Joanna Ruocco: Dan

While she hesitated, Grady Help slowly looked Melba up and down.

“Bev Hat isn’t dead,” he said. “Why I saw her yesterday.”

“But that’s just it, Grady,” said Melba, forgetting his victimization as thoughts of Bev Hat’s deadness rushed back. “To know someone is alive you have to see them right now.”

Grady Help blinked. “I don’t see a lot of people right now, Melba,” he said. “In fact, right now I see you. Only you, Melba.” Melba spun around, gazed down the empty street. Above the street, a large black bag hanging from a wire snapped in the wind. Melba shuddered. The wind blew harder. The wire was anchored at each end in a metal eyelet driven between bricks in the facades of two opposite-facing buildings, and Melba detected the low sound of the eyelets groaning. Farther down the street, she noticed the flags that usually hung so limply from the cantilevered gaffs alongside the second-story windows of the Dan Hotel leaping about, bright and agitated. The wind was active, moving around, having effects, but it wasn’t a person, and Melba looked back at Grady Help. He was right. She was the only one.

Melba opened her mouth then closed it. How did Grady Help know her name? They had watched an animated television program about hot air balloons in adjacent folding chairs in the school auditorium before Grady Help became a victim but he couldn’t possibly remember that. He was so different back then, strawberry blond and dressed in neatly pressed chino cloth. Was it that her name was one of the names known to men in Dan? She doubted it. She knew from experience that Melba Zuzzo wasn’t a name that appealed to men, not like the names Adele Pear or Stella Duck. Once, when Randal Hans had been her boyfriend, he and Melba had gone stargazing in the swamp. They lay down side by side on a wide plank and looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, all of the stars were displayed, and for a time Melba spoke with Randal Hans about their uneven distribution. In certain regions of the sky, stars clustered thickly, so thickly some mushed together, formed clumps, each double, triple, quadruple the size of a regular star, and with an oozy, bursting brightness. In other regions, darkness dominated, rich and plain, scarcely flecked, another kind of sky altogether. It was as though the night were a batter poorly mixed, a batter into which bagged blueberries had been introduced by an amateur baker, a woman who had never worked at a bakery, who shook the berries from the bag and folded them, still frozen, into the batch, so that two distinct types of muffins resulted from the oven, the one type heavy with fruit, the other dry and light, almost a biscuit.

“But in this instance,” said Melba, “the batter is dark like frozen blueberries, and it’s the berries that are white, milk-white. There may be such berries,” said Melba, “grown in darkness, the bushes hilled over to prevent photosynthesis, or perhaps the berries are grown in caves. Cave berries,” said Melba. “Now that I’ve said it, I feel like I’ve heard it before. Cave berries.” She hoped that Randal Hans would repeat this, like a refrain, and so the conversation might continue, although the conversation would have become something different, something more like a chant.

“Cave berries,” said Melba. Randal Hans said nothing. Soon Melba too fell silent. She felt discomfort and fidgeted, but Randal Hans sighed and seemed to settle into the plank as though the plank were a freshly turned bed. Melba turned her head to look at him. Randal Hans was lying perfectly still, smiling encouragingly at the moon.

“I’ve never been here before,” Melba confessed. “Have you?”

“A few times,” said Randal Hans. “Wow, I like this plank.”

“With other girls?” asked Melba. A damp weight struck her chest and just as suddenly lifted off. She thought it must have been a frog or maybe the feeling had come from inside her chest. She almost changed the subject, a question about frogs and hearts rising to her lips—“Do you suppose a frog transplanted in a human chest could perform the heart’s functions? They’re both muscular lumps, roughly of a size, and if the frog was stimulated with electric impulses …”—but said nothing.

“A few other girls,” said Randal Hans, at last.

“Were they prettier than me?” asked Melba.

“Now a few of them were,” said Randal Hans, reflectively. “But I say that unofficially, Melba. You can’t be certain unless you think about girls in a particular way — as composites of discrete features — and then you input data about each feature into a rubric, and I have never been one to use a rubric. Even the word ‘rubric’ gives me a prickly feeling. I’d rather weed-whack a half-acre of poison celery than prepare an official statement about the prettiness of girls.”

“Oh,” said Melba, pleased.

“I only asked them to come to the swamp with me because they were the usual girls,” explained Randal Hans. “The ones with obvious names that everyone knows. I don’t like to point to a girl and say ‘Hey you!’ It isn’t how I was reared.”

“Well, that’s fine,” said Melba Zuzzo, but Randal Hans wasn’t finished.

“Your name is difficult, Melba,” he said. “It isn’t Tara Mint, for example. If you were named Tara Mint, nothing about you would be the same, I mean, at the molecular level. We all vibrate to the frequencies of our names.”

“I know that,” said Melba.

“Of course you do,” said Randal Hans, gently. “And you know that there are some vibrations people respond to positively and there are some they don’t. Other creatures may have completely different reactions. Think about dogs. Haven’t you noticed the way dogs chase after you? They love you, Melba. I think Melba Zuzzo vibrates in their register.”

“Hush,” said Melba, because something, an owl perhaps, was flapping by overhead. Perhaps her vibrations were perturbing to owls? She wished she had never mentioned girls to Randal Hans. She never felt quite right when they talked about girls.

“Owls don’t give birth in the air ever?” asked Melba, in a rush to change the subject. “Accidentally?” On several occasions, Melba had been struck by eggs while riding her bicycle, but she had never been able to ascertain where the eggs came from, from the sky or the culvert or the surrounding bushes. She began to talk rapidly, recounting where and when she had been struck by each egg, but she could tell by Randal Hans’s closed eyes and dreamy smile that he was not participating mentally in the exchange.

“Diana Joy!” cried Randal Hans, starting up. “That’s a name that gets around! She was pretty and smart too. But you know the thing about Diana Joy.”

“I don’t,” said Melba.

“She couldn’t be close to a man,” said Randal Hans. “She worried too much about thermal energy. Men have higher body temperatures than women, and when they’re close — pardon this frankness, Melba, I don’t know how else to say it — when men and women join together, something happens. The female system is being heated by the male system, and the male system is being cooled by the female system. That’s all well and good, but eventually both systems will reach the same temperature and there can’t be any further energetic exchange. It’s over. Both systems are totally inert.”

“I don’t …” began Melba.

“They die, Melba,” said Randal Hans. “That was Diana Joy’s problem.”

Melba breathed in and out several times, pondering Diana Joy’s problem. She was convinced that Randal Hans had brought it up because it was somehow pertinent to the two of them, to Randal Hans and Melba Zuzzo, two energetic systems vibrating side by side on a single plank. This conviction gave her a feeling of satisfaction.