Free Women and Children First by Francine Prose Page A

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    Nasir said, “Okay, later maybe,” and straightened his clothes and walked back up to the house. Valerie just stood there. After a while she caught a whiff of smoke from the fire which reminded her of autumn, and she thought how often in fall she had driven along the edge of the forest, beside all the color, and imagined it would be even brighter inside, inside the woods and that beauty. So she would park and walk into the forest, but it was worse there, the light was wrong, you couldn’t see far enough, it had been brighter from the road. Now she stared at the fire, at the changing shapes, and thought how the very worst moments of waiting for life to begin are better—much better—than knowing it already has.

Creature Comforts
    R ICE TAPS HIS SKINNY , suntanned chest. He says, “Would I stiff my own brother?” On his face is the fixed, slightly glassy smile of a passenger in a convertible, going fast.
    Nicky and Kate can’t look at him. They can’t even look at each other. They’ve been on the edge of a kind of hysteria since Rice’s wife Pammy said, “That’s some gigantic jade plant you’ve got there,” and they both remembered how, when their twins were born, Pammy said essentially the same thing about the babies’ ears. It’s been eight years, the twins have grown into their ears, but other things have happened. Once, in an argument about nuclear power, Pammy said she was for anything that let her keep her creature comforts. Creature comforts! Rice and Pammy live in downtown Phoenix, in what used to be a motel cabin.
    Once a year, around Christmas, they drive down to Tucson with gifts for the twins. Kate and Nicky had assumed this was one of those visits until Rice announced that he would be working in Tucson all January and wanted to live in the guest house in Kate and Nicky’s backyard. Now he is trying to reassure them that he can be trusted to pay his share of the electric bill.
    Rice’s question hangs in the air. Would he stiff Nicky? Probably. But that’s only one of the reasons he shouldn’t live here. Rice drinks too much, smokes too much dope; at least he’s quit stealing cars. Twelve years of marriage to Pammy have pacified him; now it’s just credit-card trouble, and, rarely, trashing his living room. Still, Rice is family, and they cannot refuse, cannot tell Nicky’s younger brother he can’t stay in the empty guest house. Also Nicky will be away that month—in L.A., where he goes periodically to work as a recording engineer. Kate would sooner have Rice here than no one. The Courtly Rapist with his knife and good manners is the current media star.
    Everyone is trying so hard that Kate actually pretends disappointment when they learn they’re not getting Pammy too. Pammy can’t leave her office job in Phoenix, so Rice will commute home on weekends. Kate even feels compelled to thank Pammy on behalf of the jade plant. Then she says, “I don’t know—it does better if you neglect it.”
    “That wouldn’t work in my house,” trills Pammy in her cartoon-mouse soprano. “I’m a kind of a witch about plants. I just look at them and they die.”
    Right at that moment the meat grinder falls down off the top shelf, narrowly missing Nicky. Nicky says, “Who did that?”
    If Kate looks at Nicky she’ll laugh. Though maybe Rice and Pammy wouldn’t notice, they hardly flinched when the meat grinder hit the floor. There is a silence as everyone stares at the meat grinder. Finally Kate says, “Gee, I forgot we had that.”
    “I mean it,” says Rice. “You think I’d beat my own brother on a bill?”
    Kate feels a bit panicky. To no one in particular she says, “Know what I just remembered? Someone once told me that in India, the worst thing you can call someone is brother-in-law. It means you did it with his sister.”
    Pammy stares fixedly at the jade plant. Only when Nicky catches her eye does Kate realize what a strange thing she’s just said. The reason she