Category: Fiction

She says, everything happens somewhere. Directs those eyes like lighthouse beams someplace west. Doesn’t find what she needs. Looks at her feet. What she is out here: alone. It’s not so bad.

When he landed he was only sixteen and piloting a light craft. One wing bent earthward and the old man slumping. Alone among planes of sand. Goggles to keep out the glare, met no one for hours by his watch. In three o’clock radiance he rested under a shelf of rock.

Finally, the watch full of sand. Moon rising on the white edge of dunes. He waited and walked in nighttime. Sliced the fleshy plants. Sap like meat.

There was a cord around his waist pulling him north, polish to keep his goggles black and clear, no one asking him who or what, or where the old man left his bones for animals to pick.
Like this, he walked out of the desert.

For the longest time it was a speck on the horizon, a cliché she would have lied and said she dreamt if anyone asked. No one was there to ask. One day it was a larger speck and then all of a sudden it was a boy her size. She sat under the azalea to wait, watched his knees pass by, stop a ways down the road. He could smell her where she hadn’t washed, she thought. Both of them settled in to wait a while.

She hated to give away the secret: the boy had no eyes, only a pair of smokeblack glasses. His face was a dialect of stars reflecting. What if dust rose up? Out would come the cloth. The miniature bottle of polishing fluid. He walked like a ragtime piano. The little strings she wrapped around her fingers pulled toward him.

In between times she consoles herself with a battered Oxford English. The smell of leather, something like shaving cream she imagines. When she picks up the book she is touching something she’s waited for. The pages sigh, or she does. Inside the dictionary everything is always the same as it ever was: a television, phonograph, or radio cabinet that stands on the floor; a desk-like structure containing the keyboards, pedals, etc. of an organ; the control unit, oh, she thinks, the brain.

It’s true her leg was missing. Sometimes when the uncle was awash in spirits he’d lead her out into barbed wilderness and wonder with her which direction it had gone. The new leg creaking. It had been a doll’s leg, porcelain as a bathtub. Sometimes you just can’t trust your own body not to run off, she thinks.

The boy has never seen it. Or anything. But he imagines the flexing muscles of the rabbit move like the ocean and in any case its smell is also salt. Under his insistent hand the rabbitbody moves uncomfortable. But it is so small. Part wants to open the sternum, feel the muscled valves pump and spray. That decision is permanent so he just waits, feels the animal know his danger, feels the heart-motor run: fast, faster. Smells the wet air.

At dinnertime the uncle brings a jar of olives out of the sack to put in the cupboard to take out for dinner when the aunt would come from the store to eat and the uncle’s hand would stop scrabbling. Olives with pimento, small red pepper the ninety-nine-cent jar. The cheap uncle. Doll’s-leg cringes away from strap.

Chicken bone, kid glove, clock. Seven mason jars full of dust, another full of soot. Glass door of the drugstore. Crack down the street’s center line. Yesterday’s apple blossoms pressed flat as a kiss between pages of a leather-covered book. Yellow brick limestone slate roof thatch roof pavestone skipstone beggarman thief.

The uncle likes the smell of the ocean parts. Where he was in the army was full of ocean and the smell of ocean. He presses his nose to them. At night she puts them in their proper places. The uncle likes things out and messy. If they’re put away just right he might not find them next time.

But sometimes the boy is there in the dark pretending to be a branch that moves air syrupslow out her window. The new leg asleep in its cradle next to her bed dreaming peaceful dreams—the branch or the boy scratches the pane and she lies still as last night’s pan fish. If her sash is up he’ll whistle—low—and make her look, give away her wakefulness, and then: can I know your name? in his brokenbottle voice. She whispers: ——

The azalea blooms. Some of its branches break. Sometimes the light in the house above the dining table tosses color onto the road. Sometimes he can hear the aunt laughing to the uncle. Sometimes he looks up into the trees. Feels her eyelashes close featherquick on cheek. Counts her blinks by the hour.

The bicycle in the garage has one flat tire and no brakes but it’s cheerfully red. Basket waving tatters of a checkered bow. Left handlebar: rubber bulb of a horn shreds and peels. Over breakfast she tells the aunt she’ll take hot lunch that day. Tells schoolteacher she’s walking home, noonhour. Sits in the motey slant of windowshine, polishes that worn-out chrome as if there’s no—tomorrow not even a thought.

Schoolteacher commands politeness, lifts it up on a platter of gold stars. Manners count. Rows of stars count. She counts them out loud for the class. Her glasses chain jingles as she moves, its fifty-four links glinting lively into the dark puff of hair. She counts on their manners, arm fat jiggling as the 14-carat tinkles above. Never counted on the two of them in next-door desks, passing notes on the rachis of a roseleaf. Rows, not roses, schoolteacher expounds. She doesn’t know how many stars they have, anyway: so many they can’t be counted in numbers smaller than ∞.

Aren’t the notes a promise. Don’t they say I’ll build you a house, with the vines on it you like. A hexagonal window. Little wires throwing sparks, a switch and a bare bulb, a built-in table, Murphy bed, two goosedown pillows, redchecked cloth, a pitcher and bowl for serving, three silver spoons and matching forks, an old knife and slab. Matching plates with apples painted on. A little garden down below. Promises growing up through the foundation. Linen sheets and a rope to hang you with.

Cusp of winter, she stands on a frozen lake and watches the world dilute. She was going crazy in the little room, the slabbody of the uncle in every corner like saltpork. White and unappetizing. The cold months hang over her head, a string of dried fish, and her body begins the process of living without her. Hair and shakes. What she’s hungry for they haven’t stored up in that house for quite some time.

When he is breathing in the alley sometimes he can feel the tips of his fingers glow blueblack and then he knows someone is there. In the perfect building of his mind he stands guard over the town. Eyes masked, all-seeing. Keep The Girl out of villain-reach, swing her up on a magic rope, the sound of his cape. Then she passes him quiet as a ——. He hears the girl moving in his darkness, the smell of lilies-of-the-valley, her fear like a struck cat. Wants to go with her wherever she is hurrying.

He is a hard nut to crack. Next to her under schoolteacher’s rigid gaze he slips loganberries, a rusted flange into her palm. She hopes. Hides his gifts under the mattress. In the house of the uncle she tries to be invisible but the little presents make her body take shape. He can’t see her, makes her want to be seen.

Someone wonders where the uncle’s voice is. Whether it is laying cutthroat in a gutter. She would answer in the paper tongue that house taught, the voice of the uncle is handmade lace along the pillow’s edge. But this is not the uncle’s story.

What it is: open bluegrass chords on mandolin, the slow fiddle’s keening. Under the bleachers music wraps her like a shawl. Fringes touching her gooseskin. The taste of sweet tea. Shape of the window on her nightwalls, her right leg talking pretty to her left, hands clapping a double-time singsong with the red-sweater girls at school. Bird in the hand.

Walking along the curb, she notices violets beginning to poke through cracks. The shade of a police car. She remembers a matching tin one, its rubber wheels, carpet fuzz tangled in treads. When the boy comes out of the drugstore, she follows him. Alley to alley. Whether he can smell her or not he doesn’t say, anything. She gathers her memories: railroad, dogwood, a mismatched deck of playing cards; tracks him into deep shade on meadow’s edge, touches his back, watches his face change. Leaves lilacs and little dreams tossing in the wake of her sprintaway.

How many people can one girl, slight-built, weak in sports, easily distracted, plain grown pretty, love in one lifetime? What is it makes that sharpsweet first taste of soda bread, trace of wool on the tongue, and how to name what never belonged to her, never could? And who can love her? The touch of hand on skin like fine thread cotton. Once things are fed and taken care of, every saucer proper in its proper place, who is going to name the way her arm muscles ache—what for?

A lot of things come in shapes with two edges. Hatchets. For example. The aunt is fond of saying her coming to live with them is a double-edged sword. She thinks, no, more like a cross to bear. What the sense would be of a blade with just one edge she doesn’t know. You want to cut the person on the way out, just like on the way in.

After everyone is sleeping there is time to curl beneath the wood shaving bench, listen for footsteps to the basement door, the trembling jars of relish and the girl brave among scraps of flaky pine. Or to run. She holds a thin spoon between her fingers, wonders what time the last light will pop into darkness, plans route after route through the midnight house.

At six in the morning something singing is in the bracken of his mind: it is no everyday. Fingers to the delicate tray of ear, glossy spectacles. Creaking out of the house, the boy with no eyes feels his way through the blossoming-unfamiliar garden. Radish bodies, potatoes budding tiny underground, the silk of dill new to flower. Tingles his palms. Leaves a blind dust on his shirt. Touches tomato leaves, feel aphids march battleward on fingernail. All new.

And if all this exists? Girl who speaks to the wolf-boy. Boy with pads of callus thick like two years on his feet. Tonight they can steal away in a red boat blue on the inside. And the sea and the boat and the bodies rocking. If she’s never been on the water before, all right; if he doesn’t know which way is north. They’ll point toward shore.

 

Éireann Lorsung was born and raised in Minneapolis. Her poetry collection, Music for Landing Planes By, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. Lorsung received an MFA in writing and BA degrees in English and Japanese from the University of Minnesota; she has also studied at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She currently lives in Nottingham, England, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies.

 

I go over and over the day that the blue girl drowned, and still I can’t think why I didn’t help. I turn it over in my mind, that first image of her out in the lake, already blue, the girl who turned blue and stayed blue, the girl who drowned and yet still lives. Why didn’t I jump in, why didn’t I swim out to her? Why did I leave it to Irene’s poor Audrey, fifteen like my Caroline and always so nervous, the kind of girl who should never have seen such blueness up close. I should have gotten up and swam, out to the buoys where you’re not supposed to go. I was never afraid of water. I knew I wouldn’t drown, if there’s one thing I’ve known all my life it’s that I’ll never drown. But I was not the one to go.

To watch someone drown is a terrible thing. To watch her revived is even worse. To watch a girl who was already blue and who stays blue even after she breathes, this is the worst thing I can imagine. In all my years at the lake as a child, I never saw someone drown, I never saw anyone fall into a deep pocket or even cough up swallowed water. At this lake in this town I learned to swim when the water still looked like glass. I taught my own children to swim when they were babies with their faces in the water first. Don’t be afraid, I’d say, it’s only water.
I used to be one of the summer people. But no more. I stayed. People say that there are only a few of us who stayed, and I am one. I used to love this town when I was one of the summer people, but now it’s just a town like any other town, except for the blue girl, who’s made everything different, even the things I cannot name.

My parents brought me to this lake when I was a child. They came from Russia and made money in textiles. They told me, Magda, marry well, marry safe, forget happiness, there is no happiness in marriage. Their marriage had been arranged, and they played pinochle and took their children to a beach to watch them swim in a quiet lake in a quaint summer town. They said that the kind of people who could take their children away to summer in a cottage were the kind of people we should know. I remember sitting on my mother’s lap while she rubbed lemon in my hair to bring out streaks and watching the lake that looked like glass. I remember my brothers throwing stones to make ripples and how I stepped into the largest ripple just before it broke apart. If I could stay inside the ripple, I used to think, if only I could stay. Anything would be possible.

And so I found that I could stay. I met a town boy with long hair and gangly limbs and got myself pregnant out at that lake. We danced in the ripples. My parents wept. They said, this boy will bring you no kind of happiness, Magdalena, and I said, to hell with happiness, you said so yourself. Mama wept more and said, who ever said such things to you? And I hugged her and said, you did, Mama, you did.

Year after year, the town grew more dull. Maybe we were waiting for the blue girl all along, without even knowing it. The lake filled with algae, and the summer people looked more tired. The children grew. My parents died. My brothers said they had never seen our parents so happy as they had been in old age, playing pinochle and telling Russian jokes. The town boy became a man who still keeps his hair long and no longer makes me laugh. One day when the children were fighting, Greg and Caroline, Greg the boy who kept me here and the sensible Caroline who reminds me why I wanted to stay, I drove out to the lake to throw stones. They skimmed the water the way my brothers had taught me when we were summer people and embarrassed by our parents’ English. When the ripples floated out toward me, I went into the lake in my jeans and sandals and stood until the ripple broke through my body. The next day, the blue girl came from nowhere, out beyond the lake in the trees. She moved slowly, but her skin flashed. At first I alone saw her, and I thought, I will stay. Now I will have to stay.

I tell the blue girl lies.

In my bed at night when I see traces of the town boy in my man-husband, I sing, Tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you no lies. He smiles and says, you used to sing to me all the time, do you remember? I smooth back the graying hair with my fingers, an old habit, and say, no, I don’t. What did I sing?

Of course I remember. But there is such a thing as telling too much, my mother used to say. It’s better to lie.

Greg stomps in the kitchen. When I named him Gregorio and nicknamed him Greg, Mama took him in her arms and said, this boy will always be a boy, Magda, this Gregorio, this Greg the Boy. He has always been impetuous, my son, and reluctant to take direction, even at three and a half. Try to teach him to ride a tricycle, this boy knew better. But this is new, this swearing. I don’t remember my brothers talking the way he does. Mama was right about him. Greg the Boy.

He throws his sneakers on the floor and says, this blue girl, everyone wants to know how does someone get so blue? How does someone get that blue and still be alive?

This is the son who kept me here, who caught inside me became this freckled, lanky boy. Such a boy, this boy is, defying me with talk of the blue girl. He wants a rise out of me, and I won’t give in.

I say nothing to him, and he says, I’m going to go find her out there, out by the lake, a bunch of the guys and me, we’re going to go find that blue girl and see why she’s so blue.

Mama taught me well.

I say, listen, boy, this is no way to talk in my house, and you will go nowhere near that girl, not if I have a thing to say about it.

I can play his game.

He laughs and says, Ma, you are such a gas.

He fishes around in his pockets, his head slung low like it’s too heavy to carry, like he hopes his head will snap off. I know the feeling. But I am trying to bake because we’re meeting tonight, and I need to make moon pies. I had never heard of moon pies before this, before Irene said we should visit the blue girl and bake moon pies to offer her for our failure to save her. She called this morning and said, we need to go, tonight, Magda, tonight is one of those nights, and I said, don’t worry, we’ll go, all you have to do is ask.

I think of the blue girl and look over at Greg with his sloping shoulders and grabbing hands, and I say, get out of my kitchen, boy, you are failing biology.

He says, how the hell do you know?

I say, I have my ways.

I pluck marshmallows from the bag and arrange them in the pot to melt. He’s failed biology three times, this boy who kept me here, this boy who cannot understand cells when it was the splitting of cells that made me stay in this sorry town.

Zygote, I say, and whack him with my spoon.

He says, what’s that? and I say, you should know, my boy, you of all people should know, and he lumbers out of the room with his hands at his sides, his arms like puppets with the hands broken.

The marshmallows bubble in the pot. White liquid simmers and draws circles around itself. This is the best part, the stirring as the bubbles rise up and then pop. I move my spoon around and around, stabbing at bubbles with the wooden handle. This is where I spoon in the lies. I imagine each circling bubble opening up and taking them in, one lie at a time.

Little white lies, tiny bubbles, my life in a pot.

Tiny bubbles, I start to sing.

Caroline shuffles into the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in barrettes, very unflattering with the zigzag part all the girls are wearing now. When she came down the stairs this morning, she leaned down to show me her scalp and the butterfly clasps that held the hair back from her forehead, which is much too large for her smallish face, and she asked me how I liked her hair. I said, very much.

Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I don’t know the rest of the words.
She leans against the sink with her arms crossed over her chest. The butterflies look t
rapped.

Mama, you look so happy when you make those little pies, she says.
I turn to her and toss a marshmallow to her from the bag. She’s getting thick about the waist, the Russian blood coming out in her with her heavy hands and squat legs. If only Mama had lived to see this.

I say, who said anything about making pies?

The marshmallow disappears inside her mouth. I throw another and another to make her laugh. Anything to keep her from my pies.

Greg’s failing biology again, she says.

The whiteness thickens. I stir and stir. The cakes are still in the oven, not quite ready for their sticky filling.

I know, I say. I have my ways, you kids should know, I have my ways.
Under the cabinet I find my oven mitts, a pair with faded sunflowers Mama bought me when I first got married. She said, to bake bread for that blond boy husband, but I’ve never baked bread for him, not a day in my life. Moon pies are all I can manage.

The cakes are perfectly round. I’ve never seen cakes so round. I let out a little whoop inside myself so Caroline doesn’t hear. She can’t have a mother whooping about the kitchen, it will give her ideas. The blue girl’s mouth appears inside my mind, open, with blue skin giving way to pink tongue. Like a cat’s except without ridges.

Are those for us? Caroline asks. I’m hungry.

I am ever the disappointing mother.

No, I say, and when she looks down at her sneakers and bends to tie the laces, I say, I’m making something special for you. These are for the bake sale, too sweet, anyway, no good, they’ll rot those beautiful teeth.

This much is true. If Caroline has one beautiful thing, it is her teeth. They shine. Even as a child, her baby teeth almost glowed. At the lake the summer people would stop me as I paddled her in the water and ask, how do you get your baby’s teeth so white?

I’d say, baking soda.

They’d look at their own babies’ teeth with the milky film across them and squint their eyes at me.

A remedy from the old country, I’d say.

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool, and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English country house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.

It was like being in an episode of Masterpiece Theater. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut-glass vases.

This was before. A lifetime away from the life I live now. This was more than a decade ago, just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed.
This was the summer I told the same funny story over and over until people started calling me Billy Champagne, which was the punch line of the story.

I worked on The Street, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy bilking little old ladies in Cleveland out of their life savings, I had a conscience and it bothered me to think of those little old ladies in their little houses in front of their little TV sets with their little cats thinking they were about to strike it rich or at least be able to get maybe a bigger TV and feed the cat when in fact they were about to strike out, most of them, not all, but most, still, the money was fantastic and the roll, the flow of it was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins.

I worked in a big room that was basically like a casino; there were no windows, no clocks, nothing but the relentless flicker of financial news on dozens of TV sets. It was both timeless and relentless. It was basically like playing one-on-one basketball for ten hours a day, followed by fat stogies in the cigar room at Frank’s and big steaks and then on to clubs where we swaggered in our monogrammed Sea Island cotton shirts and $200 scarf ties from Hermès and sat in the VIP section and ran up $2,000 bar bills and took town cars home at three in the morning when we had to be back at the office at seven-thirty. We did things like write our phone numbers on girls’ tits with Mont Blanc pens, and they always called us back. Always.

You could smoke then, that’s how long ago it was.

This was life. This was everyday life, and we didn’t understand people who didn’t live like this. We were the curl of the zeitgeist and we were all young and mostly good looking and we all found time to work out like dogs, weird times like six in the morning, so we had these fantastic bodies, well, not all of us had fantastic bodies, some had the spindly hollow-eyed stares of junkies and some topped three hundred pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day; but I’m thinking about the guys who came to the house that summer, we were all in perfect shape and had the kind of women you get when you have a fantastic body and a wad of cash and the utter arrogance that comes with having the big dog on the leash.

We were the people people wrote about when they wrote about the evils of contemporary society. We made too much money. We spent too much money. We didn’t do a single thing to help the less fortunate, which included most of the people on the planet. We drank too much. We did too many drugs. We had eighteen-year-old kids with rasta braids coming to drop shit off in the middle of the day. We went to Alphabet City the minute we turned our computers off for the night. We felt not one ounce of remorse. We only felt pity for the rest of the gray masses. All of these things were true. But, man, did we have fun. It was like a giant testosterone flambé.

Bonuses were a big thing. Bonuses were given out in yards, a yard being a million dollars. People would say, sucking on a big fat Cubano, that they got a yard or a yard and a half. Everybody lied, of course, but everybody got a lot and it was a big deal.

I wasn’t the brightest nickel in the bag, but I had the best education, and I was as aggressive as a pit bull, I could trade shit for silk, and so I was good for half a yard. I was thirty-one.

After I paid off the taxes and my enormous bills—I owed Bergdorf’s $12,000, which was basically three suits, two cashmere sweaters and a bottle of Aqua di Parma, the same cologne Cary Grant wore—I still had quite a pile, and I decided to get my own house in the Hamptons. Not just any house, the house.

I had shared before. Little bungalows on Gin Lane. I had gone through the ritual of being a houseguest—my mother once said when you’re a houseguest, don’t ring the doorbell with anything but your elbow, so I took cases of champagne and new badminton sets from Hammacher Schlemmer—so I knew what I wanted was a palace of my own, where I could invite people every weekend, and have them bring me lavish and largely unusable stuff.

I looked at six houses. I took the sixth one. It was chintzed and striped and leopard printed, stuff that would charm women, and it had a grand piano and a deck from which you could smell the sea, and the pool and the garden and service for thirty. It was English aristocracy without the dog shit and the cigarette burns in the upholstery.

Someone witty once said to me that living in a castle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Darling,” she said, “you still have to wash your hair in the bathtub.”

I had never been in an English country house. I thought this was the real thing. I took it immediately. It cost $96,000, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I wrote a check. The house came with a maid, so the owners could feel safe about their fabulous stuff, and she cost another $800 a week which I paid by check, and I leased a car for the summer, a deeply impressive convertible Mercedes, midnight black, with every accoutrement you could wish for and the smell of brand-new leather and a top which slid back with the touch of a button, slid back as silently as a snake through the grass. This was a very nice car. I gave them my platinum card.

I bought sheets in the city for every bedroom, from Frette, since the sheets that were there were the kind of clever pastiche designed to make you think maybe Kmart was a good idea after all. My guests would sleep in 600 thread count cotton, white with scalloped borders, so the cool night air could pass over their bodies like a lover’s kiss.

I still have the sheets. Quality lasts.

I found a huge Moroccan tent in the city and bought it for $25,000 and had it put up on the lawn and filled it with benches and silk pillows and those low kind of Moroccan tables and hung with chandeliers so it was like being in a fantasy seraglio, all about sex. It was hot as hell in there, like being at a rinky-dink circus on a July afternoon in Reno, but it was beautifully embroidered and dotted with thousands of tiny little mirrors and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

From the second story of the house, you looked down at the roof of it, or whatever tents have, and it was like looking down at the stars, with all the mirrors twinkling, and the candles glowing softly through the canvas.

The first weekend, I invited George who was hysterical, and Frank, who was enormous, 6’4”, just to show I wasn’t filled with self-doubt, and Fanelli and Teddy. I took two days off from work to stock the house, bread and desserts from the Barefoot Contessa, $30-a-pound lobster salad from Loaves and Fishes, and all kinds of salads and hors d’oeuvres and candy and cakes from all over and vegetables from the Green Thumb. And liquor, Jesus. Everything you could imagine. I even stopped by the road and bought tall flowers to go in all those vases, and little bunches in every room, and when I was done the whole thing looked like an at-home Vogue shoot showing how some English heiress lived when she was tired of town and longed for the simple life.

<p
>Friday night, they all showed up, with the girls, and I picked up my girl Susanne from the Jitney, and we were a household. The girls, frankly, were the least of it. Everybody assumed they would be beautiful and pliable and enviable and basically disposable. So all summer the house was the five guys and whatever the cat dragged in.

And the presents. Like Christmas all over again. George brought a case of 1986 Romanée-Conti Montrachet, God knows where he found it, and Frank brought a picnic hamper from Bergdorf’s with real china plates and Fanelli, who was a thug, brought a Z of really good coke, and Teddy brought ten white beach towels with my initials on them, every monogram a different color.

We drank rum drinks that came out of a blender. Frank claimed he’d never seen a blender before and Teddy said he’d never tasted rum. His mother told him it was the devil’s drink and taught him never to touch it. He got over that pretty fast, and Frank became a whizmaster at making blended drinks because he was mechanically inclined, he said.

The household was perfect. It was a complete universe, all by itself. We ate butterflied leg of lamb on the Weber super grill, and we drank rum and Montrachet until we were silly and did many, many lines of fine white cocaine, but only after we’d eaten the lamb with this ninety-dollar-a-bottle Burgundy I had laid in and we smoked Cuban cigars until the whole angst of the week had worn away and we went to bed at two in the morning to sleep with these beautiful girls and the sex was not quiet and every human sensuality was redolent in the quiet night air.

The next morning, everybody was fresh as a daisy. Juices were poured, omelets got made and eaten out on the sunporch, and then Bloody Marys got made and drunk out by the pool, and then the guys went off to play tennis. We knew this one guy, a yard and a half at least, who had hired a tennis pro for the summer to come every Saturday afternoon, so we got to going over there, knocking balls around while their women looked on and read novels, us quick-footed in our three-hundred-dollar-Prada tennis shorts and our raggedy old T-shirts from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Florida, and places like that, just to show we weren’t fashion pussies.

We were the kind of people who got their pictures in Hamptons magazine. We were the kind of people who dressed in Nantucket red linen trousers to go to the Hamptons Classic Horse Show. We could get into Nick and Tony’s on thirty minutes’ notice. That kind of people.
The second weekend, we really found the perfect thing to round out the house. We found a pet.

Her name was Giulia de Bosset. I found her at a party.

She came up to me at the bar while I was getting more drinks for everybody and she looked straight at me and said, “I know you.” As though we were in the middle of some conversation already.

“I’m sorry. I don’t…what?”

“I know you. I met you when you were still at Hopkins. I was just a little girl.”

It turned out she was the baby sister of the college roommate of this extremely thin girl I used to date, and so we rehashed old times, and I asked her where she was staying and she said she was staying at the God-forsaken Maidstone Club, of all places, with all those old farts, so I told her to come stay with us, where at least she could get some peace and quiet without somebody whacking golf balls all over the places.

Things were different then. We spit at golf.

So she came. We picked up her things at two in the morning, and she came and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen which she said was just fine with her, anywhere but that mausoleum.

She was a waif. She was like Audrey Hepburn, not that I knew who Audrey Hepburn was at the time. That was just one piece of information that hadn’t been downloaded yet.

Later, I kept hearing her name, especially when she died, so I went and rented all these old movies and boy, she was something and boy, was she ever like Giulia de Bosset. I bet neither one of them ever went to a dance where they had to get their hands stamped if they wanted to get back in.

Giulia was naïve and quiet and had chopped-off hair and lived in the East Village where nobody lived in those days, and she would tell funny stories about finding guys shooting up on her stairs, and she talked about getting mugged by those same guys and she obviously had money and we were all intrigued and we just adored her and so we asked her back. And she came.

“I’m home!” Lydia cries out.

“Dov’è la biblioteca?” says Lyle. He’s at the stove, his back to her, tossing something into a pot. His voice is steady, reassuring, as seductive as the all-night jazz radio host who inhabits the parallel universe that of late has revealed itself to Lydia—a world populated with graveyard shift workers, or people like her, who have lost the innate ability to sleep.

“Dov’è la biblioteca?” he repeats, and this time Lydia sees the wires dangling from her husband’s ears, as if he were plugged into himself. Lyle, the multi-tasker, is practicing Italian while he cooks. Lydia is supposed to practice, too, but she resents the cheerful prattling of Flavia and her boyfriend, Gianni, who hold tedious conversations with Florentine waiters, museum guards and shop clerks. Now one of them appears to be in search of a library.

Lydia places a bag of Chinese takeout on the counter, before swooping in to hug Lyle. She comes up from behind, burrowing her face into his wooly sweater, which smells faintly of onion and soap. He sets down a wooden spoon, plucks the mini-speakers from his ears letting them drape around his neck, then turns to greet her. “Buon giorno, signora!” He smiles and pecks her cheek. “Or is it sera?”

Lyle, a high school English teacher, is one of the last sticklers for syntax and grammar. He teaches his students to parse sentences; he corrects their spelling, though the current orthodoxy dictates that such nit-picking stifles creativity. Lydia has tried assuring him that it will not matter if he wishes people a good evening before the appointed hour. What she hasn’t said is that she may not go, that she’s not ready, as he put it when he surprised her with the tickets to Rome, to “move on.”

“What’s in the pot?” she asks, her voice too bright. She’s banking reserves of goodwill, before confessing that she’s already seen to dinner, that on her way home from seeing Dr. Becker she stopped at Wing Yee’s.

“Chili,” he says, and as if to dispel any doubt, tosses some minced jalapeño into the cast iron pot.

“Smells good,” she lies. “Who’s the author?” Lydia doesn’t feel up to playing this game, but she’s still hoping to atone for the dinner mix-up. Every school year, Lyle takes on a new project, and this year has been no exception. What started as a joke, after he’d read an essay, “How to Cook a Wolf,” turned into his Moveable Feast project. Lyle will lure his students into the world of books through the pairing of readings with recipes. So far, he has prepared Mrs. Cratchit’s holiday pudding, and a vegetable noodle soup suggested by a passage in Middlemarch that details the annoying manner in which Mr. Casaubon scrapes his bowl with a spoon.

The other day, Lyle showed Lydia a recipe for Jim Harrison’s mesquite-roasted doves, which began: Find some wild doves. Shoot them. When they finally stopped laughing, the couple stood frozen, embarrassed by their mirth, which had seized them without warning. What to do with such unexpected—yes, unwelcome—pleasure? Lydia had been about to apologize, when Lyle pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, delivering them both from the discomfiting spell.

“Simon Ortiz,” Lyle replies, holding the spoon to Lydia’s mouth. She recoils, then with a rueful glance toward the Chinese takeout, accepts his offering, though she has little enthusiasm for food. It’s all the same to her, which is the reason she couldn’t understand why Lyle had stormed out of the house last week when she snatched the marmalade from his hand. After setting the jar back on the windowsill safely beside the others, she retrieved some strawberry preserves, but by the time she set it on the table Lyle had left the room, and soon she heard the front door click shut.

He’d issued his ultimatum later, after he returned home, sweat-drenched from a run. “It’s me or the jars, Lydia.” He paced the floor as he spoke, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, as if he were measuring the length of the room with his feet. He had on orange running shoes, the color of popsicles. She’d been about to ask if they were new, when he said, “A year is enough.”

When she asked if he’d leave because of some jam jars, he said, “You know it’s not that.”

She remembers looking up from her husband’s shoes to the jars perched on the sill above the sink, like amber frozen in time. “He’s right, Lydia,” they seemed to say. “A year is enough.”

Whether to the jars or to Lyle—she still can’t be sure—she heard herself say, “The man in the truck would understand.”

Lyle stopped pacing. “What man?”

Then she told him about the man who drives around with a coffin in the back of his pickup. When Lyle looked even more puzzled, she said, “His son was killed while on patrol in Najaf?” Only she spoke in that annoying interrogative lilt, that verbal tic that afflicts so many young people, turning every declarative sentence into a question. It was as if she couldn’t bring herself to assert what she knew was true.

She told Lyle that the coffin holds a few of the son’s belongings: a soccer ball, a pair of his favorite shoes, his boots, uniform, dog tags. The side panels of the father’s truck are plastered with poster-sized photos: the son in uniform; the son blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, a paper hat askew atop a mop of dark curls. “He was in all the papers. On the radio.” Again, that annoying, questioning lilt.

She didn’t say that she’d picked up the phone to tell the man that when her husband isn’t home she sets Sophie’s picture on the windowsill beside the jars. But another caller came on the air and accused the man of dishonoring his son’s memory, so she hung up and turned the radio off.

When Lydia said, “Surely, you’ve heard of him,” Lyle shrugged and shook his head and she hated him for his indifference. She couldn’t get the man’s voice out of her head. “My son’s off to Iraq. And there I was at home learning that there’s no weapons of mass destruction.” He was soft-spoken, his speech lightly accented, the way she imagined Gianni might sound if he spoke English. “I had two TVs going all day long, and the radio, trying to get news, to figure out what is happening over there. I see sandstorms, the Tigris River, tanks. I see the Marines move through dark alleyways. They kick in doors. All the time, I am afraid for my son, but I am helpless.”

Now Lyle is pressing a spoonful of the literary chili to Lydia’s mouth. Despite everything, he still needs her approval. She opens wide, feigning delight at his offering. “Mmm. Do I detect a hint of cinnamon?”
“Nice touch, isn’t it?” He beams.

She offers to set the table, and when he says the chili won’t be done for at least another hour, she says, again too brightly, “That’s alright. We can have it tomorrow.” With a nod toward the paper bag, she confesses that she’s already seen to dinner.

He turns sharply and the glasses he has started to wear for reading slip, so it appears that he’s peering down his nose at her. She braces for a fight, but his voice is as soothing as her favorite radio host when he says, “I told you I was cooking.” And she can tell by the slope of his shoulders, by the way his six-foot frame has collapsed in on itself, that he is too tired to argue.

Lyle returns to the chili and while Lydia sets out two dinner plates, she considers what, if anything, she can say to atone for the mix up. The truth is, she passed by Wing Yee’s on her way home from Dr. Becker’s, and bringing dinner in had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Lydia, who has no desire to share her innermost thoughts with a stranger, is seeing Dr. Becker at Lyle’s insistence. This afternoon, she told Dr. Becker: “Lyle wants the marmalade gone. That’s why I’m here.” She didn’t tell her how on sunny days the light filters through the jars, creating an incandescent glow. And she could never say, as the man in the truck did: “My world tumbled, and I felt my heart go down to my feet and rush back up through my throat.” She couldn’t even say, “Save me.” Instead, she described Lyle pacing while issuing his ultimatum.

Sophie had found the marmalade recipe in a dog-eared Sunset in the orthodontist’s waiting room. It was sandwiched between recipes for persimmon pudding and fig pie—desserts conceived for people with backyard trees bearing bumper crops. Their own yard, in Minneapolis, in a growing zone unable to sustain such exotics, yields nothing more than acorns. Lydia remembers thinking they’d have to buy the oranges, as well as the kettle and jars and tongs. Turning to Sophie, she’d said, “It’s a lot of work.” But when Sophie flashed that tinsel grin and said, “It will be fun,” Lydia believed her. Besides, once she got hold of an idea, there was no stopping Sophie. Nothing. Nobody. Not Lydia. Not Lyle. Not Lydia’s mother, who threatened a hunger strike if Sophie didn’t come to her senses. But that came later.

So they made marmalade as if they had their very own orange tree out back, instead of an old oak that shed prodigious amounts of inedible nuts. They danced to their favorite Paul Simon recording, while they scrubbed and chopped, boiled and stirred.

Now Lyle, who has been chopping green pepper, looks up from the cutting board, and in a voice suddenly tight with anger, accuses her of forgetting. “How could you?”

“I just did,” she says. Hoping to leave it at that she starts fussing with the alignment of the tarnished forks and spoons. Her mother had given the set to her after selling the house. Lydia had protested that it was too much, too soon. “Besides, what will I do with silver?” When Ida replied, “Some day you’ll pass it on to Sophie,” Lydia relaxed. The gift felt like insurance, a guarantee that everything happens in turn. Some day it would be Sophie’s. Now the dulled utensils feel like a rebuke, a symbol of Lydia’s failure to oversee and protect the natural order of things.

She picks up one of the dulled spoons, rubs it with the hem of her silk blouse, holds it up for inspection. Though the job clearly requires more than elbow grease, she continues buffing, as if she can erase the dull miasma, which, like acid rain or nuclear fallout, coats everything around her.

After returning the spoon to the right of a knife, she looks over at Lyle, who’s gone back to his chili. Now would be the time to tell him about the tree, to cut through the anger and resentment that chokes the room. Lydia has always derived immense satisfaction from the sort of quotidian exchanges that pertain to the upkeep of a home, that signify a shared existence—reminders about the plumbing, car repair, dry cleaning. She supposes that over time, such minutiae, and particularly the need to discuss it, might wear a couple down, but she has always found the exchange of such ordinary—some might say mind-numbing—detail, to be extraordinarily intimate. Who else besides Lyle needs to know, or for that matter, even cares, that the car needs a new muffler, or the leak in the living room ceiling is coming from the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, or the shirts won’t be ready until Friday?

Yet as soon as she says, “The tree is coming down first thing tomorrow morning,” she senses her blunder. It can only remind Lyle that she’d cancelled the previous appointment, which had taken six weeks to procure, as well as the one before that.

But he merely nods, which Lydia reads as permission to press on. “What’s ‘first thing?’” she says, straining for a light-hearted tone. “Is it seven o’clock? Or eight!” She pauses. “Yes. Perhaps eight o’clock is second thing.”

Once, this might have gotten a rise out of Lyle-the-Stickler, but now, as he tosses diced pepper into the pot, he accuses her of trying to change the subject. Yet his voice is eerily composed, as if he has just asked her to please pass the butter. Then he says, “I told you I was cooking dinner. How could you forget?”

 

“It seemed like a good idea.” She waits a moment, then says, “At the time, I mean. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Then she crosses the room to where she’d set the dinner, carries it to the table, flops down in front of one of the places she’d just set, unfolds the bag that Mr. Yee’s daughter had sealed with the swift, assured precision of an origami artist, pulls out a carton, picks up one of the tarnished spoons, and plunges it right into the heart of General Tso’s chicken.

“Lydia!” Lyle rushes toward her, still clutching the knife, hair falling over one eye, ear buds flapping, the Italian lesson pouring out of them. Briefly she wonders if he plans to use the knife on her, though Lyle has always been the gentlest of men.

Standing over her, he pleads with her to stop. But as she shoves the spoon into her mouth she realizes that she can’t, and then, when it’s empty she licks it clean, before plunging it back into the carton for more.

“Lydia, please! For God’s sake, stop. Please. Stop.” The very words, that he, (she, too), should have said to Sophie.

She digs in again, only this time he yanks the spoon out of her hand, sending a gob of chicken, red-hot chili peppers and congealed sauce sailing across the room, where it hits the window and oozes down the pane, landing on one of the pristine jars.

Lyle grabs a towel and starts mopping the mess that landed in Lydia’s lap, but she pushes him away and rushes to rescue the sullied jar, which nearly slips from her trembling hands as she tries to wipe it clean. If only she could speak, this would be the time to suggest that he see the shrink. Let him, the one who flew into a rage over a carton of Chinese chicken, sit in that stuffy office in an overstuffed chair, confronted by a box of man-sized tissues, cheap, leggy carnations, Dr. Reena Becker’s long, crossed legs, and her three-hundred-dollar stiletto heels. Everything about that place seems calculated to make Lydia feel small.

But she’s tired. Lyle is, too. She can see that now. Even the tan he has acquired from all that running can’t mask his pallor. She wonders if the strain in his face is a new development, or something else she’s neglected, like the tarnish, or the tree, which has been dying in stages. “Oak wilt,” the forester had said. And then, as if it were any consolation: “It’s wiped out half the trees in the city.”

Lydia resists the urge to cross the room and stroke her husband’s cheek, push his hair back. She remembers the night before the funeral, the way they’d comforted each other with their bodies. The clinging had felt so familiar that it was hard to believe that everything else in their life wasn’t also the same. It was their subsequent couplings that felt indecent, a betrayal of something, their better selves, perhaps.

She sets the jar back on the sill and says, “I’m sorry.”

That’s what she’d said to the men who stood on her front porch. They wore dress greens, their pant creases sharp as if Mr. Yee’s daughter had pressed them. The pink-cheeked man wasn’t much older than Sophie. At first Lydia wondered if he might be one of her daughter’s old boyfriends. Then he called her “ma’am,” and she wanted him to be one of those clean-cut proselytizers who sweep through the neighborhood now and then—a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness.

Through the screen door, the older man, identical to the first in nearly every way except for the color of his skin, asked to come in.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.”

She wanted to get back to the kitchen, where she’d been preparing marmalade as a surprise for Sophie, who was due home in sixteen days. It was a lot of work, as she’d predicted all those years ago, though it had never felt arduous when the two of them worked side by side. But without Sophie even Paul Simon sounded flat, so she’d turned it off. That’s when she heard the tap. It was the lightest tap on the door that she’d ever heard.

“Ma’am, we need to come in,” the young man insisted. He was fresh-faced, barely shaving.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

Then his partner asked to speak with Lyle, with “Mr. Martin.”

When Lydia said, “He isn’t home,” they offered to wait.

Lydia, who ordinarily supplies the men who work on her house with pitchers of lemonade in summer, mugs of hot coffee when it’s cold, closed the door, retreated to the kitchen and turned the recording back on to drown out the sound of the knocking. Then she wiped the cooling jars and moved them to the sill, thinking back to a time when she and Sophie had stood admiring their handiwork, pleased as if they’d just lifted delicate raku bowls from a kiln.

It was Lyle, still flush from his run, who let the men in. How could he know? He wasn’t like her, consumed by fear as she finished those jams without Sophie, fear that even gentle-sweet Paul Simon couldn’t assuage, fear set off by knowing, knowing, absolutely knowing why those men in starched greens were standing on her porch. How could Lyle, punch-drunk on endorphins, know? So he let them in.

Later, Lyle told her how she’d run to the piano for the picture of the three of them, then waved it in their faces, pointing to Sophie, who was being swung in the air by Lydia and Lyle, one moist, dimpled hand tucked inside each of theirs. “You’re wrong,” she’d shrieked. “Mistakes happen!” Hadn’t they heard of death-row prisoners? DNA? “You’ve come to the wrong house.”

Then she ran back for the picture of Sophie swinging a tennis racket, vintage Sophie with the crooked smile and the perfect teeth.

“My daughter is nineteen years old,” Lydia cried. “She was captain of the high school tennis team.” She jabbed a finger into the starched chest of one man and then the other. “Was it you?” she cried. “Did you come to campus and promise to teach her to fly? Or was it you?”

After Sophie had phoned home to announce her plans, Lydia had said: “Tell them you didn’t mean it.” Then she hung up and scrubbed the kitchen floor and ironed all the laundry, including Lyle’s boxer shorts and socks. Lyle, who had never done so before, put on a pair of old gym shoes and ran around the block three times. Lydia’s mother, Ida, called Sophie and said, “If it’s flying lessons you wanted, why didn’t you tell me?”

Then Lydia called Sophie back and reminded her of the picture on her grandmother’s living room mantel, the one taken minutes before Ida and her first husband, Harold, who was on a weekend pass, were married at City Hall. The newlyweds spent their brief honeymoon at the old Edgewater Beach Hotel, where Harold carried Ida over the threshold and into a room filled with orchids. As a child, Lydia never tired of listening to her mother tell that story, though she wished it didn’t have to end with Harold stepping on a land mine. She used to fantasize that, had he lived, Harold, King of the Romantics, would have been her father. Even after she was old enough to understand that, had he lived, she never would have been born, Lydia wanted the story to have a different ending.

Sophie was killed by an improvised explosive device. “An IED, ma’am,” said the baby-faced man.

“IED?”

“Sharp metal objects,” said his partner.

Back and forth they went.

“Remote detonators.”

“Garage-door opener.”

“Doorbell.”

“Easy to make.”

Together: “Nobody’s sure just how it went off.”

Lydia can’t shake the idea that IED is one letter off from IUD, the contraceptive device that had failed and given them Sophie. She’s never been able to share that particular thought with Lyle, who, after adjusting the burner to simmer, informs her that he’s going for a run now.

When she’s sure Lyle’s gone, Lydia retrieves the picture, the one she’s kept hidden in the pantry since the day Lyle the grammarian, the stickler for the precise turn of phrase, railed at her “fucking shrine.” When she tried explaining, when she told him about the pot-bellied Buddha and the plate of oranges and incense arranged on the floor near the cash register at Wing Yee’s, he rolled his eyes and she slipped the picture into a drawer.

Now she sets it on the sill beside the jars. There’s Sophie, in a straw hat and goofy sunglasses, laughing as Lydia and Lyle swing her off the ground. Lydia and Lyle are laughing, too. Lydia can’t recall shoving the photo in the officers’ faces, though she remembers that after they left she beat Lyle on the chest with her fists; she punched his stomach. She screamed: “You let them in!” Later, after all their friends had departed, leaving them alone with a refrigerator full of plastic-shrouded casseroles and cakes, she told Lyle, “I opened the door and when I saw the men in dress greens I knew. I knew. But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let them in, they couldn’t tell me. And then it—none of it would have happened. And then you let them in.”

Lydia is suddenly aware of voices and panics at the thought that Lyle may be right, that she really is crazy and it has come to this: auditory hallucinations. Then she sees the iPod, which he’d left on the table. She tries turning it off, gives up, and plugs the mini speakers into her ears. Flavia and Gianni are in a trattoria, where Flavia is dithering over whether to order carne or pesce. Lydia has had enough of Flavia and her unexamined life. She’s had enough of Flavia, to whom nothing untoward happens, unless you count the time her luggage was lost at the airport in Prague, where she and Gianni had gone on holiday. She doesn’t care whether Flavia orders meat or fish. She yanks the earbuds out and sets the device back on the table.

Their own dinner is in shambles. Chili à la Simon Ortiz? Or General Tso’s chicken? The chili is simmering, but she sees that the offending carton, as well as the rest of the takeout, is gone. Perhaps Lyle tossed it out when he left the house, though more likely he would have set the remains in the refrigerator. She hopes it’s the latter and is about to check when a shadow crosses the room. Looking up, she sees a squirrel, perched on the ledge, gnawing an acorn. They’ve blanketed the lawn this year, and she remembers the arborist explaining that it happens, that a dying tree can still produce acorns, even an abundant crop.

Tomorrow the tree comes down. Earlier, when she’d reminded Lyle of that, she’d wanted to thank him for his patience and understanding. Last month, when she confessed to canceling the tree cutter, she’d jokingly called it “a stay of execution.” But then she started to weep, and he said they could plant another. When she bristled at the suggestion, he admitted that a new tree wouldn’t be the same. Then she stopped whimpering and shared with him the first thing that came to mind: “We can try planting an orange tree.” Instead of replying, “You’re fucking nuts,” or more likely for Lyle, “You have gone round the bend, haven’t you?” he went for a run.

She loves that oak. It has served them well, gracing the yard with a canopy of leaves, providing shade on the sultriest of days. It provided fodder for squirrels; a blaze of fall color. Dormant, it stood silhouetted against the sky, a majestic reminder of seasons to come. Like the silver her mother had passed down, it stood as insurance against the vagaries of life, a symbol of consistency and order.

Lydia resists the notion that death is an inevitable part of that order. Sophie didn’t have to die. Not in that desert. Not in that trumped-up war. Not, she thinks, ever. No. That’s not true. The truth is: Sophie didn’t have to die now. Not in that way. Not while Lyle was running through the streets in his Day-Glo shoes and she was sorting laundry.

She taps on the window now and calls out, “Enjoy it while you can!” The squirrel drops the acorn, leaps off the sill and scurries toward the safety of the tree.

Lydia grabs Lyle’s plaid shirt off a hook near the back door and heads outside to rake the acorns. As she gathers them in piles, they resist the pull of the rake. Her arms burn from the effort; her hamstrings throb from all the bending to scoop them up. Tomorrow she will feel the effects of all this effort, but right now she feels a surge of energy, like lights that blaze before shorting out in a storm. This must be how Lyle feels when he runs—exuberantly exhausted.

As she scoops the last of the acorns into the bag, she wonders if a bumper crop portends a harsh winter—record snowfall, ice storms, extreme temperatures? At that, she turns the bag over and calls to the squirrel. But night has fallen, and if he’s still out there, she can’t tell.

She’s heading toward the house when a light goes on in the kitchen. Lyle is back from his run. Though he can’t see out in the dark, she ducks behind the tree and watches as he opens the refrigerator. Perhaps he’ll take out the Chinese, stand over the sink and eat it straight from the carton, as she’s caught him doing in the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep either. Instead, he stands with the door ajar, swigging orange juice from the carton. There was a time when she would have reminded him to close the door, drink from a glass, and he wouldn’t have objected.

He closes the door and looks around as if he’s forgotten the reason he came into the room. Under her breath she reminds him to check the chili, and he starts toward the stove, as if they hadn’t lost that eerie telepathic power that some close couples possess. He stirs the pot, brings the spoon to his mouth, but stops short, sets the spoon down and heads toward the window.

Lydia holds her breath as she sees him reaching for one of the jars. He wipes it with the hem of his T-shirt, carries it to the table where he sits at one of the places she’d set. As he taps the lid with one of the tarnished spoons, she knows she could never reach him in time to stop him. Her only recourse is to stand hiding behind a diseased tree while she spies on her husband, waiting for him to break the seal, which may be the very thing that is holding her together. The situation is beyond her control.

As Lyle wraps his hand around the lid, she feels light-headed and closes her eyes, leaning into the tree for support until the dizziness passes. By the time she opens her eyes, the lid is off and he is eating the marmalade, straight from the jar. She doesn’t falter. Even after he scrapes the jar with the spoon, she is steady on her feet. “That leaves four,” she whispers, knowing, just as she knows the tree is coming down in the morning, that at breakfast tomorrow she’ll open another jar and spread marmalade on a triangle of toast. She will give a jar to the mailman and perhaps one to the man who comes to cut down the tree, which she ducks behind again, just as Lyle looks out the window, scanning the yard, as if he knows she is out there.

“Buona sera!” she calls out. “Or is it notte?”

Though she knows he can’t hear her, he seems to shrug, as if to say that such distinctions are unimportant. Then he turns, and the last she sees of him, his hands are clasped behind his back, his head slightly bowed, as if he were taking a measure of the room.

Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

Today’s my last day off work. I took the week off for arrangements—ordering the box, funeral logistics, church reception, nodding at lawyers. Today’s my last day to get shit done around the house before going back to work, so I open the kitchen cabinet next to the dishwasher and extract all the food storage containers and pile them on the counter. I open another drawer and pull out all of the lids and pile them next to containers of various sizes from small transparent cubes to large oblong orange ones with vacuum-sealable lids for foods like brownies and nachos. Some of the containers seal in moisture while others preserve crispness.

“Where are all the goddamn lids?” my wife always yells. “I can’t find a lid to match a container.” That’s why I’m taking care of this problem.

I match lids to containers, and of 37 lids and 43 containers, I find only twelve matches of containers to lids, which makes my armpits suddenly burn like a gas grill and itch like mad. Just before I’m about to crash my fist into the refrigerator, my son Danny screams and I hear falling objects pound his closet floor upstairs.

“Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”

“Who’s Kimmy?” I say.

“Jimmy,” he says.

“I swear to God you said Kimmy.”

 

Last Friday when I got to the hospital after work, I knew Dad was dying because he had scared little-child eyes, except they weren’t white and clear like kids’ eyes. They were yellowed, almost brown, because his kidney was shutting down and shit was filling his blood, and I said, “You want the baseball game on? Santana’s pitching tonight.”

Dad mumbled through the mask that cupped his mouth and nose and pushed in and pulled out air. I couldn’t find the right TV station. Even the ICU, where terminal people went to die, had the deluxe cable package. The biggest lesson I learned from the deathbed scene: people about to die still care about what’s on TV.

“Norty tree,” Dad said, voice limp like a wrist through the incoming and outgoing air. At his house on the lake, he got the games on channel 43. The nurse came in and said, “Lift the back of his head. I’ll take this thing off so you two can talk. You’re his son?”

“Norty tree,” Dad said again, this time closing his eyes because of the effort.

I reached behind his head and lifted. The back of his neck felt like fish skin hardened by sun. Dad was a roofing contractor who had half the sun’s energy stored in his neck flesh. His skin still released heat. The nurse pulled off the mask. I let his head fall back. He panted for air.

“Santana’s pitching tonight,” I said.

“Get ice cream,” he said. “I got chocolate and vanilla. Where’s the kids?”

“They have chores tonight,” I said, lying. Bringing them to a deathbed scene was just too much work. I’d have to pay attention to Dad and watch the kids at the same time, make sure they didn’t start screwing with sensitive medical equipment. Also, my wife promised to watch some neighborhood kids because the parents were going to a church function and I’d worked sixty hours through Friday and was lucky to get off by five so I could see Dad, who’d been in the hospital since Wednesday. Long story short, I was tired and couldn’t deal with the kids.

I sat on a little metal chair in the corner off the foot of Dad’s bed. He was way up high and I could just barely see his head angling down at me, his cheek flesh scrunched up as he tried to make out my shape, and I laughed at a quick thought about the Hallmark Hall of Fame ending where a sensitive son would hold his dad’s hand and whisper, “What’s it like, Dad?” And then pause. “Dying, I mean? What it’s like?” And the dad would look his son in the eyes and say, “It just feels right, son. No more pain.”

But instead I said, as I fiddled with the remote for the TV, “You can’t get sick on me now. I have to finish that tile work behind the stove.”

“I got the glue and grout over there,” Dad said. He pointed limply at a wall of white cabinets full of medical supplies. He thought he was at home.

I didn’t hold his hand the way my sisters did when they came into the room later, one standing on each side of the bed and squeezing his leathery mitts over the bedrails. If I held his hand, he’d know he was dead.

I figured out the remote control and got the game, the Twins against Tampa Bay. I wanted a more historic rival like the White Sox or the Tigers for Dad’s last game, but we got the fucking Devil Rays. Life is bullshit, and so is death. That’s also a thing I learned.

 

Now that things have slowed—we’re done with the paperwork—I can get to projects. Before I organized the food storage containers, I’d been on the toilet reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens on how to build a backyard Japanese garden. I always read BHG, which my wife subscribes to, when I’m taking a dump. Though my next project is to wrap our two-tiered deck around the side of the house and install a recessed hot tub, I’m vacillating on putting a meditation garden there instead.

At Miriam’s insistence, Estelle scheduled her flight so they could meet at the concourse and cab into the city together. She supposes that, given their mission, there’s a likelihood one of them might back out, and really, neither should be alone as they approach the business at hand, the crime.

Estelle is the first passenger up the ramp, calf-sueded and cashmered with colorful dashes that complement the dyed trim of her coat. Up close Miriam sees the fur is real, and sighs. It’s not as if they haven’t had this conversation. Estelle is practically a spectacle next to Miriam in her wool car coat, tan slacks and tan cardigan—an ensemble that could be tossed into a dustbin, should there be any need to dispose of evidence. Similarly non-descript replacements are in her overnight bag.

The sisters bump cheeks and quickly comment that the other is looking well. They turn down the vast concourse.

For a dozen yards, Estelle watches her sister in the periphery. Miriam has faded some, Estelle thinks, is less like herself, more like a widow.

Miriam can feel the deceptively soft gaze Estelle employs. She turns and they make real eye contact. “You hardly look the part, Estelle.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you hardly look like a killer.” It comes out much louder than intended.

Estelle’s eyes swivel to the family of travelers just abreast—a couple with two beefy teens in varsity jackets with athletic patches on their sleeves that look like Oreos. She squeaks, “Well, neither do you, Miriam.”

As the family moves ahead, Estelle sees the patches are embroidered hockey pucks, and though they pass quickly out of earshot, she attempts small talk, pointing out the many shops and kiosks along the concourse. “Airports were never like this back when Roger and I were traveling. They’re like malls now, aren’t they?”

To Miriam, the airport seems identical to the one in Boston—the same Starbucks and Cinnabons situated on the same corners, so that she must concentrate to place herself in Minneapolis. As they walk, she fidgets with the bangles that had set off the metal detector at Logan and wrecked her nerves for the morning. She hesitantly tells Estelle about her run-in with security, “Do you think getting rid of these might be more prudent than risking more trouble on my return flight?”

Estelle picks up her sister’s wrist then drops it. “I’d toss them.”

Miriam sniffs. “You would.”

“You asked.”

The silver bangles are souvenirs from a trip to Mexico with Dennis, but Estelle wouldn’t know that. Rearranging them, Miriam notices a new liver spot on her wrist and frowns—they are definitely multiplying in spite of the expensive cream she’d ordered from an infomercial. The guaranteed two-week trial period has already passed twice. Suddenly ashamed for her brief flight of vanity, she shoves her hands in her pockets, deciding to keep the bangles and throw away the cream.

Estelle trawls for conversation, “Is that coat new?”

“No.” Miriam stops. “There’s nothing about me that’s new.”

“Well, you look fine, Miriam. Very nice.” The hairstyle could easily be fixed. “By the way, did you get my birthday present?”

“I did. Thank you very much.”

“Did you get the joke? The amount, I mean … a hundred for every year?”

“Of course I got it, it’s a lot of money, Estelle.”

Estelle crooks her arm through Miriam’s, “Well, my kid sister only turns seventy once!”

“I’m seventy-two. Since you started fudging your own age, you can’t keep anyone else’s straight.”

“Sheesh. Remind me to send you another two hundred, then.”

Miriam closes her eyes and shakes her head as Estelle starts humming her self-conscious hum. Kid sister. Miriam looks up at Estelle, whose skin is taut with procedures and peels, any worry lines buffed away. If Estelle worries at all it would be over the sorts of things other people only dream of worrying about. With her young face and lolli- pop voice, Estelle makes an unlikely elder to her and Penny, their in-between sister, the one they’ve come to Minnesota to see.

They will visit Penny. If it’s as bad as all that, if she’s doing that poorly, they will say their goodbyes. If things seemed stalled, and Penny really needs their help, Estelle and Miriam will fulfill the pillow pact and kill their sister.

Miriam whispers, “Maybe.”

“Pardon, Mir?”

“Nothing.” Penny could live for weeks yet. Months. Her sons seem to think so, anyway.

They move on, scanning open storefronts, making full stops to look at cleverly displayed bags of wild rice, plush loons, and novelty snacks. Estelle examines such items as if they are essentials, choosing packages of Gummy Mosquitoes and Viking bobbleheads for her grandsons, a flickering blue night-light shaped like a bug-zapper, and a pair of trout-shaped oven mitts for Francesca.
A shop in the far periphery catches Miriam’s eye. “What time is it?”

Coming from opposite coasts, each is hours removed from the other’s time zone. Estelle pulls back a fur cuff to reveal her Omega. “Only 10:15!”

Miriam is out of the novelty store and charging toward another shop—one that sells sleep- number beds. She’s never seen such a store in an airport—in the window a mattress is sliced in half to show its innards slowly expanding and contracting, as if breathing. She watches for a few huffs and heads inside to another display, a fully made bed roped off against children or anyone else naturally inclined to lie down when tired. Miriam steps around the velvet swag to sit on the duvet. A lamp glows pinkly on a nightstand—she might be in someone’s bedroom.

Estelle appears with her packages and her shoulders slump, “Oh no. Miriam, really.”

“What? I need a bed.” She lifts the price tag and makes a tiny noise. “And I have all that birthday loot burning a hole in my pocket.” As she lowers down onto the pillows, a groan escapes her. Not bad. Squeezing her lids to feign sleep, she can hear Estelle breathing. Soon enough, pacing commences next to the bed. Miriam is just beginning to drift along to the rhythm when the footfalls stop. She opens one eye to Estelle staring down at her, very near. With a twinge Miriam realizes she is in the same position poor Penny will be in an hour or so: prone, trapped, and at the mercy of sisters, those who love but are under no obligation to like.

“I’m so tired, Estelle. I had a two-hour drive to Boston and two flights.” She pauses before adding, “Both in coach.”

When Estelle sits on the edge, Miriam shifts over, believing her sister might kiss her forehead. But she only clucks, “You should have said something, Goose, I would’ve upgraded you.”

Miriam rises to her elbows, suddenly fighting tears. “I really did not sleep a wink.”

“Of course you didn’t. I only got six hours myself.”

“I might not have the energy for this, you know.”

“Miriam, but you said …”

She knew what she said. That she possessed the required detachment to do the Kevorkian thing, if it came to that.

72 Degrees
You’re wide awake at six a.m. when the sun tips its hand. You barely slept at all last night in the hot box that is your cramped third-floor apartment. There’s no air-conditioning, the windows are all propped open. You spent most the night on top of the sheets, waiting for a breeze that never came, just listening to the sounds of the city; cars whirring by on the street, college kids passing by on the sidewalk below, talking excitedly about their night at the bar. It sounded too familiar. That’s why you moved, to get out of the rut you were in. So far, it isn’t working.

You might have slept for an hour or two, long enough to have dreamt about the beach—which is odd. You’re not a beach person. You haven’t gone swimming in years. Still, the idea echoes in your head while the heat begins to build, while broad swaths of yellow light climb the cream-colored walls around you.

It’s a Saturday. You don’t have to work today and it’s going to be viciously hot again. Your friends back home would rag you to no end for even considering going to a beach by yourself. “Pathetic,” they’d say. But they’re not here, and you’re not there. Besides, there’s no one you know well enough to ask to join you.

It’s settled: You will go to the beach.

There’s a nice one within walking distance. You’ve driven past it dozens of times and walked around it once or twice, watching everyone else have fun. Today you’ll see for yourself what it’s all about.

Tell yourself it’s because you’re bored, because any more time spent in this broiling apartment might drive you mad. But deep down inside you know you’re going for the girls. Five months without a date is a long time. Four months in a new town with none of your old friends to fall back on has been a lifetime in itself. You moved, and that’s good, but now it’s time to get moving.

You roll free of the damp sheets. Your feet hit the gritty wood floor. The dry boards feel warm, not cool like you were hoping.

74 Degrees
Your second cup of coffee goes down smooth. You’re just enjoying the morning, reading the newspaper, and taking it all in. You can feel the city waking up around you and it thrills you in some vague way knowing you’re a small part of it. The light morning traffic sounds like a symphony to you. People jog by and zoom past on bicycles. There’s energy in the air, everything seems alive, possible. You never had this sense back home. The shaded downtown streets always seemed empty, the people you did walk past hardly ever looked your way.

The picnic table on the sidewalk outside the coffeehouse was empty when you got there and you have room to spread out your paper. You’re just getting to the sports page when a pretty girl steps outside with her coffee. From the corner of your eye you can see her thinking about joining you. She’s attractive, somewhere right around your age—twenty-five, you guess—give or take. She has long blonde hair and is wearing round, blue-tinted sunglasses. She looks to you like everything you’ve been missing out on your whole life.

The words to invite her to sit down are on the tip of your tongue, where they’ve always been when it comes to being anywhere near forward, but they refuse to fly. Instead you get nervous and swallow self-consciously. You study your paper for a moment, feign a look of grim concentration, and then look up at her hopefully. She returns your gaze and even gives you a friendly smile before turning around and going back inside. You smile, too, wryly, before flipping the page.

You promise yourself right then and there the next time a chance to meet a girl comes along you will go for it, because it’s better to die on the mountain than starve in the valley. Or something like that.

It’s still early. You aren’t thinking clearly yet.

76 Degrees
Instead of walking home after leaving the coffeehouse, you decide to go the grocery store to get supplies for the day. Before the heat comes down, before you change your mind and all you feel like doing is hiding out at the mall, maybe seeing a matinee by yourself. But you know that’s a dead-end street, with no chance for any interaction. No, the beach is where you should be today. You need to be out among people.

The morning air outside is already heavy, but not choking like it will be later in the day. You listen to the birds singing in the trees. Even they sound restrained. The sky above you is a stark blue and streaked with traces of high, silver clouds. It looks to you as though one more scorching day might bleach away what color remains.

Thoughts of the beach have you feeling light for the first time in weeks, happy. Your light-brown sandals flop rhythmically on the sidewalk, the sound echoing down the block.

The back streets are quiet, there’s barely any traffic at all. Nothing seems to move but you. You almost wish someone would walk past you just so you could smile at them, and perhaps even risk a “Good morning!” if they happened to make eye contact with you. Smiling, you look up at the sky. There’s no sense getting too carried away.

65 Degrees
It has to be at least ten degrees cooler inside the store. You grab a handbasket and walk over to the fruit and vegetable section. You’re in the heart of the trendy part of Minneapolis and the health-conscious hippies are out in force. You look at their tattoos and their piercings, and the way they intently study each piece of fruit, as though the fate of the world depended on them finding just the right bunch of bananas.

A pale young woman with jet-black hair cropped in a bowl cut catches your eye. You freeze and then hazard a small smile. She rolls her eyes like she expected nothing less from you. You grab a pound bag of red grapes and move on.

It amuses you to think that here you’re the strange one. You, with your scrawny build, dark tousled hair and nondescript, clean-shaven face. You and your white T-shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. It would have bothered you once, not so long ago, the way she looked at you. It would have made you feel small and insecure.

Now it just makes you laugh.

Chucho and I were searching for golf balls in the protected wetland on the twelfth hole when my feet found a body. There were already several hundred golf balls sitting on the edge of the marsh ready to be cleaned and sold and I’d dug my feet into the mud expecting to feel the cool dimpled cover of another one, but instead, I felt a face.

Buried in the mud, a golf ball feels like a rock and you curl your foot like a hawk’s claw and yank it out. Over the course of the summer, searching for golf balls in water hazards, my feet had become very sensitive. I likened them to a blind man’s hands, something that you could substitute for eyes.

Sometimes Chucho and I played this game where he dropped some pocket change on the ground and I put my foot over it and told him exactly how much it was. It was a useless talent knowing that there were 78 cents underneath your foot instead of, say, 82, but the skill came in handy at times like this. When I patted my toes around in the brackish water I knew right away that my foot was pressing down on someone’s nose.

“There’s a body buried where I’m standing,” I told Chucho. I ran my big toe over its pursed lips. “And it didn’t die happy.”

“Hold still,” Chucho told me.

He dove under the water to get a closer look. He was down there forever, swimming right by my feet. He came up with three golf balls, chucked them over to the shore.

“Well?” I asked.

“Bog body,” he said. “I’ll go get Dutty.”

 

Dutty was the greens keep. He was a drunk with a legendary mean streak, but he let us rummage around in the creeks and ponds on the municipal golf course in exchange for giving him a cut. His mail-order bride had recently arrived, a Russian girl named Kika. Chucho and I figured that it was partly our doing that Dutty had been able to finance such a venture. We were none too pleased.

Three days ago, instead of making us wait on the stoop when we dropped off his money, Dutty had ushered us inside.

“My trench-footed friends,” he’d said, “I’d like you to meet the missus.”

His place smelled of grass seed and cigarette butts. There were bags of fertilizer leaning against his TV cabinet. Kika was sitting on the couch, smoking and watching a TV show about penguins.
“Boys, this is Kika,” Dutty said. “Kika, this is the boys.”

Kika glanced up at us for a second. She had dyed blond hair and a slightly turned up nose. She grunted something in Russian and then returned to her TV show. She scratched her scalp and she cracked her knuckles and then put her feet up on the milk crates that were doubling as a coffee table. She was sitting right there next to us, but I felt like we were staring at her in some sort of cage, waiting to see what she’d do next. She snuffed out a cigarette in an ashtray and immediately lit up another one.

Dutty extended his arm out beside Kika like he was showcasing a brand new coupe at a car show. He was beaming. I was thirteen, old enough to understand that I was expected to say something.
“You’re a lucky man,” I told him.

“I most certainly am,” he crowed.

 

As I was waiting in the water, I watched the endangered herons peck at their nests about thirty yards off, their urgent cawing and their skinny legs impatiently tamping the earth to find solid ground. The reeds of the marsh made a pleasant whoosh whenever the wind freshened.

I didn’t want to move around a lot and lose contact, so I kept my right foot on the body’s head while my left foot explored the rest. I could tell the body was wearing a blazer or something that had a shitload of buttons on it; there was a long skirt, a pair of boots with a sharp heel.

Bog bodies showed up every couple of years around here. We’d seen the pictures in the papers. They were from centuries ago, whores and heathens strung up by the locals because they didn’t believe in the right god. Or because they didn’t believe in God the right way. They were fully preserved by the salts in the marsh, complete with skin and clothes and their hair parted however they parted it during their time on earth.

I saw Kika and Chucho walking down the twelfth fairway with a couple of shovels.

“Dutty went into town,” Chucho explained. “At least that’s what I think Kika just told me.”

Kika was wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top and her hair was in a ponytail. She was barefoot and I noticed that she’d painted her toenails red.

“There’s a body,” I said pointing at my feet. “And Chucho and I are going to dig it out.”

I was speaking slow and loud, hoping that she might gain some meaning from my enunciation and volume.

Kika responded in Russian. I heard her say the word “Dutty” and then she spit on the ground. She said his name again and spit. “Dutty,” she said. Then she spit three more times right in a row.
“Lady,” I told her. “I understand. Dutty sucks. We get it.”

After she was out of spit, Kika flopped down on the edge of the marsh and lit another cigarette. Chucho passed me a shovel and we started digging. After about ten minutes we’d cleared the wet earth around the body. Chucho took the legs and I grabbed onto the shoulders and we lifted it out and set it down on the shore.

It was a woman. Her skin was this strange silvery metallic color. She was wearing a long skirt and a waistcoat that buttoned all the way up to her chin. Her hair was pulled back into a bun.
When Kika realized what we’d pulled out of the marsh, she started screaming and pointing at the body and then at us. Who knows what she was thinking? Maybe she thought that we were teenage murderers who liked to dig up our kills and show them to our next victims before we murdered them. Or maybe she was thinking something even worse. Maybe she’d just had enough of this place, enough of Dutty. Her shrieking was tremendous, and it scared the nesting herons and the endangered reticulated wood owls into flight. Chucho moved toward her to calm her down. Kika screamed louder and then she turned and ran off.

Chucho and I watched her run toward town, wondering if we should stop her, try to explain ourselves. Maybe there was some diagram that we could sketch out that would help her understand that this sort of thing was normal around these parts. Neither of us moved a muscle, though. We were both sick of Dutty; sick of us having to give him more money than we thought he deserved.

“If he wants her,” Chucho said, “let him go track her down.”

 

Dutty returned a little while later and we showed him the body. He got on the phone and called it in. In a few minutes, the town’s newspaperman was out at the golf course interviewing us. He posed us next to the bog body and snapped pictures and we pointed and smiled.

“You seen Kika?” Dutty asked.

“Haven’t,” I told him.

Dutty gave me a little nod and then he turned and trudged back up the hill. That day would be the last time any of us ever saw Kika and it seemed like Dutty already knew that she was gone. Dutty was walking up that hill like he was an old man who did not trust the earth to hold his weight. He was walking like there was something strange buried beneath the soles of his feet, and for the life of him he couldn’t seem to figure out what it was.

 

Fiction fan? Read Brad Zellar’s short fiction blog at www.rakemag.com/yoivanhoe