Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Majorette

THE NEW HOUSE, AND ALL ITS NEW FURNISHINGS.

The Sears rugs, the pasteboard sideboard, the pine table made by the groom, who, just then, had his arms full of his bride. She, only sixteen, in an ivory crepe de chine suit, baby-faced, pincurled, a rosebud of a painted mouth. Hershey Queen, 1951.

Also, this: a bundle in the oven, the baby yet invisible but still extremely present.

When the bride was deposited on the floor of the twilit hall, she threw her white roses into the air, smiled her victory smile, gave a little dance in the dining room, and draped her newlywed body over the sofa. The groom smiled glumly, emitting fumes of the whiskey bought all night by the stepdad of the bride, Joe Helmuth, breeder of basset hounds and bearer of a menacing handlebar moustache. The girl’s mother gone these past two years, it had been up to Joe to come into the surveyor’s office one day and stand over the not-yet-groom’s desk. And all he had to do was pick up the compass on the desk, trace a few interlocked circles in the blotter, and the boy gulped and looked up, comprehending. When Joe Helmuth left, tipping his hat at the boss, the compass stood embedded through the cardboard, into the wood, kicking out the pencil leg like a Rockette.

Hence the Saturday festivities in the church with a few frantic sips from the flask, then at the Kiwanis Club with the clucking ice cubes in the tumblers of booze. Now here they were in the splitlevel on the outskirts of Hershey, encumbered with a thirty-year mortgage. Thirty years! the groom thought. He’d be dead by then, what, fifty-five. An old man. He had two years of college — though technical college, true — and had dreams, but his new wife didn’t much fit into them.

Pretty, he’d said to his best man, taking a nip in the nave before the ceremony. But she don’t have a whole lot going on upstairs, see? He’d been angling for a country club wife, the wife of a professional man, the kind that knew how to speak that double-speak that drove all the men mad, but saved the sweet stuff for her husband.

But his best man had said, salacious, Pretty’s the best kind, don’t know much more than they need to. At that, the groom just shrugged.

On her new couch, the bride kicked off her heels and laughed at the spangled asbestos ceiling, sending her cigarette smoke toward it. The wind rose, carrying with it the mysterious sweet scent from the chocolate factory, and she heard her groom go into the kitchen, then heard the refrigerator smooching open. Jingle of a bottlecap hitting the floor, groan of chair legs against the linoleum, soughing of wind in the chokecherry sapling in the yard. When she went in to find her new hubby-hubby, he was in the dark, staring at the bottle in his hands, head in a dark wreath of smoke.

She went to him and stroked the hair back from his handsome forehead. He was stiff, unyielding. She pulled his hand from the bottle with her plump fingers, and he sighed, moved to her, rocked his forehead against the belly where the bean-sized baby was forming. Softly he kissed the belly where the child pulsed and grew, where her little body was building cell by cell, so beautifully.

WHEN THE BABY CAME AT LAST, she came screaming into the hands of the nurse, for the doctor was eating his veal cutlet at the club under the needling glare of his wife. He brushed the crumbs from his chin with his pinkie finger, rolled the wine around his mouth as if it were mouthwash. At last, avuncular, he patted her hand, said: No way it’ll take less than three hours, honey. First-time mother, seventeen years old, tiny little thing. We have time.

Only fifteen minutes after that pronouncement came the crowning, the puckered face, the fishy shoulders slipping out, the fat belly, the kicking legs, the toes in their waxy, bloody patina. A beautiful, healthy baby girl, the nurse said, brushing sweat from her forehead. The baby latched with angry piglet grunts onto the bottle, and the mother, at seventeen years old, felt ancient, a Madonna under the fluorescent hum of the hospital brights.

When the father came in, his knees were wobbly in his work-stained pants. He ran a finger up the tiny arm, holding his breath, and felt a terrible matching tenderness in his own, as if he were feeling what the new child was feeling, as if his callused finger were burning the brand-new skin. For weeks after she was born, he slathered the girl with air kisses, his lips stopping millimeters from the sweet cheeks, blowing smooches at his raw little girl.

Thus petrified with anxiety, vibrating with thrill, the new parents agreed that their new daughter was a good baby. A very good baby, though soon she began sobbing with ferocity. All night long, she seemed to choke herself with sorrow, keeping the parents tossing in their twin bed, clutching their baby-care manual that told them…a terrible mistake to go to the baby when she cries…this will teach her to call for you with screams…Instead, you must steel yourself, go to her only once a night, for feeding and changing if she needs it. They slept with their fingers in their ears; they sat smoking against the headboard in the dark; the father rhythmically pounded his forehead against the kitchen table; and at last, the baby stopped screaming in the nighttime, resigned to lying in her wet and stink until dawn.

Only during the day was there peace, a gentleness, when the mother would fill the bath with tepid water and for hours the two of them would be still, suspended, there. All afternoon, the baby’s little rear bumped against her mother’s belly, the tiny shoulders tethered to the dry land of her mother’s chest, and in the buzz of the baby’s grapefruit skull was the sweet release of familiarity. Together, they would float and breathe and stare at the hieroglyphs the smoke made on the ceiling until it was time for the meatloaf, the gelatin salad, until it was time for the mother to spritz herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume and crack open the beers.

Some nights, the parents, still so very young, put the baby in her stroller and propped her up with cushions. There, the baby watched the two planets in her universe swing each other around the dance floor of the kitchen, pink and sweaty, giggling, smoking, drinking. She laughed as the parents turned the radio up and up some more until it was very loud, and only began to scream when it hurt her cockleshell ears. She laughed until the father tossed his wife into the air too high and she hit her head on the ceiling; she laughed until the mother stumbled, drunk, and the father pushed her away, disgusted.

The baby grew, and learned soon enough that, though they looked sweetly chewy, her toes were not for eating, that when a father puts his little finger in one’s mouth, gumming was fine, but practicing new teeth was not. She learned when one flailed one’s sausagey arms against the linoleum, one could scoot forward. Such fun! With a snaky movement of the belly, then a lifting movement of the knees, she could perambulate along nicely. She could grasp the little fuzzies that spun around under the couch, she could take the hard bits of corn from under the stove and suck happily upon them as her mother looked at the same page of a movie magazine, staring like this, for hours.

THE BABY WAS SICKLY, whooping with coughs, quaking with colic. Even so, it took her no time at all to ignore her sickness and grin with nearsighted delight at any balloonish face that loomed above her stroller. Invariably, the faces said, What a beautiful baby!

And the young mother would sigh and say, Oh, well, she’s pretty now, but her hair’s darkening already. She’d say this, stroking the velvet head, but in the nighttime, she would stuff envelopes with pictures of the girl and send them off to baby food companies. At last, she won a spot on a can of formula for her lovely girl, which the family kept on the mantel-piece for decades until some rodent gnawed the label where her face had been.

Only Joe Helmuth, who’d had the foresight to have a framed picture made from the label, had any proof of her starring role on the formula canisters. Darling girl, you’re a dandy little thing, he’d say to her, mouthing a cigar under his peppery moustache. He’d puff and regard her from his height, his boxer dogs snuffling under her skirt. Darling girl, you’re my formula baby, and he’d pull a silver dollar from her ear. As she squealed with pleasure, he’d say, I’m going to marry you, you know. Only have to wait me some sixteen years or so. And he’d give her a dashing grin until she fell over on her love-weak legs.

But soon, another creature began to grow in the mother, sucking all energy right out of her, and so the girl learned to totter then run when the mother was taking her afternoon naps. There was a terrible emptiness inside her then, a sickness that her mother used to soothe by her presence alone. Now, she sang to herself, but the songs didn’t sound right; she licked the cranberry-glass goblets in the china cabinet to see if they tasted red, but they didn’t. And so, rattling alone in the dim house, the girl learned to take off her dress, to slide button through hole, ribbon-end through the bunny-ears of the bow, because the frills and the starch of her dresses were harsh on her skin and she liked the sweep of air much better. And when the mother was weak in bed, and the father snipped violently at the hedges outside, she learned how to take off her little patent leather shoes and her lacy socks and her big-girl diapers with the pink-nubbed pins. She took off her dress, but left the red hairbow in her rag curls. And then she stood in the bay window that gave out onto the busy, sunny streets, the postman coming up the walk, the boys playing dodgeball with a flabby ball, the mothers pushing their babies in their strollers, the little girl stood there and pressed her belly against the cold glass like a sunbleached sand-dollar. She pressed her hands against the glass until they turned into suction cups holding her there. She stood in the window, nude and happy.

But a boy saw her and began to scream with laughter, holding the red rubber ball against his chest, pointing. The other boys began hooting. The mothers covered their smiles with their red-nailed hands, made little shooing motions, and the postman, talking to the father, turned and guffawed. In her pleasure, all the people in the glass laughing, the little girl laughed, too, sending out bell-like peals of joy. She was excited, fizzed to the bone, and clutched her crotch because she had to pee, which only made the boys laugh harder.

Then her father looked up from the hedges, grew pink, and stormed inside, still holding the clippers, so that, for a moment before he grabbed her roughly by her fat forearm, she thought he was going to snip her in the way he snipped the hedges, and she was afraid. She opened her little mouth in a round O and narrowed her eyes and sirened with alarm.

When the father spanked her, she screamed so loudly he thought he was doing her great harm. After he put the diaper and the dress back on and shoved the shoes roughly on her betrayed little feet, he held her so tightly she panted, kissing her until the mother came down from the nap, bleary-faced and asking groggily what had happened.

WHEN THE GIRL WAS BIG ENOUGH to open doors and steal into rooms where she shouldn’t be, she peered through the bars of the crib at her small brother, who looked like the baby rabbits that Fritz, the collie, found and ate in the yard. He smelled of celery, of urine, of baby sweat. He looked at her with his pink and quivering face, opened his mouth in a rictus of joy.

You, she accused, are ugly. He reached out his tiny hand and clutched at her nose, sliding his earthworm fingers into her nostrils, grinning his bare-gummed grin. She put a thumb into his mouth and he clamped down on it, and his tongue was hot and squirmy. Some small warmth hatched in her, and for a moment, she forgot the sick feeling that she had felt since her mother was fat with him, since he came home. She sighed. It’s okay, she said, taking his fingers out of her nose. You can be ugly. You’re a boy. He let out a cackle, as if agreeing, then the sick feeling returned to her.

Girl things were beautiful. Beauty was in girl things. Pretty, she breathed as her mother lifted the charlotte pan from the quivering dessert. Beautiful, she said to her face in the puddle when she took the red berries from the chokecherry and smeared the juice across her lips. Lovely were the dance lessons, the little pink leotards and tutus that made her look like a carnation. There was a lot of jumping and leaping and twirling, and the girls told secrets and pulled their leotards from the necks to show their nipples and sat in the middle of the lesson to cry for no reason. The girl scorned such behavior; she did not sit and cry, and for that reason, for the performance, she was the one chosen to be the purple butterfly when everyone else was pink. Her mother spent all night on the clacketing sewing machine creating her wings, vast and fluttery, with wire supports. When she wore them she was a butterfly, and at night she would crawl from her sleeping body and go spinning out the window over the rooftops of her neighborhood, flapping about with her spangled wings, looking down upon the daddies like her own, weaving home on the sidewalks and singing slurredly, the mothers like her own in the kitchen, in curlers, in housedresses, flipping through magazines, cigarettes in their downturned mouths. Above their unsuspecting heads, the girl spun unseen in the dark sky, so beautiful, so very beautiful.

She loved the wings so much she wore them on her first day of school. But the wings were crushed when she went out to play on the monkey bars and one boy twisted them savagely. Stupid, he said, You’re not no stupid butterfly, you’re just a girl. She said, I am so, you monster, I am so a butterfly, and she threw her shoe at him and ran away, one-shoed. When her mother came to get her, fat again with yet another baby, she clung to her mother’s knees and choked until she vomited. The prettiest thing in the world, her wings, now dead, now gone, now crushed. Pure sorrow.

For consolation, her mother let the girl wear her Hershey Queen tiara and the girl fell asleep with it glittering on her head that night. Her baby brother patted her foot with his dumpling hand, the warmth of his flesh against her foot extraordinary, sweet.

SHE WOULD NO LONGER PLAY on the playground for fear of dirtying her dresses and her father spanking her for it. He had begun to spank her for anything: for talking at dinner, for quarreling with her brother, for hiding the booze when he staggered home at night, calling out to his wife to get her ass down here and help him upstairs, goddammit. Her mother would stand at the top of the stairs, her arms folded over the new baby girl, who looked like a monkey with a bad overbite. She would sigh and finger her sausage curls and send her eldest daughter down, and the girl would sit on her father’s lap as he drank the whiskey that, under threat of the belt, she had miraculously found in the pie safe for him. Her back would vibrate under the great warm thumps of his heart, and he would kiss the back of her rag-bound head, kiss without stopping, kiss long after she fell asleep on his lap.

The one day that she wore an old brown dress to school in order to go out for recess, the boys pushed her against the chain-link fence, tied her there with her own jump rope, and lifted her skirt, chanting, I see London, I see France, I see Dummy’s undiepants, and the girls shrieked with laughter, and she stood there, furious, kicking at the boys as they gyrated around her. When they set her free, she decked the biggest of them with a swift fist until he cried into the dirt, then she ran off into the classroom. She refused to take recess for the rest of the year, stopped talking in class or singing in choir, shook her head when the teacher asked her to read from the Little Bear book, although she read very well.

Because she wouldn’t speak, the teacher brought her parents in for a conference in the shiny green classroom. Her father’s face was knotted when they went out, but they all went for ice cream, and the girl was sucking a mouthful of strawberry delight when her mother leaned forward, with her smell of lily of the valley and cigarettes. Oh, honey, she said, patting the baby calm, tugging at the brother’s tether so that he wouldn’t wander. Oh, my little princess, you’re going to stay back a year. The teacher says you’re behind. Your teacher says you’re a little slow, honey. It’s okay, some people just take a little longer than others. You understand? You have to stay back.

And the terrible shame in the girl, the way the blood rushed before her eyes, turning her sight dark. The strawberry ice cream souring in her mouth. She did not want it, gave it to her little brother, who smeared it over his sailor suit, and let a passing dog gobble it up.

Then the father said to the mother, as if the girl weren’t there, Don’t worry, honey, she’ll always have her looks, at least. Squeezing the mother’s knee, winking at her.

When the mother frowned her carmine lips, the girl said, No, I am not slow. But even though there was a scream inside her, a feeling as if her stomach had had holes punched into it and she was pouring out, she said it so softly that nobody else heard.

ONE DAY WHEN SHE WAS TEN, the father came home early and sat at the table, head in his hands, drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, which he never did, not even when he staggered home late at night. The mother banished the children to watch the cowboy program on the television set while the parents’ voices rose in the kitchen. I don’t care…the girl heard, What are we going to do…the girl heard, Jesus Christ, why didn’t you get your tubes tied…she heard. There was shouting and the girl turned up the television, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown it all out. When the front door crashed, the mother came into the den. Go to bed, she ordered the brother, grabbing the girl’s hand so that she would stay. Take the baby with.

We got to brush our teeth? said the brother, and the mother sighed. No. Just put your sister in bed, and the little ones went away, and the mother turned to her daughter, and, wordless, put her kerchiefed head in her lap, burying her face on her skinny legs. As the girl stroked her mother’s fine hair, she tried to keep down the thing that was rising in her stomach, and the mother kept saying, Oh God, can you believe? Lost his job. Now! Of all times. Stupid drunk, she said. Oh my God. The mother’s cigarette trembled in her lips until it ashed itself all over her daughter’s legs, but the girl did not move them under the tiny burn.

This was how the littlest baby of the four was born a little clammy and a little dull: every few weeks her father wobbled home late at night and the girl awoke and listened to his curses below, and at school her cheeks were flushed with all that she held in. Her little brother wet his bed, her little sister ate from her diapers, her mother swelled up, pale and bloated, and the neighbor ladies asked curtly for their casserole dishes back. The girl was not surprised when the mother sat everyone down and unveiled the sleeping face of the new child. She had heard it on the playground. She knew it as a truth: Mongoloids come, she understood, from a lack of love in the family.

ON SATURDAYS THAT BAD WINTER when she was twelve, the girl pushed the three littlest in the swings at the park when her mother was in the church basement, waiting for a boxful of dented cans and dandruffy cake mixes. At home, there were endless projects, her mother bent over the sewing machine crafting trousers out of curtains, remaking some little Anabaptist’s dress into something the girl wouldn’t hate, perhaps even a skirt the other girls would finger with envy, wondering what boutique it was from.

She was picturing exactly this one day as she watched her brother and sister whip one another with willow branches in one of those sordid little parks beside the more generous churches. The spade-shaped duck pond was filled with cigarette butts and little plastic jellyfish she was too young to know were condoms. The girl was pulling her cold fingers through her curls to keep them from knotting, shivering in the sharp March wind. That was the year she didn’t have a winter coat, pretending that three old cardigans and a scarf and some mittens spelled warmth.

She turned her head and he appeared, the young man with thinning hair and irisless eyes and round red cheeks like a doll’s. Those cheeks were why she didn’t scream when he stood close, closer, why she sat on her bench, frozen, looking up. She didn’t move when he opened his trousers and out popped his little worm and he brushed it, hot and silky, against her neck. And then he gave a breathy giggle as her brother shouted at a duck at the far end of the park, and the man pushed the worm back in the pants hole and hurried away over the desolate grass. She watched him go, holding her breath, clutching the bench so hard she felt as if she broke her hands. At home, in the pink bathroom, she scrubbed at her neck with the guest soaps in the shapes of curled nautili, scrubbed until she scrubbed that spot bloody and, eventually, scabrous. That night, sleepless, reimagining the hot brush on her neck, that gulf the girl carried around inside of herself widened with a terrible dull roar. When her daddy came home, silent and sober, the dangerous fire in his eyes snuffed when she shied away from his kiss. He looked at his eldest daughter, her pinched averted face, her bad shoes. I suppose I deserve that, he said, softly.

A DAY CAME WHEN THE GIRL RAN HOME, eyes kindling with excitement. There was a teacher in school who would teach the girls to be twirlers, with fire batons and everything! The mother frowned, put down her cigarette, and stood, arms akimbo, pushing the new baby in his rocker with her foot. Sparked by the girl’s excitement, the brother raced out of the room with a Mohican ululation, the little sister did a shimmy to the music on the radio. The mother had to look away when she took a deep drag and, letting it out through her nose like a dragon, told her daughter, No, my pretty one, you know we don’t have the money for baton lessons.

The girl struggled with the bitterness that stirred in her. Trained as she was by now, she didn’t open her mouth. She bowed her head. Set the table.

It was the face the girl made, sharp as a needle, that the father saw when he looked up through the steam of his sauerkraut and pork supper. And the next day, old Joe Helmuth came into the kitchen with one hand behind his back, his favorite bitch clicking along behind him. He leaned over to whisper in his stepdaughter’s ear. Her puffy, once-pretty face lifted, broke into wonderment. She clutched his hand and put her cheek on it, wordless.

Then old Joe Helmuth looked at his stepgranddaughter as she pinned the hem on a dress across the table and asked her what she thought he had behind his back. She guessed a silver dollar, but the hand came out waving a baton in saucy imitation of a twirl. Give your old granddaddy a little kiss, he said, and she did, a big one, and didn’t mind his scratchy moustache or the way his lips lingered a half-second too long on her own.

Now the father worked at the kennel all day, mucking the dog shit from the concrete floor, no matter that he had two years of college, no matter that he had once been a government employee. And with the father at work so long, the mother was able to finish her chores before supper, and the girl had time to practice. Lordy, did she practice. She took that hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, twirled in the basement in the foulest weather, when her hands stuck to the metal in the cold and she could not practice on the lawn. In her bed at night, her fingers flicked imaginary batons in the air. She sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky, batons flipping around her body like ions to her atom, batons spinning about her like glittering wings. She twirled through her legs and over her body as if her batons were her very own limbs. The mother paused to watch her daughter practice out the kitchen window and plum forgot to bread the chicken. The father took her in the early mornings to the far-off competitions, drinking coffee from a thermos as she snoozed against the car door, and praying a little to his forgotten God before she marched onto the field.

A natural, said the baton teacher, clasping her hands to her breast, rolling her eyes cloudward. A natural, smirked the boys on the football team as she marched at the head of the marching band in her knee-high boots, in her spangly little leotard, in her hat like an upended loaf of bread. She was the head majorette in her sophomore year of high school, hers the sole white costume amid the others’ discontented blues. The other twirlers dropped, one by one, nastily, all humdrum twirlers compared to her, until, at last, she stood alone. Before the thousands of awestruck fans, she tossed her solo batons until they spun above the bleachers on the football field. The fans lost the thin bands in the dusky sky and gasped when they fell into the girl’s hands, streaking stars.

THE GIRL SPENT HER EVENINGS plucking her eyebrows, hair by hair, until they were as thin and arced as scythes. She swabbed the roots of her hair with cotton soaked in peroxide until she was blond as the day she was born, reduced with cottage cheese until her arms were twigs, smeared petroleum jelly over her lips and hands to keep them supple. She hemmed her skirts to mid-thigh, then hemmed still more. She wore her sweaters tight until her brother, embarrassed by his horn-dog friends, asked if she didn’t think her sweater kittens were going to freeze, exposed as they were. She looked at him coolly and changed into an even tighter sweater, so tight one could trace the label on her brassiere.

And she said Yes to the boys who called for her, despite her daddy, who snarled and barked at them, and Yes to the football players who jogged after her before practice to ask her to the movies, and Yes to parking in the makeout lane, and Yes to their hands under her skirts, and Yes when they pushed their jeans down their thin hips because by then she forgot what it meant to say No. She caught her father in her room one evening holding her underwear up to the window, panty by panty, examining. She caught him staring at her above the goulash and she had to look away, in confusion, a dank feeling in her stomach. When Stepgranddaddy Joe Helmuth came for Easter supper, he settled his bitches in the corner with a bone, and Fritz the old collie wobbled over and sniffed them with panting eagerness. After Joe Helmuth said the prayer and the rest of them dove into their food, he looked long and hard at the girl, her makeup, her hair, the neat halves of each portion left on her plate in service of her diet. Then he said to her mother with a mouthful of lamb, Better watch my little wifey like a goddamn hawk, else she’s going to turn into her mother, my dear. He pointed at the girl with the tines of his fork, and the father dropped his napkin and pushed up from the table and went to pace the lawn, kicking at the dropped chokecherries.

The girl then looked at her mother with the purple sleepless bruises around her eyes, at her smallest brother, who drooled in bubbles and seemed only to have attention for the way the cigarette smoke shattered against the overhead lamp. And there was something icy in her gut then, something hard, and she stopped saying Yes. She stopped saying much. She smiled, coquettish, and posed for the photographs for the school paper, for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and she twirled, but no longer went out with the boys.

Instead, she spent her nights and weekends at beauty pageants. Why not? she’d decided one Saturday night, restless and imagining the boys with their boy smells. Why not? She already had the sparkly leotards. By Monday she had stitched together an evening gown. By summer, she had won enough for a coughing blue Hornet and went chugging around the state, preparing for Miss America. She dreamed of the big payout, the scholarship to the college of her choice, vague classes with lab coats and fat books and professors with leather patches on their coats, four years, a real college, not two at a stupid technical school. But when she brought home the sashes and the crowns, the bouquets of red roses, she didn’t tell a soul where she’d gotten them, not even her mother, who had smoked herself foul-smelling and unpretty. In a box under her bed the girl buried Miss Hummelstown, Pennsylvania Milk Princess, Miss Lancaster County, Central Pennsylvania Cheese Duchess, and even Hershey Queen. All that long hot summer, the smell of chocolate rose from the factory, a memory made sensual, all that she’d won.

Her mother watched her come into the house, this fine, thin girl. She pulled her sudsy hands from the sink and she walked toward her, holding them out to the girl as if to clutch her, to hold her, even briefly, before she had to let her go. But the daughter backed away from the soapy arms with a look of disgust, and fled the kitchen to the room she shared with her incurious, moody sister, to recount her tiaras and to straighten her sashes in order.

AND SO IT WAS UNTIL THE DAY in her junior fall when the girl was outside with her fire batons on a day her father was burning leaves. She was spinning them skyward, where they blazed bright against the glum fall sky. Her monkey-faced sister was raking leaves, sulking in an old red sweater of their brother’s, and everywhere the glorious smell of singed leaves, smoke as thick as wool.

The girl sent the fire baton into the air with her left hand as she did an Around the World with her right. When the baton fell, it fell a little askew, and she missed catching it with her palm; it fell on the ratty fringe of the old jeans she was wearing, they flamed up, and she stared at the bright blaze, blank, for a couple of seconds before she began to scream, Help me, help me, help! clapping at the flame. The father dropped his wheelbarrow and ran, but for the younger daughter, for the red sweater — he tackled the younger daughter, and smacked out the flames of her red sweater before he realized they weren’t flames at all. By the time he reached his eldest daughter and put out the fire, holding her as the sister ran for the telephone, there were black scorch marks on the flesh of the girl’s shins and calves, and she had gone limp and unconscious.

When the girl awakened, she was in the burn unit, tubes in her arms, her legs bandaged and elevated and feeling as if they were packed with clay. Her idiot brother was kneeling on a chair beside her, nobody else in the room. He rubbed her cheek with his finger and cooed.

Oh, little guy, she would have groaned if she could only get her mouth to work. Oh, little guy, what happened? She only remembered the flames when she saw, on the stand, monuments of flowers, from the principal, from the football team, from the boys who knew every inch of her skin rather well, from her calculus and biology teachers, from her stepgranddaddy, from her baton teacher’s good-looking husband. All, she realized, from men. She picked up a novel her mother had dropped there, and she read to escape the thought.

By the time the flowers wilted and dropped their petals one by one, the girl had devoured a tower of books. She was a religious convert for books, parched and feverish. While she spun her batons she had forgotten that terrible ache; the books made her forget for longer. She gave up the idea of Miss America with nary a pang; nobody wants a singed beauty queen. And when she began walking again with her skinny, tender legs, and zipped up the long boots she would forevermore have to wear with her skirts, and she realized her grades were not good enough to slide into school on them alone, she began twirling again. Only halfheartedly. Only to stay in the light. She was good at it. It would take her where she would need to go: to college, that distant horizon.

In the summer, she was selected to be the head majorette for Big 33, the state high school football championships, and as such, she choreographed the routines of forty-five of the state’s best twirlers. On the big day, she did a perfect routine with three fire batons. On television, in front of everyone, Joe Paterno watched her and gave a little smile and said, Hell, if I had any say over the Penn State band, that young lady would be my number one draft pick.

Flushed with her success, knowing this was the pinnacle of her half-abandoned life as a majorette, she drove home in her coughing Hornet, her father by her side, her mother crammed in the back. And perhaps it was what Paterno had said, but her father looked at his firstborn, and his eyes filled, and he couldn’t say a word, only turning away from her, to look out into Pennsylvania flying by. The girl felt the heat of his gaze, and then the relief as he looked away.

Though that autumn her history and English teachers had a great blowup in the faculty lounge about who, exactly, should take credit for the girl’s turnaround, neither was responsible: after the fire, after Paterno, the girl read at night until the books made her fall asleep. That was how she earned herself a full scholarship to Lafayette College, near Allentown. For their first coed class, the admissions committee wanted a diverse group of girls. She fluttered her eyelashes. She aced her interview.

THE SERENITY, THE BEAUTY, the aged brick of the campus stirred in her something close to exploding, something sweet and good. She smiled, she got along well with her roommates, both city girls, both rich. She borrowed their White Shoulders, their miniskirts, their brandy; their bracelets chuckled on her wrists. And though the football games were quieter than her high school ones — the team was awful, the fans more interested in smoking pot and watching the clouds above explode into psychedelic shapes — every weekend, she put on her flabby handed-down uniform and twirled mightily and gained a few fans.

Hey, Darlin’, war protesters outside the union would shout at her as she crossed the quad, Hey, Majorette. Come twirl over here to protest the war.

And when she’d give them a shy smile at halftime as she marched out for the routine, one boy with gleaming reddish hair and a sweet face under his glasses would trot before the bleachers and woo the sky, singing, One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war! And the crowd would raise their fists and say, Five, six, seven, eight, twirl them sticks to set them straight!

And the girl, under the spinning batons in the air, would laugh. She’d give a little antiwar shuffle to the beat of the chant. And then she would think of her glowering father if he were to see her, and become scandalized at her own daring, and flush and run off.

She didn’t know that the redheaded boy was in her biology class until the day she saw him as she was coming down the steps of the lecture hall to hand in a test. Her skirt was the miniest she had, her boots white platforms, and he dropped a pencil to peer up the stretch of her legs. He grinned at her, and, despite herself, she grinned down at him, and this is how they met. He was in premed, he said, because his draft number was ridiculously low, and if he didn’t get into graduate school he’d be in some Asian jungle somewhere, torching babies.

What do you think? he said, naked, gleaming with sweat on his frat-house bed, looking at her anxiously. If I don’t get into med school, would you go to Canada with me? For weeks her greatest anxiety had been how to hide her seared calves under his sheets, but now she forgot her own body entirely. And she looked at him, began to blink, and as she blinked, there was a tremendous shifting as if something began to strain closed inside her. He frowned. What’s the matter? he said. And she said, Nobody ever asked me what I thought before. And he said, That’s silly, you must have been asked what you thought at some point, and she said, No, and he said, Well, you have to have opinions, everyone has opinions, and she said, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make opinions. And he pried her hands from her face and kissed her on the nose, and instead of saying, as she thought he was going to say, Well, I’ll have all the opinions you need, little missy, he said, Well, you can have all the opinions you want around me. Go ahead and practice.

And she looked at him, at the laughing redheaded boy who squinted at her presbyopically, she saw the lick of salt from the dried sweat on his forehead and said, I think you are the kindest man I know. And he said, Well, that’s a good one. You’re about the only woman in the world to ever have that opinion, and they laughed together, and he stopped laughing and he looked at her very seriously, brushing the bleached hair from her face. He opened his mouth. And when all the other men she’d known would have said, Baby, you’re so beautiful, he didn’t. Instead, he said, Beautiful, you are smart. Believe it.

Then she burrowed into him, tried to fit her whole head into the hollows of his torso. Oh, she wanted to weep, but not from sorrow, from confusion. She felt as if all her life she’d been carrying this black sack filled with cobras, and the redheaded boy had swept it from her hands and given her a different one, filled with something soft, and said, Listen, this, too, is yours, and you can have it, and didn’t you know there are millions of different things to carry in the world, darling? And she thought of her father, of Joe Helmuth and all the other hard, dark men in her childhood, and had to blink to see the redheaded boy with his big nose and his sleepy, mole-like eyes as the same genre of human as them. Later, she let the sheets fall off her legs, let the boy exclaim and hold her calves in his hands, and she explained the burns, told the story for the first time of her own small revolution. As she watched him sleep that night, she thought a very definite Yes.

THIS IS HOW A LIFE FALLS INTO PLACE. A graduation, a wedding with her pale, redheaded groom sneaking into her room before the ceremony for a prewedding snuggle, the reception with Joe Helmuth in a fine blue tuxedo, spinning her around the dance floor, his white moustache twitching with pride as she smiled up at him in her lace dress. A hot day outside, the chocolate factory perfuming the wedding, like a blessing bestowed by her hometown. Her parents looked small and nervous at their table, her father becoming so drunk he wept openly, smacking his forehead with his palm, smacking, smacking, until her mother stubbed out her cigarette, and took his hands in her own jaundiced ones, and held them to her lips and kissed them until he leaned his forehead against hers. They sat there, calm, eyebrow to eyebrow. Her monkey-faced sister, who turned out to be quite pretty in an overbitten Betty Boop way, swept her retarded brother around the floor, both laughing like fools, and the bride’s younger brother pressed her to him for one brief moment after the dance, unable to speak, his eyes full of tears. He smelled the same as ever: celery, sweat.

Then she was the breadwinner, putting her husband through medical school, drawing blood samples from small Amish boys who never so much as whimpered at the needle. Her father, resenting this — It’s not natural, he said, it’s not right; a man should provide for his wife — began to only grunt in her husband’s presence, always seeming to have a tool in his hand. Joe Helmuth tried hard to provoke her husband to bickering and when her redheaded husband only laughed, refused to bicker, he at last relented, giving them a basset puppy that grew up fat and gentle. With the residency came the years of joyous scrimping, years of making baskets for gifts and canning her own vegetables, and hovering over her first child, a beloved son, whose birth was the best day of her life, at least until the birth of her daughter, an even brighter day that seemed to engulf her, drown her in its fearsome miracles.

When she unwrapped her daughter for the first time, she touched the tender folds of the baby’s body, the warm little tires of her neck and lips and eyelids and kneepits. And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms. If her daughter cried at night, she stood and slipped into her room and kissed her to sleep. She nursed her and felt herself grow softer, her hard edges sanded off, as the satiated mouth grew slack.

And she watched this daughter grow, grasp at words as if they were bright things, shove everything the world offered into her mouth, as if to taste it all. She watched those little legs in their corduroy pants pump like pistons down the lawn after her older brother, she watched her build forts of sticks and stones and tree stumps, make soft beds for herself of thick moss. The delicate things her daughter crafted with her hands she held in her own and wondered over, as she wondered over the fierceness of the girl’s bright force as she shouted and pulled at a stranger’s mean dog that had attacked their family’s golden retriever, at how, so young, the power of her fury drove the mean dog off. The years of dancing to suburban hip-hop in the kitchen as they did dishes, of bent flowers ripped from the ground in a pitcher for Mother’s Day, of the hurling of words more painful than any thwack of her own daddy’s belt, her daughter screaming words at her, spiny with superiority: You’re so fucking superficial; It’s the nineties; Make Dad make his own sandwich, for God’s sake. And then the swallowed sorries and bittersweet repentance: Mom, you know I love you. Her daughter grew tall and muscled, fierce and laughing, so terrible that the girl scared her mother, her brother, her small and suspicious grandparents. Joe Helmuth laughed and laughed at her. My girlfriend, he said with admiration, Such a spicy jalapeño. Her mother watched her, awed, this mountain of a girl; she saw how the hunger in her was different from her own, greedy, not empty.

Should a life be lived with such intensity? the mother asked her husband as he read a magazine before bed. Should life be lived with the intensity our daughter lives it? He put the magazine down, smiled, the skin behind his glasses crinkling. He was bald now, plump. What do you think? he said. She did not answer him at first, spent a few minutes looking through the dark panes and into the city where they lived, far from Hershey, far from her childhood. She thought of her mother’s cigarette smoke as it spun a blue web on the ceiling. Yes, I think it should, she said, and then put out the light and folded herself under the covers, rested herself against him. Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.

In the end, it was volleyball that was her daughter’s steady passion, the sport for leaping Amazons. The mother sat in the honeyed high school gymnasiums, the college gyms, and watched the stony look come over her daughter’s face with every stuff, dig, kill. In the stands, the mother touched her ravaged calves. She was still so lovely in her increasing years, her hair dark now and straight, her lips glossed, eyebrows grown out to a normal thickness. When the ball shot toward her girl, the mother leaned forward and waited.

She saw her daughter’s thigh muscles bunch as she readied herself for the jump; she saw one beautiful summer night at her parents’ years ago. Her children had been tiny then, running around with glass jars to collect the fireflies, her retarded brother was singing a song under his breath. Tang of daiquiri in her mouth; lick of cigarette smoke curling into the night; scent of the middle-aged chokecherry pricking her eyes. She ran inside and dug in the basement for her fire batons and came out onto the lawn, setting her mother’s lighter to the ancient ends, flinging them one, two, three, four, into the air so they spun into the starred sky, one after another, outglowing the stars. She saw herself reflected in the faces of her family, twirling, the children spellbound; she saw how they looked at her with surprise.

In the warm glow of the gym she closed her eyes to imprint her daughter upon her eyelids, stilled her in midmotion. As the game went on, she held her daughter leaping. A wonder, this girl, who knew already how to catch herself.