The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [42]
You mean you’re not for real? she screeched, and she ran outside to the weeds while the baby slept and she poked at his back hard until he said You’re hurting me and she said You’re a fake fake fake! and scooping up the baby she flew down the four hundred stairs. She walked the streets of the city until she found a cheap apartment on the bad side of town. She met a man with no legs. How did you get this way, she asked, and he said My father didn’t know I was under the car working on it and she said I’m so sorry and took off her clothes. He was not the lover that the hunchback was, though. She only came every now and then when she allowed herself the remembrance of his hands and his tongue. She quieted and took up nursing, specializing in deformities. But the baby: she did turn out lucky. She grew up to be a movie star. She headlined movies in silver dresses and everyone watched her huge face on the screen with her long long eyelashes and said This one is Special.
It was so unfortunate that her career ended the way it did. On the set of her fifth movie, the starlet was sitting at her makeup table with her head on her arms feeling inestimably sad. I have beauty and fame and riches and boyfriends, she thought, and yet I am so unhappy. Her mother, a frequent visitor, knocked at the door of the trailer. Sweetheart she said opening the door, they—She stopped in mid-sentence. She saw it right away. What’s this? she gasped, face falling open, leaning on the door for support. The starlet raised her burdened head and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw the hump rising up on her back like a landscaped hill, and reaching back one tentative hand to touch it, could hardly contain the airborne feeling of relief.
DREAMING IN
POLISH
There was an old man and an old woman and they dreamed the same dreams. They’d been married for sixty years, and their arm skin now wrinkled down to their wrists like kicked-down bedsheets. They were maybe the oldest people in the world. They sat outside their house together, elbows touching, in the wicker chairs you’d expect them to sit in, and watched the people walk by. Occasionally they called out images from the night before to the gardener or to whoever happened to be passing. Most people smiled quickly at them and then looked back down at the sidewalk. And when night fell, the old man and the old woman walked into their bedroom, drew back the white sheets, covered themselves up, and shared what was beneath.
• • •
This summer was the one where I worked in the hardware store, and my mother talked only about going to Washington, D.C., to ride on the cattle cars at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum there. Apparently this museum had the best simulation of Auschwitz in the world. I didn’t want to go; I was happy giving refunds to wives who’d bought the wrong pliers for their enterprising husbands. Besides, my mother and I had pretty much done the concentration-camp museum circuit by this point—looking at piles of hair in the Paris one the summer before, walking past black-and-white photographs in Amsterdam. I didn’t like going, but she, somehow, craved it. I watched her hands tremble as she looked at the biographies pasted on the walls, and wondered what she was thinking.
My mother didn’t have much to do with her day besides plan these trips; she taught, and kept her summers free, but I was very busy at the store, stacking bags of potting soil