Read from "Helen and Frida" in Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger:

"I’m lying on the couch downstairs in the tv room in the house where I grew up, a farmhouse with sloping floors in upstate New York. I’m nine years old. I’ve had surgery, and I’m home, my leg in a plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work or school. My mother re-covered this couch by hemming a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Woolworth’s in Utica (“Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants Priced as Marked”) and laying it over the torn upholstery. Autumn leaves—carrot, jaundice, brick—drift sluggishly across a liver-brown background. I’m watching the Million Dollar Movie on our black-and-white television: today it’s Singin’ in the Rain. These movies always make me think of the world that my mother lived in before I was born, a world where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My mother told me that in The Little Colonel Shirley Temple had pointed her finger and said, “As red as those roses over there,” and then the roses had turned red and everything in the movie was in color after that. I thought that was how it had been when I was born, everything in the world becoming both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black-and-white world, the world of magic and shadows, disappearing forever in my wake.

Now it’s the scene where the men in blue jean coveralls are wheeling props and sweeping the stage, carpenters shouldering boards, moving behind Gene Kelley as Don Lockwood and Donald O’Connor as Cosmo. Cosmo is about to pull his hat down over his forehead and sing, “Make ’em laugh!” and hoof across the stage, pulling open a door only to be met by a brick wall, careening up what appears to be a lengthy marble-floored corridor but is in fact a painted backdrop.

Suddenly all the color drains from the room: not just from the mottled sofa I’m lying on but also from the orange wallpaper that looked so good on the shelf at Streeter’s (and was only $1.29 a roll), the chipped blue willow plate: everything’s black and silver now. I’m on a movie set, sitting in the director’s chair. I’m grown up suddenly, eighteen or thirty-five.

Places, please!

Quiet on the set!

Speed! the soundman calls, and I point my index finger at the camera, the clapper claps the board, and I see that the movie we are making is called Helen and Frida. I slice my finger quickly through the air and the camera rolls slowly forward toward Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, who are standing on a veranda with balustrades that appear to be made of carved stone but are in fact made of plaster.

The part of Helen Keller isn’t played by Patty Duke this time; there’s no Miracle Worker wild child to spunky rebel in under one hundred minutes, no grainy film stock, none of that Alabama sun that bleaches out every soft shadow, leaving only harshness, glare. This time Helen is played by Jean Harlow.

Don’t laugh: set pictures of the two of them side by side and you’ll see that it’s all there, the fair hair lying in looping curls against both faces, the same broad-cheeked bone structure. Imagine that Helen’s eyebrows are plucked into a thin arch and penciled, lashes mascared top and bottom, lips cloisonnéd vermilion. Put Helen in pale peach mousseline de soie, hand her a white gardenia; bleach her hair from its original honey blond to platinum, like Harlow’s was; recline her on a Bombshell chaise with a white swan gliding in front, a palm fan being waved overhead, while an ardent lover presses sweet nothings into her hand.

I play the part of Frida Kahlo."

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Call Me Ahab, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Call-Me-Ahab,674129.aspx.