Motion and thought. It is so simple. Ulrike thinks of Hanno’s parents’ water bed, where screwing had always been unreasonably difficult. The rhythm was too different, and it made it all far too embarrassing.
Thus they finally get moving. Ulrike, Nina, and Polina walking in a line, Rosa Imaculada and Wlibgis treading behind them. Each in her own way. Presumably as a result of this first, somewhat traumatic image, Ulrike’s style becomes flamenco furioso, a banging rhythm executed with an exaggerated straight back: see how with each kick the tips and heels of the shoes gradually wear through the double-laminated vinyl surface . . . Bring on the flood . . . Let them all drown . . .
Ahead, beyond Shlomith’s narrow frame, something red suddenly flashes. For a moment it disappears behind Shlomith and then appears again, a tiny red spot that grows, disappears, then comes into view again a little larger. Some sort of shape begins to take form. It isn’t a blotch or a hole but a separate thing like Ulrike herself and the other women. Something that could be touched. Clearly it could be touched, but what is it? Red, rippling. It seems to be a little higher than them, and the closer they trudge to it, the more clearly above it is. And then: they are beneath it. Ulrike bends her head and looks into it. A hollow cage like a calabash gourd, with red hair fanning all around as if floating in water but completely motionless.
Now Ulrike is forced to learn another new skill, the skill of rising upward. Maimuna has already dived to the surface: the red hair has become the level relative to which everything else is defined. Everyone is going there, to the level of the hair, and Ulrike must rise too, but once again: how?
Maimuna had raised her hands like a diver, squeezing her head between her long arms (plug your ears!) and clenching her right thumb in her left fist (hold tight!), and then she pushed off, and now she is there. Polina of the Swamp grabs something with her hands (peat moss, tormentil roots, bog star stems, sawgrass blades?) and heaves herself up little by little, with some backsliding. Wlibgis of the Snow simply digs herself a tunnel to crawl through. Rosa of the Feather Pillow licks her hands and then squeezes and rotates the nothingness to make small, apparently rock-hard balls she can place as steps. Nina of the Waterwings thrashes and falls and lurches up, and Shlomith of the Miso Soup launches into a series of movements that look like vomiting. Throwing herself back-first with the force of the retching, she moves in fits right up to the hair.
Ulrike thinks of a flood. She thinks of Hanno lying naked on his stomach at the bottom of the empty water-bed frame, drowned. She thinks of her shoes and the shreds of PVC fabric stuck to her heels. She thinks of Hanno’s parents’ bedroom and the stains on the ugly brown antique wallpaper. She begins to fall. Slowly she begins to float farther away from the women and the red hair. Instinctively she lifts her hands toward them, like a child asking to be picked up; she kicks and pushes but only continues to move away. She screams like she is drowning (actually people who are drowning don’t scream), and as she shrieks she senses how the sound disappears somewhere, as if it has never left her throat. She hears her cry for help, her echoless, impotent wail, and still it seems to come from somewhere else. She waves her arms and sinks, until she feels Maimuna’s firm grip under her armpits. Do not think bad things, Maimuna whispers to her, only good things, and in her panic, Ulrike thinks of cyclamen. Eyes shut! Maimuna orders, and Ulrike obediently closes her eyes and curls up in the middle of a meadow of cyclamen. The sun shines, birds sing, and a butterfly lands on her arm as they begin to rise.
This is their campfire. Their gathering place. Whenever they wish to speak about something together, Shlomith says, they come here to Wlibgis’s wig. It was veeeery kind of her, Shlomith drawls—that Wlibgis donated her beautiful, artificial hair for this use. Although, privately, Shlomith really thinks that Wlibgis’s wig is rather second-rate. And that one could only get truly beautiful wigs that actually looked genuine from the Hasidic Jews in Borough Park, who covered their married women’s hair not with scarves but with hair creations, each more lavish than the last. Women who covered their hair with sheitels were always well groomed, with an enviable polish that rivaled that of manikins; bad hair day was not in their vocabulary. When a mother of a family she knew came down with cancer and started chemotherapy, she immediately demanded to go to Borough Park. Her Hasidic wig had been more beautiful and natural than her own hair ever was. The cancer took the woman, but the family didn’t want to give up the wig. They set it on a beige velvet display head and the display head on a dresser in the living room, and told everyone who visited that some day, if one was very lucky, cheerful vanity might catch the fear of death in a headlock.
Ulrike glances at Wlibgis, at her misshapen, lumpy head, flat at the back; her whole head actually looks like a pickle. The sacrifice has undeniably been great. Or maybe not. Perhaps it hasn’t been a sacrifice at all. Do things like hair, clothing, or hygiene mean anything any more at this stage? On the spur of the moment, Ulrike lifts her hand and sniffs her armpit. She smells nothing. Nothing bad and nothing good, not sweat and not the Angel by Thierry Mugler she had undoubtedly sprayed there in the morning as she left for work. It had been a pathetic gift from Hanno. She had wanted perfume
