GOD BLESS THE CHILD

A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of a . The requirements for The Degree OXo 2-0'k Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

by

Dylan Brie Ducey

San Francisco, California

January 2016 Copyright by Dylan Brie Ducey 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read God Bless the Child by Dylan Brie Ducey, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San

Francisco State University.

frotessor of Creative Writing

Department Chair of Creative Writing GOD BLESS THE CHILD

Dylan Brie Ducey San Francisco, California 2016

God Bless the Child is a collection of short stories peopled by characters that attempt to connect with others, often to disastrous effect. These characters are mothers, men, young women, girls, all trying to find their place in the world. A couple awakened by gunfire in the middle of the night, a young woman whose boyfriend is an immigrant, a mother struggling with postpartum psychosis, a working mother who finds herself at a birthday party on Mother’s Day.

I certify that the annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written

:ee Date ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

I am grateful to Joy Williams for her line edits on “Hush Little Baby,” and to the editors of The Pinch, WhiskeyPaper, Pear Noir! Gargoyle, decomP, Transfer, New Delta Review, Gravel, and Monkeybicycle, where some of these stories first appeared.

Special thanks to JPD for childcare.

TLG, HRG, TZG: You are the world to me. TABLE OF CONTENTS

All the Things You Are...... 1

Two Polish Parties...... 17

Even When You Think I’m Not There...... 36

The Acolyte...... 54

Black Faux Fur Coat at Caffe Trieste...... 58

God Bless the Child...... 64

Hush Little Baby...... 83

How To Be an American Mother...... 101

The Woman and the Baby...... 112

39th Street, Oakland...... 117

The Black Leather Pants...... 123

Jaconita...... 125

Twelve Is Hell...... 145

Effacee Like Me...... 150

v 1

All the Things You Are

“Andrzej Sczcypiorski,” I said, tossing back a third shot of vodka. I’d brought out my Polish shot glasses, special.

“The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenmann,” Sutton said without pausing. “I liked it.” She glanced at her watch. It was 11:30 and raining torrentially. I supposed I should offer to walk her home, but I felt lazy. Besides, I wanted her to stay with me. Quickly I thought up another quiz item to distract her.

“Bruno Schulz.”

“The Street of Crocodiles. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.”

“You’re good. But here’s a hard one. Hanna Krall.” I was stalling.

Sutton rolled her eyes. I could see she was tiring of my game. “The Subtenant. I have to go,” she said, getting up out of her chair. She had a special talent for leaving just at the moment when I felt I had to have her.

“Thanks for the drink,” she continued, and moved smoothly about the room, gathering her bag and jacket. I sat helplessly, wanting to mess up her hair and then comb it, feeling its sleekness under my fingers. Instead I followed her to the door, and unlocked 2

the deadbolt for her. The most I could manage was to draw her to me and kiss her. The thinness of her chest against mine made me lose my breath. She tolerated the embrace, then slid out of my arms into the hall. “Bye,” she said, smiling. I stood watching while she disappeared down the stairs, wishing my apartment had a window on the street so I could watch her walking in the rain.

I went back inside and listened to the ringing of the telephone. I knew it was

Clara, so I let the machine answer it. When Clara spoke in her soft, hesitant voice I turned down the volume. She was my girlfriend.

I had never cheated on a woman before, and didn’t know what one did at this point. In brief, I’d seen Sutton in an evening class, admired her for a month, looked her up in the phone book and, incredibly, she’d spent some time with me. But I wanted more.

I consulted my friend Tad on this matter.

“I’m going to tell Sutton I’m seeing someone already,” I suggested, expecting him to say this was a good idea.

“No, is bad idea,” he said in his heavy Polish accent. “You falling for younger woman, Stan. To her you are furniture. Chair maybe. She sit on you, then throw in garbage.”

“But Tad,” I protested, “How do you know all that? You’ve never met her!”

“Stanislaw, you trust me, yes? Is mistake to tell new girl about Clara.” 3

I did not like what he had said, so I ignored it and began planning my confession to Sutton. First I took Clara out to lunch, and casually mentioned that tomorrow night I had to go to a boring lecture with Tad, and that I would be home late. “Okay,” she said.

No resistance there. I walked her back to the head shop where she worked, right next door to my apartment building, and she went behind the counter to smoke some pot. I took a hit too, and then kissed her and went back up to my apartment.

I went straight for the telephone and dialed Tad’s number. He wasn’t home; he was at the Slavic Department at school. (He was writing a dissertation, which is what I would have been doing too, if I’d turned in a competent Masters thesis.) I left him a message: “Tadeusz, The Girl is coming over tomorrow night, but if Anyone asks, I’m with you at the Russian lecture. Got it? Djienkuje bardzo, czezc.”

The next number I called was Sutton’s. It was 2:00 on a Thursday, so of course she was at work. I spoke to her machine: “Sutton, angel. Come to dinner tomorrow around seven? I will provide the edibles and potables. Just bring your self.” I was a little stoned. I was also unemployed, so I had a lot of time to kill. The next thing I did was to run back downstairs and buy a 120-minute cassette at the record store, so I could make a tape for Sutton. I wanted her to hear some of the jazz I enjoyed so much.

My telephone rang late that evening, and I was engrossed in writing a villanelle, so I let the machine pick it up. Sutton left a message: “I might be a little late, but I’ll be there.” Then Tad called and I picked up the phone. He berated me for only a moment, and 4

then said “You are like brother, Stanislaw. I am alibi for you, but remember about furniture.” After talking with him I played Sutton’s message back more than a few times.

I liked her voice. Also her hesitation, the difficulty of winning her over. Though her prettiness accounted for at least fifty percent of my motivation.

I looked around my studio, trying to see it as Sutton would. It was very small, with wood floors, radiators, big windows and not much sunlight. More importantly, there were no scarves, lipstick, lotion, jewelry, no feminine accoutrements; it was a “bachelor apartment,” as I’d said to her once, pointedly. There was just a bed, bookcases, stacks of books, desk, chair, cds. I did not own a television. Had Sutton noticed that? Had she noticed that I read the Village Voice? Had she noticed my pathetic lack of manners and how I stared at her? Doubtless.

At 8:30 the next evening Sutton sat on a stool in my cramped kitchen with her legs crossed and her hand wrapped around a glass of merlot. She looked so unsuspecting in her little black minidress and tights. She hadn’t said anything about how clean my place was: I’d spent the day dusting, cleaning the bathroom, straightening the stacks of books. I had tossed crumpled pieces of paper around the desk, to show that I’d been working, and I’d tacked the new villanelle up on the wall. All this activity was, I must add, unprecedented (I had cleaned for no woman before her), and she didn’t notice any of it.

“What is this you’re feeding me?” she asked, as I handed her a plate. 5

“Why, this is my effortless, casual lentil salad,” I said. I brought out bread and butter, then I sat on a stool next to her and raised my glass. “To you,” I said. She nodded and drank, as though men toasted her every day. I was sitting close enough to watch her chew, close enough to bump knees. It felt so intimate, eating with her. This was a thousand times more thrilling than any meal I’d had with Clara.

“Are you nervous?” Sutton said.

“Yes, actually.”

“Why?”

I supposed that now was the moment. I took a long drink of wine and refilled both our glasses. “I’m seeing someone. I’m not single.” There. I’d said it. Sutton looked at me for what seemed like an entire minute, as though she were waiting for me to finish my thought.

“Really,” she said. “Well that’s interesting.”

“I wanted to be honest with you,” I said, feeling magnanimous, and wondering when she was going to react.

“You don’t act as though you’re seeing someone.”

“Well I

“You looked me up in the phone book, and we’d never met.” 6

“Yes, I did. But I’m really seeing someone.”

“What’s her name?”

That’s going a bit far, I thought. I had to leave something unsaid. “Oh, I shouldn’t reveal that,” I said. As if in response, the answering machine clicked. Fortunately I’d turned the volume down and the ringer off. I looked sideways at it. The red button was flashing. Had Sutton noticed? She had her head tilted and was reading the titles of the books on the bookcases.

“How long have you been seeing her?” she asked the books.

“A while.”

“A short while or a long while?”

I was starting to get irritated. “We don’t need to discuss these details.”

“You mean it makes you nervous,” she said. “And besides, you were the one who brought it up. Can I have some more wine?” She finished the bottle, and at midnight kissed me and left. She tasted of merlot. What did the rest of her taste like, I wondered.

The next day I thought about the evening’s events. Sutton had asked the name of the person I was seeing, so maybe she did care about me. I could hardly stand to contemplate it. I felt so compatible with her. But it was impossible to tell from her cool exterior how she felt; I had to decipher her phrases and gestures. She would never do 7

something obvious, such as throw her arms around me. Instead she would throw me a look.

She was not home when I called her. It was Saturday night, and I thought perhaps she was out with her girlfriends. I left a message without saying my name, figuring that she knew my voice by now. “You wanted to know her name. It’s Clara.” I hung up, and turned on the ringer of my telephone so I’d hear it when Sutton called.

But she did not call that night. When I realized that she might decide not to see me again, I panicked. Maybe she thought I didn’t feel strongly about her. I hadn’t told her, after all. Should I just leave Clara, I wondered. What we once had was now dissolved into disinterest, at least on my part. I had to let Sutton know.

I went to a florist on Sunday afternoon and bought a colossal bouquet. It had just about every flower I’d ever heard of, except red roses. I took the bouquet, and the jazz cassette, and I walked in the rain to Sutton’s apartment. The downstairs door was open a crack, so I went up to the second floor, treading on the ratty carpet. I paused in front of

Sutton’s door, and I heard a low murmuring. When I knocked, the voices stopped but no one came to the door. I left the bouquet there with the cassette stashed inside.

My buzzer rang later that day, and I felt a thud in my chest. But it was only Tad.

“Come up,” I yelled into the intercom. He came in, shaking his hair like a wet animal. “Is 8

raining dog and cat,” he said, grinning at the idiom he’d acquired. “Stanislaw, how it’s going?” He clapped me on the back.

“Women are troublesome,” I answered, and gave him a plate of lentil salad. The telephone rang, and Tad and I looked at each other. “Do you think is for me?” he asked, laughing with his mouth full. We listened while the machine clicked. “Why you not answer?” he asked. He didn’t know how close I was to my machine. I hesitated, then picked up the receiver. It was Clara.

“Hi baby,” she said. “Am I going to see you tonight?” I lied and told her I wasn’t feeling well. While I talked to her about her job at the head shop Tad made faces at me and cleared his throat a couple of times.

“Is that Tad?” she asked. “I’ll let you go, baby.” Tad and I drank vodka shots that night and listened to Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Tad told me that Clara loved me and that I shouldn’t waste my time on Sutton. I listened to him with one ear and kept the other one free in case the phone rang.

Several days went by before I saw Sutton again. I sat with her at a pub down the street.

“Thanks for the flowers,” she said. “And the tape.” 9

“You’re welcome. I thought maybe you never got them.” She didn’t respond to this, so I changed the subject. “Did you listen to the tape yet?” She shook her head absently, and then there was an awkward silence.

“I haven’t seen you in almost a week,” I said. “I wanted to.”

“Me too. When I talk to you, it’s like...you understand me.” She mumbled this into her pint glass, not looking at me. I felt a wave of love for her. She was like me - shy and introspective. Maybe that was why we got along.

“I more than like you, you know.”

She looked at the table. “You have Clara.”

“I have Clara, but she doesn’t have me. I mean, I don’t want to have her.” I hoped

I was making myself clear. Sutton said nothing, and she looked through me, as if an interesting object were suspended just behind my head. Still, when she moved over to my side of the booth and spoke seductively about iambic pentameters I thought perhaps tonight was the night. She walked me home, holding my hand, and at the door of my apartment I invited her in. She shook her head, her lips verging toward mine. The kiss was devastating, all the more so because she then turned and left.

When my buzzer rang the next day I was sitting in a chair thinking about my inevitable merging with Sutton and how glorious it would be. Yes, divine. I assumed it was Tad at the door, so I buzzed him up without speaking into the intercom. To my 10

shock, I opened my door to find Clara. She had never before dropped by without calling first. “What a surprise!” I said, and I meant it. I offered her the chair, but she refused to sit. Then she told me she thought we should take a break. Stop seeing each other for a while.

“I’m serious,” she said. I had not anticipated this development. I had been under the impression that she was crazy about me, yet here she was leaving me and she didn’t even look upset. When I asked her why she just shook her head and wouldn’t say. Christ, maybe she was having an affair.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I offered weakly, but she said she had to go.

I paced my apartment, feeling sick. It was comical, in a way. I had failed at my lone attempt to have an affair, and now, by virtue of being single, I couldn’t cheat on anyone. How did experienced cheaters manage it, I wondered. Out of habit I picked up the phone to call Tad, but then put it back down. I intended to tell Sutton I was officially single, and I knew Tad would loudly disapprove. In fact, he would probably call in the

National Guard to prevent me from doing it.

I told Sutton my news at a Thai restaurant, waiting until our dinner was on the table.

“How are things?” Sutton asked.

“I’m single,” I said, as casually as I could. 11

“Really. I’m surprised,” she said. She balanced her chopsticks in her left hand, and dipped into her soup for a piece of chicken. She didn’t look at me.

“It was a mutual decision. We had just grown apart,” I said. I didn’t want her to think I’d been dumped, nor did I want her to think I’d left Clara for her. Sutton was skittish, and either of these impressions might have caused her to flee.

“So you and I are both single,” I said, pressing on. “What timing!” Now Sutton stopped eating, chopsticks in mid-air, and she was wearing her ‘I’ve heard enough’ look.

“You don’t have to say anything now,” I said, hastily backtracking. “Just think about it and we can talk the next time we see each other.” At this Sutton’s face relaxed, and the chopsticks went back into her mouth. Later she held my hand, but when I walked her back to her apartment she didn’t invite me in. I’d have to be patient, I told myself.

She liked me, I knew. She’d told me she could talk to me.

Tad dropped by the next day like a tornado. He dashed into my studio, panting.

“A^Mrwa,” he muttered, collapsing into the chair. “I’m dying, was running here all the way.”

“Tadeusz, such language.” I chuckled, feeling momentarily better.

He staggered into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. “Stanislaw, what Sutton looks like?” 12

“Very short brown hair, thin, blue eyes. Ravishing.”

“What means-”

“Piekny. Belle.”

“I saw her at cafe with man. Talking with faces close together. They kiss.”

I felt ill. “Jesus Chrystus. Are you sure?”

“She stand in the line to take a coffee, and this man, he call to her. ‘Sutton, get cafe au lait for me.’ Like he is king of Poland.” Tad shook his head, disgusted.

“What did he look like?” I felt a morbid curiosity.

“Tall, blond, big biceps. Chest was big too. This guy stays at gym a long time.”

“Tad! Whose side are you on, here?”

“Is truth Stanislaw! You have some fat!”

He was right. But I moved quickly past vanity and to the point: If Sutton were still at the cafe I could confirm this story for myself.

We sprinted the three blocks and arrived at the cafe out of breath. It was a big place, but all the tables were taken and people were prowling with their cappuccinos, waiting for an empty seat. Some of those seated were staring at large textbooks. The 13

place was hardly conducive to study, however, as it was intolerably noisy. It was like a nightclub.

“Where were they sitting?” I said loudly to Tad. He pointed discreetly at a table by the window. A professor-type in a tweed jacket was sitting there, talking solemnly at a girl with waist-length blonde hair. She didn’t speak, but nodded a lot. Tad looked at me and shrugged. He scanned the downstairs while I searched the upstairs for Sutton’s minidress and cropped hair. It must have been a fast cafe au lait, I thought, because she had vanished already.

Or she had never been at the cafe at all. Tad was late to class, so there wasn’t time to tell him I thought he might have made a mistake. His English was terrible, after all. He had probably thought he heard the name Sutton, when the man had actually been saying

Susan. Tad had seen a black mini-dress and assumed the worst. Too, I reasoned, even if it really had been Sutton, the man with her could have been a relative or a friend. Yes, perhaps a friend visiting from out of town, who she hadn’t seen in years. She’d probably tell me all about him the next time I saw her. The whole episode got me thinking, though.

I realized I should tell Sutton how I felt about her. Not tiptoe around the issue anymore, not try to hint at it with a bouquet. I’d ask her out for a drink. Then I’d tell her I loved her. 14

I dialed her number on Saturday night. It had been days since I’d heard her voice, and my stomach got all jumpy. The telephone rang four times, and I began to be concerned that her machine was going to pick it up. But she answered, breathless.

“Hello?”

“Hello, it’s Stan! Are you busy?”

“Well, yes.” Her voice sounded tight.

“Oh. With a person?” In the background I heard Cassandra Wilson singing “Shall

We Dance.” Sutton was finally playing the tape I’d made for her.

“Yes.”

“A male person or a female person?”

“Stan!”

I recovered quickly. “I’m sorry, I just want to see you. Do you have time later?”

“I have to go.” She mumbled this so I could hardly hear.

I felt her slipping away and I panicked. “You’ll call me? Say yes.” In the seconds before she spoke I heard three things: First a man’s voice in the background calling

Sutton’s name, then the singing of Cassandra Wilson, and finally I heard plates being laid 15

down hard on a counter. My heart shuddered. She was with a man. She was making dinner for him.

She said the perfunctory yes, and then she hung up. Shaken, I stood with the receiver in my hand. I pictured her standing in her kitchen, soon to be sitting at the table with the unknown man. Who was he that she would have him in her house and cook for him? What was she cooking? And my god, my tape was playing: “It Never Entered My

Mind,” Miles Davis. Then “Gone with the Wind,” Art Tatum and Ben Webster. Then

“All the Things You Are,” Art Tatum and Ben Webster. I had hoped she’d be thinking of me when she listened to the tape; I had not imagined she’d play it for someone else. And whoever he was, he couldn’t appreciate the sequence, the nuance, of the music. He was a cad, he didn’t understand her. She was making dinner for this stranger but she’d never made dinner for me. I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck.

It was dark in my studio. I pushed the chair over to the window, close enough so I could look up and see the starless sky. It was 9:00.1 could not stop thinking about her. It was ridiculous, but I hoped that what had transpired had not, actually, transpired. “Round

Midnight,” Enrico Rava. hat will she be doing when “Round Midnight” plays, I wondered. That was the last song. If the man in her apartment is just a friend, then she’ll be alone soon, I mused. She’ll be tired, there will be the dishes to wash. I considered calling her again, just to check in. She might want to tell me what she thought of the tape. 16

I’d have to make another for her. Considering she was making such good use of this one.

The phone rang, interrupting my reverie. I let the machine pick it up. 17

Two Polish Parties

This was a Polish soiree in San Francisco, at the apartment of an economic refugee. Amber was observing two huge Ukrainians who had crashed the party; they drank from bottles of Stolichnaya, hurled plates from the kitchen window, and lurched around leering at the women. The bigger of the two gazed with interest at Amber; she was wearing a black minidress with black cowboy boots, and her legs were bare. The

Ukrainian took a pink rose from a vase and marched up to her with the flower clenched between his teeth. He looked ridiculous but also menacing. As Amber scanned the room for her boyfriend, Darek, the Ukrainian spoke in slurred Russian and the pink rose fell to the floor. In a moment he had Amber pinned with her back against the wall. His hand lingered in her short hair and she shrank from his touch, realizing he was so drunk that he wouldn’t be able to catch her if she ran.

Now a man appeared, not handsome, but dressed in a grey suit that hung elegantly, and smelling faintly of cologne. His brown hair was thinning. He was the oldest person at the party, maybe in his early forties, and a great deal smaller than the

Ukrainian.

“What you want with this nice girl,” said the man, a hint of irritation under his heavy Polish accent. “You go in kitchen, try vodka called Wybarowa.” And to Amber’s 18

surprise the Ukrainian left with a shrug, only hesitating when he got to the door of the kitchen.

“ Wy-ba-ro-wa,” repeated the man, and the Ukrainian nodded and disappeared.

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure. Is trick I learned in prison.” He picked up the pink rose and handed it to her, then gestured at her empty glass. “I get you a drink.” Amber watched him go off to the kitchen, and she sniffed the delicate scent of the rose. Soon the man reappeared with a bottle of red wine, and refilled her glass nearly to the top.

“Djienkuje. ”

“Prosze. My name is Aleksander.”

“I’m Amber.”

“Enchantee.” He took her hand and kissed it.

Amber smiled. The younger Poles she knew never kissed a woman’s hand; probably they thought the gesture was old-fashioned. But charming, she thought.

“So, what you are doing at Polish party?”

Amber was about to speak when the front door opened and in walked the answer to Aleksander’s question: Darek and his friend Roberto, laden with grocery bags. The 19

women turned their blonde heads in Darek’s direction. He looked like a hybrid of Slav and American - tall, with the unmistakable wide face of a Pole and the muscles of a fitness-obsessed American. Amber knew he was the object of many desires. But this time, for once, Darek did not acknowledge the attention. Instead he shot Aleksander a withering look and spoke to Roberto, who took the bags and headed for the kitchen. A blond titan in a bomber jacket, Darek came and stood next to Amber.

“With whom are you conversing, Amber?” Darek enunciated each word as if tasting it, his accent hardly noticeable compared to Aleksander’s. He didn’t bother to look at Amber when he spoke, but glared down at his rival.

“Just nice Polish gentleman,” smiled Aleksander. “Protecting beautiful girl from psycho Ukrainian.” Darek raised his eyebrows. Seconds later his expression darkened, as if he suspected the line about the Ukrainian was a ruse constructed exclusively to slight his manhood. It was incredible how everything, ultimately, was about Darek’s manhood.

Across the room the watchful Roberto threw up his hands - what can we do with Darek?

Darek is simply Darek.

“Well, I won’t leave her alone again.”

Amber breathed. At least Darek wasn’t going to attack Aleksander. She didn’t think she could stand it if he did that. Aleksander looked amused and a bit appalled. He gazed at Amber as if wondering “American girl, why you choose this cro-magnon?” 20

Amber wanted to answer. She also wanted to sit opposite Aleksander in a restaurant and drink red wine while listening to his accent by flickering candlelight, but as she concocted this image Aleksander smiled and stepped away. No! Don’t leave!

Amber thought wildly. I want to tell you! I didn’t choose Darek, it was the other way around.

A year ago she’d been on the bus when she saw a man’s reflection in the window, watching her from a few rows back. He followed her off the bus, calling “Excuse me!”

Days later they sat in a noisy cafe, surrounded by undergraduates with huge textbooks.

Darek himself studied philosophy. In 1985 he’d slipped across the Communist border into West Germany, and then come to the U.S. as an economic refugee. As he spoke to

Amber he took off his jacket, revealing muscular arms. She tried not to stare. Men like this, she thought, wanted girls with long hair, girls who painted their nails and wore makeup and didn’t read books. Amber was the opposite of these girls, she felt. When

Darek touched her hand and said “I want to see you again,” it was as if someone had turned off the background noise in the cafe: Conversations halted, the espresso machine ceased its hissing, the music stopped. And so she thought she wanted him, too.

At the party, Amber studied Aleksander’s languid pose. He was across the room enjoying himself, oblivious.

“Amber.” Darek touched her face. “Who is he, mloda? Why are you looking at him like that?” 21

“Like what?”

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

“Dariusz, relax. Nothing happened.”

“Kocham q i e He kissed her mouth. “Let me see your eyes, Amber. Look into my eyes. Tell me.”

Amber didn’t want to say it. Still, she knew the words would reassure him.

“Kocham qie"

“In English.”

“I love you, Darek.”

The longer they lived together, the more overbearing Darek became and the more

Amber wanted to get away from him. “Don’t get any fatter,” he’d told her today as he lifted weights in the living room, “because then I might not be attracted to you anymore.”

And if Darek wasn’t harping on what her body weighed, he was harping on where it went: He couldn’t stand it when she left the apartment alone. “You’re too independent,” he sputtered. “Someone might abscond with you.” At first Amber was amused by this, since Darek had acquired an especially good word, searching through his Polish-English dictionaries. But he was not joking. There was a clerk at the grocery store with whom

Amber talked sometimes, and when a series of empty messages appeared on the answering machine Darek became convinced she was having a secret liaison with the 22

clerk. “He’s in love with you, Amber,” he declared. Amber protested, but after that Darek went with her to the store and steered her only into lines staffed by female clerks.

At the party, Darek kept his muscular arm around Amber for the rest of the evening, only loosening it when he went to find his jacket. While she waited, Aleksander approached and slipped a scrap of paper into her surprised hand. “Was nice meeting you,” he said softly. Then put a finger to his lips and turned away. On the scrap of paper was scrawled a telephone number and his name. Later, Amber took the scrap of paper from her coat pocket and hid it, folded, in the back of her jewelry box. It was the sort of thing Darek would look for. The word jealous was not strong enough, though she’d seen him flirting with other women plenty of times, looking them up and down.

On Thursday Amber was home alone, pondering the name and number. She was nervous just dialing, as if Darek might somehow intuit this and rush home. Aleksander’s telephone rang four times.

“This is Aleksander. Please leave the message.”

Amber hung up. A minute later she called back to hear the deep and drowsy voice. Aleksander was like an extravagant dessert she’d been waiting an entire year to order. Say, a mouthwatering tiramisu. Amber had been subsisting on moldy bread, and now that she’d glimpsed dessert she was outraged. Why had she been deprived so long?

Why hadn’t she tossed out the moldy bread? 23

It sounded so easy, so straightforward. Just toss out the moldy bread. Ju^t leave

Darek. But this was as complicated and daunting to Amber as the thought of climbing

Mount Everest. Darek took up so much time and energy. She felt depleted, as though he had turned her inside out and consumed all that he found.

Two weeks after the first party, Darek and Amber were invited to another one by a painter named Jolanta. Amber wanted to go. She was dying to dance and drink and meet people. But Darek said he wanted to stay home. The seventh anniversary of his emigration from Poland had passed recently, and he was moody and melancholy.

Luckily, Roberto called.

“Czesc Amber! You guys going tonight to party of Jolanta?”

“Yes! Here, talk to Darek.”

Darek paced the living room with the receiver against his ear, his rapid Polish punctuated by shouts and laughter. Amber busied herself with the dishes, knowing that

Roberto could talk Darek into anything. Finally Darek hung up the phone.

“Well, kochanie, Roberto is going to Jolanta’s party. So I think I want to go, too,” he told Amber. She did a happy little dance and ran into the bedroom, changing into stretchy black pants, an orange mohair sweater, and huge fake pearl earrings she’d gotten at Woolworth’s. 24

As Amber and Darek walked to Jolanta’s place in the cool of the early evening, a red Fiat convertible passed them, blowing autumn leaves up into the air. Amber watched the car speed down the street, and Darek suddenly took her hand. He kissed her, looking into her eyes and holding her against him. Then he picked up red and golden leaves from the sidewalk and stuck them in the pocket of her coat, warming his hand on hers. Warmth spread through Amber’s chest. Darek was capable of kindness. He had a human inside him. And on those occasions when he let the human out, he invariably did something beautiful or charming and Amber was touched. When had she realized that there were two Dareks? Not at the beginning, of course. Darek had been hell bent on seducing her, or he may have believed he loved her, so he’d given the human free rein. She’d existed then in a perpetual state of wonder: His habit of bringing home an entire cheesecake in a pink bakery box. The thirty-minute showers he took in a pitch dark bathroom. How he loved to lie next to the speakers while Amber spelled out Beatles lyrics for him. That was before. Now when some kindness surfaced, she was grateful, nearly overwhelmed.

Jolanta’s apartment was crammed with people. The large Roberto had arrived already, and after lifting Amber up off the floor and kissing her on both cheeks two times, he worked the room busily, flirting with all the single women. Jolanta introduced Amber to a tiny blonde named Marzena, who was a sculptor, and they drank red wine and discussed Jolanta’s paintings, mostly female nudes which hung on the white walls of the apartment. 25

“Form of woman is big image for me,” Jolanta told Amber. “Are you painter, too?”

“No, but I write stuff. Poems about women, sometimes.” Amber pointed at a painting of a woman with dark hair whose fingers rested on her collarbone. “My poems are exactly like this.”

Jolanta nodded. “I want to read sometime your poetry.”

“Would be interesting to do some collaboration,” said Marzena. “What you think?”

On her way to the bathroom Amber passed through the crowded kitchen, and there was Darek talking with a tall brunette whose hair fell to her waist. They were standing close together and drinking vodka, and the girl gazed at Darek as though he were Poland itself, Christ of nations. She saw Amber then and flashed her an unfriendly look of recognition and turned back to Darek. Whatever, thought Amber. If she knew what a pain he is, she might not keep refilling his glass.

But on her way back through the kitchen, Amber saw that the brunette had her hand on Darek’s shoulder. Amber felt her eyebrow beginning to twitch. It was as though she were suspended above the kitchen, watching someone else’s melodrama unfold. She felt calm, and coldly analytical. The question to ask was not “What will Darek do next?” but “What won’t he do?” Amber grabbed a bottle of red wine, shut her eyes and felt her 26

way into the other room, steered only by the people she kept bumping into. While uncorking the wine, she asked Marzena about the tall brunette, and Marzena said “Aha.

You mean Marya. She is too much sometimes.” Amber refilled their glasses, and they drank first to poetry, then to painting, and finally to Marya. Because Darek is too much, too, Amber thought, and his kitchen dalliance will be a good excuse for me to leave him.

Roberto emerged from the bedroom, looking rumpled.

“Your hair, Roberto,” Amber said.

“Tak, Roberto,” said Jolanta. “What you are doing in my bedroom?”

“I am busy man,” said Roberto, pulling a comb from his pocket. “Where is bathroom, Miss Jolanta?”

A few minutes later he came back, looking alarmed. He took Amber aside. “Did you go in kitchen lately?”

“Yes. I’m exploring my options,” replied Amber.

“What?”

“Tak, Roberto! I saw Darek in there with Marya. But what can I do?”

While they talked, they were joined by Roberto’s friend, Roman. He told Amber about how he was exporting used American cars to Russia. 27

“Is big business,” Roberto said. “American cars better than Russian. But Roman must have bodyguard in Russia.”

“Is true,” Roman shrugged. “I keep three armed guards with me. Russian mafia controls all business; actually mafia wants to kill me because I am so good businessman and make so good money.”

“Really,” said Amber, trying not to think about what was happening in the kitchen. “I think Roberto needs a job.”

“7M,” offered Roberto. “I am big guy.”

As Roman lifted his glass and was about to toast Amber for her good idea,

Roberto’s eyes widened. There was Darek standing in the doorway of the kitchen, his eyes flashing, his t-shirt half-untucked. He rushed over to Roman.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“What? Kurwa, am having glass of the wine! What is problem?”

“My problem is that you want to fuck my woman!”

Jesus. Were there no limits with Darek?

Marya appeared in the kitchen doorway, her lipstick smeared, teetering on her high heels. She looked at Amber with a peculiar mixture of defiance and shame. The room was silent except for the tinny Polish pop music, and Darek’s shouting. 28

“Well? Answer me, you asshole!”

“Darek-” started Amber.

“Shut up.”

“Can you relax, Dariusz?” attempted Roberto. “We just talking. Just having the nice conversation with Amber.”

“Oh, and you probably want to fuck her too,” Darek countered. At this, Roberto’s face hardened.

Darek looked at Amber coldly. “If you want him, here he is.”

He reached for Roman’s collar, uttering a string of Polish expletives including moje dupa, a particularly stunning insult aimed at Amber. She looked at the floor, horribly embarrassed. Everyone in the room knew what that word meant. It was worse than calling her a bitch.

Now Darek had the panting Roman hanging by his collar against the wall.

“Help!” gasped Roman.

Roberto sighed and stepped forward with resignation, his fists out. “I no want doing this, Dariusz.”

“Fuck you.” 29

Roberto looked stung, but he kept his fists up. Amber was tense with the effort of pretending she didn’t care that Darek had made a fool of her. And after this preposterous scene he would expect her to come home with him, and she could not possibly do that.

She could not.

In the midst of the melodrama there was a discreet knock at the front door.

Everyone heard it, because everyone was waiting breathlessly for Roberto to swing. The guests looked at each other, and then everyone looked at Jolanta, who suddenly remembered her role as hostess.

“TakT

“Aleksander mowil”

The doorknob turned slowly, and Aleksander peered inside. He was dressed in black tails.

“What is happening? I interrupt meeting of Solidarnosc?” he asked. Someone pointed a finger and Aleksander saw what they were all staring at: Darek doggedly holding up Roman by the collar, and Roman looking strangled and exhausted. Roberto finally put his fists down.

“I was at opera tonight,” said Aleksander, obviously amused and speaking to the party as a whole. “You know, opera is so boring. I think Polish party is better for entertainment.” 30

A muffled snicker was heard near the window. Several others laughed openly, and

Darek’s stem face reddened.

Aleksander looked at Darek. “What you are doing with this guy?” he asked finally. “Hanging the laundry?” Roars of laughter followed this, and Roberto laughed so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes.

Darek gave Aleksander a nasty look and released his grip. Roman fell to the floor and hauled himself up so he could lean against the wall. “I’m thirsty,” he croaked. The guests stirred and murmured. Marzena ran to the kitchen and returned with a full glass, and she sat next to Roman and rubbed his neck. Meanwhile Darek looked at Amber, expecting her to come to him, and she looked away.

Roberto leaned down to Amber. “What I should do?” he whispered.

Amber breathed in. “Could you please get him out of here?”

“I take him to my apartment.”

“Yes. I like it.”

“Who take you home?”

“I’ll take me home. Don’t worry, Roberto.”

Darek leaned against the door, sullen and humiliated. He looked worn out, and one of his running shoes was untied. When Roberto spoke to him he shook his head and 31

fixed his gaze on Amber. His eyes implored her. Come to me, they said. You will come to me because in spite of my faults you still love me. You long for me, you cannot conceal your desire.

Amber averted her eyes. She only had to walk ten feet, and she’d be in his arms.

And they would go home and he would make skillful love to her and she would postpone once again the inevitable parting. But he would be nice for a time, as he was when she’d met him. She wanted that badly. She wanted the old Darek back.

Amber looked at Darek again, wavering. So much depended on her next move.

He seemed to sense her internal struggle. He held out his hand, smiling, coaxing. Just ten feet, Amber. I will hold you when you get to me. I will take you home and I will make you mine.

Amber locked her hands together. “No,” she said, hearing her own disembodied whisper. She thought her hands would cease shaking then, but they shook more violently.

It was as though she’d lifted the top off a pot of boiling water. Darek’s hand was still outstretched as if she hadn’t spoken, as if she’d have to say it a dozen times before he believed it. Though she didn’t believe what she’d said, either. She wanted to kiss him and to kill him. She wanted everything and nothing.

Amber forced herself to move. She got her coat off a chair and walked toward

Darek, who smiled a tentative winner’s smile. Then from the coat pocket she took out the 32

autumn leaves he had given her only an hour or two ago, and she placed them on his palm. Looking at his confused, beseeching face made her feel sick, and when Darek opened his mouth to speak she walked past him.

Inside the bathroom she closed the door and locked it, exhaling as she heard the thwack of the deadbolt. She was a little drunk. She stood in front of the huge mirror, and saw the dark circles under her eyes. Ha, she thought. I look as hollow as I feel. She sat on the toilet for a few minutes, listening to the party noises and flipping the pages of

Jolanta’s Polish fashion magazines. After five or ten minutes she turned the lock gingerly and opened the door by inches, ready to slam it if Darek was there. But he was not, and

Amber made her way through the crowded kitchen to the edge of the living room, where people were dancing and drinking as if nothing had happened. Jolanta and Marzena saw her, and came over.

“How you are doing?” asked Jolanta.

“Better.” Amber looked warily about the room.

“He is gone, Darek” said Marzena. “He go with Roberto.”

“I was afraid he would stay.”

“Roberto said no,” said Jolanta. “Maybe is better you can sleep on my couch, if you want.” 33

Someone put Amber’s favorite Maanam record on the record player, Derwisz I

Aniol. The lilting music filled the room, and at that moment the party seemed perfect. She looked across the room, and there was Aleksander waving at her. He came over, the scent of his cologne floating around him.

“You look hungry. We go out somewhere?”

“That would be great.”

Amber took her coat and Aleksander opened the door for her. He pointed at a door on the second floor as they walked down the stairs.

“That is my apartment. I am manager of building, so I have the apartment for free.

I take care of tenants, fix the broken heater, and other things. During week I work as research chemist at laboratory.”

“So this means you can let me back into Jolanta’s apartment later?”

“I have master key, hungry girl.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Why are you so calm when faced with big, crazy guys?” 34

“Because I seen the worse things. Darek is young guy with ego who wants fighting everyone. He was never in the prison, never he saw the friends killed for

Solidarity. He never was hiding from secret police, never his apartment was searched.”

“So you were a dissident.”

Aleksander nodded. “All my friends, too. I am thirty-nine years old, but I am old man. Darek, I think, left Poland when he didn’t like the martial law. He try to become

American, and decides big thing he can do in new country is threaten small woman who weighs nothing.”

“Hey, now. I don’t weigh nothing.” Amber looked down at herself, trying to see what Aleksander saw.

“Jesus Chrystus, this guy is animal. Does not know how to behave.”

Amber knew he was right, but she felt unable to speak. They were in the small parking lot now, standing under streetlights.

Amber looked at Aleksander, standing there in his tails. She did not care that his face was lined and that he was too old for her; at the moment she cared only that he was nice and that he was going to take her out. She felt suddenly ravenous. “I want to eat something,” she said. “I want a cup of coffee.”

Aleksander pointed at a little red car at the end of the lot. 35

“We go in Fiat to quiet restaurant.”

Amber recognized the Fiat as if it were a significant item from her previous or future life. Then she remembered: She’d seen the car when she walked to the party with

Darek, when it drove by and the autumn leaves blew in its wake. Then Darek had given her the red and golden leaves but she didn’t want them, did she. She didn’t want them.

She sank into the worn leather seat, and Aleksander started the car. 36

Even When You Think I’m Not There

Amber arrives at Halina’s house, which looks as though it is going to collapse at any moment. Peeling paint, warped boards, broken windows. Amber climbs the stairs with their mildewed carpet; the walls are dirty and dusty and a dank smell hangs in the air. On the second floor there is a refrigerator in the corner of the large hallway, and innumerable boxes and stacks of newspaper. There is a communal bathroom, and there is no kitchen, not upstairs anyway. Other people rent rooms here, mostly poor students and a few illegal immigrants. Halina is legal, a student, and very poor.

Amber knocks on the door of Halina’s room. The door is slightly ajar, and Amber peers in. Halina is sitting at her desk in tiny pink satin pajamas and white mules. Her hair goes halfway down her back, and is blond and permed. She looks like an eastern bloc

Barbie.

“Czescl Kurwa, you are looking good! You lost so much weight, god damn it!”

Amber smiles ruefully as Halina takes a hairbrush from the desk drawer, which is crammed with mascaras, lipsticks, eye pencils, creams, and nail polishes in many hues.

“I am cow compared to you!” Halina laughs. When she says “compared,” it sounds like “Compare Ed.” 37

“I am going to tell my brother you are goddess with hot body!”

Darek is Halina’s brother, and Amber’s ex-boyfriend. It was Amber who broke up with Darek, and he took it badly. There was drama. Darek stood in the street, screaming.

He put his fist through a wall. There were other things. Things that Amber cannot stand even to think about, much less try to articulate. Anyway she is fine now. She can have it both ways: She can be broken up with Darek and remain friends with Halina. So she tells herself.

Amber has brought two glasses of coffee. She got in the habit of drinking coffee from a glass when she lived with Darek. He mostly drinks tea, and always from a glass.

Amber sets one of the glasses of coffee on the desk. “For you, darling.”

“Djienkuje, darling,” Halina trills. “You are so kind to poor refugee.”

“Oh, please.” Amber rolls her eyes. Halina likes to play up her status as an economic refugee, but Amber knows that her parents are educated, cultured. A doctor and a lawyer.

Amber sits on one of the single beds. It is Darek’s bed. He lived here for a while when Amber kicked him out of her apartment in November. Amber knew he would do this. Halina is Darek’s only relative in the United States, so the two of them lived together like sardines until Darek couldn’t stand it anymore and moved across the Bay to

San Francisco. 38

Now he is gone, but a lot of his stuff is still here in Halina’s room: A bookcase, notebooks and papers, a bicycle, five Polish-English dictionaries. He left these very same things at Amber’s apartment when she kicked him out. He kept saying he’d come back for them, but Amber knew he just didn’t want to admit he wasn’t living with her anymore. He wanted to feel as though he could come back when he wanted. His friends kept calling Amber’s number because they didn’t know Darek had moved out. The calls from Janusz, Roberto, and Frank didn’t bother Amber, but finally she had her number changed so Darek himself would stop calling, so she could sleep at night without the phone ringing and the answering machine going off. Darek, with his incessant shouting messages. I’m going to get you, and so forth.

Seeing his possessions here in Halina’s room gives Amber the distinct sensation that Darek is present. Waiting in the hallway perhaps. It is a sinister effect, but also thrilling. Thrilling because he always had that effect on her: He wooed her and caught her up in romance. But sinister, because once spumed, Darek became a menace and made her life hell. He used to wrap his arms around her and say without irony, “I’ll always be with you. Even when you think I’m not there.” She had felt so loved when he said this, but hadn’t realized that he meant it literally. Even for the after. He wanted her to have this hangover forever, as her punishment for leaving him, or for having been so stupid as to fall in love with him in the first place. Still, right now Amber’s heart has only sped up; it is not galloping. Her hands are only trembling a little, not shaking violently. She is able to sit more or less calmly among Darek’s possessions and talk with his sister. Two 39

months ago she could not have done this. This is proof, she thinks, that she can be friends with Halina in spite of Darek’s whims. He forced her to leave him and to barricade her doors, but he cannot force her to give up her friend.

“Amber. Kurwa, you are in coma with eyes open.” Halina is staring at her, shaking her head.

“What?”

“I said, what you think of the red lipstick?”

“Oh. It’s a bit much.”

“Is too much? But I am too much, nieT

“Tak. You are too much.”

Two hours and a lot of grooming later, Halina and Amber are seated at the bar of a trashy nightclub Amber. The darkness is broken only by two strobe lights that spin hypnotically. Pop music blares from several massive speakers, and the place is crammed with horny men and tightly clad women. Halina does fit in here: She is wearing an impossibly small miniskirt, a tight red shirt, and red spiked heels. Amber has on her usual going-out clothes: black minidress, black cowboy boots. She spent maybe ten minutes getting ready, to Halina’s sixty minutes.

Halina raises her glass. “To us in the discotheque, babe!” 40

“To you, Halina. I am here only in body.”

Halina looks at her approvingly. “And is great body, Amber. So sexy. All the guys are checking you out. I have to tell you what my brother said.”

Amber could say no. She could say ‘No, Halina, I don’t want to hear it.’ But she says nothing.

“He said to me on telephone that he really love-ed you. I said, then why you do all this stupid things to her? Why you scare her and make her call police? I say this is not love, Dariusz. He says no, I love her. Other American girls are stupid, do not read the books or newspaper, are not smart like Amber.” Halina pauses, watching Amber closely.

“Is strange. Sometimes I think he believes it, that was really the fate for you and him to be together.”

Though they come from Halina’s mouth, the words are Darek’s own. Amber looks at Halina’s wide face and sees Darek. She hears Darek’s voice. “So that was why he tried to break into my apartment, because he loved me so much?”

“Kurwa, I know was crazy what he did. Was craziness of passion. I don’t know. I thought before that you should marry with my brother, because I could see you really love-ed him. And he chang-ed with you. You gave him the home, and he didn’t have that for so long time, since he was in Poland with our family. With you he was not the jerk like normal. But then he just went back to old Dariusz. Old shitty behavior.” 41

Exactly. Old shitty behavior. Amber left Darek because she had to. She could no longer stand how badly he treated her. She knows she cannot go back to him, but she still aches for him, for the person she thought he was, and this is what she doesn’t say to

Halina. But her friend must know it on some level. Why else would Amber be hanging around with her, if not for the suggestion of contact with Darek?

They sit, watching the bouncing bodies on the dance floor.

Amber is drinking steadily and silently, so Halina tries to change the subject.

“I’m sorry I talk like this. Is difficult position for me, because he is my brother and you are my friend. You were first American I met here. Remember, you took me to the school for the English classes? Kurwa, I was so fucked up, I didn’t have any English in this time. I was so crazy when first I came here. But you took me to the parties. You explained to me the American manners, how Americans are different from the Polish people. This crazy American kultura.”

Amber nods. Halina was a mess when she arrived from Europe. On her second day in Berkeley she showed up at Amber’s door all tricked out in hot pants, high heels, and a skin-tight shirt. She wanted directions to the shoe store on Telegraph Avenue.

Amber made her come inside the apartment and tried to explain that Halina couldn’t go out dressed like that, that people would think she was a prostitute. But she didn’t know 42

how to say “You might be attacked” in Polish. Finally Darek came home and unleashed a string of Polish expletives, and he made Halina go home and change clothing.

Halina continues, speaking with emotion. “But the thing Darek said about you is true. You are not like American girl, I think you are European really. How you are this way, Amber? How you can understand us? Is incredible. I never met other American like you in three years since I come here. Is like you know us, is like you are us. I think you are Polish girl in other life.”

“Maybe I was kidnapped by Americans as an infant.”

Halina laughs merrily. But Amber is experiencing Darek-overload and she wants this conversation to be over. At least Halina has not told her whom Darek is sleeping with this week. It is always someone new.

“I wish you are with my brother Amber, but I think is better you are not. He is my brother, but he is not good person. I think he is, how is the word, niemoralnyr

“Immoral.” Amber cannot disagree.

They finish their drinks and as they are sitting there looking at their empty glasses, the inevitable happens: Two men appear, a blond one and a tall one. Amber is both relieved that the Darek conversation is over, and dismayed that she now must witness Halina in her true element - seducing a hapless man. Thank God she can be real with me, Amber thinks, because around men she is unbearable. 43

“Can we buy you another?” asks Blond, his eyes locked on Halina’s chest.

“I think so! You are first in the line!” giggles Halina.

“What will you have?” asks Tall, looking at Amber.

“Scotch,” Amber says. “On the rocks.” She studies Tall and Blond dubiously.

Blond asks Halina if she is from around here. It’s clear that he suspects she is not.

“I am from Poland,” Halina says slyly. “Nice Polish girl from small village.”

Amber snickers. Halina is from Warsaw.

“Wow.”

“Yes, darling,” coos Halina. “Do you want to dance with me?”

Amber is amused by this performance, but only for a moment because Halina is about to leave her alone with Tall and even he looks alarmed at this prospect. Amber is not in the mood to entertain anyone.

Blond helps Halina down off the bar stool. Amber watches them bleakly as they disappear onto the dance floor. What is she doing at a trashy nightclub with Darek’s sister? She’s lonely. Halina is her friend, the only one who understands what she went through with Darek. Darek, the love of Amber’s life-so-far. The womanizer, the stalker.

Amber’s lover and her hater. 44

Tall hands Amber a drink.

“Thanks,” she says. He is not bad looking. She hopes he doesn’t try to talk to her.

“Are you from Poland, too?”

“Ha. No, I’m American.”

“Really? You seem so much like her, and you have an accent too.”

Oh, great.

Amber’s voice has changed to accommodate Halina and other friends who are not fluent in English. Darek’s English is flawless, but for the others Amber speaks carefully, enunciating every word and omitting the cumbersome ones. This is the most obvious sign that she has been immersed in another culture, albeit in her own country. Poland was just a place near Russia before she met Darek. But then she was living with Poland - the language, the mannerisms, the food, the dark humor.

Tall continues his blind attempt at conversation. “Do you have any hobbies?” He looks at her nervously; he doesn’t want to be there any more than she does.

“Books,” says Amber laconically. “I read books.” She looks down into her glass, but can still see the strobe light zinging little tiles of light across the ceiling and walls and floor of the nightclub.

“Reading, yeah, that’s cool.” 45

Amber finishes her scotch. She scans the dance floor, hoping to see Halina and

Blond, but they are not there. She tells Tall she’s going to the bathroom and heads for the door instead.

She spots Halina and Blond in the parking lot, kissing next to a grey Jaguar.

Halina turns and waves gaily at Amber, then she writes something on a piece of paper and hands it to Blond. She pushes him back toward the nightclub with her little hand.

Blond walks slowly past Amber, grinning as though he has just been given a million dollars. Amber goes over to the Jaguar.

“He said this is his car,” Halina says. “What means jag-you-are?”

“It’s an expensive car.”

“Aha. He think he will get the sex because he has the nice car. Kurwa, he is cockroach like all other guys.”

On the way back to Berkeley, Amber asks Halina what was on the piece of paper she gave to Blond.

“Phone number.” replies Halina.

“Halina! What about Lug Nut?” Lug Nut is Halina’s boyfriend. He lives with

Halina, though he isn’t home much because he’s in the Navy.

Halina gives Amber a bored look. “Lug Nut went away on the ship. He is stupid.” 46

Halina drives several blocks in silence. Then she looks sideways at Amber.

“Ah, something I have to tell you. Phone number I gave to the guy was not mine.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Halina laughs nervously. “On the paper. Was your phone number.”

“Mine! How could you do that?”

Halina takes on a slightly righteous tone. “I could not give my number because I don’t want him to know I have boyfriend! When he calls, just say I am not at home. Then call me, and I call him back.”

Amber is amazed at Halina’s cunning. “I can’t believe you,” she grumbles. “What am I, your answering service?”

Halina pulls up in front of Amber’s apartment. “Just for a little while, baby. You can answer telephone, no? You always answer anyway the telephone. Why not do it for me? Your good friend.”

Amber is exasperated, but it is one o’clock in the morning and she can’t stand any more wheedling. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it. But just this once! If it happens again I’m going to tell Lug Nut.” 47

On the way up the stairs to her apartment, Amber remembers the time that Darek accused her of cheating on him because she had a conversation with the clerk at the grocery store. “What do you see in him, baby?” he whined.

“We were out of bread and milk, that’s what I see in him,” Amber replied, incredulous. But Darek ignored her protests and searched the apartment for incriminating notes. Finding nothing, he kissed her begrudgingly.

“Okay, baby. I guess I believe you, then.” But thereafter, he would stand in a long line just to avoid that particular clerk.

The morning after the night club, Amber is reading the paper when the telephone rings.

“Hello, may I speak to Halina?”

“She’s out right now.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back? This is Mark, from last night.”

What a sucker. “Any minute now. I’ll have her call you.”

“Thanks. You know, my friend liked you. He waited for you to come back to the bar, but you disappeared. Maybe the four of us can go out sometime.” 48

“Yeah, why don’t we do that,” says Amber. Right. In the next lifetime maybe.

She dials Halina’s number.

“Hello?” Halina is breathless, as though she has just run up the stairs.

“It’s me. Idiot-Head called.”

“Rrrreally? What he said about me? That I am innocent Polish girl from small village, that he will save me from the komunizm?” She giggles, and Amber hears the telephone fall with a crash onto the floor. “Sorry darling. But what he said really?”

“Oh, my god. Just call him.” Amber is longing for a second cup of coffee and she is disgusted at her role as the Polish Refugee Answering Service.

“What he said about other guy?”

“He said the other guy liked me and we should all go out.”

“Kurwa, I knew it. Other guy was really handsome and he likes you. This is always story with you Amber! All the guys want you. I am little bug, you are Marilyn

Monroe.”

Amber makes another cup of coffee and takes it and the newspaper out to the back porch. She is absorbed in reading when Blond calls again. He wants to know why

Halina hasn’t called him back yet. Then Halina calls, to ask Amber if Blond has called.

“Yes, he called. And yes I am fed up.” Amber is getting testy. 49

“But-”

“Enough! I’m not one of your little boyfriends, Halina.”

Halina is suddenly repentant. “Kurwa, I’m sorry. Is true, you are not the doormat.

I take care of it. Is okay? You not hate me?”

“No, I don’t hate you.”

The following Saturday, Amber is reading The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno

Schulz. Schulz was a Polish Jew, an art teacher who refused chances to escape the ghetto during the war, and was finally shot by an SS guard. Amber knows his drawings also, of cruel dominatrices with boots and whips, eager to inflict pain. His prose is dreamlike, hallucinatory, and Amber is so absorbed in it that her ringing telephone is an annoyance.

“Can you go for the coffee right now?”

“Now? This is 911 or what?”

“I have problem I want to discuss with you.”

“Hmmmm. Is this about Blond Idiot Head?”

“Yes, is really important. Amber, prosze, meet me at cafe at two-thirty. You will come to Cafe Europa?” 50

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

Amber has never known Halina to be on time, so she reads until 2:40, then she walks six blocks north to the Cafe Europa. She used to go there often with Darek when he was still in school. They would go with all the Polish friends on the weekend, or she would meet him there after his classes.

At the cafe Amber stands in line and gets a cappuccino. She sugars it and steps outside into the sun. The place is crowded with students, every table is taken. Halina is sitting at a little green table at the edge of the cafe. She beckons to Amber. “Czesc,” she calls warmly.

Amber starts toward her. The sun is very bright. She sees something green on the chair opposite Halina’s. The sun is hitting Amber right in the eye. She squints. Then she sees the green thing for what it is: It is a bomber jacket.

Amber looks at Halina, who is still smiling. A tall blond man approaches Halina’s table from the other direction. Amber understands now. This is not the man from the nightclub. This man is wearing his usual white t-shirt and jeans and running shoes. He has an olive complexion and a square jaw, and stands six feet and a few inches tall. He has very broad shoulders. He is so strong that with little effort he can shove a woman aside with one hand, and with the other hand lock the door so she can’t get out.

Amber feels the hair on the back of her neck stand up. 51

Darek sees Amber and in the first moment he looks surprised and confused. It’s obvious that he was not expecting to see her here. He was expecting to have a coffee with

Halina. But in the next moment Darek’s blue eyes gaze into Amber’s, and he looks her up and down as if they are alone in a room with the shades drawn. Desire flashes over his face and he looks optimistic. I’m right here, he seems to say. Just a few steps and you’ll be mine again.

Only a few moments have passed but it seems like forever.

Halina smiles nervously at Amber with her most innocent “small village” look.

“Come sit, guys,” she says encouragingly. “Why you are standing there? Sit and talk.”

Amber’s hands have started shaking. The cappuccino sloshes in the cup and spills into the saucer and onto her hand. Is it fear she feels now? Or fury? Whatever it is, it has bubbled up to the surface and threatens to explode.

“You lied to me,” she says, and she’s talking to Halina. But then both Darek and

Halina talk at the same time.

“I didn’t, baby,” protests Darek. “I never lied to you.”

“But,” protests Halina. “Only I invite you to cafe!”

Amber shakes her head. “I trusted you. And you do this?” She waves her hand in

Darek’s direction. 52

What a pair they are, one tiny and blonde in her blue mini dress, the other a blond giant with big muscles in his white t-shirt and jeans. It’s like they’re the same person, each furthering the sick goals of the other. And what is Amber to them? Why do they want so much from her and what will they give her in return?

Amber feels exhausted by all this drama and her impulse is to get away from it.

She wants to leave. It’s simple, right? Just turn and go and leave the drama behind. It’s easy. But she doesn’t turn. While Darek and Halina watch, she backs up a few steps. But her movement is sudden and she bumps hard into a busboy. She drops the cup and saucer, which crash to the ground and shatter. Now people are shifting in their chairs, turning to look. Her drama on display.

“Sorry,” Amber says under her breath. “I’m sorry.” To whom is she apologizing?

She doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. Her anger has receded for the moment. Now there’s just embarrassment and confusion and something wet and sticky. She has gotten cappuccino all over her jeans.

The busboy looks worried. It’s obvious that something is wrong. “Are you okay?” he whispers.

“I’m fine,” Amber assures him. “Thank you.” She exchanges glances with him and smiles. “Really.” 53

It’s clear that the busboy doesn’t believe her, but what choice does he have, he nods deferentially and starts to clean up the mess. He picks up the pieces of the broken cup and saucer and goes to get a mop. Halina and Darek have been watching all this time and now they are ready to help. Halina offers Amber some napkins. Darek offers Amber a chair. 54

The Acolyte

Darek wore Boss, and I don’t remember it except that it was loud. It was

Fahrenheit that really got to me, that was Roberto’s scent. The smell of it would float through a crowd, down a hallway, out a window. It smelled warm and luxurious and sexy. Roberto wore it every day.

Roberto and Darek were tall, blonde, blue-eyed. Roberto was from Gdansk, Darek was from Warsaw. Darek was better-looking, with a square jaw and a flawless body.

“Body of a god,” his sister used to say, with a voluptuous shiver. “Torse de gladiator]”

Roberto was taller, bigger, and a little chubby. He had a slight double chin and a baby face, and he was a proficient womanizer. Before he came to stay with us I knew only his happy voice on the telephone or answering machine. If we didn’t pick up the telephone, he would yell on the answering machine: “Czesc, Pan Darek, Roberto mowiV Or sometimes, when we were lazy: “Guys! Hey, get up guys, kurwal You always in bed, too much sex, guys!”

Roberto came to stay with us in the summer of 1991, and he quickly morphed into

The Houseguest Who Wouldn’t Leave. He became our constant companion. At first he did not have a key to the apartment, and so he would show up directly after I got home from work. He parked on the street and waited for me in his truck, in the late afternoon. I would come home exhausted at 5:30 or 6:00, and haul myself up the stairs into the 55

broiling second-floor apartment. No sooner had I kicked off my shoes, dropped my things on the floor and poured myself a glass of cold water then the doorbell would ring. It never failed. I’d go back down the carpeted stairs, open the old creaking door, and look up at the towering figure of Roberto grinning down at me. “Hi!” he would bellow.

“How’s eet going?” He usually was carrying a bag of groceries, and wearing a pair of black sunglasses that made him look like an enormous insect.

For Darek’s twenty fifth birthday, Roberto and I took him to a Polish restaurant in

Mountain View, Eugene’s. We got all dressed up, me in a blue minidress, Roberto with a liberal dose of Fahrenheit, and Darek in his dusty Communist-era suit coat, and we got in

Roberto’s blue Bronco. Roberto drove fast, giving the impression of total relaxation as he held the wheel languidly with one hand, a cigarette between his lips. I watched the speedometer with morbid fascination as it climbed to ninety miles an hour. Then suddenly it dropped to sixty. I glanced up at Roberto to see what had caused this. He was looking out the window at a little red MG convertible in the left lane. It contained a brunette in a black miniskirt. I could see that her legs were very long, since we were up high in the Bronco and she was closer to the asphalt in her MG. Roberto sped up until we were right next to her. He took a drag from his cigarette and smiled at her. She smiled back. They did this little dance for several miles, until finally Roberto pointed at an exit sign. The brunette shrugged, and Roberto stepped on the gas and got in the far right lane.

To my amazement, she followed him. I looked at Darek: He was watching intently, as though he himself had a stake in the outcome. 56

Roberto pulled into a gas station, and the red MG followed in less than a minute.

Roberto got out and went over to the car to make his transaction, which consisted of him smiling a lot and looking casually at the ground and talking. Then he came back to the

Bronco for a pen and paper. “Jackpot!” he whispered triumphantly. The conquest. Darek nodded respectfully at Roberto. This was a man-to-man exchange, as if I was an invisible girlfriend and not actually there in the Bronco with them. I felt sick and wondered if

Roberto had ever observed Darek doing the same thing. Or was Darek the acolyte in this equation? But I was hopelessly in love with Darek so I put it out of my mind.

The brunette called Roberto back, but he lost interest quickly. He moved on to other women, on other freeways, in nightclubs, bars, streetcomers. When the three of us went out Roberto would disappear, trotting after a pair of stocking-clad legs. Darek and I would park ourselves at the bar. He would set me on his lap or keep a proprietary hand on me as a sign to other men. After one drink I would joke to him that that I was going to tattoo his name on my ass. After two drinks I would press my face against his chest and make him put his hand under my shirt. After three drinks I would despair. “I love you,” I would whisper. “I love you awfully.” Darek suffered my devotion, while looking up and down the bar to see which women were sitting alone. Eventually Roberto would show up again, and we would review the evening’s accomplishments and phone numbers before staggering drunkenly back to the Bronco. 57

After sleeping on my couch for three long months, Roberto left at the end of that summer and moved back to Poland. He was a cad to other women but not to me, and I missed him. Now Darek and I were alone all the time. He watched other women and didn’t bother to conceal it. He spent hours in the bathroom, spraying perfume and doing his hair and admiring his own reflection. I told him I loved him. I told him I hated him.

I never saw Roberto again, but sometimes I caught the scent of his perfume on the street or in a restaurant. I’d look for his tall figure in the crowd, hoping, but he was only a phantom presence. 58

Black Faux Fur Coat at Caffe Trieste

You: Brunette, about 35, no wedding ring, high cheekbones, blue eyes, black faux fur coat. Cappuccino. You’re sitting by the window with your friend (thin man in blue jeans, glasses, no wedding ring). There is a manuscript on the table, maybe one hundred pages.

Me: 45, 5’9”, brown hair thinning on top. Brown eyes. Sitting alone with a cup of black coffee and a copy of “Story” by Robert McKee. My relationship status is complicated. I don’t like children. I hope that you don’t like them. My sister has three.

She’s crazy now. She wasn’t before. I don’t care for her children, and they know it.

I should be reading “Story” by Robert McKee but I don’t even bother to open it.

Jean gave it to me. She said I should use this time productively and try to write a screenplay. I have never been interested in screenplays. I mentioned to her that I was interested in writing, but what I meant was fiction or poetry. I didn’t mean that I would try to write something and sell it. But as far as Jean is concerned, it’s all about money.

She doesn’t understand that some people do things just for enjoyment. Not that I’m one of those people anymore, but still. I could be. Maybe one of these days I will be again.

I try to catch your eye but you are involved in your conversation with the thin guy. I think that you are talking about Keats, because I distinctly heard you say “Alone 59

and palely loitering.” Is this possible? Maybe I was having some sort of aural hallucination. Can I tell you something personal? I know that poem. “La Belle Dame sans

Merci.” I took a poetry class in college. I wanted to major in English, but my parents said they wouldn’t pay for a useless degree. I had to do something practical, they said, so I majored in accounting. I stashed my poetry books behind my accounting textbooks so my roommate wouldn’t see them.

I do not like the thin man because I think you are sleeping with him. He is not offensive, not wearing an NRA t-shirt or anything like that. I just assumed because you’re here with him in the morning. You’ve probably just made love with him on his futon on the floor in his sparsely furnished poet’s apartment. I’m seething with jealousy and tracing the outlines of your breasts with my eyes. Your breasts are small. They might be larger if you weighed more. I noticed that with Jean: When she gained weight, it went straight to her breasts. Don’t get me wrong, though; I actually prefer small breasts.

If you’re wondering, I did not meet Jean in college. I met her at work, several jobs ago. She is an accountant, like me.

You are wearing a black shirt, it might be wool, it might be a sweater. It’s a little tight. You are very thin. I’m a little concerned about this, and you have not eaten anything. I think you should go up to the counter and get a pastry, maybe several pastries.

Black wool sweater, tight jeans, black coat. You look European, the way you are dressed, sort of casually glamorous. I am desperately attracted to you and you’ve glanced at me 60

twice, maybe three times. But I know you are going to leave with the thin man and I won’t have the nerve to speak to you, you will walk out of the Trieste and out of my life

forever, etc. I’ve been watching you for thirty five minutes. I wonder do you dress that

way at home, do you go around in tight jeans and a faux fur coat or maybe just the coat

with nothing underneath.

My relationship status is complicated. Technically, I am single. Meaning I am not

married. I have commitment issues. That’s what Jean said. Then she threw my jacket out

the window, she was so angry. Jean is a serious woman, a good woman. But she doesn’t

look like you. She doesn’t wear her clothes like you do. She doesn’t read Keats. But, Jean

has said that one of the things she likes about me is that I took that poetry class. I am

different, she says. She may be right, but it doesn’t matter because I look the same as all

the other accountants: I wear a suit to work, I get regular haircuts, I don’t have any

tattoos. I look like a normal guy. I always wanted to get a tattoo, though. I did get one of

my ears pierced when I was seventeen. My girlfriend and one of her friends did it with a

needle and an ice cube. It hurt like hell, during and after. Then I came home past my

curfew and my father was sitting in the dark living room waiting for me. He flipped on a

light and saw the earring and told me to turn right around and get out of his house. My

father was a Green Beret in Korea. I wasn’t inclined to argue with him, so I went back to

my girlfriend’s house and knocked on her bedroom window. The next day I took the

earring out. It healed pretty fast. Now you can’t see any evidence that my ear was ever

pierced. It was, though. I had my rebellious moment. 61

The thin guy is standing up. This is exciting. Is he leaving? He didn’t say goodbye to you. Maybe he’s going to the bathroom. I don’t want to turn around to see what he’s doing; that would be too obvious. You’re sitting alone. You’re looking out the window at the fog and I want to talk to you. I want to pass you a note, write down my number, write down your number, look down your shirt. Oh god, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, I wouldn’t really look down your shirt. I like women, I respect them. God, who am I kidding. I’m 45 and unmarried, my mother has written me off and thanks my sister every day for her grandchildren. Obviously I’ll never come through for her.

Remember I mentioned before about my argument with Jean and she threw my jacket out the window? Well, we were arguing about children, the fact that I don’t want to have them and the fact that Jean does. We argued first about the children and then about marriage. Since we’re not married. I haven’t asked Jean to marry me. She wants me to, of course. Everyone at her company (it’s not my company anymore since they laid me off) kids her that she’s “shacked up” with me. Anyway I told her that I don’t like children because they’re messy and loud and I just don’t see the point. Look at my sister, I told her. She is barely recognizable anymore. She has huge circles under her eyes, and she’s fat, and always, always in a bad mood. It’s to the point where she’s permanently in a bad mood, which means she’s crazy. She had three children two years apart and she and her husband never have enough money and they discuss this everywhere they go. Invite them to dinner - they’ll talk about how they’re broke. Go with them to the grocery store - 62

they’ll engage the clerk in discussions about how they’re broke. Like the clerk cares, and

I’m pretty sure they have more money than he does anyway.

I’m starting to think you don’t care about the thin guy. You nod when he speaks, you look him in the eyes but you’re not beaming at him. I read that somewhere, in a short story. “She beamed at him.” The beaming meant that she had fallen for him and was unable to conceal it or didn’t want to. She didn’t care if he knew. Anyway you are not beaming at the thin guy. Maybe he’s the one who wants you. That would make sense, you’re the attractive one. He’s...whatever. He’s thin, he wears glasses.

Me, I’m beneath your notice, you can’t be bothered. The thin guy is funny. I think you’ve known him for a long time. I really should open the Robert McKee book but I don’t care. It was Jean’s idea, she bought it for me after I lost my job. She said now you can write that screenplay you’ve been talking about for the past two years. I can’t seem to write it though, and I can’t get through the book. That’s why I came here to the Trieste, to get out of my apartment and try to break through this writers block. Which is a curse, by the way. And I think you understand that, especially given the manuscript on your table, bound by a big pink rubber band. I noticed that when I sat down at this table.

I should add that I sat down at this table because it was close to yours. There were other tables. But I was emboldened when you looked at me for a few seconds as though 63

you recognized me or knew me from somewhere. And just as I began to feel hopeful with that rushing feeling of hope or lust or whatever it is, craziness, then you shifted your eyes back to the thin guy. And I realized with a thud that you hadn’t noticed me at all, you were looking through me, or at someone else. I just don’t find Jean exciting. I suppose I never did. She’s an accountant, you know. It’s really boring, what she does. She doesn’t bring it home, she doesn’t talk about it much, but still, it eats at me. She is fundamentally dull.

Jean is supporting me. I probably haven’t mentioned that until now. She’s been supporting me since I was laid off, and she has never griped about it or pressured me. She knows how bad it is out there, there aren’t any jobs. And I don’t really want to live with

Jean, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t love her but there it is, there’s the situation. I have someone who loves me and I should appreciate that. I should. It’s just that all that goes right out the window when I look at you in your black coat and your earrings, your tight black shirt, I feel so strongly about you though I’ve only known you

for forty five minutes. You’ve said some things about writing, I’ve been eavesdropping desperately. I sort of wonder what you think about Robert McKee, I’d like to ask you. Or the thin guy, though I have a feeling he wouldn’t be sympathetic. He’d think I’m some

kind of nut.

I won’t have the nerve to talk to you and you’re going to leave soon. 64

God Bless the Child

Maria let herself into apartment B and laid her keys and bag on the excavator

shovel, which was set cleverly on its side like a giant end table. The shovel belonged to

Maria’s roommate, Dora. She had gotten it at a junkyard.

Maria took off her high heeled shoes and tiptoed up the wooden staircase. At the third floor landing she paused for a moment, curious. In the three months Maria had lived

in the loft she had never seen Dora so much as fry an egg, yet there Dora stood, cooking

energetically and wielding a wooden spoon amid the competing scents of melted butter

and nutmeg. Maybe Dora had a secret life. Maybe she was actually a gourmet in the guise

of a barefoot bohemian, whipping up hollandaise and boeufbourgignon when everyone

else was at work.

Gourmet or not, Dora had offered to make dinner for Maria tonight. Politeness,

and a sort of bafflement, had led Maria to accept the invitation. Why, she wondered,

would Dora bother?

Now Dora turned from the counter and smoothed her vintage polka dotted dress.

“Hi, Maria!” she exclaimed. “You look so professional!” 65

“Thanks,” said Maria, looking down at her black pants and sweater. It was her standard attire for her editor job in San Francisco. She was also a poet, and ran a reading series at a local restaurant.

Dora fiddled with the knob on the hot plate. “Gosh dam this thing!”

“We could get a stove, you know,” said Maria. “Ever thought about it?”

“A stove? But that’s so.. .what’s the word?” Dora waved her hand around.

“Bourgeois”

“That’s it! You are so smart. That’s what I tell everyone about you.”

“Mmmm. Is there any wine?”

Dora pointed to a bottle on the counter. “I hit the jackpot at Canned Foods.” That was the grocery outlet just across the railroad tracks from the warehouse, where one could procure stale ravioli, moldy cheese, and dented cans of everything imaginable.

“Ooh. Chianti.”

“It was three bucks,” said Dora, as she crossed the kitchen to the bathroom. “Can you believe it? It’s pretty good, too.” She lifted up her dress and sat on the toilet, leaving the door wide open.

“How was work?” she said sweetly from her perch on the toilet. 66

“Hectic,” replied Maria, averting her eyes and shuddering on the inside. Why couldn’t Dora shut the door like everyone else? Why the exhibitionism? It was as though

Dora was challenging her, daring her to say something.

Maria poured herself a glass of wine and sidled over to the enormous window, looking out at the commute traffic on Interstate 80. She could almost see the exhausted expressions of the drivers on the University Avenue off-ramp. One of them might be her own father. He rose at 5:00 a.m. and left home at 6:00, stopping for black coffee and a donut to get him through his 30-mile commute. Her father was like Sisyphus, she thought. No matter how many times he made that drive, he had to do it again the next day.

Maria drank from her glass. “I am so glad it’s Friday,” she said to the window. “I thought this week would never end.”

“I know how it is,” Dora replied. “The bookstore is a madhouse! Well, I don’t have to tell you.”

Dora worked two days a week at her father’s bookstore. In exchange for this he paid Dora’s rent and gave her an allowance. Then there was the Jeep, a gift for her twenty-fourth birthday. Dora never had to worry, but she wasn’t even aware of this. That was the beauty of never having to worry.

Maria thought of her friend Jack, a free-verse poet who worked for Dora’s father at the bookstore. Last year he threw a party at his studio apartment and invited all the 67

bookstore employees - except Dora. However Dora had managed to find out about the party and at 10:00 she appeared at Jack’s door.

“Jack,” she said with acid triumph. “Thanks so much for inviting me.”

Jack blanched. “Oh God,” he said. “Well, you’re here now, so welcome to my palatial digs.” He introduced Dora to Maria, and then fled for the kitchen, leaving the two women alone. All Maria knew about Dora was that was notorious for trying to lord it over her father’s employees. But here at Jack’s party Dora seemed charming. She told

Maria she was a singer, and gave her a business card with her photo on it, in black and white. “Dora,” it read. “Jazz Standards.” Surely Jack was wrong about Dora. Maybe it was just the usual work tension between the two of them; maybe the job was the problem.

A few months after Jack’s party, Dora called Maria. “Strangest thing,” Dora told her. “My roommate moved out in the middle of the night. I woke up and she was gone!”

Then she offered Maria the now-empty room in her loft. Maria had been wanting a change, and this was because of Richard. He was her ex-boyfriend. He called twenty or thirty times a day and he also showed up unexpectedly. It was getting so Maria was afraid to answer the phone and the door. She could never relax in her own apartment. So when

Dora called about the room, Maria saw a chance to escape. She gave up her apartment and moved into Dora’s loft. 68

Three months later, Maria had gotten to know Dora a little too well. Dora pestered her about the rent, weeks before it was due. As for housework, Dora had high standards and a lot of free time. She would make up a schedule - mopping on Tuesday, vacuuming on Thursday - and, perversely, would write Maria’s name on the schedule during times she knew Maria would be at work. And Maria found that that, although Dora sang in a beautiful throaty contralto, she suffered terribly from stage fright and was prone to bursting into song at unexpected moments. Over coffee at 8:00 a.m. she would suddenly start belting out “I’m Old Fashioned” and expect Maria to listen and applaud, but she couldn’t bring herself to get up on stage and sing for an audience of strangers. It was a shame, Maria thought, because Dora was a good singer.

Lately Dora had been complaining about Jack. “It takes him two hours to inventory the poetry section,” she said. “Two hours! I’ve never done it, but I’m sure it shouldn’t take that long. I keep my eye on Jack when I’m at the bookstore. He’s lazy.”

Maria had no idea how long it should take to inventory the poetry section. Still, she was skeptical. Dora had never worked a forty-hour week in her life, so who was she to judge Jack? For his part, Jack had told Maria that Dora wanted to install a machine so the bookstore employees could punch in and punch out. “Like it’s a factory,” Jack said.

“Thank god she’s not the boss.” 69

Maria turned from the kitchen window to see Dora emerging from the bathroom.

Her dress looked uncomfortably tight, and she paused to re-fasten a button. Then she sailed back to the kitchen counter and put the finishing touches on the pasta-like something that was simmering on the hot plate. With a flourish, she set two mismatched plates on the green dinette table.

“Dinner is served!” Dora proclaimed, giggling. “I love saying that.”

Maria sat down and raised her glass. “Well, here’s to you for cooking.” She really did feel grateful that she didn’t have to make her own dinner. Then she took a bite of

Dora’s fettucine alfredo. It was so gluey that it stuck to her teeth.

“Delicious,” said Maria, and she washed it down with a big glug of wine.

“I’m so glad you like it,” Dora said, beaming. “So, did I tell you? I’ve written some poems.”

There it is, Maria thought darkly. “You have?”

“Yes, and I want to read them. You know, in your reading series.” She wanted a reading! That was why she’d made dinner. Incredulous, Maria looked across the table at Dora. Dora the poet? What happened to Dora the singer? What happened to Jazz Standards?

Really, when Maria thought about it, it was absurd. This poetry thing was a phase for Dora. She was a poet-right-this-minute. She couldn’t give Dora a reading. And if she 70

did it would just make the other writers mad and they wouldn’t respect her anymore.

Besides, Maria’s reading series was tiny, just a small salon thing for a group of totally unknown writers. The stakes were so low, why was Dora even interested?

Maria explained to Dora that the reading series was already booked for the next four months, but Dora was undeterred. She quickly produced a sheaf of papers and set them in front of Maria.

“These are my first poems,” Dora confided proudly, her round face lit up like a candle.

She looked like she was getting ready to receive an award.

“Wow,” said Maria.

“I’ll read one to you now. Okay?”

Maria felt like screaming, but in the face of such dogged determination she also felt spineless. Resigned, she reached for the wine bottle and refilled her glass all the way to the top.

Dora got out of her chair and backed up a few steps in the direction of the staircase. She was blushing furiously. “Gosh, I feel so nervous. It’s like an audition!”

“It’s not. See, there’s no stage. It’s just me,” said Maria, hoping this would go quickly.

Dora cleared her throat. “Here goes.” 71

“This is a poem about world peace.

Peace in the world and no guns.

Because we’re all friends.

We’re all the same.

We’re all animals.

With fur.”

Maria watched the floor, waiting for the next line. Then she realized that there was no next line. The poem was over. “Well,” she said carefully. “That’s really thought- provoking.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Dora. “Do you like the part about the fur?”

Maria nodded. I hate myself, she thought. I have no courage. I am a coward.

“So, can I read in the series?”

“I will look at the calendar,” Maria said, miserably.

Dora smiled. “This is so exciting! When will you let me know?”

In desperation, Maria forked some fettucine into her mouth. “How about tomorrow? I may have had too much of this excellent Chianti.” 72

Dora giggled uncertainly. “You are so funny.”

“I get that way when I’m a little drunk.”

A look of irritation flashed across Dora’s face, but this was soon replaced by an angelic smile. “You’ll read the rest of my poems, though. Right?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I will.”

Maria read the rest of the poems later that night. They were even worse than the one about the war and the fur. So painful to read. Still, maybe she was just a snob and maybe Dora really was a poet - maybe she was more poetic than everyone else. But even if she was, Maria couldn’t rearrange her whole schedule for Dora. That would be a terrible precedent. And what would Dora want next?

Maria put Dora’s poems aside and reached for a book. As she was reading, she heard someone, or something, moaning. It sounded like an animal, maybe a cat. She tried to think who in the warehouse had a cat. Then there was another theatrical moan and

Maria realized it was coming from upstairs. It was Dora. Oh, no. No! Maria clapped her hands over her ears in disgust. Then she buried her head beneath a pillow. There were no limits with Dora. She had no sense of decorum. It was too much! 73

The morning after the fettuccine alfredo, Maria crossed the second floor landing.

As she was starting up the last flight of stairs she saw a tall man emerging from Dora’s bedroom. She rubbed her eyes sleepily.

“Goodness gracious,” the man said, as he made his way toward the stairs. “I’m

Bruno,” he added.

“Maria,” said Maria. She pulled her robe tighter.

“Oh,” said Bruno. “I wondered when I would meet you.” He looked her

thoughtfully up and down. “Dora didn’t tell me your hair was short. And she didn’t tell

me you were pretty.” He chuckled to himself.

“Urn, thanks,” said Maria.

“After you,” Bruno said, and he waited for Maria to ascend the stairs ahead of

him.

Maria went up the stairs as quickly as she could without actually running. She

needed to pee quite desperately. But instead of going into the bathroom she took a sharp

left to the refrigerator and peered in, pretending to search for something. She couldn’t

stand the thought of this complete stranger waiting for her to finish using the bathroom.

Bruno closed the bathroom door then, and Maria tiptoed back downstairs. So that’s

Dora’s new boyfriend, she thought, taking a towel and a bar of soap from her bedroom.

She slipped out the front door and headed down the hall toward the communal bathroom. 74

Dora didn’t have many boyfriends, and the last one had nearly been her undoing.

He was an animator, and Dora introduced him repeatedly to everyone in the warehouse.

At a party Maria had eavesdropped upon a group of artists who had just met the animator for the third time. “This is my boyfriend, the artist,” quipped a sculptor in a falsetto voice.

“Isn’t he cool? And I’m cool, too! I’m not just another rich girl!” They laughed among themselves as Maria listened, horrified. She pitied Dora. After that party Dora told Maria that she and the animator were going to live together, and even hinted that Maria would have to move out to make room for him. But Maria noticed that the animator came around only rarely. Then she found Dora crying over a glass of wine at the kitchen table - the animator had moved to Portland to live with another woman.

“He left me a note on the front door,” Dora sobbed. “He didn’t even call.”

On Sunday morning Maria tiptoed up to the third floor. She turned on the hot plate, but nothing happened. Then she shook it violently, and the light went on with a little click. She made a lukewarm cup of coffee, and as she turned from the counter,

Bruno came padding quietly up the stairs. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and socks.

He looked handsome. Maria hadn’t noticed this the last time. High cheekbones; black hair cut very short; brown eyes large and liquid.

“Good morning,” Maria said. She intended to go right back downstairs. 75

Bruno smiled. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Maria leaned against the kitchen counter, holding her coffee cup like a shield against - what? This calm, benign man?

“How are you?” she offered.

“I’m good,” replied Bruno. “So you must like it here. It’s great that you and Dora live together. You have so much in common.”

What did Bruno mean by that? “Yeah,” Maria said vaguely. “We get along really well.”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“What?”

“I mean, do you have a boyfriend?” But when Bruno saw the look on Maria’s face, he backtracked. “Oh, that’s too personal. I’m sorry. I just thought if you did have a boyfriend, the four of us could go out to dinner.”

Maria glanced past the stairs at Dora’s second floor bedroom, and gave Bruno another look. She had to talk to him, she decided. He was probably going to be around for a while.

“I had a boyfriend,” Maria told him. 76

Bruno lifted his eyebrows at this unexpected disclosure. “Had?”

“He was too needy,” Maria said, and she sliced her finger across her throat to indicate the excising of Richard from her life.

“A high-maintenance guy,” mused Bruno. “Let me guess. He was a professional.

A lawyer?”

Maria shook her head. “A bicycle guy. You know, bike races, bike shop, that sort of thing. He used to ride his bicycle from his house in Castro Valley to my apartment.

Only he did it at midnight.”

“Interesting. The obsessive type.”

Maria told herself that she should stop now, end the conversation, because Dora would get jealous. That was how insecure Dora was. She would be mad if Maria and

Bruno did not get along, but she would also be mad if they did. Maria got a sudden picture in her head of Dora sitting on the toilet, and felt suddenly furious that she had to think about Dora’s stupid insecurities. She felt defiant.

“It got so I kept the telephone next to my bed and put the cops on speed dial.”

“So what happened?”

“I had to get a restraining order.”

“What else could you do, really?” 77

“He was a little crazy.”

“Maybe you attract that sort of guy.”

Maria shrugged. “Maybe.”

She thought ruefully of Richard, the bicycle guy. His plaintive knocks upon the door, his muscular thighs, his whining. “Please stay,” Richard had said. “I’ll do anything if you’ll stay.” But she couldn’t stay and it didn’t matter that he thought he loved her. She was indifferent. His devotion to her seemed comical.

“What about you?” The question was almost an afterthought.

Bruno lowered his voice to a whisper. “This is a step up for me,” he said, tilting his head toward Dora’s bedroom. “I grew up in Hayward. I never met my father. I didn’t go to college. And Dora, she’s a rich girl. She’s not like us.”

“True enough.” Then Maria dared to ask: “Are you two getting along?”

“I’ve liked other girls more. Girls like you.” He smiled. “In another life, maybe.

But in this life I guess it’s time for me to settle down, think about starting a family.”

It was sad. Bruno didn’t even pretend to be in love with Dora. And she seemed so happy with him.

Bruno rose from his chair. “So I guess I’ll see you at Dora’s reading.” 78

“Dora’s reading?”

“Next week. Right?”

Maria opened her mouth, getting ready to say that no, Dora didn’t have a reading.

Bruno looked at her in confusion. He knew that something was amiss.

Then Dora’s own voice sang out from the second floor. “Yes, my reading. Next week!”

Dora dashed upstairs decked out in another vintage dress, this one flowered and just as tight as the last. A narrow black belt was cinched around her ample waist and she was wearing red lipstick. She stood at the top of the stairs and flashed a smile at Bruno and Maria.

“Are you having coffee together? I’d like a cup, too, so I don’t feel left out. I’m so happy you two are getting along so well!”

“I was just going,” Maria mumbled.

“I don’t drink coffee, Dora, you know that,” said Bruno irritably. Then, as if apologizing, “Do you want me to make some?”

“Would you, darling?” replied Dora. “That would be wonderful.” Then she addressed Maria and her tone was insistent. “Don’t go, Maria. We have to talk about next week.” 79

Maria felt panicky, so she breathed in and counted. One. Two. Three. Four. She thought of the artists in the warehouse who had mocked Dora behind her back. How pathetic Dora was, yet how manipulative, how aggressive. Maria felt like a little rodent under her paw. She had to stand up for herself She couldn’t let Dora bully her.

Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Did anyone ever say no to Dora? Her father had wrecked her by always saying yes. But Maria’s own father might do the same thing, if he had the money. Maria was glad that he didn’t. She was glad she wasn’t spoiled. She knew, also, what her father would tell her to say to Dora now.

“Dora, the series is booked, and not just for the next four months. It’s booked for the next year. I was just being polite before. There’s no reading for you.”

There. She’d said it. What would Dora do? Would she explode?

Dora’s face turned pink. “But my poems! I worked so hard! You said—”

Bruno had unplugged the hot plate and turned it upside down to fiddle with a wire, but he interrupted Dora now. “You’re not a poet, honey. You’re a singer. You sing all the time. You sing in the shower, in the car, in the bookstore. Last week you even sang on the street, remember? And all those people started clapping?”

“But I want to be a poet, like Maria,” Dora pouted. “I wanted to impress you, so I wrote some poems. Why won’t she let me read them at her series? Why does Maria 80

always get what she wants? She’s so thin and perfect and she has so many boyfriends and they all love her. Why, it’s a revolving door! It’s not fair.”

Maria felt stricken. What was Dora talking about? She didn’t even have a boyfriend now, not since Richard. And she wasn’t thin.

Bruno sighed. He plugged in the hot plate and turned it on, and set his hand just above the coil to test for warmth.

Dora tugged on Bruno’s sleeve. “You talk to her, Bruno. She’ll listen to you.”

“Now, now,” soothed Bruno. “Sing us a song, honey. Wouldn’t you like that,

Maria? Wouldn’t you like to hear Dora sing?” He shot Maria an imploring look.

“God, yes,” Maria stammered. “I’d love to hear her sing. She’s an amazing singer.”

Dora batted her eyelashes. “Bruno, do you think I’m pretty? Prettier than Maria?”

Maria thought of her nice, quiet studio apartment that she had given up in order to live here in the warehouse. The radiator that hissed and wheezed in winter. The tiny gas stove with its cunning little oven and four burners in perfect working order. The abundant counter space with cabinets above and below, the built-in china hutch, the old-fashioned bread box. The quiet and the lock on the door. 81

“Of course, Dora, darling,” said Bruno. “You’re a star. A beautiful star.” He looked tired and forlorn. He was hunting for the coffee on the shelves under the kitchen counter.

“All right, then. I’ll sing. Oh, and Maria, the rent is due.”

Maria nodded. “I’ll write you a check.”

Dora turned away for a moment. She cleared her throat and seemed to be gathering herself together. Then she turned to face Bruno and Maria again and opened her red mouth and introduced herself.

“This is one of my favorite songs. I sing it for my father all the time.” Then she began singing and her voice rang throughout the space.

“Them that’s got shall get,

Them that’s not shall lose,

So the bible says and it still is news.

Mama may have, Papa may have,

But God bless the child that’s got his own...”

Dora held her hands in front of her like a pair of conductor’s batons, raising them up and down according to the notes. She closed her eyes like a real performer, singing as 82

though the kitchen were a real stage, as though Bruno and Maria were an audience of thousands.

Bruno watched Dora patiently. He had made his choice. He would be Dora’s audience forever. Somewhere in the third stanza, though, he glanced at Maria. ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed. Thank you for getting me off the hook.

Bruno nodded slightly. He filled up the kettle and set it on the hot plate. The water would not boil, of course, it would only get hot. That would have to be good enough. 83

Hush Little Baby

Bernard and I are watching television when something hits the window. It sounds like a handful of pebbles.

Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop.

For a moment I’m confused about where the noise came from. I grab the remote and

press the mute button. Bernard is already on his feet now and I hear a crunch. There’s

broken glass on the floor. Someone broke our window.

“Damn it,” Bernard says. He edges up one slat of the blind, and peers out into the

darkness. Then he turns to me and adds “Well, we have to replace it so I’ll order a

double-paned window. It will cut down the noise from the street.”

I nod, doubtful. A double-paned window. Do those really work? We're not talking

about a little noise, here, but a lot. Cars, music, yelling at all hours.

My whole body seems to be buzzing. It’s late at night, but it may as well be morning

because I feel as jittery as though I just drank a big cup of coffee. I should point out

that that’s almost normal for me now - constant nervousness - but the situation with

the broken window makes it more intense. I guess I have the pebble-thrower to thank

for that. So thanks, pebble-thrower. Five minutes ago I was a nervous wife. Now I’m

a freaked-out mother of two. I don’t know what to call you. Do you have a

preference? Do you have a name? I don’t know what you were thinking, going 84

around breaking people’s windows. You didn’t have to throw the pebbles so hard,

you know.

Bernard has gone into the kitchen and now he’s whispering into the telephone.

Fleur is sleeping in the laundry room. She’s the baby.

I decide I’m going to tell Bernard about the pebbles. I get off the couch and as I walk

toward him he puts his hand over the receiver. “I’m on hold,” he says. “I can’t believe

it. I called 911 and they put me on hold.”

I think Bernard is overreacting, calling 911 about some pebbles, but I don’t say this. Instead I ask him what he’s going to tell the 911 people.

“I’m going to say that I saw a gun.”

I don’t get it. “But the streetlight is out. It’s too dark out there to see anything.”

“Yeah. But the only way to get the cops to show up is to say “He’s got a gun.”

We live in Oakland, obviously.

Bernard looks at the receiver as if considering whether to let it drop onto the floor.

“It was a pellet gun,” he adds.

A pellet gun? I do not think I can accept this idea. I feel strongly about the pebbles, though I'm not sure why. And I don’t want to think that the pebble-thrower was actually wielding a weapon. But now that the idea is in my head I think about a pistol, a twenty- 85

two. Maybe a sawed-off shotgun. I go back to the living room now, and I’m feeling pretty nervous so I give the front window a wide berth. I scan the floor for shell casings, and find none. Then I check for holes in the walls or ceiling, but everything is smooth and intact. It wasn’t a real gun, then. Maybe Bernard is right. It’s true that, in matters of the neighborhood, his instincts have always been right. Like when he said no one would ever mess with our cars here. “The vehicle is sacrosanct,” he said. “You never touch another person’s ride.” And it was true.

I try to accept the idea of the pellet gun, because it makes sense. It's logical. Buf here is the problem with that: I used to be logical, but not anymore. Everything's upside down with me now, that's the point. And right now all I can think of is pebbles. I am fixated on them. Little round smooth white pebbles. I look again at the window and the broken glass on the floor and I try to imagine the pebble-thrower. He’s a man, of course, maybe even a boy. I can’t quite picture him but I know he’s young. He’s a secret someone trying to convey a secret something. That’s it, I think. He’s Romeo.

Now that the stranger has a name I can tell him: You’re only supposed to toss the pebbles, Romeo. The idea is to get Juliet’s attention, not damage the Capulet property.

I am sort of waiting for Romeo to say something now, so I am not at all expecting it

when Posey appears like an extra-small ghost. The sight of her startles me almost

more than the sound of the breaking window.

Oh god no, I think. Go back to bed. 86

She’s wearing her striped pajamas; her blanket is draped over her shoulder and trails

on the floor behind her. She clutches her binky. “Mommy,” she says, gazing up at me

with her liquid blue eyes. “I heard a noise.”

“I heard it too, honey,” I reply in what I hope is a soothing voice. I wea^e my fingers together to hide their trembling.

“The noise waked me up.”

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

Posey looks at me expectantly but I have no authority here. I have no answers. I only have questions. Someone has broken at our window. Please clarify.

Bernard stands in the doorway to the kitchen, holding the phone to his ear and watching Posey. He flashes me a look of consternation and honestly, I feel a little annoyed. I turn a palm up toward the ceiling:

She’s awake now, there’s nothing for it. She’s an actual little person. She’s three years old, how can I keep her from getting out of bed? Really.

Then Bernard starts waving his arms around wildly. Why is he making such a fuss? I turn, and only then do I see that Posey has slipped past me into the living room.

She’s right in front of the window, standing over the broken glass in her bare feet.

“What’s that, Mommy?” 87

I stare at her, dumbstruck. My brain is like a record skipping on a turntable, repeating

the same lyric over and over, but the words will not come out of my mouth.

Meanwhile Bernard rushes past me and lifts Posey up off the floor. “Little girl,” he

says quietly. “You can’t be in here right now.”

“Why?” she asks. Her eyes are huge.

He doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t care. She gazes at him adoringly as if she has just

recognized him. “Daddy!” she exclaims. She pats his cheek, then his head with its

black knit hat.

Bernard carries her into the hallway where I am still standing, feet cemented to the floor. I am mortified. I wait for Bernard to make eye contact with me. But when he does it’s not an angry look. It’s a look of resignation, the look of someone who has carried something heavy for so long that he cannot imagine the weight being lifted off his shoulders. He will not speak about this, though, and I am so ashamed that I cannot speak about it either.

He sets Posey down on the floor and she winds herself around his leg. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Listen, I’m going o-u-t.”

“Oh,” I say casually. I am stunned. I point at the door. Out there?

Posey sings softly to herself. “I love you Daddy, oh yes I do. I love you Daddy, and I am true...” 88

Bernard nods. “I won’t be long. Just a few minutes.”

Little alarms start going off in my head. Bernard is a skinny white guy with little wire-rimmed glasses. If he finds the person who broke our window, what is he going to do? Talk about it?

Bernard bends down and kisses the top of Posey’s head and whispers something to her. She disentangles herself and sits on the rug, still crooning.

“When you are near me, I’m glad. Oh Daddy I love you.”

I feel a horrible hollow feeling as Bernard sidles over to the coat rack and slips his arms into his dark green Carhartt jacket as though maybe he is invisible and Posey might not notice. I am not so sure about his instincts now.

I shake my head at him, trying to convey urgency.

Bernard adjusts his hat and mouths the words “it’s okay.”

My eyebrow twitches. There are things I want to say to him but I can’t say them in

front of Posey. I start talking to Bernard in my mind. It’s one of those silent one-way

conversations.

There’s something I haven’t told you. Remember when I broke the microwave last

week? And you ran out immediately to replace it? And the drawer that collapsed

because I slammed it too many times, and you fixed it right away. Well, suppose you 89

found a body in the kitchen. Suppose it was me. I’m just saying. I’ve thought about a

kitchen knife. I know it’s lame, but that’s all I’ve come up with.

I wipe my eyes with my sleeve. Bernard looks at me with sympathy, but it’s obvious: He feels that the situation outside the house is more critical than the one inside.

At the moment. Of course, and I have to take this into account, he hasn’t heard the things

I’ve just told him in my mind.

Posey decides to weigh in. “Where are you going, Daddy?” she says. “It’s the nighttime.”

Bernard kneels down. “I have to run an errand, Pose. Be a good girl and go back to bed, okay?” His voice is deep and reassuring.

Posey flares her nostrils, annoyed. “Daddy. Who maked the noise?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he says. He backs toward the door.

“Daddy!” She stands up, incredulous. She is his most precious thing, his ally and his darling. How can he walk away from her like this?

“I’ll be back soon, okay? Kiss?”

Posey drops her eyes and shoulders in defeat. I watch her nervously, wondering if she is going to pitch a fit. But after a few moments she looks coldly up at Bernard. She 90

pops her binky into her mouth, then turns away from him and leans her small weight against me. She has resigned herself. She’s stuck here with me.

Bernard takes a breath and turns his attention back to me. “Stay inside,” he entreats in a whisper, as if we are colluding somehow to catch the window-breaker. “And don’t look out the window.”

My eyes sting now.

“You won’t go in the living room, right?”

“No,” I cry, and I rest my head on his chest and what I mean is don’t go, don’t leave me alone with the girls. He thinks I am worried about him, about the window but it’s not just that. I don’t trust myself with the girls and I am fearful.

Posey leans closer against me and I wrap an arm around her.

“Everything will be all right,” Bernard whispers. “I’ll be okay. I’ll be right back.”

He turns off the hall light and unbolts the heavy front door and then the metal security door. He leaves the porch light off. The metal door clicks shut behind him and then there is silence.

It’s just me and Posey now. We look at the front door but it has nothing to say to us. 91

“Everything will be all right, Mommy,” says Posey. Her face is innocent and round, her brown hair a tangle. I nod. I feel so tired. What would a good mother do now?

A good mother takes care of things. She doesn’t walk around crying all day. So if I were a calm person, good in a crisis, what would I do? Maybe I would change the subject.

“Let’s check on your sister,” I say.

Fleur is sleeping in her white wicker bassinette in the laundry room that adjoins the kitchen. She has squirmed out of her swaddling blanket and lies on her back, arms thrust above her head. Posey peeks gravely over the edge of the bassinette. She’s not fond of the baby, of course. She was only a baby herself when Fleur came along, and that’s when all the trouble started. My trouble.

It is dark back here, and quiet. I take the swaddling blanket and lay it over Fleur, who is sleeping a heavy, nearly comatose sleep. I have a sudden urge to curl up inside the bassinette with her. Of course I’d never fit in there. But she looks so peaceful in her sleep and I long for that. Insomnia has plagued me for months. Maybe sleep is infectious.

Maybe I could catch it from Fleur.

I linger at the bassinette, devising ways to squeeze my body into it. But Posey is finished here. She grips my hand and pulls me through the kitchen.

“We have to be quiet, Mommy,” she whispers loudly. “A bad man breaked the window. Fleur might get scared. But I am not scared. I am the big sister.” 92

“That’s right,” I hear myself say. “You are the big sister.”

I shut my eyes. There is a lump in my throat and I know that it’s happening now, I am coming undone. A litany of images rushes toward me, and I am quickly surrounded by all the things that are wrong here: The window is broken. There are feral cats, dime bags, a skinny lady in a flowered dress smoking crack in the side yard. Jacked-up cars with their shiny rims and ear-shattering music that makes everything vibrate. There’s a heroin dealer across the street who watches me with enmity as I push the double stroller.

But I can deal with all that. It’s what’s inside the house that I cannot handle. Dirty floors crying out to be washed. Endless piles of dirty laundry. The wail of the baby at 3:00 a.m.

The pulsing pain as my milk lets down. The stack of mail that grows taller every day and the stack of diapers that grows smaller.

“Mommy?”

I hear Posey’s muted voice as if through several walls, but I keep my eyes shut.

Goodnight nobody, goodnight moon.

A year ago I was in the hospital on a morphine drip. Then I was on Percocet, which

they wouldn’t let me take home because it’s Percocet. Then Darvocet and Vicodin

and these kept the pain away and everything was fuzzy and I went around in my

pajamas for months. I might be able to find something in the medicine cabinet. A

couple of big pink Darvocets would make all this go away. For a while. 93

Childhood songs play on a loop in my head.

If that mockingbird don't sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

If that diamond ring turns brass, Papa’s gonna buy you a looking glass

“Mommy. Come to my room.”

You get a line I get a pole, honey. You get a line I get a pole, baby. You get a line I

get a pole, and we’ll go fishin’ at the crawdad hole, honey, baby mine

“Please, Mommy.”

Hush little baby don’t say a word

When Bernard is here and I have these attacks it’s okay. I shut myself in the bedroom and wait it out while he watches the children. But now he is outside chasing his perceived enemy when really the danger is here. The danger is me.

“Mommy!”

I open one eye and there is Posey standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She is exasperated with me now. Her patience has run out.

“I’m sleepy, Mommy. I want to go to bed.” 94

Of course. She should go back to bed. I put a hand to my forehead, I try to think clearly. But when I tell her that I’ll tuck her in, she balks. She doesn’t want to be alone,

she says.

“I’ll sleep in your room,” I tell her, seizing on my idea. “I’ll get a sleeping bag from the closet.”

Posey looks doubtful, but I assure her that it’s fine. Everything is fine. Inside her room I push aside picture books and wooden blocks and an alligator pull toy, and then I unroll the sleeping bag next to her tiny toddler bed. My attack has passed, but I have to work quickly because it might come back.

“The bad man is outside, Mommy.” Posey shifts from one leg to the other, watching the window.

“No, I don’t think so,” I reply, smoothing out the sleeping bag.

Posey cloaks herself in the blanket and winds a corner of it around her wrist.

“Before, Mommy.”

“Yes, he was outside before.”

The gears turn in her head as she struggles to articulate an idea.

“The bad man breaked the other window. Not my window.” 95

I stop fussing with the sleeping bag. The layout of our house is common knowledge on the street. Everyone knows someone who lived here - six years ago, or seven or ten. If Romeo were outside, he would know this was a bedroom. If he had a handful of pebbles or a pellet gun, that would be one thing, but what if he had a real gun?

He would have a clear shot at me from the sidewalk. I could be dead in seconds. Or, God forbid, Posey. We should not be in here at all.

“Let’s sleep in Mommy’s room.”

Posey nods and stumbles backward to the doorway.

Inside my bedroom she clambers up the wooden stepstool onto the bed. She watches as I undress and take a nightgown from my wardrobe.

“You can sleep on Daddy’s side,” I tell her.

She smiles and lays her head on her father’s pillow. Then her expression changes.

“I need my binky, Mommy.”

“I’ll get it,” I tell her.

She sits up, anxious.

“Mommy,” she says, querulously, and thrusts out her hand as though she might never see me again. 96

I cover her hand with mine. “It will just take a minute. I promise.”

When I’m at the door to her room I turn and wave to her. I’m only nine or ten feet away.

“There is a binky on your bed,” I tell her. “It’s the blue one. I’m going to get it. It will just take a few seconds.”

She nods bravely and her bottom lip quivers.

“Here I go.”

I walk into her room and grab the binky. Now I’ve got what I came for, but instead of going right back to Posey, I pause for a moment and turn toward the large window. The blinds are closed. I know I should not do this but the temptation is too great.

I stand in front of the window and I think again of Romeo. And I imagine the time it would take a bullet to travel from the sidewalk to my body. It would take short, as Posey says. I am tired of anguish. I am tired of being tired, of never even having the energy to understand why I am so tired. I just want to sleep.

Romeo, I’m here. It’s just me. You can tell me your secret now.

But Romeo is silent. I think of more questions then. Each question begets the next until I don’t know what I’m asking anymore. 97

Was it pebbles, Romeo? Or pellets? I’m just wondering, why not real bullets?

Bullets would solve my kitchen knife problem and absolve me of responsibility. And you could have shot me right there on the couch, I was sitting next to the window. Talk about an easy mark.

I am suddenly furious - at Romeo, at myself, at everything. And I am surprised at the strength of my anger, and I have to remind myself that Romeo brought a message for me. I have to contain my rage. It won’t do to get angry at him.

I’m sorry, Romeo. I shouldn’t have spoken that way to you. What was it you wanted to tell me?

But Romeo is silent. I’ve scared him off, I think. I must be patient. It’s me he threw the pebbles for, I know it. I’ll try to coax him into talking.

You have a message for me, Romeo. Tell me. I’m listening.

I stay quiet, hoping he believes me.

I listen, and inside the silence it seems to me that I can hear Romeo’s voice. He’s come to relieve me of my suffering, he says. Pebbles or pellets or bullets - it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that my anguish will be over soon.

I feel so relieved. I stand before the window with my eyes closed. I go into a pleasant limbo that is neither dark nor light, a waiting room like any other. I am ready. 98

Posey cries out then and the stillness is broken. My eyes snap open. For a second I think that the cry came from me, but I know that's not right. It's Posey.

I have to go, Romeo. Something’s come up. I’ll talk to you later.

I run back to my bedroom to find Posey standing on the bed, sobbing, her face blotchy and red. I hold her to me, and her little body heaves with emotion.

“I’m scared from the bad man, Mommy. I’m scared he taked you away.”

“No, no. No one can take me away.”

She presses her wet face to my chest, gulping air. She's so fearful, she's almost sick with it. I sit on the bed and she falls into my lap, clinging desperately as though she will never let me go. I stroke her hair and rock her in my arms until she quiets.

“Is he coming back? The bad man?”

I shake my head. “No. He went home to his house.” I reach for a Kleenex and wipe her nose.

“I miss Daddy. I want Daddy to come back.”

“He’ll be home soon. He will come in and kiss you goodnight.”

“I want to wait for Daddy.” 99

“We can wait together. Here’s your binky.” We lie down next to each other, sinking into the soft duvet.

“Mommy?”

“Yes.”

“When I am asleep stay here.”

“I will stay here.”

“Don’t go away, Mommy.

I pat her little hand. “I won’t.”

I look at the ceiling and for a few minutes I listen to the silence in the house. I should get up and get the broom and the dustpan. I should clean up the mess in the living room. But I don’t. I lie still, for once. I think of quiet houses on quiet streets. A street where Romeo wouldn’t go, but maybe I could live there someday. Next to me, Posey is already asleep. Her binky has fallen onto the pillow and she snores faintly. I reach out to smooth her hair and I remember what she said in the kitchen: “I am not scared. I am the big sister.” She does not look brave or stem now. She looks like a sleeping baby.

Posey acts like a tiny adult sometimes, she steers me through my darkness and I let her do it. Looking down on her now I feel a fresh shame: What a crushing weight for a little girl. I wonder what kind of mother I am and I cannot stand to answer my own 100

question. I must stop depending on Posey this way. It is a fearful idea. Who will help me when my darkness overtakes me again? How will I resist Romeo the next time he wants to talk? I do not know the answer.

I hear something then and I tense up, thinking Fleur might be awake and hungry.

But as I listen more closely I realize that the voices are coming from outside, and one of them is Bernard’s deep voice. He is talking to the police. He’s good at that, and I know he’s doing it right there on the sidewalk where everyone can see. It doesn’t get more conspicuous than that. I picture him nodding, smiling, keeping up a conversation while glancing casually sideways to see which neighbors are standing on their porches, which have retreated back inside their houses, and which never dared to come outside in the first place.

Soon Bernard will come back inside his own house. I know exactly what he will do. He’ll go into the basement and bring up a roll of tape and some plastic sheeting and cover the broken window. 101

How to Be an American Mother

At the Mother’s Day breakfast, sit next to the window. Sunlight bounces off the yellow walls, there are bouquets of roses, bouquets of daisies, clamoring children, husbands cutting pancakes and giving bottles to babies. There is the smell of coffee and paper whites and buttered toast and bacon. Strawberries, pineapple, cantaloupe. It seems like a party, but then the orange juice is drunk and the bill is paid and the tip is left and it’s over.

At 12:30, look at the clock. You are late! The birthday party starts in half an hour!

Have a mild anxiety attack. Not serious enough to require Valium, but enough to propel you into action. Finish loading the dishwasher. Don’t forget the detergent. (Note that the box of detergent is almost empty. Write “dishwashing detergent” on the shopping list.)

Now scan the kitchen for the party invitation. This will be tricky since your kitchen is a mess.

Once you spot the invitation, do not rush to open it. Rather, eye it warily, for beneath its innocent exterior lies a world of trouble. The invitation rests silently on the kitchen table. Procrastinate a little. Let the invitation watch reproachfully as you hurry into the laundry room to throw a load in the dryer. As you handle the wet blue jeans and towels, think of a margarita on the beach. Frozen, in a nice frosty glass with extra salt on 102

the rim. You have never had a margarita on the beach. (Again, why?) Press the start button on the dryer and visualize a nap. Allow yourself to think longingly of the pillow, the duvet. In their soft, feathery voices they call out to you like sirens.

“Mommy. I want to go to the party.”

That is the voice of your little girl. She’s a siren of another sort.

Pat her cheek and tell her “Yes, it’s almost time to go.” Then tear open the pink envelope and take out the pink invitation, with its pink embossed ballet slippers on the front. Wonder idly why everything must be pink. Crumple the envelope, or put the damn thing through the shredder if you feel like it.

Now read aloud the part of the invitation that says “Please bring a new or gently- used book for a book exchange.”

Read it again and wonder if it’s some sort of joke. Look down at your daughter and giggle. She will giggle, too. Then repeat the phrase “gently used.” Pause for a minute to really appreciate its absurdity. Laugh again. Let it all out. Laugh until you don’t whether you’re laughing or crying, until your little girl looks alarmed and runs to find her special blanket. Wipe the tears from your eyes. Let hilarity reign. After all, your children don’t use anything gently.

At this point you should consider the phenomenon of the “book exchange.” You have never experienced it firsthand, but you gather that the book exchange is meant as a 103

lesson: The book exchange will teach our children not to covet stuff! It will teach them that books are better than toys! It will teach them to give to others, even on their own birthdays! Holy hell, you think to yourself I am so sure.

We’ll take a short break now so that you can recognize your own cynicism and rebelliousness. Grow up. A child is having her fourth birthday, for God’s sake. This is no time to be a catty bitch.

Go into the children’s bedroom. It’s dark in here, and you will immediately step on a Lego. This will feel not unlike stepping on a nail. Swear under your breath and examine the sole of your foot. Open the curtains and search the bookcase for a book that hasn’t been chewed, tom, or peed upon. Exult when you actually find one, a pristine copy of “Bootsie Barker Bites.” It is a hilarious book about a playdate gone awry. Wonder to yourself how it escaped your children’s grubby little hands.

It will occur to you to wrap the book in pretty paper, but there isn’t enough time.

Will you regret this? Probably.

Your daughter does not want to dress up for the party, and there isn’t time to convince her otherwise. She is wearing purple leggings and a black t-shirt, and has draped her special blanket around her shoulders. The blanket looks like a dirty rag. Spend a moment dwelling upon the fact of your daughter wearing a dirty rag as an accessory.

Realize there isn’t time for dwelling. Hustle your daughter outside, where you see the day 104

is beautiful and warm. What a shame to be fulfilling an obligation today, when you’d rather be lying on a chaise longue on the beach, with its gently lapping blue waves and fine white sand. You’d rather be wearing your bikini and black sunglasses and sipping a margarita. (Do you even have a bikini?) Picture yourself waving to the man in a white suit, carrying a tray. “Garfon,” you call, but he doesn’t seem to hear you. Isn’t this

Tahiti? “Gargon\” Maybe you should switch to Spanish.

Snap out of it. You are not on a beach in Tahiti or Mexico anywhere else. It’s

Mother’s Day, and you are on the street in front of your house. There is your ugly green station wagon. It is not time to indulge in any old-fashioned American self-pity, though, because all the other mothers out there are in the same boat. Today every last one of them is doing laundry, changing diapers, scrubbing dishes, or chauffeuring children.

Once seated in the driver’s seat, look at your daughter in the rear view mirror, with her cloud of blonde hair. She sits quietly in her car seat, fingering her blanket. She is three years old and this is the first party she has attended without her older sister. She wants to go, but she is nervous.

Halfway to the party, stop at a red light and observe that you are right next to a cafe. Roll down the window and catch a whiff of that caustic goodness. Face it: You cannot get through the ballerina birthday party without a cup of coffee. Whatever was in your cup at that Mother’s Day breakfast was hot mocha-flavored water. Take your daughter into the cafe and pay $3.50 for a caffe latte. You will be tempted to buy your 105

daughter a cookie and sit at a table outside and do some people watching. Once again, you will want to relax. But your little girl looks up at you with her large blue eyes, her blanket draped around her shoulders like a shawl. “Mommy,” she says. “Let’s go.” Look at that angelic face. Nod forlornly. Dump some sugar in your coffee, and take her back to the car.

The party is being held at a dance studio on a tree-lined street near shops and the library. You know of this studio because you wanted your girls to take ballet classes there

- but these classes are given only during the week and you work full-time. So much for your budding ballerinas.

The door to the dance studio is open; apparently you are the first to arrive. You note this with annoyance - rather than rushing, you could have spent ten minutes relaxing at the cafe. But you’re here now so you walk inside, your daughter’s face pasted to your thigh. You note the high ceilings, the large windows. Small tables are set up with ballerina paper dolls, glue sticks, and paper and lace clothing. There is the ballerina birthday cake with its four candles and four plastic ballerinas posted at the comers. Your daughter points and is about to speak when a tall man appears. This is the father of the birthday girl, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. He greets you. As you smile and introduce yourself, it will occur to you that he is the one paying for all of this. (This is a 106

catty thought and you know it. We have talked about your attitude before. Do you need a time-out?)

The khaki-clad father mentions that the birthday girl takes ballet lessons here at the studio. It’s so convenient, he says. It’s across the street from our house, and her mother does not work.

Of course, you think.

It occurs to you that you have some class issues. Your own mother worked from the time you were six months old; heck, she’s still working! When you were a child you never knew anything different. But now that you are an adult and a mother yourself, you’ve become aware of a subculture among women of your demographic: The stay-at- home-mother. The over-educated diaper changer.

Just then your daughter shouts the name of the birthday girl, who is now crossing the street with her mother and grandmother. Now other guests begin to arrive. They seem to come all at once. Twelve little girls come running into the studio, dressed in pink tutus and leotards, some even with ballet slippers. There is your own daughter in her purple leggings, decidedly unballerina-like. And even when she sees her friends, she still clings to you as though she does not know them.

The girls squeal when they see the paper dolls on the tables; they cluster around the birthday cake table, pointing. You ask your daughter if she wants to go to the craft 107

tables. She shrugs, folding into herself. “Okay,” you say. “But I want to see the paper dolls. Will you come with me?” She holds your pinky finger in a vise grip as you walk together. The little girls have converged around the little tables. Their mothers’ conversations are peppered with high-pitched interruptions from the girls, who need the cap removed from a glue stick, or need to go to the bathroom, or want to know when it will be time for cake.

You have seen some of these mothers before, at the preschool. Your favorite is the one in the green tube top - she has five children, the youngest of whom are three- week-old twins. This woman fascinates you. She has brown eyes and long brown hair, and she looks radiant. She always has a smile on her face. She has brought the twins in their enormous double stroller with its two infant car seats, along with her oldest daughter who is almost four. She is a grave little girl, her status as the eldest weighing heavily upon her. Someone asks the mother if she is breastfeeding her twins. You are stunned when she says yes; you can hardly imagine the effort involved, and the pain. But she laughs a carefree laugh. “It’s so easy,” she says. “It’s really much easier than using bottles!”

You have entered the parallel universe of the Perfect Mother. She is dedicated and her patience is boundless. She does not sleep. You feel like a freak in this universe. You do not belong here. You have only two children and she has five, but she seems so much more comfortable than you in this role. After all, don’t you escape every day to your 108

office? Don’t you linger in bookstores and cafes, postponing the inevitable pickups, the sticky lunchboxes, the dirty clothes, the lost jackets and the 6:00 meltdowns? Does she love her children more than you love yours? Of course not, you tell yourself. But you wonder. Faced with such radiance and cheer, you feel like a fraud.

A curious thing you notice about this birthday party is that none of the mothers say anything about Mother’s Day. No one says “Damn it, why did they have to have the party today?” No one grouses about having to accompany her child here on this, the one day of the year that is supposed to be about the mother. You are a skilled eavesdropper, and you hear not so much as a bitter whisper. They all look so happy with their beautiful little girls, their husbands so healthy, so blond and prosperous. You are also the only person holding a coffee cup. Probably coffee is not allowed here in the dance studio. It is a good thing no one has called you on this - you already feel put-upon, and if they took away your coffee, well, you would just get homicidal.

After the paper dolls, the little girls proceed into the next room. It is a real dance studio, complete with three walls of mirrors and a double barre. The girls take off their shoes, and are enjoined by the teacher to take off their socks so they do not slip on the wood floor. Your daughter refuses to enter the room without you, so you remove your own sneakers and hold her hand. The parents sit on chairs at the edges of the room, while the girls dance and caper until the teacher calls order. She asks them to sit in a circle, which they do, except for your daughter, the reluctant ballerina. 109

“Come,” you whisper to her. “I’ll sit with you.”

She sits in your lap and remains there for the duration of the class, unwilling to part with you. You do not mind. You do not demand affection from your children, so when they give it voluntarily it’s a secret joy.

Meanwhile, the teacher is doing ballet exercises with the girls. They run and leap and play princess. They grande jete and pirouette, they plie and grand jete again. They are a collective pink froth dashing breathlessly across the floor and pausing to admire themselves in the mirror. You hear the clicks of cameras, watch the adoring gazes of the parents. Every so often you ask your daughter if she wants to join the ballerinas and she responds by burying her face against your chest. You accept her decision. Actually this party isn’t so bad, you think to yourself. It’s just a bunch of parents trying to do their best for their children, like anyone would.

After the dancing comes the book exchange. Every guest has brought a book wrapped in paper and ribbon, and the birthday girl’s mother has provided a dozen wrapped books. Each ballerina receives her gift and opens it. Your daughter is thunderstruck. She has never received such a lavish gift at someone else’s party - hers is a hardback Angelina book. You sidle over to the birthday girl’s mother, feeling especially foolish. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I didn’t wrap my book.” Why are you saying this to her?

And why do your eyes sting, and why does your throat swell? Why are you choking up?

Because among these perfect mothers you are a fuck-up and a fraud. You know this and 110

you expect the birthday girl’s mother to confirm it. But she doesn’t. Instead, she pats you on the shoulder. She is sympathetic. This surprises you so much that you nearly dissolve into tears. Yet even this does not faze her.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Really.”

When you leave the party your daughter says “Mommy I want to have my party here!” You nod vaguely, visualizing huge green dollar signs. Later you will look up the website of the dance studio. You will be aghast to find that a two-hour party, including ballet lesson, costs $400. How do people do it? Are you the only cheapskate mother who would refuse her little girl a ballerina birthday party? You calculate the cost of the box of tutus, twelve hardback books, paper dolls, ballerina birthday cake, helium balloons.

Should you explain to your four year old that you have to save that money for college?

Or groceries? But of course you will not explain. Besides, your little girl would be excited if four of her little friends came to her house for birthday cake - this is all it would take to make her happy.

In the evening, while your husband is clearing the table and getting the children ready for bed, pour yourself a glass of white wine. Slip through the laundry room and open the back door and close it quietly behind you. Click. It’s warm out here, and still light. Sit in a chair, and imagine that it is a chaise longue. Imagine that your drink is a frozen margarita. Run your finger around the rim of your glass. Lick off the imaginary salt. Imagine that the back porch is a beach. When you hear your children shrieking at Ill

each other, resist the urge to rush back inside. Stay on the beach for a few more minutes and finish your drink. 112

The Woman and the Baby

The woman brought the baby home and right away there were problems. First of all, the baby cried, but there was no nurse to soothe it or change its diaper or understand what the hell it wanted. Second, the morphine drip. The woman didn’t have it anymore, the button to press when the pain came pulsing back, waves of searing pain that left her gasping.

The obstetrician gave the woman Percocet before she left the hospital, and also a prescription for Darvocet. Keep ahead of the pain, the doctor said. She was a Swedish blonde, competent and kind, in a red leather jacket. She had visited the birthing room five times during the early part of her shift, checking the woman for dilation and telling the woman “I can’t feel the baby’s head. The baby hasn’t dropped.” But the woman didn’t understand, she was too tired to understand that her pelvis was too small, the baby was

trying to descend to the birth canal but there was simply no room. The baby was stuck.

All the woman’s friends had delivered naturally; they expressed a visceral scorn for those who didn’t, or couldn’t. “It’s bad for the baby,” one sniffed. “Studies show that babies delivered by c-section are incapable of forming attachments to humans or pets, and often end up as drug addicts and murderers. So really, natural childbirth is the only way to go.”

Something like that anyway. These same friends read “What to Expect When You’re

Expecting” and believed what it said about cravings being a figment of the imagination 113

(or was it morning sickness that was a figment of the imagination?) They also ate organic food, exclusively, and eschewed refined sugar and alcohol, of course. One glass of wine could lead to fetal alcohol syndrome, they said. Duh. Only a bad mother would have a glass of wine.

The woman’s labor went on and on. Reluctantly, the obstetrician gave the woman more Pitocin because after thirty-five hours of labor she still wasn’t dilated. The woman’s body was not cooperating. Then the baby flat lined. There was a prolonged and terrible beeping from the machine, and a squadron of doctors and nurses rushed in and prepped the woman for surgery and hustled her husband into blue scrubs and the woman was wheeled down to an operating room faster than you can say “caesarian section.” The

Swedish obstetrician performed the surgery in minutes, and with military precision. The woman trusted the obstetrician but she was frightened and exhausted and her cheeks were wet with tears and there was her husband sitting just next to her and she heard the cry of the baby and a collective sigh of relief from the doctors, nurses, anesthesiologist. Then the obstetrician quickly did the tubal ligation, snip, snip. She ushered in the next surgeon to repair the hernia. That took more than an hour and the feeling of tugging and no sensation anywhere below her breasts but the anesthesiologist stayed next to the woman anyway and asked her every few minutes.

Keep ahead of the pain. Don’t wait too long to take the pills, the doctor had said, and was she ever right because here at home the woman had forgotten. In the rush to feed 114

the baby and answer the telephone and knock over her cup of coffee and clean up the spill she’d forgotten. Now, the waves of pain had started. They appeared first as if from a great distance. Gentle, soft little waves. So far away. But then they came closer and increased in intensity and soon they were great tsunami waves that just kept coming. No sooner had one wave subsided when the next began and the woman was weeping involuntarily and struggling to catch her breath. The woman’s husband scrambled to find the bottle of Percocet and he brought the woman a glass of water. The husband had dark circles under his eyes, and he waited there, watching the woman swallow the little red pill. It would take thirty, maybe forty minutes until the pain would subside.

Now the baby was crying as well, crying with hunger. The woman’s husband collected the baby from the bassinette. Oh, what are you crying about you little baby, he said. He had the baby in one arm and a bottle of formula in the other but the woman objected to this. The baby needs the breast, she said. La Leche League, she said. Breast is best. The baby could be damaged!

The husband took a breath. Then he spoke. You’re going to lie down in bed now and I am going to feed the baby, he said.

But formula is bad for the baby, the woman wept, all the books say. 115

The husband was getting frustrated now. He led the woman to the bedroom. It’s food, he said. It’s food for the baby. One bottle of formula won’t kill her. She will eat and she won’t be hungry and she’ll stop crying.

The husband pointed to the bed then, and indicated that the woman should get in it. He had the baby in one arm, squalling furiously, and the evil bottle of formula in the other.

The woman lay in the bed wiping her tears and trying to be still, trying not to set off another spasm of pain. She looked at the Van Gogh print on the wall (le Moulin a poivre) and tried to focus on the windmill, no, on the two French flags. She tried to breathe slow deep breaths. The pain would subside soon, she told herself. Instead of thinking about the pain she thought about her baby. Her baby was like any other baby. It wailed in frustration as it waited for the milk to let down. And once the baby had eaten it went right to sleep. That would have been mildly interesting if she, the mother, hadn’t been so fucking tired. The woman watched the flags and thought drowsily of all the times she’d believed she’d been tired before the arrival of this baby: staying up all night having sex, or writing a paper in college, or getting drunk at a bar. My god, that was nothing.

Now she was lucky if she could sleep one hour between feedings. It was a hungry baby, it never stopped eating. Only a week old, it couldn’t even see her clearly. It squinted up at her, wrapped tightly in its lavender swaddling blanket. 116

The flags fluttered, blue, white, red. The woman eased her body further down in the bed and rested her head on a pillow. How did one get to know a baby, really? Was it possible? It seemed amoeba-like, a little cell like all the others. The woman gathered she was supposed to love it already - as if you could truly love someone you’d met only a few days earlier. Her friends loved their babies instantly, gushing about how perfect and cute they were. Definitely, the woman didn’t love her baby yet. She harbored a mild curiosity about it, when she wasn’t washing its tiny sleepers and tiny blankets and tiny sheets, and throwing tiny cloth diapers into the diaper pail and putting Lansinoh on her bleeding nipples (as it turned out, the baby could bite), or easing herself in and out of bed without setting off that searing pain.

The flags shifted and the woman’s eyelids fluttered. The waves of pain would subside. The woman would love the baby. Her incision would heal into a nearly invisible scar. She would love the baby. She would love the baby. She would love the baby. 117

39th Street, Oakland

The difference between this couple and some of their more fastidious contemporaries was that they were willing to view the house with the renters inside it. It was not a comfortable situation, but they went through with it. The woman who lived there was a foster mother with one teenage daughter and five foster children. The foster mother was from Port Arthur, she told the couple. Now that the house was up for sale she might go back to Port Arthur, except that she had all these kids. She didn’t know what she would do.

The youngest foster child, a little boy around five years old, hid behind ihe foster mother at first. He peeked fearfully at the white couple, then fled to a bedroom. Later, when the woman looked into the bedroom, the little boy was standing by the window and holding a stuffed bear tightly as if he were sure she was going to take it from him. The room was crammed with three twin beds. Dirty white carpet. The walls stark and unadorned. The woman smiled at the boy, and he gazed at her for an instant, tightening his grip on the bear.

After the couple bought the house, the woman went to the realtor’s office to pick up the keys. She had never done this before. She was thinking one, two keys at the most.

The realtor was a tall man in his sixties, with a chiseled, strangely unlined face. He 118

handed the woman a ring with twelve keys on it. “I don’t know what key goes to which

lock,” he said with a shrug. “You might want to get the locks changed, um, right away.

There’s no telling who has the keys to your house.”

Fifteen stairs led up to the front porch with its metal security door and a second

door of solid wood. Each door had a turn lock on the doorknob as well as a deadbolt for a total of four different locks. It took the woman five minutes to try all twelve keys on each

lock just so she could get inside the house that first time. The back door was the same.

The locksmith was unfazed. “See it all the time,” he said. “I’ve seen twenty keys, thirty keys.”

The floor of the back porch was badly warped and needed a fresh coat of paint. At the top of the stairs, the lower part of the wooden railing was gnawed nearly in two. A

Rottweiler, the realtor said, had lived there. A large blue doghouse sat in the back yard.

The back yard was engulfed with weeds grown waist-high. When the weeds were

finally cut down, the couple found that the yard was littered with dozens of dime bags,

syringes, and small liquor bottles buried five or six inches in the dirt.

The house had a full basement with a high ceiling, and bars on all three basement

windows. One of the sets of bars was loose: someone had broken in, or broken out.

Someone who lived in the house had been dealing crack. A next-door neighbor told the

couple it was the foster mother’s teenage daughter. “It wasn’t those foster kids,” the 119

neighbor said. “Wasn’t them nohow. They was good kids. The girl, though, she a world of trouble to her mother.” The neighbor said he was glad the couple had bought the house, glad for one less crack house on the block. “Y’all are quiet,” he commented. “We could use some quiet here.”

That was the house. Then there was the street. It was a wind tunnel, scattered with the detritus of the ghetto—candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, greasy fast food bags. The wind carried them like so many feathers, and they blew continually up 39th

Street from the west. An extraordinary amount of trash. This in addition to the usual scattering of dime bags, used condoms, half-eaten cheeseburgers, soda cans, cast-off furniture. There were no trees on the street. Just a few twiglike stalks, planted by the city in hopes that no one would kick them, or spray paint them, or light them on fire. These trees usually died within six months.

The street was relatively narrow. Turning your car around was tricky, even in a driveway, because the street was typically lined with parked cars. People liked to park in front of their own houses, too. It was an unwritten rule that if you didn’t have a driveway, you had a god-given right to the space directly in front of your home. As if it had your name written on it in invisible ink. There was one man who lived in the middle of the block who would stand inside his house, watching from behind the curtain. If anyone parked in front of his house, he would come outside promptly, before the driver had even 120

gotten out, and say, “Excuse me. This is my wife’s parking space. She parks here when

she gets home from work.” He was polite about this, but firm. If the driver had the gall to

suggest that the man did not own the street, the man would become irate. Who did the

driver think he was, taking the man’s wife’s parking space like that? Why, the wife had

been parking in front of her house for twenty years and she wasn’t going to stop now!

Listen, the man said. She likes it this way, so I like it this way. You go park somewhere

else. Park down on West. Park up by Marcus Books on Martin Luther King. Park by

Gallagher’s Liquors, though I’ll allow that wouldn’t be my first choice. There have been

a few incidents lately. I’d turn your car around, go down to West. Park it real close to the

curb. People tend to drive fast down West, I can’t tell you why. Guess they’re in a hurry.

Still, it’s pretty wide as streets go. Your car should be okay. And my wife needs that spot.

Bye now.

Twice, the couple found a dead kitten on their front lawn. Once, a sawed-off

shotgun. Though it wasn’t right to call it a lawn, that meager patch of grass that Bernard

tended and fertilized and mowed. The neighborhood children dropping their bicycles on

the sidewalk, stopping to stare. A curiosity. There were four or five patches of grass on

that block, but only one white man and one white woman. Soon, two baby girls.

The babies shared the front bedroom, the one where the foster child had stood by the window. Now the room was painted blue. The carpet had been ripped out, the wood

floors sanded and polished. Against one wall stood a toddler bed with a bright canopy, a 121

crib against the opposite wall. A changing table with neat stacks of cloth diapers, two

diaper pails. A large area rug, chosen for its soft colors, its soft texture. When the babies

learned to walk, they would stumble and fall not onto the hard wood floor, but onto the pink and brown flowers of the soft rug. Wooden pull toys, a stuffed otter, neatly folded pastel swaddling blankets.

Bernard felt unsafe on the street, though he never said so. Rather than walk a block to the liquor store for a gallon of milk, he would drive a mile to Safeway. The woman could have walked to the liquor store, but she did it only rarely, preferably with a baby or two in the double stroller. The babies as her shield, her cute little defenses. She did, however, walk to the cafe. Two blocks from the house, the Cafe Dejena, owned by

some Ethiopians who believed staunchly that the neighborhood was coming back. “Up and coming,” they said. Which was amusing in a bleak way because that was exactly

what the realtor had said. “Up and coming.” Coming up from where, exactly?

To get to the cafe, the woman had to walk past the fruit stand on Martin Luther

King, Jr. Way, where, Bernard assured her, they were most certainly not selling fruit.

“But,” the woman said, “I saw fruit there. Oranges. Apples.” And Bernard smiled, bemused. 122

The gunfight happened at one o’clock in the morning on a weekend. A booming of semi-automatics, a spray of bullets that brought the couple instantly up out of a deep sleep. They sprang out of bed, sleep-addled and confused. Bernard went straight to the living room. The woman rushed to the children’s room where, incredibly, the two-year- old girl was sleeping peacefully. This almost defied belief; the older girl was usually a light sleeper. The woman was so relieved that she almost started crying. How would she explain a gunfight to her two-year-old? Well, she was two-and-a-half. But still.

Then the woman rushed through the kitchen to the back of the house, to the quiet little laundry room where the baby snored gently in her bassinet. This was not such a surprise, as the baby was a heavy sleeper. But the woman was deeply relieved nevertheless. Now the woman went back through the kitchen, and already she could see the lights flashing from a dozen police cars, an ambulance. Bernard out on the porch now, descending the steps. The woman got her robe and slippers and followed him. The street was lined with parked cars, as usual, and the windows of all of them were shattered. The two sidewalks covered in broken glass. People hovering on their front porches, shaking their heads in shock. Others picking their way gingerly through the sea of glass. The woman watched one man start down his steps carrying a large push broom. Then he stopped halfway down and just stayed there. He watched the police spread out up and down the block, breaching front yards and back yards, searching, searching. Their uniforms dark blue, their guns holstered, their flashlights on, searching. 123

The Black Leather Pants

She was never the mother who pushed a grocery cart while nursing a newborn, or hosted a party while nursing a newborn, or mowed the lawn, etc. She was the one with a complicated setup on the couch, involving pillows and cloth diapers, a glass of water, a digital alarm clock, a purple tube of Lansinoh, a pen and paper. Gritting her teeth at the letdown - a sharp pulsing pain that lasted ten seconds- and writing down the exact time of feeding. Keeping track of the thing that was eating up her life. To the minute.

She was the mother, who, while nursing her baby, thought about a pair of size two leather pants, languishing in a wicker basket on top of her wardrobe. She used to wear them with a T-shirt, boots, and a faux-fur coat. She could be ready to go in five minutes.

That was freedom. Sleeping around, sleeping late. A bare apartment, the pictures not even hung on the walls but leaning against them like noncommittal guests at a party.

Mismatched dishes in the kitchen, more wine glasses than water glasses. Men to sleep with, women to drink with, a binder of poetry to read from at dark smoky nightclubs. A job now and then. She’d stay just long enough, until they expressed a need for her. This was supposed to be flattering, an appeal to her need to be needed and her need for cash.

But their need made her want to go. Then she would quit, sit in cafes until money grew scarce and the electric company threatened to turn off the lights. 124

She was the mother who wondered about the black leather pants. Can she squeeze into them now? Please. It’s 4:00 a.m. The baby has fallen asleep on the breast. 125

Jaconita

Posey woke me up that first morning in Jaconita. She stood next to the bed in her underpants, clutching her princess nightgown in one hand and her Mother Goose blanket in the other.

“Mommy. It’s hot.”

I reached out and touched her round face. Warm. Too warm? I couldn’t think.

We’d gotten in late last night and I was sleepy.

I looked around at the toothpaste-pink walls, the ceiling fan whirring overhead, the French doors that opened out onto a patio. On the wall hung a print of Georgia

O’Keefe’s “Oriental Poppies, their petals red and orange, their centers deep purple. There was an O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe and I wanted to go. I’d never been to New Mexico before and I wanted to see a kiva, I wanted to see everything.

“Where are Daddy and your sister?”

“Fleur is eating. Daddy is outside. Grandpa is grumpy. Grandpa got mad because

I don’t have any clothes on.” 126

I felt a familiar thrum of anxiety. Fly eleven hundred miles to Albuquerque, rent a car, and drive an hour and a half in the pitch dark down unpaved roads, so that the child’s grandfather can get mad at her.

“Grandpa gets mad for no reason,” I told Posey. “You stay away from him, okay?” I got out of bed and she toddled after me into the bathroom, dragging her blanket.

I was going to launch into an explanation of why Grandpa was so fucked-up, but thought better of it. She was only three and a half.

When we came out of the bathroom there was Bernard in jeans, a black t-shirt, and his metal-framed glasses. He was tossing the pillows off the bed. One by one they sailed and hit the floor with a thump.

“I lost my hat,” said Bernard. He reached under the covers and felt around for a moment, exclaiming “Aha” as he produced the offending red knit hat. Then with an air of triumph he placed the hat on his bald head.

This spectacle was for Posey’s amusement but she only gazed listlessly at the floor.

“Fever,” I said to Bernard. We had been married for six years and had mastered the shorthand required to deal with frequent child situations.

Bernard went to find the thermometer while I sat in a wing chair next to the

French doors. I beckoned to Posey and she wilted into my lap. I thought I would melt 127

from the heat of her. Her brown hair was damp. Her entire body was hot to the touch, as though the fever would consume her from the inside out.

Bernard knelt next to Posey and turned on the thermometer. He brought it to her ear, and in a moment we peered at the screen. It read 103.5.

We had only just gotten to Jaconita. How could she be sick already? I opened my mouth but Bernard shook his head slightly.

“Well, look at that. You have a fever, little girl.” His voice was deep and soothing. It was a good voice for a father. You didn’t want the father of your child running around yelling hysterically when his girl had a fever. You wanted him calm, decisive.

I remembered something the pediatrician had told me. “Bernard, the fever is too high. Just Tylenol won’t bring it down. We have to give her Motrin, too.”

Bernard nodded. He disappeared into the bathroom and fumbled among the luggage. I sat there looking out the French doors and just then I saw Bernard’s father walk by. He was looking at the ground and muttering to himself. He had done the same thing at our own house in California just a few months ago: He paced up and down the sidewalk, around the backyard and the side yard. Sometimes he walked around the block, picking up trash off the street. He collected cans and bottles for recycling, too. He’d take a garbage bag with him, and only come back to the house when the bag was full. When 128

he had amassed several of these bags he would drive to the giant recycling center in west

Oakland and stand in line with the homeless and dispossessed, getting cash for his bottles and cans. I imagined that he looked more or less like the other people in line, although he had a full bank account, investments, a paid-off house, and a veteran’s pension.

I did not mind these excursions of his - 1 myself was better off when he stayed outside. Inside my house, he hovered, micromanaging. When I left the refrigerator door open for ten seconds, he ordered me to close it. “You’re wasting energy!” When I used a can opener, he told me I was doing it all wrong. When I dialed the telephone, he demanded to know whether the call was local or long distance. And was I was dialing direct, or using a long-distance code? “Use my phone!” he yelled. “It’s cheaper!”

Nothing escaped his notice. He behaved this way with everyone in the family, and they all tolerated it. I was the only one who resisted.

In any case, Bernard’s father didn’t want to be here in Jaconita. None of us did, except for Bernard’s mother, Hazel. She had organized the trip, including the extravagant villa. She was determined to bring the family together.

While Posey languished in my lap, I smoothed her damp hair off her forehead.

From inside the bathroom I heard the sound of zippers, the rustling of plastic bags. When we traveled with the children, Bernard enthusiastically packed bottles of children’s cough syrup, antihistamines, fever reducers, wet wipes, band-aids in all shapes and sizes. He was the original Boy Scout, I would tease, and he would reply: “Eagle Scout, thank you 129

very much.” I didn’t tease him now, though. I was glad we didn’t have to drive to Santa

Fe hunting for a pharmacy.

Bernard emerged, shaking a plastic bottle. He poured a teaspoon of orange liquid into the plastic dosing cup. Posey watched suspiciously and then she arched her back and twisted away from me.

“No, Mommy!” she wailed. “I don’t like it!”

I held her tightly. “I know, sugar,” I murmured. “But the medicine will make the hot feeling go away. Now be a good girl and drink it.”

Posey gave me an evil look. Then she sighed. She took the cup and drank it down, wincing theatrically.

Outside, Bernard’s father stalked past the French doors. He appeared to be going in circles. In the stifling dry wind, around and around he walked.

In the kitchen, Bernard’s niece opened the refrigerator.

“Ooh,” she said. “Cookie dough.”

Maya was eighteen years old, and six months pregnant. She ate constantly. She was not married, and this was a scandal in the little world of the family. To the grandparents, what she had done was unthinkable. Hazel had told us that the baby’s 130

father was from Mississippi. “We’ve never met him,” Hazel whispered. Then she added gleefully “And I don’t think we ever will!”

Maya had flown to New Mexico alone; her father would arrive tomorrow. She was staying in a separate wing of this huge, rented house. It was so huge that we could all stay here for a week and tolerate each other. That was the idea, anyway. The adobe villa went on and on, with its sprawling courtyards, its five bedrooms and bathrooms, its two living rooms, its vast dining room whose table seated twenty. It was absurd.

Maya took the roll of cookie dough out of the refrigerator and slit the package open with a knife. She sliced off a hunk and took a big bite. Then she looked sheepish.

“Oh god, I’m so rude. Would you like some?” She held the roll out to me and

Bernard.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“I’m good,” said Bernard. “But you enjoy that.”

Bernard’s father came into the kitchen as we were talking. A former Green Beret, his shoulders were broad, his arms huge. He saw Maya and recoiled visibly. Then he saw what she was doing and his eyes widened behind his thick glasses. 131

“Maya!” he sputtered. “Your grandmother bought the cookie dough for the children. The little children. You are not a child!” He waved his finger in the direction of her swollen belly. “You’re, you’re... Oh, crap.” He turned and rushed from the room.

Maya shrugged. “My mom says that grandpa is like really messed up because in the old-timey days his family didn’t have any money. You know, like he buys stale bread and stuff and his shoes are all old and gross?”

There were so many possible responses to this that I found myself unable to choose one. Also, I was wondering where Bernard’s father had gone. Maybe he’d resumed his patrolling of the perimeter of the house. Still, I reasoned, he would not have heard what Maya said even if he had been nearby, because he was quite deaf. He had to turn up his hearing aids or he missed the gist of most conversations.

“Maya,” Bernard said. “You’re eating for two so don’t worry. I’ll run to the store and replace that.. ..what is it? Cookie dough?”

“Aww,” Maya cooed. “Thanks, Uncle Bernard! You’re so cool. I wish my dad were as cool as you. But that ship has sailed, right? Ha, ha. The cool ship.”

Hazel came into the kitchen then. She was a round woman in blue polyester. She eyed the open roll of cookie dough but, thankfully, ignored it.

“Well, I think your father is cool, Maya.”

Maya nodded. “You’re sweet, Grandma.” 132

Hazel turned to me then. “Baby Fleur is outside playing. Where is Posey?” Her tone was vaguely reproachful.

“She’s sleeping, Hazel. She has a fever.”

“Well bless her heart, isn’t that a shame.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bernard’s father hovering near the doorway.

Hazel changed the subject now. “Whose turn is it to make dinner?” she asked brightly. “I’m not going to do it. I’m on vacation!”

Bernard’s father spoke from the doorway. “You’re always on vacation,” he scoffed. “You haven’t worked in twenty years.”

Hazel put on her most unnatural smile and I could see that she was gritting her teeth.

“We’ll make dinner,” offered Bernard. He was the peacemaker. I was just about to object when he pulled me aside.

“I’ll do everything,” he murmured. “Don’t worry. You just take care of Posey.”

Bernard and I retreated to our bedroom to check on Posey. She would awaken soon because the fever reducers were about to wear off. I lay on the bed, speculating 133

about how much sicker she was going to get, and whether her sister would catch it, too. I mentioned this to Bernard.

“I think Posey has altitude sickness,” he said.

“Altitude what?”

“I looked it up. Jaconita is at 5,728 feet. She is having a reaction to the elevation.

It’s very common.”

“Our vacation is making her sick.”

Bernard snorted. “Yeah. But it’s not contagious. If Fleur was going to get it, it would have happened already.”

I made Bernard open his laptop and show me proof that altitude sickness was a real thing. Then we discussed calling a doctor, and Bernard said we probably didn’t need to do that as long as we could keep the fever down. We watched Posey sleeping. She lay peacefully on her back, looking beatific. She was always perfectly still when she slept, waking in the exact same position in which she fell asleep.

After a few minutes of quiet, Bernard nudged me. “Listen,” he whispered. “I was thinking of going to the big flea market tomorrow. Saturday. It’s only on the weekend.”

He watched me uncertainly. I would be the one to stay home with Posey. It went without saying. I visualized my vacation, vanishing before my eyes. I looked resentfully at the 134

Georgia O’Keefe print on the wall - a poor substitute for the real paintings at the museum.

The doorknob turned and Fleur appeared, holding her stuffed otter. She was two and a half.

“Posey is sleeping,” I whispered. “Close the door, baby.”

Fleur closed the door with exaggerated care. “Shhhhh, Mama” she admonished.

Bernard opened one eye. “My mom might go to the flea market, too. And Maya.”

They would all go, then. And we did not talk about it, but it was understood that

Bernard’s father would stay, too. He hated outings.

That evening Bernard made spaghetti. Hazel sat outside under an umbrella and read a romance novel. Maya watched a movie in the other wing of the house. Posey lay curled up in an armchair, watching cartoons. She was fully medicated, with only a slight fever, but she was too tired to run around. Meanwhile Fleur raced around the house and the outdoors, as healthy as ever.

I was applying a cold washcloth to Posey’s forehead when I heard Bernard’s father raise his voice to Fleur.

“Calm down! Go do something productive! Read a book! Goddamn kids are out of control.” 135

I dropped the washcloth and headed to the living room. Bernard emerged from the kitchen, holding a wooden spoon. He saw the tension on my face and the forward motion of my body and he raised one hand to stop me. “I’ll handle it,” he said. A moment later I heard him admonishing his father. Then Fleur flew into the room. She flung her arms around my legs, sobbing. I knelt and she buried her face in my neck.

Before bed that night, Bernard took a Valium. “Really” he said, “there is not enough Valium on earth for this vacation.” Then he fell asleep and snored loudly all night. I lay awake worrying about the girls. I heard Posey moan in her sleep and I rocketed out of bed and laid a hand on her forehead. But the fever was lower and she was deeply asleep. Then I checked on Fleur. In the dark I had trouble finding her forehead because her feet were on the pillow. Fleur was all over the place when she slept.

By morning I was exhausted. I felt as though I hadn’t slept at all. Everything seemed fuzzy and hazy. Bernard gave Posey some Motrin, and he took both girls out to the kitchen for breakfast. Then everyone ran around getting ready to leave for the flea market, while I made a cup of coffee.

“It’s a bummer that you can’t come,” offered Maya.

“I know,” I said. “It’s killing me, actually.”

“A mother’s work is never done, Maya,” said Hazel pointedly, as if hoping to give Maya a glimpse of her own future. But Maya seemed not to hear. She was searching 136

the refrigerator for cookie dough. Hazel put on her most disapproving look, her lips pursed, her brow furrowed, but the girl didn’t even notice.

Hazel tried again. “Maya, a young woman in your condition shouldn’t—”

Maya rolled her eyes. “Grandma. It’s a craving, okay?”

Posey came in, crying about why couldn’t she go to the flea market, too. Then she pitched a fit right there on the kitchen floor.

“I don’t want to stay home!” she shrieked. “I hate fevers! Fevers are mean!”

Bernard kissed me goodbye. “Take a nap,” he said. “Posey can watch a movie.”

Everyone filed out to the car and I stood there watching, wishing I could go. Still,

I had a plan for Posey that would get us both out of the house, if only briefly. How could a house that large make me feel so claustrophobic? I could hardly stand it.

Back in the kitchen I sat on the tile floor next to Posey. Her blanket was draped over her head. She was so small that I could see only her toes sticking out.

“Funny thing,” I said. “Did you know there is a swimming pool here?” I spoke casually, as though it were nothing.

Posey lifted up the blanket, revealing her tear-streaked face. 137

The pool was fifty yards from the villa, down a dirt road. It was near the safety of the house, but far away enough to qualify as an outing. Outside it was hot and windy but I didn’t care. I’d been stuck inside that dark room for two days. Posey was glad to be outside, too. She walked along the dirt road in her red swimsuit and sneakers, pointing at trees and the wide blue sky.

The pool was encircled by a low iron fence, with a gate. There was a sign that

said “No Trespassers” in large red letters. Posey pointed at it, wondering, but I told her,

as temporary denizens of the villa we were allowed to use the pool. Inside the gate we

found pretty yellow flowers growing like weeds, pushing up through the cracks in the concrete. Paper flowers, Bernard had told me, native to New Mexico. They thrived under dry, harsh conditions.

The pool was small, not large enough for a real swim, but still we had it all to

ourselves - we had seen no other people since the family had left. Leaves floated on the water, which we quickly discovered was very cold. The cold was made worse by the stiff

wind. Still, Posey wanted to get in the pool and I let her. This was our paltry vacation,

such as it was. Soon enough her fever would go back up, if this really was altitude

sickness, and in five more days it would be back to preschool for her and Fleur, back to work for me and for Bernard. So I sat at the edge of the pool and watched Posey

splashing. I tried to be optimistic. It was just as well that I had not gone to the flea

market; I did not have to deal with the family and I had my daughter to myself. I shut my 138

eyes against the sun and the wind, thinking of real vacations on tropical beaches. I imagined that I was reading a magazine and drinking a glass of white wine. I tried to relax.

Half an hour later we walked back to the house. Posey was happy now, but also wet and tired. She spotted a hill of red ants and screamed. She was sure that the ants were going to chase her so she ran, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Then she tripped on her shoelace and fell into the dirt, weeping. I carried her the rest of the way to the house.

The house was silent and there was no sign of Bernard’s father. I kicked off my shoes and the tiles felt cool under my feet. In the bathroom I stripped off Posey’s dirty swimsuit and felt her forehead. It was a little warm, but I looked at the clock and knew I couldn’t give her Motrin yet. I had to wait another two hours. I ran a bath and Posey climbed in obediently and sat perfectly still while I washed her hair.

“I’m tired, Mommy.”

“Me too, baby doll. Let’s take a rest.”

When Posey was all combed and dried I dressed her in a clean t-shirt and underwear. We sank onto the huge bed and I watched her fall asleep. I felt exhausted. I closed my eyes. 139

I awakened suddenly to a high-pitched cry. Posey was not in the bed, but her t- shirt was there. I grabbed it; it felt damp. Her fever must have shot up while I was asleep.

I stumbled out of the bedroom in a panic, rubbing my eyes.

I found her in the living room with the vaulted ceiling. Posey was wandering around the large room in her underwear, mumbling, her face flushed. My father-in-law followed close behind, wringing his hands.

“There’s something wrong with her!” he cried.

I rushed forward, gathering up Posey’s hot body. Jesus, she was hot. How could one small body contain so much heat and not burst into flames?

“We’re in the world,” she said. “Mommy, we’re in the world.”

I knew right away that medication wouldn’t bring down the fever fast enough. I rocked her gently, trying to think what to do. Then my eyes fell on my father-in-law, who was pacing anxiously and mumbling to himself. He could help me.

“It’s the fever,” I told him. “You’re going to help me. I want you to run a cold bath.”

He stared at me, uncomprehending. “What?”

It took me a moment to realize. He had turned down his hearing aids. The old man could not hear me. He lived among people, but could not stand to listen to their stupid 140

talk. I was seized with fury. I pointed at my ear. “Turn up your hearing aids,” I growled. I watched him comply clumsily and I hated him then. I hated his bullying ways and his obstinacy and I didn’t care if he knew it.

I repeated my instructions about the bath. I spoke clearly and loudly but he hesitated, looking helpless and afraid. I had an overwhelming urge to slap him. I didn’t have time for this. There was no time. “Go!” I shouted. “Now!”

He rushed away, startled into action. I looked down at Posey, lying inert in my arms. Her face was pink with fever. She gazed through me.

“Mommy, I see little birds flying, little paper birds.”

“Birds,” I echoed. I carried her back through the dining room, feeling as though I was watching this scene from above. Like it was someone else’s life, but it wasn’t. It was my life. I’ll bring down the fever, I told myself. She’ll be fine.

I had never felt such fear.

First I retrieved the thermometer from the bedroom. In the bathroom the water was running in the tub - my father-in-law had done that much, at least. He stood there awkwardly and watched while I set Posey down and took her temperature.

The little screen read 104.1 felt my stomach drop and a hollowness in my chest. I showed the thermometer to my father-in-law. “That’s pretty high,” he said. 141

“I need all the ice from the freezer. In a bowl. Find a big bowl.”

He left the bathroom and I pulled off Posey’s underpants and lifted her into the bathtub, my hands on her burning hot skin.

“I want you to sit down now, baby,” I murmured.

Posey looked down at the water doubtfully.

“This nice cold water is going to cool you off. You feel hot, don’t you?”

“I feel so tired, Mommy.”

“I know, baby. But Mommy needs you to sit down.” I summoned all of my will.

Get her to sit down first. Get her to sit down first. Jesus, if you bring this fever down I won’t complain ever again, I will be everlastingly patient with my children and my family.

Posey sighed. Then she held out a hand to me. I took it, and she eased herself slowly down into the water.

“I want you to lie down now. Your body needs that cold water.”

Posey did not resist. She lay down and leaned against the end of the bathtub. 142

I turned off the tap and my father-in-law appeared, carrying a stainless steel mixing bowl.

He looked at me expectantly. I had to tell him to do every little thing, he could figure out none of it for himself.

“Put the all the ice in the bath,” I said. “I’m going to find the medicine. But you have to stay here. Do you understand? Do not leave her.”

I was only going into the next room, but I knew he was clueless.

“If you leave her, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

He nodded obediently, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

I stood up and backed toward the doorway.

In the bedroom I threw open the curtains and light flooded the room. She’ll be fine, I told myself. I just have to find the medicine.

The Tylenol was on a bedside table, but the bottle of Motrin had gotten knocked off and was under the bed, along with the plastic dosing cup. I couldn’t reach the cup, and had to go around to the other side of the bed. I’ll give her Motrin first, I told myself as I felt around in the darkness. Finally my fingers closed around the sticky cup.

Back inside the bathroom, Posey lay in several inches of water, ice cubes floating all around her. My father-in-law knelt next to the bathtub, watching her dutifully. 143

I took the bottle of Motrin and shook it hard and poured it into the plastic cup. My fingers trembled so much, I almost couldn’t hold the cup. I wished that I had had the sense to call a doctor yesterday, when it first occurred to me. Now it was Saturday and there was no one to give me sound advice. I was stuck here with a sick child and a crazy old man.

I got down on my knees and my father-in-law moved over to make room for me. I felt no rancor toward him. As big a man as he was, he seemed so small now.

Posey lay in the water, her brown hair floating, her body perfectly still except for the slight rise and fall of her chest. I put my hands under her armpits and slid her up to a sitting position.

She gazed over my shoulder. “There are birds flying in this room, Mommy. The birds don’t have feathers. The birds are saying lie down, lie down in water. Yellow birds.”

My throat constricted and I thought I would cry. I swallowed hard. “I see the birds, too, sugar. Yellow birds.” I brought the cup to her lips. “Drink this.”

She tipped her head back and drank. Then she looked at her grandfather, as if just noticing him. She smiled her most disarming smile and she seemed luminous, a creature from another world.

“The birds, Grandpa.” 144

The old man nodded in wonderment as if he had never seen his granddaughter before, as if she were an angel complete with wings and a halo. “Yes, Posey. The birds.”

I sat there, depleted. My father-in-law knelt quietly next to the tub, waiting for instructions. The mixing bowl sat on the floor, empty. I would have to tell him to take it back to the kitchen. I would have to ask him if he had refilled the ice cube trays and put them back in the freezer. I might need more ice. 145

Twelve Is Hell

The girls are all crammed in the bathroom. Giggling, whispering, opening and closing drawers. The smell of perfume, the ssssssssst of hairspray. Someone opens a window. Squeals. Only one girl is silent. She is painfully shy, older than the rest, heavyset, with long black hair. The other four girls talk ceaselessly.

The girls are guests here. This is a birthday party, but the hostess is not with the girls in the bathroom. Improbably, she is in the living room. She is with her sister and her parents and her grandparents. The adults do not know what to think. What is she doing out here? Why isn’t she in the bathroom with her friends? If you were a twelve-year-old girl, you would not want to be in the living room with your family.

The guests empty the bathroom drawers. There is the rattling sound of plastic containers hitting the floor. The guests have found makeup: mascara, eyeshadow, lipstick. They proceed to paint each other’s faces. The quiet girl demurs, but is ready to put makeup on others. One girl ends up with the most makeup, what looks like an eighth of an inch of black eyeliner, garish green eye shadow, orange lipstick. Another girl paints concealer on her own lips. Still another takes a pink lipstick to her cheeks. The pillaging proceeds to the adjacent bedroom. The birthday girl’s dresser is ransacked, her clothes strewn all over the floor. Even the younger sister’s dresser is emptied, the older girls squeezing themselves into her tiny t-shirts and leggings. 146

While her guests binge on clothing and makeup, the birthday girl stays stubbornly

in the living room. Her brown hair is curly, almost to her shoulders. She is playing a

video game. Her lips are folded. She concentrates on the screen in front of her. Chirping noises emit from the television. “Please stay here,” she whispers to her younger sister.

“Don’t leave.” The sister gives a slight nod: In a million years she would never leave her

older sister, especially at her own party when her friends are shunning her. The younger

sister is ten years old, with blue eyes and heavy blonde hair falling past her shoulders.

She has a dreamy aspect to her, an abstract quality. But about this she is very concrete:

She is loyal to her older sister. It is a horror, she thinks, her older sister’s friends ignoring

her at her own birthday party. The younger sister tries to imagine her own friends behaving this way, but she simply cannot. Her friends would not do this to her. The younger sister cannot fathom the cruel depths of these twelve-year-old girls, with their

training bras and athletic shoes, their false smiles and rolling eyes.

One of the girls emerges from the bathroom. She’s the one with black eyeliner,

green eye shadow, and orange lipstick, and she has put on a dress that belongs to the younger sister - a short-sleeve blue and white striped bodice with a pink pleated crepe de

chine skirt. A cunning pink rose at the shoulder matches the skirt. The dress barely covers

her bottom, and with all the makeup she looks like a clown. Absurd. Grotesque. She skips

obliviously through the kitchen as though she lives here, as though it is her prerogative.

Really all the guests are behaving this way, with their raiding of dressers and cosmetics,

but it is only this one clownish girl who steps, unthinking, into the private sphere of the 147

family. But she stops short at the door to the living room because everyone there is now

staring at her garishly painted face, her adolescent body crammed into the girlish dress.

The adults raise their eyebrows and shift uncomfortably on the couch. The older

sister turns from her video game to look at this unrecognizable friend. The younger sister gapes, realizing that the guests have rifled through her own dresser. But she doesn’t

speak. No one speaks.

The girl in the crepe de chine dress stands frozen in the doorway. She locks eyes with the older sister and a question is written on her face. Will you come? I t’s weird that we ’re in there and you ’re out here. Will you get dressed up with us and put on makeup?

The older sister’s face has darkened; she seems unable to speak. The girl in the crepe de chine dress looks baffled, but the adults know what’s going unsaid here and so

does the younger sister. I didn ’t want to put on makeup and get dressed up. I said I didn ’t

want to and you all went anyway and you wrecked my bedroom and you don’t even care that it’s my birthday.

The clownish girl turns away then, and she drops something: Her cell phone. It

falls and bounces on the kitchen linoleum. She bends over to retrieve the phone and the crepe de chine skirt lifts a few inches, exposing her underwear and something bulky beneath it. The four adults on the couch all see it and so does the older sister. The 148

younger sister sees it, but she doesn’t understand what it is: The girl’s sanitary pad. She has her period.

On the couch, the women shake their heads and sigh. The men grimace and look away. I t’s too much. No one needs to see that. Why are these children behaving so badly at a birthday party, anyway? Isn't it time for cake and presents?

The girl in the crepe de chine dress tiptoes back to the bathroom.

The older sister stares after her for a moment, her mouth open.

“What?” asks the younger sister. “What?”

The older sister bends her head down and whispers an explanation. The younger

sister gasps.

Now the quiet girl eases noiselessly into the living room. Her dread is palpable, her face hardly visible behind the curtain of hair. She glances sideways at the adults as if

fearing they will reprimand her, and then casts her eyes down. She stands next to the

birthday girl and inclines her head toward the other end of the house, where the guests are

slathering themselves with makeup. They want you to come put makeup on, too They said it was a misunderstanding. But the birthday girl shakes her head. She smiles briefly

at the quiet girl, though. I t’s okay, I don’t hold it against you. The quiet girl disappears

back to the bathroom. 149

The adults exchange glances. The quiet girl was sent as an emissary. She did not

want to come into the living room, but how could she refuse? She did not want to lose her friends.

The television chirps. The older sister stands wanly in front of the screen. She

looks wiped out. The younger sister watches her. It’s her job to stay with her older sister

- she’ll stand here all night if she has to. The friends are oblivious. The friends are not

friends. The younger sister inches closer now. She nudges her older sister. “Start the

game,” she says. “I’ll play with you.” 150

Effacee Like Me

These pants make me look fat. I had dessert and I feel guilty. I’m gonna practice ballet now even though I don’t have a barre at home. Do you want to see my pirouette,

Mommy? Rond de jambes, pirouette! I love ballet, but twice a week isn’t enough. I need to get more exercise. I want to do gymnastics. I want to join the cheerleading squad. I want to play soccer. I have a muffin top.

I want to ride my bike to school. I need a basket for my bicycle so I can bike to school with Olivia. Can we go to the bike shop? Does my butt look too big? Mommy, I found a soap on Amazon.com. It’s for losing weight. It’s only $5.95 can I get it it’s really important. My thighs are huge. MOMMY. Can you get me this tea. It’s for losing weight.

Sylvie told me about it. Sylvie got me gummi gutta pills for losing weight. She gave them to me after school in a little bag. I said I was going to the cafe after school but instead I went to the donut shop with Joseph and Cora and Sylvie. I lied to you. But then I was embarrassed because I don’t know how to swallow a pill. I gagged and I spat it out. I told

Sylvie and I was embarrassed. She said it’s okay, it’s cute that you can’t swallow a pill.

Then she patted me on the head and said “Can I have the pills back ‘cause I need them.”

But I had thrown the pills away. I snuck the bag into the kitchen trash and shoved it to the bottom. 151

I’m gonna be a vegan. Vegans have a lot of energy, plus I can save the animals.

It’s mean that people eat animals.

No more cheese for me. No milk from cows. Mommy. Can you get me some almond milk today? And some more dried cranberries. You never listen to me. I hate you,

Mommy. Did you even hear me? Did you sign me up for more ballet? Are you getting the almond milk? I can’t eat cereal with cow’s milk. If you don’t get it then I’m not gonna eat at all. Actually I’m not hungry. Watch me practice. See, 1st position, plie, and... .grandplie. 1st position, and.. .grand battement. I can do a grand jete. Watch me do a flying leap, I won’t fly through the window. Wow, that was close!

This step is called effacee. Do you know what effacee means? It means ‘erased.’

See, I turn so that you can only see half of me. It’s like part of me is not there. Effacee is my favorite because I want to be thin. It’s important to look perfect all the time. I wish I didn’t have to flat iron my hair every day but I do. That’s so my hair won’t be curly and fluffy. If I iron it every day then it’s thin. Mommy. Are you listening? MOMMY. Do you see? It’s effacee like me.