1992-Vol28 by Quarto

QUARTO ISZ.J,

QUARTO

Quarto

The Literary Magazine of the School of General Studies Columbia University Volume 28 1992

Table of Contents

Submissions Current and recent General Studies students—including nondegree students and students in other branches of Columbia University who are taking Writing Program courses—are encouraged to submit to Quarto. We welcome poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, and plays, including excerpts from longer works. Each submission must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Please include your name, address, and phone number on your manuscript. Manuscripts may be submitted elsewhere while under consideration at Quarto; just notify us of acceptance by another publication. Address all submissions and correspondence to:

Quarto 615 Lewisohn Hall Columbia University New York, New York 10027

Flesh and Blood

Richard Dragan

....8

Fruit Cafe

H;ye Yung Park

..20

Mother Tongue

Sally Jones ....

...21

State of Grace

Gale Dick ....

..27

Pierre De Vos

.33

Lady Slipper

Jo Ann M. Clark

Halley's Comet

Jo Ann M. Clark

Maryhu Capes

Lynne Kassabian

Ears

Apologia Olive and Aurora I Don't Remember

Laurie Schaffler

Small Voices

the Word Chemotherapy

Murray Nossel

Walnut Grove

R. L. Toume

Play

James Brosnan

Contestants

Leslie Holland

J. Valera

David Hauger

Barbara Livenstein

Unavailable One

Janet Kaplan

101

Fourteen

Janet Kaplan

102

Jeanne Dutton

104

Malcolm Ulysses

Sean Daly

110

Correspondence

Sean Daly

112

Bras and Things

Amy Scheibe

113

The Dover

Charles Ardai

122

"Contemplating . . ..'"

Mela Bolinao..

Millay Shelburne Graveyard Blizzard

Willy Jenkins on the Wild Side

All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists upon publication. ISSN 0735-6536

Photographs

Rhya Fisher..

Cover .19,32,63,65, 103

Editors Anna Brailovsky Amy Evalds Rhya Fisher Petra Lewis Allison Marshall Lybia Marsi Burt Murray Dante Polichetti Sheila Quinn Amelia Richards Jeffrey Schieli Jalina Smith Katharine Thelma Alex Whitney

Faculty Advisor Joy Parker Director, Writing Program Alan Ziegler Quarto is produced by students in the Literary Editing and Publishing course at the Writing Program. Designed and typeset by Alex Whitney, Thin Line Design. The editors wish to express their special thanks to Mary Ruth Strzeszewski and Lynn McGovem, and Sally Jones, who did a fine job of proofing.

Quarto Prize This year's Quarto Prize for outstanding literary achievement is awarded to:

Richard Dragan

for "Flesh and Blood" Chosen by Joy Parker and Sheila Quinn from the contents of this issue.

Richard Dragan

Flesh and Blood by Richard Dragan

urely he should have been somewhere else, somewhere less to do with shadows and this business of lurking. That was his job, incessant lurking, dispassionate observation behind the viewfinder, hiding behind the crosshairs in his studio, a loft actually that seemed always to fill up with damp as if after a rain. There Hilmar photographed babies, mothers, brides, grooms, high school debutantes, and cheerleaders, those categories of people most concerned with human feeling, he suspected, which he had thrown aside some years ago for much more private and stringent obsessions. People came to him for photographs of the dead as well as the newlyliving. He retouched the images of deceased relatives and friends. Usually, he cropped out the living from the corner, and then centered the frame around the one who had passed on. The photographer turned the careless snapshots into icons to treasure, something to hold onto, to place on the mantel over the dull light of a waning fire, and to savor in the space of a moment or two before resuming the old battle with everyday noise. He tinted photographs with chemicals so toxic as to eat away the fingertips of the leather driving gloves he wore through an idiosyncratic (so he believed) sense of fashion in the world of the darkroom, the place where he birthed his faces of the missing, who routinely reappeared as if by a rough magic under the stopper bath, still smiling as if nothing were wrong, or looking somber and skeptical (he found that many of his subjects who had passed into the beyond had been preserved in moments that intimated their pending demise). These faces kept their expression under the water as he washed them. They seemed quite content to be drowned. The daguerreotype portrait that one could hold in the hand, he knew, was invented to remember the dead in a time of disease, medical

charlatanism, and ignorance that did little good to anyone. So went the origins of the photographer's art. The photograph of the dead child in its flowered crypt kept a memory alive, at least until the beholder succumbed to the same war, the same influenza, the same typhus soon after. One could do little except look on and pray. The photographer considered himself the heir to his art's original intent. Hilmar was a traditionalist. The surveillance outside his studio was a messy extension of his real work back in the dark, but he enjoyed it too, to be able to walk around in the park with his lenses and measure the world around him in its shadows and raw visual forms, which appealed, he suspected, to the inner core of his brain, the reptilian center most preoccupied with temperature, hunger, crude survival. It was this part of him that caused him to seize certain situations over others within the frame of his lens. The woman was playing with her leather handbag now as she sat uncomfortably on the metal park bench in a pose of uncomfortable expectation, of waiting for a friend or lover who might not show, half-hoping that he wouldn't, in fact, because if he came, there would no doubt be discord. The woman, who was tall and dressed in a red cashmere coat, now examined the back of her hands as though searching them for hints of age. She smirked as if unhappy with what she found, though she was perhaps only thirty-five, and her dark hair showed no trace of gray. The photographer watched the woman readjust her coat nervously on the surface of the seat. He liked the way her body did not seem to fit the bench. He took a few shots, the silent shutter of his Leica whirring like a timid night insect out prematurely in the light of afternoon. The woman's elegance, the set of her attenuated limbs reminded him of a Modigliani or a Mannerist painting, the angular jut of her jaw reminded him of his very first model, Louisa, whom he had met in a bar in Frankfurt during his student days. That night, Louisa said she was nineteen, but she obviously wasn't, and she was extraordinarily drunk. When he took her back to his room at the pension, little larger than the trunk for his camera equipment, she seemed a willing enough victim. When he asked her to be politely tied up with a variety of ropes and makeshift gags, she wasn't as concerned as he thought she might be. She only laughed a drunk's laugh and abandoned all forms of caution. He had only wanted to photograph her in varying degrees of undress. He had planned no more. When she was free to go without even a chafed wrist or ankle for the evening's exertions, it was Louisa who had, in fact, seduced him. They 9

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continued to see each other for about six months. By the end, she was comfortable posing for him for hours on end. She didn't seem to mind holding still while he reloaded his camera, set up his floodlights, and held the camera immobile while coaxing her into the exact position dictated by that inner, lidless eye that told him what he wanted. In those black-and-white images taken in the chill of winter, Louisa's gooseflesh was visible. Hilmar was pleased with the detail and always felt a pleasing tinge of nostalgia and distinct memory—indeed, much like a photograph—whenever he looked back on his student period. He had sent Louisa a copy of his first book that featured some of her photographs. Not his best work, he thought, but he had written that he thought she was ravishing. Louisa had written back in her own letter that whenever she thought of their time together, she felt physically cold. He had no idea why. His new subject had not moved for some time. Presently, a balding, short, and squat man, wearing a leather coat that extended well past his fat knees approached the woman on the bench. He was smiling guilelessly, the smile of an angel. She stood to meet him. The photographs from this moment were taken in rapid succession with Hilmar's zoom lens turned full up. They showed the woman rear up in her seat, as if surprised that it is indeed time to meet the person she had spent nearly an hour anticipating. In the first frames, the woman had put on what looked like a resplendent smile of her own. Only after the first twenty frames does the camera detect that she was terrified; on closer inspection, the smile looked like that of a weirdly happy mannequin. Although Hilmar's photos could only hint at motion, one could imagine that in these middle images, the corners of the woman's thin red lips were quivering at their upturned edges at the impossibility of carrying off her deceit. The man in the coat now grimaced. He embraced the woman as if administering a kiss of betrayal. He lunged his wide body toward her. She was defenseless at his approach and could only accept the violation of the buffer zone of her private space. This image, one of the best, Hilmar later believed, showed her looking panicked and distant as the man's lips contacted her pale cheek. Perhaps it was the cold, or real terror, but, under extreme magnification of the image, one could make out the outline of a welling tear in an eye made dull by terror. As the man retreated, her posture seemed to dissolve; she crumpled noticeably as she stepped back. Then the short man stood with his legs apart, savoring the power of conquest. Here the photographer switched to his back-up camera, having exhausted his first thirty-six exposures, and having no time to 10

reload. The new camera, an old Nikon, was bulkier; its black metal body cold to his touch. The woman and the man, one hundred and fifty feet away and invisible, they believed, to everyone, now exchanged words. The woman reeled back even more, and suddenly, though the open shutter did not capture the impact, let loose a slap that landed on the right side of the man's face. The camera would record only the twist of his neck in reflex to the fresh pain and the woman's now genuine smile at her momentary triumph. The man, however, retaliated, and the photographer was actually surprised at the force and suddenness of the man's blow to her head, the way her body flopped sideways to the ground like a child's discarded toy, and the man's subsequent solitary, and equally vicious kick. The photographer only managed to capture the blurred image of the man's receding frame as he walked rapidly down the path away from the woman, and the twitches of her legs and arms as she contorted in distress. Before Hilmar could think about what he was doing, he found himself running down the hillside, from his perch behind his rock, to assist the woman. In his haste, he almost forgot his camera bag, but the part of his mind most dedicated to habit remembered to sling the bulky bag over his shoulder. His two cameras bounced their costly optics against one another before he could slow down and consider what he was about to do. The woman was sitting up, sobbing quietly, nursing her leg and right temple. Before the photographer could re-establish his invisibility—surely this was what all his instincts impelled him to—the woman called out to his back as he took a step away from her, toward his usual, calculated anonymity. "Please. Help me," she called out to him. When he turned, he saw her bloodied face with its mask of total bewilderment. Her former elegance was shattered. His first impulse was to grab for his Nikon and obtain a few shots of the woman's contorted frame, which had taken the mottled shadows of the sunlight through the trees. How interesting, he thought to himself. He thought he remembered that one of his favorite artists, Rodchenko, had done a series on wounded faces back in '37. Or was it Kirchncr? Hilmar continued to speculate. But he was soon watching his hand carefully reaching down to the woman and helping her to her feet. The woman's stocking was torn. As she stood, she re-established contact with the earth tentatively, like some newly-born animal uncertain that legs were in fact designed for supporting the entire weight of the body. 'There you go," he offered, as the woman collapsed back onto her bench. Her head was bent to one side as if she were having difficulty with 11

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balance. As she Ribbed a bruised shin with the back of a beautiful hand, he noticed her left shoe was off. "Thank you," she said. He could tell that if he left now, she would probably be too disoriented to remember that she had been abandoned. He could retreat to his room and work on printing some of the shots of the day. He had the inklings that he had stolen something remarkable from his world today, the worth of which could perhaps only be savored back in his dark lair. The photographer was not sure what to say. He was surely more visual than verbal. And now nothing was clear to him. "Do you want the police?" he asked her, really not sure of whether she would want to involve the authorities because of the suspicious nature of her assailant. "Later, perhaps," she said. "Thank you for stopping," she added. She was regaining her composure. He noticed her body on the bench had pulled its weight back into its previous configuration. She winced as she rubbed her leg. Her head nodded hypnotically as if acceding to an unstated question that only she could hear. "I was just passing," the photographer replied. "On my way to conduct some business," he continued, motioning to the equipment around his neck. The woman nodded as if understanding exactly what his business would be. He knew right then that she was someone of great personal acumen and cunning. He knew from the way her aura reassembled itself. In a few moments, he would not be able to get away. She would be conscious of him, and, more importantly, of herself. He would not be able to just walk away and disappear. He would have to provide his name and other personal, and therefore, incriminating data.

clearly still in pain. He could tell from the way her eyes wanted to glaze over with tears, but her sense of discipline kept her from breaking down. "Can I take your picture, Ms. Klimt?" Hilmar ventured. "Mrs. Klimt," she corrected him. "I'm afraid today I am a victim of my ex-husband, whom you have almost had the opportunity to meet." Yet the woman agreed to his request as though it were totally natural. She only straightened her hair with her finger. She proffered the cut side of her head for the camera. On the black-and-white film, the smudge of blood on her cheek would perhaps be even more dramatic, despite the loss of color. Hilmar moved quickly, as if guilty about what he was sampling. Even he could not have staged the events of the day any better.

"Not everyone would be as concerned as you," she continued. "No," he agreed. "I mean, yes, that is unfortunately true." "My name is Cassandra Klimt," she offered, "I do not, of course, know who you are." The photographer winced at the implicit suggestion. He looked at the woman's eyes and admired their determination at not letting her pain escape. He felt drawn to those eyes and unconsciously fingered the buttons of his Nikon. "I am Hilmar. And I am a photographer," he replied after a pause. "Thank you, Hilmar," she said, testing out his new name. She was

"Thank you, Ms. Klimt," he offered. He was genuinely grateful. His heart palpitated in his chest as it always did when he had committed a photographic crime of such intensity. On a whim prompted by that darkest part of his brain, the one that understood shapes rather than names, he took her hand and kissed it dramatically, with great compassion and empathy. Her face registered extreme shock, as if hit by another punch, and then a sublime understanding of Hilmar's gesture of emotional affectation. "Hilmar," Cassandra said, "I don't know what to say." "Let us go to the police," Hilmar said. "Whoever did this to you must be punished." "I am afraid that the police will not be able to help." "Whatever you wish," Hilmar said. He suspected that she knew what she was about. "My cx-husband is a desperately sick man," she went on. "I'm afraid he enjoys expressing himself through violence." Hilmar nodded his assent. He knew exactly what she meant. "So it was him. He did this?" Hilmar ventured. He thought it really didn't matter, except for his own curiosity, to know the circumstances surrounding all of his work. "We met to discuss some money he owes me," Cassandra said. "I told him he could surrender it politely or my attorneys would get it from him through legal force." She rubbed her left eye, which was growing bluer as her injury took on a bold, visual form. Once again, Hilmar was possessed by the deep urge to affix the shape of her damaged face to film. He shook his head noticeably at the thought. "I sec you understand," Cassandra said. "He resorted to calling me

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names I do not deserve to hear." She stared off into the trees beyond her. She was still on the verge of semi-consciousness. "I had forgotten how hard Georgie can hit, and his ability to sink to great depths." Hilmar asked what she meant. "He said he would undoubtedly kill me." Staring out past the trees, she spoke as if reading a fact in a newspaper. It was clear that she either didn't comprehend what she was saying or chose not to believe it. Perhaps she was so secretly afraid that she could not look at anyone and tell the stark facts. "He said tonight everything would be settled." Hilmar was enchanted. He tried to look unconcerned. The edge of a plan formed in the blackest root of his brain stem, but he didn't dare bring it up. "We cannot let that happen," Hilmar suggested. "I will not let it." He was clutching onto his camera. Its metal body now felt warm against his chest. He felt unreasonably confident, slightly invincible. "Don't worry about me," Cassandra said. "I can take care of myself." There was a pause as she took stock of her situation. "And I hardly even know you," she added. Her eyes had widened and revealed their black centers, liquid and whorling with fear. Hilmar had only seen such a look on some of his subjects, the ones that in real life no longer existed, except on the print he was grappling with under his fingers, rinsing it or submerging it into chemicals, to attempt to bring that person back to life for someone left behind. Hilmar thought she could be one of his best subjects. Despite her polite protests, he rode with her in the taxi. She lived on the third floor of an old brownstone made out of mauve brick with white marble ornaments, sneering gargoyles, and child angels lining the top of her roof, guarding her castle from the city below. Hilmar took a few shots of the architecture and the street for documentation. He helped her up the stairs and into the elevator. Her foot was still giving her keen discomfort. Her left calf had purpled and was markedly swollen. Her head was still set on the rest of her body incorrectly; it listed noticeably whenever she attempted to walk on her own. Still, Cassandra's fundamental dignity, her will not to appear vulnerable, was intact. Hilmar was quite impressed with her bearing. Out of reluctance or dizziness, she hesitated while searching for her

Richard Dragan

key in her handbag. Hilmar persisted, however, feigning chivalry and empathyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;though there was a touch of something sincere to be sure. He was most interested in making sure she was safely ensconced in her apartment. Then he could go on with his other plans. The apartment itself was palatial. It must have occupied the whole floor and some additional heretofore undiscovered space in the building. It was an architect's playground: sleek metal-framed furniture set at well considered intervals in the main room. There was a white leather ottoman, a rug of some kind of striped skin on the floor, and huge windows that looked over a tiny garden and then the profile of the entire city. He sat Cassandra down; her sleek lines complemented those of the chair, he thought, and he fought off a subterranean impulse to ask her to tilt her head to one side into a beam of light given off by a lamp in the corner. But he had packed his cameras away on the ride over. "You must go to the hospital," he reminded her, "as you promised." "I'll see my doctor tomorrow," she said. "I'll be perfectly fine in the morning." The photographer didn't think so. He was convinced that Cassandra had some kind of mild concussion. "Fewer questions," she explained. "My physician has seen this thing with me before. I don't have to invent anything, like falling down the stairs." Hilmar was touched by her revelation. He was convinced that this Georgie was even more monstrous than she had described. From the first day of their time together, she told Hilmar, Georgie had been violent. Apparently, he was an unscrupulous importer; he bought cheese, rugs, and even illegal ivory into the country. He wasn't a gangster himself, Cassandra said, but he worked with gangsters every day, and the petty criminals of many lands. His work took him to many different countries, where he made all kinds of money, she said. Georgie had been prodigiously unfaithful to her. Yet, he had always made up, even after the occasional exclamations of violence, with exquisite gifts: paintings, jewels, poems of his own devising, written on the jet between Hong Kong and Los Angeles. It wasn't the money that held her in his grasp; she had enough of that on her own. It was something inside her, she was convinced, that was bent on something close to self-annihilation that had kept her with Georgie for almost four years. Hilmar listened to her story intently, as if conducting a psychological interview, an assessment, an initial and important observation that would deter15

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mine the course of treatment for his patient, now supine on the couch. He told her that he understood everything, that she needed rest most of all, and that he would be back to check on her later. "I need to take care of some personal affairs," he told her. He could tell that she was skeptical of his intentions, but thought that if she had trusted him so far, there wasn't enough evidence to shift her alliance, to tell herself to act on her own. He also noticed that she seemed very tired. He poured her a tall glass of gin mixed with some orange juice that he found in her refrigerator, careful to wipe the bottle and glass after he was finished pouring. He watched her sip it slowly and methodically. She collapsed once more on the couch and fell asleep. Hilmar took some liberties with his lens this time, convinced that he had full license. He photographed her torn stocking. He photographed her chest uneasily rising and falling. He photographed the shape of her hair on her velour thrown pillow, and then he found himself out of film. Before he left, he fished the keys out of her handbag. He turned out the lights with his elbow, and made sure the door was locked. Once he was convinced that Cassandra was in no pressing danger, he walked out of the apartment, the click of his heels echoing emptily on the marble floor of the lobby. He turned into the night and planned on what equipment he would need later that evening.

At nine o'clock, Hilmar knocked on the door, not loudly enough to wake her should she be at home and still sleeping. Over his shoulder, he carried a bulky bag, which contained some necessary tools: a few lights, a collapsible tripod and two dozen rolls of film. He was wearing a pair of driving gloves that he used in his darkroom. He did not want, of course, to leave anything as personal as fingerprints this time. After knocking more loudly and getting no answer, the photographer was convinced that she was either still lost in sleep, or missing from the apartment. (Perhaps she had taken herself to the hospital after all, Hilmar thought.) He opened the door with guarded suspicion and peered into the dim outlines within the huge nave of the apartment. There were no lights on inside, only the hundreds of tiny illuminations from the city's nightscape casting a murky glow into the room from the bay window, adding up to a shade of light just dimmer than a faint moon. Hilmar put his bag next to the door as it closed behind him. He was acutely conscious of the air flowing in and out of his lungs. Though he 16

certainly had four churning chambers inside his chest, he was struck by the feeling that his heart had suspended operation. He imagined his body absorbing the dark air directly, like an animal so elemental, so primitive that it hadn't even developed the need for blood. There in the dark, searching for organic shapes in the corners of the room, shapes that at this moment might present danger, Hilmar felt that he was his own creator. He now had his camera in one hand and his other ready to defend himself. In the kitchen, Cassandra lay unconscious in a heap underneath a glass table. Her eyes were half-open. They fluttered slightly as she breathed. Her limbs were folded underneath her as though she were sleeping. Before attending to her, Hilmar checked the rest of the apartment for other signs of life. He found nothing. He called out her name, but there was no motion. He then touched her cheek and found that it held an odd chill. He picked her up and carried her to her couch. She was very heavy. Through his exertions, he felt the blood returning to his hands and feet. He felt the regular pattern of his heartbeat through his black shirt. Cassandra stirred as she was being dropped back on the couch. Her breathing was irregular, an uneven rasp. Hilmar began dialing for an ambulance, then slowly put the phone back in its resting place. Someone was scratching at the door, fumbling with keys. He turned round just as a band of light from the hall carved a dim trapezoid out of the blackness of the room. It was Georgie, earlier than expected, wearing what looked like a ski mask. His wide body was dressed completely in black. He hesitated before he put his foot through the doorframe. But he must not have noticed Hilmar or Cassandra because he walked into the room with the same uncareful swagger that had made such an impression on Hilmar that afternoon. "Cassie? Cassie!" said Georgie in the darkness. His voice was quier and gruff. It promised unlimited malice. He did not seem to be carrying a weapon. But Hilmar suspected that, from Cassandra's description, George would be quite content to do his work with his fists, with only his bare hands. Hilmar did not expect such a direct confrontation. He had expected to set up surveillance in an adjacent room, to set up the lights and the camera on its tripod, and to wait for the precise, opportune moment. Despite the change in procedure, Hilmar's reaction was swift, sure, and only appeared to be premeditated. Looking back, he would have said that he had acted upon some vital, instinctual impulse, and that it was exactly this drive that made him the photographer that he was. 17

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The photos from these few seconds were not beautiful, Hilmar would be forced to admit. They were shot with an extremely brilliant flash, too bright to preserve the details of die subject under scrutiny but, on the other hand, appropriate to the situation, given the subsequent effects. The images were taken rapidly, with the aid of film ripped through the abdomen of the camera by a motor. They occur every half second, conceived in an intense light much more sterile than sunlight, and much more short-lived. There are thirty-six of them. They show a hooded figure with a wrestler's compact frame stop abruptly from his tentative, forward motion through the door. They show a hand sprouting hairy knuckles reaching behind the back of his head as if for a secret resource, a concealed weapon. But what is revealed is a middle-aged man's thinning hairline, eyes that are round with shock, large jowls, and a menacing expression about the lips. The precise details of Georgie's face came back to Hilmar, even in those fragile seconds in the darkness exploded by those small strokes of lightning. (Under more serene conditions, Hilmar would have liked to shoot Georgie more carefully. He had a visually intriguing face, at once exquisitely padded with flesh, and undoubtedly grotesque, like an overweight bulldog. Hilmar's visual lobe in his brain had to agree, despite any misgivings about Georgie's personal character.) The middle ten frames show this grappler put up his guard and reach into his pocket. There are two or three frames where the subject is clearly searching for something that doesn't exist. One could tell by the look of desperation that came across the heavy face. (Perhaps, Hilmar later thought, Georgie was used to carrying a gun, but for this job, which satisfied such personal needs, he had decided against it and opted for a more brutal and bare-knuckled technique.) The latter half of the series—which aren't in focus because the subject under surveillance has moved too quickly for the auto-focus to compensate—show Georgie turning as if to begin a sprint and pouncing back through the doorframe, like some large bear or buffalo suddenly wounded and hurt and desperate for open spaces where it can recuperate in quiet. The camera could not record it, of course, but the real Hilmar heard Georgie's deep growls as he made his way to freedom. When Georgie was gone, Hilmar found his newly returned heart palpitating, not out of fear as much as excitement, the adrenaline rush of what's captured and transferred from one darkness to another, from that of the inside of the camera underneath his trembling fingers to that of his black room at home. After checking the hallway and closing the door, Hilmar dialed an 18

ambulance for Cassandra, who seemed to be sleeping better now. The photographer reloaded his Leica and took another few shots of Cassandra's slumbering form. He could not wait for the ambulance to come. There would be too many questions to answer. There was always that camera obscura of memory, which filled in details with extraneous—and artificial— material. It distorted and denied whatever it wanted, he knew. But Hilmar had saved the real facts, the absolute story for later. It could be exposed privately, in all its luxuriant detail, in the comfort of his studio as a sequence of preciously paid-for images. To his mind, that truth was perfect and undeniable.

Fruit Cafe by Hye Yung Park

Mother Tongue

'Two plums please," you say and pluck them off the tree, soft leaves falling onto the rim of your glasses as we bite into the sweetness. And then you smile, your lips full and purple as if you'd just had a popsicle. So how 'bout it? A ranch, a small ranch, with lots of dry dusty wind and long green trees with orangey leaves, and waking up to the warm quiet; not even a clock ticking but maybe a few birds, and sheets warm and curled around our legs. We'd have bread and butter. And sometimes we'd sit outside at night, grass tickling soft, and I'd close my eyes, imagine how to draw the sky like that, all dark and wild and black but purple inbetween the trees; and we'd say it was that plum you ate.

by Sally Jones

Essie Macpherson was a healer, an early practitioner of holistic medicine, though no one thought of it in those terms back then. Essie didn't talk much about her gift. She'd tell you that her cures were just recipes, handed down from one generation of Macphersons to the next. If you can imagine a hardy clan of superstitious Scots intermarrying with their mystic CherokeeSauk neighbors, you'll get an idea of the strange combination of ingredients that made up Essie's cures. If you really pinned her down, she might admit that the magic came from some collective life force that she didn't feel the need to lay a name to—Essie didn't believe in God. She didn't believe in God, per se, and she didn't believe in doctors, who she felt were just out to make a buck. She had raised eight children to adulthood on what she called good-old-fashioned-common-sense, with no more to guide her than a medical dictionary, the farmer's almanac, and the diaries of those pioneer ancestors and she was hard pressed to understand these modern parents who carried their babies off to some pudding-faced pediatrician at the first sign of the sniffles. Mary Kate Macpherson never said so, but her children could tell she thought their Grandma was a little off her rocker. Mary Kate suspected Essie's earache cure—which consisted of blowing cigarette smoke directly into the ear and if that didn't work pouring warm mecurichrome into the ear drum—was responsible for the hearing problem of Angus Macpherson, who was Essie's son and Mary Kate's husband. He hears when he wants to, was Essie's response. 21

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As Mothers- and daughters-in-law go, Essie and Mary Kate got along pretty well. Bound together by their love for Angus and the children, they developed a grudging respect for one another as women, which, when kept at a respectable distance, seemed almost loving. Their clashes, when they came, mostly concerned the raising of the children, whom Mary Kate had insisted be baptized Catholic. Essie had a philosophy of noninterference, for which Mary Kate was grateful, but a tension ran beneath their civil conversations that was as much a part of the atmosphere of Essie's kitchen as the sound of the percolator forever perking on the back burner of Essie's stove. Essie loved to babysit those kids. Just drop them off and you fellows go have a good time, she'd say. But Mary Kate seldom took her up on the offer and the children got the idea that Mary Kate felt that if she were to let them out of her sight for one minute, the higher powers that Essie seemed to have some special pull with would send down a real disaster just to test her strength. And sure enough, every time the children were left with Essie circumstances did conspire to let Essie ply her trade, for Essie loved a sickness, and no ailment was too minor for her attention. A single hiccup had her pulling out her back issues of Prevention magazine. These Essie viewed as diagnostic tools only; the cures were her own invention, adaptations of the family recipes. People mark the passing of years by the remembrance of certain events; Essie's grandchildren had her cures. Those children would save up their complaints for the weekends alone with Essie, when Angus' business trips would take their parents away. The car would no sooner pull away from the driveway than the children would begin to recite their ailments. Six-year-old Hannah knew she had only to tell Grandma Essie about the wart on her finger—that had so repulsed Sister Eunice that she had lectured the whole morning assembly (with self-righteous ire) on the benefits of good hygiene, while pointing out Hannah as a negative example—and Grandma Essie would respond with just the right mixture of sympathy and indignation that no Macpherson should have to put up with such ignorance. Inevitably the moment came when Essie uttered the words her grandchildren longed to hear. Let Granny have a look at it, she'd say, and bring her horn-rimmed bifocals that hung from a black silk cord around her neck up to the tip of her nose, and look, and hum a little, and look some more. Why it ain't nothing but a silly old wart, she'd say. Granny can get rid of a silly old wart. The wart cure was one of the best, but unfortunately, thought her 22

grandchildren, so powerful that it never had to be repeated again. Hannah stood still within the circle of her Grandma's arms and held out the offensive finger. Grandma Essie's head loomed low over Hannah's shoulder as she tied a string around the wart, her face so close that Hannah could trace the fanlike lines that textured her grandmother's neck and face and the tiny orange freckles that seemed to have fallen, like splattered paint, from the red bristly wave of Essie's hennaed hair. Is that it, she asked her grandmother, a little frightened: Hannah enjoyed the cures more when they were someone else's. That's the hard part, said Grandma Essie, now comes the fun part. Essie led the children out to the vegetable garden, where they each dug up a fresh potato and submitted it for their grandmother's approval. Essie chose the one with the most protruding bumps and tied a string around one of the bumps, then she buried the potato, string and all, back in the ground beneath the old black walnut tree. She bid Hannah to stomp the ground flat with the heel of her shoe. When Hannah had done this, Essie turned her around, then around again, in a circle, while muttering under her breath. Hannah looked up into the widespread arms of that tree whose blacks of branches jumbled up with the patches of blue sky until she became so dizzy she would have fallen if Grandma Essie hadn't chosen just that second to swoop her up into her arms with an ecstatic cry. Granny's good girl, she said, through her smiling rows of white teeth that she cleaned religiously with baking soda before bed—Essie didn't believe in dentists— and in the reflection of her grandmother's glasses Hannah could see her own smiling, toothless grin. The wart vanished little by little over the course of the week and there was no trace of it by the time Mary Kate returned to collect her children, but the story lived on, and it festered anger in Mary Kate's heart that, however much she prayed, she could not purge herself of. Like many siblings who share collective memories, the Macpherson children had a favorite. They called it the sty cure because Essie had used it to get rid of Kevin's pink eye. It was a most mysterious process, requiring that they find the nearest intersection, stand in the middle of it, and shout out a rhyme three times. Not daunted by the dense fall of snow, Grandma Essie bundled the children up in their car coats and leggings, putting socks on the hands of those who couldn't find their mittens. Flat River, where Essie lived, was a rural town and the nearest intersection happened to be the old state highway, quite a ways away. They walked like chicks, with Essie leading, and the windswept snow so irritated Kevin's eye that he had 23

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to close both of them and be led by his parka hood. When they got to the intersection Essie lined the children up, some on either side, while she and Kevin braved the traffic to get to the center. Now, shouted Grandma Essie, when I say start, 1 want you to call out, loud as you can: sty, sty get out of my eye and go to the next fellow that comes by. Essie made them practice once in unison, then she picked Kevin up in her arms and whirled him around in a circle, bidding him keep his eyes open if he could. When she called, now, the children began screaming the chant. The wind flung their words right back at their faces and hung them there in the mist from the expulsion of their warm breath while Grandma Essie and Kevin whirled between the lanes of the meandering traffic of the intersection. Normally a boisterous group, the children were awed into silence as they filed home. Out of the quiet piped up Kevin's voice asking Essie the question that burned in their minds: wasn't it a sin to pass the sty on to a stranger? Honey, Grandma Essie said, that's his own misfortune. Kevin's sty was gone by the next morning and though Mary Kate said he'd likely burned it off in the chill wind, the children had felt the magic. Some years passed, marked by the usual childhood traumas of broken bones and chicken pox, which were tended by the family physician, Dr. Martinez. Knowing how painful Essie found these tales of illness cured by money, Mary Kate instructed the children not to tell their grandma unless she asked. This did not fool Essie. It became her practice to ask after the children's health first thing when she saw them. Mary Kate's attempts to hide her children's illnesses tickled Essie. Perhaps she knew her day was coming—she had dreams that way. Some say she had The Power but wouldn't use it. There's enough bad news on the radio, Essie would say. Like two trains headed toward one another, Mary Kate's and Essie's faiths were bound to cross paths, and the ensuing collision would bring change to all their lives. Angus Macpherson nearly died one year. Essie cured her son of death. The children have varying memories of that night. Some things are recalled vividly by some, and not at all by others. Thomas, the eldest, says he woke up with his dad's voice in his head, calling his name—not in the way he did when Thomas was in trouble, but as he would if he wanted to show Thomas something interesting. It was about three in the morning and the air felt unusually dense and chilled. The light shining in from the bathroom brought him out of his bed. He padded down the hallway, past the open door to his parents' empty room and tapped quietly at the half-opened 24

bathroom door. He called for his dad, but no one answered, so he pushed the door open with his toe and immediately smelled the blood—there was about three inches of it in the bathtub. Everything else looked completely normal: the towels were rumpled on the racks, the toothbrushes dangled from the caddy, and someone had left the lid off the toothpaste. Thomas looked down at that tub of blood, as if expecting the answer to swim to the surface. He was standing there shivering when Essie found him. They had hot sweet tea around the kitchen table while Essie cleaned the bathroom. She shouted out to them while she scrubbed, catching them up on the details in a matter-of-fact voice. Mary Kate had phoned from the hospital a little after midnight. It turns out that Angus had an ulcer that he refused to have treated. He had been hiding it sufficiently well from Mary Kate until it abscessed and he vomited blood into the bathtub. No one knew how long Angus had laid there over the edge of the tub before Mary Kate found him. He had lost so much blood that death was probable. Mary Kate would be on her way home soon. Angus was in surgery and she couldn't see him—she would want to get home to her children. There was no time to waste, Essie told them, coming into the kitchen with a can of Comet in one hand and a sponge in the other, Mary Kate would surely try to stop them. The death cure was a strange recipe, even for Essie. The list of ingredients was long and ranged from the mundane to the esoteric: strands of Angus' hair, tokens of his love for his family, and a fresh chicken egg were some. No one recalls the others. Essie stressed the power of positive thinking. If the children all believed in the cure, it would work. Like Tinkerbell, she told the younger ones. We believe, we believe, we believe, the children were chanting when Mary Kate walked through the door. Their mother did not look tired, as they had expected. She looked beautiful and cold and angry. She didn't respond when the children kissed her hello. She never took her eyes from Essie's. Mary Kate seldom raised her voice, but she slammed into Essie with years of repressed anger: Essie was to blame for Angus not seeking treatment; Essie was to blame for her grandchildren's unnatural skepticism; Essie was to blame for Angus' lack of faith in God; and it was Essie too who was to blame for Mary Kate having to spend the rest of her widowed years praying her husband out of limbo. Mary Kate cried then. The children thought their mother was laying it on a bit thick. They wanted to shout out in Grandma Essie's defense. They wanted Grandma Essie to defend herself. But Essie was strangely silent. Still as a statue, she slowly raised her arms and held them wide to Mary 25

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Kate. And Mary Kate fell into those arms and buried her sobs in Grandma Essie's plump bosom. A serene quiet emanated from the kitchen while Grandma Essie rocked their mother, just the way she did her grandchildren when they were sick—as if their mom were a little girl. Later that day Mary Kate returned to the hospital to see Angus come out of surgery. Essie loaded the children into the stationwagon and drove to the fields around her house. It took the better part of the day to get the death cure together. Essie produced a cigar box that was decorated with glued-on dead carcasses of insects. It had belonged to Angus as a boy. They dumped out the baseball cards, coins, and marbles and put the ingredients for the death cure inside. Essie gave it to Thomas to hold. What about the hair, Thomas asked her. We'll check his pillow, Essie said. We can try the hairbrushes in the bathroom, suggested Hannah. No, said Essie, we must be sure it is only his hair. We could go to the hospital, Kevin said, and clip some. They won't let us in, said his grandmother, only your mom and only for fifteen minutes every hour. Even then, someone has to put the box beneath his pillow and make sure it stays there. She'll never do it, said Thomas. She has to, said Essie. She has to, Thomas repeated. The children picked up the chant again: we believe, we believe, we believe. Oh, Granny's good girls and boys, said Essie, her blue eyes smiling at them in the rearview mirror. So it happened that it was Mary Kate who clipped Angus' hair, with toenail scissors that she sneaked in inside her coat pocket. It was Mary Kate who laid the strands in the box and hid the box beneath Angus' pillow. And Mary Kate did not balk at the children's quiet chanting in the hallway of Mary Magdalene Hospital. The children did not notice their mother slip away down the hallway until Grandma Essie stood up to follow her. Feeling suddenly bereft, the children followed their grandmother down the winding passages of the corridor through the arched chapel doors, down the hushed aisles that smelled of beeswax and incense to the crushed velvet kneelers of the pew near the shrine of the Blessed Mother where Mary Kate knelt praying. Mary Kate did not look up as Essie took the place beside her, nor when Thomas and then the others filled the pew. But she felt them there, and they felt her, praying for Grandma Essie's death cure to work.

State of Grace

by Gale Dick Eric's car limped up to the curb on Washington Square, spat me out, and sputtered off into the crowded streets. One moment there was the Village, and all of New York City, going about its normal business; then suddenly I was there, standing on the sidewalk with a duct-taped suitcase in my hand and about fifty-six cents in my pocket. I'd blown a corpuscle or two and, although I can't be sure, there were probably puffs of smoke and maybe a trickle of blood or spinal fluid coming out my ears. I had arrived. Moments later the stock market crashed. Okay, so maybe it took a week or so for the world economy to collapse. And there was no actual blood. But the point is, I didn't exactly ride into town on my lucky pony. And if the people in the park that day did not run screaming through the streets when I got out of the car, they probably should have. Once upon a time, I was a normal guy with sensible shoes and a job. Before coming to New York, I lived for a short time in Boston to be near my girlfriend, Anne, who was in college not far away. She could only come to town on weekends, so 1 was free during the week to put my training as a promising young American to work. The anonymity of that frigid city, where I knew almost no one, absorbed me completely. I watched TV and ate frozen chicken. There was a deep, luxurious laziness in my bones. The go-go eighties raged all around me, but I felt content, even principled, to give it a miss. I was absolutely innocent of ambition and though 1 was desperately in love with Anne, I tried not to let it get to me. The credo of the era was one I avidly obeyed: Feign indifference, but fulfill your lust. One afternoon, as I came whistling home from work and stood poised at my doorstep, I thought I heard a strange whooshing sound, a gasp of wind, coming from under the door. What happened next still mystifies me, but a similar thing took place in a movie I saw just recently, a big Hollywood oaf called Backdraft. Apparently, some fires—big, violent fires—

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Gale Dick

can be a mere breath away from igniting, just waiting for a puff of oxygen or a minute change in air pressure. Such explosiveness creates a sinister whisper, audible only to movie audiences, as it sucks at likely portals. If you miss this subtle warning and open the door, you end up a sizzling corpse in another part of town. When I saw that movie, all I could say was, now they tell me. If I'd known, I would have paid attention to the wind under the doorjamb, or at least noticed that great movie audience in the sky squirming in its seats and shouting, "Don't do it!" Behind that door, it seems, things were ready to blow. For months I'd allowed complacency and emotional sloth to pile up like gas-soaked rags in a corner, and I was living like a man who falls asleep smoking in bed. But that day in Boston, who knew? 1 charged blithely ahead, releasing the pent-up fury of all the hard lessons I'd somehow managed to avoid. The first thing I noticed when I went inside the apartment—the way people in bad accidents think calmly of things like lost keys or itchy toes— was how badly the place needed to be swept. 1 noticed this because everything that had been on the floor just that morning—the ratty couch and chairs, boxes of old letters and photographs, even the hamper with my goddamn dirty clothes—was, how to put it? . . . not there. Filched. Quite missing. Only a vast, echoing space remained. Tumbleweeds of dust drifted forlornly across the floor. This set off a dizzying squall of similar events during the weeks that followed. The next morning, for example, in front of friends and co-workers, my boss accused me of stealing money and told me to expect criminal proceedings. I was then robbed of large chunks of cash money by gun-toting crazies, not once but twice, and pickpocketed a third time. Birthday gifts were lost in the mail. My roommates—charming, faithful friends that they were—sensed the gathering storm and hastily fled, leaving their rent checks bobbing like corks in their wake. After a while I began to feel purified by this unchecked hemorrhage of assets. I was shedding the corrupt flesh of material comfort, I thought, and could soon enjoy an ascetic's clarity of vision. Life was becoming very simple indeed. But a much deeper, more spiritual purge still stood between my becoming a total loser and attaining a state of grace. The medium for much of my suffering had been my answering machine. With an eerie precision I came to admire, the thieves had left almost nothing behind except the machine; so every time I came home, the

But when I got home, Hector was beckoning, and, zombielike, I obeyed. My girlfriend's voice came over the machine, but it had an odd new tension—a faint Prussian accent, maybe? "We need to talk," said the voice. I dialed Anne's number and listened to her voice some more. It said, "Mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble." Something about bad timing and a rock-and-roll drummer. The air in my apartment was getting thick, viscous, but the rest of the world seemed to be spinning faster. I was in one of those running dreams, the kind where you have this frantic need to move, but your limbs are wheeling lazily through space, unable to find traction. Next thing I remember, I'm staring out my window at poor Hector, who is lying like an uprooted weed on the sidewalk with his cord trailing behind him. My knuckles are raw and I have new bruises on my elbow and forehead. A rush of cool, maple-scented air is filling the apartment, streaming in through the broken window, and I am gulping it down, flooding my lungs with it. Suddenly, the downstairs neighbors are buzzing around me, telling me to sit down and exchanging worried glances. Okay, I'm thinking, time to leave this town. Time for that winter trek across Siberia. Time to move to New Orleans, eat two thousand raw oysters, and die in the arms of a Cajun prostitute. To the neighbors I say only, "Whiskey!" They do better than that. They prudently give me whiskey and codeine, and I spend the next twenty-four hours in a futile attempt to use the telephone, drooling like a baby and watching my dishes fill up with cigarette butts. Luckily, my friend Maria very kindly adopted me at about this time.

little bastard was sitting there winking at me with its red eye, cheerfully waiting to victimize me further. And I was powerless against it. In a trance, I would push the button, and a parade of nasty spirits would be channeled through the thing, demanding, threatening, accusing. In an effort to appease it somehow, I began calling the machine "Hector." My memory of Hector's true moment of glory is a bit hazy now. It happened early that autumn, which in New England is a season of acute melancholy. These were days of a laserlike crispness, days that made you think of apples tart enough to make a child's mouth bleed. The air was so brittle then that on the last day of the baseball season, the crack of the bat at Fenway could be heard all the way out to Sommervillc. That morning, I'd been out being stoic about my new poverty, foraging for roots and berries along the fetid dividing strip of the highway, and was feeling ready to start life afresh.

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The only explanation I could think of for her generous good nature was that she enjoyed watching me through the funhouse mirror my life had become. I lived in a wiggly world in which familiar, comfortable proportions were distended and bent in strange directions. Not much fun for me, but a source of great merriment to those around me. With each new twistâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the muggings, the eviction notices, the police visitsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Maria would laugh and ply me with wine and food for the details. She also made sure I bathed, found a lawyer to exonerate me, cooked me dinner. When I got an envelope from Anne addressed to me but containing a letter to Mr. Drummer Guy, Maria wisely burned it and kept me locked inside a room until I was calm enough to say "1 will not eat broken glass" ten times in a row without wavering. Maria's damage control allowed me to stay the hell inside, out of harm's way, and really get into the jilted lover thing. My empty apartment offered an arid, cathedral-like purity in which my fever could run its course. Fall was progressing, and the apartment had no heat; so I would pace around wearing thick sweaters, looking at my breath in the pale light. The only furniture I had was a borrowed mattress I'd put in the middle of the living room floor, which I would circle slowly on my skateboard. I'd spend whole afternoons in one of the bedrooms smoking cigarettes and throwing a tennis ball against the wall. Thock, slap. Thock, slap. Thock, slap. Large chunks of my sanity were calving off like icebergs. One day, as 1 stood staring into my empty refrigerator, my friend Eric came storming in and said, "We're going to New York. Today." Oh, great, I thought, just what I need: a much more dangerous and expensive city. But at this point I knew my only hope of escape was to look my beast in the face. It was bed-of-nails time for the cowboy saddhu. Plus, Eric's was the only free ride out of town I was likely to find, although any ride with me in the car would be anything but free. So I left my barren sanctuary, said goodbye to Maria, and rode solemnly off to meet my fate. I should tell you that Eric, who's no role model for the drug-free nineties, was going to New York for a big party, and feeling festive. Plus, he's an accomplished talker. So it was only natural that he should be feeding me cocaine and chattering at a mile a minute and turning up the stereo while I'm driving his European sports car down a crowded freeway at high speeds after dark. When I have a moment to spare, I look up at the highway in time to notice bags of cement dropping like turds from the truck in front of us. Suddenly, we're airborne. During the nanosecond it takes to land,

Gale Dick

Eric and I tell each other our life stories and have an earnest discussion about the nature of fate and the importance of maintaining perspective in times of adversity. The car lands and skids to a stop. We're fine, but there's a three-car pile-up behind us. I know then that I've become contagious. I want to stand by the freeway with a megaphone and warn people. "Be afraid," I tell Eric. "Be very afraid." Hours later, we're trying to negotiate the Pulasky Bridge. Almost there. Just past the cemetery and across the river, the entire Manhattan skyline shimmers like a jewelled crown. But the car has a shattered alignment, a bald, temporary spare tire on one wheel, and another tire that is nearly flat. We are meandering whimsically all over the road while semi trucks and demon taxicabs whistle past like fireballs. Finally, we roll to a stop somewhere on Staten Island. Our hair has turned white and the inside of the car is sprinkled with a delicate tooth dust from the terror-stricken grinding of our jaws. We're so lost it gives us vertigo. On one side of us lurks a darkened mall and on the other, a vast garbage dump. A noxious green mist pours like water over the dump's embankment, shrouding the streetlight and the huge phantom mall. Adrift in America. We eventually managed to find our destination, and spent the few remaining hours of darkness diluting our tension with enough gin to poison a boatload of sailors. Without a wink of sleep, we drove into Manhattan the next morning. I had a leaden queasiness in my gut and the deafening roar of last night's highway in my head. After Eric dropped me off in Washington Square, I wandered the East Village like a refugee, lost in a blizzard of primary colors. My only sense of purpose was to follow some guy who'd strapped a large Cubist nude to a backpack frame. The tilted cube at Cooper Square spun recklessly amid used clothes and books and pornography. The streets were filled with wild freaks and people dressed as corpses. The grotesque nude bounced up and down in front of me. All of this floated languidly in and out through the thin membrane of my eyes. And so it was that I came to be sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square later that afternoon. The day had become gray and drizzly, and the park was covered with sticky grime. On the bench next to mine, a jaunty old homeless guy sat covered with dust, lost in a monologue of great importance and complexity. His brow was furrowed and he was gesturing feverishly to himself and making pre-lingual noises. I just sat there listening to the sizzle and whirr inside my skull. 31

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Suddenly, an object plummeted straight down from the sky and landed with a thud on the ground between us. I wish I could tell you that a delicate mourning dove, or a nightingale or something, had alit before me in a halo of light, bearing a message of hope in its beak. But it was a pigeon. A mottled old rag of a bird; belly up, wings spread. It was very dirty and very dead. A deep silence descended upon the city while I held my breath, stupefied. Slowly, slowly I glanced up at the wild old guy next to me, and his response will stay with me forever. He was staring straight into me with the most peculiar look on his face—at once mocking and pitying and gleeful and deeply relieved. My mouth was forming the question, searching for words. But he stopped me short by raising his hand up and flashing me a vigorous "A-OK" sign—thumb and forefinger forming a zero, the other fingers fanned out like a peacock's tail.

t didn't surprise me much when I read about John. ny Grobbelaar and his friend and what they had done. I was watching the wires in the newsroom. Words rattled out of the telex machine until my eyes became watery and unfocused. Then this story came in and really straightened me up. Johnny Grobbelaar. Sentenced to seven years imprisonment for manslaughter. I hadn't thought about Johnny much since the day we cleared out of the army. Hadn't seen him since the day we tossed our berets into the patriotic blue sky and said our final good-byes. But he was always somewhere in my mind, a dark spot that wouldn't fade. We spent five months together in a small army base near Ruacana on the border between Namibia and Angola, I guess you could say we were friends. We slept in the same brown square tent with four other white boys from Johannesburg and spent our duty hours in front of the small radar screens in the sandbag bunker near the mess hall. During those balmy nights we spoke softly, cracked cold beers to keep us going through the night and listened to the static on the two-way radio—bored beyond boredom. We laughed a lot though. Johnny and me and all the other boys. At sunset we sat on the bunker roof and stared out over the grasslands and over the white sands that stretched beyond the horizon and our imagination. We sipped Lion Lagers and tossed the empty cans into the big hole that we'd dug up in the soft Ovamboland sand for that purpose. Filling up that hole kept us going through those lonely nights. We lingered there, waiting for Johnny to come and tell us about his nights with the trainee nurse in the back seat of his car. He relished the details and so did we. He made our virgin ears ring, always ready for more. "Jesus," he'd say, "you should have seen her. She had huge knockers like this. 1 tell you she was hot." We laughed—knowingly we thought—and tried to match his stories with adventures of our own. Somehow we never did. Night after night we got into our smelly sleeping bags, the wind plucking at the tent straps. 33

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health and spoilt it more than I thought possible. We lectured Johnny a little, but he just kept laughing, cracking another beer. "It's just a cat," he said. "You're acting like a bunch of fairies." He did grow a little quiet though. At least for a while. Afterward, in front of our blank radar screens, I asked him why he did it. "You know," he said, "I sure was stupid with what I did to the fucking cat. If I had known you guys cared so much I would have left it fucking-well alone." And that was the end of that. We returned to our base camp in Potchcfstroom soon afterward and I spent less time with Johnny who had his own friends there. A few weeks before we cleared out of the army, he had to go back to Wolmaranstad to get married. He'd gotten his girlfriend pregnant and marriage was the only thing to do. He was proud of it tooâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it showed that he wasn't bullshitting when he told us his stories. That was the last time I saw him, but somehow he was always there, in a dark spot at the back of my mind. A story waiting to happen. So I read the wire report and in a weird way it all made sense. Seemed that Johnny and his friend were packing away the beers one Saturday afternoon like we used to do. Seemed that Johnny had some trouble with his wife. Third baby on the way. He took to the road with his car speakers blasting, sunroof open, and the warm wind blowing through his hair. On the dirt road leading to the township they picked up a black woman in a frilly red dress. There were witnesses to prove it. When they found the young woman's naked body in a drainpipe on the edge of town it was a messy sight. Kicked to death with blows to the head and body, the judge found. Also blows to the head with a brick or a big stone, but that was only after she had been dead for a few hours. That's all the news report said. Nothing about ears.

Ladyslipper by Jo Ann M. Clark i. I leave Penn Station for my seasonal confrontation with the Maine woods, I leave for the dead of vacated winter from this unsheltering city where even snow squalls lend no cover In my lifetime the B&.M has never run In some elegant era that was the way to go Now it's South Station to the bus terminal and how right it seems that the closer I get to home the longer it takes II. The family has mostly splintered south but those remaining accept this visit From the cellar I carry up wood and we remake our peace and conversation by a burning stove III. Sleep in these woods mingles the years, the seasons: Now I'm belly down among the ladyslippers in the dank and spongy moss amidst several pink and an unpaired, rarer white oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; amazed at the one-slippered lady halfshod about these woods where black bears roll and weave drunk with the ferment of rotting crab apples 37

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Halley's Comet Now I, and the lady, and the bears roll and weave through an orchard overgrown, almost waltzing when the moose join in, then I am the lady, then my sisters come dancing and mother calls it's time, come in for dinner and grandmother calls yes come in you must not lose yourself here

IV. The morning's freeze saves some fancy of its own. Ice like glass encases pine and paper birch. My stepfather, a true native, will not be taken in. Over coffee he observes that January's extremes can cull a deer herd by half. I think of his last gift to me, presented sealed and wrapped—his venison in my apartment in the back of the freezer in the city V. On my fifth and last day out—on skiis this time not walking—the woods engage an overcast sky, feign dreariness and, but for the ubiquitous squirrels and my own stale tracks, maintain an inanimacy that all this week has mocked my waking hours. What I take and leave behind remains precisely and always the same—lessons too well learned. For again I did not get lost or love to stay, and yet come spring 1 will be home again.

by Jo Ann M. Clark ' T ' T T TVUbedead % ^f I or very old— % i\ I I can't remember which— V Jr when it comes around again. What's certain is we'll not be as we were tracking its course through the heavens from your front lawn. I'm not sure I truly saw it; I may have said I did to match your excitement as, night after night, you peered through your telescope. I had hoped for a moon-sized brimstone burning up the sky. Whereas, this exact transgression was wonder enough for you.

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Marylou Capes

Apologia by Marylou Capes

mother; her mother, twenty years older than Natalie; Natalie, ten years older than Dinah; and Gene, at ten, is only ten weeks older than her relationship with Larry. Gene's birthdays mark her years with Larry more precisely than any calendar—for Gene's birthday is an early summer event, and she dates the beginning of her life with Larry not from the day they met or from the first time they shared a bed, but from the first summer she brought him to this house.

August 12 t is too early to be so awake, Natalie is sure. There is some light but just barely. And the wind from the lake that rattled the casements all night and got into her dreams is still at it. She takes Larry's robe from the foot of the bed and, even though he is fast asleep, she says, "I'm taking your robe—okay?" then bends over and pulls on a pair of sweatsocks. It's been like this lately: The eloquent old house asserts itself during the night and in the changing air near dawn. Eaves constrict and then give, buckle and sigh. Loose panes chatter. She often wakes to what sounds like her mother or grandmother, both long gone, calling her to breakfast. Sometimes she thinks she hears her father and uncles rising before daylight to go fishing: the clank of their tackle boxes and whispers on the stairs. During those summers past, cousins came and went, always noisy and hungry. Playmates called from the porch, "Get up, get up. Come out, come out." But in recent summers there has been only herself, Larry—whom she feels married to even though she isn't—her son Gene, and Dinah. Dinah is her younger sister, her connection with summers past, the only other one who hears voices in the morning. One of the night's dream images blinks before her then vanishes: Larry behind a thick pane of glass, mouthing a soundless word with exaggerated precision. What word? She concentrates, strains to remember. First, his lips drawn back for a smile or a hiss, his teeth together. An "S"? Then the mouth an open "O". Then a phoneme that makes him pout. Soap? Sorrel? Solzhenitsyn? Careful with the creaky door and sidestepping the loose board in the hall, she tiptoes to Gene's room to check on him. Only ten and already his voice is changing, making occasional startling adenoidal sounds. It isn't fair. He has grown too quickly. But whenever she says this everyone laughs. Especially Dinah. Especially when Larry is around. And Larry has been around almost as long as Gene. Her family is marked by tens. Her father, ten years older than her

It was the summer when she was a young divorcee, so distracted by her love for Larry, so content and unworried, and so casual about motherhood that she would wrap Gene in sun-warmed towels and leave him on the porch, in the old cradle she'd found in the garage, while she swam and sunned some thirty feet away. Occasionally, she went back to feed him or just to see how he was doing, peering down at him, detached and curious, as lake water dripped from her hair. Otherwise, he was watched over by whoever was around: by summer people she barely knew whose faces changed week to week and month to month, or by teenaged Dinah, their absentminded father, the odd aunt or cousin and, once in a while, by only Euphoria—an ancient collie, blind in one eye and apt to run off at the first scent of feline or chipmunk.

Gene's sixth birthday was the summer of the long drought, when fines were issued for using a hose. She used to get up in the middle of the night to water the fig trees and that brilliant patch of wildflowers she could never identify. Van Gogh yellow they were, and smelled of strong tea. "I can just see it," Larry had said, '"Your honor, my wife has great simpatico for all forms of plant life. She weeps when I mow the grass.'" He looked at her and grinned. "We'll plead insanity." She'd taken note of that word: wife. "Do you realize we've lived together longer than Gene's father and I were married? Much longer?" "Do you want to get married?" "Do you?" But he'd smiled and kissed the tip of her nose. "After six years of unwedded bliss, what's the point?" It is ten years now and things are still the same: patronizing kisses, summers at the lake, Dinah acting as if the house is hers alone though grandmother left it to both of them. Dinah is an actress, a waitress, a sometime restorer of New England antiques, and almost always unemployed. She has made the summer home—not insulated for winter, not easily heated—into her full-time resi-

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dcnce and behaves, every summer, as if the arrival of Natalie and her little family is an unspeakable intrusion. That is why Natalie woke so early. The sounds of someone, inconsiderate and loud, leaving the house, rousing the dogs, letting the screen door slam and rebound, slam and rebound. She stops at the little hexagonal window midway down the stairs. None of the cars—her own Datsun, Larry's minibus, or Dinah's jeep—is missing. Then she sees a distant figure with Dinah's perfect rump, wearing Natalie's favorite flannel shirt, at the edge of the long, unpaved drive. In a second, the figure, shrugging into a backpack, makes a turn and is out of sight. Angry Dinah, always going off in a huff and getting away with it because she is—always was—so beautiful. And now Nat must stew with it all morning, trying to figure out what the trouble is. She continues down the stairs and into the kitchen to make coffee. Nice to be so pleasantly chilly in the dead of August. But of course it won't last. The sun will rise higher and higher, gradually draping color over the mountains, making the parched brush look deceptively inviting. Then the heat will settle in and all movement on the lake will stop. And, weary and cranky, Dinah will come back ready for a nap just as Gene and Larry are getting up. Depending on how far she walked, how long she was gone, Dinah might not come downstairs all day—especially since she'd promised to help sand down the kitchen chairs and clear out the tool shed. "Ma?" Gene pokes his head around the doorframe, rubbing one eye. "Good morning, sweetheart. Want some breakfast?" "What time zit?" She twists in her chair and looks at the clock. 'Ten after six." He frowns at her. "You crazy? I'm going back to bed." But he makes no move to do so. "Larry up?" "No. Not yet." "He was silly last night." Tactful child. He was drunk, but pleasantly so. He'd set up the tape deck in the living room and run through the master of his new album. Then he showed those films they'd taken in Greece last winter, with his own music as score. It had resulted in some hilarious coincidences: Natalie and Gene, hopping up and down, giggling, making faces on the steps of the Parthenon, while Larry's voice sang: "Watch your step/O baby/Watch your step/Go eeeeee-zee." And then three thumps from a snare drum, each on the downbeat, just as Gene lost his footing and went down on his ass, laughing so hard, holding his stomach, blushing bright Kodachrome pink. 42

In Greece they ran into those young French girls who made nuisances of themselves, going so far as to follow them to Lindos. It happened everywhere. Sometimes people recognized him even when they didn't realize it: "Wait. Don't tell me. Didn't you used to work at Vivaldi's Restaurant near Brattleboro?" Or: "Didn't we go to school together?" Or: "Weren't you in Nam?" Even men did it. For a while, when he had that strange hair that Gene liked so much—sort of a long brittle crewcut with a few strands over his left eye dyed phosphorescent purple—only true aficionados knew him. It narrowed the field. She liked that at first until she saw that such positive means of identification made the fans surer, blunter, bolder. He claimed to be annoyed but she didn't believe it. "You love it." "Are you kidding?" "Why else would a grown man make himself stand out in a crowd this way? You practically glow in the dark." But when he let his hair grown out again and settle into soft dark waves, it didn't really help. Though the fans became less sure of him the others started again. "Haven't we met...?" The next time they quarreled, he used it as proof of love. "I let my hair grow out for you." "For me?" She didn't buy it. He'd never done anything he didn't want to do.

Natalie is in the pantry. Despite the late afternoon heat, it is cool and dark in here, slightly damp, smells fruity. The one narrow window is covered with a thick film of dust, as are the old appliances lining the shelves: a waffle iron, a hand-crank juicer, a single-slice toaster and other, more mundane items with frayed cords and scratched surfaces. There are discolored cake pans and muffin tins hung in sharp-edged clusters from the low ceiling joists, and two worn wooden barrels sit side by side like a portly couple. She lifts the lid from one, and a memory—of herself at fifteen and Dinah at five—rushes at her with the clarity and pungency of the ripe apples beneath her: Dinah in tears, running into the kitchen and then the pantry, crying, "Natty I'm alone! I'm all alone!" She should have been in bed. "No, you're not. I'm right here. And the others will be back later." She crouched down to Dinah's height, brought her face close, wiped the tears with her hands. "Did you have a bad 43

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dream?" "No!" said Dinah, striking her own breast with a tiny fist. "In here! I'm alone inside! In here!" "I'm sorry, honey," Natalie said, at a loss. She picked her up, held her close, put her to bed with aspirin and warm ginger ale. Isn't the knowledge of existential solitude supposed to creep up on you slowly, as you grow, as you come to see that your mother has her own life, apart from yours? And isn't the knowledge that your life, too, is apart and your very own, supposed to compensate? Natalie had experienced no such moment of revelation like Dinah's and, to her knowledge, neither had Gene. It was eerie. A premonition of the moment, six winters away, when her mother's old green Buick would spiral endlessly in a killing skid on 1-95. With the palm of her hand, she clears a circle in the center of the pantry window then wipes the hand on her jeans, already pale with a fine coating of pastry flour. She can see Larry and Gene on the lake, a few yards out, poling the raft Larry made for Gene's birthday last year. She hadn't liked the idea. "It's not safe. He's too young." "He's only read Huckleberry Finn seven or eight times. He only brings up rafts twenty, thirty times a day." But he'd seen the worry, plain on her face. "It'll be okay. I'll test it before I give it to him." "All right but there have to be rules. He can only go out with a grown-up. Never alone." "He's a good kid," Larry had said, his mouth full of nails. "He'll do what we say." And it's true. He has, indeed, been good. She carries a stack of plates to the dining room. Gazing out at the lake again she sees the bright little Uruguayan flag rise up the raft's makeshift mast. Gene had begged for it at the U.N. giftshop. Sky blue and white-striped, it has a gold sun with a solemn face in the upper left-hand corner. He already has talismans.

chairs. "Because it's my house too." She reaches for the stepladder, opens it and climbs, two boxes of spaghetti in her arms. "What a mess," she says, mostly to herself. She starts rearranging the shelves then turns to face him. There is wonderful music coming from the alcove off the living room. "That's lovely. What is it?" "Handel's Water Music," he says. He looks up and meets her eyes. "You bring a lot of it on yourself, you know. What do you care if she stalks off at sunrise? Why is it your problem to figure out what's going on? I'd let her stew in her own juice." She turns back to the shelves. "You would not. If it had been you this morning, instead of me, you'd have run after her and cooed at her until she calmed down and came back to the house. I've seen you do it. Time and again." "When?" She sighs. "Could you put that towel between you and my latest project: "Huh?" She looks at him, eyes steady, then looks at the chair. "I just sanded it."

"Why do we keep coming back summer after summer? We could go somewhere else." Larry is sitting at the kitchen table, watching Natalie put away groceries. In wet hair and bathing suit, a fuzzy red towel around his neck, he has made himself comfortable on one of her newly-sanded kitchen

"Shit." He rearranges himself just as Dinah enters, apparently in a good mood. She wriggles out of her backpack, lets it thud to the floor, and seats herself near him. "You went shopping," she says. "Did either of you remember to get my shampoo?" "It's upstairs," says Natalie. "On your bed. Did you walk far? You've been gone for hours." "I did some serious climbing." She folds her arms on the table, then nestles her head in them. "I'm beat." Natalie looks at Larry again and, to her surprise, he is wholly attentive, eyes already on her. She smiles. "That is so pretty. I didn't know we had that record." "We don't," says Dinah. "Must be the radio." "It's a record. You can tell by the sound." "Radio." "It's a record," Larry says. "I put it on myself." Without a word, Dinah stands and leaves, heavy-footed, giving the swinging kitchen door such a push that it creates wide arcs long after she is gone.

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Larry slams his hand down on the table. "Let's go somewhere else next summer. This is crazy." Natalie climbs down from the stepladder, a hand to the small of her back. "Go ahead. Go talk to her. You seem to be the only one around here who knows how." "You know: You always do this. You bitch when I pay attention to her but when 1 don't, you want me to. All this stuff is between you two and I'm tired of being the middleman." Nat stops, considers. This is a new line of thought. "Interesting," is all she says as she goes to the window over the sink and watches Dinah dive into the lake. She does a powerful Australian crawl and makes good time, heading for the tiny island in the center of their inlet. The island has long been Dinah's favorite retreat. It was always a place where Nat, not a strong swimmer, wasn't likely to follow. "Gene had a nightmare last night," Larry says. She turns to him. "He did? I didn't hear a thing." It's been years since his ritual two a.m. wakings. "What did he dream? Did you ask?" "Yeah. He dreamt—get this—that we were in Greece again and the police wouldn't let us leave." "Maybe he sensed it." Larry sits up straight. "Sensed what?" "Do you think he could tell what was going on? At the Athens airport?" It takes him a second, but she watches the light dawn and enjoys it. "You're absurd," he finally says.

"You're mighty free with my money."

'Take it to the men's room and flush it. Please!" "It's in the arch of my shoe. Nobody's gonna ask me to take off my shoes." "Why are you so desperate? Can't it wait till we get to New York? You can get some coke from your buddies in New York." "I want to do some on the plane." "Why are you so desperate?" "I'm not. Why do you want me to flush a hundred dollars down a Greek toilet?" "You can afford it."

"Did he have trouble getting back to sleep?" Larry is still angry with her, she can see. Not quite ready to let it pass. But he does. "I sat with him awhile. We read comics and ate potato chips." He is sitting slightly forward, etching a little path, with his thumbnail, into the wooden table top. He puts an arm around her waist and leans his head against her stomach but goes on with his tabletop doodling. "I'll never understand," she says, "why you and Dinah have always gotten along so well—especially when you were using. She's even more hysterical about drugs than I am." She waits, studying his hair. He is grayer. 'Tell the truth: Are you after her again?" "Here we go." He takes his arm from her waist, stands, and heads for the refrigerator. "You can't get it through that thick skull of yours that you're every bit as pretty as she is." 'That's not what I'm talking about." "You know—she thinks you're the prettier." "Did she taste like celery? Did she massage your legs for you?" "Nat. . ." "Why can't you apologize?" So obvious and necessary does it seem to her, that this one longstanding omission has come to feel like a deliberate cruelty. "Why can't you? Just once. You act as if nothing happened. As if I'm crazy, and I'm the one who should apologize." "You don't understand," he says. "For me—you're not gonna like this—it's like it never happened." "How can you say that? If it never happened, would I feel like this?" She can hear it; her tone is no longer caustic. She is sincere. Would she feel like this? He is bent over, his head in the refrigerator. She can barely hear him—like last night's dream when, wordless, his lips formed a word. What was it? "I'm gonna tell you one more time:" he says. "I slept with her that once, when you first brought me up here, before we ever discussed living together. It was ten years ago." He straightens up, peers at her over the open refrigerator door. 'Ten years! Please give it up."

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Give it up. What would she be giving up? A moment? A memory? Yes, the memory of a moment; that moment of premonition during the tearful preface to Dinah's tearful confession. A moment of unwanted understanding and the memory of how it felt. A very physical sensation it was, as if there simply wasn't enough air and something inside her was about to cave in for lack of it—a something she'd thought was strong and turned out to have no more stamina than a cobweb. She can feel it now; the fiimsiness inside. Why talk to—why live with—someone who has no memory? If you let your memories go, don't you eventually forget yourself?

• * *

But part of her was not surprised. Dinah was allowed to go through life bad-tempered and was always forgiven—particularly by men—because of her looks. As if physical beauty offered a reparation to be found nowhere else.

Natalie is out on the dock, awaiting the sunset, when she hears, behind her, Dinah's jeep going much too fast. She turns and watches as it bypasses the drive and climbs right onto the lawn, wrenching to a stop at the very crown of the embankment. It rolls forward about a foot, perches unsteadily, then seems to give up. Noting that she is right in its hypothetical path, she moves. A man of about twenty-five or so hops out of the car while Dinah, at the wheel, a can of beer in her hand, stands on the seat then leaps over the windshield and onto the hood. She shrieks, cries out "Geronimo!" and vaults gracefully to the grass, landing like a slightly wobbly Olympic gymnast. The man clasps his beer can between his knees and applauds. Dinah sees her and seems, strangely enough, delighted. "Natty! How are you?" She does not wait for an answer but skims her way with tiny surefooted steps down the steep, albeit short, incline of the bank. As she nears, she calls back to the man already on his way down: "C'mon, Peter! Meet my sister!" She is, without a doubt, drunk. Not for years has Natalie seen her drunk. Peter joins them and drapes a languid arm over Dinah's shoulder as she introduces them. "Natalie meet Peter. Peter, Natalie." Her eyes are locked on Nat's and are bright with an old but familiar message from her adolescence: I don't know how 1 got myself into this, but I've got to dump this guy and you've got to help me. "Peter's a drummer. He wants to meet Larry." Dinah drains her beer, hollers out "Poll-oo-shun!" and throws the can into the lake. "Hey," she says. "Hey, Nat. How long's he been out there?" Natalie follows her gaze and sees Gene, on his raft, alone. "I've been here nearly half an hour. This is the first I've seen of him." She hears her own voice, high-pitched and incredulous. Childish. Dinah shrugs. "Oh, well. He's a good kid. Should come in though. It's getting dark." She faces the water and, arms spread, waves them in haphazard semaphore. "Gee-een! Get-chur ass in here!" But the light is not good and he is so far out, it is difficult to tell whether he has seen her. Meanwhile, Nat has taken it in and is angry. "He knows he's not supposed to go out alone." She puts a pinky and thumb in the corners of her mouth and produces an overwhelmingly piercing whistle. They look out

"Is it the house?" he asks. "What?" What can he mean? "You did this last year too. After the barbecue. Is this going to be an annual summer event?" He opens a bottle of beer, takes a swallow. "And you haven't been within ten feet of your typewriter since we got here. Are you turning into some kind of hausfrau?" Briefly, they stare at each other. Then he leaves. In a few seconds, she hears the muffled sounds of an electric guitar, wailing. He has shut himself in the cupboard behind the stairs where he spent a whole day and most of a night, last year, soundproofing it by tacking empty egg cartons to the walls and ceiling and to the back of the door. He will be hours. She goes to the porch and stretches out on a hammock. It is starting to cool. She rocks herself and remembers last summer's barbecue. Dinah was absent most of the day, then especially tense at night when people bedded down all over the place—in every spare room and sleeping porch, on the sofas, floors, and hammocks. She and Dinah wound up arguing in the downstairs bathroom, at the top of their voices and well within everyone's hearing, about the "intruders." A lot of people, evidently insulted, left; mostly music business people she didn't know and didn't care if she ever saw again. But Matt Leone, whom she'd gone to grade school with—Matt the Lion, they used to call him—she couldn't let him leave like that. She sat with him, gently coaxing, for a long time. What had happened between then and the next morning when she found him and Dinah entwined around each other in the back of the minibus, wearing only tee-shirts? What had happened?

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and wait. She does it again. Then they see that Gene has tied his flag to the pole and is waving it high above him. He has heard her. But, as they watch, he dips the pole into the lake farther and farther, all his small weight behind it—Dinah: "Oh my God. It's too deep there"—and, in a flash, falls in after it. The raft overturns and seems to strike him. Nat watches this incredible thing: the raft standing motionless, upended on the surface of the lake. And her sister has lost her mind; unaccountably, she is taking off her clothes. Dinah does an expert shallow-water dive off the dock. Nat grabs the arm of the stranger, Peter, and tells him: "He's a good swimmer. He'll be up in a second. It's only a lake, not the ocean. He'll be up in a second." But her memory dredges up the most hideous replay—herself to Gene on water safety: "It's got tides, our lake. People have drowned." She watches as Dinah moves nearer to the overturned raft. There is no sign of Gene. "Maybe he's holding onto the raft," Peter says. "On the other side. Away from us." Dinah reaches the raft. She treads water and dives once, twice, again, again, then she brings him up. She is shoving him onto the raft, supporting him on one shoulder. The raft keeps rocking and tipping. At first, he is on his stomach but, in a moment, she turns him over and starts giving mouth to mouth. "He needs blankets!" Natalie says. She grabs the tattered one from the dock, the one they use to sun themselves, and runs to Dinah's jeep. She will go to the Garners', the next house on the lake. They have that little outboard. Peter is at her heels. "No," she says to him. "Go into the house. Call the paramedics." She jumps into the car, tears at the stick, guns the engine, and streaks over the lawn and onto the lake shore road.

and over, bundling him in blankets and then holding him close. "It's all right, it's all right." After wrapping a blanket around herself, Dinah takes the helm and heads for shore through the inscrutable country dark. Larry and Natalie stay at the hospital until she is able to speak with Gene, until she is reassured that he is still himself. By four A.M., Larry and the doctors convince her that she can go home. They will return for Gene tomorrow. By daybreak, they are driving up the road to the lake house. Once inside, Larry pours them each some brandy. But Natalie wanders off, down to the dock. It is low tide. The usual flotsam has washed up on shore and, with it, the torn, muddy Uruguayan flag. Cautiously, she walks toward it then stands over it, staring. August 13

She pilots the little boat the way she drove the jeep. Its bow is high. When she's not flying over the water in long leaps, she is cutting deep paths, wide arcs of spray spewing from either side of the hull, soaking her to the skin. It is nearly dark. As she nears the raft, she holds up a high-intensity lamp and sees Dinah, still bent over Gene. "He's breathing," she says, "but I was afraid to stop." Dinah is glassy-eyed, her lips and nipples blue. She drags him, under the arms, to the boat and Nat pulls him in. "It's all right," Nat says, over

Dinah wakes but does not feel rested. One eye nestled blind to the pillow, she is full of vivid dreams. Of the sounds of weeping, of whispered arguments, of uneven scuffling on the stairs—footsteps without the rhythm and measure of destination. And images: of shovels and swords and a gleaming perch, thrashing on the end of a taut line; Nat as Hamlet saying, "Alas, poor Yorick..." and laughing flirtatiously with the gravediggcrs; a letter revoking her own Red Cross Life Saver status: "Dear Dinah, We regret to inform you..."; and more arguing, painfully loud this time while, in the dream, she leaned her head against a giant speaker, unconnected to any visible source of sound: "Your fault!" "No, yours!" "Faithless!" "Crazy. This is crazy." Then she remembers. Earlier this morning, just before dawn, she was awakened by a woman somewhere just outside the house, wailing and crying as a man's voice yells, "What the hellsa matter with you?" over and over. Finally, she pulled a sheet around her and went onto her sleeping veranda and into a halfhearted rain, sparse and cold. She was aghast at the freshly dug earth in the middle of the yard—a morbid sight. Aghast too at Natalie clenching the heavy old spade, at Larry trying to wrest it away from her, at the vehemence with which she would not let it go. Eventually, Larry gave up and sat on the porch steps, watching, smoking. But Natalie did not speak to him as she filled the hole she'd made, stamped the soil down carefully, and replaced the sod. As Nat returned the spade to the toolshed, Larry turned and saw Dinah. His face was still and angry. "She buried the flag," he said.

- ' • • " • ' ' "

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"From Gene's raft." Then he threw his cigarette away and said: "Crazy." "Is Gene okay?" "Yes." She could barely keep her eyes on him. The sun, breaking through the cloud cover and glinting on the lake, was distractingly radiant. "You going back to the hospital?" "Soon." And then Nat came walking back across the yard from the toolshed. Barrette between her teeth, her hair in her hands, she caught sight of Dinah and called to her—not without some humor—"You won't believe what I just did." "I saw." "Gene's going to be fine." "Larry told me. When you see my nephew, tell him to shape up." Nat waved then veered away and out of sight, probably to feed the dogs. And Dinah went back into her room and back to bed. She is always the one who leaves, who finds places to go, things to do, other men to be with. Her back aches and one of her shoulder is sore. Up on one elbow, she takes a sip of warm orange juice from the wax carton on her bedside table, then sits up in bed, slowly, experimentally. She is covered with mosquito bites. If Nat were just a little more frightened, a little less responsible, a little—maybe Larry was right—crazier, more than colorful bunting would get obliterated. Forget about the banner with the strange device—she would harm herself: because she wasn't the one who saw Gene, alone on the lake and too far out. And because she believes herself too inept a swimmer to have saved him on her own. Convinced of her impotence, she will reproach herself, giving no weight to the influences of those twin miracles, motherhood and adrenalin, so desperate and able. But it will pass. Dinah has seen this kind of angry sadness in Natalie before, and it will pass. And once Gene is well enough to lament his recklessness aloud and to promise it will not happen again, it will pass even more quickly.

pull away with such force, she envisions new ruts in the yard and leveled shrubs. She considers going back to bed but decides to phone the hospital. Gene will be released today, they tell her. She asks for his room and speaks to Natalie, who wants to know if Larry has left yet. "Yes, I think so. I mean, I just heard the minibus drive away." She goes for a swim and, with more power and memory than expected, her last swim comes back to her: the puckered chill of her skin and the fearfulness of being naked; the early dives to the bottom when she could not find him, and the heavy limpness of him when she did. How, at first, he would not breadie, and the only valuable thing she could offer was her stubbornness: the unrelenting bend of her back that atrophied into pain as she forced her breath into him over and over, as he finally gagged and vomited water, as the sun went down too fast, and the air got colder, and the mosquitoes. . . . She looks up at the sky, hazy and white with heat. She is awake now and does not want to be in water. She turns and heads back to the house.

She gets out of bed, slips into a bathing suit and listens for the sounds of speech amidst the trills of a mockingbird, the distant hum of a motorboat, the wind in the trees. She looks out at the sky. It must be near noon. As she starts down the stairs, Larry enters from the porch, sees her and, without breaking stride, points to the telephone on the wall and shouts, "She's nuts!" and keeps right on going. Seconds later, she hears his minibus

Up in her room, she finds some calamine lotion and begins dabbing it on her legs and arms. Propped against the mirror above her chest of drawers is a laminated sign, like the one that used to hang above the green chalkboard in her firstgrade classroom. "Think," it says, in big block letters. Dinah puts the lotion aside and blows on the pink splotches to help them dry. She goes to her closet but cannot imagine what she will do once she's dressed. Where should she be? At the hospital? Maybe right here, for their return? Maybe out, to give them a spate of privacy? How will Gene feel about it? Will it matter to him, one way or another? It is the problem of summer: Where does she belong? When Nat first started going out with Larry, Dinah was seventeen and assumed she was welcome. Here was a family to replace the one she'd lost when her mother died and her father—within months—married a woman she didn't like. She'd misjudged, however, the extent of her welcome and, on top of that, had been too hungry and clumsy. As for blame, there was no way to parcel it out. Yes, she was seductive and counted on his responding—but only to a point. Yes, he encouraged her and then wouldn't let her off the hook when she turned shy and fearful. But, she was sure, he would have stopped if she'd been adamant—which she was not. Instead she clung to his beautiful shoulders and weaved a dream of belonging that never ousted Natalie but only created a place for herself. She didn't think.

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Would it have been better, all these years, if she had never told Nat about it? Yes, probably. Easy to say now, when she knew and accepted that she was not part of them. Harder to say then, when the mere thought of keeping secrets from Nat was unthinkable. She had envisioned forgiveness, and Nat did not fail her. Nat would do anything for you. All you had to do was ask. Trouble was, Larry didn't like to ask. Trouble was, Dinah no longer had many requests. August 15 Natalie has taken to shooting with the old Winchester Dinah keeps in the house—always unloaded—for bogus protection during the snowed-in winters alone. Probably the first time in years the gun has had any live rounds in it. But Dinah keeps it clean and oiled and ready like she keeps everything; her hair, her breast stroke. They used to do this when they were children—come up here with Papa and shoot coffee cans and milk cartons. This morning, Larry had tried to stop her: "You going again?" as if she'd been doing this for years instead of just two days in a row, for the first time in ages. "We were all scared Nat, not just you. And don't go reminding me—again—that I'm not his father. You can't protect him forever." There it is, just like in her dream. His finger pointing right at her, like the old posters of Uncle Sam. "What a stupid, inadequate thing to say," she says. In the dream, however, he was mute. Pointless elocution: his lips formed a word, but he made no sound. "You going to shoot and bury the first girl who breaks his heart?" No. Of course not. And yes, burying the flag was a blunder, a miscalculation, because the flag wasn't it. And though the lake itself was closer to the truth, the lake wasn't it either. Neither was the raft, though that was even closer. The wind is strong and gusty. The milk cartons will not stand. She practices sighting but aims at nothing. September I

"Dear Larry, I know we spoke just yesterday but you're always so distracted when you call from the studio and anyway, it's been too long since I've sat down quietly and organized my thoughts on paper. I thought it might be good for me. I'm alone in our room, at the desk, and it's twilight. We're almost all packed and should be in Boston by tomorrow night sometime. Be sure to let me know if you start running behind schedule. 54

Otherwise, I'll expect to see you at home, next Saturday. How's New York? "It was sweet of you to send the new flag. I was less than appreciative on the phone, I know. I'll try. I'll try to give it to him. He told me, just last night at dinner, that he can 'live without the raft' but he'd 'sure like to have the flag back.' (Amazing. Kids can be so resilient.) Like I said, he seems fine. Even that occasional rasping cough is gone. He misses you and asks for you. He keeps wanting to search for the raft, but the mere mention makes me feel sick." She stares at the letter a second, considers throwing it away, but only caps the pen and slumps back in her chair. She is nostalgic. Incredible. What is there to miss of this terrible summer? But it is not the summer she will miss, it is her little sister. How ridiculous. Dinah will make a few trips to Boston during the winter, as she has always done, and they will return next summer—welcome or not—as they have done for the last ten years. She rises and goes to the bureau. Her feet are bare and the floor is cold. She opens the bottom drawer and takes out the package, unwraps the box, opens it. The face of the solemn little sun is a blank in the poor light. She will not throw it away and is not tempted, in the least, to hide it with earth. But she is not ready—not yet—to give it to Gene. She wraps it again, carefully re-tying it according to postal regulations, and slips it back into the bureau drawer. But if you do this, you'll only have to decide again someday. All over again. And should she take it home to Boston or leave it here? But if she takes it home, it will nag her every day. But if she leaves it here will she want, sometime this winter, to give it to him only to be faced with having deliberately left it behind? Dinah could send it, of course. But what if Nat loses her nerve again by the time it arrives? She can see it now: the irreversible future. Every time she decides to keep it from him means the decision reawaits her. It's too much. She reaches into the still-open drawer. Yes. This is easier. And the word comes to her; the single word silently uttered in a dream. The word is Sorry.

Lynne Kassabian

I wonder whatever happened to Horton? she asks now as Olive locks the door. Remember to lock the door, Olive. I don't know, says Olive for the millionth time. All I know is that he opened a dairy farm. Do you think he really loved me? asks Aurora as they move forward to the ticket window, surrounded by young couples with wild hair and tight jeans, hands in each other's back pockets. Olive doesn't answer, never has answered, the question. Olive doesn't wear, never has worn, a hat. Olive, instructs Aurora, as they stand on line to have their tickets torn, you really should wear a hat. I don't like hats, says Olive. But it's always been the done thing, says Aurora. In our day, ladies always wore hats. I Don't Like Hats, says Olive. Don't bust yourself, sister, says Aurora. It was just an idea. What a nice hat, says the pimpled ticket-stub collectorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;new on the jobâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;grinning at the concession-stand girl. You look so nice in that hat, he says. What a joke, he is thinking to himself. What he really wants to do is play some baseball. Thank you, says Aurora. Are you new on the job? Yep, says the boy, hitting an imaginary ball with an imaginary bat. It's outa here! he exclaims. Lady, that's some hat. I'd give my throwing arm for a hat like that. Oh my, says Aurora. She blushes and throws Olive a triumphant look. Olive glares at Aurora and goes to stand on line for a large box of red braided licorice. I just don't like hats, she mutters, carefully counting out two dollars and thirty-five cents in nickles and dimes. The concession-stand girl impatiently raps her red-lacquered fingertips against the glass top as Olive carefully counts out her change, and then the two sisters walk slowly into the dimly lit theater. They sit.

live and Aurora are going to the movies. Olive drives, sitting on the New Jersey Bell yellow pages. Aurora, her older sister, yells, Look out! Turn left! Signal! Olive, ninety last week, says, Be quiet, Aurora. Olive and Aurora go to the movies every Wednesday night for the 7:30 show. That is because midweek, they get a senior citizen discount. As Olive turns into the Fine Arts Cinema, Aurora suddenly says, as she does every Wednesday, Did you remember your senior citizen card? Yes, Aurora, it's in my change purse, says Olive, wondering why her left blinker is on when she is turning right. Aurora says, I hope you remembered your card. I did, Aurora, I did, says Olive; though no ticket kiosk employee, however bored a teenager, however desperate a newly-divorced Jersey mother of two, however preoccupied a laid-off flatware salesman, would have ever required more than a fleeting glance as proof that these two ladies were indeed senior citizens. Aurora wears her hat with the three small red plastic apples and fake green leaves on it, the one that her first (and last) beau gave her in Rye in 1918. He died at least half a century ago, but Aurora says every Wednesday night as she pins it with the pearled hat pin, says with a sigh as she gazes in her mirror, Horton gave me this hat. Aurora never married Horton. He kissed her under a pear tree and then moved to Charlottesville to open a dairy and Aurora never heard from him again. 1 wonder what happened to Horton, she often asks, sometimes when Olive isn't even in the room.

The thing with being ninety and ninety-one and a half is that you have no one else to talk to anymore but each other. Everyone else you ever knew is dead. The thing with being ninety and ninety-one and a half is you suddenly think all of the things you want to say to your sister when the

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lights go out and the roaring lion (roar, rooooar), or the Paramount peaks, or (Olive's favorite) the liberty lady in the robe with the torch comes on the screen. Look, says Olive, doesn't that lady look like Aunt Sally? Shhhhhh, someone says. I think she looks more like Mother, replies Aurora. Aunt Sally wasn't slender. You couldn't possibly say she was fat, though, says Olive. No, not fat, but certainly not slender. Shhhhhh, says someone. Would you say she was stout? Stout? No. No, not stout. I think solid would describe Aunty Sal. And didn't she hate it when we called her that. What? Didn't she just hate it when we called her Sal? Oh, yes, she did. Yes, yes, she did. Oh, I remember— Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhh! say quite a few people. What's that? asks Olive. A fire? No, sister, I do believe someone is hoovering the carpet in the lobby. Why? asks Olive, checking where the fire exit is, just in case. Perhaps they have cats, says Aurora, taking off her hat and placing it on her knees. Oh, cats, says Olive. I hate cats. Shed, shed, shed. Oh shut it up! calls a man with a goatee from the back row. Olive and Aurora are sitting in the front row. What? says Aurora. He says to shut up, says Olive. Oh, says Aurora. She nibbles on a licorice braid and passes the box to her sister, who shakes it. It is lonely in the dark and quiet, she tirinks. If they wanted to sit in the dark and quiet, she thinks, they could have stayed at home, sitting up in bed, looking at the dark and quiet as they do every night, as they have done every night since they were girls. The movie is about a black married man who falls in love with a white unmarried Italian woman. During the sex scene on the light table, Aurora fingers her hat and thinks of Horton. Horton never pulled her down on a table like that. Olive, however, cranes her neck up to the screen so she can see better. Olive has never had sex. (Neither has Aurora.) It looks like 58

interesting thing to do. That looks like an interesting thing to do, says Olive. Yes indeed, says Aurora. I like her stockings, says Olive. Do you think they're silk? asks Aurora. What else could they be, sister? Polyester, or Spindax. Though polyester is easier to wash because it dries so quickly. Spandex, says Olive. Spandex, sister. No, spandex doesn't dry so quickly. I don't believe it does. Oh for crying out loud, yells the man in the back, we're trying to watch a movie here! What? says Olive. He says we're trying to watch a movie here, says Aurora. That's right, says Olive. We're watching a movie here. What? says Aurora. A movie. I said we're watching a movie here. That's right, says Aurora, a movie . . . It went like this: Aurora was the prettier one, but Olive had the spirit. Aurora never married after Horton moved away; and Olive, who never even wanted to marry, being a suffragette, was packing for her move to New York City when Mother died. Aurora walked through the empty house to the room she had shared with Olive since they were children. Olive was sitting on top of her trunk on her twin bed. Aurora sat down on her own twin bed with the bedspread the same as Olive's with the dangling little balls on its border and said, Please stay. No, said Olive. I require the liberty of self-abode. Please stay, said Aurora, stay at least until I marry. Olive saw the tears in Aurora's eyes and decided she could wait a few more years. The sisters settled in for the long wait, and though many things happened—television and atom bombs and Watergate—Aurora never married and Olive never moved away to New York City to walk smartly along Park Avenue in black lace-up boots and a carefully folded umbrella. Olive, says Aurora, blames her for that, and is an angry person because of it. Aurora, mutters Olive, is a horse's ass to have pinned every last hope on a man who so loved cows.

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The black man goes back to his black wife and the white girl goes back to her white boyfriend and the movie ends. I knew it would end that way, says Olive. The two sisters sit through the credits while the theater empties out into the parking lot and then slowly make their way up the aisle and out the door. Goodnight, ladies, leers the ticket-stub tearer, leaning against the ticket box, waiting for the 9:45 show. Goodnight, curtly nods Olive. Goodnight, calls Aurora. That was very good, says Olive, as they walk to the door. I didn't like the ending, says Aurora. You never do, says Olive. Endings don't appeal to you. But I liked the music, says Aurora. Me too, says Olive. And they go into the night, glad to have each other, after all.

popcorn machine. What a babe, thinks the ticket-stub tearer. He then plucks off the third apple, puts it in his mouth and spits it, as hard as he can, at the concession-stand girl in an attempt to charm her. It works: she laughs and thinks he is clever. Finally, he puts his fist through the straw crown that has endured seventy-three years of weekly wear, since Aurora carefully wraps it in tissue paper each time she removes it and then replaces it in its original hatbox, sighing to her sister as she climbs into her twin bed, I wonder whatever happened to Horton? Yowee! Itches like hell! yells the ticket-stub tearer as he pulls the crackling brim over his lank yellow hair and then down, hard, over his head so it rests like a straw collar around his neck. He dances around, flapping his arms like a rooster. That is when Aurora and Olive come through the glass doors. Uh-oh, says the concession-stand girl. Yikes, says the usher. My hat, whispers Aurora, as she stares at the ticket-stub tearer, who looks like a choir boy gone wrong with the straw collar over his grubby white shirt. But Oliveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the spirited oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;says, Shame on you. She says shame on you to the concession girl and shame on you to the usher. She then walks up to the pimply ticket-stub tearer and with the thick rubber sole of her right beige orthopedic Oxford shoe steps as hard as she can (which is considerably hard) down on his instep. And the ticket-stub tearer feels something rise up in him that he has never felt before, not even when the principal dragged him down the hall by his car after he slid into his homeroom teacher, Old Mrs. Gild, and that is remorse.

Olive drives home, sitting on the yellow pages. As they turn onto the highway, a small terror causes Aurora to raise her trembling hand to her head and she says, I forgot my hat. As they turn back to the cinema, a laughing young usher in a black bow tie, the kind you clip to the collar, finds Aurora's hat with the apples on it on the floor. He spins it on his finger like a Harlem Globetrotter and brings it to the lobby. Do we have a Lost-and-Found? he asks, winging it, frisbeelike, to the ticket-stub tearer. Whoa, he's stealing second! yells the ticket-stub tearer, catching it and sidearming it back to the usher, who, as he catches it, also decides to play the part of the runner. He slides on top of the hat. When he gets up, his bow tie is crooked and one of the apples is hanging loosely by its thin plastic stem. Home! Home! yells the ticket-stub tearer as the usher tosses him the flattened hat. The 9:45 crowd is not in yet, just lined up outside the door. There is time for a laugh. He plucks off one apple and lobs it into the trash. The can's silvery door swings on its hinge. Swing, swing, swing. Good shot, yells the usher. The ticket-stub boy plucks off a second apple and flings it at the usher, who sidearms it to the concession-stand girl, who giggles and protects her breasts from the throw, which was a little hard, after all. She bends over to retrieve the apple and, wanting to be part of the action, throws it into the huge bin that catches the excess popcorn from the

At home that night, Aurora carefully wraps up the broken bent brim of her straw hat in some tissue paper and replaces it in the box. She is still weeping a little as she asks Olive, who is reading a paperback in her bed, Whatever do you think happened to Horton? I don't know, says Olive, as she has answered every Wednesday night. I believe he went off to raise some cows. Do you think he loved me? asks Aurora, as she has asked since the day he left and never came back. Olive closes her book and closes her eyes. The evening, the sex scene, the hat episode have given her a sudden headache. What she desires more than anything right now is resolution. Movies have resolution. They

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begin, things happen, possibilities abound, and they end. Olive has always liked the end. Aurora has never liked the end. Aurora, she says, I do not know. I do not know whether Horton loved you or not. It is possible that even Horton did not know whether he loved you or not. And a small minute passes wherein Aurora realizes that Olive has answered the question, for even I Don't Know is an answer of sorts. Suddenly Aurora feels something. She is ready. She has seen her beloved hat bent and broken around the neck of a delinquent. She wants, and will get, a definitive answer to her life's question. Now. Sister, she says—no, demands—sitting up straight in her bed. Do you think he loved me? And Olive, thinking of New York City and how she was going to walk with a smart gait up and down Park Avenue, her full black skirt swinging freely around her, before Horton and his confounded hat came into the picture, answers emphatically, with all the spirit she can muster (which is considerably spirited). She answers as if finally answering one way or the other will bring back all the possibilities of life, so that it is no longer one long wait to the end, No. No, sister, I do not believe he did. The fact is he gave you a hat and left you for some cows. I therefore do not believe he loved you.

w ith

3 small scare in it, like one's first bike ride, or one's first kiss. You know, sister, says Aurora, I think it is time for a new hat. Yes indeed, smiles Olive. A new hat is a fine idea. One without apples, giggles Aurora, wiping her eyes, quite taken with the idea of peaches, or maybe a banana. Perhaps an avocado would be the ticket, chuckles Olive. And the sisters veritably crow, clapping their hands and kicking their bedspreads as they shout out their cornucopia. Eggplants! Oh yes, and celery! Oh sister— bell peppers! And Aurora gasps, so breathless is she with the sudden idea of the wind in her hair as she walks along Park Avenue with Olive on a cool Wednesday evening, bareheaded.

And she switches off the lamp and waits for the worst. Oh my, says Aurora, sitting in the dark, waiting for the grief to hit. It doesn't. She peers into the dark—the best time, after all, to talk to one's sister—gives one final blow into her hankie and says, You know, sister, I never really liked him. Well, you were quite right not to, snaps Olive. He was an imbecile, sister. And I never really liked the hat either, ventures Aurora, a small giggle beginning in her. She feels quite heady. Oh my, she giggles. You were quite right not to, smiles Olive. It was a silly hat. It certainly was that, giggles Aurora. Three apples indeed! Three apples my foot. I'll give him three apples! And the two sisters laugh out loud. Oh my, says one. My, my, says the other. And then there is another pause, wherein the sisters sit up in bed and look at the dark, and an entirely new method of going through life begins to occur to Aurora. The kind of idea that only comes, after all, to fill the gap of what has been taken from you. The best kind of idea; the kind 62

LaurieSchaffler

I Don't Remember the Word "Chemotherapy"

Going on with everyday life, we played Monopoly beside the blinking tree.

by Laurie Schaffler January 1, J969. Dear Diary. Today my brother died. There were twenty pills or eighteen each day. Loss of hair. Bloating. Long needles jabbed deep into the spine. Eventual paralysis of the left side of your face. A few bumps and you were dying. I remember the last Christmas, sitting by your bed, nothing to say, turning my face away to avoid seeing the open sores beneath your sheet. A week of morphine passed; you laughed with no expression. Mother saw you leave your body. She held your hand, felt your soul breeze out. 64 65

Murray hlossel

MAX. I think I missed it. Say it again.

.a E

to CO

SAM. I'm getting married.

0 MAX. And again. SAM. I'm getting married.

u u 3

Characters: MAX—a man in his mid twenties,

MAX. And again. SAM. I'm getting married.

SAM—a man in his late twenties. JO—a woman in her early twenties.

MAX. And again and again and again. SAM. I'm getting married. I'm getting married, I'm getting married.

AX. You're getting married. She's going to be your wife.

MAX. Okay. It's enough. SAM. I don't want to hurt you.

SAM. I'm sorry. •

MAX. I should have believed you. SAM. What?

MAX. Would you mind saying it? MAX. I should have listened. SAM. What? SAM. When? What are you talking about? MAX. That you're getting married. MAX. That time in Durban. Remember? SAM. Yes, but why? SAM. No. MAX. Because I may not believe it otherwise. MAX. When we went home with that girl. SAM. If it will help you. SAM. I'd almost forgotten. MAX. 1 was hoping you may have changed your mind. MAX. I can't forget. I try. SAM. You want me to say it again then? SAM. I can't even remember her name. MAX. No. I want you to say it quickly. (Spotlight on Jo.)

SAM. Okay.

JO. I'm Jo. MAX. No. Quicker than that. You should have said it already. SAM. Hello, I'm Sam. SAM. I'm getting married. MAX. Max. MAX. Did you say it? JO. Come here often? SAM. Yes. 66

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Murray Nossel

SAM. No. Do you?

(Spotlight off Jo.)

JO. On Holiday?

SAM. She liked your eyes.

SAM. Yes. We're passing through.

MAX. So you do remember?

JO. Where are you from?

SAM. Yes. I agreed with her.

(Spotlight off Jo.)

MAX. Yes?

SAM. You didn't say much in the bar.

SAM. Of course.

MAX. I could see the way things were going.

MAX. Well I wish you would have said so.

SAM. You said that's what you wanted. I believed you.

SAM. She was pretty pushy.

MAX. Of course it's not what I wanted. I knew it was my only chance.

(Spotlight on Jo.)

SAM. Chance for what?

JO. You guys got a place to stay tonight? MAX. Yes.

MAX. For having something with you.

SAM. No.

SAM. What do you mean? (Spotlight off Jo.)

MAX. It was like coming in through the side door, surreptitiously. MAX. You lied.

SAM. It wasn't necessary. SAM. I know. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity.

MAX. Yes it was. MAX. I wanted to die.

SAM. It wasn't. I wanted you. I was just waiting for the right opportunity. MAX. I thought it made me more acceptable in your eyes.

SAM. I thought it was what you wanted. MAX. I wanted to be alone with you. SAM. I knew that.

SAM. What? MAX. If I said I also wanted a woman.

MAX. You knew? So why did you lie . . . and tell her we had no place to stay?

SAM. Well, she seemed more interested in you than she was in me. SAM. Like I said . . . it was a perfect opportunity. I knew we'd have (Spotlight on Jo.)

plenty of chances to be alone.

JO. Why are you so quiet, Max?

MAX. It was a nightmare.

MAX. I'm tired. We were eight hours in the car.

(Spotlight on Jo.)

JO. You've got nice eyes, Max.

JO. Want a drink?

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Murray Nossel

SAM. Yes.

SAM-1 wasn't thinking.

MAX. No.

MAX. 1 thought you would have given me a chance.

JO. Let's get comfortable.

SAM. You should have been more forceful.

(Spotlight off Jo.)

MAX. I couldn't.

MAX. 1 wanted to run.

SAM. Why not?

SAM. Why?

MAX. Because it was you I really wanted.

MAX. Because I could see the way things were going. SAM. Why didn't you?

(Spotlight on Jo.)

JO. It's you I really want, Max.

MAX. You don't get it, do you?

(Spotlight off Jo.)

SAM. What?

MAX. Did you sec her after that?

MAX. I couldn't let you out of my sight.

SAM. Yes. Once or twice.

SAM. You seemed okay.

MAX. So did I.

MAX. I watched you do it with her.

SAM. Why?

SAM. You were on the bed with us.

MAX. Symmetry.

MAX. Don't.

(Spotlight on Jo alone with Max.)

SAM. What?

JO. Kiss me Max.

MAX. Remind me.

MAX. Have you seen Sam again?

SAM. I'm sorry.

JO. Will I ever see you again?

MAX. The next day you bought her a locket.

(Exit Jo. Max and Sam alone.)

(Spotlight on Jo.)

MAX. I had Christmas with you and your parents.

JO. Why are you so quiet Max?

SAM. I waited for you.

MAX. Nice locket.

MAX. Your hair had been cut. You were in the army.

JO. Tonight it's your turn.

SAM. I thought about you all day long.

(Spotlight off Jo.)

MAX. The Jacaranda trees were in blossom.

MAX. You pushed me off her.

SAM. We climbed the mountain behind the house.

â&#x20AC;˘PT Quarto

MAX. I gave you a secret gift. SAM. I still have it.

Walnut Grove

MAX. Have you shown it to her? SAM. I gave you a green bottle, with mother of pearl

by R. L. Towne

MAX. I smashed it one day, in a rage. SAM. I glued it together again. MAX. Piece by piece. SAM. I've kept it for you.

"I was the first to realize what dreams are bound to wake up: real. And

MAX. We lay side by side.

snatches of speech caught in passing, and chance meetings along the road, these

SAM. It wasn't the first time.

too have secret meanings."

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound" MAX. The warmth of the sun was on your back. SAM. I listened to your breath. MAX. The door was open to the veranda. SAM. The cat came in. MAX. I felt your childhood in that room. SAM. You were the guest of honor. MAX. I lay in your arms. SAM. I'd never felt that way before. MAX. You said you wanted a woman. SAM. It was already hurting. MAX. I should have believed you.

stop at the intersection and light a cigarette. I quit smoking two months ago but I figure what the hell, now is the not the time to quit. It tastes like mothballs but the next puffs are pretty good. The tires squeal as I take off. The guy next to me is in a blue convertible with a girl. They look happy. They look glad of the bright afternoon. Clouds pass overhead like small birds in a harsh blue. I turn off the radio. The music is annoying. I decide I have extra time to drive around the old neighborhood before my appointment and I head down Highland. I stop at the 7-Eleven for a beer. I buy two. It's cold and it tastes good. 1 calm down. I drive leisurely past the high school. It looks like a fortress in a medieval movie set. A plain but extraordinarily huge building surrounded by treeless playgrounds and ball fields. A few kids arc scattered along the edges, a few in the middle. They look like people in a train set, metal legs, blurred features, painted for passengers on a toy train. The building brings back no real feelings. I think of the gigantic marble halls, the marble curving around the polished banisters. The foyer empty without my hands brushing against the brown marble crisscrossed with gray and beige, touches of yellow. Sad marble. I pass the mall. It's a new one. It's been built since I left four years ago. I shopped there last Christmas when I was home visiting. I bought Martin a present I couldn't really afford then. He opened it in the hospital

AU performance righu reserved.

R. L. Toume

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where he had been since Thanksgiving. "What am I supposed to do with this?" He tossed the box and the tissue paper on the floor and held the sweater up near his gaunt face. I stared at the tissue paper. It was decorated with scenes from Africa. The monkey folded next to the tiger, the zebra. I liked the paper more than the sweater. "Maybe 1 can tear it up and use it as bandages or maybe you can wear it yourself. You've always looked good in blue." He was like that then. Hateful, vicious, mad as hell. He hated me for not dying with him. Hated me because I was alive. Blamed me for his illness. He wrapped the sweater around his head like a turban, a navy blue, cashmere turban. "Merry Christmas, Merry fucking Christmas." I pass Aurora Circle. On the corner is my old piano teacher's house, Mrs. Sanders. Three times a week, I went there, sat in her little airless house on a hard bench. Three times a week for two years before I started playing basketball after school. I can't remember her face. I know she had frizzy hair she kept in a french knot but it would always fall out at the sides. Her hands would go to her hair and arrange it with hair pins, long silver pins to match the gray. On top of the upright piano was a metronome, a clear, glass candy dish with lemon drops, and bust of Shumann. Sometimes we would talk instead of practice. When she was a girl she went to camp with Darla on "The Little Rascals," who was beautiful but had to wear thick, glasses because the movie lights had damaged her eyesight. The glasses ruined her looks, and wasn't that terrible. I didn't think so. She told me about composers. Shumann was her favorite. His bust had a pointed chin and fleshy eyelids. She said he went crazy thinking of this one note over and over and that he died with this one song in his head. That's how I feel sometimes, like something's stuck in my head and playing over and over. That's how I feel about that summer, that particular summer, I was eleven. The summer I was Mrs. Petty's yard boy, when I met Lady Mae. I keep coming back there sniffing the hard cold ground as if to find a bone, buried long ago.

As long as I can remember, my mother told me not to cross Walnut Grove. I could play on the side streets, Highland and Park, until the end of old Mrs. Palmer's well-kept yard with its sad-faced house and weeping willows, but never should I cross, by myself or with a friend, never should I cross Walnut Grove. Its sloping curves and distant avenues had been held responsible for brutal wrecks, the constant disappearance of neighborhood pets, my cat, Rusty, an occasional missing bike, lawn mower, or garden tool and Mrs. Petty's husband. The year she retired from the notions department in Brockman's her husband took off down Walnut Grove, flat out in a new convertible and wasn't heard from again. I knew all the stories, like the suicide motorcycle rider that killed himself in an embankment at the end of the street. His parents were German and put flowers where he had died every anniversary until they died too. I had heard the sensational details of countless wrecks and, although I had seen diesels whizzing past, moving vans lumbering by, and one day a whole brick house, usually the street was quiet.

I am going pretty fast down the street and I miss the turn to Dr. Hill's clinic. 1 have to back up and think a minute. Mother's car doesn't want to go into reverse. It sticks and then I pull up to the curb. I start on the other beer and light a cigarette. The neighborhood has changed so much. The larger yards have been subdivided into several lots and I have a hard time getting my bearings. I make a fast turn right before Walnut Grove.

"Mr. Kirk," the thin nurse says. "Mr. Kirk? You can go to examining room four. It's there on the left." She points her wrist with a heavy gold bracelet toward the back hallway. She is a new nurse. New to me anyway and she seems impatient with the forms in front of her. She is cute, but so serious. Her eyebrows tuck down and her eyes don't meet mine. Her shoulders are hunched in a hard line. She has a small waist and long pale fingers. "Please take off everything and put the gown on. There on the stool. See it?" she asks. "Yes, I found it," I say, nude from behind the screen. "How does this tie?" I ask without thinking she will come behind the screen to help me. "From the front or the back?" I am fumbling with the strings. I keep the robe as close to me as I can. I've lost weight and 1 look too thin. I see myself in the mirror. Maybe it's just from worry. Worry that I'll lose more weight. She looks at me as if she knows I'm hiding my body. Her eyes are brown and clear. She tells me not to be nervous. "It's just an exam. It won't hurt. Is this your first visit? Dr. Hill has a great bedside manner." She hangs my shirt on the hat rack behind us. "No. I know. 1 mean, I know Dr. Hill. He's been my family doctor since I was little. I'm just home seeing my mother." I tell her like it's a routine check up. "Does your mother come here too?" "Yes, her name is Mrs. Kirk."

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"Of course, I didn't make the connection. She's a lovely lady, so thoughtful. She brought us some divinity candy at Christmas time." "That's her." "And you have a sister named Lucy." "Yes." "Who just had a baby." "Yes, that's us." "That's a darling baby." "It sure is." I am surprised I can still make small talk. But it goes okay. "Now that I think about it, I've heard your mother talk about you. You live in California or somewhere. Right?" "Yeah, San Diego." I watch her straighten up the rest of my things with her pale hands. She is prettier than I thought at first. Martin would have loved her, if he were still alive. He loved pale girls like her, and pale boys like me he loved more. She stands watching me, picking at the side of her nail like she is trying to decide if I will be okay by myself. Then she says, "It won't be too long, Dr. Hill will be in in just a minute." "Okay, I'm okay now, Thanks..." "Rachel, Rachel Parks." "Thanks, Rachel, I'll be fine," I say and jump up on the table. I try to look comfortable so that she will go away. Not that I don't like her. If 1 wasn't gay, I would probably ask her out. I'm sorry I let her see my hand shake. Her worried, comforting face makes me want to be alone. She shuts the door and I lie back on the hard table. I feel like an insect under a microscope. I wriggle my legs in Kafka-like fashion. It makes me think of Mrs. Petty and that summer. I was thinking about Saturday morning. We had finished breakfast, Mother, Lucy, and I. It was before the divorce, but Dad wasn't home anyway, one of his "road trips." Luck was watching TV, cartoons just like every Saturday. I was trying to escape to the garage and get my bike and get to Jimmy's house. He was my best friend and we loved to go to the subdivision and blow things up and light firecrackers and cherry bombs. Mother was cleaning the refrigerator when she caught me out of the corner of her eye making a dash for it. "You promised to cut Mrs. Petty's yard this afternoon, so don't go out to that subdivision and get so wound up playing or doing whatever you do and forget that you're expected there this afternoon. Don't make a face and don't forget to take out the garbage before you leave," she

said swinging her blond pony tail as she scrubbed the counter tops with a soapy sponge. "She's counting on you, son. You know Sam Boy can't do it. He tried once but he ended up just making pretty patterns on the lawn. He's just not good at anything like that. Now, go get the garbage." I would droop my shoulders as I carried the full plastic bags to the side of the house where we kept the garbage cans. There were only a few flies and never much of an odor because mother cleaned the cans once a week but I resented chores of any kind. I flew out of the driveway, swerving to miss a huge stray cat that had been hanging out around our yard. Mother was saying, "Don't set foot on Walnut Grove, be home by six and don't forget Mrs. Petty's yard. Ben. Ben? Don't go near Walnut Grove." I lost her shrill voice at the end of the drive and then started to climb the hill at the top of Park. From there I could fly, pedaling as fast as I could until I got to Walnut Grove. I would make sure no one was watching, I would pedal back and forth, daring God to strike me dead. Smiling because nothing ever did. I headed for Jimmy's. "We have to get out to the subdivision before it gets too hot, so hurry up and bring the good M-80s and the cannon balls." "Let me get dressed, for Christ's sake," Jimmy said from his upstairs window. His deaf grandmother stood on the porch and watched us ride off in the brightness of the morning, sun gleaming off the handlebars and spokes. We stopped by the corner store for root beer and grape gum. We rode down the tree-lined street and turned at the gravel road that led to the development. After the sign that said, "Perkins' New Model Homes," the rolling hills turned to flat roads, in and out of the treeless home sites halfbuilt, with naked frames and bare roofs. Mr. Perkins had lost his loan at the bank and was trying to sell. Meanwhile, construction was slow, if ever. The rains had warped some frames like diseased bones in the stark heat, crooked yet alive, waiting to be fleshed out, like a featherless bird wing, like trees cut down to make the flat roads and tossed in heaps in the gully, leafless and brittle. We rode our bikes on the riding trails that hadn't been leveled when it was Myer's horse farm. Part of the barn still stood, with weathered wood and deep green vines, and smelled of manure as we passed. We stopped at the half-built house on the corner of Perkins Avenue. The house where we hid matches, candles, extra jackets, and a deflated soccer ball. It was deserted on the weekend and we would build a fire on the stones and cook marshmallows and hotdogs and pretend we were stranded on a secluded island or awaiting orders from the F.B.I, to save the world. The M-80s would go first.

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We would watch them spin, craving the loud noise like the tender explosions, sometimes tying several together or enhancing them with powder from shotgun shells or bullets. We loved the power of the brightness in the silent sky. At night, we would hold firecrackers to the last second before throwing them, embers meeting the fireflies in the dusk of the day. I remember how my hands would smell of gunpowder constantly because of our experiments. Like the Tiny fiasco. I had built the ultimate rocket with match heads and gun powder. It had taken hours of carefully tying each match head around the cone I had made out of balsa wood. Then I had cut a beer can in half to use as the cockpit. Lucy wouldn't let me borrow Tiny, her hamster. Usually, she would agree to anything but on this she stood firm, so I had to sneak into her room and take Tiny out of his cage. I had a hard time getting him into the small compartment but he finally relaxed after I shook the capsule a few times. I took the rocket out to the end of the driveway so I could see where it would land. A terrific moon filled the night with luxurious light and made shadows on the drive. There were a million stars. The capsule went up about twenty feet with an M-80 giving it an extra blast. It exploded in mid-air and melted. Tiny's body was burnt at the end of the drive. He met a hero's death. I never told Lucy and for months she looked for Tiny in the attic or under the beds. I still remember Tiny's little face when he stopped fighting and lay down in the homemade cockpit. I have seen him in dreams. Creamy, soft Tiny.

thought I had forgotten, but I still remember sitting there waiting for hours until he contacted my father to see if it was all right to use corporal punishment. I could've saved him the wait, of course Dad would think it was okay. I saw them shake hands in the glassed-in office. He charged me with smoking in the bathroom. Then he ordered me to pull down my pants. I pulled them down. "Underwear too." He had a gravelly voice, but it sounded light that afternoon, as if he would burst out laughing, sort of giddy. He clapped the paddle against one wide palm and teased it across the other. "Hurry up son, I haven't got all day." I did as he said. I stood exposed, by his green leather chair and, not knowing where to look, I focused on the brass pin set on his desk. I could see my nose and part of an eye. I was oblong and golden with dark edges. "Grab your ankles and count with me," he said guiding me over with the tip of the paddle, his arm cupped across my back. His hard muscles and tough hair scratched my skin and I wanted to yell. My pants, which mother had creased so carefully that morning fallen crumpled around my shoes, I received the hard hits. I knew they were hard because of the sound and the pain later and because he would be hard, but at the time I only felt blood rushing in my heart and pounding at my temples. "One, two, say it louder son or this will take twice as long." I wanted to please him, I yelled the numbers with him. "That's good, now, one, two, three, louder or we'll start again."

"Ben?" Rachel knocks as she opens the door. "Looks like Dr. Hill is going to be a while. Would you like some magazines or something to look at?" "Medical journals?" "No. We can do better than that. We have some other things. National Geographic! Timel Newsweekl" "Well, maybe. You know, what I would really like is a Coke. Is there a Coke machine around anywhere?" "I'll get you one." I hand her some quarters. "Thanks a lot. How long do you think he will be?" It will be a while. A child was brought in. An emergency she tells me. He swallowed something that's making him choke. They have to x-ray and it takes time. The walls are painted sea-foam green, like the paint they use in schools, like the waiting room to Mr. Holmes' office at the high school. I

He hit me fifteen or seventeen times, some odd number. I can still see his face when he finished, exuberant and refreshed, pouring a drink from a cut-glass decanter. He sat behind his walnut barrister desk. He looked pleased, justified. "Your father says you've been a problem at home too, so keep this in mind, Mr. Kirk: if you get out of line again, here or at home, your father wants me to punish you again, so be forewarned." He found it necessary to punish me once a week for the next few years and I became accustomed to his manner, even purified by his action. I dropped by to see him after I graduated, we kept in touch. But after that day, I never smiled at my father and when he died I didn't go to the funeral. I am almost asleep when I hear Rachel come in and put down the magazines and the Coke. She tells me to take a nap, that she'll be back in a little while. I don't get up. I put my arm over my eyes to block the florescent ceiling light. From a distance, I hear a lawn mower. It reminds me of Mrs. Petty's lawn. I had talked Jimmy into helping me, not that he minded. We were always together and we would do anything to be around the Petty household. We were fascinated by everything connected with that tall,

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scary house on the edge of Walnut Grove. It was a three-story Victorian house with well-kept gingerbread, painted dark green, outlining the white wood. It had two long porches on either side and a sleep porch on the back that was screened in. There was a stained-glass window in the front room of a castle with white horses and knights with red poppies. And the cupola with towers like demon eyes. That mesmerized us. It had spirals that jutted off in odd directions and gargoyles sat on a stone terrace. The windows were tall with lace curtains that flapped wearily like beckoning ghosts when there was a breeze. We were sure spirits lingered there and we wanted to meet them. We knew they watched us and that Mae knew them personally. The yard in front was covered in magnolia trees and high birches that shaded the ground so there wasn't much grassâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;just cool moss and ivy vines and wild baby rabbits. The back yard seemed to never stop. Lined in tall pines and slight hills, it turned to weeds and tough bushes and lost its definition. There was a small vegetable garden where Mrs. Petty grew cherry tomatoes and a grape arbor that was grown over with vines. Mrs. Petty would give us lemonade and cookies out on the porch. Sam Boy would sweep the stone walkway that led to the garden. She said we could take off our shirts and we sat in the cool shade listening to her talk. Mostly she talked about Sam Boy. I wanted to know about Mae. Occasionally, I would see a curtain move or hear a shutter open upstairs. "1 saw her once last year, getting into die car," Jimmy said. "What did she look like?" "She looked kinda pretty but it was far away. I couldn't see real good. She was as small as a dwarf." "You mean like a midget?" "Yeah, maybe smaller." "Wonder why she won't come out?" "My grandmother says she used to go places with her mother but then she just quit. Nobody sees her anymore." It rained a lot that summer and the grass grew quickly. We had to cut Mrs. Petty's lawn every week or the next week it would be harder. Sam Boy followed us everywhere with his broom. He was tall, about six-feet-four, and very fat, not a hard fat but soft like a baby. I know he was about thirty then but his skin was smooth and free of lines like a plastic doll. He slumped over as if he were trying to make himself smaller. He would sit in the smallest chair, and scrunch his body like he wanted to be little. Mother said he had water on the brain. He didn't talk much but he liked to listen to us and giggle. 80

One afternoon Mrs. Petty sat on the porch fanning herself with a lace fan from the funeral parlor. She wore a wig because she had lost most of her hair, she said, from nerves. Her store-bought hair, as she called it, was in a constant flip. That afternoon it was askew. Strawberry-red with maroon ends, tilted on top of her head. "It keeps my head nice and warm in the winter but it's hotter than Hades in the summer." She sweated great pools of water, her clothes were always wet. She wore dangling earrings that matched a brooch she pinned to her checkered housecoat. And always she made up her face with lots of powder, a couple of shades lighter than her skin, ruby-red lipstick with a purple cast ran into the seams of her lips and bright green eye shadow melted on top of her thick lids. Her eyebrows were shaved and replaced by hand drawn ones, arched in an amazed expression. She wore Jungle Gardenia perfume, powder, and oil. I could smell that strong, sweet smell everywhere. It was faintly on the cookies she made us, on the rims of glasses we drank from and, when she burnt the top of the cake, her scent hung in the air. She sat in the porch swing swatting mosquitoes and wiping her forehead with a lavender handkerchief. She had rolls of skin under her chin and around her apron. When she sat down she seemed to be at an angle and the swing dipped and creaked as she rocked. "You boys want some iced tea?" she asked, kicking a sandal off her foot. She craned her neck to see us around the corner. "Don't touch those cages in the side yard by the azalea bushes, okay? That's some of Sam Boy's doings. Just leave that area to him. He'll get it with the hedge clippers." I held the wheelbarrow in place as Jimmy piled in the damp grass. "Let's let these little birds go Jimmy," I said as we walked by the cages. "No way, he'd be pissed and he's pretty big." "It's just so gross." "It's not that bad, besides he sells them for the church. He's helping to raise money for the choir's trip." "I don't think people would buy them if they knew that they were real." 'They're just little birds. It's not like they're a dog or something. You eat chicken, don't you?" "Well, yes, but. .." "Well, it's the same thing." "There's something different about it. It's not right. I think it's mean. 81

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"Look, those little birds don't live very long anyway and most of the babies die, so don't worry about it." On one of the hottest afternoons, Sam Boy was in our every step. "Sam Boy, you go sit in the shade with your mother, okay? Go get some tea." We tried to encourage him to stay with his mother but he wouldn't listen, he wanted to help. The lawn mower overheated so we got to rest. "Help yourself to some tea or cool water," Mrs. Petty said. We cooled off in the garden hose. Sam Boy ran up on the porch with his mother. "Look, I think Mae is watching from the kitchen." Jimmy laughed and squirted the window with the hose. The curtain closed. "I think I saw her. Why is she so shy? She looks pretty, what 1 could see," I said, excited that I was close to the mysterious Lady Mae. Jimmy bent down to drink from the hose, and whispered in my ear, "She probably doesn't want anyone staring at her. She's old anyway, she's close to nineteen or something. Why do you care about her so much? You want to feel her underpants? She'd probably let you." "No way, I just want to see her, that's all. And you don't know that. She probably wouldn't even talk to me," I said, but I wanted to feel Mae's underpants, I wanted to feel Mae all over. Late afternoon became night, the yard was cut and 1 was paid and split the money with Jimmy. It was hard work and when I went to bed that night, I felt like my hands were still holding the mower. I slept with deep dreams of Tiny speeding towards me in a sparkling capsule over lakes that ran to Walnut Grove and beyond the subdivision. And Mae kept watching me from the window in the cupola with eyes like Tiny's in a long floating veil. The door opens, I think it's Rachel, so I stay on my back, the chair moves, I glance over, it's the older nurse with the short nose who was eating a sandwich at the back desk when I came in the office. "I'm here to take your blood. We'll go on and get the blood work done while Dr. Hill is with another patient. If you'll just sit over here and give me your arm." I obey her. The chair is cold. My gown falls open a little but I don't care if she sees my body. I lay my arm across the table, she takes my hand, rubs my skin with alcohol, and stabs me with the needle. She can't find the vein, she sticks me again. It stings but just for a second. She bites her bottom lip. "There we go." She bends my arm gently at the elbow. 'That's all for now."

"No, not here, we send them to the lab. Then they send back the results." "When?" "It depends on the tests Dr. Hill orders, but usually two to three days, unless they're backed up or it's a holiday or the weekend. Then it's a little longer." When I'm alone again I put my shirt around my shoulders. It's cold from the air conditioning and I'm shaking. I think about my blood in the glass tube traveling to the lab. Some unknown face peering inside me. Knowing my secret before I do. Jotting some record down on a chart by a number. The results riding in a van across town in a manilla envelope. Positive, negative, written, perhaps typed. Existing there, overnight in a lab, quietly in a drawer or file cabinet. I drink my Coke, I wish I had a beer. I light a cigarette and stare out the window. I can almost see Walnut Grove. That summer when the temperature finally broke, I could cut Mrs. Petty's yard in half the time and spend all day in the subdivision. I played there without thinking about the time. One afternoon the light was fading, Jimmy had already gone and I saw the sun disappear. The sky turned gold, then pink. I thought I saw Venus, white next to the rising moon. The street lights were dim in the twilight. I felt as if I was the only person alive. It scared me but I felt noble, somehow entitled to the earth. My earth. I didn't see any cars on the way home, the streets were empty. Only a plane passed by far away in the heavens and I thought it must be filled with dead people and that I was really alone. The naked shells of half-built homes that I passed on the way home seemed to tell me with O-shaped mouths that I was alone. The sole survivor of the world. I parked my bike on Highland and ran behind Mrs. McDill's backyard. I leaped over the hurricane fence and the manicured shrubs. The shortcut home. The only danger would be a Pekinese yapping at my ankles but it was quiet as I hurdled the porch furniture and dodged the birdbath. I was sure everyone had been killed in a nuclear bomb that had somehow not reached the subdivision. Miraculously, I had been spared. I finally made it to the redwood fence that surrounded our yard. I climbed the braided boards, I had to be careful of the nail heads that were loose and stuck out at the joints. Once I had cut myself so deeply that I had to have stitches in my thigh. I bit my lip trying not to cry but when mother hugged me in the bathroom, the tears came out. Dad called me a sissy when he stuck his head in the bathroom and saw my head buried in mother's arms crying. He said 1

"When do you get the results? I mean, do you do the tests and stuff here?" I ask her. 82

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Quarto was a crybaby and then he called me one. Crybaby, crybaby. After that 1 tried to be careful so I wouldn't have anything to cry about. When Dad was sick for the last time he pulled me over very close to him, he smelled like Band-Aids and his voice was low. He pulled my elbow with his free arm and said in my ear, "I think I'm dying." I didn't cry then. I rarely cry. From the top of the fence, I could see my family. They weren't overcome by radiation and it surprised me. They were in the kitchen. Mother stood at the stove, Dad was taking his place at the table, and Lucy sat on a telephone book placed in her chair to make her high enough to reach. They were captured there in the gold light on the room against the coming night, a living picture. My private dollhouse. The sliding glass doors reflected the fading sun, the dark trees of the backyard were silhouetted around the plate glass. Limbs hung like metal arms waiting to clip me as I ran by. A warm breeze from the humming, central air motor made me wish for cool water as I ran past the sticky rose bushes to my mother's dinner, pricking my legs in the dark air. It was the last of summer vacation and I could feel the days becoming cooler. The real hot days seemed to have disappeared like the sixtoed cat with blue eyes that Mrs. Petty liked to feed in her carport. "Guess you boys haven't seen that old white cat, have you?" she would ask us. "I wish I could find that old cat. Sure you haven't seen it? Hope it didn't get run over. If it got on Walnut Grove, no telling what happened." The large house was full of things I had seen at the church bazaar. On the table was a hot plate made out of popscicle sticks, a napkin holder made of different kinds of seeds, a picture of an owl made out of yellow and brown yarn, a Kleenex box covered with sea shells sprayed silver. A doll's head was crocheted into a toaster cover. Enclosed in a curio stand made of cherry were odd little bugs and small birds with dazed faces set in polyurethane and epoxied to stones that Sam Boy had painted neon colors. Some were trimmed in rick-rack or showered in rhinestones, some wore straw hats or bow ties and some held signs that said, "Get well," or "Be my Secret Pal." They glistened behind the etched glass of the antique cabinet. In the room she called the big den where they watched TV and ate dinner on trays, I would stand and look at these creations for hours. 'Trash and treasure," Mrs. Petty would say. "One man's trash is another man's treasure." One day Sam Boy wanted to take me to his work room. The carpet in the hallway was thick with large wool roses in a flesh-colored pink. As I 84

alked along the hallway to the back stairs, my tennis shoes caught on the heavy petals. The hallway was musty and cold with faded wallpaper in a floral design. We walked through the largest kitchen I had ever seen, with two stoves, a walk-in pantry, a silver closet, a butler's pantry, and a fourteen-foot work table. When Sam Boy saw me looking at the dumb waiter, he said, "That's for Mae. On the tray was a tea service in bone china made for dolls. Petite linens, hand-monogrammed and edged in handmade lace, had been carefully folded and placed to the side. I wanted to touch each dish and feel the teapot in my hand, but Sam Boy hurried me up the stairs. The servants' stairs were tight and winding. Sam Boy had to hunch his shoulders more than usual. He pointed to the sitting area on the second floor with a sunroom and tall rubber plants, ceramic vases stood in the corners with gaping faces. There were rows and rows of leather-bound books and child-size chairs and ottomans. "She hides in her room, it's on this floor," Sam Boy told me without any expression. On the third floor the steps were so narrow I was surprised that he could maneuver as well as he did. He was surprisingly agile. When we reached the cupola, it was purple and gray, and far off there was heat lightning. Black-edged clouds moved like sailfish across the sky. I could smell the rain and the tops of the pines. From the cupola I could see the storm coming over the neighborhood houses and lawns spread out before us like a play village. 'This is where I make my treasures," Sam Boy said. "Mae doesn't like it." He whirled his arms inside the cupola, pointing out the different projects on the long workbench. There were hand-made boxes for the butterflies. Their fragile wings patted against the velvet cardboard. He adjusted a few of the pins stuck in their heads. Some were already dead. "I make them into paperweights. Aren't they pretty? I catch them around the rose bushes." The clouds turned pink and dark gray and the wind picked up. Lightning made Sam Boy jump. It looked as if it touched the top of the cupola. The curtains blew out like a great breath of air had released them. There were jars of insects, moths, butterflies and bees waiting to be immortalized, all beating against the glass. On the other side of the cupola, were the wire cages. He removed the covers. The small birds were singing, afraid of the storm. "I'll show you how I make my treasures. I'll let you do one. Hold out your hand." He handed me a baby bird with a helpless glare. "Keep it still, bring it over here." At the work table, he taped the little feet. The bird was warm and I could feel its heart, pulsing softly against my fingers. He told me to hold tight and keep him in place on the mat. Then he 85

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glued the taped feet. The bird was wiggling, he told it not to move. He brushed glue under its wings and mouth and then painted the bird, coating the feathers. The bird struggled to breath. His eyes seemed to be begging for help but then, like Tiny, he relaxed and gave way to the stiff death. His head cocked as if to get the last bit of life from the air. Then Sam Boy sprayed him with a generous coat of polyurethane and clapped his hands in approval. 'Trash and treasure," he said. "I want to do bigger stuff. I sent off for a freeze-dried kit, I want to do cats and dogs." Above him were miniscule birds lacquered in bright colors. He handed me a chartreuse mother and baby with silver glitter. The storm moved in and the rain fell in torrents. Sam Boy disappeared to get us some sandwiches. I looked at the shellacked birds dead in different poses; one in flight, one was running. In the cages they sang in odd keys, petrified of the storm. Every cage was full of little birds, rocking in the dark wind that blew leaves and brittle limbs about the floor. Mixed with the fresh smell of the rain was formaldehyde. 1 felt sick. It smelled like my father's breath after he got so sick. I though of his stitches and the red, puckered skin. I was alone in the cupola when I heard her calling for Sam Boy. "He's downstairs," I told her. "It's me, Ben. Ben Kirk." She said yes, she knew me. Could she sit with me for a moment? She was scared of storms. Water blew on my face and I had goose bumps as Mae stepped into the cupola. The lightning showed her face in flashes. I tried to memorize each feature in each flash. She was so delicate, so lovely, like a fairy from a book, her gown flowed to the floor and her tiny slippers stepped close to me. "I've always been afraid of storms. Lightning and thunder terrify me." We sat on the divan by the back windows. The cupola was dark and brilliant from the claps of lightning. I was scared too. She put my arm around her frail shoulders, shivering in the pale light. "Don't be scared," I told her, but a limb from the oak tree crashed against the side porch. She fell trembling into my arms and buried her face in my lap. Her tiny gold curls were tied with pink ribbons. I patted her head as my mother did mine sometimes. She smelled like tea roses and her voice was clear and soft. She looked up into my face with hopeful eyes and then relaxed. "Please stay with me," she said with tears. "Mother is visiting Aunt Willa and won't be back until tomorrow night. Sam Boy just sits in his room and watches TV or murders birds. I can't stand that. I hate to be 86

alone." I called my mother and told her I was spending the night at Jimmy's. The rain was steady and the thunder seemed distant. Sam Boy brought sandwiches and cookies. Mae and I sat very still. We pulled the satin coverlet off the chaise lounge and made a pallet on the floor. We could see the sky from the tall windows. The lightning like fireworks. "Don't be scared," I told her. Lady Mae fell asleep, her small head resting against my chest. I was half-awake, half-asleep, watching her breath. Her breaths were like little gasps, for a second I thought she had quit breathing. Finally, I fell asleep. The sheets of rain, the low drone of the TV from Sam Boy's room downstairs and Mae's sweet body next to mine rocked me to sleep. The breeze blew from the lilacs and hydrangea bushes, purple and blue in the black yard below. I had dreams about long rivers floating like green ribbons in the sky and huge drops of rain splattering and steaming on black summer asphalt. And there were walnuts made of gold that exploded like firecrackers in my hands without pain. The rain was hard and real, and when I awakened I thought I was home and that I had wet the bed. It was still dark and the moonless night made it hard for me to see. I felt her soft hair in my hands and her soft lips kissing my chest. Her fingers pushed at my waist, she undid my pants. She rested her cheek on my stomach and kissed my bare thighs. She took me in her warm mouth, her perfect pink mouth touching me in the dark. Afterwards, I fell back to sleep and thought it must have been a dream. I never told anybody about staying with Mae that night and very seldom would she come to me. Sometimes at dusk when jimmy had gone home, she would stand by me in bare feet smoothing my hair and feeding me chocolate drops or red licorice. One evening, I was watering the forsythia bushes while she stood on the ledge around the fish pond, dangling her toes in the cool green water. "I love you," 1 whispered, but she just looked straight ahead and kept walking in a circle around the dark pool. I told Martin I loved him one morning. He sat up in bed and stared out the window as though he hadn't heard me. I walked out mad and smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes in the cafeteria and watched the orderlies. 1 stared at one in particular and he followed me to the men's room. I thought of Martin while we had sex. I went back to the room with a smug smile, the nurse was fussing with his sheets. He was dead. Quickly, quietly, staring straight ahead. Dr. Hill comes in. Everything looks good he says. Vital organs look good. Wait for the blood work before jumping to conclusions. He gives me a 87

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prescription for tranquil izers. I have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. Weight loss not a good sign. He says things I already know. H.I.V. Positive. I know, but I wait for the results. One night Mae came and knocked on my window. There was no moon, but 1 could see her small frame in the light from the porch. She was terrified that Sam Boy was going to freeze-dry the white stray cat that he had caught in his trap. "It's got to stop, it's all got to stop," she said from the bushes. I dressed and met her at midnight by die fish pond. My pockets were stuffed with firecrackers. Vines from die grape arbor tangled in my hair. I sat on the ledge and waited for Mae. She held a candle so we could see. 1 followed her. I knew what we must do. It was time to set the birds free. She guided me to the traps in the side yard in the darkness and we released the birds and then we smashed the traps with a hammer. We went along the stone path to the back gate and inside the house without a sound. We climbed the stairs until we reached the cupola. We opened all die windows and then the cages. Hundreds of liberated creatures leaped to meet the night. Feathers fluttered in the quiet air of the breathless night and seemed silver even in the darkness. I heard the soft cry of the cat and I stooped to open its cage. 1 untied the wire tangled around its paws and kissed its neck. When everything was free, we went down to the yard. I kept the cat close as I found footing on the uneven stones until I reached my bike. We tied a basket to the handle bars. Mae wrapped the cat in a silk cloth and placed it in the basket. I could see her eyes from the glare of the street light. I peddled to the street, stopping a few yard down to light my firecrackers and rockets. Exploding bars of light fellâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;red, jagged against the lustrous night.

by James Brosnan

HARLES and JULIE, kindergarten classmates, five years old, in

her room: expensively decorated in upper'middle-class taste for children.

JULIE. Let's play house. CHARLES. House? How do you play house? JULIE. One of us stays home. The other has to go to work. CHARLES. You mean like parents? JULIE. (Slightly puzzled herself:) Well, sort of. I'll be the mommy. CHARLES. The mommy? JULIE. I'll be your wife. CHARLES. You will? JULIE. In the game. Come on. We'll have breakfast. (Like a housewife.) You sit down, and I'll put die food on the table. Do you want orange juice?

I take a right and light a cigarette. Late afternoon clouds gadier like a dark bird around the blood-red sun. In the rear view mirror I look at my face, I look like my father around the eyes. I smile, staring straight ahead as I race down Walnut Grove, under the flutter of wings.

CHARLES. Oh, I like orange juice. JULIE. Okay, here you go. (She mimes putting down plates; they eat.) Hurry up. You're going to be late. CHARLES. Okay. JULIE. Come on, you have to go to work. CHARLES. I have to go to work? (Starts to get it.) JULIE. Yes.

James Bros-nan

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CHARLES. Okay. (Stands up, starts to go.) JULIE. Wait! (He stops.) Don't forget your jacket. And your briefcase. CHARLES. Oh, yeah. (Mimes putting on jacket and picking up brief-

case.) Ooh, it's heavy. JULIE. What do you mean, it's heavy? Are you a weakling? CHARLES. (Stands upright.) No, no. It's just early. Hey, wait, what do you do while I go to work?

Julie. (Fake matron voice.) How ahhre you, dahhling? Yes. Oh, you're having a pahhty in the Hamptons? Yes, of course I'll go. I was so afraid you wouldn't ask. (Looks at Charles.) Charlie? I suppose I can bring Charlie. I'll see you then. CHARLES. (Picks up imaginary "phone" and tries to one-up her.) Johnson? This is Thompson. Are you ready to move that shipment yet? Well, move it! Why? Because I said so. That's good enough. Who cares about Davis? Good. Call me. (He hangs up the phone, puts his feet up, and mimes reading a newspaper.)

JULIE. How is your new apartment working out? Marvelous. (To Charles.) Her bathrooms are made of marble.

JULIE. (98 ) Oh, I have to sit around here all day. CHARLES. Hey, that's not fair.

CHARLES. I'm at work.

CHARLES. (Pausing, unsure of what to do.) Oh.

JULIE. Oh, sorry. (To phone.) How are your new bathrooms? Oh, that's so nice. When are you going up to your country house? We'll be there a little later than that. So we'll see you there. Ciao.

JULIE. (Shooinghim out the door.) Get moving.

CHARLES. Chow? What's chow?

CHARLES. (Waking up.) Oh, yeah. Bye.

JULIE. It means "Bye."

(Charles mimes opening the "door" and going to work.)

CHARLES. Can't you just say "Bye?"

JULIE. (Standing at the "door" and waving.) Bye. I'll miss you while

JULIE. Are you talking to me from work?

JULIE. What do you mean, it's not fair? You have to go to work.

you're at work.

CHARLES. Can't I? CHARLES. I'm getting on the subway. JULIE. You could call me. JULIE. Don't you drive? CHARLES. Oh. (Picks up the phone, dials. Pause.) You're not picking CHARLES. Nobody drives. You take the subway.

it up.

JULIE. (Puzzled.) Oh. (Brightening.) Okay.

JULIE. It's not ringing.

CHARLES. Okay. Now I'm at work. Where do I work?

CHARLES. Ring!

JULIE. I don't know. You never talk to me while you're at work.

(Pause.)

CHARLES. Oh. Well, it must be important. (Looks at his "desk" not really knowing what to do.) Okay. I'm working.

JULIE. Oh, I'm so tired. CHARLES. Ring!

JULIE. I'll call friends. (She picks up a toy phone.) Hello, Sarah? It's JULIE. I should clean up around here. 90

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James Bros nan

CHARLES. Ring! Ring!

CHARLES. I didn't think about that.

JULIE. Oh, I'll answer that. (Slowly, she picks up the phone.) Hello, who is it?

JULIE. Well, I suppose it's time for you to leave. CHARLES. I have to stay until a time?

CHARLES. It's me. JULIE. Sure. It's like school. You stay in school until two. You stay at work till five.

JULIE. Me? Who's me? CHARLES. It's Charlie.

CHARLES. My parents must come home at weird hours. They can walk in at anytime and find me watching TV.

JULIE. Oh, hi Charlie.

JULIE. (Ignoring him and playing by the rules:) Okay, you can leave now.

CHARLES. Hi. JULIE. How's work?

CHARLES. Okay. CHARLES. (Sudden gruff business tone.) We're real busy. I just ordered a shipment.

(Charles gets up and walks straight toward her. She objects to his rulebreaking.)

JULIE. A shipment of what? JULIE. You have to come home on the train. CHARLES. I don't know, but it was important. I had to yell at that fool Johnson.

CHARLES. Oh, yeah. (Charles mimes taking the subway home.) I'm on the subway. (Makes subway noise.) Now I'm getting off.

JULIE. When are you coming home?

(Charles mimes getting off the "subway," opens the door.) I'm here.

CHARLES. Oh. I don't know. JULIE. You have to know when you're coming home. Why else did you call?

JULIE. That's nice.

CHARLES. Oh, yeah. I'll be home for dinner.

JULIE. The other side of the room? You were at work.

JULIE. That's nice. How soon?

CHARLES. Okay, if you say so.

CHARLES. Oh, real soon. I have more important things to do.

JULIE. You were at work. Are you tired?

JULIE. Okay. Bye.

CHARLES. Sure. I'm tired.

CHARLES. Bye. (Both hang up the "phones.") Can I leave now?

JULIE. Just sit down and rest. I'll get your slippers.

JULIE. I thought you said you still had work to do.

CHARLES. I have slippers?

CHARLES. But I don't want to do it.

JULIE. Of course you do.

JULIE. How are we supposed to make money if you don't want to work?

(Julie gets "slippers," mimes putting them on.)

CHARLES. The other side of the room is real nice.

CHARLES. Thanks. Now what do we do? 92

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JULIE. I don't know.

CHARLES. Why don't we play another game? Remember the last time I was here? Let's play that.

â&#x20AC;˘ |

JULIE. I don't want to play that.

;

CHARLES. That game's fun. JULIE. I'm not supposed to play games like that. CHARLES. Why not?

JULIE. My mother doesn't want me to. CHARLES. You told your mother? JULIE. I didn't really tell her. She just doesn't want me to do things like that. CHARLES. Oh. Well, let's play house again.

JULIE. I don't want to.

Contestants

by Leslie Holland

here she is, Miss America No one knows she hasn't eaten in three days. She hasn't been fed, three whole days. Madison Avenue says, Save your soul. Be Thin or Die. Not sure what she needs more, A hug or a good meal With a side of Shakespeare. Prisoner of Madison Avenue. Her face plays a Sousa march While her body plays Danse Macabre, Even though the ribbed violin strings Are encased in sequins and lace.

CHARLES. Now you don't want to? Poor dear, Feed her soul. Feed her sole, Broiled dry, no butter please.

JULIE. No. CHARLES. How come you start out wanting to, but then when I really start to like it, you don't want to do anything? JULIE. I just don't. CHARLES. I don't understand. Last time I was here . . . we took off our clothes.

j j

JULIE. And you let my mom know. You walked out with your shirt unbuttoned. You let my mom know. You're so stupid.

(Blackout.)

There she sits, Mrs. America, Here, at the Welfare Office For what seems like three whole days. Children clinging to her legs, haven't eaten in as many. Not sure what they need more, A hug or a good meal With a side of Sesame Street. Capitol Hill says, Isn't it a pity, but Don't Blame on Me. Souls in need of repair. Soles in need of repair, Wants to stand on her own two feet. 95

Millay

Shelburne Graveyard by J. Valera

e were lying on the rumpled bed you were reading Millay to me. I can still hear your ringing voice: 'There isn't a train I wouldn't take." And through the years you have taken many trains planes, buses, cars rickshaws, horses camels, and oxen away from me. Now, as I board my own trains I can still hear your ringing voice: "There isn't a train I wouldn't take."

by David Hauger

here was no road where the road was. The living had moved away. Sky trains still passed over. Crow perches in the old cornfields, distant stalks giving way to wooshing winds. Stragglers. A resplendent sun stood still, just beating down, burning rocks and breaking asphalt. Battered mailboxes rusting, abandoned. Cars reluctant to cross an old stick bridge over a gravel stream. A tall iron sentry without a fence, locked. Invaders beware. Weed-shy headstones scattered behind, leaning in an open field in a most unmilitary fashion. No heroes here. No glorious or proud, but the hill soldiers from another day still stood guard. A flower pot with dried shoots at rest atop a puddled face watching the sky encampment pull up stakes. A weathered oak soldier with an arm lost. Home Guard hallowed. Murmurings, with broken voices. But only a few. Aunt Helen's lost boy. Ossie Hecht. Obie Pope, the hairless. Roddie Herrell, the retarded patrol boy disregarded by a speeding truck. My name was uttered several times and once directly to me. But never again when I left. Timewashed away.

Barbara Livenstein

T ' X T ' T henEben % ^f t said please, I % i\ I thought he really T T meant it this time. So I went. The train moved quietly through the velvet snow. At each successive station it got deeper. Frosted cars moved slowly through the falling white, the white falling like little bits of existence crumbling, disintegrating, flying away in frenzied swirls. When I stepped off the train it was up to my knees. 1 saw the back of Eben's gray jacket, his wild, black hair blowing. Then he turned and the terrified look came over his face. He never smiled when he saw me. He would never allow such a revelation. Instead, he made a fierce face, controlled, passionate, and purposeful. 1 always got sucked in. He took my bag. I followed him to the car. The tracks of his tires had already filled in with fresh snow. It was like driving through a cloud. I couldn't see anything, although my eyes were wide open. Then he cut the engine. A single spotlight illuminated the big tree in the front, its naked branches like snakes frozen solid. Through the glass doors I saw the table: two white plates, two crystal glasses, two white napkins, two bright candles, their flickering tops gasping. It looked nice. He had tried. We ate. We didn't touch. The fire kept dying. Now Eben had white sheets, and we watched the snow from the big bedroom window upstairs. We always like to look out the window just afterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;before sleep. Eben thought the trees looked like dinosaurs, monsters left over from the time when the earth was another planet. I had never seen trees that tall. He'd been out trying to gather wood for the fire. But all of the wood was too wet. When he touched me, all I could think of was the icy tree with its branches like frozen tentacles. 98

The next day, Eben's friends came overâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the new friends, the neighbors, the people who lived in this summer community year-round. I'd met them before: the art dealer, the architect, the artist from Switzerland who always wore ledcrhosen, the artist from Germany who was completely bald. The artists were lovers; they slept in a bed rumored to have been owned by Marie Antoinette, found in a flea market somewhere in France. Downstairs, they discussed Art. Upstairs, I was staring out the window. Against the clear blue sky were only trees now, massive, dark, clumsy in the wind. The room was stark and very white: white walls, white sheets, white dresser. Even the windows were white with a filigree of ice that looked like white lace. I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry, but then Eben walked in with his white skin and white shirt and white pants, black hair wild and dark eyebrows shielding alert animal eyes that flashed when I turned around, and then I couldn't stop. He did not console me. He didn't, or wouldn't, say the right words, the finding words. He didn't touch the right places. He didn't want to discover me anymore. I said, You have given up on me. He never came back to New York after that. He never took any more pictures. He sent for his children every summer and sent them back every fall. When the Hasselblads were destroyed in the flood he never even bothered with the insurance. He fished. You have given up on me, I said, and he said, You always took everything so personally. Then he put his white hands on my face and they stuck there, so the only thing holding us together was tears. They all came for dinner that night, the artists, the art dealer, the architect. Everyone ate too much, drank too much, smoked too much, laughed too loud, and the fire kept dying. Eben ignored me all night. I didn't know when I first noticed that he was ignoring me, but suddenly I realized his denial of me, his refusal of me was active, present, and very alive. I worked hard to be gracious, refilling wine glasses. 99

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I cleaned the kitchen as if possessed. I cleaned the kitchen until I saw my reflection, tiny and distorted, in the chrome latch of the dishwasher lock, and then said to Eben, alone now and smaller without his friends, I'm going for a walk. It's past midnight, he said. I want to see the ocean, I said. But the blizzard, he said. I don't care, I said. Do you want to be alone, he said, and I said, I've been alone all weekend, and he got up and got his jacket. We walked to the beach in silence as absolute as the dark sky. I heard the ocean but couldn't see it. The wind roared. The ferocious wind bellowed, shrieked, and raged, but I couldn't be sure how much of the din was inside me. The surface of my skin grew colder with the chill that went right through me. I became the same temperature inside my body as outside my body. Then my jacket blew off, and my clothes. My sweater blew off, my shirt blew off, my underwear blew away, billowing and flailing in the wind. My skin blew off, blood flowing away from my bones which froze, crystallized and dissolved into the ice-encrusted sand. Eben stood at the water's edge, hazy in the snow, as if it were erasing him. I'm freezing, he said, and the hovering wind with my voice howled.

Unavailable One by Janet Kaplan

ou are telling me that I love you the way a woman might love a priest, it's safe. But as you speak you cross one leg and a knee joint pulls against

your trouser, a band of skin emerging below the cuff. I've dreamt about this legâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it stretches across the room to me, the white of it. The sun remains sunk in the airshaft, but the black lampshade throws a halo of light onto my chair, where you place your foot by my lap. My fingers play among your toes, spreading them. I tell you about the animals that frighten me, how the panther I've been trying to keep as a pet is working out of its leash, how the snake slowly circling my left arm gets hungry. You sit opposite me, tired, leonine head on your fist. "What do you see?" you ask, looking back at me and waiting. My tongue grows thick in my mouth, caged by teeth. A man, I want to say. A woman, 1 want to say.

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you do, you who know by heart this madwoman who does not stay in the attic but comes to greet you in real life, exposing your real life at the place where somehow you must show up every day to study your lines, where somehow you must perform the dress rehearsal of your womanhood.

Fourteen by Janet Kaplan

hen the woman asleep on the schoolyard bench is your mother, you can't ignore the jump-start in your stomach, can't let the image flicker and fade like a poor picture on TV, can't shut the scene of her torn skirt, her legs absently spread to a show of her sex, the copper hairs glowing like electric wires down her white thighs, can't yank the cord plugging your life to her body, no, you stay tuned to the crusts of breakfast glazed down her chin like leftovers on a snack tray no one could bother to wipe, there is no interruption as you stare, rapt as any lecher at the frayed, checkered shirt barely buttoning her chest, the life in her clearly rising, her breathing effortless and constant as the roadrunner beeping up and down the cartoon hills while the lunatic coyote of her brain sets the detonator over and over, but you can't stop that crime, you choke yourself on tears, you keep your hands to yourself though you want to throw a cloak, thick and warm with your love, over her half-naked body, this is all you want, to protect her, hide her from the audience, the throng that comes for the spectacle, you want to steal her from those who do not love her as, truly,

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Jeanne Dutton

Willy Jenkins on the Wild Side by Jeanne Dutton

ust bad luck, that's the way I saw it. It could have been anybody at the wheel rolling over them dumb chipmunks, or whatever you call them. Anyone. I seen respect fall out of kids' faces before, when I make them sit up for talking or something, but I never seen so many go all at once. There they were, all lined up with their little projects and things, ready for the Big Pemaquot County Regional Science Fair, and they all got that look. Ugly. First it's pain or disgust or something, and then it's real clear it's hate. I don't even know what I done yet, I just know it's bad. I hear it too, little squibbling gone faint that just made my spine ache. "That ain't no curb you hit, Willy Jenkins," is what I says to myself, "you must a done it this time." There was a guy last year who hit a kid. He was from Brewer or somewhere and things got so bad, he had to leave town. Fourteen kids on the bus and all of them traumatized and thinking of suing. Not to mention the little sweetheart who wound up in traction. I remember feeling so rotten about it that I ran out and bought a set of plastic monkeys, and made them elementary schoolers play. I didn't even get mad when Harley Willis turned them into sling shot ammo and started beaning the back of my head. I just figured it was his loss. Kids today don't got no respect for the small stuff. They gotta have them terminator-mountainous erector sets, or else. So it was like 1 was having a day with a big spector on it, anyway, alright? 1 mean, that's how it went. I started out with one of them dreams you have right before daylightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a bus driver's dream. We get up earlier than most so we can figure our routes and have a meeting at the depot before the high schooler shift. A lot of times it means you find yourself sitting straight up out of a haze and trying to make sense of the world. I've gone six steps before I realized I wasn't being coronated, or sworn in that day, and I do got pants even though I couldn't find them before. That's the kind of thing I mean. 104

First there were these little fish that got catfish fins, but real naked people bodies. They were hiding and coming out of everywhere. I sat down to use the toilet and one bit me on the bum. At work, the bus was full of them. Just crawling. I kept saying to myself, okay, okay, this is okay. I just got to pretend like it's not happening, you know. I don't know why I was thinking about that, but it was a dream and I was taking it. So them fish kept swilling around pinching my arms while I'm driving, and then my mother's on the bus asking me why I didn't go right instead of left. I looked around and I didn't know either. Pretty soon the alarm went off, and I sat there looking for fish bites. I had half a second where I wished my mother was dead and then I went out and made my breakfast. A lot of bus drivers don't do that. Make breakfast, I mean. They just get up at six-thirty, maybe, and roll into work without eating or showering. Not me. I go through the whole thing. I make myself a pot of oatmeal because all I've got to do is boil water and then I take a big shower. Bus drivers that end up not showering got the kids all over them telling them they smell bad. I ought to know. One time some little girl noticed my dandruff problem and pretty soon they were all drawing pictures of it. Harley Willis, the monkey shooter, told me I should try putting Denerex on one side, and Head and Shoulders on the other. I never told anybody this, but I did it. It went alright. I got sold on the tingles and stuck with the Denerex ever since. So this morning, with the fish and all, I felt funny about water. I decided to make the shower a real quick one, leaving out time for the conditioner to actualize. When I was done I went into the kitchen and started boiling. As I did this, I noticed I don't got any more oatmeal, so I was stuck with eggs whether I liked it or not. The problem with eggs is you've got to brush them out real good or you're going to taste them in your mouth all day. I put on my usual bus driver clothes, and shoved my wallet and my keys into my back pocket. We gotta wear brown pants for some reason. It's in the rules. Also, our shirts gotta be white. The shirt I got on has a spit ball stain on it, right under the pocket. It's my unlucky shirt, and I've got unlucky socks on too. Normally, I wouldn't risk it but this day for some reason I thought, "What can happen?" which is something I should never think. I've got uncommon bad luck and I always get zotted with it when I think I'm due for something better. Take the time Sheilah left me for the electronics store guy, that's a perfect example. My heart got broke and I was only thinking I might want to clear the 105

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jelly doughnuts out of the house. I was sick of them, and, to be truthful, I was wondering what sex might be like without all the layers of fat between us. It's mean, I know, but I paid. So the green socks went on, and then after that my black shoes. You can tell what I do because my shoes bend up at the ends from working the pedals. It's a darn good thing I don't walk anywhere because I look like I got clown feet. At the depot, we all got feet like that, every one of us. Line us up in a row and we'd look like Weebles, all wobbling but not falling down. The kids don't notice it for some reason. They'll notice ear wax, facial hair, neck sweat, and perspiration stains, but I ain't seen an elementary school kid yet that's noticed anything from the waist down. Now, junior high school, on the other hand, that's another story. What they're looking out for happens above the knees and lower down than the waist. They're fixed on it. The zipper broke on my windbreaker, with me shoving at it, so I just left it hung open and tried to get to work early. We always share stories while we're waiting for the meeting to start, and with some of the guys they're pretty good. Mine tend to be on the boring side, scenically speaking, because I do the housing developments. Up Oak, down Poplar, up Quentin, down Richards, like that until Z. There's a guy named Skippy Douglas who's been with the company for years. He's got the rural route and one time he passed by a whole herd of grazing deer. He popped the kids out of the bus and let them watch. Pretty soon he's got a bus full of valentines the third graders made for him. 'We Love You, Skippy,' they say. I can't tell you how much I wish that would happen to me. Sheilah was in the meeting room, alone, the only one. She was holding a cup of coffee. Usually, she's just the dispatcher but once in a while she takes over for somebody who's sick. For a regular amateur she can handle a bus like nobody I've ever seen. She can speed shift and corner tight even on rainy days. I got to hand it to her. Also, the kids never mess with Sheilah because she's mean. I know first hand. She took one kid over her knee and whacked him with a hair brush. There are all kinds of laws about that, but she never got caught. Not Sheilah.

and Sheilah caught me at it. "What are you grinning at?" she asked me. She'd gotten diese terrible big circles under her eyes, so I knew straight out she'd either been drinking or crying. Maybe bodi. 1 headed over to the coffee machine and put my face the other way so she wouldn't see me twisting up my mouth for control and then I said, "Nothing," in a way that made out like it ain't nodiing, it's something. I even rocked a little bit on my feet like the guys who get laid. It's sort of a bus driver code, that rocking. We all do it. But only on special occasions. If I was feeling good, I couldn't help it. I'd been waiting a long time for Sheilah to take her fall. She raked me over die coals good in our break upâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; making fun of me when I bought her roses to try and win her back and reading one of my letters out loud right in front of the guys. It was dumb. I said she was the fat pumpkin of my breast and the unquenched fire of my soul. I even drew a heart, and a picture of us together. I don't know what got into me. I tend to be a little on the lonely side. That's the way it is for a bus driver. You can't talk to the kids. At least I can't. Skippy Douglas can. He tells them stories about the war and they all move up front trying to listen in. I tried to tell my kids about technical school once, it was the only thing I could think of. I went to technical school instead of regular high school. There was part of me that wanted to be a plumber. My modier said no son of hers was going to stick his hands into toilets, so she made me take cosmetology classes. Not even carpentry, but hair washing and stuff. I don't have to tell you I was bad at it. I mean, I could do the scissor part and I was best at permanents because you could mix the stuff, but the chitchatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;1 stank at it. No chair-side manner is what my teacher said. Plus, I didn't look like a beautician. My mother still insisted on cutting my hair herself with a bowl. Sometimes kids with mothers like that get on my bus, and all I can say is, I know what they're going through.

It turned out Skippy Douglas picked up die flu, which is bad news. The kids get it, then we get it, and then the kids get it again. He's an old timer so I hold my breath anytime he's sick. I'm next in line for that country route. It could happen but I don't want to hope. Bad diings happen when I do that. Still, I felt the corner of my mouth turn up just a little bit,

Harley, the halitosis detector, wasted no time in shooting holes through the entire story. Of course I didn't tell him about the pin-setting classes. No way. I pretended I studied auto mechanics instead. I made like I once had to fix a giant tractor trailer truck with only a set of pliers. I made like there was one thing wrong with it, way deep in, which meant a lot of taking apart. I even pretended that I only had half-an-hour to do it in, and if 1 didn't finish, I was going to fail the class. 1 was just getting to die part about the really hot radiator, that if I touched even slightly, the whole

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thing would blow upâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I was just getting to that part when little Harley piped up and said, "Did you check the ring gaskets?" "What?" I asked. "The ring gaskets, the ring gaskets, or what about the brake drums? It could have been the brake drums?" "No," I said. "It wasn't either of those things. It was the carbonater. The carbonater wasn't churning properly." I figured that would fix him and he would sit back down and leave me alone so I could get to the explosive part, but he got this look on his face and his eyes crossed. "That's stupid," he said. "That's really stupid." It turned out Harley's got a brother who knows cars, so he wasn't fooled. I kept insisting that this was a truck, a giant Mack truck, only one of its kind, and that was why. But Harley kept shaking his head and the other kids went right along with him. Then all of the sudden he looked at me and he said, "Do you know you've got hair growing out of your ears?" Which made them all laugh and I knew the pictures were coming next. It's possible they even drew pictures of the dead guinea pigs. At the depot there was a funny smell like diesel fuel. I could taste it even in the coffee. I think it's because the mechanics made it when they came in first. Guys like that never wash their hands, but why should they? Who's going to bother them? Sitting around there, I got to feeling a little dizzy, and maybe that's what got to me. Maybe that was it, or maybe it was what Sheilah said to me. What Sheilah said to me sticks in my head even now. I makes me ache. She looked up from her coffee, which she all but dunked her nose in, and she said to me, she said, "Willy Jenkins, you are the sorriest son of bitch that ever was born." Well now, maybe she meant it, and maybe it was just the hangover talking, but I couldn't help knowing she was right. Knowing deep down in, you know what I mean? I mean, what am I? A bus driver, trained to be a beautician, who really wanted to be a plumber but got stuck listening to my mother instead, so now, now, what am I? Nothing. All three inside, but nothing outside. Just nothing.

made friends. And what did I do? I flattened them. Right before their impressionable little eyes. I couldn't help but cry and cry, right in front of everybody. With the kids just hushing each other up and staying quiet. Even letting hate out, I know it. Another bus driver had to come out and relieve me, and with my luck it's Skippy Douglas, not nearly as sick as he thought he was. In fact he was jumping around just like his name and making those poor sad kids grin a little. By this time I felt a little braver myself, so I pulled the bus back off the collapsed cage. Inside were mashed gopher heads and twisted bodies crunched by the wheel and not even knowing a thing. I looked at it some and then I went behind a little tree and let go of my eggs. They'd been forcing their way up my tongue all morning and were just waiting for an excuse to escape. I wished I'd had oatmeal. Oatmeal sticks to your ribs. After the little horseshoe of gawkers broke up and Skippy had most of the kids loaded up on the bus, I stood alone on the curb. No way to get home, and feeling faintish and sweaty from the ordeal. I stood like this with the breeze bending the hair on my head, still cut with a bowl, and little globs of the kid's mice still stuck to the tarmac. I stood like this going over the embarrassment of Sheilah, and her getting the upper hand, and all the jelly doughnuts I've tried to eat, and the cat boxes I've put my feet into, and the one time my zipper broke in church and I had to cover it up with a Bible. I thought about all this. Then Harley Willis slid down a window and stuck his elbow out. "Hey, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Jenkins!" He yelled. "D'you remember how in Robo-Cop, he runs the guy over with a bus and turns him into a puddle of road pizza?" "No," I said. I rubbed the top of my head, thinking about it. "It was neat-o," he said and his elbow dropped back into the yellow school bus. It took me a minute to figure it out, but I was pretty sure he was right.

The front wheel going crunch crunch over the carcasses of them baby chipmunks on Sycamore street that day not only confirmed it on every one of them kid's faces, that what Sheilah said was true, it sealed it in my heart forever. It was a science fair project they made to run mazes with. Grew the tykes up from pups. Practiced with them. Nuzzled them. Even 108

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Sean Daly

Malcolm Ulysses by Sean Daly

alcolm Ulysses Philemon tossed and turned that night even worse than the night before. Earlier in the evening, he had gone to unusually great lengths to ensure the conditions for a proper rest. Placing his boots neatly to the side of the bed, he had dived deep into his bedclothes, turned on his favorite side, and assumed a fetal position. He had even settled into his recurrent dream: Manhattan's tall buildings and deep streets were in fact the excessive crests and troughs of a turbulent, unknown sea. The cityscape had yielded to a "C" scape and he, Malcolm—towed in by the urban backwater and without a dinghy—would have to swim. Malcolm was almost in a deep sleep when he awoke to a sharp noise coming from the far side of the room. The door had opened and—as far as he could tell—a woman had stepped in. His eyes open and head turned to the side, he watched leather pumps, well-shaped calves, and a tight tweed skirt walk cautiously around him. The gait was familiar and Malcolm became immediately attentive at the resemblance. She was thinner, certainly better-dressed than the last time he had seen her but, yes, upon further scrutiny of the profile, this woman was indeed his first wife. Malcolm was stunned: she had ignored his presence and had simply walked to the opposite end of the room.

She pressed "SAVINGS," then "WITHDRAWAL," and quickly returned to the manual. "Step 3: Place a chain of keys, ball-point pen, or any pointed object, for that matter, in your dominant hand ..." By the time the withdrawal box finally began to hum, the woman— her two morning cups of coffee having swept over her as both beat-skipping fear and a distracting desire to pee—was, nevertheless, armed and ready. Her face prepared in a decidedly warlike grimace, she snatched her forty bucks up out of the machine, and awaited the onslaught of her assailant. But nothing happened. And as her bank card and receipt were being duly returned to her, she looked back to find the homeless man fast asleep in the fetal position. Malcolm was dreaming.

"Baby, give your man a hand," Malcolm stuttered, rolling up on his side. "I know we's had our fights—shit we did—and here I is all dirty, my hair all nappy . . . but take me back, baby. Take me home." The woman at the far wall turned, gave him a nervous glance, and quickly fingered her numbers into the cash machine. Ignore him and don't make eye contact, she repeated to herself, rushing over in her mind with astonishing clarity an old rape prevention manual she had read years before. This man is deluded; I'm in here with him. She clenched a small fist, noticed a run in her stocking, and felt her stomach swell with grave fear. 110

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Bras and Things

Correspondence

by Sean Daly

by Amy Scheibe

Louise W. slipped nine sheets into the Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet, fingered the SE menu, and "escaped" into printing. As the scan bar tabbed through the screen's contents, she sat back and suppressed a long sigh. The printer shuddered, shucked, and rolled to a low hum. When Louise opened her eyes, it was to the low murmuring of an infant, a bright new-born, sluiced in ions, and lying cradled by the printer's steep plastic. Again she was amazed, and yet again, her amazement turned quickly to anxiety. Checking to see if her office neighbors had heard the faint cries, she was relieved to find them absorbed by their respective tasks: Robert tied to the phone; S. caught up in word processing; Dean ground in the teeth of an open file cabinet. She turned to the child. Swaddling it in bound galley proofs and photography matting, Louise passed quickly down the hall, past her co-workers, through Marketing, through many offices, and down many steps to the street- There she personally watched her bundle loaded up and crushed in the iron bowels of a waiting sanitation truck. She returned to her desk and began the day's correspondence.

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t's hard to imagine how much a person can lose in one summer until it happens to you. My summer was 1976, the year of the great bicentennial, and while people all over the country were shooting off fireworks, Candy Dalton and I were huddled by the James River, trying to get a grip. Candy was my best friend, although she was a few years older than me. She and her folks lived in the trailer house next to ours until her dad was killed in a pile-up on 1-94 when his truck exploded. Then Candy and her mom moved to Fargo and I guess she outgrew me, because she never wrote back to me, even though I wrote to her every week for a year. Their trailer was double-wide with one of those pretend bay windows on the front end. It was also set up on cinder blocks, making it the highest trailer in the court. During the summer we would climb up on the roof where we could see over the fence surrounding the baseball diamond. We liked the team from Oakes because they wore orange uniforms and had the best butts. Sometimes we'd sneak beer from my house, but only when my brother Andy wasn't around. We were supposedly twins, but I always thought my folks had gotten some kind of two-for-one special the day I was born and bought him cheap from some white trash single mother who already had too many kids to make welfare worthwhile. See, he didn't look or act anything like me, and we had no telepathy or secret language or anything cool like twins are supposed to share. And he was always snitching on me for the fun of it, to the point where he'd make things up about me to see if mom would believe him or me. She'd usually just say, "Why don't you get the knives and fight it out amongst yourselves," and that would be the end of it. 1 did try to like him sometimes, but by the time we were 113

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twelve that summer, I was maturing at full speed while he was still acting like a little kid. He got on my nerves. On really warm nights, I would make sure Andy was a safe distance away by giving him money for the game. From the top of the trailer I could see his red cap bobbing in the stands. Candy would swipe a package of her mom's Vantage Blues and we'd smoke them with a couple of Millers. Betty Dalton was the type of chain-smoker who would buy three cartons at a time and never notice a missing pack. She would just assume that she was smoking faster than usual, never thinking that Candy would be capable of smoking, much less theft. On one such night in June, a couple of weeks before The Fourth, Candy lit up and passed the cigarette to me. We could have smoked our own, but thought it cooler to pass one back and forth. Our team was hosting a group from Ellendale, a town so small that most of their players were as old as my dad, with pants that hung too low in the back from being belted under their beer bellies. I took a long drag, or what I made Candy think was a long drag, because I couldn't really inhale without gagging, which was uncool. I passed the smoke back. After taking a long drag and exhaling through her nose, she said, "Shit, Patsy, these guys suck. Our team is trampling them. God what a boring night, pass me the beer, would ya?" "Yea, they sure do," I said, cracking open a can. "At least we didn't pay to watch this shit." "You can say that again," Candy said, leaning her head back to take a long draw of beer. "Hey girl, what are you and your queer family doing for The Fourth?" I only let her call my family queer because it was true. My dad was the county extension officer, which meant he was a 4-H bigwig, judging pigs and cows at the county fair. My mom taught wok cooking to ladies who tried to use their cast-iron skillets to saute carrots. I got called all the great names like "pig shit breath" and "slant eyes," even though my family was Anglo-Saxon. I spent most of my time alone or with Candy. "Oh well, you know, what every other geek in this town is gonna do. Go out to Memorial Park for a day of fun, family, and fireworks," I said with faked enthusiasm. "Yea, my old man'll be home for the day just to put in an appearance at the kegger," Candy said. Her parents had started fighting soon after she was born and would have divorced, but decided that they should stay 114

together for her sake, so he started driving a truck and was only home three times a year: Christmas, Easter, and The Fourth. Most of that time was spent at the N and J Tavern. He and Candy had a weird relationship, he would call her from motel rooms around the country and tell her about the women he was sleeping with. "Listen, little friend," Candy said to me as though she had a secret, "have you ever thought about losing your virginity? I mean, just giving it up like that." She snapped her fingers on the word "that," not really for emphasis, but just because she liked the sound. "Nah, I'm too young," I said, which was my usual response when Candy would start in on me about my virginity. "You got your period already, didn't you?" she asked, although she was there when I got it and told me pads were for sissies and gave me a couple of junior tampons instead. "Yea, so?" I said. "So-oh, you're not too young for s-e-x." "Jeez, I'm only twelve. I don't even wear a bra yet," I said, feeling uncomfortable. "You're almost thirteen, and I was eleven, case closed." We sat there until the game was over and Andy mounted a surprise attack with his goofy friend, Max. I couldn't understand how the three of us could be the same age; I was a foot taller than both of them and I had stopped playing commando two years before. But there they were, pretending they had walkie-talkies in their hands, acting like they had just raided the enemy's camp. "Chrrr, Keller to Peterson, we got a bust. The enemy is ours, over, chrrr," Andrew said into his hand. "Oh God, it's the dweebs," Candy said, standing up and readjusting her shorts at the same time. "Let's scram, girl." "Chrr, Peterson to Keller. Do you read me. Over, chrr," Max's voice cracked from where he was crouched by the ladder. "Chrrr, Roger Wilco, continue Peterson, over, chrrr." "Buzz off you little turds," I said, knowing they wouldn't. "Chrr, looks like we got some fe-male type enemies here, looks like a set-up, over, chrr," Max said, moving closer to Andy but still crouched over. "Okay, PARTY'S OVER!" Candy's mom yelled, her head appearing over the top of the ladder. "You kids get off my roof and GO TO BED." Candy had already ditched the beer cans over the side of the trailer 115

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and into the bushes, the cigarettes were tucked into her shorts. "No prob, mom, in fact, that's exactly what we were just discussing," Candy said, pushing Max and Andy toward the ladder. I followed close behind her, hoping to be that cool by the time I turned fourteen. Two weeks later I got my first bra. It was the day before The Fourth and my mother took me into Winnie's Department Store under the pretense of buying me a new outfit to wear to the picnic. The store was the only place in town to buy clothes, selling everything from baby booties to overalls in one big open room. Winnie Bierman ran the store for twenty years, then left town after her husband had a heart attack while smoking and burned the place down one Sunday when she was out visiting her mother in the nursing home. But before that, her store was the pulse of the town. Nobody bought panty hose without Winnie knowing about it first. I insisted on getting a pair of shorts just like Candy's, only in green instead of blue. Mom thought they were a little too short, but she was feeling generous for some reason and said okay. Then she picked out a matching green t-shirt with a tulip pattern made out of dots that pierced the cloth. I went into the dressing room and when I came out to model the outfit, Mom and Winnie were standing right there. "You look lovely," Mom said. "That color really suits you. What do you think, Winnie?" "Oh, my, yes, lovely. But don't you think she needs a b-r-a?" Winnie said, still looking at me as I felt my face go deep red. It was a conspiracy, I knew it, mothers can't wait to see their little girls in training bras. Mine had been talking about this every day since I turned ten, saying things like "Oh, Honey, wait till you get your first bra. It's so exciting!" She'd talk about bras, but it was Candy who had to tell me about my period. Mom asked Winnie if she had any training bras, which I thought was pretty lame, since she had obviously planned the whole thing. They wandered over to the lady's underwear table, which was marked by a small mannequin torso dressed in a bra and girdle ensemble. Mom brought back two choices, both white, one with a pink rose in the middle and the other with a pink bow. They were padded and marked AAA, yet Winnie insisted on getting her tape measure to make sure they were the right size. At this point there were quite a few mothers milling about, pretending not to watch, but I knew they were whispering about me. "Okay, arms out to the sides," Winnie said, putting her arms around 116

me in order to pass the tape from one hand to the other, right there, in front of every one. "My, look at that, a perfect 27! You've got the start of a lovely figure." Everyone in the store was blatantly staring now and I just wanted to run out of there and into the street so I could maybe breathe again. Fortunately, Mom sensed my humiliation and told Winnie we'd take the one with the pink bow. That night on Candy's roof she turned to me and said, "So, I hear you got a BR-Ah today, congratulations, kiddo, you're ready for the big time." "Yeah, great, the whole town knows by now," I said, still pained at the thought of having to wear that bra the next day at a picnic where everyone would be thinking how adorable I was. "Why today, why me, why not next week, so I could hide out until the news died down." "Oh, c'mon Patsy, it's not that bad," she said. "Easy for you to say, you're not the one who has to be stared at tomorrow. Let's drop it, okay?" "Sure, girl, no prob." We watched the game for awhile and then the inevitable happened once again. Without looking away from the action, Candy said to me, "So, I guess all that's left now is for you to lose the big V." "Okay, fine, how do you suggest I go about it, wise guy?" I was really tired of talking about it, and besides, I thought, it must be fun, if Candy thought it was such a big deal. She looked at me as though I had just told her that I loved her. "No kidding, you really want to?" "I don't know, why the hell not." I was trying very hard to be cool, but my stomach hurt. "Great," she said turning to me and starting to whisper, "tomorrow night, during the fireworks, meet me behind the concession. I'll have everything taken care of. If you're lucky, I'll be able to get the guy who did me." "Who?" "The guy I lost my cherry to, stupid. You know that guy that catches for Oakes? Bob Roster?" "No way! Bob Roster! He's to die for. God, he must be at least sixteen. How you gonna get him to do it?" I said, nearly falling off the roof. "No prob. Let's just say he owes me one. Look, kid, I got a lot of work to do before tomorrow, why don't you go home and get a good night's rest," 117

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she said, getting up to leave. Just before we got to the ladder she turned to me and whispered, "Look, just remember that the first time's not that great, so don't get freaked, okay? I'll be there the whole time." I spent the night "getting freaked" as Candy called it and finally fell asleep an hour before I had to get up. I took my new clothes and training bra into the bathroom to avoid Andy busting in on me, as it was the only door that would lock, and carefully cut all the store tags off with a cuticle scissors. When I had finished dressing, I sat down on the toilet and started to cry. The crying soon turned into sobbing and I could feel the bra tighten with every breath, making me cry more. I suddenly wasn't very interested in growing up or being cool, but I finally got myself calmed down, and tried to cover my puffy eyes with Mom's makeup. The minute I walked into the living room where everyone was waiting for me, Andy shouted, "She's wearing a sling-shot," and fell to the floor in shrieking laughter. I ran to the bathroom and slammed the door, starting to cry all over again. "Patsy, honey, don't mind him, he's just silly," Mom said from the other side of the door, "we gotta get going before the potato salad gets warm." "I swear to God I'm gonna kill that little monster if he gets anywhere near me today," I said. "Okay, honey, whatever you say. Let's go now, we're going to be late," she said, walking back down the hall. Not much happened that afternoon. It was hotter than hell, coupled with the fact that Memorial Park is surrounded by a river, so all the old folks sat around saying the "It's not the heat, it's the humidity" line. I hung out mostly with my cousins playing on the swings, daring each other to go over the top and make a complete circle. A kid did that once and walked away with just a broken arm. Andy challenged Max to see who could swing higher before wussing out, and they were kicking up into the tall trees when Mom and Mrs. Peterson got scared and made them stop. They were grounded for the rest of the day-the kind of knee-jerk reaction which makes a kid have to rebel. Late in the afternoon the women brought out tupperware containers full of food and stacks of paper plates while my dad and his brothers tried to out-grill each other. The food was pretty good, but the best thing was being 118

the "beer-runner" for the chefs. They would call out my name and I would grab their empty plastic cups and go to the keg for a refill, sipping off the foam before bringing them back to the grill. By the time it was getting dark, I was feeling pretty high. I told my folks that I was going to watch the fireworks display with Candy and her mom, and ran off to the concession stand. As I passed the swings I saw Andy and Max hanging out, kicking up dust with their high tops. I thought about running back and ratting on them, but I didn't have the time. Besides, they were just acting like the kids they were, and I had more grown-up things to worry about. When I got to the stand Candy wasn't there, and I felt momentarily relieved. "Psst, hey virgin, over here," I heard her whisper from the bank of the river a few feet away. "Get a move on, we don't have all night." I followed her down along the river to a small clearing. There was a horse blanket already spread out on the ground. 'Take off your clothes and put some of this down there," she said, handing me a jar. "What is it?" I asked, taking my shorts off. "It's vaseline, so you won't bleed," she said, helping with my shirt "Hey, nice bra, but you gotta cut that dopey bow off. Hurry up, he'll be here in a minute." "Bob?" "No, I couldn't get Bob, he had to play in some tournament over in Edgeley." 'Then who'd you get?" I said, but I was so drunk on the beer, I didn't really care. "My dad," Candy said. "Yeah, right, funny guy," I said, thinking it was a little sick of her to kid around like that. "It doesn't really matter who, all that matters is you get the first time over with so you can enjoy the second time," she said in a way that made me feel excited and scared. "Oops, gotra go, I hear him coming down the path. Now, remember, I'll be right over there if you start to freak." "No prob," I said, lying down on the blanket. The darkness of the river made me feel better. I knew that whoever this guy was he wouldn't see my face, so he'd never know it was me. He came rustling through the trees and over to the blanket. Without saying a 119

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word he knelt down and unzipped his pants. I lay there staring up at the stars, and just as I felt a piercing pain in my groin, sirens sounded. The man was up and gone before I realized where the noise was coming from, and then Candy was beside me handing me my clothes. "Something must have gone wrong with the fireworks," she said, hooking my bra behind my back. "We'd better get back before our folks think it's one of us." Candy looked scared for the first time I could remember, which sobered me. I pulled on my shorts and stepped into my Keds in one movement, and we ran back up the bank to the park. There was a large group of people around the swing set, and the red twirling light of the ambulance flashed against the metal chains. We squirmed our way through the crowd in time to see a stretcher being pushed into the ambulance, its legs folding underneath it. Then I saw Max standing next to a swing that was still in motion, as though some little ghost was having a ride. I was hit by what felt like a blow to my lower back and I was suddenly on the ground, unable to breathe. "Patsy, honey, it's Winnie, come on baby, let's go to the car," she said, trying to help me up. "No, what happened, where's Mom and Dad. Where's Andy!" I was screaming, but felt like I was whispering. "Your parents had to go in the ambulance, baby, Andy's been hurt," she said, smoothing down my hair. I broke away from her and ran through the people back down to the clearing where 1 found Candy rocking back and forth on the blanket. "He's dead, isn't he, I can feel it!" I yelled at her. "Yes, he is," she said, "Mom said he fell off the swing and broke his neck. I saw them pull the sheet over his head." "I want it back," I said, falling to my knees. "Please, God, I want it back."

through the gauze strips. "Hey, kiddo," she said, her voice making me feel more comfortable. "I know, I look like the invisible man, but at least it doesn't hurt so bad now." "Candy," I said needing to cut through the small talk, "I have to know something." "Like what?" "Who was it that night?" I said, but she looked confused, like maybe I was talking about the fire at the bar, so I said, "I mean the night Andy died, who did you fix me up with?" "Oh really, Patsy," she said, turning her head away from me and towards the window, "you don't even know the guy, and trust me, you never will." "What do you mean?" I said as I saw tears on her cheek. "You have to tell me, I have a right to know. It was your dad, wasn't it?" But Candy wouldn't answer me, she didn't even turn her head back to look at me. She just buzzed the nurse who came in and asked me to leave.

It wasn't long after that night that Candy's dad died and she and Betty moved to Fargo. I didn't see her again until five years later, after she was in a freak accident at the topless bar where she worked. I was wearing braces by then and had to go to Fargo to see the orthodontist, so I decided to stop by the hospital first. When I walked into the room, I was stopped short by the sight of Candy wrapped up in bandages, her red hair cropped and sticking up 120

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Charles Ardai

The Dover by Charles Ardai

o. Not that one. Janson's History of Art, very well; never cared much for his analyses anyway. But not the Dover.

David Mendel lifted John Dover's Masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance from the bookshelf. Eighty-one color plates. It could go for sixty or seventy dollars. He hated to let it go. But... But sixty dollars was sixty dollars. Mendel gently laid the Dover on top of a dozen other books in a cardboard box. Now for paperbacks. Doxey's The Key to Finnegans Wake. He'd been trying to unload that tattered paperback for almost a year. Some day, a curious student would chance upon it and pick it up, hoping to save himself the trouble of reading the novel. That was how Mendel had picked it up himself. The Short Novels of Henry ]ames, Collected Poetry of Thomas Hardy, The President's House, Volumes I and II, Kabbalah—ah, that was one he

would hate to lose. Gershom Scholem's Kabbalah came out of the box and went back on the shelf. Mendel took another look at the Dover, half hidden under a layer of paperbacks. Its dust jacket was in perfect condition, not even faded at the spine. Not a single plate was missing, not a single page was dog-eared or torn. He remembered buying it at the start of his second semester at NYU. January 1948, Art History, the class that would leave David Mendel with a new major and a new goal in life. Back then, he'd decided that he would become the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not right away, of course. He'd have to work his way up. But in time he'd make it. Mendel remembered all the plans he'd made for special exhibits. Caravaggio and Poussin, on loan from Italy. Lost Goyas from Hungary. In reality, he'd never ended up curator of anything larger than a SoHo gallery, and that was only after work and on weekends. But back 122

when the Dover was new, David Mendel had had dreams in which he went straight to the top. He took the Dover out of the box and put it back on the shelf. There were some things you didn't sell. Not for sixty dollars, not for six hundred dollars. Back to the paperbacks. Four copies of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, twofifty each, a sure sell. He was still selling off the remains of an over order— his mistake—that the department had made him buy out of his own pocket. That had been in 1966. Or was it '67? The hell with it. The real mistake had been to try teaching English in the first place, at a city high school, no less. He packed up copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels—small loss, he knew he'd never read them again. Then he pulled two Nabokovs off the shelf. Invitation To a Beheading and Pnin. Pity. But he had to sell something. Mendel closed the flaps of the box, threading each under its neighbor. The top of the box bulged. He bent at the waist and with a huge effort lifted the box a few inches off the floor. After a few steps, he lowered it to the floor again and pushed it the rest of the way to the door with his foot. His back hurt as he straightened up again. A box of books was more than he could lift. He should have known that. The folded-up card table was already outside in the hall; Mendel shoved the box of books out next to it, then got his keys out of his pocket to lock the door. In his head, he did a mental tally of how much he would get if he sold all the books in the box. Two hundred, two-twenty... were there books he was forgetting? He didn't think so. Two hundred and twenty dollars, together with his pension, would just barely make up his rent—and that was assuming that he did sell everything he brought down, which never happened. If he didn't make at least that much, he'd have to go into his bank account. He had a vision of his bank balance dipping into the triple digits. And this was the last weekend before the end of the month, his last chance to sell to those students who needed his books before the spring semester really got underway... He had his key in the lock, but instead of locking the door, he opened it, got the Dover down from the shelf, and returned to the hall. Can't be sentimental, he told himself. You've got to pay rent and you've got to eat. So the Dover went in the box and the box went down to the street.

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Mendel opened his table and set the books out one by one. A few college kids stopped to watch as he unpacked. One even looked at the price pencilled on the flyleaf of the Doxey. But either it was too high, or the kid decided he really wasn't that interested in Finnegans Wake. He walked on. The art books went in the back, paperbacks in the front. Mendel leaned on the table with both hands and looked down at his stock. Each book triggered a memory for him: a class in graduate school, a late-night study session, a lecture he had given to apathetic undergraduates . . . or a private evening at home, alone, cross-legged in the armchair he still sat in to read, the floor lamp casting its glare on the pages as he read from them. He thought of the memories he was selling to the people who bought his books—one day they, too, would look back at these books and remember the circumstances under which they read them. Some day, perhaps, one of the young men he sold a book to today would stand where Mendel was, stooped under the weight of his own shoulders, and sell the book again, like a teacher passing knowledge on to a new generation of students.

Some salesman he was. Guarding his hoard like a fairy-tale dragon, defying passersby to try and buy something. Make an effort, he told himself. Relax. He unclenched the fists he was using to lean on the table and took a step back to the curb. He even risked a few glances away from the table. Not too many—he didn't want to encourage thieves. But enough so that potential customers didn't feel intimidated. One boy, obviously a college freshman, walked past, kept going for a few yards, then turned and came back. He leaned over the table and opened the art books one by one, touching die pages gingerly and respectfully. He looked up into Mendel's eyes. "Are these yours?" Mendel nodded. "They're very beautiful." "Are you an art major?" "I haven't decided yet," the boy said.

At least when Mendel sold one of his books to a student, it was a little less painful, almost as if he weren't losing it, almost as if he were just playing a different part in the cycle he had entered when he had bought the book in the first place. Almost. But still it hurt him to see the books he cared about leave his hands for another's, however worthy. He gave his books good homes, but the fact was that once a book left his hands, he would never see it again, would never hold it or leaf through it or read it again. His shelves got emptier each week. He was selling off his past to pay for his future. What he would do when the shelves got empty he didn't know. A young woman—not so young, Mendel decided after a second glance, just younger than me—stopped in front of the table and turned a few of the books over to read their back covers. She selected one of the Hemingways, paying for it with dollar bills carefully drawn out of a compartment in her purse. She let go of each bill reluctantly, as though she feared Mendel might take her money and then keep the book. He supposed some of his reluctance to part with his books showed in his face. But of all the books, it was the Hemingways that he was the least upset to part with. He tried to reassure her by handing over her change before she gave him the third dollar. She smiled at him for this. After the woman left, Mendel turned each book she had looked at over again, so that the front covers showed.

The child would have plenty of time to develop his own cynicism and, anyway, wouldn't listen to an old man selling books on a street corner. "How much is this one?" The boy's finger landed on the Dover. Mendel hesitated. "The others have prices," the boy explained, "but this one..." He let his voice trail off and pointed at the bland flyleaf. Sell the Dover to this boy? This child who wasn't even sure he would need it? Maybe he would change his mind as Mendel himself had, become a physics major or a historian or an engineer, and then what would happened to the book? It would languish on a closet shelf or go out in the trash. "It costs too much for you," Mendel said. "Why don't you get the Janson?" "I've got money." They boy sounded mildly offended. "No. It's too expensive for you." "How much?" "A hundred," Mendel said. He wiped the back of his hand against his mouth. "A hundred!" the boy said. "A hundred dollars?" "Yes," Mendel said, reassured by the boy's tone that he had picked a price the boy wasn't prepared to pay. He had feared for a moment that he was talking to the son of an oil tycoon or a real estate baron. But now he felt bad. "I'll let you have the Janson for fifteen if you want it." That was half price.

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Mendel stifled the urge to say, Don't do it. Don't throw your life away.

Charles Ardai

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"Really?" The boy carefully closed the Dover. "Sure." The boy dug into his pocket. "Do you have change for a twenty?" Mendel pulled out a small bunch of singles. He counted out five and took the boy's twenty. The boy lifted the Janson off the table, leaving a big hole where the book had been. Mendel moved immediately to erase the hole by shifting the other books around. It struck him suddenly that he had just taken his final look at a book that had been a part of his life for fortyfour years. "Enjoy it," he shouted after die boy, who was flipping through die pages as he walked down West Fourth Street. 'Take care of it!" Unhappily, he went back to rearranging the books on die table. Why didn't you sell the Dover? he asked himself. That's what you brought it down for. That boy had money in his pocket—he may not have been a millionaire, but he could have parted with sixty dollars. And did you see the way he handled your books? He would have treated the Dover well. Languish in a closet, indeed. Mendel knew the answer. He hadn't let the book go because he hadn't wanted to let it go, not to the gentlest, most deserving reader in die world. Yes, the boy would probably have given die Dover a good home— but how good would Mendel's home have been without it? No, he couldn't sell that book. He suddenly regretted ever having taken it off its shelf. A man stopped by the table, looked at Mendel's books, shrugged, and walked away. Mendel stood, hands in his pockets, shivering as the wind picked up. It was only a little after noon. Practically the whole day left. Another man, wearing black jeans and a black denim jacket, stopped to buy the Thomas Hardy collection. While he paid, he asked whether Mendel had any Sartre. Mended did not. Any Camus? No. The man left, disappointed. A girl with straight brown hair stood for ten minutes over the twovolume set of The President's House. Hesitantly, she tried to haggle: she was a history major, she would be researching the White House, could she have both volumes for six dollars instead of for ten? Mendel agreed. And so it went, through the day. Did Mendel have a copy of LoUtal Not for sale, no. Well, then, were these two Nabokovs any good? Excellent. The customer said he would buy only one, just in case. As though he were a gourmand, trying a new food he 126

might not like. He left widi Pnin. Could Mendel recommend a good book for a nine-year-old boy? This question came from a mother widi two children in tow. Mendel couldn't decide which was the nine-year-old. No, he told the mother, nothing he had would be good for a boy his age. What about one of diose art books? the mother asked, her eyes lighting on the Dover. Absolutely not, Mendel said. The woman left. No sale. By six, about half the books on die table were gone. Not the Doxey, not die Henry James. Not the Dover. There was one Hemingway left. The Great Gatsby was all that was left of the Fitzgerald collection. There were no more customers; the street was empty. Mendel started packing the books away. The first one to go into the box was the Dover and as soon as he packed it away, Mendel breathed easier. Two more people had asked about it during the day and he had told both of them that it was reserved. Had they believed him? Maybe not. Maybe they had thought that he was just a foolish old man who couldn't bear to sell his treasures. Mendel didn't care. He turned the table on its side and started folding the legs. Let them think what they will, buy what they will, say what they will, only let me not lose everything. Mendel knelt to loosen the leg of the table that always stuck. The box of books was behind him. He could feel it pressing against the small of his back. He prepared himself mentally for the exertion of getting the box and table back to his apartment, the worst part of his work. It hadn't been as good a day as he had hoped; at least it was over. But suddenly something was happening—a hand on his shoulder, pushing him forward; the card table clattering onto the sidewalk; the box lifted into the air in one quick movement. Mendel's heart started to pound as he raised himself to his knees. Tears crowded his eyes, not from pain but from shock and horror. He had only been an inch away from the box! He had only turned for an instant! That people might snatch a book off a table if you let them he had always known—but the entire box...! The man who had grabbed the box now ran in front of him. He was tall, had black hair, wore a yellow windbreaker, and carried the heavy box easily under one arm. He ran off down the block. There was no one else around. 127

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The Dover was in that box—never mind the other books, but the Dover! To lose it now, like this, not even to a student or a scholar, but to a thief, a man who would cut the book to pieces and sell it plate by plate, or throw it away, or offer it on a sidewalk blanket until days of rain and sun warped and pulverized it! In an instant, as he watched the thief run, these scenes filled Mendel's mind—these and a thousand others, scenes of himself studying from the Dover past midnight with passion and hope in his heart—and suddenly it wasn't the book that was being stolen but Mendel's life, all that was left of him that wasn't a white-haired man selling the relics of his youth to pay his rent. He cried out, "Stop! Please!" Then, desperately, "I'll buy it!" Almost the whole block away, the thief stopped. He turned on the balls of his feet. Mendel rose to his knees, digging money out of his pockets, all the money he had earned during the day. He held the crumpled bills out in his open palms. "Please, take it! Please! Just leave me my books!" The man cautiously came back, confusion showing on his face. He took the money out of Mendel's hands. He still held the box. "Please," Mendel begged. "They're only old books. Ones I couldn't even sell." The thief stared at him, then dropped the box and, suddenly frightened, ran, cramming the bills into his pockets as he went. Mendel wiped his eyes on his sleeve, opened the box, piled books on the sidewalk until he came to the Dover and cradled it in his arms. A few dropped dollar bills blew past him in the breeze. He didn't notice.

Biographies CHARLES ARDAI is the author of numerous short stories, articles, and essays that have appeared in such publications as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Twilight Zone, The Year's Best I Iorror Stories, and Best Mystery of the Year. He is also the editor of several anthologies of short stories and an ex-Editorin-Chiefof Ouarto. He lives in New York City. MARYLOU CAPES spent six years as "an over-aged undergraduate " and will continue her studies in the Writing Program at Columbia's Graduate School of the Arts in thefalL She hopes to teach some day and to shake off all compulsions toward tidiness. She is a great cook, a native New Yorker, was at Woodstock (really!), and has trouble reconciling her checkered past with her studious present. "The only thing I have in common with the twenty-year-old who was me is our curly hair." She u convinced, however, that one can be nerdy and sexy al the same lime. If she ruled the world, psychotherapy would be mandatory. No exceptions. JO ANN M. CLARK writes, works, and studies in New York City. Among her former teachers are David Ignatow and Joseph Brodsky. She thanks her friends—and the editors of Ouarto •—for their encouragement. Presently a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, SEAN DALY became interested infuztion as a tool for architectural design, a method of exploring new building types and new cultural scenarios from the level of human response. He believes in short precise fiction that works the "nearside of the implausible, "fracturing assumptions and ultimately enhancing our recognition of the world. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he studied philosophy, political science, and Latin American literature. GALE DICK has been in the Writing Program since Fall '91. When he grows up he wants to be a normal guy with sensible shoes and a job. Until then, he'll live the glamorous life of a Ouarto contributor. RICHARDDRAGANtakes Columbia University writing workshops and u working on his first novel.

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JEANNE (JEN) BUTTON graduated from Skidmore College in 1986 and u hack

Marshall Poetry Contest (1992). She has been published in Passaic County

at Columbia's School of General Studia) for more. Graduate school is the next stop.

Review, Black Buzzard Review, and Famous Last Words.

DAVID HAUGER has embarked on a second career as a writer and is now only

AMY SCHEIBE was born and raised in North Dakota and spent her formative

commuting to the room at the top of the stairs. He is currently a student at the

years on a small farm. After high school, she attended Moorhead State theatre for

Writing Program at Columbia University and is working on his first book.

two years, dropping out "after a shattering loss of self-confidence." She moved to New York when she was nineteen and took a job as a nanny for a small family in East

LESLIE HOLLAND writes, reads, and runs in New York City. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she ui a non-degree student in the Writing Program. Leslie wishes to thank Dinitia Smith, Ijes Seifert, Austin Flint, her Structure and

city to pursue a modeling and waitressmg career. Having "succeeded overwhelmingly

Style II class, and The Dangerous Mind.

had always enjoyed writing, and thought she might be able to do something with her

SALLY JONES is a playwright with the Columbia Dramatists. She id currently

was poetry, but after writing her first short story, she began devoting herself to prose.

writing a chronicle play, titled She-Wolf about the life of Isabella, wife of the infa-

She is a sophmore this year with a 3.9 average. "Anything else you'd like to know?"

mous Nth-Century King, Edward II, of England.

Her favorite ice cream is Ben and Jerry's Rainforest Crunch. "Peace."

JANET KAPLAN'S poetry has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in such publica-

R.L. TOWNE attended Memphis State University. Her works have been published

tions as MS., The Sow's Ear, Emrys, Heresies, event, and in The Anthology of

in The Stone and Road Apple Review. Robin is currently working on a collec-

Magazine Verse t3 Yearbook of American Poetry, 1987. In 1991 she was a recipient

tion of short stories. She is a three-time recipient of Columbia University's Woolricb

of the Bronx. Council of the Arts'BRIO Awardfor Excellence in Poetry.

Fellowship.

LYNNE KASSABIAN is a graduate of the College of William and Mary in

J. VALERA is a student in the Writing Program. She has studied with Austin Flint,

Virginia and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University.

Joy Parker, and Alan Ziegler. She is currently working on a book.

Rockaway, Long Island. She soon "wised up to that situation " and moved into the as a waitress, "she decided to go back to school and try her hand at anew career. She "limited knowledge." Her main strength when she first started at Columbia in 1990

Most recently, her short stories have appeared in Ararat and Sporadic. She lives in Dobbs Ferry, New York, with her husband and son.

PIERRE DE VOS is a South African lawyer who received his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in May, 1992. He is returning to South Africa to teach law.

BARBARA LIVENSTEIN is completing a collection of short stories and is beginning a novel MURRAY NOSSEL Li from Capetown, South Africa where he trained and practiced as a clinical psychologist. His play, Small Voices was performed at the West End Gate Theater in 1992. In 1991 he won the Columbia Writer's Club award in dramatic writing for Private Bodies. His play No Boundaries was previously published in the 1991 Sporadic. HYE YUNG PARK is a sophomore at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is the winner of the Barnard College Academy of American Poets Prize (1992), Middlesex County Writing Contest (1989), and third place winner of the Lenore

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