A. Homes: Things You Should Know

“Mrs. Ha?” I lift her up, I put my hands under her arms and pull. She is compact like a panda, she is made of heavy metal. Her skin is at once papery thin and thick like hide. She clings to me, digging in.

I carry her back to her bed. She cries. I find her nightgown and slip it over her head. When she cries, her mouth drops open, her lips roll back, her chin tilts up and her teeth and jaws flash, like a horse’s head. It is as though someone has just told her the most horrible thing; her face contorts. Her expression is like an anthropological find — at eighty-nine she is a living skeleton.

I touch her hair.

“I want to go home,” she wails.

“You are home.”

“I want to go home,” she repeats.

I sit on the edge of her bed, I put my arms around her. “Maybe it was the soup, maybe the dinner didn’t agree with you.”

“No,” she says, “I always have the soup. It is not the soup that does not agree with me, it is me that does not agree with me.” She stops crying. “They are going to flood my home, I read it in the New York Times, they build the three gorges, the dam, and everything goes underwater.”

“I don’t know who they are,” I say.

“You are who they are,” she says. I don’t know what she is talking about.

Mrs. Ha reaches to scratch her back, between her shoulder blades. “There is something there,” she says. “I just can’t reach it.”

I imagine the little green blip on the tracking device, wobbling. “It’s OK. Everything is all right now.”

“You have no idea,” she tells me as she is drifting off. “I am an old woman but I am not stupid.”

And when she is asleep, I go back to bed. I am drenched in sweat. Susan turns toward me. “Everything all right?”

“Mrs. Ha was crying.”

“Don’t call her Mrs. Ha.”

I take off my shirt, thinking I must smell like Mrs. Ha. I smell like Mrs. Ha and sweat and fear. “What would you like me to call her — Ma Ha?”

“She has a name,” Susan says angrily. “Call her Lillian.”

I cannot sleep. I am thinking we have to take Mrs. Ha home. I am imagining a family trip reuniting Mrs. Ha with her country, Susan with her roots, Kate with her ancestry. I am thinking that I need to know more. I once read a story in a travel magazine about a man who went on a bike ride in China. I pictured a long open road, a rural landscape. In the story the man falls off his bike, breaks his hip, and lies on the side of the road until he realizes no help is going to come, and then he fashions his broken bike into a cane, raises himself up, and hobbles back to town.

She is lying on a raft in water. Floating. Every day when she comes home from school, she puts on her bikini and lies in the pool — it stops her from snacking.

“Appearances are everything,” she tells him when he comes crashing through the foliage, arriving at the edge of the yard in his combat pants, thorns stuck to his shirt.

“Next time they change the code to the service gate, remember to tell me,” he says. “I had to come in through the Eisenstadts’ and under the wire.”

He blots his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “There’s some sort of warning — I can’t remember if it’s heat or air.”

“I might evaporate,” she says, then pauses. “I might spontaneously combust. Do you ever worry about things like that?”

“You can’t explode in water,” he says.

Her raft drifts to the edge.

He sits by the side of the pool, leaning over, his nose pressed into her belly, sniffing. “You smell like swimming. You smell clean, you smell white, like bleach. When I smell you, my nostrils dilate, my eyes open.”

“Take off your shirt,” she says.

“I’m not wearing any sunblock,” he says.

“Take off your shirt.”

He does, pulling it over his head, flashing twin woolly birds’ nests under his arms.

He rocks her raft. His combat pants tent. He puts one hand inside her bathing suit and the other down his pants.

She stares at him.

He closes his eyes, his lashes flicker. When he’s done, he dips his hand in the pool, splashing it back and forth as though checking the water, taking the temperature. He wipes it on his pants.

“Do you like me for who I am?” she asks.

“Do you want something to eat?” he replies.

“Help yourself.”

He gets cookies for himself and a bowl of baby carrots from the fridge for her. The bowl is cold, clear glass, filled with orange stumps. “Butt plugs,” he calls them.

The raft is a silver tray, a reflective surface — it holds the heat.

“Do you have any idea what’s eating me?”

“You’re eating yourself,” he says.

A chunk of a Chips Ahoy! falls into the water. It sinks.

She pulls on her snorkel and mask and stares at the sky. The sound of her breath through the tube is amplified, a raspy, watery gurgle. “Mallory, my malady, you are my Mallomar, my favorite cookie,” he intones. “Chocolate-dipped, squishy…You were made for me.”

She flips off the raft and into the water. She swims.

“I’m going,” she hears him say. “Going, going, gone.”

At twilight an odd electrical surge causes the doorbells all up and down the block to ring. An intercom chorus of faceless voices sings a round of “Hi, hello. Can I help you? Is anybody out there?”

She climbs out of the pool, wet feet padding across the flagstone. Behind her is a Japanese rock garden, a retaining wall holding the earth in place like a restraining order. She sits on the warm stones. Dripping. Watering the rocks. In school, when she was little, she was given a can of water and a paintbrush — she remembers painting the playground fence, watching it turn dark and then light again as the water evaporated.

She watches her footprints disappear.

The dog comes out of the house. He puts his nose in her crotch. “Exactly who do you think you are?” she asks, pushing him away.

There is the outline of hills in the distance; they are perched on a cliff, always in danger of falling, breaking away, sliding.

Inside, there is a noise, a flash of light.

“Shit!” her mother yells.

She gets up. She opens the sliding glass door. “What happened?”

“I flicked the switch and the bulb blew.”

She steps inside — cool white, goose bumps.

“I dropped the plant,” her mother says. She has dropped an African violet on its head. “I couldn’t see where I was going.” She has a blue gel pack strapped to her face. “Headache.”

There is dark soil on the carpet. She goes to get the Dust-buster. The television in the kitchen is on, even though no one is watching: “People often have the feeling there is something wrong, that they are not where they should be….”

The dirt is in a small heap, a tiny hill on the powder-blue carpet. In her white crocheted bathing suit, she gets down on her hands and knees and sucks it up. Her mother watches. And then her mother gets down and brushes the carpet back and forth. “Did you get it?” she asks. “Did you get it all?”

“All gone,” she says.

“I dropped it on its head,” her mother says. “I can’t bear it. I need to be reminded of beauty,” she says. “Beauty is a comfort, a reminder that good things are possible. And I killed it.”

“It’s not dead,” she says. “It’s just upside down.” Her mother is tall, like a long thin line, like a root going down.

In the front yard they hear men speaking Spanish, the sound of hedge trimmers and weed whackers, frantic scratching, a thousand long fingernails clawing to get in.

There is the feeling of a great divide: us and them. They rely on the cleaning lady and her son to bring them things — her mother claims to have forgotten how to grocery-shop. All they can do is open the refrigerator door and hope there is something inside. They live on the surface in some strange state of siege.