EMBOUCHURE and THREE STORIES by BARBARA R. DRAKE a THESIS PRESENTED to the GRADUATE SCHOOL of the UNIVERSITY of FLORIDA in PARTI

EMBOUCHURE AND THREE STORIES

BARBARA R. DRAKE

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2004

Barbara R. Drake

For Jorge

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the University of Florida and the Creative Writing Program for the opportunity to study and for their financial support. I would also like to thank certain faculty: Jill Ciment, who opened my eyes to story and novel structure; Michael Hoffman, whose remarkable mixed-forms class inspired me to complete my first novella; my thesis committee members Kenneth Kidd, for his support and goodwill; Sidney Wade, whose enthusiasm and critical eye gave me a new understanding of how to knit together poetry and prose in a single piece; and, finally, my director David Leavitt, who gave generously of his time, insights and peerless editing skills, and who won me over to the serial comma.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

ABSTRACT...... vi

TOWN & HILLOCK...... 1

THE GIRL SCOUT VARIATIONS: TWELVE MEDITATIONS ON THE 1913 HANDBOOK FOR GIRL SCOUTS...... 20

Theme: The Girl Scout Law ...... 20 I: Portrait of Myself, Age 8...... 21 II: How to Carry the Injured ...... 22 III: Tests for First Class Scout, 1913...... 25 IV: Badges: Memories of a Girl Scout Circa 1972...... 26 V: How to Secure a Burglar with Eight Inches of Cord...... 30 VI: Cookies...... 31 VII: Frontier Life ...... 37 VIII: When I Light a Match...... 38 IX: All the Dangers Begin with ‘D’ ...... 42 X: Modesty ...... 43 Favorite Game, Age 4...... 43 Drawing, Age 5 ...... 43 Taking a Bath, Age 8...... 44 Going to Camp for the First Time, Age 9 ...... 44 Rock ’n Roll TV Comic-strip Song, Age 9 ½ ...... 45 XI: Cabin Fever: Camp Madeline Mulford, Age 10...... 46 XII: The Girl Who Became a Stream ...... 49

HOW TO MARRY A SOUTHERN MAN ...... 51

EMBOUCHURE...... 63

Part One ...... 63 Part Two...... 77 Part Three...... 118 Coda...... 160

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 164

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

EMBOUCHURE AND THREE STORIES

Barbara R. Drake

August 2004

Chair: David Leavitt Major Department: English

The four prose works in this thesis collection represent two years’ work in the

creative writing program. The heart of the thesis is a 100-page novella, written in my last

semester. It is preceded by two short stories and a hybrid work of creative nonfiction,

which incorporates poetry, found text and autobiographical narrative. The settings of

these pieces range from 1970s New Jersey and Western Massachusetts to contemporary

Santa Barbara, California, and Ocala, Florida. “Embouchure,” the short novel, is about a

fifteen-year-old flutist who breaks her jaw in a bicycle accident and falls in love with her oral surgeon. “Town & Hillock,” a semi-surrealist tale, skewers the world of shelter magazines and explores the perils of getting what you want. In “How to Marry a

Southern Man,” a phone psychic from Manhattan flees to Northern Florida, where she buys a horse ranch and finds herself unexpectedly smitten with southern rhetoric. In “The

Girl Scout Variations” I investigate my own girlhood, and American girlhood in general, through the frame of the original 1913 Girl Scout handbook and the ten Girl Scout laws.

The twelve variations in this piece cover moments in my own brief, but highly

vi competitive “career” as a Brownie and Junior Girl Scout -- selling cookies, earning badges, going away to camp -- contrasted with instructional text from the 1913 handbook on topics ranging from how to tie up a burglar with eight inches of rope, to how to live a wholesome, productive life.

vii

TOWN & HILLOCK

They’re photographing the house today. I can’t wait. Mr. Bill Bradford, the editor, tells me they’ve been looking for ages for a home in Santa Barbara with a view of the valley and a neo-Georgian cupola to boot. “It’s perfect!” he screamed when Rona Gould took him into my son Tommy’s old room, that first time. It was our annual holiday party, and my husband Richard and I were out back on the deck with the dogs, mixing Pisco

Sours. “Don’t you dare do a single thing to this house, Adele Fisher,” Mr. Bradford shouted over the barking. “I’ll have my team over for the next issue.” I was immediately all for the idea; Richard, of course, dug in his heels. “Hold on, Adele,” he said in that cautious, administrator voice of his. “Do we really want a bunch of strangers running all over the house, taking pictures? This could be trouble.” Honestly, I could have smacked him right then and there; thank god Mr. Bradford took me aside and explained that the husbands nearly always resist, at first. Let him talk to Richard privately, out in the gazebo. He’d bring him around. Sure enough, an hour later Mr. Bradford materialized behind me and, squeezing my waist just a little too hard, whispered: “We’re on, Adele!

Get ready for fabulous!”

Well, that was eight months ago. I have been sitting on my down-filled, Donghia- covered couch ever since, waiting for the phone call, telling my husband, no nachos in the living room, use a coaster, no wet towels on the bed. Eight months, not a word from

Town & Hillock. And all that time, Richard a perfect roller coaster of moods: edgy and excited at first, then oddly subdued, then wanting to call the whole thing off, and then,

1 2 last month, investing $40,000 in a Virilite security fence. (As if anyone reading Town &

Hillock notices what kind of fence you have!) Eight months of this. Then last night, out of the blue, Mr. Bradford’s croaky voice is informing my answering machine that the crew is coming this morning at seven, and to please crate the animals. I have been up all night signing and faxing back the release forms, pages and pages of miniscule print; God knows what it all means.

I cannot believe how many trucks and people there are when they arrive. Women in dark colors and chatty young men and no-nonsense types with tools. And bringing up the rear, Mr. Bradford himself, with his hair in a King Arthur pageboy and orange pants and a humongous three-ring binder, Post-it notes falling out everywhere. He plunks down on the couch and feels a pillow: “Out with the old,” he announces. So all the assistants and the assistant assistants go back outside and start directing this enormous moving van into my driveway. The neighbors are gawking at their windows when this other trailer leaps over the curb and drives onto my front lawn, right into the Japanese magnolia. Did my heart leap! Thank goodness it wasn’t any worse, just some broken branches and a crushed birds’ nest that I thought was abandoned. Fortunately, these people are creative; they can get around any catastrophe. A young man with a Nikon picks up several speckled-blue eggs, the ones that aren’t broken, and lines them up on the railing of the front porch.

“Mrs. Fisher, over this way. You’re blocking the light,” says a girl with thick tortoiseshell glasses, as if I didn’t live here, as if this weren’t my house. Click click click:

The photographer is bent over those tiny eggs like they were Fabergé treasures from the

Kremlin. I would love to stay and observe but I hear weird a pounding coming from the kitchen.

Two men are trying to get a dolly under my brand-new refrigerator. “Christ almighty, it doesn’t want to move,” the red-haired one says. “Use a saw,” calls an assistant.

I am trying to tell the redhead that the refrigerator stays. He rubs his sweaty forehead and stares.

“Surely you don’t expect Town & Hillock to be featuring a Whirlpool!” he says, his blue eyes bulging. He turns to his partner: “A piece of mediocre craftsmanship in the pages of a fine magazine. Can you believe it? She actually thinks….”

I am seeing red. My voice has gone loud, whatever it is I am saying.

Mr. Bradford wraps an arm around my shoulders and steers me to the dining room.

“Don’t worry, Adele,” he says in that peculiar, strangled voice of his. “We do this all the time. We’ll have it back to normal at the end. You’ll see. Better than normal. You’re going to love the improvements. It’s all part of the process!”

I stare at his chop-chop bangs and am seized with panic. Richard, I remember. I have to call Richard at the museum office. I get him on the third ring.

“They’re attacking the refrigerator. The Town & Hillock people. They’re here in the kitchen and they’ve got a dolly and this sweaty ogre is trying to extract it from the cabinetry—”

“Didn’t I tell you?” he asks. “We’re getting a new Sub-Zero, with a wine cooler.

Bradford’s idea. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Oh.” I’m suddenly light-headed. “No, you didn’t tell me. I feel – I don’t know how I feel.”

A fax starts up in the background.

“Excuse me,” he says in his business voice. “I have to go now.”

I sit down at the place where my beloved oak dining table formerly was, and which

is now occupied by an elliptical slab, all shiny white marble. The young people’s voices

buzz around me. “Should we leave the country chairs? They might provide an interesting

contrast with the Saarinen table.” Great blasts interrupt whatever they are about to say

next. They have to saw through the kitchen wall to make room for the Sub-Zero fridge.

It must have shown on my face. How I felt, I mean. The tortoiseshell girl stops

whatever it is she’s doing and pulls up a perfectly nice wicker chair and leans close to me

with her big, thick frames.

“Look,” she whispers. “It’s always this way. Nobody’s house gets photographed

looking like it does in real life. The whole thing’s a fake. We bring in all this stuff and

make it look like we want it. See that Barcelona chair? Every other house we shoot has

something by Mies van der Rohe in it. Even if we didn’t bring the furniture here, it

wouldn’t matter. We’d use a photo from some other house and say it was yours. If Bill

wants us to, we’ll supply a Dalmatian or a Boston terrier or even a few children to

complete the scenario.”

“But I have a child,” I say. “Tommy is my child. He’s moved out of the house, but he’s still ours.”

“Of course he is, Mrs. Fisher. It’s just that….”

She uncrosses her legs and sighs. I get the distinct impression that this is an effort for her, communicating with a woman thirty years her senior.

“Look,” she starts in again. “I know it’s a letdown. You thought we were photographing your decor. But -- look at the bright side! You’re getting a free remodeling

and an up-to-the-minute redecorating plan and free publicity. Everyone is going to covet

your house once it’s been in Town & Hillock. We will have to take the new furniture

with us, though, when we’re done.”

Behind her the assistants are lugging in couches, side tables, Tufenkian rugs, big pieces of pottery, carting out all the lovely things I spent five years buying in the design district, everything that I thought was the point of this photo shoot. My heart is going thump, thump, quite rapidly; my chest is flushed. It’s like the whole hot-flash business all

over again. I call Richard again.

“They took our dining table. The couch is in the hallway.”

“Damn,” he says. “I thought Bradford said the furniture stayed.”

“My point exactly!”

He muffles the receiver; I can hear the fax machine start up again in the background. “Oh. They must know what they’re doing. Let them do whatever it is those people do. I’ll pick up some Chinese for tonight.

“Chin up,” he adds.

I take the cordless and peek into the living room.

The lights are huge! Big lenses and things on tripods and silver screens to bounce the light. Now the arguing starts. The chatty young men become sharp and opinionated.

More overhead, more blue, the photographer says to a light person. But we always use a

(some unintelligible word). Get me a (rhymes with ballast). Click click. I am running back and forth between the garage where the dogs are and the kitchen where a skinny blonde is braiding hydrangea into a wreath. She glances up and smiles.

“What does Bill have you doing on this shoot?”

“I live here.”

“Oh. Nice cupola.”

She stuffs in the last stem of hydrangea and carries the wreath and a bucket to

Tommy’s room, slopping water on the wood floor. Click click. Someone turns on

Richard’s radio and tunes in to some loud rap music. A small despair seizes me.

Then Mr. Bradford gets the brilliant idea to pose me in the garden. Fortunately I am ready for this moment with my straw hat and my rose basket and my cutting shears, but no, the photographer has something else in mind. He has spotted a part of the boxwood hedge with the most amazing vista to the lake behind it. I am to stand there.

“Where?” I ask.

Tortoiseshell Girl gives me a pitying look, takes the shears and starts hacking.

Soon, instead of a thick privacy hedge, there is a gaping O that the neighbors’ dogs can crawl through whenever they like. Richard will hemorrhage when he sees it.

“I can see Cachuma Lake,” the photographer gasps. “Mrs. Fisher, will you kneel on the gravel, in front of the hedgerow, please, and point that way with your hand clippers?”

Well, naturally I am devastated when I come back inside and see it. My son’s old bedroom, I mean. Someone has hot-glued tiny mirrors all over Tommy’s blue quilt and hung a stuffed bull’s head above the dresser. The linen curtains are in a heap under the bed. Tommy’s high school wrestling trophies are nowhere to be found. The nightstands have been stacked, one on top of the other. Bradford has strung Balinese lanterns from the ceiling, suspended a copper gong as a headboard.

“Where do you want them?” Hydrangea Girl asks, balancing a wheelbarrow full of pink river rocks. “Covering the whole rug or just cascading out of the closet?”

Well, I don’t know what happens next because I take the Saab and head to

Sullivan’s for an afternoon pick-me-up. It’s Richard’s idea; there’s no use in my getting

worked up and in Bradford’s way. He’ll meet me at seven, at home, with the takeout.

Rona Gould’s ex-husband is at the far end of the bar, as usual, and the dogs’ old groomer, and the woman who teaches ballet above the bakery. We start on the regular gossip, and before you know it, it’s five-thirty and I’ve polished off three Rob Roys. I no longer give a thought to Hydrangea Girl or Tortoiseshell Girl or my ruined hedges; I am nearing equilibrium, as Marty Gould says. And then in walks this outlandish woman in a turquoise hat, claiming to be a palm reader.

One look at her fraying caftan and her armloads of bangles and her crazed expression, and I know it’s time to leave.

Time to walk the dogs, I announce, and leap nimbly off my barstool – rather too nimbly: keys and little black bag go flying off the counter. While I retrieve quarters, etcetera, from under a table, the woman stumps around the U-shaped bar in her

Birkenstocks, her ankle bracelets jangling, dropping wads of business cards on the marble countertop. The floppy hat sways on her head like an enormous blue mushroom, purple scarves dangling from the brim. Just as I dread, she veers over to where I am crouched.

She leans down, stinky patchouli oil and all, and stuffs a card in my hand: “Trina

Belagovksy. Palm readings. Past-life regressions. Divinations. Future-event rehearsals.

‘Because it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.’” I turn the card over. There is a

Santa Monica P.O. box and several phone numbers, all of them crossed out.

There is some grumbling, among those of us who know better, about “New Age

bullshit.” Then the woman, Trina, offers to read anyone’s palm for free, in exchange for a

drink. Suddenly everyone’s game, including me. I reclaim my seat. The dogs can wait.

Trina arranges her big rear on a stool next to Marty and, hat still on, orders a rum and Coke, looking very pleased with herself. I know the type: embroidered tent dresses from Mexico, silver amulets, messy kohl eye makeup, a tarot deck and a ball of hashish in the macramé shoulder bag: an old hippy girl gone to seed. From her saggy face and wrinkled brown cleavage, I am guessing she is 55, 58 – my age, in other words, only not so well preserved. Au naturel, a kinder person might say. No doubt she’s been pulling this stunt for decades: driving up and down the coast in some wreck of a car, trading

“readings” for drinks or drugs, taking up temporary residence here and there, always moving on. There is a kind of bravura to her that impresses the young and people in crisis, who are briefly taken with her eccentric costumes, her wild predictions, her willingness to sleep overnight on a sand dune, if necessary. I am taken with none of it, especially the phony-sounding Russian name. I do know a diversion, though, when I see one.

First on the hot seat is the ballet teacher. She holds out a large, mottled palm and looks panic-stricken, as well she might: I know for a fact she’s unhinged. Nearly half her monthly salary goes to personalized astrology reports from some kook in Seattle.

“I already know what my problem is,” the ballerina says anxiously. “My heart line is too long.”

“You love too much,” the groomer chimes in.

Trina pinches the mound of flesh beside the ballerina’s thumb and frowns. She’s downed two rum and Cokes already and has gone into some kind of trance.

“A passionate nature,” Trina says, in a gruff voice. “Sensual. Too sensual. You are easily aroused by false promises. Avoid married men. Wear underwear more often. Eat radishes. Next?”

The groomer, Fred, has better luck. He will live to a hundred if he gives to charity.

He will meet the love of his life at sea. His power stone is the topaz. His lucky number is

13.

“I knew it,” says Fred, elated.

The ballerina sobs quietly into a white cocktail napkin.

“And you?” she asks. Her dark, kohl-rimmed eyes are upon me. I have the sensation of falling into a deep well.

“By all means,” I hear myself say. I exchange seats with the groomer.

She clutches my left hand and kneads it rhythmically, her nails digging into my skin. I have the sudden urge to run away; no good can come of these encounters with the untethered souls who roam up and down the Pacific Coast Highway.

“Tch, tch,” she says, pointing to a horizontal line that dead-ends in the center of my palm. Spokes radiate from the terminus, like the rays of a star.

“I am sorry to inform you,” she says. “Your husband is with another woman. You will lose your lovely home. I see flames. You must align yourself with the Divine Spirit.

Wear white. Pray for a miracle.”

“Well, I never…,” I say when I find my voice. Tiny amoeba-shaped things are

reeling in front of my eyes. How dare this woman walk into Sullivan’s, con upstanding

people out of drinks, insult them, and expect to get away with it?

Trina, meanwhile, has snapped out of her trance and is acting like any old barfly

from the Valley. She props her droopy cleavage on the counter and taps the side of her

glass: Another, she calls to the bartender. Her voice is especially annoying; I want to

grab one of her cheap scarves and choke her with it. The thought invigorates me.

“How would you like me to report you to the police?” I stand on wobbly legs and

cast about for my little black bag. “I have the number right here. The chief of police is a

good friend of mine. Just one word from me, and he’ll lock you up. Believe me, it’s a

crime in Santa Barbara, being deranged. Just as soon as I find the number,” I say, poking

at the buttons of my cell phone.

“Adele, please. It’s not worth it,” says Marty.

I keep poking, but the keypad won’t unlock.

“It’s seven-thirty,” Marty says. “Won’t Richard be?….”

“Oh my God,” I say, a sort of light dawning in my head. I can picture Richard in

the mirrored lobby of Wong’s, trying to decide between General Tao’s and Lemon

Chicken. He’ll eat half of it in the car on the ride home, the Styrofoam box balanced on

his lap. He’ll also bring spring rolls and fried rice and egg-drop soup, and at the thought

of this I am ravenous.

“You’re perfectly right,” I tell Marty. “I’ve got to go feed the dogs!”

I stuff the cell phone in a pocket, put some bills on the counter, and snap my purse shut.

“You owe me a drink,” a voice says.

Trina’s wide self and floppy hat are blocking my exit.

“I’m not buying you any drink. Not for that nonsense.”

“It gets worse if you don’t buy me a drink.”

“Oh, no. Don’t try that with me.”

“A lot worse.”

“Go to hell,” I say. And as I brush past her, I tip the turquoise-blue monstrosity off her head, ratty scarves and all. It rolls onto the carpet and gets tangled underfoot a crowd of people gathered in the lobby. With great satisfaction I watch Trina scramble on hands and knees to retrieve it, like a sow rooting for truffles.

“Go to hell, go to hell,” I laugh.

And whatever happens next to that unlucky woman, I don’t know: I’m out the door, in the parking lot, my car. I ram the shift into reverse and tear out of Sullivan’s like the careless driver I am, and then I’m out on the open road, chanting, “Go to hell, Trina

Belogovsky, Go to hell.” Then it’s onto the highway and one, two, three? -- yes, three exits. Around and around the steep curves, past the tasteless new villas they’re erecting.

Somehow I make my way up the final hillside, don’t ask me how. My guardian angel must be exceptional. All I know is when I pull in front of the house, the moving van is backing out of the driveway, there are lit torches by the doorway, the garage door is off the track, the dogs are loose, and there are peacocks on the front lawn.

I kill the motor and leap out of the car.

“Don’t worry about the mess, Mrs. Fisher,” the bright young people shout from the back of the van. “We left you the Saarinen table. It’s been great. It’s been great, and we will definitely use most of the shots or some of them in some future issue.”

“But what about my beautiful lawn?” I cry. “My hedges? My husband? Where is

Richard?”

“Out back,” Tortoiseshell Girl calls. “Out back with the rest of them.”

“The rest of what?” I want to ask.

“Out with the old, in with the new,” shouts Bradford. “Keep in touch, Adele.”

A shower of Post-it notes flutters in the van’s wake as it rounds the corner. The dogs are howling and running up and down the street.

A loud boom goes off behind the house. Fire leaps into the night sky. I run down the driveway to the backyard and peer over the new Virilite fence. They’ve lit a bonfire by the deck – armchairs, tables, rolled-up rugs, an upended sofa – heaped in a pyre. Four small children in bathing suits stand perilously close to the flames, roasting marshmallows on dinner forks.

I fumble with the latch, but it doesn’t budge.

“Children,” I shout, “get away from the fire! You’ll burn yourselves!”

At the sound of my voice, they turn their shiny, strawberry-blond heads and stare.

They don’t say a word.

The fire crackles and hisses. Something inside the bower collapses – a stack of magazines? Sparks float up in the air, like tiny spirits.

Richard comes to the gate, carrying a bag from Wong’s. At the sight of his familiar slumped shoulders, his silvery crop of hair, I’m overcome with relief.

“Oh,” I say, breathing in the smell of fried rice. “I’m so glad you’re here. Can you

let me in?”

“Adele,” he says brightly.

He looks happier and more relaxed than I’ve seen him in ages. He’s wearing the

wool pants I bought him in St. Croix last year and an orange shirt I’ve never seen before.

For some reason, he does not undo the latch.

“Richard, what is going on? Did you see what they did to the house?”

“Yes,” he laughs, an odd sort of laugh. “Yes, it’s great. Those Town & Hillock people know what they’re doing, don’t they?”

He turns to the pretty, dark-haired woman standing beside him. She is about my height and is wearing a long, white evening dress with pearls.

“Bella,” he says, “meet Adele. Adele, Bella.”

The woman pokes a tanned arm through the slats. “Nice to meet you,” she says in a tinkly Italian accent.

“Bella?” I look at Richard. “Who is Bella?”

“My wife.”

“I’m your wife.”

“No. You used to be my wife,” he says, wrapping an arm around the woman’s miniscule waist. “Bella is my wife now. Your friend Bradford arranged everything. Sent the paperwork to my office this afternoon.”

He holds up the faxes I signed last night.

“Gotta love him,” he says. “Weird pants and all!”

Behind him, the children dangle a leather photo album over the fire. There is a

damp, hissing sound; the pages ignite.

“Who are they?” I point a trembling finger.

“Oh.” He looks over his shoulder. “Let me think: Briano, Botticelli, Blanca and

Beatrice. Or, is it Brandon, Brian, Britney and Bonnie? Hah! I can never get it straight.”

“Silly man!” The Italian woman pinches his cheek. “You know that Bill says, no,

no, no Anglo-Saxon names this season!”

She turns to me with hard, black eyes: “They are our children, of course.”

“Of course nothing,” I say. “Richard: Open this gate at once.”

“I can’t do that,” he says.

“Open the gate now, Richard.”

“Sorry. No can do. By the way, it’s Ricardo, now. Ricardo Pesce.”

“Will you please get rid of her?” the Italian woman asks.

“Name’s official as of next week. Bradford’s expediting the papers.”

“Ri-cardo,” I repeat. “Ricardo Pesce. Like-- the actor?”

“Because if you cannot, I do it myself,” she says, reaching on the gate for the security box.

Richard pushes her hand away and trips the flat, oblong switch. A low, warning beep goes off – Stage One, according to the Virilite owner’s manual. In forty-five seconds, an ear-splitting alarm will sound. In five minutes, the police will be here.

“I’m sorry,” he mouths to me. “I had to.”

“Don’t forget to tell her about the money,” says Bella.

“The money?” I ask.

“The joint accounts – they are frozen,” she says.

“Oh.” A small gasp of pain escapes me.

She gives me a triumphant look and disappears around the hedges.

“I left five thousand in your own checking,” he says. “That should be enough to see

you through.” He looks around, nervously. “I have to go, Adele.”

“Richard –”

“Wait,” he says. “Take this.”

He passes the bag of Chinese food over the fence. The boxes still feel warm through the plastic bag.

I grab his hand.

“Please, don’t,” I say, kneading Richard’s bony palm.

“They didn’t have Lemon Chicken, so I got you Happy Family.”

“I’m your wife!”

“Oh, Adele,” he says, wrenching his hand away. He examines it, as if for bruises.

“Get over it, will you?”

He gives me a pitying look.

The shrill, metallic sound of the alarm rips through the air.

Clang! Over and over. Over and over.

“Chin up,” Richard yells, backing away from the fence. “It’s all part of the process!”

And then he is gone, and I am alone underneath the cold night sky, on the other side of my security fence, looking into my backyard, and I cannot undo the latch. The dogs are running in circles around my ankles and howling. The alarm is clanging. The

blank eye of the surveillance camera gapes at me. And in less than five minutes Officer

Carl will be here.

***

Well, so it goes. Marty Gould says the breakup three months ago was all my fault: I

was lusting after fame and glory; I had to the let the Cat in the Hat into our house, I had

to be photographed for a shelter magazine, I had to shake hands with Thing 1 and Thing

2, hence the alienation of poor Richard, hence the arrival of the new (and improved) Mrs.

Fisher alias Signora Pesce, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, mumbling into his

umpteenth Cuervo Gold – but, really, what does Marty Gould know? He can’t even recall

the title of a movie he’s just seen, five minutes after we’ve left the theater; that’s how

diminished the man’s mental powers are. No, I cannot rely on someone as distracted and

bitter as Rona’s ex to help me sort through this mess, which still leaves me wondering:

Could all this have been prevented? And is it realistic in this day and age to expect

fidelity from anyone, let alone everlasting love?

True, I could consult with the ballet teacher or with Fred, the groomer, but I’m loath to go down either of those paths. The ballerina would probably blame my misfortunes on some celestial mishap, and Fred, well, Fred would just sigh and start in on

The Pointlessness of Everything or his other favorite topic, The Tendency of All Men,

Gay or Straight, to Behave like Assholes. That leaves – who else? Trina Belagovsky

(heaven forbid!) or Mr. Bill Bradford, the Evil One himself, He who dangled the carrot in front of my nose, let me lunge for it in full view of my friends and neighbors, and snatched it away at the last second, leaving me without husband, home or resources. Pour my soul out to that man? I think not. Besides, I no longer have money to waste at

Sullivan’s, at least not at the rate that I seem to have gone through it the last few months,

ever since that evening Richard left me at the gate.

No, the only person who could possibly offer me solace is my dear, dear Tommy, and I’m afraid it’s too late for that. He’s gone to Guatemala with that druggy friend of his to open a raw foods restaurant. His big chance, he calls it. The other day at my new P.O. box I received a postcard saying that he and Lars had found the perfect location: an abandoned church at the foot of a famous volcano, the one that looks like a squashed bundt cake and is supposedly inactive. I wish the two of them the best of luck; really, I do. They’ll need it with the complicated politics there and Tommy’s iffy grasp of the language. The fact that his parents’ marriage has dissolved, and his father has been hypnotized into marrying a total stranger, and his poor natural mother is reduced to wandering the streets of Santa Barbara without a roof over her head – well, that’s no reason to drop everything and fly back to the United States, now, is it? No. Tommy may be my only son, but I have to face facts: he’s gone, he and Richard both, and I’m the one who’s got to face this thing on my own: me and my new lawyer, the one that Fred met last month on a cruise to Hawaii. Perhaps it’s all for the best, this so-called crisis. I am embarking on a new chapter of my life. Really, anything can happen now. That’s what I keep telling myself.

To keep my spirits up, I’ve borrowed this sky-blue tent from Marty and propped it on El Refugio Beach, behind a sand dune, as far from the other campers as possible.

That’s where I’ve been staying for the last three months – temporarily, of course, until I get my settlement from Richard. As long as I pay my weekly campsite fees and bring my trash to the recycling bins each day, no one bothers me. With my long, tanned legs and

my still-pristine, white tennis skirt, I look like just another Beach Matriarch -- except

older, perhaps -- visiting the beach for the day with her children. Really, it is conceivable.

To maintain the façade, I unfold a beach chair near the ocean, scatter some buckets and

shovels on a family-size tatami mat and bury my nose in one of the magazines I keep for

this purpose. As usual, the sun and the masses are out full force today, so I’m slathered in

Bain de Soleil, SPF 8, my face shielded by the biggest sun hat I could find at Walgreen’s,

my ears stopped with silicone ear plugs. Bring it on, I say to the screeching brown pelicans, the crying babies, the loudmouth surfers, the rappety-rap music that booms all day. Bring it all on. The wads of pink stuff in my ears reduce your racket to a flat, muffled roar. I am immune. I am above it all. I am evolving. Even when some clumsy fool knocks the back of my chair with his surfboard and fails to apologize, do I get upset?

Do I make a scene? No, I carefully check my neck for whiplash and smile like the understanding woman I am becoming. And why? Because This too shall pass, as I like to remind myself. I will get out of this mess. I will regain civility or dignity or something better. Whatever that may be.

I settle back in my faded beach chair and open the December issue of Town &

Hillock (which cost me the last ten dollars in my wallet), and, low and behold, there’s my

(former) house, the neo-Georgian cupola glinting in the sun, the shiny robin’s eggs perched on the front railing, just as I saw them that morning when Mr. Bradford and his crew came to play. There is what used to be my front door and then on the next page there is my house with someone else’s dream kitchen and someone else’s stainless-steel appliances and someone else’s original Barcelona chair, sitting by my flagstone fireplace.

There is my big, glorious boxwood hedge with the enormous hole in the middle and

there, if I look very carefully, I can see the tip of my anonymous nose as I peek into the

frame, coquettish, like a new bride. But I am not the important person in this story. Not at

all. My gardening shears are angled at a precise, forty-five degrees, and they’re aimed at

page 117 and a photograph of Tommy’s room, all done up in river rocks and sparkles.

Four merry, strawberry-blond children are leaping on the bed in a pillow fight. The gong

vibrates, a fierce, coppery blur. There are wet towels on the bedspread, hydrangeas

encircling the bull’s head, broken nachos underfoot.

A stack of love letters – written by nobody, addressed to no one – lies unread on the nightstand.

THE GIRL SCOUT VARIATIONS: TWELVE MEDITATIONS ON THE 1913 HANDBOOK FOR GIRL SCOUTS

Theme: The Girl Scout Law

1. A Girl Scout's Honor Is to be Trusted1

2. A Girl Scout Is Loyal

3. A Girl Scout's Duty Is to Be Useful and to Help Others

4. A Girl Scout is a Friend to All, and a Sister to every Other Girl Scout no Matter to what Social Class she May Belong

5. A Girl Scout Is Courteous

6. A Girl Scout Keeps Herself Pure

7. A Girl Scout Is a Friend to Animals

8. A Girl Scout Obeys Orders

9. A Girl Scout is Cheerful

10. A Girl Scout is Thrifty

There are 10 Girl Scout Laws, one for each finger on a Scout's hand, and the object

of these laws is to make one LOYAL, KIND, CHEERFUL, and OBEDIENT.

1 All excerpted text is taken from How Girls Can Help Their Country: The 1913 Handbook for Girl Scouts, by W.J. Hoxie, © 1913 by Juliette Low. Reprint, New York: Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. Excerpts indicated by italics.

20 21

I: Portrait of Myself, Age 8

Orange tie askew, arrow straight beside the flag -- a Brownie, at last.

II: How to Carry the Injured

We hear every day of people being killed and injured on the railroad by autos or in street collisions.... It is good practice to convert a camp or club room into an improvised hospital and to try what service you can render to a bruised or maimed companion acting as the victim.

Four Girl Scouts in Ranger hats, their faces grim, display a bandaged child on a stretcher.

Their shoes are polished brown; the earth is green, the sky, gray. In the distance spreads a deciduous tree and, beyond its dappled leaves, warms an afternoon sun.

The Scout on the left has the broad, impossible cheekbones of a cat, an unsmiling mouth, flintlike eyes. I am drawn to her forthright gaze, the way her wrist curls to grasp the stretcher, its wooden pole resting on her knee to support the companion who lies there feigning injury, death, mutilation:

This is the work to be done.

The Scout opposite has the crooked, wary expression of a woman born to scour pots and sweep floors. Already in her face I sense approaching catastrophe: stock market collapse, bread lines, Dustbowl, famine, war.

Someone has pinned a leader’s stripes to her shoulder. Thrift and Industry have laced one shoe with white cord. Resourcefulness has made of her necktie a sling. In Emergency, her petticoat can be torn to serve as bandages, a rescue flag, a makeshift tourniquet.

She faces the camera with one cocked eye, the other in shadow, but perhaps what lies ahead should not be traversed with both eyes open.

Nearer the blurred tree, two Scouts uphold the other end of the stretcher. Their pale faces float on the horizon, neckerchiefs smooth as banners, the rim of their hats, dark halos.

The one to the left is a stern, Victorian beauty. The other, something of a pilgrim. Present, yet anonymous, these girls will march wherever they are told to march, light fires, set up camp. They will Be Loyal, Be Useful, Help Others.

And who is balanced on the stretcher?

The victim wears a single shoe. The left foot has been undressed to show how a bandage can be wound beneath the heel to support an imaginary injury. I see only a dark fleck of hair, the dot of an eye. The girl’s foreshortened body lolls to one side. Hands folded on chest, she appears to be in no pain. Her role demands only that she be receptive to the drama around her.

The photographer steadies her camera. The girls’ expressions will never be so resolute, so Scoutlike, as they are this Savanna afternoon.

Tableau accomplished, their leader signals it is time to go. Bandages are unwound. The victim puts on her shoe. The Scouts retreat, leaves crunching underfoot.

The vague tree deepens in the twilight.

All Girl Scouts remember that by their promise they are bound to do a good turn to somebody every day. When you get up in the morning you tie a knot in your necktie or handkerchief, which is only untied when you have done something for somebody.

III: Tests for First Class Scout, 1913

Sew a shirtwaist or a skirt by herself.

Swim fifty yards in her clothes or show a list of twelve satisfactory good turns.

Have elementary knowledge of signaling, semaphore code, and Morse alphabet.

Have fifty cents in savings bank, earned by herself.

Know how to save life in two of the following accidents (allotted by the examiners): fire, an apparent drowning, runaway horses or sewer gas.

Give correctly the Scouts’ secret password, Be Prepared, said backwards.

IV: Badges: Memories of a Girl Scout Circa 1972

I must have every single badge. I must have more badges than anyone else. The embroidered patches crowd my emerald sash, snaking down my right shoulder and up my back. I am festooned with symbols of my prowess. My skills are various and impressive:

Art in the Round Community Safety Active Citizen Dabbler Needlecraft Friendship Backyard Fun Gypsy Foot Traveller Books My Community Collector Health Aid Troop Camper Cook Drawing and Painting Water Fun Dancer Toymaker

My mother sews the badges onto my sash after supper. A tin of needles and thread sits at her side as she holds the green cloth to the light. The badges are thick. She uses waxy, extra-strength thread, which she doubles twice and knots. Her thick needle pierces the tough canvas backing, over the stitched border, and through the sash again. She tugs and pulls. Her thumb throbs pink, then red. I slouch on the sofa, poring over requirements in my handbook for yet another badge. It is never-ending, this wanting new ones. Each tinted pen-and-ink drawing holds out such promise: a fireplace with twisting red-and- yellow flames (My Home), a brown-and-white covered wagon (Folklore), two scouts leaping sideways (World Games). I imagine these images transformed into embroidered icons. My fingers itch to feel the tiny bas-relief figures, the shiny, silken threads. My heart thumps with pride as cloth medallions proliferate across my chest.

The den mothers are my conspirators. Before each troop meeting, I frantically demonstrate to them my latest accomplishments: measuring dry, solid and liquid ingredients, dancing the polka, folding the flag into a fat triangle. Out of breath, I press

27 the den mothers to date and initial each goal achieved, until I earn their final signatures.

Several weeks later, when new badges are distributed at our troop meeting, I run to claim my prize. Each oval patch comes sealed in a tiny, transparent pouch. I rip open the plastic and marvel at the beauty of this much longed-for oval, now mine. My finger traces the raised stitches; I tilt the glossy surface this way and that in the light. My joy is complete.

Five minutes later, the badge becomes unspectacular, plain, nothing. That night I experience a brief flare of satisfaction as my mother arranges the new patch on my sash, and then that feeling, too, is gone. I am already dreaming of badges on other pages of the handbook, badges that must surely be more beautiful.

My raging desire for badges peaks in fifth grade. By sixth grade, I have grown too cool for Girl Scouts. I wear my uniform to school with embarrassment; bit by bit, I

“forget” parts of it at home. First the beret goes, then the yellow tie, then the official Girl

Scout belt. The sash is hardest to part with. I carry it with me in a paper bag. After school

I change into my uniform in the girls room, slipping the sash over my growing chest. At the troop meeting I display my embroidered trophies with feigned indifference, watchful in case some other scout should present herself as a challenger. Still, I refuse to wear the sash home. My friends and I undo the top buttons of our uniforms as we stroll by the basketball court where the boys are playing. We hope that their eyes will look our way.

Invariably, one of the boys throws a ball in our direction. We scream and duck; none of us dares catch it or throw it back. There are no Girl Scout badges for basketball in the

1970s. Maybe that omission is intentional, part of the handbook’s larger design. As we girls become women, we’ll learn that in some games, we can tip our odds in our favor by playing it a little bit helpless. Something in me must already understand this as my

friends and I scatter down the sidewalk, laughing uncontrollably, my sash crumpled at the

bottom of my book bag.

What has become of the passion I once lavished on Girl Scout badges? Since then I have wanted many things, but not with that same drive, that intensity. I have been erotically obsessed; I have been hell-bent on acceptance to a particular college; I have been determined to gain assorted job promotions, and, for eight months, I was fanatically devoted to a weekly television show. Some of these things I took pleasure in, some I did not, and, in the end, all wore me out. That narrow-minded urge to excel has been replaced by a need for balance, an appreciation of harmony. At least this is what I tell myself on good days. Other days, I wonder if I haven’t lost some crucial inner resource: the ability to be consumed with getting what I want. I see my tenacious, ten-year-old self bent over that handbook, plotting my next move, and I feel unsettled, conflicted. I admire that ten- year-old. I laugh at her. I fear her.

Not long ago, my mother retrieved a box from one of her hall closets. There,

perfectly preserved, was my Junior Girl Scout uniform. My heart contracted as I lifted the

sash from the white tissue paper. The badges looked just as crisp, just as glossy as they

did when I earned them decades ago. For the most part, I could remember what skill each

badge was meant to represent, although several designs were decidedly cryptic: an eight-

sided star, a pair of yellow wings, a red-and-white building backlit by a radiant beam.

Nevertheless, even their strangeness struck me as fitting — like the uniform itself,

something both alien and familiar, right down to the stitches on the dress’s hem. If I tried

very hard, I could remember what it was like to strut around in this outfit and feel like a

general, fueled by ambition, greed, and high-sounding American ideals. However, when I

29 lifted my arms to slip the sash over my shoulders, my elbows became trapped in the cloth, bent like birds’ wings. Whatever it was, this fervent enterprise called Scouting, I had long since outgrown it. The uniform belonged in the box. I didn’t crumple the sash this time but folded it neatly, in thirds, like a flag. “Taps” would have been a nice touch. I could almost envision myself saluting.

V: How to Secure a Burglar with Eight Inches of Cord

Make a slip-knot at each end of your cord. Tie the burglar’s hands behind him by passing each loop over his little fingers. Place him face downwards and bend his knees. Pass both feet under the string, and he will be unable to get away.

VI: Cookies

Ringing the neighbor’s buzzer, your hand shakes. Oh, the pain and the humiliation

of selling Girl Scout cookies. It is so beneath you. Salesmanship. Playing on people’s

sympathies with your uniform. What a violation of the soul. Already other girls in the

troop have far surpassed you in sales. You smolder with envy because one of those girls

will get the prize for most boxes sold. A little Napoleon, you want to be the winner in

everything, even that which you despise. On the order sheet clamped to your rusty

clipboard, you have gathered only two signatures. Those of your mother and a woman

from her office. Obviously, acts of pity. Still, you will not stoop. You will not elucidate

the merits of Peanut Butter Patties. You will not be Industrious. You will not be Cheerful.

The opening of the neighbor’s screen door fills you with dread. Your eyes fixate on her

waist, the worn, yellow apron tied there. You wince as you recite:

“I am a member of Girl Scout Troop Number 870 at Fairview Elementary. To raise

money for our annual camping trip, we are selling these delicious cookies....”

Blah, blah, blah, you hurdle to the close:

“You don’t want a box, do you?”

The neighbor runs her thin fingers along the edge of her apron. Even if she says

Yes, you are not off the hook. According to the den mothers, you are supposed to pressure her to buy a second box. The final indignity. It is almost a relief when she says,

“I’m sorry. Another little girl came by last week, and I bought two boxes from her.”

You’re sure you know what little girl she means. Patty Ann Benadetto. The day after the first cookie-sales meeting, Patty Ann’s mother took her out in a station wagon and canvassed the neighborhood. They even got as far south as Belleville Avenue. You know this because another mother called yours and ratted on them. “It's a sin,” Mrs. D’Amico

whispered into the receiver. “So unfair to the girls.” You were upstairs in your bedroom,

playing Barbies, procrastinating, listening in on the line. It was a beautiful afternoon. An

afternoon made for selling Girl Scout cookies. You were working yourself up to it, you

told yourself.

It’s the same story at other houses along the street. Another girl already sold them a box. Some people just plain don’t like cookies: “No, thanks. We don’t eat sweets.”

“Next year get out earlier,” one helpful person says. You drag yourself around the block and back to your own cracked sidewalk. When you open the front door, your mother asks if you visited the next-door neighbor. You tromp across the lawn. The neighbor invites you inside the crowded living room -- cautiously; you broke her basement window last spring. One of the few times you ever threw a softball any distance. For a moment, you stand there as this elderly woman with a diabetic husband considers placing a second order (Patty Ann has been to this house, too), but there is no joy in such a transaction.

Her hand may be reaching for her pocketbook, but your eyes are already searching for an exit. “Never mind,” you call out, your heart flooded with the thrill of noblesse oblige, the exquisite pleasure of refusing this woman’s money. You flee through the maze of china poodles and Hummel figurines that beckon you to collide with them.

Inside your own home, it is possible to spend blissful afternoons on the sofa watching TV and eating Ring Dings. There you feel restored and unlacking in virtues.

The selling of Girl Scout cookies becomes what you have always known it to be: insignificant. You recognize that in her greed Patty Ann Benadetto has done you a great favor, the burden of having to con the neighbors now eased from your 11-year-old shoulders. You can relax. The world outside, however, brings you up short. Here you

33 revert to your ruthless, competitive self that cannot bear to see another child beat you at anything, even Candyland. In the troop room, a burning sears your stomach as you watch the den mothers rack up the sales figures on a blackboard. The total by Patty Ann’s name swells by the week: 12, 23, 38 boxes sold. Such numbers are inconceivable to you. A supermarket sells that many boxes. You imagine Patty Ann seated on her pink chenille bedspread, excitedly counting out stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills. The envelope on your dresser contains exactly two dollars and fifty cents. You wish the envelope were fatter, just as you long to ruffle your thumb over a wad of sales sheets, your sales sheets, crammed with customers’ cookie orders.

Patty Ann’s only serious threat is Laurie Ann Mondo, whose father sells to co- workers at the local Pepsi-Cola plant. The week that Laurie Ann’s sales top those of Patty

Ann, 42 to 41, the girls fight in the hallway. “Brat,” one girl snarls. A green beret goes flying across the linoleum. Even the Brownies run out of the library to catch a glimpse.

You, formerly renowned as the champion badge-winner of the troop, now watch from the sidelines. You have never been a bit player before. It feels like life is happening without you in it. Even your best friend, Susie, has sold eight boxes. At the bottom of the blackboard, your name registers two boxes sold, in tie for last place with Josephine

McCarthy. Since first grade, you have understood this Josephine to be the stupidest girl in

Fairview Elementary. The very fact that she was admitted to the troop lowered the Girl

Scouts in your estimation. Now the sight of her name coupled with yours sends you reeling into fits of disgust. This will never do.

You discuss the problem with your mother over dinner. There must be someone she can ask to buy a few boxes: a friend, a relative? She shovels Tater Tots onto your plate

with a spatula. Your father stays out of this: “I work for the government,” he says,

solemnly. This is his way of saying he works for the Post Office. “No soliciting.”

“But, John,” your mother says. “Can’t you do something?”

“Yeah, Dad, Patty Ann’s gonna win the prize. And I’m all the way on the bottom.

With the losers,” you choke.

Your father is angry. He puts down his fork. “It’s important that Barbara learn to do things on her own. I did. Sold underwear in Grand Central Station. Met a lot of interesting people that way.” He picks up his fork and resumes eating. This is his way of saying the discussion is over.

Later, over Laugh In, your mother suggests that you trying selling cookies to some of your teachers. You find the idea offensive and kiss-ass. What an obvious tactic. Going classroom to classroom. While protesting, you decide to file the idea for later, a last-ditch effort if nothing else works out.

The next afternoon at school, at the other end of the hallway, you see Patty Ann in her Girl Scout uniform, showing something to a teacher. Getting closer, you see, in her white-gloved hand, a mimeographed sales sheet. The look on Patty Ann’s face amazes you. She is so focused, so animated: She enjoys this, you realize. Rage washes over you.

This idea of your mother’s that you scorned, your ace in the hole: now Patty Ann’s ruined that, too. It occurs to you that you could take this opportunity to sneak downstairs to other classrooms and beat her to a few sales. There is still time. Teachers still would be at their desks. But, of course, you can’t do it. The crassness of copying Patty Ann, the horror of wheedling a teacher out of money: these things have you paralyzed. Besides,

your practical self notes, how can you compete with a Scout in full regalia, buttoned

gloves and all? You didn’t even bring your sales sheet.

Over the next week you pester your mother to drum up sales at the pharmaceutical

company where she works as a secretary. Two days before the deadline, she relents.

That evening, after supper, she unfolds the order sheet. On the third line, newly signed in

her own hand, is the name of her boss: Mr. Raymond Fagan, 1 box, Thin Mints. Your

mother takes a pencil and changes the 1 by her own name to a 2. Two boxes, Peanut

Butter Patties.

She opens her change purse and counts out two dollars and five dimes of her own money. The dimes slip over the bills as she hands them to you:

“There. You may notify the troop that you sold four boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

“I am sure Mr. Fagan will be very pleased to receive his,” she adds, pointedly, as if you haven’t figured out what is going on. “I will bring the cookies to the office myself when they arrive.”

“Thanks, Mom,” you say, embarrassed and relieved. You leap up the stairs two at a time and charge into your bedroom. You take the envelope from the dresser. The four one-dollar bills look good lined up together. When you tilt the envelope, the change rattles from side to side. Later you notice that the horrible burning in your stomach has cooled to a simmer.

Your mother’s generous act does little to improve your foul mood outside the home. Still, at the final sales meeting, on the blackboard, you have the satisfaction of seeing your name and the number 4 slotted above Josephine’s pathetic 2. Patty Ann

Benadetto wins the prize for most boxes sold, a 50-color watercolor set with a drawing of

36 a Cherokee chief on the lid. You are mystified by Laurie Ann Mondo’s calmness at having lost the prize. If you were her, you’d be in the bathroom, sobbing. The den mothers proudly total the number of boxes sold, a figure that will register in neither your nor any other Scout’s mind. Already you are thinking ahead to the next project: weaving pot holders, camping overnight in the nearby state park. If you fulfill just two more requirements, you will quality for the green-and-white Hospitality badge. You make plans to put on a skit to demonstrate proper telephone etiquette. Later you will explain the importance of good table manners.

The cookies, when they arrive one month later, are very good. As always. Your teeth make a pleasing bite-shape in the layers of chocolate, peanut butter and hard cookie.

You could eat several boxes of these. You bring home four. They rattle lightly in your book bag. A blessing, you now see. The girls who racked up big orders are stuck with cartons the size of liquor crates. The den leaders carry the boxes to a side exit, where a line of mothers sits revving their station wagons. There is a lot of opening and slamming of doors, big brothers rearranging things in back seats, entire families squeezed up front.

The mothers stub out their cigarettes and head grimly into traffic. The weekend is just ahead. You skip along the broken sidewalk, green knee socks slipping down your legs.

Patty Ann Benadetto and her mother pass you in their brown station wagon, headed south. Through the rear window, you can’t even see the tops of their heads; that’s how many cartons they have stacked in the back.

VII: Frontier Life

Many of you that live in town may some day go out to some settlement in the wilderness. Some of you have already been there and know how necessary it is to be able to look out for yourselves and others far from civilized help. However well placed you may be now, times may come when you will have to know how to milk, cook, cut wood, wash clothes, act as a nurse or even defend your life.

All of these things you can learn as a Girl Scout.

VIII: When I Light a Match

I am afraid. None of the campfire badges can be mine. I cannot light a match.

I cannot light this match. My trembling fingers refuse the slip of flimsy cardboard.

No strength to make the two surfaces ignite. Even at the suggestion of a spark, my whole self leaps back. I can do almost everything else. I can get straight A’s. I can stand up to bullies in the coatroom. I can do double pirouettes and swim underwater. I can even take a shot of penicillin in the behind, if I have to. But I can’t do this.

My mother sits patiently at the kitchen table, a dishpan filled with water resting on her lap. I’m supposed to strike the match and immediately douse it in the water. A safety precaution. So simple: light the match, drop it in. The flame will drown. Yes, I think I can see how this works. The smell of sulfur —

For a moment I am holding fire, and then it’s gone. I’ve thrown the match at my mother’s face. It only singes her turtleneck.

Try again, she says.

Over and over we go. She sits there holding the pan of water as I break one match after another. I am scared when they break. I am scared when they almost light. I know my approach is all wrong. I shouldn’t be hysterical. I should be able to do this normal thing like everybody else. Adults light fireplaces, start up gas stoves, put Christmas candles in the window. I’d better get a move on. Besides, if I don’t figure this out, I won’t even be able to earn the badge for Beginner Campfire Skills. What kind of Girl Scout doesn’t go camping?

Try again, she says.

I use up the entire book of matches. The blackened stubs bob on the water. Come on, Barb, I know you can do it, my mother has been urging me. I feel wrecked from

having almost lit nineteen matches. The twentieth was the one I threw at her; we don’t

mention that one. We don’t mention how, when I was five years old, I played matches in

the backyard with Kirky Weiss and burnt down the garage.

Fire leaped up the back of the small, gray building. My father put on his brown felt hat and ran inside. John, John, my mother screamed. He ran out again, pushing the lawn mower. Seconds later, the garage burst into flames. I watched from the back stoop.

Firemen with axes broke down our picket fence.

We’ll try again tomorrow, my mother says. She reaches for her pack of Larks.

***

I am 26. I live in New York City in a crappy old apartment with a gas stove. If I want my morning tea, I have to light the pilot. When my toaster goes, I have to slide slices of bread under the oven broiler. For the two years that I live in this place, there’s not one instance when I light a match that I am not deathly afraid. I buy the longest, thickest, wooden safety-matches I can find. Every time I make a strike, I see my fingers, my hand, the sleeves of my bathrobe immolated. A martyr to the flames.

Why does my hand shake like this is something new? I wonder.

***

I am 34. The healer from North Miami Beach eases me onto his cushy massage table. On the shag rug underneath is a foot-high chunk of rose quartz carved in the shape of pyramid. Fine by me, I think. I’m here to rid myself of the pain in my spine. The healer can supposedly see into my aura, my past lives, my etheric blueprint. I stare face down through an oblong hole in the cushion. He kneads the muscles of my back.

Oh, he says, casually. You were in Salem. You were burned at the stake for being a witch. They burned you for your knowledge.

Really? I say, trying to not sound too excited.

I leave the healer’s office feeling as though I’ve been handed something precious and monumental, but ultimately useless. The undiscovered works of Shakespeare written on the surface of a bubble. A map to the real El Dorado spun of spider’s filament. I can do nothing with this spectacular revelation, neither verify nor refute it. Nor make it my own. It dissolves on my fingers as soon as I breathe inquiry on it. I mention this episode to no one.

***

But perhaps the healer’s words work their cure after all. I am 38, almost 39. I have a husband and a toddler. I light matches every day. Safety matches. We live in another crummy old apartment. Art Deco. The stove is straight out of The Honeymooners – a tiny, white-glazed combuster. The burners ignite in quick, dependable bursts. At the entrance to the kitchen we’re erected a wooden safety gate, secured by a wobbly crossbar.

Sometimes I wonder what the barrier’s purpose is: To keep the child from danger? Or to keep the mother from the child’s reach?

“Just give Mommy a minute to make your eggs,” I say to my 22-month-old son.

“Fire,” he shouts, kicking with a small, scuffed boot. The wooden fence rattles in the doorframe.

I back away, an unlit match in my hand, shoulders tensed. I know my little son. He is fearless and reckless. He balances on the backs of sofas and steps into thin air. He dives headfirst into the bath water. At the park he stuffs his mouth with twigs and dirty

41 candy wrappers, leaps from the top of the jungle gym, throws juice boxes at unleashed pit bulls. When the dog’s slobbery jaw growls at him he shrieks with laughter and jumps into my arms, all twenty-five pounds of him, like a cannonball fired at a fortress. Mommy can take it, he assumes. Determined madman that he is, my son would think nothing of sticking his hand in the stovetop’s pretty blue flame just because it’s there. He would kick down the gate and push me aside. Already he’s managed to knock one corner of the gate off its track. I had better scramble these eggs fast.

I turn the burner knob to High and strike the match against the box. A bright, orange flame bursts just inches from my fingertips. I hold the match in the air. I hate doing this, I acknowledge to myself. I have always hated doing this. One thing has changed, however. My hand no longer shakes. I don’t have time for that.

Slowly I lower the lit match to the burner. The flame meets the invisible ring of gas that hovers there, then -- boom – it’s a circle of fire. My heart beats wildly. My hand is steady. Coolly I adjust the burner flame to Medium and stand watch over the pan of congealing eggs, one foot propped against the gate to keep it upright. My son shakes the frame with two fists, peers at the stovetop, wide-eyed. I tame fire. I stave off disaster.

“No. No kick,” I say firmly, as my son attacks the barricade, eager to fling himself at the flame. “No kick.”

He looks up at me with searching brown eyes.

“Fire,” he shouts. He points a little finger upward. “Mommy. Fire. Mine.”

IX: All the Dangers Begin with ‘D’

Remember that nearly all dangers to health in your house begin with a D, and these dangers are:

Darkness Damp Dust Doubtful drinking water Defective drains

Against these destroyers, which bring debility, disease and even death, the Scouts’ defenses are:

Daylight Delightful fresh air Detergent.

X: Modesty

Don’t let any man make love to you unless he wants to marry you, and you are willing to do so. Don’t marry a man unless he is in a position to support you and a family. Moral courage is one thing that all Scouts keep a stock of. Don’t be afraid to say you won’t play at nasty, rude things.

A Girl Scout is pure in thought and word and deed.

Favorite Game, Age 4

Stand at top of slide in backyard and pull down underpants. Mother yells. Activity stops only when mother says, The policeman will come.

Drawing, Age 5

Long hair curls up with the yellow crayon. Pink lips make a sticky sound. Switch to messy black. The pretty girl’s long eyelashes: every one curls up, in a row, to the end of her diamond eye.

She wears crazy, orange tights and a mini skirt, pink-and-green swirls. She is crazy, this girl. Dancing. Dancing. The white crayon: wipe the dirty marks on a napkin. Pressed down on the paper, it makes shiny, white go-go boots. Look at her go. Down to the paper.

Peel it around and around.

The dirty black crayon. Make a fat line at the top of the page, the other, underneath her feet. There. Draw straight lines over her body. Be neat. All the lines in a row, except where her face is, that stays. But over her crazy tights and her mini skirt and her go-go boots, draw big, black, zebra bars.

Dancing. Dancing.

In a cage.

Taking a Bath, Age 8

Warm water, halfway to the top. Shower curtain pulled all the way around. Nobody can see. Button pushed in on the doorknob. Blinds drawn. The edge of the pink shower curtain slicked against the pink tile wall.

Maybe a crack of light can get through. The washcloths are in the closet. Dip all of them in the cloudy water. One for the right arm, one for the left. Cover the too-round belly. One for the right chest, one for the left. The knees that poke up like mountains.

One for down there. The elbows, the hands. Everything tickles, even the idea of somebody trying to tickle. Cover the invisible hairs on the wrist.

Nobody can see. Scott Brink is at the window. He can climb up the side of the house, three stories, to the top floor and look in. If you breathe too much, the washcloths will float apart. Lift each one carefully, in case a crack of light can get through the window. The nubby fabric tickles. No one can see. Here comes the soap. Scott Brink is breathing on the glass.

The washcloths sway in the soapy water. It’s a tidal wave. The water goes down the drain. Lie on the bottom of the cold, hard bathtub, body stuck with wet washcloths. Don’t move. Don’t make a single move. A drop of water is about to fall.

Scott Brink is watching.

Going to Camp for the First Time, Age 9

The girls in the cabin make the new girl take off all her clothes. They put her in a closet and lock the door. The counselors don’t know a thing. The girls make the new girl walk around the cabin naked. She has to hide in the closet. Nobody else knows. It’s a secret. This is what is going to happen.

I don’t want to go to Girl Scout camp.

Why? Mother asks.

I’m afraid.

Afraid of what?

I don’t know anybody.

Oh, Barb, you’ll make friends.

But all the other girls know each other already.

No, they don’t.

Maybe they’ll laugh at me.

Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.

Rock ’n Roll TV Comic-strip Song, Age 9 ½

Big girls Betty & Veronica with curvy hips short skirts hot pants patent-leather lace-up boots up to there (Archie’s tongue hangs out when he sees them Reggie walks into a tree) Shake your booty play that funky music white boy black boys are like candy ‘cos he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good (Boys with afros and jumbo piks walk like this down the hallway step aside) Flower Power Laugh-in girls wiggle their bikini butts painted peace signs Sock It to Me kissed by plastic see-though dresses (Joe Namath lets the girl squirt shaving cream all over his face and shave it off)

Teenagers on the high school lawn throw cigarette butts Make Love Not War your cousin’s funny little yellow pills (Grow your hair straight like Susan Dey) Tight hip huggers cut-off midriff Bonnie Bell lipsmackers the old janitor grabbed your arm do you wear baby dolls to sleep in? (Millie the Model’s boyfriend just takes pictures of her) Bye bye Miss American Pie Lucy in the sky with take a walk on the wild side Gee your hair smells terrific (Listen to Melanie’s Brand New Key twenty-eight times in a row)

Nobody else but you is still playing Barbies Your babysitter ran away from home How come Janis Joplin sounds like she’s crying? Go ask Alice

XI: Cabin Fever: Camp Madeline Mulford, Age 10

At rest time, after lunch, our tent plays Family. It’s Tracey’s idea. Her sister learned it at bible camp. I’m the Father, Tracey’s the Mother, Harpo’s the Sister, Lydia is the Big

Brother, Jo-Ann is the Italian Grandmother, Little Barbara is the Baby.

The family goes back to their house in the woods. It’s daylight outside, so they pull down the side flaps. The front flap stays open, unless it’s raining. I’m the Father, so I tell everybody to go to sleep. Mother lies down. Big Brother lies down. Baby cries.

Little Sister says, I don’t want to take a nap.

You have to, Father says.

But Baby’s crying, says Little Sister.

Hush, little baby. Here’s your bottle. Go to sleep.

Baby shuts up.

Grandmother pretends to sweep the floor. Mama Mia, she says. Who made-a this disgusting mess?

Hush, says Father. You’ll wake Baby.

Grandmother puts down the nonexistent broom. I guess I’m-a sleepy, too, she says.

She snores loudly. Pretty soon the whole Family is snoring loud and hard.

This is the Mother’s cue to sit up in bed. She unzips her shorts and pulls on a black, satiny half-slip that she keeps underneath her pillow. The wooden floorboards creak as she stands up. The Mother walks back and forth in her shirt and slinky underwear, fanning herself with a Popsicle stick. We watch through tiny slits, snoring like bears.

Oh, dear, it’s getting hot in here, Mother says. She unbuttons the top of her official

Girl Scout shirt and slides it down, over her shoulders. She strolls around like this, yawning and fanning and muttering to herself.

This is dreadful, she says. Everybody else but me is asleep. What am I going to do?

She stops at the open flap and glances outside. The sun is golden hot. Crickets

whir. She undoes the last two buttons of her shirt and gives a big stretch.

Ah, it’s so much cooler with my shirt off!

The white blouse falls to the floor. She has no undershirt on. Nothing. We see her

back. Then her front. Nobody makes a sound.

Someone giggles in the tent opposite.

She flops on her sleeping bag and props herself on one elbow. Her brown eyes

gleam in the darkened tent. The Popsicle stick traces dreamy circles on her belly. Along

the pale insides of her arms, up her ribs, around her nipples. Somebody remembers to

snore.

Mmmm, now I’m feeling so sleepy, says Mother. I think I’ll take a nap.

Family goes on the next day and the next. It’s getting better than regular Camp.

One afternoon we miss swimming lessons. Baby wants to be nursed. Now girls from other tents want to play, too.

No, the Father says. Family is just for our tent. Only we get to play Family.

That Sunday it rains. The first-session girls lug their duffle bags to the general store. We form a circle in our yellow rain ponchos, a green trefoil over our hearts. The

charter busses pull up. Tracey, Harpo and the others hug everyone goodbye: friends,

counselors, cooks, the nurse. Those of us staying behind clutch our autograph books and

sob. Tracey and Harpo climb onto the bus and wave behind steamed-up windows. The

busses’ wheels leave deep, muddy trenches.

I wanna go home, too, someone says.

After lunch we slog through mud to our tent. A new girl has moved in. Big deal.

Lydia’s sleeping bag got soaked. We pull down the side flaps, zip shut the front. Nobody mentions Family. We lie on our homesick stomachs, writing postcards. I hate the outdoors. Somebody stole my flashlight. I have no more clean underwear. Rain drums overhead. Our hands tire of holding a pen. We burrow into musty-smelling pillows. The girl taking Tracey’s cot unrolls her pink sleeping bag and slaps a poster on the side of the tent with huge pieces of masking tape. We watch through slitted eyes. David Cassidy in a striped shirt, hip huggers. The rain is drumming, drumming.

Hey, I have an idea, the new girl says.

We are all of us drifting into sleep. We are dreaming of our ranch houses and our wall-to-wall carpeting and our fluffy bedrooms and our Barbie dolls. Camp is only half over.

Let’s play Partridge Family.

XII: The Girl Who Became a Stream

Walks and picnics are all very well as far as they go, but to get the full benefit of actual contact with Nature it is absolutely necessary to camp out. That does not mean sleeping on wet, bare ground but just living comfortably out of doors, where every breath of heaven can reach you and all wild things are in easy reach.

The girl from Newark screamed at night in the woods. She was not used to tree frogs, caterpillars, things that fell from beams overhead. Nightfall she howled and cried. She would wet her sleeping bag rather than grope to the outhouse in the dark.

One afternoon nap she tore off her clothes and ran into the forest. Sturdy counselors chased her down riverbank and slope, through dappled green and leaves, and the girl’s brown limbs disappeared into tree trunks. Deeper and deeper into wilderness fenced in by cyclone fence and a swath of New Jersey Turnpike. Just the white flash of underpants and then those, too, were gone, tossed on the low branches of a bush.

Someone must have coaxed the girl from behind a tree but we did not see this. All that remained was an empty cot. A dark stain marked the canvas where once she’d been.

We spoke of her in whispers: The Girl Who Went Home.

I think of her now, the girl from Newark and her transmutation, and I am filled with wonder. I am running through the forest, and it is my own heart pounding as I leave these things behind.

That is my body which leaps from its uniform, tears the buttons from its chest, says No to hard soles beneath the feet.

See my legs, a pale blur, leap from sunlight to shadow, plunge through thicket, over tree stump, through moist shade. No time to look back. I hear the counselors calling me, but I am beyond their echo. I am stumbling. I am racing. The river is ahead.

I slip on hands and heels down crumbling riverbank. Red dirt streaks my thighs. Daughter, the air around me sings. There is so little time. Over bare root, earth, matted leaves, and this whirlwind in my chest presses onward. Hard rock scrapes my knee, and I am at the bottom of the embankment. My toes grip mossy stone. Already I feel cool water lapping. I look up.

The silver whistle waits at the counselor’s lips. White shirt, yellow braids and the green cord that hangs at her neck. See the others gather there, at the river’s edge. Observe the miraculous silence. Their hands reach to snatch my laughter. Liquid, it runs through their fingers. Are they as amazed as I am at my metamorphosis? My tongue, teasing, divides into rivulets. My legs, leaping, dissolve into air. Twisting, I submerge as larger currents bear me away.

Oh, uncomprehending witnesses, you brought me to this wilderness and made my bed under the stars. Wind and crickets lulled me to sleep, and in the morning I awoke to newness, an arc of dew above my lip. Is it so surprising that my tongue should know her name – Fair Huntress – that I should become Arethusa?

HOW TO MARRY A SOUTHERN MAN

I’m standing here on the vinyl flooring of my newly acquired kitchen, in gray

flannel Prada and a pair of black, patent-leather Manolo Blahniks, and this tall, dark-

haired man in a blue jumpsuit is telling me how to turn my oven on.

“Ma’am, this here’s your timer,” he says, pointing with a tanned, calloused finger.

“These buttons are your temperature, your timed bake, your broil option. You just push

like so, ma’am ” – he taps the little buttons up and down, long, square-tipped fingers, no

ring – “and you get the digital temperature here.” I see the blinking red numbers, I’m

nodding, the information’s going in one ear and out the other. He’s being so helpful, so

patient; evidently this is part of his job, acquainting new Ocala Power & Light customers

with the features of their gas appliances. “Like so, ma’am,” he continues, the syllables a

deep, soothing drawl – and now I’m about to fall off my four-inch-high stilettos because this attractive man has pried open my oven door and he’s saying to me something no one’s ever said:

“Ma’am, here’s where you’d put your pies.”

Your pies. The words have me giddy, tingly all over. Your pies. As in, my pies, pies made by me, Jennifer Chase, all by myself, pies plural, from scratch. What a concept. In

New York, no one venturing into my one-bedroom shoebox would have mistaken me for someone capable of baking anything, let alone a pie, but here I am standing in my 400- square-foot, soon-to-be-remodeled country kitchen in Ocala, Florida, and some green- eyed stranger is ma’am-ing me and casually imagining scenarios in which I am rolling

51 52

out pie crusts and fussing with my oven timer. How outrageous! Does he actually think

that a woman with acrylic tips like these and a refrigerator door plastered with takeout

menus would know what a pie pan is? Do the details of who I am no longer matter, now

that I’ve traded my Statue of Liberty license plate for one with a little round orange on it, now that Eddie Dugall has delivered on his promise and gotten me the Quick & Easy, now that I’m just another 32-year-old blonde who’s bought property in Marion County?

Oh, god, I’m not ready for this. I’m going to have to sit down.

And he’s right there at my side, inquiring like a gentleman, “Miss Chase, ma’am, are you alright? Can I get you a glass of water?” as I sort of slide off my Manolos and ease onto a kitchen stool. And it’s while he’s bending down and his stubbled cheek almost (but not quite!) touches mine that I happen to notice that his hair – his thick, glossy black hair – is combed off his forehead and slicked in place with what must be an inch and a half of hair grease. Like Elvis in Clambake. So, naturally, as I’m noticing these things, I reach for my little amulet and switch to one of the mental exercises I use when I want to make my day more interesting: What if this guy asked me out? Would he take me to a NASCAR race? Would we eat at a Sonny’s barbecue pit? Afterward, would he unfurl a wool blanket under the live oaks and urge me to lie down upon it and unroll my $18 Donna Karan sheers down my legs? Or would that happen on the second date?

And suppose -- just suppose -- despite our obvious differences, the Ocala Power &

Light man and I turned out to be truly compatible: Could we make the relationship work?

Would he, for instance, be willing to scrape the Confederate flag sticker off his rear bumper if I agreed to learn how to make Red Velvet cake? Would our getting married

require me to become a Baptist? Or would he be okay with my staying home Sunday

mornings and reading the New York Times?

But I don’t have time to wonder how our marriage turns out. The doorbell rings.

It’s my five o’clock.

“Thanks, ma’am. I’d best be leaving,” he says, slipping on a baseball cap and

dropping some brochures on the kitchen table. “Glad to be of service. Don’t hesitate to

call if you have questions.”

Ocala Power & Light tips his brim to Wayne’s Tile World as they pass each another in the hallway. I’m one step ahead of them both. I’ve already changed into a black lace camisole, a Dolce & Gabbana two-piece suit, and calfskin riding boots. I’m wearing Balmain perfume, two-carat diamond studs in my ears. My hair’s reined in a high, sleek ponytail.

This one’s not even my height, five seven, sloping shoulders, tattooed forearms, belly going soft above his Wrangler jeans. I’m a bit let down after Mr. Ocala Power &

Light, naturally. But there are always possibilities.

We get right to business. He has his tape measure, his figuring pad, his calculator to tabulate price per square foot for tile and labor. He crawls on hands and knees over my vinyl fake-brick floor, skirting the edge of my well-oiled boot. Tappety, tap goes my pointy calfskin toe. Tappety, tap.

He’s ma’am-ing me every other sentence, but I’m no longer thrown by this (I’m a quick study). I’m focused on what he’s offering to do for me: Put a proper foundation underneath my feet. Before the tile goes in he’s going to have to pour a layer of concrete, of course, because the kitchen’s built on a wood subfloor. When it’s finished, it’ll raise

54 the floor up a whole two inches: Is that okay by me? I’m nodding my ponytail in agreement, crystal amulet in hand; he has deep blue eyes, dark lashes, and evidently years of experience in these matters. I have only one request: Can his men lay the ceramic tiles on a diagonal, instead of straight across like squares on a Scrabble board?

“It’s Mama’s kitchen,” he says, his dangerous blue eyes bearing in on me.

“Whatever Mama wants, Mama gets.”

Mama. Skinny, little New York me: Mama! Help me, Jesus.

I want to kick off my boots, sink my heels into the soft sheet vinyl, and give birth to triplets right there, where the doorjamb is. The tattooed tile man will build me my dream kitchen – he will see to that – and I’ll cook collard greens and dumplings in his grandma’s cast-iron skillet. The children will be a lot to deal with, of course, but I won’t mind their clamoring around my knees and pulling the hem of my dress because by then

I’ll be a size 3-X and wearing tents, and I’ll have plenty of padding on my thighs, to dull the scraping of their ragged fingernails. And Wayne – because he is the Wayne of

Wayne’s Tile World, he’s going to open two more stores in Gainesville and Jacksonville soon, I know it – Wayne will come home every night from a hard day of ripping up linoleum, and after the kids are in bed, the two of us will curl up in front of our 57-inch wide-screen TV with boiled green peanuts and 12-ounce Fosters and laugh ourselves silly, me heaving these big, deep-down belly laughs like I’ve never laughed before, like I could never laugh when I was an arrogant, anorexic, childless Yankee who couldn’t even pop the top off a Diet Pepsi without worrying about breaking a nail. Hah! What an uptight little bitch I was back then, we’ll laugh.

“Darlin’, I never thought of you as a bitch and I never could,” Wayne will murmur in my face with his boiled-peanut breath. “Wasn’t your fault you was raised by atheists and went to college with a bunch of lesbians and ended up scared of men and marriage.

You just needed some good, ole Southern loving, that’s all.”

But it costs money to hire Mr. Wayne’s Tile World and redo an entire kitchen with

a concrete subfloor and 400 square feet of imported Italian tile and a marble backsplash.

Nine-thousand-seven-hundred-and-sixty-five dollars, to be precise.

“Do you take credit cards?” I ask, slipping the amulet under my camisole.

“Does a hound dog have fleas?” he asks.

I shake Wayne’s hand and file his estimate in a drawer where the future me (a

Southern-ized Jennifer Chase) will keep her grocery coupons.

“When you’re ready, you let me know, ma’am,” he says. He backs his pickup out

of the long driveway and waits for me to pull ahead of him before starting along the road,

a gentleman to the end.

It’s not easy keeping my foot on the pedal in my slippery Lucite wedges, with bits

of down from my chartreuse feather boa catching in my mouth, but still I do it: I drive to

Albertson’s before they close at 10. They’re at me even before I’m out of my convertible.

“Beautiful evening, ma’am.”

“Welcome to Albertson’s, ma’am.”

“Can I get you a cart, ma’am?”

“Here, ma’am, let me help you with that.”

I count four energetic men in their early twenties -- two white, two black, in white

button-down Oxfords, tan khakis neatly pressed -- circling me in the supermarket parking

lot. There is the matter of my Dior chiffon pants getting caught in the car door, but the

Albertson’s men can handle it: They laugh and spring open the latch; the shorter, serious-

looking one gently eases the fabric from the mechanism and smoothes it until it lies flat

again.

They hook elbows and breeze me to the entrance, five abreast.

“Welcome,” beams the store manager, rolling a cart toward me. “What’s a beautiful woman like you doing shopping on a Friday night?”

And because I am feeling talkative this evening, I tell him everything: How I just moved to Ocala from New York City, how I just bought my first house, how I really don’t know many people in Ocala – yet.

“A pretty woman like you, not know a soul in Ocala? We’ll have to change that.”

And he laughs and winks, and I throw my head back and laugh a deep, horsy laugh.

There are barely any shoppers in the aisles, so I fly through the store, tossing into my cart bananas, frozen bagels, low-fat cream cheese, Scrubbing Bubbles, Tampax. And at the head of every aisle, there is another Albertson’s man in a white shirt and pressed khakis, asking me if I’m finding everything okay, is there is something he can get? Trip, trip, trip. I’m floating in Lucite sandals over a gleaming checkerboard of freshly waxed linoleum, teal and white squares. As I round the corner to Produce, the giddiness accelerates.

“Ma’am, can I help you find anything?”

Why, no, I say, but the heavyset man stacking broccoli is already laughing – I think all the men in Albertson’s must have gotten high before their last shift, and why not? It’s

a balmy Friday night and nobody really wants to be in a grocery store at this hour, do

they?

“You have a lovely smile,” he says. Warm brown eyes, dusky brown skin. A faint

mustache above his upper lip. “Tell me, ma’am: Are you enjoying yourself at Albertson’s

tonight?”

Short of getting high myself, I have an urge to say something outrageous. The

clock’s not even running on this one.

“Enjoying myself? Oh, yes, ” I say, solemnly, fingering the amulet. “This is a treat

for me.”

“A treat, ma’am? How so?”

And keeping a straight face, I explain how back home I have a baby, a teeny six- month-old baby, and normally I go food shopping with the baby and it’s arduous, because my baby fusses in the cart and tries to grab things off the shelves – but tonight, I found someone to look after him and so for once I’m able to enjoy the luxury of pushing a shopping cart in peace and quiet, with no screaming baby. This counts as a good night for me.

“I’ll look after your baby any time you like, ma’am,” he says.

“Really? How about my two-year-old?”

“Yep.”

“And my-four-year-old? My six-and-a-half-year old? My seven-and-three- eighths?”

“Them, too,” he grins. “I’ll watch all your babies.”

And I can see all of us – the white children, the white me, the black produce man, the pinky-brown babies we make together, all the children I don’t have – gathered on the porch of his grandmother’s house in High Springs, Florida. It’s a one-story cracker house built on concrete blocks, with a steep tin roof, and friends and relatives are pulling up in their cars onto the front lawn, the back seats piled high with presents. The little girls in the wedding party are wearing dresses of pink muslin, with fairytale headpieces made of pink silk roses and satin ribbon. The boys are wearing tailored navy sports coats and khaki pants and white magnolias in their lapels. It’s raining cats and dogs, and we’re all waiting for the rain to stop, and then a rainbow appears -- or is it the minister waving a patch of kente cloth?

But I never get to find out if we jump over the broomstick. Because I suddenly remember that my new phone line is being turned on before midnight, and I have a very important call to catch.

I rush through checkout and let five of the best-looking men load the groceries into my trunk. “Good luck!” scream the Albertson’s men as I run a red light.

I’m unlocking the front door when the phone starts to ring – not my new line, the regular one.

“Congratulations, ma’am,” says Eddie Dugall. “Are you happy?”

“Oh, yes,” I say, as I toss the groceries, plastic bags and all, into the empty refrigerator. “Incredibly. I can’t believe it’s mine. Thank you so much.”

“Didn’t I tell you I was your huckleberry?”

“You did great, Eddie.”

“I told you I’d come though for you in two weeks and I did. The Quick & Easy.

Like I said. I’m only sorry it wasn’t two weeks to the day, ma’am. I regret that.”

“No problem.”

“I told them we closed on the thirtieth, but the god-dang girl in the title office

messed up and pushed it to the first.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s giving someone my word and not living up to it. Two weeks and one day. Made me furious.”

“Eddie. Please. Stop it. I got the house. It doesn’t matter about the extra day. I’m very, very happy.”

“Really? Well, then.” He lets out a sigh. “I was wondering about that little matter we talked about last week.”

There’s a big pause. My Lucite platforms are echoing on the wooden floors as I walk through the empty house. Clack, clack, clack. I need a bedroom light.

“Little matter?” I fling open the doors to my walk-in closet and survey the contents.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to get your way in life, you have to dress the part, connect with the Appropriate Power, then visualize like crazy. The logistics take care of themselves.

“’Bout what you do, ma’am.”

I unzip the Dior. “I do a lot of things,” I say. “Remind me.”

“Mistress Isara. Clair-whatever. Que sera sera,” he says. “Your special talents, primary source of income and all.”

“Eddie, I’m surprised.”

“Aw, Miss Chase. Let me hear just a little.”

I put the phone down and let him sweat it out. In New York, they call it a Tony

Soprano mortgage: no paperwork, no credit checks, nothing. Just a big, fat down

payment that you somehow get your hands on: the lender doesn’t ask how or where. It’s

the perfect solution for someone like me, someone with a terrible credit rating, two bad

judgments against her and $74,000 in outstanding loans and card debt. In fact, My Very

Own Mansion has been a favorite on my list of mental exercises for the last six years: the

humungous lump sum conveniently depositing itself in my checking account, an

amazingly low-interest No-Income-No-Assets-Verification Loan shoe-horning me into

the palace of my dreams (ideally, one with room out back for some animals – say, a pair

of golden retrievers. No, scratch that: make it an Arabian stallion). So when the IRS made

that mistake last June and sent the $100,000 refund check to the wrong Jennifer Chase, I didn’t bat an eyelash, I didn’t mark the envelope, “Return to Sender.” No, it may have taken longer than I would have liked, but in the end, like they always do when you follow the plan, things worked themselves out. Now it was up to me to act fast, to find someone to cash that check, and to sink the money into something the government and the collection agencies could never touch.

Well -- as I will one day tell my champion racehorse, Serendipity -- thank god for the Internet and Florida’s generous Homestead Exemption laws, which protect every penny of your home equity from being seized, even in the event of bankruptcy! And thank god for the Ocala realtor whose web site directed me to a 360-degree virtual tour of

Mr. Earl Chatham’s four-bedroom, five-acre Country Manor ranch house, complete with paddocks and koi pond! Most of all, thanks to whoever supplied the links that transported

me to EverWhichWayLending.com and its founder/CEO, Eddie Dugall, King of the

Alternative Mortgages. As Eddie explained to me exactly fifteen days ago, the North

Central Florida lending community offers innovative home-financing solutions that are

more or less equivalent to those found in the New York/New Jersey/Damn Yankees

TriState Area. While not a genuine Tony Soprano mortgage, at four-and-a-half-percent

the Quick & Easy gives you, the credit-impaired borrower, the flexibility to put down a

hunk-o-cash, thumb your nose at the assholes at Bank of America, and take title to your

god-dang property within a fortnight, without a bunch of nosy appraisers and building

inspectors falling off your roof and serving you with lawsuits.

Well, you get the idea of what Eddie said to me. I was charmed, actually.

Eddie’s still on the line. He’s breathing heavy. I don’t know yet if he drinks. I’m

sure I’ll find out, one of these days.

“Hello, down there,” I giggle into the receiver. “I’m back.”

He gulps. We’ve never met in person, actually. We’ve only communicated by

phone and the Internet.

“Ready?” I’m wearing a red-brocade silk robe from China’s Forbidden City,

armfuls of gold bangles, two Bakelite rosaries, a twenty-five-inch-high jeweled headpiece

from Bali: my latest online purchases. If I do say so, I look outstanding. (Thank you,

Buddha/Jesus/E-Bay.)

“Remember,” I continue, leaning back in a chair. “It’s no more ‘Miss Chase.’ You

have to say it exactly like it says on the flyer.”

A hiccup-y moan escapes him. “Now, you know I’m not an ‘exactly’ kind of man.

It’s gonna come out my way or--”

“Eddie. Please.” I close my eyes and feel for the talisman. “Just try.”

He clears his throat: “So, Mistress Isara, ma’am. High Priestess of the Infinite,

Goddess at the Four Crossroads, All-seeing, All-knowing Oracle of Madison Avenue – aw, heck, ma’am, let me finish it my way -- darlin’ Belle of Ocala; seraph with the honey-colored hair, petal open, pollen dripping, blossom to my bee: What do you see in my 360-degree Future?”

I take my time describing it, like I do with the clients who call on the other line.

Eddie seems pleased. He’s what we mediums call a clear signal, meaning: a person with a wide-open psyche, the kind that you can peer right into and get a reading from fast. Only, as I’m giving him his reading, Eddie won’t keep quiet, like he’s supposed to. He keeps butting in and revising my predictions with his own ideas – how outrageous! – until I have to admit: Eddie’s no ordinary client. He’s a lot like me, actually: a big talker and an even bigger dreamer, someone who writes up his own Lotto ticket and cashes it at the

Piggly Wiggly that same day, one jackpot after another. Maybe he can show me a trick or two, see the way clear to escape the IRS forever. Maybe he could even be The One. Who knows? It’s not implausible. See, the way I understand it, there is no one future. There’s a limitless number of them. The trick is knowing how to call the right one to you. It all starts with a word, and the word is – well, you know perfectly well what the word is. Just put your lips together. Picture a bush covered with a dark-blue berry that’s not called what you think it is. Say it.

EMBOUCHURE

And she feels it almost like seduction when her indurated hand, in which fevers full of senselessness had burned, comes from far-off as if with blooming touch to caress the hardness of her chin. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

from “Die Genesende”/”The Convalescent,” translated by Edward Snow

Part One

At the moment the brakes of her SL3 Bianchi inexplicably locked (something they’d never done) and she pitched chin-over-handlebars toward unruptured sidewalk, fifteen-year-old Caroline Destes was not thinking about:

the summer music camp she’d returned from four days ago

the counselor in Liszt Cabin who played French horn (adequately)

the counselor’s age (twenty-three)

his rust-dark hair

his restless hands

his thin lips

the strong turn of his neck

the too-thin lips which were barely lips, really, just part of his mouth

her resolve to take the dirt path behind Liszt on her way to the showers

because it was quicker

63 64

which it wasn’t

then her need to pass Liszt on her way to flute lessons

and cycling team and orchestra and breakfast lunch mailbox any old excuse

(spy at the low window, heart pounding a furtive 3-against-2 hemiola)

and still no sign of his neck bending towards hers

her sudden announcement to old Mr. Szurös that she would no longer attend

four-o’clock sight-singing because “moveable Do is asinine”

(actually b/c she wanted to unfurl herself in gold afternoon light in her crocheted bikini on the lower bunk and eat hard biscuits dipped in watery Earl Grey because it would be a relief to suspend worship of tiny black dots on the page meaning that she would have all the bracketed time in the world to pull leisurely on the rusty springs that sagged overhead, her tangled curls teasing the profiles of faceless boys during which endless measures of rest the counselor might possibly take a walk past Ravel and perhaps notice through the ragged screen the glow of a red bandana tied as a lampshade signaling him to step inside and unravel all her knots: fat chance)

her announcement (understandably) offending the cranky Hungarian solfege master

which somehow led (unfairly) to her being demoted to second chair flute

which felt like a blow to her pride/intestines/glorious career plans (pick one)

spurring her in the final week to outdo herself in all categories of instruction:

(win back orchestra seat, bike 20 miles to Worcester and back, spend all night Tuesday on The Field with conceited trombone player and ignore him on Wednesday, raise metronome to 132 on Maj/min scales in thirds, convince camp director’s daughter to get high in the woods, perform Telemann w/crazed prodigy from Curtis, channel Elvis via Ouija board, sunbathe topless w/second flutist on floating dock, hear Afternoon of a Faun for first time and dissolve into melancholic bliss)

And still the copper-haired counselor looked at her squarely like she was So-La-Ti-

Do immutable, just another fifteen-year-old with a retainer, no breasts, and with only two

days left until she was deposited back in stultifying Longmeadow, Mass, it was Now or

Never so to his longstanding request she finally said, Yes, she would volunteer her

Bianchi as a demonstration model/sacrificial lamb for his end-of-camp workshop on Bike

Safety & Repair – sure, dismantle the gearshift, loosen the cables, tighten the brake pads, grease the chain -- even though there was nothing wrong with her cherished Italian racer, nothing, nothing at all.

What was she thinking about when she pitched off the worn, leather seat, her long, black curls still damp from the shower, her sneakers no longer touching pedal but cloud and sky, and the white clapboard houses to her right floating backward so unhurriedly

(she swore) she could read the polished brass plaques (est. 1756, 1803, 1799) mounted on each?

This is happening so slowly.

I could stop this right now.

I am not going to fall.

I am not

She lay under the revolving wheel and looked at the sky, which was very blue and perfectly able to coexist with the clockwise whir of stainless-steel spokes. From this slanted perspective there were also several tree branches, intersections of shadows and light. The wheel as it spun over her made a slowing click click click. Cars rushed by noisily to her left, on Laurel Street, but she could not see them; her left cheek and chin were smashed against – no, into the concrete sidewalk. Her hands were braced near her

shoulders, palms down, as if ready to do a push-up. “Help,” she said, once, to herself.

The sound died immediately, like a trumpet high note clamped by a mute. There was a

keen, metallic taste in her mouth. And the sweet, almondish scent of Flex shampoo mixed

with something else, something that made saliva rush to her cheeks.

“Help,” she cried. It wasn’t any louder.

Everything significant seemed to be concentrated at the front of her face. A slow,

spreading heaviness below her mouth, the fleshy area there. But no pain. No panic, either.

It was peaceful here under the gently spinning wheel, and she would have been content to

lie on the motionless concrete, just breathing and observing, only she was struck by the

idea that she should get up. That people who fall off bicycles should get up, especially

when the bicycle has fallen on top of them, its metal frame digging into their spine. All

right. She would do that. She would make the effort, stand. It was easy enough once she

understood what was expected. Only one thing didn’t seem fair: Why wasn’t anyone

stopping to help?

After considerable rocking on her shoulders and kicking with her bare legs and pushing with her forearms (her hands were no good, the palms skinned raw), she heaved the bicycle’s dead weight off her back. The gearshift made a horrible grinding sound as it struck the pavement. If she strained her neck forward she could see all four lanes of

Laurel Street where it widened into Route 192; not a single car in either direction bothered to stop, even though she was struggling in plain sight, under a brand-new Yield sign. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, exhausted. Branches rustled benignly overhead. With the drivers she felt not angry, but affronted; they had got it all wrong.

They hadn’t bothered to save her; they had failed in their civic duty. Why wasn’t that

67 clear to them? When she got home, she’d have to tell somebody about it, someone who would make the drivers see, make them feel ashamed. They had made a mistake.

It was all around her now, the strange, sweet smell. She was probably bleeding somewhere.

And then the eerie sensation of her right hand, now freed, floating hesitantly near her face, trying to sense where to land. To that numbed mound beneath the lips: the chin.

Stiff fingers grazed invisibly against skin that should have seared with pain but did not because there was no flesh at that outcropping, only bone. Hard, wet, slippery bone.

It hit her: She was touching her jawbone. She was actually touching her own skeleton!

So, it was true, she thought. All those diagrams of human skeletons she’d studied in freshman biology, the yellowed skulls under glass at the natural history museum: people really did have those things inside them -- specifically, she did. She had a skull. It was right here, pressing into her fingertips: a hard, not very facelike shape propping up her features. And this skull, this bulging, heavy dome, had been inside her all along. It had been grinning at her, behind her eyelids, balancing atop her spinal column and accompanying her everywhere – to school, to flute lessons, to the mall, to the movie theater -- yammering in conversation, aping her every word, noiselessly. It was her, this jawbone, this skull. The real her. Or, as much her as any other part of her body could claim to be. This hard, smooth wall of Caroline that she was touching: it would endure. It would wait as long as necessary to show itself. She knew that, now.

She lifted her index finger. Cautiously, delicately, she touched the bone again. An extraordinary happiness rose inside her.

She had been given a gift. An awesome, terrible, wonderful gift. She could hardly wait to share it with someone.

The elderly woman with a cloud of white hair who opened the door turned deathly pale. She staggered back and sank into an upholstered chair in the living room. The husband wasn’t any use, either.

“Oh, my God,” he repeated, staring at Caroline’s chin. His hand clutched the top buttons of his cardigan and held there, like a brooch, over his heart.

Caroline swept past him, cupping her jaw. The horrible sweet smell followed.

“I’ve been through this before,” she thought, taking in at a glance the blue-flowered wallpaper, the ticking grandfather’s clock, the andiron shaped like a lion’s paw.

“I need a phone,” she explained, calmly. They stared at her with terrified eyes. “I

had an accident in front of your house.”

The woman buried her face in the man’s sweater. He bent over and began patting her shoulder, rhythmically, rocking back and forth in his shiny, black oxfords. He did not look up.

“Where’s your telephone?” Caroline asked, louder. It hurt to talk.

There was blood on the blue carpet. Bright red splotches. She cupped her left hand over her right. The man was now hugging his wife, his sweatered arms folded stiffly around her.

“I said, where’s the phone?”

“Over there,” the man said angrily.

Caroline lunged down the unlit hallway, knocking into a small, round table. A glass dish slid off and fell onto the carpet, unbroken, scattering potpourri. There it was, through the door to the right, on the kitchen counter: a black rotary phone. Underneath a mirror, heart-shaped, into which she could peer if she bent forward like this and lifted her fingers

(stickily), one by one….

Jesus –

She was missing the lower rim of her face. There was bone and a flap of skin dangling from her jaw and blood, blood everywhere: on her cheeks, in her hair, down her neck, dripping down her green-and-white-striped Lacoste shirt She looked like a monster.

Night of the Living Dead.

Adrenaline surged in her veins, prickling her fingertips.

On the tiled counter was a stack of dishtowels. Soft, white terrycloth, neatly folded.

I’ll need these,” she thought, matter of factly, and grabbed the whole pile.

Deftly she sopped up her chin and with a finger of the other hand dialed the familiar number. Four, five rings. No doubt her mother was in the kitchen, burning something. Six, seven.

She peered again. The towel-chinned creature in the mirror looked back crossly.

Only her deep-set eyes and unruly eyebrows looked like herself. Eight. Her mother picked up.

“Hey, I fell off my bike and busted my jaw. The people here are freaking out. You have to come get me. I need to go to the hospital.”

Where was she? her mother wanted to know.

“Eighteen-thirty-one Laurel,” she said, recalling the brass plaque above the doorbell outside. Something stopped her. “No. Wait a second.”

She lifted the phone cradle. Taped to the countertop underneath was a yellowed index card with the couple’s name, address, and phone number on it (Frank + Rita

Silverman, 54 Laurel Street…). The letters were written in a careful, slanting hand, a smear of blue ink over the R. She read the address to her mother and hung up.

There was nothing strange about knowing where to find that card, she thought, retracing her steps down the hallway, along blood-spotted carpet. It was as normal as feeling time slow down when she flew over the handlebars or reaching into her face to touch her jawbone or seeing somebody else when she looked in the mirror. Things like that happened to people every day, all over the world: in Boston, in New York City, in

China, in the Soviet Union. Maybe people didn’t talk about those things much, but they were real; they were part of life. Everybody knew that.

It was a shame she couldn’t explain that to the couple in the living room.

She waited it out alone on the front porch, and when her mother pulled up in the station wagon Caroline could tell by the look on her face that things were bad. But not so bad that her mother didn’t stop to light up a cigarette. They drove eighty-five-bumping- miles-per-hour on the back roads to Mercy Hospital, through the worst parts of

Springfield, Mrs. Destes blowing quick puffs of smoke out the side window.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. All of a sudden the brakes locked.” Caroline felt queasy. There was

that smell again. She forced herself to look out the windshield, at the painted white line,

not at the desolate row houses on either side.

“The brakes locked? Why?”

“I don’t….” Caroline’s voice trailed off. She saw the gleam of a monkey wrench in

the counselor’s hands, the cocky way he twirled the nuts off the screws and held them out

to the front row, all teenage girls. He was grinning as he did this, white teeth in a tanned and freckled face. She had been impressed at the time, proud that it was her bicycle he was so confidently disassembling in front of her rivals.

“Stop the car. Right here,” she yelled savagely.

They swerved into the lot of an abandoned gas station.

Caroline leaned out the passenger door and vomited.

The pediatric surgeon spent two hours lacing her chin with eighty stitches: forty inside, forty out. He was renowned throughout New England for his precision; you could barely see the scars afterward. Children would fly all the way from Boston just to have him sew them up, the nurses claimed.

“You’re a lucky girl,” said the short, plump one. “You’ll still have your pretty face after this is over.” She gathered the bloody towels in her arms and stuffed them in an orange hospital bin marked Biohazardous Waste. “Thanks to Dr. Brooks.”

The doctor in the bright lights resembled a smiling, pink blur, decorated with glasses. He leaned closer and inspected the enormous white bandage affixed to Caroline’s chin. He appeared to be as fascinated by her injury as she was.

“I felt my own bone,” volunteered Caroline. “Here.”

“Ah – don’t touch!” He turned briskly to a nurse: “Get the mother an FAQ on

wound care.”

Mrs. Destes called after him: “Will my daughter be able to play her instrument

again? She has her heart set on becoming a concert flutist.”

They sent Caroline home with ice packs and painkillers and told her no bike riding or flute practicing for one week. They did not take X-rays.

“How could I fall on my chin like that and not break my jaw?” mused Caroline, drowsily, on the ride home. A nauseating stiffness chilled her mouth. “Don’t you think

I’d have a broken jaw?”

Her mother glanced uncertainly in the rear-view mirror. “Well,” she said, echoing the doctor’s words, “you’re still talking, aren’t you?”

There were two days in which Caroline did nothing but walk around like a mummy face and throw up in the toilet and pester her mother to take her to another doctor. On the third day, a Monday, Mrs. Destes relented.

“I don’t think your daughter has a broken jaw,” opined the pediatrician. He pressed along the swollen curves with his dry fingertips. “She wouldn’t be talking if she did.”

Caroline swayed on the examination table, gorge rising. Even though she had washed her hair several times since Friday with another shampoo, the bad, sweet smell was still there. Just seeing the Flex bottle under the bathroom sink made her want to puke. And now her whole face and jaw ached, especially around her ears.

“But it wouldn’t hurt to have another opinion,” added the pediatrician.

The dentist concurred.

“I’d take her to see Dr. Gripple.”

Dr. Gripple was, or had been, Caroline’s orthodontist. He’d removed Caroline’s braces only six months ago; she was still getting used to the delicious sensation of running her tongue over smooth, bare teeth, of not having scars inside her mouth from practicing.

Now here she was on a Tuesday afternoon, tipped back in the hated green chair, mouth aching, just like the old days, mother hunched next to her, waiting for Dr. Gripple to finish examining her X-rays. She kept silent: each word cost her a stabbing pain. Now she knew how the rusted Tin Man felt in The Wizard of Oz. Oil Can.

The orthodontist rolled toward them on his stool. “Well, Mrs. Destes, it looks like your daughter is right: I’d say our prodigy has broken her jaw – in several places.”

A feeble triumph rose in Caroline.

“I knew it,” she said to herself.

She leaned over the tiny enamel sink and spit, trying to avoid the bandage. Blood and saliva swirled down the watery vortex. Outside in the parking lot she had thrown up in the bushes, her second time this morning. It was exhausting.

“This is terrible,” said her mother. “She kept trying to tell us this weekend. I didn’t believe her.”

“These things happen, Mrs. Destes.”

“Oh!” Her mother’s voice choked. “All that beautiful work you did on her teeth.

Will you be able to fix it?”

“This is out of my realm of expertise,” continued Dr. Gripple, placidly. “She will have to see an oral surgeon.”

Her mother grew still. “Why didn’t they find this at the hospital? Why didn’t they take X-rays there?”

“Sometimes they don’t consider it necessary. Not often, but sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” volunteered Caroline, jaw throbbing, “people are idiots.”

Her mother burst into tears.

By the time of her appointment with Adam J. Horowitz, D.D.S., M.D., at 9:30 a.m.,

Wednesday, August 2nd, four days and twenty-two hours after the accident, Caroline

Destes had:

• washed her hair eleven times with “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific”

• thrown up so many times (she’d lost count) her throat was raw

• stopped eating

• stopped talking

• stopped caring what she wore (just put on any old shorts and grungy T-shirt)

• thought about practicing her instrument just once (and then, without a flicker of interest, like she was contemplating playing a game of bridge)

• developed yellow-and-black bruises all over her left cheek, around her left eye, underneath her jaw and behind both ears

• fantasized about cutting off her head to end the lunatic pain

• pretty much given up on her mother (who was driving her crazy with her mea culpa face and over-solicitousness), her father (who blamed her for not wearing a helmet), her beagle Bugles (who smelled awful, she decided); had given up on doctors, dentists, nurses, hospitals, old couples in historic houses, obnoxious counselors with red hair: the whole adult world, in other words.

So it was that when she finally roused herself from the scratchy orange couch on which she’d been sitting and, following the dark-haired receptionist’s directions, walked

(sullenly) through the automatic doors, down the brown-and-orange carpeted hallway, to

the second door on the left (mother scurrying behind like a lab rat, beta to her alpha) and

pushed open the (surprisingly) heavy door – Horowitz & Bell Institute of Oral and

Maxillofacial Surgery, displayed in six-inch-high, gold letters – she really didn’t see Dr.

Adam Horowitz standing beside his Danish modern desk, Space Pen in hand, pleasantly

smirking, standing there in all his slope-shouldered, big-nosed, deep-voiced, rangy,

masculine glory. No. What she saw was:

A tall guy in a white coat who was going to fix her jaw. Maybe.

What happened next reminded Caroline of the spaced-out movies her cousin Andy made for film class at Amherst – or was that effect caused by the anesthesia they soon administered? She couldn’t be sure. X-rays were taken and discussed, gowned nurses led her by the elbow to a tiny dressing room where she tied on a blue paper smock and was escorted again to another room, this one larger and whiter and more antiseptic smelling, where it was explained that the fracture was going to be wired; she should lie back in the chair and listen to the music. It would all be over with soon. First a swabbing along the gums of orange-flavored antiseptic, followed by numbness, then by a few harmless needle pricks, a pinch in the right arm. Yes, that was the sequence. It had left her feeling like a small bar of soap, dissolving unconcernedly in a bathtub. There must have been a tray of sterilized implements (drills?), pins, and several long, metal wires arranged alongside, but Caroline couldn’t remember seeing them; these things floated like dust motes in the periphery of her vision, dwarfed by the warm, gloved fingers that gently pulled aside her cheek and did something in there that sounded like, tap, slip, tap.

She kept her eyes closed. The doctor’s gravelly voice droned on in an easy, companionable way – he liked to race cars, he explained to her kindly, not

condescendingly, in his unfamiliar New York accent – and her attention flickered in and

out, drawn fleetingly to the disco music thumping in the background. He had bought the

Maserati out back last year; he had a niece nearly her age, too; he sometimes took her to

the speedway; bite down – and then she found herself thinking about mandibles and front

fracture, those were the words he had used in the front office, the one with the mirrors,

where he’d shown her the X-rays. “This is your left mandible, the lower jawbone; yeah,

here’s that knock-out left break; you have one on the other side, too” – his square-tipped

finger had traced along a jagged, moon-white line – “You really interested in this? Here,

you can see it better on this one” – and he had pulled down an anterior view and,

crouching behind her, chin level with hers, long arm gesturing, pointed to the different

parts of her cranium: Maxilla, frontal sinus, lacrimal, nasal fossa, sphenoid. His fingers

had left a greasy trace on the film. “Those are my eye sockets,” she had thought, gazing

into the ghostly, black orbs, and now, sprawled low in the operating chair, she could

sense their enormity, behind her closed eyelids.

“Almost done, kid,” the doctor said. “Hold still.” His forearm tensed as he leaned

against the armrest, warm shoulder pressing into hers, and twirled some unseen tool near

her left molar.

There was a crisp snip.

“There.” His body relaxed.

Wet towels under her chin were whisked away by an assistant (whose icy fingers had been in Caroline’s mouth as well).

“Joyce, you can ask Mrs. Destes to come in, now.”

The chair rotated upright. Caroline looked, woozily, from her mother’s worried face to the doctor’s steady, reassuring gaze. “I know what you’re made of,” his eyes seemed to say. “You’ve been to hell and back. But you’re going to be okay, eventually.”

Nhey, niy anp awht, she said through clenched teeth. (“Hey, I can’t talk.”)

Her mouth wouldn’t open. Her jaws had been wired shut.

“You’ll have to get used to communicating with these.” Dr. Horowitz handed her a small, spiral-bound notebook and a yellow pencil. “That’ll probably make things easier on you, Mrs. Destes.” Caroline thought she saw the doctor wink at her mother. He had brown eyes, kind of squinty, the tanned skin wrinkled at the corners. It didn’t look bad, though.

Part Two

• No talking

• No eating solid food

• No practicing

• No arguing

• No wisecracks

• No complaining that you have a massive headache

• No telling your mother to let you alone

• No answering the telephone

• No yawning wide

• No saying goodnight to your parents

• No grinding on your retainer

• No whining, “I’m hungry,” when you finally feel like it

• No chewing warm, toasted bagel

• No sinking your teeth into juicy hamburger, thick-cut French fries with salt, lots of salt

• No saying, “Down, girl,” when Bugles claws the back door to go out

• No cursing, “Oh, shit,” when you bang your shin on the doorjamb

• No calling out, “Hi,” to the silent old man who prunes the Coopers’ weirdly beautiful fruit trees

• No spitting out toothpaste in the bathroom sink

• No singing “Bad Girls” in the shower

• No whistling anything, including “Flight of the Bumblebee”

• No blowing air into your mouthpiece to warm it up

• No getting your arpeggios and scales back period, let alone to triplets at 132

• No gossiping on the phone with your best friend, Roxy Bowman

• No asking, “How are you?” to the lady at Bliss Pharmacy who rings up your refills of amoxicillin, liquid Darvon

• No joking back when she teases, “How you doing, old thing?”

• No calling hello across the street to someone you haven’t seen since the last day of school

• No saying, “In a minute,” when your mother tells you to please make your bed

• No biting into a broiled cheese sandwich like the one your mother is snarfing down right in front of you

• No sucking on ice cubes, even

• No shouting, “No fucking way!,” when your father announces he wants to sue the counselor for reckless endangerment

• No calling up Roxy at 11:30 at night

• No whispering that your parents are driving you crazy

• No taking big, gulping breaths when you sob into your pillow

• No saying, “Yes, it does hurt,” when your father finally asks how your jaw feels

Thanks

She held the notebook up to her mother, who was sitting across from her at the kitchen counter, eating a burnt grilled cheese and dill pickles. A dusty kitchen witch, riding on a cinnamon-bark broomstick, dangled over their heads. Bugles paced at their feet, her long tail knocking against the rungs of the stools, pleading for a handout.

Mrs. Destes glanced at the note and smiled. “I thought you’d like the strawberry flavor. The plain must be – I don’t know, chalky tasting?”

“Mmmm hum,” murmured Caroline, at the back of her throat.

Lumps of pink powder clung to the sides of the glass, which she had just drained of liquid. All she could eat with her jaw wired shut were protein shakes and smooth soups – chicken broth, vichyssoise, gazpacho strained through a cheese cloth. She’d lost her taste for soup after a few days of experimenting – it made her gag, for some reason. She was now subsisting entirely on milkshakes, made with the powder, ice cream, milk and raw eggs. The blender whirred all day long. Weirdly enough, the eggs didn’t make her want to throw up.

“I’m taking you to your appointment tomorrow,” said her mother.

Caroline pictured brown eyes, a reception area filled with low-slung, orange couches, dim lighting.

“He’s such a nice man,” said her mother, splitting the emphasis between the last two words. “Don’t you think he looks like that actor on M.A.S.H.?”

Alan Alda? she wrote.

“Yes.”

No way. She double-underlined the words. Alda = pointy nose. Whiney. Talks too

much.

“Caroline, you’re awfully harsh. When you’re older you’ll see that Alan Alda is a

very attractive man, in a certain kind of way. Intelligent. Funny. The kind of man who

probably listens when you talk….”

But Dr H ≠ pointy nose, whiner, etc., she scribbled. Dr H = big nose, deep voice,

normal.

“…a man who can talk about his feelings.” Her mother was staring out the window, at a red bird feeder.

Wake up, Caroline wrote in big letters. Alan Alda/Hawkeye = dork. She waved the page in her mother’s face.

Her mother laughed. “I suppose you’re right. Alan Alda is…dorky.” She laughed her way to the sink. “Dorky. Some things never change. Oh, no --” Her mother stopped scraping the sandwich remains into the garbage disposal. “I almost forgot about you,

Bugles.”

Mrs. Destes retrieved the metal bowl from the floor and broke the sandwich into pieces. Bugles yelped when she smelled the pickles.

“You know, the vet says not to feed her those,” Caroline felt like saying. Now that her jaw was wired shut, her mother was able to get away with more of her “quirks,” as she called them. It was too hard writing out warnings for all the stupid and embarrassing thing her mother did: “Don’t feed pickles to the dog,” “Don’t let anybody see you in the

too-short green shorts,” “Don’t wear the yin-yang necklace,” “Don’t smoke so much,”

“Don’t tell people that I made All-Mass Symphony.” Her fingers would cramp up.

Mrs. Destes paused at the back door, lighter in hand: “I’m going outside. Maybe

you should get a little sun? You’ve been inside all week.”

No Thanks.

“You know, when you were a little girl, you had a crush on Walter Matthau. Your father and I both thought it was hysterical. We couldn’t kid you about it, though. You were very serious. Don’t bother with the blender. I’ll wash it by hand.”

The door closed behind her.

It was true, Caroline thought, filling her glass to the brim with cloudy water. She had liked Walter Matthau in Cactus Flower, when it showed on the Million-Dollar

Movie. He had seemed so big and capable and funny. She had found his slouchy walk and semi-permanent smirk especially attractive. At the time she had thought there was nothing strange about a girl in third grade being in love with a 50-year-old actor.

Even when she saw him a few years later in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, older and more ruined, his allure lingered. Homely, yes. But never dorky. Maybe it was his rumbly voice or his knowing eyes or his large, banged-up nose. He wasn’t one of those pretty boy actors; he looked like he’d been around and knew what was what. He looked like he would tell you about it, if you asked.

Now that she thought of it, she’d had a thing for guys with big noses ever since the third grade. A big nose was a plus, as far as she was concerned.

So far Caroline had been sitting on this weird chair in Dr. Horowitz’s mirrored office, waiting for him to finish with another patient, for exactly four minutes and twenty-

82 two seconds. She knew that because she wore her big-face watch with the super-wide

(itchy) suede band, and she kept glancing at it because it looked cool on her thin, tanned wrist, only not as cool it would have looked if she had gotten some more sun, like her mother suggested. She had also put on her favorite denim cut-offs and a peasant shirt and her rolly-soled Ferragamos because she realized there was no sense walking around looking like a slob, even if she was bolted and stitched up like Frankenstein. Do I look okay? she had written after inspecting herself (with one eye) in the hall mirror, and her mother had been no help whatsoever, had just given her one of those soft, melting mother looks and told her it would be nice if she pulled her hair off her face, wore some barrettes for a change. (Not that Caroline took her advice: There was no way she was going to show off her fat chipmunk cheeks; the longer and wilder her hair/mane/veil, the better.)

So now she was sitting on the ends of her hair – it had grown down to her butt at

Camp Staccato, like Lady Godiva’s, – and, yes, it was uncomfortable, and so was this slippery, blob-shaped armchair, for that matter, but that wasn’t what was bugging her.

What was really freaking her out was this poco a poco realization that not only had she been stoned on pain last Wednesday when Dr. Horowitz had operated on her, apparently she’d been wearing some kind of mental blinders as well: she hadn’t understood, hadn’t seen this place. Almost everything looked different today.

For instance – she checked her wrist; six minutes, 35 seconds -- the car in the parking lot. Last week she had stumbled past it, staking out bushes and garbage cans in case she suddenly needed to throw up. This morning, however, when she slid out of the station wagon and stepped over the concrete curb stenciled Dr. A. Horowitz, she had stopped in her Ferragamo-ed tracks: The doctor didn’t drive a car. He drove a bright-

83 yellow, four-wheeled rocket with a single, giant windshield wiper and angular doors that apparently opened skyward and futuristic rear boosters that perked up so high, they looked like they could shoot you into another dimension. Jesus. Nobody in Western

Massachusetts drove a car like that. How could she have missed it last week? She had wanted to peer through the tinted windows, to see if the inside was equally as incredible, but her mother had tossed her cigarette into the curb and snapped this was no time to dawdle; the doctor was waiting for them.

So she had let her mother drag her away from The Car and up to the 11th floor of the Holyoke Professional Centre – eight minutes, fourteen seconds -- where, it turned out, the room where you read magazines and waited for Doctor Horowitz to See You Now was not a waiting room: it was more like somebody’s Deluxe Apartment in the Sky.

There was a sunken conversation pit with cushy, orange pillows, a lava-rock fireplace, a wall of expensive-looking stereo equipment, and trippy, abstract paintings, which, when you touched them, turned out to be real, not prints. Unlike Dr. Gripple’s waiting room, there were no Highlights for Children or Good Housekeeping magazines lying around; when Caroline and her mother were informed that the doctor would be a few minutes late, he was still in surgery, Mrs. Destes had staked out a corner of the conversation pit and buried her nose in the latest Cosmopolitan (“Best Lovemaking Positions for

Waterbeds!” read one cover line), leaving Caroline to flip through back issues of Esquire,

Car & Driver, and Downbeat. Even the dark-haired receptionist was New & Improved, her manner less bossy, her tone more dolce. There was no need for Mrs. Destes to go inside with Caroline today, she explained, half-smiling, through the glass window; the doctor would just do a quick check-up. Her daughter knew her way down the hall, right?

Second doorway on the left. Yes, Caroline nodded, leaving her mother looking

momentarily confused, hands fidgeting with the hem of her short blue halter-dress, as

Caroline nudged through the doorway and roll-walked down the brown-and-orange

carpet, the automatic door gliding thock-shut behind her.

So now Dr. Horowitz had already kept her waiting nine minutes, 23 seconds in his swanky, mirrored office, which, like the waiting room outside, was filled with things that demanded a closer look, finally prompting her to get off her tangled hair and wander

around, absorbing his good taste in furniture, his popularity with injured sports stars

(signed photographs on the walls) and his fondness for model race cars (’73 Maserati

Bora, ’78 Lamborhini Countach LP400). And all during her meandering/snooping (twelve

minutes, 54 seconds), she avoided looking at herself in the mirrored wall but was working

herself up to it, reminding herself that the doctor had probably seen worse, a lot worse,

when the door opened and a tanned, much-handsomer man than she remembered poked

in his head, a green hospital cap flush with his eyebrows, and said, “One minute,

Caroline.”

His deep voice startled her. She dropped the Space Pen she’d been examining, and

it was strange how guilty she felt: she had no intention of stealing it. So why was her

heart pounding?

Then, stupidly, the pen rolled off the desk, and she had to go find it down there.

Otherwise he’d think she was a thief. She groped around in semi-darkness – tangled phone wires, a chewed pencil, dust balls, a bent paperclip, a wadded up phone message, the back of somebody’s earring – until her fingers closed around cool metal. No doubt it

was expensive. She backed up on hands and knees, being careful not to bang her still-

tender skull overhead, and bumped, bottom-first, into a pair of trousered legs.

“Did you lose something?”

Dr. Horowitz’s dark eyebrows frowned down at her shorts; he definitely did not

look like Alan Alda, she decided. The green cap was gone, his thick, black hair combed

to one side.

She held up the pen: “I knocked this off your desk,” she tried to say. A horrible, strained sound – like the moanings of a mental patient – escaped through her teeth.

“Thanks, kid. That’s my favorite. I would have missed it. Here – ”

Dr. Horowitz grabbed her left hand and pulled her to standing, so forcefully she almost pitched forward on her platforms. For reasons she didn’t understand, she found herself blushing. Her shorts were too short, her legs too pale and naked, for a visit to the oral surgeon’s; her mother was right; she would have to work on her suntan. The doctor’s face was warmed to a healthy, even brown, a hint of pink on the bridge of his nose. His eyes – she avoided looking directly at them, but could sense their movements – gave off a confident, male alertness, as if he were almost but not quite smiling. And there was something else he emanated, something that you could feel on your skin, like a shift in temperature.

“Don’t even try to talk,” said the doctor. Tawk. His voice was gruff, but soothing.

“It’ll only make you frustrated. Write it down. How’s that going, by the way?”

She tugged the notebook out of her back pocket, metal spirals tickling through the rough denim, and flipped to an empty page. OK, she wrote in pencil, standing up. Hard not being able 2 say stuff. Hand hurts.

“Yeah, it’s a b – I mean, that’s the toughest part. That and the pain. Hey, nice watch.”

She flushed with pleasure. Thanks, she wrote. Bitch. He was going to say the word bitch.

He nodded to the padded, reclining chair. “You can sit here – no, that other one’s just for looks. I need to be able to see into your mouth.”

“You do still have pain, right?” The doctor’s deep brown eyes looked into her own.

She nodded.

“Where?”

She pointed to both sides of her jaw, her left cheek.

His eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been ice-ing regularly. I can tell.” He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. “Lean back.”

The doctor was all business, just as she remembered from last week. This time, though, she tried to keep her eyes open. He was hovering over her, so close she could see the pores on his forehead, peer into his elongated, kidney-shaped nostrils, smell his cool, linen-y scent, slightly antiseptic. His gloved fingers, moving slowly here and there, rested on the bones of her face with a deliberateness that was strangely calming, as if he were explaining to her skull that no more harm could come to it; now was the time to be silent, to knit together. She breathed in cautiously and hoped that the doctor’s hands would stay on her face for a while – it felt good to know something other than pain there – but, no, the gentle weight lifted; the hands had been called to duty scribbling notes in green notebook labeled “August 1978.” A shaft of morning light lit up the page on which the doctor was writing, his pen pausing now and then as he searched for the right word or the

correct diagnosis, and from out of nowhere it struck Caroline that she desperately wanted

to play her flute again: that she wanted to pour herself out in pools of liquid sound, her tone more beautiful than it had been before the accident -- not flashing silver, no, but rounded, golden. Was such a thing possible?

Then Dr. Horowitz’s big face swung back into view, and both hands were doing this terrible, humiliating thing: flipping her lips inside out, into a hideous Balinese-mask- style grimace, exposing her teeth and gums. Cool air rushed inside her mouth, puckering her membranes; her eyes watered. As the doctor ran a finger over the ridges of her gums and the occasional hard, painful something, he murmured “uh huh, uh huh,” and “good, yes, very good” -- his deep voice lowering in a gravelly diminuendo so soft, so nearly out of normal hearing range, it was intimate. Unbearably intimate. So much so, she had to close her eyes, a single tear escaping down her hot, bruised cheek. Because it wasn’t possible to look up at the doctor and at the same time to admit to herself what she had

vaguely understood since age eleven: that she had preternaturally sensitive hearing, that

she lived through her ears, like other musicians, attuned to the micro-nuances of speech

and sound, but with one key difference (no, she was not like other people, why pretend

otherwise?): her ears were a conduit, secret and direct, to her inner seat of pleasure (yeah,

she was a freak for ravishing sounds, which was no doubt why she spent hours a day

listening to and replicating the aural hallucinations of Debussy, Mozart, Ravel, Satie,

Stravinsky, Prokofiev, all those divine madmen – half humans, half angels), and that

whoever grasped that truth could one day probably win her heart as well.

And the doctor had located the hidden passageway (had he seen it on the X-rays,

behind the Maxillary Antrium?) and was letting his whispered voice echo through it, just

as he had done last week, yes, he had done this to her then, playing her like an alto flute, just the upper register so far, fingering low notes that she didn’t know could resonate in her, and she was powerless to say anything because her upper and lower jaws were soldered together, her tongue locked up inside, and, anyway, who would want to kiss a fifteen-year-old with her head wired up like a freak show and her chin a stitched-up gash?

The thought came at her, like a fist punching through a wall.

I like Dr. Horowitz.

Once out, she couldn’t take it back.

I like Dr. Horowitz. I like my oral surgeon. I like him!

And then she was upright, and the doctor was leading her down the brown-and-

orange carpeting, to the brightly lit nurses station where her mother was standing, red tote

bag and checkbook in hand. From the end of the hallway her mother looked like a stylish

Barbie doll, neatly done up in her blue halter dress and matching ballerina flats and pert

Dorothy Hamill haircut, but as Caroline got closer she saw that the dress was wrinkled,

the shoes were the wrong shade of blue and the hands were veined and jittery. Poking out

of the tote bag was the rolled-up Cosmopolitan she’d been reading when Caroline had

gone in for her appointment. She couldn’t remember what time that had been. The

waiting room seemed like something that had happened weeks ago. Even her legs felt

longer, rising like saplings from the wobbly Ferragamos, as if she’d grown several inches

in her sleep.

According to her wrist, it was exactly 11:58 a.m.

“Do you want the stronger prescription? We can go to Bliss Pharmacy right now.”

Her mother’s hand trembled with the lighter as they stood outside the Holyoke

Professional Centre; an hour and a half was a long time for her to be without a cigarette.

The doctor’s office had a big No Smoking sign in the door as you walked in.

No, wrote Caroline.

“It’s on the way.”

Regular Darvon=OK. Don’t want 2 become addict.

“Fine, we’ll skip it. We can always fill it later.” Her mother’s voice tightened as

she inhaled. “You don’t have to be a martyr, you know. You have three more weeks of

this.”

I will survive! She pantomimed the moves of the disco queen she’d seen on Johnny

Carson, the half-remembered tune playing in her head: “As long as I know how to ----, I know I’ll be alive.” What was it, love? hump? do the Bump?

“Facial trauma is no joke, Caroline. Read the pamphlets Dr. Horowitz gave you. At the very least, you should be icing four times a day. He saw that you haven’t been doing it.”

Will ice face. Promise.

It was hot and sunny. Caroline blinked away from the noontime glare, toward a dark patch of pine trees, next to a gas station with a long line of cars. She liked Dr.

Horowitz. She was going to become a great flute player. She would show them all. What was some temporary, insignificant face pain compared to that? Her mother had no clue what went on inside her. She would get a pair of big sunglasses, lie out in the sun, turn golden brown. If the pain didn’t get better, there was always Maya. Roxy’s older sister always had pot.

They were walking to the parking lot, now, side by side, Mrs. Destes’ dainty slippers going slick slick slick on the uneven sidewalk, Caroline’s wavy platforms slightly off rhythm, two steps to her mother’s three.

“It’s very thoughtful of Dr. Horowitz to write you a prescription, anyway.” The red tote bag swung at Mrs. Destes’ side. “He’s probably been through this hundreds of times: teenage girls too proud to admit they’re in pain. Really, he has excellent people skills.

You must need them to be a good oral surgeon. People come to you with their faces shattered, looking like hell. Imagine the self-esteem issues…”

“Mmmmm.” The sound came out of her surprisingly loud, edged with frustration.

The doctor has not been through this hundreds of times, she wanted to scream at her mother. Only once. With her. No other girl in Western Massachusetts had ever cracked her jaw in three places and suffered in exile for four days, twenty-two hours, and needed to be put back together like she did. She was it. His speechless Humpty Dumpty. His

Bride of Frankenstein. He knew her.

“You know, while you were in there, this poor man came staggering into the waiting room,” said Mrs. Destes. “He’d been hit in the mouth with a hockey puck; he actually caught it with his teeth. Can you imagine? They made him wait twenty-five minutes.”

She could hear Dr. Horowitz’s voice deep in her ear. Uh huh, uh huh. Quick, almost impatient-sounding, but not really. No, he wouldn’t want her to rush. That was just the New Yorker in him talking. He wanted her to mend. Maybe she’d lie out tomorrow afternoon on the Coopers’ side, by the fruit trees. Maybe she’d rig up her stereo speakers so she could listen outside.

“… his whole lower face like this, sideways, like a typewriter carriage…”

Maybe she’d wear the crocheted bikini. Maybe…

There it was. The Car.

This time Caroline took her time peering in the tinted windows, prowling around

the sleek, wedge-shaped rocket. (Mentally she reduced her mother to the size of a

Wishnik doll, trapped under a thick glass dome; “Please get in the car now,” the tiny creature pleaded in an infinitesimal, impossible-to-hear voice.) So this was a

Lamborghini – a Countach 400, like the model in the doctor’s office. No wonder people went crazy over them. The car made you want to jump inside and become part of it: speed, speed and beauty. Uh huh, uh huh. Good, yes, very good. And her oral surgeon owned this phenomenal thing: piloted it through the pilgrim-hallowed highways and down the proper main streets of the Pioneer Valley. It was thrilling just to imagine him stopped at an intersection.

“Caroline….”

Reluctantly she climbed into the wagon. The stodgy, brown, paneled door shut beside her. Her bony knees wedged against the dash as she slouched on the hot front seat, her long hair falling over her face. The engine made a terrifying scraping sound as her mother did something not right with the ignition key; then, finally, the engine turned over and a blast of refrigerated air hit their faces.

The Lamborghini disappeared in the rear view mirror.

Maybe she would get inside the doctor’s car one day, she thought. Slip into the low, black-leather bucket seats and lean back and let Dr. Horowitz drive her around the block or better. Everything about Adam Horowitz, DDS, MD, was kind of ultra and fascinating

and definitely a million times better than anything about any of the boys she had gone out

with or even liked – including the counselor in Liszt cabin, whose name she sometimes

couldn’t remember. He had thin lips and a nice neck but no sexy, bashed-in nose or deep, knowing eyes like Dr. Horowitz. The counselor also missed a lot on the high notes, especially in Til Eulenspiegel.

She had only pretended that didn’t matter.

They braved the trucks on I-91 and drove south to the first Longmeadow exit, ending up at the town green. Some patriot troops had trained there during the

Revolutionary War; now in the summertime, people’s fathers dressed up in knee breeches and pretended to shoot muskets at one another. Mr. Destes had once been a Red Coat in a

Long Meddowe Days reenactment and had spent the weekend sweating under an especially decrepit powdered wig. Drinking pints of piss-warm ale and charging at hay bales with a lacrosse stick, shouting, “Bayonet the buggers!” had in no way compensated, he informed them.

Mrs. Destes merged onto Longmeadow Street, pumping the brakes; the cops waited by the library to ticket you.

Slowly the austere clapboard houses and brick mansions rolled by: 1795, 1840,

1725. A white star on a red square for an 18-century house, a blue square for the 19th. A tinier star with a vague shape underneath for the home of a Minuteman.

They idled in front of the old First Church at Williams Street, its Puritan spire soaring into blue sky, waiting for the light to change. Caroline reached behind the driver’s seat, into the red tote bag, and pulled out the Cosmo. On the cover a long-faced blonde thrust her cleavage at the camera, her gold lamé jumpsuit straining in all

directions. “Should You Cheat on Your Husband? Dare to Take Our Quiz!” it read near

her armpit. And, just below the line about the waterbed: “Flirt Your Way to a Bigger

Raise,” “Raise Your Togetherness Quotient, ” “Hawaiian Orgasm Secrets—Revealed!”

How in the world could her mother be interested in this magazine? She was forty-one.

She was a mother. She and her father had just celebrated their eighteenth wedding

anniversary. It was obscene.

Jane & Robert Destes, June 21, 1960, Congratulations! read the embossed,

scallop-trimmed coasters, kept in a box of souvenirs in the pantry.

“I’m only borrowing it,” her mother said sharply. “Don’t give me that look.

There’s an article inside I want your father to see.” She lit another cigarette. “I’ve

changed my mind, by the way. We are going to Bliss.”

They took a left and tore down Williams, Mrs. Destes running all the lights. They

were only red around the edges, she said.

It being delicious to lie out all afternoon in the hot sun like a sultana;

It being, likewise, a pleasure to have a supple, fifteen-year-old’s body (no breasts,

aside) and a crocheted bikini with which to adorn it;

There being in the hall closet an ample supply of Bain de Soleil (and a stack of clean beach towels, and a new pair of Foster Grants);

It being impossible for anyone, even a prodigy, to play the flute through clenched teeth;

It being an immense, giddying release to be free of guilt from not practicing;

(must be how a lapsed Catholic feels when Father Anonymous behind the confessional grill absolves her of some small sin that has been crushing her since second grade, not that Caroline would know anything about it;

she had been raised healthy/heathen Unitarian. Run wild! Be free! Just be sure to make sound, ethical decisions and to recycle your aluminum cans; consequently, for the rest of her life there would be no guilt-tripping priests/ ministers/rabbis on whom she could conveniently blame her inner torments)

There being no known medical or physical impediments to her soaking up large

doses of solar radiation;

(her antibiotic cycle having come to successful completion the day previous, her menstrual period not due for another week, the huge white bandage on her chin having been exchanged for a semi-transparent butterfly strip through which, yes, you could see the row of tiny, even, black sutures)

Today being a glorious, cloudless eleventh of August;

The sun being at a perfect angle, on the lawn between the Destes’ house and the

Coopers’, to give her four uninterrupted hours of tanning (from noon until four o’clock, at least);

Mrs. Destes having been abducted by a shoe sale at Talbots, for several hours;

Caroline had finally decided to:

Put on the crocheted bikini and oversized sunglasses and drag the flowered lounge chair out of the backyard shed, up the steep incline (Bugels panting behind) to the shadowless trapezoid of lawn near the Coopers’ fruit trees, where, draping the chair’s cushions with thick, detergent-scented towels, she had lain down upon it, coated herself with orange-slick oil, and submitted her body to the rigors of blinding sunlight.

She’d been broiling out here since one o’clock, with Bugles snoozing underneath the chair; it must be after three already. She knew that because she had left open her bedroom window, stereo playing, so she could listen to a recording of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and it had been a long time since Juliet had stabbed herself in the heart

(around the third time Caroline turned over), the piercing oboe melody and string

tremulos fading into stillness. Silence was a sound, her flute teacher insisted, and

privately she used to think this was one of Mr. Carlisle’s few stupid ideas – everybody

knew silence was a rest from sound, duh – but now, listening to motionlessness trailing in

the Prokofiev’s wake, as she fingered the flute part on the arms of the chaise (she had

perfect pitch, near-perfect aural memory), she wasn’t so sure. Silence wasn’t a sound, but

maybe it was like a sound, the way white was like a color: you could paint with it, the

color could fill your eyes, even if, technically, white was the absence of color.

Black – now, that seemed like no color at all, pure nothingness; however, when you focused on it, like she was seeing right now into her closed eyelids, bright, swirling shapes began to emerge, the colors so hot and molten, they didn’t correlate to those in real life. And if you pressed your eyelids with a finger, like this, the colors reversed, and stars appeared. She slid the sunglasses back in place and opened her eyes; even with sunlight piercing the thin, green lenses, the shapes lingered. Yes, she’d been outside for more than two hours: her nose was sunburned. She’d either have to put a towel over her head and risk suffocation or flip onto her stomach again and find a more comfortable angle for her jutting hipbones. The flat expanse of her belly gleamed darkly, slicked with oil. Crickets whirred in the hedges, like violinists rosining their bows before a concert.

Good, yes, very good. Two weeks, no, twelve days until her next appointment. She would turn over.

The vinyl rungs creaked; Bugles, lying on her side under the chair, woofed in her sleep. Caroline reached a finger to the beagle’s silky brown ear and flipped it back. The dog’s mouth twitched and settled. The exposed ear glistened in complicated white folds, sparsely haired, a perfect instrument for cupping and hoarding sound. Bugles heard

everything in the neighborhood when she was awake, and maybe when she was asleep,

too: the only part of her more sensitive than her ears was her nose. Muddy boots, raw

hamburger, dill pickles, stained fire hydrants, dirty socks, the poodle across the street: the

beagle’s wet, black nostrils would quiver and send her howling in pursuit. When Bugles

was on a leash, Caroline’s arm would be nearly wrenched from its socket.

Caroline shifted again; with her knee slightly bent, the pressure on her hips

vanished. She now had a good view of the Coopers’ strange fruit trees out back: apple

and pear trees pruned to fantastic, two-dimensional shapes: six-foot-high fans, palmettes,

and a u-shaped variation that looked like a football goalpost. Espalier was the name for

this type of pruning, she had learned after years of bewilderment; from the time she was

small, she had marveled at the intricate trellises erected in her neighbors’ backyard, the

plentiful fruit that ripened all along the obedient branches, not just at the tips. Several days a week, a silent, white-haired man came to prune the trees, sawing off branches and sealing the cuts with a milky, brown paste, pinching buds, and over time, she had come to appreciate his patience. In the back of the house he had trained a double row of trees, pyracantha, into a five-foot-high canopied tunnel, and sometimes as a girl she would creep deep inside with Bugles and play with her Barbie dolls and their lone boyfriend, a

G.I. Joe missing one arm, and pretend that it was her house. It was easy to do that, especially in the summer; the Coopers were always off traveling in July and August and didn’t come back until after Labor Day.

More oily sweet Bain de Soleil – sweet not like fresh orange juice but like overripe fruit trapped and condensed, like that liqueur in the Cosmo ad -- the slow trickle of sweat cooling the crease of her knees, the wispy hairs at the back of her neck. Long hair, still

wet, twisted in an absurdly high ponytail – the Demented Doll look, Roxy and Maya

called it – directly on top of her skull, the Corona Suture; what did it matter how she

looked? Nobody important was watching. Certainly not Dr. Horowitz, he

lived…somewhere. Not in Longmeadow. Maybe some pervert old man or some stupid

sophomore boys driving by could peek between the rose bushes and the oak trees out

front, but, realistically, who would bother? Unless you were at school, nobody paid

attention to what you did (she knew that now), especially adults. Anyway, most of the

kids from school were away in their summerhouses, in Nantucket, on Martha’s Vineyard.

Longmeadow in August was a ghost town. She would lie here, for as many days as it

took, turning golden brown, knitting together.

Then, in three weeks’ time, Dr. Horowitz could churn up the sediment on Walnut

Drive, coming rumbling into her driveway, shake the pears and apples from Mrs.

Cooper’s trees. Her own private house call. That was something doctors only did in the old days, according to the movies, but maybe Dr. Horowitz could be convinced to make an exception. He’d come slouching over the front lawn, his black doctor’s bag swinging by his side, and crouch by her side, all cool and grassy smelling: “I’ve come to unwire you, Caroline; just lean back in the chaise lounge….” It all would spin out from there. All of it. Really, since she was an Artist, there was no practical reason for her to finish high school; she could skip her junior and senior years and embark directly on a concert career, with Dr. Horowitz at her side like a devoted manager/lover/sugar daddy. He liked music, didn’t he? He’d probably get into it. When she wasn’t on tour with the New York

Philharmonic and he wasn’t performing trepanation on numbskull hockey players, they’d go on some amazing vacation in the Riviera – say, on her 16th birthday, in October. He’d

98 race the yellow Lamborghini on those high, scary roads from the James Bond movies.

She’d scream good-naturedly as they narrowly escaped plunging over a cliff. There’d be cars honking at them, and teenagers weaving in and out on tiny motorcycles and everywhere the scent of fresh lavender – fields and fields of it. At some tiny green and white sign – Les Baux – he’d turn off the road and lead her to a ruined fortress. No railings there to prevent her from falling onto the steep-roofed village below: just the doctor’s arm cinched around her waist, as he murmured, “Quit talking, kid. Let me make a woman out of you.” They’d find an abandoned chapel, spread his white doctor’s coat there. He would stroke her scar. He would show her his. Because surely he had scars too, right? Everyone had them. They’d be drinking Cointreau – that’s what the man and woman were drinking in the ad – and the sticky liquor would mingle on their tongues.

He’d undo the belt to his navy-blue trousers. There’d be that phenomenal, surprising hardness there, and then, while she was biting the oral surgeon’s neck he would – oh, wow, this was hard to imagine, exactly; let her go back to the beginning of the scene.

Yeah, that was better. She’d put her lips on his scar, make him tremble. Then (fast- forward), somehow, she’d be rid of this, this annoying, clueless virginity of hers…

Bugles yelped and leaped up from under the chair, butting Caroline in the stomach.

The dog took off toward the purring rumble of the station wagon in the driveway, the ratcheting open of the garage door. Her mother was home.

Caroline sat up and yanked the seatback to vertical. It took several minutes before her heart quieted.

Her long, bony legs stretched before her, amber brown.

“I should be practicing,” she thought, reflexively.

For some reason, the familiar admonition offered no sting of comfort.

Bright bursts of canned laughter, the high-pitched drone of the television going in the living room. Rapid-fire wisecracks – Voice A (mumble), Voice B (nasal whine) -- more forced hah, hah, hahs, one of the most depressing sounds in the world, she thought.

Caroline paused at the doorway to the dimly lit living room: her parents were watching M.A.S.H., not their usual routine. Typically, after dinner, her father read newspapers in the den, while her mother straightened up the dining room and left pots to soak overnight. Tonight, though, the two of them were sitting side by side on the couch, her mother’s left arm draped around her father’s shoulders. She was playing with his collar. They both had their feet up on the ottoman, her father’s jiggling impatiently in wingtips, her mother’s splayed out, like a dancer’s, in new espadrilles. This afternoon, when Mrs. Destes had modeled her purchase in the kitchen, the sandals had made her several inches taller, the bright pink-and-yellow ribbons binding her small ankles and crisscrossing up her calf.

“Your mother is holding me captive,” said Mr. Destes over his shoulder. “She insists that I watch.”

“Shhh,” said Mrs. Destes. “I can’t hear.”

“You’re looking better, Cary,” he whispered to her. “The swelling’s gone down a lot. How do you like that new album I got you?”

“Great, Dad,” she said, holding up the Debussy. “I’m going downstairs to play it.”

In the basement she pulled back her long hair and examined herself in the mirror.

Her father was right: the grotesquely swollen chipmunk pouches had detumesced. The large, creeping bruises were no longer purple-black but a pale, yellowish brown.

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Cautiously she touched her right mandible, near the base of her ear; if she didn’t press in

but merely rested her fingertips, lightly, it wasn’t even painful.

Her deep-set eyes gazed back at her familiarly. She’d spent years practicing down

here – nearly every day, for hours. When she first was learning to play the flute, at age

nine, she used to stand in this exact spot and watch herself hyperventilate. Pinpricks of

light would sting her eyes, and then a cool, rushing feeling would come over the top of

her brain, as if a wave were swallowing her. The last thing she’d see, before going under,

was her own face: a forlorn heart shape, skin pale white, eyes black and cavernous. The

face of an old woman. When she’d come to, she’d be sitting on the cold, linoleum floor,

the silver flute balanced in her outstretched hands. Her parents, absorbed in their own

pursuits on the floor above, would hear nothing. “Wow, I have to do that again!” she’d

thought the first time. She’d stopped hyperventilating after a few months, but she’d found

her escape route down here. She could come down here whenever she wanted and leave

everything upstairs – her parents, school, Longmeadow – behind. She was tunneling her

way out. And now, for the first time in six years, she couldn’t practice. She literally

couldn’t play a note – or could she?

Her leather flute case, untouched since the accident, lay on the folding table. She

sprung the metal latches and ran her fingers over the blue velvet lining, the silver flute joints nestled there. Carefully she fitted the three sections together, twisting the oiled joints until they aligned. Right thumb under thumb-rest; left hand on top. She ran her fingers down a D-major scale, one octave. The simple movement of the keys – no breath

-- made a ghostly, harmonic echo of each note. She raised the mouthpiece to her lower lip; all she could produce through clenched teeth was a feeble hissing. A nauseating fear

101 rose in her: she would never be able to play again. Dr. Horowitz would unwire her -- whatever that was; she couldn’t feel any wires -- and her sound would be this horrible, thin stream. She’d lose her technique. She’d give up the flute. She’d have to go through life like ordinary people, just breathing in and out, never doing anything with her breath…

No, stop it, she told herself. You’re going nuts. The wires come off in twelve days.

August 31st. Just be patient. You’ll come back better, better than ever.

She propped up the Debussy album and traced a finger over the cursive script:

Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune. The orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, was one of her favorites. The painting on the album cover showed a strange, moonlit clearing in a jungle, its tear-shaped leaves dark and menacing. In the background was what appeared to be a nude figure, a woman, playing the flute. She had long, black, rippled hair, down to her knees, and deep brown skin; a boa constrictor twined around her neck. A pale moon shone down on her transverse flute, and an odd, not entirely accurate looking flamingo stood at her feet. Her face was in shadows. Whoever had painted this picture knew about stillness.

She set the needle down on the record and closed her eyes. The intoxicating sounds that she had first heard only weeks ago flooded out of the speakers. The music sounded like it was inventing itself, like it was erasing time signatures and downbeats, and the instruments had been set free. It was like a dream that you wanted to lose yourself in and the flute was leading the way, leading you away from this life, the life that everyone said was so good, but really, it wasn’t. That was why, on the floating dock she had shivered

102 when she heard this piece: it had made her feel ecstatic, but also sad, incredibly sad.

Sweet and salty. Light and dark.

That was the incredible lie about music. Something sad and minor sounding could be beautiful. You could savor it. In real life, sad and horrible things were just ugly. And they made you feel awful.

And so began an oasis of afternoons in which Caroline did nothing but lie in the hot sun and listen to music. And when the records had stopped spinning on the turntable, she would find a more comfortable angle on her chaise lounge and let the stillness surround her. And in that stillness, she heard something. Or remembered something - that was more like it. There was a place where music had been and now was not, and from that humming absence spun all the distinct sounds that belonged to this moment: her breath going in and out, the rustling of the oak trees nearby, Bugles going woof in her sleep; the clip clip of the gardener’s shears as he circled discreetly to her left, around the twisted pear trees and the obedient Jonathan apples and the flowers that bloomed namelessly in the Coopers’ flower beds. There was so much sound around her; it wasn’t organized; you couldn’t call it music, but it had its own rhythmic rise and fall, and it was pleasant to let these sounds find her, as she knit together and allowed her mind to do what it seemed drawn to do naturally: to think of a pair of strong arms, propped on either side of her shoulders, and a heavy weight pressing her hips into the chaise, and warm lips parting her own and murmuring something, or nothing at all. And usually those lips would belong to

Dr. Adam Horowitz, because it was true, after all, she liked her oral surgeon, she liked

Dr. Horowitz! but occasionally the mouth kissing hers would be that of the conceited trombone player at camp, or some random boy from school, or even the thin-lipped

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counselor himself, whose spell still lingered, pale and degraded, like Beethoven’s “Ode

to Joy” heard in a tepid Muzak arrangement.

And after supper or in the morning, she would steal down to the basement and run her fingers silently over the keys of her instrument, and think about a tone that was both silver and golden, and imagine herself standing on the lip of an enormous stage, under blinding white lights, the Boston Symphony or another great orchestra throbbing behind her, as she lifted the cool mouthpiece to her lips and poured herself out, phrase after phrase, into the great, black womb of the audience.

And sometimes she would grimace at her reflection and want to open her mouth so badly, she felt like screaming. And she’d imagine cutting open her teeth with a buzz saw

and going on a rampage, eating everything in sight, biting apples and cheese and dill

pickles and crackers, chewing decks of cards, ripping open pillows. And her jaw would

stretch sympathetically as she envisioned all the chomping, and then her jaw would start

to hurt, and she’d feel angry and depleted. That would happen, too.

And in the middle of this dark and light, last-days-of-summer-vacation cadenza,

Roxy Bowman came pedaling up the Destes’ driveway on her bicycle, took one look at

Caroline’s mahogany-tan, and told her the game was up. No more pretending she was this pathetic invalid, stuck in bed all day with an ice pack. No more getting her mother to lie about it on the phone, to Caroline’s best friend, yet. No more moping around like Ophelia and thinking day and night about Mr. Skinny-butt Counselor and driving everyone crazy on Walnut Drive with her loud as hell symphony music. It was time to get out, for a change, join the land of the living. Whether Caroline wanted to or not.

“We’re going to Utopia tonight. You want to come? It’s strawberry daiquiri night.”

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I can’t.

“Come on. They play the best music. We can just dance with each other, if you want.”

My mom would kill me.

“Oh, please.” Roxy rolled her dark, almond-shaped eyes under her hat. “Your mother freaks out about everything.”

15=too young, she says.

“What does she know?” Roxy tossed the notepad on Caroline’s towel. “Seize the momentary moment. It only comes once. You want some more?”

No, Caroline shook her head.

Roxy stood up, bare-footed, and walked gingerly around the perimeter of her pool, cursing the hot cement. There was a gurgling as Roxy refilled her glass of California iced tea; the four o’clock sun was blazing low on the horizon. The two friends had on matching bikinis – black velvet with silver-moon appliqués – and humungous wide- brimmed hats by Halston. Mrs. Bowman wasn’t home; she was divorced and ran a clothing store/esoterica shop, Hecate’s Lair, in downtown Springfield. She also did tarot readings at parties and dressed up like a gypsy for Renaissance fairs. When Mrs.

Bowman wasn’t around—which was most of the time – it was 18-year-old Maya’s job to watch after her sister. This summer that had meant lying around the pool reading

Jacqueline Susann books or getting stoned in Maya’s psychedelic bedroom or cruising around town in Mrs. Bowman’s other car, a white Cadillac with a powder-blue interior.

At night Maya and Roxy went to discos in Enfield, Connecticut, right over the state line, where, unlike Massachusetts, you could get in at eighteen. While Caroline was away at

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music camp, Maya had started a business making fake IDs for local kids and was making

a small fortune at it. Right now Maya was inside at the kitchen table with a laminator,

cranking out IDs for some junior varsity cheerleaders. She got about $100 a piece for

them.

Roxy plopped down on a towel next to Caroline, set her drink on the ground, and

fanned out a deck of tarot cards.

“Now we’re going to settle your love life.”

Caroline blushed. No thanks.

“All I heard about in those letters was ‘the counselor this,’ ‘the counselor that.’

How you were going to die if he didn’t make a move on you.”

“I am not going to tell her about Dr. Horowitz,” Caroline thought. “She’d never understand. She has no clue about the subtleties of human behavior. Even if she does claim she’s going to go to New York City one day and become a great actress.”

“ I even got my mother to cast a spell for you,” continued Roxy.

“Really?” Caroline said with her eyebrows. Spell didn’t work.

“Hmm.” Roxy stared at Caroline’s chin. “Sometimes the magic turns back on you, three times. Maybe you did something horrible to the counselor in a past life. Pick seven.”

Roxy scrutinized the upturned cards. “Hmmm. I’m not sure. Either you’re going to lose your cherry to the Devil or someone’s going to be resurrected.”

What’s this? Caroline picked up a bearded man with a scepter. He looked like he was going to clobber somebody with it.

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“He’s good. He’s the king of something. My sister knows the deck better. Maybe

that’s your counselor. He looks too old, though.”

“Definitely Dr. Horowitz,” Caroline thought. And that?

She pointed to a card of a man dangling, head downwards, from a tree.

“The Hanged Man. You got him last time. I forget that one, too. Hey, if you had

gotten Death this would have been easier.”

Maya stuck her head out the sliding glass door and frowned in the sunlight. “I need

more stuff from the art supply store. The glue thing ran out. We have to go to the mall

now.”

“What does the Hanged Man mean, again?” Roxy asked.

“Sacrifice, stupid. You want to come, Caroline? Your face doesn’t look too bad.”

Caroline and Roxy threw on shorts and T-shirts and piled into the front seat of the

Cadillac. Roxy sat in the middle, next to her sister, who was driving with one hand and smoking a joint with the other. From where Caroline was sitting, backed against the passenger-side door, one knee up, the two sisters looked remarkably alike -- auburn curls, freckled skin, pert noses, sultry sloe eyes – nearly twins, right down to their voluptuous figures (big breasts, tiny waists, unfashionably ample hips) and companion black t-shirts

(Incubus read the dripping red letters on Maya’s chest; Roxy’s said Succubus). Roxy could easily pass for eighteen with a fake ID, thought Caroline, but not herself. She was too girl-faced, too gawky looking – even with cool shades and three-inch platforms -- to fool anyone. Just this past winter, at Mount Snow, the man at the ski lift had mistakenly issued her a “12 and Under” day pass.

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Maya stubbed out the joint in the ashtray as they turned onto Hazardville Road. A

song Caroline hated came on the radio. Roxy bounced on the seat and sang along: “Push,

push, in the bush!”

“Bb major,” Caroline thought, automatically.

The black-and-gold Utopia sign flashed by the window.

“You’d better watch out,” Maya said. “Uri’s going to come after you if he hears you singing that.”

Caroline turned in her seat to look at the squat, cinder-block building, the empty gravel parking lot shared by a row of seedy bars; she had never been to Utopia and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go. Maya and Roxy went every Saturday night to the club, where they drank pina coladas and daiquiris and danced with grown men in three-piece suits (usually foreigners) who tried to convince the sisters to go to bed with them. Roxy didn’t have a curfew but Maya told the men her little sister did, so Roxy got whisked home at midnight. Apparently, this strategy only made the Iranian engineering students and the Israeli leather-goods importers want Roxy more, judging by the messages left on the Bowmans’ answering machine during the week. Caroline had no idea what Maya did when she went back to the Utopia.

“Uri and I are just friends,” Roxy explained. “ We discussed it last week in the parking lot.”

“The guy won’t stop calling.”

“No, that’s Chengis, his roommate.”

“Him, too. Hey, let’s get this over with quick. I promised Cindy I’d have her order done by eight.”

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They spent several hours at the Enfield Mall, where Maya shelled out $60 for clear

sheets of plastic and Space Glue and Polaroid film and some silver origami paper that

was supposedly a dead ringer for the State of Massachusetts seal. After salads (Maya and

Roxy) and a strawberry milkshake (Caroline), they took the elevators upstairs to the indoor waterfall, where Roxy and Maya spotted some boys they knew from Enfield – loud-mouthed jocks. Maya and Roxy walked right over; Caroline threw pennies in the fountain for good luck. A shy looking boy with a too-short haircut and a green polo shirt glanced over at her.

“I wouldn’t mind talking to him,” she thought. “And I can’t say a word.”

Caroline pulled a thick, heart-shaped leaf off a hanging ivy plant and dropped it in the water, not far from the boy’s scuffed, white tennis shoe. The leaf drifted in slow, halting circles past the spurting fountain, down cascading tiers to the floor below.

Caroline chased the leaf down half a flight of stairs, to a landing, until it was out of sight.

“Hey, I’m Kenny,” the boy said. He had followed her onto the lookout.

Roxy’s teasing, smoky laugh floated down: “It’s, like, a devil who sits on a

woman’s chest? And has, you know, sex with her?....” Florescent lights spun off the

churning waterfall, the polished, beige marble floor below.

“Mm hm,” Caroline said, trying to sound relaxed, human. Kenny. A normal- sounding name. Too bad she couldn’t do the normal thing, say hers back.

She turned to face him.

Maya’s sharp voice cut through the boys’ coarse laughter. “No, stupid, that’s an

incubus….”

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The boy was leaning against the waist-high Plexiglas railing, his back to the elevator, legs crossed. One hand – long, square-tipped fingers, piano? Chess? Animal vivisection? -- played with a horizontal strip of metal. For some reason, no one else was coming up or down these stairs. They probably all used the elevators. The Plexiglas was invisible, nothing, air. For one dizzying second she imagined the green torso tipping backward over the lookout, the boy spiraling to his death. She smelled almonds, something bad-sweet…

“Is something wrong?”

There was a red welt above his heel, where the sneaker rubbed.

She looked into his intelligent eyes. He looked like someone you could have a conversation with, as her mother said. Sensitive. Not a dumb jock. His feelings probably bruised easily. And there was no reason to hurt the feelings of a boy like this, none at all, only because you could…

“We can go back,” he said, hesitantly.

A powerful feeling gripped her stomach, like the head of a tympani being raised a whole pitch.

“You have no idea who I am,” she thought, willing her thoughts into his closely cropped head. “I have eighty stitches in my chin, forty inside, forty out. Thick, itchy, black stitches. I touch them at night before I go to sleep. My jaw is busted in three places.

I’ve reached in and touched my own skeleton and it was hard and wet and slippery.

That’s what a real skull feels like. I can’t talk to you. I can’t tell you my name. I couldn’t even kiss you if I wanted to because my teeth are wired together. Get it? I don’t say anything. My head is like a cage. That’s what’s behind these lips, in case you were

110 wondering. But you’ll never know that, will you? No. Because I’m not going to tell you.

Because I don’t want to tell you. Because I like having a secret and saying nothing and seeing your eyes go all dark and hurt and then quick boy-angry as I back up these stairs, like I’m doing now, back away from you -- you, whoever you are, nice Kenny from

Enfield. And when you leave tonight with your jock-ass friends you’re going to wonder why the girl with the curly black hair ran away and wouldn’t even tell you her name -- rich Longmeadow bitch, they’ll say – but I’ll know the truth, and you won’t, and it will never, ever occur to you because it’s just too weird.”

10.

The next morning, after breakfast, she passed her mother dusting in the hallway.

“Did you have a nice time with Roxy at the mall?”

“Yeshh, grayt,” Caroline yelled through her teeth, a harsh, guttural sound. “I sound like a mean, old sea hag,” she thought. “With a mouthful of seaweed.”

“It’s good you’re going out in public again. Your father and I were getting worried about you.”

“I’hn vhery popler wif peep my aghe. Ehvry buddy lufs meh,” she spat.

“What? Don’t try to talk, dear. Use the notebook. You only have eight more days of being wired up.”

Eight more days! And she’d be seeing Dr. Horowitz tomorrow, for the final verdict.

Yippee, she wrote.

Her mother was looking at her curiously, that melting mother look tinged with something else – jealousy? Squashed jealousy.

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“I have to say, Caroline, you’re skin has never looked better. It’s amazing. Those

milkshakes seem to agree with you. You’re glowing. You might have even put on a few

pounds. And to think I was worried about your losing weight!”

It was true, Caroline thought, examining herself, alone, in the bathroom. Under the tan her skin was glowing. Radiant. And perfectly smooth – she hadn’t had a pimple the entire month. Obviously she had stumbled onto the perfect eating plan; she could live the rest of her life on ice cream and protein powder and raw eggs. Like an astronaut. She’d probably do great in outer space; she’d be the only one up there not dying for a grilled steak.

She stepped on the bathroom scale; her mother was right -- 107. Plus three pounds.

But where were they? She pulled off her pajama top. Certainly not there. Her rear end?

She balanced on the rim of the bathtub, pajama bottoms pushed to her knees, and twisted around, briefly. No (Coppertone Baby), it appeared to be the same size. She did look nice, though. She had these skinny white tan lines over her shoulders and tiny isosceles triangles mapping her berry breasts and black pubic hair, and every inch of the rest of her was a warm, rich brown – the kind of tan other girls would have killed for.

She hadn’t been this dark since she spent the summer at the Cape, at age ten. (Usually, when she wasn’t at Camp Staccato, she spent June-July-August holed up in the basement, practicing for fall auditions. “Moldering like a mushroom,” her father called it.) A few more days in the sun and she’d be as mysterious as that woman in the painting – La charmeuse des serpents. It was a shame that Dr. Horowitz couldn’t see this – not that she’d want him to know it was her. Maybe just from the neck down. Maybe her face in shadows. She would entice him tomorrow during their private audience – perform some

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kind of mental telepathy on him. She would bend his attention to the thin peasant blouse,

coax him to notice her tan lines, will him to want to see further. X-ray vision.

She stepped out of her pajamas and turned on the shower. Reaching under the sink her hand avoided the green and yellow bottle, but still, her throat gagged. Saliva filled her mouth.

Why did I have to be so mean to that boy? she wondered, face upturned, water battering her closed eyelids. He had leaped down the staircase and chucked a rock at the elevator and made an alarm go off. Walking past the mall bookstore with Maya and

Roxy, on their way out, she had thought she saw the boy’s skinny leg, his scuffed white sneaker, protruding from the end of an aisle marked Classics.

11.

But there wasn’t time for a long, winding flute melody or the intro to L’après-midi d’une faune or high-beam mental projections of some irresistible Siren dropping her gossamer veils, one by one, down the long, brown and orange carpet, over the threshold, lock the door, into languorous lavender provençal ecstasy.

Something wounded was screaming its head off.

“Arggh-owww!” a voice bellowed from the examination room next to hers.

“Joyce,” called out Dr. Horowitz, testily. “Give Mr. Gronsky forty milliliters of

Vicodan and tell him to keep still under the shunt. I’ll be in there in one minute.”

“Sorry,” he said to Caroline, his voice going rumbly soft. His face looked distracted. “He’s experiencing complications. This happens sometimes with older patients.”

His warm fingers quickly felt her jaw, the notches under the ear. “Uh huh, uh huh.”

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Goosebumps rose under her gauze blouse. “Please stay,” Caroline wanted to tell his hands. “You still need to heal me.”

He had tugged her mouth to one side, now, shoulder against hers, and was poking at her gums. “Good, good, very good.” She breathed in his familiar, woven smell – like cool, plaited grass. “Doing great, kid.” Doin’. No final g sound. “Bite’s almost all healed.

No lateral shifting. You’ve been following directions.” She could feel him smiling by her ear. “Kids make the best patients. Your bones mend back together in no time. You can bounce back from anything.”

“Would you look at me?” she wanted to scream. “I’m not a kid. I’m almost sixteen years old!”

“Ugggh-uggh!” The roar echoed through the walls.

Dr. Horowitz didn’t even flinch. He scribbled some notes in his green book. “Good news.” He stood up and stretched.

Again Caroline had the weird sensation that had hit her earlier when she had walked in the office and taken in his white-coated figure at one glance: just the outline of him had given her a literal shock. In her imagination she had severed him into isolated, manageable pieces – Dr. Horowitz’s big, sexy nose, Dr. Horowitz’s deep, knowing eyes,

Dr. Horowitz’s strong, masculine hands – but now, seeing him perform the most ordinary tasks – tucking a pen in his front coat pocket, gathering up papers on his desk, slouching to the wastebasket in that adorably unselfconscious, I-don’t-give-a-shit way of his, like he was some teenage wiseass being sent to the principal’s – she realized she had overlooked the most precious part of him: his aliveness, his being-ness (whatever that thing was that people missed when they saw somebody they knew lying dead in a casket). This being-

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ness surrounded his movements, like the resonance of his voice when he spoke, only it

was an actual, visible presence, subtle yet exact, like the outlining in black of a figure in a

painting. Just his moving across the room struck her through the heart. Was it possible to

be in love with someone’s silhouette, she wondered?

“I’ll take out the wires next Thursday.”

A terrible sadness pierced her. “That’ll be the last time I see him,” she thought.

“No. I don’t want that. I don’t want next week to come. I don’t want the wires out. I’ll lie here forever and ever. I’ll fall off my bike again, if I have to…”

“Ugggh-ughh!” There was loud crash as a hulking man with an eye patch careened past the doorway, headed towards the nurses station.

“Joyce! Janet!” Dr. Horowitz was tying on the green cap.

What’s going to happen to that guy? she wrote frantically.

“I have to break his jaw again.” Dr. Horowitz calmly filled a syringe. “You’re set,

Caroline. See you next Thursday. No food after the midnight before. Ask Joyce if you have more questions.”

He ducked out of the door – the doctor seemed to do everything fluidly – and caught up with the screaming man. “Mr. Gronsky, you have to come back in the room….”

“Sedation,” whispered the nurses.

Caroline peered in the hallway. Mr. Gronsky was being lugged, one arm around the doctor’s shoulder, into an open doorway, his bearlike face twisted in pain. Her mother had wandered into the mess and was meekly standing to the side in her sundress and espadrilles, an alarmed look on her face. A plaster cast of a human skull had been hurled

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onto the linoleum, by a disinfecting tub. It lay in four or five large pieces. A nurse with

frosted-blond hair was picking them up, one by one, and arranging them tenderly on a

plastic tray.

“Oh, thank god, I thought that was you, Caroline!” said Mrs. Destes.

Caroline sneered. “Harrgggh,” she screamed through her teeth, her voice cracking.

Elephant girl, she thought. It was a full-out scream but with closed teeth, it was barely

mezzo piano.

The blond nurse gave Caroline a disapproving look. She placed the tray on top of a

filing cabinet – a little too reverently, Caroline thought, like she was handling a saint’s

relic.

“She’s probably in love with Dr. Horowitz, too,” Caroline thought. “They all are.

They fight over who hands him the scalpel in the operating room. The runner-up gets to

stick her finger in the patient’s mouth. The loser has to sit in the hallway and tidy up after

the wackos.”

“Harrgggh,” she screamed again, just because she could. .

“Don’t be smart, young lady,” said Mrs. Destes. “Be glad your treatment has gone smoothly. You could have had permanent brain damage, you know.”

“Sad but true, Mrs. Destes,” said the nurse, slipping behind the desk. “But I think it’s best not to dwell on worst-case scenarios. Accentuate the positive, I say!” She leaned forward and whispered: “He’ll be okay, really. You’d be surprised. Sometimes it’s the big brutes who have the lowest pain thresholds.” She flipped open the appointment book.

“How does the 31st at nine work for you?”

Caroline motioned to the tote bag. There was another Cosmo in the bottom.

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Don’t you dare, said her mother’s look.

12.

That evening Caroline sat with her parents and Bugles in the living room, watching

Welcome Back Kotter. An ad for beer came on.

It was the man from the office, the hockey player -- Mr. Gronsky. He was lolling in a hot tub with a bunch of models, his scowling, bearlike face clamped in a smile. The young women wore candy-pink bow ties and pink derbies and nothing else. Mr. Gronsky had on his black eye-patch and a bow tie to match. With his one good eye he winked at the camera as he splashed in the steaming water with his massive, blubbery arms, breathing heavily. He reminded Caroline of a manatee. They had always seemed like harmless creatures to her, unless, of course, one rolled over on you accidentally.

Mr. Gronsky’s ruddy jowls filled the screen. He appeared to be overheated. “Off the ice, I always relax with a pink lady or two.” His Boston accent was so thick, it took several seconds’ delay for each word to sink in.

He held up a mug of light brown beer and grimaced. The girls nuzzled his hairy, mottled chest. “Or three. Or four. Or five…”

Music swelled under the voiceover. “Pinkerton’s Pale Ale,” said a fastidiously nasal voice, instantly recognizable. “For the discriminating gentleman.” It was Dick

Cavett.

Caroline started to laugh. “Harrgggh,” she screamed through her wired teeth.

“Harrgggh.”

Her father looked at her, puzzled.

“I didn’t even get to see his car,” she thought despairingly. “My idiotic mother parked out front.” That made her laugh more, for some reason.

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Soon her mother was laughing uncontrollably. “The discriminating gentleman!”

“I don’t understand,” said her father. “That’s Chuck Gronsky. He plays for the

Bruins. So?”

“Harrgggh,” moaned Caroline. She got up and staggered around the living room,

beating her chest like King Kong. Bugles leaped at her legs, tail wagging. “I didn’t get to see the outside of the Lamborghini, let alone the inside,” she thought. “No trip to the moon for me.” She picked up a cheap bust of Beethoven she’d won at Camp Staccato and threw it on the carpet as hard as she could. Whunk. No luck.

“Harrgggh.”

Bugles ran to sniff the plastic statue.

Her father was getting more annoyed. It dawned on Caroline that Beethoven and

Mr. Gronsky were a lot alike. Two unglamorous guys with thick faces and bad tempers who drank a lot of beer and made embarrassing scenes in public. Maybe that was the way to go in life, if you were a guy. You always had that option. Not girls. You were supposed to keep your composure and keep your legs together and blah-blah-blah. Or else. Or else – what? What was she talking about? She wasn’t. She fell down and rolled around on the carpet and banged her head against the coffee table by mistake but not too bad. “Harrgggh-uggggh.” Nothing was really painful compared to the accident. Just a bitch not being able 2 say stuff. So what if hand hurts? She should write it down and show him. Really. Really she would. Dr. H, pls take my hymen. Having 1=inconvenient.

Plus I think yr amazing. No I love U yes I dont.

“Hergggghh!”

Bugles licked at her bandage with her rough, stinky tongue.

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It was terrible. She couldn’t stop. Her mother was bent over in hysterics.

“The discriminating gentleman!” laughed Mrs. Destes. “Oh, I’m going to pee in my

pants!”

“Would somebody please tell me?” asked her father. “What’s funny? What’s so

goddamn funny?”

Part Three

He leaned against her shoulder and tugged with his arm, and out slipped the absolutely implausible, strange object: a long, skinny wire made of some kind of metal, silvery and dull, but tough. Industrial-looking wire. Maybe steel. About the thickness of a paperclip and wavy-bent at random intervals, like a strand of very curly hair that someone had futilely tried to straighten, and – this was the worst part – about eight inches in length, maybe more. Stippled with brown-gray stains (gross!) and viscous streaks, pale red. Just like the other one. Two frighteningly long wires that had been pulled from ouch deep in her mouth, and all she could think was, Why hadn’t she seen the wires in the bathroom mirror? And, where in her mouth had they been hidden for the last four weeks?

Blood smell. She felt sickish.

“You can open your mouth, now, Caroline,” said Dr. Horowitz.

She let her lower jaw fall open – creak open was more like it – and at once there was the liberating sensation of her stale mouth filling with fresh, new air, and her tongue being released from its prison, and she could talk, yes, she could finally say something, say anything, anything she wanted.

“Can I brush my teeth?”

Her voice was squeaky-loud. Like an elementary-band clarinet.

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Joyce handed her a new blue toothbrush and a mini Crest and a cup of antiseptic rinse. Caroline stood for what seemed like half an hour over the stainless-steel sink, rinsing and spitting and brushing every bit of disgusting moss off the insides of her teeth, over and over; it was that necessary. “I would gladly spend the rest of the afternoon doing this,” she thought. And when she turned around, Dr. Horowitz had taken off his green cap and was watching her, half-smiling, the heart-stopping black halo hovering around him still. And for a moment she could almost believe the half smile was for her, for Caroline, he would want to kiss her, like she had planned, but then she caught sight of the two disgusting wires, lying on the tray next to his arm, and she realized, no, it was ludicrous to think that. If he was smirking, it was because he knew something, something she’d been blind to all these weeks. Wires that long + Caroline? Something didn’t add up.

“I’ve heard that’s a great feeling,” he said. “Finally being able to brush your teeth.

Don’t feel obligated to keep the brush. Joyce can give you another to take home, if you want.”

“But where did the wires go in my mouth?” she asked, and as soon as she said it, in her rusty, high-pitched voice, she knew it sounded idiotic. But she needed to know.

Obviously the long wires hadn’t dangled in her mouth (she would have felt them); they had to have gone somewhere. But where? Of course, she’d known she was “wired” the whole time, but she hadn’t felt any wires; her jaw had simply seemed soldered together.

If there were wires, they were short ones, attached in some mysterious way – to metal plates on her molars, perhaps? But “wired” as in her mouth harboring long, snakelike things? No, that idea had never occurred to her.

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He led her to the light box and her latest batch of X-rays. He was right at her side,

with that good, linen-y smell of his. “Look here, I’ll show you,” he was saying.

He pointed to a side view of her skull: “See that spot, at the back of your maxilla?

I took a long needle and I threaded the wire up here, and then out through the soft palate, and down to the lower mandible” -- he pointed to her lower jaw – “about four times on each side.”

“You stuck a needle through my jaw?”

“Not a sewing needle, Caroline.”

“A needle?” This can’t be, she was thinking. It went right through my gums and membrane and the roots of my teeth and my soft palate.

“A special needle for oral surgery. The ones I use are curved a little. It’s great

you’re interested. Most patients, they don’t want to know.”

My nice soft palate, she thought. Right where I triple tongue. She probed the area with her tongue, and there was a little bloody taste, and maybe a subtle indentation but no hole that she could discern. Oh and the wire had gone around and around and around.

Eight plus eight inches of industrial wire equals sixteen total inches. It was disgusting.

He had opened a cabinet drawer and had fished out something, was excitedly showing it to her: “See? It’s thin but strong. Here. Be careful, though – ”

He carefully tipped the gleaming hook into her upturned hand.

The needle was so light – so problematically light; it wanted to float away. She tried to keep her palm flat but still she felt a little prick, near her heart line. A drop of blood welled. Oh, she was going to be sick. She was sure of it.

“ – it’s sharp.”

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The rest of the appointment was awful and stupid and over with in five minutes. Dr.

Horowitz stuck a cotton ball on her stigmata and told her to hold it there and called Mrs.

Destes inside for the Grand Unveiling. Her mother marched in all perky and animated in her pale-blue suit – no doubt bought to impress Dr. Horowitz; unbuttoned halfway down her cleavage! -- and when Caroline said, “Hey, Mom,” her mother started to cry. “My baby can talk again!” she said in this annoying, quivering voice, and weirdly enough, Dr.

Horowitz didn’t seem embarrassed; he got right in on the act, handing her mother a box of tissues and even giving her a pat on the back, like that was part of his job description; her mother must have loved that. Ridiculous hundred-year-old flirt. Then Dr. Horowitz made Caroline demonstrate to her mother that she could open up Wide, and stretch her jaw Left and Right and Big Yawn Like a Walrus and made her promise to do the exercises for the next four months, “to restore mobility.” And all throughout this humiliating performance her mother kept beaming and saying, “I can’t believe it! Her beautiful smile is back!” and reaching out to touch Caroline’s hair until Caroline finally had to push her mother’s fingers away; enough already. And right at the end, when Dr.

Horowitz said The Most Horrible Thing of All, and it looked like he might actually give her a mother hug (he was moving toward both of them, it was hard to tell who was going to get it), that’s when Caroline decided, I’ve had it, and she jumped out of the chair.

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all year,” she shouted at their middle-aged faces and stomped down the tacky mod hallway and out into the doofus Hugh Hefner waiting room and into the elevator and didn’t look back. That was the great and wonderful final doctor’s appointment she had been so looking forward to.

You don’t have to come back any more, kid.

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She was standing in the parking lot now, next to his car. He could probably see her

from his window, but she didn’t care. She had every right to be in this parking lot. Her

heart was finally calming down. It had only taken two minutes; it said so right here on her

cool, suede watch. Kid or no kid, the doctor was right; she did bounce back quickly. And

that was her mother scuttling around the corner of the building, arms waving like a

beetle’s, scanning the parking lot for a sight of her daughter. Quick. She’d have to act fast

if she wanted to go through with this. But even with her mouth wide open (not quite as

wide as before the accident, but big enough to barf on the yellow roof of his hot-shot car),

nothing would come out. The momentary moment had passed, as Roxy would say.

She backed away from the Lamborghini, trembling. This was the most amazing car

she had ever seen, and, yes, she would love to know what it felt like to have those black,

leather seats wrap around her, and, no, she would never take a ride with Dr. Horowitz.

She saw that now. She had spent the last four weeks in some kind of dopey haze,

admiring the white fronts of her teeth and her deepening tan in the mirror and lying

around on her beach towel practically having orgasms thinking about the doctor’s voice

and hands. Deluding herself that he might want her. Deluding herself that his finely

calibrated uh huh, uh huhs were a sign meant for her, a message in basso counterpoint that he understood her secret musician’s physiognomy. When all he was really doing when he scrutinized in there was admiring his own handiwork, exclaiming over the effectiveness of the ugly stained wires, like the 100-year-old cords of the Brooklyn

Bridge, ugly tensile wires that wrapped around and around, and through bloody craters that he had bored, himself, into her clueless pink gums. Good, yes, very good disgusting grossness. Bored with his awesome, terrible, not-so-wonderful hands.

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She sat on the curb and rested her head in her arms, exhausted.

“Caroline, what’s wrong? I had no idea where you’d gone.” Her mother was

leaning over her, panting, dingy teeth framed by coral-pink lips. “You didn’t even thank

Dr. Horowitz. Are you sick?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel so good.”

Her mother bent down by the curb. “You’re clammy. I need to get you into the

car.”

Caroline let her mother help her into the front seat. The vinyl cushions smelled sour in the heat. Mrs. Destes turned on the ignition and took out a cigarette.

“I thought we could go to Friendly’s for a cheeseburger.”

“Uggh. No food.”

“Okay, that’s out of the question, for now. I could take you to Steiger’s for some school clothes. Would you like that?” Mrs. Destes started to fiddle with the lighter and looked at Caroline’s face. “Right. You’ve had a long morning.” She put the cigarette and the lighter back in her purse. “I’m taking you home.”

“Thanks, Mom, for not…” She waved her hand vaguely.

“I am trying to quit. Once you go back to school…”

“Don’t say that. You know it never works.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Destes cleared her throat. “Well, it’s good to hear your voice again. I missed it.”

Caroline thought: “Even when I’m nagging you? Even when I’m telling you you’re a loser? Even when I’m about to fucking scream at you for coming on to Dr. Horowitz?”

She opened the car door and spit the blood taste out of her mouth and slammed it shut.

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“Me, too,” she said. “Me three.”

Strange. She’d been waiting for this moment for weeks. Now that she finally could

open her mouth, she couldn’t find anything intelligent to say.

She woke up that afternoon from her however-long nap/crying jag and sat up. She

was wearing nothing but underpants, for some reason. Her outfit from that morning was

heaped on the floor: the Ferragamos and a Seiji Ozawa t-shirt and black-satin hot pants

that Roxy had loaned her. Her mouth was bone dry, and a warm weight was crushing her

left leg: Bugles. She heaved the dog off the bed and held out her other hand: both were

shaking violently.

“I have to go to Friendly’s,” she informed her mother in the kitchen. The room smelled like sour milk and onions. “I’m starving.”

“Look in the fridge. There’s cottage cheese, yogurt….”

“No, I need real food. A cheeseburger. French fries. I need it now.”

“But it’s four-thirty already. I’m making supper. Your father will be here soon.”

“Fine. I’ll take my bike.” She stopped. She couldn’t take her bike. She was scared to death to ride it. Come to think of it, she hadn’t even seen her bike since the accident.

“Caroline: it was going to be a surprise. Your father’s having your bicycle repaired.

I’m making tuna casserole.”

“Even more reason. I’ll walk! It’s only one mile.” Her hands were shaking really badly now. She could not zip up her shorts.

Her mother set the timed-bake dial on the oven. “Okay. I’ll take you. I’ll leave a note for your father. But don’t wear those, please. I was going to tell you earlier. You look like a hooker.”

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They sat at the counter at Friendly’s; at a quarter to five, there were hardly any people in the restaurant. The smells drifting from the kitchen made her dizzy, clawed at her stomach; Caroline begged the waitress for soda crackers and ate five packs. They were dry and salty but heavenly to chew. The thin layers snapped between her teeth with

a satisfying crunch; her mandibles ground the crumbs to soggy bits.

“Slow down,” her mother said. “You’re acting like a ravenous beast.”

“I can’t help it,” she said, grabbing over the counter at the heavy, white plate floating toward her, and she fleetingly remembered an odd fact: this was the last meal most frequently requested by death-row inmates: cheeseburger and fries.

And it was good, embarrassingly good: her teeth sinking into soft bun and meat, the warm juices spilling on her chin, the remarkable, crisp saltiness of the potatoes. It was frightening, almost overwhelming, really (tears came to her eyes) to taste real food again after four weeks of milkshakes, to finally fill her belly, and she was aware that the waitress was giving her funny looks from the kitchen doorway, but she had to keep eating, she just had to. It wasn’t possible to satisfy herself and, simultaneously, be ladylike, be Longmeadow polite. “I haven’t had anything to eat in a month,” Caroline wanted to tell the waitress, but there wasn’t any time: she needed to concentrate on the hot brownie sundae waiting in front of her.

Her spoon dug into chocolate sauce, warm and dripping, vanilla ice cream melting, a thick fudgy brownie, roasted nuts. Nuts were good; she could crunch these. All of it was good; the terrible ordeal was over. Like it had when she fell off her bike and was lying on the sidewalk, everything significant seemed to be concentrated at the front of her face, only this time it was a pleasant sensation, a delightfully voluptuous one. The

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accident had shown her: You had to take your pleasures where you found them. It almost

compensated for the hollow pain around the bull’s-eye of her heart.

She raised the mouthpiece to her lips, drew in the corners of her embouchure, and blew. A sweet, airy middle D echoed in the room. She ran up and down the D major scale, two octaves, dove down to low B, climbed chromatically up and up until she sent a piercing high F straight through the cheap drop-ceiling.

“Oh my god. I can still play,” she thought.

But she sounded like shit, she conceded. Her tone was breathy. Her low notes weren’t centered. Her fingers felt like lead. It was time to crack open the Boehm, start over again.

She spent about fifteen minutes playing the first study and then went on to No. 2, and that went on for ten minutes or however long and she stopped. The sixteenth notes were blurring together on the page. The italic 3 above each set of triplets looked like a typographical error. She kept losing her place.

“What’s wrong with me?” she thought, sidling up to the mirror. A dark gleam seemed to glower at her from behind her eyes, frightening her more. “I’m losing it. My career is going to go down the drain before it starts. I’ll be a nobody. I’ll no longer be a musician…. No. Stop it. This doesn’t make any sense. Let me figure this out.”

She sat on the sofa and got very still, like she did before a performance. Gradually the panicked voices died away. There it was. The scene that had been playing intermittently in her head. Still rolling.

It was raw footage, an Andy-style movie: sounds and images and sensations, all jumbled up in no discernable order. Things she’d said that morning in Dr. Horowitz’s

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office. Things she hadn’t said. Things she wished he had said. The doctor’s smirking,

dark-eyed gaze. Her size nine sandal dangling off the edge of the chair. The warmth of

his shoulder, crisp white doctor’s coat. Something that made her laugh. The sweet,

almondish smell as he pulled out the hideous, the long, bad wire. Don’t look. Wicked.

Shiny, curved needle. Stupid mother, stupid tears. “My baby!” The moment Caroline said

to him, “Thanks, Dr. Horowitz, for being such a great, incredible doctor,” and he hugged

her, spontaneously, to his chest. Crushed her. White doctor’s coat. Antiseptic. Pinprick. A

single drop of blood. Black eye sockets gazing at her from the ghostly light box. You

don’t have to come back any more, kid. Don’t come back.

Please. Come back.

It was Friday night. They were in Roxy’s room, sitting on her Indian-print bedspread. Roxy was doing her nails. Caroline had told her everything. Almost.

“…and now I feel like crap because I wimped out and I didn’t tell him anything and I’ll never see him again. Ever.” She reached for another tissue. “And my mom likes him too.”

“Your mom?”

“Yeah.” She wiped the tears away. “I’m pretty sure of it. She was all over him, hugging him, when I ran out of the room. Or, she was just about to do it.”

Roxy shook the bottle of red nail polish and started in on the other foot. “That doesn’t sound like your mother. Aren’t she and your dad…together?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know. She’s acting different. I don’t even think it’s her, though.

It’s Dr. Horowitz. He gets, like, a hold over you. He’s got this big nose, these brown eyes.” She gestured ineffectually.

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“He sounds like Dr. Gripple. You hated him.”

“No, Roxy. I swear; every one of his nurses is in love with him. It’s like a harem in there. They follow his every command.”

“Fine, whatever. I believe you. Your oral surgeon’s hot. And he drives a

Lamborghini.” Roxy finished dabbing her little toe and leaned back to admire her handiwork. “I can’t believe you kept this from me. You did seem a little weird, though. I thought it was from not practicing. Maya said it was the painkillers.”

“I stopped taking them.”

“So, the question now is: What are you doing to do about it?”

Do about it? There was something to do about it? “I told you,” said Caroline. “I had my last appointment two days ago. He said, ‘You don’t have to come back here any more, kid.’ That’s it. I can’t see him any more.” But as she was saying this, her heart was thumping.

“Of course, you can see him again. What do you think this is, a police state? Use your imagination. Where does he live? You don’t know?” Roxy dragged a phone book from under her bed. “H. Hornsby, Hornstein, Horowitz, Adam: 435 State Street; he lives in Springfield.”

“But we don’t know that’s him,” argued Caroline. “Anyway, how am I going to get someplace to see him? I don’t drive. I don’t even have a driver’s permit. I’m only fifteen.

What am I going to do, ask my mother to take me?”

“So, what about having him come to you? Ask him to one of your concerts.”

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“That’s too far away. I don’t play the Mozart with the Greater Mass Orchestra until spring. I’m doing a solo at Christ Church on Christmas Eve, but I don’t know. He’s

Jewish, I think. I really can’t see myself...”

“I like Christmas carols and I’m Jewish.”

“Barely. You don’t even do Hanukkah. Your mom celebrates the winter solstice. I can’t remember the last time your family had a Passover supper.”

“Seder. My sister and I both had bas mitzvahs.”

Caroline remembered. Roxy had recited the Hebrew perfectly. The rabbi’s advice to Maya had been: learn to say no. That was right around the time Mr. Bowman had left

Mrs. Bowman for good.

“Anyway, what do you care?” asked Roxy. “You don’t believe in God or religion.”

“I believe in something. There’s something out there, bigger than us. I just don’t believe in putting a name on it.”

“You’re all confused. You’re not Jewish, you weren’t baptized, you’re not a

Buddhist or a Quaker or Wiccan or anything: Haven’t you wondered what’s going to happen to you when you die? Where is God going to stick you?”

“You should talk.”

Maya walked in. “What are you two arguing about?”

“Caroline’s in love with her oral surgeon.”

Roxy explained. Maya listened. “Hmmmm. He’s a doctor. He’s single. He’s definitely loaded. He drives a hot car. He plays disco music in surgery. It’s simple. Invite him to Utopia this Saturday.”

Of course, Caroline thought: it was inevitable.

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In ten minutes Maya had dreamed up the skit and jotted it down. They would invite him to some oral surgeon thing. Roxy would do the talking. Above all, she was supposed to sound mature and professional. Like a pruney dentist with 100 years of medical school under her belt and a shelf full of awards. Nothing, repeat, nothing was funny. Not even the word maxillofacial.

“Max-EEL-ee-oh-face-EEL-ee-oh,” stuttered Roxy.

“Good enough. Here, you dial,” she said to Caroline.

“Me? He knows my voice.”

“Please. You were all wired up, remember? You’re just making sure it’s him when he answers. Don’t say anything. Just give it to her.”

On the fifth ring, the doctor picked up. “Hello?” the deep voice said.

Oh, my god, Caroline thought. She nodded and thrust the phone at Roxy:

“Excuse me, is this Dr. Adam Horowitz, Doctor of Dental Surgery?” asked Roxy in her sultriest voice.

She could be an actress, Caroline thought.

“Yes, this is he?” Roxy squinted at the paper; she was too vain to wear glasses.

“My name is Dr. Pamela Edelstein and I am the president of the New England

Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, NEAOMS, for short. We’re brand new.

Maybe that’s why you haven’t heard of us? But we are a professional organization. We are all professional people and we do everything in a professional way. Well, uh, the reason I was calling….”

“Get to the point,” whispered Maya.

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“…is, because – do you hustle, Dr. Horowitz? I mean, do you do the hustle, the dance? No, this isn’t a survey. The reason I’m asking is because NEAOMS is having a social event this Saturday night, a disco social, for potential members, and I wanted to extend a personal invitation to you, seeing as you’re such a, uh, highly respected oral surgeon especially with teenage girls, I mean, accident victims.”

She is so blowing this, Caroline thought.

“Where?” Roxy motioned to Caroline to get the black-and-gold card stuck in the

mirror. “The Utopia Lounge.” She gave address. “Yes, starting at 10 p.m. No cover if

you’re on our guest list. Shall I mark you down? Great. And there will be complimentary

gin and tonics, and a lot of our female lady doctors -- ”

“college students,” Maya hissed.

“-- doctors in training, college girls will be there and they will be looking forward

to meeting some real doctors, you know, people who can mentor them, professionally

speaking. Yes, it’s going to be a great party. There’s a big buzz going on about the new

root canal treatment from Sweden. Yes, I’ll be there. You can’t miss me. I have red hair

and I’ll be wearing a red Danskin. And so will my co-president, Dr. Maya Bowman. No,

that’s okay. Dr. Pamela Edelstein. Saturday night at 10. See you there”

Caroline and Roxy looked at each other, stunned.

“I can’t believe he fell for that,” said Roxy.

“He won’t go,” said Caroline. “That was the phoniest-sounding thing ever.”

“He’ll go,” said Maya, knowingly. “What forty-year-old man is going to pass up an

evening with free booze and college girls?” She turned to Caroline. “Congratulations.

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You’re finally going to Utopia. And you’re probably going to see your doctor. You owe

me big time.”

It was inevitable, Caroline thought, walking the half-mile home in the dark. The

Utopia was like a black hole sucking her in, and even though it made her feel queasy, there was also a part of her that was curious, excited, even, by the idea of going to a grown-up club and seeing what it was like. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be any way to stop herself and Utopia (and maybe Dr. Horowitz) from converging; it all seemed predestined. It was even in yesterday’s horoscope for Scorpio: “Away you go! Your future is calling and it feels like it cannot wait one moment longer for you to arrive in it.

Don’t bother with the seat belt. It won’t help. In case of disaster, clarity of mind is the

only thing that will save you.”

Now all she had to do was figure out what to tell her mother.

They were doing about sixty-five down Longmeadow Street, headed toward the

Connecticut line: her, Roxy and Maya. It was a quarter to ten on Saturday night, and

Roxy had the radio on loud: Donna Summer, Bee Gees, burn baby burn stuff. The sisters

had already had a few joints and about four gin and tonics each, and it showed: Maya

kept speeding up and slowing down and tailgating the car in front of them. It made

Caroline nervous. She did not want to die in a wreck while three men sang in falsetto

about staying alive. She just wanted to go to Utopia and dance with Dr. Horowitz and

maybe sit in his car and make it home in one piece, without her parents finding out. Right

now she was supposedly at a sleepover at Roxy’s. Her mother believed that people her

age still went to sleepovers.

“Maya, you are driving like shit,” said Roxy.

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“You want me to take you back to the house?”

“There are cops all over.”

Maya slowed down. Fifty, thirty-five.

“She does listen to reason,” thought Caroline. “Thank god I’m not the only sane one in this car.” Earlier that evening, getting dressed at the Bowmans’, she had snuck into the downstairs bathroom and flushed her second gin and tonic down the toilet, untouched.

She didn’t want to be one of those stupid teenage girls who get sloppy drunk their first time in a bar and end up passed out in the parking lot, being gang-banged by a bunch of frat boys or Hell’s Angels. You read about it all the time in the newspaper; she was not going to be a cliché or, worse, a statistic. Most of all, she was not going to make a fool of herself in front of Dr. Horowitz. Whatever was going to happen tonight, she wanted to stay alert. Don’t bother with the seat belt. In case of disaster, clarity of mind is the only thing that will save you. Well, maybe. She reached up for the satin-blue belt and buckled herself in.

They passed on their right a three-story brick house with black shutters. White star on a red square. 1785.

“Mom says the guy who built that house had slaves,” said Roxy. “Four of them.

They lived in the back in the kitchen.”

“I thought you couldn’t have slaves in Massachusetts,” said Caroline.

“Everybody did in the Colonial days.”

“No, we would have read about it.”

“Did you see Roots?”

“Yeah. So?”

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“There you are.”

Maya spoke up: “It’s true. Mom knows the lady who lives next door. She says the slaves’ ghosts are still there. They get up at night to make popcorn. You can smell it.”

They argued about it more and passed over the Connecticut line. They stopped at a

7-11. Maya was starving.

They ate orange Cheetos and frosted cinnamon buns standing up by the ice machine, outside, cars coming and going. Bright spotlights glared down, casting oily shadows on the asphalt. Caroline felt conspicuous in her purple leotard and wrap skirt and super-high, black patent-leather platforms (all borrowed from Roxy); she was doing this for Dr. Horowitz, she had to remind herself. Tractor-trailers zoomed by on Route

Nine, and some pulled up at the neighboring BP station and honked at them. Maya and

Roxy tossed their dark-red curls and yelled more animatedly at one another over the clunking sounds of the icemaker.

“I’m going back in the car. I feel stupid out here,” said Caroline.

“Wait. Let me get the coats.”

Maya opened the large trunk. “I got a Small for you,” she said to Caroline, tossing her a cellophane package. Maya ripped open hers and Roxy’s. “You and me are

Mediums. Mom got them cheap at a hospital supply place.”

“Hey, do I look professional or what?” Roxy twirled on her red stilettos in the white lab coat. It was big and boxy, with long sleeves, and came down to her hips.

Underneath she wore a red leotard with a plunging neckline and a matching wrap-skirt, like her sister. They did look like twins tonight, thought Caroline.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said out loud.

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“Here, Dr. Pamela Edelstein.” Maya handed her sister a nametag. “And yours.”

“I’m not putting this on,” said Caroline. “He knows I’m not a medical student.”

“I spent a long time making these tags. We’re supposed to be a professional association. We have to look the part. You can take yours off later.”

“Now I wish you’d gotten the stethoscopes,” said Roxy. “Call me Doctor.”

“Doctor, you can operate on me anytime.” The scruffy-looking man coming out of the 7-11 gave a low whistle. He was carrying a six-pack and a long slick of beef jerky.

“Larvae. Ignore him,” said Maya, turning her back.

The man laughed and walked away.

“Oral surgeons use needles, not stethoscopes,” said Caroline. “Super-sharp, hooked needles and disgusting metal wires. And probably power drills.”

“Ugh. Don’t get into that again.”

Caroline pinned the tag to her left lapel, over her heart – temporarily, of course, to humor Maya. Roxy’s sister had done a good job with the artwork and the laminating: there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a skull, by Beardsley, and NEAOMS in elegant, scripty letters. Underneath Maya had printed her name: “Caroline A. Destes, Trinity

College Medical School,” to match her new I.D., which certified that she had turned twenty-one on August 5th, and lived in downtown Hartford. Maya hadn’t even charged her for the ID; “You owe me one,” she said in a flat, certain tone.

They were getting back in the Cadillac when two cars – a Camaro and a banged-up

Pinto -- pulled into the empty spaces on either side of them

“Mike, Steven,” yelled Roxy.

“Hey, Incubus. What’s up, Succubus?”

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Caroline dove into the front seat and slammed the door.

It was the boys from the mall. Maya and Roxy tottered over to the Camaro and

modeled their lab coats and name tags. “You’re crazy,” said one of the Enfield boys. All

five of them piled out the car and stood in the parking lot, hands stuffed in their pockets,

kicking at concrete posts. Caroline glanced to her right and hunched lower in her seat: it was the boy from the waterfall. Kenny. Nice Kenny from Enfield. He drove a Pinto. “I hope he didn’t see me,” she thought, burying her nose in the starchy collar of her lab coat.

There was a dry, squeaking noise of a window being rolled down.

She peeked again: The boy’s left arm, propped in the open window, was covered in a thick, white cast. The cast went all the way from his knuckles to just above his bent elbow. “What happened to him?” wondered Caroline.

“Nah, we don’t go to places like that,” said a burly-looking boy in a football jersey.

He looked at the Pinto and laughed. “Especially not him.”

His friends laughed, too.

“Why not?” asked Roxy.

“Disco sucks.”

“Oh, come on. It won’t be so bad. We’ll be there.”

“That’s where all the old farts go. To pick up underage girls like you.”

“Yeah? So if you hate the place, how come you seem to know so much about it?”

Maya and Roxy got back in. Roxy insisted on being in the middle again, so she climbed over Caroline’s lap. Her stiletto heel left a long, white scratch on Caroline’s knee.

“They said they might go,” said Roxy. “We might even get them to dance.”

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“What do they mean, old farts?” asked Caroline, worriedly. “I don’t want to have

to dance with someone like Principal Reeves.”

“Forget them. They’re just high-school boys. They’re probably trashing the place because they can’t afford the cover charge,” said Maya.

“Don’t worry,” Roxy whispered to Caroline. “You and me can dance together.”

“Hey, give me another cinnamon thing, somebody,” said Maya.

They sped down Hazardville Road, hulking warehouses and sorry-looking package stores rolling by on either side. Caroline leaned forward and stared up at her reflection in

the darkened windshield. Her hair was long and wavy, a black river tumbling over her

shoulders to her hips, the strands at her temples harnessed in two long, skinny braids.

Roxy had strung purple glass beads at the bottom of each braid to keep them from

unraveling. Caroline’s deep-set eyes were round and starry looking, the pupils dilated, the

whites of her eyes glowing in her tanned face. Now that the swelling had disappeared,

she could see her cheekbones again: Cat Face, her father called her when she was little.

The bandage, too, was gone; only if she tilted her chin and scrunched her mouth, like this,

could she see the shiny, pink scar underneath. It still felt tingly when she touched it. “I’m

fifteen years old,” she whispered at the glass. “I’m going to a disco. I’m going to see Dr.

Horowitz. My future is calling.” None of it seemed real. Not even the disco part. It was

like she was hurtling toward a unknown destination with her eyes half shut, and all that

mattered was staying to the right of the dotted white line.

They parked way at the back of the large, fenced-in lot, which was already full of

cars. The Utopia sign spun around and around, its gold letters rimmed in neon yellow.

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Through the wire fence, multicolored Christmas lights blinked in the window of a

neighborhood bar. There were sounds of laughter, car doors slamming, footsteps

crunching on gravel, and a low, thump, thump, thump that vibrated through the seat of the

Cadillac, flooding Caroline’s stomach with dread. Several people bumped against the passenger-side mirror, their voices loud and swaggering: “They always have another

Pope ready to take over. They live in tunnels under the Vatican.” Keys jangling. “Yeah?”

Another tough-sounding, male voice: “Hey, I could get used to being Pope.”

The thumping grew louder as the girls approached the club. A long line of people

stood out front on a black and gold carpet, waiting for a scary-looking man in a gold shirt

to let them inside. He had huge, veined arms and a battered face, and a completely bald

head: either he was that way naturally or he shaved his skull; Caroline couldn’t be sure.

She kept her eyes on Roxy’s shoes as the line moved forward.

“This will never work,” she thought, fingering the ID’s unfiled edges. “He’ll see it’s a fake. He’ll throw me out. Maybe I’ll be arrested.”

Maya and Roxy were explaining to the bouncer that they were expecting a friend tonight, a VIP, Dr. Adam Horowitz. Please, could Barry let him in without a cover? Just this once? “Sure, no problem,” the guy said, and waived them inside without a glance at their IDs.

Then the bouncer’s thick fingers were taking the ID from her hand, and he was squinting at the seal and already handing it back. “All right. In.”

It was so easy!

“How much do I pay?” asked Caroline, dazzled by her sudden reprieve. Whatever amount he named, it was worth it.

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“Don’t take that from her,” Maya said to the bouncer, swooping down on the twenty-dollar bill. “Put that back in your purse.”

“Huh?”

“Girls don’t pay to get in, stupid.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

Caroline gave Maya a bewildered look.

“Oh, saints and Lucifer. I am going to have to teach you everything. You’ve been down in the practice room too long.”

Caroline ignored the insult and caught up with Roxy, who was doing a goofy

“Keep on Trucking” strut through the lobby and laughing to herself.

“Was Maya giving you a hard time?”

“Nah.” Caroline smiled and squeezed her friend’s arm tight.

“That was easy,” she thought, a chilly queasiness rising in her stomach.

“Ridiculously easy.”

An hour later, and she was over her shock at being there and almost liking it.

Stuttering strobe lights and a pair of mirrored disco balls twirling overhead, and a big dance floor with multi-colored squares that lit up in predictable patterns, just like the one in that movie. Sweet strawberry taste on her tongue (she had asked the bartender to make her daiquiri virgin), and bodies pressing against hers as she fought her way back from the bar, to the raised platform where Roxy and Maya stood fearlessly in their lab coats like a pair of demented scientists, evaluating all the men and women as they jostled by. The two sisters agreed. Everybody in this place was over the hill, except them. Who else had such

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firm skin and such devastating curves and could get away with not wearing a bra under a

rib-tight Danskin? Nobody. Well, nobody except for maybe those girls in sundresses

clumped up near the water fountain; they looked under twenty-one. But apart from those

girls? Nobody else. Maya, Roxy -- and now Caroline -- were the hottest things in there.

So of course there was a price to pay for being hot: you had to put up with the flies,

Maya said. Flies, asked Caroline? All these guys buzzing around you. You had to figure

out your strategy. Were you going to swat most of them immediately and concentrate on

the few who mattered? Or were you going to be a bleeding-heart Buddhist and never kill

a living creature and shower your kindness on everyone, from wiggling grub to lap dog to

Adonis?

“Well, I don’t know,” began Caroline, confusedly; “I can’t look at these guys like that and say, ‘He’s a grub, he’s a….”

“Look at me and Roxy,” Maya interrupted. “I swat them away and that’s why I’m known as a bitch, but you know what? I don’t waste people’s time, and my way isn’t as cruel as Roxy’s. She’ll never come right out and say, You’re not a stud, you’re fly larvae; she has to go around and around, and that’s why she’s out in the parking lot half the night, trying to break it to them gently, giving all those poor guys blue balls. No, that’s an

expression. Oh -- hold my drink; I’m going to dance with this guy. He has potential. But

Caroline, you are going to have to decide. Bitch or Buddhist. Think about it.”

That was a terrifying half-minute: Caroline standing on the platform, alone, trying to balance three drinks in her hands, wondering: Was Maya right? Did she have to start thinking about guys this way? Did she have to make up her mind? Was she a bitch or a

Buddhist?

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She bent down and set the drinks on the edge of the platform and crouched there for a moment. No. She did not have to make up her mind. Maya was ridiculous. She had come here for two reasons: to dance at a club and to see Dr. Horowitz. Was he here? She peered through the smoke and flashing lights. Under a spinning disco ball, a tall, dark- haired man in a baby-blue vest and tight pants was leading a crowd of people in a line dance. No, thank god, that wasn’t him. Dr. Horowitz didn’t have a mustache. It was eleven-thirty already. Obviously he hadn’t been taken in by their prank call.

She slid off the platform and went looking for Roxy.

“Hey. You said it was okay if we danced together.”

Roxy rolled her eyes at the somber-looking man opposite her. “This is Caroline.

Caroline, Chengis.”

“Pleased to meet you.” He bobbed up and down. “You are Roxanne’s friend, the musician? Good. I have heard of you. We will all dance together, then.”

The three of them danced together then. It was all thump thump thump and wailing high-pitched voices and silly lyrics and funky Brother Love bass lines – really elaborate, syncopated counterpoint, Caroline thought, admiringly; some of the bass players were virtuosi – and after a while, she got into it, her beaded braids whacking her in the face as she swung around, around and around, into the dark, swirling vortex, which wasn’t frightening, really, as long as you kept both feet on the ground (except when Chengis dipped you, squeezing your waist just a little too hard) and you refused the coconut-milk, alcoholic something-or-other that Roxy was insisting you try. A simple, polite, No thank you. That was how you stayed alert, maintained clarity of mind. Nobody could do anything to her, unless she let them; she could see that now. She was just dancing, just a

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fifteen-year-old girl dancing in a room that happened to be filled with other people, older

people, older men, who were also dancing. You could think of it as molecules under a microscope, if you liked: dancing, happy molecules. Thump, thump, thump. There was no threat in that. It was a bit disappointing that the Main Molecule hadn’t made it under the lens, but in the big scheme of things that was okay, really; they could always prepare another slide, some other day. Actually – she undid the buckles of her platforms and pitched them under a table; too hard to dance in these patent-leather torture devices -- it was good that Dr. Horowitz had not shown up; she probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Really, she was in over her head, just being in a place like this, it was all so new to her, let alone seeing him here, let alone talking to him, let alone dancing or whatever. Yes, it had worked out for the best, his not showing up; this was turning out to be a good night; she’d be able to face her mother in the morning, and then Roxy was yanking one of her braids and saying, “Look over there, Look over there,” and Chengis was lifting her up, up, up, over his pomaded head, and she could see Maya in her white coat standing by the doorway, talking with someone in a black shirt, and pointing behind his back and mouthing, “It’s him, It’s him.” And oh my god – his smirking profile -- it was. It was him.

It was Dr. Horowitz, for real.

Fruit died on her tongue, sweet berry turned to straw.

10.

She hid in a stall in the bathroom.

“I’m chicken,” she thought, behind the locked door. “I can’t do this. I will do this.

But I’m only fifteen. So? Walk out the door and go talk to him, moron. You wanted this,

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didn’t you? Didn’t you? Isn’t this what you been dreaming about – having a chance to

meet him, be with him? So, what’s your problem? What kind of twisted weirdo runs

away from the person she loves?”

And then ten minutes later, tears dry on her cheeks: “Wait a second. This wasn’t

my idea. It was Maya’s.”

Roxy came running in. “Caroline, Caroline Destes,” her voice echoed. She ran along the row of stalls, peeking underneath, red stilettos clattering.

“Shit,” mumbled Roxy. The door banged shut again.

Caroline stepped off the toilet seat she’d been balancing on. Her bare feet were wet with someone else’s urine. (How disgusting! What was wrong with some women? How come they couldn’t pee straight into a toilet bowl? And why didn’t they clean it up if they missed?) At the sinks she turned on a faucet and, standing on one leg at a time, soaped and rinsed each foot, over and over. The women applying makeup gave her strange looks.

“Need a hand?” asked a middle-aged black woman, kind-faced, her salt-and-pepper hair done up in cornrows.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Caroline, gratefully accepting the wad of paper towels.

“Looks like you lost your dancing shoes. Better go out and find them before some other girl steals them. Lost my best pair of platforms that way. Right here, last Saturday night.”

“But you came back.”

“Damn right. You meet some fine men here.” She opened a compact and began applying silver glitter to her eyelid.

Caroline studied her. This woman was okay. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.

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“I’m in love with somebody,” she said. “But I’m scared to go out and talk to him.”

“Uh huh. Been there.” The woman gave Caroline a sidelong glance. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Right. But you’ll be there soon enough. Anyway, I’ll give you same advice I’d give anybody. Quit hiding in the lady’s room. Go out there and claim your man.” She finished the second eye and snapped the compact shut. “Before you get old, like me.”

Caroline dried her left foot carefully, stroking the thin, blue vein that pulsed near her ankle. She was overcome with a rush of tenderness for herself. Here she was, out in the real world, meeting real people, having real experiences, and it was tough, really tough (broken hearts and pee-slicked toilet seats), but she was finding out. She was finding out what it was like to be a woman. She was on her way. She would march back out there and find her shoes and claim her man, like the woman said. At this sudden onslaught of clarity she felt invigorated, matured beyond her years. It was only when she glanced up that she saw how ridiculous she looked: a flat-chested girl in a purple leotard, a lumpy, white coat knotted at her waist, holding up one foot like a flamingo.

She went back in the disco. The table had been pushed up against a far wall but she finally located both shoes under a chair. A man was sitting there, a teenage-girl spread- eagled on his lap, the two of them frantically making out.

“Excuse me,” said Caroline, primly.

She put on her shoes and climbed onto the disco platform. He was the only guy in the whole place wearing all black and it looked devastatingly good on him, with his slick, black hair and dark eyes, and she should be able to pick him out in this sea of white suits

145 and patterned shirts and pastel this and that. Then again, maybe she should look harder; black wasn’t easy to see, all the colors blended together. But no, he was not in this room, and come to think of it, where was Roxy? Where was Maya?

Chengis tapped her on the ankle. “Roxy was looking for you earlier. She was quite upset. Now I can’t find her. It is most annoying. We were going to go out to my car, she and I, and have a private talk.”

“I’ll help you look for her.”

She took his arm and walked through the lobby, past the scary bouncer, down the black and gold carpet. It was wonderful to feel fresh air on her face again. Her platforms wobbled on the gravel; Chengis pattered beside her in his tassled loafers:

“Our relationship is entering a critical phase. I must know where she stands. You are her childhood friend. Tell me –”

“Oh, not now, Chengis.” She was squinting at the moonlit parking lot, going methodically, one by one, down the rows of cars.

“Why won’t Roxy go to bed with me? I am considered good looking. I invite her to the Log Cabin for lobster dinner. I send her one-dozen long-stemmed red roses. Only the best.”

No, no, no, she thought. His car’s not here.

“I am even courteous to her older sister, who is not the most pleasant person I have met in America.”

“Oh, Chengis: Do you know how old Roxy is?”

“She is nineteen and a half years old, of course.”

“No, she’s fifteen. She’s just a kid.” She kept scanning the rows.

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“I do not believe you. She is a first year at Baypath Junior College, like yourself.

She let me see her college I.D. No, I cannot believe you.” His voice was getting high-

pitched.

No, no, no, and there it was: the bright-yellow Lamborghini, with the passenger door open, skyward. And her heart thumped; it absolutely thumped.

“Wait. I understand!” cried Chengis. “You girls are playing a trick, right?”

She was running along the gravel, to the farthest car, past Corvettes and couples making out in front seats and guys sitting on car hoods, drinking beer out of brown paper bags. From the open door of a nearby bar, a Bruce Springsteen song drifted across the parking lot. She stubbed her toe on something sharp and kept running, her flimsy purse bouncing against her hip. She reached the end of the aisle, Chengis panting behind her, and there:

“ – really, I do not find this very amusing, and – Oh! I must say! That is a most incredible car. It is a Lamborghini, I believe.”

The passenger door was pointing skyward. The rocket boosters were going to send you straight to heaven. The black-leather seat beckoned in the moonlight, its soft curve deep and inviting, saying, “Come inside, Caroline. Your carriage is waiting. Let me take you for a ride.” And then an ample hip rolled into view and a shapely, pale leg extended from the black vortex, and someone’s red hair – whose? -- was spilling over a shoulder, and there was laughter. Careless, mingled laughter. Brittle high notes and a gravelly, ominous bass. She took a step backward, involuntarily. Uh huh, uh huh. And through the car’s impractically narrow rear window: a dark hand gripping a white shoulder and two heads drawing together, merged into a single, monstrous silhouette.

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11.

She pushed open the door. Pete’s Place, the sign outside said, and when the first chilled, beery gust of air hit her nose and she heard the Lynyrd Skynyrd riffs grinding in the background, she immediately remembered what kind of place this was: It was a blue- collar bar where kids from Longmeadow went slumming. Boys like Henry Egglesworth

III, with his nautical belt embroidered with spouting whales, and Bill Pintington of the cracker-manufacturing family and party girls like Katie Delsworth who drank like a fish and would whack you in the shins with a hockey stick if you got in her way on the field

(Caroline still had the scar): this was their hangout. They would come here dressed down in wrinkled khakis and play pool and get shit-faced and sometimes do shots with the regulars up front. She’d heard about Pete’s at a keg party her freshman year, and it had seemed like the last place she’d want to visit, and now here she was, dressed in her purple disco-doctor ensemble, forehead pressed against the hot glass of Pete’s famous juke box, staring at an album cover of two bearded guys called Z.Z. Top. With several arrows piercing her heart and no idea what she was going to do.

If she went back out there, she’d probably run into Chengis again. “I am not afraid to get to the bottom of this,” he had said to her in the parking lot, before she fled. He had unfolded a piece of graph paper: Private Talk Highlights it said at the top, underlined with a ruler in blue. No, she didn’t want to talk about it with Chengis.

She stood up and untied the lab coat from her waist; whatever else you might say about Pete’s Place, it had better air-conditioning than the Utopia. Maybe she could find someone to take her back to Longmeadow. Because there was no way she was ever talking to Maya or Roxy again – whichever one was humping Dr. Horowitz out there.

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She walked past the bar counter, where some older men sat pickling themselves,

and through a crowded pool room, where she thought she recognized a few people her age, and into a small, green-lit room in the back, which was practically empty. There was a tall, Formica counter on the left, lined with black-and-chrome swivel chairs, and behind the bar stood an elfish-looking man in a white shirt and dark suspenders, waiting on two customers. The one closer to Caroline, a guy maybe in his thirties or forties, was drinking a beer and stuffing his face with pretzels. Next to the wall, on the very last seat (she couldn’t see well in the green lights), sat a much younger man with a full pint glass in front of him, his arm in a cast.

Caroline put her purse down on the Formica counter. His hair had grown in a little at the back since she’d seen him at the mall. He looked miserable.

Maybe he needed company. She was miserable, too. It was stupid to feel embarrassed around this boy. She hadn’t really done anything wrong to him. Not much.

She sat down next to him. “Hi,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. Normal

cheerful.

Kenny glared at her. He turned back to his drink and studied it. Whatever was in

the glass, he did not appear to be drinking it.

“So,” she persisted, willing her mind from the horrible scene in the parking lot.

“What happened to your arm?”

He took a tiny sip and shuddered. She could hear the gulp. His stared at her with some kind of thoughts flickering across his irises. “I punched my fist into a concrete wall,” he finally said, each word slow and deliberate.

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Wow. He had more in him than she’d thought. Lately other people’s accidents were

very interesting to her.

“What did you break?” she asked. “Did the bone poke through?”

His eyes took in the long sweep of her hair, the miniscule dip of her cleavage, her white lab coat, the nametag pinned to the lapel. She began to feel uncomfortable.

“Huh.” He smirked. “What are you, about twelve?”

“No,” she said, angrily.

“You’re a very strange girl, Caroline Destes. Doctor Caroline Destes. In fact, I don’t even think I want to be having this conversation with you. ” He swiveled back to his drink. Accidentally he overshot his mark and banged his cast on the edge of the counter. Ouch, his face said.

The bartender came over. “Can I see your identification, Miss?”

“Sure. No problem.” She coolly pulled the card from her wallet and made a point of not looking at Kenny. “I’ll show him,” she thought.

The bartender’s upturned eyes flickered back and forth, from the card to Caroline’s face. He sighed and handed it back.

“Okay. What would you like?”

“What is he drinking?”

Kenny’s long, square-tipped fingers were drumming on the countertop, in time with a jumpy melody.

“Pinkerton’s Pale Ale,” said the bartender. “It’s dollar-a-pint night.”

She laughed so hard, it came out like a honk.

“What’s so funny?” asked Kenny.

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“Nothing.” She said to bartender: “I’ll have a pint of Pinkerton’s, please.”

He set the full glass in front of her.

“Gonna rock this town upside-down, mama!” sang the tight-voiced singer on the juke box.

She raised her glass: “Here’s to discriminating gentlemen.” She laughed again, her heart fluttering in her chest. To undiscriminating assholes in Lamborghinis. And traitor slut girlfriends.

“You’re definitely cracked,” said Kenny.

She took a sip. It was horrible. Like oatmealy water. With a peculiar aftertaste, like old cantalope.

“Yuck,” she said. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Kenny.”

“So. You remember my name.” He smiled faintly and traced a line down the side of his glass. He looked less angry, now, more like the boy she had met at the waterfall.

The arm with the cast hung at his side.

“You know,” – this was hard for her to say, for some reason – “I didn’t run away that night because I thought you were weird. I couldn’t talk. My jaw was wired together.”

“Oh, right. Right.” He shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said quietly, to himself.

“It’s true. I broke my jaw in three places. I just got the wires taken out two days ago.” She tilted her chin and ran a finger over the scar. The new skin was tender, except for a few dead patches, where she felt nothing at all. Dr. Horowitz had said that full sensation would come back to her jaw, eventually. Caroline wondered when that would be. “Eighty stitches. See?”

“It doesn’t look like eighty.”

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“Forty inside, forty out. Touch it. It’s okay.”

“Hmmm.” He hesitantly brushed the center of the scar, a dead patch, where her chin had absorbed the full impact of the fall. The horseshoe shape of the jaw had transmitted the force in a branching arc, cracking both the right and left mandibles, according the doctor. She couldn’t feel anything for the millisecond that Kenny touched her chin, but after his finger was gone, a phantom touch lingered, oddly warming.

“That’s one gross scar.” He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs; he was wearing shorts and a black t-shirt and the same scuffed tennis shoes from the waterfall.

His good arm cradled the one with the cast, as though it were a fragile, heavy package he was carrying to the post office to be weighed. “I broke four of my knuckles and fractured my radius,” he said. “They only gave me a few stitches, though. They itch like crazy under the cast.” He took a sip from his glass and grimaced, surreptitiously giving her the once-over. “So how did you eat with your mouth wired together?”

“I drank milkshakes.”

“Did you lose weight? You look pretty skinny.”

“No, actually, I gained a few pounds.” She was getting annoyed. You are no big deal yourself, she thought. I can handle you. “So how come you did it?”

“Oh – punched my hand through a wall?” He rested the cast awkwardly on the counter; his fingers and thumb protruding from the rounded holes. “My brother was in his room, playing the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack really loud. He wouldn’t turn it down. I couldn’t take it. I just punched my fist into the wall. I forgot it was concrete block.”

“That’s really stupid.”

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“Yeah, it wasn’t the best move. How’d you break your jaw?”

“I fell off my bike. I let somebody fix it who didn’t know what he was doing.”

“That’s stupid too.”

“Look: before you keep talking to me, you need to know something. I’m an excellent flutist. I’m probably going to be famous one day. People have been calling me a prodigy since I was eleven.”

“Hey, I hate to break it to you, but lots of people are called prodigies. It doesn’t mean anything. People are so amazed when you’re young and you can do something half- decently. That’s because there’s all these idiots around you fucking up; you end up hailed as the class genius just because you know what iambic pentameter is.”

What in the world was this guy babbling about? Of course she was a prodigy. It had nothing to do with iambic pentameter, the exact meaning of which escaped her at the moment. Anyway, whatever Kenny from Enfield was driving at, she didn’t care. This was about her.

She put two dollars on the counter and closed her purse. She calmly regarded his extremely intelligent, somewhat pissed off, definitely curious gaze. “Would you like to drive me home?”

“What?” he said incredulously.

“Don’t you know the way to Longmeadow?”

“Of course I know the way to Longmeadow. Everybody knows the way to

Longmeadow. It’s just right up the road. But what about those friends of yours?”

She stood up. “Take me home. I’m sick of this place.”

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12.

They drove north on Hazardville Road in silence, the Pinto’s engine rumbling in

spurts. A bright, round moon followed them on the left, illuminating the cast resting at an

angle on the doorframe. Warm, humid air blew through the open window, stirring her

bare arms and shoulders.

“I have to drive slowly because of this,” he finally said. “I’m not so good with just

one arm.”

His profile glowed in the moonlight: long, high-bridged nose, full lips, the cropped ends of his hair, so short it resembled a military cut. Under his jaw was a faint rash of acne.

“Slow is okay with me.” She shifted her weight again, trying to find a more comfortable position in the tipped-back seat. “Better than driving like a crazy maniac.”

She felt behind her and came up with a paperback she’d apparently been sitting on the whole time. Siddhartha. Herman Hesse. Whoever that was.

“Sorry I didn’t clear off the seat,” said Kenny. “You can chuck that in the back.”

She tossed it next to a pile of cassettes: Ramones, The Clash, New York Dolls, the

Sex Pistols. She knew that group.

“You don’t look like a punk,” she said. “Where are your safety pins?”

“I’m not a nihilist, if that’s what you mean. I just like the music.”

“So, what are you?”

“Me. Just me. For a while I thought I might be an anarchist, but I gave that up. It’s taking months, though, for my hair to grow back.”

She tried to imagine him bald and gave up. “I’m just me, too. And a Unitarian.”

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“And a world-famous flute prodigy.” The corner of his mouth twitched, like he was suppressing a laugh. “Hey, you want to get something to eat here? I can stop…”

“No,” she said angrily as they passed the 7-11.

They drove over the state line. Houses. Then bigger houses, bigger lawns.

Mansions, hills, the Longmeadow Country Club. He became very quiet.

“You turn here,” she said, making him go the long way, around Bradshaw Drive, where she used to race her bike. The air smelled like pine trees, now. They turned right on Laurel.

“That’s where I broke my jaw.” She pointed at the Yield sign, colorless under the street lights. Everything looked so ordinary and at the same time, sinister.

“How come you stared at me that way on the stairs that time, in the mall?”

“What way?”

He swallowed. “Like you hated me.”

She felt squirmy-terrible. A bug pinned to wall. “I don’t know. I felt…mad. Maybe about my jaw being wired shut and not being able to talk or eat or stuff.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“I know.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“That explains it.”

“What are you, sixteen?”

“Eighteen.”

Something’s going to happen, she thought. I know something’s going to happen.

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13.

“Here,” she said.

He pulled up in the Coopers’ long, winding driveway, under an oak tree. All the lights were out. Behind the black-shuttered windows on the second floor, lace curtains hung ghostly white.

“You live here?” he said off-handedly.

“No, next door.” She pointed to the smaller, one-story house.

She folded the lab coat and, tucking it under one arm, climbed out of the car.

“We’re going around back.”

He was quiet. His scuffed white sneakers followed her on the garden path. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

They were standing in front of the espaliered hedge.

“They’re away all summer. They don’t come back until after Labor Day. Come on.

In here.”

Caroline took his hand and ducked through the leafy doorway, leading him inside.

Moonlight filtered through the sturdy, twisted branches that arched overhead, casting sharp-edged shadows on the grass. Both she and Kenny kept their necks down, shoulders hunched, as they walked along the low corridor, to avoid hitting their heads. His white cast, pressed against his ribs, reminded her of a shield. His palm felt moist and heavy, so she let it go.

“This is so strange,” he said as they crept along. “What happened to these trees?”

“They’re supposed to be like that. It’s a kind of pruning called espalier. It takes years to train the branches into these shapes. Usually the trees grow flat, against a

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support, but the Coopers wanted it curved, like an arch. This little old man comes several

times a week to prune it for them. They give us some of the fruit in the fall.”

He felt a branch overhead and pulled off a leaf. “It’s really elaborate. I don’t know

if I like it. Don’t you think the trees mind, being bent like that?”

“Maybe, but it’s beautiful. The pears and apples are extra sweet, for some reason.”

They stopped where the bower flared into a semi-circle. The canopy overhead was

thinner; you could see individual leaves silhouetted against the night sky.

“This is a good place,” Caroline said. She unfolded her lab coat and spread it on the

ground. The grass here was long and lush since the gardener didn’t always bother coming

all the way down with the mower. It smelled like earth and moss and growing things.

She patted the spot next to her, heart racing. “Here.”

“Are you sure they’re not coming back until Labor Day. Or the day after Labor

Day, I mean? I mean, oh –”

He was kissing her.

She felt the hard knock of his cast against her knee. He tasted like cinnamon hots.

He was kissing her neck, licking it, biting it, biting her ears, her shoulders, like a

puppy, pulling off her stretchy leotard. Fast, too fast, but nice. She felt delirious.

“No, Labor Day is in two days.” She didn’t know what she was saying. She traced

her finger down his wiry back; their bodies were crisscrossed in shadows and light.

“Listen,” he said, leaning on his right elbow. “I don’t know if I can do this with my arm.”

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She had unfurled herself below him in her underwear. The purple leotard and skirt

were tossed somewhere near her feet. The grass felt wet on her legs. It seemed too

complicated to remove her shoes at this point.

“I can help you unbutton or whatever.” Her heart felt like it was going to explode

out of her chest. She rolled on her side. “Here--”

“No, it’s not that. I can’t use my forearms. Do you mind? You could--”

“No, really, you try.”

So that was it?

She sat up and stared into the bower, which seemed to have grown smaller.

It had been extremely brief and by the time she got used to it and could imagine

liking it (which was about forty seconds) he was done. So that was what all the fuss was

about?

His arm had shaken the whole time. She was positive it wasn’t supposed to be like

that. She had been worried the whole time he might fall on her. They had made a cushion

for his cast out of his folded-up t-shirt, but that didn’t seem to have helped.

Kenny was lying on his right side, eyes closed, one leg thrown over hers. He had

kept his sneakers on too, she now saw.

She felt let down but only mildly. She was not angry at all. She pushed his leg off

hers.

She pulled on her underpants, not caring if they were inside-out or not, and felt around in the shadowy grass for her clothes. When she had put these on -- correctly, she hoped -- she crouched on hands and knees and got close to his face. He smelled like wood, salt, exertion.

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“Get up.”

He was watching her with one eye.

“Get up.”

His penis stirred. “Would you like to be my girlfriend?”

She ignored him and gathered up his clothes. His shirt was right there. His underwear was hanging off an espaliered branch about a foot off the ground. She tossed it to him and watched while he held the underpants with one hand and tried to stick his sneakers through the holes. It took several attempts. She helped with the t-shirt since it was harder for him to stretch that over the cast. Strangely enough, her disappointment was already receding. When he was done sitting on the lab coat, she picked it up and brushed off the grass and twigs and put it on, because she was cold.

She stood up, being careful not to hit her head, and yawned. It was time to go home. A strange elation was rising in her, a buoyant smugness.

There, that’s taken care of, she thought. I’m no longer a virgin.

15.

She pulled the chaise lounge over to the window and climbed inside. Kenny put his foot on the chair to keep it steady.

“I leave for UConn on Tuesday. Here’s the number at my parents.” He slipped the paper under the frame of the screen. She took it and put in on her dresser without looking at it. She hadn’t realized he was going away to college. That was even better.

She leaned over the window ledge and kissed him.

“You call me,” he said wistfully. “Bye, Caroline.”

“Goodbye, Kenny. I hope your arm gets better soon.”

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He waved with the good arm and disappeared around the hedges. A minute later

she heard the Pinto start up and roar down the street. The sound died away. Crickets

chirped. 4:05, the alarm clock read. She took off the lab coat and examined it under the

lamp on her nightstand: there were grass stains but no blood. Apparently that was just a

myth. Or maybe she’d lost her hymen during gymnastics.

The next morning she woke up and stared at her room. Everything was the same:

the lavender walls, the flowered bedspread, the stuffed animals lined up on her dresser,

her white wicker desk and chair, the poster of messy-haired Michael Tilson Thomas

raising his baton. Everything was exactly as she had left it, and that was the most surreal

thing of all.

She went over to the mirror. She didn’t look different. Maybe it wasn’t something that other people noticed. Or maybe it was only when you were in love that you glowed in some conspicuous way. This was okay for now. Just imagine if it had actually been good sex. Just imagine if it had been Dr. Horowitz. She would be a basket case by now.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have been so great with him either. He was old enough to be her father.

She tied her fuzzy bathrobe around her and stepped barefooted into the hallway.

Her mother screamed.

“Oh, my god. I thought you were a burglar!” She put down the Chinese plate she’d been dusting. “Why aren’t you at the Bowmans’?”

“I came home late last night. Maya drove me. You two were asleep. I let myself in the back way.”

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“That’s strange. I didn’t even hear Bugles bark.” Her mother was standing beside her, in new oxblood pumps. Their chins were exactly level.

“She was asleep too,” said Caroline. “I was super quiet.”

Her mother looked at her. “Did you and Roxy have a fight?”

“Yes. This is it.”

“I’m sure this one will blow over, like the others.” Her mother brushed a strand of

hair from Caroline’s face. “Do you want some eggs? I got a new kind of pan. Teflon.

They say nothing ever sticks.”

Caroline walked around smiling all morning. She wasn’t a virgin! She wasn’t a

virgin! She was sweet to her mother. By mid-afternoon she was ecstatic, gloating with

pride. She did not call Roxy. She would never call Roxy. She did not tell her mother. She

got happier and happier and then when she was sated with happiness, something in her

turned a corner and she felt keyed up and ready for something else. And she knew what

she had to do.

Coda

Many years later – twenty-four, to be exact – Caroline Destes awoke in the

predawn hours at the Hostal Loreto, in Cuzco. A streetlamp shone feebly through the

frayed curtains at the window. A man she loved very much but would not marry lay at

her side. She took care not to awaken him. She eased out of bed and dressed quickly in

the half-light, creeping down the hallway in her stockinged feet before she stopped to

lace her worn, leather hiking boots. Then she stole out of the ancient building and into

the dark, humming air, toward the main plaza, to Calle Marquez and the 16th-century

church of Santa Clara.

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Her rubber soles trod softly over the uneven, Inca-made cobblestones. In her backpack, swaddled in its black, tamperproof case, lay her prized, rose-gold Muramatsu flute, handmade for her more than fifteen years ago. No matter where you went in the world as a musician, you had to watch out for thieves, especially in remote tourist spots, like this one. Her agent had tried to dissuade her from interrupting her concert tour with a sightseeing trip to Peru, but Caroline had insisted: She’d never been to Machu Picchu or

Cuzco -- the “belly button of the world,” as the Incas had called their capital; it would sour the trip if she couldn’t slip away for at least a week. She had gotten her way. Over the last three years she’d made a hefty amount in concert appearance fees for ICM; her album of aria transcriptions was selling surprisingly well; there was talk of it being nominated for a Grammy. All the things that make an artist management company happy.

For herself only one thing mattered: She was playing even better than she had at twenty- three. Her tone still rang out like she was spinning silver into gold, only now that sound was molten. She was on to something, and even when she was on tour – playing with good and not so good orchestras, enduring bad accommodations, boring receptions, difficult conductors – she could find her way, sometimes, to a place where it felt like the music was inventing itself as she and the other musicians played it.

The massive wooden doors of the Santa Clara church, more than two stories high, were open when she arrived; six a.m. Mass had already begun. This was the one time during the day that the church was open to the public, and she had expected to see more tourists in the courtyard, but no, the ungodly visiting hour had deterred most of them.

Through the second set of doors she could see only a scattering of people, mostly local

Andeans, kneeling in the pews. When the people rose and took their seats again, she

162 slipped in the right-hand doorway and claimed a seat in the middle of the nave. She breathed in the musty, incense-laden air and looked around her, elated: It was strange, enormously strange, just as the guidebook had said. An immense, gloomy church, nearly every inch of it – walls, ceiling, altars, shrines – covered with mirrors, mirrors of all sizes: from reflecting circles no bigger than the palm of your hand, to window-sized panes of glass. Even the priest roaming around the front altar, chanting in Latin and

Spanish, was part of the disorienting spectacle, his embroidered robes glinting with mirrored patches, shallow basins that caught the diffused light bleeding through the doorways and tossed it up to the three-story-high coffered ceiling, down the ancient, pearl-colored floors, across the faded murals, to the tight-lipped Virgin of Belen and her attending wooden saints. No wonder five hundred years ago, the Inca people had abandoned their intricate tapestries and farming terraces and had flocked here: it was a paradise of spinning, eerie luminescence, and the natives, who had never seen a mirror before, were bewitched. As the Spanish had known they would be. As she herself was.

She was not one of the devout, so she could violate the precept that the man she loved, a lapsed Catholic, had urged her to observe: Don’t turn around during Mass.

Otherwise, she might turn into a pillar of salt, he’d said half-laughingly. But he was not here to stop her. So she turned. And it was huge and ominous what waited at the back of the church: a floor-to-ceiling gate of heavy iron stakes, black, rusted and pointed at the ends, bound to a black, mesh grill, impossible to penetrate with the eyes, and behind that, unseen, a choir of cloistered nuns. Las hermanas del convento de Santa Clara. All the sisters took a vow of silence. The only time they were allowed to utter a sound was at

Mass, where they sang each day at sunrise, trapped behind a metal grate.

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“Es a travese el cuerpo de Christo…. de la sangre…” Someone coughed behind

her.

And then the singing began. A startlingly bright sound – high-pitched, vibrato-less

-- like a thousand questing angels. A sound to make you prostrate yourself on the dirty marble floor and give yourself up to God, Jesus, Mary, Mama Pacha, Buddha, Jahweh,

Allah, Elohim: whatever. Names, all names, for the Nameless One. Sounds borne of silence, returning to silence. Out of habit she raised her hand and unconsciously traced the thin scar on her chin, nearly invisible after twenty-four years, but still sensitive to touch, all except for the very front, a span about the width of a fingertip. The feeling had never returned there. Her long, black hair, still thick and unruly, was now flecked with gray. She was thirty-eight years old. She would be thirty-nine in two weeks.

The sound filled her, lifting her up. The mirrors were blinding. Around her the believers and the nonbelievers alike bowed their heads to the four corners of the earth.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Barbara R. Drake was born in New York City and raised in New Jersey and

Massachusetts. A classically trained oboist, she studied at the Boston University

Tanglewood Institute and at Ecoles D’Art Américaines, in Fontainebleau, France, and

attended the Hartt School of Music before receiving her B.A. in English from SUNY

Purchase. She lived for some years in New York City where she worked as a writer and

editor before she moved to Miami Beach, Florida. She has published fiction, poetry and

creative nonfiction in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Purchase Poetry Review,

Iris and the Portland Review. She also has written extensively on the arts and travel for

publications such as the Village Voice and Caribbean Lifestyles and has co-authored

several travel books on Guatemala and South Florida. In 1997 she was awarded an

Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the Florida Cultural Affairs Council. She

now lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, photographer Jorge Vera, and their son Samuel.

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