Jane Shore   BUYING A STAR An ad on the radio says that you can buy a star. Call the toll-free number, charge it to your credit card, and they'll send you a parchment certificate of authenticity and constellation chart with your actual star circled, mapping your province of gaseous darkness, fire and ice, over which you can rule, like the Creator. The summer we got married, remember the night we wrapped ourselves in blankets and lay on our backs on the hood of our Toyota, watching the meteor shower? For an hour, we lay so still-- a husband and wife side by side atop the stone lid of a medieval sarcophagus. Beneath us, the damp grass shivered with crickets and, above, quick as eye blinks, meteors streaked across the sky. Every few seconds we'd see one die. There! there! in the upper-right-hand-corner-- no martgage, no upkeep, no perpetual care-- there we are! buried in darkness, flashing, then out. For Howard   DRIVING LESSON "Name the eight states that begin with the letter M," Mohammed, my driving teacher, says. I'm forty-one. Am I in school? I glance at the rear-view mirror, glad I can't see my embarrassing STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker. I spread a ghost-map across the windshield, scroll down the east coast, top to bottom. "Maine. Massachusetts. Maryland." Sweaty left hand gripping the turn signal, I step on the gas, edging out into congested Nassaue Street in Princeton. Twenty years since I last drove a car, twenty years since I was a passenger in the red VW Bug my boyfriend Jeremy totaled on a Vermont back road, twenty years since plastic surgery fixed my broken cheekbone and eye socket, my double-vision, but not my fear. "Are you hurt?" the priest has asked, standing over me as I lay dazed on bloody gravel, waiting for the ambulance. Last rites? He'd just happened to be driving by. Where am I? It's as if I just woke up and found myself in the driver's seat, steering the company car onto suburban country roads past ugly half-built multi-million-dollar mansions, muddy sub-divisions, my right foot on the gas, my cold hands at the wheel nailed at ten and two o-clock. "Minnesota," I say, "and Michigan," stopping inches from the crosswalk. An orange hand flashes DON'T DON'T DON'T. I check the speedometer, fuel guage-- dash board lit up like a cockpit. "Mississippi, Missouri. Mobile, and in mobile, as in automobile," I say. "Get it?" Bearded Mohammed frowns, not in a joking mood. Strip malls and luxury town-house condos streak by as his sneakers tap-dance around his safety-breake. We lurch. Stall. Cars behind us honk. "Montana. Have I named them all?" "Next lesson, I'll teach you how to park," Mohammed grins, adjusting his turban. "Now, name four states that begin with the letter A." I rev my engine. "Alabama, Arkansas." At sea, I'm seasick in the Bible Belt. "Arizona. Oh God, I almost forgot Alaska!" "Relax," Mohammed says. "It's like I told you. While you drive, you can keep your mind on more than one thing at a time." Kathy Keler Corset 1997, 10" x 7", oil and alkyd on wood panel   see more of Kathy Keler's work     MISSING These children's faces printed on a milk carton-- a boy and a girl smiling for their school photographs; each head stuck atop a column of vital statistics: date of birth, height and weight, color of eyes and hair. On a carton of milk. Half gallon, a quart. Of what use is the body's container, the mother weeping milk or tears. No amount of crying will hold it back once it has begun its journey as you bend all night over the toilet, over a fresh bowl of water. Coins of blood splattering the tile floor as though a murder had been committed. Something wasn't right, they say, you are lucky. Too soon to glimpse the evidence of gender, or to hear a heartbeat. Put away the baby book, the list of names. There are four thousand, at least, to choose from. No need now to now their derivations, their meanings. Faces pass you in the supermarket as you push the wire cart down the aisles. The police artist flips through pages of eyes and noses, assembling a face, sliding the clear cellophane panels into place. You take a quart of milk. Face after face, smiling obediant soldiers, march in even rows in the cold glass case.   EVIL EYE When my daughter was two, watching The Wizard of Oz on television, the moment the Wicked Witch appeared in a scene, Emma would walk, as if hypnotized, to the glowing screen and kiss the witch's luminous green face in the same placating way my mother used to kiss the little silver hand, the charm she wore on a chain around her neck. The day Emma was born, my mother bought a yard of narrow red satin ribbon. She tied a bow, several bows, and basted the loops together in the middle until they formed a big red flower she Scotch-taped to the head of Emma's crib to protect her while she slept. My mother made a dulpicate, in case I lost the first one, to pin onto the carriage hood. "You can never be too safe," she said. My mother used to coo in Yiddish over the crib, "Kine-ahora, kine-ahora, my granddaughter's so beautiful." And then suddenly as if remembering something, something very bad, she'd go "pui pui pui," pretneding to spit three times on the baby's head. My mother wasn't some fat bubbe from the shtetl. She owned a business, drove a car. I'd never seen her act this way before. Sitting at her kitchen table, she lit another Kent. "You should have given Emma an ugly name to ward off the evil eye. Harvey Lebow, the brilliant young concert pianist? The evil eye was jealous, so it killed him. Mrs. Cohen, who won the lottery and went on a spending spree? A week later, she had a miscarriage. Remember Bonnie, the doctor's daughter, you friend who died of leukemia when you were growing up? Her mother wore a floor-length mink; they had a pinball machine in their basement rec room. That's like an open invitation." My mother stubbed out her cigarette. My hand fanned the smoke away. "Ma, You don't really believe in that hocus-pocus, do you?" "Maybe not," she said, "but it doesn't hurt."   THE SLAP In 1959, at Horace Mann Elementary in North Bergen, New Jersey, wearing white on Wednesday meant you were a virgin, wearing red on Thursday meant you were a lesbian, wearing green on Friday meant you were a tramp. The gymnasium, with its locker room and showers and drains, moldered in the basement. Sanitary napkin dispensers were always empty, and the changing room with stalls for privacy had white flapping curtains that didn't quite close. I undressed, and put on my gray cotton symnsuit out in the open with all the other girls. The gym teacher, Miss Piano, wore a Dutch-boy haircut. Her legs were as solid as a baby grand's. She called us by our last names, like privates in the army, and clapped, as each girl climbed the ropes and disappeared into girders and beams and caged light fixtures on the ceiling. When my turn came, I gripped the lowest knot and dangled down; my legs drawn up, I looked like a dying spider. On wooden bleachers, chummy as sorority sisters the lucky girls who had their periods gossiped and did their homework after handing Miss Piano a note from the nurse. Where was my excuse? After gym class, I'd undress in my own stall, stuffing my gym suit back into its mildewed bag. But first, I'd examine my underpants for the red smear of "the curse." The last of my friends, the last of the last. No luck. I'd swathe myself again in my neutral clothing. When one morning, I woke up, two black ink blots staining my pajamas, I dragged my mother out of bed to tell her. We squeezed into the bathroom as if into our clubhouse, as if she were about to show me the secret handshake. Blushing, leaking, I sat on the tub's rim, as if poised over the mikveh, the ritual bath. Stuffed inside my underpants, the bulky Kotex, safety pins, and elastic sanitary belt I had stored in my closet for over a year. My mother took a seat on the toilet lid. "Ma," I shyly said, "I got my period," then leaned over to receive her kiss, her blessing. She looked as though she were going to cry. In her blue nylon nightgown, her hairnet a cobweb stretched over her bristling curlers, my mother laughed, tears in her eyes, and yelled, "Mazel Tov! Now you are a woman! Welcome to the club!" and slapped me across the face-- for the first and last time ever-- "This should be the worst pain you ever know."     Jane Shore teaches at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC and Vermont with her husband, the novelist Howard Norman, and their daughter, Emma. Her first book of poems, Eye Level, won the 1977 Juniper Prize; her second book, The Minute Hand, won the 1986 Lamont Poetry Prize, awarded by The Academy of American Poets; and her third book, Music Minus One, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book is Happy Family, published by Picador USA in 1999. Published in Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2001.