Revolution House Magazine Volume 2.1 by Revolution House Magazine

REVOLUTION HOUSE STAFF EXECUTIVE EDITOR Alisha Karabinus MANAGING EDITORS Fati Z. Ahmed Elaina Smith CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITORS Jaime Herndon Jami Nakamura Lin FICTION EDITORS Karen Britten Carol H. Hood Sarah Kamlet Koty Neelis Katie Oldaker POETRY EDITORS Jonathan Dubow Karissa Morton Susannah Nevison Staci R. Schoenfeld

Cover Art by Fabio Sassi

It’s springtime here, a new year, a new cycle of issues. We can hardly believe that this is our second year of operations, that we came through the first and were able to reach so many people. This year we look to expand: bigger and better issues, new ideas, new offerings. It’s spring, after all. It’s a time for growth. In this issue, you’ll see the first evidence of those plans. Not only do we have a fine selection of fiction and poetry, but we’re presenting our first ever special section, the Spring Creative Nonfiction Spectacular, along with our first Editors’ Choice prize. And spectacular it is, in every sense of the word. We read so many wonderful submissions and had to turn so many away—submissions that, on another day, we might have published. That’s the hardest part of this process: when our needs change, or we get an influx of certain kinds of essays, stories, and poems and have to make difficult decisions. With this contest, we were awash in essays of all types, each better than the last. Sifting through and choosing these creative nonfiction pieces was tough, but we ended up with a wonderfully wide array of work. Dustin Michael’s quietly affecting graphic memoir is here, as well as another piece of William Henderson’s memoir-in-process, this time with heartbreaking photo support. We first got to know Mr. Henderson last year, when we nominated his “Mon Coeur” for a Pushcart Prize, and we’ve become very invested in his story. But we have more, so much more, beautiful essays and memoirs, little scoops of thought and memory, like the very short offerings by Harmony Neal, Jill Kolongowski, and Grace Hobbs, and those that push and pull on the form, as with Chelsey Clammer’s incredible “Bodyhome.” On the sliding scale of literary magazines, we tend to skew more often toward the traditional narrative (with some notable exceptions), but we know what we like, and we loved “Bodyhome.” The lush, naked beauty of the prose resonates with power at every turn, and we’re thrilled to award Ms. Clammer our first Editors’ Choice prize. While our Creative Nonfiction Spectacular takes up a large amount of space in this issue, we’re pleased to present a lovely selection of fiction and poetry as well. We open the rest of the issue with a trio of deeply resonant poems from Nick McRae, poems that serve as a beautiful bridge from creative nonfiction to the rest of the issue. Here, too, there’s new work by the legendary Marge Piercy, as well as three very different short stories by three very different authors. We hope you’ll enjoy everything as much as we did. As a final tidbit, we also have an interview with the fantastic Dan Chaon, who was kind enough to talk to us about his new collection Stay Awake and his love of a good dragon kill. In an issue of firsts, we’re happy to present Mr. Chaon as our first interviewee. He is an icon for the RevHousers, and we are so pleased to have had the chance to sit down and talk with him. More than ever before, we’re offering up a bouquet of goodies—truly something for everyone. And there’s so much more to come this year. We can’t wait to tell you all about it.

See you in the summer,

SPRING Spring Creative Nonfi c t i o n S p e c t a c u l a r Daughters Jill Kolongowski

Treasure This Ecstasy

Christopher Martin

Swimming

Made of Iron

Cassia Hameline

Snapshot

Marilyn Martin

When a Drunken Man Tells You His Secrets

Lisbeth Davidow

Green Lemons

Chelsey Clammer

Internal Architecture

Dustin Michael

Bodyhome

William Henderson

That Spark

Kirby Wright

Weights and Measures

Grace Hobbs

Harmony Neal

2012 Introduction to Czech Studies

Nick McRae

Martin, Slovakia

Nick McRae

Benediction for Slovakia

Metamorphosis

Nick McRae

Tara Deal

249

Clark Chatlain

Vectors

Gwen E. Kirby

Don’t send dead flowers

Marge Piercy

Walking to Buy Apples

105

Jackie K. White

The Parents’ Row

103

Christopher O. McCarter

Body Cento from the Decade I Edited (Year Two)

102

106

Brooks Rexroat

A Conversation with Dan Chaon

113

DAUGHTERS Jill Kolongowski One of my friends got pregnant. She was my first close friend to get pregnant, so we all spent a great deal of time pretending everything wasn’t about to change. I traveled home to see her and to touch her protruding belly, a tiny globe, another world. I watched her hands. She stroked her belly like a reflex, as if to remind herself that it was still there. We all orbited her and marveled at creation. Her husband loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. I asked if he was excited to be a father. “I cried when I saw the ultrasound,” he said. “Everything in her life will be pink and soft and good.” I realized he had not answered me at all. My friends and I planned a baby shower and readied all sorts of pink offerings for the little daughter. It gave us something useful to do with our own hands. Before the shower, I stood in the diaper aisle of the grocery store. It makes sense that babies would have different-sized diapers. It should have been obvious. There are different-sized babies. I stood bewildered between the shelves with my empty hands at my sides, nowhere to rest them. Organic? Biodegradable? Leak guard protection? In the end I chose diapers like I choose wine—I picked the second-cheapest ones, casting guilty glances to the left and right. I walked toward the checkout with a fluttering uneasiness in my chest. I was going to give my friend’s baby daughter some cut-rate diapers. Motherhood was so far away, something I’d maybe be good at later, but here it was in a claustrophobic supermarket aisle. I’m supposed to be a grown woman. I have a 401k and health insurance. I pay my rent on time. But I had no idea that diapers came in different sizes. The day of the shower, even though it was February in Michigan, we hoped for warm rain, a thaw, budding flowers—a symmetry of weather, and maybe then things would make sense. Instead, guests came in covered in white mantles of snow and left their coats to drip in the closet. Inside was completely pink, celebrating everything girl. I thought we might’ve overdone it, but everyone was talking about ballet slippers and teacups. My friend and her husband sat, a little shell-shocked, at the front table. They practiced saying the word daughter. He sweated in a blue dress shirt, looking so much the boy in all that pink and making me think that we’re all so young that we can’t know what the fuck we’re doing. They held hands and looked out at the snow, but mostly at each other. After the shower, in the couple’s apartment, we stood in the living room and stared at the piles of gifts. “What are we going to do?” my friend said, her hands clasped over her belly. I had no answer, so I gathered diapers and

started stacking them in the closet by size, looking for some order in counting, in the cadence of numbers. My friend reached for my hand and placed it on her stomach. Her face had changed, like a dam breaking, the hard edges washed away. The sweep of a small heel or elbow pushed against my fingers. A gentle pressure, the side of a rounded stone. I remembered hearing the baby’s heartbeat on her home ultrasound machine, fast, a beat like hummingbirds’ wings. My own heart hammered. I wanted to tell them that it would be all right. I wanted to tell them you do what you can. I fled my friends’ diaper-strewn apartment and went to my father’s house to remember I was still a daughter. In the morning, I woke to my father banging around in the kitchen, unpacking grocery bags and swinging cupboard doors. He had already gone to the store and set out cups and plates and silverware while I was asleep. I sat cross-legged at the kitchen table in my pajamas. “Good morning. Do you want a grapefruit?” he asked, even though I could see he was already cutting into one. I was thinking about diapers again, so much to do for one tiny thing, that miniature heel in the palm of my hand. Everything would not be pink and soft and good. So many hard ways to love her—driving across the state in the middle of the night so she will fall asleep in her carseat; cutting out a splinter while she cries; getting her a white limo for prom; hiding your anger and worry and fear when she is almost arrested for drunk driving; trying to save her from all things sharp and hurtful, forgiving yourself when you can’t; letting go, holding on—my father set a bowl in front of me. I am twenty-four years old and my father had cut my grapefruit into seven careful sections. He cleaned the knife and set it gently in a drawer.

Kolongowski

TREASURE THIS ECSTACY Christopher Martin [Winter Visitors] (January 2011) Just outside my window, birds descend from the bare limbs of sweet gums and water oaks, visiting my feeder, gathering around the seeds I’ve strewn across the snow. I sit on the floor and watch them as my wife and son sleep in the midmorning cold. The dim light filters through clouds and reveals an array of wings and winter. The titmice and Carolina chickadees are constants most of the year but the weather this morning brings them in droves; they flit about the feeder hanging from the porch awning, sometimes clinging to icicles until a place at the feeder clears. The feathers of the titmice match the sky, once pregnant with snow but now relieved of its labor—wispy slate blue overcoming the gathering, rolling smoke-dark of the night’s storm. The chickadees retain the shades of storm on their bodies, their midnight-black caps, their icegray wings and breasts. Unlike the titmice and chickadees that will take their sunflower seeds and retreat to the trees to crack and eat them—alighting on the feeder but for a moment—house finches, gray-brown with graces of crimson, cover the feeder, eating their seeds on the spot, rarely moving until they’ve eaten seed after seed. They chatter in the gusts of wind and the advances of swifter birds. Last night I set out extra blocks of suet—which I make myself with peanut butter, cornmeal, and leftover grease—knowing a snowstorm was stirring, a rarity here in the Georgia piedmont, and that the birds would need more energy to get through the coming days and nights. I put one of the suet cakes in a wire feeder and placed the extras on the porch rail. Chickadees and wrens visit the suet cage at times before proceeding to the seed feeder, and every so often I watch a downy woodpecker bob through the air, as though underwater, and latch onto the cage which twists and sways with the bird’s landing. My wife stirs, opens our bedroom door, steps softly to the bathroom. Several bluebirds—as dull a blue as the season, approaching gray—descend on the porch rail to peck at the suet cakes with pine warblers and wrens, a procession of blue, pollen-yellow, and copper set against the snow and the dingy white paint of the porch. “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep,” wrote Thoreau in contemplation of Walden Pond in winter. As juncos, sparrows, and mourning doves gather on the ground to eat the seeds resting on top of the ice, and as a cardinal flickers in the deep green of a holly bush, I sense that same kind of somnolent question, which my wife wakes

and puts to words: “Weren’t you just talking about wanting Cannon to have a brother or sister?” she asks as she opens the creaking bathroom door, a pregnancy test in her hand. [Caves] The doctors told Deana and me that our daughter wouldn’t turn on her own, that Deana wouldn’t go into labor. This after other things: that our unborn daughter’s kidneys had too much fluid in them, that there was too much space between her spine and her brain, that she was going to be very big— macrosomic was the word they used. It seemed that every appointment they would ask us about gestational diabetes, would ask Deana whether or not she had passed the test. She had. “Oh,” they would say. “Just a big baby then.” The doctors told us not to worry about the macrosomic part. It would necessitate a C-section, they said, but otherwise there was no problem. For the extra fluid in our daughter’s kidneys and especially for the space between her spine and brain, the doctors ordered several sonograms and eventually, when those didn’t provide clear enough images, an MRI. I brought books with me to Deana’s MRI appointment, knowing it would take a good bit of time. We talked in the waiting room, Deana and I, both a little worried, both a little hopeful. When they called Deana’s name, I decided I would not take the books in and so I went to put them and all our other things into the locker they gave us. As I was about to close the locker, a nurse asked me if I had anything to read. I pulled The Brothers Karamazov out of Deana’s purse and took it into the machine-filled room, its great plastic cave in the middle. Years before, not too long after we’d met, Deana took me caving at Raccoon Mountain, just outside Chattanooga. I only panicked once, trying to climb up through a tight crevice, unable to see where I was going, my slick boots slipping on a hill of pebbles and rock shards, no grip at all. But Deana was behind me, in the cave with me, there above a shallow pool, an abode of blind salamanders. I was not pregnant with a child or with fears for that child’s health; I had the earth if nothing else, contact with the ground, the musty mud, and could lie down, gather myself, plunge upward once peace settled. (“Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.”) Deana’s belly nearly touched the sides of the white tunnel as she entered. (“God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up.”) Soon noise drowned the room. I sat in my chair, wearing clunky earphones, cold,

Martin

clutching my book like a rolled newspaper. (“But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds.”) Deana panicked in the scanner, pressed the call button for the nurse, and came out crying. I put down my book, unopened and bent, and walked to Deana, kissed her forehead, gave her water. (“Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears.”) The nurse consoled her and, once Deana was calm, sent her back in the scanner. (“Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.”) A few days later, we went back to the maternal fetal diagnostic center to talk about the MRI results. “You know how I told you I’ve only been wrong once in the past thirty years?” the doctor said. We nodded. “Well, I lied. I’ve been wrong many times. This is one of those times. Your baby’s going to be fine. Big, but fine.” Deana got an automated call a day or so later telling us her C-section was scheduled for September 8th, for us to be at the hospital by 5 AM with our paperwork. “Is there any chance I’ll go into labor on my own?” Deana asked her obstetrician at the next appointment, two weeks before the 8th. “None. And in fact you don’t want to. You’ll still need a C-section no matter what, and if you do go into labor, go straight to the hospital. But you won’t. She’s not coming on her own.” Deana nodded, I nodded, and the doctor continued: “We’re almost there, kiddo. You’re almost there. I’ll see you next week. How’s the 6th? We can talk details about the C-section then. Just get some rest. You’re pregnant with a toddler. This baby might come out walking.” [Water] In the predawn hours of September 2nd, I woke to Deana banging on our bedroom wall from the bathroom, yelling at me to get up. “I’m up, I’m up,” I said. I knew. She yelled at me to come to the bathroom. The scene I recall in the bathroom is one of the many, many reasons I get confused by the sentimental cloud that hovers over much of the common discourse on pregnancy. I once wrote an essay, for example, about the birth of my first child, my son, which included a realistic, concrete description of Deana as she began her labor, and I took it to a manuscript critique group. “What is going on?” one reviewer commented on that particular scene. “Shouldn’t this be a tender moment? She seems far too grumpy.” Saying that my wife’s “water broke” that morning of the 2nd would be a

Martin

profound understatement. Anything I could say would be an understatement, in fact. This essay is an understatement. But the spirit of God moved upon the face of those waters, to be sure. The spirit of God moved upon the face of that water there in our bathroom, on the face of the water and the blood, on the face of the child inside my wife, the little girl moving there in the wake of the waters. Breaking water. Flowing spirit. Moans. Contractions. We called the hospital and went on our way, leaving our son at home, toddling in the living room, holding his blanket, sleep still in his eyes, in the care of his grandmother. “Opal’s coming,” I told him. “Opal come,” he said. [Waiting] No room in the inn. Just a hallway. A nurse rolled out a room divider, a blue canvas stretched across a metal frame. “We’re growing here at Northside Cherokee,” she told us. Deana labored there in the hall, behind the rolling wall, for nearly three hours. No epidural, either—they couldn’t give her that until they took her to the operating room. Passersby looked through the gaps in the temporary wall, hearing Deana’s groans, averting their eyes when their eyes caught mine. It turns out there was also no operating room. The nurses said something about a plumbing issue, water breaking through the ceiling of one of the operating floors, flooding some of the rooms, making them unsuitable for surgery. So Deana labored there in the hallway, waiting, contractions growing closer and closer. Deana’s obstetrician came for us at last and down we went to a recently cleared OR. The doctors wheeled Deana into a room and left me in the hall, in my scrubs, waiting. “Opal come,” my son had said, not really knowing what he meant. “Opal come.” I’m not sure I knew what those two words meant, either. Doctors and nurses walked by, congratulating me, asking me how I was doing. One doctor told me she wasn’t used to seeing fathers waiting out in the hall to go in the OR but she was glad I was there. I didn’t know whether this meant they usually didn’t do C-sections on this floor or whether they did and fathers didn’t usually come; but either way, I appreciated her words.

1 All quotes in this section are from The Brothers Karamazov, Book VI (“The Russian Monk”), Ch. 2 (“Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima”)

Martin

[Seeing] A doctor opened the door and told me to come in; he gave me a swivel chair and I sat beside my wife. I held her hand, touched her face, tried to let her know I was there without making her more uncomfortable. We had been through this before, Deana and I. Cannon, our first, had come by C-section, too, though his was not planned. After seven hours of intense labor, on Christmas morning of 2009, the doctors called it a “failure to descend” and so arranged the operation there on the spot. Neither Deana nor I knew what to expect, and so our emotions that morning were of a different kind than those surrounding our daughter’s birth on this September morning not quite two years later. We were excited about Opal’s arrival, certainly, but we were not quite so worried. Despite the early challenges—the health concerns for our unborn daughter, the MRI, the surprise labor, the hallway, the long wait for an OR to open up—we both felt a little calmer this second time around. And so I sensed more about the room and the operation itself: The burning smell of laser-cut veins. The surgeon behind the blue curtain who said “This isn’t working.” Deana’s moans and violent tremors, much more violent than when Cannon was born. Her irrepressible jolts and jerks when the surgeons started tugging on Opal. Her release, like the exhalation of a Pentecost wind, when she heard Opal crying—a sound we had not heard right away when our son first entered the world. One of the surgeons, Deana’s obstetrician, said that we had a little Deana lookalike. Deana smiled and laughed amid her tears and trembling. I asked the doctors if I could see my daughter. They let me, and I kissed Deana’s forehead, walked around the curtain, and again noticed the room: the white radiance; the wires and machines; the lights; the spatters of blood on a blue sheet, on the hands of the surgeons, on their surgical masks; the little buckets full of blood and bodily fluids. And there she was, there in a clear plastic bin, kicking a little, crying a little, gracing me, this is my daughter, dove on the Jordan. She took my finger. I touched her dark hair. There were ghosts there, too, a crowd of them; they had followed me in the room before the doctor shut the door, and two came to the front, two smiling old women with curly white hair, who stood behind me, their loose-skinned, warm hands on my back, looking over my shoulder. “Hey, Opal Mary,” I whispered to the newborn girl.

Martin

[Night] Music meant nourishment and encouragement to me when I was growing up, in my adolescent years through high school. I would often go to bed with headphones in my ears playing old R.E.M. but sometimes older, slower songs. Sam Cooke’s songs, introduced to me by my father, were some of my favorites. This nightly ritual helped me stave off the darkness a little longer so that I could fall asleep. I remember one night that I was away from home playing Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” over and over. I must have been about thirteen at the time, just shortly after the emotional and psychological abuse I endured at home had peaked. I remember crying as I listened to the music. I don’t know if this time of my life is what my mother was thinking of when she sent me a text message the day after my daughter was born to tell me she’d been having nightmares about me, but I’d wager it is. [Cupid] I held my crying daughter, on her second day in the world, trying to pacify her. I patted her back, rocked her, gently moved her up and down, spoke consolingly to her. Nothing worked and she cried on so I tried singing. I started with old R.E.M. which my son always seemed to like, though I tried to think of songs with some feminine reference. “She wore bangles, she wore bells on her toes when she jumped like a fish, like a flying fish…” “That’s the girl of the hour by the water tower’s watch…” But they did not work. Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” did not work. A couple others I tried did not work. And then I remembered Sam Cooke. “Cupid, draw back your bow and let your arrow go straight to my Opal’s heart for me, nobody but me…” She stopped crying and looked up, sensing me, aware, if in but the smallest way, of my shadow and my voice. I kept singing and she kept looking. “Don’t know much about history…” “A friend of mine told me one early morning…” “How I used to ramble, how I used to roam, oh but since I met that Opal of mine, all I do is stay at home…” “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, to show my love…” I realize that singing those particular songs to her probably had nothing to do with the end of her tears. But they had everything to do with the beginning of the end of mine.

Martin

[Light] Out the window, on the roof, against a backdrop of shadowy pines, beneath a congregation of rain clouds, four crows have descended. They caw and chase one another and play tug-oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;-war and keep-awayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;two with an empty plastic bag and the other two with a strip of tar paper they tore from the roof. Here, on this side of the window, Deana feeds Opal. I take Opal moments later. I lie on my cot, looking out the window through sunflowers in a vase and open blinds at the slate blue sky swept with clouds and gathering darkness while my daughter lies on my chest, falls asleep as the sky turns to ink. She smells like cinnamon and milk, this little light in my arms, rising and falling with each breath I take, my chest rising and falling in the peace of her sleep.

Martin

SWIMMING Grace Hobbs When my mother died I was too young to understand it–too young to do much of anything besides cry and sleep, so I spent the first three years of my life being shuttled between the houses of grandparents and sympathetic friends. I experience death the same way now: as tears that only stop when ragged sobs are soothed into the slow rhythms of sleep, eyes swollen shut, barely able to breathe through my nose. My father was devastated. We don’t speak much about that time. He remarried a little after my third birthday, to the woman who taught me that family is who you choose. I made my stance clear early on: I howled for my father during the wedding, and when the ceremony was over I proceeded to eat, with the nonchalance of a practiced antagonist, the bottom tier of brightly frosted flowers on their wedding cake. It took years to build up love between us. I’d rage and disobey and dismiss her attempts at closeness, imperious and implacable. You’re not my real mom! I’d scream. I don’t have to listen to you! I hate you! I give her credit for not giving up, for not resigning herself to an uneasy peace at best. She gave me a hard love that turned me into a hard believer. She never let me forget that when she chose my father, she chose me, too. I learned to swim when my stepsister coaxed me into our pool and slyly slid off one water wing, then the other. I was terrified of the lopsided feeling, one arm above the water and one below it, stretched out and beating frantically as if they really were wings, as if I could, with enough effort, bring myself to hover over the water. When my sister slid the other wing off I grabbed her immediately, clutching her arm like a sailor clutches driftwood at sea. She pried me off and stepped away. “Kick,” she instructed. “And scoop the water with your hands. Swim to me.” My sister kept herself just out of reach, forcing me to do circles around the pool until finally I managed to push myself forward to grab her arms again. “I can swim!” I screamed, grinning hugely. “Good,” she said, unfazed. “I’m going to get out now. You stay in and swim some more.” As she arranged herself in one of the patio chairs I became braver, pushing off the wall of the pool and kicking madly to the other side. When I put my head under the water and opened my eyes I could see the shadows moving at the bottom of the pool, swimming with golden minnows. I didn’t think yet to dive for them, though all I would have grasped was the uneven vinyl liner. Finally, tired, I paddled to the ladder, stared at my water wings

across the pool. “Come on,” I commanded. “Swim to me.” Sometimes I think about what it would be like to lose my second mother and I don’t think I could do it. I’ve faced a lot of death and I’ve watched both my parents cry over their parents and seen coffins and urns lowered into graves but I’m afraid if my own parents died I would die with them. If I lost my second mother I would crawl into the long wood box and curl up like an earthworm, ready to sleep below the ground. That’s what I’m afraid of, but I also know I’m not allowed to die. I have a family who chose me the way I want to choose you and I owe them not to die. I’m incredibly grateful for their anger, for the way they would rage at my unfairness and selfishness if I died with my parents. They demand my strength. I can’t say to them I hate you or You’re not my real family! because they’ll call bullshit and refuse to leave me alone until I tell the truth. Which is only that we need each other equally; every time I say to swim to me they answer with I’ll swim to you. We move toward each other, circling, sometimes touching, keeping afloat. When I open my eyes I can see you underwater, diving for the golden minnows in my pool. You don’t care that it’s only a trick of the light and the water; you believe in things I’d long forgotten. I choose you as my family. Swim to me.

Hobbs

MADE OF IRON Kirby Wright My father and I boarded a night flight from Honolulu scheduled to arrive in Denver at ten in the morning. I’d already said my goodbyes to my mother, kid sister Julie, and big brother Barry at the gate. They’d given me plumeria and orchid leis and I promised to call collect every Sunday. My mother and Julie had come home a day early from their summer in Boston to see me off. She’d said things went well with her old boyfriend Fletcher but refused to elaborate. I could tell she was pleased by the attention because she laughed at little things and her voice was full of joy. I’d found out from Barry that Fletcher had taken her to a Brookline piano bar where she sang, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” As I headed down the ramp, I knew going to the Punahou Prom with an Asian girl had distanced me from my mother. She didn’t want to hear Laura’s name and she avoided topics that might lead me back to her. Because my mother wasn’t getting love from my father, she expected Barry and me to make up for it. She figured that, since she’d put herself on the line to keep the family together, she’d earned an unconditional love that prohibited her sons from loving other women. After admitting I was attracted to Laura, my mother treated me in a perfunctory manner, the way a jilted girlfriend treats a former boyfriend. I’d taken Laura out that summer while my mother was away but I didn’t tell her about the dates until Barry mentioned it. My brother was now number one son because he’d become her confidante. She waved good-bye with one arm around his waist and he seemed embarrassed because he kept looking around the airport to see if anyone was watching. Julie stood apart from them, as if conceding Barry was the favorite. There was a sparkle in my mother’s green eyes and I knew the intrigue with Fletcher had revived her. And she had Barry to keep her company while the other two men in her life were heading off to Colorado. I followed my father into the 747. He’d given me a vinyl briefcase for graduation and that, along with a windbreaker, was my carry-on. I’d stuffed the briefcase with packages of Yick Lung mango seed, cans of Mauna Loa macadamia nuts, a Hawaiian Beach calendar, and a two-pound sack of Hinode rice. My father found our seats in economy. He’d reserved seats in the tail section because he’d read an article that that was the safest place to be if we crashed. His worst-case scenario landed us in a middle aisle, five seats from the nearest window. I stowed my briefcase in the overhead compartment. “Take off those leis,” my father said. “Why?” “Men in Denver don’t wear flowers.” “So what if I do?”

He waved a limp wrist. “They’ll think you’re a mahu.” “I don’t care what they think,” I said, keeping the leis on. My father had made reservations at The Brown Palace, the only hotel he knew in Colorado. He’d stayed there in 1949 when he drove his red convertible cross-country after graduating from Harvard. He’d dined on Rocky Mountain Oysters at the hotel and was curious if sheep balls were still being served. “Full of iron,” my father’d said. “Wha’d they taste like?” I’d asked. “Meatballs, only more gamy.” Our jet took off and I could make out the lights of Honolulu through a distant window. I spotted the blue rings of La Ronde Restaurant and the red lights at the Top of the Waikiki. The jet surged skyward and we entered a cloudbank. All signs of Oahu disappeared. I wondered how Laura was doing. She’d left early to catch the last session of summer school at Lewis & Clark; Ma and Pa Kwon weren’t exactly thrilled when I showed up at the airport with three strands of pikake for Laura. We’d had two dates before she left for Portland and both times Ma told me, “Go find nice haole girl.” There were no plans for Laura to fly to Colorado or for me to fly to Oregon but Christmas vacation wasn’t too far off and we promised to write. There wasn’t a movie on our flight so I kept my overhead light on. My father asked a blonde stewardess with tan legs for The Wall Street Journal and she brought him a copy. He checked out her legs as she made her way down the aisle. It was strange seeing my father check out other women. I was sure he had fantasies about them and maybe certain ones reminded him of girls or women he used to make love to. I sensed a sexual tension in him, a frustration just below the surface. I figured he wanted to be young again so he could have a second chance to sow his wild oats. I wondered how it made him feel to have sex with the same woman for twenty years when he knew, deep down, that she didn’t really love him. I opened Julie’s Bon Voyage card and cried reading the sentiments. I was worried about her fragile ego in a household controlled by a domineering father and a narcissistic mother. Then I thought about Barry. He’d quit roofing and was working construction in Waikiki because the pay was better—he said blue flies swarmed his pork adobo plate lunches and that scorpions were frequent guests inside the Porta-Potty. Co-workers called him “Jesus” because of his long blond hair. He refused to attend KCC and wanted to prove to my father he didn’t need college to be a success. He had two guns and was still living at home. There were times when Barry appeared so All-American and other times when he seemed capable of violence. Our

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last summer on Moloka’i had been bittersweet. Barry seemed to relax more in the primal setting of Wailau Valley and the adventure cooled Barry’s animosity. We were using nicknames again but Barry understood we were heading in opposite directions. I knew he’d secretly hold going to school on the mainland against me because I was doing what my father wanted. And then I wondered if maybe Barry had never wanted to go away to college because he was terrified to leave the house. I figured he’d invested so much of himself in being my mother’s savior and proving my father wrong about everything that, without those desires driving him, he’d probably drift aimlessly through life. He was the equivalent of an institutionalized yet rebellious prisoner, only the home was the prison with my father as warden. The Wright family was something I didn’t want to be part of anymore and that was my reason for leaving. The pilot said the sun was rising over the Rocky Mountains. I walked over to the emergency door and gazed out the tiny window. Colorado resembled crumpled brown wrap. I wondered why John Denver got so excited about it. It all felt like a mistake— being with my father, heading east to school, going without a friend. I returned to my seat and watched my father gulp orange juice. Gramma thought I looked like him. The half-moons in his bifocals made his eyes look huge—you couldn’t tell he was Hawaiian unless you noticed they slanted. His hair was more salt than pepper and he’d slicked it back with Yardley Brilliantine. The pomade smelled like a doctor’s office. His sideburns had finally grown in. He folded up his tray and locked it into place in the seat in front of him. He shook a plastic tumbler full of ice the way a gambler shakes dice before a toss. I fingered the plumeria on my leis—the blossoms had turned brown. The orchids were limp. I took them off and crammed them into the compartment in front of me. I checked out the cabin—most of the passengers around us had their necks at odd angles with pillows folded under their heads. A few read. A bald steward walked by and took my father’s tumbler. “Say, fellow,” my father said, “what’s the temperature in Denver?” “In the fifties,” the steward said, “but it’ll warm into the seventies.” “They call it ‘The Mile High City,’ don’t they?” “That’s right, sir. It’s a mile high.” “Cheesus,” he said. We rented a Buick Skylark and drove to The Brown Palace. My father was disappointed Rocky Mountain Oysters were no longer on the menu. We both ordered trout at The Palace Arms, a hotel restaurant displaying guns and swords from the Napoleonic Wars. There were candelabras, crystal

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chandeliers, and golden flags with fleur-de-lis emblems. The waiters hurried by in blue tuxedos. My father ordered a double martini on the rocks. “Now, Kirby,” my father began, “have you picked a major?” I sipped my water. “English.” “Good. English will help you analyze and write. Very few law school graduates can write. Writing term papers develops your analytical abilities.” “I like a different kind of writing.” “Oh? And what kind is that?” “Poetry.” My father smirked. “Poetry doesn’t pay a damn thing.” “Some poets make money.” “Name one.” “Robert Frost.” “Yeah,” he said, “but that’s only because JFK had him read at his inauguration. Ninety-nine per cent of poets don’t have a pot to pee in.” “Allen Ginsberg does okay.” “That guy’s a jerk.” He unfolded his napkin and put it on his lap. “Look, I’m not sending you to Colorado to write poetry. You’ll end up digging ditches like Barry.” “Barry works construction.” My father pulled off his glasses. “That work involves digging ditches, especially down in Waikiki. Can’t you guess what’s under all the asphalt?” “Coral?” “Water, and lots of it. The Ala Wai flows right under it. I should know, I draw up all the big contracts.” “Barry makes good money.” “It might seem good now,” my father said, “but it’ll never support a family. Barry’s in for a rude awakening if he thinks he can make it doing manual labor.” “He wants to start his own company.” My father took his napkin off the table and placed it on his lap. “Another pipe dream,” he said. “I’m giving Barry one year to come to his senses before I kick him out.” The waiter delivered trout on bone-white platters shaped like fish. There was rice pilaf, steamed broccoli, and a sprig of mint. “Careful,” the waiter said, “these plates are hot.” “That’s looks good,’” my father said. “Doesn’t it look good, Kirbo?” “Good enough to eat.”

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The waiter smiled. “May I bring you gentlemen some tartar sauce?” “None for me,” my father said. I put my napkin on my lap. “I’ll have some.” “That sauce is full of fat,” my father said, “nothing but fat.” “Fat oils my arteries,” I told the waiter, “bring it on.” When the waiter left, my father cleared his throat. “Now there’s something I want to talk about, Kirby,” he said, “something I’ve been noticing.” I squeezed a wedge of lemon over my fish and took a bite. It tasted bland compared to mahi-mahi. “What have you noticed?” I asked. “You’re becoming a real wise guy. That could get you into lots of trouble in Colorado.” “I’ll take my chances.” “Nobody likes a wise guy. Some football player might let you have it.” “What if I let the football player have it first?” “Well, don’t call me if you get into a scrape out here.” “I won’t call you,” I said, “even if I’m in jail.” “Good,” he replied. That night, I listened to my father snore in the bed next to mine. Uncle Bobby had told me that, in the old days in Kaimuki, he and my father slept on cots in the parlor. Granny slept on a cot between the boys because she’d given her sons the bedrooms. My father could hear Dad Hickman snoring out on the porch and he fantasized about sneaking out and slitting Dad’s throat with the French bayonet Chipper had given him. No, he thought, killing him wasn’t the answer. It would be best to become successful to prove Dad Hickman wrong. My father knew he’d inherited his father’s looks and could pass for haole. But what would he do to escape Kaimuki? He thought about Uncle Carlos, Granny’s lawyer brother who’d stolen all the land. He decided to excel in school the way Carlos had. He would finish up at Saint Louis High and then win a scholarship to attend UH. He could work at the pineapple factory every summer as a straw boss supervising Filipinos. He smiled mulling over his plan. Then something strange happened in the parlor— Granny got up and headed for the back door. He pretended to be sleeping as he watched her turn the knob and walk out into the moonlight. She lifted one corner of Dad Hickman’s mosquito net and crawled in his bed.

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After toast and orange juice the next morning, we headed north to Boulder. I’d picked up brochures in the lobby advertising various tours and historical sites. I unfolded the brochures in the Skylark. “Let’s sightsee,” I suggested. “Sightsee what?” my father asked. “Pike’s Peak or Aspen. There’s this big Coors brewery, in a town called Golden. You like Coors, don’t you?” “Yes.” “It says you can drink all the Coors you want for free.” My father sneezed. His sneeze smelled like stale sneakers. “Christ,” he said, “I barely have time to drive you to Boulder and you wanna sightsee? You’re lucky I was able to get away at all.” We headed north through the wheat fields and I fiddled with the radio. The fields were flat and stretched as far as I could see. A threshing machine looked like a praying mantis on the horizon. We passed cows behind barbed wire and a house with a barn. Beside the barn was a big tank on stilts with GAS painted red on its side. “I can’t drive willy-nilly all over kingdom come,” my father said. “I have responsibilities at the firm. You’ll learn about responsibility later on when you’re married.” My father sneezed again and droplets speckled the windshield. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose. It felt like he hated me. But it wasn’t really hate—it was more like toleration. He saw me as a marginal son, as someone similar to my mother in brains and ambition, a mediocre child who would go through life excelling at nothing because there was no drive to get ahead. He blamed himself because he felt he’d spoiled Barry and me by giving us everything he didn’t have as a boy. I thought about the night I ran away from home and the fight we’d had out in the driveway. If he did spoil us it wasn’t with love. By denying us love, he’d shriveled up our insides and made us small men. I wondered what my mother had seen in him all those years ago and how she must have felt trapped in the tract home on Aukai Avenue with two toddlers and a husband she hated. She’d traded love for security to avoid ending up poor like her mother. I spun the dial and settled for Sly and the Family Stone singing, “Everybody is a Star.” “How can you listen to that god damn crap?” my father asked. “I thought you liked The Supremes?” “That’s not The Supremes,” he said. “Find the news, I wanna know how the Dow’s doing.”

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We arrived in Boulder. The town was nestled under cliffs that reminded me of pyramids. We walked the pine campus, opened my bank account, and had burgers at the Alfred E. Packer Grill. I had the feeling Barry was right— my life wasn’t my own because my father’s expectations had made me his investment. And with those expectations came a cold, calculating distance. It was as if he were standing back trying to gauge when I’d go up or down. His wise guy warning made me think I was begging for a fight. But the funny thing about it was that I was only a wise guy when he was around. We drove to Montgomery Ward at The Boulder Mall and a salesman with a bow tie approached us. “Anything I can help with?” the salesman asked. “I need some funky threads,” I said. “What do the students wear?” my father interrupted. “Right this way,” the salesman said, leading us to Men’s Clothing. I selected an orange down jacket. “This is cool,” I told my father. “That’s too loud,” he said, pulling a brown jacket with a thin lining off the sales rack. “Now this is more like it.” He did the same for my boots, pants, and shirts. I let him do it because it was easier that way. “What about BVDs,” my father muttered. “Don’t wear ‘em,” I said. “You what?” “Just kidding,” I answered. “I’ve got plenny.” “Good. Now let’s get you checked into that dorm and get an early dinner. I have a long drive ahead of me back to Denver.” “What’s wrong with staying one more day?” I asked. “You can sleep in my room at the dorm. Remember all that free Coors in Golden?” “I don’t care if it’s free,” he replied. Baker Hall was a red-bricked dorm in the middle of campus. It was a men’s dorm. Because I’d been on the waiting list and accepted late, it was the only dorm that still had vacancies. The first day of classes was a week away and Baker Hall was deserted. “What beautiful red brick,” my father said. “Just beautiful.” We got the key from a black secretary in the Headmaster’s office and she said the heat hadn’t been turned on yet. “He can take it,” my father said. She smiled and handed me a wool blanket. “Just in case.” We walked downstairs. My room was in the basement, at the end of a long hallway. The names of my two roommates—Gary Rennecker and

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Michael Dyes—were on a yellow card taped to the door. I slid the key in the lock and turned the knob. The door wouldn’t budge so I jammed my shoulder into it and that sprung it open. My father found the switch on the wall and turned on the light. “Now this is very comfortable,” he said as we entered. The room was cold. Webs covered the windows. There were bunk beds and two desks against the far wall. A single bed was in the middle of the room. I put the blanket on the single bed and tucked my clothes into a chest of drawers. “You’ll get lotsa studying done in here,” my father said. My father made it a point to meet the Resident Advisor down the hall. A tall guy wearing an Izod sweater answered the door. He introduced himself as JP Culhane and said he pitched for the Buffaloes. “Who are the Buffaloes?” I asked. “Our school mascot,” JP replied. “What’s your major, JP?” my father asked. “English.” “Do you plan on teaching?” “No. I plan on going to law school.” “Kirby, did you hear that? JP’s going to law school.” JP looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s very admirable,” my father said, “your parents must be very proud.” “They want me to be a doctor.” “I went to Harvard Law myself,” my father said. “Take it from me, law school is the best place to go, even if you don’t wanna practice.” “You really went to Harvard?” “Thanks to the GI Bill,” my father said. “It wasn’t easy, but I gutted it out.” “I’ll keep an eye on Kirby.” “I’d appreciate that,” my father said, “he’s a little green.” “How old are you?” JP asked me. “Seventeen.” Our last dinner was at Richard’s Steak House across from the CU campus. We sat down in a booth and ordered T-bones from a redhead with “Mandy” on her nametag. She had freckles and wore a green blouse with white

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bellbottoms. The steaks were sizzling when she delivered them to our table. My father perused the Wine List. “Can I get you some wine?” Mandy asked. “You look like a skier,” my father said. “Are you a skier?” “Whenever it snows.” My father put down the list. “A bottle of your best Chablis.” “My pleasure,” Mandy said and headed for the kitchen. “Chee,” my father said, “she’s a good-lookin’ gal. If I was single, I’d really go for her.” He took off his glasses and placed them on the table next to his wine glass. “Now look, Kirbo, this is your chance to date lotsa girls. Play the field. Don’t go falling in love with the first girl you meet.” I picked up my fork and knife and cut around the bone. “What about Laura?” “Where’d she go? Oregon?” “Lewis & Clark, in Portland.” “I’ll bet she gets lotsa dates. Mainland guys really go for Orientals.” I stabbed a piece of meat. “I might transfer.” “You’re staying right here.” He cut his steak and forked a piece in his mouth. “When it comes to mainland girls,” he said as he chewed, “don’t be shy. If you like someone, tell her right off the bat you’re from Hawaii. That’ll set you apart from other guys.” “I’ll tell them I have Hawaiian blood.” I knew I’d stunned him because, after he swallowed, he put his knife and fork down. “You have very little Hawaiian blood,” he said. “Hardly a drop in the bucket.” “Gramma says you’re an eighth so that makes me a sixteenth.” “Nobody knows the exact amount. Besides, it’s nothing to advertise.” “I’m proud to be Hawaiian.” “Then you should be more proud that you’re English and Irish because that’s what you’ve got more of.” Mandy showed up with the wine and popped the cork. She handed my father the cork. He sniffed it, nodding. She poured a half glass and he took a sip. “Nice bouquet,” he said. “I think so too,” Mandy replied. She put the bottle into a bucket of ice and walked over to another table. My father sipped the wine. “Remember, girls don’t forget when you say, ‘Hawaii.’”

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I studied the meat on the end of my fork. “Is that what you told Mom?” “No, not right away. She liked me because I was a good dancer.” He took another sip. “And don’t go falling in love with the first girl that you meet. That’d be your brother. Barry would get all excited and marry the first girl who looked his way. That guy doesn’t think.” “Like a chicken with its head cut off,” I blurted. “That’s right,” my father said. “Not thinking, not using his brains. Men who marry the first girl they screw end up getting divorced. Play the field, that’s my advice.” “Did you play the field?” “Oh, boy,” he laughed, “boy, did I.” After we finished dinner, Mandy walked over carrying a tray with mugs and a pitcher of beer. “Everything peachy keen?” she asked. “Yes,” my father said. “Very peachy.” “Can I bring you men some dessert?” “None for me,” my father said, patting his belly. “How ‘bout you, Kirby?” “None for me either.” Mandy walked over to a table of older guys who looked like seniors. They were talking about how their football team could never beat Nebraska and that, if Nebraska beat them again, they’d streak the sidelines at Lincoln. Mandy put the tray down on their table. My father slipped his glasses back on and fingered his sideburns. “You’ll never be given another opportunity to meet so many wholesome girls,” he said. “Dating helps you decide what it is you want in a girl. I dated all the time in Boston before I met your mother.” “Did she date much?” “Oh, she liked this limp wrist from MIT who wanted her to type his thesis. Then there was this Fletcher character who had to sell his blood to take her out. Know what he did during dinner?” “What?” “Sat there nibbling breadsticks while your mother ate her Lobster Thermidor. He said he was too weak to eat, but I know it was because he couldn’t afford two meals.” “He’s a millionaire now.” “Who’s a millionaire?” “Fletcher.” “Come on.” “Don’t you know? He invented polyester.”

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My father toyed with the cork. “That’s what he tells people in Boston, like some of your mother’s friends. But I’ll bet he played a very small part in its invention. He’s one of these scientists who makes about twenty thousand a year, bending all day over a Bunsen burner heating test tubes.” “Twenty thousand? That’s all?” “That’s if he’s lucky.” I sipped my water. “What made you decide on Mom?” “She was a wholesome girl.” He leaned over and whispered, “She was a virgin.” “Really?” He nodded. “You don’t want a girl who’s been with lotsa men.” He gazed out the window as coeds walked by. They wore tight jeans and Kappa Delta sweatshirts. “Cheesus,” my father said, “everywhere I look, beautiful girls.” “One right after another,” I said. “Don’t forget to take them to nice restaurants, Kirbo. Girls like nice places.” I wasn’t sure how I was going to finance dinner dates seeing I only had $90 in the bank and was on the 20-Meals-A-Week plan at Baker Hall. Mandy delivered the bill. “Sure I can’t tempt you?” she asked. “We have a delicious cherry pie.” My father put his hand on his belly. “I’m stuffed,” he said. “Excellent steak.” Mandy stacked our plates. “When’s the first snow, Mandy?” he asked. “Usually by Halloween.” Mandy winked at a guy wearing a white turtleneck at the other table. His friends were slamming quarters off the table trying to get them to bounce into their mugs. “I’m in lust!” the guy with the turtleneck said. Mandy giggled and walked over to him. He pushed his chair away from the table and she sat on his lap. “And don’t forget to exercise,” my father told me. “That’ll help you concentrate on your studies. Don’t sit around getting fat and pudgy.” “I’ll join the boxing club.” “Don’t take too many blows to the head. If you do, you’ll get punchy later in life.” “I’ll bob and weave.” “Good. And watch out for personal hygiene. Girls don’t like smelly men.” “I don’t smell.”

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“I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “but Barry has horrible halitosis and disgusting BO. No wonder he can’t get a date.” “That’s not the reason. Even stinky guys get dates.” “Then what is the reason?” “Barry has no confidence. He has no confidence because you never praised him.” My father’s face turned ruddy and his cheeks puffed out. “You’re one of these kids who blames his parents for everything, aren’t you? That way, you can’t take responsibility for your own actions.” “We’re talking about my brother, not me.” “Funny, I didn’t have a mother or father growing up and look how well I turned out.” “You did?” “Don’t get smart with me, wise guy. Why, I had nothing but I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and made something of my life. You kids nowadays have it too damn easy.” “You weren’t the easiest of fathers.” “At least you had a father,” he replied. My father paid and we walked out of Richard’s Steak House. We were in a district called The Hill that had no streetlights. The moon helped us find the gnarled oaks lining Broadway and then the car. My father unlocked the Skylark’s door and I stood beside him as a truck drove up the incline. The truck’s headlights lit us up. My father looked at his watch. “Cheesus,” he said, “I’m late. I hope you can find the way back to the dorm.” “Sure.” “Well, good-bye.” “What are you made of, Dad?” I asked. He stared at me. “Iron,” he answered. “I’m made of iron. So, Kirby, what are you made of?” “Steel,” I replied. “I’ve always been made of steel.” I held out my hand and we shook like businessmen. I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. He let me hug him for a few seconds before climbing in the Skylark and rolling down the window. He stuck his head out and waited for the traffic to ease. “Remember what I said about not being a wise guy,” he said. “I’ll remember.” The traffic let up and he pulled away from the curb. I stood on the crest of The Hill as he drove south on Broadway. I felt bad for wanting him out of my life. Jukebox music and laughter came from Tulagi’s Pizza across the street. The laughter made me feel self-conscious and lonely. I watched until his blinker came on and the Skylark turned left on Arapahoe.

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“Aloha,” I mumbled, “aloha ‘oe, Harold Wright.” I walked across the street to campus. I decided to wipe the slate clean, to make a fresh start. I could start singing and tap-dancing on Broadway like a crazy person and nobody would hold it against me. I walked by an outdoor amphitheater and passed a gang of girls and guys heading for The Hill. “Howzit,” I said to no one in particular. “Hi,” a girl answered. When I got back to Baker Hall, I took the stairs to the basement. I looked down the hall and saw clothes and speakers in boxes outside a room. I opened my door and locked it behind me. The room was freezing. I didn’t want to walk down the hall and use the community bathroom. I stripped down to my underwear. I walked over to the bunk beds and considered taking the top bunk because there was a view out the window. But I unfolded the wool blanket and spread it out over the single bed. I turned out the light and climbed under the covers. The moon lit up the door. I thought about Laura and how she had the same moon a thousand miles away in Oregon. “Laura,” I whispered. I felt the need to cry but fought it off. It didn’t matter to me if mainland girls liked guys from Hawaii because my heart was with Laura. I had a crazy urge to get up at dawn and catch a Greyhound bus bound for Portland. I heard footsteps on the carpet, doors creaking on their hinges, a father talking to his son. I’d come a long way to be somewhere lonely, but I knew that would pass. I thought about my father flying back to Honolulu. He would listen to his stock reports over his headset and drink martinis. He would check out the stewardesses and look at his watch a hundred times. The man of iron was gone. He couldn’t bug me if I was living all the way out in the Rockies. But I wanted to find a reason to love him to make our lives mean something. I imagined driving with him in the Skylark, moving through the twilight fields south of Boulder. John Denver sang “Rocky Mountain High” and the lights from Denver glowed on the horizon. The future was somewhere beyond those lights, rolling over the dark plains of Colorado. NOTES: haole: white mahu: gay pikake: Arabian jasmine

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WEIGHTS AND MEASURES William Henderson Caucasian male. Five feet, 11 inches. 155 pounds. Driver’s license indicates that he is 30 years old. Found in his home. No evidence of foul play. Current indication is that he committed suicide. I hate when they commit suicide. Strike that last comment. But I do. The coroner, in his lab, a lower level in a hospital. Male. Maybe female. Seems that medical examiners and coroners on television procedurals are mostly female. And black. Adds diversity to a television show without needing to hire a star. Except the medical examiner on Castle. I enjoy her more than I enjoy the other medical examiners the television show used during its first couple of seasons. Tried the show because of the premise: A writer and detective, solving crimes, and falling in love. Of course they are in love, even though the rules of the television dictate that theirs will remain a mostly unconsummated love. At least until ratings dictate the pair needs to come together. Or come separately. Simultaneous is a myth that television characters have propagated. Another myth? That a coroner or medical examiner actually conducts the autopsy. A forensic pathologist will be hired for the job. A coroner may be present during the procedure. To observe, and maybe to take notes. Up to the coroner. I don’t like thinking that several people saw you naked and dead on the table, so no coroner present for your autopsy. Just a forensic pathologist. Male, let’s say male, not that I know. Or will know. But for the purposes of this postmortem, the forensic pathologist hired to perform the autopsy is male. He is in scrubs, blue. His office, a morgue, or morgue-adjacent. Someone comes in every night and polishes the metal surfaces. The autopsy room is tiled, for cleaning and disinfection. These tiles must be cleaned at night, too. A stainless steel operating table in the center of the room. Above the table, a scale for weighing body parts. Next to the table, another table on which the forensic pathologist has the instruments he’ll use. Striker saws for ripping bone, suturing materials, saws, knives, and scalpels. No need to sterilize the instruments; infection and contamination no longer matter. Somewhere in the room, a source of water to wash your body. Drains in the floor. An X-ray machine. Jars filled with various organs, and empty jars to fill. Your body, to be cut apart and then put back together. Your online profile had much of the same information that the forensic pathologist will record before beginning the autopsy. Caucasian male. Five feet, 11 inches. 155 pounds. Except you were 28 when our online worlds collided, and when we began orbiting each other. Your screen name: Icarusdescending.

Months after we met, I was in Harvard Square and I was on my way to your apartment, and I saw this living statue after and before his being still, wings outstretched, and in this beforeand-after span, he was unable to fly. I took a picture of this man and his wings, and when I shared the picture with you, you told me how much you loved it and how badly you wanted to see the world through my eyes.

If I were dissecting you, I’d use pen and paper. Were dissecting you? I’ve been dissecting you for a longer period of time than you and I were together. Icarus flies too close to the sun and falls to his death, and we never find out what happens to Daedalus after Icarus falls. I guess Daedalus just keeps flying. You and I had planned for, and dealt with, death. Your mother had cancer. She beat it the first time she was diagnosed with cancer. Or, she beat cancer with your help. Wasn’t supposed to come back, but it did, and you told me you’d never get through it without my help. And then there was my computer, which you took apart and put back together when my hard drive died. That’s what you said: Will, your hard drive is dead. Told me the parts to buy and promised to make everything right. Taught yourself to take apart an iMac. Didn’t tell me until after that mine was the first iMac you had taken apart and put back together. I assume you killed yourself in a way that presented itself as suicide when the police came for your body. I assume your sister found you, and that she called the police. Unless you died of a drug overdose, which you may have, and if you did, you might have been using with her. The last time you lived with her, you and she used crystal meth like fiends. You always used the words used crystal meth like fiends, when you’d describe the period of time when you were living with your sister. Then you stopped using, you told me. “I’m a former crystal meth addict.”

Henderson

Middle of our second date. Outside. Waiting for our takeaway sushi. I knew that someone like you liking someone like me came with a catch. “I haven’t used in a while, but when I use, nothing else matters. And the last time I used, I destroyed my life, hurt people I loved, and almost died. Crystal left me with nothing, and I know if I use again, I will not come back. I will use until I die.” “But you don’t use now,” I said. Or asked. I sounded like I was asking. “No, but I like to occasionally get high. I only recently started smoking. I never buy it. My roommate gives it to me. Will, I don’t know what we’re becoming, but if we’re becoming anything, if you ever think that I may possibly use crystal, or if you think my drug use is growing out of control, then you have to promise that you will do whatever it takes to stop me.” “I promise I’ll do whatever stopping you takes.” And I meant I’ll do whatever stopping you takes when I said I’ll do whatever stopping you takes because the idea of not stopping you, if you needed such stopping, scared me, and because already, I loved you. A little, but enough to know that I didn’t want to go back to living without you. After examining the body, I have found no birthmarks, one tattoo of a Buddha on his back, and several holes where piercings were. Both earlobes, and the cartilage of one ear. Both nipples. Also, two dermal piercings in the back of the neck. Have removed all piercings and set aside. No other jewelry. His family may want the piercings back.

We were together when you got the dermal piercings. You’d never taken someone with you when you got a piercing, but you wanted me to come with you, so I came with you. After, I made you sushi, which you said you liked, even though I could do a better job, if I were making you sushi today.

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Several scars, including scars on both arms that appear to be from a previous suicide attempt. The scar tissue looks to be about four years old. One scar is darker and thicker than the other. “I cut one arm, but I didn’t cut deep enough. And then I cut my other arm, and I cut too deep. I’m not suicidal or anything like that, in case you were worried.” You, to me, in your bedroom, near enough to the beginning of our relationship that I hadn’t figured out how to ask you about the scars on your arms. You saved me having to ask. You probably were used to being asked. You had rehearsed your explanation. I used to think I’d stop seeing those scars, the longer we were together, but I always saw those scars. I didn’t mind them; I believed that you weren’t suicidal. Besides, those scars were reminders: To you, not to try that again, and to me, of you before you became part of you and me.

The lesser of the two scars. The bruise on your arm probably the remnants of a hickey. Each time we fucked, we promised not to leave marks, and each time, we left marks.

Henderson

A scar, the size of a newborn’s fingerprint, on the right side of the body, above the heart. You told me that your left arm had grown connected to your chest, so that, after your were born, a doctor had to cut the membrane connecting your hand to your chest. The way your arm must have formed and grown, even in the womb you were protecting your heart. “I’ve had to learn how to protect myself,” you told me, the same night you told me that you thought you were close to finding your soul mate. I wanted you to mean me. I didn’t want you to have to protect yourself from me. Always alone, you’d say you felt, never lonely. The difference between the two words, blade-thin. Fingerprints next. Police might need your fingerprints. For what? Maybe you drank something that killed you. Took pills. Or a gun. Would you have shot yourself? Too messy. You wouldn’t have wanted to leave a mess for someone to clean up. Always conscientious. Probably even in death. No rope or lead pipe. Doubt your sister had a library or conservatory. Probably your bedroom. Music playing? Probably music playing. Ani Difranco. Had to have been Ani. You love her. Loved her. You died a month before her latest album. I’m going to see her in April. You were in your bed, wrapped in the sheet and comforter set you bought when you and I started dating. New relationship, new sheets, you said. You also bought new underwear. You showed them to me on Valentine’s Day. We hadn’t fucked yet, but we were going to, and did, a week later. The Valentine’s Day underwear was red. You looked good in red. Upon examination, I do not see anything out of the ordinary on the body. No unexplained fibers, blood, bruises, or wounds. The forensic pathologist looks under fingernails and between toes. He counts the fillings in your teeth. I can’t remember if you had fillings in your teeth. Why can’t I remember if you had fillings in your teeth? The forensic pathologist looks for signs of rape. Am taking photographs. Wide-angle first. Front. Back. Now, close-ups of

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his body. He is wearing a blue T-shirt and pair of jeans. The jeans have holes in the knees. He has on a belt. He has on socks and shoes. His head is shaved. His eyes are blue. Hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Can’t tell that when you smiled, you always looked like you were up to something. I’m drawing blood, which we’ll use to determine if he had recently used drugs or drank alcohol. Of course you recently used drugs or drank alcohol. We broke up because you couldn’t admit to how much you were using. We broke up because I recorded you buying from and selling drugs to friends. Without your knowledge. We broke up because the recording proved that you were snorting pills, and when I asked you if you had snorted pills, you told me you’d never put anything up your nose. We broke up because when you found out that I had hidden a recorder in your room, you said I was creepy. You said that we were done. You said that you felt violated. And nothing I said would get you to take back the things you said. You and I broke up, and I told my wife that I had been having an affair with you, and she told me that we’d need to get divorced, not because I had an affair but because I deserved to be able to marry the next man I wanted to marry. I wish you had had a chance to know her. You would have loved her. Everyone does, when they hear the story of me with you and then me without you. Everyone calls her a saint, even though she says that I must not be telling the story the right way because she didn’t feel like a saint when I was telling her all of the reasons why our marriage was over. She is coming with me to see Ani in April. Later that day, a police officer served me with a restraining order that you had taken out. Barred from contacting you, going to your home, or going to where you worked. Ours was not the first relationship you ended with a restraining order. That night, I swallowed what I thought would be enough pills to put an army to sleep. But I woke up the next morning. And then that night, I drove to a bridge, but thinking that I’d end up in a vegetative state without anyone to take care of me caused me not to jump. You know the thing that most people think after jumping from a bridge, at least the survivors who have shared their stories? That they had made a mistake.

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You and my wife e-mailed several times while I was completing a 72hour inpatient stay at a psychiatric hospital. I had checked myself in. I no longer felt safe. You told her that the idea of my trying to kill myself hurt you to your very core. And you told her that you never intended for any of this to happen. And you told her that you couldn’t understand why I’d try to kill myself, because I have so much to live for. And you told her that you’d always love me. Three weeks after we broke up, we resumed our relationship. I have started to cut. The forensic pathologist begins at your right shoulder, cuts down, diagonally. Lifts the blade. Another cut at your left shoulder. Down, diagonally. The incisions meet in the middle, below your ribs, and then one cut, down to your naval. I am cutting. Spread the skin. Look for broken ribs. Careful. Carefully. Examine lungs, then heart. Blood drawn from heart. Lungs and heart present as normal. So many times you gave away your heart to men who treated you badly. Liars and thieves and dicks. Your words. I hated all of them, not because they had you first, but because they added to the layer you built around your heart. After our relationship ended, I was afraid that the layer had grown complete. Brambles. A forbidden forest with crawling things and glow-inthe-dark sentries. You gave me the keys to the kingdom, or, the key to the childhood kingdom you created in your bedroom. And I wore that key on a chain around my neck, because you wanted me to wear that key on a chain around my neck. “I have big plans for that key,” you told me, and when you gave me the key, you clarified: When we got married, you wanted to melt the key and use the metal to form my wedding band. I’d wear your past as a symbol of our future together. “I want you to know you have it all,” you said.

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But I was the one who proposed. I bought you a ring without measuring your ring finger. I expected to just know how big your finger was, but the ring I bought was too big, and was being re-sized when our relationship ended. As a stand-in, for a while, I drew the ring on your finger, and some nights, after the ink had washed away, I’d look for where it had been and wonder where it had gone.

Romantic, grand gestures. The boombox held overhead playing Peter Gabriel. The one arm raised high, hand in a fist, because princess agreed to go out with criminal. The cartoon girls with tower-long hair who give away voices bite into apples lose glass slippers dance with beasts save John Smith and end ever-after happily with a kiss. That first kiss we shared. Two hours after we met. Your room. Your bed. Your old comforter and sheet set. I wonder who used those sheets with you when those sheets were new. We were puzzle pieces clicking into place. No borders, but the picture of me and you, fully formed, put together. Did you feel the difference in your heart’s beat as it slowed to a stop? Your heart’s beat, one of the last things I’d hear on the nights I slept with you. Head on chest. “Goodnight,” you’d say. “Move in. Stay with me always.” The forensic pathologist doesn’t care about always. Tissue samples. Fluids. Weights and measures. Spleen. Intestines. The last food you ate, partially digested, helps narrow the time period in which you went from alive to not alive. From you to it. Urine, with a syringe. To detect drugs or poison.

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Your eyes. Tiny, broken blood vessels can be a sign of choking or strangulation. Fractures or bruises to the skull indicate trauma. The sound a saw makes when the saw is electrical or battery-operated and used to cut through skin and bone. I am cutting into the skull. I have removed the top of the head and skull. I am reaching in and around the brain. I am removing the brain. More samples to take. More to weigh and measure. The rest of your organs, catalogued, along with the evidence that supports a cause-of-death. Back together, briefly, you and I met for ice cream. A Thursday. MidAugust. “You know, if I found out I only had a month to live, I’d max out all of my credit cards and rent an apartment here,” you said. I had gone in and checked out of the psychiatric hospital, and I had completed a two-week partial hospital program, and I had started medication, and I had an appointment with a therapist “on the outside,” and you and I, on Newbury Street, an affluent part of Boston. “No you wouldn’t,” I said. “You’d max out your credits and travel. You haven’t really been anywhere.” “You’re probably right, rabbit,” he said. He called me rabbit, a pet name. And while he had called me rabbit via text messages during the week, his using rabbit, on Newbury Street, was the first time he had out-loud called me rabbit since the break-up. “I know I’m right,” I said. “You’d come with me,” he said. The way he said you’d come with me, equal parts question and statement. “Of course I’d come with you,” I said. “If you found out you had a month to live, we could do whatever you wanted to do.”

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We were walking on Newbury Street, and then we were walking through Boston Common and the Public Gardens, and you said the approaching sunset was brilliant. You stopped and took out your phone, and you took a picture of the approaching sunset. While you were taking a picture of the approaching sunset, I took a picture of you taking a picture of the approaching sunset. I thought we’d hang the pictures together on a wall in the home we’d one day own. The pictures belonged together as much as we did. If you look carefully, you can see the picture you are taking on the back of your phone. The two pictures together, just not together the way I thought they’d be together.

I learn about your death, and I am convinced that the obituary is fake. I can only find one obituary, and it was posted by a crematorium. Easy for you to convince a friend who works at a crematorium to post a fake obituary. Only one person signed the online guestbook, which is another reason why I think the obituary is fake. You posted this fake obituary so that, if I ever Googled you, I’d think you were dead. And I liked didn’t like thinking you would go to such extremes to keep me from finding you, if I ever chose to look, because if I didn’t think you faked the obituary, then I’d have to think about you dead, and I wasn’t ready to think about you dead. I wasn’t ready to think that you had broken up with life. I called the crematorium, but the director told me nothing more than what was in the obituary. The police investigator assigned to your case was more helpful. The case is closed. And the coroner had determined a cause of death. Which was?

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Cause of death, suicide. But I will not be told if you died of a drug overdose or if you intentionally hurt yourself. How long did you know that you would die on December 5? If intentional, you probably knew for a while. If accidental, did you know as it happened? Did you think: I shouldn’t have done this? How much I will miss. How much I will be missed. I have too much to live for. The details, the weights and measurements, the conclusion, will be shared with your family. Emotion-less words delivered in a monotone with the obligatory sorry for your loss. We for-good broke up two days after our date on Newbury Street. Sorry for your loss. You told me that you knew you were going to marry me and raise children with me and that we would and could get there and that you and my wife would learn to get along because we’d all be raising a family together and everything you said I had wanted you to say. We were going to be OK. But when I asked if we were going to see each other that night, you told me you wanted to get high with your friends and play Wii. And I told you that I deserved better and could get better and would get better. You texted me a picture of the restraining order, and told me you’d use it if I ever contacted you again. Six weeks later, you and I met in a courtroom and the restraining order was dismissed. In a courtroom is where I last saw you. Outside that same courtroom, nine months earlier, is where you confessed to being a crystal meth addict. Poetry, the start and end, but poetry only in hindsight. Icarusdescending. Even then, I wanted to catch you. But you were already gone. Or on your way to going. Your mother would die six weeks after the restraining order was dismissed. And you would die 13 months later. Your body given back/made available to your family, which had already decided to cremate you. You never wanted to go into the ground. You didn’t want a place for people to go to remember you. “I’ll want to remember you,” I told you, the night you told me that when you died, no one would want to remember you. “I’ll always remember you, and you’ll always remember me, and we’ll always be the way we are right now.” You probably called me rabbit, and you probably kissed me, and you probably said the things you are supposed to say when someone says that they will remember you for always, and I believed the things you said after I said that I would remember you for always.

Henderson

THAT SPARK Dustin Michael

BODYHOME Chelsey Clammer

’S OR T I ED OICE CH

WAKING, SINKING, DREAMING 4 a.m. is my favorite color. It’s when the quiet dark sky cuddles with the air, when a crepuscular shade full of stillness and possibility inhabits the world. The morning hours swell with dreams. As I wake up to these dreams, my body unfurls, opens to the solace. I thump my feet on the ground, extract myself from the me-shaped dent in the soft mattress, cross my room in six steps, and tuck myself behind my desk. I light two candles and gaze into their glow. The flame, my brain yawns open. My notebook sits in front of me, the last words I wrote from the night before stare up, want more. How do we listen to desire? A question not begging an answer, but wanting more questioning, more consideration. As I look down at the blank space waiting to be filled, I tuck my dreadlocks behind my ear and pick up my blue pen. Up until this point, the point where my body is positioned above my words and ready to make more, my bed has been what I desired most. Not out of tiredness, but to get back into that space at the end of each day in which I am a body being, a body still with itself, a body dreaming. I sit at my black desk, stare past the shushing candlelight, and my eyes linger on the sight of my bed, the dark green quilt crumpled to one side, the brown top sheet urging me to come back. This is not about sleeping, but dreaming. Desiring that space in which my body is mine, is my home. The home I curl into at night, the body I crawl into when the world exhales, and I slip into the quietly lying skin, the skin I grasp in awe of its presence, persistence, elasticity, growth. And in the morning, in this morning as in every morning, the night’s reveries of living fully in my body continue to drift about my head, hum along my skin. Because this is my dream, my desire: to live. To live fully in my body. It is one dream constantly in the making, one perpetually shifting its shape. I grow into the world with each breath, each dream, each time I lay down to sleep, to rest, to settle into my skin. And so I seek sleep, seek the space of myself as I lie down with my desires. SLEEPING I am eight years old and lying in the back seat of my mom’s car. She drives my sister and I home from swim practice, guides us through the dark, the world full of stars, and aims us toward our beds. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. What I am really doing is escaping into the desires of my mind, the dreams that are in my body, the ones that feel safe and cozy. I keep my

eyes closed, feel around inside my head, dream of my body as it becomes a body being hugged, skin being loved by women, women as I am starting to become attracted to them. In the car, the bump between the two bucket seats curves up into my ribs, and prevents me from finding a comfortable position. But I’m snug in my mind, finally having sunk into the space in which I am dreaming of womanly arms embracing themselves tight around me. I smile and continue to keep my eyes closed to the world that tells me I should not want this, these woman hugs. But in the dark, with my eyes closed, I am safe with these dreams, so I settle into my tired body and seep into the desires of my mind. What I find are fantasies of love, of feeling safe and well held. I think of the older women from whom I seek comfort, an enveloping embrace. My second grade teacher, strong female characters from TV. Murphy Brown, Angela in Who’s the Boss. Women who are old enough to be my mom, who could give me big motherly hugs. I dream of having soft skin against my own, of falling asleep in a woman’s arms that hold me steady, keep my growing body together. My eyes are closed to the back of my mom’s seat. I tune out the conversations she has with my older sister, and I concentrate on this idea of a hug. I feel my mom navigate the car home, and my body tingles with each curve through the forests of Colorado as we speed closer to home, to my bunk bed, to my room swathed in posters of strong female characters from TV. When we reach the house, I curl into my mattress, hug my arms against my budding chest, settle into my resting place where dreams blossom in my body. In my bed, the feeling of comfort and safety stretches, grows. BODY TAKING I am twenty years old and I wake up to a lover’s hands. Her fingers grasp my shoulders, her legs straddle my naked stomach. I had been waiting for her to return, for her to come home from the bar so I could curl into her arms and fall asleep. But I fell into sleep on my own. While I was waiting for her, I curled up in her soft comforter, the blue and white cotton weaving around my flesh as I wrapped my own arms around my own body and hugged myself to sleep. And now here she is, disrupting my dreams. She has crashed into the bed, stumbled onto my body. She has fumbled the comforter away from my skin, and now she is on top of me, prying my arms away from my body, opening up the naked skin of my belly to her alcohol-drenched breath.

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I open my eyes to her silhouette. The room is a startling dark, except for the slant of the hallway light flaring into her bedroom. The white light darkens her body, the negative space of what I do not want. I was fine alone, content in the dreams I can no longer remember. Her body breathes fumes of whiskey onto my skin. I try to slink away, to crawl further into myself and away from what I do not want, from what I know will come next. Chelsey, come on, she slurs onto my exposed nipple. The cocoon of my arms has been broken. She slithers down my body. I do not tell her no, because I do not know how. Because how do you say no to the lover whom you have said yes to for years? She pries my legs apart, I rest my hands at my sides, curl my fingers into a fist as she twirls her own fingers around my pubic hair, parting it in order to dive in. I close my eyes against her body and the light that now spotlights this scene I do not want to endure. Lids closed, I swell with tears. She sloppily licks away, pushes her fingers into places I no longer want to feel, and performs something she believes to be desire. And then she passes out. And then I roll over, try to cover my body with my hands, but there is too much there to touch. I travel away from myself, loose the hold on my body I no longer want to be mine. I push away the want to be enveloped. I want to be gone. BODY BREAKING It is night. I am kneeling near my bed inside of my closet. A plastic bag sits in front of me on the floor. The white bag tells me a dozen times in bright red letters Thank You Thank You Thank You. Thank you, it says. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re welcome, say my insides. My insides scream as I force them out of myself, as I purge all of the food into the Thank You bag. My stomach, its contents, slosh their way inside the bag. A bag of me, its plasticity that holds the weight of what I could not refuse to eat. A loaf of bread with butter. Mashed potatoes. Fries and onion rings at the bar. Chips. Candy I got on the way home. I binged as I traveled. Consumed everything I could. I got home, took one of the bags I acquired in my shopping and binging spree, and laid it out in front of me. On the wooden floor of my closet, I now dip my head into the Thank You messages. And it all comes out. I am on my knees, in the closet with the hopes that the thin walls and wooden door will muffle the sound of my heaves

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from my roommates. My elbows and forearms circle the bag. The contents of my stomach come up easily with the alcohol that washed it down. After I have brought up everything, after I have knotted the bag closed, sealed up the stench of my stomach and mushy food, concealed the scent of my own embarrassment and pain, I drop the bag in my trashcan and wobble over to my dresser to grab my stashed bottle of whiskey. I pop the black waxy cork off of the Knob Creek and take a swig. Cleansing my tongue of the vomit taste, the self-destruction continues. I pick up a razor and begin to cut. It is the bulimia I want to cut out of my life, so I slice reminders into my skin to not eat, to be the socially accepted anorexic instead of the disgusting bulimic. Each swipe is a promise. Slice. I will not eat. Slice. I will refuse food. The effects of these reminders seep out of my skin, soak into the t-shirt I have grabbed to wipe up the blood. A sight of red to remind me that this is what I want, to disappear, to gush away from myself. My disintegrating body is all I know how to claim. I stumble into my bed with a swollen throat, blood soaked with alcohol, blood soaking through the shirt I wrapped around my arm. I smash into sleep with my thin skin wrapped tight around my bones. It is skin that triggers, skin that remembers the feeling of the time when I was perpetually raped by my ex-girlfriend. I continue to remove my body from myself, to let the feeling of a body break away from my skin. Before I finally crash into the darkness of sleep, I vaguely wonder if I will wake up the next day. This is not sleeping, this is dying. I spill, splatter into a pause from the selfdestruction. My nose drips. My blood drips. I dip further away from myself, ripped from a body dreaming, now a fractured body that does not know how to be stitched back together. BODY SHIFTING I wake up in the white-colored bed, the soft pale comforter doing nothing to ease the pounding hangover in my head. My legs are tangled in the fluff of white, ankles wrestling to free themselves from the heat the down comforter presses into my skin, trapping my alcohol drenched blood underneath my covered flesh. I wrangle myself free from the covering, and throw my body over the edge of the mattress. The mattress bends down, rejects my sweating skin from the comfort it did not give me, flinging me out as if it is sick of me, tired of my body that constantly stinks and stains the serene white with alcohol, with drops of blood. I sway as I stand and reach down to the floor for the cloudy glass of vodka I was drinking from the night before. I desperately chug at the last few drops of liquor fermenting in the bottom

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of the glass, my body brushing up against hard the bed as I lean over. But there is nothing there, nothing left in the glass to quench this ugly feeling. Angry and irate, I stomp away from the bed, extract from myself from the room that contains the mattress that gave me no sleep, no dreams. I bump my naked body against the door frame as I enter into the white hallway. If I can’t drink my hangover away, then I’ll at least binge and purge the sour feeling out of my stomach. I travel the length of the swishing hallway to the kitchen, and realize I binged and purged everything last night. With no food and no alcohol, I resort to the last thing I know that helps to steady my shaking hands. I am suddenly standing in a bathroom. For now, this bathroom, that bed, are not places or things I own, but simply occupy. I was kicked out of my last roommate’s apartment for binging on all of her food. The loaf of bread, the two boxes of noodles, her stash of cookies, everything I could ingest when I was drunk and out of my mind, again. She came home to an empty kitchen, her roommate passed out down the hall. So she kicked me out and I found myself lost, broke, and with nowhere to go. Luckily, there are people in my life who love me more than I love myself. One of my bosses at work offered me this apartment. She owns a three bedroom, but is living at her girlfriend’s house. Without asking for rent, without even asking if I want to move in, but more of demanding me to do it, she gave me her keys, expected me stay in her extra bed. The bright white walls of the bathroom, the sun stinging my skin as it strikes the mirror through the window all pierce my bloodshot eyes as I grab my razor that sits expectantly on the sink. I cut. I cut and something finally slashes into my brain. Finally, the cut changes something inside of me. Not just a feeling of pain or shame or something like momentarily relief, but a cut that screams this has to stop. I look up at myself in the mirror. My yellow and puffy skin stares back at me, waxy and bloated; my eyes are wobbly and full of red streaks, broken blood vessels. I am repulsed by myself. I look down at the cut, look away from the evidence of a depressing and terrified life, and become even more disgusted. On my arm, I get a full view of the evidence of my shameful life. The red seeps out, stares at me as I try not to gape at the gaping wound. I cannot look any more, cannot continue to bear witness to this life. With blood dripping down my arm, I go into the bedroom, the white bed staring at me, pushing me to get out of here and do something about this urge to do something horrible, again, before it goes away. I grab my phone. I call a friend, one of the three I have left in my life, one who did not retreat from me when I started to get scary. One who is not afraid to face my

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eating disorder, my alcoholism, my self-injury. I tell her what I know. What I know is that if I stay home today, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll continue to cut. And I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop until there is nothing left to cut. We go to the ER. I sit slumpishly on the stiff hospital bed and answer a series of questions about suicide risk and self-injury. I tell them the truth, tell them that if they let me go home I will cut again. They assess me, they agree, they know, they see it in my eyes, the desperation sitting pleadingly on my face. I sit on the hard hospital mattress, my legs swinging back and forth, swishing the white paper covering of the maroon mattress as I wait, as I yearn to move towards something else. I am admitted to the psych ward. I walk through the heavy metal hospital doors, am lead to a room dressed in depressing gray walls, and collapse onto another uncomfortable hospital bed. This one, a blue plastic mattress that is also barely there. It is just a small bit of padding against the steel frame underneath. I curl my legs up to my chest, and let out a sigh of relief. In this stifling place I will be taken care of, watched over, forbidden to drink, to binge, to cut. And in this uncomfortable bed, under the buzzing florescent hospital lights, I begin to feel a sense of surrender, of finally giving in to the care I need to have, to take, to give myself. BODY SOBERING It is my second day in the hospital. I have created a large dent in the thin plastic mattress, a mold of my body, of my need to just lie and surrender myself. The door swings open; a female social worker strides over to me, grabs my arm, and pulls me away from the bed. My body unsuctions from the mattress. She takes my hand as my legs creak with each step towards the meeting room, towards my first AA meeting. I sit. I gawk at the other alcoholics. I do not want to be here. I am stubborn at first, do not want to admit to my problem of alcohol even though I know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the root, the initial action that spurs all of my other problems. I just want to lie in bed and soak and be nothing and not think about anything but the mattress taking in my weight, sighing with me. I am resistant to getting out of bed, to going to AA, but I go because I am there, because each day the social worker comes and unsuctions me. Each day I remove myself from the solace of my bed, temporarily remove the heap of my body from the mattress to learn about my problems. And after a few meetings I start to get it, start to see how I am powerless to alcohol and, hell yes, my life has become unmanageable. I sit in a meeting on my ninth day in the hospital. I am slumped in a large maroon padded wooden-framed chair, and I feel a shift take place

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in my head. Something scoots its way into the space between my skin and my bones. There is a word that rattles my body: the syllables of enough. After the meeting finishes, I head back to the harsh florescent lights that beam down on my thin blue hospital mattress that has become a place of solace. I lie down, my last night to lie down in the uncomfortable bed that has unexpectedly given me much relief. It is the bed in which I have started to caress my broken skin as I lie down and stare at the blue cotton-weaved curtain. Scabs are flaking off, my body has sobered up, and my throat no longer tastes of blood. I take this feeling, this shift, this sense of enough, and I switch off the lights. I clasp my hands against my chest and I fall asleep, and I begin to dream. BODY MAKING It has been a month since I got out of the hospital, and while I am slowly stitching my life back together, forming a new way of living, the effects of abusive experiences, the destructive habits created from them, the ways in which I avoided my body for so long still linger. I am on my way to work, getting on a train in Chicago. My commute has become a ritual of sitting in my body, mapping out the space she inhabits. Each day I go through the obstacles of my mind as I judge the way my body moves. At the train stop, I go through the turnstile, and it rushes up behind me as I push it with my hand. The metal bar hits the back of my bag, an overstuffed messenger bag that bustles with snacks for the day, with notes for my job. The metal hitting my bag does not indicate to me that I am carrying a large amount of stuff to work, but it means I exist too much, that I take up too much space, that there is too much of me in the world. Feeling the bar slap behind me, I intensely feel the curve of my butt and wish it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there. If I were flat, barely visible, then I would slip through unnoticed, untouched. But I my body touches the metal every morning, and every morning I think my body is too for the smallness I feel on the inside, for how I want to shirk away from my skin. My body touches the world, and I am too big. I hold onto this piece of judgment each day, this rubric, for if I am or am not on the road to perfection, to still being able to slip a bit away, to that distorted place of a disappearing body that feels like safety. And while I am sober and safe, I still yearn to remove myself, to keep any side of me from touching the world. The game of Operation. I need to slip by untouched. When I do, no buzzers ring in my head. This has to stop, I tell myself, again, one morning, as the bar slaps behind me. I am growing weary of tiptoeing around myself, of not letting my feet fully hit the ground for fear of hearing myself live.

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I sit on the train, keeping my body rigid in the plastic seat so as not to touch the woman next to me. The brick city buildings slip by as I think about the turnstile, about my butt that now exists, and I consider how I want the judgments to stop. But I do not know how to make them cease, how to allow myself space in my body in which to live. The sky slowly emerges from a the quiet dark to a loud pink. I focus my eyes on the sky above the buildings and let the warm thoughts of what I have done to help my body rise in my mind. The bulimia has stopped. The cutting has stopped. The alcohol is now gone. My body tingles with pride at the steps I made to get into a new version of myself. I relax my legs, allow my skin to unhinge from its hyper-vigilance of the space I inhabit. Ten hours later, on the train ride home from work, I release just a bit more into this new feeling. I practice the techniques of learning how to reside in my body. I allow my leg to touch the person next to me, to let her know I am a body that exists, that makes contact with the world. My polyester pants feel rough against my skin, the cloth pressing into my flesh as it nestles up against her own gray dress pants. When I enter my apartment, I strip my body of my clothes and slip into my pajamas. In the few seconds that exist between removed work clothes and pajamas put on, my body is naked to the world, my skin is caressed by the air and I sense I am slowly welcoming my body back into myself. I carefully brush my teeth around the gums that have receded, and place my weary body into bed. Too tired to grab, I simply lie down and allow my body to rest, to just go to sleep. BODY DREAMING Chicago to Minneapolis, $60 round trip on Megabus. I have met a writer, a woman who teaches in Chicago one winter, who teaches me to get at my memories through my writing. She teaches in Chicago, but lives in Minneapolis. We have started to become friends. I visit her monthly, take the eight hour bus ride to get to the city that is beginning to feel like home. My body as it is encouraged by her, by writing, and by sobriety also begins to feel like home, like a space in which I would want to live. I get on the bus at 10:30pm, and will arrive in Minneapolis at 6:30am. The bus floats into the night, the road underneath creating a steady susurrating sound of sssllleeeeeeeeeppp. The tires glide, and I glide into tiredness, my body exhausted from the excitement of returning to the city with which I am slowly falling in love. My body is fatigued from trying to will the bus to move faster so I close my eyes against the moving world, and slip into my skin. My head drifts back into the space it has known since I was a little kid

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in the car ride home from swim practice. I dream with my mind awake, fall into the desire of a body being hugged. And this time it is me that is doing the hugging. I want to hug, want to enter into the space in which I caress myself. So I practice the hugging on the bus, cross my arms tight against my chest, my elbows slightly grazing those of the woman sitting in the seat next to me. I lean my head against the cool window, and daze into the image, into the feeling of me hugging me. When I arrive in Minneapolis, my friend brings me to her apartment to nap before we head out to a coffee shop for the day. My body soaks into the brown leather couch, the place where I nap, where I sleep, where I call my own in her apartment. I close my eyes with a smile, continue the practice of hugging my arms around my body. It is my third trip there, and as my eyes slightly shut out the emerging pink morning light, I realize I have started to feel something different in me that I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite name. It is a few days after my arrival and we host a party for two friends who are getting married the next fall. I stand in the bathroom, prepare my body for the party. The soft afternoon light reflects off of the mirror and hazes onto my skin. I slink my jeans off and pull my red dress out of my blue duffel bag. I have brought this dress and matching red heels for the occasion, but as I emerge from the bathroom with the red heels clunking on the floor, I realize I am unskilled in the art of walking female. My ankles wobble in the high heels, and I keep tripping on the hard wooden floor as I try to plunk my way back to the living room to stash my belongings behind the brown couch. This is ridiculous, I think. I cannot go the night tripping over myself, cannot stand the thought of being so aware of my hips as they heave my weight from side to side, trying to balance the body that is not accustomed to walking female, that is still learning how to claim the space of a female body with hips. I sit down on the couch, the brown leather suctions onto my almost bare thighs that poke out from the short red dress, tear off the high heels and toss them back into my bag. I will go barefoot for the night, tromp around the floors in my cute red dress and bare soles. Hours later I lie on the couch again, my body stripped of its dress and resting in green plaid boxers and a gray t-shirt. Everyone has left, and my drowsy body stretches along the length of the couch, the open window cooling off my skin in the early summer heat. My back rests on the seat of the cool leather cushions as I place the crook of one elbow over my forehead, and rest my right hand on my stomach. I feel dirt on my feet, and I raise my right foot up to my hand to wipe it off. And thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when I notice it. The heel of my foot is dirty. Up until this point, I have been tiptoeing around myself, walking softly in order to feel light in my body, to not be noticed by the

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world. I have resisted the sound of myself walking, hoping to pass by people without them really seeing me. The dark night hides my smile, but I can feel it there, can feel it spread across my face as I can just make out in the moonlight the evidence of something new, of the word that is slowly starting to emerge in my body. The dirt on my heels tells me I have been hitting the floor with all of my weight, with all of me. I have allowed my body to make noise, to exist. I smile wider at this shift. I do not wipe the dirt from myself, but instead extend my leg back down and think of the space in which I have finally arrived. I have moved back into the space of myself. And as I lie on the couch and consider this notion, the word enters into my head, whispers along my skin. HOME. I can be at home in different city, home in someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apartment, home on this couch that is not mine, because I am at home in my body. And it hits me, the realization that I can feel at home wherever I am because my home is with me, is in my body, is in me. My home is me. BODYHOME I have moved to Minneapolis, have moved into the space of myself, my home. It is night and I sit in a meditation AA meeting, opening up to the idea of faith and a higher power. My body rests on a creamy floral couch as I open up my senses to the idea of spirituality, to the feeling that there is something bigger than me in this life, that life is something of which I cannot control. As I sit with my body still, unmoving as if getting ready to sleep, I feel my skin full with life, feel it vibrate with the involuntary wave of inhaling, then exhaling. With my eyes closed I see it, get a glimpse of what I must do. I must let go of this body, allow it to take up whatever space it was meant toâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;no, wants to inhabit. I must let go, and no longer try to control, to hide from myself. My body, like the world, is not mine to control, but is something for me in which to inhabit, in which to live. I return home that night, enter my bedroom that I finally can claim as a space in which I live, the hard wooden floors softening my steps as I no longer resist their existence, and coax my body out of its clothes. I remove my gray cotton shirt and strip away the layers of judgment. I begin to love the space of my body, my body as it is home to me. In the dark room, I hold my naked stomach. Now I have a stomach to hold. I grasp myself with compassion for my perceived imperfections. In the same way I do not resent the drips coming from the faucet, the way the pipes in my apartment growl with noise, how the floorboards creak under my weight, I love the home of my body for what it is. A home with flaws, with scars, with fat where there

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used to be negative space. And it is a cozy home, a soft home that provides comfort, a home in which I can live. I furl my naked body back into the me-shaped dent in my bed. Curl into the body which is mine, my home. My body rests, turns off its conscious thoughts and curls up into the night. I close my eyes lightly to the world, and sink into my skin, relax my muscles in the shimmer of the moonlight. I no longer imagine other arms hugging me, and barely think of hands prying me apart. I have my arms, my scarred arms that are no longer scared, my steady hands with which to hold me. I smile into my mind, stroke the subtle rungs of my ribs, and take pride in the fact that I feel more skin, fat, and muscle than bone. My home is well insulated, my bodyhome here to keep the me inside of me. I roll over and expose the underbelly of my skin to the world. I open. I sleep. I dream. And when I wake up to the sight of my favorite color, the world at 4 a.m., I keep my mind in that space, in the space of my body as my home, the space in which I have a desire to live.

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INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE Lisbeth Davidow “Are you wearing perfume?” Gerri, the nurse practitioner, stands in the doorway of the exam room, her short square body still as a stone. “No. Why?” “I’m extremely allergic.” I look at her blue eyes, spiked, silver hair and wonder what her reaction would be: Hives? Migraines? Anaphylactic shock? She walks to the front of the exam table where I sit and straddles the stool. “How is your general health?” “Good.” “Have you gone through menopause? “Years ago.” She suggests I take hormone replacements. I tell her I don’t take drugs unless I absolutely have to. She asks me to put my feet in the stirrups. I move my butt to the end of the table, the thin paper gown creeping up my thighs, and open my legs, assuming once again, the dreaded, vulnerable position. “Your vagina looks old.” She didn’t just say that. I want to snap my knees closed, even if I knock her head off while I do. I should never have agreed to see her for a pap smear, even if the gynecologist, whom I’ve yet to meet, is booked for weeks. She inserts the metal speculum. I breathe deeply to assuage my discomfort. “You have a cervical polyp.” “I had one before. My last gynecologist froze it off. It was no big deal.” I should never have left my last gynecologist, even if she repeatedly kept me waiting for forty five minutes in a freezing exam room. Gerri insists on doing an ultrasound to make sure my uterus isn’t filled with polyps. I go along, confident that she’s wrong. A female technician joins us in a small dark room. The three of us watch grey shapes on a monitor. No more polyps—just as I thought. “What’s that?” Gerri’s voice rises sharply. “What’s what?” “That mass in your right ovary.” I squint at a grey clump on the screen, trying to dial down the alarm that’s ringing in my head. “When was the last time you had an ultrasound?” “When I was pregnant, over 16 years ago. It’s probably been there for years.” Long silence. “What do you think it could be?”

“Let’s not go there. I want to do another ultrasound in a month.” The alarm ratchets up its volume. I’m “there.” Gerri leaves. I tell the technician I would prefer that Dr. Heinz do the second ultrasound. “You should have told Gerri that when she was still in the room.” What does that mean? Am I supposed to be concerned with office politics and/or with Gerri’s feelings? On my way out, I tell the receptionist that I want Dr. Heinz to do the next ultrasound and ask if that’s a problem. She says not at all. It happens all the time. Dr. Heinz calls that afternoon. “Don’t worry about what Gerri saw today. It could just be water that will pass.” But she still wants me to see a radiologist in five weeks for another ultrasound. Despite her calm tone, I’m not reassured. My attitude towards doctors, which becomes adversarial at times, took seed when my father, who was my age, 56, had what seemed like, but was not exactly, a stroke. The best doctors in Boston assured us repeatedly that they were doing everything they could, but they didn’t know what was wrong or what to do, aside from drilling holes in his skull to alleviate the pressure from a horrific headache. Eventually they operated on a malignant prostate gland; he contracted acute hepatitis from a bad transfusion and died. His autopsy revealed that he had cancer everywhere. He had smoked two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day, had a smoker’s cough that could occupy him for whole minutes at a time, but the doctors never diagnosed him with lung cancer, which probably then metastasized to his brain. The radiologist’s eyes narrow as she watches the monitor during the ultrasound. “I’m going to recommend a biopsy.” My stomach contracts. “How do they do that?” “It’s a minor surgical procedure. Don’t worry. A friend of mine just had a biopsy of her ovary. It turned out to be nothing.” Does she say that to all the girls? Dr. Heinz is tall, thin, professorial looking, with closely cropped brown hair. Tweed pants peek out from her long white coat. She takes my husband Miles and me into her office and opens a folder with her freckled hands. I remember the friend who recommended her saying that she had great hands, that she felt taken care of. Dr. Heinz starts talking about my “uterine” problems.

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I ask if she’s got the right folder. “Oh. Sorry.” She looks around for the right one. I roll my eyes at Miles. He rolls his back. She studies the ultrasound photos of my right ovary through her rimless glasses and looks up. “This is worrisome.” She needs to do a biopsy. I need major surgery. A laparoscopy would be too dangerous. Pulling the ovary through a small incision could crush it; cancerous cells could spill into my pelvic cavity. If the tumor is benign, she’ll close me up, and I should be okay in about six weeks. If it’s malignant, she’ll do an hysterectomy, and an oncologist/surgeon will biopsy my intestines to see how far the cancer has spread. All followed by chemo. “You’re lucky,” she says, “We’ve caught it early. Ovarian cancer is usually detected too late.” I don’t feel lucky. I feel healthy. “I don’t believe I have cancer.” She nods. “That’s what everybody says.” I want to smack her across the face. “We have a couple of choices,” she continues. “We can do the surgery first thing next week, or we can wait until I get back from vacation.” I’m relieved she’s going away. “I’ll wait. It will give me time to work a miracle.” Where did that come from? Do I think I’m some sort of sorceress? She stands up. “I’m going to call the oncologist. I want to know what he thinks of these pictures. I’ll call you over the weekend.” Miles and I walk towards the door. I stop at her desk. “Why are you so convinced it’s cancer?” She opens the folder and points to the ultrasound photos. “There’s internal architecture here, which usually indicates malignancy.” I look at the photos and imagine the small shapes inside my ovary are tiny modern office buildings. “And you’re positive that’s cancer?” She closes the folder. “I’ve been doing this for over twenty years. I’m worried.” During the elevator’s descent, I have trouble breathing, like there’s not enough oxygen in the small compartment. I look at Miles, dressed for the day’s legal battles in a handsome suit. His face is white. He takes my hand and shakes his head. “Shit.” At home, the only miracles I’m capable of performing are ordinary tasks: sautéing chicken breasts or folding laundry. I ask Miles for hugs, seeking comfort from the softness of his worn cotton t-shirt, his body warmth and

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his heart beat. “I know,” he says, lightly rubbing my back. “This is really hard.” When I can no longer bear being vertical, I lie on my bed in fetal position, trying to tolerate the speed of my heart rate and the nauseating chemical of terror coursing through me. My biggest fear is that my daughter will lose her mother. Thankfully, she doesn’t notice my distress. She’s too preoccupied with her part in a summer musical theater production. When she’s not out with friends, she spends most of her time on the phone. Dr. Heinz calls Saturday afternoon, her voice full of concern. She hasn’t reached the oncologist yet, but she wants me to know she hasn’t forgotten about me. She sounds like she’s familiar with this role, tending to women frightened for their lives. I imagine her wringing those big freckled hands of hers. I don’t welcome her worry. I already have an anxious mother. I can’t sound nasal on the phone without her calling me back later in the day to see if I have a cold. Dr. Heinz calls again on Sunday. The oncologist said he doesn’t need to see the ultrasound pictures—I have a cervical polyp. I have a mass in one of my ovaries. It’s obvious: I need a complete hysterectomy. I picture him taking a break from his Saturday golf game in the Valley, holding a club in his hand while he tells Dr. Heinz to take it all out. Both of these doctors are supposedly the best around, but they’re so eager to gut my insides, I want to run as far away from them as possible. This is not the first time that doctors have been eager to remove my internal organs. Eleven years earlier, I was diagnosed with the worst case of ulcerative colitis my gastroenterologist had ever seen. Sitting next to my hospital bed one summer afternoon, she pleaded with me to have my colon removed. I refused. Seven years later, after two hospitalizations, three transfusions, massive amounts of steroids and immuno-suppressant drugs, I consulted a nutritionist who gave me digestive enzymes and told me to stay away from wheat and dairy. Two weeks later, I stopped bleeding. I’ve been fine ever since. I tell Dr. Heinz on Monday morning that I want a second opinion. She suggests Jon Bloom, “…by far the most brilliant gynecologist around. He’s done the most research.” “Really?” Jon Bloom was yet another gynecologist I saw twenty years ago. He was so affable, assured and handsome in a way that reminded me of the

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self-satisfied fraternity boys I knew in college that I was skeptical of him. But he saw me through a year of trying to get pregnant at 39 and never lost faith. The only procedure he suggested was an hysterosalpingogram, an X-ray of the uterus and fallopian tubes which reveals any obstructions. It showed nothing. I got pregnant three months later. He congratulated me and asked me how I did it. I told him that I visualized rocking my baby in one of the bedrooms of the house we had just bought while I gazed out a huge window at a blooming jacaranda. He thought it was more likely that the hysterosalpingogram flushed things out, making it easier to conceive; but he allowed me my more mystical theory and didn’t argue the point. He also responded calmly to an hysterical phone call during my first trimester, after I discovered that I’d been taking twice the recommended dose of vitamin A and had read that that could cause birth defects. He did research at the UCLA medical library and called me back to say that the odds were highly in favor of her being okay. And he supported my fierce determination to have a natural delivery, even though I turned 40 in the third trimester. The only hitch was that he was one of five gynecologists who rotated during their patients’ pregnancies. During my 20 hour labor, he never showed up. When, after maximum amounts of pitocin, I couldn’t dilate past 4, the least experienced member of the practice performed a Caesarian, nicked my daughter’s cheek during the procedure and told me not to worry—it would heal in six weeks. To this day, a pale one inch scar runs across the top of her left cheek. Disappointed and angry, I left that practice for a gynecologist who wore Birkenstocks and a long braid. She moved to Oregon a couple of years later, and I switched to the gynecologist who kept me waiting forever in the cold exam room. Now I’ve put myself in the hands of Dr. Heinz who is sure I have cancer and wants to dispose of my reproductive system altogether. Dr. Bloom greets us with a big smile and a firm handshake. His hair is thinner and grey, but he still looks great—a cross between Omar Sharif and Sidney Pollack. A plaque on his wall states that he’s the President of the American Laparoscopy Association, another that he’s one of the Best Doctors in America. I tell him that I used to be his patient. He seems to remember, asks why I left. I tell him about the c-section, the nick to my daughter’s cheek. He looks rueful and asks why I’m here. I hand him the ultrasound with the suspicious “internal architecture,” a phrase that’s stuck with me for its

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poetry, despite what horrors it might bode, and tell him what Dr. Heinz thinks. He studies the ultrasound and says he wants to examine me. He actually thinks he can sense something with his hands? Dr. Heinz never suggested that. His exam room is the same: comfy alpaca-lined stirrups, pink printed fabric billowing from the ceiling directly over his examination table. He inserts the speculum, investigates my pelvis and palpates my abdomen, all the while asking about my daughter—what grade she’s in, what her interests are—as if we’re talking over coffee. Then he takes off his rubber gloves and tells me if there’s a tumor there, he can’t feel it. Back in his office, he draws pictures of ovarian tumors on his memo pad, explaining what each one might and might not mean. Leaning back in his chair, he says he wants me to see his radiologist for another ultrasound. He’s not convinced I have cancer. He figures the chances are 50/50. He’s just lifted the guillotine blade a few inches from my neck. Miles’s face, like mine, is flushed with relief. We leave with a copy of his book, “A Gynecologists’ Second Opinion: The Questions and Answers You Need to Take Charge of Your Health.” On page three he writes: “When viewing videotapes of photographs of their uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, most women are surprised to see how attractive these organs actually are. The colors are quite beautiful.” I’m reminded of something I heard a therapist once say: “I look at my patients as though I’m seeing a beautiful tree through a window that needs cleaning. My job is to clean the window.” I doubt Dr. Bloom would ever comment on the age of a patient’s genitalia. Dr. Bloom’s radiologist, a jovial guy, makes small talk while he does the ultrasound. Turns out our daughters are in the same production of Chicago. His eyes don’t narrow nervously like the first radiologist’s, but he does say, “There’s definitely some kind of mass that shouldn’t be there. I can’t tell what it is exactly, but it has to come out.” Dr. Bloom faces me from across his desk. He has read the second radiology report and agrees with Dr. Heinz that I need to have a biopsy taken of my ovary. But he strongly recommends a laparoscopy, which involves two to four tiny incisions, less than one half inch in length. If the tumor is benign, I can go home that day. I’ll heal in a week or two. A hysterectomy is necessary only if it’s malignant. I tell him Dr. Heinz thinks a laparoscopy is too dangerous. He disagrees, tells me how he’d wrap the ovary in a little bag made of the same

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material they use to manufacture parachutes, impossible to tear. I can’t wait for him to pause so I can ask him if he’ll do the biopsy. “I’m going to tell Dr. Heinz that if you were my patient, and you’re not, and that if I were going to doing the surgery, and I’m not, that’s what I would do.” I’m stunned, like I’ve just run headlong into a glass door too clean to see. “You won’t do the surgery?” “I can’t. You’re her patient.” “I’ve seen her once. I was your patient for five years.” He shakes his head, like an old flame refusing to cheat on his wife. “I can’t do it.” “What is it with us? You couldn’t deliver my baby, and now you can’t biopsy my ovary.” He smiles wanly. “Let’s do this. While she’s on vacation, I want you to get a blood test, a marker for ovarian cancer. It’s not that reliable, but if the numbers are very high or very low, they’ll give us some indication.” He’s letting me down easy. A couple of days later, I get a phone call from an old friend who lives in New York and whom I’ve called several times since the tumor showed up. She wants to know how I’m doing. I tell her about Jon Bloom. “Where’s he from?” “He sounds like he’s from Long Island. Why?” “I went to summer camp with a Jonny Bloom. What does he look like?” “Square jawed, ruddy complexion, dark hair, although now it’s grey.” “What’s he built like? Johnny was wiry. He played a lot of basketball.” “I can’t see his body through the white coat, but he seems like he’s in good shape.” “Where did he go to college?” I picture the plaques on his office wall. His B.S. degree emerges in my mind’s eye just as Judy says, “Jonny went to N.Y.U.” Bingo. “Shit, Judy, what if it’s him?” She tells me he was the greatest guy in camp. Everyone loved him. They went out one summer when he was a waiter and she was a counselor, and they kissed behind the mess hall. “Ask him if he went to Camp Onteora.” The phone rings at 8:00 the next morning “Liz? It’s Dr. Bloom with good news.” His voice is loud, excited. “Your blood test came back. Anything

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under 30 is considered normal. You’re a 6.” I’m elated and appreciative that he’s so eager to tell me. “That’s great. Can I ask you a question?” “Shoot.” “Did you ever go to Camp Onteora?” “Get outta town…how do you know about Camp Onteora?” He sounds sixteen. “Judy Schwartzman is one of my oldest friends.” “No way.” “I’ve known her for thirty years.” He lowers his voice. “Did she tell you we went out one summer?” “Yes, she did.” “Did she tell you we kissed behind the mess hall?” Now I’m sixteen too, and I’ve just gotten in with the coolest guy in class. “Yes, she did.” “…she was sooo cute.” I wait a beat before interrupting his reverie. “Can I ask you another question?” “Sure.” “Since you won’t do my surgery, and since Dr. Heinz won’t do a laparoscopy, who else would you recommend?” “I’ll tell you what. If she won’t do a laparoscopy, and if you can get her to release you as her patient, I’ll do it.” Either I really am a sorceress, or this six-degrees-of-separation coincidence is a choreographed answer to a prayer. I call Dr. Heinz’s office, talk to her associate, who calls her in Maui and calls me back to say I’m released. Dr. Bloom wants to schedule the surgery for September 11, 2002. He asks if I’m superstitious. I tell him not about this. He says, “I have a good feeling about it.” I love that he uses the word feeling. The blood test was encouraging. When my daughter asks, “Mom, are you okay? I keep hearing you and dad talk about doctors,” I’m relieved I can answer her honestly: “I think I’m fine, honey. I just need to have a test to make sure.” But when the nurse preps me for surgery, I still don’t know what they will find. The oncologist will be there, ready to assist if a hysterectomy is necessary. Next time I’m conscious, I’ll either have a couple of small incisions in my belly, or a large deep cut. I’ll be missing one ovary, or all of

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my reproductive organs. As the anesthesia enters my veins, I close my eyes and ask for courage. Someone’s hand is on my ankle, rolling my right leg from side to side. A voice with a foreign accent is yelling, “Lisbeth, wake up.” I struggle to surface. “What happened?” “You had an oophorectomy.” “What’s that?” ”You had your ovaries removed.” “I didn’t have a hysterectomy?” “No, you had an oopherectomy. They took out your ovaries.” “Both of them?” “That’s what it says.” She picks up the chart clipped to my bed. “Bilateral oopherectomy.” Thrilled I don’t have cancer, but confused, I ask to see Miles. He tells me Dr. Bloom, who left an hour ago, told him they found an unusual growth called “borderline.” It’s not cancer, but it proliferates, can eventually reach other internal organs and interfere with their functions. A spot of it had reached my left ovary, so he had to remove it, too. “Dr. Bloom said you wouldn’t be happy about that,” Miles tells me. “But I told him you’d be relieved that you’re okay.” He’s right. I’m so grateful to be healthy, it seems greedy to ask for more. I do wonder, however, given how long I’ve been suspicious of doctors, why I so thoroughly trust Dr. Bloom. Why was I so willing—eager, actually— to put myself in his hands? Because of his competence and confidence? Because he bent the rules for me this time, sparing me a needless abdominal surgery? Because he accepted me into his circle of summer camp friends? Or was it his belief, like his faith that I could conceive my first child at 39, that a mysterious mass in my ovary could be benign—his ability, in other words, to see me as a healthy tree through a less than gleaming window? Is that why I see him now, former frat boy or no, as solid and flexible as a deeply rooted oak? Three years later, I’m meeting a cousin of mine in a busy café in Venice. Someone taps my shoulder. I turn around. A face with glasses and grey hair is inches from mine. “Hello,” the face booms cheerfully. I back up to see that it’s Dr. Bloom, trim and athletic in a T-shirt and jeans. “What are you doing here?” He tells me he has to give a lecture on an article he wrote, that he’s

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come here to go over it. He lifts a toned forearm, the article rolled up in his fist. It’s supposed to appear in Oprah’s magazine by the end of the year. “Wow. What’s it about?” He unfurls it and explains he did research on hysterectomies in women under sixty five, how it’s important, if at all possible, to keep the ovaries because… I interrupt and parrot back to him the research findings he told me about during my last checkup a few months earlier “… the estrogen and progesterone they produce protect the heart and bones and those benefits outweigh the risk of ovarian cancer.” “What a memory! If Oprah asks me to come on her show, you should come with me.” “But you took out both of mine.” “I had to,” he says, looking apologetic. “I know,” I say and leave it that, not wanting to belittle his discovery. A pair of arms grabs my waist from behind. It’s Diana. I introduce her to Dr. Bloom and tell her that he’s my gynecologist. Her eyebrows arch. He shakes her hand and laughs. “Women’s eyes always get big whenever they hear I’m a gynecologist. I was in a restaurant with my son last night. A patient of mine walked by and I said ‘Hi’ and she said ‘I’m surprised you recognize me. I thought you only knew me from the waist down.’ My son turned bright red.” I feel like we’re at a party he’s hosting—he’s having fun while making sure we feel at home. Of course, I think, he makes women comfortable all day long. “Mr. Onteora,” Judy called him, the mayor of all situations. He touches my arm before walking away. “Say hi to Judy.” As soon as we sit down, Diana says, “He’s Dr. McDreamy.” She’s not yet thirty and still single. “Diana, he’s my age.” “I don’t care. What a handshake. I’ve got this thing for hands. He’s got great hands.” “Yeah,” I say. “He does.”

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GREEN LEMONS Marilyn Martin I grew up watching my brother, a misfit in a family of stellar students, struggle with learning. We were a family of four children. John came third: my only brother. When he started kindergarten, no one thought much of it. He got new shoes and a lunch box. Kindergarten, a children’s garden, what could go wrong there for a five-year old? The worst thing that could happen was that you might cry the first morning. Wiry and adaptable, my brother wasn’t a crier. He spent his playtime devising contraptions from wood, rope and pulleys like those in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. My cerebral father wasn’t handy, so when our television broke, it was my brother who figured out how to restore service by rigging up coat hangers. He also had a talent for mimicry. When he copied your expression or gait, it was like looking in the mirror. My mother had to teach him about that fine line between humor and cruelty when, at four, he walked behind a handicapped man in a shoe store aping his spastic movements. At first my brother couldn’t wait to get his hands on the Froebel blocks, the poster paints, to drink milk from those tiny wax cartons. On warm August mornings, he grabbed his new lunch box and practiced walking the halfmile past Lagatelli’s General Store to Chestnut Grove Elementary School. From the playground, he located the window of Mrs. Bolivar’s classroom and peered in expectantly. Mrs. Bolivar had been my kindergarten teacher nine years earlier. I was in her inaugural class. She made home visits back then, and I remember her sitting in an armchair in our living room, balancing a teacup and espousing her idealistic views. She was an artist and wanted to introduce children to beauty. The art projects we did that year were indeed charming. A pink naugahyde rabbit fashioned from a pattern she had designed. The requisite handprint in a circle of clay made memorable by her choice of paint colors. A silhouette—a perfect likeness of my profile—my mother still keeps in a box in our attic. The only problem was we kids did not really create these items. Mrs. Bolivar did. We simply sat still while she drew and cut. I did well with her though. This was 1958 and not much was expected of kindergarteners. Tie your shoes. Count to twenty. Recite the alphabet. Write your name. Five years later, when my sister, Sheila, started school, Mrs. Bolivar had given up on home visits. I remember passing my sister’s classroom and hearing the teacher’s voice, loud and strident, spilling into the hallway, admonishing her charges to sit still. One day, a boy tapped me on my shoulder.

“Hey, Martin, your sister wants you.” Mystified, I followed him to where Sheila stood breathless in the doorway of my fifth-grade classroom. Waiflike and tiny, she was all hair and eyes. “Mrs. Bolivar says you have to come and explain about the lemon,” she said. She could hardly speak between gasps of air. How did she get here? I wondered. Her class was in the kindergarten wing, a protected enclave where each room had its own private exit. Kindergarteners didn’t walk around the school unaccompanied. I asked her what on earth she was talking about. But she couldn’t explain. Silently, she led me down the stairs and through a maze of corridors. When we entered her classroom, the first thing I saw was Mrs. Bolivar’s knees in her shiny nylon stockings, as she sat perched on the edge of a child-sized chair. All the kids in Sheila’s class were sitting patiently at her feet on a piece of gray carpet, holding objects for Show-andTell. Then I caught sight of the green grapefruit-sized citrus fruit cradled between Miss Bolivar’s palms, and immediately guessed why I had been summoned. “Oh Marilyn, I am so glad you are here!” she said, “Sheila keeps insisting this is a lemon.” She addressed me as if we were equals. As if I, too, could understand how infuriating small children could be. “I keep telling her it’s a lime. Lemons are yellow, and limes are green. So of course this is a lime. But your sister wouldn’t stop arguing with me, so I told her to go get you.” For a minute, I considered betraying my sister. Mrs. Bolivar’s intensity made me squirm, and I had rarely been in trouble before. What if she started screaming at me? Or worse sent me up the chain of command to confer with the principal? So I tried to soften the blow. “Everyone says that about our lemons, Mrs. Bolivar. My mom has this tree in a pot, and sometimes, the lemons turn yellow. But mostly, they get so big they fall before they have a chance. If you leave them by the window, they’ll turn yellow.” A few months later, Mrs. Bolivar wrote in the comments section of my sister’s report card that she was immature and socially backward. I remember my father cursing out Mrs. Bolivar while he ate breakfast. Of course Sheila’s immature, he fumed. She’s only five. That’s why she needs to go to school. My mother complained to the principal, but the whole incident was forgotten by the time my sister started first grade. She never had any more trouble in school. Four years later, Mrs. Bolivar had my brother. At first, he got up early, ate breakfast and joined the swarm of neighborhood kids who walked to school. However, as the weeks passed, his circadian rhythms seemed to shift. In the morning in our small house, he began to sleep through dogs barking, clocks ringing, and people screaming. At first my mother thought he was sick, but

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when the doctor could find nothing wrong, she initiated a morning routine that would continue for many years. After pleading, cajoling and finally screaming, she would give up and carry his groggy body down the stairs, sit him in a chair and force his clothes on. Then she pushed him out the door with a piece of toast in his hand. At first, no one associated my brother’s reluctance to get up in the morning with kindergarten. Starting school was more routine back then. The glossy women’s magazines my mother read were filled with articles about Jackie Kennedy and household management; nothing about school “readiness” or how to direct her children’s education. If you asked my father, he would have scoffed at the idea that kindergarten could try the mettle of any child. One day, I overheard my brother pretending to be Mrs. Bolivar. He was sitting on the dining room carpet, and he had a funny expression on his face. “Now, John, can you tell the class your phone number?” He spoke to an imaginary audience and modulated his voice so he sounded like her. Then he stood up, his tone returning to its original timbre and repeated the first three characters of our phone number. “NE4,” he announced with his mouth agape, staring into the faces of imaginary children before him. He could not recite the last four digits. Soon he was missing recess. Sheila reported she’d spy him through the single window in the classroom door while he filled up pieces of cheap newsprint with indecipherable marks, his fingers stained black from the silvery lead of his thick pencil. But he just couldn’t do the things Mrs. Bolivar wanted him to. One afternoon right before Halloween, my brother failed to come home. Around four o’clock, my mother pulled on a pair of dirty white Keds and walked up to Chestnut Grove. From the classroom doorway, she saw him standing in the middle of the room, wearing his jacket. His lunch box and several papers rested nearby. He was crying softly, as he futilely yanked on the metal tab of his zipper. The snagged silver teeth were never going to snap into place. Later, I overheard my mom telling my dad that Mrs. Bolivar looked up as if she was expecting her. “Hello, Mrs. Martin.” She sat at her desk, writing in a notebook. I imagine she used the same conspiratorial tone with my mother as when she had discussed the lemon with me. “I told John he could go home as soon as he learned to zip his coat.” All this, you understand, took place in a time when the balance of power was heavily tipped in favor of the school. Records were closed. Teachers could write the most fantastical things about a child without fear

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of censure. And in my brother’s case they apparently did. By the time he turned eighteen, a more liberal law allowed him to request copies of his records, and after they came in the mail, my mother read me some of things teachers had said. Someone conjectured that he was mentally retarded because he was late with toilet training. Someone else concluded he must be from a deprived background. My mother remembers a sympathetic fourth-grade teacher who removed some of the most incendiary pages from his burgeoning file. Right after my brother had to stay after school, my parents met with Mr. MacKinnon, the principal, to see if John could be moved to a different class. A nervous man who resembled a tall Groucho Marx, Mr. MacKinnon hid his watery brown eyes behind a pair of thick tortoise shell glasses. Sometimes my brother would stand on the toilet seat in our small bathroom, so he could stare into the mirror and mimic the way the man’s right eye would twitch uncontrollably when he broke up fights at recess. My father got Mr. MacKinnon’s eye going right after he sat down. (Later, my mother learned to leave my father home when she attended meetings about my brother.) No matter how hard my dad tried, he could never control his temper. He wanted to help my brother, but his anger was always reduced to an accusatory flood of words. “Mrs. Bolivar is incompetent. Actually she’s an idiot.” “Mrs. Bolivar is our best kindergarten teacher,” Mr. MacKinnon countered. “I want my son out of her class. What kind of fool makes a child cry because he can’t zip his coat?” “We can’t switch a child’s teacher in the middle of the year.” Mr. MacKinnon continued. “The problem is John. He needs to try harder. You have other children, and they all zip and count and write.” “OK, then, I’ll take him out of Chestnut Grove.” The concept of choice in early childhood education had not yet caught on. There were only two recognized options for kindergarten in our neighborhood. You could either attend the parish school of St. Augustine or Chestnut Grove. So when a small yellow bus started to pick up my brother and drive him for half an hour to a kindergarten in a Victorian house, I don’t think my parents realized how radical a step they had taken. Or that they had unwittingly drawn a line in the sand. My brother learned to write his name and zip his coat in the Victorian house, but it didn’t help him much. The following September, when my parents tried to re-enroll him in Chestnut Grove for first grade, Mr. McKinnon insisted he repeat kindergarten. Even if John’s private school

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was accredited by New York state, he argued, it couldn’t be as good as Chestnut Grove. The only concession he would grant, and that was because he realized my father might have killed him right there in the office, was that my brother did not have to get Mrs. Bolivar again. This was the 1960s. No one mentioned learning disabilities to my parents. There were only a few ways to explain school failure: stupidity, laziness, a bad mother, a lousy home. So my brother became a local legend, the only child in Chestnut Grove stupid enough to get left back in kindergarten. His reputation followed him through twelve years of schooling until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. To use the lingo of modern education, he continued to develop his strengths. Once he constructed an intricate apparatus of ropes and pulleys that allowed him to conceal a neighbor’s wagon in the upper canopy of an oak tree. My mother had to call the fire department to get the wagon down. And he honed his talent for mimicry until he could do perfect impersonations of his teachers. By making people laugh, he deflected comments about his diminutive height and enhanced his popularity. My youngest sister, two years behind him in school, had to prove herself every time she ended up in a high school class taught by one of John’s former teachers. “Miss Martin, if you are anything like your brother, watch out.” My parents did their best, but I realize now they were as guilty as the school. They pinned all the blame for John’s difficulties on bad teachers and an inept school system. Yet my sisters and I attended the same schools and had many of the same teachers. But we did not need our teachers to be skilled and compassionate in the same way my brother did. We could get by with less and do more with it. My parents never seemed to grasp this. So my brother’s problems became my family’s private cause célèbre, and his difficulties joined us at every meal. My immigrant father used his considerable intelligence to criticize what he called “the American educational system.” Although many of his conclusions were accurate, he became so full of accusation and blame that he lost sight of my brother. He never acknowledged what even I, as a child, could see. Something mysterious and shadowy surrounded my brother and interfered with his ability to learn. I think my father was terrified for his son. He could not imagine a way of succeeding in this world from a place of weakness. So he never chose to accept my brother’s core difficulties. My father died when my brother was in college. The tragedy of his life, I think, was that he gave up the opportunity to help John deal constructively with his problems. My mother reacted by doing too much for him. She took care of him

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in a way she never took care of me. He was excused from all chores and responsibilities so he could “rest”—no paper routes, dishes, even museum trips. Now a man in his forties, he still lives at home with her. I was fourteen the year my brother attended the school in the Victorian house. I was curious about what he did there so one morning I rode the bus with him. We were the only passengers as we bounced and careened around the curves on Route 9W. Eventually the suburbs disappeared, and we drove past forests until we got to where the land thinned out into farms. My tiny brother sat by the window, formally dressed in pressed corduroy pants and a white dress shirt. The only sound was the banging of his brown leather oxfords against the metal underside of the seat. So intent on the job of getting us there, the driver never spoke. And I remember thinking, as I filled up with a sense of outrage, “Where are the grown-ups? Aren’t there supposed to grown-ups to help with problems like these?” Rationality was such a small part of the conversation about my brother that no word or label was ever affixed to his bewildering constellation of difficulties. So when my daughter was born in 1981, it never occurred to me that she could be at risk for any “condition,” or that my brother’s situation could somehow be passed down as if it were a set of heirloom china. Right after Sara was born, someone gave me a baby book. Between pictures of pink rabbits and beaming ducks, I dutifully recorded that she smiled right on schedule at six weeks. I pasted photographs of her in smocked dresses and knitted hats, or swaddled papoose-like in crocheted blankets. I answered the questions about when she doubled her weight or first ate a mashed banana. But there was no place in this chronicle of normal development to record deviation or concern. So for the next six years, I kept a second, invisible baby book for more troubling observations. One of its first entries was how different Sara’s motor development was from the other babies. Content to stay in one place and watch, she still could not sit up until she was nine months old. She rolled over a month later and learned to walk right before her second birthday. She always met the important milestones quite late, but not late enough to veer off the charts in Spock or Brazelton. Our grandfatherly pediatrician defended her. “She’s not floppy,” he pointed out. What alarmed me most was not how old she was when she learned to sit or walk, but the torturous route she took to get there. In the real baby book, there is a picture of Sara at ten months performing an “airplane,” a curious action where she lifts her arms and legs high in the air so she is balanced on a small part of her torso. Babies do this, the pediatrician told

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me, to strengthen their backs in preparation for walking. In the invisible baby book, I noted how Sara performed dozens and dozens of airplanes, her forehead wrinkled up with concentration. I was alarmed by how much practice she needed to conquer simple things like sitting and rolling over. Still, I followed the advice of the baby care manuals, removing a blue pottery bowl from the coffee table and securing the kitchen cabinets with plastic locks in the middle of her first year. But these precautions only benefited Elizabeth and Danny, the babies in Sara’s playgroup who unearthed buttons from under our carpet, chased the cat and crawled gleefully up and down the stairs. My child was content to watch them. She preferred to explore the world passively, from the command center of a baby bouncy chair. She was all ears, magnetically attracted to the words spoken by a human voice. She was enthralled as I turned the pages of those thick cardboard infant books and repeated the labels that matched the pictures. Cow, monkey, tree, sun. Frequently, she would stare expectedly at some object in the room, and we would talk about it. In the invisible baby book, I recorded how out in the world Sara could barely tolerate the gaze of strangers, but as long as I could keep strangers at bay she was easy to integrate into adult activities. My friends with babies had temporarily given up restaurants and museums. But Sara liked to go to the Garfield Conservatory to observe the palm trees or the Art Institute to look at paintings. She never left her stroller, and seemed genuinely entranced with listening to me prattle on about orchids or Monet. Despite all my misgivings, we were happy. If she didn’t like to relate to others, she clearly adored my husband and me. The pediatrician recommended that I worry less, so I tried to push my worry to the back of my mind. And there it remained until one afternoon in February when I became keenly aware of my thirteen-month-old daughter’s problems. On this particular day, Sara was in her bedroom, seated at a child-sized table. I was working in the living room and could hear her happy babbling. Perhaps her past behavior had lulled me into a false sense of security. She did not get into dangerous things. She did not fall down, and since she was rarely quiet, I had only to listen to the sound of her voice to keep track of her. There was a tiny pause before her first scream. It was not a cry but a scream, a scream of someone genuinely terrified. It took only a few seconds for me to go from the living room to gaze down the short, narrow hallway that led out of Sara’s bedroom. I expected to see her bloodied. Instead, she was crawling down the hallway, her forehead wrinkled as tears rolled down

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her cheeks, her chest heaving and gasping with sobs. She was crawling, this child who had never been able to balance on all fours. She stared at the two walls on either side, as if she were afraid they would collapse on top of her. Then she sobbed a bit more and proceeded to move forward a little. An instinct told me not to pick her up or interfere. It was clear that she did not know where she was. Although she had lived in the same apartment for her entire short life, she didn’t know where to go next, or even what was next. She was like a superstitious member of Columbus’s crew, terrified she would fall off the edge of the earth. “This way, Sara. This is the way to the living room.” The only sounds were the slap of her palms and her knees on the wooden floor as she moved forward into the abyss of the living room. “This is the dining room,” I told her, as she followed me into the next room. “This is the kitchen,” I said, as we finished exploring her universe. She calmed herself soon after. But I remained overwhelmed with the knowledge of how disoriented my daughter seemed. She was totally lost. She did not know where each room was or how to go from one room to the next. She lived in a world where the possibility existed that plaster walls could collapse at any moment. My worry came out of hibernation. By the time Sara was ready for school, the invisible baby book was filled with disturbing observations. Sometimes she reminded me of my brother. She too had trouble with zippers, memorizing sequences of numbers and writing her name. But her difficulties seemed deeper, more complex. Other children and unfamiliar situations made her unaccountably edgy. She could never remember where the bathroom was in our best friend’s small house no matter how frequently we visited. Finally, there was her speech. Only my husband and I could follow what she was saying. People reminded me it was normal for small children to mispronounce some words. But my daughter mispronounced every word, and did so until she was ten. When Sara was three, I sent her to the Montessori School where I used to teach. I sent her there because it was a familiar place. I hoped, because they knew us, they would see her as I did: delightful, brimming with possibilities, but with mysterious impediments. I particularly hoped they could help me decipher the observations in the invisible baby book. After all, wasn’t it Montessori who said the best way to learn about children was through careful observation? But I hoped for too much. Sara did not adjust well, and her problems developed right away. The school, a beehive of activity where two hundred children were initiated into the importance of order and self-reliance, was

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just too jarring and kaleidoscopic. There were too many rules, too many people and too much space for her to maneuver. Sometimes when I hugged my daughter goodbye, I could feel her heart pounding through the cloth of her shirt. The school’s philosophy could be summed up by the Chinese proverb, “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The teachers sought to make their charges self-sufficient in the very motor areas where Sara floundered. Children learned how to put on their coats by laying them backwards on the floor and flipping them over their heads, to cut carrots into circular slices with real paring knives. The teachers were unusually dedicated—devoting chunks of their free time to making new educational games or optimizing the classroom’s layout. The Montessori Method was the cornerstone of their belief system, so it was only natural that an unresponsive child and her bumbling mother would be seen as ungrateful. My daughter, as she repeatedly flipped the wrong end of her coat over her head and continually used the dull side of the paring knife, became an unwitting challenge to the teachers’ unwavering conviction that the tenets of Montessori were inviolate. It did not help that I was a former Montessori teacher. In fact, it made the whole situation more embarrassing. In Montessori lingo, a wellorganized, balanced child is known as a “Montessori child,” and here I was sending them the Montessori equivalent of the “Anti-child.” Of course, I should have known better. Deep down I realized Sara would never make it as a Montessori child, but I deceived myself through some form of magical thinking: my former colleagues would find a way to make things work for her. At first, the teachers considered my daughter a puzzling special case. We were granted certain allowances. I was permitted to walk Sara right to the door of her classroom long after other mothers were banished to the schoolyard. If a teacher saw me tying Sara’s shoe or wiping her nose, she looked the other way. The first time Sara got her school picture taken, I was allowed to accompany her onto the stage and squat down next to her chair while the camera flashed. I still have the picture: Sara is dressed in a green Polly Flinders dress; she stares straight ahead with a vacant expression. If you look closely at the bottom corner of the photograph, you can see the tip of my thumb tightly grasped in her fist Soon other problems developed. In each classroom, the puzzles and games were shelved on trays kept in orderly rows throughout the classroom. After you played with one of them, you were required to return the tray to the exact spot where you got it. Sara explained to me she was afraid to try

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the activities because she never remembered where to put them back. “You get in trouble, Mom,” she told me. The teachers told me they were not mind readers; Sara only needed to ask for help. But the way she mixed-up her sounds in spoken words made her inquiries impossible to decipher. When she tried to say something, the other children looked startled. “What did she say?” they asked each other. In the hallway, through the two-way observation window, I watched Sara wander anxiously around the room. About six months before Sara’s fifth birthday, the teachers felt Sara should “try harder.” They believed she should learn how to open the entrance door to the school. Even though they had patiently shown Sara how to open the heavy door, she couldn’t seem to remember which way to turn the handle. We reached a standoff. The teachers insisted that I no longer leave my car idling at the curb so I could get out and open the door for Sara. They believed I was not only interrupting the car pool line but also interfering with Sara’s independence. “Just drive away,” they advised. “She is manipulating you.” After that, Sara worried all the way to school that she might be locked out. I promised her that I wouldn’t drive away until she was safely inside. Up the block, just out of eyeshot, I pulled the car over. Through the rearview mirror, I watched her vainly work the mechanism on the heavy door handle. In the car, time seemed to pass slowly, but eventually another child always arrived, opened the door, and Sara scooted in on their coat tails. She never figured out how to open the door. One day, I parked my car and sneaked into the school early. I found Sara sitting on a chair facing the classroom door. She was happy to see me. She explained that she preferred to sit on a chair all day. She would rather wait for me than participate in the activities. “There is no point,” she said. Every afternoon at home, she watched the Disney film, Dumbo. She told me how she identified with the main character. “That’s me,” she explained. “I’m a Dumbo.” A week later, she stopped talking altogether at school. At home, she chattered constantly, but in school she didn’t utter one word. I visited the director of the school. I told her how important verbal explanations were for Sara, how if you wanted her to understand something you needed to explain it to her very clearly. For example, if you wanted her to put the trays back in the right place you had to tell her exactly where they belong. I told her to use a clue, like the green trays all go on the third shelf. “Think of words as her seeing-eye dog,” I explained. The director listened politely. It was as if she had forgotten I was once

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a teacher in this very school. Or that she had eaten dinner at my house. Perhaps she thought motherhood had addled my brain. She patiently explained how in Montessori school the teachers show but they don’t tell. Because most kids find words distracting, the teachers prefer to operate like a troupe of mimes. They couldn’t make an exception for Sara. The director recommended that I make an appointment with a certain psychotherapist who was also a speech therapist. “I think you and Sara are too attached,” she explained as she handed me the therapist’s card. “Aren’t small children supposed to be attached to their mothers?” I asked. Yes, she responded, but sometimes these intense attachments cause separation problems. The therapist was a tall elegant woman who suffered from a stuttering problem. Displayed on her desk was a framed photograph of her handsome son, who also stuttered. She explained how speech problems were often psychological. Even though she had never met Sara, she had a theory that when my daughter was an infant, she suffered from “failure to thrive.” Since Sara had been a plump baby, I found this hard to believe. At our next appointment, I showed the psychotherapist cum speech therapist a photograph of a chubby one-year old Sara sitting in her bouncy chair. The therapist was surprised but undaunted by this conflicting evidence. A few weeks later the therapist observed Sara at the Montessori school. She brought a large baby doll with her. That evening, Sara told me how a strange lady had followed her all over the classroom and tried to get her to talk to a doll. “I think it was a trick,” my daughter said. “That lady didn’t even know it’s against the rules to bring toys to school.” At my next meeting with the school’s director, she wanted to discuss the separation theory proposed by the therapist. I pointed out how Sara’s discomfort at school did not seem to stem from being away from me. She seemed upset rather because she couldn’t find a way to master the tasks, to make herself understood, or to join in the other children’s games. I felt the director underestimated how confused Sara was, how she couldn’t find her away around and how their showing-but-not-telling approach wasn’t working with her. My words were met with pity, a clucking of tongues. Now I sat on the same side of the table as my father had sat with Mr. McKinnon, and my selfrighteous anger must have been the same that rose in him. No wonder he lashed out at the principal who had made such unfair claims. I also realized something else I had never fully understood before. Once a professional

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like the speech therapist had reported her findings to other professionals, a mere parent could not successfully challenge the conclusions. In fact by doing so, I was unwittingly supplying further proof of being in denial and an obstruction to my daughter’s progress. The truth had been stated and there was no room for discussion. My father, the scientist, who was used to reasoning out problems, must have felt keenly the unfairness of such a debate. The final irony was that I had become a Montessori teacher because of my brother. One of my seminal memories was riding the bus with him that day and the question that I had asked myself. I wanted to be an adult who understood what to do for children like him. Was there an educational map? A journey my family could have taken so my brother would have suffered less? So I figured if I understood educational methods, I might discover the right thing to do. But I turned out to be wrong. Dogmatic educational methods had nothing to offer Sara. A lemon is always yellow, they seemed to say, and a lime is always green. My next step was to find a school where Sara could speak. The Lutherans ran the kindest kindergarten I could find. When the teacher, Mrs. Whalen first met my daughter, I believed I saw a telepathic spark pass between them. There was Sara, her tremulous eyes at odds with her brave smile and deeply dimpled cheeks. Something about my daughter’s Alicein-Wonderland appearance—her rosebud mouth, oval face and masses of waist-length hair—must have piqued a vein of daughterly longing when Sara reached for the teacher’s plump hand. Mrs. Whalen confessed she had only boys: two stalwart sons, boisterous as puppies. In addition, she was studying for a PhD in child development. Sara presented a professional challenge, and Mrs. Whalen was convinced she could get her to speak. We were not Lutherans. Nor were we religious, and for my Jewish husband to send his daughter to a Lutheran school would be going far afield. We were both nervous about the daily “Jesus time” when the whole class sat around a table listening to Bible stories. One day, a few months after Sara had adjusted to the new school, she asked me, “Mom, who is this Jesus guy they talk about all the time in school?” I got the feeling she wanted to know if he was someone like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Someone you believed in for a while even though you knew he wasn’t real. After I told her who Jesus was, she laughed. “Well at school, it’s pretty weird. They really think he is there in the room, following them around and helping them do stuff.”

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We did have Jesus to thank for getting Sara to talk. The day before she began her new school, Mrs. Whalen had announced to the class that Jesus was sending them a new student who had problems pronouncing words and would only talk to them if everyone was nice. The next day, twenty children welcomed Sara at the door as if she were a celebrity. Mrs. Whalen’s plan worked. Gradually, we found our way. I ferreted out schools and classes where my daughter could fit in, and I came to ask only that they do no harm. We consulted experts. Some were helpful; others like the diagnostician who tested Sara in high school and deemed her of low intelligence were not. When I pointed out that Sara was flourishing in an academically challenging program, this diagnostician remarked, “tests don’t lie.” The person who had the most to offer was Sara herself. Learning was slow and difficult for her, but she had an enormous capacity for work. I taught her how to zip her coat, read books and write stories. My husband showed her how to ride a bike. Her brother walked with her back and forth from the park until she knew how to get there herself. Eventually, I came to understand that her problems were not a baffling morass of unrelated difficulties, as it originally seemed, but an interconnected set of strengths and weaknesses. Sara went on to accomplish much more than I ever imagined. The girl who couldn’t zip her coat learned how to knit. The girl who couldn’t speak clearly delivered the Salutatorian’s address at her high school graduation. The girl who could never find the bathroom in her friend’s house spent a semester in Bolivia. The girl who needed to see a speech therapist for five years became one herself. When Sara was twenty-three, a neuropsychologist finally confirmed what I already knew. My daughter was bright, and he also attached a label to her difficulties: Nonverbal learning disabilities. It’s a rare condition that causes a disconnect between how a person processes visual and auditory stimuli. I imagine it’s like experiencing life as a movie where the sound and picture aren’t in synch. People with NLD pay attention to the dialogue, but they fail to take in much of the picture. As a result, they have trouble making sense of all they see with their eyes. NLD makes it hard for Sara to recognize familiar faces. Her sense of geography is sketchy at best so it’s difficult for her to find her way around. She’s poor at copying movements so she struggles with motor tasks like using a can opener or a corkscrew. Because she fails to notice nonverbal cues, social situations can be unsettling. Then there’s her tendency to be

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literal and how it leaves her vulnerable in an imperfect world, an easy target for the unscrupulous. But NLD gives as well as it takes. She’s a loyal friend, sweet and generous. She’s entranced by language, and it’s easy for her to memorize dates, phone numbers and even sonnets. It’s true NLD distorts a person’s world. All that pain—my brother yanking on his zipper, my daughter reduced to muteness—but occasionally there’s magic too. Several years ago, Sara and I were in a New England city checking out a graduate program where she’d been offered a scholarship. It was a sunny day, and as we idled at a red light, Sara’s brown hair whipped around her face as she stared out the open passenger-side window. “Hey, Mom, look,” Sara said, pointing excitedly at a street sign suspended above the traffic light. “It’s Washington Boulevard. That must be the same Washington Boulevard we have in Chicago. Turn down there, and we can take it all the way home.” We’re hundreds of miles from Chicago, but for my Alice, the Washington Boulevards of our nation spool out continuously like Woody Guthrie’s miles of highway, endless skyway. The world is a wonderland, and all roads lead home.

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WHEN A DRUNKEN MAN TELLS YOU HIS SECRETS Cassia Hameline When you’re fourteen and you decide you’re going to spend the weekend with your father, a man who likes to live by his own schedule and pretend that clocks do not accurately measure the amount of time in a day, make sure you realize what you’re getting yourself into. When you choose to tell your mother that you’ll be staying with him for the weekend, be prepared to make a fifteen minute long, persuasive argument explaining why this is a good idea. Do not tell her about how you know he’s going to let you stay out with your friends until midnight, or that you think he’s the fun parent. She’s going to tell you that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, so tell her everything will be fine, but know that she’s probably right. You’ll make it through the weekend without any major scratches, and the clock will tell you it’s nine p.m. on a Sunday night while your mother’s text says it’s time to be home. Tell her you left five minutes ago even though you’re still waiting in the parking lot for your father. You’ll still have an hour-long drive ahead of you, but at least she’ll think you’ll be there soon. After you leave your father’s house, you’ll feel relieved to be a little bit closer to home. Don’t. You’ll get twenty-five minutes down the road in his giant black truck with his name plastered to both sides in silver stickers, and he’ll slow down and pull into the sketchy parking lot for a bar named The Wig Wam, while you pretend to know what’s going on. When he tells you you’ll only be there for ten minutes, he swears, walk inside and choose a seat near the pretty bartender who is the only other girl in the place. She’ll ask you if you’d like some Pepsi or Seven Up, and when you ask for the latter she’ll give you that plus a free piece of the Turkey Joint candy sitting in the dirty glass mason jar you’ve been ogling since you sat down next to it. After she gives your father his second can of Milwaukee’s Best, you might look at your watch and see that it’s already ten o’clock. In five minutes, when your mother calls to check in about where you are and why you’re late, you should press the ignore button to avoid intimidating questions and awkward answers. You might start to feel a chill in your faded jeans, torn at the knees, and your creamsicle-orange colored long-sleeved T-shirt as frigid air rushes through the large wooden door that opens every twenty seconds and slams shut with a loud creak and a bang, so you’ll zip your toosmall blue and yellow ski jacket up to just below your neck. You may start to feel that strange awareness that someone’s looking at you: look to your right. A man who reminds you of Shrek will be sitting next to you. He is balding, and wears a leather vest with matching boots. There are scratches on his thick arms, and you’ll wonder how he got them, but won’t ask. As you look him up and down, you’ll start to feel nervous and

want to beg your dad to leave, but before you can look in the other direction, he’ll tell you that he has a niece that looks just like you. A flashing red light will go off in your head, letting you know that it’s time to get out of there, but you’ll be frozen to the seat in terror. You’ll assume that he’s triple your size. When you don’t answer, he’ll look down into his foggy glass filled with something brownish, and when he tells you his name, know that it’s okay to forget. You’ll notice that his hands are quietly shaking, maybe shivering from the cold, and his face looks a bit softer, sadder than it did at first glance. He’ll tell you that he’s always wanted a daughter, but his wife passed away four years ago and he could never dream of having a child with another woman. He’ll tell you how he didn’t know it was possible to love anyone, or anything, that much until she was gone. He’ll tell you her name was Laura. You’ll feel sorrow for this large man, which will overpower your fear of him, and you’ll ask him how his wife died. He’ll say it was from a motorcycle accident, and begin to break down as he explains how much she loved to ride. He’ll start to reminisce about how she rode every day on her black and yellow 1997 Honda Valkyrie, a little faster than what he would have liked, but that’s one of the reasons he loved her. As he sniffles and wipes his eyes with his small napkin, already moist from the condensation of his cool drink, pat him on his bowling ball-sized shoulder with your small, pale hand and tell him that it’s how she would have wanted to go. You’re only fourteen, but you’ve seen this gesture and heard this line in movies you’ve watched late at night with your mother, and figure it’s the right thing to do. He’ll look at you in confusion, and say that she deserved to live for another forty years and pass peacefully, and although his expression starts to turn to anger, you’ll say that if she truly loved the sport, then that is how she should have gone. You’ll talk for twenty more minutes about Laura, and life, and ignore the constant buzzing of your cell phone in your pocket. When you think back to your mother at home, and know how she must be worried, realize for the first time that some things are more important than others, and right now this stranger needed you more than her. He needed your short, fourteen years of experience at life to fix the thirty-three of his own, and you’ll feel special. An intoxicated stranger has no walls built up, no reason to hold back, but rather a simple desire to share with the world their story. There is no fear, nor judgment, simply the desire to connect himself to something in a time when they are most alone. Know that this stranger may show you a different kind of pain that life forces upon us, and the vulnerability that comes as a result. Know that your influence on them may be just as important as theirs on you, and keep in mind that this man is no exception.

Hameline

When your father tells you it’s time to leave, introduce him to the giant man crying into his oily palms, because it’s polite to introduce your friends. Make sure to say you were glad to meet him, and that things will get better, and wave before you walk out the door. When you get home at 11:30 p.m., your mother will walk outside and start to yell at your father for being so irresponsible. You’ll watch as she stands with her arms across her chest, outside of his giant black truck with the window down. They’re loud, and angry, and you hate when they do this but you won’t be able to look away. The usual scene that plays again and again, of large gestures from a small woman, while simple, rude, one word answers are uttered from your father’s mouth, might make you cringe. You may start to think about how you wish your life were different; a life with parents who didn’t fight, parents who could catch you doing things you knew were a bad idea, who could eat a simple meal together in peace. You’ll start to realize that you can’t have this perfectly played-out life, though; that for some reason it wasn’t meant for you. At that moment, it may feel like someone is poking you, jabbing you in the chest, right where your heart is; a familiar ache that never seems to leave. But then, just as you question how much more aching you can bear, you will think back to that giant man in the bar: a man who has nothing.

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SNAPSHOT Harmony Neal Somewhere exists a photo of me and my grandma from when I was five. I’m sitting on a sorrel pony against a backdrop of mountains. My skin is the clearest and whitest it will ever be, framed by wispy white gold hair that barely touches my collar. My grandma stands next to me, arm around my back, wearing a striped, button-down sweater that I stole as a teenager. I think of the sweater as brown, but it’s not: there are thin knitted stripes of white, burgundy, green, and rust, with a bit of brown. The buttons are long gone and there’s a lima bean-sized hole in the left sleeve, but it is still my favorite sweater, and that will always be my favorite photograph of me and my grandma, even though I have no idea where it is and haven’t seen it in years. In the photo, my grandma is young and thin with long black hair, smiling. I wish I could remember that day. I prefer the memory of the photograph to the more recent memories of my grandma hooked up to an oxygen tank, playing Hearts tournaments online. Five years old, on a pony, I had no questions about whether or not my grandmother knew everything, could protect me. It wouldn’t be until I was a teenager that she’d offer information that made me pause. Sometimes, when you order chicken at McDonald’s, they give you ostrich meat instead. I knew that could not be right. I’d seen few ostriches in my life, but I’d seen a semi with a giant wire cage, the live chickens crushed into each other, wings, legs, and beaks broken by pressure and wind. I’d seen the chicken semi and vomited, stopped eating chicken at all. It’s much easier to think of that photo and remember those times than to admit I don’t call my grandmother as often as I should, or that when I drive or fly down to Florida to see the family, I spend the least time with the person who once truthfully told me I was her favorite person in the whole world. A child can bear the weight of that kind of love better than an adult. A child craves that devotion, feels incumbent to reciprocate nothing but presence, simple existence. An adult knows better that things fall apart, quirkiness reveals itself as instability, flights of fancy are renamed delusion. Taking is no longer enough. There must be reciprocation or guilt. It is easier to keep outside the perimeter that which would devour. I’ve never asked my mother to find a copy of the photo, never rooted through the old family albums. I don’t want to see what might be there: the shadow falling across my grandmother’s face, her embrace that might be a clutch. I don’t want to look on my creaseless face and see the seeds of the person I

will become, aloof, leery of attachment, frightened by a world full of chicken semis and relationships that pluck at your sleeves. It is better to have the memory of the photo: grandchild and grandmother, happy, enjoying sun on their faces that wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cause cancer, in a mountain range that will never crumble into the ocean.

Neal

INTRODUCTION TO CZECH STUDIES Nick McRae

Brno, Czech Republic

In a pub off Veveři Street, the linguistics professor, sweating, neckerchiefed, rails that Kundera still comes to visit the city, though in disguise. We know this to be false. At least that’s what we hope. We don’t want to imagine him in a fake mustache, wide-brimmed hat pulled low, refusing to speak. We have all been drinking. The professor peeks at us through his fingers, the sobering process beginning already. He says it was a sad mistake, Kundera’s exile. Inside the man had lived a chimera— part socialism, part artist’s temper, part dope. It had been the seventies after all. We discuss his plight, wondering how one might disguise oneself to return home in secret. One’s speech must surely modulate—a new accent, the loping intonation of a foreigner. He grew progressively more French with each year away, and so Kundera, by now, would not need the thin mustache we pray he never penciled on. The man must act lost and foreign with ease, flawlessly disgusted by the locals. The professor mimes a camera with his fingers. He tells us that Kundera speaks English in the shops like a tourist, and might profess his love for France in Freedom Square. We hope

he is mistaken. The professor does not cope well with slivovice. He admits drinking is a mistake for a man like him—a sad, washed-up protestor. All those years damning the Marxists he despised wore him down. Now only two things make him speak his true mind: hard plum liquor, and Kundera. The Czechoslovakia of his mind is its own chimera— part mother’s milk, part hopelessness, part hope. He’s never seen Silesia or the Tatras’ peaks, but he’s climbed library stacks, knows the musty, ashen corners of every church beneath gray Moravian skies, knows Kundera—his fallen star—and us, his confessors.

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MARTIN, SLOVAKIA Nick McRae As the elevator door ticked shut, my neighbor Villam lurched in and, red-faced, gripped my arm and chortled, “Pivko, pivko,” taking pulls from a mimed bottle—beer, a little beer. My Slovak too rough for a polite decline, I let him drag me down the ice-slicked block. Inside the corner potraviny, Villam dropped two euros on the counter, shoved a lukewarm bottle in my hands—“Pi, pi.” (Drink, drink.) Villam was old. His face was old. He stank of sweat, and bacon grease, and borovička. I think he lived alone (I lived alone), and I couldn’t understand a thing he slurred except, “môj syn, môj syn”—My son, my son.

BENEDICTION FOR SLOVAKIA Nick McRae

Numbers 6:24-26

Bless Jozef Ruman and the house his sons moved home to build with him, the mother dead ten years, and bless the sweating cups of ice and young white wine the three men palm together, silent, the floorboards settling beneath them. Bless Villam Ondrla who, half-drunk, shovels snow and watches families traipse sure-footed down the lanes he cleared. Lord, bless the sons he never had, the wife he’ll never lose, his bare apartment. Bless them, Father, keep them. Bless the Roma children dotting sidewalks everywhere, all coatless, laughing, flinging rocks at gutted, crumbling tenements circling the train yard. Bless their idle hands. Father, turn your face to shine upon them. Bless all the men who’ve seen more flags than most men ever see unfurled above their streets— and bless the fading Hapsburg-era glamour of flaking gold foil, plaster cracked and soot stained, the spired cathedrals empty, wreathed in lichen. Lord, Bless the towering blocks of pre-fab flats— their fuchsias, ochres, pastel blues, and yellows where the Communist grays and whites had been— and bless the singer on the street proclaiming “Slováci ožijú”—the Slovaks will revive.

METAMORPHOSIS Tara Deal He never felt unworthy of attention or stifled by his parents, who had latched onto a boat in another part of the world and ended up here, entrenched, before he was born. He never suffered from low self-esteem, and so becoming a bug was not what happened to him. Plus, this was suburbia. And so he grew up, got married, bought a silver car and a house with a pool, and called the exterminator (when he had to). He did not become someone else, something else entirely. (He became almost exactly what you’d expect, frankly.) You could catch a glimpse of his fine form whipping through the pool out back sometimes. Or you’d see a flash of iridescence in the driver’s seat of that car. The terrain of lush lawns and empty sidewalks suited his habits. And he could be spotted, once in a while, out in the warm nights, stretching, getting ready to run, while August crickets chattered. He jumped over obstacles when they were placed in front of him. He thrived in this life cycle that no one ever thought to document. That is, until the microclimate shifted, and someone discovered a rift in the dining room, a fault line straight through the house and into the green grass where he liked to take refuge, now more than ever, apparently. But he didn’t want to talk about things. Things change. Then a global warming of emotions, and soon his species of kindness turned a corner. Pinstriped jackets were sloughed off into the closet. There were witnesses who tried to explain. He became more nocturnal, harder to find, and then all of a sudden, extinct one evening. Free is what the neighbors called it. As the silver car disappeared, zapped by the beam of streetlights, then turned to dust in the distance.

249 Clark Chatlain pelican I can almost remember how the tides of your prehistoric eyes carved the moons in the marshes of time how your bill drew fish from the lakes late named for our own saints where history washed blue into deeper pasts of forgetting when your own being swayed and held on cold waves under white skies now my farewell means almost nothing as we fade from a shining world taking nothing good not understanding not compassion while your flight before the sun will be my last vision I know nothing

VECTORS Gwen E. Kirby The foot of the oak bed loomed over Leda, dwarfing the small lumps—feet, kneecaps, ribs, breasts—that hardly changed the topography of the white sheet. The comforter was on the floor. She was cold, but did not move to pull it over herself. Instead, Leda moved her hand to her hipbone, feeling its reassuring jut, pinching herself when a gunshot that she knew a second later was another car door slamming startled her anew. Wide-awake, exhaling long and slow, her heart and the bruise on her head throbbed. The week, which had started out so well—coming home from the clinic last Sunday, eating enough at the right times, going to the doctor to be weighed (her own scale was in a dumpster), gaining on schedule—had gone wrong in one day. She willed herself to fall back to sleep, but every night noise—a passing car, a siren in the distance, the heater shuddering on— made her twitch with irritation. The nearby traffic light cycled through its colors, changing the tint of the ice on the window as snow tumbled leisurely in fat flakes. Lightly, she pressed her fingers down on the bruise. There was a small pebble between the skull and skin, where before it had only been tender. This is your punishment, she thought, and the empty dresser drawers and bare bureau glared at her in agreement. Since coming home, she hadn’t unpacked. Her photos—the family at the Ohio state fair, her friends in their graduation gowns last spring, Walter, the now-deceased family dog—were still in her tiny day bag, face down, below the pants and shirts and underwear that she was unpacking one outfit at a time. Leda rolled over and twisted into a knot, stomach churning, imagining the explanations the next morning, the disbelief on Brian’s face as she lied to him. The truth—that all morning she’d sat in the red corduroy armchair—was too personal. All morning telling herself that in five minutes she would put down the book she wasn’t reading, place one foot in front of the other, walk to the kitchen, and put the Cheerios between her lips, one spoonful at a time. Not Cheerio by Cheerio, but mouthfuls. Instead, the incredible gnawing hunger, the hunger she had beaten so thoroughly into submission, was back. If she had one bite, she knew she’d eat everything in the whole house, everything in the whole world. So she’d just sat there, watching the sunlight slowly brighten the window, staring at her bony knuckles, chewing on the end of a blue University of Minnesota pen, listening to the landline ring. Two people had left messages, each voice echoing loudly through the silent apartment: her boss, who wanted to know when she’d be back to work at the lab, and her friend Meg, calling to wish her a happy birthday a day early. She hadn’t called either of them back. By six in the evening, the day had still had the neatness of a large,

round zero. Nothing taken in to tip the comforting mental balance. Zeros, encompassing all of nothing in their round O’s: zero calories and zero phone calls made, zero trips outside the house, zero pages read and zero words spoken. Just today, I won’t eat anything, then tomorrow I’ll go back on the schedule. Fine, she’d mouthed silently, her mouth was so dry the saliva felt stringy and thick, everything is going to be fine. Water. She stood up from the chair as if she hadn’t been paralyzed there for hours. Where was that moment, between paralysis and movement? As a child, awake after a nightmare, she always felt paralyzed, only slowly able to move her hand from her side to reach between the mattress and bed board and pull out a book. Feeling for it, stronger the moment it was in her fingers—each book she had hidden there over the years had its own distinct smell, like a mother or a father. Somehow, the e-book reader in her hand wasn’t providing the same moral support. As she walked from the living room into the kitchen, she really did feel fine. It was a high she recognized, the light-headed exhilaration beyond hunger. She’d just get a glass of water and then she’d call Meg back. Brian didn’t need to know that she hadn’t eaten. In front of the refrigerator, with the cold air on her stomach, reaching for the water pitcher, her vision had blurred and telescoped and she’d fallen, hitting her head on the corner of the counter. Coming to, Leda had found the refrigerator door still open, the air still cold—she must have been out only a moment. Brian’s boxes of leftover Chinese takeout and her bowl of sliced cantaloupe were at her eye level, the lone bulb above the milk carton the only light in the dark room. Afraid to stand up—would she fall again? was she bleeding?—and afraid if she didn’t, Brian would find her that way, Leda scooted herself over to the refrigerator. Arms trembling, she’d pulled out a tupperware of cold tofu, broccoli, and rice. The smell made her want to gag, but she put her fingers in and ate slowly. Even after chewing, the pieces felt too large going down her throat, but she had to eat so she could get up, or Brian would find her and think it was like last time. Leda threw the sheet off too fast, clawed it off, disturbing Brian, who rolled over, his eyelids fluttering. He looked so cold in just his boxers, her favorite pair, with the giraffes and elephants from the Minnesota zoo. She picked the comforter up off the floor, pulled it over him, leaned over as if to kiss his forehead, then paused and tucked the cover tightly underneath his arm; he was already softly snoring again. Leaving off her slippers, she padded quietly to the bathroom. Even in the dark, her reflection in the mirror assaulted her: her worried face and bony

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shoulders, the slack silhouette of her baby blue spaghetti strap nightgown, the bruise on her forehead, now a deep purple spreading from her hairline to her eyebrow. Mirrors had been something she had learned to avoid, letting her eyes slide over them, unfocused, when she washed her hands in the bathroom at work or walked past a storefront with high, reflective windows. At the clinic, they had encouraged her to stand in front of a mirror for at least five minutes a day, just to start seeing herself again. Stroking her collarbone, running her middle finger towards her sternum, down her sternum between her breasts, Leda tried to look at herself dispassionately. She could do that: see the situation dispassionately and do the right thing. Her lips mouthed the word fine as she shimmied out of the nightgown, dropping it to the floor, and stared at herself, her rib cage like a barrel, hard and hollow. The sight of her own bones had frightened her. Before, her bones had represented control, success, but now they reminded her of calling her parents from the hospital, of having to tell her boss that she needed a month off from work to go to rehab. She put her fingers on her stomach, relieved to feel that she was soft somewhere, that the fat was starting to grow back. It was like she was pregnant with herself and this new person would keep growing despite her mind’s best efforts to sabotage it. Maybe, if she were lucky, this new Leda would hardly remember the old one at all. But Brian wouldn’t forget. She hated that he had seen her like that. Every time she looked at him, every time she went pee in this tiny, moldinfested bathroom, she remembered herself paralyzed in the shower, hands on her thighs, nails digging into her flesh, toes pruning and the water finally running icy. When she couldn’t stand the cold anymore, she’d gotten out of the shower, and the mirror, which usually would have been fogged up with steam, was clear. There she was, all bones and pale skin, black bags under her eyes, brown hair plastered to her head and neck, teeth chattering: repulsive. Twisting, holding her breasts to her chest, her eyes squeezed shut, she’d just wanted to disappear, to get out of the body she was destroying, just fly away and stop existing. That had been when she’d gotten the Sharpie out of her purse, used for her presentation to her lab group that morning, and started drawing. Brian had been the one to find her, sitting alone, naked and wet on the floor, the mirrors covered in Sharpie. F=ma, F=ma, boxes and boxes like porcupines with vector arrows: one for gravity, one for friction, one for the Normal force. One box with no arrows at all, a little string attached wiggling in a breeze. “Do you get it,” she had asked him as he bent over her silently. “If you

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exert no force on the Earth, it exerts none on you. Nothing exerts any force on you. Everything lets you go, like a balloon.” She had smiled and held his arm tight, as if she had been about to float away herself. Then she had burst into tears. The next morning, she’d checked herself into the hospital, knowing that if she didn’t, Brian would. There had been no tears this time, though, no trip to the hospital, not this soon out of rehab. Leda hadn’t lost it when she’d fallen in the kitchen, hadn’t stayed on the floor until Brain came home to find her broken again. Standing there, in the semi-dark, she had realized what she had to do. On the refrigerator, tucked under her favorite magnet, a cartoon of Benjamin Franklin, the Punctual Plumber, was a photo of a girl who looked like Leda, but was shorter, rounder. Leda’s older sister, standing far away from the camera and not smiling. That’s how I like her best, Leda had told Brian. It looks like her. Brian had raised his eyebrow and nodded, but he didn’t understand what she meant. Karen wasn’t hamming for the camera, wasn’t smiling or trying to be liked. Karen was strong. She never seemed touched by the bullshit. Leda had taken the picture down, slipping the magnet into her pocket. Karen was in Austin. She could go there, where it was warm; she had to leave Minnesota, leave everything she owned. Leave her cookbooks, gathering dust on the shelf that was too high for anyone to reach, leave the clothes she had bought when she had first gotten so thin. Leave Brian, whose expectant smile was now tight and nervous, not looking forward to her next surprising thought, but dreading it. Unsure how to touch her, but still reaching out with his clumsy hands. Leave before she had to go to her birthday party, which she hadn’t told Brian she didn’t want, but shouldn’t it be obvious? Imagining her escape, touching the flesh of her stomach in the bathroom, Leda caught his gaze in the mirror. Brian’s reflection hovered over her shoulder as he sat in their bed, staring at her as if about to ask a question. She turned and quickly shut the door, hugging her breasts to her body even after he couldn’t see her anymore. Brian walked briskly down the street. Out in front of the Lutheran church with the stained glass window, cars were parked bumper to bumper in their white lined pews. Sunday. It was strange, now that he was out of college, how easy it was to lose track of the day. Working part time for a computer repair shop, getting hours when he could, one week forty, the next twenty, designing websites from home: Brian kept the month’s due dates in his head,

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but the days of the week melted together, meaningless. For a moment, Brian wondered if SuperAmerica would even be open on Sunday, then shook his head. It was a stupid thing to wonder. Of course it would be open. Curling and uncurling his toes in his thin Converse, he stuffed his hands further into his jacket’s pockets, searching for a pocket of warm air left undisturbed since summertime. The asphalt streets looked almost ashy, matching the fresh snow already scraped into gray snow banks. The cars in the church parking lot were crusted with slush and only a few trees along the sidewalk still had a leaf or two, dry and brown and dangling limply. Still, Brian felt a spring in his step. Last night’s snowfall had cleared the gray December sky, and the sky was blue for the first time in days. He’d needed to get out of the house that morning as soon as he’d seen the sun. Leda had still been asleep, and, though he felt guilty, it was nice to sneak out of bed and start the day alone. He thought of Leda in the bathroom the night before, silently assessing her naked body in front of the mirror. He wished that she would let him do that. He was aching to look at her, to touch her all over and feel her legs starting to flesh out again, to tell her she was beautiful. But when he had said that, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, over and over again the first few days she had been back from the clinic, she had just nodded dully, then one morning snapped, “Do you think I give a fuck what I look like right now? Do you think you’re helping?” Then she had collapsed into the red chair she loved and cried until she fell asleep. He hadn’t even been allowed to hug her since then. What had she been thinking last night? Was it bad or good for her to be looking at herself? She hadn’t really talked to him since the awful night in the bathroom, where he’d found her curled up and shivering. “I need to go away,” she had kept saying, and he had been afraid she meant she needed to leave him. “I’m scared.” “You can’t go away,” he had said, getting down on the floor with her. But of course she had meant something else entirely. Inside the SuperAmerica, a neon sign advertised fresh coffee. As he stepped through the doors, a squat floor fan repelled the cold air eddying at his feet. The smells of the SuperAmerica were a medley of indulgence: coffee steeping, fresh donuts in the pastry tray, and a constant, heady whiff of gas coming in from outside with the cold and the snow-prints. He wished he could bring all these smells back to Leda, back to their tightly closed apartment, where the same air circulated and they sat listening for the other to breathe. Wandering aimlessly around the store, he paused in the chip isle. Original Cheetos. Flaming Hots. Cheeto Puffs. Paws. Criss-Crosses. They

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had laughed about Cheetos, months ago, when she had been having a good couple of weeks. Leda couldn’t remember ever having had any, not even as a kid, but Brian insisted that she must have, that she would remember if she had some in her hand, hard and knotted like witches’ fingers, rather like Leda’s fingers now. They had laughed, and he had promised to buy her some the next time he went to the store, but in the morning he had found Leda in her chair staring out the window, hunched and pulling her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth, irritable. Of course he had known something was wrong and that she was too thin, but he had never known her to be much bigger and he had thought she was just depressed and not eating enough. By the time he had realized how sick she was, she was too sick for him to help her. Brian picked up a large bag of Original Cheetos. They had to stop dancing around each other. Today was her birthday party, so the bag could be for everyone, not just for her, and it would be no pressure, just a Cheeto or two if she wanted. Maybe she would smile and remember that they had talked about it, at least notice that he had remembered. Then maybe she would tell him why she had a bruise on her forehead this morning, why her bag was still packed and she’d taken down the picture of her sister from the refrigerator, the last thing in the house that proved she lived there. Not for the first time that week, Brian fought the urge to call all of their friends and just cancel the birthday party. Planning it had been something to do while she was gone, a way to keep their lives together, moving forward. He’d imagined how great it would be for her to come home and see everyone who loved her there, ready to support her, so he’d made the calls, organized the food and drinks and games. He’d be the perfect host, making sure there were no awkward silences. The party was the right thing to do. He wasn’t going to leave her alone, even if she wanted him to. Today they were going to talk about things. Holding the Cheetos under his arm while waiting in line, Brian ate a donut from the “pick-your-six” donut pack he had put together. At the checkout, he threw in a packet of whitening Orbitz gum. After paying, he hurried through the automatic door, the plastic bag hanging from the crook of his arm as he made his way back home over the uneven concrete. Perhaps she would still be asleep and he could crawl back under the warm covers and wrap his arm around her for a moment before she woke up and shrugged him off. Once Leda heard the door click shut and was certain Brian was gone, she rolled out of bed and put on a baggy pair of cargo pants and an old t-shirt

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that had been her father’s. It hung off her shoulders like a sail. The house was wonderfully silent, and there would be no questions about her bruise. She’d be gone before he got a chance. Before she did anything else, Leda went straight to the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of cereal, filling the bowl up to the highest red stripe, below the final blue and yellow ones, just the right amount of breakfast. Then she poured the non-fat milk and took the bowl with her into the living room. She waited a minute to make sure the cereal was just saturated enough with the milk, but not too soggy, and started to eat methodically. It tasted good and, since she hadn’t had enough to eat the day before, it left her wanting a second bowl that she knew she wasn’t going to let herself have. If Brian had been there, he would have tried to ply her with an “extra” egg he had scrambled but didn’t want or a piece of toast he had made but “didn’t have time to eat” because he was late for work. It had been a relief to have him sneak out of bed in the morning while he thought she was asleep. His tentative goodbyes the past week, whenever he had to leave the house, even for the littlest thing, were making her crazy. His face always half encouraging smile, half flinch, like he was afraid of not acting normal but more afraid that she’d do something crazy while he was gone. She wanted to be the girl that she had been when they’d first started living together, excited to welcome him home, tell him about her day at work, kiss him on the ear and smile at him while cutting a cucumber into six tiny pieces. He always used to laugh at how organized she was with her food, cutting each piece into the perfect size, spearing a cucumber and tomato and mozzarella slice so that every single flavor was perfectly proportioned. Now it made him anxious. But that was just who she was, wasn’t it? That wasn’t her eating disorder, it was her personality, her personality that had fed so smoothly into one or two more rituals, doing quick math in her head to estimate calories, memorizing Nutritional Content labels until the whole world was a forbidding landscape of knowledge. How would she ever recover from being herself? In her pocket, her cell phone started to buzz. For a second, she was afraid it was her boss at the lab, but instead it was her mother. “Hey, Mom.” “Leda!” Her mother sounded surprised to be talking to her, as if she had tried to dial a different number and gotten her daughter instead. “Leda, sweetheart, Happy Birthday! I thought you might be out or something, doing something to celebrate.” She had been dreading her birthday ever since she had gotten out

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of the clinic and Brian had told her about the party, though apparently he hadn’t told her mother, for which Leda was grateful. Who else was she going to have to talk to on the phone today? Over drinks and snacks she would hold on her plate and not touch. Over the last six months, Leda had dropped out of touch with all of her college friends. It had been surprisingly easy to do—just a few unreturned phone calls and unopened emails and people seemed to give up. What did they think of her now that she wasn’t the confident girl they had graduated with, the person who told jokes and teased? Couldn’t everyone be kind and just leave meaningless Facebook messages, happy bday, have a gr8 day!, even a bold miss you, girl. hope to see you soon, to which she wouldn’t have to respond? Either her friends would come to the party, and she would have to face the pity or curiosity in their voices, or they wouldn’t, which might be even worse. “Darling?” The line had been silent too long. “I’m still here, Mom.” “I asked, are you two doing anything fun?” “It’s still morning, Mom.” “Brian’s taking you somewhere nice?” “Sure. We’ll see.” “Let that boy take you out, Leda. You’ll both enjoy it.” “Sure, mom, that’ll be great. And we’ll get me a nice big piece of cake, ok.” “Great, honey.” Her mother’s cheerful tone faltered, unsure whether Leda was being sarcastic. Unlike Brian, who seemed to want to talk about everything every minute but kept silent, her mother wanted to talk, and talk, as if everything was still the same. Sure, her mom had said to Leda when she’d gotten home from the clinic, they had girls who’d gotten too skinny in Toledo, same as anywhere else, but now Leda was out and the doctors were happy. Just keep the doctors happy, sweetheart, and everything will be fine. Even though she had been the one to bring up cake, Leda wanted to scream, Do you know how great it is that I ate a fucking bowl of cheerios! Cake is too much, I’m not ready for cake. Near tears, she said instead, “I really appreciate you calling, Mom. I’m really sure Brian and I will do, you know, something.” “Great, honey. Great. I love you.” “Bye, Mom.” Leda hung up and put the phone back in her pocket. She needed to

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hurry up. Why was she wasting time, sitting in this chair, eating and talking when she needed to be packing. Taking the bowl into the kitchen she put it in the sink, resisting the urge to rinse, wash, rinse again, and leave it to dry in the dish rack. Just leave it, she kept telling herself, but her hands gripped the edge of the countertop, resisting her hurry. The refrigerator looked lonely without her sister’s picture. Brian had already been gone for twenty minutes. Hustling upstairs, she found her suitcase under the bed, inside a larger suitcase that her mother had gotten her last Christmas. In case I need to move an entire family with just one bag, she’d said to Brian when she had brought it home, and they had both laughed. Picking up her small duffle, she unzipped it and dumped everything into the larger bag. The photographs rattled but didn’t break, settling on top. What else did she own? Her summer dresses were packed up in a box in the hall closet. Walking quickly to the closet, she opened the door and pulled the string for the light. On the floor of the closet were two boxes, each wrapped in Happy Birthday! paper, with balloons and confetti. Careful not to step on them, she reached up and pulled down the box, knocking over a stack of Brian’s baseball hats, the Twins and the Red Sox’s and Dodgers all askew over the presents. What had he gotten her? Kneeling for a moment, she rattled one of the boxes, but couldn’t tell. It was heavy. She put it on top of the box of dresses and went back to the bedroom. There had to be other things. Her life didn’t use to fit into that duffle bag. Just leave it, she told herself again, but she wasn’t going to leave all of her things. How would she pay for anything new once she left? Her job would be gone and so would her health insurance, so no more weigh-ins with the doctor. That would be fine, though, because maybe in Texas Karen could just let her have the scale once a month and then lock it up the rest of the time, or hide it. Leda would find it, though, if it were in the house. If Karen had a scale, she would have to throw it away. And no appointment Tuesday with the therapist. She didn’t want to go anyway; the therapist would just put her on anti-depressants, antidepressants that would cover her in a foreign puffiness and a fuzzy mental calm. She was ready to gain weight, but not that kind of weight. It had to be the right weight, her real weight, not drugs. Her fists were kneading the clothing, even though it couldn’t be packed any tighter. Everything was in the suitcase, the clothes and pictures

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and the present, and it simply wouldn’t zip. Leda sat on it, trying to use her weight to squash her whole life into the bag, leaning on it with her butt while holding herself up with her arms, angling her body to avoid crushing or breaking anything. The bag was too small, but she refused to use the one from her mother. Then she heard the screen door open. Brian came into the apartment through a side door that led into the kitchen and started to put away the few things he’d gotten, quickly hiding the Cheetos in the cupboard as a surprise for later. Humming, too loudly, because he wanted Leda to know he was there and not lurking, just happy to have another day with her, Brian knew Leda was awake. Her cereal bowl was in the sink with a slick of milk and two bloated Cheerios. It wasn’t like her not to wash her dishes. He realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t sure she hadn’t planted it there. “You smell like gas.” Brian started, the bowl he had been rinsing clattering in the metal sink. “Jesus, Leda.” He wanted to give her a hug but she stayed just outside the tile boundary of the kitchen. As usual, she had no socks on, even though it was December, and she hated to walk on the tile without socks. Her bare feet just barely protruded from under the legs of her pants, leaving only her black-nail-polished toes sticking out. “I hope you don’t mind that I went out this morning without waking you.” “That’s fine.” She wasn’t making eye contact. “I got some donuts. There’s five more, if you want one. I got the kind with the rainbow sprinkles.” “Thanks.” Now that Leda was there in front of him, the Cheetos sat inside the cupboard like a small landmine, and he felt unsure of whether to take them out, yell “Happy Birthday!” or just pretend he had never bought them. She wasn’t ready for donuts or Cheetos or this party. What was wrong with him? “You know what? I was thinking maybe I could make us dinner tonight. Before people come over. Something a little nicer than usual, for your birthday. I know you need to stick to your schedule, but it says pasta tonight, and I could make us a Bolognese.” He hadn’t even been thinking about it, but it had come out of his mouth anyway. “I could go to the store and get some stuff. The real grocery store I mean.”

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Before Leda had a chance to answer, if she was really going to at all, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, looked at it, and put it back. “Who was it?” “Meg again.” “Again?” “She called yesterday.” “So, what, you aren’t talking to her either now?” The anger in Brian’s voice took them both by surprise. “I am talking to her. But I’m talking to you right now. Besides, I am sure I’ll have plenty of time to talk to her tonight.” Now there was anger in Leda’s voice too. “Sure. Tonight.” Brian paused and collected himself. “Tonight’s going to be great. Everyone who still lives around here is coming. Jessica and Lisa, and her Indian boyfriend, whose name I can’t remember.” “I don’t think we should have the party tonight,” Leda said, cutting him off. “But you just said you’d see Meg tonight.” “Then I guess I won’t. I want you to call everyone and just tell them that it’s off.” “Is this because you have a bruise on your head?” Brian’s voice got very soft. “I fell over.” “Did you trip or something?” “I hit my head on the counter. Yesterday wasn’t a great day.” She turned to go back into the living room. Brian thought, for a moment, that he should just give in. It would be like falling asleep in the snow. Cold and painful but then warm and kind and, above all, easy; Leda could handle things on her own. “Leda.” She stopped and when she turned back to him, her eyes were filled with tears. “I just can’t have my birthday today, okay? Can we have it in a month? A very late birthday? A very late merry un-birthday to me?” The laugh that came out of her throat almost choked her. He took a step toward her, so confoundingly happy that she was talking to him, even if she was crying. “What do you think they are going to think of my head? I’m not talking to them about it. It isn’t anyone’s business. I don’t want all these people pulling at me. Just leave me alone!” “Darling,” he said, and she backed away a step. Visibly trying to get control of herself, Leda looked worse than he had seen her since before she

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went anyway. She opened her mouth, as if about to speak, then closed it again, her forehead coming to an angry, frustrated crease over her nose. “Jesus Christ, Brian,” she said, and she ran upstairs and slammed the door. Brian didn’t follow her upstairs for almost an hour. Instead, he stood in the kitchen, taking another donut out of the box even though he wasn’t hungry, trying to fight the old feeling that she was going to leave him. When he opened the bedroom door a crack, he expected to see her on the bed, her small body curled up like a cat on the pillow. Instead, the room was empty. Her arms were barely strong enough to carry the duffel bag down the stairs without letting it touch a single step. Once, she nearly dropped it and it thudded against the wooden banister, the wood reverberating like a deep bass. She paused, but the house was silent; he hadn’t heard her, or he would have stopped her from leaving. She slipped out the back door, walking slowly around the house, by the side door to the kitchen, careful to duck as she walked past the window, to where her Honda Civic was parked on the street. If she was lucky, Brian would stay in the kitchen, otherwise the wide front windows would give her away. She dug the keys out of her coat pocket and pressed the unlock button, grimacing at the beep that seemed so loud. Arms aching to put it down, she threw her bag onto the passenger seat then ran around the front of the car and hopped into the driver’s seat. Key in the engine, foot on the gas pedal, cell phone in her purse to call her sister: did she have any idea what road to take to Texas? Start with 35 south and figure it out from there. She turned the key and the car came to life, groaning that it was too cold but turning over anyway. Maybe she would stop at a truck stop and ask for directions, get a Subway sandwich with whatever she wanted on it. No one would watch her eat, wondering if she was going to eat the whole thing or just pick at it. She swiped her sleeve across her nose; it was wet from crying. Her whole face felt like a wet sponge. Brian had been there to see her lose it what felt like a thousand times, but it was still humiliating. And Karen wouldn’t understand that kind of breakdown. Had Karen ever done anything like that? Why was she driving all the way to Texas when Karen might not even be happy to see her? Panic began to replace the feeling of freedom, pressing into her stomach, making her nauseous. The only think keeping her going, it seemed, was the forward momentum of the car. Then the stop sign appeared out of nowhere. Leda slammed on the breaks, the seatbelt catching and hitting her

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hard between her breasts. A car behind her honked and swerved around her. A minute later, she was still parked there, another car sitting behind her, then swerving, a woman looking at her with confusion as she drove cautiously by. Only two blocks away from the house, Leda pressed her forehead into the steering wheel, willing herself to breathe slowly and deeply, everything was fine, everything was fine, Brian would still love her, the world wouldn’t fall apart, even if she gained the weight back, everything would still be fine. Mantras were disgusting. She shook her head. She was disgusting. Her new mantra could be wherever you go, there you are. Bumper sticker wisdom. All the control she had gained in the clinic was gone and here she was, crazy again, running away to Texas, writing on the mirror, waiting to be let go of like a balloon, to float over cities and watch people from on high, weightless, a giant zero that the earth no longer had the power to pull down. Someone rapped twice on the windshield, startling her. “Leda?” She stared at Brian, in just his button up shirt, his jacket forgotten. He moved his hand in a circle, roll down the window. No one had to roll down windows that way anymore, she thought dully. Always five years behind reality, Brian. She turned on the engine and pressed the button. “Sweetheart. What are you doing?” “I’m running away.” He crinkled his brow and without a word left the window, walked to the other side of the car, and opened the door. “We can run away together.” “No we can’t.” “Well you aren’t running away by yourself and that is final.” He crossed his arms, his arms now shivering, from nerves or the cold. They sat in silence for a few minutes. “Remember when we talked about Cheetos,” he said, almost to himself, “you had said that you’d never tried them, and I promised I’d get you some someday.” “I remember. I lied. I had eaten them before.” “I can cancel the party, if you want.” Leda shook her head. “Just tell them you beat me up, okay?” “Jesus, Leda. That’s not funny.” He looked over at her and she was smiling a little. “That’s not funny. We’ll tell them you fell into the lake,

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trying to pet a duck.” “Or maybe that I fell off a bicycle, running into a parked car.” Now they were both smiling. He reached over to hold her hand and she stiffened, but didn’t pull away.

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DON’T SEND DEAD FLOWERS Marge Piercy There is your mother, your son, your friend with their insides sucked out, organs in the sewage, that primped body filled with carcinogenic chemicals painted, pinned, presented for your enjoyment like plastic fruit in a bowl. Everybody is supposed to coo, simper, doesn’t she look as if she’s sleeping. But she’s stone dead and half of her gone missing now. An organ oozes lugubrious sound. Dead flowers surround the corpse. I want to go into the earth quickly, quietly and give my minerals back. I want to become the living soil, home of beetles and yes, worms. Let my flesh feed and my bones fertilize. Gone not to dust but dirt, the mother of us all. Coffins like limousines, like Mercedes expensive and shiny for the leftovers of a person, pretending death is a nap and people are permanent marble monuments. My flesh tears easily, bruises, will rot and stink and finally end sweet as compost, giving itself to trees, to grass, to wildflowers and bees and mice, to whatever wants to grow from my spent life.

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WALKING TO BUY APPLES Christopher O. McCarter The orange butterflies found yellow ones, the orange marigolds found black ones, and no fruit glistens quite like bottles of liquor in the sun. The sunny side of the street is not always the side of the street where the houses face the sun openly. No, because this side of the street is actually the shadier side of the street due to the oak trees’ shadows stretching way over. Sometimes I wonder about shadows, specifically, the difference between shadows in the day and shadows in the night. More specifically, what is dark and how is it dark in the day. In the morning, Billie Holiday can come over and make her voice the night in rain, she can make her voice the way a bruise saturates sugar on a fruit, she can make her voice like the tracing of the outline of the path of cigarette smoke in the air leading exactly back to an individual’s fingers, leading to their mouth, to their breath, her voice leading to their room and their bed, where it rests on their pillow with the sweet peace of dry hair and smoke. I walked by the cemetery. I saw all of those flat beds with stone headboards. I felt everyone get really quiet and hushed as I approached. If I were buried like that I wouldn’t shut the fuck up. If I had known this would feel like being a bulb planted in the very wrong season, never to bloom, never to break from an even smaller box, barely forgotten, never to be, I would have been cremated— I want to swim as ash. I want to be a shell! I might have never left. Maybe they were so quiet so that I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t tell.

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Cars quiet everything with an angry message. Every car has an angry message and it is, Stop singing, I’m going somewhere. There are also critters in the hot grass. They must look like very fat moths because it sounds like inside them is a rattling nut. You’re in my grass. Bffffft. You’re in my grass. That’s their angry message. These porches in the rain: matching furniture sets, ceiling fans, mounted speakers beneath a modest mansion—Is it so easy on these porches? Would you even listen to the blues here? Some of my favorite houses are the derelict, missing teeth on their porches, maybe swallowed down their red door throats. I don’t have a porch and I have decorated my home with empty vases: a milked white glass one on the coffee table, a skinny silver one on the nightstand, a large, see-through green one in the bathroom I fill with a candle. Don’t know why I never pick the damn flowers outside my door. Nothing glistens quite like bottles of liquor in the sun, shining through the window from the shelves they are on. The man in the empty parking lot, shuffling to them, must know something similar. That store isn’t even open yet. There were no apples at the market. But one farmer had pale pears, dented and homely, looking concerned, even. Going out, everything is something to be sung; The man outside the liquor store must sing.

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BODY CENTO FROM THE DECADE I EDITED Jackie K. White

Year Two body body body body

dark kitchen mantle antidote brushstrokes

pleasure trumpet broken bottle narrow passage or anchor

says body

the body remembers everything the first word

blasted, fallen hoisted, stuck thrust into one theory you remember you could spell

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THE PARENTS’ ROW Brooks Rexroat We sat in line together four hours as the snow fell and soaked our wool coats. We played cards with the couple next to us, watched the grizzled concert vet fidget with the drawstrings on his black Megadeth hoodie while he told us about how he saw Nirvana play in someone’s basement—we counted the eleven times he said before they were big and with every repeat we rolled our eyes and believed him even less. All the archetypes were there: the nonchalant hipsters, the kissing couple, the loudmouth, the cell phone chatterbox, a couple versions of That Guy (each decked out in merchandise from the band’s previous tours), the parade of panhandlers who sang or danced or told jokes or begged or just quietly approached and held out chapped palms, hoping. Closer to show time, six people piled out of a stretch Hummer, each of them sporting hair that’d been frosted, tipped, or extended, each of them dressed in very tight, very shiny clothes. “We just go to the front, right?” asked one of the women as she hiked down her tight black skirt so it covered all of her pink thong. The nonchalant hipsters sat up and bristled at this remark, cell phone girl stopped texting long enough to issue a nasty glare, and Megadeth hoodie guy denounced the lady’s plan in a firmly profane manner. She snapped her gum in disgust; her compatriots sighed and walked off, their high heels and dress shoes click-clacking toward the end of the line, past people dressed mostly in worn-out Levi’s and thrift store flannel. We laughed/smiled/scoffed indignantly as they left—our hodgepodge front-of-the-line community had defended its patch of chipped and litter-covered concrete from the uptown interlopers, and it felt good. Twenty minutes before door-time, I held our spot while Bobby and Michelle ran to the parking garage and ditched our coats in the car so we wouldn’t boil alive once we got inside and the crowd started moving around and packing tight, pressing toward the stage. Bobby’s face was all lit up when he came running back across the street. “Check out that line—and we’re in front!” he said. “This is awesome, Dad.” A bouncer with a barbed wire tattoo around his biceps distributed paper wristbands: red for drinkers and blue for the underage. I tensed up at the way he jerked on Bobby’s wrist. I guess he saw my reaction and decided to pay me back—when my turn came, he (very slowly and very deliberately) pressed the adhesive part of the band straight onto my arm hair. I knew it’d hurt like hell to tear the thing off after the show, and I wanted to rip into the smarmy bastard—but then I saw Bobby watching, waiting to see how

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I’d react. I took a deep breath and bit my lip, kept quiet as the man worked his way further down the line, away from us. Another bouncer emerged from the club, this one with a blue Mohawk and clunky black boots, his wrists adorned with spiked black leather bands. He shouted a list of rules: stay orderly, don’t run to the stage front, no cameras or weapons or spiked black leather bands allowed, and so forth. Everything it already said on the backs of our ticket stubs. Even Bobby rolled his eyes. I raised my eyebrows, gave Bobby my best dad look. “Guy’s just doing his job.” “He doesn’t have to be a cock about it, though.” “Remember that,” I said. Bobby told Michelle she’d better pee before the doors opened, because it would be a free-for-all to the front of the club. She nodded, then ducked into the Chipotle restaurant next to the club and snuck past the sign that said Restrooms for Paying Customers Only! “You sound like you’ve done this before,” I said, and his face got a little red, but he dug himself out of it, said, “Just common sense, right? I don’t want to lose my spot waiting for a toilet run.” Then he gave me a little punch in the shoulder. That bummed me out, getting the patronizing shoulder punch. But then he said, “She says her dad would never take her to a show like this.” Inside, I smiled like mad. But I didn’t want to blow the moment, so I just nodded and said, “Sweet.” Michelle came back five minutes later with a small soda. “I felt guilty, not buying anything,” she said. “Kinda defeats the purpose though,” Bobby said. I turned away to keep from laughing. We stood when we heard workers unlocking the doors from inside. I watched the way Bobby squeezed Michelle’s hand tighter when the line started to move, the way he rose to his tiptoes—peeked over and around shoulders, eager for that first glimpse. I followed them until our tickets were scanned and our bodies were patted down. In the carpeted foyer between the band’s T-shirt booth and the Budweiser tub, we parted ways: Bobby and Michelle raced to spots along the rail at the base of the stage, and I scooted up a flight of stairs to snag one of the precious few seats along the front edge of the balcony. The parents’ row. I chose a stool in the center and leaned it forward against the railing to mark it as claimed, then went to the bar for a Coke. The girl (whose head

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was shaved and whose nose would never have made it through the same metal detecting wand I’d just endured) impressed me with her dexterity, the way she sent text messages with her right hand while with the left she took my money, made change, scooped ice, poured, and handed off the drink without spilling a drop. I tipped her a buck for it. Bobby was down in the pit, checking it all out, his head swiveling around and his arm pointing out gear to Michelle while she nodded. He leaned forward to watch the roadies work, then settled back and draped his arm over Michelle’s shoulder when the section started to fill in. He was years younger than nearly everyone around him (hell, half his neighbors down there were older than me) but he seemed like he belonged. I waited, eager for the moment when he would turn around—not to look at me, but at the auditorium—and get that rush that comes when you’re the first one in a room, then you look up to find it full and breathing, everyone pressing forward because they all want to be where you are. I never got to see that moment, never got to see his eyes light up at the full and buzzing club. Instead, my attention was stolen by a man hovering uncomfortably close to my left shoulder, pointing to an empty stool. He tapped my back and asked, “This one taken, brother-man?” I just shrugged, and he plopped down. “Whatcha drinking, big guy?” he asked. “Coke.” “Coke-and-what?” “Coke,” I said. “Just Coke.” “Man, I’m drinking a Bud, and it sucks. I just had a Coors, and figured I’d drink a Bud, but man, it tastes like hell. Don’t drink the Bud, dude. Their tap must be messed up or something.” I nodded and sipped my Coke. I hated him. I didn’t even try to stop myself from hating him, didn’t remind myself of all those times I’d said, “Hate is an awful strong word, Bobby.” I’d never imagined myself at the wrong end of a club, so far from the motion and energy, stuck next to some chatty back-lurker. The guy kept looking at me, waiting for me to keep the conversation breathing, but instead my knees tensed up, ready to bolt my padded stool and flee downstairs, where I belonged. I looked for Bobby and Michelle, but by that point, I couldn’t pick them out from the press of bodies. I figured I could maneuver my way up front. I’d stood in that line, after all—I deserved to be there. But Bobby didn’t need me hovering. And my knees weren’t up for three hours of standing. I took a deep breath and stayed put.

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“My name’s Teddy,” the guy said. “Colin,” I lied, then shook his outstretched hand, which was cold and wet. “Good to meet you, man,” he said while I wiped my palm on my jeans. He wore khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt with white socks (soaked from the snow and dripping on the floor) under his sandals. I wanted to look him in the eyes and say, “What the hell?” I took one more look over the railing, scanned the club floor for potential pathways, weak spots through which I could navigate the thick mesh of shoulders. There were some big guys down there, though. I remembered how hard I used to elbow the late-arriving bastards who tried to weasel past me, or who shoved through like they’d called Manifest Destiny on the mosh pit. The wrong side of a thrown elbow is a bad place to be, but that’s not what held me on the stool. It was a far more terrifying thought that kept me planted: the idea of working my way to the front and squeezing myself into a spot next to Bobby along the rail, only to look down and see him involuntarily offer the sort of disappointed grimace I had just given Teddy. The Leave Me Alone look. I sighed and dug in, and Teddy kept on with the “conversation.” “Seen these guys before?” “Couple of times.” I wondered if he was maybe a plainclothes narc, waiting to race downstairs and nab whichever moron would light a joint during the show (someone always does that, and they always get caught). That made me chuckle, which I guess he took as a sign I wanted to keep talking—he opened his mouth again, but one of the stagehands saved me by pointing his flashlight at the sound booth and blinking it three times, the go signal. The houselights dropped to black, stage lights went up in bright green, the pre-show elevator music cut out, and the opening act ran onstage. Teddy’s voice was lost in the white noise of screams and claps. The first note set off a god-awful cacophony of strobe lights (something I’d have probably found cool years ago) that left me squinting behind bifocals. But the music was good enough to at least partially justify the bombast. The crowd shifted and swayed, and for a moment I could make out Bobby’s silhouette. In the stop-motion of strobe pulses, he handed Michelle a pair of the foam earplugs I’d given him before we left home, then inserted his own. That reminded me to put in mine, and I grinned at his young and functional memory, his dutiful obedience. I thought about myself at that age, figured I’d have immediately and accidentally dropped the plugs on the sidewalk about three steps outside the front door. “They’re still around?” I asked when Bobby mentioned the show one night at dinner. Of course I knew they were, but it about bowled me off my chair

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to learn my kid dug a band I listened to when I was his age. It’s not that we’re not close—he’s just a quiet kid, a mumbler. A loner. And since I was, too, at fifteen, I don’t get on him about it—even if it means I don’t get to know all I want to (or should) about him. Every now and then I press my ear against his door, try to figure out who he’s talking to on the phone, or what band he’s listening to. But it’s about impossible for a parent to spy anymore with no paper love notes left sitting around, no CD cases stacked on the dresser—everything digital and easily concealed, impossible to rummage through the way my old man did. I guess that’s a good thing—I’ll never be tempted to emulate the way he crushed my entire music collection the night he found curse words in the lyrics of a CD liner I had left on my desk. He sneered at me for weeks over the rotten language before he softened and even tried once to apologize. I never did let him off the hook, though; of all the aggravating things he did, that’s the one I found most crushing and intrusive. The one I never forgave. The night Bobby bought the tickets (with my credit card), he left a burned disc outside my door and a note telling me I should “brush up” before the show. I slid the same songs, in their original 1991 jewel case, under his door. The next day at dinner, I was simultaneously excited and terrified to learn that grunge had turned into the new retro cool. “Kids are even starting to wear flannel at school,” he said. “It’s pretty rad.” I tried not to cringe when he said rad. “I think I’ve got some old shirts in the basement. I’ll take a look later.” That evening, we picked through my old clothes for plaid and paisley (they were loose on him, but he picked out about a dozen anyway). “By the way,” he said as we stepped out of the stairwell and I flipped out the basement light, “How would you feel about Michelle coming?” I stuck my head back through the doorway, peered downstairs pretending I was searching for something so he wouldn’t see me looking disappointed. “Of course. Bring her along.” “Good,” he said. “I got three tickets.” By the time the house lights came back up and the opening band retreated, the place was packed, and there were even people pressed up against my back. I never knew the parents’ row was such a hopping place. Half the balcony dwellers watched the stage; the rest stared downward—watched their kids watch the stage. My neighbor left a half-full beer cup on his seat to mark his territory and stumbled back toward the bar for yet another round—he was on about his tenth already. I hoped to God he wasn’t in charge of driving anyone home. 110

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As roadies pounded drums and checked microphones, people pressed harder toward the balcony lip and I gave up on the barstool—pushed it aside and stood to lean on the rail. The flashlight blinked again, stage lights blazed, and the band hit the stage dressed in ridiculous shiny costumes that would have made them cringe when I was Bobby’s age, back when they were starting out and it was just T-shirts, torn jeans and loud-as-hell rock. They played lots of new stuff, and it was solid. The catalogue songs more closely resembled the measured and careful radio versions than those ferocious live renditions I remembered. (Did vantage point really matter that much, or had they just gotten older and calmer along with me?) More than anything, it felt good to be inside a club again, close enough to feel the bass lines rumble through my body, to feel the humidity rise off a writhing, jumping crowd. Teddy never returned; a blonde lady with no ring on her left hand pitched his beer and took the stool. We nodded at each other and she smiled, then we both turned back toward the band and our kids. Of course, she couldn’t be the chatty one. After the show I met Bobby and Michelle in the lobby. They were beaming and beat, both with sweaty hair stuck to their cheeks. For that minute, Bobby didn’t look like my kid at all. He looked like someone I would have hung out with. He looked like me, long ago. I got carried away for a moment. “Wanna go out back,” I asked. “Meet the band? Get an autograph?” Bobby looked at Michelle first, and she torqued her lips as if to say if we have to. “Nah,” he said, and for a split second I was a little disappointed because I kind of wanted to, but also relieved (I was exhausted) and proud (I’d raised an unselfish kid). “No need,” he added. “The music’s enough.” He bought her a CD full of music he already owned. “Just burn me a copy of yours,” she protested. “Save your money.” He shook his head no, then took his place in line. It seemed silly, the excitement I felt as I watched him exchange money and come back with a real, honest-to-God disc in his hand. He handed it to her, she gave him a peck on the cheek, and we headed back to the garage, back to our coats. Most of the crowd probably arrived late enough to find free street parking, but we paid for our ambition: when we tried to exit the garage, we were the first car stuck behind a gate that refused to lift. Despite signs that promised the place stayed open until 2 a.m., there was no one to be seen, and the ticket reading machine was shut off. A line quickly formed behind us, wound up the ramp toward the second deck. People honked and shouted. I left the car, tried in vain to find a phone number or an attendant

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on smoke break, even tried to lift the gate by hand. Nothing. I searched the ticket reader for an on-off switch, or a disconnected power cord. More honking, more yelling. The driver of the Escalade behind us inched forward, even closer to my fender. I tried once more to lift the gate on my own, leaned down to get my shoulder under it and gave it everything I had. Didn’t even budge. I got back into the car, where in the back seat Michelle just looked indifferent, content to have her trip home delayed. Bobby looked worried. “What are we gonna do?” he asked “Leave,” I said. “Buckle up.” That’s when I put my car into gear. In the rearview, Bobby’s eyes got wide and even Michelle sat up, paid attention. I kicked the gas and the wood gate splintered to pieces then thumped under our tires. “That,” Bobby said, “Was the most awesome frigging thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” I kept the stereo volume low so I could enjoy that sweet post-concert ear-buzz. This time, I sat up front and the kids grinned from the cheap seats. Bobby hugged Michelle at her door and slipped a peck on the forehead when he thought I couldn’t see, then joined me in the front seat for the rest of the drive. I thought about asking him if he wanted food or an ice cream or something on the way home, something to keep the evening going—but there’d been enough fun dad for the night. I looked at my watch, and my first thought was panic, but then I reassured myself: it’s okay—it’s a weekend. In the seat next to me, Bobby yawned as if in silent agreement. I thought about my own dad, how music had remained one of our most excruciating wedges right up until the end, how a night like that one would’ve never happened. Could’ve never happened. I wondered what it would’ve meant if we’d been able to have just one night like that one—just one evening when we really connected. Over anything. Then I wondered how many times he might have tried—how many times I might have blown him off. I must’ve been caught up pretty good in the wondering, because there on the doorstep when I finally felt Bobby’s hand on my shoulder and turned to him, he wore a worried look and he asked, “Dad, you okay?” I snapped out of it, told him I was just thinking. He nodded sympathetically, then yawned again. I unlocked the door and we stepped inside. “That was cool,” he said. He bounded up the steps two at a time for his room, then turned around at the landing. “We should do that again.” “We’ll see,” I said. This time, I didn’t bother hiding the smile. “Right now, let’s get some rest.”

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A CONVERSATION WITH DAN CHAON Dan Chaon’s latest short story collection, Stay Awake, debuted early last month, and has been a hot topic in the RevHouse ever since. These new stories are marked by tragedy, darkness, the harrowing sense that something is just not quite right in the world... and superb readability. A literary pageturner that is both devastating and unforgettable, Stay Awake is a book to read in the darkness, though it may leave you raw-nerved, nail-bitten, and likely grateful that your own life isn’t quite that bad. Not long ago, RevHousers Alisha Karabinus and Jonathan Dubow sat down with Dan to discuss Stay Awake, the importance of Skyrim’s freedom, geography, zombies, and the separation of genres in contemporary literature. Alisha Karabinus: This first question is vitally important, so let’s get it out of the way: when I saw you at Purdue, you talked about losing your entire winter break to playing [the Bethesda Softworks video game] Skyrim. Dan Chaon: Mmhmm.... AK: I did the same thing—I think we put in about the same amount of hours in an effort to do everything. But I wanted to ask you: what race did you play, and did you go Empire or Stormcloak? Because it’s really going to color how I feel about you in the future. DC: Really. Okay, interesting. Well, I played an orc. I generally always play an orc; it represents a side of myself that doesn’t get to be expressed as often. And I went with the Stormcloaks— AK: Yes! DC: I was really pissed that the Empire was gonna cut my head off. I was a little disturbed as I went along that the Stormcloaks were kind of racist…. AK: Yeah, a little bit. DC: But they seemed to be okay with me, even though I was an orc. Yeah, I did the same thing. I was an elf. DC: What kind? Not the high elf?

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AK: No, no, I was a dark elf. DC: Thank God. Dark elves are awesome, but high elves are obnoxious. AK: Yeah, they really are. But I’m glad that you went Stormcloak! I know they had some problems, Ulfric being, you know, something of a dick at times, but if you’d gone Empire, I might have given all your books away. AK: Okay, well, now that we have that out of the way—I’m sorry, I just really wanted to know! Jonathan Dubow: This might be the whole reason we’re interviewing you, so that she could ask that question. AK: Basically! I didn’t want to do it at Purdue. People there might judge me. But no, now we have some more serious questions. DC: This should be enough for both of us to be judged by basically everyone who reads this interview on the Internet. AK: I figure the people who count are the ones who will find it charming, yeah? DC: Yeah. Right. AK: And we were joking about titling the interview something like “Dan Chaon Kills Dragons, and oh, Also He Writes Books.” So there’s that. Dan Chaon, DRAGON KILLER. Okay, so, real question about writerly things: when I first started reading your work, I was working on my undergraduate thesis. My mentor, Dr. David Jauss, recommended you—and really, that was the best recommendation I ever received—but I read Fitting Ends first. I usually like to start at the beginning of a writer’s body of work. And the stories there were firmly anchored in Nebraska. The Dan Chaon version of Nebraska, at least. You talked a little bit about this at a panel on the Midwest at AWP. DC: Yeah. AK: And even though you were a little flexible with the world, there was

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a very real sense of place that worked its way into everything. But as I’ve moved through your other works, you’re shifting geographically, moving slowly eastward. There’s a lot of Chicago. In Stay Awake, Ohio seems to be creeping in. So I wanted to ask you why you’re creeping across the country. Is this just following your own physical trajectory? Did you just feel like you were done with Nebraska? DC: Well, yes, I think that’s right. I’m creeping across the country, writing about places that I’ve lived, in one way or another. I guess I’ve slowed down on the Nebraska stuff because I haven’t lived there in thirty years [laughing]. I feel like I’ve done everything I need to do with that. I’ve lived in Cleveland for a really long time, but I’ve just started writing about it. There’s some Cleveland stuff in Await Your Reply—the twins are from Cleveland—and there’s quite a bit of Cleveland stuff in Stay Awake. And it’s interesting; I think I’m inspired by places that have a sort of rundown or slightly ominous quality, and Cleveland definitely has that. There are some nice parts of Cleveland, but I’m much more interested in the Rust Belt aspect of it. AK: That’s really one of the things I like best about your work. I have that same attraction. I appreciate those same kinds of places. It’s so much more interesting than a city that’s really pretty and clean. DC: My stories tend to tilt in that direction, but I don’t know which came first: whether I like weird places because I write creepy stories, or if I write creepy stories because I like weird places. JD: I read that Stay Awake was written over ten years, and I know when I was taking classes with you at Oberlin, you would touch on this idea that you had to re-imagine yourself as a novelist. That made me wonder if you always saw Stay Awake as a collection, or were you just writing stories in between novels, until you had enough for a book. Either way, what was the process of going from stories to book? DC: I had an idea fairly early on that I wanted to write a collection that would play with the idea of the ghost story, so the stories that ended up being included in this collection were the ones that fit that bill, for the most part. There were some stories that got left out that didn’t really fit the theme. When I was putting it together as a collection, I was really aware of wanting the stories to have a kind of inter-connected feel to them, so some of the revision I did was to create more of that feeling.

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JD: In the time you’ve been working on these stories, you’ve also had two novels come out. Is it a difficult transition to go back and forth between novel- and story-writing? DC: No, it was kind of a relief. A lot of the stories were written as a break from writing the novels, or when I was stuck with one of the novels, I would work on a story for a while. Really, stories are the thing that I’m most attached to in a lot of ways, so going back to the form was always something that made me really happy. I felt at home with it, as opposed to writing novels, which is not as easy for me. JD: Are you working in any other mediums at the moment? I know you’ve done some screenwriting. DC: Oh, yeah, I just finished the first draft of the screenplay for Await Your Reply, and I’m working on the second draft of that. I also did a screenplay based on a few stories from Stay Awake that’s a little Altman-esque ensemble piece that won’t be very commercial, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Once I’m done with that, I’ll probably have to go back to a novel. JD: You say that with such trepidation. DC: Yeah, I am a little nervous. I don’t really have anything that feels like it’s a novel. I don’t have anything that I’m that committed to yet. AK: On this idea of being more attached to the story, would you say you prefer reading novels or short stories? DC: When I’m reading for pleasure, like when I’m in the car listening to audiobooks, I tend to read novels. I do like that feeling of being immersed in a world for a long period of time. When I have time to myself, when I’m reading before bed or something, I’ll tend to read stories more often. Stories are a more personal and private thing for me, strangely enough, and I think maybe they are for other people, too. But if I just want to be entertained, I don’t often turn to stories, and I think that’s one of the reasons people tend to buy novels more often than stories. AK: Before we sat down with you, I was re-reading Stay Awake—except for “The Bees,” which I can’t re-read. It’s just too upsetting for me—

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DC: What’s upsetting about it? AK: Well, I have a small child…. DC: Oh, well, I understand that. But it’s not the only story with dead babies in the book. AK: Somehow it’s just the worst for me. Eventually I’ll revisit it, but it makes me cry. We even have a system in place here at RevHouse: the fiction editors warn me when we have a dead child story in queue, and I’m basically off the table on those, because I just begin to wail and cannot be at all objective. It’s pretty embarrassing [Editor’s note: this is unfortunately true, though we’ve managed to handle some children-in-peril stories with panache in our past issues]. But! While I was re-reading, I was thinking about that idea of the haunting, and to me, it seems the primary idea of haunting, what the characters in this book are haunted by, is this looming sense of the inevitable, that things are not going to be okay. We’re constantly hearing that old saw, “Everything’s gonna work out!” But here, there’s a definite sense that things are not going to work out. Things aren’t going to be okay. I think that this feeling’s always been present to a degree in your work. I’ve heard a lot of your stories described as “claustrophobic,” but it’s much stronger here, and it’s a very realistic feeling. Tragically realistic, but realistic. So you have all these people who are saying of this book that you’re creeping more toward genre fiction, that you’re suddenly writing more darker fiction, but you have this terribly realistic mood that infuses these stories. Is that an approach you were taking—an attempt to balance the surreal with the very real? Or is that just how the stories naturally came about? DC: Well, I knew that I wanted to have stories that were grounded in realism in some way or another, because I think one of my primary interests in short fiction is character and realistic psychology, while at the same time I feel like it’s fun to add something else to that rather than to just write another story about an alcoholic or another story about a sad person whose wife has died, and to try to give it some added parasitic psychological quality as well. But I don’t know if that’s a good answer. AK: No, I think that’s a very good answer, since one of the problems people often cite in straight genre fiction, or what we refer to as genre fiction, is that those elements of the real and the character aren’t as strong. You’re working

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near that realm, but bringing it back to what we call literary. But on that, I wanted to ask you how you felt about the separation of genres. Lately it seems there’s been a real blend of genres in some of the really exciting work, and it seems that it’s more a matter of labeling than of any concrete consideration. Pam Houston’s talked about this, the way her work is marketed; whether it’s fiction or nonfiction is kind of up in the air. And there are a lot of books labeled YA that don’t seem to have many of the characteristics of traditional YA fiction. And then there are writers like Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, and you, just all over the place, writing in these careening styles. Sometimes people want to call them literary and sometimes they don’t. Then on the other side of the equation you have a writer like Steven Erikson, the premier fantasy novelist, who is a product of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. So there’s all of this smearing and smudging of the lines, and I was wondering if you thought that continued separation between “literary” and “genre” was going to be as important in the coming years. DC: No. I don’t think so. I think it’s already breaking down. I think there are people who have some kind of agenda, people who want to keep it up, but there’s probably more concern about it at places like AWP than there is among readers or writers. But I still encounter people who, for one reason or another, refuse to engage if they see something that’s not straight realism, and I think that’s weird. Teachers, too. I know that there are still people who say, “I don’t accept genre fiction in class,” and they have this really strict definition of what genre fiction is, though what I think what people imagine genre fiction to be is just really hack fiction, or formula fiction. And there is that stuff—there are formulas for the horror story, and there are formulas for the science fiction story and the romance, but there are also formulas for literary fiction, which I think is not recognized as often. I can’t tell you how many really boring, formulaic literary stories and literary novels that I’ve come across that I feel are just as paint-by-numbers as anything with a werewolf in it. JD: When you’re writing, do you feel like you have an agenda toward ruining those distinctions, or at least complicating them? Or are you just writing what feels most natural and being happy that you’re not writing in the ‘80s? DC: I don’t know whether it’s an “agenda” or not, but there was a point at which I realized that I needed to get back in touch with the sort of magical or not-real stuff in my work, because that was where a lot of the heat from the stories was coming for me. Even in the early stories, when I was putting

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together Fitting Ends, I had a story with a ghost, and the ghost was a big part of what I wanted to write about. I realized that in order to write the kind of stories I wanted to write, I had to challenge that particular status quo a little bit. As a student, when I went into classes, there was a pretty strict rule that you were going to write like Ray Carver or Alice Munro, and you’re not going to really vary from that. I accepted that. But once I was out of college, I started to think about why I just gone along with the agenda, and now as a teacher, I don’t really want to be that teacher. JD: I remember in classes you gave us Kelly Link and Lynda Barry. Opened our eyes a little bit. You’ll be happy to know I recommended Magic for Beginners to someone today. DC: That’s good! AK: Since we’re talking about preferences, and Jon and I both had a few questions about this, I, at least, wanted to know what kind of things you loved as a young reader, and what’s stuck with you over the years. DC: When I was young, I was pretty strictly a horror and science fiction reader. As a kid, my favorite authors were people like Ray Bradbury. Shirley Jackson was a big one, Stephen King was big for me, Peter Straub… and I used to read those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies— AK: Me too! DC: Did you? He had one series that was for young readers, maybe for preteens or the early teen years, these large books called things like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders and Suspense. AK: And that magazine, the Hitchcock magazine, was the first I ever subscribed to. DC: I subscribed to a magazine called The Twilight Zone Magazine. I don’t think it had a very long life, but it published a lot of stories that today we’d probably call slipstream. That actually was the first place that I encountered a Charles Baxter story. He had published a story called “Under the Safety Net,” and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is really awesome.” A lot of people are not necessarily all realism, even the people held up as examples of great realists. Baxter has all the weird stuff going on in his stories. You go back to

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Cheever; he had all these very magical realist things going on. I wouldn’t call Flannery O’Connor a realist, either. So I’m not sure where we got this idea that “literary” means “naturalist.” It’s a very strange idea. AK: And the tradition of naturalism is buried in extremism, heavy violence, these over-the-top stories, and those stories, written today, would meet with cries of alarm. But hey, sometimes you’ve just got to chew on your wife’s fingers. DC: I don’t know where to place the blame. There was a point where it felt like the short story had become so rarefied and polite that it almost didn’t exist. The stories were so weightless. I’m thinking of a lot of the stuff that was in the slick magazines in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, particularly, but I don’t want to name names. AK: We’ll protect you. JD: Sure. Something I’ve always admired about you, and I’ll even say intimidated by, is how much art and culture you’re able to consume. I just wanted to know what you’re reading now, what you’re watching now, what you’re listening to now. What are you getting excited about? What’s inspiring you? DC: Well, I’ll give a few I’m working on now. I just finished one of the new Joyce Carol Oates books, a short story collection call The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, which is more of her scary stories, my favorites of hers. The new Daniel Woodrell short story collection The Outlaw Album. Most people know him because he wrote Winter’s Bone. The Outlaw Album is really good, super violent and super disturbing, which I enjoy. I’ve been excited for Game of Thrones to start— AK: Definitely. More so than the books at this point. DC: I couldn’t ever get into those. AK: They have their ups and downs. Second half of the first book through the third book is pretty solid stuff. DC: I read a lot of high fantasy and even though I kept hearing about the books, they just weren’t for me. I did read this pretty good YA fantasy novel not long ago called Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. Are you familiar with

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that one? AK: No, I hadn’t heard of it. DC: It’s good. Oh, the other book I really want to recommend is the newer one by Chris Ware called Lint. It’s his newest graphic novel, and it’s amazing. Probably his best. JD: I know we’ve been talking about stuff that’s new, and I feel like in MFA programs, there’s an anxiety—maybe tension is better—between the idea that students should be reading the titans, or they should be reading everything new they can get their hands on. Do you feel as a reader that’s a tension for you? DC: It is to some extent, because I do have some big blind spots, but I try to go back and forth. I think the majority of my interests is in at looking at what’s new because I want to be part of my own time. I’m curious about it. And I’m excited about it. But at the same time, I think every second or third book I read is something old that I either want to go back to, or that I’m particularly interested in for some reason. Right now I’m reading a lot of Nancy Hale, who is a sort of forgotten short story writer of the 20th century, because I’m working on a introduction to a reissue of one of her books. So I’m reading a lot of that, and she’s really great. There are also certain writers I’ll go back to because I love them so much, like Dickens. There was a recent new audio of Bleak House that I listened to and thought was great. I think you can do both, and I also think you’re not going to live long enough to read everything that you want to, so just stop feeling guilty and try to read what gives you the most pleasure and what you feel is the most helpful to you. If there are hipsters at a party who are looking down their nose at you because you haven’t read all of Proust, you can just pee on their shoes. AK: So you know my pet topic: that piece you wrote for The Review Review on “What Writers Can Learn From Rock Stars.” I love that piece. I think it’s perfect. I share it around on the regular. But I wonder: what do you think we can do it about it? This dovetails a little on what Jon was just asking. The writers who do read often have such strict self-imposed limits, and I’ve known professors who encourage students not to read anything after, say, 1950, for fear it might influence them! But the ones who just aren’t reading… what, if anything, can we do about it?

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DC: I don’t think there is anything we can do about it. I think it’s clear from their writing if they’re not reading. They’re just taking something out of their toolbox. They’re not participating in the conversation if they’re not reading, and it’s a really important thing to be doing. AK: Is that what you tell your students? DC: Yes. I point it out when it comes up, and I’ve got a lot of literary magazines at the creative writing house, and I try to make that stuff available to my students. I encourage them to take things, and I leave a lot of books laying around, hoping that students will steal them. AK: Well, the last thing I had wasn’t really a question, but just a comment. When you were here for your reading, I encouraged my Rhet/Comp students to go and they really seemed to enjoy it. More than half my class attended, which was really impressive. Those who went had to write short papers, and most of them said they expected to be bored and were quite pleasantly surprised with the story you read. They were thrilled to hear a zombie story, especially one that was more human experience than blood and guts. DC: That’s great! We here at the RevHouse think it’s great, too, and we’d like to thank Dan for taking the time to talk with us.

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. Clark Chatlain lives and works in Missoula, Montana. His poetry has appeared most recently in Caketrain, The Adirondack Review, and Camas. Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. Her writing has appeared in a number of print and online publications, including “Windy City Times,” Make/shift, THIS, as well as upcoming nonfiction pieces in Sleet Magazine, Spittoon, and Stone Highway. She has an essay in the forthcoming Seal Press anthology, It’s All in Her Head, due out Spring 2013. A resident of Minneapolis, MN, Chelsey is currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction essays about finding the concept of home in the body. Lisbeth Davidow’s essays have appeared in Sliver of Stone, Mandala Journal, Prime Mincer, Pilgrimage Magazine and Alligator Juniper. An additional essay will soon appear in Marco Polo Arts Mag. Her essay,”Separation Anxiety,” was nominated to be included in Best of Creative Nonfiction, Volume 2. She also co-wrote “Ryan and Angela,” an original screenplay, for Universal Pictures and edited and assisted in writing Women in Family Business: What Keeps You Up at Night? She lives with her husband in Malibu, California. Tara Deal is the author of two books from small presses: Wander Luster is a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press, and Palms Are Not Trees After All is the winner of the 2007 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press. Her shortest story appears in Hint Fiction (Norton). Find her online at www.taradeal.com. Cassia Hameline is a current undergraduate student at St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college located in Canton, New York. Despite

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currently working with an undecided major, she continues to define herself as an aspiring writer. William Henderson lives in Boston, where he takes care of his two children, rarely reads directions, and blogs about love at hendersonhouseofcards. com. Grace Hobbs is a writer living in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in PANK and Corium. Gwen E. Kirby is an MFA candidate in fiction at Johns Hopkins University. A graduate of Carleton College and devotee of the Midwest, her work can be found at flashquake, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, and the Rake magazine. She is working on her first novel. Jill Kolongowski has lived on both coasts but she grew up and learned to write in the middle, in a small town in Michigan. She has worked as a writer, an editor, and a doughnut-maker. Jill’s work appears in Fugue and the Red Cedar Review, and she writes a food column, The F Word, at idler-mag.com and a personal blog at jillkolongowski.com. She enjoys people-watching, baking, and running. Her only vices are television and Broadway musicals. Christopher Martin lives with his wife and their two children in the northwest Georgia piedmont, in an old house between Red Top Mountain and Kennesaw Mountain. He is pursuing a Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Kennesaw State University, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shambhala Sun, Ruminate Magazine, Still: The Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Drafthorse, Loose Change Magazine, New Southerner, American Public Media’s On Being blog, and the Elevate / Art Above Underground project in Atlanta. His first chapbook of poetry, A Conference of Birds, was published by New Native Press in February 2012. Chris is at work on a collection of essays titled Native Moments: An Ecology of Fatherhood, a second poetry chapbook about Kennesaw Mountain, and a handful of projects on the north Georgia poet Byron Herbert Reece. Chris edits the online literary magazine Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination, and he was recently profiled as an emerging writer at the Southern Nature Project. Marilyn Martin has degrees from the University of Chicago and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Front Porch Journal, Southern Indiana Review, The MacGuffin and Gulf

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Coast. Her book, Helping Children with Nonverbal Learning Disabilities to Flourish, was published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Christopher O. McCarter is from the San Francisco Bay Area where he began writing poems late at night on his parents’ old PC. Currently, he lives and teaches in Alabama, writing poems and other things in the afternoons at his favorite meat & three. Christopher O. McCarter is not a grown man nor is he a bimbo, but equidistant to both (in limbo). At City Café, you should order the hamburger steak with gravy. Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, and Moravia, forthcoming from Folded Word Press. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared or will soon appear in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, Passages North, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Dustin Michael lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter. His work has been published by Brevity, Big Muddy, airplanereading.org and asininepoetry.com. His doctoral dissertation, a collection of creative nonfiction, should have been finished months ago. Currently, he’s chasing shots of 5-Hour Energy with Mountain Dew in a mad, bleary-eyed scramble to complete it. He also teaches writing at Savannah State University. Harmony Neal is the 2011-2013 fiction Fellow at Emory University. She’s been published in recent issues of New Letters, Ninth Letter, Cold Mountain Review, and Word Riot. She spends her spare time playing with her dog, Milkshake, and growing poets in her home. Knopf brought out Marge Piercy’s 18th poetry book The Hunger Moon: New & Selected poems 1980-2010 last spring, scheduled for paperback this spring. Knopf has The Crooked Inheritance, The Moon is Always Female, What Are Big Girls Made Of and several others in paperback. Piercy has published 17 novels, recently Sex Wars; two early novels, Dance the Eagle to Sleep and Vida, have just been republished with new introductions by PM Press. Her memoir is Sleeping with Cats (Harper Perennial). Her CD is called Louder, We Can’t Hear You (Yet!). Her work has been translated into 19 languages. She gives numerous readings, workshops and occasional speeches here and abroad.

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Brooks Rexroat teaches and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio. He holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his work has appeared in publications including Weave Magazine, The Montreal Review, The Cleveland Review, The Literary Bohemian, and Boston Literary Magazine. Visit him online at brooksrexroat. com. Fabio Sassi lives and works in Bologna, Italy. He’s started making visual artworks after varied experiences in music and writing. He makes acrylics with the stencil technique on board, canvas, old vinyl records or other media; his brushes are spray cans. When he makes an artwork sometimes he browses his stencil patterns trying to match them to create an unusual or surreal composition. He is also inspired by the news and by the human condition and its shades. He also makes photos searching the weird side of things. Find out more at coroflot.com/faboisassi. Jackie K. White earned her PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from UIC with concentrations in Latino and Latin American and Women’s Studies. She served for 9 years as an editor with RHINO, and is an associate professor at Lewis University. Her poems and translations have appeared in ACM, Bayou, Folio, Karamu, Natural Bridge, Quarter after Eight, Spoon River, Third Coast, etc. and online at seven bridges, shadowbox, and prosepoem. com. Her chapbook Bestiary Charming won the 2006 Anabiosis Press award, and Petal Tearing & Variations was published by Finishing Line in 2008. A third chapbook, Come Clearing, in which “Body Cento...Year Two” appears, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Jodi Stutz Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Robert Browning Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. Before the City, his first poetry collection, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards. Wright is also the author of the companion novels Punahou Blues and Moloka’i Nui Ahina, both set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii. He was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This issue would not be possible without the generous support of our benefactors: CHRIS GREENHOUGH We would also like to thank everyone who took a chance on us. Thank you for sending us your work. Thank you for your faith and kindness.

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