Willful Creatures

Motherfucker

The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities-Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicago, Betsy’s lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Los Angeles.

“I fuck mothers,” he said to anyone who asked him. “And I do it well,” he added.

He was also reasonable; he didn’t fuck married mothers, only available ones who wanted to date and who’d lined up an appropriate babysitter for the child that’d made them a mother in the first place.

He wined, dined, danced, romanced-martinis and kisses on the neck, bloody steak and Pinot Noir-the word “beautiful” said sincerely with a casual lean-back into a booth. He asked pointed, particular questions. By midnight had most of them in bed, clothes off in a flash, the speed of a woman undressing changing rapidly over time, faster and faster, and he was a very good lover, attentive and confident, a giver and a taker, and the mothers lined up to see him, their babysitters growing rich, twenties stuffed in those tight teenage pockets.

He never liked any of them for longer than one or two times. Or, he liked them but not enough to keep calling. I love all women, he told himself. He liked to try on hats in stores.

One afternoon, he was at a fancy Bel Air party on a damp lawn talking to some damp-and-fancy people. They stood in groups of three and four, stirring lemonades laced with vodka, that liquid shark swimming among the yellow feathers of their drink. The motherfucker wandered across the lawn to the starlet, famous for her latest few films, wearing the red straw hat and matching red dress, the one watching her four-year-old play on the lawn chairs, the one whose husband had left her for a man, or so said the newspapers. Everyone else was afraid to talk to her.

She had shiny hair under her red hat and was drinking nothing, hands still at her sides.

The motherfucker told her he liked her hat. She said, Thank you. He asked about her son; she said, He’s four. The kid rolled in the grass, collecting stains on his clothes like lashings from a green whip.

“I think you’re a good actress,” the man said. “Why do you always pick such sad characters to play?”

“Me?” she said. “Sad characters?” And she flashed him her teeth, the long white ones that had been photographed a million times by now, each tooth a gleaming door into the mysteries of her mouth.

The motherfucker said yes. “You,” he said.

He stood with the starlet for a while and told her he was a graduate student at the school for emotional ventriloquists. She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. “No,” he said, “it’s true.” She laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s true. You throw your emotions on other people in the room,” he explained, “and see what they do then.”

“So what do they do?” she asked, keeping that perfect eyebrow halfway up her forehead.

“It depends,” he sighed. “Sometimes they lob them right back at you.

“Turns out life,” he said to her, “is a whole lot like tennis.”

They walked to the gazebo. The party was ending, and the sun was going down and the grass had turned a softer shade of green. He knew he needed to do something to make her remember him so he stood there with her in the gazebo, watching her son, and put his hand on her famous shining hair, just for a second, lifted it off her back and let it down again. She jumped.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh,” he said, “your hair was stuck.”

Then he didn’t touch her again, not for weeks.

He got her phone number from the host. Motherfuckers have their ways. It took only one lie and he left with those ten numbers, one dash, and two parentheses tucked with care inside his shirt pocket.

At home, he put in a call to crazy Heddie from Butte. He asked her a half hour of penetrating questions and then tried to have phone sex but found he couldn’t really muster up the gusto. His mind was elsewhere. The next day, he called the starlet and asked her to dinner.

She laughed. She sounded even prettier on the phone. “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. “After all, I am a movie star.” He said no, he wasn’t afraid of her, he thought of her as an interesting, attractive woman who happened to have a very public job. She said that was sure a new way to put it. They set a date to meet at an Italian bistro on Vermont, and there she signed twelve autographs and he asked about how what she did as an actress and what he did as an emotional ventriloquist were similar, but she said they were in a restaurant and it was too distracting so they should talk about something light while they were there. “Maybe you’re afraid of me,” he said. She looked closer, eyes green and piercing. “Maybe I am,” she said, and the rest of the dinner was quiet. The waiter asked for an autograph on a napkin, and by the time they left, it was already hung up by the host’s podium with a red thumbtack, next to some signed black-and-white photographs of other stars, many of whom by now were regular people or else dead.

The motherfucker recognized one of the mothers he’d fucked at a table to the right and waved while exiting but the mother didn’t acknowledge him because she was jealous and also starlets made her nervous.

The starlet found the motherfucker trustworthy so she invited him back to her new house in the dark curves of the Hollywood hills, the wood floors brown and shining, the pillows sentimental, the magazines unread. They sat and had a good talk on her thousands-of-dollars couch. He mentioned his train trip and she said her father had been a conductor for years. They discussed depots. At the door he did not kiss or hug her but just said he’d had a terrific time, and she closed the door behind him, pensive. She paced a little and then watched some TV. She saw herself on the news.

The motherfucker went home and rented one of her latest movies and watched it closely, and even though it was a comedy, he looked at the smile on her face and decided she was possibly the saddest person he had ever met or pursued.

He didn’t touch her even when they went to lunch and she cried about her empty house. About how she had known all along with her husband but never would say it was true to herself. He didn’t touch her even when she raised limpid movie eyes up to him and gave him the look that meant Kiss Me to film fans from all over the world. He let his other mothers call and call but he didn’t pick up or call back. He invited the starlet to the ballet and during act two, he picked up her hand, and while the stage was full of people as flowers and birds, trying with all available muscles to be lighter than air, their hands learned each other, fingers over fingers, palm on back, palm on palm, edge to wrist, watchbands clinking because both of them liked to know what time it was at all times.

He dropped her off, said he couldn’t come in. She was disappointed. She dreamed he was making love to her in a hamper.

Heddie from Butte called. Heddie’s father was mad at her about something that had happened four Christmases ago and Heddie was upset. The motherfucker talked to her for a while but he couldn’t concentrate and said he had to go write his graduate-school paper on the relationship between sadness, mime, and Ping-Pong. “Why, I didn’t know you were in school,” said Heddie. “I wish you would talk more about yourself.” The motherfucker pretended he had call waiting. His goodbye was rude.

He asked the starlet to dinner again. She was pleased. “He treats me,” she told her friend, the other hot new starlet, “like a regular person.” “Why on earth,” said her friend, the other starlet, “would you want that? What’s the point,” said the other starlet, “of being a starlet in the first place?” Our starlet put her hand on her cheek. Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth. “I think it has to do with getting emotions thrown on you,” she said.

This dinner they shared a bottle of wine and no one stopped to get an autograph. (She was wearing a hat.) She said he could come back to her house again, maybe they could have some tea. They played the hand game under the table and this time the volume was twice as high. His whole body was taut for her. “George is asleep,” she said, meaning her son. They drove back and she paid the babysitter, a huge tip to get her out as soon as possible, and she went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and the moment of the first kiss was prolonged, longer, prolonged; she offered tea, she offered wine, she went to the bathroom and he pictured her in there, looking down at the toilet paper which was not yellow but clear with other liquid, and she returned, sat next to him on the couch, picked up a magazine, stood, sat, stood, sat, and he thought: It has been a while since this woman has been with a man who wants to be with women. And so he just sat there first and thought of women, thought of what he loved about women, thought of the slopes and the jewelry, the lines and the circles, breasts of all sizes, emotion, opening, contraction.

He watched her. She put her head on her own shoulder-coy, twitchy.

“I think about you,” he said.

“What do you think about?” she asked. She ran through the movie scenes in her head. They all were very pretty options. He said, “I think about how nervous you are.”

Her face fell. “What?”

“No,” he said, flustered, “it’s great that you’re nervous.” His expression, for once, was open and earnest. She kept her eyes on him, and laughed once then, the laugh that stole the hearts of a million moviegoers, that fed the wallets of a fat handful of studio executives, and he said, “Wait.”

“What?” she said.

He took a step away, and looked at her. She made a wry little joke about directors. Then put her face nearer, ready to kiss him, to prove herself unnervous, how bold, how witty, but he didn’t move forward. “Hang on,” he said.

She grew bolder, interrupted, said- “Hey. Let’s go outside. There are bushes out there.” The motherfucker paused and smiled, said no. She twisted and said- “Come with me, let’s go to the bathroom counter.” She’d had movie sex scenes on the bathroom counter and in the bushes, both. Audiences had liked those a lot. He shook his head, no. “Let’s do it on a cliff under a tree!” she sang, and he said no. “I want to make love to you in a bed” is what he said.

This made her feel completely out of control.

He stepped closer. For some reason, his hands were shaking. Using his finger as a pointer, he drew an invisible line around her. He said, “Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.”

“It’s not a very big house, is it,” she said.

“Don’t smile,” he said. She pulled in her lips.

“Don’t smile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be big at all. It should be the closest it can to being your actual size.”

She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones. She knew just what she looked like.

“Don’t,” the motherfucker said, harder.

And the smile, like a wave at the beach, receded. And when she didn’t smile, when the windows stayed shut, the glass bending out to the night but not breaking, the glass curved from the press of release but not breaking, then the tension went somewhere else, something buckled inside her and made the longing bigger, tripled it, heavied it, made it so big the whole house grew thick and murky. This was not something she knew well, this feeling; she was used to seeing her desire like an angora sweater discarded on the other side of the room.

And she felt like she needed him then. In the same basic way she needed other things, like water.

She was up again refilling her cup of tea and he followed her in and as she was pouring it he took the teapot out of her hand and balanced it right on top of the teacup and while she was looking at that, her hands shaking now, he took her fingers and leaned in and kissed her. Took her face in his palms, then suddenly the faces were too close for anything else to be happening and the kiss was soft and so sweet and in the next room the kid shifted and his dream switched to one about lightning and a boy who stuck his hand in the electrical socket and what happened next.

“What do you want?” asked the motherfucker, getting ready to motherfuck, and he stepped into her house and her hands were all over his face, his neck, his bones, his hair.

“Stop asking questions,” she said to him, kissing him again. “That breaks open your windows, doesn’t it?” And the motherfucker felt he could crush her, because she happened to be right, and he shut up and his house grew smaller, smaller than he was used to, and she didn’t smile or run to the bushes, so hers grew smaller, smaller than it had ever been, and then smaller, and then smaller, until she fit inside, gloved, a house of desire the exact size and shape of her. She thought she might wheeze away but then his hands touched skin, and her throat cleared and lifted.

The next morning, a dry clear day, the starlet made the motherfucker banana pancakes. Her son wandered in in pajamas and got some pancakes too. The motherfucker took a shower in her gourmet shower and used shampoo made from the placenta of sea urchin. He came out as fresh and clean as an underwater urchin infant. She was a yield sign, all sinews and mush, and he sat down and she whispered, “That was a wonderful night,” and he said, “It was,” and he meant it and he meant it too much and he said, “I think I have to go now.”

She called him a motherfucker, but in a teasing way.

He said, “It’s true, though.”

He didn’t call her that day. He didn’t call her the next day. She realized she did not have his phone number, could not tell him that she had to go on location to shoot the movie about people with problems but would miss him. During her movie the director asked her to smile but she said no. “This movie,” she said, “I am going to stay in my house.”

On the screen, she was so luminous in her seriousness, she made the whole cinema fill with tension, so much so that every cinemagoer went home charged up like an electrical storm, fingers in sockets, so much so that she got nominated for seven awards. The motherfucker, who never called again, watched her win from the quiet of his small bedroom. She was wearing a dress the color of the sky before it rains and had become, suddenly, beautiful. She had been something else before, but now she was something else from that. She thanked her parents most of all, her father the train conductor, her mother who rode the trains back and forth across the country to be with him. The motherfucker held his own body close. His apartment was very plain. “This is the house of your desire,” he whispered to himself, looking at the small walls behind him, and when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

Fruit and Words

So there we were, Steve and I, smack in the middle of the same fight we’d had a million times before, a fight I knew so well I could graph it. We were halfway down the second slope of resignation, the place where we usually went to different rooms and despaired quietly on our own, and right at the moment that I thought, for the first time in seven years, that maybe things were just not going to work out after all, that was the moment he suggested we drive to Vegas right then and tie the knot. “Now?” I said and he nodded, with gravity. “Now.” We packed as fast as we could, hoping we could pack faster than those winged feet of doubt, driving 100 miles per hour in silence, from sand to trees to mountains to dry plains to that tall, electric glitter. Parked. Checked in. Changed clothes. Held hands. Together we walked up to the casino chapel but as soon as Steve put his nose in the room, well, that’s when those winged feet fluttered to rest on his shoulder. Reeling, he said he had a migraine and needed to lie down. An hour later he told me, washcloth on forehead, that he had to fly home that instant and could I drive back by myself? I stood at the doorway and watched him pack his nicest suit, folding it into corners and angles, his chest and legs and back and butt in squares and triangles, shut and carried.

“Goodbye,” we said to each other, and the kiss was an old dead sock.

I spent the day there floating in the glowing blue swimming pool in my brand-new black swimming suit, cocooning myself in a huge white towel that smelled of sunshine, walking past tigers and dolphins. I slept diagonal on the king bed. After checking out, I went to the car, which was boiling hot, and put my bag in the trunk and geared up the engine and turned on the air conditioner and pulled out of the parking structure. The road extended through the desert, a long dry tongue. I didn’t feel like listening to music and was speeding along, wondering if to all people the idea of marrying felt so much like being buried alive, as in particular the idea of marrying this man did. Anticipating the talks we were going to have, to get to the point where we both admitted we were only in it out of loyalty and fear, my mouth dried up and I had a sudden and very intense craving for a mango.

I’d never eaten a mango in my life. But the craving was vast, sweeping, feverish.

Great, I thought. It is not mango season and it is not mango country. And I knew those bright flavored gums would not cut it.

After half an hour, the craving was so bad I stopped at a gas station and tried anyway, bought a pack of orange-pink candy-Mango Tango! — but the taste of each flat circle, so sugary and similar to all other sugar flavors, made me long for the real one even more. I stopped at every market I saw but the fruit they had was pathetic: soft mealy apples, gray bananas, the occasional hard green plum.

The road was quiet and empty of cars. I sped past gas stations and fast food.

I was thinking, seriously, of driving straight to the airport and emptying my savings to fly myself to Africa so I could find one there, easy off the tree, the gentle give at the touch of my thumb, when far ahead, several miles up the road, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a shack. It was part of a tiny commercial strip facing a doughnut store and an oil lube filter station. From a distance it looked colorful and lively and as I got closer and closer, I thought I might be hallucinating from the heat because as far as I could tell, the front of the shack was full of trays and tables and shelves and piles of ripe beautiful fruit. My mouth started to water and I pulled over and parked my car on the shoulder of the road.

The highway was still empty of cars and the fast food doughnut chain was empty of cars and the oil lube filter was closed, so crossing the street was a breeze. The awning of the store was a sweet blue-and-white gingham and sure enough, there were huge tables burgeoning with fruit: vivid clementines, golden apples, dark plums, swollen peaches, three patterns of yellow and brown pears.

The awning said fruit and words.

I went inside. I found a tan woman behind the counter perched on a stool, dusting a deep red apple with her sleeve.

“Hello,” I said. “Wow, you have such beautiful fruit here!”

She had a flat face, so flat I was scared to see her in profile.

“Hello,” she said mildly.

My hopes were swelling as I walked by a luscious stack of papayas, surging as I passed a group of star fruit and then, indeed, next to a humble pile of four, I found the small sign that said what I wanted to hear. And there they were, gentle and orange, the smell emanating from their skin, so rich I could pick up a whiff from a distance.

She nodded at me. “They’re very good,” she said. “Those mangoes are excellent quality.”

She placed the polished apple in front of herself like she was teacher and student all at once. I scooped up all four and took them to the counter. I felt a wave of utter unearned competence. Ha ha to everyone else. Finding fresh mangoes fifty miles out of Las Vegas seemed to me, in no uncertain terms, like some kind of miracle.

“You have no idea how wonderful this is,” I told her, beaming. “I have been having the most powerful mango craving. And here we are, in the desert of all places!”

She shrugged, agreeable. She’d heard this before.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

She picked at the point of her eye.

“I get the fruit as a trade,” she said. “There’s a buyer who likes the salt here so he brings me fruit as payment.”

“What a deal for you,” I said, “getting all this gorgeous fruit for just a little salt.”

I brought a mango up to my nose and smelled the sweetness inside its skin.

The woman sniffed. “It’s not regular salt,” she said. She indicated behind me with her chin.

“Ah,” I said. “What’s all that?”

“Those are the words,” she said.

I kept my arms full of mangoes and took a step nearer. As far as I could tell, the entire back wall of the shop was covered, floor to ceiling, with cutout letters. They were piled high on shelves, making big words and small words, crammed close together, letters overlapping.

“Go closer,” she said. “You can’t see as well from here.” She gave me a shove on my shoulder blade.

As I approached, I could see that the words weren’t just cut from cardboard. Each word was different. I first saw the word NUT; it was a large capitalized word NUT and it was made out of something beige. I couldn’t really tell what it was but then I saw the word GRASS which was woven from tall blades, green and thready, and LEMON, cleverly twisted into cursive with peels and pulp, letting off a wonderful smell, so I went right up to NUT and discovered that it was in fact crumbled pieces of nuts all mixed together into a tan gluey paste.

“Isn’t this interesting,” I said to the woman.

I found PAPER, cut clean with an X-Acto knife, and a calligraphied ORGANDY, fluffing out so frothy I could hardly read it, and HAIR which was strawberry blond and curled up at the edge of the H and the leg of the R. The man who’d left Las Vegas had strawberry blond hair so I ignored that one and picked up PEARL instead.

“This is pricey, I bet,” I said, and she gave me an anxious look, like I was going to drop it. It was stunning, not made of tiny pearls, but somehow of one solid piece of pearl, rippling out rainbow colors across its capitals. I put it back carefully on the shelf next to BARNACLE, prickly and dry looking.

“Why do you make these?” I said. “They’re so beautiful!”

And they were. They were beautiful on their own and they were beautiful all together. I thought of her in her desert studio, hands dusty, apron splattered, sweat pouring, hammering down the final O in RADIO. She was making the world simple. She made the world steady somehow.

“People like the words,” she told me, picking up her apple to shine some more. “I made them for fun and then I got rich.”

“Well, I’d definitely like to buy these four mangoes,” I said.

She pressed the register. “Ten dollars.”

“And just curiously, how much are the words?” I kept my eyes on that wall, wanting to lean my head on PILLOW.

“Depends,” she said. “They vary. Plus, you see, those are just the solids.”

“What?” I stroked the petals that made up ROSE.

“I mean those are just the solids. I put the solids on display first because they’re easiest to understand.”

“Solid colors?” I said, staring at PLAID.

“Solid solids,” she said. “Liquids are in the back. Gases are in the back of the back. Both are very pricey,” she said, “but I’ll charge you just three dollars to look. Three dollars for the tour.”

“Liquid words?” I said, and I brought out my wallet. She rang up my mangoes and the tour. I moved closer to the register. “I think I’d like to buy a solid too,” I said.

I was feeling, suddenly, more liberated than I had in seven years. I wanted to take over the store. I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles. I bit into a mango. The skin broke quick, and the flesh, meaty and wet, slid inside my mouth, the nearly embarrassing free-for-all lusciousness of ripe fruit.

“Oh!” I said. “Incredible!”

She gave me two dollars in change. I licked mango juice off my wrist and turned back to the words.

“Can I buy a solid?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Of course,” she said. “Which one?”

I wanted them all so I just pointed to the first I’d seen. “How much for NUT?”

“Interesting choice,” she said, walking over and pulling it off the shelf. “NUT. There are seven different kinds of nuts in here. Macademia, peanut, walnut, pecan, cashew, garbanzo, and almond.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed.

“Wow,” I said.

She just stood there.

“Isn’t garbanzo a bean?” I asked.

She held it out to me. “I’ll give it to you for fourteen,” she said. “Two dollars a nut.”

There was a ten in my wallet between four ones and I lifted them all out. I had another drippy bite of mango.

“I won’t eat it,” I told her, indicating NUT.

She gave me a lip smile and took my money. “You can eat it,” she said. “I don’t care.”

Scooping all my purchases into a brown bag, she lifted a simple silver key off the wall behind her and beckoned for me to follow. We stopped at a gray door. Before she inserted the key, the woman put a hand on my sleeve.

“Be careful,” she said. “These are very delicate words. Don’t drip mango on anything.”

I had almost finished that first mango by now, the most incredible piece of food I had ever eaten in my life, and I held the remains of the pit away from me. My lips were sticky with juice. I felt the horror of Vegas dissipating, clarity descending like a window wrapped around my heart. She turned the knob, and I followed her in.

The back room was a square with a glass door at the far wall. This room was full of shelves too but the words were even harder to read from far away. I walked quietly up to them.

“Don’t touch,” she hissed.

The liquid words were set up in two ways. Most of them were shooting through glass pipes that shaped the letters. This looked really neat but I felt a little bit like it was cheating. Some of the others were liquids spilled onto a glass board, forming the letters. This was less cheating but looked cheaper. I walked down the row. I was not thrilled by WATER or COKE. I was drawn to RUBBING ALCOHOL, which was done with the piping and took up almost a whole shelf. It was a good one because it looked just like the water but I trusted that it wasn’t. There was one called POISON, no specification, and the liquid was dark brown. The letters were fancy on that one, like an old-fashioned theater brochure. I found BLOOD.

“Real blood?” I whispered, and brought the mango back close to me. Licked its pulpy pit.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“From what?” I asked, voice a little higher, and she didn’t answer. It shot bright through the pipe as if in a huge loose vein.

I didn’t like that blood one. I was recording all of this in a monologue in my head and I wondered then who I would tell the story to, and for the moment I couldn’t think of anyone. This made me feel bad, so I went over to LAKE and held that and it had little tiny ferns floating in it and I thought it was pretty. It was next to OCEAN which was looking more or less exactly like LAKE and that’s when I wondered if the woman was really truthful and how would anyone know? I wanted to buy OCEAN too, I wanted to have the word OCEAN with me all the time, it was way better than NUT, but I didn’t really trust it. It seemed likely that it was, deep down, TAP.

I paused by MILK. The sole white liquid. Soothing, just to look at.

“Gases?” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure. I’d like to see the gases, why not.”

My hands were now hardening with stickiness, each finger gluing slightly to its neighbor. I wanted to wash them, but instead I dropped the gooey pit into my purse near my wallet. The woman gave me a disapproving look and brought out another silver key, this one from her pocket. She turned and clicked and we went through the glass door in the back of the back room.

The gas room was empty.

“Oh,” I said, “hmm.” I worried for a second that she’d been robbed and was just now finding out.

“Be very very careful,” she whispered then. “This is expensive.” She looked tense beneath her tan, each of her features tight in its place.

“More expensive than PEARL?” I said.

“Much more,” she said. “This takes very difficult concentration. This is my most challenging work. Look here,” she said, “come here and look.”

She walked over to one of the shelves on the wall and close up I could see there was more glass tubing-not much, but one word’s worth. It spelled SMOKE. Soft granules of ash floated through the M.

“It’s a good one,” I said. “I like it.”

“Most of them,” she said, still whispering, “in this room, don’t have the tubing.”

“Oh.” I bobbed my head, not understanding.

“See,” she continued, “there are many many gas words in this room but you might not be able to read them.”

I looked to the shelves and saw nothing, saw shelves that were empty, saw how my apartment would look in a month when Steve had cleared out his books and his bookends.

“Top shelf: XENON,” the woman said. “It’s there, it’s just very hard to see. I can see it because I have very good eyes for it, because it is my medium.”

I looked to the top shelf. “There’s no XENON there,” I said. “There’s nothing.”

“Trust me,” she said. “There’s XENON.”

I shook my head. I shifted my feet a few times. There was POISON in the room before, dark and available, and a thin wire of fear started to cut and coil in my stomach.

“ARGON,” she said, “is on shelf four, below XENON.”

“Noble gas number two,” I said.

She nodded. “I prefer the noble gases.”

“I bet,” I said. “There’s no ARGON there,” I said.

“It’s there,” she said. “Be extremely careful.”

I spoke slowly, coated now in a very mild shellac of panic. “How,” I said, “how can it be there, it would dissipate. I took chemistry. It can’t just sit there. Argon,” I said, “can’t just sit there.”

“I put guidelines in the air,” she said.

“I make a formation in the air.”

I turned toward the entrance.

“I think it’s time for me to go,” I said.

“NEON,” she said, “is on shelf number three.”

But right before I walked to the door, I reached out a hand which was so hard and gluey from the mango juice, reached out just to wipe it slightly on the very tip of the shelf. The coil in my stomach took my fingers there. I barely even noticed what I was doing.

The woman drew in her breath in agony.

“Aaghh!” she choked as I got in my little wipe wipe. “You broke it!”

“I broke what?” I said. “Broke what?”

“You broke AIR,” she said. “You need to pay for it, you broke it, you broke AIR.”

Then she pointed to a sign I hadn’t seen before, tucked half behind a shelf, a half-hidden laminated sign that said: VISITORS MUST PAY FOR BROKEN MERCHANDISE.

“There’s air there still,” I said, “that’s no special air.”

“It was air in the shape of AIR,” she said. “It took me a while to train that space, it was AIR. That’s three hundred dollars.”

“What?” I said. “I won’t pay that,” I said, speaking louder. “I didn’t even break it, look, there’s tons of air around, there’s air everywhere.”

I waved my hand in the space, indicating air, and she let out another, louder, shriek.

“That was HOPE,” she said, “you just broke HOPE!”

“HOPE?” I said, and now I went straight to the glass door, “Broke hope? Hope is not a gas, you can’t form hope!”

The door, thank God, was unlocked, and I swung it open and stalked into the liquid room. The woman was right on my heels.

“I caught hope,” she said. “I made it into a gas.”

“I want to go now,” I said. “There’s no possible way to catch hope, please.”

My voice was gaining height. I didn’t believe her but still. Of all things to wreck.

“Well,” she said. “I went to wedding after wedding after wedding in Las Vegas. And I capped the bottle each time right when they said ‘I do.’”

This made me laugh for a second but then I had to stop because I thought I might choke. I could just see those couples now, perched at opposite ends of a living-room couch, book-ending the air between them, the thickest, most formed air around, that uncrossable, unbreakable, impossible air, finally signing the papers that would send them to different addresses.

I thought of the seven years I’d spent with Steve, and how at first when we’d kissed his lips had been a boat made of roses and how now they were a freight train of lead.

So that I wouldn’t cry, I put my hand near my face and made a pushing motion, moved some wind toward her. “I’m Queen of Hope,” I said. “Here. Have some of mine.”

She grabbed BLOOD from the liquid room shelves.

“Give me my money for AIR!” she said, waving the BLOOD in my face.

I opened the door to the solid room and ran through it. I kept my back arched so she wouldn’t touch me. I couldn’t pay the money and I wouldn’t pay it, it was air, for God’s sake, but I didn’t want that blood on me, didn’t want that blood anywhere close to me.

“I’m sorry,” I yelled as I edged out the front, “sorry!”

I looked past the fruit to locate my car and as I did, my eye grazed over the solid words, familiar now, but on the bottom shelf I suddenly saw CAT and DOG in big brown capitals which I hadn’t seen before and my stomach balked. The woman kept yelling “You Owe Me Money!” and I hit the dead warmth of the outside air.

Everything was still. My car sat across the street, waiting for me, placid.

The woman was right behind me, yelling, “You owe me three hundred dollars!” and I took NUT out of my bag and threw it behind me where it broke on the street into a million shavings. “Nut!” I yelled. I got into my car, key shaking.

“Vandal!” she yelled back, and she didn’t even try to cross the street but just stood at the front of the blue-awninged store with BLOOD in her arms and then she reached back and pelted my car with a tangelo and a pineapple and one huge hard cantaloupe. I locked my doors and right when I put my key into the ignition, she took BLOOD and threw that too; it hit the car square on the passenger-side window, cracking on the top and opening up like an egg, dripping red down the window until the letters ran clear. Maybe it was just juice, but that one I trusted, that one seemed real to me.

Hands trembling, I put my foot on the accelerator and the car started quickly, warmed from the sunlight, the desert spreading out hot and fruitless. The window to my right was streaking with red now. I kept a hand on the car lock, making sure it was down. Across the street, the woman pulled back her arm, which was an awfully good arm, by the way, she was some kind of baseball superstar, and she let fly a few guavas, which splatted blue against my rear window.

I drove away fast as I could. The shack and the woman, still throwing, grew small in my rearview mirror. I drove and drove for eighty miles without pausing, just getting away, just speeding away as the blood dried on the window, away from the piles of tangerines, from the star fruit clumped in stolen constellations, from the seven different mutations of apple.

In an hour I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a gas station. I still had the brown bag of mangoes with me. When I opened it up, they were all black and rotten, with flies crawling over them. I dumped the whole bag. The one I’d eaten was just a pit, which I removed from my purse and kept on the passenger seat, but by the time I got home and pulled into the empty driveway, it too had rotted away into a soft, weak ball.

Jinx

Two teenagers were standing on a street corner.

They were both wearing the hot new pants and both had great new butts, discovered on their bodies, a gift from the god of time, boom, a butt. Shiny and nice.

They did not like their butts.

One was complaining to the other that she thought her butt was more heart than bubble and that she wanted bubble and her friend said she thought heart was the best and they stood there on the street corner pressing the little silver nub that changed the mean red hand to the friendly walking man and the light did not change.

One friend had breasts, the other was waiting.

When the light changed, they both walked to the poster store where the cute boy worked. He was growing so fast that he slept fourteen hours a day and when he came to work he had a stooped look like he’d been lifting large objects for hours and in fact there was some truth in that, he’d been unfurling his body up through his spine, up through itself. Each day people looked shorter and today these two girls-the one he liked with the ponytail bobbing, the other one that touched his elbow which he liked too-they were there again looking in the glass case at the skull rings and joking.

The boy showed them a new poster of a rock-and-roll star in a ripped shirt on a stage with a big wide open mouth that you could fall into. The girls, at the same time, said they thought it was gross. Jinx! They laughed endlessly. Too much tonsil, said one, and she grunted in such a way that made them laugh for another ten minutes. It was that fifteen-year-old laugh that is like a stream of bubbles but makes everyone else feel stupid and left out. Which is part of its point. The boy got a break halfway through the time they were there and one girl said she wanted to look at the posters one by one, flipping those big plastic-lined poster holders, because she liked to stare at her own pace, and the other girl, ponytail, went out back with the growing boy, rapidly notching out another vertebra right as they spoke, straightening higher like a snake head rising from an egg. They went out back so he could smoke a cigarette and she smoked it with him and when touchy girl finished flipping through the leather-pants women and the leather-pants men and looked for her friend, she couldn’t find her and wandered out of the store by herself.

Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.

She liked to kiss in public, so that if someone had a movie camera she could show people. See.

The other girl, now called Cathy, was on the street alone, looking for her friend who was out back with ash on her lips pushing lips against ash, using her tongue in all the different interesting ways she could think of, her breasts rising.

Cathy, teenager, out on the street alone.

This is so rare. This moment is rare. This teenage girl out on the shopping street alone: rare. She walked by herself, eyes swooping side to side, looking for the bobbing blur of her friend, Tina’s, ponytail, but Tina was not to be seen, not even in the dressing room of the cute clothes store next door where they’d recently tried on skirts made of almost plastic that were so short they reminded you of wristbands.

Tina now had his hands on her waist, thinking of that exact skirt right as Cathy walked by it, thinking how it had held in her butt and if she was wearing that plastic skirt now, and he held her butt, it would remind him of a bubble, not a heart.

I do not want guys to feel my butt and think of hearts, she said to herself, that is too weird.

Cathy walked to the corner. She thought, Did Tina leave? She thought she’d head back to the poster store but she sat down on a bench instead and when the bus came she got on. She looked at the people on the bus and no one was looking at her except some creepy old man at the front with those weird deep cuffs on his pants and the seat was cold and Tina was somewhere left out in the stores and would they miss each other? Did she miss Tina? Oh, she thought, probably not. And this was her stop and she got off and walked home, and it was hours too early, they were supposed to be at a movie, and when she went inside her mother was sitting there on the couch looking at the backyard. It was like the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short. She sat with her mom, making sure the backyard stayed put, which it did, and when her mom fell asleep it all seemed disgusting and this was what happened in the afternoon and she went and looked at herself in the mirror for an hour and felt terrible even though she liked the pose of her left profile best.

And Tina, done with kissing, done with skull rings-the boy settled back behind the counter after waiting two minutes, counting, to tame his erection-Tina was walking the streets and asking people if they’d seen a girl with a great yellow shirt on. No one had, they thought she meant some older woman but Tina said, No no, and she started to cry on the street because she thought the worst thing, but when she called on the phone just to see, just in case, the most familiar numbers in the world, Cathy answered. Hello? Tina forgot how to talk for a second, she was so surprised, and then she just said, Oh. Oh? Hi. Cathy? Tina? Hi? The two girls bumped around the conversation for a few minutes, but for the first time in life, they didn’t know what to say to each other. After a while they just said goodbye and hung up. From then on at school they tended to be friendly but distant and found other people to sit with at lunch. By graduation day, three years later, they had forgotten each other’s phone numbers completely, even though they hugged in their caps and gowns and tassels for old times’ sake and said, Good luck, Keep in touch, Have a hot summer, Later.

I Will Pick Out Your Ribs (from My Teeth)

Here is my opinion of the emergency room: it’s bad.

Here’s the deal: everyone is sick and coughing or has some finger falling off or is bleeding all over several Kleenexes or crying because the one they love is taken away to be fixed or not fixed or else running to the bathroom with a bladder infection. I do not think it is a good TV show. I think it is a bad place to be and I go there all too much because I am in love with someone who is in love with hurting herself so the emergency room is our second home.

The nurse knows my name. Sometimes I use a fake name just for fun but she raises her eyebrows and corrects me.

Okay, this seems unrelated but it’s not: at Thanksgiving I broke a plate and my mom did not get angry. It was an especially big plate, and after I broke mine there was only one left. “These,” she said to me, “have never fit inside the dishwasher anyway and they always break and sprinkle plate dust everywhere.” She looked at me. “So,” she said, “let’s break this last one too.”

We went outside and she held it up and then just let it drop. I kind of wanted her to throw it but she had her own style and that’s okay. It still broke off into little plate pieces that I offered to clean up and while she went back to the turkey I swept up the pieces and thought about my mother who was not afraid.

But my girlfriend is. Afraid. Of. Name it. I am going to refuse to go to the emergency room after a while but I know I’m lying when I say that. Some things you know you will never stop, your whole life. Some things just stay and stay.

So let me tell you more facts then.

In the emergency room the carpet is yellow and filled with little drops of red (now brown) that you know have been there for years and the carpet cleaning bill should be huge but they just let it go. There will always be more blood, they figure, so why clean up the old stuff? Smarter emergency rooms use linoleum. But my girlfriend isn’t a bleeder; she takes pills. I rush her in with her slurry speech and shaking limbs and sometimes I want to take her out of the car and just leave her at the emergency room gutter. I figure they’ll find her, but what if they didn’t? I saw a dog washed up on the beach the other day and no one saved it. Cute as it was, it was not cute enough. I thought about lifting up the collar and memorizing the number and calling the owner but I couldn’t touch its wrinkly neck. I’m not as brave as my mother. She’s the one who broke the plate.

My friends tell me I’m an idiot; well, I say, no. They say she’ll never die and I’ll do this forever and I think they’re right but I still can’t stop driving that familiar ride to the hospital with the weird three-way stop that takes too long. I tell my friends that I like that emergency room nurse. That it’s all a big scam to fuck the emergency room nurse. With her white shoes and bouncy tits and thin knee-highs and my tongue up her dress.

You know the truth: the nurse is in fact old and tired and gives me looks like I’m causing the overdoses, right. Me, the nicest person on the face of the earth. Like I’m the problem as I sit there and read the same magazines over and over. When I look for the crossword puzzles, they’re filled in, and worse: they’re filled in by me. And I can’t even correct myself because I still don’t know the same answers I didn’t know last time I was here.

My girlfriend comes out from the back this time with that tag on her wrist and she crawls in my lap and kisses my neck and I grumble to the air.

She’s telling me a secret.

We all know what it is.

“Never again,” she whispers to me. She thinks I’m so dumb. Like it would even matter. “This is the last and final time.”

On the way out the door she wants a candy bar but has no money so we go into the lobby shop and I get her a Snickers and I get myself a coffee and we walk arm in arm to the car. At the car door I find I don’t have my keys.

“Wait.” I keep checking my pockets, one two in the back, one two in the front, top of shirt. No jingling.

“I’ll go get them,” she says, “they must’ve fallen out while you were sitting.”

She’s so helpful now. Her skin is very pale; she looks diluted. I sip my coffee.

“I’ll look,” I say, “you stay here.”

I race back and the nurse’s eyes widen or at least I think they do and my keys are sandwiched in the pages of a magazine causing a pregnant lump and I’m back at the car and Janie is gone. Am I really surprised? She does this all the time. And like usual, there’s a little note in my windshield: Took A Walk. See You At Home. Plus a little heart shape. J.

I’m supposed to be mad again. Instead I am interested in the traffic laws. Car on the right: go. Yellow means slow down. Use your blinker.

I use my blinker. I find myself using it to go into the left left lane and getting on the freeway. This is not where I live. But I love those green signs. I love that they picked green instead of black.

I drive to my friend Alan’s house. He answers the door in a towel. I think he’s been having sex with his new girlfriend, Frieda from Germany, who he says is the hottest ever. She is walking around the living room naked and her breasts are different, un-American. Oblong. She waves at me. I wonder, Why did he answer the door?

“Just stopped by to say hi,” I say. “I was going to bring you that book but I forgot.”

“Lunch?” he says.

“Sure.” I go into the kitchen and Frieda spoons cereal into a bowl without milk and then leaves again. I can hear her crunching in the living room. Alan gives me a cold barbecued rib and some pear slices and a piece of paper towel and a glass of milk.

“Wow,” I say. “It’s the perfect lunch.”

He leans closer to me. The only reason he let me in is because he wants to talk about her.

“It’s so good,” he says, rolling his eyes, gripping the table, “I mean: fuck. I mean: go to fucking Germany now and get yourself a girlfriend.”

I’m gnawing on the rib and loving how it sticks in my teeth.

“Maybe it’s not Germany,” I say. “Maybe it’s just her.”

He nods and grips the table harder. “Then,” he says, grinning, “you are fucking out of luck.”

The skin of the pear is abrasive and rubs the rib juice off my lips.

“Janie?”

“Still alive,” I say, “just got back.”

“Pills?” He looks away.

“Yup,” I say, “same darn pills.”

“And you?” He leans back now. He is a decent guy.

“No pills for me.”

“No, I mean how are you holding up.” He takes a sip of my milk; it’s a big sip and it sort of makes me twitch because I was saving it for last. Even though it is rightfully his. Still. I like milk.

“Like I said: no pills.” I drink the milk until only one very slow drop is climbing up the side of the glass. I consider how I will back out of his tricky driveway. Make a perfect S shape, with one arm across the back of the front seat, like the seat is my girlfriend. A careful release on the brake while he goes to Frieda and kneels between her legs and the crunching gets louder and louder.

Back home, Janie is in front of the television. It’s not on, but she’s looking at her reflection in the greenish glass. She doesn’t ask me where I was. She’s not too good at noticing things like that, like the fact that it took me an hour and a half to get home.

I go into the bathroom and get dental floss. There are rib twigs between all my teeth. How I love to pop them out. One goes flying into the carpet.

“Do you hate me?” she asks. She has her legs tucked underneath her and her head against a pillow and I can see the line of her thigh all the way up. I still think she is beautiful. She won a beauty contest when she was six.

“Nope.” I keep flossing.

“Come here,” she says, and I go lie down next to her and keep flossing.

“Stop,” she says, laying her head on my chest. “I can hear you doing that.”

“No,” I tell her, not touching her yet; I won’t touch her yet.

She presses her face down hard. I stroke her head with my available elbow and her hair is shining like gold in the sunlight through the unopened window. It all makes me very sleepy.

“The thing is,” she says, voice muffled out through my T-shirt, “what I said before, you know, never again, I can’t really promise that.”

“I know,” I say.

“I don’t really know what will happen.”

“I know.” I wrap the floss around my index finger like a ring and watch the blood shift. The tip of my finger turns waxy and purple.

“What would I do without you?” she says, and I get the floss around my wrist this time.

“Same thing,” I say as my hand darkens.

When I go to bed I think of Frieda but after a while I get bored. I don’t know what Frieda’s like. Janie, who I do know, is asleep. All her pill bottles are locked up in the trunk, and I own the key. It’ll take her a while this time to find where I hid the key; I’m getting better and better at stumping her. Last month it was floating in the bag of walnuts, and it would’ve taken a long time for her to find it except I forgot that she loves walnuts. Now we both hate them; Janie because of the taste in her mouth, me because when I found her, they were scattered all over the floor surrounding her and for a second I actually thought they were tiny shriveled lungs with all the air sucked out of them.

This time, the key is hidden under the bathroom counter. Where the lip of the counter rises above the floor? I have taped it. You only notice if you’re lying flat down on the bathroom rug, relaxing, or if you’re running your hand along the rim. So this round should take at least a few months. One of these days, I’ll just do my duty and make a scene and dump all the pills down the toilet like I’m supposed to and Janie will cry and cry and then find herself a new boyfriend.

Until then, it’s our best time together. She plays with my hair. She sits on the sofa in the slanted light with her guitar and sings songs with my name in them that she makes up on the spot. When she was six, she won that beauty contest talent competition by singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking” with a pretend guitar slung around her shoulder and a dance routine. All the adults cheered as she stomped about in her country-western outfit. All the other kids started crying backstage when they heard the thunderous applause. We still have the trophy; it’s locked inside the trunk with the pills tucked inside the cup part like a sordid story in a celebrity magazine at the airport. The boots she wore are in there too; they’re really little, made of thin yellow leather with fringe on top and a silver badge on the side. I didn’t have anything special to add, but just to be fair, I put my report cards from junior high school in the trunk too. I got all As. I have always been a good student.

Ironhead

The pumpkinhead couple got married. They had been dating for many years and by now she was impatient. “I’m getting cooked,” she told him, and she took his hand up her neck to the inside of her head so he could feel the warmth of the flesh there, how it was growing soft and meaty with time; he reeled from both burden and arousal. Taking her hand, they walked over to the big soft bed and while he unbuttoned her dress, he thought about what she was asking for and thought it was something he could give her. He slipped his belt out of the loops and the waist of his pants sighed and fell open. When the pumpkinheads had sex, it was at a slight angle so that their heads would not bump.

They had a big wedding with a live jazz band, and she gave birth to two children in the span of four years, each with its own small pumpkinhead, a luminous moon of pumpkin, one more yellowish, one a deep dark orange. The pumpkinhead mother became pregnant with her third child in the seventh year, and walked around the house rubbing her belly, particularly the part that bulged more than the rest. At the hospital, on birth day, the nurses swaddled the baby in a blanket and presented him to her proudly, but she drew in her breath so fast that the pumpkinhead father, in the waiting room watching basketball, heard through the door. “What is it?” he said, peeking in.

She raised her elbow which cradled the blanket. The third child’s head was made of an iron.

It was a silver model with a black plastic handle and when he cried, as he was crying right now, steam sifted up from his shoulders in measured puffs. His head was larger than the average iron and pointed at the tip.

The father stood by his wife and the mother adjusted the point so that it did not poke her breast.

“Hello there, little ironhead,” she said.

The siblings came running in from the waiting room, following their father, and one burst out laughing and one had nightmares for the rest of her childhood.

The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seasonal pie on Thanksgiving.

“Next year,” she told her husband that November, “I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I’m serving a big human butt.”

Her husband was removing his socks one by one, sitting on the edge of the bed, rolling them into a ball.

“And for dessert,” continued his wife, stretching out on the comforter, “we will have cheesecake from brains and of course ladyfingers and-” She started laughing then at herself, uproariously; she had a great loud laugh.

Once undressed, her husband lay his head flat on her stomach and she held the wideness of his skull in her hands and smoothed the individual orange panels.

“I think our son is lonely,” she said.

They made love on the bed, in a quiet relaxed tangle, then threw on bathrobes and went to check on their children. The two girl pumpkinheads were asleep, one making gurgling dream noises, the other twitching. They shook the second gently until her nightmare switched tracks and she calmed. Shutting the door quietly behind them, the parents held hands in the peace of the hallway, but when they stepped into the ironhead’s room, they found him wide awake, smoothing his pillowcase with his jaw.

“Can’t you sleep, honey?” asked his mother. He shook his head. He had no eyes to look into, but the loll of his neck and the throw of his small body let them know he was upset. They sat beside him and told a story about zebras and licorice. He tucked his head agreeably on the pillow and listened the whole time, but his parents tired before he did and tiptoed out of the room, figuring he was asleep. No. He never slept, not because he didn’t want to but simply because he couldn’t, he didn’t know how. He spent a few more hours staring at the wall, feeling the sharp metal of his nose, breathing out clouds into the cramped sky of his bedroom. Around three in the morning, he read a picture book. At five, he snuck to the kitchen and had a snack of milk and cookies. He felt very very tired for four years old.

• • •

At school, the ironhead made no friends because he was expected to be a tough guy due to the sharpness of that metal point, but he was no tough guy and preferred the sandbox to the grass field. He filled buckets with sand and then submerged them in sand. One afternoon, tired of being teased by the seas of children with human heads and his sisters who escaped ridicule by being the best at every sport, he left the playground by himself and went for a walk. He walked past the residential area of town, with the friendly rickety houses and their green-yellow lawns and an occasional free-standing mailbox in the shape of a cow or a horse. He walked past the milkman, whose arms were full with glass bottles of frothy white, all set to be delivered, and who laughed at the iron-head, which just made steam rise from the boy’s neck. He walked until he reached a big field, one he’d never seen before. Beyond it was a building. Glancing around, the ironhead crossed the field, lifting his little legs high to clear the tall patches of weeds, and the air was shifting smell now, it smelled bigger than the town did, pollen riding on wide open space, immigrant seedlings.

When he reached the building he saw that it was an appliance shop. COME ON IN! it said on a sign in the window, so he reached high and opened the glass door and entered. This wasn’t a large store, but it was the largest he had ever seen, bright white with fluorescent light like the inside of a tooth. He walked down the four aisles slowly, hands in his pockets, passing blenders and sewing machines and vacuums and toasters. Finally he came across the assortment of irons in the middle of aisle three, and here he stopped. There were four or five different styles, some in boxes with photos on them, some freestanding, chin up. He settled himself down across from the irons and looked up at them. He imagined it was a family reunion. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you. He greeted his aunt, his uncle, his cousins. Reaching out, he took the boxes from the shelves one by one and set them in a semicircle around him. They were silent and price tagged and cold company. The ironhead sat there all day long, from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon, breathing a slow hush of steam, and no one in the store even talked to him. Finally the cashier’s boss entered, and when he found out how long the ironhead had been there, he called the police. “This is not a public park,” he said. “We are trying, after all, to make some money here.” In ten minutes, the cop car pulled up, and the two policemen walked over to the ironhead sitting quietly in aisle three trying to take that ever-elusive nap. One cop laughed out loud and the other pretended to pull out his gun in fake terror. “You never know what you’re going to see in this podunk town,” the laughing one said. “Got any wrinkles on your shirt there, mac?” His partner smirked. The ironhead leaned down and put his head on the white tile so that the boxes of irons rose over him like buildings.

The cashier, who was not unkind, put in a call to the iron-head’s worried parents; they drove right on over, hurried in, hugged their son close. One of the policemen cracked a Halloween joke which made the mother livid but she was more concerned when she saw the half-moon of irons around her son’s head; she asked him what it meant on the drive home but he just shook his head, snuggling against her warm hip. That night, he lay in bed awake again, for the thousandth night of insomnia, listening to the sounds of his sisters and parents sleeping in the next rooms, which was the most lonesome sound in the world, and by morning was so exhausted, down to the root of his bone, that he begged to stay home from school. Because she loved him dearly, almost more so because he had been a complete and utter surprise, his mother gave him a good lunch of hot dogs and potato chips and chili and milk, set him in front of the TV with a blanket, and left for work herself.

When she came home at five, her ironhead was dead. He was in front of the TV with his ironhead turned toward the sofa, away from the screen, and when he didn’t respond to her inquiries, she went to check on him, listening for his breath in its small steamy gasps, and she heard nothing coming out of him at all. She was so used to the slow steady hushed sound of his breathing that it was only the abrupt silence of him that convinced her he wasn’t there anymore. She crumpled by his side and held him close and cried and cried and when the little girls came home from soccer practice they didn’t know what to do and couldn’t stand to watch their mother crying like that and so they got mad at each other and screamed and kicked on the front lawn. The mother held her little ironhead close and his body felt cool and distant. She stroked down the plastic handle and when her husband came home she nearly fell against him.

The doctor who came by that night to state the cause of death said that the ironhead had died of utter exhaustion, that it had nothing to do with the chili or the journey across the field or the iron in boxes or the laughing policemen. He weighed the iron and said that the weight of it was completely out of proportion with the rest of the body, and that it was frankly incredible that the boy had lived at all, carrying a head like that around all day. “This is rock-solid iron, and you can imagine-” he declared. The mother stood still as a stone; the father nodded slowly. The doctor didn’t finish his sentence, and bowed his head in the face of their grief. The pumpkinhead family buried the ironhead in the cemetery which was only a few blocks away, and at the funeral, children from the school filled buckets with dirt and then submerged them in dirt. A few well-meaning but thoughtless types brought irons to put on his grave, but the mother, her body taut and loosening at the same time, flung them as far away as she could, flying irons, until they crashed among the trees, shading boat-shaped imprints into the earth. One thrifty mourner secretly collected them and took them with her and sold them for half price back to the appliance shop where they crowded the aisle, chins up. The pumpkinhead family sat together at the cemetery and the mother kept uncovering dishes of warm food so she could release steam on his grave, because she wanted to give him voice, to give him breath again.

For many weeks, all they ate were the casseroles brought by the neighbors. When they ran out of those, the mother went into the kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made spaghetti. She was slow and heavied, but she did it, and the family ate together that night: four. While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

Thirty years later when the girls were having their own children, they had mostly pumpkinheads, but the recessive gene did rear its head once more and the second daughter’s third child emerged with the head of a teapot. This seemed less difficult to live with than a pointy heavy head of iron and the teapothead child did just fine, made many friends, and slept without trouble. She breathed steam just like her uncle had, and so they sometimes called her ironhead as a pet name even though it didn’t fit. She was very good at soccer. The mother and father pumpkinhead still visited the cemetery regularly and sat there with their backs against the dates of their child’s birth and death and the mother said, “I can feel my head softening,” and the father said, “My shoulders are shrinking and my knuckles are growing,” and they sat with their heads orange globes against the gray stone and green grass and after a few hours walked home together.