1996-Vol32

QUARTO

QUARTO THE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF THE SCHOOL OF GENERAL STUDIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VOLUME 32

1996

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.a SUBMISSIONS

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Set in Palatino and Helvetica.

Cover: Janice L. Sugarman, Bleecker Playground, July 1995 Centerfold: Janice L. Sugarman, Halloween, October 1993 Copyright © Quarto, 1996 All rights are reserved and revert to a u t h o r s a n d artists u p o n publication.

ISSN 0735-6536.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR DANIEL MCHUGH MANAGING EDITOR GENIE NEAL COORDINATING EDITOR

LnsA AKKOLA ART DIRECTOR KATHYPANKAM DESIGN CONSULTANTS ANGELA DARLING SUE HUNNEWELL EDITORS ZEHAVA BERGER KAI-MING CHA ZHANNA COHEN PAOLA SCARPELUNI CRCTTS ANGELA DARLING NAIMA DIFRANCO RONENGUMER MARISSA HELLER SUE HUNNEWELL MEGHAN IRMLER YEKATERINA KAZAKINA ANNA LEE STACEY MILLER KATHYPANKAM JAMIE PEARLBERG WHITNEY PEELING ROBIN POINTER KIMROBLES JOSHUA ROSS MICHAEL POLSNEY JOYINSHIH JENNIFER WORRELL

FACULTY ADVISER LESLIE T. SHARPE DIRECTOR, WRITING PROGRAM ALANZIEGLER

Quarto Prize 1996 FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT

MARIA OLIVAS

MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS TWELVE LONG-AWAITED CHILD OF PEACE

CONTENTS Lachrymosa

JULIENNE KlM 1

Fires

PAUL SCHOFIELD

4

Red Birds

ABIGAIL SUSIK 11

Corumdale

DAVID PERRIN 12

Starving Time Perspectives on Place My Father Died When I Was Twelve Charmed

DACIA GRAYBER 21 PORTFOLIO MARIA OLIVAS 2 3 VICTORIA G E D U L D

28

My Pious Grandfather

RAFIQUE KATHWARI 5 4

I Remember

RAFIQUE KATHWARI 5 5

Taxicab Marmot Mama Don't Come 'Round Here No More Your Voice Perspectives on People Long-awaited Child of Peace

ClNAMMON McCLINTON 5 7 HEATHER FlSHER 7 3 ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ 7 7 STEPHEN PAGE 8 5 PORTFOLIO MARIA OLIVAS 8 7

Inheritance

BARRIE STEVENS 9 8

Listening

PAUL SCHOFIELD 9 9

Lachrymosa JULIENNE S. KIM

The first time Grandmother fell off her bed, she lost her right arm and her right leg. She fell to the ground, making a horrendous sound as they flung themselves fromher body and hit Petrunella in the head. When the doctors came, they poked and probed the right arm and right leg, pronounced them lame, and left them in a pile on thefloor.Petrunella picked them up and stuck them back on with scotch tape. Ripping and tearing and taping. That night, Grandmother fell asleep with her body pressed up against the wall. She should have taught me how to sew, thought Petrunella, as one hand held on to her head and the other to the edge of her bed.

The second time Grandmother fell off her bed, she lost her language.

Her head hit the ground, making a terrible sound as her words tumbled out in an incomprehensible jumble. When the doctors came, they said that she would never speak again, and left her words scattered on the bedroom floor. Petrunella swept them up and put them in a box. That night, she emptied them out onto the table and dug through them, one by one. She should have taught me how to speak, thought Petrunella.

Grandmother stared, speechless, her tongue numb.

The last time Grandmother fell off her bed, she lost everything but her eyes. When the doctors came, they strapped them on to a stretcher and took them to the hospital for surveillance. Petrunella picked up the rest of her body and put the pieces into a large garbage bag along with scotch tape, some glue, a stapler, and a needle and thread from Grandmother's sewing chest. When she arrived at the hospital, she found Grandmother's eyes lying on a bed with metal safety bars. Petrunella stared silently as they flooded the bed with tears.

The next three days were spent putting Grandmother back together again. Petrunella dumped the contents of the garbage bag out onto the bed and began assembling the pieces. She picked up the head, gently

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scooped Grandmother's eyes off the pillow and put them back in their sockets with a dab of glue behind each one. They watched anxiously as her fumbling fingers placed the torso to the neck, the arms and legs to the torso, and the hands and feet to the arms and legs. The scotch tape on the right arm and right leg had lost its stick and was full of lint. Petrunella peeled it off and picked up Grandmother's needle and thread. It took her an hour to thread the needle and her sewing resulted in inefficiently large and clumsy stitches. Look, Grandmother, I've taughtmyself how to sew, thought Petrunella as she secretly reinforced the seams with staples.

Petrunella worked day and night, while the doctors looked on, amused by her efforts. And when she was done, she overheard them laughing at the unsightly mess of staples and stitches. But in the background of her body. Grandmother's eyes looked beautiful.

The sun went up and down as Petrunella waited for Grandmother's body to move, but it remained fixed with only the eyes moving from left to right, right to left. The earth spun round and round as Petrunella waited for Grandmother to speak, but her box of words remained useless at the side of the bed. It was so quiet, Petrunella could hear the sound of a heart beating and bloodflowing,only she couldn't tell whose it was. No degree of silence could distinguish life between the two.

One day, Grandmother's eyes stopped moving. They hung like dead weights off to the right, the direction her head had been tilted for so many days. Petrunella stared into them and in the silence, they spoke of nothing. When the doctors came, they said that Grandmother was dead, closed her eyes, and wheeled away her metal safety-barred bed.

Petrunella stared silently as they drained Grandmother's blood from her body and filled her with embalming fluid. The blood sunk slowly down a clogged sink. The fluid inflated the body, oozing out between stitches and staples. And when the embalming was over, they put Grandmother in a cold steel box in a cold steel room where everything was blue. That night, Petrunella crept into the room, opened the box and

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JULIENNE S. KIM

climbed into its coldness. She opened Grandmother's eyes, lay down next to her, and listened to her own heart beating and blood flowing.

Their lives echoed against the steel walls. Petrunella's fledgling fingers felt along Grandmother's seams. Grandmother stared stiffly into Petrunella's gaze. And death died with the breath of Petrunella's mourning.

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PAUL SCHOFIELD

Fires PAUL SCHOFIELD

That's half whaf s the matter, running up and down those stairs. I used to could do that all day without feeling it much in my legs, and in my back. Uncle George is the reason I'm climbing the stairs all day. He's the other half. When I married him, for better or for worse, he was the kind of man you could always tell which side of any question he was on.

He took a stand and you heard it, but good. Now I tell him what-all and he sits there, cooing like a turtle dove and staring out the window, all two-hundred-twelve pounds of him. I've never seen a bigger, stronger man turn so quick into, well, a memory of himself, like a big old sack of potatoes up in that room.

It happened just like this: Uncle George was fixing to drive into Bridge City. He was standing out on the front porch, and I asked him, "George, would you carry me into town in your Fairlane?"

Where all you going?" he said, then I heard a crash like to break the window panes, the house shook so much. He fell so hard on top of the porch swing he broke its chains right off their hooks. That was the last thing I heard Uncle George say: "Where all you going?"

He had been feeling poorly, with indigestion and headaches. But when the doctor came, he said that Uncle George had suffered a stroke, and, my word, I believe he was struck down. The hand of God reached out and struck him down.

Uncle George was never my uncle. I called him that from the day I met him, on account of Lucy. She was my friend at the time, and she was his niece, and when she introduced us, she said, "Betty Jo, meet Uncle George," and I've called him that ever since. His full name is George Walter Houston, and when I met him, he was a firefighter for the Hardin County Fire Brigade. He stood six-foot-three in his boots and wore red suspenders to hold up his pants, and his shirts were always starched and pressed. He looked right smart.

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WrÂŤnIhavemystrengmandifsprettyoutside,IsUdehimoffthebed and sit him upright in the wheelchair and roll him out to the upstairs porch. He hasn't been downstairs since they brought him home from the hospital. He loves sitting out there on the porch. Before his stroke, he used to sit out there for hours, sucking whiskey out of a lemon. He would score a lemon, pour whiskey into the hole and then suck on it. One lemon last him all afternoon and into the evening. One bottle of whiskey last him at least a week, depending.

Now, George Walter Houston is the only man I've ever known, that is, in the way that only a wife can know her husband. We never did have anychildren,butit wasn'tfor lack of trying. I could see from the first time I laid eyes on him that Uncle George was a lady's man. He walked down the street with those red suspenders and alligator boots and white Stetson hat, and even the married ladies stopped to give him the onceover.

When he asked for my hand, Itoldhim outright that I wanted him to quit fighting fires just as soon as he could find another line of work. He promised me he would quit, but he kept on fighting fires for twentyseven years. I was so scared, scared all the time, that he would get burned upinoneof those fires, like when theHardin County Courthouse burned to the ground. He made another promise: that he wouldn't betray me after we married, that he wouldn't see other women. He swore to me he wouldn't.

If I had listened to my second mind, I wouldn't have married him at all. A man so handsome and straight and tall, who had known more women than I could meet in a month of Saturdays shopping at the Farmers Market. Talk about trouble. I've had trouble all my days since I met Uncle George. No sooner than we settled into our house after the wedding he would go out evenings, telling me he was going to the firehouse, or to see about some business, and he would stay away for two, three days at a stretch, worry me sick. Sit there ringing my hands

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and crying. He'd comeback smelling of whiskey and cheap perfume, his shirt buttoned up all wrong. By God, I swear he once came home with his pants on backward, he was so drunk. I cursed him up and down that night, but he never remembered it.

Uncle George wasn't a lying man or dishonest. He was that honest that he wouldn't steal a thousand dollars if he knew it would never be missed. He just loved the ladies. The day we were married, he carried me over the threshold of the front door of our house and made love to me right there in the vestibule, me with my wedding dress still on.

"What about the neighbors, George?" I asked him.

"Damn the neighbors," he said. "We're man and wife."

Oh how I loved that man.

One evening, the same day the Hardin County Courthouse burned to the ground, we were sitting out on the porch and Uncle George was telling me about a fellow named Lee who had been hung for killing a man over a forty-five-dollar Stetson hat.

"Seems that Stagger Lee shot that poor bastard because he picked up the wrong hat from a restaurant coat check. Made himbeg not to kill him, then he shot him cold—in front of his wife and baby too," Uncle George said.

Even with the sun going down, the temperature was in the nineties— hot, but I shivered to think of such coldness. I watched the sunset turn the clouds cotton-candy pink.

'Judge Bryant sentenced Lee to hang, and everybody in thechambers got up and cheered. Damndest thing."

At that time there was a judge in Hardin County, name of Samuel James Bryant. Had a shock of hair red as a tomato, redder even. In thirtyseven years as judge he'd hung more men than any other judge, sixtythree men, mostly for killing, and for horse stealing in the early days.

He'd quote the Bible, "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," slam his gavel,

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PAUL SCHOFIELD

and pass sentence, quiet, like he'd almost forgot what he was going to say: "Death by hanging."

"When Stagger Lee stood up on the gallows, he cursed Bridge City up and down. But when he promised to come back—that he would take us all to Hell with him—everybody got quiet. Then they dropped him. I don't believe I'll go to another hanging in my lifetime." Uncle George looked disgusted, poured more whiskey.

Right about then, when Uncle George was telling about how long they left Stagger Lee hanging up, I saw smoke rising in town, black and thick, like something big was burning down. Uncle George got up off the porch and put on his boots.

'Til send word later on," he said. "You wait here."

I had a bad feeling, begged him not to go.

"By the looks of that smoke, we're gonna need every man we can get," he said, and he left. He didn't hug me or kiss me or even say good-bye.

Just drove off like he was going up the country for a Sunday drive.

I sat on the porch and watched that black smoke rise, and it clouded in the sky until it looked like the darkest thunderstorm was blowing in.

I saw a boy on a bicycle riding toward town and I called out to him, "Son, whaf s that burning in town?"

"You ain't heard? Courthouse is on fire. There's six fire trucks, two of them come from Orange County."

Smoke rose through the evening, until the stars came out, and the smoke was all lit up from the fires burningbelow. All those records, birth and death certificates, hunting licenses, marriage licenses, our marriage license, burning.

I'd waited on George during many fires, I can't remember how many, but I never felt so scared of him getting burned as I did during that courthouse fire. I waited until I heard the hall clock chime midnight, I could still see the smoke for the fires below, and I took George's bottle of whiskey and I poured myself a glass full. I never have been one for

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drinking, but I drank that glass full without stopping for air and poured myself another. I drank it too.

I went downstairs and put on my shoes and started walking. I didn't follow any signs other than the orange and black clouds of smoke. I walked for at least an hour before I got downtown and I saw it, the Hardin County Courthouse all burned to the ground, except for six columns, the six columns that stood at the entrance of the courthouse for all of its seventy-six years. Those columns looked like smoke stacks from a burnt-up factory.

Abunch of folks stood around watching, and three fire trucks sprayed water on the ruin.

"Haveyou seen my Uncle George?" I asked a fireman who leaned up against a tree watching the fire bum out.

"Was he inside?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "He was fighting this fire."

"You mean George Houston?"

"That's him."

"No, ma'am," he said, "But there ain't no more fighting this fire tonight." He lifted his arms and showed me his palms, like he didn't know and whatever he didn't know wasn't his fault.

I looked for Uncle George all up and down the street in front of the burnt-up courthouse and I walked around it twice—a full city block. The smoke burning in my eyes hurt worse than cutting fresh onions, and I cried and I cried, with the heat from the courthouse embers heavy on my face and hands. I walked home again, thinking he was dead, or worse, all burned up somewhere and nobody to help him. When I got home the morning birds were singing and the sun was coming up. I sat on the porch upstairs and waited.

The sun was well high in the sky when I heard George Houston's voice out on the street in front of the house.

"Red on the head like the dick on a dog!" he yelled. Thaf s what he

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PAUL SCHOFIELD

said. I'd never heard that said before. He stood in front of the house, shirtless, with a bottle of what I took to be whiskey in his hand. He had his other hand clenched in a fist and he was shaking it up at the sky and he yelled again: "Red on the head like the dick on a dog!"

He stepped into the yard and he said "God damn you, Samuel James Bryant!" and he fell down in the grass and went to sleep.

In my estimation, the lord God is a hanging judge. If I were to venture a guess about the color of his hair, I would say that it isn't white or gray, butblood red, like Judge Bryanf s, or without color, like wind, where you can't see it but if s strong enough to knock over your house.

There was only one person who died in the courthouse fire, and that was Judge Samuel James Bryant himself, sleeping in his chambers after a day of passing judgment on thieves and killers and the like. When Uncle George got there, the fire was so far gone that they decided to just let it bum, to contain it, so that it would burn itself out. Uncle George left, seeing as they don't need so many men just to contain a fire, and he got drunk. Wasn't until late that night that they found out the judge had been sleeping in his chambers. He burned up with all those marriage licenses and hunting licenses and birth and death certificates.

I hated Uncle George that day. He was sleeping out in the yard and I wanted to go out there and light him on fire where he slept. Me walking halfway across the county while he's getting drunk in a bar, carousing.

Sometimes it comes to me to light his bed on fire where he rests. He couldn't get out of that bed to save his life.

But I was so happy to see him alive that day, after the courthouse burned, that I couldn't hold on to my anger. Besides, he could make yesterday seem like it never happened. That same day, after he sobered up and washed and shaved, he went out for half an hour and came back with a box of chocolates and chrysanthemums in a pot. "Here comes the candyman," he said, and he picked me up and carried me to bed. I just

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couldn't hold on to my anger.

Yes, the lord God is a hanging judge, and he's got my Uncle George hanging, not sleeping and not awake, just cooing like a turtle dove and staring out the window, all cockeyed.

It's going on ten years since the courthouse fire, and two years since Uncle George was struck down. I don't hold anything he's done against him. Thaf s between him and his maker. Now all I want is for Uncle George to be happy. If there's one thing that makes him happy, if s good loving. It always has. I've often wondered if he did it the same way with other women, whether he made the same noises while he was loving them. Uncle George doesn't talk anymore, and he can't even get up out of bed. But there's parts of him that work just fine. I can tell when he likes it. He lets out a moan that sounds like a whole bevy of turtle doves, and when we really get going, if s the way it used to be, just me and him, like there never was anybody else.

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Red Birds ABIGAIL SUSDC

Oftentimes I put red birds like pipe cleaners down my throat and let them nest in my cage where they hang from strings.

Small lightbulbs, ornaments, their beaks poke out triangular from my breasts— breathing from the lung trembling for the heart a feather in the pulse— they are seasonal maids that beat out my rugs and open the windows.

When I flatten my hand to the span of their song they wing out with the sash from my coat, leaving forked footprints stitched onto my lips.

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DAVID PERRIN

Corumdale DAVID PERRIN

Everyoneflewthecoop.Thenewspaperheadlineread: "BACK COUNTRY 'INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY' FULL OF DRUGS AND INCEST." City slickers and politicians be aware: backward, bumbling eco-freaks to scapegoat. Now Esop just sits on the compost toilet all day and reads the paper from last week that'Ma got in Two Horse along with the supplies. He doesn't even bother to put on pants. Theflieshave given up trying to compete with Esop and he has forgotten not to piss on the pile.

"Carrots should be ready to pull next week, Jin. Make sure the third bed next to the asparagus is ready for the garlics to winter down. And don't forget the last of the apples before the crows get them. Not that we're going to be able to sell any of this produce now anyway. And Jin, please don't run around the pasture swatting at fireflies. It upsets the horses, especially Ole Bessy."

Jin is the dimwitted one who would have agreed with the reporter that incest in this valley is probably the best you'll find this side of the mainland. He thought it was a new crop we had just begun to grow this year that he hadn't yet heard about. The reporter went to town with the suggestion of incest. Jin or not, that man did us in. Everybody reads the newspaper in this country, even way out here.

When we got wind of the article, I half-expected "Ma to gather everyone up at her house, our community center, to talk about what had happened. But 'Ma is not much for words. She is a big woman and she has seen hard times before in her seventeen years here. 'Ma has always eaten for the worst of possibilities. So everyone kept their reactions to themselves, which I was afraid of. From the toilet, Esop mumbled something about finding the Old Man. Then he flipped to the sports page and made a racket about the scores. Mostly it was difficult to get a sense of peoples' reactions.

We didn't make anyone feel guilty about leaving after the neighbor-

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jng ranchers threatened to shoot at any moving object up in the hills.

Xhe/re just about as paranoid as the city folk. Bathing naked at Clairvoy Falls all but stopped when someone heard a shotgun echo off the cliffs in the direction of the falls. The bathers that day all claimed not to have heard the shot but they also said they were spending most of their time underwater. Now only Clive and Sandy sneak up to the falls, stripping at the beginning of the trail so as to not leave traces of clothing caught on the brambles on their way to the secret bathing hole. Reanne said before she left that she suspected Give and Sandy would continue to risk walking through the hills to get to the hole so they could watch each other scale the granite face and then jump over the falls to disappear into the deep, dark pool. The water of course continues to smack down onto the pool as if nothing has happened.

But life is about to get very difficult. The newspaper article stated, "It is parts of the country like this secluded valley on the tip of the isthmus, where your organic produce comes from." It was like our produce had been poisoned. We heard from town that the same people who had been enjoyingour strawberries by the bucketscould not beforced at gunpoint to touch any of the hundreds of leeks we spend three days harvesting to go to market. The leeks rotted on the stand until finally Rivero had no choice but to pack up the stall and leave the farmer's market in shame.

Esop stands up wobbly, pours a whole bucket of sawdust on the heap, and makes his way inside in just enough time to pull on some pants and plop down at the dinner table. On a cloudy day the photovoltaic we all worked so hard to invest in doesn't collect enough solar to power the lamps so we eat by candlelight. We've never had electricity from the grid out here anyway so candles are fine by purists like 'Ma. Sometimes for dinner 'Ma makes an omelette. She was eating eggs before us younger generation came to Corumdale and made veganism its mainstay. Nights when she does make the putrid-smelling thing, we all just about throw up saying grace before the meal.

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Any stranger who happens up the dirt road into Corumdale is always welcome at dinner and to stay as long as they like. 'Ma has never turned anyone away. That's how the reporter was allowed into the house. Jin gave himabighugouton the porchand immediately handed himaknife to core the apples for crumble. That night at grace 'Ma didn't have her omelette so we sang a song, and thanked the corn and the acorn squash and the mushrooms in the creamed mushroom soup, products of Bill's two-day foraging expedition. The reporter stuck out because he was new and he didn't sing or have any mushroom soup, which we all ate first of, it being a rare delicacy.

Although he didn't appear so, we made the reporter feel comfortable.

We really didn't know he was a reporter, and a cub at that. It turns out he saw a lot of things, misunderstood them, and later wrote about them: "They invited me and welcomed me with open arms In the evening I was shocked to peer through the opening in the bathroom door and see a man, woman, and child bathing together. The man and woman caressed each other with a strange sponge." See now, city folk are often prone to show their ignorance like that. Loofa, which can be used for a sponge, comes from a gourd and we can grow it right out back. By now the baseball bat-shaped gourds are almost full grown—they get about two feet long—and ready to be dried.

The man misinterpreted our system. 'Ma has the only mechanism for heating up water out of all the houses in Corumdale. It's a passive solar collector, which means if if s cloudy and people want hot baths they're going to have to share. Plus the plastic on the collector is cracked. There's not always enough hot water to go around. Reanne, probably the one in the tub that cloudy night, left with her boyfriend Trevor because they feared for their child if the authorities came up and raided Corumdale.

She said she might go to one of the islands and build a hut with Trevor out of scrap wood and old tires that wash up onto the little beaches where the mangroves give way. She was kind of worried about the mosquitos.

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Other families left with less direct excuses, like they weren't sure if their children were getting enough protein on a strictly vegan diet. There has not been an animal killed on this land for thirteen years and Ma claims that the karma generally feels much better around the place. No one used to worry about protein. Whenever someone would bring it up, 'Ma would bark at that person, telling them what the Old Man used to say about protein. "He used to say we're made of protein—our whole bodies are made mostly of protein—you can't worry about protein." It was the only time she talked about the Old Man. And when Clive and Sandy timidlybroughtupprotein, 'Ma didn'tsay anything, as if this time she was too defeated. But Jin sort of forced the issue. He had heard Esop recommend finding the Old Man to solve the crisis and asked 'Ma about the founder of Corumdale. *Ma started slowly. "The Old Man is five feet tall old man with a beard reaching down to his knees. He only wears a loincloth except in the dead of winter. No one has seen him since he left sixteen years ago—a year after he and I founded Corumdale. Occasionally somebody from Corumdalewill claim to have run intoamanfittinghisdescriptiondown among the dunes by the seashore. Usually the story goes that he is standingwimarmsoutstretched,clutchinga piece of carved whalebone in the shape of a dolphin—or a bird—shouting at the ocean while his beardflapsin the sea breeze. I don't think anyone has ever seen him, but they say spotting him is a good luck charm. I don't think anyone has seen him in sixteen years, though he's probably around here." 'Ma looked lost, her head tilted back from talking so much. We didn't expect her to say she thought he was around here.

Before Esop resigned himself to sitting on the toilet all day, he used to write songs about the mythology of the area according to 'Ma, and assorted paleo-ecological clues. He had even written a song about the Old Man, according to Tvla. That was how people thought they knew what he looked like. The first time anyone ever saw the reporter pull out

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DAVID PERRIN

his tiny notepad and purple fountain pen was when Esop picked up his guitar and sat on the porch with his legs dangling over the side tuning up for a song. Esop never learned to tune very well so he just plays all the chords he knows until everything sounds right to him. The reporter squatted next to him and began to get antsy. "Come on, play a song, mate, play a song." But Esop doesn't do anything before he's ready and when he was ready, the reporter heard it like this: Los yonder hills of the Pleistocene after dinosaurs and marsupial queens Pangaea did its about-face got primates running their own race.

Brown topsoilfor earth red clayed survived The yellow wings of butterflies.

Ether fossil records just might show The ancestors sweated smoke by their big toes And come look very closely turn all around these clouds in the sky might just be the crown.

The reporter ended his piece with this attack: 'To conclude, traditions of animism, racism (due to lack of appropriate racial representation in this bucolic,hedonisticvilla),and/oosesexufl/codes,arenot trends thiscountry should be proud of. We are by no means one of the larger nations of the world and reputations such as these, denigrating our national fabric, could have serious consequences for export prices and otherwise, if they were to leak out to the not-so-distant corners of this ever-shrinking global village."

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Most of all I think everyone's feelings were hurt. No one wants to be seen in the eyes of the nation as a bunch of dangerous and dirty social outcasts. The week we all heard about the article everyone walked around with their heads down and forgot to offer hugs upon seeing a fellow community member downtrodden. Jin was least affected by the whole thing probably because he didn't really understand what it meant. One morning he collected the roundest rocks left in the stream down by the pasture. All afternoon he sat by the rocks as they heated up over the fire next to the dome-shaped steam hut covered with hides and pine needles. That night at dinner he announced a "steam" to anyone who wanted to join him later on in the evening. He said it was almost a full moon.

Everyone showed up at the steam under the light of the moon. The kids had already been put to bed. Quietly and one by one, each person slid out of their clothes and paid reverence to the red ash glow of the fire that had heated the rocks next to the hut. Then they slipped in under the doorway hide, which is said to be from the same piece of skin as the Old Man's loincloth. Inside everyone stared into the white-hot heat of the rocks. No one spoke. Jin pushed the door aside and asked if everyone was in. The water hissed as Jin ladled it over the heated stones. Someone let out a sigh.

After that no one talked about the event of the past week. "Ma said the prayer to thank the Old Man, acknowledging him for singlehandedly having built the steam hut. Everyone relaxed. Reanne said she couldn't wait to make sauerkraut this winter and Trevor nodded in agreement, running his hand through the hair on his bare thigh, which was beginning to bead with sweat. Rivero, who had brought back the rotten leeks to the compost, told us about how the city-folk were paying two dollars per Jerusalem artichoke these days. Everyone in the hut either laughed or let out sighs of exasperation remembering how Jin had accidentally butchered the crop in early summer because he thought the young

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artichokes were actually the liver wort weed that had been invading the garden. Jin didn't hear the laughter because he was concentrating on the rocks. Clive sat next to Sandy and made her giggle by whispering in her ear. Esop suggested that we sing or play the drums. Corumdale sweated and smiled and sang under that almost-full moon like it would never be the same.

The next day was when people began announcing their departures.

Although in good spirits from the previous nighf s steam, the sadness of the impending separation crept in. I immediately got to baking with our best amaranthflowerfrom last year to send everyone off with the tastiest muffins they could imagine. Esop said he had to take a shit, and Ma. swept and made the kids wash their faces the way she did every morning right after the hens quit their racket. Rivera offered some people rides back into town or the city if they wanted to go that far, in his beat-up hatchback with one operational tail light.

Then, all of a sudden someone yelled down from the gates that they saw the Old Man walking up the dirt road road with the whale bone in his hand. Jin ran down to verify the sighting and disagreed that this was the Old Man but rather that it looked a lot like the man who had come for dinner and then wrote in his pad with a purple pen the whole next day. It happened that the man was neither old nor a reporter but rather a young, long-haired traveler who described himself as a beatnik and wasinsearchofamannamedMushroomBill.Wetoldhimhewasinluck because Bill was leaving for his last expedition that very afternoon in search of the most poisonous mushroom in the country. Bill said that if the cops ever made a grab for him, he could pop this particular 'shroom and be dead within seconds, painlessly. The beatnik said "Yeh, man" and agreedtohelp muck the stables.

Throughout theday, families and individuals strapped on backpacks and borrowed hammocks and piecesofbamboo for the road.Weall cried and exchanged our last few secret recipes and agreed to meet again on

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DAVID PERRIN

the great cosmic byway, somewhere. Those leaving all turned when they reached the gates to blink three times at their only homestead so as to remember it forever. 'Ma says she has remembered everything perfectly that she ever blinked three times at. Then these loved ones became smaller and smaller bipedal shapes on the horizon of the dirt road, bound for somewhere safer.

I could never imagine anywhere safer than Corumdale. At least I thought I couldn't until two weeks after many of our fellow community members had begun the diaspora, after the fateful newspaper article. But thisday was worse. This kind of bad luck exceeded anything thatanyone could print and sell to hundreds of thousands of readers.

Bill, lost for almost ten days now up in the evergreen pine forests on the northwest stretch of the handle, came limping into Corumdale. He had lost the beatnik kid and was banged up pretty good on the right side of his body. According to Bill, the kid had poked himself in the eye by turning around into an especially long pine needle on one of the evergreens. The kid clutched his eye and tripped over a root, falling facefirst onto the most deadly mushroom in the country. He lay still for a second, then got up and in a wild-eyed craze began to beat Bill senselessly on the right side of his body. The beatnik quickly lost consciousness before he could kill Bill and Bill tried to induce vomiting from the kid but it was too late. So Bill went about taking care of himself, surviving by drinking only pine needle tea, which does have a lot of vitamin C. This very same day while caring for Bill, trying to restore feelingtothe right side of his body, Jin was badly injured running in from the pasture.

He was coming to tell us he thought he saw the authorities walking up the dirt road. Ole Bessy had finally gotten fed up with Jin running around the pasture swatting at fireflies and she kicked him in the thigh just as he was running behind her. Jin fell and began screaming that they would never be able to mend his femur and that he could never farm again. We heard the screaming and rushed down just intimeto find the authorities

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CORUMDALE

standing in a circle around a squirming but quiet Jin. He was scared out of his senses by the big shiny badges and as he had promised each and every one of us never to talk to a cop, he bit his tongue to keep from expressing the pain.

I quickly dropped to tend to Jin and at first ignored the cops when they asked me if I knew this man. Without looking up, or wondering why they were on our property in the first place, I replied in disgust that of course I knew this man. Then the cops parted and asked me the question again, allowing me to see the real subject of their inquiry. The Old Man lay in the grass behind them with sand all in his hair and beard. The cops had carried him up from the beach. His eyes were closed and his lips pursed. His arms lay limp by his sides and his lungs had already began to expand. He looked small. The whale bone was tucked into his loincloth and there wasno sign of injury. The copsmurmured something about him probably having died from old age but no one believed that.

They asked me the question again.

"Yes. Yes, of course I know this man."

Starving Time a poem about breathing DAQA GRAYBER

stop, breathe. breathe in aching cornfields and tired erections and slow gin dances in the Mississippi rain [~21 sweet cool fingers playing waltzes on your neck and sambas on your thighs breathe in cool jazz sand of a broken Georgia beach in the middle of a particular nowhere and that jazz noise that sweet jazz whimper stinging dawn cry breathe that jazz in deep, real deep. thafs breath.

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PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE

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JACQUELINE LEIGH SNYDER COLLEGE INN DINER

My Father Died When I Was Twelve MARIA OLIVAS

I remember my father singing to me and my mother as the three of us rocked in the big rattan duyan hung between two coconut palms in our backyard. It was at least ten years before the Japanese marched their prisoners up Bataan to Camp ODonnell, six years before the carriage caught Mama's long hair in its spokes and snapped her neck beside the church.

"Be Thou my vision, oh Lord of my heart," Papa crooned while he pulled on a rope tied to the mango tree to keep us moving. "Naught be all else to me save that Thou a r t — " I remember my father with his gun over his shoulder saying "Jack is your best friend besides me." Jack was an even-keeled boat of a dog so tall his shoulders cradled my right elbow without my having to stoop.

He stood strong in the red leather collar my mother had made before she died. She braided it out of strips from a jacket the missionaries had given her. Mama had used the rest to patch the water-buffalo harness. "We have the best-dressed animals in the province," she laughed.

Into both harness and collar she'd woven herbs for health, courage, loyalty, stamina. She was going to weave in long life, too, but the minister's wife discovered the notebooks Mama was reading, written in Papa's mother's craggy hand. Fearing for our souls, that good Christian woman took them away. Without guidance, Mama couldn't remember which plant meant what. "Hoy, and what if I weave in the wrong one, what if I bring them fertility?" she bit her lip, then laughed again. "They would have many babies and how would we feed them all? We cannot even keep a pig."

After the runaway horses careened through our lives, taking Mama's with them, Papa would go to the woods alone, leaving Jack to guard me.

It was Jack who taught me to run fast and swim far, Jack who licked my bee-stings and wore my garlands around his ears. And it was Jack who

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MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS TWELVE

found Papa dying in the swamp.

A typhoon had trapped my father for three days. When the flooding cleared, my cousin Gilberto followed the dog's plaintive howls to the roots of the river, where my father huddled, glassy-eyed beside a soggy deer carcass. Gilberto, his arms and back corded from training with fightmgsticte,carriedPapabadctoourviUage.AuntieCarrnela,Gilberto's mother, spared her second-best maid to nurse him and brought us some food.

Papa lived for two weeks, and when he was delirious I sat at the bedside and hated him and his God. "Yes, Lord, I am coming to you." He dared smile that way as he spoke of leaving me alone? "Sweet Savior, Senor..." and he would hum and sing, "pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise though the eye of sinful men Thy Glory may not see," even "The First Noel" though it was July. He was happy to die. He loved God more than me, and he only mentioned my mother when he was lucid.

"I will tell her you have made top scholar every year, Esther, my child." He twisted under the mosquito netting, and sang the ave, the gloria, the kyrie, things he said he'd left behind when he joined the Methodists. Things he told my mother not to sing in our hut.

I bit my lip as I wiped his forehead, thinking, This is how you repay her, who turned her back on her parents' religion and the largest house in town to marry a barefoot farmer, and she only sixteen.

When my father was buried beside my mother, Auntie Carmela took me in. I had two new sisters. Lissa danced even down the stairs. Citas drove a harder bargain than her brother. In exchange for my upkeep, my father willed our water-buffalo to Auntie Carmela and his rifle to Gilberto. They let Jack come, but didn't allow him upstairs. Some nights they would track me to his corner of the kitchen, and I would awaken on stiff starchy cotton after drowsing on warm brown fur.

Then the Japanese came, and we had a new teacher, a captain of the

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Imperial Army, whose English equaled my grandmother's.

"His family is well placed in Japan," Auntie Carmela told us. "Thaf s why he has good manners."

"Thaf s why he isn't at the front," said Gilberto, as he honed his machete.

Unlike other Japanese teachers we heard of, the captain was very gentle. If one of us called him "teacher" instead of "sensei," he gave us extra homework, instead of striking us or making us kneel on gravel.

When the command came to rename all children, he selected accurately foreachoneofus.MÂŤi, "gracefuldance," wasmylight-footed roommate.

Rie, "picture of prosperity," was her older sister.

"And you," he smiled at me. "Eiko, bright shining one, star.'"

Besides teaching us Nippongo, our new national language, Sensei translated for Sergeant Yanigasawa when the patrol came looking for Gilberto. My warrior-cousin had joined the insurgents preparing for MacArthur to fulfill his promise and return from Australia.

"Gilberto said he was going to Cebu," murmured Auntie Carmela, trying not to stare as the sergeant, squinting with pleasure, scratched his ear-canals with the unsulphured end of a match. "I have not seen him these six weeks."

Yanigasawa tapped his holster and replied, "Sow carabao tnoraitarn, kono hanashimono maruni narete da to omou." Then he thrust the sliver of wood with its blotch of yellow fuzz between his teeth and held it there, darting his tongue around it.

"He says 1 think this story would seem more real if that carabao followed me back to the camp.'" Sensei gazed past the corner post of the porch, his eyes hazy. I was the one who took the harness off the waterbuffalo, and gave the nose-rope to the Sergeant's aide. I could see why they wanted to take it. Like Jack and me, it had filled out in Gilberto's household.

Auntie was shaken after Yanigasawa left. "Hoy," she shuddered, as

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she washed vomit from her chin at the pump," if that creature does such unclean things in public, what can he be capableof in thecamp? How the prisoners must suffer."

One day I was drawing water in the backyard, with Jack lying beside me damp and happy in the spray from the pump. Gilberto, thinner, bruised, appeared on the fringe of the forest. I brought him the dried mangos and fish that were always ready in the cabinet behind Jack's bed and he said "Hunting has been hard. Let me take Jack for a while."

I said yes, though Jack did not like to leave me. What was one or two days with my cousin? If Yanigasawa had been less efficient, Auntie Carmela's larder could have fed the whole guerilla troop, but the Sergeant counted cans and bottles; we could funnel out only perishables.

Five days went by, and Jack did not come back from the mountains.

It was exam week; I was not allowed to roam.

"What a pity if you, named Star by the teacher, should have poor scores on her tests," chided my auntie. The next Saturday, Gilberto came again. But for the creak of the kitchen cabinet, I would not have seen him.

"Hsst, are you stupid? Why did you come to the house?" He had risked so much. Through the window I saw his sister beside the pump.

"You did not ask Citas to bring the food?" then "Where is my Jack, cousin?"

He tried to keep his eyes down, but I had seen the flick of his lids toward the comer, where on Jack's mat lay a red braided collar, almost cut in half.

Up the bank of river, through the Chinese cemetery, between the paddies and the fishponds, through the swamp that killed my father, to the slick dank caves where the rebels slept on beds of moss, I ran.

I had never cursed before, much less at an adult whose face must have stung again and again as I cracked braided leather across it. When the sight of his blood brought a grim smile to my lips, he said, "Little sister,

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we were afraid he would bark when Yanigasa wa's patrol came through, and then who would suffer? Not us, who move quickly and sleep as we march, but the town and our families, and yours."

"Even if that were true, and I know it is not, because my Jack was a smart dog, you should have come to me beforehand and said This thing we do is because of war; it is for the safety of our people.' I am no infant who must be protected from what is necessary. And," this time I slapped him, "you should not have eaten my Jack, the dog my father gave me, when I have prepared dried fish and mangos for you these four months."

I knew that if they had just killed him, Gilberto would have brought the body home for me and Lissa to cry over while Citas read a psalm.

One man brought me Jack's skull, wrapped in a soft, broad leaf. The back had been cracked open; they had mixed his brains with hot rice.

Through my sobs I heard him say, "Gilberto tried to stop us, but we were in a fever. It had been three months since we had had fresh meat. The knife was sharp. The dog did not suffer."

When I returned home, Auntie Carmela, Citas, and Lissa helped me dig a hole near my parents' grave. When I heard Citas reading "Thou art with me," I understood my father's wisdom in loving his fleshless, bloodless, boneless God above all else. You would never have to bury His skull and wonder which one had eaten His heart.

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VICTORIA GEDULD

Charmed

A novel in progress VICTORIA GEDULD

"You can never be too rich or too thin." —Duchess of Windsor

When the weather is nice, my neighbors throw clear green glass beer bottles at me as I walk home. As the bottles are landing, splattering around me like pellets of large hard rain drops, the guys wearing sweatshirt hoods and wool caps say nothing unusual: Blond Bitch. They make squawking or cooing noises that sound like the sirens that chase them but more rhythmic, like a song. If the blue boys come out of their car, my neighbors scatter like marbles in a pack.

Emerge from Valentino's Unisex Salon in my building a little later.

Spring has just begun.

I'm in school, out of work. The conversation with my mother and Daddy goes something like this: they say, Do we look like a bank?

Actually, Daddy does look something like a banker, but he doesn't wear a jacket and he doesn't smell like a bank. He doesn't smell inky and touched, like old sweat, like money. He comes home in sweet pinstripe pants, pressed so neat. And a tie, some designer tie that my mother picked up at some place named for a man.

I know how to tie Daddy's tie. He taught me to swing it over, loop it into a knot. And I remember how the silk fled across my fingers as I smoothed it down. Then he shook the knot up, made it tight. Took his whole hand, burnished fingers, and brushed my hair, fingers through my hair. But that was before I grew up.

Daddy doesn't wear a jacket because he wears a white coat, or a blue-green scrubs, mesh mask. Plastic blood-stained gloves that he peels off. Slaps into a red can marked "Hazardous" when he's done.

And he smells like soap. Not flowered up or sharp like men's cologne.

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He smells like a soap that cuts through the oils on your skin. He smells like soap thaf s supposed to get rid of something, take something off.

And when he waves his hand in front of me explaining how I could live with them in this Park Avenue palace that he bought for my mother, for my sister, for me, that I don't have to be so independent, really, that Harvard is upper-class, Princeton is middle-class, and Columbia is lower-class, so why, just why didn't I just go off to Boston and do it like the rest of the world, I smell that bitter soap. And just as the smell hits me, I excuse myself to the bathroom.

I see from the ring in the toilet that my sister has been home, bingeing again. I can't imagine what she eats here. The only food is leftover party goods like pate, St. Andre, chunks of bitter marbled blue cheese. Old crackers in a baggie. Wine gone to vinegar, corked in the refrigerator. I do a line and sneak out. Walk home. I spent the bus fare on my own party goods.

So here I am on Eighth Street and Waverly dressed as a house. It is a large rectangular yellow house with white shingles and shutters. I look out through holes in the attic and my arms reach out through two side windows. The house comes down to my knees. I am trying to convince people to please, oh, please take a leaflet.

And I am hung over in this house. Sweating last night out.

No one takes my leaflet. I stand there. I try to put these standard eight by ten printed sheets in the way of people. I try to make it so they will take one because if they don't, they'll bump into them. So they'll walk into it. Spread them out on the sidewalk in a flurry of haste.

Embarrass themselves. But they brush past them, knowing just how to curve themselves so they don't hit a thing.

I make the papers into a fan. Maybe these wise pedestrians will come over, think I'm doing a trick: Pick a card, any card. Just take one so that I can go home.

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I have to work until five or until the leaflets are gone. We check garbage cans, they tell me, we check them good. Don't try anything cute.

The last thing I feel inside this house is cute.

I get a lunch break, but it doesn't do much good. I can't sit down.

I consider pressing the house up over my head, but I think, I'll get stuck. I don't want to ask for help. How would it sound: Can you help me get out of this house? I'd sound like my mother talking to some lover of hers. Or to her car service on a snowy day. Anyway, only some creep would help me. He'd sit down next to me and my house and want to talk. He'd probably start with something original: So. You're an actress, huh?

No. I'm an economics major.

That always gets them. Shuts them up. The unfortunate part is that I would be telling the truth.

After getting my pay, I quit the temp business and spend my paycheck on good vodka and fresh-squeezed orange juice. No money for anything more. I watch TV with the windows open. Listen to the way the sirens on TV mesh with the ones singing on the street, the chewed-up sounds of foreign voices and rhumba music, the explosions, and the sound of water and laughter from the hydrant outside my ground-floor window covered with a sheet, nailed to the wall.

Tuck myself under a sheet after a cold shower. Get blurry drunk some more. Sweat to sleep.

I charge cash on my VISA. If s supposed to be for emergency funds only. I'm having some emergency, let me tell you. It never lets up, this trouble I'm in. So it's next semester's tuition. Maybe I'll go back to work. But for now this works.

I call a guy with some home remedies that I know, captain of the swim team, and he says it's past finals. He's packing up to go home.

But he gives me a name and a number. See you in the fall, he says. We

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have great parties in the dorm, you should come again. Thaf s what he said when I started buying this winter, but I only went once. Those boys and ladies are so pretty with their pink cheek smiles. Smiles that say, I've never failed. Never had to. I have to leave these parties right away because I fall in love with all those polished boys. I don't need more trouble. They're trouble when they take you out on the floor for a fast jitterbug, a dance I know well, and let their hand rest on that lovely piece of skin just under the arc of your, and then they say it, Great ass. These are the kind of boys who take you when you're passed out, drunk, and leave you with a puddle of wet cloudy jelly between your legs the next morning. That's how you know exactly what happened. Just try and remember which one you let in.

I call the guy he gave me, Mickey, and go to his house on the border of gun-land. Just below this bar. Before he shows me what he promised, he opens his closet door. Look, he says. And I do. He has machine guns and guns and bullet-proof vests and suitcases piled up and he says, Wanna see more? And I say, No. That's okay. The streets are hot, but I want to get out of his air-conditioned place and back out to those streets where I can breathe. Why so much? Whaf s the occasion? he says. I couldn't say, It's Monday. Or Tuesday. Any day.

So I say, It's my birthday. Happy birthday, he says. Lef s do some in honor of you. And I say, No. I'm late for my party.

When I go to the bank this time, they take my VISA and I wait. I wait a little too long. Then I keep waiting some more. I am wearing a little dress, probably meant to be a swimsuit cover-up, but I wear it every day now, so if s okay. It's always right there when I wake up, if I get to sleep. Right now, it's been a few days.

So then another lady comes back holding the card, and up from under the counter she takes a pair of scissors and right there in front of me and the rest of the customers, she holds the card up, snaps it in

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two. Pushes it back under the plastic partition.

I don't know what hits me, because I know she must be right, I mean I've been charging hundreds of dollars of cash a day to keep this all up, but still I start screaming. I start saying that there must be some mistake and other things and she just stands there and says, "Take it up with your bank." Bank. I don't even have a bank. All I have is a stock broker who belongs to clubs with Daddy. So I suddenly feel my skin go burning hot and I think, I'm here in this bank practically nude, and then I think about how it'll be to come down and I start screaming some more. I can't tell my connection that it's my birthday. It's only been a month since my last one. Then as I'm saying something more about managers and other things I see a guard at my side and I say, Okay. Okay. I'll take it up with my bank.

It's Friday and I use my key to get into the Park Avenue place and I watch TV with a bottle. Look for some cash but they've hidden it again. Wake up with crawlies over my skin, my legs, some on my arms around the wrist. A little guy on the tip of my nose and I think that I'm thawing out or something. My skin is hungry, my pores are salivating for the next round of what I don't have. Can't get. And there's nothing left, and I'm so hungry. I just scratch and keep going to the full-length mirror in Daddy's marble bathroom the size of a real room and look for the bugs. There must be something on me, on my skin, maybe some varmint just so tiny that the eye can't see him. I'm so hungry and my stomach is full, bloated. I have another drink even though the sun has just come up. It's still like night, I tell me. I wait until Sunday to go home. They get home from the country on Sunday.

So I beep Mickey and tell him about it on a pay phone and that afternoon I go to the address he gives me. Some apartment with the numbers on Lexington Avenue, but the building's just off it. I didn't expect a doorman. But he's not the type of doorman that my parents

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have. This guy's gold braid on his sleeve has coffee stains or something on them. Crumbs from an old bialy stuck on with cream cheese.

When I tell him where I'm going he doesn't even look up as he waves me to the elevator. A double-wave with the back of his hand like I'm something to be gotten rid of. Shooed away. Although the standing plaque says that visitors must be announced, I am not.

I press the bell for apartment A. Then I see that the door is slightly ajar and I do a Mother Move: I knock, peek in, say hello with a twinge of the South. I hate it when I do her like that.

The apartment is all white walls and shiny narrow board wood floor. I keep going. Kitchen to the right with one of those window shelf cut-outs. Nothing in the kitchen. No coffee, no booze. Not even dirt. Big windows and nothing going on inside that first room.

Nothing but walls and floor. I walk in. Walk into some hallway which looks like it's got bedrooms off it. It must have three or four bedrooms lined up. Knock on the first door. Look in. Don't say a word. No more Mother voice for me. Nothing there either. I expected something. At least a bed. A large heart-shaped bed with mirrors. A bathtub or pool.

Chains attached to walls, leather whips, handcuffs. Something. Anything would do. Instead there was nothing. Nothing there but walls, window, and floors.

Then I hear this low cigarette voice call me. Is it the new girl, she says. Yes, I say, and I say my name. If s me.

I go to the voice and in the last room there is a woman, blond, movie-like, but not quite, sitting there in a pinstripe knock-off of Daddy's suits. She's behind a big wooden desk with drawers on both sides, my mother would know it was an antique partners' desk. The room is done as though the rest of the apartment is full of furniture and this is the library, smoking room. There is wood paneling, bookcases, some kind of executive leather couch. Phones on her desk like this is a real office. Black ones with small receivers and red and

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green lights blinking on and off like there's conversations all over the place. But I only see her and she's just listening. Sheflipsone of three rolodexes packed tight, the ones that spin around all the way, and she just keeps flipping it, over and over. If s some kind of habit because she just looks past it as it rolls. One hand rolls it, the other hand lets the cards tickle the tips of her lean, smooth hands, finished nails.

Sit down, she tells me with her head arching off to a large leather seat, but I don't. I walk around, look at the books in the oak paneled shelves. All classics. Emma. Oscar Wilde. Moby Dick. At least she's got a sense of humor. But when I get up close to pull one out I see that they're all glued together. Have no insides. Only the titles are real.

She puts the phone on hold, receiver on her shoulder like a fur boa.

I look at her as she finally speaks now, after she inhales her slim cigar and lets it go with the words.

She asks me if I am free Wednesday night. You'll like your date, she says. He's real nice. Older. All our gentlemen are gentlemen, she says.

And the older ones are nicer, for the most part. Then she laughs.

Although I should be, when she laughs, I'm not really frightened. I laugh a little too and we both smile. I like her, although I usually don't.

Like women, I mean. She looks at me again, lets her eyes roll over my face and she says, Nice smile. Smile a lot. Make them glad they're with you. I like you, she says.

She tells me to meet her at Lord & Taylor, Better Suits. I tell her I've got plenty of party dresses. No sequins, she says. We've got taste, here. And I suddenly think, So does my mother. And I want to defend my closet full of those dresses with the price tags dripping off them, hanging from plastic like stalactite tears, but I don't. I just say, I understand, as though I didn't until then.

And get some rest, she says. I know she's right. The drug dents are starting at my cheekbones. She says: Lay off it for a bit. Our gentlemen like ladies.

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And don't forget, she says as I'm leaving, Don't do anything I wouldn't do, and she laughs again, picking up the telephone as I turn.

I put on an evening gown I had bought at Bergdorf's on my mother's charge which I was supposed to wear to one of my parents' cocktail parties that I never went to. The one thing I can do as much as I want to is to shop at Bergdorf's. Unlimited account access. They want me to look good. The dress is black, like a little slip. No jewelry.

No perfume. Stockings, not panty hose.

A black sedan comes for me and takes me to the Plaza. Walk in like you've been there before, like you're visiting somebody, like you own the place, she said. Easy, I thought. My dad has lunch a lot with the brother of the guy who does. Cut him open, gave him a new heart. The car has frayed leatherette seats and nylon pile animal skin covers for the front seats. It smells like deodorant.

As I walk through the lobby, it seems too bright, overlit. There's a lot of gold paint around, bordering things, on the ceiling. It feels as though I've never been here before as I ask the concierge, Where are the elevators, and he says, Directly across the lobby, and I see them there, four steps from where I am.

Steps from where I knew they were because we used to come here to visit my grandmother. Daddy called room service for two hot dogs, ketchup, and I ate them in her suite and watched "Captain Kangaroo."

My sister had just learned to walk, so my mother took her to an exercise class. They got thin together.

So the concierge asks if I wish to be announced and I say Sure, and then correct myself quickly and add, That would be lovely, and I give him my name for the job. I chose it. Eloise.

The guy says, Let me see what I've got here, and I stood there. His eyes go clinical, watching me, surveying my hips, my legs, my small breasts. He says, You've got good eyes, I like them, as though he could

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take them home with him when he was done.

Once I got back on my feet, financially, I actually showed up for one of my parents' cocktail parties and there was one of my dates. All presentable and stand-upish, talking to my father. It turned out that he was a cutter too. I hadn't known that then, but looking back on it there was something in his hands, in the manner that was the same.

The way he smoothed my skin or something. Touched my hair.

Twisted the strands between his thumb and forefinger, looking at them as he rolled them back and forth, examined the thick waved strands as though he could find something in them, some answer.

I don't think he remembered me, probably because I didn't spend much time there. It wasn't one of those dates where you talked or went to a party or a show or dinner. You didn't look at each other or anything. On our date he just kind of did his thing, and my face was cheek to cheek with the carpet mostly. The carpet had that cleaned smell, too, like him.

He kind of looked at me when I came over to pass some hors d'oeuvres. My father said, Why don't you let Ada do that, honey. I said, Because this way, Daddy, I get to meet all the guests. My father told the date how I had recently recovered my senses and switched from Film to Economics. They were proud, he said, that I was coming to my senses. Little did he know, I was losing my mind.

The date looked at me and said, I think we've met before. Yes, that's right. When you were younger. Isn't that right, Charles, he said to my father.

Yes, Daddy said, and looked at me like he knew. Knew something, but he didn't know what.

I said, That must be it. Because you look familiar to me, too. And as I turned to go I felt my hair sway back and forth over my bare back

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and I could tell from their silence that they were watching m e as I went.

• My sister comes over with an Entenman's deep chocolate cake with that dark brown whipped-glue icing, two quarts of vanilla Haggen Daz, a gallon of milk, and a family-size box of Captain Crunch. She was feeling a little low, she said.

She always picks these Southern guys who treat her so nice, pull out doors, chairs, all the stops. But then there's the day, the evening cocktail hour, sometime that she sees them at a SoHo bar, at a Gala Ball. Skinnier, prettier. And then she comes here. So here she is.

She's on my parents' good side, mostly because she knows how to charm my mother. They go to Radu together, do some squats. Go to lunch, don't eat. Shop until they get dizzy from hunger, drink an espresso, keep going. Going to Ferragamo. Get some shoes, a purse to match. And my sister looks good. Nars and Bobbi Brown. Chanel and St. John. She's the type who actually lines her lips. She's an editor at some new women's magazine, when she makes it in. Mostly she does research, first hand. Or stays home in her bedroom listening to my mother dress and go.

My sister's always looking through the thick-paged magazines at those pictures of people you've never heard of dressed in gowns.

There's the person, smiling, big-teethed, almost beautiful, not as elegant as the dress, and their name, the name of their friend, and the name of the event printed at the bottom. Which charity tonight. She looks and then she says, There's Sally, like I care, and she says it again like I really should care. Really. And then she says something about how she was somewhere there, but the picture must have gotten misplaced or there she'd be. Right there in that magazine. But she's

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not. Mostly she's just one of those rich but not rich enough hangerson at these functions. Like wallpaper, she stands there with a boyfriend and a drink. Against the wall. Still. Smiling.

I don't see how you stand it here, she says. But she made her way in. Shopping bags and all. They all yell at you, she tells me like I don't know it already. Thank God I don't understand their language. She's hauling her groceries in a Gucci shopping bag. The kind of shopping bag that's thick and shiny. Doesn't break under the pressure of heavy goods.

It's home, I say.

She starts to eat.

As she opens the milk container, she struggles. She pulls the paper spout apart, tearing it. She always drinks milk first, to coat her insides.

As she drinks from the red carton, a picture of a missing or lost child on the side, the thick liquid drips down the side of her chin, spilling from the tear. This little river sticks to her skin, rests in her tiny blond hairs. She tells me: I have to be careful or it won't come out. Once it wouldn't, when she had just started, didn't know how. She panicked with it stuck in there, a cake, a bagel, extra cream-cheese, shrieking that she'd get fat if she didn't get it out.

So you'll exercise, I said.

Laxatives, she responded like it was something great to say. But still, if 11 take days to get it off, she said. Off my thighs.

So she drinks and she eats, legs spread, cake out of the box with a fork. Doesn't even offer a bite. But I know if s hers. She loves to fill up on an entire box of whatever it is. Then she gets it all out, starts again.

When she's almost done she tells me she can't finish and runs to the bathroom. She turns back, tells me: I'm going to throw up.

I get another glass of wine from my jug. Do a line. She won't do anything with me while she's eating because she's afraid she'll die.

But after she's done and her heart has stopped racing and her head is

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clear, stomach empty and flat, then she'll do a line.

After she finishes the cake and four bowls of cereal, comes back again, she tells me she's not too hungry today. That she won't finish the cereal. Do I want it?

No, I say. I don't eat much these days.

Then she shows me her new purse—it's wide and deep. She shows me how she lines it with plastic zip-lock bags if she's in a pinch, can't find a bathroom, needs to throw up. Simple and neat, she tells me. See? You better stop this before you get too good, kill yourself, I tell her.

Now I sound like the older sister I'm not.

Thaf s okay, she says. Because I almost already am. Dead, I mean.

Maybe Daddyil fix me up when I'm worse.

Then she laughs. It's a tiny strange laugh like if s just a little thing caught in her throat waiting to come out or go down.

She came by every week almost, every month. She was always busy going through something. The only thing new was the bag routine. So I couldn't tell that anything was so different that night when she left.

I am requested. If s a big deal. It puts you higher on the ladder, gets you the better dates. Better tippers. She tells me that I'm moving up fast.

Plaza again, but this time the Athenee. This time I get there first and it's going to be a party. Two on one. I get extra pay. When I get to the room all I have to do is this: take a bath. I just get into a tub, fill it with water, and take a bath.

I get the keys to the room from the front desk: I have to be the first one there. So there I am in this bath, the water getting lukewarm, and I'm about to get out against orders and do a little pep-up of my own because I'm feeling a little too straight when I hear the door open. One of my dates has the bellman here too. I can hear him. He's showing

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them the heat, air, mini-bar, the phone. He starts to open the door and my date, one of them, says, No. No. Thaf s okay. I'll take care of that.

And then I sink down into the tub, trying to get sexy, but all I feel is wet. And my skin is all bunched up and thick like a sun-dried fruit skin you could peel.

And then he comes in and looks at me and I think, I'm dead. He says, I thought so. I thought it was you. And then I'm thinking that he'll call the police, or my father, and that I'll be arrested and kicked out of school. And now, here, if s all important even though it never was. I'm thinking of things like records: school records, police records, all the things that could document how I've gone wrong. I've never thought like this before. Maybe if I had I'd stop, but maybe not. And he takes a step closer. I expect him to say, Get your clothes on, or something, but he just smiles. He has these tiny teeth, all close together. They look like the teeth of a child, but yellowed. And all he says is that this time he'll be sure to look at me.

He takes off his jacket. Rolls up his sleeve. He yells into the living room: Chase. Chase, open the champagne, I'll be out in a minute.

When he says this, he does not take his eyes off of me. He dips his arm in the water, cutter's arm, brings his hand close to me. Arms, hands like thick weathered tree trunks. Old, used, scaled with definition and wide curves. The hairs on his arm are long and swim together like tiny minnows in the water. They are almost beautiful the way they move together, like fish.

As I leave I think that there must be something wrong with me. But when I call in for my next date on the pay phone downstairs she tells me that he's already called back, that Chase booked tomorrow night.

You're a good girl, she tells me. She says it like I'm a small girl, home from school, holding something that I made for my Daddy. You're a good girl, she says again.

He doesn't touch me. He just says, Temperature okay? and I say, I'll take more heat. He gives it to me. Searing hot so my leg turns red in a patch where the water blasts down. He says, Make yourself clean and wet for me, and takes my hand, guides it across my body, into curves where I am warm, slippery. Keep going, he says. And I close my eyes and he says, No. No. You have to look at me this time. Maybe next time you'll remember me. And I look and look and finally the

So now I'm trying to stay current with my classes because maybe if that guy made so much money, so can 1.1 even study. And I'm sitting in the cafeteria at school, not the meal-plan variety but the one for artists and graduate students. I am the only person in here with an electric calculator with extra symbols. So this guy sits down next to me and I think. Here we go again, and I keep writing on my graph

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water sways with my body making gentle waves and he says, Good.

Now get dressed.

By the time I get out, he's gone. The other one, Chase, he's still there, sitting there, drinking champagne. He hands me a glass and it is so cold in my hand after that long hot bath. The glass steams a little.

I am too straight. He says, Do a line. Enjoy. I just drink.

And I do. And I do again.

He watches. Finally he says, Chase. His name. Chase Wells. I'm not a doctor. And then he just starts to talk. He talks about how he's never paid for a girl before because he's so rich. He talks about Wall Street and how he made it so big and now he's retired, but he trades, teaches, has a big house with nine bedrooms that he bought from some nuns the last time real estate crashed. He talks and tells and orders room service and after he's done eating he says, I'd like to see you again. I move to stroke him, touch him, anything, and he says, No. Next time.

And takes me to the door. Escorts me there. Holds it open for me as I go. He says, Bye, sweet and high, just like a real Charleston gentleman.

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paper. I try to make these symbols look complex, difficult. Maybe he'll go away. But he says, Anyone sitting here? I just look at him like he's bothering me, which he is, and I point to the seat like, Isn't it obvious? He says, Thanks. I do not.

Then I sit and I write and tap in numbers as though I know what I'm doing and then he starts to move my stuff. He takes some straws, lines them up and divides the table in two. He pushes my ruler, colored pens, extra graph paper, pencil bag in which I have my wakeup supplies. When he touches that bag I do a little jerk inside me: that pulse like just before you go to sleep. I take my bag. Pull it closer.

After he's done, I don't look up. I don't say a word. And we sit and he reads and I write and then I need something so I get my little bag off the table, dip into it and take a small bitter pill with my juice. He gets up and brings back two cups of coffee, mine just the way I take it. He says, I saw you here yesterday.

I say, Yeah. Thanks. I think, This is some weirdo. Watches girls.

Finds out how they take their coffee.

I'm a doctor. Or I'm going to be if I can get through the nights and not kill too many people.

I know some doctors, I say. I know about that. But I'm on my own.

I'm just trying not to kill myself. Today, anyway.

Yeah, he says. Sure. And I let the silence go. And just as I think he's going to take his straws and go he says, How about breakfast tomorrow?

Breakfast. What kind of creep asks you out on a breakfast date.

A creep on call, he says. Anyway, what d'you just take?

Breakfast? I say. I ignore the rest of it. What time, I say.

College Diner. Eight. But show up straight. You'll be gorgeous when you're straight.

If I'm up, I say. And he packs his straws and starts to go. I look at him as he takes each straw in his hand, young hands. He's just out of

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school, that's what those hands say. They're still lean, normal. Not yet over built. And I see the way his shirt clings to his mountain climber muscles, long, bulky, all over the body. They're the kind of muscles that bury you, keep you warm. Keep you from running too far.

I cancel my date for that night. Stay clean so I can sleep. Drink only a half bottle of chateau nouveau and watch the sun set in my apartment. Wait for eight.

After awhile, I only meet Chase at his house. Although it is against the rules, I go there. It has a sweeping stairway and the place is decorated like a Southern bordello, fringes from the lampshades, red pile curved couches.

I sit and listen. I cook our meals. He pays me my hourly wage to go to cooking school. For him, I must cook in the nude. I feed him, pour the wine into his mouth, then mine. Tonight I am the dessert platter in the center of the table. I have whipped the pastry cream and spread it, layer myself with a thin flaky cake and more cream. He says I am lovely. And I am.

Cleaned and full, we make love. I don't get high to make love to him because it comes so quickly now, so easily. On other dates, I'm zooming so far up. I'm so glad because I'm just so high that it doesn't matter who I'm with. With him, the rhythm of us is how I would rock alone, but it's better with him, holding me. He gives me back myself as we go, little by little. He knows just what to do as I breathe in or out, signal I am close. He knows how to tease, how to let me arc back and then fall into him as he presses so hard it almost hurts. And I cry, hold on. Sleep a bit. Stretch before I'm awake. And the smell of his bed is of us. It's as though he doesn't wash the sheets the way it gets thicker each time I come here. It's as though he's weaving me into his bed with our smell.

At the door, he tells me to study up. He tells me that one day he'll

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be so proud when I'm a money maker. Wall Street, he says. Like it's mine already. I say, I am. He looks. A money maker, I say. He kisses me lightly on the cheek, says, Legit. He has to reach up to me, strain a little when we are standing. I say, Oh, like a little girl. He kisses me again, but this time it's like sex. He's inside me, and we're tangled up.

When he pulls away, I have to wipe us from the side of my mouth and we smile. I smile. Like I've got myself back for a bit.

I use the company car service to visit my sister in Long Island. She's put away near my parent's house on the beach. Only eighteen thousand a week, or so. Nothing I couldn't live on.

This car is brand new, and the driver is one I've never seen before.

A day guy. Chinese or Korean, whatever he is, he's clean. And he's one of those types that obeys speed limits, is trying for the safe driver of the year award. These guys are killers in New York. In New York, you've got to be willing to die. And then once we get on the highway, he goes exactly the limit. And he signals for seconds before moving into the next lane. I want to reach over to the front seat. Remove him.

And when we get to side roads he really slows down. Actually goes five miles an hour in School Zones.

I ask him to pull over so I can go to a bathroom, do a line. And we get to this place and the smell in the encrusted room is so bad that it hurts to inhale. And there's blood splattered on the mirror. Someone missed a vein. I'm not up to that yet.

But when I get to the gates of her new hospital, I can't go in. I tell the driver, Turn around. I'm sure that if they see me, those doctors, see my pin-hole eyes, see the marks on my face, that they'll keep me there.

Never let me out. I don't want to clean up, not yet. I've got this thing under control, I think. Now that I've got cash, I'm okay. I do it when I want to, so it's not a problem, but I forget that that's all the time, and thaf s the problem. They make her eat, don't know enough to take

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away her designer bags. Don't know she zip-locks her insides and throws it away. I think about what she thought just before she went into her own warm bath, made it go pink, red, overflow.

With my habit, at least I have to go get it, seek it out, crawl around places that someday may scare me enough to make me stop.

I call her from the cell phone, say that I'm sorry, that I have to work, that I can't make the drive.

I didn't know you had a job. Congratulations, Honey, she says.

Like my mother. She must not be feeling so well in there after all if she sounds like her. What are you doing, I want to say. But I keep quiet.

Just temp work. For fun, I add. Because now, sometimes, it does seem like fun.

So I have breakfast with John for weeks. The first week I think, what an unfortunate name, and then I think that I could love him. But I don't. He's the type I would love: soft smile, hard body. Curls, blond.

Like a statue, but not quite. Funny. Coy. Removed.

After breakfast he doesn't even kiss me. Doesn't ask me if I'd like to take a nap. Nothing. He just says, Good-bye, and stands a little bit away from me. I start to think there's something about me. That the only ones who want me are the ones who pay for it. That no one wants me for real.

Before I get there, I try to get myself going but it doesn't work. I have been high for so long that doing more doesn't work so I try one pill, then another. All that happens is that my heart starts to beat like it's going to jump through me. The cavity in my chest has always seemed so strong, so reliable. Firm and there for me. Because I never had to think about it going wrong before now. But now it seems that things could be getting a little out of hand. Because suddenly it seems that my insides are breaking through my front. And all I want to do

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is to sleep but when I lie down on the couch in my apartment, the pounding and the fear only get worse and my eyes are stuck open. So, that tired, that straight, I go on my next date.

They told me, All you have to do is watch. Easy, I think. But they paid extra.

I meet her in the lobby and I look at her and I think, How am I going to do this? In the lobby, we are not suspects. We are like rich housewives. We cannot be who we are this time because she's so round and her balloon stomach makes her so pure, skin translucent and cheeks like the/re in bloom. Nice dress, I say to her. I've got a good place, she says. They rent evening gowns.

We go upstairs and he says to me, Have a drink, and hands me a little bottle of Absolut Citron like you'd see in an airplane. I drink it straight in a glass and he hands me another one. She says, have one for me. I've got to stay straight.

Every other date I've been on has champagne, something. Not these little single serving bottles. Maybe he figures that I'm the only one drinking. Little does he know, I need the bottle. That now I need a whole bottle.

She takes off her dress and stands there. Rounds her hand over her stomach. Skin pulled tight over the huge rounded sphere. The skin is so light, so thin, so delicate that it almost seems to glisten. And then there are these purple lines, like flooded roads flowing to the child inside. If I lie down, she says, you will feel the baby kick.

Lie down, he says. And then to me: Feel the baby kick.

So she does. I do. And I want to leave. To take her away, but they seem to be in charge. Not me. After it kicks a few times and I say, I feel it, and I look into her eyes and then he says, Now stand up. So I start to stand up and if s like there's a string of pain holding our eyes together in this gaze and he says: Not you. Her. She says nothing as she bends over the couch, and I hear the thick

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pillows exhale as they start.

We leave together. The elevator is quiet except for a rhythmic, click-click, as we pass each floor going down. She stares at the numbers. There is nothing in her eyes. No hate. No sadness. Just nothing. Just black holes and blue green color and no pain. No anything. And I think, Wouldn't anything be better than just nothing in those eyes. And then I think that I could be next.

I've taken a few days off. John takes me to brunch Sunday. For the first time, he picks me up. Brings me a rose. White. Something in him has changed. What's up with you? I say. Girlfriend leave you for another woman or something?

Something like that, he says. And leaves it at that. Then he tells me that he stole the rose off a new mother's bouquet in the hospital elevator.

As we walk down the street, he stands close. I smell him: a burnt wood, a roasted smell. A smell I could eat like a meal. And I think that after all these weeks of breakfast, why hasn't he stood close. Kissed me. And he says, Let's go here. He chooses the nicest place in the neighborhood. Not that nice, but clean. White walls, fabric draping the windows. A shuttered room where we sit. He orders a bottle of wine. It's early, I say. But craving it.

Just as long as I'm not too late, he says.

After we finish our wine and push our food around, I go to the ladies room to get myself all drugged up and ready for sex. When I get back he says, I've paid the bill. Let's go.

Then he does what I knew was coming and he kisses me. He takes hold of me as though I'm a guy, like we're wrestling, but then he pulls me in and I'm taken. But his kiss is just tight lips. I can feel his teeth behind them. But they are lips that I now suddenly want to stroke, to open, to wet. But then he says, Now let's go down the street and have

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another drink.

So we go to this old place where two guys at the end of the bar are sleeping next to amber liquid-filled shot glasses. We drink there until the sun starts to go down.

I start to talk, but it's like a date the way I'm talking. If s like I'm one of my dates the way I'm talking and telling. I feel as though I cannot stop. I tell him about my father and my stay at home mother who was never really there and about how I visited the hospital when I was a child with my father and how I learned from him the way death smells. The way each kind of death has a different smell. The way some are sweet, sickly sweet like flowers baking in the late summer sun. Some sour, bitter, others just like wet rotted soil. And there I am telling him things I've never told myself and I say, Thaf s why I never wanted to become a doctor. Because I could never take care of anyone else. I'm just concerned with me. I'm just trying to take care of myself.

And he says, Yeah. Yeah, that's why I think that I like you so much.

Thaf s whaf s got me hooked.

And then I have to go do a line again because he's hooked and I don't want to be. Not here. Not now. I'm too good with Chase to fuck up my life with this.

But he says, I know where you're going, and this time I'm taking you, and I say, Whatd'ya mean and he says, Let me show you and he pays the bill and we leave.

He takes me to this place, it must be where he lives. We're the only American-looking people as we go through this multi-lingual fraternity house. I say, How'dya get in here? Aren't you one of us? He says, Yeah. Basically. I've got some passports.

And we go into his tiny room covered with socks and clothes and with a white shirt covering the window and he pulls out this neatly organized case and he says, Stop with the shit. Lef s get serious if we're going to do it. And he takes out a needle and says, At least I

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know what I'm doing, and you won't fuck up your nose this way. It's not heroin, he says. You're not going to get sick.

Since I know I'm having some trouble now and then getting high off the stuff I put in my nose, stomach, wherever, I have been thinking that this is the time to try something new. More direct. Less simple.

But as I watch him, I am petrified for myself. For my life. For what I'm going to do next. But that fear, the tiny cold sweat that I feel around my scalp, that fear feels better than anything else. Here I am, awake.

Alive. Trying something new again.

He preps my arm just the way any doctor would. He wraps a yellowed plastic tube around my upper arm, and I open and close my fist automatically. Good, he says and runs his finger over my lips.

They are dry, scaly. Don't worry, he says. Alcohol pad. He taps my vein, flicking at it with two fingers like it is a tiny bug. And when he enters me I do not feel a thing. And then the rush of relief as the tube is untied, my arm is soft and sucking in the liquid from his needle.

Taking it in so easily, like I'm thirsty.

And I sit and we stop talking and there it is. I just have a silken velvet head. He says, That's better. Now you're quiet.

And when I wake up, he's gone. I feel dry, untouched. Maybe a little sad.

Chase tells me he needs me for an entire weekend. He's going to lecture in Miami and he wants me there. The agency quotes a price and he pays it, plus tip. I think about all that I can do after we're done.

That maybe I'll take a vacation.

Igoonaseparateplaneand meet him ina separate hotel roomand that night he gives me a ticket to his lecture. When he's done he comes to my seat, gets me, takes me to the reception dinner. Pinches me on the buffet line. Pretends I'm his date. Hirts with me like he's never had me before.

On our way home, I see a store called Heirlooms of Tomorrow. In

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our double stretched white limousine with lights on the sides, we pull over. Inside there is unbelievable junk. Great stuff you can laugh about: statues, jewelry, dolls. Things with signs under them that say, "Collectibles."

He buys me a statue of a woman dancing in a wedding gown with a guy in a blue tuxedo. It is called, "Lovers." He hands it to me and says, Not any more they're not. Now all they've got is grief.

When we get back to the room I am drunk. Finally so drunk and not high that I can just enjoy the full dizzy swing of it all and laugh with him. As we do, I realize it's been a long time since I've laughed. As I try to remember what we're happy about, it starts to go, so I forget about it, laugh some more. And when we make love I realize that I haven't taken my pills, that I forgot my protection. He's paying for all this and I've forgotten and can't say, No, but just as he's about to come I say, I don't have anything in, and he says, Good, and he comes.

I say that we're in trouble, like if s all kind of funny, and he tells me that he's always wanted kids. He just doesn't want a wife. That he loves the idea. But I don't. The only thing I think that I love is him.

The next night we fly back and I go back to his place before I go home. After we are done, he goes under the pillow, pulls out a box.

If you want collectibles, he says, here's the real McCoy. Inside there is a ruby and diamond ring the size of two of his thumbs. It's real, he tells me. Don't lose it. Remember me, he adds, and kisses me as though he never will again. But when we get to his front door he tells me: See you soon.

When my sister comes out, we have a party. A family dinner. I have to show up with a date. John has called a few times in the middle of the night, and I think I have told him that I love him, which I do, but only when I'm high. But we haven't hooked up yet. We're scheduled for the day after the party, and since if s not good protocol to call a

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guy, ask him out for two nights in a row, I don't. Especially if you suspect that your father will humiliate him. Especially if you think that you told him you love him. Especially if you don't think you do, and you're not sure if you said it.

So then there's Chase who's the one I want to take, but then there's my parents and the enviable connection that could be made and the fact that he is a little bit famous if you know about what he does. And if I don't ask, he can't say no. I can just sit there thinking about how he would be there if I had asked. So I go alone.

When I get there my sister is there, too, in a full-length gold sequin dress that she borrowed from my mother. Although my mother is a tall size four, the dress is too big for my recovering but not yet recovered sister. She greets me as though she has never seen me before and starts to excuse herself to the kitchen for the hors d'oeuvres.

You're early, she adds.

Hey, I say. You look better. Even though she doesn't.

I can't talk now, she says, going.

I am then greeted by Ada and my coat is taken and I get a glass of champagne and then I see my sister's date sitting on the piano. There he is: my father's friend the cutter. And there's nothing I can do but stand there and say, Hello. Good to see you again.

You recognize me? he asks.

I never forget a face I tell him, take a long drink.

I understand you always cut to the chase, he adds.

I walk over to him and stand a little too close. Brush up against his front. Smell him but all I get is a cologne that's sweet like a knock off designer perfume. I say this. I say, Forget about me, I'm for sale. But don't fuck with my sister. And I take a little pinch of his leg, a little too close for his comfort, and he lets out a tiny yelp and I say, Oh, I'm terribly sorry, and I walk away.

He says, Don't worry. I only like little boys.

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And I think, I'm dead, really dead. Chase. .

And that night as we have our candlelight celebration, my sister eats and eats. She has two plates of dinner, three desserts, a plate of little cookies over cordials. No one thinks this is strange because she's not possibly throwing up because all the bathroom doors are locked at mealtimes. But after she excuses herself for the fifth time to make a call, I follow her into the coat closet, musty with my mother's furs, and she stands there with her handbag, laughing. Look, she says, I learned from a girl in there how to make myself throw up spontaneously, and she does. Doesn't even stick her hand down the back of her throat the way she used to. Whoopsy-daisy, up and over and into her zip-lock bag. She adds: I always learn so much when they put me away. If you ever want to teach an addict, just lock them up with more seasoned ones. Stupid shits. I believe that the last phrase is in reference to my parents, but I don't ask.

Look, I start, but I don't know what else to say. I want to save her, but I have no words for her. For myself. I want to tell her that I'm scared. That maybe, after all, I'll be the first one to die. That I know how hard she's trying to go first and that I don't want her to go at it like this. That I need her.

Let's go have a drink, she says. I need a drink.

As we walk into that green draped dining-room I hear my father talking. Yes sir, he says even though I can see that he's talking to my mother too. Yes sir, my daughters live a charmed life. We were not supposed to hear this, and we begin to pretend that we don't, but when we sit down I look at him and I just say, Yes, sir.

VICTORIA GEDULD

* !-, | | f

; | I

strokes my sweating scalp and takes me upstairs to an empty room in the cardiac ward and we make a gentle strange love. I try to get him to enter me, come into me, but he says, No. No, lets just start slow. And he shows me, says, Like this. Afterward he says, If s always better the second time, and I'm caught there. Can't do anything but look down at the boot I'm lacing up my leg. Because I'm not sure what he's talking about, I don't remember, but I know what he's saying.

Chase has called, and even though my tests say that I'm fine, I don't call back. My doctor, Doctor John, he tells me that I'll live, that there are some other things that the tests showed, but not that. He hasn't told me what else. Hasn't called back.

The agency calls, tells me I've got a date, a regular, and from the way they say it I know if s Chase and I know that I have to go. I know that I'll go and try not to cry and tell him that I am so in love with him that now I've even got a boyfriend to get him back, to hurt him. And I know that afterward we'll make love, soft love with heat and skinon-skin sex that can kill me. And I see the whole thing before it happens. I see it in the shower before I go, as the needle kisses my skin, in the car, in the elevator ride up, as we drink our first glass and both look at the floor, shy for the first time.

After the party, I go to the emergency room where John is working.

I ask to see him, look desperate and pale in the fluorescent light. I tell him, ask him, Do some blood tests. Now. And it's okay because he thinks I'm scared because I got it from his needle and he holds me and

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My Pious Grandfather RAHQUE KATHWAM

Two Birds of Paradise on the Tree of Life dazzled the wall above the serpentine headboard of his king-size bed. He named the female bird Sofia, after his granddaughter, heartless tease at thirteen.

I too fancied her, feigned sleep in his bedroom, on a faded Prayer rug draped over a corner chaise, on my belly, fingers trembling over the fringes.

The petrified male yearned for flight, perched on a limb, his one-eyed gaze catching grandfather's hand probe Sofia on the bed.

The female fluttered in midair, plumes fanning out, each feather a brilliant madder dye.

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.jflHf

*""

I Remember RAFIQUE KATHWARI

A lukewarm spring day silvery Himalayan peaks our hilltop bungalow my mother cross-legged on a rug the scent of mustard oil on her glistening black hair our fat cook on his bike taking lunch to my father "Can I go too?"

I don't remember what Mother said but I cried.

55

She told Quranic fables "God saved Isaac" I rememberfleecewhite as snow I opened my jaw to Maa pursed my lips to moo I bathed with Maamoo in an oval tin tub under the grand oak tree.

Late March the wind fervent Eid al-Adha Mother pulling her hair pleading with Father the cook fastening Maamoo's legs

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I REMEMBER

56

feeding him sugar "You do this to sweeten the blow" the sharp knife at Maamoo's throat I remember In the Name of God Father's Bistnillah a crescent of blood soaking the shaggy grass red the lamb's head at my feet his trusting eyes looking back at what had happened to the world.

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Taxicab CINNAMON MCCUNTON

Everything rises to my head as I get up. I have no parting words for any of these people. I step out, I raise my hand, I get him. If s like that for me sometimes.

And imagine my surprise. Longstanding fascination with taxi drivers aside, there is no more example of a what, complete item, than this driver.

I open the door, while staring in the window at him. Hey! Taxi driver! In the back seat I sit up. I like to take the pose of someone who is driven. I look at the back of his head. Hot young black guy. But young, though.

Young.

He won't look at me, I see. Not that he doesn't want to look at me— a guy who "doesn't want" holds himself differently. He's clenching himself not to look, won't. I wonder why. I give him directions to Greenpoint, and then I say things to get him to look. "Ah!" I say.

"Hmmm," I say. "What a night." I peek around in his rearview mirror, and sort of hop. (And this seat here is blue and new: it loves to bounce back to my butt—what a girl I am, I know it.) Taxi driver! Specimen, you!

Ooh! He pulls away. I say, "I like your taxi. This is maybe the nicest taxi I've ever been jn, I think." He says nothing. I blink hard, as my glass-eye drunkenness is reflecting stupid perverted thoughts too loud back to my brain—Shut up! Shut up!—I want to talk out loud but I don't, and as I feel this creamy blue vinyl seat with my hand, I think that no one has puked here yet. I also sort of want to sigh and roll around on my back.

But then I remember to fasten my seatbelt.

Seatbelts are my habit, one of them, to which caution has led me, and it is embarrassing, but I have made a promise to myself. Because I have spent a good many long hours drinking in bars, and there is fruit, too, to this labor. Time I have spent (I keep track of this time) estimating that light-blue space between me and death has made me see clearly the peril

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of my daily situation. See, I'm a stupid girl. I am always finding myself in stupid-girl situations. Death, I know it, is following me at two paces.

Death!

(Death! These days he doesn't have a cloak and scythe, you know. He is wearing running shoes and he is keeping up, believe me. Oh, I am teaching myself caution for the sake of my own life, and paranoia is how you get there. Even party girls need a project: every morning I wake up hung over, running again to work and clutching at my side a whole new phonebookful of fears. There are so many simple ways to die.)

But I always hide when I do it. The seatbelt. I am, after all, a girl who likes men. I suck myself all small into a corner so that maybe he won't hear the click—maybe (I squint up, inhale)—click.

Now he looks. Dammit! I punch the seat and it makes no noise. Well, doesn't he know the way taxi drivers drive! For him to mock me?

We have to take the Williamsburg Bridge, and I yell "the middle! the middle!" because I'm mad at him now. In my corner, I stare at the back of his head. Never mind about this one, I say to myself. I will live to see another day and that will be enough.

They say, see, make forty to fifty dollars a night in tips. A taxi takes seventy-five to a hundred dollars a night to rent. And so they have to lease the thing for twelve-hour shifts!

(Now,on this February late-night, seatbeltedj'mlooking outside this window, at some woman on the Lower East Side inside her apartment window. This hot, hot, incredibly hot taxi driver has stopped at a light and is still not looking at me. This woman, who I'm watching, lives underneath a giant billboard for vacuum cleaners. And she's just like a puppet, hanging there, and she can't see a huge vacuum cleaner, the size of a helicopter, looming above her, about to suck her up into the sky. And I think to myself, Now, why am I not that woman, and why can I not just assume that I'm safe?)

Back then I had people to say goodnight. My taxi charioteers, and those guys liked me. They took me home—Williamsburg Bridge, the BQE. Say, this your house? Yes. Say, how much rent? Eight hundred.

Say, you have a boyfriend. Yes. Say, you want to go to Bay City with me Sunday? Not your boyfriend. Only you. Bye now, baby, bye now, goodnight, bye.

Used to be, before I figured out my own odds so concretely, I would hang over that uncomfortable metal taxi partition (and let that ribbing bust right into my upper arms) arms folded, just to see what they all had to say. Forme it was always late at night enough to do stupid things. And they were always all ugly and fat, you know. (But taxi drivers really know no night. Right?)

All them. All some mix or tune of Indian and Middle Eastern and African, they taught me huge shit about this shitty city. I was their girl, back then, and it was worth all my blabbering nights in crazy-ass bars to have them sing me, calmly, straight home to my bed, like Manhattan gondoliers. I was interested in them. From Haiti? From Ghana? From Israel? FromPakistan? Lord, I wasthe world'smost wonderful taxi rider.

Now I look at the back of his head through dirty glass on which someone has put a J-love sticker that rips into streaks and fuzzes when I reach out to peel it—forget it. I drop my hand down and just look at the blurry back of his head. I can't possibly know the front but he has a backward East Side cap and I think, fly-boy cabdriver? Who will find out? Or who will not find out and live forever with her own regret and useless wondering?

Click. I sigh. I figure that maybe I will die. I unhook. Lean way over the seat to look. He's looking into the corner pocket for a map or something so excuse me while I wait. I look. He is back with a cigarette.

And he is so hot—cha cha cha cha! So what that I'm drunk. I tap him on the shoulder and he dusts my hand off. "Excuse me," I say. "Yeah," he

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CINNAMON MCCLINTON

1

says, pulling onto the bridge, and lights his cig with the hot-plug from ; the car and does not look. Look at how pretty I am. All the other cab drivers want to marry me, man. Look how pretty. Look! I hold my pretty ; hand in front of his face. "Hey!" He yells at me through the cigarette, and swats my hand, and still doesn't look. "Sit the fuck down. Hey. Fasten your seatbelt!"

Then I'm angry again and I want to slap him—what in the hell else does this guy have to pay attention to right now, goddammit. Not me risking my life, for one thing. I stand up squooshed over in the cab, stomach to the vibrating metal rim, my torso squeezed through that j opening. If s a brand-new cab, and it doesn't even have a lot of bullet- | proof plastic. Mostly if s open. I lean way over. He tries to push me back, J but he has to keep driving. I notice there's a huge pile of jackets in the j passenger's seat corner. God damn! I look at the pile. Must be he's doing j laundry, that is an enormous pile of clothes. I am standing up in the cab. 1 I look over at him smoking. We're on the end of the bridge. Bumping i along. | I realize, suddenly, that I am riding on the Williamsburg Bridge standing up in a car. Wooo!

He doesn't look at me and I remember that I'm trying to slap him, so * I try to slap him, and he grabs my hand like he's pissed and twists it away f from me and holds it out toward the windshield, and he still doesn't look | at me. "Ow!" I scream. But the physical sensation feels a little good. I 1 admit. It pierces through my drunkenness. I can feel that metal railing I in my stomach, a little. (I could go right through the windshield but I f watch him drive. He seems to be a pretty good driver.) * But I am surprised when he doesn't let go. I tug my hand back but he won't let it budge, and I start to get mad. He holds me there over the \ railing and drives, and smokes, his one hand darting to compensate for f the other, which is holding me nearly horizontal, as we fly toward the r BQE. "Owwwwwwwww!" I yell. I tug with my arm again, and he Âť

doesn't let go. "Hey!" He takes the first exit after the bridge, using only one hand to turn the cab and one hand still to pull me away from myself. He stops the cab with a jerk. He lets go. "Don't fuck with your driver," he says.

I sit back down. I'm shocked. I look at him. "You monster!" I say. I pull my hand back in order to examine it (because we are, I'm pretty sure, still flirting, although I am really pissed at his behavior). There are red finger marks. "You can't do this!" I yell, looking at my wrist. "You can't do this, mister." I lean way over to read his card, but he doesn't have a driver name-card...

Of course, I think. Of course! I pull myself as far away as possible.

Rapist. God! I pull my body far into a corner. Psychokiller! God! Everything, I realize, is over. "Now sit," he points to me. "Down. Good."

He turns around and drives. My heart pounds. My throat and ears pound.

"Where do you live?" he asks, all nice, looking at me in the rearview.

I am locked. Not locked in preparation, but in muscle-armor. He can't get me if I'm hunched and locked. (And, I can't help but think, the injustice of danger! Did I not have my seatbelt on?) I edge to one side and press my leg to the door; I don't want him to see me. I shake, shake. I picture him choking me with the scarf around my neck so I take it off quietly and try not to cry. I slide to the door and sink almost to the floor.

I wish I were outside, which I can see, barely, out the window. Outside, where there is all darkness, all Brooklyn sleeping at three in the morning.

Everything is closed. Huge dark supermarket looks like a mountain.

Small closed shops choked with sheet metal. And what about girls who might need help?

"Where do you live?" he repeats, and I tell him, stalling for time. When he deliberately misses my turn, I will know he's psychotic. We will stop

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at a light and I willrollfromthe car, pick up and run—he will chase me in the cab—I will run toward houses and in between stores and I will pound on some doorway and hope I can beat him. And hope for some deli, hope for some bum or scared counterboy. I will run in and say the man! In the taxi! The driver! Before he races in, ski mask on, knife to my throat, down to the river in the car. I grab hold of the metal door handle.

I test the lock, open it with one finger. 'Turn here?" he asks. "Yes," I say, and start to cry.

I try to stop crying. I need composure, they smell fear, I know it. But I'm crying, not because of what they'll all say—how good I was, how they'll all miss me, how unfair it is. No, I'm confused, I'm crying, I don't know what to do. I'mdrunk. You know? Wasn't I supposed to take a taxi home? Just how much caution is a person supposed to have!

I inhale deeply. I peer over the edge of the front seat at his huge head, and beyond that, over that, okay—a light that's red.

I gather my strength, I squeeze open the door and fall hard onto the pavement. If s freezing outside. I get up and run, and my legs feel wobbly; I clutch my purse in one hand and shake tears out of my eyes so I can see to run.

As I run up Greenpoint Avenue, I turn to see him look at me, but I don't want to hear what he has to say. Run! I gasp and gasp, and try to run with all my strength, my life, I think, my life, my life. But fear is making me slow and stiff, I know he could catch me. I tell myself to go faster, oh God! please! I have my arms out in front of me and I touch walls—a closed-up computer store, a house, a travel agent, a Polish nightclub—to propel myself. My feet slap and clunk on the ground but all I can think is how slowly I'm moving, like I'm not moving at all. God! I run up the street and look for a narrow alleyway, but stores are pressed together tight and there is none. And all the houses and storefronts are closed up and black!

I run, but then I freeze in panic: I listen for him behind me. He's there.

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CINNAMON MCCLINTON

I turn my head and see the taxi, following me slowly. I stop and try to tell myself to go! go! and then I quickly turn and run down Greenpoint the other way, gulping, tears streamingdownmy face. Hebacksupafterme, and rolls down the window and yells. "Hey!" He sounds like a madman.

"Pay your fare, bitch!"

I race around the corner and run fast down McGuinness. I've got it down now. I swing my arms and pelt my legs as fast as they will go. I run likeumph,umph,sprinting.Evenhere,eveninGreenpoint,thoserapists won't chase you that far.

When I'm almost two blocks down (and the breath is catching in my lungs, and I remember that I have left my jacket in the taxi), I turn around to look, and he hasn't followed. I am shaking. His shining yellow taxi is hidingattheendofthestreetlikesomesharkinacoralreef.Hahallthink, Bastard! I want to shake my fist in the air, but I don't. I jog silently up the street with all my senses on high volume. The air I breathe is cold. I am like Rocky,Iamlike Rocky Balboa.Iamalivingvictoryilclutchmypurse and jog home.

• I sing so Marvin'll get up and not kill me and remember that we's happy and we's theivin and forget maybe that I let that damn bitch go.

"Ger-il. Ggggeeerrrl..." I sing, as I drive. "She don't-ah! she don't-ah!

Don't know, noooo... n o . . . white gerl!"

"Don't-ah! Don't-ah! Nooo... n o . . . " One thing I'll tell you, I should be some goddamn famous singer. Not one thing I can't make sound like some kind of song, nooo. He stays down. And I'm singin. And I kinda like this. Marvin climbs out from under our jackets, all scrunched to the floor around the bag.

"Now what in the hell was up with that bitch?" He's got blue carpet lint in his hair, I can see from here. Shit. He's mad.

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"Shit, you know," I say, and try and calm him down, "crackers, man."

"Why the fuck didn't you chase that bitch down?" Marvin says, all pissed off, and he hits the window with the back of his hand.

I look at Marvin and pretend like I didn't think he was gonna say this.

"You want me to? Shit I could, man. Easy. She don't know we live here; we could catch her easy."

"Nah," Marvin says, and looks into the paper bag again, and makes himself comfortable on the seat. "Shit. Lef s just get the fuck somewhere."

I look at Marvin. I don't like to be asking the guy stupid questions, but sometimes, you know, I ain't no mind reader. "Where?"

"Shit, I don't know!" he yells, and punches that fuzzy top of the taxi.

He mashes his face all up. "Just drive around! Drive the fuck around!

And turn that light on top off so don't nobody flag us!"

I don't know how to switch the damn light off, so I just pretend to be doin switching shit so Marvin wont get crazy. I drive. Marvin looks out the window. He can't say nothin bout me letting that girl go cause it was his own wack idea to pick her up in the fist place. We were just drivin around, towards the Williamsburg Bridge, make our getaway, and he sees some five-oh like two blocks behind and says, "Shit, man, quick, pick up some whitey. We gotta look like we the real," and hides down under those jackets. Not my idea, now. But, shit, it is lucky she run cause bitch never noticed I didn't figure how to turn the meter on in the first place. Lucky for her too she didn't see Marvin. Shit.

I drive more, and start thinkin, In this here dark, in Brooklyn, I'm drivin, like through black smoke, and I'm cracklin evil, I'm cracklin. But look at me, I will let that white bitch go. You know my moms always thought I's an angel. Shit I guess we know why.

"So," Marvin says, relaxing, "whaf s up with this Panza anyway, man."

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CINNAMON MCCLINTON

Ah! Yeah. I switch my brain to this nice, comfortable, fine thought.

"Want to know whaf s up?" I say, "Yeah, you know. Every nigga wants to know whaf s up with that Panza!" I smile. I feel good. Marvin's okay, w e drivin somewhere, and we about to talk about something I fuckin like. Thing's good. Thing's okay.

"See it starts," I nod, "with Mariso. He got this black high-school princess." I look over at Marvin.

"She in school?" Marvin says.

"Yeah," I say. "And you seen her! I don't know from where he got her but shit, she fine. Admit that, huh."

"Yeah," Marvin says. 'Tuck yeah." He fumbles around the floor in the jackets where he was hiding. Looking for blunts: I know Marvin. Thaf s a good man, Marvin, I think. Go on, get those blunts.

I watch the road. Don't want to get busted for some damn traffic thing.

Nough to be some young black guy drivin a clean yellow cab round the ghetto in Brooklyn. But figure. I'm driving the fuck nowhere around Brooklyn. Oh shit, I think bout all that trouble, and if s dope, in some kind of evil fuckin way. Trouble me and Marvin could have with this fuckin taxi in Bed-Sty? Yesss. I go on, and smooth my hands all over the wheel like I'm thinkin bout that girl. "Her name is Panza, now her moms musta been set trippin, right? Panza."

"Yeah!" he says. "What kind of fucked-up name..." He looks out the window and I'm glad he's happy. He unrolls a blunt and dumps it in the ashtray. Fills it and rolls it back up. Lights it, and this takes time; waves his hands round his face; I wait for him to say something. When he's inhaling he says, "Yeah? So?" "So," I say. I feel like I'm telling Marvin stories and shit to calm him down. Like he some baby and shit. It's okay, though. We fine. Just him and me driving around. "We're all one night down by the deli and Mariso brings round this tiny Panza. And we don't know what to think, right?" I look at him. "Cause she all small and shit? Not like you think of.

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You know, normal sistas, right, man? No big tits, man. And she got an ass, but if s still smaller. Know why? She's Ethiopian..." I look over at Marvin, but he's just smokin and lookin out the window. Outside all dark and friendly ghetto Brooklyn town. Figure: me and Marvin could just drive round all night! Wouldn'tbotherme. Huh! And in the morning we could go get that Panza and see whats she want to do next!

Marvin looks at me like I should keep talking. "Yeah?" he says.

"So he brings her round and we all just be lookin, and she looks right back at us and starts hangin with us there and drinks down her forty fast And soon Mariso gots to be buyin her another one."

Marvin looks at me and exhales long time. I still don't know where the fuck we goin. I make a left.

"She that type of girl that always be saying, you know, like your shit is too much, and laughing, like she happy, right, like she's making fun of your shit but like she likes it too?" I look at Marvin. He just met Panza tonight in the cab so he don't know. (We brought Marvin along cause he gots a semi-automatic nough to scare the shits quiet fore you say anything. Course, Marvin puts himself in charge and thafs straight with me. He don't know it's Panzareallyin charge. Panza said bring Marvin cause she wanted a peep that gun.)

Thing is, I don't understand too well what's so dope about that girl either. But I keep talkin about her. "And when she was there she was always jokin and kiddin us and tellin us what to do. We said, Mariso, you can bring that Panza round again, she can hang with us anytime, you know, man!"

Marvin looks at me. I look at him and then at the road.

I say, "Cause if s me who's better lookin and I knew I would get that honey from that dumb-shit Mariso!" Marvin laughs, and smoke comes out through his nose.

So it was her plan, now, tonight: Panza always be talking shit and we

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CINNAMON MCCLINTON

say, girl you be smokin those rocks, and she say, all in her girl-voice, "Yeah, fuck that but I do whatever I want makes me happy," and shit, Ibelieve her cause she's a happy girl. You know? Could never have crept up on that taxi without that girl. We said, "Where's Mariso?" when she told us bout what she wanted a do when we was down by the deli and she just said, "Shit I don't know."

We all took the subway in, tonight, and she was just like on fire and shit. I can not, never stop lookin at that woman! All dressed up lookin like some flower. She got the taxi down by the World Trade Center; had him pull over, pick us two g's up on Broadway just before Canal ("Don't worry," she said to the driver when we's comin in. "These are friends of mine."). Pulled into an alleyway over by the docks on the Lower East Side, and put the damn cab driver in the trunk.

"And on that tip," I say, "I don't know where the fuck Mariso found her in the first place. Now I'm thinking, way up in Harlem?"

Marvin is feelin okay, I can tell. He says, "Hey, know? I could do this, man, taxi drivin?" (He laughs.) "Big ole blunt always burnin in the tray.

You know, man?"

"Yeah." I start singin, "Big ole blunt, burnin in the tray, ride my car, bitch, then you pay."

"I will get you anyway."

"Don't fuck with me cause I can play."

"Heh-heh," Marvin says again. "Dumb-ass ugly white bitch!"

"Yeah," I say. But truth is I am forgetting already that stupid white girl. Too much business at hand, yo. I make a right onto a empty street called Metropolitan. Just so long as we don't have no cops, we good. We very good.

"And you know," I say, "this ride is pretty dope,right,and maybe I could take it to the shop when Panza pulls whatever shit she thinkin and have them paint it black or somethin? Could be not so bad—could sell that shit and buy a jeep!" I look over at Marvin and he grins at me.

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"Heh! Yeah, man! Sell this shit be—damn!" He looks in the bag again.

"Motherfucker only had two hundred fuckin dollars? We wasted our night for this shit?"

Marvin's gettin mad again, but I can't think of more stories, so I don't keep talkin. I make another right turn.

He sucks on the blunt. I say, "She puts on these nice-ass fuckin clothes, like you do not see in Brooklyn, cept maybe down on the crackers livin in, I don't know like, the fuckin Heights? You know like we seen her in tonight?"

Marvin nods his head with his eyes all wrinkled from holding the smoke in.

I say, "Stuff makes me want to touch her little self, all these pinks and purples, all soft-fuzzy—shit I don't know what but when Panza puts that shit on! And shit, I can't touch that fucking girl!"

Marvin laughs. "Cause Mariso pop you with his fuckin nine!" He makes a gun with his hand and pops it at me.

I laugh too. "Yeah."

• I see my father's face hovering there before me, and I whack my head again and again. I do not try to think of my inhale and exhale of breaths because then I will start to count and then I will surely panic and that will be the end. I have enough breaths, after all. I have the whole world of breaths. All the universe of breaths. The girl she stabbed a hole in this trunk before they put me in, and now I can still see the streetlights flash through. Wherever we are now, the roads are bad—very bad, I whack and whack—but the streetlights, I tell myself, the streetlights are regular.

Not yet do they take me down by the river!

My head whacks the bottom of the trunk on every third heartbeat.

One, two, three whack! one two three whack! This, I think, must be

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justice. My muscles all shake and my fear, too, is justice. Oh my evil! Oh my evil—iflgetoutof this trunk and livelswearl will take Islam, I swear my life will be all holy! God in Heaven (whack!). God in Heaven (whack!).

The girl stabbed a hole in the trunk with a long knife she took out of her purse. I was screaming and crying (I see my father's face; I see my father's face), and to the huge black man with a machine gun to my chest I was screaming, "My brother! my brother!" because look at me, a darky too? But where we were was some dark hole of Manhattan, and no one to hear my cries!

And now in here! I smell only Peter's new taxi trunk smell and I feel this crowbar and jack underneath my leg. And I have only seconds, minutes, to think of what is my life story? And my head whacks and my eyelids shake!

My father was a general in the Pakistani army. A bad general, a bad man. But a general, still. And not so many people believe me when I tell this, my father a general: me only a taxi driver, drive for money in New York City, all night just to wait for death to come to me like black men and one woman with a long knife? Me, from Pakistan! Father a general!

Living now in some corner of a hole, and bugs crawling in the hole, and the walls rotting, and no one cares, in New York City. They only look at the Chrysler Building, from their beds,and say,one to theother, my dear, about that notice I faxed to you Monday... And now I will die!

All the breaths I have taken. In Faisalabad, where each breath has a thousand colors. In Geneva, where the air is liked clipped grass. In New York City, where the air is secret and ugly and soaked through. New York Gty, where a man can be evil. My head pounds. My body is wrapped, stuffed in a small place. This is my end.

My life, I think, and breathe. My life. When I was seven years old, when the gymnasts took me away and my father was proud, he stood me on the cement doorstoop and told all the rest to go away: my mother, the

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servants, my sisters. He kissed meonbothcheeks,and said, "Youaremy son." And now I have come to the end of my life! There is not enough air in the trunk. I inhale carpet, I exhale carpet. I look to the hole, I whack my head.

Oh holy God! I was a gymnast in Pakistan. At an early age I could lift my leg up and wrap it around my head. One day at school I showed this to a teacher (a bad thing—it embarrasses me now—showing my upper leg to a teacher), who called the National Gymnast Troop. A great honor.

The general's son. Gathered young boysfromall around the country. In I went, as if I were an egg into a basket. My chances for escaping were as good as an egg's. I lifted my limbs for the next ten years. When it came to the Olympics I was not selected, and I left my country happy.

Then I became a waiter in Switzerland. Whack!—a very hard bump.

I look to the hole, but still the lights are regular. Still a small time to live, and maybe to breathe, to think: to offer those men sex for my life? To call Peter to ransom me? To escape? Impossible. My punishment is as inevitable as my life was evil, and more than this, if s justice!

In Switzerland I was austere. For a while. I saved my money. Until I spent it. I refused all come-ons. Until I took them all. Oh God, let me live!

Oh God, let me live! I will dedicate my life! I will change for good! I will quit drinking forever! I will give up sex! Anything! Anything!

Whack! Whack! Whack! I wiggle my hands with such fury against each other in their duct tape that perhaps they will set fire. Fire to all the heathens in Peter's taxi!

I am deserving. Having fallen to evil! On my first evening in Switzerland I went to a bar with an Indian high school friend. He laughed as I staggered and then vomited after my first half-pint of beer. He laughed from night to night from then on, until I had dropped out of cooking school, until my limbs had all grown fat and weak, until I had moved to America and acquired false papers, until I was driving a taxi all day to drink enough bourbon in the nighttime.

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And now in New York City? Daytimes I drive a taxi. I do not drive nighttimes. I drink nighttimes! For me to be doing this one all-night shift, sober and in the company of my own thoughts only, just so that Peter cannot find me, in order to punish Peter for his small indiscretions—oh, the wicked will be punished, as we see! The wicked will be punished, as my father has always believed. (In 1990 he sent me five hundred American dollars and told me to find Islam and a wife. I tooka man called Steven to Windows on the World, and now I fulfill my destiny to be hijacked and then murdered by two black men and one woman!) My destiny—God, holy God, almighty God, save me, please save me, your humble servant, I beg you— But it is true, when I drink I see only pleasure and nothing in this life will ever harm me! I am beautiful! It is true, when I drink I am no son.

When I drink I am alive: I movefrombar to bar, and people wish to know me, to befriend me, to understand me, to be me. Taxi or not! Father or not!

People say that I am addicted but if I am, I am merely addicted to being myself!

But time spent drunk is not really time. Oh holy God. And no story composed drunk can have any merit. Oh indeed I deserve to die! Indeed, indeed I am a failure!

Thump! and thump! and thump! goes my head on this carpet! The crowbar digs into my leg, and my head whacks and whacks the floor. But up above me I look to the one poke of flashing light, and though I am suffocating and soon to die, I try to remember that there is the whole world full of air for me!

But it is true, I have had many lovers. I go from bar to bar, and I hear no thumping. I gofrombar to bar and I see no hovering faces. Only my face—my face in the faces of all who wish to meet someone so young and lithe, so slender and happy. No one knows I am a drunk, and people who know it, they don't care. Peter wishes to buy me the world. But I will not take his favors. (But that is no excuse for evil!) I am composing the story

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of my own life. I will not take his presents. He has bought me a new taxicab and you see where it has got me. Peter will be sorry. I have no story. In the end I have nothing.

Deep in Brooklyn, a short prostitute stands alone on the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues. She queries patiently, and then listens to the wisecracks of the two men as their cab stops at the light. As she turns away, her tired eyes catch a glimpse of the finger wiggling out of a hole in their trunk. A dark finger. It wiggles up and down, and then side to side. And as the car speeds off, the finger grows smaller, wiggling, and is gone.

When the taxi is out of sight, the girl leans against a wall and rearranges her skirt. The light changes from green to yellow, and then to red.

Marmot Mama HEATHER FISHER

Out of the gray grand granite fissures of the craggy rock A marmot peeked, like a small child learning traffic laws.

Left, right, left again! Seeing me she stopped, staring through her sweet-scented mouthful of baby fur for it could only have been that sweet sleepy scent born of her newborn.

Ah, the marmot! Bane of all backpackers.

The last I'd seen stole half a salami as I swam beneath bright sun in the icy lake.

But I knew their rodent tricks now, me with my backpack, my ice-axe, meant for ice and bears, who, while hunched in berrybiting delight might in concern for cubs alone notice me and the waftful scent of peanut butter, thus the sharp orange blade.

The marmot mama stared at me, and the sun hit our eyes.

She dared a forward step. Silent, not wanting to intrude, I longed to offer a hand in her endeavor. One, two, her marmot paws across the cragged rock, eyes darting, mouth full and feet fleet across my path to a rocky closet next to the cold breath of the stream.

That was where she left her load, hefting its tiny blind body into the cave as I stood, an unwelcome guest in the great green meadows of the melting mountain.

And up the great gray granite steppe she went again, sharp rocks blunting her stubborn feet.

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I longed to babysit for her, to care for her furry beloved as she scrambled back up the hill to her former lair I wanted to hold her tiny one, alone and I supposed afraid, to swear at any mountain beast who might trounce upon its fragility.

But does one feed the animals? Does one comfort a marmot in need? My time for these questions was short.

She traipsed back through the glacial granite with another load, jaws tired of furry passengers and came down through those great grand rocks, peeking suspiciously over her shoulders at my straight body, waddling down with mouth full of infant.

And I wondered, was her flight inspired by a move from an abusive husband? An unfaithful marmot man, who found her old and tired and flaccid from her pregnancy?

Or perhaps a fateful accident had befallen him, a hiker like myself, having lost too many salamis to these altitudinal wonders.

A hiker who carried an ice-axe too. I wondered.

But she was strong, this marmot mama, and as infant #2 flopped against her great yellow belly (left, right, left) She saw me, questioning. Carrier of dry salamis or oddly formed pine tree? Deciding the latter, she tucked this little one next to the first in the rock closet next to the breath of the stream.

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HEATHER FISHER

I wanted to soothe her aching jaw, to soak her tired feet in Epsom salts, to bottle-feed her tiny one so she could rest in the shade.

And scurried up the great crags for another! I watched, clutching my ovaries in one hand and flat stomach in another. What could it be to have so many newnesses clinging to my breast? I felt the fur of her babies climb into my mouth as a third tiny body dangled as she crossed, and puzzled that her marmot legs had not stopped, that her jaw had not gone limp with exhaustion.

And it got the better of me. A marmot in need, a hiker with Mother Teresa as heroine. The babies were tucked there, under the rock, next to the soft water icy snow creek.

I had just a moment, for she had started up the cliff again perhaps for a marmot trinket from the old homestead, or for #4.

I peeked. Blind, squinting, runting, and rolled atop one another, they knew not to be afraid too full of mama's breath, mama's milk.

It was there that I placed the salami, unpeeled with my knife, salting the air with its meaty scent. They made no move for it, just lay among the quiet coolness of the granite, waiting for the return of the stubborn familiar feet.

Which came all too fast. I did not move when she returned, with the runt of all runts, one that I ached to fit in my palm.

I stood straight and silent as she smelled me,

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sniffed my salty aid to her dependent children and I thought she bowed at me as she backed into the small cavern her journey complete, with perhaps a moment to rest her aching feet, before their tiny cries and minimarmot mouths sought her yellow belly.

I longed to stay, to offer to set up house, do the dishes, attend to the newborns.

But I stole away, up the craggy granite cliffs, my meaty gift a mere shadow of her greater gift to me.

Don't Come 'Round Here No More ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ

Bita don't come 'round here no more. I know that sounded like Alice don't live here no more, or is it go ask Alice, but the shit is she didn't die 'cause she was on drugs or something like Alice. I mean, she ain't even die and if she did die I think I'd die too 'cause I love her, but she just don't come 'round here no more. I know if s just July 4th no big deal holiday like Christmas or Easter, but even if she ain't come that don't mean nothing bad,ifsjustthatlkinda miss her.Momssaysits'causeshe forgot her roots and she says once you lose your roots you lost, 'cause people is just like trees and trees need roots to keep the winds from knocking them over, and once a person lose their roots they can never stand straight and people just walk all over them.

For Christmas Moms said she wasn't gonna ask her to come, if she wants to come, good, if not que sevaya pal carajo. I told Moms not to be like that, but she said she ain't ever had to beg in her life and she ain't ever gonna beg a comemielda, even if the snot was her daughter. But Moms just talk sometimes and I knew that come Christmas day she'd be crying in her room to God, asking him what she did wrong in her raising that she sacrificed her life and she don't deserve this and all the talk with God had to do with Bita. And I don't know about everyone else but that sounds like a pretty fucked-up way to spend Christmas so I called Bita and told her that Moms wanted her there.

Bita didn't go for it. She said "Why you gotta fucking lie? I know and you know that Moms ain't say nothing like that. And you can tell Moms that I will be there for Christmas, and I wasn't ever planning not to be there so you didn't even have to fucking lie."

Bita said my present was the best, but I don't know if that means anything 'cause the only other person who got her something was Moms and all she got her was a pack of those pink Daisy razors so she could stop

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being like those dirty white hippies that are making Bita forget all the good Moms taught her. I gave her three dollars.

Christmas was going fine till Anibal the animal came—that was our stepdad even though Bita says he wasn't, that he was just Moms' boyfriend, but Moms always said he was our stepdad. Anyways, Bita couldn't stand him and I was hoping the animal would stay out and drink, but no, the sucker came in drunk and according to Bita, he looked at her all wrong so Bita threw little Tito's Tonka truck at him and pushed him out the door and locked it. She said that she wouldn't have thrown the truck at him if he had just said that he hated her instead of walking around the house looking at her like she smelled rot or something.

Of course Moms was not happy and she started tripping and praying to God asking him what she did wrong in her raising—then Bita butt in and said that God would never listen to her unless she got rid of the animal and Moms said that if she got rid of the animal we'd be spending Christmas on the streets. "Somebody's got to pay the rent," Moms said.

And Bita had to open her big mouth and say "Welfare pays your rent, Ma." So Moms kicked her out and said she'd rather have no daughter at all than to have such an evil, dirty-mouthed, sinverguenza daughter like Bita.

So Christmas day was pretty fucked up anyways, and I was sure Bita wasn't coming for New Year's so I ain't evenbother calling her and lying.

But Bita showed up anyways, real early in the morning and woke me, Moms, Tito, and the animal up. The animal played it cool and went under the covers when I said it was Bitaringingthe bell and stayed there till Bita left. Moms started making breakfast for all of usand even though she know Bita don't like eggs or bacon, she put the plate in front of her and said "Eat it before it gets cold." And Bita said "I'm not eating that."

And Moms plays dumb and asks "Why?" And Bita says "'Cause it ain't

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ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ

good for you." And Moms lost it again and started rolling and praying, asking God how come he made her suffer so much and that all she was trying to do was be a good mother and get a bit of appreciation and instead this is what she got. Bita said "Food ain't got nothin' to do with appreciation." And Moms said she always took the time, even when she ain't have the time, to make us hot cereal, never like those other mothers who gave their kids cold cereal for breakfast. Bita had to get me in the shit and asked me what I liked better, cold or hot cereal, and I like cold better but I had to fucking lie 'cause Moms was just waitin' for me to talk, so I said "Hot cereal, of course," and Bita got pissed at me and called me a little fucking liar again. Moms called her a malagradecida, that's a person who don't ever appreciate all the trouble other people, like Moms, do for them.

BeforeBitaleftshe turned on the lights in the animal's room and called him a lazy fucking bastard. Moms said "Why you gotta talk like that?"

And Bita said "'Cause he is a lazy fucking bastard." And Moms said if she was gonna be using that language that she ain't ever want her in the house again so thaf s the second-to-last time I saw Bita and the last time Bita came home.

Last time I saw Bita was day before Easter. The animal dropped me off at Prospect Park where Bita was waiting for me and I was all superpsyched 'cause Bita said she got me a rabbit, but when I saw it I wasn't psyched no more 'cause the sucker was real big and I thought it was gonna be a little one like the one my homeboy Papo has. But I ain't gonna tell Bita that I don't like it so I says "I love it, Bita," and I was happy that she ain't call me a fucking liar again.

Anyways, me and Bita had a lot of fun and we wrestled on the grass and I can't say that I let her win even though I wish I could say that, but Bita's a little stronger than me only 'cause she's older but I beat her in runnin' that day and she said that she was gonna help me train for the

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marathon 'cause I had some nice, strong-looking legs but that I had to start liking pasta. Then I asked Bita when she was coming home and she startedlookingallsadandlwishedlain'teveraskwhatldid'causethen we was both looking real sad. She told me she ain't ever think she was coming home again 'cause Moms and her was always fighting. When I tolds her that she was forgetting her roots she told me to shut the fuck up 'cause that was Moms talk and if I was gonna say something it better be something I made up. And she says that even if she don't come home again that don't mean she forgot her roots. When I asked her if she was turning white she said I was talking Mom shit again and just 'cause she drank skim milk that ain't make her less Puerto Rican than me. Then I asked her if she was still gonna take me to parks and she ain't say nothing and I ain't say nothing either 'cause I wanted to cry but I didn't cry 'cause there were all these big guysplaying Softball next to us and I was sure one of them would see me and call me a sissy, and I don't like that sissy namecalling shit. So after we was all quiet for a longtimeshe punched me real hard on my arm and she said that she was gonna make sure I win that marathon and then she told me to shut the fuck up 'cause I was asking too many questions.

I know I said that the 4th of July ain't no big holiday, but the shit is that it's my twelfth birthday today and Bita ain't ever miss my birthday so I know something must be wrong with her or that she got hit by a car or something bad like that happened. Moms says that Bita just don't care no more and that I gotta understand that but I think Moms is full of shit and that it's Moms who don't give a shit 'bout no one but herself and her stupid boyfriends. The animal left a month ago and now she got some other man here who kicks my dog and smokes all the time even though he knows I got asthma and Moms ain't say nothing to him. When I told Moms to tell him to stop she said that she ain't want no trouble with him, that the man got a temper, and that if it bother me to go to my room. And

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ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ

* m s jf 1 g \ • ;

',. ;

today I'm stuck in my room even though if s my birthday and Moms was gonna take me to the movies, but now we ain't going 'cause Moms' boyfriend's sick and he says she gotta take care of him.

If Bita called me I'd pack up my clothes and go with her and I don't need to go to school 'cause Bita got a lot of books and she smart and maybe if I win the marathon I'll get a lot of money so I could help Bita out with the rent.

Now I'm thinking about my dad 'cause he was born the same day as me but he died when I was two and Bita was nine. Tito's dad still alive, but he never comes around. My dad is Bita's dad too and Bita says he was a good man and that when I was born he was so psyched that he threw a big party with lots of blue balloons and cigars and Bita says everybody was happy then. Bita says he used to take us to the Bronx Zoo all the time and he always read to us in our room before we wents to sleep. But my dad died and now we's stuck with Moms' stupid boyfriends who Bita never liked and I don't like none of them either. I wish I could forget but I could never forget the one who used to touch Bita every time Moms would go to the store. I'm gonna find him when I get big and he's gonna be sorry. And I'm not gonna be scared of him anymore like the day I told him to stop touching her and he pushed me and says "You wanna get fucked up, little boy?" and I gots scared and went to my room, even though Bita was still crying. I was only six or seven and I was skinny but I'm gonna start lifting weights soon and I'm gonna find him and I'm gonna fuck him up.

Bita lifts weights and she got a lot of muscles and Moms says she look like a guy, and she do a little bit, but Moms also says that she's a pata, and that's a bad word for a girl who likes another girl, but I don't think she is 'cause I saw her making out with Pete in the basement when she was sixteen. Moms calls her mach.ua too 'cause she says Bita act like a boy and fights like a boy and that's true. When I was 'bout ten, Moms had a boyfriend who always said "Get me some water, now!" He never told

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Bita to get him water wow but he'd tell me and Moms all the time. One day he asked me in front of Bitatoget him water and Bita said "Let him get his own water," and Moms' boyfriend looked at me and said "Dan, get me some water," and I never liked getting that sucker water anyway so I just stood there and looked at him and then at Bita and I said "I gots H.W. to do." I started walking to my room and then the sucker called me a pendejo real loud, that's kinda like a sissy but worse, and then I heard Bita cursing under her breath and when I turned around, I saw Bita throw Moms' porcelain horse at him and if the sucker hadn't moved his head, his face would've been real fucked up. Bita said "Don't ever talk to him like that." And then the sucker said "Girl, if you were a man I'd set you straight." And Bita said "Consider me a man, motherfucker," and thaf s why I think Moms thinks Bita acts like a boy.

Well, if Bita don't come by six I'm gonna go to my homeboy Papo's house 'cause my Moms' boyfriend is yelling and calling my Moms a "madgdalena" 'cause she's crying again and I think she's crying 'cause Bita ain't come for my birthday even though Moms says she don't give a shit that Bita don't come around no more. All this yelling makes me sick so I'm just gonna mind my business and go play Nintendo at Papo's and when Bita gets here she could pick me up there.

Well, Bita did come by yesterday. She came late but she came, and I know I should sound happy and I was happy for a little while but then Bita made me real sad. She came while Papo's moms was cooking dinner for us and she asked Papo's moms if it was all right if she take me for a walk and Papo's moms is cool and she said "No problem, he's your brother." And I told Papo "Later," and left with Bita 'cause I was happy to see her. When we got out on the street she punched me real hard on the arm and said "Thought I forgot about you?" And I said "No, I knew you was coming." And she laughed and said "You don'tknownothing."

And I said "I knows something." And she said "What do you know?"

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ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ

And I said "That I knew you was coming." When I said that she laughed and then she punched and hugged me and I felt happy that she ain't forget about me.

When Bita asked me where I wanted to eat, I said McDonald's 'cause I like it and it was just around the corner and I know Bita don't like walking around the neighborhood on July 4th 'cause four years ago someone threw a firecracker at her and it burned her chest right through her blouse. I was with her that day and when the firecracker hit her she started cursing and saying "Who the fuck threw that shit?" and "If you had the balls to throw it, you should have the balls to own it." But nobody owned up so we just went back upstairs to the apartment and Bita went to the bathroom and even though she turned on the shower, I could hear her cry and then I felt like going outside again and beating up whoever it was that threw the firecracker 'cause they were making Bita cry. I think maybe she got scared but I ain't asked her. Anyways, thaf s why I didn't want to walk too much and we went to McDonald's.

I ordered a Big Mac with fries and a chocolate shake 'cause Bita said Icouldget anythingl wanted. She got herself a boring-looking salad with no meat and I almost said "Thaf s all you getting?" but I didn't 'cause I knew she'd come out her face if I did. And then I was just sitting there feeling happy that I didn't have to eat Papo's moms' food, and that I got to go out, and that Bita came to see me, and then Bita had to go mess it up by telling me she was going away. "Going away where?" I said. She said she was going to El Salvador 'cause her friend Miriam lived over there and that she was gonna help the poor people over there. And I said "We're poor too." And she said "If s different." And I said "How different?" And she said that she just wanted to get out of New York, and I said "Why?" And she said that she just wasn't too happy here. And I said "Why?" And then Bita says really loud,"Danny, stop asking so many damn questions!" And then I started feeling sad and mad at the sametimeand when I feel mad and sad at the same time I start crying and

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I didn't want to cry 'cause there was so many people there so I grabbed -4 my Knicks cap and said "I'm going home, Bita." And she said "Sit down ' and finish your food, Dan." But I ain't listen to her and I walked right out of McDonald's. When I reached the corner I heard Bita calling after me so I stopped and she walked up to me and said "Let me walk you home," and I said "All right." So we walked home together and she ain't say nothing to me and I ain't say nothing to her till we got to my stoop and she said "Yo Dan, you know I ain't ever gonna forget you," and I think she would've kept on talking but I ain't want to hear her anymore so I just said "Bye, Bita." And I walked up my stoop and I kind of wanted to look back 'cause I knew she was just standing there but I was too pissed so I just kept walking till I heard the front door slam and when I looked back all I could see was that metal door. And even if I did go back outside I ain't have nothing to say to her so I just walked up the stairs to my apartment and walked past Moms and her stupid boyfriend who was just watching T.V. and then I wenttomy room. Moms knocked on my door and asked if Bita picked me up at Papo's and I said "Yeah." And then she asked if I was hungry and I said "No." Then she asked if I had a fun time, and I said "Yeah" again.

Now that Bita's gone I wish I would've asked her if she was coming forChristmasor New Year'sbutmaybeifsbetterthatlain'tasked'cause I don't think she's coming back. Maybe Moms was right when she said Bita don't give a shit. Or maybe she do give a shit but her stupid friends are making her forget where she comes from. All I know now is that I am gonna win that marathon and when I get famous Bita's gonna see me in the news and I know she'll come to see me then.

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Your Voice STEPHEN PAGE

as I woke up this late, late afternoon I thought I heard your voice in the other room

85

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PERSPECTIVES ON PEOPLE

Yukio Gion In Jamaica, 1995

1

—•"•*-•••-

James Starace Portrait •h;;-^SA^^£J^Sis^^ii^i^iii.ii!CisS

Yukio Gion The Fox, 1991

1

Long-awaited Child of Peace MARIA OLIVAS

My brother loved to drum, and that is what doomed us. My parents could not overcome their past, and that is what doomed us. I was too headstrong; we were told Americans were demons; the Emperor was blind to his Household's actions: all these things doomed us.

The pounding waves throw salt mist onto my face. Beside me my husband bleeds. I have tried to speak to him, but no sound comes from me. I hear shouts from the GIs' landing boats, and rifle shots from the battalion on the cliffs. Feeble last effort; I know it is over. Saipan has fallen, and we three will die.

I was not born to this place and people. My childhood home, Kichijoji, was the jewel of Tokyo's western sector. I was the jewel of our household: precious Hanako Asai, cosseted daughter of a line of scholars, whose parents treasured the past while embracing the modern. When my parents named me "Child of Flowers" they meant the blooms of civilization as well as the garden. Schooled in all the comely arts, from calligraphy to singing, I knew everything necessary to captivate and entertain. Even Western visitors were charmed by my delicate wit. I was destined for a stunning match; a governor at least, perhaps a diplomat.

A man my parents approved of, a leader of our brave nation, Nippon.

The nationalists decided we should lead Asia; after all, we were the most modern, the most advanced of the Asian countries. We had inherited the best of every sector of toyo: the academic and philosophical achievements of China and India; the vitality and cultural variety of Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. And we possessed the technology of the West. We were all things. We were Nipponjin, a chosen people, the glory of an age.

But this glory belonged only to true Nipponjin. The Ainu we did not even discuss, they were invisible, banished to the north, with their facial

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MARIA Ouv AS

hair, their chants, and their salmon gods; no one worried about them.

The Okinawans, though quaintly fierce, had no armories of their own and were quelled in the 1800s. Let them have their primitive music and their dialect; they were a vacation spot, not a prefecture of worth.

The burakumin however, lived among us. "Nonhumans," "the pol- * luted," these were other names for them: they slaughtered beasts, and * worked the hides, so the nation had meat and leather. Bathed in blood, i unclean by action, we suffered them for their work. Though the Meiji emperor and his new parliament had declared all citizens equal more than seventy years ago, there were still lists, long lists, and should your * family name be traced to one, certain freedoms were denied you, certain i privileges could never be yours. Burakumin, filth. Burakumin, outcaste. | •B

Burakumin, untouchable.

Masahiko, my husband, was one of them.

| 1

If I could have chosen an easier path, I would have. I would have turned away from Masahiko, would have banished his soft voice and firm body from my memory and wed a rich man. j It was June when I first saw him, June 1939. I'd walked home from * dance class along the riverpath. I stopped when I saw him at the back door; visitors never entered there. Husky and dark, he knelt in the raked gravel path stroking my puppy.

"Sweet soft thing," he murmured while Aji quivered under his hand.

"So charming, you tempt me to steal you! What lovely bright eyes, what shining hair! A delight to this gray world." He was a wizard; Aji was of the finest Akita stock, a present from father's dean. Her ancestors had guarded the compounds of princes since the time of Prince Genji and Lady Shonagon. Though barely weaned, she rarely liked people outside of our family, much less wriggled with pleasure at their touch.

I stood in the cedar grove that cradled our yard, glad the needles beneath my feet cloaked the sound of my wooden geta on the path. In my

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eighteen years, I had never heard a man speak that way before. Even Kenji, my adored brother, was formal, almost distant in his love.

Then my brother came outside.

"Masahiko! You're early!" Kenji jumped the last two steps, crouched beside Aji,and scratched her other ear.Mother would havesighedathim forlmeelmgonmegaidenpam,hissilksmstlmgonthegravel.Masahiko's clothes were far sturdier. His feet sported the rubber-soled canvas tabi of a laborer, and though his garments were clean their weave was coarse.

The indigo had faded, and the cotton molded to his broad body.

"I finished reheading your taiko more quickly than I thought. If s in the alley, on my cart." His voice, so tender toward thedog, turned boisterous as he replied to my brother.

Ah, the drum, the taiko, the wondrous instrument Kenji had been sighing over for a month at least. Though Father called it a waste of time, Kenji had been studying drumming with a commoner in Kanda. The man claimed knowledge of rhythms from old Edo, the proud capital Tokyo had been in medieval times.

It was the one thing Kenji had insisted on, the way of the drum. He came home aching from his exertions; his hands were sometimes bloody after pounding for hours on the horsehide with his bachi, oak drumsticks as thick as my wrist.

My brother became obsessed with owning a drum of his own. But a new one would not do. He wanted an antique. He scoured old neighborhoods, visited shrines and temples. Finally, he purchased one from an old man who could no longer play, who had no family to pass it on to.

The heads were old and worn through, but Kenji's classmate, whom he had become close with during a year of study in the United States, had offered to refurbish it for him. Masahiko, a graduate student who could work leather. Masahiko, who had been born burakumin.

The barrel-sized drum glinted fox-brown in the summer light; Kenji

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could not encircle it with his arms. They carried it between them by the steel rings bolted to its sides and placed it on its side on a shoulderheighth stand. Then Masahiko brought two pairs of bachi from the cart, and they rooted themselves on either side of the drum, paused for a moment with their arms arced high, then lunged toward the taiko, the sticks heavy in their hands, the sun golden on their faces.

The first blow shook the crows from the cedars; they wheeled toward the river, complaining. Aji whimpered on the porch, nose on her paws. They played an oroshi, pounding slowly, racheting their arms behind their heads between each strike. Then, the acceleration, gaining speed in a cycle like the bouncing of a ball. At fastest pace, they rolled a full minute—wrists blurring, necks taut, strained. Then they reversed their rhythms, slowing gradually to a standstill, each stroke slower and more deliberate than the last, like the heartbeat of a god.

When the rhythm faded, I saw that my brother's passion had shredded his elegance. His desire for the drum and its power was carnal. His gown, damp beneath his arms, clung like waterweed, its seams puckering around his slender frame. He sucked at the air, eyes wide with elation. Even from a distance I knew he was unsated, that he would strive again and again for that fierce sensation; his obsession would give him no peace.

Masahiko, in contrast, stood entranced by the drum. His demeanor exuded a profound love that surpassed the lust displayed by my brother. His every gesture spoke of a commitment to a higher art; even when his shoulders and arms surged toward the rawhide like waves, you could see that his own desires had dissolved; his own being no longer concerned him. For Masahiko, the taiko was elemental, a force to live with, not an object to be conquered. Kenji considered the taiko his mistress, himself a passionate servant, groveling and demanding by turns. Masahiko simply became one with the drum.

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My life with Masahiko began then, when I realized he was worthy of love.

How well I remember that summer; how closely I hold those memories. Our family had always gone to the O-Bon festivals, where every member of our township danced, in ever-widening circles, the motions that honored our prefecture, our city, our ancestors. Because of the social reforms the Showa Emperor and his counsellors were installing, new dances had been created to celebrate our growing strength as a nation and the unity of our people. I was one of five volunteers from Tachibana School who were teaching the new dances to young people: college students, high school students, elementary students.

And so I taught dance, and Masahiko drummed for me. He and my brother, and their drum, came with me to every community center, every elementary school, every college campus in Kichijoji. Bandai-san, dance of the sacred mountain, Tokyo-ondo, movements of the great city—and Showa-ondo, dance of sharing and peace, I demonstrated them hundreds of times during those three months, the pulsing beat of the taiko emphasizing my every move. Of course Masahiko fixed his eyes on me—how else to judge which pattern to play? Of course I returned his gaze with my own; how else to signal the end of a sequence?

During the festival season, from late July to mid-August, we were together every day. Featured artists at local fairs all along the Western side of Tokyo. "Learn the new dances; show your support of our Emperor!" read the signs and posters. "Help shape our future by honoring our past."

My dance teacher told my parents that I had never before performed with such spirit and conviction.

"Every gesture is charged with purpose," I heard her whisper to my mother. 'Tour daughter's art is blossoming; I congratulate you on her skill."

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During thosemonthsMasahikoandlnever kissed. Webarelytouched.

He poured tea for me, and carried my umbrella when it rained. I lent him handkerchieves. He never gave them back. One day hebroughtadaruma to our practice, the round red doll you wish on, filling in one eye. When your wish come true you draw in the other eye. Staring hard at me, he inked in the daruma's right eye. Covering his hand with mine, I guided the pen to the left eye, and we filled it in together. I had never known such joy.

At summer's end, Kenji was recruited into the Imperial Guard Officers' Corps, and left for military training.

"Afittingplaceforsobrightaprospect/'saidour neighbors. "Suitable for his spirit and his education." And they noted that Mother's greatgrandfather had been no scholar but a samurai, who had been adopted into the family when he wed the only child. It made me hopeful, that story. Perhaps Masahiko, too, could leave his past behind and become one with our household; my parents were both highly educated and progressive. They had sent me to college after all. And, though they knew he was not of noble birth, they liked Masahiko, I could tell. His wit and manners charmed them. Even after Kenji had gone, my parents invited him to our home. He stayed to dinner. They gave him presents.

Perhaps...

"ItisKenji'sfault!" muttered Father theNovemberdayhediscovered our secret love. "Your brother brought the drum here and invited that creature into this house." And he, quiet scholar and indulgent father, rushed to the drum Masahiko had restored for my brother, and knocked it from its stand. The taiko's metal rings left pits in the woven tatami matting as he kicked and shoved it toward the door leading to the veranda.

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"My husband, be calm," soothed Mother. "Let us talk with the child.

Reason with..."

Father ignored her, and thrusting apart the sliding doors, heaved the drum through them. The force of his motions brought his arm around.

His hand knocked over the incense burning on our ancestral shrine. The cinder burrowed into the tatami, set free the scent of summer hay.

"See ho w the influence of this animal damages our home?" he hissed at Mother, as thetoz'fcorolled into the rain and mist, cloaking the garden.

"The blow was your own," Mother's tone never changed, but in the glimmer of the lamp I saw she had turned her face from him.

And so I left home. Mother helped me pack and gave me money. I wrote to her at the dance school, so my father would not burn my letters.

I have not seen her since I put my bags on Masahiko's cart six years ago.

I was fearful, yes. All the myths came back to me: our children would have hooves; they would crave fresh blood. My ancestors would haunt us; my parents would become sleepless ghosts. My advanced education allayed most of these worries. But one lingered; if the decree of equality (endorsed by the law, but not necessarily the Emperor), did not apply on the cosmic level, Kenji and I would be separated after death. His family and mine were of different spiritual status. No matter what joy we achieved in the physical world, there was a chance that our eternal rewards would be significantly different.

"We cannot know until we die," he shrugged finally. "I am selfish. I prefer a little joy now and eternal longing for its return over no joy for this lifetime and eternal loneliness. I will love you while I can."

Masahiko had changed his nametocover his heritage, and so he was not drafted. We decided the mainland was too difficult, too many questions. When we heard of the colonizing subsidies for Saipan, we deliberated for only a week. Then there were ten days of pitching seas,

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the March sky dark with rain and gales. When we landed at the pier, our clothes, crusted with brine, sweat, and spittle, hung off us; we had each lost five pounds.

The local people were kind and friendly, though other Japanese dismissed them as savages. "They are inferior, of course," sniffed women who would have cast down their eyes before my mother in Tokyo. "Do not waste your time with them."

My husband was torn. Accepted as true Nrpponjin by the other colonists, he dared not risk overfriendly relations with the native folk.

But in their suffering he saw his childhood.

"I groveled in the dirt on my hands and knees," he told me. "And once, a teacher shouted 1 know youfilthhave only one testicle!' and my classmates pinned me down and stripped me. After they had seen my flesh, they beat me with sticks."

He worried about my father, not just for our sake.

"My aunt planned to marry a successful farmer," he muttered, pacing. "The man truly loved her, he didn't care about our family's position. She was smart, a hard worker. He felt they belonged together.

The day before the wedding, his father killed himself. Aunt Chizuko moved away; she never married."

"Masahiko," I answered him, "you know my father is stubborn and proud. Perhaps we will never see him again, but he will not destroy himself. He will either adjust to the situation or spend his life planning to retrieve me. He will never give up."

And he laughed and agreed with me. He knew I was right.

Mother's last letter was hopeful.

"Itoldyour father that you will have a baby, and it seems, in time, he may come around. These difficult days have made him long for your company again, I know. The other day, he mentioned that Masahiko

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would make a good father, that he is a good man, flawed only by circumstances beyond his control. When peace has returned to Nippon, come home, and bring your family. For the child, if nothing else, your father will see you."

When we read that, our lives took on deeper meaning. Kenji had not yetmarried;we would givemyparents their first grandchild.Ourmuchbeloved baby would close the chasm separating us from my father.

Thus, when we chose names, we selected ones that incorporated yu, the symbol for peace. Maiyu, for a girl, "dance of peace." Yutaro, for a boy, "first-born son of peace."

My contractions had started before sunrise; they were evenly paced, and not too painful. We had gone to the fields just after dawn. Masahiko had me lie in the shade near him, so he could be near when my time came.

"Our child will be born in fields he will work later on," he smiled at me as he hoed.

"Or she," I retorted.

"Or she."

"Up, get up," yelled the commander. "Up the hills, to the cliffs. The white demons are coming, and if you are caught, they will torture you.

Contact with them will desecrate your souls, and you will never meet your families in the afterlife."

Superstition they used on us, superstition and fear. Our officers, in the name of the Emperor, had done horrible things to Saipan. Forced native children to slay their pets and eat them. Beaten the mothers with statues of their Jesus.

"The Americans will do the same to you," theyinsisted. "Youaretheir enemy, this is war."

While we waited on the cliffs, I squatted behind my husband, to feel

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beneath my skirts. And froze, unbelieving. How much more misfortune could we bear? Instead of a crowning head, my fingers traced two small, slick feet hovering between my legs.

I'd heard some women shriek with pain during childbirth. But the day had numbed me. I stood, and Masahiko placed one arm around my shoulders. The other gripped my hand; his body quaked when Itoldhim "The baby is turned around. I can touch only feet." He gripped my hand; blood smeared from my palm to his.

Off the cliffside we saw ships on the water, flying the flag of our enemy. Stars, stripes: so many elements, so many colors. A contrast to the single red sun of Nippon.

Who knows how long we stood there, two thousand of us colonists, while the Imperial Army waited for the final word from the Palace.

When it came it was some consolation to Masahiko, "All those who die for the glory of our nation will be admitted into the highest level of Shinto paradise, no matter the origins of their birth. This is the promise of the Imperial Household."

Some of our neighbors grew hysterical. Ohama, the baker, ran by us down the slope, and was gunned down. Then the sacrifices began.

The youngest child of each family was pushed over by the next oldest, who was pushed over by the next oldest, until the oldest, who was pushed over by the mother, who was pushed over by the father, who then ranbackwards over the cliff. Ikka-senju: family suicide. The children, well schooled by the soldiers, were very brave; only a few of them cried.

It was mothers who were screaming.

MARIA OLIVAS

exposed, and we will be able to choose a name. Look, tell me, is our child Maiyu, or Yutaro? Quickly, so we will be able to find each other in the afterworld."

He hunkered at my side, tugging up my skirt. Against the shrieks of other women, I heard him murmurtothe child dangling half-in, half-out of me, felt his hand brush my leg as he touched the small body. Then he kissed my shuddering belly, locked his left arm under my knees and, sliding his right arm up my back to my neck, stood, holding me against him.

"Yutaro," whispered Masahiko, pressing his lips to my neck. "We have a son." Then he took three running steps and jumped.

Was it likeflying,that rush of air?

"Masahiko, I love you," I said as we fell—did he hear?

Though we spun and turned, his grip stayed firm. He shifted his weight, tryingtoensure that I would land atop him, striving to cushion me against the crags at the cliffs base.

My husband's arm is still around me, though its warmth is fading.

Our sonlies with us beneath thebright tropic sky; if Icouldclosemyeyes, I would pretend we were having a seaside luncheon, that Kenji was coming soon to greet his nephew. If I could close my eyes I would pretend we were already in the afterlife, Yutaro, Masahiko, and I, happy and ever youthful in the highest Shinto paradise, as promised by the Chrysanthemum Palace, house of Tenjin Showa, Emperor of Peace.

"I am happy that some good comes out of this," Masahiko murmured into my hair. "Because of the promise from the palace, my baby and I shall not be separated from you in the afterlife." Without his grip, my knees would have buckled with the force of the contractions.

We were almost to the edge of the cliff when a surge ripped through me. I stumbled against Masahiko, whispering "Maybe now the child is

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Inheritance BARRIE STEVENS

Sucking the smoke from the car exhaust must have been a real gas, Grandpa.

Starving myself in your honor was no easy task but I felt you deserved it.

We could disappear together, two of us hobbling off into the sunset, our bony hands joined for one last dance.

Your daughter spoon-fed me sour yogurt.

It smelled up my room the entire summer. No sweet sixteen for me.

I broke my fast with a grape Tootsie Roll Pop my little brother unwrapped and handed to me in divine simplicity, as if to say, "Please eat this, if s purple, and sweet, and life is good."

I ate the squares of cut-up orange cantaloupe Nana stuck with flat wooden toothpicks, on turquoise plates that matched the table you tiled, and where you left us to clean up your mess.

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About one o'clock in the morning we passed the old man on the interstate. I rode shotgun from the bed of Dad's Ram pickup, standing on top of Mama's hope chest (thaf s what she called it but it was just an old trunk) and leaning up over the cab with a piece of pipe aimed at the thick trees on either side of us. The old man had his shirt in his hands, waving at us, and his skinny chest and arms caught the headlights, white as a full moon. I got a bead on him with the piece of pipe, wishing I had a real gun, at least a Daisy airrifle,then I saw his leg all jacked up over a wire fence, mostly white but red too from blood.

Dad had slowed down but I started banging on the cab window and yelling at him to stop. He looked back at me in the rearview and pointed his finger for me to quit. Mama woke up and said something to Dad and Ray-Ray kept sleeping with his head in Mama's lap. Ray-Ray's only eight, that's why he can't ride in the back with me. Mama had her hand on his head but she didn't look at him, like she had a melon in her lap and didn't want it to fall on the truck floor.

The old man called out "Howdy!"

The air smelled of rain. Wind pushed around in those tall trees and thunder rolled in the valleys but when I looked up at the sky I saw just stars, a long strip of stars between the trees where the interstate cut through—more stars than I ever saw from our backyard in Knoxville.

That afternoon Dad had come home early from work and yelled "Vacation!" before he even got through the front door. I thought whoever heard of vacation only three weeks after school started and I went into the backyard to look for Ray-Ray. Through the screen door I heard Dad saying to Mama "Mobile—yes, Alabama. In Mobile they got jobs laying pipe and offshore too. Cousin David called and said get there

by Tuesday or they'll all be gone. Besides, we're backed up on rent."

Mama didn't scream at him. I guess he sounded too serious or maybe

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she hoped he'd get a job so she yelled through the screen door at me and Ray-Ray. "Harris! Ray Junior! Y'all get in here right now!"

I found Ray-Ray poking a stick into an ant bed and he looked like he was about to cry from the way Mama yelled at us. "They ain't fighting, Ray-Ray," I told him. "We're going on vacation to Mobile, Alabama, where you can eat all the shrimp you want till your dookey turns pink."

He looked at me like he didn't get it but he laughed anyway and he followed me inside.

We left Knoxville at supper time, when all our neighbors were at their kitchen tables or watching T.V. in their living rooms. Wasn't anybody out on their front porches or in the yards, just locusts screeching at us like they were blaming us for taking the T.V. set that came with the house when we moved in. By the time we hi t the Smoky Mountains, the sun had already set and when Dad stopped the truck for the old man there weren't locusts anymore, just crickets chirping and the wind in the trees.

"Just nothingbut semi-trucks past here for the last two hours," the old man called from his place on the fence. "Even slowed 'em down some, but they got to make time."

Dad told Mama to stay in the truck. I jumped out and we hiked up the embankment with the old man talking the whole time while he put his shirt back on, like he was afraid we'd leave him where we found him if he didn't keep talking.

"Hey, old-timer," Dad said, leaning over the barb-wire where the man's leg was all hung up. "Looks like that wire stung you good."

"I crossed this fence near every week since they hung it up about twenty years ago. Got loose from my hand and stuck me here—" the old man pointed to his white thigh where he'd torn away his pants leg.

"You'ens came in good time. I'm about peaked."

Dad told me to go to the truck and get Mama to bring some towels. He looked up into the tops of the trees, listened for rain. He said for me to get

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his wire cutters out of the tool box inback of the truck. I heard the old man talking to Dad the whole time while I went to get Mama and the wire cutters. He just talked, said something about thunder gusts, with Dad saying uh-huh and looking down at the bloody leg. Dad yelled for me to get the Coleman lantern too.

Mama wrapped the old man's leg in a towel and held it steady while Dad cut away the barbed-wire one strand at a time, starting from the bottom. "We'll just cut a hole right through this fence and you'll be able to walk by here anytime like you was on a Sunday stroll," Dad said, clipping the wires.

"Come through this thicket every week, collect me some mushrooms, ginseng, mayapple root depending on the season." The old man had an old cotton tow sack on the ground next to him.

"If 11 just be half a minute," Dad said.

Mama held his leg with both hands but it looked so skinny she could've held it with one hand—it was as skinny as her arm and smooth white, striped with blue veins, like the belly of some fish.

Dad cut the wires close to his leg and eased the barb out where it had dug in. If the old man winced I never saw it.

"You're gonna need a tetanus shot," Dad held the barb-wire in his hand. "If s rusty."

The old man picked up his sack. "I'm obliged to you'ens," he said.

Then he started limping back up the side of the hill, Mama's towel wrapped around his leg.

"Hey. Hey there," Dad said. The man stopped, looked down at the towel and began unwrapping it from his leg as if to return it. "Thaf s not it," Dad said smiling. "You're needing a ride to wherever it is you're headed."

"I'm obliged to you'ens," the old man said, heading down the embankment toward Dad's truck. He'd gotten quiet since we cut him off the fence. I guessed it was because he wasn't stuck anymore. "Wake up

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Ray Junior," Dad told me. "He's riding in back with you." Ray-Ray had never ridden in back with me but I didn't talk back. There wasn't room in the front for four of them.

The clock on the truck dashboard said one-fifteen. Ray-Ray had sprawled out over the whole seat. I thumped him on the ear. "Get up, Ray. Get up, stupid." He sat up, looking like he was about to cry, holding his ear with one hand and rubbing his eyes with his other hand.

"Come on, Ray," I told him. "You're gonna ride shotgun with me." By then Mama and Dad had helped the old man down to the truck. Me and Ray-Ray climbed over the tailgate into the back.

"Hold on, Ray, you could fall out if Dad hits a bump," I warned him.

He sat on the tire well, staring past Dad's side of the truck. I took my place on Mama's hope chest, leaning up over the cab. As Dad pulled out onto the interstate I felt rain on my face. In the cab the old man explained the way, pointing with one hand and motioning a turn with the other.

"Harris," Ray said. "Who's that?" Ray-Ray nodded at the whitehaired man sitting nexttoMama up front. I wanted to lie to him, say the old man was our uncle and he was moving with us to Alabama, but I didn't think quick enough. "I don't know," I said. "We picked him up off the side of the road. He cut his leg."

"If s raining," he said.

"I know it," I told him. "We're taking him home, to where he lives."

The old man leaned across where Mama sat between him and Dad and shook Dad's hand, nodding his head.

We rode on the interstate with the drizzling rain in our faces, then we turned onto an asphalt road and around a hill. Wasn't more than ten minutes before we came to a dirt road, then the old man's house, lit up by the truck headlights: two stone fireplaces on each end and the rest of it made of wood, with a porch running clear across the front. It looked bigger than the house we'd had in Knoxville.

'This is where he lives?" Ray-Ray asked.

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A hound, an old redbone, ran the length of the porch and back again but didn't step into the yard, like it was afraid of the rain, or the truck, or both.

Mama and Dad and the old man got out of the truck, the old man saying "Besides, with this rain and all, highway's a peril at night." The rain drizzled, but the wind blew hard and thunder rolled through the valley. "Poplar Cove is the name of this place. They was a stand of poplar trees right here, some of them five feet around." The old man limped toward his house while his dog watched from the porch. "Whileback, well near a hundred people lived in this part of the valley."

"Come on, boys," Dad leaned into the bed of the truck. "We're staying with Will tonight. You call him Mr. Freeman."

The house looked bigfromfheoutsidebutinsideitwasjusttwo rooms connected with a hallway in the middle. One room was a kitchen and the other was his bedroom. It smelled like wood smoke. Freeman lit lamps in the kitchen and the hall.

"The youngens, they can sleep in here," he pointed at a wide bench in the hall. "I got covers, we can pile up the quilts for a bed."

"They'll be fine," Mama said, putting her hand on Ray-Ray's head and messing up his hair. "They're asleep on their feet."

"You'enscan sleep in here," he said to Mama and Dad, pointing to his bedroom. "There's fresh linens in the trunk."

"Oh," Mama started, "where will you sleep?"

"Generally can't sleep of a morning. I reckon I'll dress up this leg." He still had Mama's towel wrapped around his leg.

Mama made a bed for me and Ray-Ray from quilts that old man Freeman pulled out of a cedar chest. Freemanbuilt upa fire in the kitchen fireplace. "Have ye a seat," he told Dad. Me and Ray-Ray got into the bed with our clothes still on and Ray-Ray fell asleep, his mouth hanging open, just as soon as he put his head down. Mama took the lamp into the bedroom.

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"Kindly care for a drink?" I heard Freeman ask Dad. I leaned out of the bed so I could see into the kitchen. Mama finished making up the bed in the other room and turned the lamp down low. She got into bed too.

"I reckon I'll join in, if you're fixin' to have some," Dad said. I'd never heard Dad talk that way. Freeman opened a cabinet and took down a jelly jar. He opened the jar and swirled the drink around, swallowed off some of it and passed the jar to Dad. Dad smelled it and had a drink. He took a slow breath and then let it out with a whistle.

"Mighty fine," he said.

"You'ens come up out of Knoxville this morning?"

"This afternoon," Dad said.

"IgotthowedinjailonceovertoKnoxville/'Heunwrappedthetowel from his leg and poked at the cut with his finger. "Nothing but a scratch," he said, brushing off the blood where it dried.

"You ought to get a tetanus shot," Dad said. "Barb-wire was rusty."

The lamp on the table started smoking and Freeman reached over to lower the wick.

"Just cuttin' up with a bunch of fellers. Drinkin' and the like."

"Do what?" Dad asked.

"Thaf s how come they thowed us in jail. Wasn't more than your age then."

Dad nodded his head and passed the jar back to Freeman.

"No work in Knoxville?" Freeman asked.

"No sir, not for me at least."

"No needtosir me," Freeman said. "You'll make out, a feller like you can do just fine."

I put my head down and musf ve fallen to sleep. Later on, Freeman's old hound pushed open the front door and came sniffing onme and RayRay's feet. Woke me up for a minute. It was already getting light outside and I looked into the kitchen where old man Freeman sat sleeping in a chair next to the fireplace, his head hanging on his chest.

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"Get up, Harris. Breakfast's ready." Ray-Ray stood next to me, pushingmy shoulder and chewing onabiscuitlsmelledbaconcooking.

"I was already awake," I lied. I swung my feet out of the bed and put on my shoes. Freeman had all the windows open without any screens.

The sun shined outside and the breeze felt warm. Indian summer. Dad and Mr. Freeman already sat at the table and Mama finished cooking a skillet full of bacon at the stove. We had eggs, grits, biscuits with honey, bacon—and when Freeman poured coffee for me and Ray-Ray, Mama started to saysomethingbutthen she stopped.'Tut some milk init, boy," Dad told me. Mama kept getting up and going to the stove to get more eggs and biscuits for us and to tend the coffee pot.

When we finished I felt stuffed as Thanksgiving day. "You'ens go outside and play, let us old folks clean up here," Freeman said to me and Ray-Ray. "Yessir," we both said, already starting for the back door.

Ray-Ray jumped off the back porch onto the grass.

"Why don't we stay here?" he asked me.

"We don't live here, Ray-Ray. We're going to Mobile."

Ray-Ray looked around the grassy clearing behind the house. "How old do you think he is?" he asked.

"Older than Grandpa when he died," I said. "Old." "How come we can't stay here and he can be like our grandpa?"

"Cause we're going to Mobile, and he ain't," I said.

"Ain't coming to Mobile?" Ray asked.

"Ain't our grandpa."

Ray-Ray walked out to the edge of the clearing, just where the forest got thick. Dad leaned out the open window and said "Son, we've got to be going soon. Tell your brother."

"Yessir," I said, then I heard Ray-Ray yelling my name.

I found Ray-Ray standing in front of a gravestone. Dad walked up behind us. "Look!" Ray-Ray said, pointing.

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The words on the stone said: Laq/ Freeman 1929-1947 Elijah Freeman Under the names, fit into a hole in the stone, a blue transistor radio had been set in with cement.

"How come there's a radio, Dad?" I asked.

"Thaf s country," he said. "Some country folks do that kind of thing."

Ray-Ray stepped in front of the stone and reached to turn the knobs on the radio. The cement around the radio was old and crumbling and pieces of it fell into the grass.

"Ray Junior you get off of there before I whip you," Dad said.

Freeman and Mama walked across the clearing toward us.

"She don't mind none," Freeman called out. "Them's kids, they don't mean no disrespect. Lacy was the patient kind, never once saw her lose her temper."

Ray-Ray stood on top of the grave and clicked the radio on and off and spun the dials like he was tuning a station.

"Ain't got no batteries in it," Freeman went on. "Lacy, she listened to the radio day and night. Back then there was some good radio on. I always told her she loved our old tube radio more than she loved me. I got it inlhe cabinet still. Must weigh more than twenty-five pound. I said to her she'd carry it with her on chores if she could lift it, should've had it on wheels. When them transistors came out, thaf s a Japanese radio, I bought it for her and planted it in her stone."

Ray-Ray asked why there wasn't any date under the second name and Mama told him to hush up.

"Thaf s 'cause that baby hardly was born before he died. Went both of 'em together, and her barely turned woman." Freeman had his arms crossed in front of him. "Thaf s my boy, Elijah. Iguess he'd be aboutyour age, born nineteen-forty-seven," he said to Dad.

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PAUL SCHOFIELD

"I was born in nineteen-fifty-four," Dad said.

Ray-Ray kept switching the radio on and off.

"I figured she could listen good enough even if it didn't have no batteries in it," Freeman said.

Dad smiled and laughed like when he read the Sunday comics: quiet, to himself.

"I leave it on, in case she wants to talk something through it," Freeman said. "Ain't no need for batteries."

'Talk through it?" Ray-Ray asked.

"Hush now, Ray," Mama said.

"We'd best be getting on," Dad said. "We got to make time." Freeman had already started walking back up to the house.

Dad took a brand-new bag of chewing tobacco out of the glove box in his truck, RedMan, the extra-large si2e, and gave it to Freeman. He told him we were much obliged for his hospitality and he wished he could give him more to show our thanks.

"Pshaw," Freeman said, waving his hands. "Come back." He took a wad of tobacco out of the pouch and put it in his mouth.

Ray wasn't in sight and Dad yelled "Ray-Ray! Ray Junior, get a move on!"

Ray came running out from behind the house, Freeman's old hound dog trotting easily behind.

"Lefs go," Dad said. "Got to make time."

"I want to ride in back too," Ray-Ray said.

"You can't," I told him.

Dad acted like he didn't hear me and he looked at Ray-Ray, sizing him up. "Go on," he said. "Get in, but don't stand up." Ray-Ray nodded his head yes and climbed up over the tailgate.

"I'm riding up front," I said. I got in the truck and slammed the door.

Mama and Dad climbed into the truck and we told old man Freeman good-bye. "Come back," he said again, and he spit tobacco

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LISTENING

juice into the grass.

Dad started up the truck and didn't say anything until we got out onto the interstate.

"Ought to make Mobile by supper time," Dad said. "That breakfast should last us all day." He rolled up the window because of the wind.

"Living up there alone for fifty years, imagine that," Mama said.

Dad adjusted the vents on the dashboard, lowered the sun visor in front of him. Then he put his arm on the back of the seat, around Mama's shoulders. We picked up speed on the interstate, heading south toward Mobile. I looked through the rear window at Ray-Ray. He sat against the tailgate of the truck, wiping cement dust off Lacy's blue transistor radio and slapping it against the palm of his hand, putting it up against his ear, listening with his eyes closed and his head tilted to one side, listening.

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Contributors Authors Heather Fisher is a recent emigree from California, where she used to backpack among greedy marmots. She lives in Riverdale with her nerdy husband and mouse-breathing cat, Mortimer. She is an anthropology major in the School of General Studies at Columbia University, but is still addicted to the Simpsons. Doh! Victoria Geduld graduated from Columbia University cum laude with a BA in Literature and Creative Writing in 1985 and an MBA in Finance in 1988. In 1995, she received an MA at New York University in English and Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in English and Italian in Spazio Umano, and, in 1995, she received honorable mention in the Hemingway Festival Competition for her short story, "Now We'll Skate." Victoria is a part-time financial consultant and stock broker. She lives in New York City.

DaciaGrayberisaGeneralStudiesstudentfromCambridge,NewYork, where there are more cows than people.

Alba Delia Hernandez is a recent graduate of the General Studies Writing Program. She was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Brooklyn.

For fun Alba practices Yoga and takes African Dance classes.

Janice L Sugarman Wally and Grandson, 1989

Rafique Kathwari, midnight's child, was born and raised in Kashmir.

He is grateful to Glenda Adams, Agha Shahid Ali, Joyce Maio, and Sue Shapiro's Tuesday Night Workshop for guidance and insight.

Julienne Kim is graduating with a BA in theater. "Lachrymosa" is her first published piece. Special thanks to Alan Ziegler.

Cinnamon McClinton lives in Brooklyn. She graduated from Kenyon College in 1994 and is now a writer and an assistant editor of the Anonymous Literary Journal.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Maria Olivas was born in Quezon City and raised in the Shenandoah Valley. She taught English in Japan for three years. Besides writing, she performs with Soh Daiko, a NYC-based Japanese drumming group.

"My Father Died..." and "... Child of Peace" are excerpts from her first novel. She thanks her friends, the Writing Program, and Quarto for their support.

Stephen Page was born in Detroit and raised in Hazel Park, Michigan.

After traveling the globe serving Corps and country, he enrolled in the Literature-Writing ProgramatColumbia University. Todate,he has had over thirty poems and one short story published. He is currently working on two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and one film script.

David Penin graduates fromColumbia College this year. An anthropology major at Columbia, David specialized his studies to the use of compost toilets in rural economies of small island nations. He hopes to continue his research in this area. David is also a past student of Georgetown University and the Bard College International Honors Program.

Paul Schofield was raised in East Texas. The two stories in this issue of Quarto are part of a collection of eleven stories that he finished writing earlier this year.

BarrieStevensisagraduateof Barnard College and Harvard University.

She lives in Huntington, New York, with her three-year-old son, Dylan, and is currently working on fiction.

Abigail Susik is a first-year student from Clearwater, Horida. Besides writing and reading poetry, she enjoys photography, silent films, and sushi. Her main poetic influencesarePlath,0'Hara, Cera volo,andRilke.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Artists Yukio Gion was born in Japan, where he studied literature at Waseda University. He wrote and directed four plays before coming to New York in 1993, where he currently works as a photographer.

Olga Promyshlyanskaya grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1991. This spring she graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where she majored in photography. Her recent work, My Life with Other Faces, appeared in Tisch's 19% annual exhibition.

Jacqueline Leigh Snyder is a 19% graduate of Columbia College. She is currently working in New York City as a color forecaster. She would like to thank Professor Archie Rand.

James Starace has been taking photographs for six years. He is working on a long-term project photographing New York City's subway musicians. He is also pursuing an acting career and can be seen in the upcoming Tim Roth movie No Way Home. He lives in Manhattan.

Janice L. Sugarman graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1983 as a photography major, specializing in editorial, environmental, and documentary portraits. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and Cover magazine. Her photography has been exhibited at the Gallery Eclectic, the Ethical Culture School, and the Trinity School, where she taught photography. Her work is currently on exhibit at the Severoceske Museum in Liberec, Bohemia, and will travel to the Naproskovo Museum, Prague, Czechoslovakia, as part of the Professional Women Photographers group show, "All Americans." Collectors of her photographs include Janis Ian, Amy Ray (of Indigo Girls), Linda Ronstadt, and Billy Payne. She has photographed many celebrities, most notably Pavarotti, Rosemary Clooney, Keith Richards, and Carly Simon.

She lives in Manhattan with her cat Brie.

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Janice L. Sugarman Dead Clown, 1990

HEATHER FISHER VICTORIA GEDULD YUKIO GION DACIA GRAYBER ALBA DELIA HERNANDEZ RAFIQUE KATHWARI JULIENNE S. KIM CINNAMON MCCLINTON MARIA OLIVAS STEPHEN PAGE DAVID PERRIN OLGA PROMYSHLYANSKAYA PAUL SCHOFIELD JACQUELINE LEIGH SNYDER JAMES STARACE BARRIE STEVENS JANICE L. SUGARMAN ABIGAIL SUSIK