Table of Contents
3. A Dream of My Son as a Sergeant
5. A Dream of My Husband with a Doll-head Necklace
7. A Dream of My Son At the War’s End
10. A Dream of My Husband Coming Home
Epilogue: 14 Views of a Screaming Mimi
Kiss Me, Stranger
In my next life I will come back as Gregory Peck and I will break your hearts, every one of you.—The Man
Illustrations by Lon, Nadia, Del, Simon, Lori, Rainy, Thom, Sara, Spence, Aida, Di, Pierce, Blu, and Marimar. Presidential portrait and other propaganda courtesy of the Bureau of Cultural Treasure.
Brooklyn, New York
1. Handful of Nails
Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were hard cheese. I’ve had to do such things because my children don’t understand deprivation, they understand only their own appetites—which is what makes children so appealing: they are all desire, wide-eyed and voracious.
“Mama, can I have this?” Lori asks, my eleven-year-old.
She holds in both hands an oil-soaked sock, which looks, I suppose, delectable. Her siblings watch her hopefully. Recently they made a meal of wallpaper paste—a glutinous soup, heavily salted and peppered—and only the three youngest got sick. The others sat around afterwards and pretended not to gloat, though they looked very pleased with themselves. I suspect they all suffered stomach cramps.
Lori is the most sensitive of my six girls, the child who looks most like me, a small crooked nose, green-green eyes, a swanlike neck but the stocky build of a field hockey player. She knows better than to eat a sock; it’s obviously a sock. But the odorous oil, dark as molasses, might have fooled her. I recall how the heady smell of gasoline tantalized me as a child.
“No,” I tell her, “you can’t have this.”
I tug the sock from her grasp, then toss it into the fireplace, where last night’s embers ignite the sock in a splendid burst of blue flame. Lori weeps, hands over her eyes as if painfully blinded. The others join her. And I have a roomful of sobbing children.
Thirteen, to be exact.
Some nights I dream that I cut off my left arm for the children’s dinner and roast it for hours like a succulent leg of lamb, basting it with a thick gravy of my own blood, the house humid with the heady sweetness of its baking. I’m not usually inclined to melodramatic thoughts, but our war is a melodrama and all of us feel the strain.
The bullies of the Presidential Militia drafted my husband a year ago. I haven’t seen him since. Our eldest son, Lon, only fifteen, joined shortly thereafter because, I fear, he liked the look of the uniforms. Families, I’ve heard, have resorted to eating their house pets, something we don’t have, fortunately, and a number of children have run away because, apparently, they felt they’d find better elsewhere.
Had you asked me, when I was a teenager, what would become of my life, I would have told you any number of fantasies, none of which have come true. I was good at math and assumed that I would be a scientist. I met Marcel (pronounced MAR-cel because he thought Mar-CEL too effeminate) at the two-year Poly-tech, where those of us without money went. He was by no means the handsomest or the smartest. To be honest: I was the smartest in our class of six hundred.
When I found Marcel following me after class one day, I turned abruptly and asked him what he was doing. “Following my heart!” he answered, his voice breaking. He was, is, a small man with close-set hazel eyes, large, capable hands, and a beautiful smile. The kind of smile you’d expect from a kindergarten teacher, which was his secret aspiration. I had dated at least twenty boys by that time. The uncertainty the others cultivated, their callous disregard of my feelings, their adolescent self-absorption, made for an edgy excitement that I found almost addictive. I thought Marcel’s lack of guile an act, the way he’d blink at me, smile that beautiful smile, then say, “Don’t you look lovely today!” His kindness wore me down. Maybe I got tired of playing games. Marcel never lied. It was a novelty being with someone like that, and soon I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.
Love sneaked up on me, it threw a hood over my head and kidnapped me. I found myself doing things I never imagined I would do. I opened a small computer-repair business with Marcel instead of going on for a degree in advanced mathematics. I agreed to live in a city row-house instead of a country home where I might have awakened every morning to birdsong instead of bus bleats. And then I let him have his dream, fourteen children instead of my suggested two. I feel selfish and embarrassed sometimes for having brought fourteen into the world. It’s a luxury Marcel and I clearly could not, cannot, afford. Strangers stare at us and shake their heads in dismay and disbelief. In jest, Marcel and I vowed never to touch one another again. “Look what becomes of love,” I would say, gesturing to the children. Everywhere, it seemed, there were children: children pulling pages from our precious books, children picking plaster from our walls, children gouging our dining table with their breakfast spoons, children peeling tiles from our kitchen floor, children wrenching knobs from our doors and faucet handles from our sinks, children unscrewing bulbs from lights and, inevitably, dropping them: bombs of delicate glass.
Our modest row-house is like an ark too long afloat. I am continually amazed that we survive, every week a triumph when I parade my brood into the street and we make our way to the market.