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by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  But Ruthie isn’t even looking at the dolls, because now she has to pee very badly. Also, she can’t find her giraffe. It isn’t there under her arm, where she left it. Her baby giraffe! It must have slipped out somewhere. But where? There are many, many places it could be. Ruthie looks down at the floor of the barn, which is covered in bits of straw. Not here. She feels her stomach begin to hurt. It was her one special thing from the Elves’ Faire. A present from her mother. Maybe her last present from her mother, who might say, If you can’t take care of your special things, then I won’t be able to get you special things anymore. But she won’t need special things anymore! She is going to get a surprise, one that gets bigger and bigger the more she thinks about it, because she has a feeling the man is able to do things her mother is not able to do, like let her live in a castle that is also a farm, where she can live in a beautiful tower and have a little kitten and build it a house and give it toys. Also she’s going to have five—no, she means ten—pet butterflies.

  The man is standing outside the barn now, waiting for her, and maybe if she doesn’t come out soon he’ll walk right in and get her. Ruthie wants to run and scream; she can’t tell if she’s happy or the most scared she’s ever been. “Noooooooo!” she shrieks when her father holds her upside down and tickles her, but as soon as he stops she cries, “Again, again!” She always wants more of this, and her father and mother always stop too soon.

  The man in the cape won’t stop. The dolls in this room are children, children he has turned into dolls. Ruthie can help him—she’ll be on his team. She’ll tell the children, I’m going to put you in jail. Lock, lock! You’re in jail. And I have the key. You can never get out until I tell you. Her friends from school, her ballet teacher Miss Sara, her best friends Lark and Chloe, her gymnastics coach Tanya, her mommy and daddy, her favorite, specialest people, all sitting with their legs straight out and their eyes wide open, and no one can see them but her. She will be on the stage copying Dorothy, and they will be watching. She will do the whole Wizard of Oz for them from the beginning, and the man will paint her skin so it’s bright, not brown, and make her hair smooth and in braids so she looks like the real Dorothy. It will be the big surprise of their life!

  Kate knows there must be a brown doll somewhere in this barn, and that it’s possibly perfect. If anyone can make the doll she’s been looking for, these Waldorf mothers can: something touchable and dreamy, something she can give her child to cherish, something her child will love and prefer, instead of settle for. Considering that she’s been searching for this doll since the moment Ondine was born, a hundred and thirty dollars is not so much to spend. For every doll in this barn can be purchased, she’s just discovered; on the back of each little cardboard tag is a penciled number, and it’s become interesting to compare the numbers and wonder why this redheaded doll in a polka-dot dress is twenty-five dollars more than the one wearing a cherry-print apron. She wanders farther into the barn, glancing at the names and numbers, idly doing arithmetic in her head: how much this day has cost so far (seventeen for the giraffe, eight for the smoothies, two for raffle tickets) and how much it might end up costing in the future. Because, if she does find the doll she’s looking for, it’d be wonderful to get that white shelf she’s been thinking about, a white shelf that she could buy at Ikea for much less than a similar version at Pottery Barn Kids, and nearly as nice, a shelf she could hang in a cheerful spot in Ondine’s yellow room from which the doll would then gaze down at her daughter with its benign embroidered eyes and cast a spell of protection. All told, with the doll and the giraffe and the smoothies and the shelf, this day could come in at close to two hundred dollars, but who would blink at that? She’s thinking about her child.

  Your attention, please! Ruthie will say. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention! Welcome to the show! And the man with the cape will pull back the curtains and everybody will be so surprised by what they see that they will put their hands over their mouths and scream.

  But Ruthie’s own surprise is already turning into something else, not a beautiful secret anymore but just a thing that she knows will happen, whether she wants it to or not, just as she knows that she will have an accident in the barn and her giraffe will be lost and her mother will keep looking at the tags hanging from the dolls’ feet, looking closely like she’s reading an important announcement, looking closely and not seeing the puddle getting bigger on the floor. When it happens, her mother will be holding her hand—she is always holding and pulling and squeezing her hand—which is impossible, actually, because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, hair-twirler, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.

  TELL ME MY NAME

  Ever since the California economy collapsed, people have been coming to our street at night and going through the trash. That sounds worse than it is—I guess if it’s recyclable then it’s not really trash. They sort through the blue bins that during the day were wheeled out to the curb, along with the black and green bins, by the gardening crews. The people who come at night are like a crew too. You used to see just solo collectors but over the past few months they seem to have joined forces. They’re efficient, with one of them holding on to the grocery cart and organizing things while the others pull out bottles from the bins. At first they carried flashlights but lately they’ve taken to wearing headlamps.

  My neighbor Betti isn’t happy about the situation. She stands on my porch, waving her extra-sharp tweezers in the air. She came over with a splinter lodged under her fingernail, and after a little poking around I got it out. It’s the middle of the afternoon but she knew I’d be home. Now that the splinter is gone she’s free to be irritated by other things, and my trash cans, lined up at the curb, have started her thinking about the recyclers. “I moved here to get away from this shit,” she says, and even though she talks in kind of an ugly way, Betti is one of the most beautiful people I know.

  She has arching eyebrows and the smallest possible pores, flat red lipstick that never rubs off on her teeth or crumbs up in the corners of her mouth. Shining dark hair smoothed back in a high ponytail. Toreador pants and little ballet flats so silvery and supple I hate to see them touching the sidewalk. The math still shocks me: she must be at least forty-five years old! You’d never know it, because her skin is amazing.

  I used to look at her picture in magazines, ages ago, when I was a regular girl going to middle school and she was a popular person going to gay dance clubs in New York. Her friends were graffiti artists, punk bands, drag queens, rappers, gallery owners: everything was all mixed up then, in a good way. I used to read those magazines monkishly, over and over again, late into the night, as if they contained a key to unlocking a secret world of happiness. And maybe they did; maybe they taught me something important. Or maybe it was just a way to kill time until I could grow up, get a job, find a partner, buy a house—

  A house four doors down from Betti Pérez! The houses are small but they cost a lot. What I mean is that they look sweet on the outside but there may be comedians or talent managers or people like Betti living inside.

  “The other morning I’m standing in my kitchen,” she says, “still in my nightie, trying to get the toaster to work, and I hear something funny. A rustling-around kind of sound, like a rat makes? And I look over and there’s a little man right outside my pantry window! Ten feet away from me! Digging away in there, helping himself.”

  “You should get your gate fixed,” I tell her.

  She raises her black eyebrows at me. “Don’t make this my fault.”

  “Secure the perimeter, that’s what Officer Cordova said.”

  “I’m trying to tell you a story.”

  “Didn’t I give you Manuel’s number?”

  Betti scowls. “I’m going to get mad if you don’t stop busting my balls.”

  A wave of happiness rushes over me. Here I am, fussing at Betti Pérez, and here she is, fussing back at me. I want to reach through time and squeeze the arm of my thirteen-year-old self:
awake at one in the morning, sucking on Altoids, studying the captions in PAPER magazine …

  Betti doesn’t know that I liked her back when she was an underground queen of New York. She probably thinks I’ve seen her on the HBO show, or remember her from that recurring role on the one about the lawyers. The fact is, I don’t watch too much TV, but there’s no way I can say that around here without sounding ungracious.

  “I wasn’t wearing any panties,” she says, suddenly thoughtful. “It made me feel sort of frozen in place. Like one of those bad dreams where you can’t move your legs and you open your mouth but no words come out. The only thing I could do was grab my phone off the counter and shake it at him.”

  I tell her that the next time she should grab her phone and call Officer Cordova.

  “The point is, they’re not waiting for trash day anymore,” Betti says. “The point is, they’re encroaching.”

  On cue, my dog starts barking crazily from behind the picture window, as if he knows exactly what encroaching means. He’s a big dog and his bark is loud, fast, and desperate. Though I’ve been living with him for over a year, his thinking remains mostly mysterious to me. I apologize to Betti and we look at my dog making a steady stream of sound, the wetness from his mouth spraying onto the glass. “Quiet, Hank,” I say, but he ignores me, which isn’t unusual for us. Betti says she has to leave. She’s informed me before that when he barks, it’s clearly audible at her house, even with her music on.

  “Tell Amy I’m still waiting to hear from her,” she says, leveling the tweezers at me, then she pivots on her soft silver shoes and walks away.

  When I go back inside, my dog is lying attentively on the carpet, cheerful and calm, as if he truly has no idea who that maniac was, barking his head off.

  I should say our dog, not my dog, because Amy and I adopted him together. We biked to the farmers’ market one morning to buy some strawberries and salt and eggs and came home instead with a dog; they told us he was a shepherd mix but I suspect he’s more mix than shepherd. The various rescue organizations are clever and set up shop all along the sidewalks on Sundays, so you can’t buy a muffin or pick up your prescription without encountering at least a dozen beautiful animals needing homes. It’s like running the gauntlet except instead of being pummeled with sticks you’re pierced by the sad eyes of kittens and stray dogs, and the less expressive eyes of rabbits. There are always a couple of weeping children too, who want the animals but can’t have them.

  I wanted a child but couldn’t have one, which is partly why we got the dog. Or maybe the dog is our warm-up to having a child—this is how Amy, who is plucky about nearly everything, looks at it. I’m the defeatist. I think the game’s already over. I think of Hank as a consolation prize, a loud and needy consolation prize who sheds huge amounts of hair, but that could just be the hCG. Now that we’ve started on injectable cycles I’ve been feeling blue. “Get out,” Amy tells me. “Take Hank for a hike.” Which always seems like a reasonable idea until I try to execute it. Amy says that the problem is my car; if I had a bigger car it wouldn’t be such a major production. She’s been researching hybrid SUVs and threatening to take me on a test drive.

  As for me, I don’t want a bigger car. I miss the days when we didn’t even own a car. I mean before we came to California, when we were still working crummy day jobs and living in New York. It used to take me twelve minutes to walk to the C/E station from our apartment on DeKalb. I used to bury my nose in my scarf and finger the smooth, flimsy MetroCard in my coat pocket and think about the magazine I would read once I got a seat on the train. Usually I would read for only a few minutes before I fell asleep, lulled by the shaking train and the warmth of other people around me reading and sleeping. If I had to get to work early, I would walk the extra distance and take the D/Q line from Flatbush Avenue, just because I looked forward to the moment when the train emerged from the darkness to make its slow, rattling way across the bridge and the morning light would pour slantwise through the girders and spill over all of us sleeping inside the subway car, our hands folded and our heads nodding, me cracking my eyes open for only a second to see this and love this and then go back to dreaming.

  * * *

  The next time Betti appears on my porch she is holding a blue ice pack on top of her head. The rest of her is perfect: jersey wrap dress in navy, big gold hoops, long gold chains looped around her neck. She says that she needs me to see if she is bleeding.

  “Should I take you to the hospital?” I ask, trying to keep Hank from wriggling past me and out the door. With all my blood tests I go to the hospital like a regular. “I know a great place to park.”

  “It’s only a bump,” Betti says. “I bumped my head like an idiot. You better get some hydrogen peroxide, just in case.”

  I find it in the downstairs bathroom along with a little plastic packet containing two quilted cotton pads that Amy must have taken from a fancy hotel. I think that Betti will like how neat and individually wrapped they are. She sits on the lower step of the porch and I sit on the higher one, leafing through her hair. She’s released it from its ponytail.

  “I don’t even want to tell you how it happened. It’s stupid, fucking stupid, and it’s going to make me mad all over again.”

  But of course she tells me. She tells me that the little man came back. He startled her when she was wiping something off the kitchen floor and she stood up too quickly and banged her head on the corner of an open cabinet door.

  “Really hard,” she says. “I could practically see the stars and tweetie birds flying around. I did that concussion test, the one where you close your eyes and touch your nose. I’m okay in that regard.”

  I can’t find a scratch anywhere. Just pale, clean scalp and the dark roots of her hair. I can see where she hit it, because the skin is pinker there and cold from the ice. But no blood. I split open the plastic packet and unscrew the cap from the bottle of peroxide. When I touch the wet pad to her head, Betti sighs with pleasure.

  “Oh boy. I feel like I’m in the nurse’s office at school. She used to go through our hair checking for lice. Every week, with her rubber gloves and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.” She laughs. “See? I told you I’m from the ghetto. That’s what Catholic school was like in the Bronx. Back in the day!”

  I love her so much. I don’t even bother to ask if she has Manuel’s number. I’m just going to call him myself, like I did when her sprinklers were flooding the sidewalk. Done: no more bottle-pickers breezing through her broken gate.

  “Is it bad?” she asks soberly. “Is it deep?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” I say, and smooth my hands over her shining hair.

  “Thank you, bunny,” she says, placing her ice pack back on her head, but now at an angle, like a beret. “It’s hard living alone sometimes.”

  I know how she feels, even though technically I’m not living alone. Betti and her husband, Rick, split up six months ago. He’s a contractor, with a show on a cable network where he rescues people from home improvement projects that have gone terribly wrong. It’s called DIY Undone. It’s funny because DIY used to mean something positive to me; it meant publishing your own magazine or starting a record label or making documentaries on borrowed cameras about homeless LGBT teenagers living in Morningside Park. Now DIY just makes me think of Rick and the look of relief on homeowners’ faces when he pulls up in his vintage pickup truck. On the show he is heroically competent, but I’ve noticed that a lot of things at Betti’s house don’t work as well as they should, like the gate. He redid the whole house himself as a wedding present to her.

  “You want to come inside?” I ask. “Everything’s a mess.”

  Betti stands and studies Hank through the picture window, as if calculating how many dog hairs are going to attach themselves to her navy dress. “I’ve got a meeting. A big one, maybe. In Santa Monica.”

  I knock my knuckles against the nearest porch column. “I think this is wood.”

  “Speaking
of which,” Betti says, “has Amy said anything to you? I feel like I’m stalking her.”

  “Not yet.” I wasn’t expecting this, and now I have to pretend to sort through the contents of our mailbox. “She’s super busy. Even more than normal. She hasn’t even had time to do her laundry.” Which doesn’t sound very convincing, so I hear myself adding: “There’s a huge pile of unwashed clothes stinking up the back of the closet.”