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  “He grabbed her cold hand, recently given to him in marriage, pulled her close, so she could feel his heart pounding and felt her wedding finger, the one joined by blood to her feelings.

  “There was nothing there but skin and bone.

  “Where’s your ring?” he cried, and she felt its absence, then fell to pieces.

  “My ring’s gone. I’ve lost it!”

  “Together, the new husband and wife searched the shoreline. She apologized over and over. It was her fault for so many reasons. She was showing off. She was teasing him. She wasn’t going to wear a wife collar and leash and be led. They looked frantically, clawing the sand and seaweed, and found fish bones, shells, a plastic bucket and a child’s shovel, but no wedding ring.

  “They were student volunteers who’d come to Cuba after the revolution to build a clinic and had saved up for their wedding bands.”

  “It must be in the ocean,” she said, weeping, her storm almost as big as the one tearing up the sea and disturbing the sand on the beach.

  “This was not a good omen. He was terrified, but he had to show her he was brave enough to save their marriage. She didn’t have time to say, ‘Don’t be silly. Forever is more than a ring.’”

  “I’m going in.” He grabbed her goggles and plunged into the water.

  “The lifeguard ran down the beach. ‘Mal agua,’ he shouted, ‘Mal agua.’

  “Neither husband nor wife spoke Spanish well. They thought mal agua meant bad water, a storm with big waves. That was obvious. How could they know mal agua meant this wind brought bad water and poisonous jellyfish?

  “The bridegroom remembered how to swim from the time before the terrible dream he hadn’t explained in full detail. All he’d said was, ‘I am afraid to go in the water.’ He walked into the sea and swam out to the place where she had gone back and forth, teasing him with her water ballet.

  “She watched him dive, her heart smashing against waves of fear. Down he went, and up. The lifeguard stood helpless at the shore. He’d warned them, hadn’t signed up for this gringo foolishness. The lifeguard had a family to support.

  “Down the bridegroom went, and stayed there.

  “I can’t see him,” the bride screamed and paced, counting the seconds. It has to be a joke. He’ll come back. “Mal agua,” the lifeguard kept saying, and still he didn’t go in after the foundering groom.

  “Some times take forever.

  “After forever, a wave delivered her oyster blue bridegroom with her ring on his baby finger and jellyfish stings swelling all over his body.

  “This must have been the dream he had before he stopped swimming, the part he hadn’t mentioned.

  “Is that a true story?” the child asks.

  “Yes, or I wouldn’t have told you.”

  I left out the part about the bride being already pregnant, with twins.

  “It isn’t nice to scare little girls.”

  “But you said you weren’t scared of anything.”

  “I’m only not afraid of make believe things.”

  “Sometimes there are reasons for frightening kids. It keeps them safe.”

  “Oh sure, I get it about crossing the street and drinking poison, but what about war and climate change? How would scaring kids about stuff like that help us?”

  “Because kids imagine, and someone has to think up ways to fix the terrible mistakes that adults make. Someone has to find the cures for war and disease and pollution, for greed.”

  I get back to scooping dirt in my bucket. Now I’m at sixty-seven.

  “Seven is my lucky number. You should stop at seventy-seven.”

  “It’s too late for that. It’s time to go home.”

  “I’m not leaving until you do.”

  “Eventually, you will have to go back to the house. Soon it will be dinnertime, and you will be hungry. You will have to leave me here and go through the woods like Little Red Riding Hood. Just go before dark and stay on the path.”

  Soon the sun will disappear behind the trees. Her legs are bare, I can see the fine hairs on her baby girl shins and arms are rigid with cold.

  The trowel holds about a cup. It is comforting to measure out the dirt that will cover my grave, just like cooking. I know the basic chemistry, so much flour to so much yeast or baking powder, so much oil, so many eggs and cups of liquid, plus the serendipitous, whatever walks into my head or out of my refrigerator. Once I knew that; I knew it all. Now I know the Socratic nothing.

  I cook the way I do everything: my garden rambles, my meals surprise, my poems assault. There is no fixed recipe for life.

  “Let’s go home and make a birthday cake,” the child is shivering.

  “It’s your turn. You go make it all by yourself.”

  “I like doing it together.”

  “When you are older, remember to read the philosopher Bishop Berkeley. He will tell you anything you imagine is real. Just imagine I am there when I’m not.”

  “Can we open the bottle now?” These scary abstractions are not for her, not now.

  “One more bucket.” I slow down, watching the child, memorizing every detail. I’ve heard it is possible to take telegrams to the dead. What message would he want from his children, grandchildren and great-grandchild?

  I already know. He will want to know that they are kind. That is all.

  I hope I will still recognize him. It has been so many years, three generations. Will he be the same? Will I? Will he recoil at the lustful bag of wrinkles and brown spots chasing him down those streets paved with gold?

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m laughing at myself. It’s a great trick. If you can flip every bad thing into a lesson or some kind of joke, then you will get through everything life throws at you. It works for me.”

  “I try to laugh when I muck things up.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Open the bottle.” She hands it to me, maybe expecting I will open it the way I have popped the cork on many bottles of plonk, banging the heel against a door frame. This is one of my party tricks.

  There is a portal here, and it isn’t the cuneiform shape I have dug, wide at one end so I can move my wings. It is blue sky. I wonder if I should tell our beautiful girl about the etymology of the word “cunt,” birth and death, or is that too complicated? Will the child’s parents be angry about my ultimate pedagogy? I have been found guilty before, guilty of giving her candy, buying her Spanish dance shoes with taps and high heels, makeup.

  Girls should know that “cunt” is a good word.

  “Stand back,” I say. I remove the foil and pop the cork. She stands her ground, and it goes right in her eye. She will have a shiner. Not the end of the world. She smiles, shows her big new teeth. “I’ll have a trophy.” Yes, she gets it. I took her to the roller derby, where bruises are trophies.

  I pour the bubbly into the tin cup. “Prosit,” I say. She says, “Mazeltov.” I say, “Salute.” “Slainte.” “Meegwech.” All my relations. She has the first sip. I have the second. We pour some in the ground.

  “I’m going to rest now,” I say, putting my down pillow down in the dirt, avoiding the word “sleep.” She knows the word “hypnophobia.” I’m over that too.

  “I’m cold. Can I lie with you?”

  “Only until I am cold. Then you must go home.”

  She climbs down and snuggles. “Is that what we’re playing, hot and cold?”

  We play the game on our birthdays, hers, mine, and her parents. The closer we get to the hidden gift, the hotter it gets. We chant in unison. It is almost my last birthday, time to leave the greatest gift behind. Her.

  “Hotter is home. You go there. Your parents will need you.”

  Clever little girl, she gets it. “Tell me one more story,” she says, “and I will go. I promise.

  MR. AND MRS. SMITH

  Jane and her twin sister Janet think of their dolls as left and right identical, made from a pair of war-rationed stockings. Along with sugar
and eggs, their Scottish aunts, also identical twins, were allowed one pair of stockings each coupon period.

  From this rare extravagance, the aunts sewed perfect dolls: no runs, no tears, gifts as generous as the precious books that came every Christmas without fail and erased the degree of separation between Scotland and Canada, aunts and grand-nieces, war and peace. Reality and fiction.

  The twins’ Scottish ancestors were Vikings, red-haired, hot-tempered, difficult to anaesthetize. The only black person their family knew intimately was their housekeeper, Virginia, with them, their father explained, to replace their mother who had “gone barking,” which meant “singing” (and maybe “fucking”) on the stages of the world.

  Virginia, who polished with lemon oil and drank lemon water by the quart, smelled like lemons. Their mother, who rode horses when she wasn’t warning the world, smelled like horses. Piss straw, manure, leather and lather, animal sweat.

  Mr. and Mrs. Smith had no genitals. They were made from the chocolate-coloured ration stockings, and with black woolly hair and button eyes, looked exactly the same, except one had a violet wool dress with a scalloped hem and the other wore violet wool pants, both reversible, with moss green on the inside.

  Given that their mother was away most of the time, the Smith dolls saw the girls through every childhood illness: measles, mumps, chicken pox, parental dysfunction and influenza. “Influenza” means “against the stars,” and that was how they thought of their mother.

  Virginia said their mother was “doing good work,” breaking glasses and glass ceilings using her fame to campaign for feminism and social justice. At home, out of the public eye, she broke things that belonged to their father and flushed his rye down the toilet, incidents Virginia called “collateral damage.”

  Wish I had a plane to fly.

  Here’s what I’d write in the sky,

  Gone fishin’ instead of just a wishin’

  When Virginia, saint of their troubled household, went home to her own family, their mother tore the house apart looking for irregularities: smudges on the woodwork (a theme reprised in Tea Party lamentation about the condition of the White House during Obama’s term of office), dust on the ledges and traces of fat in the oven.

  “Lazy black bitch,” she said, clearly, no doubt about the diction of Our Lady of Dog Notes, coloratura champ.

  At the end of her second pregnancy, Virginia sat down a lot, polishing silver. That was way past lazy. Their mother said it the way she said “beyond the pale.”

  “We’re all survivors of something,” Virginia said, possibly hearing oars plodding across the Atlantic Ocean, against the current. Several times a day, she took a photo of her infant daughters out of her pocket and kissed it.

  Their mother had “hard hands,” their father said, which meant she rode people hard. Jane and Janet wondered if there was ever a time when their father enjoyed that, but never asked.

  The Smiths loved Virginia, and the twins did too. In the beginning, she sang them to sleep, their dolls cradled in their arms, then dressed up for dance dates with her husband, a porter who rode the trains. That was in the beginning. Later as she transformed from awesomely bright, tight satin dresses, high heels, purple eye shadow, into a grey chrysalis, she went off to Bible classes.

  Virginia was awesome, her cooking was awesome, her kindness was awesome. She made the trade, lost her bebop and found her gospel bounce, but her heart stayed rainbow brilliant. Virginia was saved, baptized in the Baptist church, as her lullabies moved on from “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Boom, Boom, Boom” to “How Awesome Is My God.” She washed off her makeup and giddiness in the blood of the Lamb, but inside her renovated façade, her bones danced on.

  The thrill was gone, but not the beat.

  The Smiths also bounced. In the dark, empowered by music, their silent best friends rose up from doll paralysis, jumping and jiving on their beds, saved by the Lord. Sometimes making babies. The twins practised too, clothes on.

  In the morning, no dark smudges marred their sheets, and in one of those moments when children realise their parents are not exactly what they hoped they might be, Jane understood that the fingerprints on the woodwork belonged to white folks. That would be their father, their mother, Janet and her.

  So much for golliwogs. What did they know? The Smiths were their morning and evening stars.

  Postcards from New York, London, San Francisco and Paris marked their passage through illness and honour rolls. They kept on sucking their thumbs until they needed to act like grown-ups. All along they had tried on their mother’s clothes when she was away, inhabiting their idea of her.

  When they turned twelve, the dress with fringes their mother brought home from her nights at Studio 54 actually fit them. Janet, who had more of a waist, wore the black velvet with a pink silk rose on the bosom. They stood in front of the floor-length mirror and shook what Virginia, back in her juke days, called their moneymakers.

  When their mother came home, she raged. Something was awry in her closet. Her wardrobe was colour-coded and carefully aligned, shoe-to-shoe, dress-to-dress. “Someone’s been wearing my shoes,” she said, surprising the hell out of them with her knowledge of childhood fairy tales, something she had neglected to share.

  Later, after a Librium and the speed that kept her skinny, she said in her sotto voce telephone voice, “You’ve been up to something.” Usually, she noticed minutiae, but not big picture things. That came later, when Janet surprised her with a left hook to the jaw that knocked her out cold.

  The family silver shone, and there were more fingerprints. Virginia, pregnant for the third time, was sacked.

  Who would the twins sing and dance with? Who would hold back the shadows at night? Who would put her cool hand on their feverish foreheads and keep their hair out of the way when they were sick without leaving a single fingerprint?

  The girls held onto their dolls, also grieving, for dear life. There were no more backflips, no tumbling on their beds, but at least Mr. and Mrs. Smith were there with their eyes wide open, taking everything in.

  “We can see you,” Janet hissed from the top bunk when their mother made a surprise bedroom visit and got into bed with Jane. She had been fast asleep, maybe dreaming, and woke up holding her breath, wondering what came next, a fairy tale, a tune? She had no songs to sing, just a secret she was going to keep.

  Where was Dad, she panicked? Probably Dad was in his usual place, his face in a book, Puccini screaming on the gramophone, the Mills Brothers.

  “I’m going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own,” the Mills Brothers crooned on the record player. Their father told them the Mills Brothers were staying at his friend’s house because the hotel where they were performing wouldn’t have black men in their rooms. Oh yes, they thought, smudge marks on the sheets and woodwork, big black rings on the bathtub.

  “Leave her alone,” Janet said, and their mother turned the Smith faces to the wall.

  The aunts had not sewn ears on the Smiths. Not that dolls with ears listen anyway.

  “I like girls,” their mother said.

  “Me too,” Jane answered. She liked Virginia and her sister. They were her world.

  “I mean, beyond like. I like to touch them.” She gathered the dolls and took off their clothing. “See,” she said, pointing to their identical gender spots, clefts stitched in wool the same colour as the stockings so she could barely see them.

  Both girls. The bowling team, friends of Dorothy’s, unfamiliar phrases whizzed by. It was some joke the Scottish aunts were in on. Jane was not in the club. Janet said she was not in the club either. They didn’t want to be in the club. It was the club that took mothers away from daughters and turned their fathers into drunks.

  When their mother left their room, Janet jumped into bed with Jane, and they rubbed the undressed Smiths together until their sock bodies ripped and their stuffing fell out. “Like, like, like,” they whispered, furious, as if young girls with flammable skir
ts and cloth dolls were fire starter, embers that stoked aberrant mothers.

  Of course, full realisation came slowly, over the years it took the Smiths to rot in the graveyard behind their house, under the star magnolia where their canaries slept in cardboard coffins.

  Jane stole bread and ate it under the covers, handfuls of soft dough. She sucked her thumb. Janet masturbated noisily under her blankets. It was all about hunger, and they knew. It is worse to know and do nothing.

  The Smiths had a terrible death. The twins made a bonfire of all the books from the aunts and lay their golliwogs on top. They didn’t know who was up, Mr. or Mrs. Smith, because naked they were identical. They faced each other, top and bottom like the bunk bed.

  The Smiths burned slowly, and Janet used the poker to move them further into the fire. Burn baby burn.

  They heard them scream.

  Then it rained, and they dug a hole for their charred remains under the star magnolia tree, beside the dead pets.

  The Smiths died like Adam and Eve or Adam and Adam, Eve and Eve, naked, expelled from the garden, half-baked in a paper fire. Genesis, Exodus, the same old story.

  Jane keeps the Smith clothes in a small cedar box. Sometimes she opens it up and sniffs. They smell like Virginia. Nice. Not like horses.

  HER NAME

  It’s the scent. Tonight the forest leaking through the open windows smells like earth, a compost cake, vegan, lemons and nuts squeezed in her pristine colon, but she’s getting ahead of herself, in the way, as usual, of the answers. First, the question, why has her life been twisted, an explanation mark with scoliosis?

  After saying goodnight to her TV, she makes a violent pivot, splashes down her cup of milk, throws open the door to the garden and breathes in the night: ocean, wisteria, with frog jism the dominant note because the frogs are singing, spitting out spring lust, and the crows harmonize, a fifth apart.

  Their singing pulls her into the darkness, across the damp lawn, moss, to the forest floor.