Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

Until the moment in question. At which time everything in the park moved at once, in the same sequence of swirls and sways. Every blade of grass; every leaf; every twig; every aster; every discarded candy wrapper. For as far as our eyes could see, every single thing pressed toward our faces, and then away from our faces, and then to our right, and then to our left, again and again in repeating patterns, right, forward, leftish, backward, left, rightish, et cetera.

It was midday on a Wednesday (we were ungainfully employed as nighttime dancers) and the park was empty; no one else to witness this odd phenomenon, or to accuse us of insanity. We were partly terrified by the absence of others and partly grateful for it. I reached out for my sister’s hand and/or she reached out for mine. We stood, absorbing this thing and searching for words.

“Pretty,” she said.

“Disconcerting,” I said.

This thing — you could feel it all over your skin.

“Fresh,” she said. “Nice.”

“Creepy,” I proposed. “Aggressive.”

I looked at my sister and she looked at me. We were identical twins; I emerged into the world six minutes before she did. I observed that this thing was capable of lifting her hair (identical to my hair — originally dullish brown but now long, coppery, curly with hair extensions), twisting and tugging and twining it around her arms and neck, around my arms and neck. It’s amazing what synthetic hair will do for one’s beauty; we are not very pretty but with our hair we give the impression of very pretty, which is far more important. Anyhow, the effect this thing had on our hair was quite an appealing one.

I observed that my sister’s squinty eyes squinted even further against the force of this thing that was moving the park, so I knew my squinty eyes were squinting too.

“Goldeny,” Roo offered.

“Colorless,” I countered. “Invisible.”

* * *

Back in ourroom we got on the Internet to search. Roo sat on my lap. She weighed three pounds less than I did, which gave her the right. I told her what to type and she typed. Something that causes movement in the park , which yielded only information about movies screened in the park in the summertime.

“I wish we’d gone to those,” I said. We were always missing out on things.

Roo ignored me and kept typing. She typed her words: Soft, Goldeny, Perfume-y, Nice, Pretty , et cetera, which yielded, obviously, nothing relevant. Then she tried mine, misremembering “Redolent” as Redundant. Colorless , she tried. Creepy . Again, nothing. I shifted my knees because my legs were falling asleep, which made Roo slip off my lap and gash her head against the corner of the metal table.

I felt terrible.

“No big deal,” Roo said calmly.

“Oh god,” I said, looking at the blood, “oh god.”

“Just keep searching!” Roo ordered. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

I searched distractedly while listening to her rustling around in our bathroom, dabbing blood with toilet paper, hunting for Band-Aids in our nasty, chaotic drawers. I knew what she was doing as well as if I was in there with her. Pawing through rubber bands and scrunchies and hairpins sticky with spilled hair spray and old fluoride rinse. Mildew green between the pink tiles under her bare feet. The bowl of the toilet stained a permanent pale brown. The smell of a sour bathmat and cigar smoke from downstairs.

Halfheartedly, sick at heart to think of Roo finding only dismembered Band-Aids in those drawers, I typed trees swaying , which got us where we needed to go.

Roo emerged with a bejeweled butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead, a Band-Aid designed for the little girls we’d once been in this very room; a Band-Aid that would go over extremely well tonight because in order to disguise the Band-Aid on the forehead we’d have to place a matching Band-Aid on each nipple.

I read: “The perceptible natural movement of the air, especially in the form of a current of air blowing from a particular direction.”

“Yes! Yes!” Roo said, excited, jumping on the bed, throwing a pillow. “Exactly!”

“ Wind ,” I announced.

* * *

The next morning(or rather, the next noon, since we were not allowed to come down to breakfast until we’d spent exactly nine hours in our room, for Sleep is essential to beauty ; we were supposed to sleep precisely eight hours every night, plus a half-hour to put ourselves down and a half-hour to wake ourselves up, rules indifferent to our restlessness, our desire to go out into the ever-brightening day that we could sense on the other side of our miserly window), Mrs. Penelope was quite distressed to learn what we had encountered in the park. She threw the spatula across the room, where it left an eggy smear on the wall.

“For crying out loud,” she said. She was an erratic, moody woman who vacillated between playing the role of tender mother and fierce madame. We were unsure which version we preferred. On days when she resembled a mother she seemed to weigh ten pounds more than she did on the madame days. Today was a madame day. We could tell by her slimming all-black outfit and the faux emeralds in her earlobes, and by the undercooked eggs and burnt toast. Mrs. Penelope the Mother would never make such mistakes. We were the only girls at the table, the last breakfast shift. The novelty of the butterfly Band-Aids had meant that Roo was tied up till nearly 3 a.m., and since we never left the place except together, I had to wait shivering in sequins on the busted couch in the back room, a spring screwing itself into my thigh as I tried and failed to recall the series of sensations created on the skin by the thing we’d encountered in the park.

Since all the other girls had been fed, there was no one to witness the things Mrs. Penelope the Lady said to me and especially to Roo about first of all making up such lies about wind in the park when wind had obviously not been seen or felt or anything in the two decades since the city got climate-controlled, and where the hell would such a wind come from, where would a lovely little wind like the one we described arise from in a region that was covered in concrete, for crying out loud, now get, time for your constitutional, and she was ranting us right out the door, and as we passed the enormous jug we deposited into it as usual everything we’d made last night, because the front door wouldn’t open until money was inserted. The sight of our coins and bills shut her up and joyfully she squirted us with expensive perfume as we stumbled down the concrete steps onto the narrow strip of sidewalk alongside the six-lane street.

We walked thirteen blocks to get to the park. We had heard rumors from other, less coveted girls that in the morning, when the sun was coming up, all the cars in the streets looked sleek and beautiful, but by the time we were released into the day the light had become flat and dull and the cars just looked gray to us.

Yet now we had something more than cars on our minds. We walked along silently, thinking the same thoughts. We did not linger outside the bodega as we usually did, gazing at the dusty rows of candy and packaged doughnuts. Even the dark, dank, concealing clothing we had to wear to the park — wool skirts that went down to our ankles above heavy, practical shoes and shirts that buttoned up to our necks beneath navy blue sweaters — did not seem quite as oppressive as usual.

* * *

Again, there was wind in the park.

It rose up when we reached the center of the lawn, just as it had yesterday. Again the park was abandoned and again we alone stood in the middle of the movement, our synthetic hair swirling around us. I understood now that wind was due to an interplay of hot and cold air.