The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

by Aimee Bender

  I told my father about Reggie, the fat boy with a bowl cut that I liked in third grade and how I cried the day he moved to Kentucky, and I told my father about my former best friend Lonnie and how she had sex at fourteen, and how dumb that was of her. Fast-lane Lonnie. He settled himself back in the bed, and smiled as I talked. I could hear myself prattling, sounding so young and eager. I thought that if I were my father I would want to pat my head. Sure enough, when I kissed him good night, he rubbed my hair with his bony fingers, still steady and confident.

  “You’re a good girl, Celia,” he said. “You’re a little prize just waiting to be discovered.”

  “Oh,” I said quickly, somewhat annoyed, “I’m not waiting for anything.” Closing the door gently, I went into the kitchen and stared at things. Then I wiped the stove down until it waxed white and pearly under my cloth.

  • • •

  In the concentration-camp museum in Los Angeles you had to pretend you were a deportee, and choose between two doors: one for the young and healthy and another for feebler people that used to go straight to a gas chamber. I chose the “able-bodied” door and found myself in a stone room with twenty other Jews, all of us picking at our clothing. I didn’t really understand why I was there, suffering through yet another museum, until I caught myself sending a hello to the ceiling. And then I knew I was visiting the dead people. I wanted to let them know I’d come back. That for some reason, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t leave them behind, loosened on the ceiling, like invisible sad smoke.

  One day the old man and the old woman woke in a panic. They looked at each other and babbled something in Polish, the language they only used when they were scared. They rushed onto the porch and alerted a young gardener who was planting azaleas across the street.

  “You,” the old man cried. “Stop!”

  The townspeople passing by, who revered the old man and the old woman as minor prophets due to the pig phenomenon, stopped and listened. The gardener wiped his dirty hands on the grass. The old woman was spluttering, her body stooped and visible through a soft yellow nightgown.

  “No other gods before me. Or we’re all dead. Town will die, die, die!” she cried shrilly, then fell back into her wicker chair.

  The townspeople were instantly alarmed by the prophecy. They ran to the mayor who listened with studied concentration, stared at the floor, and then spoke.

  “Town meeting,” he announced in a firm, authoritative voice previously used only for the dog when it peed on the carpet. “We must hold a town meeting.”

  In a flurry, the townspeople were assembled. The gardener paraphrased what he’d heard. “ ‘No other gods before me or we’re all dead, dead, dead,’ she said.” Due to all the anxiety, no one could really make any sense of the obvious until Sylvie Johnson, a Catholic who owned the potato store (all kinds—red, white, brown), spoke up.

  “It’s Commandment Two,” she said calmly, pleased to demonstrate her Bible knowledge.

  The crowd murmured in both recognition and feigned recognition.

  “What do they mean by dead?” asked an older banker.

  Everyone looked up at the mayor for some guidance.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Hmmm.” He looked out over the people. “Just follow it.” He was humbled by the possible presence of God in his congregation. “Town dismissed.”

  Everyone streamed out of the gymnasium. By nightfall, garbage bins all over the city were overflowing with sculptures from Africa and colorful masks from Mexico, anything that even slightly resembled Another God Before Him. There was much concern over the Greek god statue in the park; its base was wedged several feet into the ground, and therefore extremely difficult to move. Finally the mayor draped a white sheet over it, which seemed to satisfy the worried public. It looked like a piece of long-awaited artwork, waiting to be revealed.

  My mother began taking long walks to nowhere. She would leave the house in the afternoon and call me two or three hours later from a phone booth. I would drive and get her. When we returned home, she would go straight into my father’s room and for ten minutes she would love him beautifully, holding his cheeks, playing melodies on his hair.

  I often wanted to be like my mother because she had long hair with red in it and to me that proved she was crackling inside. Somewhere in her there was a gene of impulsiveness, a gene I was sure I lacked. My hair was brown; at times I would dye it temporarily red for a week but it felt like putting a princess’s gown on a handmaid. The breeding was not there.

  Once when the sunset light came into the living room, my hair did turn red, really red, like my mother’s. I watched it set my head on fire for several minutes, holding up strands and letting them fall. I felt I was in another country, where the air was so hot you could see it, and my back was dripping with sweat. I felt, for an instant, the absurd sturdiness of my legs and my back. Then I heard my dad in the other room, counting the drops under his breath as he watered the radishes, and I went to take a shower, to erase the red from my hair. I scrubbed my body fiercely with the soap, as if it were not mine, as if it weren’t young, or soft, or wondering. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to want things. I tried to empty all the things I wanted into the drain and let them swirl away from me, silenced.

  I came home from the store one afternoon and found my father had fallen out of bed onto the floor. He’d had some sort of seizure because his sheets were twisted into ropes near his feet and the radishes were broken on the carpet, a pile of dirt and terra cotta. My mother was on a walk. I rushed to the phone and looked at it, then rushed back to him. He was breathing, I could see that, but his head was strangely tilted and he didn’t respond when I said his name. I said his name a few times anyway, but I didn’t want to touch him. I could see the strange black hairs on his thighs that were usually hidden by the yellow blanket. I stepped into the backyard and ran and ran little tight circles around the lemon tree, leaning my head in to increase the centripetal force, trusting this would prevent me from running away. I wondered if there was a train waiting at the train station, going to someplace beautiful; I wondered if the conductor had a mistress that he kept in the caboose. I imagined him stepping through the cars to reach her, train shaking, going to see her, going to make love to her in the shaking long train, and I kept making the train longer, pushing him back, ten cars, twenty cars, an impossible length before he can see her, and I pushed him and pushed him until I heard my mother open the front door. She went straight into my father’s room. Running inside, I found her kneeling at his body, a hand on his leg, taking a pulse.

  “Celia,” she said. She was clutching a brown bag from the bookstore. I wondered what she’d bought.

  “Here,” I said.

  She looked up at me. “Help me lift him up,” she said. “He’s okay.”

  Once he was in bed, he looked normal, like a regular sleeping person. My mother made me a hamburger and we watched TV for five hours. It was Tuesday night, a reasonably good TV night, which was lucky. Before I went to bed, I wandered briefly into my father’s room; his breathing was calm. I stopped and fingered a baby radish buried in the mess on the floor. It was hard and red as a reptile’s heart.

  The old man and the old woman still dreamed the same dreams but she could no longer speak anything but Polish. Regardless, there were usually at least eight or nine devout followers sitting in front of their house, listening. As a whole, the town was now alert, on edge. Nervous about the commandment, people went about their day with great caution, trying hard not to make the irreparable goof. There was a moment of terror in the hardware store when Mrs. Johnson accidentally blurted, “Oh my stars,” after dropping a wrench on her foot. Everyone held their breath and wondered if it was the end. Nothing did actually happen, but Mrs. Johnson hurried home in a daze, and parents hugged their children a little closer than usual that evening at bedtime.

  The old woman loved her audience, and didn’t seem to realize that no one understood her anymore. She asked the garde
ner long complicated questions in Polish. But since his parents were immigrants too, he always nodded appropriately, and often picked a flower from the garden and gave it to her before he left. The old woman placed the flower in the hand she always shared with her husband, and they sat, quiet and patient, fingertips linked by the bloom.

  One afternoon my mother went on a walk and didn’t come back. By nine o’clock my father seemed confused because he kept asking me if the TV was on. An on TV was a sure sign that my mother was home. After a while I just turned it on anyway even though he could tell from his room that it was alone, blaring to an empty couch, a lamp turned off.

  By eleven, I was worried and drove by the bookstore looking for her familiar turned-out walk. There was no one but people my age, weaving through the sidewalk, heads on shoulders, the taste of beer in their mouths. I imagined fast-lane Lonnie, out with her boyfriend, her hand calm on the small of his back; I imagined my mother in Niagara Falls, screaming and laughing into crashes of bluish water.

  When I got home my father was nearly asleep. He heard the front door and called out from the darkness.

  “Ellen,” he said.

  “Celia.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said. “She just does these things sometimes. Tomorrow.”

  “I should call the police,” I said.

  “No,” he said firmly, “really. If by tomorrow this time we’ve no news, then okay. But she’ll call.”

  I smiled. I knew he was wrong. But as a comfort, I stayed in the living room with the TV on all night, as she often did. I didn’t really watch much, but stared at the reflected silhouette of my body in the TV screen, twirling my ankle sometimes just to remind myself that I was there.

  The next night after dinner we still hadn’t heard a word. I brought him milk and sat by his bed.

  “She’ll call,” I said feebly.

  “I know,” he said. “She just does this sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Really.” He looked at me for a moment, touched my hair with his forefinger. “You’re a pretty girl, my Celia,” he said. “You ought to go out sometimes. You must be so sick of taking care of me.”

  “No,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “No.”

  “Boys, any boys you like now?” he asked.

  “No,” I said again. “No boys.” He looked at me and patted my head again. I could feel myself smile.

  • • •

  She called at ten. She was at a bar in Connecticut, on her way to D.C., to the museum, walking. She had a day or so more to go, and she wanted me to send my father on a train, bundled in blankets to keep him warm. She wanted him to meet her; they could go on the cattle cars together. She said her feet were already very blistered, and I imagined her relaxing into the cattle car, arm around my blanketed father as they prepared to experience simulated genocide.

  “Put your father on the phone,” my mother told me.

  “He’s asleep,” I said. “We were both really worried. You didn’t call. I was sure—we didn’t know where you were.”

  “Is that Ellen?” I heard my father’s voice, oddly strong, from his room.

  “Put him on,” my mom said.

  “He’s tired,” I said.

  “Celia,” she ordered. “Now.”

  I brought him to the phone. He was delighted to hear her voice. I waited for him to be angry, to tell her how mad we were, but he didn’t sound angry at all. Instead, he curled up in his bed like a teenage girl, and cooed into the receiver. I walked, disgusted, into the living room, and watched my ankle in the TV again until I heard the click.

  “She wants me to take a train and meet her in D.C.,” he said.

  “Oh well,” I said.

  “But if I’m bundled up and in a wheelchair I should be okay,” he said. “You know, we’ll explain it to the conductor. It’d be fun to go on a trip.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “no, it could work. It’s a little crazy, I know, but it could work. Your mother is walking to Washington—now that is crazy.”

  I stared at him. “It’ll give you a break,” he said. “You can have a little vacation from us.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d suddenly lost his mind. He’d been in bed for several months. He hadn’t been outside for an entire season.

  “Daddy?” I asked.

  “I’ll take a lot of vitamin C,” he said. “It’ll be fine. I’ll go tomorrow. You’ll take me to the train station?”

  I walked to the door frame of his room and looked at him, so thin under the many blankets that I couldn’t see his body anymore.

  “Really, Celia,” he said, “I wouldn’t try if I didn’t think I could do it.”

  “Let’s see in the morning,” I said quietly. He smiled at me and clicked off his light. I stayed in the door frame for a few minutes, trying only to remember the words of radio songs, trying hard to fill my whole brain with hundreds and hundreds of lyrics. I cleaned the refrigerator but it was clean. Finally I left the house.

  The night was warm and clear, all the lights off in the neighborhood, front lawns wide and empty. I walked through the streets counting the sidewalk squares over and over under my feet until I reached one thousand, which brought me right to the middle of the center square. And there was the Greek statue looming under its sheet. I stood quietly at its base, and looked around. The park was empty, only trees and circles of splintering wooden benches surrounding me. Even under the sheet, the statue commanded the space. I began to run in front of it, back and forth in tight rows.

  “I’m going to do something,” I warned, back and forth in front of the pedestal. Windows in the distance were dark, people sleeping, holding their wishes in tightly. I could hear my breath mounting as I ran faster. “I’m going to show him,” I yelled, louder this time. The silence was great and empty. I ran for a moment more, faster, faster, then stopped abruptly in front of the base of the statue, and stilled my body. Breathing quickly, I grabbed a corner of the white sheet. I rubbed the corner over and over between my fingers, chafing my skin, until it climbed into my fist and I had a good hold. And then, with one fierce yank, I pulled the sheet off. It blew up high, like a gasp, then floated to the ground, collapsing and bowing behind the statue.

  Uncovered, the god looked huger than ever—young, unbreakable. I put my foot on the top of the pedestal and pulled myself up. I climbed on his foot, then his knee, until I was high enough to face him. Holding on to his shoulders to steady myself, I moved in close, arms wrapping around his shoulders, pressing into his chest.

  “Father,” I whispered. I listened as my breathing slowed, and waited for something to change.

  THE RING

  I fell in love with a robber and he took me on his rounds.

  Don’t talk too much, he said, or you’ll mess me up.

  As I talk a lot, this was difficult for me. He told me in a hushed voice to look around the kitchen while he went to scour under the living room couch. I stuck my hand in the flour canister and found a diamond ring! It was so hard not to shout out! Clamping a hand over my mouth, I whispered to my palm the word diamond over and over. I put it on my wedding finger and the white dust sprinkled over my glove as if someone was about to cook me.

  The robber returned with a bag full of loot—three gold chains, a watch, two diamond bracelets and a shiny spoon—but when he saw that ring standing tall on my leather finger he proposed to me right then and there—took it off my finger, put it on again, kneeled down, looked me in the eye. And right there in a stranger’s kitchen I said yes to that robber and both of our eyes filled with tears at the Tightness of it all. Shutting the front door quietly behind us, we walked hand in hand to the car; when he said we were far enough away, I let out a shout of joy.

  The next day we declared ourselves married and for our wedding night he went to the supermarket and bought ten bags of flour. Pouring it on my bedroom floor, my robber made a foot-deep flour sandbox. It was going to be
a pain to vacuum but I loved the clean way it rolled off our skin and how I squeaked on the grains and when we kissed it tasted like morning.

  Late that night I called my parents and told them I was married and my mother shrieked with delight and when my father asked: What does he do? I said, He’s a baker. I could hear they were skeptical about the life of a baker’s wife but I said, It’s a good life and I love him and my mother said, That’s all that’s important, Penny—congratulations and my father grunted but I knew he was happy; I know his spectrum of grunts and this one was pleased.

  We moved into a little apartment together on the rich side of town which was a good career choice for him. We used my furniture because he said he didn’t have any. I got wedding gifts from my side of the family: a rainbow array of pot holders, a fluffy towel set, a million cashews. He didn’t get anything from his family and he said that’s because he didn’t have one. Really, I said, why didn’t I know that, and he said: Probably because I didn’t tell you. I stood still for a second, absorbing this. He said, I don’t own anything, Penny, family or furniture, and I piped in, You own me now! and he smiled and kissed the top of my head.

  Handing me my dainty pair of black leather gloves, he donned his and said: Worktime, my lady, and I took his leather hand in my leather hand and squeezed it because I was now his family and we went four blocks down to the opera couple’s mansion who were at that moment seeing La Bohème without us.

  We crept alongside the house until we reached the kitchen window which was always open. My gentlemanly robber let me climb in first, and I blossomed into this new kitchen and did a quick twirl on the tile, imagining myself there cooking. I’d make a stew, I’d make lasagna. I’d make chocolate out of nothing but brown rice and water. Reaching out a hand, I lifted him in too and we stood for a moment in that first beautiful silence of takeover. I felt like the walls were bending to us. Then I got that curious urge and so we explored quickly; I found the bathroom with its big Art Deco black-and-red mirror and beckoned for him to come look with me. We gazed at our reflection together and I felt we looked like a particularly in-love couple in this particular mirror. I could tell he was itching to get under that living room couch, so I kissed him quickly and let him go hunt for gold while I returned to the kitchen and took to petting the very soft white cat. I checked the sugar this time, why not, and what do you know—down deep in the sugar canister was another ring, this time a ruby, the stone redder than the skin off cherries. I slipped it on over my glove and when my love came back with his bag of goods I showed it to him and he whirled me around in the air, right there next to someone else’s oven. He told me he loved me and I blushed, the ring’s sister. Before we left, he asked if I wanted to steal the cat too, but I said, No, you can’t steal a cat, it’s against the rules. It has a collar, it has a name; it belongs to them. While he crawled out the window, I made clicking sounds with my tongue to tell it goodbye and it leapt up on the sink to watch me leave, blue eyes unblinking.