The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

by Aimee Bender

  He also likes to read.

  He picks this library because it’s the closest to the big top. It’s been a tiring week at the circus because the lion tamer had a fit and quit, and so the lions keep roaring. They miss him, and no one else will pet them because they’re lions. When the muscleman enters the library, he breathes in the quiet in relief. He notices the librarian right away, the way she is sitting at her desk with this little twist to her lips that only a very careful observer would notice. He approaches her, and she looks at him in surprise. The librarian at this point assumes everyone in the library knows what is going on, but the fact is, they don’t. Most of the library people just think it’s stuffier than usual and for some reason are having a hard time focusing on their books.

  The librarian looks at the muscleman and wants him.

  Five minutes, she says, tilting her head toward the back room.

  The muscleman nods, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He goes off to look at the classics, but after five minutes, follows his summons, curious.

  The back room has a couch and beige walls. When he enters the room, he’s struck by the thickness of the sex smell; it is so pervasive he almost falls over. The librarian is sitting on the couch in her dress which is gray and covers her whole body. Down the center, there is a row of mother-of-pearl buttons and one of them is unbuttoned by accident.

  The thing is, the muscleman is not so sure of his librarian fantasies. He is more sure that he likes to lift whatever he can. So he walks over to her in the waddly way that men with big thighs have to walk, and picks her up, couch and all.

  Hey, she says, put me down.

  The muscleman loves how his shoulders feel, the weight of something important, a life, on his back.

  Hey, she says again, this is a library, put me down.

  He twirls her gently, to the absent audience and she ducks her head down so as not to collide with the light fixture.

  He opens the door and walks out with the couch. He is thoughtful enough to bring it down when they get to the door frame so she doesn’t bump her head. She wants to yell at him but they’re in the library now.

  Two of the men she has fucked are still there, in hopes for a second round. They are stunned and for some reason very jealous when they see her riding the couch like a float at a parade, through the aisles of books. The businessman in the vest holds up a book and after a moment, throws it at her.

  You are not Cleopatra! he says, and she ducks and screams, then clamps her hand over her mouth. Her father’s funeral is in one day. It is important that there is quiet in a library. The book flies over her head and hits a regular library man who is reading a magazine at a table.

  He throws it back, enraged, and they’re all over in a second, pages raining down, the dust slapping up into her face. They rustle as they fly and the librarian covers her face because she can’t stand to look down at the floor where the books are splayed open on their bindings as if they’ve been shot.

  The muscleman doesn’t seem to notice, even though the books are hitting him on his legs, his waist. He lifts her up, on his tiptoes, to the ceiling of the library.

  Stand up, he says to her in a low voice, muffled from underneath the couch, stand up and I’ll still balance you, I can do it even if you are standing.

  She doesn’t know what else to do and she can feel his push upward from beneath her. She presses down with her feet to stand, and puts a finger on the huge mural on the ceiling, the mural of the fairies dancing in summer. Right away, she sees the one fairy without the mouth again, and reaches into her bun to remove the pencil that is always kept there. Hair tumbles down. On her tiptoes, she is able to touch the curve of the ceiling where the fairy’s mouth should be.

  Hold still, she whispers to the muscleman who doesn’t hear her, is in his own bliss of strength.

  She grips the pencil and with one hand flat on the ceiling steadies herself enough to draw a mouth underneath the nose of the fairy. She tries to draw it as a big wide dancing smile, and darkens the pencil lining a few times. From where she stands, it looks nice, from where she is just inches underneath the painting which is warmed by the sunlight coming into the library.

  She doesn’t notice until the next: day, when she comes to work to clean up the books an hour before her father is put into the ground, that the circle of fairies is altered now. That the laughing ones now pull along one fairy with purple eyes, who is clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming.

  SKINLESS

  Renny’s phone privileges were revoked when they discovered a swastika carved into his bed board. He had been at Ocean House for three days. The staff, arguing in the Off-Limits Room with their hands warmed by white Styrofoam coffee cups, took an hour before they decided on this as a punishment. Jill Cohen, the activities director, went into his room while Renny was playing pool with Damon, the one who’d stabbed himself in the thigh, and turned the swastika into four boxes and then put a roof and a chimney on top. She wanted to make smoke coming out of the chimney, but the fork did not carve curls well, so she left the hearth cold.

  Jill drove forty-five minutes every other day to run the evening activities for the group of runaway teenagers living at Ocean House. This was her first job out of college, and she had been thrilled when they accepted her. “The kids are supposed to be really troubled but really great,” she’d told her college roommate, who was silently walking out the door with a banana box filled with books in her arms. “Good luck,” they had said to each other, and then college was over. Jill had a new boyfriend named Matthew who liked to eat foods so spicy they made him cough. His body was covered with fair, shining hair, and in bed, with the side lamp on, he seemed to almost glow. When he held her while they made love, she would sometimes imagine scratching off his skin, scratching repeatedly with her nails until the layers peeled off and she discovered that beneath that sheath of flesh, he was made entirely out of pearl.

  How? she’d splutter, and he’d laugh and kiss light into her mouth.

  She often remembered the day she first grew breasts, how her usually olive skin was covered with red, crisscrossing stretch marks, like a newly revealed secret map to the treasures of her body.

  Renny ran away from home because his older brother Jordan came to visit. Returning home from a friend’s house one afternoon, Renny found Jordan’s green truck parked crooked, taking over the driveway. Renny kept going as if he didn’t even recognize the house. As he walked, he gathered a globule of spit in his mouth in case he saw anyone who looked, in any way, dark. He walked straight, over an hour, to the sagging framework of Ocean House because you only had to stay for a couple weeks, the food was supposed to be decent, and if you were lucky, he’d heard you might even meet other members of the Resistance there.

  Jill hung up the phone with her mother, and looked searchingly at Matthew. He was sitting on the sofa, balancing the remote control on his knee. “You know,” she said, “that if we had kids, they’d be rightfully Jewish. You know that, right?”

  He nodded. His eyes were on the TV.

  “I think it would be okay with me, as long as you don’t think it’s totally important to teach them all about Christ, do you? You don’t believe in Christ, do you?”

  “Not really, but Jill, we’re not getting married.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling on her earlobe, “but just in case?”

  “Jill,” he said, “we’re not getting married.”

  But she couldn’t get the wedding out of her head. There would be both a rabbi and a priest, and the priest would have no hairs on the backs of his hands, like a young boy. She walked over to Matthew, eyebrows pulling down. “If you know that for sure,” she said, “then why are we going out?”

  Matthew drew her onto his lap. “How long till you have to leave for work?”

  “Half hour,” she said, absently rubbing the top of his wrist. “Just in case,” she said, “it’s mainly a cultural
thing.”

  “Half an hour is plenty of time,” he said and he reached his hand up her shirt. “Shhh, Jill, sshh.”

  Renny’s father was dead, but his brother was eight years older, in the army, and handsome. He wrote home once a month, one side of one page, from a country with unusual stamps. Jordan was well loved by women, and had three illegitimate children spread over the country. He never called them, met them, touched them.

  At thirteen, Renny captured his brother’s little black phone book in an effort to find information on these mothers. He carefully copied their names and numbers onto the inside of his closet door.

  “Little shit,” Jordan said to Renny when he found him frozen in the closet, phone book in lap, “what are you doing with my book?”

  Renny leaned his back carefully against the door, hiding his writing. “Just looking at all the people you know,” he said, half-holding his breath.

  “Impressed?” Jordan asked, looking down and smiling.

  “Oh yeah,” Renny said, “lots of girls.”

  Jordan pulled his brother up and put one big hand on Renny’s neck. “Just don’t fuck with my stuff, little brother, okay? You ask first.” He tightened his grip, then let go. “Nosy fuck.”

  Renny sank back to the floor. Jordan went into the backyard to smoke a cigarette. Renny waited until he heard the screen door slam, and then turned around to look at the numbers. They were smudged, but still readable. He leaned his forehead on the wood of the door frame and breathed in the bitter smell of the lacquer.

  Jill’s mother, in phase three of her career, was the owner of a Jewish dating service. She tried to meet at least three new Jews a day and convince them that she held their ticket to marital bliss. Often, she did. Her agency had something like a 75 percent success rate because it only accepted customers who were willing to work and commit, and who had abandoned their Prince Charming/Virgin-Whore fantasies. Jill worked there during summers and had met every available Jewish man in Los Angeles. She dated some, liked some, but was required by the agency to fill out a date report after each encounter. Her mother liked to supplement her daughter’s questionnaire with new, handwritten inquiries, like: What do you appreciate in a good kiss, Jill? At first she answered these questions openly, believing it was part of that mother/daughter “we are now best friends” syndrome. But suddenly, her dates began to execute these perfect kisses, and the third time a man tipped up her chin gently before he laid his lips on hers, Jill ran, yelling, to her mother and quit the job. Her mother did not understand. But Jill remembered that the woman was, in fact, not her best friend but her mother, and proceeded to divulge the kissing facts only to her friends, telling her mother instead about her intricate opinions on all the recently released movies.

  On Saturdays, when rates were lower, Renny called Boston, Atlanta and Hagerstown, Maryland. Often, the mothers were home taking care of their new babies, usually crying in the background.

  “Hello, Mrs. Stevens,” he said in his best older voice, “I’m calling from Parents magazine, may I have a few minutes of your time?” If they said no, he plowed ahead anyway. “Is your baby happy? How old is your baby? Would you describe your baby as a fun-loving baby or a serious baby? Does your baby more resemble you or the father?” Sometimes he slipped up and asked questions too personal, and the women began to fall suspect, and hang up. He called them, on average, every two months. Sometimes he was a contest man, asking them to send photos to a P.O. box and enter My Baby’s the Cutest! contest. Maybe they would win $100,000! Sometimes he just pretended he’d gotten the wrong number. He liked to hear their voices. They sounded tired, but kind.

  “We’re drawing our dreams tonight,” Jill announced to the group of seven teenagers in front of her.

  “You must’ve been such a geek in high school,” Trina said.

  “No hostile comments,” Jill said, smoothing down her red Gap T-shirt. “If you’re mad about something, maybe you should tell the group.”

  “I don’t think any of us want to be here for that long,” Trina said. She smiled at Damon. “And it still wouldn’t change you being a geek in high school.”

  Jill passed out pencils and papers. “I was not a geek,” she said. “Do you want to do this or not?”

  “Go ahead, Jill,” said Damon, smiling. “Dreams. Cool. Trina’s a geek too, she just doesn’t want you to know.”

  “Oh, shut up, Damon.” Trina rolled her foot into his lap. No sex was allowed at Ocean House, guests would be expelled. Damon circled her ankle quickly and gave it a squeeze. Trina pulled it out, and relaxed.

  “Any crayons?” George asked. No one liked him. He smiled too much and made jokes about cyberspace that were either stupid or confusing. Jill pulled a 64 crayon box out of her huge, denim purse.

  Renny watched her carefully rezip her purse. Then he leaned back and drew circles on his paper. He put the eraser end of his pencil in his stomach and pushed it in until it ached. He imagined Jill, emaciated and naked, her hair in strings, trying to speak to him in German, begging him for mercy.

  “Did my drawing, Jilly,” he said.

  She looked it over. “You dream about bubbles?”

  “Ha ha.” He looked at the other residents who were, mostly, doodling. Damon was drawing a big eye.

  Renny leaned over. “Eyes the color of sky …?” he asked. He hadn’t pegged Damon for the Resistance because he talked to Trina, the black girl, so much, but you never knew.

  “You a poet?” Damon said, turning around to face Renny. “I never knew we had such a wonderful poet among us.” Renny leaned back. No one here but him. He filled in the circles with black crayon.

  “I dream about the insides of olives,” he told Jill. “I dream about big black holes.”

  One mother sent a photograph to Renny’s P.O. box. The baby was a girl, half black, dark, dark eyes and a serious face. Her arms reached toward the camera, wanting to play with the lens. “Nicole Shaw,” it read on the back, “ten months old.” Renny took the picture to the park with him and stared at his niece for an hour. He could feel her, how heavy she would be in his arms, how she would fall asleep and curl her head into his chest, enamored by the unfamiliar arms of a boy. Are you my daddy? she would ask. He looked into her eyes, and he could see in them, already, already, that death of loneliness, covering her like a thin gauze, impossible to remove. He picked up a twig and scraped at her face. The colors eased off, thin white stripes crossing through her tiny body. He erased Nicole and her arms and her eyes until she was just scratches on a piece of film.

  • • •

  Matthew broke up with Jill because she wouldn’t go on the pill. She said she’d go on the pill only if he would move in with her, and he looked at her like she was crazy, and said he hated condoms, they had to have a change. I get bladder infections, she told him, I can’t use a diaphragm. Let’s wait a little while, and maybe I will go on the pill, if it seems like we’re more serious. I’m not serious, he told her, I don’t want a real relationship now. Maybe you do, but you’re scared, she said. Maybe I’m not, he said back. I think we want different things. I have to go to work, she said. In a half hour. Go early, he said, maybe there’s traffic.

  “We’re going to do trust exercises today,” Jill stated.

  “Fabulous,” said Trina, glaring at Damon.

  Jill cleared her throat and continued. “One of you is blindfolded, and the other leads the first person around the house and the backyard, being gentle and trustworthy, and then you switch. It’s scary because you’re used to using your eyes so much, but it’s a nice way to learn about trusting each other. Okay, pick partners.”

  Trina and Damon were an obvious pair. The two cocaine addicts who giggled a lot and were pretty nice to Renny grabbed hands. George, the outcast, looked toward Renny who looked away, realizing there was an odd number; George was paired with Lana, the very quiet, beautiful one who moved in slow motion like she was underwater and never told anyone why she was there.

  “Did your ma
th wrong, Jilly,” Renny said, kicking out his boots and running his palm over the smooth splinters of hair poking out of his skull.

  “No, you’ll be my partner, Renny,” Jill said. He blanched.

  “I don’t want to do it,” he said.

  “It’s tonight’s activity,” Jill said. Her eyes were tired from crying about Matthew. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

  “You go. Get blindfolded,” Renny said. She selected a blue bandanna from the stack. “Do you trust me, Jilly?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, tying the cloth at the back of her head and letting the triangles fall over most of her face. She stood directly in the middle of the room, arms straight down her sides. “Please don’t call me Jilly, Renny. Lead me around. I trust you.”

  Her mother had taken her to lunch that day. Jill hadn’t wanted to mention the breakup with Matthew.

  “I forget, honey, is he cute?” her mother asked, bright eyes boring into her daughter. Jill had never brought Matthew home to be scrutinized.

  “He’s not blond,” Jill said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said, “I’m sure he’s a very nice boy. His parents come from where, again?”

  “I don’t know.” Jill wished she could lay her cheek down on her plate and just rest there with the cold porcelain. “Whatever. It’s not serious.” Her voice was fading.

  “But do you want it to be?” Mrs. Cohen asked, a piece of French bread stilled in her hand.

  “Doesn’t really matter, does it, whether or not I want it to be. It’s not.”

  “Well, it could always become serious, right?” She scooped up some white butter with her knife and spread it on the bread. “Does he talk about commitment?”

  “We broke up yesterday, Mother,” Jill said finally. “It’s not an issue. We’re broken up. Stop asking questions.”