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PARTISAN REVIEW
future halls of power by excessive political zeal. Infantile leftism. All
diseases named, described, catalogued-warning labels on every
shelf. "You and your mother, you weren't the only dreamers," his
father tells him. "Those old men could make your mother seem prac–
tical. I swear it."
American fantasies. Like fucking the watcher over your child–
hood. Accuracy demands. Miriam had been the twins' sitter. He had
been free to come and go as he pleased. Only not to be burdened, as
his mother put it, by responsibility for his sisters. Sometimes, he
thinks his mother sensed what he and Miriam did after the twins
were put to bed. Maybe that was why they never came home early.
He would lie on the rug from Pakistan with the deep colors blending
into one another and he would close his eyes and concentrate mind
and body limp so that he could feel precisely what Miriam promised
he would feel. Her hands playing his body, he lies still and passive.
At thirteen, he still believes it is different in the rest of America. Not
with your sisters' sitter. Not in the rest of America.
"Nice girls don't," she says.
He slaps at his pillow, balances on an elbow, studies her face.
Cossacks sweep through the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Melding of
bloods in a nasty variation ofthe universalist dream. He leans down,
kisses her neck. "Don't what?"
"Make love to other nice girls."
"Is that what they don't do?" He lies down, staring again at the
dark blue of the ceiling. He has spent hours carefully painting it the
right shade of blue. Midnight blue. He has taken the ceiling for his
own. His mother always insisted on white ceilings. To lighten the
apartment. Now that the apartment is his, he will paint each ceiling
in each room a different color. His arm reaches across Miriam's
body for the cigarettes on the night table next to the red bowl. He
sits up in bed. He will tell his father he does not want the bowl, ask
him to take it. He lets the cigarette dangle from his lips, examines
the book of matches. Is he interested in finding a well-paying job, a
solid career? Tool and die making.
"No," Miriam says, "they don't."
"It's 1986, Miriam," he says. "New York in 1986. Everything
goes."
"Even for nice girls?"
He lights the cigarette, draws deeply on it. He should stop
