Aimee Bender - The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pig,” the old woman said.

“No breath,” he finished.

“Pushing pig,” she said.

“And brown and dead.”

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

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

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

I told my father about Reggie, the fat boy with a bowl cut that I liked in third grade and how I cried the day he moved to Kentucky, and I told my father about my former best friend Lonnie and how she had sex at fourteen, and how dumb that was of her. Fast-lane Lonnie. He settled himself back in the bed, and smiled as I talked. I could hear myself prattling, sounding so young and eager. I thought that if I were my father I would want to pat my head. Sure enough, when I kissed him good night, he rubbed my hair with his bony fingers, still steady and confident.

“You’re a good girl, Celia,” he said. “You’re a little prize just waiting to be discovered.”

“Oh,” I said quickly, somewhat annoyed, “I’m not waiting for anything.” Closing the door gently, I went into the kitchen and stared at things. Then I wiped the stove down until it waxed white and pearly under my cloth.

• • •

In the concentration-camp museum in Los Angeles you had to pretend you were a deportee, and choose between two doors: one for the young and healthy and another for feebler people that used to go straight to a gas chamber. I chose the “able-bodied” door and found myself in a stone room with twenty other Jews, all of us picking at our clothing. I didn’t really understand why I was there, suffering through yet another museum, until I caught myself sending a hello to the ceiling. And then I knew I was visiting the dead people. I wanted to let them know I’d come back. That for some reason, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t leave them behind, loosened on the ceiling, like invisible sad smoke.