gardening and farting and pinching the bums of young lads. She moved in and became my sister. We came to do the things that sisters do. We wrote lists of what we hated about each other and taped them to the wall. She communicated for weeks with nothing but grunts and shrugs. I threw a slice of pizza at her face. *** One hot, nasty Chicago afternoon. I watched Mom enter the yard through the alley. Crab apples were rotting. Worms were ecstatic. She was murmuring in the breeze and she seemed pissed at the sun. She was drunk. "Oh, honey." She'd come from a smoky, black-windowed bar where she learned the barmaid's son was born with his bladder outside his body, and rushed to America on an emergency visa. The doctors saved his life but left him with a stub of a penis. "The kid is fourteen. He has a girlfriend. All he wants is a penis, God bless him! We're gonna raise the money. Whaddayou say? We'll put on a grand gala." Ruby was pumped. She mapped out endless menus of goodies and planned to invite the world. She picked out songs she would sing on a stage of bubbles, wearing a silver gown. And then, not long after, Ruby moved out. ''I'm changing," she said, and she disappeared from our lives. The party never came to be. *** In the big town, on the mainland, we stayed in a garden apartment with Stana, a warm old woman who fed us good fish and lemonade. Ruby and I shared a room again. We watched each other dress for the disco and tried to outskin one another. Ruby's breasts quivered a bit in her corset top. My tits stood alert in nothing but a tissuey t-shirt. A burly man with a white beard watched us walk." Ladies," he pronounced in a voice as low and cool as the rumble before th~nder: "God damn!" After the disco closed, the line at the bakery snaked out the door. Apple baklava, bread balls with lic..ls on top and cream insic..le, cherry cobbler, cheese pie. . A man in line told me he could see my future. "You will have baby before you know it," he said. Niko had already left for Bosnia, to see his father. We scarfed our sweets in bed and stayed up past dawn with Mom, gossiping under crisp white sheets. Our cousin had called from her honeymoon suite on the isle of Capri. She spoke like a stone and she split to shards. "He's alreac..ly left for Rome. Probably got a date with some bitch tonight! It's over! I'm getting the paperwork c..lone and I'm coming home." 40
FUGUE#33