Death Benefits

Chapter 1-2

"I am Yardena Marrano y Iglesias de Ximinez-Quick. My grandfather was Marrano and my grandmother was Iglesias de Ximinez. Their son, Enrique Rafael Marrano y Iglesias de Ximinez, married our mother, Anne Quick d'Serafini Held, in Seville where I was born and where we all lived until my father died. I don't remember much because I was just a baby, but Gari was six and remembers we lived in a big house with open windows and a Nana."

"And then mommy married Him," said Barengaria. "And then she died."

The children recomposed themselves.

"I'll begin," said Yardena. She spoke briefly and quickly about the story she read for English, the material she had covered that day in Social Studies and Geography, and lingered, because it was more difficult and more fascinating, over Advanced Geometry. Thane and Barengaria followed the simpler geometrical solutions in their heads. Yardena put the more complex geometry problem in the air between them, describing the angles, length of line, and proportions. Laying out the axioms, she arrived, quite happily, at the inevitable mathematical conclusion.

Thane spoke next about what he had done that day in Citizenship and in History, both local and American. But he was most concerned about the story he had read in English.

"This guy in England is sitting in his cottage during a rainstorm," he said. "His girlfriend, Porphyria, comes in, hangs up her wet shawl, and makes a fire in the fireplace. Then she sits down and spreads her wet hair over him. He realizes that she loves him and so he strangles her."

He paused while they waited.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"You would think there would be rules against that," said Yardena.

"Maybe the rules are different in England," said Barengaria. "They are in France, I know."

"No punishment at all?" Yardena asked.

"No," said Thane. "The last line is 'And yet God has not said a word.'"

They absorbed this sagely. It seemed to make sense.

But it worried Thane. He loved his sisters and knew that they loved him. He hoped he would not have to strangle them.

Barengaria talked about European History with emphasis upon current events. She taught them the French grammar she had mastered during class and the vocabulary she learned during recess.

As the light changed from dull to gloom, they turned to calisthenics. Like republics on the cusp of revolution, they moved from mental to physical exercise as the light failed. It was Thane's idea, a way of warming themselves against the night. He thought of it as a counterweight to the girls' ability to remember things better and to imagine solutions more quickly than he could. It was a way of defining himself.

Thane rigged a broomstick on looped rope suspended from ceiling hooks twisted into the joists and adjusted the crossbar for each to do chin-ups. They found jars of ancient preserves that they held in their hands and lifted toward their shoulders. They graduated from one-pound lifts to five-pound lifts to lifts of indeterminate weight -- cans of bolts or sacks of grout and cement. They did knee-bends and leg-lifts. They stretched and twisted. They knew the order of drill and moved from station to station with confidence. And if they arrived too early, they would do one-leg knee-bends while they waited.

They had no plan: they were not preparing for some future intellectual triumph or self-defining physical test. They were filling time, economizing on the present; otherwise the hours in the basement were boring.

So long as they could see each other, they spoke in whispers, they traded lessons. But as the dark came up from the floor around them, and their faces were dimly visible only in the band of gloom that eddied into the basement through the windows, talk tattered and stilled. They retreated into the comfortable self-absorption of exercise -- the stretching, pulling, twisting of their bodies denied them by the absence of afternoons at play. Their concentration shifted from their society to themselves. They relished the silence and the focus on their own bodies. And if they spoke, it was only to clarify a point in their lesson.

"What's the French for 'fruit cocktail'?" Thane might ask as he lifted a can toward his eyes.

"Compote."

"And in Spanish?" asked Yardena.

"Frutas mixtas."

They had explored the basement during the summer months when the light lasted longer. They could differentiate among the lockers by the smells they emitted. One smelled of naphthalene, a thick, clean, narcotic smell; another smelled of tree-rot and mold, the low, earthy smell of decay they associated with dead clothes and something else they could not quite identify until Barengaria said it reminded her of the sheets on her bed. Another locker held suitcases and trunks, and the last locker seemed to contain boxes or packages of irregular shape piled to the ceiling. This was the locker that smelled sweetly of an odor they could not identify -- until Barengaria noticed that Ms. Klumb, the substitute teacher, smelled the same. She told Thane and Yardena who surreptitiously sniffed Ms. Klumb as she walked down the hall. They all agreed that the odor emanating from the sweet locker was the perfume that Ms. Klumb wore. It was a small mystery solved. But what was that perfume doing in a locker in the basement and why did it smell so pungently from that locker alone?

--3--They had nowhere to go. They had nothing to do. They suspected other children had different lives with visible advantages. They attributed those advantages to having two parents, perhaps, or a bedroom with a desk and lamp, or a bathtub with hot water and soap. Without such advantages, they could only depend on each other.

Thane was a boy and allowed to be dusty and unwashed; Yardena was a child whose peculiar color and opinions distanced her from the expectations of her peers. But Barengaria noticed what others had and her own deficiencies. Some of her peers pinched their noses when she passed. No one chose to sit near her. She knew something was wrong. She didn't know how to fix it.

Once she stole some of the pink liquid from beneath the kitchen sink. She squeezed it into a black plastic film container she found in the street with a crack down the side that she repaired with scotch tape borrowed from the school secretary. After Thane and Yardena had gone to sleep, Barengaria stuffed a sock into the hole at the bottom of the sink and filled the bowl with the cold brown water from the tap. She smeared the pink detergent over her skin as sparingly as she could because she wanted to wash her whole body, but when she tried to wash it off, it only got soapier and soapier, suds without end. Buoyant bubbles slopped over the bowl and wet the floor, leaving her skin itchy, red.

She went to bed that night to dream of the Handsome Man, but as she stuck her thumb in her mouth and ran her forefinger beside her nose, she touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye. The detergent set her eye aflame. The more she rubbed, the more her eye burned, the more the tears flowed. It was the first time she had cried in years and years.

"I smell bad," she said one day in the basement.

Thane tilted toward her and sniffed.

"No you don't, Gari. You smell just fine. Like always."

"You can't tell because we all smell bad."

Thane lifted his arm, twisted his head around like a sleeping duck.

"The kids in school look at me funny and hold their noses when I pass."

"You need soap," said Yardena.

"Or some of that perfume," said Thane, jerking a thumb toward the sweet-smelling locker. Thane liked the smell. It reminded him of Ms. Klumb who had breasts.

"How can we buy soap?" asked Barengaria. "We have no money."

"If we each save a dime from our lunch money,” Yardena explained, “we should have enough saved up by the end of next week to buy a bar of soap. Thirty cents a day for ten days is three dollars. How much can it cost?"

"We've never bought soap," said Thane.

"It can't be too difficult," said Barengaria.

But it was. They stood before the racks of bewildering soap bars gorgeously wrapped and smelling like all the perfumes of Araby. Dial, Irish Spring, Zest, Safeguard, Ivory, Lux, Cashmere Bouquet, Jergens, Palmolive, Dove, Camay, Shield, Tone, Caress, Gentle Touch, Aloe and Lanolin, Vitamin E and Lanolin.

"I don't get it," said Thane. "What's it all for?"

"Different things," said Barengaria quickly reading the smaller print. "Some are for beauty; they are called 'beauty bars.' Some are to make you smell good; they are 'deodorant' bars. Some are to make you healthy; they have vitamins."

"You don't want to be beautiful, do you, Gari?" The thought that Barengaria might want to be beautiful was disturbing to Thane.

"No," she said. "Just clean."

"They don't seem to have any soap for that," he said, examining the rack. And then he suddenly laughed.

"What?"

"This soap has oil in it. See? 'Made with baby oil.' That's stupid. Why would anyone want to wash themselves with oil?"

Thane reached into the rack, pulled out another bar, and read: "'Kirk's Original Coco Hardwater Castile.' What does it mean?"

Yardena and Barengaria peered over his shoulder at the bewildering label.

"Castile is a province in Spain," said Yardena. "Columbus. Ferdinand and Isabella."

"And 'coco' must be 'cocoa,'" said Barengaria.

"But what is 'hard water'?"

"If this soap is from Spain, it should be good," said Yardena.

"Do you know what hard water is?" Thane asked.

Yardena was silent.

"It doesn't make sense," he said.

"Look," said Barengaria, "we should be able to figure this out. It's a possessive, an adjective, and three nouns. We just have to figure out the relationship among the nouns."

"The possessive is somebody's name. But who is he? 'Kirk.' Could be anyone."

"Maybe it's like telegraph language," said Yardena, "and all we need to do is add the prepositions. So it would be, maybe, 'Kirk's original cocoa [made from] hard water [in] Castile.'"

Since it seemed to make sense, they considered this seriously, but finally Barengaria said, "But who cares what the cocoa is made from or where it was made originally?"

"And what does cocoa have to do with soap?" asked Yardena.

"And if they have hard water in Spain," Barengaria continued, "it won't do me any good here. Ours is liquid "

"Someone must have placed this hard water cocoa in with the soap by mistake," said Yardena.

"This is no good, either," said Thane, pulling another bar out of the display rack. "See. It's for dry skin. You're going to use water, right?"

"I thought so."

"Why do they make soap like this?" he asked. "It just doesn't make any sense."

A wrinkled woman pushed her cart among them.

"Excuse me, children," she said. She took a cake of Dove Beauty Bar from the display.

"See," whispered Thane as she wheeled away, "she needed that."

They stood aside, as if by common agreement, and waited for someone more like Barengaria to choose a soap.

The Assistant Store Manager, arranging apples with the bruised side down, watched from among the fruit and vegetables.

Barengaria waited in expectation as a giggle of girls with buoyant hair and flouncy skirts came down the aisle, but they didn't stop at the soap.

A woman with teenage daughter in tow approached with her cart and stopped in front of the soap display. She threw a six-pack of Safeguard and another of Dial into her cart.

"You want Lux or Camay?" she said to her daughter.

"No," the girl said, "they dry out my skin. I want to try … Aloe with Lanolin."

"They all dry out your skin. No soap is any good for you. God! I'd be so happy if this damn family would use one bar of soap instead of six different brands."

"Safeguard doesn't seem to work on Bobby. He still smells like a locker room."

"At his age he's nothing but glands and hormones."

"But not me."

"No, dear. You're all sugar and spice and everything nice."

"Aloe with Lanolin, that's what I'll try. Or maybe Vitamin E with Lanolin."

"What all you children really need is brown laundry soap."

And she wheeled her cart away.

"Brown laundry soap?" said Thane when she was gone.

"No, I don't think so," said Barengaria. She reached tentatively for the Lux and then, at the last moment, her hand closed upon the Ivory.

"'Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure,'" Yardena read. "What does that mean?"

As they turned to go, the Assistant Store Manager blocked their exit from the aisle. He knew they were guilty because of the way they looked at the floor.

"Do you have anything in there that doesn't belong to you?"

Barengaria and Thane looked at him, Barengaria because of the bar of soap in her hand and Thane because he didn't know the way to the basement of the supermarket. But Yardena slipped her backpack off her shoulder and drew out a library book. She opened the back cover.

"I have an extension for another week," she said.

"What do you have in your hand?" he asked Barengaria. She held out the bar of Ivory.

"You have enough to pay for that?"

Yardena reached into the side pocket of her pack and withdrew a fistful of dimes.

"You pay for that right over there," he pointed.

They moved together to the cash register under the watchful eyes of the Store Manager in the gallery above, the Assistant Store Manager on the floor, and the three solemn women at the checkout counters.

"Do you want a bag for that, dear?"

"Yes, please," said Barengaria.

"Plastic or paper?"

"Plastic," said Yardena who was thinking ahead to the winter.

"Well, now you have it," said Thane as they walked home through the wintering woods.

"That man frightened me," said Barengaria.

But Yardena didn't hear what they were saying. She was worrying about the fifty-six hundredths that wasn't pure.