” The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she’d married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but non-functional, like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months, and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally, he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. “Hey, cutie,” he’d call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and rushed off to his office. And when he came home from work he’d disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids had gone to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this, he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course, later she would understand that all this meant that he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

“All husbands are space aliens,” her friend Jan said on the phone.

“God help me, I had no idea.” Kit began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly. “He’s in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad.”

“Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet, he’s a veritable Solomon. ‘Bring the stinkin’ baby to me now!’ ”

“Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?”

“Sure! Look at Ollie North.”

“He lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven.”

“But he got some votes.”

“Yeah, and now what is he doing?”

“Now he’s promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It’s a life!” She paused. “Do you fight about it?”

“About what?” Kit asked.

“The rockets back to his homeland.”

Kit sighed again. “Yes, the toxic military-crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don’t fight, I just, well, O.K.–I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ask, ‘Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?’ I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ Then I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ again. Then I ask, ‘Are you deaf?’ I also ask, ‘What do you think a marriage is? I’m really just curious to know,’ and also, ‘Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?’ A simple interview, really. I don’t believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding.” She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. “I’m also interested,” Kit said, “in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong about those. I’m probably wrong. That’s where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in.”

In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amid the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died.

Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit’s gums. On the counter, a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark’s grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. “Why not complete the symmetry?” he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and generally in keeping with the principles of space-alien culture.

The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if the more formal versions of them were the ones who were divorcing–their birth certificates were divorcing!–and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not yet told her that he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said, trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”

Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center with a cold blue heat. At the funerals of two different elderly people she hardly knew, she wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe–or, rather, Raphael–again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation; it was already booked, so what could they do?

This, at last, was what all those high-school drama classes had been for: acting. She had once played the queen in “A Winter’s Tale,” and once a changeling child in a play called “Love Me Right Now,” written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these performances, she had learned that time was essentially a comic thing–only constraints upon it diverted it to tragedy, or, at least, to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde–if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disturbed and the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in an effort to persuade her not to join him and the children on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.

“I’m going,” she said.

“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”

“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“I just don’t think you should go.”

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab. Who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

At this point, however, she and Rafe had not yet signed the papers. And there was still the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring–which did look like a typical wedding ring–a year before, because, he said, “it bothered him.” She had thought at the time that he’d meant it was rubbing. She had not been deeply alarmed; he had often shed his clothes spontaneously–when they first met, he’d been something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

“What if I can’t get my ring off?” she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

“Send me the sawyer’s bill,” he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

“What is wrong with you?” she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

“What is wrong with you?” he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state’s extremely progressive divorce laws–a boy needs his dad!–she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d’ suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs–a family about to break apart forever–didn’t look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases–to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop–the words “La Caribe” emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.

There were ways of making things vanish temporarily. One could disappear oneself, in movement and repetition.

Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”

“They look happy,” Kit said.

Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. “They look happy so you won’t kill them.”

“You think so?”

“If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.” That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase “cinnamon M&M’s” repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. “I’m a big brother now,” Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.

Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. “Would you like a man or a woman?” the receptionist asked.

“Excuse me?” Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men–or women? “There’s no such thing as ‘men,’ ” Jan used to say. “Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence.”

“A man or a woman–for the massage?” Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

“Oh, either one,” she said, and then knew she’d get a man.

Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas–tobacco, incense, cannabis–swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Daniel Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break, but perhaps you could move on to the next one, and the next, like a worm with its several hearts. Daniel left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn’t the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.

“That was nice,” she said, as he was putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crockpot filled with water, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

“Where did you get those stones?” she asked. They were smooth and dark gray–black when wet, she saw.

“They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He placed them in a metal fishing-tackle box.

“You live in Colorado?” she asked.

“Used to,” he said, and that was that.

On the last night of their vacation, her suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. Sam put out the little doorknob flag that said ” WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES.” The flag had a pre-printed request for a 3 A. M. wakeup call so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully, and before the midnight deadline, no staff person woke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched during the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who were too lazy or deaf to have got up in the night.

“Look, come see!” a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented the scuba gear said. Sam, Beth, Dale, and Kit all ran over. (Rafe had stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in desiccating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” the man said. “You are the last ones to see these little bebés.” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. And that’s when a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them, one by one, from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. His every posture contained a strut. What bimbo had he wanted to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist, you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor would tell her. “As a feminist, I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit would reply.)

“I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.

“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.

Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you that?

When they finally left La Caribe, she was glad. Staying there, she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro, she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But, for now, she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who, as he aged stoically and carried on in bottomless forgetting, would come to scarcely recall–was it even past imagining?–that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

By Lorrie Moore, New Yorker

Alec’s grandpa proves to be his best friend. But what happens when a best friend gets hurt and everything turns hopeless?

Kids at school think I’m a nerd. That’s because I don’t like basketball or football, but I do like chess and math. At home it’s just about the same, though nobody calls me names. My dad and my mom and my older brother Jake are always riding bikes or running half-marathons or rowing boats, and they’re always trying to get me to go. “Come on, Alec. Give it a try.” When I tell them no, they shake their heads, and I know what they’re thinking: nerd.

That’s why Grandpa is so important to me. He saved me.

Every summer my grandparents rent a cabin up in the Cascades. I’ve got a big family, so whenever we go, cousins and aunts and uncles are sure to be there. Hiking, fishing, swimming–day after day.

For years I was forced to go along. Everybody thought it was fun climbing up rocks and down into gulleys with mosquitoes biting you and sweat burning your eyes. They couldn’t believe I didn’t think it was fun, no matter how often I told them.

Then Grandpa put his foot down. “Alec doesn’t like going, so stop making him,” he said, staring at my dad the same way my dad sometimes stares at me.

The next morning when everybody left for Falls Creek, Grandpa and I stayed behind at the cabin. Grandpa took a chessboard down from the closet. “You know how to play?”

While they hiked, he showed me different openings and gambits and defenses. Then, when vacation ended, Grandpa and I played online. Neither of us wrote much; just what our moves were and something like, I’ve got you now. When I won my first chess tournament, I was so excited that I e-mailed him before I even told my mom and dad.

Then everything changed. Everything.

We live in Seattle, where it rains all winter long. Grandpa lives in California, where it’s warm all the time. Here’s what happened.

My Uncle Jack talked Grandpa into a bike ride up in the mountains above Menlo Park. Grandpa was slow, so Uncle Jack pushed ahead until he reached a little store in Woodside, where he stopped and waited. After 10 minutes, he headed back. He found Grandpa unconscious in a ditch. Nobody knows what happened. All anybody knows for sure is that Grandpa hit his head hard on the concrete.

My dad flew down that night. He stayed a few weeks. One afternoon, when I came back from school, Dad was home.

“Is Grandpa O.K.?” I said.

He shook his bead. “Alec, he suffered serious brain damage. He thinks and acts more like a child than a grown-up.”

“But he can get better, can’t he?” I said.

He frowned. “It would take a miracle.”

My dad had given up on Grandpa, but I hadn’t, because I’d read about people who were sick or born wrong, but somebody believed in them, and they got better. I’d be that person for Grandpa.

That summer Grandpa and Grandma rented the cabin in the Cascades same as always. Before we drove up, my mom pulled me aside. “He’s still your grandpa, and he still loves you,” she said. “But you’ll have to find a new way to be his grandson.”

Three hours later we were in the mountains.

When Grandpa had looked at me in the past, his blue eyes had a twinkle in them, as if we two were enjoying a secret joke. Which we were in a way–the joke being that we both knew that our chess games in the cozy main room of the cabin were a thousand times better than the hikes everyone else took. But now his eyes were just blue and his smile was just a smile.

“And who are you?” he asked as he shook my hand.

“I’m Alec,” I said, and I wanted to cry.

At dinner, Grandma treated Grandpa as if he were 5 years old. When he ate all his meat and none of his carrots, she wagged her finger at him. “No dessert until you eat your vegetables.” After dinner, the adults talked about Iraq. “It was real sunny today,” Grandpa put in, but they just ignored him.

The next morning everybody was up early for a hike to Cooper Lake. When Grandpa went to the closet to get his boots, I pushed the closet door shut. “No, Grandpa. You and I stay here and play chess. Remember?” Grandpa stared at me. “Remember?” I repeated.

My father’s voice came from behind me. “Grandpa can’t play chess anymore, Alec.”

“I can play chess,” Grandpa said, his voice firm and strong.

I wheeled around and faced my dad. “See?”

Once everyone had left, I set up the chessboard. Grandpa picked up the rook and stared at it. “That’s a rook,” I said. “It moves horizontally or vertically.” I picked up a bishop. “And bishops go diagonally. Don’t worry. It’ll all come back to you.”

We played. He moved the pawns O.K., but he kept messing up with the knights and the bishops. When he made a mistake, I explained the rule to him slowly. “I see,” Grandpa said, but he kept making the same mistakes again and again. Finally he stood up and went onto the porch. I followed.

“Where is everybody?” he asked.

“Out hiking.”

“Why aren’t we hiking?”

“We don’t hike, Grandpa. You and me–we play chess. Remember?”

He just sat in one of the chairs on the porch, his back to me.

Grandma was in the kitchen listening to talk shows on the radio. I could smell something cooking in the oven. I went to her. “What’s for dinner?” I said.

“Go fishing with him, Alec,” she said, switching the radio off. “There’s a pool of calm water off the river about a hundred yards down the path. There are poles in the closet. I’ll get them for you.”

“I don’t know how to fish,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter. Throw the line into the water and sit with him. It’d be good for both of you.”

“He can play chess,” I said. “He can.”

“Do you love your Grandpa, Alec?” she said.

“Yes,” I said angrily. “You know I do.”

“Go fishing with him.”

But I didn’t. And I didn’t the next day, or the day after that. I kept thinking of the stories I’d read about people working through hard times. It had never been easy for any of them, but they hadn’t quit. If I could get Grandpa to remember how to play chess, I was sure everything else would come back to him. But on Saturday, after I’d set up the board, he shook his head. “I don’t like chess.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “It’s your favorite game.”

“No, I don’t. I hate it,” he said, and his big hand flew across the board sending the pieces flying. Then he stomped outside and sat alone on the porch.

Grandma came out, saw what had happened and helped me pick up the pieces. One knight was missing. “It’s got to be here,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees to look under the sofa.

“Don’t worry about it, Alec,” Grandma said.

“I’ve got to find it,” I said. “I’ve got to.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and she went back into the kitchen.

I looked for that knight for about five minutes, fighting back tears all that time. Finally I stood and went into the kitchen. “Where are the fishing poles, Grandma?”

Grandpa and I were sitting on a riverbank boulder in the hot summer sun. Below us, fish darted about in the clear water. Grandpa opened his tackle box, stuck some salmon eggs on the end of his hook and threw the hook into the water. I did the same. Then we sat there. For 20 minutes. Nothing.

“We’re not catching any fish,” Grandpa said at last.

“No, Grandpa, we’re not.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What, Grandpa?”

Instead of answering, he stood and peeled off his shirt, then his pants. He was standing in his underwear. A second later he jumped into the little pool.

He looked up at me from the water. “Don’t you know how to swim?”

“I know how to swim,” I said.

He waved me toward him. I pulled off my shirt and my pants until I was in my underwear, standing on the boulder. Then I jumped in. I couldn’t believe how cold the water was, but in a few minutes I got used it. Grandpa pointed to some fish. “Let’s catch them,” he said. So we swam underwater and tried to grab the little fish with our hands.

We were in the water for about 30 minutes. Then, without saying a word, Grandpa got out. I followed. We sat in our underwear on the rock, the warm sun drying us. “I love the wind,” Grandpa said at last. “I do, too.”

“I love the sun and I love the clouds and I love the water.” “So do I.”

“You know what else?”

“No, Grandpa. What?”

“I love my wife and my sons and my daughters and my grandchildren. That’s what else.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. He noticed:

“Do you love everyone?”

“Yeah. I do.”

He rubbed the top of my head. “Good.” He paused. “You’re Alec, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, Grandpa, I’m Alec.”

Grandpa stood and started to dress. I hadn’t wanted to come, but now I hated to leave.

“Grandpa,” I said softly as I pulled on my pants. “Let’s make this our secret place. Let’s come here every day and go fishing and swimming but not tell anyone about it.”

“Our secret place,” he said. “No one else.”

“That’s right,” I said. “No one else.”

“Just you and me,” he said.

“Just you and me,” I answered.

He thought for a while. “O.K.,” he said at last. Then he stuck his hand out and I shook it, and the world seemed perfect. The miracle had happened just like I’d hoped. Only it hadn’t happened to Grandpa, it had happened to me. I was with him, and he was with me. That was all that had ever mattered; it was all that would ever matter.

This short story, based on similar events that actually happened to a friend’s grandfather, began as an English class paper by 16-year-old Marian Deuker.

We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment when we got to Portland, because we had no standards; we stood in our tiny new studio and admired our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the apartment. This was tremendously exciting for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we’d met when we were children and we seemed destined to sleep together like children, or like an old couple who got married before the sexual revolution and are too embarrassed to learn the new way.

Next we focussed on employment; we went hardly anywhere without joyfully filling out an application. But once we were hired–as furniture sanders-we could not believe that this was really what people did all day. Everything that we had always thought of as “The World” was actually the result of some one’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We went at it with determination–three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted an ad to the local paper. Finally, the Portland Weekly accepted it; it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Did such a thing exist? We would also consider a woman of average means who had saved up her money.

The ad ran for a month and our voice-mail box overflowed with interest. Every day we listened to hundreds of messages from men, waiting for that one special lady who would pay our rent. She was slow to appear. Perhaps she did not even read this section of the paper. We became agitated. We knew that this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Could we pay Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. Was he interested in the old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. He wanted to be paid in the traditional way. Pip grimly began to troll through the messages for a man who sounded gentle. I watched her boyish face as she listened and I realized that she was terrified. He would have to be a withered man, a man who really just wanted to see us jump around in our underwear. Suddenly, Pip grinned and wrote down a number. The woman’s name was Leslie.

The bus dropped us off at the top of the gravel driveway that Leslie had described on the phone. We’d told her that our names were Astrid and Tallulah, and we hoped that Leslie was a pseudonym, too. We wanted her to be wearing a smoking jacket or a boa. We hoped that she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin. We hoped that she was not the way she’d sounded on the phone. Not poor, not old, not just willing to pay for the company of anyone who would come all the way out to Nehalem, population 210.

Pip and I walked down the gravel path toward a small brown house. A woman stepped onto the porch. Her age was difficult to determine from our vantage point–a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus. She was perhaps the age of my mother’s older sister, Aunt Lynn. And, like Aunt Lynn, she wore leggings, royal-blue leggings, and an oversized button-down shirt with some kind of appliqué on it. My mind ballooned with nervous fear, and I looked at Pip, and for a split second I felt as though she were nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied my leg to hers before jumping off the bridge. Then I blinked and I was in love with her again.

Leslie waved and we waved. We waved until we were close enough to say hi and then we said hi. She said, “Come on in,” and we went in. Pip asked for the money right away, which was something we’d decided to do beforehand. It is always terrible to have to ask for anything. We wished we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting. She told us that we were younger than she’d expected. We sat on an old vinyl couch, and she left the room. It was an awful room, with magazines piled everywhere and furniture that looked as if it had come from a motel. We didn’t look at each other or at anything that was reflective. I stared at my knees.

For a long time we didn’t know where she was, and then slowly I could feel that she was standing right behind us. I realized this just before she pulled her fingernails through my hair. I hadn’t been able to imagine her as the sexual type, but now I realized that I didn’t know anything. It had begun, which meant that every second brought us closer to the end. I told myself that long nails meant wealth; the idea of wealth always calmed me down. My head relaxed and I did that exercise where you imagine that you are taming into honey. My mind slowed to a rate that would not have been considered functional for any other job. I was alive only one out of every four seconds; I registered only fifteen minutes out of the hour. I saw that she was standing before us in a slip and that it was not really clean and I died. I saw that Pip was taking off her shoes and I died. I saw that I was squeezing a nipple and I died.

On the long ride home neither of us said anything. We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand. The money we’d just made was also in that hand. Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home from the bus station and then we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more. Pip put the money in an envelope and wrote Mr. Hilderbrand’s name on it. Then we stood there, apart, bruised, and smelling like Leslie.

We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery. I decided to take a bath. Just as I was stepping into the tub I heard the front door close and I froze mid-step; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me. With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited for an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back that day. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood there naked until she returned? I had done things like this before. I had hidden under cars for hours. I had written the same word seven hundred times in an effort to alchemize time. I studied my position in the bathtub. The foot in the water was already wrinkly. How would I feel when night fell? And when Pip came home, how long would it take her to look for me in the bathroom? And would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone? And, even if she did realize that I had performed this impossible feat for her, what then? She was never thankful or sympathetic.

I left the bath and paced around our tiny room. It didn’t even occur to me to go outside; I had no idea how to navigate the city without her. There was only one thing that I couldn’t do when she was with me, so after a while I lay down on the couch and did this. I closed my eyes and ran through my memories from our childhood. We were under the covers on her mom’s foldout sofa, or on the top bunk of my bunk bed, or in a tent in her back yard. Every location was potent in its own way. No matter where we were, it would begin when Pip whispered, “Let’s mate.” She’d scoot on top of me; we’d clamp our arms around each other’s backs and rub ourselves against each other’s small hipbones trying to achieve friction. When we did it right, the feeling came on like a head-rush of the whole body.

But just before I got there I noticed a clicking noise in the air. It was distractingly present, quietly insistent. Above my head, our five Chinese paper lanterns were rocking slightly of their own accord. As I reached toward them I suddenly realized why, but I was too late to stop myself. I shook a lantern and cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling on each other even as they fell. They were determined and surviving as they passed each other in the air. They were planning the conquest of wherever they landed before they had even touched down. And when they hit the ground they didn’t die–they didn’t even think of dying. They ran.

When Pip finally came home, we agreed that the Leslie job had not been worth the money.” But a few days later we saw Nastassja Kinski in the movie “Paris, Texas.” She was wearing a long red sweater and working in a peepshow. I thought it looked like a pretty easy job, so long as Harry Dean Stanton didn’t show up, but Pip didn’t agree.

“No way. I’m not gonna do that.”

“I could do it without you.”

This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive. I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles. In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

“I won’t do it–never mind.” “You sound disappointed.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s O.K. I know you want them to look at you.”

“Who?”

“Men.”

“No, I don’t.”

“If you do that, then I can’t be with you anymore.”

This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew but because of something else. Because we both didn’t want men to look at me. I told her that I would never work in a peepshow, and she stopped doing the dishes, which meant that she was O.K. again. But I wasn’t O.K. In ten years we had touched only three times, not including the thing with Leslie. It seemed as though we’d stopped mating on the day we learned what fucking was.

These were the three times:

When she was eleven, her uncle tried to molest her. When she told me about it, I cried and curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest, and I knew that if I didn’t open my eyes it would happen, and it did. She slid her hand under my tights and felt around until she had located the thing she knew on herself.

Then she shook her finger in a violent, animal way. When it was over she told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t know if she meant about this thing with me or about her uncle.

When we were fourteen, we got drunk for the first time and for a few minutes eyeing seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter felt promisingly normal, and in the following days I waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.

In our last year of high school, I momentarily had one other friend. She was just an ordinary girl. Her name was Tammy. She liked the Smiths. There was no way I could ever have fallen in love with her, because she was just as pathetic as me. Every day she told me everything that she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together. I wanted to talk about myself, too, but it was hard to know where to begin. So I just hung out, in a loose imitation of Pip. Pip did not think much of Tammy, but she was mildly intrigued by the normalcy of our friendship.

“What do you guys do?”

“Nothing. Listen to tapes and stuff.”

“That’s it?”

“Last weekend we made peanut-butter cookies.”

“Oh. That sounds like fun.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No, it does.”

So Pip came along the next time I went to Tammy’s house. As predicted, we listened to tapes. Pip asked if we were going to make peanut-butter cookies, but Tammy said that she didn’t have the right ingredients. Then she threw herself down on the bed and asked us if we were girlfriends or what. An appalling emptiness filled the room. I stared out the window and repeated the word “window” in my head. I was ready to window window window indefinitely, but suddenly Pip answered.

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I have a gay cousin.”

Tammy told us that her room was a safe space and we didn’t have to pretend, and then she showed us a neon-pink sticker that her cousin had sent her. It said “Fuck Your Gender.” We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings–at least two, probably more. Tammy seemed to be waiting for something, as if Pip and I were going to obediently fall upon each other the moment we read the sticker’s bold command. I knew that we were a disappointment, meekly sitting on the bed. Pip must have felt this, too, because she abruptly threw her arm over my shoulder. This had never happened before, so, understandably, I froze. And then very gradually I recalibrated my body into a casual attitude. Pip just blinked when I sighed and flopped my hand onto her thigh. Tammy watched all this and even gave a slight nod of approval before shifting her attention back to the music. We listened to the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, and the Sugarcubes. Pip and I did not move from our position. After an hour and twenty minutes, my back ached and my hand felt numb and unaffiliated with the rest of my body. I asked Tammy where the rest room was and then ran out of the room.

In the powdery warmth of the bathroom I felt euphoric. I locked the door and made a series of involuntary, baroque gestures in the mirror. I waved maniacally at myself and contorted my face into hideous, unlovable expressions. I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling first one and then the other. I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood. The scientific name for this spasm is the Last Hurrah. The feeling was quickly spent. I dried my hands on a tiny blue towel and walked back to the bedroom.

I knew it just the moment before I saw it. I knew that I would find them together on the bed; I knew that I would be stunned; I knew that they would spring apart and wipe their mouths. I knew that Pip would not look me in the eye. I knew that I’d never speak to Tammy again. I knew that we would all graduate from high school and that Pip and I would live together as planned. And I knew that she did not want me in that way. She never would. Other girls, any girl, but not me.

Now that we had paid the rent, we felt entitled to mention the cock- roach situation to the landlord. He told us that he would send someone over, but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. “Why not?”

“Well, it’s not just your apartment-the whole building’s infested.”

“Maybe you should have them do the whole building, then.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. They’d just come over from other buildings.”

“It’s the whole block?”

“It’s the whole world.”

I told him never mind, then, and got off the phone before he could hear Pip hammering. We were making some renovations–specifically, we were building a basement. Our apartment was small, but the ceilings were high and there was a tantalizing amount of unused space above our heads. Pip thought that lofts were for hippies, so even though our studio was on the second floor, she had sketched out a design that would allow us to live on a low-ceilinged main floor and then, whenever we were feeling morose, descend a ladder to the basement. We would leave the really heavy things down there, like the couch and the bathtub, but everything else would come upstairs. We could both picture the basement perfectly in our heads. It had a smell–damp, mineral–but was not entirely uncivilized. Warmth and beams of light seeped through the ceiling. Up there was home. Dinner was waiting for us there.

One of the many great reasons for building a basement was our access to free wood. Pip had met a girl whose father owned Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. Kate Berryman. She was just a year younger than us and went to the private high school by Pip’s grandma’s house. I had never met her, but I was glad that we were using her. We practiced a loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, we’d concluded, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours. Kate probably thought that she was on our side of the restitution when she straggled to pull large pieces of plywood out of the back of her parents’ station wagon. She left them in the alley behind our building, honking three times as she drove away. We hauled the wood upstairs, convinced that we had hoodwinked everyone. We were always geeing away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world.

Each morning, Pip made a list of what we needed to do that day. At the top of the list was usually “Go to bank”-where they had free coffee. The next items were often vague–”Find out about food stamps,” “Library card?”-but the list still gave me a cozy feeling. I liked to watch her write it, knowing that someone was steering our day. At night we discussed how we would decorate the basement, but during the day our progress was slow. Mostly what we had was a lot of pieces of wood; they leaned against the wails and lay across the couch like untrained dogs.

We were trying to nail a post into the linoleum kitchen floor when Pip decided that we needed a certain kind of bracket.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll call Kate and she’ll bring it.”

Pip made the call and then went to take a shower. I continued hammering long nails through the post and into the floor. The post became secure. It was a satisfying feeling. It wouldn’t bear any kind of weight, but it stood on its own. It was almost as tall as me and I couldn’t help naming it. It looked like a Gwen.

The buzzer rang and Pip ran damply to the door. It was Kate. I looked up at her from where I was sitting on the kitchen floor. She was wearing a school uniform.

“Where’s the bracket?” I said.

With panic in her eyes, she looked at Pip. Pip took her hand, turned to me, and said, “We have to tell you something.”

I suddenly felt chilled. My ears were so cold that I had to press my hands against them. But I realized that this made me look as if I were trying to avoid listening, like the monkey who hears no evil. So I robbed my palms together and asked, “Are your ears cold?”

Pip didn’t respond, but Kate shook her head no.

“O.K. Go ahead.”

“Kate and I are going to live together at her parents’ house.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m sure Kate’s dad doesn’t want you living in his house after we stole all that wood from him.”

“I’m going to work at Berryman’s Lumber to pay him back. I might even make enough money to get a car.”

I thought about this. I imagined Pip driving a car, a Model T, wearing goggles and a scarf that blew behind her in the wind.

“Can I work at Berryman’s Lumber, too?”

Pip was suddenly angry.

“Come on!”

“What? I can’t? Just say I can’t if I can’t.”

“You are purposely not getting it!”

“What?”

She raised Kate’s hand clasped in her own and shook it in the air.

Suddenly my ears were hot, they were boiling, and I had to fan my hands at either side of my head to cool them down. This was too much for Pip; she grabbed her backpack and marched out of the apartment with Kate following her.

I could not let her leave the building. I ran down the hall and threw myself on her. She shook me off; I locked my arms around her knees, I was sobbing and wailing, but not like a cartoon of someone sobbing and wailing–this was really happening. If she left, I would become mute, like those children who have witnessed horrible atrocities. Pip was prying my fingers off her shins. Kate kneeled down to help her, and I was repulsed by the touch of her puddinglike skin. I wanted to puncture it. I lunged at her chest. Pip took advantage of this moment to scuttle down the stairs and somehow Kate was behind her. I ran after them, watched them scurry into Kate’s car. Before they pulled away, I shut my eyes and hurled myself onto the sidewalk I lay there. This was my last hope–that Pip would take pity on me. I heard their car idling beside me. I listened to the traffic and to the sound of pedestrians stepping carefully around me. I could almost hear Kate and Pip arguing in the car, Pip wanting to get out and help me, Kate urging her to leave. I pressed my cheek against the pavement in prayer. A pair of high heels clicked toward me and stopped. An elderly woman’s voice asked if I was O.K. I whispered that I was fine and silently begged her to move on. But the woman was persistent, so finally I opened my eyes to tell her to leave. Kate’s car was gone.

I slept for three days. At intervals I’d open my eyes just long enough to remember. Then I’d drop back into unconsciousness. In dreams, I was tunnelling toward her–if I could only dig deep enough I would find her. The tunnels narrowed as I crawled through them, until they became impossibly knotted strands of hair that I could only tear at.

On the afternoon of the third day, the phone finally rang. It was Mr. Hilderbrand. In some bizarre alternative reality, the rent was due again. A month had passed since we had lifted Leslie’s dirty slip. I hung up the phone and looked around the room. My post was still standing in the kitchen, tactfully silent. A dangerously tall tablelike structure wobbled in the middle of the room. It was the first square foot of the upstairs. I crawled underneath it and imagined Pip and Kate eating dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Berryman. It was the kind of scenario she had often described. We could never walk past a fancy house without her presuming that its owners would want her to live with them if they only knew that she was available. She saw herself as a charming street urchin, a pet for wealthy mothers. It was a scam. There was nothing in the world that was not a con–suddenly I understood this.

I went to the bathroom and threw handfuls of water on my face. I took off the jeans and T-shirt I had been sleeping in. Naked, I crouched on the floor and sliced the legs off my pants with a box cutter. I put on what was left of the pants and they were itty-bitty. Itty-bitty teeny-tiny. I sawed through the T-shirt, leaving “If You Love Jazz” on the floor. “Honk” barely covered my small breasts, but hey. Hey, I was leaving the apartment. I was walking down the hall, and there was a small basket of old apples in front of the neighbor’s door, with a sign that said, “For my neighbors–please take one.” I was starving. I took an apple and the door swung open. I had never really met this neighbor, but now I could see that she was a junkie. An old junkie. She told me to take another one and then she asked for a hug. I hugged her hard with an apple in each hand. A week before, I would have been afraid to touch her, but now I knew that I could do anything.

I had no money for the bus, so I walked. It was an incredible distance. A horse would have got tired galloping there. When birds flew there, it was called migration. But it wasn’t difficult; it just took time. It was a new experience to walk across the city in tiny shorts and a half shirt that said “Honk.” People honked without even seeing the shirt. I had the feeling that I might be shot in the back with an arrow or a gun, but this didn’t happen. The world wasn’t safer than I had thought; on the contrary, it was so dangerous that my practically naked self just fit right in–like a car crash, this kind of thing happened every day.

The place I was walking to was in a strip mall, between a pet store and a check-cashing place. I asked the man at the counter if they were hiring, and he gave me a form to fill out on a clipboard. When I handed it back, he stared at it without moving his eyes, which made me think that maybe he couldn’t read. He said that I could start that night if I wanted to come back at nine. I said, “Great.” He said that his name was Allen. I said that my name was Gwen.

I hung out in the strip mall for three hours. The pet store was closed, but I could see the rabbits through the window. I pressed my fingers against the glass and an ancient lop-ear hopped toward me wearily. It looked at me with one eye and then the other. Its nose quivered and for a moment I felt that it recognized me. It knew me from before, like an old teacher or a friend of my parents. The rabbit’s eyes darted across my clothes and sniffed my wild, sad urgency and guessed that I was up to no good. I stood up, brushed off my knees, and walked back into Mr. Peepers Adult Video Store and More.

The “and More” part was in the back. Allen left me there with a woman named Christy. She was sitting in a green plastic patio chair and wearing a pink OshKosh overall dress. Looking at the sturdy brass overall fasteners, I wondered if everything familiar was actually part of a secret sexual underworld. Christy showed me into a booth and began packing dildos and bottles and strings of beads into a sporty Adidas bag. Her tools were laid out on an old flowery towel that smelled like my grandmother. She wrapped the towel around a small empty jelly jar.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Pee.”

Even pee was in on this. She showed me the price list and the slot that money would come through. She raised the flat of her hand in the air as she described how the curtain would roll up. She cleaned a telephone receiver with Windex and a paper towel and warned me never to leave it sticky. Then, with hasty efficiency, she pulled her long, thin hair into a ponytail, swung the Adidas bag over her shoulder, and left.

The store suddenly felt very quiet, like a library, I sat on the green plastic chair and adjusted my shirt and shorts. The fluorescent lights droned with a timeless constancy. I looked up at them and imagined that they, not the stars, had hung over the long creation of civilization. They had droned over ice ages and Neanderthals, and now they droned over me. I walked into my booth. I didn’t have anything to lay out on a towel; I didn’t even have a towel. All I had was the key to my apartment. If 1 didn’t make any money tonight I would be walking all the way back there. At night. In this outfit. I was in the unique situation of needing to give a live fantasy show in order to protect my personal safety.

I practiced taking the phone off the hook. I did it five times, quicker and quicker, as if this were the skill I would be paid for. I thought about the words that I would have to speak into it. I had never said any of those words, except as swear words. I tried to think of them as seductive. I tried to say them seductively into the receiver, but they came out in a swallowed whisper. What if I couldn’t say them? How awkward would that be? The man would ask for his money back and I wouldn’t get to take the bus. In a panic, I said all the dirty words I knew in one long curse: Cock-sucking ball-licking bitch whore cunt pussy-licking asshole fucker. I hung up the phone. At least I could say them.

I sat in the plastic chair for more than three hours. During this time, two different men came into the store. They both peeked at me over the racks of videos, but neither of them walked to the back. After the second man left, Allen yelled out from behind the counter.

“That’s the second one you’ve let go by!”

“What?”

“You’ve gotta be more aggressive! Can’t just sit on your ass back there!”

“Got it!”

Twenty minutes later, a man in a black sweatshirt came in. He peered over a rack of magazines at me and I rose to my feet and walked toward him. His sweatshirt had a picture of a galaxy on it with an arrow pointing to a tiny dot and the words “You are here.” The man looked up at me and pretended to be surprised. I imagined him instinctively pulling off his hat in the presence of a lady, but he wasn’t wearing a hat.

“Are you interested in a live fantasy show, sir?”

“Yeah. O.K.”

He followed me to the back of the store. We parted for a moment and reunited inside the booth with the curtained glass between us. I heard a Velcro wallet ripping open, twenty dollars fell lightly into the locked plastic box, and the curtain rose. He already had his penis in one hand and the phone in the other, I lifted the receiver. But, as I had feared, I was mute. I stood paralyzed, as if on a rock over a cold lake. I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another, I could stand there all day, letting the other kids go in front of me forever. He was pumping it up and down, and it was a strange sight, not something you see every day; in fact, I had never seen this before. He said something into the phone, but I didn’t catch it. Despite how close we were, the reception was not very good.

“Excuse me?”

“Can you take off your clothes?”

“Oh. O.K.”

From the start, one is trained not to take off one’s clothes in front of strangers. Keeping one’s clothes on is actually the No. 1 rule for civilization. Even a duck or a bear looks civilized when clothed. I pulled down my shorts, slid off my underwear, lifted my shirt over my head. I stood there, naked, like a bear or a duck. The man looked at me with grim concentration, my pale breasts, the puff of hair between my legs, back and forth between these poles. And he checked occasionally to make sure that I was looking at him. I diligently stared at his penis and hoped that this was enough, but after a few seconds he asked me if I liked what I saw. Again I was on the rock; kids splashed below me yelling “Jump!” I knew that jumping was like dying. I would have to let go of everything. I considered what I had. She hadn’t called, she wouldn’t call, I was alone, and I was here–not in some abstract sense, not here on earth or here in the universe, but really here, standing naked before this man. I pushed my hand between my legs and said, “Your big hard cock is making me so horny.”

At 5 A.M., I was gliding through the night on a bus. The bus was just a formality, though–actually I was flying, in the air, and I was taller than most people are, I was nine or twelve feet tall, and I could fly, I could jump over cars, I could say “cock” ravenously, gently, coyly, demandingly. I could fly. And I had three hundred and twenty-five dollars in my pocket. Standing with one foot in the bathtub until Pip returned wasn’t just a way to stop time–it was also a ritual to bring her back. I would be Gwen until she came home.

I bought a lime-green negligee, a dildo, which I de-virginized myself with, and a bobbed chestnut-colored wig. I hated my job, but I liked the fact that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn’t. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn’t, it was like suddenly being good at sports. I didn’t care about football, but it was pretty amazing to be in the N.F.L. I told long involved stories that revolved around my own perpetually wet pussy. I spread open every part of my body. I told customers that I missed them, and these customers became regulars and these regulars became stalkers. I learned to stay inside until the moment before my bus came, and then dash past anyone who was waiting in the parking lot, waving and yelling, “Come see me on Thursday!”

And I missed her terribly.

One evening, the bus was late and a customer followed me out to the curb. He stood beside me at the bus stop and I ignored him, and then he started spitting. First he spat on the pavement, then more generally in the air. I felt tiny wet specks blow Onto my face and I pressed my lips together and stepped back. His harassment relied on a logic so foreign that I felt disoriented. I couldn’t gauge whether this was terrifying or silly, and it was this feeling that told me to go back inside. I walked, then ran, slamming the door behind me. Mr. Peepers was not exactly a safe haven, though, and I couldn’t stay there forever. I asked Allen to go outside and see if the customer was still there. He was. Couldn’t Allen tell him to leave? Allen felt that he could not, because (a) he wasn’t breaking the law and (b) he was a good customer. Allen thought that I should call a friend or a cab to pick me up.

I had been waiting for this moment, and I marvelled at how organically it had arisen. I usually imagined poisoning myself or getting hit by a car. Someone official–a cop or a nurse–would ask me if there was anyone I wanted to call. I would gasp her name. “She works at Berryman’s Lumber and Supply,” I would say. This situation was not as dire, but it did involve safety, and, more important, it hadn’t been my idea to call her. I had been ordered, almost commanded, by a superior, Allen.

I called Berryman’s Lumber quickly, almost distractedly, modelling myself on the kind of person who would have a question about replacement saw blades. But the moment the line began ringing my senses dilated, winnowing out everything that was not the sound of my own heart.

“Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. How can I help you?”

“I’m trying to reach Pip Greeley?”

“Just a sec.”

Just a sec. Just two months. Just a lifetime. Just a sec.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, hi.”

I knew this wouldn’t do. This Oh, hi. I couldn’t be the person who elicited a response like this. I straightened my wig. I smiled into the air the way I smiled when customers unbuckled their belts, and I made my eyes laugh as if everything were some version of a good time. I began again.

“Hey, I’m in a bind here and wonder if you could help me out.”

“Yeah? What?

“I’m working at this place, Mr. Peepers? And there’s this really creepy guy hanging around. Do you have a car?”

She was silent for a moment. I could almost hear the name Mr. Peepers vibrating in her head. It described a man with eyes the size of clocks. She had devoted her whole life to avoiding Mr. Peepers, and now here I was, cavorting with him. I was either repulsive and foolish or I was something else. Something surprising. I held my breath.

She said She guessed she could borrow a van and could I wait twenty minutes until she got off work? I said I probably could.

We didn’t talk in the van, and I didn’t look at her, but I could feel her looking at me many times with bewilderment. I usually changed my clothes and took off my wig before I went home, but I had been right not to do this today. I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised–we feigned boredom and prayed for traffic. Just as her former home came into view, Pip made a sudden left turn and asked if I wanted to see where she lived now. “You mean Kate’s?”

“No, that didn’t work out. I’m living in this guy I work with’s basement.”

“Sure.

The basement was what is called “unfinished.” It was dirt, with a few boards thrown down here and there, islands that supported abed and some milk crates.

Pip waved a flashlight around and said, “It’s only seventy-five dollars a month.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, all this room! It’s more than fifteen hundred square feet. I can do anything I want with it.”

She walked me between the beams, describing her plans. Then she slipped the flashlight into a hanging loop of string and a dim spotlight fell on her pillow. I stretched out on the bed and yawned. She stared at the length of me.

“You can stay here if you want–I mean, if you’re tired.”

“I might just nap.”

“I have some cleaning up to do.”

“You clean up. I’ll nap.”

I listened to her sweeping. She swept closer and closer, she swept all around the edges of the mattress. Then she laid the broom down and climbed into bed with me. We lay there, perfectly still, for a long time. Finally, Pip adjusted her shoulders so that the outermost edge of her T-shirt gazed my arm; I recrossed my legs, carelessly letting my ankle fall against her shin. Five more seconds passed, like heavy bass-drum beats. Then we turned to each other, and our hands grabbed urgently, even painfully. It seemed necessary to be brutal at first, to mime anger and concede nothing. But once we had wrestled deep into the night and turned off the flashlight, I was surprised by her gentle attentions.

So this was what it was like not to be me. This was who Pip was. Because, make no mistake, I kept my wig on the whole time. I believed it had made all of this possible, and I think I was right. The wig and the fact that I did not cry, even though I desperately wanted to cry, to tell her how miserable I had been, to squeeze her and make her promise never to leave again. I wanted her to beg me to quit my job and then I wanted to quit my job.

But she didn’t beg, and in fact Mr. Peepers was essential. Each night she picked me up in the Berryman’s Lumber van, took me under the house, and made love to me. And each morning I went home and took off my wig. I scratched my sweaty scalp and let my head breathe for two hours before getting on the bus to go to work. I lived like this for eight beautiful days. On the ninth day, Pip suggested that we go out to breakfast before I went to work.

“I wish I could, but I have to go home and get ready.”

“You look great.”

“But I have to wash my hair.”

“Your hair looks great.”

Our eyes locked and an unfriendly feeling passed between us. Of course it was a wig–I knew she knew this–but she was suddenly determined to call my bluff. I imagined for a moment that we were duelling, delicate foils raised high.

“O.K., then, let’s have breakfast.”

“I can drop you off at Mr. Peepers.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

Everyone knows that if you paint a human being entirely with house paint he will live, as long as you don’t paint the bottoms of his feet. It only takes a little thing like that to kill a person. I had worn the wig for almost thirty hours straight, and as I stripped and jiggled and moaned I began to feel warm, overly warm. But after each show a new customer appeared. By midday, sweat was running down the sides of my face, but the men just kept coming. It was a day of incredible profits. Allen even patted me on the back as I left, saying, “Good work, champ.” Pip was waiting in the van, but the walk across the parking lot felt long and strange. I thought I recognized a customer crouching by his car, but, no, it was just a normal man huddled over something in a cage. He murmured, “That’s right, we’re going to take you home.”

Pip put me right to bed and even borrowed a thermometer from her coworker upstairs. But she did not suggest that I take off my wig, and in my fever I understood what this meant. I saw her in the clearing with a pistol and I knew without even looking that my hands were empty. But I could win by pretending to have a pistol. If I said “Bang!” and let her shoot me, I would win. If I died this way, as Gwen, would the rest of me go on living? And what was the rest of me? I fell asleep with this question and tunnelled through the night ripping at the knotted strands until finally the wig came off. I didn’t put it on in the morning and Pip didn’t ask me how I was feeling; she could see that I was fine. She didn’t offer to drive me to work, either, and we both knew that she wouldn’t be there to pick me up.

I sat in the green plastic chair under the fluorescent lights. It was a slow day. It seemed as if all the men in the world were too busy to masturbate. I imagined them out there doing virtuous things, solving crimes and teaching their children how to do cartwheels. It was the last hour of my eight-hour shift and I had not given a single show. It was almost eerie. I watched the dock and the door and began to place bets between them. If no customers came for me in the next fifteen minutes, I would yell Allen’s name. Fifteen minutes passed.

“Allen!”

“What.”

“Nothing.”

There were only twenty minutes left now. If no one came in the next twelve minutes, I would yell the word “I,” as in me, myself, and. After seven minutes, the door dinged and a man came in. He bought a video and left.

“I!”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

It was the final eight. If no customers came in, I would yell the word “quit.” As in no more, enough, I’m going home. I stared at the door. With each breath I took, it threatened to open. With each passing minute. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

By Miranda July

Skin the rabbit–that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike.

Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm–he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.”

He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too.

After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows.

You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr. Bailey, he said he can’t believe that I can catch them so near town. I told him that you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nodded so small you could only just see his chin moving up and down. “You’ve got it there, Billy,” he said.

After he paid me we looked at the dogs and had a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.

Lately, in the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the gum trees and every time I look at them I think of that day in school when I was right and Mr. Fry was wrong. Mr. Fry showed us a picture and told us that trees lose their leaves in autumn, and the other kids started writing it down, but I felt the words come up, and I said no they don’t lose their leaves, they lose their bark. Mr. Fry said how typical it was that the one time I opened my mouth in class I’d come up with the wrong answer. Now I look at the trees standing bare in the mist and think about how I kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and how the other kids sat smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.
When you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colors when it’s wet. One day I was looking at the leaves and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they were like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about–rain, probably. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited. Or frightened.

But now that it’s winter the trees just look dark and shrunken, as if they’re hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said that his body was closing down slowly. On the track there’s ice crystals in the clay, and when you look real close you can see that the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in a cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks run through it, rushing outward like tiny creeks.

Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. “What are you bawling for?” my dad said. I hid the gloves under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like green leaves, soft and dry and bendy, not knowing autumn’s coming.
The morning I saw the lady’s porch lights my dad gave me a new hat for my chilblains. He made it for me from rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his sweater till my mouth ached from holding it shut, then he pulled the rabbit-fur flaps down and tied them. “See you back here with the bunnies,” he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip furnace.

One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids that we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, “It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who.” I asked Dad what deliverance meant and he rolled a cigarette and said why. The next time he wanted chicken pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked the chip furnace up so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then asked would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the hens and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands in front of him. They were bright pink, like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, “Don’t forget to tell your friends.”
I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing new overalls and you could still see the fold marks in them. She had hair the color of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me–like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school, just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straightaway and not giving me any time to think it over.

She said, “Well, hello there, has the cat got your tongue?” She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.

I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.

“You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag?” she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, “Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?”

I said for Mr. Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said, “Goodness me,” looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see it better.

She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame that it would cost an arm and a leg to put the power through, otherwise she would have made an offer, but this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a gold mine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish talking so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside the bag–I could smell them.

“What’s your name?” she asked me finally, and I said Billy.

“And do you go to school, Billy?”

I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.

“And is it a special school, just for special children?”

I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really, then my mouth blurted out, “You got hair like a fox.”

She laughed like someone in a movie. “Good heavens,” she said. “You are a character, aren’t you?”

A man in a red dressing gown came out onto the veranda and the lady said, “Look, darling, some local color.”

“Love the hat,” the man said to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, “The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake.” Then she said, “Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling,” and I pulled one out and Roger said, “Good God.”

They both laughed and laughed, and Roger said, “Well, it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home.” Which was wrong. They were both home and they’d turned the lights off by then.
When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting, my boots cracked on the black ice. You’ve got to be careful you don’t go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really–you just have to get down real close to see where the water froze then melted a bit, then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.

Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because so much time had passed. The skins ripped off with the sound of one of those Band-Aids they put on your knees in the school sickroom. “Get them off,” my dad said when I came home with the Band-Aids on the time someone tripped me at school and I banged my knees on the concrete. Dad was watching me, so I pulled both of them off fast and my knees bled again. “Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious,” my dad said. “Get some air onto them.” I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.
Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the lady’s house. You could hear banging and machines, and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges. One day I crept up and saw the lady on a new veranda, which was covered in pink paint, standing with her arms folded, just staring out at the trees. She didn’t look so happy now, with everything half finished and mud instead of a garden. There were big piles of rocks around, like she was waiting for someone to move them, and I saw a duck standing still as anything under a tree. I went closer and she saw me.

“Well, Billy!” she called, and I went over and saw that the duck was a pretend one.

“Look at all these bloody trees,” she said, sighing. “I’m sick of the sight of them.”

She had the overalls on again but they didn’t look so new anymore.

“What are those trees, anyway, Billy?” she said, and I said that they were gum trees, and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished talking and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.

I said there was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she asked how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening–she was still looking down the state-forest gully toward the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.
Three weeks later I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying. It was a big old tree and it used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk somebody had cut a circle, and sap was dripping out, which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. The person had used a little saw, then a hatchet, and I could see that whoever it was didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so that it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me, trying its hardest to stay alive.

The next week I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening: seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up in the air again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.
“You’ve done it again, Billy,” Mr. Bailey said when I came by. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Two big fat ones today.”

I got my money and walked up the hill toward the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees, planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.

This time I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me, and she jumped backward.

“Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you?” she said, all shaky. She had a scarf that had slipped a bit off her hair and you could see where the red color stopped and the hair underneath was dark brown and silver, which was funny because sometimes it’s exactly the same on a fox’s tail, striped like that.

“God, this place,” she said like a hiss, and threw down her trowel. “Isn’t the collective cold shoulder enough without you creeping around like . . .” Then she stopped and said, “Forget it, forget it.” I saw that she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said in a different voice, “Where did you get that box, Billy?”

I said, “Out of the shed.” She laughed. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.

“Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint Colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?”

Her voice was all excited.

“What about selling it to me?” she said.

I said that it was my rabbit box and she asked did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up the old boxes for the chip furnace. He kept nails and bolts in them.

“I know where there’ll be a lot,” I said. “At the Franklin garage sale.”

Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr. Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.

“When is it?” she asked.

“On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.”

“Like what?” she asked, and then said a whole list of things–fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards?–and I just kept nodding.

“Lots of that kind of thing,” I said. “Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.”

She folded her arms and looked at me harder. “Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?”

“Yep,” I said. “But you got to get there real early in the morning. Like six-thirty or something. ‘Cause other people come up from the city.”

She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.

“I can get there earlier than the dealers,” she said, looking down the hill at the trees all secretly dying in a row to the lake.
On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says that it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.

I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop in the night, cutting open the trees’ skin while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr. Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over.

When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars at school, cold metal that hurts your chest. I found a still, stiff rabbit in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.

The crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all around that sharp turn. I was careful with the rabbit, as careful as when I set a snare. It looked like it was alive all right, sitting up there by itself in the middle of the track.

I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.
My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.

“You’d better go out and check your traps,” he said as he split the kindling.

Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums, and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr. Farrelly said that the ambulance blokes themselves had nearly skidded on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. “What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning, anyway?” Mr. Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. “Bloody loonies.”

Under her front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. For everything poisonous there’s something else nearby to cure it, if you just look around. My dad says that, too.

I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.

By Cate Kennedy

…All this while killing time in Cleveland, waiting for the Mansfield john to show up to collect the girl, because against all odds he had sent payment in advance for an evening of pleasurable escort after succumbing to Shank’s well-polished pitch:

The girl’s name is Meg. Hell, name her whatever you want, but I’d like you to call her Meg when you greet her for the first time, my friend. Said girl being in the prime of her youth, fresh as a daisy and raring to go. She’d practically escort you for free if I weren’t around to mediate her desires, my friend, he said from a phone booth outside Ypsilanti, watching the girl as she sat in the car, fixing her face in the mirror. The Mansfield john’s number had come from a list of potential clients he’d been keeping, names and numbers whispered to him as he and Meg rambled aimlessly around the Great Lakes. OHIO MEN IN NEED, it said at the top in block lettering. Below were six names. He’d tried four of them already, with no luck, but this time he felt the guy taking the bait–a sense of urgency formed at the other end of the line as the Mansfield john succumbed to the image he had painted: a bright young girl entwined in a skein of sexual confusion, open to just about anything. A girl born out of the loins of Akron, smothered by a father’s touch, and then cast out to fend for herself. (He’d left out the boring details: the way he had come upon her small body curled up, asleep, beneath an overpass outside Port Huron; the long journey they’d taken around the rim of the state of Michigan, following the mitten, staying as close as possible to the waterline. He’d left out her delicate neckline and the shallow hopelessness of her gaze and the way he’d educated her in how to make use of her flesh to earn funds. He’d left out his former religious training at the Grand Rapids Bible Institute and the way God had failed to give him a precise indication of His will.)

After that, he’d begun to zero in on a price, speaking to the image he had conjured of a somewhat dainty man in neat trousers, with the kind of studied, dreamy comportment you’d expect from a farmer who had gone into the seed business and left field work behind for good; there was a hint of yokel in the Mansfield john’s voice, a bit of hick around his tongue tempered by churchgoing and Sunday-school teaching. Yes, there was most certainly some Bible study in the formality of his elocutions, and there was fear in the amplitude of his voice–just loud enough to sound natural. In the phone booth, Shank imagined Mansfield as a man with neat hair, parted clean on the left-hand side, held with a shellac of brilliantine, cut tight above the ears. His wife would be in the family room watching television, aware of her husband in the kitchen, maybe even listening in to his side of the conversation, which to her would seem naturally cryptic because he often made deals on the phone, talking about seed prices, the best hybrids to plant, the way to intercrop carrots with corn. With this in mind, Shank took care when the dickering began and told Mansfield, Just say soy if you’re going to bid lower on Meg, and alfalfa if we hit the magic number. Eventually the john said, softly, Yes, alfalfa is the way to go because it’s a versatile crop, alfalfa will do just fine in your soil if you’re lucky with the weather, and Shank said, Good, we’ve got a deal and you’ll be saving this little girl’s life, Mansfield, you understand, because she’s putting money away for college after being kicked out of her home for no good reason. Then he instructed the man where and when to meet, adding, Just give us a nod. You’ll see us standing around outside the Holiday Inn, and then go on up and check in and I’ll send her up to you. You’ll know us when you see us. I’ll be the one with the big shoulders, and she’ll be the one with the sweet derrière.

Here we are, Shank thought (or maybe said) outside the hotel, waiting out yet another john delayed by his guilt and his doubts and the time it takes to check his morality at the door, driving north, praying for forgiveness, taking a rain check on his deeper principles while the dull fields fly eagerly past the bug-speckled windows. As Mansfield drives, alone in the car, his face will be composed–the same look he might have when teaching his Sunday-school class–as he reaches up once or twice to straighten his cuffs, or his tie, and assures himself that if he maintains a certain formality he’ll be able to justify anything he might do in this good world. When he gets to the hotel, he’ll be so enthralled by his own desire–acute, as solid as carved stone–that the rest of his life, the house and the business and his upstanding place in the community, will become nothing but a small white dot behind him, zipping away like the last of an old television image.

A bolo tie at his throat, fresh-pressed plaid shirt tucked smartly into his chinos, the john will unchain the door, let it swing open, throw his arms wide, and say, Come on in, Meg, offering up a room truncated and narrow, papered in gold foil, periscoping to a view of Lake Erie from fifteen stories up. She’ll go directly to the window and stay there, with her back to him, as long as possible, looking out, trying to fashion some drama. From the violent johns she’s learned that it’s best to build up an assemblage of gestures, somewhat vaudevillian and slapstick, around the act itself in order to preëmpt the hard, cold dynamics that otherwise set in naturally. (She would’ve got that from her father, an old tool-and-die guy: an awareness of the importance of the fine gradients, of using a micrometer, measure twice, cut once, and all that. . . .) Most johns were as hard as tungsten, as square inside as an unworked block. Behind her, Mansfield will cough a couple of times, unhitch his belt, and then approach her hesitantly. Beneath his façade of neat and upstanding morals will be a horrible goatlike presence, a humping energy that will arrive musky and damp, pressing up against her, moaning, reaching around to tweak her breasts. That much is certain. This john’s a connoisseur of dry, Shank had warned her. He likes it sandpapery and rough, no lubrication, none, nada.

As Shank waited for her down in the hotel lobby, he began to feel himself edging into pure speculation. He knew little about what really went on up in the room, but he had a basic idea and he could imagine, in general terms, how she coped. Most likely she’d:

1. Find a crass rigidity, all bone and sinew, in the brashness of survival.
2. Abolish the formality of her own flesh. Reduce herself down to an essence–hips, the arch of her foot and shoulder blades, the part in her hair, the fine down on her earlobes, the nape of her neck.
3. Assume a protoplasmic mobility; the creep of the protozoa, one-celled hydra, primal and original and eager to consume itself for lunch.

In due course, Mansfield will tell her that he sells seed and some heavy equipment wholesale, just outside of town proper, and then he’ll let his pants fall to the floor, step out of them, and move behind her as he places his cold, bloodless hands around her belly and tries to turn her while she resists slightly, and then some more, until he has to use a little force, and then they’ll do a give-and-take shuffle to the bed, where he’ll push her down and take her clothing off a bit at a time until finally they’ll be doing it, and then he’ll completely embody that goatlike carnality, grunting and groaning, while she keeps her eyes closed and concentrates on the spot Shank had pointed out to her on the water earlier, and she’ll think about how it would feel to be devoured by darkness and then spat out somewhere, startled and renewed, fresh and tight from a spigot into a bucket or out onto a lush lawn somewhere pleasant–yes, she’ll use that image, hold to it, and it will make things easier for her, he thought down in the lobby, waiting for her to emerge from the elevator, which she did, about forty-five minutes later, raising her hand to adjust her hair, glancing around for him with a bit too much eagerness.

There was something in her face: a slackness in her jaw that foretold the confession she’d give an hour later, driving through the moonlit suburb of Lakewood, speaking softly, saying: He had that string tie on the whole time, and it kept bugging me. You know, those cold metal tips kept brushing me, and it was like they were saying, Here I am, yank me. We’re ready to go. Just grab hold. Cross the line, he said. Not out loud, but with his hands and his you-know-what. I said no. He struck me and said, Cross it. I said no. He hit me again. Then those strings told me: Draw me tight. And so I did. I did. It took all my might. I dug a knee into his ribs, tightened the bolo tie around his throat, and rode him like a bronco until he stopped moving, she said

Shank could just barely make out the shape of her face in the pale Ohio light. Go on. Go on, he said, and she said, Well, what do you want to hear? Give me the nitty-gritty, he said. Give me the sick parts that this country ain’t ready for, the bits folks would never believe. He waited, listening to the engine shudder. Well, she said, his teeth popped out during the fight. His bridge, I guess you’d call it, the four front ones, and when I was done I popped them into my mouth and said, What’s up, doc? You didn’t, he said, feeling the laugh come up from his ribs and then listening as she laughed in response.

Eventually they were up on the beach road, passing sensible homes, locked tight and frowning out at the lake with mute but unshaded windows while the first light came along the edge of the lake and he explained to her how even Erie would ignite if you touched a match to it correctly, and then he rambled on (trying to stop himself at first) about the time he’d witnessed the Cuyahoga River burn, a calico blanket of shimmering flames elbowing its way into the heart of Cleveland, and how the sight of it had changed everything and made him aware that his calling wasn’t with the Lord, because there hadn’t been a single recognizable sign of prophesy in that water, even as it burned.

After a swing up to Detroit for no good reason except to pay off a gambling debt and to cast a glance at Lake St. Clair, they headed east along the dreary tedium of Canada, Highway 401, the staggering dull flatness and repetition. This part of Canada’s nothing but a feeble reflection of U.S. glory, he said. Then he carried on about old draft-dodger buddies who’d gone nuts from missing the American stuff. Guys who hallucinated burger joints, strip clubs, and billboards behind their eyelids. I avoided that. I skirted that issue, he said. I went into the merchant marine to get around running to Canada, and I got around it easy while my buddies went over and came back fucked up, or dead. Do I feel the guilt that comes from that? I certainly do. Do I live each day pondering it? I certainly do. Do I lament the way history chewed my best buddies up? I certainly do. Do I wonder at the great forlorn gravity of the way things went in the past? I most certainly do. Do I spend my days in a state of total lament? I certainly do. Do I tell the same old threadbare stories over and over as a way to placate the pain that is stuck between my rib bones? I do indeed. Am I just another lost sixties soul who dropped one tab too many and can’t extricate myself from a high? I certainly am. And then, from that point, he kept talking, unable to help himself, until his discourse expanded (while she dozed and slept fitfully, rising from her dreams to catch fragments of his voice) and he fell into a reverie and told a long story as he drove, keeping close to the speed limit because the Mounties were out, their hats aslant. Here’s the story, verbatim, as he told it:

There was this guy named Ham. This was just after my buddy Billy-T came back from his first tour of duty. You had to surmise Ham’s story, because otherwise he was pretty much a blank slate. A big guy, the son of a pipe fitter from the Upper Peninsula, he was living in that shantytown I told you about, the old hobo hangout near the Kalamazoo River, a spot beneath the railroad tracks, not far from a gravel pit. Anyway, Ham had this wigwam setup, an assemblage of old sheet iron, tar paper, birch bark, leather, nylon, deer hides, and bearskins laid over the original Potawatomi wigwam frame, arched branches twined with petrified deer hide, and the old smoke hole, too–and there was another shack, which had originally been a sweat lodge or something. You went in and smoked some hash and listened for the spirits to call. And they did call, man. Those spirits came in all forms and sizes and said things you’d never forget, at least not for a while.

Anyway, Ham had this girl, Maggie, a street kid from Detroit, a real looker, with those baby blues, bright blond hair, and a lispy little pair of lips that had trouble around polysyllabic words. Naturally, I took a shine to her, but she was Ham’s, and you couldn’t so much as look her way without getting him on your case. I snuck a glance anyhow, when I could. One day, I took her by the hand and led her down to the river and told her I’d baptize her right there if she wanted, and she said she did, go on, do it to me, make me clean or whatever. My study at the Bible institute was a year or so behind me then, but the words were still around, and I could still utter them in a convincing way. Full immersion, I told her. The works. Right down to an evocation of the Holy Spirit, which would pass into her soul, and so on and so forth, and her soul flying upward, skyward, I said, and so on and so forth. I admit, I laid it on thick, talking about the purity of her heart this, and the salvation of the soul that, and so on and so forth, and she listened to me attentively while her hands, tiny things, fluttered like hummingbirds sipping from her ears. Even now, when I think about it, I can imagine them fluttering on my shoulders and breastbone. (Here he lifted his hands from the steering wheel and waved his fingers.) Anyway, the Kalamazoo was one of the most polluted rivers in the world at the time. You could’ve walked across it if you’d had the will to do so. That sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but it was loaded with pulp waste from the paper mills, along with whatever Checker Cab felt like adding to the mix. In any case, I led her through the bush to the shore and we stood there looking at the water. This was early evening, or maybe dawn, or maybe early afternoon, late fall, perhaps, but a warm day for sure. The sky tried to reflect itself in the water but failed. Clouds and trees fell against the surface and were lost forever. The fish in the Kalamazoo begged for the hook. You’d flip them onto the shore and they’d flex their gills as a way of saying thanks. A few hardy bugs stalked the surface, yanking their gummy feet. You’ll do better, I mean gracewise, without those garments, I told her

Meanwhile, during all of this, Ham was in his wigwam, sleeping. He slept like a mule. You could hear his snores all the way down to the shore. At least I thought you could. I knew he’d eventually get up, find her gone, and start looking. I knew he’d come down the trail noisily, heaving from side to side, unsteady on his feet, coughing and wheezing, because he was a grizzly of a man, and he snorted and snuffled even when he was still. You wanted to give him fair warning if you came up to him from behind. One was inclined to wear a bear bell around the guy.

Anyway, in her full, naked glory there was a shame in her that made her put her hands up, and then down, and then up. I said, I’m going to hold you under and speak the words, and you’ll be down there in the depths, where it’s dark and dreary, amid the detritus and waste for a moment, and you’ll panic, most likely, feeling my hand here, I said, putting my hand on the back of her head. But you must resist the panic because I’ll keep you under just as long as it takes me to say the words. Then I’ll release you and you’ll come up sputtering into newborn light brighter than anything you’ve seen before. And she said, I’m right for it, I’m in need, I’ve got blemishes that must be washed away, and I said, Good, good, you’re ready. But one more thing. When you see that newborn light, take a long look before it fades when your eyes adjust. You only get a glimpse before it goes away, and then you have to rely on memory, and if your memory isn’t strong you’ll lose your grip on salvation. Then I took her into the water and started, pushing her under, and at some point I heard Ham on his way down, heaving through the brush. He must’ve seen me through the trees. What did he see? A man gripping his girl’s head, holding her down while she wiggled with the Holy Spirit, splashing a froth into the air. Naturally, from his vantage, he misconstrued my actions and became wild with rage, dancing his way bowlegged through the brambles, held back only by his fear of water. Ham’s terror of water was incredible. He could hardly find it in himself to splash his own face from the tap. He found brushing his teeth impossible. You could see his fear in the way he came in up to his toes and then backed out quickly. There were huge forces at play. He’d gone up against them as far as he could, and then he drew a line. He cursed the water, the river, and then yours truly. Against this backdrop, I tried to keep to the task at hand, and if anyone’s to blame for my failings, for holding her under a beat too long, it’s Ham himself for proving such a distraction. Timing is everything when it comes to the work of baptism. One wrong move and God enters the world at a weird angle. Take my word for it. I kept to the task at hand. After I released her body to the currents, Ham raced along the shore. I can’t account for her spirit, but her body swung in wide windmill loops as it was drawn downstream, just out of Ham’s reach. For a moment he stood still, quivering in a force field between his rage toward me and his lust for her. Lust won the prize, and he moved downstream, trying to lure her in with the end of a branch. But the currents were too strong.

Long story short, I went back to Ham’s wigwam and sacked his food. Long story short, I ate his food while he followed her body all the way to Lake Michigan, where he stood on the shore and rolled his shoulders, as if bracing for a fight. He stood on the shore and bellowed. He was a grand, operatic bellower. His voice spiralled out over the water, as if blown from a conch shell. A big fat bellow that came five miles up the river to his wigwam, where by the time the sound got to me it was weak and feeble but still as clear as day. I sat, held off on my chewing as long as I could, and listened, clenching my teeth against the ringing in my ears, and the soft breeze that was coming through the leaves as evening approached. I was happy, because when the evening light met the Kalamazoo it did so on equal terms, and then for a while, until night fell and it was too dark to see, the river looked clean and even drinkable, Meg, as pure as anything you’ve seen in the world up until now.

He talked and then fell silent and then talked some more, until a few hours later they were in Niagara Falls and he nudged her awake so she could see the mist plume over the horizon. Then they drove along the river and up to the observation station and got out to stretch their legs. That river goes the wrong fucking way, it goes north instead of south, he explained, taking her hand. Then he climbed onto the fence and sat, patting the wooden railing. It goes against the grain of gravity heading that way, Meg. And it did. To their right the Niagara’s water tore along the bank, groped hard, forming small eddies in which leaves and bits of trash pooled. To their left all fury and wonder until the river got close to the edge and then grew smooth and calm, thin with hesitation. You’ll be able to walk out there if you’re careful enough and stick with the harder surface near the edge, he said, and if I tell you to do it, you’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll step right out there on your beautiful little feet when I give you the command, and you’ll be just fine.

One more textbook case of discard and loss, another suicide fished out of the waters. Bodies were pushed to the bottom initially–for a few minutes–and then, unless snagged on the rocks below, they bobbed up and twirled around, unable to catch the outflow, which made it easy for the man named Kit Wilson, who took his Zodiac out with the collecting nets, to catch hold of her body and draw it up against the hull. Another slipper, he thought. Another foolish tourist who got too close. Another drunkard unable to resist the lure of danger. Another kid who went in too deep and couldn’t get out of the rage. Another American testing the edge. (Canadians rarely went over.) Another girl skinny-dipping with her boyfriend, swimming too far out into the tangle of currents, taking the long trip down with plenty of time to think over her life and to consider the mistakes she’d made in one form or another. Maybe she simply couldn’t live up to the expectations that life had, and decided that this was the best way to go, majestic and grand, united with the great drive of the water that had been coming over this escarpment for a million years (with the exception of that wonderful time, years ago, when just a trickle came over the scarred jawbone of rock while the rest of the mighty river was surprised to find itself diverted through the power-plant intake pipes). It seemed that at least once a year the same girl came over the falls to give him a bit role in the large drama that would culminate when the news crews showed up and asked him to speak. His Canuck voice would be clear and exact: We don’t know where she came from. No idea why she did it. The falls aren’t something to fool with. And, No, I don’t get used to pulling them out like this.

He fished her out and saw that she was maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a thin, malformed rump, tiny arms, and a bruised face, cut along her brow, from which stared a pair of mute blue eyes. Her lips were pulled back in a grimace, exposing a gap between her two front teeth. Looking down at the body, flexing along with the hull, he got a hint of her story. (Later he’d hear her name, Meg Allen, and learn that her history could be traced back as far as a hotel in Cleveland, where she had murdered a seed dealer from a place called Mansfield, and then a bit farther back, to a hell-on-earth childhood in Akron.) Whatever produced these bodies with regularity would go on, he thought. If there was a way to stop it, it had been forgotten long ago. He held the tiller and got the motor going full throttle and watched as the wake dug surprisingly straight and clean out of the torment. He loved the feel of the boat when its stern cut deep and, in turn, the bow lifted toward the sky, slapping over the waves. He loved the way the wake spread itself out–even in the foam and rage–and how, when he was past the wash-up, as they called it, the water gathered itself into order and smoothed quickly, as if eager to be done with all the noise and to get back to a more settled existence on the way down to the whirlpool, where it would spin mindlessly for a few minutes before being released into the relative calm of the river as it headed toward the merciful breadth of Lake Ontario.

By: Means, David, New Yorker, 8/21/2006

Look what I found in the driveway,” said Billy’s father. He held up a little rocket ship. “I almost ran over it. Does it belong to anyone here?” “No, sir,” said Billy. “We have a problem then,” said Billy’s father. “It must be a spaceship from another planet.” “Is there anyone inside?” asked Billy’s mother. She was carving the turkey. They had turkey every night. Billy’s father held the little rocket ship up to his ear and shook it. “No,” he said. “That means they must be hiding here in the house somewhere.” “May I be excused?” asked Billy. “Not until you eat your turkey,” said Billy’s mother. Billy went to his room and opened his drawer. It was filled with little spacemen. They had landed in the driveway the night before. They had climbed in the window and hidden in his drawer.

Billy had pretended to be asleep but he had watched the whole thing from under the covers. “Who are you?” asked the spacemen when Billy opened the drawer. Billy told them. “What planet are you from?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” they said. They were wearing space helmets. “Is this Earth?” “Yes,” said Billy. “You can take off your space helmets. There’s plenty of air here. It’s not like the Moon.” Billy had learned about the Moon at school. There is no air on the Moon. “Your air stinks,” said the spacemen. “It does not,” said Billy. “It does so,” said the spacemen. They put their helmets back on. “We are here to conquer Earth,” they said. “We are going to kill everybody and then it will smell better.” “You are too little,” said Billy. “That’s why we need your help,” said the spacemen. “I’m just a little boy,” said Billy. The next morning the spacemen were still in the drawer. “Look what we found,” they said. “That’s just a pencil,” said Billy. “It is not, it’s a spear,” said the spacemen. “Sharpen it for us.” Billy stuck the pencil in his electric pencil sharpener. A little light came on when the pencil was sharp. He gave it back to the spacemen. “I think you should go home,” he said. “You can keep the pencil.” “It’s a spear,” said the spacemen. “And we don’t care what you think. Take us to your leader. We will kill him and take his keys.” “I have to go to school,” said Billy. “That’s even better,” said the spacemen. “We can hide in your lunchbox.” “What if I say no?” said Billy. “Then we’ll kill you too,” said the spacemen. Billy took the spacemen to school. They were hiding in his lunchbox. It had a rocket ship on it.

“That’s a stupid lunchbox,” said the teacher. “That rocket doesn’t look real.” “It does so,” said Billy. It was embossed. “And it’s full of spacemen. They intend to conquer Earth.” “That I want to see,” said the teacher. “It’s your funeral,” said Billy. He opened his lunchbox. The spacemen jumped out and killed the teacher. All the kids screamed. Pretty soon the police came. They took Billy home. “The teacher killed himself with a pencil,” said the police. “All the kids were screaming.” “It must have been a tragedy,” said Billy’s mother. “It was his own fault,” said Billy. Billy went to his room. He dumped the spacemen out of his lunchbox into his drawer. “You almost got me in trouble,” he said. “That was my teacher you killed.” “That was just for practice,” said the spacemen. “Now take us to your leader so we can kill him and take his keys.” “What if I say no?” “Then we’ll kill you too,” said the spacemen. “But if you help us conquer Earth, we’ll make you King.” “Hmmmm,” said Billy. “Let me think about it.” Billy was only pretending to think about it. He didn’t want to be King. He was just a little boy. But he was afraid of the spacemen. What if they killed him? He decided to fool them. “Okay,” he said. He took the spacemen into the bathroom and put them on the toilet seat. “What’s this?” they asked. “It’s round.” “The White House,” said Billy. “It’s supposed to be round.” He picked up a toothbrush and hid it behind his back. “Where is your leader?” asked the spacemen. “Down there,” said Billy. “Look.”

The spacemen leaned over the edge and looked down. Billy knocked them into the water with the toothbrush. Their helmets made them float. Billy flushed the toilet and they disappeared. Then he flushed it again just to be sure. “Get a load of this,” said Billy’s father. He was reading the paper. “Spacemen Suspected in Teacher Death.” “What spacemen?” said Billy’s mother. “I never heard anything about any spacemen.” “They were little,” said Billy. “But they were mean.” He told his parents how he had fooled the spacemen and flushed them down the toilet. “They intended to kill us all and conquer Earth,” he said. “That was a close call,” said Billy’s father. “I guess we can get rid of this little rocket now.” He took out his hammer and broke it. Then he passed the turkey. “You could have been King,” said Billy’s mother. “Instead you are a hero.” “No,” said Billy proudly. “I’m just a little boy.”

By: Bisson, Terry. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aug2006

It’s supposed to be autumn, THE TIME OF YEAR WHEN THE CLOUDS ARE HIGH IN THE SKY AND THE AIR IS FRESH. THAT’S HOW AUTUMN WAS WHEN I WAS LITTLE. BACK THEN, WE LIVED HOURS FROM THE CITY CENTER ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BEIJING. TODAY, WE LIVE IN 1508B, 15 FLOORS ABOVE THE STREET, AND THERE’S ONLY A CRISP BITTERNESS IN THE AIR–CRISP LIKE THE MILES OF STEEL THAT SURROUND US.

The heavy door to the apartment building slams shut behind me, and I get into the elevator and press 15. The elevator obediently lurches into the air even though it’s probably too old to meet any safety codes. I nervously check the signs rolled up in my backpack: small, bright green posters with “Say NO to McDonald’s” scrawled across the top. The McDonald’s corporation is trying to build a huge complex next to the temple. A group at school was handing out the posters, and when I saw them, I had to grab a few. One more McDonald’s probably won’t matter; it seems like Beijing already has hundreds of them. But I get so sick of seeing giant, neon fast food signs that I have to do something to stop the takeover.

I slap one of my posters onto the elevator wall and stuff the rest of them back into my backpack. I wouldn’t want Mom to see them–she wouldn’t approve. The elevator doors squeak open, and I step into the hallway of floor 15.

Floor 15: Where the occupant of 1502A, Mrs. Li, is a lonely widow who leaves her apartment door open and quizzes anyone who steps off the elevator. Floor 15: Where the occupant of 1503B is an American poet who visited Beijing 15 years ago, just after I was born, and “fell in love with the city.” Floor 15: Where the occupants of 1504B are artists who leave their large canvasses in the hall to dry and invite us to trendy art shows. Floor 15: Where the occupants of 1506A are restaurant owners who store all of their leftovers in their industrial-size fridge. (What does a family of four do with 17 leftover servings of roast duck, anyway?!) Floor 15: Home.

Immediately after Mom gets home from work, she starts filling our apartment and the hallways with the smell of her cooking. But sometimes she works long hours so she can send money home to her factory-worker cousins in Shenzhen. On the days she works late, I know the second I get off the elevator because I don’t smell food–just paint from the neighbors’ apartment. Today, the strong odor of tofu with pickled greens overwhelms me. I escape Mrs. Li, who has captured the American poet like a Venus flytrap devouring her victim. I step around a wet canvas and let myself into 1508B.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, entering the kitchen. It’s a mess of unwashed pots and pans–the downside to Mom’s extravagant cooking.

She turns to me, hands full of chopped peppers. “Lian!” I get a standard kiss, then the usual survey. I can just see my mother’s mind working. Ooh, those shoes are too big. Showy. And I wish she would wear a respectable blouse. But she doesn’t go into her usual rant about how my appearance reflects on the family name. (“We can’t have one of us walking around looking like … like … well, never mind. Looking bad. If you look bad, the rest of us look bad.”) She only shoos me out of the kitchen with, “Go to your room and change before Father gets home.”

My closet is divided in two. The right side is my clothes–the jeans and t-shirts I wear every day. The left is what I wear to please Mom: conservative skirts, my school uniform, polyester slacks. I even have the clothes I wore when I was 6 and 7–Hello Kitty tops, cotton leggings, tiny pleated school uniforms, and pink outfits adorned with bows and bears.

The clothes I find most embarrassing are the ones that please Mom the most. So I choose a pathetic yellow sweater with a crisp white collar and a pair of navy chinos. Goodbye, yoga pants. (“Why so tight? Aren’t you uncomfortable?”) Goodbye, green tank top. (“Won’t you be cold?”) Goodbye, fuzzy sweatshirt. (“Sort of sloppy, no?”)

Kitchen, take two: “Hi, Mom.”

“Lian! Much better. The yellow shirt is very, very nice. How are you?”

I shrug. “Good, I guess.”

“Guess?”

“You know. Pretty good.”

“Just pretty good?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Well, want anything to eat before dinner?”

“No, thanks.” I pick up a copy of the Renmin Ribao, the daily paper. Mom looks at me and frowns.

“Just Communist stuff, you know,” she says.

I know. Why else would it be called the People’s Daily?

“Communists …harrumph,” Mom mutters. She grew up during the Cultural Revolution and still blames the Communists for destroying her family’s art gallery. Mom wanted to be an artist like her parents, but she ended up selling computers wholesale to American companies. Instead of painting in a cluttered studio, she sits obediently at a desk high above the streets of Beijing.

“Well. What’s the news, then?” My mother is always curious and looking for rumors, news–anything she could talk about later. She finds the laundromat exciting because she can pick up gossip while doing chores. Call it multitasking.

“Not much.”

“That’s the problem with those Communists–nothing good ever happens.”

“Yeah.” I know Mom doesn’t really care about politics. She just likes to criticize. It could be the grade on my history test, the prices at the grocery store, the new high-rise next to her office…anything.

“Nothing good ever happens.” Mom repeats herself all the time. She’s like a little kid who keeps saying the same thing until someone responds. “All they ever do is talk about change, restrict the media, make regulations.”

“Yeah?” This is new. Mom usually only goes into detailed criticism when it involves loyalty to the family, obedience to Father, or reverence to our ancestors.

“Yes. You know, Lian, I really don’t like them.”

“Them?” Is she referring to the mushrooms she’s torturing with slow, accurate slices of the knife?

“The Communists!” WHACK! She splits a flesh head of cabbage in half, revealing the intricate folds inside. “When I was your age ….”

Oh, no. Mom stops chopping and squints until her eyes are slit like a snake’s.

“I was very political,” she continues. “Very … disobedient.”

“Disobedient?” I ask. I can’t believe it. For goodness sakes, this is my MOTHER! The only time she’s ever disobedient is in an effort to be obedient, like leaving work a few minutes early so she can have dinner ready by the time Father gets home.

“Yes,” she says, slowly stirring the onions sizzling in the frying pan. Either she’s really dwelling on her past or the onions are starting to get to her. “When your uncle–my brother–was in detention … I’m not always proud of my actions. But he’s family … what could I do? Sometimes obedience is wrong.”

The glimmer in her eye is different from any expression I’ve ever seen her wear. Suddenly she’s not just a corporate businesswoman or a strict, loving mother.

On an impulse, I pull the “Say NO to McDonald’s” posters out of my backpack and hand one to my mother. As she reads it, I take a closer look at the woman who stands in our kitchen every day with an apron thrown over her business suit, wildly–yet dutifully–creating an addictive mix of flavors, love, and mysteries. I think I see a hint of a smile on her face.

By: Thompson, Natalia M., New Moon, Sep/Oct2006