by Laura Ruby
Toni said, “Why do you speak English better than Daddy if he was here longer than you?”
“Sometimes it works that way,” she says. “Some people learn a new language very fast, some people can’t let go of the old one.”
“I spoke Italian once,” Frankie said. “At least, that’s what Vito tells me. I don’t remember.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Marion. Her lips opened as if she was going to say more, but then she snapped them together before they let loose.
“Did our father say anything else?” Frankie asked.
“About what?”
Frankie shrugged. Toni said, “About us.”
“He misses you,” Aunt Marion said.
Frankie could only see one side of Aunt Marion’s face because she was sitting next to her on the bench. “That’s what he told you?”
Aunt Marion gazed up at the angel. “Yes.”
Toni got up from the bench and rolled a rock with her shoe. Frankie scooted away from Aunt Marion. She didn’t say that Marion was going to have to confess her lies at her next confession. Frankie assumed Aunt Marion knew that already. Or maybe she didn’t care.
Aunt Marion stood the pocketbook on her lap and opened it. “I can’t stay long today, but I have something for you both. From your father.”
From inside the enormous pocketbook, she pulled something wrapped in tissue paper. “Here,” she said, offering it to Toni.
Toni stopped kicking the rock and took it. She shoved Frankie aside to sit back down on the bench and dug through the tissue paper. “A hat!” she said, fingering the soft blue felt, the glossy black feathers. She put it on and turned to me. “How does it look?”
“Real swell,” Frankie said. And it did, too, nestled in her dark hair. Frankie thought about Vito’s letters, about how Ada’s girls couldn’t get enough of hats. Frankie wondered if they had hats like Toni’s. She wondered if they had lots of hats like Toni’s. She wondered if it was one of theirs. A castoff.
“And this is for you, Frankie.” Frankie expected Aunt Marion to pull out another hat, but she didn’t. She handed Frankie a thin metal tin with no label.
“What’s this?” Frankie said. “Cigarettes? I don’t smoke.”
“Open it.”
Frankie opened the container to find a bunch of crayons. No, not exactly crayons. She picked up the red one.
“Careful,” said Aunt Toni. “You don’t want to get stained.”
It was a cross between a crayon and paint so thick they made sticks out of it.
“It’s a pastel,” Aunt Toni told Frankie. “Artists use them to draw.”
An artist had used these, at least a little. There was only half a black stick, and some of the other colors were worn down here and there. A cast-off set. But that was all right with Frankie. I wondered about the artist who had been forced to sell them. I wonder how how hungry and desperate that artist must have been.
Frankie said, “My father wanted you to buy me this?”
“And this,” said Aunt Marion. She pulled out a small sketch pad with the thickest, nicest paper Frankie had ever seen and gave it to her. “He sent me the money. He said you liked to draw. They’re used. We couldn’t afford new. But they’re still good.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “This is, this is . . .” She trailed off, trying to decide exactly what it was. How she felt about it.
Just then, a tall man in a brown coat passed by, walking with a boy. The boy. Her boy.
Frankie froze right in the middle of her sentence. He—the boy, Sam—glanced at her. He tipped his cap and said, “Hi, Frankie,” with a smile just deep enough to show his dimples. His voice, lower than she’d expected, slipped under her skin, vibrating there, as if someone had just moved a bow across the strings of a cello and left her yearning for a whole symphony. The man and Aunt Marion exchanged good afternoons. Then the man put his hand on Sam’s neck and steered him around the other side of the angel, and out of sight.
Toni watched them go, stroking the feathers on her new hat, the sly smirk on her face aging her a thousand years. Aunt Marion nodded at the angel, as if they were talking to each other, but only in their heads, no time for dimpled boys. Frankie sat there, oblivious to them all, the pastel warm between her fingers, thinking about the fact that Sam knew her name, thinking about the way his lower lip curled under his teeth to pronounce it, thinking about his lips and teeth and hair and bones and all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.
Frankie smoothed a page in her book and sketched an apple, round and red and good enough to eat.
What Didn’t Burn in the Fire
I WENT TO THE BLUE house in the sea of brick and watched Berry Girl and her boxer boy eat a quiet lunch at their kitchen table. They did not speak, but held hands through the entire meal—cheese sandwiches, cups of canned tomato soup. While I was watching the two of them, cozy in their quiet, shabby kitchen, I thought about the new chapters of The Hobbit I’d read over the shoulder of the blond man with the crooked teeth. With the help of the magic ring, Bilbo Baggins escaped the goblins and the creature Gollum, made his way out of the Misty Mountains, and ran straight into Gandalf the wizard and the dwarves. But Bilbo didn’t tell anyone about the magic ring that could render him invisible. Hobbits had secrets too. When the wolves found them, and then the goblins, the eagles came and swept up the hobbit and the wizard and the dwarves and flew them away. But no eagles came to my rescue when the red fox found me again.
Shoo! I said.
It snuffled at my feet like a dog. It was beneath the dignity of a fox to snuffle at the feet of a person with no actual feet. Which is what I told him.
He stopped snuffling and looked up, reproaching me with eyes like the amber in my mother’s bracelets.
Fine, I said, it’s beneath my dignity to peep into people’s windows.
Of course it wasn’t. But watching Berry Girl and Boxer Boy hold hands over lunch hurt like a splinter a pin a shard of glass, so I drifted to the next yard, the fox trotting after me, the stupid, beautiful thing. The people in the next house were also getting ready for lunch, each in their own way—a pale woman heating something on the stove, and a paler man behind her, a hand on her hip and the other furiously kneading one of her breasts as if it were a lump of dough. Maybe this happened every day. He came home for lunch, kneaded one of her breasts like a lump of dough while she stirred the pot and tried not to roll her eyes. Except now she was rolling her eyes.
She’s rolling her eyes, I told the fox.
The fox smiled a foxy smile, because nothing in the whole wide world was new.
I moved to the next window, where a tired woman fed four children under the age of six; the next, where a lone man ate a lone sandwich at a lone table with a lone chair; the next, where a young boy cuddled a striped cat that strained to get away; the next, where a young woman curled up on a homemade rug, crying and crying and crying; the next, where a man pulled on a dress and carefully painted his lips red; and the next, where two other men kissed so passionately it was hard to tell one man from the other. Faster I moved from window to window—a woman a man a girl a boy a cat eating and feeding and kneading and holding and clawing and crying and painting and kissing—looking in on all that life, the happy-unhappy thrill of it, and I wanted a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich, a cup of hot soup. I wanted someone to hold my hand as I ate. I wanted a breast to knead, a cat with a desperate heart clawing blood from my skin. I wanted my own wings so that I could swoop in and save myself.
I might have cried a little, or I might have punched the window with my not-fist, I might have clutched at my chest trying to take a breath, but I couldn’t be sure. One minute I was standing in the yard of a stranger and the next I was slumped at the foot of the angel, telling her about the fox, that stupid beautiful thing.
It won’t leave me alone, I said. One day someone will see it, and then what will happen?
You k
now the answer to that, the angel said.
What?
What happens to you all. Blood to stone, stone to ash.
I’m not ash, I said.
Her laugh was kind. Aren’t you, though? You’re what didn’t burn in the fire.
I said, I don’t remember a fire.
Again, the kind laugh. There’s always a fire.
Frankie confessed everything. Not to Father, but to Loretta and Huckle. The first time she saw Sam skidding across the kitchen floor. The way he hovered behind the other senior boys twisting his hat but never saying a word. And then out of the blue, “Hi, Frankie,” as if they’d known each other forever.
The whole cottage was lined up, waiting for Sister Bert to check their hair for lice. Loretta, Huckle, and Frankie were all the way in the back, whispering.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had a fella?” Huckle demanded.
“Shhh!” Frankie said.
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t. I don’t.”
“Sure sounds like you do.”
“I don’t,” Frankie said. And then she added, “yet.”
“Oo-la-la!” Huckle said.
“Shh!” Frankie shook her fist at Huckle as she giggled.
“Please don’t shake your fist like that, Francesca, it makes me nervous,” Sister Bert called as she inspected Joanie McNally’s hair for nits. They had two new girls in the cottage, and whenever there were new girls, there were nits.
“Aw, come on, Sister Bert. Nothing makes you nervous,” Joanie McNally said, talking while bent at the waist, almost upside down. “You could probably take on Hitler hisself!”
Sister Bert pursed her lips and held up something pinched between her fingertips. “Just as I thought. A nit. I believe I shall call him Hitler,” and she squished him between her fingernails. “All right, Joanie, you can stand up straight. Unless you prefer spending your time looking at your own knees.”
They all knew what was up now, and started moaning even before Sister Bert left the cottage to scare up some kerosene. If one of them had it, it usually meant all of them had it. Frankie’s scalp suddenly felt itchy, and she scratched at it. Soon all of them had their hair soaked in kerosene and wrapped up in towels.
“Gosh, we stink!” said Huckle.
“You always stink,” Stella said, and then she said, “Ow!” when Huckle socked her on the arm.
Immediately Stella started moaning. “Sister Bert! Huckle hit me!”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Sister Bert as she unscrewed the cap off another can of kerosene. “Huckle, please don’t hit Stella. It makes her yell and that gives me a pain between my eyes.”
Stella stopped whining and watched Sister Bert with a sad look on her face; Frankie could see that it wasn’t just another one of her acting jobs. As much as she couldn’t stand Miss My-Name-Means-Star-in-Italian-and-Isn’t-My-Blond-Hair-Swell? and as much she liked it when Sister Bert said things like that to her, she couldn’t help but feel just a little sorry for Stella; you could tell that Sister Bert didn’t like her any more than any of them did. She wondered if there was a person who truly liked Stella.
There had been, once. Stella was an only child born to a silvery sylph of a woman even more beautiful than her own daughter and a man so handsome that both men and women would stop on the street to stare. They knew they were beautiful, and they knew their child was too, so they’d spent all of their savings to commission a painting of the three of them. They’d sat for the artist for weeks, little Stella still and quiet as a porcelain doll on her mother’s lap. Once the painting was done, they’d hung it over their fireplace and spent their evenings admiring it, and one another. But when the silvery sylph caught a strange sort of cough, grew thinner and thinner till she was more spirit than flesh, they’d had no money left to treat what consumed her. During her last months, she’d taken to sleeping outside in the yard to take the edge off her fever, snowflakes gathering on her eyelashes. And then one morning, she was gone to the angels. Stella’s father sat by the fire, drinking and staring at the portrait of his family, too beautiful for this life. And though his own beautiful daughter was hungry for food and for solace, though she brushed her own hair till it shone and dressed herself as nicely as she could, he gave all his attention to his bottle until he too was in the ground.
Now, at fifteen, Stella liked herself, loved herself, because there was no one else to do it. And one day she would convince someone else to take the job, through sheer force of her considerable will.
It would, in fact, take a lot of someone elses to make up what she had lost.
When the kerosene had set long enough, Loretta unwrapped her own hair and plopped herself on the floor in front of me. Frankie combed through Loretta’s hair with the lice comb, looking for the little white eggs and the bugs. When she found a nit or a bug, she squeezed it between her fingernails.
“Look at us. We’re just a bunch of nitpickers!” Joanie McNally said.
“Funny,” Loretta said. Frankie knew that she hated the lice and the smell of the kerosene. “We don’t look like people. We look like monkeys,” she said, which made Frankie think of the boys and all their monkeying around, which then made her think about washing dishes in the senior boys’ dining room, which led her to the boy, her boy. Sam. She sighed.
“Hey! Are you looking for nits or what?” Loretta said.
“No, she’s just mooning over what’s-his-face,” said Huckle. She would have said more, but Frankie kicked her.
“Who?” Stella said. “Who is Frankie mooning over?”
“Oh, I’m sure Huckle is talking about Jesus,” said Sister Bert. “Francesca is obviously praying to Our Lord and Savior so that we never get nits again.” She opened a drawer and took out a pair of scissors. “I suppose now is as good a time as any to give everyone a trim. When you’re all finished combing through each other’s hair, I’ll trim you up. Then we’ll go down to the shower room and rinse the kerosene out.”
Frankie didn’t cry much, but that was what she wanted to do right then and there. Nobody but orphans wore their hair up around their ears. And she still had so little hair that she couldn’t stand to lose even a tiny bit of it.
“Ow!” Loretta said. “Don’t tug so hard!”
“Sorry,” Frankie told her. “I don’t see why we have to get our hair cut so short.”
“To keep away the nits,” Loretta said matter-of-factly.
“It doesn’t work too well.” Frankie pulled a tiny gray bug from a strand of Loretta’s hair and killed it with a pinch. “What boys are going to look at us with orphan’s hair?”
Huckle snorted. “Maybe that’s the whole point.”
When Sister got done trimming everyone’s hair, they gathered up the kerosene-soaked towels and dropped them at the laundry. Frankie didn’t complain, though; none of them did. What would be the use? When she got out of the orphanage, Frankie thought, she would grow her hair as long as Lana Turner’s, and curl it every night so that it fell into her eyes the way Lana’s did. That kind of hair would make any boy sit up and pay attention. Then she thought about how she’d have to confess having impure thoughts on Sunday.
It took about five minutes to walk out of the cottage and down to the shower room. They changed into their tights—the sack dresses they wore into the showers—in the dressing rooms, and then all forty of them crowded into the shower room. Sister Bert passed out the soap, and they each picked a showerhead. Most girls tried to get the ones in the corners because they thought they got more privacy that way, but the truth was that there wasn’t any privacy when you were soaping up with forty other girls. It was the tights—those dresses—that kept them decent and modest, the nuns said. To wash, they turned their back to the other girls and reached underneath the dress and did the best they could. If you asked me, sticking your hands underneath a wet dress seemed far more lewd and far less effective an act than simply washing a naked body, but no one was asking me, a scandalous and
shameless girl, not nearly dead enough.
After they washed, they took that strong brown soap and scrubbed their hair with it, too, making sure that they rinsed out all the stinky kerosene. Basically, they were trading one kind of stink for another kind of stink, kerosene for the brown soap. In the wintertime, Frankie’s skin was always itching from one or the other.
As they got ready for bed, Huckle said, “So what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About him,” she said, as if Frankie was too silly for words.
“What can I do?”
“You’re going to have to talk to him.”
“When?”
Loretta said, “In the yard.”
“In the yard?” Frankie squeaked. Some of the other girls glared at them because the radio was on. Frankie lowered her voice. “I can’t talk to him in the yard. If the nuns see me crossing the yellow line, they’ll beat me for sure.”
“He ain’t worth a beating?” said Huckle. “I don’t know if I’d want a fella that ain’t worth a beating.”
Loretta shrugged. “And you can get beat for a lot less around here.”
“I don’t know,” Frankie said. But they were right. She had to do something. What if his eighteenth birthday was next month? What if it was next week? What if he was shipping out tomorrow and Frankie would never see him again? How can you miss someone you never really met?
But as soon as she could, Frankie climbed to the top of the slide, where she used to sit to see her brother, Vito. Since so many older boys had gone, it was easy to spot Sam. There he was, kicking a ball across the yard to another, shorter boy. Sam looked up, and waved. Frankie glanced around, making sure he was waving at her, before she waved back. And she realized that Sam was the boy who was with Vito the last day he was here, the boy who’d gotten hit upside the head for waving at her. Maybe Sam thought she was worth a beating. The thought made her feel warm inside, as if she were sipping hot chocolate after coming in from the snow.
She climbed down from the slide. Her skin was sweaty and she wasn’t sure if she could do it, wasn’t sure if she could stand there by the yellow line. But she did. The slip of paper was in her pocket. Just a short note in pencil—no hearts, no flowers. Loretta and Huckle thought she should put Frankie + Sam on it, but she couldn’t—it seemed both too bold and too childish. And, as wobbly as her knees were, as much as her hands were shaking, she didn’t want to sound that cheap.