craft, lunar junk, wild birds, no air.” In another he’s hurrying to junior high school to teach when a car pulls up, she’s at the wheel and leans across the front seat and says “Hi, like a lift?” “Sure, but since when do you drive?” “Oh, I’ve been practicing in my hospital bed and wheelchair, and stick shift too.” He gets in beside her and says “What is it, some special handicapped car?” and she says “Oh no, I’m all better now, I’ve just come from the hospital,” and lifts her legs above the seat and shakes them. “Watch out for the cars,” he yells and though her car hasn’t moved, her feet go back and forth on about eight floor pedals, so fast he can hardly see them. “I can walk too but why walk when you have a car?” “And your crutches?” “First thing I did when I got out was put them under the tires and run over them.” “You should have given them to the hospital or Goodwill,” and she says “Symbolism over reality any day. You never went through what I did, so how could you know?” Another one she’s in a wheelchair, slumped over asleep and held in by a waist strap, tubes in her nose and coming out from under the blanket on her lap, when she suddenly crows, rips the strap off and tubes out of her, stands and kicks the chair back so hard it bangs against the wall and falls over, and starts walking around in circles, sniffing the air like a dog. “Look at you, you’re walking,” he says. “Mom, Dad, look at Vera. It’s a miracle.” “That’s right,” she says, “and this is the way I’m gonna be from now on. I can’t stand the position I was put in,” and walks out of the apartment, building, down the block, walking so fast he can’t catch up with her even though he’s sprinting. “The world’s fastest walker,” he thinks. “I’ll enter her in the Olympics if they have such a race. She’ll win medals and fame for the family and write a book about it and make millions and not have to worry about anything again in her life.” He stops when he’s out of breath; she turns south on Columbus and next thing he knows she’s just a dot at the tip of Manhattan and then he can’t see her. His father hands him binoculars and he looks through them and sees her walking as fast over a huge suspension bridge. Cars are speeding toward her but she zips around them. “Vera,” he yells, “Vera,” and then loses her. In another she’s in a hospital sitting against the side of her bed. Frail, gaunt, hair a mess, skin yellow, sores on her legs, feet twisted in. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “—do I smell bad?” “No, you don’t smell bad,” he says. “Well I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to live another minute and you have to help me do it.” “Do what, live?” “No not live.” “No, do, live. You smell good. Maybe there’ll be a cure for you some day. Sure there will. I’ve read articles, people have sent you them.” “You think so?” “I’d almost stake my life on it.” Suddenly she’s four or five, same ugly hospital clothes on though, and then quickly becomes around fifteen and her body starts blossoming, little bumps, then big breasts, hips develop, legs lengthen, thighs harden, and she’s wearing a thin summer dress and Greek sandals, they used to call them, with the straps wrapped halfway up her calves, hole in her neck and shoulder slump gone, bed becomes a chaise longue on a patio somewhere, flowering trees behind her and behind them a lake. “I told you,” he says. “You did, didn’t you, Mr. Knows-it-all and always so good to me, so prophetically correct and sweet, does anyone in the world deserve more than you?” and she gets up, comes over, puts his arms around her and her hands in his side pants pockets and kisses him on the mouth. “Oh boy, she’s a hot number,” he thinks. “What am I going to do with her now?” In another she’s stepping off a train onto an empty outdoor platform. Tall, meticulously dressed, hair done up, no sign of her illness. And must have been a long journey, he thinks, what with all the luggage that’s now beside her. She seems to be looking around for someone as the train pulls away. He says “Hey, I’m here, over here,” and keeps shouting and waving as he approaches her, but she doesn’t turn to him or seem to hear him. “Vera,” he says, standing next to her, “the trip’s done wonders for you. What was it, some kind of tour of various spas?” She keeps looking around but never at him. Then she shakes her head, is disgusted, picks up two valises and what looks like a makeup case and walks to the small train station. He lifts her one trunk onto his back, almost collapses from it, holds it by an end strap with his hands over his shoulders, and follows her. “Right behind you,” he says, “if this thing doesn’t kill me first. And hold the door, please, hold that door,” but she lets it swing back into his head. In another she’s sitting at a table in the staff cafeteria of a junior high school he taught at for years, arguing with another teacher about a book they’ve all read. “The author portrays her as a whore. She’s no whore. No woman’s a whore. The whore’s the author who portrays women as whores so every man and lez can stick his finger in while he reads. Because when she sticks her finger in it’s for her pleasure, pure and simple, and perhaps as a mnemonic device, but not for whores who think all women are whores, lezies and fingers.” “You make no sense and are also downright offensive in your references to lesbians,” the teacher says. “And what do you make, you big bag of haggard figs? Fart on me, fart on me, why don’t you?” and she stands up—“Your crutches, watch out, you’ll fall,” Howard says — and she says “Hell with my crutches, who needs them?” and grabs them off the floor and breaks them over her thigh, says to the teacher, who’s never stopped eating, “You’re lucky I didn’t wrap them around your little onanist’s neck,” and slaps the sandwich out of his mouth and stomps out of the room. “Crude, rude and wasteful, is the way I’d characterize your sister,” he says, “and you’re fired.” In another he’s sleeping in bed in his old room, little light from the streetlights coming in through the Venetian blind slits, when the covers are slowly pulled off him, he starts shivering and says “Please, whoever it is, I’m cold,” and looks up and sees she’s naked and has the body and body hair of his wife. She says “Mind if I come in — I’m frightened,” and he says “I’m not allowed to — I promised the folks,” and she says “Why, because I’m supposed to be sick and sad person? Well, you don’t see me crying or on crutches or canes or in a wheelchair or anything, so I must’ve recovered or else always been well,” and she slips in beside him—“Please, it’s a narrow single bed, go back to your own”—kisses him on the chest, tickles his nipples, grabs his penis and jerks it till it’s hard—“That’s reflex, not feeling; it’s even happened when I’ve sat with a plain empty box on my lap”—gets on top of him; he tries to buck her off and she says “Don’t be a rotten bastard; I might, like everyone else in life, be frightfully to moribundly sick tomorrow or even later tonight, so let me have my kicks while I can”—sticks his penis in, arches back to sort of lock it in and bounces up and down on him, while he’s looking at the door, waiting for his parents to burst in and thinking of an excuse to give them—“I couldn’t help it; she forced me to; she’s become so strong and big that she simply overpowered me; I also thought that for all the permanent harm it’ll do me, maybe it’ll do some short-term good for her in some particular way, and I also didn’t want to wake the two of you up…” His mother, Vera and he are at the airport; he’s leaving for a year on a fellowship at a California school. Vera says “Wait, nobody go away,” and on crutches goes into a shop, comes out and waves her hands no and goes down a passageway and disappears, comes back just around the time they’re thinking of looking for her, with a newsweekly and cheap paperback copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems. “I thought you’d like them for the plane. I won’t pretend I’ve read the poems or even know how to say her name, but it was the only poetry book they had and from what it says on the back cover it seems very good.” He kisses her cheek, she lowers her head and blushes, he wants to tell her that if she has another operation he’ll fly home immediately and stay as long as she likes. That he can’t thank her enough for the book, which he’ll start reading right away on the plane, even before the magazine, which he also thanks her for. That right now she seems balanced on the outstretched crutches like some winged statue of victory on top of an institutional dome. That he’ll come home for Christmas for a month and maybe Thanksgiving if the fare isn’t too steep and they’ll go to restaurants and movies and just spend lots of time talking at home. That he’d trade places with her if he could. He’s had twenty-eight good healthy years, so he’d be willing to take her place from now on if she could be healthy again. That if she ever needs some of his skin for grafting, which the doctors said she might need, and of course any amount of his blood, whose type they share, she can definitely count on him. That she should think about coming to California with Mom to see him for a week or two, but when the weather’s nice so they can see the pretty hills and big smelly trees and exotic flowers and flowering citrus trees, with eventually real fruit on them, he hears the area’s known for. That he’s going to buy a used car there and they’ll drive all the way to Santa Barbara or the Hearst Castle if she wants, even if it turns out to be farther than Santa Barbara, and back along the ocean route through Big Sur where they can even camp out for the night. That he’ll try to write her almost every day but certainly a couple of times a week and of course call. That he loves her very very much and she’s in his thoughts daily and she’ll be in them even more a day when he gets out there and he’ll miss her she can’t know how much and he really thinks, though he doesn’t know why he feels so sure about this — maybe it’s the way she’s been looking and acting lately — but that she’s going to get much better the next year, off the crutches, no more of those urinary and eye problems to add to it and headaches and such, gaining weight and maybe even height and walking and doing just about everything normally again. And that there’s always the chance he’ll get the disease too, as the doctors said, and that she’s set the standard how to deal with it year after year. The departure’s announced, he kisses his mother and her good-bye, thanks her for the book and magazine and tells her to take care and he’ll call them soon after he gets there, the plane goes, he sits in his seat crying for a while, reads the magazine cover to cover, opens the book when lunch comes but the pages start falling out while he’s turning them. One of the first things he’s going to do after he finds an apartment and gets set up in California is stick the loose pages and rest of the book into a postal bag and send it to the publisher with a note complaining of the lousy binding and asking for a new copy plus reimbursement for the cost of the bag and mailing the book to them. He and the woman he’s living with like going to a different restaurant every other week. They take Vera with them every third or fourth time. One time she says the Indian food’s too hot. “If you take me again, please not too spicy a place?” She doesn’t like the Mexican food. “Too heavy and any food that has chocolate in its main course has to be in deep trouble to come up with something original.” Philippine food’s too peanutty, Chinese food too gooey, Japanese food’s pretty but has no taste and the small portions make you feel gypped, German food seems as if it’s been left on the stove for days by mistake, Cuban and Ukrainian food seem unclean. “I appreciate being invited — it’s nice just to get out — but I wish I liked tasting different foreign foods or saw the point to it as much as you. Have you ever eaten French? — I’m sure you have,” and they tell her if it’s any good it has to be too expensive for them, and American food, which she wouldn’t mind having—“Since summer camp I’ve loved things like succotash and chicken à la king”—they feel they’ve had too much of it at home and they also like drinking different foreign wines and beers. The woman’s very attentive to her, holds her arm when they walk, makes sure she gets the best taxi and restaurant seat, provides her with magazine articles she thinks she might be interested in, always compliments her clothes, often comments about her soft sultry voice and long straight well-groomed hair, that she has a perfect little model’s nose and beautiful small fingers and ears and how smart she is not to use rouge and nail polish and hair spray and how well she takes care of her cuticles and nails. Once when he goes to the men’s room she says “I wish I could be like you. Beautiful, a natural height, breasts, hips that don’t look like a six-year-old’s, your posture, educated, engaged to an all-right guy, the chance to drive a car and go to work and have kids. I hate my life but don’t tell my brother any of this. Say I’m satisfied, to a degree, if he asks what we talked about and you say ‘life.’ But sometimes I wish I could suddenly die and nothing really helps that feeling. Religion sometimes, psychiatrists no time, I never took to booze or food as a release. And because my insides are so bad in various places after so many operations and the wear and tear on them from the disease, I’m not supposed to smoke, but screw that I say, since it’s my only peace except sleep.” The woman tells him all this later and he says “Why doesn’t she have more incentive to do something with her life? Sure, death, that’s a good one to scare the shit out of you and which she’s talked a lot about and years ago actually tried, because she hasn’t the fucking imagination or spunk to do anything harder, like possibly doing something. For she has the use of her hands, her brains have the potential, she gets around on those crutches OK or can always take taxis, and she certainly has the time. She doesn’t have to go out and hack it, everything’s given her, the libraries are stacked with the best anyone could read, the state and federal government will pay for any education she wants for as long as she likes right up to a Ph.D., and Social Security or some other big agency guarantees her a decent income for life and even more — if the rest of the family dies — should she suddenly fall flat on her face or can only meet things halfway,” and the woman says “Why do you take her out and spend the time with her you do and talk and say you think about her so much if after all of it you still can’t put yourself in her place?” “Wait a minute — what did I say? Maybe you’re right. I can be a little too hard on people. Let me go to sleep on it, but Christ I’m being straight-out honest when I say I wish she was a more interesting and better-read person and had some intelligent things and few other experiences than her repetitive nonevent bland ones to talk about when we go out,” and next morning, mostly so the woman wouldn’t think him a bastard, he says “You were right on the mark about Vera last night. Maybe I’d had too much to drink or something at dinner and it got me mean and angry, but I was being totally insensitive and unfair.” She tries killing herself with aspirins when she’s around ten. His mother sees her acting giddy, thinks she drank some liquor from the liquor cabinet, sees the empty aspirin bottle, throws her down, sticks her fingers down her mouth till she throws some of it up, gets her in a cab to a hospital to have her stomach pumped. Later Vera tells her she’s never going to try anything like that again. For a day or so she felt sick of her condition and didn’t think anyone liked her but her mother and that her father even hated her and that’s why she did it. “But getting that tube down my neck was worse than any killing myself could be. They must’ve thought I wasn’t awake, but I never felt anything so painful and disgusting in my life.” A couple of years later she cuts her wrist with a razor blade she