Porochista Khakpour, “Kingdoms”
“Years after it happened, her rapist was trying to get in contact with her.
In the same week her dog arrived. Lucy called the local Greyhound Rescue chapter months before. She had filled out an application promising that she would be able to walk it at least three times a day, that she would never let it off a leash, that she would feed it regularly, that she would return it immediately should she no longer be able to act as a capable owner. She had had a short interview in which the representative, a chatty older lady with six greyhounds herself—“my six greatest loves in life,” she had called her reindeer-named dogs—had asked exactly what she was looking for. Lucy had said, Well, anything, a dog. You know? The greyhound lady asked her, But why a greyhound? I mean, I know the answer, but I want to know what you have to say on that. She replied that it was mainly because she knew they had to be rescued, that they were a cause, a good cause, that these dogs needed to be saved, and so why not. She had heard they made good pets as well. The greyhound lady chuckled and asked if she had given any thought to what type of greyhound she wanted, what gender, age, color, size, temperament. She said she wasn’t sure. The greyhound lady said, Well, you sound like someone who could use a male!”
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“Normally he got a leg in too, but this time it was just the one arm, and the doors closed on it. With great pressure, they clamped shoulder tissue against bone. As he pried at them, a train operator two cars down leaned out and shouted something hostile.”
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“Weekend afternoons during that sweltering, after-Jack summer of 1974, Sylvie and her roommate Lisa would wiggle into bikinis and slather themselves with baby oil and lie in the backyard under the sun. Periodically they wet themselves down using the hose in the shadowy space between the high walls of their house, where they lived on the second floor, and the neighboring house. Sylvie opened the tap one afternoon and held the hose above her head and closed her eyes while cold rivulets coursed her scalp. When she opened her eyes she saw the silver tabby from across the street. The cat arched its back and hissed at the stream of water issuing from the hose. Sylvie adjusted the tap so the stream became a trickle and propped the end of the hose on a cindercrete block. She called to the cat, coaxed, ‘Which of your nine lives are you in, kitty? Do you learn something every time, or do you get it wrong over and over?’”
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“We might as well begin with the homes. The condos, the townhouses, the penthouses, the classic sixes and sevens. Let’s begin there and with the servants that cook and clean them, though ‘servant’ is not the term used. The wealthy prefer ‘housekeeper.’
This one time, I was called for an emergency paper intervention, dispatched on twenty-four hours’ notice to 70th and Park, where Isabel Shear led me past her snowy white bedroom, a capacious boudoir whose proportions easily exceeded my Brooklyn studio, and into her office, a tidy little space by the back staircase dedicated solely to the serious intellectual work of eighth grade.”
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“The younger sister—if she could still be called that, since she was no longer anyone’s sister, nor younger, lacking an older to be younger than—did not want a girl doll. What she wanted instead was a boy doll, one that could do all the things the brother had once done.
The sister said, The doll must have brown hair. And brown eyes.
It should look like it is the same age as me, and only we will know it’s older.
It must have freckles, but not too many freckles.
There is a perfect number of freckles, and that is how many I want my doll to have.”
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“The boy dawdled down the road into Tenmile with the practiced nonchalance of a troublemaker, shifting along like a raccoon, miming
terrific fascination at the foil wrappers and sun-scalded aluminum cans blown flat into the weeds at the side of the two-lane highway, stopping for items worthy or simply shiny, peering, sometimes picking one up, and then moving on. The sun had eased into the trees of the mountain, and Henry was at the put-in by the river watching the kid cross the bridge into town. Songbirds darted to their final assignations in the bleeding light. The bats pitched themselves at right angles into the mayflies milling above the water. Henry tossed the crust of his sandwich out his pickup window high over the river and watched as bats honed and dove for the morsel. The boy arrived at the town square. Henry started his truck and rolled alongside the boy, who did not look up.”
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