Birds of America

COMMUNITY LIFE

When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries — a fibbing fruit, a story store — and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories — a vocabulary of arson! — she’d transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls.

She had learned to read at an early age. Her parents, newly settled in Vermont from Tirgu Mures in Transylvania, were anxious that their daughter learn to speak English, to blend in with the community in a way they felt they probably never would, and so every Saturday they took her to the children’s section of the Rutland library and let her spend time with the librarian, who chose books for her and sometimes even read a page or two out loud, though there was a sign that said PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS. No comma.

Which made it seem to Olena that only the boys had to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted.

She had loved the librarian.

And when Olena’s Romanian began to recede altogether, and in its stead bloomed a slow, rich English-speaking voice, not unlike the librarian’s, too womanly for a little girl, the other children on her street became even more afraid of her. “Dracula!” they shouted. “Transylvaniess!” they shrieked, and ran.

“You’ll have a new name now,” her father told her the first day of first grade. He had already changed their last name from Todorescu to Resnick. His shop was called “Resnick’s Furs.” “From here on in, you will no longer be Olena. You will have a nice American name: Nell.”

“You make to say ze name,” her mother said. “When ze teacher tell you Olena, you say, ‘No, Nell.’ Say Nell.”

“Nell,” said Olena. But when she got to school, the teacher, sensing something dreamy and outcast in her, clasped her hand and exclaimed, “Olena! What a beautiful name!” Olena’s heart filled with gratitude and surprise, and she fell in close to the teacher’s hip, adoring and mute.

From there on in, only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them.

“Nell, how are ze ozer children at ze school?”

“Nell, please to tell us what you do.”

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone. It was a body walled in the cellar of her, a whiff and forecast of doom like an early, rotten spring — and she longed for the Nell-that-never-lived’s return. She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world, not someone hidden away, behind books, with a carefully learned voice and a sad past.

She missed her mother the most.

· · ·

The library Olena worked in was one of the most prestigious university libraries in the Midwest. It housed a large collection of rare and foreign books, and she had driven across several states to get there, squinting through the splattered tempera of insects on the windshield, watching for the dark tail of a possible tornado, and getting sick, painfully, in Indiana, in the rest rooms of the dead-Hoosier service plazas along I-80. The ladies’ rooms there had had electric eyes for the toilets, the sinks, the hand dryers, and she’d set them all off by staggering in and out of the stalls or leaning into the sinks. “You the only one in here?” asked a cleaning woman. “You the only one in here making this racket?” Olena had smiled, a dog’s smile; in the yellowish light, everything seemed tragic and ridiculous and unable to stop. The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave.

But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when she gave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.

She first met Nick at the library in May. She was temporarily positioned at the reference desk, hauled out from her ordinary task as supervisor of foreign cataloging, to replace someone who was ill. Nick was researching statistics on municipal campaign spending in the state. “Haven’t stepped into a library since I was eighteen,” he said. He looked at least forty.

She showed him where he might look. “Try looking here,” she said, writing down the names of indexes to state records, but he kept looking at her. “Or here.”

“I’m managing a county board seat campaign,” he said. “The election’s not until the fall, but I’m trying to get a jump on things.” His hair was a coppery brown, threaded through with silver. There was something animated in his eyes, like pond life. “I just wanted to get some comparison figures. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

But he came back the next day and asked her again.

The coffee shop near campus was hot and noisy, crowded with students, and Nick loudly ordered espresso for them both. She usually didn’t like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. She drank the espresso fast, with determination and a sense of adventure. “I guess I’ll have a second,” she said, and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

“I’ll get it,” said Nick, and when he came back, he told her some more about the campaign he was running. “It’s important to get the endorsements of the neighborhood associations,” he said. He ran a bratwurst and frozen yogurt stand called Please Squeeze and Bratwursts. He had gotten to know a lot of people that way. “I feel alive and relevant, living my life like this,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve sold out.”

“Sold out to what?” she asked.

He smiled. “I can tell you’re not from around here,” he said. He raked his hand through the various metals of his hair. “Selling out. Like doing something you really never wanted to do, and getting paid too much for it.”

“Oh,” she said.

“When I was a kid, my father said to me, ‘Sometimes in life, son, you’re going to find you have to do things you don’t want to do,’ and I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘No fucking way.’ ” Olena laughed. “I mean, you probably always wanted to be a librarian, right?”

She looked at all the crooked diagonals of his face and couldn’t tell whether he was serious. “Me?” she said. “I first went to graduate school to be an English professor.” She sighed, switched elbows, sinking her chin into her other hand. “I did try,” she said. “I read Derrida. I read Lacan. I read Reading Lacan. I read ‘Reading Reading Lacan’—and that’s when I applied to library school.”

“I don’t know who Lacan is,” he said.

“He’s, well — you see? That’s why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just ‘where is it?’ ”

“And where are you from?” he asked, his face briefly animated by his own clever change of subject. “Originally.” There was, it seemed, a way of spotting those not native to the town. It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along — the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics — with a motion not unlike peristalsis.

“Vermont,” she said.

“Vermont!” Nick exclaimed, as if this were exotic, which made her glad she hadn’t said something like Transylvania. He leaned toward her, confidentially. “I have to tell you: I own one chair from Ethan Allen Furniture.”

“You do?” She smiled. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Before that, however, I was in prison, and didn’t own a stick.”

“Really?” she asked. She sat back. Was he telling the truth? As a girl, she’d been very gullible, but she had always learned more that way.

“I went to school here,” he said. “In the sixties. I bombed a warehouse where the military was storing research supplies. I got twelve years.” He paused, searching her eyes to see how she was doing with this, how he was doing with it. Then he fetched back his gaze, like a piece of jewelry he’d merely wanted to show her, quick. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there; we’d checked it all out in advance. But this poor asshole named Lawrence Sperry — Larry Sperry! Christ, can you imagine having a name like that?”

“Sure,” said Olena.

Nick looked at her suspiciously. “He was in there, working late. He lost a leg and an eye in the explosion. I got the federal pen in Winford. Attempted murder.”

The thick coffee coated his lips. He had been looking steadily at her, but now he looked away.

“Would you like a bun?” asked Olena. “I’m going to go get a bun.” She stood, but he turned and gazed up at her with such disbelief that she sat back down again, sloppily, sidesaddle. She twisted forward, leaned into the table. “I’m sorry. Is that all true, what you just said? Did that really happen to you?”

“What?” His mouth fell open. “You think I’d make that up?”

“It’s just that, well, I work around a lot of literature,” she said.

“ ‘Literature,’ ” he repeated.

She touched his hand. She didn’t know what else to do. “Can I cook dinner for you some night? Tonight?”

There was a blaze in his eye, a concentrated seeing. He seemed for a moment able to look right into her, know her in a way that was uncluttered by actually knowing her. He seemed to have no information or misinformation, only a kind of photography, factless but true.

“Yes,” he said, “you can.”

Which was how he came to spend the evening beneath the cheap stained-glass lamp of her dining room, its barroom red, its Schlitz-Tiffany light, and then to spend the night, and not leave.

Olena had never lived with a man before. “Except my father,” she said, and Nick studied her eyes, the streak of blankness in them, when she said it. Though she had dated two different boys in college, they were the kind who liked to leave early, to eat breakfast without her at smoky greasy spoons, to sit at the counter with the large men in the blue windbreakers, read the paper, get their cups refilled.

She had never been with anyone who stayed. Anyone who’d moved in his box of tapes, his Ethan Allen chair.

Anyone who’d had lease problems at his old place.

“I’m trying to bring this thing together,” he said, holding her in the middle of the afternoon. “My life, the campaign, my thing with you: I’m trying to get all my birds to land in the same yard.” Out the window, there was an afternoon moon, like a golf ball, pocked and stuck. She looked at the calcified egg of it, its coin face, its blue neighborhood of nothing. Then she looked at him. There was the pond life again in his eyes, and in the rest of his face a hesitant, warm stillness.

“Do you like making love to me?” she asked, at night, during a thunderstorm.

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Are you satisfied with me?”

He turned toward her, kissed her. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t need a show.”

She was quiet for a long time. “People are giving shows?”

The rain and wind rushed down the gutters, snapped the branches of the weak trees in the side yard.

He had her inexperience and self-esteem in mind. At the movies, at the beginning, he whispered, “Twentieth Century — Fox. Baby, that’s you.” During a slapstick part, in a library where card catalogs were upended and scattered wildly through the air, she broke into a pale, cold sweat, and he moved toward her, hid her head in his chest, saying, “Don’t look, don’t look.” At the end, they would sit through the long credits — gaffer, best boy, key grip. “That’s what we need to get,” he said. “A grip.”

“Yes,” she said. “Also a negative cutter.”

Other times, he encouraged her to walk around the house naked. “If you got it, do it.” He smiled, paused, feigned confusion. “If you do it, have it. If you flaunt it, do it.”

“If you have it, got it,” she added.

“If you say it, mean it.” And he pulled her toward him like a dancing partner with soft shoes and the smiling mouth of love.

But too often she lay awake, wondering. There was something missing. Something wasn’t happening to her, or was it to him? All through the summer, the thunderstorms set the sky on fire while she lay there, listening for the train sound of a tornado, which never came — though the lightning ripped open the night and lit the trees like things too suddenly remembered, then left them indecipherable again in the dark.

“You’re not feeling anything, are you?” he finally said. “What is wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” she said cryptically. “The rainstorms are so loud in this part of the world.” The wind from a storm blew through the screens and sometimes caused the door to the bedroom to slam shut. “I don’t like a door to slam,” she whispered. “It makes me think someone is mad.”

At the library, there were Romanian books coming in — Olena was to skim them, read them just enough to proffer a brief description for the catalog listing. It dismayed her that her Romanian was so weak, that it had seemed almost to vanish, a mere handkerchief in a stairwell, and that now, daily, another book arrived to reprimand her.

She missed her mother the most.

On her lunch break, she went to Nick’s stand for a frozen yogurt. He looked tired, bedraggled, his hair like sprockets. “You want the Sperry Cherry or the Lemon Bomber?” he asked. These were his joke names, the ones he threatened really to use someday.

“How about apple?” she said.

He cut up an apple and arranged it in a paper dish. He squeezed yogurt from a chrome machine. “There’s a fund-raiser tonight for the Teetlebaum campaign.”

“Oh,” she said. She had been to these fund-raisers before. At first she had liked them, glimpsing corners of the city she would never have seen otherwise, Nick leading her out into them, Nick knowing everyone, so that it seemed her life filled with possibility, with homefulness. But finally, she felt, such events were too full of dreary, glad-handing people speaking incessantly of their camping trips out west. They never really spoke to you. They spoke toward you. They spoke at you. They spoke near you, on you. They believed themselves crucial to the welfare of the community. But they seldom went to libraries. They didn’t read books. “At least they’re contributers to the community,” said Nick. “At least they’re not sucking the blood of it.”

“Lapping,” she said.

“What?”

“Gnashing and lapping. Not sucking.”

He looked at her in a doubtful, worried way. “I looked it up once,” she said.

“Whatever.” He scowled. “At least they care. At least they’re trying to give something back.”

“I’d rather live in Russia,” she said.

“I’ll be back around ten or so,” he said.

“You don’t want me to come?” Truth was she disliked Ken Teetlebaum. Perhaps Nick had figured this out. Though he had the support of the local leftover Left, there was something fatuous and vain about Ken. He tended to do little isometric leg exercises while you were talking to him. Often he took out a Woolworth photo of himself and showed it to people. “Look at this,” he’d say. “This was back when I had long hair, can you believe it?” And people would look and see a handsome teenaged boy who bore only a slight resemblance to the puffy Ken Teetlebaum of today. “Don’t I look like Eric Clapton?”

“Eric Clapton would never have sat in a Woolworth photo booth like some high school girl,” Olena had said once, in the caustic blurt that sometimes afflicts the shy. Ken had looked at her in a laughing, hurt sort of way, and after that he stopped showing the photo around when she was present.

“You can come, if you want to.” Nick reached up, smoothed his hair, and looked handsome again. “Meet me there.”

The fund-raiser was in the upstairs room of a local restaurant called Dutch’s. She paid ten dollars, went in, and ate a lot of raw cauliflower and hummus before she saw Nick back in a far corner, talking to a woman in jeans and a brown blazer. She was the sort of woman that Nick might twist around to look at in restaurants: fiery auburn hair cut bluntly in a pageboy. She had a pretty face, but the hair was too severe, too separate and tended to. Olena herself had long, disorganized hair, and she wore it pulled back messily in a clip. When she reached up to wave to Nick, and he looked away without acknowledging her, back toward the auburn pageboy, Olena kept her hand up and moved it back, to fuss with the clip. She would never fit in here, she thought. Not among these jolly, activist-clerk types. She preferred the quiet poet-clerks of the library. They were delicate and territorial, intellectual, and physically unwell. They sat around at work, thinking up Tom Swifties: I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.

Would you like a soda? he asked spritely.

They spent weekends at the Mayo Clinic. “An amusement park for hypochondriacs,” said a cataloger named Sarah. “A cross between Lourdes and The New Price Is Right,” said someone else named George. These were the people she liked: the kind you couldn’t really live with.

She turned to head toward the ladies’ room and bumped into Ken. He gave her a hug hello, and then whispered in her ear, “You live with Nick. Help us think of an issue. I need another issue.”

“I’ll get you one at the issue store,” she said, and pulled away as someone approached him with a heartily extended hand and a false, booming “Here’s the man of the hour.” In the bathroom, she stared at her own reflection: in an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking of?

She went into the stall and slid the bolt shut. She read the graffiti on the back of the door. Anita loves David S. Or: Christ + Diane W. It was good to see that even in a town like this, people could love one another.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked him later at home.

“Who? What do you mean?”

“The one with the plasticine hair.”

“Oh, Erin? She does look like she does something to her hair. It looks like she hennas it.”

“It looks like she tacks it against the wall and stands underneath it.”

“She’s head of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. Come September, we’re really going to need her endorsement.”

Olena sighed, looked away.

“It’s the democratic process,” said Nick.

“I’d rather have a king and queen,” she said.

The following Friday, the night of the Fish Fry Fund-raiser at the Labor Temple, was the night Nick slept with Erin of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. He arrived back home at seven in the morning and confessed to Olena, who, when Nick hadn’t come home, had downed half a packet of Dramamine to get to sleep.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his head in his hands. “It’s a sixties thing.”

“A sixties thing?” She was fuzzy, zonked from the Dramamine.

“You get all involved in a political event, and you find yourself sleeping together. She’s from that era, too. It’s also that, I don’t know, she just seems to really care about her community. She’s got this reaching, expressive side to her. I got caught up in that.” He was sitting down, leaning forward on his knees, talking to his shoes. The electric fan was blowing on him, moving his hair gently, like weeds in water.

“A sixties thing?” Olena repeated. “A sixties thing, what is that — like ‘Easy to Be Hard’?” It was the song she remembered best. But now something switched off in her. The bones in her chest hurt. Even the room seemed changed — brighter and awful. Everything had fled, run away to become something else. She started to perspire under her arms and her face grew hot. “You’re a murderer,” she said. “That’s finally what you are. That’s finally what you’ll always be.” She began to weep so loudly that Nick got up, closed the windows. Then he sat down and held her — who else was there to hold her? — and she held him back.

He bought her a large garnet ring, a cough drop set in brass. He did the dishes ten straight days in a row. She had a tendency to go to bed right after supper and sleep, heavily, needing the escape. She had become afraid of going out — restaurants, stores, the tension in her shoulders, the fear gripping her face when she was there, as if people knew she was a foreigner and a fool — and for fifteen additional days he did the cooking and shopping. His car was always parked on the outside of the driveway, and hers was always in first, close, blocked in, as if to indicate who most belonged to the community, to the world, and who most belonged tucked in away from it, in a house. Perhaps in bed. Perhaps asleep.

“You need more life around you,” said Nick, cradling her, though she’d gone stiff and still. His face was plaintive and suntanned, the notes and varnish of a violin. “You need a greater sense of life around you.” Outside, there was the old rot smell of rain coming.

“How have you managed to get a suntan when there’s been so much rain?” she asked.

“It’s summer,” he said. “I work outside, remember?”

“There are no sleeve marks,” she said. “Where are you going?”

She had become afraid of the community. It was her enemy. Other people, other women.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick’s gaze, learned to learn his lust, and when she did go out, to work at least, his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at. She turned to inspect the face of every pageboy haircut she saw from behind and passed in her car. She looked at them furtively or squarely — it didn’t matter. She appraised their eyes and mouths and wondered about their bodies. She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up.

A rapist.

She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

But for a while, it was the only way she could be.

She began to wear his clothes — a shirt, a pair of socks — to keep him next to her, to try to understand why he had done what he’d done. And in this new empathy, in this pants role, like an opera, she thought she understood what it was to make love to a woman, to open the hidden underside of her, like secret food, to thrust yourself up in her, her arch and thrash, like a puppet, to watch her later when she got up and walked around without you, oblivious to the injury you’d surely done her. How could you not love her, gratefully, marveling? She was so mysterious, so recovered, an unshared thought enlivening her eyes; you wanted to follow her forever.

A man in love. That was a man in love. So different from a woman.

A woman cleaned up the kitchen. A woman gave and hid, gave and hid, like someone with a May basket.

She made an appointment with a doctor. Her insurance covered her only if she went to the university hospital, and so she made an appointment there.

“I’ve made a doctor’s appointment,” she said to Nick, but he had the water running in the tub and didn’t hear her. “To find out if there’s anything wrong with me.”

When he got out, he approached her, nothing on but a towel, pulled her close to his chest, and lowered her to the floor, right there in the hall by the bathroom door. Something was swooping, back and forth in an arc above her. May Day, May Day. She froze.

“What was that?” She pushed him away.

“What?” He rolled over on his back and looked. Something was flying around in the stairwell — a bird. “A bat,” he said.

“Oh my God,” cried Olena.

“The heat can bring them out in these old rental houses,” he said, stood, rewrapped his towel. “Do you have a tennis racket?”

She showed him where it was. “I’ve only played tennis once,” she said. “Do you want to play tennis sometime?” But he proceeded to stalk the bat in the dark stairwell.

“Now don’t get hysterical,” he said.

“I’m already hysterical.”

“Don’t get — There!” he shouted, and she heard the thwack of the racket against the wall, and the soft drop of the bat to the landing.

She suddenly felt sick. “Did you have to kill it?” she said.

“What did you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Capture it. Rough it up a little.” She felt guilty, as if her own loathing had brought about its death. “What kind of bat is it?” She tiptoed up to look, to try to glimpse its monkey face, its cat teeth, its pterodactyl wings veined like beet leaves. “What kind? Is it a fruit bat?”

“Looks pretty straight to me,” said Nick. With his fist, he tapped Olena’s arm lightly, teasingly.

“Will you stop?”

“Though it was doing this whole astrology thing — I don’t know. Maybe it’s a zodiac bat.”

“Maybe it’s a brown bat. It’s not a vampire bat, is it?”

“I think you have to go to South America for those,” he said. “Take your platform shoes!”

She sank down on the steps, pulled her robe tighter. She felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The bat, she could now see, was small and light-colored, its wings folded in like a packed tent, a mouse with backpacking equipment. It had a sweet face, like a deer, though blood drizzled from its head. It reminded her of a cat she’d seen once as a child, shot with a BB in the eye.

“I can’t look anymore,” she said, and went back upstairs.

Nick appeared a half hour later, standing in the doorway. She was in bed, a book propped in her lap — a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information.

“I had lunch with Erin today,” he said.

She stared at the page. Snoods. Turbans and snoods. You could go for days in a snood. “Why?”

“A lot of different reasons. For Ken, mostly. She’s still head of the neighborhood association, and he needs her endorsement. I just wanted to let you know. Listen, you’ve gotta cut me some slack.”

She grew hot in the face again. “I’ve cut you some slack,” she said. “I’ve cut you a whole forest of slack. The whole global slack forest has been cut for you.” She closed the book. “I don’t know why you cavort with these people. They’re nothing but a bunch of clerks.”

He’d been trying to look pleasant, but now he winced a little. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Miss High-Minded. You whose father made his living off furs. Furs!” He took two steps toward her, then turned and paced back again. “I can’t believe I’m living with someone who grew up on the proceeds of tortured animals!”

She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!

“Don’t drag my father into this.”

“Look, I’ve spent years of my life working for peace and free expression. I’ve been in prison already. I’ve lived in a cage! I don’t need to live in another one.”

“You and your free expression! You who can’t listen to me for two minutes!”

“Listen to you what?”

“Listen to me when I”—and here she bit her lip a little—“when I tell you that these people you care about, this hateful Erin what’s-her-name, they’re just small, awful, nothing people.”

“So they don’t read enough books,” he said slowly. “Who the fuck cares.”

The next day he was off to a meeting with Ken at the Senior Citizens Association. The host from Jeopardy! was going to be there, and Ken wanted to shake a few hands, sign up volunteers. The host from Jeopardy! was going to give a talk.

“I don’t get it,” Olena said.

“I know.” He sighed, the pond life treading water in his eyes. “But, well — it’s the American way.” He grabbed up his keys, and the look that quickly passed over his face told her this: she wasn’t pretty enough.

“I hate America,” she said.

Nonetheless, he called her at the library during a break. She’d been sitting in the back with Sarah, thinking up Tom Swifties, her brain ready to bleed from the ears, when the phone rang. “You should see this,” he said. “Some old geezer raises his hand, I call on him, and he stands up, and the first thing he says is, ‘I had my hand raised for ten whole minutes and you kept passing over me. I don’t like to be passed over. You can’t just pass over a guy like me, not at my age.’ ”

She laughed, as he wanted her to.

This hot dog’s awful, she said frankly.

“To appeal to the doctors, Ken’s got all these signs up that say ‘Teetlebaum for tort reform.’ ”

“Sounds like a Wallace Stevens poem,” she said.

“I don’t know what I expected. But the swirl of this whole event has not felt right.”

She’s a real dog, he said cattily.

She was quiet, deciding to let him do the work of this call.

“Do you realize that Ken’s entire softball team just wrote a letter to The Star, calling him a loudmouth and a cheat?”

“Well,” she said, “what can you expect from a bunch of grown men who pitch underhand?”

There was some silence. “I care about us,” he said finally. “I just want you to know that.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I know I’m just a pain in the ass to you,” he said. “But you’re an inspiration to me, you are.”

I like a good sled dog, she said huskily.

“Thank you for just — for saying that,” she said.

“I just sometimes wish you’d get involved in the community, help out with the campaign. Give of yourself. Connect a little with something.”

· · ·

At the hospital, she got up on the table and pulled the paper gown tightly around her, her feet in the stirrups. The doctor took a plastic speculum out of a drawer. “Anything particular seem to be the problem today?” asked the doctor.

“I just want you to look and tell me if there’s anything wrong,” said Olena.

The doctor studied her carefully. “There’s a class of medical students outside. Do you mind if they come in?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know this is a teaching hospital,” she said. “We hope that our patients won’t mind contributing to the education of our medical students by allowing them in during an examination. It’s a way of contributing to the larger medical community, if you will. But it’s totally up to you. You can say no.”

Olena clutched at her paper gown. There’s never been an accident, she said recklessly. “How many of them are there?”

The doctor smiled quickly. “Seven,” she said. “Like dwarfs.”

“They’ll come in and do what?”

The doctor was growing impatient and looked at her watch. “They’ll participate in the examination. It’s a learning visit.”

Olena sank back down on the table. She didn’t feel that she could offer herself up this way. You’re only average, he said meanly.

“All right,” she said. “Okay.”

Take a bow, he said sternly.

The doctor opened up the doorway and called a short way down the corridor. “Class?”

They were young, more than half of them men, and they gathered around the examination table in a horseshoe shape, looking slightly ashamed, sorry for her, no doubt, the way art students sometimes felt sorry for the shivering model they were about to draw. The doctor pulled up a stool between Olena’s feet and inserted the plastic speculum, the stiff, widening arms of it uncomfortable, embarrassing. “Today we will be doing a routine pelvic examination,” she announced loudly, and then she got up again, went to a drawer, and passed out rubber gloves to everyone.

Olena went a little blind. A white light, starting at the center, spread to the black edges of her sight. One by one, the hands of the students entered her, or pressed on her abdomen, felt hungrily, innocently, for something to learn from her, in her.

She missed her mother the most.

“Next,” the doctor was saying. And then again. “All right. Next?”

Olena missed her mother the most.

But it was her father’s face that suddenly loomed before her now, his face at night in the doorway of her bedroom, coming to check on her before he went to bed, his bewildered face, horrified to find her lying there beneath the covers, touching herself and gasping, his whispered “Nell? Are you okay?” and then his vanishing, closing the door loudly, to leave her there, finally forever; to die and leave her there feeling only her own sorrow and disgrace, which she would live in like a coat.

There were rubber fingers in her, moving, wriggling around, but not like the others. She sat up abruptly and the young student withdrew his hand, moved away. “He didn’t do it right,” she said to the doctor. She pointed at the student. “He didn’t do it correctly!”

“All right, then,” said the doctor, looking at Olena with concern and alarm. “All right. You may all leave,” she said to the students.

The doctor herself found nothing. “You are perfectly normal,” she said. But she suggested that Olena take vitamin B and listen quietly to music in the evening.

Olena staggered out through the hospital parking lot, not finding her car at first. When she found it, she strapped herself in tightly, as if she were something wild — an animal or a star.

She drove back to the library and sat at her desk. Everyone had gone home already. In the margins of her notepad she wrote, “Alone as a book, alone as a desk, alone as a library, alone as a pencil, alone as a catalog, alone as a number, alone as a notepad.” Then she, too, left, went home, made herself tea. She felt separate from her body, felt herself dragging it up the stairs like a big handbag, its leathery hollowness something you could cut up and give away or stick things in. She lay between the sheets of her bed, sweating, perhaps from the tea. The world felt over to her, used up, off to one side. There were no more names to live by.

One should live closer. She had lost her place, as in a book.

One should live closer to where one’s parents were buried.

Waiting for Nick’s return, she felt herself grow dizzy, float up toward the ceiling, look down on the handbag. Tomorrow, she would get an organ donor’s card, an eye donor’s card, as many cards as she could get. She would show them all to Nick. “Nick! Look at my cards!”

And when he didn’t come home, she remained awake through the long night, through the muffled thud of a bird hurling itself against the window, through the thunder leaving and approaching like a voice, through the Frankenstein light of the storm. Over her house, in lieu of stars, she felt the bright heads of her mother and father, searching for her, their eyes beaming down from the sky.

Oh, there you are, they said. Oh, there you are.

But then they went away again, and she lay waiting, fist in her spine, for the grace and fatigue that would come, surely it must come, of having given so much to the world.