The Tilted Building

As everyone knows, the streets of New York are hollow; their paving is the shell of a dark egg. When you walk along them, you hear your steps echo in the city’s smoky inner cavity, where fires that eat up the evidence of unsolved crimes are kept burning by workers who’ve grown allergic to sunlight and slightly translucent over the years.

Late one Saturday afternoon, a muffled blast of thunder shook Helene’s Beauty Nook. It rattled my young head, which was soon to be layered with some caustic potion, as well as the windowpanes frosted by the clear bleeding sweetness of the November rain. Our lights winked and glowed brighter as darkness consumed the blurry world outside the crowded little storefront salon owned by my grown-up cousin Claude.

THE RAT STORY

There was a story he liked to tell about a rat who wandered into a Japanese teriyaki fast-food restaurant. This was no mouse, he’d say. This was—and here he’d pause to measure a length with his hands—as big as a newborn: a giant Norwegian rat.

Around dusk, Dad and I were crossing the Kansas plains in his borrowed 1953 Pontiac, windows open, shirts flapping, on our way to check out a ghost town high in the Colorado mountains where he said the sun shone 320 days of the year.

Dad tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, loudly singing a sailor ditty with words like “titty” and “bum” that made me laugh.

She had only had her driver’s license two weeks when she totaled the family car. Darcy’s father had to rouse a neighbor in order to borrow a vehicle to come retrieve her from the scene of the accident. Her best friend, Lydia, had been taken away by ambulance.

I called my wife. I tried to explain.

Theta waves, I said. It’s all about theta waves. They’re more longitudinal than alpha or beta waves.

What? my wife said. What are you talking about?

What Hair Does

“I’d trust Jane with a pair of scissors . . .” I was cross-legged on the vanity bench aiming to slingshot my mother with a garter belt.

She looked up from the sewing machine and peered over the top of her bifocals. She had on a stretched-out, once-white bra, and a dainty roll of pale freckled skin lopped over the waistband of her half-slip. “You’d let anyone with a rusty kitchen knife and a DustBuster at your hair! Thank god those bangs have grown out.”

Fingers
My Piper will break your heart with her new gap-toothed smile, and her flapper haircut, and her tiny bitten fingernails. When you see my Piper in front of the Toasted Oats, spindly-legged beneath her summer dress and her red rubber boots, her brow crinkled in concentration as she runs her nimble fingers up and down the grocery list, you will want to gather her up in your arms.

Homo sapiens have 78 organs. Homo sapiens have 660 skeletal muscles, 206 distinct bones, and 50 trillion cells. Homo sapiens have human skeletons. Homo sapiens reproduce internally through sexual intercourse. Homo sapiens have a head, a neck, a torso, two arms, and two legs.

When I was a girl I collected Hummel figurines, troll dolls, and the Madame Alexander dolls, a hobby with a significant sticker price range. At every major holiday a relative could take her pick, buy something low end or go berserk, depending on her circumstances—my gift to them, the easy child to shop for. No judgment from me.