The Color Master

Appleless

I once knew a girl who wouldn’t eat apples. She wove her walking around groves and orchards. She didn’t even like to look at them. They’re all mealy, she said. Or else too cheeky, too bloomed. No, she stated again, in case we had not heard her, our laps brimming with Granny Smiths and Red Deliciouses. With Galas and Spartans and yellow Golden Globes. But we had heard her, from the very first; we just couldn’t help offering again. Please, we pleaded, eat. Cracking our bites loudly, exposing the dripping wet white inside.

It’s unsettling to meet people who don’t eat apples.

The rest of us now eat only apples, to compensate. She has declared herself so apple-less, we feel we have no other choice. We sit in the orchard together, cross-legged, and when they fall off the trees into our outstretched hands, we bite right in. They are pale green, striped red-on-red, or a yellow-and-orange sunset. They are the threaded Fujis, with streaks of woven jade and beige, or the dark and rosy Rome Beauties. Pippins, Pink Ladies, Braeburns, McIntosh. The orchard grows them all.

We suck water off the meat. Drink them dry. We pick apple skin out from the spaces between our teeth. We eat the stem and the seeds. For the moment, there are enough beauties bending the branches for all of us to stay fed. We circle around the core, teeth busy, and while we chew, we watch the girl circle our orchard, in her long swishing skirts, eyes averted.

One day we see her, and it’s too much. She is so beautiful on this day, her skin as wide and open as a river. We could swim right down her. It’s unbearable just to let her walk off, and all at once, we abandon our laps of apples and run over. Her hair is so long and wheatlike you could bake it into bread. For a second our hearts pang, for bread. Bread! We’ve been eating only apples now for weeks.

We close in; we ring her. Her lips fold into each other; our lips skate all over her throat, her bare wrists, her empty palms. We kiss her like we’ve been starving, and she tilts her head down so she doesn’t have to look at us. We knead her hair and kiss down the long line of her leg beneath the shift of her skirt. We pray to her, and our breath is ripe with apple juice. You can see the tears start races down her face while our hands move in to touch the curve of her breasts and the scoop of her neckline. She is so new. There are pulleys in her skin. Our fingers, all together, work their way to her bare body, past the voluminous yards of cloth. Past those loaves of hair. We find her in there, and she is so warm and so alive and we see the tears, but stop? Impossible. We breathe in, closer. Her eyelashes brighten with water. Her shoulders tremble like doves. She is weeping into our arms, she is crumpling down, and we are inside her clothes now, and our hands and mouths are everywhere. There’s no sound at all but the slip of skin and her crying and the apples in the orchard thumping, uncaught: our lunches and dinners and breakfasts. It’s an unfamiliar sound, because for weeks now, we have not let even one single fruit hit dirt.

She cries through it all, and when we’re done and piled around her, suddenly timid and spent, suddenly withered nothings, she is the first to stand. She gathers her skirts around herself, and smooths back down her hair. She wipes her eyes clear and folds her hands around her waist. She is away from the orchard before we can stand properly and beg her to stay. Before we can grovel and claw at her small perfect feet. We watch her walk, and she’s slow and proud, but none of us can possibly catch her. We splay on the ground in heaps instead as she gets smaller and smaller on the horizon.

She never comes by the orchard again, and in a week, all the apples are gone. They fall off the trees, and the trees make no new ones. The air smells like snow on the approach. No one dares to mention her, but every morning, all of our eyes are fixed on the road, waiting, hoping, staring through the bare brambles of an empty orchard. Our stomachs rumble, hungry. The sky is always this same sort of blue. It is so beautiful here.

The Red Ribbon

It began with his fantasy, told to her one night over dinner and wine at L’Oiseau d’Or, a French restaurant with tiny gold birds etched into every plate and bowl.

“My college roommates,” he said, during the entrée. “Once brought home.”

“Drugs?”

“Women,” said Daniel softly, “that they paid for.” Even in candlelight, she could track the rise of his blush.

“Prostitutes?” Janet said. “Is that what you mean? They did?”

The kitchen doors swung open as the waiter brought a feathery dessert to the table next to theirs.

“I did not join in, Janet,” Daniel said, reaching over to clasp her hand tightly. “Never. Not once. But I sometimes think about the idea of it. Not really it, itself—”

“The idea of it.”

“I never once joined in,” Daniel repeated.

“I believe you,” said Janet, crossing her legs. She wondered what the handsome couple sharing the chocolate mousse would make of this conversation, even though they were laughing closely with each other and seemed to have no need for anyone else in the restaurant. She herself had noticed everyone else in the restaurant while waiting for the pâté to arrive, dressed in its sprig of parsley: the older couple, the lanky waiter, the women wrapped in patterned scarves. Now she felt like propelling herself into one of their conversations.

“I’m upsetting you,” he said, swirling fork lines into his white sauce.

“Not so much,” she said.

“Never mind,” he said. “Really. You look so beautiful tonight, Janet.”

On the drive home, she sat in the backseat, as she did on occasion. He said it was to protect her from more dangerous car accidents; she liked thinking for a moment that he was her chauffeur, that she had reached a state of adult richness where you did nothing for yourself anymore and returned to infancy. She imagined she had a cook, a hairdresser, a bath-filler. A woman who came over to fluff her pillow and tuck her in. Daniel turned on the classical music station and a cello concerto spilled out from the speakers in the back, and from the angle of her seat, Janet could just catch a glimpse of the bottom of her nose and top of her lips in the rearview mirror. She stared at them for the entire ride home. Her nose had fine small bones at the tip, and her lipstick, even after dinner, was unsmudged. There was something deeply soothing to her in this image, in the simplicity of her vanity. She liked how her upper lip fit inside her lower lip, and she liked the distance between the bottom of her nose and the top of her mouth. She liked the curve of her ear. And in those likings and their basic balance, she felt herself take shape as Daniel drove.

Back at home, she spent longer than usual in the bathroom, suddenly rediscovering all the lotion bottles in the cabinet that were custom-made for different parts of the body. For feet, for elbows, for eyes, for the throat. Like different kinds of soil that need to be tilled with different tools. When she entered the bedroom, fully cultivated, skin stenciled by a lace nightgown, the lights were off. Only the moon through the window revealed the tiny triangles of skin beneath the needlework.

“Time for bed, honey,” she said cheerily, which was code for Don’t touch me. But there was no real need; his back already radiated the grainy warmth of sleeping skin. She slid herself between the sheets and called up another picture, this one of Daniel, a green bill wrapped around his erection like a condom. The itch of the corners of the bill as they pricked inside her. His stuff all over the faces of presidents. Stop it now, Janet, she thought to herself, but she finally had to take a pill to get the image out of her head; it made her too jittery to sleep.

Daniel went to work at the shoe company in the morning, suit plus vest, and Janet slept in, as usual. Her afternoons were wide open. Today, after she had wrested all the hot water out of the shower, she went straight to a lingerie shop to buy a black bustier. She remained in the dressing room for over twenty minutes, staring at her torso shoveled into the satin.

“So, Janet,” called the saleslady, Tina, younger and suppler, “is it lovely? Does it fit?”

Janet pulled her sweater on and went up to the counter.

“It fit,” she said, “and I’m wearing it home. How much?”

Tina, now at the cash register, snapped a garter belt between her fingers. “I need the little tag,” she said. “This isn’t like a shoe store.”

Janet inhaled to full height, had some trouble breathing out because her ribs were smashed together, and said, sharply: “Give me the price, Tina. I will not remove this piece of clothing now that it’s on, so I either pay for it this way or walk out the door with it on for free.”

When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken à la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens. She remembered Daniel’s first insistent kiss, by the bridge near the Greek café on that Saturday afternoon, and she hadn’t thought of it in years and she could almost smell the shawarma rotating on its pole outside. He had asked her out again, and again, and told her he loved her on the fourth date, and bought her fancy cards inside of which he wrote long messages about her smile.

By seven o’clock that night, all the shoes in Daniel’s shoe store were either sold or back in boxes, and clip-clop-clip came his own up the walkway. The sky was dimming from dark blue into black, and Janet sat in the warmly lit hallway, legs crossed, bustier pressing her breasts out like beach balls, the little hooks fastened one notch off in the back so that she seemed a bit crooked.

Daniel paused in the doorway with his briefcase. “Oh my,” he said, “what’s this?”

She felt her upper lip twitching. “Hello, Daniel,” she said. “Welcome home.”

She stood awkwardly and approached him. She tried to remember: Be slow. Don’t rush. When she had removed his coat and vest and laid them evenly on the floor, she reached into the back of his pants and pulled out his walnut-colored wallet. He watched, eyes huge, as she sifted through the bills until she found what she wanted. That smart Mr. Franklin.

He usually used the hundred-dollar bill to buy his best friend, Edward from business school, a lunch with fine wine on their sports day.

She waved it in his face.

“Okay?” she said.

He grabbed her waist as she tucked the bill inside the satin between her breasts.

“Janet?” he said.

She pushed him onto the carpet and began to take off the rest of his clothes. Halfway through the buttons on his shirt, right at his ribs, she was filled with an enormous terror and had to stop to catch her breath.

“For a week, Daniel,” she whispered, trembling. “Each time. Okay? Promise?”

His breathing was sharp and tight. “A week,” he said, adding figures fast in his head. “Of course, I would love a week, a week,” and his words floated into murmur as she drove her body into his.

They forgot about dinner. They stayed at that spot on the carpet for hours and then tumbled off to the bedroom, his coat and vest resting flat on the carpet. He stroked the curve of her neck with the light-brown mole. She fell asleep first.

On Wednesday, Janet heard Daniel call Edward and cancel their lunch date. “I’m just too busy this week,” he said. Janet smiled to herself in the bathtub. He brought her handfuls of daffodils. “My wife doesn’t love me,” he told her in bed, which made her laugh from the deep bottom of her throat. She put a flower between her teeth and danced for him, naked, singing too loud. He grabbed her and pushed her into chairs and she kept singing, as loud as she possibly could, straddling him, wiggling, until finally he clamped a hand over her mouth and she bit his palm and slapped his thighs until they flushed pink. When it was over she felt she’d shared something fearfully intimate with him and could barely look him in the eye, but he just handed her the hundred and went into the bathroom.

On their wedding day, Daniel had given her a card with a photograph of a beach on it. “You are my fantasy woman,” he’d written inside. “You come to me from my dreams.” It had annoyed her then, like a bug on her arm. I come to you from Michigan, she had told him. From 928 Washington Street. He’d laughed. “That’s what I love so much about you, Janet,” he’d said, whirling her onto the dance floor. “You’re no-nonsense,” he’d said. She’d spent the song trying furtively to imitate Edward’s wife, who danced like she had the instruments buzzing inside her hips.

By the end of the week, nine hundred dollars nestled in her underwear drawer. She put the bills on the ironing board and flattened them out, faces up, until they were so crisp they could be in a salad.

She’d thought about buying a dress. My whore dress! she’d thought. She considered sixty lipsticks. My hooker lips! she thought. Finally she just tucked the cash into her purse and took herself to lunch. Thirty dollars brought her to the best bistro in the area, where she had a hamburger and a glass of wine. The juice dripped down, red-brown, and left a stain on her wrist.

“Ah, fuck you,” she said to the homeless man on the street who asked for change. “You really think I can spare any of my NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS that I made by SELLING MY BODY?”

The man shook his head to the ground. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

“And don’t you God-bless me!” she yelled at the man from down the block.

“I will not,” he called back. “I have no interest in blessing you at all.”

Once she was home she couldn’t bear to sit down. She couldn’t move or answer the phone. Breathing felt like an enormous burden.

She took an hour getting dressed in a pressed slate-gray suit she’d never worn before but had bought because it was on sale and elegantly cut. The jacket had this slight flare. She swept her hair into a bun and clasped a pearl necklace from their fifth wedding anniversary around her throat. Daniel came home, and she served him rosemary lamb and chocolate-nut truffles, all bought at the gourmet food store with one hundred dollars of her money. Reinvest for greater profit later. She did not eat, but massaged his shoulders, and brought him coffee, and when he seemed calm and satisfied, she sat down with him at the table.

“You’re being so loving,” he said. “What a week we had, didn’t we?” He warmed his palms against the mug. “And you look great in that suit, Janet. Like one hot businesswoman.”

She set a piece of paper on the table. And then nodded, as if to signal herself to begin.

“I know it’s odd,” she said, with no introduction, “but for whatever reason, I can’t seem to summon up any desire right now to do it without payment.” Her voice was the same one from the lingerie store when she’d walked out with the bustier on. “I need a specific amount, each time,” she said, “or,” clearing her throat, “I feel I will melt into nothingness.” She adjusted the cuffs of her suit jacket so that the buttons lined up right with the gateway into her hand.

“What’s that paper?”

“Just for notes.”

“Are you going somewhere later?” he asked, sipping his coffee.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I’m getting to that,” he said. “You’re just all dressed up, I was trying now to figure out why.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said coldly. “I dressed up for you.”

He replaced his coffee in the center of the small white napkin. “Well, you look very nice,” he said. “As usual. But, Janet,” he said, “please, will you tell me why more money, why? If it’s to please me, I am so pleased. You and I had a wonderful time this week, and I will remember it forever.”

“Me too,” she said, nodding. “Forever.”

“But, then, why more money?” he asked, moving his chair closer to her. “Wasn’t it just a game? Don’t you like our sex? Isn’t sex its own reward? What can we do differently?”

He reached out his hand, warm from cupping the mug, and placed it on her collarbone, tracing the line with his finger.

“It’s good,” Janet said briskly, “I like it, I like how you touch me on my back, I like the pace and the kissing, and I like it.” Daniel moved his finger to the dip at the hollow of her throat, but her voice did not shift or relax. “But Daniel,” she continued, “let me make something clear. Maybe you did not know this, but nothing is its own reward for me.” She stared at his face as directly as she could. The words felt like fireballs in her mouth. “I want you to understand that. You don’t have to understand why, just that it’s true.”

“That nothing is its own reward? Really?”

She sat up straighter. “Now, we can of course reduce the fee to make it more financially feasible. Fifty?”

He took his hand off her body and placed it back on the table. “I mean, Janet,” he said, “do you have any idea how hard I am working my ass off to make—”

“Twenty?” she said. “I know you’re working so hard, honey, I know. But it would mean so much to me.” As soon as her voice softened, it began to break apart. “I can hardly explain how much it means to me.”

“Twenty?” he said. “Twenty?” He stuck out his lower lip, thinking. “Twenty? Jesus. I suppose I could do twenty for another week, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to. And is nothing its own reward, Janet? Really? Isn’t love its own reward?”

“Or thirty?” she asked, sorry now that she’d gone so low.

“Twenty, Janet,” said Daniel. “And then come on, now. How much money can you really make in a week off twenty dollars? Do you have something you need to buy and don’t want to tell me about? Do you think you should reconsider going back to work?”

“Twenty-five?” she murmured, tears in her eyes.

He sipped the last of his coffee very slowly, and when her eyes spilled he leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Twenty-five,” he said. “Fine. Until November 1, though, and then we’re back to regular. Okay?”

“November 8?” she asked, brushing dry her cheeks.

“Janet!”

She moved closer and pressed him desperately to her. “Our love is wonderful,” she said. “I know that. I know it’s true.”

His nose pushed into the smoothness of her hair. “We’re each other’s reward,” he offered, but she just dug her head deeper into his shoulder and whispered into the caves of his neck.

“November 8, then,” he said. “And that’s it-it-it.”

“Thank you, Daniel,” she breathed. “You have no idea.”

After they hugged, he went to watch TV. She wrote it all down carefully on the paper: November 8. 25 dollars. 770 currently. As if she would forget.

Starting the next morning, she initiated sex every day. If the week before had been largely his fantasy enacted, now it was all hers. In the shower, in the darkness under all the covers of the bed, at his warehouse among the shoeboxes in his work boots. It felt slightly pathetic to her that she had to do four now to each one before to make the same amount of cash, but she was ravenously hungry for contact all day long, and Daniel, who had grown accustomed—before the previous week—to a steady but slightly lackluster sex life, let her enthusiasm spark his own. He took a lunch with Edward as a break, and only begged fatigue a few times when Janet’s demand was kind of overwhelming, he said, since he’d just gotten home and just this morning in the shower and he needed some food and couldn’t they watch TV tonight?

She laughed with big red smudge-free lips and fed him and let him watch four sitcoms in a row, but before he fell asleep she was on him again and said he didn’t have to do anything at all but just be still and sleepy and she would complete all the movement.

At the end of the week, on Sunday afternoon, she presented him with a tidy bill, typewritten, accounting for each time, and labeling where/when it had happened, with a dotted line and a $25 at the end. The total for that first week was $250. A small amount compared with the easy near-thousand of the previous week, but a clear exchange nonetheless. Daniel paid it into her palm, in cash, counting backwards.

“Sunday’s my day off,” he said when she started to undo her bra. “Go do something else, honey, please.” He plopped in front of the TV with a bowl of rice cereal to watch some football, and Janet gathered herself into the pale-blue bathtub and attended to her body quietly in there, moaning softly under the whir of the bathroom fan; afterward, she paid herself fifty dollars by transferring funds from her savings to her checking account. That made three hundred dollars for the week.

November 8 shot around the corner in a blink; it was probably the quickest two weeks of her life. And it was not enough. That much was clear instantly. She had started, by now, to see the entire world in terms of currencies. She considered charging her few friends for their lunches based on who demanded more time and attention during the lunch itself, charging strangers a quarter in the supermarket aisle when they did not move their cart in time. Charging for each meal she cooked, including tip. One afternoon, when her father sailed off into one of his long monologues on the phone, she actually tape-recorded their conversation and then took four hours and typed it out as a script, with his endless speech on the right side of the page and her responses on the left: yes, uh-huh, of course. It was amazing, to see the contrast. How long were those pageful reports. How little she spoke. How wealthy she would be if she just charged him a dollar a word.

I am twenty-four-hour resentment, said Janet, in her bustier, to the glinting mirror. I am every-cell resentment. I am one hell of a big resentment, she said. The mirror and wall did not answer. They knew very well what she was like by now. But when had it shifted? In high school, she’d walked tall in her own deprivation and had volunteered at the homeless shelter in her free time. She bought her dad charming birthday gifts, and the homeless shelter made her a mobile saying she was wonderful, with each paper letter brightly colored, hanging from the stick. The “N” and “R” fell off in a week, so over her bed, for years, the stick slowly turned, announcing “WODEFUL.” I am grateful, she’d said every day in high school, grateful for the food on my plate and the roof over my head. Grateful for my dad. Grateful I live in a country where we have options. For our beautiful environment, she said on Saturdays, sorting through the sticky plastic bottles at the recycling center.

Now, years later, even washing a single dish irritated her. I do everything around here, she grumbled to herself while moving the sponge over the circle. Even though she knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t done the dishes in weeks. Daniel changed all the lightbulbs and paid the bills. He rubbed her feet and listened to her complaints. The truth was, she just didn’t want to do anything at all. She did not want to have a job or have children or clean the bathroom or say hello. She only did a dish with happiness just after Daniel had done a dish. She only bought Daniel a present after he’d just bought a present for her, and even then she made sure her present wasn’t quite as good as his.

It disgusted her as she did it, but it was the truth. She certainly liked the image of herself as the benevolent wife with arms full of flowers, but if she bought the flowers she would spend part of the ride home feeling so righteous and pleased that she had bought flowers; what a good wife she was; wasn’t he a lucky man; until, by the time she arrived home with the flowers, she’d be angry he hadn’t bought her flowers.

She reached out a hand to touch the cool sweep of the wall.

“It seems,” she said to it, “that I have lost my generosity.”

Her whole body filled with a sparkling panic, painful and visceral as poison champagne, because she did not know how to get it back.

The grand total on November 8 was $1,245. Daniel paid her the remaining money and gave her a fake sad look that could not disguise his relief, and then trundled off to the bathroom to get ready for work. She ironed the new bills, and packed them all into her tiny pocketbook of black velvet with the glittery clasp. The cash poked out its green fingers and her heels made pointed bites in the cement as she walked down the street, past the stores. She kept opening up the clasp of her purse and sticking her hand in there and stroking the money like it was a fur glove or a child’s hair. What with the angle at which she held her bag and that look on her face, to passersby it seemed vaguely like she was masturbating.

People looked away. It was either that, or stare. She was magnetically disturbing to watch.

She stopped when she reached the mall, big and curvy. She roamed the three floors and mingled with all the people milling about with their big paper shopping bags and worn, drawn faces.

Inside the biggest and fanciest department store, at one end of the mall shops, she walked around the various sections of women’s clothing, and observed all the different desks, and the different sets of salespeople. She watched for almost an hour, noting how each saleswoman interacted with customers, and how she looked, until she settled on the one she liked best. This was in the women’s impulse department. The saleslady was about Janet’s age, a little younger, and had a red velvet ribbon tied neatly around her neck, just like the horror story Janet had once heard about a woman who wears a velvet ribbon around her neck her whole life, every second of every day, until the one night when her curious husband removes it and her head falls off.

“Excuse me,” said Janet, resting her pocketbook on the counter. “I have a question for you.”

“Sure.” The saleslady reupholstered her salesface in seconds. “How can I help you?”

“Do you support yourself?” Janet asked. She smiled, as amiably as she could.

“Pardon me?”

“I know it’s an unusual question, but do you support yourself? Are you self-supported? Financially?”

The saleslady squinched up her nose. “Well,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I am. Why do you ask?”

“And do you have a boyfriend?” Janet took in the bare left ring finger. Then she refixed her eyes on that red ribbon. The more she looked at it, the more it did seem to be glued to the woman’s neck, and the red of the ribbon was the perfect shade to bring out the red in her lips and the brown of her eyes. It was the kind of glorious and simple fashion move you could stare at for hours in admiration.

The saleslady laughed, uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, are you looking for clothes, ma’am? These are fairly personal questions. There’s a sale on pencil skirts on the right.”

“But do you?”

“Why?”

“I’ll look for clothes in a second,” said Janet. “I need a cream turtleneck. Ribbed. Wool. Expensive. I’ll need two, maybe three. But I’m just curious. Do you?”

“Well, yes,” said the saleslady.

“Then, please, let me just ask you a little bit more,” Janet said, leaning on the counter. She hugged her pocketbook into her chest. “It’s for a study. Who talks more?” she asked.

The saleslady narrowed her eyes at Janet, and then relaxed against the cash register. Business was slow; only a few other customers rotated around the perimeter of the department.

“You mean when? Like during dinner?” asked the saleslady.

“Whenever. Sure.”

“Depends on who has more to say that day, I guess.”

“And who pays, if you’re out?”

“We usually split it,” said the saleslady. “We both make about the same salary. Or one will take the other. There’s no rule. What kind of turtleneck? You might want sportswear instead, that’s one floor down. Did you say wool?”

Now, in addition to the ribbon, Janet noticed how the delicate mole punctuating the tip of the saleslady’s eyebrow looked just like Venus at the tip of a crescent moon. Perfection.

“And do you regularly orgasm?” asked Janet.

“Excuse me?”

Janet held still. She could hear the cash registers erupt into sound around them. Printing out receipts over the sounds of pens signing shiny credit card paper that curls into itself.

“Please,” said Janet. “I know it’s very forward, but please. It would mean an enormous amount to me to know.”

The saleslady’s eyes dodged around the store.

“The turtlenecks are downstairs,” she said. “You’d better go down there. There’s a woman downstairs in that department who likes to talk about things like this. You should ask her. Molly. Look for Molly.”

Janet shook her head. “I want to ask you,” she said.

The saleslady was fidgeting all around the cash register now, pushing buttons, ripping tissue paper, as if she were trapped in there.

Janet took a breath. “Look,” she said. “I’m sure I seem crazy, but I’m not. I just don’t know what it’s like for other people. I live a sheltered life. Do you keep track? I don’t want to ask Molly, because I don’t want to be like Molly. This will be my last question, honestly.”

Janet fumbled in her purse and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills.

“I’ll pay you,” she said firmly.

The saleslady stared at the bills and balled the ripped tissue paper into hard pellets.

“Two hundred dollars?” She glanced over her shoulder. “For one question? Are you serious?”

Janet didn’t even blink.

The saleslady’s eyebrows crunched in, and the mole pulled closer to her temple.

“It’s for a study?”

A nod. “A self-study.”

“And then you’ll stop?”

Another nod.

“And are you a member of this store?”

Janet rummaged in her wallet and this time produced a bronze store credit card.

“Well,” the saleslady said, bobbing her head tightly, “if it’s worth that much to you. Fairly regularly, yes. What would you call regular?”

“Majority of the time,” Janet said.

“Fine, then,” said the saleslady. “Majority of the time. About seventy percent, through one method or another. Easier on some days than others. I don’t keep track, no. Better off the pill than on. Nicer for me at night than in the morning. Now. Done! The turtlenecks are that way.”

Her face was flushed. The red ribbon matched, in perfect harmony, the blush high on her cheeks.

Janet thrust the bills forward and held herself back from taking the woman’s hand and kissing it.

“Thank you.” She felt her eyes watering. “You are really very beautiful.” The yearning in her voice was so palpable it caught them both by surprise.

The saleslady stared at the money and broke into uncomfortable giggles before she grabbed it and strode off into the suit section. The older, blonder manager meandered over from across the room, sensing a need for managerial skills.

“Can I help you?” she asked Janet, now standing alone at the register.

“I need a turtleneck,” said Janet.

In the horror story, the woman tells the man that she loves him, and she will marry him, but he must never remove the red velvet ribbon around her neck. It is the one thing he can never ask of her. At first it’s the easiest trade; he complies for years and they are blissfully happy, but after a while it begins, in a slow broil, to burn him up inside. Why all the mystery? He unties the ribbon late at night, while she sleeps, and screams when her head rolls onto the floor.

Before, at summer camp, the story had always made Janet puff with righteousness. What a pushy spoiler of a husband. Wasn’t their happiness enough? Couldn’t he respect her one rule? One? But in the dressing room, her nose full of the clean smell of new turtleneck, she felt the story tugging at her. Something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. As she paid cash for the turtlenecks—three: cream, fuchsia, black—she told a quick version of the story to the blonde manager, a woman who clearly knew her way in the world. Strong shoulders, proud large hands, open smile. “What do you think it means?” Janet asked. Far off in the distance, she could see the saleslady of her choice rehanging blouses on a rack.

The manager flattened out the receipt to sign.

“I remember that story,” the manager said, sighing. “I had the cutest camp boyfriend.”

“I mean, why not just be happy with the way things are, right?” said Janet.

The manager took the signed receipt and put it in the register’s pile. She folded the turtlenecks, separating them with sheets of tissue paper, and then slipped all three into a bag. “But can you blame him?” she said, handing the bag to Janet. “I mean, I’m all for clothes, but at a certain point, they’re supposed to go away, you know? How long were they married?”

“I don’t know,” said Janet, taking the bag. “Story doesn’t say.”

“Take it all off!” said the manager. She winked at Janet. “Turtlenecks are good that way too.”

Across the room, the woman with the red ribbon had finished lining up the blouses and moved on to the slacks. It was true, what the manager said. That ribbon was practically made to be removed. Even Janet herself wanted to slide over and undo the knot and unspool the choker from the woman’s throat.

So—the man didn’t know what was coming, Janet thought as she walked to the escalator. They’d been married for years, and he wanted her to give up the last thread of cover so she would stand before him nude and he could make love to her entire skin.

Well, of course that made her head fall off. Of course.

At home that night, wearing her new fuchsia turtleneck, Janet made a simple dinner of spaghetti and red sauce from a jar. She and Daniel ate together in silence. When they were both done, he cleared the dishes and put them in the sink.

“Thank you,” he said, at the counter. “That was very good.”

She watched him run water over the forks. His hair needed a cut—it was getting too long on the sides.

“It’s November 9,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Thank you again.”

He dried the forks with a cloth. He seemed unusually quiet.

“You know, you were right,” she said, brushing crumbs off the table into her palm. “What you said a few weeks ago. About your wife.”

He didn’t turn from the sink. “When I brought you flowers?”

“Yes.”

“And what did I say again?”

“That she does not love you very well.”

He ran his finger under the tap, back and forth, and poured a glob of dish soap on the pile of plates. “Actually, I think I said something different.”

She picked up the drying cloth. “Oh?”

“I think I said that she doesn’t love me at all.”

He cleared a dish clean with the sponge.

She leaned over, to touch his arm. “Oh, Daniel,” she said. “You know that’s not true.”

She could feel the turtleneck, climbing up to cover her neck, her shoulders, her torso. Pants, covering up her legs. Socks, over her feet. Underwear, over her pubic hair. A bra, over her breasts.

“I want to do better,” she said, quietly.

He placed a dish carefully in the dish rack, lining the circle up with the bent wire.

“Do you ever think about leaving?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He turned to her. His eyes were bright. “Sometimes I do,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Think about leaving,” he said.

She shook her head at him, confused. “But you can’t leave,” she said. “You’re the devoted one.”

His eyes were kind, and sad, at the sink.

“Are you leaving?” she said, and her voice rose, sharp.

“No.” But there was a softness to his tone that implied a question, or the very first hint of a question mark, and she could see, suddenly, that they were on their way to leaving already, that this conversation was only a walking through a door already open, and once those eyes left they were not going to return and the clothing would be no barrier at all, nothing, shreds, tissue, for all the pain then rushing in.

Tiger Mending

My sister got the job. She’s the overachiever, and she went to med school for two years before she decided she wanted to be a gifted seamstress. (What? they said, on the day she left. A surgeon! they told her. You could be a tremendous surgeon! But she said she didn’t like the late hours, she got too tired around midnight.) She has small motor skills better than a machine; she’ll fix your handkerchief so well you can’t even see the stitches, like she became one with the handkerchief. I once split my lip, jumping from the tree, and she sewed it up with ice and a needle she’d run through the fire. I barely even had a scar, just the thinnest white line.

So of course, when the two women came through the sewing school, they spotted her first. She was working on her final exam, a lime-colored ball gown with tiny diamonds sewn into the collar, and she was fully absorbed in it, constructing infinitesimal loops, while they hovered with their severe hair and heady tree-smell—like bamboo, my sister said—watching her work. My sister’s so steady she didn’t even flinch, but everyone else in class seized upon the distraction, staring at the two Amazonian women, both six feet tall and strikingly beautiful. When I met them later, I felt like I’d landed straight inside a magazine ad. At the time, I was working at Burger King, as block manager (there were two on the block), and I took any distraction offered me and used it to the hilt. Once, a guy came in and ordered a Big Mac, and for two days I told that story to every customer, and it’s not a good story. There’s so rarely any intrigue in this shabberdash world of burger warming; you take what you can get.

But my sister was born with supernatural focus, and the two women watched her and her alone. Who can compete? My sister’s won all the contests she’s ever been in, not because she’s such an outrageous competitor, but because she’s so focused in this gentle way. Why not win? Sometimes it’s all you need to run the fastest, or to play the clearest piano, or to ace the standardized test, pausing at each question until it has slid through your mind to exit as a penciled-in circle.

In low, sweet voices, the women asked my sister if she’d like to see Asia. She finally looked up from her work. Is there a sewing job there? They nodded. She said she’d love to see Asia, she’d never left America. They said, Well, it’s a highly unusual job. May I bring my sister? she asked. She’s never traveled either.

The two women glanced at each other. What does your sister do?

She’s manager of the Burger Kings down on Fourth.

Their disapproval was faint but palpable, especially in the upper lip.

She would simply keep you company?

What we are offering you is a position of tremendous privilege. Aren’t you interested in hearing about it first?

My sister nodded lightly. It sounds very interesting, she said. But I cannot travel without my sister.

This is true. My sister, the one with that incredible focus, has a terrible fear of airplanes. Terrible. Incapacitating. The only way she can relax on a flight is if I am there, because I am always, always having some kind of crisis, and she focuses in and fixes me and forgets her own concerns. I become her ripped hemline. In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy. I’m really really lucky she’s my sister. Otherwise no one like her would give someone like me the time of day.

The two Amazonian women, lousy with confidence, with their ridiculous cheekbones, in these long yellow print dresses, said okay. They observed my sister’s hands quiet in her lap.

Do you get along with animals? they asked, and she said, Yes. She loved every animal. Do you have allergies to cats? they asked, and she said, No. She was allergic only to pine nuts. The slightly taller one reached into her dress pocket, a pocket so well hidden inside the fabric it was like she was reaching into the ether of space, and from it her hand returned with an airplane ticket.

We are very happy to have found you, they said. The additional ticket will arrive tomorrow.

My sister smiled. I know her; she was probably terrified to see that ticket, and also she really wanted to return to the diamond loops. She probably wasn’t even that curious about the new job yet. She was and is stubbornly, mind-numbingly, interested in the present moment.

When we were kids, I used to come home and she’d be at the living room window. It was the best window in the apartment, looking out, in the far distance, on the tip of a mountain. For years, I tried to get her to play with me, but she was unplayable. She stared out that window, never moving, for hours. By night, when she’d returned, I’d usually injured myself in some way or other, and I’d ask her about it while she tended to me; she said the reason she could pay acute attention now was because of the window. It empties me out, she said, which scared me. No, she said to my frightened face, as she sat on the edge of my bed and ran a washcloth over my forehead. It’s good, she said. It makes room for other things.

Me? I asked, with hope, and she nodded. You.

We had no parents by that point. One had left, and the other died at the hands of a surgeon, which is the real reason my sister stopped medical school.

That night, she called me up and told me to quit my job, which was what I’d been praying for for months—that somehow I’d get a magical phone call telling me to quit my job because I was going on an exciting vacation. I threw down my BK apron, packed, and prepared as long an account of my life complaints as I could. On the plane, I asked my sister what we were doing, what her job was, but she refolded her tray table and said nothing. Asia, I said. What country? She stared out the porthole. It was the pilot who told us, as we buckled our seat belts: we were heading to Kuala Lumpur, straight into the heart of Malaysia.

Wait, where’s Malaysia again? I whispered, and my sister drew a map on the napkin beneath her ginger ale.

During the flight, I drank Bloody Marys while my sister embroidered a doily. Even the other passengers seemed soothed by watching her work. I whispered all my problems into her ear, and she returned them to me in slow sentences that did the work of a lullaby. My eyes grew heavy. During the descent, she gave the doily to the man across the aisle, worried about his ailing son, and the needlework was so elegant it made him feel better just to hold it. That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in.

At the airport curbside, a friendly driver picked us up and took us to a cheerful green hotel, where we found a note on the bed telling my sister to be ready at 6 a.m. sharp. It didn’t say I could come, but bright and early the next morning, scrubbed and fed, we faced the two Amazons in the lobby, who looked scornfully at me and my unsteady hands—I sort of pick at my hair a lot—and asked my sister why I was there. Can’t she watch? she asked, and they said they weren’t sure. She, they said, might be too anxious.

I swear I won’t touch anything, I said.

This is a private operation, they said.

My sister breathed. I work best when she’s nearby, she said. Please.

And like usual, it was the way she said it. In that gentle voice that had a back to it. They opened the car door.

Thank you, my sister said.

They blindfolded us for reasons of security, and we drove for more than an hour, down winding, screeching roads, parking finally in a place that smelled like garlic and fruit. In front of a stone mansion, two more women dressed in printed robes waved as we removed our blindfolds. These two were short. Delicate. Calm. They led us into the living room, and we hadn’t been there for ten minutes when we heard the moaning.

A bad moaning sound. A real bad, real mournful moaning, coming from the north, outside, that reminded me of the worst loneliness, the worst long lonely night. The Amazonian with the short shining cap of hair nodded.

Those are the tigers, she said.

What tigers? I said.

Sssh, she said. I will call her Sloane, for no reason except that it’s a good name for an intimidating person.

Sloane said, Sssh. Quiet, now. She took my sister by the shoulders and led her to the wide window that looked out on the land. As if she knew, instinctively, how wise it was to place my sister at a window.

Watch, Sloane whispered.

I stood behind. The two women from the front walked into view and settled on the ground near some clumps of ferns. They waited. They were very still-minded, like my sister, that stillness of mind. That ability I will never have, to sit still. That ability to have the hands forget they are hands. They closed their eyes, and the moaning I’d heard before got louder, and then, in the distance, I mean waaaay off, the moaning grew even louder, almost unbearable to hear, and limping from the side lumbered two enormous tigers. Wailing as if they were dying. As they got closer, you could see that their backs were split open, sort of peeled, as if someone had torn them in two. The fur was matted, and the stripes hung loose, like packing tape ripped off their bodies. The women did not seem to move, but two glittering needles worked their way out of their knuckles, climbing up out of their hands, and one of the tigers stepped closer. I thought I’d lose it; he was easily four times the first woman’s size, and she was small, a tiger’s snack, but he limped over, in his giantness, and fell into her lap. Let his heavy striped head sink to the ground. She smoothed the stripe back over, and the moment she pierced his fur with the needle, those big cat eyes dripped over with tears.

It was very powerful. It brought me to tears, too. Those expert hands, as steady as if he were a pair of pants, while the tiger’s enormous head hung to the ground. My sister didn’t move, but I cried and cried, seeing the giant broken animal resting in the lap of the small precise woman. It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moment. When our father died in surgery, the jerk at the liquor store suddenly became the nicest man alive, and gave us free cranberry juice for a year.

What happened to them? I asked Sloane. Why are they like that?

She lifted her chin slightly. We do not know, but they emerge from the forests, peeling. More and more of them. Always torn at the central stripe.

Do they ever eat people?

Not so far, she said. But they do not respond well to fidgeting, she said, watching me clear out my thumbnail with my other thumbnail.

Well, I’m not doing it.

You have not been asked.

They are so sad, said my sister.

Well, wouldn’t you be? said Sloane. If you were a tiger, unpeeling?

She put a hand on my sister’s shoulder. When the mending was done, all four—women and beasts—sat in the sun for at least half an hour, tigers’ chests heaving, women’s hands clutched in their fur. The day grew warm. In the distance, the moaning began again, and two more tigers limped up while the first two stretched out and slept. The women sewed the next two, and the next. One had a bloody rip across its white belly.

After a few hours of work, the women put their needles away, the tigers raised themselves up, and, without any lick or acknowledgment, walked off, deep into that place where tigers live. The women returned to the house. Inside, they smelled so deeply and earthily of cat that they were almost unrecognizable. They also seemed lighter, nearly giddy. It was lunchtime. They joined us at the table, where Sloane served an amazing soup of curry and prawns.

It is an honor, said Sloane, to mend the tigers.

I see, said my sister.

You will need very little training, since your skill level is already so high.

But my sister seemed frightened, in a way I hadn’t seen before. She didn’t eat much of her soup, and she returned her eyes to the window, to the tangles of fluttering leaves.

I would have to go find out, she said finally, when the chef entered with a tray of mango tartlets.

Find out what?

Why they unpeel, she said. She hung her head, as if she was ashamed of her interest.

You are a mender, said Sloane, gently. Not a zoologist.

I support my sister’s interest in the source, I said.

Sloane flinched every time I opened my mouth.

The source, my sister echoed.

The world has changed, said Sloane, passing a mango tartlet to me, reluctantly, which I ate, pronto.

It was unlike my sister to need the cause. She was fine, usually, with just how things were. But she whispered to me—as we roamed outside looking for clues, of which we found none—she whispered that she felt something dangerous in the unpeeling, and she felt she would have to know about it in order to sew the tiger suitably. I am not worried about the sewing, she said. I am worried about the gesture I place inside the thread.

I nodded. I am a good fighter, is all. I don’t care about thread gestures, but I am willing to throw a punch at some tiger asshole if need be.

We spent the rest of the day outside, but there were no tigers to be seen—where they lived was somewhere far, far off, and the journey they took to arrive here must have been the worst time of their lives, ripped open like that, suddenly prey to vultures or other predators, when they were usually the ones to instill fear.

We slept that night at the mansion, in feather beds so soft I found them impossible to sleep in. Come morning, Sloane had my sister join the two women outside, and I cried again, watching the big tiger head at her feet while she sewed with her usual stillness. The three together were unusually productive, and sewn tigers piled up around them. But instead of that giddiness that showed up in the other women, my sister grew heavier that afternoon, and said she was sure she was doing something wrong. Oh no, said Sloane, serving us tea. You were remarkable.

I am missing something, said my sister. I am missing something important.

Sloane retired for a nap, but I snuck out. I had been warned, but really, they were treating me like shit anyway. I walked a long distance, but I’m a sturdy walker, and I trusted where my feet went, and I did not like the sight of my sister staring into her teacup. I did not like the feeling it gave me, of worrying. Before I left, I sat her in front of the window and told her to empty herself, and her eyes were grateful in a way I was used to feeling in my own face but was not accustomed to seeing in hers.

I walked for hours, and the wet air clung to my shirt and hair. I took a nap inside some ferns. The sun was setting, and I would’ve walked all night, but when I reached a cluster of trees, something felt different. There was no wailing yet, but I could feel the stirring before the wailing, which is almost worse. I swear I could hear the dread. I climbed up a tree and waited.

I don’t know what I expected—people, I guess. People with knives, cutting in. I did not expect to see the tigers themselves, jumpy, agitated, yawning their mouths beyond wide, the wildness in their eyes, and finally the yawning so large and insistent that they split their own backs in two. They all did it, one after another—as if they wanted to pull the fur off their backs, and then, amazed at what they’d done, the wailing began.

One by one, they left the trees and began their slow journey to be mended. It left me with the oddest, most unsettled feeling.

I walked back when it was night, under a half-moon, and found my sister still at the window.

They do it to themselves, I whispered to her, and she took my hand. Her face lightened. Thank you, she said. She tried to hug me, but I pulled away. No, I said, and in the morning, I left for the airport.

Faces

On an unusual day during my childhood, my mother showed up at school and asked me questions about myself. I was twelve or so then, and generally I found my own way home: bus, walk, hitchhike, bike, get pushed forward by the shoe soles of others. I hardly recognized her car, waiting there by the flagpole with all the other mothercars until she honked and beckoned me inside.

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” I said at the window.

“Get in, William,” she said, pushing open the door. “How was school?”

“Why are you picking me up?”

“Get in,” she said, pushing the door open more.

I had, right then, a fast stab of fear in my stomach, like maybe she would kidnap me. Except for the fact that she had birthed me. It was confusing.

I settled into the passenger seat.

“So,” she said, as she pulled out of the school lot. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” I said.

“How are your friends?”

“Fine,” I said.

“That’s good. What did you do today?”

“We played war. How are you?”

…

…

“You played war on the playground?”

“Yes.”

“War is not a game, William. Your uncle—”

“I mean we played tag. I forgot. Sorry.”

“Oh. And was that fun?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve always enjoyed tag myself.”

“Tag is a classic.”

We turned onto the main street, by the shopping area. My mother used to work nearby as an administrative assistant, but she had lost her job the month before. “We have nothing left to administer,” they told her.

“And who do you like the best of your friends?” she said.

“Mom,” I asked, picking at the seat belt, “why are you here? It smells like French fries.”

“Is there a friend you like more than the others?”

“Not really,” I said. “I like them all the same.”

She eyed the driver behind us in her rearview mirror, waving as she changed lanes.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Nowhere special. Do you have someplace to be?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Do I have someplace to be?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Good, then. Now, why don’t you tell me one of your friends’ names.”

“Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”

“I just want to know one of your friends’ names,” she said, slowing down at a light.

“Gath,” I said.

“Last name?”

“Gath.”

“First name?”

“Gath.”

“Gath Gath?”

“Sure.”

She smiled straight ahead, but her eyes were wavering.

“What do you mean, sure?”

“That sounds about right,” I said. “Can we stop for fries?”

“But is it his real name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Gath Gath?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“You don’t know your friends’ names?”

I opened the glove box to discover many neat stacks of paper about cars and their insides.

“So what do you call them if their back is to you?”

I thought about it for a second. The car in front of us had a kid facing out in the backseat, waving and waving.

“I call them Hey or You,” I said, waving back.

She almost laughed, but it turned into a grunt. The kid turned left. Bye. We drove into the mall, and I sat in the parking lot while she went shoe shopping. Half an hour later, she returned, smelling suspiciously of chocolate cake. “The shoes in there,” she said, “are so expensive!” She handed over a bread roll. She didn’t want to bring me in with her because last time mall security found me quietly moving items in the department store into the wrong departments.

She brought it all up again at the dinner table that night, over spaghetti and red sauce.

“My friends have many names,” said my little sister, Ginny, promptly. “Angie, Kevette, Marjorie, Orrel—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”

Dad tilted his head down to his plate. He wasn’t often home before nine, so this was a rare encounter, to be all eating at the same time. It felt like some kind of grand coincidence.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

My mother shook her head. “You don’t get it,” she said. “He honestly doesn’t know his friends’ names, and these are kids he sees at school every single day.”

“I know who they are,” I said. “They’re my group of friends.”

“Do they look different to you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean can you tell them apart from each other?”

I took a sip of juice to stall. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—do you know one from the other?”

“Three of them are kind of the same,” I said, wiping my mouth. “Then there’s the really tall one! He’s different.”

My mother stared at my father. “Are you hearing this?”

“I’m exhausted,” he said, drawing his hand down his face. “I think I single-handedly saved the company today.”

“Which company?” asked Ginny.

“The one that sells bottles,” he said. “The plastic-bottle one.”

“Oh!” she said. “My favorite!” She jumped down from her chair and sped into the bathroom, then returned with a yellow plastic bottle of shampoo, just to show she could identify his work in the world at large. He mussed her hair. My mother poured herself a little glass of cheap sherry and forwent her spaghetti altogether, and who can blame her, since it was pretty much just noodles stirred with ketchup.

“So,” said my mother. “You can’t tell your friends from each other. Can you tell me from your father?”

“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Easy.”

She coughed mid-sip. Dad was explaining plastic-bottle structure to Ginny and didn’t hear, which is too bad, because he, for one, might’ve laughed.

“Am I Mom?” asked Ginny, pretending to listen to Dad.

“Your uncles,” asked Mom.

“I’ve never met,” I said.

“Your grandparents?”

“Which ones?”

“Any.”

“I can mostly tell them apart,” I said. “For example, there’s the demented one.”

“William!” said my mother, clearing her dish. She scraped spaghetti into the trash can.

“There is a lipid in the cellular structure,” said Dad.

“We need to take you to the doctor,” Mom said. “There’s something very wrong with you.”

“He is so messed up,” murmured Ginny.

“Why’d you pick me up today in the first place?” I asked.

My mother sipped her sherry in the kitchen and sniffed. My father had evaporated from the table by now; I found him reconstituted on the sofa, asleep, with a book on his lap about the history of plastics, and the bottle of shampoo nestled against his stomach like a baby.

The next day, my relentless mother:

“Enough kidding around, William,” she said. “You’re very funny. Now, who, specifically, did you eat lunch with today?”

“All five Gath brothers,” I said. “They were at school two days in a row!”

“And which one is the nicest?” she asked.

“None of them is the least bit nice.”

She stopped dusting a birdbath made of wire, complete with wire birds and little wire-looped water drops falling from a wire tree.

“Or which Gath brother talks the most?”

“All of them the same.”

“No one talks more than the others?”

“No,” I said. “All of them at once.”

“How can you possibly understand anything if they’re all talking at once?”

“Easy,” I said, swaying. “You just go with the flow of it.”

She shook her rag in the air, and a muggy cloud of dust sank to the carpet. “This is rapidly becoming like a bad Abbott and Hardy routine,” she said. “Except it isn’t funny.”

“Why are you so interested all of a sudden?” I said. “Who are your friends? How come I don’t know any of their names?”

She closed the shelf and locked it, half-dusted. She always locked it, like I was going to steal a wire birdbath and keep it for my very own. Then she brought out a series of knickknacks and put them on the coffee table. A stone lizard, an ashtray of rock, a glass princess.

“Never mind me,” she said. “Now, which one is glass?”

I pointed to the princess. “I’m not stupid,” I said.

“Which one is a lizard?”

I pointed to the ashtray.

“The lizard, William,” she said.

I pointed at the ashtray again, with no expression.

She blinked up at me, alarmed, and I held it for a second and then just laughed and laughed until I fell on the floor, laughing. I had to eat dinner that night in my room. Leftover ketchup spaghetti, cold. I have no problem at all identifying objects.

Later that night, when I took out the trash, I found a magazine called Mother Magazine on top of the pile, and to make my sleuthing even easier, it fell right open to a quiz called “How Well Do You Know Your Children?” I could see her fresh pencil scrawls all over the page. Questions like: Do you know where your child is after school? She had G: “yes.” W: “no.” Do you know the names of your child’s friends? G: “yes.” W: “no.” Do you know your child’s favorite color? G: “yellow.” W: “blue.” (Which is wrong. I don’t believe in picking a favorite color; it seems like a pretty dumb thing to rank, if you ask me.) Do you know any of your child’s fears? G: “death, and chemical warfare.” W: “?Friends?” And: Do you know what your child might like to be when he/she grows up? G: “vet or singer.” W: “?army?”

The magazine had a rating scale too—if you got 85–100 percent of the questions, which she did with Ginny, you were “A Mother to Be Reckoned With!” and it said how great you were, how tuned in, how involved. The middle category was something like “Hang In There, Mom, You’re Trying!” and the final one, which she got for me, was “Mother, May I Suggest Some Mothering?”

“This was all for a quiz?” I said to her when I went inside, washing trash juice off my hands, and she finished folding up the newspaper into neat rectangles and said she was sure she had no idea what I was talking about.

The following day, after school, we drove half an hour away to the doctor, who was both a specialist in perception and also miraculously covered under our scant insurance. In the waiting room, we sat on different sofas, and my mother read the magazine on brides and I read the one with the weekly news report that has a section in the back about how to raise your kid, which I find hilarious.

“Robertson!” called out the receptionist. I grabbed a handful of hard candies on my way in.

The doctor’s chambers were white-walled and blue-trash-canned and orange-chaired. I ate a cinnamon and a peppermint at once. The doctor strode in with coat and clipboard, and my mother launched into it right away: “Hello there, Doctor, thank you so much for seeing us, my son has this funny thing where he has trouble telling the difference between a group and a person.”

“Well,” chortled the doctor, “isn’t that interesting.”

Her neck was so long it seemed strange that she was a doctor specializing in perception.

“Let’s see what we can discover here,” she said. “Hi, William.”

“Hi.”

She stuck instruments into my eyes. She made me read various letters across the room. She had me close one eye and then the other.

“His vision is fine,” she said, after ten minutes.

“Ah,” said my mother.

I chomped down on a butterscotch, and a little shard of gold sugar flew up and stuck on the doctor’s white coat collar.

“Sorry,” I said.

She brushed off her coat and put a few slides up on the wall and had me explain them: Does the line appear to be wavy? It’s really straight. Does the circle above appear to be smaller? It’s really the same size as the one below. “But doesn’t everyone have these perception problems?” I asked, after identifying both the witch and the young girl in the same drawing of a face. “True,” she said. “Sure. But they’re fun to look at, aren’t they?”

She turned the slide projector off and rummaged in a drawer, returning with a photograph of a group of people.

“Let’s try this,” she said. “William, who are these people?”

“They’re a group of people,” I said.

She bobbed her head. “Mmm-hmmm. Okay. And what do these people do?”

“They’re all nurses,” I said.

“That’s right!”

I pointed to the bottom of the photo, where it said Nurse Convention on a black plaque in big white letters.

She nodded; her neck was so long that a nod for her took about four seconds to complete.

“And what can you tell me about any of the people in the picture?”

“They’re all nurses,” I said again.

“And how are they different?”

“They’re different heights,” I said.

“Okay.” She looked in my ear while I was talking.

“My ears feel fine,” I said.

“She’s checking your balance,” whispered my mother, sitting perfectly still in a stiff orange chair in the corner.

The doctor straightened the photo in front of me.

“Now, William,” she said, “can you tell me if any of the nurses are older than the others?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are there elderly nurses in the photo?”

I peered at it. They all looked pretty old to me. I found one with white hair.

“This one seems old,” I said. “He has white hair.”

She looked over my shoulder at the photo. “Okay,” she said. “Good. And you can tell that it’s a man there.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s an old man nurse, right there.”

“And what else can you tell me about them?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “A bunch of nurses in a photo. For a convention.”

She returned to the drawer and brought out another picture. The second photo was of a bunch of young men in the army.

“Soldiers,” I said, pleased with myself. I could tell from the camouflage clothing.

“Okay,” she said. “And?”

“And what?”

“And … how are they different?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “From each other? They’re all soldiers.”

“For example,” she said, “are some happy?”

I looked at it again. They were moving around, some of them. “Sure,” I said. “I suppose some are.”

“Can you tell?”

“Not really,” I said. “You can’t ever tell for sure if someone’s happy or not.”

She pointed to the corner with her fingertip. “What about this one here?”

“What about him?”

“How is he doing?”

I peered closely at his face. “I don’t think he looks too good,” I said. “His expression is weird.”

The doctor blew her nose into a tissue. “He’s getting shot,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Huh. I didn’t see that part yet.”

“You didn’t see his torso?”

“No,” I said. “I was looking at his face, like you asked. Now that I look at his body, I can see that he is getting shot.”

“And so is he happy?”

“Well, I certainly doubt it,” I said. “I’m not a moron.”

“And are any of them dead?”

I looked again at the photo. It took me a long time. Several of the soldiers were lying down. One of the ones lying down had his face in the dirt.

“This one could be dead,” I said, after about five minutes. “But maybe he’s sleeping.”

She unscrewed the earpiece from her instrument and took the photo out of my hands. “Thank you, William,” she said. “Fine. Let’s take a break and try something else for a minute. Of your friends at school, whom do you like the best?”

I could actually hear my mother’s jaw stiffen behind me.

“I like them the same,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really.”

“And do you have friends at school?”

“I just said so, didn’t I? I have a couple of groups I float between; I’m not really in one main group.”

“And can you tell the two groups from each other?”

“Of course,” I said, ripping up the corner of the papery doctor-visit shirt.

“How?”

“They sit in different parts of school,” I said.

“I see,” said the doctor. “And is there a leader in these groups?”

“They change around,” I said.

I turned and glared at my mother. She had her head down, her eyes on the wall, the ceiling, the floor.

“Can we move on, Doc?” I asked. “Any more photos?”

The doctor wrote something on her clipboard and returned to the drawer to take out another picture, this one of a family. I wasn’t sure why she had all these group pictures in her drawer, but maybe she saw people like me all the time.

“How about them?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“They’re all black,” I said. “I can see that.”

“Can you pick out the grandfather?”

I looked for a while. No one had white hair. “No.”

“Can you pick out the baby?”

I looked for a while again, and finally I found a baby stroller, off in the corner.

“There,” I said. “A baby.”

“Can you find the young man?”

I stared at it, but I couldn’t find the young man any more than I could tell who was the grandfather. And just because someone was old didn’t mean he was a grandfather anyway.

“No,” I said. “And it’s not because I’m racist.”

She brought out a similar photo of a family of white people. All I got was the shape of the group made by their heights and the positions of arms and feet.

“This one is sitting,” I said, pointing.

The doctor looked at my mother now. They exchanged a meaningful look.

“What?” I said. “Do I have brain damage? What? Who cares who’s who? I enjoy the general. What’s so wrong with that? Why is this important? If I meet the person and talk to them, I’ll know who they are then.”

My mother was silent.

The doctor was silent.

“Why did you say that?” asked the doctor, after a minute.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you just say all that?”

“Because I hate snap judgments,” I said.

The doctor folded her arms.

“But how do you know?” she asked.

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know we’re making snap judgments?”

I unwrapped another candy. Green peppermint. “No reason,” I said. “My mother gave you a look.”

Now the doctor leaned against the wall.

“So you could see her look?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t she give you a look?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “I gave her a look.”

“But you could see your mother’s look,” said the doctor. “Why?”

“Why?”

“You can’t see an old man. You can’t see a soldier getting shot.”

“I know my mother’s face.”

“Can you see it now?”

I looked over. Truth was, I couldn’t really see her face. I could see big red lips because she was wearing lipstick because she likes to look nice for doctors.

“Make a face, Mrs. Robertson,” the doctor said.

She did something. What, I couldn’t tell.

“Can’t tell,” I said, sucking on the candy.

“But you could tell the earlier look,” said the doctor.

“Just sometimes,” I said. “Are we done?”

“Do you see me as a group?” asked the doctor then, in an all-too-friendly voice.

“I am not retarded,” I said, pulling my shirt back over my head. “I can see that you are one person, and that you have a ridiculously long neck.”

“William!” barked my mother.

“William, may I speak to your mother alone for a moment?” the doctor asked.

I stormed out. I emptied the entire lobby candy jar into my pockets and left the building. There was a candle shop next door, so I went in there and smelled wax for a while; the one that said it smelled like chocolate was wildly misleading. I have an excellent sense of smell. On the street, I tried to look at all the people walking by, but they just looked like walking people to me. I didn’t see why I needed to read their faces. Wasn’t there enough complication in the world already without having to take in the overload of details and universes in every single person’s fucking face?

The drive home was mostly silent. My mother didn’t wave at the drivers when she changed lanes, which is unlike her. In general, she’s at her best in the world with strangers, and gets great reassurance from a wave or a nod between cars. But on this drive home she changed lanes on her own without acknowledgment of anyone and was quiet until we pulled into the driveway.

“I just don’t understand,” is all she said then.

My dad walked in from work late that night, as usual, and found some frozen pizza thawing in the refrigerator by accident. It had never been cooked, but he didn’t bother to heat it up and just ate it cold. “Cold pizza,” he said, smiling at me, as little flecks of cheese fell to the floor. “It’s not the same,” I told him. When he was done, my mother asked if she could speak to him in the other room. Ginny was playing hospital with her torn stuffed animals, and I skulked around their door as they settled in the bedroom and I heard her whisper to my dad that we went today to the doctor who did lots of tests and was very kind and professional and William has a real problem and the doctor diagnosed him with facial illiteracy.

“Wait, what?” I said from the hallway. I leaned in the door frame. “She said what?”

My mother’s eyes were enormous. Okay, I could see them. My mom only, sometimes. My father’s hair was a mess from exhaustive mussing, and he said: “Facial illiteracy? What the hell is that?”

“He cannot read a face,” said my mother, wincing. “He cannot recognize facial or, for that matter, bodily signals. He can’t read people at all. And, Stan,” she said, “it’s true.”

“Oh, whatever,” I said, kicking the door. “I bet the doctor made that name up right on the spot.”

“Go to bed, William.”

“It’s nine o’clock.”

“You’re a growing boy. Go to bed.”

“So what does it mean?” asked my father.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He may have to take special classes. On recognition. Of faces and people. Go to bed, William!”

I stayed by the door until she came and closed it on me.

Shoving my ear against the wood, I heard my father’s tones of mild protest and my mother’s rising pierce. “Soldiers!” she was saying. “All dead! He thought they were happy!”

At the TV, I found Ginny surrounded by her now mended stuffed toys, watching the sitcom about the people who work at the pet store and act like animals. She likes the boss, who talks like a monkey. I tried to look at each actor’s individual face, but all I saw were eyebrows and teeth. No one emerged from the parental bedroom for over an hour, and I fell asleep on the couch. That’s where I woke up with the first light of morning, covered with stuffed bears just barely held together by clusters of staples and tape.

For about a month, I went to classes across town taught by the long-necked doctor. They involved me and her in a dark viewing room, looking at huge slides of babies’ faces crying and laughing, and I had to tell her which was which. The doctor was stupid, because she kept using the same set of slides, and each time she’d tell me which was which, not realizing that every slide had a small gold number embossed in the corner. I just made notes on my leg: 14 is laughing, 13 is sneezing, 12 is crying, 11 is sleeping, etc. Within two weeks, I got eight out of ten on the test (I missed two on purpose), and she seemed very pleased with both of us. “Let’s see how you do for now,” she said, and she let me have my Saturday mornings back, which I used to climb roofs and mess with people’s TV antennae.

My mother did not pick me up from school again. She was back pounding the streets, looking for a job. She did interrogate me several times at the kitchen table when we were home at the same time, but by now I’d learned my lesson. “His name’s John Gath,” I said to her, as I ate my fifth piece of toast. “He talks the most of anyone, and he is the leader of the group. I like him the best, except on the days when he’s in a bad mood.”

“John?” she said.

“John,” I said, chewing the crust. “And his brothers are George and Paul, and his cousins are Rocky and Jo-Jo.”

“And who talks the least?” she asked, brushing ants into the trash can. I watched them climb out.

“Jo-Jo,” I said, “is a quiet sort. By the way, my favorite color is blue.”

“Blue,” she sighed, leaning back on the counter. “That’s a good one. Have you done your homework?”

“All done,” I said. “Did you get a job?”

“Soon,” she said.

You know what I like to look at? The birdbaths, locked up. The stuffed bear stuck together with staples and tape. The TV. The refrigerator. I like the car. The changing weather. The taste of wrong-color peppermints. The doctor’s neck.

On a Saturday Afternoon

I have known them for at least three years, these two; we all went to school together, and at one point I dated the blond but it was brief. The timing was off and both of us were swept along by the river of another match. I have flirted with the brown-haired one for years.

I have this fantasy, I say one evening, when all of us are slightly drunk, sitting on my apartment steps on Gardner on a clear July night. Would you come back? Four o’clock? Saturday?

Sure, they tell me, curious. The word marked by brake lights and bitten fingernails. Everybody facing out. We all hold hands at once, and we are all lonely when we go home, but this is helpful, this hand-holding, this sitting on the stoop of my apartment building, watching while other people look for parking.

I have recently broken up with someone whom I did not expect to break up with, and every morning, the earliest time I wake up is suffused with remembering; I can’t seem to beat that moment, no matter how early I rise. I once thought if I traveled in France I would have a different brain, the brain of a girl who travels in France. I saw myself, skipping through meadows in a yellow-and-blue-print dress. But even with the old buildings, with the bright bready smells, with the painted French sunlight, it was still my same brain in there, chomping as usual, just fed this time by baguettes and Brie.

In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up. Too early. Before work. But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.

The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.

On Saturday, there’s a knock at the door right at four, and I open it up. Hi! Hi, hi. We’re all joking and nervous, and they brought beer. Me too. I usher them in. My apartment sometimes reminds people of a warehouse; the space is high and elongated and feels empty. The living room is a stripe. It’s too narrow to watch TV in, so I put the furniture on a diagonal.

They both look great, thriving out of control. These are solid men, with square kneecaps and loving mothers, who are still sort of awed by women. They have a line of fur instead of hair at the napes of their necks, sometimes dusting the hinge of their cleanly shaven jaws. Me, I’m clothed and workmanlike in overalls with many pockets. A red tank top, legs covered. They have had crushes on me at some point, and me on them, but everyone knew that friendship was best, and it is in this spirit that they walk through my door. They’re good at the greeting hug routine. There is a wild fondness in the air. We grab beers, twist off, fling bottle caps into the air.

They’re friends with each other, too. Sometimes they play soccer together.

They said they would do what I asked them to. That’s the agreement. It’s a four o’clock afternoon and the July sun is lazy and inviting and it’s a second-floor apartment, so it’s always a little warm from the rising heat, and here are these two men I’ve captured, inside my house, wearing worn white T-shirts. One of them has a stain right in the middle from the peach cobbler he ate at lunch, left over from the potluck he went to Friday night at Valerie’s. He is the type everyone gives their leftovers to at the end of the party, because they know he will eat them, and he does. Somehow this makes me proud. Whenever these two walk down hallways, or through crosswalks, in their tall boyishness I feel a surge of pride that is faintly motherly and also not. I want to fuck and birth them at the same time.

Today, they have another beer. Me too. We joke around. We play bottle-cap hockey. I serve cookies on a chipped green plate. They eat them, fast. They have sweet tooths, they say. One prefers the chocolate chip; the other enjoys the texture of oatmeal. They’re deep in the stripe, by the windows at its end, and I sit down in the chair that I’ve placed closer to the door. Stay over there, I tell them, as they swallow the last two bites off the plate. All right, they say. They sprawl out on the carpet, hands propping up their heads, and they know how to own space, how to feel important without realizing it. They have never questioned their right to be alive; it is borne in them, and obvious. One is wearing shorts and has blond hair all over his pale knees. Like poured milk from a glass carton.

Okay, I say, after the third beer is finished. I bring out tequila. I give each of us two shots. Down, down, down.

Then: Just touch hands, I say.

One touches his own hands. No, I say. His. His hand. Touch that.

It takes until just now for them to realize I want them to touch each other. They have assumed they’ll be touching me. I don’t have shoes on, but I have the rest on, and maybe a ponytail. I’m in the day. Just touch hands, I say. Gently. Please. They look bewildered—not upset, just unsure. They will need my constant reassurance. This is why I will not feel left out.

It’s okay, I tell them. Just feel his arm. Maybe the back of his neck. Just see what it feels like.

The sun slants through the curtains as their two hands reach over and they sort of grab at first but then relax. They explore the knuckles, the wrists, the elbows. They don’t giggle, but there is some nervous shifting, some more drinking from beers. Wet barley lips. One is from Oklahoma, and came out west to direct movies. The other lived in Oregon, in a clapboard house with an attic where he gathered bird nests from trees. They remember their first kiss with a girl, the years of masturbating in the shower before their sisters would bang on the door, yelling about hot water.

They are touching each other’s arms now, with freckles, with downy hair. Touch his stomach, I say, to both. Four eyes beam up at me, frightened. It’s okay, I say. It’s for me, I say. Please. And their hands, shaking slightly, reach down under the loose T-shirts and just glance over their stomachs, which have tiny lines of sweat forming in the creases from sitting.

I am in my chair. They feel scared, even from over here, but not awful scared. They’re openhearted and they can stand it. They have untested liberal minds. They are also getting turned on. Their faces move closer together as one grazes the inner arm of the other.

Kiss him, I say, out loud.

The light through the drawn curtains is a dark red and partially obscures their clean-shaven faces. They lean in, and their cheeks bump at first and finally touch. Their lips, so soft. They are tentative and frightened, faces pressing gently against each other. Lips meet. Boy lips on boy lips. I love watching them. I could watch them for hours. Their heads leaning and listing, the lips learning what to do, how almost-familiar it all is.

One stops. Looks at me. Is this all right? he asks. His lips glisten. Why don’t you come join us—

I’m watching this time, I say. Just watching. You’re so beautiful, both of you.

The other turns to me, eyes overly brightened. Come on, he calls. Come over!

I shake my head.

Absolutely! they both say.

No.

I’m on the weird island, over here. They love me too; I’m not totally absented. We all know I’m in the room.

Keep kissing, I say. I can’t tell you how much I love to watch you kissing.

Their big young male faces drink more beer and then lean back in and I see the erections, poking up from their pants, and they seem hopeful and nervous and vulnerable, and as they keep kissing, hands moving now down shoulders, to back, to stomach, I tell them to take off their shirts, and they do, because today they listen to me. I will not hurt them. I can only get away with this once. And the shoes kick off, and the pants roll down, and there they are, nude and strong, poking each other in the stomach. More beer. More tequila. Eyes closed. The reddish light flutters on the floor, and cars honk downstairs. I tell the one on the right, the one with the brown curls in his hair, to lean down. To try it out. Please, I say again. Please. My voice is so quiet, but we all hear everything. He bends down. The one on his knees now has on his face a combination of pained concern or confusion over what this might mean and utter joy too, and he opens his eyes and glances at me, and I smile at him, my whole body awake. He can see how turned on I am. There’s a furrow of worry in his brow, so I reach to the overalls straps and unclip them and pull my shirt up so that there are breasts in the room. Visiting. His face lights up, in part because he likes them, but even more because he knows them, he recognizes the shape, they are a marking point for identity and memory.

And then my overalls are back on and he closes his eyes again, I have relieved some knot in his thinking, and the first one is curled over and he doesn’t know quite what to do but also he has some ideas, and his mouth is earnest and effortful.

Their hands grip the carpet hairs. Look at the initial swell of a bicep, that bump after the dip of the inner elbow.

When they switch, they’re laughing. Everyone’s drunk. No one has come yet. They kiss in between switching, and their hands move all over, into inner thigh, rounded curve of the ass, sweaty necks. I feel the tide fading from my feet. They look up—come with us, come join us, they say, but I’m over here, I say, for today—and at once they are disappointed and also we all know the rhythm has been set as is. Tight calves and legs lifting. Brown curls and blond knees. When they’re kissing again, I could stare for hours. Men love to watch two women kiss, but how I love to watch two men. So clear in their focus. The amazing space created for me when there is nothing demanded or seen.

When they are sleeping, I go into my bedroom. It is darker than the rest of the apartment, and only large enough to fit a bed and a dresser. I don’t sit down, but I stand with the furniture, my whole body triggered. And it is only now that I feel the coldness of watching, the interminable loneliness, how the exit will happen, how they will hug me but something will have shifted, how our meetings will be awkward for a while, and possibly never recover. I slow down my breathing, move away from the clawing inside. After a while, I hear as they get up off the floor and let themselves out. They leave me a nice note, and one washes the cookie dish, and they even put the beer bottles in the recycling bin, but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and do not want to feel anymore.