Authors: Francine Prose
The flames! They’re carrying their trays, and this time—Vera cannot believe that Madame has really gone through with this—the candles are lit. Their long hair whips dangerously near the fire. Vera closes her eyes and waits for the screams. Then she opens them and sees: they keep missing each other, it’s magical, like watching someone dance through burning hoops. The lights flicker but don’t go out and instead make a pattern like sparklers waved in the dark. It seems a kind of miracle, and if it weren’t
her
daughter up there risking immolation, Vera would be on her feet applauding Madame’s brilliance.
Well, it’s a good thing she’s not: the dance isn’t over. One thing she’s learned from hearing Rosie rehearse is that the music always lasts ten times longer than you expect. Then suddenly—and like so many terrible things, when everyone’s least prepared—loud music blares from the back of the room, a back beat that doesn’t just drown out the Sugar Plum Fairy but pulls it out of the water and stomps it: Michael Jackson singing “Beat It” on a ghetto blaster turned up to full volume.
Rosie and Kirsty stop in midtwirl. There’s no way they can go on. All at once their costumes look silly—dingy and worn, like rummage-sale nightgowns. The candles take on the foreboding air of lights that some weak-lunged birthday boy or girl can’t manage to blow out. There’s no telling if the ballet music’s still playing; maybe it’s just as well. The Tchaikovsky would sound fussy and overdone, a pale second to Michael Jackson’s energy, fake anger, and real youth. It’s how Vera feels at office parties when she and Mavis are wearing their next-to-best clothes, and the secretaries flash by in their satins and ankle socks and tarty plastic barettes.
First Kirsty, then Rosie burst into tears. Vera and Lynda link arms so they won’t run up on stage and embrace them. Short of that, Vera would like to go back and engage the radio-playing karate kids in hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile she watches her daughter cry. Thank God
someone
takes action. The music stops as suddenly as it started. The girls stand there, their eye makeup smeared so badly they look like junior replicas of Madame. A couple of curtseys and brave, teary smiles would bring down the house. But how could they know that? They’re only ten. They back offstage, and not one soul in that audience of adults is grown up enough to clap into all that silence. They’re all paralyzed, even Vera, who’s afraid that if she starts the applause, Rosie will somehow discern this and never forgive her.
Madame comes out and says, “Thank you,” but it’s not the kind of thank you meant to start the crowd cheering in agreement. “And now for our last number, ‘Zee Flight of Zee Boomblebee.’” Vera steels herself for more white noise. But now Miss Rossen slides onto the piano bench so awkwardly and self-consciously,
she
could be ten years old and this her first recital.
It’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” all right. Miss Rossen’s pounding away; the piano’s got at least forty different unwanted overtones buzzing at once as the little girls swarm on. They’ve got bobbing antennae, wings out of some stiff net, tutus that seem to have been sewn from alternating strips of brown and yellow bath mat. Hardly the stateliest costumes, and worthless at disguising the fact that all the little bumblebees are terribly overweight. Nor is theirs the smooth, tight flesh of most plump little girls. Everything over those toe shoes jiggles and shakes.
Watching their scowling, determined buzz, Vera has never felt so gloomy. Putting them all together this way seems like the most barbaric cruelty. They simply can’t move as fast as the music insists, and as they strain and trip and mortify their poor flesh, she understands that this is what the whole weekend’s been leading up to. No solace anywhere, not in love or food or media witches, not even in Rosie’s grace. Everything’s a cartoon, and Vera even knows which one this is: the hippos’ dance in
Fantasia
. No use telling herself these ducklings will grow into swans. There’s no guaranteeing the future, no denying the present and past. According to a recent
This Week
poll, half the American people think everything that happens on earth may be stored forever in some galaxy, and Vera hates thinking that this moment may survive for eternity.
Eventually the dance ends. The lights go on. Vera blinks grumpily, as if it’s a camera flash and she’s been immortalized in her present state of mind. The piano keeps buzzing forever, or at least that’s how long it seems before the clapping begins. It gives Vera some satisfaction that the applause peters out before Madame gets on stage and doesn’t start up again when she does. Everything’s slightly hurried. The karate boys are shadowboxing the empty spaces in back; the crowd can feel those black-belt eyes drilling the backs of their heads. Everyone talks at once and, in the general nervousness, seems to say the wrong thing.
“Goodness,” says Mavis. “Somebody should have covered that for
This Week
.”
“The bastards,” Dave keeps saying, “the bastards,” though it’s unclear whether the bastards in question are Madame or the radio-players or whatever forces of nature and society make some little girls fat.
By now the karate group’s jumped on stage, where they’re chaotically bashing each other while they wait for their teacher to join them. All over, little minstrel girls and bumblebees are finding their parents. Quite a few are in tears; the rest get their kisses and hugs and then stand around in stiff, unnatural groupings as if posing for some invisible graduation photographer. Vera doesn’t see Rosalie in the crowd, but for once she’s not worried. In fact, she’s rather grateful; she hasn’t quite decided what to say.
Ignoring the
NO SMOKING
signs, parents are lighting up. Vera checks out the fire exits. But Lord, how wonderful it smells!
“I’m going outside for a second,” she tells Mavis and her parents. “If you see Rosie, say I’ll be right back.”
Outside it’s hot and dark and, except for the traffic, deserted. Moving shadows augur worse than the karate group inside: teenage killers with some awful violence yet to commit before they’ll even reach the rehabilitation stage. But Vera doesn’t care.
She’s thinking about Bigfoot, about how much worse she’d feel if she were Bigfoot now, stranded on Flatbush Extension. And suddenly she understands that the reason she thinks in Bigfoot stories is not that she writes for
This Week
but because on some level she wishes she
were
Bigfoot—huge and strong, self-sufficient, her dignity and privacy insured because no one’s even sure she exists. If she were Bigfoot, she’d never have to see another flasher or screamer or ballet recital again. She’d steal cigarettes by the caseload till her lungs turned black and she died. Branches and leaves would cover her, keeping her secrets in death as in life, hiding what’s left and what’s already gone as flesh and bone and fur sifted quietly into dust.
I
T’S BEEN A ROUGH MONDAY.
Rosie sulked through breakfast and wouldn’t speak to Vera, who went off to work to find Hazel mysteriously gone and in her place a young guy with slicked-back hair and a tight muscle T. When Vera asked about the logo on his shirt—
WANNA SEE SOMETHING REALLY SCARY?
—she was treated to a frame by frame description of
Twilight Zone: The Movie
, while she prayed for Hazel’s quick return and made a solemn vow: If Hazel comes back while Vera’s still at
This Week
, she’ll apologize for writing
ELEVATOR LIFT-OFF SMASHES SEVENTH GRADE.
The elevator stopped, no closer to the floor than Hazel ever got; and Vera’s longing for her old friend swelled as she understood that what she’d always seen as malice might just be a question of tricky alignment. Then into the office, where Vera spent the morning hiding at her desk for fear that Shaefer and Esposito might look at her and guess the secret of where she’s headed now.
A block from the Greens’, Vera sees a flashing blue light and has no doubt about whose house it’s turning in front of. She’s equally sure that whatever the cop car’s doing there doesn’t bode well for her visit. So she slows down, hoping they’ll leave while she cases the territory for some jangle of familiarity, some clue to suggest she’s been here, met this family, forgotten.
But for all its showy gingerbread, its turrets and swirling verandahs, this neighborhood reveals nothing. Its residents don’t order personalized name plaques from mail-order catalogues, wrought-iron silhouettes of Mom and Dad, the right number of kids and pets. Nor are they the kind who sink bathtub grottoes in the front yard to shelter their private visions of sanctity and grace. The lives inside these homes are as opaque as their mottled Victorian diamonds of leaded glass. The brownish, going-to-seed hydrangeas, the rhododendrons curled against the August heat could be on any lawn, anywhere.
Once she must have biked down these streets; her parents’ house isn’t far. She remembers a story about Jean Cocteau revisiting his childhood village, recalling nothing till he got down on his knees and, child-sized again, recovered all the lost sensations. Vera’s ready to try anything but that. The sight of her approaching on her knees would probably drive the Greens over the edge.
Though the cop car’s still there, Vera decides to go in anyway. She feels like a child selling Girl-Scout cookies or paying a first visit to some idolized school chum. She’s looking so hard it takes her a while to register what she
doesn’t
see: grass, shrubs. Her tour of the neighborhood’s given her some sense of what this lawn must have been. Now it’s fine dust, gravel, ruts—a sandlot kids have been trampling for generations, except even sandlots have patches of hardy, unkillable weeds.
The cops’ presence turns out to have one advantage. The front door’s wide open, so there’s no ringing the bell and waiting around like some Jehovah’s Witness. From the doorway Vera can see the policemen’s broad blue backs. She knocks, then walks in, counting on the officers to witness her innocent intentions. What murderer or thief would enter a house full of police?
The cops turn. One of them is middle-aged, that dark, potato-colored, handsome style of Italian. The other one, younger and gap toothed, looks like Eighteenth District Representative Terry Blankett. They barely acknowledge Vera, assuming she’s family or neighbor—until they catch the Greens’ blank stare. Then the younger cop tenses and says, “Yes?…” as if it’s his house.
Vera feels like the heroine of an espionage drama with ten seconds to locate the one sympathetic double agent at a crowded party. Luckily, it takes her less than that to fix on Stephanie Green, who’s one of those New York mothers she’d recognize anywhere. Angular, bright, intense, they all look like twenties vamps, the young Anito Loos. Where do they get such lovely wrists, such straight, obedient hair?
“I called Friday evening,” says Vera. When this gets no response she introduces herself, and that works fine. Now everyone knows her, everyone but the cops. Still playing secret agent, Vera stands erect, waiting for someone to denounce her to the authorities. But the Greens just exchange long looks, and after awhile Stephanie says, “We’ll be right with you,” as if Vera’s come on some innocuous business like new upholstery or re-seeding the lawn.
“What’s
she
doing here?” asks eight-year-old Joshua Green, whose skin has the rubbery look Vera associates with overindulged, chubby children and polyvinyl dolls.
“Hush, darling,” his mother says.
“Doc?…” The Italian cop makes a let’s-get-back-to-business gesture with his clipboard. Vera can’t see a cop write anything without feeling a tightening in her chest—a legacy from when Lowell’s old Volvo was always missing some vital sticker or part.
“If this is a bad time…” Vera mumbles.
“It’s
all
a bad time,” snaps Dr. Green, a slight man with moist amber eyes that must inspire his patients’ trust and might seem winning now except that they’re contracted—two pinholes beaming lasers of accusation at Vera. As if it’s his wife who needs calming, he reaches out and takes her delicate wrist. The tops of his hands are matted with hair; he’s probably hairy everywhere beneath that neat jacket and tie. When the phone rings and Stephanie goes to answer it, his hand’s left encircling air. His shiny head, his little moustache, his odd, pear-shaped face all suggest a thin, Jewish Oliver Hardy, just as his obvious exasperation recalls those moments when Hardy would straight-arm Laurel up in the air and slam him down on his feet; that’s what Martin Green must wish he could do to Vera.
“It’s unbelievable,” he says. “We got off for two lousy days to my brother’s place in Connecticut. To get away, you know?” Vera nods. “We get home this morning and what do we find? The house has been broken into!”
“Oh, Jesus,” says Vera. “What did they take?”
“That’s the hell of it,” says the gap-toothed cop. “Nothing.”
Vera almost says something conciliatory and inappropriate like, “Oh, then, that’s not so bad,” but manages some self-control and asks, “How do you know they broke in?”
“Crowbarred the back door off its hinges,” the other cop says. “Laid it neat as a pin against the back wall. That ain’t something that just happens. I mean, that ain’t the wind.”
“That
is
weird,” says Vera, feeling a shiver along her nerves. Down the same synapse comes a premonition; she’s just a step away from figuring out what this break-in’s all about when Stephanie reappears with a weird tan dog. The dog’s as thin and intense as Stephanie, only sniffier and with a tinier head.
“You had the dog with you?” asks the Italian cop.
“No,” says Martin Green. “The dog was here. My brother has a male dog, too; it’s a mess when they get together. Ibo’s fine here, we leave plenty of water and food—” He goes on, describing his pet’s happy life as if clearing himself before some investigative committee from the ASPCA.
“Ibo’s the dog?” says gap-tooth.
“Funny,” says the other cop. “Funny he didn’t tip off the neighbors.”
Suddenly Vera knows why and wants to cover her ears so she won’t have to hear Martin say, “It’s a Basenji.”
“Beg your pardon,” says the younger cop.