The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (13 page)

When he reached Mrs. Allen’s door, which was wide open, he walked in with quiet Leonard and Mrs. Allen promptly burst into tears and the policeman slunk out the door.

She thanked the young man a thousand times, even offered him the Green Star, but he refused it. Leonard turned on the TV and curled up on the sofa. The young man walked over and asked him about the program he was watching but Leonard stuck a thumb in his mouth and didn’t respond.

Feel better, he said softly. Tucking the basketball beneath his arm, the young man walked home, shoulders low.

In his tiny room, he undressed and lay in bed. Had it been
a naked child with nothing on, no shoes, no necklace, no hairbow, no watch, he could not have found it. He lay in bed that night with the trees from other places rustling and he could feel their confusion. No snow here. Not a lot of rain. Where am I? What is wrong with this dirt?

Crossing his hands in front of himself, he held on to his shoulders. Concentrate hard, he thought. Where are you? Everything felt blank and quiet. He couldn’t feel a tug. He squeezed his eyes shut and let the question bubble up: Where did you go? Come find me. I’m over here. Come find me.

If he listened hard enough, he thought he could hear the waves hitting.

The hunchback took in the pregnant girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out. He was her stepuncle, stepmother’s side, lived in a castle with a butler and several spoiled cats. Her parents, disturbed by the predicament, brewed over the problem until her father came up with the brilliant idea: That castle! Your weird brother! Wanting nothing more to do with their daughter, they placed her on a casde-bound train with a suitcase of wide-waisted dresses and a thank-you fern.

Chin brave, the girl ascended the four hundred stairs over the moat and decided she liked the view of the garden from her bedroom. The butler threw out the fern. She held her belly in her arms and bounced with it while the hunchback, a gourmet vegetarian, served her creamy spinach and mashed buttered yams in his cold, stone-walled kitchen.

By her fifth month, they were lovers. He licked her body
up, thirsted after her swollen breasts, consumed her corners until she felt she was one cohesive circle.

I never really came with
him
, she whispered one night to the hunchback, pointing to her stomach. Someone once told me that if the woman comes at conception, then the baby will be lucky. Let me tell you, she continued, if that’s true, this’ll be one cursed child.

The hunchback burst into laughter and held her tightly because just ten minutes before she could hardly
stop
coming from the insistent lappings of his tongue. He said Maybe some of our luck is going up, post-conception luck, and she sank into his millions of pillows and let out a breath of satisfaction. When they slept, she spooned him from behind, her extended belly fitting perfectly into the space created beneath the lurch of his hunch.

She dreamed about luck traveling up her inner thighs, sparkling and ticklish, like softened diamonds.

After the baby came, she wouldn’t leave. No one called for her, and she wouldn’t have gone with them anyway. She wanted to stay, she told him and he nodded. He said Move into my room and she did in two hours, his room with its strange swaybacked chairs and the midnight-blue four-poster bed. She was at his desk one morning, preparing the papers for the baby to be his, for him to be the official father, when she came across medical papers from a plastic surgery clinic. What’s this she said out loud but the hunchback was in the
rose garden, weeding. She read the papers because she figured This is to be my baby’s father, and she found out that two years previous this ordinary normal man had had a hump added to his back. The doctors had opened up his skin and injected fat globules into his shoulder region, and it had cost him a lot of money but he was really rich. The papers said Warning: overeating will affect the size of this hump which explained to her the way it had swelled on Thanksgiving night; she’d chalked it up to her own imagination.

You mean you’re not for real? she screeched, and she ran outside to the weeds while the baby slept and she poked at his back hard until he said You’re hurting me and she said You’re a fake fake fake! and scooping up the baby she flew down the four hundred stairs. She walked the streets of the city until she found a cheap apartment on the bad side of town. She met a man with no legs. How did you get this way, she asked, and he said My father didn’t know I was under the car working on it and she said I’m so sorry and took off her clothes. He was not the lover that the hunchback was, though. She only came every now and then when she allowed herself the remembrance of his hands and his tongue. She quieted and took up nursing, specializing in deformities. But the baby: she did turn out lucky. She grew up to be a movie star. She headlined movies in silver dresses and everyone watched her huge face on the screen with her long long eyelashes and said This one is Special.

It was so unfortunate that her career ended the way it did. On the set of her fifth movie, the starlet was sitting at her makeup table with her head on her arms feeling inestimably sad. I have beauty and fame and riches and boyfriends, she thought, and yet I am so unhappy. Her mother, a frequent visitor, knocked at the door of the trailer. Sweetheart she said opening the door, they—She stopped in mid-sentence. She saw it right away. What’s this? she gasped, face falling open, leaning on the door for support. The starlet raised her burdened head and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw the hump rising up on her back like a landscaped hill, and reaching back one tentative hand to touch it, could hardly contain the airborne feeling of relief.

There was an old man and an old woman and they dreamed the same dreams. They’d been married for sixty years, and their arm skin now wrinkled down to their wrists like kicked-down bedsheets. They were maybe the oldest people in the world. They sat outside their house together, elbows touching, in the wicker chairs you’d expect them to sit in, and watched the people walk by. Occasionally they called out images from the night before to the gardener or to whoever happened to be passing. Most people smiled quickly at them and then looked back down at the sidewalk. And when night fell, the old man and the old woman walked into their bedroom, drew back the white sheets, covered themselves up, and shared what was beneath.

•   •   •

This summer was the one where I worked in the hardware store, and my mother talked only about going to Washington, D.C., to ride on the cattle cars at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum there. Apparently this museum had the best simulation of Auschwitz in the world. I didn’t want to go; I was happy giving refunds to wives who’d bought the wrong pliers for their enterprising husbands. Besides, my mother and I had pretty much done the concentration-camp museum circuit by this point—looking at piles of hair in the Paris one the summer before, walking past black-and-white photographs in Amsterdam. I didn’t like going, but she, somehow, craved it. I watched her hands tremble as she looked at the biographies pasted on the walls, and wondered what she was thinking.

My mother didn’t have much to do with her day besides plan these trips; she taught, and kept her summers free, but I was very busy at the store, stacking bags of potting soil until they were all in perfect rows. I spent my afternoons scraping bird shit off a statue of a random Greek god that stood in the town’s central square. The statue had ended up there inexplicably—no one, not even the oldest people, remembered when it arrived. It seemed to have simply grown up from the earth. My boss at the hardware store thought it was his duty to keep it shining, so every afternoon when business was quiet, he sent me outside, and I rubbed the dried white off muscled iron thighs, running my cloth down sinewy gray biceps. This was the only man I had ever touched so closely. I sang songs in my head from the Sunday morning countdown
while I cleaned him. I kept songs going in my head because they were the easiest thing to think about.

At home, during the evenings, I took care of my father, who was sick and stayed in bed all day. My mother thought I made the better nurse. I told him all about my day, half-listening to my mother watching television in the next room, her wrist cracking and popping when she saw something she thought was funny. She did that instead of laughing.

My father liked to hear details about the store. He liked talking about hardware.

“Any wrenches back today?” he asked, arms flat by his sides, sticks.

“Yes,” I replied. “Mrs. Johnson said hers was the wrong size, so we just traded that one in, and there was a man passing through who needed one for his car, he was having car trouble.”

“Transmission,” my father said knowingly, relaxing further into his pillow.

The old man and the old woman once dreamed that a pig drowned. As usual, they announced this to the neighborhood, listening closely to the sounds of their own voices. They rarely spoke in sentences, but instead called out the images in fragments, like young earnest poets.

“Pig,” the old woman said.

“No breath,” he finished.

“Pushing pig,” she said.

“And brown and dead.”

That day a farmer from across town heard them as he walked by, and when he arrived home his wife hurried out to tell him that the tractor had accidentally scooped up a pig instead of earth and thrown it headfirst into a pile of manure. The pig couldn’t get its footing, fell forward, and suffocated. The farmer was disgusted and annoyed by the story but didn’t think of the significance until he was on the toilet before he went to bed and then he remembered the old man and the old woman. And brown and dead. Disturbed, he told his wife about the prophets in the town, and she promptly told all the neighbors. When the news got back to them, the old man and the old woman just smiled and touched elbow bones closely, loose skin nearly obscuring the tattooed numbers on their inner arms.

I brought my father potting soil and put a pot of growing radishes by his bed so he would have something to tend to. He watered it maybe twenty times a day with an eyedropper, placing strategic drops near the roots—this would increase growth capacity, he said. And I told him plants grow more if you talk to them, so I’d find him, at odd hours in the day, whispering secrets into the damp dirt—about his dreams, about what it was like to be sick, I thought. About his first kiss and other stories.

But when I sat with him it was only me who would talk: Celia and her Anecdotes. He wanted to know, with a power-fill
urgency, what I did in fourth grade, because he’d been well then and hadn’t paid attention to what I was doing. He was busy flying into enormous airports and doing deals. He dreamed, then, of having a son and playing catch on the lawn. Now I knew he thanked God he’d had a daughter. A son would be long gone. A son would be windswept in New York City, the warmth of red wine in his mouth, hands firm on voluptuous women while his father grew thinner and thinner in a queen-sized bed in the country.

I told my father about Reggie, the fat boy with a bowl cut that I liked in third grade and how I cried the day he moved to Kentucky, and I told my father about my former best friend Lonnie and how she had sex at fourteen, and how dumb that was of her. Fast-lane Lonnie. He settled himself back in the bed, and smiled as I talked. I could hear myself prattling, sounding so young and eager. I thought that if I were my father I would want to pat my head. Sure enough, when I kissed him good night, he rubbed my hair with his bony fingers, still steady and confident.

“You’re a good girl, Celia,” he said. “You’re a little prize just waiting to be discovered.”

“Oh,” I said quickly, somewhat annoyed, “I’m not waiting for anything.” Closing the door gently, I went into the kitchen and stared at things. Then I wiped the stove down until it waxed white and pearly under my cloth.

•   •   •

In the concentration-camp museum in Los Angeles you had to pretend you were a deportee, and choose between two doors: one for the young and healthy and another for feebler people that used to go straight to a gas chamber. I chose the “able-bodied” door and found myself in a stone room with twenty other Jews, all of us picking at our clothing. I didn’t really understand why I was there, suffering through yet another museum, until I caught myself sending a hello to the ceiling. And then I knew I was visiting the dead people. I wanted to let them know I’d come back. That for some reason, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t leave them behind, loosened on the ceiling, like invisible sad smoke.

One day the old man and the old woman woke in a panic. They looked at each other and babbled something in Polish, the language they only used when they were scared. They rushed onto the porch and alerted a young gardener who was planting azaleas across the street.

“You,” the old man cried. “Stop!”

The townspeople passing by, who revered the old man and the old woman as minor prophets due to the pig phenomenon, stopped and listened. The gardener wiped his dirty hands on the grass. The old woman was spluttering, her body stooped and visible through a soft yellow nightgown.

“No other gods before me. Or we’re all dead. Town will die, die, die!” she cried shrilly, then fell back into her wicker chair.

The townspeople were instantly alarmed by the prophecy. They ran to the mayor who listened with studied concentration, stared at the floor, and then spoke.

“Town meeting,” he announced in a firm, authoritative voice previously used only for the dog when it peed on the carpet. “We must hold a town meeting.”

In a flurry, the townspeople were assembled. The gardener paraphrased what he’d heard. “ ‘No other gods before me or we’re all dead, dead, dead,’ she said.” Due to all the anxiety, no one could really make any sense of the obvious until Sylvie Johnson, a Catholic who owned the potato store (all kinds—red, white, brown), spoke up.

“It’s Commandment Two,” she said calmly, pleased to demonstrate her Bible knowledge.

The crowd murmured in both recognition and feigned recognition.