The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

by Aimee Bender

  The neighbors discovered his talent accidentally—he was over at Jenny Sugar’s house one evening, picking her up for a date, when Jenny’s mother misplaced her hairbrush, and was walking around, complaining about this. The young man’s nose twitched and he turned slightly toward the kitchen and pointed to the drawer where the spoons and knives were kept. His date burst into laughter. Now that would be quite a silly place to put the brush, she said, among all that silverware! and she opened the drawer to make her point, to wave with a knife or brush her hair with a spoon, but when she did, boom, there was the hairbrush, matted with gray curls, sitting astride the fork pile.

  Jenny’s mother kissed the young man on the cheek but Jenny herself looked at him suspiciously all night long.

  You planned all that, didn’t you, she said, over dinner. You were trying to impress my mother. Well you didn’t impress me, she said.

  He tried to explain himself but she would hear none of it and when he drove his car up to her house, she fled before he could even finish saying he’d had a nice time, which was a lie anyway. He went home to his tiny room and thought about the word lonely and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two l’s in it, each standing tall by itself.

  As news spread around the neighborhood about the young man’s skills, people reacted two ways: there were the deeply appreciative and the skeptics. The appreciative ones called up the young man regularly. He’d stop by on his way to school, find their keys, and they’d give him a homemade muffin. The skeptics called him over too, and watched him like a hawk; he’d still find their lost items but they’d insist it was an elaborate scam and he was doing it all to get attention. Maybe, declared one woman, waving her index finger in the air, Maybe, she said, he steals the thing so we think it’s lost, moves the item, and then comes over to save it! How do we know it was really lost in the first place? What is going on?

  The young man didn’t know himself. All he knew was the feeling of a tug, light but insistent, like a child at his sleeve, and that tug would turn him in the right direction and show him where to look. Each object had its own way of inhabiting space, and therefore messaging its location. The young man could sense, could smell, an object’s presence—he did not need to see it to feel where it put its gravity down. As would be expected, items that turned out to be miles away took much harder concentration than the ones that were two feet to the left.

  When Mrs. Allen’s little boy didn’t come home one afternoon, that was the most difficult of all. Leonard Allen was eight years old and usually arrived home from school at 3:05. He had allergies and needed a pill before he went back out to play. That day, by 3:45, a lone Mrs. Allen was a wreck. Her boy rarely got lost—only once had that happened in the supermarket but he’d been found quite easily under the produce tables, crying; this walk home from school was a straight line and Leonard was not a wandering kind.

  Mrs. Allen was just a regular neighbor except for one extraordinary fact—through an inheritance, she was the owner of a gargantuan emerald she called the Green Star. It sat, glass-cased, in her kitchen, where everyone could see it because she insisted that it be seen. Sometimes, as a party trick, she’d even cut steak with its beveled edge.

  On this day, she removed the case off the Green Star and stuck her palms on it. Where is my boy? she cried. The Green Star was cold and flat. She ran, weeping, to her neighbor, who calmly walked her back home; together, they gave the house a thorough search, and then the neighbor, a believer, recommended calling the young man. Although Mrs. Allen was a skeptic, she thought anything was a worthwhile idea, and when the line picked up, she said, in a trembling voice:

  You must find my boy.

  The young man had been just about to go play basketball with his friends. He’d located the basketball in the bathtub.

  You lost him? said the young man.

  Mrs. Allen began to explain and then her phone clicked.

  One moment please, she said, and the young man held on.

  When her voice returned, it was shaking with rage.

  He’s been kidnapped! she said. And they want the Green Star!

  The young man realized then it was Mrs. Allen he was talking to, and nodded. Oh, he said, I see. Everyone in town was familiar with Mrs. Allen’s Green Star. I’ll be right over, he said.

  The woman’s voice was too run with tears to respond.

  In his basketball shorts and shirt, the young man jogged over to Mrs. Allen’s house. He was amazed at how the Green Star was all exactly the same shade of green. He had a desire to lick it.

  By then, Mrs. Allen was in hysterics.

  They didn’t tell me what to do, she sobbed. Where do I bring my emerald? How do I get my boy back?

  The young man tried to feel the scent of the boy. He asked for a photograph and stared at it—a brown-haired kid at his kindergarten graduation—but the young man had only found objects before, and lost objects at that. He’d never found anything, or anybody, stolen. He wasn’t a policeman.

  Mrs. Allen called the police and one officer showed up at the door.

  Oh it’s the finding guy, the officer said. The young man dipped his head modestly. He turned to his right; to his left; north; south. He got a glimmer of a feeling toward the north and walked out the back door, through the backyard. Night approached and the sky seemed to grow and deepen in the darkness.

  What’s his name again? he called back to Mrs. Allen.

  Leonard, she said. He heard the policeman pull out a pad and begin to ask basic questions.

  He couldn’t quite feel him. He felt the air and he felt the tug inside of the Green Star, an object displaced from its original home in Asia. He felt the tug of the tree in the front yard which had been uprooted from Virginia to be replanted here, and he felt the tug of his own watch which was from his uncle; in an attempt to be fatherly, his uncle had insisted he take it but they both knew the gesture was false.

  Maybe the boy was too far away by now.

  He heard the policeman ask: What is he wearing?

  Mrs. Allen described a blue shirt, and the young man focused in on the blue shirt; he turned off his distractions and the blue shirt, like a connecting radio station, came calling from the northwest. The young man went walking and walking and about fourteen houses down he felt the blue shirt shrieking at him and he walked right into the backyard, through the back door, and sure enough, there were four people watching TV including the tear-stained boy with a runny nose eating a candy bar. The young man scooped up the boy while the others watched, so surprised they did nothing, and one even muttered: Sorry, man.

  For fourteen houses back, the young man held Leonard in his arms like a bride. Leonard stopped sneezing and looked up at the stars and the young man smelled Leonard’s hair, rich with the memory of peanut butter. He hoped Leonard would ask him a question, any question, but Leonard was quiet. The young man answered in his head: Son, he said, and the word rolled around, a marble on a marble floor. Son, he wanted to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  LEGACY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  DREAMING IN

  POLISH

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Pig,” the old woman said.

  “No breath,” he finished.

  “Pushing pig,” she said.

  “And brown and dead.�
��

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

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

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