Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  “Of course we’re nowhere near ready to finish the roof,” his parents tell me. They speak spontaneously in unison, in harmony, one voice rising in pitch as the other falls. “But we plan to cap off the building with a Ferris wheel—an old-fashioned one. We keep making offers to the owners of the Wonder Wheel—we’ve already worked out how to reinforce the walls and foundation to take the weight because the water is rising—they won’t sell so far, but you never know. We remember when they built the Wonder Wheel. We were teenagers in love and we were already wizened and gray, even bald. We were little kids playing on the beach as the waves rolled in and we were thirty-year-old construction workers, but we were never lost, not for one moment.”

  I imagine the Wonder Wheel atop this behemoth of a house, turning steadily in wind and rain and sun. It is not an unpleasant idea, but then out of nowhere, I imagine the wind rising, the sky above Brooklyn darkening, and rain bombs being thrown down onto the borough, and out of the black roaring sea of the sky comes a lightning bolt striking the wheel, crackling around and across the circle, hub and spokes, which turns black and flies into pieces, shooting shrapnel in all directions and the water is rising.

  I open my eyes and see that the model Ferris wheel is burnt and smoking and in pieces on the floor.

  Adam’s mother and father sigh. “Yes,” they say. “Yes, well, that does happen, and more often than you’d think. Adam, go downstairs and fetch the broom, please. We can put this back together tonight after you children leave.…”

  After we clean up the scorched earth of the model room we go upstairs to the carnival floor, the floor that Adam’s parents are giving to us. There is a room of bumper cars with flashing strobe lights and a disco ball and loud jarring electronic music as cars speed back and forth slamming into the walls and one another and more than once we have to jump out of the way when a garishly colored car heads for us like a battering ram.

  Also on that floor is the room with a huge hand-carved carousel in the center whirling around and around as its internal organ howls out Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” I wonder whether we could reprogram it to play something else, but doing that would mean going near the clown faces carved on the trunk. I remember my mother taking me to the carousel in Central Park when I was little and part of the thrill was spinning around so close but just out of reach of those scary clowns jeering at you, and I think that was when I began to understand the pleasure, the eroticism, of being just a bit frightened. But I never had to go within reach of those clowns and I will not go near these, not so close that they could reach out with their wooden tongues and painted mouths and get me, drag me into the carved wood, where I would be frozen, trapped in a sharp relief of terror forever and ever. And trapped in wood, I would someday burn.

  The next room is not quite finished; it’s the one they are currently working on; it’s the one they have set aside for me, they tell me, and perhaps someday it will make a good nursery, or perhaps a university, an anniversary, an adversary, a anursereversary. It does not yet have a name.

  “We’re still working on this,” they say. “It’s quite tricky, working out how to make these stick together, but well worth the effort, we think you’ll agree.…”

  And I can see that it must be tricky, for instead of bricks and mortar, the walls are built of layer after layer of plastic mannequins, the kind found in shop windows everywhere, from Strawberry’s to Macy’s. They lie on top of each other, fixed in place by Krazy Glue and their own plastic flesh melted together by a blowtorch. Impossibly smooth and stiff limbs stick out of the walls like swimmers reaching for shore. And this room is not yet finished—a wall and a half remain to be done and cold winds rush in from the open sky outside.

  “Plastic repels water,” Adam’s parents continue to explain, but I have stopped listening. Plastic does indeed repel water, but when I look closely at the wall I can see tiny drops of water in the corners of the mannequins’ eyes. They look like the eyes of a baby doll I had when I was very young. She was called Tiny Tears. She was small with a head of short black hair, and she had been my mother’s before she was mine. Her eyes opened when you picked her up and closed when you put her down. She came with a little plastic bottle that you could fill with water. Then you would fit the tip of the bottle into her little open mouth and nurse her, and then the water would leak out of the tear ducts in her little eyes, and then you would comfort her. Tiny Tears. These weeping mannequins remind me of her, little Tiny Tears, my mother’s doll, and my doll, and perhaps someday my daughter’s doll.

  Later that night I dream about the house.

  In my dream, Adam and I and two tiny weeping babies are living in the Wonder Wheel on top of the house, climbing from one car to another whenever we need to move into or out of a room. The babies love it, swinging from one steel bar to the next with the greatest of ease, like little orangutans, but not I, I slip and lose my grip and then my balance and then I plummet, falling down and down and down until I stick. I try to sit up but I can’t move, I’m glued down and I only realize where I am when I see Adam’s parents lowering a mannequin smeared with Krazy Glue down to me. I try to yell, but my mouth doesn’t open because it’s made of plastic, so I can’t prevent them from gluing me into the wall of mannequins. My eyes begin to leak tiny warm tears that roll down my face and my feet and gather into a puddle that swells and I wake up with a sound between a gulp and a sigh as the water is rising and the waves are rolling in.

  I watch Adam sleeping next to me until the sky turns from black to royal blue. I realize what I have to do.

  I will blow up the house.

  Then I lie back down and sleep peacefully through the morning.

  2. THE PLAN

  It is important not to hurt anybody. I would never hurt Adam’s parents, not if my life depended upon it. So I must make sure the house is unoccupied when my fuses reach their ends. I do not want to hurt anybody at all, just the terrible house, only the beast of Brooklyn.

  I want to kill the house, but I will not. No. To kill the house, to destroy it completely, that would be too terrible for Adam’s parents. Their beloved older child, their life project, the house they began back when they were newlyweds, or young teenagers, or perhaps infants—think how it would hurt them to lose their house completely. All their love, all their work, the luxury of their sweat, and sweet Adam’s work as well—no. I can’t destroy the house entirely.

  I will hurt nobody and I will not destroy the house. All I wish to do is to cripple it a little. Scorch it a bit. Nothing that will not heal. Make the upstairs uninhabitable. Not the downstairs. I do not wish to make Adam’s parents homeless—then they would move in with us. I just want to make them unable to house us. Adam and I have friends we can impose upon in the event of an emergency.

  I can make an emergency.

  So. Not to hurt anybody. Not to destroy the house. This will be easy. I have resources. I can get a small bit of explosive and a timer. Oh yes. That is not difficult at all.

  And it will have to happen on our wedding day. During the ceremony. How else can I ensure Adam’s parents will not be in the house? Adam and I are staying at the hotel the night before and the night after the wedding. The night before in separate rooms, so that the bride does not see the groom before the wedding. No. The other way round.

  Yes. Just a bit of explosive on the top floors. On our wedding day. During the ceremony.

  Yes.

  3. THE WEDDING

  It was easy and slightly disorienting, for I had not expected such—what shall I call it? Enthusiasm? Excitement? Cooperation?—from the house. Poor thing, it is as trapped as I am. But no longer. Soon we will both be free.

  I’m afraid I got a little carried away, but only because the house was so happy, so helpful. It wants to end. I can feel it. Yes.

  It was easy. I slipped out of the hotel at three in the morning. Nobody saw me go. I was too careful for that. I took the subway, slipped my key into the lock, and let myself in. At first I was very caref
ul, anxious lest I wake Adam’s parents, but I soon realized I could clatter up and down the stairs as loudly as I liked. We had formed an alliance, the house and I, and it was taking care of me, enveloping me in silence, taking care to muffle my noise.

  I started on the top floors, placing bits of explosive in the jeering mouths of the clowns—I knew that the house would protect me, would not let them get me. I put explosive in the reaching, grasping hands of the mannequins and in each careening drunken bumper car, each one nestling lovingly against my shins, waiting its turn. I left a large chunk of explosive in the center of the model, and then I realized that I’d gone farther than I had planned, that I had not wanted to hurt the lower floors, on which the people soon to be my in-laws lived, but there was no going back, the house wanted this, and I could only go on.

  On the third floor I held out my cupped hands and the birds flew about me taking bits of explosive in their beaks and brushing me with their wings to say thank you before flying off to place their contributions at the weak places in the walls. On the second floor I approached the dining hall timidly, but the Valkyries bounded over, shaking the house with every step, for they are large as life and twice as natural. They snatched me up on their shoulders and carried me around, cheering “Huzzah, huzzah” and throwing me up in the air again and again until finally I must go, really, I must go now, and they took the last of my explosive and each put some into her tankard, and then I really did leave.

  I took the train back to the hotel, I was back in bed by five thirty and no living soul the wiser, except, perhaps, the house.

  And the rest of the day has been a flurry of kisses and bridesmaids and white tulle and now here I am, walking down the aisle, looking at the moist smiles of all my friends and family, thinking of the house in Brooklyn, now only minutes away from freedom, until I see Adam waiting for me, and I feel such a surge of joy and contentment that I think of nothing else.

  The justice of the peace first asks Adam to take his vows. We keep catching each other’s eyes and trying not to giggle. And then I take my vows, and as I say “I will,” the air is filled with a terrible cracking, a joyful shuddering, and we all look up, and the top of the hall has vanished so we are looking up into blue sky.

  First come the birds, pinwheeling in reckless gyres, the birds of flight holding up the penguins and ostriches and even a dodo, saying farewell before they rush away in a sudden burst of squawking and crapping. And then the Valkyries ride through the air on their motorcycles, waving swords and screaming full-throated battle cries. They blow me brief, loving kisses before revving their motors and howling off into the distant blue.

  * * *

  And finally, finally, the air is filled with falling mannequin parts, plummeting down soft as snow. I do. They are falling all around us. I do. They become true snow as they land, piling up in haphazard drifts and sliding across the floor of the hall. I do. They’re already up to my waist I do and I see Adam leaning over I do and he begins to pat the snow together and make a fort or perhaps a house like my great-grandmother used to build on the Lower East Side when she was growing up I do and I understand. He is not angry, and this will be our life together. I do. He will build up and I will knock down. He will put up buildings and I will blow them apart. He will set the wood and I will strike the match. He will make the fort and I will kick it over. He will make a tower of blocks and I will send a plastic truck smashing, flying, rolling, crashing into it. I do. And one day we will change, and he will tear himself to pieces and I will collect his limbs, his torso, his head, his penis, and put him back together again. And we will live in a Ferris wheel, going up and down forever, together and together and together I do I do.

  The snow melts, turns to warm salt water I do which rises just over my head I do I do. Treading water, I turn and see Adam, whom the waves have carried some distance from me. He is bobbing along, looking somewhat confused. I do. I gather my skirts around me and I swim toward him, the warm water carrying me along smoothly. I do. The water is rising, and I am swimming.

  LILY GLASS

  The girl is gone from the castle and her stepmother wanders the corridors.

  Here is another way of saying the same thing: the girl wanders the corridors, but her stepdaughter is nowhere to be found. Neither is her husband; she is alone in this solid, bulky mansion built on endless reels of flickering light.

  * * *

  The marriage was for love as far as anybody knew, and “anybody” included the bride and groom. She was swept off her feet by his worldliness. The lines on his sun-toughened parchment skin exuded an offhand debauchery she could not even pretend to understand. How could she, an ingénue just out of her teens turned leading lady overnight? And the tension she felt in his presence, the sense of familiarity and corrupted need, the fluttering laughter that bubbled up inside her when they spoke—what could this be but love?

  The groom was Leo Wredde, Hollywood’s most famous rake and ladies’ man. He had been struck by the combination of her deceptive beauty, which changed from day to day, and her awkward, gawky movement. She was shy, almost too frightened to speak to him, and her fear made him self-conscious as well. Perhaps this vicarious return to innocence was what caught his heart, for soon the aging roué and widower was enamored with sultry youth.

  They met at the screen test for her first film. Casting an unknown to play against such a famous and riveting actor was unusual but not unheard of—it was how stars were made. She had done some modeling, and at her audition Leo watched her for a few minutes and then introduced himself, staring intently into her black eyes, which slanted exotically over high, angular cheekbones. After the screen test, she went back to the small studio flat she shared with her mirror, sat in front of the vanity, and slowly stripped off her makeup. Her eyes, it turned out, were not black and her cheekbones were not particularly high. When she was finished, her face was clean but she barely recognized it. She had a new name now, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was. Not Rose anymore, but … L-something, she couldn’t quite remember … Lily, that was it, Lily Glass. It wasn’t so different from her old name, after all. One flower became another, and her surname was translated so as not to sound so Jewish—that was important; only producers and comedians were Jewish—but it meant the same thing. It wasn’t even the first time she had lost one name and gained another. She could remember being five years old, burning up with fever, and her mother chanting and weeping over her, calling her Rose to fool the angel of death. Rose looked in the mirror but she could not find Lily. She reached for some pencils, just to touch up her eyes.

  The movie was a smash, especially after a fan magazine ran a carefully leaked story about the stars’ romance. They were cast opposite each other again, and within a year, to the scandalized delight of the moviegoing public, the notorious hell-raiser had proposed marriage to his innocent sweetheart and she had accepted. A love match, as best as they were able, and if the best they were able didn’t touch either of them very deeply, well, she didn’t know any better and he didn’t want any more.

  * * *

  Now she walks through the mansion’s halls, searching ever more distractedly for her stepdaughter, who, she knows, is not there.

  * * *

  Nivia was the daughter of Leo’s first wife, Bianca, his high-school sweetheart, whose early death had sent him spiraling into brutal decadence as he drank and screwed his way through most of Hollywood, until he met Rose Glaser, now Lily Glass, beautiful, pliant, and only two years older than his daughter. That is one way to tell the story, anyway.

  Nivia is almost never mentioned in the tabloids; there is what amounts to a tacit gentleman’s agreement between the gossip writers and her father. He will provide them with all the salacious gossip they need, and they will avoid all mention of his daughter. He loves her and wants her to have a normal life. Even when Nivia was forced to leave school for conduct unbecoming a young lady and it had taken all of Wredde’s clout and much of his cash to get her into a new o
ne, a boarding school far away in New England, where it snowed during winter, not a whisper of such interesting goings-on made the gossip sheets.

  There was no conduct unbecoming a lady at the boarding school. Nivia kept herself cool, alone, untouchable. At first the other girls were excited and curious about her life even though their parents were pleasantly appalled by her trashy, nouveau origins. But every so often, a classmate who had seen one of Nivia’s father’s movies or read an interview accompanied by a photograph of him wearing one of his custom-fitted black silk shirts, rolling a cigarette across his lower lip, with his signature half smile—who would have thought he was over forty?—would approach Nivia, half shy, half defiantly hopeful, and ask if it was true that Leo Wredde was her father. And could she, perhaps, be persuaded to invite him to the school? Or invite her home for the holidays?

  The answer was always no.

  And then, perhaps out of spite, perhaps out of snobbery, the questions got worse. Was it true that her father had requested, or perhaps rented, the attentions of a dozen young women to help celebrate his best friend’s forty-second birthday? Was it true that her father had screwed the waitress at his favorite after-hours club on the bar in full view of the other drinkers? Was it true, what his last mistress had said when she Told All to the lowest scandal sheet in Hollywood, about the handcuffs and the leather and the riding crop?

  In case you are curious: all of these tales of Leo Wredde, aging libertine, are true, though he himself is fictional. He is a good enough father to deny them in Nivia’s hearing, though she has her suspicions—after all, she must have inherited her unbecoming conduct from somebody, and surely it was not from her sainted mother—but he is also a good enough movie star to wink at the press and answer evasively. You can hear his fans gasp at the thought of his rapacious appetites and the barely plumbed depths of his perversities.