Cara has crooked feet because we're poor. They are twisted up like an old lady's and bunions haunt her big toes. She's getting the wraps off today and she's truly believing her feet are going to be beautiful. Mama spoons some dry pancake mix into her mouth and says, "Don't get your hopes too high….
Ben wriggles around, crowding closer. He's cold. More than that, he wants his mother to be awake. He presses against her, feeling for her heartbeat. It's not a beat he can count, separate knocks through her skin. It's more a constant soft rustle, like a mouse scratching around under a pile of dry leaves. There's…
Years ago on a Sunday afternoon in late October Hetty and her mother's boyfriend Dyan Trumball-the one who played acoustical guitar with a local band-were walking in the lakeside park a few miles from Hetty's mother's house. Hetty was thirteen years old at the time with a narrow face and dark warm watchful eyes-so nervously…
Something happens in the water: first of all, you are weightless; this is the first thing Rosie noticed, remembers. She learns to swim the ordinary way many of us learn: a small rectangular pool in a day camp in the Indiana dunes, one hour's ride through smelly south Chicago, past the threatening smokestacks of Gary,…
FIRE One girl among us set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she'd gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father's car had run out of gas? I couldn't look at her without thinking about…
Cecily's parents are divorcing, and perhaps for revenge, perhaps to distract, perhaps to build self-esteem, her mother Kate has taken to frenetic self-improvement. Shopping trips, perms and cuts, nail wraps, aerobic exercises, massages. Now she is going to Calistoga to the mud baths. Cecily finds the idea of mud baths bizarre, yet, curious and amused…
Walter could almost feel the rush of breath, hear the women roaring, mothers, girlfriends, sisters, sweeping up towards the flight deck, the warm fall day, San Francisco, 1945. A couple chasing a blue jump-suited baby girl just beginning to walk wobbled by him in exaggerated pursuit. He had been alone that day. Hadn’t wanted to…
I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…
Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing,…
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