The Summer Without Men

than a victim, worse to have a cruel child than one whose vulnerability allows attack. I would have to devise a strategy, if not to save the situation, at least to bring it into the open air. I like that expression, the open air. Before me I see the wide fields outside Bonden, flat and broad, with the immense sky over them.
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    I cried on Bea the first night after she arrived. You’d think that all the bawling and blubbering I had done over the course of about six months would have drained my ducts and left my eyeballs permanently damaged from flooding, but it seems that there is an endless supply of the salty secretion, and it can pour forth at regular, bounteous intervals without any lasting effects. The old fleshy temple truly is a marvel. It felt so good to have Bea patting my back and shushing me and rocking me a little in her arms. Mia and Be-a. Once we had dispensed with my keening lachrymosity, we settled into the Burdas’ bed, and she filled me in on the doings of Jack and the boys. (Jack, the same old, same old, driving her crazy with his weekend sculpting, the results of which she referred to as erections because they were, each and every one, towering protrusions inspired by the Gaudí phalluses on top of the Padrera, but she did not want them all over the lawn. She did not want a skyline of yards in the yard, for Christ’s sake. Jonah thriving in college, Ben a little lost in class but soaring in musical theater and no girlfriend ever, and maybe he’s gay, which was fine by Bea, she just knew she couldn’t say it first, what kind of mother would do that, if he was or wasn’t, and then he had never been obviously fey, or anything like that, so they’d just have to let him figure it out, and her lawyering, which she loved the way Harold had, Our Father before her, the subtleties and loopholes and the precedents and even the grind.)
    And then with our two heads, one brown, one red, propped on pillows, we lay beside each other and gazed upward at the white ceiling and remembered playing Baby Huey. I was usually Huey, the enormous baby duck in diapers who drooled and puked and pooped and issued guttural gagas to Bea’s howling joy. We remembered Mrs. Klinchklonch, the witch woman we invented, who hated children, and how we delighted in describing her monstrous doings. She threw children out the window, dunked them in wells, peppered them vigorously, and drenched them in chocolate sauce. We remembered becoming the Mellolards, a vocal team that appeared when we sat at our little red table in our little red chairs and sang commercials, not real commercials, but made-up ones about toothpaste that spurted from the tube and laundry detergent that turned the clothes green and candy that melted in your hand, not in your mouth. We remembered our blue dresses with pinafores and our patent leather shoes that shone with Vaseline and that we held our knees together and folded our hands in our laps and were very, very good. We remembered Mama’s embroidered calendar and the tiny wrapped presents that appeared on it every day of December and that our anticipation for Christmas gave us stomachaches, and we remembered baths. We held a washcloth over our eyes so we wouldn’t get soap in them and leaned backward, and Mama poured the warm water over our heads with a pitcher, and she heated towels in the dryer and wrapped us in the warm terry cloth, and then Father would lift us, one at a time, high up into his arms and gently lower us into chairs in front of the fire to keep us warm. Baths were paradise, said Bea. They were, said I, and then she told me she used to pretend to be asleep in the car when we returned late from our grandparents’ so that Father would carry her inside, and I told her I knew she was faking and that I had been jealous because I was too big, and I had sometimes worried that he loved her more. I was a crybaby and she wasn’t. You’re still a crybaby, she said. So true, I said. Maybe, my sister said, I should hried more. I always had to be so tough. We were quiet then.
    I’m sorry I was such a wimp, Bea .
    Let’s go to sleep, she said, and I said, Yes, and we did, and I didn’t take a pill, and I slept very well.
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    How to tell it? asks your sad, crack-brained, crybaby narrator. How to tell it? It gets a bit crowded from here on in—there’s simultaneity, one thing happening at Rolling Meadows, another at the Arts Guild, another at the neighboring