The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (6 page)

I have a fantasy, he says, of a librarian.

She smiles at him but asks her original question again. She doesn’t want someone brand new to the business but neither is she looking for a goddamn gigolo. This is an important fuck for her. He tells her it’s been a few months and looks sheepish but honest and then hopeful. She says great and tells him there’s a back room with a couch for people who get dizzy or sick in the library (which happens surprisingly often), and could he meet her there in five minutes? He nods, he’s already telling his friends about this in a monologue in his head. He has green eyes and no wrinkles yet.

They meet in the back and she pulls the shade down on the little window. This is the sex that she wishes would split her open and murder her because she can’t deal with a dead father; she’s wished him dead so many times that now it’s hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Is it true? He’s really gone? She didn’t really want him to die, that is not what she meant when she faced him and imagined knives sticking into his body. This is not what she meant, for him to actually die. She wonders if she invented the phone call, but she remembers the way her mother’s voice kept climbing up and up, and it’s so real and true she can’t bear it and wants to go fuck someone else. The man is tired now but grinning like he can’t believe it. He’s figuring when he can
be there next, but she’s sure she’ll never want him again. Her hair is down and glasses off and clothes on the floor and she’s the fucked librarian and he’s looking at her with this look of adoration. She squeezes his wrist and then concentrates on putting herself back together. In ten minutes, she’s at the front desk again, telling a youngster about a swell book on aisle ten, and unless you leaned forward to smell her, you’d never know.

There is a mural on the curved ceiling of the library of fairies dancing. Their arms are interwoven, hair loose from the wind. Since people look at the ceiling fairly often when they’re at the library, it is a well-known mural. The librarian tilts her head back to take a deep breath. One of the fairies is missing a mouth. It has burned off from the glare of the sunlight, and she is staring at her fairy friends with a purple-eyed look of muteness. The librarian does not like to see this, and looks down to survey the population of her library instead.

She is amazed as she glances around to see how many attractive men there are that day. They are everywhere: leaning over the wood tables, straight-backed in the aisles, men flipping pages with nice hands. The librarian, on this day, the day of her father’s death, is overwhelmed by an appetite she has never felt before and she waits for another one of them to approach her desk.

It takes five minutes.

This one is a businessman with a vest. He is asking her about a book on fishing when she propositions him. His face
lights up, the young boy comes clean and clear through his eyes, that librarian he knew when he was seven. She had round calves and a low voice.

She has him back in the room; he makes one tentative step forward and then he’s on her like Wall Street rain, his suit in a pile on the floor in a full bucket, her dress unbuttoned down, down, one by one until she’s naked and the sweat is pooling in her back again. She obliterates herself and then buttons up. This man too wants to see her again, he might want to marry her, he’s thinking, but she smiles without teeth and says, man, this is a one-shot deal. Thanks.

If she wanted to, she could do this forever, charge a lot of money and become rich. She has this wonderful body, with full heavy breasts and a curve to her back that makes her pliable like a toy. She wraps her legs around man number three, a long-haired artist type, and her hair shakes loose and he removes her glasses and she fucks him until he’s shuddering and trying to moan, but she just keeps saying Sshhh, shhh and it’s making him so happy, she keeps saying it even after he’s shut up.

The morning goes by like normal except she fucks three more men, sending them out periodically to check her desk, and it’s all in the silence, while people shuffle across the wood floor and trade words on paper for more words on paper.

After lunch, the muscleman enters the library.

He is tan and attractive and his arms are busting out of his shirt like balloons. He is with the traveling circus where he lifts a desk with a chair with a person with a child with a dog
with a bone. He lifts it up and never drops anything and people cheer.

He also likes to read.

He picks this library because it’s the closest to the big top. It’s been a tiring week at the circus because the lion tamer had a fit and quit, and so the lions keep roaring. They miss him, and no one else will pet them because they’re lions. When the muscleman enters the library, he breathes in the quiet in relief. He notices the librarian right away, the way she is sitting at her desk with this little twist to her lips that only a very careful observer would notice. He approaches her, and she looks at him in surprise. The librarian at this point assumes everyone in the library knows what is going on, but the fact is, they don’t. Most of the library people just think it’s stuffier than usual and for some reason are having a hard time focusing on their books.

The librarian looks at the muscleman and wants him.

Five minutes, she says, tilting her head toward the back room.

The muscleman nods, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He goes off to look at the classics, but after five minutes, follows his summons, curious.

The back room has a couch and beige walls. When he enters the room, he’s struck by the thickness of the sex smell; it is so pervasive he almost falls over. The librarian is sitting on the couch in her dress which is gray and covers her whole body. Down the center, there is a row of mother-of-pearl buttons and one of them is unbuttoned by accident.

The thing is, the muscleman is not so sure of his librarian fantasies. He is more sure that he likes to lift whatever he can. So he walks over to her in the waddly way that men with big thighs have to walk, and picks her up, couch and all.

Hey, she says, put me down.

The muscleman loves how his shoulders feel, the weight of something important, a life, on his back.

Hey, she says again, this is a library, put me down.

He twirls her gently, to the absent audience and she ducks her head down so as not to collide with the light fixture.

He opens the door and walks out with the couch. He is thoughtful enough to bring it down when they get to the door frame so she doesn’t bump her head. She wants to yell at him but they’re in the library now.

Two of the men she has fucked are still there, in hopes for a second round. They are stunned and for some reason very jealous when they see her riding the couch like a float at a parade, through the aisles of books. The businessman in the vest holds up a book and after a moment, throws it at her.

You are not Cleopatra! he says, and she ducks and screams, then clamps her hand over her mouth. Her father’s funeral is in one day. It is important that there is quiet in a library. The book flies over her head and hits a regular library man who is reading a magazine at a table.

He throws it back, enraged, and they’re all over in a second, pages raining down, the dust slapping up into her face. They rustle as they fly and the librarian covers her face because
she can’t stand to look down at the floor where the books are splayed open on their bindings as if they’ve been shot.

The muscleman doesn’t seem to notice, even though the books are hitting him on his legs, his waist. He lifts her up, on his tiptoes, to the ceiling of the library.

Stand up, he says to her in a low voice, muffled from underneath the couch, stand up and I’ll still balance you, I can do it even if you are standing.

She doesn’t know what else to do and she can feel his push upward from beneath her. She presses down with her feet to stand, and puts a finger on the huge mural on the ceiling, the mural of the fairies dancing in summer. Right away, she sees the one fairy without the mouth again, and reaches into her bun to remove the pencil that is always kept there. Hair tumbles down. On her tiptoes, she is able to touch the curve of the ceiling where the fairy’s mouth should be.

Hold still, she whispers to the muscleman who doesn’t hear her, is in his own bliss of strength.

She grips the pencil and with one hand flat on the ceiling steadies herself enough to draw a mouth underneath the nose of the fairy. She tries to draw it as a big wide dancing smile, and darkens the pencil lining a few times. From where she stands, it looks nice, from where she is just inches underneath the painting which is warmed by the sunlight coming into the library.

She doesn’t notice until the next: day, when she comes to
work to clean up the books an hour before her father is put into the ground, that the circle of fairies is altered now. That the laughing ones now pull along one fairy with purple eyes, who is clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming.

Renny’s phone privileges were revoked when they discovered a swastika carved into his bed board. He had been at Ocean House for three days. The staff, arguing in the Off-Limits Room with their hands warmed by white Styrofoam coffee cups, took an hour before they decided on this as a punishment. Jill Cohen, the activities director, went into his room while Renny was playing pool with Damon, the one who’d stabbed himself in the thigh, and turned the swastika into four boxes and then put a roof and a chimney on top. She wanted to make smoke coming out of the chimney, but the fork did not carve curls well, so she left the hearth cold.

Jill drove forty-five minutes every other day to run the evening activities for the group of runaway teenagers living at Ocean House. This was her first job out of college, and she
had been thrilled when they accepted her. “The kids are supposed to be really troubled but really great,” she’d told her college roommate, who was silently walking out the door with a banana box filled with books in her arms. “Good luck,” they had said to each other, and then college was over. Jill had a new boyfriend named Matthew who liked to eat foods so spicy they made him cough. His body was covered with fair, shining hair, and in bed, with the side lamp on, he seemed to almost glow. When he held her while they made love, she would sometimes imagine scratching off his skin, scratching repeatedly with her nails until the layers peeled off and she discovered that beneath that sheath of flesh, he was made entirely out of pearl.

How? she’d splutter, and he’d laugh and kiss light into her mouth.

She often remembered the day she first grew breasts, how her usually olive skin was covered with red, crisscrossing stretch marks, like a newly revealed secret map to the treasures of her body.

Renny ran away from home because his older brother Jordan came to visit. Returning home from a friend’s house one afternoon, Renny found Jordan’s green truck parked crooked, taking over the driveway. Renny kept going as if he didn’t even recognize the house. As he walked, he gathered a globule of spit in his mouth in case he saw anyone who looked, in any way, dark. He walked straight, over an hour, to
the sagging framework of Ocean House because you only had to stay for a couple weeks, the food was supposed to be decent, and if you were lucky, he’d heard you might even meet other members of the Resistance there.

Jill hung up the phone with her mother, and looked searchingly at Matthew. He was sitting on the sofa, balancing the remote control on his knee. “You know,” she said, “that if we had kids, they’d be rightfully Jewish. You know that, right?”

He nodded. His eyes were on the TV.

“I think it would be okay with me, as long as you don’t think it’s totally important to teach them all about Christ, do you? You don’t believe in Christ, do you?”

“Not really, but Jill, we’re not getting married.”

“I know,” she said, pulling on her earlobe, “but just in case?”

“Jill,” he said, “we’re not getting married.”

But she couldn’t get the wedding out of her head. There would be both a rabbi and a priest, and the priest would have no hairs on the backs of his hands, like a young boy. She walked over to Matthew, eyebrows pulling down. “If you know that for sure,” she said, “then why are we going out?”

Matthew drew her onto his lap. “How long till you have to leave for work?”

“Half hour,” she said, absently rubbing the top of his wrist. “Just in case,” she said, “it’s mainly a cultural thing.”

“Half an hour is plenty of time,” he said and he reached his hand up her shirt. “Shhh, Jill, sshh.”

Renny’s father was dead, but his brother was eight years older, in the army, and handsome. He wrote home once a month, one side of one page, from a country with unusual stamps. Jordan was well loved by women, and had three illegitimate children spread over the country. He never called them, met them, touched them.

At thirteen, Renny captured his brother’s little black phone book in an effort to find information on these mothers. He carefully copied their names and numbers onto the inside of his closet door.

“Little shit,” Jordan said to Renny when he found him frozen in the closet, phone book in lap, “what are you doing with my book?”

Renny leaned his back carefully against the door, hiding his writing. “Just looking at all the people you know,” he said, half-holding his breath.

“Impressed?” Jordan asked, looking down and smiling.

“Oh yeah,” Renny said, “lots of girls.”

Jordan pulled his brother up and put one big hand on Renny’s neck. “Just don’t fuck with my stuff, little brother, okay? You ask first.” He tightened his grip, then let go. “Nosy fuck.”

Renny sank back to the floor. Jordan went into the backyard
to smoke a cigarette. Renny waited until he heard the screen door slam, and then turned around to look at the numbers. They were smudged, but still readable. He leaned his forehead on the wood of the door frame and breathed in the bitter smell of the lacquer.

Jill’s mother, in phase three of her career, was the owner of a Jewish dating service. She tried to meet at least three new Jews a day and convince them that she held their ticket to marital bliss. Often, she did. Her agency had something like a 75 percent success rate because it only accepted customers who were willing to work and commit, and who had abandoned their Prince Charming/Virgin-Whore fantasies. Jill worked there during summers and had met every available Jewish man in Los Angeles. She dated some, liked some, but was required by the agency to fill out a date report after each encounter. Her mother liked to supplement her daughter’s questionnaire with new, handwritten inquiries, like: What do you appreciate in a good kiss, Jill? At first she answered these questions openly, believing it was part of that mother/daughter “we are now best friends” syndrome. But suddenly, her dates began to execute these perfect kisses, and the third time a man tipped up her chin gently before he laid his lips on hers, Jill ran, yelling, to her mother and quit the job. Her mother did not understand. But Jill remembered that the woman was, in fact, not her best friend but her mother, and
proceeded to divulge the kissing facts only to her friends, telling her mother instead about her intricate opinions on all the recently released movies.