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  To Ruby

  THE FIRST WHIFFS OF SPRING

  I took a bus past the old dairy with the big metal cow out front. The cow had long, thick eyelashes and pink-painted lips like a human woman’s. On the cow’s head was a pillowy, blue-spotted bonnet topped with a large, floppy bow.

  Hey, I called to the bus driver. Everyone else had gotten off earlier, at the hospital.

  Hey, I said. Why do you think they want that cow to look like a human woman? No ideas? I said.

  You can’t be drinking that in here, he said without looking up.

  I pinched my own lips in a pucker and sucked air into my mouth. Then I let out the long, suggestive whistle I’d recently learned.

  Where I was going—it was something to do with a family. It may have been my family. When I arrived, there was a large frosted cake, boxes of wine, and a pyramid of sparkling plastic flutes.

  I swallowed some flutes of wine and from a metal platter lifted a single cube of orange cheese that someone had taken the time to stab with a little pick.

  I walked the perimeter of the room and leaned on a wall beneath a large, unrecognizable flag. On the dance floor, several people were creeping around in the dark. A hectic pattern of lighted dots fell all over them.

  In the bathroom, someone had painted bright, childish flowers along the bottom of the wall, giving the impression that the flowers were growing from the linoleum floor. The hand soap had left a bright pink puddle on the sink. Its cherry smell made me wish for something pink to drink. It mingled with a septic odor that emanated from the old lidless toilets.

  I was wearing a dress, a purse, shoes. Earrings. Some bracelets. A large, elaborate brooch. Barrettes and clips. Rings. A belt upon which I’d set my hopes of pulling everything together.

  People sang. Several individuals, working together, lit a large quantity of candles.

  Then, the swaddled body landed in my arms—somebody’s new, red baby—another stranger brought into the world. Here was the cause of our celebration.

  I looked down at its swollen face, its unseeing eyes. It waved an arm stiffly.

  Smells of mud and manure were coming through the open windows—the first whiffs of spring. When I went outside, the wind began to blow. It was coming from a long way off with nothing to stop it. It turned me around. It opened my mouth. It undid my hair and lifted my skirt. It scattered me just like I liked.

  THE CANDIDATE

  The father was a professional manipulator of spinal bones and the mother was a skilled scraper, dauber, and suctionist. They enjoyed playing together: tennis and golf, as well as games of chance. They were slim and tan and drove sporty European cars. One didn’t mind his lack of hair, because he had physical vigor and a nicely shaped head—or maybe it was his money. She kept her hair chemically kinky—a nonchalant frizz.

  In the morning they liquefied fruits and in the evening they steamed leaves and heads in a large metal pot. The breast of a bird—split, skinned—turned slowly in the dim yellow theater of the microwave oven.

  There was a dog, of course. It was big and blond with an expensive heritage. The dog’s name—it eludes me, but it was something to do with victory, royalty, luxury.

  And there were two children—an adolescent boy and a prepubescent girl.

  I was blond, too, but of a different sort. My pedigree was mixed. For a brief period, they tried me. They took me on a trip with them—all of us together in a large van with a small television in the back. A second adolescent boy was auditioning as well.

  We drove for a day, then arrived at the stucco condo that was to be the site of our happiness and relaxation.

  I understood my role as companion to the girl, but my exuberances could not excite her. She watched me with the disinterest of the statistician she would become.

  To the mother and father I went then, but because they had recently cleaned themselves and put on fresh, light-colored clothing, my approach caused a great deal of alarm.

  The boys, then, I could not avoid. At the pool, they bared their hideous bodies to swim or just because it was hot and they were proud. They strutted—huge and spindly, jackal-faced, inflamed, malformed. They called to me.

  I dropped straight in. When I tried to come up, they held me down as long as was funny. I understood this as their birthright. On they would go—a lifetime of dunking, of the pleasures of the dunker.

  I suppose I was asking for it—the way I would hide beneath a piece of furniture and cry out when frightened. I was easily riled. It didn’t take much to spook me. I was a soft thing, very grabbable, with large, wet eyes and a tender nose. At mealtime, I ate at top speed, jealously eyeing the bowls and plates and the rates at which they emptied into mouths other than my own. Here was a group of individuals who took their time with food and did not appear to derive any particular enjoyment from consuming it. In a corner, the dog daintily took its kibble, coin by coin, and never approached the table to beg.

  The day we were to go out on the motorboat, the girl began to bleed. The mother took her into a rest-stop bathroom and stood outside the stall while the girl attempted to insert what her mother had given her. The girl cried. She said she could not do it. This went on.

  The phenomenon had recently been explained to us in the music room at school, where many of the female teachers, as well as most of the mothers, had assembled one afternoon. On a table at the front of the room sat a large human torso—gruesomely separated from the rest of its body—vivisected to reveal the organs, which were brightly colored and removable.

  The lights were dimmed and a movie was projected onto a screen. In the movie, some girls had a sleepover at a friend’s house. The friend’s mother poured pancake batter into a hot frying pan in the morning. She made a large pancake in the shape of the female reproductive system to illustrate what had happened to one of the girls in the night. Then, together, they ate the pancakes.

  The lights were turned on again. Blood, sanitary napkins, and the importance of personal hygiene were discussed.

  Otherwise, I said loudly, you might start attracting flies.

  The teachers and mothers—my mother—all turned to look at me then. It was a look I have come to recognize.

  My companion emerged at last—triumphant but shaken. Mother and daughter washed their hands in happy communion, talking to each other’s reflection in the mirror. Then they turned and saw that I was still leaning on the wall, cramped between two dryers. There came a change in posture like a sigh.

  Come along, clipped the mother. The boys have waited long enough.

  We were late getting out on the water. It was crowded with other boats and ours burned your arm if you leaned on it. The father popped a beer and revved the motor. We bounced along.

  At last the father found us some solitude. One by one, they dove gracefully into the water and surfaced laughing. They floated and flipped their bodies around. The father did it one-handed, his beer held aloft.

  I stood at the edge of the boat. The steps dissolved into thick green water. I wore a man’s heavy T-shirt over my bathing suit. I said it was because I burned quickly, which was also true.

  Come on! shouted the father.

  Do it! shouted his boy.

  Little baby! shouted the second boy.

  The dog barked and drank the water in huge gulps.

  The girl and her mother swam quietly around each other. The girl disappeared first. When they emerged, they were far away—a pair of slicked, shining heads moving quickly out of the picture.

  Now the mother is dead. The dog is dead. The girl has a little boy. The boy has two wives and three girls. The father has a new dog and a new wife and a new house. The second boy has all of these—and more. Like so many things in my head, this information arrived uninvited, and insists on hanging around.

  BEEF HEARTS TRIMMED OF FAT, BRAISED

  Do we have anything to eat? he asked.

  There’s some cornflakes, I said. In the cupboard.

  He got the box of cornflakes and poured some into a bowl. He poured a little milk onto them. He stood holding the bowl with one hand, and with the other, he got a spoon. He dug in.

  These are terrible, he shouted.

  I can’t hear you, I said.

  They’re completely stale, he said. Ugh, they’re really bad.

  He finished the flakes in the bowl, then finished the flakes in the box and flattened the box and rinsed the bowl and set it by the sink.

  Later he said, I’m still hungry. Why don’t we have anything to eat in this house?

  There’s plenty to eat, I said.

  Like what, for example? he said.

  Just look, I said. Just look around.

  Then

I heard him opening and closing doors and drawers. There was the light suctioning sound of the refrigerator and freezer.

  After a while, he came to where I was, holding a foil-wrapped bar to his mouth. He gripped the unwrapped end between his teeth and grimaced. The bar—brown, dense, lightly flecked—would not give way.

  He tossed it into the small waste bin in the corner, where it made a loud sound when it struck.

  Where did you even find that? I asked.

  You hid it from me, he said, a long time ago, and then you forgot about it. That’s what I think.

  Why would I do that? I said. But I often hid things from him, because if I didn’t, he would eat everything all at once, in a single day—in one sitting, even.

  At that moment, for example, I had a sack of cashews in my underwear drawer, an unopened bag of pretzel rods in an empty shoebox at the back of the bedroom closet, three chocolate bars folded into the kitchen towels in the pantry, and a large, costly wedge of aged cheese wrapped in cloth in an unused corner of the unheated basement, where I crept with a knife when he was in the bathroom or occupied by the television.

  When we dined out, we dined exclusively at all-you-can-eat establishments. You got your table—then, without even sitting down, you approached the food arrayed beneath the hot flood of gold light. Here were spiny creatures carted up from the bottom of the ocean. Here were the most succulent sections of a whole herd of ungulates and run-of-the-mill vegetables and fruits prepared in ways you’d never trouble with at home. You made your selection, and it gave you a sense of yourself. No one’s plate looked like yours.

  I ate quickly. In the end, however, I never ate much. I would finish in a matter of minutes, but he ate much more slowly, chewing thoughtfully, a distance runner.

  Are you done, really? he would ask.

  Yes, I would say. I’m very full.

  I would sit drinking ice water while he went back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth plate of food.

  He sat in a relaxed posture—unhurried, one hand flat upon the table while the other rose and fell. I suppose he cost the establishment a good deal of money.

  In fact, not long after we became regulars at one particular restaurant, the price of the buffet increased from $12.95 to $15.95, so we stopped going there.

  It was a pity, because it was my favorite. There was a very grand feeling it gave you. On each table was a little lamp in the shape of a dripping wax candle. At the top of the lamp was a clear glass bulb like a flame, with an orange filament flickering inside, and at the base was a small button that, when pressed, summoned a busboy to your table lickety-split.

  On our last visit there, after four glasses of water, I made a trip to the bathroom. I glided along—past the other diners—admiring the patterned carpet, the gilded wallpaper, and the glossy plastic plants, the leaves of which looked to have been regularly wiped of dust.

  Daylight came through the front wall of windows, which went all the way up to the ceiling. The windows were framed by the tallest drapes I’d ever seen, heavy velvet brocade, held in place by gold-tasseled ropes.

  The blinds on the windows were discreetly raised or lowered by the busboys depending on the angle of the sun. Two of the boys were working to lower them, tenderly tugging the cords and releasing the slack.

  Just past the busboys, I saw him. He was chewing—then he stopped. He seemed to be darkening—dwindling. He squinted, then turned his face up and sniffed.

  We drove home with the defroster blasting. In my mouth, with my tongue, I found something small and sharp—stubbornly planted—up in a place I couldn’t reach.

  PLAYHOUSE

  They are a family of four, our neighbors, with one biological son and one adopted, but so near in age and similar in appearance it seems a little funny, as if the parents had their minds set on twins. The boys do not like each other and they do not like their parents and their parents do not like each other and they do not like their sons, neither one of them.

  In the morning as the father backs his car into the street, one son runs from the house and throws himself onto the hood. The father honks until the boy rolls off, sullen, his arms hanging like clubs. Inside the house the mother will scream for minutes at a go. We have our hands on the phone to call someone about it. But then she stops, steps out onto the patio, sits and props her feet onto the ottoman, and lights a cigarette. Her hair is smooth and her clothes look pressed and cool.

  Sometimes comes the surprise of another day, another night ending, quietly, and without incident. The father returns from work and drinks a beer on the patio. The boys play basketball in the drive. The mother flips pieces of food on the grill. But in the small hours of the morning, one son is chasing the other in the yard with a pair of scissors. It is early enough that we could be dreaming it, the half-clad boys running and tumbling like satyrs in the blue light of the lawn. Our dream disperses when the father bangs out of the house, puffed up, trailing his untied bathrobe. He throws his arms around the scissor carrier, and they topple into the grass together.

  At any hour, the father can be seen tending his property. We’ve awakened at midnight to the sound of his mower. There is little in the way of ornament, though the shrubs are kept neatly cubed.

  Between their lawn and ours is a child’s playhouse, sturdily built, with real glass windows and a slide and two swings. When the snow melts in bleak spring, the father sands the sides of the family’s house and the playhouse and touches up the peeled places. He stands on a ladder, using the same paint, a medium milky brown, for both buildings.

  In the early evening when daylight lingers a little longer than it did the day before, when the father has finished his work and put away his tools and stands in his bare brown yard, appraising, we see how the two structures look like two of the same animal, large and small, grown and juvenile, or parent and offspring.

  On an afternoon while the parents are away, the boys are outside doing things they are forbidden to do. Slowly they start to shove each other toward the playhouse. They stand in front of it a while, throwing pieces of grass as hard as they’re able, but the grass only falls peacefully to their feet. They sit on the swing seats, their bottoms hanging out the backs and their ankles dragging under them.

  The boys stand and put their hands on the playhouse. They grab it and mount their long bodies onto it, rocking it from its rutted resting place. They climb inside. We can see wedges of them pressed up to the glass. The playhouse shudders on its stilted legs, and the boys do not come out. The sun drops into the trees and the grass goes dark.

  When the parents return, the car’s beams swing across the lawns—ours and theirs—and come to rest at the raw, unfenced spot where the playhouse sits. The mother and father wait with the engine running. The ungainly thing begins to tremble, then one boy drops out and stumbles into our early flesh-pink rhododendron. The other son follows and falls face-first into our bleeding heart. There is some permanent damage.

  Our house is similar in color to our neighbor’s—awkward and glass-fronted. The houses on our block are not old but look vaguely historical, all built, it seems, with no concern other than getting the best possible view of the sunset.

  HAPPY WIFE, HAPPY LIFE

  When my wife died I did not want to live, so when my heart stopped I thought, Good. But my daughter took me to the hospital and they opened my chest and found me in there.

  My wife would say, Arguing with you is like talking to a bowl of potatoes! So I would argue with her sometimes just to make her happy.

  FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS

  My parents wanted me out from the start. In good weather they turned me loose at dawn to wander door to door. I was liked by neighbor women with grown children—they’d put me on their laps and feed me sticky rolls and milky coffee while they smoked and talked about their husbands. At dusk—with reluctance—my parents unbolted their home and whistled for me to come. They kept me in the basement in a large room with a tiled floor and a window that looked onto the ground of the backyard, where I watched their sandaled feet cross and uncross in the grass.

 

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