Love Invents Us

Just as I Am

I wasn’t surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.

“Sable is right for you, Lizbet,” Mr. Klein said, draping a shawl-collared jacket over me. “Perfect for your skin and your eyes. A million times a day the boys must tell you. Such skin.”

No one except Mr. Klein had ever suggested that my appearance was pleasing. My mother took time out from filling half the houses on Long Island with large French cachepots and small porcelain dogs to take me shopping at Lord and Taylor’s Pretty Plus; her aesthetic sense made her look the other way when the saleswomen dragged me out in navy blue A-line dresses and plaid jumpers. Looking at me sideways, she saw the chewed ends of my hair, smudged pink harlequin glasses, a bad attitude.

I stood on a little velvet footstool and modeled fur coats for Mr. Klein. He had suggested I take off my perpetual green corduroys and hooded sweatshirt so we could see how the coats really looked. I agreed, only pretending to hesitate for a minute so I could watch his thin grey face expand and pinken. I felt the warm rushing in my chest that being with him gave me. He also gave me Belgian chocolate, because he felt Hershey’s wasn’t good enough for me, and he told me that if only God had blessed him and Mrs. Klein with a wonderful daughter like me, he would be truly happy, kayn ahora. My mother never said I was wonderful. My father, whose admiration for my mother had diminished only a little over the years, was certainly not heard thanking God for giving him the gift of me.

“This one next, Lizbet.” Mr. Klein handed me a small mink coat and set a mink beret on my dirty hair.

“This is my size. Do kids wear mink coats?”

If you had to dress up, mink was the way to go. Much better than my scratchy navy wool, designed to turn chubby Jewish girls into pale Victorian wards. The fur brushed my chin, and without my glasses (Mr. Klein and I agreed that it was a shame to hide my lovely eyes and so we put my glasses in his coat pocket during our modeling sessions) I felt glamorously Russian. I couldn’t see a thing. He put the beret at a slight angle and stepped back, admiring me in my bare feet and my mink.

“Perfect. This is how a fur coat should look on a girl. Not some little stick girl in rabbit. This is an ensemble.”

I turned around to see what I could of myself from the back: a brown triangle topped by a white blur and another brown smudge.

I modeled two more coats, a ranch mink, which displeased Mr. Klein with its careless stitching, and a fox cape, which made us both smile. Even Mr. Klein thought floor-length silver fox was a little much.

As always, he turned his back as I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt. I sat down on one of the spindly pink velvet chairs, putting my sneakers on as he put away the coats.

We said nothing on the drive home. I ate my chocolate and Mr. Klein turned on WQXR, the only time I ever listened to classical music. Mr. Klein rounded my driveway, trying to look unconcerned. I think we both expected that one Monday my parents would finally come rushing out of the house, appalled and avenging.

I went inside, my shoelaces flapping against the hallway’s glazed, uneven brick. Could anything be less inviting than a brick foyer? It pressed into the soles of my feet, and every dropped and delicate object shattered irretrievably.

I know some cleaning lady greeted me; we alternated between elderly Irish women, who looked as though they’d been born to rid the world of lazy people’s private filth, and middle-aged Bolivian women quietly stalking dust and our greasy, oversized fingerprints.

Every dinner was a short horror; my eating habits were remarked upon, and then my mother would talk about politics and decorating and my wardrobe. My father talked about his clients, their divorces, their bank accounts. I would go to my room, pretend to do my homework, and read my novels. In my room, I was the Scarlet Pimpernel. Sometimes I was Sydney Carton and once in a while I was Tarzan. I went to sleep dreaming of the nineteenth century, my oldest, largest teddy bear held tightly between my legs.

Mr. Klein usually drove up beside me as I was walking to the bus stop. When I saw the tip of his huge, unfashionable blue Cadillac slowly slide by me and pause, I skipped ahead and dropped my books on the front seat, spared another day of riding the school bus. He dropped me off in front of Arrandale Elementary School as the buses discharged all the kids I had managed to avoid thus far.

On the mornings Mr. Klein failed to appear, I kept a low profile and worried about him until the routine of school settled upon me. I was vulnerable again only at recess. The first two days of kindergarten had taught me to carry a book everywhere, and as soon as I found a place on the pebbled asphalt, I had only to set my eyes on the clean black letters and the soft ivory page and I would be gone, spirited right out of what passed for my real life.

Our first trip to Furs by Klein was incidental, barely a foreshadowing of our afternoons together. Mr. Klein passed me on the way home from school. Having lost two notebooks since school began, I’d missed the bus while searching the halls frantically for my third — bright red canvas designed to be easily seen. I started home, a couple of miles through the sticky, smoky leaf piles and across endless emerald lawns. No one knew I liked to walk. Mr. Klein pulled up ahead of me and signaled, shyly. I ran to the car, gratified to tears by a smile I could see from the road.

“I’ll give you a ride home, but I need to stop back at my shop, something I forgot. All right?”

I nodded. It was better than all right. Maybe I’d never have to go home. He could drive me to Mexico, night after night through the Great Plains, and I wouldn’t mind.

Furs by Klein stood on the corner of Shore Drive, its curved, pink-tinted windows and black lacquered French doors the height of suburban elegance. Inside stood headless bodies, six rose-velvet torsos, each wearing a fur coat. There were mirrors everywhere I looked and a few thin-legged, armless chairs. The walls were lined with coats and jackets and capes. Above them, floating on transparent necks, were the hats.

Mr. Klein watched me. “Go ahead,” he said. “All ladies like hats.” He pulled down a few and walked discreetly into the workroom at the rear. I tried on a black cloche with a dotted veil and then a kelly-green fedora with a band of arching brown feathers. Mr. Klein emerged from the back, his hands in the pockets of his baggy grey trousers.

“Come, Lizbet, your mother will be worried about you. Leave the hats, it’s all right. Mondays are the day off, the girls will put them back tomorrow.” He turned out the lights and opened the door for me.

“My mother’s not home.” I’m really an orphan, adopt me.

“Tcha, I am so absentminded. Mrs. Klein tells me your mother is a famous decorator. Of course she is out — decorating.”

He smiled, just slightly, and I laughed out loud. He’s on my side.

Almost every morning now, he gave me a ride to school. Without any negotiating that I remember, I knew that on Monday afternoons I would miss my bus and he would pick me up as I walked down Arrandale Avenue. I would keep him company while he did whatever he did in the back room and I tried on hats. After a few Mondays I eyed the coats.

“Of course,” he said. “When you’re grown up, you’ll tell your husband, ‘Get me a sable from Klein’s. It’s Klein’s or nothing.’ ” He waggled a finger sternly, showing me who I would be: a pretty young woman with a rich, indulgent husband. “Let me help you.”

Mr. Klein slipped an ash-blonde mink jacket over my sweatshirt and admired me aloud. Soon after, he stopped going into the workroom, and soon after that, I began taking off my clothes. The pleasure on Mr. Klein’s face made me forget everything I heard in the low tones of my parents’ conversation and everything I saw in my own mirror. I chose to believe Mr. Klein.

At home, to conjure up the feeling of Mr. Klein’s cool round fingertips on my shoulders, touching me lightly before the satin lining descended, I listened to classical music. My father made approving snorts behind The Wall Street Journal.

I lay on the floor of the living room, behind the biggest couch, and saw myself playing the piano, adult and beautifully formed. I am wearing a dress I saw on Marilyn Monroe, the sheerest clinging net, with sparkling stones coming up over the tips of my breasts and down between my legs. I am moving slowly across the stage, the wide hem of my sable cape shaping a series of round, dark waves. I hand the cape to an adoring Mr. Klein, slightly improved and handsomely turned out in a tuxedo cut just like my father’s.

My mother stepped over me and then stopped. I was eye to toe with her tiny pink suede loafers and happy to stay that way. Her round blue eyes and her fear of wrinkles made her stare as harsh and haunting as the eyeless Greek heads she’d put in my father’s study.

“Keeping busy, are you, Elizabeth?”

I couldn’t imagine what prompted this. My mother usually acted as though I had been raised by a responsible, affectionate governess; guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar.

“Yeah. School, books.” I studied the little gold bar across the tongue of her right loafer.

“And all is well?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine.”

“You wouldn’t like to study an instrument, would you? Piano? Perhaps a piano in the library. That could be attractive. An older piece, deep browns, a maroon paisley shawl, silver picture frames. Quite attractive.”

“I don’t know. Can I think about it?” I didn’t mind being part of my mother’s endless redecorating; in the past, her domestic fantasies had produced my queen-size brass bed, which I loved, and a giant Tudor dollhouse, complete with chiming doorbell and working shower.

“Of course, think it over. Let’s make a decision next week, shall we?” She started to touch my hair and patted me on the shoulder instead.

I didn’t see Mr. Klein until the following Monday. I endured four mornings at the bus stop: leaves stuffed down my shirt, books knocked into the trash can, lunch bag tossed from boy to boy. Fortunately, the bus driver was a madman, and his rageful mutterings and yelping at invisible assailants captured whatever attention might have come my way once we were on the bus.

It was raining that Monday, and I wondered if I should walk anyway. I never thought about the fact that: Mr. Klein and I had no way to contact each other. I could only wait, in silence. I pulled up my hood and started walking down Arrandale, waiting for a blue streak to come past my left side, waiting for the slight skid of wet leaves as Mr. Klein braked to a stop. Finally, much closer to home than usual, the car came.

“You’re almost home,” he said. “Maybe I should just take you home? We can go to the store another time.” He looked rushed and unhappy.

“Sure, if you don’t have time, that’s okay.”

“I have the time, tsatskela. I have the time.” He turned the car around and drove us back to Furs by Klein.

I got out and waited in the rain while he unlocked the big black doors.

“You’re soaking wet,” he said harshly. “You should have taken the bus.”

“I missed it,” I lied. If he wasn’t going to admit that he wanted me to miss the bus, I wasn’t going to admit that I had missed it for him.

“Yes, you miss the bus, I pick you up. Lizbet, you are a very special girl, and standing around an old man’s shop in wet clothes is not what you should be doing.”

What I usually did was stand around in no clothes at all, but I could tell that Mr. Klein, like most adults, was now working only from his version of the script.

I sat down uneasily at the little table with the swiveling gilt-framed mirror, ready to try on hats. Without Mr. Klein’s encouragement, I wouldn’t even look at the coats. He didn’t hand me any hats.

He pressed his thin sharp face deep into the side of my neck, pushing my sweatshirt aside with one hand. I looked in the mirror and saw my own round wet face, comic in its surprise and pink glasses. I saw Mr. Klein’s curly grey hair and a bald spot I would have never discovered otherwise.

“Get your coat.” He rubbed his face with both hands and stood by the door.

“I don’t have a coat.”

“They let you go in the rain, with no coat? Gottenyu. Let’s go, please.” He held the door open for me and I had to walk through it.

The chocolate wasn’t my usual Belgian slab. It was a deep gold-foil box tied with pink and gold wisps, and topped with a cluster of sparkling gold berries. He dropped it in my lap like something diseased.

I held on to the box, stroking the fairy ribbons, until he told me to open it.

Each of the six chocolates had a figure on top. Three milk, three bittersweet, each one carved with angel wings or a heart or a white-rimmed rose. In our fat-free home, my eating habits were regarded as criminal. My parents would no more have bought me beautiful chocolates than gift-wrapped a gun for a killer.

“Lizbet …”

He looked out the window at the rain and I looked up at him quickly. I had obviously done something wrong, and although my parents’ anger and chagrin didn’t bother me a bit, his unhappiness was pulling me apart. I crushed one of the chocolates with my fingers, and Mr. Klein saw me.

“Nah, nah,” he said softly, wiping my fingers with his handkerchief. He cleared his throat. “My schedule’s changing. I won’t be able to give you rides after school. I’m going to open the shop on Mondays.”

“How about in the morning?” I didn’t know I could talk through this kind of pain.

“I don’t think so. I need to get in a little earlier. It’s not so bad, you should ride with other boys and girls. You’ll see, you’ll have a good time.”

I sat there sullenly, ostentatiously mashing the chocolates.

“Too bad, they’re very nice chocolates. Teuscher’s. Remember, sable from Klein’s, chocolate from Teuscher’s. Only the best for you. I’m telling you, only the best.”

“I’m not going to have a good time on the bus.” I didn’t mash the last chocolate, I just ran a fingertip over the tiny ridges of the rosebud.

“Maybe not. I shouldn’t have said you’d have a good time. I’m sorry.” He sighed and looked away.

I bit into the last chocolate. “Here, you have some too.”

“No, they’re for you. They were all for you.”

“I’m not that hungry. Here.” I held out the chocolate half, and he lowered his head, startling me. I put my fingers up to his narrow lips, and he took the chocolate neatly between his teeth. I could feel the very edge of his teeth against my fingers.

We pulled up in front of my house, and he put his hand over mine, for just one moment.

“I’ll say it again, only the best is good enough for you. So, we’ll say au revoir, Lizbet. Elizabeth. Not good-bye.”

“Au revoir. Thank you very much for the chocolates.” My mother’s instructions surfaced at odd times.

I left my dripping sneakers on the brick floor, dropped my wet clothes into my lilac straw hamper, and took my very first voluntary shower. I dried off slowly, watching myself in the steamy mirror. When I didn’t come down for dinner, my mother found me, naked and quiet, deep in my covers.

“Let’s get the piano,” I said.

I started lessons with Mr. Canetti the next week. He served me wine-flavored cookies instead of chocolate. One day he bent forward to push my sleeves back over my aching wrists, and I saw my beautiful self take shape in his eyes. I loved him, too.

Take My Hand

I found comfort in the red, shy eyes of Mr. Klein and Mr. Canetti, and I found it in Franks Five and Dime. I didn’t think of it as stealing; I didn’t brag about it to other kids, not that I talked to them anyway, and I didn’t pray for forgiveness. It was just Taking. Every school day I took Necco wafers and a Heath bar from Frank’s. It was a long, dim box of a room; the candy racks were in front of the cash register, halfway down the left wall facing a heavy glass case, five shelves filled with Madame Alexander dolls and their hats and shoes and luggage sets. I walked in ten minutes before school started most days and cruised the shop, pausing in front of the doll case, looking for the little knot of businessmen and newspapers to stand behind. I was a terrible thief, slow and sticky and predictable. Without my round, trusting face and geeky glasses, I would never have gotten as far as I did. I put the Neccos, shifting in their glassy opaque tube, into my lunch bag and held the Heath bar in my coat pocket. It was easily unwrapped, one blind finger sliding under the smooth brown back flap. Once, my pocket lining was torn and I had to tuck it in the waistband of my panties and get it out during coatroom time. I smelled of anxious sweat and chocolate all day.

I got caught. Frank wrapped his huge hand around my wrist and squeezed until I dropped my lunch bag on the counter. He took out the candy, and I said, my mind blank with humiliation, that I had intended to pay for it.

“Sure you did. Every day you come in here. For this. Get outta here and don’t come back.”

Ellyn and Cindi Kramer stood in the doorway, listening openmouthed, and looked at me with real pleasure as I walked between them. It could have been worse; he could have telephoned my parents, who surely would have made me go to the psychiatrist I’d been ducking for the last year. I didn’t want to talk about what I did and why; I already knew I was crazy. As it was, I entered hell all by myself, like everyone else.

What I did at Mrs. Hill’s wasn’t stealing, either. Stealing was sneaking lipstick from Woolworth’s or blue silk panties from Bee’s Lingerie Shop. After Frank’s, after months of being called a thief by the whole bus, every single day, of being followed down the street by Ellyn and Cindi, catcalling until I reached the hedges that marked our property, I stayed out of candy stores, but I still stole. By the middle of seventh grade, I was casually lining up pens, fluorescent markers, and leather barrettes on one long table in study hall like it was the local flea market. But everything I took from Mrs. Hill I hid in my closet. Every time the doorbell rang I could see two big cops, hands on their guns, standing in my mother’s foyer and calling out my name.

Mrs. Hill was almost blind, she had something-retinitis; there was a hole in the center of her vision, as if someone had ripped the middle out of every page. If she turned her head way to the right or left, she could just about see my face. When I walked toward her as she sat in the big red vinyl recliner, she would turn her face far to the right; the closer I got, the more she would seem to yearn toward the kitchen. When I was almost upon her, she would smile away from me.

Every Saturday I tidied up Mrs. Hill’s house and made her lunch and dinner. She was my good deed, courtesy of Samuel C. Shales, minister at the Beech Street A.M.E. Zion Church, Where Everybody Is Somebody and Jesus Is Lord Over All. At eleven o’clock on September 16, through the window of my algebra class, I heard gospel music for the first time. Those sweet, meaty sounds led me to a white wood church on a corner my school bus never passed. Each time I had to walk by Reverend Shales’ office, and each time he looked up and kept talking on the phone. I stayed near the church bulletin board, my eyes down, my heart singing like Mahalia Jackson.

Reverend Shales was shorter than I’d thought, and his glasses shimmered in the dusty light.

“Miss? You’re visiting our church again?”

I said yes. He asked my name, my parents’ names, my address, and my school, and however embarrassed I was to be caught lurking in his church hall, he was not sorry to have me there. His eyes shone like black pearls. I seemed like a girl who could offer a little companionship, he said. I could run to the corner store and bring back the right change, couldn’t I? I wasn’t above a little light cleaning, was I? He invited me to come and listen to the choir whenever I liked, and at the same time take the opportunity, the special opportunity to serve, to offer Christian charity to a very sweet, very lovely elderly lady a few doors down. He led me out the church door and pointed down the street to the small white house with the patchy lawn and the listing porch.

“I’ll phone Miz Hill to say you’re on your way. You are on your way now, young lady.” And he put his big hand on the small of my back and pushed. He said Go, and I went.

Crinkly, lifeless grey curls floated up and across Mrs. Hill’s grey-brown scalp, winging out over her ears. What must have been round, brown eyes had become opaque beige slits, like two additional spots of smooth skin in her dark puckered face. She had seven housedresses, and her doctor daughter came home twice a year from the great, safe distance of California and replaced them all. Mrs. Hill did not rotate them as Dr. Hill intended; she wore the pink one all week, and when it was stiff with sweat and moisturizer and medicated cream for her eczema, she threw it in the hamper for me to wash. On Saturdays she wore the purple housedress, and I didn’t blame her a bit. It was the least practical of them; instead of a cotton-poly mix, it was soft velour, and the pull on the end of the zipper was a purple and yellow sunflower, as though van Gogh had gotten loose in the Sears catalog. In her purple sunflower robe, Mrs. Hill told my fortune.

“Long life here,” she said, one thick, twisted finger digging into the middle of my palm. “Love affairs here. Did you bring Mrs. Hill some pork rinds?”

Dr. Hill had sent a note that Mrs. Hill had all sorts of things wrong with her heart and that salt and fat were out of the question. Mrs. Hill and I had a deal: one palm reading for a bag of Salty Jims Pork Rinds. Mrs. Hill told me that Salty Jim was really Jim Buckton, who played trumpet with Duke Ellington in the fifties and had gone to high school with Mrs. Hill. Out of respect and school loyalty, we usually ate Salty Jim’s, but when the Red Owl Supermarket carried Li’l Pig Bar-B-Que Pork Rinds, we had to give old Jim the heave-ho and stock up on orange-speckled, amber clouds of pork fat.

“Open up that bag and set it right here. Let’s have that hand.” I popped open two cans of grape soda.

Mrs. Hill bent over my palm, and I could smell the greasy fruit smell of her hair pomade and the piercing eucalyptus of Vicks VapoRub, which she used prophylactically.

“The love affairs startin’ early.” She jabbed my palm and then held my own hand up to me, showing me the point at which the love line joined the life line.

“Really?” I said. I didn’t think of Mr. Klein or Mr. Canetti as love affairs. I knew that they had loved me and I had loved them back, but there wasn’t any sex, and you couldn’t have an affair without sex. When I was in fifth grade I had had a little sex with Seth Stern, but it wasn’t what I thought a love affair should be. We were playing James Bond, and he pulled down my underpants and stuck his hand between my legs. He was only in sixth grade, but he was shaving already, and I found the red nicks on his throat and chin mysterious, alluring tribal scars. He stuck one long finger inside me and rocked me roughly on his hand until we heard our parents gathering coats in the front hall. He pushed me back onto the bed and yanked up my panties while running his thumb along the inside of my thigh. My parents called for me, and we went downstairs, all my attention on my bruised, wet center and on Seth, who insisted on shaking my fathers hand as we said good-bye. The tension and excitement and shame I felt were terrible and vivid. This was life. Out of remorse, or indifference, he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and my parents had just about dropped the Sterns anyway, so I kept my virginity quite a while longer. I dreamt of his hands.

Mrs. Hill leaned back in her recliner and twisted her face away to watch me.

“In my closet there’s a hatbox, an old red hatbox. Bring it to me, sugar.”

Mrs. Hill only used endearments when she was asking me a favor or criticizing me.

The closet would have been my mother’s worst nightmare: blouses lying on the floor in their own wrinkled, dusty puddles, single shoes turned heel up, sticking into piles of sweaters and pants. On the top shelf were three hatboxes, one faded red, one with green and white stripes, and a yellowed one with grimy ivory tassels hanging from the sides. Mrs. Hill was much shorter than I was and could barely hobble from room to room; the hatboxes and the shelf they sat on were covered in dust.

Mrs. Hill rested the red hatbox in her purple velour lap, her bony knees hunched up to keep it from sliding to the floor. “Some pretty things in here. If I kept them out, a burglar might get them. No burglar’s going hunting through an old lady’s underthings, through a messy old closet.” I was always looking to justify the mess in my room, too.

Mrs. Hill lifted off the lid and handed it to me, the thick dust rippling slightly.

“What about these, miss? You don’t see these anymore.”

They were eight long silver straws with filigreed hearts at their ends. Mrs. Hill handed them to me one by one, and I ran my fingers over the thin silver lacework around the hearts’ edges. She waved one straw in the air.

“Spoons for iced tea. Plus the stems are hollow, so you can sip too. Wedding present.” She closed her eyes. “Wedding present from Alva and Edna Thomas, he worked with Mr. Hill. Iced tea and strawberry shortcake in the summer. And brandy cup and lemon cake with burnt sugar frosting at Christmas.”

I had never seen anything so fancy and frivolous in all my life. My parents’ house was all handsome, angular teak and tautly rounded leather, and each decorative piece had the added weight of culture or art or good taste. These were just pretty and gay, and as I held them I could feel that if I pressed down any harder at all, the hollow stems would give way.

“Are you going to give them to your daughter?” I asked, sure that the Dr. Vivian Hill in the pastel-tinted eight-by-ten on the mantelpiece, with one manicured hand on the hood of a big white Mercedes, black eyes flatly daring us to wonder how she got from here to there, would not want the spoons, or anything else from this small house with the rutted floors and soiled lampshades. Dr. Hill’s old bedroom was now the storage room — wire hangers, dresses from twenty years ago, shoes slit for corns and bunions and still not right, cat food for the cat that died six months before I came, cookie tins filled with rubber bands and green stamps. The only bit of Dr. Hill left was the graduation tassel used to pull down the window shade. Dr. Hill stayed at the Great Neck Inn when she visited.

Mrs. Hill made a feeble grab for the spoons, snatching at the air to my left. “Give them to Vivian? Why should I give them to anyone? I’m not dead. Gimme those spoons, girl.”

I put all but one of the spoons back into her hands; they stuck out like silver pins in an old brown cushion. She sorted them and wrapped them in the tissue paper. Before she could count them up and accuse me, I handed her the last one.

“Don’t forget this, it fell off your lap,” I lied.

She gestured for the lid. “Next time, we can look at some more treasures,” she said.

I put the red hatbox back and quickly lifted out the striped one. Inside were twelve silver spoons with short, thickly twisted stems, the ends crowned with tiny enameled portraits of long-haired, biblical-looking men. Each little white face was touched with two pink dots for cheeks and pairs of blue or brown dots for eyes. Their hair was several different shades of brown.

“Don’t be goin’ in my things, now.”

“I’m not, I was just trying to get this put back where it belongs. I was tidying up your closet, as a matter of fact.”

“Uh-huh. Snooping and spying is more like it.”

I knew she didn’t mind; it wasn’t like there were millions of people interested in Mrs. Hill’s life, never mind the contents of her closet.

Mrs. Hill had two cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking and The Paschal Lamb, which was put out by the Greater A.M.E. Zion Church of Philadelphia and was almost as long as the gravy-stained Rombauer bible. I read them both, and once Mrs. Hill showed me how to light her chipped gas stove, I was fearless. I didn’t see what harm I could do. No Limoges plates to break, nothing to stain or put back the wrong way, no system to throw out of whack. Mrs. Hill’s spice rack was six tins of Durkee’s in a shoebox on the counter. I put my hair in a ponytail, and Mrs. Hill wrapped a pink gingham towel around my waist. I made chicken-and-dumplings. I used lard and cornflake crumbs, and when Mrs. Hill said she’d loved Brunswick stew as a girl, I turned to this page in the Lamb and said, “All I need is corn. And a squirrel.” I made sweet potato casserole and angels on horseback for Mrs. Hill’s birthday. I made lasagna and divided it into four little loaf pans so Mrs. Hill could just heat them up during the week. I precooked them so if she didn’t have the energy to put them in the oven she could eat them cold without getting some kind of uncooked-meat disease.

At school on Monday, I asked Mimi Tedeschi, who practically lived in church, who she thought the men on the spoons could be.

“The apostles. Don’t you know who the apostles are? Peter, Andrew, John, Matthias, James the Greater …” She rattled off all twelve names. “I guess being Jewish you didn’t learn about them. My grandmother has a set like that. Apostle spoons. Hers are all on a little wood stand over the fireplace.”

After a few Saturdays, Mrs. Hill and I had gone through all three hatboxes. Besides the apostles and the iced tea stirrers, there were two small bowls of cranberry glass set in baskets of braided gold wire; four monogrammed silver napkin rings; six half-size teacups and matching saucers, each with a different flower garlanding the sides of the cup and the face of the saucer, each with one coy bud resting at the bottom of the cup. I loved them all. Mrs. Hill would hand them to me to admire, and then we’d rewrap them in tissue and I’d put them back in the closet.

In November, Mrs. Hill was always cold. She was tired of the hatboxes, tired of reading my palm, and tired of lasagna. She would fall asleep around two and wake up as the sky was getting dark.

“Don’t you leave while I’m sleeping. Elizabeth, you hear me? Don’t you leave if I’m not awake.”

“Okay. I mean, even if I did, you’d be fine. I mean, nothing would happen.”

“Don’t tell me what’s gonna happen in my own house. You come and wake me up before you leave.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The next Saturday, she fell asleep in her chair right after lunch. I went into her bedroom and stood in the mouth of the closet, staring up at the row of hatboxes. I took down the apostles and chose one whose eyes seemed to tilt up at me beneath lashes as dark and spiky as Seth Stern’s. I put him into my backpack and changed Mrs. Hill’s bed, trying to hold my breath until I got the clean sheets on and the old ones stuffed into the washer.

The following Saturday, I took one with blue eyes, and the Saturday after that, another dark-eyed one. I wanted to take the lady’s-slipper teacup next.

Mrs. Hill said to me, “Could you come this Tuesday? Vivian’s coming by, for just a little while. I think we could do a little cleaning up before.”

I had to smile; when “we” cleaned up, Mrs. Hill put on an old plaid apron and sat back in her recliner while I scrubbed the backsplash and threw out dead plants and moldy bread.

I didn’t like cleaning, and Mrs. Hill never offered to pay me, and even if she had, Reverend Shales had made it very clear that I was not ever to take money from her.

“I can’t. I’ve got school stuff. The paper. I have to go to a meeting.” I didn’t think Mrs. Hill would know that the special ed class put out the school paper all by itself.

“I think you might have to skip that meeting, sugar. I don’t like to put you out, you know that, but I really do need your help on Tuesday. Can’t have my Doctor FancyPants shakin’ her head, talkin’ about putting Mrs. Hill in some home. I need you Tuesday.”

If I came Tuesday, I would be there all the time. I could feel her need for me reaching out like terrible black roots, wrapping themselves right around me, burying me in wet brown earth.

“I’m really sorry. I just can’t. I have to be at that meeting. Maybe there’s someone else from church.” The A.M.E. Zion Church seemed to me to be overflowing with neatly dressed gloved and hatted ladies eager to help.

“Have someone from church come in here? Don’t talk crazy. You’re the one I need. And I need you on Tuesday. It’s not too much to ask if you think on it.”

I didn’t say anything, hoping that she’d get embarrassed about being so insistent.

“Come here, sugar. It’s not too much to ask since you’ve got three of my spoons. Three silver spoons and you won’t come on Tuesday and help out your friend Mrs. Hill? I call that selfish. And stupid. I call that stupid. Steal from me and then make me mad? Don’t you think I’m going to go right to Reverend Shales and tell him that nice little Jewish girl he found for me is stealing my silver? Don’t you think I’m going to have to call your father and tell him that his daughter’s a thief, taking advantage of a poor old lady, half-blind and living all on her own?”

“Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low, so she wouldn’t leap out of her recliner and attack me.

“Don’t you call on Jesus.” Her voice softened. “You can have the spoons. You can have a teacup too. I can’t get by with only Saturdays, and that’s the truth.” She leaned back in her chair, pressing her cheek into the ratty old doily she’d pinned to the headrest.

I went over to her, more ashamed that I had made her beg than about the stealing. I would make it up to her; I would walk in the pathways of righteousness every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the rest of her life.

A Balm in Gilead

Ellyn and Cindi, who had followed me faithfully every day through the winter of sixth grade yelling “Thou shalt not steal” and “Watch your stuff, here comes the thief,” moved on to boys and pretty, popular, less honestly aggressive selves. They said hi when we passed in the halls, to show that they were nice girls, but they didn’t say my name, to make it clear that I was not part of their group. There was only one person still interested in my criminal past, a big redheaded eighth-grader, arms like pocked marble, lashless blue frog eyes watching for me as she leaned, surefooted and excited, on the door of my locker. I was so far off the mainland of junior high that I couldn’t see she was barely one notch above me on the reject pile. I didn’t even know she was crazy, but I don’t think anyone did. I thought she was just mean and my destiny.

I tried to find safe corner seats at isolated tables for study hall, but every other day Deenie sat down across from me. The first Monday, she cracked her knuckles a few times and handed me a sheet of paper. She had drawn a picture of a fat little girl hanging from a gibbet, wavy lines indicating the swinging of her feet. In later pictures the girl was frying in the electric chair, hair sprayed straight out from her head; one time she was lying in six pieces on the ground, with “Thief = Shit” carefully blocked out under her in strawberry-scented marker. Deenie smiled at me, clinically curious. I counted the dots in the grey ceiling tiles, wondering whether I would die or just be paralyzed for life if I jumped from the second-story window. I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep my face still and ran my tongue over the tiny grooved holes inside my mouth. Her notes got more elaborate, whole paragraphs describing my crimes, illustrated by drawings of my violent, Road Runner-like deaths. At the end of seventh grade she went to a private high school. Five years later, I saw her sitting across from me at the Aegean Diner, drinking coffee and poking at piles of change scattered over the tabletop. Her red hair was dyed black. She nodded vaguely, and I have to say I was a little hurt that she didn’t remember me.

Eighth grade. Mr. O’Donnell discovered that I had the uncanny and otherwise useless gift of flawless sentence diagramming. If I was allowed to leave class and go to the lunchroom, I brought back twenty-eight perfectly corrected papers. I didn’t have to take a single English test that year, and got on good terms with the cafeteria ladies, who used to fold their arms in front of the baked goods when they saw me coming. Now we were all pals. I walked in three times a week with a quarter for the carton of milk for Mr. O’Donnell’s ulcer, a fat sheaf of papers under my arm, and my new Saint Christopher medal around my neck. I’d found it in the girls room and thought that if anyone should have one, it was me. It looked good down between my breasts, knocking against the pink bow on my bra.

There were other, fatter girls in navy blue A-line skirts and loose sweaters, arranging and rearranging the Honor Society bake sale table, running their fingers along plate edges and cupcake overhangs, and other, braver girls in sloppy shirts and overalls, their long hair twisted up in barrettes they’d made at Bucks Rock leather shop, sitting on the back stairs passing cigarettes around. I clung to my own marginal, frightened identity and refused to be part of any group that would have me.

My mother went to England for two weeks in October, and my father went to Oregon after Thanksgiving. She brought me a white cashmere cardigan and he brought me a malachite butterfly on a silver chain and I thought both were pretty in their way and I lost them. I don’t remember anything else about eighth grade because my body took over my life. The changes surprised me, even though I’d seen the Snow White and Her Menstrual Cycle filmstrip in sixth grade. Everything was moving, even while I slept, and when I woke up, flesh I had known my whole life had slid off or moved down or hidden itself under a blanket of thin dark hair. I wouldn’t have mentioned my period to my mother at all if I hadn’t had to apologize for the blood smeared across the top and bottom sheets, seeping down to cling to the ruffled edges of my lilac shorty pajamas. My mother stripped my bed herself and plunged everything into cold water in the tub as I stood behind her in my wet pajamas, pressing my legs together to keep blood from dripping onto the lilac bath mat. Right then, chin tucked down to steady the pile of clean linen, she was not my chill, familiar mother. She was the woman in overalls who attacked white fly in the greenhouse, who rubbed an ice cube against a wad of bubblegum stuck in my hair down to the scalp, and took it out without a cross word. Her suddenly rough, competent hands snapped in the pleasure of the task, and her lips set in a cheerful can-do line. I longed for her the way lovers in movies longed for each other, across time and space, their eyes looking right past what was possible.

She pushed me down on the toilet seat with one tiny hand. I waited for her to come back, afraid to move until she brought me what I knew would be the right thing; she came in with a small blue box of Tampax and a pair of dry underpants.

“Don’t wear light colors when you have it, lovey,” she said, and left, and I pressed my face against the clean pajamas.

My mother had rules and guidelines for life, and although none of them applied to the life I’d led so far, she delivered them with great force, sometimes digging her hand into my shoulder until I nodded. Only beauty gives life meaning, she said. Good manners are more important, and more durable, than feelings. Natural fibers and a flattering cut are all that matter in clothing. Also, men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them. These ideas were held by my mother’s friends, too: “progressive,” apparently romantic, sixth-generation upper-class daughters of twits and earls. Everyone who knew our family knew that my mother was the daughter of a barrister and his landed-gentry wife, both tragically killed in the Blitz; in some stories they were buried in each other’s arms, in my favorite they were overcome by smoke after pulling their servants out of the burning rubble.

What everyone knew was a lie, except the English part. My mother was the illegitimate daughter of a London prostitute who had just enough feeling for her newborn baby to bundle her up in a stained sheet and deliver her, clots of blood still clinging to her little scalp, to Great-aunt Lil in Putney. My mother left school and Putney (and Aunt Lil and Cousin Harriet) at sixteen. World War Two gave her the opportunity to re-create herself. She took off for Liverpool and ran goods for black-marketeers and did other things that the poor and resourceful do in major ports.

When I read The Little Princess I saw my mother, not myself, as the forlorn, aristocratic little girl, befriended and heaped with presents by the very kind and very rich Indian Gentleman. I identified with her starving, dim-witted companion, roll crammed into her mouth, eyes darting in terror as she muttered thanks in dreadful yowling tones. If I had met the brave, lying girl Cousin Harriet knew, I think I would have liked her. I could have admired her improvised and perfected self; the pinched, pasty face turned into fashionable slenderness, terrible abandonment replayed as well-bred self-sufficiency. We both knew I was not the daughter she’d planned for, was not at all the necessary, dimpled denial of Aunt Lil’s boardinghouse, of night bicycle rides, two pints of gin strapped under her jacket, butter sweating through waxed paper in her book bag; of head lice and chopped-off hair. Cousin Harriet visited when I was eight and spent our only weekend together setting my straight hair on hot metal rollers until my scalp blistered and telling me the truth about my mother. As she unrolled one stiff, stupid ringlet after another, I saw the nuns sweeping my mother’s blonde curls across the room and into the dustbin and my mother turning her back to the class.

“No blubbing, mind you, like the other little girls, just wet eyes. And only cried a bit when we walked home.”

Margaret was brought to the States by Stan Muslic, an army captain, who married her somewhere near the family’s dairy farm in Ithaca. (Cousin Harriet was not sure about Ithaca, but was very sure about the farm part.) For all I know, she loved Captain Muslic madly, and his absurd death, skewered by his ski pole three days into their honeymoon, nearly finished her off just when she thought she was safe at last. After Cousin Harriet left, I searched my mother’s nightstand and her drawers, understanding that she had a past and had a self that came before me, but I never found a picture of Stan Muslic, nor one of Margaret Brown Muslic before she married my father.

I pressed my mother for details of Life Before Sol and found out only that she left Ithaca after a few years and studied art. This is what I made up: She sketched at night while lying on her pallet in the chicken coop and lived on the table scraps of the large and vile Muslic family. She sent away for art books with her egg money. Unable to endure their harshness, their obesity, their utter lack of manners, she fled to New York City, where she fell in love with garmentos, labor union organizers, knock-off Dior suits, and anonymity. She supported herself buying and selling antiques and reproductions and fakes. For herself in those early years, she bought only sketches from up-and-coming artists and two elegant, witty Limoges boxes, one of a hot-air balloon, one of a white-and-gilt piano with a single black note painted inside. She gave me the boxes instead of a bat mitzvah.

Margaret was twenty-six, with a nineteen-inch waist and a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, when she met my father. In my version, she looks a great deal like a blonde Vivien Leigh before she lost her marbles. The men she met must all have been married, or losers, or something worse, because she became fond of my father during his twenty-five-minute lunch breaks from Phillips, Kritzer and Kahn, the best firm a young Jewish accountant could join in 1953 (as he told me a hundred times). She let him browse among the antiques as though he belonged there, and let him look at her as though his interest was not absurd. He must have thought she was the answer to his prayers, the shield for his defects: naturally thin, naturally blonde, obviously English (meaning not Jewish), and artistic (meaning sexy) without being hysterical.

I don’t know what my mother thought. Her bravery had limits; she believed that marriage provided camouflage and safe passport, that she was at risk without it. I don’t say she was wrong. I just wish she’d stayed single a little longer, looked a little further. Sunday mornings I sat in front of the TV, watching cartoons and reading in my pink, pilly robe. I licked the corners of my mouth until they cracked and bled, pressing them dry on a tissue. My father threw The Saturday Evening Post across the room, saying I was “just like Aunt Freda, for God’s sake.” When I tired of imagining my own dead body sprawled at the bottom of the front hall stairs, I pictured him crushed to death by Great-aunt Freda and her sister Aunt Dorothy and their brother Uncle Izzy, all relatives I’d never met, left behind in the villages of Poland and the chicken farms of New Jersey.

* * *

My mother left me alone in the bathroom for about an hour. Finally, I figured out that you had to take the cardboard off before you used the tampon, and after that, my period was boring. I didn’t bleed much, and I didn’t smell too bad. I actually liked the smell of iron and salt. I didn’t keep a little calendar like some girls, so I ruined about twenty pairs of panties that year and took to carrying extras in my schoolbag, along with six tampons, Maybelline Frosted Peach lipstick, Lush Lash mascara, Midnight Pearl eyeshadow, and a Cornsilk compact. I looked in that little mirror constantly and covertly. I stroked my thighs and breasts, shaved my legs every other day. I examined every inch of my face and front, and stole my mother’s pink European gels and aqua creams, sometimes exfoliating, hydrating, and pore-minimizing all in one Saturday night. I used a loofah on all my rough spots and slept on a stolen satin pillowcase to combat premature wrinkling. I bleached the tops of my toes so that when I appeared on the Riviera, Sean Connery would not be disgusted by the sight of my darkly hairy feet. I languished seductively in the bathroom mirror, using the steam and my towel-turban to create movie star cheekbones and attitude. I would not say it to anyone (who would I say it to, even if I’d been willing?), but I thought I had potential.

In ninth grade, no one cared about what anybody’d done in elementary school. When Frannie Grant, the most popular freshman girl, was browsing with her group just one aisle away from me in Woolworth’s she smiled at me, her famous triangular smile, and I picked up a bouquet of mascaras, black and mink and teal blue, one for each of her friends, and a tray of eleven coordinated eyeshadows, the nearest expensive thing I could grab, and walked out of the store. I put it all into her cupped hands.

“I have more stuff than I need,” I said. “Knock yourselves out.”

Boys looked at me carefully, smashed into me in the halls, but didn’t speak. Rachel Schwartz lent me lunch money and taught me to say “Fuck you” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili. Rachel was the only person worth talking to. When we were in fifth grade and she was the new girl from New York City, she invited me over for three weeks in a row. We played Lawrence of Arabia and terrorized her mother’s elderly dachshund, Schatzie, who had to wear a chiffon scarf around his neck and be the sheik. We played Sailor, and I put on one of her brother’s blue baseball shirts and walked bowlegged around her canopied bed until the big moment, when I undid her bra and laid my head on her soft, custardy breast, making sure my nose and lips didn’t touch her raspberry-pink nipple. Because of her big breasts, Rachel got to be the Lady. A few times, dressed in her father’s black silk kimono, Rachel made me tie her to the metal pipe in their semi-finished basement and light matchbook fires in a circle around her. She swooned neatly, slipping out of the kimono, and I untied her and dragged her over the cork floor to the safety of the laundry room, reviving her with tender pinches and sips of soda. Her head lay back on my arm, and as the Sailor and the Lady we French-kissed, and she tasted like Fresca and the smell of doused matches was in her hair. We read to each other from the Playboy Adviser, whose mascot was a Bunny Tinkerbell with fascinating, garterless black hose pressing into her thighs. Our last Saturday, we pulled her mother’s stockings over our faces and pretended we were robbing a big bank and the loot was her mother’s costume jewelry and all the change in her father’s sock drawer. Rachel didn’t call me the next day and she didn’t call me the next week. I waited and smiled warmly when I saw her at school and still she didn’t call. She walked around the courtyard with Sabra and Julianna Cohen, a twist of arms around waists.

By the next year she’d bounced off the Cohen girls to the most popular socks-matching-sweaters circle, and in eighth grade her picture was in the junior high yearbook eleven times, six times with boys. But in ninth grade, as I was finally figuring out the rules, happily wearing skirts barely covering my underpants and hiphuggers riding just above my pubic bone, she quit horseback riding and modern dance and pep band and got fat and angry and more weird-looking than the rest of us. She wore sunglasses and bunny bedroom slippers and mirror-spotted Indian halters to school. She called to tell me the dachshund had had a heart attack, and then she said “I’m sorry,” and we never got off the phone. We played records into the receivers for each other, and occasionally Rachel played her guitar over the phone. On weekends we answered the personal ads in the The Village Voice and made dates we would never keep with grown men whose desperation and terrifying want could only be managed by ridicule. The more elaborate the date plans, the more specific the costume requests, the harder we laughed when we got off the phone. Given weapons, we would have been snipers.

Most of my teachers liked me, and I didn’t feel too bad about being in Extended Algebra, which took three semesters to do what everyone else did in two. If they had had Super-Extended Algebra, I would have been in that. Mr. Provatella saw that although I grasped the concepts of algebra, I had not learned how to divide and could barely multiply, and while everyone else struggled through endless sheets of equations, he and I talked about infinity and the envelope of time.

Mr. Stone, my English teacher, read poetry to our class and told me I could show him my own poems after school. I sat next to him, smelling his coffee and tobacco and middle-aged-man smell, watching him roll up his sleeves over his wide arms. He tapped a ridged fingernail over each line, circling a misplaced word, running a yellowed fingertip back and forth over a nice phrase.

I wrote poems about loneliness and terrible fires in crowded tenement buildings and poets dying in the Russian snow.

Mr. Stone said, “I know you know about the loneliness, honey,” and he crossed out every other line and made me put away all the poems located in places I’d never been. I brought him three boxes of blue pencils.

Mrs. Hill and I were working our way through Pride and Prejudice and the story of her courtship with Mr. Hill. I gave her a couple of manicures without hurting her too badly and hoped she wouldn’t ask for a pedicure. One afternoon, I found her smiling in her sleep when I walked in, her feet, brown and yellow and bumpy as toads, soaking in warm water and chamomile leaves. I dried her feet and moisturized them and filed down her toenails and painted them Carnaby Crimson.

I had everything I needed.

Peace Like a River

From behind Mr. Stones desk I watched the entire junior high walk by, their faces passing between my pointy toes. I drank Mr. Stones coffee and waited for someone to admire my red cowboy boots propped up on a pile of blue books. I shut the door and read everyone’s grades.

In that little office, with the frosted-glass window facing me and the view of the parking lot behind me, with the dirty metal file cabinets and the film of cigarette ash and dust and the apple cores rotting in Mr. Stone’s wastebasket from Monday to Friday, I felt whole. The dreams other girls tried to make real with boys or clothes or horses were nothing to me. The best dream, the true red heart of my life, was Mr. Stone; Rachel and Mrs. Hill were the ribbon, and books were the lace trim.

When he came in, I was crying.

“Liz, what’s the matter?”

“My father’s moving out.”

My sharply proper mother had loosened the reins on me entirely, distracted by weekly legal encounters over the Chippendale, the Klimt, and the Fiestaware. My father gave me twenty dollars every time he saw me, and offered me all the things he wouldn’t let me eat when I was little. It wasn’t really so bad. It wasn’t tragic.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Stone said.

I think he felt sorry for us all, even for my mother, who never inspired sympathy.

“Maybe things will get a little better now. Maybe you and your mother will fight less and you and your father will spend more time together.”

I didn’t think he really thought that.

“Maybe, maybe not.” I stared at the toes of my boots.

“Maybe not,” Mr. Stone said without smiling. Sometimes he would smile when I was looking away, but when we really looked at each other, I saw the pink rock of his face with grey mossy hair on top and wild, twiggy crescents of eyebrow above his small, slanty blue eyes.

I loved him for not lying to me, but I started crying again, drops falling on my notebook. I hoped he’d give me permission to skip class. I hoped my nose wasn’t running and that I wasn’t ruining Rachel’s mother’s silk shirt.

“Can you go to class? The bell’s ringing.”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“All right, forget it. Stay here. I’ll write you a pass and you can go later. Whose class are you missing?”

“Algebra. Mr. Provolone. I mean, Mr. Provatella’s.”

“Well, you can’t get much more behind than you are, I guess. You’re not going to be a mathematical genius, Miss Taube. You better cultivate your other talents.” He poured some coffee out of his thermos. “I have to go teach. I can give you a ride home if you want.” He walked off quickly, a kind of fast, barrelly cowboy’s walk.

I sighed and rummaged in his desk for the chocolates in the back of the bottom drawer. He loved me.

Mr. Stone drove me home that afternoon, and in the cocoon of his little Volkswagen I inhaled the smoky air and held my breath, smiling and trying to memorize each passing house, to make the trip from the junior high parking lot to my driveway seem longer.

“You’re growing up.”

“Yeah. It happens,” I said.

“Do you babysit, grown-up?”

I had, but I was still scared to stay by myself at night. “Yes. I mean, not much,” I said. “But I can.”

Mr. Stone frowned. “Okay, maybe you’ll babysit for us sometime.”

He pushed my hair behind my ear, squinting at me through the smoke, and I thought that he wouldn’t ask me to babysit, that we would never sit in the Volkswagen, driving past darkened houses in the moonlight, but he did, right before school ended.

I expected to be a good babysitter, even a great babysitter. I liked cats, I admired the toddlers at my father’s office Christmas party, I cleaned up after Mrs. Hill all the time. I could babysit for the Stones. Really stupid girls babysat for three kids, even three boys, all the time.

I waited in the foyer, watching for him through the colored glass panels. His car drove through the purple, the blue, and the yellow, and at the green I went out to keep him from honking the horn. The thought of my parents and Mr. Stone in the same room, standing in the foyer, sitting side by side in the leather chairs, chatting about me, was so horrible that at night I would imagine it to scare myself, the way I used to shut my eyes and see, on the deep red screen of my inner lids, blood-tipped green monster claws hanging over the edge of the clothes hamper.

Mr. Stone didn’t say much on the ride over. I wore my low-riding bell-bottoms and a Mexican blouse with lemons and oranges and red hearts swirling down the front of my breasts. I sat completely upright so my stomach wouldn’t come close to my belt. He said, “Pretty blouse.” He talked like a father, about his sons and what they were good at; he didn’t even look my way. He said that they were good kids and exceptionally bright, which even my parents said about me. He said Danny was shy, Marc was outgoing, and Benjie was nine going on thirty. I thought I would probably get along with Marc and maybe we could watch TV while the other two played chess or read The History of Western Civilization or did whatever brilliant children do. I told Mr. Stone I loved children, and he laughed.

I had never seen a house like the Stones’. Later on, lots of the houses I went into reminded me of theirs, but then it was as new as a foreign language. I loved the zebra-striped door and the leather-and-bronze knocker and the brambly brown lawn. Every cliché of bohemian life was new and charming to me: the black and red canvas pillows on the scuffed wood floor, the low black foam couch on fat mahogany feet, the grey, balding rugs, and the trailing, two-generation spider plants in bulbous hand-thrown pots, their hairy green strands winding down through the macrame onto the backs of people’s necks and into their lumpy, half-glazed mugs. A headless mannequin with an army cap on its neck and a peace symbol on its chest stood in the front hall. My parents had taken me to Versailles when I was eleven and I was not half so impressed. The only things I didn’t like were Mrs. Stone’s paintings. I didn’t not like them; they terrified me.

Mr. Stone practically pushed me through the front door, and when I had to go back to the car for my knapsack, he disappeared. Mrs. Stone invited me to look at her pictures and made me cross the room with her until we stood facing them. They hung on the wall like nightmares, even the frames oddly pale and uneven, covered with worm lines and tiny brown bug holes. I could hear Mr. Stone in the other room, rumbling over the sound of the little boys and the Muppets.

“Well, now you see what I do,” she said, like I’d been wondering.

“Uh-huh, yes, I do.” I looked around, hoping Mr. Stone or the boys would come out of the TV room.

The biggest picture was a corpse, a woman with her belly slit open to her breasts and little creatures — I didn’t look too closely — miniature soldiers and animals climbing out across her body.

“What do you think?” She reached up and put her hand on my shoulder and just left it there.

“It’s trying to say something” is what my mother always said when she looked at things this ugly, but I couldn’t say that. I did not want to know what these pictures were trying to say, or why Mrs. Stone was trying to say it to me.

“Elizabeth may not be ready to comment on her employer’s artwork, sweetheart.”

I kept quiet, listening to that complicated “sweetheart.”

“All right, Max,” she said, and she took her hand off my shoulder.

The boys were behind Mr. Stone, hanging on like little freight cars and wearing the weirdest pajamas I had ever seen. They were like flannel nightgowns, but instead of being navy or plaid, which would have made them a little less weird, they were hot pink with tiny black houses, grey with rust-colored stars, and yellow with blue frying pans printed all over. Danny and Marc were real twins, not fraternal, and one of them was wiping his nose on the hem of his nightie. He wasn’t wearing underpants.

“You’re quite tall,” Mrs. Stone said.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say, And you’re quite old. Or, Your teeth are quite yellow and your paintings are quite nuts.

“I designed the boys’ nightwear,” Mrs. Stone said.

I figured. “What time do you want them to go to bed?” That’s what babysitters always asked my parents.

“Oh, let’s see. Eight-thirty for the twins, I don’t know, they’re only eight. Nine for Benj, I guess … if that seems reasonable.” She didn’t seem to have much experience with babysitters.

I asked them for the phone number where they’d be and if the boys were allowed to have snacks and everything else that my babysitters used to ask. My parents’ favorite sitter wrote it all down in a little notebook, which I thought was pretty obsessive, even though I hadn’t known the word at nine. Benjie probably knew the word.

Mrs. Stone clasped each boy’s face in her palms and turned around to look at us all as Mr. Stone led her out, as if she were going away for years. When the door closed, all three boys sucked thoughtfully on their lower lips, just like Mr. Stone.

“So, who eats ice cream?”

I was the babysitter I’d never had. I was better than Mary Poppins because I didn’t care what kind of people they became, I just wanted to be their favorite; I wanted them to despise other babysitters. I showed them how to soften the ice cream, mix it with broken-up cookie pieces, and refreeze it. We ate a quart of that. Their eyes got big and starry when I found the hot fudge and let them eat it out of the jar while we watched Million Dollar Movie. We played cowboys-and-Indians-in-outer-space until the twins collapsed in the hall, and then I wiped the biggest chocolate streaks off their faces and dragged them heels first up the stairs to their beds. They had bedspreads as weirdly patterned as their nightgowns.

Benjie said, “They have to go, you know. Or else.” And I got them back up for that and threw them in bed again.

“Let’s play something,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and took out a deck of cards in case he wanted to learn Spit or Crackerjack.

He leaned back against the couch, opened his mouth wide, and rolled his eyes up until only the whites showed. Opening his mouth made him look much worse, the wet pink hole and the brown-tipped fern leaves almost grazing his bulging, blank eyes.

“Benjie. Benjamin.”

“I can’t hear you or see you. You are invisible.”

“Okay. You can unroll your eyes if you want. I’m now invisible.” I had a babysitter who would play this kind of game with me: Let’s pretend you’re an animal in the zoo, you get under the table and you can’t get out, while I go talk on the phone. I hated her when I understood, but if he wanted to play like that, I didn’t mind. I picked up a Life magazine and flipped through pictures of hundreds of girls getting their hair cut like the Beatles. Benjie unrolled his eyes, and they were very bright and liquid, like they’d been washed while they were up there. He stood up and pulled his nightgown over his head, making a flannel column with his arms, so I could get a good look at his naked body. It was like his brothers’ but bigger, and I had more time to look. His thing was like a soft, taupey cigar. A cigar with a droopy little bow around it. He kept standing there, and finally I picked up the magazine again.

“Any time, Benj.”

“You are invisible,” he said from within the nightgown.

“Oh, yeah. Okay, I’m invisible.”

He threw his nightie across the floor and took the magazine out of my hands, making me look at his naked chest.

“Do you want to play cards? I can teach you a game.”

“Okay,” he said. “Strip poker.”

“Definitely not. How about regular poker?”

“You’re invisible,” he said.

He dove onto the couch and began rubbing up against the cushions in this really disgusting way.

“Oh, Max, Max, Max,” he squealed.

“Come on, don’t be gross.”

He kept pumping away at the cushions and finally just lay there shaking, his little butt sticking up like another cushion, round and shiny.

“I’m going to look in my father’s room,” he said, and I followed him because I thought I should keep an eye on him and because I loved to look at peoples stuff.

“You want to put something on? It’s cold in here.” It was cold. The Stones must have kept their bedroom at fifty, and Benjie’s whole body was covered with goose bumps.

“Invisible,” he said, and headed for their dresser.

Which was exactly what I would have done if I was by myself. The things I liked best about babysitting, in the three jobs I’d had so far, were the eating and the snooping, both unfurling through the evening, lushly inviting, any small wave of shame easily subdued by the prospect of being, for once, satisfied. I ate smoked oysters and caviar for dinner, having discovered that people’s pantries yielded up interesting hors d’oeuvres tucked away behind the flour and the Crisco and the onion soup mix. And I ate ice cream with my fingers and shook Oreo crumbs down my throat when I’d finished the box. No one saw.

Benjie crouched in front of the dresser, his little thing dangling between his ankles. He held up a few pairs of his mother’s baggy white underpants, more like my panties than a grown woman’s, I thought, and then he put them back in the drawer. I certainly wasn’t going to make fun of his mother’s underwear, but if that was all we were going to find, I’d go back to the magazine and he could call me when he was tired. He held up a little plastic shield.

“Athletic cup,” he said, putting it in front to show me how it worked. “My dad used to wear it for rugby.”

I started looking around on my own. If I waited for Benjie, we’d never get to any good stuff. I stuck my hand under the bed, and then I got down on my knees. Under the bed and back of the closet had been the best places so far. I didn’t like going into basements, certainly not for the split garden hoses, rusty skates, and used tires that everyone kept.

There was nothing under the bed, but in the back of the closet there were shoe boxes half filled with curling photographs. I let Benjie rummage in the underwear drawers. The pictures were of Mrs. Stone.

She was naked, kneeling in one, on her hands and knees in the others, looking back at the camera with a stupid smile. Her long hair hung over one shoulder, and her rear end was dark with pimples and little creases and hairs. The whole thing was worse than her paintings. I put the photos back in the box and the box back behind Mr. Stone’s winter boots.

“Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

“Look at this. It’s Greta.”

I hated it when kids called their parents by their first names, like they were other kids.

She is skinny and tall in the photo, taller than she looks now. Maybe it’s because her skirt is so short and her hair is short too, with bangs sticking out in three directions. She’s wearing shoes with no socks, but it doesn’t look like summer; she’s wearing a boy’s jacket, her hands stuck in the pockets.

“Where is that?” It’s obviously not America.

“Prague. That’s in Czechoslovakia. They speak Czech. My mother speaks Czech.”

“Do you?”

“A little. Not really. She looks weird.”

“Yeah.” I looked at the picture again. I knew what she was thinking as if I were standing there myself, my hands in her pockets, our fingers wedged together in the torn lining. She is trying not to cry. Everyone wants her to be happy now, and she’s trying.

“It’s late, Benj. You’re supposed to be in bed.”

“You’re invisible.”

“I am not fucking invisible and it’s ten-thirty. Come on, put the picture back.”

He jumped on the bed, bouncing like a trampoline expert, knees bent, arms parallel to the mat, thing flapping up and down in a blur.

“Come and get me, milacku.”

“What’s that?” I began circling the bed. I wanted to grab him, but I didn’t want to smush my face against his thing or his butt.

“Milacku, sweetie pie. Milacku, sweetie pie. Mam te rad. I love you. Mam te rad. Dobrounots. Good night. Dobrounots. Good night, good doughnuts.”

He kept singing the words and repeating them until the English and Czech ran together and I couldn’t understand anything. The bed was creaking loudly, rocking on the short wooden legs.

“Benjie, get off the bed.”

“Say the f-word again.”

“Get off the bed. I’m sorry I used bad language.”

He started screaming. “Say it. Say the f-word.”

“Okay, stop it. Jesus. Get off the fucking bed. Okay? Get off the fucking bed and give me the fucking picture. Your parents will never fucking hire me again if they come home at eleven and find you wandering around the fucking house butt-naked. Okay?”

By the third “fucking” he stopped bouncing, and then he just sat on the end of the bed, waving the photo at me like a little grey flag. I took it out of his hand and put it back in the black leather wallet he’d found it in.

“Where’d you get the wallet?”

He shrugged.

“Come on. You can’t go looking through people’s stuff and leave it all over the place.” Lessons in Rudimentary Snooping.

“In the thing there.” He pointed to the nightstand.

I wasn’t a genius, but at nine I knew the word for “nightstand.” Of course, because of my mother, I also knew “escritoire,” “armoire,” and more about Chippendale Chinese than most people.

I slid the picture out, looking again at her face, skinny little scared face with a big fake smile. I put the wallet back in the drawer, laying a pencil stub across it to make it look normally messy.

I was getting used to Benjie being naked. I didn’t even care when he left the bathroom door open while he brushed his teeth and peed.

I pulled the covers over him.

“Sit with me,” he said. “I’m scared of the dark.”

“Come on,” I said. I wanted to watch TV.

“I am. You have to sit with me. Max does when she’s not here.”

“Usually it’s your father?” I liked the idea of Mr. Stone’s being a great father.

“No. Her. Because she’s here. You know, she sleeps in here.” He pointed to the twin bed on the other side of the room.

“Your mother sleeps in here?”

“Yeah. Is that weird?”

“No. Maybe she sleeps in here because you’re scared of the dark. To keep you company.”

“Maybe,” he said, and he yawned.

“You can fall asleep now, you’re all right. Good night, Benjie.”

“Dobrounots, milacku.”

“Dobrounots, you doughnut.”

Scandalize My Name

“Let’s have a look-see at that right hand,” Mrs. Hill said, eyes on the ceiling.

“Vivian said absolutely no more pork rinds.”

I was fifteen, and in our two years we had one ambulance ride, two angina attacks, and more than a few sponge baths between us. After Pride and Prejudice, we alternated between the tabloids and the poetry of Mr. Paul Dunbar.

“Do you see Vivian on the premises?”

“Come on, Mrs. Hill, it’s not good for you.” There was no other adult I could talk to like that. My mother never did anything that wasn’t good for her, my father’s arteries were of no interest to me, and Mr. Stone, who knew something about everything, made it clear that we could talk about me but not about him.

“Who dropped you off? I heard a car door.” Mrs. Hill liked to think that her hearing was extra sharp to make up for her eyesight.

“Mr. Stone.” Very proud.

“Who’s that?”

“He’s my English teacher this year.”

“Why’s he dropping you off here?”

Mrs. Hill was always faintly accusatory. I shrugged, which I knew she couldn’t see but would feel, and started peeling carrots.

“Elizabeth, am I talking to myself? Are you in some kind of trouble at school?”

“No, I’m not. I imagine he dropped me off here because I was going here.” I spoke very slowly and clearly, to show her how stupid she was being.

“How old a man is this Mr. Who?”

“Mr. Stone. How should I know? Old. Do you want these carrots pureed or in circles, to go with peas or something?”

“He drives you home a lot?”

I sliced the carrots into inedible oversized chunks and went into her bedroom to gather up the laundry. She would sit and wait for me to come back. Her legs hurt too much for her to follow me around pestering me.

“Has your mother met him?”

Not on a bet.

“Your legs are getting long.”

I shrugged again.

“You stopped wearing your glasses. How come?”

“Contacts.” I loved my contacts. I loved the sharp world and I loved my eyes, edged in black eyeliner. I had scratched my corneas twice because I couldn’t bear to take the lenses out, except to sleep.

Mr. Stone dropped me off on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after that, I tried to shut the car door softly, grabbing it with both hands to keep it from slamming, and as soon as I walked through the door Mrs. Hill would say, “Fool,” as though she were speaking to someone else.

Charlotte Macklin was the school social worker, and if she had heard Mrs. Hill, she would have felt better about me, She thought no one gave a damn that I spent all my study halls in Mr. Stone’s office and was frequently seen getting into his car after school. Mrs. Macklin knew, even if no one else did, that although it did not violate any school rule, it undermined morale for students and teachers to see a ninth-grade girl sitting behind the desk of the English department chairman, sipping coffee out of his thermos, showing her boot bottoms to the passing world. Mr. Stone had already heard from her, but I didn’t know that then. Mrs. Macklin looked at me knowingly as I skated past, her pale blue eyes narrow with concern, her handkerchief twisting into damp white loops. She sent me three notes, inviting me to a self-esteem group, to a girls-with-divorcing-parents group, and finally to a one-on-one interview to discuss my goals and expectations for high school. I declined, and she called me out of algebra, showing that she had not read my school records all that carefully. She asked how I was feeling about my parents’ divorce and I said fine. She said she’d noticed that I preferred to have my lunch in Mr. Stone’s office rather than in the cafeteria and I said that was true. We eyed each other for five minutes, and she sent me back to class. I told Mr. Stone about it, and his face got really red, which meant trouble for Mrs. Macklin. Mr. Stone and the principal were old friends and Mrs. Macklin was nobody.

By the end of May my parents were legally divorced. My mother took on a secretary, a yoga teacher, and a bottle-green MG. She was already talking about where I would go to college. She’d had enough.

My father moved further out on the Island, to a cottage in Sag Harbor, and came by for oddly formal, oddly pleasant visits. We gave up on eating out together after trolling up and down Northern Boulevard in his Oldsmobile, looking for a place to get to know each other, silently fishing broccoli out of broccoli and beef, anchovies out of Caesar salad, and raisins out of rice pudding, and discovering that this was what we had in common. He’d knock on the door and come in with bags of Chinese food or gargantuan deli sandwiches, so fat the white paper unwrapped by itself as he laid them down, crumbling slices of pastrami and corned beef falling out the sides, shining heaps of pink meat, enough for another meal. My mother had never liked cooking, but the kitchen was her domain, and it didn’t occur to us to eat in there or to put our big Polish paws all over the glass dining room table. The living room was out; I didn’t mind smears of Ba Tampte Kosher Mustard on the four-hundred-year-old Turkish prayer rugs, but even estranged, my father wouldn’t have it. We: ate in the TV room, surrounded by enough food for six people, and when my mother walked past she shook her head, smiling politely, as if my father were an extravagant, ultimately unacceptable suitor, as I guess he was.

He stopped wearing the navy blazers and light grey pants he’d always worn to make himself look like a German-barely-Jewish-almost-a-Warburg financial adviser instead of an accountant from Pustelnik by way of Brooklyn. He stopped wearing the ties my mother bought him every year, red silk prints of stirrups and foxes and unicorns. Now he wore denim shirts and cotton pants that weren’t jeans but were nothing my mother would have approved, and soft, goosey brown loafers, and he began every conversation telling me how great the air was in the Hamptons. He didn’t touch me much, but when he did, I didn’t flinch. When I was eight, we’d bumped into each other naked outside my parents’ bathroom, and as he gently pulled me off him I cried out at his trembling, helpless sac; I felt so sorry for him, appalled that that dangling, chickenish mess was the true future of boys. He was friendlier, away from my mother. She was the same. No warmer (I saw mothers put their hands to their children’s cheeks for no reason and wondered how you got a mother who did that), no cuddlier (not that I wanted cuddling now), no more interested in my life as her daughter than she’d ever been. My poor father belonged somewhere else, not the somewhere else that was right for me, certainly not the somewhere else of the narrow, balconied brownstones and stark glass apartment buildings that seemed right for my mother.

After he left, my mother put the moo goo gai pan and the shrimp in garlic sauce in plastic tubs and said, “Another shiksa in your father’s life? I daresay she won’t have to convert.”

Mr. Stone still picked me up after school most days. I was pretty sure I’d stopped growing; I pressed my knees one way and my feet the other just to sit almost comfortably in the VW’s front seat. I rode with my hands tucked between my legs. I put on lip gloss in his visor mirror. Comic book remnants and paper cups and cigarette packs covered my sneakers. One Tuesday afternoon, at the second light, I said what I’d been wanting to say since February vacation.

“I think it’d be nice if you met Mrs. Hill. I think she’d like to meet you. She used to teach, I think.”

“Really.”

“She said she did. Here, don’t forget, it’s the next one on the left.”

Mr. Stone said, out the window, “You know, I grew up in a place a lot like this. Mostly white, though — my God, look at those.” He pointed to twin blue-shuttered houses with orderly twin gardens and bitty porches, each with two chairs and a small plastic table set with four tall pink glasses and matching pitchers. “You smell that? That’s the smell of the South, right there. Mint, dirt, and cornstarch.”

I led him in, describing our progress so Mrs. Hill wouldn’t be surprised and pissy.

“We’re here, Mrs. Hill. I brought Mr. Stone, my English teacher. He thought he’d stop by and say hi.”

Mr. Stone didn’t look like he appreciated being shanghaied into the middle of Mrs. Hill’s blue brocade living room set. Mrs. Hill looked right at him, which was like turning her back.

“Welcome, Mr. Stone. Elizabeth’s famous English teacher. Honey, why don’t you make us some tea?”

I just stood there until Mrs. Hill flapped her hands a couple of times like I was a loose chicken, and then I backed out, watching Mr. Stone. He smiled at Mrs. Hill and flapped a hand too. I listened on the other side of the kitchen door, which was so thin I could hear Mrs. Hill sighing and Mr. Stone sighing back.

“Could you come a little closer? My eyesight’s not so good.” Mrs. Hill’s sweet-little-old-lady voice.

I heard him drag the ottoman over, which meant he was sitting a good six inches below her, putting them face-to-face. Ear to face, since Mrs. Hill was probably trying to get him in her sights.

“You’re not even a young-looking man,” she said, and I heard Mr. Stone laugh.

“No, ma’am.” He sounded different, Southern, not his classroom voice, not his smoking-in-the-car voice.

“Come a little closer,” Mrs. Hill said. “South Carolina?”

“Yes, ma’am. Kershaw. And you?”

“Mars, Alabama.”

The tip of his nose had to be denting her puddingy cheek for them to be talking so quietly.

“All the way from Kershaw. My.” For a minute, I didn’t hear anything. “And what do you want with my girl? You like girls in particular? Children?”

Mr. Stone breathed in fast. I wanted to rush in and hit her, and as she lay on the floor we would drive off to someplace pastel and foreign in our dark-red convertible.

“No, ma’am. I’m not like that. I don’t prefer girls to women. I’ve got a wife at home. And three boys.”

“Well, then,” she said, and I thought, So there, and wondered how close they were now. I could just see a sliver of his shoe tips pointed toward the recliner.

“Well, then,” he echoed. “I know it doesn’t seem right. I could lie to you, that’s what a reasonable man would do. A reasonable man, oh Jesus. I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

I heard Mrs. Hill’s wheezing and Mr. Stone’s deep cough and the clock on the mantel.

“I don’t do anything I shouldn’t,” he said.

“Except what you’re thinking, and you won’t stop that, will you?”

“Can’t, not won’t. How can I? I’m not leaving town, if that’s what you mean. And that’s what it would take, about three thousand miles. Could we throw in an ocean?”

Very softly, Mrs. Hill said, “We could throw in two oceans for all the good it’ll do you, and you know we should, because there is no glory coming from this and this is not a conversation about forgiveness. I don’t care how you end, that’s your concern, or your poor wife’s. You put one hand on that child, who thinks you love her fine mind, one hand, even when she’s more grown, and I’ll see you turning in Hell, listen to you pray for death. And don’t think I won’t know. That child tells me everything. So maybe you can keep your hands to yourself, and I won’t have to think so badly of you. Mis-tuh Stone.”

“Yes, ma’am. I don’t want you to think badly of me, and I don’t want to think badly of myself. I have no intention of harming her. You must see that whatever it looks like, it is love. And I have to say it is, in part, for her fine mind. I give you my word. Well, I don’t have much else, under the circumstances. I would cut off my hand first.”

It didn’t sound like it was so hard for him to give me up and just admire my mind for the rest of his life. He didn’t sound so madly in love with me that it was scaring him and Mrs. Hill. He just sounded happy to be talking Southern, the two of them purring along, word endings gone to nothing, their voices loopier and wider and sweeter than when they talked to me.

I brought in the teacups, went back for the spoons, and had to go back a third time for milk; Mr. Stone poured. Mrs. Hill told a couple of funny stories about the kids in her Sunday school class, all of them now at least Mr. Stone’s age, and Mr. Stone slapped his leg and laughed.

I walked him to the door, and he said my name and straightened my shirt collar. I lifted my shoulders to meet his fingers, and he dropped the little bit of shirt he’d been holding. Mrs. Hill said of course he should come by again, and he said of course he would hope to come again, without imposing on her hospitality, it would be a pleasure.

I closed the door behind him. She was already sighing and sucking her teeth, getting warmed up for something.

“That’s your Mr. Stone.”

“Yeah. Do you want some dinner? Turkey tetrazzini? You’ve got that three-bean salad from the weekend.”

“All right. In a minute. Come in here, Elizabeth. Are you going to make me shout all night?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, sighing at least as loudly as she had.

The ottoman was still warm, even damp, from when Mr. Stone sat on it and told her he loved me.

“He sure does like you. And you like him.”

“He’s okay. He’s a good teacher. He’s interested in poetry.”

“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning / fair as the moon / clear as the sun / and terrible as an army with banners? Like that?” Mrs. Hill said.

I didn’t answer, just walked into the kitchen while she was reciting.

“You’re in the room, you’re out of the room, I know what I know. Were you eavesdropping?”

“I don’t care what you know and I don’t care what you said. I’m starting dinner.”

“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

I gave her the water and cooked and washed up while she ate, which took forever. I wiped up the bean salad goop and the turkey shreds and wiped down the counters.

“I’m going.”

“Be good. Be careful. You are going to thank me someday.”

I slammed the door.

Mr. Stone stopped waiting for me in the parking lot. When I went to his office, there were always other kids in it, kids who could hardly read, kids waiting to show him their papers or ask for advice or just sit around with him. I ate lunch behind the field house until school ended, and watched the little kids at recess, and saw which girls sat by themselves near the monkey bars or the back steps. Mrs. Hill gave me the rosebud cup and saucer to cheer me up.

My mother established accounts with our four favorite food places and never made another meal. I didn’t tell her I’d learned to cook. She offered to send me anywhere for the summer — to sail in the Caribbean, to slop pigs and make jewelry in Vermont, to study architecture in Venice. I got a job at the Great Neck Public Library and boxed old magazines and stole old books. Mr. Stone didn’t call me.

In the fall I was in high school. In the middle of October I walked over to the junior high to visit Mr. Stone. I brought Tony DiMusio, who went with me everywhere for two months, until we exhausted ourselves dry-humping and made the mistake of having a conversation. I wanted to bump into Danny or Benjie in town and remind them of what a great babysitter I was, but I never saw them, although I looked in the comic book store and near the parks. Rachel got skinny again and we fell out over Eddie Sachs, who was supposed to be her boyfriend but asked me over to his basement when she was in Bermuda with her parents. I said yes and he told her what we did and she told me she would never forgive me even though it was only one time. When they passed me in the halls, they put their arms around each other and their hands in each other’s pockets and looked through me.

I studied a little, went on hamburger, cottage cheese, and hot water diets so my ribs would show under my leotards, and stole money from my mother. I bought pot from Eddie Sachs’ brother and smoked it under the football bleachers. It made me sleepy and compliant, and I stopped when I woke up in the dusk with my head on a rock and someone’s hand under my shirt. My father moved to Ohio for six months and came back. He said Cleveland was not the West and he was still working on getting out to the wide open spaces. I told him I might not go to college.

He said, “You do what you want to do. If you start school before you’re twenty, I promise you I’ll have enough money. Not after that.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “I got to have a life, too, Lizzie.”

“I know,” I said.

I made some cross-hatching at the top of my thigh, and it hurt like hell and looked terrible. I didn’t do it again. I drank vodka and Hawaiian Punch with Eddie Sachs’ brother in their basement. I think that’s all I did the first year of high school.

Mr. Stone wrote to me in June, inviting me to make tapes of Treasure Island for his junior high literacy project. I threw out the letter.

“I’m going to be really busy next year,” I said when he called.

“Please. I can’t do it without you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Elizabeth, don’t make me beg,” he said.

Fare Thee Well

I lay on my back in the dark, Max’s head resting on my bare stomach.

He said he was sorry, he meant to wait until I finished high school, but he couldn’t. We always did it that way, me naked, him fully dressed, after the first time, Columbus Day my junior year. Greta and the boys were at a conference for gifted children. Max made me dinner at his house when my mother thought I was with Rachel, and he kissed me on the mouth when I went to put away the salad. The refrigerator door curved out cold behind me, and Max curved in, smelling just like he did when I was in ninth grade. I saw it coming, the hairy, fishlike opening, and I closed my eyes. The feel of his mouth wasn’t terrible — a soft bathing of Scotch from his tongue, his lips two slick bars of pressure.

“If you need to say no, say no,” he said. He was nervous.

I didn’t say anything. What would no get me?

He put his hand on my zipper and waited.

“No?” he said.

All right. “No.”

“Your no is very sexy. You know that.”

That helped. I leaned back to make him come closer, and then I leaned forward to leave. I made him nuts. Pathetic. My body said jump, his said how high. If I said no, the conversation would be over, I’d just be a scared girl. When I looked straight into his blue eyes, with the long lashes, I didn’t see the crumpled skin around them or the way his brow sloped over them or the deep dirty holes in his cheeks.

I lay facedown on his bed, their bed, pretending I was asleep, while he lay on top of me, touching me under my clothes. I pressed my body hard to the mattress, trying to drive my spine to it and keep some space between us. He slid his hand right under me, his fingers wrestling against me, his belly pressing on my back. My eyes kept opening onto one of Greta’s paintings, and I tightened my body until it felt like wood, and finally he said, “All right, go to sleep.” He was so old to me, dark freckles and grey hair on his shoulders and the back of his neck, not tons of it like those gross guys at the pool, but still. Little scoops of flesh pulling down under his arms, and lines creasing his back. And he saw how I looked at him; when I cracked my eyes open, he had his shirt and his pants back on. After that, I kept my eyes closed.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked a week later, thinking that he must know.

He laughed and lifted his head. “What’s going to happen? I’m going to love you as long as you’ll let me, and I’ll teach you a little about literature and about real music, and then you’ll break my heart. That’s the classic denouement.” He sounded cheerful. I thought he was teasing me.

“How am I going to break your heart?”

He kissed my stomach and pulled me up, deep into his lap.

“Like this, baby.” He kissed my cheek lightly. “Like this.” Again. “Very gently, I’m sure.”

“Maybe you’ll break my heart.” Half the time, I felt he had broken my heart, turning what was simple and safe as milk into a pool of black ice, everything familiar sliding sideways and slipping under.

“Ha. You’re seventeen. Never mind the rest. All seventeen-year-olds break the hearts of their elderly lovers. Even the ones who are not half so delicious as you. Honey, I am just the first stop for you.”

I was almost sixteen, and this was my favorite part; I could listen to him talk about my irresistibility all night. “What’s the rest?”

“You’re fishing. That’s not a nice girl thing to do. The rest is your wit and your beauty and your limpid green eyes. And so on. Now behave, I can’t spend all day cataloging your charms.” He kissed his hand and laid it on my cheek, and I put my hand over his. His hands were the part of him I liked to touch.

“Why not?” I loved showing him my worst self because there were no consequences. He couldn’t help how much he loved me. In my real life I had become remarkably trustworthy. People gave me their keys when they went away for the weekend, and returned to find everything as they’d left it, their personal correspondence undisturbed. I babysat for newborns and folded clothes while they napped; I negotiated with the principal to get permission for students in good standing to go off school grounds for lunch. I had become a student in good standing. I still had too much to hide to behave badly in public.

“I have to read these exams, and Danny will be home soon, at which time you’re supposed to take him downtown to the movies. Is it okay, babysitting for us again?”

“It’s fine. Danny’s a nice kid.” I stretched out over his papers.

“Please get dressed. I can’t begin reading with your sweet little breasts staring me in the face. As it were.”

I put on my T-shirt, content. I wondered what it would be like when I was grown. Two years ago he had swept me and my glasses and my pimples and my bumping, changing body into the sheer gold-trimmed gown of Aphrodite and kept me there. Everything that followed, even between us, was bound to be a disappointment.

Every Monday and Wednesday lunchtime, Greta was at her hypnotherapist’s, the boys were in school, and I was under Max’s black and red sheets, slightly sick from the smell and feel of Greta. Even the invisible grit in the sheets was hers, put there to annoy me and make me hate Max.

He took something out from under the bed. It was electric, I could see the cord running to the wall. He turned it on and I laughed. It looked so stupid, an egg beater with nothing to mix, just buzzing in the air and jiggling his hand.

“What’s that?”

“You’ve never seen one?”

I pretended to shut my eyes, looking down so that I could see what happened when he got closer.

“It’s pretty noisy.”

“It is,” he said, “it’s a noisy little thing. But nice. Nice for you. I’m just going to hold it on your skin, it doesn’t hurt. None of this hurts. It’s just fun, just something nice for my sweet girl.”

Max put the blobby white ball against my arm. It tickled. He moved it up and down my legs, and then he turned me over and ran it down my spine.

Max said my back was my erogenous zone. It was also the only place I could bear to let him touch me. When we lay next to each other, his fingers felt slick and oysterish. They didn’t hurt me, and with his arm around me, sitting on his couch, I loved his hands. They were as wide as they were long, and his fingers were thick and smooth and strong. Romantic hands, but I hated how they felt on my skin, and when I saw them moving down my body, I closed my eyes.

In tenth grade, Tony DiMusio and I got drunk at a party and I let him touch me down there, and he snagged a piece of my skin with his nail, and I was bleeding, saying like a moron, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s just a little cut.” Like a cut in the middle of your vagina wasn’t a big deal. He called me for six months to go out, I must have seemed like such a good sport, but when we saw each other at school, I would narrow my eyes and he’d look away.

Max circled the little ball up and down my legs on the inside of my thighs, making electric tracks on my skin. He turned me over again onto my back and pulled the blanket around his face like a babushka, to be funny, and threw it back to the end of the bed. He rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose bumps and tucked my hands under his sweater. The hair on his chest was wet.

“You’ll warm up in a minute, sweetheart. Do you want to shut your eyes and just concentrate on what you feel?”

He straightened out my legs and tried to pull them apart. I pressed them together and smiled to show I was sorry. I tried to relax.

“You don’t have to do anything, baby girl. You don’t have to move, or kiss me, nothing. If you don’t like it, you let me know.”

He put the little ball right between my legs, and I almost jumped out of the bed.

“Jesus. What is that?”

“Is that too much?” He put it down and waited.

“Sort of. Like a shock, but it didn’t hurt. It felt weird.” I opened my eyes. I could see how excited he was, sweat rolling down his temples and his neck onto me.

“All right,” he said.

I lay back down, and this time he got his arm around my hips, holding me steady. He put it between my legs, without touching me; it just hovered above me, moving the air. A little breeze buzzed my pubic hair.

“Very easy now,” he said, and he lowered it to my skin, tightening his hand on my hip. It started making muffled overdrive noises as Max circled it around like a tiny metal detector. Hard waves rolled through my legs, from the soles of my feet, burning through my shins, and then right into my center, knocking my head back. I heard Tony’s voice, before he hurt me: Oh, yeah, ba-de-boom. Let me do you like that.

“Oh, yes,” Max whispered, a hundred times. Nothing was left of me but smoking skin, liquefying bone. My hips lifted high under Max’s hand until I slammed down on the bed, released. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs shook so hard I knew I couldn’t walk out. I curled up deep in the covers and wouldn’t let him touch me.

“All right?” He put it back under the bed. I certainly didn’t want to see it.

I wouldn’t talk, and when he put his hand on my breast, I pushed it away. After a while he got up to change his wet shirt, and I went into the bathroom and saw my wide, blurred face sliding around like Jell-O on a plate.

“Cow face,” I said to the mirror, and came out dressed, my hands fists. Max backed away. I know he wasn’t afraid I’d hurt him. He was worried I’d hate him. He was worried I wouldn’t do it again.

“You are a fucking pervert,” I told him, and even when it took me ten minutes to undo the lock on my bike, he stayed in the house and watched me from the bedroom window. I gave him the finger, which felt like a stupid cow thing to do, but I couldn’t think of anything else that meant I hate you.

It was him calling my house all weekend, but I didn’t pick up the phone and he hung up when my mother answered. On Saturday afternoon my mother called the telephone company to complain. Even when the repairman ran all over the house like a crazed hamster with his ringing belt, my mother following him from phone to phone, I sat quietly in the rec room, opening and closing the dollhouse doors until he left. My mother bought two new phones. Max mailed a letter to me the last week of school, which was stupid. He could have been arrested.

Dearest girl,

Your absence and distress is killing me. Please forgive me. I didn’t play fair. All I really wanted was to have something special with you. I’m sorry that I frightened you, angered you, whatever I did, I’m sorry. I am sorry and I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. You took my breath away. Please at least have breakfast with me before school ends.

All my love, for as long as you’ll have me,

M.

I was bored by August. Mrs. Hills house was about a hundred degrees during the day. We had so many fans on we couldn’t hear each other, which was fine with me. She gave me two more cups, and every once in a while she’d point out some handsome white guy on the soaps and say, “Now, that’s a nice young man,” as if the next step was for me to call CBS. Rachel and I were sort of talking again, but she had a new boyfriend, a sophomore who followed her everywhere and smiled when she made fun of his devotion. After teaching retarded children how to swim and learning how to French-inhale, I had nothing to do. Finally I called Max. I put the receiver down when he answered.

He knew who it was and called me back, crying that nothing mattered but me, and I heard my mother making a cup of tea, and I could barely picture him in my mind while he talked and cried. He was a speck.

For a long time I wouldn’t take a ride home, even in bad weather. I did good deeds and played solitaire. I read Baudelaire and I read Georgette Heyer. I spent my mother’s money on the movies and gas and began to watch boys again and smile at them. My body was humming, a cheerful, wild tune just behind everything else. And then I wanted to talk about the books and the boys with Max, and I smelled coffee and Barbasol in my dreams, and we started again.

Speak to My Heart

I was not a cheerleader, I never played team sports, and I never watched them; I never showed school spirit, but I did like the basketball players. I even watched the NBA on TV once, but they were too much for me: huge, big-veined men, hard as trees, plunging across the floor on their big bandaged legs. The basketball players at my high school were all damp skin and calcium deposits, a few good-sized, broadening young men, the rest just tall, lanky boys with cornsilk hair flopping in their eyes until it got ridged and wet in the second half, or brown mushroom Afros wobbling slightly as they ran up and down the court. The white boys got dark half-circles under their arms and big blotches in the middle of their chests and backs, but the black boys ran water. And Huddie Lester soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night. I was tutoring a ninth-grade girl more interested in not being left back than in actually learning how to read, and we took breaks every ten minutes. During the breaks, Yolanda ran wild in the halls, jimmying lockers and xeroxing her ass in the teachers’ lounge; I watched Huddie shoot hoop.

I watched them practice three Fridays in a row and finally Huddie dribbled over as they broke up into groups of four, shooting endlessly, a dozen balls swishing through nets, bouncing against the hard white backboard and the hard shining floor.

“You like basketball?”

“It’s okay. At least you have to think when you play. Or at least you look like you’re thinking.” Inside, I was smashing my head against the wall.

“Yeah, we think. You tutor Yolanda McKee?”

It turned out Yolanda was good friends with Huddie’s cousin Abigail. We could hear her singing in the hall, loud and sweet, behind the noise of the boys. He rested his hand on the bleacher and bounced the ball lightly, looking somewhere between me and the gym door.

“You go out with Allen Schreiber?”

“No. He’s just a friend.”

“Jon Schwartz?”

“No. Is this a quiz?”

“Yeah. One more.”

“Okay. Could you stop that?” If he was going to ask me out, if he liked me that way, he’d stop dribbling.

He spun the ball up on one skinny brown finger and we watched it turn, orange, black, orange. He popped it down his arm.

“How about pizza after practice? We finish at five, I don’t have to get to the store right away today.”

I don’t know how I said anything. My ears rang yes and my blood jangled and we sat there grinning and breathless until we heard the janitor hollering at Yolanda.

“Meet you at the bike rack at five.”

We were very private and very proud. We met at the furthest bike racks, the ones shunned by the jocks and the hippies; we nodded to each other in the halls, and on the weekends we walked down Bleecker Street, kissing at every street corner and looking into the eyes of people who looked at us. I expanded Yolandas tutoring sessions, which was a good thing anyway, and I watched Huddie’s practices like someone with a little time to kill, sitting down so my legs wouldn’t shake. In all our months together, we saw one local movie and ate pizza by the slice at the revolting train station pizza joint, run by an Indian family who seemed not to notice that all successful Long Island pizza joints were run by Greeks, and the diners by Italians, and that the only exotic food anyone wanted was eaten on Thursday nights at Bruce Ho’s and included canned litchis and large blue tropical drinks. The Patels served watery ham, green pepper, and pineapple specials and flat Coca-Cola, and the drunks and tired women waiting for the Flushing and Bayside trains were the only people we ever saw. The pizza was so bad we started ordering the curry, mentioned only in apologetic small print at the bottom of the menu; astonished and happy, the Patels phased out the worst of the pizzas. We liked rogan josh and chicken vindaloo and the yogurt shakes, which separated us once more from everyone we knew. We made ourselves invisible. We never said why.

We used every private place a small, affluent town has, every well-kept wood, every wintering swimming pool, every empty boathouse, and even the seven-foot-wide granite boulders that some people in Saddle Rock Estates put in to make their quarter-acre backyards more interesting. Huddie brought us sodas and Twinkies from his father’s store. One night we painted all the little black jockeys in Kennilworth white and made out until dawn, watching for the first homeowner to discover the new ornament on his Ivory Rose-spattered lawn as he picked up The New York Times. We lay in the shadows of the boulders and boats and in the big blue bathtubs of empty pools and talked. Big things were happening around us, the Revolution was under way, even here, and when the older kids and decent adults finished changing the country, we would step in and carry on their work. We assumed we knew what we thought about politics, and we assumed we agreed. Brushing and braiding each others hair, unbuttoning shirts, idly running a toe along a bare leg, we talked about our families, about our school and idiot teachers, of our great luck, of his future with the Celtics and mine with The Village Voice.

I forgot Max. Every day with Huddie erased him further, until the only truth was that I had had a student crush on him years ago, that I used to babysit for his kids, that he had been kind enough to teach me how to drive a stick-shift, and that I guessed (and I could even smile at this part, flattered but sort of embarrassed) he seemed to find me attractive now that I was grown up. Did anything happen? Huddie asked. No, are you kidding? I said, and put my hand on the jumping muscle in his arm. Every time Max appeared in the parking lot across from the high school to lead me toward his car for our lunchtimes, I was completely surprised. And then I said that Mondays were no good, and then Wednesdays were no good, and I would only do it once in a great while, to cheer him up, and when I couldn’t anymore, I just gave him a little kiss and Rachel stood on the school steps for a whole week, her arms folded, daring him to ask where I was. He didn’t belong near my body now that it was Huddie’s.

Love and desire slammed us into each other, giddy and harmlessly wild as bumper cars. We were separated only, and only occasionally, by my terror of pregnancy and Huddie’s inability to maintain an erection while wearing a condom, a combination that made both of us sneakily skillful and ashamed. My passion for him flooded up like white water, immediately drained away by anxiety whenever we took our clothes off. Standing in the gym locker room, surrounded by normal girls with normal desires and normal condom-wearing boyfriends, I was amazed to learn that they found, or said they found, the erect penis itself exciting. To me, it was a dull, treacherous companion to be greeted with warmth and secretly plotted against. Huddie’s penis was stupid, but Huddie was not. I had to seem so carried away by excitement that, apparently unawares, I would make Huddie come, maneuvering not to let him near me until he was done. And since we were both seventeen I had to do it a lot. To keep Huddie and his little friend distracted, I learned how to bow and stroke like the Perlman of penises; I could lick, nibble, or hum Huddie to orgasm from any position in no time. As soon as he was soft, I’d fondle him gently, my hand and his penis nuzzling as sweetly as two bunnies. As soon as he got hard again, I’d slide my fingers around the slick, ridged surface and hold tight, working steady as a piston, pumping his come against the backseat or onto the blanket we carried with us.

One time, as we lay naked in the green depths of Wadsworth Park, his slim brown back formed one arc, the spray of his semen another, a dark and a white crescent against a background of thick ferns and the violet evening sky; I had to twist my two hands deep into our blanket to keep from leaping on top of him, holding that beautiful, bucking power inside me.

The last sunlight came through the leaves overhead, and Huddie looked up from between my legs and flung himself forward, sliding between my wet thighs so quickly I couldn’t roll away, as I always did.

“I want you to feel me,” he said, pressing down on me heavily, from chest to thigh. “Baby, please, just a little. Just the head, that’s all.”

It was wonderful. Better than fingers or tongues, this perfectly shaped, perfectly smooth and full plum flesh, moving into me, moving me right to the edge of my skin.

Leaning back for one wet, mindless moment, I felt his penis move forward, balanced with me on an inner fulcrum. Instantly I saw myself weeping in the girls’ room like poor Celia Sheehan, and I pushed at Huddie’s hips and slid him out of me, feeling the awful cool narrowness where he had been. He came on the blanket and cursed me and began to cry, fists to his eyes, like a little boy.

“I don’t want to fight about this, I don’t want to fight with you. You want to, don’t you? I know you do. I know it. Can you take the pill or something? You know I’d take care of it if I could.”

I did know. He spent a week wearing a condom, trying to get used to it. He put one on before he went to school and he wore it all night long, but at the first grip of latex, his penis softened into a scared purple curl cruelly swallowed by a big yellow dunce cap. “No condom, no sex” took care of my pregnancy fears, except for the ones about armed and fanged sperm, swimming and gnawing through my cotton underpants, but it drove Huddie crazy. He’d started having sex when he was fourteen and wasn’t planning on giving it up just three years later.

Huddie dropped me off at the Planned Parenthood above the A&P, where I met with a series of enthusiastic, slightly disapproving women, happy to have the business, not at all pleased that I was it. I filled out forms and took off my clothes and handed the forms and a Dixie cup of urine to a woman who looked so much like Greta Stone I accidentally splashed her with half the contents. I held my breath during the internal exam and wondered how a woman could put cold metal into another woman without even flinching. The speculum clicked inside me, opening me up to the nurse’s eyes and fingers, not unkind, just saying “This is what you want? This is how it is.” The birth control counselor gave me a free first month’s supply of tiny yellow pills and a row of little pink ones to be taken during my period. I couldn’t remember anything she told me that wasn’t about killing sperm, and I didn’t listen to the part about side effects. Breast cancer and blood clots don’t mean much to teenage girls. Social ostracism and pregnancy were the only real disasters for us, and I had lived through one and was planning to outsmart the other.

I came back to the car, and Huddie watched as I ceremoniously swallowed the first of the yellow pills. He clapped and I laughed and stuck two fingers in his mouth, his sharp teeth against them, the slippery, warm insides of his lips around them.

I don’t know how it worked for other girls. I know the nurse told me to wait thirty days, to use “alternate modes of contraception” while the yellow pills fooled my body into thinking that it was pregnant, blooming with all that I would have sold my soul, my real emerald ring, and Huddie’s car to avoid.

I tried. We tried. We compromised, we had intercourse with every other body part, we made deals with God as each other’s juices ran down our chins, and we invited disaster every way we could, short of formally announcing that having acted like grown-ups, having done right, we were now entitled, goddammit, to have some big-time fun. On the twentieth day, Huddie and I cut study hall and went to his house. On his narrow bed, with the raw plywood headboard banging steadily into the faded yellow wallpaper, with me murmuring, “No, no, no” and clutching his hard wet back to me, pulling him right through me, until it amazed me to see any part of him still outside my skin, Huddie and I stopped trying to be grown up. After forty-five minutes, we melted down, panting and numb like long-distance runners.

There was no time to shower, which didn’t bother us. We had never taken a shower together. Kids have nowhere to fuck and nowhere to shower. Only adults, cheating and careful, clean up afterwards. We jumped wet and proud into our jeans, and we left his room thick with our scent of damp, salty fur, two puppies playing in a marsh, a smell that dripped from Huddie onto me and the sheet beneath us and seeped back into our skins. Liquid as hot and thick as my own blood ran down my legs for the rest of the day, and I smiled every time I sat down and felt the rough seam of my jeans cut into me. You would have had to shoot us to keep us apart.

By the weekend I knew I was pregnant. I remembered reading about girls my age who delivered and didn’t know they were pregnant until they went into labor. Did their parents really believe that? That these girls felt their breasts change into tender, painful eggs, hot as a fever, felt their bellies slope into firm, enveloping tents around tiny insistent strangers, threw up at the smell of spinach or bacon or coffee, and didn’t know? I knew.

I didn’t want to worry Huddie and I didn’t want to lose him.

I called Max.

“I’m pregnant,” I said. “I think I’m pregnant.”

Max said nothing. His breath was in my ear, thick and smoky; I heard him swallowing.

“Why don’t we get you a test first? Just to make sure.” I heard the flick of his lighter. “Don’t worry, baby girl.” He didn’t say, It’s not my baby, although I knew he knew it wasn’t.

“Okay. Rachel told me she had a test at Planned Parenthood.”

“Who was the boy?” Max had never liked Rachel, and after I told her just a little about what went on, not mentioning the vibrator or the way he put me in the chair naked and just stared at me, she hated him. When we saw him in town, she’d glare at him and mutter, and once she scraped his car with her keys. “Huddie’s so cute,” she said. “He’s disgusting, Elizabeth. It’s sick. We should kill him.”

“Zvi Carnofsky. Anyway, she wasn’t.”

“Fine. Anyway, I didn’t mean Carnofsky. If you don’t want to go to Planned Parenthood, go see a friend of mine. Hilda Ringer. She’s a very good doctor, a lovely woman.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d never made my own doctor’s appointment.

“Do you want me to call for you?”

“No, I can do it. What do I say? Do I say I’m pregnant?”

“No, you ask to see Dr. Ringer and you say you want a pregnancy test and that Mr. Stone suggested you call. I’ll take care of the bill.”

“Will you come with me?” He wouldn’t. People would wonder why he was there with me, and it would cause trouble.

“I don’t think so, baby girl. I think that would be pretty conspicuous. You go and I’ll pick you up afterwards. We can get a bite to eat and wait for the results.”

“Never mind. I’ll go with Rache. I’ll go with someone. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I won’t do anything conspicuous.” I slammed down the phone. I was furious until I remembered it wasn’t his baby.

I wasn’t happy that I had to wait three more weeks for the abortion, but the counselor at Planned Parenthood told me what I wanted to hear and held my hand when she promised me no pain, “just a little cramping.” She made it sound like going to the dentist, which was what I wanted. She smiled at Huddie and looked gravely at me and handed us a pile of educational booklets with cheerful stick-figure men and women making sensible and healthy decisions. I dropped them in the trash on the way to Huddie’s car. I said it was no big deal and Huddie said it was, and we fought about things that were too big for us until we got to the park, where we lay beneath hundred-year-old oak trees and said, We might as well.

Hear Me

Thanks to Mrs. Hill and her daughter, I knew as much about cholesterol levels and heart disease as any elderly cardiac patient. I made casseroles with a skim-milk white sauce from a recipe I found in an American Heart Association pamphlet, and skinless chicken breast with tomatoes and mushrooms sautéed in a half teaspoon of olive oil. Sometimes I substituted turkey for chicken and potatoes for tomatoes. The pork rinds were long gone, as were the palm readings. Now we were serious; Mrs. Hill was seriously ill and I seriously loved her.

Mrs. Hill was having a pretty good day. Her skin was its normal coffee color, not overcast with greyish yellow tones, and we had spent some up time before her nap, clowning around while the radio played a tribute to the Supremes. Mrs. Hill and I could do all the appropriate hand gestures for every song, and we agreed that Diana Ross was too skinny and bossy for her own good. We preferred Flo Ballard, who looked a little like Vivian, or even Cindy Birdsong, who was obviously dumb as a tree but good-natured.

I was skinning the chicken breast and then I was not.

Huddie made his deliveries and found me curled up on the floor, my cheek on the red and grey speckled linoleum, my hands pressed to my belly.

“Are you okay? Liz, sweet, I’ll take you to the clinic. Elizabeth?” I could hear him and I could smell him and the pain was not so bad but I couldn’t speak. A cold rising river closed in on me, running through me, carrying only me and my baby — all of a sudden my baby, wrapped in my arms. Naked, swept over sharp, half-hidden rocks, stones scraping my feet, icy grey sprays chilling our cheeks, stiffening her soft body, pulling her fine hair with rough fingers.

My baby is dying, I thought, and I pounded on the floor, terrifying Huddie. The blood had begun to seep through my jeans. I reached inside my underpants and looked at my red-streaked palms. I crawled to the bathroom, and he pulled off my jeans and my underpants and sat at my feet, crying for me.

Cry for her, I thought, and I told him to leave me alone. He looked at my smeared hands and legs, my bared teeth, the bits of blood drying in my black hair, and he sat down outside the bathroom door and waited.

I sat and sat, feeling clumps of blood and tissue sucked out of my bright veins, pulled out of my young body, into nothing, leaving nothing. I would be old when this was over, a shell scoured clean by the waves. Huddie would be young and I would be old, as tired as Mrs. Hill. Just lay me down next to my little baby, leave us be. I’m sorry, baby, I will never think of having an abortion ever again, no matter what, I’m sorry, God, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby. The cramps were almost gone, just the smallest waves now.

I asked Huddie to bring me a pair of his jeans and to take a box of sanitary napkins from his father’s store. I stood up to wash myself off quietly, amazed that my banging and crying hadn’t woken Mrs. Hill. I didn’t recognize my own face, smudged with bad Halloween makeup, my hair twisted into dry red tips, my cheeks chalk grey. I looked away, down into the toilet bowl, and fell back on my knees, my spine broken one more time. Little curl, little baby bud, floating in our blood. I couldn’t go outside in only my spattered T-shirt, and I couldn’t flush the toilet. I would never flush my baby away.

Huddie came back, and I finished washing myself and put on his faded jeans, smelling of Huddie and the industrial detergent Mr. Lester used on everything. We started cleaning up the mess, Huddie wet-wiping the kitchen floor, me tackling the bathroom. Then I took a jar from Mrs. Hill’s kitchen collection. A little six-ounce jelly jar was all I needed. I went back into the bathroom.

“I’ve got to bury the baby.”

Huddie looked at me, too kind, or too scared, to argue.

“Where do you want to go?”

I wanted to go to Wadsworth Park, but I couldn’t leave Mrs. Hill. I wanted not to abandon anyone ever again. I wanted to be good.

“Get a shovel from the garage. We can go into the woods behind the church.”

“Behind the church?”

Well, it wasn’t my church. I didn’t care. There were tall pines and soft ferns and no one there on a Thursday afternoon.

“Get a shovel, okay?” All I wanted was the sweet clean smell of pine and a safe place for my baby.

Well into the woods we dug a deep, fast hole, Huddie sweating through his shirt in the afternoon sun. We laid the jelly jar down, wrapped in plastic, wrapped again in tinfoil, and we covered it up and smoothed out the dirt.

“We ought to tamp it down more. So it’s solid,” he said, not looking at me. And we stamped on it with our sneakers and threw pine boughs and decomposing leaves over the space.

When Mrs. Hill woke up, I was sleeping on the couch, my feet in Huddie’s lap. He wouldn’t leave, even though he had other deliveries to make.

Mrs. Hill, who couldn’t remember the day of the week or whether or not she’d eaten, looked at my face, at the sheets of newspaper I’d put under me to protect her ugly blue brocade couch, at Huddie’s hand on my leg, and knew.

“That you, Horace Lester? You delivered my groceries already, haven’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Huddie said, not moving.

I don’t think my mother knew Huddie existed. Huddie’s father knew there was someone, but he didn’t know it was me. Huddie delivered to Mrs. Hill once a week, but I didn’t think Mrs. Hill had ever caught a glimpse of us together. I was the one who was blind, thinking we were invisible. Huddie and I sat there, watching our fates juggled by a crabby old lady with bad eyesight and severe self-righteousness.

The doorbell rang, and I could hear Mr. Lester’s rough voice calling for Mrs. Hill. She shuffled off to the door and he bowled in past her, his round face hard and black, his leather apron shiny and tight over his big chest.

“Horace, you are planning on finishing your deliveries, aren’t you? I’ve been looking for you for the last hour. Miz Hill, do you need any more of Horace?”

“No, Gus, I don’t. I do appreciate his coming by and all. It’s a big help.”

Huddie had taken his hand off my leg at the sound of his father’s voice, and I had thought of jumping up, but we stayed on the couch, frozen, committed. I wondered if we were all going to pretend I wasn’t there. Mr. Lester’s eyes were red pin dots in his black, pitted face, and I wondered how anyone so butt-end ugly could have produced someone as perfectly formed as Huddie.

“You know Elizabeth Taube, the girl that helps me out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, don’t you?” Mrs. Hill sounded like my mother at a bridge party, gracious and wary and ready.

“No,” said Mr. Lester, clearly knowing, right then, who I was. “Sorry to have barged in, but I do need my boy back at the store. Horace?”

Huddie rose like a six-foot puppet, and I saw Mr. Lester’s big hands come down on his shoulders. I winced, and Huddie made two fists and put them in his pockets.

“Say good-bye,” whispered Mrs. Hill.

“What for? He didn’t even say hello to me.” I was not showing off my good manners for Mr. Lester.

“To Horace, say good-bye to Horace.”

“Good-bye,” I called out in confusion, and I saw the gold-brown tips of his fingers waving, his left thumb and forefinger forming the letter L, for Love, for Liz, as he walked beneath the kitchen window, picking up his bike. I knew he’d heard me.

Mrs. Hill fell into her recliner as I sank back on the couch, keeping my muddy sneakers propped up on more newspaper. She looked at the clock and picked up the phone. I was amazed to hear her tell my mother that I seemed a little unwell, that I was welcome to spend the night, and that she would enjoy my company. Her voice was smooth and bright and almost accentless, and I wondered how she turned it on and off.

Mrs. Hill shut her eyes.

“I said say good-bye because he’ll be going away. Gus has family in Alabama. You see Horace again this year, pigs’ll be flyin’.”

Mrs. Hill couldn’t palm-read worth a damn, and her predictions about the weather were completely cockeyed, but she was right about this. I didn’t see Huddie again for seven years.