Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  There is one danger to this approach that you should be aware of. Teenage girls are, by definition, immature. If you flirt with other young women while standing directly in front of her, she may haul off and kick you on the ankle, causing you to fall over in front of the other young woman.

  If she does, it will be the only part of this experience that she does not later regret.

  * * *

  The Belle finds SoHo more familiar than she did the East Village; it is the same, only more so. More gentrified, louder, more crowded. But the grid hasn’t changed, the street names are still the same, and nobody pays attention to a twenty-year-old girl wearing bright red lipstick, combat boots, and a miniskirt making her way down Mercer Street. She seems a little dazed, a little disoriented, a little out of place, but she is not what has changed. She has not changed at all. She looks vulnerable. And she used to be vulnerable. But now she’s dead, and she’s come back, so what is there left to hurt her?

  She drifts into Fanelli’s, a bar on Prince and Mercer that’s been there forever. Well, since 1922, and that’s close enough. They used to serve good mussels, she remembers vaguely, and then remembers that she doesn’t eat anymore, not food.

  And then she sees him sitting at the bar. He’s drinking a pint of Bass, as always. He looks … older, but in the bar’s dim light it’s not as obvious as it would be in sunlight. Strawberry blond hair is now mostly white. The lines in his face are deeper than they used to be. Even so, he looks exactly the same.

  * * *

  He hates this bar, has hated it for years, but it’s so close to home, it’s hard to eschew it completely. And the mussels are good, though he’s not eating them tonight. He’s just in for a pint before he goes home, before he spends the evening with his wife, doing … whatever it is they do together. I actually have no idea, so neither does the Belle. He’s almost finished, almost ready to put on his motorcycle jacket and leave, when he sees her.

  What is she doing here? he thinks, flashing back twenty-five years, before realizing that’s ridiculous, that can’t be her. She’d have to be … middle-aged by now, in her mid-forties, probably, just about the age he was when they first met, and hadn’t he heard through the grapevine that she had a kid now? Something like that. Even if she still dressed the same, her hair should be threaded with white, her own face should now be lined, and surely she wouldn’t still be so slim, her limbs wouldn’t still be so coltish. That girl can’t be her.

  But he looks again, and they make eye contact, and it is her. She looks a little wan and forlorn, and he almost feels—not sorry, what’s the word? Responsible—for her. Perhaps he should approach her, make sure she’s all right? But then he remembers the hours and hours of couples therapy that was the price of keeping his marriage intact, and he remembers how he never even brought her up, because why bother? She was a mild fling, some fooling around in taxis, one or two trips upstairs to the room she rented on Ludlow Street, not worth mentioning, not when he and his wife had years and years of his infidelity with his mistress to unpack. Nothing serious. No bones broken. So there’s no need to acknowledge her now, not so close to home, not when he’s on his way home to his wife, and he finishes putting on his jacket and he picks up his guitar case and heads for the door. But to get there he has to walk past her, and as he does, she puts out her hand and grabs his shoulder in a far more decisive gesture than she’d ever allowed herself all those years ago. She spins him around with more strength than he ever thought she possessed.

  Revenants are strong, for they have overcome death, and draw on their will alone for power. She could throw him into the wall if she wanted to. But that’s not what she wants right now.

  So they are face-to-face.

  “Hey,” he says. “How’ve you been?” It’s a ridiculous question because she clearly hasn’t aged at all, time hasn’t passed for her, she’s exactly the same as she was, but he’s freaking out a little and is playing for time.

  She nods. “Come with me.” She transfers her grip to his arm above his elbow and stands up.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks. She doesn’t answer. “I can’t go with you,” he says, but she’s strong-arming him out the door into the dim evening, down the block and around the corner, into a niche sheltered by some scaffolding, and he can barely keep up.

  What do I want the Belle to do to him there? He wants … what he has always wanted, until he didn’t want her anymore. I would like her to lean in and suck all the love that has been given him out of his soul. I would like her to breathe in and strip him of his decades-long marriage, of his memories of first love in Ireland, of his time with his mistress, of every significant romantic relationship he’s ever had, and then to release him, let him go home to an empty house and a life without the kind of love he took so much for granted. I want her to take from him what he took from me.

  But don’t be ridiculous, that’s not possible, not even for a revenant. What do you think this is, Azkaban? And revenants don’t come back to rip away your memories and love.

  Revenants come back for vengeance.

  Revenants come back for blood.

  * * *

  Why now? you may be wondering. Why now? Why, after so many years, did I call her out for vengeance now, when he’s an old man already? Why not earlier?

  Trauma is suffering that will not stay in its temporal position. It comes for us long after it happens, intrudes on us when we’re least expecting it. Memories flash before my eyes and my body physically recoils, I turn my head away and shiver from shame. Sex is so fraught with anxiety that it chokes me and I cannot speak. Trauma recurs, time and time again, pushes you into repeating patterns you thought you had long since put to bed.

  Why now? Why not just let it go?

  I will not let it go because it will not let me go. Twenty-five years later blow jobs are still fraught with shame and anxiety. Twenty-five years later I still occasionally have a memory that causes me to physically pull away in an effort to shake it. Suffering shared is suffering halved, they say, and what is vengeance but suffering shared?

  Let me tell you a story. Recently, I had dinner with some old friends, friends whose daughter I used to babysit. She’s eighteen now, and giddy in love with her first girlfriend. Her eyes glowed and she blushed as she told me all about her new love. Her skin shone with happiness and youth and innocence. And I remembered the child I had taken care of fourteen years ago, so little, so vulnerable. How I held her hand to protect her when we crossed the street. How I gave her piggyback rides. How she cuddled on my lap while I read to her. And she is still that little girl, glowing with happiness.

  What kind of monster would have pushed that child in front of the oncoming cars instead of holding her hand and guiding her to safety?

  What kind of monster would see that glow, that potential for happiness, that trust, and instead of treating it tenderly, transmute it into humiliation and shame? Smear it with shit? Just to get his rocks off?

  Monsters walk among us.

  And I thought, looking at the teenager who used to be the child I protected and played with and put to bed, I thought, once, I must have been like that. Once, I must at least have had the potential to be like that. To trust like that.

  Monsters walk among us.

  And in that moment, I felt rage.

  * * *

  When the Belle emerges from under the scaffolding, leaving a crumpled, distorted heap behind her, there is blood on her hands, blood under her fingernails, and blood smeared around her mouth, but that kind of thing doesn’t arouse much notice in New York City, not even now. What people do notice is her weaving walk, her air of confusion, and they steer clear, because an unpredictable person is a dangerous person, even if she is only a young woman.

  The Belle is confused. Why is she still animate? Why is she still alive? A revenant that has achieved its goal is allowed to pass on, according to all the stories. That is the point. Is there more to her goal than she thought? What is she doing still her
e?

  But she feels a familiar tug, the same tug that brought her to SoHo, and this time it’s pulling her to Brooklyn.

  * * *

  That’s the secret, of course. That piece of my soul, of my self, he’s not the one who killed her. He never had that kind of power. Only one person had that kind of power.

  I killed her. I killed the Belle of Avenue A.

  I had tried first to kill my sexuality, my desire, on the grounds that if I never felt desire again, I would never fall for that kind of manipulation, and indeed, it went dormant for years at a time, only to reemerge at unpredictable intervals. But I met with only mediocre success; I tend to dissociate during sex, to find myself somehow not there, unable to feel anything at all. My libido vanishes for years at a time, without any indication of its reasons. I have never quite shaken the sense that sex is something I am obliged to do under certain circumstances, whether or not I feel like it. But my desire had the wiry strength of a weed, and I could never uproot it completely.

  So I killed the Belle instead, so I wouldn’t believe in the first flush of love again, so I couldn’t be taken in by romantic notions, and that worked. She was already injured, and suffering, and she was willing to die. When I smothered her, she barely even put up a fight. And I thought I was protecting myself.

  As she walks slowly over the Brooklyn Bridge (revenants do not take taxis and they certainly don’t crowd onto the subway), I wonder what will happen when she reaches me. Will I have to kill her again? Will her teeth meet in my throat?

  Or instead, will I hold out my arms to her and bid her come near and let me comfort her, let me smooth her hair and wash the blood off her face, let her cry in my embrace? Will I give her what every revenant wants—affection, apologies, a loving welcome home?

  BURNING GIRLS

  In America, they don’t let you burn. My mother told me that.

  * * *

  When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons. They stowed away on the ships with us, curled up in the small sacks we slung over our shoulders, crept under our skirts. When we passed the medical examinations and stepped for the first time out onto the streets of granite we would call home, they were waiting for us, as though they’d been there the whole time.

  The streets were full of girls like us at every hour of day and night. We worked, took classes, organized for the unions, talked revolution at the top of our voices in the streets and in the shops. When we went out on strike, they called us the fabrente maydlakh, the burning girls, for our bravery and dedication and ardor, and the whole city ground to a halt as the society ladies who wore the clothing we stitched came downtown and walked our lines with us. I remember little Clara Lemlich, leaping to her feet at a general meeting and yelling, “What are we waiting for? Strike! Strike! Strike!” Her curly hair strained at its pins as if it might burst out in flames, the fire that burns without consuming.

  * * *

  I was raised in Bialystok. I was no stranger to city life, not like those girls from the shtetls who grew up surrounded by cows and chickens and dirt. Though I had my fair share of that as well, spending months at a time with my bubbe, who lived in a village too small to bother with a real name, three days’ journey from the city.

  My sister, Shayna, she stayed in the city with our dressmaker mother and shoemaker father and learned to stitch so fine it was as though spiders themselves danced and spun at her command. Not me, though. I learned how to run up a seam, of course, so that I could be a help to Mama when I was home, but my apprenticeship was not in dressmaking. Mama could see from the beginning that I was no seamstress.

  Mama didn’t have the power herself, but she could find it in others. Eyes like awls, my mama had. Sharp black eyes that went right through you. When I was born she took one look at me and pronounced, “Deborah—the judge.”

  When Mama saw what I was going to be, she knew that I would have to spend as much time with my grandmother as I did with her, and so when I was four years old, my father rented a horse and cart and drove me out to my bubbe’s village. That first time, I sobbed all the way there as if my heart would break. Why would my mama and papa send me away? Why could I not stay with them as I always did? I imagined it had something to do with my mama’s rounding belly, but I did not know what.

  My bubbe was a zugerin in her village, one who leads the women in prayer at shul, and after only a few hours by her side I was so happy to be with her that I barely noticed when Papa left. Over that summer and the ones that followed, she kept me by her side and taught me not only the proper rites but how to conduct myself toward other women, how to listen to what’s not being said as well as what is. She was a witch, looking after the women of her village, because the kinds of troubles women have are not always the kinds you want to talk to the rabbi about, no matter how wise he is.

  If her village made Bialystok look like a metropolis and we had to be afraid of the Cossacks, it was as close as a girl like myself could get to cheder, the Jewish schools where little boys began their education in Hebrew and reading Torah. Every day my grandma set me to learning Torah and the Talmud and even some Kabbalah. None of these are for girls, say the wise rabbis, but for the working of pious magic, what else can one do? I studied the sacred words and memorized the names of God and his angels, and I liked that best. Within a few years, I was able to help my bubbe as she wrote out amulets to preserve infants from the lilim and prayers for women whose men were wandering out in the world, peddling in each little town in order to keep their families in bread. I couldn’t get away from the sewing, though. Still I had to sew simple shirts of protection to preserve those same peddlers from harm, and every time I pricked my finger and bled on the fabric, I had to start over again.

  When I returned home after that first summer, Bubbe came with me, the first and last time she ever did so. She did not like the city, though she admitted it was safer for us than a town exposed to the wild like hers. And so the first birth I ever witnessed was that of my little sister, who from the very beginning was wreathed in dimples and golden hair. She blinked her green eyes up at Mama and smiled so bewitchingly that Mama smiled back and whispered, “Shayna meydle.” So Shayna was her name.

  I did not get the golden hair or green eyes, but then, Shayna did not get any of our bubbe’s powers. When I examined myself that evening in my mama’s hand mirror I saw sharp angles, even at four, coarse black hair, and eyes like Mama’s. Eyes like ice picks. I was not an attractive child, not like Shayna.

  But I had the power. I knew already that I could be useful.

  The following summer, when Papa drove me to Bubbe’s, I bounced up and down in my seat as though I were one of the horses and could speed the cart on its way. I did not like to think of pretty Shayna at home with our mama and not me, but my bubbe’s house was where I was the favorite. My fondest memories are of sitting at her kitchen table writing out the names of angels and symbols of power while she praised my memory and confided that there was no shame in making up names and symbols when one ran out of traditional ones—for is it not true that all things are held in the mind of God, and so anything we create has been created already?

  Less to my taste, but even more practical, were the lessons I learned from watching Bubbe’s visitors. Women from the village came to see her, both the shayna yidn and the proste yidn. They came in and my grandmother would offer them coffee and talk to them as if they were old friends just come over to pass the afternoon. Then, usually, just as they were leaving, they would turn and say, as though they had almost forgotten, “Oh, Hannah, a puzzle for you,” and my grandma would usher them back to the kitchen and listen intently as they poured out stories about sick children, women’s illnesses, being with child when one more would be more than a woman could ever want. Most problems my grandma could solve with a jar of her broth, seasoned this way or that, but this last was always trickier, and was when Bubbe welcomed another pair of hands most. I could not manipulate her instrument
s as well as I liked with my smaller hands, but I could boil them and watch and learn. And when it was time for a baby to come, my smaller hands were a great help.

  What was hardest for me to learn was tact.

  Once when I was eight and I was studying the holy symbols and how best to combine them with the various names of God, a local woman, a nobody to my mind, a maidservant home for a visit, for heaven’s sake, rushed into my grandma’s cottage and stood there looking around her. I did not like her at all. Her stupid stuttering interrupted my thoughts and she looked like a lost cow as she stood there blinking, unable even to articulate her need. I scorned her, knowing in my child’s way that I would never be at a loss for words like this, no matter my trouble.

  “Well?” I asked her.

  Nothing. She said nothing for a long minute and then she stuttered out my grandmother’s name.

  “Fine,” I said. But instead of running to fetch my bubbe from the other room, I just stuck my head in and hollered, “Bubbe, another pregnant maid for you!”

  Two things happened. One was that the girl burst into tears, and the other was that my grandma appeared in the kitchen and slapped my face so hard that it felt as if one of God’s angels had smitten me. I landed on my tuchus.