Fiction – Page 19 – Philadelphia Stories

Regalia

The scepter was in a special bin—actually; just a cardboard box with the lid cut off—located in a dim corner at the rear of the Army-Navy store, near the rack of Big & Tall Camouflage Fashions. The cardboard box had a wooden paint stirrer stapled to it and stapled to the paint stirrer was a hand-written sign: DISCONTINUED DAMAGED ONE OF A KIND.

The scepter looked weird there, thrown in with mismatched waterproof socks, outdated hunter’s sausage, and compasses stuck on SE.

The scepter glittered. Jerome picked it up. It was surprisingly light. He turned it every which way. He didn’t fool himself. The jewels covering the surface of the scepter were luminescent crimson and gold, but they were imitation—ruby and topaz colored glass. Yet Jerome was very much taken by the way they caught the light.

Jerome was not a sophisticated man but—and perhaps this is surprising—he knew a scepter when he saw one. The artifact he now held was a (no doubt) very cheap modern replica of a real scepter, which is basically a gaudily decorative type of stick used throughout the ages by rulers of all kinds as a symbol of royal power. Jerome remembered pictures of the British crown jewels he’d once seen in the encyclopedia at his grandfather’s house.

He remembered

an orb, and

a robe, and

a bracelet, and

spurs, and

a scepter.

Jerome had read that Oliver Cromwell melted down many of the originals of the British crown jewels. But the Royalists made a comeback, and so did the jewels. Jerome had turned the yellowed pages of his grandfather’s encyclopedia, looking at photographs of the gleaming baubles, mesmerized by their otherworldly quality, and by the example, the message of the uncaring waste of such spectacular wealth. Like Cromwell, he’d thought: Have they no shame? But he’d been weirdly excited by the photographs.

The Queen of England’s scepters are three feet long. One is topped with a four-sided head containing exquisite, gilded carvings of St Stephen, asserting the Crown’s (temporal) authority over the church. The other has doves.

The Army-Navy scepter Jerome held in his hands was only—he guessed—about seventeen inches in length, topped with an oblong, three-sided knob, and ornamented with simple Celtic-looking designs. It seemed toy-like; a child seeing it might take it for a magic wand.

Jerome hesitated. An eight-dollar scepter purchase (including tax) would require use of all the funds he’d intended for the purchase of new laces for his hiking boots, as well as the cost of carfare home. In other words, if he bought the scepter he’d have to walk the several-mile distance back to his apartment—in boots with broken laces.

But Jerome decided he would buy the scepter. Granted, it was silly, but there was, to him, something irresistibly appealing about the idea of a non-royal guy using all of his “worldly goods” to purchase a bejeweled artifact. He imagined showing it off to people at work, or better yet, just displaying it casually on a loop descending from his belt so his co-workers would be intrigued and provoked into asking him about it. He’d reply in one of these ways:

This scepter? You never noticed it before?

Or: I spent everything I had on it. Every penny in my possession.

Or, simply: Bow down, peasant.

He wouldn’t mention the eight dollar figure unless pressed.

Alice was a woman Jerome had known. He’d seen her the first time when he was part of a large group of people all going to the movies. She was the sister of a sort-of friend of his. Jerome sat in the row behind Alice and he liked

her neck, the way she showed it when she tilted her head back to laugh, and

the flickering gray-blue light from the film which shone on the top of her hair, and

her profile, when she turned to whisper something to her neighbor, though it blocked his view of the screen.

The next time Jerome saw Alice was when he attended his sort-of friend’s wedding reception, at a neighborhood catering hall. It was dark and hot in the hall and the ceilings were low. Alice wore an emerald dress. She was drunk, and there was something on her mind. When Jerome asked her to dance she cheered up, and laughed in a theatrical way, and took his hand. Once out on the tiny dance floor, she broke away from him and gyrated wildly, lifting her knees too high and flailing her solid body around and paying, it seemed, very little attention to the music, which was romantic and slow. (Jerome had purposely waited for a slow number to come up before his approach.) Embarrassed by his partner’s display, his face hot, Jerome saw people watching, pointing, and laughing—but he stayed with Alice . He marched forward and took her hand again to keep her under control, and that worked for a while, but her hand was slippery and on one unexpected turn she broke free from his grasp and lost a shoe and spun toward the too-small table with the wedding cake on it. Alice fell without putting her hands out; there was a meaty thud. Her body rolled and jarred one of the table legs and the cake shuddered but didn’t fall. Everyone laughed once they saw the cake was all right.

Jerome picked up Alice ’s lost shoe and then he picked up Alice . Her right shoulder strap had detached itself from the back of her dress and, rooted to the front, stood half-erect, an emerald serpent wavering beckoningly in the air between them. As he raised her to her feet, Alice brought her hot-breathed mouth close to his ear and whispered: Where do you live?

She stayed with him all that night and some of the next day. They had sexual intercourse 4½ times.

Jerome called Alice on three different occasions after their night together before it became clear that she didn’t want to see him again, not even to have sex ½ times more, to even things out. Jerome gave up because he didn’t want to be a creep.

The young dark-eyed male clerk who waited on him gave Jerome a peculiar, malevolent look when he took the gleaming scepter up to the cash register to pay for it, then rudely snatched the proffered money from his hand, saying nothing. Jerome, curious to learn why an Army-Navy store was selling scepters, was so baffled by the boy’s hostile body language that he could only meet the clerk’s silence with his own, unsure how to broach the subject of the scepter’s origins in the face of such apparent animus.

When Jerome returned to his apartment, he sat for a minute on the sofa to catch his breath, winded from the long walk. Then he gingerly inserted his moist right hand into the softly creased brown bag in which he’d brought the scepter home, and, with two fingers, pulled it free and let it swing inverted before his face, a sparkling pendulum, trailing warm flimmering smiles of scarlet and gold, which lingered in the air before fading. Jerome’s apartment was

dim, and

drab, and

unclean.

But the scepter shone brilliantly, and the room was newly lit.

Jerome carried the scepter to the bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door, and faced the full-length mirror hung on the back of it, the only mirror in the house. He posed with the scepter, adopting various postures:

clutching the scepter tightly across his chest, then

pointing it at the mirror, as if giving a command, then

naked and pointing.

Jerome expected that holding the scepter would make him look—and feel—different. Like he had felt when looking at the pictures of the crown jewels. Or during that time with Alice .

Exalted .

But Jerome did not look or feel any different. He was not exalted. In fact, he looked and felt rather silly, a glowering commoner grasping a cheap shiny stick.

10.

Jerome decided that a scepter was not enough. He would need a crown.

11.

Jerome looked up “crowns” in the phone book. There was a small entry for the word between “Crowd Control Equipment” and “Cruises,” but it only advised him to “see Dentists.”

Jerome thought about the problem for a couple of days. Where does an average guy buy a crown?

During the time he was thinking, Jerome did not take his scepter to his job with him as he had planned; he left it home, on the bureau. Each day when he returned from work, Jerome approached the bedroom and peered in at the scepter. It seemed wrong to keep it there, as if thrown down without care on the dirty scratched wooden surface, lying next to his much less-shiny keys and loose change, but trial and error had proven that the scepter didn’t look right anywhere else in the apartment, either.

12.

On the third day, a Saturday, Jerome thought: Why not see if they have a crown at the costume shop?

13.

The shopping trip was fruitful. Not only did Jerome obtain a crown, he also got an orb and a cape. They all came together in a cardboard box with a cellophane window. The box was called “Royal Fun Kit.”

The kit seemed intended for use by children, and that worried Jerome a little, because he thought the crown might not fit. And the mottle-faced woman behind the counter would not let him take it out of the box before purchase to try it for size; in fact, she seemed to think he was joking when he suggested it.

14.

Jerome took the Royal Fun Kit home. In the bathroom, he found that the crown was too small (almost comically so), but when he wore it and the cape (short and purple, with a faux ermine fringe) together while tendering both the orb (gold-colored plastic, with red paste jewels) and the scepter, he saw something new appear in the mirror.

A king.

Now what?

16.

He thought:

I am my true self, and

no one can deny it, and

a king must have a queen.

17.

Jerome took off his regalia to eat dinner; it just seemed wrong to eat a chicken pot pie while wearing a crown. After his meal, he called his sort-of friend and endured a bit of uncomfortable chitchat before he managed to steer the subject of the conversation around to where Alice might be. The sort-of friend off-handedly remarked that Alice spent most Saturday evenings drinking with her girlfriends in a tavern called Alane’s Hole. Jerome immediately steered the conversation to another subject so his sort-of friend would not get a weird vibe from him, then hung up as soon as politeness would allow, turned off the lamp, and sat in the dark, thinking.

18.

After a while, Jerome went to the bedroom and got the scepter, brought it into the living room, and held it near the window. He pretended that the pale light coming in emanated not from the flickering street lamp outside but from moon glow, or the cool illumination of stars.

19.

Alice sat with her friends Lisa (small and dark) and Jennifer (large and red) at their regular table. The bar had gotten quieter and quieter as closing time approached.

It’s the shank of the evening, Lisa said.

Jennifer was thirty percent less intoxicated than her friends since she was the designated driver. She said: No, it’s later than the shank. It’s the rectum, the rectum of the evening.

Alice and Lisa both laughed, even though they didn’t understand. When you’ve been drinking the word “rectum” is always funny.

It was around this time on most Saturdays that Alice and her friends complained about men. They said that

all the good men know they’re good and avoid getting married, or

all the good men are already married, or

there are no good men.

20.

The soft murmur of conversation surrounding the three women ceased suddenly and they looked around to see what was going on.

There was a man in a crown and a cape standing in the entrance to the tavern. In one hand he held a big shiny ball and in the other a glittering stick. He began a magisterial procession in their direction.

Oh crap, said Alice .

Jerome moved with regal deliberation along the irregular aisle between tables, surveying the faces around him, searching. The patrons he passed were shocked, awed, and silent. Some of the drunker ones bobbed their heads.

The spell lasted until Jerome saw Alice and approached; the approach brought him within range of the ceiling fan, and one of its leisurely circling blades knocked his crown off. Unfazed, he stepped to one side, reached down, reacquired the crown, and perched it back on his head without breaking the eye contact he’d made with his queen. Meanwhile, the commoners in the bar erupted into laughter—even the approaching waitress, who had previously been sure she’d seen everything.

Jerome raised his scepter above his head and the bar grew quiet instantly. Tufts of fake ermine escaped the fringe of his cape, impelled by the ceiling fan. They floated in the air, orbiting him like moons.

Jerome quite dramatically dropped his arm so that the scepter pointed at Alice .

I choose you, he said, to be my queen.

21.

Alice blinked. Her friends turned to look at her, then turned back to look at Jerome. He smiled, majestically.

Alice started to stand. Jennifer grabbed her arm.

Alice , don’t, she said.

I can’t help myself, Alice said. It’s a royal command.

22.

Toward dawn, Jerome returned from the bathroom and noticed something glittering under the bed. He knelt down and picked it up. The scepter. He looked closely at it in the lavender light. It was missing two stones, he noticed. But it was still a lovely thing.

Jerome knelt on the edge of the bed. In his absence, Alice had imperially invaded his side of it, sprawling with covetous assurance on as much square footage as she could cover. She was naked, and quite unconscious. Jerome studied her as the sun rose.

Alice :

snored, and

drooled a little, and

was nonetheless glorious.

23.

Jerome placed the scepter next to Alice . There, nestled against her left breast, glimmering in the auspicious golden aurora of sunrise, it at last looked right, safely at home with one of its own kind. James (Jay) W. Morris grew up in Philadelphia and attended Central High School and LaSalle University, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and for a time he worked as a monologue writer for Jay Leno. Recently, his first play, RUDE BABY, was produced by the City Theater Company of Wilmington, Delaware. “Regalia” is the second story of Jay’s to appear in Philadelphia Stories.

Cheesesteak Heaven

[img_assist|nid=909|title=Removed Sections, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=135]The cops were hungry. They had stopped for salads two hours earlier. Now they were hungry again, so hungry that instead of listening to radio calls or watching what streamed across their computer screen, they were daydreaming food, both of them picturing bags stuffed with burgers and onion rings, flipping the lid on a pizza box and smelling that beautiful grease and cheese.

“I want . . .” Nilda said.

“Don’t even start,” Raymond said.

“What? I can’t even talk about it?”

“I’m not into fantasy. I believe in the real thing. Talk is bogus.”

Nilda snorted.

“Do I talk? Or do I get?” Raymond said.

“Not that I am interested in your sex life. Because I am not. But do blow jobs count as actual real sex? Like in the straight world, it’s like just foreplay. You know?”

“You are too much,” Raymond said.

“What? What? I’m just saying,” Nilda said.

“Always finding fault with me.”

“You big fat baby. Stop whining.”

“Won’t be fat for long. Twenty-two pounds so far this slim-a-thon. Never fear, I will carry our team to ultimate victory, my sister,” Raymond said.

“I’m doing my part. I’m doing really good. It’s not my fault that women can’t lose as fast as men. We’re just built different. Ask anyone. Not one woman in the world can lose as fast as a man,” Nilda said.

“So? What’s the number?”

“None of your business.”

“I’m on your team, Nilda,” Raymond said. “Slim-a-thon team manager. Here to help coach you, get you up to speed.”

“Do you have to use such foul language? I have a college degree. I didn’t become a cop to hear garbage in my ear all day long. I could report you, you know.”

“Go ahead. That would really endear you to your fellow cops, reporting that your partner used a distasteful word in your presence.” Nilda grinned, turning her head so that Raymond couldn’t see her. Men were so easy. And gay men were super easy.

“Have some consideration,” Raymond said. “Please.”

Now he’s begging me, thought Nilda. This guy is too fucking much.

They pulled up to the house. The front door was wide open. They were in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia, an old part of the city where there were big trees and the houses were stately and large, with stone fronts and porches with white columns.

The woman was bleeding from her nose. She sobbed, held a fuzzy pink slipper sock to her nose and never took her eyes off the man. The man was fat, his belly hanging over his belt and his shirt gaping, buttons straining.

“Please come outside now, sir,” Nilda said her hand on her gun. The man scurried outside with her.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” the man said. “I’m just so sick of her putting me down all the time. I can’t do anything right. I lost it. I swear it was a mistake. A one-time thing. I will never, I swear on my mother’s grave, never do that again. Please don’t arrest me. I’m a CPA. I have an MBA.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Nilda said and she arrested him.

“Did you see how fat he was?” Nilda said to Raymond afterwards.

“Why are you always picking on me?”

“What? I’m talking about the man. The man.”

“I know what you’re doing. You never let up. You think I’m as fat as that man. I’m doing everything right now. I’m going to lose this weight.”

“You better. It’s not allowed, is it? To be gay and fat. Isn’t there some kind of oath you guys sign, to stay buff?” Nilda said. She was needling him deliberately. She was hungry and sex-starved and there was nothing she could do about either thing for the next few hours.

Nilda liked to fight with Raymond. They squabbled like brothers and sisters. She thought Raymond was a big faggy baby, sensitive about everything. He looked at Nilda with shiny hurt eyes when she got on his case. It made her want to fight more with him, make him out-and-out bawl. She used to make her brother Nestor cry all the time. She smiled.

“What’s with you? Happy now? Because you made me feel bad?” Raymond said.

“You talk too much,” said Nilda. “There’s something very annoying about a man who talks too much.”

“Sometimes I hate your guts, you know that? You’re a drag.”

“Is that the best you can do?” Jeez, that’s lame, Nilda thought. She wished he were more ruthless. If he really gave it to her, she would be distracted from the gnawing emptiness in her stomach.

“I’m hungry,” Nilda said.

“Do you bring your snack with you?” said Raymond.

“I don’t want a mother-fucking apple,” Nilda said. She found the apple in the glove compartment, opened her window and threw it out. “I want a cheesesteak with fries.”

Raymond took his hands off the wheel and held them over his ears.

“Please,” he said.

“Please nothing. Take me to Cheesesteak Heaven,” she said.

“I will not.”

A call came in for them to respond to a robbery in progress.

“I hate those,” Nilda said. “God, I hate those.”

“What exactly do you like? You hate domestics, you hate robberies. What do you want?”

She thought about it, turned over everything she had done on the job in the past week, month, year. Raymond sped toward the robbery. He was a good fast driver and knew all the shortcuts, so she let him drive.

“I like drunks,” she said.

“You’re kidding me. You never know what they’ll do. They vomit on you, throw punches.”

“Drunks are easy,” she said. Nilda was lazy. She mostly liked riding around in the car.

“Not to me.”

“That’s because you try to talk to them, reason with them. If they give me trouble, I just give them a crack and they lay there like babies.”

Raymond shook his head.

When they pulled up to the liquor store, there were already a bunch of other cops there and the robber was handcuffed and in the car. Nilda and Raymond hung around for a while talking. Nilda took off her hat and undid her ponytail, leaned against the car. Single, single, married, don’t know, married, she them counted off. Finally Nilda and Raymond got back in their car.

“He was cute,” Raymond said.

“Which one?”

“The one you were working it for.” Raymond imitated Nilda tossing her hair around.

Nilda wondered if she had been that obvious. She had been trying hard to open that knot she felt inside since her last husband left. Whenever she thought of his face, she made herself erase it and picture a white rose unfurling slowly inside her heart. I need sex, she thought. If I don’t have sex soon, I am going to die. Love is too much to ask for, but sex is a reasonable request.

“How do I get some?” she asked. “I don’t even know how to get it. You get it all the time. I was married for the last seven years. I forget how to get it. Before him, it used to just come automatically.”

“See how you are? Make fun of me, tease me, curse at me, then you want advice. Now you want me to help you. Why should I?”

Nilda was very hungry. Suddenly she couldn’t think about anything else.

“Pull over,” she said. “I want to drive.” Nilda never wanted to drive.

“What are you talking about?” Raymond asked.

“Take me to Cheesesteak Heaven or I’ll take myself,” Nilda said.

“Think about what you’re doing, Nilda. Is this going to solve anything? Are you going to feel bad later?” Raymond said.

“I have two hungers, Raymond. Two very bad hungers. And yes, it will solve something. It will solve my stomach hunger, Raymond.”

Raymond sighed. Just like riding with a fucking old lady, Nilda thought. She sighed back at him loudly.

He put on the blinker and turned toward Cheesesteak Heaven.

“Look, here’s the deal. If you want sex, you go get sex. If you don’t need it that bad, just wait it out,” Raymond said. “You pay a price either way. Which price do you want to pay?”

She hated him. Mr.Got-It-All-Figured-Out. Mr.Gay Man, Sex-Anytime-He-Wants. Well, plump middle-aged straight women do not have dance clubs to go to where men line up to give them satisfaction, she thought. He got a lot of action because he was a cop. Gay guys loved that cop thing, even if Raymond was fat. She bet he went to the bar in his uniform and that’s how he got so much sex. Men would run the other way if she did that.

“What price do you pay, Raymond?” Nilda could practically taste that cheesesteak now. Her mouth was full of water, waiting.

“Don’t you think it takes a bite out of my soul every time I have sex with someone I don’t love? Don’t you think a little something dies inside?”

“Mother-of-God. Let me out of this car,” Nilda said.

Cheesesteak Heaven was crowded. She stood in the back, reading the menu board over and over, breathing deep. The only choices on the board were the size of the sandwich and the toppings. Do I want hot peppers? Do I dare have a large? A large is very very big, Nilda thought. Can I handle it, after weeks on this stinking diet?

It smelled so good. Everyone was smiling in Cheesesteak Heaven, the cooks slapping the meat around on the grill, the wrapping crew as they squirted cheese stuff on top and rolled the cheesesteaks in tin foil, the cashiers handing over the bags to the customers, bags that were instantly grease-stained and dripping. The customers were the smiliest, though. The ones who just got their bags clutched them to their chests, never mind the mess. The ones perched on the stools hunched over their food, because they couldn’t wait to bring it home and eat at their own kitchen tables, eating with both hands, dripping ketchup and fried onions all over the place. They looked really happy.

“Nilda, come on,” Raymond said. “There’s a fight out in the parking lot.”

“Sure.”

“I swear to God. Come on.”

“If you are just trying to get me out of here, I am going to kick your ass so hard,” Nilda said. He’s probably serious, she thought, he’s too straight-laced to make up anything having to do with work.

They took their time getting to the fight, hoping it would be over by the time they got there. It was two men, rolling around on the concrete, hitting each other with one fist and each holding a bag in their other fist.

Raymond sprang into action, putting himself between them, using recommended moves from police academy classes. Nilda watched him think, set his position, try a move, get knocked over, get up and think, flip a page in the academy training manual and try again. He has the worst instincts in the entire fucking world, she thought.

“Police. Stop. We are the police,” Raymond said. He looked at Nilda.

“Police,” she rolled her eyes and repeated.

“Hey!” Raymond yelled louder at the men, who were rolling more than hitting now.

Nilda stuck her baton hard into one guy’s stomach, snagged the bag from his hand. He gasped, jumped up.

“Thas mine,” he said.

“And how drunk are you, my man?” she said.

“Drunk? Not me. Only had two,” he said. “Then I got hungry and came over here.”

“Two dozen drinks? That’s a lot, my man,” Nilda said.

“Did I say that? I’m tired. I meant to say I didn’t have nothing to drink tonight. Maybe one.Thaas it, one beer.” The man was having a hard time standing up. He swayed a few times, then sat down on the pavement. “Can I have my cheesesteak? I’m feeling faint. I need food.”

“Are you going to fight anymore?” Nilda held the bag over his head. She opened the lip and let out the smells.

“No, ma’am, officer. No no no.”

The other man was holding his head. He lay flat on the ground with his bag squeezed between his knees.

“And you? Are you going to keep fighting?” Nilda said.

“Don’t take my bag. Please don’t take my bag. I’ll be right up.” The other man struggled to sit up. “I’m okay. See I’m fine. I’m just going back to my room and eat my dinner. All quiet.” He clutched his bag under his arm now.

The cops got back in their car. Nilda wanted to go back in and start over, but the sight of the dirty bag between the drunk’s knees turned her stomach.

“Should we have just left them like that? What if one of them had car keys?” Raymond worried.

“Those guys haven’t owned a car for decades,” she said. “Stumblebums. Relax, RayRay.”

“Please call me Raymond.”

“Please call me Raymond,” she mocked him. She was trying to get some friction started, craving a distraction that would kill the last hour of their shift.

He clammed up then, drove without talking for a solid half hour. Be that way, Nilda thought. She laid her head back and closed her eyes. Raymond smelled so good. Say what you will about gay guys, they smell damn good, Nilda thought.

She opened her eyes. “Raymond, this is serious,” she said. “I need to find a man. Tonight. You need to help me. I mean it. This is a truly desperate situation. Do you get it? You are a gay man from birth and you are starting to smell good to me. I need some help here.”

Raymond smiled.

“I am not kidding around. I think I just crossed some kind of sex starvation threshold. When you start thinking about sleeping with a gay man, you are a woman in deep trouble.”

“Seriously? What am I supposed to do? I don’t know anything about where straight women go to get some,” Raymond said.

Nilda stared him down. Raymond got rattled.

“I’ll make some calls. I’ll call my sisters,” he said.

“Forget it. Thanks a lot, dude.”

“What? What? What did I do?” Raymond asked.

“Useless. You are useless to me,” Nilda snarled.

They drove silently back to the station. Their work shift was over. Raymond hesitated getting out of the car.

“Want a hug?” he asked.

“No, Raymond. I don’t want a hug. I want a lot of things, but I do not want a hug from you.” Nilda felt like crying. She felt so needy. “Go home, useless.”

“That’s not nice,” Raymond said. “You know I would help you out if I could.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Maybe a good dinner will cheer you up. Why don’t you go out and get a nice healthy dinner somewhere? Treat yourself.”

Nilda changed her clothes, got into her car, and drove straight back to Cheesesteak Heaven. “I’ll have a large, with hot peppers,” she ordered. She breathed deep. “It smells so good in here,” she said out loud to no one in particular.

“Isn’t it amazing?” the man next to her said. He smiled.

Nilda smiled back.

“We don’t have cheesesteaks back home in Indiana,” he said. “I can’t wait to rip into one. It smells so darn juicy.”

“I’m Nilda,” she said. “And your cheesesteak is on me. I insist.”Kathy Anderson, a South Jersey resident, was awarded a fellowship for fiction from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Hoffman, the Spiritualist

[img_assist|nid=912|title=Freaky Deaky by Clifford Ward ©2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=225]Hoffman’s wife, Tookie, died last week. She used to collect loose hair from her brush and comb then burn them in a glass ashtray: this isn’t related to her death, Tookie just had a ritual. She kept the glass ashtray on the porcelain toilet tank under a small Monet.

The bathroom still has a burnt hair stink. Hoffman is touching the ashes; he rubs them between his thumb and forefinger. They feel talcumy.

He once asked his wife why she did it, why she burned her hair. Tookie said she didn’t want people to steal her soul. Indians burned their hair, she said. They didn’t like people snapping their pictures, either. He told her she wasn’t an Indian.

Hoffman is holding a cardboard box filled with Tookie’s things. Her silver brush and comb set. Her plastic shower cap. Her pills and face creams and makeup. It’s her bathroom box. Hoffman also has a bedroom box and a hall closet box.

He killed his wife a week ago Thursday, or it feels like he killed her. They were married only four months. What can you do? He drove his new Jaguar XK into the iron gate of their Bensalem home at 78 m.p.h. They had been drinking martinis with a lemon twist. Tookie broke her neck. Her head plunged forward then snapped backward. Hoffman got a cut on his forehead and a cracked windshield.

Tookie had real looks, black hair, huge brown eyes. A sweetheart, too. He should have seen it coming. She would have been thirty-nine next week, two years younger than him.

What if I make the same promise as Houdini? She had said. When I die, I’ll come back. But instead of Halloween, it’ll be my birthday. She promised this on their honeymoon.

Hoffman first met his bride the night she came to his home with the Vanderlings from Bucks County and the Averys from Connecticut. She was there as a client, one of the hungry babies. This is what Hoffman calls his clients, hungry babies. They have that hungry baby desperation. They salivate to his every word. They hunger for someone or something on the other side to show him-her-it-self.

Clarice Vanderling wanted to know if her departed mother was finally at peace. If so, would she reveal the hiding place of her gold broach with the diamonds? Randolph Vanderling wanted his dead father to give him the okay to buy a new stock. The Averys had similar questions. Estelle Avery’s dead brother hadn’t divulged his Grand Cayman account number. Her husband, Sonny, needed to remind his Aunt Jillian how excluding him from her will was un-Christian and hurtful.

Then Hoffman turned to Tookie. What about you? he said.

I don’t remember my family, Tookie said. I’m not sure who’s dead or alive. I just want to know if there are other things to do after this. It doesn’t have to get better, only different.

On the afternoon of her thirty-ninth birthday, Hoffman goes to his library. It’s mostly brown leather and wood. Books fill the wall shelves. They have a faint mildew odor. Books are also stacked on the oak floor and the coffee table. A dozen track lamps mark the edges of the room in warm yellow light.

Hoffman is now seated at a large round table off to the left, his fingers tapping its green felt top. He is tall and slim and wears a dark suit and tie. Hoffman has the look of a concerned mortician.

His clients are the hungry babies, not him, never him. But tonight he may join the multitude. This thought brings a flush to his neck and cheeks. Wife or no, is he really waiting for a dead person?

Tookie is gone. Tookie is sealed in an 18 gauge A-line steel casket with swing bar hardware and premium white crepe interior. Hoffman paid $1,500.00 extra to have a lighthouse and an ocean airbrushed on the glossy pearl sides and top. Goldstein’s Funeral glued Tookie’s eyes shut and powdered her dead gray skin. Nobody is home. Everything inside the 18 gauge A-line steel casket is going to rot, even her bones. Good-bye and so long, my Tookie. Houdini won’t be stopping in to say hello. Dear Tookie won’t be doing that, either.

This isn’t what the hungry babies want to hear. This isn’t what Hoffman says to them. He didn’t buy his 9,000 square foot home in Bensalem and his Jaguar XK based on the truth as he sees it. His hungry babies aren’t paying top dollar to take a grim peek at Life and Death 101. They want life to have a purpose and suffering to have an end and a reward. Hoffman will always listen to the client’s question to understand how the client wants that question answered.

Is Auntie Polly there with Uncle Joe?

His arm is around her shoulder, Hoffman says. Auntie Polly has her head resting on Joe’s chest. She’s smiling at you and waving, Hoffman says. Can you see her? Close your eyes and see her. They talk about you constantly, did you know that? True as I’m here, Hoffman says. They are impressed with your generosity, your kindness. They like to discuss the sensitive way you treated them during their last days. At the convalescent center. At the hospice. At your house.

What is it like on the other side? Are there trees? Birds? Flowers?

That and more, Hoffman says.

Do they have pets? Dogs? Cats? Fish?

You can bet on it, Hoffman says. Dogs with big watery eyes and cats that curl up on your lap and stay there.

Are there individual homes? Condos? Semi-detached?

More choices than you can imagine, Hoffman says. Something for everyone.

Is there a wooded area with a stream? Uncle Joe loved to fish, they say. Are there bass in the stream? Salmon? Cod? Perch?

Let’s hope you put a fishing rod in Uncle Joe’s casket, Hoffman says.

Everybody laughs. Some of his clients are so relieved they weep.

But what about social activities? Auntie Polly was always a very social person, they say. Are there discussion groups?

Hoffman shuts his eyes.

No groups. No.

They’re dead. Joe and Polly and Tookie, all of them are dead.

His poor Tookie. What is he, a drunken animal? Hoffman’s elbows rest on the large round table. His fingertips press against his forehead. He begins sobbing. Then he uses a white handkerchief to blot the tears from the green felt.

Hoffman should have seen it coming. He is supposed to have a sixth sense about these things. It’s what he does for a living.

Hoffman’s father is a retired orthodontist who lives in West Philadelphia. The grandfather was David Douglas Hoffman. David Douglas was born in Cardiff, Wales.

His parents shipped him off to the mother’s sister in Philadelphia at the age of nine. The mother said her boy’s cradle would rock by itself. She said when David Douglas was four; he accurately predicted the death of a cousin.

The retired orthodontist didn’t understand his father. He can’t understand his son. This doesn’t stop Hoffman from visiting him on Tookie’s birthday.

You’re too thin, the father says. His name is Marv. He is inspecting his son over the rims of his tortoise shell reading glasses. When you’re mother died, may God rest her, I ate like a horse, Marv says. Cherry cheesecake. I ate half a cherry cheesecake a day.

Too much sugar, says Hoffman and makes a face.

What can you do? says the father.

Marv Hoffman has that refugee look. His brown and white striped flannel bathrobe is open at the neck and stops at the knee. It shows a white bony chest and thin white legs. A few long and obstinate strands of graying hair are combed over his freckled head.

Before Hoffman entered the living room, his father was reading the leisure section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The newspaper is now folded on his lap. Corked-tip cigarette butts fill the ashtray on the end table beside his chair. Along with stale cigarette smoke, the room has a bacon odor, maybe from breakfast, maybe a B.L.T. A brass floor lamp shines its light over the old man’s left shoulder.

I didn’t see it coming, Hoffman says. He slumps onto the beige feather-cushioned sofa across from his father. More stupid tears are coming, he can feel it. Hoffman says, we’d been drinking, Tookie and me. I was tipsy. I admit that, I take full blame. But we’d been tipsy before and nothing happened.

You had bad luck, says his father.

I want to hear her voice one more time, says Hoffman. I sound like my clients. But I want to know everything is all right.

She’s all right, says Marv. She’s dead. You and your grandfather, unbelievable.

What sort of business is dead people? It would be different if you buried them, that’s a nice dollar.

You don’t understand, Hoffman says. You never understood me. You don’t have a clue. For years I’ve wanted to tell my clients how it’s all crap. Everything. Heaven, hell, all of it.

That’s it, exactly, says Hoffman. But now I don’t know. I don’t want to think that way. About it being crap, I mean.

You don’t want Tookie to just rot in the box, the father says.

"I can’t bear the thought, Hoffman says. “ Especially today. It’s her birthday, for God-sake.

Marv is nodding and smiling and going uh-huh uh-huh under his breath. He drops the folded Inquirer on the pine wood floor. Marv re-crosses his thin white legs, tucking the hem of the brown and white striped bathrobe under his thigh. He lights himself a king-sized Kool. Smoke and the bacon odor mingle. His long fingers angle the cigarette pack and a yellow Bic lighter next to the ashtray.

You’re like me, says his father. He turns his head and exhales a line of smoke near his left shoulder. It becomes luminous gold under the glow of the floor lamp. His father says, The synagogue was for old farts and kids, that’s what I thought. You couldn’t pay me to go to synagogue. Marv stops and looks down at his cigarette. His fingers have a tremor. He says, Then my Ruthie passes. What can I do? I can’t shut her in a box and walk away. Who can do such a thing?

You got that right, says Hoffman.

His father taps the cigarette on the edge of the amber ashtray. I started going to Shul. Friday night services, his father tells Hoffman. I say a few prayers. I say, how you doing, Ruthie? How’s my sweet girl? I’m good. I hope you’re doing good. Marv’s voice becomes tight. He has to wait a second or two. Then he tells his son, I don’t say these things out loud, of course. I say them to myself. To her. Me and her, talking. Like it’s a phone conversation.

That’s a good idea, Hoffman says.

Not that good, his father says.

What can you do?

It’s late afternoon. Hoffman is on his way home. Even with the top down on the XK, he smells like cigarettes. Overhanging trees along the Schuylkill Expressway run shadows across the XK’s silver hood. The river is to his right, the sun low and reflecting an orange light on the water. A shell boat with a single oarsman keeps a smooth and even pace.

He will give Tookie’s clothes to the D.A.V., maybe the Salvation Army. Tookie has expensive taste. Had. She had expensive taste. Prada bags, some nice Versaces, a Rianne De Witte, nothing cheap. Somebody will be happy. Then Hoffman remembers the ashes from Tookie’s hair. The glass ashtray is still on the porcelain toilet tank. What’s he supposed to do? Does he flush her ashes down the toilet? Does he trap her soul if he stores the ashes in a baggie? He wishes he had Tookie’s advice.

He stops the XK for a red light. The car on his left is a maroon Dodge Caravan. The car to the right is a tan station wagon, maybe a Volvo, maybe a Mercury Sable. He isn’t that familiar with these types of cars. A phone has started ringing. Hoffman hears it but can’t grasp its exact direction. It’s a distant, muted ring. He glances at the woman in the Caravan. She’s thin with thick black glasses. She is staring straight ahead. An older man to his right has an unlighted cigar at the corner of his mouth. He is also watching the red light. Hoffman’s right hand sweeps the glove compartment then beneath his seat. What phone keeps ringing? An unexplainable panic is working him. Did he bring his cell phone? He must answer the phone now. Hoffman knows this better than he knows anything else. He must answer it this moment, or it will never ring again. Ron Savage lived in the Chestnut Hill area of Philly and went to Leeds Junior High and Germantown. He has worked for 27 years as a Senior Psychologist at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. His work has appeared in numerous journals.

Lovesick

The summer she and I were twelve, Alexandra Metcalf became my best friend only hours after she moved onto our block. I was sitting on my front stoop, hugging my knees, listening to the bees’ late summer panic as my parents carted sod back and forth. They were planting the evergreen that would eventually tower over the house, and surrounding it with chrysanthemums. Alexandra’s blond head bobbed past our honeysuckle hedge and she stopped to wave at me as if she weren’t thinking twice about it.

We swam like minnows in the pool in Alexandra’s back yard every day that first week. On the first day, I learned to dive, crouching low, peering at my reflection peering back at me, then meeting the surface with a bruising splash. There was nothing dainty about my dives. Alexandra’s were practically swan-perfect, her rounder thighs catching the sunlight, shaming me in my own bony frame.

"Let’s play shark," she said one day, a hiss of authority behind her voice that upended my will, a will only practiced on my parents until then. Her china-blue eyes were round with eagerness, her teeth bared. "You be the lady swimming at the beach and I’ll slowly swim near you, kind of tap you like this.” She nudged my leg and I flinched as if a real shark had nosed me. "Then you scream, as loud as you can, and I’ll pop out of the water and catch you and drag you under. Okay?"

"What if you hold me there too long?" I glanced at Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf, poolside, both of them reading magazines. Alexandra’s sister, Michele, who was about to start her sophomore year of high school, was stretched out on a chaise, tanning. Her skin was already brown. I could see the faintest shocking white line gleaming at her hip.

"I wouldn’t dare!" Alexandra screeched, as if offended that I suspected her of this. "C’mon, Carrie, grab the side and just kick your feet a little." She paddled backwards to the middle, her eyes fixed on me, then took a deep, silent breath and went down.

I clung to the side, waiting. It was taking her longer than I expected. Michele turned onto her back. From just below the blue tile lip of the pool, I watched, mesmerized, as she slathered a dollop of sun block onto each of her long legs and began massaging it into one of them in long, deliberate strokes.

"Gotcha!" Alexandra yelled, surfacing next to me. "Didn’t you feel me touching your leg?"

My gut lurched.

“I guess not,” I said. “You really took your time."

“The element of surprise. Daddy says there’s an art to it. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

"That’s right," Mr. Metcalf said, eyes closed, one arm slung across his forehead.

I played the game again, doing it the way Alexandra wanted to, waiting with my back turned and my attention riveted on her stealthy approach from behind. I was truly terrified, the delight of it squirreling up my chest and into my throat as I sensed her coming nearer. I turned in time to see her head charging forward, leaving a cleft in her wake that, for a split second, made me think she was a real shark. Before she could grab hold of my legs, I scrambled out of the pool. When she burst from the water, bewildered, and saw where I was, she let her arms splash back in and she arched into an effortless backward somersault.

"You’re hopeless," she laughed, coming up for air, spitting water in a neat fountain far ahead of her.

Michele didn’t like to swim. She lay still, glistening as Mrs. Metcalf read her magazine, nodding and clucking under a white straw hat.

“Watch this,” Alexandra whispered.

Like a rotor, she spun herself into a frenzied whirl, arms in the air until she lowered one into the pool and splashed a cascade of water directly on her sister.

Her sister screamed, livid, and grabbed the towel from her chaise.

“You little brat!” Michele shrieked, grabbing a towel and curling into a ball as if traumatized.

Ignoring her daughters, Mrs. Metcalf absently patted the few drops that had landed on her, but Mr. Metcalf strode over to the pool. Clad in a tight piece of spandex, he was a full, slender head taller than my stocky father and seemed to tower over us.

“You know better than that, Alexandra.” His voice was deep and full of quiet condemnation.

“It’s no big deal,” Alexandra said. “You’re in your swimsuits.”

“We don’t play those games in our family,” Mr. Metcalf said. “Do that again, and you’ll go straight to your room.”

When he turned his back on us, Alexandra looked at me. Her mouth was cockeyed, and her eyes rolled toward her father. I jumped back in, and we ducked our heads and blew bubbles to keep from laughing out loud.

When we came up for air, Michele and Mr. Metcalf were walking back into the house, and Mrs. Metcalf had risen from her chaise. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman who, under her livid rouge and brown eye shadow, was paler than milk, even in the sun.

“Would you minnows like some dinner?” she asked.

Alexandra nodded and looked to me to see if I’d stay.

“I guess I should call home first,” I said.

“Then call,” Alexandra said.

“And just so you know, Carrie, you’re always welcome in our home.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Metcalf,” I said.

Shivering, I got out of the pool and picked up the cordless phone, my movements jerky from the cold stiffening my bones. As I called home, I watched Alexandra doing dolphin dives in the water and knew then, not just from watching her move but from a growing intimate knowledge of my own uncooperative body, that I was Alexandra’s complete physical opposite: my straight brown hair hung just above my shoulders, my teeth jutted from my face. Thankfully, we were both flat-chested.

When swimming got old, we did gymnastics on my back lawn. I admired Alexandra’s perfect cartwheels and long-held handstands even as I thudded onto my back, sending the wind gusting up and out of my chest. My mother flitted near the kitchen window, applauding us both, but Alexandra was too busy spinning and springing along the grass to notice.

She’d never taken lessons.

She was a self-taught acrobat, fearless and airborne.

And when she watched me walk, Alexandra couldn’t help but offer instruction.

“You always look like you’re about to bend, Carrie,” she said one afternoon as I sauntered over to a silver maple to investigate a fallen bird’s nest. “My mother says you should straighten up or you’ll get a hunchback by the time you’re thirty.”

“She said that about me?”

“Not you. People.”

Alexandra stood by my side and told me to look straight ahead. I did as she said, and my eyes started aching.

“Good,” she said. “Now tuck in your butt, bring your shoulders back, and push your chest out a little.”

I obeyed, and it felt good for about ten seconds.

“Don’t worry,” Alexandra said as my shoulders started to fall. “You’ll get used to it.”

When she wasn’t looking, I preferred the comfort of slouching.

At home, Alexandra was all I could talk about. My new friend had a collection of China dolls, I told my mother as she chopped vegetables in the kitchen. And each doll had a different dress, and each dress was a different color. The dresses were made of real silk, I added when my mother remained unimpressed, and in addition to the China dolls, Alexandra also had a collection of crystal animals from Prague .

“You have your own collection,” my mother said.

“Spoons,” I said. “Stupid spoons.”

“They’re not stupid,” my mother said. “And you’ll appreciate them when you’re older.”

The collection had been mine for as long as I could remember, and for as long as I could remember, my mother had been telling me that I’d appreciate my blossoming set of sterling silver flatware when I was older. At the time, however, I couldn’t imagine sharing my plain yet elegant spoons with Alexandra. Her love for showy things kept me from pulling the heavy wooden case from my mother’s closet and explaining the history behind each piece of sterling it contained. Born out of thin air with a history that had surely started and ended with her parents, Alexandra could only be bored to tears by stories of my grandmother and my Polish great-aunt and great-uncle—now long dead, all contributors to this collection in honor of my birth.

“I want something I can show off now,” I muttered, scorning a legacy I knew was precious. “I’m going to Alexandra’s.”

“No you’re not,” my mother said. She’d finished with the vegetables and had begun splitting chicken legs from thighs. “I need you to help with dinner.”

“Mom.”

The sickening sound of moist bones breaking was enough to make me wish I were a vegetarian just like Alexandra and her big sister, Michele.

“Good God, Carrie, you practically live there,” my mother said. “Why don’t you spend some time with your own family for a change?”

“I wish I had a sister,” I mumbled, though I wanted much more than that.

I wanted to be someone else.

“You can see Alexandra after dinner,” my mother said, turning to face me, one hand on her hip. “Besides, if she really wanted to see you, she’d call or come knocking once in a while, don’t you think?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I took for granted, as I should have, that Alexandra would be around forever.

The first time I ate dinner at the Metcalfs’ house I was dazzled and sickened all at once. They drank buttermilk out of wineglasses. I hated milk and one look at the thick yellowish liquid clinging to the inside of the glass closed my gullet. But I always said yes when it was offered because it seemed so elegant and strange. At my house, I avoided milk and drank juice from jelly glasses my mother picked up at yard sales.

It was clear to both of us that we preferred her house with the pool and fewer rules. There was also the occasional chance to spy on Michele who looked at her body in the tall oval-shaped swivel mirror, cupping and holding the plum-like roundness of her breasts. Through the keyhole, we took turns peering in as she scowled at her reflection, reaching languidly for her robe, covering herself. I couldn’t think why she looked so angry, and wished my body would open up like hers, my sharp edges soften into curves. I still marvel that she had no idea her keyhole afforded such a perfect view.

Whenever she came across us while we played dress-up with Wally, their fat orange cat, I stared at her polished toes, afraid I might fasten my gaze on her nipples because they always seemed to poke out past her bra like tiny, fat buttons.

“If that cat has any brains, he’ll run far away from here one day,” Michele said one afternoon. She had come downstairs to flip on the T.V. “The way you dress him up like that, it’s a disgrace to cats everywhere.”

“He’s my cat, so I can do what I want,” Alexandra said. “Right, Carrie?”

I looked up at Michele, and she smirked at the two of us as if she knew something we could never understand. Then she turned off the television, wheeled around and delicately climbed the stairs without waiting for me to prove my loyalty to her sister.

“She’s mental,” Alexandra said, glowering, when Michele was gone. “She dresses Wally up, too, when she’s not busy looking at herself.”

I didn’t know whether or not to believe this, the improbability of a girl like Michele playing dress-up with anything at all except herself. Part of my fascination with Alexandra and her family was with their glamorous boredom. They never seemed to need to be busy; their languor was an activity. The effortless way they moved through their house and around each other, their striking looks, distracted me from Alexandra’s bull’s eye accuracy of reducing me to the smallest version of myself simply by being who she was, someone I loved instantly without wanting to admit soon after that I sometimes hated her.

One Sunday afternoon, the last before we returned to school, I was alone at Alexandra’s. She had to leave for a piano lesson and, though I wasn’t asked along when the time arrived for her to go, I was invited to stay in the house.

“You can lie on my bed if you want or read something. I have the whole Bobsy Twins, series,” Alexandra said. “But just be really careful about the shelves,” she warned.

At first, I lay down on her bed, and the whisper of her pink cotton coverlet sent up a perfume I couldn’t place, except that all of her clothes smelled like this bedspread. Mine smelled bleachy and over clean. The door to her room was closed and the house was quiet as I looked around, my head perfectly still on the pink and white gingham sham, its plumpness keeping it that way.

Alexandra’s China dolls filled one tall pink wicker bookshelf, and the tiny crystal animal figurines filled another one. Everything on those shelves was sacred. Even Alexandra refused to touch her treasures. She’d already lost one in a pillow fight, and she was so terrified that another one, which had been knocked askew in the same fight, would fall as well, and she wouldn’t even let her mother right it in case it toppled. So there it stood, teetering on the verge of certain doom.

Alexandra and her mother were taking a long time. I had fallen asleep and, jerking awake ten minutes later as the clock radio blinked the lost minutes back at me, I wondered if they’d forgotten I was still there, waiting. Not that I minded too much. It was enough to lie there and pretend it all belonged to me.

I rolled off the bed and padded over on bare feet to peer at the row of crystal animals lined up at eye level, each one different. A giraffe standing next to a lion that was curled up beside an elephant. All the rest behind them were dogs and cats. The sunlight streaming in through Alexandra’s bedroom window bounced off the giraffe and onto the floor in a colorful pool of light. Slowly, my hand steadier than I knew it could be, I took the luminous giraffe and gingerly held it, arcing it through the shaft of light and down, bewitched by the rainbow spilling across the pine planks under my feet.

Just as I finished counting the colors, I started again, sure there were more than my eye could see, but I’d barely begun my second count when I heard crying. Creeping to the door, I opened it slightly until I realized that the crying was coming from the next room.

“You know better than that, Michele,” a man’s voice said, deep and even. “We don’t cry in this house.”

And then Mr. Metcalf was standing in the hallway, in front of me. His frown reversed almost too fast for me to have seen it and he smiled.

“I had no idea you were here, Carrie. Where’s Alexandra? Did she go off and leave you here to fend for yourself?”

I nodded, mute, my palm suddenly empty. We both looked down and saw the giraffe at my feet, snapped cleanly in two.

“Mrs. Metcalf said I could stay if I wanted,” I managed to say.

“Fair enough. Why don’t you join me downstairs for some milk and cookies?”

“What about Michele?” I asked. “Will she be coming, too?”

His smile vanished. He looked at me as if I’d insulted him.

“No,” he muttered. “She’s not feeling well.”

When he turned to go downstairs, I pocketed the two pieces, then followed.

“Have a seat, m’lady,” he said, gesturing with a flourish to a dining room chair. Then he went into the kitchen and came out with a goblet of buttermilk, which he placed before me, and a plate of cookies that wasn’t sweet enough to smother the taste of the milk that Mr. Metcalf seemed intent to have me drink, one agonizing sip at a time.

He said nothing as he watched me choke it down. With Wally purring on his lap, he began to ask me meaningless questions.

“Carrie, are you happy to be returning to school? It’s not long now.”

I shook my head, my lips pasted together.

“I’ve heard the school here is very big. Very good, but very big. Do you think you and Alexandra will have any classes together?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, tonguing the cookie into my cheek.

At that moment, Alexandra and her mother breezed in the door, Mrs. Metcalf chirping, “Darlings, we’re home!”

As if wound from behind, I took my empty plate and unfinished milk to the sink and scurried off with Alexandra, the giraffe’s head and body in my shorts pocket.

That afternoon, back at my own house helping my mother prepare dinner, I knew I had to tell Alexandra what I’d done. Her father had seen the murdered giraffe.

Gathering my nerve, I went back to their house, the pink and purple creeping into the sky before sunset almost displacing the terror I felt from my scalp down to my feet.

When I knocked on the door, Michele answered.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked, nudging one sandaled foot against the other.

She eyed me for a heartbeat. “Fine,” she said. Her voice fell flat between us. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“I guess you’re looking for Alex,” she said, opening the door wide. “She’s downstairs torturing Wally.”

The one time I’d tried to suggest that Wally might not be having such a great time, Alexandra had said that I was being ridiculous. Cats had no idea whether they were having a good time or not. Besides, Wally was her cat, and I could go home if I didn’t like dressing him up.

Stung by her words but unwilling to be chased away, I stayed on and helped her lace the dresses over his fat, furry stomach and truss the tops of his paws into the tiny booties. This time, however, Alexandra looked up at me, and I thought she understood why I’d come.

I knelt next to her and picked up a piece of doll’s clothing, tracing the eyelet at the hem, embroidered with green petals. Alexandra had a dress just like it in her own size.

“Wally looks nice,” I said. “Like he’s going to a party or something.”

Alexandra was silent.

“Is he?” I said. “Going to a party?”

“Wally doesn’t like parties. We both hate crowds.”

“Then maybe for a walk? Maybe we can take him in the stroller. It’s pretty outside, with the sun about to set.”

I hated how Wally looked, but for the first time, I didn’t want to be in the house any longer than I had to be.

Still not looking at me, Alexandra gathered Wally into her arms and placed him in the stroller, his hind legs poking up, his front paws bound too tightly in ruffled sleeves and slippers for him to fight even if he wanted to.

Once outside, we walked together back toward my house and past it into the park that led toward the school. I started to worry about whether I should bother with any of this—with a confession, with a decision. And I worried, too, that if there was any decision to be made, no matter what I would say, it might not belong to me, that it might be out of my hands altogether.

“So, what’d you do while I was out at piano?” Alexandra asked. “Did you get to read?”

“No,” I said, the fingernails of one hand clamped between my teeth. “I think I fell asleep.”

Alexandra laughed. It was an adult laugh, the kind I’d heard from my mother once or twice, and it made me wonder what kind of emotion could can produce such a mirthless sound.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said before I really wanted to. I hadn’t planned to ask her anything. But the will I’d abandoned when Alexandra first bobbed into my life was beginning to right itself, stretching, as if roused from sleep.

She stopped the stroller and turned to face me.

I looked at the ground, knowing I had to go forward. “Do your parents—?”

“What? Love us?”

Alexandra spit out the word like a curse, and it dovetailed with all that I knew about her: that she would be a friend I could always count on to put me in a place that would suit our friendship best, even if it hurt her to have me there. It would be a place where I could not hope to be allowed to love my new friend in the way everyone should be loved.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, ripping off my cuticles and staring back at her.

“Then what did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

But in a way that terrified me more than what I was sure of, I really did.

I knew exactly what I meant.

Casey Krivy Hirsch is formerly of Toronto, and living in the Philadelphia suburbs since 1989. She has been a freelance writer for numerous regional newspapers and publications, including Main Line Today and City Paper. Mother of three, she is currently

Housemates

He told me about his war wounds. I recounted my masturbation injuries. We bonded.

Then came winter.

“See here, Klugstein,” he said. “There’s no need to raise the thermostat above 45. If the pipes won’t freeze, then neither will you.”

Inspired, I replied, “Righty-O!” and reached for the Echinacea.

The New Year brought the worst ice storm on record. The roads were impassable. The supermarkets closed. He ate my cat.

“Sorry about little Priscilla, Klugstein,” he said when I objected, “but this is no time for sentimentality. There’s work to be done.” Undaunted by gale-force winds and temperatures below the freezing point of blood, he climbed onto the roof to remove a fallen tree. I boiled water for herbal tea. He returned shortly with his face encased in ice and poured the kettle over his head.

“Good show, Klugstein! Keep the home fires burning!” he exclaimed while disemboweling my puppy. He grinned sheepishly. “All apologies, old chap, but I’m a bit short of rope, and catgut simply will not do for this job.” He went out again with two hammers in one hand, a saw and a drill in the other, and Bowser’s intestines between his teeth. I boiled more water.

He came back an hour later with an armload of chopped wood, which he put in the fireplace. “Home is where the hearth is,” he chortled, and in one motion struck a match against his mustache and flicked it into the kindling, which ignited immediately. “Who needs natural gas?” he said. “The tree is gone, the roof is patched, and I save a trip to the lumber yard.” He went to the garage to do something complicated to his car.

The next day, while I tried to open a stapler, he used the remains of the fallen tree to build a deck, a dining room table set, and a life-sized replica of Tensing Norgay. He stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Sherpas are a stout-hearted and industrious people,” he said. “A model minority, if ever there were one. Our immigrants would do well to emulate them. Are you Jewish, Klugstein?”

I threw out the stapler and entertained myself with the puppets he had made for me from Priscilla and Bowser.

I knew little of his politics. He loathed all welfare handouts, including Halloween candy, and would toss fake chocolate bars made of scrap wood into Trick-or-Treaters’ bags. Around each splintery Hershey’s simulacrum he wrapped a brief lecture on self-reliance and dental health.

On Mischief Night our mailbox was firebombed.

The next year he placed a trap of his own design in the mailbox, and we awoke to the screams of a nine-year old boy whose arm had been caught and permanently mangled by the device. The parents sued, but expert testimony, that shifted blame to their child-rearing practices, made certain their defeat. In a counter suit he recovered all legal costs plus an undisclosed sum. The Judge sent the boy to a foster home in a remote part of the state.

He was an excellent housekeeper, but not given to socializing, so I was rather surprised when I returned home one evening to discover much of the furniture occupied by cadavers, including two in my bed. “Have you taken up grave robbing?” I joked.

“No indeed, by the time they’re buried they’re no good to anyone.” He explained that he and several like-minded individuals in the medical and funereal professions would seize the deceased at opportune moments and donate them to Third World medical schools and to a few amusement parks in the less developed regions of Canada . “Waste not, want not, ay? Pardon my use of your boudoir, Klugstein, but if we leave them on the floor, they’ll likely be stepped on, and we can’t have that, can we? By-the-by, have you dusted in there recently?”

I tried to emulate him but lacked the will. Though he almost never criticized me, my self-esteem plummeted as I repeatedly failed to live up to his standards. Finally, after seeking solace in a solitary all-night Punch and Judy show that I put on with Bowser and Priscilla, I decided to quit my job and move in with my parents.

I dreaded telling him this, but when I did, all he said was, “Well, at least it’s not the public dole,” and returned to the task at hand, the smelting of three rusting vans from the next-door neighbor’s yard.

My last contact with him was a congratulatory email he sent to me when “The Bowser & Priscilla Show” went into national syndication on PBS, where it replaced “Barney.” I knew we would not cross paths again, for the tracks of our lives were not parallel, but skew.

He returned every cent of my security deposit, with interest.

Eric Thurschwell now lives in Wynnewood, PA, but he once shared a house in Langhorne with a handy person. No animals were harmed in the production of this story.

Lee’s Rant

[img_assist|nid=4280|title=Red by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=107]Why did things have to get all retarded when I came out of The Shepard? Why did I have to be the only bull to see those bulls clocking that bull? One stick! Then two! Popping down on Old Man’s dome like me cutting open melons for dessert. Poor homeless fuck. Punk ass with a Kidd jersey’s kicking him under the alley light but it looked like he was just kicking a bunch of tattered rags. Poor emaciated homeless fuck.

I tossed my garbage bag loudly into the dumpster. Gave it a swift boot for a scare. “Hey,” I shouted, my chest puffed all big in case they wanted this shit. “I already called the cops!” That wasn’t true. I hated the fuckin’ Blue and would never call them ever, not since they busted my boy Lou for smoking on the curb in Oak Lane two months back.

Kids took notice and took off, but Kidd Jersey chucked a basketball I didn’t even know he had. Hit Old Man square in his bloody dome. Why aren’t these Kids shooting hoops somewheres instead of stirring the Hill? Why do I gotta go back inside and serve up dessert while they get to chill over at Pastorius and pat Kidd Jersey for bucking Old Man in the dome?

Victorious Kidd Jersey on a park bench, smoking a bowl: All right, we finally beat up the Old Man. “Way to bring him down. Our lives are finally like so complete!”

Poor Old Man, they played knickknack on his dome. Promised myself I’d get a wet rag and go set him straight. But Dickhead Donnie came down in a huff.

“How fucking long does it take to throw out trash, Margaret?”

“I’m sorry, my name is Lee.”

“Excuse me, Leanna, but those fucking people could use some fucking coffee!” Dickhead Donnie’s got a gray Amish beard and nothin’ on top. Yo, J once said it looked like his hair melted, like in Temple of Doom or some shit. Male pattern baldness to the extreme. All he has left is some chin soot.

Dickhead Donnie dumped dollops of cream on some mixed berries. “For everybody else (dollop), this is a fucking job. For me (dollop, dollop), it’s like I’m a culinary Einstein!”

I grabbed a tray with two urns of coffee and a stack of porcelain cups which clanked as I steadied it on my shoulder. “Dickhead Donnie,” I said, leaving out the Dickhead, “when you start splitting atoms instead of artichoke hearts, we’ll fucking talk.”

Right through the double door, smiling. Then I remembered Old Man, streak of blood, broken promise, Super Lee turning all Clark Kent.

J was coming through the other side, and I practically sent his tray of dirty dinner plates airborne.

“Morning Ralph, I said.”

“Morning Sam.”

That’s our Wile E. Coyote thing.

“Yo kid, listen,” I stopped him, “Old Man got bucked in the parking lot by Punks Ass Kids from Pastorius.”

“Damn, really?”

“Yeah, and Dickhead Donnie’s got me serving coffee to these fools.”

Listen. Why were everybody’s eyes on Lee? Why did I have to open my mouth and let out a stench? Why does Groom’s Pops gotta be grinding his teeth over there in the corner? Why couldn’t I be home with J and our favorite Ma watching whatever instead of catering at the Shep?

“Want me to go and help him out?” J’s all concerned, and that’s what I love about him. Had to give him a pat on his free shoulder. Good kid. Loyal as fuck, especially to his Ma. Knows I treat his Ma well too, knows he’s my bull.

Rich Moms turned and raised her coffee cup expectantly, as though I didn’t know where to pour the coffee. Thank you ever so kindly Rich Moms for showing me, I was gonna turn the powdered white creases of your dome into raging rivers of hot coffee. I started pouring—linen napkin on my arm all classy—making sure to give Rich Moms Regular even though she asked for Decaf. She don’t know ‘cause a Bunch of Wasps started chiming their water glasses like a fuckin’ drum line.

Bunch of Wasps: “Speech! Speech!”

Best Man, Thick Boston Accent: “Now, uh…” He’s all red-cheeked and pissed and starts patting his khakis for his notes that he left on the counter in the men’s room that I flushed thinking they were trash. “I’ve known Jason for four years, through most of our time at B.C.”

I’m not even taking orders at the point, just switching back and forth, Regular, Decaf, Regular, Decaf. Yo son, then I got confused ‘cause I was listening to Best Man wax on all eloquently; two Decafs in a row, nobody noticed a change in the flow.

Best Man, TBA: “Anyway, a bunch of us made up a little ditty that best sums up how we feel about this guy right here.” Jason blushed but I’d bet you a nickel it was the Bombay that they had us serve. “It’s pretty easy to follow, so anyone who doesn’t sing will have to do a shot!”

Laughs from Jason’s friends, dirty looks from Jason’s grandparents, coffee from Extra-attentive Lee.

Listen. Best Man jacked himself up on the table, kicking aside dessert plates and half-empty bread baskets that should’ve been removed before but I was outside watching Old Man catch a beat. Yo, work was coming second and I knew it when I saw a couple of rolls bounce on the floor. But I couldn’t help thinking of Old Man. His scruffy bloodstained face, his raggedy coat, his pathetic body trying to prop itself up.

“Jason!” Best Man started droning slowly, then faster and faster: “He’s awesome. He’s studly. He’s the ma-an!”

An immediate crowd pleaser. A new number one on my list of Best Chants I Ever Heard In My Life, replacing the time at the Phillies game with Mary and J last September, when a bunch of true blue fans in front of us starting yelling “ Safety School!” at a herd of Nova freshmen. Listen, them sheep was wearing big royal blue V’s on their tees at a fuckin’ orientation outing and all.

Had to tell J. I dumped my coffee tray on the bar as Groom’s Pops stood to make a speech. Don’t bother Groom’s Pops, nothing’s gonna top Man with two syllables.

Listen, though. In the kitchen, bunch of chefs and waiters were crowded around J, who’s sitting up on the silver counter with his black bowtie undone and the top button of his dress shirt open. Blood’s splattered on his collar like a dessert decorated by Dickhead Donnie. The sinks were filling up fast with suds; a knife was left in the middle of a cake like it was baked that way. Dickhead Donnie dropped the title for a minute and brought J a rag with ice. Fit it on his head like a crooked turban.

“Yo, what happened, J?”

“I was helping the homeless guy,” he winced as a chef blotted the scrape on his chubby cheek, when I got tackled from behind. “They pushed me into the ground. Grabbed my wallet, my tips from tonight, everything.”

Listen. It was enough to shake loose my hair band and make my fro fan out like a black peacock. I was Ragin’ Hulk, Wolfy Berserk, Vigilante Lee.

Donnie went into his office to call the Blue. I grabbed the knife from the cake and shook a glob of chocolate cream to the ground as I headed through the back. Past where Old Man’s dome bled, though there’s just some broken glass and a pile of newspapers now under the light. It was all dark at the Toyota dealership across the street, the red and white flags barely flapping. Yo, even quiet enough on Germantown Ave to hear a car’s tires grind up the cobbles of Chestnut Hill. All the lights were lit-up on Allen Street though. I imagined White People probably watching me from their massive stone homes.

White People, nasally voices: “Oh my gosh, there’s a Black man with a knife walking up to the park. Lock the doors, for Pete’s sake, lock the doors!”

Pitch black at the end of the block, where Pastorius began. Must’ve taken a full minute for my eyes to adjust on the park. But then I saw a flicker across the field, and a couple of red embers floating back and forth like fireflies. Covert Lee ducked behind a nearby Sycamore, thinking out his next move.

Listen, how did my day go from eating Delasandro’s cheesesteaks with Mary and J down on the Art Museum steps to seeing Old Man get bucked, to taking lip from Dickhead Donnie, to Man with two syllables, to J getting bucked when I should’ve been the bull to be bucked, to this vigilante shit? Why’s my ‘stache sweatin’? Why did I once again have to be the only bull to take the only bulls? Why couldn’t I just clean up and go home, but with J’s wallet and our tips?

Punk Ass Kids, in a fair world: “We’re really sorry Lee; we know not what we shit we did. Here, take your wallet back, and take ours too. You can use our parents’ credit cards all you want. They don’t give. And give us a kick in the ass so we learn our lesson.”

“Damn right you’re sorry bitches, but don’t forget Old Man.”

I ran over to the Punk Ass Kids and gave one a Doc Marten to the back. He went down like the shit was a fixed match. The other two jumped backward.

“Whoa, man what the fuck!” I grabbed one around the neck. He smelled like cigarettes and skunk weed. He’s elbowing me in the side and my tux shirt gets all untucked. Kidd Jersey scrambled for the bat.

“Leave it bitch,” I yelled, whipping out the knife from my belt. There isn’t much light on the field, but enough for Kidd Jersey to see me holding it to his bull.

Yo listen, I must’ve looked deranged, in my catering clothes with my hair freaked, holding a knife to Hostage Kid’s throat. Probably the knife that did it; the difference between Good Worker Lee and Vigilante Lee.

“You’re not gonna do nothing, bitch!” Kidd Jersey screamed.

Kicked Kid’s wheezing for air somewhere at my feet, and Hostage Kid’s squirming to make a break. Yo son, Kidd Jersey was right and he knew it, so I squeezed Hostage Kid til he coughed a little. And I cursed.

“You stole my fucking boy’s money, Motherfuck! I want his shit back!” I had to call J my boy, no time to get into the dynamics between Mary and me.

But listen. Blue and red started flashing up Allen, and we all stopped to look, even Kicked Kid, who was faking a lot of the pain ‘cause he was scared of Deranged Lee. Hostage Kid emptied his pockets onto the grass and I let him squirm free. Bulls booked it into the woods toward Millman St., and I grabbed the wads of cash and J’s wallet and split back down the lawn toward Allen.

I could feel my adrenaline pumping the way you feel a glass of ice water. I got back and Donnie’s about to drive off in his van. Didn’t see me stash the knife in my pants though.

“I know you gotta look out for your boy,” he started, back to Dickhead status, but I’m not paying you to go chase after Kids. Do that on your own fuckin’ time. And Lee, don’t forget to lock up.”

No, “Congratulations, Lee?” No, “Way to save the shit, Lee?”

I went back inside and started rearranging the tables and chairs for tomorrow. J mopped the floors quietly.

When we got into the car, I took out the wad of ones and nodded triumphantly to J, who started divvying them up on the dash. Eighty-three each, plus our two hundred flat. Not bad for a night of crime-fighting for Lee, not worth it for J, who’s gonna have to have Mary fussin’ all night.

I started the engine and the lights and radio blared, but then, yo, J hit the dial and nodded out his window.

We both got out of the car, helped Old Man to his feet and walked him up to the back entrance of the Shep, where I slipped a twenty into his tattered overcoat pocket and let him in to lay down on the couch in Dickhead Donnie’s office. Showed him where the fridge was too. Listen. I’d be back in the morning to get him out before Dickhead Donnie showed up. Call time’s always an hour earlier when you gotta set up for a wedding.Zack Pelta-Heller is a non-fiction grad student at The New School. He writes regularly for AlterNet and Zink magazines, and his prose has appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, SuitCase, Slow Trains, and Lilith. Currently, he edits crossword puzzles for a living.

Pieces

If summer was breaking plates, what then was spring?

A time to keep moving. One deliberately placed foot at a time. A left step followed by a right. Learning what the phrase “going through the motions” means.

Begin with the occasion. A blue linen cloth covers the table. Your mother ironed and starched the embroidered daisies into submission. The candles flicker. Small, pastel, foil-wrapped eggs are scattered artfully amid the individual saltcellars and pepper shakers, the pot of jonquils, the butter sculpted in the shape of a lamb. I can see now that its peppercorn eyes take it all in. An oversized chocolate rabbit flanks the table setting of each grandchild. Even though they are too old for hunts, there is one for eighteen-year-old Phillip, one for thirteen-year-old Emily. The candy figures are hollow—the chocolate, chalky. Later, they will be discarded.

Happy Easter!

Or should I correct myself—the beginning was Good Friday.

Actually, an interesting day to tell me that you were leaving.

And in the time that it took for Jesus to rise, there I was swallowing bites of glazed ham. Helping myself to spring peas and a dollop of mashed new potatoes. All the while waiting for a plank in the wooden floor to open up, vaudeville style, and drop me out of the scene. For a scene it is. And I am the greatest performer of all. Amazingly—showered, styled, coiffed, even articulate. Chit chatting with your parents. Catching up on the latest family news. Helping in the kitchen. Passing plates of hors d’oeuvres. Sipping white wine.

Now keeping myself upright in the Hitchcock chair, I lean against the painted frame for support. No one sees the slightest crack in my smile. No one hears the slightest cry in my voice. I appear fresh, but on the inside the stain spreads.

You said you were unhappy.

Playing over and over in my head like a classic hit gone wrong. You were going through the motions. Needed to do this. Looking for your own place. But, still, somehow, you didn’t want to throw away almost twenty-seven years.

And how was I feeling?

Too shocked and scared and panicked to have made such a decision. That, indeed, you should stay until Phillip graduates, until Emily and I take our trip to Spain and France, until the season passes for you to leave.

And was there even a spring?

For there must have been daffodils poking through the matted winter mulch in the rock garden. Their thrustings like small fingertips reaching for the warmth, the light.

And what about the lavender curling over the rocks, choking every little plant in its way. A shock of purple, a symphony of bees. That must have been later in May.

Spring was a time of pretending. It was a time when my spirit whispered, barely audibly, all will be well, and all will be well, my chant, and all manner of things shall be well against the sound of your voice droning on and on, gaining strength and momentum about your ever-present unhappiness like so many worker bees.

The vernal equinox must be slightly out of kilter.

The sun sets. Each night I listen to the rhythm of your breath as you sleep. Your eyelids flutter as you plan your move, gather your energy, your resolve, while I grow exhausted, deprived of rest but driven, somehow, to stay awake, to worry, to plot out scenarios.

How exhilarating it would have been to take a rain check on Easter. Bag the singsong greetings, discard the bouquet of tulips, throw out the dessert. For the holiday set the precedent when there should have been an announcement: the spring performance is cancelled due to lack of interest.

And because there is no communication between us, has in fact never been, we busy ourselves planning the menu for the graduation party and painting the sun-porch woodwork. I pull the faxes out of the machine, page by page, of the houses on your list. Shake my head and murmur a wistful no. I do not wish to help you look for a new home even though you respect my opinion.

And so the season, like everything else, passes. We sit in the living room, the children wondering what they did wrong now, when you tell them your news. Your desires. Your needs. Your plans sketched out for them. There is silence and then Emily runs out the front door, slams it shut, to find a friend around the corner while Phillip, on his way out the back, tells me through his tears that everything is going to be all right.

So I return to planting my summer hostas in the bed near the kitchen. I see you standing, watching me, through the den window. The light is fiery and illuminates your figure in the late part of the day.

The children will not return for dinner. As it turns out, it is the last supper of sorts but no one realizes this now. You will be gone in the morning before Phillip and Emily even wake up. I ask if you would like to eat in front of the TV. A sitcom will do the talking in our house tonight.

I prod the pasta salad with my fork. Suddenly, the tomatoes, the black olives, the green peppers confuse me. I rest my fork carefully on the ironstone plate.

“This is very good,” you comment. “You’ll have to give me the recipe when I leave.”

My silent rage grows, spreads, but has nowhere to go. I pick up my plate. When I open the backdoor, the early evening air washes over me. As I throw the plate against the shed, I imagine the pasta salad scattered amid the ivy and pachysandra. It takes several tries to break the heavy plate, but when I succeed, the smooth, glazed shard reveals its chalky inside.

Betsy L. Haase teaches eighth grade Communications. She is a Teacher-Consultant for the National Writing Project and a candidate in the Master of Arts Writing Program at Rowan University.

Gittel and the Golden Carp

[img_assist|nid=654|title=Creation by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=104]Gittel Goldberg turned her back on her cramped kitchen and gazed out the window over Madison Street. How she longed for a space between the tenements, a glimpse of the ocean—the last thing that had touched the world she had left behind. But no, only an unyielding line of stone and metal stood before her, buildings and fire escapes huddled together beneath a gray sky heavy with rain. She wiped her hands on the dishtowel and untied her apron, all the while staring at the window directly across the way—Frieda Mandelbaum’s place, with its fringe of white curtain blowing to and fro. Looking at it, she remembered the dream of the night before.

There she had been, back on the ship in her narrow berth, Zev curled up beside her, his little head in the crook of her elbow, and the oldest three sleeping just a handbreadth away. The sea had moved beneath her like a wild thing, and the creaking of the ship had frightened her. She had woken up in a sweat to find her husband Gedalya sleeping beside her and had thrown off the feather quilt, still gripped by her terror that she was drowning, drowning in a sea of bodies! But then the moments had passed, and the pounding of her heart had slowed. Familiar shadows had eased her back into sleep. She had been grateful, so grateful, to be far away from the ocean. But other times—how crazy she was!—she longed for the ocean. Always it happened when she was alone in the apartment. Then she would yearn for those waves and all that she had left behind on the other side of their vast stretch, so far away that memory itself seemed to be a dream.

[img_assist|nid=653|title=Peace by Suzanne Comer|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]Ah, enough of this! Gittel told herself, folding the dishtowel and apron and placing them by the enamel stove with its sturdy iron burners that defied dreams. Better to think about gefilte fish. And throwing on a shawl, she grabbed a bucket and fled the tenement to breathe in the cold damp smell of March and the pungent presence of the East River. By the time she entered Kimmel’s Fish Shop, there was a bloom on her cheeks, and last night’s dream was forgotten. Ostrov, Poland, it wasn’t, but the smell of the shop—that much was the same.

Mr. Kimmel couldn’t help but notice that Mrs. Goldberg’s dark hair had come loose from her bun, and he stopped arranging the whitefish to admire her. She was a sturdy, compact woman, pleasingly zaftig, with high cheekbones and a proud way of holding her head. She picked out a whitefish. She picked out a carp. Kimmel nodded and reached for his knife. How much gefilte fish had he been responsible for? It was beyond counting. Still, he considered. If all the platters of gefilte fish that had begun in his shop were lined up from his door, they would go from Essex Street to who knows where. Definitely over the Brooklyn Bridge . But Mrs. Goldberg interrupted his thoughts.

"Not so fast! I want to do all the knife work myself. Just like I did back home.”

Kimmel lowered his knife and raised an eyebrow.

"You know how to kill a fish, Mrs. Goldberg?"

"You will excuse me, Mr. Kimmel, but such a question, I am not going to answer."

Hershel Kimmel smiled and shrugged as if to say, you want the guts and mess? Be my guest. And so the fish were unceremoniously dropped into Gittel Goldberg’s bucket—she insisted that he add some water from his sink—and he watched the three of them go out his door, shaking his head. But Gittel, she was happy. She walked home, the fish flipping and flapping in her bucket, splashing water all over. Back in the tenement, she filled her bathtub with water, and she dumped the fish in. So far, so good. She rolled up her sleeves, reached into the bathtub, and grabbed the whitefish. In no time at all, the head and the bones were salted and placed in the icebox. Now it was time for the carp.

"Okay my goldeneh fisheleh," Gittel said to the carp swimming around in the bathtub. Why did she talk to the fish? Who knows? Hours later when she couldn’t sleep, Gittel would wonder if that was the beginning of everything right there. But at the time, she talked to the fish because it looked so pretty, so golden in the bathtub. It darted, it dived, it dashed round and round.

"Maybe you should slow down, Mister Fisheleh. You should be tired already. Watching you, I’m getting dizzy."

But the fish wasn’t tired. It was having a grand time. It zipped around like it was born in a bathtub! All this fish needed was a tuxedo, and it could perform on Second Avenue. Gittel sat back on her heels and sighed. She looked at the knife, the fish skins, the guts and scales. Gefilte fish–it didn’t seem so good anymore. Gittel gave herself a shake and leaned over the bathtub.

"Sing and dance, why don’t you?" she said to the fish. "You do everything else."

And that’s when it happened. That’s when the fish did something Gittel would remember till the end of her days. The carp rose up on its golden tail and turned its silvery black eye upon her. Opening and closing its mouth, it waved its fins and uttered, "No!"

Gittel gripped the edge of the bathtub and sank down upon the floor. Her heart flopped so hard in her chest, she thought God had punished her by turning her heart into a fish. She pressed her forehead against the cool edge of the bathtub; she gasped and prayed. Then she raised her head. There was the carp in the same position, high on its tail, its fins fanning the air. Once more, it opened its mouth.

"Okay! Okay!" Gittel cried. "I won’t! I won’t!"

Now Gittel was a very wise woman. She read the Yiddish papers every day. She had been to the harbor at Le Havre, France. She had traveled across the ocean. She had seen more of the world than she had ever dreamed she would. Plus, she had talked to every woman in her tenement more times than she could count, and she had heard many a strange story. But she had never, never in her life heard anyone say anything about a carp talking. And in English, no less! So she knew this was a sign meant only for her. This was her wonder. Her mystery. Her very own miracle.

Gittel stood up slowly and wiped her hands. When she looked down, the carp was darting and diving around the bathtub. But it was keeping an eye on her, you better believe it. And Gittel looked right back into that silvery black eye, and she was not afraid anymore.

"My fisheleh, my fisheleh," she whispered. "Don’t worry."

So Gittel went back to Mr. Kimmel, who looked up with surprise when he found her once again at his counter.

“Don’t tell me it’s next Shabbes already.”

“I want to buy a basin.”

“This is some new ingredient for gefilte fish?”

“Mr. Kimmel, with four children, I can’t be using my bathtub for fish one day a week.”

"Mrs. Goldberg, let me tell you, I have been in this business a very long time, and I have, if I may say so, many customers who are as particular as yourself. And for them I do all the skinning, the boning, the everything—and I do it for free! So what, I ask you, is the point of throwing your money away on a basin?"

Gittel gave Hershel Kimmel a look. "You will excuse me, Mr. Kimmel, but such a question, I am not going to answer."

So don’t you know, come Shabbes, the golden carp darted and dived in the basin, right there in the corner of the kitchen. The children loved it. Gedalya had second helpings of the gefilte fish. That much was the same.

Shabbes came and went without any further commentary from the fisheleh, but Gittel kept stealing glances at the carp. Its flips and flops caused her heart to do the same, and such gymnastics, Gittel said to herself, she did not need. She went to bed Saturday night grateful that her husband had fallen asleep before her. She needed to think. With Gedalya snoring beside her, Gittel stared into the darkness. She did not like this weight upon her heart, this secret between herself and a fish. She found herself longing for Monday, Monday when her children would be in school and Gedalya would be working down the street at the Schulmanns’. Come Monday, she would do something. Perhaps—yes!—she would give the fish back to Kimmel. At the very thought, her heart stopped aching. Monday night, she would lie beside her sleeping husband, and this torment would be over. But no sooner did Monday night shimmer like a paradise before her than she knew that she could never bring the fish back to Kimmel’s. What would she say to him? She could just picture the look on his face, the eyebrow raised, the questions he would throw at her, and how many questions can a woman refuse to answer? And then, even if he took the fish—and this, she knew, he would never do, but suppose, just for a moment, that Kimmel took back the fish and said nothing—even so—then what? She would be sending Mister Fisheleh straight into the hands of another woman! And such a deed she could not do. She could not live with the thought that another woman, bending over her bathtub before Shabbes, would get the shock of her life. An older woman could die from fright. A pregnant woman—Gittel shuddered. It was out of the question.

But to keep the fish was also out of the question. Already her children were making up names for it. Already Zev was telling stories about it, bringing his friends into the kitchen to watch it. He hung over that basin so much, it made her nervous. One day that smart aleck fish would open its mouth to her youngest son, and then where would she be? No, on Monday when she was alone with the fish, she would explain to it the whole situation.

"Gottenyu, what am I doing?" she groaned, as her husband sighed and flung his arm over her. "Here I am, planning a talk with a fish!"

But plan it she did. She wondered if the fish had any Yiddish. It had spoken in English, yes, but this little talk on Monday she would rather have in Yiddish. Okay, all right, she’d throw in a bit of both. Surely the fish would see that this was a kindness that must be repaid with kindness in return. And with this hope, she rolled towards her husband and gave herself up to sleep.

So everything was planned for Monday. As for Sunday, Gittel planned to lay low. Do some washing, do some cooking, and keep an eye on the fish. The weather was fine, and Gedalya took Avrum, Mendel, and Ruchel to Seward Park. But Zev, he wasn’t feeling right. His cheeks were flushed, and Gittel knew that the child had a fever. On any other day of her life, Gittel would have been thinking only of her youngest child and how she could nurse him back to health. But now she chafed at the thought that he must stay home with her. She wished he were out of the apartment, far away from the carp in its basin. Instead, he sat on one of the kitchen chairs, his feet propped up on another chair, his dark curly head leaning against the wall. Gittel noticed how the damp curls clung to his forehead. She wanted him in bed, but he refused to lie down. The child wanted to be with her. As she ironed Gedalya’s shirts, she bit her lip.

"What is it, Mama? Are you mad at me for being sick?"

"No, no, totteleh. I am distracted, that is all. Mrs. Greenbaum, she told me a foolish story, and I can’t get it out of my head."

"Tell it to me."

Oy oy oy! Why had she said anything about a story? She couldn’t make up a story now without that fish working his way into it!

"Mrs. Greenbaum’s mishegoss—it’s not for children, mein kind. You tell me a story, and I’ll finish the ironing. Then we’ll take a nap, okay?"

The boy studied his mother and nodded. His gaze traveled around the room and settled upon the fish. Gittel winced, but it was too late. He had begun.

"Once there was a fish. It had a golden tail and silver fins and black, black eyes. One day the fish was swimming in the East River, and a man caught it in a net."

"Zeiskayt, you don’t have to tell me a story. I’ll stop right now. Look, I’ve finished the shirt. Let me get you something to eat, and we’ll take a nap."

"No, I’m not hungry! Do your ironing, Mama. I want to tell you a story."

Gittel clenched her teeth as she reached for another shirt. She prayed that the child’s story would end soon. The sooner she could him get out of the kitchen and away from that fish, the better she’d feel.

"So the man put the fish in a bucket, and he brought the fish home. He was going to cook the fish for dinner, but he was so tired that he fell asleep.”

"That’s a very nice story," Gittel said, "and you and I should sleep too! I am tired of ironing, and here you are with a fever. We should lie down already."

"I’m not finished!" Zev flashed back at her. Gittel felt ashamed of herself for interrupting him. The child loved telling stories. How could she deny him this pleasure when he was sick? And yet, she was more and more anxious. It was all she could do to go on ironing. But—she was a mother first and foremost. She smoothed out the next shirt.

"While the man was sleeping, the fish jumped out of the bucket and landed on the man’s pillow," Zev said, his voice dreamy, his eyes fixed on the window overlooking Madison Street. "Then the bed turned into a river, and the man woke up and said to the fish, ‘What is happening?’ And the fish said, ‘I am taking you to my home for a visit, because you were kind to me and didn’t hurt me.’"

Gittel looked over at the basin in the corner. With a tightening of her heart, she saw that the fish was not swimming around in his customary way. He was still, his fins moving gently, the water billowing against the sides of the basin.

"That gonif is listening!" she thought furiously. Her boy was sick, he needed his rest, and that fish, that fish! Gittel unplugged her iron, marched over to her son, and picked him up.

"Put me down, Mama! I want to finish my story!"

"You can finish it in the bedroom!"

"Let me say goodbye to the fish. Then I’ll sleep."

A wave of tenderness swept over Gittel as her son’s head rested against her shoulder. How could she say no to him? Just for a moment they would look at the fish. Then she would carry him into the bedroom and close the door. As soon as her son was well enough to go to school, as soon as she had a morning to herself, she would get rid of that fish! She didn’t know how, but she would! Gittel breathed in the scent of her boy’s sweaty curls and kissed his forehead. Then she walked over to the basin, and mother and son looked down at the fish. Its fins moved so delicately that Gittel wondered if the fish was asleep. The kitchen was silent, and Gittel felt her son’s heart beating against her breast.

And then between one heartbeat and another, the fish rose up on its golden tail and turned its silvery black eye upon them. Beating its fins and opening its shimmering mouth, the fish uttered "Go!"

Gittel gasped, gripped her son in her arms, and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

"Mama! The fish! The fish talked!" Zev struggled out of her arms and pushed against her, trying to open the door, but Gittel leaned against it with all her strength.

"No he didn’t!"

"He did! He did! You heard it too!"

And then both of them were flinging open the door and rushing into the kitchen.

There was the golden carp, swimming around in the basin, doing nothing.

It was all Gittel could do to stop herself from grabbing that fish and throwing it out the window. She staggered over to a kitchen chair and sank down into it. "Mama?"

Maybe the fish could talk, but Gittel could not say a word.

"Mama, I think we should let the fish go. I think he wants to be free. Let’s do it now."

Gittel tried to look like a mother in charge of the situation. She smoothed out her dress and adjusted her hairpins, tucking the wisps into her bun. Maybe if she had worn a shaytl like she was supposed to, none of this would have happened. At the thought, a flush rose to her face, half shame, half rebellion. She had always hated those wigs; she had always told herself that she would never wear one! And here she was in America, the land of the free! But still, there were other women, women right in her building, who wore them every day and passed her on the stairs, looking at her. She turned to her boy, her youngest child, who would be in December six years old. She felt so old and confused, and he—he was so young and sure.

"What should we do, totteleh?"

"We should put the fish in a bucket with some water and take him outside."

"Then what?"

"We should walk to the river and let him go. Come on, Mama."

"You feel well enough?"

"It’s not far. It’s warm out. When I come home, I’ll rest. I promise."

And so together, mother, son, and fish went down Madison Street and turned at Montgomery, headed for the river. It was a mild day, and many mothers and fathers were out with their children. No one gave any thought to the little pair and their bucket. When they got to a certain place along the wharf, Zev squeezed his mother’s hand.

"This looks like a nice place, Mama." They looked down. There was the water glinting beneath them. A moment later, there was the golden carp catching the sunlight, disappearing into the water with a soft splash.

Gittel stared at the spot where the fish had vanished, overcome by a longing that went through her like a knife. How she wished that she too could go back to where she came from, back to how things used to be! Beyond the East River, the Atlantic beckoned, but she knew there was no homeland waiting for her on the other side. She had crossed the ocean, and the landscape of her heart had changed forever. She belonged here now, on these streets by the East River, even if belonging only meant feeling accustomed to the feeling of not belonging.

"He’s going home now, Mama!" Zev said, his little hand pulling her away from her thoughts. "He’s going home to his family."

"Yes, zeiskayt. He’s going home," Gittel murmured. Holding tightly to her son’s hand, Gittel turned away from the river and headed up Montgomery. At least she hadn’t been the only one to hear the fish’s last word. If she had been, she would have worried for the rest of her life that she had taken leave of her senses. But here she was, her familiar self: a little round now, her hair touched with gray, the small square hands, the ring that Gedalya had given her so many years ago. And there was her boy beside her, chattering happily, going on with his story about the fish. By the time she got him back to the apartment, he was so tired that he fell asleep instantly. As she lay beside her child, Gittel felt herself floating between the "Go" and the "No," between the golden carp and the empty basin in the kitchen. Yes, the fish had spoken—and in a language she would never be able to call her own. But the rise and fall of her son’s breathing—that much was the same. Raima Evan grew up in Swarthmore. She attended Radcliffe College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she received an M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing as well as her Ph.D. in English. She is an assistant dean at Bryn Mawr College and

Lantanas and Rain

[img_assist|nid=4282|title=Blue by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=259]As the rain sopped cement becomes an ever darker hue, Jeanette calls to insist that she’ll be over to visit within the hour. Thirty-three years of watching the rain in blissful solitude isn’t a bad run. Besides, I already know that today’s rain isn’t going to be one of those eternal days. The air isn’t right. I’ll check outside anyway, even though the rain wasn’t violent enough. It wasn’t urgent. Rain needs to be urgent; my husband taught me that.

Parker loved the rain. We got married in the rain. We had our babies in the rain. I buried him in the rain.

It rained for two days solid when Parker went into the ground. As soon as it stopped I went outside. The eternal stillness swallowed me, which I like to think of as Parker’s last gift.

Parker shared the secrets of eternal stillness with me on our honeymoon. That was the first time I experienced it. Only in the fifteen minutes after a drastic rain storm is there even a chance of eternal stillness. When you walk outside and the lines of the trees are so clear, sharp, and vivid that they seem unreal—you’ve found it. The air is heavy yet clear. Nothing moves. The colors of the atmosphere are a mismatch, with every color visible in the grey light. There’s a smell in the air that you recognize reflexively, but that can’t be named. As you stand there nature takes predominance. You can’t ignore it because it’s so vivacious. From an acre away you can see the needles on the pine, the cracks in the bark. You feel yourself moving with the earth, the circular movement of time itself. You feel the lines of your own body sharpen and define. Momentary harmony. Even the grass individualizes itself, each blade separates as the excessive rain settles on its waxy coat. This is eternal stillness. In this moment you can breathe, you’ve joined the universe, and you don’t have to move. It’s not necessary.

That’s what I learned from Parker. Shared with him.

[img_assist|nid=4283|title=Untitled by Nicole Porter|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=113]Now any rainstorm seems like a message from him, even if it’s just one on the Weather Channel. Since he died there’s only been two moments of eternal stillness. Even while he was living we only had twelve together. I’ve put a window seat in so that I can watch the rain in comfort. It’s the best, most ridiculously ornate window seat that’s ever been furnished. It’s like a cotton candy explosion in silk.

In front of my window are my lantanas. The first time I ever saw a lantana was at the annual garden show. The next day Parker came home with twelve flats of those beautiful flowers. Their colorful petal cluster bouquets remind me of our wedding. They were the last thing that Parker planted before he died. When it doesn’t rain I stare at the lantana, and it makes me a little less lonely.

From my perch I watch Jeanette’s red Subaru sputter up the driveway. Today Jeanette’s got a pizza box huddled under her umbrella. Must be a turquoise day. She’ll let herself in, so I take a few moments to stare out at the rain. Shame it’s slowing down.

Jeanette slams everything when she enters—the door, her umbrella, the pizza box. Makes her happy to know that she can still cause a racket. “Lunch!” Jeanette has the voice of a windblown sailor. I can hear her in the kitchen; banging cabinet doors that she knows damn well don’t contain what she’s looking for.

“What kind?” I ask as I lug my bum foot into the kitchen.

“Pepperoni.”

“And?”

“What do you mean ‘And’, you crazy old broad. Pepperoni. You want a gourmet pizza call your goddamn kids.”

“How many times have I got to tell you, onions aren’t gourmet.” I flip open the pizza box, and of course there’s a mix of pepperoni and onion. Jeanette waddles over next to me to stare at the pizza as well. She puts one paper towel in front of me, and another in front of herself. Scrapping the chairs across the faded orange linoleum, we sit and listen to the wooden seats creak beneath us. What happened to the days when we’d glide in and out of these chairs?

Jeanette lifts a slice of pizza out of the box. A greasy umbilical cord of cheese complicates the process. “You seen those ungrateful kids lately?”

I rub my nose. Mention of my children always makes my nose itch. “They called. Wanted to know what my plans were for the holidays.”

“What your plans were? What the hell do they think; that you’re trying to decide between the goddamn Queen of England’s invitation or the goddamn yacht party?”

I blot my pizza with a napkin, and watch the grease soak through the paper into my hand. It’s possible that Jeanette always brings pizza in an attempt to kill me, even though she’s not in the will. “No, they’re trying to decide. Benny and his nit-twit wife want to go to France for a real Christmas at Notre Dame. Precious is afraid to leave her boyfriend for a week, so she thinks she’ll spend it with his family. And don’t you know, his family celebrates Christmas at the Ritz or something like that.”

“We like having you for the holidays anyway. Fuck ‘em.” Jeanette spits out her first bite. Steam billows out of her mouth, and off the slightly chewed piece of pizza. Slurping her water, Jeanette scrunches up her face so that it’s a maze of lines.

“You want me to bring the pie again?” I ask.

“Yeah, Little Jim was requesting it on Sunday. He’s a cute little bugger. Out of nowhere he asked me, ‘will Violet bring me another pumpkin pie all my own?’ That kid’s got a memory like an elephant. Must be hell for his mother, but that’s what they call karma coming back to bite you in the ass.”

Once the pizza cools we eat in silence. Or rather, we don’t speak. These days there’s always some sort of noise accompanying a meal. We’ve accepted it, even though our children haven’t. Today, Jeanette eats her crust. I wonder how long it’ll take her to tell me what’s wrong. That’s the thing about Jeanette; she’s never been good about just coming out with a problem. Even after all these years she has to work up to it. That’s why I call it a turquoise day, getting to the trouble takes as long as it does for one of those pretty blue stones to form.

Jeanette begins folding up her paper towel into a neat, greasy little square. “It’s raining.”

“Sure is.” I listen to the drops pinging off the roof. Out the kitchen window I can see the drops hanging off the laundry line. It’s a murky rain. A chill seeps into the house. Not my favorite kind of rainstorm. It’s more on the line of eternal monotony rather than something sublime. I can hear Parker lecturing me, ‘if it’s been raining for thousands of years, then consider this storm just as miraculous.’ He was always kind of sappy that way. Still, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s right.

“Parker out there?” Jeanette nods her head, with its beehive of died black hair, at the window. She knows that I believe Parker’s spirit returns with the rain and she doesn’t think I’m crazy for it. That’s friendship.

“I think so. He’s not making himself known.”

“Just like him, the old bastard.”

I don’t know what to say, so I make sure the cardboard lid is tightly pressed closed. One thing about Parker, he was never a bastard. At least not to my knowledge.

The clock ticks away, as it always does when there’s a need for distraction. I take Jeanette’s napkin out of her veiny hands. “What’s eating you?”

“Usual shit.”

“Bull.”

Jeanette looks at me, with those droopy eyes that used to devour everything she came in contact with. She shakes her head. “Just been thinking lately.”

“About things you can’t control?”

“I know. What’s the goddamn point? Sunday Little Jim gave me a mug with World’s Greatest Grandma on it, and all I could think was what the hell am I going to do with this. How many other women got the same goddamn mug? Florence McAdams probably has one, and I’ll be damned if she’s the greatest anything.”

“I don’t have a mug that says that.”

“That’s not really a consolation.”

“No.” I look over at the wall by the stove. There used to be a picture of the kids there, but I took it down last year. Actually, I threw it at Precious when she got mouthy with me. Still haven’t figured out what she did with it. Now there’s a square of unfaded wallpaper in the middle of the wall. It makes the whole kitchen look tacky.

“You want a mug that says Worlds Greatest Grandma?”

“Not really. Even when they were babies, the kids always knew they rated a distant second to Parker.”

“You want to go look for him?” Jeanette scratches her chin where three sharp, thick, white hairs poke out. I kinda like that she got hairy in her old age; it serves her right for all her former pampering.

“Depends if you mean you want me to drop dead right now or just go outside.”

Jeanette stands. “Outside. It’s too goddamn stuffy in your house, and it smells like meatloaf.”

“I don’t even eat meatloaf.”

Jeanette pulls her coat onto her left shoulder before flinging it to the other side. “Then why does your house always smell that way? Get the damn umbrella.”

Outside the rain is slow enough that I don’t need to worry about the blue rinse washing out of my hair. Jeanette throws both of our umbrellas onto the stoop in front of the front door. A few of the surviving remnants from my garden perfume the air. Of course, the pines are particularly fragrant.

Parker would have pulled me into the muddy grass by now, to wait for that moment of eternal stillness. We would have waited until all possible hope was gone, then we would have laid our heads down, so that we could see life from the perspective of ants, with every blade of grass becoming a mountain.

Today smells like dirt.

Jeanette and I walk up the driveway, and circle around her car. There’s not much to look at other than an old beat up aluminum shed that I’ve always hated, and the little cracked stucco house that would shame the kids if they could see it in its current state of disrepair. Personally, I like the weather-beaten look. Although a new coat of paint on the shutters would liven the place up. Maybe I’ll finally go for the purple trim. That’d piss everyone off. Even Parker.

Jeanette heads over to the vegetable garden that’s already in hibernation. She crouches down. I didn’t even know she could still kneel, but that’s what you get for being Catholic your whole life. I join her, and feel the rain seep through my trousers. You’d think I’d feel closer to Parker at this moment, but it’s just the opposite. I want to be in my house, my smelly house.

Pulling at some of the weeds, Jeanette tears the limp green stems apart. Pull, tear. Pull, tear. I’d tell her to stop, but I hate weeding, and it needs to be done. She sneezes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “Vi, I’m loosing my mind.”

“So?”

“I’m really loosing it. They’re going to pack me off soon.”

“They won’t do that if you don’t tell anyone. Look at me. I’ve been seeing Parker outside this house since the day he died. I’ve obviously lost my mind. Thing is I know who to tell, and who not to. Besides, neither of us ever had much of a mind anyway, least not a great one. Now we get to be as dingy as we want.”

Jeanette’s voice cracks, and as it does so, her body looses its rigidity. She slumps sideways, so that her left leg is in full contact with the wet grass. “I don’t want to lose my mind.”

“Too late for you to start being a conformist.”

“The goddamn doctor said there’s no cure. He said all my fucking eccentricities aren’t eccentricities, and it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get to the point where I don’t know anyone. Might be a good thing, but Vi, I don’t want to forget. Too much has happened just to forget it all.”

“Maybe the doctor’s wrong.” I start pulling at the weeds as well. We put the green scraps in a pile that quickly becomes a mound.

“I told him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and he had the nerve to say that kind of language didn’t help anything. Condescending prick. He reminds me of Benny.”

“Sounds like it.” It’s true my son is a condescending prick, and a doctor.

Jeanette yanks up a large weed, that turns out to be a forgotten carrot. She tries to pull the stem off, but it’s stuck on tight. So she traces the carrot through the mud. “There are some things I was planning on telling you, on your deathbed. Now I can’t, because I probably won’t remember any of it.”

“You’ve been planning to have a scene at my deathbed? What if I died suddenly, fell down the stairs or something?”

Jeanette shrugs. “I don’t see that happening. You’re a stubborn ass; you’ll make us all suffer along with you.”

I nod. It’s true I was planning to have an elaborate deathbed scene, just like Parker. Not that his was enjoyable for any of us, but it was memorable. I wouldn’t give up that time with him for anything. The drizzle stops. I look around, there’s nothing extra vivid or alive. It’s a murky post-rain just as I predicted. “Tell me now.”

“Vi, I tried to seduce Parker. I tried for almost forty years. The most I got out of him was a sloppy kiss that had more to do with you than it did me. He was mad at you for something. I don’t remember what. Christ, I used to know. I knew yesterday. You have no idea how much I wanted Parker. I tried everything. Once, I thought about pushing you down the stairs while you were pregnant with Precious, but I decided that Parker would be a miserable widower, and I didn’t want to deal with that.”

A drop of rain, probably from the pine tree, drips onto my head. One large splat of water, nothing else. I wait for another drop. A bird calls out without receiving an answer. “Why’d you tell me that?”

“Thought you should know. It wasn’t fair of me, hiding it from you all these years. I’m a shit, and you need to know that. Because I consider you my best friend, that’s how I describe you to everyone. In my heart I’ve been a complete bitch to you. Vi, I tried everything.”

“You didn’t need to tell me that. I could have died happily never knowing.”

“Vi, you have no idea what I’ve done. I couldn’t help it, Parker was everything to me. Still is. If he had let me, I would’ve taken him from you and the kids, and moved far away. I never would have felt bad about it, not even a little.”

“Well, you’ve cleared your conscious. I guess I’ll have to forgive you. Nothing happened, and besides, I need somewhere to go for the holidays.”

“Thank you, Vi. It’s more than I deserve.”

“Goddamn right it is.” I swish my hand through the pile of weeds we had just created. The wet stems stick to my hand. It’s time to go back inside my smelly house. As I try to get up, I notice that Jeanette remains seated. She leans back with an arch.

Jeanette closes her eyes to sigh before she continues her confessional. “You know, Parker used to tell me about the moment of eternal stillness after a big rainstorm. I was kinda hoping that would happen today. That’s why I’ve been waiting to tell you until it rained. Sometimes he’d take me outside and we’d walk until it was quiet. Then we’d wait. I never saw it, but Parker said it’s the moment when everything is clear and distinctive. Only when the world is sharp, will you know that you belong to the eternal circle. That’s what he said.”

I grab the carrot right out of Jeanette’s hands. She rocks back slightly as I take it from her. Then I beat her over the head with it. That soggy carrot strikes her shoulders, her back, her head until she’s laying in the fetal position next to my dead vegetable garden. With each whack I feel the carrot loosen. I’m not sure if it’s the carrot or my fists hitting her anymore. Only when the carrot brakes off its stem do I stop.

I throw the carrot in her face and stretch my body up so that I’m standing fully above her. “I hope you forget everything except this goddamn carrot.” I try to run back into my house.

I slip as I get to my door and fall on my hands. The stinging travels through my entire body. Instant soreness. I look back; Jeanette hasn’t moved yet. I look up, and the clouds begin parting, revealing a lighter sky. As I pull myself back to standing, I see that my my potted lantana blossoms are filled with water. Each colorful delicate cup has a perfectly round bubble of rain in it. It’s like the rain is being held in a perpetual freeze. That’s when I know that Parker is present—watching me and Jeanette. He’s resting in the lantana, where the rain has frozen in a moment of eternal stillness.

With more strength than I know I have I pick up the planter and carry it to Jeanette’s car. She watches me as I get closer. I put the planter on the top of her trunk. “Now you’ve got him.” Jeanette doesn’t move. Part of me wants to hit her again.

Instead I return to my house. From the front door I watch her slowly stand up, stumble to her car, and place the planter in the passenger seat. After she and Parker drive away, I rummage through my junk drawer, looking for purple paint samples.

Melissa Mowday is a Philadelphia area writer. Her fiction has appeared in the Avenue Literary Journal. She was also commissioned to write the 2005 Hibernia Park Murder Mystery, which is her second play to be performed. Currently, she is completing her

Restoration

[img_assist|nid=4295|title=”Dravidian’s Cure” by Antonio Puri © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=73]I’m sitting at a small rickety table by the window of this nondescript cafe, its only sign a half-shattered plastic square that reads “Breakfast.” No name, just what it serves. What I serve. Remarkably, Angel manages to keep this place open. I don’t know why he picked this location, this dingy block of downtown Long Beach , so empty of hope the only life on the sidewalks are the alcoholics ditching into the Algiers Bar across the street. I’m on my break, trying to read a moldy paperback copy of The Stranger, drinking coffee I’ve laced with whiskey from the flask I keep in my apron pocket. The awning of the bar reflects the sun in glaring hot swaths across the asphalt. I lift my cup to drink and in she walks, predictable as the heat of the California sun.

I wonder where she’s been today. She looks more alert than usual, though wearing the exact same outfit as she has all month: leopard skin coat, fake-fur collar gray with cigarette ash and dandruff, grimy pink mules. The exposed rough skin of her unshaven ankles makes me sad.

“Hi, Mom,” I say.

She ignores me and slowly pushes a stiff lock of yellow-streaked white hair from her broad forehead. She makes no eye contact, although I note a distinct lift of her chin. My mother is too good to be seen talking with the hired help. She glides like a queen toward the counter where Angel is wiping down the plastic wood-grain paneling. Her hands hang limp. A black patent leather purse dangles off the tips of her long-fingered left hand.

She clears her throat, a rheumy thirty years of tobacco smoke clogging the pipes. Angel ignores her, and my heart hurts. She’s beautiful. How can he ignore her? But Angel has a business to run, as he explained to me last week, when he dialed 911 to report a vagrant: my mother.

I am worried at how best to proceed because she’s earlier than usual and I am not prepared. Yesterday had been a good day, because I had remembered to lay out two quarters on each table before she got here, so that she could come right in, do her work—which is to steal my tips—then get out before Angel calls the cops. But today everything—the sun, the heat of the whiskey—pushes me to forget just where I am.

I watch her and feel the familiar urge to have a normal conversation, the urge like a gnawing hunger. It must be normal to want that, especially now. I’m getting married this week. It’s normal for a girl to turn to her mom at a time like this. It must be. I think: I’m so glad you came in. I wanted to tell you something. Mike and I are getting married on Wednesday. Do you remember Mike?

Angel is now glaring at my mother although he still hasn’t spoken to her. He hates it when she comes in. Says it ruins business to have crazies wandering around. I tell him it isn’t her fault; she is my mother, what am I supposed to do? We don’t argue about it anymore, though. Angel is only threatening to call the police. He’s the last person to want the cops to come in, check things out, study the fake green cards and expired licenses. Besides, he doesn’t want me to quit, really, because who else would work in this dull, nameless place?

My mother turns on her heel and heads toward the table in the far right corner. I wince. I have not cleared the table, and the last customers had had a three-year-old who, with both hands, smeared pancake syrup all over everything. I’d noticed the hacking cough of the father, the balled up napkins containing God knows what.

I want my mother to sit with me, have a cup of coffee, watch the people slip into the darkness of the Algiers Bar.

Remember Mike? We came to see you at the hospital? Mike paid for the taxi fare. He gave you a carton of Lucky Strikes. You told him you were trying to quit so you were going to flush them down the toilet. He thought that was funny. I was relieved, because he’d paid for them out of his tip money and I thought he’d be mad. And he’s so mean when he’s mad. But instead he said, “Well, hon, do me a favor and flush them one at a time so they last.” You thought that was funny.

Angel jerks his head over at my mom, then looks pointedly up at the clock. My break is over. I get up and dig through my pockets for some tips. I have about three dollars in change. I approach my mother, who has seated herself at the filthy table.

You’re invited. Will you come? Adrian ’s Wedding Chapel. Adrian said we could invite a witness, but if we couldn’t find one, he’d ask his assistant, Hilda. I thought since maybe you were around here, you know, you might stop by. Just a thought. Two o’clock on Wednesday. That’s the day after tomorrow.

My mother lights a Lucky Strike and gazes out over the cafe while I gather the sticky plates and place them on the table next to us. I pull a clean ashtray from my pocket and sit down across from her. Angel slams something and stomps into the kitchen. I can hear him making a ruckus, something that sounds like forks being thrown into a fan.

Her body smells unwashed. Her black shiny purse sits in front of her. I want to open it up, dig through to the bottom for pennies and sen-sen and flecks of tobacco.

“How are you doing, Mom?” I push the quarters in her direction. “I have something to tell you.”

She sighs, plumes of white smoke pouring from her nostrils. She looks down at her hands, the backs of her long beautiful fingers tanned from Thorazine and her wanderings beneath the hot sun. Then she frowns. She picks up the quarters. Her brow twists in confusion, her hand resting on the table, palm up, full of quarters. She looks up at me, perplexed.

“Who the hell are you?”

I fold my hands around hers, curling her fingers around the quarters. Her hands are cool and soft.

Will you come? Maybe you could play for us. There’s an old piano at Adrian ’s. Nothing much. But all the keys work. I checked. You could play anything you wanted. Chopin. You always loved Chopin.

She is still frowning at me and I can’t find any words to speak. I get up and hug her shoulders. Suddenly she pulls me down and we kiss. It is an awkward quick collision of soft smoky lips. We have never done this before, kissed on the mouth, and for a moment I hold my breath, not knowing what to think. Then my mother turns fierce, her eyes blazing blue and sharp. She grabs my collar and whispers loudly, “I’ve got a tip for you. Never fall in love with a woman.” Her eyes fill with tears. “They’ll break your heart.”

I stand up , blushing , and my mother’s face snaps back to its calm disdainful beauty. She stands abruptly, drops the quarters into her purse and marches across the cafe to the front door. She stands there until Angel sighs and opens it for her. I run to the window and watch as long as I can the leopard skin back prowling down the street.

It’s okay. Never mind. It’s no big deal. We don’t love each other very much anyway.

Angel whistles and calls out that it is time for me to get back to work, though there are no customers. The breakfast rush is over. I put my hands into the pockets of my apron, feeling nothing, feeling nothing because I don’t know that I will never see her again.

This piano is old.

“Strange that a piano this old and so, umm, untaken care of, sorry—”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Well,” he crawls out from beneath the legs as if from under a car. His clean blue jeans are worn at the knees, his waist is slender. The piano tuner, Timmy, sits on my carpet, legs crossed Indian style. He rests his hands and polishing cloth in his lap. His hair is black and curly. His long lashes wave up at me. “It’s one of the sweetest pianos I’ve ever heard.” He grins.

I am grateful for this young man, who has come into my home with shiny , elegant tools. I always thought it was just my opinion, just my love for this piano, my mother’s piano, loving it the way we love the first voice we ever hear, how we come to understand that all other voices are mere echoes of that first sweet voice, a voice I have not heard for 15 years.

It is a Winter 1937 cottage grand. A cottage grand looks like a regular spinet, but there’s something different about its internal workings that I never understood. The chain of events that flows through its intricate systems of levers, springs and hammers, through felt and wool and wood, makes it different.

We lift the upper lid , swing the tapered arm down to keep it propped open. I gently pull the hinged lid that covers the keyboard all the way out, exposing its insides. Timmy gets to work. He raps a silver tuning fork against his knee, then sticks it between his teeth. He reaches in and secures a tiny wrench, making minuscule adjustments, seeking 440 vibrations per second.

I ask Timmy what happens to a piano as it ages. He explains that first the leather and felt compact so that the action becomes uneven and less responsive. Rattles and squeaks develop.

“All the action parts become worn out,” he says, tapping middle C. He frowns. “Hmmm. The keys are getting wobbly.” I want to stop his hand from tapping the key, from using up its strength.

“It gets worse,” he continues. “Hard to believe, but the strings may actually break.” He plucks a rusty B-flat string and its dull thud silences us for a moment.

“Some pianos just die.” Timmy leans toward the hammers and sighs. “The big failure is hidden—look, just below the surface of the cap.” He points to the cap, fingers it, and in the rising dust I smell decades of cigarette smoke and my mother’s breath.

When he’s finished tuning, we examine the ornate cabinet. Its color shifts from one side to the other. The side closest to the fireplace is paler than the rest. He rubs his finger into a round cigarette scar; around the water-stains of the alcoholic years I spent trying to rid myself of Mike.

To distract Timmy from the damage I tell him, “I clean the keys with curdled milk.”

He shoots me a glance. “Oh, I think I heard about that. Something about lactic acid?”

He encourages me to reconsider restoration. “I know it’s expensive, but it’s such a lovely instrument. Still. She’s worth it.”

When the piano tuner leaves, I pull out the bench. I’ve draped it with a homely pink rug to cover up how it is cobbled together with too many thin nails since that day ten years ago , when Mike broke it into pieces against the wall then came after me, w hen one post-blackout morning the damage he did to the piano, to me, finally entered my consciousness and I made calls. The police came. I met Margaret, a therapist, in a hospital rehab hallway.

I rub the dampness of last night’s bottle of whiskey off the coffee table. I only had one, just one when I got the letter; when I heard the news, then called Margaret; what should I do?

Thirty or more books of music line the shelf above the piano. I choose Chopin preludes. The prelude is not a piece I’m familiar with, so I proceed slowly, addolorato. But even in this dirge I can hear the water, the life force. The piano tuner told me this piano is now only in tune with itself, accurate pitch no longer possible for its aging body.

My mother had schizophrenia and perfect pitch. She’d call out “G” when the phone rang, “F” at the doorbell. As I clumsily, slowly, begin the prelude’s arpeggio down the keyboard, like so many drops of rain on a lonely night, I try to remember if this piano—her piano—was always weak in its pitch, and if so, was this what drove her mad, knowing the way she did what constituted a perfect sound? I do not know what drove her from me that last day near the Algiers Bar. I do not know what killed her. Tomorrow, because Margaret says I must, I will find out.

When I enter the Medical Records office of Metropolitan State Hospital , a man rises from a desk. The nameplate on the desk reads, Miguel Torres. He is the records clerk who answered the phone when I called weeks before, when Margaret and I decided it was time to know. He waves his hand at a long table. On it is a stack of folders twelve inches high. I stand in the middle of the room, rubbing the backs of my hands. They burn when I am afraid. The smell of dust and mold is familiar and sad.

A woman wearing a white muumuu with pink hibiscus comes into the room. I think she is a patient. She says hello. She stands close to me and then I think she isn’t a patient, because she smells fresh and wears socks and white tennis shoes with her laces tied. She smiles at me and motions to the tower of my mother’s records.

“Go ahead, honey. Tell us which ones you want. We’ll copy them for you.”

Miguel comes back in and hands me a box of paper clips. “Sixteen admissions,” he says. “What do you want?”

Everything, I want to tell him. How can he ask me that? Why can’t I just pick up this stack and walk back to my car and drive away? Miguel leaves the room again and the woman touches my shoulder. “Five cents a sheet.” She shakes her head and sits down at a typewriter table and begins to poke fingers at the keys.

I open the first manila folder. There is a small black and white Polaroid of my mother’s face, an intake photo of a woman in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Her hair hangs longer than I remember it. Her eyes seem sleepy and she is almost smiling, as if she has just had good sex or heard the voice of God.

I did not expect to find my mother, not like this; I have been without her for so long I assumed all traces of her life had disintegrated into dust. I had thought, wrongly, that this hospital had closed, that the tools that shocked my mother, burned her memory down to ash, the so-called machinery of cure, had been bulldozed.

When I received the notice from the hospital that her records were to be purged I called Margaret, whom I had only seen a few times, back when I was disintegrating into alcoholism, before these blank years of sheer coping. Margaret asked, how did she die? I told her I did not know, that she had disappeared one hot day while I was at work.

But here is my mother, stapled to a form. I quietly yank the photo from the page and slip her into my purse. For an hour I turn the pages slowly, finding more photos, delaying the inevitable final pages. Miguel comes back into the room and taps his watch.

“We have to get started copying or we won’t be able to give you anything,” he threatens.

I relinquish my stack to him and he carries it back into the bowels of the archives.

When I rise to leave, my hands not full enough of what I came for, of what I crave, the woman in the muumuu says, “Wait, honey. I’ve got something for you.” She opens a drawer and hands me a piece of paper. On it is a recipe for shrimp mousse. And a recipe for Harvey Wallbangers.

“It’s different now,” she says. “It’s not shameful anymore.” I’m not sure what she’s referring to. I thank her for the recipes and touch her shoulder lightly as she turns back to the typewriter. She bats my fingers away and bends toward her work. I notice, then, the key dangling from her wrist. She’s not a patient. At least, not anymore.

On my way home I stop only once, for bourbon. The red blinking light of a message greets me as I unlock the door to my house. It’s Margaret, asking me to call her. I do.

“Did you get the records?”

“Yes.” I move to the refrigerator and try not to make any noise as I drop ice cubes into a glass. My hand is shaking. “Not all, though.”

“Call me if you want to later, will you?”

I hang up, and my hand stays on the phone for a long time. Chopin is playing in my head and I am riveted to the spot, one hand around a glass of booze, one on the phone. It is my mother’s crazed rendition of the minute waltz, which she played in thirty seconds flat, and I see before me the frenetic dance I would dance behind her as she sat at our piano, the sweet oceanic dread of the waltz making me weep with her.

When the music fades I bring the hospital records to the couch. I hold tight to the glass. Finally, I begin to turn the pages.

There she is again, more photos. They are askew, as if she could not stop moving. In one she looks like a mean parrot; in another her hands blur as she makes the sign of the cross across her polka dot blouse. The blouse is on backwards. In another her eyebrows are lifted into a dramatic “v” as if to plead, “what am I doing here?”

I begin to disbelieve. It is all so unreliable. I remember my mother as young and beautiful, not sick and dying. I thought she was not mad, just agitato and rhapsodic. As I read these records, I see that even the orderlies have written down the wrong year in places , that the nurse mistook her sleeping form for another patient , that a doctor noticed she had some musical ability.

Then I am stopped by one last photo. It is the leopard skin coat. It is the stiff white hair.

The phone rings and its Margaret again.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk?”

I shake my head, but she can’t hear that. I want to tell her I am grateful she called but that I have to go now, the news has arrived and my mother is dying. I must attend to her funeral. I hang up, hoping she understands.

I turn to the final page. The handwriting is elegant for a doctor. I wonder briefly if he was an artist, then I read this, how it was lung cancer that killed her. She drowned in ash, and the physician wrote: “all I could do for this patient was give her a cigarette, for which she was obviously grateful.”

Yes, she would have been. What a kind gesture. I wonder if there had been any others since I saw her last.

The phone rings. I set the glass down, push it to the edge of the table. The liquid makes a tinkling sound, and the smell hovers, like smoke.

Robin Parks’s fiction has appeared in Bellingham Review, Prism International, The Raven Chronicles and other journals, and has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Parks has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the Presidential Fellow in Creative Writing. Originally from Southern California, she lived for many years on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest, and now calls Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, her home.