The girls jumped off the rock and scrambled into the bushes.
“The new one will rub your head.”
“Do you think so? I hope he will. He’s got beautiful hands. So smooth.”
They came along the path, two of them in high heels, smoking cigarettes out of long, black holders. Their perfume spread out ahead of them, sweet and complicated and unlike anything that came from the earth. One had red hair that looked as though it had been lacquered, and the other wore a hat with a veil. They had their arms linked, and walked with strong, confident steps. They looked almost innocent, like they’d be happy if they could spend all their days at a garden party. Mimi shook her head—there she was making that same mistake again. Innocence shouldn’t ever be assumed. Who knew what they’d done to Eddie? They’d probably laughed and watched him bleed. Mimi tried hard to keep from thinking about it.
What did the grown-ups really want? And how many of them were there, anyway?
Luisa’s theory was that there was an endless amount. She said that if she had the courage and the endurance, she’d kick them endlessly in the shins.
Andrew thought it didn’t matter how many grown-ups there were, that the only thing that mattered was that they could do whatever they wanted.
Mimi’s theory was that it was just six, but that they kept changing clothes—and privately, to herself, she thought she could look at each of their outfits forever. She loved their clothes. She loved the way they could put anything together and make it seem effortlessly stylish. She would die before she told anyone else that, though, before she told anyone that she’d love to see her reflection in a mirror, draped in a satin sheath, her shoulders hung with fur.
Natasha just batted her eyes and hummed whenever they tried to figure it out.
The two grown-ups stopped now in front of the bushes where the children hid.
“Do you smell them?” the veiled one said.
“Children?” The other said. She sniffed the air; then let out a mouthful of smoke.
“Even after a bath they smell like animals.”
“They might as well be animals. The new one says they cry at night.”
“Isn’t that sweet!”
“I know. So sweet.”
They started walking again. Their dresses were tight, but they had slits in the back and they took long steps. Their heels clacked on the stones. Their laughter and perfume trailed behind them even after they disappeared over a hill.
Mimi sniffed her armpits. Did she smell? She washed as best she could, but maybe they were right. She poked Natasha to see if she would make a sound. The kid surprised her all the time—how was it that her hearing was better than anyone else’s? She wanted badly to know what Natasha’s voice sounded like, to get an explanation, but the kid just shook her head and kept her lips pushed tight together.
Andrew sat cross-legged in the grass at the bottom of the hill and stared at the sleeping pigs. They lay with their legs splayed front and back, sacked out on the soft dirt under the shade of an olive tree. They murmured in their sleep, and shifted, sometimes, and murmured again. Their sides heaved as they dreamed. Andrew, staring at the pigs, thought he could see traces of a time before the island—not their time, but his. Sometimes, for even less than a moment, he thought their bristly skin grew clear. Beneath its surface everything that had ever disappeared inside them became visible again. Why shouldn’t his life become visible as well?
The children didn’t spend much time talking about the pigs, but when they did, they speculated about who might have put them there. Someone strong, they thought. Someone unafraid of sharp teeth. Someone who didn’t mind the hard work of getting gigantic pigs onto an island in the middle of the ocean, and someone confident enough to leave them there to do their work. Once, the children had played at making an altar. They’d collected smooth-edged stones and piled them into a little tower in the hollow of a hill. They’d bowed down in front of the stones and touched their foreheads to the earth, and Mimi had chanted something in a monotone about thanking a god for building a fence between them and the pigs, but it had all seemed too serious and, even to them, a little pretentious. They’d knocked the tower down and thrown the stones at a target instead. Andrew had won that game, of course. He was more coordinated than any of the girls.
Looking at the pigs, he remembered being bounced on someone’s shoulder. He remembered someone playing with his feet. He remembered someone stroking his hair at night while he curled up in bed, and the sound of cars outside, sirens, the whirring of a city. He liked to think about that while he watched the pigs. He liked to sing the pigs scraps of songs he remembered from those days. He liked to tell the pigs stories about the city. They chewed on them in their sleep.
“Once,” he said, “my mother took me on the subway and the stroller nearly got caught in a closing door. A homeless man jumped up to help her, and she pulled me through. She was secretly relieved when the door slammed shut and he was left on the platform looking in.
“Once,” he said, “we rode the ferry and a man in a suit gave her a silver dollar. ‘Give it to him when he grows up,’ he said. ‘Tell him he’ll save the world.’ She kept the coin locked in a drawer. She said I was too young to keep it safe.
“Once,” he said, “my mother and father had a fight. They were fighting about my mother being pregnant. They thought I was too young to understand. Neither of them wanted another child, but they couldn’t agree on what to do. All they could do was blame each other. I wanted to tell them that whatever they decided would be all right with me. I wanted to tell them that I liked being alone, that I didn’t need a sister or a brother. They thought I was crying for no reason, and it made them even angrier. It was awful. My mother ended up sleeping in bed next to me, crying all night, turning her back to me when I cried too.
“Once,” he said, “I lived in a city. The buildings were so tall you’d think they reached the sky. It was unbelievable that anyone thought to build them that high. You’d think they were trying to climb all the way up to God.”
Andrew could go on and on once he got started. The pigs listened to him with their eyes shut. They might have been asleep, but they smiled and sighed when he fell silent, as if they were patiently waiting for him to continue.
Up on the hill, Natasha collapsed again on Mimi’s lap, and Mimi shook her head and whispered that she would never wear velvet on a day like this.
“That one with the red hair?” she said. “She should stick to silk. The velvet just makes her look fat.”
Luisa was willing to talk now. She scrunched her eyes shut like she was trying to picture the grown-ups in front of her. She picked a blade of grass and chewed on it and then took it out of her mouth and said, “I like velvet better. It’s weird to see it on such a hot day, but I think it goes a long way toward hiding the flaws in the female form.”
“I disagree,” Mimi said. Luisa was just repeating something that she’d said to her once. She tried to remember which magazine she’d read it in before she’d thrown it to the pigs. Mimi was the only one who really paid attention to what the grown-ups wore. She wished just once she could try on one of their outfits. Not even one of the really fancy ones, just something nicely tailored. Even just a pencil skirt.
“But velvet’s so soft,” Luisa said. “I touched it once. Old curtains. I once tossed velvet curtains to the pigs.”
“You don’t know anything about fashion,” Mimi said. “Don’t even try.”
Luisa’s face hardened, and she turned away. She picked up a rock and tossed it as far as she could. It didn’t go that far, but it hit the tree she was aiming at. She looked surprised, and picked another rock up and threw it, too. This one missed.
Mimi never knew why sometimes she said the things she did, why occasionally words came out with no purpose other than to be mean, but she couldn’t help herself. And