The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

THE HEALER

There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else’s hands were normal. The girls first met in elementary school and were friends for about three weeks. Their parents were delighted; the mothers in particular spent hours on the phone describing over and over the shock of delivery day.

I remember one afternoon, on the playground, the fire girl grabbed hold of the ice girl’s hand and — Poof — just like that, each equalized the other. Their hands dissolved into regular flesh — exit mutant, enter normal. The fire girl panicked and let go, finding that her fire reblazed right away, while the ice spun back fast around the other girl’s fingers like a cold glass turban. They grasped hands again; again, it worked. Delighted by the neat new trick, I think they even charged money to perform it for a while and made a pretty penny. Audiences loved to watch the two little girls dabbling in the elements with their tiny powerful fists.

After a while, the ice girl said she was tired of the trick and gave it up and they stopped being friends. I’d never seen them together since but now they were both sixteen and in the same science class. I was there too; I was a senior then.

The fire girl sat in the back row. Sparks dripped from her fingertips like sweat and fizzed on the linoleum. She looked both friendly and lonely. After school, she was most popular with the cigarette kids who found her to be the coolest of lighters.

The ice girl sat in the front row and wore a ponytail. She kept her ice hand in her pocket but you knew it was there because it leaked. I remember when the two met, at the start of the school year, face-to-face for the first time in years, the fire girl held out her fire hand, I guess to try the trick again, but the ice girl shook her head. I’m not a shaker, she said. Those were her exact words. I could tell the fire girl felt bad. I gave her a sympathetic look but she missed it. After school let out, she passed along the brick wall, lighting cigarette after cigarette, tiny red circles in a line. She didn’t keep the smokers company; just did her duty and then walked home, alone.

Our town was ringed by a circle of hills and because of this no one really came in and no one ever left. Only one boy made it out. He’d been very gifted at public speech and one afternoon he climbed over Old Midge, the shortest of the ring, and vanished forever. After six months or so he mailed his mother a postcard with a fish on it that said: In the Big City. Giving Speeches All Over. Love, J. She Xeroxed the postcard and gave every citizen a copy. I stuck it on the wall by my bed. I made up his speeches, regularly, on my way to school; they always involved me. Today we focus on Lisa, J.’s voice would sail out, Lisa with the two flesh hands. This is generally where I’d stop — I wasn’t sure what to add.

During science class that fall, the fire girl burnt things with her fingers. She entered the room with a pile of dry leaves in her book bag and by the time the bell rang, there was ash all over her desk. She seemed to need to do this. It prevented some potential friendships, however, because most people were too scared to approach her. I tried but I never knew what to say. For Christmas that year I bought her a log. Here, I said, I got this for you to burn up. She started to cry. I said: Do you hate it? but she said No. She said it was a wonderful gift and from then on she remembered my name.

I didn’t buy anything for the ice girl. What do you get an ice girl anyway? She spent most of her non-school time at the hospital, helping sick people. She was a great soother, they said. Her water had healing powers.

What happened was the fire girl met Roy. And that’s when everything changed.

I found them first, and it was accidental, and I told no one, so it wasn’t my fault. Roy was a boy who had no parents and lived alone. He was very rarely at school and he was a cutter. He cut things into his skin with a razor blade. I saw once; some Saturday when everyone was at a picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom and he was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg. Raised and white. I put out a hand and touched it and then I walked directly home. It was hard to feel those letters. They still felt like skin.

I don’t know exactly how the fire girl met Roy but they spent their afternoons by the base of the mountains and she would burn him. A fresh swatch of skin every day. I was on a long walk near Old Midge after school, wondering if I’d ever actually cross it, when I passed the two of them for the first time. I almost waved and called out Hi but then I saw what was going on. Her back was to me, but still I could see that she was leaning forward with one fire finger pressed against his inner elbow and his eyes were shut and he was moaning. The flames hissed and crisped on contact. She sucked in her breath, sss, and then she pulled her hand away and they both crumpled back, breathing hard. Roy had a new mark on his arm. This one did not form a letter. It swirled into itself, black and detailed, a tiny whirlpool of lines.

I turned and walked away. My own hands were shaking. I had to force myself to leave instead of going back and watching more. I kept walking until I looped the entire town.

All during the next month, both Roy and the fire girl looked really happy. She stopped bringing leaves into science class and started participating and Roy smiled at me in the street which had never happened before. I continued my mountain walks after school, and usually I’d see them pressed into the shade, but I never again allowed myself to stop and watch. I didn’t want to invade their privacy but it was more than that; something about watching them reminded me of quicksand, slide and pull in, as fast as that. I just took in what I could as I passed by. It always smelled a bit like barbecue, where they were. This made me hungry, which made me uncomfortable.

It was some family, off to the base of Old Midge to go camping, that saw and told everyone.

The fire girl is hurting people! they announced, and Roy tried to explain but his arms and thighs were pocked with fingerprint scars and it said OUCH in writing on his thigh and no one believed him, they believed the written word instead, and placed him in a foster home. I heard he started chewing glass.

They put the fire girl in jail. She’s a danger, everyone said, she burns things, she burns people. She likes it. This was true: at the jail she grabbed the forearm of the guard with her fire fist and left a smoking tarantula handprint; he had to go to the hospital and be soothed by the ice girl.

The whole town buzzed about the fire girl all week. They said: She’s crazy! Or: She’s primitive! I lay in my bed at night, and thought of her concentrating and leaning in to Roy. I thought of her shuddering out to the trees like a drum.

I went to the burn ward and found the ice girl. If anyone, I thought, she might have some answers.

She was holding her hand above a sick man in a bed with red sores all over his body, and her ice was dripping into his mouth and he looked thrilled.

I want you to come to the jail, I said, and give her a little relief.

The ice girl looked over at me. Who are you? she asked.

I was annoyed. I’m in your science class, I said, Lisa.

She gave a nod. Oh right, she said. You sit in the middle.

I looked at the man in the hospital bed, the bliss on his face, the gloom on hers.

This can’t be too fun for you, I said.

She didn’t answer. Come to the jail, I said, please, she’s so unhappy, maybe you can help.

The ice girl checked the watch on her flesh hand. The man beneath her made something close to a purring sound. If you come back in an hour, she said at last, I’ll go for a little bit.

Thank you, I said, this is another good deed.

She raised her slim eyebrows. I have enough good deeds, she said. It’s just that I’ve never seen the jail.

I returned in exactly an hour, and we went over together.

The guard at the jail beamed at the ice girl. My wife had cancer, he said, and you fixed her up just fine. The ice girl smiled. Her smile was small. I asked where the fire girl was and the guard pointed. Careful, he said, she’s nutso. He coughed and crossed his legs. We turned to his point, and I led the way down.

The fire girl was at the back of her cell, burning up the fluffy inside of the mattress. She recognized me right away.

Hi, Lisa, she said, how’s it going?

Fine, I said. We’re on frogs now in science.

She nodded. The ice girl stood back, looking around at the thick stone walls and the low ceiling. The room was dank and smelled moldy.

Look who I brought, I said. Maybe she can help you.

The fire girl looked up. Hey, she said. They exchanged a nod. It was all so formal. I was annoyed. It seems to me that in a jail, you don’t need to be that formal, you can let some things loose.

So, wanting to be useful, I went right over to the ice girl and pulled her hand out of her pocket, against her half-protests. I held it forward, and stuck it through the bars of the cell. It was surprisingly heavy which filled me with new sympathy. It felt like a big cold rock.

Here, I said, shaking it a little, go to it.

The fire girl grasped the ice girl’s hand. I think we weren’t sure it would work, if the magic had worn off in junior high, but it hadn’t; as soon as they touched, the ice melted away and the fire burned out and they were just two girls holding hands through the bars of a jail. I had a hard time recognizing them this way. I looked at their faces and they looked different. It was like seeing a movie star nude, no makeup, eyes small and blinking.

The fire girl started to shiver and she closed her eyes. She held on hard.

It’s so much quieter like this, she murmured.

The other girl winced. Not for me, she said. Her face was beginning to flush a little.

The fire girl opened her eyes. No, she said, nodding, of course. It would be different for you.

I clasped my own hands together. I felt tepid. I felt out of my league.

I don’t suppose I can hold your hand all day, the fire girl said in a low voice.

The ice girl shook her head. I have to be at the hospital, she said, I need my hand. She seemed uncomfortable. Her face was getting redder. She held on a second longer. I need my hand, she said. She let go.

The fire girl hung her head. Her hand blazed up in a second, twirling into turrets. I pictured her at the mountains again — that ribbon of pleasure, tasting Roy with her fingertips.

Ice whirled back around the other girl’s hand. She stepped back, and the color emptied out of her face.

It’s awful, the fire girl said, shaking her wrist, sending sparks flying, starting to pace her cell. I want to burn everything. I want to burn everything. She gripped the iron frame of the cot until it glowed red under her palm. Do you understand? she said, it’s all I think about.

We could cut it off, said the ice girl then.

We both stared at her.

Are you kidding? I said, you can’t cut off the fire hand, it’s a beautiful thing, it’s a wonderful thing—

But the fire girl had released the bed and was up against the bars. Do you think it would work? she said. Do you think that would do something?

The ice girl shrugged. I don’t know, she said, but it might be worth a try.

I wanted to give a protest here but I was no speechwriter; the speechwriter had left town forever and taken all the good speeches with him. I kept beginning sentences and dropping them off. Finally, they sent me out to find a knife. I don’t know what they talked about while I was gone. I wasn’t sure where to go so I just ran home, grabbed a huge sharp knife from the kitchen, and ran back. In ten minutes I was in the cell again, out of breath, the wooden knife handle tucked into my belt like a sword.

The fire girl was amazed. You’re fast, she said. I felt flattered. I thought maybe I could be the fast girl. I was busy for a second renaming myself Atalanta when I looked over and saw how nervous and scared she was.

Don’t do this, I said, you’ll miss it.

But she’d already reached over and grabbed the knife and was pacing her cell again, flicking sparks onto the wall. She spoke mainly to herself. It would all be so much easier, she said.

The ice girl had no expression. I’ll stay, she said, tightening her ponytail, in case you need healing. I wanted to kick her. There was a horrible ache growing in my stomach.

The fire girl took a deep breath. Then, kneeling down, she laid her hand, leaping with flames, on the stone jail floor and slammed the knife down right where the flesh of her wrist began. After sawing for a minute, she let out a shout and the hand separated and she ran over to the ice girl who put her healing bulb directly on the wound.

Tears streaked down the fire girl’s face and she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The cut-off hand was hidden in a cloud of smoke on the floor. The ice girl leaned in, her soother face intent, but something strange was happening. The ice bulb wasn’t working. There was no ice at all. The ice girl found herself with just a regular flesh hand, clasping the sawed-off tuber of a wrist. Equalized and normal. The fire girl looked down in horror.

Oh, pleaded the fire girl, never let go, please, don’t, please, but it was too late. Her wrist had already been released to the air.

The fire girl’s arm blazed up to the elbow. It was a bigger blaze now, a looser one, a less dexterous flame with no fingers to guide it. Oh no, she cried, trying to shake it off, oh no. The ice girl was silent, holding her hand as it reiced in her flesh palm, turning it slowly, numbing up. I was twisting in the corner, the ache in my stomach fading, trying to think of the right thing to say. But her body was now twice as burning and twice as loud and twice as powerful and twice everything. I still thought it was beautiful, but I was just an observer. The ice girl slipped silently down the hallway and I only stayed for a few more minutes. It was too hard to see. The fire girl started slamming her arm against the brick wall. When I left, she was sitting down with her chopped-off hand, burning it to pieces, one finger at a time.

They let her out a week later, but they made her strap her arm to a metal bucket of ice. The ice girl even dripped a few drops into it, to make it especially potent. The bucket would heat up on occasion but her arm apparently quieted. I didn’t go to see her on the day she got out; I stayed at home. I felt responsible and ashamed: it was me who’d brought the ice girl to the jail, I’d fetched the knife, and worst, I was still so relieved it hadn’t worked. Instead, I sat in my room at home that day and thought about J. in the Big City. He didn’t give speeches about me anymore. Now we stood together in the middle of a busy street, dodging whizzing cars, and I’d pull him tight to me and begin to learn his skin.

All sorts of stories passed through the town about the fire girl on her day of release: She was covered in ash! She was all fire with one flesh hand! My personal favorite was that even her teeth were little flaming squares. The truth was, she found a shack in the back of town by the mountains, a shack made of metal, and she set up a home there.

The funny thing is what happened to the ice girl after all of it. She quit her job at the hospital, and she split. I thought I’d leave, I thought the fire girl would leave, but it was the ice girl who left. I passed her on the street the day before.

How are you doing, I said, how is the hospital?

She turned away from me, still couldn’t look me in the eye. Everyone is sick in the hospital, she said. She stood there and I waited for her to continue. Do you realize, she said, that if I cut off my arm, my entire body might freeze?

Wow, I said. Think of all the people you could cure. I couldn’t help it. I was still mad at her for suggesting the knife at all.

Yeah, she said, eyes flicking over to me for a second, think of that.

I watched her. I was remembering her face in the jail, waiting to see what would happen when the fire hand was removed. Hoping, I suppose, for a different outcome. I put my hands in my pockets. I guess I never told you, she said, but I feel nothing. I just feel ice.

I nodded. I wasn’t surprised.

She turned a bit. I’m off now, she said, bye.

When the town discovered she had disappeared, there was a big uproar, and everybody blamed the fire girl. They thought she’d burned her up or something. The fire girl who never left her metal shack, sitting in her living room, her arm in that bucket. The whole town blamed her until a hungry nurse opened the hospital freezer and found one thousand Dixie cups filled with magic ice. They knew it was her ice because as soon as they brought a cup to a stroke patient, he improved and went home in two days. No one could figure it out, why the ice girl had left, but they stopped blaming the fire girl. Instead, they had an auction for the ice cups. People mortgaged their houses for one little cup; just in case, even if everyone was healthy; just in case. This was a good thing to hoard in your freezer.

The ones who didn’t get a cup went to the fire girl. When they were troubled, or lonely, or in pain, they went to see her. If they were lucky, she’d remove her blazing arm from the ice bucket and gently touch their faces with the point of her wrist. The burns healed slowly, leaving marks on their cheeks. There was a whole group of scar people who walked around town now. I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.

LOSER

Once there was an orphan who had a knack for finding lost things. Both his parents had been killed when he was eight years old — they were swimming in the ocean when it turned wild with waves, and each had tried to save the other from drowning. The boy woke up from a nap, on the sand, alone. After the tragedy, the community adopted and raised him, and a few years after the deaths of his parents, he began to have a sense of objects even when they weren’t visible. This ability continued growing in power through his teens and by his twenties, he was able to actually sniff out lost sunglasses, keys, contact lenses and sweaters.

The neighbors discovered his talent accidentally — he was over at Jenny Sugar’s house one evening, picking her up for a date, when Jenny’s mother misplaced her hairbrush, and was walking around, complaining about this. The young man’s nose twitched and he turned slightly toward the kitchen and pointed to the drawer where the spoons and knives were kept. His date burst into laughter. Now that would be quite a silly place to put the brush, she said, among all that silverware! and she opened the drawer to make her point, to wave with a knife or brush her hair with a spoon, but when she did, boom, there was the hairbrush, matted with gray curls, sitting astride the fork pile.

Jenny’s mother kissed the young man on the cheek but Jenny herself looked at him suspiciously all night long.

You planned all that, didn’t you, she said, over dinner. You were trying to impress my mother. Well you didn’t impress me, she said.

He tried to explain himself but she would hear none of it and when he drove his car up to her house, she fled before he could even finish saying he’d had a nice time, which was a lie anyway. He went home to his tiny room and thought about the word lonely and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two l’s in it, each standing tall by itself.

As news spread around the neighborhood about the young man’s skills, people reacted two ways: there were the deeply appreciative and the skeptics. The appreciative ones called up the young man regularly. He’d stop by on his way to school, find their keys, and they’d give him a homemade muffin. The skeptics called him over too, and watched him like a hawk; he’d still find their lost items but they’d insist it was an elaborate scam and he was doing it all to get attention. Maybe, declared one woman, waving her index finger in the air, Maybe, she said, he steals the thing so we think it’s lost, moves the item, and then comes over to save it! How do we know it was really lost in the first place? What is going on?

The young man didn’t know himself. All he knew was the feeling of a tug, light but insistent, like a child at his sleeve, and that tug would turn him in the right direction and show him where to look. Each object had its own way of inhabiting space, and therefore messaging its location. The young man could sense, could smell, an object’s presence — he did not need to see it to feel where it put its gravity down. As would be expected, items that turned out to be miles away took much harder concentration than the ones that were two feet to the left.

When Mrs. Allen’s little boy didn’t come home one afternoon, that was the most difficult of all. Leonard Allen was eight years old and usually arrived home from school at 3:05. He had allergies and needed a pill before he went back out to play. That day, by 3:45, a lone Mrs. Allen was a wreck. Her boy rarely got lost — only once had that happened in the supermarket but he’d been found quite easily under the produce tables, crying; this walk home from school was a straight line and Leonard was not a wandering kind.

Mrs. Allen was just a regular neighbor except for one extraordinary fact — through an inheritance, she was the owner of a gargantuan emerald she called the Green Star. It sat, glass-cased, in her kitchen, where everyone could see it because she insisted that it be seen. Sometimes, as a party trick, she’d even cut steak with its beveled edge.

On this day, she removed the case off the Green Star and stuck her palms on it. Where is my boy? she cried. The Green Star was cold and flat. She ran, weeping, to her neighbor, who calmly walked her back home; together, they gave the house a thorough search, and then the neighbor, a believer, recommended calling the young man. Although Mrs. Allen was a skeptic, she thought anything was a worthwhile idea, and when the line picked up, she said, in a trembling voice:

You must find my boy.

The young man had been just about to go play basketball with his friends. He’d located the basketball in the bathtub.

You lost him? said the young man.

Mrs. Allen began to explain and then her phone clicked.

One moment please, she said, and the young man held on.

When her voice returned, it was shaking with rage.

He’s been kidnapped! she said. And they want the Green Star!

The young man realized then it was Mrs. Allen he was talking to, and nodded. Oh, he said, I see. Everyone in town was familiar with Mrs. Allen’s Green Star. I’ll be right over, he said.

The woman’s voice was too run with tears to respond.

In his basketball shorts and shirt, the young man jogged over to Mrs. Allen’s house. He was amazed at how the Green Star was all exactly the same shade of green. He had a desire to lick it.

By then, Mrs. Allen was in hysterics.

They didn’t tell me what to do, she sobbed. Where do I bring my emerald? How do I get my boy back?

The young man tried to feel the scent of the boy. He asked for a photograph and stared at it — a brown-haired kid at his kindergarten graduation — but the young man had only found objects before, and lost objects at that. He’d never found anything, or anybody, stolen. He wasn’t a policeman.

Mrs. Allen called the police and one officer showed up at the door.

Oh it’s the finding guy, the officer said. The young man dipped his head modestly. He turned to his right; to his left; north; south. He got a glimmer of a feeling toward the north and walked out the back door, through the backyard. Night approached and the sky seemed to grow and deepen in the darkness.

What’s his name again? he called back to Mrs. Allen.

Leonard, she said. He heard the policeman pull out a pad and begin to ask basic questions.

He couldn’t quite feel him. He felt the air and he felt the tug inside of the Green Star, an object displaced from its original home in Asia. He felt the tug of the tree in the front yard which had been uprooted from Virginia to be replanted here, and he felt the tug of his own watch which was from his uncle; in an attempt to be fatherly, his uncle had insisted he take it but they both knew the gesture was false.

Maybe the boy was too far away by now.

He heard the policeman ask: What is he wearing?

Mrs. Allen described a blue shirt, and the young man focused in on the blue shirt; he turned off his distractions and the blue shirt, like a connecting radio station, came calling from the northwest. The young man went walking and walking and about fourteen houses down he felt the blue shirt shrieking at him and he walked right into the backyard, through the back door, and sure enough, there were four people watching TV including the tear-stained boy with a runny nose eating a candy bar. The young man scooped up the boy while the others watched, so surprised they did nothing, and one even muttered: Sorry, man.

For fourteen houses back, the young man held Leonard in his arms like a bride. Leonard stopped sneezing and looked up at the stars and the young man smelled Leonard’s hair, rich with the memory of peanut butter. He hoped Leonard would ask him a question, any question, but Leonard was quiet. The young man answered in his head: Son, he said, and the word rolled around, a marble on a marble floor. Son, he wanted to say.

When he reached Mrs. Allen’s door, which was wide open, he walked in with quiet Leonard and Mrs. Allen promptly burst into tears and the policeman slunk out the door.

She thanked the young man a thousand times, even offered him the Green Star, but he refused it. Leonard turned on the TV and curled up on the sofa. The young man walked over and asked him about the program he was watching but Leonard stuck a thumb in his mouth and didn’t respond.

Feel better, he said softly. Tucking the basketball beneath his arm, the young man walked home, shoulders low.

In his tiny room, he undressed and lay in bed. Had it been a naked child with nothing on, no shoes, no necklace, no hairbow, no watch, he could not have found it. He lay in bed that night with the trees from other places rustling and he could feel their confusion. No snow here. Not a lot of rain. Where am I? What is wrong with this dirt?

Crossing his hands in front of himself, he held on to his shoulders. Concentrate hard, he thought. Where are you? Everything felt blank and quiet. He couldn’t feel a tug. He squeezed his eyes shut and let the question bubble up: Where did you go? Come find me. I’m over here. Come find me.

If he listened hard enough, he thought he could hear the waves hitting.

LEGACY

The hunchback took in the pregnant girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out. He was her stepuncle, stepmother’s side, lived in a castle with a butler and several spoiled cats. Her parents, disturbed by the predicament, brewed over the problem until her father came up with the brilliant idea: That castle! Your weird brother! Wanting nothing more to do with their daughter, they placed her on a casde-bound train with a suitcase of wide-waisted dresses and a thank-you fern.

Chin brave, the girl ascended the four hundred stairs over the moat and decided she liked the view of the garden from her bedroom. The butler threw out the fern. She held her belly in her arms and bounced with it while the hunchback, a gourmet vegetarian, served her creamy spinach and mashed buttered yams in his cold, stone-walled kitchen.

By her fifth month, they were lovers. He licked her body up, thirsted after her swollen breasts, consumed her corners until she felt she was one cohesive circle.

I never really came with him, she whispered one night to the hunchback, pointing to her stomach. Someone once told me that if the woman comes at conception, then the baby will be lucky. Let me tell you, she continued, if that’s true, this’ll be one cursed child.

The hunchback burst into laughter and held her tightly because just ten minutes before she could hardly stop coming from the insistent lappings of his tongue. He said Maybe some of our luck is going up, post-conception luck, and she sank into his millions of pillows and let out a breath of satisfaction. When they slept, she spooned him from behind, her extended belly fitting perfectly into the space created beneath the lurch of his hunch.

She dreamed about luck traveling up her inner thighs, sparkling and ticklish, like softened diamonds.

After the baby came, she wouldn’t leave. No one called for her, and she wouldn’t have gone with them anyway. She wanted to stay, she told him and he nodded. He said Move into my room and she did in two hours, his room with its strange swaybacked chairs and the midnight-blue four-poster bed. She was at his desk one morning, preparing the papers for the baby to be his, for him to be the official father, when she came across medical papers from a plastic surgery clinic. What’s this she said out loud but the hunchback was in the rose garden, weeding. She read the papers because she figured This is to be my baby’s father, and she found out that two years previous this ordinary normal man had had a hump added to his back. The doctors had opened up his skin and injected fat globules into his shoulder region, and it had cost him a lot of money but he was really rich. The papers said Warning: overeating will affect the size of this hump which explained to her the way it had swelled on Thanksgiving night; she’d chalked it up to her own imagination.

You mean you’re not for real? she screeched, and she ran outside to the weeds while the baby slept and she poked at his back hard until he said You’re hurting me and she said You’re a fake fake fake! and scooping up the baby she flew down the four hundred stairs. She walked the streets of the city until she found a cheap apartment on the bad side of town. She met a man with no legs. How did you get this way, she asked, and he said My father didn’t know I was under the car working on it and she said I’m so sorry and took off her clothes. He was not the lover that the hunchback was, though. She only came every now and then when she allowed herself the remembrance of his hands and his tongue. She quieted and took up nursing, specializing in deformities. But the baby: she did turn out lucky. She grew up to be a movie star. She headlined movies in silver dresses and everyone watched her huge face on the screen with her long long eyelashes and said This one is Special.

It was so unfortunate that her career ended the way it did. On the set of her fifth movie, the starlet was sitting at her makeup table with her head on her arms feeling inestimably sad. I have beauty and fame and riches and boyfriends, she thought, and yet I am so unhappy. Her mother, a frequent visitor, knocked at the door of the trailer. Sweetheart she said opening the door, they — She stopped in mid-sentence. She saw it right away. What’s this? she gasped, face falling open, leaning on the door for support. The starlet raised her burdened head and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw the hump rising up on her back like a landscaped hill, and reaching back one tentative hand to touch it, could hardly contain the airborne feeling of relief.

DREAMING IN POLISH

There was an old man and an old woman and they dreamed the same dreams. They’d been married for sixty years, and their arm skin now wrinkled down to their wrists like kicked-down bedsheets. They were maybe the oldest people in the world. They sat outside their house together, elbows touching, in the wicker chairs you’d expect them to sit in, and watched the people walk by. Occasionally they called out images from the night before to the gardener or to whoever happened to be passing. Most people smiled quickly at them and then looked back down at the sidewalk. And when night fell, the old man and the old woman walked into their bedroom, drew back the white sheets, covered themselves up, and shared what was beneath.

• • •

This summer was the one where I worked in the hardware store, and my mother talked only about going to Washington, D.C., to ride on the cattle cars at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum there. Apparently this museum had the best simulation of Auschwitz in the world. I didn’t want to go; I was happy giving refunds to wives who’d bought the wrong pliers for their enterprising husbands. Besides, my mother and I had pretty much done the concentration-camp museum circuit by this point — looking at piles of hair in the Paris one the summer before, walking past black-and-white photographs in Amsterdam. I didn’t like going, but she, somehow, craved it. I watched her hands tremble as she looked at the biographies pasted on the walls, and wondered what she was thinking.

My mother didn’t have much to do with her day besides plan these trips; she taught, and kept her summers free, but I was very busy at the store, stacking bags of potting soil until they were all in perfect rows. I spent my afternoons scraping bird shit off a statue of a random Greek god that stood in the town’s central square. The statue had ended up there inexplicably — no one, not even the oldest people, remembered when it arrived. It seemed to have simply grown up from the earth. My boss at the hardware store thought it was his duty to keep it shining, so every afternoon when business was quiet, he sent me outside, and I rubbed the dried white off muscled iron thighs, running my cloth down sinewy gray biceps. This was the only man I had ever touched so closely. I sang songs in my head from the Sunday morning countdown while I cleaned him. I kept songs going in my head because they were the easiest thing to think about.

At home, during the evenings, I took care of my father, who was sick and stayed in bed all day. My mother thought I made the better nurse. I told him all about my day, half-listening to my mother watching television in the next room, her wrist cracking and popping when she saw something she thought was funny. She did that instead of laughing.

My father liked to hear details about the store. He liked talking about hardware.

“Any wrenches back today?” he asked, arms flat by his sides, sticks.

“Yes,” I replied. “Mrs. Johnson said hers was the wrong size, so we just traded that one in, and there was a man passing through who needed one for his car, he was having car trouble.”

“Transmission,” my father said knowingly, relaxing further into his pillow.

The old man and the old woman once dreamed that a pig drowned. As usual, they announced this to the neighborhood, listening closely to the sounds of their own voices. They rarely spoke in sentences, but instead called out the images in fragments, like young earnest poets.

“Pig,” the old woman said.

“No breath,” he finished.

“Pushing pig,” she said.

“And brown and dead.”

That day a farmer from across town heard them as he walked by, and when he arrived home his wife hurried out to tell him that the tractor had accidentally scooped up a pig instead of earth and thrown it headfirst into a pile of manure. The pig couldn’t get its footing, fell forward, and suffocated. The farmer was disgusted and annoyed by the story but didn’t think of the significance until he was on the toilet before he went to bed and then he remembered the old man and the old woman. And brown and dead. Disturbed, he told his wife about the prophets in the town, and she promptly told all the neighbors. When the news got back to them, the old man and the old woman just smiled and touched elbow bones closely, loose skin nearly obscuring the tattooed numbers on their inner arms.

I brought my father potting soil and put a pot of growing radishes by his bed so he would have something to tend to. He watered it maybe twenty times a day with an eyedropper, placing strategic drops near the roots — this would increase growth capacity, he said. And I told him plants grow more if you talk to them, so I’d find him, at odd hours in the day, whispering secrets into the damp dirt — about his dreams, about what it was like to be sick, I thought. About his first kiss and other stories.

But when I sat with him it was only me who would talk: Celia and her Anecdotes. He wanted to know, with a power-fill urgency, what I did in fourth grade, because he’d been well then and hadn’t paid attention to what I was doing. He was busy flying into enormous airports and doing deals. He dreamed, then, of having a son and playing catch on the lawn. Now I knew he thanked God he’d had a daughter. A son would be long gone. A son would be windswept in New York City, the warmth of red wine in his mouth, hands firm on voluptuous women while his father grew thinner and thinner in a queen-sized bed in the country.

I told my father about Reggie, the fat boy with a bowl cut that I liked in third grade and how I cried the day he moved to Kentucky, and I told my father about my former best friend Lonnie and how she had sex at fourteen, and how dumb that was of her. Fast-lane Lonnie. He settled himself back in the bed, and smiled as I talked. I could hear myself prattling, sounding so young and eager. I thought that if I were my father I would want to pat my head. Sure enough, when I kissed him good night, he rubbed my hair with his bony fingers, still steady and confident.

“You’re a good girl, Celia,” he said. “You’re a little prize just waiting to be discovered.”

“Oh,” I said quickly, somewhat annoyed, “I’m not waiting for anything.” Closing the door gently, I went into the kitchen and stared at things. Then I wiped the stove down until it waxed white and pearly under my cloth.

• • •

In the concentration-camp museum in Los Angeles you had to pretend you were a deportee, and choose between two doors: one for the young and healthy and another for feebler people that used to go straight to a gas chamber. I chose the “able-bodied” door and found myself in a stone room with twenty other Jews, all of us picking at our clothing. I didn’t really understand why I was there, suffering through yet another museum, until I caught myself sending a hello to the ceiling. And then I knew I was visiting the dead people. I wanted to let them know I’d come back. That for some reason, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t leave them behind, loosened on the ceiling, like invisible sad smoke.

One day the old man and the old woman woke in a panic. They looked at each other and babbled something in Polish, the language they only used when they were scared. They rushed onto the porch and alerted a young gardener who was planting azaleas across the street.

“You,” the old man cried. “Stop!”

The townspeople passing by, who revered the old man and the old woman as minor prophets due to the pig phenomenon, stopped and listened. The gardener wiped his dirty hands on the grass. The old woman was spluttering, her body stooped and visible through a soft yellow nightgown.

“No other gods before me. Or we’re all dead. Town will die, die, die!” she cried shrilly, then fell back into her wicker chair.

The townspeople were instantly alarmed by the prophecy. They ran to the mayor who listened with studied concentration, stared at the floor, and then spoke.

“Town meeting,” he announced in a firm, authoritative voice previously used only for the dog when it peed on the carpet. “We must hold a town meeting.”

In a flurry, the townspeople were assembled. The gardener paraphrased what he’d heard. “ ‘No other gods before me or we’re all dead, dead, dead,’ she said.” Due to all the anxiety, no one could really make any sense of the obvious until Sylvie Johnson, a Catholic who owned the potato store (all kinds — red, white, brown), spoke up.

“It’s Commandment Two,” she said calmly, pleased to demonstrate her Bible knowledge.

The crowd murmured in both recognition and feigned recognition.

“What do they mean by dead?” asked an older banker.

Everyone looked up at the mayor for some guidance.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm.” He looked out over the people. “Just follow it.” He was humbled by the possible presence of God in his congregation. “Town dismissed.”

Everyone streamed out of the gymnasium. By nightfall, garbage bins all over the city were overflowing with sculptures from Africa and colorful masks from Mexico, anything that even slightly resembled Another God Before Him. There was much concern over the Greek god statue in the park; its base was wedged several feet into the ground, and therefore extremely difficult to move. Finally the mayor draped a white sheet over it, which seemed to satisfy the worried public. It looked like a piece of long-awaited artwork, waiting to be revealed.

My mother began taking long walks to nowhere. She would leave the house in the afternoon and call me two or three hours later from a phone booth. I would drive and get her. When we returned home, she would go straight into my father’s room and for ten minutes she would love him beautifully, holding his cheeks, playing melodies on his hair.

I often wanted to be like my mother because she had long hair with red in it and to me that proved she was crackling inside. Somewhere in her there was a gene of impulsiveness, a gene I was sure I lacked. My hair was brown; at times I would dye it temporarily red for a week but it felt like putting a princess’s gown on a handmaid. The breeding was not there.

Once when the sunset light came into the living room, my hair did turn red, really red, like my mother’s. I watched it set my head on fire for several minutes, holding up strands and letting them fall. I felt I was in another country, where the air was so hot you could see it, and my back was dripping with sweat. I felt, for an instant, the absurd sturdiness of my legs and my back. Then I heard my dad in the other room, counting the drops under his breath as he watered the radishes, and I went to take a shower, to erase the red from my hair. I scrubbed my body fiercely with the soap, as if it were not mine, as if it weren’t young, or soft, or wondering. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to want things. I tried to empty all the things I wanted into the drain and let them swirl away from me, silenced.

I came home from the store one afternoon and found my father had fallen out of bed onto the floor. He’d had some sort of seizure because his sheets were twisted into ropes near his feet and the radishes were broken on the carpet, a pile of dirt and terra cotta. My mother was on a walk. I rushed to the phone and looked at it, then rushed back to him. He was breathing, I could see that, but his head was strangely tilted and he didn’t respond when I said his name. I said his name a few times anyway, but I didn’t want to touch him. I could see the strange black hairs on his thighs that were usually hidden by the yellow blanket. I stepped into the backyard and ran and ran little tight circles around the lemon tree, leaning my head in to increase the centripetal force, trusting this would prevent me from running away. I wondered if there was a train waiting at the train station, going to someplace beautiful; I wondered if the conductor had a mistress that he kept in the caboose. I imagined him stepping through the cars to reach her, train shaking, going to see her, going to make love to her in the shaking long train, and I kept making the train longer, pushing him back, ten cars, twenty cars, an impossible length before he can see her, and I pushed him and pushed him until I heard my mother open the front door. She went straight into my father’s room. Running inside, I found her kneeling at his body, a hand on his leg, taking a pulse.

“Celia,” she said. She was clutching a brown bag from the bookstore. I wondered what she’d bought.

“Here,” I said.

She looked up at me. “Help me lift him up,” she said. “He’s okay.”

Once he was in bed, he looked normal, like a regular sleeping person. My mother made me a hamburger and we watched TV for five hours. It was Tuesday night, a reasonably good TV night, which was lucky. Before I went to bed, I wandered briefly into my father’s room; his breathing was calm. I stopped and fingered a baby radish buried in the mess on the floor. It was hard and red as a reptile’s heart.

The old man and the old woman still dreamed the same dreams but she could no longer speak anything but Polish. Regardless, there were usually at least eight or nine devout followers sitting in front of their house, listening. As a whole, the town was now alert, on edge. Nervous about the commandment, people went about their day with great caution, trying hard not to make the irreparable goof. There was a moment of terror in the hardware store when Mrs. Johnson accidentally blurted, “Oh my stars,” after dropping a wrench on her foot. Everyone held their breath and wondered if it was the end. Nothing did actually happen, but Mrs. Johnson hurried home in a daze, and parents hugged their children a little closer than usual that evening at bedtime.

The old woman loved her audience, and didn’t seem to realize that no one understood her anymore. She asked the gardener long complicated questions in Polish. But since his parents were immigrants too, he always nodded appropriately, and often picked a flower from the garden and gave it to her before he left. The old woman placed the flower in the hand she always shared with her husband, and they sat, quiet and patient, fingertips linked by the bloom.

One afternoon my mother went on a walk and didn’t come back. By nine o’clock my father seemed confused because he kept asking me if the TV was on. An on TV was a sure sign that my mother was home. After a while I just turned it on anyway even though he could tell from his room that it was alone, blaring to an empty couch, a lamp turned off.

By eleven, I was worried and drove by the bookstore looking for her familiar turned-out walk. There was no one but people my age, weaving through the sidewalk, heads on shoulders, the taste of beer in their mouths. I imagined fast-lane Lonnie, out with her boyfriend, her hand calm on the small of his back; I imagined my mother in Niagara Falls, screaming and laughing into crashes of bluish water.

When I got home my father was nearly asleep. He heard the front door and called out from the darkness.

“Ellen,” he said.

“Celia.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said. “She just does these things sometimes. Tomorrow.”

“I should call the police,” I said.

“No,” he said firmly, “really. If by tomorrow this time we’ve no news, then okay. But she’ll call.”

I smiled. I knew he was wrong. But as a comfort, I stayed in the living room with the TV on all night, as she often did. I didn’t really watch much, but stared at the reflected silhouette of my body in the TV screen, twirling my ankle sometimes just to remind myself that I was there.

The next night after dinner we still hadn’t heard a word. I brought him milk and sat by his bed.

“She’ll call,” I said feebly.

“I know,” he said. “She just does this sometimes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Really.” He looked at me for a moment, touched my hair with his forefinger. “You’re a pretty girl, my Celia,” he said. “You ought to go out sometimes. You must be so sick of taking care of me.”

“No,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “No.”

“Boys, any boys you like now?” he asked.

“No,” I said again. “No boys.” He looked at me and patted my head again. I could feel myself smile.

• • •

She called at ten. She was at a bar in Connecticut, on her way to D.C., to the museum, walking. She had a day or so more to go, and she wanted me to send my father on a train, bundled in blankets to keep him warm. She wanted him to meet her; they could go on the cattle cars together. She said her feet were already very blistered, and I imagined her relaxing into the cattle car, arm around my blanketed father as they prepared to experience simulated genocide.

“Put your father on the phone,” my mother told me.

“He’s asleep,” I said. “We were both really worried. You didn’t call. I was sure — we didn’t know where you were.”

“Is that Ellen?” I heard my father’s voice, oddly strong, from his room.

“Put him on,” my mom said.

“He’s tired,” I said.

“Celia,” she ordered. “Now.”

I brought him to the phone. He was delighted to hear her voice. I waited for him to be angry, to tell her how mad we were, but he didn’t sound angry at all. Instead, he curled up in his bed like a teenage girl, and cooed into the receiver. I walked, disgusted, into the living room, and watched my ankle in the TV again until I heard the click.

“She wants me to take a train and meet her in D.C.,” he said.

“Oh well,” I said.

“But if I’m bundled up and in a wheelchair I should be okay,” he said. “You know, we’ll explain it to the conductor. It’d be fun to go on a trip.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “no, it could work. It’s a little crazy, I know, but it could work. Your mother is walking to Washington — now that is crazy.”

I stared at him. “It’ll give you a break,” he said. “You can have a little vacation from us.”

I wasn’t sure if he’d suddenly lost his mind. He’d been in bed for several months. He hadn’t been outside for an entire season.

“Daddy?” I asked.

“I’ll take a lot of vitamin C,” he said. “It’ll be fine. I’ll go tomorrow. You’ll take me to the train station?”

I walked to the door frame of his room and looked at him, so thin under the many blankets that I couldn’t see his body anymore.

“Really, Celia,” he said, “I wouldn’t try if I didn’t think I could do it.”

“Let’s see in the morning,” I said quietly. He smiled at me and clicked off his light. I stayed in the door frame for a few minutes, trying only to remember the words of radio songs, trying hard to fill my whole brain with hundreds and hundreds of lyrics. I cleaned the refrigerator but it was clean. Finally I left the house.

The night was warm and clear, all the lights off in the neighborhood, front lawns wide and empty. I walked through the streets counting the sidewalk squares over and over under my feet until I reached one thousand, which brought me right to the middle of the center square. And there was the Greek statue looming under its sheet. I stood quietly at its base, and looked around. The park was empty, only trees and circles of splintering wooden benches surrounding me. Even under the sheet, the statue commanded the space. I began to run in front of it, back and forth in tight rows.

“I’m going to do something,” I warned, back and forth in front of the pedestal. Windows in the distance were dark, people sleeping, holding their wishes in tightly. I could hear my breath mounting as I ran faster. “I’m going to show him,” I yelled, louder this time. The silence was great and empty. I ran for a moment more, faster, faster, then stopped abruptly in front of the base of the statue, and stilled my body. Breathing quickly, I grabbed a corner of the white sheet. I rubbed the corner over and over between my fingers, chafing my skin, until it climbed into my fist and I had a good hold. And then, with one fierce yank, I pulled the sheet off. It blew up high, like a gasp, then floated to the ground, collapsing and bowing behind the statue.

Uncovered, the god looked huger than ever — young, unbreakable. I put my foot on the top of the pedestal and pulled myself up. I climbed on his foot, then his knee, until I was high enough to face him. Holding on to his shoulders to steady myself, I moved in close, arms wrapping around his shoulders, pressing into his chest.

“Father,” I whispered. I listened as my breathing slowed, and waited for something to change.

THE RING

I fell in love with a robber and he took me on his rounds.

Don’t talk too much, he said, or you’ll mess me up.

As I talk a lot, this was difficult for me. He told me in a hushed voice to look around the kitchen while he went to scour under the living room couch. I stuck my hand in the flour canister and found a diamond ring! It was so hard not to shout out! Clamping a hand over my mouth, I whispered to my palm the word diamond over and over. I put it on my wedding finger and the white dust sprinkled over my glove as if someone was about to cook me.

The robber returned with a bag full of loot — three gold chains, a watch, two diamond bracelets and a shiny spoon — but when he saw that ring standing tall on my leather finger he proposed to me right then and there — took it off my finger, put it on again, kneeled down, looked me in the eye. And right there in a stranger’s kitchen I said yes to that robber and both of our eyes filled with tears at the Tightness of it all. Shutting the front door quietly behind us, we walked hand in hand to the car; when he said we were far enough away, I let out a shout of joy.

The next day we declared ourselves married and for our wedding night he went to the supermarket and bought ten bags of flour. Pouring it on my bedroom floor, my robber made a foot-deep flour sandbox. It was going to be a pain to vacuum but I loved the clean way it rolled off our skin and how I squeaked on the grains and when we kissed it tasted like morning.

Late that night I called my parents and told them I was married and my mother shrieked with delight and when my father asked: What does he do? I said, He’s a baker. I could hear they were skeptical about the life of a baker’s wife but I said, It’s a good life and I love him and my mother said, That’s all that’s important, Penny — congratulations and my father grunted but I knew he was happy; I know his spectrum of grunts and this one was pleased.

We moved into a little apartment together on the rich side of town which was a good career choice for him. We used my furniture because he said he didn’t have any. I got wedding gifts from my side of the family: a rainbow array of pot holders, a fluffy towel set, a million cashews. He didn’t get anything from his family and he said that’s because he didn’t have one. Really, I said, why didn’t I know that, and he said: Probably because I didn’t tell you. I stood still for a second, absorbing this. He said, I don’t own anything, Penny, family or furniture, and I piped in, You own me now! and he smiled and kissed the top of my head.

Handing me my dainty pair of black leather gloves, he donned his and said: Worktime, my lady, and I took his leather hand in my leather hand and squeezed it because I was now his family and we went four blocks down to the opera couple’s mansion who were at that moment seeing La Bohème without us.

We crept alongside the house until we reached the kitchen window which was always open. My gentlemanly robber let me climb in first, and I blossomed into this new kitchen and did a quick twirl on the tile, imagining myself there cooking. I’d make a stew, I’d make lasagna. I’d make chocolate out of nothing but brown rice and water. Reaching out a hand, I lifted him in too and we stood for a moment in that first beautiful silence of takeover. I felt like the walls were bending to us. Then I got that curious urge and so we explored quickly; I found the bathroom with its big Art Deco black-and-red mirror and beckoned for him to come look with me. We gazed at our reflection together and I felt we looked like a particularly in-love couple in this particular mirror. I could tell he was itching to get under that living room couch, so I kissed him quickly and let him go hunt for gold while I returned to the kitchen and took to petting the very soft white cat. I checked the sugar this time, why not, and what do you know — down deep in the sugar canister was another ring, this time a ruby, the stone redder than the skin off cherries. I slipped it on over my glove and when my love came back with his bag of goods I showed it to him and he whirled me around in the air, right there next to someone else’s oven. He told me he loved me and I blushed, the ring’s sister. Before we left, he asked if I wanted to steal the cat too, but I said, No, you can’t steal a cat, it’s against the rules. It has a collar, it has a name; it belongs to them. While he crawled out the window, I made clicking sounds with my tongue to tell it goodbye and it leapt up on the sink to watch me leave, blue eyes unblinking.

That night, he sprinkled some sugar on our living room floor and we made love in it, dressed only in gloves and shoes; I lapped the sugar off his shoulder like a kitten. Sweet as it was, I had a hard time really being there with him that night because I kept stealing looks at that ring. It was so bright and so dark at the exact same time. After we were done, he went to take a shower and wash off the leftover sugar, and I pulled the ring off my glove and put it in Aunt Lula’s sugar jar. When I went later to peek again at its crimson glory, I was surprised to find that the sugar was red too.

What? I said, Sweetie, did you pour fruit juice into the sugar jar?

He stirred and said, No, come back to bed, and I said, Wait just a second and put the ring in the flour.

Odd: in the morning, all the flour was red too. Red flour looks wrong.

Sweetie, I said, this ring is leaking, and I put it out on the counter and the counter turned red and I covered it up with a paper towel and the paper towel turned red and yes, even the tip of my finger was red now; I ran it under the tap but the water did nothing at all but get me wet.

My robber came out of the shower and I said: Sweetie, this ring has to go back or everything we own including ourselves will turn ruby and the robber picked it up with the gift towel from around his waist and the whole towel turned red and he said, Wow, you’re right, okay.

That night the opera couple was out seeing The Magic Flute and we dropped the ring from a little paper bag that was of course red into their sugar jar again. Their sugar did not turn red and I couldn’t figure that out. It seemed like there was something special about their sugar and it made me feel a little bit bad, like my sugar wasn’t tough enough. Still, I kept lifting up the lid of the jar to see the ring nestled in there — it looked so beautiful glistening on the sugar crystals. The cat came to look with me and I wanted the cat badly but I knew that even if we took it home and gave it milk and renamed it, I still wouldn’t feel like it was mine.

We jimmied the back door of the neighboring house; the couple was out of town somewhere cold. I’d watched them board the shuttle for the airport and he’d been wearing a ridiculous fur hat.

What did I go for this time? I went for the huge container of salt they had on their kitchen counter, the grandpapa of all salt shakers, and sure enough in there was a ring with an emerald the color of grass seen by someone with green eyes.

My sweetie hugged me and wanted to do it right there on the counter with the salt but I said I didn’t want to make love in salt because it made me feel like dinner, in a bad way, and he said he understood.

We took the ring home and I put it in our salt and woke up in the middle of the night to see if our salt was green but it wasn’t.

I climbed back into bed. It’s still there, I whispered, and the salt is still salt.

He kissed my ear. Penny, he said, let’s go to Tahiti and call it quits until winter again. I’m tired for now, let’s get some sun. I said all right and he nestled his head into my shoulder. I looked at the diamond ring in the darkness, my little captured star, and I crept out of bed and went to the salt canister and retrieved the emerald ring and put it on my other hand. Climbing back into bed, I curled up to him again. The rings looked so beautiful together. I wanted three.

I guess I miss the other ring, I said out loud, though he seemed to be asleep.

When we got to Tahiti, in our pretty hotel room with the lavishly floral bedspreads and toilet paper folded into a point, he gave me a little wrapped gift in red wrapping paper and a beautiful red bow and I opened it up and I guess he’d not been asleep after all because what was it? It was that ruby ring.

Oh darling, oh sweetie, I said and I wanted to slip it on and I saw he’d attached a little rubber strip around the interior so that my hand wouldn’t change. I noticed his fingertips were red from doing that, and I kissed him for his kindness. The ring caught the light like an open wound and I watched the sparkles all over my fingers dancing from red to green to white and back again and thought: I am the most stunning and loved baker’s wife to ever live in the world ever.

We went swimming one hour after lunch. I was a little drunk from the second piña colada. The ruby ring slipped off my finger into the water. The ocean turned red.

All the swimmers ran out screaming. They thought it was blood, a massive hemorrhage by some very large person. I groped for the ring but got only handfuls of water. As far as the eye could see the ocean glistened scarlet, and in some places, it was even an electric magenta.

My robber paled and started to cry. This is the ocean, he said, what did you do, and I said, I forgot, and he said This is awful, throw in the green ring and I said But the salt stayed salt, and he said: Do it. So I did, I took the green ring off my finger and tossed it just under the arc of a little crimson wave. Nothing happened. The robber kept crying. I grew up by the sea, he said, I love blue, and he said Try the wedding ring and I said Our wedding ring? Our Wedding Ring? and he said You must and so I did, I tipped my hand down and just let it slide off my finger, cut past the surface of the waves and ring it, a full finger of water inside as it shimmied all the way down to the bottom of the sea. I heard him let out his breath when the ocean didn’t change back. My fingers were bare and I could hardly recognize my own hands.

Now I started to cry. My marriage ring had been eaten by the huge red wet mouth of the ocean.

The robber stood crying and I stood crying and the sand glowed a pale orange. The environmental committee was already arriving in big trucks, with equipment. They were almost crying, it seemed, but they used megaphones to cover up the shaking in their voices. Check the fish, they called, and they did and the fish seemed fine. They measured the red part. I’d been fearing that the whole world’s oceans were red now, but they said in their megaphone that the bleeding stopped one mile out. It was a one-mile ring. It was not all-powerful.

The robber and I went back to the hotel room. I sat in the bathroom and folded the toilet paper into a point like I worked there. When I went into the bedroom, he said he wanted to make love on sheets. I said No. He said Are you still mine? I still love you, do you love me? and I said I don’t even know your first name, and for that matter, I don’t know your last name either and besides, you just let our love plop into the ocean and so how am I supposed to love you now? I put my hands on my hips.

He said It wasn’t our love that plopped into the ocean, Penny, it was just the ring, and I said But this was the ring from the flour jar and I don’t know how to be yours without it.

He held my face in his hands. I looked out past the window to the foam crashing. It was pink.

Listen, I told him. I’m confused. I’m going home.

I took a shuttle to the Tahiti airport by myself. I left the robber sitting on the made bed, staring at the wall. I sat in the back of the shuttle bus and didn’t talk except in curt one-word answers and the shuttle driver kept asking me questions that required more than one-word answers and he kept calling me Sugar and I was getting more and more annoyed and wanted to yank the steering wheel out of his hands and throw it out the window until out of the blue he gave me an idea. I barely remember paying him because I thought about this idea from the moment it came to me, and I thought about it the whole plane ride, through the snack and through the movie and through the dinner, and that’s where I went first. I didn’t even stop home to drop off my bags.

The white cat was still there and purred the second I touched it but more important, the sugar jar was still there too. I took it in my lap, opened the lid and peeked inside. The grains glittered.

Oh sugar, I said into it. You are the strongest of all.

I picked up their phone — it was a tortoiseshell phone with gold buttons — and called direct to the hotel room in Tahiti. To my surprise, the clerk said we had checked out several hours ago and just then there was a rattle at the window and in stepped the robber.

How did you know? I beamed, phone receiver in hand, and he shrugged, face tired and sunburned.

It was a good guess, he said. Madame Butterfly signs out and all.

We leaned forward and had an awkward hug. I held on to his elbow. He nudged his chin into my neck.

Pulling away, I held up the jar. So look at this, I said. Maybe this will help things.

What is it? he asked.

It’s that special sugar.

Oh, he said. Well. I’ve always liked sugar.

I felt a little nervous but he gave me a good supportive look, so I dipped a finger into the sugar and licked it off. Mmm, I said, mmm, you’ve gotta try this. The grains sparkled on my tongue. The robber sat down in one of the wicker kitchen chairs next to me.

It’s really good, I said.

He dipped in his own leathered finger and took a tentative lick off the glove. I watched his expression carefully. The house seemed very quiet except for the precise ticking of the clock above the kitchen table.

Do you feel any different? I asked.

Not yet, he said.

He put his finger in it again and I did too and once we touched fingertips and he curled his knuckle around mine and squeezed.

Hello there, I said softly, to our fingers.

He put his hand on my leg. My leg leaned into his hand.

I think we should eat it all, I stated. He moved closer to me. I’m full, he said. Keep eating, I said.

But Penny, it tastes just like regular sugar, he whispered into my ear.

Sshh, I murmured back, touching my shoulder to his, scooping up a new pile of grains into my hand. Don’t tell.

THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT

When I came home from school for lunch my father was wearing a backpack made of stone.

Take that off, I told him, that’s far too heavy for you.

So he gave it to me.

It was solid rock. And dense, pushed out to its limit, gray and cold to the touch. Even the little zipper handle was made of stone and weighed a ton. I hunched over from the bulk and couldn’t sit down because it didn’t work with chairs very well so I stood, bent, in a corner, while my father whistled, wheeling about the house, relaxed and light and lovely now.

What’s in this? I said, but he didn’t hear me, he was changing channels.

I went into the TV room.

What’s in this? I asked. This is so heavy. Why is it stone? Where did you get it?

He looked up at me. It’s this thing I own, he said.

Can’t we just put it down somewhere, I asked, can’t we just sit it in the corner?

No, he said, this backpack must be worn. That’s the law.

I squatted on the floor to even out the weight. What law? I asked. I never heard of this law before.

Trust me, he said, I know what I’m talking about. He did a few shoulder rolls and turned to look at me. Aren’t you supposed to be in school? he asked.

I slogged back to school with it on and smushed myself and the backpack into a desk and the teacher sat down beside me while the other kids were doing their math.

It’s so heavy, I said, everything feels very heavy right now.

She brought me a Kleenex.

I’m not crying, I told her.

I know, she said, touching my wrist. I just wanted to show you something light.

Here’s something I picked up:

Two rats are hanging out in a labyrinth.

One rat is holding his belly. Man, he says, I am in so much pain. I ate all those sweet little sugar piles they gave us and now I have a bump on my stomach the size of my head. He turns on his side and shows the other rat the bulge.

The other rat nods sympathetically. Ow, she says.

The first rat cocks his head and squints a little. Hey, he says, did you eat that sweet stuff too?

The second rat nods.

The first rat twitches his nose. I don’t get it, he says, look at you. You look robust and aglow, you don’t look sick at all, you look bump-free and gorgeous, you look swinging and sleek. You look plain great! And you say you ate it too?

The second rat nods again.

Then how did you stay so fine? asks the first rat, touching his distended belly with a tiny claw.

I didn’t, says the second rat. I’m the dog.

My hands were sweating. I wiped them flat on my thighs.

Then, ahem, I cleared my throat in front of my father. He looked up from his salad. I love you more than salt, I said.

He seemed touched, but he was a heart attack man and had given up salt two years before. It didn’t mean that much to him, this ranking of mine. In fact, “Bland is a state of mind” was a favorite motto of his these days. Maybe you should give it up too, he said. No more french fries.

But I didn’t have the heart attack, I said. Remember? That was you.

In addition to his weak heart my father also has weak legs so he uses a wheelchair to get around. He asked me to sit in a chair with him once, to try it out for a day.

But my chair doesn’t have wheels, I told him. My chair just sits here.

That’s true, he said, doing wheelies around the living room, that makes me feel really swift.

I sat in the chair for an entire afternoon. I started to get jittery. I started to do that thing I do with my hands, that knocking-on-wood thing. I was knocking against the chair leg for at least an hour, protecting the world that way, superhero me, saving the world from all my horrible and dangerous thoughts when my dad glared at me.

Stop that knocking! he said. That is really annoying.

I have to go to the bathroom, I said, glued to my seat.

Go right ahead, he said, what’s keeping you. He rolled forward and turned on the TV.

I stood up. My knees felt shaky. The bathroom smelled very clean and the tile sparkled and I considered making it into my new bedroom. There is nothing soft in the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is hard. It’s shiny and new; it’s scrubbed down and whited out; it’s a palace of bleach and all you need is one fierce sponge and you can rub all the dirt away.

I washed my hands with a little duck soap and peered out the bathroom window. We live in a high-rise apartment building and often I wonder what would happen if there was a fire, no elevator allowed, and we had to evacuate. Who would carry him? Would I? Once I imagined taking him to the turning stairway and just dropping him down the middle chute, my mother at the bottom with her arms spread wide to catch his whistling body. Hey, I’d yell, catch Dad! Then I’d trip down the stairs like a little pony and find them both splayed out like car accident victims at the bottom and that’s where the fantasy ends and usually where my knocking-on-wood hand starts to act up.

• • •

Paul’s parents are alcoholics and drunk all the time so they don’t notice that he’s never home. Perhaps they conjure him up, visions of Paul, through their bleary whiskey eyes. But Paul is with me. I have locked Paul in my closet. Paul is my loverboy, sweet Paul is my olive.

I open the closet door a crack and pass him food. He slips the dirty plates from the last meal back to me and I stack them on the floor next to my T-shirts. Crouched outside the closet, I listen to him crunch and swallow.

How is it? I ask. What do you think of the salt-free meatball?

Paul says he loves sitting in the dark. He says my house is so quiet and it smells sober. The reason it’s so quiet is because my father feels awful and is resting in his bedroom. Tiptoe, tiptoe round the sick papa. The reason it smells sober is because it is so sober. I haven’t made a joke in this house in ten years at least. Ten years ago, I tried a Helen Keller joke on my parents and they sent me to my room for my terrible insensitivity to suffering.

I imagine in Paul’s house everyone is running around in their underwear, and the air is so thick with bourbon your skin tans from it. He says no; he says the truth is his house is quiet also. But it’s a more pointy silence, he says. A lighter one with sharper pricks. I nod and listen. He says too that in his house there are moisture rings making Olympian patterns on every possible wooden surface.

Once instead of food I pass my hand through the crack. He holds it for at least a half hour, brushing his fingers over my fingers and tracing the lines in my palm.

You have a long lifeline, he says.

Shut up, I tell him, I do not.

He doesn’t let go of my hand, even then. Any dessert?

I produce a cookie out of my front shirt pocket.

He pulls my hand in closer. My shoulder crashes against the closet frame.

Come inside, he says, come join me.

I can’t, I say, I need to stay out here.

Why? He is kissing my hand now. His lips are very soft and a little bit crumby.

I just do, I say, in case of an emergency. I think: because now I’ve learned my lesson and I’m terribly sensitive to suffering. Poor poor Helen K, blind-and-deaf-and-dumb. Because now I’m so sensitive I can hardly move.

Paul puts down his plate and brings his face up close to mine. He is looking right at me and I’m rustling inside. I don’t look away. I want to cut off my head.

It is hard to kiss. As soon as I turn my head to kiss deeper, the closet door gets in the way.

After a minute Paul shoves the door open and pulls me inside with him. He closes the door back and now it is pitch black. I can feel his breath near mine, I can feel the air thickening between us.

I start shaking all over.

It’s okay, he says, kissing my neck and my shoulder and my chin and more. He lets me out when I start to cry.

My father is in the hospital on his deathbed.

Darling, he says, you are my only child, my only heir.

To what? I ask. Is there a secret fortune?

No, he says, but you will carry on my genes.

I imagine several bedridden, wheelchaired children. I imagine throwing all my children in the garbage can because they don’t work. I imagine a few more bad things and then I’m knocking on his nightstand and he’s annoyed again.

Stop that noise, he says, I’m a dying man.

He grimaces in agony. He doesn’t die though. This has happened a few times before and he never dies. The whole deathbed scene gets a little confusing when you play it out more than twice. It gets a bit hard to be sincere. At the hospital, I pray a lot, each time I pray with gusto, but my prayers are getting very strained; lately I have to grit my teeth. I picture his smiling face when I pray. I push that face into my head. Three times now when I picture this smiling face it explodes. Then I have to pray twice as hard. In the little hospital church I am the only one praying with my jaw clenched and my hands in fists knocking on the pew. Maybe they think I’m knocking on God’s door, tap tap tap. Maybe I am.

When I’m done, I go out a side door into the day. The sky is very hot and the hospital looks dingy in the sunlight and there is an outdoor janitorial supply closet with a hole in the bottom, and two rats are poking out of the hole and all I can see are their moving noses and I want to kick them but they’re tucked behind the door. I think of bubonic plague. I think about rabies. I have half a bagel in my pocket from the hospital cafeteria and the rats can probably smell it; their little noses keep moving up and down frantically; I can tell they’re hungry. I put my hand in my pocket and bring out the bagel but I just hold it there, in the air. It’s cinnamon raisin. It smells like pocket lint. The rats don’t come forward. They are trying to be polite. No one is around and I’m by the side of the hospital and it’s late afternoon and I’m scot-free and young in the world. I am as breezy and light as a wing made from tissue paper. I don’t know what to do with myself so I keep holding on tight to that bagel and sit down by the closet door. Where is my father already? I want him to come rolling out and hand over that knapsack of his; my back is breaking without it.

I think of that girl I read about in the paper — the one with the flammable skirt. She’d bought a rayon chiffon skirt, purple with wavy lines all over it. She wore it to a party and was dancing, too close to the vanilla-smelling candles, and suddenly she lit up like a pine needle torch. When the boy dancing next to her felt the heat and smelled the plasticky smell, he screamed and rolled the burning girl up in the carpet. She got third-degree burns up and down her thighs. But what I keep wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?