Epiphany Fall Winter 2010 11 by Willard Cook

Editor in Chief

Editor

Willard Cook Jeffrey Gustavson

Managing Editor

William Schaumberg

Fiction Editor

Odette Heideman

Poetry Editor

Martin Edmunds

Contributing Editors

Assistant Editors

Readers

Typography & Design

Friends of Epiphany

Board of Directors

Elizabeth England, Joel Hinman Stacey Kahn, Martha Mortenson Christopher Bradt, Stefanie Demas, Mark Foard Keith Hendershot, Belinda Kein, Ellen Song Kate Welsh, Davita Westbrook, Suzanna Filip Kimberly Smith Bernard and Elsie Aidinoff, Vicky Bijur Heleny Cook, Warren & Brammie Cook Rebecca J. Cook, Lavinia M. Currier Elizabeth England, George Franklin Irene Emery Goodale, Michele Herman Sarah Lutz & John van Rens Jerry & Naomi Neuwirth, Carol Moldaw Michael Ramos, Kenneth & Michelle Stiller Willard Cook, Jeffrey Gustavson, Kaylie Jones Remy Kothe, Lisa Paolella, Jamie Schwartz

Epiphany is published biannually by Epiphany Magazine, Inc., a nonprofit §401(c)(3) corporation. For submission guidelines, please visit our Web site at www.epiphanyzine.com Donations and gifts to Epiphany are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. A one-year subscription is $18; a two-year subscription is $34. Make checks payable to Epiphany Magazine and send to: 71 Bedford Street, New York, NY 10014 or visit our website at www.epiphanyzine.com The ISBN number is 0-9749047-1-4

The ISSN number is 1937-9811

The FALL/WINTER 2010/2011 issue was printed by: McNaughton & Gunn Inc. 960 Woodland Drive Saline, MI 48176 Phone: 734-429-8728 Fax: 734-429-8740 MISSION STATEMENT: Epiphany is committed to publishing literary work in which form is as valued as content; we look for writing, wherever it may fall on the spectrum from experimental to traditional, that is thoroughly realized not only in its vision but also in its devotion to artistry. We are especially open to writers whose explorations of new territory may not yet have found validation elsewhere. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written consent of Epiphany Magazine, Inc. Bookstore distribution is through Ingram Periodicals (ingramperiodicals.com) and Ubiquity Distributors (ubiquitymags.com). Epiphany is a proud member of C.L.M.P.

CONTENTS [FICTION] Jerome Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 What, So? You Are Lost, Are You? So What? The Places You Find Yourself

Dale Peck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore

Shelly King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Morning Fog

Lisa Dierbeck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 A Wanted Man

Robin Willig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Yellow

Toni Graham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Hope Springs

Timothy Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 The Third Principle

Lindsay Merbaum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 The Summerhouse

[MEMOIR] Lindsay Sproul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Nativity

Kirk Stirling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 The Return of the Hostess Pajama

A.B. Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Keep This Fortune

[POEMS] Joe Elliot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Advertisements for a New World For Maya Edelman

Sarah Carson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 When A Man Flies Aftermath Demolition Derby at the Fairgrounds The Affair

Nick Thran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Raining in Darling Pleasure Boat

Jeffrey M. Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 By Mourning Moth (Landscape) Ghostlight Is Woven Portrait

Andrew McCord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Mahmud of Ghazni’s Mosque in Swat E-mail Trail for Beena Kabul

Asadullah Khan Ghalib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Guileless Heart: Five Ghazals (translated by Andrew McCord)

Maasjid ke zer-e-saya kharaabaat chahiye Isshq mujh ko nahi vahasht hi sahi Taskeen ko ham na roeen jo zauq-e-nazar mile Koi umeed bar nahi aati Dil-e-nadaan tujhe hua kiya hai?

Benoît Conort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Transfixed Observer: Poems from Au-delà des cercles (translated by Kim Cushman) Je ne peux qu’approcher Je suis resté longtemps devant Le ciel Est-elle Eurydice? La lune ronde se disloque Il y avait cet enfer

Melissa Green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Lupercalia Leda, Later Design from the Aran Islands The Vigil

[CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

Poetry Fiction Essay Interview Translation

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umsl.edu/~natural

Jerome Edwards

WHAT, SO? YOU ARE LOST, ARE YOU? SO WHAT?

“

un at noon, tan us.” I’m given to this kind of talk after too long in the sun. “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?” Dom’s used to it. We’re back where we started, a part of town where the locals say— in a brand of Spanish I still can’t manage—that the devil never even lived. Hot stench wafts from a stretch of railroad where a dead bird splays awkwardly along the tracks, a wing turning up like the last page of a book. I’m aloof, a fool am I—which is to say that Dom is the leader of this duo by default. I drag the toe of my boot across a worn railroad tie, let my foot carry through a patch of brown grass, wait for the next route to be decided. Color has been burned from the sky, leaving only a stifling blanket of brightness, and I’m nostalgic about sunglasses. I drain what’s left in my boto—pain rolls from one side of my head to the other. Dom tries the map again, but gives up on it soon enough. “It’s too hot to hoot,” I say. “We just need to find the station.” “We could follow the tracks.” Dom’s nodding, but not because we’re any closer. We double back, pass through a blanched scrap of town where the air holds distinct odors you can measure by—some kind of food, some kind of smoke, some kind of decay. A sun-bleached piece of wood with “MUSEO” carved into it hangs from a shanty that looks like it’s been built from the remains of a bonfire. “Se orar—raro es,” I say, a phrase I picked up somewhere, meaning something like “I can pray—it’s strange.” I try it again, the “r”s rolling away from me. We turn a corner and pass through a shadow. Buildings like cardboard boxes along a hard road of dirt; a tire-less rusted hatchback cocked at an angle. We’ve seen all this before—it’s familiar and foreign 9

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and the heat is everything. The heat is heartbreaking. A fly spreads itself on my tongue. Later, in a market with a makeshift roof, we buy two bottles of Regal Lager and refill our botos with wine. Dom buys plantains from a boy pushing a cart. A small girl wearing shorts held up by a shoelace pulls at the cheap camera around my neck—I’m trying not to look directly at her undeveloped chest and asking, “Borrow or rob? Borrow or rob?” I secure the camera with my hand and she poses as I take her photo. “Oh, cameras are macho,” she says, then pushes up on her toes, kisses my cheek . . . The sun is still high when we approach mildewed old furniture piled around a dark round man whom we’ve passed twice today already—“Tut-tut,” he says when I finally ask if he speaks English, and Dom asks him loudly, slowly, “Where. Is. Train. Station?” “La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural” is the man’s calm reply. I’m laughing and laughing because it’s all so goddamn funny to me. “Circles,” Dom says, maybe to himself. “Somos o no somos,” I say—I roll the oblong syllables out of my mouth until I think I have them down. Heat ghosts hang over the only section of paved road in front of us. I step into my own footprints and feel like I could belong. How clear it is to me that we are all lost, always. Up ahead, the alula of a dead bird’s wing lifts, showing a spot of rot underneath. Dry wind pulls the foul scent to us. The same stretch of tracks. Dom spits into the dust. “Do geese see God?” I ask. I wring a stream of red wine into my mouth and search my pockets for something, for anything. We’re at the beginning. We’re at the end. We’re somewhere in between. We are where everybody is. We’re somewhere in between. We’re at the end. We’re at the beginning. I wring a stream of red wine into my mouth and search my pockets for something, for anything. “Do geese see God?” I ask. Dom spits into the dust. The same stretch of tracks. Dry wind pulls the foul scent to us. Up ahead, the alula of a dead bird’s wing lifts, showing a spot of rot underneath. F

Jerome Edwards

THE PLACES YOU FIND YOURSELF

ou walked out of the shitter one morning and kicked an armoire. You didn’t know what an armoire was before you met her. Now you know how she takes her coffee, that she hates the word moist, and that she’ll read anything being made into a major motion picture. You know that she loves when you walk on the street side, hates when you pass cars in traffic, and that she regularly sends back food in restaurants because it’s not what she expected. It might be another one someday, but for now it’s her and you kiss her in the morning and remove her hair from the shower drain and you introduce each other at dinner parties and smile and shake hands and nod and sip until those familiar motions blend into the predictable patterns that make up the calculated hours of your days. But soon a time will come—maybe next month, maybe next year—when you’ll realize you haven’t seen a movie in weeks, haven’t unstopped the tub for ages, and those tired questions about what the fuck you’re doing will start to exert real meaning again. Questions that will remind you of how lost you really are, questions that make you wonder if this is all there really is. Then one morning you’ll wake up and there will be another one lying next to you, maybe this one a brunette, and you’ll make her coffee before you leave for work and when you return home at night she’ll have her laptop on the table, reading to you about the new movies she wants to see. F

The one lying next to you now is blond. Her name is Heather—or is it Kelly? She snores against your shoulder and her head smells like parsley. Her body conforms to yours in a way so that her stubble prickles your hip. She was attentive to it early on, but now those coarse hairs reach at you from the edges of the panties she dons shamelessly for nights on 11

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the couch watching TV, panties so threadbare that small ellipses have formed at points of duress in the fabric. It’s not lost on you that this is in itself a tender expression of intimacy—that, by all accounts, this is what intimacy looks like—but you resent her for those fucking panties anyway. She’s wearing them under your office league softball championship t-shirt, the brushed cotton T-shirt that she put on and danced in the night you won it, the shirt that was bunched around her neck as you propped her onto the bistro-style kitchen table and bruised your thighs on its beveled edges. The shirt she put in her drawer the next day. A shirt you’ve never worn. In the morning you drink coffee as she straightens her elastic waistband in the reflection of the oven door. You used to have her wear her uniform to bed—you even wore it yourself once, pictures of which still exist on a hard drive somewhere—but now you just think the bulky white costume is ridiculous. You think she’s ridiculous for wearing it. When she’s gone you listen to the morning traffic report and can’t remember if you’ve had one cup of coffee or two, so you drink another before adding to the long, slow queue of cars on the freeway. F

You arrive to the office early, for the same reason you leave late, the same reason everybody else does the same thing. Your responsibilities don’t require that level of commitment, but you’ve learned to maintain a schedule that keeps you busy enough to ward off questions about why you’re spending the best hours of each day on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in a blocky industrial park in an age when everything can be done on a phone from almost anywhere on the planet. You’re fully aware that these aren’t original sentiments, yet you fail to understand why the things you’re expected to do aren’t expected to be done efficiently. During your first few months with the company you knew, as you know now, that this antiquated life of cubicles and corporate hierarchy is reaching its certain end—that everything is reaching a certain end— but you’ve since learned that your apocalyptic preoccupations won’t help you with where you are now. You neatly push those questions aside with all the others. Besides, it was a job you wanted, right? A job you were fortunate to get—a fact that’s become unmistakable now, in These Trying Economic Times. Once foreign jargon now falls from your mouth like small apologies, each sterile phrase carefully 12

JEROME EDWARDS THE PLACES YOU FIND YOURSELF

manufactured to assess vulnerabilities while adjusting to new paradigms— all part of your desperate attempt to stay clear of inevitable restructuring plans. Persistent play-acting designed to move you deeper into the herd as it’s systematically thinned. Yet despite the enormous personal overhaul to realign your ambitions with your current circumstances, all those unanswered questions still hang around you like allergens. On your weaker days—when you tell yourself you’ve had enough, that this wasn’t supposed to be your life—the questions can accumulate and rupture like embolisms, reducing you to misguided fits of blinding anger, spells of immeasurable guilt, extended bouts of debilitating sadness. But you’re one of the lucky ones. Each unspoken mantra brings you closer to the emptiness of the weekend, the white noise of a rare government holiday. F

Ring. Ring. It’s Harris from thirty feet away, asking if you’ve updated the figures. There was a time when you liked Harris, even enjoyed a few happy hours with him. He told you about his home-brewed beer operation and how Receptionist Sandy—always in those short skirts—knows exactly what she’s doing by keeping the client files on the bottom shelf. Because sober sex with Heather Kelly had become a chore, you quickly downed the cheap happy hour cocktails and Harris matched you. One night after fast drinks on an empty stomach you’d said Fuck this, let’s start our own company—a beer company. We’ll call it Nuther Beer, you said. It’ll taste just like any other beer and when people order Another they’ll be ordering our beer, see? Excuse me, miss, can I have a Nuther? People are already ordering it, you said, impressed with your own intoxication. Harris laughed and you both ordered another and laughed some more and got good and drunk. These days, on the rare occasion that you find yourself at happy hour with Harris, you pace yourself as he sips safely at a gin and tonic, one and a half over the course of happy hour. F

Heather Kelly is straining pasta noodles when you get home—you peck her cheek as steam grabs her head in soft focus. Your back hurts from too many hours in your ergonomic office chair; you rest your wrists on bags of ice because you swear you’re getting carpal tunnel. 13

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She puts a plate of noodles in front of you and empties onto them Ragú from a jar. The sauce is cold, you say, but she tells you to mix it with the noodles and it’ll be fine. She’s right, of course, but you resent having to do it. You tell her about the work you’re behind on, how you don’t know how they can expect you to have it done in time. You tell her that Harris thinks he’s the Big Shit now. She says something about deformed molars, receding gums. Later, when a movie ends, she jolts upright on the couch and you rub her back as she denies having fallen asleep, as she’s done during the same movie twice before. Walking in front of you to the bedroom she knocks into the armoire and curses. She asks when you’re going to move it. The armoire, she says, as if you’ve had this conversation five times before. Can’t you just please please move it already? F

In bed she wants sex, so imagining you have hold of Receptionist Sandy’s short skirt, you work down the familiar panties. Soon you’re thinking back to the first time she let you fuck her, less than a week after you met. The ease with which she granted penetration to a relative stranger disgusts you now, but at the time—when she’d finally submitted after two nights of relentless pleading—you probably would’ve taken the rejection too harshly to keep seeing her. When it’s done she pushes a deep breath across your chest and within minutes she’s asleep. The effortlessness with which she falls asleep each night has become somehow inexcusable to you. A couple hours later stray hairs are tickling your face but rather than risk waking her, having her ask what’s wrong, you lie still and concentrate on your breathing. Light from an outside lamp touches the oblong mole on the back of her neck. Before you learned her geography you ran your mouth across the lone blemish regularly; now you cringe to think of how that black lump felt on your tongue. Soon you’re thinking about your first girlfriend, Tara—her eager giggle and eggshell skin, her body so lithe and young and compliant, how commanding and protective she made you feel. That these are the same traits that led you to accuse her of being too naïve to trust is lost on you tonight—you’re too busy thinking of how she worked those legs in bed, how yours was only the second cock to enter her. And then it’s your ex-girlfriend Kim—or was it Jennifer? Her firm stomach, round ass, how she made you wait three months to fuck her. You wonder where 14

JEROME EDWARDS THE PLACES YOU FIND YOURSELF

she is, why it had to end, curiosities that only emerge because you’re forgetting how she never laughed at your jokes, how she’d have you come down six floors to parallel-park her Neon, how she’d brush her hair in bed, leaving on the sheets those long, wispy reminders of her constant presence in your life. The edited memories are enough to move you into a few disappointing half-dreams but not the restful sleep that’s eluded you for months. When morning comes to the window you roll carefully from the bed, walk through your small apartment and step outside. You notice that yours is the only door to still have a newspaper delivered to it. Beyond the red clay roof tiles sunlight begins to sort itself out in the sky. Why is it that you always seem to feel so right at this time of morning, before the day has had a chance to happen? F

Coffee drips into the pot and the sports page tells you the scores but none of these details register because you’re deciding how to tell Heather Kelly it’s over. You deserve more than I can give. I care for you too much to keep going on like this. I feel like we’re holding each other back. It’s all the same—dialogue ready-made for this very reason. It doesn’t really matter what you say. What matters is that once she’s gone everything will fall into place. You’ll have time to figure things out, to find what’s missing. Another day, a Nuther Beer. Fucking brilliant. Pipes shift in the wall when the shower starts and your shoulders pull tight like piano strings. The stiffness has become as much of a component of your day as traffic, e-mail, or disdain, and you no longer notice it. You think of the work you’re expected to do today, knowing that none of it really matters. She drifts out of the hot bathroom with a towel on her head, singing an Amy Winehouse song; she turns on the television, where Joy Behar interviews Kate Gosselin. You try to pinpoint when, exactly, you came to know who these people are. Three minutes into your shower the water runs cold. You tolerate it long enough to rinse away most of the soap. You’re shivering while you shave, and nick your lip. When you were a kid you wanted to be a firefighter. I put out fires. How easy would that be to say? 15

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Harris is already at the coffee station when you get there. You lie to him about having watched the game and now you’re forced to fake your way through a conversation about football. You know he knows you’re lying. At your desk you delete three e-mail forwards from Heather Kelly, well beyond questioning the role of luck in your life. When you finally begin updating the figures you’re distracted by Robin, two desks away, chuckling into her phone. You smell coffee cake, and your throat tightens when you hear her say Oh, I’m just nibbling. This might have something to do with your inexplicable contempt for Robin or maybe it reminds you of how Heather Kelly’s frame began to widen just minutes after you cleared closet space. Not long after that she chopped her hair. Do you like it? she’d asked. Perhaps you screamed into her swelling fucking face that No, no, no I don’t like it, it’s absolutely fucking horrible! Such An Epic Fucking Mistake! CUTTING YOUR HAIR WHEN YOU’RE GETTING FAT JUST MAKES YOU LOOK FUCKING FATTER! But you didn’t scream that into her face, did you. You answered as you should. You wait out Robin’s phone call by absently stirring powdered creamer into old coffee with a tiny plastic straw. Soon you’re sliding down a pole, sprinting across a station house. Hanging off the back of a long red truck, roaring towards a house blanketed in flames. Bracing a high-pressure hose, taming a rampant blaze. Leading with your shoulder as you barrel through a fiery door. Feeling nothing but your blood. F

It’s ten past eleven when Harris calls to say you’re late for a meeting. You look at one of the Post-it notes on your desk and see that he’s right, you’re late. You pick up a folder and legal pad, just to have them in your hands. Thirty minutes later you’re back at your desk. You had a vague idea of what was being discussed and had nothing to offer, yet you resent that you weren‘t asked for your input. Scribbled on your pad: Long day? Have a Nuther. There’s always time for a Nuther A Whole Nuther Beer. Heather Kelly texts saying she wants to meet for lunch. At Luigi’s she sends back a chicken Caesar salad because it has too much dressing. By the time her new salad arrives you’ve finished an overcooked 16

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burger. She tells you Dr. Larson might give her a raise. You tell her Dr. Larson wants to fuck her. Oh, stop being ridiculous, she says, unable to grasp that what you’ve just said to her is the most honest thing you’ve ever said to her. At six-thirty you decide to stay in the office another halfhour. Fifteen minutes later you’ve had enough. You leave the desk light on so Harris might think you’re still there, knowing he used to do the same thing. You tell yourself you’ll come in early tomorrow. You tell yourself you have to. You wonder if firefighters ever fantasize about working in offices. F

Traffic plods along half heartedly. Talk radio rattles out of your speakers. Eventually you fall into the comfortable trance that allows you to detach long enough to make it home. But today it’s cut short by a honk. Several furious honks. The man in the sedan behind you wants you to cover the ten yards or so that have opened between you and the car in front of you. Usually you’d let this kind of thing go. You’d pull forward, maybe offer an apologetic wave. But the man’s eyes are so intensely set on you that when the car ahead of yours advances several more yards, you decide, for a reason you can’t name, to stay right where you are. Knowing that you’ve acknowledged him, the man lays on his horn a little longer. Instead of lifting your foot from the brake, however, you keep your eyes on the rearview mirror—on the urgent pain that’s now bending the man’s face around profanities you can’t hear. Without giving it much thought, you shift into park as the surrounding traffic continues on. Passing cars begin to swerve into the open road space in front of you and now the man is flinging his arms wildly around the interior of his car—his entire body gripped by some primitive survival dance that takes him aggressively out of his car door and onto the street. He’s larger than you expected, and clearly more experienced at activating his anger. Yet even as he stabs a finger into the air and unintelligibly shouts at your stopped car, you find it strange that where you’d normally feel fear is something that puts you at ease with this man’s display of rage. It’s disproportionate and you understand it—you understand it enough to know that anything you might do right now would seem trivial in the face of such pure emotion, with his rage superseding any sense of time or place or decorum. You’ve never seen anyone more present. When he lurches toward your car your stomach finally lifts and heat pushes into your arms—your head lightens with fantasies of carnage. You’re not equipped for what this man is capable of, but right now, right 17

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here, you wouldn’t have it any other way. Today you’re ready. Ready to be dragged roughly across the asphalt, for blunt knuckles to reposition cartilage, for heavy boots to snap ribs, for damage to be irreversible. Ready for the full extent of what such beautiful anger can bring. But that’s not the world we live in, is it? A series of calculations move across the man’s face before he stops mid-stride, turns, drops back into his car and yanks the door shut. A fever rushes out of your body. He tries to maneuver his car around yours but he’s still too close. Out of options, he channels his anger into his own steering column. He forces out the unrelenting scream of his horn. Perhaps it’s because you understand disproportion all too well, or perhaps it’s just disappointment, but, keeping your eyes on his in the rearview, you lay on your horn, too, and the harsh duet rises out over the midweek commute. Soon other drivers are shuffling to identify the source of the sustained horns. One lane over, a middle-aged woman in a Lexus, who makes you as an offender, offers a conspiratorial grin before leaning into her horn, too. Soon other drivers join in—then more—and still more, until countless drivers up and down both sides of the congested freeway are contributing to the reverberating chorus of horns. Somewhere in the fray, the booming air horn of a big rig grounds the ensemble, and during that jarring symphony of eclectic horns, everything else begins to fall away. Everything else goes quiet. F

You sit in your car in your numbered parking space at the apartment complex. The engine has been off long enough for the cooling fan to run its course. Neighbors you’ve never met park their cars, pick up their mail, go inside to eat dinner, feed pets, check e-mail, watch reality television, maybe have sex, maybe argue. How could it be that you don’t know any of these people? In the kitchen, you playfully drive a finger into Heather Kelly’s side and she squeals and whips around, smacks you with a wooden spoon. You wrap her up in your arms as she calls you a stupid stupid stupid shit for scaring her and soon you’re both laughing, her lungs shaking against yours, the herbal blend of her hair in your nose, echoes of car horns still moving in your ears. You tuck a loose ribbon of hair behind her ear and drag your lips along the thin skin of her jawline until she slides away— Guess what? she says, wielding the spoon like a weapon. Dr. Larson’s giving me that raise! 18

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Baby, that’s great, you say—and your earnestness surprises you. You look straight into her and say, That goddamn dentist is so fucking lucky to have you. Baby, she says, her eyes measuring you. Thank you for saying that. It means . . . so much. She presses into you, shaking again, maybe crying, and she squeezes her little arms around you tighter than you ever thought she could. I love you, she says. I love you, too, you say. You say it like you’ve never said it before. You say it like you’ve been saying it for years. And this is how it will go: Some days you’ll think that maybe this is actually all there is and maybe that’s not so bad. And some days that will be enough to help you endure the certain disappointments and countless absurdities while tolerating an endless accumulation of questions that will go forever unanswered. And you’ll move through the days and weeks and months ahead doing what’s expected of you and trying not to dwell on what you can’t control, and every now and then you’ll look around and no matter how much the world has exceeded or failed your expectations you’ll find yourself right where you are. Right where you put yourself. Here you are. F

Then one night you’ll open your eyes and there will be another one, maybe this one a redhead, snoring softly against your arm, and you’ll scrutinize the flaws of her pale body and know down to your blood that this isn’t where you’re supposed to be, that this isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing. And soon you’ll be caught in the aromatic memory of Heather Kelly’s hair, lost in how her lips tasted on yours. You’ll remember her inexplicable optimism and willingness to sacrifice, her easy ability to trust you. You’ll think of how comfortable she was with your flaws, how considerate she was about your past, how sensitive she was to your personal shortcomings. You’ll begin to feel how much she must have truly loved you, to put up with so much of your shit. You’ll wonder why you couldn’t have been better for her. Why you couldn’t be enough. You’ll wonder why you can’t do it all over again. And in the morning she’ll lightly shake you awake, whispering your name. Already dressed for work, she’ll ask, oh so softly, if, before you leave for the office, could you please please please please please move the armoire out of the hallway? F 19

Joe Elliot ADVERTISEMENTS FOR A NEW WORLD

In a tuck tuck three in the back, two in the front, and one sitting on the battery, holding on with one hand, wide-eyed and happy.

A mom, a young child on her lap, an older one riding behind, and a piglet in the basket of their mobylette, coming home from market, a family in the wind.

JOE ELLIOT ADVERTISEMENTS FOR A NEW WORLD

Two university students in love on a Vespa, and in their handmade sidecar a sizable houseplant, and in their ears the shared cord of a single iPod, playing the soundtrack of the movie of the new life theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re shooting together, a compound life of light and air, of speed and shadow.

An old lady pushes her bicycle slowly, careful not to spill the bowl of goldfish resting on the seat.

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

Two boys on long boards, school bags swinging from their backs, as they race in and out of traffic, flying by a voluminous black Hummer at a red light.

High above the street, buckled in and power-locked behind tinted windows, a trophy wife waits at a red light, safe in the air-conditioned military vehicle her absent banker husband bought her to run her errands in, and whose state-of-the-art navigational system he can also access

remotely to track her movements.

JOE ELLIOT ADVERTISEMENTS FOR A NEW WORLD

Barefoot shaved head a young monk crosses the street in his stylish saffron robes, one hand holding his rice bowl, the other waving to the handsome couple waiting for him on the other side.

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

FOR MAYA EDELMAN Ladies with open and empty valises would be falling out of a blue unclouded sky were it not for the white and red balloons theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re holding onto without haste or effort or fear or any other chosen color.

Enshrouded, she huddles beneath her houndâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cloak, slowly becoming the hound.

Mirror images of herself, one of them upside down, both with one hand grabbing the braid high up,

JOE ELLIOT FOR MAYA EDELMAN

the other with open scissors, narrow neck bent over to get a good angle on the braid, the single continuous braid from one image to the other. To be free, fall out of the frame singly, and then together. F

The traveler, two duffle bags in either hand, and on her back a busy village crowning a hill, half bulging out of her pack. F

In her hands a basket of eggs, and way up, aloft, on top of the long brown spiraling vine of her hair, a nest on fire.

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

The teapot is tied to the top of her head. She tilts and it pours into her cupped hand. F

The sisters are sitting opposite each other, playing catâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cradle with their long brown hair, the hair of their imagination, the hair that grows out of their heads, alive and interweaving. Whose is whose, and this transformative web will catch what? F

JOE ELLIOT FOR MAYA EDELMAN

Now the girl holding an umbrella over her head just in case, and held aloft by two branches rising up from her shoulders, a little gray cloud above the umbrella, the joke muted in natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colors. F

An icy lamppost, and on either side, like pennants in a stiff breeze, perpendicular children, winter scarves and booted feet straight out in the pale air, holding on by the pink tips of their tongues. F

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

Attached to the very ends of two long braids snaking out of the sides of her aviator cap, two identical model airplanes flying in formation up and behind her so quietly, she does not notice.

The simple fish decorating the inner tube donut-ing the young batherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abdomen are also in the air. Fish schooling, finding their way back into the ecstatic batherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s simple open mouth.

Dale Peck

Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore

avis was pushing a tiny wheeled cart across the living room carpet when I walked through the front door. The cart was attached to a long stick that was pinkish red, like a dog’s penis, and some mechanism connected to the wheels’ axle caused a bunch of wooden balls inside a plastic bubble to bounce and clack against each other as he moved it back and forth. Davis called the toy a vacuum, but if it was a vacuum, it sounded like it was sucking up an endless stream of lost change. “Hey, Gayvis, what’s up?” In my experience, gay is one of those words, like penis, that’s always good for a laugh. Davis, however, didn’t laugh, or look up from his vacuuming. “Well look who finally decided to come home? Would it have killed you to pick up a phone?” Davis wore an apron made from one of my T-shirts held in place by one of my belts, double wrapped around his soft, tiny waist. I dropped my gym bag in the middle of the floor and headed down the hall. “Laird Swope! After I slaved all day to clean this house for you, and dinner still to get ready! The least you could do is—” I slammed my bedroom door on Davis’s rant. His mom worked as a waitress at the titty bar out by the interstate. She worked the day shift, when there were six, maybe seven cars in the parking lot, tops. One of them was hers, and one of them was the stripper’s, and one of them was the bartender’s, and plus Davis’s mom was a little fat, so you know the tips sucked. My mom said flat out that the only way she could possibly make ends meet was by blowing truckers. I could see how a mother like that could drive you crazy. My mom wasn’t half as bad as Davis’s, and she made me nuts. I cracked my laptop just as Davis hipped open the door, his vacuum clackety-clack-clacking into the room behind him, my backpack hanging off his tiny shoulders like a catamount mauling a calf. 29

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“Don’t you close the door when I am talking to you, Laird Swope.” My mom wasn’t very good at covering her tracks. The cache of Internet Explorer said that after she checked for updates on the gay porn site she read every day she looked up recipes for tuna casserole and green beans almandine, which turned out to be green beans with almonds. Great. Green beans and nuts. Davis vacuumed my floor, his little voice barely audible above the racket. “All day I slave, and do I hear one word of thanks? One ‘Honey, the house sure looks great’ or ‘Is that a new hairstyle, darlin’ ’ or even ‘Screw it, babe, put the pork chops back in the fridge and let’s go to Olive Garden’? No. Nothing.” “Davis, if you keep pushing that toy around I am going to shove that penis stick so far up your rectum you’ll have to vacuum with your ass.” “Rectum”: another one of those words. Davis didn’t seem to know this, but at least he dropped the penis stick and pulled his feather duster from the belt of his apron. Was it creepy that my mom looked at gay porn? Or was it only creepy because she did it on my computer? The computer’d been a fourteenth-birthday present from my dad, which sent her through the roof. “Can’t afford child support but he can drop a thousand dollars on a computer? How’m I supposed to pay the mortgage with that?” I doubt the computer was worth a thousand bucks new and it was beat to hell by the time I got it, but at least my dad’s porn, or the porn of whoever he bought it from, was gender appropriate, even if the girls were my age. Davis’s duster flitted and fluttered over the computer screen. “Laird! Looking at those kinds of pictures, and in front of me! Imagine!” “This way I don’t have to imagine. Hey, Gayvis, why don’t you clean under the bed? Or in the closet? Or maybe on a busy highway?” Davis worked his way down the desk, reached his duster up to the windowsill. He’d had it with him the first morning his mom dropped him off at our house, and before she left he was already running it over the TV and stereo. I caught the scene as I was heading off to school: a five-year-old with a feather duster and a kerchief tied around his head, I had to stop. His right pinkie stuck out as though he held a teacup, and a golden cloud enveloped him, iridescent in the morning light. “Static electricity draws dust bunnies like bees to honey!” I looked at the mother of the freak. A couple inches of stomach rolled out between her cutoffs and a Double-O Inn T-shirt. The Os circled her boobs and the “INN” had an arrow at the bottom of the second N that pointed to her vagina. “Don’t you worry about Davis,” she said, sucking on a cigarette. “He just has his little routine.” 30

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“I know how housework can get away from you, Mrs. Swope,” Davis said, lifting a china figurine from the TV, dusting it, setting it back down. “But don’t you worry, I’m here now. If you’ll just show me where you keep the cleaning supplies, I’ll have this place spic ’n’ span before you know it.” “I get off at four,” Davis’s mom said, reaching a finger into the fold of her navel and pulling out a belly ring. “But sometimes I run a little late.” She let go of her belly ring and it disappeared again. I looked up to see if maybe her hair had gotten longer. “Laird,” Davis said now, somewhere behind me. “I want to talk to you about your mother. I know I must sound like a broken record on this, but I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to live with that woman.” On screen, Tina told me she’d been saving it all for me, but I knew she hadn’t. “Always with the telephone, and the TV, and the nail polish. All day the woman does her nails. Would it kill her to do one load of laundry, or even rinse her toothpaste blobbies down the sink? And our love life has suffered since she moved in. I hate to say it, Laird, but you know it’s the truth.” No, Tina hadn’t saved anything. But she was willing to show me what she’d learned from giving it away. That was what I liked about Tina. “And her friends! Don’t even get me started on her friends.” My mom’s “friends” were the other kids she babysits. This had been her brainwave last spring, which coincided with her getting canned from the café for spending more time flirting than working: unlicensed day care. Substandard service at bargain-basement prices. The business didn’t actually have a name, but my mom referred to it as Broken Homes, Not Broken Bones. Meanwhile, Tina wanted me to take it out of my pants. Just then there was that knock/open thing my mom did, and her face appeared in the doorway with the phone tucked under her ear. As a well-prepared teen, my computer faced away from the door, and I glared at my mom over Tina’s teased hair as if it was me who’d caught her doing something. “Davis, honey, your mom just beeped in. She’s gonna be late so you’ll be having dinner with us, okay? It’s tuna casserole, your favorite.” Davis had clambered on the bed and was running the edge of his apron—i.e., my shirt—between the posts of my headboard. “It’s not ‘Could we have tuna casserole tonight?’ or even ‘I’m feeling like tuna casserole, what about you?’ No, it’s ‘It’s tuna casserole, your favorite,’ as though it was my idea all along.” “Green beans almandine, honey. You’ll love it.” 31

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“And does she even ask what my husband, her son, who pays for the roof over her head, wants for dinner? No-o-o.” “Your husband hates tuna casserole,” I said. “And green beans. And nuts. Except his own, of course.” “Oh, Laird, don’t encourage him, he’s weird enough as it is.” With a little scrolling I was able to make Tina’s face disappear, and my mom’s took its place. The result looked like one of those caricatures you get at the State Fair, with the head all big and the body tiny, and the boobs sticking out from either side of the skinny abdomen like balloons tied to a stick. It occurred to me that the creepiest thing about my mom looking at gay porn on my computer was that she looked up recipes immediately afterwards. “I do not like it when you look at me that way, Laird Swope. You are a very disturbed boy. No, Dan, not you,” she said into the phone. “My other boy. And baby? The yard is looking a little raggedy. You think you could get out the mower and—not you, Dan. My other baby.” She closed the door, her giggles faded down the hall. An afterimage of red nail polish hung in front of my eyes, although I couldn’t remember actually seeing her hands. “Fine, I’ll make your tuna casserole. Anything you want, Mother Swope.” I closed the laptop on Tina’s headless body, swiveled the chair to face Davis. He was taking the soccer clothes out of my bag. T-shirt, shorts, socks. Despite the fact that they were soaked with sweat and caked with mud, he folded them up one at a time and put them in my dresser. He stopped when he came to the jock, which he held up with a questioning look on his face. “Dear?” “It’s the wrapper from some headcheese I bought today.” Davis put his free hand on his hip and frowned skeptically. “No, really, smell it. It smells like headcheese.” The jock was gray and kind of caky, the cup still in it. Davis brought it close to his face and his nose wrinkled. He sniffed once, then a second time. Then a third. “I don’t believe I care for headcheese, dear.” He threw the jock in the wastebasket beside the bed, which was mostly filled with crusty tissues. “Oh, do you have a cold?” He pawed through the wastebasket, taking out tissue after tissue and lining them up on the windowsill like sharp-edged snowballs. “You should tell me these things, I could have picked up some Nyquil while you were at work. You’ll be up all night. Laird!” Davis called as I walked out of the room. “I hope you didn’t forget it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow!” 32

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It was July 20, 2005, seven months to the day into George W. Bush’s second term of office. Davis was five years old. F

So. Mowing the lawn’s cool. Anyway, it’s something you can do and see what you’ve done—as opposed to soccer, say, which is something that’s gone as soon as you do it. Don’t get me wrong. I liked soccer, and camp “got me out of the house during the summer,” as my mom liked to say, but I didn’t quite get the point of it. There was nothing to hold on to unless someone took a picture—and that’s not soccer, it’s just a picture of it. And it wasn’t like I enjoyed mowing the lawn or anything, but I liked the tracks of cut and uncut grass. That day I mowed the word “FUCK” into the front yard and then mowed it out. Whenever a Japanese car went by I flipped the driver the bird. I don’t have anything against the Japanese, or their cars, but you have to have a system, right? Otherwise you end up hating everything. Speaking of systems: Davis walked back and forth between the front door and the trash bin on the street. He held up his apron by the corners and carried something in the dimple with great delicacy, as though it were an unhatched egg. When he got to the bin he transferred the two corners of the apron to one hand and threw the lid open with the other— he had to heave his whole body to get the hinged lid to lift past ninety degrees and fall against the back of the bin—and then he pinched two fingers into the dimple of the apron and pulled out . . . wait for it . . . one of the tissues from my bedroom. He threw the tissue away, then turned around and repeated the process. He always closed the lid before he went back inside, and to top it off he only walked in the lines I’d mown, so that each trip took about five minutes. I appreciated his method, but God, the kid had issues. More issues than I had tissues, har har. The whole Davis-is-my-wife thing started about a week after he began coming to our house. I got home from school and found Ari and Ina, the six-year-old Eggleston twins, sitting side by side on the couch, staring at Davis with expressions half fascinated, half paralyzed. “Ladies,” Davis was saying, even though Ari was a boy, “I’ll tell you what my mother told me when I was your age. There are three things you need to do to keep your man. One: Never say no. It don’t matter if your ankles are swollen from a double shift out at the Oh-Oh Inn and all you want is a tequila slammer and a Sominex. When the little soldier lifts his bayonet you lie down flat and take one for the team. Two: Dinner at six. Always. A full man is a sleepy man, and a sleepy man won’t be out chasing tail, let alone starting a half-breed family in the trailer park on the south side of town. He is also slower on his feet. And 33

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three: Always keep your waheena clean. There is nothing that makes a man bust your lip open faster than a stenchy waheena, and believe you me, thirteen stitches take a longer time to get over than the sting of a little douche.” Ari, shy and obedient, raised his hand. “What’s a waheena?” Ina, more worldly and dominant, elbowed Ari in the ribs. “You don’t have one.” Ari looked like he was going to ask his question again, but then his eyes went wide and he clapped both hands over his mouth. “Now watch, ladies, as I demonstrate the proper way to greet your man when he comes home from a hard day at work.” Davis walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, followed by the sound of a popped top. A moment later, Davis reappeared with one of my mom’s Silver Bullets. He leaned provocatively against the doorframe, one hand stretched above him so that his dirty T-shirt rode up over an inch of equally dirty belly. “Hello, baby,” he said in a breathy voice. “Can I offer you a cold one? Or would you prefer something . . . hot?” Just then my mom walked in the back door. “Don’t even think about it, Laird.” She pinched the beer from Davis and took a swig. Then, realizing Mrs. Eggleston was due any minute, she put the open can back in the fridge. “Isn’t he cute? He’s been going on about you all day.” Davis regarded my mom with his hands on his hips and a disapproving frown on his face. “Really, Alice. You had him for the first fourteen years of his life. It’s time to cut the cord.” Davis’s mom showed up late that night, funky with booze and cigarettes, a sort of misty/smoky cloud enveloping her body, and then sharper blasts (the word “stenchy” came to mind) when she opened her mouth. A crusty stain, like brown gravy, or feces, stood out prominently on her stonewashed miniskirt. Maybe it was because she talked so much trash behind her back, but something about Davis’s mom made my mom nervous, and she stood up from the couch and held out her hand. The only time I’ve ever seen my mom offer someone her hand like that is to pull them out of a pool or something. “Hey, Miss Davis. Davis is all ready to go. Just let me get him.” I stood in the living room with Davis’s mom. The only light came from “7th Heaven” and the tip of Davis’s mom’s Capri when she took a drag. There was a white mark on the left side of her upper lip, but I couldn’t tell if it was a scar or just a crack in her lipstick. 34

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“You named your son Davis Davis?” Pfft. She sucked in smoke like she was doing a whip-it. Poof. The smoke she exhaled felt damp on my face, as though full of spores. “I named him after his daddy.” She fixed me with a kind of dead gaze, and I should have known to drop it. But I didn’t. “I didn’t know you were married.” Pfft. Poof. “Who said I was married?” Suddenly a scream came from the back of the house. “I . . . said . . . in . . . a . . . MINUTE!” “Oh goddamn that child.” Davis’s mom whirled on her wooden heels, caught her balance on the wall, then thumped heavily down the hall. “Davis! Quit your fussing and get on out here!” Davis was in my bedroom. He had dragged the chair in front of the dresser and stood on it, looking at himself in the mirror. He had my mom’s hairbrush, and he was brushing his hair down the side of his face with long even strokes. He wore one of my T-shirts, which he’d made into a sort of nightgown by cinching it below his chest with something that I thought was a shoelace. “Ninety-sixteen, nineteen seventy-three, nine two nine two nine—” “He says he has to do both sides a hundred times,” my mom whispered. “He can’t count to a hundred.” “That’s sort of the problem.” Davis continued brushing. His mouse-brown hair was charged with so much static electricity that it followed the brush up and down like a swarm of cobras transfixed by a flute. I wondered what he saw when he looked in the mirror. “Ninety-ninety, one huntert.” Davis put the brush at a perpendicular angle to the edge of the dresser. When he stepped down from the chair his nightgown rode up a little, and I could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. He looked not at his mom, or mine, but straight at me. “Ready to hit the sack, big boy?” And, sashaying, he walked the three steps to my bed and plumped the pillow invitingly. I wondered if he thought the pillow was the sack he was asking me to hit. Nothing moved except for Davis’s mom’s right arm. Three puffs of smoke filled my bedroom. Finally she hung her Capri from her bottom lip and walked over and grabbed her son and swooped him onto her shoulder with one final oof of smoke. Davis’s eyes never left mine until his mom turned around unsteadily. Inside my shirt his legs straddled 35

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

her right boob, and the nipple was visible beneath her T-shirt, and mine. “He don’t know what he’s saying. He’s just a little boy.” A thin singsong filled the room: Never know how much I love you Never know how much I care

It was Davis, singing “Fever” in a falsetto whisper. When you put your harms around me I get a fever that’s so hard to bear

Davis’s staticky hair shot straight out from his head and attached itself to his mom’s as though thoughts were passing between them via wires. “Penis,” I said. Davis giggled. F

An incessant honking drove me to the kitchen, where I found my mom’s boyfriend Dan sitting in front of a children’s toy that was basically the dashboard of a car, complete with steering wheel and electronic horn. This wasn’t as strange as it sounds. No, nix that. It was every bit as strange as it sounds. Dan, you see, spent all his spare time “adapting” famous riffs from classical music for the horn of his 1999 Renault Something or Other, which he thought would get him on TV one day (“Why, yes, Regis, I do play an instrument: the French horn”). So you know, first of all, that he’s a winner, and, secondly, that his neighbors love him (the toy, in fact, was a “gift” from one of them, who heaved the box through his living room window). That night he was practicing something he called “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which nonpretentious people know as the theme to 2001. The steering wheel was smaller than his hand, and, what with the intense look of concentration on his face and his wild hair—bushy and uncombed on the sides but thin on top—he looked like a circus clown in a midget car. His fondness for Hawaiian shirts didn’t help, especially since most of them were “preowned.” With Dan you had to use a lot of quotation marks. The clock over the sink read a quarter past eight. “Dan? Hey, Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan?” Dan finally looked up. There was an innocent expression on his face, as if he was surprised to find that he wasn’t alone. 36

DALE PECK NOT EVEN CAMPING IS LIKE CAMPING ANYMORE

“Huh?” “Open the pod bay doors, Dan.” Dan blinked. “Huh?” “He means the horn, honey,” my mom said in the kind of voice you’d use to talk to a five-year-old. “Playtime’s over, dear, it’s time for din-din.” She turned from the oven holding the casserole in mitted hands. Stopped. “Huh.” “What?” Dan said. “Davis only set two places at the table. Davis? Honey, where are you anyway?” He turned out to be in the dining room, where he’d set two more places, complete with paper napkins his little fingers had folded into convincingly birdlike shapes, and a few bits of clover blossom in a glass, and a candle, lit. Because the table was so high, he was kneeling on his chair instead of sitting on it. He looked like an altar boy at a shrine. There was something worshipful in his expression. “Laird? Darling? I thought tonight we could renew our vows.” “Davis, I told you not to play with matches.” My mom blew the candle out, spattering wax over the tabletop. “Now come on, grab your plate and come in the kitchen with the rest of us. Laird, grab your plate.” In the kitchen, Dan had replaced his toy with a beer. There was a crunching sound as his spoon broke the crust on the top of my mom’s tuna casserole. “The recipe called for just a little bit of dirty-sock cheese sprinkled over the top. I was afraid it would make it less crispy but it seems to have worked out O.K.” Dan systematically skimmed off the top layer of casserole, which everyone knows is the best part, and put it all on his plate. He pushed the gloopy remainder in front of me. “Here you go, Laid, dig in.” Laid was Dan’s idea of a joke. Dan was a bit of a jokester. He watched intently as I spooned noodles on my plate. My mom’d been seeing him for about a year at that point, which was pretty much a record for her. I’d managed to stay out of his way, mostly, because he preferred to take my mom back to his place to screw, mostly. A lot of times he just sat in his car and honked, usually “Shave and a Haircut” or the Woody Woodpecker song, but sometimes he treated us to a couple of bars of Beethoven’s Fifth or Ninth, or the Lone Ranger theme, which I have to admit he played amazingly well. When he did stay I usually left, or went to bed. A few drops of cream of mushroom soup spilled on the table. 37

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

“Oh, Laid, look at that! Looks like you could use . . . a tissue.” With a flourish, Dan pulled one from the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. My mom stifled a snort, barely. “Laird has the sniffles,” Davis said, snapping the tissue from Dan’s fingers and blotting up the soup. “He also has all his hair.” My mom let the second snort fly. “The things that come out of that boy’s mouth!” She pulled his plate toward her and scooped casserole and green beans onto it. “It’s almost eerie how grownup he sounds.” If you ask me, what was eerie about Davis wasn’t just that he talked the way he did, but that he talked the way he did and still managed to pay attention to what was going on around him. For example: my mom’s nails. They were, in fact, freshly painted. Not red, as I’d thought, but purple. “Why thank you, Alice,” Davis said when my mom slid his plate back in front of him. And then: “It’s so nice to see you helping out around here. Now that Laird’s home.” My mom’s grin hardened. “Like I said. The things that come out of that boy’s mouth.” She spooned green beans onto Dan’s plate, mine, then served herself. “Shut up, Laird. You’ll understand when you have kids of your own.” “Alice raises a good point,” Davis said. “When are we going to have children of our own?” Dan got up, got a second beer from the fridge. “I mean really, Laird. What do we do it all for, if not to leave it to the next generation? It won’t mean nothing to us when we’re dead and gone.” Standing behind Davis, Dan made the universal symbol for crazy over his head. “Is it a crime that I want to have children, Laird?” Davis pushed his plate in front of my mom. “Load me up, Alice, tonight I start eatin’ for two.” Dan returned to his chair, set his beer down heavily on the table. “Why don’t you start with that, Davis,” my mom said. “If you want seconds, there’s plenty.” But Davis was looking at me, his face as round and deep and full as my mom’s casserole pot. “I wanna have triplets and name them all after you: Luh-hay-erd. C’mon, baby. Stick a bun in my oven. Knock me up. Get me in the family way. Take me right now, on the kitchen table. Let’s do it like teenagers!” “Davis!” my mom said. “Laird is a teenager. You are not.” Dan was staring at Davis with a look of fascination and disgust. What really bugged me, though, was that I knew the same expression was on my face. 38

DALE PECK NOT EVEN CAMPING IS LIKE CAMPING ANYMORE

“Good Christ. What uncle fucked that little boy?” Dan’s dumb-ass comment made me think about what Davis’s mom had said that one time—about Davis being named after his daddy—but my thoughts were cut off by a smack. My mom’s hand, Dan’s cheek. Not particularly loud, not particularly hard, but apparently hard enough to piss him off. Before either of us quite knew what was happening, he was holding my mom’s wrists in one hand, squeezing her jaw with the other. Her fork clattered to the floor. “When I think of a new life growing inside of me! Oh, Laird! I know that’s what God put me here for! To bring a little love into the world!” “Uh, Dan. You wanna let go of my mom?” “Shut up, Laird. This is between your mom and me.” “If there were more loving homes in the world, there’d be less violence. Less war. We could start a revolution, Laird. You and me. Right here, in our own home.” “Uh, Dan?” I made a little knocking sound on the table, and Dan looked over to see that I had my knife in my hand. “That’s really not cool.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Davis rubbing his belly with one hand. Full men rub their bellies vigorously, with both hands, but pregnant women only use one. Only use their fingertips, only touch gently, as if afraid to wake the child slumbering within. As with everything else, Davis got the details perfect. Only the body was wrong. Dan let go of my mom and settled back into his chair. “Jesus Christ, Laird, calm down. It wasn’t nothing.” He picked up his beer and drained it in one long glugging gulp. My mom unfolded her napkin into her lap. “I’m sorry I hit you, Dan. But you shouldn’t talk that way about Davis. Especially not in front of him. Laird,” she added, picking up her napkin and patting her lips, although she hadn’t started eating yet. “Put the knife down, please.” Dan burped, and then he picked up his fork and began shoveling a green-and-gray mixture of tuna casserole and string beans into his mouth. “Somebody should get that boy help.” It was unclear whether he meant me or Davis. My mom looked at me and then she looked at Davis, as if trying to decide. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said finally. “Where the hell is that woman?” Her eyes looked at the left side of her plate, the right. Not seeing her fork, she picked up her spoon and started eating. It was a teaspoon, so she was forced to take Davis-sized bites. Davis had already finished eating, and held his plate out for seconds. F 39

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But Davis’s mom didn’t come, and at 10 o’clock, with Davis curled up next to me on the couch—Dan was already in bed—my mom said it was time both of us hit the hay. “He can bunk with you.” “Aw, Mom. Why can’t he sleep on the couch?” My mom looked around our living room. Some run-down places look better in dim light, but ours looked worse: the shadows in the warped paneling seemed to hide deep voids, and the upstretched arms on the dancing figurines my mom “collected” (she found a box of them at a garage sale and bought the whole set for ten bucks) looked like sinners running from the Second Coming. The picture frames on top of the TV were dark rectangles, and at this point I can’t even remember whose faces hid inside them. “He’s five years old. That’s just too depressing.” “It’ll be like camping.” My mom shook her head. “Not even camping is like camping anymore. Now take a pillow from my bed. Preferably the one under Dan’s head.” I carried him down the hall. I was surprised by how light he was. I wasn’t a big kid, wasn’t particularly strong, but Davis felt lighter than the pillow I tugged from beneath Dan’s snoring head. Dan didn’t wake up at the jerking motion, but Davis did, and when his unfocused eyes squinted in my direction I remember I wanted him to say something that’d make it clear the whole Davis-in-an-apron thing was just an act. That he knew who he really was. Who I really was. Instead he curled his arms around my neck and turned his face into my chest and whispered, “Finally.” I pulled his shorts off him, laid him on the outer edge of the bed, then got undressed and climbed over him to the side next to the wall. I figured it was better he had the outside, in case he had to pee in the middle of the night. I realized I’d forgotten to give him his pillow, which sat on my dresser, on top of my laptop. Circuits crossed, fired, fizzled: the pillow from my mom’s bed, the laptop with its pictures of Tina, Davis’s whistling breath on my right side, the cold flat wall pressing against my left shoulder. I mean, Jesus Christ, who needs to look up a recipe for tuna casserole? Voices came from the other side of the wall: “Who took my pillow?” “I’ll take your pillow, mister.” “Aw, baby, you’re not still mad? You know I didn’t mean nothing.” A pause. “That kid gives me the creeps. It’s really got to come from somewhere.” “Oh, Dan. Dan, Dan, Dan.” 40

DALE PECK NOT EVEN CAMPING IS LIKE CAMPING ANYMORE

“What? What, what, what?” “If you were a parent, Dan, you wouldn’t care where it came from. You’d care where it was going.” Let’s face it: the reason I didn’t want Davis to sleep in my room was because nighttime was when I jerked off. My penis poked above the waistband of my boxers like a loaf of French bread sticking out of a grocery bag. I tried lying on my back but the blanket seemed to caress the tip. I tried lying on my stomach but the heavy weight of my body made me want to grind my hips into the bed. I turned on my side, and there was Davis, all of four inches away, and that was just weird. I turned to face the wall. I tried angling my penis so that it lay under the waistband of my boxers, and it popped out of the fly. Apparently my penis didn’t like being angled. I tried to think of the severed heads of chickens, the hair in the bathtub drain, the motherboard in my computer. Apparently my penis was not put off by abstract thought. I found myself wondering how the French got their bread home without busting the loaf in half: it bumped against everything. “Penis,” I whispered, and laughed at my own joke. The stereo went on in the other room. “Hooked on Classics,” Dan’s favorite camouflage. In approximately seven minutes he would patter out a bit of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or “Rhapsody in Blue” on the bedside table. If nothing else, his presence in our lives had been educational. A few inches behind me, Davis turned. His breath came louder, and I realized he was facing me. In the quiet, his silent voice was strangely present, a singsong bouncing back and forth between my ears to the accompaniment of the creaking bedsprings in the next room. Davis’s words, the things he talked about doing, were a pretty straightforward imitation of the women in his life—his mom, and, let’s face it, mine— crossed with women he saw on TV. The fifties sitcoms Nickelodeon ran ad infinitum, with their bright-faced beaming slaves in starched aprons and permanent waves, and the ones on my mom’s soaps, who were a different kind of caricature, all sucked, tucked, fucked. The combination could only be called freaky, especially when it came wrapped up in a five-year-old boy’s impossibly tiny, incredibly fragile body. I remembered the weightless weight of him in my arms. Was I ever that small, I wondered. Was my mom? Dan? It seemed impossible that someone like Dan could’ve passed through such a stage before turning into his adult self, omnivorous, with a bladder that could hold a quart of urine and fingers that bruised, broke, smudged, and made music from the strangest sources. Sometimes I felt like Dan. I wanted there to be a revelation, a single incident to explain away Davis’s behavior. The uncle or grandpa teach41

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ing Davis things he was too young to know, an overabundance of some chemical in his brain. But as far as I knew there was nothing like that. Aside from the general fucked-upedness of his existence, I mean, which was no more fucked up than mine or anybody else’s that I knew, there was no abuse, sexual or otherwise, no traumatic witnessings, no blows to the head. It seemed that Davis just knew what he wanted. That he was one of the few people in this world who wasn’t afraid to ask for it. As if reading my mind, Davis sighed. His whisper wasn’t all fake sexy like the voice I’d been hearing in my head. It sounded like the voice of a little boy whose mom’d forgotten about him a long time ago. “Laird? Please?” “You shut your cakehole, Davis. Just shut your fucking mouth.” See, the thing is, I wasn’t like Davis. I couldn’t let my mind go far away like he could and still keep track of the world around me. But when I tried to focus on the things that were right next to me, they ended up losing their edges a bit, and the next thing I knew there was a knife in my hand. Or a penis. Or my mom: why was it that she looked at pictures of gay guys who were all hairless and oiled and curved like, well, like really hard women, but then she went and picked a guy like Dan out of the lineup, whose only curve was his beer gut, and hair everywhere but where it was supposed to be? What I mean is, how come he made her happy, when she seemed to want something else? Sniffles now. Little bitty sobs. I did my best to think about Tina, then realized my hand was moving in time to the creaks in the next room. And the music: Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Who in the hell fucks to something that’s basically a war requiem? And then suddenly a drum roll, so loud I jumped and rolled away: “Bah-dah bah-bah-bah, I’m lovin’ it!” I realized I was facing Davis. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, only that they were wet. His hands were folded under his cheek in the universal symbol of sleep and prayer, I could feel his breath on my face, and all I could think was, How do you tell a five-year-old that he’s made it impossible for anyone to touch him? But then I thought, What do we do it all for, if not for the next generation? “Aw, fuck it, Davis. C’mere.” Reader, I made him so happy it nearly killed us both. F

Sarah Carson When a Man Flies Tonight there are nine houses burning in the city where I was born. Last night there were eleven. The night before—thirteen. The firefighters left town weeks ago. They told us we should go, too, but the people who leave never come back with good reports. The cops told us curved fingerprints are the most common and hardest to trace, and we tried to use this information to our advantage, but it was a lot to think about. Then someone showed us a website that measured your annual income against the rest of the world’s. If you were an American you were, by default, in at least the 97 th percentile—even the man down the street who tries to sell stolen lawnmowers for ten bucks or the best offer. I was in the 98th percentile, but all I could think about was how to be in the 99th. I did things unbecoming of a young lady. I cut in a line. I said something rude to a cabdriver. I did a shot of tequila and fell in a parking garage. The next morning a bruise formed on my knee atop a scar I’d had for years. I was six. Dad had just removed my training wheels. The wound looked deep. It was the second time I’d ever seen a man fly.

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

Aftermath A man is here to fix the stove. You tell him to come back later. He thwacks his wrench on the vinyl siding. In the distance a girl is screaming. A phone rings. A child picks up. Mr. So-and-So goes out to get the mail again. You are returning now with a bucket to de-ice the windshield. You are confident it won’t crack beneath all the cold and water. The repairman’s truck backfires as it’s starting. A dog begins to bark. The door handle comes off in your hand.

Demolition Derby at the Fairgrounds Last night at the demolition derby, he broke three bones in his foot trying to loose the clutch pedal from the floor, smoke pouring into his car from the Oldsmobile Cutlass stamping its grill into his wheel well. He had to walk five miles downhill on the gravel road through the cemetery to get home again this morning. When he reaches the fence, he curls his fingers around the chain links to support himself on his way to the porch. He digs through his front pockets for his house keys, holding onto the railing when he opens the door and the dogs spill into the yard, disappointed to find that heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the first one home.

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

The Affair Earlier in the night it was raining, and he had ducked the raindrops as he climbed the stairs to her apartment. He wasn’t drunk enough that he didn’t know where he was, just enough that he didn’t care. And when she kissed him, the blood on his bottom lip dissolved on her tongue like sugar left over a flame. But now it’s almost morning, and as the phone vibrates, it makes a buzzing sound against the top of the television. Sleeping hard, he doesn’t even dream that there’s a call for him. But she’s awake. She’s been awake for hours.

Lindsay Sproul Nativity

n the closet at my mother’s house, there is a box of homeless dollhouse dolls. They are all women. They wear Victorian gowns and rhinestones in their hair. They stand, pale and stoic, with their fingers stuck together and their arms reaching forever outward, their mouths sealed shut. When I find them, I pull them out and they stare at me, unblinking, their tiny feet hidden by eyelet lace. My father was supposed to build me a dollhouse. It would have had a secret room in the attic. It would have had working lights. Had he finished it, the tiny women I chose would have had pet ducks and chamber pots under their beds, bowls of fruit made of clay. I would have made them kiss each other and sneak porcelain hands up each other’s skirts. This was my bedroom. This used to be a boarding house, and back then, my room shared a wall with the bulimic opera singer’s room. She stole a chicken from us and kept it under her bed, humming Stravinsky through her nose while she chewed. In this room, my father first noticed my breasts. This is where he touched them. This is where my foster sister explained fellatio to me one night before I fell asleep in her arms, before she got pregnant and dropped out of secondary school. This is where the snapping fire inside the stove stole into our dreams, and this is where we woke each morning with rings of black coal in our nostrils. Someday, my mother said, we’d be able to afford real electric heat. I’m home for one week from New York, and I search late into the night for evidence that I am a person. In a bureau drawer, there are photographs of me in my cheerleading uniform. My hair is long and combed across my forehead, but my knees are scraped up. Underneath the pleated skirt was the underwear that said the name of our town in purple script across the back, each half of the word stretched across one cheek of my bottom. During halftime routines, we were supposed to lift our skirts up for the dads in the bleachers. We were supposed to act puckish in a harmless way. I was the flyer, so the other girls would throw me up into the air, where I was expected to spread my legs and touch my toes. I was one of three nine-year-olds on the squad who were 47

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allowed to shave our legs. Once, they dropped me. I was expected not to cry. Because I can’t stand being in this room for long, Melissa and I drive around our hometown and she shows me the places that I used to know. We tell each other about when we were raped, but we use adjectives and proper nouns to skirt around the actual word. I tell her about the father I used to have, his pet hawk, his Fiat Spider convertible. She tells me about the cast she had around her arm for weeks after her friend’s brother pinned her to the mattress. Did you have nightmares? I ask her. Yeah, she says. Yeah, I say. Me too. We don’t feel bad. This is not uncommon here, and few of us have fathers anymore. She presses a canvas sneaker down onto the brake and pulls into a row of empty parking spots next to the ocean. Isn’t it weird that we’re from here? I say. Melissa was the real Homecoming Queen, but the girl who took home the crown shared her last name and some wires got crossed somewhere. She wore her band uniform out on the football field, and her hair in a French twist. Melissa spent her childhood catching lobsters to sell at her father’s deli. She dropped out of college during her senior year, and now she lives in an apartment above her older sister’s garage. It looks like the other houses in this town—overgrown lawns, dated plaques by the front doors, cars up on cinder blocks in the driveways. We walk along the seawall and down the jetty, and she tells me about scuba diving here when she was a kid. The rocks start out everywhere, she tells me, then they become sparser and sparser until everything drops off into sand. That’s what my life is like, she says. It started off grounded and then there were little clumps of foundation here and there, and then, way, way out, just nothing. After she says this, her eyes turn serious, then we look at each other and laugh. She picks up a periwinkle. We talk about something else. I stick the toe of my expensive boot into a tide pool and the water seeps through the sole onto my sock. This boot doesn’t belong here. We get back in the car, and Melissa drives me to the corner of houses where all the fathers died of heart attacks. One of them used to be my friend’s. On weekends in secondary school, we would sleep on her white sheets after parties out on the fire trails. We would hold each other and breathe warm, yeasty air into each other’s faces and touch each other’s ears. Her window faced east, and when the sun came up, our bellies were usually still full of beer. We would close our eyes and get that seasick feeling, then fall asleep and wake up sweaty, our skin 48

LINDSAY SPROUL NATIVITY

sticking together. Melissa points to that house and I begin listening again. And then that father died next, she says. Heart attack, sitting right there at the kitchen table. By then, I was already long gone and the girl was no longer my friend. A heart attack killed the father of another of my friends several years earlier. I was the only kid who met him, and it had only been once. He had driven us down to Cape Cod one afternoon and taken us out for fried fish sticks in tartar sauce, then to a store where there was a piano whose keys played all on their own when you fed it quarters. We all suspected him of having ties to the Rhode Island Mafia. Right when he died, my friend looked around, around the room, at the open window, thinking: He must still be, he must be nearby somewhere, he must still be somewhere in this very room. Then his skin went cold and his eyes were wide and fish-like, and the ambulance came. And we all got out of fifth period for the funeral. We walked proudly out the front door of the secondary school with our passes in our pockets, and stopped for egg sandwiches on the way to the funeral home. My fingers were greasy with melted American cheese, and I was glad to be missing an algebra test. Some people in my family had the chance to die of a heart attack, but some never made it that far. My great-grandmother was hit by a Mack truck, and Not-Quite-Uncle Roy shot himself in the head from a payphone booth in Florida. Sometimes I hope to grow old, and sometimes I don’t. Later on, sitting on the couch in my mother’s living room, Melissa tells me she thinks she would make a terrible mother. Yeah? Yeah, but I’d be a great dad, she says. I pull the quilt higher up on my thighs. Our heads are inches apart, and I wonder what it would be like to kiss her. I want to stick my finger in her dimple and press. She tells me that even as a child, she wanted to be a dad when she grew up. I wouldn’t know how, I say. After he left, our house was full of women. They fought over whose hair was clogged in the shower drain, and they chased me around the house with tickle fingers, singing the jingle from those Velveeta commercials. I learned dangly earrings, lip-liner, and smoking. I learned leaving men who hit you, finding your strength in that spot where the bruise blooms. I learned coming back to those men, too. Sometimes, a 49

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roommate would leave silently in the middle of the night, and you knew then that she’d become weak. The men never came inside. My mother didn’t allow them. The women were always coming and going. They were always treading water in some kind of Siberian nowhere, and they stayed until something became clear to them and they knew where to go next. Then there would be an empty room for you to sit down in the middle of. There, you were allowed to cry. The women took turns churning the coal stove. In winter, we sat around it and made our breathing into a pattern. We drew tribal lines on our faces with dampened coal chunks. At dark noon, we sang and chanted on the living-room rug and felt our heartbeats in our temples. In the morning, we avoided each other’s eyes, pretending we’d never done any of it. From them, I learned black coffee and sunglasses. I learned abortions and blood tests. I had only mothers, I tell Melissa. This house looks like a hotel now. The stove is gone, and the heat comes out of vents in the walls, from some unknown source of electricity. After living in New York, it seems too dark at night. When you close your eyes, you can hear the ocean. It comes into your room and reminds you that you are small. I close my eyes. I am allergic to lobster. Mothers, says Melissa. Mothers are good. We press our hands to our stomachs and stop talking. The yellowing wallpaper stares at me cheerlessly, but the guilt passes quickly. I am already planning to forget all of this. F

Nick Thran

Raining in Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling Darling

Beech wood Drunk tank Rosebush Bank light Front lawn Glass lamps Bathtub Car park Long drive Deerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes Floorboards Night sweat Warm bed

epiphany FALL/WINTER 2010-2011

Pleasure Boat To sit the lived-in house and breathe its fragrant air is to experience time in the garden of staying put. Here are the bookshelves. Here is the wicker chair which has practiced fidelity through minor affairs with visiting houseguests. Yes, almost illicit to sit the lived-in house. Breathing the musty air among the layered notes of cork boards, the cat-hair wig on the sofa, the computer monitor on sleep and the well-fed bookshelvesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the wicker chair sags flush and contented. Folks in photos stare at the sitter, a migratory species of insect. To sit the lived-in house and breathe its distinct air is to enliven the iris, snoop and browse, share an intimacy with the owners who have lived so long with the chattering bookshelves, their wicker chair, that they break back into their lives by riding the getaway car over the bare arms of the highway. What sweet kiss to sit the lived-in house and breathe its fragrant air. To pick from the bookshelves, lounge in the wicker chair.

WRITER’S PROCESS

Nick Thran “Raining in Darling” borrows its title from a song by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The song’s a slow burn, and includes some wonderful lyrics: “Darling, I can stay awake all night. And I will make mistakes alright, / because the body asks so much.” My prompt was to write a song after a piece of music, and what do you possibly say to a song that already says as well as sounds so much? React and identify, I guess. In this case, the idea was to try to lay down something bare and unadorned in a way that was responsive to, rather than sung along with, the song. The “Darlings” can be read vertically down the left-hand column, falling one on top of the other to the flat line on the ground. I think, as I write this, that I might have taken an unconscious cue from Canadian poet bp Nichol’s Landscape 1, which sets “. . . anunbrokenlineoftrees” over a line through the middle of the page. It’s one of the few concrete poems that appear in Canadian poetry anthologies. Landscapes are tricky things to translate into poems. So is music. Especially those landscapes and songs that remind you of so many foggy, heartbroken nights that you’re a blubbering, sentimental sap before you put the pen to the page. Keep it concrete, I thought. Keep it together. Read it left to right. Take the pause. Just list the sites and write the rain. See if the language will do something that Will Oldham isn’t already doing with his voice and his guitar.

Shelly King MORNING FOG

ou wince as the door closes and echoes in the empty hallway. He’s asleep inside, wrapped in threadbare sheets smelling of sweat and stale perfume. Your boots cough in the long hallway of the workingman’s Victorian. Should have left in your socks. Outside, the sharp morning air of the Upper Haight makes your skin feel hard and brittle, like you could crack it open with the tap of a spoon. The colors of the night, conjured through the bottom of beer bottles and the fairy dust of street lamps, are gone. Mornings hurt. You cross the street to the diner where the two of you ate after the concert. You ask a waitress wearing a hairnet and white rubber shoes for coffee to go. This is not the one who yawned through your order of pecan waffles at midnight. This woman smiles when you slide the dollar you found in the Laundromat dryer across the counter. She thinks she knows you. So does he. You lumber down the steps embedded in the hill to the street below and sit on the curb. He’ll be hurt. It was supposed to be your “get-back-together” date. Perhaps you’ll go back. Perhaps you’ll go home. Perhaps you’ll sit here and let the sun burn you off with the fog. Sweetness drifts over from a bakery next door. Your stomach lurches. A woman walks by and pulls an overloaded key chain from her backpack. She unlocks the rolling cage in front of the bakery and, as she lifts it up, you notice her belly breaking through the opening of her coat. She looks at you, her hand circling over the top of the child inside her. She smiles at you, a smile much like the woman in the diner, her eyes distant, somewhere years ago. You look away, back to your coffee, wishing you’d asked for sugar. A few minutes later, she walks up to you, a long white apron tenting out over her stomach. She hands you a small paper bag. “They’re a day old,” she says. “But still good.” You stand and reach into your empty pocket. It’s a gesture. “No charge,” she says.

Shelly King MORNING FOG

You look in the bag and see two bagels. The sun is turning the fog pink, and you see him at the top of the steps, in his jeans and bare feet, stretching to see farther than he can, looking for you. The bakery woman sees him, too. She shoos you up the steps, sending you back to him. You call out. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I brought you breakfast.â&#x20AC;? F

Jeffrey M. Baker

BY MOURNING a moon of one syllable one syllable wanting more, to be a fig or a detour to be a bridge between two evenings as a glass of water almost tips over as the brushstrokes of voice wash ashore something like, “unspoken dreams never age” if only you’d talk in your sleep, transcribe the dusk as an absinth, a witness in this drift, this remembered, this casualty still wet, the body unbodied

neverlanding falls slow through the unpronounced dark it has darkened, a failure called joy of flows and arcs in dim semblances

MOTH (LANDSCAPE) we took apart the chimeras into vertigo and hoops this shade of blue is not a metaphor for once, but a public solitude, a hyacinth fragments of dreams exhale in the margins nothingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reflected for long in this sea waves remake themselves in our sleep

GHOSTLIGHT IS WOVEN cathedralled space which pretends to know the way, a field, and graysleeping echo black, blacker, the hushed arc is not yet an owl but the suspended breath which brought it near desire lasts a second longer than its life, the taste of that stare and star of that surrendered sea distills on your sleep there must be air where what I know of you curls between a memory and objects without memory looming and moonblind

PORTRAIT and this, this is composed (written) to frame, to locate

that which cannot be (

that that is between the flight of a bird and a bird that flies between these braids of smoke and the snow on your tongue between is for and breathed between in between and the blue that is green and the greenblue night that is your body that answers that is

)

Kirk Stirling

The Return of the Hostess Pajama

lder people saw them in huge theatres, in the erotic, breathing dark. I met them in our small living room—dropping homework, chores, even the books I loved to deepen the acquaintance. On our black-and-white Zenith TV screen, ashen, shrunk to pygmies, were these movie actors. My mother looked like one. Or so claimed the widower who operated the village grocery store. “John Connolly says I’m the spit of Celeste Holm,” she told me. When I saw Celeste Holm in Come to the Stable, playing a French nun with a smashing tennis serve, my mother, “the spit” of this divinity, was vacuuming ten feet away. I’d been ennobled. Did anyone else in this awful town have a mother who looked like a movie actress? I defied you or John Connolly to name one. F

My parents didn’t go to the movies. We lived in a village in northern New York State, fifteen miles from the nearest theater. On ceremonial occasions we were taken to Disney pictures. These movies weren’t much fun for me. Everybody remembers the trauma of Bambi; I remember more clearly the dreariness of other winter matinées: nervous Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller, grumpy Patrick McGoohan in The Three Lives of Thomasina, pasty Fred MacMurray and Vera Miles in Follow Me, Boys!; the chattering animals in The Sword in the Stone. The only Disney feature I was crazy about was an aberration. I saw 101 Dalmatians in 1961, the year it opened, at the Schine Theater in Massena, New York, and didn’t shut up about it for weeks. I imitated Cruella DeVil—a pencil standing in for the cigarette holder—until my father began to mutter that I “wasn’t right.” It never occurred to him to blame Disney for initiating me into the mysteries of camp at the age of seven. My mother, meanwhile, had no idea that I was being seduced by movies on television. The ones I loved most were shown at her busiest 62

KIRK STIRLING THE RETURN OF THE HOSTESS PAJAMA

times of day. She was shaking a dust mop or doing laundry while I sat in front of the Zenith too absorbed to blink or breathe, in what can only be called a state of arousal. I remember the afternoon I watched The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex: a costume drama with this tempestuous person, this Bette Davis, with her oval, dead-white egg for a face, her mad eyes, her rasping bark and murderous swagger. Near the end the camera tracked back and back again in a vast Tudor hall as tiny Bette cried to the doomed and gorgeous Errol Flynn: “Take my throne! Take England!” I was mouthing this line as I staggered into our knotty-pine kitchen. I had to tell someone about seeing Bette Davis in our living room. My mother was there. “Not much for looks, but a great actress,” she said, with her head in a cupboard. That was the day I learned that looks have little to do with talent. What I refused to learn was that Bette Davis was ugly. Such creatures were surely beyond beauty or ugliness. “Take my throne! Take England!” I mouthed in bed that night, and felt cold on the back of my neck. F

On TV were old movies, oldish TV shows, new TV shows, and live things like the news (Kennedy assassination, rocket launches, Hugh Downs and a chimpanzee on “Today”). I was allowed to watch till eight in the evening on weeknights; on weekends until nine or ten o’clock. The Zenith was on while my mother cleaned, cooked, mowed the lawn, clipped the hedge, watered the horse and the pony, bathed the dog, weeded the flowerbeds, hung new curtains, ironed the sheets, painted the trim on the garage door—did any chore to maintain a distance from my tired, irate father. He fell asleep in a reclining chair while the shows went on at night. I remember being scooted up to bed one night in the middle of “Bonanza.” I was nine or ten. Pernell Roberts was taking a bath in a tin tub. Over my dawdling shoulder I glimpsed his spoiled Byronic face and the fur on his chest, heard his deep, hammy stage-trained voice, and realized: That’s a beautiful man. (Not, of course, as beautiful as Errol Flynn. I was already a snob about television actors.) Drifting off to sleep, I could hear gunfire, hooves, rancher voices, my father’s sharp snore. If I lay awake long enough I would hear my mother telling my father in a cold voice to wake up and go to bed. F

THE BIRDS is coming! We were on another Disney outing, but before the talking critters we saw a trailer that made me feel I’d touched 63

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a live electric fence. “Please can’t we see this one? Please?” I nagged my mother all the way home. “Not on your life,” she said, and meant it. I’d learned earlier that there were movies on television and Disney pictures. Now I knew that there were thrills forever denied “children not accompanied by an adult.” My mother did not sneak off to see The Birds without me. She didn’t even want to go! How, I wondered, could she deny herself that kind of pleasure? It took me years to learn that pleasure was something my mother and I would never define in the same way. And I’m saddest about my childhood when I talk to friends whose moviegoing parents took them to see everything. F

“She was so beautiful in the death scene!” our babysitter said breathlessly. She was a confiding, enthusiastic sort of girl who’d saved nickels and dimes to pay for college. Not the tough type of caretaker we got sometimes—the girls who talked while back-combing, eyes narrowed against drifting Marlboro smoke. “Tell me!” I begged. She’d seen Cleopatra on some city trip (could it have been to New York?), and her eyes still seemed full of it. “She was all gold. A gold dress, and gold—or was it blue?—on her eyelids. I never saw her look so beautiful. And did you know that when they were making that movie she almost died?” (One of the comforts of living into the early twenty-first century and real middle age is knowing that Elizabeth Taylor is still “almost” dying, again and again; and “as beautiful,” my mother likes to say now, “as ever.” They are exact contemporaries.) F

Cleopatra was dirty. “Boring, too,” my mother reported, as if that settled it. This was the kind of thing she found satisfying to say, and I can now understand why. She wanted to indicate that she’d been to the rodeo. But my mother hadn’t been to the rodeo in any way that I could see. And she was a liar. In the early sixties, dirty things were interesting, and I knew as well as she did that they were everywhere. You could buy Henry Miller paperbacks at the drugstore. Movies were full of sex and cursing. Only Disney pictures and some Westerns (which I hated) were still safe. I can see why my mother faked boredom: if you had a child like me, you knew with absolute certainty that just talking about the new movies was likely to spread infection. 64

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“Tell again about the cleavage!” I would beg the college-going babysitter, who had just seen Tom Jones on a date. Later, when my mother said something sour about my interests, I priggishly informed her that the film was based on “classic English literature.” How could that be “dirty”? F

A bookworm, I had a wunderkind reputation because I’d checked War and Peace out of the library in the fourth grade. But I didn’t always read what I brought home. Tolstoy was a lot of work when you could get the same thrills from trashy costume romances by someone named Harnett T. Kane (he specialized in New Orleans and adventuresses). I read books as I watched movies—to furnish an unbelievably gaudy fantasy life. I found out later in the nineteen-sixties that movies were “good” and “bad”—and that there were people called film critics who told you which was which. Before that, movies were just what the television set beamed into my life. They were like the light that reliably poured through parchment shades when I switched on the lamps in our living room. F

I’ve forgotten the Star Lite Drive-In. In the summer, cheaply printed flyers turned up in our R.F.D. mailbox. The orgy they promised was MOVIES ALL NIGHT—movies my mother really didn’t want her kids to see. I associated drive-in movies with the family next door. The DeShanes were from Michigan, and just a little funky for our street. They drove a black DeSoto. Their chihuahua was named Missy. Father Floyd had a John Hodiak mustache and a bad-tempered way of chanting “Jee-zuss CHRIST!” He drove a school bus to cover their mortgage, and his wife, Leona, put on a hairnet a couple of days a week and served in the school cafeteria. It was hardly surprising that these people, who my mother pityingly said were “bad with money,” went to “that drive-in” all the time. She could already tell that their kids weren’t going to amount to much. The oldest son spent all his time tending his thinning ducktail; their oldest girl was skin and bone, with an equine, stupid, tragic face and a long teased blue-black pageboy that flipped at the ends, as if to cheer the rest of her up. My brother was friends with the completely forgettable younger son—which is how we were asked along one night and permitted to accept the invitation. F 65

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You can imagine the impact of Ann-Margret, Ann-Margret on a drive-in screen, Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie on the boy I was. She sang the title tune against a dark backdrop in a tight orange dress. The dress and her skin seemed to pulse as her tough little voice came through the window speaker. Incredible that my hosts could sit calmly munching pizza in their frumpy old car while something this pagan, violent and gorgeous was going on. Next up that night was Kirk Douglas in Ulysses. I don’t have to tell you what that was like, since I’ve already mentioned Pernell. F

About this town without a movie theater: it belonged in a movie. Never more than a village, it had been a milk-train stop in upper St. Lawrence County until the late fifties, when the Seaway opened and General Motors and Reynolds and Alcoa built plants twenty miles away. Victorian frame houses still lined the main street, which ran parallel to a shallow stretch of the St. Regis River. When I see movies like The Magnificent Ambersons and Meet Me in St. Louis and On Dangerous Ground and All I Desire, I’m taken back there. Despite new people and new jobs like my father’s at General Motors, the town remained Victorian; and when I see spoiled Tim Holt flog his horse, or estranged Barbara Stanwyck listening at a screen door, or embittered Agnes Moorehead in that big dark kitchen serving shortcake while it thunders, I’m in Winthrop, New York, in 1965 or so. Along the main street, from the ugly sandstone Catholic Church to the IGA at Connolly’s Corners, the branches of maple trees nearly meet overhead. Unpaved until the Second World War, Main Street is now U.S. Route 11, and there’s heavier northbound traffic on the way to the bridge at the Canadian border. We didn’t live in a Victorian house. My young parents were considered rather advanced because they lived in a split level, drove a Corvair, and eventually got a divorce. But “upstate,” as they say in Manhattan, remained a nineteenth-century place far into the twentieth. As recently as 1944, my mother, raised in Livingston County, had driven a buggy five miles from her father’s farm to her uncle’s place to save the gasoline. As a child I could easily find the album with the Kodak Brownie snapshot of her: twelve years old in a dime-store felt sombrero, sitting on the hard buckboard seat behind a big bay gelding with the reins wrapped around her wrists. A child of the space age, I was also used to living in the past. Old movies—the ones old enough to be shown on TV—were part of that. F 66

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Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948): the director, Max Ophüls, once said: “I adore the past.” I adored his movie when it turned up one rainy Sunday afternoon on Channel 9 from Montreal. It’s an anecdote: Joan Fontaine is seduced, made pregnant and forgotten by Louis Jourdain in Habsburg Vienna; he finds out years later what has happened when she writes to him. What I’ve remembered all my life is the heroine climbing stairs endlessly. And I’ve never since seen anything more beautiful than that woman on those stairs. When my father hit me on another rainy afternoon, I walked slowly up the four or five steps to my bedroom, quite consciously playing that Unknown Woman. Movies often helped me in that way. F

My father took me to a movie once. My parents had divorced, I was sixteen, and at a matinée of True Grit he fell asleep like a bored child. What amazes me now is how very young my parents were: when I was ten, my mother was just thirty, and my father was thirty-three. When he was married to my mother, my father played golf, played baseball, bowled, joined the Masons, spent hours at the American Legion Hall (he’d been a pilot in Korea). He came home only when he was worn out and half-drunk, to catch up on his sleep. He had his recliner, and he could sleep through anything except a baseball game on television. While he watched baseball on Saturday afternoons with my brother, I sat at my end of the sofa and read a book. I never watched movies on television with my father. I had my reasons. He once came downstairs hung over, looked owlishly at Maureen O’Hara’s creamy bosom and groaned: “Jesus, look at those!” I sniffed, offended for her. F

Some movies on television were too much for me. Sometimes, when my mother was too distracted to insist on bedtime, I saw horror pictures. Not darling silly old werewolf-and-vampire romances, but gray, flat, paranoid nineteen-fifties stuff about infiltration and annihilation. In one—I can’t tell you which—a woman in a sundress is lying on a chaise longue on some suburban lawn. A man in a polo shirt—a big, beefy guy whose whole career must have run several notches below Richard Egan’s—kisses her hungrily while she screams and struggles. This isn’t her husband or her boyfriend, it’s some thing, using a human body to have her. The scene reminded me too much of the dream I sometimes had about my parents. 67

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They took off rubber parent masks to reveal something infinitely scarier. F

In the early to middle sixties, the premium movies-on-television experience occurred in prime time on the networks, usually on Saturday night. I didn’t see many and didn’t much want to. It’s hard, now, to explain how dreary it was to look at a fifties picture in 1963. Blake Edwards had updated the format for glossy entertainment; I didn’t want to see anything older than Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Experiment in Terror. There were a couple I couldn’t ignore, though: movies with Utrilloclotted living rooms, big cars driven drunk, crazily exaggerated light and shadow, mirrors, hysteria, a kind of poisoned luxury. Movies made by Truffaut’s “villain,” Douglas Sirk, with names like Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and All That Heaven Allows. Douglas Sirk movies made me think about Vivian and Mack McElwaine. They were a rather glossy couple who lived across the street, and I sometimes pretended to belong to them. I could see their house from my bedroom window. It was smallish and architect-built—something unheard of in our town. (I can see it now whenever I watch A Summer Place and hear Dorothy Maguire purr to Sandra Dee: “Frank Lloyd Wright built our house.” ) “Viv-and-Mack” were childless, belonged to a book club, had pastel appliances and Mexican pottery and canvas butterfly chairs and hardwood floors glossy with wax. Raven-haired Viv was a bit butch, with a blaze of white to the right of her widow’s peak; her lipstick was matte and orange. Mack was square-jawed and taciturn, wore Pendleton shirts most of the year, and smoked a pipe. When I imagined myself their adopted son, I saw us driving their red Rambler station wagon slowly out of Sirk’s CinemaScope frame: the car pulling away, the camera craning back and up, the façade of the perfect house keeping all our secrets: The End. It was another staple of Sirkian melodrama, the car wreck, that enabled my fantasy self to annihilate my parents and cross the street. There would be no more long, bitter, quiet conversations on the other side of my bedroom wall. Instead, Vivian and Mack, casually elegant, rightfully house-proud and, unlike my late father, careful with their booze, would be packing me off to a good prep school in New England. And there, in CinemaScope once more, Dean Stockwell and I would take long walks through drifts of autumn leaves and read Keats to each other.

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In 1964, there was a shooting next door—a murder. These neighbors, the Harveys, had been unhappily married for many years. She lived on cigarettes and coffee and could sometimes be seen in their yard in her nightgown. She shot her mild fat husband from their bedroom window while he stood at his workbench in the garage. It happened around eight in the evening. My brother was doing homework at the dining-room table and I was in the living room watching Richard Burton and Claire Bloom in Alexander the Great. My mother heard the shot and ran over. Mrs. Harvey called the sheriff herself. Nobody liked her, and everybody was surprised when she turned out to be as sick as she’d always said she was and died of cancer before she could be tried. My mother wondered how a woman in such poor health could calmly heft a .30-06 and blow her husband’s head off at a distance of fifteen feet on what was just another night of the week. The occasion belonged to film noir, of course—a genre with which I was unfamiliar until I went to college. As time went by, the empty murder house next door began to look like a newsprint wire photo as the paint faded and the lawn grew shaggy. The following summer, Viv McElwaine’s mother and father, bored by retirement in Scottsdale, drove east in their air-conditioned Chrysler Imperial and bought the property for nothing. F

In 1965, I reached puberty, my parents separated, my mother pretended to quit smoking, a fat clergyman put his nose into our business, and my father moved into our house again, sleeping in what had been our playroom off the garage. All this to-ing and fro-ing was embarrassing, but it also made me feel a little glamorous—wasn’t there something movie-ish about it? Now that the Harveys were dead, no one else on the street had “a troubled marriage.” That year the Greek chorus assembling in all the driveways seemed to talk of nothing but my mother, my father, my brother and me. And it all seemed up-to-date, somehow: of a piece with our split-level house and our two cars (my father now drove a station wagon, too), and our new fruitwood console TV. What I hated about that time was my father watching television with us. He was a man well-liked in bars and on golf courses and sometimes in the back seats of cars driven by his friends’ bored wives. But he was not a success at home. One of the things he hated most was intimacy. (So did my mother. How do such people manage to meet?) For this “trial period,” my brother, my father and I sat in front of the new 69

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Zenith (or was it a Motorola now?), watching—what? It must have been so painful that I’ve forgotten. One of the worst moments with my father came when he asked me to tell him about a book I’d read. Sharing that kind of thing with him seemed pointless. Why? He was extremely intelligent but easily bored, and touchy about his lack of education. I can now understand how bleak those evenings must have been for him. My mother never sat down with us, unless with her checkbook to pay bills. I remember my father calling down the cellar stairs to her at nine o’clock one night. She wasprobably painting the frames of storm windows. By this time, he’d found a book to read. It was by some doctor and contained what he believed to be a true description of their trouble. She needed to read the book, too, he said. I’m sure he never finished it himself. The bold white letters on the black dust-jacket spelled “FRIGIDITY.” F

Two weeks before Christmas 1965, my father, who had agreed to live “out” again, drove into our garage with all his clothes on hangers in the back seat. We hadn’t invited him and decamped the same night, running eventually—after a couple of days in a hotel under a false name my mother got from our taxi driver—to my grandparents’ downstate. My mother hated living with them. After two months in the dead of winter in their half of a draughty farmhouse, she found us a cheap apartment in town and took a clerking job at W.T. Grant & Co. It was a bad time for her: no money, no training, two nervous boys. Under cover of this somewhat chaotic situation, I managed to discover sex—with myself and with an older boy who looked, I realized later, like a very young Montgomery Clift. Other things changed. In 1966, we no longer went to Disney pictures and we didn’t own a television set. Instead, I read till my eyes burned, haunting the public library three blocks from our apartment. I found Patrick Dennis’s Little Me there and was bewildered. Was this a rude book about a real movie star? All I knew for sure was that there were some maddeningly attractive, nearly naked men in it. (When you’re twelve, precocity carries you just so far.) Sixteen years later, reading a gay skin magazine, I discovered that the man impersonating Letch Feeley in Little Me was now appearing as a “real” leather extra in Cruising. Irony can take you on some fairly long trips. F

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Admiring movie stars, Belle Poitrine included, is one thing; loving “cinema” is another. My fantasy life would only grow gaudier, my taste for imitations of life more jaded, but my addiction was made somewhat respectable by people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. I discovered that my disreputable pleasures had been systematized and encoded by people who wrote; that movies and the people who made them were ranked; and that there were tricky passages in the aesthetics of film criticism that made it miraculously all right to love some movies as much as I did. (“Time, if nothing else,” intoned Andrew Sarris, “will vindicate Sirk.”) F

In 1966, my mother was 34 and looked 28. She got a Mexican divorce (my father coughed up the pittance for it), bleached her hair almost white, tanned assiduously, wore black sheaths and looked, if not as wholesome as Celeste Holm in Come to the Stable, at least as glamorous as Lola Albright in Joy House. The problem was what she chose to do with all her glamour. She packed it up in a secondhand pinky-beige 1962 Plymouth Savoy, along with my brother and me, and hauled the whole kit back up north to that movie-set town without a movie theater. What possessed her? Didn’t she know that women like her were supposed to move to Southern California and get a clerical job in The Film Industry? She did it to spite my father. He was still living there in our newish house, with our newish car and our console television set. She was going to show him what he’d lost. What fascinates me is how she came to act all this out. She’d never watched movies with me, but hers was the behavior of someone who’s “seen too many bad movies.” Many years later, I can tell you that the behavior in bad movies is fairly close to most of the behavior in real life. F

We lived in that apartment house for three years, and it was a time when everything seemed to be happening elsewhere. My mother got a job with a kind, garrulous Jewish dentist who took an interest in me and sent The New York Times and old issues of Time and Newsweek from his waiting room. I read about hippies and rock groups and Vietnam and The Homosexual in America—and movies. Meanwhile, down at the IGA, my mother looked over some of the other things John Connolly sold and chose us another black-and-white Zenith—a portable. (I think she paid it off with three dollars a week. 71

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John Connolly was a nice man.) In the summers, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, there were at least two movies every day from my favorite TV station in Ottawa: at noon, at four, and on weekends at eight and eleven. Because it was hot in the small apartment, I took the portable out on the porch. Anyone who passed and looked hard enough would see a thin boy in warped horn rims in a creaking wicker chair, sometimes fondling himself or smoking furtively, with eyes for nothing but what came through that little screen. My mother didn’t like it, but what could she do? She was at work all day. Wasn’t I safer at home, not mixed up with other boys who got into trouble—boys like my brother, boys like my father? I had a few friends at school, but it was hard to spend much time with them. They didn’t know or feel enough. They lacked the intensity of black-and-white people talking, of light and shadow and movement and music. Outside, the breeze lifted maple leaves to show their white undersides, grass in the vacant lot next door turned to hay, the ancient pony tethered there slept standing, cars sped through Winthrop on the way to Ontario and Quebec, and I lit another stolen cigarette (my mother’s) and watched another movie. It was around this time that Pauline Kael wrote about the rubble of old movies on TV. You could visit the thirties, the forties, the fifties, and the early sixties in a single day; see the great stars age or regress to near infancy with one turn of the dial. Aladdin’s Cave revealed its treasures randomly, carelessly. All they cost was a bored boy’s time, and I had plenty. At the end of those summers, I was the palest kid in town. Because we were so near the Canadian border and just north of the Adirondacks, the signals our set picked up were from Montreal and Ottawa. This skewed my sense of movies and TV for a long time. American shows were broadcast on a Canadian schedule; Canadian TV-station film libraries were full of British product—Ealing comedies and Gainsborough romances and Pinewood melodramas. (The Blue Peter starred Kieron Moore, his black curls greased to catch the light, his buttocks falling out of belted wool swim trunks. The sight left me so dreamy and bereft that I spent a month trying to draw him from memory on lined notebook paper. My mother found the drawings and there was trouble.) I’m the only American I know who became a fan of Joyce Grenfell’s in junior high because I’d seen all the St. Trinian’s comedies one summer; I’m also the only one I know who at fourteen fantasized, in every carnal detail, a passionate affair with Guy Madison after seeing him play a young soldier for two minutes in Since You Went Away. As my mother pointed out with justifiable exasperation, waving away a pall of cigarette smoke as she walked by, I seemed to get into plenty of trouble without ever leaving the house. 72

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Along with my growing collection of erotic images and passionate narratives, there was—crude, but also slowly growing—a sense of what worked, what reverberated, even when cut to pieces for a tiny screen and spattered with ads for margarine and cat food and secondhand cars. There were movies with what I’d learned from Henry James to call “the sacred terror.” F

Caught, 1949, Max Ophüls: Another hot afternoon and the Zenith is planted on a treadle sewing machine in the angle of the porch. The porch is glassed and shaded by maples, so there are green boughs and reflections of green boughs everywhere, and a spiral of cigarette smoke rising and a wicker chair creaking as I lean forward to watch this extraordinary movie about fantasy and lying and extreme, toxic wealth. In the movie, it’s three in the morning. The very young Barbara Bel Geddes, harnessed in jewels,hysterical with pills and sleeplessness, writhes on a couch. Slimy Curt Bois plays Viennese waltzes while they wait for her psychotic husband to come “home.” Later in the movie, I can see twice—once in the window glass, once on the screen—Robert Ryan’s collapse under his billionaire’s pinball machine, his screams for medicine, his pregnant wife wandering up the stairs and leaving him (more Ophüls stair-poetry) to die. When my mother comes home from work that evening, she spends a long time on the phone with her sister. The married man she’s seeing isn’t working out. I think of him taking my mother to Saratoga during Race Week in a maroon Ford that smells of horses. I think of Barbara Bel Geddes, a penniless shopgirl before her maniac turns up, flipping through Vogue in her slip and saying in her slightly husky voice: “But mink is so everyday!” F

This Angry Age, 1958, René Clément: It’s late, eleven-thirty on a Friday, and my mother is in no mood to let me sit peering through electronic snow at an Ottawa broadcast of some movie about decaying French colonials in Southeast Asia. (I’ve led her to believe that we might be going to watch a Susan Hayward biopic of the one-legged soprano, Jane Froman. My mother cherishes the memory of seeing With a Song in My Heart on her high-school senior trip to Washington, D.C., in 1952.) It’s now too cold to watch TV on the porch. My mother’s bed in 73

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this three-room apartment is the unbelievably hard living-room couch, which has a high back and arms like the seat in a European railway carriage. I’m going to be watching TV while she tries to fall asleep five feet away. This Angry Age is from The Sea Wall, by Marguerite Duras. Jo Van Fleet plays the rice-planting matriarch whose fields are destroyed by the sea; her children, too obsessed by fantasies of sex and escape from the plantation’s drudgery to care, are played by Anthony Perkins and Silvana Mangano. They look like beautiful deer—so well matched that the director frequently frames their profiles like those of an imperial couple on an ancient coin. I’ve never seen that movie again and suspect it isn’t very good. But I’ve never forgotten the feeling it gave me. What enchanted me, in that snowy transmission from Ottawa, was its languor: the humid, sexy hopelessness of it, the drift of sampans on the river, Mangano’s bored mask under a vast straw hat, Perkins making up to Alida Valli—old enough to be his mother—in a squalid movie house. Despite the English dialogue, it was the first really foreign film I’d ever seen. And something about that brother and sister and their erotic boredom must have made me think about myself. I filled my own days with sexual daydreams. On that dead-of-winter night I was counting the days till school was out, when I could read and smoke and masturbate and watch television unsupervised until I crawled into bed and slept. My mother, who hadn’t been able to sleep through the movie, also failed to get over my desire to watch the whole thing. “What was so good about that?” she asked the next day. She looked hungover from lack of sleep. “The characters’ despair,” I said loftily. She gave a short laugh, put on her coat and left for the Laundromat. F

I’d begun to be ashamed of the junk I read. A romantic snob who adored the past, I switched to Edith Wharton and Henry James, the popular histories of Nancy Mitford, and Ivy Compton-Burnett because her novels, besides revealing homosexuality, incest, fraud, blackmail, parental tyranny and murder, unfailingly unfolded in country houses before 1910. There was a big public library in Massena, new-built with L.B.J. money. My uncomplaining mother drove me to change my books there every other week. Lying on my plaid bedspread reading for days on end was “better” for me than watching television, she no doubt thought. But those books were also essential generators of images. One of my favorite writers discovered in that period of reading was asked at a dinner table in Italy if she thought in words. “Certainly not,” said 74

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Elizabeth Bowen: “one thinks in images and the language found for them is nothing more than a translation.” Another memory: I’m sitting on a flat rock on the riverbank behind the house we live in (I read outdoors because I think no one can see me smoking). I’m pushing cautiously through the short chapters of James’s The Awkward Age. The endless pussyfooting dialogue maddens me, but I’m transfixed by the villain, Mrs Brookenham. She’s terribly funny and despises everyone for being less intelligent than she is. She is (or so I think then) beautifully heartless. And as I read the book, I’m making it into a movie. I have no idea how this is done technically, but I know ways to make myself and other people see the story. The book’s brittle talk needs to be spoken in the Georgian Revival drawing-rooms of 1899. We need to see those rooms in the harshness of “the new electric light.” We need to see women self-consciously smoking cigarettes at garden parties. We need to see Mrs. Brook sinking into a deep chair after catching her son stealing money from an ostentatious Louis XV desk. And at the end, when Nanda may be sold to her mother’s lover, we need a shot of Mrs. Brook twitching the back of the dress her daughter has just worn to the British Museum. It is always going to be about seeing, for me. F

My father finally sold the house on the other side of town and moved away. He’d got a transfer to a G.M. plant in St. Louis, where a big munitions contract at the height of the Vietnam War was giving him the chance to make a lot of money. He now lived in an expensive, “swinging” apartment complex out there; he drove a sporty car again; he’d even bought a four-seater Cessna. That plane had a lot to do with my continuing cinematic education. In the summer of 1969, he came East to claim my brother and me and flew us back, through terrific Midwestern thunderstorms, to a town that never seemed real to me. It was hot and flat; that famous Gateway Arch took people to its apex in little capsules for a dull view of the river and the plains. The place my father chose to live in was no more connected to what I thought of as “the city” than my own home town: a clump of flat-topped beige brick buildings on a highway, where you parked your car under the kitchen window and walked through stifling heat to a swimming pool inside a chain-link fence. I don’t remember many trees. The air conditioning was never, ever off. That summer was, perhaps, my father’s idea of atonement for all the wretched years we’d lived together. We were going to be bachelors, not father and sons. The name of that “complex” could well have been Liberty Hall. 75

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Business was brisk because of the war. My father worked around the clock. Shift blurred into shift; he came home to sleep. His goodlooking blond roommate had been discharged from the Army after being wounded (“shot in the ass,” he deadpanned) in Vietnam. Like my father, he worked long hours in the plant to support his swingin’ life. He had a boat, not a plane, and soon drove off with it hooked to his bumper, locking his room so my brother and I couldn’t study the collage of Playboy centerfolds stapled edge-to-edge over all four walls and the ceiling. My father gave up his room to my brother and me and slept on the black vinyl couch. When we came back, my mother said tightly, “So how much of St. Louis did he show you? I mean, aside from his swimming pool?” F

I didn’t care about seeing St. Louis. When we took trips in the car they were to the zoo, to the Gateway Arch, to a Cardinals game, to Gaslight Square: the boredom was so intense I thought I’d faint. I wanted to stay in the apartment. While my father worked, I could be alone there in a way that was much headier than being alone had ever been before. (My brother was always in the pool; this was the summer he taught himself to swim.) For eight, ten, twelve hours there was no adult interference in what I liked to think was my adult life. I made coffee, operated a dishwasher, drank beer in the early afternoon and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day (my father didn’t like this, but was reluctant to do anything so unswinging as interfere). I had access to those bottles in the kitchen cabinet: Taylor sherry, Hiram Walker schnapps, J&B, Smirnoff, every tool in my father’s rather limited seduction kit. There were women around—heavy-bottomed types with hair just as rococo as the hair I’d seen on “Hee-Haw.” My father treated them like domestics. They lent us their vacuum cleaners or took home my father’s laundry; they tended to be obsessed with Chappaquiddick. Some evenings I tried to impress them with my sophistication and charm—a sixteenyear-old boy with a tumbler of Taylor sherry on the rocks—while my father looked bleakly on from his Danish couch. The women embarrassed him, I embarrassed him, the summer was turning out to be a lot less fun than he he’d thought—even if it had been worth it to get us away from my mother. Late in our stay he took us to the plant where he was a foreman. I saw a couple of older black men taking care to suck up to him while they were polishing a mortar shell, and I enjoyed a feeling of righteous disgust. (I was passionately against the war in a 76

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vague, I-don’t-want-to-fight-in-it way. And quick to note that my father was the kind of racist who is always finding blacks to love him.) When I raged about Vietnam, my father pointed out that the war was paying the wages that allowed him to live so well. Booze and a plane for him, grudged child support for us, and nothing for my mother—who had decided after twelve long years that living well with my father could never be living at all. F

In St. Louis in 1969, there was a movie on television almost any hour of the day or night. I saw nearly all of them. More than the gold wall-to-wall carpet and the motel furniture and my father’s bored or sleeping face, more than the beautiful dark boy who lived with his widowed father and seemed never anywhere but next to the swimming pool in tight striped trunks, more than the fights with my brother and the affected letters I wrote home and the tornado warnings and evil heat, I remember those nights full of movies. My brother, worn out by his swimming, went to sleep early. I would pull the TV on its cart to the foot of the wide bed, plump my stale pillows, plant a huge ashtray on the nightstand, fill a gas-station tumbler full of sherry and soda and ice; and smoking and drinking in the freezing dark would see, in one insomniac stretch, Poppy, with W.C. Fields and Rochelle Hudson as father and daughter; Kansas City Confidential, with John Payne in another swimming pool; Hot Blood with Cornel Wilde and Jane Russell as singing gypsies in Los Angeles; Dragonwyck with Vincent Price, Gene Tierney and a lot of mahogany bedsteads; Unholy Wife, with Diana Dors sulkily married to Rod Steiger and a California vineyard. And on another night: Hilda Crane, with Jean Simmons giving Evelyn Varden a heart attack; People Will Talk, with Cary Grant talking furiously to a skeleton; The House on Telegraph Hill, with refugee Valentina Cortese pretending to be somebody else; The Eddie Duchin Story, starring Tyrone Power, Kim Novak and Central Park; and No Room for the Groom, with Piper Laurie, Tony Curtis, a kitchenful of character actors, and a refrigerator with a turret. By this time I had a copy of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema, and the little paperback was as well-thumbed as any old phone book. I sat tailor fashion on my father’s bed night after night, full of sherry and images (some of them pretty lurid on my father’s color set), and came gradually to know that every day of my life was going to be spent seeing, looking forward to seeing, remembering seeing, and dreaming about seeing movies.

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Andrew Sarris had told me about Douglas Sirk and a lot of the other people whose names appeared on that St. Louis TV screen. These were names I revered on faith, even as I puzzled over the “greatness” not apparent to me in No Room for the Groom. The times I come closest to revering—maybe loving—my father are when I think of the summer he inadvertently gave me, the summer I started two addictions and discovered what passion was all about. F

My father at thirty-six was tall, bald with a gray fringe, well-built, graceful (he still sometimes played ball and had been a drummer), attractive to most women, with a firm sensual mouth like a Roman bust’s and a broken nose. A couple of times after dinner we changed into swim trunks in his bedroom before having drinks by the pool with the fat widower and his beautiful son. I remember being aroused by the sight of him and then thinking, No, that’s not what you feel about him at all. Almost any attractive undressing man would do. I used to look forward to seeing them on television. By the pool I remember telling the boy (his name was Robbie, just like the dreamboat on “My Three Sons”): “I saw a movie last night with somebody who looks like you.” “Who was it? “Elizabeth Taylor in A Date with Judy.” The boy cried, “What do you mean?” (He had a light, drawling, rather Taylor-ish voice.) “Do you mean that I look like a girl?” My embarrassed brother hissed: “Why don’t you shut up? You’re drunk!” I ignored him and said to Robbie, “Your eyes are like hers. And you have the same— ” I was cut off by the sound of a splash as my father did a lazy flip into the pool and swam to our end. When he came over for his towel, Robbie smiled at him. Another night Robbie said, “I really like your dad.” We were listening to Judy Collins sing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” and I was trying to get him drunk on schnapps. That’s when I understood that Robbie was probably just as queer as I was, but not necessarily for me. F

By the time I graduated from high school, my father had moved East again and married a divorced French Canadian nurse who drank as much as he did. They settled in the town with the movie theater, fifteen miles away. My brother and I spent some weekends with them. They liked to take us to her family’s cabin in the Adirondacks, a place 78

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with gaslight and a privy and no TV. They drank there, usually sitting up late enough to have a fight. I remember the sound of her spilled drinks, ice cubes skittering over linoleum that was cold even in the middle of the summer, and the sound of her dry little sobs that sounded like coughing. (My mother was not a weepy woman, so it was strange for me to hear a woman cry outside a movie.) I also remember sitting in a hunters’ bar on the way home, drinking a beer and smoking one of my stepmother’s Winstons, and asking her what she thought of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children—recently reprinted as a “lost classic” and discovered in the cabin on a shelf of mildewed thrillers. It was the closest we ever got to “a talk.” “Aren’t families horrible?” I said, thinking of Stead’s Pollitts. “Some,” my stepmother allowed. She was tiny and dark, like Henny Pollitt, and her own family called her Merle, which, she told me, meant “blackbird.” She had a cousin involved somehow in the New York theater and spoke sometimes of visiting him down there. She owned the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle; I was fairly sure that unlike my mother, Merle had been to the rodeo lots of times. She made her visits sound like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a movie that had become my shorthand for “New York”: townhouses, cocktails, venery, terrifying women in Dracula capes who talked in bass voices as they wrote checks for sleeping with George Peppard. I was surprised, really, that Merle had been willing to marry someone as crude as my father. Was it the companionship of booze, or the sex they were having, or the fact that she had a young son of her own and needed a home for him? I was too young to be any kinder or smarter than that. The last time I saw her, I was in college. It was the day after Christmas at two in the afternoon. She was holding a cold can of beer to her temple and looked like Ruth Roman in Love Has Many Faces— bloated, much older, her hair dyed an implausible brown. My father and I began an argument about money and she went back into the master bedroom with her beer and closed the door. Poor Merle. For a while she’d been a sort of movie for me: the woman who, after half a pitcher of Martinis when her nursing shift was over, shaved her legs dry on a dare; who dragged my father into a transvestite bar in New Orleans on their honeymoon; who kept a paperback of Fanny Hill and a tube of KY in the drawer of her night table; who telephoned my mother late one night and said in a hoarse drunk voice, “I think we should meet to talk about your son. He’s a rather disturbed young man.”

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Pauline Kael mentions privileged moments in her lifetime of moviegoing. My favorite is a conversation between Curt Bois and Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk. He: “Do you know you’re very beautiful?” She: “Yes. Isn’t it lucky?” I see myself in my mother’s living room at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, working my way through Fox and MGM and Warners and Paramount and RKO and Universal and Republic and Ealing and Rank and UFA and Cinecettà and back again, TV Guide making it possible for me to play a kind of cinematic roulette. “Do you know you’re very hooked?” I ask. Yes. Isn’t it lucky? F

There’s been no end to it, of course. Last night I sat up till two to see the climactic fashion show in a fifties melodrama of the Texas nouveaux-riches, Lucy Gallant. Edith Head appears “as herself” and barks: “THE RETURN OF THE HOSTESS PAJAMA!” Ten years ago, beside somebody I no longer live with, I sat in a cone of gin fumes watching Joan Crawford rule the mob in The Damned Don’t Cry. Fifteen years ago, on a very hungover New Year’s Day, came one more moment of sacred terror, when Jean Simmons appeared white-haired from electroshock therapy in the first reel of Home Before Dark. This morning I remembered that thirty-six years ago Barbara Stanwyck, cloaked like a witch in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, had stood on a Paramount hillside and snarled, “This is my town!” while I made love with two other boys on a Murphy bed. I now live in a city with plenty of movie houses, and used to go more often than anyone else I knew. Now I’m more likely to stay home and watch movies on television. “I just have to,” I explain to people who may think I’m too old for this—speaking over my shoulder as I hurry home to keep vigil with Turner Classics. All the real moments of being in my life can be summoned by movies on television. Almost any Turner broadcast can summon a sound, a color, a day’s weather, old love or grief. Isn’t that the sacred terror? The power of these people and these settings, these glistening lights and darks, these lines of charged and sometimes silly dialogue, these camera movements and dissolves and cuts, these fashions in twentieth-century feeling, these marvelously distorted images that are truer and purer than anything we’ll find in life—and somehow, themselves, living? 80

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A month before I was to leave my little town for university, I visited my friend Alice. Alice was the barber’s daughter. Their house, on a rundown street near the railroad bridge, was another Aladdin’s cave—of old board games, old canned goods, old newspapers, old radios, old mismatched sofas and tables and chairs. In one of these chairs, as I knocked and walked in, sat Alice’s mother, a heavy rosy woman with a gold front tooth who talked broad rustic and had once kept a pet raccoon. She was sitting with a pile of folded laundry in her lap, tears streaming down her face as she watched a movie on television. Fellini’s La Strada, broadcast from Ottawa, was just ending. She turned to me without drying her eyes and said: “That was the most beautiful thing I ever seen.” F

for George Hasbrouck (1951-2007)

Andrew McCord

Mahmud of Ghazni’s Mosque in Swat On the verge of commingling And conquering, where did he send The horde opposing his horde? Did he slay? Did he mend? Above the village and under the fort, We’ve climbed too high to enter. What seemed the way in is the mehrab. We’ll have to climb the wall and hand The baby down, then hold her, back up, Under a raptor in the sun, Standing in her shade like Ayaz Who let the falcon shadow his king.

E-mail Trail for Beena I Police are taking down the green and black and red From a new pedestrian overpass. Two tattered flags Of the same tricolor are quilted with a hundred rags In a threadbare pallet on a cracked cement floor. II The Ranger escort fled Liberty Circle. Its follow van never arrived. At first it sounded like a crowd with firecrackers for the Sri Lankans. Down the route the security stuck to its literal post, staring at the fight in the roundabout. The old traffic warden kept up like a white-gloved wind-up, directing the frozen bus in a three-cornered ambush until the bus driver floored it to the cricket ground. The last gunman calmly shot the traffic warden dead and then rode pillion off toward Mecca Colony.

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III I was the lifter operator in a cold storage shed then. Truck after truck they brought bodies in. No one would touch phosphorous flesh. They rolled them out with sticks onto pallets I lifted and would lift again under a dark moon back into the trucks for burial. IV “We were told, ‘We don’t know. You just must come with us.’ ” There is more than one way to evaporate order.

Kabul Where is the staging ground for the next force To make nonsense of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plan? How many engineers mark off the land With blast walls, girlsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; schools, and embassies? Who now could do better than Salter Pyne, Who went out a Cockney and came back a lord After failing to lay a railroad though he did Put up a locomotive works And a raj-gone-rococo palace, now ruined? The hillsides are stepped hutment on hutment Far above trickles of water and the one Safe road out. North, you can rest In a riverside cabana, drinking green tea And eating a fish seined a week Ago from a pond in Sindh, with a breeze Off the current and its damp strand, The sky shading turquoise to lapis. You must leave before dark.

Lisa Dierbeck A WANTED MAN

“

et’s see what we have here,” Christopher had said, poking at her things. He pulled a crumpled heap of bills out from her bag. “Seven dollars,” he said, catching her eye. “Is that all you have on you?” “Don’t tell me you need money,” Jenny said, her tone sharp. “I’m on a fixed income, you might say,” Christopher said. “Great. Lucky me,” Jenny said. “I fuck the Senator’s son on Fifth Avenue and he asks me for financial aid.” “Very fixed income, that is,” Christopher said, liking her, the way she snarled, the way she didn’t kiss up to him. Self-possessed for a girl of fifteen, she was as combative as an equal. “I depend on the upper class for handouts,” he said. “You are the upper class, stupid,” Jenny explained. “Not exactly. They’ve got me on an allowance. It’s not as easy as it looks, Jenny.” “What isn’t?” She examined her toenails. “You don’t have any nail polish around here, do you?” Christopher searched through the drawers beside his bed, found a bottle of nail polish that his fiancée kept there together with her tampons and a spare diaphragm, and began to open it. He had twisted off the plastic cap, had taken the little doll-sized brush out, and had wiped it free of excess nail polish. In a gentlemanly mood, he had taken Jenny’s ankle in his hand, prepared to paint her toenails for her. She kicked him. “Ouch. What was that?” Christopher said. “What are you doing?” “Painting your toenails. So you can show off your toes in the sandals you stole.” “First of all, I never stole sandals,” Jenny said. “No? What are those in your bag?” “Those happen to belong to me,” Jenny said. “Your mother has no idea how many pairs of shoes she has and I am simply recycling something that isn’t being used.” “I wasn’t going to tell on you,” he said. “Relax. I rip my parents off 86

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all the time. I take cash, silver, jewelry. You prefer shoes, whatever. To each his own.” He once again began to try to apply some nail polish to her pinky toe nail. “That color is low class,” Jenny said, pulling her foot away. “Like you know.” “You don’t need money to have taste,” she said. “My fi—” he began, and stopped. “Your fee?” Jenny said, skeptically. “This just gets better and better. You’re a gigolo. You’re charging me?” He had been on the brink of telling her that his fiancée had left the nail polish there, and that she was from an aristocratic European family. She had perfect pitch when it came to classy nail polish. His fiancée was a doyenne of fashion. She had designed their wedding clothes, selected a remote beach resort in Morocco for their honeymoon, hired a graphics artist to print their wedding invitations, and chosen the monogrammed silverware for their wedding registry. He decided against it. “I’m charging you,” he said, playfully, applying the polish to his own toenails instead. “I told you, I’m dead broke thanks to the Anti-Christ and his concubine, otherwise known as the Senator and Mrs. Benedict, my parents.” “Fantastic,” Jenny said. “You’re knocking on the wrong door.” She began lighting a rather expensive hand-rolled cigarette of Christopher’s—Thai stick laced with opium—which she had found on the dresser. She coughed a little as she inhaled. “You’re Manhattan royalty, for fuck’s sake,” she said after a while. “If you need money, don’t look at me. I’m the last person on earth who could help.” “I’m living in genteel poverty,” Christopher said, removing the joint from her hand. “I don’t even think that such a thing exists. That’s a load of shit. You want to see the other side of the tracks, you ought to come over to my place.” He smiled. He was intrigued by the disparity between them. Small tokens would go a long way with Jenny, he thought. If she wanted a necklace, he could simply walk into his mother’s bedroom, open the top drawer of her dresser, take out one of the four lacquered, multitiered jewelry boxes, and present her with one. Compared to a tropical parrot or a python, a girl like Jenny would be an easy, low-maintenance pet. “This your mom?” he’d said, finding a photograph in her wallet and removing it for study. Jenny had made a grab for the photo. “Give that back.” He took a long drag from the joint, then stamped it out carefully in a china saucer that he was using as an ashtray. His eyes alighted on 87

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hers. “Let me guess,” he said, craftily. “Your father’s not around. You were an illegitimate child, born out of wedlock like half the Second Chance girls. Generational delinquency. The culture of poverty. You don’t even know who your father is. Am I right? Do you?” “Fuck you. You’re detestable,” she said and began to gather up her clothes. “The truth hurts I guess,” Christopher said, smiling to himself. He placed the remainder of the joint inside his leather portfolio, saving it for later. Jenny, obviously offended by what he’d said, reached for her bag. A cache of cosmetics fell out on to the floor—lip gloss and mascara, blush and eyeliner. Christopher, pretending to ignore her impending departure, opened a lipstick and applied some to his lips, checking in the mirror to study the effect. “Give me that,” she said, and snatched it away from him. “Oh, calm down. I’m on your side,” he said, handing her her lipstick. “Why don’t you wear any of this? Is there some kind of rule they have against painted ladies? Did they make you give up makeup and start dressing like a prim little spinster nun over at the Second Chance Society?” Jenny shrugged. He watched her appraising him, deciding whether to befriend him or turn against him. Her emotionalism excited him. “My counselor at Second Chance encourages us to look natural,” she said. “No heavy makeup. We’re not supposed to invite—you know.” “No, what?” “Male attention,” she said, collecting her stash of makeup and tucking it back into her bag. “It distracts us from our studies. We all. We all fucked up,” she stammered. “The girls at the Society were fast. And we. And I.” She didn’t continue her confession. He’d already discussed her early teenage pregnancy with her the first time they’d met, a week earlier. “You were a teenage whore?” Christopher offered, helpfully. Her expression darkened. “I mean that in the nicest possible way, Jenny,” he assured her. “Not an insult. A compliment.” He’d had a thing for the Second Chance Society girls, ever since he’d first found out about them. Bad girls. Loose girls who, by the age of fourteen, had already racked up a prison record, lost a friend in crossfire, or given birth to a child. They were shining examples of deviance. Christopher admired them on principle. “Jenny the Whore,” he said, in a singsong voice. “X-rated Jenny.” Her face changed, and he read it, first surprise and, there, the sting, he’d struck a nerve. Without saying another word, she’d begun to get dressed, her gestures fast, limbs slicing through the air, no longer 88

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relaxed and languid. Even a proud girl could be played. Even a cocky girl had strings to pull on, to make her jump and jerk. “I was just kidding around,” he’d told her, touching her wrist. Jenny whirled around, shaking her finger at him. “You listen to me, you little fuck. I’m warning you not to disrespect me. Never underestimate me,” she said. “Do you hear? If you don’t treat me right, I swear to God, you’ll live to regret it.” Her eyes had glowed and sparkled in a way that he’d liked. He liked her fuming, this plump small girl, full of pride, as hungry and hostile as a stray dog. “You’re cute when you’re angry,” he said. F

Like everything else that’s bad for you, it had been sublime in the beginning. He had goaded her on to new dangers and misbehaviors. With Christopher, she’d discovered the childlike delight of wrecking things. One afternoon, at Christopher’s warehouse, he and Jenny began making calls to the phone booth on the corner of President Street and Bond, to see if any passersby would pick up the phone. They could hear the ringing phone from where they sat on the window ledge. It rang forever, or so it seemed, incessant, like an alarm, roiling. Even though they were the ones making the call, the sound jangled her nerves, an unheeded plea for help. With no one around, ringing insistently on a desolate street, that phone seemed to announce some encroaching disaster. Jenny had said to Christopher: “Forget it.” But Christopher had persisted, letting it bleat. When a patrol car drove by, Jenny tried to hang up the receiver, wary in the presence of police. But Christopher held firmly to the phone. A cop got out of the front seat, walked to the phone booth, and answered it. Jenny pressed her ear against Christopher’s head. He turned the receiver so they could both listen. “What’s happening?” the cop said in a casual, almost flirtatious tone that Jenny did not associate with the New York City police. Jenny listened, horrified, while Christopher, imitating the other man’s conversational manner, said, “Hey there, this is Christopher. Who am I talking to?” He sat up straight, on the windowsill, one leg crossed over the other. His comportment was as assured and graceful as a dancer’s. He didn’t look in Jenny’s direction, so he couldn’t see her desperate gesticulations. She wanted him to hang up. “Hey, I’ve got a fifteen-year-old girl here without any clothes on. If you look up at the window of the third floor, the second building across 89

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the street—the one with trees on the roof garden—you’ll see her standing here.” Christopher reached out to Jenny and grabbed at the obi of the silk kimono, until he’d pulled the wide strip of patterned material off and the folds of the kimono fell open. He stroked her shoulder blade as he pulled the fabric, ever so gently, peeling her outer covering away until the husk of the kimono slithered off her skin, landing at her feet. Jenny, being Jenny, hadn’t stopped him. Breathing fast, she’d stood by the window as Christopher said, waiting for the one thing, the only thing, she cared about. To see what happened next. Officer Moore looked up at Jenny in the window. Disjointed scenes filled her head. She saw herself at the police station, in custody, in trouble. She saw herself in a courtroom, talking to a gray-haired lawyer in a suit and tie. She saw Christopher stepping into the patrol car and waving to her as the car took him away. They had broken some laws together and she had no sense at all of who was innocent, who guilty. Christopher gave Jenny an encouraging push, caressing her hips, lightly smacking her ass. She stepped closer to the window to display herself naked to two uniformed police. Three stories below, the street was empty. Dozens of overstuffed black garbage bags gleamed beneath the streetlamp. I am crazy, Jenny thought. I’m losing it. It wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done, or the hardest, but it may have been a close runnerup for stupidest. She hadn’t known, yet, that the police were fallible, human. She hadn’t known about the porous mesh that is the Law. For the first few seconds, she felt suspense. Maybe Christopher, right then, would be hauled off and placed under arrest. Swiftly, though, the shock of her nudity began to be absorbed by the ravaged streets of an outerborough industrial zone, where old brick buildings are acquainted with sheltering illegal activities. The factory across the street had no windows. As far as Jenny could tell, it conducted no legitimate business and had no employees, no inhabitants. To see if she could get away with it—that was half the fun of tearing her clothes off. Stripping off her clothes, pulling up her dress. These were routine activities for Jenny. Police, however, that was a first. She’d never flashed her breasts at cops. “Nice, isn’t she?” Christopher had said into the phone. “Would you like to come over and hang out with us?” Christopher said, and again the feeling came to her stomach, a pleasant sizzle, a vibrating anticipation, of a good or bad thing, which one didn’t matter. “Come see her up close,” urged Christopher. 90

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By this time, he called himself her boyfriend. With a smirk, Christopher hung up the telephone. “Officer Moore and his partner are coming over,” he told her. “What? Are you deranged? When?” Jenny said. Christopher gazed serenely down at the patrol car. “It’ll take them a minute or two,” he said, amiably. Jenny began running around the bedroom, frantically cleaning up, gathering discarded lingerie, socks, drug paraphernalia—the plastic sandwich baggies filled with dope; the crinkled scraps of tinfoil; the glass pipe stained black; the red, orange, pink, and blue pills of various sizes and shapes, scattered over the tabletop by the handful, like so many jelly beans; a tiny transparent envelope with a last pinch of brown powder stuck at the bottom, like grains of dirty sand. “Let’s not let them in,” Jenny said as she threw their belongings into the closet. “Christopher, it isn’t funny.” “Who said it was?” Christopher raised an eyebrow. “I mean it. Just don’t answer the door. My aunt could lose custody, don’t you understand? They could take me and put me in a foster home. This is my life we’re talking about here, asshole.” Jenny’s mother had gone traveling with a new boyfriend, leaving Jenny and her aunt in the East Harlem apartment. “Such drama. No one’s taking you away,” Christopher said, in the way he had. Whatever ailed her, Christopher, the indestructible, was immune. “Please don’t open the fucking door,” Jenny said. “This is non-negotiable.” “No one’s negotiating. I invited them and they’re coming over,” Christopher said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “They can’t open anything inside a closet or cupboard without a warrant,” Jenny said, and she knew, when she heard these words, that she’d already given in. “What are you talking about, woman? This is a social call. I don’t open the cabinets when I’m invited into someone’s apartment, as a guest, for caviar and cocktails. Do you? Let’s give these boys some credit. They’re not heathens.” Christopher gave her his in profile, as if posing, staring out the window. Jenny threw another handful of things inside a drawer and slammed it shut. Out of breath, she spun around the room, looking out for anything else that might be illegal or embarrassing. A pink rubber sex toy, gathering dust, peeked out from under the bed. Jenny pounced on it and threw it in the drawer. “God!” she said. “You’ve gone over the edge! Why are you doing this to me? You’re demented!” 91

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“Relax already, sweetheart,” Christopher said. “Oh my God, oh shit, oh my God,” Jenny said, crooning the words softly to herself in a chant, opening and closing the cabinets, stashing pornographic photographs and illegal substances, condoms and satin negligees and thong bikinis, body oil, kinky accoutrements, leopard-print panties, underground comic books and anything else incriminating. “You’re kidding me, right?” she said, going to the window. “It was a joke? This is you, being an asshole? The cops aren’t coming, are they?” But the patrol car had parked, and the two young policemen, their hair shorn down to the scalp in military-style crewcuts, dressed in blue uniforms, were loafing around on the sidewalk, stretching their legs. They began sauntering towards Christopher’s front door, in slow motion, dream police from Jenny’s nightmares. “Aren’t they cute?” Christopher said, drawling. Jenny let out a shriek. “Don’t do that, please,” Christopher instructed. “Quit worrying about it. If you aren’t into it, be boring. Who cares? I’ll handle it.” He handed her a quart of gin. She accepted the bottle, drank from it, and, retrieving the silk robe, she ran into the bathroom, half-undressed, the folds of the Japanese kimono streaming behind her like the train of a gown. She locked herself in and proceeded to gulp down the gin as if it were no stronger than ginger ale. Through the door, she heard voices, small talk, footsteps walking into the kitchen. The sound of their chitchat was soon drowned out by music. Christopher had turned on the stereo. A rhythmic electronic pulse rose and fell as Debbie Harry began to wail and burble in her clear high soprano, her delivery indifferent, the embodiment of blasé chic: once had a love and it was a blast / soon found out had a heart of glass / seemed like the real thing and it was divine

Jenny retied the obi around her waist and waited, channeling Debbie Harry’s aloof cool, for what felt like an eternity. At some point, curious and impatient, she unlatched the small metal hook that locked the bathroom door. She opened the door a mere crack, no more than a quarter of an inch, just wide enough to see Christopher on the floor before Officer Moore, whose unbelted trousers had been pushed down along his hairy thighs. The other cop was standing with his back to Jenny, holding a pair of handcuffs and a nightstick. Whether to smile at this or to frown, to be impressed or distressed, Jenny couldn’t tell. Christopher, as usual, had cracked opened the city like a piñata to get the goodies inside. Nothing functioned there in that factory on the 92

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Gowanus Canal quite as it was supposed to. Cops took prank phone calls from strangers and delivered themselves to the door like pizza boys, like call girls. Christopher’s city was diabolical and boundless, peopled by characters like him. Whatever he did, wherever he went, he found new converts. Aktionism was his religion of sensation. Jenny shifted her weight. Now she could see Officer Moore’s jaw, and, as she moved back, his neck and shoulder came into view. When he turned, she saw a bright crimson slash: an armband. She moved away from it, repulsed, before even seeing what it was, before her brain had translated. He no longer wore a police cap. What he had on his head was similar, but instead of the plain shiny black bill, his new cap had an eagle and a swastika on it. Jenny shut the door with a click and sat down, heavily, on the rim of the bathtub. She didn’t know where this Nazi shit had come from. She wanted to believe, but didn’t believe, that New York City cops were in the habit of carrying Third Reich memorabilia around with them. She couldn’t accept that it had anything to do with Christopher, he of the pink satin smoking jacket, he of the anarchist revolution, he of that insouciant cult of the senses. Jenny climbed inside the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain closed. She laid back, her vertebrae pressing against the flat hard porcelain. She clasped her hands behind her head to form a cushion and stared up at the ceiling lamp, its white glare softened by a red paper Chinese lantern, four gold tassels swaying beneath it, trembling, each attached to a pale green bead. Now she was trying not to listen for sounds coming from the bedroom, but she caught herself straining to hear. She propped the bottle between her knees and covered her ears with her hands. Even so, she imagined too much, sensed too much, attuned to fugitive noises that ran beneath the music, low and faint, like someone sighing. Blondie’s voice dominated. “Once had a love, and it was divine, soon turned out, to be a waste of time,” came the words in their inimical offhand, nasal whine. Blondie was trying to tell her something. Jenny lay down on her back and stared up at Christopher’s skylight. It was shaped in a circle, and the design he’d painted around its edges made it look as if he owned a piece of sky. It was the middle of July, and the window was full of blue sky with one streaky white cloud stretched thin over it, like a phantom hand whose bony white fingers reached ahead towards something Jenny couldn’t see. When she opened her eyes again, the factory was quiet and the sky was the color of ink. Jenny had drifted off to sleep. “It’s safe to come out now, you chicken,” Christopher called as a sliver of moon slid out from behind a darker cloak of cloud. 93

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“Bluck-buck! Bluck buck-buck!” Christopher was imitating chickens clucking. He rattled the doorknob. “Any chickens in there?” he said. Jenny climbed out of the tub and unlocked the bathroom door. There stood Christopher in jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, his long straight hair combed neatly as a schoolgirl’s. He was shrugging on his black leather trenchcoat, ready to go out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, as they often did, as if nothing unusual had happened. With a bemused, cynical expression on his face, he said, “I’m sorry you didn’t meet the officers, Jenny. What nice police!” F

“I could stay,” Jenny said, shyly, in a soft voice, eyes downcast, twisting the bouquet of daisies and irises in her hands. “Stop. Hold that for me. Don’t move.” She’d posed for him on the windowsill of the warehouse on Bond Street, contained within the window frame, her face in profile. Like many an overweight girl, Jenny had a delicacy about her face. She had her attractions, yes, but she was full of defects. Christopher, oppressed by his family’s worship of athleticism, had initially been drawn to her sickliness. Jenny had sunken, deep-set eyes, shadowed by purplish circles. Potato chips, soda, doughnuts, and fries were her four essential food groups. In Christopher’s world, the one built by the Benedicts, no one was fat. Fat people were looked down upon by his mother, who was unable to hide her aversion to them. That Jenny was overweight had recommended her to him. His lust for her pillowy belly and pendulous breasts commingled with a thrill of repulsion at the loose wobble of slack flesh. Simply by standing by the window in her transparent dress, this buxom girl subverted all that generations of Benedicts had preached. Sloppy and cheap, she laid waste to the Benedicts’ Calvinist Weltanschauung, their shit about decency, self-control, and perseverance. Her huge tits repudiated the puritan work ethic. Her puckered thighs denounced the allure of élite private colleges. Her soft hips spread out over the sill to question the benefits of good taste and advantageous social connections. She was a poor fat girl with dirty hair and torn underwear who fucked strangers on her rooftop and lived off government checks. How Christopher’s camera worshipped his muse. She’d been a bad girl turned good by the Second Chance Society, Mrs. Benedict’s charity for inner-city girls. Second Chance volunteers had Jenny studying hard and staying sober during her school semester, when Christopher and 94

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his camera came to Jenny’s rescue. He’d seen her original sins that day and he’d restored them, turned wild Jenny loose, gave her back to herself. She was a slut from uptown who’d been hired, by Mrs. Benedict, to feed the household parrot and water the plants. And he wanted her to remain like that. Savage Jenny, saved. Christopher had been looking at Jenny through his viewfinder, and now he peered up at her with his naked eye instead. It had taken him all this time to hear what she’d said. “Did you just ask me for my hand in marriage, doll?” I think I could marry you. She’d said this, he was almost certain of it, but she’d spoken softly. Jenny now examined the peeling paint on the window casement. Christopher, who had two cameras strapped around his neck, raised one of them, his Rolleiflex. He preferred that to the Pentax. The Rolli’s slower shutter speed would heighten textures and make each detail prominent: the pebbled surface of the wall; the wilting sateen petals, Jenny’s skin. Click. He captured her as she twisted daisies in her two red, work-roughened hands. It was the end of summer and Christopher was leaving. He had to drift away before finishing anything. He did this deliberately, in order to upset the extended family of Benedicts, who complained about him. “Where will you end up if you don’t buckle down and apply yourself?” “We opened doors for you.” “We invested in you, Christopher.” And Senator Benedict’s perpetual gripe: “To get you into that school, you realize, I paid a visit to the favor bank.” None of this meant anything to Christopher. He would become precisely what the Benedicts feared. He aspired to be a low-level drug dealer, a rake, an impregnator, a thief, a penniless heroin addict. A degenerate. Well, they could go fuck themselves. He was leaving for California and British Columbia. Dropping out of art school for the second time, he’d be taking what his parents called an “extended academic leave.” He planned to travel across the country on his motorcycle, from the East Coast to the West, arriving in Seattle by early October. From there, he’d take the ferry to Victoria, and on to Vancouver, where he and his fiancée would breed racehorses on her farm. Christopher had told Jenny only that he was taking a trip. “That’s good,” he said, aiming the Rolli at Jenny. “Excuse me.” She crossed her arm over her chest. “Are you deaf? Did you hear what I just said?” Amid the cameras, tripods, and piles of contact sheets marked with grease pencil, Christopher sat draped over a leather club chair, one leg thrown across the arm. His fervent wish was to ignore whatever Jenny had said. He only wanted to keep on snapping, photographing her to the beat of Blondie. 95

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Jumping down from the windowsill, Jenny landed on the floor with a heavy thud. “Christopher.” “You know I do,” he said, in response to a question. He was lying. Christopher was ashamed to be seen with the big, slatternly girl in public. Now she crossed the room and sat down, literally, at his feet, her hands on his knees, looking up at him. “You mean it?” Her expression was earnest and needy. She glanced down, picking at the rubble between the rotting floorboards of his factory. “Ever think of getting married?” “Not to you.” His voice was cruelly playful. “Why would I? You’re a loser.” She’d dropped out of summer school by the middle of July, after her grades had plummeted. She’d started sniffing glue again, on the roof, in June. She’d completed two short films with him, produced and directed by Christopher, each twelve minutes long, by the first week of August. “We could get a marriage certificate in Las Vegas on the way.” “On the way where?” “Across the country,” she said in a strident, high voice. Where had she gotten the impression that she was coming with him when he departed for the Coast? He slid out of the armchair, stumbled to his feet, and strolled into the kitchen, where he leaned against the kitchen counter. The sense of foreboding didn’t go away until he’d pried the cap off his bottle of beer. As he drank, he envisioned the course of his life as it would unfold without her. He would leave the city earlier than he’d intended, without mentioning the change in plans to Jenny. She’d become a royal pain in the ass. “Here, take one,” he said when he returned to the central room of the warehouse, with a bottle of beer in either hand. She was approaching him, lips pursed, eyes wide. He felt himself recoil from a foul atmosphere she was generating. He thrust the beer at her to deflect her embrace. “No, thanks,” she said. “I stopped drinking.” Her eyes telegraphed some new message. “When did that happen?” “I gave it up as of last week,” she said in a determined voice. “I gave up drinking. For a while. I gave up alcohol when I got back from the health clinic.” She opened her hands and examined a fingernail, painted black, which had broken. “Suit yourself.” It would be easier to leave than to break up with her. He pictured himself on his motorcycle, alone, driving through Arizona, the dry, flat landscape, with its dramatic rust and red hues and its molten sunrises. Nothing felt as good to Christopher as leaving. He loved to leave. He 96

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loved to leave without considering anyone else’s feelings, without asking anyone else’s permission. He loved to leave in a hurry, like a wanted man, throwing a change of clothes and a toothbrush into a bag and skipping out. He was terrific at leaving because he got a lot of practice at it. He’d been leaving for years. He’d been in first grade the first time he’d left. He’d simply walked out the classroom door while his teacher’s back was turned to the blackboard. He’d ambled down the hall to the fire exit, which no one was supposed to use, and he’d pushed open the door and he’d walked through it onto the sidewalk. He’d walked down the block to the candy store at the corner. He’d bought himself a Snickers bar and a water pistol. He had given no thought to any of this. After playing with a stranger’s children in a courtyard, he had arrived home to 82nd Street. He had been perplexed to find his mother collapsed in a heap beneath the crucifix in his father’s study. The housekeeper had been putting his toys away, as if Christopher had been flattened by a passing truck. Now it was time for leaving Jenny. Christopher had done it before, acquiring a fresh girlfriend, becoming intoxicated and running off without saying goodbye. Girls glommed on to Christopher and he was never entirely sure why. The less he needed a girl, the more she’d suck up, attaching herself to him. Jenny-the-blow-job-queen, Jenny-theexhibitionist, Jenny-who-liked-to-fuck-in-doorways. He drank from his bottle of beer and smacked his lips. He considered himself the victim of false advertising. She just wanted to entrap him in some crap ranch house on a bland flat stretch of land. He’d be bored after a month. She wanted to cook for him and play house and be the mother to his . . . Well. He wasn’t falling for it. Now she turned away from him, picking up a paintbrush from out of the jar he kept them in. She squeezed tubes of acrylic onto the palette, dabbed the brush in, then painted a stroke on the wall, a workin-progress, picking up the pattern from where she’d left off the last time. Neither of them said anything while Jenny painted a female figure shaped like an hourglass. “Hey,” he said, to change the subject. “I’m going over to Lenny’s studio in a couple minutes.” He didn’t invite her, though he didn’t explicitly exclude her, either. Christopher hadn’t taken Jenny out with him in weeks. He’d been avoiding her. But in the warehouse, she put her arms around his neck and began, too gently, to kiss his chest. “Stop it.” He pushed her face away. Jenny’s eyes shone with injured pride. She raised her hand, lashed out and, before he could make out what was happening, her sharp nails had scratched his neck. 97

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It came out of nowhere, wanton, unstoppable. “Get off me, witch,” he said. The feeling was unnervingly similar to arousal and, as he gave her a shove, his head swam with it. She slapped him in the stomach. “You stupid cunt.” A hand collided with a cheek. A human head shielded itself from the blows which rained down upon it. No one had done this. It was being done. Incredibly, Christopher was the one beating her up. Again he struck her, not quite where he’d aimed, decking her on the jaw. Her head was flung back from the force of his smack. She was turned away now, looking over her shoulder. She stayed like that, the round shoulders shaking, then becoming far too still, transformed into a statue. The space between them had expanded, as if Jenny had sped away from him on a conveyor belt. There had been a fine line drawn between them, and he’d crossed it. In the past, when he’d hit, she’d hit him back. She’d growled and punched him out and, afterwards, neither of them was ever sure who the hell had started it. They’d just licked each other’s wounds, they’d just laughed at it. They were being animals. This time, Jenny kept her back to him. It was taking too long. Something was different. Nothing was O.K., nothing was funny. “You’re good,” she said at length, each word brittle and distinct. “At ruining things.” Still, she wouldn’t look at him. She was standing up, she was stomping over to the door, carefully brushing off her dress. Her gestures said: I have worth. I have limits. Too late, Christopher noticed the sweet pink rhinestone barrette in her hair. Now he saw the frilly dress, the care she’d taken to prepare herself for him that day, like a vestal virgin. Jenny’s harder edges had been prettified and softened. Ordinarily bed-rumpled, her blond hair had been neatly combed when she’d arrived today. It had formed ringlets that brushed her cheeks and curled upwards, like a duckling’s tail, at her neck. And what the fuck had happened to her face? How had failed to see all this before? The smeared black eyeliner was gone. Her skin was naked, except for a shimmer of lip gloss. She’d arrived here looking beautiful, on purpose. But a crimson line ran down the side of her mouth and bright red blotches spread over her nose and cheekbone where he’d struck her. A black eye threatened to appear; he’d messed up her daintily arranged hair. He studied all of this distantly, objectively, his eyes mechanical as cameras. With a shudder of recognition, he perceived the pitiable romantic hope she’d nursed for him. He wouldn’t allow himself to acknowledge any of this, not to Jenny. “May I take your picture, now, like that, before you go?” he heard himself ask. His voice sounded artificial. 98

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She put her hand on the brass knob and yanked the door open. While she stood on the threshold, Christopher observed the two spots of perspiration on her lower back, noting how the fabric wrinkled, clinging to her sweaty skin. “If you leave now, Jenny, you can’t come back.” She slipped through the door and down the corridor. He saw her head bobbling up and down as she maneuvered down the staircase. He listened for her response, even a “Fuck you!” But he only heard her footfalls, climbing down the steps, and then the sound of the door as it creaked open on the first floor. He imagined the rest as if he were watching a movie. Slam (the first door had closed with a rattle of frosted glass). Thump (the second door had shut). He pictured her, still just a few feet away, on a doorstep in a lifeless Brooklyn street, a low-rent beauty on a summer’s day, illuminated by the sun, gaining her freedom. She would march up the block with her angriest and most assured gait, barefoot, navigating the broken glass and the bottle caps, limping slightly because he’d stepped on her toes during their altercation. She’d left her sandals beneath his window. They were the same sandals that, a year earlier, he’d seen her filch from the Benedicts of Fifth Avenue. F

Asadullah Khan Ghalib GUILELESS HEART: FIVE GHAZALS (translated, from the Urdu, by Andrew McCord) Some years ago, I spent a morning or two a week at lectures on the Urdu poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib that were given for M.Phil. students at Oriental College in Lahore. On the left side of a hall filled mostly with women students, I would sit among about a dozen males. In the back row of our cluster, four boys in green turbans would take their seats. Their turbans marked them as members of what a friend called “a religious pressure group.” One day, we came to the poem beginning “In the shade of the mosque, there needs be a bawdy house.” The young professor repeated the line several times before going on to its pair in the couplet. His face lit up and he directed his pedagogic gaze over my head at the green turbans in the back. “What does this mean?” he asked, and then proceeded to riff on life’s juxtapositions—sacred and profane, good and bad—winding up, as I remember, with a miniature homily: “It would be nice,” he said, “if mangoes would ripen now, in February, when the weather is perfectly temperate, not too hot or too cold. But they don’t. Mangoes come in June, when it is too hot to breathe. This pleases Ghalib. He rates human life over paradise.” Ghalib lived from 1797 to 1869, mostly in Delhi, which until 1858 was home to the last Mughal emperor, whose suzerainty extended barely beyond the city walls. He wrote in other genres, too, but he is mostly known for his mastery of ghazal, a lyric made up of rhyming couplets. This poetry is traditional and impersonal, employing tropes, meters, legends and myths, and rhyme schemes inherited from Persian, which was the language of the Mughal court when its empire was a grand one. In his many letters—to one or two erratic patrons and to a handful of devoted poetic disciples—Ghalib takes exaggerated pride in his command of the Persian heritage and his formal virtuosity, but he rarely, if ever, elucidates his meanings or brags of profundity. It is a little absurd to ascribe a particular sensibility to a poet in an impersonal tradition, but whether it is happening to the poet or to the tradition, it is hard not to feel something new coming into these poems. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the well-known twentieth-century Urdu poet and Pakistani dissident, applied to Oriental College in the early 1930s to do a Ph.D. on the history of Urdu poetry. His proposal was rejected as “too broad,” but his outline survives. For Ghalib, Faiz projected a separate chapter headed “The First Modern.” I read him that way, too—a bittersweet but life-loving poet, soaked in tradition, coming at the end of empire. God knows we can use imaginations like that here, now. Readers of American poetry can find some of the strict requirements of formal unity in ghazal poetry from the late work of Agha Shahid Ali or the recent work of Marilyn Hacker. A vivid sense of the conceptual dislocations from couplet to couplet in a ghazal can be gained by reading the unrhymed ghazals Adrienne Rich published in the 1960s. The scheme is increasingly familiar: a rhyme pattern of a-a, b-a, c-a, etc.; the poet’s signature in the closing couplet usually; a lack of logical or thematic continuity from couplet to couplet. In Urdu, the rhyme is most often accomplished by combining a rhyme word or syllable with a part of speech, such as a case marker or the end part of a compound verb. Besides rhyme, this creates syntactic repetition that runs through the poem and ties it together. The resolution of syntax is where the drama lies, and I have tried to bring this “rhyming” of syntax into the English even when I can’t rhyme as a proper ghazal would do. Ghalib’s later life figures as a principal part of the story of a wonderful book, William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Knopf, 2006). To get at the nuts and bolts of the poetry and its interpretation, there is an encyclopedic Web site compiled by Prof. Frances Pritchett, most easily reached by Googling its title, “A Desertful of Roses.” —A. McC.

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Masjid ke zer-e-saya kharaabaat chahiye In the shade of the mosque, there needs be a bawdy house. Under an arched brow, needs be an eye finding the way. I, too, have been in love with another personâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; At last, something needs be requited from oppression. Sky above me, praise hearts of who love longingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Indeed, there needs be return on what went before. Because of the moon-cheeked we are studied in art: To draw them we draw near, and there needs be communion. What dark character wants giddiness from wine? Day and night, I need be at least a little out of myself. Growth and bloom is from root to branches, Ghalib. What needs be said slips from silence itself. The color of rose, tulip or sweet briar is various. Tint by tint by tint, there need be proofs of spring. Eyes need be facing the Kaaba when time comes to pray. Time comes to leave self: head needs be at mouth of the still. Which is to say, as the glass of the describable circulates, The knowing need always be steeped in real wine.

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Ishq mujh ko nahi vahasht hi sahi No love for me? Barren wildness will do. From my wildness your fame will ensue. Please break not a connection with us. If nothing else, then hatred will do. What is exposed by my presence? If not in assembly, meeting in cloister will do. We are no enemies to ourselves: If you love a stranger that will do. May what could be become of my being: If not cognizance, then stupor will do. Ever so much as years pass like lightning, Time enough to squander heart’s-blood will do. How neglectful of fidelity have we been? If no chance of love, its trouble will do. Unjust heaven, please grant something. A parting gift of leave to protest will do. We, too, are made numb—by submission— As with you, the practice of indifference will do. Asad, if touch of the hand of the loved one ceases, If there is no union—grief and longing will do.

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Taskeen ko ham na roeen jo zauq-e-nazar mile We ache not to be soothed, if we can relish the sight, Among virgins in heaven, of eyes like yours at night. After the murder, bury me not in your alleyway. Why publish the way for the world to your gate? Shame not your stewardship of the wine, now. On any evening, we drink what is poured as our lot. I have no word against you, but, my dear, dear one, Remember me to the go-between if he asks for you tonight. We would show you all what Majnun showed Layla Could we be free of struggle to hide a lovesick plight. Must we track Khizr like Moses or Alexander? He seems so old on the road where we meet. Quiet residents of the street of who holds my heart, Look out for Ghalib, his worried mind is not right.

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Koi umeed bar nahi aati A single hope to fruition comes not. To the eye a single face comes not. A day to die has been appointed, Yet, through the night, sleep comes not. Time was, on questions of the heart came laughterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Now, on any matter, it comes not. I know the reward of submission and abstinence, But there my very nature goes not. On matters of a certain sort I am silentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Nothing would be unspoken if I were not. Why not scream? Would I occur to you If the sound of my cries did not? Dear physician, if you see not the scar You smell my heart burning, do you not? We have reached the place where even To us the news of ourselves reaches not. We die in the longing to die. Death comes, but we die not. How could you face the Kaaba, Ghalib, But that shame was something you knew not?

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Dil-e-nadaan tujhe hua kiya hai? Guileless heart, what is happened to you? At last, what potion is there for this pain? We are elated. The other is past feeling. Good lord, what is this? What happened? I keep a tongue between teeth, too. Would that you ask, “What is your complaint?” As, lacking you, no one is present, Then, God help me, what is this commotion? How so the angel-faced people here? A glance, a spark, a come-hither gesture—what is it? Why fall ambergrisen tresses in curls? What is the glance of a lightly made-up eye? Where has the green and bloom come from? What sort of cloud is a man? What is Eve? We have hoped for promises from one Who knows not what a promise is. Do good and good will come to you: A dervish’s cry . . . What more is in it than that? My love, my life, I scatter you. I do not know what a prayer is. Conquest mattered not a jot to Ghalib— It came to hand, what is the matter with that?

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y parents were getting rid of us. I was sure of it. Stevie thought I was nuts and said I was just being eleven, which he claimed was practically an infant. But I had clues. They would leave us for hours every day with different families, like we were on dog-adoption tryouts. Only no one seemed to want us; we always wound up at home. Then one day Mom said, “We’re going to Shep’s,” and even Stevie was beginning to get my point. Shep—Eugene Shepherd, if we were being formal—was the weird one of my parents’ friends, the one with no wife or kids, the one who thought his stringy gray ponytail was somehow drawing attention away from that Africa-sized bald spot on the top of his head, the one who held out both his palms and said “gimme ten, kiddo.” The one who would hand us whatever he had in his pockets and call it a gift: coins, a pack of dental floss, a guitar pick. Once, Dad grabbed a book of matches before it landed in Stevie’s palm. Shep was the only particular, single, solitary thing or human being in the world on which Stevie and I agreed: he was phony and gross and not fooling anyone. “Your dad and I are making a trip to Manhattan,” Mom said. “We’ll pick you up before dinner.” I pretended not to listen, but Mom was still talking. “Hey,” she added, “Shep has an art studio.” Like it was ice cream or something. Shep was an artist, but I knew for a fact that I was better at coloring than he was. We once drew birds together when he came over for a barbecue, and no one guessed what his was; Mom knew right away mine was a blue jay. “An art studio,” I repeated. “Don’t they have naked ladies there?” I could practically feel Stevie’s ears perk up from the next room. “Does Dad know about this?” I asked, but Mom was licking her finger and concentrating on removing the dried breakfast milk from the side of my lip. “Ew, Mom. You know there’s soap for that.”

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She wasn’t listening to me at all. I wondered if Shep had soap. His hands were always inky, especially under his nails. Questions went round my head like wooden balls in the bingo wheel that we kept in the basement. Where did Shep even live? Would there be toys? Kids? Would we eat anything? Mom acted as if every possible question was answered with one sentence: “After, we’ll take you for pizza.” And like that, it was done. Stevie and I were packed up and in the back seat of the Country Squire station wagon. My dad studied maps and tapped distractedly on the gas while we waited eons for my mom. My first few “Why Shep’s?” were ignored, but eventually Dad answered: he was helping us out. “How?” I asked. But by then he had stopped talking. F

Dad took the scenic route toward the highway. He liked to check on things around the neighborhood—see who wasn’t keeping their hedges neat and whose house needed a paint job. “You’re not the mayor,” Mom would say, but this time she was quiet. She seemed to be the only one in a hurry to get to Shep’s. I could tell by the way she chewed on her cheek that she was annoyed, but I liked wandering through town with Dad. It made me feel like we were in charge of things. Until that summer, this was all the traveling we did, down side streets and cul-de-sacs, or maybe to Carvel or the gas station. One week every August we’d see our grandparents and the Amish in Pennsylvania. But that was pretty much nowhere. We mostly lived inside our kitchen, in Edison, New Jersey. Stevie said it was the middle of the world. Our table sat four, our dishes were a sensible white, dinner was defined by the days of the week: Monday through Friday, meatloaf through fish sticks. Stevie was thirteen, and those extra two years apparently earned him parental status when Mom and Dad were out of sight. When I colored with markers, it was Stevie who reminded me of the dangers of drawing near upholstery. When I watched my shows, it was Stevie who yelled “too close!”—and then changed the channel when I moved my chair back. After dinner, my dad would read the Home News in his big red chair, one stationary hand on the head of our beagle, Lucy. She sat there as though a baseball mitt had landed on her scalp; it was simply her job to carry it, her brown beagle eyes peeking out from under his fingertips, her look both adoring and resigned. Our biggest controversy concerned a set of yellow drinking glass107

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es we had collected one by one from the Mobil station each time we filled the car up with gas. After months of negotiation, I finally won my argument: the color of a glass most definitely disturbs the flavor of its contents. Milk should not be yellow. As my prize, I earned the privilege of drinking my milk from a paper cup. After that, our table looked oddly out of line—three tall yellow glasses and my squat paper cup. For this, I was nicknamed “The Litigator,” which in no time became “Little Gator,” and then, sadly, just “Gator.” No one ever called me Elizabeth anymore. F

We were finally merging onto the turnpike when Mom started in with the whispering. She was doing this a lot lately and I had to remind her it was impolite. But she didn’t stop; she just turned on the radio and kept talking. Olivia Newton-John was singing “I Honestly Love You,” which made Stevie pretend to put his finger down his throat and make vomit noises. Dad switched to the nasal news guy on the AM dial, who said the same things over and over again. And Mom just kept whispering. Things had started changing in June. That was the first time my father stayed home from work. It was strange, like a freak snowstorm in summer. Then it seemed to happen once a week. Stevie and I had to be extra quiet, in the middle of the day. Even Lucy was thrown by the change in routine. She started whining at odd hours, something my mother referred to as the “final straw.” I’d try and put my hand on Lucy’s head from behind like Dad did, but it never worked to quiet her. She always knew it was me, even when I rubbed my palms together to make them warm, swollen and big. Then came the day trips. Since school was out, Stevie and I were free to be delivered wherever my parents felt like taking us. “We have errands,” Mom would say, “and we’re dropping you off for a while.” The “where” was a revolving list of neighbors, relatives, and friends. Each place came with a standard set of rules, plus a few others particular to that destination. At the Solomons’, we had to avoid touching all the fruit before we picked the one we wanted. They had plastic-covered sofas that loudly peeled off my thighs when I got up. This caused Stevie to scream “stop farting, Gator.” Every single time I moved. At the Beineckes’, we had to play with their kids. Stevie claimed to hate Diane Beinecke but I once found him writing her name in his 108

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notebook: in script. Trevor Beinecke was my age but, unlike Stevie, I really did hate him. He coughed a lot and never covered his mouth. The Kellehers’? Jackpot. They had a pool, and we got to stay in the water till our fingers were as creased as raisins. Then Fritos and Hi-C for snacks. The only time Mrs. K raised her voice was to yell “Don’t drown each other!,” usually when Stevie was getting too rough, mostly when I accused him of peeing in the water. F

We were nearing the exit for the airport when Mom turned down the radio and began dispensing the rules for Shep’s. You’d think they would have changed for “an art studio.” Evidently, they were more strictly enforced. “Crayons only.” “No markers, under any circumstances.” Dad was hunched over the steering wheel, navigating the slick, hazy road while Mom applied her lipstick, spouting the instructions as if to break up her continuous line of the Playful Pink. “No whining.” “Or back talk.” She doled them out like mile markers on the turnpike. “No horseplay.” “Or teasing.” The windshield wipers, synchronized marionettes, wheezed with every swipe. “Be polite.” I kicked Stevie, who was tracing the rivulets on his window. “She’s talking to you,” I whispered. “Ga-tor,” he said through gritted teeth, reminding me that at any time he could transition seamlessly into a Rottweiler. He returned my kick with a hard shove to my arm. Mom didn’t even notice; she was on a roll. “Put toilet paper on the seat.” “No shoes on the furniture.” The rain sounded like a spray of BBs on the roof. Dad added the left-turn signal to the clash of recurring sound, and Stevie mimicked the click-click, click-clicks with his tongue. “Remember, this is not just where Shep lives, it’s also where he works. It’s not a playground. As we slowed to park, Mom twisted around to make eye contact. “Do what Shep says, and don’t touch anything. Am I clear?” Stevie and I gave the required answer and got out of the car. I 109

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pulled on my rain hood and pretended I was a prizefighter, about to enter the ring. Dad waited in the car while Mom herded us into a cage she said was an elevator, and cranked us up to the top floor. Stevie jumped up and down, scratching his head and belly, and said this was how they transported chimpanzees from the jungle. I stared at Mom: she looked strange operating machinery. She didn’t drive the car unless she had to, and even then, it was only to school or soccer games. F

Despite what Mom had said, Shep’s studio looked more like a playground than like anyone’s home or office. The room was the size of our entire gymnasium at school. The floor had no carpet or tiles— it was a mass of red cement splattered here and there with drops of color, like melted candle wax. Floor-to-ceiling windows covered three of the walls. There were no shades or drapes, just full sky and clouds. If you stared hard, you could make out a tiny wire mesh pattern inside the glass. It looked like the honeycombs from our science books. On the fourth wall, large inky canvases were stacked against each other, like the 45’s we kept next to the record player in the den. We had each been allowed to bring one thing with us. Stevie took his newest Encyclopedia Brown book; there were ten cases to solve, and he liked to keep going until he’d gotten every one. I took my pink rubber ball, and it was a good thing, since Shep’s studio looked great for practicing high pops. My dad once told us that whether you called them “Spaldeens” or “Pensie Pinkies” told a person exactly what part of New York you were from. He called them Pensie Pinkies—Brooklyn—so I did, too, even though no one from New Jersey called them anything but a ball. I wasn’t even sure where Brooklyn was. Mom no longer seemed concerned about the whole list of potential disasters she’d just prepared us for. She talked in the corner with Shep, who stood too close and spoke too softly, and drew an imaginary diagram on the wall with his finger. “If you get to the Dim Sum Palace, you’ll know you’ve gone too far,” he said. A palace! I ran to Mom to beg her to let me come along, but Shep started again with the whispering game. I heard him anyway. “You have nothing to lose; you’ll be in good hands with Master Fu.” Mom started to tear up. I backed away, but kept an eye on Shep. When she saw me Mom gave me a hard kiss on the forehead. “Be good,” she said, and then she was back in that cage, pulling the 110

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latch and gone before I could breathe right. I ran to the window and watched our car disappear across the lots. They were full of gravel, crushed soda cans, and cigarette butts. There were no people anywhere. In the distance, train tracks merged right into the turnpike. “Where are we?” I whispered to Stevie. At Stevie’s slightest hint, I could easily imagine we were involved in a kidnapping plot or a jewelry heist. “Newark,” he said. “It’s like New York. Only not.” Shep overheard us, and went right for his Atlas. He liked to explain things, so Stevie and I got a lesson on East Coast geography, which spread quickly to the seven continents, interspersed with stories about places he’d been, like Hong Kong and Venezuela. I wanted to remind him we were on summer vacation, but there were no interruptions once Shep got going. Then he asked where Stevie and I wanted to go. “Home,” I said, and the lesson finally stopped. F

Shep sat across from me on his red concrete floor, his gray and bony legs spread out in a V formation like mine, only bent. We rolled my Pensie Pinkie back and forth but it kept escaping like a mad mouse through the gap beneath Shep’s knees. Of course, it was my job to run and bring it back. Each time, Shep smirked and winked, like it was some sort of moment we were sharing. “Hey, Gator,” Shep said after a few rounds, as if he’d just gotten a new idea. “Do you understand what’s going on with your dad?” He had given up even trying to keep his legs straight; they were folded now, Indian style, like we were girlfriends about to share vital crush information. He was wearing sandals and his big toe made me nauseous. I started a new rule in my head: past a certain age, you are not allowed to show any of your toes. “Elizabeth,” he said again. He touched my chin the way he did when he adjusted my pose for one of the so-called masterpieces he’d sketched when he came to our house. “Don’t hide your neck,” he would say. But he wasn’t painting now and his finger felt sandy under my chin. “I think we should talk about your dad. I mean, I thought we could talk about what’s going on. Is that O.K.?” I shrugged. I meant to say, “You can talk about whatever you want” in my tough voice, but nothing came out. Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about my dad, except to know when he was coming to get us. Stevie was on the other side of the room, thick inside his book. I wondered if he was somehow involved with this game. 111

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I knew things were wrong. Just that week, my dad had turned yellow. You could see it clear as day when he came to the table Wednesday night. Even the whites of his eyes had changed, like old newspapers left out in the sun. But no one was saying anything, so I pretended not to notice. And anyway, Stevie was going on and on about one of his Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. So I just stared at my paper cup and held my breath when I wasn’t chewing. When we got upstairs that night, Stevie said he knew exactly what was happening. “Beriberi,” he’d whispered, nodding in apparent awe of his own genius. He said he’d learned about it in school last spring; it was something you got from eating too much rice, and it made your skin turn the color of pee. “Uncle Ben’s a killer,” he added, in the sort of Dracula voice he was picking up from the late-night movies on Channel 9. I was already at the mirror pulling out my cheek for closer inspection. F

Shep was going on and on about how I wasn’t a little kid anymore and how I should know what was happening. How I needed to be prepared for certain things. “There comes a time when you have to act like a grownup,” he said. “Even before you think you’re ready.” There was a faint indent above his eyebrow, where my dad had once hit him with a rake. It looked almost like you could stand a penny in there. My mother said it happened during the days when Shep and my dad had too much time on their hands and too much bourbon in their bellies. “It was all in fun,” she’d add. They liked to laugh about it now and then, as if to explain that everything was once different, before I was born. Not that I could have ever used that excuse for hitting Stevie with a garden tool. “Do you know what cancer is?” Shep asked. I had heard this word through the walls in our house. My parents said it in their after-dark voices, like it was a beetle bug they didn’t want me to know about, living deep down in the shaggy rugs, hiding inside our folded towels, creeping over us, silent, while we slept. I wanted to tell him I’m not an idiot, but I stayed quiet, kneading my ball, trying to turn it to Silly Putty. I knew my mother wanted to tell me things when she sat on my bed at night and worked through the knots in my hair. I could see her face in my mirror, and I learned to divert her attention however I could. Sometimes I made up stories about the kids on the block just to make her laugh. My mother’s laugh was one of those great 112

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moments like when the fire bell went off at school in the middle of a test. You never knew when it was going to happen, but it was fantastic when it did. I had convinced myself that my father’s staying home from work was a whim, like that awful permanent in my mother’s hair one Thanksgiving. Stevie liked to ask a lot more questions, but me, I didn’t want to know. My mother comes home one day with fried hair? My dad looks like a banana? O.K., I say, and wait until things get back to normal. Shep’s voice echoed against itself, and I wished that the skies would crack open with thunder and blow in all the windows. I wondered what effect the honeycombs would make. Would the glass break around them? Would we be like chickens inside a coop? Shep was still talking. “I think you learned about the liver in your science class at school, right?” What did Shep know about school? All of a sudden I felt angry with Stevie, who was reading his book on the other side of the room. Shep was talking about how the liver worked and some guy named Billy Rubin who was making my dad turn yellow. “It’s called jaundice,” he said. I pictured some fat kid coloring my dad with yellow markers. Shep was still talking. “Like when you mix up paints. If you don’t mix them up just right, the color’s off. But when your blood is off, it begins to act like poison.” I began to count the honeycomb patterns in the window, starting at the bottom and working my way up. I was at 67 when Shep finally stopped. I bounced my ball and followed it to the other end of the room. When I looked back, Shep had already moved on to Stevie. He was showing Stevie his paintings, talking in a low voice while they sifted through the canvases. Stevie annoyed me by looking interested. I needed to get him away from Shep. I needed Shep to be a statue, cold and gray and quiet. Maybe a pigeon on his head. “Stevie!” I yelled, but he wasn’t listening to me. Shep rubbed Stevie on the back the way my father did when Stevie got upset. “Stevie!” He didn’t even look. F

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Shep started acting as though he hadn’t even said those things about my dad. As if Stevie and I had just gotten there. He offered to set each of us up with paints, but Stevie said, “no thank you” and then so did I. I started practicing my high pops. I’d only done one bounce when Shep came and grabbed the ball. “Not in here,” he said. He gave me back the ball and I switched to a girly game, bouncing the ball and tossing my leg over it the way my neighbor Didi had taught me in first grade. A, my name is Anna and I come from Alabama and I sell apples. I liked the sound of the ball on cement. It was almost like we were outside. I was only on “g” when Shep was back. “You sure you don’t want to paint?” I did, but it seemed wrong to switch sides. “I think you’d like to work at an easel, wouldn’t you,” he said. He put his hand on my back as if all I needed was a push. I pulled away. “You don’t know shit!” I yelled. I had never said the word “shit” before and it felt shocking coming out of my mouth. Stevie looked afraid. I said it again, louder, and waited to be yelled at. But Shep was calm, calmer than he’d been all day. “I understand, Elizabeth,” he said. “You’re scared. You’re scared for your dad. It’s O.K.” “When I tell my mom about this—” I started, but the look on Shep’s face made me stop. It was as if he had turned into someone else altogether. He started talking again, but it was so quiet, as if he didn’t even know we were there anymore. “Someone’s got to tell you kids the truth,” he said, and stroked the side of his scalp where there was still some hair. He shook his head so slowly that his ponytail didn’t even move. “Does you no good at all to be in the dark. Only make things worse for Jean in the end. How the heck is she going to handle the two of you on her own?” He looked back at me and then at Stevie. “Christ almighty,” he said, his eyes turning gooey and wet, and began to walk away. I wanted to hit Shep in the head with my ball, bounce it off that bald spot. It taunted me like a bull’s-eye. He seemed to know what I was thinking and turned around just when I released the ball. It went just wide of his temple. Shep smiled. Not the kind of smile you give old ladies or small children, but the kind that just shows up on your face when you know something no one else does, the kind where your teeth don’t show and you have doll’s eyes, unmoving and glassy. I smiled back, only meaner. I let my teeth show, metal braces and rubber bands and all. I squinched up my eyes. And then I picked up 114

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the nearest thing, a small can of turpentine. I wound my arm around, circling and circling, and picking up speed. The can was heavy; I was a discus thrower in the Olympics. The whole time I smiled. Things were all slo-mo, like I wasn’t even there. No one was. Except Shep. I wouldn’t look at him. I wouldn’t look at his paintings, or the splattered paint on the floor, or the blank canvases, or the stacks of cans and tubes, or Stevie, who was running toward me. I looked out at the sky and wondered about that “palace” where my parents were. I wondered if they’d leave us here with Shep forever. I let the turpentine fly just as Shep was about to grab me. The can drew the most beautiful arc in the air, and I thought my dad might even appreciate it, maybe offer up a “good arm, Gator.” Or maybe he would be angry, the way he got when I fought too hard with Stevie and tried to kick him with my clogs. The turpentine can was a rocket ship and I was inside it, weightless, headed to the dark and away from Shep and his paints and his stupid ponytail. The last thing I heard was the glass breaking—the large window shattering like a hailstorm and the rain coming in the room as if it were just waiting for an entrance. The can bounced twice on the gravel and then rolled to a stop, leaking its contents like pee mixing with the puddles. The honeycombs turned out to be as fragile as burning hair, disappearing against the sky like scattering gnats. I had a scraping feeling in my stomach, as if Billy Rubin was now onto me, taking a wire brush and pushing it round my belly from the inside, pointy and painful. Stevie was holding me and telling me not to cry, it would all be O.K. I wanted to believe him. All I saw was Shep’s back as he ran for the tarps and unfurled them over his precious paintings. F

We were back on the turnpike, all of us quiet. This time Mom was behind the wheel and Dad’s hair peaked over the passenger headrest like a snowcap on a mountain. Sitting behind him felt like I had the wrong shoes on—my left sneaker on my right foot. I wondered how far this would go: if they’d switch sides in their bed, or at the dinner table; if Mom would sit in his big red chair after dinner and put her hand on Lucy’s head. There was a lot of traffic and my Mom looked like she was concentrating really hard. Dad’s head bounced sideways, up and down again to some odd rhythm, dictated by his dream. I didn’t ever want to talk again. We rounded a curve and I let my body fall toward Stevie. “Gator’s not wearing her seat belt!” Stevie yelled. My father, awakened from his drowse, suddenly turned his head. 115

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“We’ll get some pizza when we get home,” my mother said. Stevie rammed me back to my side. We were the only ones who had returned to our proper roles, enemies again. “Quit it!” I yelled. My father swiveled his head, accepting his new role as passenger to keep us in our places. He would need to threaten to sit between us; if it got really bad, he would suggest that one of us might enjoy walking the rest of the way home—though this never actually happened. “I was just sitting here,” I said. My face felt swollen and hot. I wondered if my father knew exactly what Shep had said about him. I looked in his yellow eyes, at his yellow throat and his yellow earlobes, trying to see the cancer. I felt the way I did when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Stevie and I had stayed outside and stared as hard as possible but we couldn’t see anyone. Mom had laughed at us and said, “You can’t see it from here, you knuckleheads.” “How about you sit in my lap,” Dad said. “We’re in the car,” I whined. My father looked at me and then at my mother. He unbuckled his seat belt and turned his whole body toward me. Suddenly there was as much commotion in the car as when Lucy would jump on the couch at home. My mother yelled “Hon, what are you doing!” and Stevie cried “holy cow!” and squirmed backward. We all fell silent, amazed at my father’s dexterity, the sudden grace of his body, how small he seemed in transit between the front and back seat. And then he was between Stevie and me, large once again, his arm around me, his finger poking at my dried-up tears, his hand resting, finally, on top of my head “Gator, baby,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” I acted as if I didn’t hear him. I leaned into him, his fingers covering my forehead like unwieldy bangs. He smelled like vitamins and incense. I had been afraid to touch him since he turned yellow and now I was even more scared. I wanted to throw Shep’s tarp on him and stop everything at once. I wanted to walk Lucy with him, run my toy lawnmower next to him when he cut the grass. Practice high pops while he yelled “Watch it, Gator, you don’t want to hit the sun.” I wanted to feel the itchy, pilly wool of his after-work sweater against my cheek, the sour smell of his pipe and aftershave mixing in my nose. I wanted to see him hit Shep with his rake. I put my palm, just lightly, on his bony forearm and waited to feel something invade my body, plant itself inside my liver, like a yellow seedling tree. I wondered how long it would take to grow. Dad fell back to sleep and I moved my hand along his arm, up to his shoulder, and around his neck. He moved slightly and so I left it there, my fin116

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gers just below his ear, my palm picking up the faint radio signal of his pulse. We rode like that for the rest of way, silent, a sleepy family of birds in our nest, the woodpecker steadily chipping away at our tree limb. I stared out the window and relived the glorious shatter of the glass. F

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Benoît Conort

TRANSFIXED OBSERVER: POEMS (Translated, from the French, by Kim Cushman)

I CAN ONLY APPROACH, be in a perpetual state of approaching. Touching, what is known as touching with the fingers, is forbidden to me, can only blind me. Here there prevails, the whole country proclaims it, a sacred order whose organization eludes my routine intelligence. I am passing through. Indifference, beyond, or in point of fact, strictly obeyed conventions, relegates me to a no-man’s-land which I could never transcend. No matter, it suffices me to be there, to move among this crowd, to feel its vitality, to submit to the shock of its Brownian motion, to receive these looks that slide over me like sun on a windowpane, penetrate me and rejoin a universe of which I have but an inkling. But they also stop, and I the observer, here I am observed, transfixed like the butterfly on its corkboard, violated by the needle of their attention, there I am drowned in the vast almond of their yellowish eyes. The child in particular has these looks that reify you. Paralyzed by the whirl of life, hogtied by the sense of my strangeness, I remain at a standstill, incapable of letting myself go and gliding in this passing stream, almost within reach, “O arms too short.” At once invisible and excessive, my absence will leave not a trace. It will be, they tell me, tangible nonetheless, equivalent to a presence, part of the universal harmony. 118

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I STAYED A LONG TIME IN FRONT OF THE TAJ MAHAL. The white and perfect face of death. Its precise equilibrium like a sacred number which satisfies completely. Light unknown of an equation, impenetrable alchemy. I imagine the absolute which could have been this other Taj of black marble facing the white from across the river. It seems less constructed than sculpted from an enormous block. The stone creates friezes, so subtle, dances in writing. I saw shadows tremble among the arabesques, the marble turn into ether, submissive lightness and superabundant peace. Why must praise be born of death, and emotion be revived by dead flesh? And I think of those legendary palaces built by the gods in a single night. At dawn there passes a cortege which becomes diluted, like a marvel, in the first ray of sun. I see again the ceremony which must have accompanied the laying to rest of Mumtaz-i-Mahal. Horses prancing in the summer dust, white garments against white marble. All day long the song of light combined with the cries of the mourners, with the piercing sound of musical instruments. The deep red of sundown sets the blue-tinged columns ablaze when, the throng at a distance, the emperor descends next to her whom he loved so much. In the silence of the crypt, on the marble still warm from this crazy day of bereavement, near sticks of incense whose coals sputter and project their fragile fire on the calligraphy-covered walls, what thoughts, what bitterness and what regrets take possession of his soul? Shah Jahan is there, face to face with dust and art. Perhaps, introspective in the stone, he sees neither the one nor the other? But the absolute having taken shape, he leans over the tomb, puts his lips on the slab that grows cold, becomes the dream of his dream.

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Ten years later, emperor without empire, exiled in the red fort, he perceives only from afar, between rows of guards, on the other bank, the monument to his grief. Workmen busy themselves with the foundations of his own tomb, somber double of the luminous mausoleum. Later still . . . in mortal agony . . . in a broken mirror he contemplates the other side, Orpheus deprived of his song. Does he throw even then, dreaming, his arms of black marble across the river, to meet the white arches? It never happened. Today the dream falls on vacant land where the river lazes. And Aurangzeb, who usurped his throne, hopes the music is buried so deep that it never reappears on this earth.

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THE SKY at Pokhara, sometimes perfectly blue, is nevertheless not clear. A progressive opaqueness seems to hinder the gaze that is drawn to the distance, as if the peaks, though soaring, defended themselves again with I don’t know what veil obstructing our view. Unless it be a summons for us to approach them. Summons to conquest—or to communion? No doubt the gods are close to us here. No doubt they have followed these paths, bathed in this water, lived this quotidian of baked earth, passers-by among the passersby. Cruel, still they remain human, on the same footing as these men with whom they like to surround themselves, whose appearance they like to assume.

IS EURYDICE in this blue town? She walks on gangways between the cranes and the broken bales On docks oily with scales She enchants herself with those mournful globular eyes with that fixed expression Blind at the water’s edge She paces streets where the cars agglutinate Dignified she ignores them Her eye sweeps over the gloss of the placards and rejoins The shadow painted on the gray walls

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THE FULL MOON DISINTEGRATES The universe in a parley agrees to the breakup The cold light of the stars impregnates the night What matters the hour? The compass points north coexistent with freezing Last gasp for him who struggles in vain I turn to the wall As the blind animal drags the millstone Grinding the grain it crushes me with the same movement Stalactite of the scream in the untuned throat This flickering light which I thought dependable

THERE WAS THIS HELL This hubbub between us of boulevard of beltway Walls that reverberated separated movement The intrigue of buildings on uneven streets Ending in suburbs of uncertain love Not recognizing each other In the past no doubt we went down these alleys Windows closed on the town and our passing Afraid of the circle of lampposts Have we hurried like this all through the night Not recognizing each other? ÂŠ Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1992

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Toni Graham Hope Springs Even though thou seekest a body, thou wilt gain nothing but trouble. —Tibetan Book of the Dead

later steps onto the front porch to scoop up the morning newspaper. When he stands, he finds himself looking up at the eaves, just above the mailbox. Only yesterday, there was a large wasps’ nest there. He is embarrassed to admit to himself that he had not realized what the thing was: Living in Manhattan had not exactly made him an expert on Oklahoma entomology, unless one counted a nodding acquaintance with cockroaches. But he had received a sharply worded note from his mailman: unless he removed the nest, there would be no more home delivery. He is so allergic to stings that he has to carry an EpiPen to avoid anaphylaxis, so he was chary of dealing with the nest himself, and he sure as hell was not about to ask his wife to do it for him. At first, when looking through the Yellow Pages for a bug-extermination service, he was unable to find any. He soon realized that the heading “exterminators” no longer existed. Bug killers were now termed “pest control experts.” Slater felt like a wuss for seeking one at all. He remembered his father going out on the back patio of their family home carrying a Louisville Slugger and, with a powerhouse swing that would make Bonds-on-’roids look tame, sending a nest flying from the patio. When the pest-control van drove up yesterday morning, things grew rapidly worse: the exterminator was a woman. Slater was given the humiliating task of standing by while a petite female with a blond ponytail sprayed the nest with a can of something and then collected 125 ducats for being braver than the man of the house. Though Slater had always thought his father manlier than himself, he had not realized the old man was a stand-up guy until Poppy was gone. He and his sisters had often complained about what a coldhearted guy Poppy could be, and his suicide certainly seemed to confirm their opinion. Later, though, they learned that Poppy was a serial blood donor—earning several plaques and a write-up in the Albany newspa123

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per for record-breaking donations—that he had always given fifteen percent of his income to Jewish charities, and that he had designated himself an organ donor. The latter was not to be—the mandated autopsy interfered with Poppy’s attempt to give part of his body to someone who needed it more than he did. Slater and his sisters were stunned three months ago when legions of mourners showed up for Poppy’s memorial service: people they had never before seen. Weeping—all of them—as if these strangers themselves were Poppy’s family. Droves of them approached Slater, tearful or sobbing, to tell him what a wonderful man Isaac had been—that he had chauffeured them around, cooked for them when they were sick, come to their kids’ graduation ceremonies and bar mitzvahs, always weighed down with food and gifts. Their tears dried up momentarily when they began regaling Slater with tales of how funny Poppy had been—how he had been able to coax them out of their darkest moments with his good cheer and his hilarious jokes. Poppy, it seemed, was perceived by everyone but his family as a hybrid of Santa Claus, Robin Williams, and David Ben-Gurion. Before retirement, Poppy was a longshoreman, a thinking-man’s dock worker like Eric Hoffer. When he was a young hod carrier, he met Hoffer and even knew Harry Bridges; he remained a staunch union man until the day he took his own life. Suicide or not, everyone else at the funeral seemed to have believed all along that Poppy was a mensch. Now a lone wasp buzzes on the porch, flying frantically around the spot where the nest used to hang. The poor schmuck, thinks Slater: It went out for a while and came back to discover there has been some sort of wasp holocaust, leaving it alone in the world. Slater cannot help it: He feels bad for the creature and rather wishes he had not caved in to the mail carrier’s request. Back in the kitchen, he decides he would rather go out for breakfast and turns off the kettle. He knows his wife will sleep for at least another hour, so he leaves a note on the whiteboard: “Beth, Went to Sancho’s—back soon.” Usually he vets students’ projects on Saturday mornings, before he and Beth go out for a bike ride, but he has a hankering for huevos rancheros. Granted, the eggs will be Oklahoma style, not Tex-Mex, so he knows the unmistakable flavor of ketchup will taint the dish. The “Mexican” restaurant in Hope Springs is a place called Siesta Sancho’s, which has a red and green neon sign bearing a logo, the form of a man slumped against a wall with a sombrero pulled over his eyes, the prototypical racist vision of a lazy Mexican. The restaurant also sells T-shirts with the same snoozing image on the front. The shirts with the dozing, mustachioed, sombreroed Hispanic are pervasive in the town of Hope Springs. 124

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He goes quietly into the bedroom, where Beth sleeps belly-down, breathing deeply, her grey-flecked black hair curtaining one eye, an arm flung across the spot where Slater slept. In the mornings, she has begun to give off what he thinks of as a doughy smell, like sourdough bread, except less appealing. Nothing that comes with aging is beautiful or fresh—this much he knows. And if Slater is repelled by his wife’s yeasty smell, she has complained somewhat bitterly about the fact that he often “reeks” of garlic. Maybe her doughy smell and his garlicky smell commingle in their bed to mimic the scent of “Texas toast.” Slater picks up from the floor a pair of Levi’s and his Tool T-shirt and slips them on. Oh, shite, the T-shirt conjures a less-than-pleasant recollection. He had worn the Tool tee on campus earlier this week, nearly late for teaching his senior seminar. While normally he would have worn at least an Oxford-cloth shirt and khakis, dressing in jeans and a T-shirt is acceptable in his department—the architecture professors never dress up the way professors in some of the other departments do. A few of the guys in English and in Theater are downright fops. But wearing the Tool shirt turned out to be a particularly unfortunate choice. As he rushed across the parking lot and toward the architecture building, he heard a girl, probably an undergraduate, say to her friend—not even bothering to lower her voice—“I bet he is a huge tool, too.” Her friend laughed. Was simply being a fifty-nine-year old noticeably balding guy wearing a rock-band T-shirt reason enough to be considered a frickin’ tool? Maybe he had heard incorrectly—maybe she actually said, “I’ll bet he has a huge tool.” He puts on his Mets cap, glad that Beth is not awake to call him on the choice. She has often told him that most people are not fooled by the hat ploy. When she sees a man wearing a cap, she assumes the sartorial choice was made for one of only two reasons: he is very short and overcompensating by adding a hat, or he is bald. Well, what the fuck is he supposed to do: spray his bald spot with brown dye the way guys on TV do? When he steps out onto the porch again, he notices that the neighbors have affixed yellow ribbons to the trees in front of their houses. Who are they mourning now? he wonders. He has noticed for quite some time that Oklahomans seem nearly to enjoy P.D.G.: public displays of grief. There is always a flag at half staff in Oklahoma, often for some dead football coach or deceased Republican former governor. Just as during the historical Oklahoma land rush many had cheated by sneaking ahead early in order to claim the better homesteads, now they rush to get to the memorial services “sooner,” among the first to be photographed publicly sobbing. The Sooners come in droves, bearing Teddy bears and plastic-wrapped bunches of flowers, weeping and mugging for the cameras. 125

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He guesses that huge P.D.G. exercises are the only thing other than football championships that provide a sense of glamour here. Whether this aspect of Oklahoma culture is a sad consequence of the Oklahoma City bombing he cannot say. He and Beth came here years after the terrible disaster at the Murrah Building. Slater was a few years afterward offered an endowed chair at the university, reluctantly but sensibly leaving New York in order to accept the position. Beth left her job in advertising and opened a gift shop in Hope Springs. The yellow ribbons are perhaps Iraq related, he figures. He and Beth are anti-war blue voters, living in a red state that is gung ho about the war. He remembers the yellow-ribbon type very well from the Vietnamwar days. There was always a certain sort of person who loved wearing P.O.W. bracelets, loved war. In Oklahoma, many of those people, older now, have young adult children who wear W.W.J.D? bracelets, expecting the entire world to believe that every second of every day, they are wondering what Jesus would do. F

Slater seats himself in Sancho’s and without consulting the menu orders a pot of coffee and the huevos. He has chosen a booth in the rear of the restaurant, his back to the wall so that no one can see his bald spot. He removes his cap, then remembers he forgot to bring the newspaper. Slater habitually carries a small notebook in his jacket pocket in case he thinks of something he needs to take care of or wants to make a quick sketch. He pulls out the notebook and a pen and begins to make some notes in order to pass the time—face it, Slater—in order to seem occupied, to avoid looking like a sad sack. He has recently begun to find himself making lists, lists that serve no real purpose. He compiles the lists, then seldom peruses them again. He looks at the list he began last time he jotted in the notebook, “Things never to do: 1. Never answer the door to someone carrying a clipboard. 2. Never sit next to a midget on the bus.” (This one is certainly moot, as he has not been on a bus since they left New York.) He crosses out the word “midget” and replaces it with “dwarf.” After a moment, he crosses that out, too, and writes “little person.” Then he changes it back to “midget.” “3. Never trust someone who is always smiling.” Slater adds No. 4: “Never call a pest control service—do your own killing.” He looks up for a moment, and is surprised to see walking into Sancho’s the psychologist who runs the suicide-survivors workshop. “Dr. Jane” they call her—he thinks her last name is something like 126

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McPhee or McMillan—it can’t be McGraw—that’s Dr. Phil, isn’t it? Dr. Jane is the group facilitator, also a “suicide survivor.” Slater has heard from his friends who have been in rehab that the facilitators are always fellow addicts or fellow rape survivors, or fellow something-survivors. Slater prefers the more antiquated terminology: victim—he and the others in the group are all victims of suicide, no matter if the word “survivor” is now the preferred nomenclature. Dr. Jane is ordering coffee, and he cannot help but catch a good view of the back of her. She wears one of those ruffly knee-length full skirts he has been noticing on campus, but he can see that she has a nice ass, and her tanned legs are shapely. He knows that when she turns toward him, she will have cute little painted toenails emerging from her sandals. He feels himself stirring like some jacked-up seventh grader drooling over a sexy high-school girl, and his face heats. He is still married to Beth, has been married to her for thirty years, will probably always be married, and Dr. Jane is aware he has a spouse. He pages through the notebook, not wanting her to see him staring. She passes by his table on the way to her own, her eyes not visible behind Jackie-O sunglasses, and as she breezes by (yep, there are the red toenails), she only nods slightly, a tiny trace of a close-lipped smile of acknowledgment crossing her luscious lips. Damn—he had not realized until now that he has some sort of crush on her. He figures this is no different from the crushes students develop on their professors; he has heard about what shrinks call “transference.” F

Metallica’s Black Album plays on Slater’s car stereo as he drives home from breakfast. He turns up the volume even louder, the sound thumping through and from the car the way the gang-bangers at home drove around, glaring out their car windows at anyone who dared to object. He presses the lever to open both front windows, treating his neighbors to a sweet taste of metal as he drives down his own block. When he pulls into the driveway, he spots a man who appears to be in his twenties, jogging along, wearing running shorts and a Siesta Sancho’s T-shirt, accompanied by a Doberman. The guy slows to a walk and stares Slater down. He and the dog are both lousy with muscles. “Got that cranked up kind of loud, huh?” the guy says. The young man’s face wears no expression: he is either naturally poker-faced or is making an effort not to show his cards. Is his question a benign inquiry, or is it a challenge? Slater is not sure. “Rock on,” Slater responds. 127

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“Sure thing, old-timer,” the jogger says, then canters off without further comment. I ought to kick his ass, is Slater’s immediate thought, though he does not seriously consider such a foolish endeavor. But he feels the sting: Old-timer. He has become a codger, Slater realizes, a schlemiel. F

When Slater enters the kitchen, Beth is sitting at the table. In front of her rests a ceramic pot of what smells like mint tea, and she sips from a cup as she watches the tiny Sony tucked into a niche on one wall. “How was Sancho’s?” she says, her gaze still fixed on the TV screen. “Ketchupy.” Beth asks if he thinks the weather is O.K. for a bicycle ride, but Slater finds he has lost his zest for exercise. “Hon, would you mind? I wanted to watch the Mets game this morning, and then I need to do some prep work for the Price Tower trip.” In fact, he had planned neither; he just wants some time to himself. “Price Tower?” Her expression registers no recognition. “Beth, I told you—I’m taking my undergrads to Bartlesville this week—a field trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright building.” She says that oh, yes, now she remembers about the Price Tower trip, but then returns her attention to the TV and says, “Will you look at that, Dave?” When Slater follows her gaze to the TV, he sees a wedding cake on the screen. Beth picks up the remote and turns up the volume. “. . . entirely out of Krispy Kremes,” he hears the TV person say. Apparently a woman in Muskogee is selling wedding cakes made from Krispy Kreme doughnuts. What is more notable, it seems the woman can barely keep up with the orders for wedding cakes made of doughnuts, and is looking to expand her facilities. Beth laughs good-naturedly. Slater says nothing. This is the woman with whom he occupied the administration building at Columbia during the student strikes in ’68: the black-haired anti-war firebrand and fellow S.D.S. member, the woman with whom he had expected to be arrested. But on the evening of the second day of the building occupation, Beth’s period arrived, a week early, leaving her sitting in a pool of rancid red fluid, some of the other students around them whispering and looking sideways. That was the end of their revolutionary stint; Slater had to wrap his jacket around Beth’s waist and escort her out of the building, where media people rushed them, wanting to interview them about their defection from the cause. His father had been so pleased to learn that Slater was going to be a part of the student strike that Slater was never able to 128

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admit to him that he and Beth had made a premature exit.

Slater drives to downtown Hope Springs to pick up some items for the field trip to Bartlesville. He buys a case of Mountain Dew and a Styrofoam cooler at the Discount Depot, then stops at the pharmacy to pick up some Tylenol and enteric aspirin and a box of Band-Aids. But when he tries to pull open the glass door of the pharmacy, nothing gives. He takes off his shades and reads the sign on the door: “Closed for Memorial Day. See you tomorrow.” Annoyed, Slater heads back to his car, realizing he will need to make a sortie into Wal-Mart. But suddenly he sees something that takes the breath out of him: an old man wearing an American Legion cap, sitting in a lawn chair on the corner, selling paper poppies. Slater feels gut shot, even lurching to one side, off balance. Poppy. Nearly every time he has to reveal to someone the oppressive fact that he lost his father to suicide, the first thing the person says is, “How did he do it?” People ask horrible questions, rude and gruesome, and do so with benign, even consoling looks on their faces. Slater has to wonder if he himself might have asked such terrible things, before he became a “suicide survivor.” Slater continues to be stunned that instead of offering a politely sympathetic phrase, such as “I’m very sorry to hear that, Dave,” they seem to perk up—their voyeurism kicks in immediately. The only thing folks want to know about is the morbid details: Did he blow his head off, stab himself in the heart, jump off a bridge, drink drain cleaner? What was that song from the ’70s?—Just blow out your brains, James; jump off the Brooklyn span, Dan; gas yourself in the car, Gar; swallow cyanide, Clyde. And if asking Slater to furnish the grim details of the means of death is not enough, the next question is inevitably, “Did he leave a note?” Why does anyone care, and what does a note have to do with the death of one’s father? Is someone’s terrible demise supposed to become a source of entertainment? Fine, cough it up for everyone, he has decided; serve up the ghoulish details on a plate; give them the complete personal horror show. No: there was no note, folks. Poppy’s goodbye consisted of messages left on the answering machines of David and his sisters: “Sorry I missed you,” Poppy said. “Love ya’.” That “love ya’ ” was the closest his father had ever come in Slater’s entire life to saying, I love you, son. His father had never said the words “I love you,” or even “I’m proud of you,” not even once. 129

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How did he off himself? Slater wishes he could report that his father blew his brains out, a death both dramatic and masculine—a real crowd pleaser. But, no, Poppy never owned a gun, much less shot off his head like Hemingway or even like poor old Hunter Thompson or that kid Cobain. Poppy’s death was more like Marilyn Monroe’s, an uncharacteristically womanly mode of death: he simply swallowed an entire bottle of barbiturates, crawled between the sheets of his bed as if he were retiring for the night, and expired. The family knew Poppy had been despondent since Mom’s death, but they did not learn until after his exit that he had been diagnosed with a malignancy in one lung; Poppy had not chosen to share the bad news with his family. Couldn’t he have just had chemo like everyone else? Beth had been astonished the first time she heard him refer to his father as Poppy. They were still students, only just beginning to become a couple, when in conversation he mentioned Poppy. “Poppy?” she said, not even bothering to hide her laughter. “Googoo Da-Da.” Slater explained that the name Poppy was not a diminutive of Papa, but rather, referred to the brilliant red flower: poppy. Like most men in his age demographic, Poppy had served in World War II. Every year on the eve of Memorial Day—in those days, not yet celebrated on Mondays—he came home from the docks wearing a bright paper poppy on his lapel. Slater and his sisters made a joke of this habit—their father wearing what seemed to them to be a corsage struck them as hilarious. Mom shushed them, explaining that veterans sold the poppies to raise funds for disabled soldiers, and that Dad was being patriotic. Still, they had begun calling him Poppy after that, and the name stuck. He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and buys five poppies from the old veteran. Sorry I missed you. F

After waking, Slater lies in bed and halfheartedly considers masturbation, remembering a crudely humorous slogan he once heard: After fifty, never trust a fart or waste an erection. Well, he has not yet pooped his pants, but the few spontaneous erections he has more often than not go to waste. Maybe he has been dreaming about that juicy shrink. He has not for a fairly long period of time felt himself seriously tempted by an extramarital affair—he and Beth put all that behind them long ago, after some calamitous dalliances in the ’60s. In any case, the cheery Baptist women who populate the town are not to his taste. Even if he could stomach them, they wouldn’t consider a Jew—he 130

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might as well tattoo the mark-o’-the-beast on his forehead. There is not even one synagogue in the town; he and Beth had to drive an hour and a half to Tulsa during the High Holy Days. Slater kisses off the possibility of morning onanism, and instead gets out of bed. Beth has kicked the blankets and sheet away from her in the night, and her nude body lies motionless on the white bottom sheet like a cadaver on a slab. He cannot help but stare at her thinned-out pubic hair. Where there was once a luxuriant thatch, now there is only the gauziest webbing, her sex revealed like a baby’s. In the bathroom, he decides to change the cartridge in his Quattro and to use some of Beth’s aloe moisturizer after he shaves; tonight is the weekly meeting of the grief support group. Slater observes his hairy chest in the medicine cabinet mirror as he shaves his chin. One cannot ignore the ratio of hair loss to hair growth that is seen on aging bodies: the more hair Slater loses from his head, the more grows on his chest and back; and as for the nose, fageddaboutit—he has had to order one of those trimming devices from the Sharper Image. They say bald men are more virile, so he can perhaps understand the growth of body hair, but what about his “E.D.,” as they call it in the pharmaceutical ads. In the three months since Poppy’s death, he has been unable to have an erection with Beth. He resorted to ordering Viagra from the Internet, and he and Beth had sex successfully one time about a month ago. The stuff worked great, but it gave him such a blinding headache that he never risked it again. Hell—he read somewhere that even Tommy Lee had tried Viagra, and that the drummer suffered the worst headache of his life. Beth’s sex drive is no longer what it used to be, either, and she too suffers from the inverse-hair issue. Though she has barely any pubic hair, he has caught her in the bathroom ripping hair from her upper lip with wax strips, and shaving her toes in the tub. A velvety growth of hair coats her neck, and her formerly pristine thighs now sprout dark hairs. Whoever came up with the expression “aging gracefully” was entirely full of crap. F

“Metaphorically at least, he died in my arms,” a woman in their circle of metal folding chairs says. She is from Los Angeles—Slater has had to wonder fairly often why so many of the members of the griefsupport group are originally from outside Oklahoma. Well, if being devastated by a suicide is what it takes to introduce Slater to some other expats, so be it. He has come to cherish these Wednesday evenings, even though there is bound to be a lot of weeping every week, sometimes his 131

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own. The metaphor-woman owns a bookstore in Hope Springs, and her fiancé blew his brains out in their bedroom; Slater’s chest burns with pain for the poor girl. Those who commit suicide are in fact murderers; Slater has long known this to be true. The woman herself now addresses this very issue. She tells the group that her little son from an earlier marriage—an eight-year-old boy who had been very fond of his future stepfather—said to his mom, “Reed thought he was killing himself, but really he was killing all his friends.” Much nose blowing ensues in the room, and Slater’s eyes sting. Dr. Jane volunteers commentary on the possibility of the woman’s son obtaining some counseling, but Slater cannot concentrate on what she is saying. Rather, he finds himself looking again at Jane’s bright toenails, pink this time, easily visible in her thong sandals. It’s not that he has a foot fetish; rather, he finds looking at her lovely feet to be quite a bit easier than looking at her uptilted nose or directly into her eyes. Now that he realizes he is hot for her, he feels self-conscious. Slater does not wish her to find his behavior “inappropriate,” nor to think of him as some sort of randy bastard, even if that’s what he is. But now Slater feels like a kid in grammar school, because while he has been inattentive, it seems Dr. Jane has steered the conversation elsewhere. “David, what about you?” she says. Slater feels his ears flame as if he were under a sun lamp. He is embarrassed that he missed the switch in topic. The fact that she called him David instead of Dave heats him up a bit; sometimes using one’s proper name instead of a customary nickname seems the more intimate choice. His groin burns hotter than his neck, and for a moment he thinks he feels dizzy. “Searching,” Jane prompts him. “Did you engage in those behaviors?” He cues right in—just last Wednesday they had been talking about “searching behaviors” in the bereaved. It seems that after one loses a loved one, particularly if the loss is unexpected and sudden, the aggrieved person begins searching for the lost one, walking about the house in a daze, looking under the blankets on the bed, opening closets, and even looking into the bathtub. Equally prevalent is the desire to wear clothing of the deceased. Newly bereaved people are often seen wandering their houses in a fugue state, wearing the lost one’s bathrobe or sweater. Sometimes, they open the front door and peer out, as if the dead person is simply tardy and any minute will appear on the porch. This all takes place during what Dr. Jane terms the denial phase of grief. Slater reports that no, his situation had not mirrored the woman’s, 132

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as his dad was not living with him and Beth at the time of his death and thus Slater had no reason to look for him. Someone else picks up on the conversation and begins to share her experience. But what Slater has not told them is that there was an odd incident, one that frightened Beth. The night after his sister telephoned to tell them about Poppy, Slater walked in his sleep. Beth found him pacing up and down the hall naked at three o’clock in the morning. When she turned on the light, apparently he looked past her with unseeing eyes, and in a voice she later described as “unearthly,” he said, “Poppy?” She had to touch his shoulder and tell him several times, “Dave, you’re sleepwalking, everything’s O.K., come back to bed.” He engaged in sleepwalking one other time in his life, when he was four years old. His father went into the hospital for a ruptured appendix—whisked from the house by ambulance attendants and not coming back that evening. The toddler Slater was found by his mother in the middle of the night walking the house in his yellow jammies, making an eerie moaning sound that awakened her. In fact, he can still, more than half a century later, remember his mother picking him up in her arms and carrying him back to bed after he murmured “Daddy?” several times. In the morning, she told him he had been sleepwalking, and reminded him that Daddy was in the hospital, but would be home very soon. He does not share these recollections with the group; he keeps things to himself, his father’s spawn. What he encountered that night when his mother discovered his nocturnal roaming was a floor made of air, through which he was about to plummet; a cataclysm; the imploding of the universe. F

The university van brings them home from Bartlesville after 9 P.M.; the students are still talking to one another sotto voce or listening to their iPods, but Slater is wiped out. Field trips are not as invigorating as they used to be when he was a young assistant professor at Pratt. He thinks of all the corny old jokes the borscht-belt comedians used to make about the legs going first; too bad this turns out to be true—his calves began throbbing while he and the students were still walking Price Tower. “Did you know that the most common post-disaster injury is cut feet?” one of his students says to her seatmate. Slater is unable to hear the whispered response. Once the van has pulled into the lot outside the architecture building, Slater makes sure all the students are safely out of the van and into their cars, then climbs into his own car, his knees cracking like 133

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adolescent knuckles. God, he feels like he could use a nightcap, but this is a college town and he does not wish to run into any of his students in a bar. He opts to go up instead of down—caffeine, rather than alcohol— and stops the car in front of Sancho’s. From his car in the darkened parking lot, Slater’s view through the restaurant’s enormous plate-glass window is unobstructed. Sancho’s blazes in front of his eyes like a brilliant outdoor movie screen, and he feels as if he is back in the 1950s, sitting in the back seat of the family car at the Pageant drive-in theater. And it is not Liz Taylor or Pier Angeli who stars in this movie, but a leading lady more au courant: Dr. Jane sits in profile, backlit like an ingénue, sipping from a cup. He recognizes her by her upturned shiksa nose, adorable. Fatigue renders him loopy. His mind swings from its hinges for a few moments, careering into irregular space. A litany slices through his consciousness: I wish for just one day I were not married to Beth. I wish I had hair like Stone Phillips—if he’s not wearing a rug, the guy must have had a transplant. I wish I were named Stone instead of Dave. I wish I still lived in New York. I wish I had been a better son. Please, God, let me find a way to get Jane into bed with me and not get caught; God, send Poppy back—if only for a day, an hour. He watches Jane take a few more sips from the cup. One last thing slides into his mind as it reels along askew, something he once overheard one student say to another as the pair walked across the quad: “You can’t pray for what you want—God is not a short-order cook.” Slater knows he should go home to Beth rather than approach Jane in Sancho’s, but he resists the sensible part of his brain, the part that would have him wimp out. I’m going in, he decides—I’m not a eunuch yet. He first takes a whiff of his underarms, just in case the long day in Bartlesville rendered him rank. He seems to pass muster, so he gets out of the car and approaches Sancho’s. He decides that rather than letting on that he has seen Jane through the window, he should make the encounter seem like a bit of serendipity—he does not want to come off as a stalker. He will casually order a cup of Joe and then walk by her table, ostensibly on the way to a seat further in back. If she does not ask him to sit down, he will assert himself, say, Might I join you? But after he has the coffee in hand and turns away from the counter, something changes. Jane has seen him and is smiling, has even raised one hand slightly in greeting. She seems glad to see him. Her teeth are so white, he thinks. He feels himself smile, too, and strides toward her table, but—oh God, this cannot be happening. It’s one of those cartoon moments, a scene enacted myriad times in Hollywood comedies—the smile-over-the-shoulder scene, a bit of cheesy slapstick. 134

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It seems she is in fact smiling at some guy behind Slater; the smile and the little hand raise are for the other man. He hears Poppy’s voice in his ear: Tough it out, boy—never let ’em see you sweat. He will not let Jane know what has just gone down. He pretends he has only now noticed her, and nods in what he hopes is a businesslike manner as he passes her table. Once he is seated, his face engorged with heat, he takes the opportunity to scope out his competition, who is now seated at Jane’s table, facing Slater. It would have been too much to expect that Dr. Jane’s companion would appear effeminate or perhaps homely or even mildly handicapped. No: the bastard could give Johnny Depp a run for his money. He has dark hair, enough for five men, and wears a tight red T-shirt and Levi’s, the red shirt inflaming Slater’s ire, the showy son-of-a-bitch. And not only does he appear to be far younger than Slater and accordingly far more fit, he also appears to be younger than Jane herself. She must be at least forty, but the guy looks barely thirty. For one goofy moment, he thinks maybe the guy’s her son. But no, Jane and sonny-boy are doing what the entertainment programs on TV call “canoodling,” nothing flagrant, but a lot of looking into each other’s eyes and a bit of fingertip touching. What was I thinking? he wonders: I’m done, the guy with the Doberman had it right when he called me Old-timer. My parents are dead and I’m flat-out next in line for the Slater family plot. And there will be no one behind me in that grim queue—maybe we should have had kids; at least some of my DNA would remain in the universe. No wonder I can’t get it up, he thinks, I’m kaput. F

In the car on the way home, Slater attempts to tamp down his distress by turning up the volume on the radio, the Oklahoma City NPR station. The first thing he hears is the interviewer asking someone described as a scientist/professor, “So, are you saying that the invisibility cloak may no longer be simply science fiction?” The man answers, “Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as he wears a cloak made of this material.” It seems the guy is in the process of creating a cloak made of what is termed metamaterials, which can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation and visible light in any direction. The scientist claims, “We think we can present a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.” When Slater was nine years old, one of his uncles gave him a radio-controlled whoopee cushion for his birthday. The thing looked like a typical accent pillow, and could be strategically placed on a chair, 135

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primed for the chosen mark to sit on. The young Slater could control the device from another location, causing deplorable honks of flatulence to emit from beneath the unsuspecting sitter’s behind. The first time he tried out the device on his parents and sisters, he caused everyone in the room to laugh when he cried out, “It’s a dream come true!” But the real dream-come-true would be an invisibility cloak. Since early childhood, he has had a persistent fantasy of walking the earth in a mantle of invisibility. The wind has picked up as Slater drives home, and he can see that it’s about to rain. A loud, sharp crack of thunder causes him to flinch. But the thunder booming above him also initiates kinesis of his mind. He finds himself transported back to the first time he can recall hearing thunder, before he even knew what it was. He was at the time about the same age he was when his father had the appendectomy, and had felt not exactly frightened, but surprised when he heard a clap of thunder above the family home, as if a convoy of trucks was driving across the roof. His father had explained to him then about thunder and lightning, and took him to the window to observe the lightning flashes. He told his son that soon rain would begin to fall. When Slater asked how his father knew this, Poppy informed him that rain inevitably followed thunder and lightning. “When it starts to rain, can I go outside?” he asked Poppy. His father said as long as he cleared it with Mom, that would be fine. His mother dressed Slater in a slicker, red rubber boots, and a sou’wester rain hat, and he stood at the window until he saw the rain begin to fall. Poppy joined him then, wearing a Giants sweatshirt and a hard hat. He held young Slater’s hand in his callused paw and led him out into the garden. They sat on deck chairs near the lilacs and honeysuckle, faces upturned, Davie Slater opening his mouth to catch the raindrops. In the driveway in front of his house, Slater sits in the car in the rain, staring at the porch light that Beth has switched on, feeling immobile and heavy, as if his body were a sack of meal. His heart breaks for a moment when he spots that poor wasp still circling on the porch, slow to get the point that he is now homeless. He sits at first inert in the car, but before he knows it, his notebook is out and he is making a list beneath the glare of the dome light: “Things to do in the invisibility cloak: 1. God forgive me, but: follow Dr. Jane home and get the goods on her—is red shirt her lover? Does she look as good naked as she does with her clothes on? 2. Wear the cloak to the grief-support group and listen to what they say about me when they think I’m not there. 3. Follow Beth—see if she has an alternate life. Does she have some man with reams of curly hair, who never smells like garlic? 4. For this one, need time machine as well as invisibility 136

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cloak: Let me be with Poppy when he dies. If I cannot change what happened, at least let me be there to prevent my father from dying alone.” Slater stops writing, then rips the page from the notebook and crumples it. He does not wish anyone ever to learn of his base wishes and pitiful regrets—let him put an invisibility cloak around those. An invisibility cloak would need to be a cape, though, wouldn’t it? Yes, a cape with which to conceal oneself. He thinks of Superman, and then of Count Dracula. If Slater wore a Superman cape, he could fly through the sky with his arms out in front of him like the young, unmaimed Chris Reeve, perhaps carrying a Lois Lane (or a Dr. Jane) in his arms, a hero. Or he could don a darker cape, the Dracula stealth cape, which he could wrap around his creamy prey before he sank his teeth into her lovely stem of a neck and took them both all the way, all the way to eternal life. Suddenly Beth appears in the driveway and raps her knuckles on the driver’s-side window. When he rolls down the window, Slater sees his wife is weeping, her nose streaming and eyes red. He looks at her, at first uncomprehending. But then he realizes, My poor Beth, she knows the man she married might now as well be a thousand miles into the stratosphere. “Come inside, Dave,” she says. “You’ve been sitting here for half an hour.” The rain has become a soaking downfall, and Beth’s hair hangs in wet sheaves, lightning illuminating her face like a flashbulb shot capturing a catastrophe. “It’s just the grief,” Beth says, “the grief, that’s all it is.” He leans out the car window, reaching toward Beth, the cold rain soaking his outstretched hand. His wife’s weeping has a muffled quality, as if she cries behind a partition. She seems far away, pearly in the downpour like a Las Vegas stage illusion. What is vivid in this moment is Slater’s vision of what might be possible. He sees himself now, flying back to the scene of that dismal afternoon, this time wearing his invisibility cloak. He swoops down on the coffin before the ghoulish undertakers can lower his father into the soil. F

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WRITER’S PROCESS

Toni Graham

I have always believed the conception and development processes of a story should remain mysterious. When one knows how a story came to be, somehow the knowledge is analogous to knowing all the lyrics to a song: one does not care to sing a song much, after one knows all the words. I confess I have been waiting for an editor to ask me to say a few words about the process behind a story, as I had my response all ready to go—in the third person, as with our bios: Graham refuses to discuss her process. Yeah, that’s the ticket! But, as usual, the urge to blab is stronger than is the temptation of the cool demurral. Recently, I watched a video in which Jimmy Page was asked what his creative process was when writing music. First, he stared at the interviewer, then said, “There is no process. There’s just a creative spark, you know?” But here’s the deal: It took more than twenty years for me to garner the courage to write a story from the male narrative P.O.V. I gathered up my nerve and summoned my butch side and, to my surprise, found that I really liked writing from the male P.O.V., and could say things from David’s viewpoint that I would never allow my female characters to say. As for how this particular David story came to be: fragments from notebooks, bits of memory, weird snippets of flotsam from the unconscious mind. Drawing by Vicki Sher

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Melissa Green

LUPERCALIA I feasted on my heart when there was nothing else, fashioned a linen shirt out of my sutured flesh. I suckled at the teat of the she-wolf, metaphor, and let my mouth be taught the mother tongue of fire. From living rib I raised a hermitage of rhyme, the ax blade of my cries the seven hills of home.

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LEDA, LATER Remind me: my bed is empty, my graying hair pinned up and tumbling from a starfish clip where once a waterfall by Crivelli flowed over the white shoulders of Sparta. I do not quarrel with my warring children. Their bad marriages are their own affairs. I sit on the rocks and watch the waves, my toes now horny as a tortoiseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. That night a storm came off the sea. I saw St. Elmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fire electrify the spars and a bluish current quivered on my skin. I studied my egg-shaped oval in the glass, breath like a wing beat in my throat, wind tearing white curtains, my flesh, and feathers on my bed in flight. I am an old woman writing poetry. I never wanted intimacy with goddesses or gods, never wanted their dangerous progeny. I only dreamt of passion, possession, surrendering to the torque of human love.

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Design from the Aran Islands In the Aran Islands, in Ireland, women knit heavy

sweaters for their ﬁshermen husbands in a particular pattern that they will recognize when the body washes ashore.

I slept beneath an August mackerel sky and dreamt it was a thousand days ago, when in November’s grim barrage of rain which punished every port and guiltless quay for miles, my father’s scudding ghost agreed to die—a plashing afterthought to ruin. Hours passed before he drowned. It seemed the buckled sea had buried time itself by picking seismic quarrels with the stars, like soldiers streaming through a million Sommes. His rum-soaked timbers buffeted in surf, as combers ﬂecked the eyepiece love distorts. I saw him thrashing in the spray, it wrung the sheets and bed rails where his frantic hands had seized a momentary hold. I heard a roar, my name, the sailcloth grommets ring convulsions of goodbye. Hawsers ran with salt, engulﬁng what his ribs had shored. And we were anchored stones around the squall, arranged like village churches on a cape. Our stiff, entangled tongues could only mourn a mile or less, because the snow had quelled all sound. White-capped wool, pulled from kelp, keeps unraveling my father, his pattern, the man.

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THE VIGIL Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve dug my grave before I die and wait for my war dead there all night, braiding my hair by the hour. The anorexic moon is tired. The Squanicook is listless, crimping silently between gaunt trees, damp air fingering my dress, the grass where the dead are camping. I hear old guns embattling fields and see the lowliest soldier mount and ride the carbon decades, mined with stars. The blood-black sky is felt. Hoof prints spark the bridled sea, a froth of surf enchains her mouth as Wilfred Owen, turning north through Massachusetts, climbs to me. He flies through battered iron gates, dismounts, his tunic buttons light as fireflies, his epaulettes flash as he vaults the graves I guard. Past cenotaphs of angels, lambs, the skull-and-willow patterned stones, he stops before the twentieth urn where a maiden in relief is limned. He pins my marble cheek against his Croix de Guerre. His lips awake me from my anxious sleep, his breath a mist of sea spray, smoke. â&#x20AC;&#x153;My dear, you read me back to life. My rhymes, in your lovely mouth rehearsed, surprised me out of death. I heard you whisper, Wilfred, you must believe 142

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you did not die at Sambre Canal.” But now in his voice the shrapnel splits my heart, the hurt that buried him a pall. Shivering, as if he felt the shelling, nails of lead, could still be falling, a fusillade of golden ingots injuring us, I saw in his eyes the greenish murk of gas, and led him away by the hand like a child. The woods wept out their foliage, the Squanicook wrapped in midnight’s crêpe. We lay down beside the river’s edge. Covered like lovers in leaves, we slept. An ivory cameo carved by war in morning’s light looks rouged by love. My kisses were the sutures where his wounds and pallor both dissolved. He lost his color far from here. My faith has made him fair again. I tug up his collar, tuck in his hair, both nightmare and its terror gone. “Wilfred, go, it’s time you rode the withes and raddles of your verse, your language luminous and vast. Sometime recall your virginal bride.” His eyes are topaz, strewn with stars. “I’ll never leave you, wife,” he grins, and bareback, boyish, grips the reins and gallops through the scalloped bars. I wave him off, I wave him home by daylight, still in a limpid dream. Who enters poetry’s vaulted realm? Under my breath, I have his hymn.

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Embracing death, I take my life in mortal hands, where pain is bound by tourniquets of joy, and bones that calcify unbandage love. My eyes agleam with viruses, my human voice with its sweet stench, the suppurating none can stanch— I’ll liquefy with mysteries. Language made my longing free and caught it. Who smells the whiff of ichor? My body—both a skiff and anchor, the carious rose, its curious fire. A cloud in guayabara clasps its hands over the young day moon. The Muse is faint. The angels mourn their fall—the sounds a baby lisps are more divine and never leave the ear of God. East winds rise and ruffle up the underbrush. I sit beside my grave and laugh. The dead are vigilant. They wait. Carved out in Braille, my hands caress their metaphor and rhyme, erased by not a minute since their deaths. Brodsky’s cigarettes still burn like lasers through the paper birch, and Papa’s rifle-scope and scotch can crack the best prose ever born. Frost’s folksy scythe will surely mow a man down like a blade of grass, and Hardy’s gentle breath outgusts a blizzard on his bleakest moor.

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Lorca’s ancient lyrics catch on sword point young Europa’s bull, and Dante’s unerring eye will build a rose geneticists can never match. At noon, in no-man’s-land, I pledge to whet my knife on polished tomes the dead have left, no stone unturned. My pen point stabs and stabs the page. Tomorrow it begins anew: my violent loves, their overthrow. The littlest lark is whistling through the boughs. My song is tearing now.

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Timothy Brown The Third Principle

’m sitting in a man’s office watching him talk. He uses his hands a lot as he speaks to me, so much so that I’m starting to feel nervous. He firmly chops at the air as he ticks through his many points. He also jabs a beefy finger on the desk occasionally, so vigorously as to shake the pens around in their holder. Then he looks at me and gives a short, intent nod of his head. He’s trying to invite me into the conversation, but I’m not sure where to interject, so I just smile and nod back, trying to mimic his energy. He obviously cares a great deal about the subject matter, which I’ve pretty much lost track of by this point. I want to leave. When I’d first come in, I’d looked around a bit. There was a calendar on the wall from an insurance company next to some certificates or awards of some kind. There was a small gray filing cabinet in the corner, and a large-leafed plant near that. I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. There was a plastic wastebasket next to the plant, with a crumpledup Burger King bag in it. On his desk there was a picture of what I assumed was his wife, a blond vacant-looking woman, standing next to two bored-looking kids. No amount of airbrushing was going to make these people happy. After that, there wasn’t a lot to look at, except the walls, which were a pale tan color that made me sleepy. As much I tried to pay attention, I felt the old insistent pull of distraction coming on. I started to stare out the window at businesses up and down Aurora Avenue. There was a Baskin-Robbins over there, next to an oil-changing place. I watched the cars racing by, trying to calm myself. I considered playing slug bug, or name the out of state license plates. But I understood not to do that and told myself to sit up straight and pay attention. I needed to talk to this fellow about my résumé, which lay unread on his desk. It was a document, I might add, filled with lies and exaggerations. The man had begun talking as soon as I’d sat down, before I had a chance to deliver some whoppers to him about my work experience. He talked about various guidelines his company tried to follow. He outlined schemata for success. He ticked off a list of principles, holding up his hand and grasping his fingers one by one like this little piggy. He men-

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tioned a book that these principles were distilled from. I was vaguely familiar with the book, having glanced through it once while sitting on the couch in a now defunct used bookstore up in the University District. I grasped that these principles were important. There were five in all, though it seemed the third one was the cornerstone of the whole philosophy. I tried to follow his train of thought, but after a while, despite my best intentions, I spaced out. I started thinking; he probably learned these hand gestures in some seminar he went to at the Radisson near the airport, further down Aurora after it turns into Pacific Highway. I’ve seen these things advertised over the years. These are business seminars guaranteed to boost sales, instill confidence, and drive up revenue. Words like “dynamic,” “inspirational,” and “powerhouse” are often sprinkled through these ads. This is a whole area of life that I know nothing about, like sauce making or the Latvian language, but it is one that I’ve always worried I should be better acquainted with. There must be a connection, I reflected, as the man waved his hands, between my lack of understanding of business seminars and the chaos I feel roaming the edges of my life like wolves around a medieval village. I needed order in my life. I needed control. I resolved to listen to this man, feeling that he could fill a void. The Third Principle separates the wheat from the chaff. The chaff is self-doubt, lack of focus, failure to prioritize. The wheat is success! I tried to concentrate, but it was no use, my mind flittered away again like birds from a truck’s backfire. As the man talked, chopping and jabbing away, I imagined him sitting in the conference room at the Radisson with a bunch of other guys in Ross Dress for Less slacks and ties, listening intently to some big cheese talk about ways to spice up your presentation. There’s note-taking going on, the scratching of No. 2 pencils on pads, maybe whispers into pocket recorders. I’m sure there’s a pie chart somewhere, up in front. It’s all very serious and attentive until something odd happens: one of the men inexplicably bursts into flames. Then, of course, there’s confusion. He’s told to drop and roll, and there’s a sudden flurry of slacks and loafers as they try to put him out. Pencils tumble to the floor as the flaming man runs around the room. Curtains catch on fire, the air is filled with smoke and the hoarse sound of screaming men. I thought about that for a while, then tried a different scenario. Perhaps this man (who was, I realized, a version of me) says something completely irrelevant. A comment out in left field, a statement that reveals him to the room as an unfocused, wayward-thinking fool. There’s silence after he speaks, and the pencil scratching ceases. That’s really beside the point, the lecturer intones. We have to stick to the point, people. Remember the Third Principle? Come on. There’s a 147

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nod of heads around the room. The principles of success. The hidden advantage. The dynamics of leadership. Focus. Some of the newbies are looking through their manuals. Ah yes, page 12 talks about the Third Principle. They scan the passage with their forefingers, their lips silently moving. Stand up, the lecturer says, rather matter-of-factly. The irrelevant man stands. His head’s bowed. He’s slumped over so that his shirt bunches up. Perhaps he’s a little fat, and losing his hair, a bumbling, dense fellow, with sweat stains in his armpits, a man like the ones in commercials who are inexplicably married to the attractive, competent wife who always saves the day for the dumbass husband. The other guys are all pursing their lips and shaking their heads, pointing to their manuals, nodding at the lecturer. The irrelevant man is shamed. The seminar turns into a sort of Japanese/Druid situation, where the irrelevant man bows a lot and then has to commit ritual suicide on some kind of stone altar. The other salesmen are in hoods by this point, mumbling strange incantations, or better yet, quoting from the book of principles. I’m starting to chuckle at this as I sit there in the office, but I also feel bad for the man on the altar. He surely had no idea his day was going to turn out like this. He’s probably wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. Then I remember I’m in a job interview. The man behind the desk has stopped talking and chopping the air. He’s staring at me with eyes like little black plates. “I agree completely,” I said. For all I know, he might have been rattling off some of the odder statements on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the ones about being spied on or poisoned. He nodded vaguely at my comment, then looked down at my résumé on his desk. “So,” he said. “I see you’ve had some sales experience.” The Third Principle invites us to emphasize our positives, to put our best foot forward. It reminds us of the value of first impressions. It instructs us to build on our strengths, while encouraging us to acknowledge and improve on our weaknesses. I smiled. “Yes,” I said, aware suddenly of how strong his cologne was. It was really quite pervasive in the room, and there was no ventilation. It was a hot day and I was wearing a heavy suit coat I’d found at the Goodwill in Ballard. When I bought it, I’d thought it was black, but after I went outside, I’d realized it was a worn plum color. I was sure it looked absurd. I started to feel dizzy. I couldn’t remember the name of the company I’d put down for sales experience, though I did remember the job itself. It was a telemarketing place I’d worked in some years before, another job that had come to a sudden and ridiculous end. They’d had a little lecture about principles there, too, on the first day. After that, it 148

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never came up. I used to space out at that job as well, mostly in imagining various ways I wanted to torture or kill my supervisor. I sold lies in that job. It turned out all the coupon books I’d been trying to hawk over the phone to old ladies wanting a stocking stuffer for their granddaughter, or well-meaning housewives trying to save a little money for their family, had been fraudulent. They were supposed to offer discounts to local businesses, like restaurants and candy shops and oil changes, but none of the merchants would honor the coupons. I never got my last paycheck, because the cops raided them and when I came to work one afternoon there was police tape outside the building. I just kept driving. I was relieved, really; I felt bathed in acid during my time there and couldn’t make eye contact with anybody outside of work. My supervisor was a guy younger than me who liked to listen in on my calls. He said I didn’t push hard enough. An example: I had one old lady on the phone who said in a frail little voice how she’d have to cash her Social Security check to buy the coupons, but she supposed it would be nice to save her granddaughter some money. I already suspected the coupons were bullshit, so I told her, No, that’s O.K., this probably isn’t for you. I wanted to protect her from all the assholes of the world. My supervisor came running up; he’d been listening. He told me I blew the sale with her. You had her, he said. His face was frozen, but his eyes glittered with a hard light. His headset bobbed as he spoke. You had her, he repeated. I never sold any coupons and I was only at that job for two weeks anyway. I put two years on the résumé, though. The man behind the desk frowned as he looked at my document of lies. “Not O.K. to contact?” he said. “They went out of business,” I explained. “To be honest, I think they just didn’t grow fast enough.” He nodded enthusiastically. “That happens a lot,” he said. I felt another lecture coming on. He began talking about growth, niches, and marketing strategies. His hands began their dance again. The Third Principle offers relief from the burden of implications. It provides a trail of breadcrumbs through the torturous maze of self-reflection and hand wringing. It bolsters clarity, enhances selfconfidence. And best of all, it works! I stared at the insurance company calendar for a moment. The July picture was of two guys in 1940s-style hats shaking hands. There were little word balloons coming from their mouths, but the text was too small to read from where I was sitting. After that, I started to go Walter Mitty again, as the chopping and jabbing resumed. I was still thinking about the old lady whom I saved from the coupon swindle. I was wondering if she was dead by now. She probably was; she’d sounded pretty 149

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old and it had been some years since our brief interaction. I hoped she’d not been taken in by other telemarketers like my asshole supervisor, or had her savings ransacked by some other amoral prick. I had thought about this old lady quite a bit over the years; she had become a staple of my imagination. I had thought about what she might have looked like, what kind of house she lived in: a 1920s-style bungalow on a cool treelined street, the sort of house I’d walked by many times, without any reason to go inside. As the doomed interview progressed, I returned to that house. I imagined I’d gone there to meet her, to run though a list of hazards to look out for when people called. I could tell her about all the lowlifes out there waiting to rip her off. She’d nod politely and offer me more sugar cookies and tea while I talked. The house would have a porch, with a swing maybe . . . no, the swing’s too much, but there would at least have been plants. Ferns and azaleas, something pretty, but hardy, too, not easily hurt. I imagined knocking on her door and being invited in to her parlor one afternoon. We would sip our tea out of porcelain cups with rose patterns. Her house would have doilies and knickknacks, there would be a nice floral pattern in the wallpaper, a rose pattern on the carpet, and some solid handmade oak furniture lining the walls. The air might be a little musty, but in a good, comforting way. There would be pictures on the wall of her family, her children, her granddaughter, her dead husband, an old black-and-white one of a brother who died in North Africa in World War II. She would tell me all about that brother and the rest of her family, and her husband, who’d worked with the same company for many years. I imagined our visit was on a warm spring day filled with flower smells. The afternoon would pass into evening as we talked. As I left, I’d be comforted by the yellow glow of her light, and she’d stand in the doorway and wave and say goodbye in her little old-woman voice. After the old woman died, her family probably sold the house, sold all the oak furniture, maybe donated her clothes to a thrift store. The house might have got divided into apartments or rented out to some idiotic college students who would have had keggers in the back yard, or x parties in the front room, their stupid tongues lolling out of their heads. I imagined in time the delicate wallpaper would fade from all the pot and cigarette smoke. Perhaps one of the renters would find an old picture in the basement, a picture of her as a young woman with a gentle smile, taken during the Depression maybe, but this dumbass of a frat boy would probably just throw the picture away. Or maybe most of her stuff ended up in an estate sale. The phone gave a shrill ring. I blinked. I hoped the man had been talking, rather than staring at me while my eyes rolled around in my head, my mind resting languidly in an imaginary room. If so, he didn’t 150

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let on, just raised a meaty finger at me as he answered the phone. He answered it with the decisiveness he’d learned at the Radisson, but in the ensuing moments, his voice became quieter and quieter, like a hidden dial was being turned down. He became meek. He did a little Rodney Dangerfield gesture with his collar as he stared at the desktop. He glanced at me, then swiveled around in his chair so that his back was to me. Neither his desk nor his chair was made of oak, they were that cheap particleboard stuff. Who could afford oak? I stared at his back as he sat there, nervously clutching at his collar. There was a roll of fat on his neck that was sort of spilling over onto his shirt. His head hunched down more and more and his voice was very quiet. The Third Principle talks about the need for sacrifice. To keep disorder at bay, to keep one’s focus. There is a lot of burning of the midnight oil involved. This comes from loyalty and a sense of purpose. Companies, businesses, and civilizations are all built from hard work. As the man nodded into the phone, I thought some more about the old woman, particularly her pictures. This reminded me of the used bookstore in the U District where I used to go and browse books like the one about principles that the man had mentioned earlier on. I liked to sit on the big overstuffed couch there, unless the owner was sprawled out on it taking a nap. That bookstore closed after a customer discovered one evening that the owner wasn’t just taking a nap as usual, but was actually dead. Anyway, I remember they had a big container of postcards and pictures up near the front that I used to like to look through. Most of them were quite old, though there were a few newer ones, which I generally ignored. There were old vacation postcards: black-and-white pictures of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon with notes on the back: arrived here on the fifth, all’s well, see you soon. They had beautiful stamps like miniature lithographs, commemorating various historical events or the old presidential series with the busts in profile, or the Art Deco style during the Depression. Then there were the photos of various people, wearing hats and ties and long coats and wool scarves. Nobody wore T-shirts with lettering in those days, or toddler shorts. Some pictures showed them standing in front of large cars like Packards or De Sotos, or at train stations or docks, smiling next to a steamer trunk, preparing to embark on a long voyage. There were other ones of garden parties or days at the beach. These had inscriptions on the back: “Labor Day, 1937,” or “our house in Astoria.” There were infants and young children in some of these photos, who were now, I understood, old or passed on. I always wondered how these pictures had made their way to this corner of a Seattle bookstore. Someone had taken them there, in a shoebox perhaps, or a crumpled grocery bag. Someone, a grandchild 151

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maybe, needed a little more room in the garage. Or the pictures were left because of divorce, or death, and the grieving or aggrieved spouse wanted to clean house, make a new beginning. Or just as likely, they were left behind in some attic crawlspace, to be found by the new owners. Some of the pictures had odd perforations along the edges, which might have been from rat’s teeth, I suppose. I would find these same sort of old pictures at estate sales. That was another job I tried briefly, so briefly in fact that it didn’t even make it onto my sham of a résumé that the guy had pretended to read. A friend with a pickup truck convinced me to go to estate sales with him. Sometimes you can get great deals, he said. If the family’s just trying to get it over with, they’ll sell you grandma’s oak table for pennies, with the fine woodworking, the Old World craftsmanship . . . he was given to sales pitches, but I couldn’t match his enthusiasm. As always, the implications of things became a sort of paralysis. I was unable to haggle for the rolltop desk or the silver tea service or the Persian rug. I could not affix a monetary value to these things. My mind was, as always, plagued by disorder and lack of focus. The Third Principle has a lot to say about that. I finally remembered I was in an interview of some kind. The room had gotten very quiet. The man was off the phone now. I had stopped listening a while back, but it was clear the conversation had gone badly. He was just sitting there now, his eyes vacant and pained. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t speak. We sat there together, in that ugly little room, for a full minute. The tan paint was starting to make me sleepy again, so I gave a short dry cough, more to wake myself up than anything. The man looked up absently. He nodded, but the bounce, the decisiveness, was gone. His shoulders slumped. His hands were quiet now on the desktop, no more seminar gestures. Even his cologne had lost its edge. He looked back down at my résumé. There were other jobs I hadn’t bothered to include on that worthless document. There were the two days spent in an ice-cream factory filled with disgruntled teens and bitter middle-aged women, slouched on a shrieking assembly line. The old lady had returned in my reveries there, as I stood on the line. She was buying ice cream for a happy beloved grandson, unaware that it was made with curses and weariness, shoveled into vats by twitchy carpal-tunneled hands. There was the job painting exercise equipment that led to nights of ominous headaches from the fumes. There was the three hours spent in a meatpacking plant that I try not to ever think about. I had been looking for order for a long time. I had absolutely no interest in sales, none, but somehow I’d thought that this sort of thing would fix my life. I needed the money, but beyond the money, I wanted 152

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structure. I had too many impulses roaming all over the map. I had thought having more structure in my life would be a positive step, like eliminating fat from my diet, or learning computer programming. “Well,” said the man. He was fiddling with my résumé, sliding it around the desktop as if he were trying to remove a stain. I understood that we were done here. I felt embarrassed, sweating in my plum-colored coat in front of this stranger. I very much wanted to leave and, if nothing else, go home and regroup in my boarding-house room. This house was likely just a few years away from demolition, but the rent was cheap. It had probably been some family house, too, ages ago, I reflected, before it got divided up into apartments. It had some nice woodworking on the stairs that had been whitewashed over, and some ancient carpet that might have once had an elaborate design of roses. Just like the old lady’s, I thought, forgetting for the moment that I had never actually seen her place, that her quiet room of lace and china was a fiction. Not that those distinctions really matter, in the end. I looked at the man sliding my résumé around on his desktop. He looked at me without focusing. I was already part of the past to him. “We’ve got your contact information,” he muttered. “Turns out we’re going to hold off on hiring for a bit. Doing some reorganization.” He glanced at the picture of his family, held his gaze there for a moment, frowned, and looked away. The Third Principle deals with order, focus, and relevancy. Things are just things, God damn it, not portals into imaginary rooms of lace or fire, or lost spring afternoons heavy with the smell of flowers. Not everything has to have a lineage, a chain of connections. Ice cream tastes good. What else matters? The pictures and postcards are just pieces of paper. With a little spit and polish, the oak desk could bring a handsome profit. The Third Principle informs us that life has no z-axis; it is not filled with occult meanings and etheric connections. But the Third Principle is positive. It says you have something to contribute. Yes, you do! Outside, I yanked off the heavy coat, squinting in the day’s brightness. A familiar surge of gratitude filled my chest, the same momentary exhilaration I’d felt when I saw that police tape, and when the headaches from the paint fumes finally went away, and all the other times I’d managed to sidestep another worthless good intention. I resolved to go for a long walk and enjoy this feeling while I could. I knew that, soon enough, the realization would arrive: I was no better off than before, and I needed a job, and money, and my life was going nowhere. I remember a few weeks before the bookstore owner died, I was picking through the box of pictures. As I said, I usually ignore the newer ones, but there was a snapshot of a busy day on The Avenue that 153

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drew my attention. I recognized all the buildings: the coffee shop I liked to hang around in, the street corner Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve passed a thousand times. There was the Indian restaurant and the magazine stand. There were many people coming and going, as they often are in that neighborhood. It was a rain-soaked winter day from the look of how they were dressed. As I pored over the photograph, my attention was drawn to its lower right corner, where the camera caught a man in a raincoat just as he was crossing the street. He was a very serious-looking fellow, seemingly in a hurry, his head down, lost in thought, on his way somewhere. In matters such as these, the Third Principle is useless, silent. That I was looking at a random image of a street scene, of cars passing, a man in a raincoat. That I pondered about this character and, as I had with so many other pictures, began to wonder about his life, what drew him, compelled him. That I looked at this blurred stranger from an unknown day, inventing for him a childhood home, a favorite hobby, a cherished dream. What does the Third Principle say of this? That only after a long minute of these speculations did I realize as the picture wavered in my hand that I already knew this manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story. I studied the photograph, feeling my own inevitable slide into history, holding this preview of myself as an artifact to be puzzled over, a relic of lost time. I was looking at a picture of me. F

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found the letter in the P.O. box one afternoon in May and immediately recognized the handwriting on the envelope. It was a note, really, written on a scratch of greasy paper. I imagined Jo-Jo marking the page on impulse in the middle of the night, holding the pen askew. She asked if she could come to the house and stay with us for a while. At that time, we had been married for almost a year and were living in my mother’s summerhouse on the Cape. Most people with houses there never see the winter. The town was without traffic, many of the shops and restaurants were closed, and few shoppers trolled the aisles in the grocery store. I felt sheltered and removed from the world. The handful of townies were friendly to me and greeted me by name when I went in for our weekly groceries or to put gas in the car, even though the house was close to the shore, several miles from town and accessible only by a rocky sand path. We had moved in during the summer, driving straight from our honeymoon in Vermont. I tended my mother’s garden until the weather stopped me. Then I bought pumpkins from the farmers’ market in town and carved them myself in the yard on sheets of newspaper. The gap-toothed jack-o’-lanterns sat on the porch until their skin grew soft. The seeds I roasted and salted. When winter came, there was less to do. I’d given up my job in Boston at a small academic journal as a kind of compromise: I had no job, but we had a place to live and Gabe had a place to write while on sabbatical. Eventually, we’d have to move back to the city. That winter, the cinnamon-colored sand was dusted with snow. The sea took on different colors, darkening in contrast to the grayed paleness of the sky. I spent several late afternoons on the beach, sitting on a sleeping bag, wrapped in a heavy fishermen’s sweater with a blanket draped over my shoulders, watching the sea’s curl and toss, the way it behaved when no one was there to see it. The sea was a constant presence. At night I lay in bed and listened to it, its steady inhalation and exhalation. I could sometimes 155

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imagine that the sound rocked me back and forth and that the water had actually curled its ink-black arm under the house and was carrying me away. Our life there suited Gabe especially well. The house was spacious and spare in its furnishings. There was a study for him to work in and he spent most of each day holed up with his typewriter. So, when I got Jo-Jo’s letter, I thought of summer. I told Gabe about Jo-Jo’s note after dinner, when he was having a glass of wine. “She wants to come here? For how long?” I told him I didn’t know, which was true. Gabe furrowed his brow and drew in his lips, then leaned back in his chair. He’d poured the wine into his cup but hadn’t yet touched it. By the end of the night, he’d have drunk about half the glass as if the presence of the wine was enough to produce the effect he wanted. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Gabe could hardly deny me a visit from an old friend. The house was suitable for his work, but I had given mine up. His eyes looked me over. “Well,” he said finally, “I just hope she doesn’t plan to stay for the whole summer.” He paused. “And, that she doesn’t interfere with my work.” I smiled in such a way as to let Gabe know I thought what he had said was ridiculous, which caused his frown to burrow deeper into his skin. I did not mention the urgent tone of her letter or my suspicion that her request had something to do with a soured love affair. That same night, I wrote Jo-Jo a reply, inviting her to come see us as soon as she wanted. “We have plenty of room,” I said. “Gabe keeps to himself most of the day in the study.” I did not ask how long she intended to be with us. The next day, I drove into town and dropped the letter into the mailbox in front of the post office. The moment the letter had slid irrevocably into the wide-slit mouth of the box, I felt a trill of nervousness. Jo-Jo and I had met at university. I came from a small, all-white town in Maine where there were no Jews or immigrants. I found myself at a university with a student body three times the population of my entire town. The differentness of the others only highlighted my ordinariness. I was just Ann, from Maine. I made friends with another girl on my floor in the dormitory who like me was from a small town. But this girl saw nothing impressive in those around her. Instead, she complained constantly about their otherness, of how they were all foreigners or, if they weren’t really, at least looked or acted like foreigners. She complained about her roommate as well, a girl she called “Josephine,” who was a slob 156

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and smoked too much, burning things sometimes, and talked like a European but had hair like she was something else, the roommate didn’t know what. I listened and nodded solemnly to all of this girl’s complaints. In truth, she was not really my friend and if I had stopped to think about it, I would have had to admit to myself that I did not like her very much. But I was alone, adrift and nervous that I would get lost trying to find my classes. This girl, whose name I have forgotten, anchored me. Until one day I went by her room and found Jo-Jo there instead. She was smoking and shook my hand with rough enthusiasm, as I’d seen my father do with his colleagues. She introduced herself as Josefina. When I sat down on her roommate’s bed, the only space not covered by clothing or clutter, Jo-Jo’s eyes surveyed the room. She smiled unself-consciously, as if the mess were something independent of her, something she could not control. Jo-Jo asked me questions about myself and nodded at my answers, encouraging me. She was the first person I had met who seemed interested in me. Jo-Jo had had experiences I had not. She had slept with a few boys, had smoked pot and snorted coke. She got drunk fairly often. “Don’t be afraid of this place,” she said. “We’ll go to parties, you’ll meet people. You’ll see it’s not so big.” My allegiance quickly shifted from the roommate to Jo-Jo, and after that the roommate would not acknowledge me if she passed me in the hallway. But I didn’t care. After college, I found a stable job and a small apartment and began to build the life I had always been expected to have. Jo-Jo found part-time jobs, which she fit together like mismatched puzzle pieces in order to support herself. She began painting and had a series of artist boyfriends. There were many times when my apartment was a haven for her, a place to come down, hide out, or make up a new plan. I was glad to help her. Perhaps, selfishly, I enjoyed the sliver of drama she brought to my life, which carried with it none of the usual trappings, simply because it did not belong to me. F

Gabe I met at a dinner party, or what I had thought was a dinner party but turned out to be a Seder. I had been embarrassed at first by the misunderstanding, by the wine I had brought that I doubted was kosher. But there were many Gentiles there and the abundance of alcohol created a jovial atmosphere. The host explained each prayer, 157

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the significance of the fingers dipped in the wine and the horseradish on the plate. When he mentioned the plagues on the Egyptians, his wife began throwing plastic frogs, and one plopped in my water glass. Gabe sat across the table from me. He spent most of the evening engaged in an intense conversation with a man seated beside him and he seemed unaware of the rest of the guests, leaving me free to study him openly. Gabe’s hair was nearly black, with a few strands of silver. The yarmulke on the bald head next to him seemed slightly ridiculous but on Gabe it was sort of sophisticated. He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses that made him appear scholarly. I guessed he was a professor, the kind that had intimidated me when I was at university by casually dropping enormous amounts of information, leaving me to struggle to collect bits of things and put them together into something coherent. Though I had enjoyed watching Gabe, I made no effort to talk to him. When I left the Seder, though, I found myself sharing the elevator with him, jolting downwards towards the street. “You were at the party?” he said, standing beside me but staring at the elevator door. I awkwardly confirmed that I was. “I thought so. You were the woman who was looking at me.” I blushed, unable to think of a response. But Gabe only laughed, and I realized then that he had made a joke. When I smiled, he invited me to have a drink with him. I learned that Gabe was the child of Holocaust survivors and had grown up in New Jersey. I had not been wrong in suspecting he was a scholar. He was an historian, and was writing a definitive history of the Jews in the Americas in the last century, a book he would work on in the time we were together before marrying and would continue to be plagued by during the year we spent in the summerhouse, though by the end of that year it would be irrevocably lost. His parents had been closemouthed people who never wanted to discuss the past and had shown no emotion when pushed into doing so. They had already died by the time I met Gabe, but he conjured them for me through imitation. “What you want to talk about that for?” he would say with a stern expression, one hand on his hip. “The past should stay where it lie.” We had a small wedding, in my mother’s garden in Maine, with a three-layer cake she and I made ourselves. Jo-Jo, in a rare nod towards fashion, wore green silk, which brought out the undertones in her pale skin and accentuated the darkness of her hair. A few bachelors, including my friend Michael, came up to me, congratulated me, and then attempted to subtly inquire about my friend in the green dress. 158

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In fact, towards dusk I saw Jo-Jo, talking and laughing with Michael, place her hand on his arm. F

A week and three days after I sent the letter to Jo-Jo, she arrived. She had not sent me a reply and I had not really expected one. I was in the kitchen laying crust into a pie plate when I saw her through the window. The wind blew her hair in a black streak across her face and she was borne by camel-colored clouds of dust on both sides of her body as whatever vehicle had brought her pulled away. I wiped my hands on my jeans and bounded out of the house. The screen door banged behind me. In a moment, I had my arms wrapped around Jo-Jo’s narrow body. Her head bowed over mine, like an enormous flower on a thin stalk. “I had to ask people in town where you lived!” “Didn’t you have our address?” “Yes, but I had no idea how to get here! I just got off the bus in Barnstable and starting asking around.” We pulled away and looked each other over. Jo-Jo’s smile was sheepish. The tip of one tooth jutted out ever so slightly over her lip and the sun made it shine, as if she had a gemstone in her mouth. Sand had covered her hair and skin in a fine brown powder. Jo-Jo raised an arm and used her hand as a visor. A stripe of skin became visible between the waistline of her jeans and the hem of her blouse. “God, you make me think how old I’m getting.” “How’s that?” I didn’t reply, moving forward instead to hug her again. I felt her laughter shake through her ribcage. I had always enjoyed listening to Jo-Jo’s voice. It was burgundy with a slight, untraceable accent. She had been born in Italy, where her father was from, then moved to England with her British mother at age fifteen, when her parents separated. Later, she ended up in California with her mother’s relatives. The screen door opened again and we unfolded from each other to find Gabe standing on the porch. In the shade from the house, I could not make out his expression. Gabe moved closer and his hand jutted out for Jo-Jo to shake. “Hello, Josefina,” he said, pronouncing her name awkwardly. “You, uh, found the house, I see.” I heard the discomfort in Gabe’s voice and felt the reaching in him, the effort it took for him to uncurl from himself and engage with this other person. In that moment, I felt a tender clutching for this man who was truly not good with people but who was trying to 159

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hide that fact, for my sake. A smile unfurled brightly across Jo-Jo’s face as she took Gabe’s hand and shook it firmly. “Thank you for welcoming me. I hope I’m not a pest, am I?” “No,” Gabe said, a little too insistently, trying too hard to make his answer sound sincere. “Anyway, you’ll be company for Annie.” Normally Gabe called me “Ann.” I wondered if he was giving me a nickname in order to draw attention to the intimacy between us, or between Jo-Jo and me. I invited Jo-Jo in and showed her to her room, a small guest bedroom down the hall from the kitchen. I made an early lunch while she unpacked and washed up, setting aside the pie I’d intended to bake. I’d noticed that she’d only brought a small suitcase and my heart skipped over like a pebble, as I realized she probably would not be with us for long. Gabe took his lunch into the study, leaving us alone in the kitchen. Jo-Jo, wearing fresh clothes, her skin now clean of sand, reached across the table and touched her fingertip to mine. She smiled but there was a different look in her eyes now. Her eyelids appeared heavier, the lashes moist. I said I was glad she had come. Jo-Jo sighed and leaned back in her chair, her long limbs spreading out, one leg bent, the other held out straight, a hand hanging from the open triangle of her arm on the chair back. “I needed to get away from”—her hand made a limp half-circle— “everything.” I asked her who “everything” was. Jo-Jo pursed her lips. “Let me show you something.” She opened her mouth, pulling her lips back. “See this?” she said, tapping her top row of teeth. I leaned forward and saw a large chip in her eyetooth, as if the corner had been neatly sliced off. I nodded and she closed her mouth. “He did that.” I felt a cold rush over my skin. “He beat you?” “I don’t know what word you would use. He pushed me. I fell down some stairs. I’m lucky nothing worse happened.” I put my hand over my mouth and began to finger my teeth through my lips. With my other hand, I reached out across the table towards her. Jo-Jo was looking at the floor and through her parted lips I could see her tongue rubbing the spot where part of her tooth was missing. “The terrible thing,” she said in a voice almost too low for me to hear, as if she were not talking to me, “is that I still love him.” 160

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I said nothing for a few moments. With such a terrible trespass, didn’t love just evaporate? Jo-Jo’s gaze slid towards me. She was gauging my reaction. “But what does that mean?” she asked, suddenly sitting up straight. “It’s just a word, a name for some feeling I have. I don’t know what it means.” Jo-Jo stood up and began fishing in her pockets. She pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and slid one out. From her back pocket she removed a match. She moved as if to strike it on the sole of her shoe, then realized she wasn’t wearing shoes. Just then, I looked up and saw Gabe standing in the doorway. Jo-Jo had her back to him. I watched him look at the battered pack of cigarettes lying on the table and then scowl at Jo-Jo. His gaze met mine for only a moment and I saw in his expression what I thought was disgust, or contempt. Then, without a word, he retreated back into the shroud of the hallway. The entire scene [had passed within seconds.] I felt my face flush. I wondered how much he had heard of our conversation. Jo-Jo got up and opened one of the drawers next to the sink. “Do you have any matches in here?” F

That night at dinner, Jo-Jo did most of the talking, while Gabe sat at his place at the head of the table, his eyes, behind his glasses, flitting from Jo-Jo to his plate, while his jaw steadily ground his food. I tried to govern the conversation by asking Jo-Jo innocuous questions about her parents. “My father has this new little”—her hand made a half circle in the air—“girl.” Her tongue rolled the “r” in the word. “You should see her. I said, ‘Papa, is this legal?’ and he just smiled.” Jo-Jo shook her head. “The older he gets, the younger the snatch.” I glanced at Gabe and saw that he had stopped chewing, though he was holding his fork midway between his plate and his mouth. Perhaps sensing his gaze, Jo-Jo turned towards Gabe and lifted her glass, toasting him. “Am I right, old man?” she said, and winked. Then she reached out and patted me on the arm. “Look at our young Annie here. Quite the catch.” Jo-Jo was now smiling at me and seemed not to notice the tinny clatter Gabe’s fork made as he let it drop onto his plate. I tried to meet his gaze and smile in a way that would say, She’s something, isn’t she? Our colorful guest! and diffuse his frustration but Gabe was looking at the wall above our heads and didn’t give me the opportunity. After dinner, Gabe retreated to his study while Jo-Jo and I stayed 161

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at the table, amidst the remains of the meal. It was then that she announced her intention to go into town. From the way she said it, “I think I’ll go . . . ” it was clear she wanted to be alone. I offered her my car but she said no, shaking her head—she’d walk. When I pointed out that it would be difficult to walk such a distance in the dark, Jo-Jo shrugged and said she’d get a ride somehow. Later, after she had gone, I sat in the living room in the silence, which summoned Gabe like a bear coming out of hibernation. When he asked about Jo-Jo and I told him where she’d gone he said nothing but put his hand over mine. Then the hand curled around, like a shell, and stayed there, pressing down on my fingers. That night, I lay in bed awake beside Gabe, his body lost to heavy sleep. Like an anxious mother, I waited for Jo-Jo to return. I could not help thinking about what she had told me over lunch. I’d always believed that abusive men were attracted to a certain sort of woman, a woman who seemed easy to hurt or who wanted to be controlled in some way. I had never thought of Jo-Jo as being like that. Nor had she ever complained of abuse from previous boyfriends. Now I wondered if there had been other incidents in the past, maybe not things definitively abusive but a way of arguing, a grab for her arm or wrist. I imagined Jo-Jo making the first move, trying to slap a man, clawing him accidentally and the way that he might first try to restrain her before striking back. Gabe rolled towards me in his sleep and his arm fit snugly around me, pulling me towards him. His face nestled in the crook of my neck and I could feel the heat of his breath. His lips touched me and he began to rub my skin. He moved, kissing me, and I felt his erection, perhaps a side-effect of some dream. F

In the morning, I found Jo-Jo sitting at the kitchen table with coffee she had made. “I found your stash of filters,” she said, sipping from her mug. “What happened to you last night? I never heard you come in.” “I slept on the beach.” “On the beach?” She nodded. “Well, there was no one around. And it was just so beautiful, the Sound. I wanted to be closer to it.” I stared at her. But why was I surprised? It was not as if sleeping on the beach was really that bizarre. And Jo-Jo was right, there was no one around. Our nearest neighbor was a few miles away. “Oh,” I said. The words “I was worried” formed in my mouth, 162

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then dissolved. I looked Jo-Jo over more critically than I had the day before. Perhaps feeling the scrutiny of my gaze, Jo-Jo abruptly stood up, put her cup in the sink, and announced that she was going for a walk. I sat at the empty table with my arms at my sides. The room felt truly vacant, as if even my presence were an absence. After a few minutes, I got up and walked outside, barefoot, towards the beach. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I searched for Jo-Jo. I looked far out, not realizing that she was only about twenty feet away, sitting in the sand. I walked towards her. She was staring intently at the sea. When I drew closer, I dropped down in the sand beside her. It wasn’t yet late enough in the day for the sand to burn. We sat there for a few minutes, side by side, not speaking. I looked out at the ocean, the surf rolling in as if searching the beach for something. Later, the tide would rise and cover the place where we were sitting, Jo-Jo in an old T-shirt and boxer shorts, I in my thin nightgown. It felt ridiculous to be wearing such a thing in the sun. Jo-Jo began to speak, as if voicing a portion of a conversation we’d been having all along, silently. “You don’t know what it means, to love a man and have him betray you . . . make you betray yourself. He hurts you. Again and again, in different ways. But you stay and it makes you feel like shit, like an addict, pathetic.” She sucked in her breath. “Who is he? You’ve told me nothing about him.” Jo-Jo looked at me. Without my noticing, the clouds had gathered around the sun. Jo-Jo put her hand over mine and her fingers worked their way between my own. “He’s . . . I didn’t want to tell you, because it’s someone you know. It’s Michael.” “Michael?” The memory of their flirtation came back to me. I met Michael when he started out as an intern at the journal I worked for. By now he might have been promoted to my old job. I remembered him making coffee for everyone in the office and talking about volunteering at an animal shelter on the weekends. “But . . . he’s a good guy,” I said stupidly. Jo-Jo’s hand squeezed mine. “Well, maybe he is. Maybe he’s a good guy with everyone except me. But with me, he’s a beast.” “Well, everyone has that in them.” “Are you talking about Michael or about me?” “Michael. Michael, of course.” Jo-Jo tossed her hair, which moved in one mass. “But if I bring it out in him, then there’s part of me that’s monstrous, too.” 163

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I told her that wasn’t possible. I knew her better than Michael did. Jo-Jo seemed to relax a bit when she heard this. She’d been hugging her knees to her chest but now her arms stretched out behind her, digging into the sand. I tried to banish from my mind the memory of the doubts I’d had the night before, the image I’d conjured of Jo-Jo provoking a man, making him lose control. Now it wasn’t just a man, it was Michael. I felt a prickling of guilt and, remotely, shame. I suggested we go back in the house and make pancakes. Jo-Jo seemed to think about the offer for a moment, turning her knees from side to side, as if she had transformed into the adolescent girl I first met years ago. “All right,” she said, but when she stood up, in one graceful movement, and began to walk slowly back to the house, it was clear that the moment had ended and the eighteen-year-old had vanished. In the kitchen, while we chatted, Jo-Jo put herself to work, taking a mixing bowl from the cabinet as if she had been living in the house for months. She began to wash the blueberries. Some kind of spell had been broken, though I didn’t know what it was. F

The rain came. Jo-Jo and I went into town and filled our purses with candy, then saw a movie at the empty theater, which ran the same movie for months at a time. We had lunch and sat in the café for hours, long after we had ceased to pay attention to our half-eaten food, after the sullen waitress had come to take it away. We were the only customers, so we leaned halfway across the table to talk. I waited for Jo-Jo to say more about Michael but she talked instead about the odd jobs she was still doing, how she struggled to make ends meet. She worked as a waitress in a bar, which kept her up nights. She slept all morning and woke up in time to teach private art classes to children whose parents paid her to come to their townhouses. Sometimes, she got occasional translation work, Italian-to-English. She complained that her apartment was a dump, a drafty studio on the Lower East Side with the previous tenant’s graffiti still on the walls. As Jo-Jo talked, I waited for the moment when she would turn the conversation over to me. When she would say, “What about you?” and then ask me about Gabe. I prepared my answers to some of the questions I expected, but they never came. Jo-Jo talked almost compulsively, and then when she changed the topic to my life, she asked questions about the house, about the job I’d left in Boston. “Don’t you miss it, working?” she asked. 164

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I picked up my mug of cold tea and held it in my hands. “Yes and no. I worked hard, correcting the mistakes of these professors, these people with Ph.D.s whose spelling was worse than undergraduates’. It was hurting my eyes, really. And I wasn’t getting paid enough.” I looked out the window at the obscuring rain, the street black and running like a deep river. “It’s quiet here,” I said. “I like it, the beauty.” Jo-Jo was looking at me and smiling a small, close-lipped smile. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Then her smile widened, and she said, “Hey, let’s get some wine to bring back with us, maybe some good cheese, too.” We arrived back at the house with our arms heavy with paper bags, full of red wine and brie, goat cheese, round sesame crackers, and fruit, jogging up and down as we raced from the car. The moment I opened the door I could feel the stillness of the house. I knew Gabe was there in his study. I paused, just inside the doorway, listening for the rat-a-tat-tat of his typewriter. Jo-Jo brushed past me, plunked her bags down on the counter, and laughed. “Look! The bottom’s all wet. I thought the bottles were going to come right through and crash.” She bent forward and stuck her hands into her wet, matted hair. “I’m going to get a towel,” she said, and skipped out of the room. I began removing things from the bags. I put the cheeses on a platter and began washing the grapes and berries in the sink. “Ah, bello!” Jo-Jo said as she came back into the room, a towel draped over her shoulders, her hair tangled. “Let’s have a little postlunch feast.” Jo-Jo filled our wineglasses and we carried food-laden plates into the living room, my favorite room, with its big yielding couch and abundant light even in bad weather. Jo-Jo put on some music, the kind of slow-paced rock, with mournful lyrics, that we listened to in college. We settled into the couch, which folded around us as if it would never let us go. We talked about whether or not Jo-Jo should cut her hair, about what kind of job I should look for when we left the house—Jo-Jo was emphatic that I should start my own academic journal, despite my lack of funding or qualifications. We talked about the children we didn’t have. Rolling a blob of brie between her fingers, Jo-Jo spoke about the exhaustion of the parents she worked for, the expressions of gratitude on their faces when she appeared at their door, ready to occupy their children for an hour. “And those are the rich parents,” she added. I smiled. “If you have kids, you can’t have an afternoon like this. 165

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You can’t have this quiet.” I realized after I spoke that we had actually disrupted the quiet. We had been playing music for hours and laughing. I imagined Gabe in his study, punching the typewriter’s keys with thick, deliberate fingers. I got up and turned the volume down on the stereo, then settled back into the couch. Jo-Jo asked me if I still wanted children. I noted that word, still. I paused, not wanting to answer. “Maybe, before it’s too late,” I confessed. “But Gabe doesn’t, I don’t think. Imagine, trying to write with a baby screaming in the background.” Jo-Jo smiled and her broken tooth glittered. Its odd shape would have looked foolish in the mouth of anyone else. But Jo-Jo carried it off almost like an accessory. On her it seemed a mark of a life well lived, something nearly beautiful. “You could leave him here and take the baby to Boston,” she said, and chuckled. “Or New York. The two of you could come stay with me.” She smiled but there was no laughter in her eyes. I forced myself to laugh, then it got away from me and I began to laugh harder, my torso shaking, ribs vibrating as if something were wrenching free. F

It was after 5:30 when I realized I had forgotten to start dinner. I jumped up from the couch and rushed to the kitchen. Wine sloshed in my stomach, and I realized I was slightly drunk. I was startled to find the kitchen light on, a curtain of newspaper suspended above one of the chairs. The paper rustled and one side dropped sharply to reveal Gabe’s face, his eyes squinting at me behind the circular cuts of his glasses. “Ah, there you are.” “I’m sorry,” I said, opening the fridge and pulling out raw chicken, parsley, a lemon. “You girls are having a good time, then.” “Yes,” I said, tearing at the plastic covering the chicken and setting it in the sink. “You know how it is, old friends.” Jo-Jo came shuffling into the kitchen, holding a half-empty wineglass. “Hi, Gabe. How’s the writing going?” Gabe smiled unevenly. “Ah, it’s killing me.” Jo-Jo pulled a chair out from the table and its feet squealed. “I thought about being a writer, once. I thought about being everything at least once. Ann, remember when you wanted to be an anthropologist? You could’ve been one of those sloppy Ph.D.s.” “Really, Ann?” Gabe said stiffly. “I didn’t know that.” 166

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“Oh, yeah, she was obsessed. She wanted to travel, live in the jungle with remote tribes,” Jo-Jo went on, slurring her words. “Then she gave it up. Hey, why did you give it up?” “Oh, it was just too much work, too many years of studying,” I said, and shrugged. Gabe’s brow was furrowed, his keen historian’s eyes studying me. I knew he didn’t like having Jo-Jo tell him things about me. “Jo-Jo, wanna help me?” “Sure.” She lurched out of her chair and came towards the sink. “What are we makin’?” Over dinner, I watched helplessly as Jo-Jo continued to antagonize Gabe. I wondered at this intuitive woman’s inability to sense his frustration. As she talked about a butch lesbian friend who’d decided she was transsexual, Jo-Jo seemed not to notice Gabe’s disapproval— his lips like an unripe berry, the acid in his voice. When she asked him again about his work, I wondered if the conversation would finally turn. Yes, I thought, let him talk. His body relaxed slightly and his eyes roamed about the kitchen as he gave a speech about the second Jewish Diaspora following World War II, one that he had probably recited many times to his students before going on sabbatical to finish the unfinishable book. But then Jo-Jo interrupted him. She’d read a book by this writer, Bowoski or something, and he had shown the ugly nature of the people in the camps, the ways they had squabbled and cheated each other. “Borowski,” Gabe said. “But that’s literature . . .” “And,” Jo-Jo continued, ignoring Gabe’s interruption and looking him in the eye, her posture more erect, “didn’t Wiesel say that ‘it wasn’t the best of us who survived’ or something like that?” Gabe stared at Jo-Jo as if looking at a potted plant that had just begun to speak. It was then that I decided Jo-Jo’s antagonism was not an accident. She was having fun with Gabe, and he—accustomed to being showered with admiration by his students, to having the respect of his colleagues bestowed upon him—was really an easy mark. Suddenly, the entire conversation seemed absurd. I looked at Gabe, sputtering and flushed, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. One cough-like giggle escaped, though, and Gabe turned his gaze on me. Jo-Jo smiled and leaned back in her chair. She reached up and began scratching her head. “Any more wine?” she asked. Then, responding to her own inquiry, she said, “I’ll get it,” and slipped away. A moment later, I heard the back screen door slam and I knew she was heading for the beach. Perhaps she would sleep there again. 167

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That night, I took my time preparing for bed. I had sinned against my kitchen, having left the dinner dishes in the sink to soak overnight. I thought I knew what Gabe was going to say and I was dreading it. I felt unsteady, my skin loose around my bones. I did not want to listen to Gabe hissing descriptions of her ignorance, her crassness, into the dark. But when I finally got into bed, it was several minutes before Gabe spoke. “She’s smarter than I thought,” he said. “Not educated, really, but not a hippie fool.” I said nothing for a moment. He’d called her uneducated, though she and I had the same level of education. “You don’t dislike her, then?” Gabe shifted his weight and cleared his throat. “What I don’t like,” he said, his voice measured, “is you. The way you are around her.” The words seized me, pulling me upright. “What?” “You’re acting like some silly college girl, like one of my students. One of those ditzes who drinks too much and giggles and burps her way through class. That isn’t you, Ann. I know that isn’t who you are.” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there, unsure of whether or not to stand up. “Are you calling me a ditz?” “No, no.” His hand patted the mattress where I had been lying. “I’m saying you’re acting foolish, not that you are foolish.” I stood up and walked towards the window and pulled at the white, filmy curtains. Only in this room had my mother put effort— and money—into these little flourishes, as if she’d intended to spend most of her time here, in bed. Perhaps she had. There was a bright moon that night, like a giant peeled apple. It illuminated the black water, distorted it, made it seem almost still. Down there on the beach somewhere was my friend, a woman I had admired for the way she lived her life, the kind of life I knew I could never lead but which I enjoyed watching. Perhaps she knew this about me. But she did not judge me, begrudge me my envy, my failures. I had not become an anthropologist. I had not had children. I had married, well into my thirties, a man everyone respected, an intelligent, successful man whom I did not love. “I’m going down to the beach,” I said. “At this hour? Ann—” I closed the door firmly, not wanting to hear the rest of his sentence. I walked slowly down the stairs, my feet moving deliberately through the dark. The moon shone through the windows. It reflected off the kitchen counters like a flashlight. I walked through the house 168

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and opened the back door, and the heaving of the sea grew louder. The sand was cold. It clung to the hem of my nightgown. I was trembling. I didn’t see Jo-Jo on the beach. I thought maybe she had walked into town again. I had my answer, a different one, to the question she had not asked me. I thought of her again at my wedding, in that green dress. I should have been wearing that dress. I didn’t know that she was inside, lying on the forgiving couch in the living room because the moon had drawn her there. She had followed its gaze into the house then fallen asleep, the smoke from her cigarette curling up towards the low ceiling. I sat down in the sand, which looked white, like ashes. The wind came off the sea and the force of it dulled my senses as it streamed behind me towards the house. Did it stoke the fire or could it have put it out, like snuffing a candle? Either way, I could not hear its lick and crackle. I didn’t know that, by morning, half the house would be gone, including Gabe’s manuscript. I did not even hear Jo-Jo’s shrieking as she ran out of the house, flapping her arms, sand flying from her feet in sprays, what looked like steam rising off her clothes. Her face glowed white and her singed hair was falling away, so black against her skin, like the marriage of the moon and the sea. F

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A.B. Meyer Keep This Fortune In the first installment of “Keep This Fortune,” in the previous issue of Epiphany, our heroine, a foundling raised amidst wealth and privilege in New York City, recounts her lifelong yearning to know her biological parents. Aware of her status as an adoptee from an early age, she felt an abiding estrangement from her adoptive parents, “Mummy” and “Daddy.” When Meyer was six, they adopted another little girl, Sandy, from the same agency, but two years later, when she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, sent her back, “as if they were returning a defective piece of merchandise to a department store.” These adoptive parents divorced when Meyer was a teenager. Many years later, Meyer undertook to track down her real parents, employing various clues and hints she had gathered over the years, some from the tantalizingly unspecific “non-identifying information” adoption agencies are required to supply. Her early efforts bore no fruit; then, finally, when she was over fifty, a detective she hired succeeded in locating her birth mother. Meyer visits her mother’s apartment building in Pennsylvania and speaks to a neighbor, who tells her that her mother is in Florida and gives her the phone number there. Meyer calls, but at first her mother pretends it’s a wrong number; at the end of the conversation, though, she whispers, “Wednesday morning”—a time when she would be able to speak freely without fear of being overheard.

Chapter 3

slept very little between that Sunday night and the Wednesday morning. At some point during those insomniac hours, it occurred to me that the familiar quality of my mother’s voice must have come from its resemblance to my own, though I could not, of course, be sure. When Wednesday morning finally arrived, I called her back at the appointed time, and we talked for several hours. I told her how long I had been looking for her. She wanted to know why. I could give her no clear explanation, and felt it was important to reassure her that I would intrude no further unless she gave me permission. “You’re my mother,” I kept saying. “I just want to know you. I’ve always wanted to know you.” I have a horror of sentimentality; I was appalled to hear myself adding, “To . . . love you, I suppose.” I was afraid it would appall her, too. She cried. I cried. Some people enjoy an emotional release in tears; I have always disliked crying, seldom do it, and am usually more embar-

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rassed than sympathetic when others weep, unless they are children. When I do give way, it’s usually in the darkness of an opera house, but never for the conventionally tear-jerking numbers. In La Bohème, when Colline, a minor character, sings an aria of farewell to the overcoat he is about to hock, I always choke up a bit—he’s grateful to its pockets for harboring the books he’s put in them (I can relate to that), it’s such a beautiful melody, and I’ve always been a sucker for low voices. But Mimì’s deathbed? Feh. Yet whenever I’m watching any kind of child-reuniting-with-longlost-parents scene, my eyes brim over helplessly, however comical it’s meant to be. The old housekeeper Marcellina is preventing Figaro’s marriage to his beloved Susanna by suing him for Breach of Promise; when she has to drop the suit because it comes out that she’s his mother, and everyone around me in the audience is chuckling merrily as he barks out “Mia madre!” with the ensemble going “Sua madre!” right behind him—even before the officious, obnoxious Dr. Bartolo is revealed as sua padre, I’m rummaging for a tissue in my purse. It’s embarrassing. And now here I was with streaming eyes moistening a telephone receiver because my own long-lost mother was babbling on about some baby clothes she’d made for me over half a century ago, which the people at the unwed-mothers’ home would not allow to be sent on with me. There had been a time when I imagined happy huggings when I found her, but somehow as the years wore on and the difficulties of my fruitless search embittered me, on the rare occasions when I found myself wondering what would happen if it ever did pay off, I envisioned something more like Inspector Javert finally nabbing Jean Valjean. But now that it was really happening, it seemed more like an impossibly avant-garde novel I once read about a guy who realizes he’s been stalking himself; I was blinking through tears at a sob-choked disembodied voice that sounded—I was sure now—just like my own. I told my mother about the woman I’d seen on the train. Could that have been her? It could indeed; perhaps it was. At that time she was regularly taking trains from New York to Philadelphia on Saturday afternoons, to visit her mother, my grandmother, who was now dead. I asked my mother if she could remember ever, on one of those trips, having seen a teenage girl who looked like her? She could not. I told her about the form letter I had sent to some thousand people in the U.S. and Canada. She told me she knew about it. She had an older brother (I knew this already, from the “non-identifying information”). He had received one of my letters, and told her. She’d cried then, too, she said. But when I asked if she had thought about getting in touch with me, she said no. “Weren’t you even curious about why I might want to find you?” I asked. Again no. Hadn’t she found herself wondering about 171

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me ever, over the years? Not even on my birthday? Or Mother’s Day? No, no, and no. I was starting to get the idea that she must simply have resolved, after giving me up for adoption, to put me right out of her mind and get on with her life. I admire people who focus on the constructive, and people who make tough-minded decisions and stick to them, and besides, I wanted to admire her, because she was my mother. If her present tears didn’t seem entirely compatible with steeliness—well, the same could be said of mine. I asked what she’d been doing since I was born. I’d had such a wide range of fantasies about her, over the years. She was a movie star, she was a criminal—in one stubbornly recurring vision, she was living in squalor in a trailer park but had once known success in burlesque under the name Bubbles LaTour. Oddly enough, the movie-star fantasy turned out to be closest to the truth. Without ever quite making it to stardom, she’d had a pretty impressive career. She hadn’t been on Broadway, but she’d been in the national touring companies of major Broadway hits. She’d met my father in one of those. He’d been an actor in the same production, and also the manager of the road company. It hadn’t been a real romance, just one of those things. He was a married man. She had done a lot of summer stock, she had flourished in television—with shows of her own, in two different cities, and at one time, also a news show of her own in New York. Not long after my birth, she got married, to an actor, and they had two children—I had a half brother and a half sister. During part of the time they were growing up, she had worked as a corporate spokeswoman, for two different businesses, flying around the country to be interviewed on TV and radio, touting the virtues of her employers’ products and services. That explained two of the aliases my detective had found. Later, her whole family had worked together in the road companies of Broadway musicals, she and her husband in the cast, their son helping with sets and their daughter with costumes. (I found myself picturing them as something like the Crummles, in Nicholas Nickleby—a happy theatrical family, if somewhat dissolute. So different, I thought wistfully, from Mummy and Daddy’s disapproval of my stints in show business.) They’d toured schools with a program of selections from classical theatre, and run a School of Dramatic Arts together, too. Her first husband had died, and later she’d married an old high-school beau, a psychiatrist, now retired: it was his voice on the answering machine. Obviously, she hadn’t told him about me. I wondered why not—a shrink could accept anything, surely—but felt some delicacy, or wariness, about asking her. 172

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I told her a bit about myself. She was disappointed that I had no grandchildren to offer her; her other children had produced one each, both girls. I felt stirrings of sibling rivalry. Explaining that I had become a writer, I promised to send her my books, and we agreed to talk again. But the conversation didn’t end there. Shouldn’t I have a strawberry mark to prove my noble birth, she asked, and the next thing I knew we were struggling together to remember the Danny Kaye song about the vessel with the pestle, the chalice in the palace. “I haven’t thought of that in y—” we both started to say, simultaneously, then stopped at the same point in perfect unison. Soon we were exchanging quotations from The Importance of Being Earnest, and I was chortling merrily, although “A handbag?” usually affects me like Figaro. She did a creditable Lady Bracknell (“I would strongly advise you . . . to try to acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over”). I contributed some opera plots; there are enough foundlings in the standard repertory to populate a sizeable orphanage. In Il Trovatore, best known now as the one in the Marx Brothers’ movie and always good for a laugh, there is a changeling who is raised by a gypsy after she mistakenly throws her own baby on the flames when her own mother is being burnt at the stake, which she meant to avenge by killing the infant heir who instead winds up being killed unknowingly by his own . . . But before I could tell the mother who had abandoned me about the illegitimate infant daughter Verdi had abandoned, which many authorities believe to be the reason he wrote so much moving music about such situations, we had to get off the phone; my mother’s husband was due to come home. “What should I call you?” I asked, in parting. “Mama.” “Mama,” I echoed, embarrassed to realize as I said it that this was one of the happiest moments of my life. About a dozen years before, I had opened a fortune cookie and read: “Keep this fortune. It will bring you your heart’s desire.” As soon as I saw it, I knew what I wanted it to bring. I had tried to tell myself that finding my real parents should not be the heart’s desire of a mateless middle-aged woman with serious literary ambitions, but that tiny piece of paper had been solemnly transferred whenever I got a new wallet, and as soon as I hung up the phone, I looked for it. I wanted to throw it away, but it had disappeared. I had asked my mother about my father, and she told me his name. She didn’t know whether he was still alive. The Performing Arts Library in Lincoln Center, where I’d put in so much time, was being renovated then; some of the collection had been moved, temporarily, to a building in the depths of Hell’s Kitchen, and the rest was unavailable. 173

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It had been years since I’d lived in that neighborhood. It was hard to find the place where the archives were being stored, and I went there without even knowing whether the information I needed was in the part that had been moved. I was lucky, in that respect. My mother hadn’t remembered my father’s name perfectly accurately, but I found it in the catalogue. File cards directed me to his obituaries; he had died nearly thirty years before, at the age of sixty-three. I felt cheated, having always longed to know my father, and now finally learning who he was—only to find he was long dead. At any rate, I could be proud of being the daughter of this man I’d never had a chance to know. He’d been successful, first as an actor, then as a director—perhaps that was what the social worker’s hint about “production” meant. She’d said he was famous, too, “if you know theatre history,” but although I had learned a lot about that subject in the course of my research, I had never come across his name before. There were lots of photographs of him. They gave me very little idea of what he had looked like out of makeup and costume. He’d been on Broadway with Mae West, my dad, in Diamond Lil. This thrilled me; I have always adored Mae West, and his association with her made me feel connected with him somehow, if only by a taste for camp. He’d played both Duncan and Banquo, and been in many plays I’d never heard of, and he’d been a star on one of the first series on TV. I could see him in doublet and hose and in togas and lab coats, in bowler hats and Stetson hats, in evening clothes and in bathrobes, and he looked like a different person in each costume. He’d been in a movie with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, too, but when I watched it, not long afterward, I couldn’t figure out which actor he was. The library also had pictures of my mother. A glamorous young actress, she had been. I am not glamorous, yet I thought that we might look alike. I realized I had seen one of the photographs of her before, on some previous research stint. It had been in a casting book, one of the yearbook-like volumes, issued annually for many decades, that showcased photos of available performers under headings like “Ingénue” or “Character” and included information about experience and any special talents like facility with foreign accents. When I’d seen it, I had thought the face looked something like my face, but after studying it awhile, I had concluded that the mouth was bigger and a different shape than mine, the eyebrows curved where mine were peaked, and I had finally turned the page. Now, comparing it with other photos of my mother, I could see that she had rounded the natural shapes of those features with makeup to fit the fashions of the forties, just as I myself had altered my appearance in the sixties. I was irritated with myself for having failed to think of that. 174

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I had a reading to attend that night, at Columbia. I had thought I would come home after visiting the archives and change my clothes and get some supper before heading out again. But I pored so long over the brittle, faded clippings and programs and photos that I had no time to do that; instead I went straight to the university, or tried to. I was in a daze. I couldn’t seem to put my mind to solving the problem of how to get up there from that neighborhood. I wound up taking some not very rational combination of buses and finally emerging where, I suddenly realized, I would have to descend through a steeply sloping ice-covered rocky stretch of Morningside Park in a big hurry if I was going to make it to the reading on time. There were stairs, but they were so deep in slippery ice that taking my chances on the rocks seemed preferable. I scrambled down somehow, forced to drop to all fours sometimes, as my thoughts mirrored the treacherous geography. A sleety rain was falling. It was bitterly cold. A woman I knew had been mugged near here. At least the weather would probably deter muggers, I thought. Why had I taken a bus anyway? I wondered as I scrambled down the icy rocks. The No. 1 subway would have let me out right at the main entrance to the Columbia campus. I went to Columbia from time to time, knew perfectly well how to get there, and knew, too, the dangers of some of the surrounding Harlem neighborhood. What was the matter with me? In some crazy unconscious way, did I think that, having found out the secret of my parentage, I ought now to die? I was determined not to be late to the reading. Nearly thirty years too late to know my father . . . I could at least manage to get to this event on time, surely. University campuses always made me nervous, anyway. Whether there as a reporter or to give a lecture, I never felt I really had the right to be. I’d been a good student, but, having dropped out before getting my degree, I was always half expecting some guard to spring out and ask to see my diploma, and when I could produce none, putting me though the kind of humiliation I always had to endure when expected to produce a birth certificate. I picked my way carefully down the icy slopes. Why the hell was I wearing high-heeled boots in weather that screamed for something more practical? For reasons that had something to do with having been given up for adoption, no doubt, leaving no stone unturned in scattershot bids for acceptance. I was not about to let those neurotically chosen boots send me to my death now. I had found out who my parents were, yes, but there was still so much I wanted to know. I had learned in the library that I had not only the half brother and sister from my mother, but another half brother as well, for my father’s obituaries mentioned his being survived by a son he’d had with his wife. My father had evidently stayed married for the rest of his life to the woman 175

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he’d been married to when I was conceived. Their son had been given our father’s name. My mother had told me a bit about her other children. They’d been having hard times lately. My sister, an artist, had been living in New Jersey, but her house had recently burned down and her husband, an engineer, had lost his job, then got a new one in Michigan; they had just moved. My brother, a chef, in Pennsylvania, was recovering from a serious accident that had left him badly burned. My mother said she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to tell them about me, but she certainly didn’t want to give either of them any more shocks to deal with for a while. I was sorry they’d had these misfortunes, and I felt that as their big sister I should be helping them somehow, yet at the same time I was jealous of my mother’s solicitude for them—I had suffered, too, without any mother to protect me—and resentful, since what she was protecting them from was me. “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” (That’s Edmund, in King Lear.) I was hoping to persuade her to let me know these legitimate siblings of mine, but I would plainly have to be patient. In the meantime, I wanted to track down my other brother, my father’s son. Having finally made it out of that miserable park, I hurried as cautiously as I could along the icy pavement to the building where the reading was being given. The street where its main entrance was had been closed off, a portion of it was floodlit and uniformed workers were bustling around. A steam-pipe explosion? Whatever. By now the whole day was coming to seem increasingly dreamlike. Maybe none of it had really happened, maybe I had never found my mother and was about to wake up in my bed, I thought as I trudged determinedly around the block and finally found another entrance. When I arrived in the auditorium, they were just closing the doors, but instead of slipping into a seat in the back, I dashed to one I spotted in the very front, close to the stage. I knew the reader, and I found myself needing rather desperately to meet the eyes of someone who knew me. This was Donald Keene, the founding father of Japanese studies in the English-speaking world. I had come to hear him because I had built an important part of my career on writing about Japan. During the eight years I had lived there, I had often thought that the reason I had been able to learn more about Japanese society than most foreigners there do was that I had no real roots in my own. “All men are brothers” had been no abstract generalization in my case. I knew that I looked rather Irish—in fact, whenever I was in Europe, people there tended to assume I must be, just from my appearance—but until I spoke to my mother, I hadn’t even been sure of my race. Some friends of Mummy and Daddy’s had adopted a little boy from the agency I came from who was supposed to be Caucasian, as his mother must have been, and as a 176

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baby he had looked that way. But as he grew, his soft golden hair turned black and coarse and straight and his features got more and more Asian—or Eurasian, anyway. Such traits sometimes skip generations; I had never been in a position even to guess about what any offspring of mine might turn out to look like. Children who don’t know who their parents are don’t have the automatic “us” and “them” of children who do know; it is simply never an option. Listening to Professor Keene reading from his biography of the Meiji emperor, I was able to put my parents out of my mind for a while and concentrate on nineteenth-century Japan. But in the question-andanswer session afterward, as he described his difficulties in finding information about a member of the Japanese Imperial Family, which guards its secrets closely, I couldn’t help thinking of my own struggles. Afterward, on my way home on the subway, as I sat contemplating the diversity of the strangers’ faces around me in the train, I felt disturbed by some change in my perception of them. My father had been described in the “non-identifying information” as being “of German descent,” but I hadn’t taken that very seriously, as one of the first things I learned when I started hiring detectives was that such information is very unreliable. His first name was a German one, but, hell, he was an actor, what did that mean? Was I half German-German or was I half German Jew? The last name could be either. And I suddenly realized that I would much prefer not to be half German. After having felt what I could now see was a certain smugness about the impossibility of my being any kind of bigot, I was discovering that while all men might be brothers, there were some whom I would rather have as brothers and some whom I would rather not. When I had thought—as I had often—that I could be related to anyone at all, Nazis had never crossed my mind, despite the “German” in the non-identifying information. I’d spent time in Berlin without once thinking of the natives as potential kin. Degree or no degree, I’m a New York intellectual, for Heaven’s sake—most of my best friends are Jews. When Bob Gottlieb was editor of The New Yorker, I worked with him from time to time, and whenever I said anything that struck him as clever or as evidence of being unusually well read, he would say, “Are you sure you’re not Jewish?” The first time he said it, I thought it was funny, and explained that, being adopted, I was, in fact, not sure. The second time he said it, I was a bit crushed that he had forgotten about my poignant ignorance of my own parentage, but explained all over again, figuring he would remember from then on. He didn’t though, and when he said it again on other occasions, I only shrugged. I tried to cheer myself up about possibly being German, but all I could think of to offset the vivid procession of unlovable Teutons 177

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in my mind were some cultural figures I admired in a vague and unenthusiastic way. Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven. Bach was better. And Schubert. Ah—E.T.A. Hoffman! Many enduringly popular works have been based on his stories—Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman opera, and several episodes of the still re-running TV show “The Twilight Zone.” I preferred the stories themselves. Now there was a German I really, really loved. But he didn’t seem quite enough, somehow, to reconcile me to Germanness. How perverse people can be. I finally found out what I’d been longing to know all my life, and here I was already nostalgic for my no-name innocence, and in a foul mood on top of that because ever since Schubert had occurred to me, the lugubrious melody of “Der Leiermann” had been thumping unstoppably in my head like an advertising jingle, along with its image of the poor old organgrinder, cranking away unseen, unheard, and barefoot in the snow. I was always saying I didn’t see how anyone could bear the endless whining self-piteousness of country-Western music, but really, what could beat “Winterreise” for that? I mean, this is a whole long song cycle about a guy who is wandering around in the dead of winter for the express purpose of wallowing in gloom. And the worst of it is, I have always loved this work, from the very first time I heard it, as a child. Zum Donnerwetter. Probably my dreary German genes asserting themselves. On the other hand, I always had a hard time with Wagner. Maybe I could be Jewish after all. The next day, I called the detective who had found my mother and asked him to find my possibly German, possibly Jewish brother for me. This time the detective got back to me within minutes. My brother, who was born about a year after I was, was living just a couple of blocks from me, at the same address where my father had been living when he died. I asked the detective how much I owed him for this information; there’d be no charge, he said. I called the number he’d just given me. It must have been my father’s number, too, for many years, I thought while listening to rings. I didn’t really expect to speak to my brother then—it was a weekday afternoon, and I was calling his home. But he answered the phone. At first I just said I thought that we might be related. “How could we be related?” he asked. Emboldened by the warm, friendly sound of his deep voice and the way things had gone so well with my mother, I came right out and said I was his sister. He said that was not possible. “Half sister,” I explained, then explained further, going on to name the show our father and my mother had been acting in together when I was conceived. 178

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“So why are you calling me?” he asked, his tone abruptly harsh. “I—well, you’re my brother, I want to know you, I thought we could maybe get together . . . I . . . you know, we’ve been neighbors all these years, don’t you think that’s amazing? I mean, I’m practically around the corner. Couldn’t we arrange to meet, wouldn’t you like to . . . to know your sister?” “I don’t want any sister. I was perfectly happy as an only child. No.” And he hung up on me. Miserable Kraut, I thought, as the telephone resumed its dial tone, but I wasn’t sure if I meant him or me. I should have been more tactful. If he’d had no reason to suspect that he could possibly have siblings, no doubt it was too much to expect him to react with anything but shock. In the course of my researches, I had checked out the provenance of the name on my adoption papers, my mother’s maiden name as I now knew. More probably Dutch than anything else, but possibly Hessian, and there were even a few Russian Jews in this country with that name. I hadn’t gotten around to asking my mother about her family’s history, but I could reasonably hope to learn about it in future conversations with her. In the meantime, could I somehow win over my father’s son and get him to tell me something about whatever roots I shared with him? I went to his building. Once there, I couldn’t think of anything to do but stare at it and at its buzzers, trying to guess what floor his apartment might be on and marveling at the fact that I had always had to walk by it to get to my polling place. Not only did I live close by him, the place I had lived before that had been even closer. The odds seemed overwhelming that we had—at least once, maybe often—crossed paths somehow in the neighborhood. His apartment house, a modest walkup, was, like many other buildings in West Chelsea then, undergoing renovations, with scaffolding and debris everywhere that made it difficult even to speculate about which window might be his. I stood there shivering, shifting from one foot to the other like Der Leiermann, staring at all the men about my age who were coming and going on the block, looking for someone who looked like me or like my father’s pictures from the library. I felt stumped, stymied. But I was not unhappy. I’d pretty much resigned myself to dying without ever learning the truth about my parentage, but I’d been wrong. So when the increasing cold finally drove me away from my half brother’s building, I wasn’t feeling too defeated; my mother had agreed to talk again. When we did, I asked her about ancestors. She thought my father’s ancestors had come from Germany but she wasn’t sure. “I didn’t really know him very well,” she said, and I found myself warming to her for 179

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this honesty. When I asked about her own parents, she was very forthcoming about her mother, whose mother had been Irish and whose father was a Scot, but Mama didn’t seem to know much about her father’s family. “He died when I was very young, you know,” she said. I asked if she thought his family had been Dutch, German, Russian, or what, and she said, “Well, he used to call me Bettina. That sounds like it could be Dutch,” then changed the subject abruptly, telling me a long story about how she had recently been asked to audition for the Philadelphia production of Wit. She had not been cast, in fact, but I enjoyed hearing the story, because it gave me yet another reason to be proud of her—just being asked was really something, for a woman in her late seventies. I felt a bit fretful about being deflected from my line of questioning. This was only the second time I had spoken to her, though, and I was still afraid—terrified—that she might decide that agreeing to speak to me had been a big mistake, so I didn’t want to press her in any direction she was bent on avoiding. And besides, perhaps it was painful for her to talk about the father she lost so early. Did she feel cheated because she had never really had a chance to know him? I could certainly understand that. We had many more phone conversations, sometimes during her husband’s golf dates, sometimes on Sunday mornings when he was at Mass. She read the books I sent her, and she said she thought, from my jacket photos, that I did look like her. She said she’d enjoyed my stories, but . . . “But?” “You’re a lot more sophisticated than I am.” I wanted her to be proud of me; I wasn’t sure if this was praise or disapproval. “Oh, I doubt that.” Let her wonder what I mean, I thought. Another book made reference to my having been given up for adoption; I had written that I was “thrown away,” and had worried, while packing it up to send her, about what she might feel when she read that. It upset her. “I didn’t throw you away—it was the only thing I could do. And I gave you to the very best agency. It would have been impossible for me to raise you by myself then. You do know that, don’t you?” I told her, “I know, I know.” Of course I did have some idea of how difficult it would have been, back in those days. I never could get her to say much about her father, but although I had a lot of experience as a reporter by then, and as such was not usually easy to distract from any line of questioning I was determined to pursue, whenever I said, “Mama,” as a preliminary to getting her back on my track, just hearing myself say it kept derailing my train of thought. I loved being able to say, “Mama.” I found myself whispering it into the darkness, before I went to sleep at night, as one might say a lover’s 180

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name, well aware of the ridiculousness of a middle-aged woman’s taking such sharp, intimate pleasure from those syllables that are usually an infants’ first experience of language, but still hardly able to believe I was finally savoring the amazing, delirious sensation of being able to address them to my very own real mother at last. Perhaps if I had ever had children of my own, the impact of that word would have been less astonishing, as it would no doubt also have been if my adoptive mother had been more maternal. As it was, the joy was so embarrassingly great that I was ashamed of my unreasonable greed in wanting even more. A fairy tale that’s always haunted me is the one about the fisherman’s wife and her demands. Her husband finds a wish-granting fish and asks it to mend his broken net, it does, and he goes home and tells his wife about it. She reprimands him—whyever didn’t he ask the fish for more—and sends him back to find the fish again. He does, it makes him rich, but when the fisherman goes back to his wife in what is now their mansion, she has already decided to send him back again to ask the fish to make him a king and her a queen . . . and so it goes on from splendor to splendor until she gets him to ask the fish to make her God, and when he does, he finds himself alone on the beach in a thunderstorm, with broken net in hand, just able to make out the rag-clad figure of his old wife in the doorway of their wretched hut. But I could not stop myself from saying, “Mama, I truly don’t want to intrude on you, or disrupt your life in any way you wouldn’t want, but I would so much like to meet you someday. I don’t know how you feel or if you would like to meet me, but . . . ” And literally held my breath while waiting to hear what she would say. Without wasting a moment on assuring me she would want such an encounter, my mother threw herself abruptly into working out the how of it. It was dizzying. I was suddenly in the thick of a conspiracy. Too difficult to manage while she was in Florida, but could be worked out once she had returned to Pennsylvania. No way she could slip off to New York for a day sometime. What about my coming to Philadelphia for a meeting, then? But she didn’t drive and wouldn’t be taking a train, it would be too unnatural, when she did everything with her husband now, he would think it too odd, no, the best way would be for me to come and stay with them for a weekend sometime. I was nonplussed. My mother carried on unstoppably. When they returned to Pennsylvania, they would be moving immediately out of the apartment building I had visited and into one of those places called “retirement communities.” The one they were moving into was far enough from Philadelphia to make a meeting in that city impracticable. So the only way was for me to stay with them for a weekend. But we were going to have to concoct a story to account for who I was. She had never told her husband (either of her husbands) 181

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of my existence and so when we got together, she would be passing me off as an old friend who had suddenly called one day wanting to get together after having been long out of touch. Could we really get away with this? What if we tripped up somehow, what if her husband asked us questions separately and our answers contradicted each other’s somehow and blew our cover? I urged economy in lying—the closer our stories stuck to the truth, the less chance of that there would be. At one time, when my mother had reached an age where parts for actresses start drying up, she had worked in New York for an inventor, as an office manager. I would have to be passed off as someone who had worked with her at that time. Although I had at one time worked as an actress and singer, our being office-worker colleagues seemed to segue more easily into the rest of our respective biographies than if we had claimed to have met when I was in show biz, for she had been traveling then in touring companies where her children also had jobs, so that they would have known me, too. We continued refining our story on the telephone. By then, we were talking nearly every time her husband went out. It was fun, if a bit frightening, working out the details of the lie together. I took notes, so I could memorize our story perfectly, and later went over the notes I had taken, over and over and over, memorizing the names of fellow workers, the location of the office, the exact time frame of our fictitious acquaintanceship. I saved up questions to ask her: had we eaten lunch together back in those days? Where had we eaten? Where gone out for drinks? What if her husband asked me . . . “But he won’t, he won’t. Trust me, I know the kind of things he’s most likely to say. And don’t forget, I’ll be there to control the conversation.” “Just please try not to leave me alone with him. I can’t very well follow you to the bathroom in your own apartment!” “It will be all right.” If our lie did not succeed, she had so much more to lose than I did, but I seemed to be the one who was worrying most about our ability to pull it off. I found myself wondering if she had some ambivalence about it, if on some level she would actually be relieved at being forced to confess having kept this secret from him for so many years. She sent me recent photos of herself. A hip-looking old person, with very, very short white hair, plumper than in the photos in the library. (Was that what I’d look like in twenty-five more years?) With great big rings on her fingers. I wear enormous rings myself. I put the picture I liked best in a pretty frame and looked at it often. It had been taken in her Pennsylvania living room. A cluttered interior—as my rooms always become despite my best resolves. I sat for hours at a time, huddling under a deep-fringed cream-colored throw on my cream-colored 182

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sofa looking at this picture of my mother sitting on her cream-colored sofa with a deep-fringed cream-colored throw folded on the back. I studied every detail. Over her head hung a museum poster of a painting by Mary Cassatt, a woman with a plump baby on her lap. The poster on my wall was a print by Utamaro, a woman with a plump baby in her arms. But Mama’s poster was a soft, sweet, muzzy blend of pastel colors; her baby was kicking its legs out in delight while the woman—whose head was cut off by the photograph—kept it stable in her embrace; my poster was hard-edged, predominantly black and orange, and my baby was squeezing the woman’s cheeks to make smoke come out of her mouth (she was holding a pipe). I looked through a magnifying glass at the spines of the books in Mama’s pedimented mahogany bookcase, trying to make out the titles. A thriller or two, The Nature of Human Aggression—her husband’s books, apparently. She’d mentioned his liking mystery stories. A psychiatrist and a reader of whodunits—could my mother and I really deceive this man, for a whole weekend? If we couldn’t, what would happen? Would she be all right? I felt a burgeoning love for this woman that was really very odd considering that I had never, unless you count the moment of my birth, actually met her. Of course, working with someone on any creative project tends to foster a certain kind of closeness, and there is nothing like a conspiracy for that. In the springtime, she came back to Pennsylvania and sent me a schedule for the train station nearest to her. Somehow the sight of that timetable made the whole thing altogether real, and I only then realized how unreal it had seemed up to that point. I bought my ticket. I chose hostess presents carefully. I wanted to bring her the sun, the moon, and the stars, or diamonds and fur coats and armfuls of flowers at the very least, wanted to make up in a moment for a lifetime of lost Mother’s Days, birthdays, and Christmases. But of course I had to stay in character. I chose exquisite soap and chocolates. The night before I was due to leave she called to tell me that she had broken down and told her husband all about me. She was crying. “I found I just—just couldn’t really bear to be deceiving him that way.” I listened to the sound of her sobbing. “Oh, Mama.” I started to sob into the phone myself. “Does this mean . . . I shouldn’t come, then?” “Oh, no. He said we’ve been through a lot together, we can get through this somehow, too.” I didn’t like being transformed into an ordeal on two legs that way—something to be got through—but the next day, before I left for the train, I wrapped up a beautiful brooch I had, to add to the exquisite soap and chocolates. F

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aking the train to meet my mother for the first time, I felt vaguely cheated of drama; all those long, cozy phone calls had taken so much of the edge off. None of the operatic parent-child reunions I could think of included this element of anticlimax, and besides, all I could imagine was paling before the astonishment of the greenery outside the windows. I’m such an urban creature, down to the very marrow of my bones; when I leave New York at all it’s usually only to go to some other big city, in some other country. I was bowled over by the endless verdant expanses unreeling outside the dirty glass. Now and again these views were interrupted by some huge blue body of water; it was all so different from the glimpses of Central Park I might get over the fieldstone wall by raising my eyes from my reading on a Fifth Avenue bus. I gazed out the train window at the spring time, the spring time, the only pretty ring time, riffling in vain through the mental detritus of a lifetime’s immersion in narrative for something more appropriate for the mother-and-daughter scene that was about to take place. I switched to a local train and found myself immersed in distasteful memories. There was a stop at the tantalizing forbidden station in the town where my prison-like boarding school had been, and another stop where I had lived for a few months with Mummy at the beginning of the great falling apart she underwent while getting her divorce, which for some financial reason had been obtained in Pennsylvania rather than New York. That station had been my only means of escape from her endless drunken tirades in those days. When I couldn’t manage to get any farther away, there was a gloomy orangutan I kept visiting in the Philadelphia zoo. I recalled reciting Baudelaire to him—probably in the hope that some Parisian existentialist would hear and be inspired to carry me off to the Left Bank. But I shoved these memories resolutely out of my mind; I didn’t want anything upstaging the glory of the coming meeting, and besides, my teenage pretensions were too cringe-making to recall and might cause me to worry about whether I was really worthy of what was about to happen and whether I might somehow screw it up. When I got out of the train, my mother was on the platform. The eyes of newborns don’t work very well, so this was the first time in my life that I had ever really seen her. It was not like studying her photographs. We rushed to meet each other, flew into each other’s arms and hugged each other tight. Then we stepped back a moment to look at what we had embraced. My mother was crying. I felt deficient—rude, almost—for being unable to summon answering tears. I noticed the unfashionably wide shoulders of her jacket. I, too, had stubbornly worn

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shoulder pads long after they went out of style. “Don’t cry,” I told her; in my mind, these words seemed like a reversion to my nanny mode, but they came out tentative and faltering. “I always cry,” Mama said matter-of-factly through her tears, as if dismissing some novelty I had suggested in setting a table or something of that kind. “Oh, well, then . . . ” The ellipsis meant “If you must.” To mitigate the hostile sound of that, and also because I really wanted to know, I added, “Could you do it at will, when you were an actress?” “Oh, yes, always.” My mother was obviously proud of that accomplishment. “Useful. You know, there was a woman in the eighteenth century, this was in London, I think it’s in Boswell—” I stopped. Did Mama know who Boswell was? I became aware that we were being observed. A short, owlish man standing next to a car that was parked by the platform was swiveling his very spherical head from one to the other of us in the classic motion of tennis-match spectators. My eyes met his, which were light blue, very round, and hooded. “ ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ ” he quoted quietly, “ ‘I am my mother, after all.’ ” “This is my husband,” Mama said to me, unnecessarily, and, even more unnecessarily, to him, “My daughter,” and then laughed at the absurdity of these introductions, and I laughed, too. “But go on,” she urged me politely, explaining to her husband, “Lindsley was telling me something about Dr. Johnson.” So she did know who Boswell was—my, how different she was from Mummy. “Well, she cried, this woman. This was her big accomplishment. She cried to order, produced floods of tears quite effortlessly whenever anyone asked her to, and the really interesting part is that this was an enormously popular entertainment. She was in big demand. People went to see her cry, or had her over so she’d cry for them. I mean that was it, that was her whole act, she just wept for people. And apparently they couldn’t get enough of it.” “I could have done that,” my mother said complacently. I had kept turning to her husband, to include him in my tale about the weeping woman. He seemed endlessly amused by my close physical resemblance to his wife and hers to me. Watching his gaze travel back and forth between us, over and over again, I had a feeling he might be tickled by the thought of our foolish scheme to deceive him about our relationship, which my mother would of course have had to reveal in the course of undeceiving him about their expected visitor. I was a bit tickled by it myself, but I couldn’t quite relax into savoring the irony, because 185

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I was too alarmed at the thought of having imperiled this precious relationship, the only genetic connection I had ever experienced. Mama and I could never have gotten away with the deception we had planned, not for a nanosecond. We had seen photographs of each other—how had we failed to realize? Perhaps it’s just not possible to have any objective sense of one’s own looks; perhaps one’s appearance is composed of something greater than the sum of its parts. The resemblance of one person to another is really most mysterious. Although when I was young I looked like Lee Remick in a brunette wig, many years later, after the movie Hannah and Her Sisters came out, I looked so much like the actress Dianne Wiest that for a year or two I was mistaken for her regularly, several times a week, partly no doubt because I had exactly the same short, unruly hairdo she had then and some of the mannerisms of the intense and ludicrously nervous character she played in that film, and also because we are precisely the same age, I guess. (One of the first things I ever did when learning how to use a search engine was to investigate the likelihood of my being related to her—which turned out to be very small.) Yet Dianne Wiest, even now that she has bleached her hair, looks nothing at all like Lee Remick. Everyone who has seen my mother and me either in person or in photographs agrees that we look exactly and even rather spookily alike, but my mother does not look like Dianne Wiest and never did. My mother looks like Judi Dench. When the show “As Time Goes By” was shown on TV in America, my mother was accosted regularly by people who were certain she must be its star (this, too, was partly due to similarity of hair), but I resemble Dame Judi in no way whatever, and can’t imagine that I ever will. But Ms. Wiest when crowned and costumed as The Evil Queen does look like Dame Judi crowned and costumed as Elizabeth I. Go figure. I was so bowled over by my resemblance to my mother that I couldn’t stop scrutinizing her, as though singling out details from some famous painting for an art-history course. From the back seat of the car, I kept catching sight of bits of her in the mirror over the front seat: a deepset, narrow eye, pale but dark-lashed, a small-lobed ear, a stretch of big square jaw, a large, long-fingered hand—bits I’d been seeing in mirrors all my life. Most people are accustomed to the experience of seeing how the genes they share are present in others, they know they have their father’s big feet, their mother’s beaky nose, they may share their tiny teeth with siblings, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Never having met a biological relative, I had never known such a resemblance before, in any degree, much less this astonishing clone-like total replication. It was as though my mother and I were the same person at two different ages. I was amazed. In fact, I was flabbergasted. It was both wonderful and 186

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awful, this suddenly discovering myself to be a kind of human Xerox. I had a disturbing feeling of having been demoted, from a gloriously unique individual to a mere copy of someone else, but at the same time, augmented, since I had, after all, been multiplied. My mother’s husband put a CD in the player and a Mozart symphony accompanied our progress into some kind of heartland. The place my mother had moved to was not suburban. We drove to it through real farm country; there were big white barns and fields with crops and cattle; little lambs were frolicking by their mothers’ sides. “Look at the piggies!” Mama cried enthusiastically, as though bent on making up now for what she hadn’t done for me when I was a toddler. A giggle I couldn’t quite suppress came out, and she said a bit defensively, “I do love pigs.” “I love Mozart,” I offered companionably, swaying to the music. “Is that what this is?” Boswell she knows, but doesn’t recognize Mozart. So we’re not quite as alike as we look. “That’s your cousin,” Mama said. “Where?” I looked out the window for a human figure. “His CD.” “I have a cousin who likes classical music?” “I mean he’s playing. With his orchestra. He’s a percussionist.” And then she told me about her brother, my uncle, whose youngest son could be heard whacking the timpani on the CD. My uncle had always played drums for a hobby, and had earned money in both school and college by playing with a band. Then he had a conventional and lucrative career as an executive with a power company, but always continued playing drums for fun whenever he could, professionally or otherwise, and after he retired he bought a drum-making company from a man he knew who was eager to sell it and retire himself. And this uncle of mine, starting at an age when most people are happy to subside into an undemanding round of lazy days in sunny spots, had turned the little drum-making business around, making it a huge success. He employed many assistants but still it was all he could do to keep up with the orders, which came from a range of sources my mother had a hard time remembering: most of the major American symphony orchestras, a few European and Asian ones, some jazz drummers, and other miscellaneous clients such as Colonial Williamsburg (for those ersatz eighteenth-century marching bands) and the royal family of Norway. He restored historical drums for museums, too, all over the world. He had two children; the elder son was not especially musical, but the younger not only played with a major symphony but also taught music courses at a university, somehow fitting that in with the orches187

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tra’s touring schedule—and still found time to help his father with the drumstick end of his business. “Hmm,” I said. “Rhythm. That’s what I was always best at, in music classes.” “I don’t have any musical talent at all,” my mother said. “But you must have some,” I told her—impatiently, for this was a replay of something we’d hashed over on the phone. She’d somehow managed to function in the national touring companies of two musicals, after all—and in real parts, not the chorus. But she insisted that she couldn’t sing. She shook her head. “You don’t get it from me.” When we reached the building where they lived, the riotous bright reds and fuchsias of azalea plantings outside it shocked my color-deprived New Yorker’s eyes, and beyond them, blossoming trees made the air as overwhelmingly fragrant as the ground floor of Bloomingdale’s. On our way up to their second-floor apartment, my mother was greeted twice, once on each floor, by fellow residents of the complex. Both women looked from her to me and back again and said exactly the same thing: “I don’t have to ask if this is your daughter—she looks just like you.” And when I spoke to them, they commented that my voice was like my mother’s, too. Later, when we ate in the dining room there, the young waiters and waitresses, after taking my mother’s orders, looking back and forth at our faces, asked, “And your daughter?” smiling with the rather condescending pleasure that is usually evoked by things that get called “cute”—their reaction to our resemblance, I presumed. My mother’s apartment was cluttered, although she had just moved into it. This has always happened instantly to all my apartments, too—I’ve never understood quite how. There were framed photos everywhere, some of her other children. I could see that I was the only one who looked like her; my half brother and sister resembled their tall, fairhaired father instead. There were photos of my sister’s daughter, too, and though her eyes were brown, I thought she looked like her grandmother in other ways, which meant also like me, and this flooded me with startling emotion, a kind of crazy joy. I had thought I was entirely resigned to never having had children, but now, confronted with images of this pale, pudgy niece of mine, I felt as though I had been given some entirely unexpected second chance, and I was amazed to feel how my heart leapt up at the sight of my own smirky smile on a squarejawed baby face familiar from my own childhood photographs. “She’s very bright,” my mother said, “very precocious,” and I grinned, and felt myself experiencing—and sharing—a feeling I had never known before. My stepson’s school achievements had always made me proud of him, but this was something else, some atavistic smugness, as if I had 188

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just received confirmation that I belonged to some superior gene pool. There was a photograph of Mama with my brother as an infant, too; she was sitting on a bench outside Central Park, looking down lovingly at the fistlike face emerging from a shapeless lump of blanket folds she cradled in her arms. “Where were you living then?” I asked, remembering a photo of myself at two outside the Park. “Eighty-fifth and Broadway. We were there for years and years.” “And you took your kids to the Park, when they were small?” “Yes.” “Oh, Mama, I was at Eighty-eighth and Fifth. And of course I was taken to the Park, almost every day, I guess—think of it, us coming in from opposite directions. Do you suppose we ever passed each other there?” She only shrugged. Besides the photos, I saw pictures my sister had drawn—some were hanging on the walls, and Mama got out others to show me. In them, I thought I could detect a family resemblance of a deep-down kind. They were fantastical, whimsical, sometimes grotesque, some of beastlike humans, some of human-looking animals. They reminded me of the work of some of my favorite illustrators—Mervyn Peake, Edward Gorey. One pencil drawing showed a squatting African woman in profile with an also profiled ostrich, under a crescent moon: the woman and the bird seemed to recognize a mutual resemblance and to be amused at recognizing it. Looking at it, I experienced what it depicted: I felt that my sister’s work was not only the kind of thing I liked but also the kind of thing I did myself, but in a different medium; surely anyone who was familiar with my fiction might see a similar sardonic playfulness in my sister’s art. I asked if Mama thought so, too, and she began to talk about a series of sculptures my sister had made of lizards playing jazz instruments: “Your kind of humor, yes.” A lot of my sister’s art work had been destroyed in the fire that had burned down her house, which had depressed her horribly. By the time Mama told me that, I was identifying so strongly with this sister I had never met that I made little moaning sounds when hearing about her misfortunes. My mother’s ready tears still took me aback, but I thought I might be getting into the spirit of them, in my own way. She told me that my sister was a writer, too; she had done a couple of picture books for little children and was working on another now, for older kids, a fantasy. That’s my favorite kind of children’s book. As a teenager, I’d even tried to write one myself, involving anthropomorphized vegetables; the only one I can remember now is the villain—a sour, uppity thing who called himself The Sublime Radish and was forever brooding about his marginalization as a mere garnish. I was getting wildly impatient to meet my sister—so unlike me 189

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physically, yet so like me in so many other ways. In an unposed wedding photo, the face above her Renaissance princess’s long-waisted bridal gown was staring over one shoulder at the camera with a comical expression of resentful alarm which I found entirely loveable. Another snapshot, from a school play, showed her costumed and made up as Mae West, leering exaggeratedly. So she, too, was a Mae West fan, had been one even as a child; we were endlessly alike, it seemed. It was harder to get a bead on my brother. In all the early snapshots, he looked strangely impassive. But one photo, taken in his early twenties, was different from all the earlier ones. He was embracing a large spread-winged bird, a goose, looking at it with a tenderly amazed delight. His hippie’s long fair hair gave him the look of a fairytale hero; I thought of Siegfried, his magic understanding of the language of birds. (Since being forced to contemplate the possibility of German ancestry, I’d been giving Wagner another chance.) Mama told me the photo had been taken on a farm my brother used to have in Santa Fe. He’d been to college in New Mexico, but dropped out and decided to stay in the area. Then his wife—well, his common-law wife—had left him there, just ran off one day, taking their three-year-old daughter with her. Broke his heart, Mama said; once he realized they were never coming back, he’d never been the same. “She was a real piece of work, that woman,” Mama said. “Beautiful, though. Just like a Botticelli.” “Why did she leave him?” “Oh, she was such an opportunist. I went to visit them once, after the baby was born, and do you know, I found out they had been telling everyone they were orphans.” This was interesting. The way my mother seemed to be exempting her son from all responsibility disturbed me, though I found her partiality somehow endearing, too. Most of the time, my mother and I pawed through photographs and clothes in the extra room they used for guests, but at one point her husband made a point of taking me into their bedroom, to show me a picture of Mama that had been taken when she was in high school; he’d been in her class. “Looks like such a little innocent,” he said—sarcastically, or was I imagining that? Except for the Deanna Durbin hairstyle, it looked just like pictures of me taken at that age. I didn’t think it looked especially innocent. Passing by the door of that room sometime on the second day I was there, I overheard him saying, “Always wearing black, like a widow, it’s depress—” My mother’s voice cut him off sharply: “Well, she is a widow.” My heart leapt up. My mother was sticking up for me. I was so delighted that I didn’t even get around to thinking about her husband’s 190

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misreading of my standard New York bohemian basic-black wardrobe until I started savoring her defense of me in memory after I got back home. The worst moment of the weekend came when I attempted some daughterly helpfulness. Mama and her husband had retired for a midafternoon nap, leaving the dryer in their kitchen running. When I heard it buzz, I wondered if there was anything in it that might be wrinkled if not taken out at once, and although I felt a little odd about invading the laundry of people I had really only just met, I decided to do it. I folded their clothes and left them on top of the dryer, then folded some napkins and took them to a kind of sideboard in the hall, where I’d seen my mother getting table linens. Not that I would have needed to observe that. Again and again, when I was helping in the kitchen, I found I didn’t need to ask where to put things away, because I could find their proper places by simply putting them wherever they went in my own kitchen, as though this were some kind of extension of my physical resemblance to Mama. As I was putting the napkins away, the door of the master bedroom opened and my mother’s head appeared in it and for one horrible moment I could see that she thought I must be stealing something, or looking for something to steal; this was unmistakably clear from the horrified expression on her face. It was a natural thing for her to think, no doubt; I had seen silver in that sideboard, too. I explained at once about the napkins—brandishing them flusteredly—and the dryer, and she was immediately ashamed of the conclusion she’d jumped to; that was also plain to see. But this encounter disconcerted both of us, and it took us a while to be as relaxed together as we’d been before it happened. All weekend, she kept filling me in on family background, extracting more photos from cardboard boxes in her closet, and explaining why she did not have yet more of them. Most of the family pictures had been stored at my sister’s house when she lived in New Jersey, and, like her art work, they had burned with it. Mama had also had other pictures, posters, programs, and videotapes, records of her career in theater and TV, which she had deliberately decided to destroy, on an impulse, after an oppressive encounter with an acquaintance of hers who was always going on about his long-ago career in minor-league baseball. “It was pathetic. And I didn’t want to be like that. So I just threw it all away one day—all the photos, all the playbills . . . ” She sighed. I had done something similar. When I decided to leave show business because I thought I wanted an academic career and had better get serious about it and stop spending my summers singing and dancing on a stage, I’d rounded up all my clippings and other memorabilia and 191

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pitched them down the incinerator of Mummy’s apartment building— fast, before I could think better of it. I said, “There’s stuff about you in the Library of Performing Arts, Mama. You could Xerox it . . . or I could.” “Really?” My mother seemed quite pleased, and so was I, at having cheered her up. Mama showed me photos of my grandmother and of my greatgrandmother, whose grandchildren had called her Mammoo. Mammoo had been Irish (so that was where I got my Irish looks) and she had married a Scot. During much of my mother’s childhood, her mother had been working, doing something administrative for the Presbyterian Board of Education, and it was Mammoo who cooked and cleaned and sewed for the children—sewed, especially. She was a brilliant dressmaker, Mama said, who could produce a flawless copy of any outfit after seeing it just once in a department-store window. I was intrigued by this, because I can do that, too, but nothing in the environment I’d grown up in had encouraged the development of such skills. I never thought I had any innate gift for needlework; teaching myself to do it had been very difficult. I studied books and picked up whatever tips I could from any experienced dressmakers who had happened to cross my path. My mother-in-law, for example, who had spent her adolescence working in sweatshops and, after some years doing various kinds of freelance sewing, had finally settled into depressing steady employment making the restraining devices for hospital patients that are known as Posey belts, because this was piecework that she could easily do at home while raising her children. In Japan, where my husband, stepson, and I were a bit too tall for the available ready-towear, I’d had an automatic incentive to master tailoring, and even made complete suits not only for myself but for both the males in my family. And now I had to wonder if some dressmaking DNA had led me to acquire all that expertise. Mama couldn’t sew herself, though. She’d never had any need to learn, having an accomplished seamstress at her disposal while her grandmother was still alive. Mummy hadn’t been able to sew, either, and with her horror of useful work she had been puzzled and a bit distressed by my childish interest in constructing wardrobes for my dolls—something my sister’s daughter also did, I learned. As Mama talked about her memories, I tried to piece together a coherent chronology: “You lived in this house when? And moved to that one when you were how old?” Whenever a question concerned her father, she would immediately begin to talk about an aunt instead, her mother’s sister, a somewhat narcissistic character pictured in a flamboyant succession of short-skirted beaded chemises, cocoon-like wraps, 192

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and other high-style flapper getups, looking much more like one of Diaghilev’s Parisian dancers than the respectable Philadelphia matron she had been, with aigrettes surmounting her exuberant thick blond curls. My grandmother had always felt obliged to take care of and protect Auntie, Mama said, and was touchingly devoted to her little sister all her life. By this time, I felt secure enough with Mama to persist in questioning even where she plainly didn’t want me to, because this going-through of photos and memories seemed to be some kind of official admission for me into her family, or recognition that I had a place in it, at any rate, so I kept bringing the conversation back to her father. And at last she told me something that made her previous reluctance to talk about him understandable. She began by sighing. Then she pursed her mouth and looked away. Finally, she said, “I think I have to tell you something. My maiden name was my mother’s first husband’s name. He was my brother’s father, but he wasn’t my father. My father—your grandfather—was an Englishman. He was a doctor. His name was William David Bacon. He died when I was very young, and I’d always called him Daddy, but my mother never admitted that he was my real father. But once I got old enough to understand those things, I figured it out myself. My brother—your uncle—and I didn’t look much alike, and there was the chronology, too. My mother was only fourteen when she married her first husband, and he’d been out of the picture for quite a while by the time I was born. When she was married to this Dr. Bacon, it made a huge difference in our lives. We all went to live in his big house. It was very luxurious and there was always plenty of everything. He was very well connected, too. I remember that we got to sit in a special box with all the local politicians to watch parades. But when he died, his wife came over from England to get the body, and my mother found out he’d never been divorced.” “So the marriage wasn’t legal!” I felt a kind of helpless glee at finding my mother was a bastard—just like me! “It was my grandmother, Mammoo, who told me all this. She said she thought I should know who my real father was.” “How old were you when she told you that?” “In my late teens. I don’t remember exactly. But she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I guess it had occurred to her that she might die and I would never know, because my mother certainly wouldn’t tell me.” “Didn’t you ever ask your mother about it?” “She never wanted to talk about any of that.” “But didn’t you want to confront her?” “It was a very different time then. People didn’t ask their parents 193

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about things like that.” “So your maiden name—the name on my adoption papers—isn’t really your name at all?” “Well, it is, was. I mean, since they weren’t really married, I had my mother’s name from her first marriage, and I suppose that was legal, since it was my mother’s legal name. But it wasn’t my father’s name.” I felt that I should make some bitter remark about all the research I had done on that red herring of a surname, trying to figure out where my ancestors could have come from, when in fact it had nothing to do with me at all, but I was too delighted by Mama’s revelation to be cross about the time and effort I had wasted. And I hardly knew which aspect of it pleased me more: that my mother was as illegitimate as I was, that I was a Bacon, or that I was descended from such a piquant kind of criminal—not tainted with violence, nothing big-time evil to worry about, just a delicious, titillating naughtiness. And besides, don’t people usually get a special kick out of physicians’ crimes? It must be something about the power they have over the rest of us—it would be better for us, as their patients, if they were infallible miracle-workers, but we can’t seem to help enjoying anything that proves them only human, after all. “My grandfather was a bigamist!” I squealed, with such obvious joy that my mother looked a little shocked. “Well, yes.” “And a Bacon! Oooh, Mama, Francis Bacon is my very favorite contemporary painter. Do you like him, too?” “I’m not familiar—” “I’m sure you must have seen some of his work sometime—the screaming popes?” She looked puzzled. “They’re very famous. You must know—miserable-looking naked guys sitting under miserable-looking naked light bulbs? Very sordid and grotesque? Harsh. Dramatic. And this totally masterful use of paint? And sometimes he puts little arrows in his paintings, sort of satirically—contemptuously, you might say.” Mama only looked blank. “I’ll send you a book about him.” “You don’t have to do—” “It’s O.K., I have several, I can easily spare one for you. We might be related to him! Wow!” I could scarcely believe my mother’s lack of enthusiasm about the possibility. He didn’t sound like her kind of thing, she said. I told her he was a really great painter. She continued to look unenthusiastic, and I remembered she had told me that her favorite artist was Mary Cassatt, whose untroubled celebrations of maternal love have always left 194

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me pretty cold. “Of course, he was a horrible person,” I conceded. “But you know, I’ve read that his father claimed they were descended from Francis Bacon, so we might—” “Wait a minute. Who was this painter you were talking about? I thought that was Francis Bacon.” “Yes, but I mean he was descended from the other Francis Bacon, so we might be related to both of—” “The other Francis Bacon?” “Mama! You know, the Elizabethan guy, people keep claiming he really wrote Shakespeare?” “Oh, yes, that Bacon.” Why wasn’t she as excited as I was? Of course, she’d had threequarters of a century to get used to the idea of being a Bacon, and I’d only just learned that I was, but still . . . I struggled after what was left in my memory of the Elizabethan Francis from my youthful obsession with Tudor history. “I don’t think Francis Bacon ever had children, but we could be descendants of the same family. Didn’t you ever wonder if you had any connection to that Francis Bacon?” “I can’t say it ever crossed my mind. It’s not as if he really did write Shakespeare’s plays.” “But he wrote a lot of other stuff—essays, and philosophy. You know, he’s sort of the originator of the scientific method. That would be an ancestor anybody could be proud of, and come to think of it, I’m pretty sure his family had some connection with Roger Bacon, so we could even—” “Now, who is Roger Bacon, darling?” Darling. I was my Mama’s darling. This made me so deeply happy that I couldn’t help grinning. Over and over again, with her, I found myself regressing to an emotional age I figured must be somewhere around three. “Well, he really invented the scientific method.” “Hold on. Who’s on first here? You just said Francis Bacon did that. I’m sure that’s what you said. The one who didn’t write Shakespeare, I mean, not the painter. Didn’t you say that?” “Well, yes, I did, but you see, actually they both did, only in different ways. Roger and Francis, I mean.” “They were working together?” “Oh, no, Mama, Roger Bacon was a medieval guy—he had been dead for a couple of centuries by Francis Bacon’s time. He—Roger, I mean— was really the first person in the world to talk about the importance of experiments. Before him, people thought the best way to figure stuff out was by thinking about it. That’s why you can say he’s the originator of the scientific method. And I believe he invented eyeglasses, too.” “But if this Roger was so much earlier than Francis, and he was the one who 195

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discovered the scientific method, wasn’t it already done by Francis’ time? They can’t both have been the ‘originator.’ ” I was pleased by my mother’s alertness, which seemed to me to make up for her lack of interest in our putative ancestral connection to so many important minds. But at the same time, her acuity frightened me a little bit. All I could remember about Francis’s actual contribution to the development of modern science was that it had something to do with inductive reasoning, and since I had just told my mother that Roger was important because he favored experimentation over thought, I was afraid she would notice that contradiction and lose all respect for me. As it was, I had a feeling I might be disappointing her somehow—unlike Mummy though she was, she might prefer a daughter who was less of a pedant. “You know a lot, don’t you?” “I minored in philosophy,” I explained apologetically, fearing this might alienate her further. To get us off this problematic track, and because it had occurred to me that the strain of grotesquerie in my sister’s art work and my writing might have something to do with the Baconian genes we shared, I asked, “Mama, how does my sister feel about being a Bacon?” My mother frowned. “What do you mean?” “Well, because she’s an artist. I’m sure she knows who Francis Bacon is.” “But she doesn’t know she’s a Bacon.” “She doesn’t know?” “Well, no, I never told her.” “Why not?” I was almost too pleased to care. My mother had told me something she had not told her legitimate daughter. I hoped that Mama might even be enjoying her freedom to talk frankly about her own illegitimacy with a fellow bastard. I so much wanted to have some role in her family; perhaps that would be it. “Oh, I don’t know. She was too young . . . and then there didn’t seem to be any point in bringing it up once she was old enough.” “Does my brother know?” “No, I never told him, either.” I could not help being pleased to be the only one who knew. I was aware that this pleasure was a childish thing, unbecoming and even absurd in middle age, but I figured that where you have siblings, you’ll have sibling rivalry, and after all, I’d never had the chance to grow out of all the unbecoming emotions it involves. When we weren’t talking about family, Mama was rummaging through her wardrobe, finding things to give me, since I was exactly the same size she had been a few years back, when she was closer to my age, and these things were too petite for my tall, large-framed sister. Like me, Mama clung to an irrational belief that she would one day lose enough weight to fit into her old clothes again, and cluttered her closets with garments she hadn’t worn in many years, not even getting rid of them when she moved to a new apartment—the utter opposite of Mummy’s conscientious regular seasonal wardrobe revisions and prunings. 196

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Similarly, Mama’s place was cluttered with furniture she kept there though she neither needed nor made any use of it. Three enormous pieces in carved oak were devouring much of her floor space; she said my sister might one day move into a bigger place, then they could go to her. I, too, keep impossible furniture that way, in case of theoretical contingencies I can scarcely identify; at that time, I could not enter my bedroom easily because of a huge, ugly dresser blocking half the doorway, which I stubbornly retained although its drawers stuck so badly that I hardly ever opened them and a Chinese friend kept warning me about dire fêng-shui. I had learned, in analysis, to regard such compulsive retention as part of a behavior syndrome connected with being adopted—according to traditional Freudian theories, it was because I was unhappy about having been thrown out myself that I had a hard time bringing myself to jettison anything at all, even when keeping it was inconvenient and although I knew that hanging on to useless things is totally irrational. But my mother did it, too, and she had not been “thrown away,” so now I had to wonder if this was simply some hereditary trait. Of course, whatever it was, it hadn’t stopped my mother from discarding me, but then, I’d dumped two fiancés and left a husband, too; perhaps the DNA I shared with Mama restricted its compassion to nonliving things. Yet Mama and I had both thrown out the memorabilia of our show-business careers—a much more extreme act in her case than in mine, of course, but still the same exception to our usual policies. I was fascinated to see that Mama’s approach to her junk mail was exactly like mine also; she looked carefully through catalogues she never ordered from, preserving pages with items that pleased her, and these were often the very same items that I, too, had singled out, quite pointlessly. In a magazine rack, I found three pictures torn out from successive issues of the Winterthur Museum gift-shop catalogue, all showing the same Imari-pattern picnic set, made of melamine. At home, in my magazine rack, were the same three catalogues these pages had been torn from, corners turned down carefully on the pictures of that same picnic set. “Are you going to order this?” I asked her, aware of something helplessly accusing in my tone. “No. What would I do with a picnic set?” “Then why did you tear out the page—three different times?” “I don’t really know.” “I have the same page marked from those same three catalogues, at home, and I don’t know why I have them, either. I definitely do not want that picnic set, yet every time I see it . . . Mama, don’t you think it’s weird that we would both do this? I mean, why?” “I guess both of us just kind of like it.” 197

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“But, Mama, doesn’t the strangeness of it get to you at all? You know, I’ve read about kids who were adopted as babies and then reunited with their birth parents, after growing up, and they found they liked all the same foods and took naps at the same time of day and stuff like that, and I’ve read about twins separated at birth who always bought all the same brands of things, really unusual brands sometimes. I remember there was a pair who both liked Vademecum toothpaste, and they even married women with the same first names . . . but how could genes determine what we both do with our junk mail?” “Beats me,” she said—sensibly, I must admit. But I could not stop being amazed. As she rummaged through her clothes, I saw how often Mama and I had bought similar things, a few times the exact same suits and dresses, for example, sometimes just the same labels; she even tried to give me a few things that were identical to items in my closet at home. I told myself this should not be surprising—two identical-looking women would naturally find the same clothes appealing because what looked nice on one would of course be just as becoming to the other—but it was disconcerting nonetheless. Our cozy tête-à-têtes came to an end at four o’clock on both days of my visit, because it was time for “Gracious Living,” which is what my mother and her husband ironically called their cocktail hour. Drinking with them made me nervous; I was afraid of getting too relaxed, possibly saying something that would undermine whatever progress I had made toward acceptance. They went on drinking at dinner; cautiously nursing a beer, I noticed that each glass of wine my mother drank made her a bit more loquacious and at the same time less able to keep track of what she said: “I had a friend who was an opera director, and once she came to stay with me, and . . . ” “And?” I prompted. “Hmm, now I’ve forgotten why I brought that up.” “I was talking about going to the opera.” “Oh, yes. But I still can’t remember what I was going to say.” Was this what I would be like in twenty-some years? Perhaps it had nothing to do with aging, though. Was it, in fact, what I was already like, when I had no reason to be careful about not drinking too much? Hadn’t I often heard myself say exactly that same thing, in those very words: “Hmm, now I’ve forgotten why I brought that up?” Mama also spilled things on her clothes. I liked this, and couldn’t see it as related to her age, because I am also clumsy, and often spill things on my clothes and always have. This was something Mummy always scolded me harshly for in childhood, and I had always been sure this was entirely unjust, because I felt my clumsiness was totally helpless. I wanted to believe the stains on Mama’s dresses proved my own 198

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slovenliness to be genetic and thus not my fault, but I couldn’t help noticing that Mama’s propensity for spilling had some direct correlation to how much she’d had to drink. Similarly, on both nights of the weekend, at dinner, she had sneezing fits. “Cashew! Cashew, cashew, cashew! Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know what sets me off like that. I think someone must have passed by wearing some very strong perfume.” “No, Mama, it’s all the wine you’ve had,” I told her on the first night. “Wine has histamines. You know, what the antihistamines in cold medicines suppress. They make your nose run and they make you sneeze. Right?” I turned to her husband, counting on him to back me up, because of his M.D. “I don’t know,” he said, in a stagey way that made me think he was telling me he wasn’t going to criticize my mother’s drinking and didn’t think I should, either. “Wine does that to me, too, sometimes,” I said, “and once somebody told me it must be the histamines.” I looked to see if this had mollified the doctor, but his face was expressionless. The second night, the same thing happened all over again. “Cashew! Cashew, cashew! I am sorry, you know, this is the season for allergies.” Mama snorted, then shook her head. Looking helpless and bewildered, she knocked back all the rest of the wine in the glass in front of her. Hadn’t she believed what I had said about the histamines? Had she forgotten? Or didn’t she care? Her sneezing was actually kind of cute—kitten-like—but I couldn’t decide whether to be charmed or exasperated by her willfulness. When I was a child, I had envied aged women because it seemed everyone always allowed them to get away with murder. My adoptive Granny had become quite erratic in her dotage and, before she had to be hospitalized, did all manner of outrageous things—once, for example, giving her diamond jewelry to a young sailor who had helped her get a cab. Everyone agreed there was no point in blaming her. What else could you expect, at her age? For that reason, I had always said that I could hardly wait to be an old lady. Now, though, confronted with my aging mother, a troubling vision of the old woman I was apparently in the process of becoming, I found that I was having second thoughts. When I gave her the hostess presents I had brought, I gave her the brooch also. “I just wanted to give you something to remember me by.” As I said it, I thought that if she decided not to see me again and never to tell her other children about me, it would be unbearable. She laughed and laughed, even after she had started to cry. “There’s no danger of my forgetting you.” I had bought a disposable camera for that weekend, to document 199

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the unique occasion. I had a proper camera, but I disliked using it and when I did, the pictures I took tended to show nothing but people’s feet. I thought a disposable one would be foolproof. But when the pictures I took with it were developed, they had all the usual defects of my photography. When I told my mother, on the phone, she comforted me, explaining that she, too, took pictures of people’s feet unintentionally, no matter what kind of camera she used, and that this must be due to something in our genes, so there was no point in getting upset about it. Just one snapshot from that weekend came out well at all; it had been taken by her husband. My mother’s sitting in a chair and I am perching on its arm; she’s looking up at me, I’m looking down at her. She’s smiling but looks a little apprehensive; I’m smiling, too, seeming rather pleased with myself. But although our expressions are different, he managed to capture our identical faces at identical angles, so it looks like a trick photograph, or a still from some cinematic tour-de-force like Kind Hearts and Coronets, where Alec Guinness played so many different members of a single family. I couldn’t stop showing it to people, along with a few family photos I had coaxed my mother into giving me, including one taken of her in the sixties, which I had recognized at once as the woman I had seen on the train as a teenager. Most were from earlier decades. Everyone’s reaction was the same: “You really do look exactly like your mother.” “What an amazing resemblance.” “If you hadn’t told me who this was, I’d think this was a photo of you, dressed up for a costume party—Fabulous Fifties.” Some of these friends had known about my searches for my biological family, some had not. Many of them asked me why I would want to open such a can of worms. Most of them said they felt that, all in all, families were more trouble than they were worth. “Easy for you to say,” I’d tell them. “You take it all for granted. You don’t know what it’s like never to have had one.” The first time Mama called after that weekend, she told me her husband had said he couldn’t imagine a better daughter. He’d said he wanted her to remind me that he was my stepfather. If I had won a Nobel Prize I could hardly have been more pleased. I felt, too, that I’d passed some kind of crucial test, that if he had not approved of me I would have had no chance of being invited back into my mother’s life again. “So, now will you two come and visit me?” Without giving her a chance to refuse, I babbled unstoppably about theater and restaurants. “Well, he doesn’t really like New York.” “But it wouldn’t be like staying in a hotel—you’d be with me, I’d spare you all the hassles.” I’d take great care of them and show them a 200

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good time, she’d see. “Stick with me, baby.” “Hmm. I suppose we could.” Heedless of the warning in the fairy tale about the fisherman’s wife, I no sooner got what I wanted than I asked for something more. “Mama, are you going to tell my sister and brother about me?” “We shall see.” F

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Contributors’ Notes JEFFREY M. BAKER is a writer and teacher who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. He brings poetry workshops to kids in neighborhoods as near as Prospect Heights and as far as Soweto, South Africa. He is currently at work finishing a first collection of poems and organizing a workshop for India in 2011. TIMOTHY BROWN, a musician as well as a writer, lives in Seattle. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and an opera. He has a B.S. in history from Utah State University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College, Port Townsend, Washington. SARAH CARSON was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, but now lives in Chicago, where she serves as an editor at RHINO and as the Communications Specialist at Switchback Books. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Limestone, Strange Machine, and Diagram, among other places. Her chapbook, Before Onstar, is available from Etched Press. BENOÎT CONORT, born in 1956, is a French poet and literary critic. His collections of poetry include Au-delà des cercles (Gallimard, 1992), which won the Tristan Tzara Prize, and Main de nuit (Champ Vallon, 1998), which won the Mallarmé Prize. He teaches at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and serves on the editorial board of the literary review Le nouveau recueil. He has traveled widely, in India, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, and the United States. KIM CUSHMAN was a translator for Life Sentence by Nina Cassian (W.W. Norton, 1990). His translations have also appeared in The American Poetry Review and Blue Unicorn. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont. LISA DIERBECK is a founding editor of Mischief + Mayhem, a new publishing collective. She is the author of two novels, The Autobiography of Jenny X (from which the story in this issue is drawn), forthcoming from Mischief + Mayhem/OR Books, and One Pill Makes You Smaller (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a New York Times Notable Book. She has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, Time Out New York, and Glamour, among other publications. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dierbeck’s fiction and essays have been anthologized in such collections as Heavy Rotation: 20 Authors on the Albums that Changed Their Lives (HarperCollins) and Oprah’s Guide to Life: The Best of O, the Oprah Magazine. She lives in New York City. JEROME EDWARDS’ stories have appeared in Lynx Eye, Natural Bridge, and EM Literary Asylum, among other publications. He lives in downtown Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel. www.jeromejedwards.com JOE ELLIOT is the author of Opposable Thumb (subpress, 2006). A new collection of his poems, Homework, will be available by the end of the year from Lunar Chandelier. Toni Graham is the author of two short story collections, Waiting for Elvis and The Daiquiri Girls. She is an associate professor of English: Creative Writing at Oklahoma State, where she serves as fiction editor of the Cimarron Review. Melissa Green is the author of two books of poetry, The Squanicook Eclogues, reissued this year by Pen & Anvil Press, and Fifty-Two, published by Arrowsmith Press in 2007, and a memoir, Color Is the Suffering of Light. She is an editor at the new literary magazine Little Star, and lives in the Boston area. 202

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SHELLY KING is a native Southerner who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works for a high-tech company designing systems to make software easier to use. Her fiction has been published in the Palo Alto Weekly, The Writer magazine, the GW Review, and Slow Trains. She is currently finishing a novel about people finding love in Silicon Valley. ANDREW McCORD has been making translations and poems drawing on the cultures and life of India and Pakistan for many years. Some of this work has been published in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Civil Lines, Epiphany, and other magazines. LINDSAY MERBAUM’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, PANK, Dzanc Books Best of the Web, The Collagist, and The Best of Our Stories, among others. Honors and awards include a storySouth award nomination and the Himan Brown Award from Brooklyn College, where she received her M.F.A. A.B. MEYER is a pseudonym of the author of two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, which were published under another name. Her writing has often appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times. Dale Peck is the author of ten books, including Martin and John, What We Lost, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout, which won the inaugural Lambda Literary Award for best gay and lesbian young-adult novel in 2010. He is a co-founder of the Mischief + Mayhem publishing collective and an adjunct professor in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his husband, the photographer Lou Peralta. LINDSAY SPROUL, originally from Massachusetts, is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals, including The Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Hayden’s Ferry Review, upstreet, and Glimmer Train. She received Pushcart Prize nominations in 2008 and 2009, and this is her first nonfiction publication. She lives in Los Angeles. VICKI SHER is an artist/curator who has shown her work widely throughout the U.S. She is currently represented by Frosch&Portmann Gallery in New York City. She lives with her husband and three children in Brooklyn. KIRK STIRLING was born, raised, and educated in upstate New York. He moved to Manhattan shortly before Steve Rubell was charged with tax evasion and has lived there ever since. He is currently working on a very long essay about disco, drinking, dandyism, and delusion, among other things. NICK THRAN’s second collection of poetry, Earworm, is forthcoming this spring from Nightwood Editions. His first collection, Every Inadequate Name, was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Canada’s first-book prize. He is currently a Goldwater Teaching Fellow and an M.F.A. candidate at New York University. ROBIN F. WILLIG is originally from New York, and never left. This is her fiction début. She has worked with authors Tim Tomlinson, Beth Ann Bauman, and Cristina Garcia, among others. She was a resident at the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s April 2010 “Family Matters” competition. When she’s not at her day job at the Community Service Society of New York, she is working on a collection of short stories, and is also on the board of the Center for Digital Storytelling. She recently discovered that writing a contributor bio was nearly as difficult as writing fiction. She is grateful to Epiphany for giving her this epiphany. Note: The Fell type used on the cover was digitally reproduced by Igino Marini. iginomarini.com

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pe · des · tri · an (n) a walker (adj) ordinary, commonplace

ThePedestrian.org • Explore the ordinary. The Pedestrian is a quarterly journal that celebrates the history and living tradition of the “light”, “familiar”, or “personal” essay. Were we to illuminate the most ordinary, common, and familiar of things, then the greatest miracles of nature and the most marvelous examples, especially concerning human actions, might be formed. michel de montaigne

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