The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

QUIET PLEASE

It is quiet in the rest of the library.

Inside the back room, the woman has crawled out from underneath the man. Now fuck me like a dog she tells him. She grips a pillow in her fists and he breathes behind her, hot air down her back which is starting to sweat and slip on his stomach. She doesn’t want him to see her face because it is blowing up inside, red and furious, and she’s grimacing at the pale white wall which is cool when she puts her hand on it to help her push back into him, get his dick to fill up her body until there’s nothing left of her inside: just dick.

The woman is a librarian and today her father has died. She got a phone call from her weeping mother in the morning, threw up and then dressed for work. Sitting at her desk with her back very straight, she asks the young man very politely, the one who always comes into the library to check out bestsellers, asks him when it was he last got laid. He lets out a weird sound and she says shhh, this is a library. She has her hair back and the glasses on but everyone has a librarian fantasy, and she is truly a babe beneath.

I have a fantasy, he says, of a librarian.

She smiles at him but asks her original question again. She doesn’t want someone brand new to the business but neither is she looking for a goddamn gigolo. This is an important fuck for her. He tells her it’s been a few months and looks sheepish but honest and then hopeful. She says great and tells him there’s a back room with a couch for people who get dizzy or sick in the library (which happens surprisingly often), and could he meet her there in five minutes? He nods, he’s already telling his friends about this in a monologue in his head. He has green eyes and no wrinkles yet.

They meet in the back and she pulls the shade down on the little window. This is the sex that she wishes would split her open and murder her because she can’t deal with a dead father; she’s wished him dead so many times that now it’s hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Is it true? He’s really gone? She didn’t really want him to die, that is not what she meant when she faced him and imagined knives sticking into his body. This is not what she meant, for him to actually die. She wonders if she invented the phone call, but she remembers the way her mother’s voice kept climbing up and up, and it’s so real and true she can’t bear it and wants to go fuck someone else. The man is tired now but grinning like he can’t believe it. He’s figuring when he can be there next, but she’s sure she’ll never want him again. Her hair is down and glasses off and clothes on the floor and she’s the fucked librarian and he’s looking at her with this look of adoration. She squeezes his wrist and then concentrates on putting herself back together. In ten minutes, she’s at the front desk again, telling a youngster about a swell book on aisle ten, and unless you leaned forward to smell her, you’d never know.

There is a mural on the curved ceiling of the library of fairies dancing. Their arms are interwoven, hair loose from the wind. Since people look at the ceiling fairly often when they’re at the library, it is a well-known mural. The librarian tilts her head back to take a deep breath. One of the fairies is missing a mouth. It has burned off from the glare of the sunlight, and she is staring at her fairy friends with a purple-eyed look of muteness. The librarian does not like to see this, and looks down to survey the population of her library instead.

She is amazed as she glances around to see how many attractive men there are that day. They are everywhere: leaning over the wood tables, straight-backed in the aisles, men flipping pages with nice hands. The librarian, on this day, the day of her father’s death, is overwhelmed by an appetite she has never felt before and she waits for another one of them to approach her desk.

It takes five minutes.

This one is a businessman with a vest. He is asking her about a book on fishing when she propositions him. His face lights up, the young boy comes clean and clear through his eyes, that librarian he knew when he was seven. She had round calves and a low voice.

She has him back in the room; he makes one tentative step forward and then he’s on her like Wall Street rain, his suit in a pile on the floor in a full bucket, her dress unbuttoned down, down, one by one until she’s naked and the sweat is pooling in her back again. She obliterates herself and then buttons up. This man too wants to see her again, he might want to marry her, he’s thinking, but she smiles without teeth and says, man, this is a one-shot deal. Thanks.

If she wanted to, she could do this forever, charge a lot of money and become rich. She has this wonderful body, with full heavy breasts and a curve to her back that makes her pliable like a toy. She wraps her legs around man number three, a long-haired artist type, and her hair shakes loose and he removes her glasses and she fucks him until he’s shuddering and trying to moan, but she just keeps saying Sshhh, shhh and it’s making him so happy, she keeps saying it even after he’s shut up.

The morning goes by like normal except she fucks three more men, sending them out periodically to check her desk, and it’s all in the silence, while people shuffle across the wood floor and trade words on paper for more words on paper.

After lunch, the muscleman enters the library.

He is tan and attractive and his arms are busting out of his shirt like balloons. He is with the traveling circus where he lifts a desk with a chair with a person with a child with a dog with a bone. He lifts it up and never drops anything and people cheer.

He also likes to read.

He picks this library because it’s the closest to the big top. It’s been a tiring week at the circus because the lion tamer had a fit and quit, and so the lions keep roaring. They miss him, and no one else will pet them because they’re lions. When the muscleman enters the library, he breathes in the quiet in relief. He notices the librarian right away, the way she is sitting at her desk with this little twist to her lips that only a very careful observer would notice. He approaches her, and she looks at him in surprise. The librarian at this point assumes everyone in the library knows what is going on, but the fact is, they don’t. Most of the library people just think it’s stuffier than usual and for some reason are having a hard time focusing on their books.

The librarian looks at the muscleman and wants him.

Five minutes, she says, tilting her head toward the back room.

The muscleman nods, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He goes off to look at the classics, but after five minutes, follows his summons, curious.

The back room has a couch and beige walls. When he enters the room, he’s struck by the thickness of the sex smell; it is so pervasive he almost falls over. The librarian is sitting on the couch in her dress which is gray and covers her whole body. Down the center, there is a row of mother-of-pearl buttons and one of them is unbuttoned by accident.

The thing is, the muscleman is not so sure of his librarian fantasies. He is more sure that he likes to lift whatever he can. So he walks over to her in the waddly way that men with big thighs have to walk, and picks her up, couch and all.

Hey, she says, put me down.

The muscleman loves how his shoulders feel, the weight of something important, a life, on his back.

Hey, she says again, this is a library, put me down.

He twirls her gently, to the absent audience and she ducks her head down so as not to collide with the light fixture.

He opens the door and walks out with the couch. He is thoughtful enough to bring it down when they get to the door frame so she doesn’t bump her head. She wants to yell at him but they’re in the library now.

Two of the men she has fucked are still there, in hopes for a second round. They are stunned and for some reason very jealous when they see her riding the couch like a float at a parade, through the aisles of books. The businessman in the vest holds up a book and after a moment, throws it at her.

You are not Cleopatra! he says, and she ducks and screams, then clamps her hand over her mouth. Her father’s funeral is in one day. It is important that there is quiet in a library. The book flies over her head and hits a regular library man who is reading a magazine at a table.

He throws it back, enraged, and they’re all over in a second, pages raining down, the dust slapping up into her face. They rustle as they fly and the librarian covers her face because she can’t stand to look down at the floor where the books are splayed open on their bindings as if they’ve been shot.

The muscleman doesn’t seem to notice, even though the books are hitting him on his legs, his waist. He lifts her up, on his tiptoes, to the ceiling of the library.

Stand up, he says to her in a low voice, muffled from underneath the couch, stand up and I’ll still balance you, I can do it even if you are standing.

She doesn’t know what else to do and she can feel his push upward from beneath her. She presses down with her feet to stand, and puts a finger on the huge mural on the ceiling, the mural of the fairies dancing in summer. Right away, she sees the one fairy without the mouth again, and reaches into her bun to remove the pencil that is always kept there. Hair tumbles down. On her tiptoes, she is able to touch the curve of the ceiling where the fairy’s mouth should be.

Hold still, she whispers to the muscleman who doesn’t hear her, is in his own bliss of strength.

She grips the pencil and with one hand flat on the ceiling steadies herself enough to draw a mouth underneath the nose of the fairy. She tries to draw it as a big wide dancing smile, and darkens the pencil lining a few times. From where she stands, it looks nice, from where she is just inches underneath the painting which is warmed by the sunlight coming into the library.

She doesn’t notice until the next: day, when she comes to work to clean up the books an hour before her father is put into the ground, that the circle of fairies is altered now. That the laughing ones now pull along one fairy with purple eyes, who is clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming.

SKINLESS

Renny’s phone privileges were revoked when they discovered a swastika carved into his bed board. He had been at Ocean House for three days. The staff, arguing in the Off-Limits Room with their hands warmed by white Styrofoam coffee cups, took an hour before they decided on this as a punishment. Jill Cohen, the activities director, went into his room while Renny was playing pool with Damon, the one who’d stabbed himself in the thigh, and turned the swastika into four boxes and then put a roof and a chimney on top. She wanted to make smoke coming out of the chimney, but the fork did not carve curls well, so she left the hearth cold.

Jill drove forty-five minutes every other day to run the evening activities for the group of runaway teenagers living at Ocean House. This was her first job out of college, and she had been thrilled when they accepted her. “The kids are supposed to be really troubled but really great,” she’d told her college roommate, who was silently walking out the door with a banana box filled with books in her arms. “Good luck,” they had said to each other, and then college was over. Jill had a new boyfriend named Matthew who liked to eat foods so spicy they made him cough. His body was covered with fair, shining hair, and in bed, with the side lamp on, he seemed to almost glow. When he held her while they made love, she would sometimes imagine scratching off his skin, scratching repeatedly with her nails until the layers peeled off and she discovered that beneath that sheath of flesh, he was made entirely out of pearl.

How? she’d splutter, and he’d laugh and kiss light into her mouth.

She often remembered the day she first grew breasts, how her usually olive skin was covered with red, crisscrossing stretch marks, like a newly revealed secret map to the treasures of her body.

Renny ran away from home because his older brother Jordan came to visit. Returning home from a friend’s house one afternoon, Renny found Jordan’s green truck parked crooked, taking over the driveway. Renny kept going as if he didn’t even recognize the house. As he walked, he gathered a globule of spit in his mouth in case he saw anyone who looked, in any way, dark. He walked straight, over an hour, to the sagging framework of Ocean House because you only had to stay for a couple weeks, the food was supposed to be decent, and if you were lucky, he’d heard you might even meet other members of the Resistance there.

Jill hung up the phone with her mother, and looked searchingly at Matthew. He was sitting on the sofa, balancing the remote control on his knee. “You know,” she said, “that if we had kids, they’d be rightfully Jewish. You know that, right?”

He nodded. His eyes were on the TV.

“I think it would be okay with me, as long as you don’t think it’s totally important to teach them all about Christ, do you? You don’t believe in Christ, do you?”

“Not really, but Jill, we’re not getting married.”

“I know,” she said, pulling on her earlobe, “but just in case?”

“Jill,” he said, “we’re not getting married.”

But she couldn’t get the wedding out of her head. There would be both a rabbi and a priest, and the priest would have no hairs on the backs of his hands, like a young boy. She walked over to Matthew, eyebrows pulling down. “If you know that for sure,” she said, “then why are we going out?”

Matthew drew her onto his lap. “How long till you have to leave for work?”

“Half hour,” she said, absently rubbing the top of his wrist. “Just in case,” she said, “it’s mainly a cultural thing.”

“Half an hour is plenty of time,” he said and he reached his hand up her shirt. “Shhh, Jill, sshh.”

Renny’s father was dead, but his brother was eight years older, in the army, and handsome. He wrote home once a month, one side of one page, from a country with unusual stamps. Jordan was well loved by women, and had three illegitimate children spread over the country. He never called them, met them, touched them.

At thirteen, Renny captured his brother’s little black phone book in an effort to find information on these mothers. He carefully copied their names and numbers onto the inside of his closet door.

“Little shit,” Jordan said to Renny when he found him frozen in the closet, phone book in lap, “what are you doing with my book?”

Renny leaned his back carefully against the door, hiding his writing. “Just looking at all the people you know,” he said, half-holding his breath.

“Impressed?” Jordan asked, looking down and smiling.

“Oh yeah,” Renny said, “lots of girls.”

Jordan pulled his brother up and put one big hand on Renny’s neck. “Just don’t fuck with my stuff, little brother, okay? You ask first.” He tightened his grip, then let go. “Nosy fuck.”

Renny sank back to the floor. Jordan went into the backyard to smoke a cigarette. Renny waited until he heard the screen door slam, and then turned around to look at the numbers. They were smudged, but still readable. He leaned his forehead on the wood of the door frame and breathed in the bitter smell of the lacquer.

Jill’s mother, in phase three of her career, was the owner of a Jewish dating service. She tried to meet at least three new Jews a day and convince them that she held their ticket to marital bliss. Often, she did. Her agency had something like a 75 percent success rate because it only accepted customers who were willing to work and commit, and who had abandoned their Prince Charming/Virgin-Whore fantasies. Jill worked there during summers and had met every available Jewish man in Los Angeles. She dated some, liked some, but was required by the agency to fill out a date report after each encounter. Her mother liked to supplement her daughter’s questionnaire with new, handwritten inquiries, like: What do you appreciate in a good kiss, Jill? At first she answered these questions openly, believing it was part of that mother/daughter “we are now best friends” syndrome. But suddenly, her dates began to execute these perfect kisses, and the third time a man tipped up her chin gently before he laid his lips on hers, Jill ran, yelling, to her mother and quit the job. Her mother did not understand. But Jill remembered that the woman was, in fact, not her best friend but her mother, and proceeded to divulge the kissing facts only to her friends, telling her mother instead about her intricate opinions on all the recently released movies.

On Saturdays, when rates were lower, Renny called Boston, Atlanta and Hagerstown, Maryland. Often, the mothers were home taking care of their new babies, usually crying in the background.

“Hello, Mrs. Stevens,” he said in his best older voice, “I’m calling from Parents magazine, may I have a few minutes of your time?” If they said no, he plowed ahead anyway. “Is your baby happy? How old is your baby? Would you describe your baby as a fun-loving baby or a serious baby? Does your baby more resemble you or the father?” Sometimes he slipped up and asked questions too personal, and the women began to fall suspect, and hang up. He called them, on average, every two months. Sometimes he was a contest man, asking them to send photos to a P.O. box and enter My Baby’s the Cutest! contest. Maybe they would win $100,000! Sometimes he just pretended he’d gotten the wrong number. He liked to hear their voices. They sounded tired, but kind.

“We’re drawing our dreams tonight,” Jill announced to the group of seven teenagers in front of her.

“You must’ve been such a geek in high school,” Trina said.

“No hostile comments,” Jill said, smoothing down her red Gap T-shirt. “If you’re mad about something, maybe you should tell the group.”

“I don’t think any of us want to be here for that long,” Trina said. She smiled at Damon. “And it still wouldn’t change you being a geek in high school.”

Jill passed out pencils and papers. “I was not a geek,” she said. “Do you want to do this or not?”

“Go ahead, Jill,” said Damon, smiling. “Dreams. Cool. Trina’s a geek too, she just doesn’t want you to know.”

“Oh, shut up, Damon.” Trina rolled her foot into his lap. No sex was allowed at Ocean House, guests would be expelled. Damon circled her ankle quickly and gave it a squeeze. Trina pulled it out, and relaxed.

“Any crayons?” George asked. No one liked him. He smiled too much and made jokes about cyberspace that were either stupid or confusing. Jill pulled a 64 crayon box out of her huge, denim purse.

Renny watched her carefully rezip her purse. Then he leaned back and drew circles on his paper. He put the eraser end of his pencil in his stomach and pushed it in until it ached. He imagined Jill, emaciated and naked, her hair in strings, trying to speak to him in German, begging him for mercy.

“Did my drawing, Jilly,” he said.

She looked it over. “You dream about bubbles?”

“Ha ha.” He looked at the other residents who were, mostly, doodling. Damon was drawing a big eye.

Renny leaned over. “Eyes the color of sky …?” he asked. He hadn’t pegged Damon for the Resistance because he talked to Trina, the black girl, so much, but you never knew.

“You a poet?” Damon said, turning around to face Renny. “I never knew we had such a wonderful poet among us.” Renny leaned back. No one here but him. He filled in the circles with black crayon.

“I dream about the insides of olives,” he told Jill. “I dream about big black holes.”

One mother sent a photograph to Renny’s P.O. box. The baby was a girl, half black, dark, dark eyes and a serious face. Her arms reached toward the camera, wanting to play with the lens. “Nicole Shaw,” it read on the back, “ten months old.” Renny took the picture to the park with him and stared at his niece for an hour. He could feel her, how heavy she would be in his arms, how she would fall asleep and curl her head into his chest, enamored by the unfamiliar arms of a boy. Are you my daddy? she would ask. He looked into her eyes, and he could see in them, already, already, that death of loneliness, covering her like a thin gauze, impossible to remove. He picked up a twig and scraped at her face. The colors eased off, thin white stripes crossing through her tiny body. He erased Nicole and her arms and her eyes until she was just scratches on a piece of film.

• • •

Matthew broke up with Jill because she wouldn’t go on the pill. She said she’d go on the pill only if he would move in with her, and he looked at her like she was crazy, and said he hated condoms, they had to have a change. I get bladder infections, she told him, I can’t use a diaphragm. Let’s wait a little while, and maybe I will go on the pill, if it seems like we’re more serious. I’m not serious, he told her, I don’t want a real relationship now. Maybe you do, but you’re scared, she said. Maybe I’m not, he said back. I think we want different things. I have to go to work, she said. In a half hour. Go early, he said, maybe there’s traffic.

“We’re going to do trust exercises today,” Jill stated.

“Fabulous,” said Trina, glaring at Damon.

Jill cleared her throat and continued. “One of you is blindfolded, and the other leads the first person around the house and the backyard, being gentle and trustworthy, and then you switch. It’s scary because you’re used to using your eyes so much, but it’s a nice way to learn about trusting each other. Okay, pick partners.”

Trina and Damon were an obvious pair. The two cocaine addicts who giggled a lot and were pretty nice to Renny grabbed hands. George, the outcast, looked toward Renny who looked away, realizing there was an odd number; George was paired with Lana, the very quiet, beautiful one who moved in slow motion like she was underwater and never told anyone why she was there.

“Did your math wrong, Jilly,” Renny said, kicking out his boots and running his palm over the smooth splinters of hair poking out of his skull.

“No, you’ll be my partner, Renny,” Jill said. He blanched.

“I don’t want to do it,” he said.

“It’s tonight’s activity,” Jill said. Her eyes were tired from crying about Matthew. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

“You go. Get blindfolded,” Renny said. She selected a blue bandanna from the stack. “Do you trust me, Jilly?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, tying the cloth at the back of her head and letting the triangles fall over most of her face. She stood directly in the middle of the room, arms straight down her sides. “Please don’t call me Jilly, Renny. Lead me around. I trust you.”

Her mother had taken her to lunch that day. Jill hadn’t wanted to mention the breakup with Matthew.

“I forget, honey, is he cute?” her mother asked, bright eyes boring into her daughter. Jill had never brought Matthew home to be scrutinized.

“He’s not blond,” Jill said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said, “I’m sure he’s a very nice boy. His parents come from where, again?”

“I don’t know.” Jill wished she could lay her cheek down on her plate and just rest there with the cold porcelain. “Whatever. It’s not serious.” Her voice was fading.

“But do you want it to be?” Mrs. Cohen asked, a piece of French bread stilled in her hand.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it, whether or not I want it to be. It’s not.”

“Well, it could always become serious, right?” She scooped up some white butter with her knife and spread it on the bread. “Does he talk about commitment?”

“We broke up yesterday, Mother,” Jill said finally. “It’s not an issue. We’re broken up. Stop asking questions.”

Jill’s mother took a bite out of the bread and chewed for a moment. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and smiled.

After he got the photo in the P.O. box, Renny painted the inside of his closet door with white paint. He painted slowly up, then down, until the numbers had vanished, and the paint would never flake away. He went into the bathroom and tried to throw up, but he couldn’t. Grabbing the leftover paint, he walked down to the train station. There was an empty cave where his older brother used to fuck girls, or smoke pot, or whatever he did before he left for the army. Renny painted seventeen swastikas, one for each year of his life, all over the cave and then curled up underneath them and went to sleep. The swastikas looked like spider boomerangs that he could fling out into the world. They would clear a path, and then come back, to guide him to safety.

• • •

Renny led Jill through the kitchen.

“Counter’s on your left, fridge on your right,” he said.

“Thanks.” She walked up the stairs and down the stairs and through the back door into the yard.

“So do you like it here, Renny?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “Step up. Just walk straight here.” They reached the cliffs overlooking the beach, across the street from Ocean House. He could see the distant figures of the other residents, their tentative arms. He heard Trina laugh.

“Are we going too far?” Jill asked.

“We’ll switch soon.”

He stopped her at the edge of a cliff. The ground beneath them crumbled down for thirty feet, and then led into the sand, and then the water.

“We’re at the edge of a cliff, Jill,” Renny said, standing behind her, his hands cupping her shoulders.

“I’m trying to trust you here, Renny,” she said. The wind blew her T-shirt to her skin. She watched the strange colors underneath her blindfold, and pictured Matthew’s back growing smaller and smaller and how the world seemed to close in on her then.

“I hated what you did to my swastika,” Renny said.

“Well I couldn’t just leave it there,” she said back. The palms of his hands were on her upper arms, warm. “I hate swastikas.”

“See, Jill,” Renny said, “it’s eyes the color of sky, not of earth, that’s what it’s about, see, that’s what we say. Eyes the color of sky, not of earth.” He stared at her hair; it was dark and long and felt soft where it touched his hands.

“But Renny,” she said, “your eyes are brown.”

He gripped her shoulders. He wondered if by the time the two weeks were up, and he returned home, Jordan would be gone.

Jill pictured the wedding again. Except now the priest was nowhere to be found, the groom was nowhere to be found, and it was just herself and the rabbi. His arm was tan and thick with black hair. See our skin, the rabbi was telling her, this skin was made for the desert.

“It’s a long way down,” Renny said.

She imagined scratching at the skin on the rabbi’s arm, scratching at her own arm, scratching them down, until underneath the thin layers of flesh she found out just what exactly they were made of.

“Are you scared?” Renny held her shoulders tightly.

“Should I be?”

Renny didn’t answer. Jill shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “a little.”

He put his arms around her chest, and brought her closer to him. One thumb very gently brushed against the side of her nipple, standing up from the chill. She was quiet.

“Is that okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. She breathed out, and closed her eyes beneath the blindfold. Her skin was rising. I am made out of dirt, she thought.

“Do you want to switch?” Renny asked quietly. His hand was light against her breast.

I am made out of gold.

“No,” she said, “do you?”

“No.” He hugged her in closer and listened to the water rush at them from far away.

FUGUE

1. Dinnertime

I sit across the table from my husband. It is dinnertime. I made steak and green beans and homestyle potatoes and even clipped two red roses from the bush in the backyard; they stand in a vase between us which is clear so I can watch the stems drift in the water as he speaks.

He puts his elbows on the table. He opens his mouth while he chews. He gesticulates with his fork, prongs out.

Me, I nod and nod. He tells me all about work. The memos are misspelled, he tells me. That new secretary can barely speak. I listen and chew with my mouth closed. The potato, no longer hot, breaks under my teeth, melts across my tongue, my upper lip seals to my bottom lip, and everything is private inside my mouth — loud and powerful and mine. A whole world of noise going on in there that he can’t even hear. Reaching forward, he spears a big piece of potato with his fork. He lifts it up, takes it in, bites down. I watch the food disappearing in his mouth and it’s my food and I bought it and I made it and I have to will my hands to keep still because I think I want to rescue it. I want to rescue my food, thrust an arm across the tablecloth, spill the drifting roses, dodge his molars, avoid his tongue, and seize it back, bring it all out, drag it down into the dish, until there is just a mush of alive potato between us, his stomach empty, my mouth still closed.

2.

Inside the pill factory, the muttering worker was switching things around.

“I’ll put the yellow pills in here,” he said to himself, mutter mutter, “and the white ones in here.” He took the bottles to the child-sealing machine and went home.

Two weeks later, outside in the world, people with prescriptions fell down dead. The muttering worker read about it in the paper, felt a surge of importance, and decided it was time to move on. He called the pill factory office and told them he quit. They asked why. He said allergies. They said: Allergies to what? And he said, Allergies to the telephone and hung up.

This was the fourth job he’d grown tired of in a month. Two weeks before he’d gotten a gig teaching English to immigrants. He’d taught them the wrong things. He’d said: pussy means woman and asshole means friend. During the week, one female student got propositioned. Two men were beaten up. They stomped into their classroom, bruised and confused, but their misleading muttering teacher was long gone — already shaking the hand of the pill factory boss, in fact, his eyes flicking with interest on the vats of colored ovals and the power hidden beneath their shells.

But now it was time to change again. The muttering man put on a tie and looked at himself in the mirror. This always made him spit. He projected it out, pleh, littering his face. The muttering man had been an ugly child. He had been an ugly teenager. Now he was an ugly adult. He found this pattern very annoying.

This time, he applied for a secretarial job. Decided he needed to do something calm and quiet for a while, like memos. Here he met his match: loud man.

Loud man wore a necklace, talked very loud and was very honest. He looked everyone square in the eye and said, Let me tell you what I honestly think and then did just that.

Muttering man hated him for several reasons, one being that loud man was his boss, another being that loud man was loud and the third and final and most awful being that loud man was good-looking. Really good-looking.

Muttering man went to loud man’s house with a gun.

“Hello,” he muttered, “I’m here to steal from you.”

Loud man didn’t quite hear him right. “You’re here to what? Speak up.”

“Steal,” said muttering man as loud as he could which was not loud at all, “I want to steal things. Like some jewelry. Like your mirror. Like your wife.”

Loud man was angry, flushed a becoming pink and said many things, including Let me tell you what I honestly think.

“Please,” muttered muttering man, “tell away.”

“I think you’re my employee!” said loud man in a huge voice, “and I Think You’re Fired!”

Muttering man fired the gun and hit loud man in the knee. Loud man yelled and sat on the floor. Muttering man squared his shoulders and took what he asked for.

First, he told the trembling wife to wait at the door. He tried to catch a glimpse of her face, to see what kind of woman such a good-looking fellow would nab, but he couldn’t see much underneath her overhanging hair.

Next, he told loud man to remove his gold necklace which he happily slipped over his own ugly head.

“I’ve never had a necklace,” he muttered, pleased.

Finally, he walked up and down the halls looking for the perfect mirror to snatch. He passed several boring oval ones but when he turned the corner and walked into the master bedroom, he found exactly what he was looking for. Hanging on the wall, just opposite the large bed, was a huge rectangular mirror in a lavish silver frame. Mumbling under his breath in delight, muttering man gently lifted it off its hook. This mirror had been reflecting loud good-looking man for years and so had turned soft and complacent, and was likely to be kind to even muttering man’s harsh features. He took a quick peek at his necklaced self and fought down the blast of hope.

With some difficulty, he angled the huge mirror under his arm and shoved the wife into the passenger seat of the car, leaving loud man howling in the house. Muttering man started the engine and took off down the street. He glanced sideways at the wife, examining her profile, searching for beauty. She was okay-looking. She didn’t look like a movie star or anything. She looked sort of like four different people he’d met before. She stared straight ahead. After fifteen minutes, he dumped her off at the side of the road because she didn’t talk and muttering man wasn’t good with silent people. Plus, he wanted to be alone with the mirror.

“Bye,” he said to her, “sorry.”

She watched him through the window with large eyes. “That necklace is giving you a rash,” she said. “It’s made of nickel.”

He itched the back of his neck. Before he pulled away, he threw her a couple cigarettes and a pack of matches from the glove compartment. She gave a little wave. Muttering man ignored her and pushed down on the gas. Less than ten miles later, he slowed and pulled to the side of the road. He lifted the mirror onto his lap. Running his fingers in and over the silvery nubs, he fully explored the outside before he dared to look in. He could sense the blob of his face sitting inside the frame, unfocused and patient, waiting to be seen.

3. Visitor at Haggie and Mona’s

“Mona,” said Haggie, “I’m tired.”

Mona was stretching her leg up to the edge of the living room couch. “You’re always tired,” she said. She put her chin on her knee.

Haggie settled deeper into the green chair, the softest chair ever made. “Hand me that pillow, will you?”

“No.” She reached forward and held her foot.

Haggie sighed. He could feel the start of that warm feeling inside his mouth, the feeling that he could catch sleep if he was quiet enough. He felt hyperaware of his tongue, how awkwardly it fit.

Leaning down, Mona spoke to her knee. “You’ll just doze off and you sleep way too much,” she said. “You practically just woke up.”

“I know,” he said, dragging a hand down his face, “you’re absolutely right. Now hand me that pillow so I can take a nap and think about that.”

“Haggie,” said Mona, switching legs, “come on.”

Mona was Haggie’s one remaining friend. The rest had gone to other cities and lost his phone number. Haggie sat around all day, living off money in the bank from a car crash court settlement, while Mona trotted off each morning to work for a temp company. She typed something like a million words per minute. She was always offered the job at the place she temped, but she always said no. She liked the wanting far more than the getting, and, of course, was the same with men. She had this little box in her room containing already two disengaged engagement rings. She’d told the men: Sorry, I can’t keep this, but oddly enough, they each had wanted her to. She seemed to attract very generous men. As a memento of me, they said, little knowing there was another such souvenir residing in a box on her dresser.

Haggie tugged on his tongue. It felt mushy and grainy and when he pinched it hard, he felt nothing.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” she asked, chin on her other knee.

“Me?” he garbled, still holding onto his tongue, “tonight?” Mona swung her leg down, and gripping the side of the couch like a barre, began a set of pliés.

He released his fingers and swallowed. “Tonight?” he said, clearly this time, “nothing. Those bowling friends of yours are having a party but I said no. They asked if you wanted to go but I said you didn’t. Do you?” He paused. Mona didn’t answer. “They all want you, you know.”

“Really?” Mona, in mid-plié, dimpled up, pleased. “Which ones? All? Really? What exactly did they say?”

Haggie scratched his head. He didn’t even know if it was true, he just liked to see Mona leap for things.

Mona bent down and touched her head to her knees. “I have a date anyway,” she said, voice muted.

Haggie let his body slump into the chair. He hated it when Mona went out — the house felt dead without her. “Hey,” he said, “please. The pillow?” He pointed again to the couch, just a few feet out of his reach. His blood felt weighted, each corpuscle dragging its own tiny wheelbarrow of rocks.

“Haggie.” Mona shook out her legs and looked at him. “Go outside.”

“Blech,” he said to the ceiling, “I hate outside.”

She walked over and stroked his hair. “Do something good,” she said, “Haggie. Do something.”

He leaned briefly into her hand. She smelled like vanilla and laundry detergent. “I really would,” Haggie said, “you know, really. If I could only get out of this damn chair.”

Mona touched his cheek. She stood next to him for a moment, then gave a little sigh and disappeared into her bedroom. Haggie turned his head and watched her doorway for a while, eventually closing his eyes. After forty-five minutes, Mona emerged, shiny, in a brown dress. Haggie was drifting off.

“Hag,” she said. “Wait, wake up, I have a question.” She twirled around. “High heels or not?” Haggie shook his head awake, looked at her and tried to focus.

“No,” he said after a minute, voice gravelly, rubbing an eye, “you’re too peppy already. Wear boots,” he said. “Weigh yourself down a little.”

She stuck out her tongue at him but vanished into her bedroom again and came out in two minutes wearing lace-up brown boots.

“Lovely,” Haggie said.

There was a knock at the door.

“There he is,” said Haggie, “Monsieur Pronto.”

Mona looked at her watch. “No,” she said, “I’m picking him up. Are you expecting anyone?”

He laughed. “My illicit lover,” he said. He sank deeper into the chair. “Maybe we’re getting mugged. Didn’t I tell you? We should get bars on our windows.”

The knock interrupted again: rap rap rap.

Mona went to the door. She peeped in the peephole. “It’s a woman. Who is it?” she called.

A muffled voice came through.

Mona looked at Haggie. “Should I let her in?”

“Is she cute?” he asked.

Mona rolled her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, “her hair is covering her face.” She opened the door.

“Hello,” said Mona, “how can I help you?”

The woman tugged off her wedding ring. “Please,” she said, holding it forward, “please, will you take this in exchange for a place to stay?”

Haggie burst out laughing.

Mona shook her head. “Oh no,” she said, “I can’t keep that.” The woman’s hand was trembling as she held the ring forward, and the edge of her dress was charred black.

“Haggie,” Mona said, “shut up. Stop laughing. She wants to stay here.”

“Fine,” he called from the chair, eyes closing. “But tell this one to keep the ring.”

Mona opened the door wider. “Please,” she said, “come on in, you look so tired.” She took the woman by the elbow and guided her into the living room. “Haggie,” she said, “get out of the chair, Hag, can’t you see this woman has been through something terrible and is about to collapse?”

Haggie sat there for a second. “But the sofa,” he said, pointing ineffectually.

Mona glared at him. “Haggie.” The woman’s legs started to curve beneath her. Haggie put one hand on each arm of the chair and hoisted himself up, wobbling a bit on his feet.

“Where are you from?” Mona asked, leaning down to relace the top of her right boot.

The woman closed her eyes. “Sinai,” she said. Haggie sat on the floor.

“What did she say?” Mona whispered, relacing the left boot for the hell of it. “Did she say cyanide?”

He looked up and noticed the woman was already asleep.

“Faster than me, even,” he said with respect.

“Do you think she’s a poisoner?” Mona hissed.

Haggie laughed.

“Sssh,” said Mona, “she’s sleeping.”

“Her dress is burnt,” he said.

“I know,” said Mona, “she smells like smoke, too. Camp-fire smoke or something.” She stood up. “Listen, Hag, I’ve got to go. Are you okay? Should I stay? What if she poisons you?”

Haggie made an attempt at a scared face but he couldn’t get himself to do it. He felt too tired. “Go, Mona,” he said. He laid his head back on the arm of the sofa.

Mona paused. “Do you think she’s sick?”

“She’s just tired.” His voice was fading. “She just needs some sleep.” The sofa arm dug into his neck. “I can’t believe she wanted to give you her ring.”

Mona smiled and checked herself one last time in the mirror. As soon as the front door closed and the clop-clop of her tightly laced boots faded away, Haggie tried to doze off, but the floor was hard beneath him and the air felt clotted and thick without Mona stirring it up, and he couldn’t find the familiar relief of that slow descending weight.

Heaving himself up, he sat on the couch. He almost twitched, craving the comfort of his chair. The woman snored lightly now. She had flushed skin and her eyelashes made simple black arcs on her cheeks.

“Hello lady,” said Haggie, “wake up and talk to me.” She kept sleeping, sending out her breath to the air and pulling it back in. Private.

It made him feel worse to be awake when there was someone else there that was asleep. The house seemed twice as big and twice as lonely. Dragging himself up, Haggie lumbered over to the bathroom. He wondered: was it possible to die simply from an absence of tempo? Sure, Mona was ruled by some kind of frenetic march, but there was no doubt that something was moving her inside — Haggie’s internal rhythms were so slow that he wondered if they counted as rhythms at all.

Inside the bathroom, he opened up the medicine cabinet above the sink; sometimes Mona kept sleeping pills in there that she used when she was too wound up. Which was often. Holding the mirrored door, Haggie took down the tiny red-brown bottle. He read the label. Do not exceed two in six hours. Haggie spilled them out on his hand; they shimmered like miniature moons. I’m bigger than she is, besides, he thought. He took nine, his lucky number, and washed them down with a handful of water from the tap. That should do something, he thought. Because I don’t have my chair. And I’m tired, he thought again. I’m very tired and I want to sleep. He sat down on the floor of the bathroom and waited for a strange feeling to overtake him. The woman in his chair stopped snoring and the house filled with darkness and quiet.

4.

When he had finished exploring every knob and bump in the frame, he took in a breath and got ready to face the mirror straight on. He fiddled with the itchy gold necklace. This time would be different, in this fancy man’s mirror, this good-looking man’s looking glass. He crossed his fingers inside the chain and let his eyes shift in and focus.

5. At the Side of the Road

That night, I sleep in a bush. I don’t sleep very well there, but I never do, I’ve never been a good sleeper. I can’t ever get comfortable. So it’s okay; the dirt on my cheek is okay, doesn’t make any difference to me. A pillow is no better.

I dream about my husband. I am dreaming that he is going to the refrigerator to fix himself a sandwich, my food, my bread, my self — digested then gone — and that’s when the shot rings out and that’s when I’m off, in the race, I’m off. He grabs his knee, and I’m out the door. I’m a racer, I’m so fast. In my dream, I run a lap around the world and some people in another country build a monument around my footprint.

When I wake up, I want to walk for a long time, I think I could walk forever and never get tired. I take one of the cigarettes that man left me and smoke it, it’s been a long time since I did that, and when I stub it out in the bush, it catches on something and the bush starts to burn. Just near the bottom, but it is burning, the bush is on fire. The air is dry, sure, but it was one tiny cigarette and so I am shocked and I look at the bush burn and then I think: maybe this is something spiritual. Here, by the side of the road, just me without any money, just me wanting a new place to go, this is the time for something spiritual to happen, this is my right timing. I wait for God to speak to me.

The flames snap and hiss.

A couple drivers pass by and slow: Want a Ride? but I shake my head, no, and it’s not because I’m worried about rapists, I’m not. Something is about to happen here — something big. I’m going to hear what this bush has to say to me and then I’m going to walk forever by myself since I never have and because it’s a better quiet outside than it is in a car and because all I took was one puff and I set something on fire. Me. The bush keeps crackling. I wonder, what will it tell me? What is it that I need to hear? I lean in closer and listen with my whole being. I can’t tell what it’s saying. I can’t find any words, just that fire sound, the sound of cracking and bursting. I start to feel a bit panicked — what if it speaks in a different language? What would I do then? The warmth of the flames flushes my face.

I speak English, I whisper to the bush as a reminder. Talk to me. I’m listening.

6.

Same ugly man.

7. Back at Haggie and Mona’s

At one in the morning, a key turned in the lock and Mona tiptoed into the living room. She could see the shape of the woman still there, lungs lifting and releasing. She felt a surge of pride that the runaway was alive and had stayed, and eased herself down on the couch across from the woman and unlaced her boots.

It had been a great date. He’d been one of those men who kissed hard, trying to merge their faces. Hand at the back of her head. It was quite urgent kissing for a first date but she liked that. She left the boots by the couch, tiptoed into the bathroom and flipped on the light and there was Haggie lying on the floor, legs tucked into his chest.

“Haggie,” she said, stopping still, “what’s going on?”

He craned his head and looked up at her with enormous eyes.

“I committed suicide,” he said. “But it didn’t work.”

“What?” Mona squatted on the floor.

“I mean,” he said, “I just wanted to sleep and sleep, sleep and sleep, so I took nine pills, nine dangerous white pills, those pills you use to sleep sometimes? I took them hours ago. Hours and hours ago. Nine of them. I’m sure of it. And I feel fine.”

She stared at him. “Did you puke?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t even puke.”

“Haggie,” she said, “are you okay?” She reached forward and felt his forehead. “You’re not feverish,” she said. She sat down next to him. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he said.

She stared at him still. He stared back. Standing up, Mona pulled the bottle down from the medicine cabinet and read the label. She looked down at him and shook her head. “Nine?” she asked, and he nodded. She kept shaking her head, placing the bottle back on the shelf and closing the door. Then she squatted down next to him again and touched his hair. Her voice was quiet. “I’m worried about you,” she said.

“I know.” He reached up an arm to grasp the counter. “Me too.” He pulled himself up. “But still, it’s all so strange.”

Mona grasped his elbow. “Do you need help walking?”

“No.” He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t.”

He walked into the living room and stood against the back of the stiff sofa, facing the big window that looked out onto their small backyard. Mona followed him in.

“She’s still here,” she whispered, pointing.

“Did you have a good date?” Haggie looked at the woman sleeping. Her entire face was relaxed. He thought she looked beautiful.

“Yeah,” she said, “it was really nice. He liked the boots.” Haggie smiled. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I guess not yet,” he said, “I’m feeling pretty awake right now. I think I’ll just stay in here.”

“Okay.” She touched his shoulder. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

He nodded. “I’m good,” he said. “Good night, Mone. Sleep well.”

Mona picked up her boots and pattered into her bedroom. The woman shifted in the chair. Haggie went over to her and gently rolled the chair forward until they both were in front of the window. He looked at their reflections silhouetted in the glass. She still smelled like smoke and it smelled good. He remembered Mona: what if she poisons you? and smiled. He sat on the arm of the couch and watched their undetailed shapes in the glass. Once Mona went to the bathroom. Other than that, it was perfectly still. After several hours, sunlight began to seep into the backyard, slowly opening out the flatness of the glass and revealing the grass and one tree. A dew-covered white plastic chair. An empty wooden bird feeder. He watched as their silhouettes faded from the window and dissipated into the morning.

8.

He started to cry, same ugly man, always: that tidal wave of disappointment. Transformation impossible. He pulled the itchy fake gold necklace off and threw it at the glass where it made an unsatisfying clink; he let out a small, ineffective spit which didn’t land on the mirror at all but instead arced down and splatted onto the fancy silver frame. The muttering man started to rub the spit into the frame, but as he did, the saliva seemed to remove a bit of the silver. “What?” he said out loud. He leaned forward. He rubbed more. Silver paint lifted off, thin and papery. Beneath it was scarred wood. The muttering man licked his finger and rubbed again. The paint continued to peel off. Darkened silver, iridescent black, collected under his fingernails, on the tops of his fingertips. Ignoring his face, he hunched down and kept rubbing. What do you know, he said, mutter mutter, well who would’ve thought it was a fake frame too. He rubbed the entire frame until his hands were black and it was no longer silver at all, but just a rectangle of flawed bumpy brown wood.

Turning the mirror around, he opened up the hooks and removed the glass from the back. Then he hung the frame around his neck. “Will you look at my new necklace,” he said out loud, to the empty street. “This one doesn’t itch at all.”

9. Mine

I sit with the bush for a long time but it says nothing to me. It continues to burn, still mainly near the bottom. I listen harder and harder, feeling a certain despair build, wondering if it will ever reach out and talk, if ever I will understand the message meant for me, but then, just as I’m listening as hard as I possibly can, it hits me, pow, like that: of course. It is saying nothing. It’s a listening bush. It wants me to talk. My burning bush would be different, my burning bush would be like me.

So I clear my throat and I tell it things, I talk to that bush. I don’t think I’ve ever said so many sentences in a row before, but I talk for at least an hour about myself — about me and my husband and my mother and my allergies, and sometimes I don’t know what to say and then I just describe what I see. The street is gray and paved. The ground is dry here. The sky is cloudless.

It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to talk like that. After a while, I’m exhausted and I think I’ve said enough. I feel great but my throat is dry and I need some water, so, thanking it over and over, I leave the burning bush by the side of the road for somebody else. And I start to walk.

It’s hours later when hunger and fatigue hit, and I find myself in front of one house, the only house on the block without bars on its windows. That’s the one I knock at. And that’s the one that answers. It’s a nice place. It is quiet inside. Just as I’m dozing off, ready to really sleep for the first time in a long time, I think about my husband and where he is, what he’s doing. I like to think he’s limping around the house, shouting my name, sitting on the bed and looking where the mirror was and staring at the grain of the wood. I like to think he opens the refrigerator and sees me inside.

But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think.

I think, maybe he hasn’t even noticed that I’m gone.

But. I have.

DRUNKEN MINI

There was an imp that went to high school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp. Of course he never wore shorts.

He bugged the girls; he had a few friends whose parents were drug addicts; he was the greatest at parties — he’d take any dare. He propositioned mothers. He told stories about airplane sex. He claimed he knew everything about women. They were all fifteen; no one dared contest that.

One thing he didn’t know was that there was a mermaid at the school; she was a sophomore as well. She wore long skirts that swept the floor and one large boot covering her tail and she used a crutch, pretending like her second leg, which of course didn’t exist, was hurt.

She was a quiet one, that mermaid; she excelled in oceanography class, but she also made an effort to not be too good; she didn’t want to call attention to herself. On every test she missed at least three. (What is plankton? A boat, she wrote.) She was very beautiful; hair slightly greenish which everyone attributed to chlorine. Eyes purplish which everyone attributed to drugs. The girls called her a snob. The boys shoved each other and agreed.

The imp sat behind her in the one class they shared: English. He had a perpetual monologue of jokes going on under his breath. Did you hear the one about the square egg? he’d say to himself, laughing at the punch line before it even happened. Often, it never happened anyway. One day he reached forward and dipped a strand of her long mossy hair into his beer. He snuck beer into class, no problem. He was a clever imp. He’d poured it into a Coke can.

What he didn’t know was that her hair had nerves; it was different than human hair; it was not dead skin; it was alive. The mermaid felt the change instantly and woozed with contentment: liquid. Lifting. Home.

Had the imp lifted the can, he would’ve been stunned: it was so light! Where did the beer go? Had he looked closer, he might’ve seen it riding up the strands of her hair, brown droplets on a lime escalator, sucked up by that straw of a lock, foam vanishing into the mane in front of him, the mane he pictured at night floating over his small shoulders when he was in his bed, naked, eyes closed.

Snob queen. Hair green. Mine.

The mermaid got drunk off the beer. She had very low tolerance. There was no alcohol allowed underwater.

That day, she exited English class swaying. The imp picked it up right away; he thought: man, she’s a party girl, too! She’s perfect! Drunken Mimi!

He worried about taking off his clothes. He worried about her hand, grazing to his knee — what are these wooden poles doing where your shins should be? she’d ask. She’d have a puzzled look in those purpled eyes. Snob, he’d think. He worried, but still, he tracked her through the halls; the way she leaned, hard on this drunken day, was sexy. The way she trusted the crutch. He tracked her one huge boot.

It was lunchtime. The mermaid wandered off to lie down under the orange-red bleachers. Her head felt bleary. Her hair felt alive. When she let it stray out into the dirt, her hair coughed. She put her backpack under her head and that was better.

The imp found her there. He wasn’t sure what to say.

Did you hear the one about the man with one leg? he began. Then he felt stupid right away. Bad choice.

The mermaid looked up.

Excuse me? she said.

The imp sat down next to her, arranging his stilts.

So, he said. A guy walks into a bar.

She turned her head slightly toward him, but said nothing.

He lay down next to her. The dirt was flat and fine, and he picked up a discarded cigarette butt and began digging a hole to put it in.

The imp was nervous; he hoped no one was sitting above them, on the bleachers, eavesdropping. That tall guy? they’d say. He’s not nearly as smooth as he says he is.

I like your hair, he said then.

Thank you, said the mermaid. She paused. She looked at him for a long second. Then she said: You can touch it if you want to.

Really? The imp wanted nothing more.

Really, said the mermaid. She gave him a lip smile. Just be gentle.

The imp left the half-buried cigarette butt and reached his hand forward to stroke down the fine green strands.

Soft, he said.

The mermaid shivered. Each hair delivered a tiny note of murmurings all the way down through her.

The imp started at the root and let his hand ride the sheen all the way to the ends.

So did you hear the one about the dead cat? he said, giggling a little.

The mermaid didn’t answer; her eyes were closing.

See there’s this cat, the imp began, and it gets hit by a car. And when it goes up to heaven, St. Peter asks it why he should let it into heaven.

I know you’re an imp, said the mermaid.

His hand paused.

Don’t stop, she said. Please.

How did you know, he wailed, no one knows! He pictured the police. He pictured the PA announcement. He clutched her hair for a second, inadvertently.

Ouch, said the mermaid. Gentle please.

Will you bust me? asked the imp.

Of course not, said the mermaid. I like imps, she said.

You do?

Definitely, she said. Imps are sweet.

Sweet? Sweet? He touched her arm.

No, she said. Just the hair.

He twitched and coughed. Stroked her hair again, slower now. Her face was starting to flush, a slow reddening.

It’s my secret, he said. She said, I understand.

He said, I’m not so sweet.

Her hair was growing staticky; it clung to his fingers.

Okay, he said, and he giggled again. Okay, he said, so the cat, the dead cat, it tells St. Peter it’s been a good cat, it brought mice to its owner for many years, said the imp.

His legs turned in and out, the stilts brittle bones beneath his blue jeans. He kept stroking her hair. Root to end. Root to end.

St. Peter, continued the imp, so St. Peter sends the cat to hell because it’s a killer.

He paused, hand in the middle of her head.

Don’t stop, she said again.

Root to end. Hair curved around his fingers in soft coils.

Your hair is pretty, he said.

She was quiet. Her hair lifted off the backpack onto his hand, a cloth of pale pale green, a curtain rising.

The imp’s hand was steady but his fingers were trembling now. Okay, he continued. So. In hell, the devil said: Catch me some mice, killer cat! I want to cook them in my stew!

But the cat said No. It said I won’t do that for you, devil. I only kill mice for a good master; I won’t kill any mice for you.

And poof! The cat went straight up to heaven.

The imp giggled. He looked down at the mermaid.

That’s it, he said. That’s the joke.

Root to end.

I made it up, he said.

Her eyes were closed; her breath was faster.

Mimi, said the imp, are you okay?

Don’t stop, she said again, barely breathing, please, she said, keep going. He kept stroking down, watching close, what was going on? and when her back finally curled up, breath out in puffs, he didn’t stop even then, he was steady and quiet and watching, he was root to end, until finally she reached up her hand, breathless, and grabbed his, holding on so tightly, thanking him over and over, not snobby at all, not snobby at all, thank you, thank you, until he laughed out loud in surprise. Her purple eyes were purpler and he thought he smelled flowers.

FELL THIS GIRL

On my way to work I see this woman wearing a short shirt that shows her belly button. She has a rounded stomach, and the skin curving in makes her belly button look like a very deep hole. I’m walking with my Walkman on down Steiner, music loud in my ears for a Friday morning, and I feel a wave of desire to stick my dick in that deep dark belly button hole, to fuck the woman with the short shirt, to lay her down on the sidewalk and take her. She walks by and I walk by and I continue on my way to work.

Of course nothing happens. But I can imagine so clearly what it’s like to enter a woman, I feel like I’ve done it. My body is on hers, drunk off the conquest, sliding in slow: my hips, push, the glaze. I think about that belly button girl and I think I would shock her and I like that. I want to see girls melt because girls are so goddamn elusive, you can’t tell what the fuck they’re thinking, except I am a girl, and I know just what a lot of girls are thinking, I know what I’m thinking, and right now it’s exactly this.

I go to a party and sit around with people I don’t know very well or like and we talk about movies we all hated. I am wearing a short skirt that flows, and a shirt with a scoop neck and I am luscious. I meet a man at this party who walks me back to my car. He has shaggy red hair, and calluses on his fingers from construction, or guitar, or golf; viva la mystery — I do not ask.

By the car I take his hand and I lay it on my breast. I’m feeling very bold since I had three beers and all I really want right now is this warm callused mysterious hand on me. He seems taken aback, but then his face lightens and his other arm reaches out to hold my waist, and I melt, I melt, I open up like a dream and I’m his for the night until the warmth goes cold.

He is a bad kisser, but he has very fine hands. We’re in the Mission and he happens to live just a few blocks away on Valencia so we go to his room which has curved-out Victorian windows and a bed on the floor and a poster of a band I’ve never heard of called Swat and next to the poster there is a flyswatter hanging on the wall signed by the band and I think it’s sort of cool. He kisses the back of my neck, and I change my mind and decide he’s a good kisser, and our clothes come off in the way that clothes do, and it’s semidark in his room, and I, for the moment, never want to leave.

He tells me nice things about my body.

While he fucks me, I imagine fucking some woman, my mouth set in a grim way. It’s the three of us in bed: me the woman, me the man, and him, the red-haired guy with the great hands. He thinks I’m just some girly girl, receptacle envelope girl, he doesn’t know what I’m thinking. He doesn’t know that I’m also a shadow on his back, pushing in.

“Oh,” he keeps saying over and over, “oh,” and his eyes are closed in concentration. When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I’ve noticed this: when it’s the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you’re sort of the stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you’re not her, and so you get all this nice residue emotion. I felt cherished, tucked into his belly, like we’d known each other for years and I was his wonderful girl and we both slept great.

The red-haired guy’s name is, of course, Patrick.

Before he wakes up I run to the bathroom to see what I look like, and I actually look pretty good. Flushed and fuck-able. I go back and he’s still sprawled out on the bed and I fold my body back into his and think about how I want to look to him when he wakes up. I want to be sleeping in a casual sexy way, to make him want me again.

I remember, especially in high school, I was so good at this kind of fake-out. I rehearsed thoughtfulness, I appeared carefree — and how many guys did I trick? As I sat there, hair tucked behind my ear, supposedly lost in a book, thinking this exact monologue, rereading and rereading the same paragraph, waiting for them to see me and want me, caught in this image of myself as a reader. What about staring at ants, wanting to seem close to nature and whimsical? What about staring into space, wanting to seem expansive, trying to find the thoughts that would fit my self-portrait? I fooled so many guys! I was found mysterious so many times, oh that girl, we don’t know what that Susie thinks, and all I’m thinking is what do I look like, and all I’m thinking is that I own their thoughts.

Curled into Patrick, I end up falling asleep again anyway, and when I wake up he’s across the room. I run my finger over the titles in his bookshelf and find a photo album. It’s pretty heavy but I lift it into bed and start flipping through it.

“Patrick,” I say, “who’s in these pictures?”

He’s sorting through videotapes maybe because he wants to watch something. He glances up.

“Friends, old girlfriends, you know, photo album stuff.” The morning light is on his back and he looks pale and beautiful.

“So who’s the most important girlfriend of all these people?” I ask. I can see several women in the pictures, and they’re all attractive which makes me feel both good and bad.

“What do you mean the most important?” He has a yawn in his voice, but I think he’s faking.

“You know, the one you really loved.”

He walks over to me, leaving a pile of videotapes, and flips through the stiff photo album pages fast, and then I know he knows the order really well and that he likes to look at his photos and it makes me want to glue myself to his body.

“Here,” he says, pointing. There are a few photos of a brunette with short hair and a big, smiling mouth, Patrick and the brunette at the Grand Canyon, Patrick and the brunette taking a self-timer picture so that their faces are distorted and their noses look huge.

“That’s the one you loved?”

He nods and leaves the room. He leaves the videotapes all over the floor. I study the girl. She does not look a thing like me. He doesn’t come back in for a while, and then I hear the rustle of the newspaper and I know I’ve lost him for at least an hour. I pick up the phone and call my sister Eleanor. She’ll be up early on a Saturday morning. She has nothing else to do.

“Hello?” Her voice is lower than mine, and sounds like the voice of an older woman.

“Ellie, do you think I should cut my hair short?” I’m naked and I stick my legs up into the air because they look the best that way, all the skin slides up and creates muscles.

“Susie, whatever.” Eleanor is always depressed. Eleanor is fat.

“I think I’m tired of the way I’m looking. Do you want to go shopping with me? It’s early, but maybe later on today?” I love to go shopping with Eleanor because in contrast I look so great in everything.

“I work,” she says.

“Is Mom there?” I ask.

“Yeah, do you want to talk to her?”

“No,” I say, “but will you ask her if she thinks I’d look good in short hair?” There’s a pause while I hear Eleanor ask the question like a good big sister. The tiredness in her voice should make me feel bad but it doesn’t. What it makes me want to do is go take a karate class because I like to hold my hands like that and chopping up a board would feel good — smash, the crack, the thud.

Eleanor says Mom doesn’t care. I say goodbye and hang up the phone. I go into the kitchen and have an English muffin without asking and read parts of the paper with the glamorous people and Patrick looks up and smiles at one point which is very smart of him if he ever wants to see my ass in bed again.

Turns out Patrick is working underneath the city inside a pothole, fixing pipes or something. He gets to lift up the pothole and jump inside. I laugh, I tell him it’s like he’s fucking the city with his whole body but he doesn’t get it, and I think when he doesn’t get something he’s just quiet. In fact, he’s usually quiet. In fact, I talk mostly all the time around Patrick, or anyone.

I go to find him inside the pothole. He told me it was on Divisadero and they don’t reclose the pothole, so there it is, like some hobbit door, opened up to anybody. I slip down into the belly of the street which is incredibly exciting, and it’s dark and it smells pretty awful and I can hear the cars rushing by above me. They seem like they’re going really fucking fast.

“Hey Patrick,” I yell, “hey Patrick, you have guests.” My voice booms out through the passages, and after a while I hear a rustling and it’s Patrick wearing something orange and he does not look happy to see me.

“What are you doing here?” He’s gruff, like his boss is next to him or something, but as far as I can tell, we’re alone.

“I thought I’d come bring you a plant for your new house,” I say, laughing, wishing I had brought a plant and thinking about how witty I am and why doesn’t he love me yet.

“You need to go, Susie,” he says. “It’s totally unsafe for you to be here. You need a special permit.” He won’t even look at me. His hands are gloved and the gloves are covered with oil. I want him to grab me with those gloves and smear oil all over my body and my nice dress and throw me on the ground, with all these cars above us, a ceiling of cars.

“Susie. Go.” His voice is louder now, almost mean. I start to climb back and he puts his hands on my thighs to help hoist me up and I swear it turns me on so much that I practically drop back in there but I want to see Patrick again, and if I did that, I bet he’d lock his doors to me forever.

Back on the street, the cars seem really slow. The air is bright and I can still smell oil in my nose. I have nothing to do and it’s Saturday night almost and I don’t think Patrick is going to want to see me first thing when he exits the pothole. I go to a bar and have a beer. The bartender doesn’t look at me and instead talks a lot to the girl next to me who has a perfect ponytail, and I eat a bag of pretzels and then rip the bag into ribbons. The whole experience only takes half an hour, and I’m sick of being ignored, so I leave.

I walk up the street with beer taste in my mouth, warm and bitter and wonderful, and what do you know, there’s that girl again, the belly button girl, leaning back to show that marvelous hole to the world. She has no fucking idea.

When I walk past her, I want to grab her wrist and drag her down into the pothole, which is just a block or two back. She looks at me and smiles because she knows she has nothing to fear from me, she thinks I’m her ally, but I’m not. I really want to trample down this girl who has her belly button open wide like it’s there just for me. I want to hurt her because she looks like she might be happy and she might have a date and if she doesn’t, she will. I want to fuck her by a Dumpster and cut her down, like she’s a tree, I don’t care if she wants me back, I don’t care if so many people back home love her so much. I walk and I walk and I walk and I end up at Mount Zion Hospital which means I’m near my mom’s house and I go by the house and in the upstairs window I can see a hint of Eleanor, in front of the TV, with potato chips. I don’t really want to touch Eleanor. Mostly I just want her to wake up. Wake up! I feel like pouring water on her a lot. I keep walking; I don’t want to talk to my sister and I definitely don’t want to see my mom.

I pass a haircutter which is a stay-open-late haircutter for last-minute urges. It’s just closing and I go in and ask her to cut all my hair off until it’s really short and sassy, and she’s so tired and beat and I bet she has five kids or something, but she does it anyway, in like ten minutes. She charges me ten bucks, a buck a minute I guess. It looks not good. I keep checking out my silhouette in the windows of stores and shaking my head to make sure the reflection is me. When I touch the back of my neck, it feels nice. I walk in zigzags through the side streets until I hit a fancy hotel and wander in and there is a knot of old rich men and I go up to them.

“Anyone want to buy me a drink?” I ask, and they all smile and they all Want to, but none of them do, they sort of shake their heads in unison like they’re old ducks. I plop down on the red velveteen hotel couch and another older man comes up to me.

“I overheard you,” he says, “and I’d love to buy you a drink.”

I smile up at him. He has gray hair, but he’s quite handsome.

“Great. Whatever you want to get me.” I lean back on the couch and close my eyes while he’s off at the bar. When he returns, I want to appear the image of ease and raw sexuality. I open my legs so there’s just a hint of darkness at the crotch. I lay my arms across the top of the couch like I’m claiming the world, this is all mine, I’m so confident. He returns with a vodka something for me, ten degrees below zero, the glass is frosted up and it slides down like very cold, watery-tasting water. I’m drunk in five minutes.

He asks me questions which I lie about and then wants to know if I want to come up into his hotel room which is a few floors up and I’m not really sure if I want to, but I do.

It’s on the ninth floor and it’s a suite. It’s really nice, with gold antique faucets and no lame landscape paintings on the wall, and a view of the bridge and the city lights which are just now coming on, ten by ten.

He stands behind me and unzips my dress, just like that, and I close my eyes and imagine he’s Patrick. Right now, Patrick is probably wondering where I am and maybe is very sorry because he made me feel so bad in the pothole or maybe he never wants to see me again because he thinks I’m some nut who goes into potholes, and maybe he’s right because here I am in a hotel about to fuck a rich businessman who really, in fact, could be my father.

I keep my eyes closed and feel his hands all over me and I think about his body, if it will be wrinkled with gray chest hairs, and I want to cut his throat with a long sharp knife and that gets me wet.

“This is such a nice surprise,” he says. “I didn’t expect this from my vacation.”

I don’t say anything. My eyes are still closed. He kisses me and it’s an okay kiss and he holds my face and smells nice and there’s a door in me that opens and I feel like I could cry and I could crawl inside his wrinkled-up gray chest and cry and it feels like he took his hand and somehow stuck it through my heart.

I need to go, but I don’t. He guides me toward the bed, and all my energy right now is concentrated on not crying. I don’t even notice when he takes off my clothes and lays me down and I’m just practicing my breathing, one two three, in out. Don’t cry, crying would be bad, but there is a whole cyclone of tears swirling in my throat and I just try to break it down, go away, piece by piece back into my stomach. I put my hands on his arms and the skin slides up a little because he’s this old man, so I decide with my eyes still closed that he’s Eleanor and she lost all this weight and so now her skin doesn’t fit anymore. He’s Eleanor and she’s tucking me in as she did when I was little and Dad left and I kept thinking he would come in through the window and trip over something and die, trying to get me back, and Eleanor would stroke my forehead and tell me there was nothing he could trip on; she would clear the path by the window. I loved my sister so much, that she didn’t laugh at me, that she cleared the path instead. And it makes me want to cry again, my love for Eleanor, and the tears sort of gather while my eyes are closed and I grip those arms and move my hips and I feel so proud of my Eleanor for losing all this weight. And when her skin bounces back to fit her body, oh she will be so beautiful. How I would love it if she would be the beautiful one for a while and I could slide into the background and be ugly and quiet.

His breathing has changed, I barely noticed the way he came in a pleased grunt. He slides off me, hand lingering on my hip. I’ve been waiting for this break so that I could run into the bathroom.

I open my eyes. His face is right there, redder and sweaty, a sappy smile on his face and I politely fake a smile back and excuse myself and go into the antique gold faucets and the little plastic bottles of hotel shampoo and sit on the toilet. For a second, I think I might split down the middle and reveal a six-year-old mess, like a Russian doll except we don’t match. But I don’t, the moment is over, I feel a few tears dribble down but the rush of them that I was swallowing is gone now. I’m just me in my body on the toilet, looking at myself in the mirror with my new short hair that is all messed up.

He’s asleep when I leave, let myself out the door and down the elevator and through the streets to my own apartment. It’s dark and there are no messages on the answering machine, the red light is steady. No one has called me. Patrick has not called me, and we were supposed to have plans tonight.

I stand in front of the mirror and I look at my body in this little dress I’m wearing, and my socks folding over different lengths and I try and forget that I just fucked a sixty-five-year-old man who only bought me one drink. I think about that whole dick fantasy, and I try to get myself to want to fuck myself. Here you go, I say, look at that fine ass, look at that body, you want to take her don’t you, you want to fell this girl.

But I just see some girl in a blue dress with short hair and sad eyes and I really don’t want to fuck her at all. She looks so tired to me. I go to the window and look out at the lights of the city which are every color and I stick my head out. It’s pretty windy, so it throws my hair back and I feel like a dog riding in a car and the wind is cold and brings tears to my eyes and I try to pretend they’re sad tears and sniffle a little.

The night is mostly quiet and I can only hear the sounds of things far away. After a while a cab pulls up downstairs. It honks and three girls come out of my building in little skirts and shiny hair and they get in the cab and they’re already laughing. The wind keeps pulling tears from my eyes. I’m poised like a gargoyle above them and I think about letting myself fall out the window and landing on the top of the cab to go where they’re going. Bending the metal of the roof until it presses down hard on one of the girls’ heads and she panics and yells at the driver who doesn’t listen. Help, she says to her friends, something’s going on, the car is caving in! They think she’s kidding but it’s real: there is a mass that is me on top of her, watching the lights and the sky pass me by in a rush, pushing down on that metal until I’m crushing her skull. My ass and her brain. My weight and her burden. I will close my eyes and feel the speed. I will feel the wind fill up my dress and pass through me in tunnels until I am so numb with cold, I can’t tell when we stop.