From Kiss Me, Stranger

Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were a hard cheese. At my most desperate, I've had to do such things because my children, like most children, don't understand deprivation, they understand only their own appetites--which is what makes children so appealing: they are all desire, wide-eyed and voracious.

"Mama, can I have this?" Lori asks, my eleven-year-old. She holds in both hands for my inspection an oil soaked sock which looks, I suppose, delectable. Her siblings are watching her hopefully. Recently they made a meal of wallpaper paste--a glutinous soup, heavily salted and peppered--and only the three youngest got sick. The others sat around afterwards and pretended not to gloat, though they looked very pleased with themselves. I suspect they all suffered stomach cramps. Lori's the most serious of my six girls, the child who looks most like me, a small crooked nose, green-green eyes, a swanlike neck but the stocky build of a field hockey player. She knows better than to eat a sock; it's obviously a sock. But the odorous oil, dark as molasses, might have her fooled; I recall how the heady smell of gasoline often tantalized me as a child.

"No," I tell her, "you can't have this." I take the sock from her, having to tug it from her grasp, then I toss it into the fireplace, where last night's embers ignite the sock in a splendid burst of blue flame. Lori weeps, hands over her eyes as if painfully blinded. The others join her. And I have a roomful of sobbing children. Thirteen, to be exact.

Some nights I dream that I cut off my left arm for the children's dinner and roast it for hours like a succulent leg of lamb, basting it with a thick gravy of my own blood, the house redolent with its sweet baking. I'm not usually inclined to thoughts as melodramatic as that, but the war itself is melodrama and all of us feel the strain. My husband, gone nearly a year now, was drafted by the bullies of the Revolutionary Militia and my eldest son, Lofe, only fifteen, joined shortly thereafter because, I fear, he liked the look of the uniforms.

Families, I've heard, have resorted to eating their house pets, something we don't have, fortunately, and a number of children have run away because, apparently, they felt they'd find better elsewhere. Had you asked me, when I was a teenager, what would become of my life, I would have told you any number of fantasies, none of which have come true. I was good at math and took for granted that I would be a scientist. It would be too easy to say that love did me in, but I must admit that, for a time, love made it seem that being in love was enough. When I met Marcel at the two-year Poly-tech, where those of us without connections or money went, he was by no means the handsomest or the smartest. To speak the truth, I was the smartest in our class of six hundred.

Marcel (pronounced MAR-cel because he thought Mar-CEL too effeminate) is a thoroughly good man, not the type to play hard-to-get nor the type to tell you one thing when he means another. In other words, he was not the type I was attracted to. The uncertainty other young men cultivated, their callous disregard of my feelings, their adolescent self-absorption, made for an edgy excitement that I'd almost found addicting. I had dated about twenty boys before I met Marcel, who sat next to me in calculus. At first I thought his lack of guile was an act, the way he'd blink at me and say, "Don't you look lovely today!" After we started going out, I realized that he was eminently trustworthy. It was such a novelty to be with someone like that, soon I couldn't imagine being with anyone else.

Love sneaked up on me, it seemed, threw a hood over my head, kidnapped me--I found myself doing things I never imagined I'd do, like opening a small computer-repair business with Marcel instead of going on for a degree in advanced mathematics, like living in a city flat instead of a country home where I might have awakened every morning to birdsong instead of bus horns, like having fourteen children instead of two. Sometimes I feel buoyed by my children as, during my girlhood summers, I felt buoyed by our too-salty sea--there is a comfort in my crowd of family. But increasingly I have a fear of the depths my feet cannot reach. Call it a fear of drowning.

What will become of us?

"Metal man! Metal man!" the children start screaming. They are clustered at the window. No tears now. The Metal Man, as they call him, is an Officer of the Revolutionary Militia who makes the rounds once a week--unannounced--to collect metal to be melted down for the RM's weaponry. It is the citizenry's job to gather an offering of nails, shrapnel, rebar, tin cans, anything for the cause. And Heaven help you if the Officer finds a cooking pot hidden in your kitchen.

"Get your nails," I tell the children. We spend a couple of hours every morning picking through the debris of the recent bombings-screaming Mimis-which have been frequent lately. While the children, under the close supervision of my most responsible--Lori, Nadia, Del, and Simon--scavenge for metal scrap, nails from wallboard and aluminum from window frames, I scavenge for copper wire and, if I am especially lucky, terminal boards, relay switches, network junctions, flatscreens . You never know what you'll find.

The metals Officer--his family name is Hermes, an alteration of a compromising ethnic name, I suppose--wears an aluminum stewpot which he's fashioned, through prodigious hammering, into a helmet. It bears a high, scratchy shine and sits a little too low on his head. He is a surprisingly young man, younger than I, to be exact, with one of those sweet rosy faces, whiskers only on his chin. I wonder what is wrong with him that he isn't in the fighting. The children open the door before he knocks. He bows ever so slightly when he sees me. I think he finds me somewhat attractive, though I don't know why, a mother of fourteen. I've lost weight, it's true, and I've noticed that a streak of gray at my left temple, which seems to have appeared over night, gives me a haunted look, the kind of startled allure you might expect of the heroine of a romance novel.

Since his visit last week, Officer Hermes has lost another tooth up front. Bad diet, I think. He's always chewing on toffee. His increasing toothlessness gives him a goofy look, like one of those retarded beggars I'd see on the Avenue of the Saints every morning on the way to the market. Before the war. There is no market now, except the black market, friends of friends who know friends who can get you this or that for the right price or barter.

"Good morning, kiddies, what gifts have you for me today?" He holds open his canvas bag like a child at Halloween, his jaw working a wad of toffee. "Can we have some candy?" the children whine. I think of chicks in a nest, always hungry, mouths gaping. The children grasp at the Officer's shiny polyester shirt, his leather belt, his rubber boots, his new blue jeans, which seem proof that he's keeping some collections for himself.

He's well fed, anybody can see, a little paunch above his belt. Something I'd like to punch, just to feel how soft it really is. "Where would I get candy?" he says cheerfully.

"You're eating it!" they shout in unison.

"You're an official!" Nadia says. "You can get anything!"That's the problem, I've decided, the "officials" of the world assuming more than their fair share.

"Get your nails," I tell the children again. Each child has a few handfuls and, as usual, we make a production of our offering, the children parading one after the other to the Officer's open bag. As the nails accumulate, their collective noise like the sound of someone going through a change purse, I think of the money Marcel and I horded before he was forced to join the RM--big paper bills which featured the President's smiling face over the slogan that made him popular so many years ago: "Let's grow smart, let's grow rich!" I try not to think of the many ways I could have spent our horde before it became worthless. Now the bills paper our leaky wall seams, and my children are wearing sandals I've fashioned from duct tape and polystyrene packing sheets . Boys and girls alike wear shifts I've stapled together from plastic shower curtains. I have failed them.

"Nice, very nice," Officer Hermes is saying, nodding his head agreeably at each handful of nails. Just then we hear a crash from the kitchen and I fear the worst, that Lori has not finished hiding the cookware.

The Officer looks up abruptly, like an alerted guard dog: "Sounded like a pan to me."

"That would be surprising," I say.

He purses his lips at me, suppressing a smile. "Let's take a look."

The children surround him, waving their hands and hopping in protest: "We don't have any pans!" "We're not hiding!" "Nobody's in there!" All of which make a convincing show of our guilt. Still, I can't help but love the children for trying.

When Officer Hermes opens the kitchen door, whose hinges are solid brass, by the way (such are the details that our dull-witted Officials overlook), Lori is at the kitchen sink scrubbing a plastic bowl furiously.

"Little Miss, why aren't you out here to greet me." Officer Hermes sounds like a storybook character. A wolf or an unctuous ogre.

"I'm being punished," Lori says matter-of-factly, "because I tried to eat a sock this morning."

Officer Hermes nods his head agreeably as if this made sense. That metal-heavy canvas bag at his shoulder, he strolls the length of the kitchen, sizing it up like a prospective tenant, then he opens the stove, which we haven't used in months, since there's no gas. Major appliances will be the next thing to go, I suppose.

"I could use these oven racks," he says. The children crowd around us. They are silent, watchful.

"You think we'll never cook with gas again?" I say. "Is that what you're saying, that the quality of life under the RM--provided the RM wins--will be so meager?"

The Officer rights himself, his face flushed: "I didn't say anything like that. Life will be better, everybody knows life will be better. But first--" he glances at the children as if to warn them, "but first we have to finish winning the war, don't we? We can't hold back, can we? Everybody has to sacrifice, don't they?" Finish winning the war. How careful he is.

"We sacrifice plenty," says Simon, aware of the implicit blame. "Bring a written order from Home Base," I say, "and we'll give you our oven racks."

"I don't need a written order," he snaps. "I have the mandate to take anything that can be spared." Why is he suddenly angry?

"You've got plenty from us already," I insist. Now I'm getting angry too, though I realize an argument's only going to put my family at a disadvantage. Calm the man, I tell myself. Flatter him. "You're right, Officer Hermes, you can do anything you please, but today's not the day for oven grills. Tomorrow maybe."

The young man looks at me for a moment as if trying to determine the depth of my disdain. Perhaps my motherly authority daunts him; perhaps he wants me to respond to his male charm, whatever he thinks that may be. In any event, he stoops into the open oven and pulls out the two racks. "This will suffice," he says.

Why I start crying at this point is complicated. I've never respected women who resort easily to tears and I myself usually have a tremendous reserve of patience. In this instance, however, I feel overwhelmed--so much has been taken from me already, I can see myself and the children reduced to living in a burned-out bus, as I've heard some families have resorted to doing on the east side of the Capital. When the fighting started, I was convinced that life under the RM would be no different from life under the PM, and Officer Hermes seems to epitomize my conviction. This candy-mouthed, pot-bellied, soft-shouldered boy of a man has the gall to stand in my kitchen and, without a twinge of compunction or conscience, take from me, take from my children. And it's just the start, isn't it?

My face covered with my hands, I try to retrieve my tears with a ragged breath--I don't want to give the Officer the satisfaction of my anguish.

"What's this?" I hear him say. "How dare you!"

I look: one of the children, Del, has smacked him in the back of the neck with a wooden spoon. Before I can admonish Del, Nadia strikes him with a small fist in the stomach and then--a horror to behold--the children fall upon the man, pummeling him. He's so surprised, he offers no resistance, only covers his face with his arms and shouts, "Oh!" And I'm so shocked it takes me a moment--no more than a moment, I swear--to yell at the children: "Stop right this minute!" But this hardly sounds strong enough. I start pulling them away. They are furious. Have my tears incited them?

"Please stop!" I'm screaming through the rain of fists.

The man is down, balled up on the floor. Again I hear him say, "Oh!" The children themselves are hollering a babble of protest: I hear "candy!" "give me!" "unfair!" "nasty!"

I peel the children away, so furious I lash out with one arm, smacking Nadia, my fourteen-year-old, across the mouth. She howls in pain and this brings the children to attention at last. They fall back, panting, several of them teary-eyed, noses runny. Nadia's lower lip is bloody. Lori dabs at it with the wet cloth she was using at the sink.

I stoop to help up Officer Hermes but he won't budge, balled up as if he feared for his life, though certainly the children's attack, while painful, was hardly life-threatening. I am reminded of those histrionic soccer players who make a show of their injury on the field in order to stop the game and gain everyone's attention. Big babies, I've always thought.

An apology is half out of my mouth--Officer Hermes, please understand how upset the children are--when I realize that the man has passed out and yet managed, at the same time, to hold this pose. Is that possible? "Get some water," I say.

One of the children brings over a full glass and, before I can take it from her, dumps it over Officer Hermes's helmeted head.

"A lot of good that does!" I yell. "Get some more."

I unfold the fainted man; the children won't back away, fascinated. I put my ear to his mouth, a finger to his neck, a hand on his chest. Nothing. I do this again. Nothing! I tilt his head back, with two fingers clear his mouth--toss away a half-chewed toffee--depress his tongue, then give him a good breath, mouth-to-mouth, for a few seconds, watch his chest rise: no obstructions, he can breathe just fine but he's not breathing. Then I check his pulse. Nothing! The man is dead! I straddle him, my hands on his chest, I pump his heart, one-two-three, one-two-three. Wake up! I scramble back around, his head in my lap, clear his throat, blow life into him again. Then back to his chest, pump and pound. Wake up!

Drastic measures, I'm thinking, this is a time of drastic measures, what will they do to us, set an example? shrug it off as an accident? did he have a prior medical condition? I'm at his mouth again when he abruptly comes to life, bucking as if from a prod of electricity. One of the children screams. The others back away. Officer Hermes has rolled to his side in a fit of coughing and gasping. I'm crying again, this time with relief. I stand up, tell the children to give the man some room, then I help Officer Hermes to his feet. He's panting, one hand to his chest, his watery eyes wandering from side to side, his helmet askew.

"What time is it?" he croaks.

"Morning," I tell him. He looks at me in a dreamy-groggy way, then half smiles. "Is lunch ready?"

"Not yet," I tell him, "Come back later." Humor the man.

He shakes his head in wonderment. "I have an appetite for something Italian. Manicotti maybe?"

"Here's some water." Lori offers him a glass.

He takes it, holds the glass to his nose, sniffs once, then hands it back. "Thanks."

"Here's your bag." Simon tries to hand it to him.

"Goodness," he says, "it's heavy, isn't it?"

"Full of nails," says Simon.

"A silly thing to carry around all day, don't you think?" the Officer says cheerfully.

The children nod in agreement. They look frightened. One hand on his hot back, I escort Officer Hermes to the door.

"When did you say lunch was ready?" he asks.

"Later." Brain damage, I'm thinking. A serious rupture of synapses.

"We should do this again some time," he says at the open door.

"Next week," I tell him. "You visit us every week, remember?" I'm wondering who saw him enter; who will see him leave; can his injury be traced back to us?

"Every week," he echoes. He's staring at the car-sized crater in the center of our street. "Shouldn't we do something about that hole?"

"I'm going to plant flowers in it," I say. "Nice." He's nodding at thought. "Let me know if I can help. I like dahlias."

As soon as he's on the stoop, I slam the door shut. I'm trembling, a headache crashing through my skull like storm waves. The children are crowded at the window, watching the Officer. "Get away from there," I bark. "Thom, what are you chewing--what's in your mouth?" He swallows before I can investigate but, of course, I know toffee when I smell it. A few others are chewing too. Pickpockets!

"You should be ashamed of yourselves," I scold them. "The man almost died."

"He wanted to take our oven," says Thom.

"Our oven grills," Del corrects.

"He was going to turn us in," says Lori.

"He wouldn't give us any candy." "Selfish old man." "Is he coming back?"

"If he comes back we won't let him."

"He'll report us."

"If he comes back we'll kill him."

"Shut up!" I snap. "Don't any of you talk about killing anybody or anything."

"You kill mice."

"And pigeons."

"And crickets."

Things we've been eating lately when lucky enough to trap them.

"Did you hear me?" I say in the manner that silences them. "I didn't raise a household of homicides."

"Nasty man," one of them mutters.

"Get your tools, we're going out," I tell them.

Their tools are sticks, plastic prods, arm-long scraps of lumber for leverage, anything that helps them dig through debris. It's dangerous work and I don't like how common it has become for us, but I have to keep them busy--in their boredom they've nearly torn apart our two-story rowhouse.

I am more than dismayed when, a few minutes later, I discover Officer Hermes sitting on our stoop. He looks up at me, blinks his boyish eyes, half-smiles his goofy smile.

He says, "Where're you going?"

"Step around him," I instruct the children, who march out double-file.

It's an overcast blustery day. I hear intermittent mortar fire on the wind, the RM blasting the PM, probably. On the north side. We're on the east, where the mimis drop.

I say, "We have errands, Officer." He is most definitely a different man.

"Can I go?" he asks.

"Can we stop you?"

He smiles again. "I don't think so, I'm an Official."

"Don't you want your bag?" He's left it on the stoop.

He waves away my concern. "Too heavy."

The children regard the canvas bag longingly, all those nails we could sell to a scrapper. By the time we return, someone will have stolen it, you can be sure. We walk to the business district a few blocks east, the children chanting the multiplication table in time to their marching. It looks like everyone's out today with their tools and tote bags, their hand-wagons and shopping carts. I've seen some people collect any- and everything they can find, no matter how worthless: fractured bricks, grapefruit-sized chunks of asphalt, handfuls of shattered glass. Something's better than nothing, they must think. The scavenging has gotten so bad, none of our buildings has doorknobs or door handles or stoop banisters any more, metal is so valuable; it's made for suspicious neighbors: we're hardly talking to one another now.

"Look at this," Officer Hermes says. He's yanking at the door of a gutted Minotaur automobile. "It's a gold mine!" The children laugh at him.

Everyone knows--or almost everyone--that the metal of the Minotaur, our national automobile, is so poor in quality it's not worth recycling. You'd do better to strip the plastic, which somebody has already done.

"Help me out here," the Officer exclaims. I don't want to see the man have another heart attack, so I order the children to unhinge the car door, which they do easily, their many little hands adept at close work.

"The door's enough," I tell the Officer. He's hefted the thing onto his back.

"It's heavier than it looks," he says. Or he's weaker than he knows. Though it's a cool day, he's sweating, too flushed from exertion.

"Stay away from his pockets," I tell the children. I see their mouths working on toffee. Who knows what else they have lifted? The man's belt is missing. "Who's got his belt?" I demand, but the children ignore me and march on, chanting, Eleven times eleven makes one hundred twenty-one, twelve times twelve makes. . . . Even Marimar, our two-year-old-whom I carry--mimics the sing-song: leben rimes leben make un-hundreds. . . .

"You could leave the door here," I tell the Officer, "and we'll pick it up on the way back."

"Do you think I'm that simple?" Hunched over like an old man, he peers up at me from under his burden. He is trudging behind us with an uncertain step.

"To tell the truth, Officer, that door is worthless."

"It feels like more than that," he says. "The manufacturer weights them with composite sludge--that's what makes them so heavy."

"It feels very heavy."

"But it's worthless."

"Nothing that weighs this much could be worthless." The young man's going to kill himself, I'm thinking. "Let's dig here," I announce. It's not an especially promising site, a few low-rises that have been reduced to heaps of wallboard and mortar, but I want to give the Officer a rest. The children look at me in question. "Here," I repeat. "Group Alpha take the northeast quadrant. Betas take the southeast and so on." We always work clockwise and alphabetically. My attempt at giving them some structure.

"I'll guard the door," Officer Hermes says.

"That's not necessary," I say.

He sets the door down gingerly, then lies across it as if it were a cot, resting on his side, his hands as a pillow.

"Are you all right?" I ask.

"Just a little nap," he says. "Maybe you should go home."

"I can't move another inch."

I lean forward, close to his flushed face. He won't open his eyes. "Do you have a condition?" I hand off Marimar, then grab at what I think is a medical alert bracelet on the Officer's left wrist, but it turns out to be only an I.D. bracelet, solid silver: it says, "Hermes." Again I ask him, this time more loudly: "Do you have a condition?"

"Very tired," he mutters. "A few minutes."

"Don't die!"

He opens his eyes. "Am I dying?"

"It looks that way," I say quietly.

"I don't feel like I'm dying."

"I think it's a heart attack, Officer."

"That won't do," he says. He tries to sit up but can't find the strength. He gasps. "That won't do at all. I can't die." Panicked, he gazes up at me like a spooked child.

Instinctively I lay an open hand on his forehead. "Just relax. We'll get you help."

The children have crowded around again. "If he's dying," says Lori, "we should leave him here."

"But take his boots," says Del, "they look like new." How have my children grown so callous under my care?

"Enough!" I instruct them to lift the car door, which we'll use as a stretcher. They whine about the burden.

"He's too fat," one of them says.

"I've tried to diet," Hermes replies feebly. "And I'm walking all day."

"Sometimes it's simply a matter of heredity," I tell him. "Simon, keep your end up." Simon sighs. By the time we get Officer Hermes to a Security kiosk, many blocks from our flat, it's dark. Although he's still conscious, Hermes looks like a corpse, lying on his back, hands folded on his chest, his eyes open to the sky. The several times we've stopped to rest I have checked his pulse and found it wildly erratic. "Don't speak," I've instructed. "Think of snow. White, quiet, blankets of snow."

"I'm thinking of popcorn," he said, "acres and acres of popcorn."

At last, the children groaning with fatigue, we have set him and the car door in an arc of yellow light just outside the kiosk. This is our ultimate scavenge, I think ruefully.

"Where are his pants?" the Security Officer wants to know. He's a florid old man with a handle-bar mustache. He wears a dirty baker's uniform and, on his narrow head, a cracked, white enameled pot. He's so distracted he doesn't seem to mind my children crowding around him, their hands reaching for his whistle, the stripes sewn onto his filthy tunic, the sommelier's cup dangling from his neck. Besides his blue jeans, Officer Hermes is missing several other personal items: his boots, his shiny pot-helmet, his belt, his socks.

"This man's half naked!" the Security Officer says.

"I don't know what to tell you," I say. "You can't put anything down these days without somebody picking over it."

"You put him down?"

"Many times," I say with regret. "He's heavier than he looks."

"I will have to write a report," he says.

I sigh. "Of course you will."

The Security Officer regards his fallen comrade sadly. "He was one of our best collectors, you know."

"Oh, yes, he's good at his job," I say. "Children, leave the Security Officer alone." They have pulled his stripes off of one arm.

"He died in the line of duty, I'll put that in my report."

"He's not dead!" I say. God forbid that he die in our care.

"What's that?"

"No, I'm not dead," says Officer Hermes.

The Security Officer flinches: "Good God! What are you doing, man?"

Officer Hermes smiles up at him politely. "I had a heart attack, I think."

The Security Officer smooths down his mustache, takes a deep breath, reassumes his calm: "How did that happen?"

"Years of bad diet, I'm afraid, and not enough exercise--"

"Or it could be a matter of heredity," I remind him.

"No," says the Security Officer, "I mean, what brought it on?"

"He over-exerted himself," I say. "In the line of duty, I should add. He was trying to carry a car door."

"Car doors aren't worth anything."

"Apparently Officer Hermes doesn't know that."

"Ridiculous," the old man huffs. He glares down at Hermes. "Don't you know enough not to take a car door?"

"Apparently not," Hermes sighs. "Will this go on my record?"

"I should say so." The Security Officer sounds disappointed. "I'll have to write a report." He starts opening drawers, searching for paper, I suppose. His computer terminal looks dead. Not enough AC apparently.

The children are entreating him: "You got candy in here?" "Can I see that cup?" "Where'd you get that whistle?"

Officer Hermes says to me, "I feel so stupid."

"You were just trying to do your job." I surprise myself that I can be so kind to this man who was so recently unkind to me. Sermonizers on the radio encourage the belief that the war brings out the best in each of us, but this is only wishful thinking. Most of what I've seen has been less than ideal. Neighbors avoid one another--we have never been more distant--because everyone's panicked by the shortages. No one wants to be put in the position of having to surrender what little he or she has hidden, horded, salvaged or stolen.

"May we go now?" I say at last.

The old man looks up, half-startled, as if I've just awakened him from a nap. "I'll need your signature."

"On what?" I can't remember the last time I wrote my signature. Paper is impossible to come by, except for the few books of Marcel's I've been saving. And worthless money.

"Here, write it on my sleeve." He produces a ballpoint pen, one of those cheap plastic kind that always leak when they're half empty. I sign a pseudonym--Madame Bovary--hardly legible on his tunic sleeve, he nods in satisfaction, trying to read my scrawl, then I leave abruptly, my children flooding around me.

I'm so weary, so confused by the events of the day. "Children, tell Officer Hermes good-bye."

"Can you make that farewell?" asks Hermes. I instruct the children to do so. Reluctantly they oblige.

Minutes later, as we're walking away, Lori says, "He's going to die, I bet anything."

"Yeah, he's meat," says Del "I won't miss him."

"Have some compassion," I scold them. "He's a sick man."

"If he wasn't sick, would you have compassion, Mama?"

"That's too hard a question to answer right now," I admit.

My honesty quiets them for a while, like a drop-cloth over a cage of finches. Ahead of us is the canyon of the darkened avenue, the dull orange flicker of candle flame in a few windows of the apartment buildings that loom on either side; I smell woodsmoke. Surprising that I hear no distant gunfire. From somewhere nearby, but not on this street, someone's playing a recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," a dreamy romantic tune.

"We didn't get any scrap today," Simon complains.

"I guess we'll have to work extra hard tomorrow," I say. The children groan in chorus. It's a pleasure hearing their collective voice: it buoys me a bit. "Watch your step," I remind them. "Who's in the lead?" Suddenly, from the gloom ahead, I hear a shrill note, loud and piercing like an alarm. One of my children has stolen the Security Officer's whistle.