Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Harvest
Eggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you could get for doing it just once. More than that if you were experienced. We knew girls who did it over and over and over again, once a semester. Mostly they were girls whose parents paid their full tuition anyway, and the money quickly manifested itself as stuff: cashmere sweaters crumpled on the bathroom floor, new stilettos clicking across the kitchen linoleum, matchboxes from Le Cirque and Nobu, endless overpriced trinkets collected on excursions to the East Side. Sometimes the stuff was more practical: new computers, a savings account for grad school. Sometimes it was just bigger: a brand-new entertainment center that got stolen the next week, and shame on us, because we weren’t particularly sorry when it did.
It wasn’t our eggs they wanted, so we spent the weekends watching burned DVDs and chasing ramen noodles with Corona the way broke college students were supposed to. Columbia credentials be damned, no one was interested in paying us for our genetic material. If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn’t belong to them, they would have just adopted. Laura Kelso, who lived in our suite—that was whose eggs they wanted. I was surprised no one had come to our door to recruit her personally; she’d practically stepped out of a want ad. 1600 SAT score, 4.1 GPA, and that only because some professors didn’t believe in A+’s. Then, of course, there was the important stuff: blonde, blue-eyed, five-foot-seven, barely 115 pounds, though we suspected the green pills she stored in a clear plastic bottle with the label torn off were diet pills of some kind. She’d been normal-sized when we met her.
She was making bank, but we couldn’t hate her for it. Absent her new income, she would have been broke like the rest of us: too good a daughter to guilt her single mother into sending more money than she could afford. Laura’s mother was a cashier at Penney’s; what she could afford wasn’t much. For a while that had given us a claim to her. She was a homegirl, a hermanita: we were in this together. Then she walked through the front door wearing Jimmy Choo boots, and we knew we were losing her. Before we knew it, we hardly saw her, and then one day she invited Ellen Chambers, serial donor, and Lisette Hartley, serial bitch, into our common area for some egg donor support group, and they compared paychecks and pain levels and wondered what had become of the little pieces of them released into the universe. We sat in Candy’s room with the door open and faked gagging. Nicole let the back pages of The Village Voice fall open, 900 numbers and round brown asses staring up at us from the floor. She said, “They’re mother material, but who wants to f*ck them? If we were hookers, we’d be making twice what they were.”
We did not particularly want to be hookers, and so this was little consolation.
What we wanted was to be a doctor, a lawyer, a spy, and happy. Nicole was the aspiring doctor; she had a love-hate relationship with her bio texts, but a love-love relationship with catalogues of all kinds. Pinned to her wall where Mos Def and Che Guevara hung on ours were ads for designer shoes and clothing, electronic equipment—even the occasional house ripped out of the home buyer’s guide to remind her of the bigger picture, the things she’d wanted growing up but never had. Candy wanted to be a lawyer: she had big ideas about justice and was always dragging us to meetings with her, hoping we’d pick up some of her conviction. Truth be told, Candy could have been Laura Kelso’s dark-haired sister, but we didn’t dare say so. Freshman year at a sisterhood meeting, some girl had looked at Candy walking in and sneered, not quite under her breath, “What the hell is white girl doing here?” Not three seconds later, Candy was all in her face, like: “Mira, my people did not get half exterminated and have half their country stolen from them for you to be calling me a white girl, OK, bitch?” You didn’t mess with Candy; she was going to be one scary-ass lawyer.
Me, I wanted to be the spy. I liked secrets. Nicole, ever the realist, liked to point out that spies couldn’t be spies on their own behalf, and I had yet to encounter a government or revolution of which I approved. So far I had not accepted the seriousness of this problem. I didn’t like to think about the future, and we were only juniors, so I didn’t quite have to. Courtney was the one who said she just wanted to be happy. Nicole said this was her middle-class showing. Courtney was from one of those barely middle-class black families where the girls are always called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family forgoes vacations and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are black. Usually what happened was Kelli tried so hard to prove her parents right that she turned into a bleach-blonde, rock-music-loving creature who seemed foreign to them. Lindsay got so tired of being called white girl that she studied Ebonics on BET and started dressing like a video extra, calling herself Lil L, and begging to hang out in the neighborhood they’d moved out of. Brooke, sick of not fitting in, would become anorexic or suicidal or both. We were all proud of Courtney for coming to us relatively normal.
Laura faded from us gradually. We kept our doors shut and she began to keep hers closed as well. We didn’t know whether this was in retaliation or because she wasn’t interested in hanging out with us. We never heard her in the shower, we rarely heard her enter: she seemed to glide. It was like we lived with a ghost—a snowflake, Nicole called her, and though she meant it in the harshly disapproving vein with which we spoke of most girls who were pale and delicate and seemed to be everywhere, in a more gentle sense the word had a ring of truth to it. We were living with something barely visible, something that might have vanished any second.

In tenth grade, I went through a bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy, I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy didn’t help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was bulimic. It wasn’t until I was lying on the floor, listening to Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I hadn’t had my period for two months. It had never been regular and I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney’s carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.
Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I didn’t want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus signs into the trash can and called my mother.
People who do not call my mother “Mother” call her Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum of her meditation music in the background let me know that.
“Angel. I was just thinking of you.”
Every time I call my house, even those times when I am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was more of it, looking down at my breasts and wondering if they were any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls who didn’t worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never explained to them about sex.
Laura had been a girl something like that when she’d come to college—not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She’d been sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-sex lecture, wide-eyed, when we met her. They’d divided us into teams and made us do races to put a condom on a banana and she’d screwed it up, put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The girls on the other team laughed.
“It’s OK,” Nicole said, putting a hand on her shoulder after we lost. “There are too many hos on this campus anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five seconds?”
“Don’t say ‘hos,’” said Candy. “Just ’cause somebody likes sex doesn’t make her a ho.”
They argued all the way to the dining hall while Laura and Courtney and I exchanged hellos and shy smiles.
Nicole and Candy were virgins then, too, though you wouldn’t have known it by looking at them. Even on budgets they knew how to dress like city girls, girls who knew their way around—not like Laura, whose wardrobe screamed Kmart and favored the color pink. Maybe that was why we’d liked her right away: her need for us was immediately apparent, and unlike most of the people who needed us, we knew what to do for her.
I told my mother about Nicole’s new Triple Five Soul sweatshirt and Candy’s plans to go abroad next year. Pages rustled in the background. My mother told me how Mrs. Wilson from down the street thinned all her hair out, leaving braids in too long.
“She’ll be back by Easter,” my mother said. “She won’t let anybody else do her hair for Easter Sunday.”
“Uh-huh,” I started to agree, but my mother had already interrupted herself to read out loud from the catalogue she was thumbing through. Health crystals, mood-balancing jewelry, a guide to spiritual belly dancing.
“Spiritual belly dancing, Angel. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
I imagined myself dancing for a minute, and then I imagined my belly fat, swollen, with stretch marks, and felt most unspiritual. I told her I had a test to study for.
“OK,” she conceded. “You should go out later, though. Your horoscope says it’s a good day for Pisces to be in the right place at the right time.”
I hung up and thought to myself that the right place was two months ago in Rafael’s bedroom, but I wasn’t sure what my horoscope could do about that.
In the morning I skipped a review session and took the C train to Brooklyn to visit my father. He opened the door to my still-raised fist and seemed pleasantly surprised to see me.
“Angel. To what do I owe the honor, Miss Lady?”
My father had called me Miss Lady since I was four years old, and though I had not been prissy enough to deserve the nickname since then, it stuck. Uncomfortably, dishonestly, but it stuck. I walked in without answering his question. My visits were always like this. I liked to disrupt him. Interrupting people was the only way I could be sure of my presence in their lives.
My father’s apartment had been painted red since the last time I was in it. I could still smell the newness of the paint. It looked as though he had painted it himself; whoever did it had forgotten a drop-cloth, and the furniture was flecked with red.
“Better not let the cops in here, Daddy. They’ll think you killed someone.”
He didn’t hear me. Instead, I heard the pop of two bottle tops and then he walked into the living room and handed me a soda. My father drank only the kind that came in glass bottles; he believed aluminum was unhealthy, and wouldn’t drink or eat anything that came out of a can.
“I want you to hear something,” he said, before I had a chance to open my mouth. I occupied myself by running my tongue around the rim of the bottle. My father had his back to me and was messing with the ancient stereo in the corner of his living room.
My father was into radio then. My father was always into something; he was a collector of hobbies and habits. Sometimes I wondered how my parents could have been in the same room for long enough to conceive me, let alone be married for four years, but my mother had amassed her own fair share of collections over the years. I imagined their marriage was just a phase during which they had collected each other until something more interesting came along. A year ago my father was into the stock market, but then he invested the few hundred dollars he’d made initially in a company that marketed giant tomatoes, and lost it all. Now he planned to get famous doing radio commercials.
The tape started. I watched its wheels spin as my father’s buttery baritone echoed out of the brown speakers, their wood paneling peeling at the edges. In two minutes of tape, my father sounded convincing selling: cars, liquor, a swanky restaurant downtown. He sounded unconvincing selling: study aids, season tickets for the Knicks, diet pills. He sounded downright ridiculous selling: golfing equipment, stain remover, the Daily News.
“What do you think, Miss Lady?” he asked when the tape stopped.
I said, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.”
My father said nothing, finished his soda in a few sips, and rested it on top of the speaker. He left the room and I heard creaking in the kitchen, the squeak of hinges, and then the rustling of cabinet clutter. He emerged triumphantly, smiling, and handed me a sticky, half-gone bottle of molasses.
“Take a spoonful of this every day, it’s good for the baby. Your mother took it when she was pregnant, and look how good you turned out.”
From the looks of the dusty amber thing he had just handed me, the letters on its label faded into nonexistence, my mother had taken her spoonfuls from that very same bottle.
“I might not keep it,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable, as though he wondered why I was telling him this. It was simple. I had screwed up, I wanted to punish somebody. He sat beside me on the couch and held my hand.
“Whatever you think is best, baby. You were always the smart one.”
The smart one. That was my other nickname growing up. It was only recently that I had been able to convince people it didn’t necessarily apply, either. I got up.
“I gotta go, Daddy. I’ll call you.”
I walked quickly and let the door slam on his parting fatherly advice.
I wanted to hurt somebody, and so far it wasn’t working. My mother, when all was said and done and she finally found out, would be devastated that she hadn’t been the first to know, but I couldn’t even have that yet. I went to see Rafael not so much because I thought he should know as because he was woundable.
Rafael is an artist, in the most clichéd college-student, nude-self-portraits-on-the-wall kind of way. There are also nude pictures of me on his wall, though I am not identifiable in any of them—an elbow here, a belly button there, an arched brow, the curve of my thigh. The one with my breasts is in his portfolio but didn’t make the wall. “I don’t want other guys staring at my girlfriend’s tits,” he said. He does not, however, mind people looking at the picture of his penis he has pasted to the ceiling, though he did take it down when his little sister came to visit.
Rafael was raised in Miami by Catholic parents who left Cuba just before Castro came to power. His father did work for the League of Cuban Voters, his mother was the president of an anti-Castro society and the most respected woman in the church that he attended twice every Sunday until he left for school. He started sleeping with me the same week that he took down the family portrait beside his bed and replaced it with a photo of Castro. I was not stupid enough to believe this was coincidence. I imagined him on the phone with his mother: No, I’m not a virgin anymore and maybe Castro was right about you and do you know what else, Ma, she’s black, even darker brown than Grandma Margarita, what are you going to do to me now?
Probably this conversation never happened. I didn’t particularly care if it did. I rather relished being his own personal Eve. It felt reckless and romantic. When I played I Never with my cousins over winter break, they raised impressed eyebrows when I drank to both Have you ever devirginized somebody? and Have you ever done it with a Catholic? People thought I was the good kid, but going to college was pretty much the only thing I’d done that they hadn’t.
Now, though, confronted with Rafael, I would have traded all my good grades to know what to say to him. I had gone there to hurt him without knowing that I wasn’t capable of it. He rambled about how we really only had to be part-time next year to finish and we could get an apartment somewhere uptown and he’d just take the train to class and we’d get summer jobs to save money, floundering when he tried to be more specific and making grossly obvious mathematical errors when he tried to compute our budget in his head. He was adorable and lost and I wanted to hold him until he felt better, but then I realized I was the one in trouble.
“Rafael, shut up,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. It was almost an afterthought.
I could hear the subtext to it, the desperate chord underneath. I love you. I love you enough. But I knew what enough turned into. One day you could have enough, and the next you had a house full of mood crystals or an apartment full of the sound of your own voice in stereo.
“I don’t think I’m keeping it,” I told him.
“Angel,” he said, then stopped. I could see him struggling. We’d had this conversation before, in the theoretical sense. For most of his life he’d been told that abortion was a mortal sin, that to even let a girl do it was to shirk his responsibility as a man and a Christian. Those voices echoed somewhere deep, somewhere I had never been. Then there were the more recent voices: his newly declared agnosticism that called those other voices archaic and self-righteous; the voices that asked who was he to ever tell a woman what to do with her body, as though he were the boss of her. He had been told so much and become so accustomed to his own opinion not mattering that at the critical moment he seemed not to know what his own thoughts on the matter were and couldn’t finish his sentence. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe it was just him being selfish the way that most artists are, part drawn to the idea of something that would outlast him, part worried that he couldn’t control it.
“Angel,” he said again.
Usually when I found myself not knowing what to say to make things better, I kissed him instead. If it were anything else he was upset about, I’d be undoing the buttons on his shirt and kissing circles down his chest until the distressing moment was gone, our fingers in each other’s hair, across each other’s bodies. I would lie beneath him and raise my hips to meet his while he breathed into the curve of my neck and kept a hand cupped under my butt. I would bite his earlobe and think I love this boy and Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not how to make it better.
Instead, I left, and told him I’d call him once I thought about it. I wouldn’t, though; I decided the least I could do was make him call me. I returned to the dorm to find the girls sprawled across the common-area furniture and thought maybe they would do. It was midterm reading week, but no one was actually reading. My friends were eating chips and salsa while an underfed starlet railed against the injustice of life on MTV, buzzing in low volume while Nicole talked over it.
“You know what Laura has now?” she asked.
Value, I thought, but said nothing.
“Some damn two-hundred-dollar jeans. Can you believe? I’m about to donate me an egg.”
“Please, girl. Who you gonna find wants a Nicole egg?” Candy said.
“Well, then you’re about to haul your light ass in there and donate an egg, then cut me a percent.” Nicole continued, “Twenty seems fair. Could get me some cute jeans anyway.”
“Right. Let me go in there and sign Dulce Maria Gutierrez Hernandez on the dotted line and see how fast they throw me out the office. Who knows what could be hiding in DNA with a name like that. Maybe the kid would only get a 1400 and its whole life would be over.” Candy laughed. I felt sick. Nicole kept going.
“Well, there gotta be some rich-ass black people who can’t have their own kids and think my 1500’s worth something. C’mon, Courtney, your parents got money, right? Think they want another kid? A better one?”
Courtney threw a lime Tostito at Nicole. I walked away without them noticing and tried to imagine telling them. Nicole would say to be realistic. She’d go through numbers the way Rafael had tried to, only hers would add up and show how ridiculous the situation would be. She’d tell me we didn’t come this far to screw it up now. Candy would say it was only guilt keeping me from doing what had to be done right now, and then she’d go on a tangent about the government’s attempts to restrict female sexuality, and when I was about to walk away and she realized what she was doing she’d apologize and then have nothing left to say. Courtney would just keep asking what I wanted, which wouldn’t be any more helpful than me asking my damn self.
I knocked on Laura’s door, not sure what I wanted from her. She looked startled to see it was me knocking; it had been months since we’d had a real conversation. We’d spoken only in passing, when at all: hello, cold today, isn’t it, psych midterm’s going to be a real pain in the ass.
“What do you want?” she asked, not quite rudely but headed there.
“Can I come in?” I said. “I need to talk.”
Maybe she could tell it was serious, because she opened the door all the way and moved aside so that I could enter. Her first few checks had mainly gone to her mother, to paying off her loans, but the last one she’d clearly spent redecorating. The cheap navy comforter had been replaced by something purple and woven. Egyptian cotton, I thought, without knowing where the term had come from. The photos on her walls were not of us anymore; they were of her at clubs I’d never been to with girls I didn’t recognize. Her pajamas were screaming Nick & Nora and her hair had recently been highlighted, and I had to look at the floor in order to pretend she was the same girl I’d once been friends with, the girl who couldn’t say “Blow Pop” because she thought it sounded dirty, the girl who’d been confused about how it was possible to pee while wearing a tampon before Nicole broke it down for her. I told her the whole story, with the vomiting and the not knowing and my mother’s health crystals and my father’s car commercials, and Rafael being all beautiful and tortured and useless. She nodded in a kind of horrified sympathy, and then asked:
“What do you need me to do?”
I needed her to stop looking at me. I needed her eyes to not be blue and liquid. I needed her to understand what she couldn’t possibly: how it felt to not be her. I asked her to come with me when I got rid of it, and she was surprised but nodded.
“I’m asking you,” I said, “because I can’t really tell them. I was thinking, though, that maybe you know what it feels like to almost be a mother.”
I let the door close as she sat there on her purple comforter, looking not sure whether to feel insulted or understood.
I wanted to schedule it in Brooklyn, on the off chance that someone I knew would be at the Planned Parenthood in Manhattan, but Brooklyn was all booked up and they sent me downtown. The whole place was pink pink pink: shell-pink carpeting, puke-pink plastic chairs that wobbled if you squirmed, pale pink walls. I signed in and took a number, imagining I was anyplace else. The DMV, backstage at a beauty pageant, the take-out counter at a restaurant. The lobby was full of mostly girls, with the occasional boyfriend. A boy who looked no older than fifteen patted the round belly of his even younger-looking girlfriend. Another twirled a strand of his girlfriend’s hair while she read through a brochure on contraceptives and occasionally looked up nervously, as though scared someone would see her there. A grown man squeezed the hand of the young woman next to him, who looked panicked and terrified.
Laura looked panicked and terrified, too, mesmerized by the tacky not-quite-tragedy of the waiting room. I imagined (this is what we did with Laura then: we never asked, we imagined) the doctor’s office she’d visited to be screened and tested and have her eggs removed. I imagined it blue, with soft music in the background and fresh flowers on the waiting-room table, next to the New Yorker. I imagined people smiled more and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy her.
I wondered if Laura was uncomfortable there. Her childhood was probably free clinics like the one we were sitting in. The shyness of her voice, the way she sometimes slipped up and had to fix a grammatical error—these hinted that maybe she was what my father would have called white trash if my mother weren’t there to say it was a term analogous to nigger and he ought to apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel analogous. They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my number. I didn’t want or not want the baby, I didn’t have any grand political problem with abortion, I didn’t have any religion to speak of and thought that if God existed and expected me to follow any particular rules, I was probably going to hell anyway, and not for this. I just didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura’s egg-donor group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to take. They felt “full” in their abdomens, swollen with potential for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it yet.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but I didn’t really care what she was trying to say right then. I looked at her for a second. Her fingertips were pressed into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us, but I started talking anyway.
“If I took summer classes, I could graduate in August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK job.”
Not a spy. You couldn’t spy with a baby. It would cry and blow your cover.
Laura looked the other way.
“I’ve done this before,” she said.
“This?” I asked.
“The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when we were in high school. Twice. She wasn’t one of those people who got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride home.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
“The doctors were sweeter to her than I was,” Laura said. “I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me, and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I’d show them, it never would be.”
“It’s not you,” I said. I looked down at my scuffed red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as one of us.
“Isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s me. You might as well not even be here.”
“Then why’d you ask me?”
“Why’d you come?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with a baby?”
“Love it,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was about to break. Love it. Like it was that simple. Like loving something ever paid anyone’s rent. I tugged so hard on the strand of hair I’d been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath.
“I’d need money, though.”
I ran through the numbers again. I thought of my baby like a doll, like one in a row of dozens and dozens of fancy toy dolls, all with price tags announcing that I couldn’t have them. The money was such an obvious problem that I didn’t even get to thinking about any of the others most of the time. It seemed wrong to me, that money should be the difference between a baby and not-a-baby. I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them. Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.
“At Financial Aid they’d probably cover my tuition for the summer,” I said. “But I’d need the security for an apartment, and something to live on till I could get a job. Plus money for doctors and stuff. Once I graduate I can’t get school insurance anymore.”
Laura turned and looked at me, and it was not exactly friendship on her face. More like resignation.
“I just got paid,” she said softly. “Take it.”
I didn’t care right then why she was doing it: guilt, or anger, or privilege. I didn’t care if she needed it or not. I didn’t even have the pride to reject the first offer and make her insist. It wasn’t that I’d planned it that way, and I don’t know when I knew what I was doing but all of a sudden it was done and I wasn’t about to feel guilty.
“All right,” I said. “If you can afford that.”
She pulled out her checkbook, like it was nothing. I thought of telling her to stop, watched her loopy cursive fill the space of the check. I wondered what I’d say to Rafael, what I’d do when the money ran out, what Laura and I would say to each other for the last few months of what was suddenly my last semester of college. I thought of telling her to stop, but like I was afraid of undoing the knot of cells growing into something alive inside of me, I was afraid of undoing what was happening.
When she handed me the check, I folded it into my wallet and didn’t say a word. I didn’t think I deserved it, not really, nor did I think she owed me. I thought the universe was a whole series of unfulfilled transactions, checks waiting to be cashed, opportunities waiting to be cashed in, even if they were opportunities made of your own flesh. I thought it was a horrible world to bring a child into, but an even worse world in which to stay a child. I left my number lying on the seat and stood up and walked out to Broadway, Laura behind me. I watched my feet as though they belonged to someone else. I looked up at the sky, feeling grown and full of something sad and aching to be known.




Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go
Georgie knew before he left that Lanae would be f*cking Kenny by the time he got back to Virginia. At least she’d been up front about it, not like all those other husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends, shined up and cheesing for the five-o’clock news on the day their lovers shipped out and then jumping into bed with each other before the plane landed. When he’d told Lanae about his orders, she’d just lifted an eyebrow, shook her head, and said, “I told you not to join the goddamn army.” Before he left for basic training, she’d stopped seeing him, stopped taking his calls, even, said, “I’m not waiting for you to come home dead, and I’m damn sure not having Esther upset when you get killed.”
That was how he knew she loved him at least a little bit; she’d brought the kid into it. Lanae wasn’t like some single mothers, always throwing their kid up in people’s faces. She was fiercely protective of Esther, kept her apart from everything, even him, and they’d been in each other’s life so long that he didn’t believe for a second that she was really through with him this time. Still, he missed her when everyone else was getting loved visibly and he was standing there with no one to say good-bye to. Even her love was strategic, goddamn her, and he felt more violently toward the men he imagined touching her in his absence than toward the imaginary enemy they’d been war-gaming against. On the plane he had stared out of the window at more water than he’d ever seen at once, and thought of the look on her face when he said good-bye.
She had come to his going-away party like it was nothing, showed up in skintight jeans and that cheap but sweet-smelling baby powder perfume and spent a good twenty minutes exchanging pleasantries with his mother before she even said hello to him. She’d brought a cake that she’d picked up from the bakery at the second restaurant she worked at, told one of the church ladies she was thinking of starting her own cake business. Really? Georgie thought, before she winked at him and put a silver fingernail to her lips. Lanae could cook a little, but the only time he remembered her trying to bake she’d burnt a cake she’d made from boxed mix and then tried to cover it up with pink frosting. Esther wouldn’t touch the thing, and he’d run out and gotten a Minnie Mouse ice cream cake from the grocery store. He’d found himself silently listing these nonsecrets, the things about Lanae he was certain of: she couldn’t bake, there was a thin but awful scar running down the back of her right calf, her eyes were amber in the right light.
They’d grown up down the street from each other. He could not remember a time before they were friends, but she’d had enough time to get married and divorced and produce a little girl before he thought to kiss her for the first time, only a few months before he got his orders. In fairness, she was not exactly beautiful; it had taken some time for him to see past that. Her face was pleasant but plain, her features so simple that if she were a cartoon she’d seem deliberately underdrawn. She was not big, exactly, but pillowy, like if you pressed your hand into her it would keep sinking and sinking because there was nothing solid to her. It bothered him to think of Kenny putting his hand on her that way, Kenny who’d once assigned numbers to all the waitresses at Ruby Tuesday based on the quality of their asses, Kenny who’d probably never be gentle enough to notice what her body did while it was his.


It wasn’t Lanae who met him at the airport when he landed back where he’d started. It was his mother, looking small in the crowd of people waiting for arrivals. Some of them were bored, leaning up against the wall like they were in line for a restaurant table; others peered around the gate like paparazzi waiting for the right shot to happen. His mother was up in front, squinting at him like she wasn’t sure he was real. She was in her nurse’s uniform, and it made her look a little ominous. When he came through security she ran up to hug him so he couldn’t breathe. “Baby,” she said, then asked how the connecting flight had been, and then talked about everything but what mattered. Perhaps after all of his letters home she was used to unanswered questions, because she didn’t ask any, not about the war, not about his health, not about the conditions of his honorable discharge or what he intended to do upon his return to civilian society.
She was all weather and light gossip through the parking lot. “The cherry blossoms are beautiful this year,” she was saying as they rode down the Dulles Toll Road, and if it had been Lanae saying something like that he would have said Cherry blossoms? Are you f*cking kidding me? but because it was his mother things kept up like that all the way around 495 and back to Alexandria. It was still too early in the morning for real rush-hour traffic, and they made it in twenty minutes. The house was as he’d remembered it: old, the bright robin’s egg blue of the paint cheerful in a painfully false way, like a woman wearing red lipstick and layers of foundation caked over wrinkles. Inside, the surfaces were all coated with a thin layer of dust, and it made him feel guilty his mother had to do all of this housework herself, even though when he was home he’d almost never cleaned anything.
He’d barely put his bags down when she was off to work, still not able to take the whole day off. She left with promises of dinner later. In her absence it struck him that it had been a long time since he’d heard silence. In the desert there was always noise. When it was not the radio, or people talking, or shouting, or shouting at him, it was the dull purr of machinery providing a constant background soundtrack, or the rhythmic pulse of sniper fire. Now it was a weekday in the suburbs and the lack of human presence made him anxious. He turned the TV on and off four times, flipping through talk shows and soap operas and thinking this was something like what had happened to him: someone had changed the channel on his life. The abruptness of the transition overrode the need for social protocol, so without calling first he got into the old Buick and drove to Lanae’s, the feel of the leather steering wheel strange beneath his hands. The brakes screeched every time he stepped on them, and he realized he should have asked his mother how the car was running before taking it anywhere, but the problem seemed appropriate: he had started this motion, and the best thing to do was not to stop it.
Kenny’s car outside of Lanae’s duplex did not surprise him, nor did it deter him. He parked in one of the visitor spaces and walked up to ring the bell.
“Son of a bitch! What’s good?” Kenny asked when he answered the door, as if Georgie had been gone for a year on a beer run.
“I’m back,” he said, unnecessarily. “How you been, man?”
Kenny looked like he’d been Kenny. He’d always been a big guy, but he was getting soft around the middle. His hair was freshly cut in a fade, and he was already in uniform, wearing a shiny gold name tag that said KENNETH, and beneath that, MANAGER, which had not been true when Georgie left. Georgie could smell the apartment through the door, Lanae’s perfume and floral air freshener not masking that something had been cooked with grease that morning.
“Not, bad,” he said. “I’ve been holding it down over here while you been holding it down over there. Glad you came back in one piece.”
Kenny gave him a one-armed hug, and for a minute Georgie felt like an a*shole for wanting to say, Holding it down? You’ve been serving people KFC.
“Look, man, I was on my way to work, but we’ll catch up later, all right?” Kenny said, moving out of the doorway to reveal Lanae standing there, still in the T-shirt she’d slept in. Her hair was pulled back in a head scarf, and it made her eyes look huge. Kenny was out the door with a nod and a shoulder clasp, not so much as a backward glance at Lanae standing there. The casual way he left them alone together bothered Georgie. He wasn’t sure if Kenny didn’t consider him a threat or simply didn’t care what Lanae did; either way he was annoyed.
“Hey,” said Lanae, her voice soft, and he realized he hadn’t thought this visit through any further than that.
“Hi,” he said, and looked at the clock on the wall, which was an hour behind schedule. He thought to mention this, then thought against it.
“Georgie!” Esther yelled through the silence, running out of the kitchen, her face sticky with pancake syrup. He was relieved she remembered his name. Her hair was done in pigtails with little pink barrettes on them; they matched her socks and skirt. Lanae could win a prize for coordinating things.
“Look at you, little ma,” he said, scooping her up and kissing her cheek. “Look how big you got.”
“Look how bad she got, you mean,” Lanae said. “Tell Georgie how you got kicked out of day care.”
“I got kicked out of day care,” Esther said matter-of-factly. Georgie tried not to laugh. Lanae rolled her eyes.
“She hides too much,” she said. “Every time they take the kids somewhere, this one hides, and they gotta hold everyone up looking for her. Last time they found her, she scratched the teacher who tried to get her back on the bus. She can’t pull this kind of stuff when she starts kindergarten.”
Lanae sighed, and reached up to put her fingers in her hair, but all it did was push the scarf back. Take it off, he wanted to say. Take it off, and put clothes on. He wanted it to feel like real life again, like their life again, and with him dressed and wearing cologne for the first time in months, and her standing there in a scarf and T-shirt, all shiny Vaselined thighs and gold toenails, they looked mismatched.
“Look, have some breakfast if you want it,” she said. “I’ll be out in a second. I need to take a shower, and then I gotta work on finding this one a babysitter before my shift starts.”
“When does it start?”
“Two.”
“I can watch her. I’m free.”
Lanae gave him an appraising look. “What are you doing these days?”
“Today, nothing.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“I talked to your mom a little while ago,” Lanae said, which was her way of telling him she knew. Of course she knew. How could Lanae not know, gossipy mother or no gossipy mother?
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll take good care of her.”
“If Dee doesn’t get back to me, you might have to,” said Lanae. She walked off and Georgie made himself at home in her kitchen, grabbing a plate from the dish rack and taking the last of the eggs and bacon from the pans on the stove. Esther sat beside him and colored as he poured syrup over his breakfast.
“So, what do you keep hiding from?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Esther shrugged. “I just like the trip places better. Day care smells funny and the kids are dumb.”
“What did I tell you about stupid people?” Georgie asked.
“I forget.” Esther squinted. “You were gone a long time.”
“Well, I’m back now, and you’re not going to let stupid people bother you anymore,” Georgie said, even though neither of these promises was his to make.


Honestly, watching Esther was good for him. His mother was perplexed, Kenny was amused, Lanae was skeptical. But Esther could not go back to her old day care, and Dee, the woman down the street who ran an unlicensed day care in her living room, plopped the kids in front of the downstairs television all afternoon, and could only be torn away from her soaps upstairs if one of them hit someone or broke something. It wasn’t hard for Georgie to be the best alternative. He became adequate as a caretaker. He took Esther on trips. They read and reread her favorite books. He learned to cut the crusts off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over and above her protests that the old sitter had let the kids stay up to watch late-night comedy, he made sure she was washed and in bed and wearing matching pajamas by the time Lanae and Kenny got home from their evening shifts.
“Are you sure it doesn’t remind you...” his mother started once, after gently suggesting he look for a real job, but she let the thought trail off unfinished.
“I wasn’t babysitting over there, Ma.”
“I know,” she said, but she didn’t, or she wouldn’t have thought to put Esther and those other kids in the same sentence.
The truth was Esther was the opposite of a reminder. In his old life, his job had been to knock on strangers’ doors in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and convince them to trust him. That was the easiest part of it. They went at night because during daytime the snipers had a clear shot at them and anyone who opened the door, but even in the dark, a bullet or an IED could take you out like that. Sometimes when they got to a house there were already bodies. Other times there was nothing: a thin film of dust over whatever was left, things too heavy for the family to carry and too worthless for anyone to steal.
The sisters were sitting in the dark, huddled on the floor with their parents, when Georgie’s unit pushed through the door. Pretty girls, big black eyes and sleepy baby-doll faces. The little one cried when they first came through the door, and the older one, maybe nine, clamped her hand tightly over the younger girl’s mouth, like they’d been ordered not to make any noise. The father was softspoken—angry but reasonable. Usually, Georgie stood back and kept an eye out for trouble, let the lieutenant do the talking, but this time he went over to the girls himself, reached out his hand and shook their tiny ones, moist with heat and fear. He handed them each a piece of the candy they were supposed to give to children in cooperative families, and stepped back awkwardly. The older one smiled back at him, her missing two front teeth somehow reminding him of home.
They were not, in the grand scheme of things, anyone special. There were kids dying all over the place. Still, when they went back the next day, to see if the father would answer some more questions about his neighbors, and the girls were lying there, throats slit, bullets to the head, blood everywhere but parents nowhere to be found, he stepped outside of the house to vomit.


When Georgie was twelve, a station wagon skidded on the ice and swerved into his father’s Tercel, crushing the car and half of his father, who bled into an irreversible coma before Georgie and his mother got to the hospital to see him. Because his mother had to be sedated at the news, he’d stood at his father’s bedside alone, staring at the body, the way the part beneath the sheet was unnaturally crumpled, the way his face began to look like melted wax, the way his lips remained slightly parted.
Georgie hadn’t known, at first, that the sisters would stick with him like that.
“What’s f*cked up,” Georgie said to Jones two days after, “is that I wished for a minute it was our guys who did it, some psycho who lost it. The way that kid looked at me, like she really thought I came to save her. I don’t want to think about them coming for her family because we made them talk. I don’t want to be the reason they did her like that.”
“What’s the difference between you and some other a*shole?” Jones said. “Either nobody’s responsible for nothing, or every last motherf*cker on this planet is going to hell someday.”


After that, he’d turn around in the shower, the girls would be there. He’d be sleeping, and he’d open his eyes to see the little one hiding in the corner of his room. He was jumpy and too spooked to sleep. He told Ramirez about it, and Ramirez said you didn’t get to pick your ghosts, your ghosts picked you.
“Still,” he said. “Lieutenant sends you to talk to someone, don’t say that shit. White people don’t believe in ghosts.”
But he told the doctors everything, and then some. He didn’t care anymore what his file said, as long as it got him the f*ck out of that place. And the truth is, right before the army let him go, sent him packing with a prescription and a once-a-month check-in with the shrink at the VA hospital, it had gotten really bad. One night he was sure the older girl had come to him in a dream and told him Peterson had come back and killed her, skinny Peterson who didn’t even like to kill the beetles that slipped into their blankets every night, but nonetheless he’d held Peterson at gunpoint until Ramirez came in and snapped him out of it. Another time, he got convinced Jones really was going to kill him one day, and ran up to him outside of mess hall, grabbing for his pistol; three or four guys had to pull him off. Once, in the daytime, he thought he saw one of the dead girls, bold as brass, standing outside on the street they were patrolling. He went to shake her by the shoulders, ask her what she’d been playing at, pretending to be dead all this time, but he’d only just grabbed her when Ramirez pulled him off of her, shaking his head, and when he looked back at the girl’s tear-streaked face before she ran for it like there was no tomorrow, he realized she was someone else entirely. Ramirez put an arm around him and started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He looked down the road at the place that girl had just been.
“The f*ck you think she’s running to so fast, anyway? Someone ought to tell her there’s nowhere to go.”


Sometimes Esther called him Daddy. When it started out, it seemed harmless enough. They were always going places that encouraged fantasy. Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the giant rat sang and served pizza. The movies, where princesses lived happily ever after. The zoo, where animals that could have killed you in their natural state looked bored and docile behind high fences. Glitter Girl, Esther’s favorite store in the mall, where girls three and up could get manicures, and any girl of any age could buy a crown or a pink T-shirt that said ROCK STAR. What was a pretend family relationship, compared to all that? Besides, it made people less nervous. When she’d introduced him to strangers as her babysitter, all six feet and two hundred and five pounds of him, they’d raised their eyebrows and looked at him as though he might be some kind of predator. Now people thought it was sweet when they went places together.
“This is my daddy,” Esther told the manicurist at Glitter Girl, where Georgie had just let Esther get her nails painted fuchsia. She smiled at him conspiratorially. He had reminded her, gently, that Mommy might not understand about their make-believe family, and they should keep it to themselves for now.
“Day off, huh?” said the manicurist. She looked like a college kid, a cute redhead with dangly pom-pom earrings. Judging by the pocketbook she’d draped over the chair beside her, she was working there for kicks: if the logo on the bag was real, it was worth three of Georgie’s old army paychecks.
“I’m on leave,” he said. “Army. I was in Iraq for a year. Just trying to spend as much time with her as I can before I head back.” He sat up straighter, afraid somehow she’d see through the lie and refuse to believe he’d been a soldier at all. When they’d walked in, she’d looked at him with polite skepticism, as if in one glance she could tell that Esther’s coordinated clothes came from Target, that he was out of real work and his gold watch was a knockoff that sometimes turned his wrist green, like perhaps the pity in her smile would show them they were in the wrong store, without the humiliation of price tags.
“Wow,” she murmured now, almost deferentially. She looked up and swept an arc of red hair away from her face so she could look at him directly. “A year in Iraq. I can’t imagine. Of course you’ll spend all the time you can with her. They grow up so fast.” She shook her head with a sincerity he found oddly charming in a woman who worked in a store that sold halter tops for girls with no breasts.
“Tell you what, sweetheart,” she said to Esther. “Since your daddy’s such a brave man, and you’re such a good girl for letting him go off and protect us, I’m going to do a little something extra for you. Do you want some nail gems?”
Esther nodded, and Georgie turned his head away so the manicurist wouldn’t see him smirk. Nail gems. Cherry blossoms. The things people offered him by way of consolation.

When Esther’s nails were drying, tiny heart-shaped rhinestones in the center of each one, and the salesgirl had gone to wait on the next customer, a miniature blonde with a functional razor phone but no parent in sight, Esther turned to him accusingly.
“You’re going away,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said.
“You told the lady you were.”
“It was pretend,” he said, closing his eyes. “This is a make-believe place, it’s OK to pretend here. Just like I’m your pretend Daddy.”
He realized he had bought her silence on one lie by offering her another, but he couldn’t see any way out of it. So they wouldn’t tell Lanae. So the salesgirl would flirt with him a little and do a little something extra for Esther next time. He had made sacrifices. Esther deserved nice things. Her mother worked two jobs and her real father was somewhere in Texas with his second wife. So what if it was the wrong things they were being rewarded for?
At the counter, he pulled out his wallet and paid for Esther’s manicure with the only card that wasn’t maxed out. Esther ignored the transaction entirely, wandering to the other end of the counter and reappearing with a purple flier. It had a holographic background and under the fluorescent mall light seemed, appropriately, to glitter.
Come see Mindy with Glitter Girl! exclaimed the flier. Mindy was a tiny brunette, nine, maybe, who popped a gum bubble and held one hand on her hip, the other extended to show off her nails, purple with gold stars in the middle.
“Everybody wants to see Mindy,” said the manicurist. She winked at them, then ducked down to file his receipt.
“Maybe we could go,” he said, reaching for the flier Esther was holding, but the smile that started for her dimples faded just as quickly.
“I don’t really wanna,” she said. “It’s prolly dumb anyway.”
He followed her eyes to the ticket price and understood that she’d taken in the number of zeros. He was stung for a minute that even a barely five-year-old was that acutely aware of his limitations, then charmed by her willingness to protect him from them. It shouldn’t be like that, he thought; a kid shouldn’t understand that there’s anything her parents can’t do. Then again, he was not her father. He was a babysitter. He had less than a quarter of the price of a ticket in his personal bank account—what was left of his disability check after he helped his mother out with the rent and utilities. He spent most of what Lanae paid him to watch Esther on Esther herself, because it made Lanae feel good to pay him, and him feel good not to take her money. He folded the Mindy flier into his pocket, and gently pulled off the twenty-dollar glittered tiara Esther had perched on her head to leave it on the counter. “Mommy will come back and get it later,” he lied, over and above her objections. Even the way he disappointed her came as a relief.


Of course, the thought had crossed his mind. He never thought Kenny and Lanae were the real thing—didn’t even think they did, really. Things had changed between her and Kenny in the year Georgie had been gone—softened and become more comfortable than whatever casual on-again, off-again thing they had before she and Georgie had dated—but he wasn’t inclined to believe it was real. He pictured himself and Lanae as statues on a wedding cake: they were a pair. Kenny was a pastime. How could Georgie not hope that when she saw the way he was with Esther, she’d see the rest of it sooner?


But it wasn’t like that was the reason he liked watching her. Not the only reason. Esther was a good kid. He thought it meant something, the way she didn’t act up with him, didn’t fuss and hide the way she’d used to at day care. But yeah, he got to talk to Lanae some. At night, when Lanae came home, and Esther was in bed, and Kenny was still at work for an hour, because being manager meant he was the last to leave the KFC, they talked a little. Usually he turned on a TV show right before she came in, so he could pretend he was watching it, but mostly he didn’t need the excuse to stay. It was Lanae who sat with him that week after his father had died, Lanae who, when she found out she was pregnant with Esther, had called him, not her husband or her best girlfriend. There was an easy kind of comfort between them, and when she came home and sat beside him on the couch and kicked off her flats and began to rub her own tired feet with mint-scented lotion, it was only his fear of upsetting something that kept him from reaching out to do it for her.


When Lanae came home the day he’d taken Esther to the mall, he wanted to tell her about the girl, the way she’d smiled at him, and scan her face for a flicker of jealousy. Then he remembered he’d earned the smile by lying. So instead he unfolded the Mindy flier from his pocket and passed it to her.
“Can you believe this shit?” he asked. “Five hundred dollars a pop for a kids’ show? When we were kids, we were happy if we got five dollars for the movies and a dollar for some candy to sneak in.”
“Hey.” Lanae grinned. “I wanted two dollars, for candy and a soda. You were cheap.” She held the flier at arm’s length, then turned it sideways, like Mindy would make more sense that way.
“Esther wants to go to this?”
“The lady at Glitter Girl said all the girls do. She said in most cities the tickets already sold out.”
“That whole store is creepy, anyway. And even if it was free, Esther don’t need to be at a show where some nine-year-old in a belly shirt is singing at people to Come pop my bubble. F*cking perverts,” Lanae said.
“Who’s a pervert?” asked Kenny. Georgie hadn’t heard him come in, but Lanae didn’t look surprised to see him standing in the doorway. He was carrying a steaming, grease-spotted bag that was meant to be dinner, which was usually Georgie’s cue to leave. As Kenny walked toward them, Georgie slid away from Lanae on the couch, not because they’d been especially close to begin with, but because he wanted to maintain the illusion that they might have been. But Lanae stood up anyway, to kiss Kenny on the cheek as she handed him the flier.
“These people,” said Lanae, “are perverts.”
Kenny shook his head at the flier. Georgie silently reminded himself of the sophomore Kenny had dated their senior year of high school, a girl not much bigger than Mindy, and how Kenny used to joke about how easy it was to pick her up and throw her around the room during sex.
“Esther ain’t going to this shit,” Kenny said. “This is nonsense.”
“She can’t,” said Georgie. “You can’t afford it.”
Kenny stepped toward him, then back again just as quickly.
“F*ck you, man,” said Kenny. “F*ck you and the two dollars an hour we pay you.”
He pounded a fist at the wall beside him, and then walked toward the hallway. A second later Georgie heard the bedroom door slam.
“Georgie,” said Lanae, already walking after Kenny, “you don’t have to be an a*shole. He’s not the way you remember him. He’s trying. You need to try harder. And this Mindy shit? Esther will forget about it. Kids don’t know. Next week she’ll be just as worked up about wanting fifty cents for bubble gum.”


But Esther couldn’t have forgotten about it. Mindy was on the side of the bus they took to the zoo. Mindy was on the nightly news, and every other commercial between kids’ TV shows. Mindy was on the radio, lisping, Pop my bub-ble, pop pop my bub-ble. What he felt for Mindy was barely short of violence. He restrained himself from shouting back at the posters, and the radio, and the television: Mindy, what is your position on civilians in combat zones? Mindy, what’s your position on waterboarding? Mindy, do you think Iraq was a mistake? He got letters, occasionally, from people who were still there: one from Jones, one from Ramirez, three from guys he didn’t know that well and figured must have been lonely enough that they’d write to anyone. He hadn’t read them.
He went back to the mall alone on the Saturday after he’d pissed Kenny off. He told himself he was there to talk to the manicure girl, pick up a little present for Esther, and meanwhile maybe get something going on in his life besides wet dreams about Lanae, who’d been curt with him ever since the thing he said to Kenny. But when he got to the store, the redhead was leaning across the counter, giving a closed-mouth kiss on the lips to a kid in a UVA sweatshirt. He looked like an advertisement for fraternities. Georgie started to walk out, convinced he’d been wrong about the whole plan, but when the boyfriend turned around and walked away from the counter, the redhead saw him and waved.
“Hey!” she called. “Where’s your little girl?”
“I came to pick up something to surprise her,” he said. “She’s been asking for a princess dress to go with the crown her mom got her.”
He was pleased with the lie, until the redhead, whose name tag read ANNIE, led him over to the dress section and he realized he’d worn suits to weddings that cost less.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “I’m not sure of her size. Maybe I oughta come back with her mother. Meantime, maybe she would like a wand.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Annie. “All the kids are into magic these days.”
Annie grabbed the wand that matched the crown and led him back to the register. The Mindy fliers had been replaced by a counter-length overhead banner. Mindy’s head sat suspended on a background of pink bubbles.
“What’s this Mindy kid do, anyway?” he asked.
“She sings.”
“She sing well?”
“It’s just cute, mostly. She has her own TV show, and her older sister sings, too, but sexier. You get tickets for your daughter?”
“Nah,” he said. “Bit pricey for a five-year-old. Maybe next year.”
“They ought to pay you people more. It’s a shame. It’s important, what you do.”
She said this like someone who had read it somewhere. It would have seemed stupid to disagree and pathetic to nod, so he stood there, waiting for his change.
“Hey,” said Annie. “We’re having this contest to win tickets to the show. Limo ride, dinner, backstage passes, the whole shebang. All you have to do is make a video of your daughter saying why she wants to go. I bet if your daughter talks about how good she was while you were gone, she’d have a shot. It’s right here, the contest info,” she said, picking up a flier and circling the website. “Doesn’t have to be anything fancy—you could do it on a camera phone.”
“Thanks,” he said, reaching to take the bag from her.
“Really,” she said. “I mean it. Who’s got a better story than you? Deadline’s Tuesday. It’d be nice if they gave it to someone who deserved it.”

He liked to think that Annie’s encouragement was tacit consent. He liked to think that if he’d had longer to think about it, he would have realized it was a bad idea. But as it was, by Sunday he’d convinced himself that it was a good idea, and by Monday he’d convinced Esther, who, after hearing the word “limousine,” needed only the slightest convincing that this was not the bad kind of lie. And when she started the first time, it wasn’t even a lie, really. Hi Glitter Girl, she began, all on her own, for a whole year while he was in Iraq, I missed my Daddy. OK, so he wasn’t her father, but he liked to think she had missed him that much. When she said how much she wanted for him to take her to the show now that he was back, he thought it was honest: she wanted not just to see the show but to see it with him. He had downloaded the video from his phone and played it back for her, and was ready to send it like that, when Esther decided it wasn’t good enough.
“Let’s tell how you saved people,” she said. “We have more time left.”
He hesitated, but before he could say no, she asked him to tell her who he’d saved, and looking at her—the hopeful glimmer in her eyes, her pigtails tied with elastics with red beads on the end, matching her jumpsuit and the ruffles on her socks—he realized her intentions had been more sincere than his. How could they not be? Esther didn’t doubt for a second that he had a heroic story to tell. He closed his eyes.
“Two girls,” he said, finally. “A girl about Mindy’s age. She was missing her two front teeth. And her little sister, who she loved a lot. Some bad men wanted to hurt them, and I scared off the bad men and helped them get away.”
“Where’d they go then?”
“Back to their families,” he said. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
“Start the movie over,” Esther said. “I’m going to say that too.”


Somehow, he was not expecting the cameras. It was such a small thing, he’d thought. But there was Esther’s video, labeled CONTEST WINNER! ESTHER, AGE 5, ALEXANDRIA, VA, right on the Glitter Girl website. It was only a small relief that this was the last place Lanae would ever go herself, but who knew who else might stumble upon it? He’d named himself as her parent, given his name and phone and authorized the use of the images, and now he had messages, not just from Glitter Girl, who’d called to get their particulars, but from The Washington Post, and Channel 4 and Channel 7 news. Even after the first few, he thought he could get this back in the bottle, that Lanae would never need to know. In his bathroom mirror, in the morning, he practiced what to say to the journalists to make them go away. He tried to think of ways to answer questions without making them think to ask more.
Listen, he told the Channel 4 reporter, I’d love to do a story, but Esther’s mother has this crazy ex-boyfriend who’s been threatening her for years, and if Esther’s last name or picture is in the paper, we could be in a lot of trouble. Look, he told the Channel 7 reporter, the kid’s been through hell this year, with me gone and her mom barely holding it together. It was hard enough for her to say it once. Please contact Glitter Girl for official publicity.
It was the Post reporter that did them in, the Post reporter and the free makeover Esther was supposed to get on her official prize pickup day. He figured it was back-page news, and anyway, Esther was so excited about it. They would paint her nails and take some pictures and give them the tickets, and that would be the end of it. When they walked into the store a week later, there was a giant pink welcome banner that proclaimed CONGRATULATIONS ESTHER! and clouds of pale pink and white balloons. All of the employees and invited local media clapped their hands. Annie was there, beaming at them when they walked in, like she’d just won a prize for her science fair project. The CEO of Glitter Girl, a severe-looking woman with incongruous big blond hair, hugged Esther and shook his hand. Mindy’s music played on repeat over the loudspeakers.
There was cake and sparkling cider. The CEO gave a heartfelt toast. Annie gave him a hug and slipped her phone number into his pocket. One of the other employees led Esther off. She came back in a sequined pink dress, a long brown wig, fluttery fake eyelashes, pink lipstick, and shiny purple nails. People took pictures. He was alarmed at first, but she turned to him and smiled like he’d never seen a kid smile before, and he thought it couldn’t be so bad, to give someone exactly what she wanted. Finally, the CEO of Glitter Girl handed them the tickets. She said Esther had already received some fan mail and handed him a pile of letters. He looked at the return addresses: California, Florida, New York, Canada.
“Is there anything you’d like to say to all your fans, Esther?” shouted one of the reporters.
“I want to say,” said Esther, “I am so happy to win this, but mostly I am so happy to have my daddy.”
She turned and winked at him. She smiled a movie-star grin. There was lipstick on her teeth. For the first time, he realized how badly he’d f*cked up.


It was two days later the first story ran. Esther had told the Post reporter her mommy worked at the Ruby Tuesday on Route 7, but when the reporter called her there to get a quote, Lanae had no idea what she was talking about, said she did have a daughter named Esther, but her daughter’s father was in Texas and had never been in the army, and her daughter wasn’t allowed in Glitter Girl or at any Mindy concert.
She called Georgie on her break to ask him about it, but he said it must have been a mix-up, he didn’t know anything about it.
“You’d damn well better not be lying to me, Georgie,” she said, which meant she already knew he was.
That night he called the number Annie had given to him, wondered if she could meet him somewhere, pictured her long legs wrapped around his.
“Look,” she said softly, “I’m sorry. I was being impulsive the other day. You’re married, and I’m engaged, and I’m really proud of you, but it’s just better if everything stays aboveboard. Let’s not hurt anyone we don’t have to.”
Georgie hung up. He went downstairs and watched television with his mother, until she turned it off and looked at him.
“You know I watch the news during my break at the hospital,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” said Georgie. “They’re not still shortchanging you on your break time, are they?”
“Don’t change the subject. Other day I coulda swore I saw Esther on TV. Channel 9. All dressed up like some hoochie princess, and talking about her daddy, who was in the army.”
“Small world,” said Georgie. “A lot of coincidences.”


But it was a lie, about the world being small. It was big enough. By the time he drove to Lanae’s house the next morning, there was a small crowd of reporters outside. They didn’t even notice him pull up. Kenny kept opening the door, telling them they had the wrong house. Finally, he had to go to work, walked out in his uniform. Flashbulbs snapped.
“Are you the one who encouraged the child to lie, or does the mother have another boyfriend?” yelled one reporter.
Georgie couldn’t hear what Kenny said back, but for the first time in his life, Georgie thought Kenny looked brave.
“Did you do this for the money?” yelled another. “Was this the child’s idea?”
All day, it was like that. Long after Kenny had left, the reporters hung out on the front steps, broadcasting to each other. Lanae had already given back the tickets; beyond that, she had given no comment. He could imagine the face she made when she refused to comment, the steely eyes, the way everything about her could freeze.
“How,” the reporters wanted to know, “did this happen?”
Their smugness made him angry. There were so many things they could never understand about how, so many explanations they’ve never bothered to demand. How could it not have happened?
At night, when no one had opened the door for hours, the reporters trickled off one by one, their questions still unanswered. Lanae must have taken the day off from work: her car was still in its parking space, the lights in the house still on. Finally, he made his way to the house and rang the doorbell. She was at the peephole in an instant. She left the chain on and opened the door as wide as it could go without releasing it.
“Georgie,” she said. She shook her head, then leaned her forehead against the edge of the door so that just her eyeball was looking at his. “Georgie, go away.”
“Lanae,” he said. “You know I didn’t mean it to go like this.”
“Georgie, my five-year-old’s been crying all day. My phone number, here and at my job, is on the Internet. People from Iowa to goddamn Denmark have been calling my house all day, calling my baby a liar and a little bitch. She’s confused. You’re confused. I think you need to go for a while.”
“Where?” he asked.
He waited there on the front step until she’d turned her head from his, stepped back into the house, and squeezed the door shut. He kept standing there, long after the porch light went off, not so much making an argument as waiting for an answer.