The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [2]
When I go to the kitchen, I peer in the glass and see he’s some kind of salamander now. He’s small.
“Ben,” I whisper, “do you remember me? Do you remember?”
His eyes roll up in his head and I dribble honey into the water. He used to love honey. He licks at it and then swims to the other end of the pan.
This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don’t ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you’re there. Because I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny clear waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and bordered, brainless, benign, heading clear and small like an eye-floater into nothingness.
I put him in the passenger seat of the car, and drive him to the beach. Walking down the sand, I nod at people on towels, laying their bodies out to the sun and wishing. At the water’s edge, I stoop down and place the whole pan on the tip of a baby wave. It floats well, a cooking boat, for someone to find washed up on shore and to make cookies in, a lucky catch for a poor soul with all the ingredients but no container.
Ben the salamander swims out. I wave to the water with both arms, big enough for him to see if he looks back.
I turn around and walk back to the car.
Sometimes I think he’ll wash up on shore. A naked man with a startled look. Who has been to history and back. I keep my eyes on the newspaper. I make sure my phone number is listed. I walk around the block at night in case he doesn’t quite remember which house it is. I feed the birds outside and sometimes before I put my one self to bed, I place my hands around my skull to see if it’s growing, and wonder what, of any use, would fill it if it did.
CALL MY NAME
I’m spending the afternoon auditioning men.
They don’t know it. This is a secret audition, come as you are.
“No really,” I say to the beanpole man on the Muni with eyes so tired you can see death lounging in them already, “do you prefer cats or dogs?”
He smiles at me in this tolerant way. I can’t tell you exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul. I want to be violated by insight.
“Cats, no question,” he says, pill-rolling with his fingers. He’s drugged out, but I don’t care. What I care about is dogs, and I am disappointed.
I thank him, run a hand through my hair and go back to sitting at my surveillance spot, front row, facing backward, right behind the driver who winked at me when I came on.
I wear dresses on the subway. I have a lot of money from my dead father who invented the adhesive wall hook. He invented it when he was in his twenties and the world scrambled, doe-eyed, to his doorstep—no one cares for nails anymore. He died when I was three so I never really knew him enough to miss him and there are millions of dollars for me and my mom, and she isn’t a spender. So it’s just me! It’s all me! I don’t much like expensive cars or gourmet dinners; what I love are fancy dresses. Today I am wearing maroon satin, a floor-length dress with a V back and matching sandals with crisscross straps up my ankles. My ears are lit by simple diamond earrings. I look like I should know how to waltz, and I do.
The men are pleased when I come on the subway because I am the type who usually drives her own car. I am not your average subway girl, wearing black pants and reading a novel the whole time so you can’t even get eye contact. Me, I look at them and smile at them and they love it. I bet they talk about me at the dinner table—I give boring people something to discuss