Aimee Bender: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

One day the old man and the old woman woke in a panic. They looked at each other and babbled something in Polish, the language they only used when they were scared. They rushed onto the porch and alerted a young gardener who was planting azaleas across the street.

“You,” the old man cried. “Stop!”

The townspeople passing by, who revered the old man and the old woman as minor prophets due to the pig phenomenon, stopped and listened. The gardener wiped his dirty hands on the grass. The old woman was spluttering, her body stooped and visible through a soft yellow nightgown.

“No other gods before me. Or we’re all dead. Town will die, die, die!” she cried shrilly, then fell back into her wicker chair.

The townspeople were instantly alarmed by the prophecy. They ran to the mayor who listened with studied concentration, stared at the floor, and then spoke.

“Town meeting,” he announced in a firm, authoritative voice previously used only for the dog when it peed on the carpet. “We must hold a town meeting.”

In a flurry, the townspeople were assembled. The gardener paraphrased what he’d heard. “ ‘No other gods before me or we’re all dead, dead, dead,’ she said.” Due to all the anxiety, no one could really make any sense of the obvious until Sylvie Johnson, a Catholic who owned the potato store (all kinds — red, white, brown), spoke up.

“It’s Commandment Two,” she said calmly, pleased to demonstrate her Bible knowledge.

The crowd murmured in both recognition and feigned recognition.

“What do they mean by dead?” asked an older banker.

Everyone looked up at the mayor for some guidance.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm.” He looked out over the people. “Just follow it.” He was humbled by the possible presence of God in his congregation. “Town dismissed.”

Everyone streamed out of the gymnasium. By nightfall, garbage bins all over the city were overflowing with sculptures from Africa and colorful masks from Mexico, anything that even slightly resembled Another God Before Him. There was much concern over the Greek god statue in the park; its base was wedged several feet into the ground, and therefore extremely difficult to move. Finally the mayor draped a white sheet over it, which seemed to satisfy the worried public. It looked like a piece of long-awaited artwork, waiting to be revealed.

My mother began taking long walks to nowhere. She would leave the house in the afternoon and call me two or three hours later from a phone booth. I would drive and get her. When we returned home, she would go straight into my father’s room and for ten minutes she would love him beautifully, holding his cheeks, playing melodies on his hair.

I often wanted to be like my mother because she had long hair with red in it and to me that proved she was crackling inside. Somewhere in her there was a gene of impulsiveness, a gene I was sure I lacked. My hair was brown; at times I would dye it temporarily red for a week but it felt like putting a princess’s gown on a handmaid. The breeding was not there.

Once when the sunset light came into the living room, my hair did turn red, really red, like my mother’s. I watched it set my head on fire for several minutes, holding up strands and letting them fall. I felt I was in another country, where the air was so hot you could see it, and my back was dripping with sweat. I felt, for an instant, the absurd sturdiness of my legs and my back. Then I heard my dad in the other room, counting the drops under his breath as he watered the radishes, and I went to take a shower, to erase the red from my hair. I scrubbed my body fiercely with the soap, as if it were not mine, as if it weren’t young, or soft, or wondering. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to want things. I tried to empty all the things I wanted into the drain and let them swirl away from me, silenced.

I came home from the store one afternoon and found my father had fallen out of bed onto the floor. He’d had some sort of seizure because his sheets were twisted into ropes near his feet and the radishes were broken on the carpet, a pile of dirt and terra cotta. My mother was on a walk. I rushed to the phone and looked at it, then rushed back to him. He was breathing, I could see that, but his head was strangely tilted and he didn’t respond when I said his name. I said his name a few times anyway, but I didn’t want to touch him. I could see the strange black hairs on his thighs that were usually hidden by the yellow blanket. I stepped into the backyard and ran and ran little tight circles around the lemon tree, leaning my head in to increase the centripetal force, trusting this would prevent me from running away. I wondered if there was a train waiting at the train station, going to someplace beautiful; I wondered if the conductor had a mistress that he kept in the caboose. I imagined him stepping through the cars to reach her, train shaking, going to see her, going to make love to her in the shaking long train, and I kept making the train longer, pushing him back, ten cars, twenty cars, an impossible length before he can see her, and I pushed him and pushed him until I heard my mother open the front door. She went straight into my father’s room. Running inside, I found her kneeling at his body, a hand on his leg, taking a pulse.

“Celia,” she said. She was clutching a brown bag from the bookstore. I wondered what she’d bought.

“Here,” I said.

She looked up at me. “Help me lift him up,” she said. “He’s okay.”

Once he was in bed, he looked normal, like a regular sleeping person. My mother made me a hamburger and we watched TV for five hours. It was Tuesday night, a reasonably good TV night, which was lucky. Before I went to bed, I wandered briefly into my father’s room; his breathing was calm. I stopped and fingered a baby radish buried in the mess on the floor. It was hard and red as a reptile’s heart.

The old man and the old woman still dreamed the same dreams but she could no longer speak anything but Polish. Regardless, there were usually at least eight or nine devout followers sitting in front of their house, listening. As a whole, the town was now alert, on edge. Nervous about the commandment, people went about their day with great caution, trying hard not to make the irreparable goof. There was a moment of terror in the hardware store when Mrs. Johnson accidentally blurted, “Oh my stars,” after dropping a wrench on her foot. Everyone held their breath and wondered if it was the end. Nothing did actually happen, but Mrs. Johnson hurried home in a daze, and parents hugged their children a little closer than usual that evening at bedtime.

The old woman loved her audience, and didn’t seem to realize that no one understood her anymore. She asked the gardener long complicated questions in Polish. But since his parents were immigrants too, he always nodded appropriately, and often picked a flower from the garden and gave it to her before he left. The old woman placed the flower in the hand she always shared with her husband, and they sat, quiet and patient, fingertips linked by the bloom.

One afternoon my mother went on a walk and didn’t come back. By nine o’clock my father seemed confused because he kept asking me if the TV was on. An on TV was a sure sign that my mother was home. After a while I just turned it on anyway even though he could tell from his room that it was alone, blaring to an empty couch, a lamp turned off.

By eleven, I was worried and drove by the bookstore looking for her familiar turned-out walk. There was no one but people my age, weaving through the sidewalk, heads on shoulders, the taste of beer in their mouths. I imagined fast-lane Lonnie, out with her boyfriend, her hand calm on the small of his back; I imagined my mother in Niagara Falls, screaming and laughing into crashes of bluish water.