“Hug me again,” Donna demanded.
Ollie complied. Then: “How about another Pamper?”
Donna gave her the rest of the box. Ollie and Africa jounced away. “You’re the devil,” Donna called after them, laughing. As for Signe — she was merely a visitor from a strict, drear world.
Donna turned her thoughts to current problems. The Helping Hands had dropped the Ladle in favor of animal rights. The Maeves’ attendance had slackened, though Michelle remained faithful. The price of vegetables was going up; even broccoli was almost out of sight. Mice were running free in the pantry. Tomorrow, Thursday, might be a nightmare. Pam was to lead an after-lunch discussion of empowerment, and who knew what would ensue? Last month the empowerment session had ended in disarray: the former lawyer had lengthily cited cases; Bitsy, in disgust, had poured iced tea down a new guest’s back. Perhaps tomorrow’s meeting would be more orderly. A representative from the governor’s office had promised to drop in. Donna hoped he wouldn’t get the iced tea.
IN FACT, THE EMPOWERMENT discussion went well. The guests who attended drafted a petition protesting budget cuts. Bitsy caused no trouble: she stayed in the children’s room with Michelle and Elijah. In the dining room Elijah’s mother sat next to the governor’s representative and with judicious obscenity explained exactly how this state had failed her. A knapsack containing all her belongings lay on the table in front of her; she punched it for emphasis. The governor’s representative jotted down some notes, but mostly he stared hungrily at Elijah’s beautiful mother — at her glossy hair, braided like an Indian bride’s; at her ivory skin; at her long blue-green eyes.
Toward the end of the discussion Donna saw the supermarket’s boy trundle in a case of young asparagus, as mauve as a rabbit’s nose. “Donation!” he yelled. The pantry mice, she’d noticed, had swallowed all their poison. They must be back behind the walls, dying.
AND NOW IT WAS Friday afternoon. Free Food had just delivered several baskets of very soft tomatoes. The staff would stew them as soon as possible. Pam and Donna were separating the merely over-ripe from the absolutely rotten.
“I got a glimpse of Signe’s handiwork the other day,” Pam said.
“What’s it like?”
“Like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a hollow coil that seems to turn inside out every so often. I can’t imagine its purpose.”
“A noose, maybe?”
Pam shuddered. “She probably rips it out every night, like what’s her name.”
“Penelope. But Signe does make their clothing. She can do useful needlework.”
“Maybe the coil is her hobby,” Pam said. “Ugh,” she added, as a tomato imploded on her palm.
Most of the guests had left. The staff and the volunteers mopped the floors and cleaned the kitchen and stacked chairs and tables. Michelle, on her way to a weekend with her boyfriend, ran by — a toothy smile, a pair of fast denimed legs. “Oh, Donna, I forgot to put away the cleaning bucket in the children’s room. Have to catch the bus. Sorree!”
Donna waved her on and went into the empty children’s room to fetch the bucket.
But the children’s room wasn’t empty. Signe and Rhea sat on their low chairs, facing each other. They were reciting something in words Donna couldn’t catch — a tuneless but emotional song consisting of questions and responses. Signe intoned the questions. Rhea declared the responses. The child’s eyes were closed, her sparse lashes long on her unmarked cheeks. Signe’s eyes were open, watching the girl with consuming interest. “You can’t—,” Donna began, lurching forward, banging her shin on Michelle’s pail.
Rhea opened her eyes. Both Signe and Rhea turned to look at Donna, who was standing on one leg now, rubbing the other. We can’t what? they seemed to be inquiring. What rule were they breaking? They were not drinking. They were not doping. They were not yelling. They were not striking each other. The tone of their liturgy was charged but it wasn’t abusive. How was Donna to finish her admonition — you can’t look peculiar? You can’t try to save your child from corruption? You can’t pray?
“Sorry,” she muttered. Limping, she pushed the wheeled pail out of the room. The harsh duet resumed. Rhea’s words sounded like numbers. Perhaps she was reciting the populations of the world’s capitals. Perhaps she was calculating square roots.
Whatever her catechism, it was soon over. Mother and daughter emerged, now in their capes, while Donna was putting away a stack of newly washed tablecloths. At the same moment a small figure with half a dozen arms and legs whirled into the dining room from the area of the bathroom, capturing the attention of all three. It was Elijah, in flight. He scooted diagonally across the empty dining room, a pinwheel shooting sparks. Then his mother ran in, too, her now unbraided satin hair streaming over her knapsack, a hunch-backed bird. “I’m going to get you!”
There was a swoop. The pinwheel was caught. His captor, however, was not the raven but the bat: Signe. She held him high, above her upturned face. He grinned down at her. Her cape hung in a column behind her. Elijah’s mother skidded to a stop.
“My baby!” she demanded.
Rhea joined them.
“I a plane!” Elijah shouted, flapping his elbows. “Donna, I a plane!”
Rhea lifted her arms in imitation of her mother. Elijah’s mother lifted her arms, too. “My baby,” she said, in a softer voice. Signe placed Elijah in the girdle formed by Rhea’s hands. Rhea held the child aloft for a moment, then passed him to his mother. She, too, held him for a moment, like a chalice, before settling him onto her shoulder and marching out.
Signe adjusted her cape. Then she turned to her daughter. They exchanged a long, silent stare — a gaze of peace and intimacy and intricately tangled pleasure. The space between them became briefly radiant. Donna, though blistered, watched. She wondered whether she would ever again pay honor to that meager virtue getting-along-with-people. She knew that she would never again claim to understand anything about mothers and children.
They left. Donna walked into the kitchen. It would be a pleasure to stew tomatoes until they burst through their skins.
HOME SCHOOLING
NAUSEATED, DIZZY, I LAY on the backseat of our dusty car, my head resting against the garment bag that held my father’s two tuxedos. Beyond my raised knees I saw a mortar sky. Above the front seat rose my Aunt Kate’s ponytailed head and shoulders, and my twin sister Willy’s head, or at least the top of her baseball cap. Willy kept fiddling with the radio and singing French songs we’d learned from our parents. “Yaagh,” I said every so often.
“Feeling better, hon?” Aunt Kate asked, not taking her eyes off the road. Just two days earlier she’d quit her graduate program in classics, chucked those Romans as if they were all losers, chucked her boyfriends, too. “They can cool their heels,” she’d told us. “Your dad is my current boyfriend.” We’d left Cincinnati the day before. “Feeling the same?” she asked me.
“Feeling worse.”
“Let us know if you have to stop.”
“I have to stop.”
At the next opportunity Aunt Kate pulled over. I sat on a hump of grass and thrust my head between my thighs. New England dandelions, I noticed, were different from Ohio ones, though the grass seemed browner in late August than Ohio’s. I could smell hamburgers from a highway McDonald’s. If I hadn’t been nauseated before, I would have been nauseated now. Aunt Kate stood nearby. Willy gazed at us from the car.