Your attention, please! Ruthie will say. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention! Welcome to the show! And the man with the cape will pull back the curtains and everybody will be so surprised by what they see that they will put their hands over their mouths and scream.
But Ruthie’s own surprise is already turning into something else, not a beautiful secret anymore but just a thing that she knows will happen, whether she wants it to or not, just as she knows that she will have an accident in the barn and her giraffe will be lost and her mother will keep looking at the tags hanging from the dolls’ feet, looking closely like she’s reading an important announcement, looking closely and not seeing the puddle getting bigger on the floor. When it happens, her mother will be holding her hand—she is always holding and pulling and squeezing her hand—which is impossible, actually, because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, hair-twirler, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.
TELL ME MY NAME
Ever since the California economy collapsed, people have been coming to our street at night and going through the trash. That sounds worse than it is—I guess if it’s recyclable then it’s not really trash. They sort through the blue bins that during the day were wheeled out to the curb, along with the black and green bins, by the gardening crews. The people who come at night are like a crew too. You used to see just solo collectors but over the past few months they seem to have joined forces. They’re efficient, with one of them holding on to the grocery cart and organizing things while the others pull out bottles from the bins. At first they carried flashlights but lately they’ve taken to wearing headlamps.
My neighbor Betti isn’t happy about the situation. She stands on my porch, waving her extra-sharp tweezers in the air. She came over with a splinter lodged under her fingernail, and after a little poking around I got it out. It’s the middle of the afternoon but she knew I’d be home. Now that the splinter is gone she’s free to be irritated by other things, and my trash cans, lined up at the curb, have started her thinking about the recyclers. “I moved here to get away from this shit,” she says, and even though she talks in kind of an ugly way, Betti is one of the most beautiful people I know.
She has arching eyebrows and the smallest possible pores, flat red lipstick that never rubs off on her teeth or crumbs up in the corners of her mouth. Shining dark hair smoothed back in a high ponytail. Toreador pants and little ballet flats so silvery and supple I hate to see them touching the sidewalk. The math still shocks me: she must be at least forty-five years old! You’d never know it, because her skin is amazing.
I used to look at her picture in magazines, ages ago, when I was a regular girl going to middle school and she was a popular person going to gay dance clubs in New York. Her friends were graffiti artists, punk bands, drag queens, rappers, gallery owners: everything was all mixed up then, in a good way. I used to read those magazines monkishly, over and over again, late into the night, as if they contained a key to unlocking a secret world of happiness. And maybe they did; maybe they taught me something important. Or maybe it was just a way to kill time until I could grow up, get a job, find a partner, buy a house—
A house four doors down from Betti Pérez! The houses are small but they cost a lot. What I mean is that they look sweet on the outside but there may be comedians or talent managers or people like Betti living inside.
“The other morning I’m standing in my kitchen,” she says, “still in my nightie, trying to get the toaster to work, and I hear something funny. A rustling-around kind of sound, like a rat makes? And I look over and there’s a little man right outside my pantry window! Ten feet away from me! Digging away in there, helping himself.”
“You should get your gate fixed,”
