“No.” She said each word carefully, signing them for emphasis: “They didn’t take her. She wanted to go. She had to go. She shouldn’t have to come back, not just for us.”
“You can’t know that!” I yelled. “How can you say that?”
She looked at me a long time. “Because I heard it,” she signed slowly, silently. I watched her scarred fingers move, the wonder that flooded her face. “I heard it, and it called me. But it wasn’t for me, not the me that’s here. It was for the other me, the one you made. The one you made for them. The circle closer. The one who listens so well that she has no need to speak. The me done right. But this me heard it and knew how bad she wanted to go.”
Then Mom went back in her room and closed her door.
Nothing happened after that. The fat Skoag never came back, and Mom never went through withdrawal. I guess the last song was enough to last her forever. I never went to school again, and the government people never came to ask about us. They never came to tell us anything either. There were no write-ups in the paper, no news stories about a little girl stolen by the Skoags. No one ever asked why Lisa never came to school. No one ever asked just how much one little girl is worth to the government. Or to a Skoag with a purple crest.
But the next month Boeing got a huge government contract that put half of Seattle back to work, and the papers were full of news about the breakthrough design that could give us the stars. So I didn’t need it spelled out. Do you?
The world gets the stars, the Skoags get Lisa, and I get nothing. Lisa’s gone, and with her every touch of Lavender. It was a hard thing he asked of me, but I did it. I looked after the Mom. The Skoags can go back home now. Every day, there are fewer of them on the streets. They always bow to my mom and me. They no longer sing, but all their crests ripple with color. Sometimes I wonder if Lavender even knew what he was asking.
Or maybe all he meant was that I should look out for Mom, and the rest of it was just an accident. I don’t know.
Mom and I still live here. Next month I’ll be eighteen. I’ll have to register with the aid office as an adult, and with the job office for training. Mom’s Career Mother checks will stop and she’ll have to get job training or lose all her aid. I’ll have to move out, because aid receivers aren’t allowed to let other adults share their homes. Mom will probably get a smaller place.
That’s too bad. Because just last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I heard a mouse, nibbling inside there.
It’s been a good home, really. I had good folks.
Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man
This story was written in 1988 as a fortieth birthday present for my husband, Fred.
Since the early 1970s I’d had an agreement with my husband. He didn’t read my fiction. He didn’t read it in draft form or before I sent it out. He didn’t even read it after it had been published. It was a wall we’d put in place after we realized that we simply knew each other too well. I could shrug off criticism from any other reader, but not from him. He was simply too good at putting his finger unerringly on exactly my greatest doubt.
Writing fiction, my friend, is a game of sleight of hand that a writer plays with her- or himself. The writer takes key events, dazzling pains, gasping joys, and unutterable boredom and weaves them into a story that is always, inevitably, about the writer’s own life. The trick is to write it in such a way that the writer does not know he or she is merely holding up a very large and distorted mirror of the writer’s life. It is my opinion that the only way writers can serve up their own steaming entrails on a platter and not know they are offering their own vital essence to the world is by disguising it.
And I was never able to disguise it well enough from Fred. He would read a story, a story that wasn’t about me or us or any time or place we had ever lived, and then he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that day. That was awful, wasn’t it?”
And suddenly I’d see the roots of my own tale. And be unable to even finish polishing the story, let alone put it out there for sale. There were two choices for me. I’d either have to give up being a writer or ask Fred not ever to read anything I wrote. I chose the second alternative, and to this day, he has kept his word. The sole exception is this story, “Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man.” It was written for him, as a gift, and he read it. And had the great good sense to not point out exactly where and how it intersected with my reality.
I do think that every freelance writer reaches a point at which he or she says, “If I quit trying to write fiction and just spent those hours working for someone else for minimum wage, I’d come out dollars ahead.” I know I certainly have, and more than once. In the speckled years of my writing career, I’ve served pizza, pulled beers, delivered the US mail, sold consumer electronics, managed an electronics store, and yes, worked as a salesperson in the ladies’ clothing department of a Sears store. And at times like that, when a writer is not writing, sometimes someone else believing in you is what it takes to put the world back on track.
And thereby hangs a tale . . .
It was about 8:15 P.M. and I was standing near the register in a Sears in a substandard suburban mall the first time the fortyish man came in. There were forty-five more minutes to endure before the store would close and I could go home. The Muzak was playing, and a Ronald McDonald display was waving at me cheerily from the children’s department. I was thinking about how animals in traps chew their legs off. There was a time when I couldn’t understand that type of survival mechanism. Now I could. I was wishing for longer, sharper teeth when the fortyish man came in.
For the last hour or so, salespeople had outnumbered customers in the store. A dead night. I was the only salesperson in Ladies’ Fashions and Lingerie, and I had spent the last two hours straightening dresses on hangers, zipping coats, putting T-shirts in order by size and color, clipping bras on hangers, and making sure all the jeans faced the same way on the racks. Now I was tidying up all the bags and papers under the register counter. Boredom, not dedication. Only boredom can drive someone to be that meticulous, especially for four dollars an hour. One part boredom to two parts despair.
So a customer, any kind of a customer, was a welcome distraction. Even a very ordinary fortyish man. He came straight up to my counter, threading his way through the racks without even a glance at the dresses or sweaters or jeans. He walked straight up to me and said, “I need a silk scarf.”
Believe me, the last thing this man needed was a silk scarf. He was tall, at least six feet, and had reached that stage in his life where he buckled his belt under his belly. His dark hair was thinning, and the way he combed it did nothing to hide the fact. He wore fortyish-man clothing, and I won’t describe it, because if I did you might think there was something about the way he dressed that made me notice him. There wasn’t. He was ordinary in the most common sense of the word, and if it had been a busy night in the store, I’d never even have seen him. So ordinary he’d be invisible. The only remarkable thing about him was that he was a fortyish man in a Sears store on a night when we had stayed open longer than our customers had stayed awake. And that he’d said he needed a silk scarf. Men like him
But he’d said he needed a silk scarf. And that was a double miracle of sorts, the customer knowing what he wanted, and I actually having it. So I put on my sales smile and asked, “Did you have any particular color in mind, sir?”
“Anything,” he said, an edge of impatience in his voice. “As long as it’s silk.”
The scarf rack was right by the register, arranged with compulsive tidiness by me earlier in the shift. Long scarves on the bottom rack, short scarves on the top rack, silk to the left, acrylics to the right, solid colors together in a rainbow spectrum on that row, patterns rioting on that hook, all edges gracefully fluted. Scarves were impulse sales, second sales, “wouldn’t you like a lovely blue scarf to go with that sweater, miss?” sales. No one marched into a Sears store at 8:15 at night and demanded a silk scarf. People who needed silk scarves at 8:15 at night went to boutiques for them, little shops that smelled like perfumes or spices and had no Hamburglars lurking in the aisles. But this fortyish man wouldn’t know that.
So I leaned across the counter and snagged a handful, let my fingers find the silk ones and pull them gently from their hooks. Silk like woven moonlight in my hands, airy scarves in elusive colors. I spread them out like a rainbow on the counter. “One of these, perhaps?” I smiled persuasively.
