Crab Orchard Review Vol 5 No 1 F/W 1999

Ian Mitchell is a graduate of the MFA program in Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

In this volume:

$6.00 ISSN 1083-5571

Fall/Winter 1999

Rebecca McClanahan Colleen J. McElroy Ron McFarland Kyoko Mori Mihaela Moscaliuc Marie Nasta Debra Nystrom Gina Ochsner Tim Parrish Lawrence Raab Carrie Lea Robb Jane Satterfield Margot Schilpp Steven Schreiner Ellen Slezak Cathy Song Maura Stanton Virgil Suárez Maria Terrone J. C. Todd Ivón Gordon Vailakis Michael Waters Miles Garett Watson Carole Boston Weatherford Gordon Weaver Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Katharine Whitcomb Saadi Youssef

Volume 5, Number 1

Liviu Antonesei Joy Arbor-Karnes Julianna Baggott Debra Bruce Nelinia Cabiles Marcus Cafagña Carlos Cañeque Judith Ortiz Cofer Billy Collins Leigh Anne Couch Jason G. Daley Christopher Davis Sascha Feinstein Joshua Furst Lisa Glatt Beckian Fritz Goldberg Rigoberto González Matthew Graham Linda Gregg Mark Halliday David Hernandez Fleda Brown Jackson Mark Jacobs Alice Jones Joan Lindgren Lorraine M. López Khaled Mattawa Janet McAdams

Crab Orchard Review

Cover Art: Three photographs

by Ian Mitchell © 1999

Crab Orchard Review $6.00us Vol. 5 No. 1

Including Our 1999 Fiction & Nonfiction Prize Winners

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REVIEW

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REVIEW A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 5 NO. 1

“Hidden everywhere, a myriad leather seed-cases lie in wait . . .”

—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” Thomas Kinsella Editor Richard Peterson

Managing Editor Jon Tribble

Poetry Editor Allison Joseph

Prose Editor Carolyn Alessio

Editorial Interns Philip Balma Ruth Ann Daugherty Adrian Harris Samantha J. Lopez Lynanne Page Josh Pugh Alberta Skaggs Katy Williams Lesa Williams Nikita Williams

Assistant Editors Stephanie Buffman Nancy McKinney Melanie Jordan Rack Jenni Williams

Book Review Editor Jon Tribble

Fall/Winter 1999 ISSN 1083-5571

Graphic Design Consultant David Lott Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Address all correspondence to: Crab Orchard Review Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503 Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States for individuals are $10 for one year, $20 for two years, $30 for three years; foreign rates for individuals are, respectively, $14, $28, and $42.

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Copyright © 1999 Crab Orchard Review Permission to reprint materials from this journal remains the decision of the authors.

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The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations.

Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979) and appear by permission of the author.

Crab Orchard Review is indexed in Index of American Periodical Verse.

Visit Crab Orchard Review’s website: <http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/>.

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This issue is partially funded by the Illinois Arts Council.

Crab Orchard Review wishes to express its special thanks to our generous Charter Members, Patrons, Donors and Supporting Subscribers listed on the following page whose contributions make the publication of this journal possible. We invite new Charter Members ($250 or more), Patrons ($100), Donors ($50), and Supporting Subscribers ($25) to join us. Supporting Subscribers receive a one-year subscription; Donors receive a two-year subscription; Patrons receive a three-year subscription; and Charter Members receive a lifetime subscription. Address all contributions to Crab Orchard Review, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503.

CHARTER MEMBERS Edward Brunner & Jane Cogie Dwayne Dickerson Jack Dyer Joan Ferrell John Guyon John M. Howell

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PATRONS Alejandro Cรกceres Kent Haruf Richard Lawson Lisa J. McClure Lillian Peterson

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SUPPORTING SUBSCRIBERS Serge & Joan Alessio Janet Bahr-Ferry Joanna Christopher K. K. Collins Jeremiah K. Durick Corrine Frisch John & Robin Haller Karen Hunsaker Sharon Joseph Jerry Klinkowitz

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REVIEW

FALL/WINTER 1999

VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1

FICTION AND PROSE Nelinia Cabiles

Letters from Noa to Nowhere

1

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Barrio-Man

19

Lorraine M. López

Possibilities for Salsa Music in the Mainstream: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer

23

Jason G. Daley

A Careful Distance

52

Joshua Furst

She Rented Manhattan

68

Mark Jacobs

Cholera

81

Gina Ochsner

Eulogy for Red

115

Tim Parrish

Exterminator

126

Ellen Slezak

The Geese at Mayville

165

Gordon Weaver

Structuring Free Space

183

Rigoberto González

Our Secret Other Worlds

223

Rebecca McClanahan

The Other Mother

231

Marie Nasta

Line Dancing

243

Carlos Cañeque translated by Joan Lindgren

Borges Ascending: An Excerpt from the Novel Quién

264

Book Reviews

Recent Titles by Ned Balbo, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Lorna Goodison, Malena Mörling, Tim Seibles, and an anthology of fiction by Peace Corps Writers

249

POETRY Liviu Antonesei translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

Pastel

35

Joy Arbor-Karnes

Eurydice in Hades

36

Julianna Baggott

Learning to Say No at The Immaculate 37 Conception High School

Debra Bruce

A Father’s Instructions

38

Marcus Cafagña

The Car Thief House of Correction

39 41

Billy Collins

Apostrophe Colorful Fish

42 44

Leigh Anne Couch

Aphrodite in Tennessee

46

Christopher Davis

Easter

48

Sascha Feinstein

Mango Anders and the Norns

49 50

Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez

Feathers Scar Jump

93 94 95

Beckian Fritz Goldberg Memory on the Shoulders of the Gaze

96

Matthew Graham

Shaker Door, Circa 1820

97

Linda Gregg

The Muchness So Different from Heaven Arkansas Afternoons Winning Harmonica Not a Pretty Bird The Heart Flowing Out

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Mark Halliday

Missouri Bar

105

Fleda Brown Jackson

Television News: Arkansas, 1957 The Jungle Room at Graceland

108 110

Alice Jones

Issue

111

Janet McAdams

The Green Children

112

Colleen J. McElroy

Why Women Need to Dance Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith

140 141

Ron McFarland

The Visiting Team: Early Season Game

142

Kyoko Mori

Suffering

144

Debra Nystrom

A Long Breath

146

Lawrence Raab

The Invisible Fragile

149 151

Carrie Lea Robb

Killing James Bond

153

Jane Satterfield

Antique Dress

155

Margot Schilpp

Vanishing Point The Perfect Poem Desolated

156 158 159

Cathy Song

What Is Given Honored Guest Horizon

161 162 164

Maura Stanton

Lough Gill: View of the Lake Isle 199 of Innisfree Dear Maureen Seaton, Dear Maurya 200 Simon

Virgil Suárez

Cochino Connivance

202 204

Maria Terrone

Garden of the Impossible Faith

206 208

Miles Garett Watson

After Dinner at the Pig & Steak

209

Carole Boston Weatherford

From Birmingham to Bristol in a Boxcar Turkey Necks and Crowder Peas

211

Steven Schreiner

212

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley I Now Wander Elegy to West Point Fishermen Ruined Trails

214 215 216

Katharine Whitcomb

Cadzzilla

217

Saadi Youssef translated by Khaled Mattawa

Nocturnal Old Pictures from Kout Al-Zain First Snow

219 220 222

Ivón Gordon Vailakis translated by J. C. Todd

La naranja todavía es ajena/ The flesh of the orange

260 261

Contributors’ Notes

271

A Note on Our Cover

The three photographs on the cover of this issue are the work of Ian Mitchell, who graduated with his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Announcements

We would like to congratulate past contributors Deborah Cummins, Opal Palmer Adisa, Suzanne Kamata, and Ira Sukrungruang.

Deborah Cummins’ poem “Hostages to Shine,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 4, Number 1 (Fall/Winter 1998), was selected for a 1999 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.

The novel excerpt from Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with Tears and Suzanne Kamata’s short story “Driving,” both of which also appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 4, Number 1, were selected by Ntozake Shange for inclusion in The Beacon Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Men and Women of All Colors.

Ira Sukrungruang’s essay “The Gift,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 3, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 1998), was listed as a Notable Essay from 1998, chosen by Robert Atwan, series editor, in the 1999 Best American Essays.

Also, we would like to congratulate past contributors Ha Jin, Kent Haruf, and Jean Thompson, all finalists for the 1999 National Book Award in Fiction.

Correction: In our last issue, Crab Orchard Review, Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 1999), Ivón Gordon Vailakis’s name was misspelled.

The 1999 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize & John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize

We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists of the Third Annual Jack Dyer Fiction Prize and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize.

In fiction, the winning entry is “Eulogy for Red” by Gina Ochsner of Keizer, Oregon. Finalists in fiction are “Coney Island Sand” by Leo Haber, “Due to Illness” by Ernest McLeod, and “Candle Moon”

by Christina Murphy. The final judge in fiction was Carolyn Alessio.

In literary nonfiction, the winning entry is “Our Secret Other Worlds” by Rigoberto González of New York, New York. Finalists in literary nonfiction are “Eye of the Storm” by Sheryl St. Germain, and two pieces by Faith Adiele, “The Master of the House” and “Transmigration.” The final judge in literary nonfiction was Stephen Howie.

Both winners will receive $1000 and their works are published in this issue. Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks to all the entrants for their interest in Crab Orchard Review.

Please note the details of the 2000 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize in the back of this issue of Crab Orchard Review.

Crab Orchard Review’s website has updated information on subscriptions, calls for submissions, contest information and results, and past, current and future issues. Visit us at:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd>.

Nelinia Cabiles

Letters from Noa to Nowhere

Noa’s mother hemmed her in with lock stitching and two yards of lavender organza. The fabric, a violet stiff and shiny like meringue, hung from Noa’s slender body in loose, but inescapable folds. This was where she stood: on a red-lacquered footstool in the middle of her mother’s sewing room. Noa’s father had made the footstool when Noa was twelve, a few months before he left them, when Noa had become, in an unguarded moment, her mother’s muse and mannequin.

Noa hated organza. It made her head itch. She tried not to touch the dress with her hands. Noa, age fourteen, graceless, also hated georgette, satin, crêpe de Chine, habutai—fabrics cut on the bias for drape and movement, fabrics from which her mother, Philomena “Phee” Sabado, part-time dressmaker to Oahu’s faded beauties and pageant hopefuls, designed airy gowns that made her clients feel taller, weightless, calm. Noa suspected that the homecoming and prom confections her mother spun from layers of shantung and chiffon for her classmates allowed them to feel smug and shiny.

What Noa despised most was silk. Its sheen, the way silk cast and rubbed light on skin, seemed like mockery against her muddy complexion, against her limp, crooked hair. Ratbitten, her cousin Angelina had said once in passing, touching Noa’s hair as she walked by.

That silk borrowed its beauty from the play of light was fitting.

Silk was shallow and frivolous. Noa knew a thing or two about fabric.

“Not much to silk except how it feels. It’s not strong or comfortable.

Throw it in a dark room and what do you have? Nothing special.

Just something slippery. Useless,” she’d said to her mother who had asked with a trace of irritation why she always made such a face when she stood in silk.

Her mother said, “Silk’s too good for you, Noa? Maybe I should make you a dress of rice bags, hu? Maybe a polyester dress, green and orange, with velvet ribbons, maybe some lace? Ha, ha, then Crab Orchard Review ◆ 1

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you start liking silk, I bet.”

“I hate dresses, ma.”

Her mother was getting married. In forty days, she would be Phee Oue. Noa found her new name silly: open-ended vowels that had no fixed place in the mouth. Phee O-Way, Phee O-Way. To Noa, it sounded like a kind of pesticide for fleas. Secretly, she was amazed that someone would want her mother, skin as pale as rice polish.

Bird like, parrot mouth. Everyone knew she’d been left behind.

Dummy duty. That’s what Noa called it, dummy duty: standing for hours while her mother fitted, trimmed, pinked, piped. From practice, Noa knew how long fittings took, a beading, a hemming, restitching a sleeve, and she learned to bide long afternoons and most weekends, if there was a coming pageant or school dance, with cross-stitches and straight hemlines.

For the first ten minutes of dummy duty, Noa would fight the urge to touch her temples and pull on her ears, a ritual of tics that started in her fingers. She learned that if she contemplated her belly button, or the top of her right ear, or the mole which marked the dead center of her back, or the photograph of her father that she had hung directly across from her perch, the need would lessen, consoled to small sounds that escaped her every now and then. There was a discipline to standing still.

Noa raised her arms so that they were parallel to the floor when her mother, wordless, with a mouthful of glass-headed pins, poked her in the ribs. Her mother had developed a language of quick gestures: a tap, a pinky up, a double snap, to indicate what she wanted from Noa. Her fingers flew to her lips then to the dress until Noa’s left arm was beaded with yellow pushpins. It seemed to Noa her mother should have been a magician—all sleight and speed and ruse of hands.

Her mother’s clients, who were former Miss Makaha Beach, Mrs. Oahu-Filipina, Miss Cherry Blossom-Kalihi, certainly thought so. Oh Phee, they would marvel, as they slipped into their gowns, cupping their breasts, curving their hands over their hips, oh Phee, you’re magic. Look at me, oh, I never want to take it off, I mean it.

They would giggle, enchanted, stepping lightly from mirror frame to mirror frame, as though beauty was a room they had just entered, 2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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approaching the three-way mirror from the side and finding their profiles, their centers, their poise, and Noa, plain as muslin, would watch them shyly and with a helpless envy, because while her mother’s clients were now stout in the waist or had fleshy arms, flaws which could be concealed with the right cut and shape, they were, at some point in their lives, breathtaking, of this Noa was sure, and sometimes, as they spun and leapt in their evening dresses, Noa saw a glimpse of their strange power: a slide of shoulder, a dip of chin, an unhurried gaze.

The day her father left, whole fields of sugar cane were burning, giving off a terrible sweetness for miles. Noa, in her classroom, unaware that her father had left, had looked out the window that day and idly read the rising smoke from the tall fields as a kind of writing, ropy plumes handlettering the sky, then falling to water later that afternoon, Noa imagined, as flat squiggles of palani, which had come unexpectedly, surprising fisherwomen and netcasters along Malehu coast who had looked forward only to catching mamu and papio for the rest of the November fishing season. Palani: black, milky-eyed, were her father’s favorite fish to grill. The palani stormed in midday, a dark, sightless cloud in the water. If he had walked the beach during the late morning instead of sunrise, as was his habit, her father would have sensed something was coming; he might have believed in his luck again. But Noa’s father, already faithless, had left at dawn. It wasn’t until late the next evening when she had lain awake for hours and hours wondering and hoping for his return that Noa could make herself believe that anything was wrong.

“Why are you marrying Isamu, ma? He’s about as interesting as cement. Face like a pot sticker. The only thing he’s got going for him is his father’s fish market, which he won’t own until his old man dies.”

“Nothing good in gossip, Noa. Only makes you feel small inside.

Don’t repeat it,” Phee frowned. “Anyway, Isamu thinks I’m beautiful, Noa. And he loves me. Has eyes only for me. More than I can say for your dad. In all our years, I never felt—” “No. Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Hu. Okay.” Phee tapped Noa on her ankle. Noa turned. “Honey, give Isamu a chance, hu. He’s shy. He thinks maybe you don’t like him.”

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“He’s right. I don’t.”

“Oh, Noa. He’s trying so hard. Something you’ll like: He’s going to buy two dress forms, so you never have to stand still for me again.”

On the wall in the kitchen, Noa’s father kept a tidal calendar, which showed the hours of high tide and low tide and phases of the moon. He told Noa that this helped him plan his fishing for the weekends. Noa’s father was a woodworker, reluctant. He built and fixed chairs and tables, the occasional bookshelf, but did not love wood. He lived to fish. Before sunrise, he would head to A’ala Bay, a fifteen-minute walk from their house. He said the ocean gave him peace. He said the ocean went through different moods during the day, all forgettable, and he was sure he had witnessed most of them, but some mornings, when it was still early enough that the horizon wasn’t yet a hard blue line that held the ocean in, he said the ocean would talk story: about the quietest places to fish, what a measure of love was, the things he still could hope to be.

The ocean can tell you things you forgot you knew, about yourself; about how moi comes up in hightide and in dirty water, and that morning glory blooms during mamu season, he said when they were walking home from the beach one morning. Because water has all the time in the world. It feels no rush. It comes and goes. It listens only the moon, the wind. Sometimes it’s flat, sometimes cold and deeper than you could imagine. Falling, rising. The same, but never the same. Do you know the water, Noa? Do you really see?

She tried to recall the weeks before he left whether her father had come home sad, whether the ocean might have said too much, but her mind seized up like a clutching hand, grabbing pockets of air, finding it empty.

Noa wrote to her father every day. She took note of the tides’ leaving and returning, the color of the ocean, what kind of fish the day might bring—nearly two years of letters that lined a wall in her closet. Sometimes when she opened the window to let in a breeze, her closet murmured, its torn pages rasping. She kept the letters simple and short. This was her entry for Oct. 9: Dear Dad, A’ala Bay is deserted this morning. Mr. Cravalho hasn’t shown up yet. The water is green 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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around the edges and silver as far as I can see. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a good day for fishing. A day of turtles, maybe some uhu if you’re lucky but not many that’s for sure. Yesterday I found your sunglasses. The ones you used for fishing. They were in the junk drawer in the garage the whole time! Isn’t that funny? Remember Mom said it wasn’t there when you asked her to look for it? She must have not looked very hard. I’ll keep it safe for you. I miss you. Love Noa. Noa hoped she sounded casual. I miss you seemed a little heavyhanded, but there it was, the truth. She had struggled with it. She didn’t want to seem desperate.

While her mother pinned and slipstitched the neck facing, Noa took in and held a big breath until she could almost feel the waist of the dress, the inside seams still raw and sharp, against her skin.

Then she let the air seep out of her nostrils, and once, though she didn’t know how she did it, through her eyes. Finding new ways to breathe was one of Noa’s many diversions.

She cleared her throat and rubbed her eyes. She hoped her mother wouldn’t notice.

“Girl,” her mother warned as she eyed the waist of the dress, as though the piping on the bodice might unfurl and betray her.

“Ma, I didn’t say anything. I’m as quiet as dirt.”

Her mother made a sad face. “No, not dirt, Noa. And you’re not so quiet, hu.”

“Well, it’s the first time I’ve moved in the last hour. That’s pretty good.”

“Yes, this is true. But this is what always happens, Noa. I know you. First hour, perfect. Second hour, here come the noises from the throat and nose, and then you start rolling your neck, unhunh, and pretty soon, you’re bending your knees, pulling your ears, and moving like your feet are sleeping, and then, huhu! my hemlines are so hamajang no one will pay money for even the thread I used.”

Noa felt the needle, muffled by organza, jab at her midriff. “Maybe I should let this out a little more, hm?”

“Yeah, you’d better. Angelina’s been hitting the cascaron pretty hard lately,” Noa puffed out her cheeks. Her mother looked up from Crab Orchard Review ◆ 5

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the rustling folds of the dress.

“Why this face?” Noa’s mother shook her head. Noa saw the corners of her mouth turn up slightly. “You and Angelina—you two were like this,” she crossed her fingers, “like sisters, and now you’re in the same room for three minutes and you’re spitting like cats.

Not so good, Noa. All your friends from last year—Cindy, Reiko, Maureen—they don’t come around. Not your friends anymore or what?”

“No. Not since school started,” Noa said. “Please, ma, please don’t ask,” she said when she saw her mother’s eyebrows become one long tilde. Phee watched Noa quietly. Noa didn’t tell her mother that cousin Angelina had renamed her Neigh, serving both as a command and insult whenever she passed Noa in the halls, taking pleasure it seemed when Noa turned bright red and walked away. Angelina and her friends would draw together in a tight circle after one of these comments, squeezing their eyes shut, throwing their heads back for effect, in case anyone was watching. Their brittle, shrill laughter, what beautiful girls make when performing for each other, fell like hard bits of rice.

“Easy come, easy go,” Noa said. She shrugged, fanned her hands and turned them at the wrists: a show of indifference. Her mother had ears and eyes that made meaning of the smallest hesitations and so Noa let her face go slack.

How could she tell her mother that one year she was Noa Sabado, unremarkable in every way and the next year, she was Noa Sabado, still plain, but now fatherless, prone to blushing, and the tallest person in her class. Each thing that made her feel different and separate seemed like a permanent condition, like birthmarks she never knew she had.

Her mother snipped the purple thread with her teeth and pushed a long yellow strand into the needle’s eye for beadwork. “Easy come, easy go,” she agreed. “But blood is blood. You and Angelina should be friends.”

“This year she’s different, ma. She doesn’t even look the same.”

“Oh, Noa. It’s just mascara, a little lipstick. Still the same girl, of course, but so pretty now, yeah? Hard to believe. Everything that was too big on Angelina, her ears and lips, now fits. You remember this? She’ll break some hearts now, hu?”

She didn’t say, “You see how this is, Noa? It’ll happen to you.

Everything will fit. Just wait, you won’t always be this menos,” but Noa heard the words spinning in the room just the same, heard the 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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thin whistle of the word menos, menohss, meaning homely in Filipino. Menohhss. It sounded inevitable, like air leaking out of an abandoned bicycle tire. Noa saw the softness on her mother’s face, and made herself look away, at the floor, at the linty corners of the room, at the photograph of her father. Noa felt her cheeks burn with shame of her mother’s hope and pity.

Sometimes when she stood on the footstool, Noa would compose a letter in her head, a letter she would later pen on a long strip of white cotton trim to her former friends who had been petty and mean to her during the day. Noa used black marker: permanent, fine-tipped, precise.

She ironed the trim so that it would be stiff and easy to work with.

She’d write the letter then sew it inside the hems of the dresses, sometimes having to redo her mother’s double and backstitching, dainty bird-scratches in habutai and Indonesian silk.

These were letters no one would ever open, much less read.

This didn’t bother Noa. She wrote the letters for her own amusement, handwritten hexes that gave her a tidy grain of satisfaction—their not knowing what she had lain at their feet: Angelina, you chubby monkey-girl, this letter would read, I heard you laughing with your monkey-see, monkey-do friends when I walked past in the cafeteria. Laugh all you want, but your father’s a cheat and your mother’s a drunk and that’s how you were born. No one wanted you. I hope you trip and fall on the hem of this dress when you’re being crowned Queen Mean and Stuckup at homecoming. You’re going to be fat. You’re already as dumb as two clusters of peanuts. Love Noa. Another time, she had written Reiko, girl of three faces, all liars, all conceited. Do you know who your father is? I don’t think so. It’s not the man who lives in your house (the one you call dad?); ask your mother. Love Noa. Noa thought the sign off, without commas, was inspired. A gentle imperative.

Letters from Noa. Letters to nowhere. Dummy duty and breathing deeply. Noa felt the measure of her mother’s stitches, of glass beads and hard sequins, of filigreed lace and ruffles and yards and yards of fabric gathering weight around her until she could barely move.

This is what Noa did: She removed from underneath her bed the turtle shell, which she had exhumed three years before at the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 7

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point along A’ala Bay where seagrass was sparse. Bits of flesh, windblackened, musky, had hardened on the thin ribs that veined outward.

Within the turtle’s belly lay a gold origami crane, its head bowed and flat, as if in meditation or loneliness. She opened its wings, then uncreased its tail and smoothed the crest at the crane’s head.

The unfolded letter sat like a rumpled geometric bowl in her hand.

She smoothed out the letter on her desk. Her fingers alighted nervously on the opihi shell necklace, a corozo button, a stubby pencil, as she re-read her father’s goodbye. His large cursive hand was upright and loopy. Each letter was a country, the arcs unconnected, lilting up at every line. Noa frowned when she noted the buoyancy of the individual letters because she liked to believe that her father was sad when he wrote his note, but the letters themselves, the purposeful k, the lively g, seemed out of line with her imaginings: Dear Noa, The ocean was quiet this morning, still sleeping.

It looked to me like a day of only papio, maybe some kumu. As usual, Magno Cravalho was already fishing when I got there, all three fishing lines cast into the water, downwind from where I sat. The color of the sky and water wasn’t easy to forget.

I am leaving, but only for a few days. I hope you will forgive me for saying goodbye in a letter, but I will be back before you know it. Please be kind and good to your mother. If you start missing me remember we will be seeing the same ocean and I will be back before you know it. Love always Dad. There came a time during dummy duty that Noa felt she could reward herself with dreaming about her father in the photograph: after thirty minutes, but not a minute before.

Anything worthwhile takes time. Spend time to save time; my nets will be stronger now, her father had answered when Noa had asked why he didn’t just buy them new, why he’d waste a perfectly good Saturday repairing nets, especially when fishing was just a hobby during the weekends. And his words had proved true: the reinforced netting could bear heavier catches of red kumu without breaking. Noa wondered whether dummy duty counted as something worthwhile.

8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Nelinia Cabiles

The photograph, overexposed, grainy, appeared ghosted in places where Noa had, over time, worried thin in dry, wishless dreaming. A year after her father had left, she had found the photograph among other things her mother was determined to throw away. The picture had become a kind of touchstone: what she pulled out of her pockets when she was feeling faraway, what she’d rub between her thumb and forefinger for flinty reassurance when she walked in the halls past snickers of well-groomed girls with clean fingernails.

She was dismayed when she discovered her fingers left oil along her father’s face and stained the edges where she had gripped the picture. And so Noa had had the photo enlarged and placed in a frame to protect it from her hands. When she stood on the footstool, her father, her namesake, was a half-nod from anywhere in the room.

She liked that. She needed only to turn her head to the right, to the left, from over her shoulder, to find him.

“Why, Noa? Why do you need this reminder?” her mother demanded when Noa had asked if she could have the photograph in the sewing room. If she had given it some thought, she would have said she needed the framed photograph of her father to distract her from the staggering tedium of standing for hours at a time, but she hadn’t thought about it. She knew only that what had begun as daydreaming when she had first found the photograph became a necessary part of her day. It had given her a context for her sadness.

It had been like that with dummy duty. She and her mother had clung to each other the first few months after her father left and had found tasks to fill their endless afternoons. Until her father had left, Noa had never known how long a day could be.

Her mother asked again, trying to find her, less impatient this time, “Why, Noa?” When Noa wouldn’t answer, her mother stomped to her Singer and snatched her metal shears. She unrolled a bolt of light blue satin on the floor and began cutting. “You forget he left us, hu? In two years, no letter, no call, no reasons for nothing. I think to myself, maybe he died, maybe he died, better for us he died. And then, bam! out of the sky!—” Phee slapped her hands together, “divorce papers last year. What?—he f inally remembered we were unf inished business! Where was he, Noa? Where was he? Nowhere. And not here. Short memory you have. You forget so much, hu.” Noa heard the scissors clicking between the thin skin of satin and watched Crab Orchard Review ◆ 9

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what fell away, the surprising wholeness of the separate piece.

“Please, ma. I’m asking for something small. A picture of dad.

It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? No such thing, Noa. Not enough that you’re always bringing him back. Last month you found his shirt button. Last week, his jar of pomade. I thought I threw everything out. Where do you keep his junk? In your room? Under your bed? Now this. Tell me why we need this here.” She wouldn’t even look at the photograph.

“I don’t know why, I just—” She watched her mother’s mouth become a vise, tightening around the chalk pencil she kept in her mouth during fittings.

Noa tried again, “It’s how I remember him. It’s already faded.

You’re in it, too, see?” she offered, a small gift, pointing to her mother in the picture, and this time her mother turned to look, her face a tired, sorrowful moon.

“Oh, Noa,” her mother said, pulling on the tape measure around her neck, pulled, pulled, pulled, the blue strip cutting into her skin before she walked out of the room. Noa didn’t know whether she was referring to her or her father.

In the photograph, her father wears a white linen shirt, crisp against his tanned face. It couldn’t have been something her mother sewed for him, Noa decided. It was unadorned, honest. Linen was honest.

Noa’s mother is in the background, but only part of her face is showing because the wind has whipped her long black hair into a flimsy veil. She is looking over his shoulder. Noa’s father is staring to the left and Noa would find herself following his gaze to the white border of the photograph whenever she stared at the photo.

He is grinning in the picture, poised to do something else, Noa can see it in his smile, his eyes flashing with mischief. Something seems to have caught his attention just at the moment the shutter is released.

Over the years, Noa liked to imagine that it was she who had made her father smile like that. In those two seconds, what the camera missed, he had probably thrown his head back to laugh, a giant’s laugh that could fill all the corners and folds of water.

She was twenty months, her mother said, at the time the photo was taken. Noa decided she could have just been learning to talk and might have said something endearing, or she might have called his name, might have been running to him, and he to her, to scoop her up and throw her into the air, but before she could reach him 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Nelinia Cabiles

she might have fallen, new as she was to walking and sand being too forgiving and surprising that way.

Noa had no idea when memory begins—was it at a year? at six months?—and though she knew she was barely two at the time the photograph was taken, it felt right and perfect to her, that memory, and so she gathered the edgeless husk of it, gave it meaning, and the memory became something warm and clean, no longer broken.

Noa used to ask herself why she wasn’t also in the picture. But she decided that she would rather not know, that she could live the rest of her long afternoons and nights never wondering why.

Oct. 12 Dear Dad, Surfers are out by the breakers this morning.

They’re screaming Banzai! every time a wave comes up. They cup their hands and slap the water and yell. One of the surfers told me making all that noise makes the waves bigger. I think he really believed it. Mr. Cravalho’s here but he’s not fishing today. The waves are too big. Mom’s getting married. I miss you. Love Noa. Noa had known of Filipino women, her mother’s dusty aunts, Manang Lita and Manang Dore, for example, who held on to mementos of their children who had died young, and keepsakes from their husbands whom they had outlived, faded tokens from a few lovers: a leather watchband, a silver ring, a white undershirt, a baby’s spoon and bowl, and in this way of mourning, these unused objects had become an elegy.

The last time her mother had trimmed his hair, Noa had snatched the fallen curls off the floor. She had felt like a thief as she stuffed her pockets with her father’s hair, but it had seemed important at the time, and Noa was glad now that she had done it.

Once, when Noa had been looking for origami paper in her mother’s dresser drawer, she found a letter from Isamu Oue, dated July 2: my dearest Phee, I cannot sleep because my head is full of you, my beautiful Phee. You said yes to me tonight and I am still walking in the heavens. I know I am not Crab Orchard Review ◆ 11

Nelinia Cabiles

a handsome man or the smartest man, but I will be a faithful husband to you. So hard for Noa to think of me as part of your family, but I will try to be a good father to her. She loves the ocean and maybe I will ask her to go fishing with me sometime?

It is very late and I still am far away from sleeping. I think only of you, Phee. I ask myself, how can this be, that one man can have so much. I feel like a boy, not a man, because I am dizzy and happy with love. I think I have loved you always, not only when we were in high school, but always.

–You have my heart, Isamu Oue Noa felt her heart racing, her armpits clammy. This was not the Isamu she knew. Sad, earnest Isamu. She felt embarrassed to have read something so intimate, a peek into her mother’s life that she had not expected to see. She quickly returned the letter to its place, and with hurried steps, slipped out of her mother’s bedroom.

“Let’s see how this looks,” her mother said. Noa caught their reflection in the mirror—she, floating above the ground, the dress falling like water over the footstool, her mother holding her easily with just the tips of her fingers.

“It looks beautiful, ma. The dresses are always beautiful. You know how to work miracles.”

“You never know. Sometimes they look beautiful, but feel bad, pinching and squeezing when you’re sitting. Make you look clumsy, hu. Walk to me, Noa. Slow. Take your time. I need to see how it moves.”

The fabric, having slubbed threads, whispered against Noa’s thighs, chamois shicksee, chamois shicksee, as she walked to the far end of the room, and heard it lisp behind her, sisa sisa sisa, when her mother asked her to turn to see how it swung from the small of her back. Wearing a dress like that, the way it spoke, brushing against her ankles and caressing the backs of her legs, Noa understood how these women, now dimpled and thin-skinned around the eyes, could feel translucent and assured all at once.

“They’re always so noisy. How come no one ever wants a quiet dress?” Noa asked. She climbed back on the footstool.

12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Nelinia Cabiles

“That’s the point, of course. My clients want to be noticed,” her mother said.

Noa hoped the dress that she would wear for her mother’s wedding to Isamu Oue would be mute, made out of cotton or a jersey knit. Her mother wouldn’t tell her. It was going to be a surprise. “You’ll love it, Noa. Trust me,” was all her mother would say about it.

“Just so it’s not silk, ma. Bad enough I have to wear a dress.”

“Noa, are you wearing a dress to your mother’s wedding?”

Maureen asked her, trying for a look of sincerity, and failing. The bleachers were packed with loose cliques of her classmates, and Noa felt sticky and thin under her sweatshirt. When Noa didn’t answer, but glared fixedly at the basketball net across the gym, Maureen, her distant cousin, turned to Cindy and whispered in her ear. Their shoulders bounced with emphasis and meaning. Maureen craned her neck and waved at Noa, serene and dreamily.

Like she’s on a goddamn float parade, Noa thought. I hate you, she said under her breath.

Later that week when Maureen had come by to pick up her dress to her mother’s wedding, Noa had given her best, most disarming smile and told her she knew she was going to look like a dream.

“It’s prettier than Angelina’s,” Noa said.

“No! Really?” Maureen said, hugging herself.

“No question about it. You’ll make an entrance, Mo. That’s for sure. You have no idea how long my mom worked on this dress. I even spent some time on it myself, to tell you truth.”

“Well, aren’t you nice,” Maureen chirped. “It’s extra special then.”

“Oh, yeah. You bet,” Noa said.

Maureen, Noa’s letter read, the skirt on this dress is wide to balance your wide pandanus head, which is light as air. You’re so dim, you have the wattage of a nightlight. I know you wanted me to hear what you whispered to Cindy before pep assembly last week. It wasn’t hard. You guys were right in front of me. I heard. And you know what? Even if I die a virgin at least I know how to spell it. Quick! What’s another spelling for moron? M-A-U-R-E-E-N! Love Noa. Noa was sure her mother knew about these letters to her classmates because once she found stitching she knew she had never made: catchstitches that secure the hem.

It was twenty days before the wedding. Noa’s dress was almost finished. She was blindfolded and irritable as she stood on the footstool.

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Nelinia Cabiles

“Why this face, Noa? So hard to do, to try on a dress?” her mother said, zipping her up. Noa could feel her mother’s excitement as she fanned the skirt. “No peeking now.”

Noa, in her darkness, felt the weight of the beads of the face of the dress. “Ma, you beaded it? Why?” Noa’s fingers, alarmed, awake, darted around her shoulders, felt the taut curve of the neckline, felt the gathers at the waist.

“You promised, ma! This is fancy. I can tell. How could you?

How could you, ma?” Noa bit her lip and took deep breaths, but she started crying anyway, thinking how Angelina and Maureen would be mocking her and laughing like fools.

“Okay this, this I don’t understand, Noa. I want you to look pretty for my wedding. How can this be bad?” Phee touched her on the shoulder.

“No! I told you I only wanted a simple dress,” Noa said, pushing her mother’s hands away. “This has beads and butterfly sleeves and feels like silk. You promised. But you only pretended to listen. I said nothing fancy, no silk, no tulle,” she sobbed. “I said please, please, nothing that will make me stand out. And this—” she paused, catching her breath, “this feels like a joke.” Her mother kept trying to interject, but Noa wouldn’t let her.

“Everyone will think I’m trying to be pretty and they’ll laugh because—because, because they always laugh. At me. Because I’m funny. Funny looking.”

Noa heard her mother step away from her, and felt the air in the room get thick, but she couldn’t make herself stop. “I’m never going to be beautiful, ma. I’m never going to break hearts or take anyone’s breath away,” she said. “I’m not Angelina! You keep wishing I was.”

She unzipped herself and stepped out of the dress. “You keep wishing I wasn’t as ugly as you. But I am, ma.”

Noa whipped the blindfold off and left her mother, hands conjuring grief, in the middle of her sewing room.

Noa ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. She heard the letters in her closet skittering, like the determined flight of sand crabs at sunset. She walked to her dresser, still sobbing, her hands wet with tears. She picked up the turtle shell; she shook out the origami crane and worked backwards until the pockets and creases and lines became her father’s letter. She held it and reread it, stumbling, falling, getting up again over each line, examining the words and individual letters, until the marks on the page lost all meaning and became 14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Nelinia Cabiles

dull, unrecognizable sounds: oh shun, pa pee yo, koo moo, lee ving.

Nov. 16 Dear Dad, I wish you could see this. There are bluepurple jellyfish everywhere! They look like they’ve been stranded on the sand. They’re just inches away from the water. They look harmless, like small balloons, but Isamu Oue told me that they can sting even when they’ve been out of the water for days. I poked one with my pencil. I thought it would be full of water or jellyfish brain (like lychees or something!), but it was full of nothing. One big air bubble. That surprised me. The jellyfish just popped and my pencil went through it and the long tentacle thing curled around my pencil and wouldn’t come off. I had to throw my pencil in the water finally because I couldn’t shake it off. The jellyfish disappeared into the water. Like the water just swallowed it up. I hoped I didn’t kill it. The water is gray and sad this morning. I haven’t seen Mr. Cravalho in three days. I hope he isn’t sick. I never said thank you for the footstool you made for me.

I love it. It’s perfect. But it looks like I won’t need it anymore, because Isamu’s buying dummies for mom. That’s all for today, dad. Love Noa. “Are you almost done?” Noa asked, trying not to sound too hopeful. It seemed to Noa her mother had become short-tempered since her outburst, on the edge of something vast and resilient and deep. Noa felt something unmooring between them when they were trying hardest to be themselves.

Her mother glared from under her right armhole. “Impatient today, Noa. You never have patience for me. You need to go somewhere? A’ala Bay again?”

Her mother tugged and tugged at the bodice. “Yes, I know. Don’t look so surprised. I know you stop by the beach before school. How? Magno Cravalho, he’s there checking his lines every morning. Yeah, he told me. You’re sitting by Kaliki Rock exactly 7:30 a.m. Never late for nothing, that’s you. Magno says you write, you watch the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 15

Nelinia Cabiles

water, you write some more, and then half-hour later, you put everything away and leave. What are you writing? Letters? Who do you write to, Noa? Who? Oh, I know who, Noa. I’m not stupid.

He’s not coming back. He never even left a note. Don’t kid yourself, hu. The sooner you face this the better.”

Noa felt her hands start to shake. She wanted to tell her mother about her father, but she felt outside of language. The right words were heavy stones.

“You had no right to be snooping, ma,” she said, trying to keep her voice afloat. She kept her eyes focused on her father’s photograph. “And he did write. He left me a letter.”

“Who said I snooped? Where is this letter?” Phee’s eyes were dark. She circled Noa. “Oh. That one. Oh yeah, I know the one. You left it out once. It’s not a letter. I didn’t know what it was, unhunh, but I recognized his writing and yours. So many words crossed out, added in. Some places the writing is fresh, others where it’s so old, looks like the paper will break for sure. He mentions only water and then he remembers, oh yeah, I’m leaving,” her mother hit her forehead with the base of her hand, “like he’s some kind of joker and this leaving is his big joke. He says, okay ’bye. What kind of letter is this? You like to fool yourself, Noa. I know you. But he’s not coming back. I don’t know what you have in your head, hu, but that’s the truth. He’s not going to be reading your letters. Your letters about the water, the tides. Two years is a long time to waste. Hoping.

For nothing. Nothing.”

Her mother sounded jealous. Parrot mouth like a clamp.

“You sure didn’t waste any time,” Noa shot back. “You said I have a short memory. You have no memory. Isamu was dropping by before the end of the year, with his wads of twenties that smelled like fish guts.”

Her mother spun on her heel and slapped Noa hard across the mouth. “Easy for you to hate me. Because I stayed. Your father is the one who left! And so you love him more each day because he’s gone, so you can dream of him and wonder if he remembers you. It hurts you wondering if he remembers. Girl, I know this,” her mother said, weeping into her hands. “So you make up goodbye letters. But you know what’s true. He doesn’t think of you, Noa. If he did, he’d be home. He’d be home by now. You, me—” her voice breaking, falling through a sieve, “not good enough reasons for him to stay.

You should have good reasons for coming home. Nothing to do with 16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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being pretty or ugly, hu. I know that’s what you think. I know you.

But sometimes people just leave, Noa. They just leave. I don’t know why he left.”

Noa looked at her mother until everything around her fell away, the light, background, foreground, walls. She looked lost standing there in the middle of her sewing room. It occurred to Noa just then that they had been sidestepping around scarred, shapeless husks of her father since he left.

After that fight, during fittings, Phee would ask her if she wanted to take a break more often, forming the question with the thick of her palms, offering her hand when Noa stepped down from the footstool. Small gifts from pinpricked fingers.

Noa spent more and more time watching the ocean, no longer writing, until one afternoon, a week before the wedding, her mother came to her, knocking softly on the door before she stepped into her room, and asked her to read the letter from her father.

“I need to hear it,” she said, “the real letter, Noa. Please read it for me.”

“I can’t, ma,” Noa said, her fingers twisting into braids behind her back.

“Yes, Noa, you can.”

Her mother sat on the edge of Noa’s bed and waited. “I won’t leave, Noa,” she said.

So Noa reached into the turtle shell and read the letter out loud for the first time, slowly, slowly, pausing a beat after each sentence, navigating over cross-hatched xxxs and carets: The ocean was quiet this morning. It looked to me like a day of only papio, maybe some kumu.

As usual, Magno Cravalho was already fishing when I got there. The color of the sky and water was easy to forget. I’m leaving. I’m sorry. I hope you will forgive me.

The day of her mother’s wedding, this was where Noa stood: in front of the three-way mirror in her mother’s sewing room swathed in creamy crepon. The dress did not make her look beautiful. It did not burnish her skin golden or lighten her hair. She was still plain. But this time she wasn’t waiting to be transformed. The dress was just a Crab Orchard Review ◆ 17

Nelinia Cabiles

dress, draping easily, with a tendency to hold her in all the right angles. Noa decided she could grow to love the way it held her.

“Your turn, ma. Don’t hurry. Isamu’s in no rush. We’ve got time.”

Noa’s mother, bride, not so young, slipped into her wedding dress, a milky white with a mood for blue from a certain distance. It occurred to Noa that it was the blue of water when the light was softest in the morning. Noa smiled and reached for her hands. They stood like that, not talking. Then Noa spread the long skirt around her mother so that she seemed to rise out of the ground. Noa felt for the opening along the hem of the dress, which she had made the night before. While her mother watched, Noa uncurled the soft linen trim and began writing.

18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Barrio-Man

My father at 70 was his own creation, Barrio-Man. As Barrio-Man he was all wise about Puerto Rican matters. He knew the Island’s past, having been born and raised there; he knew the present, since he kept informed by subscribing to various political publications and by taking annual trips with a group of Puerto Rican barrio seniors to visit the historical spots of their nostalgic past as Borinqueños; and he knew the future, because he now could state his opinions based on La Experiencia, Amigos, and no one dared to dispute him. As Barrio-Man, now retired from a series of jobs as maintenance man, or El Super, to various barrio buildings, my father dressed in the traditional Puerto Rican dandy style (which he never did as an Island puertorriqueño)— guayabera from Panamá (he was of the opinion that Central and South American women do a better job embroidering the fancy shirts, and a guayabera is Puerto Rican attire no matter who does the needlework), black pants with creases sharp as cuchillos, “you can defend yourself from muggers with them,” he would boast. There was a chinese laundry where he was “on good terms” with the lady-owner, so that his pants were starched and ironed by hand and just right. His American/barrioborn second wife didn’t iron. She believed in wash ’n wear, he joked to his compañeros when they kidded him about his Oriental girlfriend having to do his laundry.

As the Barrio-Man my father counseled the young men about jobs, women, and politics. He despised drug abusers and los bonés, the bums, the vagrants who sat on the stoop of his building, and he did not fear insulting them to their faces. As a viejo, that was his privilege.

Sinverguenzas, he would spit out at them on his way in, and Mierda, on his way out.

He was no longer ashamed of his thick accent, in fact, he exaggerated it as a mark of pride in his ethnicity. “I am a spick,” he would proclaim when he had a couple of cervezas, “and I’m proud of it.” When the patriotic spirit possessed him, beams of energy seemed to shoot right through him and out of his eyes. He would stand to his Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19

Judith Ortiz Cofer

full height of five feet six, and sucking in his beer belly and puffing out his chest, he would commence to talk to whoever was in his presence about the hardships of being a puertorriqueño in this country and how we should claim our heritage for our children and grandchildren. He was still capable of misting his eyes with real tears, especially when he was asked to play and sing “Verde Luz,” that incomparable hymn to the beauty of the Island of his dreams (and at every social occasion he was likely to be asked to play the old songs by either me or his wife because when he sang, he became too choked-up with sentiment to lecture or sermonize).

My father as the Barrio-Man was full of intent and urgency, as if our culture depended on his words and actions to continue existing. He had his own daily itinerary which included visits to all the barrio gathering places: the bodega, where the men met to talk, drink, and play cards or dominoes, and the laundromat where he serenaded the ladies. He stopped by the park to put in his unsolicited opinion about Castro and the course of the Cuban men’s eternal domino game, which had been going on since the airlift; and he visited the semi-comatose pastor at Saint Mary’s, who had long ago done his Purgatory time by catering to the fractious Latinos in the parish. Padre James was so senile now that he often said the Spanish mass in Latin, his mind having reverted to pre-Vatican II times in his old age. My father was allowed to see him for one half hour, American time, by Mrs. O’Henry, who was determined that Father James should not die alone in the company of this talkative Puerto Rican. The old housekeeper was said to keep the extreme unction oils in the medicine cabinet and was prepared to administer the last rites herself, if necessary. La Cucaracha, my father called her, the queen of the church ladies.

My father had established a society for himself in this way, a sense of missionary purpose that thrust him out of bed at seven every day, urged him to choose his wardrobe with the care of a public personage, and prompted him out the door for a full day of visitations and information gathering which he would bring home to his wife at dinner time.

How did my father come to be Barrio-Man? It had to do with his songs, his tales of Island life told to the generation before mine, who like the survivors of Atlantis, had a vague racial memory of the mythical Island they had left as children. My father, the Super, had had access to their apartments and thus their ears, and eventually their hearts. They came to know and trust his voice. They wanted to hear the Spanish 20 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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words spoken or sung aloud to them, the half-forgotten lyrics of their childhood. People would seek out my father to advise them during passages in their lives, to tell him their dreams, to cheer them up; and the women, to love them en español: to say, mi amor, mi vida, to them.

In him they saw a man who loved the barrio, who had chosen to trade his Island life and identity for that of a barrio man. A man who became more and more their idea of a puertorriqueño the longer he stayed away from Puerto Rico.

Now he was an Hombre de Familia. My father’s nostalgia was like a lozenge melting all day in his mouth, a sugar glaze on the bitter pill of memories. Every thing that had once made him rage now caused a smile. He told us about the hurricane that blew away his birthplace, gone with the wind en español, he grinned. I could see that his teeth were a crooked row of tombstones worn unevenly by the grinding years.

He joked about the bad years with my mother before the divorce. At least he ate better in those days, he winked in the direction of his second wife who was busy in the kitchen. He bragged that he had still had enough ammunition to make two new babies young enough to be his grandchildren, and was suddenly reminded of me, middle-aged daughter who was still unmarried. And there we were in his living room listening to him tell us how eating the fish caught in the waters off the pueblo where he was born made the men of that region more potent than any others on the Island. A male dancer on the television show his boy was watching prompted him to declare that if women stayed home with their children there wouldn’t be so many homosexuals and other perverts on the streets. ¿Verdad, mi amor? He yelled at my stepmother who had her own problems. She stepped on a roach on her kitchen floor, shaking her head in dismay. No matter how clean you kept your house they were always there. Puerto Ricans and cockroaches, my father sang out, it’s a love-match, you can’t keep us apart. An old chiste, that one. Even I smiled on cue.

I was a jamona in his eyes, an unmarried woman whose time was about to run out, and my father was embarrassed to be meeting my new lover. He had no emotion selected for this. Too late for shame. Besides, I had given plenty of occasions for that in my youth with my past loves, a rainbow of men, all wrong for me, as he had predicted, but not for the reasons he feared. This one might be my last chance. I saw it on my father’s eager face, and I was ashamed. The day I brought my man over for inspection, the apartment grew too small for my father and a second male so he soon suggested a move outdoors. We trooped single file Crab Orchard Review ◆ 21

Judith Ortiz Cofer

down the narrow staircase and out to the backyard el patio, all vowels short in this word as my father said it, pah-tee-oh. It was a space the tenants of his building had made into a summer dream of their Island youth, a replica of nothing that existed anywhere but their memories, replete with spit for a pig, a thatched hut that had to be covered with tarpaulin each fall and a bar for el ron y las coca-colas of late evening domino games at the cement table where we now sat. My father in old age was finessing himself from Barrio-Man to what I designated as the nouveau-puertorriqueño, sentimentality dripping off him like sweat.

He sweltered in a starched guayabera, his costume of national pride, in this June heat, but we had to sit, my lover and I, upon his stage and on his terms.

I was weary of having to nearly shout over the wailing plenas playing in his boombox. My man smiled and smiled. He was the beautiful American produced by the sixties, liberal politics, jogging, tennis, and twenty years among books. He knew how to relax among the natives. I found myself irritated by his easy acceptance of this cultural facade my father and his barrio friends of a certain age had adopted. I drank another rum and coke my stepmother had placed in my hand and tried to love both these men. I watched them easing toward each other like high wire walkers hoping to meet in the middle without consequence. Finally, just as I was ready to faint or scream, slowly driven mad by the oppressive heat, my father’s droning on and on about La Independencia for the Island, the moral decay of the Barrio, and his heroic efforts to save us Boricuas from total extinction—there was a breeze—Gracias, Dios mío, a wave of fresh air rose out of nowhere, and it was scented with the promise of good food and a cooler evening.

Suddenly I felt grateful to be there in that barrio backyard, at that cement table, at that time, listening to my father tell the man I thought I loved about life on the Island paradise of his dreams. In that setting I could imagine almost anything. My neck cool and my insides warm from the liquor, I felt nearly glad that El Destino, as my father called everything that had happened in his life, had brought us here. I decided that I was going to make a toast. This was my chance to say to my father: “I am glad I came here with you as a young girl, glad that we flew here away from a fate I cannot now imagine on that island you yearn for, so perfectly beautiful that it could have never been real. It is better, Papi, that it has become a dream for us. I am glad for this day.”

“Feel that breeze” is what I said instead.

22 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lorraine M. López

Possibilities for Salsa Music in the Mainstream: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer

Judith Ortiz Cofer is the author of a novel, The Line of the Sun, a collection of essays and poetry, two books of poetry, Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland, and The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry. Her work has appeared in Glamour, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review and other journals. She has been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Prize Stories. She is the recipient of numerous awards, ranging from fellowships from the NEA and the Witter Bynner Foundation for poetry to the Pura Belpre medal and the Paterson Book Prize. The Rockefeller Foundation recently awarded her a residency at the Bellagio, Italy Conference Center in 1999. A native of Puerto Rico, Judith Cofer now resides in Georgia and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

LÓPEZ: What inspired you to become a writer?

COFER: I have always had a need for creative expression. Even as a child I was always acting in little plays that I made up. For a long time, all of my energies were put into school. I was the “Scholarship Kid.” I married young and had a child. After I accomplished my immediate goals of becoming a teacher and getting my graduate degree, I still felt a need that I could not identify at first. It was a vacuum that didn’t get filled until I started to jot down notes and stories and made a few hesitant attempts at poetry.

When I began to write every day, I realized writing is something I need to do. But I didn’t really start writing seriously until I had finished my education because I had so little time. I have an essay about this called “Five A.M.” I had tried to do everything at once— get married, have a child, go to school. I literally didn’t have [enough] hours in the day. So I started making the time by waking Crab Orchard Review ◆ 23

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up at five in the morning, which I still do whenever possible. Writing for two hours a day, minimum, has become an intrinsic part of my life.

LÓPEZ: Which writers have influenced your work most and how?

COFER: It’s an eclectic list. People sometimes think because I have several labels attached to my name like Latina, woman writer—that perhaps all of my influences should come from the Spanish-speaking world, should all be women. But I grew up in a place and time where woman writers were scarce, scarcely represented, I should say, in my syllabi and on the bookshelves. Virginia Woolf was practically the only one allowed on the graduate reading lists, so I had to depend on her to inspire me and talk to me as a woman. But I was also heavily influenced by the passionate male writers like Hawthorne and Blake and Byron. It wasn’t until I was out in the real world (away from academia) that I started discovering there were woman writers writing about this world and this time, like Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov.

I read what engages me. Recently I was totally under the spell of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. What a storyteller! He is as good as my grandmother! There are some voices that I return to again and again because they speak to me in a particularly intimate way. Those writers stay on my shelves forever. My reading in one night can encompass Sor Juana and The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Teen Magazine. What[ever] engages me at the moment. But it has to be good writing about things that I find interesting and important. So, you see, my reading list is eclectic.

LÓPEZ: William Faulkner said the inspiration for The Sound and the Fury came to him from a single image. He had spied a young child in soiled underclothes climbing into a window from the branch of a tree, and the idea for the novel was triggered immediately by this sight. What are the sources of your inspiration? Images? Words?

Dreams?

COFER: Poetry inspires me. I started out writing nothing but poetry.

The first thing I do in the morning is turn to poetry. I either read it or write it. To me the music and the images [poetry evokes] is just like listening to a song. A lot of my essays in Silent Dancing are directly related to my poems.

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In one essay, I write about my paternal grandmother, a woman who was oppressed, but who found ways of being rebellious. One of the things that I found very incongruous about this very shy and introverted Puerto Rican woman was that she always had a huge pack of cigarettes in her pocket. Her husband had never allowed her to smoke, even though he did. After he died, she smoked like a chimney, and she also displayed her vice. So out of that image of this shy little person with a huge pack of unfiltered cigarettes in her pocket grew an essay.

In another essay about my parents’ marriage, I attribute [the inspiration] to their wedding picture. So images are very crucial in the genesis of poetry for me. But also sometimes, it’s a musical phrase of some sort, something that I can’t stop hearing, sometimes Spanish words hit me as in “El Olvido,” that poem I have explained many times. I heard a conversation between my mother and a woman in which the phrase was used so dramatically. Aí, el olvido! It explained everything! I could not be free of it until I wrote a sort of dramatic definition of what that meant.

Sometimes I have to wait until the idea becomes totally sublimated, becomes part of my subconscious, and then I can create characters that are made out of the stuff of that idea, but they are not mere symbols of that idea. I don’t want to write a sermon; I want to write a novel.

LÓPEZ: Which genre do you find most satisfying for the expression of your inspiration, your ideas?

COFER: I think poetry because it provides the satisfaction that I imagine a sculptor has after taking fifteen years to make a huge statue. But in two or three days, one can make a beautiful vase, maybe. For me, it’s not that the poem doesn’t take long; sometimes I’ll work on a poem for years. But it takes shape before your eyes. It becomes. It starts looking like what it will be. It’s a creation you can add to, but it’s already there. Whereas the novel is this great, plastic thing, a huge thing filling the room of your life, and you’re trying to deal with it and mold it. And you have no idea whether: a) you’ll be able to do it, or: b) what shape it will be when it’s finished, or: c) whether you’ll even have the energy to do it. With a poem, there’s this beautiful time when you are shaping it and you say, yes, it looks like a poem, it sounds like a poem. It is a poem! I would Crab Orchard Review ◆ 25

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never call it immediate gratification because I have poems I have been working on for years. In fact this morning, I printed out three poems. One had a date of 1995 on it! So I wouldn’t exactly call it a quick process.

With a novel or even a short story, your labor may or may not turn into an identifiable story or novel. I have thrown out hundreds of pages after several years of work on something that refused to become a novel or story. I also think that poetry contains the whole spectrum of pleasure that language can offer. You can read a chapter in a beautifully written novel and say, “Ah, yes that was satisfying.”

But you read a poem and it fills you like good wine. I literally cannot stop myself from getting goose bumps if a poem touches me. It’s hard to sustain goose bumps through fifty pages of prose. It might become a permanent condition! I don’t think that I am necessarily better at poetry, but for me, it is the most satisfying form.

LÓPEZ: When inspiration strikes you, how do you, as a multi-genre writer, know what form your idea will take?

COFER: That’s a hard one to answer, but I think it has to do with the concentration, the level of concentration. In my mind, I think of it in the way one knows if a substance is going to be juice or jelly.

How do you know the consistency of it? It all depends on how much of the ingredients you choose to put into it.

When I need to write a poem, the image is so concentrated and the impulse is so strong that I want to immediately put it in its right container and shape it as such. For example, I have a very old poem in which I talk about my mother’s hands, how she held my hand. The way she held my hand was like a Braille code telegraphing her fear and her anxiety.

I suppose I could have written an essay about that, but it didn’t feel like an essay. I didn’t want that image of my mother’s hands to have many tangents or to go off in many directions. I wanted it to be just about that image, to be concentrated and fully about that.

It’s the difference between a close-up and panning. Do you want to show a scene of a funeral with everyone hunched over and crying or do you focus the camera right on a tear falling down that child’s face? To me, the essay or the short story is the camera moving further away and trying to take in a scene. If it’s everything that led to that scene, then it’s a novel. But if it’s just that one close up, that one image that has to represent everything—then it’s a poem.

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LÓPEZ: In addition to “genre-switching,” you have written for juvenile as well as adult audiences. Your most recent book, The Year of Our Revolution, for example, is a young adult piece. Would you comment on this or other projects and your desire to write for a younger audience?

COFER: I didn’t start out specif ically aiming for a younger audience. What happened was that I found out that I had a lot of [young adult] readers. It’s interesting because Arte Publico [my publisher] will list Silent Dancing as a young adult book, but they also list it in their regular catalog. The same with other books that I have. For example, a lot of stories from The Latin Deli are used in high schools, but they are also used in college courses. When an editor, Melanie Kroupa, asked me to try my hand writing specifically for young adults, the result was An Island Like You. The stories in it are being reprinted in textbooks, which I find very satisfying.

I don’t want to limit myself to writing for young adults, though.

I want to be able to write for and about any age group. In fact, the novel that I have been trying to finish for years, that I now call Don Juan’s Daughter, is told from an extremely old woman’s point of view, looking back at her youth in Puerto Rico before World War II up to the present. What I want to do with her life is to show a woman who has lived in two worlds for most of the century. Since I am not extremely old myself, I’m going to have to do some research.

LÓPEZ: In your short story, “Barrio Man,” the protagonist is clearly an individual resolutely lodged in his remembrances of the Island. I have heard you comment on the criticism writers receive for continually “plumbing the past” in their work. Will you discuss your comment and tell how “Barrio Man” as well as your popular poem, “El Olvido,” address that particular criticism?

COFER: In “Barrio Man,” I was aiming for a commentary on “political correctness.” First, I witnessed a time when it was important for Puerto Ricans in New Jersey to call themselves Hispanos instead of Puerto Ricans because it was not cool to be Puerto Rican. Then in the last decade or so, there has been this recognition of multiculturalism. Everyone has joined the bandwagon.

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feel oppressed by being told they have to recognize diversity. There are the Native Americans, the African-Americans, the Latinos and the Asians, and the white kids feel left out. On the other hand, more and more Latinos (I’m only going to speak about Puerto Ricans) have decided that they’re going to take full advantage of this hot new interest in Latinos. You see it in the mass media with Hollywood out there beating the bushes for another Jennifer Lopez or Ricky Martin.

In “Barrio Man,” I wrote about a man who had decided in his old age that he was going to be The Barrio Man. He was going to represent being a Puerto Riqueño, and that meant wearing the costume—the guayabera—of the Puerto Riqueño, talking like a Puerto Riqueño, taking cultural trips back to the island, instructing the young people on how to be Puerto Riqueños. It’s about a woman who goes home with her lover, and her lover is duly impressed by her Puerto Riqueño father while she’s thinking, “Give me a break!” yet knowing that she loves this old man.

But it’s [also] a commentary because I myself have suffered from suspicion that what I do is trendy [even though] I have been doing the same thing from the [beginning]. I’ve had stuff rejected by editors saying, “That is not Latino enough.” And I say, “Well, what do you want me to do? Put more rice and beans in it?”

I write about the things I have known. So if I know the barrio in Paterson better than I know any other neighborhood I’m going to write about that. Did Faulkner write about the French Riviera? He wrote about Mississippi, right? This is what we do. I’m not comparing myself with him. But take Flannery O’Connor. Why is it okay for her to write about Milledgeville and not be accused of plumbing her life for her work, while I can’t write about being a Puerto Rican without being accused of only writing about memory? Well, I’d like to set something in another planet, but science fiction is not my thing. So in this story I go in the other direction and comment on the people who feel it’s “our time now.” Since it’s cool to be a Latino, let me be the ultimate Latino!

“Barrio Man” is just a short piece, but it’s a social satire on the weariness of this character going home to discover that her father might as well have an emblem on his chest with the words “Barrio Man” on it.

In another piece, “El Olvido,” a poem, I’m not saying write only about the past. [Rather,] to put on a different persona to suit the times—whether it is the persona of the super Latina because it 28 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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is now time to be that, or to sublimate that and write postmodern prose set in neutral zones like a supermarket—would be phony. So the poem is not a directive to write about the past, but to write the truth. Be the truth.

What I am, for example, is not the super Latina. I happen to be a woman who is physically identifiable as being of Hispanic origin, but I am equal parts Puerto Rican from New Jersey, Southern woman and Island Puerto Riqueña. I’m going to visit my mother in a couple of weeks. I’ll have to speak nothing but Spanish there. People will laugh at my American accent and my American demeanor and my brash attitude. Then I’ll return to Georgia, and people will ask me where I’m from, and when I say Louisville, Georgia, they’ll laugh.

They mean where am I from. I’m obviously not a Southern girl. So I am neither this nor that, but I am something else, and that something else happens to be the combination of all those things. When I write, I have to address that.

LÓPEZ: Those who are familiar with your work are aware that family figures prominently in your writing. How has your family dealt with the idea that they may—or, in some cases, they may not— become subjects in your poetry and prose?

COFER: I have tried to be very well aware of their sensibilities. I dealt with that very directly when I wrote The Line of the Sun and was actually afraid that my mother might be offended by some of the things [in that novel] because she is recognizably in it. But she saw that my imagination took over. Though I based a lot of the characters on real people, I also departed significantly from them.

The other book that was more direct in its approach to the use of family as the basis for the work was Silent Dancing. I took care, first of all, to write a foreword in which I discussed Virginia Woolf ’s theory that the past really belongs to the teller [who is] basically a witness and a participant and not liable for getting everyone else’s version of the past right. I wanted to express that this is how I absorbed the events around me.

I did it in the form of creative nonfiction, which means I put at the core of each of the pieces real events in real time. I was accurate in my historical time, but I felt free to dramatize conversations that I remembered or recalled without claiming that they were word for word accurate. I also took care to change the names of the people and to Crab Orchard Review ◆ 29

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make sure that their physical descriptions didn’t match so closely that someone was backed into a corner. I was after a poetic truth.

LÓPEZ: In your novel, The Line of the Sun, you employ a multivocal narrative strategy in switching from the third person “floating” perspective to first person narration midway in the book. More and more, multicultural authors alternate perspectives, often engendering criticism for “unevenness” in narration. Finally, contemporary critics are beginning to understand the necessity of including a multiplicity of voices in a single work. Will you comment on the significance of shifting perspective in this novel?

COFER: When I did it, there wasn’t much [perspective shifting] out there, but now there is. I’m not saying that I was innovative; I’m just saying that I received some of the first criticism for changing perspective. I wanted the novel to have a narrator, but I also wanted The Line of the Sun to be a commentary on story-telling. If you are a great storyteller, you disappear and the story takes over. I saw that happening when my grandmother would start a story, and all of a sudden, my mind would be flooded with images that she was conjuring. And I forgot her. When she would finish, I felt like I was coming out of a state of hypnosis.

In The Line of the Sun, I wanted to play that “trick,” to create what John Barnard calls “the continuing dream,” to inject my reader with “the drug of forgetfulness.” I wanted my reader to forget there was a narrator, but I wanted there to be a voice in the reader’s head.

So [the character] Marisol actually speaks to her uncle in the beginning, and then slowly her voice fades into the background, but she’s still telling the story.

It’s supposed to be made up of images that this girl has either heard or invented because that’s the way it was in my family. Often I didn’t know an uncle or aunt; I only knew the stories that were told about that person. Yet that relative would become a very real presence in my life. My mother can still say, “You know that aunt of yours, the one who ran away with a musician?” And even though I may not know the woman, I will know so many stories about her that she’s a character just like any of those people that you’ve read and heard about so much that they take on a life.

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like the Puerto Rican Indiana Jones that she has imagined him to be. I wanted to redefine her childish, romantic idea of the hero to the real uncle who doesn’t look like the Hollywood version of a hero, but who has a heart bigger than she can comprehend. That was the plan.

LÓPEZ: Anyone who has attended one of your readings knows you are a gifted and dramatic reader of your work. How does the idea that you will in all likelihood perform a piece at some time influence your vision and revision of your work?

COFER: It doesn’t because I consider the reading separate from the writing. There are some things that I never read aloud because they work best in the eloquent silence between the writer and the reader. There are some pieces that I fortunately have found to be quite readable. They’re usually infused with humor and drama. For example, “Advanced Biology” is funny and has a lot of dialogue, so I can read it and perform the parts. It works well.

But there are others that are very meditative, and they don’t have the same effect on the audience. For example, “Silent Dancing,” the essay, gets reprinted a lot, but because of its disjointed, nonsequential nature, if I try to read it aloud I lose people. In the essay, the movie [camera device] interrupts the narrative. You can see that on the page because it’s in italics, and it’s very obvious. But [when I’m reading] I can’t say, “Now, you imagine the movie, here.” It would be disruptive.

I consider the reading a different art form. I consider it a performance. It is my material, and I’m still giving it to the audience, but I’m not going to read just anything. I am going to read what works best with the human voice as opposed to something I would like people to read on their own.

LÓPEZ: In addition to writing, you teach through the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia. What are some observations you have made about creative writing programs in general and what advice can you offer the student writer contemplating a career in writing?

COFER: A lot of people like to say that you can’t teach someone to write. Well, that’s true. You can’t teach someone to be a parent or to Crab Orchard Review ◆ 31

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fall in love either. But you can instruct them in what to avoid in being a parent and in how to get the person you fall in love with to notice you. Those sound like strange things, but some people assume that certain things just come to you. And writing is a destiny in some ways, but it also requires some direction and it requires a context.

There are people who would be very good writers, but they have not read enough. They assume that they’re doing something new with their work when they’re not. I’ve had students in my classes who are obviously very smart and very talented, but they’re trying to become the new e. e. cummings or the new Beat poet. It takes me most of the term to convince them that it’s okay if all they want to do is write their own version of “Howl” for the rest of their lives, but if they really want to make a difference, they’re going to have to absorb that and then go on to do something new.

The creative writing program does what the parenting class or a little lesson in social graces does, which is to allow you to avoid the obvious mistakes in what seems natural, being a writer. And it gives you direction and also saves you time because the world out there is so full of information, so full of books. We need reading lists that give us a sense of where we are in literature. Like the poet Stanley Kunitz says, “Tradition is a life-giving fountain, not a cistern full of toads!” I think that tradition prepares you to write in the way that studying music from the past prepares you to be a contemporary musician or composer.

Creative writing programs provide the resources for that, the cumulative experience of practicing writers sharing the pleasures and pitfalls of (I don’t even want to call it a career) a chosen path because if you think you are going to make a living being a writer, I think that you need to take a good look around. Being a writer is a condition of existence, and if you feel that’s what you want to be then you give yourself as much instruction as possible, but you also prepare yourself to supplement your living doing something else.

LÓPEZ: You also teach literature courses, most notably, multicultural American literature. How would you describe this category of literature, your place in this category and the experience of teaching it in the South?

COFER: When I started writing, I didn’t think of myself as a 32 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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multicultural writer. I just thought that I wanted to be a writer.

[Multicultural literature] is just one of those categories that I have fallen into. I happen to be a multicultural or minority writer because I was born in Puerto Rico and I am classified—for everyone’s convenience—that way. For my own self confidence, I don’t want to think that my being Puerto Rican is responsible for the interest in my work.

If it has something to do with the interest in my work, it should be that people consider, “Well, she writes well and she’s a Puerto Rican writer, so when we’re teaching multicultural literature, we’ll use her.” But if it’s the other way around, then there’s something awfully wrong. I don’t think that there’s any room for political correctness or affirmative action in art. I’m not going to put a picture on the wall just because it’s painted by a particular minority artist and it’s the right thing to do. I’m going to put it there because it satisfies my aesthetic sense, and I find it beautiful or satisfying in some other way.

I’d just like to be seen as a writer out there competing with all other writers. Everyone has something that they are called: feminist writer, Jewish-American writer, gay writer. In this country, we just have to assign tags to everybody and everything, and if that gets your work read and studied and kept in print, then that’s fine. But if it’s just going to be a flash in the pan, well, okay, and next year, we’re onto Serbo-Croatian writers, no more Puerto Rican writers, then what good does that do me? I don’t want to be a fashion trend.

LÓPEZ: How does teaching and creating literature—in its various permutations—inform your vision of what literature will be in this country in the next ten or twenty years? What changes do you foresee?

COFER: I foresee an opening up of literature. For the longest time, we seem to have been in a fortress called the Western canon. It was a wonderful fortress and very solid, but it did not allow much change.

It was somewhat like [saying] we live in a palace, we don’t have electricity, still we live in a palace. It’s time to rewire the structure, to allow for different ways of seeing and speaking. I cannot believe that anyone can still claim we are not enriched by having Toni Morrison or Louise Erdrich or Rudolfo Anaya or any voices like these added to the so-called canon.

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What I think will happen is that a new generation of people, who are multi-racial and multi-ethnic (they are already appearing), people who speak standard English, who have gone through the educational process, but come from a multitude of cultures, will be creating a literature that will represent the true diversity of this country, not just pockets. These young kids, like my daughter and your children are going to be working together and communicating easily with each other, but they will be very aware that they are different in some ways.

That’s my idealized view of the new literature that encompasses an easier acceptance of the certitude of diversity in the United States, much like my daughter doesn’t get up in the morning and think, “I’m half-white and half-Puerto Rican. What shall I wear today?”

But many days I had to get up, feeling I didn’t want to go to school, dreading things [at school] that I didn’t understand. As times change, I foresee an easier acceptance of difference and thus art and literature are going to represent the vision that, for example, salsa music is possible in the mainstream.

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Liviu Antonesei

Pastel translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc & Michael Waters Dusk of ashes, copper on water—the end of vacation like a sensual sadness . . .

—Yes, love, the world passes, the spirit alone throbs in limbs, in limbo.

Sand, slender thighs with their succulent black cherry, the stars immersed in icy glasses (the moon—ferocious pall cast over faces).

We love each other with despair, with fear—dogs howl, whipped out of their senses, the sea moans onto the shore; an infinite placenta, beckoning death . . . (sand and water, empty bottles, glinting tin lids, hotel lights, stiff cocktails, tuffs of grass, ships off the coast, soldiers hunched over cannons, campers, automobiles and summer neuroses, Polish words, nude Swedes, the Dutch coat of arms, silver coins and paper dollars will all pass like the year one thousand—love, the spirit alone throbs in limbs).

Sand rustles under flesh, the sea pulses, a fire, a fire, a fire that cleanses everything— flesh and fears and . . . a visceral smoke floats over the waters.

Poetry. And more poetry. A crystal bullet strikes the void.

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Joy Arbor-Karnes

Eurydice in Hades

When my songs went underground women blamed him— for looking back, for being unable to step into the future without making sure love was following. But he was a poet.

And I had never followed him before.

In the woods, they tore him to pieces, offering each limb to a different direction.

They dug deep wells, cupped their hands to their mouths, yelled to me of their revenge, begged for a poem. So I gave one to the earth that covered the gates to hell with mud and hives and thatches.

I didn’t want those women with me, only him.

The dead don’t come here anymore, but are also buried, in hopes they’ll shift and shimmy their way down. I hear them jostling in their boxes, gossiping through the wood.

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Julianna Baggott

Learning to Say No at The Immaculate Conception High School

For years they only taught us to bend at the waist, to kneel and bow our heads, but our bodies arched naturally like blades of wet grass when knees were weak and heads heavy with wanting.

Inside his Pop’s Wagoneer parked by the tracks— the train’s one-eye bearing down, the press of it so solitary and blinding— under Jimmy Vetrie’s gaze, how could I say anything?

Why would I want to, after all of those aching sentences about geometry and his brother’s sleeper hold?

Finally, pale, we stretched against each other.

And they kept it up, filmstrips of dirty loveless girls and how to shake our heads until it became a breath, a whisper, until our hips rang with it, no, no, no, as mechanical as the train’s churn and above it the whistled moan rising.

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Debra Bruce

A Father’s Instructions

She died five times in the ambulance.

With those high-tech gadgets she never had a chance to go in peace. And that frothy pink thing they laid her out in—Christ! Just like last spring, if your Uncle Bobby could have seen himself— he never wore a necktie in his life— he’d’ve sat up in the casket and torn it off.

At least I’m glad you made it home this time.

And listen, doll, don’t worry about that scam.

(Scan, Dad.) I might not have it anyway.

Good flying weather for your trip home today.

See my white hydrangea out there? It gets that tinge this time of year like it’s soaked the sunsets in all summer. Who would want to know in advance if there’s nothing you could do?

The sky’s so smooth today. Besides one doctor says one thing and then one says another.

I wouldn’t mind flying somewhere in this kind of weather.

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Marcus Cafagña

The Car Thief

I could shrink down the sidewalk, woozy in the moment and faint in a fog, exhilarated. Now that he’s hot-wired and crashed the G-rider, and the rival gang has returned seconds later to find their lime green luck beached and a delivery truck stalling his escape up the narrowest one-way street in the city. Now that the steering wheel’s collapsed and lanced his chest against the seat of the Deuce and a Quarter dead on the curb, shocked with collision, fender shuddered around a fire plug on Sansom. I stand in the lunch mob, the rush of my own breathing, my own blood, on the lip-edge of trance, as if it were not him but me gripped in the car as fist after fist slung through the open window, as vatos in teardrop tattoo and crown regalia flash their revenge.

His only prayer that someone calls

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Marcus Cafagña

the cops before gold knuckles purge against his skull their every misfortune, that one of us admits how easy it is to watch someone get beaten and starts yelling, For Christsake don’t kill him. It’s only a goddamn car.

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Marcus Cafagña

House of Correction

Her son had been busted at the old digs on Cass, taken by squad car up Fisher Freeway beyond Chinese margins and the raw walls of buildings torn away. At the visiting hour each vagrant memory rose against her: the veins he’d slapped awake at the elbow, the thumb that collapsed the syringe. The scag became Messiah, his new mother to suckle in that bed-on-a-wall, that idiot-box reason to live. The county gate ground open to a trustee she followed through the maze of Mexican hieroglyphs scrawling the piss-rotten corridors and steel rolling apart before the small pink mask of his face spilled its perpetual child. She couldn’t give up. Nor she could save a good vein from the tourniquet’s fire, from his heart’s refusal, that burning angel spiked and spiked not so much in search of euphoria but with the resolution he’d try for what remained of his life, like that first rush, to reach heaven and break in.

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Billy Collins

Apostrophe

This one wants to become a nightingale and this one a skylark or just a rush of westerly wind.

This one ambles down a lane and feels he would be better off a thrush, and another stands on a windy bluff longing to be aloft with a pelican or simply plunge into the cold oceanic.

It must be the human they are sick of, the overcoat weighing down the shoulders, the tense grip of money, elevated trains rattling the windows, then turning all night on the wheel of a bed, turning on the spokes of a dream.

It’s just enough to make you want to turn into a stone on a beach of stones, or a low limb on a lakeside tree, barely touching the water in late summer— enough to make you cry out O to be a high thin cloud O to be a mushroom or anything that comes with wings.

It’s enough to make you run back to the house and shriek O to be a tea kettle O to be a magazine rack or a carpet woven in a distant land.

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O to be the first tentative words of a poem, someone might wish, a few lines on a clean sheet of paper.

O to lie there in a small downtown apartment, warmed by a kindly lamp and the face of the poet peering down like a full moon, full of love and disquiet.

O to be that wide-faced man himself, I am shouting as I write, the pen angled back in the hand, the poem chugging off in some odd direction, the loose curtains lifted by a breeze.

Beyond him, we can see the haste, the heavy perturbation of the city, and beyond that, a ring of lawns then a wide ring of woods, and perched in the dark upper branches row upon row of small silent birdsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and O the night racing on, the stars rolling like tears down the frozen sky, and all those sweet, immortal birds sleeping, as Chaucer said, with open eyes.

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Billy Collins

Colorful Fish

We have unbolted the poem from its smooth metal chassis and separated piece from piece, and here it lies the way the parts of a racing car are laid out on the floor of a well-lit garage or the wheels of a wristwatch are set out on a white tablecloth by a precocious and disagreeable child.

But now it is hardly possible to turn the key in the ignition or to say what time it is, so we must start all over again with a new page, a large cup of steaming coffee, and a parallelogram of sunlight on the floor.

This time, we will write down a line and then the line that follows it and so forth into the afternoon, and if a dog scratches at the door of the poem, we will let him in whether it is pouring outside or not, we will have the heart,

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we will open all the windows and the many doors and spread our arms wide, and if a colorful fish appears, opening and closing its small silent mouth, we will invite it inside so it can swim back and forth, from one transparent corner to another, and you never knowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; many years from now, someone in a city we have never heard of, a man alone in bed, a girl in the aisle of a bookstore, might spend a minute or two watching the fish swim back and forth behind the glass, and admire its vivid stripes, its gauzy billowing tail.

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Leigh Anne Couch

Aphrodite in Tennessee

A woman on Tate Street in the drizzling rain at six a.m. in jeans, heels, dangly earrings, and one of those girl-creamy angora sweaters with pink snowflakes along the neckline.

Arms raised like a dancer’s, holding a silver jacket over her blonde head, she gives a sly smile like she’s going places—and if you don’t like it you can go to hell.

The same woman is a widow painted to match the house painted to match her blue Chevy in the carport.

Her husband never made her laugh, then he died without making her any babies.

The locals know to watch for her like a possum scuttling out of the lights thrown from porches and cars along Route 6.

At twilight the widow’s burning leaves— damn oak leaves clog up her ditch and make the yard look trashy.

She rakes little piles all around her, sets them on fire like warnings

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and almost remembers herself in the rain after a night with—oh, she had them all wrapped around her finger. Mortal or divine, they didn’t know what to make of a woman like her.

The sky’s liquid with setting sun and bits of cloud are flotsam above the trees.

She looks—to all of us passing through like gully water—as if she’d pull a child in to her side and chuckle low, so he’d never forget, “The sound of hail is Satan beating on his wife.”

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Christopher Davis

Easter

Sit, invisible, in a meadow.

Run both lifelines through the soft, sun-consuming blades.

Should one hope to influence the wind-blown grasses with these batting lashes, turn our breath into a nutrient inside this green meat trembling before the winds change, moisture becomes memory, the skin brittles and one prepares to fall into the leaf rot, home?

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Mango —for Divia My wife sifts through dry rice ripening a mango, breathes the blushed skin with the conviction of time and the knowledge of green. One more day, so she buries it again. Outside, sisters from Sri Lanka carry you through the garden while they comb your hair.

Two years ago, we thought you’d slip from the womb, but today they build a levee of pillows on the bed where you were conceived, turn off the light to cool the room, your face a pearlized flush of tropical air.

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Anders and the Norns —for my mother, Anita The fairy tale wrote itself from a dream, you said, and your illustrations bloomed to the cover: my middle name, Anders, in tall letters circled with blue.

Above the mountains, three Norns whispered as they spun the lifelines that guide our journey. One night, a storm swept the peaks, whirlwinded their twine into hard knots: a child born backwards in manners, stuttering, though he sang his youth with the forest’s birds— tanagers, parakeets, toucans.

Coming home one day, he saw black wings and a huge beak pulling the line’s end, took hold of the last knot, and, flying now, soared over houses, an ocean.

They glided to an island called Wish where he met a king and his daughter who had chestnut-colored skin. The princess untangled the line until his stutter disappeared, and they fell in love. Anders made a wedding dress for her sewn from the island’s large white flowers, and she wove a suit from his own yarn.

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After you died, we packed the book away but I’ve wondered as the years passed how you could have known that day what I couldn’t have known to ask: Did you see my future appear in the vision before your death?

For I’m in love with a woman whose hair drifts down her back like tapestry threads, her skin dark brown, her home an island halfway around the world. In dreams she’s curled her fingers into your hand, the two of you rising over vast green seas.

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Jason G. Daley

A Careful Distance

I find myself in the Conway Theater Center a few days after Martha Blase shows up on Leno describing her sex life in a series of hand gestures. She is graphic, she is crude. She even names names.

Live theater has never been my thing, I much prefer the sticky floors and bucket seats of the multiplex, but tonight I am lonely, not just lonely but feeling abandoned, and the only show listed in the paper that sparks any interest is Resistance!—starring Martha Blase, a woman I don’t want to face again for a long, long time. Before closing the entertainment section and accepting the prospect of another night on the couch, a small advertisement catches my eye.

It is a simple black box surrounding the words “Take Away Nothing, A New Play by Local Dramatist Kevin Lorin, presented by the Thatcher Theater Guild, sponsored by Cinco Bank and Trust.” As lethargic as I am, as unadventurous as I feel (losing a woman is a very depressing process), the thought appeals to me; a night in a new venue, a new story written by a skinny accountant or night janitor, a different audience . . . It’s a change from the movies and that is what I need, something small, something hard and real, a place where I can’t overstep my already shaky bounds.

I first saw Martha Blase in a noir thriller called In Defense of Harry.

It was a large part for a debut film, but she wasn’t much to take notice of, truth be told. The ripple of hair plastered across her forehead and a deep Boston accent disguised her genial English charm and lingering diction a little too deeply. It was a strange movie, not the best I’ve ever seen, but I liked it. Martha played a shy maid who escapes from an abusive stepfather. Leaving her brother behind, she comes to work for Harry, played by Devon McClure, at eighteen. Years pass, then, one day, Harry, disappointed with his life and wealth, begins to cross every line, he breaks every taboo, then comes home to cry on his maid’s over-sympathetic shoulder. She plies him with brandy and he tells her 52 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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his secrets, but instead of turning him in to the cops she begins to fall in love with the demonic tycoon, and believes he has fallen for her too.

He has gone through the first six of the seven deadly sins when Martha, fully in his grips, goes to bed with him and is then violently knifed as the screen fades to black.

It wasn’t until she starred in an adaption of Madame Bovary that I began taking serious notice of Martha Blase. The tale was set in Reading, England rather than Rouen, and sitting there in the theater, surrounded by strangers watching the young country wife attempt to escape her life, I began for the first time to be moved by a performance. I was not one to love from afar, I never had posters or photographs of bands or actresses on my walls as a kid, I never had a crush on a sales clerk or checkout girl. But that night I was caught off guard by emotions that had never touched me. It felt strange at the time, and it feels odd to discuss even now, but I am not ashamed to tell you that I fell in love with an actress, a movie star actually, although at the beginning of our relationship the title “star” was still on her horizon.

The Conway Center has been reluctantly standing on Washington St. since before I was born. I remember my mother dragging me here for Saturday morning showings of Peter Rabbit, and now, twenty-two years later, I reenter. This place was once a Department of Motor Vehicles office (the sign in the back still says “DMV Parking Only”), and I think the ticket booth is where eye tests were administered. Then, briefly, it was a homeless shelter before the city decided to build the two story Public Charity Home. After that the run-down building was re-fitted for the purposes of drumming up culture. The guild is run on leftovers, leftover bits of the city budget, throwaway props, even handme-down scripts. No one around here is really interested in theater, especially in this little city, though they may drive three hours for the rights to wear a Les Mis. or Rent tee shirt. I can hardly blame them for their apathy when the theater guild actors daylight as attorneys, housewives, or kindergarten teachers. Despite free television ads, onthe-house newspaper listings and chamber of commerce posters, people are just not interested in showing up for the latest Kevin Lorin plays when the majority of performers are extras from the high school production of Brigadoon. As far as I’m concerned tonight, though, even if the entertainment isn’t first rate, at least it’s interesting. A nicely flubbed line by the local weatherman is worth two bucks.

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off work, pushing back curtain time to twenty after. Sitting in my wooden folding chair, one of six people in the auditorium, I can’t help but mull over my disappointments. Six audience members, seven actors up front—those are numbers I can handle. I wonder if I ever had a chance with Martha. It doesn’t seem right, it’s criminal to put one actress on 2000 screens showing her three, maybe four times a night. 200,000 men watch the same actress, are fed the same lines, same gestures, and she isn’t even in the building. More than likely the person they’ve spent two hours learning to understand is off on some South Seas resort “refreshing” herself with wine coolers at her producer’s villa. Hollywood has taken their bodies away and left us with roles of celluloid. You can never find her, hand her flowers, meet her after the show. You can just go to the movies and watch her, two dimensional and trapped by the rhythm of the projector.

When the curtain finally comes up on Take Away Nothing I let out a sharp cough, trying to hide my grin. This is much different from the movies. On the right half of the stage is a high schooler reaching his arm out, sternly pointing towards a potato sack. His hair is dusted white and he has a handlebar mustache glued to his upper lip, but he is too short and creamy faced to be even half an old man. Next to him is a post-menopausal housewife who is squeezing her lips together in a prissy look that resembles constipation much more than snobbery. With her hair done up in a bun, she looks like Mrs. Olson from Little House on the Prairie, except, like the boy, her hair is dusted with a thick coating of talcum powder and hair spray. She and “young gramps” are positioned side by side and are looking at each other, an obvious indicator that they are man and wife. Behind what looks like a folding table draped in oil cloth stands a slightly balding soda jerk who I think I’ve seen on cable access doing racist political commentaries. They all stand in suspended animation, the one pointing, the one pursing, and the other grinning away. Then the narrator comes out and begins: “Yokochopa Valley is a nice place to visit, but make sure you take away nothing when you leave. Doc Cleaver . . . ” And so begins the pathetic synthesis between Our Town and She Stoops to Conquer that I will soon have by heart.

A woman on the movie screen is easily quantifiable—legs, eyes, breasts, hair, hands, lips, even her words are geared to tell the audience exactly what and who she is, either good girl gone bad, 54 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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bad girl gone good, soft girl gone tough, or engaged girl gone gaga for good-looking best friend. It’s easy to fall for these characters, that’s what they’re created for. That’s why people hang movie posters on their walls or create web pages about their favorite stars. Contrary to what Hollywood wants us to believe there is no set formula in love, it is not as linear as the movie plots propose. I’m proof of that.

Eventually you will love every aspect of a person, the way they walk, brush their teeth, hum “Yankee Doodle.” You will love a wrinkle in their brow, or the funny way they sneeze. You will love what they say and how they say it. Who says conversation must come first? In the end good conversation will be the first aspect of love to go. Most older couples do not communicate more than the basic essentials, “time to eat, time to sleep, come sit near me.” And what about lovers who bicker continuously? They’re still in love, though their conversation skills are lacking. Besides, don’t we love the mythology of one another anyway? How can we ever know someone fully?—I don’t think we can. We just guess, and those guesses build a model of the mind of the person we love. I think it is more pure to love someone for reasons beyond what they think or say. Minds can change. So when I tell you I fell in love with Martha Blase you have to know that it was true, not infatuation or movie poster love. I knew her as well as I’ve known anyone in my life. I can’t help it if they took their bodies away from us.

Act I scene ii Emily enters. She is wearing a brown cotton print frock and has her hair in a simple rope down her back. A dusky complexion and high eyebrows mark her out, her movements are natural, her speech has no other emphasis but her own. She enters the store and kisses the old-young man on the cheek and yells into his ear, “Did you sleep well last night, Poppy?” to which the dusty boy replies, “Fine Em. Fine.” She moves to the grocery counter and pulls a rope of licorice from a glass jar by the register, and I can’t feel myself anymore, I can’t move my mind off stage. “Poppy, I’m going swimming this afternoon at the Emerson’s pond. Buck pulled a twenty-inch mud cat from there last week, so I’m going to wear Mama’s old shoes to protect my toes!” I can see the way her eyes expectantly hover on the other actors. She anticipates their lines and I think she is the master of the stage. Poppy and Mama and the weatherman/narrator all orbit around her. The program folded in my lap tells me that her name is Emily Fontelli and the character Crab Orchard Review ◆ 55

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she plays is Emily Graham. The next night I find myself in the front row of Take Away Nothing.

It wasn’t until her third film and the Oscar Nom for Best Supporting Actress that I knew I was in love with Martha Blase. By that time our connection was so intimate, I could tell by the way she walked down steps, the way her back arched in a quest for height, that she wished she was two inches taller. I knew she hated the way they shaped her eyebrows for Bovary because she touched them twice during the film.

I knew she preferred hot cocoa to coffee, water to wine, and she liked the crust the best. These are things I just knew about her. And I knew she had a ritual, one similar to mine except hers was much more graceful and her surroundings more elegant. At night, when the spotlights were killed and the cake of makeup was scraped from her face, she’d drive home taking the back roads, the routes with the most deciduous trees because the palms and wide boulevards made her lonely. Her car would wind its way up a hairpin path into the foothills, the radio silent, and she would park in a low boxy garage the color of butter. She picked this house because it doesn’t interrupt the horizon. She can look off her roof and see the edges of L.A. and small side canyons, but most of the buildings and suburbs are blocked by two bristlecone pines. There is a yucca by her front door. She always enters the house through the garage and heads for her bedroom where she slips on a soft brown turtleneck and khakis, no shoes, no socks. After sprinkling some fish food above the aquarium Martha would take her place on the velvet sofa in front of her whitewashed brick fireplace. She had the fireplace built to resemble the one she has at home in England, and on the mantle are photos of her family and close chums and the dog she had until she was twenty. There is a spot on the right about the size of an Oscar, but she’s not saving it for a statue, she’s saving it for a photo of a man. And she sits and stares into the fireplace for hours, not wanting to rearrange the logs with the poker she holds limply in her right hand. She would stare at the fire until it burned itself out, and she would think about someone, someone like me, not knowing that someone like me was sitting in his armchair listening to raindrops tap against the air conditioner, thinking of a woman, one exactly like her.

Emily’s last lines, after being rescued by her grandfather from the clutches of a youthful gambler in a flophouse are, “It’s a nice place to visit, but you can’t take it with you!” With the spattering of 56 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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applause the piano breaks into an unusually slow rendition of “The Entertainer.” Each character comes out to take an individual bow, including the director, lighting technician/prop master, and a man on crutches who is in charge of makeup. Emily’s bow isn’t quite real. As if the audience doesn’t exist, as if she has never come out of her role, she steps to the edge of the stage in her little canvas shoes and curtsies, no bravado, no smiling, nothing but Emily and the lone spotlight. That look keeps me up all night the first time I see it. I can read her easily, Emily onstage and Emily offstage are one— same breathing, same mannerisms, same inflection in her voice. There is a jig in the middle of the play when she dances with Grandpa while disguised as a flapper. The scene feels out of place, as if it is there to eat up time so Grandma can have a costume change. Grandpa begins by doing a hambone, then Emily repeats. Then Emily does a tap, and Gramps repeats when all of a sudden they both break into the Charleston.

The weird thing is Emily never looks away from the other actor, she does all of the dances so the audience can only see her profile, like she is a cartoon. She never looks towards the audience, and I think she is embarrassed dancing on stage. I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t.

Things like that help me know her. They are pure Emily.

The composer Berlioz once fell for an English actress. She was playing Ophelia in a company touring France. She would enter the scene every night sprinkling wilted daffodil petals above her head, scat singing her lines in a mad frenzy, and Berlioz, the carrot-top in the front row, would sit intently studying her every move until he was sure that he was in love with her. He chased her through Paris, to Marseilles, Lyon, on to Brussels, and home to England. What she must have thought, each night as this strange French man handed her a bouquet of roses and whispered “I love you.” How he must have wept, unable to reach her from his seat. How unreal the stage must have seemed for him, impenetrable, as foreboding as, say, a movie screen is today. But all was not for naught; Hector and Harriet Smithson were married four years after he first wept over the death of the waterlogged virgin. And for all the happiness of the tale I cannot help but feel anger and jealousy; Berlioz had an advantage over me. He had a backstage.

Martha Blase was a shy actress, at first never giving talk show interviews and only answering questions in tight two line quotes.

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That’s one of the things that endeared her to me, that guarded English privacy that even shone out in parts of her films. She fought to hold herself in during a movie, attempting to create a character completely separate from herself, which only made it more noticeable, to me in any case, when the true Martha broke free. Her big break, the one that’s still playing, was Resistance!, a film about De Gaulle and the French Fifth Column during World War Two. It was a big film shot on location in Lyon and on the French Riviera with scenes in Morocco and Algeria. Half action story, half romance, it was a big departure for her, and in this role more than any other she could let her shy self come through playing an “emotionally distraught English nurse learning to trust love again in an atmosphere of intrigue and uncertainty.”

Opening night I couldn’t get in, the line stretched half a block. But the next day I went to the Saturday matinee. She was brilliant. There she was on the screen, as if she had decided to play herself, Martha Blase, out of character. In the opening scene she was crying, really crying, a dead soldier’s head resting in her lap. Maybe the director pulled her strings, brought up her grandmother’s death or her brother’s suicide, I don’t know, but there was something different throughout the whole film. Her eyes were her eyes, they corresponded to her lines perfectly; she was more than an actress on a screen. She was transcending the celluloid. I didn’t know if anyone else noticed, and I prayed that they would not, or would not care. This performance was for me, the one whom she called out to, the one who could appreciate her. At last she revealed herself to me, opened herself up as I had opened myself up to her, and I stopped feeling foolish about love. There was a chance for me. There was a chance for me like there was for Berlioz.

The seventh and closing night of Take Away Nothing is memorable.

At the last bow the cast has already discarded their costumes, wigs and all except for their dusty white eyebrows. It is a treat for someone who has seen the play seven times to see the true faces of the actors, although I imagine the act has nothing to do with me; they are probably just eager to get to the cast party. Emily has stayed in costume and I can’t tell the difference between her and the rest of the cast. She blends. I am watching a young tear come down her cheek as the swelled audience of twenty-five stands up, coats in hand, at her graceful curtsy. The woman who has played Grandmother advances to the front of the stage and, almost scolding the audience, begins a speech: “Excuse me, excuse me. Thank you. This has been such a wonderful 58 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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experience. Everyone who worked on this play put their whole hearts into it, but some don’t get enough credit. . . . ” As she calls up the piano player, director, and usher to present them with bundles of plastic wrapped roses I find myself feeling a tinge of desperation. What next? I have been in a daze for the past week, rotely showing up show after show with no real purpose. I just watch Emily, hardly realizing that she is only thirty feet away, and smaller, not larger than life. I hesitate, but then a small bit of resolve tightens my chest. It tells me to meet her. To wait outside and speak and be spoken to.

Resistance! was a big hit, one of the largest grossing films of all time, and Martha Blase, swept higher and higher up the star ladder, began to turn more heads than just mine. Best Actress at the Golden Globes, another Oscar nomination, she was quickly leaving me behind. She was on the cover of every magazine, and even began giving brief and unrevealing print interviews. I was proud of her success. Someday we would be together, rich, talented, and in love.

Emily exits the theater center from the recessed side door, the only opening into the old building. I stand leaning against one of the hawthorns that line the parking lot waiting for her entrance.

When she appears below the street lamp readjusting the strap of her tote bag I move towards her, or I think I move towards her, but find the palms of my hands glued flat to the tree. I try to loosen my locked joints. Little white shoes, brown dress, hair combed down her back, thick eyeliner; I let out a pathetic call, “Emily,” clear my throat and seek a more masculine voice, “Emily Fontelli!” She looks my way, peering forward towards the black row of trees, extending a neck that sticks forward like a turkey’s.

“Yeah?” she calls tentatively back, “Who is it?”

I step forward into the beam of the street light, conscious that I am making her nervous. “Oh, no one you know, just a fan . . . an admirer. I wanted to say that you were wonderful in the show. Really, I have to say you have such a natural style.”

“Thank you,” she says, a coy smile widening her face, “We don’t get very many compliments unless they come from relatives.

Actually, I have to admit, we were in better shape last night. I think we were, you know, kind of antsy to, like, finish this thing up.”

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failing to mention Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, “and I guess that did seem more together.” In my head I continue in earnest, “You have progressed every night, lines that at first sounded awkward in my ears turned rhythmic with each passing performance. Tonight was your aria, pure gold, each word true, truer, perfect.”

“Well I’m glad someone noticed. My ride’s waiting for me um . . . there’s a cast party at Mick’s so . . . ” she moves down the sidewalk.

“Oh, I was wondering if you would like to have coffee or something sometime. I’d really like to discuss the play some more.

I just, well . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, that sounds great.” Her smile grows bigger as she bobs her head. “Let me write down my number.” She fumbles through her tote and draws out a felt tipped pen and a folded yellow program.

She pulls the cap off with her teeth and jots down her name and number using the back of her hand as a desk. She hands me the paper and trots off down the street, waving as she flees. “Call me,” she tries to shout, the blue pen-cap still clenched in her teeth.

At home I smooth the precious yellow program out on the kitchen table, studying the sloppy curves of her handwriting. Emily Fontelli. I can’t shake the idea that this slip of paper is nothing more than a postcard, an alien piece of mail dropped through my slot by mistake. Emily Fontelli. Because I spoke she responded. Because I love she responds. None of it seems quite right. Because I love her— nothing. The way it should be.

The next day I sit writing out my future conversation with Emily.

I don’t normally do this, I’ve never done this, but I don’t think I can handle calling her on my own. Sometimes I write out a witty answering machine message before I record it, just so it flows, but this feels much more sinister. I script out an elaborate schemata of questions and responses beginning with “Hello?” Each question has three possible responses, and each response has three possible questions. There is a scenario for each possible inevitability, from her forgetting about me, to her accepting an invitation, to her postponing.

I know if I try to improvise I will lose myself entirely and stumble.

I choose an unassuming time to call, one that, if she glances at the clock, will show that I hadn’t planned the call ahead of time. 7:22. Too 60 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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late to seem eager, but early enough to negotiate a same-night date.

I wait by the phone watching the lights of the digital clock above the refrigerator slowly rearrange themselves until the appointed time stares at me in red. I dial. After two rings she answers.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Emily, I . . .” I shuffle through my notebook trying to determine the right response, “I talked to you last night after the show . . . ” “Right, right, the guy who wanted to go out for coffee. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I say, throwing my notebook down. I feel exhilarated.

My chest loses its tightness. The conversation progresses naturally and forty-five minutes later we are both sipping hot cocoa in the park. We discover that neither of us enjoys coffee or coffee shops.

I read an article “Martha Blase, Blazing to the Top” in Movieline a few days after seeing Resistance! She was intense, very real. She explained how she still lived with her mother and that after every film she stayed home for a month or two taking no calls, doing no interviews. She simply dug in her quaint English vegetable patch, the same one she had tended since she was three. The studio, she said, was putting pressure on her to become more public, that no one would let her work if she didn’t start putting out. I tore a page of the interview from a copy in the library.

Why are you in movies if you can’t stand being a movie star?

Why didn’t you become a shorthand clerk or a lorry driver? Martha crossed her legs and looked at me, still stunning though she wore no makeup or shoes. “Why are you an interviewer? I’m sure listening to famous people go on and on about what a bang-up job they’ve done on this or that flop doesn’t get your knickers in a bunch. You do it for the moments when the truth comes out, when Clint Eastwood threatens to punch you for mentioning his illegit kid or Sandra Bullock cries because you mention her dead puppy, don’t you? I mean you look for the reality behind the identity those hyper-real children throw at you, isn’t that right? The rest is a fucking joke.

I’m an actress, it’s what I love. During a shoot I become someone else’s vision: the director’s, the screenwriter’s, the cameraman’s, even another vision of myself. And then way down the road the audience picks it up and creates a new vision, a mass vision, something none of us has ever expected. It’s fascinating, really Crab Orchard Review ◆ 61

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brilliant. That’s what I love, giving someone a vision. But I didn’t ask to be a movie STAR. That’s horrible in a sense. I hate it, it’s taking a vision beyond its logical conclusion. I don’t want to be a character when the projector stops, I want to be me. But the other members of the younger set get a thrill out of it, hanging out at the Viper Room and taking pills. It’s rubbish.”

Despite your reputation as a recluse do you find fame seeks you out? Can you still walk down the street? “Believe it or not, yes, because I’m so dolled up in my movies that no one recognizes me on the street. And I’ve never been in a blockbuster before. I can still fly a kite in Central Park when I’m there or take visitors on a jaunt around P.C. if they’ve never seen London.” Two weeks later in her 5th Avenue flat she greets me with the words, “It’s all changed.” As I get ready for the second half of our interview she begins pouring her heart out. Resistance! has just been released the week before and is already breaking most box office records. “They’ve found me. I wonder if it’s as much fun flying a kite from a rooftop.”

I am writing very meticulously in a pocket notebook. “Favorite Color.”

She replies, “Blue.”

“Favorite Month.”

“August.”

“Animal?” “. . . Vole.”

“Bird?”

“Robin. Why do you care?” Emily is resting her head in my lap. We are sitting on a park bench in the early evening. Two weeks have passed since that first phone call, and we have seen each other almost every day since.

“I just like to know these things. I think it’s important to know basic things about another person.”

“Why are you writing them down, it’s not like we’re in a novel here. We’re just getting to know each other.” I close my notebook.

“I don’t have a good memory. I don’t want to ever disappoint you if I forget your birthday.” We both pause. She snuggles her head deeper into my lap and looks up at me, smiling. The darkness and the odd position distorts her face so she does not look like herself.

She looks like a man, a man with a dark aureole around his head and flaring horse-nostrils.

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“That’s so cute. You’re very romantic. I think we should go dancing tonight. Do you dance?”

“Well, of course I dance,” I reply, “but it’s been a few years.

I’m no Cary Grant. You’ll have to be patient with me.”

“Oh, I don’t care how you dance. I’m a horrible dancer. It’s just a fun thing to do.”

“Sure,” I say, “but let me drop by home and change shoes.”

“Hey! I forgot to tell you, Mick called last night. They want to run Take Away Nothing for another week. If everyone agrees we’ll reopen on Monday. Isn’t that great?”

“Wow, you guys deserve it.” I am secretly elated.

“Yeah, I guess they broke even on the production costs, which has never happened before, so they thought since it was so popular they’d try and make a profit. The ticket-taker said one guy showed up for all seven performances. Isn’t that wild?”

“Yeah, that’s really great. It was a good show. I didn’t think I’d ever like a theater center production that much.”

We stop by my apartment and I slip on some tennis shoes and splash on some aftershave. “How about Molly’s?” I call from the bathroom. “They have a good mix. I want to see if you can do the hustle.” I waltz out of the bathroom, dancing with the air. “Are you ready darling?”

Molly’s has the biggest dance floor in town and a sedate clientele. I find us a table on the edge of the dance floor and we sit for a moment, holding hands and watching others grind to the music before we hop in. Emily looks very silly, bouncing with the beat, and I know I must look the same way, but I can’t see myself. I watch her dance, and feel myself winding down. I am barely moving but still smile at her. She is lost in the rhythms and doesn’t notice the amount of attention I am paying to her movements. The first song deftly transforms itself into a slow ballad and Emily carefully wraps her arms around my neck. I embrace her waist and she looks into my eyes and pulls my head closer to hers. I feel queasy. She is looking at me, and I grimace. I try to hold off the anxiety, but she is looking into my eyes. I can’t see her whole face, just her eyes looking right into mine. No reflection, just deep brown eyes. I feel like I’m standing on a mattress and that I’m slowly sinking into the floor. I try to force my limbs to move, to bring my tempo back up, but my legs continue to melt. I look at Emily and don’t know who she is. I hear the music but it has no pattern. I try to calm myself, but I am nowhere to be Crab Orchard Review ◆ 63

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found. I am standing still and she is dancing against me.

“I . . . I can’t do this. Let me sit down,” I manage to say, breaking my hold from around her waist.

“What, are you okay?” she questions, looking concerned. I lead her off the floor and we sit down. I take a sip from my plastic cup and rub her back.

“I’m fine. Please, just dance. I want to watch you dance.” I say, more confidently than is appropriate. “It’s a fun thing to do,” I mock.

“What? You wanna watch me dance?”

“Yes, just dance. I’m fine here. I just don’t feel right. It’s been a long time . . . ” For a moment her face tells me she is waiting for more explanation, but then she breaks her gaze and turns towards the crowd. She goes out on the dance floor and looks at me, she dances and wraps her arms around herself and sings along with the song, directs her song, one I don’t recognize, to me. She is having fun. It is a romantic gesture, but I can’t enjoy it. I try to watch, I bob my head and squint my eyes and pucker my lips, but I can’t hold out and turn my head, not wanting her to look at me. I look at the floor, look at the table, hold my drink. I pretend like I’m coughing, but she can see I’m faking it. She comes over, offended.

“You jerk. I’m not going to dance by myself if you’re not going to watch.” She is harsh, but not cruel. I can tell she is waiting for the punch line.

“Why don’t you dance with someone else? It makes me uncomfortable when you look at me. Actually it’s kind of creepy.” I give her a little boy smile. It’s a mild confession, but it seems to hurt her.

“You want to watch me dance with someone else?” She knows I’m not joking. “Why did you say you wanted to dance if you didn’t want to dance?”

I hope she will go back out on the dance floor and do the flapper jig like she does in the play. I want her to forget that I am there. The pounding of the music makes it difficult to think. I feel terrible.

“I like to watch,” I tell her. “I just like to watch when people do things. It makes me nervous when I get involved. I have a very low stimulus threshold,” I say in a mad professor imitation.

“What?” she asks again. I can tell she’s disappointed.

“I really like watching you,” I tell her, yelling over the music, “like when you’re in the play. I just don’t know if I can handle a real woman.” I don’t know why I say this, it is more than I wanted to say.

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Maybe my drink is too strong. Her face turns black.

“Is this a sexual thing?” she asks. “Are you trying to suggest something to me? I don’t get what you’re saying.” The music is very loud, and I pretend I am having trouble understanding her.

“What?”

“I said, are you a pervert.” She is not joking.

The whole situation feels artificial, it moves unusually fast, and I can’t handle the dialogue. I wish that we were in the park on the bench where I could think, but here I feel rushed, I feel like she is breathing down my neck. I try to think but I melt into the floor, and the longer I think the angrier she looks. She really doesn’t know me, she really doesn’t know me; the words run through my head and I believe them.

“Well?” she asks. Her arms are crossed and her chin is bunched up. “Is this some sex game? Have you been playing me this whole time?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice trembling. I just want her to go away, I regret saying the word, but as she gets up she shoves the table into my chest and looks me in the eye.

“Sicko,” she says. I watch her walk out of Molly’s, and I feel relieved, I feel like I can breathe, but my heart hurts.

Martha showed up on Leno to promote Resistance! wearing a lacy white dress and gloves up to her elbows. She looked like Madonna in the “Material Girl” video. I thought the outfit was dignified, very sexy. She looked like she was going to a ball. Before Leno could begin his greeting she began mugging the camera. “I just want to tell all the girls out there that have been wondering, yes, Kip Yeager’s bum is real and it is much, much tighter than shows up on screen.” The audience responded with a round of whoops and hysteric cat calls. Martha let a wry smile curl the right side of her mouth. My heart sank, there was something amiss. I couldn’t find Martha anywhere, her eyes looked dull. She crossed her legs and leaned back, then, flaunting all good talk show manners, pulled a cigarette from her gloved forearm, and with a few lingering puffs managed to foul the beam from the spotlight with a gritty haze of smoke. In under six minutes she was able to discuss her sex life from age thirteen on, badmouth every director she ever worked with, and offend the saxophone player, destroying any respect or any plans I held for her.

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“So, ah, Matha, this is your first television interview,” begins Jay. “Everyone’s always said ‘Oh she thinks she’s too good for TV, she’s too British, or she’s too shy,’ but, nah, you seem very comfortable. Why haven’t you ever done a TV appearance before tonight?”

She looked right into the camera, smiled, and said, “The world wasn’t ready for Martha Blase before tonight.”

I sit in the back row opening night of Take Away Nothing’s second run so there will be no chance that Emily will spot me. I marvel at her return, the white canvas shoes, brown dress, the pony tail. It’s a relief seeing her up there on stage again; I can’t call to mind one detail of our brief affair. The familiar lines begin to flow, and then Emily comes on stage, kisses her grandfather, and takes a piece of licorice. The urge comes over me to call out to her, to see if she will respond, see if she will move to the front of the stage and call back into the dark theater, but the silent wall, the shield between audience and stage holds me back. I’m not even sure my voice would be heard. In Cantonese Opera there is an imaginary line, hu-dumen, which the players cross when they step on stage. Their identities fail, their offstage lives are swept into some nether region where they wait and shiver for their bodies to return. The actors are supposed to become what they are on stage, their world is only that of props and cues and lines. That they come back at all is the real encore.

I move to the side of the theater, careful that my shoes do not squeak against the slick concrete. I stand and listen to the dialogue.

I know all the lines and mouth them along with the performers.

Every time I see the play the words are the same, the story unravels in the same sequence, but the delivery is always different, as if the actors can’t handle their characters. But I have tamed them all. I know exactly how Grandpa should speak, I know how the narrator should move his arms. It is my play. I brush past the piano player and mount the steps to the stage.

“Emily,” I call softly from the top step, but she does not turn from her grandfather. They are doing the dance sequence, she has on a tube dress with fringe shaking across the bottom. She has her head turned. I find myself on the stage, my jacket draped over my arm like a waiter’s rag. I can hear the audience murmur and the narrator angrily motions for me to leave. Gramps stops his dance and blushes. He looks towards the audience sympathetically. I have 66 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the urge to push him aside and take over where he left off, but it is only a passing feeling. I am halfway across the stage before Emily turns around. She does not seem to recognize me.

“Emily,” I say again. “Your favorite month is August.”

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She Rented Manhattan

The blue and white striped sweatshirt, or the ribbed off-white sweater from the Limited; the Guess jeans or the short skirt with black tights; maybe, the other Limited sweater—the one with the pocket sewn on at the hip . . . or the maroon lambs-wool sweater she got from Benetton for her birthday, she could wear it with the tan Banana Republic pants—but she doesn’t want to be too dressed up. . . Maybe. . . .

Mary can’t decide. There are too many choices. There’s no way to tell which one’s right. Although all of the clothes in her wardrobe imply “Mary,” all reflect a tint of the bright attitude she tries to have toward life, there are minutely calibrated differences in how they affect her mood. The wrong combination of wardrobe and mood has her crawling out of her skin, thinking “This is not me,” or “This is the wrong me,” or “This is an impostor—pay no attention—she’s trying to give me a bad rep.” With the right combination she feels sexier than she believes she actually is, or smarter, or more fun loving, or less afraid to leave the house.

She wishes she knew who would be at the party. Mary lives out of the party loop; she usually doesn’t even hear about them until the Monday after they’re over. Stephanie said this one’s supposed to be big, but, who knows, it might be an all-girl thing. If she knew there weren’t going to be boys, Mary would just wear a hooded sweatshirt and the new jeans that still need to be broken in. But how could there not be boys? The entire town knows that Sarah’s parents are in Florida and she has the keys to their lake house.

Mary’s nervous stomach tells her to dress defensively, just in case people she doesn’t want to talk to—like Justin—show up. She wishes she could wear her ripped jeans, a white pocket tee, and the white leather vest that, when she bought it, she thought was such a risk, so capable of labeling her a girl not to be messed with.

But tonight, she remembers, it’s supposed to be cold. She returns to her closet. She starts from scratch. ◆◆◆

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Today was Mary’s birthday. At exactly 2:36 this afternoon, she turned sixteen. Except for the hour out to eat with her parents at The Olive Garden and the half hour during which Stephanie stopped over to deliver her present—a heart-shaped crystal jewelry box that Mary has already filled—Mary spent the day alone. She rented Manhattan and dreamt of being Mariel Hemingway all afternoon.

Mary loves Manhattan; those first few notes of Rhapsody in Blue draw her into a world so exhilaratingly melancholy that by the end of the film (it’s in black and white on purpose, so it’s a film) she’s convinced that, if she were that Dalton girl, the sadness she so often feels would not be gratuitous. Mary has always imagined that the refined and sophisticated Manhattan so casually captured by this film is a place far superior to the small Wisconsin town into which she had the bad luck of being plopped down; Manhattan’s a place where life is not cheap and people are careful to wrap it in bubble wrap—visiting psychiatrists for extra padding and considering the effects of their every action before doing anything stupid. And that girl, that girl—to Mary’s blunt mind, a girl like the girl in Manhattan could never experience the complete, disassociative wrongness that makes up Mary’s idea of herself. Yes, Mariel Hemingway is the epitome of everything Mary is not and should be. Every year on her birthday, Mary strolls through Manhattan.

Because she’s got this movie, she is able to be less ashamed of not fitting into the mise en scene she belongs to: the mise en scene of Goodrich High School.

Nonetheless, not fitting in is intensely lonely. Mary sometimes imagines that the only life she has is the one she vicariously receives from Stephanie. Stephanie’s life is exciting. Mary often gets no phone calls for a week, but Stephanie’s phone never stops ringing—even the catty clique that decides their school’s public opinion sometimes calls her. She’s always chock-full of gossip and, no matter how bad Mary knows she’s being, she revels in her almost palpable thrill and shock as it’s invariably passed along. Listening to Stephanie, Mary almost feels bold herself; Stephanie isn’t afraid of anything; she talks about her dates more flippantly than Mary would ever dream of—Mary has gone out on a few dates, but they’re never as exciting as Stephanie’s; they’re always too fraught with emotion.

Stephanie sometimes drags Mary out into this larger world, and she’s given Mary no choice tonight. That’s how she phrased it: “You don’t have a choice.” And Mary gave in. Anything—even a terrifying party she knows she’s not wanted at—is better than moping around Crab Orchard Review ◆ 69

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the house watching the seconds stand still on the kitchen clock and imagining how much fun the girls who go out with football players are having, how excited the skateboarders must be by whatever misdemeanor they’ve defiantly chosen to pull off tonight, imagining even that the ostracized, the hackers and computer game addicts are together, celebrating a new CD-ROM with Schnapps from someone’s parent’s liqueur cabinet. Mary can’t stand another night of that—not on her birthday.

So, after she’s chosen her outfit, Mary will wait on the front steps of the duplex her family shares with the Hildebrandts for Stephanie’s car to appear down the street. She’ll watch the sky darken from blue to gray and fret about what will happen tonight.

When Stephanie finally arrives to pick her up, Mary will immediately ask if the outfit is alright. If it’s wrong, Stephanie won’t be afraid to say so. If need be, she’ll even wait as Mary changes.

They both know how Mary clings when she feels insecure. Then, they wind up resentful, not speaking for days, both wishing Mary were less of the person she is.

But tonight, although Stephanie has minor qualms with Mary’s jewelry and thinks that the make-up’s too much, she will merely say, “Take off the hat and you’re perfect.” Baseball cap thrown back into the house, Mary will amble into the car and they’ll be off.

As always, Mary will jump, first thing, into Stephanie’s day, asking hundreds of questions, hoping to get every detail of every second since last time they saw each other. Normally Stephanie savors the attention, spouting off the mendacities of her life like she’s a charming and charismatic world leader holding court to a worshipful audience on matters of global importance. Tonight, though, because Mary had refused to come to Milwaukee shopping, Stephanie will want to hear about Mary’s day first.

Mary will play coy, like she would tell if she could but she’s been sworn to secrecy, until Stephanie gives up in frustration. Stephanie will lightly tease Mary and make her promise to tell all later. Mary will cross her heart and pray to the God that her parents believe in that Stephanie forgets about this; she’ll pray that her self pity is allowed to wrap itself silently into the past the way guilty pleasures are supposed to. Then she’ll press Stephanie to get on with the litany.

She’ll listen raptly as Stephanie starts in on the traffic jam caused by some kind of accident involving a jack-knifed semi on Highway 41. She’ll take mental notes as Stephanie rates, song by song, 70 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the CDs by REM and Pearl Jam that she bought at the Grand Avenue Mall. She’ll commiserate and say, “you’re not fat though, it’s ok,” as Stephanie berates herself about the humongous salad, with ranch dressing that wasn’t even low-fat and mega-amounts of grated cheese, that she ordered at TGIFridays—she ate the whole thing! Stephanie will describe every pair of clam-diggers and every designer Tee-shirt that she did not buy for summer clothes with as much fervor as she describes those she did buy, and Mary will passionately agree with her choices. She’ll shiver as Stephanie vividly recreates all the details of the nagging, half-spoken argument her parents dragged from retail outlet to retail outlet, and then all the way home in the car.

Camping up her disappointment to heighten the guilt, Stephanie will ask Mary why she refused to come along. Mary will have no way to explain why she has more fun listening to Stephanie describe what happened than she does when she actually goes out into that world, where she pressures herself so heavily to be spontaneous and fun that her self-consciousness sucks and clings like a plastic bag around her.

She’ll meekly attempt to shift the conversation away from herself.

And, because it’s Mary’s birthday, Stephanie will begrudgingly let it go at this first sign of bristle. She’ll fly into gossip, reeling off names and vital information like who’s broken up with whom, who’s started going out with whom, and who’s likely to fight with whom over who whom is now going out with. The list will go on and on.

It will seem to Mary as if every single student at Goodrich High School except she herself is somehow involved in a steamy affair or a messy divorce. At first, she will consider herself lucky as she attempts the impossible task of keeping all these sex lives straight; the chart in her mind will quickly grow unreadable. Laughing, enjoying the geometry of the project, Mary will make Stephanie back-track and retrace and define the length of each amorous line.

Eventually, she’ll realize that everyone has been with everyone else and she’ll wonder how she was so sadly able to keep herself so completely outside of the matrix.

She’ll wonder if it is her own fault; Stephanie would say so.

Stephanie would say “Toughen up, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

They’ve argued about this before, and when the two of them are together now, Mary is always aware of the possibility of Stephanie turning on her. It won’t surprise her—she’ll have almost been expecting it—when Stephanie’s grip on the steering wheel tenses in the extra-safe ten and two o’clock position and she lets the car coast Crab Orchard Review ◆ 71

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to an illegally low velocity as if preparing for falling rocks ahead.

Mary will allow the gossip to tumble away on the pavement behind them and wait deferentially—flinching—for the lecture that she sees coming.

As the car falls to an inch-along idle, with a beleaguered look pulling at her face, Stephanie will glance back and forth between Mary and the street. She’ll glance at the from-the-box ranch houses lined with manicured saplings. She’ll sigh, storing up energy and say, “So, tonight, when you’re at the party—” Mary will tense and search for a distraction—the hard plastic, bowtied koala bear hanging from the rearview window, the chewinggum wrapper crumpled on the dashboard, the frayed, growing hole in the foamy plastic handgrip tied around Stephanie’s steering wheel, the colon blinking between the hour and minute of the dashboard clock.

She’ll cut Stephanie off—“No, I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll be good.”— as she becomes transfixed by the blinking, the blinking, the blinking.

Stephanie will commit to the brake and the car will jiggle to a stop in the middle of this laneless street. She won’t even bother to go through the motions of pulling off to the shoulder. She’ll contemplate the windshield and rapidly pop her jaw. Then she’ll turn and attempt to make eye contact.

Sensing Stephanie’s effort, Mary will focus more tightly on the blinking colon.

“I’m so serious, Mary,” Stephanie will say.

And Mary will try her best to ignore her.

“Mary. I know you’re listening, Mary. And just let me say that this is really stupid. This is really baby-ish. Because, Mary. . .”

Stephanie will pause expectantly. When she starts up again, her voice will contain a tinge of whine. “Why won’t you look at me? You don’t even know what I was going to say. I wasn’t even gonna say anything bad.”

Mary will be drawn in by this. “Yes I do know what you were going to say.”

“What, then?”

“That I better not act like a spazz.”

Caught, Stephanie will arch her eyebrows and say, “Well. . . .

But I wasn’t going to say it like that,” trying to turn it into a joke they’re both in on.

Mary will turn to the window and study a sprinkler’s rotation across the lawn beside her.

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“I was going to say—It’s your birthday, Mary. Do you think I’d drag you to a party where nobody liked you on your birthday? I wouldn’t do that. People like you. You’re not an untouchable, Skanky Stacey and GI Joe, they’re untouchables, but not you. You just have to be yourself tonight, Mary, please? Just be. . . . Relax and let things happen and don’t look at people like they’re like offending you when they say stupid shit. Just talk to people. They all want to be your friends . . .”

It will strike Mary that Stephanie’s being completely sincere, but Mary will refuse to acknowledge this. Instead, she’ll remind herself of what she knows: that to be known is the biggest danger there is—to be known is to be able to be hurt. She can’t prove it and she will not share it with Stephanie; Stephanie would want proof; Stephanie would refuse to comprehend how, not only Mary, but anyone could know something simply because she knows it, as if by osmosis, without even an illustrative anecdote to back her conviction up. Mary will sink into the rhythm of the sprinkler and tune Stephanie’s continuing pep-talk out.

She’ll wait, frozen in place, until Stephanie gives up in frustration, turns the engine over and squeals off toward the lake.

As she watches the houses grow further and further apart until the road is surrounded by fields of seedling alfalfa, Mary will skim backwards through the events of her day until she reaches Manhattan.

She’ll let herself wander into an academic game of compare and contrast, pitting herself against Mariel Hemingway. Mariel Hemingway would never find herself fighting with her best friend on the way to a party she didn’t want to go to to begin with. Mariel Hemingway would have just refused to go. She’d be too busy doing actually interesting things with exceptionally fascinating people: engaging in intellectual debates, going to the theater and watching real actors, famous actors (as opposed to the plant managers and town council members and mothers on view at the community theater productions Mary herself is privy to), reading books that were written by people she actually knows. And gradually, as this imagined life unfolds, Mary will replace Mariel Hemingway with herself . . .

Every light will be burning in the two-story house. People will be huddled in packs all over the lawn and, especially, around the keg on the back porch. A cluster of kids will be sitting on the dock with their shoes off, swinging their feet in the water, daring each other to be the first one to skinny-dip. Couples, thinking they’re hidden, will be necking in the shadows of oak trees and maples.

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Stephanie will jump from the car and run around blabbing to everyone that it’s Mary’s birthday, and even though Mary knows that, beneath the good intentions, Stephanie’s doing this to get back at her for the car, she won’t mind. No, she won’t have time to mind, she’ll be too overwhelmed by the reactions of her classmates. People will come to her of their own volition, just to say happy birthday, to find out what she’s been up to—to chat! And when Mary demurely answers their questions with ambiguous, wholly uninformative responses, they’ll be satisfied. They won’t think she’s weird. They’ll seem to accept her.

Wow! She’ll smile, half embarrassed, half elated by the attention.

Greeting her, Sarah will tell her she “shines.” Mary won’t even think about running to the bathroom to search her face for the blemish that would provoke such an underhanded witticism. She’ll blush more.

She’ll return the compliment without paranoia, without skepticism even.

Soon, there will be such an interest in Mary’s birthday that Stephanie will wander off. She will move on to further conversations, mixing out of sight into the crowd across the lawn.

Mary, pumping another beer from the keg, will not feel the usual urge to follow Stephanie; she’ll feel at home, damp and soft like the plaster walls of her self haven’t dried yet, but it’s already obvious that they’ve been sparklingly renovated. She’ll credit Stephanie for the compelling interior design, and she’ll silently thank her.

Normally, Mary can’t think of anything to say at parties. They feel like exercises in masochism to her, and while at them, she sinks toward an isolation so deep her own voice sounds like it’s talking down to her. Most of the time she leaves early. When she stays, she drinks herself dizzy attempting to push herself into a more sociable state of mind; by the end of the night, she needs help walking and has to be carried home by someone she vaguely recognizes—usually Stephanie. Tonight, surprising herself more than anyone, she’ll drink just enough to maintain a nice buzz.

Slightly mystified, tingling with the sensation of winging it, she’ll speak casually with people she’s always thought were stuck up about their plans for the summer. Without betraying how incredibly disconcerting she finds it, she’ll listen as they spitefully dish about people she’s always thought were their best friends. She’ll even toss out a few crowd-pleasing witticisms which will be no less self-satisfying for being unintentional. At some point, she will realize she has lost Stephanie altogether for the night, but this won’t inspire her usual panic; it will be simply an observation, flashing into and 74 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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out of her consciousness, causing no more pause than “It’s sort of interesting that everybody smokes Marlboro Lights” and “I think I just stepped in spilled beer, oh well.” Tonight, it will seem to Mary as if her life has the soft-lit feel of a romantic movie; for the first time she can remember, she’ll compare her life favorably to Manhattan, and let herself fall into a deep, cozy joy.

Sometime near midnight, she’ll take a deep breath and the air will smell perfumed and sweet. With a sudden desire to feel the night breeze, to get lost in the blanket of romance it conjures up in her mind, Mary will wander off alone along one of the wooded trails that meander past the house on their way around the lake. Still within earshot of the party, she will find a boulder that juts out into the water and, hoping there’s no poison ivy, she’ll forge off the trail to climb daintily onto it.

Sitting with her knees to her chin, her plastic cup full of beer tucked neatly into the crook beneath them, Mary will marvel at how the surface of the lake shimmers like a robe of white gold in the moonlight, almost as if it could be unhooked from the black water below and folded away, to be brought back out only on special occasions, when the moon wants to wax romantically at someone, like her, whom it knows will appreciate the subtleties of its attention. The white gold will mesmerize her. She’ll lose track of time and space, to be brought back only when Justin calls out from the trail behind her.

“Sarah said you were out here somewhere,” he’ll say. “Are you hiding, or something?”

She’ll look over her shoulder at him, noticing that he’s got a new spiked haircut, before answering, “No. . . I like the quiet here.”

“I was looking for you,” he’ll say as if he’s embarrassed.

She’ll smile and curse herself, remembering how much she likes him.

Mary and Justin went out for three weeks in January. They never really did anything, mostly sitting on the concrete wall behind the gym during basketball games and wandering around Franklin Park on weekday nights when there was no one there. They hardly even made out, maybe five or six times tops, and, even then, she only touched him a couple of times through his jeans—and he never tried to go further than massaging her breasts lightly and sucking her nipple once after midnight in Franklin Park; mostly, it was just sloppy kisses and long beautiful conversations. Justin seemed like a die-hard romantic; one night, after talking on the phone until they were both so tired that they became incoherent, he told her they shouldn’t hang up, they should Crab Orchard Review ◆ 75

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sleep with the receiver next to their ears and it would be like they were in bed together, “I’ll cuddle the phone and pretend it’s you,” he said.

She had thought they were falling in love until he inexplicably stopped calling her and got his sister to say he was never home. He pretended not to know who she was in the hallways at school.

Mary had kept the relationship a secret even from Stephanie and she’ll remember how she had felt like bursting with no one to talk to about her confusion. She will put this out of her mind as he asks if it’s ok for him to climb up and sit next to her.

She’ll nod and scoot over, taking a sip from her beer. She’ll be conscious of how sweet her face feels from smiling as she watches him come close to losing his balance in the trench of mud between the trail and the boulder, grabbing and almost breaking a young sapling nearby just in time. As he scrambles up the side of the rock, he will almost spill his drink—some kind of fruit juice concoction, probably vodka and cranberry. She’ll take it from him and suck a long draught through the straw, not giving it back until he settles down next to her.

He’ll grin like he doesn’t know what to say.

“Look at the water, doesn’t it look like it’s almost got skin?” she’ll offer.

He’ll stare gravely out at the lake for a while before nodding, “U-huh.”

“Or, maybe not skin, like a coat or something, like it’s. . . . You know what I mean?”

“I wanted to say happy birthday,” he’ll say.

She’ll smile again. “Sweet sixteen—yeah, right.” She’ll wait a moment to ponder the danger involved before continuing, “Did I tell you that? I mean, before?”

“Sure,” he’ll say as he reaches out to take her hand.

They will sit in silence for a while, watching the water lap lightly against the boulder.

She’ll desperately want to know why he stopped calling her, but she won’t ask. She will be afraid of his answer; it might deface her image of what happened. She has decided to believe that Justin ran from his feelings because of a fear of overload, a fear of desiring more than he could hold on to; he was not yet ready to test his own boundaries and she can forgive him for that—it’s only human. She can still like him this way. If he tells her his side, it might contradict this. She will fight with the questions she so wants to ask, crossing them out one by one until she has nothing at all to say.

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She will look at him, trying to catch his eye, but he will be transfixed by the water. The expression on his face will be so sad and distant that she’ll want to kiss him, but she’ll resist.

Breaking his trance, he’ll say, “Was it good?”

“What?”

“Your birthday.”

“It was ok. I watched Manhattan.”

“What’s that?”

“A movie. You probably wouldn’t like it. It’s black and white.”

“Did you like it?”

“U-huh. I watch it every year on my birthday since I was about twelve.”

“I’d like to see it, then,” he’ll say, squeezing her hand.

She’ll squeeze back and massage the soft spot beneath his thumb. Slowly, the two of them will reach for a kiss. She’ll run her hand through his hair and giggle and say, “Spiky!”

He’ll grimace, slightly embarrassed.

Taking this as his way of admitting that it looks kind of silly, she’ll kiss him again. She’ll take his lip between hers, lick it, then, pulling a few inches away, she will blow on it softly, kiss him again, and nestle her head up against the tender part of his shoulder between the neck and the blade.

After a while, they’ll wander back to the party. Mary will hold Justin’s hand, unafraid of being seen, and guide him along the path so he can continue to examine the treetops.

As they come out of the woods and move across the lawn toward the house, Mary will realize how late it is. The handful of people left will be sitting around in half-drunken stupors, trying to sober themselves for the drive home. They will be negotiating rides and complaining about how stale the beer has become.

It will seem to Mary that she and Justin are in a separate world from the one of the party—like they are passing through the world of their friends, but distantly. As if the world of high school were meaningless, not worth her fear, not worth any consideration at all.

When Stephanie sees her, she’ll tell Mary that she was worried; she’ll say that she thought Mary had gotten lost or fallen, drunk, into the lake or, truthfully, that she’d had one of the panic attacks she is prone to and was quivering under a tree somewhere.

Mary will smile abstractly and say she is fine.

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her know there was nothing to worry about. When she notices Justin is standing there, her whole demeanor will suddenly change; she’ll flash a fake smile and offer him and his friend Mike a ride home.

Mary won’t pay much attention to any of this. The broad smile still on her face, she’ll gaze at everything glimmering under the lamp in the front yard, finding patterns in the minuscule grains of glass that will seem to float in the paved driveway, virtually tasting the dew that clings in perfect circles—each one enwrapping a tiny diamond of reflected light—to the grass.

She’ll climb into the back seat, squeezing up close to Justin, who will put his arm around her shoulder.

They’ll make out for a while, rubbing their cheeks together like seals, nibbling each other’s lips, brushing each other’s teeth with their tongues.

They will giggle conspiratorially when—as the car bounces over potholes—they are jolted apart, or sometimes, bumping foreheads and noses, together.

As the car heads onto the better roads in town, Mary will let the rest of the world disappear completely. To her, the back seat of this Escort will be all there is; she and Justin will be alone in a velvetlined pocket. She’ll awkwardly shift her weight to one side and work her free hand gradually down Justin’s chest, finally resting it on his belt buckle. With just a tinge of trepidation, she’ll check to find out how turned on he actually is.

Resting her hand on the bulge in his jeans, she will look into his eyes.

She’ll think of all the things they didn’t do in those three weeks in January and wonder if what they did do had meant anything to him. He said it did at the time. They had in-depth conversations about the difference between getting sexy with someone because you mean it and getting sexy with someone just because they’re there. They both agreed that it must feel different when you mean it, although neither had the experience to back up this conviction.

Justin will scrunch up his nose and squint in a goofy way.

Still staring into his eyes, Mary will begin to move her fingers slowly up and down like a snake charmer.

He’ll slide his own hand under hers and fidget with his belt. When he has it undone, he will unbutton the top button of his jeans. He’ll raise his hand up behind his head, then, changing his mind, rest it on the edge of the door; he’ll keep moving it every few seconds until 78 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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finally—scrunching up his nose again—he’ll rub her cheek with his knuckles, and hide his arm, up to the elbow, behind his back.

She’ll finish unbuttoning his jeans. As she takes him out of his underwear, she’ll carefully hook the elastic waistband behind his testicles so it won’t cut off his circulation. She’ll look down as she begins to massage and tickle the length of his penis with her fingertips. Putting her index finger in her mouth, she will heap saliva onto it to then spread over the head, flicking her finger back and forth like the wrong end of a magnet swinging in and out of his field of attraction.

When she leans up to kiss him again, he will open his eyes and study her face through weighted lids. His pupils will be dilated, his irises almost not there. He’ll scrunch up his nose and roll his bloodshot eyes in self mockery.

Mary will twist her body around, bending at an uncomfortable angle. Her elbow will lodge in his chest, unable to be removed. She will take him into her mouth.

He won’t moan. He won’t gasp. He won’t breathe heavily. She’ll have to crane her neck and peer up at his face to see if he likes it.

When she meets his eyes, he’ll bite his lips in an ecstatic grimace and, as she turns back to his penis, he’ll begin to gyrate his hips and run his fingers roughly through her hair.

She won’t know how much time has passed when Justin abruptly pushes her away. The look on his face will be cruel and judgmental.

The slight alcoholic buzz that is left will slide out of her blood to be replaced by a racing of red cells, flushing her face like shame.

As she slides across the cracked seat away from Justin, Mary will glance at the front where she’ll notice his friend Mike is looking back at them, shaking his head.

Stephanie will be intently driving, as if her peripheral vision’s been forcibly blocked off.

Justin will slip his underwear up and over his still hard penis.

He’ll quickly button his jeans and buckle his belt, then turn completely from Mary to watch the street glide past out the window.

They will drop Mary off first. As she crawls out of the car, she’ll want to say goodbye to Stephanie, but the look she’ll receive as she opens her mouth will stop her. Stephanie will stare until Mary can’t bear it. Lowering her eyes to the curb in front of her feet, Mary will faintly hear Stephanie’s flat “Happy Birthday” as the car rolls back into the street.

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Mary will watch them turn off at the corner. She’ll then watch the empty street for a while. She’ll look at her clothes and think “This stupid Benetton sweater. It’s too big. This stupid shirt with its stupid fake-pearl buttons. And this stupid silk bra, and these stupid jeans—as if Guess even means anything.” She’ll feel more naked than if she were naked.

But, right now, Mary can’t decide what to wear. She wants to pick just the right thing. She wants to be someone—anyone—else tonight.

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Cholera

In my experience, this is how things work: The only and one reason I got to play the cholera in the Lopez Lopez play was because of my great body. I did catalog underwear ads for a couple years until the feeling of being some sick citizen’s mail-order gigolo got to me.

Anyway the job wasn’t me. The real me is the colorfully garbed disease you see whirling across the boards. It’s called acting, which is a euphemism for the necessary blind jump to the center of the recreated universe. At one time or another you too have wanted to go there. Everybody does. It’s genetic. It’s what keeps us separate from the beasts. So let me clue you in on my secret: Chance is the road you take to get there.

You could say, for example, that it was only chance that I went to Niagara Falls. I wanted to track down Edgar Allen P. Murphy, the greatest underappreciated actor in America. One reason was to pay the man some homage, but there was more to it than that. A Times feature I read made a big deal out of his retirement at sixty, at the peak of his powers. Murphy had refused to be interviewed for the story. Can you picture an actor, any actor, turning down a Times puff piece? The writer was a big fan. He made Murphy out to be some kind of romantic, bat-like creature, darkly brooding in his cave of isolation on somber mysteries the rest of us plebes couldn’t appreciate. That got under my skin. As far as I’m concerned Shakespeare is still dead.

When I called Murphy at home I made the mistake of telling him I was an actor. He hung up on me. I was between jobs, so I dropped by the local amateur company to see what was going on. I needed to kill some time until I figured out how to get to Murphy. I can’t tell you why I wanted so badly to do that, unless it was the creepy certainty I had that he knew something I ought to learn.

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bass voice that meant he’d once had ambitions of his own. As I said, people liked my body. They also liked my academic background, which was in Marvel Superhero comic books. I take them seriously, the way Murphy takes Shakespeare. That’s one reason they call me The Flash. It has to do with controlling your speed, and the uses you put it to, which can be noble.

This sounds like a cliché but it’s true. It was Casablanca all over again. None of us knew how good Cholera was going to be until we made it happen. Larry Lopez Lopez is a Chicano guy from Buffalo who wants to be the nation’s greatest living playwright. They play started out basically as a way to get rid of his ethnic guilt for growing up comfortable. (His old man is an anesthesiologist.) It’s set in Mexico in some miserable imaginary fishing village on the coast that’s suffering a massive outbreak of cholera. It’s got all kinds of dancing—my dancing justifies the great body, by the way—and contemporary music you would have a hard time pigeonholing. But what’s truly unusual is the words. Normally in the kind of multimedia approach to theater that Cholera falls into, the words are like afterthoughts tacked onto the main idea, which is basically visual.

The music is what carries the production. But in Larry’s play the words bring the whole thing together and make it art, even though there’s not that many of them. Picture drops of shining silver hitting a rolling river, how perfect that could be.

This was in November, a sloppy, cold season in western New York. I grew up in Southern California, where that kind of weather is the same as religious guilt, i.e. not relevant. On opening night it snowed hard. The crowd was small, but we knocked their collective socks off. They must have put out the word because the next night the house was packed, and we were better than good. It went like that. There’s no chemical high quite like performing, is there? Plus the flukey way I wound up playing amateur cholera in Niagara Falls somehow made the whole thing even better. I wanted to share what I had, I wanted Murphy to come see our play. But the way he hung up on me when I called convinced me he was serious about his nocomment policy. That in itself struck me as unnatural for an actor.

It made me want to get to the guy that much more.

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Diane because she, like me, looked her part. She was voluptuous and athletic at the same time, somebody you’d like to play baseball with before you went to bed together. (I’m a born infielder, shortstop, usually.) Everybody was willing to overlook Diane’s fiery red hair, even Lopez Lopez, who said he wouldn’t fall on his sword for a verisimilitude thing and besides there was probably such a thing as a Mexican redhead anyway. Diane knew somebody who knew somebody who worked at the phone company. I gave her Murphy’s number and she came back to me the next day with the address.

I should say that the place where she came back to me was her apartment. We had a very successful short-term relationship going by the end of the first week of rehearsals. One reason why it worked was we both knew it was temporary, so we could afford to be unstintingly (that’s a legal word, isn’t it?) nice to each other. We humored each other, we listened well, we made each other feel good in the dark infield. No questions asked except for the minimum HIV drill you have to go through these days. Realism is not the enemy of romance the way they tell you it is. Who in his/her right mind could picture Flash and the fishermen’s Madonna in anything permanent? True love is timeless, which means it might not last forever.

Murphy in retirement, or withdrawal, or whatever it was, had gone back to his roots, which were tangled in a run-down neighborhood on the east side of the city. Apparently a generation or so back it used to be a pleasant urban alcove, the kind of place you’d like to grow up in yourself. Since then, however, the whole area has slumped downhill in the direction of seedy. It’s turned into the kind of menacing, gritty environment you roll up your car windows against if you happen to drive through by mistake. Maybe I’m exaggerating because where I come from it’s all overpriced suburban barns protected by upscale alarm systems and everybody exploits a Filipino gardener, but Diane, who grew up in the Falls, tells me I’m not.

Murphy’s house was what they call a duplex, brick, two separate apartments, the top floor rented out to somebody who had to walk around in socks at night. The place was in better shape than its neighbors.

The window sashes were painted grass green, the porch steps were clean, the windows washed. But the effort only made the general blight surrounding the house more pathetic, like the frowsy old woman who thinks she’s better than her neighbors because her dead husband worked in a bank instead of the tire factory like everybody else.

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was out of sight watching Murphy sweep a thin skin of dry snow from his steps; they call it corn snow, I understand. I had never seen the man off the stage, hadn’t seen him at all for maybe three years.

(He’d been splendidly Learical when I last went to watch him, traditional in the right way; clean plus passionate equals eloquence.)

In real life, as they say, he looked more rather than less imposing, like an impatient English aristocrat with that classy silvered hair, the long, chiselled face, the arrogant blue-gray eyes, the thin-lipped mouth turned down to disapprove of ninety percent of the items that came across his field of vision.

“Go away,” he told me when I ventured up his newly swept walk.

He knew I wasn’t selling vacuum cleaners. He pointed his broom at me, dry snow stuck to the bone-yellow bristles.

“Just a question,” I said. I’d racked my brain all morning for an opening line that would disarm him. Nothing. “One question. Then I’ll go.”

His mistake was believing me.

“How come?” I asked him. Meaning how come he quit.

In the cold air his breath blew out like a bull’s in a cartoon just before he charged the silly-hatted rabbit taunting him with a cape.

“Vanity,” he said. “Not enough people cared enough.” There was a smell in that rich voice which couldn’t avoid instinctive cadencing even in casual conversation, a smell of spices burning in a bonfire, maybe, a smell from a high-intensity dream you had once about landing shipwrecked on a cannibal island. I knew he was lying.

“What did you want, what Dustin Hoffman got?”

He shook his head just perceptibly, squinting in the bright air. I was somebody he had only imagined talking with.

“People who understand what you do say there’s nobody better in North America. They say it in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. The BBC did a special on you, didn’t they? You’ve played everybody you ever really wanted to play, haven’t you?”

They did. He had.

“Then I don’t get it. What else do you want, a Pepsi Cola commercial?”

“You can go away now.” He leaned his broom against a wooden rocking chair on the porch. He didn’t quite slam the door behind him when he went inside.

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hung up on me. I was his most persistent daydream, a fantasy on legs talking in more-or-less complete sentences. When he came out of the house to pick up a few groceries from the corner store, I was there striding beside him on the sidewalk. Diane’s day job was in computers. She did a search on the Net for stuff on Murphy. There was quite a pile, enough praise to keep an ambitious person secure and satisfied. I read every piece she printed out for me, quoted provocative bits of it at him while he walked to the store or shoveled snow. He couldn’t outwalk me, let alone run. I was The Flash, speed in the flesh. Plus every night Diane was giving me back the energy I spent during the day.

With all that going for me, it’s embarrassing to admit what it took to finally get me inside the house. I told him I had to take a leak. Actually I did. The ninety-year-old woman in the burgundy rocker recliner in the small, stuffy living room really threw me. You never told me you had a mother, I almost blurted out. She was blind, evidently, her mind’s eye focused on something of transcendent importance I couldn’t see. The mesmerizing burble of wonderful words coming out of her mouth seemed to have no connection with anything going on at the moment in Niagara Falls, New York.

“Shakespeare,” I whispered, although it was obvious she wouldn’t care if I screamed the Gettysburg Address in her ear. In her long, highcollared green housecoat, the hair in uncombable wisps of silver across the bas-relief skull, you could see traces of the stateliness of body the son inherited, part of what he required to ply his trade, which was also my trade. I noticed there were no mementos visible, nothing to show that this was the house of an actor of considerable parts. The only thing on the walls was family photos.

“Mother’s an Irish nationalist,” Murphy explained, “born in County Cork. She was taught that Shakespeare is an Irishman. All those arguments down through the centuries about who wrote the plays and the second-best bed—they were a smokescreen to keep scholars from getting at the real issue, which had to do with the Bard’s true birthplace.”

He poured some Bushmill’s single malt into juice glasses for both of us. It was late afternoon, the daylight already draining away to wherever it went. For a moment I wished I was somewhere in Southern California, or else in the place the light disappeared to. I was supposed to swing by in a cab and pick up Diane from work.

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early, and if circumstances were favorable we made some theatrical love in one of several low-lit nooks we commandeered there. But I sat happily in the chair toward which he pointed me with a directorial finger.

“Why do you act?” he wanted to know.

“Because that’s what I do. I’m good at it.”

That wasn’t good enough. He shook his head. “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”

“Because the recreated universe is the only one worth living in.”

He nodded. Better. Straight up, the Irish whiskey tasted pretty good. It made the idea of drinking, say, a piña colada seem ridiculous, ephemeral, a decadent consumeristic impulse.

“One acts,” Murphy told me, “to keep off death.”

I knew that. You didn’t have to be old and accomplished and famous to know it. “If you don’t act, the world as it is freezes up on you.”

“I was in New York,” he said, “reading for The Tempest.”

“Swan Song Blue. That’s what they called the project in Newsweek, right?” I was too enthusiastic. I knew better but didn’t check myself.

“Shut up.”

I shut.

“I was staying in a hotel on the upper West Side, the same place I always stayed. They know me there, they take care of me. I’m a creature of defined habits. Well, I went out for dinner with some friends. Not actors, real people. When I got back to my room it was quite late. We’d been drinking quantities of excellent Chilean wine and reminiscing the way overly intelligent people often think they must. You know: all that brilliant white irony, distancing themselves from feeling the simple emotions they’re too smart to be trapped by.”

He stopped. I let him pick out the words he needed, no pressure, not from me. I was getting what I had come to get. Diane would understand if I stood her temporarily up.

“Death,” Murphy finally told me, “was there waiting for me in the hotel room.”

It sounded like a punch line. It wasn’t.

“I’m not talking about some kind of psychological experience,” he warned me, as though I was about to challenge him. “And I don’t mean to speak metaphorically.”

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briefly, like the seventh wave crashing louder on the passive beach than the first six.

“You mean death,” I said. “The beast itself.”

“No metaphors,” he shook his head.

“You have a tumor,” I said. My voice was half an octave higher than it usually is. I was jumpy, at a loss. “Or cancer.”

He laughed loud enough to break the flow, for a moment, of his mother’s reflexive Irish Shakespeare. “What I have,” he corrected me, “is eyes that can’t stop seeing.”

“So?” I pretended not to understand.

But that only made him mad, which made him shut up. He watched me resentfully until I finished my whiskey, then showed me courteously to the door. “No need to come back now,” he said.

The words came out so cold they froze in the air before they fell.

“We’re doing a play,” I told him, “over at the Power City Playhouse. It’s called Cholera. It’s good. As good as Shakespeare, only different.”

“Not interested.”

The problem was, he really wasn’t. I have no idea whether this is unusual or totally predictable or what, but Murphy’s death visitation in his New York hotel room threw me majorly off balance.

For the first time that night I was less than brilliant as the cholera.

Then when Diane asked me what was wrong I snapped at her. Our first cross words followed, something we couldn’t afford given the way our leads overlapped in the play. I couldn’t sleep that night even after she forgave me, pulled me sleepily into her circle of warmth. I got up, paced the strange apartment, smoked a cigarette I didn’t want. I thought about Murphy: bolt upright, as they say, in a lumpy upholstered chair across from death, then walking away from The Tempest back to original anonymity in the Falls. He had to have some money. He could have retired some place nice with a beach and steady sunshine and some of his own kind around for entertainment, and brought along his mother if that was what he wanted. What he had done, instead, was go into hibernation with his eyes open. I couldn’t let it go.

Diane told me I was making too much of it. Her family had known the Murphys way back when, and the clan had a reputation for being slightly out of adjustment. During the first year of the Kennedy Administration, one rampaging Murphy had been arrested walking nude across the bridge to Canada demanding political asylum from the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 87

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WASPs, who were still persecuting him and his Catholic kind. Kennedy, he told the border guards, was a figurehead put in place by WASP elements to cover the conduct of business as usual.

I appreciated Diane’s attempts to help out, but whatever it was that had gotten under my skin kept going deeper. I couldn’t help it, I hounded the guy: on the phone, at his door, every free moment I had, and I had plenty. Sometimes he talked a little, sometimes a little more. Sometimes I couldn’t get two connected words out of him. But I wouldn’t let him alone.

In the process, something happened to me that was passing weird. I can be as late-twentieth-century cynical as the next person.

It’s in the air we breathe; it corrodes the cells in major organs in our vulnerable bodies, doesn’t it? You know what I’m talking about.

But the anxiety that invaded me from watching Murphy, face-toface opposite death in an armchair, pushed me into the role of cheerleader for the bright light and good cheer team. Fight it, I told him. Don’t go comatose into the great gulping night. Besides, look outside, it’s only afternoon. I made a list of every significant actor over sixty I could think of. Diane helped me put it together culling salient stuff from the Net. It didn’t work. We were coming to the end of Cholera, too. There was some talk of taking the show to the theater district in Buffalo for a trial run. And the Power City people wanted me to stay for that. But my only reason for putting up with the goddawful western New York weather was Murphy. Plus I was pretty sure Diane was ready to reclaim her apartment and her independence. Fuck it, I said to myself, or words to that effect. It was time to go to New York and get some work that paid money.

I was pretty grumpy when I went to take my leave of the Irish misanthrope. The morning, for a change, was sparkling. Even the mounds of used snow around town looked decorative, almost festive with their lacework of sooty black. I guess one advantage to living in a miserable climate is you appreciate good weather when it’s there. No one answered my knock at the Murphy residence, though. That’s okay, I thought. In fact it’s better this way. But then I saw an aristocratic back turning a corner three blocks down, and I dropped my indifference and the disguise and turned into the real me: The Flash.

I ran, but I wasn’t even breathing hard when I got close enough to be sure it was Murphy. He was walking fast, a man who knew where he was going. I hung back to see where, which turned out to be 88 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the very falls. He didn’t stop or turn around. I was safe tailing him across the bridge over those amazingly roaring rapids onto Goat Island.

Goat Island is a woodsy little retreat at the head of the Falls.

There’s a tourist train with guides who point out the natural wonders for the imaginatively challenged, and picnic tables, and people strolling who for one reason or another aren’t punching clocks somewhere inside the American machine. Actually it relieves me to know that not every last citizen in the nation is on the workaday treadmill. Freedom is like clean water, absolutely necessary but in diminishing supply. Anyway, the island is girdled by a bucolic path that cuts through the woods and parallels the rapids making a rough oblong. When Murphy started around it, the path was speckled with walkers of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities, bundled against the bright cold. Some of them were walking quite fast, but Murphy ploughed past them. I had to hustle to keep up. For a little while I thought he was going to throw himself into the river, but when I saw it was nothing like that I made my move.

“You,” he accused me when I came up from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. “Get away from me, you bastard. Go on back to wherever you came from.” He pulled away, walked on even faster.

I realized he was afraid of me.

I came to say goodbye, was what I should have said. Instead I asked him again how come. The question pulled him up short. His chest heaved, his breath came out like angry smoke signals I couldn’t read. He frowned me down. “I had a dream last night.”

“About what?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It woke me, though, and when I woke there it was again. In the room with me.”

“Death . . .”

“Mother’s not well. She’s failing. She’s stopped reciting.”

“I’m sorry, Edgar Allen.” I hoped that was what his friends called him.

“Who sent you?” he wanted to know. The strange smell wafting across Goat Island was paranoia.

“What do you mean who sent me? Nobody sent me.”

A middle-aged Japanese couple in dark glasses passed us, extolling in their own language and with controlled hand gestures the fresh air and the woodsy, watery prospect around us. Murphy looked a little crazy. He was a man on the lam, or he thought he was, or that he should be.

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“I saw you in New York,” he muttered. “You were following me around the city, weren’t you? I didn’t let on, but I knew all along it was you behind me. I should have called a halt to the whole thing then and there. My mistake.” He glowered, shook his head.

“You’re out of your mind.” Maybe I should have been a little more sympathetic, but the guy’s wackiness was having a negative effect on me.

“Who’s paying you?” He shook my arm hard; I rattled.

“Nobody’s paying me. What’s happening to you, Murphy?

What’s going on?”

That, for some reason, was the one question he couldn’t tolerate being asked. He emitted a bear-like noise of rage and frustration and swung at me hard. If he’d connected the punch would have knocked me down. Pretty impressive for a man of his age, but like a lot of actors he was in excellent shape. When I ducked gracefully out of his reach he came after me like vengeance too long postponed.

So there I was, The Flash in the flesh, running around Goat Island in the Niagara River above the famous noisy falls, being chased by a maniacal, prematurely-retired actor who thought I was the Grim Reaper’s contract hit man. Staying ahead of him, out of range of his balled red fists, was no problem. But the man would not give up, and after we had made a full circuit of the island, Murphy bawling like a bear every hundred yards or so causing every tourist in earshot to stop and stare at the free show, I started worrying that his heart would give out on him. He huffed, he puffed, he bawled, but he kept coming. For his own good I had to cut the crazy tie binding us.

“Go ahead and die,” I yelled at him. “That’s what you deserve.”

And I took off running hard. In his prime he could not have caught me. Remember I was The Flash. Through the woods, across the island, over the bridge above the rapids, which snarled and snapped at my legs, back into the city. I assumed Murphy, at some point, knew enough to sit down and catch his breath.

I hit the theater late that night. The idea of playing the cholera, just then, held little appeal. Very unprofessional; I admit that. But maybe you too would have dawdled if you’d been chased by a bloodthirsty, death-obsessed actor the way I had. Not that I’d accept excuses from anybody else who showed up late for work and play.

As it turned out, though, my being late didn’t make any difference.

Diane was there waiting for me at the back door. “You did it,” she congratulated me. “I’m impressed.”

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Mark Jacobs

I won’t take any credit for what happened, because it just happened. The house was full. The local paper said we were a major event that shouldn’t be missed, we were much bigger than Niagara Falls and destined for some kind of big time. There were also repeat offenders in the audience, people who’d seen Cholera and knew for themselves. Some of them, at least, had no idea of what they might be about to see, which was Edgar Allen P. Murphy playing the cholera in Larry Lopez Lopez’s tremendous cathartic play.

“He just showed up and asked to look at the script,” Diane said.

I resented the awe in her voice. “The man has a photographic memory.

He flipped through the pages and he had it. All of it. He ran through it with me.”

“Fuck him,” I said loudly. I wanted everybody to hear. “He’s an asshole. He’s not taking my part.”

But he was. Give credit to Diane for that. She knew it was the right thing to do. You might say that the idea of working with a serious star helped along her generous impulse, but don’t; that’s just me being small. I don’t need to be small. It has to do with controlling your speed, and the uses you can put to it.

Believe it or not I almost didn’t get a seat, the place was that full. But eventually I sat down and listened to the titter going around the house that Murphy was there, Murphy was backstage, Murphy was coming out of retirement. I sucked on my lips in the dark.

Well, he was brilliant. What did you expect? All that backed up passion, all the high-toned rage against the death visitation that had waylaid him in his hotel room in New York, came out in the cholera, which was the perfect vehicle, under the circumstances and given the absence of Shakespeare. I sat there with my mouth open, learning that greatness is not an adjective critics paste into their reviews, it’s something real, it lives and has a home in certain actors, one of whom had chased me around Goat Island in the morning and stolen my lead the same night.

When it was over I went backstage, of course, had to. They were already at the hugging stage. There was a crowd around Murphy, who had his arms around Diane, who was glowing, buzzing, lifted up. Transfigured would be somebody else’s word.

“Aren’t you glad?” she whispered into my ear before I gave up, let myself be embraced by Murphy, who was temporarily gigantic.

“It’s still there,” he told me inside the hug. “It has no eyes, my friend. It’s all mouth and belly and sucking instinct.”

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 91

Mark Jacobs

What I read between his lines was that he could go on for a while anyway. He squeezed my collar bone in a friendly way that was supposed to mean thank you. He allowed himself to be distracted by a fan.

People wanted to be good to me, the way I’d let myself be upstaged for a worthy cause. They didn’t know the generosity was Diane’s. They were all over me. There was champagne spilling from big bottles, and people with roses in their teeth locking arms doing pseudo-ethnic dances the way they do at weddings, and wistful voyeurs in the audience, and photographers in baseball caps snapping pictures, and Mr. Deep Pockets beaming benevolently as though the play really had been his to make happen. I couldn’t take it. It was Snaggletooth, if I remember correctly, who said it best: Exit, stage left.

Outside, behind the Power City Playhouse, the Niagara Falls night was cold and hard surfaced, like metal, something that would hurt you if you ran into it. I wished I had a pair of gloves. But I didn’t really need them. All I needed was to take a long run. I was The Flash. The cold air getting down inside my lungs woke me up.

But I needed a minute before I took off. My legs were temporarily weak, trembling. Actually my whole body was betraying me. It was a reaction, I guess, to carrying Murphy, heavier than anybody’s father. I waited it out. Eventually the trembling stopped and my strength came back. And I was running into the dangerous night.

It’s about speed— isn’t it?—and the uses you put to it.

92 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez

Feathers

She’s in the dark, wearing a blanket of shadow over her shoulders, trying to strike the wet matches she’s kept inside her heart’s bottom drawer.

He’s held her for three months, and at the beginning of each a fire starts—once behind her bed, sheets aflame, then last night when sparks from the grill lit up her black sleeve, and every far away place and dance step she’d given up glowed on her arm. With his hand he smothered the orange feather swaying at her elbow. Had I not been there, he thought later, her arm would’ve blazed into a wing.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 93

Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez

Scar

She’s inches from the mirror and can’t see it.

It’s right there, he says, pressing her cheekbone with his fingertip.

She worries what else he might find on her body or under her bed: the halo, the future, her previous boys mummified in lint.

She fears they’ll wake up from their long hibernation, that those drowsy boys will crawl out into the light, yawning and stretching.

She knows that small scar is just the beginning.

94 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lisa Glatt & David Hernandez

Jump

He leans over the railing of her fourth story balcony and imagines himself plunging, the hard impact of pavement, death swerving his cab up to the curb.

She is in the kitchen, unaware, standing in flannel pajamas.

She hums while splitting peas for soup, will hum later if he lives through the night, if he doesn’t jump.

A list of reasons why he shouldn’t scrolls over the edge to the sidewalk down below: the glass of red wine in his hand, the red sunset, her painted lips tattooing red flowers on his skin. She wants this union to save his life and her own, wants to swallow the pungent hope they might make on this Monday.

When the soup is done, she dips a ladle into the broth and fills a bowl for him, the steam lifting in ribbons.

It’s ready, she says, but talks to only half of him because he’s bending forward. She calls to his calves, the long backs of his thighs.

The rest of him, his torso, is already gone.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 95

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Memory on the Shoulders of the Gaze

As you enter the museum there is a gate covered with photographs clearly from another time—when the camera could only capture the conversation between light and the several darks.

The village, of course, was destroyed.

The people were taken somewhere.

The animals stayed behind—and lived in the local portrait studio which was by mere accident the only building left standing— faces all over the floor, the floor looking, the animals walking—the sun going down like a gray clay and the lives of mothers and their children and the lives of children and their wolf-pets and the curious fur hats behold the way you go— the way you are returning, alien because you live, because you always knew memories were sons-of-bitches, secret dogs who watched them torture and burn.

96 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Matthew Graham

Shaker Door, Circa 1820

The burl of the sycamore still swirls In this door, as this door once turned Shut on a grinning, handshaking world With its overland wagons of sin.

This door, open to celibacy, To confession and separation From the world we’re still wandering in.

You gasp as I move in you, toward you, Move you toward a closed door opening On moonlight and the holy murmur Of sycamores. Early fall. First frost.

Those long gone Shakers sought redemption In movement, and in their denial— Simplicity. Still time turns us all With commerce, with silence, and with prayer, Toward the inevitable struggle Between opening and closing, Between the waiting and the going somewhere.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 97

Linda Gregg

The Muchness

She went back, knowing the way in her marrow.

Trees in leaf but joyless, ceremonial.

Lit with the underworld’s slum light.

A small, ordinary apartment.

Iron heater, remnants of the heart’s quiet, of the mind’s radiance.

A wooden chair and three windows.

Wobbly table in the kitchen, lily plant on the linoleum.

In the darkest room the bed.

And the trunk open.

She opens the window an inch.

All around her a world that used to be.

98 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Linda Gregg

So Different from Heaven

On a day with heavy rain I went with two men into a room filled with a whole orchestra of dusty gamalans. The two of them played a long time in the dull light. Until an old custodian came in and, without saying anything, joined the other two.

Later, he stood silent on the porch facing the wet courtyard with that look adult men here have of already knowing about death. Eternity made of fervor, so different from Heaven.

The sun is hot. The moon lessens and regains.

I am sure it is the only life that God can taste.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 99

Linda Gregg

Arkansas Afternoons

Today I took the postmaster’s advice and found Nina May, “who will talk to anyone,” he said.

I needed to find how to get my quilt-tops backed.

Following his map, I drove behind Goshen to the small square and the dots that meant pine trees. There she was in her house that looked out on fields.

She draped the four tops over a card table and named each design: bow tie, snail, nines. Then told me the story of how she almost died a week ago.

She showed me a big pot of turnips she was cooking, gave me the recipe. Gave me a glass of Doctor Pepper. Answered the phone and told a sick friend she would call back if her mind held out. She never answered any of my questions about the quilts.

Said she would take care of them after she got well, that we could go to see her friend Pearl, did I want her to mend the old tops. Went on about the blue and yellow. “One might look good with an edge that had a small design to balance the top’s boldness,” she said.

I was saying inside, “Goodbye, goodbye, my love. The great love of my life.”

Waving like an Italian woman, shamelessly. Knowing everything was lost four years ago. Waving to no one now.

100 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Linda Gregg

Winning

There is having by having and having by remembering.

All of it a glory, but what is past is the treasure. What remains.

What is worn is what has lived.

Death is too familiar, even though it adds weight. Passion adds size but allows too much harm.

There is a poetry that asks for this life of silence in midday.

A branch of geranium in a glass that might root. Poems of time now and time then, each containing the other carefully.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 101

Linda Gregg

Harmonica

Gone like the fish in water The rock on the road A dove on the sill of the soul Love is gone like a rock in water A dove in the air Sun that was on the mountain Fish up the stream Buckeyes flowering Horse on the hill House on the other side of the hill

102 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Linda Gregg

Not a Pretty Bird

She was not a nightingale as the Greek said.

Philomela was a woman.

The sister of the new wife.

Raped, tongue cut out by the husband.

Locked away.

Not a swallow, not the bird of morning and late evenings that end so swiftly.

Not a myth. She was a girl.

That is the story: the empty mouth, the bloody breasts. The outrage.

Not the transformation.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 103

Linda Gregg

The Heart Flowing Out

All things we see are the shapes death makes.

When we see straightly and hard we see with the eyes of death. Light and dark, the weight of the forms: a bell, a door, in their placement one with the other. The black window and the white wall are taut in their exact distance, and firm in themselves, surrounded by the imperfect dark hills and the absolute light of the sky. Feeling is not in the things, but in us. Though sometimes they shake like a vision in their perfect tension of being. Death is strong, so the world is that strong too. A man walks down a road then cuts across a field. We walk with our soft bodies and tough minds.

Water is the shine moving, death does not flow.

We flow, our bodies and hearts flow.

When we enter death it gives way, but not yet. Our hearts flow out through the consciousness, focused.

The more it looks, the more it sees the hard thing shaking with its own energy in relation to the whole scene and its meaning.

Making that meaning, whatever it means.

104 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Mark Halliday

Missouri Bar

In Missouri there must be this bar where the real other life transpires. It is so real. It is not exotic; instead it exposes the illusion of the exotic by being at once so ordinary and so textured. For the folks drinking there this bar is a place near home and just a bar except it is extra real in this dense easy way lubricated by alcohol, but for me it is so much where I am not. What if I could walk in there and discover the thousand non-clichés there in that blue-shady half-dark among those Missouri drinkers some bitter some itchy with loneliness some with comic lust all this very solid while also spiced: several speak of bets placed on horses, boxers, drivers— detail is lavish fueled by knowledge, these people are not stupid, I realize now this lack of stupidity does distinguish this one bar which is not exotic but extra real, they speak of what is what from right smack in it—what if I could hear them and not miss everything? “Shaver’s boy took that pedal-steel and put guts in his daddy’s tunes” “Old Brankin lost that thousand last August gon’ be poppin’ clutch to jump out front of Cedric and them come Tuesdee” “and him still saying vagrant rhymes with fragrant” I am not quite catching “Marbella said you don’t got the check you don’t bring TJ for his good time Saturday” “buck naked on Sunday” they are not stupid, they are so fully in it hence the talk lavish as in “rich” novels Crab Orchard Review ◆ 105

Mark Halliday

but this more something than any novel, more crunky more crunkydunk than any novel but me not catching it— what would it be for me if I did? Me there at a table with such a discreet small black notebook, nobody notices it, they just don’t, they’re all around me like this big man in a blue baseball cap, the insignia is either of a pro team or an electricians’ union, he leans toward me on un-shy reddened elbows telling how the mayor tried to catch the police chief selling cocaine, another guy tells tales of a poker game where you need a knife and each player has a witty odd nickname, or not, I’m not sure, but I find out when I’m there and it’s not clichés, also the story of how Robbie met Marge at the crafts fair— this is making me tired but when I’m there I’m not tired at all hearing all about someone’s sarcastic sister and the frustration of certain sexual hopes at Evelyn’s Diner, all unstupid and true in the grainy way while in my unseen black notebook I write it down losing none of it, and Charlotte doesn’t notice nor does the man who is half Pawnee.

Hours and hours I’m there not impatiently, never wishing I was reading instead.

Brad who knows everything about refrigerators, his second divorce; Lillian whose twin sons are in the Air Force on Guam. “Guam” I say, nodding in sympathy which is real, I know both laughter and tears, I finish six beers till it is only the natural inevitable when Darlene or Colinda comes to my table in her tight jeans, not exotic, just so fully actual, stands close to me, I can see she is forty and has had forty men and I want her, Colinda of embodied knowledge who says “Watchin’ golf on TV is not my idea of a big weekend” and her hand touches my wrist so matter-of-factly, “We can say we’re sorry tomorrow”—she has thus 106 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Mark Halliday

made my wrist part of what is available in Missouri so plainly she can connect me including my wakened cock for which she has three funny names to what is so I shove the black notebook into my back pocket and walk with Darlene out to her car which is a big horsey 1973 something— in the front seat I’m throbbing but amazingly at peace (with the notebook bent under my buttock) because at last I’m going to be there at the worn tough dark heart of Missouri and it must mean—or just be—something deep so deep.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 107

Fleda Brown Jackson

Television News: Arkansas, 1957

She is not on television. TV news is new and awkward, camera not placed right.

Her own mind records the closing-in mob as variegated shapes, voices as wire whisks against her skin, “Bitch! Bitch! Lynch her!”

She is blocked in by soldiers and white kids, trying to keep moving. She wants to go to Central High, to be a lawyer.

She walks inside her mother’s last mouthed prayer behind the screen door, inside the new dress she made herself, her body so dark she is inside-out. No, right-side-out for once, the interior brighter than anything.

She smells baby powder, a static-y fog that will rise out of her years later, when she’s afraid.

Rifles, bayonets, she’ll remember as baby powder: arriving white at fifteen: her private, exposed self, pulling loose from the crowd to the bus stop, a clearing, her mind a clearing, a slate.

Elizabeth is the name she scratches on slate. Says, I Am Definitely Here, fire and blood, 108 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Fleda Brown Jackson

her future blossoming and wilting from this point, as all things do, the vanished particulars suddenly being her life.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 109

Fleda Brown Jackson

The Jungle Room at Graceland

What’s money for, if not to buy the moment’s furniture? You never know, though, which regrettable colors and postures will freeze in place: Tahitian tables of distressed myrtlewood under thick polyurethane forever. Matching jungle fronds on massive drapes and chairs. The trapped breath of the jungle, dead Elvis’s Spot of Time, like the one Wordsworth kept to himself thirty years before he wrote “The Prelude”— low breathings of the Alps down his neck.

I’m saying I wanted those terrible breathings like I wanted to live, the dark breath on my neck—the moment of extremity in a stripped-down Ford, The Big Bopper, maybe, singing “Oh baby, you know what I like.” (You stop hearing, but any song works.) “You’ll marry him,” my next-door neighbor Gail said when we got out of the car, and she was right.

There I am, petrified in that old dazzled air, one foot raised to step into the Ford with a bedspread for upholstery—the moment you stop breathing and can’t move on.

110 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Alice Jones

Issue

Going forth, towards the far shore, beyond everything nameable to a place where we were never children, no father to mark his thumbprint onto our foreheads, no identical shape of small toe to claim us as his, maybe creatures instead with brown fur, the right thing to keep warm when you’re out on a limb, where we like to pretend we seldom are when it’s actually our everyday address, farm of the unseen, we’re fathering shoots out of furrows of time, rumpled and collapsing in crumbs like earth, that’s how we’re grounded.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 111

Janet McAdams

The Green Children Brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Suffolk, 1150

I. Eyewitness In Suffolk, the light was so bright, the air so fierce, they lay down senseless.

They lay down beside the wolf-pit until, fresh from fields slouched with haystacks, reapers found them.

Their skin grew light on a diet of whey and barley, the dense brown peasant bread, linnets snared on the limed branches of ash.

The green girl became like everyone else, baptised and married. But her brother grew sick with longing When his jewel-green skin faded white as a fishâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s underbelly, the green boy died on a white English day.

II. Storyteller It is said: When captured, they wept bitterly.

It is said: They refused food, breaking open only the pods of fresh peas.

When she learned to speak English, the green girl told them everything they wanted to hear: her land was a Christian country though locked in twilight,

112 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Janet McAdams

pulled by the sound of a bell sister and brother entered a long cave in the land they called St. Martin’s and found themselves in England, the gate home closed forever.

Most of the story is lost to history: whether they were the color of holly or citrine, if their hair shone like emeralds or lay dull as jade along their scalps.

III. Sister The English had never heard of the twilight St. Martin’s.

The green girl said she was eager to take up the work of the knight’s demesne: To soak and comb the flax until her fingers bled.

To weave a linen slip to wear beneath the coarse russet wool of the dress they gave her.

To rise in the dark and lay her head against a wall of cow and squeeze until the last drop of yellow milk was wrung from its pink nipples.

The nights she whispered over her brother’s green grave: In this bright country, grass grows in blades.

Each field is a crowd of sharp edges.

They taught me blue: the sky where song birds mob the fierce brown hawks that steal their young.

They taught me red: the color of mouths crying open.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 113

Janet McAdams

IV. Brother But the one who died instead of speaking, never told them: In our soft country we never knew we were green.

The world was moss, water cool as the depths of any well you might drink from. Our mother’s hair wafted like the fronds of ferns that grow thick as fingers along the river. Our father’s voice was a low hum, sweet as bees’ wings in the dusk of green meadows.

Oh never go there. Let them live, my kinsmen in the twilight country. Not this hard light. Glare and shadow.

We never needed this journey.

114 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Gina Ochsner

Eulogy for Red Hate is unfortunately always much more observant than love, and more observant even than an insufficiency of love.

—Josef S„kvorecky, The Bass Saxophone

That was the day I awoke and red was gone. At first, I didn’t notice it: my flat faces a shadowy inner courtyard where old Vaclav, the manager, keeps the trash bins and the Ukrainian couple next door hang out their laundry, and besides, it was early in the morning and still dark out. But when I reached the street I saw that something was wrong: red was missing, like someone had erased it from a color test patch, had washed it away from the air and the sky and everything under the sky. The glowing of the sunrise pushing up from behind the hills bled in stale shades of slate and cobalt and shale. The trees, which had gone to blood and fire and all the warm colors of fall, now looked frozen as if in the photographer’s silver, the leaves pale like old paper money.

I kept walking, shaking my head in disbelief, walking like a tourist whose head wheels in all directions. I watched the traffic creep by and noted how stopping and going at intersections had become a matter of looking for green. The red had drained from the neon signs hanging at the windows of the shops, cafes and pubs along Spálená Street and Václavské Náme∑sti, both of which seemed a little dull, even naked, without it. Gone was the red from the bricks, as blood leached from stone, and even the rooftops looked colorless and cold, like the scales of chapped lips. It made me think of looking at the world through the shard of a bottle or a piece of colored glass, or off those cheesy plastic tourist slide viewers, the kind that had only three color slides mounted inside and that over time faded out into the sepia brown colors of the earth and aged photography. I looked up and wondered if Mars, that red planet, had been affected, too, and if I could even pick it out from the nighttime sky with my cheap toystore telescope. Finally, when my neck started aching, I went to work.

When I go to work, I usually stop in at the basement break room and harass Mack, an apprentice copywriter who thinks he’s Willie Crab Orchard Review ◆ 115

Gina Ochsner

Nelson or John Denver or something and who wears a big Tombstone belt buckle. We exchange off-color jokes and office gossip and then I hang up my coat, get a cup of coffee and head for the print floor. But today, Mack had his earphones turned way up and besides the tinny noise coming from his earphones and the ordinary noises of the press dulled by the concrete walls, I could hear nothing strange, nothing unusual, no cries of panic, political harangues or philosophical musings.

Everyone was strangely quiet as if contemplating a joke that they’d all heard, but no one had got yet. I looked at the blueline proofs lying on the break table expecting an 18-point or maybe even a 24-point headline.

But there was nothing about red in the proofs, either. I scratched the stubble on my chin. Shouldn’t there be a special feature, a quote from somebody important in the scientific community? How did we come to be here stranded by red into the blues and what should we do about it, I wondered. From what I could gather, the President hadn’t yet made a statement. He had been in Brno, then Slovakia, and I thought, maybe he’s too busy to make a statement. I wondered if we shouldn’t make some sort of comment for him, after all, as printers and distributors of news, that wouldn’t be too far afield. I sat on my stool, watching the wheel spin ream after ream of paper over the plates and spit out pages of copy, the whole time feeling guilty, like I was participating in a lie, and wondering what I could say about red. I was still shaking my head and chewing the inside of my cheek, sure that I was sleepwalking and that this was just another strange dream. Finally, the bell rang and I got up from my stool, as did the others, and we all filed out to make room for the next shift while the wheels kept rolling.

All the way home from work, I kept looking for signs that I was not alone in this, that others were worried, too. I went past the butcher’s shop where they chop off heads for a reasonable price, noted the light gray smears on the butcher’s apron, the ashen splatters on the block. I passed my hands over my eyes and blinked. I pinched myself. I cleaned the lenses of my glasses, but only the birds nesting in the trees were willing to acknowledge that something was wrong: I could tell from their loud squawks, shrill cries and the long throat-rending screeches, like those you hear from actors pretending to die on stage, that they were upset and I worried for the redpolls and robins.

I walked home deciding to call in at Loli’s, whose flat was on the bottom floor of our apartment building. If anyone had theories about red it would be old Libus∑e, or Loli, as she called herself now 116 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Gina Ochsner

that her husband had wandered off for good. Her flat opened up to the street where she ran her tiny florist shop. She lived in the room at the back where she grew her more exotic flowers under plastic flaps and beehive-looking contraptions. What she couldn’t contain in her sleeping room spilled out into the courtyard: topiaries in stucco pots and flats of herbs, potted geraniums, and hanging baskets of flowers and vines whose names she had told me, but I had forgotten.

Loli had the kind of laugh people mistook for a cry and that could stop cold all conversation around her, but I always liked visiting Loli because she was a little crazy and because her efforts had turned the courtyard into a green oasis of life. It was hard to be depressed or sad around Loli, who saw no good use for such things.

I walked past the Widow Dubc∑ek’s, stopped in front of Loli’s flower stand set up on the street, and noted her latest project: a large privet hedge that was really a series of individual potted bushes lined up to give the appearance of a solid wall of hedge.

Most of her roses were bleached of all color and the freesias looked like they’d turned to stone. She was bent over her lilies and crooning to them the way some people talk to little dogs or kept birds. Then she saw me and started waving her hands around.

“So what do you make of all this?” I asked her, sweeping my arms out wide toward the street and turning, my attempt at an expansive gesture.

“What?” Loli wrinkled her nose and wiped her gritty hands on the sides of her skirt.

“Red. It’s vanished, you know.”

“Oh. That.” Loli turned back to her lilacs. “What’s got me worried—I’ll tell you what I’m worried about.” I sighed, for this was the key turning, the battery charging, and any second now, she’d start in again on her theories of invasive organic gardening and how it could save the planet if we’d all give it a try. And then I felt embarrassed that I was embarrassed by her, and ashamed that I was the kind of guy who was impatient with old women.

“I’m thinking of trimming the hedge in back and coaxing out the form of an animal—a fish or bird maybe—because I read just today that every garden should have a joke in it, something amusing that draws the eye and a laugh. Which do you think I should do—a fish or a bird?” Loli asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, brushing my hand along the biting edges of her meticulous privet hedge. “A bird might be nice,” I said and stared Crab Orchard Review ◆ 117

Gina Ochsner

down the street, letting my eyes blur in and out of focus, watching the people moving past me coming home from work. It felt good to let my eyes fix on the street, staring without purpose, without thought, really.

Then I felt gazes sliding over my face and shoulders, and I became aware that I was being looked at, that people were probably thinking I was an idiot or something. I shook my head, waking myself from my reverie and saw Loli, a harried look on her face, worried, I knew, for me. I shrugged and walked back down the corridor, past the Widow Dubc∑ek’s, to the stairs and to my flat. But the whole way I was thinking of the red woman of Ramadan who chases those who try to cheat death, her red eyes burning, and wondering if the red woman was to blame, thinking there must be someone to blame.

That evening, twilight unspooled in unexpected shades of glowering yellows gone to gray, the softer colors of long-burning embers of loam, lye, ash and shale, and I actually put my hand to my ear, sure a quiet fireless smoke would start thundering and we’d all be done for. I stood there outside the flat and watched the sky cool, and I remembered a day when I was in primary school, a day just like this one, a day we all stood around staring up at the sky. Except then we were waiting for a total solar eclipse. My father had made pinhole viewers out of shoeboxes for each of us kids. I remember his fervent warnings and of putting the shoebox to my eye and being afraid, terribly afraid that I’d make a mistake, at the critical moment flinch, blink, miss it all, or worse, blind myself by looking at the eclipse with the naked eye.

That night I dreamt that my mother came to me stuck to the flip side of a bottle cap and floating on a red tide along the banks of the Vltava. “Oh, Mother—what’s happening to you?” I cried. She unfurled her wings then folded them up again, for she was a little swan with her old, human, mother head stuck on the tiny curving white neck of a swan. She spun her head around in a full circle, snapping open and closed her golden glassy eyes.

“Don’t worry so much. This is what happens when you die,” she said, nibbling at something bothering her in her feathers. I thought she was an angel and a fish, like both these things and like neither of them all at the same time, all at odds there in the red Vltava. She glided soundlessly onto the wide lip of the river’s bank, then disappeared into a slurry of fireflies beneath the branches of the willow and lime trees along the river’s edge. I settled in my covers a little deeper and could hear faintly as if from very far off, 118 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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though I knew it was as near as just under my bedroom windowpane, the Widow Dubc∑ek hollering at her cat and I worried for the cat and thought, if I get a chance, I will grow catnip for it in pots and reserve the very best of my trash for that poor cat.

I awoke the next morning with a bad taste in my mouth and lay beside Madla, listening to her heavy breathing and thinking about red. I thought, then, that we should be very careful with what colors remained, taking great care to remember and preserve them accurately and with reverence. Maybe we’d been careless, had taken red for granted, collectively forgotten red and so it disappeared.

Maybe it was still here, even now, but we had all changed and couldn’t see it. Entire cities had disappeared, I knew, without a trace from memory and maps alike, simply because people had forgotten to remember them. Then I thought, maybe we are just stunned, like those birds that fly in the window panes of buildings, mistaking the glass for sky. We’ll rouse ourselves, wake ourselves from this redless dream, and all will be as it was before.

I kicked the covers over onto Madla, pulled on my trousers, and went to the kitchen, where I stuck my head out the window. It was a late October morning, and now without red, the whole world had gone blue, the hillside and outlying fields retreating to purple and then a dark that didn’t have a name on any color wheel. There was Loli hosing down the courtyard in her hip waders and her husband’s f ishing hat that jingled with tackle and artificial flies. Then I remembered her comment, and wondered if taking red away wasn’t the Gardener’s joke on us. I pulled my head back in and sat down at the kitchen table with a pencil in hand, determined to do something, and made a list of everything I knew about red: 1. It is a primary color at the lower end of the visible spectrum.

2. Red can vary in hue from a deep dark blood color to a very light rosy pink.

3. It is one of the first and last colors of sunset, one of the longest lingering colors.

4. Red is frequently associated with anger, bad financial moves and communism.

5. They say there is the tiniest bit of red in every strand of hair on every head of every person on this planet and that only dead or dying hair doesn’t have traces of red.

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6. My mother’s hair was red and when I was a baby, mine was too, but since has turned brown.

7. When I grow a beard, it is red, except, of course, now my beard is a grayish white.

I read my list over twice and closed my eyes. I thought if I just concentrated very hard, I could bring it back, even though I knew it was silly to believe anything so big depended upon my efforts. When I opened my eyes and red was still gone, I decided to go looking for it there in the kitchen. I could hear Madla stirring in the bedroom and her old radio, an outdated box that sputtered and struggled behind static like a moth at a screen, buzzed to life. I was on hands and knees, my nose in the refrigerator, sniffing for the scent of red, and I opened a jar of beets which had blanched entirely, then put my ear to the vent, listening for red. All the while the most beautiful jazz rendition of “Stardust” floated in from the bedroom.

“Help!” I cried into the vent. “I can’t remember what red looked like!”

“Go back to sleep!” someone from upstairs yelled back down through the vent.

Madla appeared in the kitchen then and yawned. “It’s no big deal, Jindrich. They’ll issue new currency, make new recommendations in the house, and there’ll be nothing more to it,” she said, setting the egg timer and retreating for the toilet where I heard the shower running and I knew this was the last consideration she was giving it.

Oh, this is silly, I thought. Stupid. Worse than that—clichéd.

This is the kind of cheap stunt an art teacher, the ink on her license still wet and a wild look in the eye, would propose to her students: paint a tomato, a strawberry patch, a broken watermelon, a bleeding heart without using any red, and rock on her heels, eyebrows arched, a tight triumphant smile stretching across her face. I looked around, sure that a siren would go off, and the joke would be revealed and we’d all have a good laugh at the prank someone had managed to pull. Behind me Madla’s egg timer ticked while upstairs the Ukrainian couple were fighting again and I thought the woman was accusing the man of taking something from her. I sighed and stared at the ceiling, trying to make some sense, read some pattern in the cracks sprawling across the ceiling like bad handwriting.

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with quick even strokes. Then the timer rang and I flinched, nicking myself. But it didn’t hurt much and I hardly even noticed the gray spotting of blood. The sun broke open over the hills then—a quiet, yellow, unspectacular affair—and I knew I had better be getting to work.

I let myself out of the flat and went down the stairs. There was Vaclav, the manager, kicking at the weeds growing in the cracks along the courtyard. He was mad for books, especially those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He didn’t like me, I knew. He didn’t like it that I didn’t know philosophy and that Madla stayed over with me sometimes.

“It’s not that I’m old fashioned,” he had said, confronting me in the stairwell one day last spring. “But the sneaking around bothers me. Do you have to be so furtive about it?” He had asked and I assured him that I didn’t know what he meant and nodded to show my respect for his opinions.

“You see!” he had cried, pointing a bony finger at me. “There it is again. Furtive!”

But today he hardly looked at me.

“Red’s gone,” I said to him.

“Yes, I know that, you idiot.” He still wasn’t looking at me.

“Well, I didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not my fault, you know.”

“How does anyone know anything?” he asked, finally swinging his gaze up to mine. I wanted to shake him, God I wanted to rattle him when he started talking like that. Instead, I shoved my hands in my pockets and started walking away, faster than the day before, but just as amazed at the sight of people, like me, moving along, as if nothing had happened, nothing had been lost, and even now, as if there was nothing to lose.

“Hey, Mack,” I said, hanging my coat up onto the peg and reaching for the coffee machine. “What’s new?”

“Nothing.” Mack was fiddling with his cassette player.

“You seem a little out of sorts.” I was testing him, trying to see if he would speak to my fear and admit that yes, something was out of sorts, dreadfully out of sorts.

“No. I’m just blind with boredom.” Mack finished with the tape player and crumpled his empty paper cup of coffee and tossed it into the trash bin. “See you,” he called and pushed through the door, his head down and the music up.

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I picked up a test copy from the break table, sure that with a whole twenty-four hours of redlessness, somewhere, someone would be up in arms about it, and any minute now our phones would be jangling off the hook, our intercoms abuzz with electricity and life.

But just as the day before, everyone was strangely serene and calm about the loss of red, as if it had never really been with us in the first place. And again, today, the newspaper was uncustomarily silent on the issue. I found an obituary for red and a few eulogies, one by an old woman who’d survived Birkenau and had more close-up encounters with the color than most. “A bright and fiery companion of orange and yellow, survived and missed by many,” her eulogy read, or something like that, describing red by what it was not. I went upstairs and sat there the whole shift, staring glumly at the presses, wishing the bell would ring so that I could go home and think in the quiet and the dark.

“This isn’t right,” I said to Madla that evening when I got home from work. “What’s wrong with everyone?” I poured myself a stiff drink.

“Oh, Jindrich. I wish you’d lighten up,” Madla said, wiping her hands on her skirt.

I tipped my head back, finishing the drink in one swallow.

Outside the sun was setting again, a distant throb and a cluster of gray, like a malignant cancer fire-star on an x-ray. “Well,” I said, dropping my hands at my side. “I guess that’s it. Red’s really gone.”

I turned around slowly unable to believe it, thinking it was some kind of colossal trick that would wear off once we could acknowledge it as such.

“It was never my favorite color,” Madla said, snapping open her cigarette case and frowning at the botched sky outside the window. Then she rummaged through her purse and tossed out her tubes of lipstick, each another dull shade of gray. She rested her chin in her hands and kept staring. I thought she was looking at the sky, looking for red maybe, but then I saw she was really watching her own reflection in the window, watching the way her bloodless lips turned white when she puckered to take a drag from the cigarette.

She blew a heavy cloud of smoke.

“Oh, it’ll come back—don’t worry,” she said at last, bending her head to check the sky as if red’s going was a simple change in the weather.

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That night, the TV’s glow looked even greener than usual and the figures slurring across the screen had yellow, green, and blue skin tones and I thought: at last, the answer to dull TV programming—I might actually make it through a whole hour of television without feeling sick or depressed now that everyone looked like a Martian.

And I kept watching, still thinking that maybe we’d hear a pop from the TV or crackle from the radio and the culprit would come forward. That’s when a public announcement message scrolled across the bottom of the screen. I thought: at last—someone will say something, someone will do something. But it was just a weather warning: the barometer had dropped unexpectedly and a storm was coming.

I went to bed. I lay there studying the dark and tried imagining it as a deep dark red, a dark that could have been red, a red sunk in shadow.

Then I gave up. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember red. I recalled a trick my uncle, blinded by war, had taught me. If you squeeze your eyes shut, he said, you can see unseen colors by rubbing your knuckles over your eyelids, digging them into the eye sockets. That night I lay there in bed, my jaw clamped and eyes clinched, rubbing my eye sockets for all they were worth. And it worked: I began dreaming of stars swimming like firebugs over the water, which was all red, that fiery color of passion, the color of the heart and of heat. In fact, everything in my dreams—the dogs, the kestrels, the swifts, the sounds of the trains and of people’s voices—was shaded in reds: brick red, maroon, vermilion, blood red, reds of the desert, reds of the tropics, coral reds of the sea, sapphire and magenta.

Some say the end of the world will come in a blinding flash of light and fire. Others believe the sky wolf will open his great jaws and swallow the sun in a long digestion, leaving the world to ice. But I figure it’s going to be slow and drawn out so we can take note of each little change. We’ll wake up and all be smaller, paler, shrinking as the sky unravels in bolts of color, only one color will be missing, and then the next day another color will be gone. Then everything and everyone will resemble each other completely, with only the slightest variations of gray distinguishing each thing from another. That’s when the snow will fall, dropping down quietly, hesitating in the air and on the palm like a small bird scared into flight, drifting and settling into imperceptible mosaics of pure white upon white, until at last the air and the ground under the air go blank as an empty canvas.

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thinking I could dream for days and not come up with anything so perfect. And then I felt a little ashamed. If it’s true there are two tongues to every language, a tongue of love and one of hate, maybe what we were seeing here was a message from God in a celestial tongue of love, of grace, only it was incomplete as yet, and we didn’t know how to read it, in fact, some of us had yet to even see it or recognize it, yes, maybe that was the trouble. But the trouble was with us, with me, not with the landscape that had diminished and wicked out to a world of boot polish blacks and ashen whites and the colors of stubble that outlives the man.

That morning, Madla and I went out to the courtyard to watch the storm roll in. We were looking over the rooftops. And then I thought if this was the end, how I couldn’t say or do one thing that really mattered now, and even if I could, I wouldn’t know what that one thing I should do or say was. I was, in fact, the kind of guy who could make his mother a little deader than she already was every time I opened my mouth. And I felt a sorrow then as thick and chalky as an aspirin too long out of the bottle, dissolving on my tongue, leaving a bitter aftertaste that I knew wouldn’t go away no matter how much I drank. And I realized that this was the end-of-my-life flash: not seeing my life rewind as if on a cheap movie reel, but seeing myself for what I was. No wonder so many people feared the end.

A wind kicked up catching a newspaper in full bloom against the courtyard brick. I could hear Loli behind her privet hedge, choking with her strange laugh and I wondered if she was, indeed, crying. And then there was Vaclav in the stone corridor singing with cheer: That’s the fucking end, said Amundsen. I pulled Madla closer and imagined I could hear our blood whistling like old radios, bleating like broken-down clocks.

Overhead, the birds keened and wheeled in tight circles and raised their pitch and I wondered if I should say a little prayer for them, the kestrels, those half-formed angels falling from sky, for the beautiful redpolls and the swifts, all unsettled by the smell of a storm and the sky’s pallor.

But instead of being afraid I felt grateful, yes, for all these things and many many more I was grateful, and to have had them here with Madla, whose warm breath even now fogged the face of my watch and who made me think that if I could know just one thing, one tiny thing, know it completely, even if that thing was not her, 124 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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but only near her, that could be enough. Then I could forget it all: the horror that if I looked inside myself there might not be anything at all to see, the mystery of my mother now happily drifting along in my dreams, and the fact that no matter how hard I tried not to, I had failed her in ways I might never understand.

Above us the sky burned with purples and blues and greens and oranges, the green stripes of the sky matching the green irises of Madla’s eyes. I felt my breath catch at the back of my throat, a quickening in my lungs and I thought, My God, what a sight, this ancient watery landscape of color, and it seemed to me then the days had never been so beautiful as these, and as this one in particular.

I wrapped my arm around Madla’s shoulders and pulled her head to my chest and breathed in the smell of her hair. Madla squeezed my hand. “I love you,” she said quickly, like the last thing you whisper as the lights die down and the projector flickers to life.

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Exterminator

Cliff touched the rim of his eye, hoping more dirt hadn’t gotten inside his contact. That would be the last downswing on the seesaw this day had been, up with the excitement of seeing Tricia, down with the worry over what was happening to her. Luckily today’s clients had been people he liked, people he was glad to help clean the vermin out of their houses, all except the last, a woman with years of dog shit scattered on her floors, who bitched about why Cliff couldn’t kill her roaches. Today he’d had to crawl through a puddle of leaky sewage beneath her bathroom to chop a two-foot copperhead. Still that wasn’t as bad as some, like at Mall City, the crackhead apartment complexes where he had seen two shootings, or the house of the unbathed survivalist who rackracked about killing everybody from abortionists to LSU’s football coach. Sometimes it seemed like the people Cliff tried to help were nastier than the things he killed.

Cliff took the knife from his belt and pried at the lid on a can of Baygon. He was purposely not looking at his co-worker, Mann, who leaned against the pick-up, eating a candy bar.

“Describe a black widow bite,” Mann said.

“I told you stop quizzing me,” Cliff said.

“How you find termites?”

“I know the test.”

Mann glanced through the window of Cliff ’s truck. “What’s the difference between a roof rat and a Norway rat?”

Cliff wondered sometimes if the reason he hadn’t slapped Mann was because Willie was his daddy, but he knew the real reason was a slap would only rattle the beans in Mann’s head. Mann popped the last bite of candy into his mouth and licked his fingers. Cliff knew Mann hadn’t washed his hands after spraying but then that was nothing. The shit he had seen that idiot and Willie do with poison boggled the mind. Just last week Willie had unscrewed a clogged hose from a full sprayer and blown on it like a trumpet. Cliff pictured 126 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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tumors hanging like clusters of grapes inside them.

“You’re a roof rat,” Cliff said. “A turd-eating roof rat.”

“And you’re a pussy. You can’t kill nothing. This morning I ran over a squirrel just for the hell of it.” Mann grinned.

Cliff knew Mann wasn’t joking. Mann himself was the joke, an exterminator who loved to kill, especially when it would piss Cliff off. Mann was constantly putting some carcass, a possum or a cat or a raccoon, in the bed of Cliff ’s truck even though Cliff had already threatened him. Once he even came in bragging how he’d lawnmowered two frogs humping in his yard.

“You’re a sick fuck,” Cliff said.

“No, I’m a professional. You’re scared of it. You’re scared of the chemicals and you’re scared to kill anything except a little bug.”

Cliff stood and looked Mann in the eye.

“How’d you get named Mann? You sure ain’t one.”

“Don’t slam my name, bro.”

“Get away from my truck.”

“Your truck. Eat me,” Mann said, spun and strode away.

Cliff locked the tool case and walked inside where Willie and Mann were watching the war on TV. Above Willie’s desk hung the company motto: INFESTATION EVERYWHERE. On the screen, soldiers shoved a round into an artillery piece and fired.

“One raghead grease-job coming up,” Mann said.

Cliff hadn’t turned on the war news the last few days, but everywhere he went it surrounded him. Sane, mild-mannered people casually discussed murdering Saddam Hussein, revelled in the slaughter of Iraqis, marvelled at death technology, all of them locked to their TVs waiting for the next violent image. Some tried to deny the real reason they were watching by saying they wanted to see what the government was up to or saying they wanted to know what was happening to the troops, but they were still aflame with war fever, caught in the thrill of it. As if they’d ever raised and fired, ever seen bits of skull fly like bloody ceramic. Didn’t anybody know the killing came back home?

“I’m outta here,” Cliff said.

“What’s the matter,” Mann asked, “big war veteran can’t stand to see a bunch of sand niggers get theirs?”

Cliff bit the inside of his lip, turned and shoved out the door.

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jungle clearings, to small men dropping at the end of his barrel. He pressed against his eyes and Tricia’s face came to him. Two years he hadn’t seen or heard from her, then this morning she’d called for him to meet her at a Stop-N-Go on Jefferson. She wore heavy makeup to cover the bruise on her jaw and smoked rapidly, the only sign of fear he’d ever seen in her, the defiance he’d fallen for eleven years before shaken by the son-of-a-bitch who’d taken his place.

“Rick hit you?” he asked.

Tricia’s eyes widened. She touched the bruise, flicked her cigarette hard. “I shouldn’t have called. I’ve been up all night. He was going crazy. Said if I tried to leave he’d kill me.”

“I told you not to get mixed up with that bastard.”

“You told me you’d hurt anybody I got mixed up with. You don’t even know him.”

“He’s a goddamn Nazi.”

“He’s Dutch.”

A month after Cliff had moved out, he dropped by the trailer and found Rick in a bikini bathing suit washing Tricia’s car. Cliff wanted to kick his ass then, but Tricia made him leave.

“I was messed up then,” Cliff said. “I’m better now.”

Tricia took a deep drag, tilted her head back exposing the curve on her throat. “Maybe you were right. He always had a temper. Now he’s mad all the time, raving about how stupid Americans are. Last night Desert Storm on TV set him off.”

“Let him take his ass back to Europe then.”

“He kept saying, ‘Fuck the Army.’” She smiled. “It reminded me of you.”

Tricia’s hazel eyes sparked green. Cliff picked up a book of matches, Baton Rouge Piping Supplies, Rick’s matches, inhaled Tricia’s smells—Benson & Hedges, Dr. Pepper, pot. “What do you want?” he asked.

“To talk. Rick’s chased everybody I know off.”

“He hit you before?”

She nodded. “I told him to move out a month ago. Told me he’d kill me and be in Central America before anybody even knew.”

“He’s serious?”

“He’s crazy. I called the Sheriff ’s Office. They told me if I evicted him I had to give him a week to get out. I did that, he’d burn the place.”

“So you want me to run him off?”

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“No, that’s not what I want. You hear me?” She ground out her cigarette. “Shit, this was a mistake.”

“I ain’t out of line. You called me.”

“I don’t want that, Cliff. I mean it.”

Cliff propped against his truck and breathed slowly until he levelled. He spat several times, then got behind the wheel. On the front seat lay the Exterminator’s Handbook. “Roof Rat (RATTUS RATTUS): Pointed nose, light slender haunch. Norway Rat (RATTUS NORVEGICUS): Blunt nose, heavy thick haunch.” Cliff flipped the book closed.

On the way home he splurged for some boiled shrimp and kept his windows rolled up to hold in the smell. In his apartment he spilled them onto a plate, held it close to his nose and inhaled, the peppery aroma spreading into his forehead. He thought of Tricia’s salty skin, the reddish tips of her hair after a day in the sun, thought of beer so icy its taste came only after you’d swallowed. He settled into the chair next to his water bed and turned on CNN. A man on TV demonstrated Iraqi entrenchment—fiery moats, trenches, tunnels.

Animation of a buried tank appeared. Its turret, pulsing red with heat from the day’s sun, protruded from the sand. Heat-sensing jets were blowing them away. For every roach you see, there are fifty more you don’t. Cliff lifted one of the shrimp, studied its tiny legs and antennae, its translucent skin. He dropped it back onto the plate.

With the remote he killed the picture. He popped open a can of beer, poured half the contents down his throat, swallowed and tugged at his lips. From this spot he could see his entire apartment—a single room. A thirty-eight-year-old man, alone and killing bugs for a living.

He’d never imagined it.

He and Tricia had bought land and put a nice mobile home on it.

Spur of the moment they headed out on adventures, the river bluffs at Port Hudson, the beach at Grande Isle, country cemeteries late at night.

From the start it was intense, two edgy people who understood the other’s anger without understanding how to cure it. The more they fought the more they partied, blew tons of money, so much that Cliff had to work overtime at Dow just to make ends meet. Endless shifts unloading tank cars, cleaning tank cars, moving tank cars, loading tank cars.

A trap. They grew tired of each other’s explosiveness and sullenness, talked to each other less, and the less they talked the better then weirder then kinkier the sex became, right up to the end—straps, belts, even burns. Since Tricia, Cliff had slept with other women, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 129

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but there had been little excitement and no emotion, just Tricia’s absence taunting him. Still, lately he had been able to sit alone and not think of her, not need to be with anyone.

Cliff finished his beer, loaded his bat hit and sat on the edge of his bed. After a couple of tokes, he drummed his fingers on the telephone.

He wanted to call but a mysterious caller might be enough to set Rick off. But then, who knew that wasn’t what Tricia wanted. Some fuckedup conflict or excuse to pop the motherfucker with the little .38 she kept. Cliff stripped off his clothes, checked each item for rogue insects, then flung them—shirt, socks, pants, underwear—against the wall. As steam roiled from the running water, he examined his skin for bites and rashes. Checking himself was a daily ritual, but sometimes at night he still awoke thrashing, the crawl of tiny legs on him. Once he dreamed of Mann and Willie setting a grand table, goblets of poison on each plate, a giant basted worm laid on a platter. The infestation of dreams was the worst.

He eased into the tub and lay back. He saw Tricia propped on the kitchen bar giving Rick the expression she had given Cliff so often, the expression that ignored and insulted at the same time, that made you mad to prove her wrong and accept you again. Rick moved toward her, screamed at her, swung his fist into Tricia’s face. Cliff sloshed upright.

He tossed water into his face, stretched his eyes. He had to slow down.

Be patient. His life was finally almost free of turmoil. He couldn’t let it seep back in.

Cliff set the last empty can of the six pack onto the floor, hoping to doze in his chair, but the phone rested like a bomb beside him.

He thought of moths drawn miles together by an invisible signal beyond their will, tried to laugh but saw again the bruise on Tricia’s face. He grabbed his keys and headed out.

By the time he turned off I-12, his buzz had sharpened into a headache. Trees and darkness crowded the winding state highway, headlights of oncoming cars pierced his temples like pincers. It was a long time since he’d been on this road and his mind travelled ahead to the trailer, to their things, her strange melting Dali prints, his king-size waterbed, the matching easy chairs in the living room. Water oaks and pines shaded their lot and on windy nights he and Tricia had lain next to an open window, the shushing and creaking of trees covering them.

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arms and legs slick with bug repellant, one of their backs against a tree. Right now he felt her lips against his.

Cliff steered onto a gravel road, cut his lights and slowed. The grind beneath his tires centered in his head, churning. He parked across the street and stared through the trees at the trailer, dark except for the bedroom. Inside, his belongings gone, his smell replaced by Rick’s smell, his bed replaced by another bed. Rick in all the places he had once been in. Cliff ’s hands tightened on the wheel. There was Rick on top of Tricia, her body tensed and resisting, Rick’s fingers clutched in her hair.

Cliff banged his hands on the dash, squeezed from his throat a noise that repulsed him. His arms, his legs, then his whole body shook. Saliva filled his mouth. The old reactions. Silence and rage.

Only sex was missing.

An image from the final months hatched full grown. One night, wasted, he had shattered a crystal unicorn that Tricia’s mother had given her. Laughing, he staggered off to bed and crashed. In this nightmare his skin burned, stung again and again by something in the dark. He swatted and thrashed, every movement increasing the stings, finally threw himself awake in a tangle of blankets. For a moment he was relieved to have escaped, then the burning and stinging were back, worse now, deeper and more pointed. He touched a hand to his side, jerked at the pain as if his own touch were needles. The pain spread to his butt, his legs, his back, his balls, all at once. He sat totally still, his eyesight adjusting to the weak light through the curtain. Blood spotted the sheet, shone black on his skin. Here and there he picked out a wing, a horse’s leg, a head. Light glinted off tiny quills on his skin. Glass shards. He screamed for Tricia, even though he knew she was gone, then reached for a cigarette to smoke before he made his way out of bed. As he smoked he imagined his revenge, binding and stranding her somewhere while she was tripping. When he finished his smoke, he pulled his feet up under him, stood and jumped to the floor, a few pieces driving into his soles. For hours he plucked and dug glass from himself, kept finding bits all through the day. Two days later Tricia returned, but neither of them mentioned the incident. The violence Cliff had played through his head, that Tricia had in her eyes, they carried to the bedroom.

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sheets, naked bodies scrambling, Tricia screaming No! He cranked the truck and drove away.

Cliff leaned over and pumped the can of Lindane six, seven, eight times, a vigorous pump for each day since he’s seen Tricia. He struggled not to call, not to follow her to a job site to see how she was, but each day she didn’t call, the greater his terror and anger grew. Was she hurt and unable to call? Or was she playing with his head, not telling him what she really wanted, just waiting to see where he stumbled and how long it would take him to blow? No. She had told him to wait and listen and he would. He wasn’t like in the old days. He had learned. He wouldn’t push and maybe they could start again, differently, with openness and an understanding of what walls between them could breed.

Cliff looked out from the center of the dingy apartment. More than two dozen roaches prowled around the door frame, feeding on the butt of a sandwich left on an end table. Infestation is not necessarily a slow process. Reproduction is often logarithmic, so an environment absolutely free of intruders can be quickly overrun. Cliff knew from the sourness in the air that the kitchen would be worse.

“Y’all seen a lot of insects?” he asked the couple, who was watching TV from the couch. On the screen, arrows showed the possible routes of allied forces flanking the Iraqis.

“We seen some,” said the man. “They like to hide.” The man’s arms seemed a little too short for his chunky torso, his head almost mongoloid. The woman’s belly swelled with an advanced pregnancy, but her shoulder bones threatened to poke through the fabric of her dress. These were exactly the kind of people who let their house pile into a garbage heap, then called Willie to complain that their roaches weren’t dead. He felt like spraying them.

“This spray stinks pretty bad,” Cliff said, pulling on his mask.

“It flushes ’em, too. Y’all might want to wait outside.”

“We’re looking at this show,” the woman said. She lit another cigarette, the smoke from the last one still hovering.

Cliff tucked his pants legs into his socks, fastened his shirt’s top button and slipped on his gloves. He stuck the nozzle behind a velvet print of a clown and sprayed. Roaches exploded onto the wall, scurrying in every direction. Several took flight, lumbering into the air. Cliff wrinkled his nose, then squirted into a crack in the door frame. From every hole and crevice roaches poured. He blasted the 132 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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wall, coated the floor at his feet, ducked and let loose a stream at the ceiling. He backed away from the wall, the room aswarm with insects. From his belt he took a can of Baygon and released a misty spray, knocking roaches from the air, sending them into spasms on the floor. He spurted into a quarter-sized hole in the wall, let go a burst under a chair and behind the couch. His skin bunched, a clog rose in his throat, but he gritted his teeth.

He’d struck them where they lived and he was winning.

Hundreds of the brown bugs twitched on the floor. Then he saw the couple, whom he’d forgotten, standing between the couch and the TV. Roaches buzzed the air around them, landed on their heads, but the couple stayed, swatting, staring at Cliff through the cloud of insecticides. Cliff stormed into the kitchen. Two plastic bags spilled garbage from their mouths across the floor. In the sink grungy dishes, pots, and pans reeked with an odor that cut through the smell of Lindane and made Cliff gag. Bugs stirred by the skirmish in the den already scrambled across the walls, but when Cliff sprayed both poisons at once, the place came alive. He stomped and ducked, squinted and kept on with both cans. He was using way too much poison for a living area, but he couldn’t stop. These people had lost control. They were being taken over in their own apartment, were infesting other apartments. He swung open a cabinet door and a nest of inch-long Americans went airborne straight at him. He stepped back, stumbled, fell into the garbage. The bags collapsed beneath him, the green plastic ballooning on either side, spewing tin cans and chicken bones and more roaches. He scrambled to his feet, bugs on his arms and legs, sprayed his own shirt, then dropped the cans and brushed at himself. He broke from the kitchen cursing, hands out in front of him, jerked open the door and dashed through still thrashing.

Cliff knocked the last couple of roaches from his shoulder, tore off his mask and work shirt. He threw down his hat and shook his hair, the tingle of small legs all over him. He clutched at his chest, cleared his throat and spat.

“What the fuck is going on?” Mann asked, sauntering up. He peered around the door. “Christ! Air show!” Cliff looked in at the people coughing and fanning at the roaches still in flight. A mist of spray swirled from the kitchen.

“Shit,” Cliff said.

“Fucking roach olympics. Hey,” Mann said to the couple, “y’all heard of cleaning?” The man and woman glanced at each other.

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Cliff trudged back in and retrieved the cans, the couple following him. He wanted to scream at them, grab them and shake them, but he brushed past.

“It makes ’em fly,” the man said.

“You ain’t done the bedroom,” said the woman.

“We’ll leave them for pets,” Cliff said, and shut the door.

“Think you used enough poison?” Mann said as he followed Cliff to his truck.

“I should’ve torched the fucking place.” Cliff tossed his gear into the back of his truck.

“What a mess,” Mann said. “Goddamn white people, too.”

Cliff pressed his hands to his ringing ears.

“I’d like to take a body count in that place,” Mann said. “I’ll bet you stroked a thousand of those little shits.”

“Hoo-fucking-ray.” Cliff ’s beeper sounded. He plopped into the driver’s seat, inhaled and got Willie on the radio.

“Somebody named Tricia wants you to meet her at the Essen Lane K-Mart,” Willie said.

Cliff squeezed his thighs, trying to steady himself, but the poison burned his nostrils, made him sneeze. Those people weren’t right.

He’d seen that, known that. The woman was pregnant, too. His eyes stung, blurred with water.

Cliff strode toward the card section, fingering the knife on his belt and half-expecting Rick to step from an aisle. Tricia was plugging brightly-colored cards into slots on a display rack, her back to him. He touched her shoulder. She started and turned. He’d dreaded seeing black eyes and a swollen lip, but her exhausted face without make-up was worse. He wanted both to hug her and to shake her.

“I been worried fucking sick,” he said, his speech thick and cottony in a way he knew she recognized. “Why ain’t you called?”

“I did call.”

“You know what I mean. He touched you again?”

She narrowed her eyes. “He hasn’t touched me. Son of a bitch better not touch me.”

“You told him to get out?”

Tricia glanced toward two women watching them and closed her box of cards. “Let’s get a Coke,” she said, and started walking.

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waited for the drinks she’d ordered. She had short fingers, strong hands. For a moment Cliff felt them on his face. Tricia looked from the corner of her eye.

“Cliff?”

He nodded, but the wariness had already settled on her.

Tricia led him into the bright sun where they sat on the curb.

Five feet away, metal grating covered a drain. Cliff ’s mind started down the hole. He forced his eyes forward. “I been scared sick,” he said. “You should’ve called.”

“I had to figure some things out first. He hasn’t hit me again.

He’s been quiet.”

Her tone made him remember her, across the room, eyes red from fatigue, a wavering cloud of smoke suspended in the air. Now as then, the distance between them expanded.

“He knew I’d seen you,” she said. “He’ll know I saw you today.”

“Then let me come with you.”

“No. It was stupid pulling you in. I’ve got to settle this myself.”

“I can take care of that asshole. I won’t even hurt him. I’ll scare him enough to leave.”

“You know you’d hurt him, then you’d be in jail.”

“Evict him and I’ll come stay ’til he gets out.”

“Goddamnit, quit.”

Cliff stood. He removed the cup’s plastic top to take a gulp, but a gust of wind snatched it from his hand and sent it tumbling across the lot.

“Why’d you pull me in if you won’t let me do anything?”

“I was scared. I had to talk to somebody.”

“You got to give him an ultimatum.”

“You think I don’t know that? Last time I told him he had to go, he got his pistol out and cleaned it. You can’t force me, Cliff. You’re still forcing.”

“And you’re still messing with me. You act like you want to let me in, then you lock the door.”

“Yeah? Well you think the only way through the door is a kick.”

Cliff sipped the Coke, syrupy and too cold. He tried to work saliva into his mouth, then wiped the corners where he knew cotton was gathering.

“I should’ve called back,” she said.

“Yeah, you should have.”

“All I wanted was to talk. Why couldn’t you just talk?”

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“I thought the dude was about to kill you, how was I supposed to act?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

“Great. Ya know, you been fucking up ever since you let that shithead move in. Jesus, our sheets weren’t even cold.”

“They were to me.”

She stood, but he put his hand on her forearm. For a second her face showed pain, then she moved her arm and looked away.

“Tricia, I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck that. You started it again. You knew what I’d want to do.”

“I hoped you’d hear what I said.”

“Right.” Cliff linked his hands behind his head. On every light pole, a yellow bow flapped in the nippy breeze. Homecoming. He tasted bitterness far back in his throat.

“Maybe I did want you to do something,” Tricia said. “It wasn’t fair. It’s too late now, though.”

“No it ain’t. It would work. It could all work.”

“It’s not working right now.”

Cliff threw the rest of his drink on the ground. He crumpled the cup. “I have to see you.”

“You can’t. I’m too tired.”

Cliff carried his sprayer out of the kitchen and into the warm living area. This morning he’d passed the test, easy, a let-down really.

Now he stood in the final unit of the three apartment complexes he and Mann had treated today, a neat, cozy place almost completely free of roaches. The last time he’d come here, bugs had been migrating from neighbors’ apartments, but the people who lived here had used his help to keep the pests under control. It was a good feeling.

He raised his nozzle to spray behind a hanging picture, noticed the photo in the frame. A young couple sat at a picnic table, their arms around each other, their free hands on the shoulders of a small girl before them. Cliff squirted behind the picture, then with one hand lifted an end of the couch, moved it aside and dropped it. He shot a stream of poison onto the baseboard, noticed a loose corner of carpet, knelt and peeled it back. A crack at the baseboard. Residue.

Termites? He visualized the wall’s interior, joists riddled and teeming with white insects, wood crumbling and collapsing. He sprayed into it and stood. His head swam. He saw Tricia beneath him, her tongue 136 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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on her upper lip, her eyes rolled back, her hands on his cheeks. He tossed his head, leaned against the wall, blew out through his mouth.

Behind him the apartment door opened.

“Quit whackin it, the Mann is here.” Mann plopped onto the couch. Splotches of insecticide covered his shirt. He picked up a framed photo of the woman who lived there. “Come with daddy,” he said, and pumped the photo on his crotch.

“Leave that alone,” Cliff said, and snatched the photo from his hand. “Out.” Cliff took Mann’s arm and stood him up, but Mann shook him off.

“Don’t touch me, bro.” Mann adjusted his clothes as though Cliff had rumpled them. Cliff pointed Mann outside, locked the door behind them, then outpaced Mann as they headed for their trucks.

“You don’t got a fucking right to touch me,” Mann said. “You’re the pissant in this company.”

“Stop, you’re hurting my feelings.”

“Fuck you, Cliff. You know, my old man, he’d fire your ass if I told him to. I could’ve said how you doused that retard house.”

Cliff faced him. “You want to squeal, go ahead. I give a shit.”

Mann grinned. His teeth glinted, razor sharp and pointed, in the sun. Cliff stepped back, shook his head and swallowed. When he looked again, Mann’s teeth were normal.

“Even though you are a dick,” Mann said, “I got you something for passing.”

Cliff went to his truck and peered in. A brown mutt lay in the bed, its head crushed and covered with green-backed flies.

“You killed this dog?” Cliff asked.

“It’s dead, ain’t it?” Mann laughed so hard he held his belly.

“Get it out of my truck.”

“You get it. It’s your present.”

Cliff stepped toward him, but Mann quickdrew his spray nozzle and squirted. The poison struck Cliff in the eye, an ice pick driven into his pupil. Cliff clawed at his contact lens.

“Ouch,” Mann said.

Cliff leaped at Mann, clutched his shirt and slung him to the concrete. Mann skidded, bellowing. Cliff plucked the lens from his eye and blinked rapidly, tears streaming down his face. He glanced at Mann on the ground, a pale blur, sponged his eye with his handkerchief and spat into the lens. The pain quivered his knees.

“You’re fired, asshole,” Mann said.

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Cliff rubbed the lens with his thumb and reinserted it. A fragment of hot steel. He bent over, then stood straight, lifted the dog from the truck and threw it hard into Mann, who scrambled away from the body.

Cliff slid into his truck, cranked it and tore out. The ice pick drove deeper into his head, but he didn’t stop. This was what it all came to. You tried to maintain a cool head and you ended up blinded and abused. You couldn’t control even yourself because vicious bastards would always fuck you over. He knew he would never be back with Tricia, would never get her out of him either. But he wouldn’t let her be victim to some psycho. She hadn’t been able to ask him to get rid of the fucker, so he’d do it on his own. He’d intercept Rick on the gravel road, block his way, threaten him, beat the shit out of him, use the knife if that’s what it took. Simple. He’d had practice. He’d show Tricia he’d been right. She’d see. Even if she didn’t, at least part of his life would be settled again.

The fire surged across his forehead and into his other eye. Ahead, the interstate came into view, wavered, doubled. He pressed against the contact but the pain intensified. He careened into a service station and screeched to a stop. From the truck seat, he grabbed his thermos cup, then threw open the truck door and hurried to the bathroom. Inside, lemon disinfectant and pyrethrin insecticide thickened the air. He filled the cup, plucked the poisoned lens from his eye and dropped it into the water. He plugged the sink, twisted the faucet handle, flushed his eye until the basin was full, then immersed his face in the water, held his breath until the eye began to cool. His face submerged, he pulled the plug and listened to the water swirl away.

Cliff fished the tainted contact from the cup and held it under the faucet once more. Carefully he placed the circle onto his iris, blinked and the burning was back, the tears flooding. He was too damn blind to go without it, but he popped the lens into his palm anyway. The burning began to subside almost immediately. He closed his fist on the lens, shut his good eye so that everything went blurry.

He remembered himself and Tricia in the trailer, ashtrays overflowing with butts, empty cans on every surface, both of them exhausted, without energy to clean or fight. Quietly, politely, as if they were strangers, she had asked him to leave, and he had, knowing that he could right then.

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face screwed into a wink. He didn’t look like a man going to hurt someone, he looked exhausted, like a man going home after work. He opened both eyes, making himself fuzzy, caught in an uncertain depth.

He could get rid of Rick, but that probably wasn’t what Tricia wanted.

He had never really known what she wanted. Hell, he hadn’t even known what he wanted. There had always been empty places inside of him, places he tried to fill with passion and rage when he was with Tricia, but those places were no fuller or emptier when he was alone. Their love made him angry. His anger made the love hungrier. At least sometimes lately he’d had something like peace.

Cliff opened his fist. In his palm lay the soft contact. With his fingertips, he squashed the jelly oval, watched it pop up again. Its shape and texture were larval.

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Colleen J. McElroy

Why Women Need to Dance

we use the fabric of the earth the sweat of dreams as skin gathers color the red dye of sunrise the budding of rebirth of death into life our shadows are cast upon clouds we have fled the same islands only to return and pay homage to unseen forces this is our birthright grayhaired we dance like daughters for our daughters in movements slower and more precise we swallow floods in pleas of rounded vowels conquer the elements in rhythms of movements pulling the tremors of earthquakes into our limbs like lava our food is fire secrets chanted in treble clicks and glides our sisters from Mauna Loa to Kilimanjaro hear with their inner ears we are Druid Navajo Ibo Quechua our tongues call the wind and sounds fall like leaves until we live in caves we can no longer find even with maps

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Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith You hadn’t oughta kiss a girl if you’re carrying a gun.

—Raymond Chandler once I found a cowboy who thought he could ride me into the New West and God put rollers on the bed to make his journey smoother last time I saw him he looked the worse for wear hair all but gone gut eating his belt he was a sight all laid out in a new suit (same one I bought him) honey he had a corvette and the morals of a chinchilla but just enough gangster to satisfy my Kansas City longings oh he was handsome as you know the devil was in his eyes and his clothes slick as sharkskin some kinda silk worn close and groin sweet like morning rain inside a buttercup Cept he dropped his pants and showed me something for the cat to play with thought he’d stopped me on the road he did but when I said come up and see me I was already heading in another direction then there was that business with some woman he wouldn’t name now would naming matter sugah you gotta know who you’re aiming for just aim for the light of one cigarette to the next always someone there with a match and an itch to scratch what hurts long as your voice holds

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Ron McFarland

The Visiting Team: Early Season Game

The bottom of the first, an open pit, swallows the best three pitchers and spits them out like sunflower seeds.

Long talks at the mound, monotonous chatter from the dazed outfield.

The catcher sweats, his stubby legs cramping up beneath his sagging butt.

The rookie Venezuelan shortstop tugs at the cross that drops from his neck, disconsolate.

If his next prayer is not granted he may hock it, pack his bags and head back to Caracas.

By the time the only out-of-town fan returns with his hot dog, the third relief pitcher has gone berserk.

Early in the season the grass dreams in its roots of being green someday.

The trainer spits a stream of black disgust at the cold concrete step of the drowsy dugout.

The coach feels a familiar flicker from his ulcer, begins to read billboards on the outfield fence, thinking early retirement, Florida.

The pine-riders tighten their jackets.

At this instant each of the umpires

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aspires to a warm shower and a cold beer. They are not alone.

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Kyoko Mori

Suffering (at the Art Institute of Chicago) In the small upstairs gallery where the centuries change, the doorway behind me flickers with the orange and gold light from the haystacks.

The swirling blue sky that embraces the drinkers as they tip their glasses and the yellow island turning into geometric plains of pure color are only a few steps around the corner, but I am walking toward the dark bronze sculpture cast in 1907

by Brancusi. It is a bust of a child who leans away from the light, eyes closed, head shaved, the sharp bone of the jaw pressed against the right shoulder. Cut off a few inches below that shoulder, what remains of the arm resembles a wounded bird or a plucked fruitâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an object far beyond consolation though it is cradled against the tender skin of the throat. The left ear tilted up into the empty air, the child strains to hear some music that will never come.

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the bone where the warmth of our own skin can only fail to comfort us the way a lover’s might. The sculpture is called “Suffering.” Do you remember it? We paused a few seconds here before moving further into our century where, hand in hand in front of the Cornell boxes, we peered into the small squares of light. The same paper ballerina is still poised in mid-leap across the bottomless well of blue shadows.

The white owl stares, back-lit and formidable among seashells and fungi. Alone in a quiet gallery, I push the button that lights up the boxes. It is a small gesture of hope, trust, or curiosity—this simple wish to see. The green parrots, the blue hotels, the mysterious maps and timetables—they cannot assuage our suffering except in the way a sudden color flashes across our memory like a stubborn Morse code.

I am out here in the mid-century before our birth, my fingers tapping the light switch to send you a message.

On the other side of the glass, our favorite birds are beckoning. As surely as we are born into suffering, we are meant also for this.

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Debra Nystrom

A Long Breath

1. Play A child pumps the board-swing, forcing the still air of August to stroke her legs and hair; fists pulling the chains against her small weight. The ash tree bows to her. Other kids shrink in the stubby grass beneath.

She could fly out with pointed feet, beyond the last plowed field, the river; big joke on this place that thinks it will keep her. Will keep her, will keep her, the metal shrieks.

2. Nights People live with worse; plenty worse.

At least there is love in this— but from the core of memory, nightly, an old woman creaks open the door into your sleep, snaps on the lamp and proceeds to undress: shoes, stockings, shift, slip, dentures, big squarish underwear and corset—hook after hook releasing the labored flesh.

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and all night she holds you.

It’s summer, thirty years later, but you keep the windows shut all night because outdoor sounds disturb your sleep (crickets, cicadas, breeze, the old maple’s screak). You lie awake regardless, watching shadows of leaves toss on the wall: restless, restless, restless, they talk to you even through the glass.

Do you call this intrusion? The grasses are speaking too, and the dust, and the sea somewhere, even if you won’t believe in it.

Do you imagine they want something from you?

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

3. Moonrise He buttons his shirt with short movements.

If he turned the light off and lay down again he’d see how the moon loses color as it leaves the horizon.

You could tell him you left a dance with a boy once, and drove to the blocked-off bridge; walked out, dodging the holes, to the middle, where the two of you stared together at the same kind of flushed moon. It was summer, and you rubbed against each other on the old condemned bridge, as the river currents spun underneath. And later, riding home, you alone found the moon again through the passenger window, by then high and white and aloof.

4. You See The things I confessed before leaving were false. I had wanted you Crab Orchard Review ◆ 147

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to rescue me, but from what?—the image of an endless winter afternoon, a girl tracing patterns of wood-grain on the floor of a dim farmhouse bedroom?— and downstairs the sounds of an old woman sorting silverware, questioning her absent husband, groaning as she sits herself down.

From time to time the girl gets up, touches the dusty violets and looks out as if something might happen. How can she say what isn’t right—except when she lifts the shade a cloud breaks for a moment, and she sees below, on the ground beside the cottonwood, clear shadow.

5. Waitress at a Window You can feel dusk suck at the heat and clatter and rhythms of earnest conversations, standing a minute with the silver pitcher, letting its sweat collect in your palm as a secret, something for yourself, like the thought of diving on a long breath into the swelling river, then rising to recover and lie motionless, face upward on the water.

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Lawrence Raab

The Invisible

At every point the great dazzle of the world shines through it, distracting you, as you should be distracted, since all this is life, whereas the invisible is one of the shapes life never chose.

Or could not hold for long.

And so, at moments, it trembles into sight— as the tip of a swaying branch, or a road unwinding into the distance, leading, perhaps, to a mountain where you never lived alone in a cabin, happy to keep the fire going on a chilly day.

And what you might have dreamt there— has it entirely slipped away?

Moonlight makes a bed.

Arranges its thin sheets.

Now a woman is taking off her clothes.

A man is opening a door.

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How pale they lookâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; almost transparent.

Outside, the wind stirs and rises.

A branch scrapes against the roof.

Another road unfolds into another night.

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Fragile

Sometimes the world insists that we think about our places in it— how fragile they feel, each one nudging the next. So many inscriptions already written. Here lies.

Beloved of. Remembered forever.

Fragile: shattery, shivery, gone.

When you’re old enough to have felt (alone, at night) the kind of pain a few pills won’t take care of, then maybe you’ve wondered— If I died now, what would I leave behind that would hurt me, what secrets that would change the minds of those who loved me?

Think of the man with his hidden shelves of pornography. He knew he was dying.

He left it that way. He didn’t ask: When shall I destroy all of this?

Who shall I turn myself into?

Brittle, delicate, severable.

Like a leg, or an arm, any part we can lose without losing ourselves.

Like an exquisite object whose beauty

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is blended with the fact that it isn’t meant to last.

All afternoon the sky is full of enormous clouds, ominous, mutable. Yet the rain holds off.

We go out to play tennis, return to eat dinner.

Whatever allows us to be here thinking as well as we can we’re ready to praise.

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Carrie Lea Robb

Killing James Bond

No one imagined it could be done— with his haughty accent, bull’s-eye wit, predatory grin, habit of saving the world.

And no one imagined me woman enough to do this, so many have tried.

They moved as he moved— whispering between his satin sheets like eels through water. I sneak past his defenses because I wear heavy shoes and stomp my feet. I smell of sweat and there is food in my teeth.

No one imagined he could sleep so soundly— his shrunken body not even stirring from its slouched position on the velvety love seat while I bang around with my bag of tools— machine guns, switch blades, plastic explosives.

No one imagined a little trail of drool would ever run down that sculpted chin, now blanched and wrinkled.

I want to point at the gray hairs coiling out of the open smoking robe shout, “Old! Old! Old!” And maybe he will wake before he goes and know how I love the crow’s feet, the powdery softness of his ancient skin.

It seems to be a human condition to love our ruins. We imagine only great lives for the old, only grandness for the Coliseum or the Mayan ruins. No one ever thinks these people may have been ill-tempered, they may have been cruel to animals,

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they may have devoured each othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hearts.

These weapons will be ineffective. We can only watch him grow old and older still.

No one imagined this would be what got him in the end. Not some plot by a corrupt government, a train rushing towards a blown-up bridge, a stunning assassin with a genius for knife throwing.

See how he falters, see his hands tremble, the irregular rising of his chest, see the quivering of his bloodless lips. Even in death he is lewd and useless.

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Jane Satterfield

Antique Dress

Seen askance, it’s all you’ve wanted, ever.

A hand-me down from who knows where, flowered over in silver embroidery, sheer confection of organza, someone’s fiddly needlework. Slip it on, agree to pose.

Wayward seams uphold—almost—their own against the body’s eaves.

And if said model angles, so,—here it slips, and here it clings.

Double-times as bondage gear.

Surveyor, surveyed, who leads and what follows.

Who puts it on, who takes it off.

All those studies kindling the flames.

Before long, you’re immersed.

In the tin bath, water warmed with an arrangement of oil lamps underneath.

You can’t help but covet a cavalcade of touch.

Benumbed in the bath, with his cold gaze going over skin, a sudden longing for streetclothes, something more serviceable.

You could catch your death.

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Margot Schilpp

Vanishing Point

The way an island holds back water, faith lets us forget for awhile that everything we are and have is brief and less than an isthmus connecting us to the next plane. It is a winter afternoon, and the trees’ branches reach down to touch the snow, to sample the ground. One of these syncopations of weather will startle the seasons into change, so don’t try to tell time by scale or fin, the iridescent motion of the tides.

Everything is heavier than it appears to be on earth, and the swans would be lifted by the slightest wind into white kites that flare in the sky against the trees’ helpful branches, were it not for the miracle of gravity,

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which is really sorrow, keeping us grounded, keeping us sad.

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Margot Schilpp

The Perfect Poem

In the perfect poem, the flawless poem, the poem with purity and grace, I could figure out a method to combine a soliloquy on Rilke and the stars, and a testament to the love of mothers, with the retelling of episodes from childhood that illustrate, exactly, how the shining and clever truth I want to convey is illuminated by juxtaposition of all of these, and moreâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;since the ideal poem could contain, too, the descriptions of the calls of many birds, and a reminiscence of indiscretions performed, perhaps too late to be called youthful.

Memory could speak in clear tones.

Words would be multivalent, fraught with overspill and how often we come up with something short of intention: look here, in the ice melting from the roof, in the rivulets of mud slipping down a hill, even in the flannel shirt wrinkled from the dryer, there are makings and there are makers.

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Steven Schreiner

Desolated

It’s possible to live on the surface of life, as on a pond, the way De Niro in Taxi Driver does.

Alone in his room he takes notes, keeps a journal on all that he abjures.

It is as if the war we never see him fight outfits him to stay awake and keep distance, always, between himself and the next likely victim. One snowy night the weather made us close, as in a carriage, and next day, bundled into sausages, we crunched through high, new snow into the destined park.

A few giddy drivers rewarded themselves for buying jeeps and trucks.

The woods were quiet, but the wind burned.

We were indivisible in our task to climb a small hill.

Alike on the landscape though apart we let the breath out of the snow with each heave as we fell step by step through the crust that had formed in the hour of the ice.

The muscles of your thighs were tired, your ankles warm with pain; there were your dark enormous eyes, the same untiring face that never expressed resolve or dismay as though you’d absorbed blows Crab Orchard Review ◆ 159

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and shuddered surprise into stillness like a fighter learning where the pain came from and how to avoid it.

When we crouched down at a windbreak, between the frozen stems of tow-headed reeds bent over by the ice, I wished, simply, that we had kissed. But I did not kiss you and you did not kiss me.

What good, then, was that storm for all its change?

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Cathy Song

What Is Given

The body’s life is a mechanical life— death built in, and desire.

Cells age, replenish, age and expire.

Everywhere, desire is plentiful; aging is earnest.

The boy at sixteen is dying as surely as he is at sixty, fulfilling his death path entered the moment the body took up the tumor of his life, an orderly mathematics of cellular division, finite and given.

Against the simple complexity the mind shouts, wanting out of the eat, piss, sleep & sex built in to the death of it, the wall of skin, the years allowed.

Agitator, destroyer of peace, the mind with its will, its own immensity presses thought through the complacent as-it-is-ness, a shapeless bristling, this thinking intensity.

Holder of grudges, expounding worry, the mind’s faulty mechanism is unforgiving.

Thinking thinking thinking, it shakes sleep to pin something down, pounds its nails, aimless and divergent.

Arms that carved an ocean, lungs that swallowed air would resolve into the physical were it not for the mind that struggles, measuring loss against what was always settled, finite and given.

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Honored Guest

Use the muse that threatens to devour.

Use the muse to break desire.

Muse of joy, muse of grief, both speak enchantment differently.

One whispers body, one shatters mind.

Both spell afflictions extreme.

One burns the body with the sigh of longing, gently disruptive, a mild opiate willingly called.

Gentle wind you attach yearning to someone seen once long ago.

Conjuring is sweet, tender and restrained.

Impossibility makes it so.

It’s the other disruptive power of another who’s got your number, who calls you on the phone to discuss superfluous matter, reckless unending drama of its own mind.

This is the shattering one, a wild stimulant unwittingly called.

Once engaged, it wants in, intimacy unearned—and for you, a thousand fires.

This dangerous maker of curses and serious chatter strickens you, renders you flat.

Master of distraction,

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it likes you like that.

Unable to spell, you are unable to sing.

Use the muse that threatens to devour.

Use the muse of desire to break the struggle into matchsticks for your own secret fire.

You be maker, expert speller.

Cast the poem, count each significant letter.

Shake the crazy laughter of its rattle.

Dry seeds scatter, diffused.

Use the muse that threatens to devour.

Use it.

Invite into your well-made home antagonist as most anticipated guest.

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Horizon

Space unrelieved terrifies.

We worship what we do not see.

A child adds a tree, a sun—solar flower maned with fire petals, a roof pitched to break a field of sky, polka dots of clouds to decorate an idea of heaven.

Blank heaven needs our adornment.

Ideas, humble encasements, sent up in thought, thin as balloon skins, frail and weak.

While earth, poor dirt of earth we plow pull weeds plant feet is given a meager line— truest gesture of our terror— this line drawn grim as a mouth, set firm, locked without teeth.

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The Geese at Mayville

When Pete Flatte drove his pickup into Mayville late in August, county workers were running canvas banners up the eight lampposts that lined Main Street. They put one each in front of the Pigeon Bowl, Pedro’s Restaurant, Eddie’s Tru-Value Hardware, the Egg and Tuna Diner, Foodtown, Bill Kostecki’s Mutual of Omaha Branch Office, Betty’s Books, and the Second Cup. The banners heralded the town festival coming in October—the arrival of the geese at Mayville.

Forty miles inland from the lake, Mayville was much like any other town in southwestern Michigan, dull and modest, not particularly pretty.

Still, two of the county workers waved when Pete tapped his horn. He decided it was as good a place as any to settle for a while.

His only income was his disability from Ameritech (bad back) and the money he’d picked up from a big carpentry job he’d finished a few weeks earlier, so he rented a two-room cabin on the old dump road about three miles west of Main Street. It had a loose and squeaky pine plank floor and a wood-burning stove for heat, but you couldn’t get much for one-fifty a month, even in Mayville. He figured he had enough money to last until spring—though he was worried about his truck, dinged-up good on the outside and jimmy-rigged under the hood. He’d have to meet somebody soon who didn’t mind giving him a jump every now and then and, as it got colder, every damn day.

There wasn’t much else on the road—just two rusted-out trailers on cement blocks and a large, tidy cabin right across from him with a late model Chevy pickup parked out front. Pete had taken only his clothes and his toolbox when he left Barbara’s farm. The way he figured it, he did Barbara a favor when he left her. She was sick— rheumatoid arthritis, the doctors said. Just aware enough to know that he wasn’t making her life any easier, Pete also knew he was way short of what it would take to stay and do some good. Barbara’s sudden illness wasn’t her fault, but it wasn’t his either.

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stuff. It didn’t take too long to unload the truck once he got to Mayville. Still, he wished his new neighbor from across the road, who’d come out to sit on his porch as Pete pulled in, would step over and help or at least say hello.

Pete waved and shouted to him right away, but the old guy, close to eighty by the sag of his face, just watched, not waving back. Never shy before an audience, Pete stacked up more boxes than he could comfortably carry. When he finished unloading the truck, the man was gone.

That same night at the Pigeon Bowl, Pete saw the old man again.

He went right up to him and stuck out his hand, “Hi, neighbor. It’s good to see you up close and to know you’re a bowling man. I’m Pete Flatte.” The old man offered back a hand and then mid-shake pulled Pete to him and hugged him hard. “Whoa, whoa fellow. Watch the ribs,” Pete stepped back.

“Just glad to see you, boy. Come on, I’ll buy you a beer and we’ll bowl a few frames.” The old man wore a blue and white seersucker suit, a red tie, and red, white, and blue bowling shoes— he could have been a poster boy for a Fourth of July fair.

Never one to question luck, especially when it came in the form of something free, Pete followed his neighbor to the bar. The bartender poured two drafts and then picked out two dollars from the array of bills the old man held out to him, “This will cover it, John. How you bowling tonight?”

“Fair, fair. Me and my son here are going to play a few frames now. We’ll see if he remembers what I taught him.”

“Sounds good. Go easy on him, John. He looks green.” The bartender winked at Pete and then held out his hand, “I’m Frank Magnus.

I own this place.”

“Pete Flatte. I just moved here from Homer City. I live across the road from . . . what did you say his name was?”

“John. John Randall. He’s a little soft now,” Frank tapped his temple, “but not always. It comes and goes.”

“Well, what the hell, as long as his money’s good.” Pete laughed alone and then turned to join John who stood swaybacked, cradling a green, marbled ball to his paunch.

John didn’t talk between frames, but twice he took his ball and heaved it so that it jolted then jammed into a gutter a few lanes away. The two couples bowling there looked over, angry, but relaxed 166 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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and waved when they saw John. John waved back and then hooked a strike down his own lane, beating Pete. They left together at midnight, walking first to John’s pickup in the parking lot, where he hugged Pete again and told him to call his mother.

“Can’t do that, John. She’s been dead for almost forty years now.” He laughed as he spoke and then wished he could snatch back the words as John began to cry and inch away from him. Then Pete watched as John, still crying, poked around in the truck bed and brought out a box of Corn Flakes, got behind the wheel, and, still crying, reached in the box and ate a handful, crumbs cascading down his shirt.

When Pete moved a little closer to see if John was okay, he saw that the bed of the truck was packed with Corn Flake boxes, tightly fitted together like sugar cubes. Not exactly sober, but figuring he was in better shape than John, and knowing anyway that his old truck probably wouldn’t start, Pete shooed John over to the passenger side and drove them both back to the old dump road.

Early the next morning, meager belongings unpacked, Pete stopped outside to survey his new home and tripped on an old rail tie that marked off a sandbox-sized, weed-choked, vegetable patch.

He knelt down and pulled a tomato off a tangled vine that snaked along the ground. It was small and green. Just a few days before, he’d been working the harvest on Barbara’s farm, acres of tomato plants laden with fruit. Things changed fast sometimes.

Barbara inherited two hundred of her father’s thousand acres when he died twenty years earlier. Her four sisters each had the same. The five of them and Barbara’s three grown-up nieces ran a farmstand stocked mainly with produce they grew themselves. The largest store around for fifty miles, the Hughes Sisters’ Farmstand always did well.

Pete and Barbara hadn’t known each other long when they married, but they weren’t kids. They knew what they wanted. That’s what Barbara told her sisters when he overheard them warning her to slow down with him. For her part, she wasn’t lying. She’d let Pete know flat out what she expected from their marriage: good loving, deep down support, friendship, and children, too. He’d nodded yes, that sounded fine, entering her trust without a request of his own.

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were a little shabby, the doctors didn’t think she was the problem.

Get your husband in here, they said.

When she told him, Pete lobbied for patience. “Aw, Barbara, those doctors make such a business of it. Let’s just be natural for a while more. Do you really want to end up on the cover of one of those women’s magazines holding a litter of babies that don’t weigh as much as a sack of potatoes between them?”

He moved to kiss and hold her, but she pushed him away, “I want you to think about what I’ve asked. You know what I want. This isn’t a big step—they just need to take a sample and do some tests.”

“I’ll think about it. I promise. Just give me time.”

She understood—at first. She didn’t mention it again until two weeks later, and when he said he was still thinking, she backed right off. But after two more weeks, his silence on the subject turned into a barrier, and it kept their paths from crossing as much. Most nights, he sat in the living room watching tv, while she sat at the kitchen table in a straight-backed chair reading magazines about babies and parenting.

It took him three months to realize that she knew for sure what he still wouldn’t admit to her. He wasn’t seeing any doctor, he didn’t care too much about having a baby, and he wouldn’t even look her in the eye and disappoint her honestly.

By that time, the barrier was so high she didn’t need to stay away to be apart from him, and she came back into the living room after dinner. They talked—but only about other things. The baby magazines abandoned, she leafed through cooking magazines instead, staring at plates decorated with food the likes of which Pete had never seen—golden beets, red lettuce, lily-white mushrooms.

“Pete, I’m sick of just selling corn and carrots and lettuce and such. Look at these beets—god, they’re pretty. It says here they taste good too. I think I’ll try something new this spring planting.”

“Well, nothing sells like corn in July and August. But you go ahead, honey. Whatever you want is okay by me.”

“I’m not asking permission, Pete. It’s my damn farm. I just wanted your opinion.”

Barbara picked a fight no matter how nice he was those days. “My opinion is that corn sells and beets should be red. You happy now?”

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into town for his truck, but the Chevy was gone and John didn’t answer his call. He looked in the uncurtained windows, eager to snoop when he thought he could get away with it.

The front room seemed bare, but a closer look showed that only the center was empty, cleared full out, a border of boxes stacked up against its north and south walls, furniture, stacked and fit together like a puzzle, against the east and west. The middle of the room looked like a boxing ring, empty except for a large bowl, shaped and painted like a half a watermelon, and a box of Corn Flakes on the floor. Pete went around back and peeked into another room that turned out to be the kitchen. A microwave oven and a minirefrigerator rested on a small table. Other than that, the room was empty except for a dozen coffee cake boxes and about twenty boxes of Corn Flakes stacked on the counter. When he heard the truck pull in up front, he ran to meet it before John could get out.

“Morning John. Say, I was wondering if you could give me a quick ride into town so I could get my truck?” Pete approached the driver’s side.

John opened the door and stretched his legs out slowly and then used the door frame to turn sideways and lever himself out. His seersucker suit was crinkled, and he still wore his bowling shoes.

His hair, stuck up and out all over, pleaded for help.

“What was that, son?”

“I need a ride to town. I left my truck there last night when I drove you home.”

Walking toward his front door, John stopped and turned back, “What did you say your name was?”

“Pete. John, it’s me, Pete.”

“And we’ve met? You know me?”

“Well not so good yet, but we bowled together last night, and I drove you home. I’m your new neighbor—I live across the road.

You hugged me and told me to call my mother.”

“That’s good advice. Sounds like me.”

“So, how about a ride?”

“You live there you say?” John pointed across the road.

“Yeah.”

“I suppose you came from Chicago or Detroit or someplace else to get way from it all.”

“No, I came from Homer City to get away from my wife.” Pete’s laugh dwindled when John didn’t join him.

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“You shouldn’t be talking about your wife that way son. I don’t imagine she thinks you’re any great bargain.”

“Yeah, well anyway, about that ride?”

“I’ll take you later. I have to soak my back right now. I think I pulled a muscle.”

By three that afternoon John still hadn’t stopped by, so Pete walked over and knocked on his door, “Hey John, I’m wondering if I can still get that ride.” He walked in and as his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, he saw John lying spread out on the floor naked. He rushed to him, sure it was just his luck that his new neighbor was dead. But once at John’s side, he could see his slow, deep breathing.

He looked at the old man’s body and then looked away, shuddering at the knobby, twisted protrusions of knee, elbow, and shoulders, the sagging flesh and age spots, all the markers of decay.

At least the old man came by it honestly. Barbara hadn’t been so lucky. By the time they harvested the golden beets in late June, she could barely get out of bed. The doctor didn’t know why the rheumatoid arthritis hit. She said the worst cases often were sudden onset like Barbara’s and could be caused by a physical or emotional shock. Barbara stared at Pete when she heard that last part. He looked out the window, his back to her, but her reflection jutted straight out at him like a fist-full of guilt.

The golden beets were beautiful. Too beautiful. Everybody exclaimed about them, but hardly anybody bought them. Every Wednesday, Pete hauled out a batch that had gone soft in the store and hauled in a new batch straight from the ground. He worked bushels of rotten beets into the compost heap the first few times, but after that he dug a trench a hundred feet behind the store and buried them all at once whenever he got a waist-high mound. He hated working with the rotting vegetables, and he alternately cursed Barbara and muttered “I told you so’s” with every shovelful of stinking beets.

While he did this, Barbara leaned on the counter inside the store, trying to take some weight off her knees and ankles, only to feel it more in her elbows and wrists. She struggled to make it to the farmstand every morning, but most days it was afternoon before she managed to get there and she didn’t last long once she did. Pretty soon she couldn’t even make it for a few hours. She had severe anemia, a constant lowgrade fever, and enough weight loss so that her thickening, twisting joints made her look more a tuber than a woman. Pete couldn’t look her in the eye. It was really that simple—that clear-cut to him. She had 170 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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help in the form of her sisters and nieces. There was no reason to stay.

In August, Pete buried the last of the golden beets. It seemed as good a time as any to pack his things.

Barbara was sleeping when he went in to say goodbye. He talked to her quietly. He thought he saw her face relax and expand as he spoke, softness replacing the straight edge of her features, like a vacuum pack just opened. His absence would give Barbara some peace, though he didn’t suppose anybody would congratulate him for it. No matter—he knew it was time to leave.

Frank Magnus said you could tell time by the geese. He told Pete all about them at the Pigeon Bowl one afternoon in early October. He said that on any given day after the tenth of October, you could pack a lunch and stop alongside the fields and watch the snow geese and blue geese glide in and feed on the remnants of corn left in the fields along Route 52. They were on their way from the Arctic Circle down to Mexico. They stopped in Mayville and rested and fed for a week or two.

“Did you know that a goose flying four thousand feet high in the sky can see for seventy-seven miles?” Frank poured Pete another draft.

“Hard to believe a goose with that much to choose from would zero in on Mayville.”

“Well, most other places probably aren’t so hot either.”

The Festival of the Geese was Mayville’s big chance. With the first Festival a few years before, Mayville attempted to draw the city folks in from the fancier lakeside resort towns, and it had worked pretty well. Last year, five hundred visitors came into town during a two-week period, and that wasn’t counting babies who couldn’t walk yet, Frank said, though most of the tourists stayed a day at most.

Since that first Festival, Mayville had opened a few unconvincing imitations of city life—the Second Cup where a glass of coffee ground fresh from stale beans cost two dollars and a gift shop that sold twenty dollar pottery bowls too small to hold a cup of soup.

It didn’t take visitors long to realize there was nothing much to Mayville. But they’d spend a few dollars here and there and some of them even forgot how bored they’d been and returned the next year.

But come that October, at what should have been the height of the tourist season bringing seventy-five new faces into Mayville every day, the merchants on Main Street were up in arms. The geese were dying. The fields where they usually massed bobbing for corn had Crab Orchard Review ◆ 171

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turned into stinking graveyards. Pete first heard about it when he was at Judy’s Nip and Tuck getting a trim on Saturday morning and then later that afternoon when he stopped for a few beers at the Pigeon Bowl. He left the bar after hearing three versions of how the geese were dying. Lily Hamlin said they had bullet holes through the back of their heads; Frank said they were losing their feathers; and as Pete left, a tourist from Chicago piped up, though nobody asked him, and said it was poison.

Pete drove John’s truck. He’d more or less taken it over since his own truck had died for good two weeks ago. He still parked John’s truck at John’s place, but he used it whenever he wanted. It worked out just fine as far as Pete was concerned. He took John to the grocery store and to church on Sunday.

Pete went to see the dead geese for himself the next day after mass at St. Luke’s. He waited for John in the parking lot during the service.

Sitting quietly, coffee and donut in hand, staring at the blacktop was religion enough for Pete. But Frank and a satin-cloaked priest interrupted his devotion that morning when they came out of church, one arm each wrapped around John, who hardly needed holding since he clutched the priest’s robe with both hands. Pete stepped out of the truck and, after setting his coffee on the hood, walked to meet them.

“He won’t let go of Father Jaspers’ robes. He ran up on the altar during communion. He wanted Father to hear his confession right there. We thought maybe he’d listen to you, Pete.” Frank unwound his arm from John’s shoulder as he spoke.”

“What is it your father has son, Alzheimer’s?” Father Jaspers stroked John’s hands.

The priest looked to be Pete’s age, and Pete looked around, confused for a second, “No, uh no. He’s not my father. He’s just a friend. I don’t know what’s going on. You think he has something?”

“Well, if he doesn’t have family to care for him, you should take him to a doctor. Not that there’s much they can do in these cases, but try County Hospital in Littleton. They have a geriatric service.”

“He has family, I think. I just run errands for him and give him a ride sometimes.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you’re doing—caring for him.”

“I’m not caring for him.” Pete stepped back, waving his arms, and bumped into the truck, knocking his coffee off the hood. It splashed on his shoes. “Like I said, I just give him a ride sometimes.”

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Pete’s as if he were giving a gift. “Just make sure he sees a doctor.”

As soon as the priest turned his back, Pete let go of John’s hands.

John didn’t protest, but walked to the driver’s side and searched his pockets carefully for the keys until Pete realized what he was doing and handed them over.

He didn’t start the truck right away, but turned to Pete instead.

“You’re a good friend to me. You can just have this truck. I like driving it now and again, but I don’t need it much anymore. I’ll just borrow it when I do.” John turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.

“Well, that’s really nice of you John, but it’s your truck. I couldn’t do that. I’ll tell you what. I’ll save up and buy it from you. You can give me a good price—something way better than blue book. But for now, let’s just keep it like it is. If that’s okay with you, I mean.”

Pete pointed, “Use the clutch if you want it to start,” and then offered his hand so they could seal the deal.

John shook it, “Pleased to meet you.” The truck lurched. “Let’s go see the geese.”

John drove on the wrong side of the road much of the way down the two-lane Green Arrow Highway, and though he tried, Pete couldn’t stop him. When other cars came speeding toward them, John put on his turn signal and after checking carefully, changed lanes, while Pete screamed, “John, what the hell are you doing. You’re going to get us killed.” When Pete grabbed the wheel, saving them from a scrape with a slow-going tractor, John started to hiccup violently and pulled up on the left shoulder, no longer interested in the road.

They were still a quarter mile from the fields on Route 52 when Pete took over, joining a long line of cars waiting to see the geese.

They idled behind a Saab with Illinois plates. A little girl, her hair held off her face with a green satin bow bigger than her head, looked out the back window and made faces at them.

The geese resting grounds ran along either side of Route 52, a couple of acres each, four on each side of the road. As Pete approached heading north, the first two fields were spotted with large brown and gray geese, grazing on the remnant kernels from the summer harvest.

Pete and John watched the geese for a while and then walked a hundred feet over to join the crowd that gathered along the edge of the northernmost field on the east side of the road.

This field of dead geese drew all the attention. People massed at its perimeter, held back by yellow plastic tape imprinted with “LAKE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT” and tied on either Crab Orchard Review ◆ 173

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end to a broomstick planted in the field. As if to display the sheriff ’s incompetence, the tape ran out from each side before the ends could meet and for twenty feet in the middle a patch job of odds and ends held people back. Pete saw three blue socks, a green plaid winter scarf, a dog’s leash, and a yellow plastic belt with white daisies glued to it.

He looked a little farther down and saw a brown necktie tied tight to a red sock that looked like the one he had lost in the dryer at the laundromat a few weeks earlier. It would seem a betrayal to break such a personal barrier. The sheriff might not be so stupid after all.

As they got closer, the stench grew strong. The little girl from the Saab was standing nearby, between her mom and dad. She held her nose and hopped from one foot to the other, tugging on her mother’s jacket and whining for apple juice. When Pete and John finally wormed their way through the crowd to the edge of the barrier, they saw a flock of geese spread before them like a banquet.

The geese were newly dead—Pete guessed one or two days at most—their bodies bloated but intact. Soon they’d be split wide open from the sun or be ravaged by the buzzards, raccoons, owls, and foxes that would pick them clean. Pete heard an old guy who he often saw at the Egg and Tuna tell a woman that the state police, the federal department of wildlife, and the Lake County sheriff were all arguing about who had jurisdiction and until they squabbled it out, they couldn’t bury the geese. Then he heard somebody else say, no, the problem was they needed to autopsy all the birds.

He looked at a still bird a few feet in front of him. Plump and heavy-bodied, its black wings spread open to display a five-foot wing span, as if it had been caught in mid-flutter by a stun gun. Its size surprised Pete. A few small elevator muscles in its wings shouldn’t be able to lift a bird that big. Its long gray-brown neck was straight as a yardstick and it had a stripe of white just before its bill. If it hadn’t been for the flies, clustered around every orifice— eyes, bill, rump—trying to get inside, never satisfied, it could have been a Audubon picture.

The crowd shifted and rearranged itself so that the little girl from the Saab was next to Pete, almost face-to-face, as her mother held her. Her father raised a video camera and trained it on the closest mud-colored mound of dead goose. They were all looking down, but their gaze moved up as a goose flew by, hovering over the field.

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it landed. At the last second, the goose thrust its feet forward and began braking itself with powerful wing beats until its rump bumped the ground. Oblivious to the death around it, the bird began to graze.

It ate for a few minutes, and then began to jerk and screech, arching the horny spurs of its wing shoulders as if preparing to fight.

Pete watched as its left wing flapped up and down and its head thrashed from side to side, back and forth like a cellophane pinwheel in a fickle gale. Its long thin neck bore the brunt of its convulsion. It took a while for the thrashing bird to finally lie still and when it did, its neck was arranged on the ground like a question mark.

The crowd froze quiet during the bird’s jerky dance, and when it was over Pete heard everything distinctly, as if the air existed only as a perfect medium for sound—the little girl, her hair swept across her face in the wind, screaming that she’d lost her green ribbon, her father exclaiming about the footage he’d just shot, her mother crying, John repeating over and over with a chuckle, boy oh boy that was a big one, and the sharp edge of his own breath scraping his throat.

John fell asleep on the way home, his face blank and smooth, his breathing steady. As they sped down Route 52, Pete scrunched against the driver’s side door, his attention split between the road he maneuvered and a new born abhorrence of John.

Pete chopped cherry wood that afternoon, preparing for the coming winter, hoping the physical activity would blot the twisted goose from his mind. He already needed to light a fire at night and morning too, to absorb the cabin’s chill. A hard winter would be trouble. He’d stacked four cords, two each of oak and maple. It would cover him if the weather weren’t too bad, but it was no guarantee.

The cherry was the hardest to chop into useful size, but the dense, rust-colored wood burned better than any other—slow and deep hot.

It would keep him warm through the coldest weather, and he wished he had more. He had too much maple. The sugar in it made it burn fast and its heat rushed up and out instead of lingering and wrapping around the cabin. He burned maple just to get rid of it. He couldn’t count on it in the winter.

Tired, Pete went to bed at ten, but at eleven he was wide awake.

He got up and turned on the tv. The lousy reception didn’t make the smug news anchor any easier to watch. She worked out of Campbell—population maybe thirty thousand—but she acted as if she were Dan Rather, all serious, like she could only smile if the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 175

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teleprompter told her to. If Barbara had been sitting next to him watching, she would have skewered her. Barbara was no bullshit, but she could spot it in others a million miles away.

He’d written Barbara last week, congratulating himself on being mature enough to let her know where he was. She wrote right back.

He turned off the tv and looked at the letter again, Barbara’s once fluid handwriting now edges and scrawls and hard to decipher. She was angry at him, that much was clear, scratchy writing and all.

“Though I hate you for slinking away, I thank god every morning that I don’t have to wake to your selfish face. Your sister called looking for you yesterday and she said it’s probably all her fault you ran off because she spoiled you rotten, you being the only boy in the family. I told her that no amount of explaining or excusing could convince me that we are not each responsible for exactly what we do, you included, even if she thinks your shit don’t stink. She hung up on me, thank god again. I need no Flattes in my life.”

It just didn’t seem to him they’d been together long enough for her to hate him so. And besides, if she were right, it only seemed fair to let him explain, to turn on a light so that everyone could see why he’d done what he’d done. He tried to think of all the reasons he could give Barbara or her sisters or anybody else who wondered why he left, but all he could remember of those months right before and after she got sick was how hard it was to look at her. Nothing else came easy to mind, and in the void he saw the crooked goose in the field not knowing what hit it.

He heard a noise and went to his window, looking across the road to John’s, relieved that here in Mayville, somebody else caused all the ruckus. He heard John’s screen door slap shut and then saw John, buck naked again, get into his pickup and back out the drive. He ran to stop him, but John sped off before Pete even made it to the road. When he finally fell asleep an hour later, John still hadn’t returned.

Pete woke early and looked out the window, worried about John and wanting to use his truck to go into town for breakfast. He saw the pickup, dent-free from a distance—a good sign. He had a cup of instant coffee and then walked across the road. He knocked and hollered for a few seconds and then walked in on tiptoe, holding his breath, not sure what he’d see, but knowing what he’d rather not. He breathed easy when he saw John swaddled in a blanket, stretched full out on the living room floor. Knowing the late night he’d had, Pete didn’t try to wake him, but took the truck and left a note saying he’d be back soon.

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When he walked into the Egg and Tuna, Francine, the morning waitress, and all the customers got real quiet. After Pete ordered his eggs over hard and skirt steak rare, a uniformed state cop pulled up a chair to his table.

“Morning, sir.” The officer took off his hat and set it on top of the Mayville Weekly that Pete read.

“Morning, officer.” Pete thought fast about what he’d done wrong lately and relaxed when he came up blank.

“What’s your name?”

“Pete Flatte, and yours?”

The man ignored his question, “You’ve been in Mayville a couple of months I hear?”

“That’s right. Nice town.”

“You drive that red Chevy truck outside?”

“It’s my neighbor’s, but he’s old and I take it and do his errands and such for him. My truck died.”

“You know the geese along Route 52 are dying too. Left and right.”

“I heard that. I even went to see them yesterday.”

“You know what’s killing them?”

“Can’t say I do. Probably toxic waste from that nuclear plant up in North Haven. Kind of makes you wonder what it’s doing to us, doesn’t it?”

“Normally, it might. But you see I’ve been in those fields and I’ll tell you something funny, they’re full of Corn Flakes. And when I swept a bunch of those flakes and sent them on to the lab in Littleton, they tell me those flakes are full of arsenic.”

“No kidding? Well, I guess funny is one word for it.”

“And then, Mr. Flatte, this morning I get a call from a Mrs. Mary Louise Urnich and she says that she’s driving by the fields late last night and she sees a red Chevy pickup parked along the side. She slows down to see if it’s somebody who needs help, but the truck is empty so she just keeps on, but then she started to wonder about the geese, so she called me this morning.”

“Really? Did she get a license plate number so you could trace it?”

“Well, that’s funny, too, because she noticed that the plate was covered with mud, just like it is on the red truck outside. That’s a violation, you know.”

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my breakfast. That about all you wanted, officer?”

“For now. But you be careful. I’ll be watching you.”

“Well, that’s a real comfort. I’ll make sure I look my best.”

Pete leafed through the paper, not seeing a word, as he finished eating his breakfast. Keen to get back and talk to John, he chewed each bite ten times, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him hurry. After he’d paid the bill and left fifteen percent and an instant lottery ticket for Francine, he walked out to the truck and using the newspaper he’d just pretended to read, wiped the back plate clean. He glanced in the truck bed, before he bent down to do this, realizing he was a Corn Flake away from being arrested, but it was swept clean. Driving home, he cursed the Flatte luck that had brought him a crazy, naked, goose-killing neighbor. He shifted smoothly into fifth, opening the Chevy up as he cruised along the Green Arrow. He sure had a nice truck, though.

When Pete pulled up in front of his cabin, John was sitting on the front steps with a woman. She was about forty, Pete figured, though it was hard to tell for sure as all her features sank into excess flesh that enveloped any wear and tear. The woman stood up, no easy feat. “I’m Julie Gerlach, John’s daughter from over in Morris.

I see you’ve got my father’s truck.”

“Well, yes. I use it once in a while to run errands and such. You know, to help John out. Hey, I’m really pleased to meet you, by the way. I didn’t know John had a daughter. My name’s Pete Flatte.”

“So, what errands did you run for my father this morning?”

Her eyes may have narrowed as she spoke, but Pete wasn’t sure, they were already so small compared to rest of her face. “Well, actually, I didn’t do much this morning. John didn’t need anything.

Listen, your dad is a great guy. I really like having him for a neighbor.

He’s kind of strange sometimes, but I deal with that.”

“He’s not strange Mr. Flatte. He’s senile.”

“Call me Pete, please. I didn’t know for sure, though I supposed it was something like that. Should I put on coffee?”

John, off to the side, counting the logs in Pete’s half cord of cherry wood, hollered yes while Julie shook her head no, her flesh following the movement a beat late, as if it had a mind of its own.

“No, I don’t have time. Actually, I came to meet you because my father mentioned you a few times, and I want to ask a favor.”

“Anything I can do, I will.”

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at three in the morning. He shouldn’t be out at that time. And I’m worried about his driving.”

“Plenty to worry about there.”

“Anyway, I figured if you’re handy with cars . . . ?”

“I am,” Pete nodded. “. . . that you could do something to the truck—something simple so it won’t start when he tries to leave.”

Pete thought for a minute, watching John at the woodpile. John’s tie was straight, and the pants of his seersucker suit were sealed against his shins in the wind, which had a bite to it. He shouldn’t still be in a seersucker in October. He’d have to check John’s closet for some warmer clothes.

“That doesn’t seem right to me, Miss Gerlach. I don’t want to play tricks on your father, even if he is senile. If you have something to tell him, it should be flat out to his face.”

“It’s only for a few weeks. My daughter is moving back from Gainesville, and she and her husband are planning to buy the truck when they get here.”

John walked away from the woodpile, and as he came up behind Julie, he stopped and pointed at her rear, “Look at the boot on that woman. How’s she fit that boot in a chair?”

Pete took Julie’s cue and pretended not to hear, though he had to choke back a laugh. “Now that’s another problem. See, John wanted to give the truck to me, but I knew I couldn’t let him do that, so we made a deal. I’m buying it from him.”

Julie turned to her father, “Is that so, Dad? You know Pammy wants that truck. You said you’d give her a good deal on it. Did you tell him he could buy it too?”

John smiled and nodded, “Oh yes, there are too many things these days. Too many. Can’t keep track of them all. Too many. I remember when we used to go fishing.” Julie turned back to Pete, “Listen, I’m sorry about what he may have told you, but as you can see he doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time.”

“Well, he said it during the other half.”

“I’m his legal guardian, Mr. Flatte.”

“And you’re not guarding very well. You should be taking better care of him. I can’t be with him all the time. I didn’t even know he had a family for sure—you should be coming by more often. Seems to me you just abandoned him. And now all you want is the damn truck.”

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town—don’t think I haven’t heard about it. And don’t presume to judge. If you’re taking such good care of him, why is he living on cereal and coffee cake?” She turned back to John before Pete could answer. “Come on, dad, I’m going to make you a healthy lunch before I go home.”

John followed her across the road and Pete heard him all the way. “That’s one big boot for a woman. Biggest boot I’ve ever seen.”

Pete laughed.

After that, Pete vowed to watch John more carefully. When John’s light went on after midnight the next night, Pete ran over and climbed into the bed of the truck. He stayed down flat so John wouldn’t notice him if he came out for a drive. Sure enough, he did, starting the truck with a lurch.

He paid attention to the turns, though he figured John was heading toward his own private killing fields on Route 52—Pete laid next to a shovel, a five-gallon paint bucket marked “poison,” and a half dozen boxes of Corn Flakes. He looked up at the sky as John drove, the stars staying constant as the truck hurtled along the Green Arrow.

It would be the same clean backdrop for stars that he and Barbara had looked at together on the night of their wedding party. She’d invited everybody who came into the farmstand. Pete hadn’t wanted a party at all. They’d gone to the county JP in Littleton to take care of the legal part—no muss, no fuss—just I do, I do. But Barbara had shushed him when it came to the celebration, “You got your way about not having a church wedding. Now I get mine. After all, I’m never going to be able to do this again, am I?” She’d wiggled her slender fingers, the diamond chip that she’d picked out from the Service Merchandise catalog lost in a weak stream of light from the sun. Five months later, Barbara’s cousin Ginny, who owned a jewelry store in Littleton, finally forgave Pete for not ordering the wedding ring from her, and came over with her jeweler’s tools to cut the ring off Barbara’s twisted, swollen finger.

But the day of their wedding party, Barbara’s long, limber fingers wrapped around a cold beer as Pete stood next to her, one arm around her shoulders, the other stretched wide in a mine-this-is-all-mine pose as he pointed out the boundaries of the farm to his second cousin Billy.

The band began to play “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” just then, and Pete swooped Barbara over to the plywood dance floor they’d pieced together in front of the barn that morning. They held each other tight, hips locked and swaying, for all seventeen minutes of the song.

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When all the guests left that night, he and Barbara walked out to the south hay field and, lying on their backs, looked up at the sky. They’d made love in the field—Barbara laughing, saying how lucky he was, how most women expected the honeymoon suite— Barbara as nice and easy in bed or a hay field as she was careful and hardworking out of it. But it was after the sex, when they looked up together that Pete felt closer to her than ever before. He thought the night sky held everything good, biding its time before it sent it all down to bless them.

He could tell Barbara felt it, too, because she was quiet and calm and held his hand lightly as if it were something that could be hurt if she touched it even a little too hard. Neither said a thing for a long time. They had been happy together then. He missed that.

The truck jolted to a stop. He’d lost track of where they were, thinking about Barbara. Pete sat up slowly, not looking forward to seeing the dead geese again, holding his breath against the smell. But when he turned to face the front of the truck, it teetered on a forty foot bluff of piled-high sand, and Lake Michigan stretched out before him.

They’d probably sink before they’d fly off, but Pete got the willies, climbed out carefully, and ran to the driver’s side window.

John raised his hand in greeting and said, as if they’ve been having a conversation all along, “Hey son, I’ve been thinking. Your mother needs a vacation. I’m going to take her to Cuba next week.”

Pete urged John out of the truck and sat down next to him on the bluff. And then sick of dancing around everything, tired of avoiding John’s craziness, just wanting to clean up the mess, he asked him directly, “John, you’ve been poisoning those geese, haven’t you?”

“Too many. Can’t keep track. Yes I do like to go fishing with Marguerite on Sundays.”

“Jesus, John, this is big. Senile or not, you could get in a lot of trouble.”

“The mark of a real man, son, is that he means what he does.”

Pete turned and put his hands on John’s shoulders, “John, listen to me.”

“Or maybe I’ll take your mother somewhere quiet. She deserves some peace of mind.”

“John, they’re just birds. What did they ever do to you?”

“The trick is to feel the rhythm of the water and the air. If you listen closely, your fly will skitter to the fish.”

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“John, the geese?” Pete willed clarity on him. And in that moment, he saw a sliver of understanding in John’s eyes, but it passed almost instantly, leaving no mark but sadness. When John began to cry, Pete let him alone at first. After a minute, he took John’s hand and put his arm around his shoulder.

They drove off a few hours later after talking some more and looking out at the lake and up at the stars. John didn’t make any sense, but his ramblings were nice and easy that night, all about the tropics and fishing. Pete took the wheel when they left, and John, his face worn out with crying, fell asleep even as Pete gunned it and backed away from the bluff.

He stopped the truck slowly, after driving only a few miles, hoping that the change in motion wouldn’t wake John. He got out and took the shovel and bucket of poison from the truck bed. He left the Corn Flakes, no need to waste good cereal. He walked twenty feet into the woods on the side of the road. Tree roots fought his shovel all the way as he dug, but he didn’t stop until he’d buried the poison three feet under.

He skipped the turnoff for the Green Arrow on the way home and drove by the geese fields on Route 52 instead. The sun, just rising, shone on a long length of green satin ribbon—an addition to the sheriff’s makeshift barrier. Pete watched as the ribbon wafted in the breeze, softly brushing the neck of the goose beneath it, too late to comfort.

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Structuring Free Space

My

marriage is very solid, very enduring. Margaret and I will always be married, with our daughter Laurel always be a family.

After ten years of marriage, there is either something present that binds husband and wife, that will keep them together—richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as the traditional ceremony puts it—or there is not. Without this something that binds, unites, I suppose it is still possible a husband and wife will continue together, but that is marriage only in an empty, deadening, mutually destructive form. Truly lasting marriages are like a well-built home, structures with firm foundations and strong walls. A true marriage has a kind of almost tangible shape, the result of potentially damaging forces rendered harmless by the dynamics of its design.

Margaret and I are married a decade, and there is a something present that means we will never part. I am grateful for this, but will never, I suppose, cease wishing it were something else joining us—not rich, but affluent, in perfect health.

What seals Margaret to me, me to her, has since the third year after we married, is of course Laurel, our only child, now just seven.

She was born blind.

I am in my two-car garage, dressed for the hard winter cold that seeps in, sorting lights, wires. Margaret says, “I don’t pretend to understand you in this.”

I say, “What’s to understand? It’s Christmas. Half the homes on Pioneer Road put up displays.”

“And for whose benefit do we put on this show?” she asks. And repeats the question when I am slow to answer.

“Whoever,” I say. And I say, “People driving by. Pioneer Road’s a showcase every Christmas.”

“So you’re spreading general peace on earth and joy etcetera for the casual commuter, is that it?”

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I dare to answer her.

“And we can afford this ostentation,” she says. This is a statement, not a question; she knows we can. The garage is cold enough to put a shiver in her voice.

I say to my wife, “If I don’t stop nattering the matter to death it’ll be Christmas before I get it all the way up and running the way I designed.” She understands I have told her to stop, to leave me alone in the cold garage with my strings of varicolored lights, my connectors and transformers and timers and bolts and clips, my ladder and tools; I have told my wife to leave me alone in our garage where it is cold enough my breath shows, cold enough to numb my fingers and toes. And she does, not slamming the door to the laundry room, but closing it very sharply, her last word on the subject.

I stand still for a bit in the cold garage—it is a very bitter winter this year, perhaps a recordsetter. I look at the heaps of wire, the varicolored bulbs in their boxes, my tools and ladder. For a moment I feel lost, no sense of what to do next, where to turn. And then I turn to my workbench, to the design I have created, carefully, slowly, for the elaborate display of Christmas lights with which I will adorn our home here on Pioneer Road. My home, mine and Margaret’s, Laurel’s.

I say she—my daughter Laurel, our only child, now just seven years old—was blind from birth. That is not accurate. When she was born, she was normal in every respect, sighted. The hospital where she was born was one of the few that still put silver nitrate in the eyes of newborns; the practice had been abandoned by most obstetric and pediatric professions for the very reason that there was a risk of blinding the infant. My Laurel was blinded, totally, irrevocably, by silver nitrate. That hospital’s obstetric and pediatric services ceased the practice shortly after my daughter’s birth. I do not—except for brief spells when I cannot help myself—blame that hospital, our obstetrician and our pediatrician.

My point is that my daughter Laurel was not born blind. For a short time, less than an hour, she was perfect in every respect, normal, sighted. For that short time she lived in, saw, the same world I and her mother did. Of course she has no memory of this, knows herself blind, forever. But I think I understand, if only faintly, why I insist on the distinction of her birth as sighted.

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bear, to hear it. Silence is as strong a bond as any words.

My wife’s approach to our daughter’s blindness is, once past the practical aspects of Laurel’s upbringing and special education, very different from mine.

I make my living—and a pretty good one it is—sitting at a computer, fixed on the screen. There is my keyboard and mouse, the monitor’s screen glowing a dull pale green, and me, eyes fastened to the letters and symbols and numbers flashing before me as fast as my brain moves my fingers. I do not feel immodest when I say I have a great talent, perhaps a near-genius, for seeing what passes before my eyes on the screen in terms that are primarily spatial, rather like the way a chess master sees the board as a near-infinite array of possible structures, a profoundly complex maze that must be fathomed to escape, to win the match.

My work demands intense, relentless imagination, and this often leaves me weary. There is much talk of the risk of damage to one’s tendons in wrist, hands, fingers, but I show no symptoms. I would complain of sometimes severe spasms of eyestrain and wracking headaches coming from my f ixation on the glowing, pulsing, flashing screen through which, by which, I imagine the structures that evolve into elaborate, significant software programs.

I don’t tell Margaret of my eyestrain and headaches. We have learned to avoid speaking about eyes, eyesight, anything of that sort.

That is understandable, and it keeps us very close together in that silence.

To bedeck a large split-level house with a truly ambitious, complex display of Christmas lights is no easy task. It was not difficult for me, given my capacity to imagine space, colors, and a striking play of lights to flash and flow, surge and recede according to a precise timetable, to create my design. I had no trouble seeing, in my mind’s eye, how it should, would perform when in place and charged with current.

My difficulty proves to be mere mechanics, laying out seemingly endless and easily tangled strings of bulbs, making measurements to fit the lines of windows, eaves, my roof, and then confronting the drudgery of bolting and clipping and connecting. The cold of this near-recordsetting winter is a heavy, enervating presence as I walk my wires and plugs, the clinking bulbs, outdoors, then fetch my ladder and ascend to heights that alarm me, clumsy in gloves, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 185

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awkward in thick coat and scarf and wool cap. The wind whistles in my muffled ears, bites at my cheeks and nose and brow, mists my eyes, shakes my ladder.

I find it odd, as I take more frequent and longer breaks to restore my circulation and rest my legs and arms inside the frigid garage, that a man justly proud of his imagination is so inept at such smaller, cruder work.

I would like to think my wife tries to watch me from one of the windows, that she describes for our daughter what I am doing, that they listen together for the sound of my footsteps on the roof as I wreath our den’s fireplace chimney with a swirl of dark red bulbs, but I know Margaret will not watch me, much less offer her help.

Laurel hears me on the roof, of course—her hearing is acute, one of the senses by which she knows her wholly dark world’s shape and texture; she knows what I am doing, for I have told her, tell her day by day of my slow but inexorable progress. Her mother will not discuss the matter with our blind child, and this surely confuses Laurel, which saddens me, but I do not flag in my purpose.

My daughter Laurel—what can I say? Every father’s daughter, only child, is lovely to look upon, or so I like to think. My Laurel is lovely. She is blond, like her mother, and slender, and delicate, very fair-skinned, but not at all wan. Her features are fine—like her mother’s. She will be tall, like her mother. And graceful, there is a grace in the movement of her hands, an intricacy inherent in her long fingers. And her voice is clear, a soprano bell that peals often, almost uncontrollably, with laughter that is the only music I know or care for.

Her eyes, of course, would have matched her mother’s blue-green, but are quite atrophied, shrunken, dull, semi-clouded, so she wears opaque glasses. When she walks, with or without her cane, my lovely daughter endowed with all her mother’s beauty and grace, she is hesitant, her gait hinting of an impending stumble or fall, her paths, though most often true, as if guided by an electronic beam, appear uncertain, her goal a kind of guess that breaks my heart. And when she sits, to read with the tips of her fingers, or to listen to a tape or record, even sitting at the table for meals she eats with neat efficiency, there is a slight wavering of her torso, a shifting and half-nodding of her head, as though she means to rise in a rush and run away to a place she suddenly remembers and sorely misses.

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do not speak of this with my wife, because I know she knows this of me; it is another silence ensuring we will remain as one in our lasting marriage.

After the chimney and the roofline and the many windows of my house are complete—I am behind schedule, slowed by this unbroken cold snap—I gain some confidence, set about ringing and draping our large yard’s trees and shrubs. My ladder feels always about to slip or slide away from the treetrunk, and I want to cling to a limb as I work with nails and hammer, but need both hands. I am more confident, but must work late into each night, temperature dropping, the sky’s blackness only occasionally pinpointed with stars when clouds break. I could use Margaret’s help, but will not ask for it.

I feel frozen at my core when cold and fatigue finally force me indoors, where I stamp feeling into my feet, shed my bulky coat and strangling scarf, drop my gloves and blow on my stony hands.

“Laurel,” I call out if she has not already gone to bed, “come hear Dad tell you what I got done tonight!” And she comes to me, very sure without her cane inside this house she knows so well by touch and sound and smell, and I tell her of the trees and shrubs I have decorated with varicolored bulbs waiting to burst forth their light when I throw—when we throw—the master switch called for in the intricate plan I created to make a brilliant, remarkable Christmas display to join those we see each year on Pioneer Road. I tell her what I have done that night, what I will do the next, try to make her see my complex design in her mind’s eye. Of course she cannot. “Can you imagine it, Laurel?” I ask.

“Oh, Dad,” she says. Sometimes I think this means yes, sometimes feel it only means I am being foolish, as she must know I am when I try to talk with her of colors, of the tones of light and dark that limn the shapes of this world I take in through my eyes, which my daughter will never do.

Pioneer Road is named for those hardy folk who settled this town nearly two hundred years ago, before statehood. They built the road to reach the city twenty miles south, and now white-flight commuters drive it to and from the freeway that will take them to their city jobs, back to their large, some lavish, small-town homes.

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either direction, and I think what an act of faith it must have been on the part of those settlers, true pioneers, coming in wagons to carve a town out of what was wilderness, among hostile Indians— what a vision they must have had in their hearts and minds!

Margaret says to me, “What you’re doing is wrong.”

I say, “It’s a Christmas light display, and that’s all it is.”

She says, “That too. Your whole approach to her is wrongheaded. You’ve never accepted.” I think this is true, but will never confess it.

I say, “I want her to know our world as much as she can. I want to know hers.”

My wife says, “If wishes were fishes.”

“What then?” I say, because I must say something, will not say what I know is true, that I do not accept, that Laurel cannot know as I know, I cannot know as she does, which breaks my heart.

“Whatever,” says my wife, and turns away from me, more exasperated than angry, I hope. I do not say to her that I think her approach to our daughter is as wrong as mine. I have no desire to inflict any hurt on my wife for our disagreement. I would hate to lose my wife, am grateful our only child is such that we will never, never part. I would like to call after her as she moves away from me, but do not. This exchange on the topic of our daughter, like so many in recent years, is brief, its conclusion tangible and irrevocable.

What the blind fear most is what they call Free Space. This refers to the situation of a blind person finding him or herself somehow in an area—a space of any sort—with no point of reference at hand. If I were to take my daughter to the middle, say, of our large lawn, take her hand away from the crook of my arm—her point of reference if she were without her cane—and step away from her, she would almost certainly freeze in place, unable, not daring to venture a single step for fear of falling, colliding, risking injury or even death by stepping into the pure void of total darkness. In this absolute dark, at just seven years of age, my Laurel would surely become hysterical.

I cannot imagine myself ever doing such a thing, of course, can only imagine how terrible this must be, this Free Space.

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were a wind—to locate the house, a kind of windbreak, which in turn might lead her to our driveway, and then she would no longer be lost in Free Space, but freed, would readily, easily, follow the drive’s edge to the front door she would know at once with the palm of her hand, know it as exactly as she knows my face, or Margaret’s, with her sensitive fingertips.

My house, the shrubs, the too-many trees are done, ready for connection, illumination. Perhaps the hardest part, Christmas figures I will string on the lathe armatures I hammered together in my garage, remains. And I must hurry to meet my Christmas Eve deadline. My neighbors’ houses on Pioneer Road already blaze in the black cold nights of this hard winter. There is an increase in traffic on our road, townspeople driving slowly by to see, appreciate, marvel at this once-a-year fairyland of light and color, some tooting their horns, a kind of applause.

So I must hurry, force myself to work later and later each frigid night, the work a little easier in the glow cast by my neighbors’ displays, the several inches of snowcover frosted with reflected red, blue, orange, yellow, green, gold. It is hard work to set my armatures in the frozen lawn beneath the snow, and I weary so quickly in the cold, my breath short, whatever wind blows burning my cheeks and nose, the cold oozing like a liquid beneath my bulky coat, stiffening my joints, turning my feet and fingers to lead.

But I take heart at the spectacle of my neighbors’ displays, already complete, alight, in both directions on Pioneer Road.

I try to know my daughter’s darkness. I lie beside my sleeping wife, our breathing in synch. I try to relax, try to look at the ceiling without really seeing it. Passing traffic sweeps swaths of pale light across the textured ceiling I try not to see above our bed. I try not to see these swift sweeps of light from traffic, try not to see where the walls join the ceiling, the shape that is my bedside stand in the corner of my eye.

Then I close my eyes tightly, and try to see the absolute darkness my daughter Laurel lives in. And I fail, always.

Spots of light, varicolored, dance or loom, wheel like planets in some cosmos beyond ours. Light flashes like mini-lightning, silver-bright, from edge to edge of this darkness behind my eyelids I wish to see in its unlit essence, its totality, its unity. But varicolored lights emerge like sunrises.

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And then I am thinking, knowing I have failed, and my mind swims with images, my lovely, graceful Laurel, my beautiful Margaret, our bedroom, our bed, myself lying with closed eyes, yet seeing the host of images that define my world, my cosmos. And I open my eyes. I have failed again, see the textured ceiling above me, the sudden slash of headlights from the road, the shape of my bedside stand.

At least I have tried.

My Christmas display will be the match of any on Pioneer Road.

There will be a large script Merry Xmas just at the edge of my wide lawn, and it will flash on and off every ten seconds. Farther back toward my house, to one side, will be Santa in his loaded sleigh, four reindeer, his hands holding their reins, the whole tilted toward the black winter sky, as if he has left his bounty with us, is off into the air to continue his journey all across the earth. There will be elves, their postures signifying their dance of inexhaustible good cheer. There will be a snowman to the other side of my lawn, his top hat, pipe, stick arms, buttons down his snowy front, mouth, pointy nose, round eyes. There will be oversize lumieres lining the long drive from the road to our front door. And my chimney, my roofline, the windows, the trees and shrubs, all will be lit, will flash on and off in varicolored light.

There will be no manger, wise men, no Joseph and Mary, no child, no camel or sheep, because I am not a religious man, will not pretend a faith I do not own.

Margaret says to me, “Would you be offended if I’d suggest you see someone, professionally, about this?”

“About what?” I say because I know exactly what she refers to.

“You will not give so much as an inch, will you,” she says. It is not a question.

“It’s a Christmas display, Margaret,” I say to her because that is all I can say when we both know it is so much more.

Imagination can be a curse. How much anguish have I inflicted on myself when I knew all the while what I imagined could never come to pass?

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pencils, the other baited with a few coins, a sign on her chest, slung on a string around her slender neck. How absurdly impossible!

I have imagined my darling Laurel an adult, seated at a long workbench, sightless peers on either side of her, the group working with precision to assemble some simple mechanism, perhaps counting beads or numbered balls into little drawstring bags, the components of some insipid boardgame. How utterly impossible!

At seven, my daughter is far better educated than I or her mother was at that age. My daughter has had the best special education, will continue to have this education for years to come, will be qualified for any number of professions as sophisticated, or more so, than mine, when that time comes.

My daughter knows music and literature and history I never learned—yes, at age just seven! My daughter has a near-genius IQ, certif ied by elaborate testing. My daughter sings beautifully, confesses to me and her mother, though we tell her she needs her rest—as we all do—that she reads late into the night, her fingers warm beneath her covers, dancing over the braille texts we provide her without limit.

My daughter Laurel is a perfect child, will be a perfect woman, except for the fact she cannot see, will never see anything, ever.

Margaret does not, will not, weep—we are years past tears for this. But her eyes do mist as she says, “Why can’t we be together for this?”

I say, “We are together. We’ve been more together since she was born than we ever were before.”

“Sometimes,” my wife says, her eyes misting, though she will not dab at them because that would show me she wants to weep, “I think so. And then you go off on something like this Christmas thing.”

“It’s a display is all,” I say because that is not true.

“It’s counterproductive,” Margaret says, “destructive.”

“I’m just trying, Margaret,” I say, and her eyes clear because she knows at least this is true.

We once took our daughter to the 4th of July fireworks show the town puts on each year in the lakeside park. I tried to describe it for my daughter as we sat on folding chairs we brought with us to the park.

“It’s a rocket,” I said, excited, “it’s going up—there!” as it burst.

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“It’s a zillion little balls of fire falling, like the ribs of an umbrella, oh, and they’re burning out, they’re gone!”

She was too young for this, was frightened by the crash, bang, crackle, the shrill whistling of the fireworks. She startled, lurched at the explosions as if someone had grabbed her out of nowhere as she stood in a Free Space, shuddered as if she were chilled.

Laurel said, “It’s too loud!” and, “I don’t like the smell!” as the tang of acrid smoke came to us in the soft summer breeze.

I saw my wife stiffen in her chair, saw her clench her jaw, look anywhere but at me or our daughter or the booming succession of fireworks in the sky. And we left well before the show concluded.

At least, I think now, we tried.

I think I came closest when I tried to experience Free Space.

Laurel was gone, at her school; a minivan comes to pick her up in the morning, delivers her back to us late in the afternoon when her school is in session. I checked to be sure Margaret was busy in the laundry room, sorting, loading the washer, emptying the dryer, folding. I did not want her to see this.

I went to our living room. It is a big room, quite large enough for entertaining, though we have no close friends our age with small children—the reason is obvious. There is much furniture, but it is placed close to the walls, leaving a large open area. When Laurel enters, crosses, and leaves this room, she takes the long route, from chair to table to chair. Once or twice I have seen her cross the open middle, protected by her cane and the perfect sense of our house’s floorplan she knows more exactly than I from her life within its darkness.

Cocking an ear for a last listen, checking on Margaret in the laundry room, I walked to the center of our big living room, stopped, stood very still an instant, and closed my eyes.

Of course I saw the colored lights slide and loom and rise and fall, as I always see them with my eyes closed. But I ignored them, stood very still, and tried to imagine I had no idea where the furniture sat all around me. I imagined a room emptied, a house abandoned, then simply a space, tried not to know there was thick carpeting beneath my shoes.

I came very close, I think, to Free Space. I raised my arms, extended my fingers, and for an instant my balance faltered, I tottered, groped with my hands, began to shuffle forward, and think I almost knew, if only for that instant, what my blind Laurel knows.

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you doing?” My eyes popped open, I was in my living room, the furniture all in place, the cold sunlight of this hard winter in the picture window, my snowcovered lawn, Pioneer Road, some traffic.

I looked at my wife; I am not sure what her expression meant, what she might have been thinking.

I said to her, “I was trying.”

My Christmas display is complete, in place. All that remains are the last connections, tying everything to the master switch, a simple box with a button I can hold in my hand, Laurel can hold in her hand.

My wife of course strongly disapproves of these conversations, so I do not talk with my daughter about her dreams until Margaret has left the house to shop or run errands.

I say, “Laurel, darling, Dad had a crazy dream last night. I was driving somewhere in a car. It wasn’t my car or Mom’s, it was some strange car. I didn’t know where I was going but I had to get there on time for something, the car went so slow I was afraid I’d be late.”

My daughter says, “What did the car smell like, Dad?” “I don’t know,” I say, “it wasn’t a new car smell. I don’t think it smelled like anything.”

“Did you touch the seat, Dad? Was the motor loud? Did it make the brake noise Mom’s used to before it got fixed? Did you play the radio or play a tape, Dad?” she asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say, and I say, “Do you feel my dream at all, Laurel?”

She says to me, “I know being late, and fast and slow in our cars.” My heart breaks because my daughter cannot see me in my dream, driving the strange car, too slow, late for whatever, wherever.

When I get an opportunity—Margaret gone from the house—I ask Laurel what she dreamed the night before. I don’t think she likes this. She often says she doesn’t think she had any dreams that night, and I remind her everyone dreams lots of dreams every night.

Sometimes she will tell me what she remembers of a dream.

She says, “There was a funny smell, almost like the smell from people who smoke, but it wasn’t that. And there was a little buzzing noise, like Mom’s mixer, but not so loud.”

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smoker’s clothes and skin, Margaret’s electric mixer whirring cake batter or beating eggwhites.

My Laurel says, “I was touching a flat wall. It was cold. It was more like the floor I was touching with all of me, except there was no rug on it, it wasn’t wood and didn’t smell like anything, and the buzzing went away, I think.”

I try to imagine my daughter, arms and legs spread, her face and hands and bare feet pressed against a wall that is like a floor, but not a floor, no carpet, not wood or stone or vinyl. I cannot imagine this.

We all dream every night, lots of dreams, and we recall some, or parts of some, see ourselves in places strange or silly or terrifying, except the blind, whose dreams are only smells and sounds and textures against their sensitive skin.

I probably should not talk to my daughter about dreams, hers or mine.

I am ready, the day before Christmas Eve. I should test it, see if this great display of varicolored, flashing light will actually come to life at the press of the button on the box small enough my daughter can hold it in her small, graceful hand. But there will be no test—it will or will not work in the full dark of Christmas Eve. There is one sort of congenital blindness science cured with one of the first practical applications of laser beams. This congenital blindness was due to a broken connection between two parts of the optic nerve. It was inoperable. But a laser beam could be directed to this place within the eye, where it performed a kind of welding operation. It was a bona fide miracle. Hundreds of sightless, blind for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, were given perfect vision.

Not surprisingly, follow-up studies showed these people were not very happy in the world they could suddenly see with absolute clarity. They suffered disorientation, panic attacks, depression.

One study still interests me. A group of these newly sighted people were seated, one by one, at a table, hands in their laps. A knife and fork were placed before them on the table. They were asked how many objects they saw. Two, they all said. They were asked if these objects were similar or dissimilar. Dissimilar, they all said. They were asked what the objects were.

They did not know—until they were allowed to raise their hands from their laps and touch the knife and fork.

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What I take from this study is that reality, things, are actually composed of words. I know my tableware when I see it; my Laurel knows hers with her fingers. Somehow this cheers me, that what we both know are the same words that make up the different worlds we live in.

Not long ago I woke from an anxiety dream I do not remember. I woke with a start, and saw a man standing in the bedroom doorway.

For how many seconds did I know an intruder stood at my bedroom door? For how many seconds did I hang, paralyzed, between the urge to wake Margaret at my side and the need to leap from our bed and attack this marauder? How many seconds passed before I realized what I saw was my bathrobe, hung on a hook beside the doorframe?

I pledged a college fraternity. Hazing was still in fashion. One night we were taken to the house’s basement, blindfolded, told to extend both hands, palms up. In my left hand the pledgemaster placed a clump of cold spaghetti. In the other he put a small heap of finely broken eggshells. He did this to all the pledge class. He then told us we held dead nightcrawlers in our left hands, our frat brothers’ toenail parings in our right. Then he ordered us to eat what we held. Two of my fellow pledges vomited after they swallowed the last of it; I did not vomit, but choked so hard I would have fainted if our blindfolds had not been removed, and the pledgemaster, cackling with glee, told us what we had in fact eaten.

My Laurel will never mistake a bathrobe for a burglar or rapist, but what if people lie to her, will not give her the true words that are the things of the world she must live in? Imagining this is horrible for me, so I try not to.

If I were to test my Christmas lights, and they failed, I doubt I would have the heart to search out the problem, fix it. If my lights fail to go on, perform as I have programmed them, tomorrow night, I will have failed, but at least I will have tried.

I tell Laurel, “Tell Dad about his face.”

She says, “I already did before this morning.”

“Tell me again,” I say because I want the touch of her fingers on my skin. Seated, I rest my hands on her narrow hips as she stands between my legs, puts her so graceful hands to my face. I close my eyes, try to see what she tells me.

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the shower but it already feels different than this morning after breakfast,” she says.

“Dirty already?” I say.

“No, just different already. I can tell.” And she says, “You have big eyes and a big nose and smooth lips, and your whiskers are already a tiny bit scratchy now,” as her fingers flutter against my cheeks and chin. “You’ve got your eyes scrunched closed real tight,” she says as I try to imagine the face she describes.

“Do you like your dad’s face?” I say, unable to imagine the face she constructs with her touch—it is no face I see in my bathroom mirror.

My darling, blind Laurel says, “I like it because you’re Dad.” And I hug my daughter who cannot tell me if I am handsome or plain or ugly. I hug my daughter close, hard enough that she gives a little gasp of breath. I kiss her forehead, her eyelids, her nose, her mouth and chin.

When I open my eyes I see Margaret watching us. I am not certain I know what her expression means. Is she angry? Resigned?

Does her heart, like mine, near-break?

I ask my wife, “Are you coming out with us, Margaret?”

“It’s ten below and God knows what with the wind-chill,” she says.

“There’s no wind blowing,” I say, and, “It won’t take that long.

I’ll bundle Laurel up good. Just bundle up,” I say.

“I’ll see,” she says to me, which I take to mean she will not come outside with me and our daughter to light the Christmas display. This hurts me, but I understand why she will not, cannot.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Margaret,” is all I can say.

“So, Merry Christmas,” is all she says.

I go outside alone for a last check, trace my wires, the connections, the timers, the switchbox small enough to fit in my blind daughter’s hand. It will either work or it will not.

I stand in this near-record winter cold, look up and down Pioneer Road, appraise the Christmas lights at the homes up and down each side of the road, wonder if mine—if it works—will measure up to their grandeur and good taste. Much traffic passes, families out to tour the Christmas lights of Pioneer Road, perhaps on their way to late services at our town’s many churches.

In daylight, cars coming from either direction see a sign erected by the state. Five hundred yards on either side of my house stands a 196 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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sign, square, large black letters on a yellow background. The signs are a warning, a caution. Each says: Blind Child Area. The signs are mandated by state statute, a precaution, a protection for my daughter.

As if I would ever, as if we would ever allow our beloved only child to play outdoors alone, as if we would ever turn her out into Free Space, at the mercy of this world so filled with danger to her at every turn!

I do not know where in our house my wife has gone so as not to see us go out. I bundle myself up, bundle up my daughter, take her outside. She grasps the crook of my arm as we go out the door, as the blind are trained to do—you do not take their arm, they take yours; this makes them steadier, feel more secure. It is so cold out, but there is no wind, and no stars in the black, cloud covered sky.

She says, “It’s real cold, Dad.” I say, “We won’t be out long. Feel how frozen the snow is?”

“I like the crunch,” she says, “but it’s real cold.”

“Here now,” I say, stop, stoop, pick up the small switchbox. I look to left and right, the lights of my neighbors. Two cars pass.

“We’re right by the road,” Laurel says.

“We’re right in front of the Merry Xmas one,” I say. “You could touch it if you wanted to.”

She says, “I don’t need to.”

Another car passes, but I do not care if anyone is here when we throw the switch. I look up at the black sky, shudder. “Here,” I say, “you get to turn it on. You need to take off your mitten to press the button, darling.”

“It’s really real cold,” Laurel says, but pulls off a mitten with her teeth, tucks it under her other arm.

“Hold the switchbox in your other hand, darling,” I say, hand it to her, fold her mittened fingers around it. “Feel the button there?”

She does.

“When should I push it?” she asks.

“Anytime. Now,” I say, and have to wait only a beat. She presses the button; it works.

My Christmas display leaps into glorious being, just as I imagined! “Oh, Laurel,” I say, the snowcovered yard bathed in blue and red and green and silver and gold, all flashing, Santa in his sleigh, his lead reindeer’s nose a bright red, his elves, the shrubbery, my trees draped with light-umbrellas, the sole spruce a giant Crab Orchard Review ◆ 197

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Christmas tree with a star on top, and Merry Xmas so close to us we could reach out and touch it, all blinks and flows and flashes of light! “Oh, Laurel, hon,” I say, my voice hoarse with the awful cold, “if you could see, how beautiful all the colors!”

“Oh, Dad,” says my daughter. “I can feel it’s warm on me, on and off, I can feel the warms come and go,” and lifts her hand to her face where the hot lights of Merry Xmas come and go on her skin.

Her skin glows with reflected colors, as if she pulsed with lights within her so beautiful, graceful little seven-year-old body. “Dad,” she says, “I feel the little warm come and go!” I am distracted for a second as a passing car honks, appreciating, applauding.

And suddenly Margaret, my wife, her mother, is there beside us, without a coat in this cold, and I hug them both to me, try to warm her, our daughter between us.

Laurel says, “Mom, I feel the little warms from it on my face!”

“Yes,” I say, close my eyes to try again—and fail—to find an even darker dark in this black Christmas Eve night.

“It’s wonderful,” Margaret says, and says, “I’d never have imagined how lovely.”

And this is how I know nothing can separate us, how I can imagine we will be together, me, my wife, our daughter, no matter what the world we live in is or might become.

And we go inside, quickly, to warm ourselves, to eat and drink the treats Margaret has prepared, and to watch our daughter delight in the bounty of her Christmas presents, watch her open them, know them with her hands, laugh her bell of a laugh as she delights in the riches of touch and sound and smell of the gifts we give her.

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Lough Gill: View of the Lake Isle of Innisfree

I walked the shore path lined with tufted reeds, swatting clouds of gnats, leap-frogging a pool rippling with slime, repulsed, yet glad to be free of red-brick Sligo town. I was a fool to ever call myself Irish! I was not— my yellow hair and flat, Midwestern mumble made me an alien here. Twice someone shot “Guten Tag!” at me.

I hated gloom. I stumbled over tangled roots, depressed by mist and dew until it seemed I’d put on Yeats’s knowledge from boyhood, as he struggled to subdue memories of famished children in the village by roaming this place, dreaming hollow cheekbones into faery beauty, conjuring swans from groans.

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Dear Maureen Seaton, Dear Maurya Simon

Our double trochees, same initials, and that First syllable, Maur—that’s what does it.

The poet I just phoned in California Recalled a chat by the shore. “That wasn’t me,” I said. “You must mean Maurya Simon.”

And last week I spoke with an admirer Of my poems, who meant your poems, Maureen.

But my aunt’s been Maura Stanton far longer Than me. Did she look down at a bald baby Grinning and cooing in the bassinet, And wish my parents had named me Myrtle Or Millicent? A red-haired Irish girl With pale skin and lovely light freckles, She must have believed she’d marry soon And change her name to something else before Her niece grew up. But she stayed single.

How happy she must have been when I married!

Her wedding present was shipped to Mrs. Cecil But when I thanked her, still using her name, She started inserting her middle initial Between our M and S. Names shimmer with mana, They’re shells we live inside, bright or dim With our prestige, our supernatural power, But lately I’m getting these upscale catalogues Addressed to Amura St. Anton, A woman much more likely to buy such goods Than me, and I’ve been trying to imagine What I’d be like if I’d been christened With that name. Of course she speaks French, Wears deep blue eye shadow and beaded chokers And traces her ancestry back to Cleopatra.

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She smokes cigarettes in an ebony holder And paints her nails with cochineal from insects.

Why, more mail came for her today, an offer To subscribe to Paris Match. She’s wonderful, With her credit card limits and Prada shoes, And every time I run my thumb under the glue Of her envelopes, I feel a little shiver.

But the mail addressed to me seems strange, too, For who am I with this common Irish name (Gaelic for Mary, or the Latin word for dark?)

Unusual enough in the Midwest to fool me Into thinking I’m unique, a name that’s often Misspelled Mora or Moira. Who is Maura?

Just an abstraction, the kind I warn students To avoid in their poems? No, she’s fancier— She’s a metaphor, a Greek warrior’s shield I hold in front of my real face, burnished To such a blinding shine no one can zap me.

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Cochino

was what they called us, the children of dissidents, the gusanos: Pigs, swine.

Cochinitos when we picked our noses in mixed company or soiled our underwear.

The diminutive is sweeter sounding. Puerco, if we did something disgusting, like throw up because we often gagged on the bad food the Revolution provided.

They said you catholic pigs pray for food and we’d pray, yet out of the cafeteria nothing came. Its swinging doors still on their hinges, then they told us to ask Fidel and the Revolution for our daily bread, and we shouted and the food appeared in carts.

We learned to accept this new label—hunger knows no dignity.

We sat and ate as quickly as we dared.

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Now, all that past, twenty-five years ago, and we still gather from Miami to Los Angeles, Christmas eve, United States, the ritual of the open pit on the ground, pig roasting.

We slaughter, we roast, the drippings sizzle, our hearts grow content, tender, at the thought that we’ve made it through another year of exile.

So we open another beer, take a cool swig, taste the crunchy and delicious, crispy skins.

Good stuff. On the stereo the music of Cuba, long ago.

Pork rinds, sweet and tasty, some say we’ve come so far to eat so well. We savor all the meanings in the flesh of this beast called cochino.

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Connivance

In the Havana summers out of school, out of uniform, we ran in packs like dingo, hunted for & killed birds that dared perch & preen on tree branches on the other side of the trash dump. We destroyed both fauna & flora, we flung rocks at the corner street lights.

During the blackouts we snuck around & banged on trashcans, for the ruckus, for the candle light appearing at the windows, the ghostly shapes of adults.

We roached around & broke windows, deflated car tires, stole all we could get our hands on. How could we not? Already outcasts in this too-small place, scarcely heaven, scarcely never enough. We pulled pranks, snuck up on people in the dark of their porches

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& howled like wolves.

Nobody paid much attention.

It was a strange time for everyone & nobody cared what we did. Our cousins came from the provinces & we spied on them, the girl cousins while they bathed. We tied a shard of broken mirror to the end of a broomstick & we peeped at them through an open bathroom window.

Amazed by the tufts of black hair between their legs, the prominence of flesh of their chests. We darted out of our own backyards & shouted, full of bravado & courage, this was the summer of 1969, there were countries at war, people dying everywhere & we ran, ran to spare ourselves these limitations in our lives.

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Maria Terrone

Garden of the Impossible No stone becomes immutable before its final consecration.

—Isamu Noguchi I have brought my father in spring to Noguchi’s walled garden where sinuous sculptures of granite, basalt, travertine rise up, defying expectations of stone—sun-hoops shining red and black, coiled marble cobras, a teetering helix that probes the possibilities of air.

But these dancers are hard, old as the earth.

Winter lingers inside my father.

He walks stiffly, pausing to trace taut curves of skin, following cleavage to the heart within.

I watch from a distance, wishing his craftsman’s hands recall what his mind may no longer grasp— that even the most obdurate matter can bend to a man’s will. I’m hoping those hands, now so soft, remember metal’s bite, then its easy yielding as he bent and soldered new life forms: exuberant copper swirls I pinned to my breast, tin knights who dueled

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across our table, the xylophone he played off-key. Now the sun aligns above his head and granite becomes a black mirror that reflects my father back to me.

If Alzheimer’s is a slow hardening, whose art will make his brain agile as these stones? If Alzheimer’s is a tangle, why can’t every twist be made straight, here, in this garden of the impossible?

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Maria Terrone

Faith

In the church vestibule I pass the monitor that registers the bodies of the faithful as gray flickers, a second of ash on a screen, and heave against the doors.

At 3 p.m. no one is here but saints, corporeal in their sandals and robes, carrying staffs, books, painted bouquets, their kind faces cracking as if they too know how it feels to come apart.

Wedged into the fingers of St. Jude is a hand-printed prayer, a paper bud curled so tight, I feel its plea for a miracle tug the back of my throat: cure the cancer, kick the habitâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the ineffable longing of a strangerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words alive on my own tongue.

Days later, the hand holds instead a shriveling rose stem.

Petals lie scattered about like small, white-robed monks, backs arched to heaven, faces pressing stone.

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Miles Garett Watson

After Dinner at the Pig & Steak

The man behind the counter tells me They used to film episodes of The Waltons Right there in Madison, Virginia, Right in his restaurant. I did not ask For this information—he simply slips It in with How was your meal?

He takes my money then points to the long Table at the back of the room & says, “That’s where they used to sit.

Mr. Walton just loved our pork barbecue.”

I ask politely if the Waltons have been in lately.

He says, “No, but I take a peach pie Out to the house once in a while.

Mr. Walton just loved our peach pie.”

I bite my lip to keep from saying What? You take pies where?

It would be risky to question this man’s Sanity while he is counting my change, So I gesture interest with my eyebrows.

As I slip my money into my pocket, I gawk at my feet wondering how Best to ask him who’s eating his pies; But before I can ask, He walks off to the kitchen.

He is apparently bored with our small talk Or thinks I do not believe him.

So I shuffle out the screened door Full of barbecue & questions.

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Maybe he spies on the house from the woods, Waits until all the lights blink out To bring his gift. Maybe he whispers, Goodnight, John-Boy Before he skips back into the white pines.

Maybe he keeps a cabin close by, Or a campsite, or maybe He just sleeps in the trees.

And maybe I’m crazy.

At the least, I’m cold, I’m standing alone in the middle Of a parking lot, & I’m talking Out loud to no one except The water tower across the street, Two beagles in the bed of somebody’s truck, & the neon sign hanging above me, Blinking on & off, open, open, open.

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Carole Boston Weatherford

From Birmingham to Bristol in a Boxcar

Somewhere else, Charles and Furdnor would have been bronze cowboys or sepia Gables, sporting pomades, natty suits with wide, peaked lapels and squiring svelte chorines as they stepped from Packards at premieres. The only bright lights in Birmingham, though, were furnaces at foundries; surely hell, they thought.

Their mama had made them choosier than they could afford, and their daddy hadn’t done them much good neither.

When they buried their mother and shut up the house, the door closed on what might have been.

Not inclined to clear trails, dig dams or blast mountain roads, they nixed CCC camp, stole away instead, hopping boxcars the way starlings ride the wind.

Without work or a woman, a man can either crawl in a hole or decide to never let grass grow under his feet. Troubles in gunny sacks, the brothers rode out the Depression on midnight rattlers, cotton harvests and close relations in distant towns— big-hearted aunts with hot meals, heels of bread and all the advice they could chew in one sitting.

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Carole Boston Weatherford

Turkey Necks and Crowder Peas

Mr. Joe stews turkey necks and crowder peas for company while the freight passes through Pelham; the cinder-block house he built Miss Willie, a far cry from the drafty camp cars where section gangs bunked.

Before the old hands turned in, they burned newspapers under the cots’ rusty springs.

On Sundays the men tossed their clothes in a big can to boil lice.

Steam rises from the stock pot on the back burner of the stove that Mr. Joe bought Miss Willie before she took sick. He imagines an old engine in the distance, its smoke, a cyclone on the horizon.

When the straw boss whistled, the crew, hot and grimy, pressed close to the tracks, leaning into the breeze as the noon train whizzed by.

The dust it stirred up smacked their faces and filled their mouths.

Alone at the kitchen table, Mr. Joe sips iced tea from a jelly jar and nibbles vanilla wafers.

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and rotten meat. By quitting time, his stomach was a tight fist.

Grip still strong, he loosens a stubborn lid from a Mason jar of peaches his daughter canned.

All muscle, sledgehammer and blistery hands, he was proud of how he pounded spikes and laid necklaces of steel, smooth new rail across the foothills.

Coughing spells and bad legs keep Mr. Joe in his La-Z-Boy most days, but he still drives his yellow Buick, has a home-brew every now and then, listens for the Limited whistling at the moon.

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

I Now Wander

I used to raise ducks, pigs, dogs, barking watchdogs.

Wild chickens loose, dancing, flapping old wings.

Red and white American roosters, meant to be sheltered and fed with vitamins until they grow dumb; in our yard I set them loose among African breeds that pecked at them until they, too, grew wild and free.

I planted papayas, fat belly papayas, elongated papayas, tiny papayas, hanging. I planted pineapples, mangoes, long juicy sugar canes, wild coco-yams. From our bedroom window I saw plantain and bananas bloom, again and again, take on flesh and ripeness. And then the war came, and the rebels slaughtered my pigs, my strong roosters, my hens, my heavy, squawking ducks. Now I wander among strangers, looking for new ducks, new hens, new coco-yams, new wars.

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Elegy to West Point Fishermen

Your corrugated zinc shacks leaned into one another, like a mask of crocodile scales, along the fevered Atlantic, where waves wash away white sand, tirelessly rising, falling, rolling, slapping.

We said your town would someday crumble into this ocean; you’d die in the Mesurado, just ahead. “One day these fishermen will all drown in their sleep,” but you did not drown, and your charcoal grills did not set your shacks ablaze . . . you’d come too far to kill yourselves so ordinarily.

But one day the sand pulled you back as you tried to flee.

Before you’d had time to gather your fishing nets, your canoes, waiting for the slap of water, your smokers, ready to smoke gbapleh and snappers thin.

Will your bony fish graze these shanty skies smoky again?

Monrovia’s skies exploded with jets; and you exploded too, all of you, children, mothers, fathers, fishermen, the smell of fish now your gravestones.

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Ruined Trails

We used to walk these trails along Bai’s farmstead at Gbaliah-De. Its razor bushes extending sharp blades and thorny brambles in rough welcome.

As though we were children, forever and aimless.

At the old farmstead, Iyeeh’s hut humped wearily beneath the hill, waiting, even though the years and the rain had eaten away soil beneath its legs.

And Iyeeh, sitting here at her doorpost as if for years she’d kept her eyes upon the narrow, dusty village street, pleading for our return. Iyeeh isn’t here anymore, like Gbaliah-De, she’s gone.

Was Gbaliah-De burnt down . . . bombed?

Did it give in to the rocking when missiles broke loose upon village, city and town?

The giant rubber trees still stand, defying, where coffee and cocoa have lost their way.

And the pumpkin has wound its way through these ruined trails, spreading orange flowers along the road.

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Cadzzilla (1948 Cadillac Series 62 Sedanette, custom made for Billy F. Gibbons, lead guitarist of ZZ Top) Billy, I want to steal your car.

I need it more than you do.

I want to crank it up the coast to a spot with a view and idle a minute in memory of Karen and Pat and Mary.

Your two-door fastback looks black, then midnight blue but up close really molten purple, “Candy Eggplant.” They would have loved your car. Pat, in her bright dresses, flashing her daggery nails while she laughed, drinking coffee in her back room for hours, she’d say what ya gotta do that’s so important?

Stay a while I got pictures of my grandbabies.

Mary, hanging her pale arms along the bakelite steering wheel singing “Cheap Sunglasses” as we drove to the only good seafood place in Des Moines. Karen, sitting next to me at the movies, swooning over some beautiful boy star, telling me how she’d love to visit Hollywood.

Billy, they don’t build them like this anywhere, not even in California and none of them made it here.

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bending the windows, your fat fins with the pipes three inches off the tar, a blue and orange plate that spells 8-TO-K-YO. I wish they could have fixed their lipsticks in the rearview of your perfect purple car, so crouchy, so sexy, Billy, your precision hunk of love.

I swear I almost saw them, young girls again, just now leaning on the hood.

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Saadi Youssef

Nocturnal translated by Khaled Mattawa On a street with disappearing features the last torches will be snuffed, the doors shut secretly with chains. What evening star is this that always disappears? What song are we muffling? Candles drip in the garden where a child swallows river mud . . . Fly, dove, a while and your branch will disappear. A candle fell. I got tired of wearing my features, a granite face was spinning, a street that had lost its features now darkens, and darkens . . . It disappears in dust, and clouds in my eyes. I pave my memory with its broken stones.

The waters that flooded his grave were a soft salt. The boy watched the comets’ glittering explosions. Women cried, and the orphaned child flew in his first car ride. Why do the girls mention his father’s name. Youssef, Youssef ? A woman recognized him and he kissed her cheek. The flood waters were a soft salt and the date palms were white and the boy watched the comets’ glittering explosions. The girls’ bewitcher, your uncle, he used to shoot comets from his hands.

At noon the girls scream Youssef ’s name. His mud tomb sinks in flood waters, and screams, and glittering comet.

If I had a tower, I would live in it alone.

If I had a palace, I would house dogs in it to guard me alone.

If I had two women, I would choose one and live for her alone.

If my steps were to tread on water, I would walk to the ends of the earth alone.

5/10/1976

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Old Pictures from Kout Al-Zain translated by Khaled Mattawa

My Grandfather’s Friend When I met him, blue fog was rising from the date palms.

He was in his orchard feeding a bird tied to a string (fearing our cat; she gives the poor man no comfort).

Butterflies in his beard, roses, and shreds of pollen— like the god of grass, meadows stretched in his eyes, water and flowers fluttered in springs of glitter.

Ah, red kaffiyah drowning in greenness! night dew on its fringe, unravelings of cotton, the gloss of mother of pearl, iris and damascene rose.

How long I wished your ruby crown would once adorn my head!

The Cemetery When night tumbles, the cemetery moans, and the djinn and the dead palms shake lifeless branches.

When the wind blares, a star yellows and falls.

A rain of yellow leaves waters the cemetery.

Mother of Lead You, squadron of rivers, and island bait in the sea of palms, wrapped in sadness, tired, broken.

You, unknown, with your muddied beaches and black livelihood.

You, roads that no god has traveled to feed the living and the dead, and water their dreams with manna and honeydew.

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the drowned secrets of your nights as your dead drink the waters of river stars?

Do you know what the skulls hide in the mud of their tombs? Mother of lead, when your dead drink the waters of river stars, a ship will come to you without anchor or sailors.

It will come like a raft and the dead will open their mother-of-pearl eyes.

They will tumble to your black boards as the night halves carrying tea, perfumes, and soap, and weeping to no end.

On your black shores stars will shake.

Dawn will pass over the palms and women will ache with yearning and dew will glitter and the dead will return weeping over the ship and the mud tombs that collapse waiting for nightfall . . .

Basra, 21/6/1962

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First Snow translated by Khaled Mattawa First snow swarms the street; its flakes speckle the trees, and the girls’ cheeks redden.

Who can ask a flower how it bloomed?

Snow tumbles and the fallen leaves swirl.

Snow . . . and you pass by warm wrapped in your leather coat until the street ends.

Snow . . . and on your writing papers the girls’ cheeks redden.

17/3/1980

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Rigoberto González

Our Secret Other Worlds

Privacy was not a member of my family. As far back as I can recall, we were always squeezed into small living quarters with abuelos, primos, tíos, even after we migrated to California from Michoacán.

Clothes and bed sheets were public property and during mealtime the dining room was as mad as a cafeteria, one person scoping out the area for the next available seat. Our extended family was a necessity for socioeconomic livelihood, not a romanticized notion of togetherness and unity; by sticking together there was less of a chance of going hungry. But the compromise was the loss of privacy.

On a particularly desperate year in the late 1970s, I remember my grandparents, their three sons (only one a bachelor) and only daughter with their respective spouses and all their children—eighteen people total—all living under the same roof. The grandchildren spread out on the living room carpet at night. Waking up in the morning was like appearing at a compound—one contorted body pressed against another in an effort to accommodate bent elbows and knees, jigsaw puzzle style.

With one bathroom, getting up earlier than anyone else meant no waiting in line with your legs crossed. Females had priority because males could go out back and piss in the brush. My grandfather showed my boy cousins and me how after he had to give up his turn to my mother. We all stared down at the spots of damp soil behind the van. He pointed.

“See there? For us men the world is our toilet.”

Having one bathroom also led to a number of embarrassing encounters. Getting the door knocked while in the shower forced you to wrap a towel around you, suds stiffening your hair. And no matter how large the towel, there was still too much exposed skin. I could have lived without having seen my grandmother’s wrinkled cleavage, or my uncle’s dark and slightly uneven nipples, or the look of terror in my cousin’s eyes as he struggled to conceal his prepubescent erection. Those indiscreet moans and groans escaping through the house at night concretized into the images of flesh and coarse hairs. The bras, the panties, the stretched-out underwear Crab Orchard Review ◆ 223

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waving from the clothesline suddenly claimed their owners. How real my family had become as I witnessed their belching, farting, vomiting and fucking. Still, I longed for the days my father could afford to pay our own rent. I scavenged for scraps of hope at the crowded dinner table where the adult conversation always centered on paychecks and job prospects. At that time my father and his brother, the married uncle, were unemployed. Our families were feeding off the reluctant generosity of my grandfather, a man so thrifty he wore a shirt until it disintegrated off his back. He was the man with all the confidence and the money to back it up. He knew how to chip your dignity down to the size of a quarry pebble.

“I think Leonel will talk to his boss about giving me a chance with the tractor,” my father said, throwing out a spark of enthusiasm on the dinner table.

“Leonel?” my grandfather cried out, incredulously. “That good for nothing drunk? A recommendation from him is like telling the boss he wants to have his beer buddy keep him company. No, you’ll get nowhere with that lazy friend of yours.”

“Well, if that doesn’t work out, there’s Sancho—” “Sancho? Are you out of your mind? He’s got a callus on his fat ass from sitting around at the unemployment office. The man can’t keep a job for a month.”

My uncle tried to save the day. “There’s always Ricardo.”

“Ricardo?”

I lost steam much sooner than my father and uncle. I withdrew from the table, defeated. My most intense fantasy at that time was that my grandfather keeled over from a heart attack, making us heirs to his hidden riches. But I suspected that he lived for those tugs-ofwar over dinner. Besides, there was not much of an inheritance, only the small stash of savings he kept in a secret pocket on the inside of his belt. (He didn’t believe in banks.) My grandmother revealed the hiding place to us in case my grandfather kicked the bucket in the middle of the street. She wanted to make sure the cash didn’t drive off with the paramedics.

She warned: “Those people peel off your jewelry and pluck your wallet. And how the hell do you prove it when you’re lying there cross-eyed like a billy-goat on a puddle of your own drool?”

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spent too many hours exchanging dirty jokes. Riding bikes with them meant parking at the ravine to talk about tits and pussy. Our oldest cousin liked to brag he was the only one who had engaged in sex so he was the designated reader of the text in pornographic magazines. He even mimicked the oohs and ahhs inside those white clouds with dialogue superimposed on the photographs. Too bored to bother with my cousin’s fake orgasms, I usually hid away in my parents’ room, where all our belongings were stored.

In that cramped room there was a door permanently sealed in the wall shared with the apartment next door. The building had apparently been larger at one time, but the owners were making a killing with the division of that one unit into two, both for rent. The unit next door was not even a one-bedroom; it was more like a studio with one common area and a bathroom in the back. I knew about its size because I saw it frequently, through a small hole a few inches from the bottom of the door. The hole was small enough to fit a cable or telephone wire through, but now it was just my peephole.

In the long lean months we lived there I saw plenty of the occupants next door. I lay down next to the bed, ready to roll behind the edge of the comforter in case either of my parents walked in.

I knew nothing more gratifying than learning about people who didn’t know I was watching. It was better than the school experiment of growing a potato plant in a cup of water. These were the people from the other side of the wall, not the dull, food stamp clan from this side.

Exciting things happened over there, not here in the place of mismatched socks and plastic spoons that got washed for reuse. Another world spun into existence, and it was a little bit mine as well.

Once there were four women in their twenties sharing the rent next door. They worked at the vegetable packing house with my mother and aunts. My cousins whistled at them when they walked by; my oldest cousin claimed he had fucked one of them. Little did they know that in the mornings the women walked around in pantyhose, comfortable in their bare breasts. The curlyhaired woman always sat on a cot against the opposite wall to apply her lipstick. She was the plain one, refusing to wear mini-skirts and tube tops like the other women. On weekend evenings she stayed behind, watching from the cot as the others dressed up on Fridays for a night out. When they left, she secured the door and then proceeded to look through her roommates’ belongings. She never took anything, she simply held and touched, clasping her fingers around barrettes, combs, and assortment of make-up kits. I watched her empty Crab Orchard Review ◆ 225

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out entire bags and shoe boxes over her cot, only to take her time putting back the contents, sometimes sniffing the powders or rubbing the smooth plastics against her cheeks. Once she was bent over the cot and I zeroed in on a small bow in the center of her panties. The bow was tearing off, crooked, and the white flesh of her buttocks showed through the opening. I immediately shut my eyes and turned my head, though that image haunted me for days. When the lights went off, the bow glowed in the dark of my mind. Each time I felt the urge to cry.

The four women moved out after just a few months, but the unit didn’t remain empty for long. A married couple with an infant child moved in. We heard them argue and throw things against the wall at all hours of the day. The infant’s bellowing added to the chaos. The couple called each other names back and forth until the man beat his wife and room quieted down to a muffled whimpering. My mother was fed up with these daily episodes so she urged my father to speak with the neighbor. He took my uncle with him.

“So we told the guy it wasn’t our business or anything like that,” my father reported over dinner, “but that he should be discreet about his ways.”

My grandfather nodded in silence. That was one of the few instances he kept his mouth shut, refusing to volunteer an opinion.

The common knowledge that he beat my grandmother was left unspoken, yet it might as well have been announced by the way the dining room went dead.

I never saw the couple’s heads because they had propped a table against the sealed door. I could only see their legs—one pair following the second from one side of the room to the other. It was like watching leopards pace left and right in a cage at the zoo, felines bored to frustration. The man once pulled up a chair to the table and sat down in the buff. His shriveled cock looked down at me. It was a sad and delicate appendage, timid. It was the first adult man’s penis I had ever seen that wasn’t a photograph or a caricature. It looked nothing like the large erect ones in my cousin’s porno magazines. This penis was pale and stubby. So powerless, it didn’t seem like much at all. I became embarrassed for the man, and the shame of having seen him in such a vulnerable state kept me away from the peephole until the next tenant.

The new tenant was an older white man with few possessions: a dusty bed, a chair, a tattered suitcase and an orange steamer trunk I never saw him open. I imagined it held his paintings and supplies.

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A thick yellow light creeping in through the hole was my cue to look through. The old white man had a companion, a small brown and white Hush Puppy dog with ears that dragged to the floor. While the man painted, the dog lay still, as if the man were painting portraits of a sleeping dog.

The white man was our quietest neighbor yet, invisible compared to a roomful of young women or a wife beater. He only spoke to his dog. “Here, Mischa,” he’d call in a high pitch. Or was it Micah?

He hadn’t been living there two weeks when he took ill. I suspected something was wrong when the light didn’t go on for three consecutive nights. The man was bedridden, day and night, the dog at his side. Yet I couldn’t tell anyone without revealing my secret. I prayed that the man got better on his own, or that he at least got well enough to call for help. Like all previous tenants the man had no telephone. Not even mail service. Even we had to rent a post office box. I wandered to the empty lot behind the apartments, my body heavy with guilt. I sat on the wooden bench near the palo verde tree, beneath an infestation of cicadas.

I was punishing myself with the buzzing, with droplets of fluid my cousins said was cicada piss that could cause boils. My cousins ran in and out of the apartment, slamming the door spring shut each time.

The hollering that followed was my aunt’s complaining about the noise.

I was struck by my ability to own a secret in a place where personal letters were read by more than one pair of eyes, where whispering into an ear was like whispering into every ear. But I felt no satisfaction.

Only my mother detected something was wrong when she peeked out the door and saw me sitting there, my face tense as a sock dried to a crisp on the line. She came out to sit next to me and to run her fingers through my hair.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

I blushed. In that overpopulated apartment we rarely had a chance for intimate moments like that one. Any time she showed the slightest affection toward me in front of my cousins, I had to deal with it later in the ravine.

“What a good little boy he is,” one cousin would taunt to get the ball rolling.

“He’s made of gold,” another said, delicately rubbing my sleeve with his index and thumb.

“He’s the favorite,” my brother added. He joined in most of the time, if not he too became fair game.

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react, I covered my face with my hands and gently nudged my mother with my shoulder.

“What was that?” she asked, letting go of my hair.

I remained silent, sweating behind my hands. I remembered the time I overheard my parents talking about moving into a trailer.

They had been calculating expenses and figuring budgets on the porch. I didn’t realize they were fantasizing and I jumped to conclusions. I was so happy we were going to have our own place I immediately went to the room and started labeling our belongings with masking tape and a black marker. When my mother walked in on me I stuttered with embarrassment, trying to explain that I was just pretending, fantasizing the way she and my father were doing on the porch, beneath the warm sun, in the odd privacy of the open air. We had invaded each other, my mother and me, and every awkward moment between us took me back to that day. I sensed I had taken her there as well, which is why she withdrew rather quickly.

“Well, when you’re ready to talk to me let me know.”

I spread open my fingers and watched her disappear into the apartment. Now I really felt like a fool. A man’s life was at stake and I gave up the chance to say something. But how could I reveal to my mother that I had been spying on the neighbors? I was a good boy, unlike my cousins who got expelled from school, who threw each other down on the floor and used their weight to make each other fart. I showered every evening, I completed my homework, I learned English so well I became the Spelling Bee champ.

I was a good boy. I vowed never to look through my peephole again. I walked into the house so full of conviction, so absolved, that the first thing I was going to do was plug the hole myself.

That night I finally found a chance to sneak in and do the job with some plaster my grandfather kept handy for all the wears and tears on the walls. We all had to learn to mix and fix because we all punched holes at one time or another and my grandfather was fed up with making the repairs himself. As a symbolic good-bye to my voyeurism, I decided to take one last look. I lost my breath and a heartbeat when I saw my aunt cooking on the small stove next door. I had to focus repeatedly to make sure I was indeed seeing my aunt moving about in the neighbor’s unit wearing her orange plastic apron from the packing house. She spoke to the old man in Spanish and he responded in English. The conversation made no sense because my aunt didn’t know English and the old man obviously didn’t understand Spanish. Yet they managed.

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“Aquí está su sopita, ¿eh?”

“I’d like my tea, please.” “¿Y para tomar? ¿Un cafecito?”

“Would you heat up some water, please?” “¿Agüita? Bueno, pues si ya no se le ofrece nada, pues hasta mañana, ¿eh? Que se sienta mejor.”

“Gracias,” the old man said, waving his limp hand from the bed, the dog curled up beside him.

There was no way of asking questions without giving myself away. My eye simply followed my aunt into the apartment next door for the next few days. She did some light cleaning, she cooked, then disappeared. The dog even took a liking to her, trailing her with its tail wagging. My aunt finally petted it one day and dared to cradle it in her arms like a doll. “Chiquita, Chiquita,” my aunt baby-talked.

The old man chuckled. So did my aunt.

The man became weaker. I heard my aunt mentioning this to my mother in the kitchen. When they saw me near they started whispering. More secrets. From what little I had heard, I discovered that the landlord had made this arrangement with my aunt as a favor to the old man’s son.

That afternoon I saw my aunt sit on the man’s bed to spoon-feed.

She displayed a tenderness I had not seen from her before, certainly not on this side of the wall. Here she argued with my grandfather and chased her sons out of the house by throwing things at them.

When she was on a rampage she took no prisoners—anyone within range was a potential victim. If she caught someone doing mischief, like that time my cousin played tic tac toe on the table with a fork, there was always an accomplice about.

“Which one of you did this with him?” she demanded to the crowded living room of frightened eyes. None of us wanted to tattle.

She took out a belt. “Then I’m going to beat it out of all of you!”

And we all dispersed in panic. The last kids out of the room were the first to get it with the belt. My father once joked to my mother that my aunt thought she was born with a pair of balls. She had a quick temper, and despite her visits next door she didn’t change much.

“I don’t like this kind of rice,” one of her youngest sons complained at the dinner table.

My aunt slapped him on the back of the head. “Eat you food, cabrón! What do you think this is? A restaurant?”

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begun. The old man either died or was taken away to a more suitable place for his delicate condition. On a sunny afternoon after school with all my cousins, we gathered to watch a young white couple empty the unit of the steamer trunk and paintings. They offered to give us kids the bed but we all said we didn’t want it, though we all slept on the floor. We watched perched on our bikes, moving back and forth as the couple pulled out canvas after canvas of tree paintings. Those trees were nothing like the ones in the desert.

“What is that?” my oldest cousin dared to ask in his thick accent.

The white guy paused, held the painting upright for us to see and said, “Virginia.” That meant nothing to us.

The couple loaded everything into a truckbed except the dog and drove off. Since we didn’t have any pets we begged to keep it but my grandfather said no. It was too small to be a guard dog and it was a bitch.

“Next thing you know we got a pack of mutts to feed,” our grandfather said.

We took turns feeding it anyway since it refused to leave its familiar surroundings. My aunt gathered scraps and bones after every meal, though she never went outside herself to cradle it in her arms or to call it “Chiquita.” Eventually we got tired of looking after it, especially because it howled all night and kept us awake. We took turns going outside to scare it away. The dog, neglected and malnourished, aboutfaced one day and scurried off, never to be seen again.

The apartment next door remained vacant for a long time. I had given up the task of sealing the peephole with plaster since there was no incentive to look through it anymore, except when the landlords went in to show it to prospective tenants. The unit empty, it echoed with the footfalls of an intruder, which was my cue to run and see who had entered. Once more my heart skipped a beat to see my aunt. She had kept the key to the unit next door from the times she took care of the old man. She simply walked in, and stood perfectly still, absorbing the silence of the room, breathing in gently, with concentration. I tried to match her breathing rhythm. Then suddenly her head jerked down and her eye landed point blank on mine. I held my breath. I even tried not to blink but that was useless, I quickly lost the duel. She held her stance however and didn’t speak or move. Neither did I. I felt both our bodies relax. It was as if we had agreed to share a secret, a private moment, the hard-to-come-by appreciation of a space burdened by neither touch nor sound.

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The Other Mother

“Who was she?” friends ask, seemingly bewildered by the extent of my grief. Sometimes I answer that she was my mother’s closest friend. Sometimes I say she was my dear friend, but when I explain that we were a generation apart I feel the listener’s sympathy deflating, as though a generation’s “remove” distances the power of loss. What I want to say is, “She was my other mother.” This seems the only vessel large enough and deep enough to contain all that she was.

“Now, who was she again? I forget.” Had I buried my biological mother, people would not keep forgetting. Theodore Roethke’s poem for his dead student, Jane, ends with this outpouring of grief: I, with no rights in the matter, / Neither father nor lover. What right do I have to mourn Carolyn’s death? If I say I feel I’ve lost a mother, does this rob Carolyn’s daughter of her rightful place on the ladder of mourning? Should I weep in private, wring my hands of her memory? Ours was an unregistered, unofficial relationship, the kind that can’t be claimed on income taxes, the kind that engenders what death educators call “disenfranchised grief.” (Disenfranchised mourners also include children, whose grief is often not valued; survivors of a friend or family member who died under conditions considered shameful; and anyone who mourns a relationship unsanctioned by society.)

It was not mother love I was seeking in Carolyn. From the first colostrum it was granted me—breast- and hand- and eye-love. Unlike those unfortunate infants who suffer from “failure to thrive,” who literally die from lack of touch, I grew fat on mother’s milk and attention. Call it happenstance, fate, something the stars tossed my way in the guise of a woman named Juanita, my biological mother.

Jung would have called Juanita my “accidental carrier,” a term embedded in the idea that as daughters grow into womanhood, we “must come to recognize ‘the human being who is our mother’ as the ‘accidental carrier’ of the archetype.” No wonder she gets so tired. Enough to carry us for nine months, then another few years, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 231

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our bodies sleep-heavy, our arms linked Simian-style around her neck.

But to carry the idea of mother, the whole ball of wax? The universe must have known this was too much for one woman to manage. So Mother Earth was born, and Mother Nature, and goddesses and grandmothers and plowed fields and caves and ovens and all manner of scooped-out vessels. At different times in my life, one or another face of the archetype has guided me. At one point, my biological mother; at another, my maternal grandmother; then her sister, Great Aunt Bessie.

Lately, the face that swims up from my dreams is Carolyn’s.

My mother is a down-to-earth, gentle woman, easy to be around and easy to love. She is also emotionally private. Though I am sure she has wept long and hard, I have never witnessed her tears. Her mother was also this way, as were my aunts and most of the significant women in my childhood. Carolyn, on the other hand, cried easily and often, at times seemingly unable to distinguish between joy or sorrow. Any occasion could bring on tears— a story, a photograph, a song played on her spinet. “No, no,” she’d say when I’d take my place on the bench, cranking up Vivaldi, my foot tapping a military beat (Carolyn had no use for metronomes). “No baroque,” she’d say. “Schumann, please. Or Brahms.” But I knew none of the Romantics. My piano teachers frowned on them, as they did on my tendency to play by ear. “Well, then, make something up,” Carolyn would say.

I’d been punished by teachers for not playing the notes on the page, and now here she was encouraging me. “Like this,” she’d say, leaning forward, her hands resting lightly on the keys. Music theory held no interest for her; she lacked precision and formal technique. Nevertheless, the music came—haltingly at first, then infused with passion, her tears falling on the keys. If her husband Walt was home, he’d sit on the couch and listen, his hand stroking the back of some aging dog or cat.

To say that Carolyn cried easily is not to suggest that her life was an open book. Like my mother, Carolyn maintained her private places, and in some ways her boundaries were more staked off than my mother’s. You entered at your own peril. The door to her study, which she called “my inner sanctum,” was always closed, and only a few people “in God’s entire world” as she put it, were allowed in.

Inside were rows of books—and when the rows filled, stacks of books on the floor, against the window, on her desk. Though each room in her house contained items she’d collected in her travels with Walt, the inner sanctum was the repository of the most precious treasures.

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Every wall, file cabinet, closet, and window ledge was filled: beads, shells, feathers, pots, teacups, bracelets, scarves, handmade paper, hand painted eggshells, weavings. Hundreds of objects, and a story beneath each one. When I picked up a single bead or a shell or a shard of pottery, I was given the tale of its acquisition—the sounds and smells of the outdoor booth, the squint of the seller’s dark eyes, the leathery feel of his hands as money was exchanged. And sometimes story layered upon story—the seller’s tale, how he’d come to possess the treasure.

During the forty years I knew Carolyn I was allowed into the sanctum only twice. It was not enough to be a loved and trusted member of her inner circle. Your entrance key was also the promise that 1) you would not touch anything unless she gave permission, and 2) you would not pass judgment on the extent of the clutter.

Carolyn made no apologies for her style of housekeeping, but she quickly grew defensive if she sensed a visitor’s unspoken judgment.

My father was such a visitor. A fastidious man, he found it difficult to ignore the stacks of magazines, newspaper clippings on the refrigerator, dog hairs on the sofa. Carolyn’s casual attitude toward housekeeping extended to the kitchen table, where cats curled beside your coffee cup and the dog licked the plate you’d momentarily abandoned.

My parents’ house—though comfortable and homey, the kind of place where friends and neighbors drop in unannounced, sprawl, and linger—is relatively clutter-free. Like me, my mother is married to a man more enamored of order and cleanliness than she is, and without the influence of our neatnik husbands, both of our homes would probably look more like Carolyn’s. Our natural instincts run to collecting, reusing, holding on to objects of emotional value, but unlike Carolyn, we keep our clutter out of sight. Under the watchful eyes of our husbands, every few months we make a clean sweep, reorganize, file away our treasures, which we can retrieve at a moment’s notice. For beneath the layers lies an order known only to our minds.

Carolyn was a master of such order. She knew not only the location of each feather and scarf, every letter sent to her, but she could put her hand on it. If something was out of place, she sensed the loss, the way God, in the parable recounted in Matthew, numbers every hair on your head and notes each sparrow’s fall. Once while I was visiting during the last year of her life, we sat in the living room, my eyes surveying the small cocktail table. Beneath the glass cover, tiny shards of pottery were arranged on a velvet cloth. They Crab Orchard Review ◆ 233

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all looked the same to me—nothing special, just broken pieces of clay and glass. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, Carolyn gasped, “My God! The Israeli Blue, where is it?” She opened the case and began searching among the folds of velvet, where she found the piece her eye had momentarily passed over. A broken fragment, no blue I have ever seen. Blue, perhaps, only in memory, the color of the sea that washed over her bare feet one morning thirty-five years ago as she waded with her young daughter.

If the universe accidentally supplied me with a loving and fertile mother (my mother gave birth to seven children), it also twisted this complication: my other mothers, both Carolyn and Aunt Bessie, were biologically childless, as I am. Thus the world names us. There is no term for women-who-do-not-give-birth that does not emphasize the without-ness. Barren, childless, sterile, even the more modern (and supposedly upbeat) childfree. In A Sense of the Morning, David Hopes writes, “Somewhere I picked up the notion that things must be mine before I can love them.” Yes, we pick up that notion early on, never quite relinquishing it. We give lip service to other possibilities (she was like a mother to me), but finally, blood is thicker. No matter whom we take into our homes, how hard we love them, how fierce the extent of our delight and grief, it appears our bonds cannot stack up against uterine ties, the blood that binds. “Step,” my stepson repeated adamantly whenever he introduced me to his friends during the many years he lived with us. “Yes,” I’d think. “Step.” A step is a place between.

And nature is a mother. All else is measured against her standard.

In my case, Nature and I were like those star-tossed lovers whose paths keep crossing, yet never intertwine. The lovers approach one another, dance awhile, fall away, meet and marry others, fall away, meet again, and so the dance continues, the timing always a bit off. Like Aunt Bessie, I miscarried. Another unfortunate word, as if we’d made some mistake, failed to carry not only the child but the whole idea of mother. Neither of us tried again.

Carolyn carried two children full-term—that is, her daughter and son survive as adults—though both were birthed by other women. She and Walt adopted the children while they were stationed in Germany. (Like my father, Walt was a career military man.) Many years later, Walt found himself once again en route to Germany, this time with their daughter Karen, who was a teenager at the time. “It was Carolyn’s idea,” Karen told me recently, though that’s not the version 234 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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I remember Carolyn relating; she’d once told me that Karen, in a fit of adolescent rebellion, had demanded to see her “real mother.”

“She wanted me to have the chance to meet my blood mother,” Karen continued. “She needed to know that my loyalties were chosen, not compelled.” So Walt and Karen set off on Eurail passes, visiting Barcelona, Paris, and finally Germany. It was a Monday when they arrived in Frankfurt, and the orphanage, where they were to obtain the birth mother’s address, was closed. “We could have stayed over another day,” Karen told me. “But suddenly it didn’t seem to matter.

I told my father it wasn’t that important to me, that I was ready to go back. He was touched, I think. We left for home that day.”

I can’t know what the birth mother carried all those years, or what the reunion might have meant to her. I’m too focused on Carolyn, on the difficult love her decision required. Carolyn, waiting at home while her daughter embarked on a journey to the other side of the world, half a universe away. The King Solomon story again: how would the child be divided, which mother would win?

Early on, I’d toyed with the idea of a different mother, but any full-fledged adolescent rebellion was short-circuited when, shortly before my eleventh birthday, my mother nearly died when my sister was born. Carolyn and Aunt Bessie were both present during the week of the difficult labor and birth, my mother’s return home, the bloodied sheets, the midnight dash to the hospital, three dark days of waiting, no resurrection in sight. Terrified and helpless, certain that my mother was dying, I begged answers from these women.

Neither, to my knowledge, had ever lied to me; both were incurably, sometimes brutally honest. “Yes,” both said. “She is very ill. No, I can’t promise she will live.”

Nights, unable to sleep, I walked to the upstairs window and stared down at the street, at the perforated line that divided it. I tried on one possibility, then another. If she died, which one would make the better mother? My choices, I remember thinking, were meager. Great Aunt Bessie was too old, too moody and emotionally unpredictable. I could imagine her, as I’d been told she’d often done when she was a newly married woman, suddenly getting fed up, strapping on her shoes in the middle of the night and lighting out for easier pastures. And Carolyn? Would she, like my mother, be waiting for me when I walked through the door?

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deck or shake the dice, trade Park Place for two railroads? Carolyn had so many interests. What if my science project was due the next day and her study door was closed? Or what if she left in the middle of dinner for one of her classes—a grown woman going to school at night, taking religion and philosophy, what was the world coming to? I’d never seen Carolyn at a sewing machine—did she even own a needle? Carolyn was a good cook; I’d eaten many meals in her house. But was her cooking the kind I could depend on, day after day? Her menus, when she executed them, seemed European, inspired. What about those days when she wasn’t inspired? My mother was like the trail cook on Wagon Train, capable of daily miracles. No matter what was or wasn’t in the cupboard, there would always be a meal.

I also feared that Carolyn might be too hard a taskmaster. My mother granted me plenty of space, as she did all her children. Though she maintained adequate order, she was not strict, and I never felt pressured to pursue a certain track. Opportunities were offered, but not insisted upon. We all took piano lessons, but after a few years, no one was forced to continue; my younger brother and I kept on simply because we wanted to. As high school graduation approached and my friends were admitted into prestigious colleges, my mother did not berate me when I made noises about getting a job, maybe taking evening classes at the junior college. She encouraged my writing ability but did not push me into English or journalism, and for a few years I changed majors the way I changed clothes, trying on one, dropping it before the mirror, then scrambling for something to suit my present mood: piano, voice, theater, dental hygiene.

Poetry was a garment I tried on early and never totally discarded, though I kept my passion, and most of my early attempts, secret.

Outside of English teachers, the first person to whom I showed a poem was Carolyn. I was sixteen, and there were three characters in the poem: the universe, my existential angst/joy, and me. The universe was portrayed first as a huge cosmic womb, then as a potter.

I, in turn, was the infant being birthed, then the clay being formed into a vessel. (Looking back, I see the poem was not only sentimental and cloying; it was also technically inaccurate. Unaware of verbs for pottery-making, I’d resorted to the woodworker’s carved to describe what the universe had done to me.)

I recopied the poem in my best handwriting, with my best cartridge pen, onto dimpled blue stationary. When I showed it to Carolyn she gave her full attention, reading it slowly, thoughtfully.

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She did not tell me it was bad; she did not ask me, as one university professor would a few years later, to “please remove this from my presence, it is fouling the air.” She simply pointed to the last line, which read I am intricately carved. “I’d make one change,” she said.

“I’d insert ‘being’ right here, so that it reads ‘I am being intricately carved.’ We are never finished.”

During Carolyn’s last spring on this earth, she sent a letter saying that the cancer had metastasized to her liver, that she was trying to be hopeful but realistic, that she would like for me to visit. Soon. In the meantime, she was putting her things in order—what did I want?

I wrote back that I wanted to have her around for a long time. She dashed back a postcard: “Don’t get sentimental on me. Just tell me what you want.” In answer, I phoned to say that I’d love to have some of her books, especially the mythology, poetr y, and anthropology. “Wonderful!” she said. “Come when you can, we’ll go through them together. But when you see me, you can’t cry.” To be with Carolyn, in the shadow of her death, and not cry? Carolyn, for whom tears were as natural as breathing? I paused. “Okay,” she said. “You can cry a little, but not much. We don’t have time.”

During my preadolescence, the place in Carolyn’s house that most intrigued me was her bedroom. I’d never known a married woman with a room of her own. My parents always slept together; in my mind, marriage was synonymous with their double bed, and the closed door meant do not enter. Once, when our family was visiting friends, my parents were offered twin beds in the guest room. The children of both families made pallets on the living room floor. After the midnight movie was over and I discovered my pajamas were still in the guest room, I knocked softly. When I got no answer, I tiptoed in. There they were, curled together in the twin bed by the window, the other bed undisturbed.

I stared down at them—my father’s face pressed into the back of my mother’s neck, his arm flung across her waist. This is what it means, I thought, to be married.

So when I discovered that Carolyn and her husband had not only separate beds but separate rooms, I questioned my mother.

“People are different,” she said. Having failed to receive a satisfactory answer, I began probing, teasing out scenarios. Maybe they didn’t like each other any more—why else would married people sleep apart? What if they’d never slept together, not even when they were first married, and that’s why they had to adopt? Maybe they’d Crab Orchard Review ◆ 237

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had a fight a long time ago and one of them had slammed the door the way I did in my sister’s face sometimes and they never got around to making up. Then how to account to obvious affection between them—the handholding, the pats, the occasional loving glances across the room? Did he knock on her door? Did they kiss each other goodnight—and what kind of kiss—before parting at the stairs?

Was it like having a roommate?

Years passed and the riddle deepened. As I grew into adolescence and beyond, then into my own marriage, their sleeping arrangements came to signify a kind of sanity, a different brand of eroticism, perhaps, the polar opposite to the easy familiarity my parents shared.

Does distance keep passion alive? Maybe I’d had it wrong all these years. Maybe there were other ways to love, ways I’d never imagined.

The last day I saw Carolyn alive I was kneeling beside the bookshelf in her bedroom while she sat on a three-legged stool, supervising my selections. Her daughter had left for a moment to answer the phone, which rang incessantly those last few months. “Walt is the one I most worry about,” Carolyn said. “He loves me so much.”

The room suddenly emptied of all sound, as if a drain had been unstoppered, all our words sucked away. I snatched at the first noise I could find, a cliché. “What’s not to love?” She turned and faced me squarely, sternly, as if betrayed by my dishonesty, my inability to meet her on her chosen ground. “Plenty,” she said. “Plenty.”

She was right, of course. Dying people are almost always right— they have no time for insignificant babblings. There is plenty, in all of us, not to love. Yet plenty remains. In the last few weeks Carolyn’s edges, always sharp, had become even sharper, honed by pain and knowledge. All was centered on the flame of her impending death.

Though not yet finished, she was as close as she would get. I reached with one hand to touch her, my other hand on the books that had filled her shelves and would soon fill mine.

Carolyn and Aunt Bessie were both avid readers—self ish readers, as I am. My mother, who also loved to read, is only now catching up on all the books she denied herself during the years she was raising children. Carolyn not only read every book she could get her hands on, she also took them deeply into her mind— questioning, weighing, reconsidering. Though deeply religious (she taught Sunday School for forty years), Carolyn did not passively walk the party line. She tested every belief, each chapter and verse, 238 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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her worn King James laid side by side with concordances, the Greek originals, texts by Kierkegaard, William James, Aquinas. And she would argue—at the piano, in the garden, after one of her fine dinners, even before the dishes were cleared and stacked and washed.

She’d push aside the platters, stroke the cat’s back, and begin the debate with her son, her daughter, my father or me. Predestination.

Proofs for the divinity of Christ. The nature of faith or forgiveness, and why Southern Baptists should ordain women.

At the time, already chafing against the church’s restrictions and planning my escape to secular humanism, I failed to see why Carolyn remained loyal to the church. Was it her signature stubbornness? Perhaps it was simply a refusal to relinquish the fight.

Though she’d preached from a Baptist pulpit, ordination was denied her; when she applied to be a missionary, she was refused. Her son would later leave the church, partly for this reason, to become a Methodist minister. He officiated at Carolyn’s funeral, held in the Baptist church where she remained a member, and his words that day were part elegy, part diatribe against the denomination that had tried to force his mother into a subservient role.

I say try, for true to her nature, Carolyn managed to find a way.

Though never sanctioned by the Southern Baptist Convention, her missionary work nevertheless thrived. Wherever she and Walt were stationed, she taught reading to children and adults, distributed books, lobbied for the opening of schools and libraries. She also employed maids and other domestic workers (at a more than substantial wage) as a way to help not only her family but theirs.

Some of these maids were skilled needleworkers. Twenty-seven years ago Carolyn sent me the most beautiful wedding present I was to receive—a pair of embroidered pillow cases for which, I am certain, the maid was generously compensated.

When I think of Carolyn I think of beautiful things. Extravagant, even. “I love things too much,” she’d say. “I am too attached to this world.” Her bedroom, at the far end of the main floor, held a twin bed, one half of a matched set. The other half, her husband’s bed, was in a small basement room furnished with dormlike simplicity. But while Walt’s bed was anchored securely in the corner of the room—a bed for sleeping, plain and simple—hers floated like a small boat in a sea of exquisite clutter. Books, clothes, cards and letters, diaries, collections of hats and beads and jewelry from every continent on the globe.

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From her bed you could reach out and touch any part of her world, any treasure. And within sailing distance was a closet filled with lace blouses, silk dresses, matching gloves and purses and shoes.

Carolyn did not possess a casual wardrobe. She dressed in stockings and low-heeled pumps, accessorizing with jewelry and dramatically draped shawls or scarves. This suited her temperament and lifestyle, which I came to think of as “indoor,” as opposed to my mother’s more active “outdoor” life. Carolyn’s daughter, Karen, refers to her mother’s style as a “grand worldliness.” My mother’s beauty was—and still is—less intentional, something that happens accidentally on her way to something else. Though she often dresses up for weddings, parties, and other occasions, her inborn taste tends to the comfortable; when the occasion is over, she’s hurrying upstairs to change into jeans or khakis, sweaters or soft plaid shirts. This leaves her free to bend, to plant, to saddle a horse, lift a grandchild, scramble beneath a blackberry bush, clean out a shed. “Can you use this?” she’ll say, pushing a crate of dishes or a basket of linens in my direction. Apart from their sentimental attachment, material things mean little to my mother. She’ll give me anything I ask for.

Carolyn, though equally generous, was more selective about her possessions. “Now you can’t have this one,” she’d say, pulling a silk scarf from an open drawer filled with them. “But any of these just take your pick.” Even at the end of her life, she remained territorial. On our last afternoon together, we rummaged through bookshelves in her basement library. Each book was scrutinized individually. She’d hold it in her lap, hesitate, close her eyes as if recalling the book’s place in her life. African folklore, myth and magic, folk tales from Thailand and India, feminist theory, the history of the Negro in America, gemology. “For now, these,” she said, gesturing to the left side of the bottom shelf. Then a grand sweeping gesture that took in the whole room of books, her fringed shawl draping over the wooden crates. “When I’m gone, of course, they’re all yours.”

Through the years, Carolyn gave me many gifts; I never went home from a visit empty-handed. A string of seed pods from South Carolina, a turquoise ring, perfume bottles, the cameo pin that had belonged to her mother-in-law. The most frivolous yet intimate gift was a quilted lingerie case with pink tassels. It had belonged to her mother decades before, and it still held a pair of silk stockings in a pale, rosy shade.

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eyes and the full, slightly upturned lips that were Carolyn’s. Once, while we were watching a Marlene Dietrich movie, Carolyn began to weep.

“She looks like Mother,” she said. A grown woman crying for her mother? The sight derailed me. “She was so lovely, I wish you could have known her. How can someone that beautiful suddenly not be here?

How can that happen? Just like that—gone.”

A few years before Carolyn’s death, she and I were browsing in the gift shop of a Smithsonian museum, where she had been a volunteer docent. I was wearing garnet earrings, and when she saw a garnet necklace under the display glass she insisted on buying it for me despite my protests. “You worry too much about money,” she said. “Besides, I get a discount.” She hooked the clasp at my neck and stepped back to admire the purchase. “Garnet is the blood stone, you know,” she said.

“It signifies the deepest ties.” Recently, when I looked up garnet in her gemology book, I learned that it derives from pomegranate, the “apple of many seeds.” With its red juice and numerous offspring, the pomegranate is the traditional symbol for the womb and its lifegiving blood. The shrine of Our Lady of the Pomegranate shows the Madonna holding the fruit in one hand and the child in the other.

When did Carolyn become a mother? When she first saw her daughter, her son? Did the pregnancy begin in her mind? Perhaps it occurred in the first tears—of joy or pain—that she wept for her children. The Archbishop of Syracuse once wrote, “A woman who weeps always becomes, in the very act, a mother.” A few weeks ago I stood in the shower and cried for my niece, for all that awaits her. The violence of the weeping surprised me, wave after wave that gripped my belly and brought me to my knees; when my knees no longer held, I sat down hard, letting the water pour over me, a baptism. I’d chosen the shower, thinking that the sound of the water would muffle my tears, which always distress my husband. I imagine him outside the door, pacing, wringing his hands, frustrated at his inability to ease my “hysteria.” But this is no medieval terror, no empty womb gone roaming.

Emptiness does not contain the power to fill us. Or, as the Archbishop of Syracuse put it, “there has never been a sterile tear.” In ancient matriarchal tribes, all females were called mothers, regardless of which woman gave birth to the child. Look around; they’re still in our midst.

Foster mothers, adoptive mothers, sisters, nannies, teachers, aunts, mentors, grandmothers, godmothers. Step-mothers, all. Steps between.

They help complete the archetype, help bear the weight.

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The last time I saw Carolyn she was wearing a bright red dress and a shawl of Russian design, red roses against a black background. Over the phone she had warned me—“I’m a very sick woman, and I look it”—but even so, I audibly gasped when she met me at the door. Carolyn had always been a tall, substantially built woman who carried herself well. This woman was smaller, thinner. Though her face and neck still retained their dignified, almost haughty lift, her chest and belly had caved in, leaving hollows where there had once been roundness. All afternoon the phone kept ringing—friends, doctors, ministers, neighbors. She was a loved woman, but I suspected that the love had become too much for her. She told me that she was craving quiet, solitude, and I took this to mean that my presence was wearing on her.

I needed to go, to leave her to herself.

Quickly I finished packing my car—several boxes of books, a sack of Winesap apples Walt had gathered from a nearby orchard, and two framed collages of African tribeswomen that had once hung in Carolyn’s inner sanctum. But when it came time to say goodbye, I hesitated, my arm resting on the piano. As if she sensed my reluctance, her tone turned suddenly breezy. “Next time we’ll do the rest,” she said. “We’ll finish that last shelf. How about after Christmas?” Was this some new game, some new place she was leading me? We both knew she would not be here Christmas. Was she trying to protect me? Or was this, finally, the way she had chosen to release me?

I thanked her again for the collages. “They’re from the Ivory Coast,” she said. “Crafted from torn bits of butterfly wings. Did you notice that?” I nodded. Yes, I’d been studying them carefully for many years— two tribal women in profile, each wearing an extravagant headdress.

One woman is framed in gold leaf, the other in crude wood. The younger woman is tall, strong, a child bundled to her back. In her hand is a club-shaped pestle lifted above a mortar, as if about to grind grain for supper cakes. The other woman is smaller, older, hunched. The pestle has become a walking stick that supports her body, the only burden left to carry.

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Line Dancing

Sometimes I have to force myself to go line dancing—the weather is bad, I tell myself; you really should be studying—or sometimes I just don’t feel like being out, sitting at the bar between dances smoking too many cigarettes and getting a backache from trying too hard not to slouch; feeling like I am being looked at, which I am. But I force myself to go, because once there I am always happy, and when I’m dancing I am not thinking of anything else but the counts and the steps, not thinking about whatever it was that made me not want to go.

It is Chad Two, my roommate, distinguished by his numeral from my other roommate, Chad One (I feel, with these boys, that I am living in a Dr. Seuss story), who first introduces me to line dancing, entirely by accident. When I tell him I am moving, because I need to live alone, he seems kind of sad so I ask him if he’d like to go out for a beer. He takes me to Country Night at Maxie’s, located in the K-Mart parking lot, where line dancing lessons are in progress. Of course, Chad Two doesn’t dance, preferring instead to sit at the bar looking mysterious and sexy—a short, tough, redneck Iowa boy who is disconcertingly sweet under his posing—wearing a black cowboy hat and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and the muscles roll gently from his shoulders to his wrists—he’s got great arms; sipping a Lite beer, dipping Kodiak and spitting into a plastic cup in which the bartender has obligingly placed a paper napkin. Chad Two doesn’t dance, but I do, I’m not shy, I’ll dance anywhere but I can only dance with the music, I never really learned to dance with anyone else.

Let me lead, my father bellows. You follow or I’ll pop you one!

My father frequently bellows, and has never, ever popped anyone, and I laugh at his bluster. But Daddy, I say, I don’t know how. Which is true. I don’t know how to follow. No one has ever taught me about paying attention to my partner’s cues; no one has ever explained to me about dancing backwards, and now I can’t grasp the concept.

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to glide gracefully across the dance floor in my father’s arms. He would be proud; perhaps it would temporarily erase that worried, confused look with which he sometimes regards his three independent daughters—me unmarried; Terry, who owned a house before a wedding ring; Patty who kept her name, and he can never get used to that, although he seems a little more comfortable with the idea since I suggested he think of it not as a refusal of her husband’s name, but rather the desire to keep her father’s. The world, I think, has moved too quickly for my father. He does his best to keep up and I love him for that, but sometimes I know he just doesn’t understand how it all could be so different from what he imagined; how a man could come home from the war and marry the girl from across the street, who was just home from college, and have the large family—seven kids—he was supposed to have, and buy a house in the suburbs like all his brothers did for their families; how could it be that the script didn’t prepare him for the cost of all those children, for their many needs; and how could he have known that the girl he married would begin to suffocate under those needs, and that he wouldn’t know how to help her, so she would turn to school and work, her books and her own bed, and he would find solace in the seduction of scotch, two fingers, neat? He doesn’t understand the most basic thing, that his vision of the world was never more than a mirage—no, that’s too kind—it was a lie. It was the fiction of a world where people went to church, and men were successful, and women baked—my mother baked everything from scratch, I came home from school one day to find her weeping uncontrollably while she mixed up a batch of brownies. And in the world in which my father put his blind faith, women didn’t love other women, men didn’t love men, and women didn’t love men who loved men, and for this reason I cannot tell him that I am in love, torturous love, with one of my professors, and that she does not love me back; and for the same reason, I do not correct him when he assumes that my best friend Kenneth—who happens to be a man, who happens to be gay, and who happens to be the person I love most in the world—is my boyfriend. At my father’s wedding I danced with Kenneth, my arms flung around his shoulders and my face buried in his neck while we swayed, formless and connected, to some slow, sappy song.

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must accept what is at once his heaviest burden and most precious gift: forgiveness. Despite it all, his children love him.

Although my father knows we can do many other useful and beautiful things, his daughters can’t slow dance, we can’t follow, and I feel for his confusion. I know he would be proud if I could dance with him, if all his brothers could see him dancing with his elegant, grownup daughter. He is proud anyway, almost all the time— seven children, he says, and seven winners, even though we are not always “winners” by conventional standards. But we’re okay, and sometimes I want to give him a gift just because it would make him happy, and if I could dance like a real girl, that would do it. But I can’t follow, and he wants to lead.

We still dance at weddings, my father and I, to fast songs, bopping and spinning and bumping into each other until we are out of breath and laughing. And I think sadly about gliding and grace, but I know I can’t be pushed, however gently, to take a step if I can’t see it first.

When The Guy Who Runs Line Dancing starts to teach the third dance, I join a bunch of other people on the floor where we will learn to break the dance down into simple counts of four, as he puts it. The problem I have, I can’t tell my left from my right, makes things a bit difficult. Direction is important in line dancing. But everyone is pretty patient when I careen across the floor going entirely the wrong way. That would be your other left, ma’am, The Guy Who Runs Line dancing says when I invariably end an eightcount combination with my weight on the wrong foot, and everyone laughs. At the end, after learning the dance passably well, I come off the floor, sweaty and winded, and inform Chad Two that this is the most fun I have ever had in my life.

The Guy Who Runs Line Dancing has the longest legs I have ever seen on a human. He is tall and skinny and a very good dancer.

He comes to Maxie’s every Wednesday night, and he has a following of people there now. I like to watch him move as he and his partner, Heather, demonstrate each dance before he teaches it. I sit at the bar reveling in his grace and rhythm and thinking with good-natured resignation that there is no way I will ever be able to learn this one, it looks too hard, too many triple-steps, which always make me lose count, or too many quarter-turns, which make me lose track of which direction I am meant to be facing. It’s worth coming to watch him dance, and I wonder if all these people who dance with him week Crab Orchard Review ◆ 245

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after week know that he is gay. I look around and think that these people probably don’t know; it is easier to think that he and Heather are a couple.

The Guy Who Runs Line Dancing is very kind. I believe he actually cares about whether people are understanding the simple counts of four he attempts to teach us.

The key to line dancing is to stand in line and follow the rules— the only instance I can think of in which doing so will yield positive results. I am usually too impatient to wait in line, and my relationship with rules is uneasy, I break them often, without even knowing it, they are subtle sometimes and often unfair, or at least illogical. And there are so many sets of rules. To which one should I adhere, how do I know, and how, I wonder often, are we ever to get along, when everyone is guided by their own rules, and hardly anyone thinks to explain or defend them? Anyway, I think that this is why I like line dancing, because I don’t have to think, just listen and I do not worry about the consequences of simply following the rules. And I don’t need a partner to line dance.

I’m gonna take a shower and go, Matthew says, and he is sitting on the edge of my bed, naked, when I come back from walking Fred down Brooklyn streets, quiet on weekend mornings. I say okay, but I am a little confused because usually he stays. I always get up first and walk the dog, leaving him asleep, nested in sheets and blankets tangled from last night’s lovemaking, and when I return an hour or so later, I wake him up and we make love again, and then he leaves and we both go on with our separate days. For nearly three years, on and off, we have been doing this. Matthew is my lover. We get along intellectually and sexually, I explain to my friends, but there’s no emotional connection. Still, he usually stays until mid-morning, and I don’t understand why he’s not, but he doesn’t offer any information and I don’t worry about it. I change into my robe while he is showering, I’ll go next, and then I put on a CD. I’ve been listening lately, again and again, to a certain Jackson Browne song—Freedom for South Africa, goes the chorus, Justice for Nelson Mandela. I listen to this song because Nelson Mandela has recently been freed from prison and I am strangely elated, happy in a deeply personal way, and my happiness makes me feel lonely because no one else I know is infused with joy in quite the same way as I am, as if something very good is actually happening to me. But Nelson 246 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Mandela is coming out of jail, where he had been for 27 years, as many years as I have been alive, and I am joyful. I remember Raven, a little girl Fred and I once met at an anti-nuclear demonstration.

She made me a poster, which I still have. Above a portrait of Fred and me in front of the New York City skyline are four short sentences: We Want Peaces. No Bombs. Free Nelson Mandela. Fred Is A Dog. And except for the last, they have all seemed like just words, slogans, empty hopes and impossible dreams—Fred is a dog, the only thing that seems real, although to Raven they are equally real sentiments in her child’s mind, and maybe I should remember that, that faith in possibility which may be our last chance. And now Nelson Mandela is being freed from jail, where he has been for 27 years, as many years as I have been alive, and I am dancing. I whirl around my living room in my robe, stretching and hopping and spinning and thinking that maybe there is hope after all. Freedom for South Africa.

Justice for Nelson Mandela. Matthew emerges from the shower and watches me as he dresses. I hardly notice he is there, and dancing is so much fun that I replace Jackson Browne with Madonna, really loud Madonna, and continue to fly around my living room, which happens to have varnished hardwood floors and no carpets, and not much furniture—it was meant to be a dance floor, I always think.

Matthew sits on the couch, watching me for a long time with a little smile. Finally I turn off the music and head for the shower, first kissing him good-bye. See you next weekend, we tell each other.

We’ll talk midweek to decide on the night. It’s always Friday or Saturday.

Later that day, Matthew calls me. I am surprised when I hear his voice. We don’t talk on the phone much. You know, he says, I should have stayed. I should have ripped all my clothes off and danced with you, and then made love to you. I should have stayed.

Yes, you should have, I think, although to him I say something noncommittal. I am unsure of his meaning, and unfamiliar with what seems to be a wistful undertone in his voice; we long ago reached an understanding, Matthew and I. He is a painter and his work will always be his love. Matthew often smells like turpentine, which I like, and sometimes I find little dabs of paint in unexpected places on his body. He paints naked, he would do everything naked if he could, he walks two miles from the train station to sunbathe nude at Jones Beach. When I sleep with Matthew, I feel like I am sleeping with Art. Intellectual and sexual agreement, I tell my friends, but Crab Orchard Review ◆ 247

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no emotional connection. I should have stayed, he says. I should have danced.

Yes, I think. You should have danced.

Sometimes The Guy Who Runs Line Dancing will teach a TwoStep for a little change of pace, and I will sit it out, sit at the bar with my glass of Budweiser and my cigarettes, and watch, because you need a partner for Two-Step. And I know I could probably find a partner from among the cowboys who eye me with curiosity—who is that quiet girl, dressed in black, sitting alone at the bar week after week—I am an anomaly, and every once in a while one will approach me, like the one who actually asked me if I came here often (yes), or the one who, without saying a word, placed a pitcher of beer in front of me like some kind of ceremonial offering, and when I looked at him with a question, he said D’ya want some? I’m driving, I told him, miming hands on a steering wheel because I’m not sure he understands the idea of not drinking if you’re going to drive, and I hope no one I love is on the road when he gets in his car to go home tonight. I could find one of those cowboys to Two-Step with me, but one time I did that. It was a waltz, and sometimes I think I would give a lot to be able to waltz, to skim like a cloud across the dance floor—how I would love to be able to waltz.

He approached me smiling—Wanna try? he asked, holding out a hand. I can’t waltz, I tell him. Neither can I, he says, but we can try to learn together. OK, I jump up from my bar stool, I am excited.

But he keeps leading me out of the line of circling couples, into the center where he pulls me up against his body and kind of sways, and I may be naive, but I know this is not dancing, it’s body pressing, which is okay, but I’d like some choice in the matter. And besides, I don’t want to press bodies, I want to waltz. So I sit out the Two-Step, but I watch it intently, enviously, and I wonder if I could ever do it, but I think not, because I can’t dance backwards.

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Balbo, Ned. Galileo’s Banquet. Washington, DC: Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1998. 67 pages. $12.00.

In his first book, Galileo’s Banquet, Ned Balbo uses the heavens as a mirror to reflect personal and human misgivings while still making redemption and forgiveness appear possible. Immediately we know what we are dealing with: in the collection’s first poem, “Losing Ourselves,” the speaker identifies himself as one “far from his true home,” a person “lost past all hope.” However, Balbo won’t let us find futility, not even in the painful excavation of what appears to be his own shrouded adoption; he leaves plenty of clues, dates, and dedications so that the line between poet and speaker is intentionally blurred. This forces the poems to be believable, certainly, as well as matter-of-fact, a feat they achieve without being stark. The second poem, “Eclipse,” in answer to the first, confronts us with the question, “Shouldn’t somebody tell / Them not to give up yet?” This tone is kept constant throughout the book—in light of the worst, no one is encouraged to stop seeking. While “a black star sharpens and falls,” it does not appear to come down on the neck of any unsuspecting person.

In organizational terms, Balbo refuses to progress simply from the heavens to his personal ghosts. He re-expands to a diverse set of material, culled from pop culture, history, art and the traditions of verse. His agility with forms is complemented by his constant use of questions; we get the sense that these poems are questing themselves in a “banquet of constellations” so vast they can only know some of the answers. The stars are a central conceit, turned over and polished repeatedly. The space motif swirls through the book on different levels, almost as if Balbo marks time by space exploration. This is a book weaned on space travel, craning back to Galileo and forward to Mars with Apollo and Challenger marking their own passages in between. One particularly haunting perspective emerges in “ Red Planet”: And in the shadow of boiling vats, you touch down on the pitted landscape, quarry scars and tire tracks, glancing once more Crab Orchard Review ◆ 249

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at the horizon—There, where once a blue gem floated, and our need was merciless—Yes, there This book speaks from the future, as well as the human past, and examines the always “marred” surfaces of the planets and scarred terrain. There seems to be a steady voice and also an overlay of consciousness which is the same voice affirming, “Yes, there.” Balbo occupies a number of voices in a book which could seem overwhelmingly confessional otherwise. From Aristarchos to Frankenstein’s wife, there is a sense of disparate speakers coming together, all under the guidance of the poet. Finally, the voice of these poems, in addition to investigating earthly and heavenly panoramas, always interrogates the inner landscape.

—Reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack

Davis, Olena Kalytiak. And Her Soul Out of Nothing. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 94 pages. $11.95.

And Her Soul Out of Nothing, Olena Kalytiak Davis’s first book, is a graceful telling of the human condition, both spiritual and physical.

Part prayer, part incantation, her writing rings of an emotional truthfulness, carving out Davis’s terrain. It is a story of loss and survival, death and resurrection, the ethereal and the real bolstered by a brand of wisdom and empirical knowledge atypical of a first book.

Through such polarizations, the book’s complicated tensions are birthed and Davis’s stories are set in motion. Take, for example, the first poem in the book: The poem is an epilogue, a key to understanding that which is to come, addressing the reader as the “visitor,” as in the title, “A Few Words for the Visitor in the Parlor.”

In this poem, she introduces her readers/visitors to the grief that will find voice throughout the book, positioning her readers as witnesses to the events of a life. The first page of the book lists two names—those of her Ukrainian parents—and their birth and death dates, like twin gravestones, stack an emotional weight upon all that follows. It makes sense, then, that the speaker of the first poem is cast as a survivor with a “cloud-covered heart,” mentioning her mother’s death while alluding to the “Ukrainian blood” that was 250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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“all over the place.” These are not easy images or simple topics to face, especially so early in the book. As if aware of this effect, Davis ends the poem with, “Today, the sky was white. And the ground was white, too. Yet, I could tell them apart. They were that easy to distinguish.” In this moment, as the visitor and speaker back away from the “living room made entirely of death,” both enter a less foreboding landscape—one that remains stark, but is significant as the grief and death distinguishing this book. There earth and sky, the tangible and intangible, reality and possibility become the path speaker and reader follow, like refugees leaving a pillaged homeland, into the hopeful unknown. This move not only provides tension but also erects the structural framework for the book, a weaving between grief and hope.

In a poem that comes toward the end of the book, Davis again addresses loss, but this time the emphasis is on the cyclic nature of life and death. The following are the opening lines of “Around The Edges Of a Cold Cold Day”: Under the ice they’re dragging the river, but I don’t mean for this to signify some kind of casualty, some kind of loss.

Even now a bicycle is being stubbornly pedaled around the edges of this wintry day, the cold snapping in its spokes, the red metal frame.

Although the speaker in this poem goes on to explain the river is being dragged in search of a drowned man, Davis never allows the poem to settle there. Instead she resurrects the moment, exemplified in the beginning of this first stanza. A bicycle, the innocent and childlike “red metal frame,” focuses our attention above the water in a stubborn and unromantic sort of hopefulness. Although a stark image, the bicycle, with its continuous circling, is a persistent form and symbol of life.

Much of Davis’s poetry concerns itself with spirituality, mortality, and immortality. Such territory is not often confronted with such intensity, if at all, so early in one’s poetic career. Her closest predecessors in voice and theme may be Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Forché’s The Angel of History. Still, the hallmark of Davis’s work is its uniqueness. She is not really like anyone.

Moreover, no comments on And Her Soul Out of Nothing could be Crab Orchard Review ◆ 251

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complete without mentioning Davis’s unique conjuring of the soul.

The title itself is an indication of the manner in which this is achieved: the soul is conjured like a fine lace of air, diaphanous, breathed to life on the page. Her images are fresh and unfamiliar territory, but close enough to the map of associative thought that her readers can trace the allusions: the “light” of the spiritual world, the warmth of the “flicker” inside as a symbol of the speaker’s spirituality. The soul becomes a more realized entity than the physical body which, in its yearning, takes the soul in as a kind of sustenance, a surprisingly life-giving force.

In “Something More Fragile Than This,” the speaker’s relationship to death (and life) is again given voice and immediacy. Davis begins: Quick, before our bodies turn themselves in, with a reverence reserved for the dead touch me because I want to remember how beautiful I still am.

While Spring snows around us, cracking her eggs on our windows, in her meager dress of yellowing-white, because I want to rise into today.

To “want to remember how beautiful I still am” is the fleeting moment, the days whisking by. Davis plucks this moment out of the air and pinches it onto the page. The contrast between living and dying and the necessity to recognize these two realities is the urgent and imperative message of the book, this poem, and especially this stanza. Make no mistake, this speaker means to live. She begs our ear. As visitors, we step into the parlor between the bookends of birth and death to witness the “rise into today,” Davis’s world already set in motion.

—Reviewed by Maria McLeod

Goodison, Lorna. Turn Thanks. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

The book is very attractive with its cover painting by the poet. But the curious title caught my attention first: Turn thanks? Two poems are titled “Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry” and “Turn Thanks to Grandmother Hannah.” What is this turn thanks? I decided that it is akin to the “return” thanks of my childhood—always a curious phrase 252 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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in itself: return thanks?—and also a turn, a twist, in which one gives thanks for something that isn’t immediately recognizable as a blessing: ’Turn thanks.

But Lorna Goodison’s poems give thanks to the person addressed: “Turn thanks to Miss Mirry / ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me. / She said she had passed through hell bareheaded. . . .”

Indeed, Miss Mirry seems to be the domestic helper from hell until the speaker is a child with red, itching measles, which Miss Mirry soothes by bathing her in a washtub of water heated in a kerosene tin, herbs sprinkled in it. The poem ends: “Turn thanks now to Miss Mirry / African bush healing woman.”

The first section of the book, “My Mother’s Sea Chantey,” is rooted in Goodison’s Caribbean heritage. It is a section of delightful poems— delightful both for the images and the sound you hear seeing them on the page. You want to feel the words in your mouth. For example, “Notes from My Mother’s Village before the Village Got Light” begins: In those times, she says, in October tenth month of the calendar year the 0 in the ten would become an opening a funnel through which rain would pour.

And it is a section of longing—“I wanted to be that simple woman / who had cooked you Saturday soup / using all golden foods.”

The second section of the book continues the Caribbean images but, also, moves further from them. It focuses on ancestors, dreams, memories, and teachers. She looks at how her grandfather lost his land, how her uncle was buried, about Columbus’s disappointment in the Caribbean. More self-conscious, it is no less satisfying.

The third section of the book, “The Mango of Poetry,” troubles me. Many of the individual poems are wonderfully evocative: for example, in “Moon Cakes and Anna Akhmatova,” the author, having tea alone on a cold Sunday afternoon, thinks of Akhmatova. But as a whole, the section is a reach, an effort to showcase the poet’s education and connection to world literature. Poems about Max Ernst, Van Gogh, and Yeats, to name a few, make me wonder if someone decided a simple book of lyric poems wasn’t sufficient.

The fourth section, “God a me,” returns to the rhythms and dialects and the lyric sensuality of the islands, even though the setting is sometimes snowbound. In these poems, Goodison combines Jamaica Crab Orchard Review ◆ 253

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and Ann Arbor, the intellectual and the sensualist. The combination is marvelous. “A Quartet of Daffodils” exemplifies this section: “I think it must be spring now because today / I feel so tender.” But my favorites are the wild woman poems, “Bringing the Wild Woman Indoors” and “The Revival Song of the Wild Woman,” which edge into experimental form. “The wild woman will never let you go back to living alone . . . she says that you are to throw stones in Hope River and trouble the water. . . . to wear brimstone red and to wrap your head and to move seamlessly up and down between the worlds of spirit and sense. . . .”

The seamless moving up and down between spirit and sense makes this book wonderful. It is a book I recommend to readers who like to inhabit more than one territory. Turn thanks to Ms. Goodison, a woman who has read widely and knows the Caribbean, who writes poems that can make you wear brimstone red and wrap your head and move.

—Reviewed by Kathryn Kerr

Malena Mörling. Ocean Avenue. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Press, 1999. 75 pages. $12.00.

Clouds, bag ladies, violinists, skeletons, pigeons, salt, and warehouses cohabitate in Malena Mörling’s first book of poetry, Ocean Avenue. The title is appropriate for there are mentions of the ocean throughout the book, though not specifically as a body of water. The ocean is a sky, a consciousness, a place to live and breathe, a place where so many life forms belong to each other: Because the ocean is also the air: the air that floats above the crowded intersections in any city and the air that hangs in doorways of houses that are suddenly deserted.

If the simplistic label “nature poetry” were used to describe Mörling’s work, in the case of poems entitled “Air,” “Constellations,” “Three Daffodils,” or “Dusk,” it would be true, at least on an elemental level. But the importance of the modern structures which espouse and contract these natural things might be neglected. What 254 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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could be found through a quick reading of this luminous work is that where items like air, aether, and ashes are acknowledged or noticed holds as much power, beauty, and form as the items of focus.

The subjects of the poems are often times seen from a city, train, or sidewalk—a modern setting, not a rural one. And the doorway or helmet or body which holds these things together exist as necessary things seen as the primary subjects of the poems, for they provide the setting for the subjects, the ‘of this world’ element in a highly spiritual volume of poetry.

In the collection’s first poem, “Visiting,” Mörling only begins to speak on matters of the spiritual atmosphere in which all things are united: “In the shape of a human body / I am visiting the earth / the trees visit / in the shapes of trees.” And Mörling ties trees and people and sky and ocean together in one of the last poems of the book, “When I Was Living Near the Ocean,” when she looks up “through the green wigs of the trees” and sees the ocean. Is it safe for a poet to say that everything is connected to everything else, in that simple language? I think Mörling might say yes, for in her poem “For the Woman With the Radio,” she writes: “Everywhere we are neither moving away from / or toward one another. . . .”

Mörling has already been compared to Whitman and Blake by Philip Levine in his Foreword to Ocean Avenue: Whitman for her expansiveness and multitudinous universality, Blake for her seeming simplicity and visionary instances. But what impresses me the most is the refreshing honesty and lack of labored craft in her work. Truly the mark of a good writer is for the work to appear as if the words came spontaneously. Mörling’s poems do seem spontaneous and meditative, natural. She asks the questions usually only children have the boldness to ask, and replies with similar directness, as in “Ocean Avenue”: What will you bring with you when you die?

Not your name.

Not your body.

Not a single photo.

Not a single flower.

The list goes on. but what’s the use?

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In a time where much “good” poetry is hard or sparse, a nonpoet or child might not “get it.” But Mörling’s work is refreshingly to the point, surprisingly orderly, and full of entire images. Mörling’s poetry is good not because it is easy, but because it can be understood by any “literalist of the imagination,” any reader who desires change.

Her lines, like these from her prose poem “Dusk,” invite readers to understanding and contemplation: This is the moment when everything stops, when we lie like dropped clocks in our beds. Only the refrigerators keep running, clicking on and off, humming in the night, like those who fear sleep and sigh and sigh, in great need for something to change in them.

—Reviewed by Ruth Ann Daugherty

Tim Seibles. Hammerlock. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999. 113 pages. $14.00.

The poem “Manic: A Conversation with Jimi Hendrix” begins with: “All these hang-ups, all this time wasted when / everything really could be really groovy.” This sentiment is the crux of Tim Seibles’ latest book, Hammerlock. He confronts the “hang-ups” of society with a montage of lyric imagery and unflinching personas.

He touches on the spectrum of culture, sometimes settling on the “hang-ups,” other times relating just how “groovy” things can be.

Seibles is able to do this with invigorating language that reflects his own pleasure in manipulating words. Still, Hammerlock is a hard testament of misguided American society—whether it be in our warped interpersonal behavior or our worship of pop culture.

The book begins with “Check Outside,” an unsettling assessment of pre-millennium tension: “Listen to a city late at night: / the deadbolts clapped into place, / tv’s spitting on the floor, upstairs / mothers hammering Jesus / into their black thumbs.” As climacterical as “Check Outside” is, it is still a necessary understanding: Necessary because in order to appreciate society’s pleasures, you must also know its uncomfortable side.

Make no mistake, Seibles speaks of the world as he sees it. His undeviating eye sometimes makes it as difficult to separate the dubious 256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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from the pleasing. “Midnight: The Coyote, Down in the Mouth” is an example of this juxtaposition: I’ve been after the road-runner for so long—I can’t tell if it’s hunger, love, or just plain stupidity.

Maybe that’s what’s so goddamn funny: my life whittled down to a riot of wild pursuits and slim chances to grab something I don’t even understand. . . .

Part of the pleasure inherent in Seibles’ poetry is his equanimity with pop culture: The Coyote is an unblemished example of America’s need-driven society. “Midnight: The Coyote, Down in the Mouth,” like the other persona poems in Hammerlock, is successful because Seibles allows the character to develop in his own voice. Unlike many other poets who write persona poems, Seibles does not try to adjust his voice to imitate the persona—Seibles gives himself over completely.

This ability to speak in many voices is not limited to fictional personas. Hammerlock extends its reach into the realm of the past as well, channeling familiar and unfamiliar voices. “Outtakes from an Interview with Malcolm X after Mecca” shows Seibles’ range: My going to prison simply made it clear that I had already been in prison.

If you misinform a man his mind becomes a cage, and everything he does is just him reaching a paw between the bars; you get too close, you get clawed. Next question.

Seibles so effortlessly flows from one persona to the next, it is at times difficult to distinguish his poems from transcriptions of conversations. Poems written in his voice sound as natural as the persona poems; but while transitioning from his own voice to Malcolm X to Jimi Hendrix to the Coyote, Seibles never ceases to make his point. He never restrains his critique of society and never hinders his enjoyment of the English language. Whatever else might Crab Orchard Review ◆ 257

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be taken from Hammerlock, it will remain a panorama of American society—a snapshot that catches everything, even the cobwebs in the corners.

—Reviewed by Adrian Harris

Coyne, John ed. Living on the Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers.

Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1999. 317 pages. $17.95.

In assembling an anthology of stories from writers who spent time in the Peace Corps, editor John Coyne successfully delivers a variety of perspectives of American life abroad—our narrators, primarily third person (thus giving the readers, who are the extreme outsiders here, a more objective look), take us to the more remote regions of Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and various other nations that the general American does not get to experience outside of the occasional nightly news report or PBS travel special. One of the really nice things about this anthology is that as readers we are given ample room to fill in environmental details ourselves without the artifice of the exotic: there is definite nostalgia running behind the voices in these stories, but the narrators take care to keep objectivity in the descriptions. They are sensitive to the cultures and environments they must adapt to but are not overwhelmed by them to the point of sentimentality.

For the most part, thankfully, we are spared in these stories from a supporting cast of broken-English-speaking villagers; just as the writers experienced while living away from the tourist locales of the countries they served in, these displaced and often lonely American characters must become a part of something else. They miss their homes, their lovers. They miss certain restaurants and speaking English. But they learn other languages and customs. In Paul Theroux’s opening story, “White Lies,” we encounter fine examples of this blend of cultures in speech: “Let’s go outside,” said Jerry in Chinyanja.

“It is not necessary,” said Ameena. “I have something for you. . . .”

The first person narrator is an inside-outsider relating to us the events of a secret relationship between a foreign researcher and a girl from 258 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the village but has enough knowledge of the local culture to present the story without having to speculate meaning in conversation. And conversation plays a key role in all of these stories, for these American characters must meet other cultures on unfamiliar terms.

Frequently our protagonists must seek help. They are in need of food or security or someone to communicate with to assuage their loneliness. They must climb inside another way of living.

The inside-outsider status also allows us to feel that these tales are controlled but not cold—a difficult task to do when writing stories that are, by nature of their inhabitants (multi-racial, -cultural, and -religious), entirely political. But the seventeen writers featured take steps to showcase the stories more than the political background. At times this feels too cautious—heavy exposition of character history and conflict pushes off scene for some time in perhaps too many of the stories, but the histories involved play significant roles in understanding motivations later on; and with the average length of the stories being a little more than eighteen pages, we can allow for longer setups—it’s what the editor, Coyne, is asking us to do: take time with these stories.

Aside from a preface that tries too hard to justify the existence of this anthology when the anthology is solid enough—paradoxically, its seven pages aim to imply that this anthology stands on its own— we have here seventeen interesting stories of America outside of America, of characters forced to live outside of and further discover themselves. These stories move us toward a more global understanding of what Chekhov believed a short story should move us toward: truth.

—Reviewed by Chris Kelsey

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Ivón Gordon Vailakis

la naranja todavía es ajena

recorro y vuelvo a calles que conozco con sabor a naranja agria de tapiales compartidos y naranjas robadas de vecinos vuelvo retorno al país de naranja ajena donde no se pela todavía y saboreo el ácido del exilio errante en la lengua y vuelvo y retorno porque no se pela todavía porque tu piel es cáscara del cielo donde sembré mi corazón en tu polvo y traigo un pedazo sin raíz corazón en el norte donde sangra por volver a la trinchera de las pesadillas y vuelvo y retorno a este camino vuelvo al domicilio pavimento de mi infancia en las preguntas que ya saben me fui y ustedes se quedaron vuelvo arrugada de recuerdos y mi ventana será de otra y la guardilla con asombro de sueño y vigilia será de otro donde la lluvia será de otra 260 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

IvĂłn Gordon Vailakis

The flesh of the orange still belongs to someone else translated by J.C. Todd As though rereading a letter, I walk the thorofares and return to the streets that I know with a taste of bitter orange of shared earthen walls and oranges stolen from neighbors I come back I give myself back to the country of oranges that belong to someone else where the skin is not yet peeled away and I savor the acid of exile that polarizes my tongue and I come back because the skin is not peeled yet because your skin is the husk of the sky where I cultivated my heart in a pinch of your dust And I bring along a piece without root heart in the north where the blood runs to come back to the trenches of night terrors and I come back and give myself back to this road I come back to the address paved over by my childhood and the questions that you already know I left and you stayed behind I return wrinkled by memories and my window will belong to another and the attic with its astonishment of dream and insomnia will belong to another and the rain will fall on another Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 261

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y vuelvo a las calles y me pierdo vuelvo a los nombres que recuerdo al cielo ojos de abrazo donde la naranja todavía es ajena.

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and I come back to the streets and lose myself in the names I remember to the sky of an embrace where the flesh of the orange still belongs to someone else.

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Borges Ascending: An Excerpt from the Novel Quién translated by Joan Lindgren . . . And the symbols of the Great Parodist live on in the same book that Homer, Virgil and Dante wrote. It seems like a lie that all of these eclogues and syllogisms could have been written by the same person.

I remember the evening when I met him in Sitges. The first thing I thought when I was able to overcome my fear and actually confront those dead but luminous eyes of his was that all those convex seas, all those deserts, tigers, shadows and knives, all those labyrinths, those literary figures of speech, those libraries had surged forth from the head of this little old man whose totality here in front of me added up to no more than an undefined particle of the universe.

How many times had I seen him in photos in this same identical dark suit, same walking stick? So that when he arrived in his wheelchair he appeared to me more a symbol of himself than a real person.

As soon as I learned of his arrival in Sitges I went to the Hotel Calipolis and asked at the front desk if they could give me a room near to Borges’. After studying a large register the receptionist smiled and told me that due to a recent cancellation, the only free room in the house was the one right next door to his. I took that as a sign, of course, that would lead me into the path of the master. In the elevator I went up to the second floor and entered Room 235 with a slow but firm step. Everything inside seemed very familiar, as in those dreams which we believe we recognize as something we have already lived.

It was an ample space and predominantly white in color. The blinds were lowered, but through them rays of afternoon striped the furniture and walls with orange. A fly buzzed intermittently, illumined in the rectangles of dust and light. Left alone, I closed the doors to the balcony to shut out the noise from the oceanside street and I pressed my ear to the wall that separated our rooms.

Above the faint murmur of bathers and the sea, I could hear—at a distance that contradicted my physical nearness—the female voice of Maria Kodama. In a few of the silences, another voice, much 264 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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more tenuous but hoarse, seemed to me to be that of a stammering monster from beyond the grave. I waited a few moments until I deduced—such was the faintness and distortion through the wall— that these grave tones issued from the Great Parodist himself. Only then did I perceive the musicality of the voice, its Argentine cadence, only then could I guess some words that, out of context, seemed far to me from his works. Then, aware that the moment would never repeat itself, I wanted to go closer, to somehow leap over the barrier that distanced us now more than ever. I sat on the bed, facing the light. A piece of furniture too big to be a night table ran parallel to my gaze. I decided to phone him. On the other side I heard the steps of Maria Kodama arrive at the telephone.

“Hello. Would this be Maria?” I asked, encouraged by a familiarity all too unjustified.

“Who am I speaking with?”

“My name is Antonio Lopez; I’m a professor at the University of Barcelona, specialist in your husband’s work. I thought that maybe I could take advantage of his being in Sitges to meet him in person.”

My referring to him as “your husband” only accentuated the strangeness of the situation. Maria’s voice reached me through the telephone as well as its echo from the other side of the wall, as if two separate people were speaking to me at once.

“Borges is very tired from the journey and needs to rest. Perhaps if you speak with Professor Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the person with whom we organized the program in Spain, he might find you a spot.”

I was tempted to say I was in the hotel, in the next room, in fact, and that we could find the spot right here, but thinking that might sound like pressure or intimidation, I said goodbye and hung up. After a few minutes the steps of Maria Kodama were directed towards the wall to which my ear was placed. There was a silence. It was as if she were spying on me. Then, hearing the doors of the balcony open, I went out on mine. There was Borges, on my left, less than two meters away. His eyes, seemingly focused on some point on the wide blue sea, suddenly were directed towards mine.

“What a lovely city and what a lovely evening,” I heard, though without his gaze ever resting on me.

It was the magic of the moment, I thought, and of the joints I had smoked for the occasion, that the Great Parodist was speaking to me. Surprised, I remained a few minutes without answering. How many times had I met him in my dreams? How many times had I Crab Orchard Review ◆ 265

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imagined a conversation with him? so that now his words seemed like a mirage. But I found the courage to say something.

“Great Parodist, it’s I, the young Borges you meet in your stories.

Chance, which brought us together at a hotel in far-off Adrogué, has now brought us together here.”

A long pause. Then a smile, which came as a great relief to me.

“Chance, a Persian word which means dice.”

A puff of breeze ruffled a few strands of his fine, long white hair. He went on talking.

“The hotel at Adrogué was demolished years ago, only the words of a dream remain. Borges and I are reconciled. Already his smile reflects something of mine.”

That reply to my words was like a wink of complicity with those books I had read so many times. For a moment I felt like the recipient of this wink, which made of me a chosen one. I remembered the last lines of “The Immortal One” as if they were far-off music. I re-read them from memory, out loud.

“When the end is near, no images from memory remain; only words remain.”

Another disturbing silence and then an enigmatic smile lit up his face for a second. I felt then that he was vacillating between anxiety and fulfillment, as if to intensify the oneiric nature of the situation. I took out another cigarette, the kind I use compulsively. I realized there were no matches, and to ask a match from an ascetic blind man seemed to me the height of irony. . . So I remembered a doctor I knew in Morocco telling me one night of debauchery that the effect of hash when ingested was much more intense than when smoked.

Never doubting him for a moment, I extracted a big piece of hash, the last one in the box, and after chewing it laboriously, swallowed it.

The Great Parodist remained silent within his interior smile, as in those photos forever fixed in my mind. The old silence began to thicken between us again but caused no distress. A few minutes passed during which we said nothing. I experienced then a multiple hallucination which I keep clear in memory and the years cannot erode. Drunk with happiness, Borges began to levitate, all the while singing the psalms in Aramaic of the Truths of The Arc. I saw him rise, enchanted, absorbed, with the same slow escape from gravity that a zeppelin rises, savoring each moment, each cubic foot that he rose into the sky. With violins in the background—I believed they 266 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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came from On High—he stopped approximately eight meters above my head (twenty meters above the level of the beach). On the boardwalk the passers-by stopped to listen and to point him out up there. Judicious fathers and solicitous mothers were trying to explain the phenomenon to their offspring. No one could apparently understand the language in which he spoke. One old bather, with a long beard connoting Hindu wisdom, ventured a few lovely Alexandrian quatrains. From her balcony, Maria Kodama reined sweetly: “Come now, Georgie, don’t make me lose my temper.”

But the Great Parodist, disobedient, kept up his psalmody, there in the air. His face was rejuvenated by many years and his voice, cheeky, authoritarian even, was no longer his own. I felt something at my hand, and focusing, I saw a crystal clear thread that joined me to him. Now he seemed like a comet that I was holding on to. Below the crowd was suddenly quiet; even the children and the dogs were mute. And then an ineffable miracle occurred: I saw a great light, high over all the other lights and I saw various moons moving above; I saw my old psychiatrist, the one who had committed suicide along the coast of Garraf, waving to me from the beach; I saw an enormous shadow over the water moving very fast towards the horizon. Sure of what to do, I began to pull in the thread until the prayers in Aramaic became a raucous shout of pain. An overwhelming fatigue beclouds my vision each time I attempt to remember what happened next. I must have remained several hours on the balcony, unconscious, no one aware of my euphoric hallucinatory state.

The coolness of the night awakened me and I went to take a walk on the beach. I realized that the whole levitation scene had been the result of an overdose of hash. Then I saw the Great Parodist having dinner in a boardwalk restaurant. He was surrounded by a group of admirers among whom I could make out the face of Llorens.

First I decided to move on, but then I realized this would be the only chance I would have to speak with the Great Parodist. I went back. As soon as Llorens saw me from the window he began his usual mad gesticulating like some hyperactive kid, and his greetings were totally exaggerated. I went inside, to stop them if nothing else, and sat down in a chair that I then moved closer to the only place that wasn’t filled up. The Great Parodist was across the table from me. I ordered only one dish from which Llorens could not abstain from helping himself with the inevitable tentacle of his fork.

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“We’ve been looking for you. Where were you? He’s very nice.

Do you want me to introduce you?”

All I needed now was to have this idiot introduce me. Besides, I had already met him on the balcony of the hotel. What must he think of that madman on the balcony? I cursed hash and swore off it forever.

In the restaurant a group of bureaucrats in ties and suits who I’m certain had never read him—much less understood him—appeared to have taken charge of him (to be certain of their own immortality).

He seemed to be subjected to their manipulation—they’d put a glass of wine in his hand, turn his head so that his ear could receive a question, speak to him about one of his narratives confusing it with another. During one moment when Maria Kodama had gone to the ladies’ room, a journalist came right up to the wheelchair to conduct a live interview on the spot. Instantly one of his proprietors leapt forward, loomed up over the journalist and pushed him. Within one meter of Borges they almost came to blows. It was pearls before swine.

“How dare you touch José Luis Borges—” he got it wrong and called him José Luis. “I’ll break your face.”

Afterwards, ridiculously courageous now with local wine, these proprietors of the Great Parodist took it upon themselves to introduce the master to the famous Catalan bread. As a consequence of his struggle with this rustic derivative of wheat, he incurred some wounds under his dental prosthesis which he said required immediate medical attention. The hotel tried desperately to find him a dentist in Barcelona, but in the middle of August this was almost impossible. Finally they found one in Sitges, who, in spite of his already advanced retirement, managed to repair the master’s prosthesis with some electrical equipment. Someone told me afterwards that when the old dentist had finished the process he asked Borges to sign his autograph in a book he had of the drawings of a man named Forges, a Spanish caricaturist. Borges signed the Forges book believing it to be his own; the dentist believed however that he was obtaining the autograph of the artist. Over the years I have thought about that and it still seems strange to me, the symmetry of that confusion: Borges, who carried to the highest elaborate aesthetics the art of false attributes, had signed the book of a man whom he, too, took for another.

The next day I woke up with a headache that nearly kept me in bed. Images of the night before spun in my mind in the form of 268 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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incredible memories. In vain I tried to remember exactly the now imprecise words of our strange conversation. I had breakfast in the room, the orange juice being stale, in spite of my instructions. There was no one on Borges’ balcony. I showered, dressed, and went down.

Someone in the lobby told me the couple had gone for a walk. I arrived in the center of town and remembering that it was my wife’s birthday, I went into the Puig bookstore to buy her a copy of Ficciones (I had just met her then and was still in love and unaware of Borges’ opinion on the female obtuseness towards the metaphysical . . .). Entering I recognized Maria Kodama’s voice.

They did not have the Pascal book he so urgently required. A clerk addressed me and I asked for the copy of Ficciones. As soon as he heard me the Great Parodist wanted to know who was buying his book. I refrained from identifying myself, passing myself off as only a reader. Curious, he tested my knowledge of his work by asking me innocent questions.

“The stories I like best of yours are ‘South,’ ‘The Search for Averroes,’ ‘Death and the Compass,’ ‘The Library of Babel.’

Although I don’t know, I like them all.”

“You know,” replied the Great Parodist, “in ‘The Library of Babel’ there is something that I would change if I could. When in a footnote it reads, ‘Memory of unspeakable melancholy: I have sometimes traveled many nights through polished stairways and corridors without finding a single librarian.’ The sometimes doesn’t work with the many nights—it’s a little strange, no?”

“How would you change it?”

“Simply eliminate many nights.”

“Here is the book in my hand. I’m going to correct it right now.”

“No, Señor, you can’t do that,” he said to me, throwing up his arms. “Leave it as is—it would be the only copy in the world to be changed and would make us all citizens of Tlon. Errors have to be integrated forever, they can’t be modified. Look, in ‘Death and the Compass’ as well—have you read it?—when Lonrot is going to die, it’s not sufficiently clear that it is really a case of suicide. I think that by adding two or three details I could have made it clearer.”

“But you are the author, you can still change it.”

“No,” he said, leaning heavily on his cane, “because then every day I would be changing many things and that would be exhausting for all of us. Besides, a perfect text belongs only to religion or to exhaustion.”

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His wife came up to tell us that there was an appointment with some journalists and they were running late. At night they would be flying back to Geneva. We said goodbye effusively. I knew that I would never see him again. I headed for the nearest bar.

270 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Liviu Antonesei lives in the northern Romanian city of Iasi, where he edits the monthly literary journal Timpul (The Time). His volume of poetry, Cautarea Cautarii (The Search of the Searchers), appeared from Editura Junimea in 1990. He has also published five books of literary, philosophical and cultural essays.

Joy Arbor-Karnes is currently a doctoral student in British Literature at the University of California, Davis, having earned her MFA from Mills College in 1998. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Santa Barbara Review, among others. She divides her time between Austin, Texas, and Sacramento, California.

Julianna Baggott’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, including The Southern Review, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, Green Mountains Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Debra Bruce’s third book of poetry, What Wind Will Do, was published by Miami University (Ohio) Press in 1997. She has published poems in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Atlantic Monthly. She is Professor of English at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Nelinia Cabiles is working on an MFA at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She grew up on the island of Lana’i, Hawaii, a dormant volcano. Her short story, “Waiting for the Kala,” appeared in Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1998 (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Marcus Cafagña’s first book, The Broken World, was a National Poetry Series selection. He has new poems forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, and Bellingham Review.

Carlos Cañeque is a Professor of the History of Political Thought at the the University of Barcelona, his native city. Cañeque has Crab Orchard Review ◆ 271

Contributors’ Notes

published books in his field of specialization, but a passion for the work of Jorge Luis Borges led him to conduct a series of interviews with Borges scholars, which were published as Conversaciones sobre Borges; and this interest also inspired his first novel, Quién, which won the Nadal Prize for 1997.

Judith Ortiz Cofer, see page 23.

Billy Collins’ most recent collection of poetry is Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).

Leigh Anne Couch has lived in the Adirondacks for the past year and a half, working for the novelist Russell Banks and teaching at the nearest State University of New York. Previously, she attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina, then lived in Sewanee, Tennessee, and worked for a small paper. She has published poems or has work forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, Whiskey Island, and Many Mountains Moving.

Jason G. Daley is a graduate of the University of Illinois. He lives in Springfield, where he works for the Illinois State Legislature and works on prairie restorations. “A Careful Distance” is his first published work.

Christopher Davis’s second book of poetry, The Patriot, was published in the spring of 1998 by the University of Georgia Press.

His third collection will be titled A History of the Only War. Sascha Feinstein’s poetry collection, Misterioso, won the Hayden Carruth Award and will soon be published by Copper Canyon Press.

He is the co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of two jazz poetry anthologies and the author of two critical books on the subject. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Lycoming College, where he co-directs the creative writing program and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.

Joshua Furst’s fiction and poetry have been published in Baccus, Poetry Motel, Art2000, and the Chicago Tribune, among other periodicals. He is the recipient of a 1997 Nelson Algren Award and is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Iowa Writer’s 272 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Workshop, from which he will receive his MFA next year. “She Rented Manhattan” is culled from a soon-to-be-completed series of linked stories entitled Short People.

Lisa Glatt, a recipient of a California Arts Council Grant, has had short stories published in Columbia, Indiana Review, and Bust. She currently teaches in the Writer’s Program at UCLA. Her second book of poems is forthcoming from Pearl Editions in September 1999.

Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s third volume of poetry, Never Be the Horse, won the University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and will be published in Fall 1999. Her chapbook Twentieth Century Children, winner of the Indiana Review chapbook competition, will be published by Graphic Design Press. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Rigoberto González is the author of So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks, a National Poetry Series selection. He lives in New York City and works as a literacy teacher for children. He’s currently completing a novel about California grape pickers titled Crossing Vines.

Matthew Graham is the author of two books of poetry, New World Architecture and 1946. He teaches at the University of Southern Indiana, where he co-directs the Ropewalk Writer’s Retreat and is poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.

Linda Gregg’s fifth book, Things and Flesh, has just been published

by Graywolf Press. She is now living in the Texas desert for five months working on her sixth book. She will be teaching at Bucknell University in January.

Mark Halliday directs the creative writing program at Ohio University. His third book of poems, Selfwolf, appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1999.

David Hernandez is a poet and visual artist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Fine Madness, Amaranth, Free Lunch, Rattle, and Pearl.

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Contributors’ Notes

Fleda Brown Jackson’s newest book, The Devil’s Child, has just been published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She teaches at the University of Delaware.

Mark Jacobs has published more than fifty stories in commercial and literary magazines. His books include A Cast of Spaniards (Talisman House, 1994), Stone Cowboy (Soho Press, 1997), and Liberation of Little Heaven (Soho Press, 1999).

Alice Jones’s books include The Knot (Alice James Books) and a chapbook, Anatomy. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. “Issue” is from a manuscript of prose poems titled Leap.

Joan Lindgren’s translations, essays on poetry, original poems, and prose pieces have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, including Latin American Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Two Worlds Walking (New Rivers Press). Most recently, she edited and translated an anthology of the work of Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness (University of California Press). Quién is a first venture into Spanish fiction.

Lorraine M. López is a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flagpole, Frontera Magazine, Stillpoint, and The Watershed Anthology. She has worked as a teaching assistant under Judith Ortiz Cofer for the past year.

Khaled Mattawa is the author of a book of poems, Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995), and the translator of two books of Arabic poetry. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Janet McAdams’ collection of poetry, The Island of Lost Luggage, won the 1999 First Book Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas and will be published by the University of Arizona Press next year. She has new poems forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving, The Women’s Review of Books, and Atlanta Review. She teaches Native American literature and creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.

She would like to thank Keith Moe for inspiring “The Green Children.”

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Contributors’ Notes

Rebecca McClanahan is the author of five books, most recently Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively (Writer’s Digest Books). Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and Seventeen. She has received a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Carter Prize for the Essay from Shenandoah. Her work appears in The Best American Poetry 1998; it has also been twice listed as “notable” in The Best American Essays and has been aired on NPR’s “The Sound of Writing.” She lives in New York City.

Colleen J. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washington. Her latest books include A Long Way Home from St. Louie (memoirs), Travelling Music (poems), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (creative nonfiction).

Ron McFarland is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. His most recent book is a critical study, The World of David Wagner (University of Illinois Press, 1997). Confluence Press will publish his new and selected poems, Stranger in Town, in Spring 2000, and the University of South Carolina Press will publish his critical work, Understanding James Welch, the same year.

Kyoko Mori has published two novels, a book of poetry, and two books of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book is Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures. She is BriggsCopeland Lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University.

Mihaela Moscaliuc has contributed essays and reviews to Romanian Civilization, and her translations (with Michael Waters) of poems by Carmelia Leonte have appeared recently in Mississippi Review, MidAmerican Review, Kestrel and Great River Review. She is the former Assistant Director of the Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi.

Marie Nasta is a waitress living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She is the 1998 recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, given by Bellingham Review. She is currently working on a book, from which “Line Dancing” is excerpted, about the formation of female sexual identity, specifically hers.

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Contributors’ Notes

Debra Nystrom’s first book of poems, A Quarter Turn, was published

by Sheep Meadow Press. She has recently completed a second manuscript entitled The Cliff Swallows and has work forthcoming in Yale Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. She teaches at the University of Virginia.

Gina Ochsner lives with her husband and two sons in Keizer, Oregon. She has work forthcoming in Cream City Review and Gulf Coast Review.

Tim Parrish’s collection of Baton Rouge stories, Red Stick Men, will be published by the University Press of Mississippi in Fall 2000.

His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Shenandoah, Connecticut Review, Whirligig, and other periodicals.

He directs the creative writing program at Southern Connecticut State University.

Lawrence Raab is the author of four collections of poems, most recently What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993).

His poems in this issue will be included in The Probable World, to be published by Penguin in 2000. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

Carrie Lea Robb lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and currently serves as managing editor for River Styx magazine.

Jane Satterfield’s first collection, Shepherdess with an Automatic, is forthcoming from Washington Writer’s Publishing House in Spring 2000. A Pushcart Prize nominee for both poetry and the essay, she has had work appear in Antioch Review, The American Voice, Massachusetts Review, Countermeasures, and elsewhere.

Margot Schilpp’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, The Gettysburg Review, Connecticut Review, Meridian, Verse, Puerto del Sol, High Plains Literary Review, and other journals. She edits Quarterly West.

Steven Schreiner is the author of Too Soon to Leave (Ridgeway Press, 1997). Recent poems have appeared in Colorado Review, 276 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Image, and River Styx. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Ellen Slezak has published stories in various literary journals, including most recently, American Literary Review and ZYZZYVA. Cathy Song is the author of Picture Bride (Yale University Press), Frameless Windows (W. W. Norton), and School Figures (University of Pittsburgh Press). She lives with her family in Honolulu.

Maura Stanton’s fourth book of poetry, Life Among the Trolls, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1998. She teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. He is the author of four published novels: Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays, and Going Under, and of a collection of short stories titled Welcome to the Oasis. With his wife, Delia Poey, he has co-edited two bestselling anthologies: Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction and Little Havana Blues: A Contemporary Cuban-American Literature Anthology.

Most recently, he has published a collection of poetry and memoir titled Spared Angola: Memories From a Cuban-American Childhood, and an anthology of Latino poetry titled Paper Dance, co-edited with Victor Hernandez Cruz and Leroy V. Quintana. He teaches creative writing and Latino/Latina and Caribbean Literature at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he lives with his family. A new collection of poetry titled You Come Singing is out from Tia Chucha Press/ Northwestern University. His forthcoming books of poetry are Garabato Poems (Wings Press, San Antonio, 1999) and In the Republic of Longing (Bilingual Review Press/ Arizona State University, 2000).

Maria Terrone is Director of Public Relations for Hunter College in New York. She has published poems in such magazines as Poetry, Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and Wind, which awarded her poem “In Standard Time” the 1998 Allen Tate Memorial Poetry Prize. She recently completed a full-length manuscript, The Bodies We Were Loaned.

J. C. Todd has published two chapbooks, Nightshade (1995) and Entering Pisces (1985), both with Pine Press. She has worked with Crab Orchard Review ◆ 277

Contributors’ Notes

Ivón Gordon Vailakis, translating and co-translating Vailakis’ work.

Ivón Gordon Vailakis was born in Quito, Ecuador. She immigrated to the United States with her family, and since then has resided in Southern California. Her publications include: Colibries en el exilio. (Ecuador: El Conejo Press, 1997). Nuestrario (Mexico: Impretei Press, 1987).

She has published in several journals in Ecuador, the U.S., and Mexico, and in poetry anthologies. In 1997, her bilingual manuscript, Hummingbirds in Exile, was nominated for an Extraordinary Award by Casa de las Américas. Her work in English has appeared in a bilingual anthology, Cruzando Fronteras/Literature from the Borderlands.

Presently, she is completing her new manuscript, entitled Shoe Necklace/Un collar de zapatos.

Michael Waters teaches at Salisbury State University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Recent books include Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (BOA Editions, 1997) and Bountiful (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992). BOA Editions will publish his New & Selected Poems in 2000.

Miles Garett Watson, a former Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, recently completed his Ph.D. at Florida State University.

His most recent work has appeared in Quarterly West, Poetry, and Arkansas Review. He is editor of SUNDOG: The Southeast Review.

Carole Boston Weatherford’s poetry is collected in the prize-winning chapbook, The Tan Chanteuse, and The Tarbaby on the Soapbox, a chapbook forthcoming from Long Leaf Press. She is co-author of Somebody’s Knocking at Your Door: AIDS and the African-American Church. She also has six children’s books to her credit, including Sink or Swim: Black Lifesavers of the Outer Banks and Juneteenth Jamboree. A recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship and the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, she resides in High Point, North Carolina.

Gordon Weaver is the author of four novels and eight short story collections, the most recent of which is Four Decades: New and Selected Stories (University of Missouri Press, 1997). A hundred of his stories have appeared in a wide variety of literary and commercial magazines, and several have been reprinted in anthologies such as 278 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes

Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. New stories are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, Agni, Crosscurrents, and Tampa Review.

He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the O. Henry First Prize, the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction, and other citations. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in West Africa, and grew up in the city of Monrovia, Liberia. She studied at Indiana University in Bloomington from 1983 to 1985 and returned home to Monrovia, where she and her family were caught up in the Liberian Civil War in 1989.

She and her family escaped the war in 1991 and have since lived in Michigan. Her first book of poems, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, was published by New Issues Press Poetry Series (1998). She is finishing a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University, where she also teaches African literature and other classes.

Katharine Whitcomb was the 1998-99 Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, University of WisconsinMadison, and was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1996-98. She has published poetry in The Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, Nebraska Review, and other journals. Her poetry chapbook, Hosannas, was published in 1999 by the Parallel Press.

Saadi Youssef was born in Iraq in 1933. He worked in teaching and journalism in Kuwait, Algeria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Yemen, and France. One of the leading and most prolific contemporary Arab poets, he has written twenty volumes of poetry, a novel, three books of criticism, and translations of Whitman, Cavafy, Ritsos, and Ngugi wa Thiongo among many other international writers. He left Iraq in 1979 and now lives in Jordan.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 279

MF A Southern Illinois University at Carbondale 3-Year MFA in Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction Small Classes, Individualized Programs Support Available

FACULTY Kent Haruf Plainsong, The Tie That Binds, Where You Once Belonged Rodney Jones Elegy for the Southern Drawl, Transparent Gestures, The Story They Told Us of Light, The Unborn, Apocalyptic Narrative, Things That Happen Once Allison Joseph What Keeps Us Here, Soul Train, In Every Seam Beth Lordan And Both Shall Row, August Heat Lucia Perillo The Oldest Map with the Name America, Dangerous Life, The Body Mutinies Contact Director of Graduate Studies, English Dept.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Carbondale, IL 62901-4503, phone (618) 453-6894

Forthcoming April 2000 in the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Crossroads and Unholy Water Poems by Marilene Phipps

“Unapologetically, Phipps describes a life of privilege set against the backdrop of poverty [in her native Haiti], and her narratives set us smack in the center of her memory’s vivid and exacting stage. . . .

Washed in bold hues, in the pinks and greens of a childhood rich in both the natural and the supernatural, these poems do not fade even after the last page is turned. We come away from this book in exuberant agreement with the widow who sends off her dead husband with a slap: ‘Why, there is nothing to regret about this earth!’”

—Lucia Perillo 72 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2306-0, $11.95 pb

Winter Amnesties Poems by Elton Glaser

“Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement.

Winter Amnesties seamlessly mixes high culture and low, the ‘glitz and zillion disciplines’ of the universe that Glaser praises.

This is an American poetry, a civic poetry infused with enough sly wit to make us root for the oak trees and the stars. These poems also will convince even the most jaded of postmodern readers that Beauty with a capital B is nothing to be ashamed of.”—Lucia Perillo 72 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2305-2, $11.95 pb

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry In Search of the Great Dead Poems by Richard Cecil

“Richard Cecil’s magnificent title poem suggests metaphorically his pursuit of all things deemed precious and abandoned or lost. It is a serious theme, and a difficult one to carry off, but Cecil does it again and again, looking squarely into the depths of experience with a great dry wit, and without resorting to nostalgia. No small part of Cecil’s triumph results from his uncanny sense of balance and proportion, a gift that is manifest in both his prosody and his emotive vision. In Search of the Great Dead is an inventory of obsessions and hard-won consolations.

In poems that range from his satirical take on realtor-speak to his moving elegy for the poet Lynda Hull, Cecil lives by a combination of intelligence, craft, and eloquence that can only be described as character. Perhaps no poet since Larkin has treated the romance of hope to such a helping of irony and come off in the barely possible human affirmative.”—Rodney Jones 96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $11.95 paper Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

“[T]he technical skill and humor on display in this collection make it likely that Cecil’s poems will be read long after he joins that ever-longer roll call of poets who have passed on. . . . [A] remarkable book.”

—Quarterly West Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681

www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry The Star-Spangled Banner

Poems by Denise Duhamel

“[S]o overwhelming is her relish for life that embarrassment, or titillation when the subject is sexual, just doesn’t stand a chance.

Life-affirming without being treacly, Duhamel is a character who assures us the world is full of character.”

—Booklist “Denise Duhamel is heir to both the urbane, campy fortune of Frank O’Hara, and to Walt Whitman’s more commodious open estate. It is the mystique and absurdity of opening the private experience to the public weal that triggers and fuels her heroic emotional candor, and in this open air cafe, she thrives as stand-up, diva, ballerina, and sage. Should someone arrest her? Yes. Duhamel is the one buying feminine protection in a foreign country, the one accounting for the cost of her poems, not in angst, but in paper clips, pens, and ink cartridges. In all of her poems, there is such a feel of release, of unmitigated joy, that one is surprised to come back later and find her beautiful and exacting craft. She is one of the most engaging American poets to have emerged in the last twenty years.”—Rodney Jones 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $11.95 paper Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

For more information on the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681

www.siu.edu/~siupress

Man on Spikes

Eliot Asinof New Foreword by Marvin Miller “[T]he writing of Eliot Asinof looks so easy that you don’t realize he has conveyed an entire milieu in the life story of a very ordinary man with one special talent and an allconsuming love for his sport. Then you discover that you’re having trouble reading the page because of the mist in your eyes and the tension in your chest.”—Harlan Ellison, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review $14.95 paper

My Baseball Diary James T. Farrell New Foreword by Joseph Durso

My Baseball Diary (1957) chronicles Farrell’s enduring passion for the game. “[T]his collection of essays and novelistic excerpts still reminds us just how talented a writer Farrell was. . . . A fine collection.”

—Publishers Weekly $14.95 paper

At bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Edited by Richard F. Peterson

OFF-SEASON Eliot Asinof “Here is the book’s great originality : it lets readers see how despite financial and cosmetic changes, baseball still retains its uncommon pertinence to the deepest truths about American life.”—Jerry Klinkowitz , author of Owning a Piece of the Minors 176 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2297-8, $22.50 cl

FULL COUNT Inside Cuban Baseball Milton Jamail Foreword by Larry Dierker “Nobody understands Cuba’s passion for béisbol better than Milton Jamail.

Part travelogue, part investigative report, Full Count covers all the bases.”—Tim Wendel, author of Castro’s Curveball and contributing writer for USA Today Baseball Weekly 176 pages, 25 illus., ISBN 0-8093-2310-9, $24.95 cl

Owning a Piece of the Minors

Jerry Klinkowitz Foreword by Mike Veeck 160 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2194-7, $24.95 cl

ThIS SEASON’S LINEUP THE NATIONAL GAME Alfred Spink Foreword by Steven P. Gietschier Originally published in 1910 (with a second, revised edition in 1911), The National Game by Alfred H. Spink is the first important history of baseball, predating Albert J. Spalding’s better-known America’s National Game by a year. Dedicating his first edition, Spink spells out his lofty goal: “I want this book to live forever, so that the names of those who helped to build up and make base ball the greatest of outdoor sports may never be forgotten.” That goal was postponed, however, as Spink’s The National Game has been out of print since 1911.

488 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2304-4, $19.95 pb

1999 All-Stars The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand!

The Game as Umpires See It

Lee Gutkind Foreword by Eric Rolfe Greenberg 224 pages, 11 illus., ISBN 0-8093-2195-5, $12.95 pb

At bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

The New Young American Poets

An Anthology Edited by Kevin Prufer Foreword by Richard Howard “I invite the reader to join me . . . to discover just how real, how rich, how rewarding our new poetry might be,”—Richard Howard

Contributors Demonstrating the range and vitality of the new generation of American writers, The New Young American Poets features the work of forty poets born since 1960.

April 2000 256 pages ISBN 0-8093-2308-7 $49.95 cl ISBN 0-8093-2309-5 $16.95 pb

Sherman Alexie Talvikki Ansel Rick Barot Paul Beatty Erin Belieu Rafael Campo Nick Carbó Joshua Clover Nicole Cooley Denise Duhamel Thomas Sayers Ellis Suzanne Gardinier James Harms Allison Joseph Julia Kasdorf Joy Katz Timothy Liu Khaled Mattawa Jeffrey McDaniel Campbell McGrath

Heidilynn Nilsson Rick Noguchi Barbara J. Orton Alan Michael Parker D. A. Powell Claudia Rankine Matthew Rohrer Ruth L. Schwartz Angela Shaw Reginald Shepherd Larissa Szporluk Ann Townsend Natasha Trethewey Karen Volkman Rachel Wetzsteon Greg Williamson Max Winter Sam Witt Mark Wunderlich Kevin Young

At bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress