Category: Fiction

Enough of us to constitute a class, a phyla, is what the redhead who cleans the Petri dishes calls us. He is taking us away from twisting our legs into DNA under our desks or leafing through bio periodicals in the library for Big Ideas so opposite sexes might fall into awe of us, he is taking the day off to show us which cliff down to the beach is best and maybe even shed his clothes with us so we will all look like those squirmy bits, he says, on his dishes. He is cute enough and we are ten or so equally aged and indeterminately gendered with interest. Along the freshly work-studied-hewn path that he leads us down lie no bras—who wears them?—but various undies, shirts in plaid, chopped jeans, thongs of any rubber and color, with all the real shoes tossed off right at the last. We lose our own bits here and there, while the cliff heats up.

Best to jump in fast before the revelations of nakedness set in, the visible feel of it, he says. Insouciant naked others will loll your way if you jiggle tenderly over the wet pebbles, if you ease in, he says, more or less. Fewer loll your way if you jump. We all jump in fast and stay in after jumping, we all watch the naked instead of vice versa, despite our gasping and thrashing in the cold, trying to keep just our eyes out.

The eyes have it.

Those on the beach do stand if they have to, they stand to pick their way to the pop, where a tired-looking bronze Asian keeps a cooler of block-and-tackled drinks, but mostly the naked loll, lie low, and look.

People always come to look on beaches, to look and to learn, says the redhead, paddling near me. Especially the men. They like to loll around on their backs and look. Except the Greek.

There are a lot of men lying around, and one Greek in spotless white pants. He uses the binoculars to spot invading ships, the redhead says with a not-so-straight face. Maybe ships actually invaded here once, since concrete bunkers still crumble at the most picturesque point where the naked divide from the others, and maybe the Greek served in an army to protect Greece—some of us followed juntas like team swaps then—but just now the invasion seems to be coming from inland, over the moons of aureoles and pubis and awful sandy coitus.

It isn’t the Greek or the redhead who keeps me neck deep in the too chill water long after everyone else finds spots to lie on, in between the rocks or squatted on top of the rubbly beach. A man reading an actual book to show off his utter udder boredom with the woman parked at his side and the man at the other end of the beach with the too pink ass are both my scheduled evening companions, times carefully staggered between movie and music. The one so obliquely womaned will not do an overnight so he has the early slot, scant hours off. The other, the whole-night-stayer, has begun to move toward me, in dim recognition.

I dunk and I dive. I fight current where others work for purchase, skin to skin, and take no notice. I swim over to a row of logs slashed into a raft that carries several sated sunbathers, and I hang on.

If he sees me, he will ravish me with kisses, long deep ones that say Sorry, I’m not looking anywhere. And then the other, seeing me with him—
The redhead, a no one from either pole but willing, I know from his lack of other escort, reminds me, using my name loudly, that deepness of water is the real problem.

I go under again—just to check.

The water stays dark where it needs to and no fish other than wriggling lovers bump me, no fish in those cold deep waters. I cannot swim around in all that coldness, I can. The man is stretching arms that long in my direction, and glancing over. The man with the book is looking up. I splash to hide behind the water, which is mostly ornamental anyway, just a setting for these encounters so mostly mammal. I dogpaddle, I sidestroke. The raft whirls itself and all its dazed bodies out of reach, as if reach is all I need.

The redhead, almost upon me, shouts, Don’t struggle.

Struggle?

I swim away. The point with the concrete bunkers quickly comes up and instead of further beach, the ocean begins, and no one follows me.

Except for the redhead. In ten strokes, he clamps a hand to my shoulder. As if there were seafloor, I shoot my foot down—into an iron railing from some piling or sub submerged so long it has rusted to just the sharp parts. I catch the rest of the railing full-chested and hang on while the tide, aswirl already in reverse, pulls at me, pulls at us backward.

Great, I say.

Wow, says the redhead.

I haven’t taken much notice of how his eyes, their middles, evoke the Petri mindlessness of the pharmaceutical until that Wow. I shiver and hold on anyway, hold onto him as much as the railing, and tell him how I am planning to go to class, study and shrug off temptation, that if not him, someone else even more serious will help me in bio.

He tells me about sharks and how I should thank him already.

We shiver and huddle, treading water, we spoon and we float and I hold my foot where it hurts when I can. No point in screaming, no one can see us in this odd rift between naked and the otherwise beaches, in the pulling waters.

The sun is easing its redheadedness into the lit up waves when we feel the tide at last pull right at us and we take it. But where will we end up? Too far from the raft, now nude of those humans, and the Greek will never turn to us with all that beach in his binoculars. We finally feel bottom near where happy nannies pack their children with sandy efforts and efflux toward a parking lot lined with gawkers.

They’re on their knees! yells a boy old enough to know better while we sidle and knee-creep beach-ward toward the brush along the cliff that surely somewhere vertical hides shorts and shirts. Then running isn’t what I can manage out of water with my foot so we walk, two wet nudes—one limping—between the beach chair-bottomed matrons, their staff, and pointing children, we walk as if they are the ones who shouldn’t be there, who should at the very least cast off their clothes in solemn acknowledgment of our bravery. Or so I suggest as soon as we make the bushes, giggling. Or is it sobbing?

We cannot stop to let me sob long. A cop is somewhere close, says the redhead, reaching past the bush for the first bit of cliff. We climb, and throughout the long time it takes us to traverse the side of the cliff with our small handholds, slipping a little back for every forward motion, bare buttocks bucking, we hear the cheering and jeering below, and some sirens. To block this, I hold my two dates in my head, both of them glaring from one beat-up pickup to the other’s, both surely parked in front of my empty apartment. One will so soon be back to his book and woman, and the other to watching the beach, not the water.

I wish them love.

Perhaps shorts hang on that ferny bush ahead.

I kiss him and kiss him.

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

For multifarious and age-old reasons the dense central city was girdled by a wide belt of poverty. Near the southern edge of this shabby cincture lay a large village. Within the village was a sandy square of sixty meters in which children played and adults gathered to talk. Everyone crossed it as they went about their business.

Mustapha’s one-room, mud-brick hut sat hard on this square. Although he was a beggar, he did not call himself one, for he always said—to those he knew, at least—I’ll repay you in a week, or so. Fifty piasters here, a pound or two there, little more than pocket change, but enough so they sought to escape when they saw him coming. Even in an area as big as Cairo, the word got around, Watch out for Mustapha.

It wasn’t that he could not work, for he was strong and quick-minded. But a regular job did not interest him. He held himself separate, as if he were above everyone else. Perhaps his choice of begging as a profession was an outcry against the irrelevance, alienation, and pitiful wages available to the lower classes.

Because Mustapha kept late hours, his shutter was closed each morning when the young reporter, Youssef, rode through the square, his bicycle emitting a high-pitched screech upon each rotation of the pedals. Youssef did not earn much at the newspaper, where he was a junior reporter, junior in every way. The job was his because the editor was a friend of his uncle and because a bribe, collected by his family, had been paid. Not yet married, he lived with his parents, sister, grandmother, and his uncle’s family.

The two men had been classmates at school, Youssef the kind of boy who got along with everyone, but the other children did not like Mustapha, whose gaze focused somewhere beyond one’s shoulder, as if he were calculating how to sneak up and bash his victim on the head. He took advantage of Youssef’s easy-going manner by copying his lessons and asking him for favors.

On the way home one day three boys were beating Mustapha because of some coarse words he had said to one of them. Youssef saw this and rushed to Mustapha’s aid. Later, when the same boys caught Youssef alone, they punched and kicked him in retaliation. As he fell to the ground, he glimpsed Mustapha scurrying into a side street.

The next day he confronted him. “Why didn’t you help me?”

“I did not see you,” Mustapha replied. “I was on my way to visit my aunt. As you know, she lives on that street.”

After they finished their schooling, the two saw each other only by chance, once at a restaurant where Youssef noted Mustapha was eating a more expensive meal than his own. Although these meetings were cordial, Youssef tensed, because it was just a matter of time before he asked him for money.

One evening Youssef and Jameela, the woman he was dating at the time, exited the movie theater and stepped around a large pile of garbage. The village was enduring another of its garbage crises when, through corruption and incompetence, the money allocated for pickup—but not the garbage—disappeared. They were discussing the movie, Chahine’s The Destiny, when Mustapha stepped from behind the pile.

“Ah, friend,” said Mustapha. “Was the movie a good one?” He still had that maddening habit of looking past one’s shoulder.

“Quite good, yes. This was the third time I’ve seen it.”

“And who is this lovely lady you’re with?”

Youssef introduced Jameela.

Mustapha said, “Youssef and I have been good friends since our school days together.” He proceeded to make many flattering and insincere comments to her. Then he motioned Youssef to the side. “I’m in a bit of a pinch. Can you spare twenty pounds? I’ll repay you in a week, or so.”

What could Youssef say? To refuse a good friend would make him appear cheap in Jameela’s eyes.

After Mustapha left, Jameela asked in a starstruck way, “Who was that guy?”

“An old friend who turned out to be a big disappointment.” He hoped she hadn’t fallen for Mustapha’s act. Although Jameela was attractive, he had a rather prosaic assessment of her charms. As they walked, he said, “I’m still full from supper. Why don’t we skip the ice cream shop tonight?” He had eaten at home. Although his sister and grandmother were good cooks, the truth was, he no longer had enough money in his wallet for ice cream.

Normally in times when the garbage was not picked up, the people dumped it in unofficial but historically used locations such as empty lots and seasonal washes. Then one day the trucks would appear and haul the piles away. But the new mayor and his friends had expensive tastes. The usual places were full; fresh piles sprouted. The newspapers kept track of them as if they were the scores of the soccer matches between the Reds and the Whites.

Youssef was assigned to the garbage beat. They called him Garbage Boy. Each day his editor expected him to come up with a new story regarding the crisis. Of course he was not expected to find out where the money had gone—no one ever discovered that—and the newspaper would not print it if he did, because the newspapers had to be careful what they printed. Nevertheless it remained his shimmery ideal. The reality was that there was only so much that could be written about garbage. Soon he ran out of statistics to cite and minor officials to interview. He was reduced to collecting stories from the people, the inconvenience, babies bitten by rats, the smell. Cairo was suffering through its most brutal summer in years. The khamsin, the hot, sand-laden, southerly wind that normally blew itself out in April or May, had not yet ceased.

As the heat grew, Mustapha’s week or so ballooned into three, then four, then six. Thus began the dance of avoidance in which borrower and lender became entwined in ways both comic and maddening. For instance, Youssef and Nur, a copywriter at the paper, went to a club in the central city to hear a techno band. He and Jameela weren’t going out much anymore. After a while he excused himself to use the bathroom. On the way, in the narrow space between the bar and the wall, there was Mustapha chatting up a horsey woman in a miniskirt. When he saw Youssef, he threw himself against her. When Youssef returned, the woman was still draped against the wall, but Mustapha had vanished.

Another time, with Nur at a beach on the Nile, Youssef noticed Mustapha ambling their way along the water’s edge. Seeing no other way to avoid him, he waded into the current, lost his footing, and was swept away. Nur swam out and rescued him.

And finally, on a day off from work, Youssef rode a bus to the east and hiked in the Al Mokattam hills that overlook the city, the Nile, and the fields beyond, to the Libyan Desert and the pyramids at Giza. The khamsin filled the air with dust, obscuring these details, but assuring a beautiful sunset. As he waited for the colors to develop, he worked himself into a comfortable position in the soft ground and read from a paperback copy of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. When he glanced up, there was Mustapha darting behind a dune. Why, he wondered, was he seeing him more lately than in all the years since school?

But it was Mustapha who truly suffered from these encounters. Each of their families was a part of the vast underclass that struggle to lead respectable lives. By his choice of profession Mustapha had brought disgrace upon his. Each time he saw Youssef, he was reminded of the comparison others would make between them.

Mustapha was moping on his door stone after being woken yet again by Youssef’s bicycle when a mother and her three children, each carrying a pail of garbage, entered the square. Undoubtedly they were headed for the dumping ground. On impulse he called to her, “Why not put your garbage here? It’s OK, no one will mind.”

That was the start of it. Seeing the fresh heaps, others began dropping their garbage in the square. Mustapha approached anyone in the district who was carrying a bag or a bucket or pushing a cart. “Come, friend, no need to walk so far. Dump your garbage in front of my house.”

When his neighbors found out who was responsible, a committee arrived at his door.

“In times like these everyone has to make sacrifices,” he told them. “My house is closer than any of yours. The smell is not that bad. Pray for cool weather.”
In truth the smell did bother him, but he did not spend much time at home, only a few hours to sleep each morning. Usually he was on the streets in the central city, because it was important for a man to be seen at his job, even if that job was begging.

Inexorably the individual heaps became a monolithic whole. Since the people still had to pass through the square, the pile was crisscrossed with paths, like animal trails in an oasis. Eventually the pile became a lopsided hill with the steepest side cascading to Mustapha’s very door. He was safe now. Youssef had to pedal around the far side.

About this time the editor said to Youssef, “We’re filling the entire issue today with garbage, although I trust your contribution will rise above that level. Do you have any bright ideas?”

Youssef admitted he did not.

“What about this fellow in your neighborhood who’s asking people to dump their garbage in front of his house?”

“I don’t want to talk to him, boss.”

“Why not?”

“He owes me money.”

“Perfect. Then he’ll have to talk to you.” When Youssef blenched, the editor added, “You need to toughen up, son, if you want to be a reporter.”

The words stung, because his editor was right.

“Now get out there.”

“I’ll have to take my bicycle.”

“You still don’t have a car?”

“I can’t afford one.”

“What do you spend your money on, that girl back in editing?”

Youssef blushed. Nur was a costly blessing.

“All right, take mine. But this is the last time. And make sure you have it back here by one o’clock.”

Youssef parked the Fiat near the east side of the square. He marveled at the pile’s size. If all the garbage were heaped in a single place, it might make a Kilimanjaro tall enough for snow. Half hoping Mustapha was not there, he rapped on the door. When it scraped open, Mustapha’s pupils pinholed in the sudden flood of light. Irritation gave way to his public face.

“Well if it isn’t Garbage Boy. Come in, come in.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I heard they call you Garbage Boy at the paper.”

“That doesn’t mean I like it.”

Mustapha broke the dun silence. “Do you want tea?”

“Tea would be good.”

“Sit down while I prepare it.”

Youssef sat at the table against the wall. “How do you stand it?” he asked after a while.

“What?”

“The smell.”
Mustapha did not answer. He set a steaming cup before Youssef and sat sipping his own. “Do you remember Aziza, the fat girl? I saw her last night in the Citadel Quarter. She’s beautiful now.”

“I thought she was beautiful then.”

“You did?”

“Her face, especially.”

“You always were a dreamer.” He packed a hookah and offered it to Youssef, who shook his head. “Are you so high and mighty now that you won’t smoke with an old friend?”

“I don’t smoke that stuff with anyone anymore.”

Mustapha’s eyes went cold. “What are you doing here, Youssef?”

“I want to interview you about the garbage.”

“Ah, the garbage.”

“Look, I don’t have much time. My editor needs his car back.”

“I’ve wondered why a big-time reporter like you doesn’t have a car.”

“And I wonder why you encourage them to dump in front of your place.”

“What’s it worth to you?”

Youssef’s brow knitted. “What do you mean?”

“A big newspaper like yours should be willing to pay at least twenty pounds.”

Blood rushed into Youssef’s head. He ought to walk out, but he would still need a story. Since Mustapha had no intention of repaying him anyhow, he said, “All right, we’ll call it even.”

Ever so slightly, Mustapha’s mouth widened.

“But only if you agree to let me interview you for free at any time in the future.” To emphasize his point, he banged his forearm—harder than he intended—on the table. “And you talk to me before you talk to another reporter.” This said, he sipped his tea and marveled at his boldness.

Mustapha scratched his cheek before offering a toothy smile. “But of course! You are my friend!”

His story was just that, a story, and not a good one. Luckily Youssef was already hip to the genteel art of journalistic embellishment. His editor was pleased.

On the face of it the debt was settled, but still the people dumped. The side of the pile facing Mustapha’s lair resembled a giant bowel filled with silage garnished with plastic. Whenever he came home, he beat out the rats with a broom. Like candy they ate the poison he put down, and they snapped the traps, startling him from sleep.

Lying on his pallet one morning, he heard voices unusually close and rushed outside. The people were balancing against the wall of the hut as they tiptoed around the glacier edge of the pile.

“No, no, no!” he yelled. “Give me some privacy. Go around to the other side. There is more room over there.”

Still, like cattle they came, bumping him in their haste to start their day. He went inside and drifted into a mean sleep. As the sun rose higher, the line slowed to a trickle. In the heat of the day few came.

When he awoke, he was a man with a plan. In the tiny courtyard behind the hut lay a pitchfork abandoned by a previous tenant. Because north was the direction from which most would return in the evening, he would block that end first.

The garbage was a compacted mass. The pitchfork was dull and two tines were missing. Each forkful stirred up mephitic odors. He tied a kerchief over his nose. As the dike rose, few were willing to scale it and risk the sweating, swearing, garbage-smeared wild man on the other side. By late afternoon it was as high as the pitchfork’s reach. Reeking, hands blistered, he went inside, drank some water and—because he was too filthy to sit on a chair—flopped to the tile floor. Soon he heard them milling. He laughed, giddy at the thought that they would have to walk around. After cleaning himself perfunctorily, for he still had the south barrier to build, he fixed a plate of food.

As the sun slid behind Garbage Mountain—for that was how he now thought of it—he started on the second rampart. The air was cooler, and his technique with the pitchfork improved. When finished, he threw his filthy clothes on the bricks in the rear courtyard and washed himself in the basin. He did not feel like going out, but it was a pleasant evening, and the streets would be full.

He puzzled over how to leave. If he climbed a dike, leaving evidence, however slight, of a successful traverse, some adventurer might follow. In the rear courtyard, which at one time had been part of the house itself, he stood on the rickety table next to the wall, hoisted himself to the top, and climbed down the scrawny baobab tree on the other side. Squeezing between neighbors’ walls, he made his way to the next street.

In the wee hours he returned. He scrabbled up the baobab tree, ripping his shirt in the process. His night’s efforts had resulted in a piddling amount, most of which was spent on alcohol. Before retiring, he opened the shutter and admired his handiwork.

Stomach queasy, head aching, he arose at midday. Each dike had a switchback worn into its side and a “V,” like a gun sight, creased each top. He screamed loud and long.

Through the winter the garbage grew more and more monstrous. Surreptitiously at first, then openly, Allah, Jesus, and even Pharaonic deities were invoked. In conversation garbage dominated over gossip about movie stars, the weather, and life’s usual cruelties. The opposition Environmental Party took the lead in clamoring for action. Wearing tall, red rubber boots, the party’s new spokesman stood atop the piles and gave fiery speeches denouncing the unnamed scoundrels responsible. He also accepted donations.

When, in the glimmering of spring, trucks hauled the piles away, those who didn’t know him said the Environmental Party had found a charismatic and effective new leader, and those to whom he was indebted wondered why Mustapha Said had suddenly become involved in politics at the ripe age of twenty-six. As for the new political reporter, Youssef Al-Kabsh, his star also rose. Whenever a contagion burbled in the cesspools of power, he was among the first to know.

I came here to lose. But the wheel won’t let me.

Once again I pile all of my chips on three. People gasp. What are the odds for winning eight straight-ups in a row?

Fools! Don’t they know wheels do not hold memory? That math and luck never go together? With roulette, every spin is new. Probability is as whimsical as life. Who would believe three is not even my lucky number?

You’d sneer at me, Mei. Superstitious, you’d say. But how can I not think that way? On March third, you walked out on me with our three-year-old son. Three years ago, you enrolled in Queens College to study English and computer science, and things began to go downhill.

Nonsense, you’d say. It has nothing to do with school.

But it does. How else could I explain your change of heart? I’m still the same Tiger Fan you loved seventeen years ago. Your mother threatened to disown you for going out with a guard soldier from the countryside. Your father pointed his gun at us when he caught me in your room. But nothing could stop you from loving me. You left your mansion without looking back and took the train with me all the way to the Pearl River. On the bank, we looked through the mist at Hong Kong on the other side. If we swam across, we’d be free. It would have taken only four hours. You shook your head, said you sank like a rock in water. But I knew you couldn’t bear bringing your family down further. Once you crossed over, you’d be an enemy of China. Even if your father denounced you, his military career would be over. At the border town, you slid a Swiss watch into the registrar’s sleeve and got our marriage certificate stamped. You sealed the red paper into a plastic bag and zipped it into my pocket, together with sixty U.S. dollars. How you got the money is still a mystery to me. If you make it, Tiger, you cried, hugging my neck, if we meet again, we’ll never part, dead or alive.

Seventeen years later, you laid quietly on your side of the bed in our Chinatown home. So quiet I couldn’t hear you breathe.

“Do you remember, Mei,” I asked in the dark, “do you remember?”

“I was young, a foolish sixteen-year-old,” you finally mumbled.

I don’t believe it. How can you forget? The scars are there, on your belly, chest, limbs, scars you burnt through the skin to keep me in your heart. Twelve years you waited, though no mail or phone could reach you from Hong Kong. Your family forced you to move on. Tiger Fan is long dead, your father announced. He’s married another woman and has children, your mother said. They brought you a troop of bachelors with great prospects for the future. But you faked insanity and checked yourself into a mental hospital.

And you couldn’t possibly forget the day we met at JFK! The tears we shed without shame, the joy over our first condo on Bayard Street, our first car, my store on Broadway, your green card …

Remember the birth of Jia?

But your ears shut down as soon as I started telling you how I almost drowned in the Pearl River, starved on the streets of Hong Kong, my spirit shattered from working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week in restaurants and antique stores until I saved enough for New York. Useless to point out how I burnt my bridges applying for a green card as a political refugee so that you could come legally, as my wife.

“Sorry, I no longer speak Chinese.” This is all I could get out of you after I spilled my guts.

The wheel shudders, stops at three. The dealer clears the chips from the losers, then stacks them up next to my bets. Thirty-five to one. How much have I won? Do I even care? Such dead silence around the table—all eyes wish me dead. I wish myself dead. I came to forget, but everything in this room—its Chinese name, Chinese customers, Chinese managers, and the damn Ping’s Noodle in the corner—stirs up memories. Even the dealer looks like your twin sister. How her almond eyes glow like embers!

Those ember eyes of yours, Mei. They used to melt me with each blink. Now they spew hate and hunger. How did that happen? What made you start speaking English at home? First with our son, then with me, even when I laughed, mocked and begged you to stop. I can humor every whim of yours, but not this, not at home. After twelve hours of twisting my tongue to please tourists in my store, I need to feel like a person again. Is it too much to ask? Aren’t we still Chinese?

“We’re New Yorkers now,” you said. “Let’s speak like New Yorkers, our first step to success. Look around, Tiger. Do any of your friends live in this ghetto? No! I’m not saying we should live in SoHo like Master Yao and his artist friends. But even Yingying and Bunny Song live somewhere else, although they can barely afford a meal in a cheap restaurant!”

I’m successful, too, just like everyone else, I almost shouted. I built my antique store from scratch in the heart of Chinatown. Do you know that every square inch of land here is worth more than gold, and our condo on Bayard Street is just as valuable as the loft in SoHo? Do you know Master Yao spent more time in my little store on Broadway than in his own grand studio? But the smirk on your lips stopped me cold. Since when did you pick up that white man’s look? I wish I could smack it off your face, once and for all.

“Dump that bitch, fast,” my friends say. “She’s your ill star, bringing you nothing but misfortune since you met her. She’s not even pretty, jaw too square, cheeks too high, signs of a man-killer. You’re still young, only thirty-five. With your looks and money, you can pick the most beautiful girls from Chinatown or Flushing.”

It’s true that women flock to my bed like moths to a light. Singles, divorcees, married women with husbands on the mainland, all beautiful and young, eager to please. They scream and writhe in my bed. They call me a true tiger and make me feel like a man. But as soon they’re out my door, I get sick to my stomach. I don’t know what they’re after, my money or my American passport. Probably both.

Ah, here comes another spin. My tablemates move their bets around as the ball leaps and rolls over the slot. Some pinch their chips between their fingers, waiting for me to make a move. I count out thirty-five chips and place them carefully on thirty-three.

Yesterday was your birthday. I made six dishes—three vegetarian and three seafood, your favorites—and a chocolate cake for our son Jia. I thought the little banquet might cheer you up. You often get depressed on your own birthdays. I dialed the number for your apartment in Sunset Park. It still blows me up whenever I think that you rented this tiny one-bedroom behind my back when we were still living together. Say whatever you want, but I just don’t believe that a normal person can find happiness in a rat hole. For a long time, you wouldn’t give me your phone number or address. Need to be alone for a while to clear your mind, you said. Clear my ass. Haven’t you figured out you can’t live without me? Don’t you know it isn’t that hard to find out where someone lives? Still so naïve, after all these years.

I listened to the ring with a clear conscience. It was your birthday, for heaven’s sake. I was inviting my wife to her birthday dinner. I wanted to hear you laugh, tell you that thirty-three was an auspicious number, like cuddling lovers, the symbol of “double happiness” on the door of the newly-wed. The phone rang and rang. Finally you picked it up, but you sounded nervous, anxious to hang up. Then I heard him, reading a story to my son behind a closed door. It was deep, muffled, a voice that didn’t need to shout to claim authority, a white man’s voice.

“Come back home, Mei. Now!” I screamed.

You waited till I lost my steam, then said, “Tiger, I just want a normal life. I want Jia to grow up good, not a hoodlum.”

You hung up and unplugged the phone.

I dumped the dinner into the garbage can.

You think I’m a tong, bitch! But how can I blame you? All the movies and TV shows you watch, the rumors behind doors, the bullets flying around the dark streets. Yes, there are tongs everywhere. But that’s only half of the truth. You never gave me a chance to tell my story.

The day I opened my shop, they drifted into the door like ghosts. Through their sunglasses, they looked at me without a word. I knew what they wanted. But instead of giving them the envelope with cash, I shouted, “Welcome to my store. Please have some candy and peanuts.”

They couldn’t believe their ears. You should see how their mouths dropped open like dead fish. The next day they came back and smashed a few plates and vases. They picked the biggest and shiniest ones, not knowing everything on display was imitation. The real stuff was locked in the safe. I opened the cash register.

“Look, it’s empty. I haven’t made a penny yet. If you loiter around my store every day, how can I get any customers? If I can’t do business, how can I make money to pay you guys?”

They looked at me as if I were nuts. I bet nobody had ever talked to them like that. Two days later, they came and placed a little black box on my counter. I opened it. It was an ear, dried and shriveled like an autumn leaf. I looked at it, looked at the two young thugs, who had no idea what tough meat tasted like.

“O.K.,” I said. “Tell your boss to meet me tonight, nine sharp, in the back room of Seafood Palace on Center Street.”
I took out my gun for Russian roulette. It was the first thing I’d bought after I made my pledge to Uncle Sam. It had taken me six years and forty thousand bucks to become an alien in this Yankee town. A perfect gift for the celebration. I’d played it in Beijing and Hong Kong. Not my choice at first. But it was the only way I could fend off the soldiers and thugs. The only way to show them I could play, and play hard, despite my pale skin and my girly face. I’m good, real good. Know when to stop. It’d be the first time I’d use it on American soil, and I hoped it’d be the last.

I got there at eight-thirty, ordered an eighteen-dish banquet, poured two glasses of white grain spirit, and waited. The boss arrived, a scrawny little guy, guarded by his seven brothers. I stood up, showed him my full glass, bottomed it, then pushed his glass over. He stared in disbelief. His bodyguards lifted their shirts, showing off the knives that dangled on their belts. I laughed, pulled out my gun, put a bullet in, twirled the cylinder, and put it against my temple. I pulled the trigger.

They all went pale.

I placed my blue beauty next to his glass, still untouched.

He stared at it like a zombie.

I slid a red envelope to the scrawny shrimp. It was swollen with fifty twenty-dollar bills. “Believe it or not, you’re the first people who stepped in my store. According to the custom of my trade, you get a present from me, as a lucky omen. Tomorrow I’ll receive my regular clients. One of them is the head of the police station on Elizabeth Street, known as Hawk. I’m sure you’re well acquainted with him. But I bet you don’t know he’s a fanatic antique collector. If you have a chance to visit his home, you’ll see his collection. Perhaps you guys should drop by my store also, have a chat with him. He’s not as ferocious as he looks, if you get to know him.”

If you had seen the way they ran, Mei, you’d know they’d never show their pimpled faces in my store again. I sat down, alone, ate the eighteen-course dinner, drank the whole bottle of liquor. It’s a shame to waste food, under any circumstance.

I wish you would believe that I run my business clean in Chinatown.

The wheel is slowing down. The dealer gives me a look, clears her throat. She seems to wait for me to change my mind before she calls out “No more bets.” Thirty-three is just a column. It pays only two to one, far less exciting than straight-ups or splits. But what do I care? I didn’t come here to win in the first place. Besides, once I make up my mind, I stand firm. I’m pigheaded like you. We have twin spirits.

The first night of our reunion, you wouldn’t let me keep the light on. I thought you were just being shy. As I buried my face between your breasts, I felt the scars. I switched on the light. Your torso was covered, some perfectly round, like cigarette burns, some with perforated edges like a poppy pod.

“Who did that to you?” I screamed in horror. “Tell me who did it. I swear I’ll get them, one by one.”

“Shh,” you hushed, sealing my lips with your slender fingers. “I did it to myself, just to prove I was mad, a real huachi who lost her mind for love, no longer fit for marriage.”

I bawled into your belly. How could I ever pay back such love in this life?

“Tiger, Tiger, look at me.” You cradled my face and cooed like a pigeon at my ear. “It wasn’t painful, not at all, not compared to the pain of longing for you, for not knowing where you were, how you were doing. I knew you were alive, no matter what they told me. I knew you were alive because I was still hanging on. Tiger, my sweetheart and lover, look at me, look at my belly. What do you see? It’s your face, your profile, if you link the dots together. Here’s the forehead, the nose, the lips, and chin. Here, here, feel them.” You grabbed my finger to trace the scars that formed a constellation.

And I remembered the first time I met you, outside your father’s mansion. You were reading on the front steps, the breeze blowing the fuzzy hair of your nape this way and that, like the waves of a golden harvest. I felt dizzy, weightless, a buoy in space. I have been floating in your universe ever since.

But it all disappeared when you exploded without a warning. No, not true. There were signs. First the change from Mei to May, then the abandonment of Chinese, your hatred for Chinatown, and the constant nagging about me being a gangster. I shouldn’t have laughed it off. I should have paid more attention.

I tried everything I could to clear my name. But you just yelled, despair in your eyes, “How could you survive in this town otherwise? Those damn tourists stare at me like a whore. They even have the nerve to ask why I don’t wear the sexy gown that split at my thighs.”

“All right,” I said finally. “Give me a year to sell out. We’ll move wherever you want, SoHo, Flushing, Brooklyn, White Plains, even New Jersey.”

I thought you’d jump with joy.

“Doesn’t matter where you live,” you screamed. “You are Chinatown.”

Bitch!

But you’re right. I am Chinatown. I live there, buy and sell stuff robbed from tombs hundreds, thousands of years old. I wear my watermelon hat and silk robe, just like a Chinaman in a movie, to amuse tourists. I even smell like Chinatown—the stink of fish, garlic, and soy sauce. Is it a crime? I do whatever it takes to support my family. But are you grateful? Jia wouldn’t even say hello when he came home from school. He chatted only with you, in English. The other day, I told him to speak Chinese like a good son, like a human being. Guess what he said after making a horrific face?

“Can you talk like a grown-up?”

I spanked him, for the first time. He’s only five, already he acts like a little devil. What will he be like when he reaches fifteen, twenty-five? I might as well strangle him right now, to save trouble for the future.

I guess it pushed you over the edge.

Fine. We live in America. Spanking is not hip. I speak Chinglish. My clothes smell of rice and old graves. But do you have to get a white devil into your bed and have my son call him “father?”

I pulled out my gun. The cold metal soothed my throbbing temple.

The ball drops. I won again. Two to one. No big deal. But the message is clear. I’m not yet finished, not yet.

I’m tired of being out. I want to be in the game, before it’s too late, you said.

Translated: you’re bored as a merchant’s wife in Chinatown. You want to be pampered by some white man.

With your China eyes and yellow skin? With your permanently accented English? Your job behind a receptionist desk in the Seagram Building and your rat-infested one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? You forget this is America, not Beijing. General’s daughter or not, white men don’t give a shit about your past.

I want to be in, too. Why do you think I swam through the night to cross the river? Why I cut off my ties with China and applied for citizenship as a refugee? Do you know how I felt when I stood on the harbor of Hong Kong, gazing at the mainland’s shadow poking through the mist? For sixteen years I haven’t returned home. Sixteen years. I want to see my mother one more time before she goes. She’s blind, ready to join her husband, the father I’ve never met. Her coffin is made and varnished, her name chiseled on the stone. But she can’t go without me, her only son, at her bedside, to guide her soul into heaven with my cry.

“What are you afraid of?” Mom asks whenever I call. “You’re a foreigner now, a rich foreigner. Nobody can touch you.”

“Yes, nothing to be afraid of.” You tell me the same thing, when you see the pinched look on my face, knowing I’m homesick. “Now that you have an American passport, the old man won’t dare harm you.”

I laugh. What do you know about your father’s other side? He can toast to his enemies at a banquet and have them eliminated before they have a chance to burp the gas out of their stomachs. He was so furious when he found out I married his only daughter that he instantly put me on the list of top spy suspects. He won’t give a shit that I’m a “foreigner” with an American passport. As soon as my name appears on the computer screen at customs, he’ll have me dragged to his cell. My only hope is to wait till he retires or dies.

Not a totally bad end, perhaps? At least he treats me as if I were still Chinese, not a “foreign devil.” Even my own mother calls me a “foreigner.” Being my mother, she doesn’t say the word devil, but I can hear it in the awkward silence, the way she bites her tongue to stop it from slipping out of her mouth. Foreign devil, foreign ghost. Once you cross that bridge, once you turn your back to your mother, you become a ghost, a ghost without a grave, without a country.

“Nonsense,” you said when I tried to tell you my morbid thoughts, your voice loud and shrill as if you were trying to scare away ghosts. “America is your home now. You belong here. We all do, dead or alive.”

I looked past your shoulder, at the antique vase on the nightstand. It captured the scene of a slender maiden chasing a butterfly in the garden and a young man peeking at her from the wall, his eyes full of lust. It’s the kind of vase that would have sold quickly, if not for the crack at the bottom. So I drilled a hole and turned it into a lamp. Tourists love Chinese antiques. Americans. Europeans. They come into my store. “I’m looking for a vase or plate with Chinese faces like you and her.” They point their fat, hairy fingers at me, at my young assistant from Shanghai. When they get what they want, they pat me on my shoulder. “Hsie hsie, China Fan.” Their thanks come out like “shit shit.”

I gaze into their eyes: blue, hazel, brown, gray. Will they ever look at me and say: Perhaps he’s an American too, just like us?

Do you know, Mei, that you’re a walking Chinatown yourself?

But no matter. Nothing stops you. The stubborn dreamer.

Somewhere far away, slot machines sing in many voices: a Christmas bell, an alarm, a combat song. They remind me of those sleepless nights in Beijing, under my cotton quilt, my ear pressed against the old plastic radio for the static sound from the Voice of America. Turn to the dealer, now. Do not weep. Must not weep. Not here.

She returns my glare with a smile and turns the wheel.

Let’s play then, Mei, you from your rat hole in Sunset Park, me from this Chinese casino room in Atlantic City. Ruyilou—House of Anything You Wish. See how I pile everything on the big red one? It stands tall, quivering, a pickax hacking into the belly of the game.

Wang Ping’s latest collection of short stories, The Last Communist Virgin, will be available from Coffee House Press April 1. Her photo and video installation, “Behind the Gate: China in Flux After the Flood of the Three Gorges Dam,” is on exhibit at Macalester Art Gallery March 3–27. Born in Shanghai, she now lives in St. Paul.

You have to get out of the house. That’s what he always says, on those rare occasions he’s home and not on the road. Or he’s on the road, on the phone, from his hotel. You have to get out of the house. Spoken truly like someone who has no idea how difficult it is to go somewhere, with two kids, three and eight months, and no babysitter, no nanny. And no one around. We’ve moved so much, luckily just within the U.S., because there are families that move internationally in his company. But we stay in the U.S., moving from one town to another. And where we are now, in this godforsaken suburb, there’s no one here during the day. All these people, their kids are older, they’re at school all day, and the dads work, and the moms are gone, doing what I don’t know. I don’t know them. Because they’re never home. And nights and weekends, they’re going to soccer, to softball, to basketball, hockey, whatever, whatever’s in season, to barbecues, to one another’s houses. It all takes so much energy. We’re home alone, Nicole and Freddy and I, going nowhere.
But though I often think Sam is wrong—this job will be better, wrong; this town will be better, wrong; we’ll be able to save more money, spend more money, have more, wrong—there are so many times when the walls feel like they’re closing in on me. Maybe I do need to get out. So when I got a brochure in the mail from the Parent and Child Center, I thought maybe Sam was right, and this would be a lifesaver. “A place for families,” the brochure said. So I signed up for a class for parents and three-year-olds, during which I leave Nicole in the nursery with the smiling mommy-aged women. Half the time she cries and they have to come get me because she won’t stop crying. I’m the only one who has a baby who can’t make it through class. The other women nod at me, superior in their own children’s ability to adjust. But even when I’m there, listening to them talk is almost worse. They know everything about parenting. And they all know one another; they’ve been taking these classes together since their three-year-olds were barely out of the womb. They have scheduled playdates and lunches and shopping excursions and visits to the park in nice weather and the mall’s soft play area in bad weather. And they invite one another’s kids to birthday parties. “So invite them over,” Sam says, as if it was that easy. You can’t just break into a tight little women’s group. It doesn’t work that way. Especially not for me; moving gracefully into a group of such self-assured and self-satisfied women strikes me as impossible. “Picture them in their underwear,” says Sam.
“That’d work better for you,” I say. They’re all thin, thin and trim, they work out, dropping their well-adjusted children at the fitness center nursery. They probably have beautiful underwear, gorgeous lingerie on gorgeous bodies. Not saggy underwear on a flabby belly.
But we’ll move again. I just don’t know where and when. Trying to fit in, that’s too much work. It’s hard enough to get out of bed in the morning as it is.
Freddy loves the Parent and Child Center. Good for him. At least someone is getting something out of it. Today, as usual, we’re late, and I’m trying to hustle him out to the car when he finds another snake in the yard. A snake in the grass! He sees them all the time, little black-and-yellow striped garden snakes. He hunkers down, fascinated, staring. “Get away from it, Freddy,” I tell him. “Snakes bite, you know.”
He shakes his head, solemn with his knowledge. “They don’t bite,” he says.
“They do,” I say. “They have little sharp teeth that really, really hurt.” I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll say whatever it takes to get him to back away. Me, I won’t go in the backyard. In the trees by the swamp—no, the wetlands, they’re wetlands, not swamps—the snakes breed, they’re always slithering back there, behind our little house.
“But no poison, Mom,” he tells me. “Daddy said.” What faith he has in what Daddy says. I remember when I was secure in the knowledge of what his father told me.
“You won’t care about poison when they sink their teeth into you,” I tell him. “Come on, Freddy, we’re going to be late. Come on.” We live in continuous echo chamber: come on, hurry up, let’s go, we’re going to be late. When we’re going anywhere, that is.
Then something slides across my foot, and I look down to see a snake using my sandal as a speed bump. For just a second I freeze, thinking maybe it’s only one of Freddy’s many toys that’s been left outside. But those, of course, don’t move. I stifle a scream and kick, jerking my foot as hard as I can, sending the thin black snake writhing helplessly through the air. Freddy watches, his face alight with joy. Then I rub the top of my foot against the back of my jeans.
“Snake germs,” I mutter, trying to make light of it.
“Snakes don’t have germs,” Freddy says. “Daddy said.”
What answer can I have for that? Daddy said. Daddy, the glamorous visitor, calling from Detroit. Chicago. Dallas. Charlotte. I stay home, keeping the doors closed, keeping the snakes out.
But now I’ve gotten out of the house, and I’ve kicked a poison-free, germ-free snake across the yard. And my reward is waiting for me at the Parent and Child Center, where Nicole whimpers and cries in the nursery while Freddy and I sit in a circle of moms and kids on the floor, and we sing songs that the other moms seem to know, but I don’t, songs about liking to eat bananas and apples. I missed this somewhere, didn’t read that chapter in the mommy manual.
Then we have our “breakout” session, where the kids stay and play with Teacher Debbie, who’s just a few years younger than grandmotherly, and the moms go off for our mom lessons. Today I’m treated to a lengthy discussion of validating emotions. This is for three-year-olds, for heaven’s sake; whoever said a three-year-old has emotions worth validating? I distract myself by wondering what’s worse, having a snake slide across my foot at home or being here, listening to this.
Maybe it’s because I’m tired, because I don’t sleep, or Nicole doesn’t sleep, which means even less sleep, but I can’t hold my tongue anymore. “Don’t you think,” I say toward the end of class, clearing my throat, “that maybe there’s too much validation going on?” The other mothers turn toward me, polite, frozen smiles on their faces. I’m not going to be a hit today. “I mean, if you think about it, how about all those kids who go around shooting other kids, or shooting their parents?”
The smiles fade. “What do you mean?” says Liz, the parent educator. Now there’s a great job title.
“We go around telling these kids their emotions are all OK,” I say. “So doesn’t that lead them to think any feeling they have about anything is a valid reason for shooting someone?”
“Oh, no,” says a women whose name I don’t remember and whose nametag I can’t read from here. “I think those kids who kill have been told to suppress their emotions all their lives. They’re really miserable. It’s just like—” she laughs, a pseudo-self-deprecating laugh, “when my husband tells me, ‘You’re making too big a deal about that. It’s not important.’ That just makes me go ballistic!” And the other women laugh and nod.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think we’re giving kids too much room to feel.”
“I don’t think you can give them too much room,” says another woman. I can see her nametag: Patty. She has a baby younger than Nicole; she’s my height and at least two sizes smaller in clothing. “We have to teach them how to handle their emotions, not suppress them.”
“I didn’t say ‘suppress them,’ ” I say. “I said ‘validate.’ Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? Validation? If my kid says, ‘Hey mom, I feel like blowing some people away today,’ I should say, ‘why sure, honey, I validate that’?”
Oh, I’ve got their attention now.
There’s a silence before the others collectively turn to Liz, as if to say, help us with this twit. Liz clears her throat and fingers the pendant hanging from her neck. “Well, that would be taking validation to an extreme,” she says. “What I think we’re”—notice the collective we’re—“saying is that we have to let our kids know we hear what they’re saying, that we understand they are really feeling that particular emotion. Not that they should go ahead and act on it.”
“But if we’ve told them their emotions are valid, how are we going to stop them from acting on them?” I don’t even care, but I can’t seem to stop.
“By giving them acceptable outlets for their emotions,” says Liz. The other mothers nod, validated. Liz goes on, encouraged: “In fact, let’s talk about healthy outlets. That’s a challenge for three-year-olds.” There’s laughter. I don’t join in.
When class ends, no one talks to me. I tuck Freddy into his jacket, make the usual parent-educator-approved comments about how hard he worked on this painting and how nice that he used so many colors. Around me, other kids are being tucked into Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren jackets, shinier and more impressive than the blue fleece jacket from JCPenney that Freddy wears. Someday, there will be money for better clothes. Daddy said.
I tell myself I don’t mind when I see the other mothers lingering in the hallway, chattering brightly. When I stop by the office to withdraw from the class I tell myself that it’s just something that didn’t work. It’s part of life. But it feels like giving up. I’m a mother and I’m a woman; I’m supposed to belong here.
But I don’t. As I’m leaving the office, on my way to pick up Nicole from the nursery, I have to walk by a cluster of women from my class, all of whom stop talking when they see me, more of those polite smiles, no one meeting my eye. As far as I know, anyway, since I don’t try to make any eye contact Freddy seems to know what I’m doing. “I don’t wanna go,” he says, pulling my hand to keep me from exiting the building. “Stay.”
“Can’t,” I say. “Class is over.” I pull him harder than I mean to, and he collapses on the floor, howling. Nicole watches him, her eyes bright. “Freddy,” I say, trying hard to sound loving in front of the attentive receptionist and the silent women behind me, “come on, honey, it’s time to go.” He just cries harder. Now Nicole is whimpering. I lean down to whisper into Freddy’s ear. “We … have … to … go,” I hiss. “Now. Come on. I’ll take you to Burger King if you stop this right now.” Bribery, I know, is not highly thought of at the Parent and Child Center. That was a topic for two whole classes.
Freddy whimpers, but at least he looks at me. “Burger King?” he says loudly.
“Yes,” I whisper. “But you have to come now.” And so we go.

I don’t want to go home, but I can only tolerate Burger King so long, and Nicole needs a nap. Some babies sleep in their mother’s laps, but not Nicole, she has to have her crib. Besides, the stink of French fries, the screaming of kids, the too-bright lights, all make me feel like my skin is being stretched too tight. So home we go. I tuck Nicole in, and she waves her little hands in front of her face, a ritual she performs to put herself to sleep. I can hear the TV; Freddy learned how to turn it on, and I keep it set to Animal Planet. He slumps down in front of it, waiting patiently for crocodiles, for snakes, for dogs and cats being rescued.
Suddenly I’m so tired that I’m trembling. The afternoon stretches before me, full of things I should do, empty of anything I want to do. I go sit in the living room, that useless room-for-show in the front of the house. But, I realize, the useless room isn’t so useless, if it gives me this time alone. Leaning my head back on the couch, I close my eyes and sit with my hands on my thighs, palms up. It’s not sleeping, but it’s not exactly conscious either. It’s about the closest thing to sleep I can do. I feel my lungs breathing, slow and slower, each breath feeling like it might be the last. Then Freddy calls, “Mom? Mom!” I sigh and open my eyes. Across from the couch is a display cabinet, full of the useless knickknacks, crystal bowls, Chinese tea sets from Chinatowns we used to visit before kids, things we’ve collected in seven years of marriage. It has a mirror for a back wall. I see myself, a puffy figure in loose, rumpled clothes, hair not really clean and pulled back into a tight ponytail. Something flickers in the upper range of my eyesight, and I look up. There’s a thin something poking out from the top of the cabinet, and I sigh. How did Freddy get a toy snake all the way up there? But then it moves, and I realize that the snake looking down on me is not a toy.

The Yellow Pages has dozens of ads for pest control companies, but most work only with mice and squirrels, bugs, moles, voles, rats and bats. No one wants to do snakes. I finally find one that does and call them. I want to hide somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t know how the snake got there, but if it made it to the top of the cabinet, it could get up the stairs. So I sit in the chair that’s outside Nicole’s room for decoration, all poofy and white, where I can watch her crib while still peering downstairs to the TV room. Freddy is transfixed in front of some show about koala bears. And I’m standing guard, as if that will help.
The snake man is big and burly, with a grizzled, graying beard that covers his face. I show him where the snake was. He brings in a ladder and peers over the top of the cabinet. “Yup,” he says. “Here he is.” Then, with his bare hands, he brings the snake off the cabinet.
“Oh my God,” I say, peering around the corner to the TV room, hoping Freddy isn’t coming our way. He thinks the big man is here to clean the china cabinet.
He chuckles. “You’re not afraid, are ya?” he says. “Of a little old garter snake?”
“I thought they were ‘garden snakes.’”
He shakes his head while he puts the snake in a canvas bag. “Common mistake. They’re really known as ‘garter snakes.’ Know why? Probably not, if you didn’t know they was called ‘garters.’ ” He twists the end of the bag, knotting it. “Since they’re mostly black with stripes, they look like men’s garters, back from the old times.” A picture suddenly appears in my head of snakes dangling from my underwear, striped snakes twisting around my legs, little snake teeth holding up silk stockings. “Although since people often see them in gardens and lawns, calling them a ‘garden snake’ is not too far off base.” He descends from his ladder. “Tell you what. I’d guess this thing got in through an open window or door, but let me have a look in the basement, just to be safe.”
“I didn’t know they could climb.”
“Oh, they’re good little climbers,” he says. “I seen ’em in places you wouldn’t believe. You ever heard of those tree snakes in Guam? They got those brown snakes—now those are deadly!—and they just drop right out of the trees.” He guffaws. “Law of gravity—what goes up, must come down!”
“There’s the basement door,” I say, pointing at it. Freddy calls for juice, and I hurry to help him, my eyes flickering up and down, looking for slithering tails on the floor and scanning the cabinets for dropping snakes.
Minutes go by. Freddy drinks his juice and wanders upstairs, where I hear the sound of his Lego bin being dumped on the floor. Normally a sound that nearly makes me cry, since it means I will be picking up thousands of Legos later, but for now it’s good.
Then there’s a shout from the basement. My stomach lurches. “Ma’am?” calls the snake man. “You better come down here.”
I pause at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”
“You got a whole nest of snakes down here,” he says.
I close my eyes. “I can’t,” I say.
“Sure you can. They get into houses easily enough.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t come downstairs.”
There’s a thumping on the steps, then he reappears. The bag in his hand is clearly fuller now, and wriggling. “I think I got ’em all,” he says. “But I want to look around outside, see where they came from.”
I wait by the doorway as he disappears around the side to the backyard. Eventually, he calls me out. I pull my winter boots out of the coat closet, even though it’s sixty degrees and sunny, unusually warm this late in the fall. The snake man is staring at the house foundation in the side yard. He bends over, and in spite of myself, I smile to see the beginning of his butt crack appear at the top of his work pants. “I think this is your problem,” he says, pointing to a minuscule gap between the concrete block foundation and the siding. “This is where they’re getting in.”
“That’s so small,” I say, squinting at it. “How can they fit in there?”
“Snakes can worm their way through almost any size crack,” he says. I have to choke back a scream of laughter at a sudden vision of a snake slipping into his crack. “And this time of year, they’re migrating.”
“‘Migrating’?” I say. “I thought geese migrated.” Now I see crazy V-shaped formations of flying striped snakes.
“Snakes too,” he says. “Spring and fall. In the spring, they’re leaving their hibernation to find places just like that”—he points to the trees and swamp, wetlands, behind our house—“to spend the summer. Then fall comes, like now, and they need a dark, kinda warm place to wait out the winter. A basement is ideal, if they can get into one. Of course, it’s not ideal for you, because come next spring, there’s babies.”
“Oh my God,” I say. There’s a hard, choking ball of panic rising in my throat. My stomach is squirming like the tied-up bag he’s tossed on the ground.
“I can do up an estimate for you to fix that gap,” he says. “And we should probably do another sweep of the basement. Once they’re in, it’s a tough job to keep ahead of them.” I try to say something, but all that comes out is a strangled sound. He looks at me.
“Where in the basement did you—” I say, unable to finish the sentence, just pointing at the bag on the ground.
“Sump pump,” he says. “That’s a common one. But I’d like to do more looking, maybe behind some of the walls. They could be anywhere. Hell, I’ve seen ’em nesting under water heaters. I went to a house where they was coming up through the pipes into the washing machine.”
“No,” I say, and what I mean is: stop talking. “Can you just fix it?”
He looks at his watch. “Not today,” he says. “You’ll have to call scheduling. I’m booked solid all week. I only got here because I was doing an estimate for mice the next block over.”
“No,” I say. “You have to help me.”
“Well, call scheduling and see if they got anyone on call,” he says. “They might be able to get someone out in the next couple days.”
I grab hold of his arm. “No,” I say. “Please. Can’t you help me? I can’t be here with these snakes.”
He glances down at his arm, where my fingers are digging in as tightly as I can.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s not that bad.”
“It is,” I say. “It’s exactly that bad. This is impossible. I can’t live with snakes in my house. Everything is wrong. I hate this house, I hate this town, I hate this—”
“Ah, hell, lady,” he says, gently removing his elbow from my hand and patting my shoulder awkwardly. “We can kill the snakes. You don’t have to feel bad about that.” He pulls a small spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket, flipping through it and frowning at it. “Well, I can move a couple of things around, come out tomorrow afternoon. I need another guy with me, but I can grab him from his lunch hour.”
“I’ll buy you both lunch,” I say. “Please.”
He peers at me, brow furrowed. “You got anywhere you can go?” he asks. “Any family? Your mom around here?”
“No,” I say. What I don’t say is that even if she lived next door, she’d be no help. All my life, she’s never been there. The shadow woman. Silent and miserable. Until my sister and I grew up and moved away. Then she was free. She’d want nothing to do with this. And I want nothing to do with her. I’ll be different, I’ve always thought, always said, I won’t be like my mother, I’ll be there for my kids.
“You gonna be OK until tomorrow?” the snake man asks.
I nod. “What choice do I have?” I say, trying to laugh.
“You could go to a hotel,” he says. “You might sleep better.”
“Yes,” I say, nodding again. “A hotel.” It sounds beautiful, dreamlike, a quiet hotel, but already it sounds like too much work—packing, planning, preparing. What if Nicole cried all night? What if someone complained?
I’ll think about it later. For now, snakes are all I can consider.

The snakes don’t bother my husband. “You don’t need to go to a hotel,” he says, from his own hotel room in Cleveland.
“I can’t sleep here,” I say. “Snakes climb.”
“They’re harmless,” he says. “Garden snakes aren’t poisonous.”
“Garter snakes,” I correct him. I can almost feel them slithering around my ankles. “But they do bite.”
“They’re not coming up to the bedrooms,” he says, patience clearly wearing thin. “So the guy found some in the basement. And by the way, what did this snakebuster cost?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He didn’t leave a bill. He’s coming back tomorrow to look for more and to seal off the siding.”
“No, no, no. Christ. Look,” he says. “All he’s going to do is spray foam insulation in those cracks and charge hundreds of dollars for something I can do myself for twenty bucks.”
“When you come home at the end of the week,” I say. “The snakes are migrating. They’re moving into the house. You’ll just lock them in with your insulation. Then next spring there’ll be babies everywhere.”
“I don’t care if the snakes are migrating, we’re not spending that kind of money,” he says. “I’ll deal with it when I’m home on Friday. I’ll go to the hardware store on the way home from the airport.”
“I already told him to come,” I say. “He rearranged his schedule just to help me. I can’t cancel him now.”
“Sure you can,” he says. “Just call them up. If you call now, you can probably just leave a message and not even talk to a live person.”
“You don’t know how awful it was to see that snake on top of that cabinet. I can’t make it until Friday. You don’t understand—the snakes climb! They climb!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “It’s not that big of a deal. The snakes aren’t going to hurt anything. You don’t need to be so dramatic about everything.”
“What else have I been dramatic about?” I demand. “I always put up with everything—”
“Give me a break,” he says. “Everything is a complaint with you. Everything is always wrong. You could show some appreciation.”
“Appreciation for what? A house full of snakes?”
“Like that’s my fault,” he says. “Listen to yourself. I should have known. All the time we dated, you bitched about your mother, how she was never around, how she worked and was so tired, and you wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t allow you to be home with the kids.”
“I—”
“And it couldn’t be just any home. It had to be a nice one. So now you’ve got what you said you always wanted, and all you do is bitch about it. ‘I hate being home, I hate this house, I hate this town.’ Well, you’re just going to have to figure out how to live with it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sighs, the annoyed, pointed kind of sigh. “Not that you’ll appreciate this,” he says, “but I’m being promoted. To manage the local office. So I shouldn’t have to transfer again, not for a long time.”
“Wonderful,” I say. “Then you can afford to snakeproof the house.”
The line hums between us. “At the moment,” he says slowly, “the extras come in the form of equity in the company, so—”
“So it’s not more money,” I say. “What a great deal. Equity. Will they give us equity in snakes?”
“Mommy?” Freddy appears in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
“What are you doing up?” I yell at him. “You’re supposed to be asleep. Why can’t you just sleep when you’re supposed to? Go to bed!”
“Is that Freddy? Let me talk to him,” Sam says.
“No,” I say. “He’s supposed to be in bed. I can’t talk anymore.” I hang up the phone and scoop Freddy up, his little legs swaying. “You have to stay in bed.”
He leans his head on my shoulder. “Scared, Mommy. Snakes.”
I stop and grab his chin, looking hard at him. “What snakes? Did you see a snake? Tell me!”
“You said snakes.” He starts to cry.
“Are there snakes in your room? Real ones? Not those goddamn toys? Tell me, Freddy!”
He cries harder. The phone begins to ring. It rings four times, then goes to voicemail. After a moment, it rings again. I haul him over my shoulder and rush upstairs, where I pull back his bed covers and look under the bed and behind the dresser, then cautiously open the closet doors. The phone stops. There are no signs of wildlife. “You see snake, Mommy?” Freddy asks, calmer.
“No,” I say, “and neither do you.” He reaches up for a hug, but I pull his arms down and plop him into bed. “Go to sleep.”
“I wanna story,” he says.
“No,” I say, and he begins to cry. “Bedtime. You have to learn that.” From downstairs I can hear the phone ringing again. I close his door and lean against the wall outside it, listening to Freddy’s wails jangling along with the phone, and I wonder how many of Freddy’s emotions I haven’t validated today.
Freddy finally hiccups to a stop, and the phone rings twice more. Then everything is quiet.
Back in my own room, the one I share with my husband when he’s here, I gingerly pull back the bed covers and look under the bed. Nothing but dust. I leave a table lamp on low, so I can see what’s happening, and I crawl into bed fully dressed. The day is ending, I think, and then I think, as I do most nights, that I don’t know if I can do this anymore. My own nighttime ritual, like Nicole’s fluttering fingers.
I remember how I saw myself in the cabinet mirrors, before I saw the snake—a puffy, unhappy woman. A shell. Useless. The skin the snake leaves behind. There’s nothing there that anyone could want. I pulled Freddy out of the class he liked because I didn’t. And because the mothers didn’t like me, and if they don’t like me, Freddy doesn’t have a chance. Better to take him out before he starts to understand that he’s being left out, and he’s being left out because of his mother.
I yell, I cry, I withhold hugs not to be mean, but because I don’t have any left. I can’t even protect my kids from snakes in the house.
All those women in that class, none of them have snakes in their basements. Or if they did, they’d cheerfully scoop them up and carry them outside, gently so the snake weren’t harmed, all the while teaching their children about nature. They don’t lie awake at night, making lists of all the day’s failures. Nicole and Freddy would be better off in any of their homes, with any of those mothers. Any mother but me.
Now I can’t sleep. Every slight sound jerks me awake, makes me wonder if a snake is moving across the comforter. I think I’m hearing noises that aren’t even there, and then I remind myself that noises don’t matter, snakes are silent. But I still hear them. Finally I get up and go out into the hallway. You’re being a baby, I tell myself, but I can’t help it.
I sit in the chair outside Nicole’s room, so tired, and watch the stairs for climbing snakes. I rest my hands on my legs, breathing slower and slower, but not slowly enough.
I won’t sleep now, even though the house is hushed and quiet. But underneath the quiet, I hear the snakes slithering in the grass on their migratory path, nosing along my foundation, searching for cracks, looking for a way in.

I heard a story at my great-aunt’s place that I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?,” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never before had occasion to meet and whom I doubt I will meet again, explained over coffee (and after the whitefish salad was served, and after I took off my funeral heels, and while we sat watching the boats that were sailing along the lake, through the great, paned windows of my great-aunt’s apartment where she had passed so many years in bed alone—for the most part alone) how it was that our great-aunt came to be born in Chicago.

“Our story begins in Poland,” I said.

“Where?” my sister said.

“You heard me,” I said. I was walking through my living room.

“Where? Where in Poland? Was it the city where the cousins were buried?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” I said. “It wasn’t that side.”

“I know but—”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Is that your line?”

“They’ll go away. So anyway, our Great Aunt X’s mother was born in Poland, but fell in love with a man who was German. She followed him—”

“Uh, oh,” my sister said.

“You know,” I said. “But when she arrived, the lover deserted her. Very sorry story. And so, at least according to the cousin—”

“What cousin?”

“I told you,” I said. “So rather than go back to Poland alone, she stayed as a tutor or governess—whatever they called it—”
“In Germany?” my sister said.

“I said that,” I said. I put a book on the shelf. I was straightening up as I was speaking to my sister. “A friend of the family played the violin—a star of sorts. Anyway, he fell in love—”

“Aha,” my sister said.

“Not yet,” I said. “She didn’t care. He played for her. He courted her. Nothing could move her.”

“But,” my sister said.

“Finally, the story goes, she agreed to marry him only on condition that he take her to America—Chicago, where her sister had settled.”

“And?” my sister said.

“This was all before the war. Meanwhile, the cousin said—meanwhile, the lover who’d left her married someone else and had a family with her. Of course, you know. The lover, the children—none of them got out. Because the camps … are you there?”

“Your phone.”

“It will stop in a minute, I think,” I said.

“That’s horrible,” my sister said.

“Listen, there ought to be a moral to the story, or anyway a point.”

“Like what?” my sister said. “God has a plan? What kind of a—”

“God?”

“Plan.”

Hang on,” I said.

“But anyway, did that man—” my sister said.

“If you change your name,” I said. “The things they don’t tell you—”

“Don’t interrupt. The father. The husband. Aunt X’s father. Did he, when he came to Chicago, continue to play?”

“What?” I said.

“The instrument.”

“Well,” I said. “Great Aunt X could sing, I’m told. Although I never heard her. But what I was saying—”

“What are you saying?” my sister said.

“There is someone who apparently really needs to reach me.”

My sweater was itching.

“Wait,” she said. “Just tell me this. Who do you think she loved in the end?”

“Who?” I said. “Great Aunt X? Or great-great—”

“The mother.”

“I’ve really got to go,” I said. “What are you asking? The one who broke her heart or the one who saved her life?”

“Which?” my sister said. “And how do you know that one of them didn’t do both?”

“Or maybe her child.”

“Or maybe her sister,” my sister said.

My hand was on the button. “Forgive me,” I said.

My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache.

“What are you thinking?” my grandmother said.

The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.)

“A beauty,” he said.

He said it was true, the story he told: “Ven I vas a boy”—before the wars, before the influenza. He said Sully was owned by a neighbor he’d had. “A beautiful mare,” he said to me. “Magnificent. The apple of the village. The neighbor vas poor, of course.” At last and in time and at very great length, he was persuaded, this neighbor, with a marvelous regret, my grandfather said, to part with her, to sell her to a traveling show.

He missed this horse.

One day in the spring of the following year, the traveling show traveled back to the village. Everyone went, my grandfather said. Every last soul who could scrape the amount to pay for a ticket. “And vot do you think?” He raised his hands, reddened from labor. “Sully broke rank the minute she saw her old master again. A plume, she had. A feather. She ran to him, ran out of the ring.” He saw through the fence posts, my grandfather did. “He threw his arms around her neck! But he could not afford to buy her back.”

“And?” I said, though I had heard it before, and more than once, and asked again.

“The horse collapsed that very night.”

He was old, my grandfather. “A plume this high.”

“Why are you telling a story like this to a child?” said my grandmother, when all was done, as was her way.

She served us cake, golden.

I had a new question.

My grandfather chewed. “Vell,” he said. There was no one alive in the village, he said, not anymore, at least not that he knew. The man did not get out, he said. “So far as I know.”

“You know, there are people,” my grandmother said, as she captured a crumb, “who eat to live.”

“Ve live to eat,” he said.

She gave him a napkin.

He died when he was very old. He’d stopped speaking English.

“What is this?” the night nurse said. “This language of his?”

“Want an animal cracker?” Renee asked, as they pulled away from a Shell along route 80. While Jack had pumped gas and cleaned the windshield, she’d gone in to buy bottled waters. They’d just crossed the Platt River, and had another day’s drive before them.

“I didn’t know they still made these,” Renee said. “I used to love them with cocoa when I was a kid. I think there’s a song about that, but I don’t remember it. Have you ever had that eerie feeling when you’re not sure if you remember something or only imagined it? Here’s a sheep. Baaaaaa.”

“I don’t want a sheep.”

“Yesterday, when we saw herds of them, you said they were beautiful.”

“Know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”

“No, Jack, but I was just wondering.”

“Sheep can hear a zipper at a hundred yards.”

“All right, how’s about a monkey with a banana?”

“Very unappetizing,” Jack said as he opened his window to the smell of diesel fumes, fertilizer, and green corn—in that order.

“Say wha? Jack, I can’t hear when wind is roaring in.”

“Too bad, I just hummed the song you couldn’t remember,” Jack said. “It’s called ‘Animal Crackers and Cocoa to Drink.’ ”

“Cocoa what?” Renee clutched her head like The Thinker, holding her hair down as if it might blow off. Her hair, she’d complained, was at an in-between length. She was growing out the spiky boyish style she’d sported since her divorce. That cut was a feminist statement, she said, not to mention a conversation starter in bars. She’d dyed her hair a streaky sun-on-straw to match the moussed way it poked up. But now she felt beyond the age of someone with a cut like that. She was allowing her natural color back, too, a shade she called “almost blonde.” Before giving up her sun-streaked spiky look, she’d had a professional photographer take a set of photos. She’d worn an off-the-shoulder dress so that once the photos were cropped it appeared as if she’d posed nude. She’d given Jack a blow-up mounted in an art deco silver frame. When he opened the gift wrapping, he stared at the photo as if lost in thought, then looked at Renee and said, There never was a question for me, was there?

Does that mean you like it? she’d asked.

Jack raised his window and turned on the air. “I said eating a monkey sounds disgusting.” His voice sounded overly loud without the road racket to shout over.

“A simple ‘No thanks’ would have sufficed.”

“No simians, thank you,” Jack said.

“Are you still in a bad mood?”

“Still? I was never in a bad mood. Why would I be in a bad mood?”

“About the stories we, you know, exchanged. It’s not fair to ask and then sulk about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“It was your idea to break up the ride by telling secrets.”

“Like my sharing the deep, dark secret that when I was nine, me and my cross-eyed cousin Cindy would sneak into the garage and show each other our hairless privates?”

“I think it was more what I told you.”

“You mean, since I’d mentioned cousins, your story about a sailing lesson with a cousin you’d always had a crush on …”

“Uh-huh.”

“… At the family cottage in Wisconsin the summer you first streaked your hair blonde when you were—seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen, wearing a green bikini, and he says the color goes great with your hair, and then asks what color your pubic hair is, and if he’ll ever see it, and the two of you end up making the Sunfish rock out there in the middle of Moon Lake, and later he says, thank god neither of us gets sea sick. You think that’s bothering me?”

“You got quiet after that.”

“I’ve been driving all day, give me a break. That was cute about sea sick.”

“We weren’t having a competition,” Renee said.

“Good thing, too, since I don’t have anything to top incest.”

“For the record, you added that part about the green bikini. I never specified. Green is your favorite color.”

“Well, that changes it completely,” Jack said.

Sudden splats of mustard and yolk streaked across the windshield that Jack had industriously squeegeed clean at the Shell station. He gripped the wheel with both hands as if navigating through a blizzard that required total concentration.

“God! Can you see the road?” Renee asked. “Try the wipers.”

“You want to resist spraying with wiper fluid,” he said. “I made that mistake once.”

The blizzard shook the whole town like a cuff on the head and in ten minutes our house was not visible from the park across the street. It was a blessing and it obliterated the Christmas Day funk that had fallen over everything. There had been a two-day thaw and the old snow and raw grass had been only grim, even with the colored lights along the eaves in our neighborhood. I tucked my pants into my boots and pulled on my Klondike flaps hat and, in my dad’s Navy pea coat, I plunged into the storm. It had erased the world and the drifts were almost a foot deep. I walked backwards around the Little League diamond which was crazy under so much snow, the two dugouts and the home-run fence an arc of snow until I saw a figure down by the bandstand, and I knew it was Newton. He was staggering around kicking at the snow waiting for me. We were excited and walked in circles for a while knowing something would happen.

“Did you get a bike?” he asked me, and I remembered the shiny Sears bicycle I’d found by the tree. It had chrome fenders. I’d forgotten all of that in this amazing snowstorm; this was so much better than Christmas. We were both nine. This was fifty years ago and it was a day I want to tell about.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s black and chrome.”

“I got six birds,” he said, “and a coop kit and a feeder. They’re rollers.” I knew his dad would help him put the coop together behind their garage where his older brother kept his pigeons.

“Where are the birds?” I said.

“We pick them up next week. I got the pictures. Did you get any clothes?”

We were standing now behind the bandstand, but still the snow blew through relentlessly. “Yeah,” I said. “Dress pants.”

“I got a million socks,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can get clothes for Christmas.” He said it like he was going to fix it when he grew up. “Come on.”

He led me out past the lump of snow that we knew was the stone drinking fountain. Walking was like some kind of survival drill.

“Let’s pelt cars,” he said. We’d always hid behind the long row of park bushes and thrown snowballs at cars. I loved to throw snowballs, to throw in an arc ahead of the car and watch the car drive into it. My favorite was the bus, because it never slowed after the snowball hit. Sometimes cars would slow or stop and somebody would chase us and once a guy caught Newton after a long run and threw him down in the snow. Today, there were no cars. Indiana Avenue was a blank heaping plate of snow in the blizzard. We made some snowballs and waited, and then we walked out into the street and stood absolutely still in the storm looking both ways.

“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” he said. “Watch.”

He fell backwards there. As far as I could tell, we were in the exact center of the street. He made a snow angel. It worried me, but after he did a second angel, I did a couple there on Indiana Avenue just off Eleventh West.
“Ho!” Newton called and I scrambled up into the biting snow before I could be run over. He was pointing to two headlights coming our way dimly. In a minute we could see the lit square above the windshield: the bus. It was going very slowly.

We backed off the street a few feet and watched it come like a big riverboat down the snowy river and we made a few snowballs, but it was going ten miles an hour and we didn’t even throw. When our angels fell under the wheels, Newton cried out, “Ahhhh!” and then we both ran behind the bus, and hooked the bumper and hunkered down sliding on our boots for half a block and then we rolled into the snow and watched the whiteness swallow the frosted bus lights. We walked in the beautiful new crisp bus tread for a block or two, sort of lost, the whole neighborhood on each side in disguise, and then we were on the bridge and the old river was below us, cut and narrowed into a new contour by the falling snow.

This was the edge of our knowledge. We were not to cross the bridge and we were not to go down by the river. Across the way were the oldest houses in the city and they were not fine houses, but shelters built long ago in this lowland and they weren’t even all facing the same way, but two dozen wooden houses built wherever they could be. There were apple and pear trees here in profusion and we stole apples and pears all summer long. Everyone in our neighborhood carried a little tiny Morton Salt container in his front pocket along with a pocket knife and, in Newton’s case, matches. We’d steal the apples and then sit in the park and salt the slices and eat them like pirates on furlough. We’d been chased from the yards over there by men and women who didn’t have children and who knows what they would have done if they’d caught us.

I watched the snow falling into the dark water and like everything else it wanted to hypnotize me and then I saw Newton appear on the riverbank running past Millard’s house. He was going to slide down the embankment, and I saw it all. We’d been down there twenty times, all forbidden, and we had thrown things in the river and thrown rocks at bottles, and now in the curtain of snow, Newton left his feet and slid down the hill and he was too fast and it was like something crazy: He went right into the water. We’d never been in the river, not once, not even in the summer. I knew there was no way he was going to stop and he was going faster when the snow parted and he disappeared into the Jordan River.

I ran around the bridge and could hear him swearing. I slid down the short hill on my feet as if skiing and I had to throw myself down to stop and I met him where he crawled on all fours onto the snowy riverside. “Oh shit,” he was calling over and over. His face was white and he was crying and he kept repeating those words. He was soaked and stood with his legs apart and his arms out. “Am I going to die?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Let’s go home.” The snow was thick and I had him by the elbows. I didn’t know if he was going to die or not. You die in the books. His house was two blocks away. He was trembling and a little bluish, but he could walk and I dragged him up toward Indiana Avenue. We fell several times getting to the top, and when we did, we heard a scream.

“What the hell?” he said, and we turned and saw something across the river behind one of the strange houses and it was a figure playing with a black dog. The person was waving a red cloth and the dog was jumping and tearing at it. The person screamed again and it was a woman and then she screamed again and fell down and then she cried, “Help me.”

Newton had stopped crying, but he was very wet and very worried. “Let’s go,” I said, and we pushed through the wind-driven snow. In a minute we couldn’t see the figure anymore, but there were still screams and now the dog was barking, muffled through the storm.

Newton pulled his arm from me; I guess we’d been holding gloves, and he said, “Go see what that is and I’ll see you later.” Moving had warmed him up and he was going right along.

“OK,” I said and turned away, the snow now at my back. There still wasn’t a car on any street, and it was impossible to determine where the streets even began. Everything was gone. Across the bridge I saw the woman and the dog in the river bottom. Now the dog was doing a sort of dance around the woman who was on her knees in the snow. The dog had the red cloth and waved it like it was a game. I called, but he kept at it, and then I crossed the bridge and descended the slope, falling finally and sliding down on my butt.

It was a woman and she was naked. I have no idea how old she was, but her face was savaged with crying and she was only white and blue, and in some stories the person who was me would look away, but I did not look away, and I saw her body entire, the hair below her belly and her hanging breasts white in the white universe. There are more than a thousand whites in this world. She was terrified of the dog and I stood between her and the dog and now the dog wanted to play with me and I saw the red rag was a shirt and I grabbed one end and then quickly reached and snagged the other end from his mouth. He bounded on me with his front paws. He was heavy, but I pushed him down. I wadded the shirt up and stuffed it inside my coat and I pushed the dog away again. I have never handled a dog that way in my life, but I was ready to kick him. He sat, perplexed. The shirt was gone.

Now I felt the woman’s hands on my back and she pulled herself up and leaned against me barefoot in that snow. “Is this your shirt?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. She had taken my arm now and was leaning against me, her hair in strings. There was blood on the inside of one of her legs and her arms were marked red where the dog had raked her.

“Where do you live?” I asked her.

“There,” she said. She pointed to the second house, one side coated with the blown snow.

“Can you walk?” I said. “I can’t carry you.”

“Yes,” she said. She was acting as if it weren’t cold at all. I have no idea what the two of us looked like climbing up the river hill, but I pulled her up the incline and I watched her all the way feasting on the strangeness. A word came to my mind: disorder. There was some disorder she had. I’d never seen such a human.
The dog was gone along the river and I could see him heading up toward the iron bridge. There were four snowy steps at her house and I pushed her up these. She looked real for the first time now against the old house and she stumbled against the door before disappearing inside.

This is when I remembered the shirt and I just dropped it there on the wooden planking.

The snow fell unabated, great sheets of eternal snow on Christmas Day, real snow that I could now feel melted in my boots and around the cuffs of my gloves. I had to walk over to Newton’s and see how he was. My mouth was shut and I walked in the magnificent weather, the firmament of snow holding me up.

In August 1924, one year after a honeymoon tour of India, Alain Coulbec pushed my grandmother down the servants’ stairs at their country home outside Paris. Bruised but uninjured, she promptly pushed the noted aviator from family history, fleeing to Tahoe with her trust fund and newborn son. It didn’t matter that Coulbec had crossed the Pyrenees in a plane that resembled a box kite; that he had flown a hundred combat missions over the trenches; that philatelists already prized his appearance, in goggles and helmet, on a rare-issue, one-centime postage stamp that commemorated an altitude record set in 1919. Coulbec was history to Agatha Babcock, and she sealed the divorce with eyes rolled skyward and thin-lipped smiles if the Frenchman was ever mentioned. She called him “a closed chapter—and a short one.” She mocked anyone who tried to look back. Motivations weren’t important. “The past is past,” was her mantra.

Even twenty years later, when Coulbec disappeared over occupied France, my grandmother spurned all the prying reporters who promised to tell “her side of the story.”

“There is no story,” she answered. “There isn’t even a body!”

Now the storyteller is gone. My grandmother died last week, in her old brass bed, leaving me with the mystery of her first husband, the famous stranger whose name I inherited. To tease her, I used to call him “grandpere, twice-removed by divorce.” To tease me, she’d offer crumbs from her past, a dubious privilege earned by no one else in the family.

Her doctor had pushed me to listen, explaining that it would help the old lady bounce back from her stroke. The prescription surprised me, but I followed orders. I carried bouquets from Rasmussen’s Floral. I emptied her ashtrays without complaint and called the corner pharmacy when required.

One day, at the clinic, the doctor said that grandmother’s behavior fit a familiar pattern.

“That smoking eventually kills you?” I asked.

He paused and tipped his head at me and I suppose he finally noticed that I had been crying. His brown eyes fixed on mine and he touched my shoulder.
“I meant that it’s common for this kind of patient to talk—it may not add up, it may be confusing, but her stories are a sign of recovery. Things are going to be fine.”

“Not in the long run.”

“ ‘In the long run’?” he asked. His eyes crinkled and his weariness lifted and I saw that the doctor was close to my age, a harried employee who had skipped a button on his rumpled lab coat and seemed askew in other ways, too: old shoes that needed a polish, a broken nose that turned to the right, a bit of gray stubble under his double chin. He started to laugh and I joined him—a long, loud peal that echoed down the tiled hall of the clinic so that everyone in the nurses’ station turned to look at us.

“When you talk like that, you sound just like your grandmother,” he said.

Grandmother launched into a coughing jag when I mentioned Dr. Saxena’s remark. “That’s priceless,” she gasped. “Is that little Buddha saying that you wake yourself up with wheezing? That you need to catch your breath after every sentence? I mean, you can cover the waterfront with this family-resemblance stuff. Do I resemble anyone? Does anyone have a crumpled paper bag for a face? And what does it matter if you’ve inherited Coulbec’s long nose? You can hardly see past it, darling—especially with it always stuck in a book.”

The fact that I worked at a library meant nothing to Grandmother. She argued that books were put to better use in her girlhood when she was required to balance a volume of Kipling atop her head, gaze into an imaginary distance, and glide amid the overstuffed chairs and draperies of an Edwardian living room. She couldn’t grasp that books keep me company. I’m one of those girls who always carries a paperback in her purse, the kind of girl you notice at corner tables, who turns pages slowly and never looks up—or if she does, it’s to peer through thick lenses, still dreaming with eyes wide open. When I picture Coulbec’s life, for example, I end up with an adventurer of the nineteenth-century model, a cad from a popular novel patched together from grandmother’s stories. Without quick thinking, he might have ended his days in a cannibal’s stomach. He carried the scar of a Bedouin knife and startled several doctors with shrapnel-filled X-rays. I suppose grandmother left her mark on him, too.

Miss Agatha Babcock was another kind of adventurer, an American heiress drawn to the hero she met at a Norman airfield. She had traveled all night from Paris, sobered by the air in an open car, her scarf flying as her passengers guzzled whiskey and promised to introduce her to Alain Coulbec. It had seemed such a fine idea when they left the city, but the riders had all passed out by the time grandmother drove onto the tarmac. Her friends had buried their heads under coats. They sprawled on the seats with mouths agape, snoring loudly as the engine of her Daimler ticked down to silence. A windsock fluttered feebly and the breeze tasted of Channel salt, and she squinted across a vast, closely mowed field where the rising sun lit a million dewdrops and glinted from the polished metal skin of the monoplane. Coulbec wore greasy coveralls. He clutched a rag in one fist, rattled orders to a mechanic and seemed not to notice her—a provocation grandmother couldn’t resist. Coulbec had reached the height of his fame and she had just been dismissed from another finishing school. She favored rakish hats, cut her hair in a bob, and stood close to six feet—no resemblance to the hunched old woman I came to know at the end, the skeleton with the girlish laugh, talking endlessly as she plucked cigarettes from a pack balanced on the bedside oxygen tank.

She never finished that story. I drove her from home to the hospital, running every red light so I wouldn’t kill the faltering engine of my rusty Ford. When the nurses took over, they asked me to wait outside. They leaned the door, but I caught a glimpse of grandmother—my last glimpse, I feared—with her skin turning blue and a mask strapped over her face. She lifted her head and waved at me, like a jaunty pilot chosen for an especially dangerous mission.

And so I waited—a task for which I happened to be “especially suited,” according to grandmother. “I’ve seen you at that library. Half the job is waiting for someone to trudge up the stairs. And really, now, I don’t want to be cruel, but I can guarantee that it’s never going to be someone like Alain Coulbec! That kind of man doesn’t come to the bait. You have to pursue him. You have to take some initiative.”

Grandmother never lacked for initiative. If I propped her up and brought her a drink, she’d rattle off the names of a dozen lovers as though she were reciting an ancient dance card. She recalled moonlit walks and kisses, a romance on a cross-country train, a two-day cruise from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Even after the stock market crash, enough income remained to support a string of husbands, men who burned through the rest of her cash as she moved from the big house at Sand Point, to the cottage in Saratoga, to our little town, outside Plattsburg, where fortunes rarely rise or fall and people assume, quite rightly, that no one will amount to much. Consider my father—her only child—who dropped through the ice on a late-season duck-hunting trip in the Adirondacks. He never bobbed up, although he was famous for arguing that booze is lighter than water. After the funeral, my mother moved south, and soon fell into a marriage with a Pensacola attorney. If she calls we discuss the weather, or her stepson, or her honest surprise, after so many years, at finding tropical fruit in her overgrown garden. I never mention the past and neither does Mom. “Let’s leave that crap to your grandmother,” she announces.

On good days, Grandmother wouldn’t stop talking. She shuffled a handful of photographs and dredged up a ring I’d never seen and sent me to dig an ancient valise from the back of a closet. It held Coulbec’s breakfast set—bowl, spoon, and silver napkin ring in a nest of crumpled paper. I lifted the set from its hiding place and balanced it on the tips of my fingers and felt like one of those scientists who conjure a dinosaur’s shape from a shattered jawbone. Each tarnished piece bore Coulbec’s crest, a rampant hawk, half-hidden by dents and scratches acquired on five continents.

“Are you starting to get the picture?” Grandmother asked.

“Maybe a little—he seems like a dreamer, like someone who was never satisfied with the things he had.”

Grandmother snorted and reached for a cigarette. When she had it lit, she looked at me sharply. “Coulbec was a doer—you’re the dreamer.”

Her words hung between us like the smoke coiling from her cigarette.

“What does that make you?” I asked.

“Oh, me? I’m the patient, darling. I’m the one who’s dying. Doesn’t that bring some privileges?”

That Fall, I learned that the buzz of a prop plane, no matter how distant, stirred memories of Coulbec for grandmother. She talked and I could picture him near the end, an old man risking another crash, approaching some aerodrome in a heavy fog. He fixed on the night with the glazed eyes and rigid neck of a mannequin. When he banked right, beads of condensation branched on the windscreen. He saw a cluster of haloed lights far ahead. He sought a triumph to cap his career, a crowd to cheer his arrival.

If dreams had a smell, this one would reek of oily smoke and anxious sweat in a cabin that Le Monde once described as “somewhat smaller than a coffin.” Coulbec’s hands and feet would be icy, his vision blurred. But in my dream the old man’s instincts remained as true as a compass.

Night flights were always his pleasure, reminding him of the arc of heaven beyond the Marne, barely eight years old and observing a milk-blue comet through an uncle’s telescope. Fireflies had brought stars to earth at the meadow’s edge. The dark brimmed with crickets and frog songs. Water trickled over the weir. Decades later, those sounds joined the throb of his engine, his sole company in the fog.

“We’re keeping her overnight. We want to observe.” Dr. Saxena stood by my table in the far corner of the hospital cafeteria. He didn’t ask to sit down. He just did it. So I pushed my plate aside and tried not to look surprised. “We’re lucky you got her here so quickly,” he said. “It looks like a relapse.”

“That’s not what my grandmother calls it—not a ‘relapse.’ She tells me she’s dying. She’s been saying it for weeks.”

The doctor looked away—at the coffee cup in his knotted hands, at the half-lit cafeteria where chairs were upturned on tables and the clock had stopped an hour ago, at the moment when I’d come down here, abandoning my post in the waiting room.

The doctor sighed. “It’s not uncommon for patients to seek control. For them, it’s a matter of dignity.”

“Is it dignified to hurt my feelings?” I asked. “Grandmother smiles when she talks about dying. She acts like she can walk away from anything—from her life and from me. Does she think I don’t care about her?”

My heart was pounding. I wanted to drag the truth from Dr. Saxena—the facts or his feelings or whatever it was that had brought him here in the night. I hated that he seemed embarrassed in that quiet way that I know so well—a discomfort that keeps me from hoping, that keeps me turning the pages of romantic novels, that keeps me nodding, unable to speak until events pass me by.

“Does she talk to you about someone called Alain Coulbec?”

“That’s all she wants to talk about!” I pounded the table and the doctor’s coffee splattered the front of his lab coat. “Oh, God, I’m sorry—”

I jumped with a handful of napkins, but the doctor gestured for me to sit as he slowly dabbed at the stain. “This is just why we wear these things,” he said. “It’s a messy job—in all kinds of ways. Patients talk to us as if we could give absolution. We hear it all—beginning with anger. Sometimes you can smell their fear. With others, you see the regret in their eyes. But your grandmother is different.”

“She’s like Coulbec,” I said.

“So you’ve met him?”

The doctor leaned forward and I didn’t know what to say. The stories came in a jumble, just as Grandmother had told them, except that I was whispering with eyes fixed on a half-eaten burger and French fries. I couldn’t make myself eat. So I fell back on public triumphs, the kind that anyone could trace on the fly-specked globe in the library reading room. Faded by decades of sunshine, the globe mapped a world of colonial powers where a Frenchman might push his wife down the stairs, might disappear on a night flight, then show up years later: a ghost in a grainy snapshot, sporting jodhpurs and a riding crop despite a pilot’s professed aversion to horseflesh.

And so I spun the globe for Dr. Saxena. I spun it and Coulbec began to move: step by step across the Hindu Kush with a mule train packing his glider, by sail to the Azores in record time, always walking away from crashes, from women, from anything that might compromise his ability to nap at a moment’s notice.

When I peeked at the doctor, he was reaching across the table. He plucked a limp fry from my plate and chewed it meditatively.

“Go on,” he said.

And so I did.

I went on, as I always do.

Bear that in mind if anyone asks why a trained librarian lets the telephone ring without answering. Why I know the name of every neighborhood dog, but rarely get out at night. Why the pregnant women with strollers always seem to be former classmates who want to know how I’ve been—as if the appearance of one long dead were an everyday matter on Main Street. I always admire their babies—the blond bundles with wiggling toes, the redheads with tumbling curls, the girls and boys, the blue and pink, who have already staked a place in the dappled light of oak-lined streets, under falling leaves, where the whole of creation seems varnished—an old, old globe of golden light, sealed away from the air, dimming gradually, over centuries, so that time lags and events grow shadowed, even those involving Dr. Saxena, who once held my hand as I wept in the basement lunchroom of Mercy Hospital, who offered a potent tranquilizer, who said it was OK to let the tears flow, that it was plain that my grandmother meant the world to me and I thought, No, it’s Coulbec who really matters.

Do you see him now? On his final flight, the old man smiles faintly, as I do when I am alone, caught in the glow of the cockpit instruments. He still has an hour of fuel—and he’s far ahead of his rivals. Pallozzi and Berger are dead. Vian has turned to his memoirs, Hackwood to the family estate. Other pilots are gone, reduced to a line in the record books, their souls consigned to hand-tinted slides—now fading—which once drew crowds to the lecture halls of Europe. In those days, flight was a novelty. Now even poets disdain such venues: stained ceilings, ripped seats, and a mustiness that might be memory’s scent: brittle letters and crumbling diaries; open trunks exhaling the past.

That’s the smell I adore in the library’s farthest stacks, where sunlight never penetrates and the hush wraps me like a blanket. An old man can’t breathe in such an atmosphere. But Coulbec coughs and stirs to life if I close my eyes, if I press my brow to the cracked leather spine of Wortham’s three-volume History of the Presbyterian Church in Massachusetts. A browser, stumbling into me, might guess that I was praying. But I’m just paying attention to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the rustle of icy air from the ceiling vents. Somewhere in that noise I can hear Coulbec’s plane in the distance. He leans into the controls and holds the plane level. He peers ahead, still hoping that those distant lights are Le Bourget’s beacons, that he will have crossed something more than a finish line.

In his forearms he feels the plane’s power, but darkness looms amid darkness as fog spawns hillsides and trees to tangle his wings. Pulling higher, he whistles a fragment of melody, repeating it under his breath. He taps the dials, which seem too steady. He rubs his eyes and wonders if a crowd has begun to gather. Are they lining the rainy field just outside the lights, pilgrims pressing the fence, awaiting an apparition, looking upward at the sound of the plane’s approach?

Grandmother said that she and Coulbec had joined a similar crowd outside Delhi, a thousand faces turned up like flowers at midday, each following a fakir’s rope as it uncoiled over their heads, stretched full-length, and held in mid air. Later, at their hotel, the English manager had volunteered explanations, invoking mass hypnosis, the Hindu mind and the well-known suggestibility of crowds. The honeymooners had laughed at him. The manager hadn’t been there, squinting into the sun. He hadn’t seen the miraculous ascent. He hadn’t felt the power of that neat, brown man who never acknowledged his silent audience. At the top, the fakir had vanished—was he ever up there? Then he reappeared amid fallen rope, which he coiled as the crowd tossed coins.

Grandmother called it a mystery, but I’m not sure about that. What is so mysterious about anyone’s disappearance? The rope tossed in air, the plane lost over France and never recovered—aren’t these just the theatrical side of a common experience? I mean when friends turn their backs, when the calls and letters stop coming, when a ninety-six-year-old woman dies in her sleep—or this, my own disappearance, when I gaze at life through the eyes of an ancient stranger, when I struggle for words, when I speak to you and the only answer is silence.