The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [45]
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 gardener long complicated questions in Polish. But since his parents were immigrants too, he always nodded appropriately, and often picked a flower