1989-Vol25

QUARTO

QUARTO 25

QUARTO The Literary Magazine of the School of General Studies Columbia University Volume 25 Fall 1989

Ingrid Geerken

Submissions

Executive Editors Jennifer Bent

Associate Emily Altschul Lucia Bozzola Alan Contini Jill Crawford Stephen Fusco Simone Haber Maxine Lefkowitz Harry Li Lisa Marmon

Current and recent General Studies students - including special students in other branches of Columbia 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.

Sally Howard

Editors Brenda Mendlowitz Sandra Monaco Elizabeth Rieger Tonia Ries Risa Schneider Stacie Spector Kenneth Tarbous Bernadette Tuazon Esther Yun

Each submission should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Please include your name, address, and phone number (optional) on your manuscript.

Manuscripts may be submitted elsewhere while under consideration at Quarto; just notify us of acceptance by another publication.

PS

Director, Writing Program Alan Ziegler

Address all submissions and correspondence to: Quarto 608 Lewisohn Hall Columbia University New York, New York 10027

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1989 by Quarto

ISSN 0735-6536

Faculty Advisor Geoffrey Young

HYV'^I

Typeset in 10 pt. Times Roman by Philmark Lithographies, NYC Printed in an edition of 750 copies by Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, MI Quarto is edited by students enrolled in Literary Magazine Editing and Publishing

Contents

9 14 17 18 19 30 32 33 40 41 42 50 62 64 65 70 77 78 79

The Red Light Is Blinking by Bill Valentine Afternoon Kiss by Joyceann Masters Desert Quatrains by R.L. Kieffer Whidbey Island by Charles Graef When the Rain Comes by Benji Whalen If He Asks Again by Amelia Burgess Only in Sleep by Kathryn Gross The Widow Upstairs by Jeffrey Jullich Is Pretty Tonight by Benji Whalen Presence by DM Gold by Dick Scanlan Poppa Was a Rolling Stone by Susan Sullivan Saiter Man On Edge by Harlan Breindel Codeine Breakfast in July by David T. Gordon Point of Entry by Luba Burtyk Chainsaw by Rick Bruner Now a painterly silence by Russell Day Dec. 31, '87 by Russell Day Begin the Beguine by Mary Firmani Contributors' Notes

BILL VALENTINE

QUARTO PRIZE

The Red Light Is Blinking

THIS YEAR'S QUARTO PRIZE FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT IS AWARDED TO I T GOT TO BE SO THAT YOU DREADED

MARY FIRMANI FOR "BEGIN THE BEGUINE"

answering the phone.

Or even worse was when you came home and there were messages on the answering machine.

That was when I always assumed the worst.

CHOSEN BY ROBERT MONTGOMERY AND NANCY HEIKEN

What do you do, answer right away, or settle in first and then deal with it?

FROM THE CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

Usually I would try to avoid it for a while, hang up my coat, feed the cat.

Maybe get dinner going.

Then deal with it.

The messages for Tim started first.

They would say "Tim, it's Frank. Please give me a call. It's about Ron." Then they got shorter. "This is Frank. Give me a call."

You knew what it was about.

The calls for me started a little later.

"Hi Phil, it's Sharon. I'm calling about Steve. Give me a call please."

I didn't really know Ron, I had only met him once.

But still you felt it.

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Bill Valentine

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I felt for Tim.

But he was full of hope, that was the great thing to see.

This was the first time he'd gone through it.

He had been going to groups and making new friends.

He and Ron had worked together for a year in Chicago before Tim moved East.

You just wanted to believe that he could beat it, hang on long enough for them to find a cure.

The first thing we heard was that Ron had stopped working.

I was home alone when the last call came from Frank.

Next it was that he had moved back to his parents' house in Texas.

"Could you tell him that Ron died?" he asked me.

Then the long phone call, the one after which you stop kidding yourself.

I waited until he took his coat off and put his bag down.

Tim was on the phone in the bedroom and I was trying to read in the living room.

When he came over to me I took his hand.

"I'm sorry," I said.

I couldn't keep my mind on the book.

He knew.

I kept thinking of that night I had met Ron.

I watched him for a few days, trying to see how he was dealing with it.

He was young and just starting out.

It was hard to tell.

I loved his voice.

But I didn't ask.

When Tim came in he was shaken.

I knew he would talk if he had to.

"It's almost over," he said, "he's lost control of everything."

That's what this disease does to you.

"They're just praying for it to end."

A few days later I came home and found him sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by pieces of fabric and his sewing kit.

It wasn't long after that that Sharon called me.

"I'm making a Quilt panel for Ron," he said. "I don't want him to ever be forgotten."

"Steve's back in the hospital," she said, "they had to take him off the drugs."

It was beautiful to see, him sitting there on the floor.

"Oh, no," I said.

"His mother buried him in his uniform," he said.

"They're talking about two to six months."

That's when I lost it.

"Jesus."

It's always the little things that get to you.

I had just seen him three months ago.

For about a month it was quiet.

We went out to brunch at one of his favorite places in West Hollywood.

I wrote to Steve.

You could tell then that something was wrong.

I didn't come right out and say good-bye.

He walked slowly and there was that pause when he spoke.

I said what I needed to.

As if he just blanked out for a second.

Things you never get around to saying to your friends because you expect them to be there.

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One night I came home and Tim greeted me at the door.

We sit closer together than we used to, and hold hands.

He gave me a hug, but this time he didn't let go.

Yeah, we hold hands a lot these days.

I pushed him away and looked at him.

"You need to call Sharon tonight," he said.

"Did Steve die?" I asked.

"No," he said.

I took my time.

I had dinner first, then I called.

"He's lost consciousness," Sharon said, "it's only a matter of days now.

Tom wants to keep him at home. Jack and Ellen are there now, and Sue is coming down as soon as she can."

I felt for her, having to always be the bearer of bad news.

"I tried praying for him," I said, "it made me feel connected to him. I gave up when he went back into the hospital."

"Don't blame yourself," Sharon said.

"I can't believe there's someone up there dispensing favors," I said, "especially to people who only call when they need help."

"We all did what we could," she said.

We went away for the weekend and I managed to forget about it for a while.

When we got back Sunday night I looked at the answering machine.

"The red light is blinking," I told Tim. "He died yesterday," Sharon said. "Tom and Sue were with him."

The next morning I called in sick to work and went to church.

It seemed like the best place to say good-bye.

And life goes on for Tim and me, survivors wondering when it will ever end.

We stay home more now, most nights you can find us on the couch, reading or talking.

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Quarto JOYCEANN MASTERS

Afternoon Kiss

VJRETA'S HAIR GOES IN all directions as the wind whips up the street. She is twenty-four years old. She wears sweat pants and her husband's thick beige fisherman sweater. Today is their anniversary. She holds her packages close to her chest. She hadn't felt like driving. The day is so beautiful —the sky the bright kind of blue that almost hurts if you look at it too long.

The market is behind her now. A mile more and she will be home.

Her mother should be getting there any minute. Greta will make sauce for tomorrow's supper, talk with her mother, and make her some tea. They will talk about family, her sisters and their children. She will feel annoyed at some point and not know why, other than something about the tone of her mother's voice that puts her on edge. Greta's mother will be staying with them for eight nights. The walls are so thin. Greta knows she and Evan will not make love.

She thinks about last night. Evan had come home, looked at her with some kind of cocky smile, some demanding glint in his eyes. Greta was reading the local paper-someone running for coroner, ice cream social in Strawberry Ridge, buy your cords of wood now, order your winter beef.

Her nipples had still ached from the quick almost rough sex of the evening before. Evan took off his jacket, flicked back his long brown bangs and said, "We've got ten minutes before Jake and Sally get here.. .come on". And she hadn't known why, was it the fact that his little dark eyes were watering, was it her sore nipples, the air, the newspaper?-but she pushed the kitchen table so hard it fell over. "I was reading, god damn it," she'd said.

14

She walks up a hill. The wind blows her long hair all in one direction. She will make the sauce, then the cheescake. Tomorrow she'll have more time. More time for what, she asks. The sun is warm on her face and she sees it catch the gold in her hair and she thinks it is beautiful though no one has said so in a long while.

Tonight's supper is already prepared. She just has to brown the potatoes and cook the veal. Homemade ice cream for dessert. Evan promised to get some wine.

Greta stops at a stop sign. Past the corner, Main Street briefly turns into a four-lane road. She walks alongside the railing. There are houses between hills. Silver silos catch the sun. Goldenrod stretches across fields and the afternoon is washed with light. The leaves of the birch trees have gone from summer green to a paler yellow. She tries to think what this odd feeling is that she has lately, whenever she is at home. She tries to find some clue in the air. But the breeze blows, the wind has shifted and the four lanes have shrunk back to two. She notices the date on her watch, October 5th. Her mother isn't coming until the 6th. She stops and wonders: is her clock set wrong? No. Their anniversary. But she could have sworn her mother was. .. No. Not until tomorrow. For a moment she feels happier, and walks faster, her armpits growing moist. A car passes. A stranger waves and she nods back. She will make the cheesecake first. When Evan comes home she will rub his back. Then turn him over and rub his front.

She will wear, why not? She will wear the corset she got married in. Five years, she thinks. She remembers that night... Her father had been drunk at the reception and fought with her mother. He'd stumbled up to Evan's friends, giving the men as well as women big, dog kisses. "Greta's old man frenched me," Evan's best man had yelled. The party ended and Greta's mother had clutched her wrist saying, "Did we dance together, Greta?

I can't remember. My baby daughter. We didn't even dance together. .."

Tears had gone round like fire. But Evan had brought it all to a wonderful end, on the indoor-outdoor carpeting of the motel room floor. Her knees had had burns all over them but she didn't care, and half-asleep they did it again with the morning sun glowing through the orange drapes.

She turns right and heads up a gravel road. She comes to an old house trailer she and Evan rented for a short time. A new couple lives there now. She stops and stares at the rusty pink awning. Doves fly past her.

She hears a train churning, yawning. The sound quickly grows faint. She passes the local school bus housed in an open barn. Everything she sees is so predictable. It is the first time in any recent time she can recall, 15

Quarto that she has actually stopped to look at any of these things.

She comes to the telephone pole which is the western boundary mark of their land. Weeds have taken over the roadside frontage that had been cleared last year. The garden has been harvested and mulch covers much of the upturned soil. She tries to remember which drawer her corset is in. Suddenly she feels her heart race.. .will it still fit? She is thin even now, but the week before her wedding she unexpectedly lost eight pounds.

The corset had fit perfectly. . .No. She decides. It will fit.

Leaves rustle behind her. She glances toward the woods on her left.

A young boy and girl lean deeper into the brush. They kiss as though they may never again. They do not open their eyes. Greta is close enough to see the freckles on the girl's face. The boy rubs his hand on her cheek.

And Greta watches, feeling for a moment, as if he is kissing her. Her heart pounds. Her nipples grow hard. She can almost taste him. She breathes in deep and feels that the world should feel like this everyday.

She turns down her path. She thinks how it used to take them so long.

How wonderful.. .Clothing all on. Just kisses. Kisses standing. Then Evan would glide her onto the kitchen table. They would kiss and grind against one another. One piece of clothing off. Just a blouse. Then a bra. His tongue tracing her mouth. Then down her neck, around her breasts. She would watch the saliva drying as he stood and slowly pulled down their pants. She remembers the dizzy feeling she used to get riding bicycles, chasing him, stopping by the graveyard behind the church. The autumn sky before them, the sun on his face. His cold, moist mouth riding hers.

A group of old people out for a walk see them. But Greta and Evan do not stop. And it is that sensation, she realizes, which she has missed.

Inside, she puts the groceries away. She stares out the window at the dark field. The late afternoon is quiet. She goes to their bedroom and opens her underwear drawer. She glances at all the lovely little things thrown in a lump. The drawer has a smell of its own-a soft powdery smell of sachet. She breathes it in. She sees a white garter from her wedding corset. She runs a finger over it. Then closes the drawer.

R . L . KlEFFER

Desert Quatrains

O H E FLIPPED THROUGH an Arizona guide-book and read to him, sweltering in the driver's seat of their '67 Chevy, anecdotes on desert survival. For example, the giant saguaro stores precious rain

in its expandable tissue and survives the heat and dryness that dehydrates less intelligent life.

Life persists only when balance is maintained, it said, without it the chain will snap.

Tonight in New York City where she lives, she stands alone groping for space on a pole on an uptown Number One local: DO NOT LEAN AGAINST DOOR. She remembers: a desert boot pressed lightly on the gas, his parched smile as he reaches across the front seat, and brushes the back of his hand against her damp cheek.

His fingertips graze her breast, and she lets a broad arm sweep her up in one smooth motion and hold her there — and the car ablaze with dry oven heat in Yuma.

He drives on, shifting unconsciously, while she gazes through dust-rimmed windows at an infinite blue.

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CHARLES GRAEF BENJI WHALEN

Whidbey Island

When the Rain Comes

WHITE bedstead

still-warm sheets next to the old radio Mukilteo is a blue hump saffron mist on the mountains outboard motor not far out good sound like cut grass hushed soft salt air and musty old things glasses clink in the cupboard downstairs while I crouch down putting on my jeans 18

W HEN THE FOG WAS GONE the sun came out and it was another hot day.

There was no wind and the jungle trees around the clearing were still.

Terry drank a cup of coffee and watched the men walking slow and shirtless around the field, rifles at their sides.

It was their third day in the clearing, after a 4-day hike up from Quang Loi. Terry was happy to rest, but he didn't like to think of what was to come. The division was on its way to meet NVA near the border. He finished his coffee and wiped out the cup. He had been in country for three and half months and hadn't fired a shot. He was in Saigon for most of that time, driving generals to meetings and airports and whorehouses.

The first day of his assignment to the 11th Infantry was the first day of the hike north. There were 350 troops in the Uth and they all seemed to know each other. Terry walked in the back, sweating in the heat and slowing from the weight of his pack. He was a muscular man, but he had gotten used to the breezy jeeps in Saigon. For the first time in a while, he wanted to write his mother a letter. But he slept from the time the march stopped to the time it started again at dawn.

The trail they made cut through the Mien Range. After four days of hiking in the mountains, the troops were glad to set up tents and dig bunkers and clear a perimeter. Terry met more of the men, and got to know a guy named Dirk from Boston. But most the time he spent alone, smoking cigarettes on his cot. He was used to being alone.

Terry put the cup back in his sack and walked across the clearing.

It was about a tenth mile wide, he guessed, and it sloped upward. At the 19

Benji Whalen

Quarto top of the slope were the officers' tents. Terry looked up at the closed, green tents and around at the tall jungle trees along the edge of the field.

It was good to be out in the open again.

That night Terry drew for patrol. Besides Dirk and himself, there were about ten or eleven soldiers in the group. One of the lieutenants, Lt. Esper, briefed them. "OK, boys, gather round. We'll be going out to a quarter mile north and circle a quarter mile perimeter," he drawled. He was a tall man, and Terry could see a long thin face in the dark. He continued. "We'll rest for two hours and then return the full perimeter. We'll be back at dawn."

Terry fell to the back behind Dirk as they filed into the jungle. In the clearing there had been stars to light the way. In the bush, Terry looked to his left, right and up and down and saw nothing but blackness. For the first few minutes he went by the sound of Dirk's steps in front of him.

Once, he stopped hearing the footsteps and sped up, running into mossy trunks and tripping on vines. He ran faster but still he heard nothing. He went a little farther and ran into someone. They fell to the ground and the man grabbed Terry by the throat and pinned him on his back. He looked at his face. It was Dirk.

"Jesus Christ!" Dirk yelled. "Where the fuck you going?" He kept his hand at Terry's throat.

Someone called back from the front. "Shut your fucking mouth, Dirk!"

"Jesus Christ," Dirk said under his breath. He let Terry up and they started walking again. "Jesus Christ," he muttered again.

They reached the quartermile mark and the Lieutenant switched the order of the patrol, so that Terry was first in line behind him. Esper took off into the bush and Terry tried to keep up with him. Now and then the tree cover would break and Terry would see hisfigureup ahead. But mostly they were under the bush and he still couldn't see where he was going, but he got used to going in one direction. He ran into the Lieutenant once but he didn't yell. He grabbed Terry's shoulder and patted him on the side of his helmet.

During the rest Terry was on guard. The Lieutenant told him to watch it, that he would be the only one up. He held his M-16 across his chest and sat back against a tree. The men snored and he looked into the dark.

The heat made it seem like daytime, like spending a day deep underground.

Terry had seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. He knew the hot parts of the earth were underneath the ground. Down near hell, if there was one. Terry took off his helmet, rubbed his head and drank from his canteen. Hell wouldn't have to be much hotter, he thought. He looked into

the bush.

He guessed he had been at guard for an hour. He looked at his watch with his flashlight. He was close-0300 hours. He turned the light out into the bush. He could make out a leaf here, a branch there. Then he thought he saw something move. He looked again but didn't see anything.

A monkey, he thought. He listened closely, though, and held his rifle out in front of him. Minutes passed and Terry again sat back against the trunk.

As he did, he felt steel, the end of a barrel at the right side of his forehead. He breathed out. The barrel was tight against his head. It slid down his cheek and pushed into his mouth.

"Guess you'd be pretty fucked now, wouldn't you?" whispered Lt. Esper, and he pulled the butt away from Terry's face. Terry looked down at the ground.

"What's you name, private?" the Lieutenant asked.

"Spero, sir." he whispered.

"That what you call night guard, Spero?"

"No, sir."

"What do you call it?"

"I donno, sir." Terry stood up and held his rifle out in front of him.

Neither of them said anything. Terry heard him walk away.

In the morning Terry tried to sleep but he felt the barrel at his head in his dreams. He woke up and he was lying across the steel frame of the cot.

On the seventh day he drew night patrol again. Lt. Burne led the group, and Terry kept up well. He felt like he was seeing better. A few days later he went on another night patrol with Lt. Burne. He wasn't just feeling his way along now. He was walking. When they came back to camp at dawn, he felt like he'd done something. He slept late into the afternoon.

On the 13th day he drew again, and Lt. Esper led the group. They did just what they had done the last time, making a quartermile perimeter.

At the resting, Esper ordered Terry to guard again. He tried to catch the Lieutenant's eye to make sure he knew who he was giving guard. Esper looked away.

All the men were snoring, and Terry sat up. He sat in some high grass, rotating to keep an eye out each way. After a while he stopped turning and just sat down.

At some point he fell asleep. When he woke up he jumped up and checked his watch. He had only slept for a few minutes. He sighed, and when he inhaled he smelled a stench. He put the flashlight on his shirt and saw a stain that wasn't sweat. He smelled it again. Something had

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pissed on his chest. "Fucking A." he said under his breath.

He walked towards the sleeping men and counted forms with his flashlight. Eleven. All there. Terry looked down at his shirt. Maybe a monkey, he thought.

Esper didn't look at him on the way back at dawn. Terry felt as stupid as he had the first night out. In the tent, someone smelled the shirt. "Spero, you pissing in your pants?" he asked, and the guys told him to get it the hell out of the tent. Terry went out and put some water on the shirt and rubbed a bar of soap on it, and left it out in the sun to dry.

The sun was always out. There would be fog in the morning, but then the sun would come out and it would be 120 degrees. Terry asked guys when it was supposed to rain and they would say they didn't keep track of gook weather.

Terry's tent held 25 men, but in the afternoon most everyone went off to see friends in smaller tents, and Terry was one of the few left inside. One day Lt. Esper walked into the tent and came and sat next to him. He'd never really seen the Lieutenant in daylight, and for a minute after he said 'hey' he just looked at him. He was as tall as he looked at night, and now Terry saw his short blond hair and his brown eyes. They played some cards, and Terry looked at Esper's long fingers as they held the hand. Terry felt funny to be playing cards with a lieutenant. He acted like a soldier.

Esper said he was from California a bit, but mostly from Texas. They didn't say much, and played a few rounds of rummy before Esper got up and left.

But he came the next day and they played cards again. Terry sat in his underwear and the Lieutenant kept his fatigues on, sweating out the afternoon heat. They would sit on Terry's cot, playing hearts or rummy.

"You going back to Brooklyn when you're out?" Esper asked once.

"Yeah, I suppose," Terry answered.

"What're you going to do?" Esper followed.

"I donno. Get a job, I guess. Sumpin'. Gin," he said, and laid down his hand.

"Pretty big plans," Esper said, and shuffled the deck.

"Yeah. Whatever happens, I guess." Terry shrugged.

"Whatever happens," Esper repeated, and dealt.

"So whaddayou gonna do?" Terry asked.

"Get rich, I guess."

"Yeah, so you're gonna get a job too. Same thing."

"Ye.ah, same thing. Like Lieutenant and Private."

"That's right. You ain't that much different from me."

Esper drew a card and smiled. "Oh, I'd say we're pretty different."

Esper came by the next day and asked him again about after the war.

"What're you going to do after you get home?"

"I told ya. Gonna get a job."

"Did you have one before you came over here?"

"Nah. I was taking a break from being outta school."

The Lieutenant laid down his hand. "Gin." "Pretty quick," Terry said.

"Yeah."

"So, did you have a job?"

"Shore. My dad owns a firm in Temple."

"Great. How'd you end up over here then?"

"I wanted to. It's gonna look awfully good later on."

"You mean on your gravestone?" Terry laughed.

"Don't worry about that, boy. This war's gonna help me. I'm gonna use this war. I'm gonna use this war for all its stinking worth, get paid back for all the shit I'm going through here, sweating my ass dry huntin' monkey people." Esper unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it on the ground.

Terry looked at the golden hairs on his chest, and dealt a new hand.

"Don't know many guys who've gotten helped by a war," he said. "Don't seem like a real career move."

"No, it isn't, not for you. People like you just go where you're told, go work in the warehouses, in the factories, come over here and walk out into the mine fields, just doing like you're told. But I'm not like that.

I'm not gonna let this war ruin my life. When I get back, I'll be a goddamn hero. Be a lawyer for a few years, then this war's gonna make me the Governor of Texas."

"You're pretty sure a'that," Terry said, looking at his cards.

"Yep," Esper replied.

Terry laughed and the Lieutenant didn't. Terry thought it was funny that he was sitting playing cards with the next Governor of Texas out there in the middle of Vietnam. They didn't say much else the rest of the afternoon. Esper's skin was dark from the sun, and Terry felt pale when he looked at himself. He was better built though, and he felt proud of his chest when they were sitting there playing cards.

On the morning of the 15th day Lt. Burne came by the tent and announced that water was off-limits. There was still a full supply of boxed apple juice. Each soldier would be rationed one apple juice a day.

Dirk asked when they'd be moving north and Burne said they weren't

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sure. Dirk asked why they couldn't move up to a river or a stream. Burne said they had orders to stay. If Dirk had problems with that he could go off by himself and find a river and drown in it. Burne left and the men swore and shook their heads.

"Jesus Christ," Dirk said. "I'll be fuck damned. Just gonna sit here and wait for the fuckers to find us dead a'thirst. Leave us sitting here sweating our asses off with the officers sitting pretty up on the hill. Probably drinking all that water themselves. Apple juice. Fuck me." Terry nodded.

The men were angry and the officers stayed up on the hill. Patrols were cut back and night patrols were called off. But things stayed quiet.

The next morning Terry got his apple juice and drank it with his breakfast biscuits. At lunch and dinner he had nothing to drink and he told himself to save his juice the next day. But the following morning he got his juice and drank it with breakfast. It was warm but it was wet and sweet.

He read the only print on the box, on the bottom. TRU-JUICE, Brooklyn, NY 11248. Funny thing, he thought. Brooklyn. Every morning he'd look at the print. He thought when he got back, he'd drink a whole warehouse of apple juice.

One day outside Esper told him why they had to stay right where they were, in the clearing. "Headquarters lost track of the NVA," he said.

"We were supposed to meet 'em somewhere up north farther, but they just lost track of the fuckers, so now we're supposed to sit here until they figure out where the gooks've got to."

"Fuck, man. They lost track of 'em?" Terry shook his head.

"Yep. They don't know whether they're up in the North Pole or digging tunnels right the fuck under us."

"Jesus Christ. Whad're we gonna do?"

"That's what I'm telling you. Got to stay here, till we find'em again."

"Till we find'em again? Gimme a fuckin' break. That could take forever." Terry looked across the clearing, shaking his head. Most of the soldiers had stopped coming outside during the day. "All right then. Just what're we gonna drink all this time when these guys are trying to find the gooks?" he asked, without turning back to Esper.

"I wouldn't worry about it, Spero. We aren't gonna die a'thirst. When it rains, we'll be fine. And it's gonna rain. There'll be so much rain you won't believe it. We're due for a big one."

"And if it don't rain?"

"It will. And when the rain comes, we'll be fine."

Terry thought he might be wrong, but Esper talked like he knew what he was saying. He could talk that way about anything. He'd tell big stories 24

about kills in the bush or wild times back at home that Terry would've thought were lies if they'd come from anyone else. He'd say the Dallas Cowboys were on their way to being the next football dynasty and Terry would have to agree. Esper was so sure.

Men started wondering out loud again why they were still sitting in the clearing. They were thirsty and would spend their days in the shade.

One day a guy from the tent next to Terry's named Jacko went out into the jungle and brought back a big helmetful of red berries. Someone told him he ought to be careful about what he was eating but he told them off, and said he was going to eat as much as he wanted, that he might even squeeze some juice and drink it all night. But half an hour later Jacko was rolling around outside his tent, holding his stomach and yelling. The corpsman came and brought him up to the officer's tent and fixed him up, but Jacko was in bed for a couple weeks.

One morning Terry wrote a letter to his mother and counted 28 days since they had gotten to the clearing. 'Dear mom,' he wrote. 'Hope everything's fine. We're out in the middle of nowhere right now, waiting for something to happen.' He stopped and put the tip of the pen in his mouth.

'Don't know when I'll get a chance to send this. Maybe never. Ha ha. Don't worry, they won't get me. Say hi to Tammy and tell her to be good. Terry.'

He put the paper in an envelope and wrote out the address slowly. Anne Spero, 5312 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, 11213. United States of America. He saw her down at the mailbox holding the letter in her hands and rushing to open it, then reading over every line out loud to Tammy, Mrs. Carney downstairs, Franco at the store, and any of the kids playing on the stoop. He saw the letter taped up in the hallway, and his mother looking at it before she went to bed.

He put the letter in his sack and went outside. He squinted in the sun and stretched. His armpits stunk, and he was growing a black beard now. He thought about Esper, and how he always smelled fine. Terry figured he must not sweat. But no, he'd seen him sweat. His sweat just didn't stink. Terry looked up the slope at the officers' tents and then into the jungle. It was still green and thick. It seemed like it hadn't changed, but the clearing had gotten dry and dusty.

He started to hate looking at the jungle. He'd see it and see how green it was, and think how full of water the leaves must've been, while his tongue felt dry in his mouth. But he looked at the jungle anyway. There wasn't anything else to look at.

On the 32nd day in the clearing, there was a fight. A couple of guys in his tent, Ferris and Earvin, were playing poker outside for apple juices.

25

Benji Whalen

Quarto When Ferris lost, he hit Earvin in the head with the end of his rifle. It got broken up quickly, and Earvin wasn't hurt. But when Ferris kept yelling at him, and said he wasn't going to get robbed by any "backwoods nigger," Earvin walked towards him. Some of the other blacks stepped up a bit, and Ferris kept yelling. He was a skinny man from Arkansas.

"That's right, he said. "I ain't gonna take anything from any nigger, let alone you stinking bucks!"

Terry came out and told him to shut up. He wasn't any civil rights marcher, but he didn't go starting fights. Ferris tried to push him away.

Terry picked him up and pulled him into the tent. "Get your friggin' hands offa me!" he yelled, after Terry had already thrown him on the bed.

Terry looked down at him. "Whaddayou tryin' to do, get yourself killed?" Terry looked out through the door and saw a crowd of other blacks standing with Earvin. He waved over to Earvin and he nodded back. Things were quiet again.

At dinner Terry sat as far away from Ferris as he could, but he still thought all the blacks were looking at him. He kept his face down to the stew and ate quickly. That night things were still in the tent. Everyone kept an eye on each other and on Ferris and Earvin. Usually guys would tell stories but that night they just cut their toenails and looked up at the ceiling of the tent.

On the 35th day Terry noticed he had stopped sweating. He told Esper when they played cards.

"Looka'me, I ain't even sweating anymore," he said. Tm all dried out."

"Maybe it's cooling off," Esper said.

"Nah, I know it ain't any cooler. Looka't'you, you're still sweatin' away."

Esper looked down at his chest. "Yeah, I guess I am. Don't worry, I'll probably be dried out in a couple of days too." Esper smiled.

Terry looked at him. "How come you look the same as you did when we got here, eh?"

Esper shrugged.

"I mean, how come the rest of us are all stinking and getting blistered and you're still looking like you just come out a' the movies studio?" Terry laughed, and Esper sighed.

One day Terry asked him if he was going to get married when he got back. He didn't say 'if he got back' anymore. He was pretty sure Esper would make it.

The Lieutenant thought a bit, and ran a hand through his hair. "Yeah, I guess I will. Kinda have to."

"Oh yeah?"

"Shore. How's it gonna look if Governor Esper doesn't have a wife with him when he's out shaking hands with all the little people? Hell, I don't want to get married. But what you want ain't got a lot to do with things.

It's got more to do with the way you want it." He looked Terry in the eye.

"How do you want it, Spero?"

"Like anyone else, I guess." Terry looked him back.

"Like anyone else. You been listening to me, Spero?"

Terry shrugged and grinned. "I can't tell what the hell you're talking about most the time anyway. Listenin'd be a waste a'time."

Esper smiled a little. "I'm trying to help you, Spero. Stick with me and you'll be all right."

Terry nodded and Esper put out his hand. "Put'er there," he said. They shook and then held their hands still together. Terry didn't know who was holding the other's hand. Esper looked straight at him. After a minute someone came in the tent and they dropped hands. Esper got up and left.

Terry lit a Marlboro and lay back on his cot and closed his eyes. He saw Esper walking back up to his tent and he wanted to go with him.

The next couple of days Esper didn't show up. Terry didn't go up the hill to see him. He wasn't sure which tent was his and he didn't want to just walk in on him anyway. He played cards with Ferris instead. He had gotten over Terry throwing him around the week before, and things had gotten easier around the tent between everyone. It was easy to get angry when it was so hot and they got tired of being around each other, but it was harder to stay angry when they were all they had for friends for 20,000 miles, and there wasn't anyone else to play cards with. So Terry played rummy with Ferris. Ferris didn't say much. He went over his beard with his fingers and said "I'm so fuckin' sick of this place, ain't you, Spero?" and Terry said "Yeah."

On the 40th day Terry was playing cards with Ferris and Esper came around again. He stood shirtless at the opening of the tent and leaned against the pole. Ferris looked up, "Afternoon, Lieutenant. Play a game a'cards?"

"Nah," Esper said and turned to look out over the clearing. After they finished the hand, Terry got up and went out to Esper. Esper kept looking out on the field. It was windy and dust was beginning to blow.

"Let's go for a walk," Esper said quietly.

Terry nodded and followed Esper behind the tents across into the bush.

Esper walked quickly and Terry hurried to keep up with him. The shade in the jungle felt good. He watched the naked back of the lieutenant and walked quickly. At some p;oint Terry thought he heard something, like

26

27

Benji Whalen

Quarto

wind, but more like water. He stopped, but he didn't hear the sound anymore. He ran back up after Esper. They started walking down a steep ravine. Terry almost asked where they were going, but didn't, and just kept following him.

Esper stopped and ahead of him Terry saw water, clear bubbling water pouring out of a stony crag above, flowing down into a clear, stone pool.

Esper turned back to him and grinned. "Guess we've all got our secrets, don't we?" he said.

Terry undid his boots and pulled his pants down.and approached the water. He reached a hand down slowly. He touched the water and brought the fingers back to his mouth. He put his hand back and took a handful of water, and splashed it on his face. He smiled. He threw himself into the pool, felt the water all around him, cold and wet and clear. He opened his mouth and drank all he could swallow. Under the water he rubbed his head and his ears and all of his skin, rubbing the coldness deeper into him. He held his breath as long as he could and then came up for air.

The pool came up to his chest. He went down again, wrapping himself in a ball, floating in the water. When he came up again Esper was taking off his boots. He looked at Terry. Terry went down into the water again, floating and feeling the coldness all around him. He stood up in the water and looked to the spot where Esper had been sitting and he was gone.

He felt Esper behind him. He felt his hands first, on his hips, and Esper's chest against his back. Esper's fingers slid down to his thighs and up between Terry's legs. Terry was hard already, and Esper stroked him under the water. Terry turned around to him, and looked at Esper, at his chest and down to his cock, at the yellow hairs around it. He held it in his hands and went under water to take it into his mouth. He rubbed Esper's legs, the long legs, and held his buttocks. He closed his eyes and felt the coolness of the water. He came up and they got out to lie on the moss.

When Terry woke up he felt rain. He opened his eyes slowly, liking the feel of the light drops. When he sat up Esper was gone. Terry's boots and pants were still there, but Esper's were gone. Terry wondered about getting back. He had only watched Esper's back on the way there. But then he thought it would be all right. He remembered enough.

He dressed and headed up the ravine. He heard thunder. For a while he was sure where he was, and walked steadily in one direction. But soon things looked strange, and he stopped. The rain picked up, and he heard thunder again. He looked around some more. The thunder continued.

"Fuck," Terry said. It wasn't thunder, it was artillery fire. He ran in the direction of the noise. As he got closer he heard gunfire between the mor28

tars. He reached the clearing and sprinted for the bunkers up the slope.

He dove into a trench and almost landed on Dirk, whose leg was split and bleeding. Dirk turned to him with a dull look in his eyes. Terry put Dirk's arms around his shoulders and dragged him through the mud up the bunker. He got him out of the rain and in cover and ran up the line to call up a corpsman. Lt. Burne saw him and said he'd send someone down when he could, but it sure as hell wouldn't be soon. Lt. Burne looked at him again. "Where the fuck is your rifle, soldier?" he yelled through the rain. Terry nodded and ran back down the line.

Terry couldn't tell where the firing was coming from. They could be anywhere out there, he thought. The other guys down the line shot steadily, like they saw something. Terry lined up his M-60 and fired into the jungle.

The shooting went on all night. When it got light out the fighting had stopped. Terry sat back in the trench and closed his eyes. The rain kept on. He felt the rain hitting him all over and thought how long he had wanted rain and now he didn't like it. He went up the bunker to the officers' tents, and saw a row of bodies lying outside the compound. Other guys came up from the trench. No one said anything and they looked at the bodies in the row. Terry looked for Esper in the tents but he didn't see him.

When the helicopters came, Terry stood in the rain and watched new soldiers and some officers come off, and the bodies get lifted on board.

Then he saw Esper. He and Burne were getting on, and they had their bags with them. Esper saw him and came over. "Taking' off, Spero," he said.

Terry nodded and squinted at him. "Got to," Esper said. "Got to. Just found out this morning. The big boys are sending me back down south.

Guess they need the help more down there than up here." Esper smiled a bit. "Just found out this morning," he said again. Terry nodded.

"See, it rained, didn't it," Esper said, looking at the ground. He turned to Terry. "Well, got to be goin'," he said. "Put'er there."

They shook hands and Esper turned to the helicopters. Terry went back to his tent. He took off his boots and pants and hung them up on the end of his cot. The rain was loud on the tent. He thought he heard the helicopters. Then he just heard the rain.

29

Quarto AMELIA BURGESS

If He Asks Again

I still have that particular scarf, and I wear it on occasion. It is my favorite-gold silk with brown scarlet roses-because it throws and catches light, and it smells of incense, like my old bedroom.

I remember the smell of morning in that room, clear and damp and blue. I opened the window quietly before I went to class, so he would have air while he slept. But I was sure he was awake, and to let him think that he had fooled me, I knelt and touched him, ran my fingers over his hips and shoulder, crept close to his face and studied, inhaled the fine, still bones. He didn't move.

I do remember the last time he asked me to marry him, when I couldn't do anything but look at him, but breathe carefully, but wish it could be true. When I said, when he touched me, Don't its not fair. (Destiny, I should've said, its beauty is that it needn't be pushed.) I remember that he touched me, anyway.

1 REMEMBER THE SMELL of cigarette smoke on damp skin.

I remember the first time he asked me to marry him; I told him, "Get a job."

Then in the theatre where he worked, the basement box office, he lay his head on the counter, eyes closed, mouth closed. I touched his back, the ever-tight muscles of his neck, marvelling at the line of his stubbled and dirty jaw, at the innocent flesh curve of his eyelids. My hands were caught now, and I bent from the window where I sat, fitted my arms around him, lay my head on his back and closed my eyes, breaming in his strangeness.

People walked by the window, eating ice cream, talking like New Yorkers, fast, in many-textured accents. I remember, like it was a movie I'd seen. I was wearing an old t-shirt that a few weeks before he had set on fire. I was wearing it when he set it on fire, though I don't remember being scared. We were in bed, and he singed the hair on his chest while putting it out.

After that, he burned other pieces of my clothing. He always asked first: could he have this scarf, could he destroy it? I said yes, and took it off my neck and gave it to him. He used his lighter, or sometimes his own cigarette, and we watched, mourning and fascinated, as the steady flame dug into the silk, its bright colors simply disappearing. Before the hole was much larger than a quarter, he extinguished the fire and nervously finished his cigarette, then returned the scarf to me. I tied it back around my neck, and he asked me why I let him do these things? and I said it didn't matter, it was up to him to not want to do them.

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31

KATHRYN GROSS

JEFFREY JULLICH

Only in Sleep

. A T NIGHT, I lie in bed,

The Widow Upstairs

OARA HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD TWICE, once to say she was delayed and then to say she had arrived. The cavernous vault of the bus station provoked in her a nagging vertigo, so that she stood, one arm tucked through the strap of her purse, cradling a giftwrapped hatbox under her chin. The old-fashioned pre-digital squawkbox was installed in the bus depot like a wooden Indian outside a cigarstore. The circle of the dial and the circles of her dizziness fused in a tremulous claustrophobia. It may have been the weiner she scoffed at the bus stop. Or the prescription the dispensary had written her for motion sickness.

Daisy had answered when the weather was gray, and Daisy answered now as the unblushing sunlight of Times Square swept a surge of dismounting passengers headlong toward Sara. Daisy with her reassuring yesmaams and her eager will to please, the generations of her children, not spent but invested in the service of, as she called her, the Mrs. The telephone was a better way to communicate, where the dribs and drabs of Daisy's reticent speech, the simplest answers to everyday questions coaxed out of her at a levy of great embarrassment, seemed meek and saddled, thankfully spared the presence of her gelatinous, bosomy body framed in rooms as doily-laden and meticulous as they were akilter. Daisy hung to the receiver as if it were a steak held to a black eye. The Mrs. expired elsewhere in some hothouse of poultices. Three quarters, a dime and two nickels were not enough to calm her, plunked one by one, at diminishing intervals, into the coin slot of the roadside payphone as women and children first stepped from bus to bus with the driver waving them across on a clipboard. Now there was no excuse for Sara. The eldest and most

lost in your absence.

I talk to myself using your words.

Finally, sleep runs its velvet fingers over me, and as it takes me down into itself, you talk to me — first in my voice and then gradually in your own

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Quarto

Jeffrey Jullich

venerable of the Alubats had called her back to the townhouse where as a girl she once played out orphaned games on a carpet, in plaid stockings.

She would flag a taxi, she would lean forward to specify the directions in a voice hoarse from consoling poor, hard-of-hearing Daisy amid the din of interstate thoroughfare, sit back in her seat to roll the window a sliver, inhale, anticipate, travel.

For some years, the aged Mrs. still kept her mudpack appointments with the help of an ambulette and wheelchair. But her last trip back into the townhouse was on a stretcher. Daisy turned her on the gong of the grandfather clock to prevent bedsores. A massage with salves kept complexion under her cheekbones. The monsignor continued his visits of mercy, sitting on a damasked bench in the foyer until Daisy would signal to him from the landing with a Winston Churchill V of the fingers. The doctors came less often, and her heirs, scattered in missionary outposts and curative salt spas globally, not at all.

This was Sara's last chance to say goodbye to the woman who had taught her to say, "It is incumbent upon me." The long journey toward nothingness must begin for some in the house where they were born. For the Mrs. it had begun with a foolish pratfall on an escalator that had the bolts sued out of it before she slid, litiginous and well-connected, to prone mortification in full view of sworn witnesses. Even death, or the cause of death, she would twist into an income of court settlements.

Sara conjured a morsel of loose change out of her wallet, closed the door from the outside, and climbed the curb on a teetering asymmetrical half-step. Decimated by neglect, the sign, swayed months before to its final rusty oscillation near the garden gate, read a headless Delpic "LUBAT."

the juridical precedents as a payee and debtor to a housebound widow.

Jesus had been at her side as an advocate during those hours. The chef might have offed with monogrammed silver, a drawerful of shrimp forks stamped S.A., S.A., S.A., a letter of resignation might have overlapped the mislaying of certain to-be-had but not inestimable collections of plaster busts, an anarchy in staff and a chaos in the upkeep might have descended on the townhouse like hellhounds come to bay, if Daisy weren't there.

Apulaeius in his Golden Ass cautions the traveler to have fully researched available hiding places before leaving on the road in the possession of any trinket more covetable than a lace veil. The existence of trinkets prompted the invention of the key. The late General A. knew these distinctions before he leased out the stud farm, and so fondly did Daisy Cross wish he were here with his military strategems and his flair for ambush to usher in the inevitable with a more fitting welcome. For her part, Daisy barricaded from within, bricking up the sources of doubt with a masonry or negations: I am not responsible, I am not unprovided for, I am not indispensable, I am not without references, I am not a beast of burden, I am not a pawn, I am not immortal, I am not unmoved...

Sadly, Daisy recounted the dirge of the past few weeks' emergency resuscitation measures, how months which should have spanned a joyous vernal holiday season were punctuated by a stream of partners from the attorney's firm of Tisch, Beadle, Hode, Hyde & Duval, respectable gentlemen with patches of suede at their elbows, the vanes of windmills at their collar buttons, but all the same none such a Thomas Alva Edison as to dispense with the utility of shoe soles and their concomitant pavement dust tracked in where the broom had just whisked.

Daisy was questioned by the attorneys, the clergy, and the constabulary as to the particulars of the afternoon when the Otis Co. entered among

The day Sara arrived, by happy fortune, as the gypsy had unerringly marshalled her pack to prognosticate, the doctor newly in charge was in consultation with the doctor longest familiar with the chameleonism of the Mrs.' health. This young, highly recommended maverick from Lilies of the Field, his accent still spiky with lilting, filtered Arables of rhetoric, the expatriate, abstemious Dr. Said, sat over cigars in the conservatory in the presence of the illustrious and beknighted Dr. Meister. Rumor had it that Meister at the rostrum was a different man than any Meister who might be found behind closed partitions vis-a-vis in the company of any swarthy ephebe out of Kipling.

Dr. Said said, "The concept of kismet provides for predestined temptation in the image of a tug-of-war umbilicus," and the maestro Meister looked at him as if his impetuous eulalia were the muffled buzzing of a maggot. What did this cross-cultural prattel of umbilicus mean to Hecuba Alubat? What possible relevance could the Ka'aba hold for one of the last authenticated turn-of-the-century hysterics, a woman so many times reprinted and anthologized and ibided?

A festschrift on Meister's eighty-eighth birthday sponsored by anglophile colleagues in Alexandria coincided with Hecuba's final progress into the carriagehouse. Her chronic recourse to the courtroom as arbiter in her life, in Alubat versus Service then and in Otis versus Cross today, Meister had long ago analyzed away as a natural but uncommon female

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2

Quarto

Jeffrey Jullich

envy for the robes and wig of the judge, robe and wig in her mind belonging to housewives, whom she saw in his perceived transvestitism as a fusion of solomonic justice and blind mercy.

Sara had met Meister before, when Hecuba, occupying the northerly exposure in one of the wings of her dream house, suspected heredity might have accounted for Sara's indifference toward maps. Geography had been dragging her "cume," her cumulative grade average, precipitously close to a B minus, too low to join the incoming frosh at the Seven Sisters.

Globes didn't help, papering the walls in hemispheres and torrid zones made no improvement. That was why she never left the house. She could never find her way home on her own.

They tried training a greyhound named Atlas to follow the route from the gate to the street, down the boulevard and back along the avenue on his own, and then leashed her to him on a dignified jumprope and set them free, instinct and disability, heads high, optimistically reckless. The Spiral Jetty earthwork by Robert Smithson looks like the curl of a greyhound tail. A greyhound tail in motion looks like a French horn. Atlas' bobbing tail, like the whorl at the top of a crozier, went before her, and the two set off in come-lightly step.

The postman saw them pass him at the corner by the hedge, and the ice man wheeled past them where the road goes steep, the two of them seated in the shade of the pharmacy awning, she licking at frozen lemonade

in a cone and Atlas lapping at a sunbonnet she had filled with springwater. The owner of the fur shop, who saw them pass at exactly three, rang the Deacon to relay the good tidings. He remarked that there must be healing of the infirm to this day at the hour of Our Lord's deliverance from the flesh.

But the Kindenberg boy, Kraus, incorrigible in his truancy, who had been trailing after them on a schoolday from the cobbles to the concrete, lost sight of them at the fording, although the butcher Cheever thought he saw them pass at a trot, but it may have been flamingos loose from the aviary. By the time word reached the Deacon, who had left the receiver off the hook by accident after the furrier had phoned him and gone incommunicado since, he was up to his third beaker in libations, and too ill-disposed to go hunting about the environs for any offspring too dislocated to cross a street on her own without the aid of animal trainers and kennels. The police, of course, chipped in, and had word-of-mouth chains set up within walking distance. Any girl under sixteen years of age found walking with a dog, be it dalmation, setter, or mutt, would set off a network of fleetfooted talkative rookies, party dress or not.

She was discovered in a sandbox, tracing interlocking furrows in the sand, while Atlas lay licking his feet to the side.

Meister was called in out of early retirement, and gladly examined the sufferer, prescribing a regimen of hourly sarsaparillas followed by foot baths in sharp waters.

Sara saw Meister as a child through his barrage of directionality tests, and that's how she saw him in profile seated in conference with Dr. Said, oblivious of her having entered unannounced with a syringe in her hand.

To whom it belonged, information Daisy was either too inobservant or too the churchwoman to provide, Sara would now demand of the accusedby-circumstantial-evidence Dr. Claudio Meister, who sat ignoring her as she approached him from behind. It was Said, positioned with his immobile head facing the passageway whence she came, who saw her first and at first said nothing, perhaps paralyzed by the sight of her advancing on tippytoe with a leaking hypodermic aimed at the back of his colleague's head, perhaps fascinated by the psychological imponderables of such a family likeness.

Sara Alubat articulated what she said hoarsely but forcibly: "Hippocrates swore his disciples to an oath of ethics, and the practitioners of medicine have never ceased inaugurating their careers on the goad of that oath, whose first words say, 'Do not harm.' Who among men in white coats has so black a heart as to maltreat the very ward of his public trust?

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37

THE LAME SOMNAMBULIST Sara raised Said's Arlesian sabots from the welcome mat, shook them, and deposited them back in their footprints, masking out all but a gasping "W OME" in the mat, proving to Daisy that the rain had evaporated before Said in his clubfooted palsy was carried to the threshold by a burly chauffeur named Fischer, since Daisy would not believe that despite never having touched the ground the overcerebrated cripple's soles might have deflected the path of one last falling droplet in a sunshower too brief to maculate Icabod's formerly stevedore shoulders, Icabod Boniface Fischer's.

At the pool table, he was known as Kabob.

Arabian empirical psychologists tended to view female hysteria through the aperture of their unexamined attitudes toward women: paramount among these was their notion that symptoms are veils.

ATLAS IN TULSA

Quarto

Mrs. Alubat is not a pin cushion; the pin cushion is in the sewing room.

"Confession may be good for the soul, but admission as to whomsoever is conspirator or perpetrator of this travesty will be even better for the plump puncturable target of this pilfered bit of hospital inventory.

Hecuba in Havana visiting Hemingway saw bayonettes less honed. Speak the truth in the name of the ten commandments." Meister, in a cravat with an earhorn, swiveled in the chair.

"Sara," he said, "Sara is aroused. Sara is serious. It's a score of zero for Sara if the winner turns out to be a bad sport. Is Sara sorry for interrupting?"

Sara said: "Being a woman who opposes bias, I thought the mad scientist to be a stereotype to go the way of snakeoil and leeches. Whatever posthypnotic suggestion you may think you implanted at our last meeting will not shield you from the reality of jurisprudence and accountability.

In two minutes I can have ten pro bono lawyers subpoena your medical records and impound every last item in your bibliography. You have a choice. Is it the Lady or the Tiger? Or is the Lady riding on the Tiger?

Or is the Lady leading the Tiger on a leash?"

"Sara is sore," he said, resuming the same line of defense from the flank and wedging between Sara and her impulse a nominal representation of herself. "Sara Marguerite Alubat is on the march. The Alubats battle fierce. She's beginning to feel sleepy and there is a soft couch behind her. Dr. Said won't mind if Sara just lies down for a while and enjoys a nap. Now, will he?"

Dr. Said made his contribution on cue: "A nap sounds like a lovely idea and a suggestion Dr. Said wishes he had made himself. I have no objection, and can foresee none arising."

Sara knew what their conniving was up to, and wanted to protest, but at the moment a feeling of choppy waves breaking at her ankles drew her to the couch or settee or whatever it was, a ton of uncooked dough, where she pressed her ebbing stamina against the enveloping cushions.

The only thing she could think of was some Latin garble, "Ars brevis, vis lex verba," which she knew was scrambled but couldn't sort aright no matter how she parsed. "Brief the craft, life the law of the word." Translation made scant difference.

After she had rested her head here on her arm for a spell, perhaps later she would breakfast, alert enough to carry this exploration into its roots and ramifications, but in the present the room drained off into a sieve. Her body was a heavy tree trunk felled by a woodcutter and her arm beside her head a branch, and her blood ran thick, slow sap. When 38

DM

BENJI WHALEN

Is Pretty Tonight

w

E HAVE A FIGHT and I drink

some beer and feel worse.

I watch Kojak. I can hear you upstairs, walking back and forth on the wood floor. You step hard steps, slow steps. I turn off the TV and go to the window of the front door. The snow is pretty tonight. I hear your steps go right above me and stop.

You must be looking out the window too.

I wonder if you think the snow

Presence

O N LEAVING, it looked lived in, a square space contracting, wedged between illusions and murky futures, transparent and silent, stripped raw inside.

Fresh respite linking two worlds indifferent with sometime inspiration.

A simple presence, stuffed with restive thoughts that space, still thinking.

is pretty tonight.

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41

Quarto DICK SCANLAN

Later that night, the three of us walked together on the beach. The ocean, my playmate during the day, frightened me in the dark. It still does.

I walked between them, holding their hands. I could feel their attraction to each other passing through me.

Gold

BIG BROTHER is ON THE PHONE with his girlfriend, crying. I am listening through the door, listening to them fight, the same way I listen to my parents battle when they've had too much to drink.

I met her at my sister's high school graduation. So did he. I was about to become a teenager and he had just finished. We sat next to each other as we always did, though we were the furthest apart in age, with ten years, three brothers and my sister between us. He surveyed the girls and I surveyed their dresses. We were a team.

My sister was first in the procession of Catholic girls entering the auditorium in long, lace dresses, the color of vanilla ice cream. They looked like brides. She walked solemnly down the aisle, a rose in her hand, a cross around her neck. Years later she would walk solemnly down another aisle holding a bouquet of roses, marrying a man I knew she didn't love, trying to get away from my parents.

Colleen was near the end of the line, where the girls grew tall like my brother was, like everyone said I was going to be. I remember her with a wreath of wildflowers in her rich brown hair. And barefoot. But maybe that was another occasion, a picnic on my brother's birthday or an outdoor concert on a summer evening.

"Get away from that door," says my father.

"Let him stay," my brother shouts from the other room.

My brother wins. I stay. My father goes back to the TV room, back to Perry Como's Christmas Special, back to his bourbon.

42

She told my brother and me that she had met us before at one of my sister's parties. Neither of us remembered it. She said she had watched me in the kitchen making hors d'oeuvres and dips from recipes in my Betty Crocker Recipe Card File, the one advertised on TV, giving instructions to my brother like a master chef. She remembered thinking I was the most special child she had ever me.

"And what did you think of me?" my brother asked.

She was silent, but I felt her answer in my body. My brother must have felt it too.

I want to talk to her. I always want to talk to her. The rest of my family panics when she calls, screaming up to my brother's room, "Ted, it's Colleen on the phone long distance from London. Hurry." Long distance phone calls frighten them. They think it means bad news. They don't frighten me. I think they're glamorous. If I can talk to London, then I can certainly go to London. Someday.

This time they are right, though. This time it's bad news.

I was the only child in the family without red hair. My hair is light brown, the kind that turns gold in the sun. And no freckles.

I refused to play little league football like my brothers. Or baseball.

Or soccer.

I read. I painted. I sang all the time, bringing my portable record player with me when we went on vacation. Sometimes for fun I would solve very complex mathematical equations.

I had no friends. My family never noticed.

Once we recreated the entire concert at Woodstock in my parents' backyard. I sang every part, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix. Colleen played the guitar and my brother played the 75,000 spectators, cheering wildly and holding up a lighted match when we finished.

She was of her era. Long, straight, shiny brown hair, shiny like a swimmer's hair. She wore flowing gauze dresses and a choker of gimp 43

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around her neck that I made for her. I made one for Ted too. They vowed to wear them until their wedding day, when they would replace them with gold bands.

She was willowy and tan, tan in a way that my redheaded, freckled family could never be.

My brother called her the sun.

"Did you sleep with him?" he is asking her. "Oh God." Oh God. I heard them making love once. I was in the room asleep, or so they thought.

"I want to make love to you all over," he whispered to her in a voice I barely recognized as my brother's.

I listened all night, mesmerized by the wetness of it. It sounded like the ocean, but it did not frighten me.

My brother is angry now. I can't hear what he's saying, but he's speaking in the hushed, metallic tone he uses when he's saying something cruel.

I want to scream at him to stop it, the way she does when he calls me a sissy and tells me to toughen up.

It was I who called her the sun.

She had sent me a watercolor of a sunrise she painted during her first semester at Smith. It was waiting for me one afternoon when I got home from school. My mother had the package in her lap and a scotch in her hand.

"What is it?" she asked when I opened it.

"It's a portrait of Colleen," I said, showing it to her.

"What are you talking about," she said, squinting her eyes, trying to focus on the painting.

"Didn't you know? Colleen is the sun."

I try and imagine the man she has slept with. I picture him with dark hair and a beard. He is shorter than she is. He is not handsome like my brother. I see them lying together somewhere in the green English countryside, an American student and her British professor, making those same wet noises that she and my brother made.

a poem, a macrame belt, a new Julie Andrews record.

We went to a "Messiah" sing-along at the Kennedy Center when she was home from Smith for Christmas. The concert hall was filled with poinsettias, their pots wrapped in gold paper. Even the conductor was decorated, wearing a red satin bow tie.

We stood when it came time for the choruses. My brother did not know the music, but she and I did, my boy soprano and her folk voice blending together, singing those songs of joy.

I wanted to marry her when I grew up.

Or, I wanted to be her when I grew up.

My mother comes up behind me.

"Let them have their privacy," she says. She is sober. She speaks quietly when she is sober. "I know how much you like her-" "Love her," I say, correcting her.

"I know. Love her. But there are some things you are too young to understand."

"I understand," I say. "Do you?"

They were always very polite to her, the way they are when they really don't like a person.

"I don't trust her," my sister told me. "Everyone at school thought she was weird."

"Everyone at school thinks I'm weird," I said.

My sister did not hear this.

On Valentine's Day I auditioned for the seventh grade talent show.

I hid in the boys' bathroom, my ear pressed against the door, until I heard my name called. I didn't want anyone to see me dressed up as a woman until I made my entrance.

I wore a purple indian print dress that Colleen had left at our house, a pair of my sister's pantyhose and Dr. Scholl's sandals. My hair was hidden under an old wig of my mother's, red and wavy, though I had tried to brush it straight.

I put the record on and sang "Cabaret" along with Liza Minelli. I could barely hear the music. I could barely hear myself, everyone was laughing so hard.

I was never angry at her. Not once. She always listened to me, even when I wasn't speaking. She looked at anything I wanted to show her:

My brother is silent now. Colleen must be speaking. I wish I could hear what she was saying, but the only voice I hear is my father's, coming

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from the kitchen.

"Marge," he is saying, "Can I fix you a little nightcap?"

I don't hear my mother's answer, but I know she says yes.

Three eighth graders burst into the bathroom as I was taking off my wig. They slammed me against the stall, hooking me up on the toilet door by the back of my pantyhose. I hung there as they tore my dress off my shoulders and pulled the toilet paper out of my bra, my underwear riding further and further up. I was silent while they taunted me, staring at their flushed, sweaty faces, feeling their fists pound my stomach and their hands slap my face. I heard my stockings rip and I fell to the floor. They fled.

I lay there on the cold tiles, surrounded by torn bits of toilet paper that had padded my bra, like the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz" with the stuffing beaten out of him.

"I'm missing my new pair of panty hose," said my sister, a week after I had burned the ripped dress and stockings in the woods behind our house.

She was eyeing me suspiciously, the way she used to when one of her Barbie dolls disappeared.

Colleen never asked about the dress. I told her about the audition, not mentioning any part of my costume.

"It was terrible," I said. "They hated me."

"Well they must be crazy. I love the way you sing."

"Don't say you love me. You don't. You couldn't."

This makes me want to cry, because I know he is wrong.

Her mother had us all over for an Easter egg hunt. She was a slim woman with black hair, a tan face, pink lipstick. I sat next to her at dinner, pretending she was Jackie Kennedy. We talked about J.D. Salinger.

"I'm in love with your youngest son, Marge," she told my mother.

"Isn't he great," she said in the loud, thick Southern accent she had when she was drunk. "Did you know he was an accident?"

"Marge please-" said my father, trying to stop her.

"We meant to stop at five. But I'm glad we didn't. I'm so glad. He's my favorite, you know," she said, her voice getting weepy.

"Mom," growled Ted. She stopped. Her napkin slipped out of her hand and floated to the floor.

The only thing I heard for the next few minutes were knives scraping against plates and ice cubes tinkling.

46

Everyone was looking down. Except Colleen—she was looking at me.

"I'll never be able to trust you after this. I'll never be able to touch vou," he says in a voice that sounds younger than mine.

I had not known I was unplanned. I did know that my parents weren't married when my mother became pregnant with Ted. I pieced it together from my grandmother's diaries, old snapshots, old letters. None of the other children knew that, though they had found the same diaries, seen the same snapshots, read the same letters.

I told Ted in my parents' kitchen late one summer night, soon after Colleen had come home from Smith. I presented the evidence to him like the lawyer my father was, like the lawyer my brother would become. It was all there, my parents' real wedding date, their flight from the small Catholic college they both were teaching at to a city where nobody knew them, my grandmother's fear that my grandfather would never forgive the man who had done this to his daughter.

He hangs up the phone. I hear glass shattering, probably her picture.

He always destroys something valuable when he's upset.

He was silent for a moment when I finished. He stood up, grabbed me by the collar and slammed me up against the wall, pressing his large hands against my neck so hard I couldn't breathe.

"If you ever show me this again, I'll kill you. Do you understand, I'LL KILL YOU," he screamed, banging my head against the wall until Colleen pulled him off me.

The house shook when he slammed his bedroom door. I heard it quietly open and shut again as Colleen slipped into his room, leaving me alone in the kitchen, trembling all over.

There is no sound now but his tears, the wetness of his tears. It frightens me.

I didn't cry until dawn, when I woke up on the living room sofa. Colleen was covering me with a blanket and putting a pillow under my head.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said. "You hurt him so much."

"I'm sorry Colleen. God, I'm sorry."

"I know you are. And so is he. Now sleep."

"Colleen," I whispered after her as she tiptoed up the stairs. "I love 47

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"I love you too," she said, coming back, taking me in her arms and stroking my hair as I sobbed. She smelled warm and womanly, like an ocean breeze on a hot summer day. I fell asleep in the stillness of her arms.

"I'll let you know when I get there," she said. I knew she would too.

I heard a loud voice coming through the door. It was a voice I recognized, but I couldn't place it. It was my mother's voice, drunk, stumbling into the room with my father and a group of their friends.

He calls out to my father. I have never heard him do this before. Even my father seems surprised.

"Coming son," he says as he freshens his drink.

I wonder who Colleen calls out to. I hope her British professor is there to comfort her. I hope he takes her out to a pub for fish and chips and dark beer, like she described in her letter to me.

I hope wherever she is she knows I'm not angry with her.

The front door closes. I look out my window and see my father and my brother walking together, my father's arm around his shoulder. My brother is carrying a bottle of beer despite the coldness of this December evening. He isn't wearing gloves. His hands must be numb.

It is so cold I can see their breath when they talk. I can't imagine talking with my father.

I had never tasted fresh cherries until I met her. Or raspberries. Or honeydew melon. She told my parents she would drive me to school one morning and took me canoeing at Great Falls instead. We stopped off at a farmers' market along the way and she bought every fruit I hadn't tried. The farmers thought we were brother and sister. So did I. I go to my room and look at the letters she sent me. Her handwriting is bold, like an artist's signature, her stationery blue and paper thin, as fragile as tissue paper. Colleen writes postcards addressed to the entire family, but I get letters. Long letters. I have read them so many times I have them memorized. Even the stamps. Even the postmarks.

She mentioned a professor in one of her letters, a young man who showed her around London. He took her to Charles Dickens' house, where she bought a deck of cards with characters from "Oliver Twist" printed on them. She sent them to me for my birthday. They were gold around the edges. I wouldn't let anyone in my family touch them, not even Ted. I hear my sister and my mother talking in my parents' bedroom.

"Everyone at school thought she was weird," says my sister.

"Well I wouldn't be surprised if her classmates at Smith thought worse than that," my mother says in a confidential tone. "Girls like her always have a reputation."

The voice of experience, I think to myself.

They laughed when they saw us. My father ordered a round of drinks for everyone at the bar. My mother hugged me tight, the way she does when she's drunk, so tight I could barely breathe. My face was crushed against her breast, her diamond brooch digging into my ear.

"Stay with us, honey," my mother said to me when Ted and Colleen got up to leave. "Daddy and I will take you to that bar I was telling you about, the one that has "I Could Have Danced All Night" on the jukebox.

Let Ted and Colleen have some time alone."

"Don't worry about us, Mrs. Donovan," said Colleen. But she was looking at me.

"I think I'll go with Colleen, Mom. With Colleen and Ted." I kissed my mother goodbye on the cheek. Ted kissed her goodbye.

She grabbed Colleen's hand, holding it in her firm, drunken grip. "He's so fond of you, dear. We're all so fond of you."

I watch them walk around our large circular driveway. Round and round they go, past the hedges with the Christmas lights, past the mailbox decorated with pine cones and red ribbon, back to the front door which is covered with gold foil and a huge wreath, like a beautifully wrapped Christmas present.

Her gift to me is sitting under the tree, waiting for Christmas morning. We had plans to open our presents at the same time during a long distance Christmas phone call.

We were sitting in a bar on the boardwalk, my brother swigging beer from a porcelain mug, Colleen sipping a Sangria and me nursing a Shirley Temple.

"Is this what a pub is like?" I asked her.

Ted and I went with her family to see her off at the airport. Her mother, Jackie Kennedy, taught me how to say "Bon Voyage!" We waited until the plane took off, like people used to wait, waving goodbye from a large

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observation window.

Ted cried. Quietly.

I didn't. I missed her already, but I was filled with excitement, as though I was winging my way across the Atlantic for a year abroad. Not driving back to my parents' house.

The house is still. When my parents and my brothers and my sister finally go to bed, it is still. And cold. Always cold.

I tiptoe downstairs to the living room, where the Christmas tree is.

The lights are on, which means my parents got drunk after Ted went to sleep and forgot to turn them off.

I sit on the sofa, staring at the tree, holding Colleen's gift in my hands.

The package is dented, a corner of its red and white wrapping paper torn from the long journey overseas, but it is here in my hands.

"We bumped into Ted's old girlfriend a few months ago at an Embassy party. She's married to a Frenchman," my brother's second wife told me when I was down from New York for my brief yearly visit. She spoke in the disapproving tone my mother always used when she talked about Colleen. "She asked about you."

"How is she?" I asked.

"She's not that pretty," she said.

I could tell by the way she said it that Colleen was still beautiful, still shining.

I open it slowly, carefully removing the red bow and setting it aside, as though it's the first-or the last-gift I will ever receive.

It is the score to Handel's "Messiah." An antique score bound in gleaming mahagony leather, with my initials embossed in gold in the lower righthand corner. It feels smooth. It smells expensive. Inside the pages are thick and cream colored, with illustrations of angels, stars, the moon, the sun.

I turn to the "Hallelujah" chorus. I start to sing, silently of course, so no one in my house can hear me. But inside, I am singing as loud as I can, singing with Colleen.

SUSAN SULLIVAN SAITER

Poppa Was a Rolling Stone

DETROIT," DAD SAID, shaking his Manhattan pitcher. "I'm being transferred to Detroit, kids." He looked at Mom. "How do you like that, Vera?

District manager in just a year and a half. Going to the head office. Not bad for a fellow from... ." He poured his Manhattan and took a sip.

My little brother, Ben, got that vacant look and sat down on the sofa next to Mom. Mom was staring at the wallpaper she'd just hung. She lit a cigarette, blew out a curvy trail of smoke, and said, "Tell them to shove Detroit up their ass."

I was a little disappointed, because I'd been taking cheerleader classes and just learned the cheers and fight song for this school. But I was excited, too, because, for the most part, I liked moving. I went to my room and lay on the bed. Mom and Dad were still arguing, but all I could hear were the names of cities we'd lived in like Cleveland and Kansas City.

Actually, we hadn't lived in Cleveland or Kansas City or any big cities, but in suburbs with names like Bolingbrook Heights and Heather Hills Township. Just like we wouldn't live in Detroit, if we ended up moving again, so if there was anything unusual or unexpected about any of those cities, it didn't matter, because the suburbs were pretty much the same.

Ben came in sucking his thumb. "If we move, we'll probably get lost again, huh Mary Jane?" he said.

Getting lost was exciting sometimes. Dad always said you have to move on to move up, and I said you have to get lost to feel like home is home. Like that time in Cleveland.

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It was right after we moved in, the night before we were to start at our new school. I was eager and restless. Some candy would take the edge off. I had to find a shopping center to get an Almond Joy and a package of Good 'N Plenty's.

I found my bike in the garage behind a bunch of boxes that hadn't been unpacked yet. It didn't seem to have suffered any punctured tires or anything. As I was heading out, I heard Ben rustling around behind some boxes. "Wait, I'm going too."

It was dusk, and the front light on Ben's bike was smashed. But mine worked, and we both had reflectors on our fenders, so I said okay. We glided down the driveway, a silent pair, and as we passed the front window I saw them, Dad drinking his Manhattan and Mom smoking her cigarette.

From the street you couldn't see Mom and Dad, just the jumping light from the TV. We rolled down the winding roads, past split-level houses that were practically the same as ours, some different only in that they were mirror images. On and on we rode, until we came to a slightly more expensive neighborhood. There were rows and rows of ranches, tri-levels and colonials, big ones with soft yellowish lights, homes where people would talk in low voices and be polite, even when they didn't have company. For a moment I felt a twinge of envy, but then who could relax around people like that?

Then there were smaller, older houses with aluminum siding. Instead of paved driveways with slick new cars, they had gravel ones with motorcycles and broken down clunkers in them. People in there would slap their kids in the grocery store. I was glad I didn't live in the other houses with other parents.

Pretty soon we were near where they were digging out land for a new subdivision. It was creepy, those big areas that looked like graves, the dead trees turned on their sides, the bulldozers with their ferocious jaws clamped shut for the night.

"We'd better try another direction," I called out.

"I'm getting cold," Ben said. "Let's go home and get a jacket."

"Not me." I slowed down, took off my sweater, and tossed it to him.

"Go if you want, big scaredy baby." I whipped around a corner and then turned to look for him. All I could see was his smooth blond hair. I waited.

He stopped behind me, looked around, and said, "I'll go on."

Poor Ben, he was always afraid to be alone. More than normal. He went berserk one time when we were moving. The men had taken all the furniture out, and Mom and Dad told me to stay with him while they went

for coffee. As a joke, I hid in the basement for a while. He smashed every window in two bedrooms and was working on the living room by the time I came upstairs. You should have seen the blood —he hadn't used a rock or anything, just his hands.

I wasn't the only one who worried about Ben. His teacher in Kansas City called once and I heard Mom snap that he didn't need any damned psychiatrist. Still, she went off and sat with a worried look all afternoon.

It was uphill back to where the nice houses were, and it took a long time, but we got there. There weren't any street lights, but there was a big moon so close you could wrap your arms around it. I turned, and there was Ben, following me like a little duckling. I loved him more in that instant than I ever knew I could love anyone.

But now I was beginning to think we were lost. We were at the edge of a woods. We turned in another direction and passed railroad tracks, and then got into an area of average houses so I thought we must be near home. But for the life of me, I couldn't find our street, Jasmine Lane.

We went up to a house, and there was a nice old lady and man, and I asked where Jasmine Lane was.

"Never heard of it," the old man said. "We'd better call your parents."

"We don't have a phone," I said, thinking how we'd get in trouble.

Ben looked at me, confused. "They put it in yesterday."

God he was dumb. "No, you're imagining things."

Ben's blue eyes lit up and he said, "She's lying."

The man looked at his wife. She said, "Better call the police, maybe."

I glared into Ben's eyes and I felt like knocking them out, but I said, "I just remembered where our street is." I bullshitted out way out of there fast. That was the last thing we needed, the police bringing us home.

I got on my bike and zoomed away. I didn't care if Ben got lost and rode around forever. But when I heard him calling me, I stopped. I went over and shook him and said, "You're always trying to cause trouble. Can't you be normal?" And I jerked him some more until he yelled. I fished around in my pocket and found a piece of bubble gum. I tore it in half and gave him one piece. But I kept the comic for myself and refused to let him read it.

We rode some more and suddenly I remembered that I didn't know our street number, so even if I found Jasmine Lane it wouldn't do much good. Our house looked an awful lot like the others. I hit the brakes. "What kind of car do we have?" I asked. "It's a red DeSoto, isn't it?"

Ben said, "No that was in Cincinnati, when Dad worked for Rivington Tires. Don't you remember? He has a free company car again. It's a Chrys-

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ler. In front it's saying 'Hi,' and in back it looks like sea gulls taking off."

"That's what you said about the DeSoto."

"No, it looked like it was saying 'cheese.'"

"Well what color is it?

"Green. And there's a dent on the left door where Dad kicked it the time he locked the keys inside."

"Let's go," I said. This street had new black top and smooth, fresh curbs and it seemed like some fiend was putting in new developments just to keep us getting lost. But then I saw a hill that looked familiar. It was steep and we had to get off and walk our bikes. A truck went by, and the driver whistled. My handlebars were cold, and the air was damper. What if I got a flat tire or some guys tried to kill us?

Ben complained that he was tired. At the top of the hill, I turned and looked—there he was, his blond head glowing in the moonlight, his arms all business pushing that little bike of his, that bike with all its dents from going in and out of moving vans, the chipped red reflector winking and doing its humble best to keep Ben safe. I felt a stronger than ever protective instinct stirring in me. I thought of the nutty things he did all the time, like getting in the car trunk and closing it to see if his transistor radio would work inside it; the teacher calling to tell Mom that Ben was writing on the blackboard all the swear words Dad said when he got fired from Tyroler Tires, then calling a few days later to say he wrote the happy swear words from the day Dad got a promotion at Echenrode Rubber.

But it seemed familiar here, and I said we'd try once more. Sure enough, the houses started looking like ours, and it felt like we'd been here before, like we'd sweated here and breathed here, left our scent, the way they say wild animals find their way around the woods.

I realized later that we'd passed the house about four times without knowing it. And it was Ben who spotted it. "Hey, Mary Jane," he shouted. "That's it! I know that's it because it looks like the upstairs windows have bags under their eyes with those flower boxes. Everything's okay now."

Ben's eye for detail sure was good—maybe too good for his own good.

But then again maybe that's how he had to operate because the world seemed so confused to him—like when you're on a ride at the carnival and you start to get sick, so you stare at some little thing, like a bolt on the gate holding you in or a dirt spot on your shoe, and you keep staring to shut out the swirling dizziness so you won't puke.

I'll tell you, coming up the driveway, looking in that window at Mom and Dad, who hadn't budged since we left, I was so happy to be home that I didn't care about not getting the Almond Joy and Good 'N Plenty's.

"Don't tell Dad we went out or we'll get in trouble. If he does catch us, say we took a walk around the block," I said. Quietly, we made our way to the garage. Ben was right—the car looked like a seagull saying hi. We tiptoed in through the back door and listened from the hallway.

All we heard was the TV. "Let's get a drink of water," I whispered. "Then we'll walk through the living room to our rooms. Act like we never left and were just fooling around in the kitchen the whole time."

As we passed by, Dad turned and said, "You kids got any homework?"

Mom and I laughed. I said, "We haven't started school yet."

Dad looked like he really had forgotten that school hadn't started yet.

Then he grinned. "When I was a kid, we got it all summer long, by God." "And you had to walk ten miles to turn it in, through snow storms," I said.

"Twenty," Dad said. "Through blizzards."

Dad had to start all the jokes about his terrible childhood. If someone else did, it was their funeral.

"In summer?" Mom said.

"Sure. It got colder back in those days."

"Maybe it was the ice age," Ben said.

Mom and Dad about fell out of their chairs laughing. I was so relieved they hadn't noticed we were gone that I felt like doing a big cheerleader cheer.

But then that other side of Ben emerged, the Ben who never could leave a moment alone, let it unfurl itself and lie there and have everyone enjoy it. He got that look on his face, his blue eyes glowing, like they always did when he was trying to get attention, good or bad. "We got lost and people were going to call the police."

"What?" Dad said, turning quickly. He was furious. Maybe a little scared, too, if I wasn't mistaken. "The police?"

Dad had been nervous about the police ever since they brought Ben home for climbing the fire escape to the top of Oren's Department Store to see how big the letters on its sign were. That was back in Pittsburgh.

"It was Mary Jane's idea," Ben said, looking scared now, too. I could never figure that kid out.

Dad jumped up. He seemed about ten feet tall and his hair stuck up on both sides like horns. His face was red and saggy. "Don't go out at night in a strange neighborhood."

"We never didn't have a strange neighborhood," Ben said quietly, like he wasn't sure whether he wanted Dad to hear it or not.

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Dad did hear and now I really could kill Ben. "Don't smart off to me, and don't go out without telling us."

I felt like a prisoner, standing there in the doorway, and I turned and ran to my room. Sometimes I felt sorry for Dad, but right now I hated him. And I hated Mom for sitting there and blowing smoke rings. I hated Ben for being weird and screwing things up all the time, and most of all I hated myself for not being able to figure out a way for all of us to be happy.

I cried for a while and then got out my map of the United States.

I picked out Los Angeles and New York City. After a while, I had myself convinced that I'd live in Hollywood and get discovered by an agent. Then I wouldn't have to work in an office like Dad and move from one lookalike house to another all my life. I'd have a penthouse higher than Oren's Department Store and the only letters Ben would have to find out the size of would be the gigantic ones on the HOLLYWOOD sign right outside my window.

Ben came in and sat on my bed. "What are we going to do, Mary Jane?"

"We're going to move, probably, and there's not much you or I can do about it."

He stuck his thumb in his mouth. Eight years old and he still sucked his thumb. Finally, he took it out and said, "They have the Detroit Tigers there."

We heard Dad's voice in the living room, wheedling now. "What's wrong with one more move? I can't turn down this promotion."

"I swore when we moved to Indianapolis that it was the last time.

That was three cities ago."

Indianapolis —our stay there was so short we must have broken a record. We hadn't lived there more than a month when they came home from a party and Dad yelled that he wanted to quit that job.

"They promote a hotshot who invites the boss over to swim in his back yard pool."

"Oh, who cares?" Mom sounded tired.

"You can knock yourself out with hard work, but they like phonies with back yard pools. I'm going to call Chuck Wylie at Ace Tires to see if his offer is still good."

"I'm not moving again."

I heard the keys jingle, the hangers in the closet dance frantically,

the door slam, and the car back down the driveway. During these fights, I never quite relaxed until the car shifted into forward gear and disappeared down the street.

After the coast was clear, I heard Ben in the next room. He was pretending he was a baseball announcer. It sounded like he was doing the St. Louis Cardinals. Ben knew every player on every team of every city we'd lived near, and he did perfect imitations of the broadcasters' voices, complete with the banter. He did an inning, then a beer commercial from Milwaukee. As I shut my door, he was singing, "From the land of sky blue waters... .Hamms the beer refreshing, Hamms the beer refreshing."

Mom came into my room. She had put on a nightgown, the one with a safety pin holding a strap.

"Couldn't sleep," she said, sitting down at the end of my bed and leaning against the wall. Pretty soon Ben was there, too. He climbed into her lap.

"Did I ever tell you about my junior prom?" she said. "I went with Norman Gipson. He lived on a duck farm."

Benny and I loved Mom's stories. They were always so unusual and the people weren't anything like the ones we knew in real life. I tucked my pillow just right and enjoyed the warmth of Mom as she talked.

"Grandma made me a beautiful dress, blue satin. It was the Depression, you know, no one had any money, but Norman managed to rent a tux. But do you know what? He still smelled like those ducks. He couldn't get rid of that smell." She lit a cigarette and held the match for Benny to blow out. Then she tossed the match. It landed in Ben's Fort Apache set. Mom had told us she didn't care about housework any more. She took a long puff and flicked an ash off into nowhere.

"What do ducks smell like?" I asked.

"A whole farm of them smells worse than anything you can imagine.

Worse than a house full of dogs, or even cats. My mother took a whiff and led me into her bedroom. She whispered. 'It's his boots. Look.'

"So I looked through a crack in the door, and sure enough, he was wearing big, clodhopper work boots."

"Why didn't he wear shoes?" Ben asked. He put his thumb in his mouth and his throat wobbled like a little bird's.

"I guess he couldn't afford any, honey. So Grandma got out her eau de who-knows-what and started spraying me and said, 'Now you'll smell so good you won't notice him.' And the next thing we knew, the atomizer got stuck. We giggled so hard, she forgot to point it away from me. I was

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drenched."

Mom hugged me and I felt good. I'd had a lot of best friends, but they never became old friends because we never lived anywhere long enough. My family had to be my old and best friends, and since Ben was unpredictable, that made it tough. Sometimes it seemed like Mom was my traveling, portable best friend.

"So we walked out the door, one of us smelling like duck turds and the other smelling like a French cat house."

Ben said, "What's a French cat house?"

Mom winked at me like I would know and hugged Ben. "Never mind."

"Well it sure doesn't smell as bad as a duck farm," I said.

Mom laughed to herself. All her mascara had been wiped, or cried off, and now from the side she looked old. "But do you know what I did?"

Mom got up from the bed and twirled around in that old nylon nightgown with the safety pin on the strap. Under the faded and snagged material you could see her still-youthful body. "I danced with everyone else, and I was elected prom queen, and I wore a beautiful tiara and cape."

I could see it. I really could, Mom looking like Miss America.

Then, like a girl at a slumber party who doesn't want to go to bed, she led Benny back to his room. A minute later she was lingering at my door, dragging from her cigarette, staring at me like she was thinking.

"You'll do all right, Mary Jane," she said finally. As she turned and walked out, her nightgown strap fell down. She didn't bother to pull it back up.

I lay in bed seeing Mom waltzing around in a blue dress and smiling her red lipstick smile all over the room. It came to me then, the truth about Mom —she was always in a better mood when Dad left after a fight.

She wasn't totally crazy about being married to him.

On the other hand, she was glad she got away from small towns and the Depression. Dad wore a suit and the right kind of shoes to work and had probably been exotic to her. So if her life was all confusion now, at least she didn't have to be the prettiest and smartest girl in town with no one to dance with except guys that smelled like ducks. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "Detroit's too cold."

"Okay, we'll get a house that's heated, then."

"Your're funny. You're so damn funny you should be on the Ed Sullivan Show."

Dad left in an avalanche of gravel down the driveway. I always worried that he'd get hurt during one of these angry fits. Once, he broke his 58

foot. It was when we lived in Denver. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * That night in Denver Dad had come home tense but all smiles. He threw his briefcase down. "We're going to Chicago, kids." He put on his Frank Sinatra album and sang along. "My kind of town, Chi-cah-go is, my kind of town," as he mixed his Manhattans.

Mom just turned the TV up louder.

I was awakened at three in the morning by a crash and some thuds.

Then I heard Dad hopping around the living room and shouting, "I think I broke something. Son of a bitch."

I heard Mom come out of the bedroom. Her voice was frantic. "Shall I call a doctor?"

"I'll have to go to the hospital. Find out where it is."

Dad kept hopping and swearing as Mom rustled through drawers.

The floor shook and the knick knacks on shelves rattled. Finally she said, "There's no hospital here. What town is nearby?"

"How would I know?"

Mom called some hospitals. "John, two say they're not nearby, another doesn't even know where Harvard Valley Manor is, it's so new."

"Harvard goddamn Hills Manor. Call the police then."

There was a lot of commotion with keys and doors, then the car tried to start. "Chr-r-rysler, Chr-r-r-rysler," that particular car went, as Ben put it. Finally, it took a firebreathing deep breath as it backed down the driveway, preparing to charge off in search of a hospital.

I felt like I'd just swallowed a sink full of dish water. Ben appeared in my doorway. I felt the silence, the healing silence, like someone had just washed and put salve and a band-aid on all the swearing and yelling.

"Hey, Benny, let's go see what's in the cupboard."

As we passsed through the living room, we saw that the aluminum panel on the screen door had a big hole in it—right at kicking height.

The front of the hi fi was smashed in, too, and a speaker was hanging out by a cord.

We stared until the upset feeling went away, then headed for the kitchen and looked through the cupboards. There was no candy, but there was a yellow cake mix. I showed Ben how to do the three hundred strokes by hand so he could practice counting while I got the pans ready. We put the cake in the oven and went into the living room and turned on the TV. There was an old black and white movie with people in evening clothes. I knew who the woman with the squeaky voice was. It was Jean Harlow.

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Susan Sullivan Salter

Happiness came over me for how many interesting old things —like that movie—and how many new things there were in life. Living in different places gave you a lot of stuff to compare —like accents and weather and the different ways to wrap your garbage. Then I felt sad for Ben, because the older we got, the more fun I had and the more confused he seemed.

I put those worries out of my head and thought, who knows, maybe he'll survive just fine, along with the rest of us.

I told Ben the movie was made when Mom and Dad were kids. We watched a while longer, and Ben said, "I think Dad hates it when he was a kid. He wants things to be like on TV now."

I didn't feel like thinking about Dad just then, especially with his broken foot. Mom had told us his family didn't treat him right, that he didn't have enough of a home to know what one was supposed to be like.

He sometimes went without a coat or boots in the winter, and one night his Mom didn't come home and he was locked out and his feet got frostbitten. The doctors had to cut off four of his toes. Dad always went around in socks and made excuses not to go swimming.

Ben said, "Middle of the night commercials remind me of driving through a scary new town and suddenly you see a happy neon sign."

I knew the ads were clicking in that brain of his, and pretty soon I'd be hearing them.

The next ad was for a floor wax. There was a shiny house and adorable kids and a Mom who thought scrubbing the floor was the most important thing in her life. None of the doors were kicked in, and no one looked confused. Dad wanted a life like they had in the commercials. So did Ben. Even Mom probably did.

So how come I didn't dream of that? Maybe because none of this stuff—nice suburban life like they showed in the commercials—ever happened to real people, or if it did, it didn't happen to us, no matter how many times we moved. Whether people other than Jean Harlow got fancy penthouses in real life was something I'd have to wait and find out.

Ben sat in the armchair next to the window and it was his job to watch for the car so we could ditch the cake out the window and run to bed, if necessary. My job was to watch the clock for the cake and serve it.

Ben every now and then got up and went over and ran his hand around in the holes of the hi fi. Predictably, he ended up hurting himself and started yelling. His hand got stuck in the hole. I helped him pull it out.

It started to ooze blood.

and drove him to the hospital at about ninety miles an hour. Dad had sweated and prayed out loud and even cried.

I took Ben to the bathroom and washed his hand off and held it until it stopped bleeding. Then I bandaged it and cleaned up the blood on the floor. Usually, something like this would depress me, but Ben was acting so sweet and normal that night and I was so desperate for a portable best friend, I didn't let it get me down.

Ben wanted a drink. There was no pop or milk, so I made us cocktails with Dad's soda water and Hershey's Chocolate Syrup and maraschino cherries, and we drank those and watched Jean Harlow and waited for the cake to bake.

We moved to Detroit, of course, just as we of course moved everywhere else.

We started listening to Motown music. A popular song then was "Poppa Was a Rolling Stone," by the Temptations. Ben, Mom and I thought it was funny the first time we heard it on the kitchen radio, while Dad listened to Frank singing "High Hopes" on the hi fi in the living room.

I decided this suburb was as good as any other. Better, in fact, for me, because I finally made cheerleaders.

The day I tried out was an important day all around, I guess you could say, because that was the day Ben got placed in special classes and transferred to a different school.

I'll never forget how I felt the morning Ben first climbed on that bus that took the retards and the behavior cases that my "cool" friends made fun of. He turned, looked at me, and smiled, and he gave a wave that tried to be nonchalant.

I just turned away from the window and quickly told myself, heck, he'll probably turn out just fine.

I turned on the Motown station and tried to get Ben out of my head and to make myself think about my own problems, cheerleader kinds of problems, like whether to wear my hair down or in a ponytail.

I thought of the time Ben jumped into the basement instead of going down the stairs. He cut his ear and Dad thought it was an internal injury 60

61

HARLAN

r

BREINDEL

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He is never so volatile until he takes out his nightmare and wears it like a cloak, it keeps out the cold. Even a nightmare is better than the cold. And when he is cold he can be found sitting behind a loaded gun and the glass, never feeling so fat as the glass or volatile as the gun.

Man On Edge

A . LOADED GUN sits next to a glass, and the glass is fat and the man behind it just as loaded as the gun.

He sits there in a moment so given to sitting and to resolution as to imagine the death of a sailor and the death of a woman, two people never met, or the death of a seagull and a bullet hole through a street lamp.. .the pairs could be infinite.

He dares to sit behind the loaded gun and the glass and dream. It's fat as if a flock of doves are flying above and a choir of little boys are singing lightly in the background. It's fat like the snubnose of a gun or all the elements of his life that he pours into this nightmare and relives again and again.

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63

DAVID T. GORDON

LUBA BURTYK

Codeine Breakfast in July

garbage trucks pasted inside a turbid sky.

Barrelling down, without drivers, without control.

Reducing and discarding, hauling away.

Brunching at the Marriott, cheese tortellinis, Marinated pig loins ground and stuffed in a shed Snake's skin. Champagne and orange juice dripping Through fountain skull, out nose, out ears, in mouth.

Vomiting muddled phrases, swishing sounds of Women scooping fruit from carcasses filled With jaded conversation, speaking in senseless Languages, building towers with eggs and Dry corn muffins. Stirring sugar in coffee, Pouring coffee in sugar.

Reducing. Discarding. Hauling away.

PHANTOM

64

Point of Entry

1 HE ONE THING WE KNEW ALMOST FROM THE START was that it was apartment 2F that was responsible. Renters. You can't expect from them what you would from an owner. I mean you know that Charlie Crimmin of PH4 wouldn't let a thing like that happen. Or even half senile Mrs. Fisk of 6A. It was Dick Vitsky of 2C who got the story, right from the horse's mouth so to speak, on the night that it happened. The renters from 2F, both of them together, came pounding on his door round about the time the eleven o'clock news was finishing up. They were too scared to go to their own apartment, they said. Wanted to use his phone to call the police. They were both talking loud, one over the other, contradicting one another. He calmed them down. The story he got out of them, more or less, was this.

They were coming back from the opera. Big fans of opera, the two of them. No season ticket, or anything like that. They go standing room.

Sometimes every night of the week. Like there's nothing else in the world to do.

They were coming back earlyish having skipped the last curtain call.

The sleet was freezing on their shoulders and in their hair. They hadn't thought to bring an umbrella.

They ran the last block from the subway. One of them already had the key out. They were prepared to rush in, shake themselves off on the rubber mat in the lobby, and dash up to their apartment for a long hot bath, but at the top of the stairs, right in front of the lobby door they saw it.

Now I say "it" because even the two of them can't agree on whether it was a male or female. .When they told the story to Dick, one of them 65

Quarto Luba Burtyk

kept calling it she, the other kept saying he. One insisted it had a beard.

The other said there was no beard—just a grey rag swaddled across its face.

They did agree, however, that it was filthy, that, even with the wind blowing as hard as it was, it smelled bad, that its sneakers were held together with silver electrical tape, that it wore no gloves and its hands were thick and red. It was tall and probably heavy, though it was hard to tell with all the layers it had on. Where the sleeve of a tweed jacket came away from its seam, they saw a red cable stitch sweater. Another sweater, brown, hung out from under the jacket's hem. A second jacket, the red and black plaid kind that hunters wear, was tied around its hips.

It stood at the head of the stairs blocking their way. Its arms were stretched over its head and it was shouting mostly undecipherable things.

One of them heard the phrase, "Bring on your bicycles," repeated throughout. Both agreed that the voice sounded deranged, threatening. There were white plastic spoons sticking out of its matted hair.

Both were sure that if they entered the building it would follow them inside. They were frightened. They looked over their shoulders to the left, to the right, hoping to see someone to walk them in, someone to clear the stairs for them, but the street was empty. The bad weather was keeping even the dog walkers inside.

They went around the corner and pressed themselves against the wall of the building. They hoped that perhaps in a few moments it would move on. They were out there, they told Dick, at least half an hour. More likely, they spent only five, maybe ten minutes hiding. The wind, no doubt, made it seem much longer.

They took turns creeping back to the stairs from time to time to see if it was gone, but it remained in front of the lobby door. Huddled together, they discussed the situation in whispers. Their breath hung in a fog between their faces.

They managed, after a time, to persuade themselves that it wasn't waiting for them, wasn't waiting to sneak into the building. Like them it was cold, only trying to stay out of the sleet, get out of the wind. They told Dick they felt sorry for it, homeless on such a bitter night. Poor, homeless soul, they called it.

Poor, homeless soul indeed. As though there were only one kind of homeless. As though there hadn't been articles about some of them being addicts and hustlers that go from one soup kitchen to another, stockpiling sandwiches. As though the whole lot of them that shake their cup at you on the streets, on the subways, in the doorways of supermarkets and banks are all poor neglected mental cases, or unemployed working stiffs who 66

are victims of the economy or some greedy landlord.

Dick didn't call them on the poor homeless soul bit or anything. No surprise there. He's been known to talk quite a left streak himself sometimes. For a while Nancy, that never-grown-up-hippie that inherited 9A from her parents, had him harrassing everyone in the building for canned food donations for some coalition she works for. Dick knew about the building's no solicitation clause but there he was ringing everyone's doorbell, dressed in a brown velour jogging suit, trying to look pious, like he was a monk or something.

"It wasn't all that unreasonable, what the 2Fers did that night," Dick said when he first told me the story. What they did was to run up the stairs, throw some change in the direction of the poor homeless soul, as they called it, and try to rush past it. Naturally, it managed to push its way into the lobby before they could lock it out. There were, of course, other alternatives that the 2Fers could have pursued instead of jeopardizing us all with their negligence. Dick, good lawyer that he is, quickly saw that once the trouble started.

However, on the night the 2Fers told him their story, Dick reassured them that they had done what anyone else would have done. Then he went down to the lobby to take a look for himself at what it was the two of them had let into the building. He found nothing. No trace of any uncombed, ranting male or female. There was a dark stain on one of the upholstered chairs. Dick touched it and it was dry. He decided that it had probably been there a long time and he just hadn't noticed it before.

After a few more minutes of looking around, he concluded that the street creature had gone back to the street. Both he and 2F went to sleep without any protective measures having been taken. The police were not called. The building was not searched.

They had no second thoughts even in the morning when they woke up to find the building heated to a sweltering 90 degrees. The super checked but couldn't find anything wrong with the boiler except that its thermostat had been set as high as it would go. He was prepared to write it off as an accident, but a red and black plaid jacket lying in the boiler room led him to consider the possibility of sabotage. No one on his staff wore such a jacket; therefore, he brought the matter upstairs to the Board.

For the next three days the heat suddenly and unpredictably shot up to 90 degrees. At such times the tap water became scalding as well. Mrs. Woods of 5J who is nearly blind and can barely walk, even with two canes, was hospitalized with second-degree burns after she tried to take a shower.

A full meeting of the Board was called. A list of disgruntled residents, 67

Luba Burtyk Quarto possible saboteurs, however unlikely, was drawn up —IOC in litigation for illegal subletting, PHI denied a construction permit, 9D with its waterdamaged walls still unpaid for by the building.

However, before any action could be taken, Melissa Hayne, the fiveyear-old redhead from 12G, told her mother she saw a bogey man with plastic spoons in his hair standing outside the laundry room. Because she is an extremely nearsighted little girl with thick glasses, Melissa's story might not have been believed had it not been confirmed by Dee Gupta, the housekeeper she was with at the time. The little girl's screams, Mrs. Gupta said, scared the creature off and it disappeared into the boiler room.

Melissa's story quickly spread along the building's grapevine of children and their babysitters and nannies. The Board was beset by calls from furious parents demanding improved security measures in the building.

It was at about this time that 2F came forward with their story, and Dick Vitsky came to the Board to offer his legal services. He suggested starting eviction proceedings against the renters of 2F. It was the least, he said, he could do, the least they deserved.

There were almost daily unconfirmed sightings of the creature. No consensus was reached as to its gender, its age, or even its height. Sentries made up of volunteers from the building were posted on each floor, but the creature eluded them. A cracked plastic spoon was found at the door to the roof. A container of vanilla yogurt scraped clean lay nearby.

A rumor circulated that someone was feeding the creature. Closer surveillance, however, showed that the teenager from 14B used the stairway to the roof as his hangout. He took his girlfriend up there to neck.

The elevator was commandeered for six hours one evening just as everyone was returning from work. We watched it ride wildly up and down without stopping at any floors. It was locked in the emergency bypass mode. We had no choice but to climb with briefcases, packages, and children slowly up the stairs. When the elevator finally jammed between the eleventh and twelfth floors its doors had to be pried open by the mechanic. It was empty.

A pile of excrement was found in the middle of the lobby floor one morning. Everyone in the building screamed that things had gone too far.

Almost no one wanted the Board to turn to outside help. The resale value of the apartments, it was felt, would be adversely affected if word of the problem got out into the real estate market. Luckily, laboratory analysis revealed the excrement to be canine in origin.

Then for a week there was peace. Everything functioned properly. No sightings. Nothing. Their pale winter faces glowed with relief.

68

At least they did up until yesterday, when we suddenly found ourselves without heat or hot water. The super had trouble getting into the boiler room. The door was barricaded. He and his staff had to break it down with axes.

The boiler, the heating tank, valves, pipes were all clotted with sand.

Eight of the twenty-five bags of sand the building had bought as an ecologically sound alternative to spreading salt on the sidewalk ice had been ripped open and strewn all over everything.

In a matter of hours the temperature in the building dropped to the ten degrees it was outside. Water pipes burst. The electrical system short-circuited.

This time the police were called. They came with dogs, but the flooding obliterated any scent the dogs may have had to go on.

The repairs, when we can do them, will deplete all our reserves. There is no one, Dick says, that we can sue. Pointless to go after 2F. They haven't got any kind of money. But we will at least evict them. Maddeningly, they are without remorse for what they have done to the building. They have given up opera and devote all their time to the cause of the homeless.

Meanwhile, we are reduced to sitting huddled in our apartments. We have no heat. We have no light. We have no water. We are at the mercy of the weather. Some have left to stay with family or friends. Those of us who remain sleep in our sweaters, jackets, coats and gloves.

We are asking everyone to keep this quiet. We don't want to attract speculators, or vandals, or looters. We are waiting for help. We need help to recoup.

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RICK BRUNER

This could be heard when the chainsaw wasn't running Her brother wanted to turn on the radio while they worked but he decided not to.

After a while they finished.

(15) The mother went downstairs to do laundry.

Chainsaw "I guess I'll go help him," said the brother.

She said, "I'll come too."

The afternoon was cool and misty.

1 HE STEPFATHER PUT HIS FORK on his plate with a clatter and stood up.

He left the kitchen for the backyard.

The others poked at their food.

No one spoke.

(5) The young woman felt lousy.

The neighbors' dog wasn't by the fence, or anywhere in sight.

(20) The majority of the small tree lay fallen in the yard-two large branches almost as fat as the trunk.

All that still stood was the trunk, as wide as a fat man's thigh, with one small branch that reached out over the yard like a paper fan.

The stepfather was around the other side of the house doing something.

"What did I say?" she quietly asked no one in particular.

The other two shook their heads, as if to say, "Never mind him; he's nuts sometimes."

She knew.

Her brother touched the sawed-off face of one of the branches to feel if it was still hot.

The fresh smell of cherry wood was in the air like a warm wood pie.

The sound of the chainsaw let a lonely mood into the kitchen.

(25) He could feel how heavy the branch was; he doubted that he had the strength to move it alone.

(10) The three cleaned up the lunch dishes leisurely, talking softly about where things go and how best to load the dishwasher.

He wondered why the hell his stepfather had cut it down; this wasn't a project anyone had talked about before.

The refrigerator hummed periodically: On, then off, then on, through its cooling cycle.

Sometimes his stepfather just behaved like that—doing something without any good reason, getting angry at a person for no fault

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Rick Bruner

Quarto

of her own.

She went to the garage and came back with a hatchet and a machete.

Some point he had to prove to himself.

Her brother chose the machete.

The young woman wasn't thinking about anything like this.

(30) One time when she was just more than a toddler, her family had gone to the beach.

He asked her if she would like to use one glove, the left one, from a pair of work gloves he'd found.

He knew she was right-handed.

Soon after they'd carried their gear to a spot on the sand, the little girl set out walking down the beach without a word to anyone.

(45) "No thanks," she said. "That's okay."

Her father, in a cheerful mood, thought this might be a moment nostalgia would favor, and followed her with a spy's reserve and a wink to his wife.

They started to hack at the branches.

The little head of fine hair wagged along the water's edge, three feet above the sand whose blond color it matched.

They came off after three or four strikes.

It wagged on, oblivious to passing maudlin smirks, for as long as her father's patience could stand, for more than half a mile, without once looking back.

(35) Two months ago she wouldn't have expected to ever be living home again.

First she would knock off the larger limbs.

Then she would knock off all the switches as big around as a knuckle.

(50) One swing of the hatchet head.

She tossed these in a pile for her brother.

The stepfather returned to the yard.

Then it got worse with her boyfriend.

She knew how much was worth an effort and when it was time to go; and one bad day she left.

He rested an axe against a grey wooden bench on which the paint was cracked and faded.

He left again for the front of the house.

For a while she lived here and there, but he would find her and scare her and take her stuff and destroy it, or keep it.

(55) Her brother picked up the small branches one at a time and swiped off the twigs with the machete.

Finally she went home.

He let these fall.

(40) Home is a place you can go no matter what, she figured; where you can stay as long as you want, and where they're not going to put up with anyone else giving you bullshit.

72

The bare sticks he would then chop into even-sized pieces about ten inches long, which he neatly stacked.

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Rick Bruner Quarto

(75) She looked up and took it: "Thanks."

There was a lot of wood to cut.

He walked to the chainsaw and started it.

The young woman enjoyed the rhythm of the work.

(60) She found a manner of artfulness in the systemized dissolution.

She sensed a deserved peace in the hierarchy of the reduction.

From limb to bough, to branch, to switch, to stick, to twig.

She gathered a few of the bare branches small enough to grip around with her hand to indicate that she'd take care of that size.

She leaned one on a log and swung the axe at it.

He paused to stuff some long strands of her hair under the hat.

(80) The chainsaw whined savorously as the stepfather pushed it through

An intrinsic order. a fat branch.

No deciding what's next, making a mistake in any such judgment.

(65) And each stage reached by the same equitable effort.

The brother raked carefully through the tender brown grass, gathering the twigs into a large pile.

Every few moments he'd bend down for some stick large enough

A swat.

to chop again and toss it aside.

Less strength spent than in a slap.

Two yards over, a neighbor looked up from his barbeque grill for

She liked the simplicity of the attack, seeing the total break-down of their problem, moment by moment, step by step, plainly the victim of their stamina.

a minute to watch the family working together.

The stepfather returned again, pushing a garden cart littered with

The young woman stopped working for a moment.

(85) Her breath made heavy steam in the air, but she felt warm herself in just a sweatshirt.

weeds and stones.

She looked at her palm and poked a sore red spot that would be (70) The young woman wiped the sweat from her brow with her sleeve. a blister later.

She crouched down on her haunches and pulled off her sweater.

When she looked up, she saw her mother standing on the back The stepfather passed with the cart to the back of the garage and then came back without it.

porch.

Her mother looked at her with an ironic smile.

He picked up an engineer-style cap from the bench and held it out to her.

Her mother spoke, not loud enough, but the young woman could make out what her lips said over the howl of the chainsaw. "How soon for dinner?"

"Here." he said.

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(90) The young woman looked at the remaining debris, not quite sure how they were going to take care of the scraps.

RUSSELL DAY

"Not too long," she said.

Her brother began to move the segregated piles to the side of the garage.

Finished with sawing, the stepfather brought the lawn mower from the garage.

Now a painterly silence

Only the twigs remained.

(95) She understood what he intended and with her boot spread out her brother's pile.

The stepfather passed over the carpet of twigs, and four times she raked them out again.

After that the lawn was clear.

He spread the fine chips on the garden which ran all the way along their fence.

The neighbor's dog watched him do this.

(100) Dusk had settled, the air was thick with the smell of cherry wood as they went inside together.

EXERTS ITSELF in the sunny room. on the wooden floors, your socks slide along counting the steps. the rain plods slowly along through the afternoon. various patterns of light, food, coffee cups are tried, moved slightly, tried again. even as the nuthatch is nesting, and the laundry dries, another pattern is found.

The paper lifts slightly in the draft as you leave.

76 77

RUSSELL DAY

MARY FIRMANI

Dec. 31, '87

CJOOD MORNING Charlie Parker and all the bright winds on this cusp of the year.

Good morning brittle trees, abandoned bricks, scraggly clearings.

Pasteboard walls and skylights, good morning.

As the cold swirls down around the courtyard, a small bird, feathers blown backwards like an old man's hair, blows a warm solo onto the flattened lawn, into the frozen clouds.

The earth rolls and falls through another day, another year.

78

Begin the Beguine

r ATHER JOHN ANDREW, FOREVER in my mind "Father Wildebeest," gaspingly fat, with a peaked head rather like Ubu Roi or some odd little smiling onion, led me out to the ground of St. Simeon Stylites, and sat me down on a wrought-iron bench within the shade of the great statue of our patron saint.

"Beatrice," he began, "do you know who St. Rita was?" Before I could answer this, he whipped a laminated prayer-card out of his sleeve and held it in front of my nose. It showed a nun, face suitable to be the object of courtly love poems, in full Augustinian habit, kneeling at a small altar.

Beside her were two roses, a prayerbook, a set of rosary beads, and a tiny instrument of self-mortification. A thin, elegant nimbus such as was fashionable at the tail-end of the Renaissance encircled her fine head, which appeared to be set aglow by a sort of gamma-ray that was emitted from the crucifix upon which she was gazing. Some garlanded rococo cherubs hung about, surveying the scene.

Father Wildebeest now read the back of the prayer-card: "'Saint Rita,'" he began, "'though desiring to enter a convent, submitted to the will of her parents, and at the age of twelve was married.

Her husband, an ill-tempered and cruel man, was murdered. After eighteen years of living with him as a model wife and mother, Rita was freed to follow her first desire. She was admitted to the Augustinians, where she lived as a model spouse of Christ. Because of the efficacy of her prayers, she is called the Saint of the Impossible.'.. .and here we have a prayer, let us pray.. .'Saint Rita, pray for us that we may resist all desire for revenge on our enemies and submit obediently to the will of our superi79

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Mary Firmani

ors. Pray that what seems impossible to us may by the will of God be granted to us through your intercession.'"

He fell silent. I swung my legs to and fro and looked across Stylites Green, down into the valley of Browntown, where the Polish slums were.

"Beatrice, child of God," Father said, leaning over me, his baggy cheeks peppered with pin-pricks of sweat, like rainwater beaded on a waxed car, "Rejoice! Be not sad. You are almost an adult now, and your mother is at last free to follow her true vocation. You shall have your own life to live, and who knows if one day you do not come to understand her decision and, indeed, make the same one. .?"

I let my head drop. He took this as my acceptance of the will of God, and kissed me on the crown of my head. Then he straightened up, pointed his finger eastward across the green, and said: "Go now, over to the convent, and say goodbye to novitiate Maria Nicola, who was once the spouse of your father, but is now the spouse of Christ."

And I went. But I couldn't help stealing a glance over my shoulder to see Father Wildebeest still standing in this posture, Job's behemoth, or perhaps a curious piece of lawn ornamentation. §

I like those little candies with the milkmaid on them, very old-world and sort of Victorian. I always try to keep the tiny boxes intact, but then I crush them accidentally. Some people are afraid to eat the wafer part because it looks entirely like onion-skin writing-paper. And I remember the huge, melting blocks of this candy amidst hissing flies which the ladies who looked like Anna Magnani would bat away, under the striped tent-tops, in the outdoor market, when I was young.

Lexie wouldn't come down the stairs, and Mrs. Hoffman kept feeding me candies while we waited for her. First, she brought out the plate of torroni, and then she appeared again with a small dish of Cote d'Or chocolates followed by red-wrapped bon-bons picturing a cherubic girl with puckered lips and saucy ringlets. And then Perugina Baci on an old tin Moxie tray, sesame candies and Jersey toffees, butterscotch kisses and hard fruit candies in their slender white parcels.

"Have another," she would say, her eyes all dewy. We sat, leaning over either side of the coffee-table, our foreheads almost touching, poking candies in our mouths and smoking her Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The clock struck five and I looked at her pleadingly.

80

"I packed you a lunch," she sighed, and produced a wicker hamper with wine-colored handles, a hamper almost as big as the kind one puts dirty clothes in. "And the doggie mittens —Lexie wanted you to have them."

She put them on top of the basket. "And the spangly-eyed bunny." She put him on top of the mittens. "And the autographed picture of Gary Cooper." She put it on top of the rabbit. "And her tri-colored bowling shoes."

She put them on top of Gary Cooper.

"Thank you," I said, and pulled a small bottle of silver buttons from my pocket.

"Give these to Lex," I said, and gathered my things.

'Wait," came a voice from atop the stairs. It was Lexie, with her fine wispy hair, "You forgot the Dada-Book."

"No you have to keep the Dada-Book."

"No please take the Dada-Book."

"I gotta go," I said.

She came down the stairs, and we said goodbye.

At the end of the walkway I turned around to see them framed in the doorway, Mrs. Hoffman with her arms about Lexie, mother and daughter, both of them crying. I dropped the latch on the gate, and stumbled away, clutching all my gifts and page one-twenty-three to two-forty-six of the Dada-Book, a first edition we had bought together at the book-fair, two years ago. We had been eating creamsickles and got it all sticky, I remember.. . §

Two hours into the train ride, when it had gotten too dark to look out the window, into the drizzling rain, I opened my lunch and pulled out: a) a bottle of Bass Ale, b) a fluffernutter sandwich on marble bread, c) a walkman with a tape of Damian Hoffman's band, The Chortling Cadavers.

I put the walkman on and played the tape. The first song, "I'm Dead," went: "I'm dead/ it sucks/ you're dead/ I'LL EAT YOUR FACE." I bit into the fluffernutter, and gave myself up to thought. I was going to live with my sister Clodia, who I hadn't seen since I was nary seven, and she sixteen, when she had run away from home. She was supposed to take me with her, but when I awoke that frosty morning, there was only a note: "Wee Bea, you'll have your own adventures, in time." Through 81

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a series of curious and tiresome events, she was now a twenty-six year old, independently wealthy widow and thriving sculptor.

— But how can I explain to you what I was thinking, then, on that train? Lexie and I struggled with this concept ever since we, taking a cue from Flaubert, began compiling our own dictionary of received ideas.

How can one say, "I was thinking 'blank'" when in actuality there is a shape in one's head, rather tesserectine, you might say, slowing, revolving, catching different thoughts, like a disco-ball catches light, and throwing them out into one's consciousness, for one to filter and perhaps communicate, "Oh, I was thinking about buying an iguana." What is the most functional, accurate way in which to communicate thought? Words are, of course, inadequate, as is tirelessly illustrated by Kundera, whom Lexie and I loathe and should like to burn in effigy on the front lawn. Does one have to, risking sounding like, for instance, Roland Barthes, contrive a new vocabulary to communicate thought? But this is stuff of idiots, like the blather on Dr. Bronner's Peppermint 18-in-one, which a person is wont to read when trapped in the John for long periods of time.

Lex and I decided to get to the root of this problem by think-speaking into a tape recorder, transcribing the words, and analysing them. The first and last time we did this, on a rainy night with a pot of Earl Grey in the Hoffman's sprawling living-room, Lexie said, "Your mother," and my transcribed thoughts yielded, thus: — My mother, my mother tells me not to look so sad half the time, and then the other half not to be so flippant... my mother is terrifically annoying, like the time that she made me scrape the wax off the back of the pew in front of us that had dripped from my candle during Midnight Mass, I think I was twelve. .. she is so holy that... she will probably be one day assumed into heaven, like Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years.. . [muffled noises] [Lexie's voice] —You're forming sentences, just speak your thoughts.

[My voice]—They're like pictures; how do you speak pictures?

[Lexie's voice] —Right. You sound like Mr. Rogers. Just go on, for now. [more muffled noises. Silence.]

[Me] —Clearly inadequate.

[Lexie] —Oh, fuck. [Sound of tape recorder being switched off.] § 82

Hours later I woke with a start. The conductor was standing over me, barking, "Tottlesville—Tottlesville next." I wiped sleep-slobber from my mouth.

It was long after midnight. No one was on the platform to meet me.

I watched the train pull away into the storm, until its back-lights turned into tiny cats' eyes in the distance. I went downstairs.

The station looked like almost any other on the Pennsylvania line, dusty, forties-ish, with an underlying sense that fantastical creatures probably lived in its boiler room. The waiting room was one large hall with high ceilings and shuffleboard maps set into its pebbly floor, rather curious.

There were maybe five or six people hanging about, none of them Clodia. I only vaguely knew what she looked like. She used to send me, every year on my birthday since she was married, a big hearts-and-flowers type card with one hundred dollars, a picture of herself, and a jotted something that usually ran rather like: "Have show in Amsterdam September next, perhaps you can come? Roof caved in, guest house. Big horrific mess. Planted tulip bulbs topside-to this year, didn't come up. Are parents being beasts? Wish you could come live with me. Love, Clodia." I used to read these notes aloud inserting "STOP" in between each sentence, it sounded much more convincing. And I would meditate on the pictures she enclosed each time and think, for example, "This year Clodia is cross, wearing smart fur collar, hair in dutch-girls plaits," or, "This year Clodia scathingly coy, black jersey (chemise? the picture stopped at her shoulders), pressing against her neck strange talisman that looks like a peppercorn grinder."

Still drowsy—it was past two in the morning, I noticed —I lay down on a high-backed pew-like bench, lighting one of my eucalyptus-fodder Sher Bidi's (foul things—why ever do I smoke these?) and, I guess, fell asleep, because— I remember I was in a smoky, hazy, war-torn wood; drumming, in the distance, a dolorous phrase from "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," and rag-tag sprites and whimsies dashing between the trees, always just out of eye shot... I stopped in front of the gnarled tree which had, caught in its branches, a few yards of stiff tulle as if torn from a passing angel, when I heard a groan and turned to see a field of dead soldiers in tinny doughboy helmets (or was it a remembrance of dead soldiers, lying there?), and one staggering towards me. I ran to help him, but he just shook his head.. .1 offered him my arm and he took it, and collapsed —I caught him and looked at him, freckled face, wide-set eyes, helmet all askew, barely older than me, handsome like a Dickens ur83

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chin. .. and then he opened his eyes and —And Clodia, I was sure it was her, was standing over me, looking down a tunnel of curls, saying, "Bea, you are one crazy poodle to be crying in your sleep in the middle of a train station; crying, or sleeping, but both. . ."

"Clodia!" I shouted.

She looked more like me than I had thought. Her eyes were more sparkling, her hair curlier-grape tendrils almost-her teeth were a little gapped, her face rounder and cheeks dimpled. I sat up to take her in.

She was wearing an old Jackie O coat with buttons shaped like X's, a green iridescent-feathered cloche, and, gads, Birkenstocks.

She picked up my portmanteau and basket.

"Come along, then," she said, exactly as a nanny might. Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? I wondered, and she said, "So like mum to become a nun. Do admit."

She had an excellent little Alfa two-seater and drove like a demon, talking all the way about nonsense-her cat, Baloo, whom they had just buried, and the difficulty they had in choosing a fitting epitaph for his teeny grave-stone; auto-maintenance (Italian cars so difficult to keep up); someone named Bobby ("a peach"), etc. She talked nonstop, and before I knew it we were turning up a circular dirt drive.

Her house, Rottley Manor, was a salmon-colored four-story flat-front stucco, awash with floodlights and ivy. She pulled her car round the drive and flattened a pom-pom bush.

Clodia ran me into the house through the rain. Creep-show lit from the outside I saw a statue of winged Nike in the foyer, which led into what looked like a Gothic-revival sitting room, The Mystery of Udolpho presumably being penned in the corner.

"This way," she said, in time with a thunder-clap, "I've fixed a room for you, to your taste, I rather think."

She led me down a hallway to a door leaking light and pushed it open.

Abruptly she dropped my things, kissed me on the forehead and said, "Sleep now," closing the door.

I stood blinking. A tremendous ormolu bed, looking like a wide, beached gondola, dominated the room, over which hung a treacherous copy after Rosetti of "Beata Beatrix'—her deceased, I remembered, was a famous collector of bad forgeries. In a corner was a decidedly un-Narnian wardrobe on which was stacked blankets almost reaching the ceiling, and, facing the bed was a Japoneserie bureau which looked like a kind of sacrifi84

cial altar for black masses. I foresaw lots of cheery dreams to arise from this set-up, and looked under the bed for The Man Who Bites Your Toes, who was not there.

Three books had been placed on the lowboy next to the gondola: Helmut Newton's Big Nudes, The Portable Machiavelli, and a Gorey-illustrated copy of Lear's The Dong with a Luminous Nose, a combination as incongruous and suspect as an Exquisite Corpse.

I was reminded, then of the Exquisite Corpse Lexie, Mrs. Hoffman and I had produced on a particularly drunken night in the Hoffman's sprawling living-room, the product of many bottles of a fine and cheap wine by the name of Trachiotomy, or something like that, it had been a little difficult because Lexie had a sparkling habit of talking about her pictures as she drew them, e.g.".. .And a sweet little man in the corner, but you understand that he must be an idiot, not in a nasty sense, but a certifiable idiot, or crazy, maybe, because little bats are flying around his head, tormenting him, and he is just grinning like an ape.. ."

I assume you might have played Exquisite Corpse: you take a piece of paper, and fold it twice, so there are three panels to draw on; the first person draws a head, and continues the lines onto the second panel, folding the head under so the second person can't see it, who then draws a torso, and flips this over so the third person can't see it, who then draws the legs, so that when you unfold it you have this silly hodge-podge character. That night our Corpse had been a jackal with his head being chopped off with an entrenching tool, on the torso of a cadaver with its skin pulled back like an illustration from Gray's Anatomy, on the legs of an armored knight standing on yet another severed head. We showed a striking simultaneity. Lexie and I noted that thought communication through pictures had the possibility of being almost adequate when used with somewhat like-minded people. And we also noted that this was a rare occurrence, indeed and that our Exquisite Corpse was, unquestionably, the damned ugliest thing we'd ever set eyes on. Mrs. Hoffman, delighted, hung it in the kitchen. §

I awoke fully clothed the next day on top of the chintz bedspread, with the feeling that I had been taken for an all-night galavant by tiny goblins. I checked my skin for telling puncture-marks.

In the hallway I found a note from Clodia: "Went to gather some things for tonight's iete. Have a look-round." This was on a small table with a 85

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cigarette-box which, I found, when opened, came out at one end like a pop-up book. I played with this for a quarter-hour, and then finally thought to smoke one.

The parlor downstairs was monstrous-wonderful, fallen into decay, like a page from J-K Huysmans. Purple damask covered the walls, showing great long water-stains towards the corners of the room. The draperies were too long for the windows and fell to the floor in a rumply Flemish engraving sort of way. Over the fireplace was a painting of some screwy old codger done in a blatantly imitative Ashcan School style. " 'Q. Eustace Rottley,'" I read aloud, giggling, and then realized it was Clodia's late husband, how dreadful. Definitely foot-in-the-grave when she married him.

I liked the foyer best with its black-and-white checkered floor and Nike standing watch. I was sliding across the tiles in my stocking-feet when Clodia came in, just in time to see me trip on the rug.

"Beatrice, whatever are you doing?" she asked, a little peevishly.

"This is Bobby," she said, and a well-dressed man in his fifties was proffering his hand. I hated him instantly. §

"The infamous baby sister!" Yet another man in a red paisley bow-tie exclaimed in an expansive Old-Ivy-League sort of way, righting his debonair forelock with a wag of his head. I had forgotten his name already and longed to forget his company. I grabbed a glass of champagne off a passing tray and threw it down the back of my throat.

"Definitely not Freixenet," he said. I coughed in agreement, standing on tippy-toes to find Clodia so that I might slip away.

"Not so fast, Baby Sister," the man said, and caught the bow on the back of my dress, pulling me down on the couch. Clodia had wrapped me up in a vintage Jean Patou cocktail dress with an enormous velvet bow "over the fanny" as she had said. It was about twenty years too old for me and did not take into consideration the fact that I had ribs. I sat bolt upright, perched on the edge of the couch.

"So, Baby Sister-" "Beatrice," I corrected.

"So Baby Beatrice, your mother decided to become a nun? An extraordinary situation, what? And you as good as orphaned?"

"Well, it's not as if she left me at the church door in a basket—" "No, ha ha ha, yes..." he plucked at the arm of a passing champagne 86

bearer, "Excuse me. . .scotch for me, and the young lady will have. .?"

"A vodka tonic, please."

"So polite! A vodka tonic, please!' The benefits of a liberal education, and all that. Do you miss your mummy? Miss your friends back in Cambridge? A little highschool sweetheart, what?"

"Yes, his name was Bubba and he played football and summarily killed any man he found talking to me, no matter the protestations," I showed inexpressible lament.

"I can see you're joking. You're extremely caustic, and such a young thing."

Our drinks came and I pulled the tiny green straw out of mine and dropped it in an ashtray.

"So bourgeois of them," he said, "putting those little coffee-stirrers in mixed drinks. Otherwise the food is pretty exceptional, quite exceptional, for such a small town."

I shrugged, clinking the ice around in my glass.

"You shouldn't shrug like a Bowery bum. Why don't they send young girls to finishing schools anymore?"

This was the limit.

"I don't know, Dad, why don't they?" I said.

There was a silence. He seemed a little embarrassed. I pulled a long blue cigarette out of someone's case on the table in front of us.

"Yes, extremely caustic. . ." he said, producing a large gold lighter and sending a sickly breath of flame up to the tip of my cigarette, "You know, your sister was younger than you when she married a man much older than I." "Fine for her, I suppose," I said, nodding at the lighter.

"Do you like my cigarettes?" he asked, "I get them sent over from the Netherlands."

"Gee, why bother? Is my tongue blue yet?" I stuck it out at him.

"Oh, you are the tease! I've noticed, young girls, sexually curious, like to tease but"—here he leaned over me—"never do follow it up."

"Oh, HO HO HO (I actually said this, HO HO HO, I confess the drinks were getting to me). So you've pegged me. 'Sexually curious'? Sticking out one's tongue is a typical expression of, well, childish contempt.

Do understand that. And your bow-tie is much TOO LOUD." I dropped the cigarette in his drink and scampered away, this time successfully avoiding his grab for my bow.

I spied Clodia upbraiding a caterer over a tray of swan-shaped cream puffs.

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Quarto "OUT!" SHE WAS SAYING, "GET THOSE THINGS OUT, OUT, OUT of my

house!"

"Clodia, who is that man you left me with?"

"Oh, darling, I knew you'd love him—Rothman Wolfe."

"No, no, no, he's horrible! I think he just made a pass at me."

"Well, darling, what else would you have men do?"

"Well, uh, God, I don't know, run for president at that age! He's such a dirty old man—" I stopped myself, too late.

Clodia fixed a hard stare on me.

"I suggest you do not say hateful things about my friends until you know them."

Rather well spoken, I thought. I tried to put my hands behind my back in an apologetic fashion but was impeded by the tremendous bow, over the fanny, and all that.

I muttered something feeble, and looked toward winged Nike, in the foyer.

"And don't go sneaking off to your room, you understand? We'll have special treats later on." She disappeared.

A man walked by and tugged on my bow. I decided that the next person to do that would get cudgelled soundly.

"No. Really."

"Beatrice," Clodia hissed, this time far louder, "Must you be so common? You are being such a little brat, all this for you, and you'll have none of it!"

"Clodia," Bobby said, "Perhaps we're rushing her."

"Rushing her? Rushing her? Don't be a fool! Why, to have a party like this, at her age..? I should think that every girl would die for such a party!"

Rothman Wolfe spoke up, "You must understand, Clodia darling, that she's not as mature as you were at her age. Someone does have to teach her some manners. Really, in some ways it's quite shocking that she is your sister.

I would like to point out at this time what an unctious creep I found Rothman Wolfe to be, and how I longed to brain him with really any available object.

But I only said, "I'd like to go now."

"Yes! Go! Go NOW!" Clodia screamed at me, and I could hear their uproarious laughter as I closed the door. §

§

Clodia called me to a room off the parlor, the library. I was feeling rather shitfaced and good-natured, but was having difficulty balancing in my heels. I followed her into the library with little steps, Morticia Adams-like, smiling like a benevolent amnesiac.

Inside the library were a few of the younger older men, among them her Bobby and the despicable Mr. Wolfe. They were crouched around a low table on which were placed small, sinister silver trays of—what?

Curious things. Bobby picked up one of the little bottles, uncorked it, and carefully tapped its contents out in a white line. Oh, cocaine, I realized. I must have said this aloud, because Clodia whispered in my ear, "And hallucinogenic mushrooms —in a cheese sauce!"

Rothman Wolfe pulled a little thing not unlike a coffee-stirrer out of his breast pocket and held it out to me.

"Take it, Baby Sister, you're the guest of honor!"

I hung back.

"Come on, then!" he yelled, laughing and shaking the odd little wand at me.

Maybe the Sand-Pit in Le Grand Meaulnes, the garden at Marienbad, the cryptic boulevard in a di Chirico, melancholy smoke from a silent train, a late afternoon of long shadows, a still piazza, the sun at four o'clock and the ineffable slate-blue sky.. .if you look at the figures, they seem to be a man and a lady, he in top-hat and tails, she in long skirt, turn-of-the-century hat... and I look at him, him again! Boy of my dreams.

He looks like the Artful Dodger might look if he were a gentleman, and every thing is as quintessentially perfect as that mournful violin in Scheherazade when, in a snap, the shadows lengthen like gangbusters, the violin snaps its strings and all is darkness, a rend in the canvas, through which I fall, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears, until — — my sister clouted me in the head with a cup of tea.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I recoiled from her in horror, but just for a second.

"Yes, why shouldn't I be?"

"You cried out in your sleep."

"What did I say?"

"I don't know, some strange Runic tongue, doubtless." She smiled like

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a mother cat, handing me the tea, and I found myself smiling back.

"It's my own blend, for hangovers."

It smelled minty and frolicsome. I downed it quickly and gave her back the cup.

I came to realize that Clodia was mad. Not exactly rubber-room mad; her neurosis manifested itself in her schizoid mood swings, her vanity, her selfishness, her fickleness (Bobby went quickly and there continued a parade of other Bobbies marching through the house) and her attempts at manipulating me to I'm not sure what ends, probably for her own amusement.

My letters to my mother ran almost exactly as Clodia's had run to me, e.g., "Clodia's Alfa died and she bought the most abominable Saab, in claret. Clodia on a vegetarian kick and consequently I've dropped seven pounds. Rottley Manor beautiful in the spring. Finished the last Jane Austen novel, very sad —Clodia's library tragically out of date. Love, Beatrice Nicola Ignatia Maria Valerius."

On the other hand, I was a regular Clarissa in writing to Lex, and my letters were rife with shrewd insights, e.g., "She completely ignores me if I try to talk about you and mom [Mrs. Hoffman, I meant] and carries on an elaborate ruse about my hither-to life: I had no friends, mother beat me and locked me in my room and the only books allowed in the house were the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. . .Last Sunday Rothman Wolfe actually pinched my bottom whereupon I punched him in the face and Clodia banished me from the dinner table for a week, much to my general glee..." I pictured Lexie and Mrs. Hoffman sitting around the table in the sprawling living room, reading and re-reading my letters, stuffing an endless supply of Torroni candies in their mouths, waving arms in the air.

Clodia was almost tolerable when working in the studio, hands messy with plastelina. Sometimes she would even smoke a cigarette with me, getting it all muddy with clay and snubbing it out half-finished. I had been there over two months and had barely left Rottley Manor, except for shopping trips to the neighboring city where she would buy me endless millinery which I would be forced into, but not too often: tiny pillbox hats and childish boaters, elbow gloves and the smart little Chanel variety, to be turned back at the wrist, all this mostly gathering dust in my wardrobe, thank god, Until one day— "Beatrice," she told me, "We're going to see Verdi's "Macbeth" at the Waterworks, in Tottlesville. Andrew [her latest Bobby] and Rothman-" 90

"—please—" "—Will be here at seven o'clock. I want you to wear. . ."

I had never been to Tottlesville proper; Clodia always said that there was no reason to go to such a little Godforsaken town. But as patroness to the Tottley Waterworks Opera Company she had to put in her yearly guest appearance.

Long before seven she had dressed me and sat me on the edge of the fussy Queen Anne settee in the parlor. I was wearing a black jersey dress with a proliferation of gold buttons, a "perfect little" wedge shaped hat, rather like what a Wave might wear, a slippery Blackglama wrap, bow-back heels and felt a priceless ass, sitting there.

"Ah, don't we look a picture?" the Unctious Blight said when he came into the room. I hadn't seen him since the pinching incident and had forgotten how dreadful he was.

Clodia came in, dripping faux diamonds and largesse.

"Are we ready?" she asked and turned on her heel.

Andrew was driving, much to my chargrin, because that meant Unctious Rothman and me in the back. I hugged the car door and the Blight contented himself with stroking my fur, how utterly creepy. §

About five minutes 'til intermission, I calculated, sneaking glances at my wristwatch. Rothman had summoned the nerve to put his elbow on the arm-rest, and his fingers dangled in my lap, try as I might to wriggle away. I have never liked Verdi's "Macbeth," and this night did nothing to recommend it to my affections.

The lights went on and Clodia and I were escorted into the lobby.

Rothman left us to gather drinks.

"How do you like it?" Clodia asked, hesitantly.

"Pretty bad," I said.

We all three nodded in silent agreement.

Rothman came back.

"Quite a cast!" he said, handing round the drinks, "That MacDuff is a sparkler!"

I threw my vodka tonic down the back of my throat, knowing mixed drinks are always weak when one gets them out. It seems, however, that I had instead gotten Andrew's straight tequila, one of his winning affectations, doubtless. I dropped the cup and ran for the ladies room just as it came out my nose.

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"You idiot," I heard Clodia saying to Rothman.

The lights were dimming.

"Oh, Clodia, please go back, I'll be all right. It wouldn't do for you to be late. I'll come in between acts."

"Don't blow your nose like a lumberjack, Beatrice."

"Sorry. It stings."

"Here," she handed me a handkerchief, the sort of thing I've never really known the purpose of, and left.

After a bit I felt better, and walked out of the ladies room, resigning myself to another hour-and-a-half of cacophony—written by an Elizabethan, composed in Italian, concerning the Scotch, supertitled in 20th Century English—when I thought, gee, this is about as much fun as memorizing Latin paradigms, and sneaky-Peted it out of the theatre.

The night was gorgeous. I broke into Billie Holliday.

Tottlesville was one of those little creeping-eruption-type towns, with lots of old building facades of gargoyles, gingerbread and cryptic Masonic symbols. Maybe they burnt witches here, I thought. I looked in the dark store fronts, especially taken with a display of Hoovers Through the Ages.

I didn't even feel the rain at first. I was studying the rates for one Madame Nadja, ("Palm Reading-$10, Tarot—$10, Pregnancy-$10, Massages —$30'—Pregnancy? What?) When I felt a raindrop on the back of my neck.

"Oh, shit," I said and made a dash for the nearest awning, in front of a pastry shop across the street.

I cursed my stupidity, and folded Clodia's wrap lining-side out. The rain picked up and I was trapped like a mincing shithead under an awning that said "Yummy-Pie." A quarter-hour passed. I paced underneath the striped awning, and suddenly a sign across the street—a sign one might see dozens of places, vaguely Pennsylvania-Dutch in flavor, saying "SUNDRIES'—called to mind the dream I had had, last night— —I was in a store, which was a lot like my old house —but bigger, huge, like a department store, when I saw this set of cups. They seemed highly ingenious, as things often do in dreams: large tea cups on saucers, with little demitasse cups fitted into them, and a cover on these which doubled as tiny saucers. I wanted to buy them, so I picked up the red92

colored set, which was vaguely Pennsylvania-Dutch in flavor, and I was about to put them in my shopping basket, when a little voice said, "No, don't pick them, Clodia likes them." So I put them down and picked up the yellow-colored set, which was not as pretty, but, after all, was not what Clodia wanted. Then, boom, I was sitting on a stoop over a tall staircase, rather an impossible stoop, and I was playing with the cups, stacking and unstacking them, when, snap, the picture tilted and I was falling, falling down the space between the stairs, skirt blown up Alice-style, cups falling around me. I seemed to fall forever, but wasn't in the mood for marmalade, when, suddenly, "Hello," he said, catching me. The Dickens boy.

I jumped out of his arms indignantly, and scrambled about the floor picking up the shards of tea cups. He crouched down too, and waved the things away, saying, "You've been hanging around your sister too long."

And then I awoke, of my own accord.

I thought of this, looking into the drizzle. And of the third and final step in our—Lex's and mine, that is —quest for perfect communication — through dream divination. The key to glory and Armageddon. But how to inspire this? Lexie and I went weeks eating the same food and trying to maintain similar levels of stress, but invariably I would dream of, say, my limbs falling off, and she of, say, finding a pencil in an artichoke.

I became aware of a figure across the street. Looking at me, perhaps?

I thought of closing my eyes to make myself invisible, realized the futility of this, and the figure started to cross the street.

He looked rather like a bat, I remember, running towards me, greatcoat flapping behind him. I stood frozen watching the rainwater jump beneath his footfalls, until he stopped just outside the awning, and doffed his cap in a curiously old-fashioned sort of way. It was the Dickens boy, incarnate, wordlessly handing me his umbrella.

I took it, very slowly and for a second we stood blinking at each other like children thrown together in a grocery check-out line. Then suddenly, turning back just once to look my way, he was gone, Jumbly Boy back across the sea in a sieve. §

I had to find him; I had to talk to him. I had to ask him what his business was stealing into my dreams.

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Clodia's favorite refrain these days, which she used to stomp up and down the stairs was, "And who is I.V.? Who is I.V.?'— the initials carved into the handle of the precious umbrella, which I had foolishly left leaning against my night-table. I admitted ignorance as to the name, but had to tell Clodia how I acquired the umbrella.

"And that's what you like to do? Take umbrellas from every foolish young man offering one to you?"

She was utterly impossible these days. I was forbidden to set foot off Rottley's grounds, and was left to amuse myself with the library, or with chucking bouncy-balls about the foyer, aiming for Nike's exposed neck, while Clodia threw endless fruit bowls on the pottery wheel in her studio.

I took to exploring the grounds of Rottley Manor. Far in the back of the house was a ruined pear orchard and a lot of toppled trellis work that might have been a grape arbor, all overgrown with bramble and Queen Anne's Lace, very Hodgson-Burnett like. I found an old wheel barrow out there, and washed it out; as the days grew warmer I would sit in it with a book and a six-pack of Dinkel Acker.

One night I couldn't sleep, the moon was so full and bright. Something was certainly afoot. I took my BB gun with me and walked out towards the orchard.

Funny what a little moonlight can do. I stepped around the warped gate leading into the orchard, and disturbed two rabbits who had been whispering sweet nothings under the fallen fence. I picked my way through the sticker bushes, and popped out of the tangle to the clearing where the wheelbarrow was.

Someone had beated me to it. I.V. Dickens Jumbly-Boy. Fascinated, I walked up to him and regarded him in the moonlight.

He was asleep, looking like something a passing stork had perhaps dropped. His face was spotted with dried mud ("Glory be to God for dappled things!" I thought), he had bloodied scratches on his hands and was wearing only one sneaker. He was snoring like all bloody hell.

I smoked three Marlboros and paced back and forth, clapping the barrel of my BB rifle into my palm over and over and saying aloud, "Dees ees veddy interestink."

Finally he started to come to. I stood over him with the butt of my toy rifle perched rakishly on my hip, and said, "Vee haff vays ov makink hyou tok."

He now performed some of the most engaging and spirited movements that I have ever seen a human perform in my life. He sat up quite 94

fast, looked at me, made a double-take, opened his mouth, snapped it shut, tried to get up and toppled over in the wheelbarrow, backwards.

"What's your name?" he asked, popping his head up.

I composed myself and said, "Leni Riefenstahl. 'Mees' to hyou."

"Ah-ha!" he said, "Vee see hyou ees lyink. Leni Riefenstahl vas de nazi sympafizer hwho vilmed 'Triumph des Willens.' Und hyou look like a guinea."

"Well, actually," I said, helping him to his feet, "My name is Beatrice. Beatrice Valerius. And do refrain from pointing out that it rhymes."

"Near-rhyme, I think they call it. Take heart, though. My middle name is Archimedes, in all seriousness. And the rest of it is Ivor. And Veidt.

Hello, I'm Ivor Veidt." He broke into a grin, causing some dried mud to crack off and fall down his shirt. His knees gave out and I held him up, placing him on a cinderblock.

"Gosh I'm sorry. I threw out my knee last night."

"I was just about to ask you about all that—" He started to lean back and I caught him again, in mid-topple.

"Do tell me what happened to you. I've got you by the scruff of your neck, so don't worry about falling."

"I thank you. Last night, well. . .do you want the Pynchon version, or the Henry James?"

Goodness, what's a girl to say? The real trick would be to do it in haiku, mmm?"

"Okay! Give me a second, let's see. . .

I-vor, very drunk-en—" "'Very' counts as two, you've got an extra syllable, your form is appalling—" "Tut-tut-tut-tut, I am aware of this. May I?" I nodded.

He cleared his throat.

"Now, I-vor, he was drunk and chased by shining black dogs into the pale night.

Pretty weak, huh?"

"Rather fine and dappled, I should think. But if I may? I think it lacks the proper, oh, how do you say? spirit of your evening."

"Oh, and I thought you might spare my feelings!" §

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Quarto

Mary Firmani

"Beatrice, where are you going so early? And what's in the bag, dad, ha ha ha?" Clodia said to me, floating down the main staircase.

"Oh, uh, I, uh, couldn't sleep last night, and I went for a walk, and I found—don't get mad —but I found the sweetest rabbit, I mean calico and real witty—uh, witless, I mean to say, scared out of his wits, poor dear, I think he got in afight."I shook my head. "It just doesn't look good."

"Why should I be mad? I've read Watership Down, I understand." Understanding nodding of the head.

I fell into the nod with her and held up the bag.

"Food and, First-Aid, to the poor dear," I said.

"Did you find the radishes in the walk-in?"

"Uh, no, I didn't."

"Well, heavens Beatrice, go to! Don't you know rabbits like those things?" §

When I got back to the clearing, he was nowhere to be seen. I was about to curse the gods when I heard a tune, "Three Little Words," I thought it was, being whistled from a tree.

"Oh, great dryad, who whistleth Gershwin'—the whistler broke into a laugh—"Please come out of your woodly abode, for I haveth teasandwiches!" I held up the bag.

"What?" Ivor said, jumping down, "sandwiches? With bread? Murdered wheat? MY BROTHERS!" he howled into the bag.

I was waiting on the other side of the shed as he put on the change of clothes I had brought him. "\bu like that throw-back music?" he yelled over the teetering building.

"Oh, God, I love all that stuff. You know, like the Dorsey brothers and Gene Kelly and "The One O'clock Jump" and Carmen Miranda . . .hold on, how about this: 'Tan shoes and pink shoelaces and polkadot dress, and man-oh-man, tan shoes and pink shoelaces, and a big Panama with a purple hat-band—'" "What's that?"

a place in Filbertsberg that you've gotta see. Vintage Deco and live Swing every Thursday night.. .but," he said, coming around the shed, "can you stand me?"

He stood before me in a silk shaker-knit sweater, plum trousers and Gucci loafers.

"Gosh, I'm really sorry," I said, "They're all the things that wouldn't be missed. Typical loungewear for Clodia's fellows."

"Clodia? Clodia Rottley?"

"Yeah."

"Where are we?"

"Rottley Manor."

"What?" he said, "Do you live here?"

"Yeah. I mean, Clodia is my sister."

He made a face. "You're Beatrice Rottley."

"No, that's her married name, silly."

"That's what they call you."

"Who's 'they'?" I was puzzled.

He didn't answer.

"Look, I've got all these sandwiches..."

We ate in silence. He kept stealing little looks at me, but he said nothing. I was plainly confused, and sat, tongue-tied.

"Well, he sat at last, "I have to get back, people might think I'm dead.

I'd like to get these things back to you..?"

"Don't worry," I said foolishly, "They won't be missed."

"Oh, well, you could give me your number, in case?"

Oh, Lord. "You know, I don't even know what it is."

"Yeah? That's how it is, huh?" he said, cocking his head back.

I thought, "It's not supposed to be going this way," but got as far as the first word and clammed up.

"Well.. .'" he said, lingering a second, "thank you."

And he disappeared through a gap in the fence. I ran to the fence in some weird fit of Bronte-like angst, and he was down in the valley of the train-tracks, walking away. I watched him, feeling powerless and confused, wondering why the Jumbly Boy went away.

"I have no idea, my dad used to play it on the Navy issue phonograph when I was little."

I could hear him smiling.

"But can you jitterbug?" he asked.

"Can I? Like nobody's business."

"I'm warning you, I just might take you up on this. I mean, there's

Now began horrible nightmares from which I always awoke with a cry, lonely wandering dreams. Sometimes I would even creep to Clodia's door and stand, a whimpering shithead, until I came to my senses and

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§

Quarto

Mary Firmani

returned to my bedroom, cursing the furniture, cursing the very bed clothes.

I summoned the nerve to call Lexie. It rang twelve times. Finally I heard Mrs. Hoffman's voice.

"Hello?" she said.

"Urgh-Ma-floog-blah!" I began.

"Oh, sweetheart!" she exclaimed.

"Mom, I can't take it anymore! I want to go home!" I blubbered.

"Beatrice, sweetheart, Beatrice, listen to me.. .Gather your wits, you'll need them... I checked with Catholic Social Services to see if we could be your foster family, and I was, well Sweetie, classified as unfit because I'm divorced and—Beatrice, honey, please—and then there's Damien's drug record.. ."

I was wailing full-tilt.

"Beatrice, sweetie, you can come stay with us in August, if your sister lets you."

white and oriental fire-screens. And anytime I pulled out a cigarette, it was like summoning a demon Prometheus with his gold lighter.

One summer day, Clodia said, "Do you know what Friday next is?"

I really didn't know.

"It's your seventeenth birthday. We're having another iete, in celebration."

I begged her not to.

"You'll change your mind, it will be great fun!" she said into the air above my head.

Clodia was imbued with a sixth sense that caused her to notice when I was extremely vulnerable, and proceed accordingly. She taught me how to throw fruit bowls on the pottery-wheel, and indeed took up every second of my days now, having me sit and watch Warhol movies with her and Claude, her latest, having me help her trim the topiaries and pick exciting things out of Neiman Marcus with her. And always Rothman would be haunting the background, amidst the chintz and brocade and blue-and-

That week the house was all a-bustle with decorators who were constantly measuring things and getting into slap-fights over color schemes: "Lapis lazuli, fool, and mulberry cream trimmings!" Slap, slap.

"Monochromatic beige, bitch!" Slap, slap, slap.

Clodia mercifully asked me to clean the studio, so as to be out of harm's way. It was decidedly the messiest room in the house, subject to Clodia's temper tantrums. One had to navigate through a forest of fruitbowl stacks just to get in the door. I was tackling the Tottley Sentinel, a year's worth, which was piled haphazardly in a corner, binding bunches with twine, when a headline on a three-week-old paper caught my eye: "TOTTLESVILLE GRADUATES ITS 107th CLASS: Byron Smedley-Smedley, guest speaker; Ivor Veidt, Jr., valedictorian." I scanned down the column, and then turned to the page where it was continued.

There was a simply enormous picture of Jumbly Ivor there, Socratic finger pointed heavenward, smile cocked one way, cap another. ". . .Ivor Veidt, Jr., gave the valedictorian address which urged for more funding for minority students and better liberal arts facilities, throwing to the wind the usual all-praise style of valedictorians past. 'Let's face it, if I'm valedictorian, something's wrong here,' he humbly noted. Mr. Veidt will attend graduate school at Harvard in the fall, seeking a Masters in War History. His father, Ivor Veidt, Esq., of 101 Plotsneck Road, was valedictorian of Tottlesville College's 1960 graduating class."

What a find! I clipped it out, put in my pocket. I now ripped through the more recent papers to search out more Ivor-snippets, but what I finally did find caused somewhat different emotions.

It was a picture of me, in the Chanel jersey dress, looking one fussy bitch in front of the parlor curtains. The caption ran: "Clodia Valerius Rottley wishes to announce the seventeenth birthday of her sister, Beatrice Nicola Valerius (pictured) on June the Thir-

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99

"Oh, she'll never let meeeee! And she's not my sister, she's the Devillll!"

I realized then that nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.

Candies and Corpses and conversations in the Hoffman's sprawling living room were things of the past and the little boxes with milkmaids on them would invariably be crushed.

"We love you," Mrs. Hoffman said, crying.

"I love you too."

I often went out to the wheelbarrow, sometimes with tea sandwiches in my pocket, even, hoping to find Ivor there. But each time I went back it was more and more bitter finding the orchard empty. And what would I say to him? %u can't run away like that, you see, you were in my dreams?

Maybe I am as mad as Clodia, I thought, but I cannot diagnose my neuroses. §

Mary Firmani

Quarto

teenth. A private party will be held at Rottley Manor-house, in celebration. Ms. Rottley will be escorted by Mr. Claude Axeley, and Ms. Valerius

by Mr. Rothman Wolfe."

"Oh no! Oh no!" I shrieked and ran upstairs, down the hall to where Clodia was.

"Clo-di-a!" I bellowed, "Why did you do this to me?"

"And whatever are you talking about, Bea?" I slapped the paper into her hands.

"Why an announcement? We're not Spanish Royalty, you know. MORE IMPORTANTLY, why 'escorted by Rothman Wolfe'? Clearly I hate this man, and have hated him ever since I first saw his blighted face."

"It's the Tottley Sentinel, Beatrice. No one reads the thing. Or whoever are you worried about reading it, hmmm? The mysterious I.V.?"

I turned away, sure my face had gone red.

Dare I call him, dare I call him and say, "Oh-that. Clodia put that in. I hate her parties, I especially hate Rothman Wolfe. Maybe-if you're not busy—you could come pick me up good and early on Friday, and we could go see Dawn of the Dead, which, I see, is playing at the revival house in town? Or maybe you know of a good restaurant, like an Italian one that gives you free bread? Both? Why, yes, I'd be delighted. Well, gee, I don't know about my curfew, actually, I'M NOT EVEN ALLOWED OUT." Some obvious snafu's in this plan. §

Friday morning Clodia pounced, literally pounced on me at seven a.m.

"So much to do today!" she sang.

"Jesus, Clodia, it's seven in the blistery morning."

She pulled a book from under my pillow.

"Being and Nothingness, Beatrice, Being and Nothingness! No one reads this drivel, Bea, one's just supposed to quote from it, and even then, it's so passe." She threw it on the floor, I could hear it splatter.

"How does it feel to be seventeen?" she said, still sitting on my back.

"A lot like sixteen, only more painful," I muttered, not opening my eyes.

She clouted me in the head.

"Get up," she barked, losing her patience.

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§

Clodia and I made our entrance into the face-lifted parlor. Gone was the purple damask, replaced by imported painted panels of very pink, pillowy, romping Boucher-like divinities and scads of gold cornice. But the crowd was the same, madding, although this time got up in ballgowns and white-tie.

Everyone clapped when we came into the room, which made absolutely no sense to me. I was miserable, smashed, having had endless vodka tonics all day. My hand was quickly wrapped around a champagne glass, and I was handed round the room by Rothman Wolfe.

"Balenciaga," he said in my ear.

"God bless you," I said.

'I mean, your dress," he said.

"It has a train," I said wistfully, "Pink satin lining. My earrings are, of course, fake."

"My God, you're actually drunk!" he said, "Ah, Mrs. Vorhees, you remember Beatrice?"

When I had made the rounds I was placed on a tall Second Empire sofa, and given a huge Baccarat tumbler of vodka tonic. I watched Clodia weaving in and out of different groups, patting various men's bottoms and bestowing scowling ladies'-kisses on the women she felt to be the least vile. I looked at the door, thinking I could sneak away now. But the piano quartet started playing Brahms in G minor, one of my favorite things. I looked at Clodia, across the room, and she winked at me. Well this isn't so bad so long as no one pesters me, I thought.

I was almost lulled to sleep by the end of this, when Clodia came up to me, and, whispering in my ear, said, "Go into the library. There's a present for you."

"Oh I don't want a present," I said loudly.

"But this is a nice present," she said, her eyes twinkling.

"Oh, come on!" I said, but then had an idea.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Why don't you go see?" she said, very mischieviously.

I searched her face for a clue, a Jumbly clue-everything made sense now. I understood. It was all a plot, a wonderful plot. Ivor was here!

I hopped down from the sofa, and smiling at everyone, made my way to the library's double-doors. But-pause-did I look all right? I composed myself, then, and pushed the door open— to see, Rothman Wolfe, standing there.

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Mary Firmani

Quarto "What. Is. This," I said.

"Oh, Beatrice!" he said, coming towards me.

I went limp like a rag-doll. He took my arm and sat me down on the leather couch.

"I don't understand," I said, miserably.

"Beatrice, darling," he said, looking the height of unctious blightedness. "Darling. . .dearheart..." he went on, passing his arm about my shoulders, "I have something for you."

He produced a small blue velvet box, and put it in my hands. Just as I flipped the top up he clamped his hand down on my knee.

It was a huge, hideous diamond ring.

"I don't want this," I said, and pressed it to his shirt front.

"Will you marry me?" he gushed.

"What is your problem?" I said.

"Darling.. .consider. .." he said, sliding his hand from my knee up to my waist and sequestering me to the couch.

"Are you daft? Entirely daft? And let the fuck go of me, straightaway, Rothman."

He tried to kiss me, suddenly, on the mouth. I caught him one in the chin with my gloved elbow.

"Oww! I've been kissed by a dog!" I shrieked in my best Lucy Van Pelt voice, and ran howling from the sofa.

"Rothman Wolfe," I thundered, "You are the most inexpressibly horrible person I've ever met. In my life. The word 'hate' would underplay the emotion I feel for you. 'Loathe' is far too tender. Why do you torment me? Are you entirely clueless? WHY DON'T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?" I turned to storm out of the room when Clodia came in, closing the door behind her.

"Beatrice, how could you?" she said.

"Clodia, how could you?" I said.

"I suggest you reconsider," she said.

"I suggest you get out of my FUCKING way," I said.

She backhanded me hard across the face, and suddenly I could taste blood. She had cut my cheek open with her huge diamond ring.

I staggered backwards.

Then she stopped, as if suddenly becoming aware of something, and held out her hand like a newly-engaged, saying, "You, too, could have had such a ring."

"You're loony! You're loony! You're all loony!" I shrieked, and pushed past her, holding my cheek and dashing for the front door.

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§

"Excuse me," I said, aware of the subtle incongruity of being dressed for a queen's at-home while actually standing in a filling station, "Do you have a phone-book?"

The attendant was looking at me with the greatest curiosity, and did not take his eyes off me while pulling out the greasy Tottlesville directory and sliding it across the counter to me.

I forgot myself and let my hand drop from my cheek while paging to the map of greater Tottlesville. The attendant coughed and asked.

"Are you in trouble, honey?"

"Oh no, no," I said, clapping my hand back over the gash, and then letting it drop. "So silly—really too much trouble to explain," I said, while memorizing the names of the streets in line to Plotsneck Road.

"Are you a Rottley?" he asked, pronouncing the name with great contempt.

"Oh no," I said, closing the book, "I'm Cornelia Guest."

But when the sun was low in the West, The Dong arose and said,— —What little sense I once possessed Has quite gone out of my head! — And since that day he wanders still By lake and forest, marsh and hill, Singing .'O somewhere in valley or plain 'Might I find my Jumbly Girl again!

'Forever I'll seek by lake or shore 'Till I find my Jumbly Girl once more!'

Jumbliness is in fact a state of being. I was crouching, exhausted and rag-tag, in the thicket of trees by 101 Plotsneck Road when an enormous and fluffy Siberian Husky bounded up to me and knocked me flat.

"What's you got there, pup?" came a voice, Ivor's.

I grabbed the husky and pulled him to my left cheek like a bountiful powder puff. Looking a cross between Clara Bow and Mrs. Woodhouse.

Ivor was standing there, wearing cut-offs and a Mr. Bubble t-shirt, and holding a Jiminy Cricket ice-cream bar, which he let drop when he saw me.

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Quarto

Mary Firmani

Then he collected himself.

"Oh, Beatrice Valerius!" he said, blinking his eyes melodramatic-like, "Dear thing! How good of you to come! Dressed to the nines, we see.

Isn't tonight your big soiree? Oh, maybe you're just slumming?"

"Ivor, please—" "Oh, now I get it," he said, "A scavenger hunt! What fun! What do we have to find, hmmm?"— he motioned about the yard—"A middle-class garden hose? Maybe a basketball? Oh, the dog, you want the dog!"

All throughout this he had been doing a sort of satry-jig in front of me, but here he stopped, balancing on one foot, and said, "But where's your dad? I mean your boyfriend?"

"It's not that way at all," I whispered, "You got it all wrong."

"No, I think you've got it all wrong. Do you realize you're sitting in my backyard, holding my dog in a headlock? What eccentric drunken shenanigans are these? Oh, the rich are different, I forgot!"

"Ivor, I'm not—" "What is the matter with these people?" He asked the heavens, seemingly, "Did you fall out of a car on the way to a progressive dinner party?

Come on, I'll drive you home."

"Home..." I said, and the dog bolted.

"Oh good lord," he said, and took my chin, turning to see the dried blood and dog-fur on my face.

"Jumbly Ivor," I said, "will you take me back to Cambridge with you?"

ice-bucket.

"Compleements ov dee haus," he said.

"Why thank you!" we chimed.

"Oh, look, Ivy, Freixenet. I love this crap."

We drank.

"If I might-" he began.

"Mmmm?"

"That is-" he said.

"Oh, would you listen to me. I've just been wondering, obsessively so, why you ever came to my house that night. I mean, after I was such a lout to you, that day in the orchard. You barely knew me. I could have been a serial murderer."

I thought a second.

"Well, I'd seen you around a lot, by some rather extraordinary circumstances."

"But how? You seldom left Rottley."

"It's really such a long story," I said.

"Beatrice, we've got all the time in the world," he said, "Please. As my dad used to say, uh, 'Begin the Beguine.'"

And wouldn't you know the band struck that up?

§

Clodia and Rothman were married under a billowing white canopy on a fine mid-summer day, to no one's real surprise, except perhaps Claude's. After a few nasty remarks ("Seducing my sister with umbrellas!") Clodia, I think, actually liked Ivor. We slipped away from the reception early, nothing left to do but go dancing at the Brassy Splash in Filbertsberg.

Ivor sat me down at our table, and I kicked off my T-straps. Ivor flapped the lapels of his George Raft suit. Cab Calloway winked at us from the wall.

"You're really just the best hoofer," Ivor said to me, taking my hand across the table.

"Pish, sweetie, I stepped on your feet twice."

"That's because they're so big and clumsy," he said.

We sat smiling lazily at each other. A waiter came up with an 104

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Contributors' Notes Harlan Breindel graduated from Columbia College in 1987. He will be a teaching fellow in the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University this fall. Rick Bruner studied writing for two years at the University of Montana then worked as a reporter in the British Virgin Islands for a year and a half. Now he is a senior in the School of General Studies Writing Program. This is his first published fiction. Amelia Burgess is a student at Barnard College. She began writing in the School of General Studies Writing Program, and is planning a future that will allow her to continue. Luba Burtyk is presently enrolled in Ellen Currie's Fiction writing workshop. A native New Yorker, she is at work on her first novel.

Russell Day graduated from Columbia College, as an English major, in 1986. He is presently working for The New York Times. He plans to attend the Graduate School of English in the University of Minnesota this fall. Mary Firmani is a student at Barnard. She takes Fiction writing with Raymond Kennedy and has plans to become a vagrant. David T. Gordon is a sophomore in the School of General Studies who will be majoring in German Studies. He is a writing student of Austin Flint.

Charles Graef is a junior in the School of General Studies, currently taking a class with Glenda Adams. Kathryn Gross, an English major at Barnard College, writes poetry and short fiction. She is a student of Mark Rudman. This is her second published poem. Jeffrey Jullich was an executive editor for Quarto last year, and is currently an editorial assistant at Shiny International. In 1988, poems of his appeared in Caliban, Another Chicago Magazine, and Normal Magazine (Rizzoli International). He is presently collaborating with composers as a librettist and lyricist. Rita L. Kieffer is graduating in May 1990 from the School of General Studies as an English major concentrating in writing. Born and raised in the Midwest, she has lived in New York for the past ten years. She is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, and is presently enrolled in Mark Rudman's poetry class. Joyceann Masters is currently enrolled in the School of General Studies. In addition to her story in Quarto, she has work coming out in Nebo and The Allegheny Review. Dana Micucci is in Austin Flint's class. A writer living in New York City, she holds a masters degree in English literature. Susan Sullivan Saiter is a former journalist, having worked as editor of The Evanston (Illinois) Review, a Chicago stringer for The New York Times; and reporter for The Chicago Sun Times. She is taking a fiction writing workshop at Columbia Univer-

sity with Ellen Currie and is currently working on a novel. Dick Scanlan is an actor living in Manhattan. He has taken both Glenda Adam's and Ellen Currie's fiction workshops at Columbia. His story, "Matinee," will appear in the first issue of Transitions. Bill Valentine is presently taking a class with Glenda Adams. He works as a computer programmer at Columbia University. This is his first published work. Benji Whalen is a Columbia College student who has studied with David Ignatow, Raymond Kennedy, and is currently enrolled in Ellen Currie's fiction class.

He is active in poetry and fiction. He grew up in Vermont, but was born in New York.

Drew Curtis is a New York artist who works as a senior craftsperson in Reproduction Studios at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scott Gubala is an illustrator. He recently graduated from Parson's School of Design, and lives in Jersey City.

James Risser is the pastor of the Postcard Church in Santa Barbara, California, where he teaches, writes and makes art.

Bernadette P. Tuazon is a free-lance photographer. She is completing her post-graduate program in General Studies at Columbia University this year.

Mark Wilson is an Australian painter living in New York City. He shows at Fawbush Gallery, NY.

1 1 ---

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*

Beginning and Advanced Classes Evening and Daytime

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