“What are those?”

Catherine points out the string around my neck.

“Crocodile teeth,” I say. “Someone gave them to me when I was in Madagascar. They’re for luck. At least in the old days people thought they were lucky.” I laugh. “They’d go into battle armed with crocodile teeth and expect to win.”

She picks at one of the flakes, then oils it.

“Tell us about your Madagascar lover,” she says.

Ernest looks up from his newspaper. The sunlight makes his forehead shimmer.

“Don’t tell her a thing,” he says. “It’s your business.”

Catherine tosses the bottle of olive oil at him. He ducks. It cracks on the concrete.

I rise to get a broom and dustpan, come back to shovel glass and oil into the metal pan. Catherine stands at my shoulder watching. I work fast so that she won’t have the notion to grab a sliver. I make a note to carry my oil in a plastic cosmetic bottle. Some of the slivers are as small as crushed ice.

Ernest is standing at the railing. He has poured himself another cup of coffee and is calmly drinking it. He brushes the hair back from his forehead. Streaks of gray and ochre and black. This is an ordinary morning, his look tries to say.

But Catherine’s look. She watches the glass like the proverbial charmed serpent with emeralds for eyes.

In the kitchen, I wrap the glass carefully in brown paper, shove it into the very bottom of the trash can.

When I come back to the terrace, Catherine is alone, sitting at the breakfast table.

“Where did Ernest disappear to?”

“Gone to the beach for a swim,” she says matter-of-factly.

“I wonder when he’ll ever get enough of you,” I can’t help but say.

Today I won’t tiptoe around her.

First she gives me one of those “What’s this?” looks, then she gives me what we’ve dubbed her movie-star smile, all bright and vacuous.

“He never gets enough of me,” she says, speaking slowly and staring over my shoulder. I’m tempted to glance back to see if she’s really reading cue cards, but I keep my eyes in hers. “Like I never get enough of him. But you, ‘you little horny bitch,’ you wouldn’t know anything about never getting enough of one man. Tell me about your lovers.”

“I think I’ll join Ernest in that swim.”

“Only the swim, girlie.”

Now she’s looking at me. Now she’s not the movie star. Now she’s the witch in the comic book. Now she’s the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.

“I’ll think about it. But you know how we little horny bitches are!”

She looks around for something to throw at me, and finding nothing, settles down, leans her lion’s head back, and catches the sun in her face.

Her forehead doesn’t shimmer; it glows.

13

Ernest isn’t in the water. He still has on his street clothes and is simply sitting in the sand, his arms around his knees, what I call my stone cat position, because I’d once seen a stone cat in a museum that some ancient Egyptian sculptor had fashioned and it looked exactly like me when I sat like that. I don’t say anything to him. I just sit down beside him and become a stone cat too. He doesn’t glance at me but seems to know all the same who’s there.