Stranger Things Happen

Link, Kelly

Published: 2001

Categorie(s): Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories

Source: http://www.kellylink.net

1

About Link:

Kelly Link is an American author of short stories born in 1969.

Her stories might be described as slipstream or magic real-

ism: sometimes a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror,

mystery, and realism. Kelly Link moved to Greensboro, North

Carolina, from Miami. She attended Greensboro Day School

where she graduated in 1987. She grew up next door to her

aunt and uncle, Sam and Babs Jones, and her two favorite cous-

ins, Bryan and Laurie Jones. Kelly Link has two younger sib-

lings, Holly Link of San Francisco, California, and Ben Link of

New York, New York. Link is a graduate of Columbia University

in New York and the MFA program of UNC Greensboro. In

1995 she attended the Clarion East Writing Workshop. Link

and husband Gavin Grant manage Small Beer Press, based

in Northampton, Massachusetts. They also co-edit St. Martin's

Press's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series, along

with Ellen Datlow. (The couple inherited the "fantasy" side from Terri Windling in 2004.) Link was also the slush reader for Sci

Fiction, edited by Datlow. Link taught at Lenoir-Rhyne College

in Hickory, North Carolina, with the Visiting Writers Series for

the spring semester of 2006. She also has taught or visited at

a number of schools and workshops including Bard College,

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Brookdale Community College,

Brookdale, NJ; the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State

University; New England Institute of Art & Communications,

Brookline, MA; Clarion East at Michigan State University; and

Clarion West in Seattle, WA. She has also participated in The

Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Mas-

sachusetts, Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. Link

currently teaches a course on Short Story Writing to under-

graduates at Smith College, near their home in Northampton,

Massachusetts. Source: Wikipedia

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3

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Dear Mary (if that is your name),

I bet you'll be pretty surprised to hear from me. It really

is me, by the way, although I have to confess at the moment

that not only can I not seem to keep your name straight in my

head, Laura? Susie? Odile? but I seem to have forgotten my own

name. I plan to keep trying different combinations: Joe loves

Lola, Willy loves Suki, Henry loves you, sweetie, Georgia?, hon-

eypie, darling. Do any of these seem right to you?

All last week I felt like something was going to happen, a

sort of bees and ants feeling. Something was going to happen.

I taught my classes and came home and went to bed, all week

waiting for the thing that was going to happen, and then on Fri-

day I died.

One of the things I seem to have misplaced is how, or maybe I

mean why. It's like the names. I know that we lived together in

a house on a hill in a small comfortable city for nine years, that

we didn't have kids—except once, almost—and that you're a ter-

rible cook, oh my darling, Coraline? Coralee? and so was I, and

we ate out whenever we could afford to. I taught at a good uni-

versity, Princeton? Berkeley? Notre Dame? I was a good teach-

er, and my students liked me. But I can't remember the name

of the street we lived on, or the author of the last book I read,

or your last name which was also my name, or how I died. It's

funny, Sarah? but the only two names I know for sure are real

are Looly Bellows, the girl who beat me up in fourth grade, and

your cat's name. I'm not going to put your cat's name down on

paper just yet.

We were going to name the baby Beatrice. I just remembered

that. We were going to name her after your aunt, the one that

doesn't like me. Didn't like me. Did she come to the funeral?

I've been here for three days, and I'm trying to pretend that

it's just a vacation, like when we went to that island in that

country. Santorini? Great Britain? The one with all the cliffs.

The one with the hotel with the bunkbeds, and little squares of

pink toilet paper, like handkerchiefs. It had seashells in the win-

dow too, didn't it, that were transparent like bottle glass? They

smelled like bleach? It was a very nice island. No trees. You said

4

that when you died, you hoped heaven would be an island like

that. And now I'm dead, and here I am.

This is an island too, I think. There is a beach, and down on

the beach is a mailbox where I am going to post this letter. Oth-

er than the beach, the mailbox, there is the building in which

I sit and write this letter. It seems to be a perfectly pleasant

resort hotel with no other guests, no receptionist, no host, no

events coordinator, no bell-boy. Just me. There is a television

set, very old-fashioned, in the hotel lobby. I fiddled the antenna

for a long time, but never got a picture. Just static. I tried to

make images, people out of the static. It looked like they were

waving at me.

My room is on the second floor. It has a sea view. All the rooms

here have views of the sea. There is a desk in my room, and a

good supply of plain, waxy white paper and envelopes in one of

the drawers. Laurel? Maria? Gertrude?

I haven't gone out of sight of the hotel yet, Lucille? because I

am afraid that it might not be there when I get back.

Yours truly, You know who.

#

The dead man lies on his back on the hotel bed, his hands busy

and curious, stroking his body up and down as if it didn't really

belong to him at all. One hand cups his testicles, the other tugs

hard at his erect penis. His heels push against the mattress and

his eyes are open, and his mouth. He is trying to say someone's

name.

Outside, the sky seems much too close, made out of some grey

stuff that only grudgingly allows light through. The dead man

has noticed that it never gets any lighter or darker, but some-

times the air begins to feel heavier, and then stuff falls out of the sky, fist-sized lumps of whitish-grey doughy matter. It falls until

the beach is covered, and immediately begins to dissolve. The

dead man was outside, the first time the sky fell. Now he waits

inside until the beach is clear again. Sometimes he watches

television, although the reception is poor.

The sea goes up and back the beach, sucking and curling

around the mailbox at high tide. There is something about it

that the dead man doesn't like much. It doesn't smell like salt

5

the way a sea should. Cara? Jasmine? It smells like wet uphol-

stery, burnt fur.

#

Dear May? April? Ianthe?

My room has a bed with thin, limp sheets and an amateurish

painting of a woman sitting under a tree. She has nice breasts,

but a peculiar expression on her face, for a woman in a painting

in a hotel room, even in a hotel like this. She looks disgruntled.

I have a bathroom with hot and cold running water, towels,

and a mirror. I looked in the mirror for a long time, but I didn't

look familiar. It's the first time I've ever had a good look at a

dead person. I have brown hair, receding at the temples, brown

eyes, and good teeth, white, even, and not too large. I have a

small mark on my shoulder, Celeste? where you bit me when

we were making love that last time. Did you somehow realize it

would be the last time we made love? Your expression was sad;

also, I seem to recall, angry. I remember your expression now,

Eliza? You glared up at me without blinking and when you came,

you said my name, and although I can't remember my name, I

remember you said it as if you hated me. We hadn't made love

for a long time.

I estimate my height to be about five feet, eleven inches, and

although I am not unhandsome, I have an anxious, somewhat

fixed expression. This may be due to circumstances.

I was wondering if my name was by any chance Roger or

Timothy or Charles. When we went on vacation, I remember

there was a similar confusion about names, although not ours.

We were trying to think of one for her, I mean, for Beatrice.

Petrucchia, Solange? We wrote them all with long pieces of stick

on the beach, to see how they looked. We started with the plain

names, like Jane and Susan and Laura. We tried practical names

like Polly and Meredith and Hope, and then we became extra-

vagant. We dragged our sticks through the sand and produced

entire families of scowling little girls named Gudrun, Jezebel,

Jerusalem, Zedeenya, Zerilla. How about Looly, I said. I knew a

girl named Looly Bellows once. Your hair was all snarled around

your face, stiff with salt. You had about a zillion freckles. You

were laughing so hard you had to prop yourself up with your

stick. You said that sounded like a made-up name.

6

Love,

You know who.

#

The dead man is trying to act as if he is really here, in this

place. He is trying to act in a normal and appropriate fashion.

As much as is possible. He is trying to be a good tourist.

He hasn't been able to fall asleep in the bed, although he has

turned the painting to the wall. He is not sure that the bed is

a bed. When his eyes are closed, it doesn't seem to be a bed.

He sleeps on the floor, which seems more floorlike than the bed

seems bedlike. He lies on the floor with nothing over him and

pretends that he isn't dead. He pretends that he is in bed with

his wife and dreaming. He makes up a nice dream about a party

where he has forgotten everyone's name. He touches himself.

Then he gets up and sees that the white stuff that has fallen out

of the sky is dissolving on the beach, little clumps of it heaped

around the mailbox like foam.

#

Dear Elspeth? Deborah? Frederica?

Things are getting worse. I know that if I could just get your

name straight, things would get better.

I told you that I'm on an island, but I'm not sure that I am.

I'm having doubts about my bed and the hotel. I'm not happy

about the sea or the sky, either. The things that have names that

I'm sure of, I'm not sure they're those things, if you understand

what I'm saying, Mallory? I'm not sure I'm still breathing, either.

When I think about it, I do.

I only think about it because it's too quiet when I'm not. Did

you know, Alison? that up in those mountains, the Berkshires?

the altitude gets too high, and then real people, live people for-

get to breathe also? There's a name for when they forget. I for-

get what the name is.

But if the bed isn't a bed, and the beach isn't a beach, then

what are they? When I look at the horizon, there almost seem

to be corners. When I lay down, the corners on the bed receded

like the horizon.

Then there is the problem about the mail. Yesterday I simply

slipped the letter into a plain envelope, and slipped the envel-

ope, unaddressed, into the mailbox. This morning the letter was

7

gone and when I stuck my hand inside, and then my arm, the

sides of the box were damp and sticky. I inspected the back side

and discovered an open panel. When the tide rises, the mail

goes out to sea. So I really have no idea if you, Pamela? or, for

that matter, if anyone is reading this letter.

I tried dragging the mailbox further up the beach. The waves

hissed and spit at me, a wave ran across my foot, cold and furry

and black, and I gave up. So I will simply have to trust to the

local mail system.

Hoping you get this soon,

You know who.

#

The dead man goes for a walk along the beach. The sea keeps

its distance, but the hotel stays close behind him. He notices

that the tide retreats when he walks towards it, which is good.

He doesn't want to get his shoes wet. If he walked out to sea,

would it part for him like that guy in the bible? Onan?

He is wearing his second-best suit, the one he wore for inter-

views and weddings. He figures it's either the suit that he died

in, or else the one that his wife buried him in. He has been wear-

ing it ever since he woke up and found himself on the island,

disheveled and sweating, his clothing wrinkled as if he had been

wearing it for a long time. He takes his suit and his shoes off

only when he is in his hotel room. He puts them back on to go

outside. He goes for a walk along the beach. His fly is undone.

The little waves slap at the dead man. He can see teeth under

that water, in the glassy black walls of the larger waves, the

waves farther out to sea. He walks a fair distance, stopping

frequently to rest. He tires easily. He keeps to the dunes. His

shoulders are hunched, his head down. When the sky begins

to change, he turns around. The hotel is right behind him. He

doesn't seem at all surprised to see it there. All the time he

has been walking, he has had the feeling that just over the next

dune someone is waiting for him. He hopes that maybe it is his

wife, but on the other hand if it were his wife, she'd be dead too,

and if she were dead, he could remember her name.

#

Dear Matilda? Ivy? Alicia?

I picture my letters sailing out to you, over those waves with the

8

teeth, little white boats. Dear reader, Beryl? Fern? you would

like to know how I am so sure these letters are getting to you?

I remember that it always used to annoy you, the way I took

things for granted. But I'm sure you're reading this in the same

way that even though I'm still walking around and breathing

(when I remember to) I'm sure I'm dead. I think that these let-

ters are getting to you, mangled, sodden but still legible. If

they arrived the regular way, you probably wouldn't believe they

were from me, anyway.

I remembered a name today, Elvis Presley. He was the singer,

right? Blue shoes, kissy fat lips, slickery voice? Dead, right?

Like me. Marilyn Monroe too, white dress blowing up like a sail,

Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Looly Bellows (remember?) who lived

next door to me when we were both eleven. She had migraine

headaches all through the school year, which made her mean.

Nobody liked her, before, when we didn't know she was sick. We

didn't like her after. She broke my nose because I pulled her wig

off one day on a dare. They took a tumor out of her head that

was the size of a chicken egg but she died anyway.

When I pulled her wig off, she didn't cry. She had brittle bits

of hair tufting out of her scalp and her face was swollen with

fluid like she'd been stung by bees. She looked so old. She

told me that when she was dead she'd come back and haunt

me, and after she died, I pretended that I could see not just

her—but whole clusters of fat, pale, hairless ghosts lingering

behind trees, swollen and humming like hives. It was a scary fun

game I played with my friends. We called the ghosts loolies, and

we made up rules that kept us safe from them. A certain kind of

walk, a diet of white food—marshmallows, white bread rolled in-

to pellets, and plain white rice. When we got tired of the loolies,

we killed them off by decorating her grave with the remains of

the powdered donuts and Wonderbread our suspicious mothers

at last refused to buy for us.

Are you decorating my grave, Felicity? Gay? Have you forgot-

ten me yet? Have you gotten another cat yet, another lover?

or are you still in mourning for me? God, I want you so much,

Carnation, Lily? Lily? Rose? It's the reverse of necrophilia, I sup-

pose—the dead man who wants one last fuck with his wife. But

you're not here, and if you were here, would you go to bed with

me?

9

I write you letters with my right hand, and I do the other thing

with my left hand that I used to do with my left hand, ever since

I was fourteen, when I didn't have anything better to do. I seem

to recall that when I was fourteen there wasn't anything better

to do. I think about you, I think about touching you, think that

you're touching me, and I see you naked, and you're glaring at

me, and I'm about to shout out your name, and then I come and

the name on my lips is the name of some dead person, or some

totally made-up name.

Does it bother you, Linda? Donna? Penthesilia? Do you want

to know the worst thing? Just a minute ago I was grinding

into the pillow, bucking and pushing and pretending it was you,

Stacy? under me, oh fuck it felt good, just like when I was alive

and when I came I said, "Beatrice." And I remembered coming to get you in the hospital after the miscarriage.

There were a lot of things I wanted to say. I mean, neither of

us was really sure that we wanted a baby and part of me, sure,

was relieved that I wasn't going to have to learn how to be a

father just yet, but there were still things that I wish I'd said to

you. There were a lot of things I wish I'd said to you.

You know who.

#

The dead man sets out across the interior of the island. At

some point after his first expedition, the hotel moved quietly

back to its original location, the dead man in his room, looking

into the mirror, expression intent, hips tilted against the cool

tile. This flesh is dead. It should not rise. It rises. Now the hotel is back beside the mailbox, which is empty when he walks down

to check it.

The middle of the island is rocky, barren. There are no trees

here, the dead man realizes, feeling relieved. He walks for a

short distance—less than two miles, he calculates, before he

stands on the opposite shore. In front of him is a flat expanse

of water, sky folded down over the horizon. When the dead man

turns around, he can see his hotel, looking forlorn and aban-

doned. But when he squints, the shadows on the back veranda

waver, becoming a crowd of people, all looking back at him. He

has his hands inside his pants, he is touching himself. He takes

his hands out of his pants. He turns his back on the shadowy

porch.

10

He walks along the shore. He ducks down behind a sand dune,

and then down a long hill. He is going to circle back. He is go-

ing to sneak up on the hotel if he can, although it is hard to

sneak up on something that always seems to be trying to sneak

up on you. He walks for a while, and what he finds is a ring of

glassy stones, far up on the beach, driftwood piled inside the

ring, charred and black. The ground is trampled all around the

fire, as if people have stood there, waiting and pacing. There is

something left in tatters and skin on a spit in the center of the

campfire, about the size of a cat. The dead man doesn't look too

closely at it.

He walks around the fire. He sees tracks indicating where

the people who stood here, watching a cat roast, went away

again. It would be hard to miss the direction they are taking.

The people leave together, rushing untidily up the dune, bare-

foot and heavy, the imprints of the balls of the foot deep, heels

hardly touching the sand at all. They are headed back towards

the hotel. He follows the footprints, sees the single track of his

own footprints, coming down to the fire. Above, in a line parallel

to his expedition and to the sea, the crowd has walked this way,

although he did not see them. They are walking more carefully

now, he pictures them walking more quietly.

His footprints end. There is the mailbox, and this is where he

left the hotel. The hotel itself has left no mark. The other foot-

prints continue towards the hotel, where it stands now, small

in the distance. When the dead man gets back to the hotel, the

lobby floor is dusted with sand, and the television is on. The re-

ception is slightly improved. But no one is there, although he

searches every room. When he stands on the back veranda, star-

ing out over the interior of the island, he imagines he sees a

group of people, down beside the far shore, waving at him. The

sky begins to fall.

#

Dear Araminta? Kiki? Lolita?

Still doesn't have the right ring to it, does it? Sukie? Ludmilla?

Winifred?

I had that same not-dream about the faculty party again. She

was there, only this time you were the one who recognized her,

and I was trying to guess her name, who she was. Was she the

11

tall blonde with the nice ass, or the short blonde with the short

hair who kept her mouth a little open, like she was smiling all

the time? That one looked like she knew something I wanted to

know, but so did you. Isn't that funny? I never told you who she

was, and now I can't remember. You probably knew the whole

time anyway, even if you didn't think you did. I'm pretty sure

you asked me about that little blond girl, when you were asking.

I keep thinking about the way you looked, that first night we

slept together. I'd kissed you properly on the doorstep of your

mother's house, and then, before you went inside, you turned

around and looked at me. No one had ever looked at me like

that. You didn't need to say anything at all. I waited until your

mother turned off all the lights downstairs, and then I climbed

over the fence, and up the tree in your backyard, and into

your window. You were leaning out of the window, watching

me climb, and you took off your shirt so that I could see your

breasts, I almost fell out of the tree, and then you took off your

jeans and your underwear had a day of the week embroidered

on it, Holiday? and then you took off your underwear too. You'd

bleached the hair on your head yellow, and then streaked it

with red, but the hair on your pubis was black and soft when I

touched it.

We lay down on your bed, and when I was inside you, you gave

me that look again. It wasn't a frown, but it was almost a frown,

as if you had expected something different, or else you were try-

ing to get something just right. And then you smiled and sighed

and twisted under me. You lifted up smoothly and strongly as

if you were going to levitate right off the bed, and I lifted with

you as if you were carrying me and I almost got you pregnant

for the first time. We never were good about birth control, were

we, Eliane? Rosemary? And then I heard your mother out in the

backyard, right under the elm I'd just climbed, yelling "Tree?

Tree?"

I thought she must have seen me climb it. I looked out the win-

dow and saw her directly beneath me, and she had her hands on

her hips, and the first thing I noticed were her breasts, moon-

lit and plump, pushed up under her dressing gown, fuller than

yours and almost as nice. That was pretty strange, realizing that

I was the kind of guy who could have fallen in love with someone

after not so much time, really, truly, deeply in love, the forever

12

kind, I already knew, and still notice this middle-aged woman's

tits. Your mother's tits. That was the second thing I learned. The

third thing was that she wasn't looking back at me. "Tree?" she yelled one last time, sounding pretty pissed.

So, okay, I thought she was crazy. The last thing, the thing I

didn't learn, was about names. It's taken me a while to figure

that out. I'm still not sure what I didn't learn, Aina? Jewel? Kath-

leen? but at least I'm willing. I mean, I'm here still, aren't I?

Wish you were here, You know who.

#

At some point, later, the dead man goes down to the mailbox.

The water is particularly unwaterlike today. It has a velvety nap

to it, like hair. It raises up in almost discernable shapes. It is still afraid of him, but it hates him, hates him, hates him. It never

liked him, never. "Fraidy cat, fraidy cat," the dead man taunts the water.

When he goes back to the hotel, the loolies are there. They

are watching television in the lobby. They are a lot bigger than

he remembers.

#

Dear Cindy, Cynthia, Cenfenilla,

There are some people here with me now. I'm not sure if I'm in

their place— if this place is theirs, or if I brought them here,

like luggage. Maybe it's some of one, some of the other. They're

people, or maybe I should say a person I used to know when

I was little. I think they've been watching me for a while, but

they're shy. They don't talk much.

Hard to introduce yourself, when you have forgotten your

name. When I saw them, I was astounded. I sat down on the

floor of the lobby. My legs were like water. A wave of emotion

came over me, so strong I didn't recognize it. It might have been

grief. It might have been relief. I think it was recognition. They

came and stood around me, looking down. "I know you," I said.

"You're loolies."

They nodded. Some of them smiled. They are so pale, so fat!

When they smile, their eyes disappear in folds of flesh. But they

have tiny soft bare feet, like children's feet. "You're the dead man," one said. It had a tiny soft voice. Then we talked. Half of what they said made no sense at all. They don't know how I got

13

here. They don't remember Looly Bellows. They don't remem-

ber dying. They were afraid of me at first, but also curious.

They wanted to know my name. Since I didn't have one, they

tried to find a name that fit me. Walter was put forward, then

rejected. I was un-Walter-like. Samuel, also Milo, also Rupert.

Quite a few of them liked Alphonse, but I felt no particular lean-

ing towards Alphonse. "Tree," one of the loolies said.

Tree never liked me very much. I remember your mother

standing under the green leaves that leaned down on bowed

branches, dragging the ground like skirts. Oh, it was such a

tree! the most beautiful tree I'd ever seen. Halfway up the tree,

glaring up at me, was a fat black cat with long white whiskers,

and an elegant sheeny bib. You pulled me away. You'd put a T-

shirt on. You stood in the window. "I'll get him," you said to the woman beneath the tree. "You go back to bed, mom. Come here,

Tree."

Tree walked the branch to the window, the same broad branch

that had lifted me up to you. You, Ariadne? Thomasina? plucked

him off the sill and then closed the window. When you put him

down on the bed, he curled up at the foot, purring. But when I

woke up, later, dreaming that I was drowning, he was crouched

on my face, his belly heavy as silk against my mouth.

I always thought Tree was a silly name for a cat. When he got

old and slept out in the garden, he still didn't look like a tree.

He looked like a cat. He ran out in front of my car, I saw him,

you saw me see him, I realized that it would be the last straw—a

miscarriage, your husband sleeps with a graduate student, then

he runs over your cat—I was trying to swerve, to not hit him.

Something tells me I hit him. I didn't mean to, sweetheart, love,

Pearl? Patsy? Portia?

You know who.

#

The dead man watches television with the loolies. Soap oper-

as. The loolies know how to get the antenna crooked so that the

reception is decent, although the sound does not come in. One

of them stands beside the TV to hold it just so. The soap opera

is strangely dated, the clothes old-fashioned, the sort the dead

man imagines his grandparents wore. The women wear cloche

hats, their eyes are heavily made up.

14

There is a wedding. There is a funeral, also, although it is not

clear to the dead man watching, who the dead man is. Then

the characters are walking along a beach. The woman wears a

black-and-white striped bathing costume that covers her modes-

tly, from neck to mid-thigh. The man's fly is undone. They do not

hold hands. There is a buzz of comment from the loolies. "Too

dark," one says, about the woman. "Still alive," another says.

"Too thin," one says, indicating the man. "Should eat more.

Might blow away in a wind."

"Out to sea."

"Out to Tree." The loolies look at the dead man. The dead man goes to his room. He locks the door. His penis sticks up, hard

as a tree. It is pulling him across the room, towards the bed.

The man is dead, but his body doesn't know it yet. His body

still thinks that it is alive. He begins to say out loud the names

he knows, beautiful names, silly names, improbable names. The

loolies creep down the hall. They stand outside his door and

listen to the list of names.

#

Dear Bobbie? Billie?

I wish you would write back.

You know who.

#

When the sky changes, the loolies go outside. The dead man

watches them pick the stuff off the beach. They eat it method-

ically, chewing it down to a paste. They swallow, and pick up

more. The dead man goes outside. He picks up some of the stuff.

Angel food cake? Manna? He smells it. It smells like flowers:

like carnations, lilies, like lilies, like roses. He puts some in his mouth. It tastes like nothing at all. The dead man kicks at the

mailbox.

#

Dear Daphne? Proserpine? Rapunzel?

Isn't there a fairy tale where a little man tries to do this? Guess

a woman's name? I have been making stories up about my

death. One death I've imagined is when I am walking down to

the subway, and then there is a strong wind, and the mobile

sculpture by the subway, the one that spins in the wind, lifts up

and falls on me. Another death is you and I, we are flying to

15

some other country, Canada? The flight is crowded, and you sit

one row ahead of me. There is a crack! and the plane splits in

half, like a cracked straw. Your half rises up and my half falls

down. You turn and look back at me, I throw out my arms. Wine-

glasses and newspapers and ribbons of clothes fall up in the air.

The sky catches fire. I think maybe I stepped in front of a train.

I was riding a bike, and someone opened a car door. I was on a

boat and it sank.

This is what I know. I was going somewhere. This is the story

that seems the best to me. We made love, you and I, and af-

terwards you got out of bed and stood there looking at me. I

thought that you had forgiven me, that now we were going to

go on with our lives the way they had been before. Bernice? you

said. Gloria? Patricia? Jane? Rosemary? Laura? Laura? Harriet?

Jocelyn? Nora? Rowena? Anthea?

I got out of bed. I put on clothes and left the room. You fol-

lowed me. Marly? Genevieve? Karla? Kitty? Soibhan? Marnie?

Lynley? Theresa? You said the names staccato, one after the

other, like stabs. I didn't look at you, I grabbed up my car keys,

and left the house. You stood in the door, watched me get in the

car. Your lips were still moving, but I couldn't hear.

Tree was in front of the car and when I saw him, I swerved. I

was already going too fast, halfway out of the driveway. I pinned

him up against the mailbox, and then the car hit the lilac tree.

White petals were raining down. You screamed. I can't remem-

ber what happened next.

I don't know if this is how I died. Maybe I died more than

once, but it finally took. Here I am. I don't think this is an island.

I think that I am a dead man, stuffed inside a box. When I'm

quiet, I can almost hear the other dead men scratching at the

walls of their boxes.

Or maybe I'm a ghost. Maybe the waves, which look like fur,

are fur, and maybe the water which hisses and spits at me is

really a cat, and the cat is a ghost, too.

Maybe I'm here to learn something, to do penance. The loolies

have forgiven me. Maybe you will, too. When the sea comes to

my hand, when it purrs at me, I'll know that you've forgiven me

for what I did. For leaving you after I did it.

Or maybe I'm a tourist, and I'm stuck on this island with the

loolies until it's time to go home, or until you come here to get

16

me, Poppy? Irene? Delores? which is why I hope you get this let-

ter.

You know who.

17

Water Off a Black Dog’s Back

Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, could you live without love, or could you live without

water?"

"Why can't I have both?"

#

Rachel Rook took Carroll home to meet her parents two

months after she first slept with him. For a generous girl, a

girl who took off her clothes with abandon, she was remarkably

close-mouthed about some things. In two months Carroll had

learned that her parents lived on a farm several miles outside

of town; that they sold strawberries in summer, and Christmas

trees in the winter. He knew that they never left the farm; in-

stead, the world came to them in the shape of weekend picnick-

ers and driveby tourists.

"Do you think your parents will like me?" he said. He had

spent the afternoon preparing for this visit as carefully as if

he were preparing for an exam. He had gotten his hair cut,

trimmed his nails, washed his neck and behind his ears. The out-

fit he had chosen, khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt—no

tie—lay neatly folded on the bed. He stood before Rachel in his

plain white underwear and white socks, gazing at her as if she

were a mirror.

"No," she said. It was the first time she had been to his apartment, and she stood square in the center of his bedroom, her

arms folded against her body as if she was afraid to sit down, to

touch something.

"Why?"

"My father will like you," she said. "But he likes everyone.

My mother's more particular—she thinks that you lack a serious

nature."

Carroll put on his pants, admiring the crease. "So you've

talked to her about me."

"Yes."

"But you haven't talked about her to me."

"No."

"Are you ashamed of her?"

18

Rachel snorted. Then she sighed in a way that seemed to sug-

gest she was regretting her decision to take him home. "You're

ashamed of me," he guessed, and Rachel kissed him and smiled

and didn't say anything.

#

Rachel still lived on her parents' farm, which made it all the

more remarkable that she had kept Carroll and her parents

apart for so long. It suggested a talent for daily organization

that filled Carroll's heart with admiration and lust. She was

nineteen, two years younger than Carroll; she was a student at

Jellicoh College and every weekday she rose at seven and biked

four miles into town, and then back again on her bike, four miles

uphill to the farm.

Carroll met Rachel in the Jellicoh College library, where he

had a part-time job. He sat at the checkout desk, stamping

books and reading Tristram Shandy for a graduate class; he was

almost asleep when someone said, "Excuse me."

He looked up. The girl who stood before the tall desk was red-

headed. Sunlight streaming in through a high window opposite

her lit up the fine hairs on her arm, the embroidered flowers on

the collar of her white shirt. The sunlight turned her hair to fire

and Carroll found it difficult to look directly at her. "Can I help you?" he said.

She placed a shredded rectangle on the desk, and Carroll

picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. Pages hung in

tatters from the sodden blue spine. Title, binding, and covers

had been gnawed away. "I need to pay for a damaged book," she said.

"What happened? Did your dog eat it?" he said, making a joke.

"Yes," she said, and smiled.

"What's your name?" Carroll said. Already, he thought he

might be in love.

#

The farmhouse where Rachel lived had a wrap-around porch

like an apron. It had been built on a hill, and looked down a long

green slope of Christmas trees towards the town and Jellicoh

College. It looked old-fashioned and a little forlorn.

On one side of the house was a small barn, and behind the

barn was an oval pond, dark and fringed with pine trees. It

winked in the twilight like a glossy lidless eye. The sun was

19

rolling down the grassy rim of the hill towards the pond, and

the exaggerated shadows of Christmas trees, long and pointed

as witches' hats, stitched black triangles across the purple-grey

lawn. House, barn, and hill were luminous in the fleet purple

light.

Carroll parked the car in front of the barn and went around

to Rachel's side to hand her out. A muffled, ferocious breathing

emanated from the barn, and the doors shuddered as if

something inside was hurling itself repeatedly towards them,

through the dark and airless space. There was a sour animal

smell. "What's in there?" Carroll asked.

"The dogs," Rachel said. "They aren't allowed in the house and they don't like to be separated from my mother."

"I like dogs," Carroll said.

#

There was a man sitting on the porch. He stood up as they

approached the house and came forward to meet them. He was

of medium build, and had pink-brown hair like his daughter.

Rachel said, "Daddy, this is Carroll Murtaugh. Carroll, this is my daddy."

Mr. Rook had no nose. He shook hands with Carroll. His hand

was warm and dry, flesh and blood. Carroll tried not to stare at

Mr. Rook's face.

In actual fact, Rachel's father did have a nose, which was

carved out of what appeared to be pine. The nostrils of the nose

were flared slightly, as if Mr. Rook were smelling something

pleasant. Copper wire ran through the bridge of the nose, at-

taching it to the frame of a pair of glasses; it nestled, delicate as a sleeping mouse, between the two lenses.

"Nice to meet you, Carroll," he said. "I understand that you're a librarian down at the college. You like books, do you?" His

voice was deep and sonorous, as if he were speaking out of a

well: Carroll was later to discover that Mr. Rook's voice changed

slightly, depending on which nose he wore.

"Yes, sir," Carroll said. Just to be sure, he looked back at Rachel. As he had thought, her nose was unmistakably the

genuine article. He shot her a second accusatory glance. Why

didn't you tell me? She shrugged.

Mr. Rook said, "I don't have anything against books myself.

But my wife can't stand 'em. Nearly broke her heart when

20

Rachel decided to go to college." Rachel stuck out her lower

lip. "Why don't you give your mother a hand, Rachel, setting the table, while Carroll and I get to know each other?"

"All right," Rachel said, and went into the house.

Mr. Rook sat down on the porch steps and Carroll sat down

with him. "She's a beautiful girl," Mr. Rook said. "Just like her mother."

"Yes sir," Carroll said. "Beautiful." He stared straight ahead and spoke forcefully, as if he had not noticed that he was talking

to a man with a wooden nose.

"You probably think it's odd, don't you, a girl her age, still living at home."

Carroll shrugged. "She seems attached to both of you. You

grow Christmas trees, sir?"

"Strawberries too," Mr. Rook said. "It's a funny thing about strawberries and pine trees. People will pay you to let them dig

up their own. They do all the work and then they pay you for it.

They say the strawberries taste better that way, and they may

be right. Myself, I can't taste much anyway."

Carroll leaned back against the porch rail and listened to Mr.

Rook speak. He sneaked sideways looks at Mr. Rook's profile.

From a few feet away, in the dim cast of the porch light, the

nose had a homely, thoughtful bump to it: it was a philosoph-

er's nose, a questing nose. White moths large as Carroll's hand

pinwheeled around the porch light. They threw out tiny halos of

dark and stirred up breaths of air with their wings, coming to

rest on the porch screen, folding themselves into stillness like

fans. Moths have no noses either, Carroll thought.

"I can't smell the pine trees either," Mr. Rook said. "I have to appreciate the irony in that. You'll have to forgive my wife, if she

seems a bit awkward at first. She's not used to strangers."

Rachel danced out onto the porch. "Dinner's almost ready,"

she said. "Has Daddy been keeping you entertained?"

"He's been telling me all about your farm," Carroll said.

Rachel and her father looked at each other thoughtfully.

"That's great," Rachel said. "You know what he's really dying to ask, Daddy. Tell him about your collection of noses."

"Oh no," Carroll protested. "I wasn't wondering at all—"

But Mr. Rook stood up, dusting off the seat of his pants. "I'll

go get them down. I almost wore a fancier one tonight, but it's

21

so windy tonight, and rather damp. I didn't trust it not to rain."

He hurried off into the house.

Carroll leaned over to Rachel. "Why didn't you tell me?" he said, looking up at her from the porch rail.

"What?"

"That your father has a wooden nose."

"He has several noses, but you heard him. It might rain. Some

of them," she said, "are liable to rust."

"Why does he have a wooden nose?" Carroll said. He was

whispering.

"A boy named Biederbecke bit it off, in a fight." The alliteration evidently pleased her, because she said a little louder,

"Biederbecke bit it off, when you were a boy. Isn't that right,

Daddy?"

The porch door swung open again, and Mr. Rook said, "Yes,

but I don't blame him, really I don't. We were little boys and I

called him a stinking Kraut. That was during the war, and after-

wards he was very sorry. You have to look on the bright side of

things—your mother would never have noticed me if it hadn't

had been for my nose. That was a fine nose. I modeled it on

Abraham Lincoln's nose, and carved it out of black walnut." He

set a dented black tackle box down next to Carroll, squatting

beside it. "Look here."

The inside of the tackle box was lined with red velvet and the

mild light of the October moon illuminated the noses, glowing

as if a jeweler's lamp had been turned upon them: noses made

of wood, and beaten copper, tin and brass. One seemed to be sil-

ver, veined with beads of turquoise. There were aquiline noses;

noses pointed like gothic spires; noses with nostrils curled up

like tiny bird claws.

"Who made these?" Carroll said.

Mr. Rook coughed modestly. "It's my hobby," he said. "Pick one up if you like."

"Go ahead," Rachel said to Carroll.

Carroll chose a nose that had been painted over with blue and

pink flowers. It was glassy-smooth and light in his hand, like a

blown eggshell. "It's beautiful," he said. "What's it made out of?"

"Papier-mache. There's one for every day of the week." Mr.

Rook said.

"What did the … original look like?" Carroll asked.

22

"Hard to remember, really. It wasn't much of a nose," Mr. Rook said. "Before."

#

"Back to the question, please. Which do you choose, water or

love?"

"What happens if I choose wrong?"

"You'll find out, won't you."

"Which would you choose?"

"That's my question, Carroll. You already asked yours."

"You still haven't answered me, either. All right, all right, let me think for a bit."

#

Rachel had straight reddish-brown hair that fell precisely to

her shoulders and then stopped. Her eyes were fox-colored, and

she had more small, even teeth than seemed absolutely neces-

sary to Carroll. She smiled at him, and when she bent over the

tacklebox full of noses, Carroll could see the two wings of her

shoulderblades beneath the thin cotton T-shirt, her vertebrae

outlined like a knobby strand of coral. As they went in to dinner

she whispered in his ear, "My mother has a wooden leg."

She led him into the kitchen to meet her mother. The air in

the kitchen was hot and moist and little beads of sweat stood

out on Mrs. Rook's face. Rachel's mother resembled Rachel in

the way that Mr. Rook's wooden nose resembled a real nose, as

if someone had hacked Mrs. Rook out of wood or granite. She

had large hands with long, yellowed fingernails, and all over her

black dress were short black dog hairs. "So you're a librarian,"

she said to Carroll.

"Part-time," Carroll said. "Yes, ma'am."

"What do you do the rest of the time?" she said.

"I take classes."

Mrs. Rook stared at him without blinking. "Are your parents

still alive?"

"My mother is," Carroll said. "She lives in Florida. She plays bridge."

Rachel grabbed Carroll's arm. "Come on," she said. "The food's getting cold."

She pulled him into a dining room with dark wood paneling

and a long table set for four people. The long black hem of Mrs.

23

Rook's dress hissed along the floor as she pulled her chair into

the table. Carroll sat down next to her. Was it the right or the

left? He tucked his feet under his chair. Both women were silent

and Carroll was silent between them. Mr. Rook talked instead,

filling in the awkward empty pause so that Carroll was glad that

it was his nose and not his tongue that the Biederbecke boy had

bitten off.

How had she lost her leg? Mrs. Rook watched Carroll with a

cold and methodical eye as he ate, and he held Rachel's hand

under the table for comfort. He was convinced that her mother

knew this and disapproved. He ate his pork and peas, balancing

the peas on the blade of his knife. He hated peas. In between

mouthfuls, he gulped down the pink wine in his glass. It was

sweet and strong and tasted of burnt sugar. "Is this apple wine?"

he asked. "It's delicious."

"It's strawberry wine," Mr. Rook said, pleased. "Have more.

We make up a batch every year. I can't taste it myself but it's

strong stuff."

Rachel filled Carroll's empty glass and watched him drain it

instantly. "If you've finished, why don't you let my mother take you to meet the dogs? You look like you could use some fresh

air. I'll stay here and help Daddy do the dishes. Go on," she said.

"Go."

Mrs. Rook pushed her chair back from the table, pushed her-

self out of the chair. "Well, come on," she said. "I don't bite."

Outside, the moths beat at his face, and he reeled beside

Rachel's mother on the moony-white gravel, light as a thread

spun out on its spool. She walked quickly, leaning forward a

little as her right foot came down, dragging the left foot through

the small stones.

"What kind of dogs are they?" he said.

"Black ones," she said.

"What are their names?"

"Flower and Acorn," she said, and flung open the barn door.

Two Labradors, slippery as black trout in the moonlight, surged

up at Carroll. They thrust their velvet muzzles at him, uttering

angry staccato coughs, their rough breath steaming at his face.

They were the size of small ponies and their paws left muddy

prints on his shirt. Carroll pushed them back down, and they

snapped at his hands.

24

"Heel," Mrs. Rook said, and instantly the two dogs went to

her, arranging themselves on either side like bookends. Against

the folds of her skirt, they were nearly invisible, only their

saucer-like eyes flashing wickedly at Carroll.

"Flower's pregnant," Mrs. Rook said. "We've tried to breed them before, but it never took. Go for a run, girl. Go with her,

Acorn."

The dogs loped off, moonlight spilling off their coats like wa-

ter. Carroll watched them run; the stale air of the barn washed

over him, and under the bell of Mrs. Rook's skirt he pictured the

dark wood of the left leg, the white flesh of the right leg, like

a pair of mismatched dice. Mrs. Rook drew in her breath. She

said, "I don't mind you sleeping with my daughter but you had

better not get her pregnant." Carroll said,

"No, ma'am." "If you give her a bastard, I'll set the dogs on you," she said, and went back towards the house. Carroll

scrambled after her.

#

On Friday, Carroll was shelving new books on the third floor.

He stood, both arms lifted up to steady a wavering row of psy-

chology periodicals. Someone paused in the narrow row, direc-

tly behind him, and a small cold hand insinuated itself into his

trousers, slipping under the waistband of his underwear.

"Rachel?" he said, and the hand squeezed, slowly. He jumped and the row of books toppled off their shelf, like dominoes. He

bent to pick them up, not looking at her. "I forgive you," he said.

"That's nice," she said. "For what?" "For not telling me about your father's—" he hesitated, looking for the word, "—wound."

"I thought you handled that very well," she said. "And I did tell you about my mother's leg."

"I wasn't sure whether or not to believe you. How did she lose

it?"

"She swims down in the pond. She was walking back up to the

house. She was barefoot. She sliced her foot open on something.

By the time she went to see a doctor, she had septicemia and her

leg had to be amputated just below the knee. Daddy made her a

replacement out of walnut; he said the prosthesis that the hos-

pital wanted to give her looked nothing like the leg she'd lost. It

has a name carved on it. She used to tell me that a ghost lived

inside it and helped her walk. I was four years old." She didn't 25

look at him as she spoke, flicking the dust off the spine of a ten-

ted book with her long fingers.

"What was its name?" Carroll asked.

"Ellen," Rachel said.

#

Two days after they had first met, Carroll was in the basement

stacks. It was dark in the aisles, the tall shelves curving towards

each other. The lights were controlled by timers, and went on

and off untouched by human hand: there was the ominous sound

of ticking as the timers clicked off row by row. Puddles of dirty

yellow light wavered under his feet, the floor as slick as water.

There was one other student on this floor, a boy who trod at Car-

roll's heels, breathing heavily.

Rachel was in a back corner, partly hidden by a shelving cart.

"Goddammit, goddammit to hell," she was saying, as she flung a book down. "Stupid book, stupid, useless, stupid, know-nothing

books." She kicked at the book several more times, and stomped

on it for good measure. Then she looked up and saw Carroll and

the boy behind him. "Oh," she said. "You again." Carroll turned and glared at the boy. "What's the matter," he said. "Haven't you ever seen a librarian at work?"

The boy fled. "What's the matter?" Carroll said again.

"Nothing," Rachel said. "I'm just tired of reading stupid books about books about books. It's ten times worse then my mother

ever said." She looked at him, weighing him up. She said, "Have you ever made love in a library?"

"Um," Carroll said. "No."

Rachel stripped off her woolly sweater, her blue undershirt.

Underneath, her bare flesh burned. The lights clicked off two

rows down, then the row beside Carroll, and he moved forward

to find Rachel before she vanished. Her body was hot and dry,

like a newly extinguished bulb.

Rachel seemed to enjoy making love in the library. The library

officially closed at midnight, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays

when he was the last of the staff to leave, Carroll left the East

Entrance unlocked for Rachel while he made up a pallet of jack-

ets and sweaters from the Lost and Found.

The first night, he had arranged a makeshift bed in the aisle

between

PR878W6B37, Relative

Creatures,

and

PR878W6B35, Corrupt Relations. In the summer, the stacks had

26

been much cooler than his un-air-conditioned room. He had

hoped to woo her into his bed by the time the weather turned,

but it was October already. Rachel pulled PR878W6A9 out to

use as a pillow. "I thought you didn't like books," he said, trying to make a joke.

"My mother doesn't like books," she said. "Or libraries. Which is a good thing. You don't ever have to worry about her looking

for me here."

When they made love, Rachel kept her eyes closed. Carroll

watched her face, her body rocking beneath him like water. He

closed his eyes, opening them quickly again, hoping to catch her

looking back at him. Did he please her? He pleased himself, and

her breath quickened upon his neck. Her hands smoothed his

body, moving restlessly back and forth, until he gathered them

to himself, biting at her knuckles.

Later he lay prone as she moved over him, her knees clasping

his waist, her narrow feet cupped under the stirrups of his

knees. They lay hinged together and Carroll squinted his eyes

shut to make the Exit sign fuzzy in the darkness. He imagined

that they had just made love in a forest, and the red glow was

a campfire. He imagined they were not on the third floor of a

library, but on the shore of a deep, black lake in the middle of a

stand of tall trees.

"When you were a teenager," Rachel said, "what was the worst thing you ever did?"

Carroll thought for a moment. "When I was a teenager," he

said, "I used to go into my room every day after school and mas-

turbate. And my dog Sunny used to stand outside the door and

whine. I'd come in a handful of Kleenex, and afterward I never

knew what to do with them. If I threw them in the wastebasket,

my mother might notice them piling up. If I dropped them under

the bed, then Sunny would sneak in later and eat them. It was

a revolting dilemma, and every day I swore I wouldn't ever do it

again."

"That's disgusting, Carroll."

Carroll was constantly amazed at the things he told Rachel,

as if love was some sort of hook she used to drag secrets out

of him, things that he had forgotten until she asked for them.

"Your turn," he said.

27

Rachel curled herself against him. "Well, when I was little,

and I did something bad, my mother used to take off her wooden

leg and spank me with it. When I got older, and started being

asked out on dates, she would forbid me. She actually said I for-

bid you to go, just like a Victorian novel. I would wait until she

took her bath after dinner, and steal her leg and hide it. And I

would stay out as late as I wanted. When I got home, she was

always sitting at the kitchen table, with the leg strapped back

on. She always found it before I got home, but I always stayed

away as long as I could. I never came home before I had to.

"When I was little I hated her leg. It was like her other child, the obedient daughter. I was the one she had to spank. I thought

the leg told her when I was bad, and I could feel it gloating

whenever she punished me. I hid it from her in closets, or in the

belly of the grandfather clock. Once I buried it out in the straw-

berry field because I knew it hated the dark: it was scared of the

dark, like me."

Carroll eased away from her, rolling over on his stomach. The

whole time she had been talking, her voice had been calm, her

breath tickling his throat. Telling her about Sunny, the semen-

eating dog, he had sprouted a cheerful little erection. Listening

to her, it had melted away, and his balls had crept up his goose-

pimpled thighs.

Somewhere a timer clicked and a light turned off. "Let's make

love again," she said, and seized him in her hand. He nearly

screamed.

#

In late November, Carroll went to the farm again for dinner.

He parked just outside the barn, where, malignant and black as

tar, Flower lolled on her side in the cold dirty straw. She was

swollen and too lazy to do more than show him her teeth; he

admired them. "How pregnant is she?" Carroll asked Mr. Rook, who had emerged from the barn.

"She's due any day," Mr. Rook said. "The vet says there might be six puppies in there." Today he wore a tin nose, and his words had a distinct echo, whistling out double shrill, like a teakettle

on the boil. "Would you like to see my workshop?" he said.

"Okay," Carroll said. The barn smelled of gasoline and straw, old things congealing in darkness; it smelled of winter. Along

the right inside wall, there were a series of long hooks, and

28

depending from them were various pointed and hooked tools.

Below was a table strewn with objects that seemed to have

come from the city dump: bits of metal; cigar boxes full of

broken glass sorted according to color; a carved wooden hand,

jointed and with a dime-store ring over the next-to-last finger.

Carroll picked it up, surprised at its weight. The joints of

the wooden fingers clicked as he manipulated them, the fingers

long and heavy and perfectly smooth. He put it down again. "It's very nice," he said and turned around. Through the thin veil of

sunlight and dust that wavered in the open doors, Carroll could

see a black glitter of water. "Where's Rachel?"

"She went to find her mother, I'll bet. They'll be down by the

pond. Go and tell them it's dinner time." Mr. Rook looked down

at the black and rancorous Flower. "Six puppies!" he remarked, in a sad little whistle.

Carroll went down through the slanted grove of Christmas

trees. At the base of the hill was a circle of twelve oaks, their

leaves making a thick carpet of gold. The twelve trees were

spaced evenly around the perimeter of the pond, like the num-

bers on a clock face. Carroll paused under the eleven o'clock

oak, looking at the water. He saw Rachel in the pond, her

white arm cutting through the gaudy leaves that clung like skin,

bringing up black droplets of water. Carroll stood in his cor-

duroy jacket and watched her swim laps across the pond. He

wondered how cold the water was. Then he realized that it

wasn't Rachel in the pond.

Rachel sat on a quilt on the far side of the pond, under the

six o'clock oak. Acorn sat beside her, looking now at the swim-

mer, now at Carroll. Rachel and her mother were both oblivious

to his presence, Mrs. Rook intent on her exercise, Rachel rub-

bing linseed oil into her mother's wooden leg. The wind carried

the scent of it across the pond. The dog stood, stiff-legged, fix-

ing Carroll in its dense liquid gaze. It shook itself, sending up a

spray of water like diamonds.

"Cut it out, Acorn!" Rachel said without looking up. All the way across the pond, Carroll felt the drops of water fall on him,

cold and greasy.

He felt himself turning to stone with fear. He was afraid of the

leg that Rachel held in her lap. He was afraid that Mrs. Rook

would emerge from her pond, and he would see the space where

29

her knee hung above the ground. He backed up the hill slowly,

almost falling over a small stone marker at the top. As he looked

at it, the dog came running up the path, passing him without

a glance, and after that, Rachel, and her mother, wearing the

familiar black dress. The ground was slippery with leaves and

Mrs. Rook leaned on her daughter. Her hair was wet and her

cheeks were as red as leaves.

"I can't read the name," Carroll said. "It's Ellen," Mrs. Rook said. "My husband carved it." Carroll looked at Rachel. Your mother has a tombstone for her leg?Rachel looked away.

#

"You can't live without water."

"So that's your choice?"

"I'm just thinking out loud. I know what you want me to say."

No answer.

"Rachel, look. I choose water, okay?"

No answer.

"Let me explain. You can lie to water—you can say no, I'm not

in love, I don't need love, and you can be lying—how is the wa-

ter supposed to know that you're lying? It can't tell if you're in

love or not, right? Water's not that smart. So you fool the wa-

ter into thinking you'd never dream of falling in love, and when

you're thirsty, you drink it."

"You're pretty sneaky."

"I love you, Rachel. Will you please marry me? Otherwise your

mother is going to kill me."

No answer.

#

After dinner, Carroll's car refused to start. No one answered

when they rang a garage, and Rachel said, "He can take my

bike, then."

"Don't be silly," Mr. Rook said. "He can stay here and we'll get someone in the morning. Besides, it's going to rain soon."

"I don't want to put you to any trouble," Carroll said.

Rachel said, "It's getting dark. He can call a taxi." Carroll looked at her, hurt, and she frowned at him.

"He'll stay in the back room," Mrs. Rook said. "Come and have another glass of wine before you go to bed, Carroll." She

grinned at him in what might have been a friendly fashion, ex-

30

cept that at some point after dinner, she had removed her den-

tures.

Rachel brought him a pair of her father's pajamas and led him

off to the room where he was to sleep. The room was small and

plain and the only beautiful thing in it was Rachel, sitting on a

blue and scarlet quilt. "Who made this?" he said.

"My mother did," Rachel said. "She's made whole closetsful of quilts. It's what she used to do while she waited for me to get

home from a date. Now get in bed."

"Why didn't you want me to spend the night?" he asked.

She stuck a long piece of hair in her mouth, and sucked on it,

staring at him without blinking. He tried again. "How come you

never spend the night at my apartment?"

She shrugged. "Are you tired?"

Carroll yawned, and gave up. "Yes," he said and Rachel kissed him goodnight. It was a long, thoughtful kiss. She turned out the

light and went down the hall to her own bedroom. Carroll rolled

on his side and fell asleep and dreamed that Rachel came back

in the room and stood naked in the moonlight. Then she climbed

in bed with him and they made love and then Mrs. Rook came

into the room. She beat at them with her leg as they hid under

the quilt. She struck Rachel and turned her into wood.

As Carroll left the next morning, it was discovered that Flower

had given birth to seven puppies in the night. "Well, it's too late now," Rachel said.

"Too late for what?" Carroll asked. His car started on the first try.

"Never mind," Rachel said gloomily. She didn't wave as he

drove away.

#

Carroll discovered that if he said "I love you," to Rachel, she would say "I love you too," in an absent-minded way. But she still refused to come to his apartment, and because it was colder

now, they made love during the day, in the storage closet on the

third floor. Sometimes he caught her watching him now, when

they made love. The look in her eyes was not quite what he had

hoped it would be, more shrewd than passionate. But perhaps

this was a trick of the cold winter light.

Sometimes, now that it was cold, Rachel let Carroll drive her

home from school. The sign beside the Rooks' driveway now

31

said, "Get your Christmas Trees early." Beneath that it said,

"Adorable black Lab Puppies free to a Good home."

But no one wanted a puppy. This was understandable; already

the puppies had the gaunt, evil look of their parents. They spent

their days catching rats in the barn, and their evenings trailing

like sullen shadows around the black skirts of Mrs. Rook. They

tolerated Mr. Rook and Rachel; Carroll they eyed hungrily.

"You have to look on the bright side," Mr. Rook said. "They make excellent watchdogs."

#

Carroll gave Rachel a wooden bird on a gold chain for Christ-

mas, and the complete works of Jane Austen. She gave him

a bottle of strawberry wine and a wooden box, with six black

dogs painted on the lid. They had fiery red eyes and red licorice

tongues. "My father carved it, but I painted it," she said.

Carroll opened the box. "What will I put in it?" he said.

Rachel shrugged. The library was closed for the weekend, and

they sat on the dingy green carpet in the deserted lounge. The

rest of the staff was on break, and Mr. Cassatti, Carroll's super-

visor, had asked Carroll to keep an eye on things.

There had been some complaints, he said, of vandalism in the

past few weeks. Books had been knocked off their shelves, or

disarranged, and even more curious, a female student claimed

to have seen a dog up on the third floor. It had growled at her,

she said, and then slunk off into the stacks. Mr. Cassatti, when

he had gone up to check, had seen nothing. Not so much as a

single hair. He wasn't worried about the dog, Mr. Cassatti had

said, but some books had been discovered, the pages ripped

out. Maimed, Mr. Cassatti had said.

Rachel handed Carroll one last parcel. It was wrapped in a

brown paper bag, and when he opened it, a blaze of scarlet and

cornflower blue spilled out onto his lap. "My mother made you a

quilt just like the one in the spare bedroom," Rachel said. "I told her you thought it was pretty."

"It's beautiful," Carroll said. He snapped the quilt out, so that it spread across the library floor, as if they were having a picnic.

He tried to imagine making love to Rachel beneath a quilt her

mother had made. "Does this mean that you'll make love with

me in a bed?"

"I'm pregnant," Rachel said.

32

He looked around to see if anyone else had heard her, but of

course they were alone. "That's impossible," he said. "You're on the pill."

"Yes, well." Rachel said. "I'm pregnant anyway. It happens sometimes."

"How pregnant?" he asked.

"Three months."

"Does your mother know?"

"Yes," Rachel said.

"Oh God, she's going to put the dogs on me. What are we go-

ing to do?"

"What am I going to do," Rachel said, looking down at her

cupped hands so that Carroll could not see her expression.

"What am I going to do," she said again.

There was a long pause and Carroll took one of her hands in

his. "Then we'll get married?" he said, a quaver in his voice turning the statement into a question.

"No," she said, looking straight at him, the way she looked at him when they made love. He had never noticed what a sad

hopeless look this was.

Carroll dropped his own eyes, ashamed of himself and not

quite sure why. He took a deep breath. "What I meant to say,

Rachel, is I love you very much and would you please marry

me?"

Rachel pulled her hand away from him. She said in a low

angry voice, "What do you think this is, Carroll? Do you think

this is a book? Is this supposed to be the happy ending—we get

married and live happily ever after?"

She got up, and he stood up too. He opened his mouth, and

nothing came out, so he just followed her as she walked away.

She stopped so abruptly that he almost fell against her. "Let me ask you a question first," she said, and turned to face him. "What would you choose, love or water?"

The question was so ridiculous that he found he was able to

speak again. "What kind of a question is that?" he said.

"Never mind. I think you better take me home in your car,"

Rachel said. "It's starting to snow."

Carroll thought about it during the car ride. He came to the

conclusion that it was a silly question, and that if he didn't an-

swer it correctly, Rachel wasn't going to marry him. He wasn't

33

entirely sure that he wanted to give the correct answer, even if

he knew what it was.

He said, "I love you, Rachel." He swallowed and he could hear the snow coming down, soft as feathers on the roof and wind-shield of the car. In the two beams of the headlights the road

was dense and white as an iced cake, and in the reflected snow-

light Rachel's face was a beautiful greenish color. "Will you

marry me anyway? I don't know how you want me to choose."

"No."

"Why not?" They had reached the farm; he turned the car into driveway, and stopped.

"You've had a pretty good life so far, haven't you?" she said.

"Not too bad," he said sullenly.

"When you walk down the street," Rachel said, "do you ever find pennies?"

"Yes," he said.

"Are they heads or tails?"

"Heads, usually," he said.

"Do you get good grades?"

"As and Bs," he said.

"Do you have to study hard? Have you ever broken a mirror?

When you lose things," she said, "do you find them again?"

"What is this, an interview?"

Rachel looked at him. It was hard to read her expression, but

she sounded resigned. "Have you ever even broken a bone? Do

you ever have to stop for red lights?"

"Okay, okay," he snapped. "My life is pretty easy. I've gotten everything I ever wanted for Christmas, too. And I want you to

marry me, so of course you're going to say yes."

He reached out, put his arms around her. She sat brittle and

stiff in the circle of his embrace, her face turned into his jacket.

"Rachel—"

"My mother says I shouldn't marry you," she said. "She says I don't really know you, that you're feckless, that you've never

lost anything that you cared about, that you're the wrong sort

to be marrying into a family like ours."

"Is your mother some kind of oracle, because she has a

wooden leg?"

"My mother knows about losing things," Rachel said, pushing at him. "She says it'll hurt, but I'll get over you."

34

"So tell me, how hard has your life been?" Carroll said. "You've got your nose, and both your legs. What do you know about losing things?"

"I haven't told you everything," Rachel said and slipped out of the car. "You don't know everything about me." Then she

slammed the car door. He watched her cross the driveway and

go up the hill into the snow.

Carroll called in sick all the next week. The heating unit in his

apartment wasn't working, and the cold made him sluggish. He

thought about going in to the library, just to be warm, but in-

stead he spent most of his time under the quilt that Mrs. Rook

had made, hoping to dream about Rachel. He dreamed instead

about being devoured by dogs, about drowning in icy black wa-

ter.

He lay in his dark room, under the weight of the scarlet quilt,

when he wasn't asleep, and held long conversations in his head

with Rachel, about love and water. He told her stories about

his childhood; she almost seemed to be listening. He asked her

about the baby and she told him she was going to name it Ellen

if it was a girl. When he took his own temperature on Wednes-

day, the thermometer said he had a fever of 103, so he climbed

back into bed.

When he woke up on Thursday morning, he found short black

hairs covering the quilt, which he knew must mean that he was

hallucinating. He fell asleep again and dreamed that Mr. Rook

came to see him. Mr. Rook was a Black Lab. He was wearing

a plastic Groucho Marx nose. He and Carroll stood beside the

black lake that was on the third floor of the library.

The dog said, "You and I are a lot alike, Carroll."

"I suppose," Carroll said.

"No, really," the dog insisted. It leaned its head on Carroll's knee, still looking up at him. "We like to look on the bright side of things. You have to do that, you know."

"Rachel doesn't love me anymore," Carroll said. "Nobody likes me." He scratched behind Mr. Rook's silky ear.

"Now, is that looking on the bright side of things?" said the dog. "Scratch a little to the right. Rachel has a hard time, like her mother. Be patient with her."

"So which would you choose," Carroll said. "Love or water?"

35

"Who says anyone gets to choose anything? You said you

picked water, but there's good water and there's bad water. Did

you ever think about that?" the dog said. "I have a much better question for you. Are you a good dog or a bad dog?"

"Good dog!" Carroll yelled, and woke himself up.

He called the farmhouse in the morning, and when Rachel

answered, he said, "This is Carroll. I'm coming to talk to you."

But when he got there, no one was there. The sight of the

leftover Christmas trees, tall and gawky as green geese, made

him feel homesick. Little clumps of snow like white flowers were

melting in the gravel driveway. The dogs were not in the barn

and he hoped that Mrs. Rook had taken them down to the pond.

He walked up to the house, and knocked on the door. If either

of Rachel's parents came to the door, he would stand his ground

and demand to see their daughter. He knocked again, but no

one came. The house, shuttered against the snow, had an ex-

pectant air, as if it were waiting for him to say something. So

he whispered, "Rachel? Where are you?" The house was silent.

"Rachel, I love you. Please come out and talk to me. Let's get

married—we'll elope. You steal your mother's leg, and by the

time your father carves her a new one, we'll be in Canada. We

could go to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon—we could take

your mother's leg with us, if you want—Ellen, I mean—we'll take

Ellen with us!"

Carroll heard a delicate cough behind him as if someone were

clearing their throat. He turned and saw Flower and Acorn and

their six enormous children sitting on the gravel by the barn,

next to his car. Their fur was spiky and wet, and they curled

their black lips at him. Someone in the house laughed. Or per-

haps it was the echo of a splash, down at the pond.

One of the dogs lifted its head and bayed at him. "Hey," he said. "Good dog! Good Flower, good Acorn! Rachel, help!"

She had been hiding behind the front door. She slammed it

open and came out onto the porch. "My mother said I should

just let the dogs eat you," she said. "If you came."

She looked tired; she wore a shapeless woolen dress that

looked like one of her mother's. If she really was pregnant, Car-

roll couldn't see any evidence yet. "Do you always listen to your mother?" he said. "Don't you love me?"

36

"When I was born," she said. "I was a twin. My sister's name was Ellen. When we were seven years old, she drowned in the

pond—I lost her. Don't you see? People start out losing small

things, like noses. Pretty soon you start losing other things too.

It's sort of an accidental leprosy. If we got married, you'd find

out."

Carroll heard someone coming up the path from the pond,

up through the thin ranks of Christmas trees. The dogs pricked

up their ears, but their black eyes stayed fastened to Carroll.

"You'd better hurry," Rachel said. She escorted him past the dogs to his car.

"I'm going to come back."

"That's not a good idea," she said. The dogs watched him

leave, crowding close around her, their black tails whipping ex-

citedly. He went home and in a very bad temper, he picked up

the quilt to inspect it. He was looking for the black hairs he had

seen that morning. But of course there weren't any.

The next day he went back to the library. He was lifting books

out of the overnight collection box, when he felt something that

was neither rectangular nor flat. It was covered in velvety fur,

and damp. He felt warm breath steaming on his hand. It twisted

away when he tried to pick it up, and when he reached out for

it again, it snarled at him.

He backed away from the collection box, and a long black

dog wriggled out of the box after him. Two students stopped to

watch what was happening. "Go get Mr. Cassatti, please," Carroll said to one of them. "His office is around the corner."

The dog approached him. Its ears were laid back flat against

its skull and its neck moved like a snake.

"Good dog?" Carroll said, and held out his hand. "Flower?"

The dog lunged forward and, snapping its jaws shut, bit off his

pinky just below the fingernail.

The student screamed. Carroll stood still and looked down at

his right hand, which was slowly leaking blood. The sound that

the dog's jaw had made as it severed his finger had been crisp

and businesslike. The dog stared at Carroll in a way that re-

minded him of Rachel's stare. "Give me back my finger," Carroll said.

37

The dog growled and backed away. "We have to catch it," the student said. "So they can reattach your finger. Shit, what if it has rabies?"

Mr. Cassatti appeared, carrying a large flat atlas, extended

like a shield. "Someone said that there was a dog in the library,"

he said.

"In the corner over there," Carroll said. "It bit off my finger."

He held up his hand for Mr. Cassatti to see, but Mr. Cassatti was

looking towards the corner and shaking his head.

He said, "I don't see a dog."

The two students hovered, loudly insisting that they had both

seen the dog a moment ago, while Mr. Cassatti tended to Car-

roll. The floor in the corner was sticky and wet, as if someone

had spilled a Coke. There was no sign of the dog.

Mr. Cassatti took Carroll to the hospital, where the doctor at

the hospital gave him a shot of codeine, and tried to convince

him that it would be a simple matter to reattach the fingertip.

"How?" Mr. Cassatti said. "He says the dog ran away with it."

"What dog?" the doctor asked.

"It was bitten off by a dog," Carroll told the doctor.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "A dog in a library? This looks

like he stuck his finger under a paper cutter. The cut is too

tidy—a dog bite would be a mess. Didn't anyone bring the fin-

ger?"

"The dog ate it," Carroll said. "Mrs. Rook said the dog would eat me, but it stopped. I don't think it liked the way I tasted."

Mr. Cassatti and the doctor went out into the hall to discuss

something. Carroll stood at the door and waited until they had

turned towards the nurses' station. He opened the door and

snuck down the hallway in the opposite direction and out of

the hospital. It was a little hard, walking on the ground—the

codeine seemed to affect gravity. When he walked, he bounced.

When walking got too difficult, he climbed in a taxi and gave the

driver the address of the Rook farm.

His hand didn't hurt at all; he tried to remember this, so

he could tell Rachel. They had bound up his hand in white

gauze bandages, and it looked like someone else's hand entirely.

Under the white bandages, his hand was pleasantly warm. His

skin felt stretched, tight and thin as a rubber glove. He felt

much lighter: it might take a while, but he thought he could get

38

the hang of losing things; it seemed to come as easily to him as

everything else did.

Carroll thought maybe Rachel and he would get married down

by the pond, beneath the new leaves of the six o'clock oak tree.

Mr. Rook could wear his most festive nose, the one with rose-

velvet lining, or perhaps the one painted with flowers. Carroll

remembered the little grave at the top of the path that led to

the pond—not the pond, he decided—they should be married in

a church. Maybe in a library.

"Just drop me off here," he told the taxi driver at the top of the driveway.

"Are you sure you'll be okay?" the driver said. Carroll shook his head, yes, he was sure. He watched the taxi drive away, waving the hand with the abbreviated finger.

Mrs. Rook could make her daughter a high-waisted wedding

dress, satin and silk and lace, moth-pale, and there would be a

cake with eight laughing dogs made out of white frosting, white

as snow. For some reason he had a hard time making the church

come out right. It kept changing, church into library, library

into black pond. The windows were high and narrow and the

walls were wet like the inside of a well. The aisle kept changing,

the walls getting closer, becoming stacks of books, dark, velvety

waves. He imagined standing at the altar with Rachel—black

water came up to their ankles as if their feet had been severed.

He thought of the white cake again: if he sliced into it, darkness

would gush out like ink.

He shook his head, listening. There was a heavy dragging

noise, coming up the side of the hill through the Christmas

trees. It would be a beautiful wedding and he considered it a

lucky thing that he had lost his pinky and not his ring finger. You

had to look on the bright side after all. He went down towards

the pond, to tell Rachel this.

39

The Specialist's Hat

"When you're Dead," Samantha says, "you don't have to brush your teeth … "

"When you're Dead," Claire says, "you live in a box, and it's always dark, but you're not ever afraid."

Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age

is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at be-

ing Dead than Samantha.

The babysitter yawns, covering up her mouth with a long

white hand. "I said to brush your teeth and that it's time for

bed," she says. She sits crosslegged on the flowered bedspread

between them. She has been teaching them a card game called

Pounce, which involves three decks of cards, one for each of

them. Samantha's deck is missing the Jack of Spades and the

Two of Hearts, and Claire keeps on cheating. The babysitter

wins anyway. There are still flecks of dried shaving cream and

toilet paper on her arms. It is hard to tell how old she is—at first

they thought she must be a grownup, but now she hardly looks

older than they. Samantha has forgotten the babysitter's name.

Claire's face is stubborn. "When you're Dead," she says, "you stay up all night long."

"When you're dead," the babysitter snaps, "it's always very cold and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the

Specialist will get you."

"This house is haunted," Claire says.

"I know it is," the babysitter says. "I used to live here."

Something is creeping up the stairs,

Something is standing outside the door,

Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark;

Something is sighing across the floor.

Claire and Samantha are spending the summer with their

father, in the house called Eight Chimneys. Their mother is

dead. She has been dead for exactly 282 days.

Their father is writing a history of Eight Chimneys and of the

poet Charles Cheatham Rash, who lived here at the turn of the

century, and who ran away to sea when he was thirteen, and re-

turned when he was thirty-eight. He married, fathered a child,

40

wrote three volumes of bad, obscure poetry, and an even worse

and more obscure novel, The One Who is Watching Me Through

the Window, before disappearing again in 1907, this time for

good. Samantha and Claire's father says that some of the poetry

is actually quite readable and at least the novel isn't very long.

When Samantha asked him why he was writing about Rash,

he replied that no one else had and why didn't she and Saman-

tha go play outside. When she pointed out that she was Saman-

tha, he just scowled and said how could he be expected to tell

them apart when they both wore blue jeans and flannel shirts,

and why couldn't one of them dress all in green and the other in

pink?

Claire and Samantha prefer to play inside. Eight Chimneys is

as big as a castle, but dustier and darker than Samantha ima-

gines a castle would be. There are more sofas, more china shep-

herdesses with chipped fingers, fewer suits of armor. No moat.

The house is open to the public, and, during the day,

people—families— driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will

stop to tour the grounds and the first story; the third story be-

longs to Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play explorers,

and sometimes they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to vis-

itors. After a few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and

they mouth it along with him. They help him sell postcards and

copies of Rash's poetry to the tourist families who come into the

little gift shop.

When the mothers smile at them and say how sweet they are,

they stare back and don't say anything at all. The dim light in

the house makes the mothers look pale and flickery and tired.

They leave Eight Chimneys, mothers and families, looking not

quite as real as they did before they paid their admissions, and

of course Claire and Samantha will never see them again, so

maybe they aren't real. Better to stay inside the house, they

want to tell the families, and if you must leave, then go straight

to your cars.

The caretaker says the woods aren't safe.

Their father stays in the library on the second story all morn-

ing, typing, and in the afternoon he takes long walks. He takes

his pocket recorder along with him and a hip flask of Gentleman

Jack, but not Samantha and Claire.

41

The caretaker of Eight Chimneys is Mr. Coeslak. His left leg

is noticeably shorter than his right. He wears one stacked heel.

Short black hairs grow out of his ears and his nostrils and there

is no hair at all on top of his head, but he's given Samantha and

Claire permission to explore the whole of the house. It was Mr.

Coeslak who told them that there are copperheads in the woods,

and that the house is haunted. He says they are all, ghosts and

snakes, a pretty bad tempered lot, and Samantha and Claire

should stick to the marked trails, and stay out of the attic.

Mr. Coeslak can tell the twins apart, even if their father can't;

Claire's eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but Samantha's

are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining.

Samantha and Claire went walking in the woods on the

second day that they were at Eight Chimneys. They saw

something. Samantha thought it was a woman, but Claire said

it was a snake. The staircase that goes up to the attic has been

locked. They peeked through the keyhole, but it was too dark to

see anything.

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty.

There was another man who wanted to go with her, and

first she wouldn't, because she was afraid of her hus-

band, and then she did. Her husband found out, and they

say he killed a snake and got some of this snake's blood

and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had

learned this from an island man who had been on a ship

with him. And in about six months snakes created in her

and they got between her meat and the skin. And they

say you could just see them running up and down her

legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body,

and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said

he saw it.

—An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

Eight Chimneys is over two hundred years old. It is named for

the eight chimneys that are each big enough that Samantha and

Claire can both fit in one fireplace. The chimneys are red brick,

and on each floor there are eight fireplaces, making a total of

twenty-four. Samantha imagines the chimney stacks stretching

like stout red tree trunks, all the way up through the slate roof

42

of the house. Beside each fireplace is a heavy black firedog,

and a set of wrought iron pokers shaped like snakes. Claire and

Samantha pretend to duel with the snake-pokers before the fire-

place in their bedroom on the third floor. Wind rises up the back

of the chimney. When they stick their faces in, they can feel the

air rushing damply upwards, like a river. The flue smells old and

sooty and wet, like stones from a river.

Their bedroom was once the nursery. They sleep together in

a poster bed which resembles a ship with four masts. It smells

of mothballs, and Claire kicks in her sleep. Charles Cheatham

Rash slept here when he was a little boy, and also his daugh-

ter. She disappeared when her father did. It might have been

gambling debts. They may have moved to New Orleans. She

was fourteen years old, Mr. Coeslak said. What was her name,

Claire asked. What happened to her mother, Samantha wanted

to know. Mr. Coeslak closed his eyes in an almost wink. Mrs.

Rash had died the year before her husband and daughter dis-

appeared, he said, of a mysterious wasting disease. He can't re-

member the name of the poor little girl, he said.

Eight Chimneys has exactly one hundred windows, all still

with the original wavery panes of handblown glass. With so

many windows, Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should al-

ways be full of light, but instead the trees press close against

the house, so that the rooms on the first and second story—even

the third-story rooms—are green and dim, as if Samantha and

Claire are living deep under the sea. This is the light that makes

the tourists into ghosts. In the morning, and again towards

evening, a fog settles in around the house. Sometimes it is grey

like Claire's eyes, and sometimes it is gray, like Samantha's

eyes.

I met a woman in the wood,

Her lips were two red snakes.

She smiled at me, her eyes were lewd

And burning like a fire.

A few nights ago, the wind was sighing in the nursery chim-

ney. Their father had already tucked them in and turned off the

light. Claire dared Samantha to stick her head into the fireplace,

in the dark, and so she did. The cold wet air licked at her face

43

and it almost sounded like voices talking low, muttering. She

couldn't quite make out what they were saying.

Their father has mostly ignored Claire and Samantha since

they arrived at Eight Chimneys. He never mentions their moth-

er. One evening they heard him shouting in the library, and

when they came downstairs, there was a large sticky stain on

the desk, where a glass of whiskey had been knocked over. It

was looking at me, he said, through the window. It had orange

eyes.

Samantha and Claire refrained from pointing out that the lib-

rary is on the second story.

At night, their father's breath has been sweet from drinking,

and he is spending more and more time in the woods, and less

in the library. At dinner, usually hot dogs and baked beans from

a can, which they eat off of paper plates in the first floor dining

room, beneath the Austrian chandelier (which has exactly 632

leaded crystals shaped like teardrops) their father recites the

poetry of Charles Cheatham Rash, which neither Samantha nor

Claire cares for.

He has been reading the ship diaries that Rash kept, and he

says that he has discovered proof in them that Rash's most fam-

ous poem, "The Specialist's Hat," is not a poem at all, and in any case, Rash didn't write it. It is something that the one of

the men on the whaler used to say, to conjure up a whale. Rash

simply copied it down and stuck an end on it and said it was his.

The man was from Mulatuppu, which is a place neither Sam-

antha nor Claire has ever heard of. Their father says that the

man was supposed to be some sort of magician, but he drowned

shortly before Rash came back to Eight Chimneys. Their father

says that the other sailors wanted to throw the magician's chest

overboard, but Rash persuaded them to let him keep it until he

could be put ashore, with the chest, off the coast of North Caro-

lina.

The specialist's hat makes a noise like an agouti;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a collared pec-

cary;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a white-lipped

peccary;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a tapir;

44

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a rabbit;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a squirrel;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a curassow;

The specialist's hat moans like a whale in the water;

The specialist's hat moans like the wind in my wife's

hair;

The specialist's hat makes a noise like a snake;

I have hung the hat of the specialist upon my wall.

The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that

their father met a woman in the woods. He is going to see her

tonight, and they are going to have a picnic supper and look at

the stars. This is the time of year when the Perseids can be seen,

falling across the sky on clear nights. Their father said that he

has been walking with the woman every afternoon. She is a dis-

tant relation of Rash and besides, he said, he needs a night off

and some grownup conversation.

Mr. Coeslak won't stay in the house after dark, but he agreed

to find someone to look after Samantha and Claire. Then their

father couldn't find Mr. Coeslak, but the babysitter showed up

precisely at seven o'clock. The babysitter, whose name neither

twin quite caught, wears a blue cotton dress with short floaty

sleeves. Both Samantha and Claire think she is pretty in an old-

fashioned sort of way. They were in the library with their fath-

er, looking up Mulatuppu in the red leather atlas, when she ar-

rived. She didn't knock on the front door, she simply walked in

and then up the stairs, as if she knew where to find them.

Their father kissed them goodbye, a hasty smack, told them

to be good and he would take them into town on the weekend

to see the Disney film. They went to the window to watch as he

walked into the woods. Already it was getting dark and there

were fireflies, tiny yellow-hot sparks in the air. When their fath-

er had entirely disappeared into the trees, they turned around

and stared at the babysitter instead. She raised one eyebrow.

"Well," she said. "What sort of games do you like to play?"

Widdershins around the chimneys,

Once, twice, again.

The spokes click like a clock on the bicycle;

They tick down the days of the life of a man.

45

First they played Go Fish, and then they played Crazy Eights,

and then they made the babysitter into a mummy by putting

shaving cream from their father's bathroom on her arms and

legs, and wrapping her in toilet paper. She is the best babysitter

they have ever had.

At nine-thirty, she tried to put them to bed. Neither Claire nor

Samantha wanted to go to bed, so they began to play the Dead

game. The Dead game is a let's pretend that they have been

playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their

father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed

to do anything they want to. They can even fly by jumping off

the nursery bed, and just waving their arms. Someday this will

work, if they practice hard enough.

The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant. The twins keep a list of import-

ant numbers in a green address book that belonged to their

mother. Mr. Coeslak's tour has been a good source of significant

amounts and tallies: they are writing a tragical history of num-

bers.

Two. The twins don't play the Dead game in front of

grownups. They have been summing up the babysitter, and have

decided that she doesn't count. They tell her the rules.

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are

Dead, you don't have to be afraid of anything. Samantha and

Claire aren't sure who the Specialist is, but they aren't afraid of

him.

To become Dead, they hold their breath while counting to 35,

which is as high as their mother got, not counting a few days.

"You never lived here," Claire says. "Mr. Coeslak lives here."

"Not at night," says the babysitter. "This was my bedroom when I was little."

"Really?" Samantha says. Claire says, "Prove it."

The babysitter gives Samantha and Claire a look, as if she is

measuring them: how old, how smart, how brave, how tall. Then

she nods. The wind is in the flue, and in the dim nursery light

they can see the milky strands of fog seeping out of the fire-

place. "Go stand in the chimney," she instructs them. "Stick your hand as far up as you can, and there is a little hole on the left

side, with a key in it."

46

Samantha looks at Claire, who says, "Go ahead." Claire is fifteen minutes and some few uncounted seconds older than Sam-

antha, and therefore gets to tell Samantha what to do. Saman-

tha remembers the muttering voices and then reminds herself

that she is Dead. She goes over to the fireplace and ducks in-

side.

When Samantha stands up in the chimney, she can only see

the very edge of the room. She can see the fringe of the mothy

blue rug, and one bed leg, and beside it, Claire's foot, swinging

back and forth like a metronome. Claire's shoelace has come

undone and there is a Band-Aid on her ankle. It all looks very

pleasant and peaceful from inside the chimney, like a dream,

and for a moment she almost wishes she didn't have to be Dead.

But it's safer, really.

She sticks her left hand up as far as she can reach, trailing

it along the crumbly wall, until she feels an indentation. She

thinks about spiders and severed fingers, and rusty razorblades,

and then she reaches inside. She keeps her eyes lowered, fo-

cused on the corner of the room and Claire's twitchy foot.

Inside the hole, there is a tiny cold key, its teeth facing out-

ward. She pulls it out, and ducks back into the room. "She

wasn't lying," she tells Claire.

"Of course I wasn't lying," the babysitter says. "When you're Dead, you're not allowed to tell lies."

"Unless you want to," Claire says.

Dreary and dreadful beats the sea at the shore.

Ghastly and dripping is the mist at the door.

The clock in the hall is chiming one, two, three, four.

The morning comes not, no, never, no more.

Samantha and Claire have gone to camp for three weeks

every summer since they were seven. This year their father

didn't ask them if they wanted to go back and, after discussing

it, they decided that it was just as well. They didn't want to have

to explain to all their friends how they were half-orphans now.

They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins.

They don't want to be pitiful.

It has not even been a year, but Samantha realizes that she is

forgetting what her mother looked like. Not her mother's face

47

so much as the way she smelled, which was something like dry

hay and something like Chanel No. 5, and like something else

too. She can't remember whether her mother had gray eyes,

like her, or grey eyes, like Claire. She doesn't dream about her

mother anymore, but she does dream about Prince Charming,

a bay whom she once rode in the horse show at her camp. In

the dream, Prince Charming did not smell like a horse at all. He

smelled like Chanel No. 5. When she is Dead, she can have all

the horses she wants, and they all smell like Chanel No. 5.

#

"Where does the key go to?" Samantha says.

The babysitter holds out her hand. "To the attic. You don't

really need it, but taking the stairs is easier than the chimney.

At least the first time."

"Aren't you going to make us go to bed?" Claire says.

The babysitter ignores Claire. "My father used to lock me in

the attic when I was little, but I didn't mind. There was a bicycle

up there and I used to ride it around and around the chimneys

until my mother let me out again. Do you know how to ride a

bicycle?"

"Of course," Claire says.

"If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can't catch you."

"What's the Specialist?" Samantha says. Bicycles are okay, but horses can go faster.

"The Specialist wears a hat," says the babysitter. "The hat makes noises."

She doesn't say anything else.

When you're dead, the grass is greener

Over your grave. The wind is keener.

Your eyes sink in, your flesh decays. You

Grow accustomed to slowness; expect delays.

The attic is somehow bigger and lonelier than Samantha and

Claire thought it would be. The babysitter's key opens the

locked door at the end of the hallway, revealing a narrow set of

stairs. She waves them ahead and upwards.

It isn't as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that

block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green

and mysterious during the day, don't reach all the way up. Extra-

48

vagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer

windows. It lights the length of the attic, which is wide enough

to hold a soft-ball game in, and lined with trunks where Sam-

antha imagines people could sit, could be hiding and watching.

The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thickwaisted

chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be

contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost an-

grily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight they look

like they are breathing. "They're so beautiful," she says.

"Which chimney is the nursery chimney?" Claire says.

The babysitter points to the nearest righthand stack. "That

one," she says. "It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery."

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black

object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The

babysitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes

in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. "The Specialist's hat," she says.

"That doesn't look like a hat," says Claire. "It doesn't look like anything at all." She goes to look through the boxes and trunks

that are stacked against the far wall.

"It's a special hat," the babysitter says. "It's not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it." "Our father writes books," Samantha says.

"My father did too." The babysitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it.

It nickers at her. "He was a bad poet, but he was worse at ma-

gic."

Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she

could have a horse. She thought she would have given up any-

thing for one—even being a twin was not as good as having a

horse. She still doesn't have a horse, but she doesn't have a

mother either, and she can't help wondering if it's her fault. The

hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.

"What happened to him?" Claire asks.

"After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him

away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him,

and it didn't find me."

"Weren't you scared?"

49

There is a clattering, shivering, clicking noise. Claire has

found the babysitter's bike and is dragging it towards them by

the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. "Rule number three,"

she says.

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. "I'm the Specialist!" she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the

floppy shape-less brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons

that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks

again and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she sud-

denly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat,

and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of curassows, of white-

lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash.

The chimneys are moaning, and Claire's voice booms hollowly

beneath the hat. "Run away, or I'll catch you. I'll eat you!"

Samantha and the babysitter run away, laughing as Claire

mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them.

She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist's hat

bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is

shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first to-

wards the right and then to the left. Claire's knobby knees stick

out on either side like makeshift counterweights.

Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Sam-

antha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look be-

hind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handle-

bars and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just

as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and

plucks the hat off Claire's head.

"Shit!" the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter's hand, black

in the moonlight, where the Specialist's hat has bitten her.

Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Special-

ist's hat rolls away. It picks up speed, veering across the at-

tic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. "Go get it,"

Claire says. "You can be the Specialist this time."

"No," the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. "It's time for bed."

When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Special-

ist's hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and

pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between

50

their feet. "When you're Dead," Samantha says, "do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?"

"When you're Dead," the babysitter says, "everything's a lot easier. You don't have to do anything that you don't want to. You

don't have to have a name, you don't have to remember. You

don't even have to breathe."

She shows them exactly what she means.

#

When she has time to think about it, (and now she has all the

time in the world to think) Samantha realizes with a small pang

that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years

old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The

number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in

all, it hasn't been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would

have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe. She has chosen to

be Dead, instead. She hopes that she's made the right decision.

She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, in-

stead of dead, if she could have.

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her

mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild

horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many

of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you

think you have one under control, it throws up its head and

tosses you off. Claire's favorite number is 4, which she says is a

tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn't care for boys that much. She

likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be

more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a

bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it

looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead, and being dead. Maybe

when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling

her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery

window. She looks out through the wavy glass. It's Mr. Coeslak.

"Samantha, Claire!" he calls up to her. "Are you all right? Is your father there?" Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. "They're always locking me in the tool room.

Goddamn spooky things," he says. "Are you there, Samantha?

Claire? Girls?"

51

The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The

babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire's eyes glitter at them

from the dark bed. Samantha doesn't say anything, but she

waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can

see them waving, because after a little while he stops shouting

and goes away. "Be careful," the babysitter says. "He'll be coming soon. It will be coming soon." She takes Samantha's hand,

and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit

and wait. Time passes, but they don't get tired, they don't get

any older.

Who's there?

Just air.

The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire,

and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the

stairs. "Be quiet," the babysitter says. "It's the Specialist."

Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the

wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

"Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?" The Specialist's voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father's voice, but that's

because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. "Are you still awake?"

"Quick," the babysitter says. "It's time to go up to the attic and hide."

Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress

quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without

breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too

dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when

she mouths the word, Up. She goes first, so they can see where

the finger-holds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then

Claire. Samantha watches her sister's foot ascend like smoke,

the shoelace still untied.

"Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you're scaring me. Where

are you?" The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open

door. "Samantha? I think I've been bitten by something. I think

I've been bitten by a goddamn snake." Samantha hesitates for

only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chim-

ney.

52

Flying Lessons

1.Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

Listen, because I'm only going to do this once. You'll have

to get there by way of London. Take the overnight train from

Waverly. Sit in the last car. Speak to no one. Don't fall asleep.

When you arrive at Kings Cross, go down into the Under-

ground. Get on the Northern line. Sit in the last car. Speak to no

one. Don't fall asleep.

The Northern line stops at Angel, at London Bridge, at

Elephant and Castle, Tooting Broadway. The last marked station

is Morden: stay in your seat. Other passengers will remain with

you in the car. Speak to no one.

These are some of the unlisted stations you will pass: Howling

Green. Duke's Pit. Sparrowkill. Stay in your seat. Don't fall

asleep.

If you look around the car, you may notice that the other pas-

sengers have started to glow. The bulbs on the car dim as the

passengers give off more and more light. If you look down you

may find that you yourself are casting light into the dark car.

The final stop is Bonehouse.

2. June in Edinburgh in June.

June stole £7 from Rooms Two and Three. That would be train-

fare, with some left over for a birthday present for Lily. Room

Three was American again, and Americans never knew how

much currency they had in the first place. They left pound coins

lying upon the dresser. It made her fingers itchy.

She ticked off the morning jobs on her right hand. The wash-

room at the end of the hall was clean. Beds were made up,

and all the ashtrays were cleared out. Rooms One through Four

were done, and Room Five at the top of the house was honey-

mooners from Dallas. They hadn't been at breakfast for three

days, living on love, she supposed. Why travel from Dallas to Ed-

inburgh merely to have sex? She imagined a great host of Tex-

ans, rising on white wings and fanning out across the Atlantic,

buoyed up by love. Falling into bed at journey's end, exhausted

by such travel. Nonsense.

She emptied the wastebasket in Room Three, and went

thumping down the stairs with the cleaning box in one hand,

53

and the room keys swinging in the other. "Here, ma," she said, handing the keys and the box over to Lily.

"Right," Lily said sourly. "Finished up, have you?" Her face was flushed, and her black hair snaked down the back of her

neck. Walter was in the kitchen, his elbows plunged into soapy

water, singing along with Radio Three as he worked, an opera

program.

"Where are you off to?" Lily said, raising her voice. June

ducked past her.

"Dunno exactly," she said. "I'll be back in time for tea tomorrow. Goodbye, Walter!" she shouted. "Bake Lily a lovely cake."

3. Arrows of Beauty.

June went to St. Andrews. She thought it would be pleasant

to spend a day by the sea. The train was full and she sat next

to a fat, freckled woman eating sandwiches, one after the oth-

er. June watched her mouth open and close, measuring out the

swish and click of the train on the tracks like a metronome.

When the sandwiches were gone, the woman took out a hard-

cover book. There was a man and a woman on the cover, embra-

cing, his face turned into her shoulder, her hair falling across

her face. As if they were ashamed to be caught like this, half-

naked before the eyes of strangers. Lily liked that sort of book.

The name of the author was Rose Read.

It sounded like a conjuring name, an ingredient in a love

spell, a made-up, let's pretend name. Leaning over the woman's

speckled-egg arm, June looked at the photo on the back. Mile-

long curlicued eyelashes, and a plump, secretive smile. Prob-

ably the author's real name was Agnes Frumple; probably those

eyelashes weren't real, either. The woman saw June staring.

"It's called Arrows of Beauty. Quite good," she said. "All about Helen of Troy, and it's very well researched."

"Really," June said. She spent the next half an hour looking across the aisle, out of the opposite window. There were several

Americans on the train, dressed in tourist plaids, their voices

flat and bright and bored. June wondered if her honeymooners

would come to this someday, traveling not out of love but bore-

dom, shifting restlessly in their narrow seats. Are we there yet?

Where are we?

Shortly before the train pulled into Leuchars station, the wo-

man fell asleep. Arrows of Beauty dropped from her slack fin-

54

gers, and slid down the incline of her lap. June caught it before

it hit the floor. She got onto the station platform, the book

tucked under her arm.

4. Fine Scents.

The wind tipped and rattled at the tin sides of the St. Andrews

bus. It whipped at June's hair, until she scraped the loose

tendrils back to her scalp with a barrette. The golf course came

into view, the clipped lawns like squares of green velvet. Behind

the golf course was the North Sea, and somewhere over the sea,

June supposed, was Norway or Finland. She'd never even been

to England. It might be nice to travel: she pictured her moth-

er waving goodbye with a white handkerchief, so long, kid! Just

like her father, you know. Goodbye, good riddance.

St. Andrews was three streets wide, marching down to the

curved mouth of the harbor. A sea wall ran along the cliffs at

the edge of the town, from the broken-backed cathedral to a

castle, hollowed out like an old tooth, and green in the middle.

Castle and cathedral leaned towards each other, pinching the

sea between them. June got off the bus on Market Street.

She bought a box of Black Magic chocolates in the Wool-

worth's and then went down an alley cobbled with old stones

from the cathedral, worn down to glassy smoothness. Iron rail-

ings ran along storefronts, the rails snapped off near the base,

and she remembered a school chaperone saying it had been

done for the war effort. Taken to be made into cannons and

shrapnel and belt buckles, just as the town had harvested stone

from the cathedral. Ancient history, scrapped and put to eco-

nomical uses.

An old-fashioned sign swinging above an open shop door

caught her eye. It read "Fine Scents. I.M. Kew, Prop." Through the window she could see a man behind the counter, smiling

anxiously at a well-dressed woman. She was saying something

to him that June couldn't make out, but it was her velvety-rough

voice that pulled June into the store.

"… don't know if the rest of the aunties can keep her off him.

It's her hobby, you know, pulling wings off flies. You know how

fond of him Minnie and I are, but Di and Prune are absolutely

no help, she'll do the poor boy just like his mother … "

55

The marvelous voice trailed off, and the woman lifted a stop-

per out of a bottle. "Really, darling, I don't like it. Sweet and wet as two virgins kissing. It's not up to your usual standards."

The man shrugged, still smiling. His fingers drummed on the

counter. "I thought you might like a change, is all," he said. "So my Rose-By-Any-Other-Name, I'll make you up a standard batch.

May I help you, dearie?"

"I was just looking," June said.

"We don't have anything here for your sort," he said, not unkindly. "All custom scents, see."

"Oh." She looked at the woman, who was examining her

makeup, her long smudgy eyelashes, in a compact. Rhinestones

on the compact lid spelled out RR, and June remembered where

she had seen the woman's face. "Excuse me, but don't you write

books?"

The compact snapped shut in the white hand. A wing of yel-

low, helmeted hair swung forward as the woman turned to June.

"Yes," she said, pink pointed tongue slipping between the small teeth. "Are you the sort that buys my books?"

No, June thought. I'm the sort that steals them. She delved in-

to her sack. "This is for my mother," she said. "Would you sign it for her?"

"How lovely," Rose Read said. She signed the book with a

fountain pen proffered by the man behind the counter, in a

child's careful looped cursive. "There. Have you got a lover, my dear?"

"That's none of your business," June said, grabbing the book back.

"Is it my business, Mr. Kew?" Rose Read said to the shopkeep-er. He snickered. She had said his name the way two spies meet-

ing at a party might use made-up names.

"She doesn't have a lover," he said. "I'd smell him on her if she did."

June took a step back, then another, hesitating. The man and

woman stared at her blandly. She found the store and the pair

of them unnerving. She wanted to flee the store, to get away

from them. She wanted to take something from them, to steal

something. At that moment, a large family, noisy, redheaded,

mother and father, how extravagant! June thought, poured into

the shop. They pressed up to the counter, shaking a battered

56

copy of Fodors at Mr. Kew, all speaking at once. June pocketed

the unwanted perfume and quickly left the store.

5. Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

It is late morning when you arrive at Bonehouse, but the sky is

dark. As you walk, you must push aside the air, like heavy cloth.

Your foot stumbles on the mute ground.

You are in a flat place where the sky presses down, and the

buildings creep close along the streets, and all the doors stand

open. Grass grows on the roofs of the houses; the roofs are

packed sod, and the grass raises up tall like hair on a scalp. Fol-

low the others. They are dead and know the way better than

you. Speak to no one.

At last you will arrive at a door in an alley, with a dog asleep

on the threshold. He has many heads and each head has many

teeth, and his teeth are sharp and eager as knives.

6. What was in the bottle.

June sat happy and quiet in the grassy bowl of the castle.

Students in their red gowns and tourists in various plaids

clambered over the worn and tumbled steps that went over the

drawbridge between the squat towers. Outside the castle wall,

there were more steps winding down to the rocky beach. She

could hear people complaining loudly as they came back up, the

wind pushing them backwards. Inside the wall the air was still,

the sky arched like a glass lid, shot through with light.

Ravens sleek and round as kettles patrolled the grass. They

lifted in lazy circles when the tourists came too close, settling

down near June, hissing and croaking. She took the perfume out

of her knapsack and turned it in her hands. The bottle was tall

and slim and plainly made. The stopper was carved out of a rosy

stone and where it plunged into the mouth of the decanter the

glass was faceted like the rhinestones on Rose Read's compact.

June took out the stopper.

She touched it to her wrist, then held her wrist up to her nose

and sniffed. It smelled sweet and greeny-ripe as an apple. It

made her head spin. She closed her eyes, and when she opened

them again there was someone watching her.

Up in the tilted crown of the lefthand tower, Mr. Kew, Prop.

was looking straight down at her. He smiled and winked one eye

shut. He cocked his index finger, sighted, and squeezed his fist

closed. Pow, he said silently, pulling his lips tight in exaggera-

57

tion around the word. Then he turned to make his way down the

stairs.

June jumped up. If she went out over the drawbridge they

would meet at the foot of the stairs. She grabbed up her pack

and went in the opposite direction. She stopped at the wall and

looked over. A cement bulwark, about five feet below, girdled up

the cliffs that the castle sat on; she tossed the pack over and fol-

lowed it, heels first, holding hard to the crumbling wall.

7. She hears a story about birds.

Down on June's right was the beach, invisible past the curve

of the castle's bulk, cliffs and marshy land to her left. Waves

slapped against the concrete barriers below her. She sat on the

ledge, wondering how long she would have to wait before climb-

ing back up to the castle or down to the beach. The wind cut

straight through her jersey.

She turned her head, and saw there was a man standing next

to her. Her heart slammed into her chest before she saw that

it was a boy her own age, seventeen or eighteen, with a white

face and blue eyes. His eyebrows met, knitted together above

the bridge of his nose.

"Before you climbed down," he said, "did you happen to notice if there were a lot of birds up there?"

"You mean girls?" June said, sneering at him. His eyes were very blue.

"No, birds. You know, with wings." He flapped his arms.

"Ravens," June said. "And maybe some smaller ones, like sparrows."

He sat down beside her, folding his arms around his knees.

"Damn," he said. "I thought maybe if I waited for a while, they might get bored and leave. They have a very short attention

span."

"You're hiding from birds?"

"I have a phobia," he said, and turned bright red. "Like claus-trophobia, you know."

"That's unfortunate," June said. "I mean, birds are everywhere."

"It's not all birds," he said. "Or it's not all the time. Sometimes they bother me, sometimes they don't. They look at me funny."

58

"I'm afraid of mice," June said. "Once when I was little I put my foot into a shoe and there was a dead mouse inside. I still

shake out my shoes before I put them on."

"When I was five, my mother was killed by a flock of pea-

cocks." he said, as if it had happened to someone else's mother, and he had read about it in a newspaper.

"What?" June said.

He sounded embarrassed. "Okay. Um, my mother took me to

see the castle at Inverness. She said that my father was a king

who lived in a castle. She was always making stories up like

that. I don't remember the castle very well, but afterwards we

went for a walk in the garden. There was a flock of peacocks and

they were stalking us. They were so big—they seemed really

big—as big as I was. My mother stuck me in a cherry tree and

told me to yell for help as loudly as I could."

He took a deep breath. "The tailfeathers sounded like silk

dresses brushing against the ground. I remember that. They

sounded like women in long silk dresses. I didn't make a sound.

If I made a sound, they might notice me. They crowded my

mother up against the curb of a stone fountain, and she was

pushing at them with her hands, shooing them, and then she

just fell backwards. The fountain only had two inches of water

in it. I heard her head crack against the bottom when she fell.

It knocked her unconscious and she drowned before anyone

came."

His face was serious and beseeching. She could see the small

flutter of pulse against the white flesh—thin as paper—of his

jaw.

"That's horrible," June said. "Who took care of you?"

"My mother and father weren't married," he said. "He already had a wife. My mother didn't have any family, so my father gave

me to his sisters. Aunt Minnie, Aunt Prune, Aunt Di, and Aunt

Rose."

"My father emigrated to Australia when I was two," June said.

"I don't remember him much. My mother remarried about a

year ago."

"I've never seen my father," the boy said. "Aunt Rose says it would be too dangerous. His wife, Vera, hates me even though

she's never seen me, because I'm her husband's bastard. She's

a little insane."

59

"What's your name?"

"Humphrey Bogart Stoneking," he said. "My mother was a big fan. What's your name?"

"June," said June.

They were silent for a moment. June rubbed her hands togeth-

er for comfort. "Are you cold?" asked Humphrey. She nodded

and he moved closer and put his arm around her.

"You smell nice," he said after a moment. He sniffed thoughtfully. "Familiar, sort of."

"Yeah?" She turned her head and their mouths bumped to-

gether, soft and cold.

8. Rose Read on young lovers.

It's all the fault of that damned perfume, and that mooning,

meddling, milky-faced perfumer. He could have had it back and

no harm done, if he didn't love mischief more than his mother.

So it might have been my idea—it might have been an accident.

Or maybe it was Fate. If I'm still around, so is that tired old hag.

Do you think that I have the time to see to every love affair in

the world personally?

Those hesitating kisses, the tender fumbles and stumbles and

awkward meetings of body parts give me indigestion. Heart-

burn. Give me two knowledgeable parties who know what is up

and what fits where; give me Helen of Troy, fornicating her way

across the ancient world, Achilles and Patroclos amusing them-

selves in a sweaty tent.

A swan, a bull, a shower of gold, something new, something

old, something borrowed, something blue. He seduced Sarah

Stoneking in an empty movie house, stepped right off of the

screen during the matinee and lisped "Shweetheart" at her. She fell into the old goat's arms. I know, I was there.

9. In which a discovery is made.

The sky stayed clear and pale all night long. When they were

cold again, they wrapped themselves in Humphrey's coat, and

leaned back against the wall. June took out the box of chocol-

ates and ate them as Humphrey explored her pack. He pulled

out the perfume. "Where'd you get this?"

"I nicked it from a perfume shop off Market Street."

"I should have known." He pulled out the book. "Aunt Rose,"

he said.

60

"She's your aunt?" June said. "I guess I should give it to you to give back."

He shook his head. "If she didn't mean for you to have it, you

wouldn't even have thought of taking it. Might as well keep it

now. She probably set this whole thing up."

"How?" June said. "Is she psychic or something?"

"This must be how they're planning to stop me," Humphrey

said. "They think if I have a girlfriend, I'll give up on the flying lessons, take up fucking as a new hobby."

"Right." June said, affronted. "It was nice to meet you too. I don't usually go around doing this."

"Wait," he said, catching at her pack as she stood up. "I didn't mean it that way. You're right. This is a complete coincidence.

And I didn't think that you did."

He smiled up at her. June sat back down, mollified, stretching

her legs out in front of her. "Why are you taking flying lessons?"

"I've been saving up for it," he said. "I went to see a psycho-logist about a year ago, and he suggested that flying lessons

might make me less afraid of birds. Besides, I've always wanted

to. I used to dream about it. The aunts say it's a bad idea,

but they're just superstitious. I have my first lesson tomorrow.

Today, actually."

"I think flying would be wonderful," June said. She was shivering. It was because she was cold. It wasn't because she was

cold. She slipped her hands up inside his shirt. "But I know

something just as nice."

"What?" he said. So she showed him. His mouth was so sweet.

10. Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

As the others step over the dog he doesn't wake. If you step

over him, he will smell live flesh and he will tear you to pieces.

Take this perfume with you and when you come to Bonehouse,

dab it behind your ears, at your wrists and elbows, at the back

of your knees. Stroke it into the vee of your sex, as you would

for a lover. The scent is heavy and rich, like the first cold hand-

ful of dirt tossed into the dug grave. It will trick the dog's nose.

Inside the door, there is no light but the foxfire glow of your

own body. The dead flicker like candles around you. They are

burning their memories for warmth. They may brush up against

you, drawn to what is stronger and hotter and brighter in you.

Don't speak to them.

61

There are no walls, no roof above you except darkness. There

are no doors, only the luminous windows that the dead have be-

come. Unravel the left arm of his sweater and let it fall to the

ground.

11. In the All-Night Bakery at dawn.

June and Humphrey went around the corner of the bulwark,

down over an outcropping of rocks, slick with gray light, down

to the beach. A seagull, perched like a lantern upon the castle

wall, watched them go.

They walked down Market Street, the heavy, wet air clinging

like ghosts to their hair and skin. The sound of their feet, hollow

and sharp, rang like bells on the cobblestones. They came to the

All-Night Bakery and June could hear someone singing inside.

Behind the counter there were long rows of white ovens and

cooling racks, as tall as June. A woman stood with her strong

back to them, sliding trays stacked with half-moon loaves into

an oven, like a mother tucking her children into warm sheets.

She was singing to herself, low and deep, and as June watched

and listened, the fat loaves, the ovens, the woman and her lul-

laby threw out light, warmth. The ovens, the loaves, the woman

grew brighter and larger and crowded the bakery and June's

senses so that she began to doubt there was room for herself,

for the houses and street, the dawn outside to exist. The wo-

man shut the oven door, and June was afraid that presently she

would turn around and show June her face, flickering pale and

enormous as the moon.

She stumbled back outside. Humphrey followed her, his pock-

ets stuffed with doughnuts and meat pies.

"My Aunt Di," he said. He handed June a pastry. "Some nights I work here with her."

He went with her to the station, and wrapped up two greasy

bacon pies and gave them to her. She wrote her address and

telephone on a corner of the napkin, and then reached into her

pocket. She took out the crumpled banknotes, the small, heavy

coins. "Here," she said. "For your flying lesson."

She dumped them into his cupped hands, and then before she

could decide if the blush on his face was one of pleasure or em-

barrassment, the train was coming into the station. She got on

and didn't look back.

She slept on the train and dreamed about birds.

62

Home again, and Lily and Walter were finishing the breakfast

cleanup. June handed the book and the perfume to her mother.

"Happy birthday, Lily."

"Where were you last night?" Lily said. She held the perfume bottle between her thumb and middle finger as if it were a dead

rat.

"With a friend," June said vaguely, and pretended not to see Lily's frown. She went up the stairs to the top of the house, to

her room in the attic. The honeymooners' door was shut, but she

could hear them as she went past in the hall. It sounded just

like pigeons, soft little noises and gasps. She slammed her door

shut and went straight to sleep. What did she dream about?

More birds? When she woke up, she couldn't remember, but her

hands hurt as if she had been holding on to something.

When she came down again—hands and face washed, hair

combed back neat—the cake that Walter had made, square and

plain, with a dozen pink candles spelling out Lily's name, was on

the table. Lily was looking at it as if it might explode. June said,

"How do you like the perfume?"

"I don't," Lily said. She clattered the knives and forks down.

"It smells cheap and too sweet. Not subtle at all."

Walter came up behind Lily and squeezed her around the

middle. She pushed at him, but not hard. "I quite liked it," he said. "Your mother's been sitting with her feet up in the parlor all day, reading the rubbishy romance you got her. Very subtle,

that."

"Rubbish is right," Lily said. She blew out the candles with one efficient breath, a tiny smile on her face.

12. The occupant in room five.

Two days later the honeymooners left. When June went into

the room, she could smell sex, reeky and insistent. She flung

open the windows and stripped the ravaged bed, but the smell

lingered in the walls and in the carpet.

In the afternoon, a woman dressed in expensive dark clothing

came looking for a room. "It would be for some time," the woman said. She spoke very carefully, as if she was used to being

misunderstood. June, sitting in the parlor, idly leafing through

sex advice columns in American magazines left behind by the

honeymooners, looked up for a second. She thought the woman

63

in black had an antique look about her, precise and hard, like a

face on a cameo.

"We do have a room," said Lily. "But I don't know that you'll want it. We try to be nice here, but you look like you might be

accustomed to better."

The woman sighed. "I am getting a divorce from my husband,"

she said. "He has been unfaithful. I don't want him to find me,

so I will stay here where he would not think to look. You were

recommended to me."

"Really?" said Lily, looking pleased. "By who?"

But the woman couldn't remember. She signed her name,

Mrs. Vera Ambrosia, in a thick slant of ink, and produced £40,

and another £40 as a deposit. When June showed her up to

Room Five, her nostrils flared, but she said nothing. She had

with her one small suitcase, and a covered box. Out of the box

she took a birdcage on a collapsible stand. There was nothing in

the birdcage but dust.

When June left, she was standing at the window looking out.

She was smiling at something.

13. A game of golf.

June tried not to think about Humphrey. It was a silly name

anyway. She went out with her friends and she never mentioned

his name. They would have laughed at his name. It was probably

made up.

She thought of describing how his eyebrows met, in a straight

bar across his face. She decided that it should repulse her. It

did. And he was a liar too. Not even a good liar.

All the same, she rented old movies, Key Largo and Casab-

lanca, and watched them with Walter and Lily. And sometimes

she wondered if he had been telling the truth. Her period came

and so she didn't have to worry about that; she worried anyway,

and she began to notice the way that birds watched from tele-

phone lines as she walked past them. She counted them, trying

to remember how they added up for joy, how for sorrow.

She asked Walter who said, "Sweetheart, for you they mean

joy. You're a good girl and you deserve to be happy." He was

touching up the red trim around the front door. June sat

hunched on the step beside him, swirling the paint around in

the canister.

"Didn't my mother deserve to be happy?" she said sharply.

64

"Well, she's got me, hasn't she?" Walter said, his eyebrows shooting up. He pretended to be wounded. "Oh, I see. Sweetheart, you've got to be patient. Plenty of time to fall in love when

you're a bit older."

"She was my age when she had me!" June said. "And where were you then? And where is he now?" She got up awkwardly

and ran inside, past a pair of startled guests, past Lily who stood

in the narrow hall and watched her pass, no expression at all on

her mother's face.

#

That night June had a dream. She stood in her nightgown, an

old one that had belonged to her mother, her bare feet resting

on cold silky grass. The wind went through the holes in the flan-

nel, curled around her body and fluttered the hem of the night-

gown. She tasted salt in her mouth, and saw the white moth-

eaten glow of the waves below her, stitching water to the shore.

The moon was sharp and thin as if someone had eaten the juicy

bit and left the rind.

"Fore!" someone called. She realized she was standing bare-

foot and nearly naked on the St. Andrews golf course. "Why

hello, little thief," someone said.

June pinched herself, and it hurt just a little, and she didn't

wake up. Rose Read still stood in front of her, dressed all in

white: white cashmere sweater; white wool trousers; spotless

white leather shoes and gloves. "You look positively frostbitten, darling child," Rose Read said.

She leaned towards June and pressed her soft, warm mouth

against June's mouth. June opened her mouth to protest, and

Rose Read breathed down her throat. It was delicious, like

drinking fire. She felt Rose Read's kiss rushing out towards her

ten fingers, her icy feet, pooling somewhere down below her

stomach. She felt like a June-shaped bowl brimming over with

warmth and radiance.

Rose Read removed her mouth. "There," she said.

"I want to kiss her too," said a querulous voice. "It's my turn, Rosy."

There were two other women standing on the green. The one

who had spoken was tall and gaunt and brittle as sticks, her

dark, staring eyes fixing June like two straight pins.

65

"June, you remember Di, don't you, Humphrey's other aunt?"

Rose said.

"She was different," June said, remembering the giantess in the bakery, whose voice had reflected off the walls like light.

"Want a kiss," Humphrey's aunt Di said again.

"Don't mind her," Rose Read said. "It's that time of the month.

Humphrey's minding the bakery: it helps her to be outside. Let

her kiss your cheek, she won't hurt you."

June closed her eyes, lightly brushed her cheek against the

old woman's lips. It was like being kissed by a faint and hungry

ghost. Humphrey's aunt stepped back sighing.

"That's a good girl," Rose said. "And this is another aunt, Minnie. Minnie Mousy. You don't have to kiss her, she's not much for

the things of the flesh, is Mousy Minnie."

"Hello, June," the woman said, inclining her head. She looked like the headmistress of June's comprehensive—so old that Lily

had once been her student—who had called June into her office

two years ago, when June's O-level results had come back.

It's a pity, the headmistress had said, because you seem to

have a brain in your head. But if you are determined to make

yourself into nothing at all, then I can't stop you. Your mother

was the same sort, smart enough but willful—oh yes, I remem-

ber her quite well. It was a pity. It's always a pity.

"I'm dreaming," June said.

"It would be a mistake to believe that," said Rose Read. "An utter failure of the imagination. In any case, while you're here,

you might as well solve a little argument for us. As you can see,

here are two golf balls sitting nice and pretty on the green at

your feet. And here is the third"—she pointed at the cup—"only we can't agree which of us it was that put it there."

The moon went behind a wisp of cloud, but the two golf balls

still shone like two white stones. Light spilled out of the cup and

beaded on the short blades of grayish grass. "How do I know

whose ball that is?" June said. "I didn't see anything, I wasn't here until now—I mean—"

Rose Read cut her off. "It doesn't really matter whose ball it

is, little thief, just whose ball you say it is."

"But I don't know!" June protested.

"You people are always so greedy," Rose Read said. "Very well: say it belongs to Minnie, she can pull a few strings, get you into

66

the university of your choice; Di, well, you saw how much she

likes you. Tell me what you want, June."

June took a deep breath. Suddenly she was afraid that she

would wake up before she had a chance to answer. "I want

Humphrey," she said.

"My game, ladies," Rose Read said, and the moon came out

again.

June woke up. The moon was bright and small in the dormer

window above her, and she could hear the pigeons' feet chiming

against the leaded glass.

14. The view from the window.

Before Humphrey came to see June, the woman in Room Five

had paid for her third week in advance, and June found the per-

fume she had given her mother in the rubbish bin. She took it

up to her room, put a dab on her wrist.

He was sitting on the front steps when she swept the dust out

of the door. "I lost your address," he said.

"Oh?" she said coolly, folding her arms the way Lily did.

"I did," he said. "But I found it again yesterday."

His eyebrows didn't repulse her as much as she had hoped

they would. His sweater was blue like his eyes. "You're lying,"

she said.

"Yes," he said. "I didn't come to see you because I thought maybe Aunt Rose tricked you into liking me. I thought maybe

you wouldn't like me anymore. Do you?"

She looked at him. "Maybe," she said. "How was your flying lesson?"

"I've been up in the plane twice. It's a Piper Cub, just one en-

gine and you can feel the whole sky rushing around you when

you're up there. The last time we went up, Tiny—he's the in-

structor—let me take the controls. It was like nothing I've ever

done before—that is," he said warily, "it was quite nice. You look lovely, June. Have you missed me too?"

"I suppose," she said.

"Aunt Di gave me the night off. Will you come for a walk with

me?" he said.

They went for a walk. They went to the movies. He bought her

popcorn. They came home again when the sky above the street-

lights was plush and yellow as the fur of a tiger. "Would you like to come in?" she asked him.

67

"Yes, please." But they didn't go inside yet. They stood on the steps, smiling at each other. June heard a sound, a fluttering

and cooing. She looked up and saw a flock of pigeons, crowding

on the window ledge two stories above them. Two hands, white

and pressed flat with the weight of many rings, lay nestled like

doves among the pigeons. Humphrey cried out, crouching and

raising his own hands to cover his head.

June pulled him into the cover of the door. She fumbled the

key into the lock, and they stumbled inside. "It was just the woman in Room Five," she said. "She's a little strange about birds.

She puts crumbs on the sill for them. She says they're her ba-

bies." She rubbed Humphrey's back. The sweater felt good be-

neath her hands, furry and warm like a live animal.

"I'm okay now," he said. "I think the lessons are helping." He laughed, shuddering in a great breath. "I think you're helping."

They kissed and then she took him up the stairs to her room.

As they passed the door of Room Five, they could hear the wo-

man crooning and the pigeons answering back.

15. Rose Read on motherhood.

I never had a mother. I remember being born, the salt of that

old god's dying upon my lips, the water bearing me up as I took

my first steps. Minnie never had a mother either. Lacking ex-

ample, we did the best we could with Humphrey. I like to think

he grew up a credit to us both.

Prune runs Bonne Hause half the year, and we used to send

Humphrey to her in the autumn. It wasn't the best place for a

lively boy. He tried to be good, but he always ended up shatter-

ing the nerves of Prune's wispy convalescents, driving her al-

coholics back to the drink, stealing the sweets her spa patients

hoard. Raising the dead, in fact, and driving poor, anemic Prune

into pale hysterics.

Di's never had much use for men, but she's fond of him in her

own way.

We read to him a lot. Di's bakery came out of his favorite book,

the one he read to pieces when he was little. All about the boy

in the night kitchen, and the airplane … it was to be expected

that he'd want to learn to fly. They always do. We moved around

to keep him safe and far away from Vera, but you can't keep him

away from the sky. If he comes to a bad end, then we kept his

feet safely planted on the ground as long as we could.

68

We tried to teach him to take precautions. Minnie knitted him

a beautiful blue sweater and he needn't be afraid of birds nor

goddesses while he keeps that on. We did the best we could.

16. The Skater.

In the morning, it was raining. Humphrey helped June with

her chores. Lily said nothing when she met him, only nodded

and gave him a mop.

Walter said, "So you're the boy she's been pining after," and laughed when June made a face. They tidied the first four rooms

on the second floor, and when June came out of the washroom

with the wastebasket, she saw Humphrey standing in front of

Room Five, his hand on the doorknob. Watery light from the

window at the end of the hall fell sharply on his neck, his head

bent towards the door.

"Stop," June hissed. He turned to her, his face white and

strained. "She doesn't like us to come into her room, she does

everything herself."

"I thought I could hear someone in there," Humphrey said.

"They were saying something."

June shook her head violently. "She's gone. She goes to Char-

lotte Square every day, and sits and feeds the pigeons."

"But it's raining," Humphrey said.

She grabbed his hand. "Come on, let's go somewhere."

They went to the National Gallery on the Royal Mile. Inside

everything was red and gold and marble, kings and queens on

the walls frowning down from ornate frames at Humphrey and

June, like people peering through windows. Their varied expres-

sions were so lively, so ferocious and joyful and serene by turn,

that June felt all the more wet and bedraggled. She felt like a

thief sneaking into an abandoned house, only to discover the

owners at home, awake, drinking and talking and dancing and

laughing.

Humphrey tugged at her hand. They sat down on a bench in

front of Raeburn's The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Dud-

diston Loch. "This is my favorite painting," he said.

June looked at the Reverend Walker, all in black like a crow,

floating above the gray ice, his cheeks rosy with the cold. "I

know why you like it," she said. "He looks like he's flying."

"He looks like he's happy," Humphrey said. "Do you remember your father?"

69

"No," June said. "I suppose when I look in the mirror. I never knew him. But my mother says—how about you?"

Humphrey said, "I used to make up stories about him. Be-

cause of my name—I thought he was American, maybe even a

gangster. I used to pretend that he was part of the Mafia, like

Capone. Aunt Minnie says I'm not too far off."

"I know," June said. "Let's pick out fathers here. Can I have the Reverend Robert Walker? He looks like Walter. Who do you

want?"

They walked through the gallery, June making suggestions,

Humphrey vetoing prospective parents. "Definitely not. I do not

want Sir Walter Scott," he said as June paused in front of a

portrait. "An aunt who writes historical romances is enough.

Besides, we look nothing alike."

June peered into the next room. "Well," she said. "You'll have to go without, then. All this gallery is old gloomy stuff. There's

not one decent dad in the lot of them."

She turned around. Humphrey stood in front of an enormous

painting of a woman and a swan. The swan arched, his wings

spread over the supine woman, as large as the boy who stood in

front of him.

"Oh," she said tentatively. "Do birds bother you in paintings too?"

He said "No," his eyes still fixed on the painting. "It's all rubbish, anyway. Let's go."

17. Bonne Hause.

The summer wore on and the nights were longer and darker.

Humphrey came on the train from Leuchars every weekend, and

at the beginning of August, they climbed to the top of Arthur's

Seat for a picnic supper. Edinburgh was crouched far below

them, heaped up like a giant's bones, the green cloak of grass

his bed, the castle his crown.

Ravens stalked the hill, pecking at the grass, but Humphrey

ignored them. "Next weekend Tiny says I can make my solo

flight," he said. "If the weather's good."

"I wish I could see you," June said. "but Lily will kill me if I'm not here to help. Things get loopy right before the Festiv-al." Already, the bed and breakfast was full. Lily had even put a couple from Strasbourg into June's attic room. June was sleeping on a cot in the kitchen.

70

"S'all right," Humphrey said. "I'd probably be even more nervous with you there. I'll come on the eight o'clock train and

meet you in Waverly Station. We'll celebrate. Go out and see

something."

June nodded and shivered, leaning against him. He said, "Are

you cold? Take my sweater. I've got something else for you, too."

He pulled a flat oblong package from his pack and gave it to her

along with the sweater.

"It's a book," June said. "Is it something by your aunt?" She tore off the paper, the wind snatching it from her hands. It was a

children's book, with a picture on the cover of a man with flam-

ing hair, a golden sun behind him. "D'Aulaire's Greek Mytho-

logy?"

He didn't look at her. "Read it and tell me what you think."

June flipped through it. "Well, at least it's got pictures," she said. It was getting too dark to look at the book properly. The

city, the path leading back down the hill, were purpley-dark; the

hill they sat on seemed to be about to float away on a black

sea. The ravens were moveable blots of inky stain, and the wind

lifted and beat with murmurous breath at blades of grass and

pinion feathers. She pulled the blue sweater tight around her

shoulders.

"What will we do at the end of the summer?" Humphrey

asked. He picked up one of her hands, and looked into it, as if

he might see the future in the cup of her palm. "Normally I go

to Aunt Prune's for a few weeks. She runs a clinic outside of

London called Bonne Hause. For alcoholics and depressed rich

people. I help the groundskeepers."

"Oh," June said.

"I don't want to go," Humphrey said. "That's the thing. I want to be with you, maybe go to Greece. My father lives there, sometimes. I want to see him, just once I'd like to see him. Would you

go with me?"

"Is that why you gave me this?" she said, frowning and holding up the book of mythology. "It's not exactly a guide book."

"More like family history," he said. The ravens muttered and cackled. "Have you ever dreamed you could fly, I mean with

wings?" "I've never even been in a plane," June said.

He told her something wonderful.

18. Why I write.

71

You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St.

Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting. Some of us have

managed better than others, of course. Prune with her clinic

and her patented Pomegranate Weight Loss System, good for

the health and the spirits. Di has her bakery. Minnie is more

or less a recluse—she makes up crossword puzzles and designs

knitting patterns, and feuds with prominent Classics scholars

via the mail. No one has seen Paul in ages. He can't stand mod-

ern music, he says. He's living somewhere in Kensington with a

nice deaf man.

Zeus and that malevolent birdbrained bitch are still married,

can you believe it? As if the world would stop spinning if she ad-

mitted that the whole thing was a mistake. It infuriates her to

see anyone else having fun, especially her husband. We've never

gotten on well—she fights with everyone sooner or later, which

is why most of us are exiled to this corner of the world. I miss

the sun, but never the company.

19. An unkindness of ravens.

June waited at Waverly Station for three and a half hours. The

Fringe was in full swing, and performers in beads and feather

masks dashed past her, chasing a windblown kite shaped like a

wing. They smelled of dust and sweat and beer. They looked at

her oddly, she thought, as they ran by. The kite blew towards

her again, low on the ground, and she stuck out her foot. The

kite lifted over her in a sudden gust of wind.

She rested her head in her hands. Someone nearby laughed,

insinuating and hoarse, and she looked up to see one of the

kite-chasers standing next to her. He was winding string in his

hand, bringing the kite down. Bright eyes gleamed at her like

jet buttons, above a yellow papier-m?ch? beak. "What's the mat-

ter, little thief?" the peacock said. "Lose something?"

Another man, in crow-black, sat down on the bench beside

her. He said nothing, and his pupils were not round, but elong-

ated and flat like those of an owl. June jumped up and ran.

She dodged raucous strangers with glittering eyes, whose cloth-

ing had the feel of soft spiky down, whose feet were scaly and

knobbed and struck sparks from the pavement. They put out

arms to stop her, and their arms were wings, their fingers feath-

ers. She swung wildly at them and ran on. On Queen Street, she

lost them in a crowd, but she kept on running anyway.

72

Lily was sitting in the parlor when she got home. "Humphrey's

Aunt Rose called," she said without preamble. "There's been an accident."

"What?" June said. Her chest heaved up and down. She

thought she felt the tickle of feathers in her lungs. She thought

she might throw up.

"His plane crashed. A flock of birds flew into the propeller. He died almost instantly."

"He's not dead," June said.

Lily didn't say anything. Her arms were folded against her

body as if she were afraid they might extend, unwanted, to-

wards her daughter. "He was a nice boy," she said finally.

"I need to go up to my room," June said. Of course he wasn't dead: she'd read the book. He'd explained the whole thing to

her. When you're immortal, you don't die. Half-immortal, she

corrected herself. So maybe half-dead, she could live with that.

Lily said, "The woman in Room Five left this afternoon. I

haven't cleaned it yet, but I thought we might move the guests

in your room. I'll help you."

"No!" June said. "I'll do it." She hesitated. "Thanks, Lily."

"I'll make up a pot of tea, then," Lily said, and went into the kitchen. June took the ring of keys from the wall and went up

to her room. She took the blue sweater out of the cupboard and

put it on. She picked up the bottle of perfume, and then she

paused. She bent and thumbed open the suitcase of the Stras-

bourg honeymooners, reaching down through the folded clothes

until her hand closed around a wad of notes. She took them all

without counting.

The last two things she took were the two books: D'Aulaire's

Greek Myths and Arrows of Beauty.

She went out of her room without locking it, down the stairs

to Room Five. The light didn't come on when she lowered the

switch and things brushed against her, soft and damp. She ran

to the drapes and flung them back.

The window swung open and suddenly the room was full of

whiteness. At first, blinking hard, she thought that it was snow-

ing inside. Then she saw that the snowflakes were goosedown.

Both pillows had been torn open and the duvet was rent down

the middle. Feathers dusted the floor, sliding across June's palm

and her cheek. She choked on a feather, spat it out.

73

As she moved across the room, the feathers clung to her. She

felt them attaching themselves to her back, growing into two

great wings. "Stop it!" she cried.

She opened the D'Aulaire, flipping past Hera's mad, tri-

umphant face, to a picture of rosy-cheeked Venus. She pulled

the stopper from the perfume bottle and tipped it over on the

drawing. She poured out half the bottle on the book and behind

her someone sneezed. She turned around.

It was Humphrey's aunt, Rose Read. She looked almost

dowdy—travel-stained and worn, as if she had come a long way.

She didn't look anything like the woman in the picture book.

June said, "Where is he?"

Aunt Rose shrugged, brushing feathers off her wrinkled coat.

"He's gone to see his Aunt Prune, I suppose."

"I want to go to him," June said. "I know that's possible."

"I suppose you had Classics at your comprehensive," said

Aunt Rose, and sneezed delicately, like a cat. "Really, these

feathers—"

"I want you to send me to him."

"If I sent you there," Rose said, "you might not come back. Or he might not want to come back. It isn't my specialty either. If

you're so clever, you've figured that out, too."

"I know you've sent people there before, so stop playing

games with me!" June said.

"Your mother could tell you what to do when a lover leaves,"

Rose Read said in a voice like cream. "So why are you asking

my advice?"

"She didn't go after him!" June shouted. "She had to stay here and look after me, didn't she?"

Rose Read drew herself up very tall, smoothing her hands

down her sides. She looked almost pleased. "Very well," she said. "Fortunately Hell is a much cheaper trip, much nearer to

hand than Australia. Are you ready? Good. So listen, because

I'm only going to tell you this once."

20. Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

"If you don't let the sweater fall from your hands, if you follow the sleeve until it is only yarn, it will lead you to him. He won't

be as you remember him, he's been eating his memories to keep

warm. He is not asleep, but if you kiss him he'll wake up. Just

like the fairy tales. His lips will be cold at first.

74

"Say to him, Follow me, and unravel the right arm of the

sweater. It will take you to a better place, little thief. If you do

it right and don't look back, then you can steal him out of the

Bonehouse."

June stared instead at the birdcage, gilt and forlorn upon its

single hinged leg. Down was caught like smoke in a sieve in the

grill of the cage. "What now?" she said. "Do you disappear in a puff of smoke, or wave a wand? Can I just leave?"

"Not through the door," Rose said. "It's time you had your flying lessons." She stepped upon the windowsill, crouching in her

coat like a great black wing beneath the weight of the moon.

She held out her hand to June. "Come on. Are you afraid?"

June took her hand. "I won't be afraid," she said. She climbed up on the sill beside Rose, and pointed her shoes toward the

moon, away from the scratch of quills against the walls and ceil-

ing. She didn't look back, but stepped off the edge of the known

world.

75

Travels with the Snow Queen

Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead.

Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy

that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the even-

ing, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected

light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You

ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to

stay the night, and even as you are falling into the bed at the

inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with

lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps

with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache

that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black

laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn't ask calls

out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming

about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long

white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the

guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs

aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking

all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have

healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the

lips, so it doesn't really count, does it.

Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mir-

ror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the

pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the

Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where

you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of

paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler.

You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs,

whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose

maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your

map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be

another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are

leaving behind you.

There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet

that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the

shards of the Snow Queen's looking-glass out of your feet, you

remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when

Kay's eyes, Kay's heart were pierced by shards of the same mir-

ror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.

76

#

Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren't easy

on the feet?

#

So this is the story so far. You grew up, you fell in love with

the boy next door, Kay, the one with blue eyes who brought you

bird feathers and roses, the one who was so good at puzzles. You

thought he loved you—maybe he thought he did, too. His mouth

tasted so sweet, it tasted like love, and his fingers were so kind,

they pricked like love on your skin, but three years and exactly

two days after you moved in with him, you were having drinks

out on the patio. You weren't exactly fighting, and you can't re-

member what he had done that had made you so angry, but you

threw your glass at him. There was a noise like the sky shatter-

ing.

The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little frag-

ments of glass everywhere. "Don't move," you said. You weren't wearing shoes.

He raised his hand up to his face. "I think there's something

in my eye," he said.

His eye was fine, of course, there wasn't a thing in it, but later

that night when he was undressing for bed, there were little

bits of glass like grains of sugar, dusting his clothes. When you

brushed your hand against his chest, something pricked your

finger and left a smear of blood against his heart.

The next day it was snowing and he went out for a pack of

cigarettes and never came back. You sat on the patio drinking

something warm and alcoholic, with nutmeg in it, and the snow

fell on your shoulders. You were wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt;

you were pretending that you weren't cold, and that your lover

would be back soon. You put your finger on the ground and then

stuck it in your mouth. The snow looked like sugar, but it tasted

like nothing at all.

The man at the corner store said that he saw your lover get

into a long white sleigh. There was a beautiful woman in it, and

it was pulled by thirty white geese. "Oh, her," you said, as if you weren't surprised. You went home and looked in the ward-robe for that cloak that belonged to your great-grandmother.

You were thinking about going after him. You remembered that

the cloak was woolen and warm, and a beautiful red—a travel-

77

er's cloak. But when you pulled it out, it smelled like wet dog

and the lining was ragged, as if something had chewed on it.

It smelled like bad luck: it made you sneeze, and so you put it

back. You waited for a while longer.

Two months went by, and Kay didn't come back, and finally

you left and locked the door of your house behind you. You were

going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common

sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover

leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is

hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give him up

yet. You told yourself that the woman in the sleigh must have

put a spell on him, and he was probably already missing you.

Besides, there are some questions you want to ask him, some

true things you want to tell him. This is what you told yourself.

The snow was soft and cool on your feet, and then you found

the trail of glass, the map.

After three weeks of hard traveling, you came to the city.

#

No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who

traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every

step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That's

a rhetorical question, of course. Then there's the girl who put

on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop

her feet off with an axe.

There are Cinderella's two stepsisters, who cut off their own

toes, and Snow White's stepmother, who danced to death in red-

hot iron slippers. The Goose Girl's maid got rolled down a hill

in a barrel studded with nails. Travel is hard on the single wo-

man. There was this one woman who walked east of the sun

and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left

her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out

at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found

him. Take our word for it, he wasn't worth it. What do you think

happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dry-

er? Laundry is hard, travel is harder. You deserve a vacation, but

of course you're a little wary. You've read the fairy tales. We've

been there, we know.

That's why we here at Snow Queen Tours have put together a

luxurious but affordable package for you, guaranteed to be easy

on the feet and on the budget. See the world by goosedrawn

78

sleigh, experience the archetypal forest, the winter wonderland;

chat with real live talking animals (please don't feed them).

Our accommodations are three-star: sleep on comfortable, guar-

anteed pea-free box-spring mattresses; eat meals prepared by

world-class chefs. Our tour guides are friendly, knowledgeable,

well-traveled, trained by the Snow Queen herself. They know

first aid, how to live off the land; they speak three languages flu-

ently.

Special discount for older sisters, stepsisters, stepmothers,

wicked witches, crones, hags, princesses who have kissed frogs

without realizing what they were getting into, etc.

#

You leave the city and you walk all day beside a stream that is

as soft and silky as blue fur. You wish that your map was water,

and not broken glass. At midday you stop and bathe your feet in

a shallow place and the ribbons of red blood curl into the blue

water.

Eventually you come to a wall of briars, so wide and high that

you can't see any way around it. You reach out to touch a rose,

and prick your finger. You suppose that you could walk around,

but your feet tell you that the map leads directly through the

briar wall, and you can't stray from the path that has been laid

out for you. Remember what happened to the little girl, your

great-grandmother, in her red woolen cape. Maps protect their

travelers, but only if the travelers obey the dictates of their

maps. This is what you have been told.

Perched in the briars above your head is a raven, black and

sleek as the curlicued moustache of the guardsman. The raven

looks at you and you look back at it. "I'm looking for someone,"

you say. "A boy named Kay."

The raven opens its big beak and says, "He doesn't love you,

you know."

You shrug. You've never liked talking animals. Once your lover

gave you a talking cat, but it ran away and secretly you were

glad. "I have a few things I want to say to him, that's all." You have, in fact, been keeping a list of all the things you are going

to say to him. "Besides, I wanted to see the world, be a tourist for a while."

79

"That's fine for some," the raven says. Then he relents. "If you'd like to come in, then come in. The princess just married

the boy with the boots that squeaked on the marble floor."

"That's fine for some," you say. Kay's boots squeak; you wonder how he met the princess, if he is the one that she just mar-

ried, how the raven knows that he doesn't love you, what this

princess has that you don't have, besides a white sleigh pulled

by thirty geese, an impenetrable wall of briars, and maybe a

castle. She's probably just some bimbo.

"The Princess Briar Rose is a very wise princess," the raven says, "but she's the laziest girl in the world. Once she went to sleep for a hundred days and no one could wake her up, although they put one hundred peas under her mattress, one each

morning."

This, of course, is the proper and respectful way of waking up

princesses. Sometimes Kay used to wake you up by dribbling

cold water on your feet. Sometimes he woke you up by whist-

ling.

"On the one hundredth day," the raven says, "she woke up all by herself and told her council of twelve fairy godmothers

that she supposed it was time she got married. So they stuck up

posters, and princes and youngest sons came from all over the

kingdom."

When the cat ran away, Kay put up flyers around the neighbor-

hood. You wonder if you should have put up flyers for Kay. "Briar Rose wanted a clever husband, but it tired her dreadfully to sit

and listen to the young men give speeches and talk about how

rich and sexy and smart they were. She fell asleep and stayed

asleep until the young man with the squeaky boots came in. It

was his boots that woke her up.

"It was love at first sight. Instead of trying to impress her with everything he knew and everything he had seen, he declared

that he had come all this way to hear Briar Rose talk about her

dreams. He'd been studying in Vienna with a famous Doctor,

and was deeply interested in dreams."

Kay used to tell you his dreams every morning. They were

long and complicated and if he thought you weren't listening

to him, he'd sulk. You never remember your dreams. "Other

peoples' dreams are never very interesting," you tell the raven.

80

The raven cocks its head. It flies down and lands on the grass

at your feet. "Wanna bet?" it says. Behind the raven you notice a little green door recessed in the briar wall. You could have

sworn that it wasn't there a minute ago.

The raven leads you through the green door, and across a long

green lawn towards a two-story castle that is the same pink as

the briar roses. You think this is kind of tacky, but exactly what

you would expect from someone named after a flower. "I had

this dream once," the raven says, "that my teeth were falling out. They just crumbled into pieces in my mouth. And then I

woke up, and realized that ravens don't have teeth."

You follow the raven inside the palace, and up a long, twisty

stair-case. The stairs are stone, worn and smoothed away, like

old thick silk. Slivers of glass glister on the pink stone, catching

the light of the candles on the wall. As you go up, you see that

you are part of a great gray rushing crowd. Fantastic creatures,

flat and thin as smoke, race up the stairs, men and women and

snakey things with bright eyes. They nod to you as they slip

past. "Who are they?" you ask the raven.

"Dreams," the raven says, hopping awkwardly from step to

step. "The Princess's dreams, come to pay their respects to her

new husband. Of course they're too fine to speak to the likes of

us."

But you think that some of them look familiar. They have a fa-

miliar smell, like a pillow that your lover's head has rested upon.

At the top of the staircase is a wooden door with a silver key-

hole. The dreams pour steadily through the keyhole, and under

the bottom of the door, and when you open it, the sweet stink

and cloud of dreams are so thick in the Princess's bedroom that

you can barely breathe. Some people might mistake the scent

of the Princess's dreams for the scent of sex; then again, some

people mistake sex for love.

You see a bed big enough for a giant, with four tall oak trees

for bedposts. You climb up the ladder that rests against the side

of the bed to see the Princess's sleeping husband. As you lean

over, a goose feather flies up and tickles your nose. You brush

it away, and dislodge several seedy-looking dreams. Briar Rose

rolls over and laughs in her sleep, but the man beside her wakes

up. "Who is it?" he says. "What do you want?"

81

He isn't Kay. He doesn't look a thing like Kay. "You're not Kay,"

you tell the man in the Princess's bed.

"Who the fuck is Kay?" he says, so you explain it all to him, feeling horribly embarrassed. The raven is looking pleased with

itself, the way your talking cat used to look, before it ran away.

You glare at the raven. You glare at the man who is not Kay.

After you've finished, you say that something is wrong, be-

cause your map clearly indicates that Kay has been here, in this

bed. Your feet are leaving bloody marks on the sheets, and you

pick a sliver of glass off the foot of the bed, so everyone can see

that you're not lying. Princess Briar Rose sits up in bed, her long

pinkish-brown hair tumbled down over her shoulders. "He's not

in love with you," she says, yawning.

"So he was here, in this bed, you're the icy slut in the sleigh at the corner store, you're not even bothering to deny it," you say.

She shrugs her pink-white shoulders. "Four, five months ago,

he came through, I woke up," she says. "He was a nice guy, okay in bed. She was a real bitch, though."

"Who was?" you ask.

Briar Rose finally notices that her new husband is glaring at

her. "What can I say?" she says, and shrugs. "I have a thing for guys in squeaky boots."

"Who was a bitch?" you ask again.

"The Snow Queen," she says, "the slut in the sleigh."

#

This is the list you carry in your pocket, of the things you plan

to say to Kay, when you find him, if you find him:

1. I'm sorry that I forgot to water your ferns while you were

away that time.

2. When you said that I reminded you of your mother, was

that a good thing?

3. I never really liked your friends all that much.

4. None of my friends ever really liked you.

5. Do you remember when the cat ran away, and I cried and

cried and made you put up posters, and she never came

back? I wasn't crying because she didn't come back. I

was crying because I'd taken her to the woods, and I was

scared she'd come back and tell you what I'd done, but I

guess a wolf got her, or something. She never liked me

anyway.

82

6. I never liked your mother.

7. After you left, I didn't water your plants on purpose.

They're all dead.

8. Goodbye.

9. Were you ever really in love with me?

10. Was I good in bed, or just average?

11. What exactly did you mean, when you said that it was fine

that I had put on a little weight, that you thought I was

even more beautiful, that I should go ahead and eat as

much as I wanted, but when I weighed myself on the

bathroom scale, I was exactly the same weight as before,

I hadn't gained a single pound?

12. So all those times, I'm being honest here, every single

time, and anyway I don't care if you don't believe me, I

faked every orgasm you ever thought I had. Women can

do that, you know. You never made me come, not even

once.

13. So maybe I'm an idiot, but I used to be in love with you.

14. I slept with some guy, I didn't mean to, it just kind of

happened. Is that how it was with you? Not that I'm mak-

ing any apologies, or that I'd accept yours, I just want to

know.

15. My feet hurt, and it's all your fault.

16. I mean it this time, goodbye.

#

The Princess Briar Rose isn't a bimbo after all, even if she

does have a silly name and a pink castle. You admire her dedic-

ation to the art and practice of sleep. By now you are growing

sick and tired of traveling, and would like nothing better than to

curl up in a big featherbed for one hundred days, or maybe even

one hundred years, but she offers to loan you her carriage, and

when you explain that you have to walk, she sends you off with a

troop of armed guards. They will escort you through the forest,

which is full of thieves and wolves and princes on quests, lurk-

ing about. The guards politely pretend that they don't notice the

trail of blood that you are leaving behind. They probably think

it's some sort of female thing.

It is after sunset, and you aren't even half a mile into the

forest, which is dark and scary and full of noises, when bandits

ambush your escort, and slaughter them all. The bandit queen,

83

who is grizzled and gray, with a nose like an old pickle, yells de-

lightedly at the sight of you. "You're a nice plump one for my

supper!" she says, and draws her long knife out of the stomach

of one of the dead guards. She is just about to slit your throat,

as you stand there, politely pretending not to notice the blood

that is pooling around the bodies of the dead guards, that is now

obliterating the bloody tracks of your feet, the knife that is at

your throat, when a girl about your own age jumps onto the rob-

ber queen's back, pulling at the robber queen's braided hair as

if it were reins.

There is a certain family resemblance between the robber

queen and the girl who right now has her knees locked around

the robber queen's throat. "I don't want you to kill her," the girl says, and you realize that she means you, that you were about

to die a minute ago, that travel is much more dangerous than

you had ever imagined. You add an item of complaint to the list

of things that you plan to tell Kay, if you find him.

The girl has half-throttled the robber queen, who has fallen to

her knees, gasping for breath. "She can be my sister," the girl says insistently. "You promised I could have a sister and I want her. Besides, her feet are bleeding."

The robber queen drops her knife, and the girl drops back

onto the ground, kissing her mother's hairy gray cheek. "Very

well, very well," the robber queen grumbles, and the girl grabs

your hand, pulling you farther and faster into the woods, until

you are running and stumbling, her hand hot around yours.

You have lost all sense of direction; your feet are no longer

set upon your map. You should be afraid, but instead you are

strangely exhilarated. Your feet don't hurt anymore, and al-

though you don't know where you are going, for the very first

time you are moving fast enough, you are almost flying, your

feet are skimming over the night-black forest floor as if it were

the smooth, flat surface of a lake, and your feet were two white

birds. "Where are we going?" you ask the robber girl.

"We're here," she says, and stops so suddenly that you almost fall over. You are in a clearing, and the full moon is hanging

overhead. You can see the robber girl better now, under the

light of the moon. She looks like one of the bad girls who loiter

under the street lamp by the corner shop, the ones who used

to whistle at Kay. She wears black leatherette boots laced up to

84

her thighs, and a black, ribbed T-shirt and grape-colored plastic

shorts with matching suspenders. Her nails are painted black,

and bitten down to the quick. She leads you to a tumbledown

stone keep, which is as black inside as her fingernail polish, and

smells strongly of dirty straw and animals.

"Are you a princess?" she asks you. "What are you doing in my mother's forest? Don't be afraid. I won't let my mother eat you."

You explain to her that you are not a princess, what you are

doing, about the map, who you are looking for, what he did to

you, or maybe it was what he didn't do. When you finish, the

robber girl puts her arms around you and squeezes you roughly.

"You poor thing! But what a silly way to travel!" she says. She shakes her head and makes you sit down on the stone floor of

the keep and show her your feet. You explain that they always

heal, that really your feet are quite tough, but she takes off her

leatherette boots and gives them to you.

The floor of the keep is dotted with indistinct, motionless

forms. One snarls in its sleep, and you realize that they are

dogs. The robber girl is sitting between four slender columns,

and when the dog snarls, the thing shifts restlessly, lowering

its branchy head. It is a hobbled reindeer. "Well go on, see if

they fit," the robber girl says, pulling out her knife. She drags it along the stone floor to make sparks. "What are you going to do

when you find him?"

"Sometimes I'd like to cut off his head," you say. The robber girl grins, and thumps the hilt of her knife against the reindeer's

chest.

The robber girl's feet are just a little bigger, but the boots are

still warm from her feet. You explain that you can't wear the

boots, or else you won't know where you are going. "Nonsense!"

the robber girl says rudely.

You ask if she knows a better way to find Kay, and she says

that if you are still determined to go looking for him, even

though he obviously doesn't love you, and he isn't worth a bit of

trouble, then the thing to do is to find the Snow Queen. "This is Bae. Bae, you mangy old, useless old thing," she says. "Do you know where the Snow Queen lives?"

The reindeer replies in a low, hopeless voice that he doesn't

know, but he is sure that his old mother does. The robber girl

85

slaps his flank. "Then you'll take her to your mother," she says.

"And mind that you don't dawdle on the way."

She turns to you and gives you a smacking wet kiss on the lips

and says, "Keep the shoes, they look much nicer on you than

they did on me. And don't let me hear that you've been walking

on glass again." She gives the reindeer a speculative look. "You know, Bae, I almost think I'm going to miss you."

You step into the cradle of her hands, and she swings you over

the reindeer's bony back. Then she saws through the hobble

with her knife, and yells "Ho!" waking up the dogs.

You knot your fingers into Bae's mane, and bounce up as he

stumbles into a fast trot. The dogs follow for a distance, snap-

ping at his hooves, but soon you have outdistanced them, mov-

ing so fast that the wind peels your lips back in an involuntary

grimace. You almost miss the feel of glass beneath your feet. By

morning, you are out of the forest again, and Bae's hooves are

churning up white clouds of snow.

#

Sometimes you think there must be an easier way to do this.

Sometimes it seems to be getting easier all on its own. Now

you have boots and a reindeer, but you still aren't happy. Some-

times you wish that you'd stayed at home. You're sick and tired

of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck

that is—you'd like the happily right now. Thank you very much.

#

When you breathe out, you can see the fine mist of your

breath and the breath of the reindeer floating before you, until

the wind tears it away. Bae runs on.

The snow flies up, and the air seems to grow thicker and thick-

er. As Bae runs, you feel that the white air is being rent by your

passage, like heavy cloth. When you turn around and look be-

hind you, you can see the path shaped to your joined form, wo-

man and reindeer, like a hall stretching back to infinity. You see

that there is more than one sort of map, that some forms of

travel are indeed easier. "Give me a kiss," Bae says. The wind whips his words back to you. You can almost see the shape of

them hanging in the heavy air.

"I'm not really a reindeer," he says. "I'm an enchanted prince."

86

You politely decline, pointing out that you haven't known him

that long, and besides, for traveling purposes, a reindeer is bet-

ter than a prince.

"He doesn't love you," Bae says. "And you could stand to lose a few pounds. My back is killing me."

You are sick and tired of talking animals, as well as travel.

They never say anything that you didn't already know. You think

of the talking cat that Kay gave you, the one that would always

come to you, secretly, and looking very pleased with itself, to in-

form you when Kay's fingers smelled of some other woman. You

couldn't stand to see him pet it, his fingers stroking its white

fur, the cat lying on its side and purring wildly, "There, darling, that's perfect, don't stop," his fingers on its belly, its tail wreath-ing and lashing, its pointy little tongue sticking out at you. "Shut up," you say to Bae.

He subsides into an offended silence. His long brown fur is

rimmed with frost, and you can feel the tears that the wind pulls

from your eyes turning to ice on your cheeks. The only part of

you that is warm are your feet, snug in the robber girl's boots.

"It's just a little farther," Bae says, when you have been traveling for what feels like hours. "And then we're home."

You cross another corridor in the white air, and he swerves to

follow it, crying out gladly, "We are near the old woman of Lap-

mark's house, my mother's house."

"How do you know?" you ask.

"I recognize the shape that she leaves behind her," Bae says.

"Look!"

You look and see that the corridor of air you are following is

formed like a short, stout, petticoated woman. It swings out at

the waist like a bell.

"How long does it last?"

"As long as the air is heavy and dense," he says, "we burrow tunnels through the air like worms, but then the wind will come

along and erase where we have been."

The woman-tunnel ends at a low red door. Bae lowers his head

and knocks his antlers against it, scraping off the paint. The old

woman of Lapmark opens the door, and you clamber stiffly off

Bae's back. There is much rejoicing as mother recognizes son,

although he is much changed from how he had been.

87

The old woman of Lapmark is stooped and fat as a grub. She

fixes you a cup of tea, while Bae explains that you are looking

for the Snow Queen's palace.

"You've not far to go now," his mother tells you. "Only a few hundred miles and past the house of the woman of Finmany.

She'll tell you how to go—let me write a letter explaining

everything to her. And don't forget to mention to her that I'll be

coming for tea tomorrow; she'll change you back then, Bae, if

you ask her nicely."

The woman of Lapmark has no paper, so she writes the letter

on a piece of dried cod, flat as a dinner plate. Then you are off

again. Sometimes you sleep as Bae runs on, and sometimes you

aren't sure if you are asleep or waking. Great balls of greenish

light roll cracking across the sky above you. At times it seems

as if Bae is flying alongside the lights, chatting to them like old

friends. At last you come to the house of the woman of Finmany,

and you knock on her chimney, because she has no door.

#

Why, you may wonder, are there so many old women living

out here? Is this a retirement community? One might not be re-

markable, two is certainly more than enough, but as you look

around, you can see little heaps of snow, lines of smoke rising

from them. You have to be careful where you put your foot, or

you might come through someone's roof. Maybe they came here

for the quiet, or because they like ice fishing, or maybe they just

like snow.

#

It is steamy and damp in the house, and you have to climb

down the chimney, past the roaring fire, to get inside. Bae leaps

down the chimney, hooves first, scattering coals everywhere.

The Finmany woman is smaller and rounder than the woman of

Lapmark. She looks to you like a lump of pudding with black

currant eyes. She wears only a greasy old slip, and an apron

that has written on it, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of my kitchen."

She recognizes Bae even faster than his mother had, because,

as it turns out, she was the one who turned him into a reindeer

for teasing her about her weight. Bae apologizes, insincerely,

you think, but the Finmany woman says she will see what she

can do about turning him back again. She isn't entirely hopeful.

88

It seems that a kiss is the preferred method of transformation.

You don't offer to kiss him, because you know what that kind of

thing leads to.

The Finmany woman reads the piece of dried cod by the light

of her cooking fire, and then she throws the fish into her cook-

ing pot. Bae tells her about Kay and the Snow Queen, and about

your feet, because your lips have frozen together on the last leg

of the journey, and you can't speak a word.

"You're so clever and strong," the reindeer says to the Finmany woman. You can almost hear him add and fat under his

breath. "You can tie up all the winds in the world with a bit of thread. I've seen you hurling the lightning bolts down from the

hills as if they were feathers. Can't you give her the strength

of ten men, so that she can fight the Snow Queen and win Kay

back?"

"The strength of ten men?" the Finmany woman says. "A lot of good that would do! And besides, he doesn't love her."

Bae smirks at you, as if to say, I told you so. If your lips weren't

frozen, you'd tell him that she isn't saying anything that you

don't already know. "Now!" the Finmany woman says, "take her up on your back one last time, and put her down again by the

bush with the red berries. That marks the edge of the Snow

Queen's garden; don't stay there gossiping, but come straight

back. You were a handsome boy—I'll make you twice as good-

looking as you were before. We'll put up flyers, see if we can get

someone to come and kiss you."

"As for you, missy," she says. "Tell the Snow Queen now that we have Bae back, that we'll be over at the Palace next Tuesday

for bridge. Just as soon as he has hands to hold the cards."

She puts you on Bae's back again, giving you such a warm kiss

that your lips unfreeze, and you can speak again. "The woman

of Lapmark is coming for tea tomorrow," you tell her. The Fin-

many woman lifts Bae, and you upon his back, in her strong, fat

arms, giving you a gentle push up the chimney.

#

Good morning, ladies, it's nice to have you on the premiere

Snow Queen Tour. I hope that you all had a good night's sleep,

because today we're going to be traveling quite some distance.

I hope that everyone brought a comfortable pair of walking

shoes. Let's have a head count, make sure that everyone on

89

the list is here, and then we'll have introductions. My name is

Gerda, and I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you.

#

Here you are at last, standing before the Snow Queen's

palace, the palace of the woman who enchanted your lover and

then stole him away in her long white sleigh. You aren't quite

sure what you are going to say to her, or to him. When you check

your pocket, you discover that your list has disappeared. You

have most of it memorized, but you think maybe you will wait

and see, before you say anything. Part of you would like to turn

around and leave before the Snow Queen finds you, before Kay

sees you. You are afraid that you will burst out crying or even

worse, that he will know that you walked barefoot on broken

glass across half the continent, just to find out why he left you.

The front door is open, so you don't bother knocking, you just

walk right in. It isn't that large a palace, really. It is about the

size of your own house and even reminds you of your own house,

except that the furniture, Danish modern, is carved out of blue-

green ice—as are the walls and everything else. It's a slippery

place and you're glad that you are wearing the robber girl's

boots. You have to admit that the Snow Queen is a meticulous

housekeeper, much tidier than you ever were. You can't find the

Snow Queen and you can't find Kay, but in every room there are

white geese who, you are in equal parts relieved and surprised

to discover, don't utter a single word.

"Gerda!" Kay is sitting at a table, fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. When he stands up, he knocks several pieces of the

puzzle off the table, and they fall to the floor and shatter into

even smaller fragments. You both kneel down, picking them up.

The table is blue, the puzzle pieces are blue, Kay is blue, which

is why you didn't see him when you first came into the room.

The geese brush up against you, soft and white as cats.

"What took you so long?" Kay says. "Where in the world did you get those ridiculous boots?" You stare at him in disbelief.

"I walked barefoot on broken glass across half a continent to

get here," you say. But at least you don't burst into tears. "A robber girl gave them to me."

Kay snorts. His blue nostrils flare. "Sweetie, they're hideous."

"Why are you blue?" you ask.

90

"I'm under an enchantment," he says. "The Snow Queen

kissed me. Besides, I thought blue was your favorite color."

Your favorite color has always been yellow. You wonder if the

Snow Queen kissed him all over, if he is blue all over. All the vis-

ible portions of his body are blue. "If you kiss me," he says, "you break the spell and I can come home with you. If you break the

spell, I'll be in love with you again."

You refrain from asking if he was in love with you when he

kissed the Snow Queen. Pardon me, you think, when she kissed

him. "What is that puzzle you're working on?" you ask.

"Oh, that," he says. "That's the other way to break the spell. If I can put it together, but the other way is easier. Not to mention

more fun. Don't you want to kiss me?"

You look at his blue lips, at his blue face. You try to remember

if you liked his kisses. "Do you remember the white cat?" you say. "It didn't exactly run away. I took it to the woods and left it there."

"We can get another one," he says.

"I took it to the woods because it was telling me things."

"We don't have to get a talking cat," Kay says. "Besides, why did you walk barefoot across half a continent of broken glass if

you aren't going to kiss me and break the spell?" His blue face

is sulky.

"Maybe I just wanted to see the world," you tell him. "Meet interesting people."

The geese are brushing up against your ankles. You stroke

their white feathers and the geese snap, but gently, at your fin-

gers. "You had better hurry up and decide if you want to kiss me or not," Kay says. "Because she's home."

When you turn around, there she is, smiling at you like you

are exactly the person that she was hoping to see.

The Snow Queen isn't how or what you'd expected. She's not

as tall as you— you thought she would be taller. Sure, she's

beautiful, you can see why Kay kissed her (although you are be-

ginning to wonder why she kissed him), but her eyes are black

and kind, which you didn't expect at all. She stands next to you,

not looking at Kay at all, but looking at you. "I wouldn't do it if I were you," she says.

"Oh come on," Kay says. "Give me a break, lady. Sure it was nice, but you don't want me hanging around this icebox forever,

91

any more than I want to be here. Let Gerda kiss me, we'll

go home and live happily ever after. There's supposed to be a

happy ending."

"I like your boots," the Snow Queen says.

"You're beautiful," you tell her.

"I don't believe this," Kay says. He thumps his blue fist on the blue table, sending blue puzzle pieces flying through the air.

Pieces lie like nuggets of sky-colored glass on the white backs of

the geese. A piece of the table has splintered off, and you won-

der if he is going to have to put the table back together as well.

"Do you love him?"

You look at the Snow Queen when she says this and then you

look at Kay. "Sorry," you tell him. You hold out your hand in case he's willing to shake it.

"Sorry!" he says. "You're sorry! What good does that do me?"

"So what happens now?" you ask the Snow Queen.

"Up to you," she says. "Maybe you're sick of traveling. Are you?"

"I don't know," you say. "I think I'm finally beginning to get the hang of it."

"In that case," says the Snow Queen, "I may have a business proposal for you."

"Hey!" Kay says. "What about me? Isn't someone going to kiss me?"

You help him collect a few puzzle pieces. "Will you at least do

this much for me?" he asks. "For old time's sake. Will you spread the word, tell a few single princesses that I'm stuck up here? I'd

like to get out of here sometime in the next century. Thanks. I'd

really appreciate it. You know, we had a really nice time, I think

I remember that."

#

The robber girl's boots cover the scars on your feet. When

you look at these scars, you can see the outline of the journey

you made. Sometimes mirrors are maps, and sometimes maps

are mirrors. Sometimes scars tell a story, and maybe someday

you will tell this story to a lover. The soles of your feet are stor-

ies—hidden in the black boots, they shine like mirrors. If you

were to take your boots off, you would see reflected in one foot-

mirror the Princess Briar Rose as she sets off on her honey-

92

moon, in her enormous four-poster bed, which now has wheels

and is pulled by twenty white horses.

It's nice to see women exploring alternative means of travel.

In the other foot-mirror, almost close enough to touch, you

could see the robber girl whose boots you are wearing. She is

setting off to find Bae, to give him a kiss and bring him home

again. You wouldn't presume to give her any advice, but you do

hope that she has found another pair of good sturdy boots.

Someday, someone will probably make their way to the Snow

Queen's palace, and kiss Kay's cold blue lips. She might even

manage a happily ever after for a while.

You are standing in your black laced boots, and the Snow

Queen's white geese mutter and stream and sidle up against

you. You are beginning to understand some of what they are

saying. They grumble about the weight of the sleigh, the weath-

er, your hesitant jerks at their reins. But they are good-natured

grumbles. You tell the geese that your feet are maps and your

feet are mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind

that they are also useful for walking around on. They are per-

fectly good feet.

93

Vanishing Act

The three of them were sitting in a boat. When she closed her

eyes, she could almost picture it. A man and a woman and a girl,

in a green boat on the green water. Her mother had written that

the water was an impossible color; she imagined the mint color

of the Harmons' Tupperware. But what did the boat look like?

Was it green? How she wished her mother had described the

boat!

The boat refused to settle upon the water. It was too buoyant,

sliding along the mint surface like a raindrop on a pane of glass.

It had no keel, no sail, no oars. And if they fell in, no lifejackets (at least she knew of none). The man and the woman, unaware,

smiled at each other over the head of the girl. And the girl was

holding on to both sides of the boat for dear life, holding it in-

tact and upright on the tilting Tupperware-colored water.

She realized that not only had the boat been left out of the

letter; after so long she could hardly trust her parents to re-

semble her memories of them. That was the great tragedy, the

inconvenient unseaworthiness of memories and boats and let-

ters, that events never remained themselves long enough for

you to insert yourself into them… . The girl fell out of the boat

into the green water.

Was it cold? She didn't know.

#

Hildegard and Myron are spying on Hildy's cousin, Jenny

Rose. It is Thursday afternoon, October the fifth, 1970, and

Jenny Rose is lying on her bed in the room she shares with

Hildy. She hasn't moved once in the fifteen minutes that Hildy

and Myron have been watching her. Hildy can't explain why she

watches Jenny Rose: Jenny Rose never picks her nose or bursts

into tears. She mostly lies on her bed with her eyes closed,

but not asleep. She's the same age as Hildy—ten—and an utter

freak.

Myron says, "I think she's dead," and Hildy snorts.

"I can see her breathing," she says, handing him the binoculars.

"Is she asleep, then?"

"I don't think so," Hildy says, considering. "I think she just turns herself off, like a TV or something."

94

They are sitting in the gazebo that Hildy's older brother James

made in woodworking the year before. The gazebo is homely

and ramshackle. The white paint has peeled away in strips, and

bees float in the warm air above their heads. With the aid of a

borrowed set of binoculars, Hildy and Myron can spy privately

upon Jenny Rose upon her bed. Hildy picks at the paint and

keeps an eye out for James as well, who considers the gazebo to

be exclusively his.

#

The three of them sat in the boat on the water. They weren't

necessarily people, and it wasn't necessarily a boat either. It

could be three knots tied in her shoelace; three tubes of lipstick

hidden in Hildy's dresser; three pieces of fruit, three oranges in

the blue bowl beside her bed.

What was important, what she yearned for, was the trinity, the

triangle completed and without lack. She lay on the bed, ima-

gining this: the three of them in the boat upon the water, oh!

sweet to taste.

#

Jenny Rose is the most monosyllabic, monochromatic person

Hildy has ever laid eyes on. She's no-colored, like a glass of

skim milk, or a piece of chewed string. Lank hair of inde-

terminate length, skin neither pale nor sunny, and washed-out

no-color eyes. She's neither tall nor short, fat or skinny. She

smells weird, sad,electric, like rain on asphalt. Does she re-

semble her parents? Hildy isn't sure, but Jenny Rose has noth-

ing of Hildy's family. Hildy's mother is tall and glamorous with

red hair. Hildy's mother is a Presbyterian minister. Her father

teaches at the university.

The Reverend Molly Harmon's brother and sister-in-law have

been missionaries in the Pacific since before Hildy and Jenny

Rose were born. When Hildy was little, the adventures of her

cousin were like an exotic and mysterious bedtime story. She

used to wish she was Jenny Rose.

During the 1965 coup in Indonesia, Hildy's aunt and uncle and

Jenny Rose spent a few months in hiding and then a short time

in prison, suspected of being Communist sympathizers. This is

the way the rumors went: they were dead; they were hidden in

Ubud in the house of a man named Nyoman; they were in prison

in Jakarta; they had been released, they were safely in Singa-

95

pore. Hildy always knew that Jenny Rose would be fine. Stories

have happy endings. She still believes this.

Jenny Rose was in Singapore for the next four and a half

years. When her parents went back to Indonesia, it was pro-

posed that Jenny Rose would come to stay with the Harmons, in

order to receive a secondary school education. Hildy helped her

mother prepare for the arrival of her cousin. She went to the

library and found a book on Indonesia. She went shopping with

her mother for a second bed and a second desk, extra clothes,

hangers, and sheets. The day before her cousin arrived, Hildy

used a ruler, divided her own room into two equal halves.

Hildy hugged Jenny Rose at the airport, breathed her in, that

strange hot and cold smell. She hauled Jenny Rose's luggage

to the car single-handedly. "What is Indonesia like?" she asked her cousin. "Hot," Jenny Rose said. She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the back of the car, and for the next three

weeks said nothing that required more than one syllable. So far,

the most meaningful words her cousin has spoken to Hildy are

these: "I think I wet the bed."

"Give her time," Hildy's mother advised, putting the sheets in-to the washer. "She's homesick."

"How can she be homesick?" Hildy said. "She's never lived in a single place for longer than a year."

"You know what I mean," said the Reverend Molly Harmon.

"She misses her parents. She's never been away from them be-

fore. How would you like it if I sent you to live on the other side

of the world?"

"It wouldn't turn me into a mute, stunted turnip-person,"

Hildy said. But she thinks she understands. She read the library

book. Who wouldn't prefer the emerald jungles of Bali to the

suburbs of Houston, the intricate glide and shadow jerk of way-

ang kulit puppets on a horn screen to the dollar matinee, nasi

goreng to a McDonald's hamburger?

Hildy and Myron come inside to make hot chocolate and play

Ping-Pong. They go to Hildy and Jenny Rose's room first, and

Myron stands over Jenny Rose on her bed, trying to make con-

versation. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty, whatcha doing?" he says.

"Nothing."

He tries again. "Would you like to play Ping-Pong with us?"

"No." Her eyes don't even open as she speaks.

96

There is a bowl of oranges on the night table. Myron picks one

up and begins to peel it with his thumbnail.

Jenny Rose's eyelids open, and she jackknifes into a sitting po-

sition. "Those are my oranges," she says, louder than Hildy has ever heard her speak.

"Hey!" Myron says, backing up and cradling the orange in his palm. He is afraid of Jenny Rose, Hildy realizes. "It's just an orange.

I'm hungry, I didn't mean anything."

Hildy intervenes. "There are more in the refrigerator," she says diplomatically. "You can replace that one—if it's such a big deal."

"I wanted that one," Jenny Rose says, more softly.

"What's so special about that orange?" Myron says. Jenny

Rose doesn't say anything. Hildy stares at her, and Jenny Rose

stares, without expression, at the orange in Myron's hand. The

front door bangs open, and James, the Reverend Harmon, and

Dr. Orzibal are home.

Myron's mother, Mercy Orzibal, is a professor of English and

a close friend of the Harmons. She is divorced, and teaches

night classes. Myron spends a lot of time at the Harmons under

the harried attention of Hildy's mother, known as the Reverend

Mother.

This afternoon was a wedding, and the Reverend Mother is

still in the white robes of a divine: the R.M. and Mercy Orzibal,

in her sleeveless white dress, look like geese, or angels.

James is wearing black. James is almost seventeen years old

and he hates his family. Which is all right. Hildy doesn't care

much for him. His face is sullen, but this is his usual expression.

His hair is getting long. His hair is red like his mother's hair.

How Hildy wishes that she had red hair.

A cigarette dangles from the lips of the Reverend Mother.

She's reached an agreement with Hildy: two cigarettes on week-

days, four on Saturday, and none on Sunday. Hildy hates the

smell, but loves the way that the afternoon light falters and falls

thickly through the smoke around her mother's beautiful face.

"Do we have any more oranges?" Hildy asks her mother.

"Myron ate Jenny Rose's." There are several in the refrigerator, when Hildy looks. She picks out the one that is the most

shriveled and puny. She tells herself that she feels sorry for this

97

orange. Jenny Rose will take good care of it. The good oranges

are for eating. Jenny Rose has followed Myron and Hildy, she

stands just inside the doorway.

"Oh, Jenny!" says the Reverend Mother, as if surprised to find her niece here, in her kitchen. "How was your day, sweetheart?"

Jenny Rose says something inaudible as she takes the orange

from Hildy. The R.M. has turned away already and is tapping

her ash into the kitchen sink.

Hildy retrieves three more oranges out of the refrigerator.

She juggles them, smacking them in her palms, tossing them up

again. "Hey, look at me!" James rolls his eyes, the mothers and Myron applaud dutifully—Hildy looks, but Jenny Rose has left

the room.

Hildy plays Ping-Pong in the basement every night with her

father, uncrowned Ping-Pong champion of the world. He tells

silly jokes as he serves, to make Hildy miss her return. "What's brown and sticky?" he says. "A stick."

When Hildy groans, he winks at her. "You can't disguise it," he says. "I know you think I'm the handsomest man in the world,

the funniest man in the world, the smartest man in the whole

world."

"Yeah, right," Hildy tells him. The sight of his white teeth across the table, floating in the mild, round pink expanse of his

face, makes her sad for a moment, as if she is traveling a great

distance away, leaving her father pinned down under the great

weight of that distance. "You're silly." She spins the ball fast across the net.

"That's what all the ladies tell me," he says. "The silliest man in the world, that's me."

The basement is Hildy's favorite room in the whole house,

now that Jenny Rose has taken over her bedroom. The walls are

a cheerful yellow, and fat stripey plants in macrame hangers

dangle from the ceiling like green and white snakes. Hildy lobs

a Ping-Pong ball into the macram? holders—it takes more effort

to retrieve these balls than it does to place them, and at night

when Hildy watches television in the basement, the Ping-Pong

balls glow with reflected TV light like tiny moons and satellites.

She lets her father beat her in the next game, and when he

goes back upstairs, she ducks under the table. This is where

Hildy sits whenever she needs to think. This is where she and

98

Myron do their homework, cross-legged on the linoleum floor of

their own personal cave. Myron is better at social studies, but

Hildy is better at math. Hildy is better at spying on Jenny Rose.

She shifts on the cold linoleum floor. She is better at hiding than

her cousin. No one can spy on her under the table, although she

can see anyone who comes into the basement.

She has learned to identify people from the waist down:

brown corduroy would be her father; James and Myron wear

blue jeans. Her mother's feet are very small. The R.M. never

wears shoes in the house, and her toenails are always red, like

ten cherries in a row. Hildy doesn't need to remember Jenny

Rose's legs or toes—she would know her cousin by the absolute

stillness. Jenny Rose's legs would suddenly appear above two

noiseless feet, pale and otherworldly as two ghost trees. Hildy

imagines jumping out from under the table, yelling "Boo!" Jenny Rose would have to see her then, but would she see Jenny Rose?

Last night at dinner, the R.M. set four places at the table,

the blue plate for James, red for Hildy, orange for her husband,

purple for herself. The R.M. likes routine, and her family ac-

commodates. No one would ever eat off the wrong-colored

plate—surely the food would not taste the same.

Hildy set a fifth place, yellow for Jenny Rose, while her mother

was in the kitchen, and retrieved the fifth chair with the wobbly

leg from her mother's study. She did these things without saying

anything: it seemed unthinkable to say anything to the R.M.,

who in any case, neither noticed her error nor saw that it had

been corrected. At dinner, Jenny Rose did not speak—she hardly

ate. No one spoke to her and it seemed to Hildy that no one even

noticed her cousin.

She was as invisible as Hildy is now, under the green roof of

the Ping-Pong table. She almost feels sorry for Jenny Rose.

Jenny Rose's parents write her every week. Hildy knows this

because Jenny Rose donates the stamps to Mr. Harmon's stamp

collection. Her father currently has eighteen stamps, neatly cut

out of the airmail envelopes, lying on his desk in the basement.

As for the letters themselves, they are limp and wrinkled, like

old pairs of cotillion gloves. They are skinny as feathers, and

light, and Jenny Rose receives them indifferently. They disap-

pear, and when the R.M. or Mr. Harmon asks, "How are your

parents doing?" Jenny Rose says, "They're fine," and that's that.

99

#

October 10th, 1970

Darling Jenny,

We have been staying in Ubud for three weeks

now, visiting Nyoman's church. Every night as we

fall asleep the lizards tick off the minutes like

pocket watches, and every morning Nyoman

brings us pancakes with honey. Do you remember

Nyoman? Do you remember the lizards, the length

of your pinky? They are green and never blink,

watching us watching them.

Nyoman asks how you are doing, so far away. He

and his wife are having their second baby. They

have asked us to be their child's godparents, and

to pick the baptismal name. Would you like the

baby to have your name, Rose, if it is a girl?

It is sticky here, and we go for walks in the Mon-

key Forest, where the old woman sits with her

bunches of bananas and her broom, swatting the

monkeys away. Do you remember how they

scream and fly up into the trees?

Aunt Molly wrote that you are quiet as a mouse,

and I don't blame you, in that noisy family!

Love you,

Mom and Dad

#

Hildy knocks on the door of her mother's study. When she

opens the door, she can see a cigarette, hastily stubbed out, still

smoldering in the ashtray. "It's only my second," the R.M. says automatically.

Hildy shrugs. "I don't care what you do," she says. "I wanted to know if you'd take me to the library. I already asked Jenny

Rose—she doesn't need to go."

The R.M.'s face is momentarily blank. Then she frowns and

taps another cigarette out of the pack.

"Three," she says. "I promise that's it, okay? She's so quiet, it's easy to forget she's here. Except for the wet sheets. I must be

the worst guardian in the world—I got a call from one of Jenny

100

Rose's teachers yesterday, and when I put down the phone, it

flew straight out of my head. She hasn't turned in her assign-

ments recently, and they're worried that the work might be too

much for her. Does she seem unhappy to you?"

Hildy shrugs. "I don't know, I guess so. She never says any-

thing."

"I keep forgetting to write and ask your aunt and uncle if she

wet the bed before," the R.M. says. She waves her cigarette and

a piece of ash floats down onto her desk. "Has Jenny Rose made

any friends at school, besides you and Myron?"

Hildy shrugs again. She is mildly jealous, having to share her

absent-minded mother with Jenny Rose. "No, I mean I'm not

sure she wants any friends. Mostly she likes to be alone. Can

you take me to the library?"

"Sweetie," her mother says. "I would, but I have to finish the sermon for tomorrow. Ask your dad when he gets home."

"OK," Hildy says. She turns to leave.

"Will you keep an eye on your cousin?" the R.M. says, "I mean, on Jenny Rose? I'm a little concerned."

"OK," Hildy says again. "When is Dad coming home?"

"He should be here for dinner," her mother says. But Mr. Harmon doesn't come home for dinner. He doesn't come home until

Hildy is already in bed, hours after the library has closed.

She lies in bed and listens to her mother shout at him. She

wonders if Jenny Rose is awake too.

So Hildy and Myron are watching Jenny Rose again, as she

lies on her bed. They scoot their bare feet along the warm, dusty

plank floor of the gazebo, taking turns peering through the bin-

oculars.

"She hasn't been turning in her homework?" Myron asks.

"Then what does she do all the time?"

"That's why we're watching her," Hildy says. "To find out."

Myron lifts the binoculars. "Well, she's lying on her bed. And

she's flipping the light switch on and off."

They sit in silence for a while.

"Give me the binoculars," Hildy demands. "How can she be turning off the light if she's lying on the bed?"

But she is. The room is empty, except for Jenny Rose, who lies

like a stone upon her flowered bedspread, her arms straight at

her side. There are three oranges in the bowl beside the bed.

101

The light flashes on and off, on and off. Myron and Hildy sit in

the gazebo, the bared twigs of the oak tree scratching above

their heads.

Myron stands up. "I have to go home," he says.

"You're afraid!" Hildy says. Her own arms are covered in

goose pimples, but she glares at him anyway.

He shivers. "Your cousin is creepy." Then he says, "At least I don't have to share a room with her."

Hildy isn't afraid of Jenny Rose. She tells herself this over and

over again. How can she be afraid of someone who still wets the

bed?

#

It seems to Hildy that her parents fight more and more.

Their fights begin over James mostly, who refuses to apply to

college. The R.M. is afraid that he will pick a low lottery number,

or even volunteer, to spite his family. Mr. Harmon thinks that the

war will be over soon, and James himself is closemouthed and

noncommittal.

Hildy is watching the news down in the basement. The news-

caster is listing names, and dates, and places that Hildy has nev-

er heard of. It seems to Hildy that the look on his face is famil-

iar. He holds his hands open and empty on the desk in front of

him, and his face is carefully blank, like Jenny Rose's face. The

newscaster looks as if he wishes he were somewhere else.

Hildy's mother sits on the couch beside her, smoking. When

Mr. Harmon comes downstairs, her nostrils flare but she doesn't

say anything.

"Do Jenny Rose's parents miss her?" Hildy asks.

Her father stands behind her, tweaks her ear. "What made you

think of that?"

She shrugs. "I don't know, I just wondered why they didn't

take her with them."

The R.M. expels a perfect smoke ring at the TV set. "I don't

know why they went back at all," she says shortly. "After what happened, your uncle felt that Jenny Rose shouldn't go back.

They spent a week in a five-by-five jail cell with seven other mis-

sionaries, and Jenny Rose woke up screaming every night for

two years afterwards. I don't know why he wanted to go back

at all, but then I guess in the long run, it wasn't his child or his

wife he was thinking about."

102

She looks over Hildy's head at her husband. "Was it?" she

says.

#

November 26, 1970

Darling Jenny,

We passed a pleasant Thanksgiving, thinking of

you in America, and making a pilgrimage

ourselves. We are traveling across the islands now,

to Flores, where the villagers have rarely heard a

sermon, rarely even met people so pale and odd as

ourselves.

We took a ferry from Bali to Lombok, where the

fishermen hang glass lanterns from their boats at

night. The lantern light reflects off the water and

the fish lose direction and swim upwards towards

the glow and the nets. It occurred to your father

that there is a sermon in this, what do you think?

From the shore you can see the fleet of boats,

moving back and forth like tiny needles sewing up

the sea. We rode in one, the water an impossible

green beneath us. From Lombok we took the ferry

to Sumbawa, and your father was badly seasick.

We made a friend on the ferry, a student coming

home from the university in Java.

The three of us took the bus from one end of the

island to Sumbawa at the other end, and as we

passed through the villages, children would run

alongside the bus, waving and calling out "Orang

bulan bulan!"

We arrived on Flores this morning, and are think-

ing of you, so far away.

Love,

Mom and Dad

#

Hildy keeps an eye on Jenny Rose. She promised her mother

she would. It isn't spying anymore. It seems to her that Jenny

Rose is slowly disappearing. Even her presences, at dinners, in

class, are not truly presences. The chair where she sits at the

103

dinner table is like the space at the back of the mouth, where a

tooth has been removed, where the feeling of possessing a tooth

still lingers. In class, the teachers never call on Jenny Rose.

Only when Hildy looks through the binoculars, watching her

cousin turn the bedroom light on and off without lifting a hand,

does Jenny Rose seem solid. She is training her eyes to see

Jenny Rose. Soon Hildy will be the only person who can see her.

No one else sees the way Jenny Rose's clothes have grown too

big, the way she is sealing up her eyes, her lips, her face, like

a person shutting the door of a house to which they will not re-

turn. No one else seems to see Jenny Rose at all.

The R.M. worries about James, and Mr. Harmon worries about

the news; they fight busily in their spare time, and who knows

what James worries about? His bedroom door is always shut and

his clothes have the sweet-sour reek of marijuana, a smell that

Hildy recognizes from the far end of the school yard.

Jenny Rose doesn't wet the bed anymore. At nine-thirty, she

goes to the bathroom and then climbs into bed and waits for

Hildy to turn out the light. Which is pretty silly, Hildy thinks,

considering how Jenny Rose spends her afternoons. As she

walks back to her bed in the darkness, she thinks of Jenny Rose

lying on her bed, eyes open, mouth closed, like a dead person,

and she thinks she would scream if the lights came back on. She

refuses to be afraid of Jenny Rose. She wonders if her aunt and

uncle are afraid of Jenny Rose.

#

This is a trick that her father taught her in the blackness of

the prison cell, when she cried and cried and asked for light. He

said, close your eyes and think about something good. From be-

fore. (What? she said.)

Are your eyes closed? (Yes.) Good. Now do you remember

when we spent the night on the Dieng Plateau? (Yes.) It was

cold, and when we walked outside, it was night and we were in

the darkness, and the stars were there. Think about the stars.

(Light.)

In this darkness, like that other darkness which was full of the

breathing of other people, she remembers the stars. There was

no moon, and in the utter darkness the stars were like windows,

hard bits of glass and glitter where the light poured through.

What she remembers is not how far away they seemed, but how

104

different they were from any other stars she had seen before, so

bright-burning and close.

(Darkness.)

Do you remember the Southern Cross? (Yes.) Do you remem-

ber the birds? (Yes.) She had walked between her father and

mother, passing under the bo trees, looking always upward at

the stars. And the bo trees had risen upward, in a great beat-

ing of wings, nested birds waking and rising as she walked past.

The sound of the breathing of the cell around her became the

beautiful sound of the wings.

(Light.)

Do you remember the four hundred stone Buddhas of

Borobodur, the seventy-two Buddhas that were calm within

their bells, their cages? (Yes.) Be calm, Jenny Rose, my darling,

be calm.

(Darkness.)

Do you remember the guard that gave you bubur ayam? (Yes.)

Do you remember Nyoman? (Yes.) Do you remember us, Jenny

Rose, remember us.

(Light.)

#

"What are you doing?" James says, coming upon Hildy in the

gazebo.

She puts down the binoculars, and shrugs elaborately. "Just

looking at things."

James's eyes narrow. "You better not be spying on me, you

little brat." He twists the flesh of her arm above the elbow, hard enough to leave a bruise.

"Why would I want to watch you?" Hildy yells at him. "You're the most boring person I know! You're more boring than she is."

She means Jenny Rose, but James doesn't understand. "You

must be the most hopeless spy in the world, you little bitch. You

wouldn't even notice the end of the world. She's going to kick

him out of the house soon, and you probably won't even notice

that."

"What?" Hildy says, stunned, but James stalks off. She doesn't understand what James just said, but she knows that marijuana

affects the brains of the people who use it. Poor James.

The lights in her bedroom flick on and off, on and off.

Light, darkness, light.

105

#

Myron and Hildy are in the basement. In between studying

for biology, and cutting out articles for current events, they play

desultory Ping-Pong. "Is your cousin a mutant?" Myron says. "Or is she just a mute ant?"

Hildy serves. "She can talk fine, she just doesn't want to."

"Huh. Just like she doesn't bother to turn the lights on and off the way normal people do." He misses again.

"She's not that bad," Hildy says.

"Yeah, sure. That's why we spy on her all the time. I bet she's

really a communist spy and that's why you have to keep an eye

on her, spying on a spy. I bet her parents are spies, too."

"She's not a spy!" Hildy yells, and hits the ball so hard that it bounces off the wall. It's moving much faster than it should. It

whizzes straight for the back of Myron's head, veering off at the

last minute to smash into one of the spider plants.

The macrame plant holder swings faster and faster, loops up

and drops like a bomb on the carpet. Untouched, the other mac-

ram? plant holders explode like tiny bombs, spilling dirt, spider

plants, old Ping-Pong balls all over the basement floor.

Hildy looks over and sees Jenny Rose standing on the bottom

step. She's come down the stairs as silently as a cat. Myron sees

her too. She's holding a postage stamp in her hand. "I'm sorry,"

Myron says, his eyes wide and scared. "I didn't mean it."

Jenny Rose turns and walks up the stairs, still clutching the

postage stamp. Her feet on the stairs make no sound and her

legs are as white and thin as two ghosts.

Hildy collects lipsticks. She has two that her mother gave her,

and a third that she found under the seat of her father's car.

One is a waxy red, so red that Hildy thinks it might taste like a

candy apple. One is pink, and the one that she found in the car

is so dark that when she puts it on, her mouth looks like a small

fat plum. She practices saying sexy words, studying her reflec-

tion in the bathroom mirror, her mouth a glossy, bright O. Oh

darling, she says. You're the handsomest, you're the funniest,

you're the smartest man I know. Give me a kiss, my darling.

She wants to tell Jenny Rose that if she—if Jenny Rose—wore

lipstick, maybe people would notice her. Maybe people would

fall in love with her, just as they will fall in love with Hildy. Hildy kisses her reflection; the mirror is smooth and cool as water.

106

She keeps her eyes open, and she sees the mirror face, yearning

and as close to her own face as possible, the slick cheek pressed

against her own warm cheek.

In the mirror, she looks like Jenny Rose. Or maybe she has

watched Jenny Rose for too long, and now Jenny Rose is all she

can see. She leans her forehead against the mirror, suddenly

dizzy.

Myron won't come over to the Harmons' house anymore. He

goes to the Y instead, plays basketball, until his mother comes

to pick him up. He avoids Hildy at school, and finally Hildy calls

and explains that she needs him, that it's an emergency.

They meet in the gazebo, of course. Myron won't go inside the

house, he says, even to pee.

"How are things?" Myron says.

"Fine," Hildy says. They are formal as two ambassadors.

"I'm sorry I called your cousin a communist."

"That's okay. Look," Hildy says. She presses the heel of her Ked against a loose board until the other end pops up. In the

hollow there is a stack of white envelopes with square holes

where the stamps have been cut out. She picks up the top one,

dated July 19, 1970. "It's her secret place. These are her let-

ters."

"I hope you didn't read them," Myron says. He sounds prim, as if he thinks they shouldn't read other people's letters, not even

letters from spies.

"Of course I did," she tells him. "And she's not a spy. She just misses her parents."

"Oh. Is that all?" he asks sarcastically.

Hildy remembers the cool surface of the mirror, the way it al-

most gave way against her forehead, like water. "She wants to

go home. She's going to disappear herself. She's been practi-

cing with the light switch, moving it up and down. She's going

to disappear herself back to Indonesia and her parents."

"You're kidding," he says, but Hildy is sure. She knows this as plainly as if Jenny Rose had told her. The letters are a history of

disappearance, reappearance, of travelling. It is what they don't

say that is important.

"Her parents always tell her how much they love her, they tell

her the things that they've seen and done, and they ask her to

107

be happy. But they never tell her they miss her, that they wish

she was with them."

"I wouldn't miss her," Myron says, interrupting. Hildy ignores him.

"They don't tell her they miss her, because they know that she

would come to them. She's the most stubborn person I know.

She's still waiting for them to say it, to say she can come home."

"You're getting as weird as she is," Myron says. "Why are you telling me all this?"

Hildy doesn't say, Because you're my best friend. She says,

"Because you have terrible handwriting. You write like an

adult."

"So what?"

"I want you to help me steal her next letter. I want you to write like them, write that she can go home now. I can't do it. What if

she recognized my handwriting?"

"You want me to get rid of her for you?" Myron says.

"I think that if she doesn't go home soon, she'll get sick. She

might even die. She never eats anything anymore."

"So call the doctor." Myron says, "No way. I can't help you."

But in the end he does. It is December, and the R.M. has can-

celed two conferences with Jenny Rose's teachers, busy with

her church duties. It doesn't really matter. The teachers don't

notice Jenny Rose; they call on other students, check off her

name at attendance without looking to see her. Hildy watches

Jenny Rose, she looks away to see Myron watching her. He

passes her a note in class on Tuesday. I can't keep my eyes on

her. How can you stand it? Hildy can barely decipher his hand-

writing, but she knows Jenny Rose will be able to read it. Jenny

Rose can do anything.

This morning the R.M. almost walked right into Jenny Rose.

Hildy was sitting at the breakfast table, eating cereal. She

saw the whole thing. Jenny Rose opened the refrigerator door,

picked out an orange, and then as she left the kitchen, the R.M.

swerved into the room around her, as if Jenny Rose were an in-

conveniently placed piece of furniture.

"Mom," Hildy said. The R.M. picked up Hildy's cereal bowl to wash it, before Hildy was finished.

"What?" the R.M. said.

"I want to talk to you about Jenny Rose."

108

"Your cousin?" said the R.M. "It was nice having her stay with us, wasn't it?"

"Never mind," Hildy said. She went to get ready for school.

#

The three of them sit in the boat. The water is green, the

boat is green, she is surprised sometimes when she opens her

eyes, that her skin isn't green. Sometimes she is worried be-

cause her parents aren't there. Sometimes there is another girl

in the boat, bigger than her, always scowling. She wants to tell

this girl not to scowl, but it's better to ignore her, to concen-

trate on putting her parents back in the boat. Go away, she tells

the girl silently, but that isn't right. She's the one who has to go

away. What is the girl's name? The girl refuses to sit still, she

stands up and waves her arms and jumps around and can't even

see that she is in danger of falling into the water.

Go away, she thinks at the girl, I'm busy. I blew the roof off

a prison once, I knocked the walls down, so I could look at the

stars. Why can't I make you go away? I can walk on water, can

you? When I leave, I'm taking the boat with me, and then where

will you be, silly girl?

#

Hildy loves her mother's preaching voice, so strong and bell-

clear. The R.M. and Hildy's father fight all the time now; the

R.M. stays in the kitchen until late at night, holding conversa-

tions in a whisper with Mercy Orzibal, Myron's mother, over the

phone. Hildy can't hear what the R.M. is saying when she whis-

pers, but she's discovered that if she stands very quietly, just in-

side the kitchen door, she can make herself as invisible as Jenny

Rose. It is just like hiding under the Ping-Pong table. No one can

see her.

At night, when the R.M. screams at her husband, Hildy covers

her ears with her hands. She sticks the pillow over her head.

Lately Hildy never loses at Ping-Pong, although she tries to let

her father win. The skin under her father's eyes is baggy and

too pink. Next week, he is going away to a conference on Amer-

ican literature.

The R.M. stands straight as a pin behind the pulpit, but this is

what Hildy remembers: her mother sitting curled on the kitchen

floor, the night before, cupping the phone to her ear, smoking

cigarette after cigarette. Hildy waited for her mother to see her,

109

standing in the doorway. The R.M. slammed the phone down on

the hook. That bitch, she said, and sat sucking smoke in and

looking at nothing at all.

Hildy's father sits with the choir, listening attentively to his

wife's sermon. This is what Hildy remembers: at dinner, the

spoon trembling in his hand as he lifted it to his mouth, his wife

watching him. Hildy looked at her father, then at her mother,

then at Jenny Rose who never seems to look at anything, whom

no one else sees, except Hildy.

It is easier now, looking at Jenny Rose; Hildy finds it hard to

look at anyone else for very long. Jenny Rose sits beside her

on the wooden pew bench, her leg touching Hildy's leg. Hildy

knows that Jenny Rose is only holding herself upon the bench

by great effort. It is like sitting beside a struck match that waits

and refuses to ignite. Hildy knows that Jenny Rose is so strong

now that if she wanted, she could raise the roof, turn the com-

munion grape juice into wine, walk on water. How can the R.M.

not see this, looking down from the pulpit at Hildy, her eyes nev-

er focusing on her niece, as if Jenny Rose has already gone? As

if Jenny Rose was never there?

Even with her eyes closed for the benediction, Hildy can still

see Jenny Rose. Jenny Rose's eyes remain open, her hands are

cupped and expectant: her leg trembles against Hildy's leg. Or

maybe it is Hildy's leg that trembles, beneath the weight of her

mother's voice, her father's terrible, pleading smile. For a mo-

ment she longs to be as invisible as Jenny Rose, to be such a

traveler.

#

When the mail comes on Monday, there is a letter from Jenny

Rose's parents. Hildy extracts the letter from the pile. Myron

watches, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He is not

happy about being in the same house as Jenny Rose.

All weekend Myron has been practicing two short phrases,

with the aid of one of the original letters. Hildy steams open

the letter over the teakettle, while Myron watches. The light in

Hildy's bedroom flicks on, flicks off, flicks on again. Hildy can

feel it pulling at her: for a moment, she feels as if she were tum-

bling down the spout, falling into the kettle. She might drown

in the kettle water. It's that deep. She's gotten too small. She

shakes her head, takes a breath.

110

They take the letter down to the basement, and sit under the

Ping-Pong table while Hildy quickly scans it. Myron, who has

gone to the trouble of collecting an assortment of pens, adds

a postscript in black ballpoint. We miss you so much, darling

Jenny. Please, please come home.

"It doesn't match," Myron says, handing the letter to Hildy.

She folds it back into the envelope and glues the envelope shut

again. It really doesn't matter: Jenny Rose is ready to go. Hildy

realizes that she wasn't worried Jenny Rose would recognize

her handwriting, it wasn't because of that—Hildy just wants a

witness, someone who will see what she has done, what Jenny

Rose will do.

"I saw your father," Myron says. "He was at my house last night."

"He's out of town," Hildy says. "He went to a conference."

"He stayed all night long," Myron says. "I know because when I went to school this morning, he was hiding. In my mother's

bedroom."

"You're such a liar," Hildy says. "My father is in Wisconsin. He called us from the hotel. How do you think he got from Wisconsin to your house? Do you think he flew?"

"You think Jenny Rose can fly," Myron says. His face is very red.

"Get out of my house," Hildy says. Her hand floats at her side, longing to slap him.

"I think you're nuts," Myron says. "Just like her." And he leaves. His back is stiff with outrage.

Hildy rocks back and forth, sitting under the Ping-Pong table.

She holds the letter in her hand as if it were a knife. She thinks

about Jenny Rose, and what is going to happen.

Hildy is theatrical enough to want a bang at the end of all her

labors. She wants to see Jenny Rose restored to herself. Hildy

wants to see the mythical being that she is sure her cousin con-

tains, like a water glass holding a whole ocean. She wants to

see Jenny Rose's eyes flash, hear her voice boom, see her fly up

the chimney and disappear like smoke. After all, she owes Hildy

something, Hildy who generously divided her room in half, Hildy

who has arranged for Jenny Rose to go home.

No one is in the house now. James, two months away from his

birthday, has gone to register for the draft. Her father is still

111

in Wisconsin (Myron is such a liar!), and her mother is at the

church. So after a while, Hildy brings the letter to Jenny Rose,

gives it to her cousin, who is lying on her bed.

Hildy sits on her own bed and waits while Jenny Rose opens

the letter. At first it seems that Hildy has miscalculated, that the

post-script is not enough. Jenny Rose sits, her head bent over

the letter. She doesn't move or exclaim or do anything. Jenny

Rose just sits and looks down at the letter in her lap.

Then Hildy sees how tightly Jenny Rose holds the letter. Jenny

Rose looks up, and her face is beautiful with joy. Her eyes are

green and hot. All around Jenny Rose the air is hot and bright.

Hildy inhales the air, the buzzing rain and rusted metal smell of

her cousin.

Jenny Rose stands up. The air seems to wrap around her like

a garment. It sounds like swarms and swarms of invisible bees.

Hildy's hair raises on her scalp. All around them, drawers and

cabinets dump their contents on the floor, while T-shirts whoosh

up, slapping sleeves against the ceiling. Schoolbooks open and

flap around the room like bats, and one by one the three or-

anges lift out of the blue bowl on the bedside table. They roll

through the air, faster and faster, circling around Jenny Rose on

her bed. Hildy ducks as tubes of lipstick knock open the bureau

drawer, and dart towards her like little chrome-and-tangerine-

, flamingo-and-ebony-colored bees. Everything is buzzing, hum-

ming, the room is full of bees.

And then—

"I'm making a mess," Jenny Rose says. She tears the stamp

from the envelope, gives it to Hildy. Only their two hands touch,

but Hildy falls back on the bed—as if she has stuck her fingers

into an electrical outlet—she flies backwards onto her bed.

Jenny Rose walks into the bathroom, and Hildy can see the

bathtub

full

of

water,

the

silly

little

boat

(is

that

what she wanted?), the green water spilling over the lip of the

tub and rushing over Jenny Rose's feet. Be careful! Hildy thinks.

The door slams shut. As Hildy catches her breath, the air in the

room becomes thin, and her ears pop. The magic trick is over,

the bathroom is empty: Jenny Rose has gone home. Hildy bursts

into tears, sits on her bed and waits for her mother to come

home. After a while, she begins to pick up her room.

112

This is the first and most mysterious of three vanishings. No

one but Hildy seems to notice that Jenny Rose is gone. A few

months later, James goes to Canada. He is dodging the draft. He

tells no one he is going, and Hildy finds the brief, impersonal

note. He is failing his senior classes, he is afraid, he loves them

but they can't help him. Please take care of his fish.

When Mr. Harmon moves out of the house, Hildy has resigned

herself to this, that life is a series of sudden disappearances,

leavetakings without the proper good-byes. Someday she too

might vanish. Some days she looks forward to learning this

trick.

What sustains her is the thought of the better place in which

one arrives. This is the R.M.'s heaven; the Canada that James

has escaped to; it is in the arms of Mercy Orzibal with her

bright, glossy mouth, who tells Mr. Harmon how witty, how

charming, how handsome he is. It is the green lake in the pho-

tograph Jenny Rose has sent Hildy from the island of Flores.

In the photograph Jenny Rose sits between her mother and

father, in a funny little white boat with a painted red eye. On

the back of the photograph is an enigmatic sentence. There is

a smudge that could be a question mark; the punctuation is un-

certain. Wish you were here.

Wish you were here?

113

Survivor's Ball, Or, The Donner Party

1. Travel.

They had been traveling together for three days in Jasper's

rented car when they came to the dark mouth of the tunnel into

Milford Sound. Serena was telling Jasper something very im-

portant. What did Jasper know about Serena after three days?

That she didn't wear underwear. That she was allergic to bees.

That she liked to talk. (She said the strangest things.) That she

was from Pittsburgh. Listening to her voice made him feel less

homesick.

Jasper was driving on the wrong side of the road, in a place

where water spun down the wrong way in the drain, on a con-

tinent that was on what he thought of as the upside-down part

of the globe, where they celebrated Christmas on the beach and

it snowed in the summer, which was the winter. A girl from Pitt-

sburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick travel-

er should have one.

"That thing you said to me in the bar was so cute," Serena

said. "You know, when we met?" Jasper said nothing. His tooth hurt. He mimed, to show that it was hurting. "Poor guy," Serena said.

They drove down the Avenue of the Disappearing Mountain

through groves of swordlike cabbage trees. The road circled up

between cracked gray boulders and the little red car went up

the road like a toy pulled on a string.

"There was a guy in Auckland who had been to Milford

Sound," Serena said. "He told me it was like standing at the edge of the world. It's funny. I'd met him before, in Tokyo, I

think. Once you've been traveling for a while, you run into the

same people everywhere you go. But I never remember their

names. You end up saying things to each other like, 'Do I know

you? Were you the guy at that restaurant, that one with the

huge fish tank, in Amsterdam?' You end up writing down your

addresses on little pieces of paper for each other, and then you

always lose the pieces of paper, but it's okay, because you'll run

into each other again.

"It's not a very big world," she said sadly.

They had been late leaving the youth hostel in Te Anau be-

cause Serena slept past noon, and then she thought she might

114

like a shower. There was no hot water left, but she spent a

long time in the bathroom anyway, writing in her journal. Jasper

hoped she wasn't writing about him. He consulted his guide-

book and then the hostel manager and still managed to get lost

on his way to the corner dairy to buy aspirin for his tooth, and

then lost again on the way back. In the end, he had to ask a little

girl wearing a red parka and striped black-and-white stockings

for directions. When he came back, Serena was sitting on the

bed, writing postcards. Her clothes and her books and other

things were scattered all around her. She looked completely at

home in the hostel room, as if she had lived here for years, but

everything went back into her backpack, snip-snap, and then

the room looked very empty, nothing but a lonely bed and a heap

of sheets.

Before they left Te Anau, they stopped at a pub for lunch.

Jasper couldn't eat, but he paid for Serena's meal. She flirted

with the barman, sticking strands of her hair into her wide red

mouth, and licking them into dark, glossy tips. She told the bar-

man that she was running away from home, that she was going

to travel all the way around the world and just keep on going,

that she liked New Zealand beer. She didn't say anything at all

about Jasper who was standing at the bar right there beside her,

but her hand had been curled in a comfortable way in his pock-

et, down under the counter.

They hadn't seen a single car since they'd left the main road

and headed for the pass into Milford Sound. After enduring

ominous weather reports all the way from Queenstown to Te

Anau, he guessed it wasn't surprising. Alone, Jasper would have

headed up the east coast to Dunedin, rather than making the

long drive into the West and Fiordland, but Serena had a great

desire to see Milford Sound and he was quickly learning that

Serena was seldom thwarted in her great desires.

Two nights ago he had been sitting in bed, watching her sleep.

Dust floated in the cold moon-lighted air and he sneezed. A

piece of his tooth, a back molar, fell into his hand. In the morn-

ing when Serena woke up, she had put it in an airmail envelope,

sealed the envelope, and written "Jasper's tooth" on it.

He had the envelope in his pocket now and every once in a

while his tongue went up to touch the changed, broken place in

115

his mouth. "I've never met anyone named Jasper before," Serena said, "It's old-fashioned."

Jasper looked at her. She looked back, smirking, black hair

tucked into her mouth. She was doodling on the back of her own

hand with a fountain pen, making thin jagged lines. It was an

expensive pen. His name was engraved on it.

"So's Serena," he said carefully, around the tooth. "My grandmother's youngest brother's name was Jasper. He died in a war."

"I'm not named after anybody," Serena said. "In fact, I've always hated my name. It makes me sound like a lake or

something. Lake Serena. Lake Placid. I don't even like to swim."

Jasper kept his eyes on the road. "I never learned how to

swim," he said.

"Then hope that there will always be enough lifeboats," she said, and closed one eye slowly. He watched her in the rear-view

mirror. It was not an altogether friendly wink. She put the pen

down on the dashboard.

"My grandmother gave me that pen," he said. He'd lent it to Serena in the bar in Queenstown when they met. She hadn't

given it back yet, although he had bought her a ballpoint at a

chemist's the next day. He'd also bought her a bright red lip-

stick, which he had thought was funny for some reason, a bar

of chocolate, and a tiny plastic dinosaur because she said she

didn't like flowers. He wasn't really sure what you were sup-

posed to buy for a girl you met in the bar, but she had liked the

dinosaur.

"I never had a grandmother," Serena said, "Not a single one.

Not a mother, not a brother, not a sister, not a cousin. In fact,

there was a general drought of relatives where I was concerned.

A long dry spell. Although once I brought home a kitten, and my

father let me keep it for a while. That kitten was the only re-

lative who ever purely loved me. Does your grandmother love

you?"

"I guess," Jasper said. "We have the same ears. That's what everyone says. But I have my father's crummy teeth."

"My father's dead," Serena said, "and so is the kitten."

"I'm sorry," Jasper said, and Serena shrugged. She held her left hand away from her, examining her drawing. It looked like

a map to Jasper—pointy stick-drawings of mountains, and lines

for roads. She stuck a finger in her mouth and began to smudge

116

the lines away carefully, one by one. "Your ears aren't so bad,"

she said.

The radio went on and off in a blur of static. Unseasonable

weather … party of trekkers on the Milford Track … missing

for nearly … between Dumpling and Doughboy Huts … rescue

teams … . Then nothing but static. Jasper turned off the radio.

"They might as well give up," Serena said. "They're all dead by now, buried under an avalanche somewhere. They'll find the

bodies in a couple of weeks when the snow melts." She sounded

almost cheerful.

There were tall drifts of snow on either side of the road.

Every 500 meters they passed black-and-yellow signs reading:

"Danger! Avalanche Area: Do Not Stop Vehicle!" Every sign said exactly the same thing, but Serena read them out loud anyway, in different voices—Elmer Fudd, Humphrey Bogart, the

barman's flirty New Zealand sing-song.

"Danger, Will Robinson Crusoe!" she said, "Killer robots and tsunamis from Mars ahead. Also German tourists. Do not stop

your vehicle. Do not roll down your window to feed the lions.

Remain inside your vehicle at all times. Do not pass go. Do not

pick up hitchhikers—oops, too late."

All day the sky had been the color of a blue china plate, flat

and suspended upon the narrow teeth of the mountains. The

road wound precariously between the mountains, and the car

threaded the road. The sun was going down. Just where the

road seemed about to lift over the broken mountain rim, where

the sun was sliding down to meet them, a black pinprick marked

the tunnel into Milford Sound. As Jasper drove, the pinprick be-

came a door and the door became a mouth that ate up first the

road and then the car.

Serena was reading out of Jasper's guidebook. "Started in

1935," she said. "Did you know it took twenty years to com-

plete? It's almost a mile long. Four men died in rock falls during

the blasting. You should always call a mountain Grandmother,

to show respect. Did you know that? Turn on the headlights —"

They went from the pink-gray of the snowdrifts into sudden

dark. The road went up at a 45-degree angle, the car laboring

against the steep climb. The headlights were sullen and small

reflecting off the greasy black swell of the tunnel walls. The

117

walls were not smooth; they bulged and pressed against the tar-

mac road.

In the headlights, the walls ran with condensation. Over the

noise of the car Jasper could hear the plink-plink of fat droplets

falling down the black rock. He touched his tongue to his tooth.

"Why, Grandmother, what a big dark tunnel you have," he

said. The terrible weight of the mountain above him, the white

snow shrouding the black mountain, the stale wet air in the tun-

nel, all pressed down inexorably upon him in the dark. He felt

strangely sad, he felt lost, he felt dizzy. He sank like a slow stone in a cold well.

"Hello sailor," Serena said. "Welcome to Grandmother's Tunnel of Love." She put her long white hand on his leg and looked

at him sidelong. He sank down, was pressed down, heavy. His

tooth whining like a dog. He couldn't bear the weight of Ser-

ena's black eyes, her thin shining face. "Are you all right?"

He shook his head. "Claustrophobic," he managed to say. He

could hardly keep his foot on the gas pedal. He saw them spin-

ning through the dark towards a black wall, a frozen door of ice.

And then he had to stop the car. "You drive," he said, and

fumbled the door open and went stumbling over to the passen-

ger's door. Serena shifted to the driver's side and he sat down

in her warm seat. It took all his strength to shut the door again.

"Please," he said. "Hurry."

She drove competently, talking at him the whole time. "You

never told me you were claustrophobic. Lucky for you I came

along. We should be out soon."

They came out into night. There was nothing to distinguish

one darkness from the other but dirty snow in the headlights.

Yet Jasper felt the great clinging weight fall away from him.

His tongue went up to touch his broody tooth. "Stop the car,"

he said. He threw up kneeling beside the road. When he stood

up, his knees were wet with melted snow. "I think I'm all right

again," he said.

"You drive if you want to," she said. "Your call, pal. It's about another forty-five minutes to the hotel, and you can't miss it.

There's only one road and one hotel."

Iced pinecones shattered like glass under the wheels of the

car. The road was steeper, circling down this time.

"What does the guidebook say about the hotel?" he asked.

118

Serena said, "Well, it's an interesting story. This is funny.

When I called to make the reservation, the man said they were

booked solid. It's a private party or something. But I talked

sweet, told him we had come a long way, a really long way." She

stuck her feet up on the dashboard and leaned her head on his

shoulder. He could see her in the mirror, looking pleased with

herself.

Jasper said, "The hotel is full?" He pulled over to the side of the road and put his head against the steering wheel. Serena

said, "This is the third time you've stopped the car. I have to

pee."

"Is the hotel full or isn't it?" Jasper said.

"Have some chewing gum," Serena said. "Your breath smells like vomit. Don't worry so much."

He couldn't chew the gum, but he sucked on it. He started the

car again.

"Is your tooth killing you?" she said.

"Yeah," he said. "Revenge of the sugar cereal."

They went another five hundred yards when something ran

across the road. It looked like a small person, scrambling across

the road on all fours. It had a long bony tail. Jasper slammed

on the brakes and swerved. Serena's arm flailed out and wal-

loped him, catching his jaw precisely upon the broken tooth. He

howled. Serena fell forward, knocking her skull loudly against

the dashboard. The car came to a stop, and after a moment, dur-

ing which neither of them was capable of speech, he said, "Are

you okay? Did we hit it?"

"What was it?" she said. "A possum? My head hurts. And my hand."

"It wasn't a possum," he said. "Too big. Maybe a deer."

"There are no deer in New Zealand," she said. "The only native mammal is the bat. It's just us poor unsuspecting marsupials

around here. Marsupials."

Then she snorted. He was amazed to see that tears were

streaming down her face. She was laughing so hard she couldn't

speak. "What's a marsupial?" he said. "Are you laughing at me?

What's so funny?"

She punched his shoulder. "A possum is a marsupial. It carries

its young in a pouch. It's just the word marsupial. It always

cracks me up. It's like pantyhose or crumhorn."

119

It didn't seem that funny to him, but he laughed experiment-

ally. "Marsupial," he said. "Ha."

"Your mouth is bleeding," she said, and snorted again. "Here."

She took a dirty Kleenex out of her bag and licked it. Then she

applied it to his lower lip. "Let me drive."

"Maybe it was a dog," he said. There was nothing on the road now.

2. Arrival

Milford Sound curls twenty-two kilometers inland, like a

dropped boot. Its heel points north, kicking at the belly of South

Island. The Tasman Sea fills the boot, slippery and cold and

dark. Abel Tasman, the first European to set foot on shore,

sailed away in a hurry again after several of his crew were

cooked and eaten. He left behind him Breaksea, Doubtful and

George Sounds, and Milford Sound, which is now accessible by

sea, by air, by foot across the Milford Track, or along the Mil-

ford Road by car, through Homer Tunnel.

In winter, the road is sometimes closed by avalanches. In sum-

mer there are sometimes unseasonable storms. Even blizzards,

sometimes. Was it winter or was it summer? There was snow on

the ground. Jasper's tooth hurt. He didn't remember.

The Milford Hotel is a tall white colonial building. It has a ver-

anda for warm weather use in December. From the front bed-

rooms, guests look out on the Mitre, rising up from the Sound

1,695 meters, thin and pointed, doubled in the looking-glass

water below. At the back of the hotel, lesser mountains march

down to a flat broad meadow. The Milford Road ends at the

hotel's front door; the Milford Track begins at the back door.

What happens when you get to the end of the world? So-

metimes you find a party. This party has been going on for a

long time. There is music, lights, people drinking and dancing.

Strange things happen at these parties. It is the end of the

world, after all.

There is a small guest parking lot behind the Milford Hotel.

To Jasper's dismay, it was nearly full when they pulled in. As

they got out of the car they could hear a band playing jazz. Two

windows stood open on the veranda and they could see into an

enormous room. There was a crowd of people, some dancing,

some sitting and eating at small tables. Someone was singing,

"I'd, like to get you, on a, slow boat, to China," in a low croony 120

alto. They could hear wine glasses being tapped against each

other, knives skittering across plates—all this through the two

French doors that stood open to the veranda, to Jasper and Ser-

ena as they stood there, and to the Milford Track.

Jasper's tooth, his whole body, burned in the fresh cold air. He

looked doubtfully at Serena, at her uncombed spit-curled tails

of hair, parted haphazardly over the new livid bruise. Her jeans

had holes in them. He was wearing his college fraternity sweat-

shirt with a cartoon of two dogs fucking on it. His tennis shoes

were covered in gray caked mud and his knees were still wet.

"Serena," he said, "They're having a party."

"Well, that's what I said," Serena said. "Come on. I love parties like this. Everything's always so fancy. Cocktails and little napkins and weird shit on toothpicks."

Inside, the women wore elegant dresses. The men wore din-

ner jackets. They were probably wearing cummerbunds.

Jasper's tooth ached.

Serena turned and made a face at him. "Come on," she hissed.

"Serena," he said. "Wait for a second. Let's find another door.

" The farther she moved away from him—the closer to the ver-

anda she got—the more the weight of the tunnel fell back on

him. His tooth was

twanging wildly now, like a dowser's rod. He ran after her.

A tall man met them in the open window. The man was all in

black. He had a hairy face. "Here you are," the man said. His clothes were old-fashioned, the collar of his shirt narrow and

starched. He smiled at them as if they were long-lost acquaint-

ances. His lips in the black beard were red, as if he were wear-

ing lipstick.

"You were expecting us?" Jasper said.

"Of course," the man said, still smiling. "The young lady was most insistent we make room for you both when she called."

Serena said, looking slyly at Jasper, "You do have a room avail-

able."

"We made arrangements," the man said. "But you must come in out of this weather. My name is Mr. Donner."

"I'm Serena Silkert, and this is Jasper Todd," Serena said. Mr.

Donner held out his hand. It was neither warm nor cold and his

grasp was not too firm nor too limp, but Jasper jerked his own

hand away as if he had touched a live coal, or an eel. Mr. Don-

121

ner smiled at him and took Serena's hand, leading her into the

hotel.

They came into the room full of people. At that instant the

music broke off. The dancers turned and stared at Jasper and

Serena. A woman laughed as pages of sheet music lifted off the

musicians' stands and came drifting and scuttering across the

floor.

The room was longer than it was wide, with two enormous

fireplaces set into the wall that faced the windows. From the

fireplaces came a gnawing noise; gradually other small noises

sprang up among the tables as the diners collected the

scattered sheets of music. There were chandeliers and candles

on the tables and the wind passing down the room caused the

lights to flicker and dim. Between the greasy yellow light of the

candles and the chandeliers, faces seemed to float like white

masks. A man stumbled against Jasper. He smiled. His teeth

were filed down to sharp points and Jasper flinched away. All

the people that he saw had ruddy glowing cheeks and shining

eyes—Why, Grandmother, what big eyes you have! The firelight

elongated and warped their shadows, draped like tails across

the floor.

"What kind of convention is this?" Jasper said as Serena said,

"You're American, aren't you, Mr. Donner?"

"Yes," he said. He looked at them, his eyes lingering on Serena's forehead. "First thing, why don't you go freshen up? We've put you upstairs in Room 43. The key is in the door," he said

almost apologetically, giving them a photocopied sheet of direc-

tions. "I'm afraid the hotel is a bit of a maze. Just keep turning left when you go up the stairs. Try not to get lost."

Jasper followed Serena through a nest of staircases and cor-

ridors. Sometimes they passed through doors which led to more

stairs. From the outside, the hotel had not seemed this large

or twisty. Serena walked purposefully, consulting the map, and

Jasper stumbled after her, afraid that if they were separated, he

would never find his way up or back down again to the dining

room. Little drifts of plaster fallen from the ceiling lay upon the

faded red carpet. Serena muttered under her breath, navigat-

ing. They went left, left, and left again.

Jasper, following Serena, had a sudden familiar feeling. He

was following his grandmother, her beehive hairdo looming

122

ahead of him. They were somewhere, he didn't know where.

He was a small child. He fell further and further behind, and

suddenly she turned around—her face—Serena put her head

around the corner of a hall. "Hurry up," she said. "I have to pee."

At last they came to a hallway where none of the doors had

numbers. They passed a door where inside someone paced back

and forth, breathing loudly. Their own footsteps sounded sly to

Jasper, and the person behind the door sucked in air with a hiss

as they went by. Jasper pictured the occupant, ear against the

door, listening carefully, putting eye to spyhole, peeking out.

The last door on the corridor had a tarnished key in the lock.

The door was small and narrow, and Jasper stooped to enter.

The ceiling sloped toward the floor, and beneath the white bol-

sters and comforter, the double bed sank in the middle like

a collapsed wedding cake. It smelled fusty and damp. Jasper

threw his pack down. "Did you see that man's teeth?" he asked.

"Mr. Donner? Teeth?" she said. "How is your tooth?"

"There was a man down the hall," he said. "He was breathing."

Serena pushed at his shoulders. "Lie down for a minute," she said. "You haven't eaten all day, have you?"

"This is a strange place." He sat on the bed. He lay down and his feet hung over the mattress.

"It's a foreign country," she said, and pulled her sweater over her head. Underneath, she was naked. A thick pink line of scar

ran down under her collarbone. There was a faint mark on her

breast as if someone had bitten her.

"I did that," he said.

"Mmm," Serena said. "You did. Maybe you broke your tooth on me."

"You have a scar," he said. He had traced his finger along the line of that scar, and she had exhaled slowly and smiled and

said, "Warmer, you're getting warmer." He had bitten her experimentally, to see what she tasted like, to make his own small im-

permanent mark on her.

"That? I thought you were too polite to ask. That was a fire.

My father's house burned down. I had to break a window to get

out and I landed on the glass."

"Oh, sorry." He reached out a finger to trace that line again, to see if they ended up in the same place again, but she was standing too far away. He was too far away, lying on the bed.

123

"Don't be," she said. "First I took all the money out of the hiding place under the sink. Always look under the mattress,

and under the sink." She pulled something velvety and stretchy

out of the pack, held it up against her body. "Are you going to

change into something clean?"

"These are my cleanest pants," Jasper said. But he took a

woolly sweater out of his bag and put it on. He lay on the bed

looking at her. As usual, she looked utterly at home, even in this

strange place. He tried to think of Serena in her home, her real

home in Pittsburgh. A house was burning down. She sat, do-

mesticated and tame, nestled on a burning couch, watching a

burning television, the kitten on her lap all made of flames. She

was holding a map, he saw, a book of maps. The fire was erasing

the roads, the continents, all of the essential information. Now

they would never get home again. He tried opening his mouth

as far as he could.

Serena pulled at his feet and he sat up and fumbled the bottle

of aspirin out of his pocket. He poured a heap into his hand and

swallowed them one by one.

The other thing from his pocket was the envelope with his

tooth in it. Serena took it away from him. She stuck her finger

in a corner, and ripped the envelope open. She held the tiny bit

of tooth in her palm for a minute and then popped it into her

mouth.

"Yuck!" he said, "Why did you do that?" But at the same time he was almost flattered.

"Tasty," Serena said. "Like candy corn. Yum. Go on down," she said. "You take the map. Don't wait for me—I never get lost. I'm going to have a quick shower." She left the bathroom door open.

In the hallway, he studied the map, his ears pricked, listening

for the occupant of the room down the hall. He heard only

music, very faint. In the end he followed the music down the

many staircases to the dining room. All the way down, just be-

hind his eyelids, he could see the thing from the road running

alongside him, crouched and naked and anxious. It was burning.

Small, heatless flames licked along its back like fur and dripped

onto the carpet. His grandmother, somewhere behind him, was

sweeping up the flames into a dustpan. Someone should put

that dog out, she said. It isn't house-trained. Somewhere up-

stairs a door opened and slammed shut and then opened again.

124

In the dining room a table had been newly laid for two and he

sat down with his back to the fireplace. At the front of the room

Mr. Donner was dancing with a stout woman in red.

The fire behind him traced black figures on the walls and

wavered over the faces of the diners around him. When he

looked at them, they looked away. But they had been looking at

him in the first place, he was certain. He wished that he'd taken

a bath or at least combed his hair.

The heat beat at his skull and the snap of the fire lulled him,

while the cold streaming in through the open doors stung his

eyes and plucked at his jaw. Half of him burned cold, the oth-

er half hot. He thought of going up to the tiny room again, to

wait until it was time to go to sleep. There would be the same

discomfort: the damp cool sheets and between them the sticky

warmth of Serena's body. Jasper thought of the white eyeless

walls and shuddered. It was preferable to sit here between the

fireplace and the open windows.

Framed in the window closest to him was a mountain, blunt

and crooked like a ground-down incisor. Halfway down its slope

he could see a procession of lights. He saw that others around

him were intently watching the mountain and the moving lights.

A waiter emerged from a service door beside the fireplace

and began arranging another table. He set seven places and si-

lently disappeared again. Jasper looked back towards the moun-

tain. His tongue went up to touch his tooth. He counted the

lights on the mountain. The musicians sawed at their instru-

ments furiously and on the dance floor the dancers moved faster

and faster, picking up their feet and slamming them back down,

spinning like flames.

Serena came into the ballroom. She was wearing the stretchy

black dress and a pair of gaudy purple tights. She had washed

her hair, and applied makeup to the bruise on her forehead. Her

face was white and delicate as ivory, under a dusting of powder.

She was wearing the silly red lipstick. The better to kiss you, my

dear, someone said.

He stood up and went to her chair. "You look very beautiful,"

he said.

She let him seat her and said bluntly, "You look like shit. Does your tooth hurt? Will you be able to eat anything?"

"I don't know," he said. "But I'd like some wine."

125

She sat down next to Jasper, put her cool hand upon his fore-

head. "Poor kid," she said. "You're burning up."

Mr. Donner left the dance floor. He borrowed a chair from the

table set for seven, and sat down next to them. He was breath-

ing hard. Jasper thought he could almost see the breath leave

his mouth, like tiny licks of wet flame. "Is your room adequate?"

he said.

"Our room is fine," Serena said. She stretched her hands out across the tablecloth, towards Jasper. "What a nice hot fire!"

All the better to cook you, my dear, Jasper thought, and

touched his tooth again. He said, "Where did all these people

come from?"

"This is the first course," Mr. Donner said. Waiters put down bowls of thin pink broth and poured red wine into Serena and

Jasper's glasses.

"Some of us have come from very far away," Mr. Donner said.

"We meet every year. We meet to celebrate the triumph of the

human spirit in situations of great adversity. We are all trav-

elers, survivors of adventures, calamitous expeditions, of tra-

gedies. We are widows and orphans, the survivors of marriages

and shipwrecks. This is the 143rd Survivor's Ball."

"That's nice," Jasper said.

Serena squirmed in her seat. "You look so familiar," she said to Mr. Donner. "Have we met?"

"One meets so many people," Mr. Donner said. He took a sip

of wine. "We're expecting one more party. They're a little late."

"Is that why you keep the windows open?" Serena asked.

"We're hoping that they'll hear the band playing," Mr. Donner said. "Music raises the spirits considerably, I find. We hope that they'll find their way back down the trail without further incident.

"You're talking about the lost hikers, right?" Serena said.

"There were twenty-three hikers," Jasper said. "They've only set seven places."

Mr. Donner shrugged. "Do try your soup, Mr. Todd."

Jasper took a small sip of the soup. It was warm and salty

and as he swallowed, it burned. "I'm starving," Serena said. She showed them her empty bowl. "Jasper's tooth broke, but he's

afraid to go see a dentist."

126

"It's fine," Jasper said. "I'll wait until we get back to Auckland." He had a very clear picture of a dentist in Auckland, who would be a kind man with a well-kept moustache. A gentle man

with small knowledgeable hands, who believed in using gas. Or

maybe the tooth would grow back.

The second course was a fatty cut of brown meat. There was

a little dish of green jelly and carrots cooked with brown sugar.

Steam rose up to Jasper's nose, thick and sweet. He diced up a

carrot and ate it with his spoon. "I'm not really that hungry," he said.

"After dinner," Mr. Donner said, "we sit and tell stories in front of the fire. I do hope you like stories."

"Ghost stories!" Serena said. "It's just like Girl Scout Camp. I used to love the campfires."

Jasper's wineglass was full again. He didn't remember drink-

ing the last glass. The better to drink you, my dear, his tooth

said. He still had a sense of wrongness, an instinct that the

proper thing to do would be to leave or perhaps just go up to

bed. But that would mean the tunnel again, or the small coffin-

like room with its sad, sagging bed. He took another sip of wine

to fortify himself. The band was playing a new song. The song

sounded familiar. It might have been "Autumn Leaves." It might have been a hymn.

"Have the two of you been traveling together long?" Mr. Donner asked.

"Oh no," Serena said. "We met three days ago in a bar in Queenstown. We're traveling around the world in opposite directions. I fly to Hawaii next Tuesday and then I'm supposed to

go home again. This is just Jasper's second stop."

"Maybe I'll come back home with you," Jasper said.

"Don't be silly," she said, but under the table her foot moved up his calf, nudged in between his legs in a friendly way. "I'm

trying to keep as far away from home as possible, for as long as

possible. Not that I have a home any longer. It burned down."

"How sad," Mr. Donner said, smiling.

"Not really," Serena said primly. "I'm the one who burned it down, but I don't like to talk about that."

Jasper looked across the table at the girl he had met in a bar.

She didn't look like a girl who would burn down her house. He

wasn't really sure what girls who burned down houses looked

127

like. What was the name of the lipstick color? That had been the

silly thing, something like Berry Me, or Red Death, or maybe

Red Delicious. Maybe Firetruck.

"See?" Serena said. "Do you still want to go home with me?"

Under the table, her hand ran up and down his leg, pinching

lightly. "Jasper isn't the sort who travels purposefully," she said to Mr. Donner. "He isn't the sort who's purposeful, or smart, or careful about the kinds of women in bars he picks up in bars, for

that matter. You've got to be careful," she said, turning to Jasper for a moment, "about picking up girls in bars, good grief, what

if I'd turned out to be weird, or something? But he isn't careful.

He's lucky instead. For example, he won his trip by filling out a

form in a travel agency."

"You are a fortunate young man," Mr. Donner said.

There was just a small smear of mint jelly on Serena's plate.

"When he told me in the bar how he'd won, I thought it was

just a great pick-up line," she said. "The tie-breaking question was Why do you want to go around the world? And he

wrote, Because you can't go through it. Isn't that ridiculous?"

"It's true," Jasper said. He was careful to enunciate. "Sad but true."

Serena smiled at him. "I shouldn't complain, though. It's great

traveling with Jasper. He gave me a plastic dinosaur. A stego-

saurus. Thanks, Jasper," she said.

"Don't mention it," said Jasper. He wanted to say something, to explain that travel was important to him, that someday, he

knew, if he traveled long enough he would eventually come to

a wonderful—a magical—place. His toothache was almost gone,

just the smallest twinge very far away. Practically in another

country. Some place that he had been stuck in for a while. He

looked past Serena, to the French window. The torches were

now at the base of the trail. They swung back and forth, lighting

up the great trunk of a kauri tree, a growth of ferns on the lawn

before the hotel.

"Look," said Mr. Donner, "here they come. Just in time for dessert."

The whole room rose from their chairs, applauding. Five men

and two women came into the room. They stopped just past the

threshold as if uncertain of their welcome. They looked long-

ingly at the fireplaces, at the empty plates piled up on dirty

128

tables, but they did not move. Instead the crowd swept towards

them.

"Excuse me," Serena said. She got up and went with the

others. Jasper watched her recede: the black hair fallen down

around her shoulders again, a tail tucked into her painted

mouth, the long legs in the purple tights. Waiters were going

back and forth between the tables extinguishing candles. Jasper

watched as they pinched the small flames between their fingers.

Soon the only light would be the red light of the fireplaces; the

bulbs of the chandeliers were faint as starlight, guttering to

blackness.

At the opposite end of the room, near the windows, he could

no longer see Serena or the hikers. The crowd was clotted and

indistinct in the dim light. It moved slowly across the dance

floor, pouring through the window like the massy shadow of the

black mountain. Sitting by the dance floor was a single cellist.

He had put his instrument down, and was cramming balls of

sheet music into his mouth. He chewed them slowly, his hands

pulling the white pages out of the air around him as if they were

alive. The wind blew out the chandeliers, but Jasper could still

see the musician, his mouth and eyes wet and horrible. "Where

are the other hikers?"

Mr. Donner was biting savagely at his thumb, frowning down

at the table. "Sometimes people do unthinkable things, in order

to come home safely," he said. "Impossible things, wonderful things. And afterwards, do you think they go home? No. You

find it's much, much better to keep on traveling. Hard to stop,

really."

The French doors had shut—the hikers were cut off from the

trail and the mountain, should they wish to go back. The fire be-

hind Jasper was flickering low, casting out more shadow than

warmth, and yet the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter.

His tooth no longer hurt. The wine and the warmth were

pleasant. "I can tell you're a good man, Mr. Donner. Otherwise

my tooth would warn me. I've never had a toothache like this be-

fore. I've never been to a place like this before. I've never been

to a party like this before. But your name, it's familiar. My tooth

says your name is familiar."

The crowd was moving back across the dance floor, towards

them, towards the table set with seven places, but he couldn't

129

see Serena. She had been completely swallowed up. The cellist

had finished his music, and like a magician, he lifted the bow of

his instrument, lowered it into his wide unhappy mouth.

"Perhaps you recognize it," said the bearded man. "But on the other hand, what's a name, hmm? After a while names are just

souvenirs. Places you've been. Let me introduce you to some of

my friends." He waved towards the approaching crowd. "Mrs.

Gomorrah over there, Mr. Belly of the Whale, Ms. Titanic, Little

Miss Through the Looking-Glass, Mr. and Mrs. Really Bad Mar-

riage, Mr. Over The Falls in a Wooden Barrel."

Off in the distance Jasper could hear a wolf howling. Which

was strange. What had Serena said? It was all marsupials here.

The plaintive noise reverberated in his tooth.

The bearded man was practically gnashing his teeth, smiling

ferociously. "I have seen snow and I have been hungry, and I

have seen nothing in my travels that is so bad as not living. I

propose a toast, Mr. Todd."

They both raised their glasses. "To travel," one said.

"To life," said the other.

—Some are leaving this fall for Texas, and more are go-

ing in the spring to California and Oregon. For my part I

have no desire to go anywhere. I am far enough west

now and do believe some people might go west until they

have been around the world and never find a place to

stop.

Elvira Power Hynes, March 1852

130

Shoe and Marriage

1. The glass slipper.

He never found the girl, but he still goes out, looking for her.

His wife—the woman he married—she has the most beautiful

smile. But her feet are too big.

This girl looks at him, but she doesn't smile. She's wearing

too much makeup. Blue eyeliner put on like house paint, lip-

stick, mascara, sexy glitter dusted all over her face and bare

shoulders. If he touched her, it would come off on his fingers,

fine and gritty and sad. He doesn't touch her. The other women

in the house, they've probably told her things. Maybe she re-

cognizes him. These women are paid to be discreet, but once,

afterwards, a woman asked him for his autograph. He tried to

think of something appropriate to write. She didn't have a piece

of paper, so instead he wrote on the back of a takeout menu. He

wrote, I am a happy man. I love my wife very much. He under-

lined happy.

They stand awkwardly in this girl's tiny room. The room is too

small and the bed is too big. They stand as far from the bed as

possible, crowded up against the wall. On the wall are posters

of celebrities, pictures that this girl has cut out from newspa-

pers and fashion magazines. The people in these pictures are

glossy like horses. They look expensive. He sees his wife with

her beautiful smile, looking down at them from the wall. If he

were to look carefully he would probably find himself on the

wall as well, looking comfortable and already too much at home

here. He doesn't look at the wall. He looks at this girl's feet.

#

He was never a very good dancer. What he loved were the wo-

men in their long wide skirts. When they danced, the heavy taf-

feta and silk hitched up and belled out and then you saw their

petticoats. More silk, more taffeta—as if underneath that's all

they were, silk and taffeta. Their shoes left thin gritty smears

along the marble floor.

He never saw what kind of shoes they were wearing. Only

hers. Perhaps they were all wearing slippers made of glass. Per-

haps glass slippers were fashionable at the time. Her feet must

have been so small. And she was a tall girl, too. She leaned

against his arms, and he hovered over her for a minute. He

131

could smell her hair. It was stacked up on top of her head, all

pinned up in some sort of wavy knot, just there beneath his

nose. It tickled his nose. It smelled warm. He was so happy. He

must have had the silliest smile on his face. Her dress went all

the way down to the floor. There were diamonds on the hem,

which was silk. The dress made a silky slithery scratchy noise

against the floor, like tiny tails and claws. It sounded like mice.

So these are the two things he still wonders about. What's

under those skirts? Those other people dancing—were they as

happy as he was?

In the garden, the clock struck twelve and she went—when

she went, where did she go? He never found that girl. He finds

other girls.

(These girls) this girl (they don't wear) she isn't wearing

enough clothes. Tangerine-colored see-through shirt; short skirt

ripped all the way up the thigh; flesh—fat breasts squashed to-

gether in a black brassiere, goose-pimpled arms, long stalky

legs balanced on these two tiny feet—he finds the body ex-

tremely distracting. "First of all," he says to her, "let's have a look in your closet."

In these closets there is always the right sort of dress. This

dress is not the sort of dress one expects to find in a closet

in this sort of house. It is prom dress-y—flouncy, lacy, long and

demure. It's pink. This girl, he thinks, ran away from home on

her tiny feet, with a backpack on her back, with these things in

it: posters of her favorite rock stars, her prom dress. And the

stuffed tiger with real glass eyes that he sees now, on top of the

red velveteen bedspread. "What's your name?"

The girl folds her arms across her breasts defensively. She

has realized that they are not the point after all. Her arms are

freckled and also, he sees, bruised, as if someone has been

holding her but not carefully enough. "Emily," she says. "Emily Apple."

"Emily," he says, "why don't you put on this dress?"

When he was a little boy it was always one of two things. He

was petted and pampered and made much of, or he was ignored

and left to his own devices. When he was alone what he liked

best was to sit under things. He liked to hide in plain sight, to

be in the middle of all the people. He sat under the piano in

the music room. At banquets he slid down his enormous chair

132

and sat under the table with his father's dogs. They licked at

his face and arms with long thoughtful tongues. He hid in the

fireplaces in the great hall, behind the wrought iron screens. In

the summer there were sparrows up in the chimneys, also liz-

ards, spiderwebs, broken sooty bits of shell, feathers and bones

caught in the grates. The ladies-in-waiting stood dozing in the

thin dusty sunlight of his mother's rooms, and he crept under

their heavy skirts and sat at their spangled feet, quiet as a

mouse.

He helps Emily Apple slide the beautiful pink dress over her

head. He buttons the row of buttons up her narrow back. He

lifts her hair up, heaps it up and sticks pins all through the

sticky teased mass. She sits perfectly still on the bed, the glass

eyes of the tiger looking out at her from the folds of her skirt.

He brings water in a basin and washes her face. He powders

her face. He finds a locket in a heap of bangles and safety pins.

Inside is a photograph of a young girl, maybe Emily Apple, or

maybe not. The little girl stares at him. What kind of a girl do

you think I am?He fastens the locket around Emily Apple's long

neck. Her face is very naked, very beautiful. Her freckles stand

out like spatters of soot on a white sheet. She looks as if she is

going to a funeral or to a wedding. They find a pair of gloves and

pull them up over her freckled arms. Her fingers stick out where

mice have eaten the tips of the gloves, but the dress comes all

the way down to the floor. They both feel more comfortable now.

Sometimes it surprises him, all these runaway girls—all these

women—with their sad faces and their tiny feet. How long has

this house been here? When he was looking for that girl, he

went to a lot of houses. He knocked on the front doors. He

announced who he was. These were eligible girls from good

homes. They had maids. He asked the maids if they would try

on the shoes, too. At night he dreamed about women's feet. But

this house, he never came here.

He has been married for nine years. Perhaps this is the sort of

house that only married men can find.

That girl, where did she go? He's still looking for her. He

doesn't expect to find her, but he finds other girls. He loves his

wife, but her feet are too big. It wasn't what he expected—his

life, it isn't at all what he expected. His wife isn't the one that

he was looking for. She was a surprise—he burst out laughing,

133

the glass slipper hanging off her toes. She laughed and soot fell

out of her hair. He loves her and she loves him, but that girl,

he only danced with her one time before the clock struck mid-

night, and then she left her shoe behind. He was supposed to

find it. He was supposed to find her. He never found her, but

these girls—this girl, Emily Apple—the other girls in their tiny

rooms: the woman downstairs knew exactly the sort of girl he

was looking for. In one of these closets, he thinks, maybe there

is (perhaps there is) a glass slipper, the match for the one in his

pocket.

#

Some nights when he comes home, he's carrying the

orphaned shoe in his coat pocket. It fits just fine. That's how

small, how impossibly small it is. His wife smiles at him. She

never asks where he's been. She sits in the kitchen beside the

fire, with her feet tucked up under her, and he lays his head

down in her lap. If only her feet weren't so big. When he was

first looking for that girl, he got to lift up a lot of skirts. Only just so high. Really, not high enough. He knelt down and he tried the

shoe on every single foot. But it never fit right and he always

went away again with the shoe in his pocket.

His wife wasn't one of the eligible girls. She was a kitchen

maid. When he saw her, she had her head stuck up the kitchen

chimney. She was beating the broom up the chimney, shaking

out the soot. Head to foot, she was covered in soot, black as a

beetle. When she sneezed, the soot rose up in a cloud. She tried

to curtsey when she saw him, and soot fell off her like a black

cloak.

Everyone had crowded into the kitchen behind him: his foot-

men, the lady of the house, her daughters, the other maids.

One of the footmen read the proclamation, and the sooty girl

sneezed again. The eligible young ladies looked sulky and the

maids looked haughty, as if they knew what was going to hap-

pen. They didn't like it one bit, but they weren't one bit sur-

prised. The kitchen girl dusted off a kitchen stool and she sat

her sooty self down on it, sooty arms akimbo. The long pre-

hensile toes of her bare black feet gripped the stone floor as

he knelt down beside her. Her foot was warm and gritty in his

hand and her long toes wriggled as if he was tickling her. He

hung the glass slipper off her toes. Soot came off on his fingers.

134

There was soot in the long folds of her skirt. He stayed there for

a minute, kneeling in the warm ashes at her feet.

"What size shoe do you wear?" he said. Her feet were so big.

"What kind of girl do you think I am?" she said. She sounded as if she were scolding him. When he looked up her face was so

beautiful.

#

This girl sits perfectly still on the bed. There is just room

enough for him to kneel down beside the bed. He lifts up her

skirt, just high enough. He cups her tiny foot in his hand. How

could anyone's foot be so small? It fits into the palm of his hand

like a kitten or an egg. He wishes he were that small, like a

shoe. He wishes he were a small, perfect shoe, that he could

be matched to her foot and hidden under her skirt forever. He

takes out the slipper and he slides it onto her foot. They both

look down at her foot, beautiful in the glass slipper, and the girl

sighs. "It fits just fine," she says. When he doesn't say anything, she says, "What do we do now?"

"What kind of girl do you think I am?" that sooty girl (his wife) said.

He says to the girl on the bed, "Take the shoe off. So we can

put it on again."

2. Miss Kansas on Judgment Day.

We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite.

We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These

words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could

live on it. We have been happily marooned—honey ma-

rooned—on this bed for days. I have a pair of socks on and

you've put your underwear on backwards. I mean, it's my under-

wear, which you've put on backwards. This is perfectly natural.

Everything I have is yours now. My underwear is your under-

wear. We have made vows to this effect. Our underwear looks so

cute on you.

I lean towards you. Marriage has affected the laws of gravity.

We will now revolve around each other. You will exert gravity on

me, and I will exert gravity on you. We are one another's moons.

You are holding onto my feet with both hands, as if otherwise

you might fall right off the bed. I think I might float up and hit

the ceiling, splat, if you let go. Please don't let go.

135

How did we meet? When did we marry? Where are we, and

how did we get here? One day, we think, we will have children.

They will ask us these questions. We will make things up. We

will tell them about this hotel. Our room overlooks the ocean.

We have a balcony, although we have not made it that far, so far.

Where are we and how did we get here? We are so far away

from home. This bed might as well be a foreign country. We are

both a little bit homesick, although we have not confessed this

to each other. We remember cutting the cake. We poured punch

for each other, we linked our arms and drank out of each others'

glasses. What was in that punch?

We are the only honeymooners in this hotel. Everyone else is

a beauty pageant contestant or a beauty pageant contestant's

chaperone. We have seen the chaperones in the halls, women

armed with cans of hairspray and little eggs containing emer-

gency pantyhose, looking harassed but utterly competent.

Through the walls, we have heard the beauty pageant contest-

ants talking in their sleep. We have held water glasses up to the

walls in order to hear what they were saying.

As honeymooners, we are good luck tokens. As if our happi-

ness, our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a

light: they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair

off our clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room—not of-

ten—two or three are sure to be lurking just outside our door.

But today—tonight—we have the hotel to ourselves.

The television is on, or maybe we are dreaming. Now that we

are married, we will have the same dreams. We are watching

(dreaming) the beauty pageant.

On television, Miss Florida is walking across the stage. She's

blond and we know from eavesdropping in the hotel bar that

this will count against her. Brunettes win more often. Three

brunettes, Miss Hawaii, Miss Arkansas, Miss Pennsylvania, trail

after her. They take big slow steps and roll their hips expertly.

The colored stage lights bounce off their shiny sweetheart

dresses. In television interviews, we learned that Miss Arkansas

is dyslexic, or maybe it was Miss Arizona. We have hopes of Miss

Arkansas, who has long straight brown hair that falls all the way

down her back.

You say that if we hadn't just gotten married, you would want

to marry Miss Arkansas. Even if she can't spell. She can sit on

136

her hair. A lover could climb that hair like a gym rope. It's fairy-

tale hair, Rapunzel hair. We saw her practicing for the pageant

in the hotel ballroom with two wild pigs, her hair braided into

two lassoes. We heard her say in her interview that she hasn't

cut her hair since she was twelve years old. We can tell that

she's an old-fashioned girl. Please don't let go of my feet.

We have to admit that we are impressed by Miss

Pennsylvania's dress. In her interview, we found out that she

makes all of her own clothes. This dress has over forty thousand

tiny sequins handstitched onto it. It took a year and a day to

stitch on all those sequins, which are supposed to look from a

distance like that painting by Seurat. Sunday Afternoon on the

Boardwalk. It really is a work of art. Her mother and her fath-

er helped Miss Pennsylvania sort the sequins by color. She has

three younger brothers, football players, and they all helped,

too. We imagine the pinprick sequins glittering in the large

hands of her brothers. Her brothers are in the audience tonight,

looking extremely proud of their sister, Miss Pennsylvania.

We are proud of Miss Pennsylvania as well, but we are fickle.

Miss Kansas comes out onto the stage, and we fall in love with

her feet. Don't let go of my feet. We would both marry Miss Kan-

sas. You squeeze my foot so tight when she comes out on stage

in her blue checked dress, the blue ribbon in her hair. She's

wearing blue ankle socks and ruby red shoes. She practically

skips across the stage. She doesn't look to the right, and she

doesn't look to the left. She looks as if she is going somewhere.

When Miss Kansas leaves the stage we instantly wish that she

would come back again.

I wish I had a pair of shoes like that, you say. I say your feet

are too big. But if I had a pair like that, I would let you wear

them. Now that we are married, our feet will be the same size.

We are proud of Miss Pennsylvania, we love Miss Kansas, and

we are afraid of Miss New Jersey. Miss New Jersey's red hair

has been teased straight up into two horns. She has long red fin-

gernails and she is wearing a candy red dress that comes up to

her nipples. You can see that she isn't wearing pantyhose. Miss

New Jersey hasn't even shaved her legs. What was her chaper-

one thinking? (We have heard rumors in the hall that Miss New

Jersey ate her chaperone. Certainly no one has seen the chaper-

137

one in a few days.) When she smiles, you can see all her pointy

teeth.

Miss New Jersey's complexion is greenish. She has small

pointy breasts and a big ass and she twitches it from side to

side. She has a tail. She twitches her ass, she lashes her tail;

we both gasp. Her tail is prehensile. She scratches her big ass

with it. It is indecent and we are simultaneously dismayed and

aroused. The whole audience is aghast. One judge faints and

one of the other judges douses him with a pitcher of ice water.

Miss New Jersey purses her lips, blows a raspberry right at the

television screen, and exits stage left.

Well, well, we say, shaken. We huddle together on the enorm-

ous bed. Please don't let go, please hold onto my feet.

#

Some of the other contestants: Miss Idaho wants to work with

children. Miss Colorado raises sheep. She can shear a sheep in

just under a minute. The dress she is wearing is of wool she cut

and carded and knit herself. The pattern is her own. This wool

dress is so fine, so thin, that it seems to us that Miss Colorado

is not actually wearing anything at all. In fact, Miss Colorado is

actually a man. We can see Miss Colorado's penis. But possibly

this is just a trick of the light.

Miss Nevada has been abducted by aliens on numerous oc-

casions. The stage spotlights appear to make her extremely

nervous, and occasionally she addresses her interviewer as Star

Master. Miss Alabama has built her own nuclear device. She has

a list of demands. Miss South Carolina wants to pursue a career

in Hollywood. Miss North Carolina can kiss her own elbow. We

try to kiss our own elbows, but it's a lot harder than it looks on

television. Please hold me tight, I think I'm falling.

Miss Virginia and Miss Michigan are Siamese twins. Miss

Maryland wants to be in Broadway musicals. Miss Montana is

an arsonist. She is in love with fire. Miss Texas is a professional

hit woman. She performs exorcisms on the side. She says that

she is keeping her eye on Miss New Jersey.

#

Miss Kansas wants to be a weather girl.

#

Miss Rhode Island has big hair, all tendrilly looking and slicky-

sleek. The top part of her jiggles as she wheels herself on stage

138

in an extremely battered-looking wheelchair. She just has the

two arms, but she seems to have too many legs. Also too many

teeth. We have seen her practicing water ballet in the hotel

swimming pool. (Later, during the talent show, she will perform

in a tank made of specially treated glass.) We have to admit Miss

Rhode Island has talent but we have trouble saying her name.

Too many sibilants. Also, at breakfast her breath smells of raw

fish and at night the hoarse mutterings of spells, incantations,

the names of the elder gods heard through the wall have caused

us to lose sleep.

Miss Rhode Island's bathing costume is designed to show off

her many shapely legs, which she waves and writhes at the

judges enticingly. We decide that we will never, never live in

Rhode Island. Perhaps we will never leave this hotel: perhaps

we will just live here.

We ogle some of the contestants in their bathing suits. We try

not to look at others. We have made a sort of tent out of the bed-

spread and we feel perfectly safe inside our tent-bedspread. As

long as you are holding onto me. Don't let go.

#

There are five judges. One of them, a former Miss America

herself, is wearing a tiara, all her hair tucked away under a

snood. She is very regal but her mouth is not kind. In her hand

is a mirror, which she consults now and then in the scoring, re-

applying her lipstick vigorously. Now and then she whispers, I'll

get you, my pretty!

One of the other judges is an old drunk. We saw him down

on the boardwalk outside the hotel lobby, wearing a sandwich

board and preaching to the waves. He was getting his feet wet.

His sandwich board says the end of the world is nigh. Beneath

this someone has written in lipstick lions and tigers and bears,

oh migh!

Two of the judges are holding hands under the table.

The last judge is notoriously publicity-shy, although great and

powerful. A semi-transparent green curtain has been erected

around his chair. We speculate that he is naked, or asleep, or

possibly not there at all.

#

The talent show begins. There are all the usual sorts of per-

formances, tap-dancing and mime, snake handling. Miss West

139

Virginia speaks in tongues. Somehow we understand what she

is saying. She is saying that the world will end soon, that we will

have six children and all of them will have good teeth, that we

will always be as happy as we are at this very moment as long

as we don't let go. Don't let go. Miss Texas then comes out on

stage and showily exorcises Miss West Virginia. The audience

applauds uncertainly.

Miss Nebraska comes out on stage and does a few card tricks.

Then she saws Miss Michigan and Miss Virginia in half.

Miss Montana builds her own pyre out of cinnamon and other

household spices. She constructs a diving platform out of tooth-

picks and sugar cubes, held together with hairspray. She stands

upon it for a moment, splendid and unafraid. Then she spreads

her wings and jumps. Firemen stand on either side of the stage,

ready to put her out. She emerges from the fire, new and pink

and shining, even more beautiful than before. The firemen carry

her out on their broad capable shoulders. T

he million-gallon tank is filled before our eyes during a music-

al interlude. We make out, frisky as teenagers. This way we are

feeling, we will always feel this way. We will always be holding

each other in just this way. When we look at the television again,

Miss Oregon is walking on water. We feel sure that this is done

with mirrors.

Miss Rhode Island performs her water ballet, a tribute to Es-

ther Williams, only with more legs. She can hold her breath for

a really long time. The first row of the audience has been issued

raincoats and umbrellas. Miss Rhode Island douses them like

candles. During the climax of her performance there is a brief

unexplained rain of frogs. Miss Texas appears on stage again.

#

I loved you the first time I saw you. Scarecrow, my dear scare-

crow, I loved you best of all. Who would have predicted that we

would end up here in this hotel? It feels like the beginning of the

world. This time, we tell each other, things are going to go ex-

actly as planned. We have avoided the apple in the compliment-

ary fruit basket. When the snake curled around the showerhead

spoke to me, I called room service and Miss Ohio, the snake

handler, came and took it away. When you are holding me, I

don't feel homesick at all.

#

140

Miss Alaska raises the dead. This will later prove to have ser-

ious repercussions, but the judges have made a decision and

Miss Texas is not allowed on the stage again. It is felt that she

has been too pushy, too eager to make a spectacle of herself.

She has lost points with the judges and with the audience.

You ask me to put on my wedding dress. You make me a crown

out of the champagne foil and that little paper thing that goes

around the toilet seat. We sit on the edge of the huge bed, my

feet in your lap, your feet dangling dangerously. If only we had

a pair of magic slippers. You have your tuxedo jacket on, and my

underwear. Your underwear. We should have packed more un-

derwear. What if we never get home again? You have one arm

wrapped around my neck so tight I can hardly breathe. I can

smell myself on your fingers.

Where will we go from here? How will we find our way home

again? We should have carried stones in our pockets. Perhaps

we will live here forever, in the honey month, on the honeymoon

bed. We will live like kings and queens and eat room service

every night and grow old together.

On television, stagehands have replaced the water tank with

a trampoline. We wouldn't mind having a trampoline like that.

Miss Kansas appears, her hair in two pigtails, her red shoes

making our hearts ache. She isn't wearing a stitch of clothing

otherwise. She doesn't need to wear anything else. She places

her two hands on the frame of the trampoline and swings her-

self straight up so that she is standing upside down on the

frame, her two braids pointing down, her shoes pointing

straight up. She clicks her heels together smartly and flips onto

the trampoline. As she soars through the air, plump breasts and

buttocks bouncing, her arms wheeling in the air, she is starting

to sing. Her strong homely voice pushes her through the air, her

strong legs kicking at the tough skin of the trampoline as if she

never intends to land.

We know we recognize this song.

We bounce on the edge of the bed experimentally. Tears run

down our faces. The judges are weeping openly. That song

sounds so familiar. Did they play it at our wedding? Miss Kansas

rolls through the air, tucks her knees under her arms and drops

like a stone, she springs up again and doesn't come back down,

the air buoying her up the same way that you are holding

141

me—naked as a jaybird, she hangs balanced in the air, the ter-

rible, noisy, bonecracking air: we hold on tight to each other.

The wind is rising. If you were to let go—don't let go—

3. The dictator's wife.

The dictator's wife lives in the shoe museum. During visiting

hours she lies in bed downstairs with the rest of the exhibits.

When you come in, you can't see her but you can hear her. She

is talking about her husband. "He loved to eat strawberries. I

don't care to eat strawberries. They taste like dead people to

me. I'd rather drink soup made from a stone. We ate off the most

beautiful plates every night. I don't know who they belonged to.

I just kept track of the shoes."

The museum is a maze of cases. Visitors wander through

narrow aisles, elbows tucked in to bodies, so they don't brush

against the glass displays. They drift towards the center of the

exhibit room, towards the voice of the old lady, until they come

upon a bed. Glass boxes stacked up in tall rows hedge in the bed

on all sides. In the boxes are pairs of shoes. In the bed is the

dictator's wife, covers pulled up to her chin. Visitors stop and

stare at the dictator's wife.

She stares back, old and fragile and crumbly. It is disconcert-

ing, to be stared at by this old woman. In proper museums, you

go to stare at the exhibits. They do not stare back at you. The

dictator's wife is wrinkly like one of those dogs. She's wearing a

black wig that's too small for her head. Her false teeth are in a

souvenir glass beside the bed. She puts her teeth in.

The dictator's wife will stare at visitors' shoes until the visit-

ors look down too, wondering if a shoelace has come untied.

#

Another old lady—but not quite as old—lets visitors in. On

Tuesdays she dusts cases with an old silk dress. "Admission free today," she said. "Stay as long as you like."

#

"My shoes," the dictator's wife says to a visitor who has

stopped to stare at her. She says this the way some people

say, My children. She's got an accent, or maybe her teeth don't

fit so well. "People don't think about shoes as much as they

should. What happens to your shoes when you die? When you're

dead, what do you need with shoes? Where are you planning to

go?"

142

The dictator's wife says, "Every time my husband had

someone killed, I went to that person's family and asked for a

pair of their shoes. Sometimes there wasn't anyone to ask. My

husband was a very suspicious man."

Now and then her right hand disappears up under her wig

as if she's looking for something up there. "A family sits down

to breakfast. The wife might say something about the weather.

Someone might happen to walk by and hear the wife say

something about the weather. Then soldiers would come along,

and the soldiers would take them, husband, wife, children,

away. They would be given shovels. They would dig an enorm-

ous hole, there would be other people digging other holes. Then

the soldiers would line them up, fathers, mothers, children, and

shoot them.

"In this country you think talking about the weather is safe

but it isn't. Neither is breakfast. I gave soldiers bribes. They

brought me the shoes of the people they shot. Eventually there

were so many pits full of dead people in our country that you

couldn't lay out a vegetable garden without digging someone

up. It was a small country but dead people take up a lot of space.

I had special closets made for all the shoes.

"Sometimes I dream about those dead people. They never say

anything. They just stand there barefoot and look at me."

Under the covers, the dictator's wife looks like an arrange-

ment of cups and bones, knives and sticks. The visitor can't tell

if she's wearing shoes or not. Visitors don't like to think of the

dictator's wife's shoes, shiny and black as coffins, hiding under

the sheets. The visitor might not want to think of the dictator's

wife's cold bare feet either. And that bed—who knows what's un-

der it? Dead people, lined up in pairs like bedroom slippers.

The dictator's wife says, "When I married him I was fifteen."

The dictator's wife says:

I was considered to be the most beautiful girl in the country

(remember, it was not a big country). My pictures were in all the

papers. My parents wanted me to marry an older man who had

a large estate. This man had bad teeth but his eyes were kind. I

thought he would make a good husband, so I said yes. My dress

was so beautiful. Nuns made the lace. The train was twelve feet

long and I had two dozen girls from good families to hold it in

143

the air behind me as we walked up the aisle. The dressmaker

said that I looked like a movie star or a saint.

On my wedding day, the dictator saw me riding in my father's

car. He followed me to the church and he offered me a choice.

The dictator said that he had fallen in love with me. He said

that I could marry him instead or else he would have my fianc?

shot.

The dictator had not been in power for very long. There had

been rumors. No one believed them. My fianc? said that the dic-

tator should go outside with him and they would talk like men,

or else they could fight. But the dictator nodded to one of his

soldiers and they dragged my fianc? outside and they shot him.

Then the dictator said that I could marry him or he would

shoot my father. My father was an influential man. I think he be-

lieved that the dictator wouldn't dare shoot him. But they took

him outside and they shot him just outside the church door, al-

though I was begging them not to.

Then my mother said that he would have to shoot her as well

because she didn't plan on living any longer. She was shaking.

The dictator looked very disappointed. She was not being reas-

onable. She looked at me as they led her out, but she didn't say

anything. One shoe fell off. They didn't stop to let her pick it up.

I had twin brothers, a year older than me. When the soldiers

took my mother, my brothers ran after them. The soldiers shot

them as they ran through the door. I thought that next the dic-

tator would have me taken outside, but my sister Effie began to

sob. All the bridesmaids were crying as well. Effie said that she

didn't want to die and that she didn't want me to die either. She

was very young. So I said I would marry the dictator.

The soldiers escorted us outside. At the door, the dictator bent

over. He picked up my mother's shoe and gave it to me, as if it

were a love token. A souvenir.

The next day Effie and I buried my parents and my brothers

and my fiance. We washed their bodies and we dressed them.

We put them in good sturdy coffins and buried them, but we

buried them barefoot. I took my parents' shoes and my fianc?'s

shoes to the dictator's house for my trousseau, but I gave Effie

to an aunt to look after.

#

144

Underneath the messy wig, the face of the dictator's wife

looks like the face of an evil old man and—just for a minute—the

visitor may think that it isn't the dictator's wife at all, lying there in the old woman's bed, but the dictator himself, disguised in an

old dirty wig.

"I was too beautiful," the dictator's wife says. "I killed a lot of men. The dictator killed anyone—men, women—who stared

at me too long. He killed women because he heard someone

say that they were more beautiful than his wife. He killed my

hairdresser because I told my hairdresser to cut off all my hair.

I didn't want people to stare at me. I thought if I had no hair, no

one would stare at me because I was beautiful."

The dictator's wife says, "My hair never grew back. I wore

dead women's hair, made into wigs by dead wigmakers. I had

closets full of dead people's shoes. I went and sat in my closets

sometimes. I tried on shoes."

She says, "I used to think all the time about killing him. But

it was difficult. There were children who sat at the table with

us and tasted his food. Every night before I went to bed, his

soldiers searched me. He slept in a bulletproof vest. He had a

charm made for him by witches. I was young. I was afraid of

him.

"I never slept alone with him—I thought for a long time that

that was how a marriage was, a man and his wife in a room

with a bodyguard to watch what they did. When the dictator fell

asleep, the bodyguard stayed awake. He stood beside the bed to

watch me. It used to make me feel safe. I didn't really want to

be in a room alone with the dictator.

"I don't know why he killed people. He had bad dreams. A

fortune-teller used to come to the dictator's house to explain his

dreams to him. They would be alone for hours. Then I would go

in, to tell her my dreams. He would stand just outside the room

listening to my dreams. I could smell him standing there.

"I never dreamed about the dictator. I had the most wonderful

dreams. I was married. My husband was kind and handsome.

We lived in a little house. We fought about little things. What

we would name our children. Whose turn it was to make dinner.

Whether I was as beautiful as a movie star.

"Once we had an argument and I threw the kettle at him. I

missed. I burned my hand. After that, whenever I was dreaming,

145

I had a scar on my hand. A burn. In dreams my husband used to

kiss it."

The dictator's wife says, "The fortune-teller never said any-

thing when I told her my dreams. But she got skinnier and skin-

nier. I think it was a bad diet, the dictator's dreams and his

wife's dreams, like eating stones.

"I dreamed I got fat from having children. Every night my

dream was like the most wonderful story that I was telling to

myself. I would fall asleep in the same bed as the dictator. The

guard would be looking down at us, and all night I would dream

about my house and my husband and my children.

"Here's the weird thing," the dictator's wife says. "In my dream, all our children were shoes. I only ever gave birth to

shoes."

The visitor may agree that this is strange. In dreams the vis-

itor's children are always younger than they really are. You can

pick them up in one hand, all of them, like pebbles. In the rain,

or in bathwater, they become transparent, only their outlines

faintly visible.

"My life was weird," the dictator's wife says. "Why wouldn't my dreams be? But I loved those children. They were good children. They cried sometimes at night, just like real babies. So-

metimes they cried so hard I woke up. I would wake up and not

know where I was, until I looked up and saw the dictator's body-

guard looking back down at me. Then I could go back to sleep."

She says, "One night, the dictator had a dream. I don't know

what. He tossed and turned all night. When he woke up, he had

the fortune-teller brought to him. It was early in the morning.

The sun wasn't up yet. I went and hid in my closets. He told the

fortune-teller something. I don't know what. Then his soldiers

came and got her and I could hear them dragging her away,

down the stairs, out into the garden. They shot her, and in a

little while I went out to the garden and pulled off her shoes. I

was happy for her."

"I never asked him why he killed her or why he killed anybody.

When we were married, I never asked him a question. I was like

the fortune-teller. I never said anything unless he asked me a

question. I never looked at his face. I used to stare at his shoes

instead. I think he thought I was staring at his shoes because

they weren't clean, or shiny enough. He would have them pol-

146

ished until I could see my face in them. He wore a size eight and

a half. I tried his shoes on once but they pinched the sides of my

feet. I have peasant's feet. His shoes were narrow as coffins."

Tears slide down the dictator's wife's face and she licks at

them. She says, "I had a daughter. Did I tell you that? The night before she was born, the dictator had another dream. He woke

up with a shout and grabbed my arm. He told me his dream. He

said that he had dreamed that our child would grow up and that

she would kill him."

She doesn't say anything for a while. Visitors may grow un-

comfortable, look away at the rows of shoes in glass boxes. The

bed and the dictator's wife are reflected in each pane of glass.

The dictator's wife says, "When my daughter was born, they put

her in a box. They threw the box in the harbor and the box sank.

I never gave her a name. She never wore any shoes. She was

bald just like me."

The dictator's wife is silent again. In the silence, the glass

boxes seem to buzz faintly. There is a smell as if someone is

standing nearby. All the people under the bed are listening. Far

away, the other old woman is humming as she dusts the cases.

At this point, the visitor asks, hesitantly, "So how did she grow up and kill the dictator?"

The dictator's wife says, "She was dead so she couldn't. One

day the dictator was picking strawberries in his garden. He

stepped on a piece of metal. It went right though his shoe. The

dictator's foot got infected. He went to his bed, and he died

there six days later."

The dictator's wife's voice gets scratchy and small. She

yawns. "Nobody knew what to do. Some people thought I should

be executed. Other people thought that I was a heroine. They

wanted to elect me to office. I didn't want to be dead yet and I

didn't want to stay there, so I packed up the shoes. I packed up

every single shoe. I went to my aunt and she packed up Effie's

things. Effie had gotten so tall! She was walking around outside

without a hat on, as if sunlight wouldn't hurt her. We didn't re-

cognize each other. We got on a ship and went as far away as

we could. That was here. I had ninety-four steamer trunks and

there wasn't anything in them but shoes."

The dictator's wife stops talking. She stares greedily at the

visitor, as if the visitor is delicious. She looks as if she would

147

like to eat the visitor up. She looks as if she would like to eat

the visitor up in one bite, spit out the visitor's shoes like peach

stones. The visitor can hear Effie coming down the aisle, but the

dictator's wife doesn't say another word. She just lies there on

the bed with her teeth out again, in the glass beside the bed.

Effie motions for the visitor to follow her. Each case has a

name printed on a tiny card. You can't see over the top of the

stacked cases, but you can see through them. Light has collec-

ted in the boxes and the glass is warm.

Effie says, "Here. These shoes belonged to a famous opera

singer."

The opera singer's shoes have tall green heels. They have

ivory buttons up the side. The visitor looks down at Effie's

feet. She is wearing wooden sandals—Dr. Scholl's—with thick

red leather buckles. Her toenails are red. They match the red

buckles. When she sees the visitor looking, she bends over. She

turns a small key in the side of the shoe. Red wheels pop out

of the bottom of the Dr. Scholls. She turns the key in the other

shoe, and then she straightens up. Now she's quite tall.

She rubs a glass case with the dusty dress one more time, and

then raps it sharply. It rings like a bell. "Museum's closed now,"

she says to the visitor. "There's a three o'clock matinee with a happy ending. I want to see it." She skates off down the narrow

glass aisle, balanced precariously on her splendid shoes.

4. Happy ending.

The man and the woman are holding hands. They are getting

married soon. If you looked under the table, you'd see that they

aren't wearing any shoes. Their shoes are up on the table in-

stead. The fortune-teller says, "It's just luck that you found each other, you know. Most people aren't so lucky." She is staring

at the shoes—a pair of old black boots, a pair of canvas tennis

shoes—as if she has never seen such a splendid, such an amaz-

ing pair of shoes. No one has ever presented her with such a

pair of shoes. That's what the look on her face says.

"You're going to get a lot of nice wedding presents," she says.

"I don't want to spoil any surprises, but you'll get two coffee

makers. You should probably keep them both. You might break

one."

"What else?" says the man.

148

"You want to know if you'll have kids, right? Yeah, you'll have

kids, a couple of them. Smart kids. Smart grandkids too. Red-

heads. Do you garden?"

The man and woman look at each other. They shrug.

"Well, I see a garden," the fortune-teller says. "Yes, a garden, definitely. You'll grow roses. Roses and tomatoes. Moses supposes his toeses are roses. But Moses supposes erroneously. Do

you know that song? Squashes. Is that right?"

"Cole Porter. Squash," the man says. "Squash is the plural of squash."

"Okay," the fortune-teller says. "Squash, plural not singular, and tomatoes and roses. That's when you get older. What else

do you want to know?"

"We get old together?" the woman says.

"Well, looks like," the fortune-teller says, "um, it looks good to me. Yeah. You get old together. White hair and everything. You

grow things in the garden, your grandkids come over, you have

friends, they come over too. It's a party every night." She turns the boot over and studies the heel. "Huh."

"What?" the woman says.

"How you met. That's sweet. Look here." The fortune-teller

points to the worn-down tread. "It was a blind date. See what I

mean about luck?"

"You can see that in her shoe?" the man says.

"Yeah," the fortune-teller says. "Plain as anything. Just like the garden and the grandkids. Blind date, first kiss, hunh! The next

date, she invited you over for dinner. She washed the sheets

first. Do you want me to go on?"

"Where will we live?" the woman says. "Do we fight about money? Does he still snore when he gets old? His sense of humor—does he still tell the same dumb jokes?"

"Look," the fortune-teller says, "You'll have a good life. You don't want all the details, do you? Go home, make wedding

plans, get married. You should probably get married inside. I

think it might rain. I'm not good at weather. You'll be happy, I

promise. I'm good at the happy stuff. It's what I see best. You

want to know about snoring, or breast cancer, or mortgages, go

see the woman next door who reads tea leaves."

She says, "You'll get old together. You'll be comfortable to-

gether. I promise. Trust me. I can see you, then, the two of you,

149

you'll be sitting in your garden. There's dirt under your finger-

nails. You're drinking lemonade. I can't tell if it's homemade or

not, but it's perfect. Not too sweet. You're remembering I told

you this. Remember I told you this. How lucky you were, to find

each other! You'll be comfortable together, like an old pair of

shoes."

150

Most of my Friends Are Two-Thirds Water

"Okay, Joe. As I was saying, our Martian women are

gonna be blond, because, see, just because."

— RAY BRADBURY, "The Concrete Mixer"

A few years ago, Jack dropped the C from his name and be-

came Jak. He called me up at breakfast one morning to tell

me this. He said he was frying bacon for breakfast and that all

his roommates were away. He said that he was walking around

stark naked. He could have been telling the truth, I don't know.

I could hear something spitting and hissing in the background

that could have been bacon, or maybe it was just static on the

line.

Jak keeps a journal in which he records the dreams he has

about making love to his ex-girlfriend Nikki, who looks like

Sandy Duncan. Nikki is now married to someone else. In the

most recent dream, Jak says, Nikki had a wooden leg. Sandy

Duncan has a glass eye in real life. Jak calls me up to tell me

this dream.

He calls to say that he is in love with the woman who does the

Braun coffee-maker commercial, the one with the short blond

hair, like Nikki, and eyes that are dreamy and a little too far

apart. He can't tell from the commercial if she has a wooden leg,

but he watches TV every night, in the hopes of seeing her again.

#

If I were blond, I could fall in love with Jak.

#

Jak calls me with the first line of a story. Most of my friends

are two-thirds water, he says, and I say that this doesn't surprise

me. He says, no, that this is the first line. There's a Philip K.

Dick novel, I tell him, that has a first line like that, but not ex-

actly and I can't remember the name of the novel. I am listening

to him while I clean out my father's refrigerator. The name of

the Philip K. Dick novel is Confessions of a Crap Artist, I tell Jak.

What novel, he says.

He says that he followed a woman home from the subway, ac-

cidentally. He says that he was sitting across from her on the

Number 1 uptown and he smiled at her. This is a bad thing to

do in New York when there isn't anyone else in the subway car,

151

traveling uptown past 116th Street, when it's one o'clock in the

morning, even when you're Asian and not much taller than she

is, even when she made eye contact first, which is what Jak says

she did. Anyway he smiled and she looked away. She got off at

the next stop, 125th, and so did he. 125th is his stop. She looked

back and when she saw him, her face changed and she began to

walk faster.

Was she blond, I ask, casually. I don't remember, Jak says.

They came up onto Broadway, Jak just a little behind her, and

then she looked back at him and crossed over to the east side.

He stayed on the west side so she wouldn't think he was follow-

ing her. She walked fast. He dawdled. She was about a block

ahead when he saw her cross at La Salle, towards him, towards

Claremont and Riverside, where Jak lives on the fifth floor of a

rundown brownstone. I used to live in this building before I left

school. Now I live in my father's garage. The woman on Broad-

way looked back and saw that Jak was still following her. She

walked faster. He says he walked even more slowly.

By the time he came to the corner market on Riverside, the

one that stays open all night long, he couldn't see her. So he

bought a pint of ice cream and some toilet paper. She was in

front of him at the counter, paying for a carton of skim milk and

a box of dish detergent. When she saw him, he thought she was

going to say something to the cashier but instead she picked up

her change and hurried out of the store.

Jak says that the lights on Claremont are always a little dim

and fizzy, and sounds are muffled, as if the street is under water.

In the summer, the air is heavier and darker at night, like water

on your skin. I say that I remember that. He says that up ahead

of him, the woman was flickering under the street light like a

light bulb. What do you mean, like a light bulb? I ask. I can hear

him shrug over the phone. She flickered, he says. I mean like a

light bulb. He says that she would turn back to look at him, and

then look away again. Her face was pale. It flickered.

By this point, he says, he wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't wor-

ried anymore. He felt almost as if they knew each other. It might

have been a game they were playing. He says that he wasn't

surprised when she stopped in front of his building and let her-

self in. She slammed the security door behind her and stood for

a moment, glaring at him through the glass. She looked exactly

152

the way Nikki looked, he says, when Nikki was still going out

with him, when she was angry at him for being late or for mis-

understanding something. The woman behind the glass pressed

her lips together and glared at Jak.

He says when he took his key out of his pocket, she turned and

ran up the stairs. She went up the first flight of stairs and then

he couldn't see her anymore. He went inside and took the elev-

ator up to the fifth floor. On the fifth floor, when he was getting

out, he says that the woman who looked like Nikki was slam-

ming shut the door of the apartment directly across from his

apartment. He heard the chain slide across the latch.

She lives across from you, I say. He says that he thinks she

just moved in. Nothing like meeting new neighbors, I say. In

the back of the refrigerator, behind wrinkled carrots and jars of

pickled onions and horseradish, I find a bottle of butterscotch

sauce. I didn't buy this, I tell Jak over the phone. Who bought

this? My father's diabetic. I know your father's diabetic, he says.

#

I've known Jak for seven years. Nikki has been married for

three months now. He was in Ankara on an archeological dig

when they broke up, only he didn't know they'd broken up until

he got back to New York. She called and told him that she was

engaged. She invited him to the wedding and then disinvited

him a few weeks later. I was invited to the wedding, too, but in-

stead I went to New York and spent the weekend with Jak. We

didn't sleep together.

Saturday night, which was when Nikki was supposed to be

getting married, we watched an episode of Baywatchin which

the actor David Hasselhoff almost marries the beautiful blond

lifeguard, but in the end doesn't, because he has to go save

some tourists whose fishing boat has caught fire. Then we

watched The Princess Bride. We drank a lot of Scotch and I

threw up in Jak's sink while he stood outside the bathroom door

and sang a song he had written about Nikki getting married.

When I wouldn't come out of the bathroom, he said good night

through the door.

I cleaned up the sink and brushed my teeth and went to sleep

on a lumpy foldout futon. I dreamed that I was in Nikki's bridal

party. Everyone was blond in my dream, the bridegroom, the

best man, the mother of the bride, the flower girl, everyone

153

looked like Sandy Duncan except for me. In the morning I got up

and drove my father's car back to Virginia, and my father's gar-

age, and Jak went to work at VideoArt, where he has a part-time

job which involves technical videos about beauty school, and the

Gulf War, and things like that. He mostly edits, but I once saw

his hands on a late night commercial, dialing the number for a

video calendar featuring exotic beauties. Women, not flowers. I

almost ordered the calendar. I haven't spoken to Nikki since be-

fore Jak went to Turkey and she got engaged.

#

When I first moved into my father's garage, I got a job at

the textile mill where my father has worked for the last twenty

years. I answered phones. I listened to men tell jokes about

blondes. I took home free packages of men's underwear. My

father and I pretended we didn't know each other. After a while,

I had all the men's underwear that I needed. I knew all the jokes

by heart. I told my father that I was going to take a sabbatical

from my sabbatical, just for a while. I was going to write a book.

I think that he was relieved.

#

Jak calls me up to ask me how my father is doing. My father

loves Jak. They write letters to each other a couple of times a

year, in which my father tells Jak how I am doing, and whom I

am dating. These tend to be very short letters. Jak sends art-

icles back to my father about religion, insects, foreign countries

where he has been digging things up. My father and Jak aren't

very much alike, at least I don't think so, but they like each oth-

er. Jak is the son that my father never had, the son-in-law he will

never have.

I ask Jak if he has run into his new neighbor, the blond one,

again, and there is a brief silence. He says, yeah, he has. She

knocked on his door a few days later, to borrow a cup of sugar.

That's original, I say. He says that she didn't seem to recognize

him and so he didn't bring it up. He says that he has noticed that

there seem to be an unusually high percentage of blond women

in his apartment building.

Let's run away to Las Vegas, I say, on impulse. He asks why

Las Vegas. We could get married, I say, and the next day we

could get divorced. I've always wanted an ex-husband, I tell him.

It would make my father very happy. He makes a counter-pro-

154

posal: we could go to New Orleans and not get married. I point

out that we've already done that. I say that maybe we should try

something new, but in the end we decide that he should come to

Charlottesville in May. I am going to give a reading.

#

My father would like Jak to marry me, but not necessarily in

Las Vegas.

#

The time that we went to New Orleans, we stayed awake all

night in the lobby of a hostel, playing Hearts with a girl from

Finland. Every time that Jak took a heart, no matter what was

in his hand, no matter whether or not someone else had already

taken a point, he'd try to shoot the moon. We could have done

it, I think, we could have fallen in love in New Orleans, but not

in front of the girl from Finland, who was blond.

A year later, Jak found an ad for tickets to Paris, ninety-nine

dollars round trip. This was while we were still in school. We

went for Valentine's Day because that was one of the conditions

of the pro-motional fare. Nikki was spending a semester in Scot-

land. She was studying mad cow disease. They were sort of not

seeing each other while she was away and in any case she was

away and so I went with Jak to Paris for Valentine's Day. Isn't it

romantic, I said, we're going to be in Paris on Valentine's Day.

Maybe we'll meet someone, Jak said.

#

I lied. We didn't go to Paris for Valentine's Day, although Jak

really did find the ad in the paper, and the tickets were really

only ninety-nine dollars round trip. We didn't go and he nev-

er asked me, and anyway Nikki came home later that month

and they got back together again. We did go to New Orleans,

though. I don't think I've made that up.

#

I realize there is a problem with Las Vegas, which is that there

are a lot of blond women there.

#

You are probably wondering why I am living in my father's

garage. My father is probably wondering why I am living in his

garage. It worries his neighbors.

#

155

Jak calls to tell me that he is quitting his job at VideoArt. He

has gotten some grant money, which will not only cover the rest

of the school year, but will also allow him to spend another sum-

mer in Turkey, digging things up. I tell him that I'm happy for

him. He says that a weird thing happened when he went to pick

up his last paycheck. He got into an elevator with seven blond

women who all looked like Sandy Duncan. They stopped talk-

ing when he got on and the elevator was so quiet he could hear

them all breathing. He says that they were all breathing in per-

fect unison. He says that all of their bosoms were rising and fall-

ing in unison like they had been running, like some sort of syn-

chronized Olympic breast event.

He says that they smelled wonderful—that the whole elevator

smelled wonderful—like a box of Lemon Fresh Joy soap deter-

gent. He got off on the thirtieth floor and they all stayed on the

elevator, although he was telepathically communicating with

them that they should all get off with him, that all seven of them

should spend the day with him, they could all go to the Central

Park Zoo, it would be wonderful.

But not a single one got off, although he thought they looked

wistful when he did. He stood in the hall and the elevator door

closed and he watched the numbers and the elevator finally

stopped on the forty-fifth floor, the top floor. After he picked

up his paycheck, he went up to the forty-fifth floor and this

is the strange thing, he says. He says that when the elevator

doors opened and he got out, the forty-fifth floor was completely

deserted. There was plastic up everywhere and drills and cans

of paint and bits of molding lying on the floor, like the whole

top floor was being renovated. A piece of the ceiling had been

removed and he could see the girders and the sky through the

girders. All the office doors were open and so he walked around,

but he says he didn't see anyone, anyone at all. So where did

the women go, he says. Maybe they were construction workers,

I say. They didn't smell like construction workers, he says.

#

If I say that some of my friends are two-thirds water, then you

will realize that some of my friends aren't, that some of them

are probably more and some are probably less than two-thirds,

that maybe some of them are two-thirds something besides wa-

ter, maybe some of them are two-thirds Lemon Fresh Joy. When

156

I say that some women are blondes, you will realize that I am

probably not. I am probably not in love with Jak.

#

I have been living in my father's garage for a year and a half.

My bed is surrounded by boxes of Christmas tree ornaments

(his) and boxes of college textbooks (mine). We are pretending

that I am writing a novel. I don't pay rent. The novel will be

dedicated to him. So far, I've finished the dedication page and

the first three chapters. Really, what I do is sleep late, until he

goes to work, and then I walk three miles downtown to the dol-

lar movie theater that used to be a porn theater, the used book-

store where I stand and read trashy romance novels in the aisle.

Sometimes I go to the coffeehouse where, in a few months, I am

supposed to give a reading. The owner is a friend of my fath-

er's and gives me coffee. I sit in the window and write letters. I

go home, I fix dinner for my father, and then sometimes I write.

Sometimes I watch TV. Sometimes I go out again. I go to bars

and play pool with men that I couldn't possibly bring home to

my father. Sometimes I bring them back to his garage instead. I

lure them home with promises of free underwear.

Jak calls me at three in the morning. He says that he has a ter-

rific idea for a sci-fi story. I say that I don't want to hear a sci-fi idea at three in the morning. Then he says that it isn't really a

story idea, that it's true. It happened to him and he has to tell

someone about it, so I say okay, tell me about it.

I lie in bed listening to Jak. There is a man lying beside me in

bed that I met in a bar a few hours ago. He has a stud in his

penis. This is kind of a disappointment, not that he has a stud

in his penis, but the stud itself. It's very small. It's not like an

earring. I had pictured something more baroque—a great big

gaudy clip-on like the ones that grandmothers wear—when he

told me about it in the bar. I made the man in my bed take the

stud out when we had sex, but he put it in again afterwards be-

cause otherwise the hole will close up. It was just three weeks

ago when he got his penis pierced and having sex at all was

probably not a good idea for either of us, although I don't even

have pierced ears. I noticed him in the bar immediately. He was

sitting gingerly, his legs far apart. When he got up to buy me

a beer, he walked as if walking was something that he had just

learned.

157

I can't remember his name. He is sleeping with his mouth

open, his hands curled around his penis, protecting it. The

sheets are twisted down around his ankles. I can't remember his

name but I think it started with a C.

Hold on a minute, I say to Jak. I untangle the phone cord as far

as I can, until I am on the driveway outside my father's garage,

closing the door gently behind me. My father never wakes up

when the phone rings in the middle of the night. He says he nev-

er wakes up. The man in my bed, whose name probably begins

with a C, is either still asleep or pretending to be. Outside the

asphalt is rough and damp under me. I'm naked, I tell Jak, it's

too hot to wear anything to sleep in. No you're not, Jak says. I'm

wearing blue and white striped pajamas bottoms but I lie again

and tell him that I am truly, actually not wearing clothes. Prove

it, he says. I ask how I'm supposed to prove over the phone that

I'm naked. Take my word for it, I just am. Then so am I, he says.

So what's your great idea for a sci-fi story, I ask. Blond women

are actually aliens, he says. All of them, I ask. Most of them,

Jak says. He says that all the ones that look like Sandy Duncan

are definitely aliens. I tell him that I'm not sure that this is such a great story idea. He says that it's not a story idea, that it's

true. He has proof. He tells me about the woman who lives in

the apartment across from him, the woman who looks like Nikki,

who looks like Sandy Duncan. The woman that he accidentally

followed home from the subway.

According to Jak, this woman invited him to come over for a

drink because a while ago he had lent her a cup of sugar. I say

that I remember the cup of sugar. According to Jak they sat on

her couch, which was deep and plush and smelled like Lemon

Fresh Joy, and they drank most of a bottle of Scotch. They talked

about graduate school—he says she said she was a second-year

student at the business school, she had a little bit of an ac-

cent, he says. She said she was from Luxembourg—and then she

kissed him. So he kissed her back for a while and then he stuck

his hand down under the elastic of her skirt. He says the first

thing he noticed was that she wasn't wearing any underwear.

He says the second thing he noticed was that she was smooth

down there like a Barbie doll. She didn't have a vagina.

I interrupt at this point and ask him what exactly he means

when he says this. Jak says he means exactly what he said,

158

which is that she didn't have a vagina. He says that her skin

was unusually warm, hot actually. She reached down and gently

pushed his hand away. He says that at this point he was a little

bit drunk and a little bit confused, but still not quite ready to

give up hope. He says that it had been so long since the last

time he slept with a woman, he thought maybe he'd forgotten

exactly what was where.

He says that the blond woman, whose name is either Cordelia

or Annamarie (he's forgotten which), then unzipped his pants,

pushed down his boxers, and took his penis in her mouth. I tell

him that I'm happy for him, but I'm more interested in the thing

he said about how she didn't have a vagina.

He says that he's pretty sure that they reproduce by partheno-

genesis. Who reproduce by parthenogenesis, I ask. Aliens, he

says, blond women. That's why there are so many of them.

That's why they all look alike. Don't they go to the bathroom,

I ask. He says he hasn't figured out that part yet. He says that

he's pretty sure that Nikki is now an alien, although she used to

be a human, back when they were going out. Are you sure, I say.

She had a vagina, he says.

I ask him why Nikki got married then, if she's an alien.

Camouflage, he says. I say that I hope her fianc?, her husband,

I mean, doesn't mind. Jak says that New York is full of blond

women who resemble Sandy Duncan and most of them are un-

doubtedly aliens, that this is some sort of invasion. After he

came in Chloe or Annamarie's mouth—probably neither name is

her real name, he says—he says that she said she hoped they

could see each other again and let him out of her apartment. So

what do the aliens want with you, I ask. I don't know, Jak says

and hangs up.

I try to call him back but he's left the phone off the hook. So

I go back inside and wake up the man in my bed and ask him

if he's ever made love to a blonde and if so did he notice any-

thing unusual about her vagina. He asks me if this is one of

those jokes and I say that I don't know. We try to have sex, but

it isn't working, so instead I open up a box of my father's Christ-

mas tree decorations. I take out tinsel and strings of light and

ornamental glass fruit. I hang the fruit off his fingers and toes

and tell him not to move. I drape the tinsel and lights around

his arms and legs and plug him in. He complains some but I tell

159

him to be quiet or my father will wake up. I tell him how beau-

tiful he looks, all lit up like a Christmas tree or a flying saucer.

I put his penis in my mouth and pretend that I am Courtney (or

Annamarie, or whatever her name is), that I am blond, that I am

an alien. The man whose name begins with a C doesn't seem to

notice.

I am falling asleep when the man says to me, I think I love

you. What time is it, I say. I think you better leave, before my

father wakes up. He says, but it's not even five o'clock yet. My

father wakes up early, I tell him.

He takes off the tinsel and the Christmas lights and the orna-

mental fruit. He gets dressed and we shake hands and I let him

out through the side door of the garage.

#

Some jokes about blondes. Why did the M&M factory fire the

blonde? Because she kept throwing away the Ws. Why did the

blonde stare at the bottle of orange juice? Because it said con-

centrate. A blonde and a brunette work in the same office, and

one day the brunette gets a bouquet of roses. Oh great, she

says, I guess this means I'm going to spend the weekend flat on

my back, with my legs up in the air. Why, says the blonde, don't

you have a vase?

#

I never find out the name of the man in my bed, the one with

the stud in his penis. Probably this is for the best. My reading

is coming up and I have to concentrate on that. All week I leave

messages on Jak's machine but he doesn't call me back. On the

day that I am supposed to go to the airport to pick him up, the

day before I am supposed to give a reading, although I haven't

written anything new for over a year, Jak finally calls me.

He says he's sorry but he's not going to be able to come to

Virginia after all. I ask him why not. He said that he got the

Carey bus at Grand Central, and that a blond woman sat next to

him. Let me guess, I say, she didn't have a vagina. He says he

has no idea if she had a vagina or not, that she just sat next to

him, reading a trashy romance by Catherine Cookson. I say that

I've never read Catherine Cookson, but I'm lying. I read a novel

by her once. It occurs to me that the act of reading Catherine

Cookson might conclusively prove that the woman either had a

vagina or that she didn't, that the blond woman who sat beside

160

Jak might have been an alien, or else incontrovertibly human,

but I'm not sure which. Really, I could make a case either way.

Jak says that the real problem was when the bus pulled into

the terminal at LaGuardia and he went to the check-in gate.

The woman behind the counter was blond, and so was every

single woman behind him in line, he tells me, when he turned

around. He says that he realized that what he had was a one-

way ticket to Sandy Duncan Land, that if he didn't turn around

and go straight back to Manhattan, that he was going to end up

on some planet populated by blond women with Barbie-smooth

crotches. He says that Manhattan may be suffering from some

sort of alien infestation, but he's coming to terms with that. He

says he can live with an apartment full of rats, in a building full

of women with no vaginas. He says that for the time being, it's

safest.

He says that when he got home, the woman in the apartment

on the fifth floor was looking through the keyhole. How do you

know, I say. He says that he could smell her standing next to the

door. The whole hallway was warm with the way she was star-

ing, that the whole hallway smelled like Lemon Fresh Joy. He

says that he's sorry that he can't come to Virginia for my read-

ing, but that's the way it is. He says that when he goes to Ank-

ara this summer, he might not be coming back. There aren't so

many blond women out there, he says.

#

When I give the reading, my father is there, and the owner of

the coffeehouse, and so are about three other people. I read a

story I wrote a few years ago about a boy who learns how to fly.

It doesn't make him happy. Afterwards my father tells me that

I sure have a strange imagination. This is what he always says.

His friend tells me that I have a nice clear reading voice, that

I enunciate very well. I tell her that I've been working on my

enunciation. She says that she likes my hair this color.

#

I think about calling Jak and telling him that I am thinking of

dyeing my hair. I think about telling him that this might not even

be necessary, that when I wake up in the mornings, I am find-

ing blond hairs on my pillow. If I called him and told him this,

I might be making it up; I might be telling the truth. Before I

call him, I am waiting to see what happens next. I am sitting

161

here on my father's living-room couch, which smells like Lemon

Fresh Joy, watching a commercial in which someone's hands are

dialing the number for a video calendar of exotic beauties. I am

eating butterscotch out of the jar. I am waiting for the phone to

ring.

162

Louise's Ghost

Two women and a small child meet in a restaurant. The restaur-

ant is nice—there are windows everywhere. The women have

been here before. It's all that light that makes the food taste so

good. The small child—a girl dressed all in green, hairy green

sweater, green T-shirt, green corduroys and dirty sneakers with

green-black laces—sniffs. She's a small child but she has a big

nose. She might be smelling the food that people are eating. She

might be smelling the warm light that lies on top of everything.

None of her greens match except of course they are all green.

"Louise," one woman says to the other.

"Louise," the other woman says.

They kiss.

The maitre d' comes up to them. He says to the first woman,

"Louise, how nice to see you. And look at Anna! You're so big.

Last time I saw you, you were so small. This small." He holds his index finger and his thumb together as if pinching salt. He looks

at the other woman.

Louise says, "This is my friend, Louise. My best friend. Since

Girl Scout camp. Louise."

The maitre d' smiles. "Yes, Louise. Of course. How could I for-

get?"

#

Louise sits across from Louise. Anna sits between them. She

has a notebook full of green paper, and a green crayon. She's

drawing something, only it's difficult to see what, exactly.

Maybe it's a house.

Louise says, "Sorry about you know who. Teacher's day. The

sitter canceled at the last minute. And I had such a lot to tell

you, too! About you know, number eight. Oh boy, I think I'm in

love. Well, not in love."

She is sitting opposite a window, and all that rich soft light

falls on her. She looks creamy with happiness, as if she's carved

out of butter. The light loves Louise, the other Louise thinks. Of

course it loves Louise. Who doesn't?

#

This is one thing about Louise. She doesn't like to sleep alone.

She says that her bed is too big. There's too much space. She

needs someone to roll up against, or she just rolls around all

163

night. Some mornings she wakes up on the floor. Mostly she

wakes up with other people.

When Anna was younger, she slept in the same bed as Louise.

But now she has her own room, her own bed. Her walls are

painted green. Her sheets are green. Green sheets of paper with

green drawings are hung up on the wall. There's a green teddy

bear on the green bed and a green duck. She has a green light

in a green shade. Louise has been in that room. She helped

Louise paint it. She wore sunglasses while she painted. This

passion for greenness, Louise thinks, this longing for everything

to be a variation on a theme, it might be hereditary. This is the

second thing about Louise. Louise likes cellists. For about four

years, she has been sleeping with a cellist. Not the same cellist.

Different cellists. Not all at once, of course. Consecutive cellists.

Number eight is Louise's newest cellist. Numbers one through

seven were cellists as well, although Anna's father was not. That

was before the cellists. BC. In any case, according to Louise,

cellists generally have low sperm counts.

Louise meets Louise for lunch every week. They go to nice

restaurants. Louise knows all the maitre d's. Louise tells Louise

about the cellists. Cellists are mysterious. Louise hasn't figured

them out yet. It's something about the way they sit, with their

legs open and their arms curled around, all hunched over their

cellos. She says they look solid but inviting. Like a door. It opens

and you walk in.

Doors are sexy. Wood is sexy, and bows strung with real hair.

Also cellos don't have spit valves. Louise says that spit valves

aren't sexy.

Louise is in public relations. She's a fundraiser for the sym-

phony—she's good at what she does. It's hard to say no to

Louise. She takes rich people out to dinner. She knows what

kinds of wine they like to drink. She plans charity auctions and

masquerades. She brings sponsors to the symphony to sit on

stage and watch rehearsals. She takes the cellists home after-

wards.

Louise looks a little bit like a cello herself. She's brown and

curvy and tall. She has a long neck and her shiny hair stays

pinned up during the day. Louise thinks that the cellists must

take it down at night—Louise's hair—slowly, happily, gently.

At camp Louise used to brush Louise's hair.

164

Louise isn't perfect. Louise would never claim that her friend

was perfect. Louise is a bit bow-legged and she has tiny little

feet. She wears long, tight silky skirts. Never pants, never any-

thing floral. She has a way of turning her head to look at you,

very slowly. It doesn't matter that she's bowlegged.

The cellists want to sleep with Louise because she wants them

to. The cellists don't fall in love with her, because Louise doesn't

want them to fall in love with her. Louise always gets what she

wants.

Louise doesn't know what she wants. Louise doesn't want to

want things.

Louise and Louise have been friends since Girl Scout camp.

How old were they? Too young to be away from home for so

long. They were so small that some of their teeth weren't there

yet. They were so young they wet the bed out of homesick-

ness. Loneliness. Louise slept in the bunk bed above Louise.

Girl Scout camp smelled like pee. Summer camp is how Louise

knows Louise is bowlegged. At summer camp they wore each

other's clothes.

Here is something else about Louise, a secret. Louise is the

only one who knows. Not even the cellists know. Not even Anna.

Louise is tone deaf. Louise likes to watch Louise at concerts.

She has this way of looking at the musicians. Her eyes get

wide and she doesn't blink. There's this smile on her face as if

she's being introduced to someone whose name she didn't quite

catch. Louise thinks that's really why Louise ends up sleeping

with them, with the cellists. It's because she doesn't know what

else they're good for. Louise hates for things to go to waste.

#

A woman comes to their table to take their order. Louise or-

ders the grilled chicken and a house salad and Louise orders

salmon with lemon butter. The woman asks Anna what she

would like. Anna looks at her mother.

Louise says, "She'll eat anything as long as it's green. Broccoli is good. Peas, lima beans, iceberg lettuce. Lime sherbet. Bread

rolls. Mashed potatoes."

The woman looks down at Anna. "I'll see what we can do," she says.

Anna says, "Potatoes aren't green."

Louise says, "Wait and see."

165

Louise says, "If I had a kid—"

Louise says, "But you don't have a kid." She doesn't say this meanly. Louise is never mean, although sometimes she is not

kind.

Louise and Anna glare at each other. They've never liked each

other. They are polite in front of Louise. It is humiliating, Louise

thinks, to hate someone so much younger. The child of a friend.

I should feel sorry for her instead. She doesn't have a father.

And soon enough, she'll grow up. Breasts. Zits. Boys. She'll see

old pictures of herself and be embarrassed. She's short and she

dresses like a Keebler Elf. She can't even read yet!

Louise says, "In any case, it's easier than the last thing. When she only ate dog food."

Anna says, "When I was a dog —"

Louise says, hating herself. "You were never a dog."

Anna says, "How do you know?"

Louise says, "I was there when you were born. When your

mother was pregnant. I've known you since you were this big."

She pinches her fingers together, the way the maitre d' pinched

his, only harder.

Anna says, "It was before that. When I was a dog."

Louise says, "Stop fighting, you two. Louise, when Anna was a

dog, that was when you were away. In Paris. Remember?"

"Right," Louise says. "When Anna was a dog, I was in Paris."

Louise is a travel agent. She organizes package tours for seni-

or citizens. Trips for old women. To Las Vegas, Rome, Belize,

cruises to the Caribbean. She travels frequently herself and

stays in three-star hotels. She tries to imagine herself as an old

woman. What she would want.

Most of these women's husbands are in care or dead or living

with younger women. The old women sleep two to a room. They

like hotels with buffet lunches and saunas, clean pillows that

smell good, chocolates on the pillows, firm mattresses. Louise

can see herself wanting these things. Sometimes Louise ima-

gines being old, waking up in the mornings, in unfamiliar coun-

tries, strange weather, foreign beds. Louise asleep in the bed

beside her.

Last night Louise woke up. It was three in the morning. There

was a man lying on the floor beside the bed. He was naked.

He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes open, his

166

mouth open, nothing coming out. He was bald. He had no eye-

lashes, no hair on his arms or legs. He was large, not fat but

solid. Yes, he was solid. It was hard to tell how old he was. It

was dark, but Louise doesn't think he was circumcised. "What

are you doing here?" she said loudly.

The man wasn't there anymore. She turned on the lights.

She looked under the bed. She found him in her bathroom,

above the bathtub, flattened up against the ceiling, staring

down, his hands and feet pressed along the ceiling, his penis

drooping down, apparently the only part of him that obeyed the

laws of gravity. He seemed smaller now. Deflated. She wasn't

frightened. She was angry.

"What are you doing?" she said. He didn't answer. Fine, she thought. She went to the kitchen to get a broom. When she

came back, he was gone. She looked under the bed again, but

he was really gone this time. She looked in every room, checked

to make sure that the front door was locked. It was.

Her arms creeped. She was freezing. She filled up her hot wa-

ter bottle and got in bed. She left the light on and fell asleep sit-

ting up. When she woke up in the morning, it might have been

a dream, except she was holding the broom.

#

The woman brings their food. Anna gets a little dish of peas,

brussel sprouts, and collard greens. Mashed potatoes and

bread. The plate is green. Louise takes a vial of green food col-

oring out of her purse. She adds three drops to the mashed

potatoes. "Stir it," she tells Anna.

Anna stirs the mashed potatoes until they are a waxy green.

Louise mixes more green food coloring into a pat of butter and

spreads it on the dinner roll.

"When I was a dog," Anna says, "I lived in a house with a swimming pool. And there was a tree in the living room. It grew

right through the ceiling. I slept in the tree. But I wasn't allowed

to swim in the pool. I was too hairy."

"I have a ghost," Louise says. She wasn't sure that she was going to say this. But if Anna can reminisce about her former

life as a dog, then surely she, Louise, is allowed to mention her

ghost. "I think it's a ghost. It was in my bedroom."

Anna says, "When I was a dog I bit ghosts."

167

Louise says, "Anna, be quiet for a minute. Eat your green food

before it gets cold. Louise, what do you mean? I thought you had

ladybugs."

"That was a while ago," Louise says. Last month she woke

up because people were whispering in the corners of her room.

Dead leaves were crawling on her face. The walls of her bed-

room were alive. They heaved and dripped red. "What?" she

said, and a ladybug walked into her mouth, bitter like soap.

The floor crackled when she walked on it, like red cellophane.

She opened up her windows. She swept ladybugs out with her

broom. She vacuumed them up. More flew in the windows,

down the chimney. She moved out for three days. When she

came back, the ladybugs were gone—mostly gone—she still

finds them tucked into her shoes, in the folds of her underwear,

in her cereal bowls and her wine glasses and between the pages

of her books.

Before that it was moths. Before the moths, an opossum. It

shat on her bed and hissed at her when she cornered it in the

pantry. She called an animal shelter and a man wearing a den-

im jacket and heavy gloves came and shot it with a tranquilizer

dart. The opossum sneezed and shut its eyes. The man picked it

up by the tail. He posed like that for a moment. Maybe she was

supposed to take a picture. Man with possum. She sniffed. He

wasn't married. All she smelled was possum.

"How did it get in here?" Louise said.

"How long have you been living here?" the man asked. Boxes

of Louise's dishes and books were still stacked up against the

walls of the rooms downstairs. She still hadn't put the legs on

her mother's dining room table. It lay flat on its back on the

floor, amputated.

"Two months," Louise said.

"Well, he's probably been living here longer than that," the man from the shelter said. He cradled the possum like a baby.

"In the walls or the attic. Maybe in the chimney. Santa claws.

Huh." He laughed at his own joke. "Get it?"

"Get that thing out of my house," Louise said.

"Your house!" the man said. He held out the opossum to her, as if she might want to reconsider. "You know what he thought?

He thought this was his house."

"It's my house now," Louise said.

168

#

Louise says, "A ghost? Louise, it is someone you know? Is your

mother okay?"

"My mother?" Louise says. "It wasn't my mother. It was a naked man. I'd never seen him before in my life."

"How naked?" Anna says. "A little naked or a lot?"

"None of your beeswax," Louise says.

"Was it green?" Anna says.

"Maybe it was someone that you went out with in high

school," Louise says. "An old lover. Maybe they just killed themselves, or were in a horrible car accident. Was he covered in

blood? Did he say anything? Maybe he wants to warn you about

something."

"He didn't say anything," Louise says, "And then he vanished.

First he got smaller and then he vanished."

Louise shivers and then so does Louise. For the first time she

feels frightened. The ghost of a naked man was levitating in her

bathtub. He could be anywhere. Maybe while she was sleeping,

he was floating above her bed. Right above her nose, watching

her sleep. She'll have to sleep with the broom from now on.

"Maybe he won't come back," Louise says, and Louise nods.

What if he does? Who can she call? The rude man with the heavy

gloves?

The woman comes to their table again. "Any dessert?" she

wants to know. "Coffee?"

"If you had a ghost," Louise says, "How would you get rid of it?"

Louise kicks Louise under the table.

The woman thinks for a minute. "I'd go see a psychiatrist," she says. "Get some kind of prescription. Coffee?"

But Anna has to go to her tumble class. She's learning how

to stand on her head. How to fall down and not be hurt. Louise

gets the woman to put the leftover mashed green potatoes in

a container, and she wraps up the dinner rolls in a napkin and

bundles them into her purse along with a few packets of sugar.

They walk out of the restaurant together, Louise first. Behind

her, Anna whispers something to Louise. "Louise?" Louise says.

"What?" Louise says, turning back.

"You need to walk behind me," Anna says. "You can't be first."

169

"Come back and talk to me," Louise says, patting the air. "Say thank you, Anna."

Anna doesn't say anything. She walks before them, slowly so

that they have to walk slowly as well.

"So what should I do?" Louise says.

"About the ghost? I don't know. Is he cute? Maybe he'll creep

in bed with you. Maybe he's your demon lover."

"Oh please," Louise says. "Yuck."

Louise says, "Sorry. You should call your mother."

"When I had the problem with the ladybugs," Louise says, "she said they would go away if I sang them that nursery rhyme.

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home."

"Well," Louise says, "they did go away, didn't they?"

"Not until I went away first," Louise says.

"Maybe it's someone who used to live in the house before you

moved in. Maybe he's buried under the floor of your bedroom or

in the wall or something."

"Just like the possum," Louise says. "Maybe it's Santa Claus."

#

Louise's mother lives in a retirement community two states

away. Louise cleaned out her mother's basement and garage,

put her mother's furniture in storage, sold her mother's house.

Her mother wanted this. She gave Louise the money from the

sale of the house so that Louise could buy her own house. But

she won't come visit Louise in her new house. She won't let

Louise send her on a package vacation. Sometimes she pretends

not to recognize Louise when Louise calls. Or maybe she really

doesn't recognize her. Maybe this is why Louise's clients travel.

Settle down in one place and you get lazy. You don't bother to

remember things like taking baths, or your daughter's name.

When you travel, everything's always new. If you don't speak

the language, it isn't a big deal. Nobody expects you to under-

stand everything they say. You can wear the same clothes every

day and the other travelers will be impressed with your careful

packing. When you wake up and you're not sure where you are.

There's a perfectly good reason for that.

"Hello, Mom," Louise says when her mother picks up the

phone.

"Who is this?" her mother says.

"Louise," Louise says.

170

"Oh yes," her mother says. "Louise, how nice to speak to you."

There is an awkward pause and then her mother says, "If

you're calling because it's your birthday, I'm sorry. I forgot."

"It isn't my birthday," Louise says. "Mom, remember the ladybugs?"

"Oh yes," her mother says. "You sent pictures. They were lovely."

"I have a ghost," Louise says, "and I was hoping that you would know how to get rid of it."

"A ghost!" her mother says. "It isn't your father, is it?"

"No!" Louise says. "This ghost doesn't have any clothes on, Mom. It's naked and I saw it for a minute and then it disappeared and then I saw it again in my bathtub. Well, sort of."

"Are you sure it's a ghost?" her mother says.

"Yes, positive." Louise says.

"And it isn't your father?"

"No, it's not Dad. It doesn't look like anyone I've ever seen before."

Her mother says, "Lucy—you don't know her—Mrs. Peterson's

husband died two nights ago. Is it a short fat man with an ugly

moustache? Dark-complected?"

"It isn't Mr. Peterson," Louise says.

"Have you asked what it wants?"

"Mom, I don't care what it wants," Louise says. "I just want it to go away."

"Well," her mother says. "Try hot water and salt. Scrub all the floors. You should polish them with lemon oil afterwards so they

don't get streaky. Wash the windows too. Wash all the bed linens

and beat all the rugs. And put the sheets back on the bed inside

out. And turn all your clothes on the hangers inside out. Clean

the bathroom."

"Inside out," Louise says.

"Inside out," her mother says. "Confuses them."

"I think it's pretty confused already. About clothes, anyway.

Are you sure this works?"

"Positive," her mother says. "We're always having supernatural infestations around here. Sometimes it gets hard to tell who's

alive and who's dead. If cleaning the house doesn't work, try

hanging garlic up on strings. Ghosts hate garlic. Or they like it.

171

It's either one or the other, love it, hate it. So what else is hap-

pening? When are you coming to visit?"

"I had lunch today with Louise," Louise says.

"Aren't you too old to have an imaginary friend?" her mother says.

"Mom, you know Louise. Remember? Girl Scouts? College?

She has the little girl, Anna? Louise?"

"Of course I remember Louise," her mother says. "My own daughter. You're a very rude person." She hangs up.

Salt, Louise thinks. Salt and hot water. She should write these

things down. Maybe she could send her mother a tape record-

er. She sits down on the kitchen floor and cries. That's one

kind of salt water. Then she scrubs floors, beats rugs, washes

her sheets and her blankets. She washes her clothes and hangs

them back up, inside out. While she works, the ghost lies half

under the bed, feet and genitalia pointed at her accusingly. She

scrubs around it. Him. It.

She is being squeamish, Louise thinks. Afraid to touch it. And

that makes her angry, so she picks up her broom. Pokes at the

fleshy thighs, and the ghost hisses under the bed like an angry

cat. She jumps back and then it isn't there anymore. But she

sleeps on the living room sofa. She keeps all the lights on in all

the rooms of the house.

#

"Well?" Louise says.

"It isn't gone," Louise says. She's just come home from work.

"I just don't know where it is. Maybe it's up in the attic. It might be standing behind me, for all I know, while I'm talking to you

on the phone and every time I turn around, it vanishes. Jumps

back in the mirror or wherever it is that it goes. You may hear

me scream. By the time you get here, it will be too late."

"Sweetie," Louise says. "I'm sure it can't hurt you."

"It hissed at me," Louise says.

"Did it just hiss, or did you do something first?" Louise says.

"Kettles hiss. It just means the water's boiling."

"What about snakes?" Louise says. "I'm thinking it's more like a snake than a pot of tea."

"You could ask a priest to exorcise it. If you were Catholic. Or you could go to the library. They might have a book. Exorcism

172

for dummies. Can you come to the symphony tonight? I have ex-

tra tickets."

"You've always got extra tickets," Louise says.

"Yes, but it will be good for you," Louise says. "Besides I haven't seen you for two days."

"Can't do it tonight," Louise says. "What about tomorrow night?"

"Well, okay," Louise says. "Have you tried reading the Bible to it?"

"What part of the Bible would I read?"

"How about the begetting part? That's official sounding,"

Louise says.

"What if it thinks I'm flirting? The guy at the gas station today said I should spit on the floor when I see it and say, 'In the name

of God, what do you want?'"

"Have you tried that?"

"I don't know about spitting on the floor," Louise says. "I just cleaned it. What if it wants something gross, like my eyes? What

if it wants me to kill someone?"

"Well," Louise says, "that would depend on who it wanted you to kill."

#

Louise goes to dinner with her married lover. After dinner,

they will go to a motel and fuck. Then he'll take a shower

and go home, and she'll spend the night at the motel. This is

a Louise-style economy. It makes Louise feel slightly more vir-

tuous. The ghost will have the house to himself. Louise doesn't

talk to Louise about her lover. He belongs to her, and to his wife,

of course. There isn't enough left over to share. She met him

at work. Before him she had another lover, another married

man. She would like to believe that this is a charming quirk,

like being bowlegged or sleeping with cellists. But perhaps it's

a character defect instead, like being tone deaf or refusing to

eat food that isn't green.

Here is what Louise would tell Louise, if she told her. I'm just

borrowing him—I don't want him to leave his wife. I'm glad he's

married. Let someone else take care of him. It's the way he

smells—the way married men smell. I can smell when a hap-

pily married man comes into a room, and they can smell me too,

173

I think. So can the wives—that's why he has to take a shower

when he leaves me.

But Louise doesn't tell Louise about her lovers. She doesn't

want to sound as if she's competing with the cellists.

"What are you thinking about?" her lover says. The wine has made his teeth red.

It's the guiltiness that cracks them wide open. The guilt

makes them taste so sweet, Louise thinks. "Do you believe in

ghosts?" she says.

Her lover laughs. "Of course not."

If he were her husband, they would sleep in the same bed

every night. And if she woke up and saw the ghost, she would

wake up her husband. They would both see the ghost. They

would share responsibility. It would be a piece of their marriage,

part of the things they don't have (can't have) now, like break-

fast or ski vacations or fights about toothpaste. Or maybe he

would blame her. If she tells him now that she saw a naked man

in her bedroom, he might say that it's her fault.

"Neither do I," Louise says. "But if you did believe in ghosts.

Because you saw one. What would you do? How would you get

rid of it?"

Her lover thinks for a minute. "I wouldn't get rid of it," he says. "I'd charge admission. I'd become famous. I'd be

on Oprah. They would make a movie. Everyone wants to see a

ghost."

"But what if there's a problem," Louise says. "Such as. What if the ghost is naked?"

Her lover says, "Well, that would be a problem. Unless you

were the ghost. Then I would want you to be naked all the time."

#

But Louise can't fall asleep in the motel room. Her lover has

gone home to his home which isn't haunted, to his wife who

doesn't know about Louise. Louise is as unreal to her as a ghost.

Louise lies awake and thinks about her ghost. The dark is not

dark, she thinks, and there is something in the motel room with

her. Something her lover has left behind. Something touches

her face. There's something bitter in her mouth. In the room

next door someone is walking up and down. A baby is crying

somewhere, or a cat.

174

She gets dressed and drives home. She needs to know if the

ghost is still there or if her mother's recipe worked. She wishes

she'd tried to take a picture.

She looks all over the house. She takes her clothes off the

hangers in the closet and hangs them back right-side out. The

ghost isn't anywhere.

She can't find him. She even sticks her face up the chimney.

She finds the ghost curled up in her underwear drawer. He

lies face down, hands open and loose. He's naked and downy all

over like a baby monkey.

Louise spits on the floor, feeling relieved. "In God's name," she says, "What do you want?" The ghost doesn't say anything. He lies there, small and hairy and forlorn, face down in her underwear. Maybe he doesn't know what he wants any more than she

does. "Clothes?" Louise says. "Do you want me to get you some clothes? It would be easier if you stayed the same size."

The ghost doesn't say anything. "Well," Louise says. "You think about it. Let me know." She closes the drawer.

#

Anna is in her green bed. The green light is on. Louise and

the baby-sitter sit in the living room while Louise and Anna talk.

"When I was a dog," Anna says, "I ate roses and raw meat and borscht. I wore silk dresses."

"When you were a dog," Louise hears Louise say, "you had big silky ears and four big feet and a long silky tail and you wore a

collar made out of silk and a silk dress with a hole cut in it for

your tail."

"A green dress," Anna says. "I could see in the dark."

"Good night, my green girl," Louise says, "good night, good night."

Louise comes into the living room. "Doesn't Louise look beau-

tiful," she says, leaning against Louise's chair and looking in the mirror. "The two of us. Louise and Louise and Louise and Louise.

All four of us."

"Mirror, mirror on the wall," the babysitter says, "who is the fairest Louise of all?" Patrick the babysitter doesn't let Louise pay him. He takes symphony tickets instead. He plays classical guitar and composes music himself. Louise and Louise would

like to hear his compositions, but he's too shy to play for them.

175

He brings his guitar sometimes, to play for Anna. He's teaching

her the simple chords.

"How is your ghost?" Louise says. "Louise has a ghost," she tells Patrick.

"Smaller," Louise says. "Hairier." Louise doesn't really like Patrick. He's in love with Louise for one thing. It embarrasses

Louise, the hopeless way he looks at Louise. He probably writes

love songs for her. He's friendly with Anna. As if that will get

him anywhere.

"You tried garlic?" Louise says. "Spitting? Holy water? The library?"

"Yes," Louise says, lying.

"How about country music?" Patrick says. "Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams?"

"Country music?" Louise says. "Is that like holy water?"

"I read something about it," Patrick says. "In New Scientist, or Guitar magazine, or maybe it was Martha Stewart Living. It

was something about the pitch, the frequencies. Yodeling is sup-

posed to be effective. Makes sense when you think about it."

"I was thinking about summer camp," Louise says to Louise.

"Remember how the counselors used to tell us ghost stories?"

"Yeah," Louise says. "They did that thing with the flashlight.

You made me go to the bathroom with you in the middle of the

night. You were afraid to go by yourself."

"I wasn't afraid," Louise says. "You were afraid."

#

At the symphony, Louise watches the cellists and Louise

watches Louise. The cellists watch the conductor and every now

and then they look past him, over at Louise. Louise can feel

them staring at Louise. Music goes everywhere, like light and,

like light, music loves Louise. Louise doesn't know how she

knows this—she can just feel the music, wrapping itself around

Louise, insinuating itself into her beautiful ears, between her

lips, collecting in her hair and in the little scoop between her

legs. And what good does it do Louise, Louise thinks? The cel-

lists might as well be playing jackhammers and spoons.

Well, maybe that isn't entirely true. Louise may be tone deaf,

but she's explained to Louise that it doesn't mean she doesn't

like music. She feels it in her bones and back behind her jaw. It

scratches itches. It's like a crossword puzzle. Louise is trying to

176

figure it out, and right next to her, Louise is trying to figure out

Louise.

The music stops and starts and stops again. Louise and Louise

clap at the intermission and then the lights come up and Louise

says, "I've been thinking a lot. About something. I want another baby."

"What do you mean?" Louise says, stunned. "You mean like Anna?"

"I don't know," Louise says. "Just another one. You should have a baby too. We could go to Lamaze classes together. You could

name yours Louise after me and I could name mine Louise after

you. Wouldn't that be funny?"

"Anna would be jealous," Louise says.

"I think it would make me happy," Louise says. "I was so happy when Anna was a baby. Everything just tasted good, even the

air. I even liked being pregnant."

Louise says, "Aren't you happy now?"

Louise says, "Of course I'm happy. But don't you know what I

mean? Being happy like that?'

"Kind of," Louise says. "Like when we were kids. You mean like Girl Scout camp."

"Yeah," Louise says. "Like that. You would have to get rid of your ghost first. I don't think ghosts are very hygienic. I

could introduce you to a very nice man. A cellist. Maybe not

the highest sperm count, but very nice." "Which number is he?"

Louise says.

"I don't want to prejudice you," Louise says. "You haven't met him. I'm not sure you should think of him as a number. I'll point

him out. Oh, and number eight, too. You have to meet my beau-

tiful boy, number eight. We have to go out to lunch so I can tell

you about him. He's smitten. I've smited him."

Louise goes to the bathroom and Louise stays in her seat. She

thinks of her ghost. Why can't she have a ghost and a baby? Why

is she always supposed to give up something? Why can't other

people share?

Why does Louise want to have another baby anyway? What if

this new baby hates Louise as much as Anna does? What if it

used to be a dog? What if her own baby hates Louise?

177

When the musicians are back on stage, Louise leans over and

whispers to Louise, "There he is. The one with big hands, over

on the right."

It isn't clear to Louise which cellist Louise means. They all

have big hands. And which cellist is she supposed to be looking

for? The nice cellist she shouldn't be thinking of as a number?

Number eight? She takes a closer look. All of the cellists are

handsome from where Louise is sitting. How fragile they look,

she thinks, in their serious black clothes, letting the music run

down their strings like that and pour through their open fingers.

It's careless of them. You have to hold onto things.

There are six cellists on stage. Perhaps Louise has slept with

all of them. Louise thinks, if I went to bed with them, with any

of them, I would recognize the way they tasted, the things they

liked and the ways they liked them. I would know which number

they were. But they wouldn't know me.

#

The ghost is bigger again. He's prickly all over. He bristles

with hair. The hair is reddish brown and sharp looking. Louise

doesn't think it would be a good idea to touch the ghost now. All

night he moves back and forth in front of her bed, sliding on his

belly like a snake. His fingers dig into the floorboards and he

pushes himself forward with his toes. His mouth stays open as

if he's eating air.

Louise goes to the kitchen. She opens a can of beans, a can of

pears, hearts of palm. She puts the different things on a plate

and places the plate in front of the ghost. He moves around

it. Maybe he's like Anna—picky. Louise doesn't know what he

wants. Louise refuses to sleep in the living room again. It's her

bedroom after all. She lies awake and listens to the ghost press

himself against her clean floor, moving backwards and forwards

before the foot of the bed all night long.

In the morning the ghost is in the closet, upside down against

the wall. Enough, she thinks, and she goes to the mall and buys

a stack of CDs. Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams,

Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett. She asks the clerk if he can recom-

mend anything with yodeling on it, but he's young and not very

helpful.

"Never mind," she says. "I'll just take these."

178

While he's running her credit card, she says, "Wait. Have you

ever seen a ghost?"

"None of your business, lady," he says. "But if I had, I'd make it show me where it buried its treasure. And then I'd dig up the

treasure and I'd be rich and then I wouldn't be selling you this

stupid country shit. Unless the treasure had a curse on it."

"What if there wasn't any treasure?" Louise says.

"Then I'd stick the ghost in a bottle and sell it to a museum,"

the kid says. "A real live ghost. That's got to be worth

something. I'd buy a hog and ride it to California. I'd go make

my own music, and there wouldn't be any fucking yodeling."

#

The ghost seems to like Patsy Cline. It isn't that he says any-

thing. But he doesn't disappear. He comes out of the closet. He

lies on the floor so that Louise has to walk around him. He's

thicker now, more solid. Maybe he was a Patsy Cline fan when

he was alive. The hair stands up all over his body, and it moves

gently, as if a breeze is blowing through it.

They both like Johnny Cash. Louise is pleased—they have

something in common now.

"I'm onto Jackson," Louise sings. "You big talken man."

#

The phone rings in the middle of the night. Louise sits straight

up in bed. "What?" she says. "Did you say something?" Is she in a hotel room? She orients herself quickly. The ghost is under the

bed again, one hand sticking out as if flagging down a bedroom

taxi. Louise picks up the phone.

"Number eight just told me the strangest thing," Louise says.

"Did you try the country music?"

"Yes," Louise says. "But it didn't work. I think he liked it."

"That's a relief," Louise says. "What are you doing on Friday?"

"Working," Louise says. "And then I don't know. I was going to rent a video or something. Want to come over and see the

ghost?"

"I'd like to bring over a few people," Louise says. "After rehearsal. The cellists want to see the ghost, too. They want to

play for it, actually. It's kind of complicated. Maybe you could fix

dinner. Spaghetti's fine. Maybe some salad, some garlic bread.

I'll bring wine."

"How many cellists?" Louise says.

179

"Eight," Louise says. "And Patrick's busy. I might have to bring Anna. It could be educational. Is the ghost still naked?" "Yes,"

Louise says. "But it's okay. He got furry. You can tell her he's a dog. So what's going to happen?"

"That depends on the ghost," Louise says. "If he likes the cellists, he might leave with one of them. You know, go into one of

the cellos. Apparently it's very good for the music. And it's good

for the ghost too. Sort of like those little fish that live on the big fishes. Remoras. Number eight is explaining it to me. He said

that haunted instruments aren't just instruments. It's like they

have a soul. The musician doesn't play the instrument any more.

He or she plays the ghost."

"I don't know if he'd fit," Louise says. "He's largish. At least part of the time."

Louise says, "Apparently cellos are a lot bigger on the inside

than they look on the outside. Besides, it's not like you're using

him for anything."

"I guess not," Louise says.

"If word gets out, you'll have musicians knocking on your door

day and night, night and day," Louise says. "Trying to steal him.

Don't tell anyone."

#

Gloria and Mary come to see Louise at work. They leave with

a group in a week for Greece. They're going to all the islands.

They've been working with Louise to organize the hotels, the

tours, the passports, and the buses. They're fond of Louise. They

tell her about their sons, show her pictures. They think she

should get married and have a baby.

Louise says, "Have either of you ever seen a ghost?"

Gloria shakes her head. Mary says, "Oh honey, all the time

when I was growing up. It runs in families sometimes, ghosts

and stuff like that. Not as much now, of course. My eyesight isn't

so good now."

"What do you do with them?" Louise says.

"Not much," Mary says. "You can't eat them and you can't talk to most of them and they aren't worth much."

"I played with a Ouija board once," Gloria says. "With some other girls. We asked it who we would marry, and it told us some

names. I forget. I don't recall that it was accurate. Then we got

180

scared. We asked it who we were talking to, and it spelled out

Z-E-U-S. Then it was just a bunch of letters. Gibberish."

"What about music?" Louise says.

"I like music," Gloria says. "It makes me cry sometimes when I hear a pretty song. I saw Frank Sinatra sing once. He wasn't

so special."

"It will bother a ghost," Mary says. "Some kinds of music will stir it up. Some kinds of music will lay a ghost. We used to catch

ghosts in my brother's fiddle. Like fishing, or catching fireflies

in a jar. But my mother always said to leave them be."

"I have a ghost," Louise confesses.

"Would you ask it something?" Gloria says. "Ask it what it's like being dead. I like to know about a place before I get there.

I don't mind going someplace new, but I like to know what it's

going to be like. I like to have some idea."

#

Louise asks the ghost but he doesn't say anything. Maybe he

can't remember what it was like to be alive. Maybe he's forgot-

ten the language. He just lies on the bedroom floor, flat on his

back, legs open, looking up at her like she's something special.

Or maybe he's thinking of England.

#

Louise makes spaghetti. Louise is on the phone talking to

caterers. "So you don't think we have enough champagne," she says. "I know it's a gala, but I don't want them falling over.

Just happy. Happy signs checks. Falling over doesn't do me any

good. How much more do you think we need?"

Anna sits on the kitchen floor and watches Louise cutting up

tomatoes. "You'll have to make me something green," she says.

"Why don't you just eat your crayon," Louise says. "Your mother isn't going to have time to make you green food when she has

another baby. You'll have to eat plain food like everybody else,

or else eat grass like cows do."

"I'll make my own green food," Anna says.

"You're going to have a little brother or a little sister," Louise says. "You'll have to behave. You'll have to be responsible. You'll have to share your room and your toys—not just the regular

ones, the green ones, too."

"I'm not going to have a sister," Anna says. "I'm going to have a dog."

181

"You know how it works, right?" Louise says, pushing the

drippy tomatoes into the saucepan. "A man and a woman fall in

love and they kiss and then the woman has a baby. First she gets

fat and then she goes to the hospital. She comes home with a

baby."

"You're lying," Anna says. "The man and the woman go to the pound. They pick out a dog. They bring the dog home and

they feed it baby food. And then one day all the dog's hair falls

out and it's pink. And it learns how to talk, and it has to wear

clothes. And they give it a new name, not a dog name. They give

it a baby name and it has to give the dog name back."

"Whatever," Louise says. "I'm going to have a baby, too. And it will have the same name as your mother and the same name as

me. Louise. Louise will be the name of your mother's baby, too.

The only person named Anna will be you."

"My dog name was Louise," Anna says. "But you're not allowed to call me that."

Louise comes in the kitchen. "So much for the caterers," she says. "So where is it?"

"Where's what?" Louise says.

"The you know what," Louise says, "you know."

"I haven't seen it today," Louise says. "Maybe this won't work.

Maybe it would rather live here." All day long she's had the ra-

dio turned on, tuned to the country station. Maybe the ghost will

take the hint and hide out somewhere until everyone leaves.

The cellists arrive. Seven men and a woman. Louise doesn't

bother to remember their names. The woman is tall and thin.

She has long arms and a long nose. She eats three plates of

spaghetti. The cellists talk to each other. They don't talk about

the ghost. They talk about music. They complain about acous-

tics. They tell Louise that her spaghetti is delicious. Louise just

smiles. She stares at the woman cellist, sees Louise watching

her. Louise shrugs, nods. She holds up five fingers.

Louise and the cellists seem comfortable. They tease each oth-

er. They tell stories. Do they know? Do they talk about Louise?

Do they brag? Compare notes? How could they know Louise

better than Louise knows her? Suddenly Louise feels as if this

isn't her house after all. It belongs to Louise and the cellists.

It's their ghost, not hers. They live here. After dinner they'll stay and she'll leave.

182

Number five is the one who likes foreign films, Louise remem-

bers. The one with the goldfish. Louise said number five had a

great sense of humor.

Louise gets up and goes to the kitchen to get more wine, leav-

ing Louise alone with the cellists. The one sitting next to Louise

says, "You have the prettiest eyes. Have I seen you in the audi-

ence sometimes?"

"It's possible," Louise says.

"Louise talks about you all the time," the cellist says. He's young, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Louise wonders if he's

the one with the big hands. He has pretty eyes, too. She tells

him that.

"Louise doesn't know everything about me," she says, flirting.

Anna is hiding under the table. She growls and pretends to

bite the cellists. The cellists know Anna. They're used to her.

They probably think she's cute. They pass her bits of broccoli,

lettuce.

The living room is full of cellos in black cases the cellists

brought in, like sarcophaguses on little wheels. Sarcophabuses.

Dead baby carriages. After dinner the cellists take their chairs

into the living room. They take out their cellos and tune them.

Anna insinuates herself between cellos, hanging on the backs of

chairs. The house is full of sound.

Louise and Louise sit on chairs in the hall and look in. They

can't talk. It's too loud. Louise reaches into her purse, pulls out

a packet of earplugs. She gives two to Anna, two to Louise,

keeps two for herself. Louise puts her earplugs in. Now the cel-

lists sound as if they are underground, down in some under-

ground lake, or in a cave. Louise fidgets.

The cellists play for almost an hour. When they take a break

Louise feels tender, as if the cellists have been throwing things

at her. Tiny lumps of sound. She almost expects to see bruises

on her arms.

The cellists go outside to smoke cigarettes. Louise takes

Louise aside. "You should tell me now if there isn't a ghost," she says. "I'll tell them to go home. I promise I won't be angry."

"There is a ghost," Louise says. "Really." But she doesn't try to sound too convincing. What she doesn't tell Louise is that she's

stuck a Walkman in her closet. She's got the Patsy Cline CD on

repeat with the volume turned way down.

183

Louise says, "So he was talking to you during dinner. What do

you think?"

"Who?" Louise says. "Him? He was pretty nice."

Louise sighs. "Yeah. I think he's pretty nice, too."

The cellists come back inside. The young cellist with the

glasses and the big hands looks over at both of them and smiles

a big blissed smile. Maybe it wasn't cigarettes that they were

smoking.

Anna has fallen asleep inside a cello case, like a fat green pea

in a coffin.

Louise tries to imagine the cellists without their clothes. She

tries to picture them naked and fucking Louise. No, fuck-

ing Louise, fucking her instead. Which one is number four? The

one with the beard? Number four, she remembers, likes Louise

to sit on top and bounce up and down. She does all the work

while he waves his hand. He conducts her. Louise thinks it's

funny.

Louise pictures all of the cellists, naked and in the same bed.

She's in the bed. The one with the beard first. Lie on your back,

she tells him. Close your eyes. Don't move. I'm in charge. I'm

conducting this affair. The one with the skinny legs and the

poochy stomach. The young one with curly black hair, bent over

his cello as if he might fall in. Who was flirting with her. Do this, she tells a cellist. Do this, she tells another one. She can't figure out what to do with the woman. Number five. She can't even figure out how to take off number five's clothes. Number five sits

on the edge of the bed, hands tucked under her buttocks. She's

still in her bra and underwear.

Louise thinks about the underwear for a minute. It has little

flowers on it. Periwinkles. Number five waits for Louise to tell

her what to do. But Louise is having a hard enough time figuring

out where everyone else goes. A mouth has fastened itself on

her breast. Someone is tugging at her hair. She is holding onto

someone's penis with both hands, someone else's penis is rub-

bing against her cunt. There are penises everywhere. Wait your

turn, Louise thinks. Be patient.

Number five has pulled a cello out of her underwear. She's

playing a sad little tune on it. It's distracting. It's not sexy at all.

Another cellist stands up on the bed, jumps up and down. Soon

they're all doing it. The bed creaks and groans, and the woman

184

plays faster and faster on her fiddle. Stop it, Louise thinks, you'll wake the ghost.

"Shit!" Louise says—she's yanked Louise's earplug out, drops it in Louise's lap. "There he is under your chair. Look. Louise, you really do have a ghost."

The cellists don't look. Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.

They are fucking their cellos with their fingers, stroking music

out, promising the ghost yodels and Patsy Cline and funeral

marches and whole cities of music and music to eat and music

to drink and music to put on and wear like clothes. It isn't music

Louise has ever heard before. It sounds like a lullaby, and then it

sounds like a pack of wolves, and then it sounds like a slaughter-

house, and then it sounds like a motel room and a married man

saying I love you and the shower is running at the same time. It

makes her teeth ache and her heart rattle.

It sounds like the color green. Anna wakes up. She's sitting in

the cello case, hands over her ears.

This is too loud, Louise thinks. The neighbors will complain.

She bends over and sees the ghost, small and unobjectionable

as a lapdog, lying under her chair. Oh, my poor baby, she thinks.

Don't be fooled. Don't fall for the song. They don't mean it.

But something is happening to the ghost. He shivers and

twists and gapes. He comes out from under the chair. He leaves

all his fur behind, under the chair in a neat little pile. He drags

himself along the floor with his strong beautiful hands, scissor-

ing with his legs along the floor like a swimmer. He's planning

to change, to leave her and go away. Louise pulls out her other

earplug. She's going to give them to the ghost. "Stay here," she says out loud, "stay here with me and the real Patsy Cline. Don't go." She can't hear herself speak. The cellos roar like lions in cages and licks of fire. Louise opens her mouth to say it louder,

but the ghost is going. Fine, okay, go comb your hair. See if I

care.

Louise and Louise and Anna watch as the ghost climbs into a

cello. He pulls himself up, shakes the air off like drops of wa-

ter. He gets smaller. He gets fainter. He melts into the cello

like spilled milk. All the other cellists pause. The cellist who has

caught Louise's ghost plays a scale. "Well," he says. It doesn't sound any different to Louise but all the other cellists sigh.

185

It's the bearded cellist who's caught the ghost. He holds onto

his cello as if it might grow legs and run away if he let go. He

looks like he's discovered America. He plays something else.

Something old-fashioned, Louise thinks, a pretty old-fashioned

tune, and she wants to cry. She puts her earplugs back in again.

The cellist looks up at Louise as he plays and he smiles. You owe

me, she thinks.

But it's the youngest cellist, the one who thinks Louise has

pretty eyes, who stays. Louise isn't sure how this happens. She

isn't sure that she has the right cellist. She isn't sure that the

ghost went into the right cello. But the cellists pack up their cel-

los and they thank her and they drive away, leaving the dishes

piled in the sink for Louise to wash.

The youngest cellist is still sitting in her living room. "I

thought I had it," he says. "I thought for sure I could play that ghost." "I'm leaving," Louise says. But she doesn't leave.

"Good night," Louise says.

"Do you want a ride?" Louise says to the cellist.

He says, "I thought I might hang around. See if there's anoth-

er ghost in here. If that's okay with Louise."

Louise shrugs. "Good night," she says to Louise.

"Well," Louise says, "good night." She picks up Anna, who has fallen asleep on the couch. Anna was not impressed with the

ghost. He wasn't a dog and he wasn't green.

"Good night," the cellist says, and the door slams shut behind Louise and Anna.

Louise inhales. He's not married, it isn't that smell. But it re-

minds her of something.

"What's your name?" she says, but before he can answer her, she puts her earplugs back in again. They fuck in the closet and

then in the bathtub and then he lies down on the bedroom floor

and Louise sits on top of him. To exorcise the ghost, she thinks.

Hotter in a chilly sprout. The cellist's mouth moves when he

comes. It looks like he's saying, "Louise, Louise," but she gives him the benefit of the doubt. He might be saying her name.

She nods encouragingly. "That's right," she says. "Louise."

The cellist falls asleep on the floor. Louise throws a blanket

over him. She watches him breathe. It's been a while since she's

watched a man sleep. She takes a shower and she does the

dishes. She puts the chairs in the living room away. She gets an

186

envelope and she picks up a handful of the ghost's hair. She puts

it in the envelope and she sweeps the rest away. She takes her

earplugs out but she doesn't throw them away.

In the morning, the cellist makes her pancakes. He sits down

at the table and she stands up. She walks over and sniffs his

neck. She recognizes that smell now. He smells like Louise.

Burnt sugar and orange juice and talcum powder. She realizes

that she's made a horrible mistake.

#

Louise is furious. Louise didn't know Louise knew how to be

angry. Louise hangs up when Louise calls. Louise drives over to

Louise's house and no one comes to the door. But Louise can see

Anna looking out the window.

Louise writes a letter to Louise. "I'm so sorry," she writes. "I should have known. Why didn't you tell me? He doesn't love me.

He was just drunk. Maybe he got confused. Please, please for-

give me. You don't have to forgive me immediately. Tell me what

I should do."

At the bottom she writes, "P.S. I'm not pregnant."

#

Three weeks later, Louise is walking a group of symphony pat-

rons across the stage. They've all just eaten lunch. They drank

wine. She is pointing out architectural details, rows of expens-

ive spotlights. She is standing with her back to the theater. She

is talking, she points up, she takes a step back into air. She falls

off the stage.

A man—a lawyer—calls Louise at work. At first she thinks it

must be her mother who has fallen. The lawyer explains. Louise

is the one who is dead. She broke her neck.

While Louise is busy understanding this, the lawyer, Mr. Bo-

stick, says something else. Louise is Anna's guardian now.

"Wait, wait," Louise says. "What do you mean? Louise is in the hospital? I have to take care of Anna for a while?"

No, Mr. Bostick says. Louise is dead.

"In the event of her death, Louise wanted you to adopt her

daughter Anna Geary. I had assumed that my client Louise

Geary had discussed this with you. She has no living family.

Louise told me that you were her family."

187

"But I slept with her cellist," Louise said. "I didn't mean to. I didn't realize which number he was. I didn't know his name. I

still don't. Louise is so angry with me."

But Louise isn't angry with Louise anymore. Or maybe now

she will always be angry with Louise.

Louise picks Anna up at school. Anna is sitting on a chair in

the school office. She doesn't look up when Louise opens the

door. Louise goes and stands in front of her. She looks down at

Anna and thinks, this is all that's left of Louise. This is all I've

got now. A little girl who only likes things that are green, who

used to be a dog. "Come on, Anna," Louise says. "You're going to come live with me."

#

Louise and Anna live together for a week. Louise avoids her

married lover at work. She doesn't know how to explain things.

First a ghost and now a little girl. That's the end of the motel

rooms.

Louise and Anna go to Louise's funeral and throw dirt at

Louise's coffin. Anna throws her dirt hard, like she's aiming for

something. Louise holds on to her handful too tightly. When she

lets go, there's dirt under her fingernails. She sticks a finger in

her mouth.

All the cellists are there. They look amputated without their

cellos, smaller, childlike. Anna, in her funereal green, looks

older than they do. She holds Louise's hand grudgingly. Louise

has promised that Anna can have a dog. No more motels for

sure. She'll have to buy a bigger house, Louise thinks, with a

yard. She'll sell her house and Louise's house and put the money

in trust for Anna. She did this for her mother—this is what you

have to do for family.

While the minister is still speaking, number eight lies down

on the ground beside the grave. The cellists on either side each

take an arm and pull him back up again. Louise sees that his

nose is running. He doesn't look at her, and he doesn't wipe his

nose, either. When the two cellists walk him away, there's grave

dirt on the seat of his pants.

Patrick is there. His eyes are red. He waves his fingers at

Anna, but he stays where he is. Loss is contagious—he's keeping

a safe distance.

188

The woman cellist, number five, comes up to Louise after the

funeral. She embraces Louise, Anna. She tells them that a spe-

cial memorial concert has been arranged. Funds will be raised.

One of the smaller concert halls will be named the Louise Geary

Memorial Hall. Louise agrees that Louise would have been

pleased. She and Anna leave before the other cellists can tell

them how sorry they are, how much they will miss Louise.

In the evening Louise calls her mother and tells her that

Louise is dead.

"Oh sweetie," her mother says. "I'm so sorry. She was such a pretty girl. I always liked to hear her laugh."

"She was angry with me," Louise says. "Her daughter Anna is staying with me now."

"What about Anna's father?" her mother says. "Did you get rid of that ghost? I'm not sure it's a good idea having a ghost in the

same house as a small girl."

"The ghost is gone," Louise says.

There is a click on the line. "Someone's listening in," her mother says. "Don't say anything—they might be recording us.

Call me back from a different phone."

Anna has come into the room. She stands behind Louise. She

says, "I want to go live with my father." "It's time to go to sleep,"

Louise says. She wants to take off her funeral clothes and go to

bed. "We can talk about this in the morning."

Anna brushes her teeth and puts on her green pajamas. She

does not want Louise to read to her. She does not want a glass

of water. Louise says, "When I was a dog … "

Anna says, "You were never a dog —" and pulls the blanket,

which is not green, up over her head and will not say anything

else.

#

Mr. Bostick knows who Anna's father is. "He doesn't know

about Anna," he tells Louise. "His name is George Candle and he lives in Oregon. He's married and has two kids. He has his

own company—something to do with organic produce, I think,

or maybe it was construction."

"I think it would be better for Anna if she were to live with

a real parent," Louise says. "Easier. Someone who knows

something about kids. I'm not cut out for this."

189

Mr. Bostick agrees to contact Anna's father. "He may not even

admit he knew Louise," he says. "He may not be okay about

this."

"Tell him she's a fantastic kid," Louise says. "Tell him she looks just like Louise."

#

In the end George Candle comes and collects Anna. Louise ar-

ranges his airline tickets and his hotel room. She books two re-

turn tickets out to Portland for Anna and her father and makes

sure Anna has a window seat. "You'll like Oregon," she tells Anna. "It's green."

"You think you're smarter than me," Anna says. "You think you know all about me. When I was a dog, I was ten times smarter

than you. I knew who my friends were because of how they

smelled. I know things you don't."

But she doesn't say what they are. Louise doesn't ask.

George Candle cries when he meets his daughter. He's almost

as hairy as the ghost. Louise can smell his marriage. She won-

ders what Anna smells.

"I loved your mother very much," George Candle says to Anna.

"She was a very special person. She had a beautiful soul."

They go to see Louise's gravestone. The grass on her grave is

greener than the other grass. You can see where it's been tipped

in, like a bookplate. Louise briefly fantasizes her own funeral,

her own gravestone, her own married lover standing beside her

gravestone. She knows he would go straight home after the fu-

neral to take a shower. If he went to the funeral.

The house without Anna is emptier than Louise is used to.

Louise didn't expect to miss Anna. Now she has no best friend,

no ghost, no adopted former dog. Her lover is home with his

wife, sulking, and now George Candle is flying home to his wife.

What will she think of Anna? Maybe Anna will miss Louise just

a little.

That night Louise dreams of Louise endlessly falling off the

stage. She falls and falls and falls. As Louise falls she slowly

comes apart. Little bits of her fly away. She is made up of lady-

bugs.

Anna comes and sits on Louise's bed. She is a lot furrier than

she was when she lived with Louise. "You're not a dog," Louise says.

190

Anna grins her possum teeth at Louise. She's holding a piece

of okra. "The supernatural world has certain characteristics,"

Anna says. "You can recognize it by its color, which is green, and by its texture, which is hirsute. Those are its outside qualities.

Inside the supernatural world things get sticky but you never

get inside things, Louise. Did you know that George Candle is a

werewolf? Look out for hairy men, Louise. Or do I mean married

men? The other aspects of the green world include music and

smell."

Anna pulls her pants down and squats. She pees on the bed, a

long acrid stream that makes Louise's eyes water.

Louise wakes up sobbing. "Louise," Louise whispers. "Please come and lie on my floor. Please come haunt me. I'll play Patsy

Cline for you and comb your hair. Please don't go away."

She keeps a vigil for three nights. She plays Patsy Cline. She

sits by the phone because maybe Louise could call. Louise has

never not called, not for so long. If Louise doesn't forgive her,

then she can come and be an angry ghost. She can make dishes

break or make blood come out of the faucets. She can give

Louise bad dreams. Louise will be grateful for broken things

and blood and bad dreams. All of Louise's clothes are up on

their hangers, hung right-side out. Louise puts little dishes of

flowers out, plates with candles and candy. She calls her mother

to ask how to make a ghost appear but her mother refuses to

tell her. The line may be tapped. Louise will have to come down,

she says, and she'll explain in person.

#

Louise wears the same dress she wore to the funeral. She sits

up in the balcony. There are enormous pictures of Louise up on

the stage. Influential people go up on the stage and tell funny

stories about Louise. Members of the orchestra speak about

Louise. Her charm, her beauty, her love of music. Louise looks

through her opera glasses at the cellists. There is the young

one, number eight, who caused all the trouble. There is the

bearded cellist who caught the ghost. She stares through her

glasses at his cello. Her ghost runs up and down the neck of his

cello, frisky. It coils around the strings, hangs upside-down from

a peg.

She examines number five's face for a long time. Why you,

Louise thinks. If she wanted to sleep with a woman, why did she

191

sleep with you? Did you tell her funny jokes? Did you go shop-

ping together for clothes? When you saw her naked, did you see

that she was bow-legged? Did you think that she was beautiful?

The cellist next to number five is holding his cello very care-

fully. He runs his fingers down the strings as if they were

tangled and he were combing them. Louise stares through her

opera glasses. There is something in his cello. Something small

and bleached is looking back at her through the strings. Louise

looks at Louise and then she slips back through the f hole, like

a fish.

#

They are in the woods. The fire is low. It's night. All the little

girls are in their sleeping bags. They've brushed their teeth

and spit, they've washed their faces with water from the kettle,

they've zipped up the zippers of their sleeping bags.

A counselor named Charlie is saying, "I am the ghost with the

one black eye, I am the ghost with the one black eye."

Charlie holds her flashlight under her chin. Her eyes are two

black holes in her face. Her mouth yawns open, the light shin-

ing through her teeth. Her shadow eats up the trunk of the tree

she sits under.

During the daytime Charlie teaches horseback riding. She

isn't much older than Louise or Louise. She's pretty and she lets

them ride the horses bareback sometimes. But that's daytime

Charlie. Nighttime Charlie is the one sitting next to the fire.

Nighttime Charlie is the one who tells stories.

"Are you afraid?" Louise says.

"No," Louise says.

They hold hands. They don't look at each other. They keep

their eyes on Charlie. Louise says, "Are you afraid?"

"No," Louise says. "Not as long as you're here."

192

The Girl Detective

The girl detective looked at her reflection in the mirror.

This was a different girl. This was a girl who would chew

gum. —DORA KNEZ, in conversation

The girl detective's mother is missing.

The girl detective's mother has been missing for a long time.

The underworld.

Think of the underworld as the back of your closet, behind all

those racks of clothes that you don't wear anymore. Things are

always getting pushed back there and forgotten about. The un-

derworld is full of things that you've forgotten about. Some of

them, if only you could remember, you might want to take them

back. Trips to the underworld are always very nostalgic. It's

darker in there. The seasons don't match. Mostly people end up

there by accident, or else because in the end there was nowhere

else to go. Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld

on purpose.

There are three kinds of food.

One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the

kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food

that you eat in dreams. There's one other kind of food, but you

can only get that in the underworld, and it's not really food. It's

more like dancing.

The girl detective eats dreams.

The girl detective won't eat her dinner. Her father, the house-

keeper—they've tried everything they can think of. Her father

takes her out to eat—Chinese restaurants, once even a truck-

stop two states away for chicken-fried steak. The girl detective

used to love chicken-fried steak. Her father has gained ten

pounds, but the girl detective will only have a glass of water, not

even a slice of lemon. I saw them once at that new restaurant

downtown, and the girl detective was folding her napkin while

her father ate. I went over to their table after they'd left. She'd

folded her napkin into a swan. I put it into my pocket, along

with her dinner roll and a packet of sugar. I thought these things

might be clues.

The housekeeper cooks all the food that the girl detective

used to love. Green beans, macaroni and cheese, parsnips,

193

stewed pears—the girl detective used to eat all her vegetables.

The girl detective used to love vegetables. She always cleaned

her plate. If only her mother were still here, the housekeeper

will say, and sigh. The girl detective's father sighs. Aren't you

the littlest bit hungry? they ask her. Wouldn't you like a bite to

eat? But the girl detective still goes to bed hungry.

There is some debate about whether the girl detective needs

to eat food at all. Is it possible that she is eating in secret? Is she anorexic? Bulimic? Is she protesting something? What could we

cook that would tempt her?

I am doing my best to answer these very questions. I am de-

tecting the girl detective. I sit in a tree across the street from

her window, and this is what I see. The girl detective goes to

bed hungry, but she eats our dreams while we are asleep. She

has eaten my dreams. She has eaten your dreams, one after the

other, as if they were grapes or oysters. The girl detective is get-

ting fat on other people's dreams.

The case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers.

Just a few days ago, I saw this on the news. You remember,

that bank downtown. Maybe you were in line for a teller, waiting

to make a deposit. Perhaps you saw them come in. They had

long, long legs, and they were wearing sequins. Feathers. Not

much else. They wore tiny black dominos, hair pinned up in tall

loopy curls, and their mouths were wide and red. Their eyes

glittered.

You were being interviewed on the news. "We all thought that

someone in the bank must be having a birthday," you said. "They had on these skimpy outfits. There was music playing."

They spun. They pranced. They kicked. They were carrying

purses, and they took tiny black guns out of their purses. Sit

down on the floor, one of them told you. You sat on the floor.

Sitting on the floor, it was possible to look up their short,

flounced skirts. You could see their underwear. It was satin,

and embroidered with the days of the week. There were twelve

bank robbers: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,

Saturday, Sunday, and then Mayday, Payday, Yesterday,

Someday, and Birthday. The one who had spoken to you was

Birthday. She seemed to be the leader. She went over to a teller,

and pointed the little gun at him. They spoke earnestly. They

went away, through a door over to the side. All the other bank

194

robbers went with them, except for Wednesday and Thursday,

who were keeping an eye on you. They shuffled a little on the

marble floor as they waited. They did a couple of pli?s. They

kept their guns pointed at the security guard, who had been

asleep on a chair by the door. He stayed asleep.

In about a minute, the other bank robbers came back through

the door again, with the teller. They looked satisfied. The teller

looked confused, and he went and sat on the floor next to you.

The bank robbers left. Witnesses say they got in a red van

with something written in gold on the side and drove away. The

driver was an older woman. She looked stern.

Police are on the lookout for this woman, for this van. When

they arrived, what did they find inside the vault? Nothing was

missing. In fact, things appeared to have been left behind.

Several tons of mismatched socks, several hundred pairs of pre-

scription glasses, retainers, a ball python six feet long, curled

decoratively around the bronze vault dial. Also a woman claim-

ing to be Amelia Earhart. When police questioned this woman,

she claimed to remember very little. She remembers a place,

police suspect that she was held hostage there by the bank

robbers. It was dark, she said, and people were dancing. The

food was pretty good. Police have the woman in protective cus-

tody, where she has reportedly received serious proposals from

lonely men and major publishing houses.

In the past two months the tap-dancing robbers have kept

busy. Who are these masked women? Speculation is rife. All

dance performances, modern, classical, even student rehears-

als, are well-attended. Banks have become popular places to go

on dates or on weekdays, during lunch. Some people bring roses

to throw. The girl detective is reportedly working on the case.

Secret origins of the girl detective.

Some people say that she doesn't exist. Someone once sugges-

ted that I was the girl detective, but I've never known whether

or not they were serious. At least I don't think that I am the girl

detective. If I were the girl detective, I would surely know.

Things happen.

When the girl detective leaves her father's house one morn-

ing, a man is lurking outside. I've been watching him for a while

now from my tree. I'm a little stiff, but happy to be here. He's

a fat man with pouched, beautiful eyes. He sighs heavily a few

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times. He takes the girl detective by the arm. Can I tell you a

story, he says.

All right, says the girl detective politely. She takes her arm

back, sits down on the front steps. The man sits down beside

her and lights a smelly cigar.

The girl detective saves the world.

The girl detective has saved the world on at least three separ-

ate occasions. Not that she is bragging.

The girl detective doesn't care for fiction.

The girl detective doesn't actually read much. She doesn't

have the time. Her father used to read fairy tales to her when

she was little. She didn't like them. For example, the twelve dan-

cing princesses. If their father really wants to stop them, why

doesn't he just forbid the royal shoemaker to make them any

more dancing shoes? Why do they have to go underground to

dance? Don't they have a ballroom? Do they like dancing or are

they secretly relieved when they get caught? Who taught them

to dance?

The girl detective has thought a lot about the twelve dancing

princesses. She and the princesses have a few things in com-

mon. For instance, shoe leather. Possibly underwear. Also, no

mother. This is another thing about fiction, fairy tales in partic-

ular. The mother is usually missing. The girl detective imagines,

all of a sudden, all of these mothers. They're all in the same

place. They're far away, some place she can't find them. It in-

furiates her. What are they up to, all of these mothers?

The fat man's story.

This man has twelve daughters, says the fat man. All of them

lookers. Nice gams. He's a rich man but he doesn't have a wife.

He has to take care of the girls all by himself. He does the best

he can. The oldest one is still living at home when the youngest

one graduates from high school. This makes their father happy.

How can he take care of them if they move away from home?

But strange things start to happen. The girls all sleep in the

same bedroom, which is fine, no problem, because they all get

along great. But then the girls start to sleep all day. He can't

wake them up. It's as if they've been drugged. He brings in spe-

cialists. The specialists all shake their heads.

At night the girls wake up. They're perky. Affectionate. They

apply makeup. They whisper and giggle. They eat dinner with

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their father, and everyone pretends that everything's normal.

At bedtime they go to their room and lock the door, and in the

morning when their father knocks on the door to wake them up,

gently at first, tapping, then harder, begging them to open the

door, beside each bed is a worn-out pair of dancing shoes.

Here's the thing. He's never even bought them dancing les-

sons. They all took horseback riding, tennis, those classes

where you learn to make dollhouse furniture out of cigarette

boxes and doilies.

So he hires a detective. Me, says the fat man—you wouldn't

think it, but I used to be young and handsome and quick on my

feet. I used to be a pretty good dancer myself.

The man puffs on his cigar. Are you getting all this? the girl

detective calls to me, where I'm sitting up in the tree. I nod.

Why don't you take a hike, she says.

Why we love the girl detective.

We love the girl detective because she reminds us of the chil-

dren we wish we had. She is courteous, but also brave. She

loathes injustice; she is passionate, but also well-groomed. She

keeps her room neat, but not too neat. She feeds her goldfish.

She will get good grades, keep her curfew when it doesn't inter-

fere with fighting crime. She'll come home from an Ivy League

college on weekends to do her laundry.

She reminds us of the girl we hope to marry one day. If we

ask her, she will take care of us, cook us nutritious meals, find

our car keys when we've misplaced them. The girl detective is

good at finding things. She will balance the checkbook, plan va-

cations, and occasionally meet us at the door when we come

home from work, wearing nothing but a blue ribbon in her hair.

She will fill our eyes. We will bury our faces in her dark, light,

silky, curled, frizzed, teased, short, shining, long, shining hair.

Tangerine, clove, russet, coal-colored, oxblood, buttercup, clay-

colored, tallow, titian, lampblack, sooty, scented hair. The color

of her hair will always inflame us.

She reminds us of our mothers.

DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.

The father hides me in the closet one night, and I wait until

the girls, they all come to bed. It's a big closet. And it smells

nice, like girl sweat and cloves and mothballs. I hold onto the

sleeve of someone's dress to balance while I'm looking through

197

the keyhole. Don't think I don't go through all the pockets. But

all I find is a marble and a deck of cards with the Queen of

Spades missing, a napkin folded into a swan maybe, a box of

matches from a Chinese restaurant.

I look through the keyhole, maybe I'm hoping to see one or

two of them take off their clothes, but instead they lock the

bedroom door and move one of the beds, knock on the floor

and guess what? There's a secret passageway. Down they go,

one after the other. They look so demure, like they're going to

Sunday School.

I wait a bit and then I follow them. The passageway is plaster

and bricks first, and then it's dirt with packed walls. The walls

open up and we could be walking along, all of us holding hands

if we wanted to. It's pretty dark, but each girl has a flashlight. I

follow the twelve pairs of feet in twelve new pairs of kid leather

dancing shoes, each in its own little puddle of light. I stretch my

hands up and I stand on my toes, but I can't feel the roof of the

tunnel anymore. There's a breeze, raising the hair on my neck.

Up till then I think I know this city pretty well, but we go down

and down, me after the last girl, the youngest, and when at last

the passageway levels out, we're in a forest. There's this moss

on the trunk of the trees, which glows. It looks like paradise

by the light of the moss. The ground is soft like velvet, and the

air tastes good. I think I must be dreaming, but I reach up and

break off a branch.

The youngest girl hears the branch snap and she turns

around, but I've ducked behind a tree. So she goes on and we

go on.

Then we come to a river. Down by the bank there are twelve

young men, Oriental, gangsters by the look of 'em, black hair

slicked back, smooth-faced in the dim light, and I can see

they're all wearing guns under their nice dinner jackets. I stay

back in the trees. I think maybe it's the white slave trade, but

the girls go peaceful, and they're smiling and laughing with

their escorts, so I stay back in the trees and think for a bit. Each

man rows one of the girls across the river in a little canoe. Me,

I wait a while and then I get in a canoe and start rowing myself

across, quiet as I can. The water is black and there's a bit of a

current, as if it knows where it's going. I don't quite trust this

water. I get close to the last boat with the youngest girl in it and

198

water from my oar splashes up and gets her face wet, I guess,

because she says to the man, someone's out there.

Alligator, maybe, he says, and I swear he looks just like the

waiter who brought me orange chicken in that new restaurant

downtown. I'm so close, I swear they must see me, but they

don't seem to. Or maybe they're just being polite.

We all get out on the other side and there's a nightclub all

lit up with paper lanterns on the veranda. Men and women are

standing out on the veranda, and there's a band playing inside.

It's the kind of music that makes you start tapping your feet.

It gets inside me and starts knocking inside my head. By now

I think the girls must have seen me, but they don't look at me.

They seem to be ignoring me. "Well, here they are," this one woman says. "Hello, girls." She's tall, and so beautiful she looks like a movie star, but she's stern-looking too, like she probably

plays villains. She's wearing one of them tight silky dresses with

dragons on it, but she's not Oriental.

"Now let's get started," she says. Over the door of the

nightclub is a sign. DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. They go

in. I wait a bit and go in, too.

I dance with the oldest and I dance with the youngest and of

course they pretend that they don't know me, but they think I

dance pretty fine. We shimmy and we grind, we bump and we

do the Charleston. This girl she opens up her legs for me but

she's got her hands down in an X, and then her knees are back

together and her arms fly open like she's going to grab me, and

then her hands are crossing over and back on her knees again.

I lift her up in the air by her armpits and her skirt flies up. She's standing on the air like it was solid as the dance floor, and when

I put her back down, she moves on the floor like it was air. She

just floats. Her feet are tapping the whole time and sparks are

flying up from her shoes and my shoes and everybody's shoes.

I dance with a lot of girls and they're all beautiful, just like the

sign says, even the ones who aren't. And when the band starts

to sound tired, I sneak out the door and back across the river,

back through the forest, back up the secret passageway into the

girls' bedroom.

I get back in the closet and wipe my face on someone's dress.

The sweat is dripping off me. Pretty soon the girls come home

too, limping a little bit, but smiling. They sit down on their beds

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and they take off their shoes. Sure enough, their shoes are worn

right through. Mine aren't much better.

That's when I step out of the closet and while they're all

screaming, lamenting, shrieking, scolding, yelling, cursing, I un-

lock the bedroom door and let their father in. He's been waiting

there all night. He's hangdog. There are circles under his eyes.

Did you follow them? he says.

I did, I say.

Did you stick to them? he says. He won't look at them.

I did, I say. I give him the branch. A little bit later, when I get

to know the oldest girl, we get married. We go out dancing al-

most every night, but I never see that club again.

There are two kinds of names.

The girl detective has learned to distrust certain people.

People who don't blink enough, for example. People who don't

fidget. People who dance too well. People who are too fat or too

thin. People who cry and don't need to blow their noses after-

wards. People with certain kinds of names are prone to wild and

extravagant behavior. Sometimes they turn to a life of crime. If

only their parents had been more thoughtful. These people have

names like Bernadette, Sylvester, Arabella, Apocolopus, Thad-

deus, Gertrude, Gomez, Xavier, Xerxes. Flora. They wear sinis-

ter lipsticks, plot world destruction, ride to the hounds, take up

archery instead of bowling. They steal inheritances, wear false

teeth, hide wills, shoplift, plot murders, take off their clothes

and dance on tables in crowded bars just after everyone has got-

ten off work.

On the other hand, it doesn't do to trust people named George

or Maxine, or Sandra, or Bradley. People with names like this

are obviously hiding something. Men who limp. Who have

crooked, or too many teeth. People who don't floss. People who

are stingy or who leave overgenerous tips. People who don't

wash their hands after going to the bathroom. People who want

things too badly. The world is a dangerous place, full of people

who don't trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this

tree. I wouldn't come down even if she asked me to.

The girl detective is looking for her mother.

The girl detective has been looking for her mother for a long

time. She doesn't expect her mother to be easy to find. After all,

her mother is also a master of disguises. If we fail to know the

200

girl detective when she comes to find us, how will the girl de-

tective know her mother?

She sees her sometimes in other people's dreams. Look at the

way this woman is dreaming about goldfish, her mother says.

And the girl detective tastes the goldfish and something is re-

vealed to her. Maybe a broken heart, maybe something about

money, or a holiday that the woman is about to take. Maybe the

woman is about to win the lottery.

Sometimes the girl detective thinks she is missing her moth-

er's point. Maybe the thing she is supposed to be learning is not

about vacations or broken hearts or lotteries or missing wills or

any of these things. Maybe her mother is trying to tell the girl

detective how to get to where she is. In the meantime, the girl

detective collects the clues from other people's dreams and we

ask her to find our missing pets, to tell us if our spouses are be-

ing honest with us, to tell us who are really our friends, and to

keep an eye on the world while we are sleeping.

About three o'clock this morning, the girl detective pushed up

her window and looked at me. She looked like she hadn't been

getting much sleep either. "Are you still up in that tree?"

Why we fear the girl detective.

She reminds us of our mothers. She eats our dreams. She

knows what we have been up to, what we are longing for. She

knows what we are capable of, and what we are not capable of.

She is looking for something. We are afraid that she is looking

for us. We are afraid that she is not looking for us. Who will find

us, if the girl detective does not?

The girl detective asks a few questions.

"I think I've heard this story before," the girl detective says to the fat man.

"It's an old story."

The man stares at her sadly and she stares back. "So why are

you telling me?"

"Don't know," he says. "My wife disappeared a few months ago. I mean, she passed on, she died. I can't find her is what I

mean. But I thought that maybe if someone could find that club

again, she might be there. But I'm old and her father's house

burned down thirty years ago. I can't even find that Chinese res-

taurant anymore."

201

"Even if I found the club," the girl detective says, "if she's dead, she probably won't be there. And if she is there, she may

not want to come back."

"I guess I know that too, girlie," he says. "But to talk about her, how I met her. Stuff like that helps. Besides, you don't know.

She might be there. You never know about these things."

He gives her a photograph of his wife.

"What was your wife's name?" the girl detective says.

"I've been trying to remember that myself," he says.

Some things that have recently turned up in bank

vaults.

Lost pets. The crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste.

More socks. Several boxes of Christmas tree ornaments. A play

by Shakespeare, about star-crossed lovers. It doesn't end well.

Wedding rings. Some albino alligators. Several tons of seventh-

grade homework. Ballistic missiles. A glass slipper. Some Afric-

an explorers. A whole party of Himalayan mountain climbers.

Children, whose faces I knew from milk cartons. The rest of that

poem by Coleridge. Also fortune cookies.

Further secret origins of the girl detective.

Some people say that she was the child of missionaries, raised

by wolves, that she is the Princess Anastasia, last of the Roman-

ovs. Some people say that she is actually a man. Some people

say that she came here from another planet and that some day,

when she finds what she is looking for, she'll go home. Some

people are hoping that she will take us with her.

If you ask them what she is looking for, they shrug and say,

"Ask the girl detective."

Some people say that she is two thousand years old.

Some people say that she is not one girl but many—that is,

she's actually a secret society of Girl Scouts. Or possibly a sub-

branch of the FBI.

Whom does the girl detective love?

Remember that boy, Fred, or Nat? Something like that. He

was in love with the girl detective, even though she was smarter

than him, even though he never got to rescue her even once

from the bad guys, or when he did, she was really just letting

him, to be kind. He was a nice boy with a good sense of humor,

but he used to have this recurring dream in which he was a

golden retriever. The girl detective knew this, of course, the way

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she knows all our dreams. How could she settle down with a boy

who dreamed that he was a retriever?

Everyone has seen the headlines. "Girl Detective Spurns Head

of State." "I Caught My Husband in Bed with the Girl Detective."

"Married Twenty Years, Husband and Father of Four, Revealed

to Be the Girl Detective."

I myself was the girl detective's lover for three happy months.

We met every Thursday night in a friend's summer cottage be-

side a small lake. She introduced herself as Pomegranate Buhm.

I was besotted with her, her long legs so pale they looked like

two slices of moonlight. I loved her size eleven feet, her black

hair that always smelled like grapefruit. When we made love,

she stuck her chewing gum on the headboard. Her underwear

was embroidered with the days of the week.

We always met on Thursday, as I have said, but according to

her underwear, we also met on Saturdays, on Wednesdays, on

Mondays, Tuesdays, and once, memorably, on a Friday. That Fri-

day, or rather that Thursday, she had a tattoo of a grandfather

clock beneath her right breast. I licked it, surreptitiously, but

it didn't come off. The previous Thursday (Monday according to

the underwear) it had been under her left breast. I think I began

to suspect then, although I said nothing and neither did she.

The next Thursday the tattoo was back, tucked discreetly un-

der the left breast, but it was too late. It ended as I slept, dream-

ing about the waitress at Frank's Inland Seafood, the one with

Monday nights off, with the gap between her teeth and the

freckles on her ass. I was dreaming that she and I were in a

boat on the middle of the lake. There was a hole in the bot-

tom of the boat. I was putting something in it—to keep the wa-

ter out—when I became aware that there was another woman

watching us, an older woman, tall with a stern expression. She

was standing on the water as if it were a dance floor. "Did you

think she wouldn't find out?" she said. The waitress pushed me

away, pulling her underwear back up. The boat wobbled. This

waitress's underwear had a word embroidered on it:

Payday.

I woke up and the girl detective was sitting beside me on the

bed, stark naked and dripping wet. The shower was still run-

ning. She had a strange expression on her face, as if she'd just

eaten a large meal and it was disagreeing with her.

203

"I can explain everything," I said. She shrugged and stood up.

She walked out of the room stark naked and the next time I

saw her, it was two years later and she was disguised as an Of-

fice Lady in a law firm in downtown Tokyo, tapping out Morse

code on the desk with one long petal-pink fingernail. It was

something about expense accounts, or possibly a dirty limerick.

She winked at me and I fell in love all over again.

But I never saw the waitress again.

What the girl detective eats for dinner.

The girl detective lies down on her bed and closes her eyes.

Possibly the girl detective has taken the fat man's case. Possibly

she is just tired. Or curious.

All over the city, all over the world, people are asleep. Sitting

up in my tree, I am getting tired just thinking about them.

They are dreaming about their children, they are dreaming

about their mothers, they are dreaming about their lovers. They

dream that they can fly. They dream that the world is round

like a dinner plate. Some of them fall off the world in their

dreams. Some of them dream about food. The girl detective

walks through these dreams. She picks an apple off a tree in

someone's dream. Someone else is dreaming about the house

they lived in as a child. The girl detective breaks off a bit of their house. It pools in her mouth like honey.

The woman down the street is dreaming about her third hus-

band, the one who ran off with his secretary. That's what she

thinks. He went for takeout one night five years ago and never

came back. It was a long time ago. His secretary said she didn't

know a thing about it, but the woman could tell the other wo-

man was lying. Or maybe he ran away and joined the circus.

There is a man who lives in her basement, although the wo-

man doesn't know it. He's got a television down there, and a

small refrigerator, and a couch that he sleeps on. He's been

living there for the past two years, very quietly. He comes up

for air at night. The woman wouldn't recognize this man if she

bumped into him on the street. They were married about twenty

years and then he went to pick up the lo mein and the wontons

and the shrimp fried rice, and it's taken him a while to get back

home. He still had his set of keys. She hasn't been down in the

basement in years. It's hard for her to get down the stairs.

204

The man is dreaming too. He's working up his courage to go

upstairs and walk out the front door. In his dream he walks out

to the street and then turns around. He'll walk right back up

to the front door, ring the bell. Maybe they'll get married again

someday. Maybe she never divorced him. He's dreaming about

their honeymoon. They'll go out for dinner. Or they'll go down in

the basement, down through the trapdoor into the underworld.

He'll show her the sights. He'll take her dancing.

The girl detective takes a bite of the underworld.

Chinese restaurants.

I used to eat out a lot. I had a favorite restaurant, which had

really good garlic shrimp, and I liked the pancakes, too, the scal-

lion pancakes. But you have to be careful. I knew someone, their

fortune said, "Your life right now is like a rollercoaster. But don't worry, it will soon be over." Now what is that supposed to mean?

Then it happened to me. The first fortune was ominous. "No

one will ever love you the way that you love them." I thought

about it. Maybe it was true. I came back to the restaurant a

week later and I ordered the shrimp and I ate it and when I

opened the fortune cookie I read, "Your friends are not who you

think they are."

I became uneasy. I thought I would stay away for a few

weeks. I ate Thai food instead. Italian. But the thing is, I still

wasn't safe. No restaurants are safe—except maybe truckstops,

or automats. Waiters, waitresses—they pretend to be kind. They

bring us what we ask for. They ask us if there is anything else

we want. They are solicitous of our health. They remember our

names when we come back again.

They are as kind to us as if they were our own mothers, and

we are familiar with them. Sometimes we pinch their fannies.

I don't like to cook for myself. I live alone, and there doesn't

seem to be much point to it. Sometimes I dream about food—for

instance, a cake, it was made of whipped cream. It was the size

of a living room. Just as I was about to take a bite, a dancing

girl kicked out of it. Then another dancing girl. A whole troop of

dancing girls, in fact, all covered in whipped cream. They were

delicious.

I like to eat food made by other people. It feels like a relation-

ship. But you can't trust other people. Especially not waiters.

They aren't our friends, you see. They aren't our mothers. They

205

don't give us the food that we long for—not the food that we

dream about—although they could. If they wanted to.

We ask them for recommendations about the menu, but they

know so much more than that—if only they should choose to tell

us. They do not choose to tell us. Their kindnesses are arbitrary,

and not to be counted as lasting. We sit here in this world, and

the food that they bring us isn't of this world, not entirely. They

are not like us. They serve a great mystery.

I returned to the Chinese restaurant like a condemned man. I

ate my last meal. A party of women in big hats and small dresses

sat at the table next to me. They ordered their food and then de-

parted for the bathroom. Did they ever come back? I never saw

them come back.

The waiter brought me the check and a fortune cookie. I un-

curled my fortune and read my fate. "You will die at the hands of a stranger." As I went away, the waiter smiled at me. His smile

was inscrutable.

I sit here in my tree, eating takeout food, hauled up on a bit

of string. I put my binoculars down to eat. Who knows what my

fortune will say?

What color is the girl detective's hair?

Some people say that the girl detective is a natural blonde.

Others say that she's a redhead, how could the girl detective be

anything else? Her father just smiles and says she looks just like

her mother. I myself am not even sure that the girl detective re-

members the original color of her hair. She is a master of dis-

guises. I feel I should make it clear that no one has ever seen

the girl detective in the same room as the aged housekeeper.

She and her father have often been seen dining out together,

but I repeat, the girl detective is a master of disguises. She is

capable of anything.

Further secret origins of the girl detective.

Some people say that a small child in a grocery store bit her.

It was one of those children who are constantly asking their

parents why the sky is blue and are there really giant allig-

ators—formerly the pets of other small children—living in the

sewers of the city and if China is directly below us, could we

drill a hole and go right through the center of the earth and if

so would we come up upside down and so on. This child, radio-

active with curiosity, bit the girl detective, and in that instant

206

the girl detective suddenly saw all of these answers, all at once.

She was so overcome she had to lie down in the middle of the

aisle with the breakfast cereal on one side and the canned toma-

toes on the other, and the store manager came over and asked

if she was all right. She wasn't all right, but she smiled and let

him help her stand up again, and that night she went home and

stitched the days of the week on her underwear, so that if she

was ever run over by a car, at least it would be perfectly clear

when the accident had occurred. She thought this would make

her mother happy.

Why did the girl detective cross the road?

Because she thought she saw her mother.

Why did the girl detective's mother cross the road?

If only the girl detective knew!

The girl detective was very small when her mother left. No

one ever speaks of her mother. It causes her father too much

pain even to hear her name spoken. To see it written down.

Possibly the girl detective was named after her mother and this

is why we must not say her name.

No one has ever explained to the girl detective why her moth-

er left, although it must have been to do something very import-

ant. Possibly she died. That would be important enough, almost

forgivable.

In the girl detective's room there is a single photograph in a

small gold frame of a woman, tall and with a very faint smile,

rising up on her toes. Arms flung open. She is wearing a long

skirt and a shirt with no sleeves, a pair of worn dancing shoes.

She is holding a sheaf of wheat. She looks as if she is dancing.

The girl detective suspects that this is her mother. She stud-

ies the photograph nightly. People dream about lost or stolen

things, and this woman, her mother, is always in these dreams.

She remembers a woman walking in front of her. The girl

detective was holding this woman's hand. The woman said

something to her. It might have been something like, "Always

look both ways," or "Always wash your hands after you use a public bathroom," or maybe "I love you," and then the woman stepped into the street. After that the girl detective isn't sure

what happened. There was a van, red and gold, going fast

around the corner. On the side was "Eat at Mom's Chinese Res-

taurant." Or maybe "Eat at Moon's." Maybe it hit the woman.

207

Maybe it stopped and the woman got in. She said her mother's

name then, and no one said anything back.

The girl detective goes out to eat.

I only leave my tree to go to the bathroom. It's sort of like

camping. I have a roll of toilet paper and a little shovel. At night

I tie myself to the branch with a rope. But I don't really sleep

much. It's about seven o'clock in the evening when the girl de-

tective leaves her house. "Where are you going," I say, just to make conversation.

She says that she's going to that new restaurant downtown, if

it's any of my business. She asks if I want to come, but I have

plans. I can tell that something's up. She's disguised as a young

woman. Her eyes are keen and they flash a lot. "Can you bring

me back an order of steamed dumplings?" I call after her, "Some white rice?"

She pretends she doesn't hear me. Of course I follow her. She

takes a bus. I climb between trees. It's kind of fun. Occasion-

ally there aren't any trees and I have to make do with telephone

poles, or water towers. Generally I keep off the ground.

There's a nice little potted ficus at Mom's Chinese Restaurant.

I sit in it and ponder the menu. I try not to catch the waiter's

eye. He's a tall, stern-looking man. The girl detective is obvi-

ously trying to make up her mind between the rolling beef and

the glowing squid. Listed under appetizers, there's scallion pan-

cakes, egg rolls with shrimp, and wantons (which I have ordered

many times. But they always turn out to be wontons instead),

also dancing girls. The girl detective orders a glass of water, no

lemon. Then she asks the waiter, "Where are you from?"

"China," he says.

"I mean, where do you live now," the girl detective says.

"China," he says. "I commute."

The girl detective tries again. "How long has this restaurant

been here?"

"Sometimes, for quite a while," he says. "Don't forget to wash your hands before you eat."

The girl detective goes to the bathroom.

At the next table there are twelve women wearing dark

glasses. They may have been sitting there for quite a while.

They stand up, they file one by one into the women's bathroom.

The girl detective sits for a minute. Then she follows them. After

208

a minute I follow her. No one stops me. Why should they? I step

carefully from table to table. I slouch behind the flower arrange-

ments.

In the bathroom there aren't any trees, so I climb up on the

electric dryer and sit with my knees up by my ears and my

hands around my knees. I try to look inconspicuous. There is

only one stall and absolutely no sign of the twelve women.

Maybe they're all in the same stall, but I can see under the door

and I don't see any feet. The girl detective is washing her hands.

She washes her hands thoughtfully, for a long time. Then she

comes over and dries them. "What next?" I ask her.

Her eyes flash keenly. She pushes open the door of the stall

with her foot. It swings. Both of us can see that the stall is

empty. Furthermore there isn't even a toilet in it. Instead there

is a staircase going down. A draft is coming up. I almost think

I can hear alligators, scratching and slithering around some-

where further down the stairs.

The girl detective goes to the underworld.

She has a flashlight of course. She stands at the top of the

stairs and looks back at me. The light from the flashlight

puddles around her feet. "Are you coming or not?" she says.

What can I say? I fall in love with the girl detective all over

again. I come down off the dryer. "I guess," I say. We start down the stairs.

The underworld is everything I've been telling you. It's really

big. We don't see any alligators, but that doesn't mean that

there aren't any. It's dark. It's a little bit cool and I'm glad that I'm wearing my cardigan. There are trees with moss on them.

The moss glows. I take to the trees. I swing from branch to

branch. I was always good at gym. Beneath me the girl detective

strides forward purposefully, her large feet lit up like two boats.

I am in love with the top of her head, with the tidy part straight

down the middle. I feel tenderly towards this part. I secretly

vow to preserve it. Not one hair on her head shall come to harm.

But then we come to a river. It's a wide river and probably

deep. I sit in a tree at the edge of the river, and I can't make up

my mind to climb down. Not even for the sake of the part in the

hair of the girl detective. She looks up at me and shrugs. "Suit yourself," she says.

209

"I'll wait right here," I say. There are cute little canoes by the side of the river. Some people say that the girl detective can

walk on water, but I see her climb in one of the canoes. This

isn't the kind of river that you want to stick your toes in. It's too spick-and-span. You might leave footprints.

I watch her go across the river. I see her get out on the other

side. There is a nightclub on the other side, with a veranda

and a big sign over the veranda. DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL

GIRLS. There is a woman standing on the veranda. People are

dancing. There is music playing. Up in my tree, my feet are tap-

ping air. Someone says, "Mom?" Someone embraces someone

else. Everyone is dancing. "Where have you been?" someone

says. "Spring cleaning," someone says.

It is hard to see what is going on across the river. Chinese

waiters in elegant tuxedos are dipping dancing princesses.

There are a lot of sequins. They are dancing so fast, things get

blurry. Things run together. I think I see alligators dancing. I see

a fat old man dancing with the girl detective's mother. Maybe

even the housekeeper is dancing. It's hard to tell if their feet

are even touching the ground. There are sparks. Fireworks. The

musicians are dancing, too, but they don't stop playing. I'm dan-

cing up in my tree. The leaves shake and the branch groans, but

the branch doesn't break.

We dance for hours. Maybe for days. It's hard to tell when it

stays dark all the time. Then there is a line of dancers coming

across the river. They skip across the backs of the white allig-

ators, who snap at their heels. They are hand in hand, spinning

and turning and falling back, and leaping forward. It's hard to

see them, they're moving so fast. It's so dark down here. Is that

a dancing princess, or a bank robber? Is that a fat old man, or

an alligator, or a housekeeper? I wish I knew. Is that the girl

detective or is it her mother? One looks back at the other and

smiles. She doesn't say a thing, she just smiles.

I look, and in the mossy glow they all look like the girl de-

tective. Or maybe the girl detective looks like all of them. They

all look so happy. Passing in the opposite direction is a line of

Chinese waiters. They swing the first line as they pass. They

cut across and dosey-do. They clap hands. They clutch each oth-

er, across the breast and the back, and tango. But the girl de-

tectives keep up towards the restaurant and the bathroom and

210

the secret staircase. The waiters keep on towards the water,

towards the nightclub. Down in that nightclub, there's a bath-

room. In the bathroom, there's another staircase. The waiters

are going home to bed.

I'm exhausted. I can't keep up with the girl detectives. "Wait!"

I yell. "Hold it for just a second. I'm coming with you."

They all turn and look back at me. I'm dizzy with all of that

looking. I fall out of my tree. I hit the ground. Really, that's all I remember.

When I woke up.

Someone had carried me back to my tree and tucked me in.

I was snug as a bug. I was back in the tree across the street

from the girl detective's window. This time the blind was down.

I couldn't see a thing.

The end of the girl detective?

Some people say that she never came back from the under-

world.

The return of the girl detective.

I had to go to the airport for some reason. It's a long story. It

was an important case. This wasn't that long ago. I hadn't been

down out of the tree for very long. I was missing the tree.

I thought I saw the girl detective in the bar in Terminal B. She

was sitting in one of the back booths, disguised as a fat old man.

There was a napkin in front of her, folded into a giraffe. She was

crying but there was the napkin folded into a giraffe—she had

nothing to wipe her nose on. I would have gone over and given

her my handkerchief, but someone sat down next to her. It was

a kid about twelve years old. She had red hair. She was wear-

ing overalls. She just sat next to him, and she put down anoth-

er napkin. She didn't say a word to him. The old man blew his

nose on it and I realized that he wasn't the girl detective at all.

He was just an old man. It was the kid in the overalls—what a

great disguise! Then the waitress came over to take their order.

I wasn't sure about the waitress. Maybe she was the girl detect-

ive. But she gave me such a look—I had to get up and leave.

Why I got down out of the tree.

She came over and stood under the tree. She looked a lot

like my mother. Get down out of that tree this instant! she said.

Don't you know it's time for dinner?

211

Publication History

These stories were previously published as follows:

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, Fence, 1998

Water Off a Black Dog's Back, Century, 1995

The Specialist's Hat, Event Horizon, 1998

Flying Lessons, Asimov's, 1995

Travels with the Snow Queen, Lady Churchill's Rosebud

Wristlet, winter 1996/7

Vanishing Act, Realms of Fantasy, 1996

Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party, Lady Churchill's Rose-

bud Wristlet, 1998

Shoe and Marriage, 4 Stories, 2000

The Girl Detective, Event Horizon, 1999

212

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to the following people. Some of them

are relatives, some are friends, some are writers or editors.

All of them have been incredibly kind encouraging. Some of

them have cooked meals for me, or taught me various card

games, or pointed me towards necessary books, or read my

stories when I needed readers. I was a member of various

workshops while writing these stories: I owe a lot to the in-

structors and members of the MFA workshop at UNC-G, Clarion

East, Sycamore Hill, the Cambridge Auxiliary Women's Work-

shop, CSFW, and Rio Hondo. Partial inspiration for "The Spe-

cialist's Hat" came from an exhibit at the Peabody Museum in

Cambridge, MA. I borrowed part of a passage (stuck up be-

side an empty exhibit case) to begin the longest poem in that

story. Also adapted, for that same story, is a passage about

snake whiskey from a folklore exhibit in Raleigh, NC. I would

like to thank my mother, Annabel J. Link, who read to me until

her voice gave out; my father, Bill Link, who read me books

when my mother was too hoarse; my sister, Holly; my broth-

er, Ben; Sam, Babs, Bryan and Laurie Jones, my grandparents,

Edwin and Lou Jones; my wicked stepmother, Linda. I am in-

debted to Joyce Nissim, Michele Harley, Barb Gilly, Lynne and

Tom Casey, Fleur Penman, Ada Vassilovski, Pete Cramer, Jack

Cheng, Margaret Muirhead, Jim Clarke, Cassandra Silvia, Vin-

cent McCaffrey, the fabulous Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, Bill

Desmond, K. Wyndham, Mimi Levin, Janis Fields, Lea and Anna

(girl sleuths), Christopher Hammond, Jim Clark, Fred Chap-

pell, Lee Zacharias, Michael Parker, Raymond Kennedy, RAchele

Taylor, Hadas Steiner, Melissa DeJong, John Golz, Lauren

Stearns, Justine Larbalestier, Jenna A. Felice, Vanessa Felice,

Veronica Shanoes, William Smith, Anna Genoese, Steve Pasech-

nick, Bryan Cholfin, Terra Cholfin, Ian McDowell, Anne Abrams,

Mr. Jeremy Cavin, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Delia Sherman,

Ellen Kushner, Gwenda Bond, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson,

Dora Knez, Jim Patrick Kelly, Sarah Smith, John Kessel, Richard

Butner, Walter Jon Williams, Greg Frost, Sean Stewart, Tim and

Serena Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Shelley Jackson, and Karen

Joy Fowler. (Especially Karen J. Fowler.) I am so very grateful

for the hard work and patience and generosity of Gavin J. Grant,

213

who has given me, among other things, a pair of shoes, a glass

eye (I broke it), CDs by Mayumi Kojima and Super Butter Dog, a

kimono, and, on my thirtieth birthday, thirty books, wrapped up

in paper.

214

www.feedbooks.com

Food for the mind

215

Document Outline

- License

- Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

- Water Off a Black Dog’s Back

- The Specialist's Hat

- Flying Lessons

- Travels with the Snow Queen

- Vanishing Act

- Survivor's Ball, Or, The Donner Party

- Shoe and Marriage

- Most of my Friends Are Two-Thirds Water

- Louise's Ghost

- The Girl Detective

- Publication History

- Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

License

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Water Off a Black Dog’s Back

The Specialist's Hat

Flying Lessons

Travels with the Snow Queen

Vanishing Act

Survivor's Ball, Or, The Donner Party

Shoe and Marriage

Most of my Friends Are Two-Thirds Water

Louise's Ghost

The Girl Detective

Publication History

Acknowledgements