Spontaneous

Chapter One
Auntie Ned burped up the warm taste of blood, of the red rare, rib-eye steak she had had for dinner. Her long fingers, knuckles enlarged with arthritis, slid along her yellow Formica tabletop, cleaning up the final nonexistent crumbs. Another evening dripped shadow by shadow into night. She would move soon, from the table to the green sofa in her living room, turn on a light, turn on the TV, pass the time until she went to bed. She felt a bubbling in her intestines, tasted the sour starts and stops of regurgitation in the back of her throat. Heartburn.
Her hand, this crone's liver-spotted and twisted hand, had once caressed the curve of a perfect flank, stroked the rump of her deepest desire, traced the swoop of each rib. These old fingers had tangled with hair and buttons, had worshiped, wiggling into orifices, touching, praying, adoring.
Another burp. A harder, hot pinch in her bowels, then down to her thighs, around to the small of her back. She shifted in her yellow vinyl chair. She wanted to scream, but screaming wouldn't help. Get up, she told herself, pick up the phone, write a letter. No one on the other end. Her throat was swelling, scarlet and inflamed. Her flattened breasts, her thighs sagging like old curtains were hers alonefor the rest of time. She banged the table with both hands. And again. She smelled her own bitter perspiration, felt the sweat bubble up in the wrinkles on her forehead, slide into the creases of her neck, boil in the folds under her arms.
She looked down. Steam escaped between the buttons of her flowered blouse. She opened her shirt. Her skin was crimson red, the pores blistering, oozing an odd yellow pus. She had the liquid feeling of a fever. Get up, she said to herself again, drink some water. Her feet had melted, fused with the floor. She wasn't going anywhere.
The heat inside Auntie Ned expanded, the burning pain dropped between her legs. She tried to see the face she had loved, to feel the chilled hands on her sweltering body, the icy strands of blond hair in her mouth. She panted with the pain. She was crackling now. She could hear her bones turn into kindling, her blood stewing, simmering. Her heart. Her hands clawed and scratched for the past. Remembering. Remembering. She was not sorry. Not sorry. Her heart detonated, a final shuddering explosion of surrender.


The smoke alarm woke the young thief in the duplex next door, startled him out of a heavy sleep. He looked out his window. He didn't see smoke, but there was a smell in the air, sweet and greasy. He knew his old lady neighbor was in trouble. He pulled on his pants and called 911 from one of his stolen cellular phones. Then he left. He had three good televisions and a collection of car stereos in his closet. He didn't want to answer any questions.


The fireman who broke down Auntie Ned's front door had never seen anything like it, but the fire chief ran his finger through the yellow oil coating the walls and knew what some people would think. He was a trim man, still young, only three weeks and three days away from his gold watch. He didn't want to open that can of worms. Not now. He called the coroner, told him it was a kitchen accident.


Nine days later, Roosevelt James Montgomery parked his old green panel truck in front of the small clapboard house. There was no exterior evidence of a fire. He admired the bright yellow paint in the dreary neighborhood; the roses, pink, peach, and red, lining the front walk. An orange and black plastic bird perched in a pot by the front door. Its nylon wings hung limp, waiting for a breeze.
Roosevelt set his toolbox on the porch and looked for the bell. She opened the door before he could ring. His hand froze over the ivory button, one freckled finger slightly extended as he looked at her. A woman with long blond hair, not smiling, wearing tight lavender pedal pushers over slim schoolgirl thighs and eating a mint-green ice cream cone. Eight-fifteen in the morning and she was licking ice cream. He watched her pink tongue move in slow laps around the green playing field. He dropped his hand.
"I'm here about the floor," he said.
"I know," she answered and smiled. Her perfect teeth were surrounded by green milk.
He looked away, squinted up the sunny street. It was a run-down neighborhood, Echo Park, between east LA and downtown. Quiet this early in the morning. He figured at night it would really hop with tire squeals, Latin music, the more than occasional gunshot.
"Come on in," she said.
He followed her into the house, watching her bare golden calves and brand-new pink Keds sneakers.
They went into the kitchen. It was bright orange and flowered, filled with the knickknacks and fussiness of old age. There were handwritten notes taped to the cabinets, above the sink, on the fridge. The handwriting was narrow and slanted and from where he stood impossible to read. Inspirational messages, he supposed.
He could still smell smoke, the faint memento of something burnt.
"You should've seen the mess," she said. "Everything was covered in this ash--soot, sort of. Only it was yellow--and slimy--like pig fat."
"Gross," he said.
"Exactly."
What was she, he thought, thirty? Older? Her hair was long and shiny blond. Her eyes were bountiful and brown. Her cheeks weresmooth, but she had that confidence, that ease of an older woman. Experience could do that too. He looked away. He was thirty-one. He was good-looking. Okay, he was just a carpenter, but he had red hair and freckles and since his wife left him there had been plenty of girls.
"Here," she said.
She moved around the yellow Formica and chrome-edged table. On the floor, fused into the gold-flecked linoleum, was a charred circle of black. It was a twelve-inch spot, so badly burned that the linoleum had melted, sinking into the subflooring, and probably below.
"How'd it happen?"
"My aunt--"
"She start a campfire?" He had seen the results of stranger behavior.
"Spontaneous human combustion."
He looked at her.
"She burned, from the inside out. The chair was destroyed," she said.
"Your aunt was sitting in a chair and she exploded."
She paused. "It was a kitchen chair, just like that one."
She gestured to his hand where it rested on the back of a yellow-vinyl-and-chrome chair. Roosevelt jerked his hand away, wiped it on the front of his gray coveralls, put it in his pocket.
"Sorry."
She shrugged. "Look at the curtains."
Directly above the liquefied linoleum was a window framed in white curtains. A row of skinny daisies crawled along the bottom. They were Kmart grandmother ugly.
"Nice," Roosevelt said.
"They're hideous," she laughed, "but that's the way I found them. Not burned, not even singed. Nothing. And six inches from the chair."
She looked at the curtains. He looked at her. Her T-shirt was white, white like it had never been dirty. The round neck scooped low. He could see her collarbones, the thumb-sized indentation at the base of her throat.
"Do you have a basement?" he asked.
She turned her head, looked at him slowly without blinking. "Why?"
"I, I, I need to go down there," he said. "Look at these floorboards."
"Okay."
She tossed her almost-finished ice cream cone into the deep porcelain sink. He held on tightly to his toolbox as she led him to the basement door.
He passed a rack of cups and read one of the inspirational sayings: SCREW THE FUCKING BASTARDS. Quickly he read another on a sugar canister: JUST SAY NO. NO FUCKING WAY.
"How old was she?" he asked.
"Sixty-eight," she said as she opened the basement door.
A cool stench of rancid air escaped. Roosevelt's palms were sweating.
"Shit," she said, "I forgot to empty the freezer."
Roosevelt let out a breath, nodded.
"The electricity was off for a week. Look in that long cupboard there, will you? Get me a plastic bag."
Roosevelt turned to the cupboard at his left.
"Not that one." She sounded exasperated. "The one behind you."
Roosevelt quickly opened the right cupboard. He was anxious to please her, worried that he'd seem slow or stupid. The cupboard was neat, a blue-handled mop and broom set stored in their proper places. On the broom handle was taped another motivational message, RAM IT UP HIS ASS!
Roosevelt found the large-size plastic trash bags and pulled one from the box. He handed it to her. She didn't say thank you.
The basement was badly lit, a single bulb hanging from a wire in the center of the room. In a corner was the chair. The yellow vinyl was gone, burned away. The frame was mangled and dripping black chrome icicles. The chair had melted.
"Jesus Christ," he said without thinking, then looked at her. "Sorry."
"It takes your breath away, doesn't it?"
He nodded. That was it exactly. "And that's how they found it ... her?"
"Yes," she said. She walked to the old upright freezer and readied the plastic bag. "The chair, the burn on the floor, a pile of ashes." She took a deep breath. "And her legs. Just from the knees down. Did you see the picture? On the eleven o'clock news?"
"I only watch the news when I'm in the hospital."
He wasn't kidding, but she laughed. It was a nice sound, her chortles surprisingly deep and joyful.
"Anyway," she said, "the TV didn't do it justice."
Her white T-shirt twisted against her breasts as she reached in her back pocket and took out a black and white photo and handed it to him. It was just a copy of the police photo, but he could clearly see the ruined chair and beneath it a hill of cremated ash. Two skinny old-lady legs, from the knees down, protruded from the dusty gray mound.
"See her shoes?" She leaned in to look over his shoulder. A strand of her blond hair brushed his cheek. "I had to ID what was left." He felt her breath in his ear. "That's how I knew it was her."
He struggled for something meaningful to say, managed a grunt, a nod. Idiot.
She put the photo back in her pocket. She stepped away from him and opened the freezer. The stink of rotten meat was stunning. He gagged.
Matter-of-factly, she began tossing soft, bloodred packages into the trash bag.
Roosevelt turned his face away to take a breath. "Tell me again what happened to her."
"From what I've read," she said, "this is always how it is with people who spontaneously combust. Their extremities, usually their legs, sometimes an arm, sometimes their head and neck, are left behind, virtually burn free. The rest of the body is vaporized."
His eyes were watering. The packages of meat slapped against each other in the bag like a hand on a wet thigh. He shifted his toolbox. He wanted her to keep talking. He didn't want to look away, look up at the damaged floorboards, not just yet.
"Why does this happen?" he asked, and he meant more than just the old woman who had erupted.
"No one knows for sure."
Slap. Another flat package of rotten meat.
She continued, "I thought there would be visitors. Experts. Scientists who knew about this phenomenon. But no one's called. No one's been by." Slap. Slap. "They even called it 'Spontaneous Human Combustion' on the news. But then they laughed."
Roosevelt would have laughed too. "She was your aunt?"
Slap.
"Actually she was my mother's best friend. No real relation. But I called her Auntie Ned. We were very close." She paused, sighed.
She looked sad and young and Roosevelt wanted to comfort her, dead meat and all. He didn't move. She bent over, reaching to the lower freezer shelf. Roosevelt stared at her ass, heart-shaped in lavender cotton.
"Help me with this, will you?" She stood up and turned to him, handing him the bulging trash bag.
"She ate a lot of meat," he said.
"Sure did. It's something we had in common." She tossed her hair off her shoulder. It fell heavily, giving her a pat on the back. "You vegetarian?" she asked.
"I am now," he said.
She laughed and took the bag from him. She held the top with one hand and spun the sack with the other, twisting its neck. She was strong. He saw the muscles in her forearm, the clench of her hand on the bag. He took a step back from her without knowing why.
"So, there it is," she said and nodded with her head toward the furnace.
"What?"
"The spot where it happened." He looked at her stupidly. "The floorboards."
"Oh, yeah. Right."
He had to blink to come back, to concentrate on the job at hand. He stepped over a Christmas box and slid behind the furnace and looked up. He couldn't really see anything, just a dark circle, a scar from the burning linoleum. He took a pencil from his pocket and stepped up on his toolbox. He poked the beams, the flooring. Everything seemed solid.
"Doesn't seem to have damaged the floor joists or even the subflooring."
"I told you it was weird."
"This'll be an easy job."
She shrugged and headed up the purple wooden stairs.
He picked up his toolbox and trotted up behind her.
"Get the light, will you?"
Obediently, he turned and went down again. He pulled the string and took the stairs back up two at a time. He didn't want her to close the door and leave him down there, alone.
He began in the kitchen. He heard her upstairs humming to herself. He moved the table, lifting carefully. He took down the ugly curtains and laid them straight across the olive green sofa in the living room. There was an odor in the couch cushions, sweet and cloying.
He crouched over the hole, measured carefully. He would have to cut away the edges, make them straight, scrape away the remaining mastic, replace the plywood. He couldn't match the linoleum. It was ancient, discolored, unavailable.
"Excuse me?" he called to her from the bottom of the stairs.
"Come on up," she called back.
She was stripping the bed. She looked at him over an armful of faded turquoise sheets. He felt embarrassed, as if he had caught her dressing. The bare mattress, old and covered in blue ticking and buttons, was too obvious a surface between them.
"About the linoleum," he said. "I can't match it."
"Let's replace it. All of it."
He nodded, agreeing with her. "You could go to Carpet Land, one of those places. Watch the sales."
"Can't you do it?"
"I could. I mean, I know how."
"But you're busy. You don't have time."
"No. I have time."
"Great. I want something plain, and white."
"I'm not sure what it'll cost--"
"Whatever."
He tried to be quiet going down the stairs. His work boots wereclumsy and he was aware of his hazardous steel toes and his black soles that left scuff marks wherever he went.
"Cup of coffee?" She clattered down after him, her pale sneakers surprisingly loud.
She poured him a cup of black, thick coffee; didn't offer any milk or sugar. She took out a glass for herself, filled it with ice. She poured hot coffee over the cubes. The ice cracked and clattered in the glass.
"I love that," she said.
He moved the table back into the kitchen. And a chair. She sat down. He leaned against the counter.
He wanted to take this woman out on a date, to dinner and the movies. He wanted to bring her back home, kiss her under the yellow porch light, follow her upstairs. But he knew that was not her kind of date. He looked at her and imagined her head against a damp wall in a dark alley, half-dressed groping, the smell of garbage and sex.
He was chewing on his bottom lip. She smiled.
"How long do you think this job will take, Mr. Roosevelt?"
"Roosevelt's my first name. My whole name is Roosevelt James Montgomery. I think my mom thought I'd be a movie star."
"I guess."
"Your name is Clark?"
"That's my last name. My first name is Amy. Amy Clark."
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. Clark."
He put out his hand, anxious to touch her, even just to shake hands hello. Her fingers touched his and shocked him. Painfully. He yanked his hand back, wiped it against his leg.
"Sorry," she said. "Did I shock you?"
He was embarrassed, but didn't try to shake her hand again. "It's fine." He rubbed his fingers, saw her watching him, put them in his pocket.
"Amy is a pretty name," he said.
"My kid sister's name is Gwendolyn." Her face got soft, thinking of her sister. "I was always so jealous of her name."
She raised her brown eyes to him over the glass of coffee and ice. Her lashes were long, blond like her hair, a fringe of sunlight. Her nails were very short and even. Her hands looked capable, capable of anything.
"Have you heard of it?" she asked.
He thought hard, couldn't remember what they had been talking about. "Gwendolyn?" he squeaked.
She laughed. "Spontaneous Human Combustion."
"Oh. Yeah. Sure."
"I think my aunt really did combust," she said. "There's no other explanation."
"There always is," Roosevelt said. "I mean, in stuff that seems spooky or weird. It turns up later--that other explanation. You just don't see it at first. A lighted candle, a spark from the stove, lightning."
"The stove wasn't on. She didn't like candles. We don't have lightning in Los Angeles. At least not very often."
"Was she a smoker?"
"No."
"A drinker? I mean, did she drink alcohol?"
"Occasionally."
"Could she have been drunk? Alcohol-soaked flesh will ignite."
"The curtains didn't burn. The table wasn't even scorched."
"Did she have a microwave?"
"Don't be ridiculous." Amy shook her head. Her thick hair moved and fell right back into place.
"Sorry."
"It's okay. Nobody believes me."
She said it with a smile, but he could see her disappointment settle over her pretty face like the cover on a cake plate.
"Then again, what do I know?" he said.
"Good question, Mr. Montgomery. What do you know?"
He turned his back to her and put his coffee cup in the sink. He didn't need this. It was just a job. He didn't need to feel like this. She was a kook. People didn't explode or implode; there were causes for events. Physics. Explanations. Fires weren't spontaneous, not really. He didn't know anything about her or her aunt and he didn't want to. He was done trying to know anything about women. It didn't get you anywhere, and it loused up the sex.
She left her empty glass on the table and went back upstairs.
He carried her glass to the sink, emptied the ice, rinsed the glassunder the water. He moved the table out again--dragging it this time, noisily.
He worked until two o'clock without seeing her. He peeled back one-third of the linoleum. It was brittle, cracked into odd pieces in his hands. The mastic below was too old to scrape. And underneath he could see many more layers of past flooring. He would have to do a lot of chiseling, removing, digging. He was actually a finish worker, he had a talent for cabinetry, but a job was a job.
She came downstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway. He kept working without looking up. Finally, she spoke.
"I'm leaving now."
"Okay."
"Just close the door when you leave. It'll lock."
"Okay."
"Tomorrow could you come a little later? At nine?"
"Okay."
He looked up at her. She had brushed her hair, put on some lipstick or something. Her nipples were hard. He frowned.
"Something else?" he asked.
Amy paused. She pushed her lips together, pulling in her cheeks. Then she let her mouth fall open with a little sucking sound. "I'm moving in," she said.
For one brief, confused moment, he thought she was moving in with him. His tiny one-room apartment flashed in his mind, the futon on the floor, his dirty laundry in the only chair. She walked in and took up the entire room.
"Here. Starting tonight. My sister, Gwendolyn, and I are moving in. Auntie Ned left this house to me."
Roosevelt stood up, crowbar in his hand. He watched her walk away. Her hips rocked from side to side. Her golden hair swung back and forth in opposition. He had never seen lavender look so good.
At the door, she glanced back over her shoulder and caught him watching. She grinned. And left.
Roosevelt knelt back on the floor with a thud. He knew he liked her. His skin was vibrating. His throat was dry, his tongue too big in his mouth. He was nuts, that's what he was, out of his mind. He had a date tonight with Sheryl, the buxom twenty-six-year-old airlineticket agent. He liked the way the buttons on her uniform cried out for his help. But Sheryl's cantaloupe charms flattened when compared with Amy. Maybe tomorrow, Roosevelt thought, maybe it will be better tomorrow.


Gwendolyn bent over her work. In the back room of the Fantasy Bakery of Beverly Hills, surrounded by stainless-steel bowls of colored frosting, she was decorating a three-tiered wedding cake. The bride wanted frosting stairs to spiral around the cake and end at the happy plastic couple on the top. The cake was white, the stairs to begin at the bottom in the darkest red and gradually ascend to the palest pink. It was hard work. Gwendolyn's long dark hair fell across her face. She tossed it back. She was supposed to wear a net, but it made her scalp itch. She usually pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but this morning she'd been late and forgotten her clip.
This morning. Gwendolyn felt her cheeks heat up. Her toes curled and she felt a twitch inside her underpants. She could use more of this morning. Right now. Right here. She closed her eyes and imagined herself spread-eagled on this white-papered counter. She was covered in frosting flowers, roses, daisies, and chains of mint-green leaves crossing her breasts, growing out of her.
She straightened and shook her head; she was turning into some sort of sex freak.
She tucked her heavy shank of hair down the collar of her white bakery coat. She forced herself to study the wedding cake steps. The dark red looked like blood, too much blue. It needed yellow to be the red of poppies, of fire trucks, of hell. She sighed, took her flat spatula, and began scraping off the bottom stairs. It was the third time she had to start over. Her heart just wasn't in it.
Gwendolyn loved to make cakes. As a child it had been her favorite thing, her response to any celebration or disappointment. She made rabbit cakes for Easter, heart-shaped cakes for Valentine's Day, cakes that looked like straw hats for Mother's Day. There were black cakes for bad days and cakes shaped like guns when her big sister, Amy, wanted to kill someone. Her friends talked on thephone, or shopped, or went to the movies. Gwendolyn baked. She didn't even eat her work. Her sole pleasure was in making them. Usually she loved her job. But these stairs were killing her. The bride had explained that they represented her road through life, climbing ever higher until this, her peak of joy, her wedding day. Gwendolyn nodded and smiled supportively and thought of how her sister, Amy, would laugh about it later.
Staircase number three. She started fresh, with a clean steel bowl and new white frosting. She dropped in two squares of the red coloring, a half square of yellow. She put the bowl in its slot on the base and turned on the mixer. The single wire beater chopped through the frosting, then began to spin and blend. Swirls of red through the white, a touch of yellow. A sunrise in a bowl. The colors merged, brightening and blending with each other. The bowl circled, the beater undulated.
Again, Gwendolyn found herself thinking of this morning. The breaking sun turned her window shade golden. Her lips were sore from kissing. She stretched on the white sheets, then drew her knees up, curled her smooth brown body into a circle around her lover. Why had it taken so long to come to this? Why suddenly now? She was twenty-eight, had been sexually active since she was thirteen, and she had never felt anything like this. She couldn't wait to leave work and climb back into bed.
But the floor guy would be there. Roosevelt. Amy liked him. Gwendolyn couldn't imagine why. They were hardly moved in. Boxes. Piles of crunched-up newspaper. And no kitchen floor. The repairs were taking longer than he'd thought, of course. The upstairs hall windows were still coated with the slimy ochre soot from Auntie Ned's demise. They had cleaned the two bedrooms, but nothing else. She'd put her own white sheets, piped in blue, over the rolling mattress. Her clothes were still in the suitcases. She had thought they should wait to do anything about the kitchen floor, put a rug over it. But when Amy got something in her mind, she did it. She said Roosevelt was just what she wanted. How much did that mean? Gwendolyn wondered.
"Gwen! Wake up!" It was Tony, her partner, co-owner of the bakery, business side of the business. And her ex-boyfriend. Seriousboyfriend. He smiled, but his eyes were dark. "This cake leaves tonight, remember? Not next year."
She stuck her tongue out at him. She was her sister's opposite, almost as tall, almost as strong, but reversed. Gwendolyn had dark hair, and startling pale blue eyes. The sisters were like white chocolate and milk chocolate. Amy, white, was more pungent and unusual. Gwendolyn, brown, creamier, friendlier. She tanned easily. She was tan now and it was only January, just from walking, being outside. Her white bakery coat accentuated her color, her white teeth.
"Stairway to heaven," said Tony. His hand went around her back, slipped onto her ass. It stayed there, not moving, just resting on the curve of her butt.
Gwendolyn shook her hips, tried to shake him off.
Tony just laughed.
"Come on, Tony." Gwendolyn hated the whine in her voice. She had been saying no for two years, a long time, but he just kept at her.
She had met him at her last job, where he was the boss and she was just one of the cake decorators. He was small, dark, and attractive. She was impressed with his Italian manners and the easy way he discussed cake sizes, flavors, and thousand-dollar price tags with movie stars. She fantasized about theirs being a perfect match. Cake heaven. He was not a good lover, but he was a good talker. He told her everything she wanted to hear. She borrowed money. They opened the Fantasy Bakery of Beverly Hills together. He told her this was it. He told her this was all he ever wanted. On their first Friday she caught him in the back room with a delivery girl. On Saturday night with a sales representative. And on Wednesday morning with a customer. She stopped listening.
Gwendolyn sighed. "I'm working."
"I can't help myself," Tony laughed. "You're lookin' so good. Must be getting it regular."
She didn't want to, but she blushed.
"I knew it!" Tony was both triumphant and jealous. "What's his name?"
Gwendolyn shook her head, tried to concentrate on the bleeding red in her bowl. It was too dark again. "Shit," she said.
"Don't tell me who it is," Tony whispered in her ear, and he wasn't laughing or even smiling anymore. "But he better not get in the way of business."
"Don't worry about it."
Tony looked in the bowl. "More white, another square of yellow, it'll be fine. Just right. Just like you."
He ran his finger down her spine so hard it hurt. He grabbed one cheek of her butt and squeezed. She jumped away from him. He laughed and went back in the office and shut the door.
Gwendolyn followed his instructions. She plopped white into the bowl, another yellow bit. She tried to get back that good feeling about her morning, tried to reimagine herself covered in frosting for her lover, but Tony had spoiled it. She could feel the scrape of his fingernail on her back, smell his breath in her nostrils.
And the floor guy, Roosevelt, was coming earlier tomorrow. He'd be there tonight and he'd be there tomorrow. There was something not quite right about him. He was a watcher, his washed-out blue eyes stayed open too long without blinking, his freckled face was too young for someone his age. Amy had started inviting him to stay for dinner, hang around, have a beer. Gwendolyn beat at the frosting with her wire whisk. She sighed. Tony wasn't just a businessman, he really knew about cakes. He was right. The color was perfect. She began building the bride's staircase.


Amy set the picnic table in the backyard for three. She was glad Roosevelt was staying. She liked to watch him eat. It was important to her, what a person ate, the way they did it. He ate well. She had chosen a carpenter wisely.
As a child, Amy ate what no one else wanted. She gnawed on the scavenged lamb chop bones; pulled the rubbery bits of sinew from the chicken legs; crunched on the skin clinging to vertebrae her family left behind. She preferred it.
When she was a teenager, her friends all became vegetarians. She never did. Amy loved meat. In the grocery store she gazed atthe clear plastic-wrapped packages of sirloin and boneless chuck. She traced the pattern of marbling, pushed her fingers down to leave indentations that quickly filled with puddles of watery blood. She frequented the butcher's counter. Her nostrils opened to the odors of the bodily fluids of cow, chicken, and pig, metallic and elemental. She loved barbecue and broiling, stews and especially steak tartar.
It was a love that she and Auntie Ned alone had shared. They had sat in Auntie Ned's kitchen, this kitchen, and consumed, devoured, gorged on great slabs of beef, sharpening their teeth on the bones, sucking on the marrow until they wore the grease like lipstick.
"Good," said Auntie Ned.
"Great," said Amy.
"Two peas in a pod," said Auntie Ned. "That's what we are."
"Two pigs in a blanket."
"Two wolves in the henhouse."
They laughed and laughed.
Auntie Ned was always there with a T-bone dinner. One night in high school, Amy was sad and hungry. She passed up the cookies, the ice cream, the leftover cake Gwendolyn had made. She needed meat. She called her Auntie Ned, knowing she would have a steak in the freezer, knowing she would defrost it in the microwave, carry it dripping and limp to the frying pan, cook it just for her.
Amy had made a conquest, realized her power to its fullest potential for the first time. That boy, the one Gwendolyn thought was so cute, had broken up with his girlfriend just because Amy had asked him. Then Amy asked him, no, told him, to take Gwendolyn to the prom. So he broke up with his steady, the girl he'd been dating since he found his first pubic hair, and asked Gwendolyn. He did it for Amy. Amy thought Gwendolyn would be happy. She wanted her to stay home with her, celebrate, but Gwendolyn was furious and went out and left her.
So Auntie Ned turned the meat in the pan and Amy found comfort in the familiar sizzle. She felt reassured watching the steak cook, seeing the flesh shrink from the heat, the color change from pink to maroon to brown. Auntie Ned vowed that eventually Gwendolyn would understand, Gwendolyn would appreciate all that Amy did for her.
"She will," Auntie Ned said, "I promise."
Auntie Ned got out beers and Amy watched the meat. Suddenly, she noticed her skin, her own skin, smoking. The back of her right hand was red, hot, blistering. A splash of fat and a terrible smoldering had begun.
Amy gasped and Auntie Ned was there. She plunged Amy's hand into a bowl of leftover soup and dirty dishwater, pulled it out to look. The skin had not broken. There wasn't even a blister. The redness receded. Bits of celery and carrot, a feeble cluster of gray bubbles clung to the smooth young skin. There was no real damage.
Amy felt better. She knew at any time she might be hurt, permanently disfigured, the flesh seared from her very bones. This boy was nothing, this prom date for Gwendolyn was unimportant. But she saw the realization of her strength. She had to use it to protect those she loved. Auntie Ned. Gwendolyn. She had to work hard, be vigilant, do what she could, for as long as she could. Otherwise, she was just like everybody else, nothing more than a piece of meat.
SPONTANEOUS. Copyright © 2000 by Diana Wagman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.