1984-Vol20 by Quarto

The Literary Magazine of the School of General Studies Columbia University

Mr. J.R. Humphreys Director, Writing Program

Submissions Current and recent General Studies students—including special students and students in other branches of the University who are taking G.S. writing courses—are encouraged to submit to Quarto. We welcome poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, including excerpts from longer works. Each submission should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Please include your name, address, and phone number (optional) on at least one page of your manuscript. Manuscripts may be submitted elsewhere while under consideration at Quarto; please notify us of any acceptances. Artists should query before submitting. Address all submissions and correspondence to: Quarto 608 Lewisohn Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 Quarto is edited by students enrolled in Quarto: Literary Magazine Editing and Publishing; Alan Ziegler, instructor.

QVOA^rO Coordinating Editor: Asst. Coordinating Editor: Manuscripts Editor: Associate Editors:

Assistant Editors:

Faculty Supervisor;

Andy Whitehead Richard Crose Steve Shiffman Mindy Appel Karen Calhoun Cynthia Lockhart Alma Rodriguez-Sokol Jane Williams Kim Dalton Rosalie Fadem Mary Ann Kyriazis Regina McNamari Emily Foe Pat Roache Ericka Smith Alan Ziegler

Volume Twenty Spring 1984

Table of Contents Nuala Cipriano Dana Douglas Nordfors Two Poems Lynn Anne Schwartz Bus Ride ElliotF. Bratton Two Poems Joseph Ferrandino Ambush JillD.Hardwick-Morton The Vestment Elisabetta di Cagno Biography Michael Schwartz Notes From A Daily Journal Michele Madigan Somerville Two Poems Patricia Volk Unfinished Business Myung-HeeKim Two Poems MiaNadezhdaRublowska Greenpoint GregHendren Two Drawings THE BACK OF THE BOOK CONTRIBUTORS'NOTES

7 16 18 28 30 33 34 39 42 47 54 56 66 68 71

Cover by Greg Hendren

Photograph by Allen Schill

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Nuala Cipriano

DANA

She seemed rather ordinary in the beginning. Nothing special really. I first saw her outside a classroom. Tall, long legs, in jeans and a crumpled blouse. Dark hair pulled back into a loose, high pony tail. I thought she looked disheveled.

I spoke to her after the midterm. We were both in Fine Arts. We discussed the exam. She said the instructor was too young to teach such a course. I liked that, She told me she was looking for an apartment and a job. She was wearing black leather pants, a short black leather jacket and sunglasses. I think her hair was down this time.

We had coffee after class one evening. She said she had recently ended a four-year relationship with someone called Max. She was glad it was over. Pisces and Libra never work, she said. She was studying Philosophy and Arabic. She identified strongly with her Lebanese background. I told her I was recently divorced and seeking a new life. She did a numerology chart comparing my maiden name with my married name. I would do better with my maiden name, she told me. She used an expensive fountain pen. She wrote in a slow, deliberate hand, all capital letters joined together. She carried an elegant, slim cigarette case. Her red nails were very long. Straight hair fell over one side of her face. The face was not quite beautiful

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sometimes, and other times extraordinarily so, depending on the moment, the light, the expression.

She was not in class for a couple of weeks. Then one day she came back and we went for coffee again. She wore a white angora sweater with a straight skirt slit up the sides and very high-heeled shoes. Over her coat she had draped a long woolen scarf with six dangling foxtails. She read Sartre to me. Her dark eyes glowed with enthusiasm. She wore make-up but you did not notice it. Her hair was smoothed back with stray wisps framing her face. We talked about El Greco. She was intrigued by his distortion of reality.

She came to my apartment one night after class. She thought it an oasis. She exclaimed over the old wicker chairs. I loved how she sat in them. She was wearing a frilly white blouse and a full black sldrt which moved with her. She smelled of myrrh. We listened to Brahms trios, burned lavender incense and drank scotch. She read parts of Kierkegaard's Diary oj a Seducer, and told me she wanted to write a script based on it. I read her e.e. cummings' "since feeling is first." She copied it down. She offered to help me shop for a roUtop desk. She offered to help me paint the apartment. It was hard to imagine those long, tapering fingers with paint on them.

One evening she came to class in jeans over which she wore black leg warmers up to her thighs. She had on a Norma Kamali top with enormous padded shoulders and a tight bodice. It flared out into a frill below the waist, giving the effect of a tutu. The instructor kept her after class and questioned her. He was suspicious of the philosophical digressions in her Rembrandt paper. She laughed because he was surprised at what she knew. The costume had confused him.

She always went along with my suggestions after class. She never had any plans. She never mentioned any friends. We roamed around the cafes and bars until four in the morning. I never thought

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of work the next day. She did not mind going home to New Jersey late at night. The subways were an adventure, she told me. As we sat in a cafe she read my palm. "You should write more," she said. "Don't waste your time at that boring job. Your career line shows success in artistic pursuits." I challenged her beliefs and superstitions, but thought them romantic. We laughed and parried back and forth, learning more about each other. Now she was carrying around Dostoyevksy. And Yeats. She was twenty-eight and trying to getaB.A. Then she could fulfill her great dream. She wanted to be a lawyer. "A trial lawyer," she said, leaning towards me, eyes blazing, face intent. "The courtroom drama, that's what I want."

She began staying at my apartment sometimes. She had to be in the city so much. It seemed only sensible. She wanted to avoid her landlady. She owed her back rent. It would all be solved when she had a full-time job. Then she could move to New York. Some nights we smoked grass while listening to music. Crass had always made me uneasy but with her it felt natural. She talked about Max. She had not seen him now for six months. She said she was convinced they would get back together again. It was just a question of time.

One late night we were sitting around the apartment. She suddenly got hungry and wanted to have some liver. We decided to go around the corner to Broadway. She reapplied her lipstick, pulled her fur cap over one eye and wrapped the fox-tail scarf over her shoulders. She had me wear my seal jacket. She sorted through her things and put one of her berets on my head. As we were walking out the door she said I looked pale. She sat me down and made up my face. "Take off your glasses," she told me. "Those eyes of yours should never be hidden. Let them see who you really are." Off we went, ready to assault Broadway and the supermarkets, she striding ahead, with the foxtails flying behind her. We looked for fresh calves liver. A half hour later we were back in the apartment. In the middle of that night I found her hunched over her Tarot cards. Tears rolled down her face. "I'm going to marry him," she whispered.

Once I went to her apartment in Jersey. She Hved in an old frame

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house on a quiet street. She had three rooms upstairs, empty except for a king-sized water bed and a chrome-and-glass table with a lamp. Thick law volumes were crammed into the closet. The place smelled of leather and dampness. The floorboards creaked and our voices echoed. There was no phone. One wall was covered with a large intricate chart showing ancient and medieval kings and popes who practiced the art of witchcraft. She laid out the Tarot cards and told me I would find what I was looking for.

Another night we drove to Jersey to see Robert Altman's Three Women. After the film she suggested going to a place she knew for a drink. It was a nightclub on a boat docked off the Hudson River. We had to cross over a long gangplank. Inside the boat was a live group playing Glenn Miller. Through the windows you could see the lights from the George Washington Bridge reflected on the water. Also the skyline of New York down to the World Trade Center. "All this for two dollars a drink and no cover," she laughed. We emptied our wallets and calculated how many Dewars we could have. We decided I should play Garbo, and keep on the black beret I was wearing. To create a bored look I smoked and inhaled cigarettes. I had never smoked before. The music changed to disco. I did not care for discos and dancing. But playing Garbo made it different. It was Garbo out there dancing, moving, letting go. People stared at us. We talked to some of them. We made up stories about ourselves. When the money ran out we left. Near the bridge we remembered we did not have a dollar and a half to get across. "Let's see if we can fake it," she said. We told our story to the gray-haired man in the toll booth. He waved us grandly on. We cheered and sang Marlene Dietrich songs all the way home. If there had been any more money the night would not have ended then.

I gave her keys to my apartment. It was more convenient. She could come and go easily. She was usually asleep when I left in the morning. It was hard for her to get up. I would hear her roaming around in the middle of the night like a cat. Frequently she would make phone calls about jobs. They never came to more than a few days of temporary work. I suggested she go to the agencies and sometimes she did. She would set the alarm for six in the morning but she seldom managed to get out of bed until much later. She had trouble

keeping track of time. The day would be half over before she left the house. This always surprised her. Preparing to face the world was complicated. The make-up that did not look made up took lots of time. Six or seven different outfits would be rehearsed in front of the mirror before she felt right. When she did work a couple of days, she was happy and generous. She insisted on taxis and extravagant presents. She filled the house with delicacies from the Arabic grocery. We ate and drank and played Arabic music. She danced the traditional dances so fluidly, with such grace. Occasionally I invited friends to join us. She loved meeting new people. She established immediate intimacy with them. They felt special.

It was near Christmas. She had no money left so I lent her some. She would pay me back when she had a proper job. She wanted so much to see her family in Indiana for the holidays. I gave her the plane fare. She would come back in a week, on New Year's Eve. We would go out on the town and celebrate. We would bring in the new year together. "For good luck," she said.

Two months later she called me. She was still in Indiana. She told me she was flying back to New York that night. I met her at Newark airport. It was hard to find her. Then I saw her darting around the baggage claim. She had on a black suede coat and a black velour body suit which hugged her legs. On her feet were a pair of 1960's spikeheeled short boots trimmed with fur. Her face was sallow and without make-up. Her hair was limp and covered her eyes. She seemed a stranger. "It was hard to get away," she said heavily. "I couldn't live there. I need New York." She had decided not to go back to school for now. She wanted to try the business world. She felt it would suit her. She had some money. We agreed she should keep it for getting an apartment in the city. Her landlady had started eviction proceedings.

A few nights later we ate dinner at an inexpensive restaurant near where she lived. She had found an old lace dress for me in Indiana. You must wear it tonight, she had insisted. I was overdressed but felt beautiful. And I had on my new contact lenses. She was radiant in a

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new white silk blouse, hair back, gleaming and full, make-up perfect. I had begun to write, I told her. Finally I had found a voice and knew what I wanted to say. She told me she had decided not to move to New York. Max lived in New Jersey and she would contact him. She would tell him that they should get married. She was sure he would not say no.

Two months later she was given three days to get out of her apartment. Her money was gone. She thought of going back to Indiana. "I feel good near my family," she told me. I suggested she stay with me temporarily. Until she decided what to do. She was so tired of temporary situations, she said. Why can't she move into my apartment, I thought. There is room. She needs stability. She will be in the city, have a secure roof over her head and a phone to make job contacts. We planned that when she found work, we would pool our resources. We would entertain a great deal. We would invite friends for literary and musical evenings. She would play hostess and cook exotic Eastern dishes. She would love doing that. Besides, I would have the pleasure of watching her. The workings of her face which haunted me so. And the way she walked across a room. It seemed like a good arrangement.

She moved in on a Wednesday. On Thursday I came home from work at lunch time. I found her in the living room. She was wrapped in blankets, only the dark hair spilling out. The room was shaded and musty. In the evening I came in the door and heard Bizet's Carmen floating down the hall. I smelled the food. She was opening a bottle of wine. There were candles on the table. She was all in white and wearing her good jewelry. Her face was shining, eyes sparkling. "Welcome home from work," she sang gaily. The apartment seemed transformed. There were new decorative touches everywhere. She had bought crystal wine glasses. And pretty new shower curtains. Each room was an adventure. She was trying to get used to the apartment, she said. She wanted to feel at home. In the middle of the bulletin board she had pinned a large picture of the Queen of Cups, her favorite Tarot card. "She symbolizes happiness and love," she told me. "And creativity."

After several weeks she was not used to the apartment. She needed to stay in bed a lot. One evening we had an argument over something minor. For three days after that she stayed under the covers in baggy sweat pants and a ripped black T-shirt. She did not eat or wash. She was very sensitive, I realized. It was best not to push her. Sometimes late at night she would smoke some grass, dress up, and disappear with my car to the Village. I was relieved when she showed signs of life.

One morning she got up at six, showered and dressed. She said she needed money for a job interview. I gave her some. Two days later she had a job. She asked for money to see her through until she was paid. Everything was going to be fine now. She was working. Evenings she came home and watched TV in bed. On weekends she slept most of the day and watched TV most of the night. Sometimes she would play Nina Hagen and David Bowie records. She would dance around the living room alone, eyes far away, face closed off. Her job was an extended temporary one. She liked that. She did not want to be too committed to one position right now, she said. And office work wasn't very challenging. She was paid by the hour. Sometimes she did not feel well and withdrew into herself and could not go to work. Then she would call her family in Indiana and talk to them for long periods. She said not to worry about the bills. Or the overdue notices on parking tickets which she had not told me about. She would take care of everything when she had sorted things out. It would just take a little time.

Suddenly she started going out a great deal. I was happy for her. She needed friends. I noticed she wore her hair differently. It was high in the middle and flat at the sides. She took to wearing white make-up and mauve lipstick. She walked out of the house in flat shoes, badly fitting pants and a man's undershirt. She had been going to the discos and clubs. "They call it the fuck-you look," she told me. One night she did not come home at all. Two days later she reappeared looking ill. "I'm drugged out," she said calmly. "Never saw so much cocaine in my life."

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Another month went by. The bills were piling up. Temporary jobs pay so badly, she explained. She thought maybe she would like to model. It would pay better. She spent less and less time in the apartment. Mostly she came home to change her clothes, iron or use the phone. She smelled of Halstan now. She had the perfume, the body lotion, the powder, and the soap. It was a wonderful scent. She wrote me a check for several hundred dollars. The check bounced. I told her our arrangement did not seem to be working. She should look for another place to live. She said she would be out of the apartment at the end of the month.

At the end of the month she thought she was pregnant. I felt bad and said she could stay longer. Then she disappeared for three days. I found her in Bellevue Hospital with tubes and bottles around her, groggy from medication. She had undergone emergency surgery for a bleeding ovarian cyst. She had not been pregnant after all. She cried and held onto my hands. "Let's start again, OK? I need to find my center, get my life in order. With you I can do it. I really blew it beforeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;got wrapped up in surface things. It will be different now, you'll see. I'm going to take the course on selling securities. There's good money in that field." She spoke with such fierce conviction. I always believed her.

Five days after the operation I picked her up from the hospital. I couldn't bear watching her shuffle to the car. She stooped from the pain of the incision. The long, careless stride was gone. She did not want to go right home. "Let's celebrate," she said. We ate out and drank lots of wine. We sat in the Figaro Cafe until three in the morning. We laughed together and decided what new films to see and what new restaurants to try. As soon as she was feeling better.

later she ended back under the covers. She gained weight and her lovely face seemed bloated. She kept the blinds down during the day. I did not like coming home. And I could not pay the bills. "I've gone as far as I can go," I told her. I asked her to leave. That night I saw her shuffling the Tarot cards in the kitchen. "Max, Max, where are you?" I heard her say again and again. I went into the bedroom, shut the door, and drank Sambuca until I fell asleep. A few days later she left carrying a small overnight bag. She had on her black leather pants. They did not fit well anymore. In her hand she clutched the doll I had given her for her birthday. We did not look at each other. She said she would come back with a truck in two weeks to pick up all her belongings.

Two years later I sold the furniture. I threw out the notes and papers. I lugged the books to a grateful law student. The clothes I packed away and sent to a friend in California. I did not want to risk seeing those foxtails flying down the streets of New York.

Recently I discovered the Tarot cards. They were inside an old wooden box. The box was decorated with Arabic designs in red and gold. It had been tucked away in the back of a drawer. I took out the cards and shuffled through them, as I had often seen her do. I turned over a card. It was the Queen of Cups. I reshuffled the deck and turned over another. It was the Queen of Cups again. I gathered the cards together to throw them out. Then instead I returned them to their box and hid them in my rolltop desk. Such romantic rubbish, I thought. Dana, Dana.

She recovered slowly. I was writing a great deal now. I had found an editor who liked my work. The months went by. She could not decide what sort of job she wanted. She wavered back and forth. Occasionally she had spurts of energy and enthusiasm for some new project. She wanted to go back to school. She spent hours in the Law Library. She talked of waiting tables at a night club. But sooner or

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Dousias Nordfors

READING A BOOK TO KEN My Brother, Age 4

ON WRITING A CHILDREN'S STORY

His head warm to my chin, the small weavings of his fingers on my hands, I breathe words into the color of his gaze; the clear waters of sorrow on a grey bear's soft face, the yellow moon over a dark-furred mouse. His toes curl in the world of the story, this fleece of air gathered between my arms. My story lies in his calm, the careful voice in his eyes. We lean to each other in our seasons.

M y eyes see spring has cleared over round hills and shadows ease like sunlit waves through bending grass in wind from the white cloud. To create a world is to find a world, the way my rabbits climb a hill and tumble down, cool air huddling inside their blown fur. I know the pureness of pictures, how time wraps around a careful pose; and now I have time that twitches with a whisker-rubbed nose, a moving circle of sky, blue in dark sleep. My rabbits' world is my shadowy peace, the shade of a spreading tree, the cry of a bird that raises sight. My rabbits roll and wrestle and twirl in changing light touching near ground moist with nurtured lines and paths. I create what I see for others: the living calm, the water of our eyes.

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Lynn Anne Schwartz

BUS RIDE

Fritzie Scolnick was going to wet her pants. She had been tapping her foot and shifting her weight on the hot plastic seat of the Greyhound bus for the past half hour. She felt like a child. She knew she should have gotten off at the rest area in Eugene but the heat had left her limp and she had not been able to leave her seat. Fritzie turned to look at the bathroom in the back of the bus. She quickly looked away. They were all there. If she were to use the bathroom on the bus she would have to walk all the way to the back. Past all the people. Past the group of men. They would smile and stare at her as she walked past. Fritzie was sure they would make those remarks again. She couldn't do it. Yesterday, Fritzie tried to walk to the bathroom at the back of the bus. When she reached the group of men they whistled and blew loud smacking kisses at her. One of them grabbed her playfully by the arm while another offered her a warm beer that had been concealed under his damp shirt. Fritzie pulled free and returned to her seat. She wanted to be left alone. She heard them laughing behind her. The old woman across the aisle nodded to her in sympathy. "Don't let 'em irritate you, honey. They're just a group of loggers riding down to Northern California." Fritzie knew they were loggers. Most men she knew were either fishermen or loggers. It all meant the same thing. She didn't want any part of it. The woman continued. "I told the bus driver they shouldn't be allowed to make so much noise. Everybody thinks just because they

volunteer to help with the forest fires they've got 'em some kind of license for bad behavior." Fritzie nodded and turned to look at the blistered view. In the distance she could see the charred stumps of corroded evergreens. "Were they bothering you, honey? Cause if they were, I'll tell the bus driver. I'll make him do something about it." "No, I just needed to stretch my legs," Fritzie assured her. She did not want the woman to make a scene. The woman had continued, not talking to anyone in particular. Fritzie watched the swollen purple veins wander up the woman's legs until they disappeared under a pair of yellow bermuda shorts. "Personally, I've always thought that loggers are a sorry lot. You can't trust 'em. They get in those big trucks of theirs and they think they own the road. They'll try and run you right off the road if you let them." Fritzie nodded. Smoke from the fires seeped into the air-conditioned bus. It stung the inside of her nose. "You know what they are?" demanded the woman. "They're hypocrites. Pretending to be heroes fighting the fires. We all know they're the ones who rip the land to shreds." The woman continued on, with Fritzie only pretending to listen. She would not try to pass them again today. Fritzie began to tap her foot harder and then grabbed her sketch pad. She threw the large sketch pad over her lap. She placed her small fingers on the wrinkled and worn cardboard and began making short swift taps with the tips of her fingers. She had taken a typing class in high school and ever since her fingers nervously tapped on pretend typewriters. Fritzie typed, / w-i-l-l n-o-t w-e-t m-y p-a-n-t-s. I w-i-l-l n-o-t w-e-t m-y p-a-n-t-s. The snoozing young man sitting next to Fritzie opened his eyes. "Do ya gotta make all that racket? How's a person supposed to get any sleep?" Fritzie looked away mumbling, "Sorry." She clasped her hands tightly together to keep from typing on her sketch pad. Her fingernails dug deep into her skin. The intercom began to screech and crackle as the bus driver announced, "Rest stop in five miles. You've got twenty minutes. Anybody not on the bus in twenty minutes gets left behind." Fritzie tightened her muscles. Only five more miles. She would have to wait five more miles. She envisioned the typewriter keyboard and kept typing in her head, F-i-v-e m-o-r-e m-i-l-e-s. F-i-v-e m-o-r-e m-i-l-e-s. Her face flushed as nails pierced the skin of her

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intertwined fingers. The young man opened his eyes again. "Is something wrong with ya? You sick or what?" Fritzie did not answer. She wondered why he wasn't sitting with the rest of the loggers. "Ya don't look so good to me," said the man yawning. Fritzie wished the man would leave her alone. She wished he would go back to sleep. He had been asleep most of the trip or at least she thought so.

"Ya look like you're gonna be sick," Wolf repeated. "I'm fine," she whispered. "You sure there ain't nothing I can get ya? I know sometimes when I ride on the bus my stomach gets to feeling a little bit tipsy. So I take some of this here dramamine." Wolf pulled out a packet of yellow pills. "Ya want one? They usually can stop the trouble." "No," said Fritzie. The bus pulled into the Medford stop. Fritzie grabbed her purse and sketch pad and ran to the restroom. There was a crowd of women and young children lined up to use the two toilets. One had overflowed. The bathroom had a strong stench of disinfectant. When Fritzie emerged from the ladies room she was relaxed enough to notice she was hungry. She started towards the snack bar.

then realized that the loggers from the bus were sitting at the counter. She moved to the vending machine instead and bought a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. It was hard and tasted stale. Wolf hadn't gotten off the bus and was dozing again, only this time his denim covered legs were stretched over Fritzie's seat. A broad smile covered his face. Fritzie wasn't sure if he was smiling at her or if he was smiling in his sleep. The old woman in the yellow shorts watched the napping Wolf with disgust. "You want me to wake him up?" she asked Fritzie. "No," Fritzie whispered as she gently wiggled her sweater out from underneath his legs and moved to another seat. Wolf did not move. When the loggers boarded the bus they whistled and chuckled as they passed Fritzie's seat. She did not look at them. The bus started up again and pulled out onto the Interstate. Fritzie opened her bag to count her money. Her purse had never been out of her sight since she'd left Port Angeles but she felt the need to check its contents regularly. She opened the faded and torn wallet and the thirty $100.00 bills lay exactly as she had placed them two days ago. She wondered how she would make the money last. Originally, there had been almost $10,000 but after the expense of her father's funeral and various debts she was left with $3,000. It was more money than she had ever held in her life. She checked it often to make sure it didn't disappear from her wallet. The steady humming of the bus had put most of the passengers to sleep. Fritzie reached for her sketch pad and began to draw. The sketch pad, three charcoal pencils and a few clothes were the only belongings she'd brought with her. The rest of her possessions she'd given away or left behind. Wolf was no longer dozing. She watched him stretch his arms until they reached the ceiling of the bus. Suddenly aware of Fritzie's gaze, he began to make his way down the aisle towards her. Fritzie shut her sketch pad. "Sorry, I took yer seat. Guess I fell asleep and sprawled out a bit too much. Ya can have it back if ya want it." Wolf took the seat next to Fritzie. "That's O.K.," replied Fritzie. "So Fritz, what ya drawing there?" "How'd you know my name?" "It's written right on your sketch pad. What ya drawing?" "Nothing." Fritzie turned the sketch pad upside down and clutched it close to her chest.

He had gotten on the bus in Salem. Fritzie had left her sweater on the seat next to her. He ignored this sign and in spite of the many empty seats around her, came right up to the seat with her sweater on it. "Hi there. Mind if I sit?" Fritzie grabbed her sweater off the seat and turned to gaze out the window. The man didn't fit in his seat and a large portion of his body protruded into her seat. Fritzie pressed herself close to the warm window. She did not want to touch him. The man was not the least put off by her unfriendliness. "Name's Wolfram TuUy. Everybody just calls me Wolf." Fritzie did not answer and instead watched the distant haze and smoke thicken and hover over the singed forest. "Looks like a nasty one. Having 'em all over this year. It's this darn heat. I ain't seen nothing like it. It's a real shame." Then he questioned her, "Where ya going?" Fritzie rested her head against the window and closed her eyes hoping that he would think she was trying to sleep. She didn't want to talk to anyone.

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"Well, I saw ya drawing something. So it can't be nothing," Wolf laughed. "It's nothing for you to see." Wolf sat quietly not sure how to respond. Fritzie watched the passing cars on the highway and tried to get a glimpse of Wolfs face through the reflection in the bus windows. She imagined she'd like the way he looked if he shaved and combed his hair. Finally, Wolf broke the silence. "You goin' far?" Fritzie did not answer. Wolf persisted, "If you don't want to talk you can just tell me and I won't bother ya. Just tell me and I won't talk to ya no more." "Where ya going?" answered Fritzie, still gazing out the window. Encouraged by the response Wolf continued with renewed energy. "I ain't exactly sure where I'm going. I bought one of those passes I seen on TV. Ya know the one? Fred MacMurray is standing by this big old Greyhound bus and he tells ya you can see this whole country for $99.00.1 thought that sounded like a pretty good idea so I bought me one of them passes. I'm just kinda riding around 'til I decide where I'm going. Where ya going? Ooops, I asked ya that before. Don't answer it if ya don't want to. San Francisco. I bet you're going to San Francisco. You look like the kinda girl that'd be going to San Francisco." Fritzie smiled. "Yuma." "Yuma?" Wolf tried to recall the name. "Where's Yuma?" "Arizona. The Mexican border." "Yuma. Sounds like some kinda fruit, don't it?" Fritzie shrugged her shoulders. "Who ya visiting in Yuma?" Fritzie reluctantly responded. "I got a sister there." "That's nice." "It's O.K.," said Fritzie. There was a long silence. Fritzie thought about her sister. She knew Carson didn't really want her to come. Carson lived in a small trailer with three kids. There wasn't any room for Fritzie. "You staying there long?" "I don't know," said Fritzie. She didn't know. She hadn't even planned on making the trip. It just happened. The day after her father's dragger went down, she walked into the cannery and quit. She meant to do it all along. Fritzie remembered standing on the cannery's wet cement floor. Water colored with blood streamed through the drains along the

floor. When the trawlers came in she often stood ten to sixteen hours at the stainless steel table, her rubber apron and knee boots sparkling with silver fish scales and splattered with dried blood. She always knew she'd work in the cannery. Most everybody did except for the one or two that escaped to the state college every year. They never came back. The day after high school graduation Fritzie told her father she wanted to paint. He smiled and told her she was lucky to have the job at the cannery. She was good at what she did. Her fingers worked quickly without thinking. Salmon after salmon. Her sharp knife slid up the belly to the neck exposing the pink meat. Her hand grasped the transparent air bag. With one quick rip a pile of bloodied intestines was pulled from the fish and pushed to the floor. She didn't mind the work. It was the cold dampness and the smell she hated. The stench of the old blood and fish sealed the room. The pungent scent seeped into her skin. She was afraid she would never lose that smell. The wetness chilled her past the saturated sweaters and socks. Past the skin. It chilled her inside. In a place she could never quite dry. "You're not a talker are ya, Fritz?" said Wolf. "Nope." "Do you mind if I sit here for a while? Ya don't have to talk or anything. I could just sit here with you." Fritzie was not sure what Wolf meant. She stammered, "I'm engaged." Wolf examined Fritzie and then smiled. "Oh yeah? That's real nice." "Yeah." "Where's your fiance?" questioned Wolf, playfully. "Home." "Where's home?" "Port Angeles." "He's a fisherman then," said Wolf. "Nope." "How come ya don't have no ring?" Fritzie paused and then nervously mumbled her answer, "I ain't got one just yet." Wolf smiled. He spoke slowly, deliberately laboring over each word. "I thought usually when somebody gets engaged they get themselves a ring. Of course, I don't know for sure cause I've never been engaged myself." "Well, I don't have one just yet." Wolf began to laugh at Fritzie's response. His smile was so large

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Fritzie thought it might stretch right off his face. "What's so funny? What are you always laughing for?" Wolf was laughing so hard he was unable to answer her. "What is so funny?" demanded Fritzie. "You," Wolf grinned. "So, I ain't engaged but I could be," replied Fritzie defensively. Wolf laughed even harder. Then suddenly he began to whistle. Wolf began to conduct Fritzie with his hands hoping she would join him. Fritzie laughed. "Can ya whistle?" asked Wolf. "No." "I bet ya can. It's easy," encouraged Wolf. "I can't," protested Fritzie. "Aw, come on. Try." I can't," insisted Fritzie. "Just push your lips together like this." Wolf took his large hand and scrunched Fritzie's small lips into a ball. Fritzie pulled his arm away. "I can't. Just leave me alone." "I didn't mean to get ya mad. I was just trying to cheer ya up," explained Wolf. Fritzie wanted to say she wasn't mad but she did not answer. Wolf did not move back to the other seat. He sat whistling softly until they reached Yreka. The bus pulled into the Yreka rest area at 7:00 p.m. Fritzie was glad to see that most of the loggers transferred to another bus in a different direction. She hurried to the snack bar and ordered a chicken salad sandwich. She looked around for Wolf but did not see him and guessed he must have transferred. As the bus was pulling out of the Yreka rest area, passengers watched a large figure running towards the bus. Through the darkness Fritzie watched the figure wave and yell at the bus. The driver looked back and with a disgusted sigh stopped the bus. Wolf scrambled aboard, out of breath. "Just about left without me," said Wolf. He placed himself next to Fritzie. Fritzie was glad to see him but, not wanting to show it, she smiled and turned away. "Ya must have had some supper. Ya don't look so cranky," Wolf jokingly replied. Fritzie returned his smile. "Well, Fritz, where do ya think I oughta go?" Wolf pulled out a large colorful map of the United States from his knapsack. "I could go to any of these here cities on this page. Any one of

them. Trouble is, there's so many of them. I don't know what to pick. What d'ya think?" "I don't know, I've never been out of the state of Washington before this," answered Fritzie looking at the map. "I tell you what, you close yer eyes and put yer finger somewheres on this map. That's the place I'm gonna go. Wherever yer finger lands is the place I'm going." Fritzie giggled, "That's crazy." "Come on, close yer eyes." Fritzie obeyed and plunked her finger on the map. "Well, yer not exactly in any city particular but it looks like you're half in South Dakota so that's good enough. Guess I'll be going to South Dakota." "You're not serious," exclaimed Fritzie. "Sure am. Got nothing else to do for a while," answered Wolf. "You a logger or something?" "Was a logger for Weyerhauser. A chokesetter. Got my leg all torn up." "Sorry," mumbled Fritzie. "Don't be sorry. Didn't like that job much anymore anyway. Think I'm gonna try something new." "I didn't like my job much either," said Fritzie. "Yeah? What'd ya do?" "Worked in the cannery. I just up and quit." "You sure don't look like somebody who'd just up and quit." Fritzie did not continue. "So pick me another city. I gotta go to more than one city." Fritzie was relieved that he had let the subject drop and gladly obliged. She closed her eyes and placed her finger on the map. Wolf began to laugh. "You did it again." Fritzie opened her eyes to see her finger in the middle of South Dakota. "I guess South Dakota it is." "I guess so," said Fritzie. For the first time since she had boarded the bus she began to relax. "How come you won't show me what yer drawing?" questioned Wolf. "I don't usually like to show them to people." "Well, you could show 'em to me cause I'm not just people. Besides I've already had a peek." "You have?"

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"Yesterday morning I was watching you draw out of the corner of my eye. You sure do draw a lot." "I Hke to." "So do I get to see 'em closer or do I have to take my chances at peeking?" "I guess it'd be o.k. if I showed them to you since you've already seen them." Fritzie handed Wolf her torn sketch pad. Wolf opened the book. The first pages were almost completely black. Charcoal sketches with hard, thick black strokes covered the page. Trees in stages of decay. Ashen, black stumps. Wolf stared at the page. "Do you think it's too much?" asked Fritzie. "I want to remember what it looked like. I don't want to come back." "It's what it looks like," said Wolf. He continued to turn the pages. Brightly colored fishing scenes appeared in water colors and pastels. "You're like one of those professionals," Wolf confirmed. "You really think so," Fritzie flushed. "Sure do." "You don't think I used too much green?" "Naw, it's perfect." Fritzie knew they weren't perfect but she was glad Wolf thought so. She wanted him to like them. To like them all. Wolf examined each sketch, not missing a detail. As he carefully turned each page Fritzie anxiously waited to show him another. Fritzie couldn't remember when she had fallen asleep but sometime in the night she awoke to find that her head was resting on Wolfs shoulder. Embarrassed, she pulled away until she realized that Wolf was asleep too. Fritzie put her head back on his shoulder and went to sleep. The sun had just begun to rise when a movement next to Fritzie caused her to open her eyes. It was still dark but she thought that Wolf had her wallet in his hand and was slipping it back into her purse. "What are ya doing?" she choked. "What do ya mean?" replied Wolf sleepily. "What are ya doing with my wallet?" said Fritzie accusingly. "Ya kicked your purse into the aisle. Your wallet fell out. I'm putting it back before somebody takes it." Fritzie grabbed the wallet away from him. "Get away from here." Fritzie glared at Wolf. "Don't ever come near me again." She did not even wait for him to move but grabbed her things and ran to another seat. When she opened her wallet the thirty $100.00 bills lay

untouched exactly as she left them. Later in the morning Fritzie walked over to where Wolf was sitting. He was reading a magazine and did not look up. "I'm sorry 'bout my wallet. Guess I should've thanked you for picking it up. Hope I didn't hurt your feelings or anything." Wolf answered quietly but did not look up, "Nope. You couldn't do that." Fritzie stood awkwardly for a few moments and then went back to her seat. She tried to smile at him whenever she could catch his eye but Wolf did not return the gesture. Fritzie waited for him to come back and talk to her. He never did. When they reached Bakersfield she watched Wolf take his luggage off the bus. She followed. "Where ya going?" "I gotta transfer here." Wolf did not stop and kept on walking. Fritzie followed. "Where ya transferring to?" "South Dakota," replied Wolf, indifferently. "I might be going there too," stammered Fritzie. Wolf stopped and looked at her flushed face. Fritzie continued, "Mind if I ride along with you? Ya don't have to talk or anything. We could just sit together." Wolf gave a faint smile. "Suit yourself." He picked up his luggage and headed toward the lobby of the bus station.

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Quarto Elliot F. Bratton

Elliot F. Bratton

ALL-NIGHT PRISON FARM 's like dreaming of black whips falling with a hiss Through hot-white light, Only I'm awake, thinking along, too tired to sing along. With the edgy blues floating out of a melting black radio. From my neck down it's disconnected muscle Pushing helplessly against the pressure Of a week-long flood; I can't remember when it began. My head's in a steambath of hot moonlight. Blood boils my eardrums into beating distant thunder. And a barracks of exhausted gray-clad men, an imprisoned brain Squirms for sleep, urges, tugs the planted legs of two young men Who stand inside each temple, thinking it's daylight, They beat the walls of my skull with sledge hammers, Trying to make rock. Hoping to break me in for Warden Pressure, to Make me a positive example for the chain-gang called Fatigue.

THE LOVERS T h e City wants to see them When the lovers walk with heads in gray sacks And arms-around-waists warmly touching The lip-red velvet dress to the death-black wool suit Strolling into the whispering lovers' lane Where hitmen watch them with blinking cross-hairs Then go home and cry green tears into clean sheets At midnight the lovers dance in heedless ecstasy Mimicking the caress of open windows and the embrace of black walls That spies bathe their ears in, frustrated they can't smell Their hallucination of a mountain of bewitched animals Gnawing each others' faces until there's a waterfall of blood. Illuminated by dawn, the lovers' restless sleep dies. Their eyes fill with gold, their hands knead without thinking. The City combs her long black hair, lifts her scales. Rips off her white blindfold, but sees no one.

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Joseph Ferrandino

T h e first r o u n d f i r e d in the L-shaped ambush struck Carmine Vitale obliquely through the bridge of his nose. It tore his left eye from its socket and shattered his cheekbone before slamming to rest in the gnarled trunk of an ageless tree. As he spun from the force, a short burst from an AK stitched three rounds across his lower back and pitched him bleedingface first into the rain-forest duff. The sharp rifle cracks of the initial volley rolled and rumbled like distant thunder under the ringing in his ears. He chewed on rotting leaflitter. The third platoon had been wiped out. Eighty percent of the men had been killed or wounded in the first ten seconds of the one-sided fight. The survivors pulled back from the crossfire and regrouped in a defensive perimeter. Nothing could be done for the others until the first and fourth platoons, which were converging on the position from east and west, arrived to reinforce the remaining handful of infantrymen. The VC, meanwhile, moved in on their helpless victims. Carmine could hear them scurrying about the killing zone. They spoke in terse gibberish-phrases as they moved from one fallen GI to the next, scavenging from the bodies whatever they deemed useful. Not wanting to be burdened by wounded prisoners, the VC executed those not already dead. Some of them, motivated by hatred or revenge, beheaded the bodies at random. Carmine saw this through his one remaining eye. He tried to overcome the pain. It would be his turn soon. He slowly searched the area immediately around him for his weapon. He couldn't find it. There was no way to fight back. Pain and fear

worked their way over and through him. The sounds of the footsteps and the voices comingled into a droning rumble. The ringing in his ears began to soften and lower in pitch; the green in front of his eye faded to gray, to black. His mind, in an effort to protect itself from pain and impending horror, enveloped itself in oblivion. Carmine lapsed into numbing sleep as the enemy approached. They pulled the rucksack from his back and rolled him over. The bleeding headwound and exposed coil of intestine that trailed from his abdomen convinced them not to waste another round. The appearance of death sufficed. One VC anxiously tugged at Carmine's jungle boots; another claimed the steel pot and helmet liner; they ripped his pockets open; picked up his weapon. Satisfied that they had stripped the corpses clean, the VC slipped silently back into the jungle before the Americans could regroup and get even. As the last rustling of leaves faded in the distance, the jungle became quiet and still. Faint rays of sunlight penetrated the dense canopy. The slaughtered were dappled by a hideous, though innocent, play of light and shade. The intense pain in Carmine's face revived him. Where the death-like appearance of sleep had served to save his life, the life-like appearance of wakefulness now served to remind him of the fragility of that life. He stared blankly at the irregular outlines of the foliage overhead. He did not feel the insects which, lured from the labyrinth of the duff by the warm sweetness of his life oozing from him onto the dense carpet, now nibbled indifferently on the ragged edges of ruptured intestines. He felt only the piercing pain shooting through his head. He choked on his own blood and spit. He did not know where he was or who he was. It did not occur to him immediately that he was still alive. As that knowledge slowly insinuated itself through the pain of his present circumstance, he could not tolerate it. He vainly groped for his weapon, for anything which could put an end to his suffering. He was alone, terribly alone and defenseless; unable even to put an end to his own suffering. All he could do was endure until, ineluctably, he bled to death. The reinforcements moved cautiously through the killing zone, appalled by the carnage. The inexperienced were wracked by selfish pity and sympathy; the veterans approached it as just another distasteful task which had to be done. "Try to keep the heads with the bodies they belonged to," instructed a platoon sergeant. "Pick it up by the hair, man. It won't bite you now." The bodies were policed up and carried back to the LZ. As they moved up the fallen column, someone noticed a furtive motion in

AMBUSH (Excerpt from a work in progress)

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Carmine's fingers. He shouted for the medics. Carmine heard the words but did not know what they meant. The corpsmen quickly fell to his side and tended to the wounds. They administered morphine to help ease the pain, then wrapped dressings over the empty eye socket. They carefully pushed his intestines back into their cavity and packed the wounds as best they could. Field dressings and gauze were wrapped around his lower torso. "How can we move him?" a medic asked. "What about his spine?" "It don't matter," the senior medic replied. "The rounds went right through him. Nothing we do will fuck him up any worse than he is now. Fill out his tag while I get this I.V. going." The medic followed the order. As the senior man taped the needle to Carmine's arm, the medic wrote the necessary information on a large tag and twisted the wires at the top of it through a buttonhole on Carmine's fatigues. "Get him to the LZ asap," the senior medic commanded. "Give him dust-off priority." They rolled Carmine over onto a poncho and, with each of four men lifting a corner of it, carried him to the LZ. They placed him on a stretcher in the Huey. The crew chief secured the stretcher with web belts and gave a thumbs-up sign. The rotor beat the air furiously as the chopper lurched skyward. They decided to bypass the battalion aide station and flew directly to the surgical field hospital. From the grayness of his skin they knew that his life was close to over. Carmine was unaware of all this earthly activity. He was in the backyard of his boyhood, eating figs and playing with a frisky dalmatian pup.

Jill D. Hardwick-Morton

THE VESTMENT D a m p air swept through the pores of my skin as if I had been woven from cloth. I was bound by my clothes which also covered my thoughts. I tried to free myself by escaping through the holes around my arms and legs. He also tried to free me, telling me to walk around naked but failed to understand when I told him I was still wearing my skin. He tried to penetrate through my woven skin but was trapped by the horizontal and vertical lines.

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Elisabetta di Cagno

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. My heart beats fast. I am afraid. I carefully slip out of bed and tiptoe out of the room. The cats are awake. I walk in the dark. I never trip or stumble. If I want to turn on a lamp, or the television, my fingers know their way. Sometimes I drape an arm over the refrigerator door and look inside, releasing a bridge of light onto the tiles. At five I watch Biography. I like Biography because it's in black and white. Mike Wallace narrates film clips of famous people. It was before he had to pretend to be young. I love the grainy footage of Queen Victoria's funeralâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; soldiers marching too quickly, wearing pointed hats, the crowds lining Pall Mall, crying; London beautiful, dreamy, ignorant of the two wars that the one-year-old century would bring. "The end of an era," Mike says. I wish Mike could show me the dinosaurs wandering placidly on the plains of Utah. I wish I could see the court of Louis XIV. One morning Mike showed me Edward VIII, standing before a bouquet of fat, prehistoric microphones. He said, "I give up the throne for the woman I love." My kind of guy. Not really. He hung out with Nazis.

Suddenly he's walking down a staircase, then onto a lawn. He looks smaller. Wallis Simpson wanted to be Queen of England. Her dress has little buttons all up the front. Her hair is parted in the middle, her mouth, black with lipstick. What did he see in her? Mike says she had a great sense of humor. Jesus. So does Henny Youngman. I give up the throne for Henny Youngman. He played the violin. So did Albert Einstein. I missed the program on Einstein. Guess I had good dreams that night. Charles Lindbergh is blond, tall in his jump suit, his smile at once arrogant and shy. As he climbs into the Spirit of St. Louis his eyes narrow. The cleft of his chin is in shadow. All the reporters wear hats. Mike shows his approach into France over miles of plowed fields, people running, looking up, their arms waving. I flew to France last year. Before landing I fill out customs cards and look down over miles of factories and ungainly buildings. I always forget that ugly buildings can exist in France. Later I watch luggage go around on a belt. Mike shows Lindbergh riding down Fifth Avenue in a Packard. No Toyota Celica for Lucky Lindy. No Trump Tower for Lucky Lindy. The Lindbergh baby is kidnapped. Mike shows the headlines, the courtroom. Bruno Hauptman is executed. The Lindberghs, brokenhearted, move to Europe. Then he hangs out with Nazis. FDR has his "Fireside Chats." Mike shows a family sitting around an enormous, stone-age radio.

BIOGRAPHY

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A little girl with a bow in her hair, leans against Daddy's wide pants leg. Junior has freckles and a dog. Mommy is slim and neat in her housedress and cardigan. There are flamingos on the wallpaper. FDR holds a cigarette holder in his teeth as he grins. Eleanor Roosevelt is speaking before the U.N. On her bias-cut dress is pinned a flower so strange, it could well have been imported from another planet. She says, "yeah," for year, "gull," for girl. Mike shows the newspaper headlines that proclaimed Thomas A. Dewey's victory. President of the United States of America, one nation under God. But Truman awoke to learn he had won the election. Eva Peron, hair pulled tightly, covered with a black veil, greets the Pope. Her smile is frozen, feral. There is a fever in her eye I don't want to understand. Helen Keller, carefully dressed like everybody else, ever clawing at darkness and silence, goes quickly downhill once her teacher and companion is dead. But the worst is Grace Kelly. Mike tells how she got her first break in High Noon. Then she meets Hitchcock. Rear Window. She is as beautiful as a leopard and nobody is as beautiful as a leopard. She tries to be so exquisite, always wearing gloves. In Italy, I pick up a paper. Grace is dead, lying in a satin-padded coffin. She is heavy, foreshortened, like the Christ in Mantegna's pietĂ . Her nose is too curved for Grace Kelly. She wears a Dior gown. She finally looks Irish.

I see her in the Rover, though I never saw it. She smiles at the turn, the car sails. We leave the restaurant on the mountain top. I drive down the winding mountain road. I laugh with fear and ask my friends, "Is this the Grace Kelly Parkway?" I know all this and she knows nothing. Mike shows her meeting Rainier. The reporter asks, "Will you continue to make films?" She smiles, "That will be for the Prince to decide." She smiles. More questions, more smiles. The prince and his flotilla sail out to meet her oceanliner. She is to enter Monaco on his ship. Crowds cheer. I cry out to her, "Wake up, Grace, there's still time." Mike says that in 1962 she announced that she would make another film. But the people of Monaco didn't want their princess to make love to another man on the screen. So she didn't. One of her subjects said, forgivingly, "After all, one doesn't become a real princess overnight." And she wanted to become a princess so bad. Her father started as a bricklayer and there are no Irish princesses. At her wedding her mother said, "I can't believe this is happening to my little Grace. Her little Grace lay dying and the palace hushed it up. Her little Grace had a briefing committee. Lessons were given on how to address her, approach her. Ladies should wear only one piece of jewelry when meeting Her Highness, A wedding ring is preferred. Mike didn't dye his hair then. The crowds went home the night Grace landed in Monaco. They left the confetti-strewn Fifth Avenue to the streetsweeper. The family turned off the radio and went in to dinner. People went home, drying their tears, after Victoria's funeral.

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They had their tea, then Hved and died. Dewey got over his defeat. T r u m a n outlived his victory. But Grace, poor Grace. How could she give away her will? And for so little. As I dress for work I realize that I think a lot about freedom. Maybe that's why I can't sleep through the night.

Michael Schwartz

NOTES FROM A DAILY JOURNAL

Went to Pie de la Cuesta.

A man in a flower shop in New York told me that the most beautiful sunsets in the world were there. We got to the beach at sunset and a man was having a heart attack surrounded by twenty children with pails. There were few people walking around, and when we got to the hotel, we seemed to be the only ones staying there. I asked the man for a key to the back door which leads to the beach. He said the beach was dangerous at night. When I went up the stairs, a rat ran up along the pipe over my head. Eve felt uneasy. I did too, but I was trying to contain it by denying it. This only made Eve more uneasy. Our contained anxiety selfamplified to incredible, unspoken levels. We walked on the street because we were so frightened of the nighttime beach. Pie de la Cuesta is a finger-shaped peninsula which is 25 percent beach. The whole place was either hotels, slums or vacant lots littered with kids throwing rocks and doing wheelies on stingray bicycles. These kids threw rocks at loitering hounds and whacked them with sticks. We went back to our room. Squeaking bats flew randomly over the courtyard and settled in a tree branch outside our room. The water in the toilet had tiny red worms in it. They bobbed in underwater quivers near the flush hole of the basin. The plaster-clay walls had been painted pink this season, in a shade that is native to flourescent light. The room was as modern as an air-conditioned shower stall. I saw a waterbug crawling on a floor tile. It looked like a walnut-stain lobster. In the middle of the night, I woke up hacking with a dry cough

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and couldn't stop. There was nothing to drink except the water from the sink, and nothing to do about it until morning. Eve reached into her backpack and began skinning a mango with a penknife. She sat on the edge of the bed and fed pieces to me and to herself. It was so thick and sweet that it sliced through my cough immediately. Each piece was more and more delicious, and when it was done, she gave me the pit, and I sucked the rest of the fruit from it and we went to sleep. In the morning, I was listless with exhaustion. Gerry Berkowitz does weightlif ting in his basementâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in lifting he works not merely for "tone," but to break through metabolic barriers at the outer fringes of human possibility. Between episodes, he undertakes four-day fasts which he breaks at places like the Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus. Our waiter at the Chinese restaurant was trying to hurry us out by slapping down the bill under a saucer of fortune cookies. After he left, we opened them and read. Ari observed that most fortunes could be paraphrased in the words, "You fool." He cited examples; "Listening brings wisdom, but speaking brings repentance," you fool. "It is time to make new friends," you fool. "Your luck has changed completely today," you fool.

sitting on the couch, next to the house's idea of a reading lampâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a 100-watt lightbulb without a lampshade. A 1973 Columbia Journalism Review that I had been reading had fallen out of my hands and was lying open, face-down on the floor. Her footsteps woke me up. She was in her coat and was on her way to her room, but she had looked into the living room out of curiosity, before heading upstairs. I think the glow of the light made her want to see who was there. My eyes had opened just before she saw me, and I was staring blankly ahead. She said, "Michael, are you all right?" The way she asked this question made me suspect that she assumed I had been there, staring blankly for hours, as a result of deep depression, and was contemplating suicide. I told her that I was fine, that I had merely been sleeping. But the urgent way she asked the question made me wonder if she was seeing that the break-up with Ella had made me depressed. What's stupid about that conclusion is that Claudette's gears are permanently jammed in about-to-panic ratio, and it was only incidental that her hysterical concern was directed at me at that moment.

When I was talking on the phone to my brother Steve, he said " I told an acquaintance of mine who knows New York that you lived on 113th Street, and he told me that that's Harlem, so I'm just telling you." I said, "I don't live in Harlem." "Yeah, this guy knows about New York, and he said that 113th Street is Harlem." "Steve, you're full of shit. I don't live in Harlem." "O.K.." I got so irritated with him that I ignored the reason he called: to tell me that he loved me, that he had a great woman who loved him more than he would ever know, and how he knows it's true love because they can truly let each other be themselves. Claudette found me in the living room late Saturday night. I was

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Michele Madisan Somerville

WAIT Note how much that is small and seeking perceptibility finds its way to eyes that lift from newspapers, train schedules and anchors

knitting a vague ship which approaching strips a fog from its back. Consider Penelope weaving a vision from the threads of a glimpse.

itself there. Consider watch tower women staring the sea down until it offers the ridiculous promise to float their men back home, through still-spooled time. Consider Penelope stretching her yarn, her twiceravelled threat tanglingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I wait not on a shortening but shifting line one moving point, noting your subtlest details through a snarled memory. Consider watch towering women holding their towers up like needles

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Michele Madisan Somerville

APPROACHiNG MORNING Down Riverside Drive I do nothing but think of it, and you— through smoke windows of a computerized bus, can't see the streetsigns, but the landmarks and changelessness of it all ignite a mundane memory as I ride feeling like something you'd find in an automat between custard pie and bologna on whole wheat, and as far from now. . . And soon we too shall peer straight outside of time, our breaths visible, lamenting something we could never put our fingers on, pressing fingertips against the glass, leaving no prints, no initials to mar the icy pane, irretrievable, we too shall suffer gurgling down into the drain which is 'finished business', be called, as the clear irrevocable challenges, and jostles us and places us down, puts us down, placing down its forward staff, making all our decisions for us. . . perhaps I shall even find you then, in the world which pursues this one now, the dark route, perhaps might lead me to the dark room which holds you when it's no longer you

who holds back. You'll wear all black—the color of that which memory cannot accomplish and perhaps then I might sleep with my head against your chest as your heart provides a sound for the motors and gears of my dream, if those indications, faint as they will be, can suggest your. . . . operations, the presence of your breath as it gives unlikely permission. I once wanted you to smoke a pipe, in wanting what it is men with pipes offer. I wanted you once for always but that wish has grown the shape of icicles; it sports a glistening and temporary charm, want you somewhat right now despite the solace of smoke, what wishes it has the power to erase, despite the lovely obscurities and the long trails they sprout, which sprout others still, which terminate—nowhere and everywhere, yes, want you right now even as you speak "smooth sailing ahead." Little evidence mocks me as I ride this tangled argument, as I ride adjacent to the river, against the river, searching through the dim night-glass for a sign. . . . a barracuda of the Hudson, an old boot, one light flashing from you, one star with one ray burning a single good omen through or one good reason to continue. . . No, nothing I say is fully alleged—no clear edged assertions. . . . and, yes, you want too— but I can't read the streetsigns and the changelessness of it all, nor your unclear danger

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which dissolves as some smoke ring which once knew endlessness. Tributaries, they don't matter any more. This silence you advocate, I can no longer memorize it. T h a t much is clear to me as I ride into, as I drift into the clarity which is cold air and the heat which mars with a white cold air, traversing time, abandoning this clear and translucent danger.

Patricia Voll<

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Something about the shape

of the man walking towards Marna makes her eyes dart even though Wolf is taking her picture. She is leaning against the side of their snow-covered car. The children, their legs over her shoulders, are sitting on the roof of the car. It is the first big snow of the year. Wolf snaps the picture, smiles through his beard, and follows Mama's eyes to the bearish man walking with his head down. The man's hands are rammed in his pockets. He is wearing the kind of clothes people who don't go out in the snow wear when they have to go out in the snow. Below his lined trench coat Marna can see suit pants tucked in the top of brown socks, the seams of his cordovans flexing through black rubbers. He is walking with his head down, so that if he slips, he will be ready. As he gets closer to the family posing by their snow-buried car, he looks up and meets the eyes of the mother. Marna. She smiles big, knowing her cheeks are red and that she looks sculptural when her knitted hat is down over her eyebrows covering her hair and forehead. The man smiles back and then his eyes dart to Wolf. He seems to take Wolf in and then the children as if he is trying to brand them onto his mind. But his pace does not slow as he enters their circle. "Hello!" Mama says and can't think of anything else. The man nods and smiles. Wolf smiles at the man and the man smiles back. Marna wonders what Wolf is thinking. He does not know the man; she does. She knows he is living in the city again. She knows because every year, for the past fifteen years, she has looked him up in the phone book when the new one is delivered. For thirteen years, after they

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stopped seeing each other, his name had been missing. Wherever she travels, for business or pleasure, Marna always looks up his name in the local phone book. Ogunquit, Maine. Lexington, Kentucky. Schroon Lake, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. Chicago, Illinois. Now, for the past two years, his name is back in the local telephone book. Occasionally, she calls his number, listerLs to his voice, and hangs up. Occasionally, she receives a call from someone who listens to her voice say hello but doesn't say anything and Mama says "Please don't be shy. I want to talk to you too." Then the person hangs up. Whenever she receives a silent phone call. Marna hangs up and then dials him, hoping to create a connection. Sometimes he answers. Sometimes she gets his machine. She knows this is no positive indication that he is making the calls. Does everyone, she wonders, get those kinds of calls? Probably yes. But if they were innocent wrong numbers wouldn't the caller say sorry or hang up immediately? Not wait there, listening, breathing against the mouthpiece. He stares at Wolf in passing. Marna tries to see Wolf through his eyes: So she married someone her own age. Radical type, beard. Look how thin his legs are. Look how easily he grins, doesn't even know me. An indiscriminate grinner Prosaic. Talks too loud at dinner parties. Marna knows from the phone book that he lives only two blocks away. It seems incredible that it has taken all this time for them to run into each other So many times she has left the apartment thinking today is the day I'm going to run into him. And now it is today and she hasn't thought about him at all this morning. And he is seeing her, unrehearsed, sculptural, with two children and a thin-legged man who smiles easily. Marna follows the man's back down the street. He is probably on his way home after unsuccessfully trying to buy milk, eggs, cheese, staples for his solitary life. But no, he does not make the turn towards his address. Instead, he heads for the park, where they are going. Wolf helps the children down from the car. They slither off the roof into his arms. Safely down, they break away. Willie, the boy, hurls his body into drifts made by the snow plow. They are taller than he is. Gala, the girl, follows him. "Watch out for the yellow snow!" Marna screams. They ignore her, laughing, rolling in the snow, friends through distraction. Indoors where there is nothing better to do, they fight all the time. Outside they never fight. Marna looks at Wolf. He is so slender and healthy looking. Outside we never fight either. His back is disappearing and it seems that he is heading for the sledding hill. Marna knows she can never catch up with him. The children find a new game to play at every step. She sees him turn in

to the park, yes, the sledding hill could be the only reason he would turn in to the park there. But why the sledding hill? Wouldn't she have heard if there were a wife and children? Marna takes her time. What if he stared at them because he didn't know who they were and wondered why they were smiling? What if he didn't remember her at all? Would it be like the man who had kissed her at the office Christmas party? The man who wouldn't let her dance with anyone else? And the next day, her heart pounding, she'd taken the elevator up to his office, stormed through the door, and said, "Did that kiss mean to you what it meant to me?" He'd looked up surprised, faintly irritated. "What kiss?" he'd said, and gone back to his work. They crunch through the snow into the park. Wolf pulls Willie and Gala on the sled. They keep forgetting to steer. They roll off, twisted together, into the shoveled snow along the path. "Watch out for the yellow snow!" Marna yells again, tramping behind them. They scramble back onto the sled. Rosy-cheeked, like Bouchers. Surely, no one ever had cheeks that color indoors. I never would have had children with cheeks this color if I'd married him, Marna thinks. He is sallow, even-toned. Even today, slightly out of breath on the street, he looks like no blood passes through his face. She looks up trying to spot his trench coat among the ski parkas, Irish sweaters, and L.L. Bean earth-tone gear. It is his ankles that give him away. The suit pants ballooning over the rims of the socks make his silhouette different from everyone else's. Her eyes move up his ankles past his trench coat to his bare head. He has the kind of bald spot Prince Charles has. It doesn't make her think of a man who is losing his hair, but of a man who is more manly for having something a woman can't have. He is standing at the peak of the sledding hill, hands still in his pockets, an island amid the jumping children, white-muzzled dogs, and bent parents. Willie and Gala wait their turn. Willie, the eldest, lies at the bottom and waits for Gala before he pushes off. Wolf gives them an extra push. "Look out below! " Marna yells to a struggling dark blue boy. He is dragging his sled up the down trail instead of the up path, which is lumpy and harder to navigate. The child is so over-dressed that his arms stand out from his body like a snowman. Marna tunes her ear like a radio dial and separates Willie and Gala's screams from the other children's. Willie paddles the .snow with his hands to go faster. Then Gala drops her boots to slow them down. Still, they make it beyond the end of the run, lengthening it

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by a foot. Wolf whoops, then runs down to congratulate them. In two side steps. Marna is next to the man. She stares straight ahead at her children and has no idea what she is going to say. Suddenly, "Do you still circle the T. V. movies you want to see in the Sunday Times?" comes out. He is silent. He looks straight ahead. Then, "What do you think?" he answers. Still looking at the children, she speaks softly, almost out of the side of her mouth. "I think you do." He was an editor and lived the most carefully ordered life she knew. He would have criticized her into the ground. Now married to a man less critical and orderly than she, Mama sees that she is to Wolf what this man would have been to her. She tries to find something else to say. Watching her family come up the hill happy makes her feel invulnerable. "The first time and the last time I ever had pressed duck was at your house." The duck press. It was silver or chrome or stainless steel, polished like a mirror, expensive looking. He used it to s(}ueeze the blood out of duck which he served with homemade carmelized apple sauce and braised leeks. Two other things she hasn't eaten since they parted. "How's your duck press?" "I use it to crack walnuts." He snorts, the closest he ever comes to laughing. She turns to him smihng. She wants him to look at her, but he doesn't. The relentless critic, the perfectionist. She might have liked herself better if she'd married him. It would have kept her on her toes. Wolf, on the other hand, loves her the way she is, loves her powerlessly. But he would have loved her conditionally, the way she loves Wolf. The question is, does love mean more if you have to earn it? "Tell me honestly, do you ever think of me?" She is simply curious, not risking anything. Wolf and the children are halfway up the hill. Willie throws a snowball. Wolf ducks. Gala washes Wolfs face with snow. Wolf falls down and plays dead. Marna and the man watch. "Do I or did I?" the editor asks. "For a while I dreamed about you," Marna says. "Once in a while I still do. It's always the same dream, but I don't have it often enough to call it 'recurrent'." Marna offers this, feehng generous. "Perhaps 'occasional' is the word you're looking for." "Thank you," Marna says as the children approach. "Mommy did you see how fast we went?" Willie is breathless. "Mommy we went so far!" Gala adds. "Hurry! It's our turn!" Wolf says, lying down on the sled first. Willie gets on top of him, then Gala. The man watches as Marna pushes them off. Wolf grunts and uses his hands like flippers.

Marna speaks, her eyes on the sled. "In the dream, I come to your apartment. You play the piano and sing for me. Then you walk me to the door and close it. I'm left outside your door. Without a coat." "They say anything you dream can't come true." "Do you live in the neighborhood?" Marna allows herself to look at his feet. She can't find them. The snow is over the top of his socks. "Yes," he says. She waits for him to ask if she lives in the neighborhood, but he doesn't. They watch the sled stop. Wolf and the children roll off. "Do you ever call me and hang up?" Mama asks. "Is that you who calls me and hangs up all the time?" Finally he turns and looks at her. "Why do you do that, Marna? What posses.ses you?" Marna does not answer. Instead, she imagines him in a rambling, pre-war apartment littered with Sunday Times TV. sections, yellowed and flaking on the floor, draped over the back of the sofa, hanging on the towel racks in the bathroom. The duck press, relegated to the bookshelves, separates his Paris-In-The-Thirties writers from his Classics. He still drinks wines with pedigrees but drinks them with food purchased at the gourmet take-out place across the street, this balding older editor who, dre.ssed inappropriately, comes out in the snow to sample life first-hand. Looking at Wolf with the children, laughing, screaming, rosy and wet. Marna feels she has made the right decision. She never could have pleased him as much as Wolf pleases her, when he pleases her. Wolf pants up the hill. He is pulling Willie and Gala on the sled. His glasses are fogged over. The children take the next run without him. "Put your arm around me," Marna tells Wolf. A long, slim, downcovered arm, rises and stretches over her shoulders, weighing heavy on them. She leans into him and he curls his arm forward, a tropism. Although the editor's arm is fatter, even in a trench coat. Marna knows she would have to sense the weight more than feel it. It would rest on her non-territorily, as if resting on the arm of a chair. The three of them stand there, watching the children. "Having fun?" Wolf a.sks Marna. She smiles up at him. Can he see me through those glasses, she wonders. "I'll warm you up when we get home," he says and smiles back. The tone of a scream changes and Gala is lying face down in the snow. Her quiet body looks like a pile of laundry. Wolf breaks into a run. Marna follows, trying not to tumble. There is blood on the snow, too bright to be real. Wolf turns Gala over. There is blood on

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The children stop in front of a flower store. They stare at over-ripe tulips from Holland and engorged daffodil buds behind the snowlined window. They pass a Gristede's and the children request cocoa when they get home. The children. If she had stayed with him, she wouldn't have the children. She might have other children, but not these. Willie scrambles ahead of her and waits inside a doorway. She can see his hand, moving up and down with a snowball as if testing its weight. An old terror she is still familiar with grips her, until she reaches for a handful of snow from the hood of a car. She slows down, packing it. The children. It is not possible to imagine not having these particular children. There is no way to even think about it. It is something there is no vocabulary for. These children. She could never have had them with any other man than Wolf. Not these particular children. And so she waits for Willie to make the first move. Then she compliments him on his aim, and throws a long one, straight and swift, high enough to sail over his head as he flies down the street.

her lips and chin. Marna stands frozen. She knows with Wolf there, all she has to do is kiss, lay hands, soothe. He will make the right decisions. No need to galvanize. Gala grins. "My wiggly came out!" she squeals. She runs her tongue along the fresh channel in her mouth. Fear cros.ses her face. "My wiggly! Where is it?" Wolf, Marna and Willie squat beside Gala in the snow. They take off their mittens and probe around the blood spots. Gala chomps on a snow ball to stop the bleeding. Wolf gives up last. "We'll come back in the spring and look for it," he tells Gala. "I need my tooth!" She begins to whimper. "The good fairy knows you lost your tooth and will make it up to you," Wolf tells her. He extends his legs and lifts Gala onto his lap. "The tooth fairy knows where all the missing teeth are. All the teeth that have fallen out in playgrounds, in the ocean, on the beach. All the teeth that have swirled down bathtub drains and been swallowed during sleep. All the teeth that are lost at hockey games and football games and boxing matches. Do you think the tooth fairy would disappoint all those people?" Gala shakes her head. "You look under your pillow tomorrow and .see what's there." Gala smiles up at Wolf the way Wolf then smiles up at Marna. They drag the sled together, mitten in mitten, with Willie leading the way. At the top of the hill. Marna sees that he is gone. Then she catches sight of the overflowing pants pulhng a sled with the stuffed blue child on it. A woman in high-heeled boots stumbles alongside of them. She too is dressed like someone who never goes out in the snow. Marna walks faster for a closer look. The woman is wearing a Hudson Bay blanket that Mama remembers from his apartment. Black cashmere-sweatered arms dangle out of the shawl openings of the blanket and end in long black leather gloves. The woman's flounced western skirt, despite its fullness, cannot hide that she is slim. He looks down at the stuffed child and says something. The child hurls a snowball at the editor and he stands there letting it hit him square in the face. On the way home. Marna imagines she is with the editor, and that Wolf, whom she hasn't seen in fifteen years, passes them on the street. She imagines Wolf looking at him and thinking: So she married an older man. Fat, sour-looking, losing his hair. Probably smokes a pipe and wears suede patches on his elbows. Probably gives her a hard time. She imagines Wolf telling her that .sometimes he calls her and hangs up, just to hear her voice. That nothing is ever really over. That he would very much like to meet her for a drink.

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Myung-Hee Kim

Myuns-Hee Kim

TO MY MiDGET

ELEGY

M y midget, you dwindle but never entirely disappear from me. You hide yourself somewhere inside me; I cannot find you in daylight. But I know you are there; I feel you as a seed of a fruit.

M y tear is tuned, like a keen ear, to the sound the inner string of my heart makes

You must be about four feet tall, rebellious, your index finger on the edge of your pursed lips in shy ponderence like one of Renoir's young girls, and dreamy eyed when looking at the sky with a secret aspiration to become a princess. Your limited vision allows you to see only rainbows over the low hill. The aura of naivete is the privilege in your province. Without perfume, you are my sweet midget but you embarrass me when you suddenly come out and claim your place. You see me as an extension of you, but having flirted with the world for a living and having fallen in and out of love with men, I am weary, sullen, and barren like an old cracked shell at the seashore. Sadly, you realize there is no longer a place for you. You have stopped growing. But you know, I still have to grow. Five feet and four inches, as I am now, is not enough. I must grow up to the height of a mountain. Let me go if you won't go with me. Let me get there. You pull me back clinging to my sleeve. Ah, this taut strand between us. You must have caught the glimpse of my eternal nostalgia for you.

at the funeral for the budding seed of my love, shriveled by frost-bite. Tears have no feet; they roll down my cheek passing my lips and rest on the pillow. My tears, salty like the sea, gather at the hollow cave of my heart to raise a pillar of salt, a monument to love.

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Mia Nadezhda Rublowska

GREENPOINT

like a hastily-blown bubble, burst. Let us be glad, then, that not too many people acquire an affinity for Greenpoint. This affinity comes on suddenly, particularly in people who are nervous and who suffer skin rashes, under conditions where nobody else would see cause for distress. Whereas most land affinities exert only dormant attractions and remain simply dreams smoked in pipes, an affinity for Greenpoint acts like a black hole on its victims, invariably sucking them in.

S o m e p e o p l e d e v e l o p strange affinities for places they have never entered. They will begin to express longings for landscapes they have never seen. There are North Pole people and South Pole people, for instance. (One group likes the top of the world while the other likes the bottom.) There are taiga people, desert people, tropical island people, and steppe people. There are Amazon River people and people who just want to stroll under big skies. Prairiebound daughters dream of the mountains. Landlocked grandfathers still shed tears because they never saw the sea. Old country women seek out the labyrinths of inner cities. In small towns everywhere, lanky auto mechanics plot their travels in space. This man here has a very specific land affinity; he wants only to walk down the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and breathe in what he imagines are the dusky smells that leak out from its cafes. His wife—who, like her husband, has never been to Hamburg—complains that Hamburg sounds too sooty for her. She would rather climb the Great Walls in the East. Her choice after that is for the terraced mountains in Java or else, she says, maybe for Key West. There seems to be no logic to explain how land affinities arise. The stranger you passed on the street this morning may have become suddenly attracted to hidden cities in the Soviet Union or he may have been stringing up a hammock all his life in some rainforest in his mind. Some land affinities are stronger than others; some people are more vulnerable to the strength of their pull. If this were not so, demographers say, our civilization would expand too quickly and.

There was gray-eyed Danuta, holding on tight to the wheel of her blue and green bus, trying to make a clean turn around a crumbling parapet in Kaunas. She tried to maneuver the bus as gently as possible because her passengers were mostly old ladies—at that time of day, all the other good people of Kaunas were at work. It was the week of White Nights; the day would never end. The window by Danuta's left arm was open and letting in dust. After Danuta had turned the bus into the old street, she found her path blocked by a long line of dark trucks, whose drivers sat on their front hoods, sipping kvass. A stationary moment, a moment to light up a cigarette. Danuta could not remember if that was permitted or not. The familiar yellow brick apartment building, reflected in her rear mirror, looked more cranky than usual. Danuta realized that she had forgotten to mail him her address, after all. Just like he had said that she would. But it is so easy to forget things in this boggy atmosphere, she thought. It was he who had been the first to describe it—that afternoon, long ago, when they picked up the beads of amber that had washed up on the river bank and he had called it a bomb-blown place. The passengers in Danuta's bus seemed to be in a great hurry. The old ladies had grown impatient very quickly of merely "tsch-tsching" the delay. Danuta could hear them begin to invoke the thundergod Pakounas in a monotonous chant that grew more and more insistent and that sounded, finally, like the chorus of frogs at the lake. Outside the bus, meanwhile, Danuta could see more old ladies. They were crawling up and down the hundred stone steps of the church. It was an ancient church, too battered to be forbidding, with shrapnel still embedded in its walls. Under white kerchieves the women moved silently on knees wrapped in rags. Adjusting the sleeve of her sweater—it was a hand-knit sweater in a Baltic shade of faded green—Danuta wondered how many old ladies could still be alive in a land that had seen so many wars. She counted them and was close to reaching a three-digit figure, when

(Excerpts from a work in progress)

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the hooligans who had been huddling conspiratorially on the corner, suddenly smashed the public drinking glasses from the vending stand onto the sidewalk. This was the same medieval sidewalk, Danuta remembered, where her great aunts had turned away from her, their faces reddened, a few days before. It was during the promenade of the city at midnight. Danuta had just come back to Kaunas, after having chased a blonde boy with a guitar to Stalingrad, to the Finland border, to Berhn. "You ran away," said the great aunts. "I went to the Square," Danuta sighed. It had been, after all, a long journey. Here and there, a truck driver could be seen returning to the inside of his cab. In fits and starts, the dark trucks got moving again. The old ladies in Danuta's bus were appeased; they sat back in their seats with knowing smiles. Danuta hesitated just a second before starting up the bus engine. She tried to remember the cool breezes of the shore. But she came back only with the sound of a word she could not place. "Greenpoint," she whispered. She said it aloud—to nobody in particular. Then she spat out the bit of dust that had just blown into her mouth. One passenger must have been listening. That old lady ran straight to the home of Danuta's great aunts to recount the story of the enigma the next morning, when Danuta was missing from her route; It may be argued that Danuta Zemstvova is one of those troubled and restless spirits who, sooner or later, will be found almost anywhere—standing up when her name is called in a mean and crowded hiring hall, asleep in a doorway without her keys, leaning over the jukebox in some smoke-filled workers' cafeteria, riding a train to the end of the line. Certainly Danuta's great aunts would agree. They still ask: "What do you expect from a girl who would go to Kharkov?" They still petition bureaucrats to keep strangers away. But they don't know about a land affinity, stronger than love, that can drive a person far from his or her native land, making him heedless of that old proverb; No keys in the pocket, no hope in the heart. They don't know about what happened to Boris Kasimierz. Unlike Danuta, Boris Kasimierz had never left Wroclaw in his life. He knew it when it was an old, old city. He knew Wroclaw now when everything was shiny and new. Walking down its rebuilt streets, on his way home from work that day—Boris soldered electrical parts at the No. 2 Lighting Factory—the fifty-year-old home-

body was looking forward to another evening spent gazing at stars. This was an old hobby. Boris liked to keep regular habits. Although it is true that years before, he had precipitously abandoned his microscope studies. "This world is too small," he had complained loudly that day. But he had given up the microscope only in favor of the less temporal worlds he said he could study through the lens of the telescope he had just found. So many hours observing the dialectical motion of the moons of Jupiter! So many hours hidden away in his room! All his life, Boris had been determined—as his old neighbors will verify—to discover some law of harmony in our universe. And, as he told the oil-man earlier that day, he believed that he was finally getting close to unraveling the truth. What made him, then, stray from his familiar path that late afternoon? Had he turned into a m o u s e as one neighbor claimed. No. Even homebodies and scientists can acquire an affinity for Greenpoint. Those neighbors who cleaned out his room would agree. They saw his maps and notebooks filled with pages upon pages of calculations. Greenpoint, they will add, must be far away. That same night, Ludmila Goloboy, or Lydia, as she preferred to call herself, got an affinity for Greenpoint. In her case, it was an affinity that was transmitted to another. Lydia had been despondent because she had all the rubles in the world but nothing to exchange her rubles for. The diamonds she had managed to purchase, from unsavory types wearing black and white shoes, were coming close to filling up the jar of strawberry jam on her kitchen shelf. She was lying in the arms of a sailor she had met earlier that evening, twisting her wine dark hair around her little finger, weeping. The sailor said he came from Gdansk, but Lydia, who had been around, could tell that he must have come from farther east than Vladivostok. "Greenpoint," she sighed suddenly. She repeated the name over and over, each time punctuated with a more and more urgent question mark. "Greenpoint," the sailor with underground eyes finally agreed. He tried to find a way to weave the new word into the long song he was singing. But the sailor soon cut his tune short when, to his happy surprise, Lydia began stuffing her things into his bag.

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W H O ELSE CAME TO GREENPOINT? On any given day an affinity for Greenpoint will strike at least several people. These days it seems to afflict a disproportionate number of Slavs and has already emptied the equivalent of two Eastern European cities. But it is not unknown for Greenpoint to seize the imagination of this or that random person born on a Mediterranean or Caribbean island. Like Nick, who came from a sunny island where clams grow on trees. Nick simply jumped ship one day and dived into the frigid waters of the Atlantic—buoyed by the vision of an all-night coffee shop, decorated in blue, on Manhattan Avenue. This experience of Nick's was similar to what Soto, who was born in Mayaguez, would later describe. The only difference is that Soto saw a grocery store, with bananas hanging in its window. Chronic drifters^or those people who suffer from multiple land affinities—also get that overwhelming urge to see Greenpoint. They are easily distinguished from the others: they are the ones who are not foreign born. It is said that when chronic drifters enter Greenpoint they are struck by that initial waft of freedom in the air. And then by the looks on the widows and divorcees who hold up signs for them that say. Welcome Home. It is true that once they finally make their way to Manhattan Avenue, they will have put their suitcases away for the last time. It is far easier to enter Greenpoint's borders than it is to leave.

space of time it took for his brown paper bag to catch a wind and fly away. Woody saw himself celebrating Greenpoint in Tet. . . .

Woody was sniffing glue in a playground in Chicago. His nose was almost touching his chest. Glue is a remarkable substance that exhibits interesting properties when inhaled. But through the haze. Woody could still feel lurking a vague discontentment. His old fantasies were not working for him, so far, that lazy afternoon. He couldn't hold in his mind a single image of delight. Not the alchemist poring over texts in a dank castle cellar. Not an iron-clad knight confronting fiery dragon. Not even a thick-legged blonde maiden about to strike him with a whip. All kept dissolving into scenes from another time and another place. All kept dissolving back to Hue. The Airplane was flying on its own course now, and Woody could only ride along with it. Woody had traveled a lot recendy. He had moved back and forth through the brilliant jet-spaces of time. The medals he had won lay scattered here and there, on the floors of apartments in Cicero, in Evanston, on the South Side. If only he could change course by three degrees—over a long distance, that would take him far away. Woody took a prolonged and final snort on what would be his last leg of the journey. And within the short

THE BORDERS OF GREENPOINT Greenpoint is a treeless stretch of houses and workplaces running along a bulge of land, which juts out at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn and curls away from the southern edge of Queens. It was built, some people say, on sandy marshlands, but the sand has long since blown away. Years ago, Greenpoint was a port for sea-bound schooners. Even today, the only modern map on which Greenpoint can be found is the nautical map of New York City's harbor. It still warns the sailor to look to starboard for that beam of light coming from the tall steeple of St. Anthony's Church. . . . No one in Greenpoint can explain why it is called the garden spot of the world. They say they cannot remember. Except for the ragman on Du Pont Street—but it is not clear whether he remembers anything at all. Ask him about the gardens and he eyes you suspiciously and then he lectures solemnly about the time the cranes appeared, the world market price of barley, and something about bread and roses. He talks about concrete walls and Spanish uprisings, drunken farmers and drunken boats, flies trapped in beehives and grandmothers holding carnations. The words tumble out of the rag-man so quickly that it is difficult to make out what he is trying to say. But for that conviction in his eyes, one might not bother. One would go away. Tho.se blue eyes take on a peculiar intensity when he begins to complain about how all the women these days go to work. By then, however, a cluster of people, their fingers to their lips, will have gathered around him. Soon, one of them will take you by the arm and escort you back to the Avenue "where it is safe," and whisper that the rag-man is an old, old liar. It is true, however, that in Greenpoint all the women go to work. They have large hands. They make electrical parts at the factory. St. Anthony's Church may be the tallest, but the factory is surely the biggest structure in Greenpoint. It is at least six stories high and takes up an entire city block. Four steel watchtowers guard each of its corners. It is enclosed by a long cyclone fence, whose tip is ringed with barbed wire. Until the men stopped working there, a huge flag used to fly from its roof. Now, there are bold words scrawled up and down its red brick walls. The factory stands supreme, like a castle, on Greenpoint's main intersection—the point where Greenpoint

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Avenue crosses Manhattan Avenue. Every eight hours, every day (except two weeks in July), these streets fill up with women coming and going. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Solderers may be a company union but the women can always be heard whistling their union song. It is said that the factory must find its foremen in places far away from Greenpoint and that once the foremen arrive, the factory has a problem keeping them from ending up at Greenpoint Hospital, too. West. To the west of Greenpoint is a river; beyond is Manhattan. The docks that once covered the waterfront are almost gone. Plank by plank they fall into the East River, taking with them ghosts and sometimes a fearless and corrupt child. There goes Pinocchio, Barbara's oldest boy, in this morning's abandoned automobile. He spent the entire afternoon wiring up the big, rusty Plymouth. Now, at dusk, he can hear the car's motor finally turn. "Faster, faster," whispers Pinocchio to the wind. He stretches his right foot and pushes the gas pedal to the floor. Just a trace of orange light hangs low in the sky behind Manhattan. The car seems to fly over the Huron Street Pier. Down they fall into the warm, oily waters. The wharf trembles and gives up to the river more of its oak. No one is around who will acknowledge Pinocchio's last fall. The warehouses on West Street have been empty for years. Their brass plumbing has been stripped; their guard dogs set free. The nightworkers have all gone away. No more neon lights announce, in labial shades of pink and purple and green. Cardboard, Rope, and Spices to the rippling waves below. Perhaps the Norwegian rats will look up. Perhaps the wild dogs will stop sniffing the air. But the two men waking up in the police car parked on the Java Street docks surely will not report the bobbing car. As if they wanted to keep their dreams from escaping, they push their hats gently over their e y e s . . . . But they knew already that the world ends at the waterfront. They could hear the nuns singing in the river: Stay away! In Greenpoint we are warned that there exist dangerous places and that one should avoid looking west too long.

lights atop each gas tank at night. Every morning the women in Greenpoint look out their windows and study the gas tanks' changing configurations—they find in them signs of fortune and signs of malevolence. When the gas tanks are full, it is not difficult to imagine them toppling over. They loom heavily on the horizon and find their way into everyone's dreams. The gas tanks stand on the easternmost tip of a land of yellow lights and automated drawbridges, of tugboats sunken in industrial canals, of railroad tracks that are entangled with Queen Anne's lace, and of nights so black the stars light up the sky. Oil is refined here; natural gas is liquefied here. This part of Greenpoint is not often entered and its dirt roads have yet to be named. The oil refineries line the eastern bank of Newtown Creek, where it flows north. It is probably a good thing that they are kept close to the water. They are discretely cordoned off by tall concrete walls and they are separated from each other by acres of nude land. They seem like living things. Like dragons the oil refineries breathe out blue flames from their mouths. The flames look as small as an oven's pilot light from a distance, but if we listen closely we can hear the young lovers from Greenpoint who have come here to be alone, turn down their radios and marvel aloud: "The fires look as long as love's tongue!" The blue flames never go out. In unison, they point the way of the wind. In gales, they only flicker and reappear. The air above the oil refineries ripples from the heat and the person in Greenpoint who looks east on a summer day suddenly finds himself sweating a bit harder. A thin ring of industry divides the oil fields from Greenpoint proper. It makes a 120-degree arc, following the Creek's winding western bank. Here can be found the Van Iderstine plants—fathouses that render rotting meat into bars of white soap. Here can be found the simple one-story factories that turn out varnish, carbona, and beer.

East. A long row of gas tanks dominates Greenpoint's eastern sky. It makes up another of Greenpoint's borders. With reptilian motion, the gas tanks rise and fall to accommodate their flammable volumes. Children in Greenpoint liken their movement to piano keys moving under a ghostly hand. They are not awake to see the red and blue

North. Newtown Creek cuts through Greenpoint's northern edge before it empties into the East River. Two bridges span its sticky banks at this point. The one called the Penny Bridge lies submerged in the red and burning waters. Depending on the tides, the waves may or may not lap against the top of its towers. The other bridge is a new suspension bridge—a mighty bridge built to last forever. Here walk the DP's—the departed people, the displaced persons, emotional boat people—them from Katowice and Scziecem, them from behind iron curtains. Hats aflying, babushkas flapping, their arms held crossed in front of their eyes, the DP's come to this bridge every

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morning and every evening. They provide a mystery for people in Greenpoint to explain. Some people say that the DP's are waiting for the Penny Bridge to rise. Others say the DP's simply like fighting the winds. South. No winds blow on Greenpoint's southern border. There is only darkness under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. On the other side of the shadow they who are in the world speak in Sicilian whispers of castella mare. The good children of Greenpoint say they like best to play in this corner. They say they like to hear the sounds of the fleeing c a r s . . . . I REMEMBER GREENPOINT The first time I saw Greenpoint, Manhattan Avenue was swarming with women; fat women with heavy eyelids and no make-up, speaking in snake-like tongues. They all wore gray cloth coats and jostled each other forward unashamedly, almost brutally. The sirens of the factory were blowing urgently, calling the second shift to work. I must have been standing on Clay Street that dwindling afternoon in late autumn. Pink clouds stood boldly behind the church steeple and were reflected in the glass fronts of the taverns and bars. I remember watching the first- and second-shift women greet each other on the bridge, and, for a moment, when they lifted their umbrellas together to the sky, they looked like Roman warriors taking a solemn, and mighty, o a t h . . . . I remember Greenpoint. I remember the long lines of men that would form every night at the newsstands. They were made up mostly of veterans who would reminisce about the wars while waiting to see if their numbers had come in. I remember the snatches of conversation about howitzers and AK-47s, about a truck factory in Stalingrad, about the smell on the Somme—woven into advice on how best to handicap a h o r s e . . . . I remember Jenny Sycamore, or Pirate Jenny as people would call her, who sent her children every morning to the priest for money to buy breakfast and who used the money to go to Bingo instead. The nightly Bingo games were solemn occasions in those days—it can't be like that anymore. The church hall would shake with the diatonic chords of the church organ; the women would sigh as they hunched over their boards. Later, they would carry the winner of the night's jackpot on their shoulders—all the way to the Triangle Bar. , . . I remember the cashier at Honig's Dry Goods Store. She was the

most beautiful woman in the world. She would sell you towels and sheets, a pair of slippers, or other sundries, at a bargain price. Her name was Betty and she had red hair. . . . I remember Leona, who lived downstairs from me, and who sounded like the Russian Army when she walked down the hall. I thought she was about fifty; then I found out Leona was thirty-one. Leona had eight children and knew all the words to an opera by Kurt Weil. I would listen to her sing Kanonensong while she was hanging out her laundry or rocking her youngest on the p o r c h . . . . I remember my first job at the factory, on the third shift. Over and over again, picking up three pieces of wire and soldering their ends together in a quick burst with the machine. Then slipping a brass clip and plastic nut around the opposite side and throwing the finished piece into a box. I remember how the foreman insisted we work with our right hands—no matter that most of us were lefthanded. We would pace ourselves to the tempo of the foreman's walk down the aisle, carefully switching our hands when he was just about to pass by our row. I remember the time the foreman insulted one of the ladies and how the next day he fell into an acid-filled vat. There was the smell of burnt hair and skin that didn't go away. . . . I remember Greenpoint. I remember waking up on the waterfront. The flapping of the sea gulls. The dazzling sunlight. We used to try to play Dominoes on the Java Street docks those afternoons. But I remember how the wind would always blow our bones off the board....

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The Back of the Book Quarto is compiling a list of campus literary magazines. Please contact the magazines for more information, including deadlines. We welcome additions.

The Barnard Literary Magazine publishes poetry and Mi

prose each semester. Submissions are open to Barnard undergraduates. Four prizes are offered during the year: the Elizabeth Janeway Prize for Prose Writing; the Barnard College Academy of American Poets Prize; the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and the Amy Loveman Prize. All material submitted for prizes will be considered for publication in the magazine unless the author notifies the editors otherwise. Copies of the magazine are available for $ 1.00 in the Barnard English office, 417 Barnard Hall. Barnard Literary Magazine 121 Mcintosh Hall Barnard College New York, NY 10027

Black Heights is an annual

magazine which publishes poetry, short stories, nonfiction, photography, and artwork. Manuscripts should deal with themes relevant to the Afro-American experience. Authors may be invited to attend workshops given by a faculty advisory board. Circulation: 2000. Black Heights 206 Ferris Booth Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 B r o a d w a y is a glossy magazine published fortnightly throughout the school year. The magazine publishes nonfiction articles with a focus on the arts and political issues. Fiction, poetry, humor, and other short pieces are considered. All may submit, but authors are encouraged to query first. Broadway is also looking for cartoons, sketches, cover designs, and photographs. Notice of acceptance or rejecttion will be given within one week. Subscription: $10.00 for twelve issues. Circulation: 10,000.

Broadway Box 3634, Central Mailroom Columbia University 119th St. and Amsterdam Ave. New York, NY 10027

Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose is a national magazine published annually by the Graduate Writing Division at the School of the Arts. It features fiction, poetry, and interviews with authors. The magazine offers two $100 prizes: The Carlos Fuentes Award for Fiction, and the Stanley Kunitz Award for Poetry. Notification of acceptance or rejection is made within a month. Subscription rate: $9.00 for two issues. Circulation; 750. Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose 404 Dodge Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027

C o l u m b i a R e v i e w features fiction, poetry, reviews, and black and white drawings by Columbia undergraduates. It is published once or twice a year. There is no notification of acceptance or rejection unless requested by the author. Circulation: 500. Columbia Review 206 Ferris Booth Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 Q u a r t o features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Submissions are open to students who have taken courses in the General Studies Writing Program. Manuscripts are received year-round, with a deadline at the end of the Fall semester. Authors may submit their work elsewhere while under consideration for Quarto. Notification of acceptance or rejection is made in February; the magazine is published at the end of the Spring semester. Copies are available at the University bookstore in Ferris Booth Hall, and at Papyrus bookstore. Single copy price: $1.00. Circulation: 600.

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Quarto 608 Lewisohn Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 U p s t a r t is published annually to promote new writers and artists of Columbia University. Poetry, prose, literary criticism, interviews, and artwork are considered for publication. Submissions are open to undergraduate and graduate students. Selections are made within two weeks of deadline. Copies are available on campus. Circulation: 1000. Upstart 101 Mcintosh or 206 Ferris Booth Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Contributors' Notes ELLIOT F. BRATTON is a graduate student in scriptwriting at Columbia. He is producer and disc jockey of WKCR-FM's Saturday night "Jazz Til D a w n " radio program. NUALA CIPRIANO works at the Center for Computing Activities and is a part-time student at O.S. This is her first published work. ELISABETTA DI CAGNO is a writer based in New York City. She is a 1980 graduate of Columbia School of Journalism. As Director of Publications at Columbia Business School, she edits the magazine Hermes. She is currently studying writing with Glenda Adams. "Biography" is di Cagno's first published poem. JOSEPH FERRANDINO wishes to express his thanks to Michael Stephens, in whose workshop ' 'Ambush" was written, and his special thanks to Gordon Lish. JILL D . HARDWICK-MORTON is a visual artist from Australia. She has had her work exhibited in New York, where she has been living for the past few years. MYUNG-HEE KIM, a native of Korea, immigrated to Canada in 1975. She attended Concordia University in Montreal, where she majored in Sociology. She received her M .A. in Higher Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1981. She is currently studying poetry with David Ignatow at G.S. and she has translated contemporary Korean literature into English. DOUGLAS NORDFORS is from Seattle, and is currently a sophomore at Columbia College. He has studied writing at G.S. with Austin Flint and David Ignatow. H e has one recurring, wonderful, impossible dream where he talks around a fire with Stephan Crane, Boris Pasternak, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dylan Thomas, Sean O'Casey, and Rainer Maria Rilke until daybreak, whereupon he wanders the English Lake District with William Wordsworth.

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MIA NADEZHDA RUBLOWSKA, having written for cultural and political journals in the early 70's, including Rat and H. S. Free Press, disappeared into Greenpoint for several years. Since coming back, she has graduated from G. S. She currently lives in Manhattan, where she writes fiction and nonfiction. LYNN ANNE SCHWARTZ is originally from Washington State. Her play Sketches has been produced in New York and Atlanta. She lives and works in New York City. MICHAEL SCHWARTZ writes: Date of Birth: May 29, 1958 (Gemini), in Cleveland, Ohio. Home: Staten Island, NY Quote: "I like writing accounts of the details surround ing people swamped by circumstances they only partially choose." Turn-ons: Watching and writing on the Staten Island Ferry; reading sports pages taken from benches and trash barrels; Wilson Jones; lined Record books with a cut-out action figure of a baseball player glued to the cover; people with common sense and crude openness. Turn-offs: The threat of nuclear war; people who don't listen. Hobbies: Swimming laps; compulsive page numbering; accumulating money; typing. MICHELE MADIGAN SOMERVILLE has been a student at G.S. PATRICIA VOLK's stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Quarto. She is working on her first novel.

0047095296

Beginning and Advanced Classes Evening and Daytime

Creative Nonfiction, News and Feature Writing, Science Writing. Criticism and Reviewing:

Offering small classes taught by distinguished authors, editors, and publishers;

JOHN BOWERS SEYMOUR KRIM JOHN LEONARD PAMELA MCCORDUCK LOUIS UCHITELLE LAWRENCE VAN GELDER KAL WAGENHEIM

Fiction and Poetry WALTER ABISH CLENDA ADAMS LYDIA DAVIS AUSTIN FLINT J.R. HUMPHREYS RAYMOND KENNEDY DAVID IGNATOW COLETTE INEZ GORDON LISH PETER RAND PHYLLIS RAPHAEL LOUISE ROSE MICHAEL STEPHENS

Scriptwriting and Playwriting: GARY GLOVER SPALDING GRAY

Publishing: SAMUEL VAUCHAN ALAN ZIECLER

The Writing Program at the School of General Studies, Columbia University's liberal arts college for adults, serves students with or without degrees. Fall Classes begin September 6, 1984 For information on a two year MFA Writing Program, write School of the Arts. 404 Dodge, or call 2S0-439I.

School of General Studies 303 Lewisohn Hall, Broadway and 116th St. New York. N.Y. 10027 (212) 280-2752

Columbia University