A Good Day for Seppuku

SKINNY BROADS WITH WIGS

For precisely twenty-five years, Barbara Stein has required her advanced placement English class at Allegheny Hills High School to produce a three-page creative essay describing their summer vacation.

Introduce yourselves to me, Mrs. Stein has asked a quarter century of 10th graders. Begin with the last three months.

In return, she’s presented with listless landscapes like postcards selected at random in convenience stores or found accidentally in a stranger’s drawer. Cities meet their harbors, waves unavoidably fill the centers with anonymous paint-can blues, but it’s all secondhand and detached from the speaker. They’re merely views without fragrance or the possibility of vertigo.

Her students omit the ambiguously provocative areas of their Julys and Augusts. They replace them with predictable travelogues. She is presented with formulaic montages of interchangeable beaches meeting cliffs with the remnants of fortresses and rubble of cathedrals and lighthouses.

The images are the certified version of location and event, but they’re a censored translation, generic, erased of danger and revelation.

This is so impersonal; it might have been transmitted from another planet. In red ink she writes, Nice image, but what are the sounds of summer? The specific smells of your July?

Mrs. Stein believes catastrophe has a distinct texture and climate. Summer disasters are deceptively intense and enacted under stark white light. It’s garish and has nothing to do with illumination. It’s the flash of a camera freezing your face with a comprehension of circumstances you don’t suspect you know. That’s why you reject the photograph. It isn’t because the angle is unflattering, but rather the image contains gestures and dialogue occurring just behind your shoulder. It’s in the hallway or on the pier, a subtle text you pretend doesn’t exist.

Tell me about the quality of light, Barbara Stein instructs, and you’ll find out who you are.

Some students begin to listen. They consider the periphery of their lakeside villages — the implications and the words they don’t actually hear but subconsciously intuit. On certain summer nights the prolongment of divorce is unmistakable — it’s an edgy scrape across an unwashed plate, an unexpected slap on a face, a slammed car door, a phone call in a voice too rapid and soft in a back room with the lamps shut off. The correlation between betrayal and darkness is obvious. One must listen beyond thunder and crickets, past wind blowing the motel banner advertising free dinners for children in six colors.

If you’ve trained yourself, you can hear disease and derangement growing. Cancer is sudden and yellow and smells like rotting tropical fruit and algae in neglected aquariums. Sickness favors surfaces like plaster hallways, mesh screen doors, and plastic kitchen counters in rented bungalows. Sometimes it appears after lightning storms as if electrically incited. Divorce has its unique architecture and undertow. You must search for this while you’re fishing. It’s not in the bucket of bait or on the nylon lines. Instead it’s in the wakes boats carve on water like a legible script.

This is a good setting, Mrs. Stein inscribes on the margin of a student paper. But I think there is more you want to say. Don’t be afraid. The page is your best friend.

Mrs. Stein is intimate with the core of summer. It’s the khaki of tents and sleeping bags and army uniforms. It’s the khaki of camouflage.

Her students entertain the notion that she has unspecified powers, perhaps of a telepathic nature. Yet Mrs. Stein is known as a teacher you can trust. You can tell her about your mother’s new boyfriend and how you’re having trouble sleeping. Mrs. Stein doesn’t demand specific information or what was actually suggested in the barn or pick-up, and the events that followed. She understands what you’re not saying. You can reveal yourself to her in a way you can’t to the guidance counselor who will report your confidences to the principal.

Barbara Stein is an expert keeper of secrets. It’s curious no one suspects her of also possessing them. That’s what keeping a low profile, rarely confiding in another human being, and buying your clothing from the LL Bean catalogue does. It renders the most salient aspects of your personality invisible. In an age of labels and categories, one can effortlessly disappear.

Barbara Stein is, in fact, festooned with clandestine hieroglyphics. If her subterfuges were made dimensional, shaped perhaps into ornaments, she could be Allegheny Hill’s annual Christmas tree. She would sparkle with the radiance of her concealment, her omissions, and what’s growing in her periphery and margins. There’s the matter of where her daughter is, and how she hasn’t spent the last twenty years of winter nights alone. If Barbara Stein told the truth, she’d blind you.

Her students respect Mrs. Stein’s courage. When the schoolboard banned The Catcher in the Rye and The Diary of Anne Frank, she continued teaching these books. She drove all the way to Pittsburgh to buy paperback copies. She purchased them with her own money. When the board threatened to fire her, she replied, “Fire is a weapon against truth. After all, they fired Joan of Arc.”

Students in graduate school return to pay their respects. Mrs. Stein doesn’t encourage this. She doesn’t save their postcards with literary allusions or their trinkets from England and Greece. She doesn’t read their publications and has only an abstract and minimal interest in their achievements in the field of the written word.

Mrs. Stein doesn’t think there is much field left for the written word. It was once a frontier, a primitive meadowland like the acres of shoulder high Mustard, Purple Thistle, and Golden Rod beyond her apple orchard and gardening plots. It’s become a squalid cul-de-sac, a footpath littered with garbage you can’t find on a map. The quality of books has changed in her lifetime. They’re constructed from a different sort of paper and poorly bound, as if intended to be discarded. They’re like cereal boxes rather than sacred artifacts. She’s seen exhibitions where text was used as a graphic element — letters were selected for their shape, rows of words were pasted into columns forming geometric patterns. These representations didn’t offend her.

In truth, few of her students want to read, not even the brightest and the most verbal. They’ve been inundated by more images in their fourteen years than entire libraries contain. Sentences and paragraphs are tedious, irrelevant like fortress walls. They don’t believe books provide revelation. Words are a version of stone.

Her students spend afternoons in computer chat rooms, employing aliases, and inventing constantly evolving identities. They exchange texts they mistake for accurate approximations of their values and psychology. They don’t recognize they’re engaged in acts of fiction.

Once she mourned the passing of the poets. She recognized that, when they became obsolete, something of what was intrinsically human would be extinct. So it was for the bards with lyres and the carvers of canoes who navigated Pacific islands by the sound and scent of currents. The Gutenberg Printing Press lasted five hundred years, certainly longer than airplanes or cinema will. The technological revolution is an abrupt compression, a swing toward an incremental and collective synthesis. Who is to say half a millennia of books are not enough? She keeps these thoughts to herself.

On Maple Ridge Road, her neighbors perceive her as neutered and eccentric. She’s beyond fertile and therefore harmless. She’s a middle-aged woman, predictable in navy and cranberry, who does her own gardening and house repairs. In late summer she sells eggs and blueberries from her yard. She looks like she’d defend Emily Dickinson’s honor with her own life if it came to it. Barbara Stein is viewed as a distillation of English literature and the teaching profession itself.

If there’s a sense of tragedy in her eyes, it’s an ancient wound — or the result of childhood abandonment. There are rumors of an unfortunate early marriage and a problem with a daughter. But it’s nothing anyone can verify. Invisible women do not invite serious investigation.

Mrs. Stein is aware of the multiplicity of rumors surrounding her. Some are perennials, flaring like banks of May Daffodils, Tulips and Lavender Crocuses. They have a short season. Then the anomaly of annuals that stun but don’t return. In point of fact, she has more than a passing interest in the powers of intuition. Mrs. Stein suspects she might be an adept. When she’s luminous with clarity, she can, in fact, see. She penetrates the ordinary to an enormous brilliant core like an inland sea. It’s a region of pure marrow, detailed and unspoiled. She could trace it with her fingertips.

The inland sea is a body she can open. She’s learned its subtle anatomy and how to subdue and characterize it. Ridges of bone are maple leaf green, the surrounding tissues are chartreuse, and the fluids are a jade she can split with her lips.

Mrs. Stein has a natural affinity for landscape and its seductive promise. All women in gardens sense there is a further purpose. Women on their knees in dirt are engaged in conspiracies of disguised eroticism. The shears, gloves and baskets are blatant props. Any woman gardening is prepared for acts of love.

“Menopause is turning me into a witch,” she told Elizabeth.

That was the last time they spoke. Elizabeth is her only child, the daughter she is going to Los Angeles to find. That’s what Barbara Stein does, secretly, during the two weeks of her summer when she has the budget to leave Maple Ridge and search for her daughter. She’s been doing this for twelve years.

“You were always unusual,” Elizabeth said, her voice raked raw and hollowed out. That was three months ago when she still had Elizabeth’s latest phone number. Barbara Stein inscribed it in her leather directory, in a section filled with discarded Elizabeth phone numbers and addresses. These are kept under D for daughter.

Sometimes she just layers blank papers with the ten phone numbers the way her infatuated students reproduce the name of the object of their desire. They’re engaged in acts of magic — a kinetic incantation, the pencil and paper are flints and there’s an angle that can produce fire. Her students wonder if this is the meaning of geometry and why mathematics is required. It’s an attempt to stem delirium.

For decades, notebook pages of —

Brian

Brian

Brian

Brian

Justin

Justin

Justin

Justin

— fall from folders onto her classroom floors. The repetition of the printed patterns, the crude calligraphy spilling beyond the margins, the curves and etchings suggest the deliberation of engineering and construction. Who is to say these are not novels about love?

She last spoke to Elizabeth three months ago. Barbara Stein was surprised when her daughter answered the phone. She told Elizabeth that her life was a simple arithmetic of addition and subtraction. She had lost her hormones, her interest in men and sex. She had insomnia, needs eyeglasses and a prescription for sleeping pills. Her hair fell out in clumps. The veins in her legs rose like so many summer flowers, lilies and peonies pushed from below.

These manifestations were not the ordinary residues of age, Barbara Stein intimated, not mere spider veins embossing her thighs and calves. Her legs were like dusk avenues where ritual processions passed and stalls on riverbanks offered Carnations and Chrysanthemums for altars and cremations.

“I’m being tattooed while I sleep,” she told her daughter.

“You always wanted a tattoo,” Elizabeth said, voice husky from cigarettes, whiskey, sequences of strangers mouths, and some unspeakable vast fatigue.

“We were going to get them together. Remember?” Mrs. Stein remind her.

Elizabeth was increasingly breathless, as if calling from a public phone on a rush hour boulevard above a subway. There’s too much noise and static on the line. But it’s better than a beeper.

“You sound exhausted,” Barbara Stein realized. “You’re not taking your medicines.”

“You’re clairvoyant,” Elizabeth managed. “It’s too hard. They disrespect me at the clinic. Nurses won’t touch me. They give me the same forms to fill out. They won’t let me use their pencil. And you always wanted a tattoo, Mommy.”

During college, her roommates returned from weekends in Boston or New York with moons carved on their shoulders and bracelets of flowers engraved around their ankles. Barbara Stein craved this ink and envied them. She couldn’t have a tattoo, of course — her parents denounced it as unacceptably vulgar.

Her father was a rabbi. Her parents were, in their way, sophisticated for their historical moment. It wasn’t about the Torah, her father was quick to point out. It was about commerce. God was the family trade and a tattoo would be bad for business. It was that simple.

But her parents are dead and she’s being etched from beneath as she sleeps. Why not choose the actual design? When she gets to Los Angeles and finds Elizabeth, she will get a tattoo. Perhaps they’ll do this together — select a symbol, an emblem, a celestial configuration.

On her final morning, Barbara Stein thinks about tattoos, constellations and the history of carving images into flesh. All cultures practice this and interpret the positioning of moon and stars as recognizable objects. It’s a perpetual night of cause and effect.

Barbara Stein slides her suitcase into her gray Volvo. She assembles stacks of AAA maps and state pamphlets listing motels and local attractions. She realizes, with sudden urgency and discomfort, she wants a summer vacation distilled to three pages.

Eric, the teenage son of her closest neighbor, arrives. She gives him the last of her instructions. He’ll feed her cat Grace for the next two weeks and pet her for ten minutes every day. He’ll pick what’s ripe in the garden.

Eric follows her into the vegetable and herb plots, noting where she keeps the shears, gloves, trowels, shovels and baskets. She demonstrates how the beans must be cut, the tomatoes and strawberries picked and stored. He’s a polite boy, shy, serious and attentive — a city boy, excited to be standing where vegetation rises enormous over his head. Jack in the Beanstalk. Yes, it is true. Behold. This is the birth of cities and epics. The grain you hold in your palm is the history of this planet.

“What about the vet?” Eric asks. “Do you go to Dr. Sutter’s clinic?”

Barbara Stein tells him that she doesn’t. It’s an odd admission and she regrets it.

“What if she gets sick?” Eric asks. He stares at her grey tabby. He’s concerned, “Okay, but if it’s more than fifty dollars, just put Grace to sleep,” Barbara Stein tells him.

The boy is stunned. Her new neighbor is a surgeon from Philadelphia. The doctor had bought Professor McCarty’s house, and his wife virtually gutted it. Their family made what they term a quality of life move. That’s what the doctor’s wife, Amanda called it. Barbara Stein isn’t sure what this means and she doesn’t ask.

The McCarty house was a sequence of maple, ash, hemlock, oak, and cherry. Walls were made from two hundred-year-old barns and doors salvaged from churches and government buildings, courthouses and town halls. The ceiling beams were once railroad ties. Now the interior of the house is a uniform light oak. Any surface that can be coated has been painted white. Glass and marble have been installed over the hemlock and cherry. The railroad ties are gone, replaced by a series of skylights.

“It’s a bare beginning,” Amanda said, urgency and threat in her tone.

On the few occasions they’ve met, Amanda spoke incessantly about her personal crisis. During mandatory student orientation, Amanda discussed the possibility of a second life, simplifying her life and changing her life — as if those concepts were interchangeable. Amanda did not mention her son. Eric sat in silence and looked out the window.

Mrs. Stein was tempted to tell Amanda that only the simple simplify their lives, and having a second life was more typically characteristic of psychotics. The only plausible verbal description was, in her opinion, changing your life. But behavior modification lacks immediate gratification and happens, if at all, one imperceptibly slow detail at a time. Then Mrs. Stein recognized she had little to say to Amanda.

The doctor and his wife send Eric to buy eggs, transmit information about the state of Maple Ridge Road, and inquire if she needs anything from town. They would prefer to ignore her entirely, but Barbara Stein has a certain status in Woods End. They volunteer their boy as intermediary.

“Mrs. Stein, I’m not sure I can handle putting Grace down,” he says, uncertainly.

“People make too much ado about animals,” Mrs. Stein says. “They should spend more time on babies and less on kittens.”

“That’s not what my mother says,” Eric tells her.

“How old is your mother?” Barbara Stein asks.

“Forty-seven,” Eric replies.

Mrs. Stein laughs. “You mean thirty-seven,” she corrects.

“No, she’s forty-seven. We just had her birthday. I lit the candles myself. Math is my best class,” Eric assures her.

Barbara Stein doesn’t think it’s possible that she and Amanda are the same age. When she’s with the doctor’s wife, she feels matronly, arthritic, and peripheral. Amanda is lithe and eager within her entirely discretionary universe. She plays tennis, goes to yoga classes, and hosts a bridge game on Tuesday afternoons.

When Amanda decided she wanted a garden, she simply ordered one. A landscaper from Buffalo came with a soil expert and drawings, two men to dig and a crew to fence. Her ornamental plum trees were put into the earth larger than Mrs. Stein’s are now, after fifteen years of growing, of wind and ice storms, of what happens when you take an idea and let the elements define its destiny.

When Barbara translates this process into human terms, she thinks of her daughter. Lena is her name now. Her West Coast working name. She’s been Lena for more than a decade. Lena doesn’t want to live unconsciously, but rather one incremental step up. She wishes to inhabit an enormous post-op, permanently on the cusp of surgery. Lena, under the squalid palms of Los Angeles, in her private version of a recovery room, waking from an operation, calling out for Demerol and morphine and getting it. Nurses are eager and competent. They bring syringes, adjust pillows and smile.

Lena, in an apartment by a bay studded with fragile vertical palms that seem superimposed, stitched unconvincingly into the landscape. Lena, in her invented perimeter where it’s artificially cold and hushed, the bleached white of nurses’ uniforms and anesthesia. Lena wants to be in that post-op zone forever, at the edge of coming to and then being put under again, to float in her own inland sea. For her daughter, every day feels like surgery. Sunlight cuts like a razor and must be avoided. Each morning she is knifed and stitched. Night is an abuse. Gravity and air sting and wound her. Voices startle her and she trembles. That’s why she gives herself injections for pain.

Elizabeth is a heroin addict and a prostitute. The order is important. If heroin were dispensed freely, Elizabeth would not be selling her body. Elizabeth would not be HIV positive. Elizabeth has AIDS now. In the clinic, the nurses and technicians believe she’s a criminal, a woman without rights or even the privileges of the terminal. It takes Lena three hours to ride the buses to the hospital. They arbitrarily cancel her appointments and deliberately misplace her chart. They pretend they don’t remember her. Lena waits shivering in corridors through their entire shifts. They want her to die.

Barbara Stein thinks about order and disease as she drives, as highways change numbers and there’s nothing for her to see anymore. It’s a journey she takes every summer.

She remembers searching for Elizabeth in Idaho, in fields of barley and alfalfa. She tried to find her in Kansas City in regions of corn and soy beans. In between were rocks, gravel, abandoned farmland — derelict barns and boarded shut bars, the metal shells of gas stations going to rust. Then the interchangeable motels, anonymous restaurants, featureless towns and ersatz suburbs that might be San Diego or New Jersey.

She avoids cities with their boulevards that could be Baltimore or Dallas. American streets with shops’ racks of cheap faux leather yellow and green jackets and rice bowls and back-scratchers from China no one wants or needs. Stores that have Going Out of Business signs on display windows the day they open. Night is worse. Every shop is locked behind black iron grates. In between are bars lit by flashing red neon. It’s the standard greeting of the great superpower. Buy some junk and get drunk.

Barbara Stein could only afford motels on the margins of cities and in strips along interstates. The designated areas for travelers on budgets. This was what America wanted for itself — a subterfuge of monolithic uniformity. This’s the mirror in which America looks at her face and concludes that she is normal.

Elizabeth couldn’t bear looking at her own face in its entirety. Elizabeth’s skin was blossom subtle, not delicate but rather rare like certain fabrics— thick silks, pure light wool and cashmere. Elizabeth has a spring face and her dark brown hair smells like espresso and harbors. When Mrs. Stein held her daughter, she breathed in her skin.

Elizabeth at thirteen and fourteen, before she ran away, had the scent of a river — the Ganges or Nile, with all the intrigues intact. She was the reason for pilgrimages and shrines, why people read texts beside vases in museums, why they collect pebbles from beaches, tiles from temples, and why they take photographs.

Her daughter with her raw silk face couldn’t bear sunlight and feared it. Mrs. Stein transformed the backyard. She dug and cemented holes in the backyard for canvas umbrellas. She cemented rakes and brooms in the ground and wrapped sheets and tarps to their tops. patches of shade fell geometrically as a sequence of squares. Her daughter, trembling and fevered, crawled between the canvas oases.

One early autumn afternoon when the maple forest was the yellow of votive for prayer and the red of heretics, she dragged a fifty-pound bag of cement toward her backyard. Sheriff Murphy drove down Maple Ridge Road toward campus. He saw her and stopped his patrol car.

Sheriff Jim Murphy carried the cement into her yard. He took her shovel and dug. “How big a tent you plan to pitch?” he asked. His eyes were hazel and he squinted as he looked at her yard.

“As big as circumstance demands,” Mrs. Stein replied.

“Can’t keep her under a canopy indefinitely. It’s unnatural,” Sheriff Murphy decided.

The sheriff handed her his card. “Need something, call me,” the sheriff said. “Anytime. I’ll come. Count on it.”

Mrs. Stein nodded. She no longer believed anyone could help her.

Elizabeth lives near the ocean. She’ll probably die near the ocean, too. Since she came to the West Coast, first to Seattle, then Portland, San Francisco and now Los Angeles, she’s rented an apartment in sight of the water. Barbara remembers this as she takes the last of the freeways to the final exit on the western edge of Los Angeles, at the bay called Santa Monica.

Elizabeth’s telephone is disconnected. It takes Barbara Stein all morning to find the yellowed stucco apartment half a block from the beach. The manager has never heard of Elizabeth or Lena or a dark haired woman resembling the photographs Mrs. Stein supplies. “Could be a blond or redhead now,” the man says. “They’re all skinny broads with wigs.”

Mrs. Stein stands in the entranceway, trying to envision what Elizabeth would have seen. The bay lacks the spectacle her daughter craves. Elizabeth requires seas like the Grenadines and Aegean, defined strata of purples and startled turquoise. Elizabeth wants a permanent Yucatan Caribbean, a patchwork of reefs beneath her skin forming a channel of depth and current only. There are no mirrors or monetary constrictions. You have fins and gills and glide through coral.

Can you say chartreuse, Elizabeth? Can you say cerulean? Do you know what is halfway between Borneo and Sumatra? A tiny island called Palau Kebatu. I’ll take you there someday. And the Bay of Bima to Komoda. Then Sumba, finally, and Bali. That’s what she promised her daughter.

The beach is a congestion of tourists and the bay looks oily and degraded. It smells tangy like citrus that’s gone bad from a wide-open sun that doesn’t play by the rules. The sky is vague and restless as if remembering a nightmare. Starched white Oleander along the fenced parking lot reminds her of nurses’ uniforms. Elizabeth might have made that association. She would have been drawn to the burgundy Bougainvillea spilling across the sides of the shabby apartment building where the paint has been abraded by wind and sand and formed what looks like scabs. Still, such an extravagance of claret vines would have caught her attention, even stumbling drugged in darkness.

There’s a boardwalk below the slow slope of hill of two-story stucco apartments with identical balconies where Elizabeth and Lena no longer live. Barbara Stein must touch this ocean, anemic and drained of blue as it is. She thinks of her English class assignments about the meaning of movement in American literature. The American experience is about physical passages. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains. The European immigrant migrations. Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks. In any event, Barbara Stein must keep walking.

Maybe we each have our own personal manifest destiny, she thinks. It sweeps us from the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to a strip of pavement studded with yogurt shops perched between acres of soiled sand.

Mrs. Stein finds a splintered bench engraved with knife-etched graffiti, gang names, the slang for sexual acts and assorted scatology. It’s much too hot. The sun seems lacquered. It has the texture of paint. Skaters in their bikinis already inhabit a future century where all disease has been eradicated. Elizabeth can sell her body to the whole navy and then take a shower, two weeks in Cancun, rinse it off, heal in salt waters, and be done with it.

“Just don’t bury me,” Elizabeth had said. “Promise.”

“I promise, yes,” Mrs. Stein told her daughter.

They were talking on the telephone. Her daughter has been too long on this earth as it is. Her daughter, subsisting by acts of desperate translation. She negotiates the ordinary and redesigns it for her personal biochemistry of necessity.

“I’m an alien on this planet,” Elizabeth said. “They’ll burn me for free at the clinic. Let them.”

Further south Barbara Stein sees a courtyard partially in sand. It’s dense with excessively magenta flowers and tattered palms, their texture rank. There’s no logic to this stunted progression, she thinks. Women stand at windows facing the ocean. They wear slips and imitation silk kimonos and have syringes of heroin in their fingers.

These women are like Lena. They have divested themselves of their birth certificates and the longitudes and latitudes of their origin. Their documents proved inadequate for survival. Maybe, like her daughter, they were once named Elizabeth. They rebirthed themselves and became Lena, married to a brown tar she burns with a match in a spoon, turned into a fluid like a muddy river she sticks in your vein. The price is your life and she knows it. That’s why such women have faces that are epics. Their eyes are like the one lighthouse on the last peninsula at the end of the world.

Barbara Stein crosses the ragged beach. She suddenly remembers college when she once wanted to collect waters and preserve them in labeled bottles. She wanted certain rivers as merely symbolic ornaments — the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube and Seine. They were like one-night-stand rivers, brief encounters she name-dropped at a dinner party. She came to know other rivers with intimacy. The Snake in Idaho during three successive summers when she almost found Elizabeth. Then the Colorado which began as a creek in the Rocky Mountains when she thought Elizabeth was in Denver. She followed it west into the California desert.

It’s a light blue afternoon. Sand offers disappointing tiny fragments of broken gray clam shells. Barbara Stein must acknowledge this region with her hands. Los Angeles is a port, after all. All ports contain certain traditional elements. Sailors and the women they buy, and cargoes of kidnapped girls and smuggled rubies? Refugees float in oceans, hidden in cartons, drinking rainwater and burning with fever.

It’s an ordinary afternoon, boys on bicycles, women hanging T-shirts on ropes. The obligatory fishing boat comes to the dilapidated pier, water a listless bleached pastel. Barbara Stein knows the new wharves of contraband are inland. The stolen computer chips and software, the prototype vaccines for cancers, formulas for extending lifespan and magnifying intelligence. They’re kept in offices in Dallas and Baltimore.

The ocean is cooler than she expected. She places a damp hand across her forehead as if it were a kind of bandage, as if she might faint. She stands by the water until sunset, waiting for Elizabeth to call Mother, Mother. She’s prepared to turn from this bay, which tells her nothing, and embrace her daughter. She stands until the sky is livid and brutal with red and it looks alive and in pain. Somebody should put it out of its misery. Somebody should put a bullet in it.

It’s sunset. Barbara Stein walks south past tattoo parlors, bistros and piercing shops. On the boardwalk, women younger than Elizabeth when she first ran away stick out their palms for dimes. Their eyes are sheeted portals. They have tornadoes in their faces. Still, they’re some version of her 10th grade students with their round faces and wide-into-the-wind eyes. They could wear the clothing of Allegheny Hills High School. In a group photograph, they would look like cousins or classmates.

Barbara Stein isn’t going to find her daughter and she isn’t getting a tattoo. She is forty-seven years old. She’s lived longer than Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo, Judy Garland and Anne Sexton. Of course she wanted less, took a measured route, but still, there’s a triumph in the simple enduring. Elizabeth will not live this long.

Barbara Stein considers all the women of Los Angeles and Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and Shanghai. A legion of middle aged women strolling boulevards named for royalty, psychotics and saints. They could feed one another’s broken and ravaged daughters. In Barcelona and Amsterdam, in all port cities where the ships come in and children lay on pavement, we must offer them bread and carry them home.

She knows that some children don’t want just one box of crayons. Some reject certain colors entirely and scream when offered yellow or red. Some won’t color within the lines. Some are like Lena and can’t tolerate the air of this Earth. On boulevards named for queens and madmen, teenagers in Salvation Army jackets look up from the pavement, twitching and dazed, longing to be fed like malformed baby birds.

When Ulysses encountered the lotus-eaters, his crew threatened mutiny. They had to be dragged back to the ship, kicking savagely. Some girls can’t simply dial 911 and come home.

At Venice Beach, Barbara Stein sits on a bench facing a billboard where a model in a bikini posed in front of lurid green palm trees. HONOLULU written in pink neon at her bare feet. I am forty-seven, she thinks, and I will never see my daughter again. It’s time for the women to remove themselves from the posters where they are imprisoned. They must peel themselves off the images of implausibly flawless island resorts. They must separate themselves from the overly representational, the vulgar red orchids and garish yellow plumeria. They could climb down feet unsteady on asphalt and then begin walking. With each step, they would enter the enormity of their own unscripted lives.

But in the millennial global warehouse, which is not a village, our offspring curl fetal on sidewalks. We have learned not to notice them. They don’t register. They’re below our radar. We step around them as we once did foreigners with sores and scabs. They are lepers and consumptives. We must not speak to them.

Meanwhile, we are exchanging inappropriate confidences with counterfeit companions in an electronic vacancy. We are intimate with people in Madrid and Tokyo we’ve never met or ever will. The children at our feet are bad girls. They deserve to be sick and suffer. Rather than entering an astonishment we’ve become rigid and laminated. We do not even exchange your real names and serial numbers. We are all prisoners of war now and the Geneva Convention no longer applies. That’s what her students are telling her.

Mrs. Stein walks past fortune-tellers on blankets at the sand’s edge. They’re reading cards and palms as they have for six thousand years. Body-pierced young women who could be in her Allegheny Hills classes, returning to the apartment where Elizabeth briefly lived. She stands near the squat stucco building her daughter no longer enters or exits, memorizing its unique characteristics — the four aggressively vertical palm trees, how the sun is white, gritty as if layered with microscopic glass chips, pieces of cactus, and splinters from strangers’ teeth. Sun is a relentless deliberate assault, a series of flesh wounds. A fuchsia on a back balcony, stems like manic dangling and longing for the pavement. They want a mouth full of gravel. They want to be burned at a clinic for free.

Perhaps Elizabeth noticed the almost full moon and smelled the White Star Jasmine in the alley making the darkness scented and drunken. The Eucalyptus, vaguely medicinal, chalky and mysterious. Things bloom in dusk harbors where the trade winds have been and gone. Barbara Stein realizes, if it were the end of myth, there would be nothing to write about.

There are smuggled girls in shuttered alcoves behind tattoo parlors. Girls who ran away in journeys begun by prank and accident. The flesh is an acquired taste like opera and shellfish. Some girls need a tutor to show them the ropes. Teach them the tricks. Turn them out. Girls who couldn’t conceive of the cliffs between Ravello and Amalfi. Big Sur and Malibu were equally distant. The highway to Hana, jungle-side Maui, was beyond their ability. Athens and Shanghai felt contrived in their mouths. They were afraid of capitals.

They were simple as stones and bells. They smelled like glass on October afternoons. They were less than a thumbprint. They didn’t wear make-up, want to speak French or tour the Parthenon. Denim was fine. Spandex and bronze did not occur to them. They hadn’t heard the whisper that says lush are the ladies of the lamps, lit from within, heads dyed copper as coins. That’s why they needed a razor scar on the cheek, a fractured arm and black eye. You’d be surprised. That’s all it takes.

They remember April when they were still cotton panty girls. They had collections of arrowheads and butterflies and a drawer for just bows. Then the powders and injections and days turned Technicolor. They carry their accidents with them. Their coats contain a sadness that doesn’t require translation.

In this darkness, pirates and magicians, exiles and alchemists camouflage themselves as beggars. Names and identities are manufactured and exchanged for cash. Flesh is bartered for packets of brown fragments resembling tree bark. The air is charged. Lamplight is calibrated an elegant 14 carat, tinged with pear. Such a light can burn in deserted rooms for years, with no fear of suffocation or fire.

If we believe in sin and retribution, then antiquity must be continuous. The Minotaur is in the Allegheny Mountain farmhouse. He’s your mother’s new boyfriend. In pastures, bulls with bronze feet breathe fire. The Cyclops is your uncle. He’s coming for supper. Yes. Again. Brush your hair and put on that pretty dress he got for you. It’s not too short. You could thank him better. How’s that going to hurt? Want to get a reputation for a cold heart? And you don’t need GPS. You know where the labyrinth is. It’s past the path to the tool shed and patch of corn behind the trailer.

Barbara Stein stops on the edge of the Mohave and buys postcards of Los Angeles. She drives east, crossing the desert and mountains. She must accomplish this journey on her three-hundred-dollar budget. Three days of sunlight like sheets bleached a pure white and leaching the air, absorbing events until they’re rubbed away past intention.

She must patch her roof before the ambush of winter and tend to her garden — the canning and freezing and the ritual of blueberry jam. Then she’ll manufacture a three-page essay encapsulating her summer vacation. She’ll describe tropical vegetation, the colossus of wild magenta Bougainvillea blanketing the bamboo fenced edges, and the boardwalk with its skaters and fortune-tellers. She’ll note the Pacific was paler and cooler than she expected. She’ll say she might have seen a movie star wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses in a Jaguar, Mercedes Benz or Ferrari.

She has the postcards to provide the authority of detail — the bay below cliffs the color of flesh where wild purple succulents cling, and on the tame exhausted waters, fishing boats return in the late afternoon. Sometimes the fraudulent laminated illusions are enough. Conventional versions can also serve. Who is to say experience can’t be distilled to a 4x6 photograph?

She won’t write anymore margin notes in red ink. We live by aliases and don’t even reveal our serial numbers. She won’t mention the stucco apartment on the low sloping hill near Ocean Avenue and Marine Street where her heart broke. These are coordinates she’ll be buried with.

Science has methods for reconstructing villages jungles swallowed. Aqueducts, bridges and temples are reformed from a chip of rubble. They can decode architecture in reverse, inventory the crops in warehouse wharves, and catalogue the birds in royal aviaries. Capitals known only by obscure footnotes and rumors are discovered beneath hundreds of feet of sand and routinely resurrected with the statues of warriors, holy scrolls in earthen jars, and concubines’ solstice gowns intact. Portraits of princesses are painted from a fragment of skull bone. Surely then the restoration of one woman’s life is possible. In this way, we will someday gather our daughters and bring them home.