Free Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison Page A

like?” Gordon Skeetling said, resting against his raised arm. He was wearing not the tan sweater today but a similar blue one. He smiled and encouraged me to make a funny story out of Ellen, but New Haven is too small. He’d recognize her—he’d turn out to be her next-door neighbor. “Why does she do this?”
    â€œI have no idea,” I said. Then, “I took something from her.”
    â€œYou stole it?”
    â€œIt was worthless.”
    â€œTo you. What did you do with it?”
    â€œI threw it away.”
    â€œHmm.”
    I could tell he was more curious than troubled, that he didn’t care whether Ellen was deprived of her possession or I turned out to be a thief. Have I described his face? Bony planes, lots of forehead. The expressive black eyebrows moved one at a time, and the gray, straight hair flopped when he gestured. A face ready to listen attentively, and then laugh. Now he was getting ready to laugh not at Ellen but at me. At least I’d deflected his attention from her. Usually someone who looks about to laugh doesn’t bestow permission here and there, as Gordon Skeetling did, but his wasn’t mocking or condescending laughter. What amused him was apparently the oddness of human behavior. He seemed to exist, just then, in order to hear me, and so he satisfied a longing I’ve always had: to explain, as if something would be accomplished forever if someone would only listen until I was done. . . .
    â€œWhat did you take ?” His voice rose zestfully with the question.
    â€œA sugar bowl.”
    â€œSugar bowl? Hmm, a sugar bowl!” Was a sugar bowl a symbol of something? The womb?
    But he didn’t keep on listening. He looked at his watch and gathered some papers, telling me to leave the key in the mailbox. “Take your time and don’t steal anything. No, if you want to, take whatever you like.”
    â€œI usually steal cars.”
    â€œThen you’re stuck, because I’m taking mine with me. But speaking of conscience, remind me to tell you about my dream. Oh, I’ll tell you now and be late. I had a German shepherd—a lovely dog—and she grew old and died. This was a dog with a conscience. If she did something she thought she shouldn’t have, she’d incarcerate herself in the bathtub, because she hated baths. So one day, after she died, I dreamed about a minister—a pastor, he was called in the dream—in Germany who was so conscientious, he threw himself out of his own church. Excommunicated himself. When I woke up, I remembered that pastor means “shepherd.” He was a German shepherd. Isn’t that good? Don’t I have great dreams?”
    Now he hurried away, and I missed this friendly man, who I thought probably resembled his dog. He’d have a functioning conscience, not one that operated like Ellen’s, without meaning, or that failed to operate, like mine. His would keep him from doing harm, and I wanted to stop stealing sugar bowls if only to please him.
    In the archive I began by dusting, and then I read. I read or skimmed a stack of articles copied from magazines or torn out: an old account of an election in Albany, a recent story about the New Haven homeless shelter. I could see no unifying principle or subject. It made no sense to group them by city, except that New Haven came up often. I was interested, because around here it’s a little hard not to focus on big, bold New York, which is only seventy-five miles away.
    I could already see that some stories could easily be discarded. I grouped the rest by subject: poverty, public transportation, crime. At the corner of the table I gathered those that piqued my interest the most. They were invariably about New Haven, I noticed. Then I noticed that they were almost all about a death, not the predictable death of an old person with a cluttered house but the shocking death of a young man or woman who hadn’t had time