1980-Vol17-No2

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School of General Studies · Columbia University

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EDITOR: Barbara Harrah ASSISTANT EDITORS: Michael Stone, Sandra Katz FACULTY ADVISER: Glenda Adams COVER: Florence Keller

V

Number Two

Volume S e v e n t e e n

A Literary Magazine Published At The School of General Studies Columbia University NARRATIVE

QUARTO is the literary magazine of the School of General Studies, Columbia University. Copyright 1980 by QUARTO. Office of Publication and Edi­ torial Office, School of General Studies, Lewisohn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. Manuscripts will not be re­ turned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. No material in this magazine may be reprinted without permission of the Publishers.

Home American Gothic No News Is No News Hotel Primitivo F.J. Turner, Nuts To You A Woman Alone Cat Support Ovaries Abroad Oy, Caesar The Aluminium Cage

2 16 18 29 37 39 40 43

John Frey Gloria Dubro Robert Kleinbardt Patricia Volk Marcia Stameli Helene Brandt Steve Schrader Judith Braun

54 64

Marilyn Greenberg Steve Szilagyi

POETRY What Was L e f t Ice C a t ' s E y e s & T a l k Shows P l a n t e d Too C l o s e Devaluation Advice t o B i r d s Contributors

15 28 52

James S m e t h u r s t Maurice Stone Pamela J o n e s

62 Preeva Adler 63 Margaret Geard 64 Thomas Haller 80

Copyright 1980 by Quarto Columbia University School of General Studies

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HOME John Frey HILDIE NEVER HAD any romances until she met Eddie Forbes. She married him when she was twenty-six.

Eddie Forbes was thirty.

Hildie had big veiny hands and strong arms from sewin' and workin' the loom. She could crack nuts in her hands and shucked corn faster than any of us. But Hildie couldn't run and sweat with us 'cause of her attacks, and her legs and chest never grew full.

It was awful seein' Hildie cough. Ma would give Hildie spoonfuls of syrup made from soakln' hickory bark in a glass of gin. The syrup was supposed to melt the knot in Hildie's throat and stop her hoarse coughin'. Ma would hold Hildie in her lap, their chests together, Hildie's head over Ma's shoulder. Ma would thump Hildie on the back and Hildie, with her eyes creased purple from no sleep, would drool on Ma's shoulder just tryin' to get a breath. I've seen Hildie cough blood dark as from a deer's liver all over Ma's back.

In the winter, 'cause the air was better, Hildie was always out playin' in the snow, hittin' me all over with snowballs should I step outside, never throwin' 'em at Dennis or Tim 'cause they'd hit her a good one, but I was fair game. If I tried smackin' her little rat face, she'd pinch me with those big bony fingers and twist my arm behind my back and push me down in the snow.

But in the summer she'd just sit on the front porch with her sewin' on her lap and watch us all go about the place. If she wasn't there, then she was inside at the loom. It was scarey watchin' her with her hands flyin' and her thighs movin', her tiny face starin', sweat drippin' off, workin' faster than Ma ever could. Outside goin' by the house you could hear the boards rattlin' right through the wall.

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Hildie told me if she took the oil Reverend Cormac used for baptizin' and she dipped her fingers in it and wiped the oil on her lips, any man she was to kiss would fall forever in love with her.

I told her that was bull, but it was at church where she met Eddie Forbes.

There was nothin' smooth about Eddie Forbes. I expected him to clank when he walked. But I've seen the dark mass of men out of the mill when the shift changes, men jump bumpin' along to the lay of the land.

Eddie Forbes was half bald, had smilin' buck teeth, big ears, fat cheeks, and his eyebrows twitched. He did yard work at the mill, carryin' steel and scrap or shovelin' coal. From it his chest and arms were thick. And he was droop-shouldered and bowlegged from luggin' and bendin' for eleven years of twelve-hour days.

Reverend Cormac was Eddie's uncle. At least that was the only family Eddie claimed. Every other Sunday Eddie Forbes worked, and the Sunday he didn't he borrowed a wagon and a mule and made the four hour drive from Homestead, showin' up at Reverend Cormac's eleven o'clock service, shakin' hands with his uncle when it was over, and then startin' the long ride back.

Ma and Hildie went to the church. Sometime Sue went along. None of us ever did. HD never let us.

One Sunday while Ma was up the steps with the crowd of women around Reverend Cormac, Hildie wandered away from the church toward the wagons when Eddie Forbes clanked out from some place. He had a tired way of talkin', and I can just hear him sayin' How do. Miss 0*Daniel?

Hildie would've blushed, put her hands behind her back and said. Pardon me?

Eddie maybe sucks his teeth once or twice and says, I apolgize...for callin' you Miss Daniel... right off like that.

And Hildie looks at him and blinks.

Eddie Forbes goes on. You see. Reverend Cormac

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is my uncle.

Oh, your uncle is Reverend Cormac.

Yes...I'm his nephew.

Oh, Hildie says.

Then Hildie sees Ma comin' down from the church and, bringin' her hands in front of her, she walks to our wagon and climbs on without so much as a nod to Eddie Forbes.

Hildie spent the week after that makin' a new stitch bonnet with a blue ribbon trim, tearin' it up twice and startin' over 'cause it weren't perfect.

And a' course Hildie never knew Eddie Forbes worked every other Sunday, and she was crushed when he didn't show up and she moped about for a week. The next Sunday she sees Eddie Forbes sit down at the back of the church as the service starts. And singin' the first hymn, Hildie just moves her lips tryin' to hear Eddie Forbes's voice, but she can't 'cause he's doin* the same thing.

After the service she a' course walks out slower than slow and is stricken and relieved by the sight of no Eddie Forbes near the wagons. Then her heart jumps when she hears the tiredj cautious voice of Eddie Forbes say somethin' like How do?

Oh. Hello, sir.

Beautiful morning.

Yes. Yes. Fine morning, Hildie says. Good sermon.

Fine sermon.

Ma hangs back at the church watchin' this and, when she thinks enough has gone on, she comes walkin' and Hildie makes her dash for the wagon, but this time she smiles her dumb little smile and says.

Goodbye.

And so it was one Sunday me and HD watch two wagons come up the road to the house. Eddie Forbes ambled off his wagon and up to us smilin' his looney grin. Ma charged past us all into the house, leavin' Hildie to do the introducin' to me and HD.

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I was maybe twelve years old. Dennis wasn't around, not havin' come in from leavin' Friday night. Eddie took my hand and nearly broke it, and I saw HD tighten his jaw tryin' hard to squeeze back. Eddie Forbes wore a coat and vest, a derby, and city shoes. He looked like a dressed up squirrel in a story book. His hands were dark and scarred, and he carried them heavy and curled.

HD and Hildie took Eddie Forbes around to show him the place, and I run inside and find Ma thumpin away at a slab of salted pork in the kitchen.

"Who is this out there. Ma?" "A fella Hildie met at church."

At dinner HD put on a clean shirt, and Ma and Hildie didn't change out of their church clothes.

When everybody was served. Ma sat down and said to HD, "Dad, would you say grace, please?"

HD looked straight across at Ma never blinkin' at bein' called Dad or bein' asked to say a prayer which we never done ever and HD says, "I believe it's Junior's turn tonight."

And I'm thinkin. Who is Junior? when I saw HD lookin' at me, and he said, "Go on, son."

Son'.

I looked at Ma, but she's already bowed her head and got her hands on the table. I looked from Eddie's hands to Hildie's hands tryin' to figure whose were uglier, when I see HD noddin' at me. Puttin' my hands on the table, I said, "Dear Our God Lord. May we...let us have our dally food and help us eat our daily bread you gived us and help us..."

This is where HD looked up at me like I were crazy, so I finished real fast. "Help us have our food amen." And everybody stared around like they just woke up.

HD started cuttin' up his bit into little bitty pieces, and Eddie Forbes was doin' the same. Hildie was havin' trouble like her hands were frozen. All you could hear was squishin' noises of us chewin' and swallowin'.

Finally HD said, "Edward? I'm sure my son would like to hear about the mill."

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His son. That was me.

"Well, boy," Eddie Forbes said, lookin' at me.

"Pour hot liquid steel and sparks a'flyin'...dust In your lungs...sweat pourin' off you...Men cussin' all day." He looked from Ma to Hildie and said, "Par~ don me, ladies."

Hildie giggled, and Eddie Forbes grinned his big teeth like he were Jesus.

Then a voice yelled through the front door like a shotgun blast.

"Hold on it's Holy Sunday."

Dennis come in and slammed the door behind him, looked around and said, "What?"

I'd seen Dennis look worse, but he looked pretty bad then. Mud up and down his clothes, his hair like a bush on fire, and his mustache droopin'.

HD stood up. "Dennis. Tis Mister Forbes, Dennis."

HD said Dennis like it were poison. "Why don't you get cleaned up and join us for dinner."

Dennis come up to the table. Eddie Forbes stood and leaned out a hand, but Dennis looked down, restin' his big hands on the table.

I seen it comin' and jumped out of my chair.

Dennis's eyeballs rolled up, and he fell on the table stomach first, then his head knocked hard, and he slipped back off the table floppin' to the floor like he were made of straw.

Eddie Forbes came around the table, grabbed Dennis at the waist, and flung him over his shoulder like he really was straw. All HD could do was point and say, "There." Eddie Forbes carried Dennis folded over his shoulder with Dennis's hands and feet draggin' on the floor to the bedroom.

Me and Tim had pulled a dead hog out of the soakin hole and were scrapin' off its hair when HD walked over and said, "Your sister's gettin' married." And he wandered away.

Kill a hog when the moon's growin', and the meat won't shrink in the pan.

Get married approachin' a full moon, and your love will never die.

So they say...

Hildie's wedding weren't mucho Nothin' like Tim and Sue's. Reverend Cormac married them on a Sunday that Eddie Forbes didn't work. Eddie brought along two men. One was old. Eddie said this was Mister Griffin, his foreman. Mister Griffin wore a derby and a high collar which the fat on his neck fell over. He kept wipin' sweat off his face with a handkerchief. The other man was called Lou with a last name sounded like Oskesk. Eddie said Lou worked in the yard with him, but standing next to bowlegged big-armed Eddie Forbes, Lou didn't look no stronger than me. Lou's face was pale, and he walked about neat and quick as a soldier, keepin' his hands in his pockets.

When Hildie come in with HD, just touchin' his arm and lookin' down, I don't know who started, but we all started clappin' real light and we stopped just after a moment. Might of been HD's serious face, but I think it was Hildie. She had made her own wedding dress. The dress made her look bigger. Healthy somehow with the puffy arms and the big wide skirt.

Her face was pink behind the veil. She had sewn blue beads into the hem of the dress. They twinkled.

I looked at Eddie Forbes. His head was straight, his chest out. His lips were down over his teeth.

(I remember me dancin' with Sue. Her in a white satin and lace wedding dress and a big crowd around langhin.' She holdin' her arms down to my hands—I must've been five years old—lookin' over my head and smilin' at everyone and swingin' me around to the music like a baby doll till my shoulders ached.

Finally she lets go and I runned through the crowd to the back door real excited and scared. Thought my heart would bust. Then I was standin' on a chair back in the corner, everybody dancin', smoke hangin' over, folks sittin' against the walls drinkin' and bouncin' their thighs to the music. The crowd moves apart. HD and Sue are dancin'. Everybody stops to

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watch. Then Dennis steps up. Sue in his arms looks like a small white bird, Dennis starts dancin' all jittery and kickin' his legs out. He brings a leg clear over Sue's head, and everybody is laughin'.

Tim comes up to dance with Sue, his new bride. But Dennis turns and takes Tim's arms and starts dancin' with Tim, The bandleader lets the music drop funny, and Dennis makes his face all surprised to see he's dancin' with Tim, Dennis stops, bows very serious to Tim, then swings a long arm out to Sue, standin' at the edge of the crowd. Dennis's big hand brings her to Tim, Dennis hugs 'em both, their heads come to his chest. He takes a step back and bows again.

The bandleader commences a slow song, and Tim and Sue are dancin' and everybody's quiet and watchin'.

HD and Ma hugged just then. And I remember Hildie's little face peekin' through the crowd,) • - 1

Almost two years to the day of her wedding, Hildie come up from Homestead to wait 'cause her labor would be startin' soon, and she come up to have Ma there and have Miss Mabel there, too.

Miss Mabel delivered all us boys and Hildie and Géraldine. Eddie wanted Hildie in a hospital, but Hildie wouldn't go.

Miss Mabel was an old woman, smoked a cobbed pipe, carried a purple satchel. Kept her hair brown by usin' a dye made from boilin' walnuts. She wore a white nurse's cap she got somewhere. When the labor'd start, she'd tuck her brown hair under her cap and put on a clean white apron. Her hands were cool and clean as ice.

Me and HD were at the dinner table eatln' stew and bread when the worst of it begun. Dennis weren't there. Who knows where he was. Eddie Forbes was back in Homestead 'cause of work.

Hildie was groanin'. It sounded so young, like a little girl screamin'.

Ma rushed out once, leavin' Hildie's door open, and it sounded like Hildie was in the room with us.

HD kept takin' up spoonfuls, starin' straight out,

his face still but for his jaws chewin'. Ma run back through with a load of towels. HD reached for some breado . , , , When Hildie started coughin and screamxn' louder I run out the house with my hands over my ears.

It was after dark when I saw Miss Mabel come out carryin' a bundle. She went to the barn and come out with a shovel. She dug near the well and kicked the bundle in. I was scared that it was the baby, but later Ma said it was the extra stuff after.

It was twin girls. Miss Mabel worked and worked stretchin' and spreadin' Hildie's bones, Hildie was heavin' and puffin' so much she started to cough.

Miss Mabel'd be spreadin' Hildie's bones, but the coughin' was closin' her skeleton. Ma said Miss Mabel took a green bottle from her purple satchel and put some drops on Hildie's tongue, and the coughin'just died.

Miss Mabel walked off dovm the road smokin' her pipe and carryin' the three dead chickens by the neck that was her payment.

This was 1907. I run off in 1910. Was eighteen.

Dennis and me shared a room. At least we woke up together. Most every night he'd take his horse out and go. Close to dawn he'd come stompin' in, smellin' of liquor and singin' soft like a prayer, "Four legs up, four legs down, soft in the middle and hard all around," and he'd fall on the bed with his clothes still on like a tree crashin'. But in the morning he'd get up with us all and put in a full day, workin' harder than Tim or HD, and then after dinner he'd be gone again. Don't know how he did it.

You'd think even a man as big and strong as Dennis needed a deep sleep once in a while. HD and Ma never liked it, but Dennis would yell at them like they were children, spit flyin' up in his mustache, sayin' that he was twenty-nine and he'd spend his free time how he pleased and he puts in a full day's work and there weren't nothin' they could tell him to do.

Me and HD found Dennis knocked out half dead in

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the creek, his face heaten and a leg smashed. Later he tells us his horse threw him, but no horse could ever throw Dennis, and the heatin' done t'his face weren't by his fallin* in the creek.

That left me and Tim doin' most of the work.

With HD bein' almost sixty, he only did what he used to call woman's work like the chickens or milkin'.

Dennis lost his leg just above the knee and it turned his spirit inside out and bad. Stuck in his bed he had no way of tearin' up anymore. He'd yell.

"You're glad I'm a cripple now, ain't ya. Ma? Keep me right here where you can see me." He had to use a chamberpot. "Hey Ma. Nice big pile in here. Nice and fresh."

Dennis stopped shavin' and a thick black beard grew in around his mustache. I'd go in the room, and he'd wave his stump in the air sayin', "Look, boy.

Look." Then if I were in the room tryin' to Ignore him, he'd pull down the bed clothes and be touchin' himself and starin' right at me like he was orderin' me to watch and he'd move his hand up and down on himself, and I'd always run out, and he'd laugh like the devil.

'Cause of Dennis I had to sleep out on the couch.

Underneath the picture of Géraldine. Geraldine was my sister born between me and Hildie. Géraldine died when she were two or three months old of childbed fever. Ma had a picture taken of Géraldine in her coffin. A baby in a white dress with flowers stuck in its hands. Since Géraldine's eyes were closed.

Ma had a man paint them open on the photograph. She hung this over the couch.

Then HD stopped eatin'. Least I never saw him eat.

Ma would set the table for me and herself. She'd fill a plate for Dennis and take it to him in bed and like every night he'd yell something like, "Goddam. It's the angel of mercy herself has brought me food. Glory. Glory."

10

Me and Ma would start eatin', and HD would go in the kitchen and pour a glass of sour mash white and come out draggin' the burlap apple bag to the table. He'd sit munchin' on apples and sippin' from his glass.

It just plain hurt to be there.

There was somethin' else made me leave.

Dreamin' and seein' myself alone at a table cuttin' meat on a plate. Funny tastin' meat sort of like venison but I knew it weren't. Ma comes in, her hair all messed,and says, "Don't, boy. Don't."

If you dream of eatin' another man's flesh means your life'11 be short. It means your children will have no children.

I was scared of dyin' before I done all the great and wonderful things that you think you're gonna do when you're eighteen.

One night I wake up. Everything's quiet. I look up at the picture of Géraldine for a while.

I go into the room where Dennis is asleep and I get dressed. I fill my suitcase with most of my things.

I stop at the bed. An ugly smell is coming off Dennis.

Like sweat. Like piss. Like something else, I drop a spit in Dennis's black hair.

In 1910 Eddie Forbes made twenty cents an hour workin' seventy-two hours one week and eighty-four the next. With Wilson declarin' war in April 1917 there was steel needed for barbed wire and shells, guns, and trucks. You can't fight a war without steel.

By the war's end, Eddie Forbes had moved from pilln' cold steel to workin' the skullcracker to assistant on a blast. And he was makin' sixty cents an hour for the twelve hour day.

One Christmas, Elbert Gary, head of US Steel, gave his wife a $500,000 necklace.

On Monday morning September 22, 1919, Eddie Forbes, along with 250,000 other steelworkers, went on strike for the right to union and the eight hour day.

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The press called the strike leaders socialist liars and vermin. Each day the press reported that the strike was over and the men were returning to work, when it wasn't, and they weren't. Sheriff of Allegheny County forbid the gatherin' in public of three or more people. Deputized troopers, chosen and paid for by US Steel, rode horseback into meetings of the strikers with their three foot clubs flyin'.

Sometimes instead of arrestin' a man, the troopers would ride him down East Robinson Street past the rail yards, beat the man, and leave him on the doorstep of one of the whore houses down there. Toward the end of October the steel companies were bringin' negroes up from the south to fill the strikers' jobs.

Hildie, Eddie, and the twins lived in a rented house built on a cliff over the mill on the river bank below. It was better for Hildie's cough livin' up high. The mill smoke mostly settled in the river valley. Lookin' down in the winter after the leaves had fallen was like a black and white picture. Dirty snow and black trees on the hillside across the river. The black girders of the railroad bridge. The smoke made a haze that softened the buildings and the smokestacks of the mill. Steamboats moved on the river floatin' like weather-beaten houses. Once every few years the river caught fire. Deep blue flames of burnin' oil. You'd think the Devil would rise out of that river drippin' the blue flames and slappin' his pointy tail on the water.

The Forbes's house has tar paper pressed to look like brick nailed to the house, roof and all.

Inside^ the ceilings were low and there were no doors from room to room. The floors were gray tile from a crate of scrap Eddie had taken from the mill. The walls were the same light green as the mill bathrooms. Was a big round six foot mirror in the sittin' room. Don't know where Eddie got that. Up the creakin' wood stair was the girls' room. Five and a half

foot ceiling and their beds on the floor. Couple small windows. Through the back closet was a ladder up to the attic.

A mornin' in early November 1919 Eddie Forbes was down the street givin' Len Jackson a hand weedin' his garden. Then Eddie heard the smashin' of glass,and the scream was Hildie's.

Eddie Forbes run up his steps hearin' the whackin' and seein' the tail end of a horse swishin' in his front door, Eddie pushed past the horse and saw the trooper knockin' dishes out the cupboard with his club.

Eddie Forbes hit the trooper in the back of the head where the skull meets the spine.

Eddie and Len Jackson pushed the horse back out the door and threw the body of the trooper over the saddle. The horse fought and reared but kickin' and shovin', they sent it flyin' over the cliff.

In the sittin' room they found the six foot mirror smashed and under the pile of glass was Hildie, bleedin' from the mouth and a thousand other places. They found the twins up in the attic clutchin each other but untouched.

They carried Hildie to Len Jackson's where a doctor was called. The cuts weren't deep but her jaw was broke. The doctor set the bone and fashioned a brace from her shoulder blade to her jaw bone.

Meanwhile Eddie Forbes loaded the possessions of his family into the wagon. There wasn't much.

The furniture belonged to the house.

Just after dark, with Hildie xnrapped in a blanket holdin' her head stiff as a puppet and the girls cryin', Eddie Forbes slapped the reins and started the four hour trip.

The fall of 1919 I had settled in Newport News, steady work in the shipyards. I wrote home. Gave my address. I had sent two or three letters in the nine years, lettin' 'em know I was alive but never givin' any place to write back. February of 1920 I got a let ter. First time I ever saw Ma's handwritin'. The letters leaned left and were big like a child's.

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Dear Les, I never thot hearin' of you was ever to com. So much of sad news has hap­ pened. HD died 2yr of strok. Ed and Hilda movd heare. Hilda just passed on near chrismas of flue and new mon feaver. Ed is workd heare. Dennis is better and walks and Tim and Sue fineο Com home in spring Les wen the sun is shine or rite us soon

much to brag about. But we get by like most folks do.

I lit out next mornin' before anyone was awake.

WHAT WAS LEFT

Love Mother James Smetliurst

• 1

Was the second week of May I came home. The hills were green. Virgin grass would be growin' on Hildie's grave. They were all standin' on the porch when I got to the house.

Dennis had a wood leg and had kept his beard.

His hair had gray streaks. Tim and Sue had a boy near big as me. Tim was gettin' scrawny like HD, and Sue was fat as a hog. Eddie Forbes stood back and nodded. The twins jumped and skittered about like monkeys havin' none of Hildie's frailness. Ma sat in a chair, did not rise. She spoke seemin' to breathe out dust.

She said, "Welcome home, son."

Dennis hobbles off the porch, usin' a cane near as long as my leg. We walk down to the church to see the graves of HD and Hildie» Dennis tells me of him findin HD on the path from the barn face down and quiverin'. He tells me of Hildie gettin'the flu on top of havin' her jaw broke and bein' too weak to fight. He tells me how Eddie Forbes sat up in the barn for three days and three nights sobbin' and moanin' and how he come out and has scarce said a word since, but's been workin' here on the farm doin' the Job of three men. Dennis, Eddie Forbes, Tim and Tim's boy worked the farm. In the fall they hire two or three men to help with the harvest and stackin' hay.

Swingin' out his free arm, Dennis says, "Ain't 14

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What was left was a grain elevator, a tree lightning split, a broken stool, a piss smell memory of pigs. We couldn't live here. At night animals we didn't own arrived, walked out of fire. Their names were different than any we had ever heard before. We stroked their backs, shot off blue sparks, shared water, and stared at a finger of rock standing beyond the corn.

We asked them how it had been here, how they had felt. They said: It was the same.

We felt the same. One day was like another, The others burned up and we were left.

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AMERICAN GOTHIC Gloria Dubro

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NED AND HARRIET had explored their potentials by the time they were five. Without help each had come to the fullest realization of their life on earth.

Small wonder after they married that they were a closely knit couple. They went for days on end not talking with anyone else, a not unusual thing in northern Michigan.

When Ned talked in his sleep, Harriet was right there translating. When Harriet tripped and stumbled, Ned had caught her in his arms before she began the descent.

Harriet stayed close by the house even when the sun shone. "Too hot," she'd say. She was into needlework, strange creweled creatures that fibrillated across the little, round embroidery hoop. The needlework was never meant to be completed. She hummed her lips in her shiney dark rocking chair opposite the unused organ. Humming, rocking, taking a stitch, thinking herself industrious.

Ned had learned to play the organ after he'd grown up, when he was an adult of eight or so. He read the thirty-two pages of instruction that came clipped to the music rack. But he sent for it again to watch Harriet play. He wouldn't touch the thing.

He thought of a wife as a smiling lady that plays the organ, no matter what else she may do.

Harriet liked the organ, and she liked the house, the lonely place in Birmingham they lived in, the town that welcomed the grizzly hunters on their way out for bear and deer. Ned felt captured by the heavy, low-slung moon that haunts the Michigan sky; he felt he belonged, and he liked it all.

They were thirty-five apiece now and wanting to have a baby.

She wanted a baby the way neurotic young

women want a baby, as though simply nothing else in the world will distract them from it. She wanted a baby that would never grow up—after the minimal training. A baby would change things in Birmingham, cut through the dull film of powerful winters. Enclosed in the house, wrapped in a robe, set down by the T.V. set, a baby could guide her through the dangerous years between thirty-five and death.

Ned finally told her something to do with the workaday world. They had a short conversation about it. The crops had failed. They planted too late.

Machinery balked. Drought triumphed. Farmers convened, but the weather triumphed as the crops went bad in a hundred clever ways.

It was a short conversation, shorter than the ones about dinner menus or the rising electric bills.

While they thought of the farm as her home, it was Ned's crops, Ned's seeds, Ned's ploughs. She just wasn't a real farmer's wife. The was the decorative kind. The kind with church gloves but no chickenkilling clothes.

Harriet worked from her womb.

When first frost passed and plants were repotted indoors, she knew for sure she was pregnant.

Once she was convinced she told Ned, and once she'd told Ned she got intense morning sickness daily, constantly, until she got so happy and stayed so pleased, groaning all day and leaning on the walls for support, that she never got sick again for the rest of her life. Such is the satisfaction of carrying a baby. "I think I'll call him Jesus," she cooed, "I see her as a Mary," she whispered to her embroidery, a study in pink and blue fillips,.

She would step out to the frontiers of her country, on the edges of the porch, as far as the domestic warmth pervaded. Her eyes were looking in through the house. Her neck was folded down to the baby in her body. Her feet were still.

For Ned, future crops and old regrets were not real anymore, now with a baby coming. He rented out the whole farm, cursing any interruptions that took 17

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him from their home. Going to business was just a break in reality.

One day a vagrant stopped by their door, on a casual hobo-like hunch. He almost thought he saw something, but suddenly his eyes burned and watered so badly he couldn't see a thing until he was back on the main road. He almost thought he spotted in­ doors a grown man and woman on all fours trying to crawl into her belly, and that was enough for him to leave town fast.

NO NEWS IS NO NEWS Robert Kleinbardt W'--i7

WHEN SEBASTIAN FIEST went into the bedroom and lock­ ed the door behind him, Theresa was concerned.

Now, she pretends to understand what is going on. "Everyone needs to be alone sometimes," she tells their friends. "I'm really not too concerned about it." ΛΑ*

Sebastian locked himself in three months ago. He hasn't been apparently has no desire to come "No need to worry," Theresa

the bedroom over out since and out again. insists.

one question, "Should I call someone?" That's another. ***

Theresa had to have a new telephone installed in the living room. Sebastian had taken the bedroom phone off the hook when he locked himself in. For weeks, when people tried to call the old number, they got a busy signal. Now, nobody bothers calling the old number—nobody but Theresa. Once a day she dials the number. She is certain Sebastian will put the phone back on the hook when he is ready to speak to her, Theresa contacts him in other ways. Every day she knocks on the bedroom door and says, "Sebastian, are you all right?"

And every time she does this, an index card (3 X 5) with small neat handwriting on it slides forth from under the door. The writing says: "No news" ***

One day the cards stopped coming. At first, Theresa thought there might be a message in this.

"Perhaps," she said to her friend Margot, "perhaps, no news ±s^ good news. That must be what it means."

After a week of no messages she went to the stationery store and bought a packet of one hundred 3 x 5 index cards. She went home and slid them under the door to the bedroom. When she awoke the next morning there was a card on the floor: "No news"

A**

Later, alone at night, trying to sleep on the couch in the living room, she worries. At nights she speaks softly to the ceiling and tells it of her concern. She asks questions. "Is it normal?" is 18

Theresa was relieved. She bought more cards and pens and slid them under the door. ***

19

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"But, how does he eat?" Margot asks.

"I leave food for him every night."

"Oh, then he comes out every night and brings the food back there with him?"

"No...not exactly."

Every night, Theresa prepares two sandwiches for Sebastian. She puts them in a brown paper bag with some fruit, two cans of beer, a jar of water, and some napkins. Then she walks down the four flights of stairs to the street, goes around to the back of the building, climbs up the fire escape and leaves the bag outside the bedroom window.

One time when she did this, the window blind was not completely drawn. She could see Sebastian sitting at his desk. He hadn't shaved since he locked himself in, but,otherwise, he looked quite well.

He was wearing stereo earphones and waving his arms frantically in the air—a conductor directing an invisible and (to Theresa) silent orchestra. Theresa studied the scene for ten minutes. When the record finished and the tone arm was back in place, she knocked on the window. Sebastian turned his head slowly to look at her, removed the earphones, walked to the window and shut the blind.

The next evening, when Theresa reached the top of the fire escape, she saw that Sebastian had taken his paints and completely covered the window —each pane a different color. It reminded her of a quilt she had had when she was a young girl and lived in Vermont.

Fr om inside the bedroom she could hear the typewriter. ÄA*

The typewriter is an old black Smith-Corona.

Despite its weight, it was called a portable. They had purchsed it for fifteen dollars from an old woman in their building. The first time Sebastian used it, he discovered that the "S" key was broken. Not wanting to ask the old woman to return his money, Sebastian decided to fix it himself. He sent a let-

ter to the company, giving them the model number of the typewriter and asking them to send him a new "S" key. In the meantime, whenever he used the machine, he improvised using "th" or "f" in place of "s." Jokingly, they called the typewriter the Old English Machine. The company sent a new key, but Sebastian never did get around to putting it in the machine. He did send them a thank-you note. The note ended: "Rethpectfully yourf, Sebaftian Cartwright." Λ*Α

Theresa sleeps in the living room on the Castro Convertible that Sebastian's mother gave them. His mother had said at that time that it was a very handy thing to have. "Especially," she added, "when you have guests you want to put up for the night." The next weekend, his mother visited on Friday night and stayed for the weekend. Before long, she was staying every weekend, invited or not. During the week, Sebastian and Theresa had many talks about these visits. Theresa complained (to Sebastian—never to his mother) about this invasion of their privacy, "It's one thing if we invite her," she said, "but just to show up uninvited and expect to spend the night...the weekend... it's just not right."

Sebastian promised to speak with his mother.

He went to see her the next day and when he returned he assured Theresa that he had taken care of every­ thing. "I told her how we felt," he said. "I just explained the situation to her."

"You didn't offend her, did you?"

"Of course not."

The next day Sebastian's mother called Theresa on the telephone. "BitchI" she screamed. "Only a bitch turns a boy against his own mother." Then she hung up.

21

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The only access to the bathroom of their apartment is from the bedroom. Theresa goes next door to Margo and Ed's apartment to shower before work in the morning. Once again, Margot insists that Theresa stay with her for as long as Sebastian keeps himself locked in the bedroom. And once more, Theresa declines saying, "I can't. He needs me now, more than ever."

"Why now?" Margot asks.

"I think he may be worse. Last night when I knocked on the door, the file card came out, like always, but this time there was no writing. No handwriting anyway. He used the typewriter. Here, look."

She hands the card to Margot. Before letting go of the card she reads it again to herself to make sure she hasn't missed anything. Centered in the middle of the unlined side of the card are the words; "No newth"

/4

"What do you think it means?" says Margot.

Theresa shakes her head, says, "I don't know," and pads off into the shower.

•Ì

The living room and the kitchen are the only rooms available to Theresa. There is a radio in the kitchen and little else. Sebastian has the stereo, the T.V., the typewriter, his paints,and most of the books in the bedroom. Lately, the typewriter seems to be getting the most use. Theresa never hears the T.V. or the stereo, although she feels sure that he uses earphones whenever he wants to listen to the stereo. She has to listen to the typewriter. She hears it several hours a day. At all times of the day—and night.

Something wakes Theresa at 4:00 in the morning.

It's the typewriter. She gets out of the convertible bed and goes to sit by the bedroom door. She leans

her back against the door, her legs straight out in front of her and her palms flat on the cold wood floor. From here she can see a small slice of sky above the building across the street. She sits and watches the sky go from black to inky blue to pale blue. The sound of traffic joins the noise of the typewriter. The clock radio comes on at 7:00 a.m. and joins the morning symphony. Then the typing stops. Theresa bangs on the door and calls.

"Sebastiani Why are you doing this? What are you doing in there? Can't you please tell me something?"

She hears the sound of paper being removed from the typewriter and a new paper being put in.

Then there is more typing. A short silence. A card glides out from under the door, its lined side showing. She takes the card, turns it over and reads: "No newth P.F. Trutht me" Theresa runs next door to tell Margot. That afternoon she buys a bottle of wine, convinced that Sebastian will soon be out and things will return to normal.

AA*

Theresa invites Margot and Ed over for dinner.

She prepares veal marsala, one of Sebastian's favorite dishes. The conversation at the dinner table is light and easy. No mention is made of Sebastian until later, over coffee, when Ed says, "How's it going with...?" He motions to the bedroom.

"Much better," Theresa says. "Last night after I put his food out^ he typed me a thank-you note.

Not much, just "thank you," but that's a big improvement."

Margot and Ed nod their heads and mutter their agreement."Sounds like he's all right," Margot says.

Immediately, there is the sound of typing. A file 23

22

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card inches forward on the floor. On it, in red caps, is the message: "DON'T COUNT ON IT" Theresa shares the note with Margo and Ed and declares, "Getting better all the timel" Λ*Λ

But secretly, it is wearing on Theresa's nerves. She worries about the future of their re­ lationship. She goes to sleep a bit later every night and wakes up earlier every morning. Her sleep is fitful, even when she takes her Valium. She eats little. Even the meals she fixes for Sebastian are affected. She no longer cuts the sandwiches in half.

"Damned if I'll cut your damned sandwiches in half for you againi" she proclaims.

Later, she cries by the door—holding onto the doorknob with both hands. "Sebastian. I'm sorry.

Forgive me."

A white card appears on the floor: "For what?"

She stops crying. "It's something I said, isn't it? Or something I did? That's why you're doing this, isn't it?"

Another card comes out: "No" "Then why? Damn it, Sebastiani You owe it to me. If you don't tell me...I'll leave now. ,.I swear I will. I swear to God. And if I walk out that door, I won't come back again. And you can cut your own damned sandwiches in half, because I don't care anymore." Theresa falls to her knees, crying.

"Sebastian, please," A white card pokes her in the knee. "Oh,

Sebastian, thank you. I knew you'd answer me." She turns the card over: "Have to find mythelf" She tells the door she understands and asks if there is anything she can do to help. "Anything, You're not alone in this, Sebastian. I'm here if you need me. Tell me what I can do to help." Again she hears the typewriter and sees a card slide forward.

It reads: "Leave me alone" "Whatever you think is best. I'm behind you 100%." She stands waiting. Then she hears the stereo.

She takes the cards, dates them, and puts them on the kitchen counter with all the rest. Then she goes next door to tell Margot and Ed the latest.

AÄ*

Days later, Theresa wakes at 7:00 a.m. to the sound of the clock radio. The weather report is promising. She has slept better than usual and feels good. She goes next door and has coffee and English muffins with Margot and Ed. The usual questions are asked about Sebastian» "He's doing better," Theresa says. "He communicates more every day. He hasn't spoken yet, or put the phone back on the hook.,.but I'm sure it won't be long."

"I hope you're right, Theresa."

"I'm sure of it. He left two notes last night, besides the usual 'no newth'—" She smiles. "One of them said, 'Good night.'"

"What did the other say?"

"Don't put mayonnaithe on liverwurtht."

Theresa walks to the corner phone booth to call

24

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Dr. Grimble, a psychologist recommended to her by Margot. She decided to call from the corner because she didn't want to let Sebastian know that he had driven her to this.

"It might upset him even more," she told Margot, "or...or it may not even bother him at all. Frankly, I don't know which would be worse." ΛΑ*

Dr. Grimble is a short balding man with a red misshapen nose, wiry black hair, and no answer for Theresa's problem. He struts around the room with his hands behind his back while Theresa sits on the chair. He stops in the middle of the room to ask a question that she has already answered. "Almost four months now," she repeats, and the doctor re­ sumes his pacing.

"He's trying to get away from everything," the doctor blurts finally. He rocks on his heels and buries his hands deep in his pockets.

"He's succeeded," Theresa says.

"He'll realize his mistake soon enough," Grimble assures her. "No need to worry."

His mistake? Theresa wonders as she writes Dr. Grimble a check for $50.00 and hands it to him. ***

u

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tv·-.

Theresa finishes a bottle of wine. It's 4:00 in the morning, and all is silent on the other side of the door. She gets up from the couch and walks to the door holding her empty wine glass before her.

She whispers something and hurls the glass at the door. Tiny broken pieces fall to the floor.

"I'm sorry Grimble was no help," Margot says to Theresa. It's a Saturday, any Saturday, and bright morning light fills Margot's kitchen. Margot asks Theresa to go shopping with her, but Theresa 26

declines saying she feels like taking it easy» She waits until Margot is ready to go out and leaves the apartment with her.

Sometime in the afternoon she sweeps up the broken glass. She stares at the door and leans against her broom. She nods her head as if she knows something. Maybe she does. ΑΑΛ

When Theresa first locked the apartment door and refused to come out, Margot was concerned. Now she pretends to understand what is going on. "They need to be alone," she explains to Ed. AAA

Theresa locked herself in the apartment over a week ago, and she hasn't been out since. There's no telling when she will be out again. The notes Margot receives from under the apartment door contain no news. Are they just Sebastian's old notes to Theresa, Margot wonders?

"You don't even know if they are together in there or not," Ed insists. "What the hell makes you think they're together?"

Margot says nothing» She knows that it would just be too awful if they weren't together in there.

And that's good enough for Margot. Ä*A

Margot and Ed are in bed. She turns off the light and lays on her side facing away from Ed» "They're both crazy," Ed says.

"Don't be so insensitive," she says. "You just don't understand them."

"And you do?" Ed asks. Margot says nothingo "I repeat," Ed says, "They are both crazy. And anyone who thinks they understand them is crazy toOo" Margot starts to cry softly into her pillow.

Ed can't stand it when she cries. He feels it is a 27

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weapon which she uses against him. Maybe he's right.

He walks out to sleep on the couch in the next room.

When he is gone, Margot rises and starts toward the door but remembers the lock is broken so she gets back into bed.

ICE Maurice Stone We made love under the AstroDome on the fifty yard line While the capacity crowd cheered and Network television recorded Our caresses coast to coast.

Later I watched the replay on my Batamax Making frequent use of the slo-mo and Fast forward adjustments. We Seemed happy together. We Smiled at one another and During the close-up I Kissed the ghosts of your eyes With b l u e l i p s .

In my dream a man and woman Walk along the beach. A storm Broods over the perfect line Of the horizon and gulls shriek And streak the sky with their lonely grace While we make love beneath a purple sun Shivering in the stern wind.

28

HOTEL PRIMITIVO Patricia Volk "I don't recommend this place to just anyone," Selma had said, and the Hoffman's could see why.

Roy had to carry his bags from the limousine to the front desk,and a bearded bellhop, dressed only in a loin cloth, had not even acknowledged the $2 tip.

"You said you didn't want any more of those Pina Colada - "Yellow Bird" hotels, Polly whispered as they stepped inside their thatched roof hut. The room had a hollow sound Polly knew would disappear as soon as she emptied the suitcases and settled in.

She inspected the drawers for hair, blowing into corners, while Roy checked the bathroom.

"Pretty clean," he said, loosening his tie.

"The glasses aren't wrapped in paper, but the tub is shiney. We have three towels apiece."

"Is there one of those paper things on tie toilet?"

"Sano-Strips?" he said. "Nah. They only put those on when they don't clean the bowl just so you'll think it's clean. If it's clean, they don't bother."

"What do you think of the room?" she asked, lining up his Dop-kit next to her make-up case.

"I kind of like it. The stuff looks natural. I mean it's not your basic ersatz gold-trimmed French Hilton stuff." He looked around. "I don't think I've ever been in a hotel room before that had plants."

"Guess what's missing. 'What's wrong with this picture?'"

There was something missing, but Roy couldn't put his finger on ito "I give up."

"No mirror," she said. "You think you can live without seeing yourself for a week?"

"How'11 I shave?"

29

"I have a feeling you won't. Did you see the reservations clerk? The bellhop? The two men in the lobby? They all had beards. Nobody here shaves."

"I came here for a rest. Not to look like Sigmund Freud."

"The brochure said this place puts worries and wordly cares behind you."

"Right. I'll have you know we're putting wordly things behind us for $120 a day. Modified American Plan."

He flipped off his shoes and fell on the bed.

The sides of it folded around him as he sunk in the middle, a hot dog roll enveloping a frank. "Hey," he said. "This bed's all right."

He watched Polly as she took off her city clothes and slipped into her vacation bathrobe. He began thinking about Vacation Sex. It was the same as City Sex, only more frequent. Good, solid sex in which he fine tuned her like the carburetor of his car then drove her for all she was worth. None of this on the kitchen table or in the bathtub stuff.

He suspected their sex life was pedestrian, but they both liked it too much to ever think of changing. He watched her, loving the way he could see the ribs through her back when she pulled things over her head. She was so soft, it always amused him that beneath her roundness there was a hard substructure.

"About the beds," she said.

"Yeah? What about the beds." His voice was soft in a way that pleased her.

"I just think it's silly that you always get first choice. You always take the bed near the window, then you fall asleep in my bed^ and I have to get out of m^ bed and sleep in your bed."

"So,what are you complaining about? That means you wind up with the window bed."

"But I like to sleep in m^; bed, the same bed every night."

"But if you start off in the window bed, then I creep into your bed,you'11 wind up in the nonwindow bed when I fall asleep anyway. So what's the difference?" He was leaning on his side now,

his elbow deep in the pillow. He was smiling.

Damn, Polly thought. He's done it to me again.

"Tell you what, Pol," he said. "I don't want you to feel taken advantage of. I'll take the window bed. See? Then every night, I'll tippytoe into your bed and make love to you and then fall asleep immediately so that you can creep out into the window bed and have it all to yourself."

Polly was smiling now too. "Well, suppose I creep into your bed?"

"You won't have to," he said, zipping his fly up and down as he raised and lowered his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

By the third day, they had adjusted to the place and settled into a routine. They wore the soft cotton sarongs provided by the hotel. Roy pulled his through his legs and tucked it in his waist. Polly wrapped hers like Dorothy Lamour and wore a shell necklace. She thought she must look very Gauguin and developed a toe-heel gait she thought would be appropriate to someone who had never worn shoes. Roy had begun stroking his face where the beard was coming in. He was careful when they made love not to let it scratch her face.

They ate outside at one of the candlelit tables sprinkled around the trees like nests. They rarely saw other people. Occasionally, Polly would look up and see someone peeping at her through the giant schiffieras, houseplants gone wild. They ate without utensils. The table was set with nacre plates from some giant bivalve. Moss served as a cloth. They drank a fresh, pink jasmine-scented wine out of coconut shells.

Roy was trying to get over his feelings of looking ridiculous. If someone had asked him what clothes he had felt most comfortable in, he'd have to say "scrub suit."

"Happy Hallowe'en," he said, clinking coconut shells.

"Are you referring to my couture?"

"Uhn," he said, imitating their waitor. So far,

30

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the only word he had spoken in three days was "Uhn." "Do you make the ice cubes with bottled or tap water?"

"Uhn." "Do you have Sweet n' Low?" "Uhn." "Please tell the chef I'm allergic to guava."

"Uhn." Uhn appeared, carrying two planks of sizzling fish, black on the outside, moist, buttery and faintly saline inside. Next to it, was a vegetable they had never seen before. It was some kind of root. Uhn showed them how to scrape the dense, sweet orange meat, the color of the setting sun, off against their teeth. They followed that with a warm clear broth that trapped the moon when they held it up to their faces to drink. There was a bread that had no crust, a bread that was all crust, and a strange fruit every night.

During the early part of the day they followed the sun. Lunch was always the same, some kind of jelly on a soft bread, followed by cheese and yogurt. They never got tired of it.

"You know," Roy said, "you could package this lunch and make a fortune back home."

"You could wrap it in a box that looked like a little thatched hut."

"The spoon could look like a shell."

"The napkin could be leaf-shaped."

"Fantastic," Roy said. "I think the city is ready for a primitive lunch."

"Uhn," Polly said, and they laughed.

When the waiter came to clear the table, Polly decided to make him talk. She had never seen a man that had no hair on his body.

"What kind of nuts were in the cheese?" she asked. His pectorals looked like they were chiseled out of granite, "Uhn," he said and removed her plate so gently a grackle pecking crumbs didn't stir.

"Bet that's a plum job on the island," Roy said.

"Yeah," Polly said. "$30 a week and all the

Uhn you can eat."

They spent the afternoon swimming nude.

Every hut had its own private cove. They lay down on their sarongs and let the sun dry them off.

"I heard Kissinger used to stay here," Roy said making a stab at conversation.

"Really?" Polly answered after a long pause.

"Yeah." He grabbed Polly's hand and placed it over his groin. "Can you imagine Henry Kissinger getting sand on his pecker?"

That night, Roy followed her to their table, appreciating the swing of her hips, hoping to see another woman so he could favorably compare Polly to her.

It had gotten dark earlier than usual, and the trail to their table was lit by burning torches.

"You know, this whole place could go up like thati" Roy snapped his fingers. "Look at all these dry leaves and the huts."

"I know," Polly said. "I wish they had one of those Fire Commissioner signs nailed to a palm or something."

Roy pulled out her peacock chair, and she noticed the little notes on their plates.

"The management wishes to inform you that Hurricane Abel is approaching the island at 173 miles per hour. Precautions will be taken to insure your safety."

"I better check the airline tickets. Want me to call the kids?" Polly nodded, thinking she would have preferred the word every in front of precaution. There was a world of difference between precaution and every precaution.

Uhn appeared at the table and set down a bowl of orange soup. The whitest scallops Polly had ever seen floated on top. The wind blew the steam in her face. It smelled like saffron. "How beautiful," she said. "Uhn!" Uhn said and leaned towards her.

32

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He's going to kiss me, she thought. She pulled up the sides of her sarong. Roy gets up for a minute and he moves in. Frustrated wife on holiday. Bet he thinks there's a Dunhill lighter in this for him.

Roy, where are you?

She sat still, awaiting the inevitable.

Uhn reached beside her head, brushing his hair against her cheek and pulled the largest purple hi­ biscus off a tree she had ever seen.

Please god, she thought, don't let him stick it in my hair. Me Uhn—You Jane.

Uhn straightened up and disappeared into the bush with the hibiscus.

Roy came back smiling. Suddenly he looked so stupid to her in his sarong. "I met a chap checking in in the lobby." Polly hated when he affected Eng­ lish words. "Said American is taking off tomorrow.

The hurricane should blow over tonight. He says he comes here every year, and they always have a hurri­ cane. What is this? Marshmallow soup?"

Polly couldn't wait to get back to the room.

The wind was gathering strength, and the palms were beginning to bend over.

She lay in the bed and watched a lizard crawl across the ceiling. She wondered if it was able to stay up there by suction or by exuding tiny drop­ lets of sticky stuff like some insects. The lizard looked black in the candlelight of their room and threw an alligator sized shadow across the ceiling.

It seemed to take one step backwards for every two steps forward. Polly imagined falling asleep and having the thing plop into her mouth. Roy told her they were always taking things out of people's orifices at the hospital. Roaches in ears. Pebbles in nostrils. Light bulbs in asses. "Give people an orifice and they'll stick something in it," Roy always said after that kind of surgery. She had thought of needlepointing it on a pillow for him.

She heard water spray against the glass doors of their room and could no longer distinguish whether it was surf or rain. She wished Roy would get out of the shower.

Suddenly, the door opened. A wet breeze swept in, blowing her hair and riffling the drapes. She saw his long leg first. Then Uhn came in, followed by a slender boy of no more than fourteen. Their skins were wet and shiny. The boy had the large purple hibiscus tucked into the waist of his sarong.

Polly watched them silently, forgetting her breasts were exposed. The boy followed Uhn to the veranda^ and together they carried the flimsy cane and rattan furniture into a corner of the room. The curtains stopped blowing as Uhn slid the glass doors shut, closing folded wooden shutters over them that Polly had never noticed in the room before. Uhn began to follow the boy out. He stopped at the door and walk­ ed back in the room. Without even looking at Polly, he stood on his toes and, reaching up, scooped the lizard into his hand. Softly, he closed the door behind him» "Who put that stuff in here?" Roy asked, point­ ing to the furniture.

"Uhn," she said, staring at the ceiling.

"He d i d n ' t see you l i k e t h a t , did he?" Roy asked, p o i n t i n g to her b r e a s t s .

"No, he didn't," she said quietly.

"Make room for Daddy," he said, dropping his towel.

"Not tonight."

"What do you mean not tonight? It's the last night of our vacation."

"It's been a wonderful vacation. I'm just so tired."

He looked at her sitting up in bed, propped up by the pillows. Her hair was so glossy and beautiful in the candlelight. He had never seen her hair the way it had been this week, undisciplined and massive.

She saw him watching her and watched his eyes slip down to her breasts. She followed his eyes and saw for the first time how brown her breasts had gotten in the sun. How the nipples, usually so soft, iced in the palest translucent pink gouache, had gotten hard and bitable. She was excited by her own body.

35

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She knew how she must look to him and was prepared to fight.

He blew out the candle and slipped in beside her.

He tried to part her legs with his hand, but she pressed her knees together. He shot his hands up towards her breasts and felt her nipples. They were hard as little stones. He couldn't wait to get his mouth on them. He knew she wanted it, but just as he bent down she arched her back and bucked, flipping over to her other side. She crossed her arms in front of her breasts and curled up, the soft bedding settling around her like leaves. He threw off the covers and straddled her, pushing down on her shoulders and trying to turn her over.

The bed was working for her, to her advantage. He couldn't push her over, she was in too deep. Suddenly, he stopped trying. His fingers had a better idea, something he had never thought of. He let them trail over her buttocks till they found the place they wanted. The soft furry vulnerable spot that no matter how tightly clenched a woman's legs are, a man can find. She had never known about that place before. His fingers slipped in, deeper, and she found her muscles relaxing long before her mind had given in. Slipping his other arm beneath her, he turned her over, prying her legs open with his knee. He pressed his bearded face into hers.

When she opened her eyes, the air seemed cool.

Rain beat against the doors, and she licked her shoulder, enjoying the salt. Her eyes fixed on the spot where the lizard had been. She thought of getting out of bed, was about to, when he rolled over and slapped his big hairy arm across her chest.

She stayed there all night, grateful for its warmth.

F.J. TURNER, NUTS TO YOU Marcia Stameli I THREW THIS party for you. So you could see them.

And for them, I guess, so they could see each other.

And for me, of course, I mean after all these years —it's only two, but it seems like a lot more—of talking, after all the separate conversations over separate cups of coffee. I thought if I brought everybody together, my life might start to make sense. My past life, of course, since I am leaving town and all this, forever. I swear. But let me show you.

Over there in the corner, by the couch, the big blond one. Isn't he a honey? That's John. John the First. There were three Johns, so I numbered them. John the First and I are just good friends, now. He couldn't relate, not after his divorce and the horrible way his ex-wife died. I wouldn't exactly say it was suicide. Actually, I^ would say it was suicide. But the coroner didn't. I think someone paid him off. And John said it wasn't. But he's a Catholic. What do they know? Nothing. Because, let's face it, when a beautiful young woman starts popping uppers and downers and downers and uppers, then sloshes down the booze, there's one thing she wants to be and that's dead.

Her name was Catherine. She was supposed to be very beautiful. And smart. They met at Harvard. And classy. Her father was part of FDR's brain trust.

But you know what the old man said when someone called in condolences? He said, "It's okay, I've got five more." Can you imagine? Poor John was in the room. He was still considered a kind of son-in-law because he still loved her. He loves her now. He dreams of her, hears her voice, sees her walking down the street. After she died, he dropped out of law school and joined the Marines. He wanted to be dead in Viet Nam, but the war ended too soon.

To see him, you wouldn't think he was a pa37

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thetic lunatic, would you? Look at that smile. Look at the line of his back. Once when I was down in Houston at a women's conference,and he was in town visiting his widowed mother, I brought him onto the convention floor, right up front of the press sec­ tion where I was sitting. I wangled the credential from this guy at The Times. Anyhow, one look at John and the whole goddamn convention started to twitch.

Oh, maybe not everyone, but certainly the entire New York delegation. You wouldn't believe who slith­ ered right up, pretending to be waiting for the speaker's podium. She put her ass on the table in front of him, and she rubbed her body all over.John kept whispering to me. "Why is she rubbing her body?"

He gave me such a headache, I finally had to kick him out. He made me wear a dress to dinner that night in retaliation.

A man like that, a man who can make a room full of feminists twitch against their will, it doesn't make any sense that he should be such a dumb sucker.

But she had the secret for him, the answer. As I guess he has the secret for me—how the hell should I know?

He said the only reason that Catherine married him was because she was angry at her boyfriend.

Somebody else, who wouldn't take her to Greece. So instead, that summer, she married John. The marriage lasted three weeks. They got an annulment. Six months later, she was dead.

She just started running around the country, fucking around, taking all those drugs. It's like when the demons take over, you know the demons, only she couldn't win herself back. What hell her life must have been. How nice for her to have been dead.

But I can't understand her either, why she couldn't make a better fight. She was beautiful. She was smart. She was rich. She had a man like John to love her. I only slept with John once. It was back in the crazy, desperate days when I first got to town.

When I didn't have any friends and I didn't know what to do with me. I picked him up on the subway.

I seduced him. He's been taking me out to dinner as

penance ever since. If it wasn't for him, I would have forgotten the taste of steak these past two years. If it wasn't for him, sometimes I think I would have forgotten the sound of conversation, too.

And he had nothing to apologize for, he was even a fabulous lover. Fabulous. I tried to seduce him a second time in Houston. I propositioned him when I was wearing that dress in the restaurant. You know what he said to me? "Shut up and eat your vegetables.

John is the only man I've ever met who uses body deodorant you know where. So I know he feels awfully guilty about something. On the other hand, he's got this huge mirror standing right next to his bed. You can move it all around. You can change the reflective angles with these two big knobs. John's also reading Gurdieff and trying to understand the wisdom of the Sufi's. But the thing I don't under­ stand is what drives people to extremes like that when they could just easily drive to California.

A WOMAN ALONE Helene Brandt THE AFTERNOON I spent sitting in the back seat of the limousine going forward with my eyes open while you rode up ahead, always moving toward your future, or was it mine? I wanted to use my time to stop all of this. I wanted to ask the driver with steady blue eyes and the N.Y. license plate to take you to 63 Hilltop Road. To set you up in the right direction again. With all the acrylic paints. To start you up again in that great loft space where, sure as the painter's hands you were born with, you could start mixing colors again. With a new adventure every day.

But you have your own time now. I asked the driver if he liked my best black woolen dress and tilted my head back and laughed. Then it all started to fall 39

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apart. The memories and half memories of me sitting on our bed nude while you painted my eyelids acrylic pink. Our laughter with the graceful curve of my belly. The collection of socks with fourteen odd singles. The collection of thick jars of paint. The collection of 97 brushes. The collection of tools and tiny screws. The collection of books and clippings. The camera you borrowed from Joe. The red neon heart strung up over our bed. The times you took me to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central with my navy blue suit and white Peter Pan collar, looking like a little girl. All seeming to fall apart, to fall apart and the sentences not ending and our daughter and our son—their blocks and new Leggo sets wrapped up in plastic—and then the undertaker came.

Packaged you in a bag and took you away. After today or tomorrow it could have been eight or was it nine years?

CAT SUPPORT Steve Schrader JANET, MY EX-WIFE, agreed to take my two cats on a trial basis. She already had two cats, but she would take mine for the sake of Jacob, our son, who lived with her. I had to get rid of them because Alice was coming to live with me. Janet asked me to de-claw the cats and also requested five dollars a week for their food. I had to assume responsibility for future veterinarian expenses and arrange for them to come away with me to the country in August. I felt that we should call our lawyers and write up an agreement for cat support, but I refrained from any sarcastic comments. We'd had enough bitterness during our divorce five years before. Now my son wouldn't be deprived of Keith and Eaglet. As long, of course, as

they got on with the two cats he already had.

Keith and Eaglet seemed to sense something was up, and they were especially affectionate to me. Keith rubbed up against me in the morning while I exercised and even scared, runty Eaglet sat in my lap and chewed the telephone wire when I was on the phone. I felt I was playing a callous trick on them and out of guilt I gave them their favorite foods several times a day.

I called the vet and got an elderly, unfriendly lady who I guessed to be the vet's wife and made an appointment for the following week. My poor cats.

On the other hand, I would be free of cat smell and cat hair. My house would no longer have that disheveled look days before the cleaning lady came for one of her bi-weekly visits.

Alice was excited. We talked of what she would bring from her apartment—plants, paintings, dishes; what I was willing to accept to improve my seedy place. I was willing to have most everything, though underneath I stubbornly wanted everything to remain the same. We had discussed living together for six months, and sometimes I felt tempted once again to call my lawyer to draw up the terms of Alice's and my living together. We had argued over where to live and what to do with the cats. The compromise was to live at my place because it was bigger than hers and for me to give away the cats. Now Alice would have a much longer trip to work every day, and I no longer would have my cats, except for a month in the summer.

Jacob wasn't happy about giving up the cats.

Let Alice get used to them, he said. I tried to explain that she had an aversion to animals, at least in the same house with her. Jacob refused to understand. Animals were very nice. The cats could live in his room. He was going to have to share me weekends with Alice and now, in addition, he would no longer have cats to play with, cats he had given me for my birthday three years before.

I assumed life would take care of itself. Alice and I would or would not get along; my cats would or 41

40

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would not get on with Jacob's cats. The tale would unfold. I was anxious to live it out, to see what would happen. And there was always the unexpected.

The next night a friend called to tell me Janet had a boyfriend who was crazy and that I might want to think of having Jacob come live with me. The day before the boyfriend had ended up on the roof of a church which was being renovated, throwing bricks at policemen for five hours. The papers had printed lots of pictures.

I decided not to de-claw the cats. I couldn't give them to someone who might live with a man who threw bricks at policemen. Besides Jacob might come live with me,and then he wouldn't see the cats anyway. Alice was understanding, but she let me know she couldn't move in till the cats were gone.

I thought of a friend who lived in a loft and had a rat problem. I called, and he agreed to come and take a look at my cats on Saturday afternoon.

He brought his girlfriend who was moving in with him, and we sipped wine and surveyed the cats. Jacob kept going in and out of his room, watching Bill and Julie's reactions. Julie took off her shoes and sat on the floor in her overalls and played with the cats. She'd grown up with dogs, cats, horses, sheep, birds, every kind of animal. She had a dreamy quality and looked like she would play with the cats for hours if they were hers. Bill described the foot long rat he had trapped and killed in the loft. He was anxious to bring the cats down for protection. Jacob worried that the cats would be overcome by an army of superrats.

Julie explained that cats came above rats in the hierarchy of animals and that just the smell of cats would chase them away.

My cats behaved themselves very well. Eaglet pursued Keith^and Keith pretended to be afraid of her, like he always did. He rolled on his back and let puny Eaglet nip at him while he wrapped a paw around her lovingly.

Bill and Julie were enthralled. I neglected to tell them about Eaglet's diarrhea and also that both cats had hairballs which caused vomiting. I assumed

Julie would cure them.

Bill expected to be able to take the cats within a few weeks, as soon as he cleaned away all traces of rat poison in his loft. Jacob wasn't nearly as sad as I expected him to be. He had visitation rights whenever he wanted and besides he had liked Bill and Julie very much.

After they left, Jacob and I went out and bought a turntable for him for his birthday which was next week. He assembled it in the living room, and the cats played in the cardboard box it had come in. The box was sitting in the late afternoon sun, and the cats darted in and out of the brightness. My son nuzzled up against me and thanked me for his birthday present.

We put the turntable back in the box, and I drove him to his mother. I wanted to go upstairs with him and chase her crazy boyfriend away. But there was nothing I could do about it. Life was like being up in an airplane. Worrying didn't reduce the chances of crashing. You might just as well sit back and enjoy the ride.

Alice and I ate dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and came back to my place. We discussed what she would bring to my house, and we moved furniture around for a while and went to bed. In the middle of the night I went to the bathroom and saw the cats stretched out together on the sofa, their heads buried in each other. I felt certain they would do well at Bill and Julie's.

OVARIES ABROAD Judith B.raun

'YOUR ANALYST IS a putz," I said.

Mickey and were on the Avenue George V, not far A3

42 HMĂ&#x2030;MIM

from my hotel. I was waxing eloquent about a doctor who had treated assorted friends and who believed you had to get to know your neuroses and adjust to them because there was nothing else to do with them.

"He really thinks once your arm's in a sling it's there for good. How can you see an analyst who doesn't believe in change?" I wanted to know. "Someone that reactionary."

Mickey didn't say anything. He was short and headed into the wind when he walked, bent over, and I could see why he was nicknamed Impact when he was in college.

"It's a waste of time," I persisted. He thinks you should adjust to your ulcer, not get rid of it, and it just doesn't make sense to bother with a guy like that."

I was passionate on the subject. Fast change and speedy people. I had no patience with the patience of the man at my side. "Get rid of him," I said, not listening to his silence. "Get rid of him." It was an order. "Really. Lose the guy."

Mickey muttered something, and we quickly got caught up in the afterglow of sex that was still new, and horse chestnut blossoms and Paris, and where we would eat that night.

Such was the beginning of a romance.

That night, crouched on different sides, we arm-wrestled in bed. "Three out of four," I said, convinced I would win. I was strong and exercised and tensile, and we were almost the same size.

"You think you can winI" He was amazed at my impudence as he pushed my arm over so it touched the mattress. "You really think you can winI" The gap between his two front teeth showed, and he looked at me with mock pity.

"I know I can win," I panted and used my other arm for leverage.

"If you can do that, I can put a foot on the floor and win that way." His teeth clenched. I was making him work. I reached over and tickled his naked armpit and pinned his elbow.

"There!" I said, exulting.

"You want to play dirty, is that it?"

"I want to win." I was huffing now. Fair means or foul.

We were both laughing when it was over. Two to two, and we decided to leave it at that» "Just this once," he said. "You cheated both times, you know."

"Call it whatever you want," I said.

"What do you mean, whatever I want. Did you or did you not cheat?" " I did p i n your arm to t h e m a t t r e s s , d i d n ' t I ? " "Yes, you did pin my arm to the mattress but not according to the rules, may I point out?"

"Whose rules? Mickey's Rules of Order?" I was amused and mocking.

"Come on. You won. I didn't say you didn't. I just said you cheated so you could win."

We were wrestling now, half in jest,half serious. On the edge. Not just with arms. Bodies flailing about.

He was tough and strong, and he wasn't paying attention to the fact that I was a woman. Somehow I assumed I would get special treatment. He wasn't giving it to me.

I was under him nowj and he had my arms back and he was staring down at me. Challenging me. I didn't like it.

Impulse and a word floated up and out of my mouth. "Pimp," I said. "Pimp." I had never called anyone that before, and it came utterly unbidden, a surprise.

Mickey didn't take time to react. Instead he launched into an attack. He began to hit. The word wiped the color from his face and drained away the humor. I had said something horrendous obviously.

Something with special meaning. He was beating me with his fists and he meant it, and the blows were painful. I fought back. It was no love match, no foreplay fun. The word had changed everything, and he was pummeling me as if he intended to beat me senseless. He was out of control. My arms were around my face as I tried to protect myself as best I could against his sledge hammer fists. "Get out," 45

44 |ff|H'TSî5îTïïJJ'""s5iî«rTî'^'"^

I whispered, scared, not knowing what was happening or why. "Get out of here." I rolled over and away and off the bed and onto the floor. Then, aching, stand­ ing up, I said it again. "Get out, Mickey. Get out and don't come back." No melodrama. Whatever the rea­ son, whatever transgression I had committed, the re­ sponse had exceeded any bounds I could accept.

He quickly dressed and left without a word. I crawled back into bed and lay there thinking of what had happened. It was so quick,so inexplicable.

The next morning I blinked myself awake in bright day, half expecting to find my room a bower, that he would have gone early to the flower market, bought everything, and sent it over with a note.

The morning passed. There was no word. He was leaving that day for Vienna for a few weeks. We had discussed where we might meet for a day or two during that timej but no decisions had been reached. The affair was over before it had barely begun.

I showered and dressed and went about my day.

I didn't understand.

The next day Salile, a Los Angeles friend visit­ ing Paris, and I left on our trip South. We had rent­ ed a car and planned a two week holiday, sightseeing and sort of bumming around and we were to end up in Cannes.

I was at the hotel window looking out at the Cathedral in Milan. Moonlight made its Gothic de­ tails look like chiseled white fretwork. "If you don't call him, I will," Salile was saying.

"I'm not calling. I'd die before I'd call," I answered.

"If you're pregnant you're pregnant and get it over with and as soon as possible." She had a prac­ ticed Catholic mind. "How late are you?"

"Just a week," I said.

"Just a week," she repeated as if that clinched it. "You're always regular. You've seen him on and off now for over a month, and just a week means you're pregnant."

"I won't call," I said.

"He'll know someone. You don't have to see him.

He's working on a movie, for chrissake, and someone on a movie will know who the good abortionist is and where to go to get it done."

"I will not call," I stubbornly repeated. "I will wait until I get back to Paris and ask someone else."

"If you don't call, then I will," Salile said.

We went back and forth for half an hour, both of us staring out at the Cathedral all the while, knowing in the morning we could clamber up and around its turrets and crypts and see the Saint in all his jeweled splendor in the vault and feel the coolness of the years around our faces.

I was too embarrassed to let Salile place the call.

"Mickey," I said when I reached him, "I don't want to talk to you and I'm only calling because I'm pregnant and I need an abortionist, and you're a likely person to find me one."

There was a moment's hesitation. He said he would check and call back. "How long will you be in Milan?" he wanted to know.

"Just until tomorrow night," I said.

"Good enough. I'll get back to you before you leave."

Polite,distant, very, very correct strangers, and neither of us made even passing reference to what had happened.

"He's in Zurich," he told me when he called back.

"A very good gynecologist with his own private clinicj and besides, it's legal in Switzerland."

"Good," I s a i d i n a hanging-up tone of v o i c e .

"We can meet there, and then I'll go back to Vienna after to finish up.

"Salile's with me," I said firmly, "that's okay," I was being oh so pleasant, "thanks a lot."

There, I'd said it all, I thought.

"I really would like to be around to make sure there's no hassle," he said without even a hint he might mean something else.

The speeches crackled back and forth between us with no connection apart from the immediate situation.

47

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"No, no," I said sweetly.

"At least let me make the hotel reservations," he said.

Salile and I drove leisurely to Zurich. The problem was a minor one, and anyway in a few days it would be behind us. A dramatic highlight to our trip. A footnote of interest. Besides, we'd never been to Zurich before,and.it might be fun to sightsee a little.

The hotel, rather mysteriously, waved us on to another.

Mickey was already there, stretched out on a bed in one of the two rooms, with the window wide open to the Zurichzee.

Of course, I wasn't surprised. I had expected him, and my only moment of doubt had come at the hotel where we were told our reservation had been canceled. I didn't even ponder the meaning. It was just a crimp in the plan and made me briefly doubt my preslent powers.

He got up.

I put out a hand. He d i d n ' t take i t . We s t a r ed a t each other, each trying to read the face we were staring a t for t r u e meaning.

"I expected flowers," I said.

"I expected a telegram," he said.

"You what?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"A telegram of apology," he said.

"For what? An apology for what?" I t was an inconceivable suggestion.

"For what you s a i d . " He seemed surprised I hadn't understood.

"For what I said?" I was c l e a r l y having trouble with the English language.

"Yes," he said.

Dr. Guggenheim's office was near the h o t e l . He'd changed the reservation when he realized t h a t , Mickey said, and besides, he wanted us in the n i c e s t place in town.

I wondered without wondering if he had changed the reservation when he changed h i s mind and decided 48

to come.

It was several floors, a mini-hospital in an expensive building with correct doormen. Attractive nurses in white hurried through well-lit halls. We were ushered into a private office where a fire was burning in a wide grate. The doctor stood up. He was tall and elegantly thin with a patrician face.

"Are you interested?" He shook hands. "I just got back from a trip to Israel and I took some very good slides." A polite host.

We allowed we were. We watched for ten or so minutes before he finally turned his attention to the reason for our visit. "There's one formality we have to observe in Switzerland. And it really is just that, a formality. You both must have an interview with a psychiatrist." He looked at me thoughtfully.

"I've arranged for that for this afternoon," he said.

"Mr. Freedman tells me you're on a trip and don't want too much delay."

I nodded. It was a different experience so far from the one I had had two years before in New York.

"Do either of you speak French?" the doctor asked, struck by a sudden thought. "I'm afraid the man I've chosen speaks no English at all." He sounded apologetic, as if he'd been somewhat rude.

We both assured him our French, though not the best, was sufficient for such a purpose.

After an examination and on the way back to the hotel, Mickey said he found it hard to believe I would not have expected him to be there.

The psychiatrist had a yellow leather couch and a sink in his office. He was round and full-faced and ruddy-cheeked and looked rather like a Dutch peasant.

A Franz Hals.

We sat opposite ends of the couch and faced him.

He smiled. "Are you married?" he asked Mickey.

"No," Mickey answered.

He smiled at me. "Are you married?" he wanted to know.

"No," I answered.

He smiled broadly at us both. "Well," he said, "in that case, have you ever been to Zurich before?

49

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Let me tell you what you should see here."

The half hour passed delightfully, and when we left we knew we would do none of the things he had insisted one must do in Zurich. We would probably never get to even one of the restaurants he told us were well worth the trip just for the sheer magnificence of food. And the pastries. We felt we were somehow abandoning him when we shook hands goodbye.

We were back outside. The rest of the day in front of us. Salile had made arrangements to take a tour of the city, and we were alone.

Over a leisured lunch we were at first polite and distant until good food and wine took over and we managed to relax.

He told me about Vienna, the movie, the people involved, some of whom I knew. The picture itself he said was godawful, and even the replacement of director, because the first one died unexpectedly of a heart attack, was not going to change the result. The new director was someone he knew well, had worked with before, and liked very much.

"Who knows why you came to Zurich?" I asked suspiciously.

"Everyone," he laughed.

"Everyone?" My cheeks flamed red.

"Well, you don't find an abortionist unless you ask," he pointed out.

"Why did you have to tell them it was for me?"

I persisted, not at all mollified.

"I had to give a good reason or they would never have unlocked the door and let me out," he said, "Oh," I answered.

"You're embarrassed, aren't you," he said.

I buried my answer in my wine glass because there was nothing to say. Not really.

The abortion was done quickly and painlessly.

Dr. Guggenheim assisted by two of his nurses. I rested for an hour or so and Mickey took me back to the hotel. I held onto his hand because I was wobbly from the anesthesia.

"You're a l l r i g h t ? " he was concerned. "You're sure you're a l l r i g h t ? " "Fine," I said. "I'm absolutely fine."

Salile wasn't back when he helped me into bed» "Stay in bed for a day or so," the doctor had advised, "and then do anything you want."

"Is it okay to drive?" I wanted to know.

"Of course," he said, "but don't drive much yourself and don't drive for long stretches at a time."

I kept my bathrobe on in bed because, as usual, I had no nighties.

Mickey sat next to me on the bed. Somehow he still had my hand. He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips. I kissed him back just as lightly. "You look dopey," he said.

I smiled, "I guess I can sleep," I answered, "Okay, I'll just sit here and read. Take a good long nap if you can." He settled down next to me on the bed,and I fell fast asleep.

When I awakened it was dark out and people were tiptoeing quietly in the next room, I sat up and put an uncertain foot on the floor. Reassured, I got out of bed and walked slowly to the window. Instantly two people were at my side, "You shouldn't get up yet," Salile said. She looked concerned and held my elbow as if I were an invalid.

"I'm fine, really, I told her, "Fine enough to go out for dinner."

"Not tonight," Mickey said firmly. "Tonight we'll eat in."

I walked some more. I did feel fine. A little sore, that's all, I protested, "I've never been in Zurich before and I want to see something of it before I leave," I said.

They gave in. We went to a restaurant in the old part of the city, one of the many the psyciatrist had told us about. I ate lightly and drank a lot of white wine. I felt good.

At the hotel Salile disappeared into the other 51

50

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room. I looked questioningly at Mickey.

"I told her to sleep in my room," he said.

I mulled that over.

"She seemed to understand," he told me.

Yes, I thought, but I don't.

I got back into bed, suddenly tired and descending rapidly.

"It's a serious business, an abortion," he said, "Maybe," I countered, "but it was a short enough pregnancy not to have to count."

"You sure?" he wanted to know.

"Of course," I was telling the tiruth and not quite the truth. There had been no decision involved. I had not given it any thought apart from the need for it.

He undressed and got in bed beside me. I watched and wondered what he was doing. What I should do. Say. We made love slowly, the best we could. Making do, I said, rather than making out. But the emotion was still there.

"Is it okay?" he asked. "Should we be doing this?"

"Yes," I murmured, sleepy again, taken care of.

His mouth was buried against my neck. "I'm sorry," he said, almost inaudibly.

"Me too," I said. "I'm sorry too." I didn't quite know why I was apologizing since he was so clearly in the voxong but I did it anyway.

"You sure?" he insisted.

We fell off, bodies entwined, fast asleep.

CAT'S EYES AND TALK SHOWS Pamela Jones The biscuits were bland but they melted the butter for us. We kicked

gently at the cat to shoo her away.

Still, in the bedroom, the radio I think it was the radio, filtered through the bland air of Sunday afternoon waning away.

The traffic noises melted before they even reached the ears of the cat.

Under the table, I kicked his leg, by accident, he kicked me back and said, "Excuse me." The radio sounded louder and the cat followed a crumb from a bland biscuit that rolled to the floor. The melted butter cooled away into lard. I reached to take them away but he said he wanted one more as I kicked out my chair. The sun melted behind the window shade. The radio carried a bland interview. The cat ran on noiseless cat paws to get away from the scraping chair that disturbed the bland aura and kicked into the hum of the radio.

The darkness melted over the walls, dripped down, and melted the room into a shadow. The eyes of the cat and the green dial of the radio glowed alone and away in the night, as my feet softly kicked over clothes on my way to turn off the bland talk show that melted the poignancy of night away. The cat played with a sock.

53

52

Into the air she kicked it. With the radio gone, the silence seemed less bland.

OY, CAESAR Marilyn Greenberg "AY, CAESAR," said the rabbi. "Oy, Caesar," he said.

"You thought might makes right." He surveyed the thousands massed for the concert. "Oy, Caesar," he breathed. "And actually looking at this amphitheatre whose foundation is from your day yet, and studying history (historyI such a concept!) and remembering that we stand this day in the very town of Caesarea, a person could believe it. Why not? Might makes right I It's the history of the world."

He paused dramatically, looked from left to right, high and low, let the sound of the waves be heard in his silence and all the whispering be stilled. "But oh, CaesarI You forgot the Jewish peoplel One people don't follow the rules of history.

One people that right makes right. Yes, you forgot about the Jewish people, Caesar, or Hitler, or Nasser or whatever your name is today.

"And here we are tonight, of course to enjoy the music. But even for us who don't appreciate music, maybe we didn't have the opportunity to learn, and even for us who may have traveler's trot or sore feet from climbing Masada; God bless our tour guides, they want us to see everything, even for us it's a great and significant evening. A Jewish orchestra. Musicians, I'll bet from every country in the world. Thrown out, despised. Did they pick up a knife? Guns? No, we have a different kind of might, Caesar! And they'll play for a conductor,

Bernstein. You hear, Caesar?"

A placard was raised in the audience to cheers: BOSTON LOVES LENNY. T.V.Iights blazed on, went off at once. The rabbi shook his finger at the Boston contingent. "Live and be well, my friends," he said, amplified for miles. "I'm not through. With God's help, you'll bear with me."

"What a thrill this is, Emma," said Emma's cousin. She leaned back against the stone tier rising behind them. "Back in Boston I'd have had to buy tickets months in advance."

"But would you?" asked Emma without a smile.

Lenny pressed her knee with his. She ignored him.

"You bother much with music, Esther? You know this rabbi?"

"No," said Emma's cousin. "He must be from Winthrop or with the Maiden group, maybe. Our rabbi couldn't get away now. He's with the fund raising for our new building. It's going to be in the shape of Israel with the new borders. Oh, isn't it wonderful," she beamed. She nudged her sleepy husband. The husband drowsily saluted and went back to his thoughts. "I tell everybody I'm going to my cousin's husband, Lenny, to hear music, and are they Impressedl" she said. She smiled. "I don't lie. But if they're ignorant," she winked, "and they only know one Lenny, the Bernstein one from Boston, it's not my fault, is it?"

"It's not my fault, either," said Emma. Lenny pressed her knee again.

The rabbi was finishing. He had nothing more to say after all. "And now let the music begin," he said, flinging out both arms. "Music, without words, a call direct from the human spirit. Caesar, remember I" The conductor swirled up to the podium, dropping his great black cape to the floor and raising his baton in the same gesture. He held that pose while the crowd came to its feet, cheering and taking pictures. The T.V. cameras panned the crowd and picked in and out of the orchestra. "FabulousI" cried 55

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Emma's cousin, waving to the cameras, "Reminds me of the Michigan-Ohio State game," said her husband with a grin. Emma and Lenny sat quietly among the standing shouting people. "It won't be long now," said Lenny in a low voice. "I can't stand the Jewish people," said Emma.

After the concert, they walked out, smoking, to the parking lot with Emma's cousin and her husband. The bus fumes were stifling. They searched for the proper line for the Boston group. "I'll see you when our group comes to Jerusalem, Emma," said Esther. "I want to go shopping with you. I hear you can get gold at a fraction of what we pay at home.

You must know all the places."

"I'll ask," said Emma. "I don't know."

School buses drew up to gather their waiting children. The children boarded and dropped chicken bones and apple cores from the windows. They roared a school song: We don't want to studyÎ We want to go crazyl and cheered themselves.

"What a country," said Esther. "The cultural advantages for the youth. We could learn from them."

Leaving them, Emma and Lenny walked down to the beach below the amphitheater. "You were kind of rough, Emma," said Lenny. "What kind of standards have you got for her? What do you want from her?

She's nice enough in her way."

Emma took his arm while she stooped to take off her shoes. "I expect a little common sense," she said. "They think everything is free here. They come for gold and I don't know what else, and they think that's what it's all about. She didn't even pay me back for the tickets. It's all coming to them. They make some donation in Boston and they think they bought Israel. Who needs them?"

They walked by the edge of the sea. "Don't take everything so hard," said Lenny. "She means well. And the government wants them. There must be

something to it." They stopped to look at the broken marble columns rolling in the low surf. Long fluted pillars, broken pediments, unrecognizable fragments moved slowly with the water's movement» "Can you believe that sight?" asked Lenny. "All that broken statuary and stuff just waiting to be collected? Oy, Caesar," he laughed. Emma laughed and put her arm around his waist. "Oy, Caesar," they said in unison.

"We better walk up to the road now," he said.

"We'll be able to catch a cab on the highway."

"Are you sorry, Lenny?" she asked. "We can't even have a car. You think you might have been as big as Bernstein?"

"Hell," he said. "How many meals can you eat?

How many pairs of shoes do you want? I'm not sorry."

"But what about career, not just money? You think you'd have had a better chance at home? Do you mind?"

"I think I'd be Lenny Lieber anyplace," he said. "Maybe you gave up something big, Emma. That we'll never know. I know you don't have second thoughts," Emma looked at the stars. "But I haven't got anything special. I'm decent and they pay me for it. What more should I want? Put on your shoes. I want to see my kids grow up, like my father didn't.

And I want to support them, like my father didn't.

There's nothing to regret, Emma. We go over this and over this. Let's go up on the highway now."

She shook out her shoes and put them on. Slowly they climbed uphill to the passing lights on the highway. The buses were all gone from the parking lot.

They ran across the road in an empty moment of darkness, and then more lights came downhill towards them.

"Shouldn't be long till we get a ride," he said.

Suddenly from around a distant curve, a school bus bore down on them, out of control. They stared at it bewildered for just a moment, then turned and clutched their way to safety up the weedy embankment. The rubber flapped loosely on its wheels as 57

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31

the bus thumped to a stop just beyond them, burying its headlights in the high grass and sand. The children were screaming in terror as the driver jumped down holding his dangling left arm with his right.

"OutI" he screamed. "OutI Everybody out. Hurry up I On the ground!"

The bus was hemstitched along its side by bullet holes. Gas flowed from the pierced tank to the shoulder of stones and gravel. The children shrieked and cried and pushed one another in panic.

"WaitI" Lenny shouted. He pulled open the rear doors. "Come this way," he ordered. A bleeding girl fell on his chest as she came down. Her hand was severed. With each arterial spurt from her wrist she uttered a mechanical cry. Lenny lay her on the ground. She looked up at him and said, "Momma, I have to get to school." She screamed again as her wrist spurted black blood. "Emmal" Lenny called.

"Emma, where are you?"

Other vehicles were arriving: Army carryalls, school buses, private taxis. An officer called out, "Lights outi Every light outi We don't know where they are." A medical corpsman walked along the shoulder of the road. "I need blood," he said. "Give me blood," he said. "We'll type it back at the hospital."

Emma said, "Here, I have blood. Here." She lay down in the gravel while the corpsman wiped her arm with alcohol. "Don't worry about that," she said.

He seemed to her fantastically inept and slow.

"Just take the blood. Take it all." The corpsman paid no attention. He finished with Emma and ran on along the road carrying his plastic bags and repeating, "I need blood."

"Emma, where are you?" called Lenny in the darkness. "Emma!"

She lay in the gravel and earth at the side of the road. She would not speak. She plotted her way back to the sea. I just want to get back to the water, she thought. Leave me alone. I'll just roll back down the hill. Nobody will see. I want the water, I want to roll in the water like the stone

columns. Leave me alone. She rolled onto her stomach and stopped.

"We'll leave the dead ones on the bus, take them back that way," directed a sergeant.

"Where are you?" called Lenny in the dark.

The terrorists had been stopped further down the highway and were brought back in their own pickup truck. Roughly they were pulled down from the back and made to line up in front of their lights.

The pickup was loaded with pipe bombs and machine guns. "I think there are more of them, sir," said a young private to the officer in charge. "Search the beach," said the officer. "Take somebody with you. No lights." He turned back to the prisoners.

Another private was crying and hitting one of the prisoners. "Children," sobbed the soldier. He punched the Arab's nose. "Children you kill." He wept and beat the man's eyes. The man let his arms hang, stood motionless and loose. "I'll kill you," promised the soldier. "I'll kill you, so help me."

"Dovid," said the officer sharply. "Enough!"

The young private went on as though he were alone with the prisoner. "I'll break your skull," he wept.

"I want to see you die." The Arab offered himself to the beating. The officer strode over to the prisoners lined up in the lights and ordered them to lie on the ground, face down. The private continued his despairing beating. "Dovid," the officer repeated.

He swung the soldier around by the shoulder and knocked him unconscious with a blow to the chin.

"Write him down for court martial, sir?" asked another soldier. The officer, a bulky dark man, turned a sweating face to him and showed him his fist, "You want some of this, too? Forget what you saw, everything. Get the prisoners ready to go.

Blindfold them and take away their shoes and belts.

No talking to each other. We'll give them a fast ride and see what we shake out of them."

The beaten prisoner cursed and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva on the ground near Dovid's head.

The officer said jovially in Arabic, "You'd like to pay him back a little?" He kicked the Arab in the 59

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testicles with his boot. The prisoner fell next to the soldier, his eyes bulging, a siren-like sound coming from his mouth.

"Emma, where are you?" called Lenny, Leave me alone, she thought, her mouth to the earth. Let me lie here. Leave me alone.

There was a scrambling on the road where the girl had fallen out of the bus. They were looking for the detached hand. "I've got iti Herel" "Don't touch it," came another voice in the dark. "We have to pick it up in something, a cloth or something. Who's got something?" he asked in the dark.

Emma stood up and pulled off her skirto "Here," she said. "Turn it inside out. It's pretty clean," She watched the unharmed hand go into the folds of her skirt. She felt herself pitch forward like a felled tree, found herself on the ground againo There were cries of "Help herl" "Stay back, give her airi" "Hurry, carry her to the carl" No, no, she thought. She resisted them. No, I want to be a snail, a sea urchin, a sand dollar; something that creeps to the sea; something remote from the terrible acts of human beings. Leave me alone. I'll lie on the bottom in a mass of bubbles» But they raised her and half carried her, half made her walk, to a waiting carryall with its motor running and its lights covered. Lenny was there.

He helped her to lie on the rumbling metal floor and said, "They'll take you back to Jerusalem, I can't leave yet. They're still searching the beach." The car drove off; several men, tense and quiet up front; Emma, near fainting, lying on the floor in back.

They wound their silent way in the dark. The road was as empty as it might be were war declared ο The men whispered that they might well be at war already. There was no way to know till they reached Jerusalem. They didn't dare use the radio. Through the shadowed hills they went, winding and ascend­ ing, from sand up to green and velvet stands of

trees planted by charity; past smashed tanks by the roadside left as a memorial to the fallen. Wind­ ing and ascending, ascending, they came to the city on a hill: Jerusalem, with all its lights twinkling in peace. The driver turned on his lights. The men lit cigarettes.

"It's safe," said one of them to Emma, lying in the back. As though waking or returning from a dream, Emma sat up and looked out. She peeled off the black plastic garbage bag taped over the window.

She saw a laundry advertising a special on extra big loads. Above the street stretched an admonish­ ing banner: Daughter of Israeli Dress modestlyl She sat up fully on the vibrating metal floor and saw her bare thighs. She went cold. She was wearing a blouse and her sandy shoes and her old underpants.

Quickly she wrapped the garbage bag around herself.

What had happened to her skirt? She couldn't re­ member. Why was she half naked in a car with soldi­ ers she didn't know? She didn't know.

"Now take it easy," said the driver, coasting slowly. "Where shall we take you? We'll take you home. Where do you live?"

"Where's Lenny?" she said, stalling. "Wasn't my husband with us?"

"I don't know, lady," he said. "He'll be all right. We'll take you home. Everything's all right now."

"Was a child hurt? Wasn't there something about a hurt child?"

The men exchanged looks. "Tell us where to take you, lady. What's your address?" But Emma wasn't ready. She knew where she lived; she knew what had happened; but she wasn't ready yet to pick up this monstrous dropped stitch and work it into her cloth.

She stared at the men vacantly.

"Maybe the hospital," suggested one of the men in a stealthy undertone.

"What hospital?" scorned Emma. "Am I having a baby?" She had made a decision; or rather, it had taken place, not to go mad. She was not sure it was

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the right decision. She gave them her address.

"Take it easy, lady," the driver repeated in front of her building. "Go in and lie down. Take a drink. Get somebody to be with you a little while.

Shalom, lady."

"Shalom," Emma said. She went in the back way in the dark, holding the plastic around herself, past the rat infested trash barrels and the stacked old newspapers. She opened the kitchen door and made out Ahuvah sitting in the dark talking on the phone, caressing her breasts. Ahuvah gave her a glance of hatred and went into a closet carrying the phone. Emma darted to the bathroom and locked herself in.

"Ma, he hit me just because I used his notebook," shouted Adam through the locked door. "Shut your face," answered his brother. She heard them scuffling. "Godammit, I have to study," boomed her oldest son from his bedroom. Connie-Ziona spoke quietly against the door. "Mom, I have to speak to you. It's urgent." Emma filled the tub. "I'm taking a bath," she told the girl. "Mom, I've been waiting for you all evening," said Connie-Ziona.

"Mom, Mom," she insisted.

But Emma was lying in the tepid, mineralhard water thinking of the marble columns rolling in the soft surf on the Mediterranean; thinking of the quiet there must be beneath the waters of the sea; the allure of it; the call.

"Are you healthy, eating, married, well?"

She'll kiss my conscience and I'll tell I watch her and I count her gray hair The darkest shadows come from care She'll kiss my conscience and I'll tell The tender touch can be the sharpest The darkest shadows come from care The pain of aging is the deepest The tender touch can be the sharpest My mother's interest is my welfare The pain of aging is the deepest She says: "You know last week I fell."

DEVALUATION Margaret Geard Your lack of interest in life deeply disturbs me.

I know its cause. I'm sorry.

I hardly saw, then, when I crushed that budding embryonic thing between you both, how my own selfishness masked your certain loss.

The little I did see I pushed aside, sensing I'd be ultimate loser, whatever the outcome.

PLANTED TOO CLOSE

Only friend, your hands are cool on me, and lips the same.

In the slow moving, almost still, waters of this autumn stream I grieve for us both in the silence of our compromise»

Preeva Adler My mother's interest is my welfare "Are you healthy, eating, married, well?"

She says, "You know last week I fell."

I watch her and I count her gray hairs.

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ADVICE TO BIRDS Thomas Haller You birds you fly too fucking fast for birds up the green tunnels of treetops, endangered by high-speed blows & slaps of leaves & whip-ends Take your flights over those choked spaces & into the clear air above them, let the green patternings shift & drop under Be more than birds, dreamers, be jet-birds & force your route thru even thinner air rise past the clouds like a hand thru a curtain Let airstreams polish your beaks as you fly breathless,wingtips held still as mathematical steel two miles above the ripped surface of clouds

THE ALUMINIUM CAGE Steve Szilagyi EDNA MADE BREAKFAST as usual that morning. Roger— her husband—waited at the kitchen table, slowly clasping and unclasping his fingers. He was looking out at something that seemed to be about seventeen inches in front of his nose: an outline or thought phasing in and out between solidity and transparency.

It might have been something mathematical, like the solution to a problem, but, whatever it was, it was generating the deeply puzzled expression Roger had worn since his stroke.

Edna made her way from the refrigerator to the stove, from the stove to the cabinet, from the cabi-

net to the table where Roger waited. She fried eggs from behind her walker—a four-legged arrangement of aluminium tubing which she gripped by a bar just below her chest. To get from one place to another, Edna used the walker just the way the therapist had taught her, lifting it out a little way before her, then, planting the rubber-knobbed legs firmly to support her weight, hauling the rest of her body toward it with tiny, shuffling steps.

The scrambled eggs were shiny and yellow on the smooth china plate. Edna balanced the tray carefully on the cross-bar of the walker, which sounded a soft tap—step-step—tap—step-step on the tiles as she crossed the floor.

Roger was hunched over the table. His back was a narrow hump under the grey flannel shirt he persisted in wearing even here in the Arizona heat. As Edna set the plate before him, his hands unclasped and spread outward on their heels.

He frowned, then he blinked and began eating his breakfast, studying each bite suspiciously before putting it in his mouth.

Off in the other room, a plastic cuckoo chirped dully, six times. Edna pulled the stainless steel throttle above the sink and felt the soft column of aerated water sigh and bubble over her hands. She glanced straight ahead of her out of the little window and saw a neighbor's parakeet. An escaped bird. It was perched on a roll of discarded fencing, pale and motionless as a dashboard statuette.

"Don't you miss smoking?" Roger said after breakfast. They stood by the door. Edna reached up and straightened the visor on his cap.

"You know I never smoked," she said, as if he still knew that.

"Yes, but still..." Roger reached for the knob.

"It was always something to do, wasn't it?"

The parakeet had flown around to the front of the bungalow. Edna saw it huddled in a sliver of shadow on the front windowsill. Its eyes were bright

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and glassy under their helmet of down. Through the front window, she watched Roger climb onto his tri­ cycle for his morning ride. She watched as he ped­ alled solemnly down the walk. The tall wire wheels seemed to spin through puddles of liquid silver. A carat of sunlight glinted off the blurred spokes.

There was the slow, peaceful movement of his legs.

The airconditioning blew cool on her ankles from a vent near the floor„ While her heart con­ tracted wistfully, she Imagined a boy in cap and knickerbockers rolling a hoop. The bird hopped off the windowsill and flew erratically over the miniscule lawns fronting the low, pastel bungalows. Edna watched it until it disappeared into flat, cloudless sky. Then she pulled the envelope out of her apron pocket and, tucking it between her fingers as she seized the bar of her walker, took herself into the kitchen. She lay the envelope in the center of the table where Roger would be sure to see it.

The envelope contained a letter, a copy of which had been sent, it said, to Edna and Roger's two children. The letter suggested that the children make arrangements to transfer their parents to a "facility where they might receive the constant care our particular community—a community for healthy, vigorous adult-seniors—is not prepared or intended to give."

When Edna had read this letter the morning before, she had felt a strange fullness in her head.

Points on her cheeks and the deep folds under her chin had glowed with the splotchy remnants of what, in her youth, had been an attractive blush. Here it was, as if it had been chasing them all through their lives and had only now caught up with them: the eviction notice.

A Mexican gardener tooling across the front lawns on his way to tend the community's nine-hole golf course was the only one who saw Edna emerging from her bungalow. She was wearing a white, sleeve­ less pullover, and her face was shaded by a long, transparent green visor. There was a net bag slung over the bar of her walker. The gardener shook his

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head and felt a moment of comfortable, uninvolved sorrow. She wouldn't be long for this place, he thought, wondering what she was doing out all alone in her condition anyway.The sight of her would de­ moralize the others. Hell, the sight of that frail, ancient woman inching her way down the walk (she seemed to be standing still, not moving at all), even demoralized him, and he was still a healthy and vigorous fifty-two ο Edna thought it would be best to establish her rhythm quickly at the start. It was a simple matter, the pattern of lifting, pulling, and stepping, a network of tiny strains and frustrations that com­ prised the business of getting about behind a walk­ er having long ago become almost unconscious func­ tions of Edna's nervous system. It was a matter of setting, then meeting, a number of small objectives.

These formed themselves into a continuous chain of miniature dramas that gave time and motion a pre­ cise, ordered quality that was easy to survive. It worked for Edna now as she made her way down the concrete "trail" that wound through the retirement community.

The sun was beginning to shed the cheery ex­ pansiv eness of early morning. As Edna inched her way down the bench-lined walk outside the recreation center, through the large windows on the eightsided building she could see the morning folk dancing class. They were spinning, whirling, and twitching to inaudible music like marionettes in the hands of a deranged puppet master. Edna turned away from them.

There was a spire atop the recreation center, a louvered wooden box surmounted by an ornamental weather vane in the shape of a rooster. The sun was creeping up under the cock now in the first stages of its condensation from the big robust disc fresh over the horizon it had been, to the hard, fiery ball it would have to become in order to make the long journey through the afternoon sky.

Edna stepped off the walk onto the grass. The grass was fresh and perfectly green, except for a few yellowish spots where the roots hadn't taken. It 67

felt spongy underfoot and offered no resistance to Edna's shuffling feet. Laid down in strips when the community was first built, it required continuous watering by a system of languidly revolving sprinklers linked by pipes and aquaducts over hundreds and hundreds of miles to melting snows up over the Donner Pass. Grateful for the regularity of its frequently mowed surface, Edna shuffled toward the border of the comm.unity, toward a place where construction on an elaborate and sinister looking security fence had recently been halted and there was a breach in the low brick wall that had formerly separated the artificially sustained green of the retirement community from the hot, blasted desert that surrounded it.

Edna passed bound hoops of prickly barbed wire, a portable restroom smelling of hot worker's urine, and a mechanical posthole digger housing like the neck of an awkward, flightless bird. Steering a course on the flat ground between the scattered bricks and mounds of dirt, Edna emerged onto the fine gravel berm of the two lane highway. Here she stopped. On the horizon, an automobile appeared, a wobbly speck almost engulfed by waves of corrugated heat rising from the pavement. Edna waited as the speck wobbled closer. In the next second, there was a flash of red metal, a quick freeze frame of jeering, youthful faces and stetson hats, an explosive growl of engine noise and thumping radio music as the car hurtled past, vanishing with a whoosh into the vanishing point, leaving a corrupt, enervated vacuum in the still air behind it.

Edna came to life and shuffled across the road.

Beyond the road lay the desert like a great, broad skillet as far as the eye could see, "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I'm half crazy, over the love of you..." The song floated gently through the Sunday afternoon park of Roger's frayed synapses as he pedalled between the rows of pastel bungalows. He watched the front tire of his big, shiny tricycle spinning beneath him in response to the relaxed ptraiping of his thighs. He

enjoyed the sense of motion and the simple, repetitive up and down, up and down taking place below his waist. At their bungalow, he pedalled up the walk and, with a great deal of regret, debarked. Now there was the disappointing feeling that motion had stopped, followed by the sad, patient effort of walking.

Roger pulled open the door. It was not locked.

Nor had it ever been. Not since Roger and Edna had moved to the retirement community four years before.

Not at all like their house back in Pittsburgh, Roger often used to think with satisfaction, back before the stroke. In their old house back East, they had to slip a gold chain into a slot, turn two brass levers, slide a heavy iron bolt into a crude hole in the door frame, then lower a lead pipe across the whole thing from the inside. All this just to keep out the niggers. And despite all their precautions, intruders had gotten in once. That was the last straw. Thank God no one was home. But it was shocking enough to walk into the bedroom and find their dresser ramsacked, with clothes and neckties hanging out the open drawers like garish entrails. All the old family photographs were trampled and shredded in the debris. Edna had almost passed out when she saw it all. It must have affected her mind, Roger thought afterwords. She recovered in a snap and went cooly and efficiently berserk looking for the old ledger books from the restaurant and didn't relax until she found them up in a corner of the attic where Roger had moved them the week before.

But there weren't any niggers here. Just Mexicans and Indians. That tall, lanky Oakie who ran the community's grocery store called Indians "desert niggers." That guy is a real card, Roger used to think, laughing just at the idea of the guy's low dangling jaw, the cigarette always stuck precariously on his lower lip, his protruding eyes always rolling behind every joke. "Desert niggers," Roger thought now as he opened the door to the bungalow, the words by-passing the long chain of associations that had inspired their sudden appearance on the blank, Nebuchadnezzarian wall of his mind. He chuckled re69

flexively. He didn't know why. The chuckle inside him wouldn't stop now, bouncing out of control, even as he re-read the letter and his features drew together in an expression of bafflement and alarm, "Mother?" he shouted.

A pair of narrow tracks in the dust emerged at a right angle from the two-lane highway. It was a long continuous trail, a practically invisible spoor leading in a straight line hundreds of yards out over the flat and burning plain, through the scattered rocks, between the low, widely-spaced cacti and stubby, greyish clumps of grass. After traveling all this distance, the tracks teinninated at the point of their slow lengthening under the tiny, orthopedically-shod feet of an old woman making her way across the empty landscape from behind an aluminium walker. Bits of quartz winked at her from out of the sand. Small, variously colored stones rolled away from the round toes pushing across the surface.

The sun tipped past its highest point. It was a flaming crystalline presence above and behind Edna's left shoulder. Thousands and millions of capillaries had begun to burst on this shoulder and the bare arm beneath it, suffusing the skin with a glowing redness, raising a pebbly field of yellow blisters that slowly filled with thick water. Edna continued on, after awhile forgetting the awful itching.

The ground began to incline imperceptibly. Soon, she found herself in a gentle depression filled with brittle, flaking slabs of baked clay. Her feet slid through the crumbling salt that clung to the lip of each tiny crevice. She became aware of her feet again for the first time in hours. A random impulse fought its way through her ordered movements, and she stopped.

In that instant, sweat began to gush from her pores like a spring bursting forth where once there was only rock, stinging her parched and burning flesh then quickly drying away. Her throat and stomach contracted, forcing her tongue forward over the roof of her mouth. The tongue pushed and pushed 70

with a force and motive all its own, tearing her dentures from her gums, the teeth emerging from her lips in a horrible grimace before dropping to her feet with a dry clatter.

Snowflakes danced before her as she groped in her bag for her bottle of water. She held the bottle horizontally to her lips, not being able to bend her head back anymore, and let the water trickle over her tongue, off her chin, and down her tremulous wattle. Bolts of pain shot up her calcified spine, bent by age into a chameleon's bow. The bottle slipped from her fingers and lay gurgling on the ground.

Back on the highway, a gold Camero slowed down near the breach in the wall surrounding the retirement community. The man driving it liad a responsible face. He was Phil, Roger and Edna's son. His wife Maureen sat next to him, her legs arranged on the bucket seat so as to avoid a direct blast from the airconditioning vents. About twenty miles back, she was startled by a sudden anxiety over whether or not they were on the right road in the middle of all this emptiness. A map lay folded on her not quite distinct lap, but she hadn't looked at it. She simply looked up at Phil's face, saw his responsible determination, and decided that everything was as it should be. Now the thin shadow of a wrought iron trellis passed over the car as it pulled through the brick pillared entrance gate to the tetirement community.

Both husband and wife were struck with helpless exhaustion as they stepped out of the car into the unfamiliar, dry kiln heat. It was almost an effort to lift their feet as they walked down the "trail" that led to Roger and Edna's bungalow. They passed the recreation center, and Maureen saw the afternoon painting class draped in grey smocks, their easels planted in a circle around an urn filled with gladiolas. Looking past the recreation center, Phil could see golfers clad in white, pulling their carts behind them, moving across the smooth, uniform grass like a leisurely procession of storks.

71 -^,^%ft.^

"We forgot Mom's stool," Phil said. In the dry air, his legs swished cleanly in their slacks, but the dark crescents of perspiration under the arms of his sports shirt were unsuccessful in performing their primitive cooling function. "She can't get into the car without a stool to climb up on. I forgot to tell you that."

"What stool do you mean," Maureen said, "does it have to be that special stool? Can't it be any stool?"

"I guess so, but this was the stool I got last time I was down here. I left it back in the garage, under the boat. You know, back then, I kinda suspected they would do this to us. Kick them out, you know.

But still, it's a dirty trick..."

The door to Roger and Edna's bungalow wasn't locked. Not like the door to Phil and Maureen's house.

Stepping inside, they enjoyed the airconditioning for a moment, and Phil shouted, "Dad?" There was no answer. Maureen wandered into the kitchen and rather absently pulled the throttle on the faucet, watching the clean, bubbling column of water streaming downward. Phil came into the kitchen wearing a look that was alert but not yet alarmed.

"Dad?" he shouted. "Mom?" It was an old Scotch-Irish song, once popular among Pittsburgh's small, teary, Hibernian community.

Phil had never heard it before. He heard it now. It was coming from above the kitchen ceiling, where there was a low, dark crawling space of difficult accessibility.

"Mother is gone," Roger sang in a high, cracked and plaintive voice. "Mother is gone..."

Edna knew that if she didn't start moving again soon, she would suffer the fate of Lot's wife in that shallow, saline depression. She raised her arms. They had become rigid. The fingers that had recently dropped the water bottle bent now into pink talons that rested weakly on the scorching aluminium baro Her concentration grew in intensity, as intense as the pain it was trying to overcome. She closed her fingers around the bar. The stringy muscles of her back heaved into action, lifting the walker and placing it 72

on the ground a few inches farther away. Now she had only to shuffle up to meet it. Just a few inches. But the weight of her body pressed down on her legs, as if they were the columns supporting a great public building. Marble, they would not move.

Edna looked out at the horizon, where the platinumblue sky pressed down on the ochre desert. Then her eyes rolled upward to where the sky had no surface.

She stood that way for what seemed like years as a kind of vortex took shape in the air above her. It swirled and spun, then suddenly disappeared as she tore her foot free from its invisible roots and slid it across the salty ground.

The other foot soon followed, grinding and crunching across the tiny, white crystals. The back lifted the walker again. And again, Edna shuffled to meet it.

Funny how easy it was once she got started again. Her movements were hardly smooth anymore, and her legs did their job in a jerky click-lock, click-lock fashion that felt strange, as if Edna no longer controlled it. But it was a more effective way of going forward. She stared deep into the tans and browns and greys passing beneath her.

There were things going on there. Swirling things.

No. Sharp, pointy things. The transparent visor began to slip down her forehead. Everything went green, vague and decomposing around the edges. Cacti waved their welcoming arms like graceful sea anemones. A manta ray circled slowly overhead in the bright photic zone. The visor finally dropped off her nose and fell to earth. The true light burst in Edna's foveae like a flashbulb.

It was a vulture circling up there. After some time, it came lower and landed beside her. Edna saw that it was, in fact, the neighbor's parakeet that had escaped that morning. It walked alongside her, taking serious little bird steps, its head bowed as if deep in thoughtÂť Back at the retirement community, they were looking for the Mexican gardener who had seen Edna earlier in the day. Word reached him as he stood leaning in the shadow of the grocery store, talking 73

1 to the tall Oakie who ran the place. "There's a fellow lookin* for you Carlos," said one of the elderly residents coming out of the store with a well-filled bag, "What guy?" Carlos asked, looking around.

"That guy, over there by your tool shack."

Carlos squinted over that way. He saw Phil in his mirrored sunglasses, his neat sportshirtâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;his accountant's pens still stuck in his breast pocketâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; standing with one of the community's administrators.

Carlos turned back to the guy who ran the grocery store, trying not to look into his eyes. But the Oakie was already smiling. "Immigration," he said. "Better get your moist be-hind a'movin,' Carlos."

"Ah, he-he, nah," Carlos muttered, pinioning the flesh of his cheeks between his thumb and forefinger, pulling it down toward his chin. "Nah," he moved away, sauntering to his golf cart, trying to look casual. Once behind the wheel, he thought of driving straight to his car. But they would be sure to be watching the parking lot. So he cruised down one of the "trails" toward the golf course.

He felt vulnerable and exposed out there in the open. Those golf carts are awfully slow if you want to go anywhere in a hurry. Bitterly, he thought about all the times he had cruised among those bungalows, a free man, proud, gainfully employed, the tools of his trade piled behind him. Now he was running like a rat runs from a teenager with a .22. The more residents he passed, smiling and waving in his usual way, the more open and prey to unknown dangers he felt. The very sky seemed to be closing in on him. He thought about his girlfriend. Would they let him see her before they sent him back?

At the edge of the golf course, he abandoned the cart and began to walk. He was heading for the fiberglass sheds housing the pumps and auxiliary generator about a mile outside the community. He walked slowly at first. But being out in the middle of the golf course, he felt that everyone's eyes were upon him.

He broke into a run. He ran and ran over the simple tees and fairways he had tended for so long, his arms snatching at the air as they drove his should74

ers forward, his mouth open and gasping for breath.

"Now, what's got into Carlos?" asked an elderly golfer.

For Edna, the parakeet was becoming an annoyance. It wouldn't let her look directly at it, for some reason, and it's yellow form was causing disturbing optical effects in the corner of her eye, somewhat along the lines of penlight tracery in a dark room. Besides, it occurred to her that parakeets didn't walk like that anyway, one foot in front of the other. Weren't they supposed to hop?

Edna found that by an infinitesimal alteration of the angle at which she set the walker each time she threw it forward, she could, after a great many such alterations, deviate from the perfectly straight line she had been following since crossing the highway. The long, barely visible track she left behind her began to bend ever so slightly, before it disappeared on a new desert surface, one formed of tightly packed sand and pebbles, held together by a tough, invisible mortar like a city sidewalk. The parakeet kept to her side.

But other things began to come up. If she hadn't been going along behind the walker with that efficient, jerky click-lock step, the shuddering surge of fluid agony that shot down her back now, sizzling down over the little ridges on the inside of her pelvis, would surely have knocked her flat. As it was, she desperately had to urinate. She couldn't very well stop, or squat, or sit. Nor could she alter her step in any way. So she let the urine come, and it trickled down her thighs and ankles, and she was very embarrassedÂť Especially since the parakeet had now become her Uncle Louis, the family wastrel, who had passed away during the time of the Great Depression.

Fortunately, Uncle Louis had been a very selfcentered type person, and he rarely noticed other people's misfortunes. The urine acted acidly on the places where Edna's thighs rubbed together, burning and corroding, causing the top layer of skin to roll into loose cylinders that dropped to the ground as little white woirms. Her face must have betrayed her 75

t

discomfort vividly. Even Uncle Louis noticed it.

"Don't worry," he said, dancing comically in and out of the jittery cone of Edna's vision.

"Things will be getting better. There's an upturn in the air. Prosperity is—as they say—just around the corner."

"I hope so, for your sake. Uncle Louis," Edna said. His brown suit, from what Edna could see of it, was worn and stained, and his shoes seemed to be held together by some kind of packing tape.

"Things had better improve for all of us," she went on. "I sure don't have any more money to send you.

You're on your own now."

"It's a matter of confidence," he said. "We've had enough of nay-sayers and gloomy Cassandras."

"We don't even have enough for ourselves any­ more. The restaurant is failing. Even now that we can sell beer. Roger knows, but he won't admit it.

But I keep the books, and I'll tell you. Uncle Louis, things are bad..."

"Of course," Louis intoned, "there's nothing the average American can do about those Jew bankers in Europe—short of writing their Congressmen and demanding the instant repayment of war debts."

"There'll be no more for you. Uncle Louis, I won't do it anymore. I won't do it with the men from the beer company anymore. Not for you, not for the restaurant, not for anybody. It's not worth it.

And like a fool, I've been marking down their lit­ tle 'gifts' in the restaurant ledgers. I put them under a special symbol, a kind of cross. But sup­ pose Roger finds out? Sometimes I think he's read­ ing my mind. If he could, it would kill himo" Uncle Louis started to look uneasy.

"Yes, kill him," Edna said. "Dead, like you.

Uncle Louis." Wearily, Edna decided that there was no more point in beating around the bush, and that it was time to bring Uncle Louis's unfortunate con­ dition out in the open.

"Ah, yes, well..." Louis said gloomily.

After walking some time in silence, Edna said, "Tell me. Uncle Louis, all these numbers, all these

columns, all this—over and over—what is it?"

Louis hung his head in a guilty sort of way.

"I don't know."

"You don't?"

Shaking his head slowly, he said, "I was a silly man,wasn't I?" Gradually, he slowed down, then stop­ ped. His figure began to diminish into that of the hunched, shabby man who had passed away in a cold Boston warehouse. Edna felt his presence receding behind her. Once, she heard him shout something in a despairing voice, but she had left him too far be­ hind to answer.

Many miles away, there was a broken down pick­ up parked beside an arroyo. There was an Indian lying across the front seat, listening to the radio. It was hot in the cab, and he soon fell asleep. He awoke some hours later, sat up erect, and rubbed his eyes» Then he started and leaned forward to look out the windshield. In the preceeding few seconds, the ground around the truck had become transformed. It seemed to undulate with dark, living splotches for several hundred feet around. The Indian recognized the phenomena. A tarantula migration. Rare, but not un­ heard of. It was getting cooler,and the spiders were starting to move, thousands of them, in a great dark mass. What had his father called them in the Indian tongue? He had forgotten. He rolled up the window and sat warily on the back of the seat until the ragged sea of eight-legged creatures passed ο The sun was a fat, red, yolky mass melting onto the horizon, spilling runny reds, and turning the shadows purple by the time Edna saw the body of mi­ grating spiders. Before then, piece by piece along the way, she had shed most of her senses, some clothes, much flesh, and now she was simply vision. She moti­ vated over the desert like a fine mist four feet above the ground. Noting the velvety black patch mov­ ing across the distant scarlet landscape, fitting it­ self to the shapes of the plants, the rocks, the cacti, she thought it might be a shadow. An anomaly.

The shadow from a passing cloud.

"So you did see her then?" the community ad77

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ministrator said to the teacher of the morning folk dancing class, a thin, hollow cheeked woman in her early thirties. "This morning?"

"Yes," the woman said, fretting with her heavynecklace. "Should I have stopped her? I didn't know, I just happened to glance out the window and I saw this old woman behind a walker. I didn't think anything of it. Isn't this a retirement community?

Aren't there supposed to be old people here?" Nerves were taut.

Phil was over in the corner talking to his sister, long distance to Pittsburgh, on the administration office phone. "Well, she can't have gone far," he was saying. "Not in her condition^ But just in case, the sheriff's department has some jeeps out looking in the desert. What? Yes, I'm very afraid.,."

A deputy came through the door with a bulky radio transmitter. "Where can I put this thing?" he asked.

Someone cleared off the desk. In the infirmary, Maureen, Phil's wife, sat in the half-darkness and listened to her father-in-law Roger's deep snoring.

The bottom of his chin, the fleshy nostril plate under his nose, and the smooth hoods of his eye sockets shone palely in the dim green light. Maureen closed her eyes, hugged her knees, and fell asleep to the familiar sounding snore, just like Phil's.

Late that night, far out on the desert, the Indian gazed into the fire he had made out of some old planks that were in the back of his truck. The heat and smoke stung his eyes. He squinted, and could see, with an almost microscopic clarity, the lean tongues of flame slowly, methodically devouring each splinter of the fair wood. He felt the chill of the desert night on his back. There are stars out there, he thought. When the fire is gone, there will be stars.

Edna motivated through the darkness. It was a long, cold tunnel, where there was no notion of speed or progress. Sometimes, there was a sensation of falling, down, down, into some soft, enveloping oblivion.

Then there was the feeling of being lifted up into a sickening, weightless void. Then there was no feeling.

78

Just the tunnel. And then a spark. It might have been there a long time, this bright little pinpoint. Edna felt herself drawn toward it. The spark grew into a refulgent circle. It burned with a strong, hopeful constancy in the empty night.

The Indian heard a faint scraping sound from beyond the glow of the fire. He thought it was a coyote, scavenging on the sterile, barren earth.

Lying there on the ground, he heard himself name the beast in the Indian tongue. He thought he had forgotten that word, too. He smiled. The fire began to burn down. Once again, that scraping sound reached his ears. Sitting up, he blinked into the night and became aware of a vague shape forming itself in the blackness.

Edna felt she was getting closer. She saw the Indian rise from behind the fire. Setting the walker aside, she stepped into the light.

79

CONTRIBUTOES HELENE BRANDT was born in New York City, has studied fiction and play writing at G.S, This is her first publication. JUDITH BRAUN is a T.V. and stage actress, has worked as a story editor at United Artists, and is currently writing a movie script for Warner Bros. This Is a first publication. GLORIA DUBRO plans to spend the rest of her life getting her Bachelor of Arts degree...and writing stories.

JOHN FREY is from Pittsburgh, Is a graduate of G.S. This is his first publication. MARGARET GEARD was born in Tasmania, sang professionally in radio and T.V. productions. This is her first published poem.

MARGARET GREENBURG'S Oy, Caesar is excerpted from her novel-in-progress about an American family trying to live in Israel. THOMAS HALLER won the 1980 Van Rensselaer Prize given by Columbia University for the best example of English lyric verse. This is his first publication of poetry. PAMELA JONES published poetry in Sunbury Magazine, is a General Studies student, and was born in Brooklyn. ROBERT KLEINBARDT edited Hobart College's humor magazine, is a reporter for the Heights-Inwood weekly newspaper. He's working on two novels, and this is the first publication of his fiction. STEVE SCHRADER has published two books. Crime of Passion and On Sundays We Visit the In-laws. He is co-director of Teachers' and Writers' Collaborative. Was born in NYC. JAMES SMETHURST Is from New Jersey, takes courses at G.S., published in Maine and other New England small presses. MARCIA STAMELL's nonfiction has been published in Ms., Viva, and Mademoiselle. She is a 1978 finalist in the Penneyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Missouri Magazine Awards. Her fiction's been published in the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies. MAURICE STONE is a movie script writer. His first film is being shot this summer by First Chance Productions. One of his short stories previously appeared in Quarto. STEVE SZILAGYI's fiction has previously appeared in Quarto. PATRICIA VOLK lives in NYC. She's published in national magazines and has previously appeared in Quarto.

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School of General Studies

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