“Give it to me.”
“You didn’t want? Stella sent you what you didn’t want?”
“Stella sent!” She tore the book from him—it was heavier than she had guessed—and hurled it at the ceiling. It slammed down into Persky’s half-filled teacup. Shards and droplets flew. “The way I smashed up my store, that’s how I’ll smash Tree!”
Persky was watching the tea drip to the floor.
“Tree?”
“Dr. Tree! Tree the bloodsucker!”
“I can see I’m involved in a mistake,” Persky said. “I’ll tell you what, you eat up the crullers. You’ll feel better, and I’ll come tomorrow when the mistake is finished.”
“I’m not your button, Persky! I’m nobody’s button, not even if they got barbed wire everywhere!”
“Speaking of buttons, I’ll go and push the elevator button. Tomorrow I’ll come back.”
“Barbed wire! You took my laundry, you think I don’t know that? Look in your dirty pockets, you thief Persky!”
In the morning, washing her face—it was swollen, nightmares like weeds, the bulb of her nose pale—Rosa found, curled inside a towel, the missing underwear.
She went downstairs to the desk; she talked over having her phone reconnected. Naturally they would charge more, and Stella would squawk. All the same, she wanted it.
At the desk they handed her a package; this time she examined the wrapping. It had come by registered mail and it was from Stella. It was not possible to be hoodwinked again, but Rosa was shocked, depleted, almost as if yesterday’s conflagration hadn’t been Tree but really the box with Magda’s shawl.
She lifted the lid of the box and looked down at the shawl; she was indifferent. Persky, too, would have been indifferent. The colorless cloth lay like an old bandage; a discarded sling. For some reason it did not instantly restore Magda, as usually happened, a vivid thwack of restoration like an electric jolt. She was willing to wait for the sensation to surge up whenever it would. The shawl had a faint saliva smell, but it was more nearly imagined than smelled.
Under the bed the telephone vibrated: first a sort of buzz, then a real ring. Rosa pulled it out.
The Cuban’s voice said: “Missis Lublin, you connected now.”
Rosa wondered why it was taking so long for Magda to come alive. Sometimes Magda came alive with a brilliant swoop, almost too quickly, so that Rosa’s ribs were knocked on their insides by copper hammers, clanging and gonging.
The instrument, still in her grip, drilled again. Rosa started: it was as if she had squeezed a rubber toy. How quickly a dead thing can come to life! Very tentatively, whispering into a frond, Rosa said, “Hello?” It was a lady selling frying pans.
“No,” Rosa said, and dialed Stella. She could hear that Stella had been asleep. Her throat was softened by a veil. “Stella,” Rosa said, “I’m calling from my own room.”
“Who is this?”
“Stella, you don’t recognize me?”
“Rosa! Did anything happen?”
“Should I come back?”
“My God,” Stella said, “is it an emergency? We could discuss this by mail.”
“You wrote me I should come back.”
“I’m not a millionaire,” Stella said. “What’s the point of this call?”
“Tree’s here.”
“Tree? What’s that?”
“Doctor Tree. You sent me his letter, he’s after me. By accident I found out where he stays.”
“No one’s after you,” Stella said grimly.
Rosa said, “Maybe I should come back and open up again.”
“You’re talking nonsense. You can’t. The store’s finished. If you come back it has to be a new attitude absolutely, recuperated. The end of morbidness.”
“A very fancy hotel,” Rosa said. “They spend like kings.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“A Tree is none of my business? He gets rich on our blood! Prestige! People respect him! A professor with specimens! He wrote me baboons!”
“You’re supposed to be recuperating,” Stella said; she was wide awake. “Walk around. Keep out of trouble. Put on your bathing suit. Mingle. How’s the weather?”
“In that case you come here,” Rosa said.
“Oh my God, I can’t afford it. You talk like I’m a millionaire. What would I do down there?”
“I don’t like it alone. A man stole my underwear.”
“Your what?” Stella squealed.
“My panties. There’s plenty perverts in the streets. Yesterday in the sand I saw two naked men.”
“Rosa,” Stella said, “if you want to come back, come back. I wrote you that, that’s all I said. But you could get interested in something down there for a change. If not a job, a club. If it doesn’t cost too much, I wouldn’t mind paying for a club. You could join some kind of group, you could walk, you could swim—”
“I already walked.”
“Make friends.” Stella’s voice tightened. “Rosa, this is long distance.”
On that very phrase, “long distance,” Magda sprang to life. Rosa took the shawl and put it over the knob of the receiver: it was like a little doll’s head then. She kissed it, right over Stella’s admonitions. “Good-bye,” she told Stella, and didn’t care what it had cost. The whole room was full of Magda: she was like a butterfly, in this corner and in that corner, all at once. Rosa waited to see what age Magda was going to be: how nice, a girl of sixteen; girls in their bloom move so swiftly that their blouses and skirts balloon; they are always butterflies at sixteen. There was Magda, all in flower. She was wearing one of Rosa’s dresses from high school. Rosa was glad: it was the sky-colored dress, a middling blue with black buttons seemingly made of round chips of coal, like the unlit shards of stars. Persky could never have been acquainted with buttons like that, they were so black and so sparkling; original, with irregular facets like bits of true coal from a vein in the earth or some other planet. Magda’s hair was still as yellow as buttercups, and so slippery and fine that her two barrettes, in the shape of cornets, kept sliding down toward the sides of her chin—that chin which was the marvel of her face;
