“Any day,” he shouts.

I look around like I’m not sure where his voice is coming from. The gas station is on the corner of a busy four-way intersection next to the highway. It’s early morning and the sun is in everybody’s face. Nobody is slowing down. Nobody is giving anybody an inch.
“Nice car, buddy. You tryin’ to save the world?” His voice sounds like gargled steak.
I set my sights on him as if finally realizing something painfully obvious.

“Save the world?” I ask. “Do I look like Jesus? I’m just trying to put the likes of you out of business.”

He gives that a ridiculing laugh.

“It’ll never happen,” he pipes up. “The price of oil will go down and people will go back to not giving a shit. We’ll make sure of it. We’re too big to fail.”

He’s the kind of guy who talks at you with his chin. He rolls the sleeves of his New England Patriots sweatshirt and folds his arms across his chest like it’s supposed to scare me. I am somewhat intimidated, but not by his hairy forearms. It’s his confidence that frightens me. He’s absolutely sure that he’d kick my ass. I don’t have that kind of esteem so I fear his. I often resort to this kind of cowering and sometimes hate myself for it. One of my knees, I can’t tell which one, has already started shaking. It’s not the usual fear. There’s some anger in there as well.

“Sure you’re big, but I’m too small to step on.” I say this with my head slightly turned from him, kicking my driver side tire for good measure.

He coughs up a wad of phlegm and launches it in my general direction. It lands a good distance from my Prius, but insultingly close to what little ego I have left. He’s really taken me for a wimp. He can’t see past my brown corduroy blazer and matching Italian loafers. I can’t say that I blame him. The costume that I wear is a convincing one. It has thus far kept me safe from maniacs like my father and blowhards like the fireplug.

I get in the car and look down at my lap. Both knees are shaking. Maybe one with anger. Maybe one with fear. I drive over to pumps. There’s only one available. I pull up to it, kill the engine, and reach down for the fuel cap switch. I flip it and the hatchback opens. I still do this from time to time, especially when I’m distracted. As I get out of the car, the fireplug shouts something else at me, but I can’t hear over the television screen mounted atop the pump. They’re everywhere these days, waiting rooms and checkout lines. It’s not like they’re showcasing classic cinema. Exxon never plays Antonioni. Neither does Stop & Shop, nor your primary care physician. Would it kill them to show something artistic while bleeding us dry? It doesn’t have to be high-minded. There are commercial masterpieces like The Godfather. Instead, they got some plastic blonde julienning vegetables for a pasta primavera recipe. I try ignoring her, but she’s louder than the morning commute itself.

I swipe my debit card. After considerable delay, the computer asks me to see the teller. It says please. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, I have sufficient funds. This particular gas station doesn’t always agree with my magnetic particles. I often take this personally and why shouldn’t I? They’re suggesting a metaphysical flaw on my part when in fact the misconception belongs to them. There’s no excuse for it. They’re too big for shoddy equipment, but they can afford to belittle me. They’re the only gas station on this side of the road. It’s not like I’m going to cross two lanes of rush hour traffic just to make a point. Location, location, location, and individuals somewhere between.

I don’t want to see the teller. I know what he looks like. He’s tall and gray with a big round pregnant stomach. Every time I see him, he’s wearing a blue Exxon sweatshirt with Earl embroidered over his heart. Earl never looks at me when I pay. He never mutters a sorry when their state of the art technology rejects my existence. He sits on a stool and listens to talk radio. I can well imagine his outlook on things. Tom Brady is God. Barak Obama is the Devil. If he can’t be swayed by runaway icebergs crashing into Australia then what good will getting in his face do? I press cancel and swipe my card again. The shaking has traveled up to my hands.

While the pump re-processes my data, I watch the fireplug open valves and lift lids. He dips a long measuring stick into the gas tanks. Something gets into me. I refuse to give him the inch.

“Don’t let that ruler get to your head, pal. It’s not that big!”

He holds his hand to his ear feigning deafness, daring me to repeat myself. I don’t look like the kind of guy who would smash his head in with a tire iron. My father looks and acts like that kind of guy. He was born in Quindici, a small town in the province of Avellino. At twenty, he immigrated to Boston in order to pursue a career as a union laborer. People have always said that he looks like Sonny Corleone. My father has never seen The Godfather. It’s a three hour film. He’s never sat down that long. James Caan has twice won Italian-American of the year for his performance as the hot-headed oldest of the Corleone brothers. James Caan is not Italian. He is the son of a Jewish butcher. It’s never made sense to me. How can my father look Jewish? Is there something about my lineage that I don’t know? People also say that my father has the body of Hercules. Sometimes they say he has the body of the Incredible Hulk. In this case, I know what they mean. They mean he has the body of Lou Ferrigno because nobody has ever seen Hercules or the Incredible Hulk in real life. They’ve seen Lou Ferrigno with a beard and club or they’ve seen him painted green. Hercules was not Jewish and neither was the Incredible Hulk. Sonny Corleone had a Herculean temper and I’ve read stories that the real James Caan is a black belt in judo. Put it this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to someday find out that I’m part golem.

The pump has rejected my existence a second time. The fireplug uncoils a large hose. With both hands, he holds it between his legs while filling one of the tanks. More wishful thinking on his part. He continues to glare at me. I blow him a kiss. He removes both hands from the hose and sculpts them into a makeshift megaphone.

“Stick around so I can put my foot up that candy ass of yours.”

He has hit a soft spot. I do have somewhat of a sugarplum ass. I’m not fat by any stretch of the imagination. I’m 5’9”. I have a 34 waist, but my ass is full and soft. It’s my mother’s ass. I am built like her. I also have her long eyelashes. Personally, I think she bears a striking resemblance to Marisa Tomei. Nobody else sees it, not even my father. Marisa Tomei has a brother Adam. I once Googled Adam’s image wondering and inexplicably hoping that we’d look alike, but it wasn’t meant to be. In looking like my mother, I look more like Adam’s sister Marisa. I also inherited the Oscar-winning actress’s angelic countenance. In all my thirty years, I’ve never struck another human being. Growing up in East Boston, I never had to. My father’s reputation and stature protected me from those who might capitalize on my Christly nature, but he’s not here anymore. He’s hiding somewhere in Italy. The authorities spend more money than he’s ever made trying to find him.

I swipe my card a third time. The plastic blond dispels the myth about adding oil or butter to your pasta water. Doing so coats the pasta and will prevent it from absorbing the sauce. They’re divulging our secrets. They’re reducing all of our worldly contributions to a few cheap and easy clichés. They will leave us with nothing. It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business. They say this and the most inhumane acts become wildly practical.
“Come over here and I’ll beat you down to size!” It’s the loudest I’ve ever yelled.

Holding up his index finger, the fireplug signals that he’ll be right over. Customers stop pumping. Some head into the store with hurried footsteps. Others duck into their cars and lock the doors. They see it coming before I do. The voice of Earl comes over the intercom system.

“Knock it off,” he says.

I look towards the store, but can’t see Earl. The morning sun is setting the windows ablaze.

“He started it,” I say aloud, not really sure if Earl is listening.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass. Either come inside and pay or get the hell out of here.”

“Whatever happened to the customer always being right?” I quip.

“I ain’t selling nice sports coats. You’re not a customer until you come in here and pay for gas.”

I take my blazer off and throw it to the ground. If it was up to them, I’d be playing Sonny Corleone my entire life. I’ve seen footage of Robert De Niro trying out for the role of Sonny. He doesn’t pull it off, which is somewhat surprising given his Oscar winning performance as Sonny’s father, Vito Corleone. You’d think traces of Vito would emerge in De Niro’s performance of the Sicilian Don’s son. Every so often, when the feds coming knocking in regards to my father’s whereabouts, they’re always surprised by our unlikeness.

“Earl, climate change isn’t a fairytale. It’s real and you’re one of the primary contributors. You’re also responsible for both wars.”

There’s some crackling feedback before he responds.

“That’s it,” he says. “I’m calling the cops.”

I’ll never know for sure if my subconscious purposely popped the hatchback instead of the fuel cap. I never did reach back inside to correct the error. Having the hatchback open made my next move all the more accessible. I unbuttoned my shirt cuffs and lifted the hatchback open. I removed the tire iron from the spare tire compartment. It wasn’t like the weighty tire irons of old. It was made of some cheap alloy but heavy enough for the job at hand. I had no intention of hitting him. I just wanted to leave an impression. I wanted to raise it above my head and see him cower. Put the fear of Jesus into him and the anger of the Hulk inside of myself.

The fireplug had turned his back to me while coiling the hose. I wasn’t looking for a cheap shot. I wanted him to see and understand my frustrations with the world. I wanted my frustrations to appear relevant and powerful. In my best Hercules pose, I raised the tire iron above my head and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t think twice about spinning around and catching me in the chin with a wild right hook. My head barely budged. All the shaking in my limbs stopped. I was tougher than I’d ever thought, but my arm panicked. It swung with the tire iron in hand—a kneejerk reaction some thirty years in the making.

I stuck the fireplug just above the brow, knocking him to one knee. He pressed his hand against the wound and whined profanities. There was lots of blood and so forth. Everything was going horribly wrong. This wasn’t what I had wanted. He looked terrified. He seemed to resent my existence, which was exactly how I had previously felt about him. He wanted to stand up and kill me. I could see it all over his face. I had no choice. I had to hit him again. I wouldn’t place the full force of my anger behind it. Just a little something to keep him down, as my father had always told my deaf ears.

The fireplug’s eyes were shut tight as if making an excruciating wish. I wanted him to see it coming. It was the decent thing to do.

“Look at me,” I said. “I want you to see me.”

He refused. He shook his head. He didn’t understand so I tried explaining it to him.

“It’s personal,” I said. “No more business as usual. I want you to see me. I’ve taken you personally, and now I want you to take me personally. It’s common courtesy. We all deserve to be taken personally. The world would be a better place.”

He still couldn’t understand. I didn’t understand either, but it was my job to make believe. This is the role of those in power.

“See that car over there?” I pointed to my Prius with the tire iron. “It gets forty-seven miles to the gallon.”

“Your fucking car? Is that what this is about?”

He wasn’t very happy. He took a pitiful swing and missed by a mile, nearly falling over in the process. Of course it was about my car. It was about global warming. It was about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was about the BP oil spill. It was about James Caan breaking Gianni Russo’s ribs while filming their Godfather fight scene. It was also about me defining myself in the absence of my father. But I wasn’t going to tell the fireplug that. I had to keep a few secrets for myself while I still had a self to save, before I turned green or grew a beard. I heard sirens. The fireplug heard them too. They gave him the courage to look up. The second blow caught him just above the left ear, a few inches shy of his temple. And it had come to me just like that, from somewhere way back when, just as I’d always anticipated.

Felicia’s Journey was before I understood I couldn’t watch violence and during the time when I was still going to men’s movies. I hadn’t yet analyzed the fact that wives went to Memento and The Blues Brothers, but husbands didn’t go to wedding movies like Pride and Prejudice or to other films that take place after the wedding. Men’s selfishness in movie choices was like the rest of life in which wives went to football games but husbands didn’t attend the deep-thinking plays their wives wanted to see, even though every Sunday magazine survey showed that men liked being married more than women and should therefore be more willing to compromise. But, no matter how many times they printed the surveys, the results were always new to the young women like the bride-to-be who didn’t believe the surveys were true.

Soon after I realized I couldn’t watch violence, I was watching Pulp Fiction with my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, the mother of the bride-to-be. She had suggested a movie and in a burst of friendliness, I had agreed but shortly after the movie started, I heard music that meant bloodshed. Stumbling over my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, I ran down the stairs to the lobby. Because I couldn’t watch violence, I was willing to leave them together to watch what men thought was an exciting movie and what therefore might be an aphrodisiac for my boyfriend, leading to the possibility that he and his ex-girlfriend might get together again, but I didn’t care.

Since Pulp Fiction, I carry a New Yorker in a correct-sized purse so I can stay in the lobby and read because, more and more, such scenes of violence have to be avoided. Sometimes, the lobby is freezing and to stay warm I pace back and forth on the dirty carpet with its popcorn-infested smell. Sometimes I go to another movie in the same megaplex. It doesn’t matter if I come in late because the movies are predictable and I can guess what went on before.  Sometimes, a movie shows an uninteresting story and tries to make it interesting by telling it backward or repeating the same scene again and again. Memento was such a movie, popular especially with men, no doubt because of the continuous thuggery. A low life kills someone, forgets what he did, drives around, kills, forgets again, drives, kills. This was supposed to be interesting because it combined both questionable techniques – repeating the scene and telling the story backwards.

My boyfriend can watch such inferior movies no matter how many times the same murder was committed by the same person. Our male ancestors must have scanned the horizon for moving images and the scanning genes are showing up in this way only now. When I met my boyfriend, I thought he had intellectual rigor and understood he couldn’t afford to spend his time in non-worthwhile movies or repeats of Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t matter, he says, the setting, camera angles, color, there’s always something to see. It is this that will make him wake up one day in five years and ask where his life has gone. The human race is lucky that moving images weren’t invented until the late nineteenth century, after other important items had been discovered, such as Bach cantatas, coffee, reading glasses, embalming, and romantic love. For centuries, this last had been classified as an illness for which it was thought that marriage was a remedy.

You would think that being invited to a wedding was preferable to a movie about  serial killers and I was glad the bride’s mother had invited me, although I knew she had invited me only because of my boyfriend. Living in a large city, I wasn’t part of any real community and I was grateful to be invited to be part of a fake community for a day. I had attended only a few weddings in my life, perhaps because I don’t have a community or maybe because my friends were smart enough not to marry. The first wedding was that of an eighteen year old friend. A year after the marriage, I met her and her husband for lunch at a café on the Mississippi River during the time when you could order only herbal tea, before my generation realized we couldn’t live on love and needed caffeine to rush to work and earn money, as well as to prevent migraines. The three of us ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on whole grain with soy mayonnaise, which was all the dressing that was allowed. The wanton divulging of unwanted information on Oprah wasn’t in fashion yet – also feminism was in a superb bloom –  so I was shocked when her husband said, “I think my wife should emulate the Virgin Mary.” Who was his model? He didn’t say. What would come of a marriage where the man saw the Virgin as a model for his wife. What became of that marriage was, a few years later, the husband married his wife’s friend’s ex-husband.

At the second wedding a beautiful twenty-two year old friend married her college sweetheart. It was a short-lived commitment but our friendship didn’t last either. The last time we talked, she wanted tips on how to talk to her now ex-boyfriend but what could you say when someone asked how to talk to a man? And her boyfriend was even worse about television than mine. I have called, sent letters and birthday cards, but she’s avoided me – it could be said to be more than “avoided” since we haven’t talked in eight years. Had I offended her by being honest? I said I had no idea how to talk to her boyfriend. Or maybe we simply had nothing to talk about anymore. My doctor said her friends don’t talk about work or kids or mates, only about The New Yorker. Knowing my doctor was up to date on her New Yorkers, I considered what that meant for my medical care but if my friend read The New Yorker, maybe she wouldn’t be a former friend.

Even though evidence for short-lived marriages was everywhere, the young knew about marriage only as a gay issue. This was one of the differences between now and when I went to college. The others include pants hanging past the butt crack, global warming, carpal tunnel from overuse of the internet, florescent lights that cause cataracts, and migration from sensible midwestern places to the California playground where the dry light causes cataracts as well as skin cancer, jitteriness, and addiction to new age philosophies as an antidote to jitteriness.  Did my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter and her fiancée know about the oppression of women and the patriarchal legal structure? When they heard about the Defense of Marriage Act, didn’t they think, “I don’t want anything the federal government defends”? But they didn’t know because schools didn’t teach those things.

“The younger generation commits to each other,” the bride’s mother said.  “We married to get presents or because someone was too stoned to say no.”

I referred her to Virginia Woolf. Nine out of ten people on the street, Woolf wrote, would say they wanted love, nothing but love, but, once married, women would say “This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.” Here were two conflicting ideas that could give you a headache and had probably given one to Virginia Woolf. I hoped the bride’s mother had told her daughter what to do when marriage went bad and your dopamine receptors meshed with your mate’s and you couldn’t leave without a huge downer. Would my boyfriend’s ex secure the necessary dopamine and inject it so that the daughter’s endorphins didn’t die?

I had attended only a handful of weddings in thirty years. Now there had been ten in the last four. Also many movies about serial killers. What did serial killers and weddings have in common? Maybe it was suspense about what came next. One event was so rosy and promising; the other wretched and hopeless. I wanted to know what parents and siblings thought. Many novels said how parents felt about their daughters’ weddings but no one explained what a mother and father thought about a serial killer son. This was something to wonder about. It was also hard to find out what parents of Nazis felt when their children turned into thugs.

It wasn’t long enough ago that I was addicted to Law & Order SVU, following the plot while I pretended to read War & Peace, reaching only p. 36 before the book was due for the second time at the library. As I pretended to read, I wondered if the victim on L&O SVU would live and, if so, would rape ruin her life? I made up back stories for the lowlife on SVU. How did the rapist get that way? What about the feral teenagers who raped the handicapped thirteen year old? It seemed to me that no amount of therapy or substance abuse treatment was going to help, even though at one point in my life I had worked with sexual perpetrators, most of whom had been married. That job taught me something about these people and their back stories that L&O never explained.

The back story of Mariska Hargitay, the female detective on SVU, is that she’s the daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay. Growing up, I read Movie Screen Magazine and systematically examined Jayne Mansfield in her floor-length, sequined skin-tight sheathes. Her IQ was 168 and she had been a classical pianist. Jayne Mansfield wore low-cut gowns that she let slip when she was out to dinner so her nipples exposed themselves and she got more exposure, too. In sixth grade, I saw that looking like her would mean a life unlike the boring one that seemed inevitable for me, even though I too was a classically trained pianist. Maybe if I hadn’t considered Jayne Mansfield second rate compared to Elizabeth Taylor, I would have tried to be more like her. Then I would have had a fuller life, married three times, and wanted to spend my time with friends at weddings instead of seeing a movie about a serial killer, although Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car accident at thirty-four so maybe I would be dead. I didn’t know then that three year old Mariska Hargitay, in the back seat when the car was hit, would grow up to star on Law & Order SVU and that I’d watch Jayne Mansfield’s genes for half of my waking life.

These were the things I mulled over while my boyfriend watched television. “Let me watch This Old House,” he always said. “You already know about building houses, ” I said. What could you think about while you were watching the house builders? These wholesome men never had a back story like Mickey Hargitay. House builders or serial killers – some nights that was the only choice.

It was like Nazi Germany, also a time of wedding, propagating and serial killing when German newspapers detailed gory details of the killings and artists painted murdered prostitutes. I realized I had to be vigilant and not only in movies. I would have to close my eyes in museums, especially in Vienna, where many of these paintings hung. The Nazis called these artists degenerate. Normally I disagreed with the Nazis but, in this case, I wasn’t sure. Still, I didn’t live in pre-Nazi Germany. Why were there so many serial murder shows now?  And weddings? I didn’t know.

Before I was invited to my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding, another friend’s daughter told me she was having a pirate wedding. Rape and pillaging, I thought. This was because I hadn’t seen any Johnny Depp movies nor attended a theme wedding. I knew of a wedding where the guests had to wear white and of one with no dress code but where the guests had to fly to Mexico City, then drive three hours to a remote village. Where did the money come from? This was something else that had changed since I was in college.

I invited the future pirate bride to lunch in a restaurant called a roadhouse, but it was nothing like the roadhouses of my childhood when families stopped between small towns on Saturday evening for chicken with mushroom soup on top. This restaurant served Ahi tuna sandwiches with aioli on sourdough bread, another reason to ask where the money came from although I knew the money for this lunch was coming from me.

“Why a pirate wedding?” I asked over seared fish. “It’s symbolic,” she said. “People wouldn’t ask if this were a Renaissance wedding.” This showed others, too, had been puzzled. When I read the wedding invitation, “Pirate dress expected. Thank you for the love, magic and collaboration you’ve shown us,” I knew the bride and I lacked a common language so I did as I was told for that wedding and rented a cleavage-revealing gown in the pirate-wench theme. But my own offerings, unlike Jayne Mansfield’s, went unnoticed. This was because of the cleavage the young revealed, which could have supported love, collaboration, and also pewter platters.

The good thing about my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding was that it wasn’t in Hawaii or Brazil and we could wear whatever we wanted; the bad thing was it was the daughter of my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, My boyfriend is close to his many exes. One invites him to her modern dance performances, one offers her house in Provence, another knits him scarves in a village where everyone is an artist or grows Gravenstein apples, although she has never brought us any. All these ex-girlfriends are annoying and his ex-wife is especially annoying. I had kept my balance in the middle of my boyfriend’s friendship with the ex-girlfriends by figuring we were roughly equal in the looks department but then my brother met the mother of the bride-to-be. “She’s gorgeous,” he exclaimed. This was demoralizing. I had always believed my mother who always said, “Just be yourself and boys will like you.” How wrong she was.

Before we could go to that wedding, we had to go to one in Portland, Oregon. So that we could preserve good will towards each other, we listened to Pride and Prejudice in the car. This put us in a romantic but realistic mood, which helped when I ran into my boyfriend’s ex-wife.

“Hi,” I said, “it’s me,” and then my name.

“Do I know you?” she said.

She must have learned this sense of humor when she became trained in Laughter Yoga, a discipline that brings oxygen to the body and brain as I found on the website. I noticed there was a laughing club near my apartment. It could be a way to counter the sadness and depression that any thinking person must feel in the face of rampant capitalism, famine in Africa, and cell phone use while driving, not to mention the failure of marriage as a cure for the disease of romantic love and the bad choices on late night TV.

A few weeks later our car twisted up the switchbacks to my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding in the brown California hills. I calculated how far we were from a corner store if the couple didn’t provide chocolate and I needed to charge up my endorphins. If I needed to cry because my life hadn’t worked out as well as the young couple imagined theirs would, I couldn’t very well excuse myself by telling the groom, “I’m sorry, I need to get away so I can stop being bitter because my boyfriend likes bad movies and I never went to live in France and now it’s too late.”

As soon as we stepped out of the car into the 95 degree heat, I saw that wearing the long, pleated red scarf had been a mistake. Under an oak tree, the groom and bride, more beautiful and elegant than Jayne Mansfield, picked from a wicker basket scraps of paper on which they had written vows. When the couple began to read the paper scraps, I was glad for the scarf. “I will make you laugh when you’re down, I will support you in your work and your hobbies and all that you do, I will help you play, I will listen always.” The problem with self-written vows was no training in poetry, which was now composed by typing on the computer, then separating words into lines according to commas. There were entire classes taught in how to determine line division in poetry but the young didn’t know this. They hadn’t read Elements of Style by Strunk and White: Rule #17, “Omit Needless Words.” The old vows were short and to the point, you had only to adjust them slightly to eliminate the non-feminist aspects.

Even though the couple was young and didn’t have cataracts, the hand-written vows were hard to read and many were repeated. Wouldn’t it have been better to type them in the best font for reading, 16 point Tahoma? I took the scarf off my neck, opened its pleats, wrapped it around my head and let it fall over my face, implying it was protecting me from the 100 degree sun. This way, I could sleep through the vows that were repeated.

Among the young people at the wedding, everyone was a singer, writer,  performance artist or computer expert. The computer experts had the money and I had to hope they were marrying the singers and artists. What would happen to California with only computer experts and artists? Who would write the wedding vows – the computer experts or the artists? I didn’t know which to wish for. This bride was an art curator, but she must not know that the most stable of all five marriage types was the breadwinner man and homemaker mom or it would have worried her.

After the vows were finished and the Universalist Life Minister pronounced them wed, the guests began the toasts. “We’ve learned so much from you,” their best friend said. The next friend repeated this, then five others did, too. I was puzzled. How much could they have learned from people who were twenty-five years old? Had they learned about Jayne Mansfield? Did they know about Abraham and Isaac and that our generation would send their generation to war? Had they learned what not to say when they got mad at their spouse? They were too young to have learned about lust fading.

Why was learning so important at a wedding? Maybe their parents hadn’t taught them enough. They hadn’t taught them about poetry or economy of language, that was true – that had been left to schools with disastrous results. They hadn’t learned about modesty in dress. Maybe, like many young people, they thought their parents hadn’t taught them anything. They had a point.

What had the couple taught their friends? Had they taught them about love? If so, how had they done it? I needed to learn more about love, and tolerance, too. Maybe I could get in on the learning but then I would have to ignore that generation’s shamelessness in dress and deficiencies in language. Why were weddings so earnest? Couldn’t they just be a good party? The couple should hope for kids, good sex for a while, and two incomes to support aging parents.

The mother cried at the wedding. She was a romantic – she hoped for a bright future and forgot the sad parts. Or maybe she cried because, like me, she compared her life to the happy couple’s and found it lacking. Of course, there was also the teary relief of getting a child off your hands.

*******

After the wedding I went to the French movie which wasn’t, in fact, about serial killers although it had nearly as many murders – it was about parents who murdered to defend their children, another result of marriage. The movie makers must have thought that the words “serial killer” in advertisements would make people want to see the movie, although only six people were watching that night.

After the movie, a young friend and I walked up a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

“Are you going to get married,” I asked.

“I’m not categorically against it,” she said.

She was my hope for the future, neither an artist nor a computer expert but a researcher on women’s reproductive health, who knew about economy of language.

“It offers security,” she said. “Like a weight watchers’ contract. Just having the contract makes it harder to divorce because of the legal hassle.”

I didn’t say anything. Maybe she was right. I’d never been married, but I doubted her reasoning, although the comparison of marriage with a weight watchers’ contract showed levity, which was good because leaving your spouse today wasn’t the same as when Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina left theirs. You might see him and his new wife when you and your new same sex partner went to a gluten-free wine-tasting party, whereas Madame Bovary had to kill herself, although if she had owned real estate, she probably could have lived.

I told my friend, if you do marry, I don’t care if you stay married, and if it doesn’t work out, I hope you don’t cry too much. But as we walked up the hill with the setting sun peeping out from the fog to reflect on the steps tiled with flowers, fish, birds and sun, every one, a marriage symbol, I knew that if she didn’t cry about that, there would be something else. I cry when the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro sings, “Dove sono.” “Where are the lovely moments of sweetness and pleasure? Why, despite tears and pain, has my love for him not vanished?” The melody is tight. Five notes next to each other, like soft crying, capture the anguish of faded love. The Countess’s song is heart rending. She was old enough to know that her husband was a sex addict but she could still be disappointed and she could still make me cry.

The neighbors weren’t a part of the evening, so they didn’t concern us too much.

What did concern us was the body, that it fell.

The body had fallen from the sofa and landed on the carpet, but the neighbors couldn’t hear that. The body landed softly, like it had been laid down on a soft surface, like it was a baby put to bed.

It’s not as if the neighbors don’t make any noise themselves. Yesterday one of them was trudging back and forth in high-heeled shoes. We listened to the high-heeled shoes and imagined what it would be like to walk in them. We don’t allow high-heeled shoes in the house, so we can’t say for sure.

We knocked on the ceiling with a broom handle and they knocked back. This went on for about twenty minutes.

Most of us wanted to go home at this point, once the body was on the floor like this, as it was late. Most of us were tired and had to get up for work tomorrow. Not everyone had to get up for work, but everyone said they did. The truth is most of us don’t work. We either don’t have to or don’t want to. No one blames anyone else either way. We all understand what everyone is up against.

We weren’t sure who was responsible for the body falling on the floor. All of us had been near the body at some point during the evening, but there was no way to tell who was responsible.

Still, none of us ever point fingers.

We drew lots to see who would take the body away. The process was equitable and went off without incident. One of us with soft-soled shoes drew the body lot and this signaled the end of the evening.

Everyone was then reminded of the neighbors. We told them to be mindful of the neighbors on the way out. We told them about the noise, the complaints. We said we didn’t know what was wrong and we apologized.

People were milling about as we did this, putting on coats and hats and discussing what they were doing for the coming weekend and the rest of their lives. Everyone had similar plans. All of us were going out east or skiing up north or to their villa in the south. No one was any different. We all blended into each other, one body into the next, arms and legs, hands and heads.

On the way out everyone whispered that it was a lovely evening, that they were happy to see everyone else and looked forward to next time.

“Patty, how are you feeling?” Dalton’s mother asked as she hung up her son’s coat. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m sorry if Dalton’s a bit wound up. He had a doughnut and two glasses of grape juice for breakfast.”

“My husband’s on call this weekend,” she added, as if that explained everything—the tardiness, the “challenges” Dalton’s behavior always presented, the self-importance that each of the D’Amicos wore like a family crest. The woman flashed Miss Nugent a photo-ready smile, kissed Dalton, and hurried out.

Parents who were too busy during the week usually ran errands, and a few chatted outside the classrooms, but the majority of the moms and dads spent the hour at the Waffle House across the street. To them, Sunday school was just another kids’ activity, like T-ball or pre-ballet. Early in the year, Miss Nugent had overheard complaints that one hour wasn’t even enough time to read the Sunday paper. She confided to her sister, who worked at a Measuring Up daycare center in Connecticut, how some of the parents grated on her. “Patty,” her sister declared, “the children are never the problem.”

At the boys’ table, Dalton looked comfortable and relaxed in his blazer, button-down shirt, and paisley tie—a smartly dressed young man rather than a six-year-old playing a grownup. He reminded Miss Nugent of his father when she’d first met with the man at the hospital.

In that pre-op meeting, Dr. D’Amico had seemed pleasant and reassuring. “We’ll nip this thing in the bud,” he said with such finality that she almost believed the threat already neutralized, the cancer excised and disposed of. (She couldn’t help but note, too, the way he’d included her in the nipping, as if they were partners in the endeavor.) He predicted six weeks of steadily diminishing postoperative pain and joked that she would be ready to return to the singles scene in no time at all.

After the surgery, Dr. D’Amico had visited her room in high spirits, friendlier than ever. “We’re golden,” he said, rapping his knuckles against her bedside table. “No sign of spread beyond the ovary, and the path report came back with Stage 1A.” Of course, to be on the safe side, he’d had to take out the whole kit and caboodle, as he called it, but they’d discussed that beforehand, and he was pleased, so pleased with the outcome. As he headed for the door, he’d beamed as if she’d won him a prize. “See you around, gorgeous,” he called.

Miss Nugent tried to shift her focus back to the children. As usual, Dalton had distracted everybody. He was rocking back in his chair and sticking his tongue out at Joey N. while the other children tried to keep from laughing.

“Sit up straight, Dalton. Feet on the floor.” Miss Nugent nudged the boy toward a more proper position. “And don’t disturb the others. Let’s be nice.”

She placed a coloring sheet in front of the boy, taking care not to lean too close. The last time she’d seen Dalton in class, weeks ago, he’d crinkled up his face as she stapled together his Lost Sheep lift-the-flap page. “Miss Nugent,” he said, his voice nasally and his eyes squinting nearly shut. “Miss Nugent, why do you smell like fish sticks? I don’t like fish sticks.” There were snickers and scattered announcements of “I don’t like fish sticks either.”

That day after worship, Miss Nugent had gone straight home and laundered her entire wardrobe. Following a tip she read in the newspaper, she set a tray of charcoal briquettes in her closet to trap any residual odors. She began showering in the morning rather than at night, using the Plumeria-scented body wash that Clarissa’s parents had given her as a Christmas/thank you gift. (Had Clarissa also detected an odor?) She brought in cinnamon sachets for her cubicle at work.

During the week, Miss Nugent audited employee expense reports for TerraOne Financial, for which she earned fifteen dollars an hour plus health and dental. Her most exciting moment in thirteen years at TOF had come last year, when she rejected a report from the vice president of business operations, who’d requested reimbursement for dry cleaning, greens fees, and cover and gratuities at a gentlemen’s club. As she positioned her mouse cursor over the DENY button, her fingertips had trembled with the stirrings of power, a kind of vigilante justice, a feeling both thrilling and terrifying that had revisited her when the man resigned at the end of the year.

Brenda Glidden, the children’s ministry director, beckoned Miss Nugent out to the hall. Brenda was teaching the First Communion class that morning, and she handed over the key to her office. “I’ve informed the other teachers you’re in charge,” Brenda said and smiled. “If anyone wants supplies, they’ll have to go through you.” Miss Nugent blushed at the pride she felt for being entrusted with this responsibility.

Returning to her class, Miss Nugent beheld a small miracle: the children, every one of them, were seated and quiet. Clarissa was decorating a frame she’d drawn around her masterpiece. Joey B. had sketched in a background with birds and trees and a happy-face sun. All were passing the markers without fuss. It was at moments such as this that Miss Nugent felt most acutely the longing to have, or have had (before the hysterectomy, of course) children of her own.

There would have been the matter of a father, though. The boys had always treated her differently than the girls did. The girls loved to tease her, for her height, her weight, her dyslexia, her packing lunch every day, her inability to turn the rope, much less jump double Dutch. The boys, however, simply ignored Plain Patty Nugent, and they kept right on ignoring her long after the girls’ taunting stopped. A faithful and practical person, Patty eventually accepted her spinsterhood and sought to discern in what other ways God was calling her to serve. Last summer, when Pastor Conn and Brenda Glidden had asked the congregation for someone to instruct the kindergarten class, she’d scarcely hesitated before volunteering.

Though she hated to disturb the tranquility in her classroom, there was a lesson to teach. “Two more minutes,” she said, circling the tables. “You can finish your artwork at home.”

As she passed the boys, Dalton blew a raspberry.

“Who tooted?” demanded Joey N. The boys laughed.

“Let’s not make impolite noises,” Miss Nugent said, as Dalton lunged over the table and scribbled across Joey N.’s paper. The two began dueling with their markers.

At the elementary school, kindergartners were subject to an array of incentives and punishments. There were extra recesses, a prize chest, Peacemaker parties. Pink slips, the safe chair, the principal’s office. In Sunday school, on the other hand, there were neither carrots nor sticks. At the beginning of the year, when the need for encouraging appropriate behavior was already clear, Miss Nugent had asked Brenda Glidden if she could reward the good children with cookies or candy. “Patty,” Brenda said with a look of genuine astonishment, “you know the Lord doesn’t see them as good or bad.”

Miss Nugent was always making mistakes like this. Grace, Pastor Conn would say. We can’t do a blessed thing about it. God gives us grace no matter what.

Miss Nugent clapped her hands and called the children to circle time. They claimed their carpet squares from the stack in the corner and filed into place. Dalton sprawled between Jimmy and Joey B. instead of taking his assigned spot beside Miss Nugent.

“If you can’t behave,” she warned, “I’ll have to separate you.”

She sent the offering plate around the circle. Dalton shook his head when Jimmy tried to hand him the plate. “I’m exempt,” he said, upending the collection and scattering the envelopes. “I’m exempt,” Dalton said again.

Frowning, Miss Nugent gathered the envelopes and replaced them. She passed the plate to Joey B.

The offering was put away, and Miss Nugent settled into her reading chair to begin the lesson. She watched as Dalton inched his foot toward Jimmy’s carpet square. Jimmy lifted Dalton’s leg and heaved it away with sufficient force to permit Dalton to spin around on his bottom and drop his other foot onto Joey B.’s lap, to which Joey B. responded with a shove.

“Crisscross, Dalton.” Miss Nugent told herself it wasn’t the boy’s fault. The gray-haired set in the congregation was forever noting how parents these days didn’t know how to be the boss, didn’t set limits, didn’t discipline their children. Although she was still some years away from the gray-haired set, Miss Nugent tended to agree with their sentiment.

The lesson was from the tenth chapter of Mark, in which Jesus compared a camel passing through the eye of a needle to a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. She distributed the story leaflets, reminding the class to treat the papers with respect; the church didn’t have the funds to buy new sheets every year. (Clearly, the wealthy members of First Mercy didn’t tithe.) Not that the children would have done the at-home activities with their parents if they kept the papers—the leaflets would probably have gone straight into the recycling bin. Miss Nugent suspected that the same families who read together for twenty minutes every night didn’t pray together more than once a week.

After reading the story, she quizzed the pupils. “What did the man call Jesus?” She glanced around. “Clarissa?”

“He called him teacher,” Clarissa said.

Miss Nugent flushed with pride. She felt an allegiance to educators of all kinds. With Joey N.’s mother, who taught math at the high school, and Mason’s parents (home ec. and middle school guidance), she was more than congenial, and she adored Clarissa’s parents, who were professors at the university. They all shared a common mission as stewards of the future.

“What did Jesus tell the man to do?” she asked. Clarissa raised her hand again. “Clarissa, honey, what did Jesus tell the man to do?”

“To sell what he owns and give the money to the poor,” Clarissa said. Miss Nugent, in her weakest moments, considered Clarissa her favorite, the child she would most like to have had.

“What does poor mean?” asked Joey B., whose family had moved to Woodview Estates in the fall. He’d missed three Sundays in a row, including the lesson on the widow’s mite.

“Poor means you have no money!” Dalton said. “What are you, stupid?”

“Dalton, please raise your hand,” Miss Nugent said. “And let’s use kind words.”

“Kind words,” Dalton mocked. He bounced on his carpet square.

She sighed. Was it the boy’s fault that he had no manners? That he was selfish and inconsiderate? That he couldn’t sit still for one minute? Whether poor conduct sprang from nature or nurture or both, the parents were to blame. Mrs. D’Amico. And Dr. D’Amico.

“Let’s pray,” Miss Nugent said. She asked the children to join hands.

“Ow!” Joey B. was yanking his hand away from Dalton. “He’s squeezing too tight!”

As Dalton grinned, a knot of frustration rose through Miss Nugent. Unable to work it loose, she forced it down again. She prodded Dalton outside the circle and sat him in a chair in the corner.

She finished the prayer and moved on to the song. Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. The melody and finger play were as simple as the words, and the children all participated. Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. They were smiling and sitting nicely at their places. Little ones like me . . . sat upon his knee . . .  Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me. After going through the song once, Miss Nugent allowed Dalton to creep back into the group. She asked the class to sing the song again.

But now the boys turned silly. The girls looked bored. Me, me, me. As the children pointed to themselves, Dalton poked his chest and collapsed. “I’ve been stabbed,” he moaned, and the class giggled.

“Dalton, get up.” The knot inside Miss Nugent rose again and tightened. She stood, looking down at the boy lying on the floor. He grinned at her again, ignorant of his effect on the others, how he was keeping them from God’s word, obstructing God’s work.

She took his hand and pulled him up. “We’re going to have a talk.”

Still smirking, Dalton at once lurched forward, tugging her along. His strength surprised her, and she couldn’t undo his grip. When they reached the far edge of the circle, Dalton teetered out away from her and then pretended to stumble.

“Stop, Dalton!” cried Miss Nugent, bracing for a fall.

The boy abruptly reversed direction, swinging out to her left side and then veering back again toward her right. Unable to halt her momentum as he crossed in front of her, Miss Nugent lost her balance. She sprawled to the floor, the back of her hand striking Clarissa’s cheek as she fell.

Miss Nugent sat for a moment in the center of the circle. The children stared at her. Clarissa was crying.

Dalton pointed at Clarissa. “That wasn’t a nice thing to do, Miss Nugent! You hurt her! Keep your body to yourself!”

At this, some of the boys began to chuckle, and even a few of the girls were smiling. The frustration inside Miss Nugent broke free. She stood, seized Dalton’s arm, and jerked him up.

“That’s it.” The children stopped as she said this, but she didn’t look at them. “Stay in the circle, class,” she muttered.

She dragged Dalton out into the hallway and steered him toward Brenda Glidden’s office. She took the key from her pocket and unlocked the door.

The office, an old storage room, had never been remodeled. It was cheerless and cramped. She recalled the spacious office that Dalton’s father occupied at the hospital, the walls decorated with paintings of tall ships and sunrises, diplomas the size of small posters, gleaming windows that overlooked the courtyard.

Miss Nugent closed the door. She kept her eye on Dalton as she banged open the supply cabinets and the drawers of the desk, furniture inherited from the minister before the minister before Pastor Conn.

Sifting through the items at the bottom of the arts and crafts rack, her hand closed on a two-foot-long wooden board, the horizontal piece for the cross used in one of the Easter displays. As her fingers ran across its glossy surface, they caught on the three bolts that attached the board to the vertical beam. She slid the bolts out one at a time and set them on the desk.

Dalton looked calm, if slightly puzzled. Maybe he was calculating how to wheedle his way out of this situation. “Miss Nugent—”

“You know how to behave, Dalton.” Of course he knew. He was sharp as nails, already excelled at reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although he didn’t understand the first thing about feelings, or kindness, or love.

“Miss Nugent, I have to—”

“Stand still, Dalton.” His fidgeting was yet another sign of his lack of discipline, how his parents were failing him. “Put your hands on the desk.”

Instead of obeying—already he was more accustomed to leading than to following—Dalton continued to stare at her. He certainly was his father’s child: full lips and cheeks, a mane of rich blond curls, brown eyes big as quarters. He would do well in school, college, medical school. He would be wealthy and successful. An attractive wife. Gorgeous, truly gorgeous children. The world belonged to people like the D’Amicos.

“Hands on the desk, Dalton,” she said again. “Bend over.”

Miss Nugent had last seen Dr. D’Amico the week after she left the hospital, as she was walking through Market Square. (Where else could she have encountered that man, aside from the hospital or at Sunday school pickup, except among shops and restaurants she could never patronize?) She started to approach him, but another man hailed him first. She hovered under the awning of the Once Upon a Toddler boutique while the man asked Dr. D’Amico how business was.

“A lot of cutting lately,” Dr. D’Amico replied, making a scissoring motion with his fingers. “I did my hundredth hyst for the hospital a couple of weeks ago.”

She hung back on the sidewalk. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop; she just wanted to thank him again. The pain had seemed to be waning.

“They should give you a watch or a plate or something,” the other man said. He laughed. “I hope the clientele’s keeping it interesting at least?”

Dr. D’Amico made a face. “It’s like the Westminster Dog Show in my O.R.”

The man woofed and then laughed again. “Look at it this way,” he had said. “You’re keeping the world beautiful.” The men shook hands. “Stay strong, D’Amico.”

Dalton was leaning against the desk now, on tiptoes, his legs jiggling. He turned toward Miss Nugent once more.

“Turn around, Dalton.” Yes, the D’Amicos owned this beautiful world; they had their reward. The first would be last, and the last first.

“Dalton, it’s for your own good.” The board felt heavy in her hands. She tapped it on the desk, as she imagined a policeman might when interrogating a criminal.

“When you’re unkind to others, you make God unhappy.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “God’s like your father, Dalton. Do you understand? You don’t want to make your father unhappy.”

Out in the hallway, footsteps and muted murmurs. Shadows fluttered across the slit beneath the door. She waited until the noises faded and then raised the board with her right hand.

“Lord helps us both,” she murmured. She clenched her jaw, concentrating the entire force of her being midway down her skull, and she didn’t feel the exertion in her arm when she swung the paddle down and smacked it against Dalton’s backside.

There was silence afterward—no cry, no plea, no apology—only silence, as teacher and student waited. And then Miss Nugent heard a trickle, like water flowing over an infant at the baptismal font. Dalton turned, his face contorted and red. Wetness streamed down the inseam of his trousers, urine drizzling onto a growing pool between his loafers while the tears spilled from his eyes. She softened, loosening her grip. The board fell to the floor. He’s just a boy, she thought. He’s just a little boy.

She scooped Dalton up—awkwardly, she’d never carried so heavy a burden. Ignoring the smell and the dampness that spread over her arms and onto the front of her dress, she held him close and hurried out toward the bathrooms. The boy shuddered with quiet sobs.

When she reached the ladies’ room, she looked up and stopped. Her gaze focused down the hallway, and for a moment she was drawn by a temptation to flee, to rush outside with Dalton, wondering where in the world they could go to hide one another, save one another, because there in front of her classroom door, all of the parents were gathered with Dr. D’Amico standing at the head of the line. And then Brenda Glidden arrived, and she and the parents turned as one to face Miss Nugent.

Miss Nugent approached the crowd. Dr. D’Amico stepped forward, and their eyes leveled at one another. She released Dalton.

“I’m sorry,” she said as Dalton scrambled to his father. “We had an accident. He needs to be cleaned up.”

Dr. D’Amico lifted Dalton up. The man’s expression was placid and matter-of-fact, a match to his dull green scrubs.

“That’s okay.” Dr. D’Amico set Dalton down and raised the boy’s chin with a finger. “Everybody makes mistakes. Right, D.?”

Dalton sniffled and rubbed his face against his father’s legs. Dr. D’Amico pried away and squatted before his son. He put a gentle fist to Dalton’s cheek. “No tears, D. Ready for the world.”

Dalton sniffled again, but he was no longer crying. Slowly, a smile appeared. He didn’t look at Miss Nugent as he closed his own fingers and put his fist to his father’s chest, just a soft beat at first, and then another, and again and again with increasing tempo and intensity, a pounding that would echo within Miss Nugent long after she had talked to Brenda Glidden and explained everything and left the church that morning, her final morning in the Sunday school.

“Ready for the world!” the boy shouted. “Ready for the world!”

“Maricon…” goes the whisper. What?! Was that at me?! I looked down quickly and took inventory. I was still in uniform but most kids leave that alone. Wasn’t like you had a choice in it.

I am the baby brother and the first to be sent to Catholic school. My mother says I’m lucky. They couldn’t afford it when my brothers were in school. So I luck out. My brothers got to go to public school. They tell me I’m missing out on a lot– but Papa says he doesn’t want me turning out like they did, so Catholic school for me. But Domingo is at UCLA so how bad did he turn out? He’s a junior and when he’s done it’s right back into law school there.

But where was I supposed to change clothes? A Superman phone booth? Maybe they were saying it to someone else.

“Maricon…hey we’re talking to you.” That was definitely one of the ten words white boys knew in Spanish. Along with ‘fuck your mother.’  I’d heard this from white boys, but they’ll call anyone a fag. I’d be walking with my brothers, the three of us, and the white boys would let loose with maricon or pendajo. We ignore it. We never stop to see who they are talking about and white kids never learn enough Spanish to learn plurals or anything more colorful, as my Mama would say. So we just figure they are just talking the only shit they know.

Not everything translates or sounds as beautiful as our mothers intended.

Girls named Beatriz and Mercedes hate their names in English–especially when white teachers with Midwestern accents from California towns like Hemet and Bakersfield call their names. When I was in junior high school we changed principals and the new one didn’t have a clue about Mexicans. Now, it’s a Catholic school in southeast LA. At priest school they don’t have guidebooks for this sort of thing? All our priests are directly from Ireland. The priest/principal we had could fuck up saying Gonzalez (goonzaaylees?) never mind more obvious fare like Martinez or Garcia.

So with a name like Renee Fabian, I am freaking doomed. In Spanish it doesn’t sound so bad—I just sounded like a telanovela love slave. And if I could be a love slave with giant pecs and silk smooth skin like on TV no one would be following me home after school trying to kick the shit out of me. Fabian the telenovela star has women––all kinds—the brown ones, the white ones, falling at his feet. But no, Renee is a girl’s name to white boys. And Fabian is (Faybeeyin). And there’s no use explaining that my mom was in Mexico watching American TV and thought Fabian was the ultimate masculine American name and named me it and then Mexicanized it.

They don’t talk about this in the schools yet. In between wanting to deport every person with a Z in their last name, they just haven’t realized that when my mother was in Mexico she was watching American movies dreaming of being here. And her sister was watching Japanese movies and dreaming of being there. That’s how come my cousins are named Toshiro and Akura, which of course, American teachers think must be cars just like all those poor little Mercedes girls.

Maricon, on the other hand, is not my name. There’s only three of them. I have a fighting chance. I turn around and face them, their crisp white t-shirts reflecting a blinding sunlight against the blinding white concrete sidewalk.

“Who are you calling a fag?” I say, fist clenched and ready. I turn around. These aren’t white boys.

“Do you do it with your brother? I heard he’s got quite a technique with that big ass mouth of his.”

They must have been talking about Jesus Jack. I winced but didn’t mean to.

Jesus Jack and I still live at home off of Whittier, in Pico almost to the border of Montebello. Jesus Jack says that’s not the only border we ride.

Jesus Jack’s real name is really Jesus Juan but he says that just reeks of wetback so he changed it. Jack is a couple of weeks shy of his barber’s license. And he swears he’s not cutting any wetback hair once he gets the license. Papa says he’ll cut the hair of anyone walking through the door. Money is money. But Jesus Jack says you gotta have some principles and what celebrity is going to want his hair cut in a wetback shop? I can only imagine what Jesus Jack may have said.

“If that thing was my brother,” says the shaved headed one with the crisp white tee shirt closest to me, “I’d beat the shit out of him daily, esse’.”

That’s all I remember hearing. Maybe they said more, I don’t know. I would like to think I would have just kept walking as usual when the public school kids come out to mock us Catholic school kids, I mean, I’m use to it. But I had to have my brother’s back here. You just can’t let people talk shit about your family. One of them kicked me in the back of the knees so that my legs folded on top of me. Someone kicked my face. Someone dropped my backpack full of books on top of me.

I don’t know how long I was on the sidewalk. It felt like my brains were oozing out of my head. My hair was sticky. I do remember swinging at the Mr. Clean smooth head of the guy in the center as I went down. Then I think I stared up at the storefront party supply place on one side and wedding and quincera dresses on the other. My mind drifted to Jesus Jack as I looked up at the white opaque sequined gowns. The silk formal guyaberas. Jesus Jack was always pissed that boys didn’t get thrown a quincenera too. Though Papa said that was the one good thing about having a family full of boys.

I look up from the sidewalk at the bus stop sign. From the bus stop to home is only five blocks but that’s five homie blocks and I’m not sure where my assailants have gone. There are just as many white kids as Mexicans now, and a melting pot of bad attitude too. My grandfather says it used to be all Jews, Armenians, and Japanese here. No shit? I asked him. I can’t picture it though. Where did they all go? They made money, my grandfather says. They moved to Friendly Hills in La Whittier. He ought to know. He’s a gardener. He does their lawns, but if they used to live in the neighborhood with grandpa, they sure didn’t take him with them.

The bus stop reeks. Freaking Catholics and their fish on Fridays. Vatican II people, it’s over. But H&R fish and chips is packed so it must be 4:30 with every mother in town lined up for a bucket of that nasty fried, that ain’t fresh fish. I try and talk my mom out of it every week. Fish tacos, yes. But not that crap. She just smiles and tells me it’s a tradition. I roll over and try to get up. Fuck it hurts.

“Renee! What the hell happened to you? Sanchez said you were in a fight. He saw you go down from the corner.” It was my Papa. Standing there, bare beer belly hanging over yellow shorts. Black socks in flip-flops. He always does this. The one time I ever brought a friend home from school to hang out, Papa sat in the front room just like that –the yellow shorts and the black socks in the flip flops, no shirt on watching TV. His English was even worse a few years ago and thinking he was saying ‘join me,’ he looked up at my friend in the doorway and said with big open arms “ENJOY ME!” Nowadays, he’s lost that immigrant pride of being in his Sunday best for all occasions out of the house. He no longer wears dress shoes to the beach. And finding his son beat up on the sidewalk is no exception.

“There were three of them, “ I mutter by way of explanation. He mutters something in Spanish that I don’t know.

“Ay, your Mama’s going to have a field cow.”

“Field day, Papa, field day. In English, you can have a cow or a field day but you can’t have both at the same time.” I want to laugh but just wanting to made my side hurt and as he helped me up I could feel myself strain not to walk crooked.

I wasn’t sure I felt like going out anymore. Jesus Jack and I were taking the bus out to stay with Domingo for the weekend. Domingo got us tickets to see Bowie. Jesus Jack is always singing along to Bowie. If he could fake being English over Mexican-American he’d do it, but his face is painfully not British. I’m cool with Bowie, I guess. Whatever. With two older brothers, I just listen to whatever they throw down to me.

The stairs to the front porch seem like they’d grown in height, after five long blocks. I made it to the dusty metal swing with its once aquamarine cushions and tried to sit. I tried to prop my legs on the bright blue chair Mama keeps there, sitting next to the bougainvillea that seemed to always be climbing away from our house. But I couldn’t lift my leg; it hurt too much. I could hear strains of Ziggy Stardust coming from the front bedroom window. Jesus Jack was home.

When Jesus Jack is home, I can tell because Mama has fresh flowers on the kitchen table in the big white glass vase left over from grandma’s funeral. When Jesus Jack is home the TV speaks only in English and if it’s not on, then the radio is and that’s only English too. When Jesus Jack is home the curtains are pulled back and the sun is beating in making us all too hot and tired, but for some reason Jesus Jack has plenty of energy. Always.

He says we are too dreary. We can’t see ourselves in conversation because when he’s not there the curtains are drawn and the lights off. True, this time of year we don’t open anything to let light in until after the sun has gone down. No air conditioning. But Mama doesn’t want the windows open all night––what if someone breaks in? To steal what, Jesus Jack laughs? If he’s home and not going out, the windows are open till midnight at least. It makes Papa nervous and then he can’t sleep.

“What were you fighting about?” Papa asks me again.

“Nothing,” I say catching my breath.

Papa goes inside the house and gets a beer. He offers to get me one for the medicinal properties it will have on my aching side and what appears to be a black eye. He shuffles back and hands me an Olympia. I drink it slow. I still feel weird drinking with the old man in front of the house. Papa looks like he’s enjoying it though. And he doesn’t press on about the fight. Papa pats my knee and gets up to move inside again. I can hear the TV switching on to Spanish.

“Jack?” I call into the house.

“Yes?” He answers in a sing-song voice, peeping his head out of the front door screen. Jesus Jack sits down on Mamas’s aquamarine chair with his legs stretched out onto the railing. The bougainvillea he pretends to drape around his neck. I have been looking down at my leg, but then I look up at him. My mouth hangs open. I can’t breathe.

“Jesus! Jack.”

I don’t know whether I want to puke or punch him. There stands my brother in a light blue t-shirt with a rainbow across it, tight enough that his nipples are showing through like darts. His pants are belled and shiny silver. I mean they’re still jeans but they’re covered in silver glitter. More glitter than a five-year-old girl would know what to do with–and the shoes. The shoes. I didn’t know they made men’s shoes that high or that sandal like. I couldn’t see too well at the moment but I’d have sworn that when the sun hit Jesus Jack’s face, it sparkled, too.

“Has–Papa —seen you?” I ask half disgusted and half amazed.

“No, I’ve been in my room since I got home. This is what I’m wearing to the show.”

“Are you supposed to ––to–be something? No fucking way I’m sitting next to you on the bus.”

“A Space Oddity! I’m a Space Oddity! Get it?” I stare at Jesus Jack for what seems like a black hole of time. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just a minute. Jesus Jack was looking me up and down as if coming up with fashion ideas for me too.

“Don’t you come near me with glitter, goddamn it. What the fuck’s wrong with you?” I could hear Papa in the kitchen opening another beer. I could feel the bruising under my eye. Then it dawned on me.

“Wait. Did you wear any of that outside the house? Outside the house you fucking moron?”

“Just the shoes from the Barber Shop to here. Wanted to break them in¬–“

“You’re a, a, a…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. And suddenly our lives flashed before my eyes. How could I have been so lame and stupid? How could I have not noticed? Hairdresser? Glitter? Glam rock? From down the street I can hear some fresh over the border oompa oompa music. From Jesus Jack’s open window I can hear “…I’m a space invader/I’ll be a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch for you…”

“Maricon!”

Jesus Jack and I both turned to see our Papa drop his Olympia straight onto the linoleum inside the front door. I think shit, Papa’s going to kill Jack and I don’t know which side to jump in on. Whose back do I get now?

“Marisela! Marisela!” My Papa calls to my mother. He’s not able to move at first but then charges through the house like a rocket ship—backward and coming in too fast for a landing too.

“Shit,” says Jack, almost remorseful. “I didn’t think he’d waddle out from the front of the TV for at least another hour. “

Mama and Papa are arguing now the way they always do. Only now? I understand part of it. I don’t get all the Spanish but it doesn’t matter what language they speak, it was all kind of foreign until now.

“If we’d have stayed in Mexico,” my father screams, “this kind of thing,” he points to Jesus Jack’s room that was Domingo’s old room too, “would never have happened!”

Then there’s a round of:

“This is from your side of the family!”

“No, your side!”

“You have that cousin that never got married what do you think he was doing?” My dad screams to my mom.

“You’ve got that prima that looks like a guy!” my mom yells back.

It goes on and on in circles. For the first time, ever? I feel sorry for my parents. All they wanted to do was raise their kids in America. They really had no idea what they were going to be up against.

I’m feeling funny in my stomach now. Like if I’m on the bus with him…? What if we get jumped again?  Jesus Jack says there’s lots of guys like him where we are going. Great. Are there any guys like me? Guys that just want to hang with their brothers and look at girls? My body is still sore.

I need to see Domingo. Mingo will set me right about things. I think Domingo will have to take a side and that will be my side but I’m not even sure what that side is.

Jesus Jack bought a shirt for me to wear to the show. It has ruffles on it but Jesus Jack is saying it’s like a pirate would wear, not a girl, and not a fag–and pirates are masculine. They steal, have no teeth, and fuck women. My ass, I tell him and punch him hard in the arm, so that he staggers, twisting his platform shoes a bit and busting the strap. It makes me smile. Now, he’ll have to wear flats.

“Does Domingo know about you being—-your clothes?” I ask gulping down the last of my beer with my words.

“Ha! That Sister? You little brother, have not seen our pretty boy Mingo lately have you?”

This is how. This is how I find out that not one, but both of my brothers are fucking gay. And this is how Jesus Jack chooses to tell me. Getting my ass kicked when it should have been his ass. I look down at my dirty uniform pants, sparkling with his glitter in the twilight.

I get up to shower and find clean jeans for the evening. I think of not going while the water, piss and blood hit the drain of the bathtub in Mama’s pink bathroom. But I can’t let him get on that bus alone. You have to change buses downtown. There’s no direct way to get from the east side to the west. Like they did that on purpose so we’d stay where we’re from.

I miss Domingo and I think I need to hear this from Mingo. Maybe Mingo still likes girls and Jesus Jack is just playing a fucked up trick on me to trip me out before the show.
But we’re going to head out with three tickets to see David Bowie, and all along the bus ride there I know deep in my heart that I’ve known this all along. How could I not? The bruises are purpling from the beating. I know they will be dark and sore soon. Jesus Jack wanted to bring his make up kit. No matter how great the concert is and no matter how good a time we have tonight, it’s going to be impossible to hide all this in the morning.

But even that came to an end when other guests were due to stay at the friend’s home, and Eileen found herself flitting from place to place, housesitting one week, living in a room another. By the end of it, Eileen had even lived in a poxied doss house in Cricklewood, with no hot water and drug addicts in the communal bathroom. It was during the time that she acted in a play at a theatre in Hampstead, but she hadn’t received any money for the production, nor was she likely to get any the way the books were kept at the theatre box office. Eileen lived in seven or eight different places during the months of March, April, and May. Finally this place came along in Maida Vale, just on the edge of Kilburn. The building was big, more like a hotel than an apartment building, with about 150 flats, all bedsits or one-bedrooms. It was called Hotel Kilburn by the people who lived there, but that was not really its name. In the first week Eileen lived there, she was in the laundry room doing her wash, and she got into a conversation with an older woman who used to live in Hampstead. When Eileen asked what she thought of this neighborhood, she told Eileen straight away.

“Kilburn is a tip,” the old woman shouted.

When Eileen was hungry, Kilburn High Road looked like manna, especially the food shops. An Irish builder once said to her that if the British gave them back Northern Ireland, the Irish would return Kilburn to Britain. But that was a lifetime ago when Kilburn was London’s Irish ghetto, just like Camden Town once was. The playwright George Bernard Shaw was so disgusted with his fellow Irishmen pissing on Camden’s High Street that he had those urinals built at the intersection with Parkway, or at least that is what someone told Eileen once. Kilburn had no such literary benefactor. It was gritty and workaday, what Americans would call blue collar. To be sure it was still Irish, but now it also was a kind of league of nations. Veiled women from the Middle East passed by in black robes. Little Chinese children still wore silk jackets they probably brought with them from China. African children spoke with perfect working-class London accents, the kind of speech that pronounced words like computer and butter without the t’s. But Kilburn was more chalk and cheese than a melting pot, more a collision of cultures than an harmonious merge.

Eileen was reminded of her own childhood in Dublin.  She still remembered that her family’s kitchen was in the basement—the lower ground floor—of the terraced house in which they lived. She loved that house, the classic urban dwelling, with its lower ground floor that led to the garden out back. Up the front steps, you walked to the elevated ground floor of the house, and above that were the bedrooms. The kitchen was large, much bigger than the one they would use in Dalkey when they finally moved away. Eileen remembered their dog, a big Irish terrier, and she remembered her aunts and cousins visiting them and standing in that big kitchen. It was not their house, though. It belonged to the people whom her mother worked for, and Eileen’s family lived in the maisonette flat on the ground floor and the basement. That great kitchen was really in the basement, though it had French doors opening onto the garden. Eileen’s mother was not the world’s worst cook. But her mother was not the best either. Her food was nutritional but not tasty. Still, as Eileen’s parents reminded her and her siblings, they did not starve. They always had food, even if it was not as delicious or redolent as their Italian neighbors’ meals. That food smelled of garlic and herbs. The herbaceous Eileen’s family ever got was to use parsley with lamb, though never at the expense of mint jelly, the most unusual they ever got in the kitchen.

Kilburn was not a tip; it was more like a scrum. People moved in every direction banging into one another. Eileen had taken to circumventing the high street. If she needed to go to the post office, she would wait until she was in Hampstead—where the lines were shorter—or Camden Town—where the long lines went faster than Kilburn. (Of course, there were no ‘lines’ in any of these places, as no one called them that, but rather queues. Eileen had picked up such expressions as “lines” from the four years she worked as a high-school teacher in Boston.) Instead of going to the grocery stores on the high street in Kilburn, Eileen took to shopping  in the little stores on Abbey Road or walked down to Maida Vale or Little Venice, sometimes, rather than approach Kilburn High Street with, not so much crowds, as throngs, hordes, or as a friend called anyone not himself, “you lot.” Of course, you lot was really Eileen herself, the unwashed masses of Kilburn, “the bloody Irish,” as she once heard it so lovingly put, in the days when terrorists were Irish instead of Middle Eastern. The former terrorists lived in County Kilburn, as Eileen also heard it called, with great humor and affection. Kilburn was like Dublin, Galway, or Limerick, crowded Irish places. They were not much different, for that matter, from parts of Brooklyn or Boston or Chicago.

But Kilburn was different.

On the surface, it possessed the Irish penchant for the shambolic, even the anarchic, like her family’s own nightly dinner times, which were more like food fights than meals, and more like gun battles than supper. This organized chaos reminded Eileen of how the Irish prayed, never in unison, always to their own drummers, in their own biological rhythms. She had heard this joyful noise since childhood, no one saying the Hail Marys and Our Fathers together, but in a group, but always apart, at one’s own pace. Later she would come to think of this discrete way of praying as deeply spiritual, each person finding a personal beat to communicate with God. Yet saying this, Eileen did not mean to equate Kilburn High Street as being a spiritual experience; it had a way of robbing your energy, of sucking the life out of you. It had a way of wearing you down in the manner of the professional boxer who leans on his opponent in the later rounds, exhausting the opponent further, then setting him up for the kill.

If Eileen took the Number 31 bus from Camden Town, invariably she got off the stop before Kilburn High Street, and walked the block along Abbey Road—the long and winding road that lead to Boundary Road and her flat. There were green grocers, corner grocers, and even a Middle Eastern super market across the street, and yet sometimes she just had to go to Sainsbury’s on the High Road for certain things, though never Marks and Spencer which seemed like the laziest way in the world to make dinner, not a food-lovers place but rather an emporium for someone overrun by the vagaries of the New Age, busy, busy, busy me, I’ll simply pop this bag of veggies in the water to boil, and voila, a gourmet meal. Eileen wanted tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, parsley, lemon juice, pepper and salt added at her pace and taste, at her own leisure and doing.

This was a Sainsbury’s day, much as she dreaded coming onto the High Street to shop. Eileen had run out of money after paying the weekly rent. But she remembered that—although all the other credit cards were frozen because she was at the limit with each—she had paid this one on time and there was enough credit available for a carefully selected week or so of groceries, and maybe even she could top up the mobile phone to make some calls, not just receive them. Eileen might even be able to get another Zone 2 weekly travel card for the local tube and the buses. Whatever the outcome of this trip, she had no fear of embarrassment because she literally knew no one in Kilburn. So Eileen went into Sainsbury’s to shop, and who should she run into but Tanya, from a job counseling group Eileen attended, at the strawberries, and in the dairy was a woman named Roberta, whom she knew from her teaching days, and by the checkout she saw another person named Casey, whom she briefly dated ten years earlier when she used to attend London Irish rugby football matches with some friends. Thank God I have some credit, Eileen thought, and am able to buy some groceries, am able to feel civil and centered, alive and well. Thank God I was not whingeing about being broke and complaining that I had nothing to eat. People frankly were sick of hearing my sob story.

Eileen would forever remember each item that she placed in her hand-held blue plastic basket, for it began to buckle as she shopped. She had entered Sainsbury’s around four o’clock of a halcyon summer day in later June, not too hot, one of those cloud-scudding blue skies that John Constable painted in Hampstead a few miles east, and a few hundred years ago. Even the bumping and abutting of Kilburn High Road had a rhythm to it, a musical shuttle like bebop or Thelonious Monk’s thunkingly melodious piano.

Eileen started in produce, placing cheap, delicious strawberries in the blue basket. These were native ones, nearly at perfection, or maybe just past it, as the expiry date was that day, and she’d luckily found a pack that wasn’t bruised or rotten. Next she picked a pack of blueberries from Spain, more expensive, she thought, but one of her extravagances. Didn’t the doctors and nutritionists say that there was nothing healthier than blueberries? It was a superfood, whatever the hell that was. Eileen also got some curly parsley, cheaper than the flat kind, less tasty, too, but good in a fresh tomato sauce for pasta. She also got some new potatoes, a bunch of cherry tomatoes, two for the price of one. Then came carrots (organic) and apples and ginger for juicing through the week. She topped it off with some Fair Trade bananas.

In the dairy Eileen got three cartons of orange juice for two pounds and a big hunk of cheddar cheese for a little over two pounds. She bought a big tub of plain organic yogurt, wishing she could buy Rachel’s vanilla yogurt, but she’d already indulged herself with the blueberries, and now she needed to move on. Lastly, before leaving the dairy section entirely, Eileen bought some grated Parmesan cheese from Reggiano, Italy, expensive, but the best tasting of this cheese, and her rationale was that it lasted a long time, which it did. Next she bought a big bag of brown organic rice and a big bag of penne pasta, but no sun-dried (sun-kissed, the jar says) tomatoes as she already had some at the flat. Eileen then got some dark rye flatbread crackers and a big, cheap bag of Scottish porridge oats for a month of breakfasts. She bought sweetened, organic soya milk, and some Sainsbury’s instant coffee, and then got some Dove soap and deodorant, some toothpaste, and looked for cheap bread and some olive oil. Logically, the olive oil should have been with the pasta and the tomato sauces, but in this Sainsbury’s, it was in the back of the store, with bread, condiments, and eggs.

The handle on the plastic basket was bowing, and so Eileen grasped the heavy load with both hands, cradling it in her arms as if it were a baby. In the way a child was precious, so were those groceries because Eileen didn’t think she could afford them until she checked the various credit card statements from the month before, and then she saw this window of opportunity, as the benighted politicians say, and therefore went to the bread basket of Kilburn High Road to affect the transfer of credit for food. In the scheme of things, Eileen felt like a millionaire, like a million bucks, i.e., like five-hundred-and fifty-five-thousand pounds, give or take a shilling.

Eileen put down the bulging market basket, this horn of plenty, and she recalculated its expense, estimating it to be thirty pounds, well within her credit limit and budget, and then she re-examined the grocery list, making sure that there was nothing there that still needed purchasing. In recent months Eileen had taken to going to the Tate Modern to look at four magnificent paintings by Cy Twombly called Quattro stagione, the four seasons. The Serpentine Gallery also had his drawings on display, and the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross showed ten new paintings and a sculpture. In all of these, Twombly wrote words in pencil, then scratched them out, and wrote other words. The seasonal paintings—the Vivaldian paintings—had poems and words from poets like Dante. The words in the drawings, as she recalled, were more muted, and the ten new paintings didn’t always have words at all, except the occasional word Gaeta, and the date. Twombly, an American, had lived in Italy for nearly half a century, and Gaeta is where he had lived. Eileen thought of him because her grocery list had words that had been written over and crossed out, so that her own list resembled a palimpsest, the same way that Cy Twombly’s paintings were. Her words were in blue ink, the lines through them in black, only because she had used the blue pen at the flat, and had the black pen in her pocket in the supermarket, a chance occurrence, a happenstance more than a willed artfulness like the paintings, had come into being. It was less Cy Twombly than Kurt Schwitters, an art of poverty and circumstance rather than imagination and wealth.

In fact, the list bore no resemblance to art. It was a life list, as sustenance, a boon, a blessing, a gift. Eileen had imagined she would eat nothing but a crazy salad of air and anger, vinegar and despair for the next month. Instead she had a plastic blue market basket bursting at its seams with food and provender, with the abundance of life.

Here is the list Eileen used:

The list seemed modest enough, but Eileen had managed to improvise from it the way a jazz musician might take a popular musical standard and give it pure, improvisational form. She had added strawberries, apples, carrots, and ginger, just like Charlie Rouse adding his saxophone solos to Thelonious Monk’s piano music. Eileen had plucked fruit from the bins into the blue basket the way a bass player—Ahmed Abdul-Malik at the Five Spot Cafe in August 1958 did with Monk—plucked improvisational chords on the big, stand-up bass, full of life’s rhythms, really full of optimism in this sea of despair, not Kilburn High Road, but Eileen’s own later life, so seemingly hopeless and foregone. Now she had been given, in Wallace Stevens’ words, a momentary stay against annihilation, she had been given a governor’s stay against execution. She had enough credit to buy this mother lode of groceries, this treasure trove, this gift of abundance.

Eileen smiled at the people in front of her and in back of her in the queue—the line, her Boston friends called it—to check out. They looked at Eileen as if she were crazy. After all, this was not some arty redoubt like Hampstead; it was working-class Kilburn, tough and no-nonsense, a commonsensical place, practical, crowded, and blindingly efficient in how it gave people what they wanted, then shot them back out onto the High Street, bag-laden, poorer, but with the potential to be less hungry, perhaps even less grumpy, less angry and feeling alone. They would eat dinner with family, watch television, and go to bed with their stomachs full. Eileen saw nothing but hope on this check-out queue, this queue that was like a stairway to heaven, if she might sample from Led Zeppelin.

Then came her turn. The check-out person wore a badge that said her name was Mary.  Eileen had encountered her many times. This Mary was decent enough, not harsh like the other clerks. There was a note of compassion in her face, especially her eyes. Like Eileen, Mary looked as though she lived by herself or perhaps with an elderly parent. At any rate, Mary had never married; that was obvious. She was a big, round, slovenly sort of woman, the kind you see everywhere in America, especially in the countryside. Eating was probably her only pleasure, Eileen imagined. Eileen was not a big, round, slovenly woman, but in every other way, she thought that she resembled that clerk Mary.

The groceries zipped through Mary’s scanner, and the end result was a figure just over thirty pounds, well within Eileen’s credit limit. She would top off the mobile at the cigarette counter near the exit. Then she would go home to cook dinner, not watch television because she had none, but maybe listen to jazz on the radio, and actually go to bed with her belly full, no food anxiety, no mad jealousy of other people’s good fortune, no desire to be anyone but who she was, Eileen O’Faherty; she would be stuffed, sated, elated, sleepy, and ready to drift into the deepest slumber. Eileen fumbled with opening the last of the plastic bags, her hands all thumbs, and Mary and the person behind Eileen popped open the bags for her to fill the remaining items into them. Eileen then handed Mary her credit card, and waited for Mary to come back with the slip for her to sign.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, “your card has been declined.”

Eileen had bagged everything now, the olive oil, the juice, the instant coffee, the bag of penne, the fruits, the cheese, the yogurt, the oats, and all.

“Declined?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Mary said. “Declined.”

Mary asked what Eileen wanted to do.

“I don’t understand,” Eileen said. “I checked my credit before going out, and it was fine.”

“What’s the problem?” the brusque assistant manager asked, stepping over to unclog the logjam Eileen had created in this queue.

The assistant manager was small and angular, brusque, bristly even, impatient to be done with Eileen or this problem or whatever it was. The assistant store manager had a touch of Irish in her voice, but not that lyrical Irish of Eileen’s mother and grandmothers, nor any of the compassion of the clerk Mary. This was the clipped brogue of angry head sisters in parochial school. Mary explained to her manager that Eileen’s card had been declined.

“Do you have another card?” the assistant manager asked.

Eileen had many cards. The only problem was that none of them worked. No, she said, that was the only card she had at the minute.

“Then there’s nothing we can do,” the assistant manager told her. “You can go off and call the credit card company to sort it out straight away and I’ll hold your groceries at the courtesy counter in the front of the store for a half hour.”

As Eileen walked back along the Kilburn High Road towards Maida Vale to the south, it seemed like every mother and child, every drunken father, every drunken bum and vagrant, bumped into her and shouted for her to watch where she was walking. Veiled women dressed from head to toe in black, with only a slit in the veil for their eyes, also bumped into her, and let fly with what Eileen imagined were infelicities of the Arabic tongue. African women, who were taller than Eileen by a head, told her to watch her step, to look where she was going. Teenagers in blue nylon jackets and pants with white stripes down the sides of them shouted in her face, and their girlfriends with their loopy gold earrings called out things like “Yo, bitch” or “Watch out, ya feckin’ eejit!” Eileen walked off crestfallen, a black cloud over her head like Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip she read religiously when she lived in Boston, Massachusetts. She walked along the high road to a call shop and called up the credit card company to sort out what had happened. Though Eileen had paid the credit card bill with cash in a bank, she was told that it was not credited for four days—two days after the due date—and the late fee, plus interest, plus being fined for going over her credit limit—which they mistakenly put Eileen over—closed down her credit line automatically. They were sorry, the voice on the end of the telephone line said, but “there is nothing we can do about it, madame.” So Eileen went back to her flat at the beginning of Maida Vale, stomach growling, arms empty of any provender, and she wondered how much longer she could continue to live like this.

It was hot, bright; I don’t remember sound.  I recall a woman with hands pressed against her groin, I remember the Augusta twins, boys my age, had their arms around each other, and that my father shoved his pistol in his belt.  Albert lay on his back, eyes open, the blood dull red beneath him, a ring of something blue around his mouth.  When I turned to follow my father’s eyes, I saw Reesus trotting down Montana Street toward us.  He wore a yellow coat, a purple scarf on his head like a pirate.

Here comes Reverend Smiley, someone said; Reverend Smiley, said another, and there he was, rolling past Obediah’s houses, bounding from the buckboard, pushing past a drifter with a melancholy face.  Then he stopped the way a blind man stopped who’d walked into a wall.  He sank to his knees and touched Albert on the shoulder.

What happened?

Reesus began to sing about a light gone out.  My father’s shirt was green with blue suspenders.  Shut up, he said, and Reesus did, and the Reverend asked, What happened?  .

He had rocks.  Was going to brain me.

We looked.  There was a rock the size of a fist on the ground next to Albert’s body.  There was one in my father’s hand; he moved as if to weigh it.

My Lord, Ebenezer, you couldn’t manage a ten year old boy with a rock?

My father stiffened; for an instant worry made his eyes small, and then they weren’t.  I didn’t, he said, mean to kill him.  The Reverend stared at him.  My father stared back.  Then he dropped the rock, stood with arms akimbo, and when he spoke his voice had changed.

Get up off the ground, Reverend.  This here is sheriff’s business.

It’s my business, too, the Reverend said, and didn’t move.  My father said something to his deputy, a big man, who shook his head.  My father looked directly at him and said something again; the deputy shook his head.  So my father did it himself: pulled the preacher to his feet, began to push him toward the surrey, firm shoves between his shoulder blades, though measured; he’d not have wanted to be accused of mistreating the Lord’s anointed.  As he went, he seemed to search each scowling face to see if his restraint was noted, and when he saw me, his eyebrows raised.  I knew instantly what he was thinking, could see it on his face: he’d found an ally.  But he was wrong, I wasn’t his ally; only blindness or a gift for self-deception could have told him so.

He had rocks, my father said—he who never explained anything to me beyond the heat of hell, the worthlessness of negroes—he had rocks, I told him to put them down, he wouldn’t….

Somebody coughed, then it was still, absolutely silent, and I knew from my father’s shrug that it had dawned on him that he need provide no further explanation.  He stepped the preacher up into the buckboard, gave him the reins; he slapped the horse who went obediently forward.  Then he turned to us.

Go on, now.  You know I can’t have you blocking the street this way.  Go on. Some left hurriedly, as if they feared reprisal if they didn’t, or wished to put as much space between them and what had happened as quickly as they could.  Others took their time, and held my father’s eyes as he glared.  I was one who chose to be deliberate in retreat, keeping my head turned so my father couldn’t see my face or hear me.  You are a murderer, I whispered, I’ll never be like you.

I looked to see him lumbering into the jail.  His deputy was lifting Albert’s body; the head hung as if too heavy for its neck.  I could feel the sun, how hard it was to breathe, and I turned toward home, carrying the powder my mother would use to make biscuits light as air we’d later eat in silence.

There was only one church in Dominion, Missouri in 1851, Christ the Redeemer, and it was to it we walked on Tuesday next for Albert’s funeral.  I recall how Bass, wearing a blue tie with no shirt beneath the black suit my father had given him, smelled, inexplicably, of milk, and how three lines of people merged to make one line, and how it broke to let Adrian pass when he arrived.  Years later, Adrian would be the drummer for a traveling band out of Saint Louis, work he’d give up for a widow with four children and a voice like smoke, but on that morning—bark colored, thin as a second thought—he sat cross-legged on the ground, his back against a gravestone, pulling from his drum the measure for our walking.  We went slowly—first my father, then my mother, finally Bass and me—we were silent, heads down until we stepped into the sanctuary where two ushers bumped as they approached us.  The white one deferred, left the negro flustered.  She was, I later learned, going to lead us to the front of the church as befit my father’s standing, but she didn’t know what to do concerning Bass.  Slaves had the right to worship, but could they sit in front?  Behind us, people leaned to either side, stood on tiptoe to see what the matter was, and when they did the drum began to beat like the heart of a man who was running.  My father, annoyed that attention had been brought to bear on him, pointed to the nearest available seats, one row from the last, only to have the usher balk again at how far they were from the pulpit.  Only when my father hissed did she relent, and it was in that charged uneasiness that we took our places.  I looked to where Reesus sat, a lime-colored cloth around his head; in front of him were the Wright and Webster families.  Then the Bowman clan, a light complected gathering of eleven: we’d learn that the fifteen year old, Harvest, had given her virginity to Reverend Smiley just the week before.  Across the aisle from the Bowman’s was Samuel James, who ran the bank, and Chauncey Riddle, who owned the general store.  The Augusta twins sat with their parents next to the Dixons and the Higginbottoms.  In front was Della, Albert’s mother.

The drumming stopped; the sun punched through the haze, and in the pulpit the stained glass window of John the Baptist’s head appeared to bleed.  Albert lay at the foot of the altar, but I couldn’t see him.  I could see the sap that stained the white pine casket; I could see the lilies bowed above it, but I couldn’t see him.  When I stretched to make myself taller, there was movement at my back, and I twisted to see the negro choir file in in military neatness: men in black, women in white, and when they reached the altar they arranged themselves to sing.  Our God is a mighty God, His glory to be praised, they sang, one verse repeated, one verse that soared, diminished, and when they were done, the Reverend stepped to the rostrum.

His text was taken from Romans 6, verse 9: For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death has no dominion over him.  He was halfway through his sermon when I understood there’d be nothing said of how Albert had died, or who’d done it.  I sat, holding myself, seething, and the white choir, the women with daisies in their hair, trooped from the back of the church, gathered at the casket where they sang a song I don’t remember.  When they’d finished, the Reverend announced it was time to view the body, and in the hush that met those words, Albert’s mother began to moan.  Nine months before, she’d lost her husband; it was Saturday, the two of them playing cards, she’d accused him of cheating.  Drunk, laughing, he’d taken the lantern to the privy, trailing a blanket because the October night was brisk.  He’d fallen asleep, the lamp tipped over, lit flesh and blanket, corncobs….

I stood before the body of the boy who’d been my friend, his white shirt starched and ironed, the hands at his chest so scrubbed the flesh below his fingernails was raw.  The blue had been wiped from his lips, and he’d been rubbed with oil that left him shining.  The oil smelled sweet. I wanted to lower my head to see if beneath it I’d find the smell I knew: dried leaves crumbled in the hand, mown hay, a musty blanket.  I wanted to open his eyes.  I was standing next to Bass, who was shaking his head as if he’d just been asked a question; the negro choir was humming, the drum outside a steady, solemn beat.  The usher said I had to move.  She said it gently, and I turned, blinking, and followed Bass to where my parents stood in front of Della.  My father’s words were awkward, rehearsed; my mother’s heartfelt, though without distinction.  I swallowed, said I was sorry.  Bass chose not to speak, simply placed his hand on Della’s hand.

Back in our seats, the drumming stopped, the negro choir sang again, and the congregation honored its exhortation to join in.  In the pew before me, November, a negro girl who’d recently come to Dominion, turned and greeted me.  Her smile was wide and warm; a purple scar the length of a finger marred her throat.  I was later to wonder what had caused that scar, and if it was why she’d left where she was to come to Dominion, but by the time I’d gathered courage to ask, she’d been slaughtered.  But then, on that morning, she was very much alive, and when she reached for me, I gave my hands and let her pull me to my feet.  Her eyes were gray and danced despite sorrow.  I smiled back and let the tears come.  I was standing next to Bass who was singing with great force, and now, all around us, white and black raised hands and swayed to song that made this promise: we were not without hope; while we waited for the life to come, the life we lived could be worthwhile, abundant.  All we need do was learn to bear each other’s burdens; all we need do was learn to grieve each other’s loss.  I was twelve years old, but I understood this.  I wept  as a sweet and powerful feeling rose in me.  I knew where the feeling came from: community, the sense that I belonged and didn’t have to be alone.  What I didn’t know was that the feeling wouldn’t last the hour, or come again until the negro troupe arrived.

My father went off after the service, but I stayed with my mother and Bass through the burial and then the funeral feast, during which Reverend Smiley circulated between tables of ham and chicken, greens, biscuits and lemonade, avoiding any mention of what had happened, choosing only to note how fine it was that all of Dominion had sat down to eat as one.  I’d asked Bass why negroes and whites so seldom came to the same Sunday service—the nine o’clock attended largely by whites, the one at eleven by negroes—and he said that most of his people preferred to sing and dance their religion, while whites praised God in a less expressive way.  It didn’t have anything to do with better, he said, it was just different, and so the first separation of the races in Dominion came not by law, but custom.

When the Reverend had retired, and all eaten their fill, several whites, led by Samuel Adams, took it upon themselves to speak to what brought us together.  Albert’s death was unfortunate, they said, a tragic misunderstanding.  But we must not let it poison who we were, we who lived in peace, who stood by one another.  We’d always done this; if one needed an example, recall this January past when, for four days running, snow fell, filling the valley to our knees, and how those men arrived wearing great coats, steam at their mouths and at the mouths of their horses.

Can you prove these slaves are yours, they said, are these negroes free?  Where are your bills of sale, your papers?

Remember how they waved that proclamation permitting them to carry away any negro whose status couldn’t be proved, and how we, white and colored, stood shoulder to shoulder, defying those men, and how God-fearing Ebenezer Dooley stepped forward to say he’d neither answer their questions nor allow the head of any negro to be touched or taken from us?

I watched as the negroes nodded.  You right.  Sheriff stood up to them mens, and us’n wid him.  You got that right, they said, their responses tight and muted.

It wasn’t until later that I learned why my father had been so noble: Obediah, the mayor, had insisted that my father carry out his duty as sheriff and protect all citizens and their property, or lose his job.

Obediah sensed the mood of negroes after the shooting, and convened a group

to discuss the incident.  The white men were Samuel James, the banker, Chauncey Riddle, who owned the general store, and the post master, Jonah Willis.   The negroes were Lucas Webster, the richest negro in Dominion, and Alexander Tibble, who owned the stable.  Rumor was that the negroes’ argument was brief: my father’s actions were indefensible.  But Samuel James said that to punish a sheriff for the shooting of someone he thought was about to commit a crime would be to strip discretion from him and to undermine the effectiveness of his office.  Then a vote was held, and the outcome, posted on the courthouse door, held that the shooting of Albert was self-defense.  The finding further noted that both my father and Albert would have benefited from restraint.

The night after the funeral, I lay in my room thinking of how Albert had come to Dominion a year and a half before, like me, an only child, his father a carpenter, his family free.  He had large, startling eyes, dark and depthless; he was small, what old folks referred to as “delicate,” and I felt a connection to him, though it was almost a week before I went up to him at recess.  When I did, he was sitting by himself, back against a tree, looking off into the distance.

Hello, I said, and he said hello, his face so open, and we began to talk. I decided what made us friends was that neither of us cared for baseball; later I understood that what drew me to him was his kindness, his stillness that mirrored my own, and because we shared a reverence for beauty that we found in the shapes of clouds, bird flight, the depth of a rose’s red.  I couldn’t bring him home, my father wouldn’t have stood for it, but I could go to his.  His room had books along one wall, and small carvings of animals and people his father had made which delighted us for hours.  When we were done with those, we made up stories, we fished, caught fireflies in jars and ran through nights holding their glowing before us.  Once we tried to move the Founder’s Rock, convinced treasure hid beneath it.  Then Albert’s father died, and Albert’s face went shut like a slammed door shuts, and what we did came between us.

Outside, heat lightening lit the night.   I blinked, and my grief came down, not in tears, but desolation.  Albert was dead.  And my father had done it.  I sat up, lit the lamp, then tiptoed across the floor to the dresser, opened the next drawer from the last, took the watch from where it lay beneath two sweaters.  My father had given it me for my tenth birthday; I was not allowed to use it except on special occasions—Christmas, Easter Sunday.  I carried the watch back to the light; it had wound down, the hands said 4:22.  I blew the lamp out, went past my parents’ room to the door that led to the yard, stepped into air thick with the smell of two stones struck together.  For an instant lightning made the night noon-bright, lit the shed, the barn, and I went to the side of the barn and threw the watch as far as I could through the darkness.  I heard the sound it made when it struck a tree, and I stood, wondering if there was anything else that came from my father that I could be rid of.  I thought of his God, and eagerly denied Him.  Said to all and to anything that would listen that I’d live out my days as a disbeliever, that I’d not serve a God that allowed my father to go unpunished for what he’d done.  For a moment I experienced a fear that God would strike me down, but the moment passed, only to be followed by the sense that my father, glowering, loomed in the dark behind me.  I spun, but there was nothing.  Trembling, exhilarated, but needing something I couldn’t name, I set out for Bass’ shed, only to pause when I reached his door.  Bass had recently said I was too big to sleep with him, that big boys didn’t go crawling into other people’s beds.  I’d turned back toward the house when his voice called out, so unexpected I jumped.

Who that?

Me, I answered.

Me got a name?

Me, Bass.  Michael.

What you want?

To come in.

Well, come on then.

I pushed the door back.  I couldn’t make him out in the darkness, but then the lightening flared.

You all right?

Yes.

I could hear him make room in the bed.  I climbed in, my back to him; he put his arm around me. You scared of dying?

I’d seen death: the horse thief my father hanged, the surprise in the doomed man’s eyes when the fall stopped so abruptly.  I’d been to funerals before, and I’d gone with my father when Albert’s father burned himself to death, saw his body, gaunt and blistered, sitting straight up on the privy hole though there was nothing evident to hold it.

No, I ain’t scared.

Sad?

I miss Albert.

I know you do.

We lay awhile, not speaking, the lightning coming and going.

Bass, why’d my father do it?

Baby, I don’t know.

I should have done something.

Like what?

I don’t know.  Anything.  Not just stood there.

Wasn’t nothing for you to do, Bass said. You do what you can in life.  Just don’t let it pass when you have the chance for doing.  Otherwise you live with empty.

Empty?

Uh huh.  Here…and here. He’d touched my chest, my stomach….

Bass, I said.  I feel things….

Do?

Like I’m different.  From everybody else but Albert.  Alone.  I make up stories.  Some times a thing’s so beautiful….

You wants to cry?

I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me.  I do.

Aw, baby, that ain’t nothing to worry about.  That’s fancy, imagination.  Another source of truth.….

Fancy’s true?

Sometimes.

How’s that?

Just is.  Make sure you feed it.

Feed it?  How?  With what?

Learn to pay attention.  Read.

Read?  Can you read?

No, baby, I can’t read.

Want me to teach you?

Can’t, it’s ‘gainst the law.

No, it’s not. I sat up.  Nearly every negro in Dominion knows how to read.

Not slaves.

Well, we won’t tell anyone.

He laughed.  Last thing old Bass want is for you to get put in jail by the sheriff.

He put his arms around me and laughed again; he was what he called “tickled.”

I turned so my knees were pressed to the backs of his thighs.  What about alone?

What about it?

Why do I feel so alone?

You’re not alone, Bass said, you got me.  You got your mama and your daddy.

I didn’t answer, and he, as if he sensed how unsatisfactory his answer, asked, How about we go fishing tomorrow?

I could feel his slow and steady heart against my hand; I could smell him, the odor of milk gone now, leaving the scent I knew: deep musk and slightly sour, and as I burrowed against him, lightening lit the room.

My father was an angry man.  Once, furious at something I can’t recall, he dug a

hole in the yard large enough to hold a body, then filled it.  Another time, again driven by rage, he cut down a tree that narrowly missed the house when it fell.  Shaken that he might have destroyed Obediah’s property—the house, the barn, and Bass’ shed were part of his salary—he took the afternoon to recover, then set up lanterns, sawed and chopped the tree into pieces, telling Bass he didn’t want assistance, and so labored through the night.

He called, my father, all the time on Jesus, but had no compassion.  I suspect he became a sheriff solely for the joy of apprehending those who broke the law; such acts were, at root, ungodly, and he was a hater of all ungodly things, not just crimes, but men and women who committed them, that and pleasure: sex, laughter and the drama, and he’d speak of these with a fervor that made his eyes shine, the light of which served not to lead, but blind him.  His recipe for salvation called for purifying the mind through observing the properties of fire, by subjugating the flesh through fasts and prayer, and he held that if one must stoop to craving, let it be for naught but sacrifice.

My mother’s name was Kathleen; she made a life for herself that consisted of her garden, of visiting the sick, and assisting savages in Peru.  On my fifth birthday she began my education about work and thrift and money.  It was my charge to feed the chickens, one of which she gave me; I sold the eggs to Dominion’s wives.  Half what I earned went toward the upkeep of the house, half into a can that sat on the mantle, and it was these savings that provided me means for a peppermint stick or a gift for someone’s birthday.

Substantial in stature, my mother carried herself in a way that suggested she was trying to hide her size—shoulders hunched, arms held to her sides—postures even more exaggerated in the presence of my father.  She called my father Dooley; she, to him, was Mother, and their preferred medium was silence occasionally broken by references to sin and the wretched Peruvian poor.

I know little about my parents’ lives before they married; my father had come from North Carolina and met my mother in Dominion, she the daughter of parents who moved to Tennessee after the wedding and who died before I was born.  Of my father’s family, I know that a group went to California to make their fortunes, only to vanish in 1830 somewhere between Haywood and Sacramento.  My father never spoke of them, and I wondered what they were like and why he hadn’t gone with them.

At some point after he killed Albert, my father took to whiskey.  At first he sought to conceal it, but soon gave up the pretense and carried a flask in his back pocket for the last years of his life.  He’d reach for it in the midst of one of his rantings: how negroes, in their failure to invent things, to explore the world, to make art, were of no account, and so to be used for one’s purpose, monitored and soundly punished should they step beyond their place.  Their natural condition was slavery and if, by some act of providence, they managed to rise above it, they inevitably turned to crime.

Now that I have some sense of human complexity, I’m prepared to argue that no man is entirely evil, nor none entirely good, and so I search for the good in my father.  The effort leads to Bass.  Although my father loathed negroes as a group, it was Bass who received his most meaningful affection.  I know this is contradiction; after all, my father whipped Bass, changed his name from Curtis, and never set him free.  But there’s also no denying the pleasure my father took in putting a window in the shed so his slave could have light, or the fact that he gave Bass a stove for heat in winter, and I know I didn’t imagine the laughter they shared at the hole my father dug and filled all by his self.  Neither have I invented the fact that when my father grew ill, it was Bass he wanted at his bedside, Bass he chose as his companion for the journey to his death.

A week after Albert’s funeral, Samantha Dixon collapsed outside the bank, spit glistening on a tongue that never spoke again, though she lived to be one hundred.  In the wake of Samantha’s silence came awareness that slaves had been afflicted with an ailment that caused them to drop plates and stumble over slop jars.  Shortly thereafter, this malady appeared to affect free negroes as well; they began to bump against their neighbors at the bank, or in the aisles at Riddle’s, causing whites to step back, perplexed, not only at negroes’ sudden clumsiness, but at their refusal to smile and beg their pardon.

Then Reesus, in blue pants and shirt, a white scarf around his head, appeared outside the courthouse at four o’clock one afternoon, ringing a cow bell.  When he had sufficient audience, he announced that what was wrong with negroes, slave and free, was that they were upset with the ruling that Albert’s killing was in self-defense.  In addition, they were disappointed with Reverend Smiley, who’d not sufficiently lamented Albert’s death, or challenged the notion that the life of a negro boy had no value.

We’re upset, too, whites said, but it’s over.  Let bygones be bygones.  No one’s said the boy’s life had no value.  No one’s said that at all.

Thank you, Reesus said, as if they’d given him what he’d asked for, thank you very much, and he went away, only to come back the next day at the same time to prophesize of bones scattered in a wilderness, a blood red sun above a desolate horizon.  While most were taken with the imagery and found it thought-provoking, a few divined that Reesus might be trying to stir up trouble, and so they went to my father, who said it was best to ignore Reesus (who he’d always referred to as crazy).  Folks shouldn’t come to hear him speak and shouldn’t respond to him, my father counseled, for if they did, he’d simply be encouraged.

The next day, wearing blue pants and a yellow hat, Reesus held out his hands so all could see the carving on the right one.  Times, he said, were about to get hard.  A pestilence was coming, from the throes of which a savior would appear, only to have his life taken, not on a cross, but by hanging.  Then he told of a mighty struggle, the deaths of boys like Albert multiplied, and no one there to mourn them.

None of this raised anybody’s ire.  The trouble began when Reesus foretold that once the struggle had ended, white people’s unborn children would slide from their mothers’ wombs to ravage the world by eating up everything in it.  This caused negroes to smile and whites to shake their heads and hiss at him.  Others tried to engage him in debate, which he studiously avoided, saying it was his job to tell the future, not explain it.  If they needed things explained to them, go see a preacher.

All while this was going on, my father was taking his own advice and not looking in Reesus’ direction.  It wasn’t until Riddle’s pregnant wife screamed at Reesus for suggesting that her child would be a monster, then collapsed, weeping in the street, that my father intervened.

Reesus, he said, You need to stop this mess.  You can’t talk about people’s children that way.  People particular about their children.

I ain’t said nothing about that woman’s child, Reesus said.  Her child be half-grown by the time monsters start arriving.

But it’s not necessary.  None of this is necessary.

I ain’t doing nothing, Reesus said, but saying what I seen.

What you seen? You can’t see if tomorrow will be Tuesday.  You can’t tell if ice will melt in the sun.  Now I want you to stop.

Stop what?

Whatever it is you call yourself doing.

Why?

My father sighed.  Because I say so.

Oh, Reesus said, because you say so. He shook his head and looked at those of us who stood there as if to say did we see what he had to put up with.

Reesus, my father said.  Don’t make me hurt you.

Oh, you goin’ to shoot me, too?

If I have to.

My father didn’t get too close when he said this; he knew the history, how Reesus had come to Dominion in 1836, a boy of thirteen, the word Tiresias carved on the back of his hand.  Negroes took him in, but when they asked, he wouldn’t tell what had happened.  Neither would he stay long with any family, as if he feared to be indebted, or wanted to distribute fairly the small burden that he was.  While negroes eventually shortened his name, for the most part they accepted a boy who was in love with colors, who wore long sleeves in all weather, who swam in the pond fully clothed.  He held to modesty even when it came to baptism, which he submitted to in a green scarf and overcoat and a borrowed winter hat.

It was Miss Alice, the colored school teacher, who told us who Tiresias had been named for, and for a while some wondered if what made him so strange was that he was both female and male.  Reesus never responded to that wondering, though when he heard of his namesake’s gift, he declared that he was a prophet.  His first pronouncement came in the spring of 1837: a president, he said, would die in Texas, men would fly and women storm the gates of power waving underclothes.  When none of these came true, Dominion lost interest in him until five white boys sought to see for themselves what lay between his thighs.  One of those boys grew up to go to Albuquerque where he worked in a gambling house, forever lisping because of what teeth had done to his tongue.  Another’s nose never regained ability to smell; the rest were beaten to unconsciousness.  Following that skirmish, Reesus disappeared (gone off to prophecy school, some joked), returning seven years later to live by odd jobs, refusing to say where he’d gone or what he’d done while he’d been there, much less what he made of the fact that in his absence slavery had come.

He made another attempt at predicting in1849, proclaiming that a drought would descend upon Missouri, and it was while he waited in vain for this to happen that I went up to him where he leaned, disconsolately, it seemed, against the Founder’s Rock.  He wore a yellow shirt and hat, green trousers, a blue sash around his waist.  I had no strong belief in Reesus’ gift for prophecy, though sometimes, for reasons I didn’t wholly understand, I’d wished he could tell what was to come.  So it was with one part unfounded hope and one part desire to make him feel better that I asked if he’d consent to tell my future.  He blinked, then looked around, insuring I was alone.  He was cautious about children; the Augusta twins had set fire to a bag of cow dung left at his door, and some other boys were fond of throwing rocks at him.

Three, he said, and held up that number of fingers.

Three?  Three what?

Three people.

What about them?

You’ll love three people.

That’s all?

No, you’ll stand and watch a fire.

A fire? What kind of prophecy is that? I said, and when his face fell, I walked away, disgusted.  He called after me, said something I couldn’t make out, but I never turned back to hear it.

Later, I wondered why he’d said three people and not three women.  And did he mean that in all my life I’d love but three?  Or that I’d love all three at the same time?  Each notion confused me.  Finally I concluded that the stricken look on Reesus’ face came from his understanding of how poor his prophecy had been.  It was second-rate, possessed neither art nor vision, and while it might have mentioned fire, shed no light.

At first, he felt flattered by these episodes of confusion. It had the merest whiff of mild celebrity to be singled out in a crowd, to be addressed in a friendly yet tentative way by someone you had never seen before, as if you had a bit part in a small film that had just come out. There was always something marvelous in their initial expressions, thinking they had rediscovered a piece of their lives they had thought irretrievably gone. Lately though, a certain annoyance had crept into these scenarios because of the bewilderment he passed through as he racked his brain for some semblance in his own past. He wondered why it almost never really was him but rather some anonymous double, a hundred times more popular.

Blake recalled that one time he had retreated from a lacerating February wind inside a café, where he waited for the university bus. It was a good spot because there was a kind of alcove where he could be separated from the actual customers, and without paying a cent, he could loiter and take in the rich atmosphere of the coffee. His mind mostly wandered to the mountains of files awaiting him at his desk, a permanent backlog not of his own doing, that properly could have been one of the seven labors of Hercules.

“Lester?” the man there had almost whispered, leaning in suddenly.  He was maybe mid- thirties, completely bald, with those odd uneven surfaces everyone conceals beneath their hair. This guy was so certain of his perception, he put his arm around Blake’s shoulder before asking him if his handicap was still four? Never so much as having touched a golf club in his life, and never being greatly enamored with hugs even among his few friends, Blake was nonplussed. He shook him off as if reacting to an assault, which of course wrecked the man’s generous smile in an instant and had him backpedaling with his hands raised in a universal sign of surrender.

Ever since these strange encounters began happening in his early 20’s, he wondered if he should he act as if he were unfazed or incredulous, as if the solicitor had just escaped from an asylum.“No, I’m sorry,” was Blake’s more customary reply. He usually let them down easy so that the shock of their hallucinations wouldn’t hit them full force. Eventually he settled into a kind of benign condescension, as he was the one being accosted and was armed with the true circumstances. It was nothing high handed, just enough to preserve some sense of personal space like a country that claims a couple miles of territorial water.

Another time it happened at the airport. He and Chloe were headed out to a couples spa in Palm Springs for a desperately needed vacation. They had paraded through the two-hour security ordeal and were waiting to board. They were sitting in the concourse with their exorbitantly priced cinnamon rolls watching planes with different brands and markings taxi along the endless expanses of runway. A well-dressed man looking to be about Blake’s age came toward them with the ubiquitous luggage on wheels, his eyes fixed as if trying to read some inscription on Blake’s forehead.

”Jim, where have you been hiding?” he blurted, as Chloe coughed in response to this ambush. It may have been worse this time either because Chloe was present or from the fact that they were sitting down, which lent the effect of being pinned in a corner. Blake took a second to swallow the last of his hasty breakfast and gather some composure.

“Nowhere…” he said evenly.  “Maybe it’s you who has been so scarce.” His identity was being stolen in little increments every time he was being figured for someone else, and now he was getting even, restoring the yin and yang. Chloe gave him a shocked look, as if he had a nickname he had never divulged to her, a secret compartment to his life. The man didn’t quite know what to make of this ambiguous remark, whether it was a real charge of the abandonment of friendship or merely the usual male jousting. “I can’t believe it. You haven’t changed…” was all he could come up with in response. For a few seconds Blake considered letting this go another couple rounds, but Chloe’s anxious glances were bearing down on him like a physical pressure and he relented.

As the people around them began to rise at the announcement for boarding passes, he said, “I’m sorry there’s been some mix-up. I’m not Jim.”  He pulled the driver’s license from his wallet to demonstrate he wasn’t kidding. Blake felt a certain duty to defray the guy’s embarrassment after having played along and held his misjudgment in suspense. “Don’t feel bad,” Blake went on. “This happens to me on an almost regular basis. I must have one of those everyman faces. Just fill in the name.”

When the man shrugged and then ambled off in search of his gate, Chloe turned to Blake and said, “What exactly was that?”

“I’m not sure. It’s like being some poor soul in a police lineup where the victim is half blind.”

Later, once they had reached cruising altitude, Blake mused about how exhilarating it had been playing along for a while, some life-altering drug, the rush of the unknown. If it was a rather cruel game, he wasn’t the one who had invited it. He wondered if that might be the key to breaking the curse, to ending the karmic cycle of his somehow being dozens of people whose uniqueness was so fuzzy as to be virtually nonexistent. As he peered down at the aerial clarity of the earth, it suddenly seemed perfectly legitimate to be a casual impostor, not in an attempt to crash some high society ball or a nuclear facility but just for the experience of being someone else for a while, someone he didn’t even know.

During those same few months, Chloe began offering accounts of a recurring dream with an almost feverish persistence. The reveries had him conducting a coldly calculated affair with Chloe’s friend Megha and her descriptions were nearly cinematic in their vividness. They told her the names of the motels where the liaisons occurred, the perfume and type of shoes Megha was wearing, the elaborate fiction Blake had concocted about his whereabouts, even the brand of cabernet they sipped as they lay naked beside one another.

Naturally, he and Chloe had laughed at the beginning but after a while it became like a lurid soap opera. If Blake got up to find something else to do in the middle of another installment, she would follow him around the house, seeming to remember more outlandish aspects of the dream as she uttered them. It was yet another subversion of his real identity, not only because he was depicted as a rakish player in her unconscious but because on some subtle level, she seemed to be judging him on the basis of these nightly scandals. It was nothing she would come out and say; rather a certain doubt, a circumspection, a withdrawal in her manner that he could trace to no other cause.

What made matters worse was that Megha was lovely—the dark eyes and narrow waist, the general insouciance– and he had long nurtured a kind of never to be fulfilled crush. She would jog through the neighborhood in her sweatpants or demure shorts, her agile figure still somehow limned inside the loose fabric. Her breathing seemed hardly to be strained, as she had been a cross-country athlete in her college days. In the course of his weekend errands, he had spotted her a couple times,but she had been so ensconced both in the rhythm of her exertion and the insulated auditory world of her headphones that he hadn’t even tried to say hello. He had just watched the feline grace of her movement until she became obscured by traffic or merely drifted out of sight.

Only one moment at a party long ago had he ever really been tempted. She and her obtuse husband Rudy were leaving and Blake went to retrieve her jacket that was in a heap with the others in the dark bedroom, Megha leading the way. Blake supposed he didn’t think to turn on the light because he was half drunk and it took her a half minute of rummaging to find it. Of course, there was something electric about her search in the dusky room and when she caught a heel and started to fall, he reflexively caught her with the result that his face sank into her soft neck for the brief interval it took to regain their balance. That was all there was to it but the imprint of that happy accident was as indelible as his own name. Even though Blake felt it was not in his DNA to have an affair with anyone, that such a betrayal would stalk his conscience like a predator, Chloe’s accounts of his nonexistent infidelity only stirred up that feeling amid the stack of coats once more.

In the meantime, Chloe informed him one night that Megha and Rudy were getting a divorce. Megha had come over that afternoon while he was at work, spilling the story. Having been married six years, she had accumulated several reasons but it was Rudy who kept accusing Megha of acting strangely, of aloofness, of creating rancor. She had gone by the time Blake got home, but sitting in a favorite leather chair in the living room, he seemed to detect a hint of whatever scent she had been wearing. Chloe and Megha were on the phone a lot the next couple weeks, and one afternoon in another room Blake picked up the receiver, not realizing they were on the line. Megha was lightly crying in that sniffling way that makes the sound almost indistinguishable from a cold or an allergy. In the few seconds he eavesdropped, he reflexively wanted to console her, just as he had caught her before she hurtled toward the pointed corner of a bookcase in their bedroom. It was just natural instinct to want to remind her of the many fun outings the four of them had had together; to hear Yo Yo Ma in the park at Ravinia, the lakeboat cruise where they were all as high as a hot air balloon, the baseball games behind in the bleachers.

Chloe began to stare at him when he would be watching TV or reading National Geographic, as if she were focusing some occult beam that rummaged through the locked rooms of his psyche. She would probe Blake’s itineraries and scrutinize the timelines of his absences like a detective on one of the dozens of dreary cop shows that now littered the airwaves. On one occasion, she examined a vaguely horizontal tomato sauce stain on his collar and said, “interesting shade of lipstick” before tossing the shirt listlessly into the hamper. He became resentful of this surveillance, even more because it had no legitimate basis. Chloe’s romantic attentions dwindled, as might be expected upon getting a crash course in all of Rudy’s vices and inconsiderateness. She began spending more time with her animal rights group, which appeared to regard humans as a heartless and vastly inferior species.

For a while, Blake had walked the streets and went to bars and movies without being hailed or summoned or badgered by some misbegotten passerby with incipient myopia or cataracts. There were a few inevitable instances when he would bump into people he did know but not very well, and he noticed during those exchanges of small talk a certain defensiveness, as if they too might be mistaken somehow. Still, before the incident with Renfield, the whole phenomenon seemed to be receding like some aberrant chapter in adolescence that disappears without a trace.

One Thursday Blake was having lunch in Plato’s, a Greek restaurant a few blocks from where he worked but where he had seldom ventured, owing to the medieval strictures of his lunch break. It was one of those places with murals of terraced cities along the Adriatic coast and frescoes of the retinue of Mount Olympus, with their lyres and thunderbolts. A fleeting March warm front had drifted in and Blake’s boss was not in the office that day, so he was determined to eat with some leisure for a change.

“Paul, is it really you?” came a voice at the edge of his solitary table. There had been something different about this one, some almost desperate timbre that this Paul be found again at last. He was almost in a kind of daze, hesitant, non-threatening. Blake seemed to detect a certain kindness in the man’s dull eyes, and he was seized with the complicated impulse to both befriend and deceive him that had first struck at the airport.

“Who else would it be? Great to see you.” The rejoinder came so naturally this time, as if he were filming a scene that he had rehearsed a hundred times, settling on a few nuances and discarding others that had felt contrived. Finishing the last of his souvlaki, Blake had the sense to proceed slowly and allow the details to come to him. If he came to be exposed, he would plead some kind of minor mental illness, and if that didn’t work, it crossed his mind that the skewers that ran through the columns of meat could be brandished for effect.

“Has it really been 14 years since Columbus?” the gentleman said, his face still flushed with surprise, as the disbelief at the edge of his smile began to recede.

“Sad but true. Tempus fugit. I didn’t even know you were living here,”Blake said, with the semblance of a barely muted enthusiasm.

“Me either. We moved a year and a half ago. A job I just couldn’t pass up. Son of a bitch. There’s something different about you.”

“You’re not exactly a carbon copy yourself,” Blake replied evenly. “But you look good. I would have recognized you anywhere.” The man sat down almost in slow motion, laying his laptop case on the floor.

“You still on the tax side of things?

“No. I switched a few years back. That’s probably how we lost touch.”

Blake felt strangely relaxed, that he would somehow be able to navigate through the minefield of ruses, eliciting information about his double’s past as he went along. There was one moment when he thought he would surely be exposed as a fraud but it passed quickly with a change of subject. His name was Ned Renfield, father of four and fellow alumnus of Ohio State. Ned was an avid member of Facebook and mentioned a number of other of their mutual friends, giving him a thumbnail sketch of their lives. Fortunately, there had been no sudden deaths to report, just the usual half life woes of divorce, minor scrapes with the law and career fiascos.

“It’s funny how things turn out. Jarrett had his wild side but I would have thought him headed for big things, a CEO or something,” Renfield said, after describing how he had recently gone down in flames amid a scandal. “I’m surprised you’ve fallen out of touch with him, Paul. You were pretty close.”

“It’s terrible I know. I just can’t keep all the balls in the air lately.”

“Do you remember when he broke into the provost’s office?”Ned blurted, carried back by the memory.

“God, he had nerves of steel.”

“That’s the way we all were back then. No regard for the consequences. What was it that he took? You were there, with the getaway car so to speak.” Even then, Blake didn’t so much panic as feel a twinge of embarrassment. They were both just actors trying to get the emotions right—the director could yell cut at any moment and they could start all over. Still, he sensed the merest tremor traveling up his left side, as Ned watched him with the fond anticipation of reminiscence.

“How can I not remember that?” Blake lightly knocking his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to jog the nonexistent information free. “I really ought to cut down on my drinking.” Blake hoped that might get a laugh and create a diversion but it didn’t shake Ned’s intentness. There were a few seconds where Ned was perfectly still, not even blinking while Blake braced himself for the dreaded scene of exposure, the incredulity and reddened faces, the hard stares from the waiters and other patrons.

“The bookends!” Renfield half shouted, drawing a few glances. “Egyptian Figures. Sphinxes, that’s what they were.”

“Of course,” Blake recovered, then felt his confidence coming back like a burst of oxygen. “The provost acted like they were solid gold.”

“It’s a good thing Jarrett was able to get them back the next night.”

“Yes, a prank instead of grand larceny.”

“Maybe it was just a matter of time with him. That the one would turn into the other…”Renfield said. When Blake considered whether to probe this directly, Renfield looked at his watch and stood up from the table, explaining that he was already late for a meeting, and handed him his business card. He made Blake promise to call so they could catch up some more. “This is so terrific,” Ned gushed looking back, as he started to make his way out. “I thought I had lost the trail.”

There was another party, Herb Harbin’s annual April Fools gala which had become a rite of spring. It featured a number of objects scattered in plain sight throughout the house that were somehow counterfeit. He offered a prize for the one who could identify the most. In past years, there had been fake diplomas, cigarettes that would not light, fraudulent books, clocks that ran backwards and sundry other illusions. According to Chloe, Megha was supposed to be there, and he mused about seeing her without the hulking presence of Rudy whose gravity always threw her into a slightly different orbit. When Chloe came down with a nasty chest cold, it surprised Blake that she insisted he go anyway. Maybe this was a test and she had spies planted in every room, or maybe the Megha factor had slipped her mind amid the sneezing and chills.

He sifted through the different ways he could act, empathetic, pretending nothing had happened, playing up the supposed gaiety of the occasion to help her forget her Neanderthal lover. It crossed his mind that he would tell her about Renfield, that especially in her new incarnation she might understand why he needed to be someone else for a while, as if he had become a fugitive from himself. But Blake wasn’t one to go out of bounds, to entertain the idea that he was any more in her universe than he ever had been. He spent most of the party looking over his shoulder, just anxious to find out if there was any detectible change, perhaps some ineffable mark that made her even more beautiful, and comfort her whatever way he could. After a while, Blake figured she wasn’t coming and gradually sank beneath the silly spirit of the evening, in which even real ordinary objects began to seem fake in some ineffable way.

Megha finally arrived more than half way through the party. She was dressed down with just some faded jeans and an oversized pastel shirt. They nodded to each other from across the room when she came in and when he saw her hovering around Mariel, another friend of Chloe’s he had never much liked, he decided she might not be much inclined for male company of any sort and confined himself to one of the other conclaves. But then Mariel got drawn away and Megha looked a bit lost so he wandered over to where she stood near the fireplace. As he got closer, her eyes appeared uncharacteristically vacant, as if she had gotten a considerable head start on the alcohol before she got there.

“I heard about poor Chloe,” she said, smiling wanly so as to not make him feel too guilty for deserting her.

“Yes, she practically kicked me out though,” he said, and immediately regretted his choice of words. “In her case, misery doesn’t love company.”

“Have you found any of Herb’s hidden tricks yet?”

“Only a little funny money—George Bush’s face smack in the middle. He’ll be lucky if he even gets his own stamp…”

“Well, you better try harder,”she said, with a hint of that Punjabi accent that was like a beguiling spice in an unusual dish you couldn’t quite name.“You’re never going to win the grand prize with that.” Her head seemed to sag a little when she spoke as if the weight of it were too much to lift upright, and she leaned a little excessively against the mantel. She didn’t appear sad so much as stranded somehow, on the side of some country road. Blake rummaged his mind for some safe topic, anything to divert her from the circumstance that encompassed her every move now.

“There’s a Kilburn exhibit coming to the Institute. Some very nice stuff. Reminds me a little of Hopper, the urban landscapes, the people in the middle of something but you can’t figure out quite what.” Out of nowhere, Blake had remembered they shared a similar taste in art and that she fooled around with some amateur watercolors herself.

“Yes, I saw a couple of his paintings somewhere. Really interesting,” she said, momentarily emerging from her fog, just as shouts arose from the den where one of the guests had stumbled across a revolver that shot bubbles. “We should go some time,” she said in a voice that immediately seemed slight and wounded, uttered without the new calibrations necessary for all the changes.

“Yes, we should,” Blake said with a little hesitance, silently exploring the ambiguity about whether ‘we’ included his slumbering wife. “I’ll find out when it is.”

Just then, Wendell Ross, one of the neighbors they hardly knew, tripped rounding a couch too quickly, sprawling at the foot of a mammoth antique bureau. By the time Blake and a couple others helped him up and retrieved his miraculously unbroken glass, she had fled to the other side of the house and soon must have slipped out through the back door.

The last time he met Renfield, it was on a Saturday, nearer Blake’s house this time.  As it turned out, they only lived about five miles apart. Blake wasn’t going to let him get too close to his life, with all the preparation that would entail, and so he had insisted on yet another neutral site. Quincy’s was an old fashioned tavern Blake had retreated to on many an occasion when his own set of walls would turn briefly oppressive, one that had not succumbed to the craze for flat screen TV’s at every angle.

Blake had slowly become fascinated with his own new persona, the cavalier, fun-loving adventurer he was never destined to be. He recalled a few of the enticements he had really passed up over the years due to some excess financial or moral scruple. The trips to South America Chet Rittenaur took every January, the marijuana trances Bob Gooley still engaged in with their pals on his patio, and the excursions to strip clubs a different crowd scheduled with an almost liturgical frequency. His demurrals had always shunted him to the periphery of every group, this fatal reluctance to take the blind leap.

“It just occurred to me I haven’t seen you smoking,” Ned said, looking a bit puzzled as Blake joined him on a stool at the bar.

“Yes, one demon down, several more to go.”

Maybe it was the early afternoon hour but some of the spark of their initial meetings had dissipated. Blake was glad to put the ball in Ned’s court, become the interlocutor so that he could give the lying center in his brain a break, rest on the fabrications he had already made. After some small talk, Renfield showed him pictures of his kids, told him that his wife Alise had recently broken her ankle, that there was something messed up with the insurance. Maybe that was what was spooking Ned that day, that things had changed, that the aura of college could only carry them so far.

“How’s Madeleine? I’ve been dying to ask. ”

“Not sure. She’s in a land far, far away,” Blake said, with what he hoped would pass for amused resignation.

“You’re kidding. I’m sorry,” Renfield said, concerned enough that Blake had to dial his mood down a notch.

“It’s OK. C’est la vie.”

“So you’re with someone else?

“Well, yes. Though it hasn’t been that long. We’ll see if the cure will take.” Blake had a brief interior glimpse of Chloe with her temperament lately like unpredictable weather—global cooling perhaps. Her image conflicting with that of Paul’s Madeleine whose features kept shifting in his mind’s eye.

“I can’t imagine you without Madeleine. I never saw two people so happy. You were like the royal couple,” Ned said, his voice trailing off at the end. “Something in me doesn’t want to believe it.” Blake noticed that Renfield seemed distracted, a little distant perhaps, as he absorbed each new piece of incongruous background on his old pal.

“It took a while for me too,” Blake said, searching for a way to shift directions.

“How did you mess that up, buddy?” Ned tried to smile when he said it but the muscles around his mouth wouldn’t hold as he turned back to his glass, so that the remark became tinged with accusation. Blake ran through the series of scenarios he had considered when the inevitable topic came up but none of them seemed to appeal to him anymore. They all seemed to call up some strange melancholy that made the subterfuge suddenly like lifting a hundred pounds of dead weight, like inheriting someone else’s sins.

“An affair, what else? Nothing very original.” As Blake said this, he found himself scrambling for the next move. He hit upon a few of the details he recalled from Chloe’s dreams: a green slit skirt, an impetuous trip to the Florida Keys, the curious seduction of stealth itself.

“Oh, well. It happens.” Renfield said, pronouncing his tepid forgiveness when none had been asked for. “You do what you have to do.”

Then he got a call on his cell, the ring like a tune you would hear on one of the summer icecream trucks. Ned had to go pick up his teenager from band practice because a classmate’s ride had inexplicably fallen through. He apologized in the harried mien of a father constantly in demand with too many balls in the air, but Blake thought he detected a hint of relief as well, that a slow disappointment had been seeping into Renfield’s take on the new version of Paul. For a split second, he knew he had taken the game too far, felt the urge to confess and let him restore everything that Paul might still have become.

They lingered for a moment outside the place under the awning, saying their goodbyes, suggesting tenuous plans. Just as Ned turned a bit abruptly and ambled toward his car, Blakesaw Megha jogging by wearing sunglasses. He figured he should at least wave, as if this were shorthand for the fact that he had decided to call her about the Kilburn exhibit. It seemed the easiest thing in the world now and Chloe would never be interested anyway, because people lived in different worlds that only intersected occasionally and mostly by chance. He extended his arm like he was reaching for something, letting it sway rhythmically back and forth like some kind of semaphore. She stopped suddenly in mid stride, still pumping her legs in the simulation of movement, struggling to recognize him through the shifting light of the street. It was apparently too far for his voice to carry. After several seconds of peering at him across the thoroughfare, an unreadable look spread across the contours of her face. Megha couldn’t be sure, must not have known who he was, as she turned and began moving farther and farther away.

Sylvia never knew her parents and was raised in a colored children’s orphan asylum, just north of the Bronx. She’d read that Ella was there for a short time after her mother died. The people in charge made sure she got her three squares a day, received Salvation Army clothing and learned her three R’s. But while Sylvia was taken care of, she never felt cared for. However, the dance craze, which grabbed hold of the country in the 1920′s, hugged itself around her like no one else ever had. The radio gave Sylvia a crash course in the music of the day. By the time she hit the dance floor, what she’d been listening to tingled in every joint of her body. Men and women, who would’ve never given Sylvia a second look, wanted to partner up with her. And if it was a night when Ella was appearing, she’d dance until closing time, as the band squeezed all the swing out of the last song they played.

Sylvia believed it would always be that way. But the War came and boys who were dancing partners left to do their manly duty; and girls exchanged their bobby socks for stockings, taking over the jobs their boyfriends and husbands had done. Because of the shortage of men, Sylvia often danced with other women on Friday and Saturday nights when she went to the Savoy. However, many refused to dance with anyone, especially on the last one of the night, saying they were saving it for their sweethearts who would come home and pick up the dance right where they left off. But the War lasted longer than anyone expected. And the music turned toward a more downhearted mood and away from the light, bouncy tunes Sylvia loved to hear Ella sing, like “Chew-Chew-Chew, Your Bubble Gum”, “Five O’Clock Whistle”, and “Deedle-De-Dum.”

Sylvia took her seat in the orchestra of the Apollo, a few rows from the stage, as the audience continued to file in. She didn’t want to believe that a drum beat in her ears and shoe leather on a dance floor had lost the youthful sizzle it had before the War. If that was true, she’d come to the right place. Who but Ella could take a song like, “Into Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall,” and make Sylvia feel she was still too young for the Blues.

Ella parted the curtains slightly at the end of the stage and looked at the audience. Her eyes hopscotched over people filing in and those already seated. But Ella couldn’t find the woman, like she always did, when performing in New York. The first time she saw her was at the Savoy. Chick Webb had died and Ella took over as band leader with war brewing overseas. She was worried that guys in the band and people who paid to hear them play would think she wasn’t good enough to have her name on the marquee where Webb’s had been. Ella remembered standing off to the side of the stage, listening to the band doing “Stairway to the Stars”, and waiting for her cue to approach the microphone. Her eyes caught the hostile stare before anything else. It was heat the color of tar, coming right out of the woman’s eyes toward Ella. She jerked her head away, just as she would’ve done if her hand had reached into a pot of scalding water. Ella steadied herself and moved to the mic in step with the bass player’s strumming lead-in to the first landing of the “Stairway to the Stars”. By the end of the second chorus, Ella relaxed. The horns sprayed the air with the melody and it floated through her ears, nose and throat. When she opened her mouth for another climb into the heavens, everything she needed from the band was right there in her voice.
Let’s build a stairway to the stars
And climb that stairway to the stars
Yes, we’re climbing, climbing
the stairway to the stars, stars, stars
Sounds of violins
way out yonder where the blue begins
The moon will guide us
as we go drift, drift, drifting along
Ella finger snapped herself into a groove that danced in her shoulders. She made eye contact with the woman again. But the burning tar in the whites of her eyes had cooled to warm fudge from Ella’s honey-sweetened voice. Ella took in the rest of the woman, who was high-waisted and healthy in the hips. The hostility made sense. A woman of Ella’s size knew how it felt to be put down. She’d probably schooled herself in using her eyes to put people in their place before they did it to her. And who better to cut with your eyes than someone just like you. But Ella must’ve changed her mind. Because that was the only time that disapproval burned in the woman’s eyes.

Ella had spent most of her life wiping those looks off people’s faces. She did whatever it took to give them something to think about other than how she looked. Ella was eight years old when the “Charleston” stepped into an America waiting for something to get it up on its feet after the hangover of World War I. Once she saw a dance, it was a snapshot her body put into motion instantly. Ella and a few friends would sneak down on the train from Yonkers to Harlem and find out what new dances were creating a commotion at the Savoy. She was the one kids and grown-ups gathered around, if they wanted the latest steps to “The Shuffle off to Buffalo” and the “Susie Q.” Swift as Ella’s eyes were to catch on to a new dance, her ears were even quicker. She listened on the radio to the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell. And their voices washed through her ears, into her throat and out of her mouth.

Ella was all of seventeen in 1934, when she decided to try her luck at one of the auditions in a Harlem amateur night contest at the Apollo. The ache of her mother’s death, two years before, from a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, was still with her. A few months later, Ella’s stepfather was stricken with a fatal heart attack as well. She never got along with him and felt dying was his way of doing them both a favor by leaving Ella alone for good and following, into eternity, the one person he cared about the most. Ella went to live with an aunt in Harlem. But with a younger sister and several cousins living in the apartment, there were too many voices vying to be the center of attention for Ella to have the audience to display her talents.

Since her family couldn’t provide what she needed, Ella satisfied her cravings, earning nickels in the streets and in off-the-beaten path joints where there were contests for hoofers, singers and anyone playing whatever pieced together instrument might make a joyful noise. Ella dropped out of school, making extra money running numbers and being a lookout for sporting houses. She was picked up for truancy and sent to a colored children’s orphan asylum. But the rules and punishments for breaking them proved too much for someone with as much giddy-up as Ella. She soon ran away and was living hand to mouth in Harlem when the Apollo started regular amateur night shows.

Ella intended to tap some shoe leather into the floor of the stage. But she heard that a well known sister dance duo was scheduled to go on in brocade studded dresses and shiny dancing pumps. She slid into a pit of doubts about herself, which wasn’t helped by wearing a shabby, patch work of a dress and men’s brogans. Ella told the MC she’d changed her mind and would sing instead. She stepped into the spotlight on stage and started to sing a few bars of ‘The Object of My Affection’. But her voice faltered. Ella heard murmurs and restlessness in the audience. The MC stopped her and gently asked that she start over. The piano player began the intro to the song again in the key she asked for. Ella took another breath and opened her mouth.
The object of my affection
will change my complexion
from bright to rosy red.
The sound of the words sparkled in her throat, showing the way out of the dark dungeon she’d fallen into. The incandescence of Ella’s voice spread through the Apollo. The audience held its breath and then drenched her in applause. Ella knew she’d found the ‘objects of her affection’ that would never let her down. And she promised herself never to take either for granted.

Since Ella didn’t look the part of someone whose voice brought out the whoopee in even the most hard-hearted Hannahs and Henrys, musicians had to be persuaded to hear her after being turned off by their first impression. This was the case with band leader, Chick Webb, when a fellow musician introduced him to Ella as a possible vocalist for his band. Webb was brutally frank in his lack of interest. However, after much cajoling, he reluctantly agreed to listen, and was brought to attention by her clear as water voice that allowed him to hear all the way through it with nothing in the way to muddy it up. But what impressed him just as much was the hard-wired nerve it took to remain unfazed by his harsh words and still do what she came to his apartment to do. Webb knew something about getting your props from people ready to write you off after just one look. His runt-sized body and hunched back had folks assuming he was a circus curiosity when he first broke into the music business. But once Webb showed off his wares on the drums, he left the hands of many a drummer death, dumb and numb. Not stopping there, he went on to lead one of the top bands of the 1930′s, setting up housekeeping at the Savoy and daring any band to come into his house and evict him. Webb heard and felt something of himself in Ella. So he took a chance that paid off big time.

In the years just after Chick Webb’s death and the start of the Second World War, Ella’s records weren’t rising to the top of the hit parade, as they once did; and there was a younger crop of boy and girl singers, like Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, whose matinee idol faces and narrow hips were talked about as much as their singing. But what caught most of Ella’s attention was the change in her voice. It had been bottled up in her head, coming out through her nose and mouth. The years of seasoning caused the sound to ripen, swelling out of the stomach into the chest and throat. When the pressure rising up in Ella’s throat could no longer be held back, the cork popped, leaving a fizz around her voice that hadn’t been there before. This change altered the way she used her tongue, lips and teeth when taking flight into scat singing. For years, Ella had easily chased down the somersaults out of the mouths of musicians like Louis Armstrong. Eventually, she figured out how to make spitting images of sounds played on just about any instrument.

Sylvia still wasn’t comfortable going to theaters like the Apollo or clubs that were built for sitting, without much room for the dancing urge to enter a foot race with a band. But she did it, reluctantly, as a favor to her friends who wanted to see where a younger, up and coming, group of musicians were headed. Wherever they were headed, Sylvia didn’t want to watch from a chair. And the War, having turned people her age away from the good times which were so much a part of being young, began to push Sylvia and her friends away from dancing where one good twirl deserved another.

Sylvia knew Wardell from high school, a smooth talker whose words were as slick as his processed hair. He rarely gave her more than a nod at school. However, when Wardell spotted her cutting some serious steps into the dance floor of the Savoy, the nod he gave her was followed by his hand reaching for hers. Wardell didn’t reach out to many girls. They were the ones usually doing the reaching. So even though he talked a lot of shuck and jive, Sylvia was never more excited when he stopped talking and gave his undivided attention to the moves she swung his way.

There were two others, a white girl and boy who came together but never danced with one another. His name was Danny and all he did was listen to the band and never said much. That was great for Wardell who liked people who were all ears, especially while he held court. The girl’s name was Anna and had chubby arms and legs and a topsy, turvy head of hair like Little Orphan Annie in the Funny papers. When Wardell asked her to dance, Sylvia was impressed by how quickly she caught on. As Wardell continued to make his tour of eligible dance partners, Sylvia went over and introduced herself to Anna. And and in no time had her doing the “lindy hop.”

That’s how it started. But it wasn’t until after they’d gone their separate ways that Sylvia realized the special bond between them worked best when they were confined to the Savoy. Some of the young men, that the War didn’t take away, like Wardell and Danny, were taken away by the music of a new crop of musicians who didn’t see dancing going hand in glove with what they were playing in small clubs and after hour spots. Even Anna fell under the spell of one of the girl singers, named Sarah Vaughan who was part of the new music scene and whose voice moved around so much from tone to tempo that Sylvia could never follow her. Sylvia’s final break with her dancing chums from the Savoy occurred when she discovered that Wardell and Anna broke the unspoken dance rule of never moving any closer to one another than the brushing of a shirt against a blouse and trousers against a skirt. Anna tried to explain that what happened was less about wanting to find out what it was like to dance underneath each other’s clothes than getting the comfort they needed after Danny turned his head and heart away from them in favor of Charlie Parker. Sylvia could only shake her head. How dumb did Anna think she was? She never knew Danny that well. But whatever Anna and Wardell felt about losing Danny was just an excuse to satisfy a hunger for each other’s skin that was at least equal to the give and take of their bodies on the dance floor. And skin color was part of it. As someone in the low brown color scheme of the world, Sylvia saw enough men and women of both races grabbing after the light, bright and sho’ nuff white, as well as the beige, berry and darkest cherry, to know that color was never far from anything that happened between day and night. Sylvia had to admit that when she bedded down with a man of whatever color, which wasn’t that often, the feeling was neither as good as she hoped nor as bad as she feared. And compared to where dancing took her, it was no contest.

Wardell asked Sylvia to go with him to hear Sarah Vaughan sing at the Onyx in mid-Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. They’d never been out together before and Sylvia agreed more out of curiosity about Wardell’s intentions than any interest in hearing Sarah Vaughan. The club was packed tight and from the bar Sylvia caught sight of Anna at one of the tables.

“Did you see Anna over there?” she asked.

“No. But I’ve seen enough of her, so I don’t need to see no more.”

“Is that so?

“I just said it was.”

“Wardell, whatever happened between you and Anna ain’t my business. So don’t make it mine by taking it out on me.”

The set began with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, playing behind Sarah Vaughan. Sylvia found herself foot tapping and head bobbing to the music. And while the close quarters didn’t cramp the style or sound of the musicians, the high speed chase the combo led the audience on still didn’t do as much for Sylvia as almost any band would’ve done on a Saturday night at the Savoy. They left after the first set, passing Danny at the end of the bar, who was in such a trance that he didn’t notice them. It was not quite 10 P.M. Most of the street revelers were making their way toward Times Square. Wardell and Sylvia found a restaurant down the block on 52nd Street.

“I was out a line earlier, talking to you the way I did,” Wardell said, as they ate.

“Damn, Wardell. An apology coming from you is gonna have me fanning myself with a brick!”

“Don’t get too hot and bothered about it, ’cause there ain’t likely to be another one anytime soon.”

“So why did you ask me out?”

“Why not?”

“No. I asked you first,” she said.

“I wanted to see how it felt.”

“And?”

“It feels fine.”

“And how did ‘it’ feel being around me before tonight?”

“You know you’ve always been all right with me.”

“Just all right.”

“Come on, Sylvia. It ain’t like you ever went out a your way to let me know how you felt.”

“Maybe I did but you were too busy to notice.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Is what a fact? That I was interested in you or you were too busy?”

“I’m not busy now.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’ll prove it to you.”

“What are you gonna prove? That you got inspiration or perspiration?”

“Both!”

“I’m not sure you know the difference.”

“I’m not following you, Sylvia.”

“That figures ’cause when you on the dance floor, all you wanna do is lead.”

“Why don’t you show me the way then?”

After arriving at Sylvia’s building, she stood facing Wardell with her back against the door of her apartment. She’d danced with him hundreds of times. And over the years, they’d flirted back and forth like they did at dinner. But Sylvia had never sized him up as a serious romantic possibility before. A wolfish grin high-lighted the gold trim around his two tobacco stained front teeth and traces of saliva at the corners of his mouth. Slivers of kinky hair poked through the slicked down conk and his breath had the smell of sour milk, making her a bit light-headed. It was usually the case that Sylvia opened up to guys who showed some interest in her. She’d never given much thought to liking or disliking someone without knowing or caring what they felt about her. And here was Wardell, not on the dance floor, asking her to dance, but standing at her apartment door, a place she’d never imagined he would be.

And it surprised her that she wasn’t at all excited.

“You gonna ask me in?”

Sylvia heard something in the breath pushing out his words that didn’t sound all that eager.

“I don’t know, Wardell. You’re hell on wheels on the dance floor. But I don’t think you got the wind you’d need to come inside.”

“Maybe I could get up to speed, if you’d show me how to whistle.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the wind for that.”

“Well, that’s the way it goes,” he said with a shrug. “First your money, then your clothes.”

Sylvia laughed so hard the back of her head hit the door.

“Yeah! I love you too, Sylvia. I’ll see you around” he said, leaning down and kissing her on the cheek.

“No you won’t, if it’s like the place we went tonight.”

“Never say never.”

“I think we just got finished doing that.” Wardell turned to go and Sylvia couldn’t help herself.

“Tell me, Wardell? What did Anna see in you?”

“Like you said before, you don’t need for me to make my business yours.”

One thing Sylvia did make her business was to find as many ways as possible to stay on the dance floor. She joined up with two sisters who were developing an act of daring dance steps that tapped in time with a band or revved up an audience as the opening act before the main attraction took the stage. They called themselves “Six Feet of Thunder” and performed wherever there was a call for hoofers. Sylvia hoped they would get a call to put their heels and toes up against Ella and the Lionel Hampton Band. But when they finally got a few minutes of Hampton’s time and gave him a sketch of their stepping thunder, his wet-mouthed grin spilled out the polite but chilly words that he wasn’t keen on the idea of sharing the spotlight with some upstarts nobody knew who might upstage the band. Despite the unceremonious brush off from Hampton, Sylvia decided against making the rounds with her dancing partners, on a night when they could’ve picked up a nice piece of change, and hustled herself over to the Apollo to hear Ella with the Hampton Band.

Ella was alone in her dressing room, not wanting anyone around her before getting the call to join the band on stage. Her nerves were rubbed raw with the usual worry about whether people would like her. And it didn’t help not seeing the woman in the audience. The only thing that relaxed her was reading the Funnies. Ella’s favorite was “Little Orphan Annie,” which she’d been reading since she was a child. Annie’s ability to get herself in and out of trouble with the just in-the-nick of time help of her well heeled but forever on the go guardian, ‘Daddy’ Warbucks, struck a note that Ella liked the sound of. Having never known her father or gotten along with her stepfather, she searched for a Daddy Warbucks of her own who didn’t have to save the day but just stay put. When Ella was a sensation all over the nation with her recording of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”, guys were up in her face, coming out of the side of their mouths with reasons why they were the ‘Daddy’ she was looking for. She even married one of them. But it didn’t last long once Ella realized the only knot he wanted to tie was the one to her purse strings. And when the public turned a deaf ear to Ella’s records, the eyes that these half-stepping talkers had for her went blind.

Ella heard the applause from the audience, signaling the entrance of the Lionel Hampton Band on stage. She’d never sang Hampton’s hit recording, ‘Flying Home’, in public before. No one had ever done a scat version of Illinois Jacquet’s no holds barred saxophone solo that left all competitors gagging on the exhaust of his horn fumes. But what did she have to lose? She’d sung herself to a stand-still; and playing with the Hampton Band was a chance for Ella to see what she could make of herself, having outgrown the voice and the songs that made her popular. With gigs in big bands not as plentiful as they were before the War, Ella spent a lot of time jamming with a group of younger musicians that included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams. She marveled at the blinding speed of their playing, daring anyone to keep up. The longer Ella listened to what they were reaching for, the more she could hear her own voice changing in her ears.

She would stand in front of a mirror and sing the melody of “Flying Home.” And without fail, there were certain things she kept doing inside and outside of her mouth. With words like(big boy blue), Ella opened her mouth and pressed her lips against her teeth or pushed them out in a shape to blow smoke rings. With others like (do the dipsy doodle), she pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth or the back of her front teeth. And in other words such as (love, lady luck and lulu), her tongue played freely, teasing her lips, teeth and gums. The sounds she kept using started with the letters B, D and L. Of course, it was one thing to sing this high speed scat chatter in front of a mirror and quite another to mouth off before an Apollo audience known to rough up anyone, regardless of reputation, who stepped out on stage and didn’t deliver the goods in a timely and tuneful fashion. Which was another reason why she’d made a point of looking out in the audience for the woman who showed up to hear her no matter what.

The Hampton Band was playing, “All My Life” with its extended piano introduction. Ella remembered singing it years before at the Savoy as a tribute to Billie Holiday who’d recorded it first. She could hear the lyrics in her head:
All my life/I’ve been waiting for you/
My wonderful one/I’ve begun living all my life.
Ella was always a little intimidated by Lady Day. Billie was not much older but had come into prominence, a few years before Ella, as a stylist, picking up where Armstrong left off with unforgettable interpretations of lyrics through a mastery of phrasing and intonation. Like Satchmo, Billie wrung the guts out of a song, leaving herself and the audience hung out to dry. All Ella wanted was to sing the song, not turn herself into it. Even after her voice lost its baby fat, there was still a lighter than air quality that was never far away from the bounce of jumping rope. Ella heard all the whispered talk about her not being a singer who could sing the Blues with conviction, and for that reason couldn’t be taken seriously. Ella had to admit she’d never cared much for the Blues. She knew what it was to be down and out but used singing to take her away from all that. Besides, all these people flapping their tongues so much about the Blues probably never had them. And on those occasions when Ella sang about heartbreak, she had no intention of breaking her heart while doing it.

After Ella sang, “All My Life” the band took a break. Ella was sitting at a table and was surprised to see Billie walking toward her in a drop dead, gorgeous, off the shoulder lavender dress. Billie’s head was crowned with a peacock feathered hat and her trademark gardenia pinned to her hair. Seeing Billie made Ella feel her body pushing against the seams of her tight fitting dress. She noticed people staring and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. When Ella sang, nothing but the song got under her skin. But when she wasn’t singing and feeling thin-skinned, like she was at that moment, her mind did a jack knife dive out of her body and watched the people staring, without feeling the sting from their eyes.

“How’re you doin’, Ella girl?” Billie asked, sitting down.

“I’m fine, Billie. I’m so glad you came tonight!”

“I bet you are, with “All My Life” comin’ out your mouth like I’m goin’ out a style.” A smile moved around in Billie’s mouth but the rest of her face was drum tight.

“Did it bother you that I sang that song?” Ella asked. “I meant it as a compliment.”

“I could tell that’s HOW you meant it.”

“That sounds like you don’t believe I did all that well.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Ella. You got a whole octave more than I do to play around with. So you can go a lot farther into the wild blue yonder than me.”

“You know Billie, there’s a rumor going around that when people talk about me, they say: How high is the sky? But when they talk about you, they say: How deep is the ocean?”

Ella watched Billie’s Adam’s apple move up and down, like she’d swallowed something caught in her throat that loosened the stiffness in her neck and face. Billie’s lips then gave way to a show of teeth and laughter that came from deep in her belly. She reached out and placed her hand gently on Ella’s arm.

“That’s a rumor I wish I’d started,” she said.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“Well, there’s that old saying, that you gotta get down before you get up.”

“What does that mean?” Ella asked.

“Just that, I take people to where they live, which is where they have to go before you take them where they ain’t never been. It’s different strokes for different folks, Ella. And I don’t like nobody barking up behind what I’m doing, which is what bothered me when I heard you singing “All My Life.”

“I meant no disrespect, Billie. You’ve been an idol of mine.” Billie pulled her hand away from Ella’s arm.

“Shit! I ain’t your mama. I only got a few years on you. I don’t wanna be nobody’s idol. All I wanna do is sing and get what’s due me. And maybe have a hit record or two like you!”

“Do you hold that against me?”

“Ella! I hope you don’t trouble yourself too much about what I think about you. I’ll get over it. And if I don’t, I’ll get over that too.”

Since they’d had that conversation before the War, the fortune which smiled on Ella shifted to Billie who felt she’d been marking time in bands that refused to see her as, not just a ‘girl’ singer, but a serious musician. However, with the 1939 New York performance at Cafe Society and recording of “Strange Fruit,” Billie declared herself a singer, ready and willing to voice the noise in the hearts of her listeners that made them tremble for more. And Ella, whose voice took the country to delirious heights, like no one since Charles Lindberg’s 1927 transatlantic flight to Paris, was now scuffling to reinvent herself as her popularity plunged into a free fall.

The Hampton band played the last few bars of “All My Life.” Ella wondered if doing her version of Lionel Hampton’s hit record, “Flying Home” would begin to pull her out of this nose dive. She heard the ear-ringing gongs from Lionel Hampton’s vibraharp over the speaker in her dressing room. Up on her feet, Ella made her way down a narrow hallway, getting into the swing of things, as the piano and bass danced arm-in-arm in a jitterbug tempo to “Flying Home.” Recorded only two years before, the stories about the effect of Hampton’s tune on audiences had risen to the level of folklore! In one, the band whipped several couples up into such an overheated state on the dance floor that they had to be rushed to the hospital and treated for sweat burns. In another, a man, who’d gotten a contact high from weed being smoked in the balcony of the Apollo, became so disoriented by what appeared to be smoldering heat billowing up from the orchestra level, that he decided it would be safer to leap from the balcony in an effort to ‘fly’ home.

Recalling these stories didn’t do much for Ella’s confidence, as she hit the steps, leading up to the stage. She was given a hand microphone just off stage at the point in the tune where tenor saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet, launched into his solo. Ella opened her mouth to sing and, as always, was surprised that a voice came out with the same ease as breathing and banished all her worries. Ella’s first flurry of scat sounds jabbed the audience with the power of B,D and L behind them. And they roared their approval even before she was visible on stage. Illinois Jacquet blew his way into the band’s runaway train tempo. Ella sidled up to him, with a chug-a-long slide step, raised a hand to an ear and nodded to the audience how impressed she was. And there she was, dead center, a few rows back: the woman who was never a no show. Ella was ready for Jacquet now! And would get rough if necessary! With every horn honking spurt from Jacquet, she mimed his body talk to perfection: from the jutting chin, the seesaw of shoulders, the swivel in the hips, the buckling knees, holding an imaginary saxophone in outstretched hands and turning it in a circle as though stirring the stew cooked up by the band.

Hampton flashed his eyes and teeth Ella’s way as a signal for her to stir the pot. She spooned her voice in to taste the tune that was making the seats in the audience too hot to sit in. Ella’s devoted fan was the first to bolt from her seat and hit the aisle to dance out the fire from blazing seats. Taking flight above the heat, Ella watched the woman’s every move, mouthing in time to the hot-footed hops, skips and jumps. She matched Jacquet’s spit fired tenor talk tit for tat, her voice hurling a swinging strike into the mitt of everyone’s ears who had no clue what would be thrown at them next. By the time Ella and the Hampton Band brought “Flying Home” in for a landing, everything played after that was a rest stop on the way to getting home for those who could still walk.

Sylvia summoned the courage to go backstage to Ella’s dressing room, something she’d never done before. As the crowd of well-wishers dwindled, Ella caught sight of her and flashed a gapped tooth, girlish grin. Once they were alone, Ella and Sylvia were at a loss for words that didn’t have music around them.

“You’re so good on your feet,” Ella said, finally, “asking you to sit is probably a letdown.”

“Being in your company could never be a letdown, Miss Fitzgerald.”

“Seeing you in the audience always gives me a boost. Have you ever missed a performance of mine in New York?”

“Never!”

“What’s your name?”

“Sylvia.”

“How’d you learn to dance like that?”

“Listening to you and Chick Webb.”

“Well, it seems like we have something in common.”

“That’s not all.”

“Oh?”

“You were a few years ahead of me. But we were both in the same orphanage.” The muscles in Ella’s jaws tightened.

“You were in that place?”

“Until I was seventeen.”

“You had no kinfolk who could’ve taken you in?”

“If I did, nobody ever came to claim me.”

“You ever try running away?” Ella asked.

“To where?”

“Anywhere! That’s what I did.”

“But you had a voice to carry you. All I had were my feet.”

“They did all right on “Flying Home” a little while ago.”

“That’s because I got lucky and found a home at the Savoy.” Hearing the mention of the ‘Savoy’ pushed distress out of Ella’s face.

“I felt the same way after Chick asked me join his band.”

“Do you miss it?” Sylvia asked.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about it and wish everything could be like it was before Chick died.”

“Dancing and hearing you sing is how I make that wish come true for me.”

“But my voice isn’t the same as it used to be. And neither is the world.”

“That doesn’t bother me ’cause you’re the only singer who makes me feel like the War hasn’t taken the swing out of things that make folks wanna dance.”

Ella dropped her head and put a hand against her forehead to keep the pleasure of Sylvia’s words from showing on her face.

“Did you like my singing the first time you saw me?”

“Oh yes! Seeing a woman like you who reminded me of myself made hearing you even better!”

Ella lifted her head, took her hand away and met herself in the flesh weighing heavy in Sylvia’s shoulders and bosom.

“That’s nice of you to say, Sylvia. You know, I’m a believer that the only thing better than singing is more singing. I just haven’t figured out how to get my kicks the rest of the time.”

“If you figure that out, I hope you let me know.”

“What about in the meantime, when you’re not dancing or coming to hear me, and you want to get that feeling of how things used to be?”

“I read ‘Little Orphan Annie’.” Ella shook her head, tickled that there was something else they had in common.

“What does Orphan Annie do for you?” she asked.

“She stays the same when everything else around her is changing. What about you, Miss Fitzgerald? When you’re not singing, how do you get back to the way things were before?”

“I try not to stuff my mouth with food,” she said, coughing up a laugh that sounded forced. But a sudden rise in Ella’s eyebrows had her rummaging through a draw of the make-up table until she pulled out something rolled up in a ball.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where?” Sylvia asked.

“You didn’t need to know that when the band played ‘Flying Home’.”

Sylvia followed Ella down a flight of steps, down a narrow hallway and through a door. The street behind the theater was deserted. Ella removed the rubber band, holding the ball together and it unraveled into a rope. She took hold of both ends and began jumping. The rope slapped the sidewalk under her feet just as they left the ground. Sylvia was amazed that, for someone her size, Ella jumped effortlessly without much exertion at all.

“Come on, if you comin’,” Ella said.

Sylvia hadn’t jumped rope in years. But like dancing or anything you did without thinking, she listened for the silent interval between the scraping sound of the rope against the sidewalk and Ella’s feet hitting the ground. When Sylvia heard it, she leaped inside the silence and the rope; and there was Ella’s gapped tooth, school girl giggle waiting for her. Ella tried to remember one of the rhymes she recited when jumping rope as a child, but they were all scrambled up in her head. But she wasn’t about to let that stop her:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
sang at the drop of a hat, hat, hat.
And each note she hit, hit, hit,
sent chills up the back, back, back.
She met a girl, girl, girl,
who danced the shimmy with a twirl, twirl, twirl.
And they jumped and skipped, skipped, skipped,
right out of this world, world, world.

On a sun-starved winter afternoon his mother threw open their front door and announced the birth of Cassandra, a blonde six year-old foster child, his sister, the tiny princess, dripping wet and feral, her forehead high and neck arched over her hunched shoulders as if trying to walk ahead and backward at the same time. She knew, as he knew, she was there for one reason, the few dollars a month the county paid. He was seven and he had been born into his life while she was being placed like a newly minted coin onto their indifferent track.

A month later, flush with the wealth of the first check, he was given a set of colored pencils for his eighth birthday. His first drawing was of Cassandra, sketched at night in a Big Chief ruled tablet as she slept on their shared bed. Her long white face was framed on either side by the detailed soles of her smooth bare feet and straight slender pink toes exactly as she appeared to him. They had agreed that the best way for them to each have their own bed was to sleep with their heads at opposite ends. It was easier to imagine away feet than an open mouth or running nose.

They grew alone, as the children of drunks do, in a world of corners, speaking in whispers. The pencils soon became nubs giving way to paints and canvas, charcoal, watercolors purchased with a little money from odd jobs and whatever he could pilfer from adult pockets. When art supplies dwindled he experimented with the mixed media of remnants, everything from which his art could be made. Eventually, in late winter when the firewood was nearly gone, nothing survived the undiscerning jaws of the woodstove.  Art’s final gift was always simple, transient warmth. In those darkest mountain nights, as his mother scavenged all that he had so carefully hidden, she would ask, “What about me?”  Wadding, breaking, stuffing, she demanded, “Do me.” But he never did —or his father. In fairness, and out of fear, he tried many times to lift them from their world into his, only to end up staring at a wash of tangled gray running toward the edges. But Cassie was always new, colors seemed to request her, variations of lashes and the first thrust of nipples, rumpled sleep hair, a complexion of sunrise snow with exotic birds nesting in her eyes.

Then she was gone, her presence truncated into an eternal ellipsis. She must have been ten or eleven. Her birthday, whatever its date, had never been celebrated; and after the age of ten or so, neither was his. Perhaps, he thought, a poison apple was involved, a cathedral tower hidden in the Rockies, somewhere she slept, endlessly and millions of safe miles from the shrugs of indifference acknowledging her abrupt absence. In the following months he turned in their bed always careful in his sleep to avoid disturbing the envelope that once contained her warm body.

*****

They moved. Things changed, their circumstances, the town, and, miraculously, though he barely noticed at the time, the drinking. In an unreliable peripheral vision he would occasionally think he saw what he used to see: there were always piles of beer cans and wine bottles, the incessant clinking of glass in the night, something rolling across the floor or discarded in a corner waiting to ambush his feet. But the drinking had left their life as abruptly as Cassie only to be replaced with other personal oddities that he chose to ignore just as he had the alcoholism.

His father got a steady job, then a well-paying steady job near Denver while his mother wandered larger and nicer homes and began buying things to fill up the larger and nicer spaces. Once he spotted two magnums of champagne and his heart leapt in fearful anticipation of the resurrection of a nightmare. What had disappeared so quickly might return just as if it had never gone. The magnums were only a set of tacky custom lamps bought at a crafts fair. Each was lit from inside with a small bulb that cast a dull greenish glow through the thick glass that for him functioned less for illumination than as a constant reminder, buoys adrift in their home, to warn him of the presence of shallow water and rocks always just beneath the calm.

His senior year of high school he began to notice an emerging trinity of objects, three cane chairs, three vacuum cleaners (same manufacturer and model, though in different colors), three Jack LaLane Juice Masters, three hardcover novels, same title and edition, each, as near as he could tell, unread, untouched. His sophomore year while he was away at college in a neighboring state, his father died in a work-related accident. The Greyhound bus home took forever crossing the icy-flat, wind-blown plains of Wyoming. When he arrived the funeral was over and he found his mother sitting at the kitchen table crying onto an open mail-order catalog, its corners anchored by identical cut-crystal ashtrays, the Tiffany and Company price tags still attached. Four. A lit cigarette sat balanced on a Coke can, a fragile snake of black ash extending precariously over the spotless white tablecloth. That night, unable to sleep, he filled a sketchpad with sixty-second gestures of ashtrays, four to a page.

In the morning a lawyer arrived to discuss the lawsuit. She introduced him as “our artist” and patted the cushion next to her on the sofa. When he sat down she took his hand in hers, sobbed once, and said, “His father was so proud of him, but artists are expensive.”

The lawyer agreed and with a wary smile added, “Most have to die before they’re worth much.” Saying this his fingers crept to the legal file that rested on the coffee table between them.

The settlement for the death of his father had been “significant.” He knew this only because he had once overheard his mother on the phone. She never volunteered anything. What amount might have constituted “significant” was unknown but he drew   conclusions that allowed him a freedom from worry about her financial circumstances. He was only expected to provide what a son should provide and even in that the expectations were his.

After college and a brief and childless marriage, he returned to her for a visit and never left.  He had no memory of making the decision to stay. What he once viewed as temporary was only his will to leave. There was the daylight basement in the large house and the slow north light nudging the hours and years ahead like a soft broom until he rarely heard her footsteps on the vast floors above him. He did not ask for money and she did not offer any.

Gradually he built a reputation for portraits, families usually, though local corporations and charities would sometimes seek him out to memorialize a founder or a benefactor. All of his clientele were wealthy and his gift, though subtle, seemed to be in removing the blemishes left by money and replacing them with a residue of ethereal compassion.  He worked long oblivious hours and he and his mother spoke infrequently and led lives apart, his studio and bed in the same room, a small oven and hot plate, the steps to the main floor dusty and cluttered from months of disuse. When they saw each other they would nod like neighbors passing on opposite sides of the street.

Advancing age fed into the tributaries of eccentricity and lingering disease until it seeped into a turbid river of death. In her last months she would invite him once a week for dinner, delivered from a restaurant or prepared by a caregiver. These meals were consumed quickly and mostly in silence, surrounded by meandering canyons of possessions whose walls seemed to grow higher with every visit. Gone were the eras of numbers and any semblance of order or design and yet she seemed to know when something, anything was out of place or missing.

One evening, after dinner, as he felt his way toward the basement along a particularly treacherous corridor of new rummage, he had noticed two unused horsehair brushes and several tubes of acrylic paint. They were angling outward from a crevice between an open box of ceramic oranges from Spain and a stack of plates all commemorating the same historical event in a small town in Ohio. He had never before taken anything from the canyons, but this time he did, thinking the paints and brushes had once been intended for him. He was wrong.

A few nights later, as he lay sleeping, the door opening at the top of the stairs awakened him.  From his bed he could see a bright yellow light tumbling into the basement.  There was the by-now familiar wheeze of her breath and the gentle scraping of her walker. “Bring them back!”

Half-asleep in his bed, he shouted, “Bring what back?”

“You know what. My paints. My brushes.”

Dressed only in his underwear, he gathered a handful of supplies in the dark from a box near his easel and carried them to the top of the stairs and handed them to her. She examined them and promptly handed them back to him. “These aren’t mine. I want mine.”

It took him several minutes to sort through the box and pick out the exact tubes and brushes and take them to her as she waited impatiently. She looked them over again and, satisfied, began to close the door.

He apologized. “I thought you bought them for me.”

She continued closing the door without replying and for the first time he heard the lock bolt turn. From the other side of the door she said, “For you? For you?” The air crackled from inside her chest like distant static. “I’m tired of waiting for you! I’m painting my own portrait someday. Maybe tonight. What do you think about that?”

He said nothing and returned to bed. The invitation to dinner skipped several weeks and when it was renewed, by a phone message, he entered the house by its front entrance. Both sides of the entry hall were lined with white banker’s boxes covered with a thin new plastic tarp, as was everything else through which he maneuvered, sometimes forced to turn his body sideways in order to squeeze through and maintain forward progress in the labyrinth. They dined on soup in her bedroom, his chair pointed in the direction of several canvases of various sizes; their unseen faces strategically aimed inward against a recently cleared expanse of tobacco-stained wall. She sipped her soup in bed and caught the errant drip with a quick tongue as it followed the random creases of a contemptuous smile. She asked him how his painting was going and he replied that it was going well with several new commissions that would keep him busy for months. When it became obvious that he would not ask her about the canvases, she put down her soup cup and said, “I’ve been busy myself, as you can see.”

Standing, he moved swiftly toward the canvases. “No, I don’t,” he said. “But let me take a look.”

Her soup cup hit him a glancing blow on his left shoulder before clattering and then bursting against the hardwood floor.  “No!” She cried then and he left, both of them knowing the canvases were blank, untouched by anything but her intention to prove a point with a ridiculous bluff. Still, he felt shame. Would it really have mattered to him to sit there and pretend she had actually created a gallery of self-portraits? Sit there and spoon his soup and act, for her sake, as if he believed it was possible and accept his punishment for stealing her supplies and years of ignoring her as a worthy model? Yes, he could have. He might have even enjoyed it a little if he could have known for certain that she knew there was no doubt in his mind that the canvases were blank. But he could never have been sure and he knew it.

Their weekly meals together continued as before. The canvases disappeared from the walls of her bedroom but the door to the basement remained locked. He had spent most of the day in Denver running errands and arrived at the front entrance for their usual dinner. A caregiver whose name was unfamiliar had left a scrawled note taped to the front door telling him his mother had died and that her body was in the town’s only funeral home. It was there, two days later, as he sat in a high-backed chair in the hushed lobby waiting for someone to deliver the urn, that the door opened and a slight blonde entered holding the hand of a miniature of herself. He knew it was Cassie even before the first greetings were exchanged.

An hour in the lobby became a long lunch and a leisurely walk through town after which they laughed and whispered again, this time about whether or not to return to the restaurant where he had left the urn containing his mother’s ashes. Was it beneath the table or on top like a baroque centerpiece? It was late in the afternoon when they returned to the house and stood in his studio looking out over the Rocky Mountains covered in heavy spring snow. They held hands as they once did and watched Cassie’s daughter Elsa play alone in the backyard.

“I have something for you.” Letting go of his hand she pulled a faded manila envelope from her purse. “Except for a change of clothes it was the only thing I left with.”

He opened the envelope and slid the carefully folded yellow piece of Big Chief ruled paper out and held it toward the sunlight. “I thought she burned this.”

Cassie explained how she had scribbled a bad copy and put it under their mattress with the rest of his drawings so his mother could find it. She laughed and rested her head against his shoulder. “God, I hope the smell is gone. I kept it hidden in my panties for months until I moved it to the lining of my coat. I was so scared she would find it and then into the stove it would go.”

He was vaguely troubled, a subtle nagging, about her version of her abrupt disappearance from their lives, from his life, as if, perhaps, she had known she was about to depart and yet said nothing to him, her brother. The order of events seemed to imply she had warning and a chance to prepare while he was left immersed in her sudden absence, forsaken in a loneliness from which he now sensed he never recovered. Or, tossed as she had been from foster home to foster home, was it simple prescience?

Together they stared at the nearly imperceptible pencil lines of the small feet and sleeping face until she said, “If it hadn’t been for you—”

The day had been spent exchanging their stories. Hers included adoption by an older couple who both died while she was a teenager. They had left her a little money for college and she had attended nursing school where she met her former husband. No hard feelings, though he lived back East now and hadn’t seen their daughter for a year. She briefly lamented the long hours and difficulty making ends meet. “Life,” she shrugged. She worked at a community hospital a few hours north where she had read in an employee newsletter of the prominent local artist responsible for the portrait of the rancher who had willed a large donation for the new pediatric wing. “I was so proud I knew you. My big brother. You’ve done well.”

“Don’t let this big house fool you,” he said. “This was all hers. And I have something for you, too,” he said.

They climbed the stairs to the main floor. Though it had only been a couple of day, he had worked nearly around the clock sorting and cleaning but he had barely made a dent in the piles and stacks and mounds of an indiscriminate lifetime. Cassie gasped at the sight of it all and followed him to a small back bedroom he had nearly cleared and was using as an office. It was here he had begun the tedious job of cataloging the major items in the estate. There had been no will, though a lawyer he had hired assured him that all of it, after taxes, would come to him. He was under strict orders not to dispose of anything of value until the estate had emerged from probate. Nonetheless, he tripped a hidden latch that revealed a small secret drawer in the desk from which he removed two tiny velvet jewelry cases stamped in gold with the names “Shreve, Crump and Low, Boston, 1796.” He opened them both and placed them on the desk in front of Cassie.  The diamond rings were identical, as were the price tags: Thirty-five Thousand Dollars. “She wanted you to have these.” He managed to say this with almost a straight face before they both began to laugh at the absurdity of such a transparent lie.

“I couldn’t,” she insisted, closing the boxes and putting them in her coat pocket. “But I will.” She hugged him and they made their way outside where she called Elsa for the drive home.

On the wide porch he asked her if she had seen anything inside she could use or wanted. “Furniture, small kitchen appliances? I’ve found seven television sets,” he said, “so far.”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” she answered. “I can come back again when we have more time, can’t I? Looks like you could use some help.”

He agreed that he needed all the help he could get. The sooner he could hold the world’s largest garage sale the better. They exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and, after more hugs between the three of them, he watched them still throwing good-byes and butterfly kisses over their shoulders as they bundled into a late model Audi sedan. He stared down the empty street long after the red taillights of their car had disappeared into the Colorado dusk.

She phoned early the next morning and together they decided she and Elsa would come and stay the weekend. When the weekend arrived she phoned to say she had been called into work at the hospital. Another date was set for the following weekend and again she was forced to cancel. He understood. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “Anytime you can make it is fine.” In case he wasn’t home, he told her where to find a key. Remembering a brief trip to western Colorado for a friend’s gallery opening, he added, “Except next Tuesday. I’ll be gone all day and night.”

No, not on a weekday. The drive was way too long and she had to work. And then there was Elsa’s pre-school. Another weekend. Soon. No, it could never be a weekday.

And that’s when they came.

*****

Except for the basement where he lived, the house had been stripped bare to the walls leaving nothing but the smell of cigarettes, the dust unset as if in their haste they had accidentally left behind a memory of air. As he listened to his footsteps echo he marveled at their thoroughness. Even the dirty dishes he had left in the sink were gone, as were the light fixtures and the canned food from the cupboards, the toilet paper from the bathrooms and, he noted with a sigh, the antique desk with all the estate work he had so far completed. He did not immediately think of Cassie. Later, as he spoke to the neighbors, they mentioned the friendliness of the blonde woman and her little girl waving hello to everyone when their arms were not loaded. Oddly, though there must have been others, muscular men with dollies and ropes, no one remembered seeing anyone else.

For a short time he thought she had simply misunderstood. Perhaps she thought she had been helping him. Within hours of returning home he had learned the phone number she had given him was disconnected and the hospital had no one by that name working as a nurse, or in any other capacity. This had not been a misunderstanding. According to neighbors the truck arrived within minutes of his departure leading him to imagine Cassie and Elsa and the others waiting down the street for him to leave. When he checked all the locks and found its hiding place empty, he realized she had also taken the master key. He knew it must have taken a fleet of trucks. The neighbors assured him there had only been one large truck, but not a moving van, and it had left and returned several times backing over the curb and up the walkway to the porch. More confused than angry or tired, he sat on the steps and stared at the muddy tracks left by the heavy tires in the soggy lawn. He would have gladly given her everything and more.

He hadn’t filed a police report, choosing instead to meet with his attorney first, which he had not yet done, preferring to make certain he thought it all through before setting up an appointment. Perhaps the attorney would insist he file a police report, which if nothing else, he knew he would be unwilling to do, though he knew that laws had been broken and that somehow he would have to account for the missing items to the court-appointed estate trustee, most of them still a mystery.

Contemplating his next move, he sat hunched over his coffee at a little bakery he liked. He spun his cell phone in circles with his index finger on the table and watched a sheriff’s car cruise the street. The cruiser made a U-turn and stopped in front of the bakery and double-parked next to his car. The deputy was just sitting and appeared to be writing, maybe a ticket, though there had been plenty of time on the meter and as far as he knew county sheriffs usually didn’t hand out parking tickets. Taking his coffee and phone he wandered outside into the cold morning sunlight and slowly walked up to the deputy’s open window.

The deputy spoke first, greeting him by his full name. “You’re the artist, right?”

He acknowledged that he was “the artist.”

“Got time for a little ride?” he asked casually. “Bring your coffee.”

“What’s this about?”

“Just hop in. We’re not going far.”

He hesitated and the deputy said, “Front seat.” The deputy smiled. “If you want I’ll even let you play with the siren? Come on,” he insisted pleasantly. “It’s a beautiful Rocky Mountain morning.”

As they drove out of town, his uneasiness slowly turned to curiosity and curiosity eventually mixed with a sense of safe adventure. He had never been arrested. To his knowledge he had done nothing legally wrong, ever.  For a few miles as they sat in silence he reviewed his life for wrong-doing and kept coming to the same unshakable conclusion that he somewhat wistfully accepted: His life had always been lived on an irretrievable and consistently legal course.   He assured himself that whatever the deputy wanted from him was inconsequential and the mystery behind the ride owing largely to the eccentricity of certain mountain lawmen. Though not altogether pleased with his life of innocence, he nonetheless accepted the unexplained drive with the confident trust in law enforcement that was the only reasonable expectation of a life-long, solid law-abiding citizen. Besides, he was relieved to be provided with a tangible excuse for continuing to avoid seeing the attorney.

The deputy was unusual. Instead of a buzz cut he wore his graying hair combed straight back from a youthful hairline pulled into a tight ponytail. Though older, he appeared fit, tanned from wind more than sun, and slender enough to look deceptively small except for the angular jaw and the ropey muscles in his neck.

They took a right turn on a secondary blacktop and proceeded up a series of switchbacks while the deputy began to hum to himself. “You know that song?”

It sounded familiar but he couldn’t place it.

The deputy suddenly began to sing the chorus from “You Can Get Anything You Want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

Then he asked, “Recognize it now?”

He admitted he remembered the old Arlo Guthrie song from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s when he was a very young child. For a moment he thought of Cassie and wondered if they might have once heard the song together. He shook her loose from his thoughts and felt a smile fill their absence. No matter how long it had been since he had heard the song an undeniable connection had been made that explained the oddness of the deputy, his hair and behavior. Thirty or forty years ago, a sea of counter-culture types had made their way to the small Rocky Mountain towns fleeing large cities like New York and San Francisco for the idyllic peace and freedom of Colorado’s high country. Some never left. It was only natural that at least a few became a part of the establishment they wanted to escape. Among the artists and musicians, craftsman, writers, it made sense some drifted into a kind of relaxed form of law enforcement that better suited a then younger, less violent generation of residents.

“Sing with me,” said the deputy, and relaxing, though shy, he began to sing along as they made several more turns and dropped onto a deserted hard-packed dirt and gravel access road lined with tall pine trees and brush. It ended in a flat circular turnout with a view of the mountains above and the foothills below with glints from the sun rising reflections off the distant metal and glass skyscrapers of Denver far to the east.

The deputy turned off the engine and they sat in silence for a moment. “Here we are,” he said, almost with joy. “The Scene of the Crime.”

He told the deputy he didn’t understand.

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” he replied. For the first time the deputy’s voice took on a harder edge.  “Maybe you need to sing a few more bars of Alice’s Restaurant until it refreshes your memory. And while you’re singing just step right over there to the lip of that little ravine and look down and up to your right. I’ll just stay right here and roll and smoke.” The deputy got out of his car and took a pouch of tobacco and cigarette papers from his shirt pocket and leaned against the hood. He turned and stared through the windshield. “Go on now,” he ordered.

There was another flat area about a hundred yards above them from which deep scars of red earth had been gouged by years of spring run-offs. From up there a truck, not a moving van, had disgorged a misspent life of possessions that had rolled and tumbled upon themselves in the dirt and mud, some finding their angle of repose along the steep slope while others, furniture mostly, had flown to pieces banging their way to the bottom.

Resurrecting the old song made sense now. The deputy had been teasing him, or amusing himself, by singing what had been meant as a hint to the reason for their morning drive.  In the song all the garbage from a Thanksgiving dinner at Alice’s Restaurant had been illegally dumped in the New England countryside.

The deputy came up behind him. “What a fuckin’ mess. Looks like the entire Salvation Army took a shit on that hillside.” He booted a rock off into the air. “And in case you’re wondering, under all that shit was a bunch of papers with your name and address. And in case I forget, sorry to hear about your mother. But that doesn’t change anything. The fine is ten thousand dollars plus the cost of clean up. Jail time can be arranged if you want to push it that far.”

“I’m not responsible for this.”

“Then tell me who is? I’ll get to work finding them and putting together all the eight-by-ten glossy photographs with the lines and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one.”

He knew he would pay the fine and arrange for clean up.

*****

The drive back into town did not involve singing, or conversation. When they had parked in front of the bakery the deputy told him, for what is was worth, that in his opinion he didn’t think he did it. “You didn’t sing like a guilty man. But I think you know who did. Either way, you’ve got three days or the county will file formal charges. Get it done quick and I doubt there be any charges or a fine.”

His attorney listened patiently and advised him to file charges for theft. When he declined, the attorney recommended a couple of service companies that might be able to do the work. “I don’t know how this is all going to play out with taxes and the estate trustee.” The attorney’s final comment was,  “It’s going to be expensive.”

In the afternoon he drove to the dumpsite followed by two men in a pick-up truck who owned a commercial landscape company. They informed him that they would begin the next day and that it was all “back work.” Everything would have to be hand-carried up hill to the trucks. For an estimate, all they could do was echo his attorney. “It’s going to be expensive.”

When they had gone he side-stepped down the slope and mindlessly began kicking at the debris, turning over a box, holding a piece of this or that in hands, thinking not of his mother but of Cassie. Beneath a pile of broken crockery he found two new table-sized leather-bound family Bibles each with foldout genealogy charts.  On the top line of each his mother had had written her name in an affected cursive style in heavy black ink. Rows of empty intersecting branches followed, a denuded family tree waiting for spring in an eternal winter. In one of the Bibles there were ink scratches just below her name as if she might have once begun to think of someone else but changed her mind. Whomever she had once thought of was destined to survive in history as a kind of ancestral hesitation mark.

The painting was unplanned, but once he started he continued until it was completed. From the vantage point where he stood with the deputy he planted the legs of his easel and squinted into the red scars containing the broken and strewn pieces that resisted composition. When the men came with their trucks he stayed and painted and didn’t leave until it was too dark to see.

On the third day they finished early and he was left alone in a mid-morning hush of wind that shuddered the trees and stirred up eddies of dust dislodged by the workmen in their cyclic struggle up and down the hillside. He thought the painting was done. He twisted his head back and forth, his eyes on the canvas with its rutted slope littered with the wreckage of a lifetime of accumulation and then to the bare red hillside and the plateau above where Cassie’s truck had parked and surrendered its contents to gravity. He might have started where he put the final brush strokes, high on the crest of the ravine with their backs to the light, but then they would have had no place to stand. There, at the top, he added Cassie and then himself, as they were as children, not staring downward but slightly up, and out.