Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

look at him. I did, and he moved toward me. His wet hazel eyes shone like glass. My dress felt hot against my thighs, and every pearl in the necklace I’d saved so long to buy burned on my neck like a match head. He could feel me in his hands already. He was the one man who ever turned full force from Lola to me, who rejected her when he could have had her. Later, even after I’d left him, he took care of Lola when I couldn’t.
    That was a long time ago, when I wore that dress and those pearls.
    Billy lived above the club. I went upstairs with him that night. I remember those hours, in rooms full of velvet furniture and racks of the showy costumes his dancers wore, file cabinets and piles of papers, and his bed that was big enough for four people. He was knowledgeable, Billy was, he could be gentle, and he used my feelings to surprise both of us. I didn’t sleep, and the next day, while Lola was at rehearsal, I went back to the apartment and told Charlie to get out. I can’t explain my state of mind. Charlie had been mine from the time I was a child myself. I thought he’d chosen me, was restored to me, but Lola had lit the fire that brought him, and she’d seduced or confused him into staying. He was devastated that I knew what he’d done and couldn’t stop doing, but it was only my knowing that allowed him to end it. I didn’t tell him to leave town. He exiled himself, drove back to Winfield and his whole favored-son routine without even saying good-bye to Lola.
    When I take stock now, I think to myself, I have Charlie and Elise and Nick. I couldn’t have cared for these children without their help. It took time to come back to Charlie, but I love him still after thirty years, and I like having my own house, separate from his drama with Gladdy I really seldom think of Lola now. Except for the questions Lark used to ask and stopped asking, it’s over and done, it’s finished. Like Elise says, there’s Lark and there’s Termite. These children have got nothing to do with Lola, except they came through her to get to me. The one has stood on her own two feet since she was barely up to my elbow, and the other is happy with a piece of dry-cleaner bag a yard long and a few inches across.

Termite
    He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves. He can see into the sky where there are no shapes. The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart. They’re the warm feel of what he hears and smells next to him, of those who hold and move and touch and lift him, saying these curls get so tangled, wipe off his hands, Lark, there’s Termite. He sings back to keep them away or draw them near. That’s all he’ll say, he won’t tell and tell. Lark bends over him and her hair falls along his neck and shoulders, her hair moves and breathes over his back and chest in a dark curtain that falls and falls. Her hair smells of flowers that have dried, like the handful of rose petals he grasped until they were soft and damp. Lark names the flowers and he says the sounds but the sounds are not the flowers. The flower is the shape so close he sees it still enough to look, blue like that, long and tall, each flared tongue with its own dark eye. Then the shape moves and the flower is too close or too far. The shape becomes its colors but he feels Lark touch it to his face and lips like a weightless velvet scrap. The flower moves and blurs and smears, he looks away to stop it disappearing. Pictures that touch him move and change, they lift and turn, stutter their edges and blur into one another. Their colors fall apart and are never still long enough for him to see, but the pictures inside him hold still. Their gray shades are sharp and clear and let him see, flat as the pages of books Lark holds near his eyes. The books are colors that run and shine but the