It was Monday. Vibrating in the back of the now-allowable Edelman van, I crouched in the fuzzy folds of Masha’s woolen cap, near the crest of her forehead, and breathed in her scent: almond-scented soap, milk. Through the thick woolen hairs that blurred my view like tree trunks, I could see Mordecai Edelman’s everyday black felt hat brushing the ceiling of the car as he drove. His peltlike beard was etched against the blare of light pouring through the windshield, the cloth of his coat bunched up at the elbows whenever he turned the steering wheel. Pearl was twisted around in the passenger seat, one arm stretched back so she could hold Masha’s hand. Masha held her mother’s hand loosely in her own, playing with the fingers.
The lurching of the vehicle was making me feel queasy. Backing into the dense copse of mohair, I was made to see, in my mind’s eye, Leslie Senzatimore parked in his white truck by the side of the road, his big arm hanging out the side, his thumb and middle finger tapping out an impatient rhythm on the door of the cab: di-di-di-BA-di-di-di-BA-di-di-di-BA. Parked just behind him was a car, red and blue lights flashing ominously from its roof.
Dennis Doyle had some very irritating characteristics. He had stopped Leslie for speeding three times since he was stationed six months ago on this flat stretch of the Montauk Highway, which Leslie had to take to get to work and had an absurdly low speed limit. Each time Dennis had stopped him, he’d asked to see his license, then took the laminated rectangle between fore- and middle fingers and walked leisurely, bowlegged, back to his squad car, leaving Leslie cooling his balls while Dennis ran a check on him to make sure he wasn’t a terrorist or wanted by the police in some other state or possibly a scofflaw with outstanding moving violations, even though he and Dennis lived three streets away from one another, had shared teachers from the first through the twelfth grade, and were both on the same Neighborhood Watch Committee. Dennis went by the book. Yet Leslie couldn’t help chuckling as he watched his old buddy in his side mirror, cropped curly hair obscured by the police cap, legs stiff from too much gym work, belly swollen under the tight blue shirt, waddling up to him, pad in hand, like he was going to take his order at a drive-in hamburger place.
“Everything okay with my record?” Leslie asked him, sunglasses still on just like Dennis’s were. He knew a cop was meant to ask you to remove your sunglasses and he wanted to make Dennis Doyle ask a man he had smoked his first joint with to please remove his eyewear so he could compare the photo on the license with his actual visage. Dennis declined to take the bait. “If you don’t like being checked, don’t speed,” he said.
“Okay, officer,” said Leslie. Doyle stalked back to his car with a straight-backed, offended air. Leslie wondered if this man could still be classified as his friend.
It was already quarter to nine; as a rule, Leslie liked to be at work by eight-thirty. It set the tone for his guys. The large sign reading SENZATIMORE MARINE was visible from the highway. Whenever Leslie saw it, his chest warmed with pride and a glimmer of surprise that he had amounted to anything.
The great rolling door was open as he drove up. Leslie walked in, scanning three boats on blocks for signs of progress. The men waved to him as they caught sight of him. He greeted them with the usual good cheer. Once he got his coffee, he would talk the day through with his team and get to work. Leslie did most of the fine woodwork himself. He looked through the glass windows of his office and saw that the coffee machine was fully loaded. Vera, his secretary of the last thirteen years, was sitting at her desk, her curved back to him. Leslie found Vera comforting. He walked into the office and poured himself a cup.
“Hiya,” said Vera.
“Dennis Doyle gave me a speeding ticket,” said Leslie.
“Who’s Dennis Doyle?” asked Vera in a nasal whine, swiveling toward him in her seat. About sixty, wizened, with whipped-up gray hair and manicured arthritic hands, she was a model of efficiency.
“A guy I went to school with,” Leslie said, taking a sip.
“Well, if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get here,” she answered, turning back to her desk.
“Why?”
“I have bad news.”
Leslie sat down at his desk. “Shoot,” he said.
“Remember how I’ve been chasing down a final payment from that Mr. Croft, for the job you did on his speedboat last December?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s filed for bankruptcy. I don’t know when—if ever—we’re getting paid for that job.”
Leslie took this in quietly. “How much did he owe?”
“Ten thousand. So that makes twenty K in owed bills I can’t get people to pay. They all blame the banks for not lending. Who knows? We can get a collection agency onto them, but some of these people are good customers. Like Mr. Clancy.”
“He just closed his store up. Says nobody’s buying high-end furniture.”
Leslie leaned back in his chair. It made a squeal.
“What you need is some blue-chip clients,” said Vera, turning to him, her skinny arms waving in the air. “Truly wealthy people don’t feel the pinch; they keep spending.”
“Okay,” said Leslie. “So find me some truly wealthy people with leaky boats.”
“You think I’m kidding,” said Vera, arching her plucked brows. “I’m not. You’re in the wrong niche. I’m telling you. You need to cater to the very rich.”
“Vera,” said Leslie, chuckling in spite of his worry, “I’m glad you have it all worked out. Because it’s looking pretty dire at the moment.” He rubbed his eyes, thinking of Stevie. There was a private elementary school they had found for him, but it cost thousands. His parents-in-law, his stepson, stepdaughter-in-law, step-grandchild, wife—they all depended on him. Leslie had to find a way of making more money. As often happened when he felt cornered, and for reasons he could not understand, Leslie escaped into the worst memory he had.
On the Saturday his father killed himself, Leslie had finished his pancakes and dumped the plate in the sink. He was late to meet his buddies down the block. Evelyn, his mother, was buttering the two-year-old’s toast. His sisters were putting each other’s hair in a bun for ballet class. His brother was attempting to tie his own shoes. No one was talking. Everyone in the room seemed to be indifferent to one another, yet if you walked in as a stranger you would get the feeling that they were all doing something as a team, so thick was their complicity, despite their silence and focus on their own activities. Even the slap Evie gave Martha was a little percussive ping in the calm symphony of Saturday morning in the Senzatimore home. Leslie wanted to get his bike out before his little brother Will looked up from the wit-twisting activity of learning to tie his own shoes and demanded to tag along.
He walked outside, head down, whistling randomly. There was a chill in the air for the first time all summer. He’d be back in school in two days. The shed had the light on in it, he noticed; his dad must be in there. Charlie Senzatimore repaired boats for a living, mostly holes in fiberglass and ripped upholstery, but when he wasn’t at work he fiddled with wood. He loved to spend time in the shed outside his house where he had his table saw, band saw, lathe, hammers, glue, nails, screws, clamps, sawhorses. He could make bookshelves, tables, jewelry boxes—almost anything. He always made the kids a present on their birthday, and gave it to them as a side dish to whatever bought toy Evelyn wrapped up for them. It was in fact hard to get Dad out of the shed at all when he wasn’t at work or in his armchair reading the paper. Charlie wasn’t a sociable guy. If anyone came over to visit unexpectedly, he’d slip out the back door and stay in the shed till they had left. He couldn’t even stand to have people who weren’t his wife or kids see him eating. If he was at the table and the doorbell rang, he’d just take his plate and finish his meal in the shed.
Over the last few months, Leslie’s father had been working on a secret surprise. He didn’t want anyone to see it and kept it covered with a tarp. He worked on it through the night sometimes. His mother joked she thought maybe Charlie had a woman tucked under that tarp, he spent so much time there these days. When she said this, Charlie would let a little air escape from his mouth, smile, and look down shyly. He was still a very slender man, no taller than Leslie at thirteen. He had dark hair, swarthy skin, and brownish circles all the way around his eyes, which made him look Italian and exhausted. The thing he was building in the shed must have been important to him; a couple of times Leslie had started to open the door and his Dad had shouted to him to wait a minute. Charlie almost never raised his voice; when he did, it made an impression. After a couple of these incidents, Leslie had taken to knocking on the door of the shed to see if his Dad was in there working on his secret project.
This particular morning, Leslie knocked on the rickety little door, but there was no answer, so he figured it was safe to walk in. The first thing he noticed when he opened the door was the canvas tarp his dad used to cover the secret thing, crumpled on the floor, and the thing itself, displayed on a sheet of plywood resting between two sawhorses. It was a wooden replica of a battleship, about four feet long. Leslie walked up to it, awed. Every gun turret, miniature helicopters, everything but the two aluminum propellers and the helicopter blades, had been constructed out of wood. The hull of the ship had been made with interlocking pieces of wood. Somehow Charlie had cut each piece for the body of the boat with just the right curve, and he had joined them all like a huge puzzle. The wood was raw, sanded, except for the words USS NEW JERSEY carefully lettered on the side with red paint. It occurred to Leslie that this must be his birthday present. Guilt at having seen it months ahead of time, twinned with amazement at the mind-boggling love it would have taken his father to produce such a marvel, overpowered him, and he made ready to leave the room and pretend he hadn’t seen it.
As he turned, a little explosion of light, like a flashbulb, bounced off an aluminum ladder in the corner of the room. The A-frame ladder was on its side, and open, like an arrow pointing toward Leslie. Above it, in the deep shadow of the corner, among several of his father’s old coveralls that hung like deflated figures from hooks in the low ceiling, the face of his father turned toward him, eyes wide and glassy. His father was flying. That’s what Leslie thought for a quarter of a second. Then he realized the man was hanging by his neck from an orange rope that had been looped over one of the rafters, the body pivoting lazily, like a Christmas ornament that twists this way and that way on its branch. Leslie spotted his dragonfly-green Schwinn leaning on the wall behind his dangling progenitor. He inched up to it, grabbed it by the smooth plastic handles, backed it up a foot, then rolled it in an acute semicircle, just avoiding his father’s feet. He walked it, freewheel ticking, across the room, kicked the door open, swung his leg over the saddle, pedaled it as hard as he could out the driveway, sped down the street to Dennis Doyle’s house, and screeched to a halt at the gaggle of kids already assembled at the base of the cul-de-sac. He spent the day with Dennis, Chuck Tolan, and Danny Morano playing James Bond and fighter pilots, every second expecting his mother to arrive in a state of hysteria. He didn’t go home for lunch. He didn’t care if he never ate again. If he could have made the day last forever, he would have. He considered running away. He stayed with his friends till evening sucked all the light out of the little cul-de-sac and the mothers started hollering. His mother called Mrs. Doyle on the phone to tell him to come home for dinner, but there was nothing in the woman’s facial expression to indicate that his mother had mentioned finding her husband hanging in the shed. Leslie rode home and walked into the house, his belly leaden. Dinner was on the table and the girls were already sitting down. Will was washing his hands.
“Where’s Dad?” Leslie found himself asking.
“In the shed,” said his mother curtly.
“Don’t you think he’s hungry?” asked Leslie. He had to get her in there somehow. He couldn’t tell her, not now that he’d waited all day.
“I don’t want to disturb him when he’s working on his project,” his mother said bitterly. “He’ll come in when he feels up to it.” Leslie tried to eat. He chewed every mouthful until the food was like sludge. The crickets outside seemed to be screaming. He realized the poor man would be stiffening up in that shed all night, plus on top of that he’d be in the doghouse with his wife for staying in there, when really he was just dead.
“Want me to take him a plate?” he asked in desperation. Evelyn made up a plate in silence and handed it to him, adding dryly, “Make sure to give him our best regards.”
Leslie walked to the shed, closed his eyes, and prayed. “Please let it not be true,” he murmured. Then he opened the door, shut it, and walked back across the lawn and into the kitchen, still holding the plate of food.
“Mom,” he said. “You need to go in there.”
After Evelyn’s shrieks; after the children had come storming into the shed; after Leslie had pushed the children out of the shed; after he had called the police, the ambulance, the relatives; after he’d put the other kids to bed, having magically become the oldest child, unofficially but permanently superseding his older sister Evie, who started sucking her thumb that night and never stopped, her ongoing pupa status manifested by an endless changing of careers into her forties accompanied by serial dating of stunted and puerile men who tended to either have strange sniggering laughs or be married, doughy, and unavailable; after mad Mrs. Bobik had come in wielding a coffee cake which she cut up and ate three pieces of, talking all the while in whining, breathless tones about how mysterious men could be; after he had sat up nearly all night with his grieving, furious mother, transformed from a fairly normal thirteen-year-old kid into the head of a family eviscerated by a man who jumped at his own shadow—Leslie lay in his bed and thought about his birthday present. He knew quite a bit about woodworking, having been trained for years in Senzatimore Marine, helping put the boats back together with his dad on weekends or sometimes after school. Occasionally there was woodwork involved, especially on the older boats, and those were Charlie’s favorites. Leslie knew that you wouldn’t make a model of a battleship like that, with all those interlocking pieces, unless you intended to have it taken apart. The boat was a puzzle.
Leslie got dressed very quietly and padded out of the house in his slippers. The crickets had gone quiet, though there was a silvery, hissing insect sound rising from the trees. He walked to the shed and turned on the light switch just inside the door. The bare bulb screwed into the ceiling shed a cone of cold blue light on the reshrouded USS New Jersey, leaving the rest of the room in a reddish black penumbra that seemed to radiate menace. The battleship cast a pointed shadow on the concrete floor. Leslie stood in the doorway, unable to move. The familiar little shed now felt electric with dread. Something palpable, like a massive Jell-O cube of negative energy, repelled the boy as he tried to walk into the room. He had to press his way into this force field, conquering his terror step by step. He made himself look only at the boat, avoiding the corner where he had seen his father’s livid face swinging around at him hours earlier. Leslie lifted off the canvas tarp gently and laid it on the ground. The boat was as long as his arm span. From above, it had the shape of a very elegant pointed shoe. Its lines were refined, elongated. The gun turrets and bridge had been made of quarter-inch plywood, glued and sanded. Four helicopters with little metal blades stood at the ready on the flight deck. He imagined all those seconds flowing through his father’s fingertips into this ship, all that time he didn’t spend with his son poured into something that turned out to be for Leslie after all. Leslie felt so bad for resenting his old man.
The gunwales and the deck all seemed to be glued together, of a piece. He gently pulled at the top of the ship and it came away. Looking inside was a little shocking: the upper floor of the interior was a fully realized replica of a battleship: panels with switches, wheels and gears, all meticulously constructed out of wood. To see the rest of the interior, he dislodged the first interlocking piece of wood on the exterior using his fingers and laid it gently onto the worktable under the window. He decided to only take apart one side of the ship to begin with, and tried to lay all the pieces out in an order that would make sense to him later, so he could put the boat back together. It took him about forty minutes to disassemble the thing. Inside, in mad detail, were three stories of a miniature battleship. A crew of men with hand-sewn uniforms worked in the four engine rooms, lay on gray-blanketed bunks reading tiny whittled books, manned the intricate control panels, ate painted plaster dollhouse food, played chess on minuscule chessboards; still others cooked and cut up little replica vegetables. Leslie noticed a magnifying glass resting amid the debris on his father’s worktable.
Only one of the rooms had a number on it: 753. Inside, a whittled blond man lay sleeping on the upper bunk. His fair hair was real, and could only have come from the head of Leslie’s baby sister Martha. The blond man’s arm, which was made of wire, dangled in sleep over the side of the top bunk. The seaman in the bunk below, a smaller, dark-haired man, was reaching for the blond, sleeping man’s hand with his own wire arms and hands. Beneath the bottom bunk, Leslie noticed strands of coarse, black hair, a patch of muslin. He drew out a little doll, a tiny woman with painted-on lips, a white face, and real, long, black hair. There was a trickle of red paint drawn down the side of her mouth. Swiftly, fingers shaking, Leslie stuffed the little replica of the woman back under the bottom bunk. He hurriedly replaced every interlocking wooden piece that made up his father’s masterwork, rebuilt the whole boat as quickly as he could. Light was streaming through the windows by the time he was done. He felt something bad had been released by opening the boat. The feeling of menace, which had dissipated while he was working, had returned. He felt his father’s secret in the room without knowing what the secret was.
Leslie’s slipper dragged a piece of paper along the floor. He bent and picked it up. It was folded over neatly. On the outside was written, Please read, in his father’s careful writing. He didn’t understand how he hadn’t noticed this before. Maybe it had been tucked under the ship and fluttered down to the floor as he removed the pieces. He sat down on the cool concrete and unfolded the piece of paper. His father would explain the secret to him, maybe. He read: Please pack this model with care and send to Hutch Sonderson, 14 Humbolt Street, Dayle, Iowa. And then, inches beneath that, like an afterthought, was scrawled This pains me. Leslie sat as though he had been hit on the head, unable to form a thought, for a long time. Then he heard his mother calling him. He stood up and left the shed.
Later that morning, he nailed together a sturdy box out of scrap wood left around the shed, lowered the boat into it, and stuffed the box with newspaper to keep the boat steady. He wrote a note with a flat pencil his father had once used to mark measurements on wood: Dear Hutch Sonderson, My father made this for you and then he hanged himself. Sincerely, Leslie Senzatimore. He laid the note on the ship and nailed the box shut. Then he and Chuck Tolan wheeled it to the post office on a flatbed hand truck borrowed from Chuck’s grumpy dad, who was in the moving business. Once they were there, Chuck Tolan helped him lift the box off the hand truck and waited outside while Leslie stood in line, the box at his feet, shoving it forward with his foot as the line grew shorter. When his turn came, he heaved the box up on the counter, paid the considerable postage with his own allowance, left the post office with Chuck Tolan, the two of them riding the hand truck along the sidewalks like a big scooter in total defiance of the menacing Mr. Tolan’s strict admonishments, and tried to forget the thing had ever existed. He managed, for the most part. But now and then, as he grew up, Leslie imagined finding Charlie while he was still alive, wriggling in his noose. He always cut the poor man down, then, with his penknife.
Leslie never opened the door of the shed again. Nobody did, until Vince McCaffrey married his mother and they turned it into a canned food storage area. McCaffrey was a suburban survivalist, and kept enough canned stew, bottled water, and beans to last several lifetimes in that shed, convinced that once the big war started and all government was a thing of the past, the McCaffreys would need a lot of stew.
I crouched on Masha’s hat, awash, by some olfactory miracle, in the scent of Leslie’s coffee, and gazed at his recollection. That was a betrayal you wouldn’t get over too fast. Yet there he was, so cheerful, capable, reliable, helpful—I didn’t believe it. There was a gash under all that exemplary maleness, a sucking crater of a wound, like his head had been ripped off and he’d just sewn on a new head. All I wanted to do was introduce him to himself.
Leslie sat still, arms folded, his deep-set blue-glass eyes staring down at the desk, as the memory evaporated and he returned, slowly, as if drugged, to the present. Segundo, stocky, phlegmatic, knocked on the door. Reflexively, Leslie’s expression changed to interested curiosity, a hint of a smile. He was knee-jerk affable, in the main. Could never stick to a bad mood.
“Segundo!” he exclaimed, his voice lifted, expectant.
“I need to show you this joint,” said Segundo softly. Leslie got up and followed Segundo out the door. As he checked the hull of the repaired speedboat in the cavernous hangar, leaving his pathetic memory behind him, I found myself following another chain of occurrence, one unavailable to my strong-jawed host but suddenly, fleetingly, visible to me. Eager for knowledge in all its forms, I hurried down this wormhole and emerged in a battleship, on the Mediterranean, in September 1955.
Hutch Sonderson sat shirtless, nipples fatly convex from the heat, his chest smooth as a girl’s, strong arms lank at his sides, wheat-colored buzz cut damp with sweat, limpid Caribbean-blue eyes unfocused on the tilting horizon. Charlie Senzatimore, dark, quick-limbed, a fast-talking urban shrimp in comparison to Sonderson’s milky, farm-boy laconism, had fallen in love with Hutch some weeks earlier, but he didn’t know it yet. The tightness in his chest as he watched Hutch space out, the feeling of embarrassed happiness whenever they spoke, he put down to a strangeness that had come over him from being offshore for so long. Three months on the USS New Jersey. The nights were the worst. Lying below Hutch, watching one big, limp hand dangling over the side of the top bunk, long, strong fingers open as if inviting him to hold it—he would never forget the nightly sight of that unattainable hand. For the rest of his life, when Charlie Senzatimore looked back on the disaster that those days were to become for him, he remembered three things: Hutch Sonderson’s hand floating above him, black in the half-light, like an ink stamp; the girl’s round, puffy face dusted with pale powder, her childlike lips tinted red; the body, so small and limp on the bed, limbs twisted randomly like some abandoned doll, strands of dark wet hair stuck to her forehead, her cheeks still hectic, though she had stopped her labored breathing some time before. It had been an accident; there was no doubt about that.
When she walked him into the room, a breeze puffed out the white muslin curtains like sails, then turned tail and sucked them back out again. A fan circled in the ceiling lazily. The bed was made up with what looked like clean pink sheets. Charlie lay down. The girl sat down beside him. He could hear the wheezing in her chest from where he lay. “You need a doctor,” he said. She smiled at him, uncomprehending. He thought, She’s probably doing this because she needs a doctor. The thought of leaving her some money and running down the stairs crossed his mind. He felt no desire. He was agitated, and fidgeted on the crisp sheets, looking up at the winding fan, trying to think of something that would stimulate his imagination. He didn’t have much experience to review. There had been a few awkward, tooth-clanging kisses with one brush-haired girl at the movies, the tentative cupping of her heavy breast. None of this made him even slightly aroused. Ironically, the only thing that made him interested in sex at that moment was Hutch Sonderson, when the whole point of being in this room with this very young, sick girl was so that he could lose his virginity and stop thinking about Hutch Sonderson. It was a simple equation and one that Charlie felt would work. It had to. If it didn’t he would throw himself into the sea. The girl said something in a whining tone, clawing weakly, insistently, at his T-shirt. She was in a hurry. Her fingers irritated him. She wore a loose-fitting robe. Her hair was long and black. He took a handful of the hair and smelled it, eyes closed. He imagined smelling Hutch’s skin, smooth, salty, warm, sun-baked. The pitch of his desire tossed him at the girl, whose thin, weak frame collapsed beneath him. He could hear her phlegmy breaths as he toiled to maintain his desire. Losing an internal battle, he flipped her over. She cried out, protesting, because perhaps she had not had that done to her, that particular thing, or it wasn’t in her contract, or it cost extra—anyway, she cried out and he muffled her cry, his hand over her mouth, only for a moment it seemed, just long enough, the breath in her lungs gurgling liquidly, like the sound of a straw sucking up the last drops of milk in a glass. The curtains kept puffing into the room and then being sucked out again, as though an enormous being the size of a house were breathing steadily outside the room. When he was done, Charlie took his hand away and she was still. He sat up and she didn’t move. He turned her over. Her mouth looked bruised. She wasn’t breathing. He prodded her, slapped her lightly. He listened to her heart. Nothing. He opened her little wet lips and puffed her full of air. He pounded her narrow, bony chest. He wept in panicked disbelief, kneeling over her. He prayed. But she was gone. It had taken so little to end her life.
He climbed out the window, shimmied down a drain, made his way through the lane, passing two stylish women laughing, then out onto the Istanbul street, walking as fast as he could without looking suspicious, his U.S. Navy uniform attracting the stares of passersby as it was, until he came to the harbor and the battleship, as long as a city, it seemed. When he got to his berth, there was big, smooth-limbed Sonderson sitting on Charlie’s bottom bunk, his bare feet flat against the lockers opposite, all golden hair and skin, glowing like Apollo, polishing his boots. His presence dwarfed the cabin. He grinned at Charlie, his teeth white as a picket fence.
“How was it?” he drawled. Sonderson had declined to come along to the whorehouse; he had a fiancée in Iowa and was going to go straight home and fill her to the brim with his gleaming seed the minute his tour of duty was done. Charlie crawled past Sonderson to lie down on his bunk, inching as close to the wall as possible, his stocking feet nevertheless inches from his bunkmate’s rock-hard ass. Sonderson continued his polishing. He didn’t notice—or didn’t mention—the tears that were coursing from the corners of Charlie’s eyes, past his temples, and wetting the pillow. Hours later, they set out to sea again. Charlie imagined the girl growing cold alone in that room.
Though Charlie Senzatimore was too frightened to commit suicide that night, cowed by the church’s famous threats of hell meted out to all self-killers, he did manage an internal death. He never told anyone about the little whore’s accidental asphyxiation, or his love for Hutch Sonderson. He served out his time in the Navy, walked off the ship, took eight befuddled years to meet the very tall Evelyn Bresnihan, and started living the life he was supposed to.
Leslie knew none of this, of course, yet somehow he’d grokked it all.
In the bleached, impeccable Edelman bathroom, perched on a soap dispenser near the sink, I watched Pearl Edelman help Masha undress for her bath. Pearl, her wig exchanged for a snood, a terry-cloth head covering with a little sack in the back to catch her hair, lowered the straps of Masha’s floor-length jersey dress; it crumpled airily to the floor, followed by her long-sleeved gray shirt, bandage-white brassiere, and cotton child’s underwear. I gazed at her perfect imperfection: rounded, graceful arms, full breasts that grew upward like buds and culminated in rosy nipples. Her hips were smooth, her legs strong, lean, and a little bowlegged. I no longer know if she was beautiful. Probably not—but she had a fluid, animal grace. Her black hair fell down her back in glossy waves. Her great, glittering eyes seemed to take up two-thirds of her face, and made her seem like a tremulous creature, vulnerable and fierce.
Tearful with longing, I turned toward the mirror, pivoting on the slick pump of the soap dispenser clumsily, still unused to all my legs, and surveyed my ugliness. My enormous convex eyes were the color of persimmons; their surface looked like the fine mesh on a fencing mask. My cranium was translucent, shiny. Yet I was prevented, mercifully, from looking into my own brains. There was perhaps some sort of skeleton holding up the structure of my head—there must be. My mouth was permanently agape. I could not bring my lips together. In my open gob, a hairy tongue lurked. I stretched it out, and a thing, like a furry cock with a flat pad at the end of it, emerged and reached all the way to the counter. It tasted something bitter and retracted, as if it had a mind of its own. My gray-and-black-striped trunk was covered by long, sparse hairs, as were my fragile, threadlike legs. Only my delicate wings held a shred of beauty. Other than that, I looked like one of the devil’s minions. And yet I was a part of creation. The Old Bastard had fashioned this monstrosity and decided, It is good. What an egomaniac. At least I was never a maggot, but emerged fully formed like Athena, breached from the head of Zeus armed and ready for battle.
It was not astonishing to me that I had been cosmically revamped, though I found my form insulting; my cousin Gimpel, a Hasid, had told me all about gilgul neshamot, the transmigration of errant Jewish souls in order to atone for their sins. Some came back as Jews, or animals; but the spirits of the wicked returned as demons. Was I a demon? That at least would be interesting, because demons can converse with humans. In fact, their main purpose, aside from stealing the breath of infants and the seed of sleeping men, was to derail the righteous and lead them into various temptations. That seemed like a perfect job for me. I decided to test myself. I took off and flew across the bathroom, landing on the rounded edge of the porcelain tub, inches from Masha’s face. She was leaning back in the water now, watching a narrow column of hot water flow, amazingly to me, from the tap. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared on her upper lip. She licked them off with her tongue. I could taste the salt! Her eyes shifted. I saw what she saw: the soap. She needed it. She sat up to get it. Too fast. The pain, again. Each heartbeat rang with pain that echoed into the base of her throat.
Dong … Dong … Dong … Dong … she waited for the tolling to grow faint. She sat perfectly still, taking little sips of breath and staring at the shiny lozenge of soap. She glanced at the door. Pearl was gone to tend to the other children. Masha had to do this on her own. Once the pain had subsided, she began to move very slowly through the water, millimeter by millimeter. It was hard to tell she was moving at all. She reached the soap, clutched it, then sat back again, keeping her mouth shut tight, breathing through her nose. I waited for the pain to recede until I tried speaking in her head.
Scratch your head, I commanded. Masha’s head inched to one side, as if she were listening. Scratch! I said. Then I heard her thought, a feathery voice in my ear: I wish I could just sleep in here …
Scratch! I implored. At last, miraculous to me as the parting of the Red Sea, a plague of frogs, a burning bush: Masha’s strong, slender arm rose slowly from the water. Her tapered fingers reached into her hair, and … she scratched!
I perched at the edge of the tub, stunned by my capabilities. I simply couldn’t believe it. Chills were going down my spine—if I had a spine. I felt flushed with power. It might take a long time, I vowed, but I would raise this girl up and out of her sanctified sleep of self-abnegation, raise her to fame. I would put her in that luminous story box she wasn’t allowed to watch; I would destroy her obedience to the old Tyrant, Humorist, Soul Recycler, Spy. And, somehow, I would bring Leslie Senzatimore, that pillar of goodness, down. Maybe Masha could even help me. I smelled the truth in these people; I needed to scratch until I found it. Two wounds, like a snakebite in the white thigh of Hashem.