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to ventilator wing? What kind of characters are up there?” He’s drawn a picture of a skinny little figure covered in a cobweb. She shakes her head. Why make decisions? She wants to hang out. She’s got this crazy routine down.
    But then he does the unthinkable. He reaches for her hand, tells her how much he loves her, how everything will be okay. He’s reaching for movement, to move beyond this moment; his decision’s been made. How dare this hospital rush them, how dare they. She simply isn’t ready. She heads for the door, throws it open and yells into the quiet, pale hallway, “DO NOT RUSH US!”
    The nurses’ station is unoccupied, but on a wheelchair by the door is the Seagram’s box filled with clean, folded laundry. She touches it, and it’s still warm.

BEAUTIFUL GIRLS
    F OR DAYS NOW SOMETHING HAD REEKED IN THE basement. None of us went down there, no laundry had been done and our mother had to hand-wash her stuff in the sink. She now stood in the kitchen in her pantyhose and mink, cursing, as she waved the blow drier over her fancy black bra while Franz waited for her in the living room.
    “Find that stink!” she yelled suddenly, chasing my little sisters around the dining room table. “Or I’ll throw all of you out.”
    “Good!” Daffodil yelled. She was nine. “I’ll go live at Shoshanna’s. They don’t have to eat roast beef every single night!”
    “Shoshanna’s, my ass. Here, you want some variety? How about an eyeround?” Mom openedthe refrigerator and tossed a package of beef that landed next to Daffodil’s foot.
    Feeling hungry, I picked up the piece of meat. “Hey Mom, 300 degrees for an hour?” I asked.
    “350. 45 minutes.”
    “We should hire someone to go down the cellar and find the stink,” Dorrie shrieked. “Like the boy who cleaned the rain gutters.” Dorrie was eleven and geeky with long, jagged teeth that didn’t fit right in her mouth. She wasn’t pretty like me or Daffodil. She looked more like our mother, big-toothed and sulky. Both my sisters, though, looked Italian while I looked more French, I thought. “We could hire someone,” Dorrie said again.
    “Do you think I’m made of money, Miss Priss?”
    “Then send Franz,” I offered.
    Mom’s faced flushed and her hands flew up to her hair. “We are not asking Franz because you three will take your little behinds down there, find the stink and get rid of it. Do you hear me, Dani?” She wasn’t fooling me; she believed Franz was too good for our stink.
    Mom had met Franz through the freezer plan. Once a month he would come with his list and Mom would check off what we needed—two packets of pork chops, a crown roast, a London broil—and the frozen hunks of meat would arrive in individual frosty plastic pouches, which my sisters and I would unload into the gigantic freezer in the basement.Now with the stink, we unloaded right into the refrigerator.
    As Mom glared at us, a skinny, sagging breast slipped out of her mink coat and gazed at us.
    “Your tit, Mom,” I said. Luckily, I hadn’t inherited that gene; mine were full and firm, perfect handfuls. But I was seventeen.
    Inggy stared into the mud, smiling, and I felt drunk all over, even my fingers felt stupid. The crème de menthe and Quaalude sloshed in my stomach as the band played the theme song to “Hawaii Five-O,” and we spun on the sidelines with our shakers high in the air. The noise swelled in my bones and Inggy’s bones and everyone’s bones—as if all bones were connected; I could tell Inggy felt it too. She closed her eyes and looked to the sky as if she were praying.
    Ingrid Oberlander, my best friend, was the color of milk with shiny blonde hair hanging down to her butt. At 5’11”, she was the boniest and most beautiful person I knew. She wanted to be a psychoanalyst and carried around a bent-up copy of
The Portable Jung
and gave me personality tests. We found out that I was ENFP, meaning I was lively, deeply psychic, prone to