The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (7 page)

On Saturdays, when rates were lower, Renny called Boston, Atlanta and Hagerstown, Maryland. Often, the mothers were home taking care of their new babies, usually crying in the background.

“Hello, Mrs. Stevens,” he said in his best older voice, “I’m calling from
Parents
magazine, may I have a few minutes of your time?” If they said no, he plowed ahead anyway. “Is your baby happy? How old is your baby? Would you describe your baby as a fun-loving baby or a serious baby? Does your baby more resemble you or the father?” Sometimes he slipped up and asked questions too personal, and the women began to fall suspect, and hang up. He called them, on average, every two months. Sometimes he was a contest man, asking them to send photos to a P.O. box and enter My Baby’s the Cutest! contest. Maybe they would win $100,000! Sometimes he just pretended he’d gotten the wrong number. He liked to hear their voices. They sounded tired, but kind.

“We’re drawing our dreams tonight,” Jill announced to the group of seven teenagers in front of her.

“You must’ve been such a geek in high school,” Trina said.

“No hostile comments,” Jill said, smoothing down her red
Gap T-shirt. “If you’re mad about something, maybe you should tell the group.”

“I don’t think any of us want to be here for that long,” Trina said. She smiled at Damon. “And it still wouldn’t change you being a geek in high school.”

Jill passed out pencils and papers. “I was not a geek,” she said. “Do you want to do this or not?”

“Go ahead, Jill,” said Damon, smiling. “Dreams. Cool. Trina’s a geek too, she just doesn’t want you to know.”

“Oh, shut up, Damon.” Trina rolled her foot into his lap. No sex was allowed at Ocean House, guests would be expelled. Damon circled her ankle quickly and gave it a squeeze. Trina pulled it out, and relaxed.

“Any crayons?” George asked. No one liked him. He smiled too much and made jokes about cyberspace that were either stupid or confusing. Jill pulled a 64 crayon box out of her huge, denim purse.

Renny watched her carefully rezip her purse. Then he leaned back and drew circles on his paper. He put the eraser end of his pencil in his stomach and pushed it in until it ached. He imagined Jill, emaciated and naked, her hair in strings, trying to speak to him in German, begging him for mercy.

“Did my drawing, Jilly,” he said.

She looked it over. “You dream about bubbles?”

“Ha ha.” He looked at the other residents who were, mostly, doodling. Damon was drawing a big eye.

Renny leaned over. “Eyes the color of sky …?” he
asked. He hadn’t pegged Damon for the Resistance because he talked to Trina, the black girl, so much, but you never knew.

“You a poet?” Damon said, turning around to face Renny. “I never knew we had such a wonderful poet among us.” Renny leaned back. No one here but him. He filled in the circles with black crayon.

“I dream about the insides of olives,” he told Jill. “I dream about big black holes.”

One mother sent a photograph to Renny’s P.O. box. The baby was a girl, half black, dark, dark eyes and a serious face. Her arms reached toward the camera, wanting to play with the lens. “Nicole Shaw,” it read on the back, “ten months old.” Renny took the picture to the park with him and stared at his niece for an hour. He could feel her, how heavy she would be in his arms, how she would fall asleep and curl her head into his chest, enamored by the unfamiliar arms of a boy. Are you my daddy? she would ask. He looked into her eyes, and he could see in them, already, already, that death of loneliness, covering her like a thin gauze, impossible to remove. He picked up a twig and scraped at her face. The colors eased off, thin white stripes crossing through her tiny body. He erased Nicole and her arms and her eyes until she was just scratches on a piece of film.

•   •   •

Matthew broke up with Jill because she wouldn’t go on the pill. She said she’d go on the pill only if he would move in with her, and he looked at her like she was crazy, and said he hated condoms, they had to have a change. I get bladder infections, she told him, I can’t use a diaphragm. Let’s wait a little while, and maybe I will go on the pill, if it seems like we’re more serious. I’m not serious, he told her, I don’t want a real relationship now. Maybe you do, but you’re scared, she said. Maybe I’m not, he said back. I think we want different things. I have to go to work, she said. In a half hour. Go early, he said, maybe there’s traffic.

“We’re going to do trust exercises today,” Jill stated.

“Fabulous,” said Trina, glaring at Damon.

Jill cleared her throat and continued. “One of you is blindfolded, and the other leads the first person around the house and the backyard, being gentle and trustworthy, and then you switch. It’s scary because you’re used to using your eyes so much, but it’s a nice way to learn about trusting each other. Okay, pick partners.”

Trina and Damon were an obvious pair. The two cocaine addicts who giggled a lot and were pretty nice to Renny grabbed hands. George, the outcast, looked toward Renny who looked away, realizing there was an odd number; George was paired with Lana, the very quiet, beautiful one who moved in slow motion like she was underwater and never told anyone why she was there.

“Did your math wrong, Jilly,” Renny said, kicking out his boots and running his palm over the smooth splinters of hair poking out of his skull.

“No, you’ll be my partner, Renny,” Jill said. He blanched.

“I don’t want to do it,” he said.

“It’s tonight’s activity,” Jill said. Her eyes were tired from crying about Matthew. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

“You go. Get blindfolded,” Renny said. She selected a blue bandanna from the stack. “Do you trust me, Jilly?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, tying the cloth at the back of her head and letting the triangles fall over most of her face. She stood directly in the middle of the room, arms straight down her sides. “Please don’t call me Jilly, Renny. Lead me around. I trust you.”

Her mother had taken her to lunch that day. Jill hadn’t wanted to mention the breakup with Matthew.

“I forget, honey, is he cute?” her mother asked, bright eyes boring into her daughter. Jill had never brought Matthew home to be scrutinized.

“He’s not blond,” Jill said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said, “I’m sure he’s a very nice boy. His parents come from where, again?”

“I don’t know.” Jill wished she could lay her cheek down
on her plate and just rest there with the cold porcelain. “Whatever. It’s not serious.” Her voice was fading.

“But do you want it to be?” Mrs. Cohen asked, a piece of French bread stilled in her hand.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it, whether or not I want it to be. It’s not.”

“Well, it could always become serious, right?” She scooped up some white butter with her knife and spread it on the bread. “Does he talk about commitment?”

“We broke up yesterday, Mother,” Jill said finally. “It’s not an issue. We’re broken up. Stop asking questions.”

Jill’s mother took a bite out of the bread and chewed for a moment. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and smiled.

After he got the photo in the P.O. box, Renny painted the inside of his closet door with white paint. He painted slowly up, then down, until the numbers had vanished, and the paint would never flake away. He went into the bathroom and tried to throw up, but he couldn’t. Grabbing the leftover paint, he walked down to the train station. There was an empty cave where his older brother used to fuck girls, or smoke pot, or whatever he did before he left for the army. Renny painted seventeen swastikas, one for each year of his life, all over the cave and then curled up underneath them and went to sleep. The swastikas looked like spider boomerangs that he could fling out into the world. They would clear a path, and then come back, to guide him to safety.

•   •   •

Renny led Jill through the kitchen.

“Counter’s on your left, fridge on your right,” he said.

“Thanks.” She walked up the stairs and down the stairs and through the back door into the yard.

“So do you like it here, Renny?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “Step up. Just walk straight here.” They reached the cliffs overlooking the beach, across the street from Ocean House. He could see the distant figures of the other residents, their tentative arms. He heard Trina laugh.

“Are we going too far?” Jill asked.

“We’ll switch soon.”

He stopped her at the edge of a cliff. The ground beneath them crumbled down for thirty feet, and then led into the sand, and then the water.

“We’re at the edge of a cliff, Jill,” Renny said, standing behind her, his hands cupping her shoulders.

“I’m trying to trust you here, Renny,” she said. The wind blew her T-shirt to her skin. She watched the strange colors underneath her blindfold, and pictured Matthew’s back growing smaller and smaller and how the world seemed to close in on her then.

“I hated what you did to my swastika,” Renny said.

“Well I couldn’t just leave it there,” she said back. The palms of his hands were on her upper arms, warm. “I hate swastikas.”

“See, Jill,” Renny said, “it’s eyes the color of sky, not of earth, that’s what it’s about, see, that’s what we say. Eyes the color of sky, not of earth.” He stared at her hair; it was dark and long and felt soft where it touched his hands.

“But Renny,” she said, “your eyes are brown.”

He gripped her shoulders. He wondered if by the time the two weeks were up, and he returned home, Jordan would be gone.

Jill pictured the wedding again. Except now the priest was nowhere to be found, the groom was nowhere to be found, and it was just herself and the rabbi. His arm was tan and thick with black hair. See our skin, the rabbi was telling her, this skin was made for the desert.

“It’s a long way down,” Renny said.

She imagined scratching at the skin on the rabbi’s arm, scratching at her own arm, scratching them down, until underneath the thin layers of flesh she found out just what exactly they were made of.

“Are you scared?” Renny held her shoulders tightly.

“Should I be?”

Renny didn’t answer. Jill shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “a little.”

He put his arms around her chest, and brought her closer to him. One thumb very gently brushed against the side of her nipple, standing up from the chill. She was quiet.

“Is that okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. She breathed out, and closed her eyes
beneath the blindfold. Her skin was rising. I am made out of dirt, she thought.

“Do you want to switch?” Renny asked quietly. His hand was light against her breast.

I am made out of gold.

“No,” she said, “do you?”

“No.” He hugged her in closer and listened to the water rush at them from far away.

1. Dinnertime

I sit across the table from my husband. It is dinnertime. I made steak and green beans and homestyle potatoes and even clipped two red roses from the bush in the backyard; they stand in a vase between us which is clear so I can watch the stems drift in the water as he speaks.

He puts his elbows on the table. He opens his mouth while he chews. He gesticulates with his fork, prongs out.

Me, I nod and nod. He tells me all about work. The memos are misspelled, he tells me. That new secretary can barely speak. I listen and chew with my mouth closed. The potato, no longer hot, breaks under my teeth, melts across my tongue, my upper lip seals to my bottom lip, and everything is private inside my mouth—loud and powerful and mine. A whole world of noise going on in there that he can’t even
hear. Reaching forward, he spears a big piece of potato with his fork. He lifts it up, takes it in, bites down. I watch the food disappearing in his mouth and it’s my food and I bought it and I made it and I have to will my hands to keep still because I think I want to rescue it. I want to rescue my food, thrust an arm across the tablecloth, spill the drifting roses, dodge his molars, avoid his tongue, and seize it back, bring it all out, drag it down into the dish, until there is just a mush of alive potato between us, his stomach empty, my mouth still closed.

2.

Inside the pill factory, the muttering worker was switching things around.

“I’ll put the yellow pills in here,” he said to himself, mutter mutter, “and the white ones in here.” He took the bottles to the child-sealing machine and went home.

Two weeks later, outside in the world, people with prescriptions fell down dead. The muttering worker read about it in the paper, felt a surge of importance, and decided it was time to move on. He called the pill factory office and told them he quit. They asked why. He said allergies. They said: Allergies to what? And he said, Allergies to the telephone and hung up.

This was the fourth job he’d grown tired of in a month. Two weeks before he’d gotten a gig teaching English to immigrants. He’d taught them the wrong things. He’d said:
pussy means woman and asshole means friend. During the week, one female student got propositioned. Two men were beaten up. They stomped into their classroom, bruised and confused, but their misleading muttering teacher was long gone—already shaking the hand of the pill factory boss, in fact, his eyes flicking with interest on the vats of colored ovals and the power hidden beneath their shells.

But now it was time to change again. The muttering man put on a tie and looked at himself in the mirror. This always made him spit. He projected it out, pleh, littering his face. The muttering man had been an ugly child. He had been an ugly teenager. Now he was an ugly adult. He found this pattern very annoying.

This time, he applied for a secretarial job. Decided he needed to do something calm and quiet for a while, like memos. Here he met his match: loud man.

Loud man wore a necklace, talked very loud and was very honest. He looked everyone square in the eye and said, Let me tell you what I honestly think and then did just that.

Muttering man hated him for several reasons, one being that loud man was his boss, another being that loud man was loud and the third and final and most awful being that loud man was good-looking.
Really
good-looking.