RHODE ISLAND FISH COMPANY

I have been losing sleep because of a fish truck parked outside my bedroom window. The cooling unit on top of the cab makes a constant hum. The hum itself isn’t too bad, I could have adjusted to that, but the pulse of the freon varies in tone. Low gurgles and sudden surges, an almost moody mechanical tempo that is ruining my nights. It’s important to me to keep on top of my fatigue. My twenty-year-old niece has come to live with me for a semester. I’m happy to have someone in the house again. I might have sold it after the dust settled and my husband moved to Denver. My sons were grown. I stayed because I have always liked our street, which crests College Hill. Living on a hill is lucky; I look down at the city and see the metallicized glass and rosy granites of the New Providence. I still like the ashy façades of the old buildings, the chalky dome of the State House upon its brilliant marble plinths. The light here is constant; it enters the house early, arcs across, and in the evening it’s on the other side with nothing to obstruct it.

My sleepless nights worry me because I need to be fresh in order to remain level. I wanted to maintain my initial “openness,” which my niece seemed to appreciate from the start. I have grown to enjoy her company, although she is mercurial, unpredictable, dewy, then full of bile. I try to comfort her, but sometimes I cross a line and I can’t tell until I’m over it and she has already retreated.

I enjoy opening my closet so she might have something “on loan,” and I’m never shaken if she’s slow to return it. My boyfriend, Garland, insists it’s vanity itself that I encourage Pamela to wear my clothes and give her carte blanche with my hundred-dollar shoes. He says I put her in my wardrobe as proof to all that I have kept my figure. He is right. I am pleased that at thirty years her senior, my pinstripe Capri pants, my kitschy pearled sweaters, and a gorgeous rubbed-silk Italian jacket fit Pamela as if she were me. We are similarly svelte, narrow-waisted. My curves have held up. Pam sometimes rifles through my lingerie drawer since we are the same cup size. Not overly buxom, but lord knows, not flat. I found her in my bedroom and we shared the tight oval of the antique pedestal mirror. Reflected there, we discussed what we thought was the sublime optimum. What was perfection? We made our lists and briskly concurred—the ideal was early Loren.

“She’s completely drenched, you remember? Her shirt is clinging,” Pamela said. “She walks out of the water onto the beach in that scene from Boy on a Dolphin.”

It was remarkable to me that my niece should identify that particular Sophia Loren movie. I watched the film with my husband twenty-six years ago in the basement of the university here, when I was eight months pregnant. My ankles were swollen. I suffered from mild toxemia and held an amber prescription bottle of diuretic pills, which I swallowed on the half-hour with a cup of tepid cola. I was disappointed to learn that Pamela had never actually seen the film but only a poster of the starlet in her soaked jersey.

I sometimes recognize a familiar male scent on my sweaters when Pamela hands them back. It’s the rich smoke from unfiltered cigarettes and sometimes the crude, slightly sweet odor of shucked oysters. A briny residue which adheres to her boyfriend, Leon, long after he’s washed up after work. I think Pamela hoards my clothes on purpose, a signal of protest when my warmth becomes too much for her. Yet, when it comes, I like the way her gratitude is expressed in quick, astonished whispers, which she checks.

Sitting across from her at the table, I notice her thick chestnut hair is the impenetrable red of Renoir’s women. I mentioned this to Pamela because she was enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design and she should know the reference. She looked at me, nodded. She stabbed a green bean and moved it like a push broom over the plate before she put it in her mouth. She kept her left arm in her lap so I couldn’t see the persistent blemish of a tattoo she had recently removed, inexpertly, with a surgical razor. The sore was still raw. I made her go to the doctor and he told her to apply Silvadene Cream and a loose dressing, but Pamela believed that a wound needs some air now and then. Dinner time was the only hour she could squeeze into her schedule to air it.

At the School of Design, Pamela had a rich social life which carried her from one day into the next. Her rituals of health and hygiene, and, in this case, wound-dressing, were always pushed back to suit her schedule of excitements.

The tattoo was a leftover from her teen years in Philadelphia, when she joined a girl gang. The gang was called the Fem Fatals. The name lacked the French pronunciation. The gang had shortened their name to just the Fatals, then they called themselves, quite simply, the Fates. I remember discussing this with Pamela at the time. She must have been fifteen when I asked her about the three goddesses, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis. I wondered if her group of girls had known about them. Pam had said, “Three fates, really?” She had looked quite skeptical. She said, “Don’t we just have one fate? The thing is, you buy it. Right? It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen. It doesn’t matter how.”

Pamela was more sophisticated since she had started college, and she didn’t like to talk about the years she roamed with the girl gang. Most of all, she seemed embarrassed that her gang had been all of one gender. She wore long-sleeved sweatshirts over her tattoo, and finally she decided to rid herself of the actual mark. Pamela said, “You have to remember, it was the early eighties. We didn’t have anything to do but hang out. Tattoos were the hot thing, they were contagious. Like a spider’s web.”

I said, “How is a spider’s web contagious?”

“The idea. The idea gets on you like a sticky web. It trapped all the girls in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because of Cher, I don’t know. Cher was a curse on us.”

“Cher was?”

“Yeah. She was, like, a hero at first. She was cool, at first. But it wasn’t like the sixties when people knew how to go about it.”

“Go about what?” I said.

“You know, change the world. Don’t you remember, didn’t you try it?”

I told her I was busy raising my baby sons, though I was sympathetic and wore black armbands on occasion. I wasn’t trying to rile her, but she looked at me in astonishment. She was trying to picture me pushing a baby stroller in the park while the war raged in Vietnam. “You had your babies in the sixties?” She stared at me hotly. She couldn’t believe it. She hit the saltcellar against the palm of her hand. Nothing.

“It’s the humidity,” I said. I apologized for the salt shaker; I wasn’t going to apologize for the other.

She told me she didn’t think a black armband would be much help then or now.

Pamela’s teens had been hardest for my brother, who didn’t have the gift of flex. I hated to watch him square off with Pam. It was like looking at a flood on the television. The news footage shows the muddy current plunging through a town, taking everything, but there’s always a big tree standing against it. Pam was twenty now, and going to school. I was pleased to have her stay with me during her first semester. Then it was up to her and her father to figure out where she would go. Dormitory, apartment, loft. There were many reasonable options.

“It’s better to be scarred than to have a tattoo,” Pam was saying.

“That’s a doozie of a scar,” I said, eyeing the sore patch on her forearm.

“I just hope I got all the ink out,” Pam said, “it looks pretty awful. At least you can’t read what it says.” She studied the place on her arm where the deep writing had been. “Illegible,” she said, “thank God.”

Her arm looked like the fell on a leg of lamb, the blotted violet ink of a meat inspector’s stamp beneath a yellow scab the size of a small wallet. “It will heal,” I told Pamela. “You didn’t want the word Fatals written there forever. You were right to remove it. I’m just glad you went to see the doctor. Your arm could have become infected.”

Pam said, “The doctor was okay. He didn’t ask me about it. He knew I made a mistake, but he didn’t grill me.”

“He didn’t ask what the tattoo had said?”

“No, he was cool about it,” Pamela said.

I was happy my doctor had behaved himself. It felt strange to have someone in my charge again. My two boys were grown and thousands of miles off. I tried to remember the last time I had driven either one of them to a doctor. It was David with a split lip that wouldn’t heal. The physician sprinkled graphite powder or something just as sooty on his mouth, and after a time the crack disappeared. Then, David was gone to college in Denver to be near his father. Denver. What a place to go to college. David just had to leave New England. New England can be suffocating to some. My oldest son, Michael, dropped out of college. He was running a healthy business writing and printing résumés for law and medical school graduates and for hundreds of others whose impressive fields I had imagined my own sons might have pursued.

Pamela, sitting across from me, dabbing her arm with a two-ply napkin, was an absurdity, really. But I welcomed her. She was always changing her appearance; her lovely hair was fluffed one day and gluey the next with a hair dressing that smelled peculiarly familiar, like diaphragm jelly. “Don’t knock it,” she said. “It works like Dippity-Do.” Her clothing was sometimes too tight. Her jersey leggings exposed both curves and muscle, the taut fabric exposed a clenched tendon or shimmied over a hollow dimple, made evocative creases at her pudendum.

I too wear running tights, but I make sure my oversized T-shirt falls past my hips.

Pamela was immersed in contemporary culture, but she at last had a focus. She was studying graphic design, something for a career in advertising. She could never make it all the way through her explanation of what she planned to do. I knew she hadn’t really decided on a final goal; it went against her grain to do so. At least she went to class every day. I trusted something would emerge. I was nosy and I once opened her portfolio to find it empty except for a book of wallpaper samples: daisies, fleurs-de-lis, imitation marbles, paisleys, and washable vinyl plaids. I couldn’t resist asking her about it, and she told me these books of wallpapers gave her ideas. “Design breeds design,” she told me. “One curlicue leads to another more defiant and ultimately awesome spiral. Curves and planes, everything has to oppose or relate.”

I started backing out of her room, but she was smiling, teasing. If she was bluffing she wasn’t trying to hide it, and this made me believe she wasn’t bluffing after all.

My friend Garland wasn’t pleased to hear I took her in. “You never mentioned this niece,” he said, as if to accuse me of conjuring up my niece out of the thin air. I assured him that Pamela was never around in the evenings and we could still have our privacy. I told him perhaps he might invite me to his house for once. I could bring fresh linens over there. He always said his own sheets were soiled and rumpled and he didn’t want me to have to rough it. “Now’s your chance to tidy up,” I said. I was tired of Garland’s “I’m an old recluse living amidst towers of old newspapers and crusted sardine tins” routine. Garland was a poseur. He was theatrical, phobic, but only to a degree that enabled him to avoid a full-blown obligation. His house at the university was a rather calculated mess. It was meant to ward off all but the most undiscerning strays, graduate students who came and went, unafraid of Garland’s three-day-old coffee and greasy glassware. Garland’s apartment sported a door-length poster of a bullfighter and a few faded Chinese lanterns strung from the ceiling fixtures with nylon fishing line. These eyesores were leftovers from previous tenants, from the pre-Beatles era, and yet Garland had lived there, in that one apartment, for twenty-two years, more than two decades, and with two different wives. The lanterns, the bullfighting poster remained. Certainly, these things were meant to imply he wasn’t settling down yet; he wasn’t a permanent tenant within any specific ethos, time frame, or any imprisoning building structure. He didn’t wish to redecorate his surrounds; he didn’t want furnishings and artwork that might accurately clock or log his existence. Therefore, he needn’t knock down the fading paper scraps of the early dwellers; their imprint was still important to him because it prevented his own. Even the few souvenirs or relics left over from his two marriages were arranged here or there as if he had come upon them after the fact. I actually preferred my own house to his, but something made me want to assert my presence in his apartment, and I was always trying to do it.

“It’s ugly now,” Pam said, showing Garland the oozing strip of skin. “It will smooth out eventually. It has a few phases to go through. The doctor said it will get crinkly like a second-degree burn.”

“A second-degree burn is not something to sneeze at,” Garland said.

“Yeah, but at least it won’t say ‘Fatals’ anymore,” Pam told him.

“Praise the lord,” Garland said.

“She’s showing you something, you don’t have to criticize,” I said to him.

“Maybe I’m being churlish, but I just ate a heavy meal,” he said.

“No sweat,” Pam said, “it takes stomach to look at it for long.”

“Why don’t you cover it up?” Garland said.

“She does. She does cover it up. I bought her the gauze sponges and the tape,” I said.

Pam held her arm extended so that it divided the room. “Men don’t like this kind of thing,” she said. She stood there and waited to see if I would defend Garland, who had moved to the leather sofa. I shrugged my shoulders, but I turned my back slightly on Garland and she was satisfied.

“Well, I’ll see you later,” Pam said. “I’m going downtown with Leon. Leon knows what I’m going through. He wrecked his mountain bike and skinned the meat off his elbows. It took a while to come back.”

Garland turned to me and said, “The tone of the evening has been irrevocably set. Who can think of the flesh now?”

“Suit yourself,” I said and I sat down in the firm captain’s chair that always helps me face someone squarely. I leaned back in the deep seat, aligning my spine with the rigid center dowel. I cupped my palms over the smooth knob-ends of its arms. I was ready for the edgy debate that always took us into sex.

I didn’t mind Leon coming to the house. Pamela and Leon were adults; I couldn’t baby-sit them. I soon adjusted to seeing Leon coming naked from the bathroom, strolling down the full length of the hall.

The first night we met, Leon walked towards me, backlit by the moon coming through the fanlight window. I couldn’t avert my eyes in time. In that glimpse, I couldn’t help but notice that his penis was still partially erect in its dreamy recovery from sex. He nodded to me and smiled and kept walking. He didn’t cover up. He wasn’t ashamed of his body and didn’t turn his hip to hide himself. Why should he? My alarm was overcome by something stronger, an affection. A warmth so familiar and even, a level surge that I found pleasing. I thought of my own sons moving through these halls, and although Leon wasn’t their double—he wasn’t my sons’ equivalent in any way—he looked too comfortable to be a mere guest.

I closed my bedroom door. Seeing Leon wasn’t like seeing my sons, at all. I felt the current of heat that flows upward from the pelvis to the brain in an instant recognition. I felt its flashpowder aftertaste in the back of my throat.

My nights were altered after that. The kernel of my sleep disorder had germinated with my first glimpse of Leon. His lanky gait. His long strawberry-blond hair, newly shampooed, seemed quite lion-like when it fluffed in golden tiers along his shoulders. When I saw him again the next night, he mumbled, “Hello.” He might have whispered something else. He stood still beside Pam’s door and shrugged his shoulders, as if he couldn’t decide if he should return to her bed or join me in mine. Of course, I might have imagined this. I told myself my sleep troubles arose from Leon’s part-time job. Leon drove a refrigerator truck for Rhode Island Fish Company. Leon loaded the truck with fish in the evenings, sliding four-gallon plastic trays of whole flounders, cod, bluefish, and swordfish steaks onto galvanized racks like built-in bookshelves on either side of the truck. Then he stacked bushels of shellfish, quahogs and mussels, in the forward part of the truck, making sure the bushels were squared and wouldn’t topple. The next morning, before rush hour, Leon would leave the house to deliver the fish to processors and seafood distributors, sometimes driving all the way into New York or over into Hartford. If he was going into New York City, he had to leave Pamela’s bed at 4:00 A.M. in order to keep to his schedule. If he was delivering locally, he could sleep through until the morning. The fish stayed fresh overnight in the refrigerator truck. After 11:00 P.M., because of Providence’s off-street parking ordinance, Leon had to park the truck in the drive, beneath my bedroom window. The unit on top of the cab was loud when it switched on and off, and it kept me awake.

My position lets me make my own hours, but I prefer to work mornings. I write press releases and public relations materials, myriads of simple three-page brochures for a large maternity hospital. A single pamphlet, written with sincerity, some flair, printed on good color stock, and distributed in the nick of time, can save the lives of a teenage mom and her infant. I never hold a squalling newborn, but I reach new mothers in the early stages with my pamphlets about back exercises, childbirth classes, nutrition guides, laundry instructions, crib safety, premature labor warning signals. Schedules, lists, tips, warnings.

There are occasional conflicts between the busy routines of the delivery rooms and the hospital’s heavy abortion schedule at the out-patient clinic. My pamphlets cover these opposite extremes. I try to get information across in a nutshell.

My routine became thrown off when Leon started to park his truck outside my window. After a week of very little sleep, I couldn’t get much done at work. I decided to talk to Pamela about the fish truck. I wanted to make sure she understood that it wasn’t Leon. I liked Leon. He was agreeable, gentle, like one of those orange tomcats that seem so adaptable, eating table scraps on the stoop, then being invited into the kitchen, then finally taking full license. Garland laughed when he heard me; he reminded me that it was Leon’s name itself that had tricked me into thinking of him as a tame cat. I protested; I reminded Garland that Leon was very sweet to Pamela and he was always courteous to me. I wouldn’t say anything to Pam about Leon’s nude prowls, his silky sex talk, clearly audible and more so as it neared its conclusion. His release, which he adeptly prolonged, shimmied through several octaves. It was quite a disturbance at first, but I might have been able to sleep through that after the first few times if not for the irregular blasts of the pumping freon. The freon was the problem. Leon would have to park the truck elsewhere, down at the harbor at Rhode Island Fish, somewhere out of my hearing.

Garland noticed the dark smudges beneath my eyes and he tugged me to him on the sofa. “You just have to put your foot down,” he told me. “Leon can get the truck in the morning like anyone in his right mind, there’s no reason he has to park it here for the night. You don’t have to sleep with those fish outside.”

I laughed about that. It was a local mafia joke, wasn’t it? To “sleep with the fishes.”

“That’s Hollywood’s golden days,” Garland said. “Today’s mob is all MTV punks; their talk is streamlined because of greed. They don’t think in those lovely metaphors.”

“But how would Leon pick up the truck? I’d have to drive him. It might be easier for me to sleep over at your place,” I told Garland.

“That’s avoiding the issue. You have to set some rules here.”

“Yes,” I told him, he was squirming so much I didn’t push it further.

Then, for a week or more, there was no truck. There was no Leon. Pam sat across from me at dinner, her hands in her lap.

“Don’t pick the scab,” I told her.

“I’m not,” she barked at me. “Christ—”

“I just mean, don’t be tempted,” I said.

“For once, can we forget about it?” Pam said. “It’s all you think of. My fucking scab.”

“It’s almost healed, isn’t it?”

“What’s it to you?”

“You aren’t eating anything tonight. Aren’t you going to a concert?”

Pamela said, “I’m going to hear a band. It’s not a ‘concert.’ There’s a difference, you know.”

“You should eat something before you go out drinking.”

Pamela said she knew how to drink. We didn’t talk about Leon. It was over with Leon or maybe it was just beginning. I wanted to tell her that love took many shapes before it gelled. Did I need to tell Pamela, former member of the Fatals, anything more about life’s lessons? She liked to instruct me. Pamela told me, recently, that life was just one big pass/fail course. All these little tests were meaningless except for the distraction. “We all need our distractions,” Pamela said to me with new acidity, as Garland arrived at the house.

When Pamela went out to hear the rock-and-roll band, Garland and I took apart one of my photo albums just to remake it in basically the same fashion. I had, years before, removed any photographs that upset me, photographs of my husband sailing a Sunfish in Newport, or steering a golf cart with a tasseled surrey; yet, even without his image, some of the remaining photographs recalled the ones I had destroyed, and these ghost pictures hung before my eyes. That week, I had received phone calls from both of my sons, one right after another, and I felt comforted that they had remembered, almost simultaneously, to love me. There was no official occasion, and their unexpected greetings warmed me for days afterwards.

During one of these surprise phone calls, my son heard Leon’s voice behind me in the kitchen and my son was curious about him. I liked hearing the shy, tinny resonance of my son’s uncertainty—perhaps his ranking was being challenged in his absence. “Oh, that’s just Leon. He’s Pam’s squeeze,” I said, aware of the complex fiber-optic braid of jealousies carried back and forth across a thousand miles, at a cost, by AT&T. I told my son I just loved having Pamela in the house.

“Here’s one of Pam,” I said to Garland when I found a snapshot of my niece photographed when she was a little girl. I hunted through my photographs, ignoring my own babies, and once and again I found a photograph of my brother’s daughter. The little girl looked back at me, unexpectedly, from her place in those early years, years when I had hardly thought of her.

“She looks almost the same,” Garland said.

“Oh, she’s a natural, isn’t she? You can see it, even then.”

Garland said, “She’s exotic, if you like that sort of thing.”

This made me feel funny. Was he saying he didn’t appreciate Pamela’s beauty or was he saying that I lacked something, something exotic? I couldn’t compare myself with a twenty-year-old girl, could I? His comment fired me up. I looked at the picture of my teenaged niece as if she were more to me than just my brother’s child—but what? I looked at my lover, wanting his face to blur the other until I pinched the cardboard sleeves of the album together.

After that, Garland and I went to bed. Later, I left Garland in the bedroom and went down the hall. I saw Pamela’s bedroom door open, so I stopped and looked inside. The lamp on her bed table burned, but she hadn’t returned from the rock club. She had left the lamp on. I liked how Pamela had made the room look different. My son’s furniture looked unfamiliar with her clothes and some of mine splashed about, her shoes paired at the foot of the dresser, and her electric hair rollers crammed on the bottom bookshelf. The bed was unmade, the floral sheets tugged high on the corners of the mattress as if ready to spring loose. She made love to Leon in these sheets, but never at the same time that I made love to Garland, so it didn’t seem like a similar phenomenon. What I did with Garland was entirely different; the difference wasn’t because of our ages or our particular status or file category in the “human condition.” It was something else. Garland and I sought privacy upon privacy, yet Pamela and Leon seemed happy to have me, and even Garland, in close eavesdropping distance of their lovemaking, as if we offered some kind of moral support. Did we sanction their raw and sensuous improvisations as we imagined them to happen? Our quiet endurance might even encourage them. Then, afterwards, if I was still awake, I might heat steaming bowls of chowder for Leon before he went off in his truck or back to Pam’s bed. I crumbled the oyster crackers over their plates, as if they were too weak to do so on their own. I couldn’t keep from imagining Leon’s phenomenal levels of expertise, which had left him looking so peaked.

Pamela never bothered to give me much support, to stick around when Garland and I were at it. Did she think I didn’t need or require her interest, her acknowledgment of my intimate life?

As I reached to switch off her lamp, I noticed some of my brochures on the bed stand. She must have brought these upstairs from my desk. There was the new one about seeking proper channels of litigation for victims of the Dalkon Shield IUD. This, of course, was of no use to Pam, who had always used a diaphragm. Then there was the booklet on Creative Visualization, not one of my fliers but one from the Home Birth Association. Then, beside the brochures, I saw a large amount of money flattened beneath a hand mirror. I picked up the mirror to look at the cash. It was more than five hundred dollars in an even fan that suddenly undulated in the breeze from the furnace grate when I lifted the mirror. The bills fluttered strangely, like something you might see ruffling underneath the water in a coral reef. I wondered where she could have obtained that kind of money. Her father paid me directly for her household expenses and gave Pam a modest allowance for school supplies and recreation. He also allowed her to use a J. C. Penney credit card and one from Sears. She didn’t often go down to the mall to shop at those stores and preferred to browse at Screamin’ Mimi’s, where everything was spandex and vinyl. Perhaps the money was Leon’s; it could have been his wages and she was going to return it to him.

Those days when the fish truck was parked outside, I sometimes thought about the fish, the fishes themselves, chilled, layered, their eyes still clear and fixed on some last, wistful look into the deep. Now that Leon was nowhere to be seen, and the truck was parked in who-knows-whose driveway, I even dreamed about them. Perhaps it was their very form—elongated pods, seed-shaped, leaf-shaped—which made an attractive vision. I found myself comforted by the image of these netted creatures. Didn’t these fish, when alive, move as a whole? Shifting in silky forward propulsion in shiny rows and layers. In Leon’s charge, they again were grouped, resting one upon the other, gill to gill. I saw how I was again thinking about mortality. I often do in the horizontal station of darkness that mimics the last phase. We expect to reach this phase; small complaints provide a window on our decline, yet we constantly work to ignore it in our daily lives.

Once recently, when I was bathing in the clawfoot tub, I heard the hall phone jangle. Pamela went out to the landing and picked it up. The caller asked for me. I heard Pamela say in a slur, “Oh, she’s decomposed, she’ll have to call you back.” Of course Pamela must have said, “She’s indisposed.” The error, hers or my own, alarmed me. It summoned a picture of rot that I couldn’t shake until I had rinsed, stood up, and dried off.

So there we were, on any given night, the fish and I, lying there on our chilly pallets. The fish were out of their element, that element which scientists assume was most likely everyone’s first element and comfort, the sea. I was making a parallel, or contrast, I couldn’t decide which—the fish with those flat dime-store eyes wide open, and I in stiff waves of bed linen. But, thinking of Leon’s fish, I couldn’t daydream with any reasonable purity.

Garland left me to go back to his apartment. It was trash day and he needed to discard the refuse he had forgotten the previous week. “I have to get home in time for the trash,” he said every Wednesday night.

His various methods of escape, his ferocious plunge from me each night was impressive and I was wary. I never demanded he stay to eat breakfast just to prove something. After all, we weren’t babies. I saw him off at a late hour. I touched the back of my hand to my lips, tapping back a rich yawn. I was still downstairs when Pamela came home. She crashed against the front door until it swung open. Immediately, I saw that something was wrong. Her coat was wrenched off her shoulders and trailing. Her face looked glazed and contorted. She might have been weeping, or retching.

“What’s wrong,” I said, taking her wrists to keep her squared before me. She twisted in my grasp, not wanting to meet my eyes. Then she leaned against me and shuddered. She felt like a bean-bag doll when I gripped her arms. I had seen something like this at the hospital, but, I walked away from the sight. I wasn’t a physician. I was a writer of brochures. I didn’t often feel ashamed of my profession until I watched others taking hold of a situation, what some people called “taking action.”

With this in mind, I shook her and asked, “What’s happened?”

Nothing.

I asked her again. I lifted her face to see her mouth was bloody, her lower lip swollen like a wide slice of plum.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Look at this. Look what I have—” Pamela said. She stood up straight to plead with me eye to eye. “Look at this!”

“What is it?” I said. I didn’t see anything.

Pamela stepped back from me and opened her fist. “I can’t believe this is happening,” Pamela said.

I looked into her hand. There was something in her palm, but it was so reddened with blood I couldn’t tell what it was. Without thinking, I picked it up with my thumb and forefinger and immediately set it down on the kitchen counter. My knees locked, and I weaved slightly from the trunk. “My goodness,” I told her.

“It’s the tip,” she whispered, then she exploded into sobs.

This surprised me. I had imagined something else. “What do you mean, ‘the tip’?” I asked her. “This didn’t come from you? I thought you might have passed it, you know—”

Pamela said, “God. You thought I passed it? Like I was pregnant or something? Are you kidding?” She looked intrigued, as if she might have liked to adopt the idea.

I was relieved that the reddened scrap wasn’t the result of an unauthorized abortion. After all, if Pamela tried to remove a tattoo with a razor, what else might she try? Then it occurred to me that something equally bizarre was unfolding, and I tried to follow her explanation.

“It’s the tip,” she insisted. “He was on me, and I bit it,” she said.

I sank down to the floor, my back against the refrigerator. I thought of the chapters of psychology I had read in college. Men feared one thing more than any other. I had always thought their fear outlandish. Then I considered Pamela, she must have been very threatened to do such a thing. I pulled myself up from the floor. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“My teeth are loose. I think one is falling out, I can push it back and forth. It hurts.” Pamela showed me how she could wobble her front teeth.

I was having some trouble getting her to explain what had happened. “What is that?” I said to her. “What is that—on the counter?” I spoke with more depth and volume than I expected. I shouted. My confusion had loosed a basso profundo, to make up for my coming up blank. I still didn’t understand what had happened.

“I told you. It’s somebody’s nose, just the tip. You aren’t going to tell anybody. I mean, it’s awful. Someone could take it the wrong way.”

“A nose? Oh, honey, I thought it was worse.”

Pamela looked at me. She made another double take, as if my ridiculous error in thinking had again outwitted her. My scenario appealed to her. She started to sputter. Her laughter came and went in maniacal waves.

Her laughter startled me, it seemed ghoulish. Of course—she was upset. Her reaction could be excused as hysteria. Finally, I took her shoulders and gave her a shake.

“He was forcing you, so you had to fight back? Is that it?”

“He was on me,” Pamela said, her eyebrows were lifted high, arched in drunken mirth.

“You were attacked and you bit his nose?” I said, trying to pinpoint the cause and effect while avoiding the tone of a legal technician.

Pamela went over to the counter and looked down at the knob of flesh, too casually I thought. “Shit, he was on me. He was just on me.” Her words were comfortably slurred. She held her fingers against her upper teeth and wobbled them once or twice to show me.

I said, “He wouldn’t get off of you even when you asked him to?”

“I didn’t ask anything. I already had hold of him. It hurt to bite so hard. I saw cold stars behind my eyes. He was snarling. I couldn’t let go. My jaw was locked. Then he hit me and my teeth clicked through like a stapler. He did it to himself.”

I made Pamela rinse her mouth and then I gave her a cold washrag. She held the dripping towel against her lips. “Don’t worry,” I told her. I kept touching my fingertips to my temple where I felt a peculiar stabbing. Pamela sat down in a kitchen chair. She drummed her fingers on the table. This confused me. She seemed to be waiting for me to decide something. I had to consider my niece, and yet, I wondered about the boy. I imagined him stumbling through town in a bloody stupor. I asked Pamela, “Who was it? Did you know him?”

“Yes and no.”

“Yes and no? This is important—did he know your name?”

“I’ve seen him at the bar. He was a creep. He pestered me when I came outside. It happened so fast. Please, I need to talk to Leon. Will you call Rhode Island Fish?” Her eyes were strange, bright with anticipation, almost like a child in the swell of pride that comes directly after a minor peril. She wanted Leon to know.

“Call Leon,” she said again. Her request was chilling because its urgency seemed oddly programmed.

I ignored her wish to telephone Leon and asked her more questions. “Was he a big man, a heavyset man?”

“He was just some guy. A guy is a guy, isn’t that right? Who cares which one? Maybe you can call Leon and tell him what happened to me.”

“Okay,” I told her, and I went over to the counter once more to see it. It looked suspect, this tiny leaf of tissue. It looked peculiar, too white and spongy. Like a sliver of tripe.

“We have to report this,” I wanted to tell her. I wanted to go to the telephone and call the police just to see what her reaction might be. I told her the police would come over in an instant when it was a situation of attempted rape. I imagined the police, the social workers, the rape doctors, all the troops who gather after sex crimes.

I went over to the counter and looked down. The bubbly scrap in its congealing web made me reconsider contacting the police. Something didn’t add up. I had to be firm and canny all at once. I had to be one step ahead of Pamela and one step ahead of my own first instincts. My first instincts keep me within the routine patterns of good deeds, indifferent allowances, and blank permissions that normal people live their lives by. Let the poor be poor, the murderers be jailed, the average citizens be left alone. If I wasn’t always exactly innocent, I knew which side of right and wrong I was meandering in, and I knew something more. I knew about crimes of loneliness, and this was shaping up to be one. I could not be sure if my niece was justified in what she had done, but there wasn’t any reason to call the authorities. This was a family matter.

I called the emergency desks at Rhode Island Hospital and at Miriam Hospital and asked the receptionists if anyone had come in. I asked them if a young man with a facial cut had registered to get care. Neither hospital would tell me if such a boy had arrived. One receptionist said that there were always a lot of nose injuries because of all the car wrecks. The nose was the first to strike the dashboard, it was the “pointer.” “People are lucky if it’s just the nose. A nose can be reconstructed.” It’s really just a decorative appendage, like an awning, and it could be reaffixed. I called all the hospitals. I interrogated the emergency-room receptionists for Pamela’s sake. She watched me as I talked to the switchboard operators, the nurses, the interns. She looked very peaceful, pleased I was doing everything I was expected to do. She listened as I told one hospital receptionist that my son was supposed to be there, he had a bad laceration, a dog bite, and could they tell me his condition. The receptionist told me she couldn’t give me the information I wanted, but just between her and me, there was nothing like that, no dog bites had come in for days. She asked me if we owned a pit bull terrier. The hospital had to report pit bull incidents directly to the Providence police.

I asked Pamela what she wanted me to do with the bit of flesh. I could wrap it in something and put it in the freezer or I could destroy it, I told her. Flush it like a goldfish with tail rot, a condom in its rumpled length.

“You decide,” she said.

“The toilet,” I said.

“Good,” Pamela said, and she stood up to hug me. She went upstairs. In a few minutes I heard her dialing the telephone on the landing. She was telling Leon about the attack. Her voice was breathless, yet perfectly modulated as it expressed her alarm, her pain, her triumph. I put my face close to the gooey lump and studied the snip. I pushed it up and down the Formica, making sure. Pamela kept talking to Leon, explaining how her teeth were loose. There was something in her tone that made me shut my eyes and throw my head back. I listened to her talk to Leon, tell him how he never should have left her on her own. He should come over. She would forgive him. I took the piece of flesh over to the sink and pushed the faucet open. I rinsed it under the stream, passing my hand back and forth until it felt clean, rubbery, then I bounced it lightly in my open palm.

Tripe. I had thought so. It was a relief, but it was a sad confirmation.

I greeted Leon at the front door. He looked truly upset and I wanted to tell him what I knew. He shouldn’t assume any responsibility for Pamela’s performance tonight. When Pamela joined my household, I had felt such rich swells of a permanent kind—one might call it loyalty or love. Now I was forced to feel caution. Forced! I watched Leon climb the stairs. I studied his narrow hips, the hollow of his broad shoulders beneath his shirt, which suggested brute strength at rest. Brute strength looks vulnerable this way. I heard Pamela lock the bedroom door after him. When I went to bed, the truck was going full swing outside my window. It had a new tic, an unmistakable gushing followed by a sizzle, then nine or ten drips slowing, until the last drip never seemed to come before the gushing started over again.

The next day I took Pamela to my dentist. The dentist bonded her front teeth together so they would stay in correct alignment as her gums healed over the jostled roots. She would not lose any teeth. She told the dentist she had had a fall playing tennis. He lifted his eyebrows, and I too wondered how she had been injured, since the rest of the story was a charade. Her teeth were indeed loose, but from what? Perhaps it was a self-inflicted injury, but I didn’t hope for that. It was more upsetting to think Pamela had created her own assailant, imitated his anger, and invented his violence against herself. It was more likely that someone had become irritated with her and slapped her hard.

Pamela was lying on the sofa eating ice cream that I had bought for her, hand-packed, at the Portuguese grocery. She had not mentioned the bloody snip, and so I asked her about it. “Where did you get tripe at that hour?”

Pamela sat up straight. She put the bowl of ice cream on the floor. “You knew it was tripe?”

“Not at first.”

“Shit. You’re unbelievable, you know that?” Pamela looked at the floor and moved the bowl of ice cream with her foot distractedly until it was halfway to me. “You let me go on and on like this since yesterday? You knew it was bullshit? God, what is it like to be so perfect? You go around trying on other people’s shoes? I guess you have so much insight. You’re so sweet. Sweeter than sugar—”

“Where did you get tripe in the middle of the night?” I asked her.

“Where? Star Market. It’s open twenty-four hours, remember?”

“You hurt my feelings,” I told her. I picked up a magazine and fluttered the pages, to show her that I was living with it. I wasn’t put off. When she saw this, she stormed out of the room. I must have appeared too much like one of those teachers who can’t be ruffled by a spitball, and this infuriated Pam. Maybe she was hoping I would use the techniques from my brother’s paperback book about “tough love.” If I had followed those puerile hints, she could stomp off feeling justified. She was paralyzed by my cheery intrusions, by my unfathomable maternal impulses—loving shrugs, my shoulders shifting like downy wings. My tactics were for my own survival as much as for hers. Mothering someone helps keep me in line, but I couldn’t admit that to her, could I?

In a few minutes, Pamela walked back down the stairs and straight out the front door. That night Leon showed up. He told me he didn’t intend to stay long, just long enough to tell Pamela he wasn’t interested in her games. I suspect he didn’t know the whole truth about the “nose,” but he told me he assumed it was bullshit or Pam would have opted for the extra publicity that going to the police would have brought into it. If there was an ounce of truth in it, she would have contacted the newspapers. He told me he had watched her tricks, several times, and he had had enough.

“She needs professional help,” Leon told me, and I nodded. I felt sad that we weren’t everything she needed. Why couldn’t we be everything, Leon and I? I have felt powerless before. Several times in my life I have looked at my mirror and tried to gauge my level of psychic energy, how much was left? I’ve always wondered at the tiny ration of strength we all start with and how it either intensifies or lessens. Like with watercolors, a little bit goes a long way; diluted, it makes a wash that can cover a whole lifetime with one weak color, or you might use it in a concentrated dollop here or there. I suppose the way I have lived my life, my strength has surfaced as an unremarkable sky blue, a domestic sky with neither the exuberance of dawn nor the inky ritual of night.

Leon sat down across from me for a few moments. It didn’t seem as if Pamela would be coming home soon. He said he wasn’t going to waste his time waiting to say goodbye to someone a second time. He asked me to convey the message for him.

“What should I tell her exactly?” I asked him.

“Tell her she’s immature. How about that?”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Now, you. Why can’t she take you as a model?”

I smiled.

Leon said, “Pamela better behave herself or she’ll be losing something when you give her the heave-ho.”

I won’t give her the heave-ho, I thought to myself. Leon, of course, had already excused himself from any further involvement with Pam. He looked at me across the table. His eyes didn’t dismiss me as we stood up. He took my elbow and tugged me around to face him.

“Where’s Garland?” he said.

“Where’s Pam?” I answered, as if our exchange had been rehearsed and cued, delivered with the bold alacrity of a witty stage production.

“I mean it,” he told me. “Where are they?”

I walked ahead of him up the stairwell. I killed the hall switch and followed the moonlight’s slack bed sheet across the old planking. I was first in my bedroom and I turned around in the doorway to greet him. Given his youth, Leon’s perceptions of me had been accurate from the start, that moment when we maneuvered through the dark and were unmoored in a momentary swell which took these weeks to crest.

He untied the collar loop on my robe. The satin piping dangled, and then the robe fell. I pushed the heel of my hand up the tight trellis of his ribs, rotated my wrist at his shoulder, and coasted my fingertips down his spine. Despite a fear that Pamela would show up, our lovemaking was sweetly edgy, prolonged, and forgiving. Leon betrayed Pamela in each hesitant discovery and into the next. I sensed it was a slave’s secret worship at the eve of his freedom, and he still thought of her. After all, it was she who led us to this union and she would serve to unlink us afterwards. Perhaps I am too seasoned, but her echo didn’t spoil any of it for me. Leon endured the halting scrutiny in my touch, and, in turn, I indulged his playful, cantankerous urges, which he had not dared to introduce to her. How often would we come across these same luxuries?

In an hour, we dressed and walked out to the curb.

There was the fish truck, newly washed. Its silvery panels still looked wet beneath the street light, blue-white and iridescent as haddock skin.

“So, you’re all loaded for tomorrow?” I asked him.

“It’s all set,” Leon said.

“The usual?”

“The same. The cod’s a little ripped up tonight, weird. But, we’ve got some nice tinker mackerel, tiny as slippers.”

When I told him how much I liked tinker mackerel he went around and opened the padlock on the truck. He hopped into the mist; his shoe slipped on the wet tread but he regained his balance and he pulled me up into the narrow aisle. I stood beside him, between the tiers of fish, as he found the plastic tray of mackerel and lifted the lid off. The fish were tiny, mottled with gold and silver dapples; the flesh along their spines was deep cobalt. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

“For breakfast?” he asked me.

“I can’t wait until breakfast, maybe tonight.” I said. We both laughed at my greed for the taste of the local delicacy.

Leon looked around the truck for a container, but there wasn’t anything. I pulled out the hem of my jersey and we laughed as he stretched the fabric around a half-dozen fish. He was begging off, leaving just these fish as keepsakes. I forgave him. He got behind the wheel of the truck and rested his elbow out the window, showing his luxurious ease, which I still admired. He seemed to know it impressed me and he smiled. I waved to him with my free hand as I steadied the icy hammock of fish at my waist.

Pamela came home at midnight. I broiled the fish with mustard and vinegar and set it down in front of her. She was touching her nose with a wadded Kleenex. Her tears were real. “I’m not on drugs,” she said.

“Of course you aren’t,” I said.

“It’s usually what people think,” she told me, “but it’s worse than drugs. I get crazed for a while, then it passes. Can you forget it?”

“Sure I will. Don’t worry,” I said.

“I don’t know why I do these things,” she said.

“Your arm is almost completely healed,” I told her. I lifted her wrist and stretched her arm out towards me. She tugged against my pull, but she relaxed as I cradled her elbow in my palm. The raw patch had calmed and a new field of pink had surfaced, hairless and glossy. I wanted to mention the ancient statuary in Greece. I had seen marble limbs discolored, worn concave at the wrist and fingertips, marred by centuries of human touch. Unchecked, these habits of adoration can wear away their subject. To tell her this might sound too much like a tour guide’s expert monologue, and already Pamela had pinned her napkin beneath her plate and was standing up from the table. How would I say, “Sit down, let me describe these treasures”?