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The Wallace Prize 2015

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The song remains the same second-place nonfiction by NOAH REMNICK

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Paper bullets third-place nonfiction by ALEXANDRA LOHMAN

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You two stay with the bear second-place fiction by ALEX BLUM

The Wallace Prize is the most prestigious independently awarded undergraduate writing prize for fiction and nonfiction at Yale. The Wallace Prize is awarded annually in memory of Peter J. Wallace â&#x20AC;&#x2122;64, a former member of the Yale Daily News editorial board.

The winning submissions in each category are published in this issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine. Judges are professionals drawn from the fields of academia and journalism, and have no connection to the News.

4 Playing house first-place nonfiction by SOPHIE HAIGNEY

Coffee spoons third-place fiction by SOPHIE HAIGNEY

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Jennifer Gersten Oliver Preston

Roost

first-place fiction

by DEVON GEYELIN

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Managing Editors Yuval Ben-David Lucy Fleming Photography Editors Wa Liu Alex Schmeling Magazine Design Editor Amra Saric Design Editors Olivia Hamel Carter Levin Illustrations Editor Thao Do

Associate Editors Abigail Bessler Jessica Blau Elizabeth Miles Copy Editors Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Isabel Sperry Sarah Sutphin Design Staff Ellie Handler Emily Hsee Editor-in-chief Isaac Stanley-Becker Publisher Abdullah Hanif Cover photograph by Alex Schmeling

first-place nonfiction

Playing house

by Sophie Haigney

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photography by Wa Liu

nonfiction

I

told him, maybe on our first date, that I didn’t want to get married. It was my first real date ever, or the first that mattered, and we were at an overpriced restaurant on Charles Street that served undercooked food and he was paying.

I wore silver earrings I’d gotten for Christmas and ate nettle risotto while we played at adult conversation and I told him what I told everyone, which was that I didn’t want to get married.

He was incredulous. “What are you going to do when you’re older? Won’t you be lonely?”

I shrugged, a little flippant. I was 16 and I had a recent Yale acceptance and a couple of published poems and the future was a bright ribbon winding abstractly ahead of me. “There are so many places I want to go and so many things I want to do,” I told him. “Marriage would get in the way.”

Of course, I hadn’t answered his question but he didn’t really notice.

Instead he asked: “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe South America.”

W

e went to South America.

Eight months after that first date, I moved to Peru for three months with my high school boyfriend.

We had fallen in love in the early days of a fresh New England spring while I was at boarding school and he was in Boston.

As a California native transplanted, the seasons had a hold on me. The melting river at school, damp April mornings, the lengthening evening light, Boston blooming, and us. The necessary cliché of first love in the springtime is the belief that your feelings are original and that the world is responding to you alone.

And it was. We were not other high school couples. This was something different. Sometimes we affirmed this to each other—no one we knew had ever felt like this.

I had postponed college for a year to get a jumpstart on seeing the world.

So did he. It became clear—unspoken at first—that we were going to do something together. During that stifling

summer we were inseparable, and we schemed. Then it was September and despite all obvious obstacles, despite advice from both sets of parents, despite our own hesitations (okay, we had none), we were saying goodbye to our tearful families in Terminal C of Logan airport. We had two tickets to Lima and the name of a volunteer organization in Cusco.

W

e started playing house in the blue backroom of a yellow building on a steep hill in a dusty red-roofed city filled with stray dogs and church-bells and tiendas selling mangoes for three cents apiece.

A Peruvian family lived in the front part of the house but when I think of it, and when I think about Peru in general, I just picture that blue room.

There was a double bed with a blue bedspread, a dresser, two bookshelves and a painting of a bright blue sailboat on the wall. There was a ceiling window above the bed and the light that filtered in was intensely blue. Retrospectively, I have the sense of Peru as a blue country because our existence for those three months was so confined to that blue, blue room.

With us, scattered haphazardly about the room, we had enough antibiotics to cure anything except what we actually got, more sunscreen than the climate could have possibly required, an outof-date Eyewitness guidebook that I had spent the summer memorizing, 22 books (mostly hardcover), minimal clothing, two journals, an empty bottle of DEET 100 bug repellent that had burst in my bag on the plane, and two prep school educations that would prove entirely useless for three months.

I also had, on my right hand, his great-grandmother’s wedding ring.

He had given it to me, half-jokingly, because his mom read in a guidebook that it was safer for women traveling in South America to wear a wedding ring. It was too big for my finger and was inscribed, “To Ann, 1917.” I never took it off.

T

here are easy ways to explain what went wrong. We spent too much time together, I tell people when they ask, or we realized we weren’t that compatible. He was too critical and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself.

It was just too intense. Those things are not false but the truth is that it happened quietly, in the space of the everyday.

We woke up and we brushed our teeth. We had sex. We had breakfast.

We read for a while or went into the city and saw something. We volunteered in the afternoons at a boys’ orphanage, which was not uplifting but totally disheartening. We came home exhausted and napped. We studied Spanish verbs.

We ate dinner with the Peruvian family and practiced using our Spanish verbs.

Sometimes we went to bars. We made some friends. We kept expenses. We journaled. We brushed our teeth. We had sex. We went to bed.

On weekends we travelled. We took long sticky bus rides to other dusty cities and beautiful, beautiful countryside. Peru is the most beautiful country—rugged and dramatic and rough in its beauty.

Once, we were on the bus back from some ruins in the Sacred Valley and I watched the sun bleed dark orange over a jagged peak. It was somehow brilliant and harsh at the same time. I thought then: this country is heartbreakingly beautiful.

Then, out of nowhere, I thought that my heart was breaking.

We were suffocating in the blueness of that room. In late October I stopped sleeping for four nights. I stared up at the ceiling window. Above, an electrical wire wavered and I watched it. I held my breath until morning came, blue.

Sometimes he napped and I took the bus to Parradero San Miguel where I paid three soles for American chocolate that I didn’t record in our expense books.

I watched barefoot children play soccer and listened to the sounds of old women speaking Quechua in the market—harsh, always close to angry. I sat on the curb by the bus stop and sobbed. I came home and woke him up. We practiced Spanish.

We had sex.

Eventually I broke down or he did.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

nonfiction We acknowledged late one night in early November that we were unhappy. He said it first, after we got in a fight about how I always put my feet on his legs when they were cold and I thought this was reasonable, and I had always done it, and he thought this was unreasonable, and he said it had always bothered him, and I asked him why. He said, “I don’t think I’m happy anymore.”

I felt like throwing up. “Me neither,” I said, and it was mostly true. We were quiet for a little bit. I sat on the edge of the bed, turned away, and asked what this meant. “Are we breaking up?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “of course not. That’s not what I want at all.”

“Then what does this mean?” I asked.

“Something is happening right now.”

We floundered for the answer until he said it. “I think maybe this is the moment we realize that first love doesn’t last forever.”

Until that moment, I don’t think I had consciously realized that I wanted it to.

After all, I was the strong independent woman who was never getting married. I was going to run around the world writing books. But here I was, sitting on a double bed that I had shared for two months with my high school boyfriend, and I was wearing his great-grandmother’s wedding ring on my finger.

“But I think I want it to,” I said, because it was all I could think to say. I looked at the ring.

“Me too,” he said. And we just sat there.

I

t really ended then, but of course in other ways it didn’t. We dragged our relationship out much longer—back home and then, foolishly, across Eastern Europe in the winter. We knew it was over but we couldn’t bear to separate and so we booked another set of flights. We traveled by train across a whirlwind of bitterly cold, bleakly beautiful countries with an expiration date at the end of it.

Communist architecture in the snow isn’t a remedy for heartache.

In February we parted ways for good.

He was going home, and I was going to Florence because I wanted to paint away

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all of my sorrows and maybe see the beginning of an Italian spring. Mostly it rained and I cried. In the Berlin airport we said goodbye. We were standing there and he kissed me and I slipped off the ring, which I had been wearing despite everything. I handed it back to him. He was crying. I wasn’t. I turned to go but he stopped me and slipped a brown glass ring on my finger. I looked at him and felt practically wild inside, numb and breaking. I kissed him and walked away.

I got on the plane to Florence and my mind was empty for the whole ride. The plane droned and I fiddled with the ring.

From this moment, it’s tempting to flash forward. To my gray time in Italy.

To the night, two months later, when I cracked the glass ring. To Alaska that summer, where I got sunburnt and relearned how to do the basic things that had seemed impossible without him, like putting toothpaste on my toothbrush. To

that other boy in August who took me to his house in Maine and taught me to shoot a twelve-gauge at beer bottles off his roof, and also other things like how to be happy with someone I didn’t love and didn’t intend to, and most of what I know about cooking.

B

ut I think this story has to end at the moment when I got off the plane in Florence with my backpack, the address of an apartment where I was supposedly staying, and the name of a painting school I had found on the Internet. I was standing in line for a taxi outside the airport and I looked down at the glass ring on my finger.

I thought about the obvious irony of a glass ring, simultaneously so fragile and binding. I thought about how light it was on my finger. But mostly I just thought: how the hell am I supposed to start over from here?

nonfiction

second-place nonfiction

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME On the road with all-female tribute band Lez Zeppelin

by Noah Remnick illustrations by Nicole Tsai

I

n just over thirteen hours, her face will brim with unalloyed delight. She will strut to the center of the stage with pursed lips and eyes squinting into blazing halogen lights. She will play one of the most iconic riffs in the history of rock and roll, and midway through her solo, she will tantalize the sea of outstretched arms beneath her with a guitar that she suspends just above their collective grasp. She will feel alive like no other moment in her otherwise ordinary life, and so will the 600 people in front of her. It will be a moment â&#x20AC;&#x201D; dynamic, sexy, perhaps even transformative â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but on an early Friday morning, standing amidst the rush hour frenzy on a street corner in uptown Manhattan, Stephanie Paynes has other concerns than the ecstasies of rock and roll. She needs a ride. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

nonfiction Paynes is the lead guitarist and founder of Lez Zeppelin, an all-female tribute band inspired by the four spunky Brits that Rolling Stone once described as “the heaviest band of all time.” Today, I — a 21-year-old college journalist at the helm of my family’s battered Toyota minivan – am driving the band. It is safe to say Lez Zeppelin does not travel the way Led Zeppelin once did.

Although she is first and foremost a guitarist, Paynes, well into middle age, has also taken over the band’s managerial duties just ten years past its inception. The responsibilities of the role are manifold and uniformly dull. Today she needs to ensure that the band — along with a handful of roadies and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment — makes it down to Falls Church, Virginia, in time for a gig at the State Theater. For 21 hours, I joined Paynes and the rest of the band on the road trip down and back — one that would take us over 500 miles of rolling highway, through generations of musical fantasies, across the gender spectrum and back, all in time for Paynes to return home for a weekend at the beach with her kids.

W

ith her face concealed by a gigantic pair of sunglasses, Paynes, snake-hipped and leather-clad, bears an uncanny resemblance to her counterpart, Jimmy Page. She even matches his swaggering and seductive demeanor as a performer.

Offstage, however, she allows her nerves to show. (Page, an inveterate junkie in his day, was usually too stoned to be jittery.

He did not vibrate. He floated.) Paynes frets constantly, about everything from ticket sales to sound quality to the press.

The self-proclaimed “Jewish mother of the band” and the actual mother of two sons, she even nags her band mates to eat well before each show so they won’t feel faint in the midst of “Dazed and Confused.”

“Why do you think your fans keep coming to your shows?” I ask Paynes as we turn south onto Manhattan’s 8 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

West Side Highway. Reclining into the passenger’s seat, she pauses for a moment to consider the question before firing back.

“They come for the beer mostly.”

A wry smile flashes across her face, and it’s clear she is toying with me.

Paynes, a former journalist for NME and other music publications, has dealt with questions like this one ever since she made perhaps the most devilishly clever consonant swaps in rock history.

The band has received years of media coverage, most of it focusing on the unorthodox spectacle of their charade.

The name alone provokes bemused joy from almost everyone who encounters it.

I couldn’t help but chuckle when I first came across their listing on a website about tribute bands. Paynes knows my type, drawn by the artifice rather than the music, and she makes a point of cutting me down. During our ride to Falls Church, Paynes mocks everything from my outfit to my driving She doesn’t bother answering certain questions and bans me from asking others. “You’re not Rolling Stone,” she reminds me more than once.

In the pantheon of rock and roll, tribute bands are typically comedic fodder — wedding singers who got their hands on a set of costumes. Lez Zeppelin is in this category, but for Paynes, it is not a party trick or a hobby. It is an earnest enterprise, a full-time passion and business that she works tirelessly to preserve. She boasts of compliments garnered from “real” rock stars like Joey Ramone and often characterizes herself, more than a little defensively, as a “true artist.”

Despite her deft and adrenalized guitar play, Paynes compiled a long résumé of letdowns and almost-madeits before the creation of Lez Zeppelin.

For years, projects floundered as quickly as they sprung up, offering glints of stardom just beguiling enough to sustain her. Paynes even called it quits from music for a while. Lez Zeppelin was the idea that took hold — the culmination of a tormented career. Formed in

2004, the band, despite its frenetic existence, has managed to survive for over a decade in an era that has been unkind to all but the biggest headline acts. They’ve traveled the globe, released two albums, earned invitations to highprofile music festivals, and even received a compliment from a first-order source: John Paul Jones, the bass player for Led Zeppelin, once remarked on the band’s “superb musicianship.” Some members have come and gone. Paynes is the band’s one constant, embodying Page and leading what she likes to call the “she-incarnation” of Led Zeppelin. The band now belongs to an expanding fleet of all-female tribute bands that includes the likes of AC/DShe and The Ramonas.

For her, this is a point of pride.

“Rock was defined by all-male role models, and women were just not brought up in a way to embrace that kind of overt, aggressive stance,” she tells me. “So when we take on a band like Led Zeppelin, who played this empowered cock rock, it’s somewhat radical and shocking to some people.”

As she finishes her explanation, Paynes extends a skeletal hand across the dashboard to indicate our first stop, a storage facility in Hell’s Kitchen, where we load a half-dozen guitars (Gibsons of the same makes favored by Page) into the trunk. Also joining the van is Megan Thomas, the band’s bassist and keyboardist — Lez Zep’s John Paul Jones. With delicate features and crimped platinum blonde hair, Thomas fails to perfectly replicate Jones’ physical appearance, but she conducts herself with similar reticence.

“JPJ liked to stay in the shadows and so do I,” she says before wrapping her face in a scarf and dozing off in the back seat.

A few miles further downtown, we pick up the last member of our crew — a haggard and lumpy fellow whom everyone calls “Nitebob.” Robert Czaykowski by law, Nitebob is a legendary sound engineer and tour manager. I’m soon told that he’s worked with Aerosmith, KISS, and Steely Dan,

nonfiction silence of the road before Nitebob interjects once more.

“Or play smaller gigs.”

T

he State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia, is a familiar joint for Lez Zeppelin. Not only has the band played it several times, but the State also caters to the nostalgic. The venue was originally constructed as a movie theater in 1936, and that remained its function until 1988, when it began hosting concerts. Situated between a center for spiritual enrichment and a beach shack that bills itself as “a little taste of Florida in the heart of Falls Church City,” the State has an unremarkable history, save that it was one of the first theatres on the East Coast to install central airconditioning. These days, its shows are often local or kitsch — $5 comedy night, “The World’s Greatest 70’s Dance Party,” and a tribute band called Almost Queen are among the offerings for the end of the year. Inside, the two-story hall can accommodate around 1150 people with standing room only, but for Lez Zeppelin, as for many acts, the main floor is dotted with tables, limiting capacity to 850 and allowing concertamong other bands throughout over became a junkie, who works at Starbucks. goers to dine in while they rock out.

40 years in the industry. At this point The subjects of their exchange are not As soon as we pull into the parking in his career, Nitebob can cherry-pick eminent — I hardly recognize a single lot, Paynes assumes her managerial clients based on prestige and lucrative name they mention — but they are duties. It’s just before 4 p.m. and the contracts, but he’s always been fond enthralled by the notion of trading show won’t begin for over five hours, of Lez Zeppelin and charges them inside information. but she feels no shortage of anxieties. a “friendly” rate, which he refuses to After a couple of hours of back and Ticket sales are mediocre, the venue disclose. Dressed in generous black forth, the two seem to have exhausted screwed up its marketing, the other sweats, and with a mop of grey hair and their arsenal of dirt, when Paynes offers band members are running late, and a mouth of browning teeth, Nitebob is one last story. A few weeks ago, she ran Paynes is short promotion shot glasses a distinctly behind-the-scenes player. into an aging has-been in the bar of a for the VIP meet and greet. And then His role lacks the traditional rock low-rent Parisian hotel. Arriving with there’s this: star glamour, but it puts him in close his wife in tow, the man, undeterred, “Always with the tribute band shit,” proximity to the stuff. What he relishes tried to engage Paynes in bit of Paynes groans. is trafficking in the memories of all that unwanted flirtation.

Indeed, above ours heads, tacked to he has seen and heard.

“It was truly pathetic,” Paynes says, the theater’s marquee, foot-tall plastic “Boy, do I have some shit to tell rolling her eyes. Cocking her head to the letters bill Lez Zeppelin as a tribute you,” Nitebob declares as he boards the right, she stares out the window, onto band. At this point, I realize that I, too, minivan, before launching into a series the highway littered with billboards and have been referring to them as such. of scathing tirades. Paynes, generally unilluminated neon signs.

She clearly resents the label though it is self-possessed, can’t hide her delight, “Rockers never die, they just fade hard to see how she can escape it. and soon they are gossiping endlessly away,” Paynes says with a sigh. For a “Most tribute bands are in the about who got fat, who got signed, who moment, everyone submits to the placid business of impersonation,” she says, as yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

nonfiction

she hauls guitars out of the minivan trunk. “They want to fool you into thinking that they’re the real thing — like if you squint, you might think it’s really them. We’re girls so how could we even do that?”

Lez Zeppelin is far from the only band to perform in the style of Page, Plant, Bonham, and Jones, nor is Lez the sole troupe of women in the business of playing once-male music.

Since Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980

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following Bonham’s death, dozens of acts have attempted to fill the void with their own iterations of “Whole Lotta Love.” Despite the flooded market, Paynes insists on her band’s singularity.

“We’ve played festivals — big festivals,” Paynes gloats. “Tribute bands don’t do that.”

She’s not wrong, of course, but as we loaf around the drab artists’ lounge on the second floor of the theater, her bravado feels exorbitant. The lounge is an unglamorous room, befitted with the trappings of a bachelor pad: a beige couch, coffee table, mini-fridge, and television set with the DVD of This is Spinal Tap (naturally). With plenty of time to go before the show, Paynes, Thomas, and Nitebob pass the time by typing away on their cellphones and picking at the modest deli platter provided by a shaggy young venue employee with the title of “hospitality manager.” Calls are placed to babysitters, emails sent to spouses, Facebook pages checked ad nauseam. Just as we settle into the undeniable ennui, the door crashes open to reveal the remaining two members of the band: Dana Athens and Leesa Squyres.

“I’m a cunt!” declares Athens, as she storms into the room, large Starbucks in hand and sunglasses falling down her face. With the band’s regular lead singer serving as a

nonfiction Broadway understudy, Athens is substituting in the role of Robert Plant for the evening. This sort of shuffling is typical for a Lez. Athens, a pint-sized brunette, made all the more diminutive standing near Squyres, whose hulking frame most contradicts the look of her Led analog, the wiry John “Bonzo” Bonham.

Reunited, the women catch each other up on the minutia of their weeks.

Although Lez Zeppelin is each of their primary musical ventures, the women have taken up a variety of other commitments as the numbers have dwindled to around 40 shows per year.

Thomas is a high school math teacher with a master’s degree in music; Athens teaches dance and singing, and fronts another band; Squyres works security at bars and nightclubs; even Paynes, the Lez obsessive, spends most of the time with her two sons.

With half an hour to go until a “VIP meet and greet,” the women turn their attention to their outfits for the evening. Though they’re cautious to avoid anything resembling “costumes,” the band is sure to don the fashion of their adopted bygone era. Athens and Thomas shimmy into pairs of skintight jeans (Athens’ grey, Thomas’ brown), which they coordinate with white tops.

Lisa, as always, wears black. The most scantily clad is Paynes, rocking a black leather mini skirt over fishnet stockings, her shimmering silver shirt unbuttoned to reveal a see-through black tank top.

Makeup is caked onto faces, hair ironed into curls, and the women are led through the bowels of the theater and up to the balcony. There wait around a dozen middle-aged concertgoers, swigging drinks and dressed in similarly retro attire. “Oh look, It’s the band!” one remarks with a point.

Soon enough, a semi-circle forms around the women of Lez, as the VIPs pepper them with many of the questions I’ve been forbidden to ask: “Have you ever met the real Led Zeppelin?” (Yes.) “Will you play ‘Stairway to Heaven?’”

(No.) “Are you all lesbians?” (“Definitely

maybe.”) If Paynes is exasperated, she refuses to let it show, not even as she smiles for a lengthy procession of cellphone photographers. Who these Very Important People are is unimportant and obscure.

A few paces over, I chat with Leslie and Marie, two VIP and self-described ladies of the go-go era. “We really came as a goof,” insists Marie. “Led Zeppelin was our absolute favorite in high school.

We figured we’d have a laugh and relive the glory days.”

They giggle at the notion, before Leslie adds, “We even managed to drag our husbands because they’re banking on a make out!” As the laughter subsides, I shoot the husbands a look. One of them, a burly man with a flannel shirt and a crew cut, silently motions to the sides of his head and mouths, “Earplugs!”

With show time drawing near, the hall slowly fills with people. It’s a Friday and hordes of married couples have left the kids at home for date night.

Also in the mix are the occasional leather-jacketed man going solo and a small collection of bemused twentysomethings. They look ironical in advance. The demographics on display — overwhelmingly white and old — are not an unusual draw for Lez Zeppelin.

Despite its potential political appeal — women mastering the archetype male band in a testosterone-fueled field — the band tends to attract a wistful, mannerly crowd. Despite the occasional half-hearted “girl power!” cries, none of the thirty or so concertgoers I speak with even mention the gender bending, feminist aspect of the Lez. They came not to rally, but to reminisce, and perhaps to laugh. When I ask people what they anticipate from the band, few express high expectations. As I chat with a plump balding gentleman named Martin, he seems to capture much of the crowd’s sentiment: “Since Bonzo died, I’ll take what I can get.”

A

dimmed, Paynes has an unobstructed view of the hall and she takes a second to estimate the size of the crowd. Just under 600, she silently concludes. The figure is smaller than she’d like, but there’s no time to dwell. Beating her black stiletto heel four times, Paynes establishes the song’s rhythm and begins a staccato riff on her guitar. The track is “Immigrant Song,” an exuberant number that affords Athens a chance to bellow a series of extended Plant-ian wails. It’s meant to rouse the audience members, but, still incredulous and sober, the concertgoers mostly remain seated. Waitresses are still dishing out orders of deep-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and for the time being, the greasy platters of food share equal billing with the band. One song passes with little fanfare, then another. The diners remain unmoved, while the few that stand, having formed a horseshoe around the tables, bob their heads with similar dispassion. But just as it seems that a certain boredom has descended upon the hall, Paynes shoots Thomas a momentary glance, and the bassist slowly strums the opening notes of “Dazed and Confused.”

Almost instantaneously, people react to the slow whirl of Paynes’ guitar. The song is hardly Led Zeppelin’s most famous or technically ornate, but, played live, it unearths its true potency. Athens snarls her way through the first stanza, recounting Jimmy Page’s scathing tale of unrequited love. Gripping the microphone with two hands, she hunches over as she howls, “Soul of a woman was created below.” Within seconds, most of the diners have risen to their feet. Casting aside half-eaten burgers, they lift their fists in the air and offer earnest nods of appreciation.

By the time Paynes strides forward for her solo, a small crowd has accumulated before the stage. A smirk emerges on her face as she unsheathes a violin bow — a stunt that Jimmy Page made famous. spattering of applause greets Lez For upwards of four minutes, she saws it Zeppelin as they take their places across her guitar strings, and the sound on stage. With the spotlights still becomes increasingly haunting. As yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

nonfiction the pitch swells to a crescendo, Paynes whacks her guitar with the bow, tearing slight horsehairs off its frame. She is alone onstage and the crowd is still, eyes unblinking as they watch her raise the bow high above her head. From my perch in the back of the hall, I watch as a mustachioed concertgoer lowers a beer from his lips and turns, incredulous, to his friend.

“She can shred,” he says in astonishment.

“My god, she can shred.”

From then on, the band has the audience rapt. They are not amused or bored or thinking about the ride home.

They are alive to this music, this band, right now. Athens begins to move with more fervor as she sings. She’s playful, but never jokey, and her arsenal of moves is unending: Deep lunges. Whipping hair.

High kicks. Her legs never stop bouncing.

At times, she fastens her legs around the microphone stand and rides it up and down. At others, she lifts the stand and swings it before her in concentric circles.

She bends back so far that her modestlength hair sweeps the floor. During the sensuous “Whole Lotta Love,” she’s at her most animated. Midway through the first verse, an overzealous fan reaches past the plane of the stage to take a photograph, and, without missing a beat, she drops to her knees and shoves her crotch in his camera. Later, as Thomas plays the song’s signature theremin solo, Athens unleashes an orgasmic moan while singing in the microphone that she holds between Paynes’ legs.

It is around this time that I begin taking note of the evolving scene around me. “This is sexy!” I overhear a woman exclaim, and she is clearly not the only one with that thought. Drunken limbs flail in the air like branches in a storm.

Middle-aged couples grind against each other, with roving hands. One particularly bold fellow attempts to do the worm. It is the most egregious dancing I’d ever seen.

As the last note of “Kashmir” echoes through the room and the band exits the stage, the audience refuses to let them go without an encore. When the women return to the stage, Paynes steps to the 12 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

microphone and offers a suggestion.

“Maybe we should play some AC/DC…” she says slyly, and indeed, she plays the beginning of the riff to “Back in Black.”

But, as ever, she’s merely teasing her subjects and, without hesitation, the band tears into “Rock and Roll.”

W

hen I reunite with Paynes after the show, she is straddling the bosom of a short brunette named Cathy. “That’s perfect — I love it!”

Cathy exclaims. We’re at the merchandise booth in the foyer of the venue, and a few paces away, snapping photos, is Cathy’s husband Jerry. They’re at the front of a line that snakes across the room and back, as people wait for a moment with the band and a chance to purchase fifteen-dollar pairs of black underwear stamped with the Lez Zeppelin logo. For close to half an hour, the band soaks in the adoration, posing for photos and autographing limbs. Last up is a tan and muscled young man. Shaved into his head is a Mohawk that transitions to a rattail in the back. He approaches the table with ambivalence and quivers as he speaks. “If I were half the man you are…” he begins, before getting to one knee and offering a bow.

It’s nearly 1 a.m. before the last fans saunter back to their own minivans and Paynes reloads the band’s gear into mine.

Thomas and Nitebob crawl into their seats and pass out by the time we hit the interstate, but Paynes is still revved.

During the ride back, Paynes has warmed up to me. She claims I “get it” now, and perhaps I did. I had to admit to myself that the whole enterprise of Lez Zeppelin, which I’d been tempted to think of as a mere lark, as authentic and meaningful as an Elvis impersonator at a corporate retreat, was something meaningful, soulful, a source of genuine pleasure for the band and its audience.

“I think when a rock star is at his or her best, it’s when you can elicit everyone’s fantasy,” she offers. “It has nothing to do with you really. It’s just the way that you can open up that person’s unselfconscious being so that they project whatever they want… It’s almost like an agreement: I’m

playing into it, I’m gonna come sex out with you, and they go nuts, and you smile at them because you’re playing the same sort of game.”

As we zip down the New Jersey Turnpike, the road cloaked in darkness, Paynes continues on about her hopes for the band. Even if she’ll never shake the “all-female tribute band” designation, she’ll fight to prove the foolishness of such a notion with every show, every solo, every step.

“I wanted to make sure it was authentic — that it was real and that it was done properly,” Paynes says, running her fingers through her hair. “And it wasn’t only because I had respect for the music, but it was also because we were women, and I knew that everyone respected Led Zeppelin and if we played it shoddily and were less than extraordinary, we would be judged for it. I felt like, for the sake of female musicians, we have to blow the fucking shit out of this stuff. We have to exceed people’s expectations because they’re gonna come in skeptical. A bunch of girls playing this music… They’re sitting there waiting for you to be a joke…

But if you show them you can do it, if you play the shit out of it, those dudes — construction worker dudes, guys who’ve been to ten Zeppelin concerts – they love it.”

By the time we could see the Manhattan skyline, the fantasy has faded along with the night. It was dawn. We drive through the Lincoln Tunnel and then cross town to home. As I drop them all off, one after another, it is easy to imagine their bracing transformations: Thomas returning to her job as a teacher, Paynes back to being a mother, and Nitebob, as always, remaining Nitebob. Now alone in the minivan, with the sun rising over the East River, and no company to keep me awake at the wheel, I turn on the radio and stumble onto a familiar tune.

And as we wind on down the road Our shadows taller than our soul.

There walks a lady we all know.

Jimmy Page’s guitar rings through the speakers and I howl along: And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.

PAPER BULLETS third-place nonfiction

by Alexandra Lohman photography by Wa Liu

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

nonfiction

O

n February 6th, 1988, the New York Times typeset a headline: ADRIAN WILSON, 64, PRINTING TEACHER AND BOOK DESIGNER. The obituary came to six short paragraphs and articulated a quiet admiration that Adrian would have appreciated. “His many volumes while little-known to the general public, are famous among printing connoisseurs, and many are collectors’ items,” said the paper.

But the fifth paragraph would have pleased him most. Tucked in among the details of his Genius Grant and his bibliography was a note about how he “became interested in typography and book design while doing alternative service as a conscientious objector at a civilian camp in Waldport, Ore., in 1944.”1

B

ack in 1942, when Adrian Wilson was just a freshman at Wesleyan University, the Office of War Information published a poster of Nazis burning books. Five uniformed men with red armbands over their biceps hurled armloads of volumes onto a smoking fire. Behind them, huge and pale like a marble monument, the artist had drawn a hardback book. Carved onto the front cover was President Roosevelt’s quote: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know books are weapons.”2 Publishers had come up with Roosevelt’s famous line, “books are weapons in the war of ideas,”3 and damn it all if they didn’t intend to win that war. Just a decade earlier, booklovers like Adrian would have been lucky to find a bookstore in their hometowns.

They had to comb through catalogues for their favorite titles, shelling out two dollars each for the hardbacks that came bundled in the mail. It was an industry for the wealthy, the intellectual, and the indolent.4 But by the time Adrian was conscripted in 1943, the publishing world 14 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

had undergone a revolution. Penguin and Pocket Books flooded the market with twenty-five cent paperbacks that appeared on magazine shelves in drugstores and dime stores all across America.5 Random House calculated that soldiers had more time for reading than civilians did and started selling single copies directly to GIs for just six cents apiece. Major Donald Klopfer, cofounder of Random House, wrote home from the front worrying about bankruptcy. His business partner, Bennett Cerf, wrote back from New York: “You are making more money every day than you ever dreamed you would have in a lifetime.”6 It wasn’t just the prices or the readership that changed; the process of making books changed, too. The copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow that Adrian leafed through in 19427 would have little resembled the copy he first read as an adolescent. For his old hardback copy, typesetters had sat at machines that looked like typewriters hooked up to car engines, each stroke of a key sliding another letter mold into line — one row of words in a book. Other workers arranged the finished lines into pages and then set the pages into metal frames, flattening them and locking them in place. Yet another group of workers poured wax over the pages to produce a plate of wax, which was dipped into a tank of melted copper to form a stronger copper plate. The plates were then taken to the printing press, where ready men laid them out on the press bed. Rollers spread ink over the plates and then the press itself rolled sheets of paper over the plates. The completed sheets were folded down to the size of a single piece of paper, and these folders were sewn together and bound with cardboard and glue.8 But in 1943, partly to save on their restricted supply of paper and partly in hopes of turning a profit, the Council on Books in Wartime started printing paperbacks on old magazine presses rather than old book presses, and the shape of books changed. Now, publishers printed two copies on a single sheet of paper and then cut the folders in half,

producing two short and squat booklets, wider across than they were tall. Many printers chose to print two columns of text on these wide pages to make the books easier to read in the low light of the army-issued tents being pitched all across Europe.9 Adrian eagerly read many of those books, but he refused to pitch one of those tents.

T

he nineteen-year-old boy who turned up at the Hartford Recruitment Office in January of 1943 didn’t look like a troublemaker.

Though he was six-foot-three and strong, with round wire-rimmed glasses that lent a professorial air to his boyish face, he didn’t press these natural advantages.

Adrian was good at keeping quiet. He was quiet even at the Fellowship of Reconciliation meetings he attended every week, where his pacifist Christian friends got into philosophical firefights over whether shooting Hitler could be morally justified. “Bang Bang! The Argument begins again, two and oneeighth guys to one,” he wrote home. “I am the one-eighth.”10 Adrian kept quiet at the recruitment office when made to strip in front of hundreds of other young men and submit to a physical examination. He kept quiet as he slipped back into his clothes. He kept quiet when he and the others were ordered into lines. When a uniformed soldier told “all who were willing to serve in the armed forces” to step forward, place their right hands over their hearts, and repeat the Oath of Allegiance, Adrian stayed in place and still kept quiet.

“What the matter with you, Buster?” the soldier demanded.

“I’m a conscientious objector,” Adrian replied.

“Oh, yeah? You’re nuts. You’re going to the psychiatrist.”11 Adrian had heard this refrain before.

Of the twelve million American men drafted into service during the Second World War, just twelve thousand successfully registered to serve as conscientious objectors.12 Their choices

nonfiction often met with accusations of cowardice, naivety, and insanity — charges Adrian had heard from family and friends for years. His parents wrote to remind him of the ramifications his registration would have for himself and his family, and for once Adrian did not keep quiet.

He wrote back in righteous indignation: “To me your last paragraph of the June 24th letter was disgusting and revolting because it was motivated by fear. You are afraid that I’ll be making trouble for myself that isn’t necessary […] The only time wrath or anger means anything to me is when it comes from someone from whom I desire respect. The people whom I consider worthy of giving me respect won’t be angry if I register as a C.O.”13 But his parents—and Adrian himself—had every reason to worry.

Adrian ran with a group of older boys at Wesleyan University who were all trying to register as conscientious objectors.

Some had become ministers to justify their C.O. status,14 others had had their applications for C.O. status denied,15 and one had even gone to prison for refusing to register at all.16 Still, Adrian didn’t budge. “Pacifism based on fear is worthless,” he told his parents.17 On his selective service application, Adrian wrote: “I believe the purpose of life is growth in mind, body, and spirit toward Christlike personality. I believe this purpose is best fulfilled by a life which has as its ideals the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. I believe that Christ’s teachings mean unwavering pacifism. I believe that there is something of God in each man and that this something can be developed best through the power of love. War or anything which contributes to war denies this credo.”18 The psychiatrist and local military tribunal in Hartford must have concluded that there was nothing too terribly wrong with Adrian, because he received a 4-E classification in the mail a few weeks later19 and was designated Civilian Public Service Worker 011409.20 He arrived at a Civilian Public Service camp in Big Flats, New York on April

13th, 1943 to begin his “work of national importance.”21 Over the next couple years, Adrian transported concrete slabs by wheelbarrow in Big Flats,22 dug irrigation ditches in North Dakota,23 and spent two weeks lying flat on his back in a hospital bed in Minneapolis as part of a medical experiment about the effects of extended inactivity.24 As far as Adrian and the other C.O.s were concerned, it was all “just pure wasted labor,” but he was determined “to run, not walk, the second mile for Selective Service, trying to turn the other cheek, not to let them just hit it.”25 But the longer he stayed in the C.P.S. camps, the more and more disillusioned he became. He didn’t resent the government for demanding that conscientious objectors serve, too. “The government has set up C.P.S. to reflect public opinion that C.O.’s should be subject to the same controls and to some of the hardships of a soldier,” he wrote to his parents. “There is really no attempt to command our wills as is necessary in the Army—only a false front that will keep soldiers’ families satisfied.”26 But he fiercely resented the draft—the S.S. Act of 1940—and the domestic propaganda being carried out by the Office of War Information. “You cannot escape from the oppression of the government,” he told his brother, Norm.

“This is just what our society does. Then it goes ahead and rationalizes the ultimate good of its cause, using slogans, atrocity stories, and misrepresentations of the enemy.”27

the country’s current problems and come to the “right” answers. He pointed out that in Germany and other countries in Europe, “millions of men just gave up the use of their minds, […] they surrendered to someone else the right to think and act for them.” So the publishing industry began producing more serious books intended to shape and sharpen American thought in the war against fascism.28 It was the Council that first proposed that the Roosevelt administration use the image of Nazi book burnings in homefront promotional work. The Council had begun using radio shows early on as a means of reaching new American readers, and its most successful radio program was an NBC special about Stephen Vincent Benét’s They Burned the Books. Nine years after Nazi officials and students gathered in Berlin to throw “subversive” works onto the flames, the image was still strong enough to be, as council member Chester Kerr argued, powerful propaganda.29 The Council also produced a list of what came to be called “Imperative Books,” titles that had been deemed useful for home-front propaganda and so were added to the growing canon that publishers thought all Americans should read. The “Imperative Books” included stories about U.S. military heroism and U.S. foreign policy achievements. Many of the books on this list came recommended by the Office of War Information, where Kerr had become a member of the Book Section of the Domestic Branch.30

A

I

s the war progressed, publishing and reading books became matters of patriotism. In 1942, U.S. publishers established the Council on Books in Wartime, a nonprofit corporation intended to help the publishing industry perform a national service and simultaneously rake in profits. One prominent council member, Frederick Melcher, declared that publishers must be “fiercely in earnest about the selection, production, and distribution of books of ideas” to encourage the common people to consider

n the summer of 1944, while Adrian was still playing guinea pig in Minneapolis, an advertisement tacked up on a wall in the lab caught his eye.

FINE ARTS PROGRAM, it proclaimed.

We here at Waldport have organized ourselves into a Committee On Fine Arts, and having the proper authorization from the Brethren Service Committee, are issuing this invitation to all serious artists and students of art to attend the inaugural term, beginning February 15th, of the first aesthetic movement in Civilian Public Service. Adrian applied for a transfer straightaway.31

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

nonfiction

His plane flew into Seattle on July 25th and he hiked through the rain and fog down to Waldport, where Camp Angel and its Fine Arts Program looked out over sea cliffs at the unrelenting gray of the Pacific. Adrian was thrilled to be there. In his first letter to his parents from Waldport, he enthused equally over the “very snappy Frank Lloyd Wright music room” and the “flush toilets.”32 What Camp Angel offered turned out to be not so much a fine arts school as a fine arts society made up of about fifteen men and women who wrote or painted or performed or did all three.

The men worked during the daylight 16 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

hours, planting trees and fighting forest fires, and then returned to the Fine Arts buildings at night to ply their trades, talk philosophy or politics, and learn from each other. Luckily, Camp Angel could boast some of the most talented artists of its generation: Bill Everson, who became Brother Antoninus, the “Beat Friar” of the San Francisco Renaissance, asked Adrian to critique his poems; Broadus Erle, a virtuoso violinist who later played with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and became a music professor at Yale University, matched his violin to Adrian’s clarinet for a Beethoven trio; and Kermit Sheets and William Eshelman, both

future printers and publishers, taught Adrian how to use the printing press.33 Once they got him started, he never stopped.34 He began by helping with typesetting and layout for The Compass,35 a fine arts magazine for all the West Coast C.O. camps. Adrian and his friends at Camp Angel produced almost three thousand copies.36 Adrian himself invented a new type of casting that allowed them to print the journal title, Compass, in a circle.37 “I can’t put my hand to the press without revolutionizing the industry!” he exulted in a letter to his parents. “The individual pieces of type were placed like

nonfiction Stonehenge in a small plywood box and plaster of Paris poured round to a depth of ¾ inches, so that the heads of the type still protruded. The casting lasted through 3,000 impressions and begins to appear indestructible. In fact I am beginning to wonder how I am going to rescue the type.”38 As his confidence and abilities grew, Adrian began printing playbills and pamphlets for the other camp members, including anti-war poetry.

The most well-known book to come out of Camp Angel was William Everson’s Waldport Poems, an elevenpart lament for people across the world trapped against their will in camps. In Part I, Everson wrote: The pacifist speaks, Face to face with his own kind, And seeks to fashion a common course That all may mark.

But whatever he offers, Finds already framed in another’s thought A divergent approach.

The binding belief that each allows Is cruxed on rejection: Thou shalt not kill.

But for all the rest, What voice shall speak from the burning bush, In the work-site noons, When the loaf is broken, And brief and rebuttal countercross, And no one wins?39 They sold 975 copies in just two months, and would have sold even more if they’d had a better printing press on their hands.40 It wasn’t much in comparison with the thousands and thousands of copies of a single book that were sold by the large publishing companies like Penguin or Random House, but for a slender, self-published volume of antiwar poetry, it was a resounding success.

“These are the years of destruction,” Everson said. “We offer against them the creative.”41

T

he twenty-two-year-old young man who turned up in a gloomy hotel in Redding in July of 1945 didn’t look like a troublemaker. He was

“very big, very handsome, very calm.”42 But after two years of unpaid labor in C.O. camps, two years of frustration with the Civilian Public Service and the Office of War Information, a part of him was also very angry. So when he hitched a ride to San Francisco in the truck of a sailor and his wife, he got into a fight.

“And for what reason are you a consciconch- conchie- objector?” demanded the sailor when Adrian explained that he was on leave from a C.O camp.

“Mostly personal and philosophical reasons.”

“What’s this philophilosphilosophical stuff ?”

“The way I think life, and particularly my own life, should be lived.”

“You know this war isn’t being fought on those principles,” the sailor snapped.

“Yes,” Adrian answered, “I am sure of it.”

The sailor jerked the wheel around, pulled into a lumber mill yard and threw open the door. “Get out. Well, I’ve put in my time over there and this yellow—” Adrian started to say, “If only I could make you understand—” “I ought to run you over, you son of a bitch,” the sailor spat, and drove away. But a few minutes later, the same truck came up the road where Adrian was standing with his traveling thumb up, hoping for a new ride. The sailor saw him and swerved so close that Adrian had to hurl himself out of the way of the oncoming truck.43 A week later, Adrian walked out of Camp Angel, got on a train headed East, and went AWOL. The FBI picked him up seven months later in Philadelphia, but the charges against him were dismissed44 and the C.P.S. officially recorded that Worker 011409 left the service on July 18th, 1945.45 Like most of the Fine Arts members, he eventually made his way back to San Francisco, where he founded the Press in Tuscan Alley.46

A

fter the war, Adrian never relearned how to keep quiet. His neighbors called the cops on him because he stayed up all night playing the clarinet with his friends and typesetting

programs for their wild, edgy theater productions.47 His printing press spoke for him, too, churning out books both beautiful and obscure. Twenty years later, he published The Design of Books, a classic in the field of printing and typography. In the introduction, he wrote that between the poles of big publishing houses like Penguin and handmade one-of-a-kind manuscripts “is a world of books, each of which demands individual treatment, the creation of a distinct personality from the richness of its subject matter.”48 Douglas C. McGill, “Adrian Wilson, 64, Printing Teacher and Designer of Books,” The New York Times, February 6, 1988, accessed December 7, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/06/ obituaries/adrian-wilson-64-a-printing-teacher-and-book-designer.html

1

S. Broder, “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942), accessed November 23, 2014. http://www.loc.gov/ pictures/resource/cph.3g04267/ 2

John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 23.

3

Yoni Appelbaum, “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II,” The Atlantic, (September 10, 2014), accessed November 20, 2014.

4

5

Hench, 14-15.

6

Ibid., 20.

Adrian Wilson, ed. Two Against the Tide: A Conscientious Objector in Word War II, Selected Letters 19411948, (Austin: Thomas Taylor, 1990), ed.

Joyce Lancaster Wilson, 14.

7

Encyclopedia Britannica Films, “Making Books,” Prelinger Archives (1947), accessed November 24, 2014.

8

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

nonfiction https://archive.org/details/MakingBo1947.

28 29

Hench, 46.

Ibid., 49.

9

Appelbaum.

30

Ibid., 48-50.

10

Wilson, 11.

31

Wilson, 76-77.

11

Ibid., 33.

32

Ibid., 80-81.

Richard C. Anderson, Peace Was in Their Hearts: Conscientious Objectors in World War II, (Watsonville: Correlan Publications, 1994), 1.

12

Steve McQuiddy, “Talented Artists and Writers,” Here on the Edge, last updated 2014, accessed December 8, 2014. http://hereontheedge.com/ 33

13

Wilson, 23.

34

Wilson, 89-101.

14

Ibid., 8.

35

McQuiddy,147.

15

Ibid., 31.

36

Ibid., 266.

16

Ibid., 12.

37

Ibid., 191.

17

Ibid., 23.

38

Wilson, 135.

18

Ibid., insert.

19

Ibid., 34.

William Everson, The Residual Years, (New York: New Directions Books, 1948), 15.

“CPS Worker 011409- Wilson, Adrian Ubele,” The Civilian Public Service Story: Living Peace in a Time of War, last modified 2014, accessed December 8, 2014. http://civilianpublicservice.org/ workers/11409.

20

21

Ibid., 35.

22

Ibid., 38.

23

Ibid., 45.

Steve McQuiddy, Here on the Edge: How a Small Group of World War II Conscientious Objectors Took Art and Peace from the Margins to the Mainstream, (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 134.

24

39

40

McQuiddy, 148.

“The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It,” Public Broadcasting Company, last updated 2014, accessed December 8, 2014. http:// www.pbs.org/itvs/thegoodwar/arts. html 41

“Adrian Wilson, Printer and Designer of Books,” The Chicago Tribune, February 5, 1988, accessed December 8, 2014. http://articles.chicagotribune. com/1988-02-05/news/8803270956_1_ mr-wilson-adrian-wilson-designing

42

43

Wilson, 140-141.

44

McQuiddy, 221-222.

25

Wilson, 38.

45

“CPW Worker.”

26

Ibid., 105.

46

McQuiddy, 259.

27

Ibid., 68.

47

McQuiddy, 236-237.

18 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

Adrian Wilson, The Design of Books, (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1974), 8.

48

Bibliography Adrian Wilson, Printer and Designer of Books.” The Chicago Tribune, February 5, 1988. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://articles.chicagotribune. com/1988-02-05/news/8803270956_1_ mr-wilson-adrian-wilson-designing Anderson, Richard C. Peace Was in Their Hearts: Conscientious Objectors in World War II. Watsonville: Correlan Publications, 1994.

Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic, September 10, 2014. Accessed November 20, 2014.

Broder, S. “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.” U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942. Accessed November 23, 2014. h t t p : / / w w w. l o c . g o v / p i c tures/resource/cph.3g04267/ “CPS Worker 011409- Wilson, Adrian Ubele.” The Civilian Public Service Story: Living Peace in a Time of War, last modified 2014. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://civilianpublicservice. org/workers/11409.

Encyclopedia Britannica Films. “Making Books.” Prelinger Archives, 1947.

Accessed November 24, 2014. https://archive.org/det a i l s / M a k i n g B o 1 9 4 7.

Everson, William. The Residual Years.

New York: New Directions Books, 1948.

“The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It.” Public Broadcasting Company, last updated 2014. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://www.pbs. org/itvs/thegoodwar/arts.html

Roost first-place fiction

by Devon Geyelin photography by Wa Liu

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

fiction

I

remember I bought a blue and white striped shirt in the months before that summer, and I remember standing in my room in cold gray March and trying it on. The fabric was rough and a little loose, with a wide neck, and the sleeves hit my wrists economically. I felt then that I looked like a girl who had gotten off a boat that morning, or would get on one that evening, or maybe — since my mirror showed only the top half of my body — I was one of those long-legged girls who goes on boats sometimes, casually.

The idea lounged around my head for a few weeks before I called my uncle Neil. He runs a harbor in Maine, in the town he and my mom grew up in. We used to go there when I was little, in the summers, while my grandparents still lived there. Still lived at all, really. It was on the coast. The houses had tire swings and shutters and were once white and blue and green, but it had been years since the morning had washed them all into hues of gray.

Then — in the mornings — I heard the foghorns while half-awake and the air hugged me coldly. I had goosebumps on my skinny legs, under my denim cutoffs, when I sat on their porch and was the only one awake.

During the days we went to Aunt Jean and Uncle Neil’s house (whitegray). It was tucked at the end of a long dirt road in the woods. My two cousins and I played on their long backyard, which stretched out and sloped down until it fell into a tumbled staircase of gray and tawny boulders, standing at odds with the sea. It looked to me like the water was coaxing its way in to join us, day by day, and eventually it would sweep me off the swing set and throw the grown-ups from their Adirondack chairs.

At night, the trees were black and blue and green, and when we drove back after dinner I was glad to have my parents in the front seats, and glad there was a car between us and the trees hanging overhead, leaning in.

I didn’t notice much about Jean and

20 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

Neil then. If I had paid attention, maybe I would have seen signs — maybe her hand on his shoulder, his eyes in his lap. Maybe his knee crossed away. In Clueless they say that’s how you can tell if he’s interested — if his knee is crossed towards you — and now I see it with every boy: how are your knees crossed? Where are you pointing?

If I had short hair and long legs and wore that shirt, I could look like one of those girls who spends summers by saltwater. They wore their ease like their summer freckles: casually, but you can see it; it’s everywhere on their bodies.

W

hen I called Neil I was glad he didn’t ask me much about why I wanted to go up there, because what would I have said? I have some vague romantic notion of being the kind of girl who can sail? He just told me sure, he’d find me something, they’d be happy to have me, and I could have my cousins’ room all to myself. They had families of their own now, and he said it would be good to see me; it had been a while. Jean and Neil I saw at some Christmases and Thanksgivings, still, when they drove down to Connecticut, but it was a long cold drive for my cousins to make with their little kids. I thought it was a shame — the air got heavy in our big white colonial, sometimes, and some tumbling kids could have freshened it out. Living Febreze.

We stopped going to Maine for a few reasons, around when I was ten.

The first, or most nameable, was that my grandparents died, and we didn’t have anywhere free to stay anymore.

Aunt Jean and Uncle Neil only had their bedroom and my cousins’ room.

That’s not really a fair reason, though — the town makes a lot of its money off the summer tourists, and we could have stayed in a bed and breakfast. My parents had the money. My mom just didn’t want to go.

She’s shown me pictures from when she and Uncle Neil were growing up.

He was the big brother, three years

older, and she was the little blond girl following him around like a baby duck.

They had known Aunt Jean even then.

She and her siblings lived in the house next door, and in the summer my mom said they spent all day riding their bikes together and slamming screen doors, playing tag in the late afternoon, manhunt in the early evening. There are pictures of the kids on their bikes, with streamers on the handlebars; in lifejackets, their calves in a row, dangling off the dock; splayed on the lawn, holding stained popsicle sticks. In the pictures, my mom is always looking up at Neil, whose face is too young to look so rumpled. Jean is always at his side.

They started dating in high school.

From what my mom said, everyone thought it was inevitable. I know he broke up with her before they graduated. He was leaving, going to work on a shipping boat for the summer, and she was staying, working at the harbor her parents owned until college in September. A few years ago, someone mentioned the breakup — it was at the end of a holiday, everyone was tired and a little drunk — and Jean fingered the bottom edge of Neil’s flannel and looked at him and said, “We all mess up sometimes.” Then she squeezed his shoulder and put her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, and looked at the centerpiece I’d made in fourth grade.

They got married right after Jean got out of college. My mom was graduating high school then. She told me she cried when he told her. Neil was just supposed to be home for the summer, working at Jean’s family’s dock until he left in the fall for a job in California, at an engineering firm. But then things changed, and everyone was careful not to mention how Jean was already starting to show in her wedding dress.

I

took the blue Volvo up in the last weeks of May, after school let out.

The GPS took me through the two blocks of town — a fire station, a

fiction

library, two ice cream places, a place to buy t-shirts, Bass Harbor Fishing Supply, a gas station — and on to this sweeping road that cut between a marsh and a stretch of beach. It was made of rocky ledges jutting out into the water, and because the light was golden and I had been in the car for hours I parked on the side of the road and got out and leaned against it.

There was a little blond boy holding his mother’s hand and jumping, two feet at a time, from one crop of rock to another. They had a brown and gray dog with them whose feet kept teasing the edge of a ledge, like he was deciding whether to go in. Every time the water crashed up at him he’d jump back, offended, and then lunge towards where the water had sprayed him from.

It had been a long time since I’d seen Jean and Neil anywhere but my house. Jean would come through the door blowing her bangs out of her face and hugging me with her hands full of homemade something. Neil followed, anything heavy slung over his shoulder. When I was very young I remember him picking me up in the air, and I’d laugh down on his face, loving it. There are pictures. But once I grew too big for that it turned into a hug, and now that I’m older it’s one

of those obligatory family hugs, or at least feels like that, to me — arms go around long enough to get your hands touching on the other side of the person’s torso and then back they come again. He smells like that Tom’s deodorant I see at Whole Foods.

It was already dark when I found the narrow road, and I had to drive slowly to make sure I didn’t miss the turn. When I pulled up to the house I could see Neil through the window into where he was reading in the living room. I could see Jean, too, in the yellow kitchen, a floral shirt stretched over her shoulders as she bent over the sink. The house is set up with long windows on either side, so when the light is right you can see straight through from one side to the other, where there’s a porch looking onto the lawn and then the sea further back.

You couldn’t have that type of house where I grew up, unless you wanted the neighbors to know all your dirty daily habits. For Jean and Neil, there were no real neighbors.

Neil heard me roll up and came outside barefoot while I turned off the engine, wearing a navy sweater and reading glasses. “Hey, Julie,” he said, coming around to where I was getting out of the car. I said “Hey, Uncle Neil!” and put my arms around his sweater,

my head knocking his chin a little, and then we started grabbing my things from the trunk and carrying them around to the side door. I saw Jean through the screen washing a pot, but she let it drop into the sink when she saw me. She came over to hug me with suds on her wrists, smelling like detergent and rosemary and telling me I looked beautiful.

Neil started carrying my duffels up the narrow wooden while Jean had me sit down at their rough-hewn kitchen table.

“I baked some chicken thighs, is that fine? Have you eaten?” I’d stopped at a gas station and bought pretzel sticks and a Snapple and eventually chicken nuggets at a drive-thru (it’s a road trip, I told myself, it’s fine), but said, “No, that sounds great, Aunt Jean, thank you.” Neil came back downstairs and started pulling plates out from a cabinet. On the wall next to it was a painted wooden rooster. Jean saw me looking at it.

“Isn’t it cute?” she asked. “I got it last year at the library fundraiser.

Claire’s niece made it. I thought it was kind of homey.” Neil caught my eye. “Oh, stop!” she said, punching his shoulder. “I like him!”

“I never said anything,” said Neil, and cut into his chicken.

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I

woke up in the morning tangled in a quilt, disoriented by the foghorns bellowing outside and the way the air came through the window screens to make my room feel blue and misty. I pulled on a sweatshirt and went down the stairs, trying to be quiet because of how early it was, but when I turned the corner into the kitchen Uncle Neil was already dressed and sitting at the table, facing me.

His gaze was focused into the mug of coffee in his hands and when he saw me he looked up, startled, and I wished I could turn around because I felt like I’d walked into his quiet. It was too late, though, and I watched him sit up, pulling himself straight and putting his cup down on the table.

“Julie,” he said. “You’re up early.

Could you sleep okay?”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah, I’m good. I get up early normally.”

He nodded. “Are you hungry? We have cereal — I think there’s Crispix, and granola — and there’s milk in the fridge. We have eggs, too, and toast. Is any of that all right?”

“Oh, thanks,” I said, “I can just make myself some Crispix. Thanks.” I started opening cabinets, looking for a bowl.

“Top right,” he said. “If there’s anything you want, we can tell Jean.

She should be doing groceries today or tomorrow.”

“I’m really fine,” I said. “Thank you, though.”

“Okay,” he nodded again, and picked up his mug. “I’m going to go read on the porch for a little, but would you be ready to go around 8:30?”

“Sure. What should I wear?”

“Anything’s fine. We can get you one of the staff shirts when we get there.”

“Okay,” I said, “sounds good.” He pushed his chair back — he had been half out of it already — and picked up the newspaper from where it had been resting, not yet opened, on the table in front of him. Nodding again, he smiled and said, “See you in a little, then.”

I sat myself at the table, crosslegged, the soles of my feet cold under

me. Spooning Crispix into my mouth, I looked out the window to where the lawn dissolved into gray-blue haze, nagged by the feeling that I had just kicked Uncle Neil out of his morning.

And that there I was, sitting alone in his kitchen.

U

ncle Neil managed Lenckley Harbor. It had been in Aunt Jean’s family for three generations and her parents still owned it, living in town nearby, but the general thought was that someday it would be Aunt Jean and Uncle Neil’s. Aunt Jean had worked there, too, when she was younger, but eventually she stopped to take care of the kids and now she volunteers at the town library.

The harbor used to house mainly lobster boats and local families’ sailboats, but it had grown to include rentals and a fleet of wealthy people’s bobbing motorboats with names like Josephine and Sarah’s Promise and Good Morning, Sunshine written on them in gold-lined navy script. I was going to be on the summer staff, taking kids and their parents in dinghy trips to and from the long sailboats nodding in the cold water, helping with the rentals, being cheerful.

That first morning Uncle Neil showed me around and introduced me to the others. Some were college kids, like me, and others were in high school and lived in town. They were friendly to me, especially the boys.

T

he beginning of that summer blends into itself in my memory.

I woke up early and went with Neil to the dock, and worked there until the late afternoon. Most days were slow, and those of us on shift would sit outside watching the dock from the lawn, waiting for calls to roll up. Then we took turns going to sit at the desk, saying hi, asking if there was anything we could help with, trotting down with them to the dock. We untethered their lines and lent them life jackets, and sometimes we steered

them in a weathered gray dinghy, the salt spray landing on our ponytails and the goosebumps on our knees.

Soon we started hanging out together in the evenings after our shifts ended. The boys wore Patagonia fleeces at night, and in my memory they’re all a row of tanned calves and wrists strung with worn-out bracelets, the kind you made at camp, the once-bright string faded to match the Maine gray resting on top of all the houses and wood and air. I spent a lot of time with one girl, Katie, who wore her hair in a messy, sun-bleached braid and had a thin gold ring pierced through her cartilage.

After work we sat on each others’ porches, and when it was still early enough in the day we went to Long Pond and lay ourselves on the sunwarmed side of the lake. The college kids especially didn’t have much to do, since a lot of their friends and lives had shifted away from town since they’d gotten out of high school. I didn’t know anyone anyway. Sometimes we wandered into town for pizza, or a lobster roll, and one night Katie and I drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain.

She told me it’s the first place the sun touches the United States every morning, but we didn’t stay that long.

Most nights I went back to Uncle Neil and Aunt Jean’s for dinner, in part because I was grateful to them for having me and in part because dinner was something I knew Aunt Jean put time into. Both of their kids, my cousins, lived within half an hour.

They and their families often drove up to the house for dinner at the picnic table outside in the early evening. The grandkids were still very young — between four and one — and Aunt Jean was a very excited new grandmother.

On the afternoons when I came straight back after work, I would help her in the kitchen, blanching peaches for a pie or running my fingers down stems of thyme so the little leaves fell in a pile on the table.

I liked watching Uncle Neil with the kids. He looked so young to be a

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grandfather, mainly because he was. I liked the way he balanced the toddlers on his knee, bouncing them and telling them they were on a galloping horse, holding their hands in his. His were strong and taut, gnarled and lined from his years as a sailor, and they swallowed up the kids’ perfect little soft ones while they giggled.

Sometimes I’d watch Aunt Jean watching him, and I liked that, too.

She would look over from the other end of the picnic table, over the landscape of bones and crumbs from the dinner she’d cooked, and look at everyone with 24 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

these soft eyes that said to me, Look what we have here. Look what we made.

T

here was one weekend in July that Jean went to go visit a friend for the weekend. She left us with groceries in the fridge and her number written on a post-it, as though we didn’t have it, and I remember when she left she looked at us both and said, “You two keep each other out of trouble.” Either that or, “You two keep an eye on each other.” I thought about that moment often, in the time after that weekend, trying to remember what

she said exactly, if her eyes had really rested on mine for an extra pleading beat.

That Friday I went to a party at Katie’s. Her parents were out of town, which felt kind of funny — like I’d gone straight back to high school, when my rebellious nights meant staying out too late at the 7-11. We were all in the backyard, sitting around on the grass and hanging off the edge of the porch, holding beers. There was a boy there Katie had introduced me to a few weeks earlier, Ira, or Isaac, or something. Ira, I think. It doesn’t

fiction matter. We had hung out a few times in her backyard and in larger groups, elbows on sticky tabletops, bodies stretched out nearby on the banks of Long Pond. I liked the way he carried himself: broad shoulders set slightly back, knowing smile, and that air of stability I was so attracted to back then. He always looked at me for that extra half-moment before flicking his eyes back down at his hands, and that’s always a nice thing, being recognized.

We ended up leaving together. I would say it was because I was tipsy, or something, but that’s not true; I barely drank, was fine driving to his house.

Mainly it had just been awhile since I’d been with anyone. I slept there, more out of convenience than anything. It was late and the roads get dark in the woods in Maine. I had told Neil I’d be out all night, anyway, thinking I’d stay at Katie’s.

I

n the morning the air was damp and earthy and hung over that dense smell of next-day bodies. Trying to be quiet, I pulled shorts over my legs and stuck my messy head through the shirt I’d left on the floor. It was early and I wanted to head out before his mom saw me or my car next to the house.

He had told me the night before that it was only them two living there, and his mom would be asleep by the time we pulled up.

I walked out of the bedroom holding my shoes in my hand, but three steps down the hall I stopped as another door opened in front of me. At first, I just registered the movement, but then I saw the face above the white undershirt, said, “Oh,” and was backing away before he had time to say anything, turning on my heel to go back through the door I’d come from.

I

watched Neil’s car pull away through the boy’s bedroom window. My skin felt dirty in yesterday’s clothes, and my teeth weren’t brushed, but I couldn’t go home because I knew he would be waiting there, so I sat on a chair in the

corner and braided and re-braided my hair three times. Then I left, walked out through the kitchen, not noticing I was barefoot until five steps into the gravel.

When I stepped into the car, small stones fell from the soles of my feet.

I drove to the deli and bought a bacon egg and cheese sandwich and a diet peach Snapple and drove again until I hit the park in town, next to the church, and sat there on the swings and ate my sandwich. It made my fingers greasy, and my stomach felt cold and bloated from the salt.

Ira (Isaac?) hadn’t told me much about his mom. We’d had a little bit of that funny in-bed conversation that sometimes happens with people you don’t know well, when you’re both almost comfortable in the way your joints are overlapping and that physical intimacy understudies for the real thing. His dad had died when he was young (“I’m sorry,” I’d said, running three fingers in a circle on his forearm) and his mom hadn’t dated anyone since. “Sometimes I worry about her being lonely,” he said.

“Since I moved out it seems like all she does is work at the library.”

I didn’t go back home until it was dark out. Neil’s car was in the driveway, but I didn’t see him when I came inside — I just went straight to the bathroom and took a shower and crawled into my bed with my hair wet, pulling the quilt over my head to make a warm dark pocket until the morning.

W

hen I went downstairs he was making coffee.

“Hey,” he said. “Julie.”

I looked at him and nodded, then walked to the fridge. “Morning.”

“Yesterday morning,” he said, “I’m — ” I picked the milk up by its handle and turned around to look at him.

“I didn’t expect to see you there,” he said.

I kept looking at him, holding the milk.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re involved in this,” he kept going.

“Right,” I said. “Yeah. I’m sure it’s

complicated.”

He looked at me and nodded and then looked at the coffee machine.

“When does Aunt Jean get back?” I asked “She’s supposed to get back around dinnertime.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m going to go home soon.”

He nodded with his eyes on mine. “Is there any way I can help you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I

left that afternoon. I just told Neil to tell Aunt Jean that I got homesick, and wanted to go home for a little bit. I figured I’d come up with something better later.

I got home late that night after driving straight through. I hadn’t called my mom to tell her because I didn’t want to explain anything over the phone, and hadn’t come up with an excuse yet, anyway. By one in the morning I was sitting on a stool in my kitchen, my bags on the floor, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and looking out to where a blue raft floated in the corner of our pool.

I

never said anything. I don’t know what Neil did, but I’m guessing he kept it to himself. Maybe he’s still sleeping with Mother of Isaac. I don’t know.

Often I want to talk to Jean, when I see her at Christmas and Thanksgiving, but how would I do that? Hey, Jean, maybe check on your husband sometime? You might want to talk to the other library volunteers — I think they might be taking community outreach a little too seriously.

And what do I know? Maybe she already knows, or they have some sort of agreement, or something. People are weird. It’s not my life.

Last Christmas Aunt Jean gave us a rooster to match the one hanging in her kitchen, and now it stares at me from its place near the fridge. “So our kitchens have something in common,” she told us.

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You two stay with the bear second-place fiction

by Alex Blum photography by Wa Liu

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M

y father collected stuffed animals in his old age. I didn’t realize it right away. I figured the plush Siamese cat and bottlenose dolphin on his bookshelf were mine from infancy, or souvenirs of Mom’s he didn’t have the heart to throw away. I found out because Brett and I had a big fight the night before. We often fought before his trips, but this one was worse than the others. He had looked, for just a moment, like he’d wanted to hit me.

I had just given up my place near Hyde Park to live with him in Wrigleyville.

It was unfamiliar. It was unusually cold for November. He went anyway.

I spent most of my Friday shift at the hospital picking at my fingernails and imagining cruel things to say to him.

The other nurses didn’t comment on my inattention, but they must have noticed.

The next morning I took the train out to Evanston to have lunch with Pop. “You sure about this prick?” he asked, when I’d told him what happened.

“No, I’m not. Sometimes we’re happy. And then there are times like this.” I took the last bite of my burger.

We were at a favorite diner of Pop’s.

“He sounds like an asshole.”

“He isn’t, not really. He’s just on the road a lot.”

“Come on, Donna. You deserve a guy who’s going to commit.” The last syllable sounded like a baseball hitting a glove.

“You said the same thing about John Richardson in eleventh grade.”

“Was I wrong? I tell you what, I’ve made some mistakes in my life but I never once got stood up by a gal for junior prom.” He ate two of my fries.

“Brett’s all right though. He called when he landed in Austin to try and patch things up.” I could feel the anger starting to leave me. “And he’s a better kisser than John Richardson.”

“He kissed you? I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him!” He smacked his hand on the tabletop. The silverware bounced.

“John or Brett?” I laughed.

“Either. Both. I’ll make them duel.”

“Okay, Pop, okay. I’m feeling better.

You can knock it off.”

“I’m serious! Pistols at noon.”

“Don’t you mean dawn?”

“You want to wake up at dawn?”

I had no response to this, and he grinned. This was vintage Pop. He’d let himself go a bit since Mom passed, but he still looked all right. He liked to wear big denim shirts and khaki work pants. He had a big gut, but it suited him.

Pop looked at the bill, put some money on the table, and stood up.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I want to stop at the toy store on the way back.”

“Toy store?” I asked, following him.

That didn’t sound like my father, the retired engineer and master welder, the husband who wouldn’t let his wife buy a waterbed because he thought they were ridiculous, the dad who’d told his daughter she hadn’t been especially interesting until she turned three. He was a man of particular tastes and strong opinions, but he was unafraid to ask for favors, and he knew people. He had helped practically half the family find jobs over the years, and never asked anything in return. He wasn’t much for lavish gifts and he didn’t like shopping, so I couldn’t fathom what he wanted from a toy store.

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But,” I started.

“Just come on. You don’t have to understand.”

We walked to the car in silence. We didn’t speak until we got to the shop, a small place tucked into the middle of a strip mall. He parked in the one handicap spot and got out.

“Pop, you can’t park there.”

“Sure I can. I’m old aren’t I?” “It’s not for old people it’s for…” I began, but he walked away. I got out and followed him into the store, which was deeper than it was wide and had shelves running all the way back. I saw Pop chatting with the woman behind the counter. She had what looked like a bug bite on her neck, and she seemed to know Pop. Maybe he’s here for her, I thought, looking at the wooden figurines and Chinese finger traps.

But no, he nodded to her and started to browse one of the shelves next to me. I joined him. I picked up a purple elephant with pink ears.

“No,” he said, though I hadn’t asked him anything. “Look. It’s single stitched not double, and that tail won’t last.

Besides which it’s purple.” I fingered the fluff on the toy’s ear and put it back.

“Oh wow, look at this one,” Pop said, holding a black and white dog.

“It’s cute!”

“It’s a Bernese Mountain Dog,” he said. “The brown accents above the eyes are perfect arcs, and it’s well stuffed.

Look, Donna, it’s firm enough to stand on its own.” He set it next to a floppy black dog toy on the shelf and stood back to let me look.

“Huh.” “I’ll call him Bernie,” Pop said, satisfied. He picked the dog back up, paid for him, and off we went. I wondered what had brought this on, but I didn’t come up with much. It was, for Pop, unprecedented.

T

he next time I visited, on an evening two weeks later, Bernie was perched on the armrest of Pop’s recliner. Pop was almost finished watching a tennis match when I knocked, and we watched the last few points together. Pop had one hand on the remote and the other on Bernie, gently stroking his fur. Later, eating the chocolate mousse I had brought for dessert, Bernie was on the sideboard.

Pop must have moved him. There were other animals around—a tan giraffe and a fuzzy blue whale—but when I said good night, Pop carried Bernie with him to the front door as he saw me out. I had taken Brett’s car for the evening, and I thought about my father and his little stuffed dog the whole drive back into the city. How odd that this was happening, how odd that my father had a favorite.

I

told Brett about Bernie and my father’s new collection. Brett seemed indifferent to it.

“Huh okay,” he said, eating a

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fiction spoonful of yogurt. “Weird.” He looked quizzically at me from under his medium length blond hair. His nose was small but crooked. We were snacking in the kitchen before heading to Pop’s place for dinner. My aunt Joan lived nearby, and was joining us.

“Leave him alone about it,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever he wants.”

When we got there, Pop was holding a crocheted koala, and as we came in we saw Bernie on the sofa, next to Joan.

She was thin, wiry, and not unkind.

“Joan reminded me that we should take the Christmas card photo today,” Pop said. Joan had retina surgery scheduled for the next week and would have an eye patch until she left to visit a cousin in Los Angeles.

“We can do that,” I said.

“Great.” Pop grabbed a camera and held it out to Brett. “Can you take the picture?”

“Um, okay.” Brett took the camera.

He frowned. “ Or I can set the timer and we can all be in it.”

“That work for you?” Pop turned to me.

“Sure.”

“All right,” Pop said. He and I sat down next to Joan.

“Ah,” said Brett, “Do you want Bernie in the photo too?”

It was a jab, but Pop grinned and picked Bernie up and put him on his knee.

Brett pushed the camera button and hurried around the coffee table to sit down. He said we were all too stiff. We took another photo, and tried to look looser.

After that we ate dinner, and I can’t remember a single thing we talked about, except that Joan looked like she wanted to ask about the animals, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to force the issue.

I

wrote a short note to go with each photo I sent out to friends and family, mentioning that I’d moved in with Brett, that Joan was recovering from her surgery, that Pop had started to collect stuffed animals.

Two things happened.

The first was that relatives called to ask if Pop had lost it. Most of them gave up after a few of minutes of reassurance that yes, Pop was still sharp, no it wasn’t a joke, yes he lived by himself and was managing just fine thank you. My cousins Jack and Anna both wondered if Pop had experienced some kind of episode, but neither cared to explain what they meant. The most persistent critic was my aunt Beth. She lived in New York and was apparently some kind of big shot at her senior center.

“But Donna, it seems so…juvenile,” she said.

“You should see how he looks at them. He’s got an eye for their craftsmanship.”

“And his mind is still…what it was?”

“Yes, Beth.” I said. We’d been over this.

“But how can you be sure? Maybe the animals bring on some kind of… lapse.”

“Did I mention that he names them?

He never repeats a name and he never forgets one.” This was true, but I also knew it would needle her.

Beth’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“He doesn’t think they’re real does he?”

“You know what,” I said, “he mentioned the other day that he hadn’t seen you in a while. Why don’t you come and visit?”

“Oh,” Beth said, “I’m a bit busy this time of year, and the airports are always so crowded.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes. I’m sure he’s doing fine.”

I made a noncommittal noise. “I’d better get going,” Beth said. “Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!”

“Bye Aunt Beth.”

T

he next time I saw Pop I told him about the conversation with Beth. He picked up the phone.

The call went to voicemail.

“Hi, Beth,” he said. “I heard you were giving Donna a hard time about my collection. I can’t possibly imagine why you’d want to do that. She’s a good kid and she’s taking care of me just fine.

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Now listen, sis. My doctor tells me I can’t smoke, drink, or eat cheese. My wife’s been dead for fifteen years and I can’t keep it up for long enough to jerk off. And you want to tell me I can’t have a fucking stuffed dog?”

I decided not to tell him about the other relatives who’d called.

The second thing that happened was that friends and family started sending Pop stuffed animals. Meredith, one of the handful of Mom’s friends Pop kept in touch with, went to Florida for the winter and came back with an alligator with big white teeth made of felt. Pop named her Eliza. A guy who’d worked with Pop for two decades brought him a lion with a silky caramel mane.

I didn’t realize Pop had picked a name until he asked me where he should put Marcus. One time I asked him how he came up with the names and he told me he didn’t. Each of them had a unique, correct name and all he had to was wait until he recognized it. I didn’t press him on it. The gifts were pleasure bursts in the slow routine of his days.

Brett and I had a few good months after he returned from Austin. I adjusted to living in Wrigleyville. I came to like it, even if I did miss my old place on occasion. Brett was in good spirits because he’d made a big sale. He worked for an educational software company, and if Texas adopted a product, other states were likely to follow, he said. On weekends, we celebrated with nights out dancing and lazy mornings in bed. I left the hospital eager to see him, and he was almost always waiting for me when I got home, often with dinner ready. He made a few day trips, but those weren’t so bad.

Then, once I was more or less used to having him around, he announced he had to go to San Francisco for a week.

There was a conference he couldn’t miss. He seemed sorry about it, which helped, but he went. I had some of the other nurses over for dinner one night, but except for Kathleen I didn’t know them too well. Most evenings I went to sleep early.

I usually had mixed feelings when

fiction Brett came back from trips—happy and relieved, yes, but I couldn’t keep anger from lingering. But when Brett came in holding his suitcase in one hand and a Giants teddy bear in the other, complete with cap and glove, everything was forgiven. For a moment.

“That’s so sweet!” I said, as Brett shut the door behind him.

“Look at the orange trim on the uniform,” Brett said.

“I can’t believe you got this for him.”

“I saw it at a souvenir shop, and I thought he might like it.” He smiled.

I put my arms around his waist. “I’m sure Pop will love it.”

He didn’t.

B

rett gave him the bear at one of the nicer restaurants in Evanston, a ramen place I knew about but hadn’t tried. Pop took the stuffed animal and put it under his chair, mumbling thank you almost as an after thought. No wide smile, no flicker in his eyes, no name for the little uniformed bear.

“Don’t you think teddy bears look like stupid fat dogs?” Pop said, when I asked him about it.

“No, I think they look like stuffed animals.” I gestured at the koala and flamingo on Pop’s coffee table.

“What kind of bear looks like that?

Or sits on its ass like that? Are there any bears that sit that way?”

“Come on, Pop. I don’t know.”

“They’re incorrect is what they are.”

“You know you hurt Brett’s feelings.”

“No I didn’t. And anyway he’s a tough guy.”

“Do you just not like him?” I asked.

It hadn’t seriously occurred to me before that Pop might actually dislike Brett. He would go along with me when I was mad at him, but it hit me that Pop might have judgments of his own about Brett.

“He seems fine.”

“And he just happened to give you the first animal you’ve ever rejected?”

“I didn’t reject it!” Pop said. “I put it with the others.”

I looked around the room.

“With the other teddy bears,” Pop said and stood up. I followed him into his bedroom. He opened his bottom dresser drawer. The Giants bear was there, as were three other bears. “I don’t like having them out,” Pop said, “But I’m not going to just throw them away.”

“Okay...” I said. “But you’ll make it up to Brett somehow?”

“Sure. We’ll go to a Cubs game or something.”

“Brett’s a White Sox fan.”

“But you live in—” “I know, Pop.” “Okay fine. We’ll go to a White Sox game.”

B

rett seemed pleased that Pop wanted to go to a baseball game with him. He bought a pair of tickets for late April, good seats along the first baseline. But he and Pop never went. Pop had a heart attack the week before. He was in the hospital for a few days, and I took some time off work to take care of him when he went home. He wasn’t easy to tend to. He was reluctant to admit how weak he was. Mostly he was angry: at me, at his doctors, at his body. The only consolation was the staggering number of stuffed animals that arrived from concerned relatives.

I carried packages into the house and sat by Pop’s bed as we opened them.

“A lemur!” It had big brown eyes and patches of Velcro on its paws.

“Looks like a George to me,” I said.

“I can see why you think that.” Pop wagged his finger. “But his name is Ringo.”

“My mistake. Ooh and Karen sent a dog. And cookies.”

“A Border Collie. Named Ginger.

And give them here.”

“No dice. You heard Dr. Sanders.”

“Screw Dr. Sanders,” Pop said.

“You better watch it. I’ll tell her where you live and she’ll come beat you up.”

“I’d like to see her try,” he said, opening the last box. “Oh no.”

It was another teddy bear. He received so many that we eventually had to dig out an old suitcase for them.

“I’ll put it with the others.”

P

op started to recover, and I went back to work. I called most days to check in. He told me about the short walks he’d started going on (at Dr. Sanders’s recommendation).

I asked how the animals were doing, and he gave me updates. He asked how Brett was and I told him he and I were doing well. In truth, the stress of Pop’s heart attack had tested us. I was at Pop’s place a lot, and when I was home I had trouble focusing. Brett never said so, but he seemed annoyed that I was gone so much. We spent a few weeks in limbo, neither fighting nor comfortable.

But eventually Pop started to show real signs of recovery, and the tension between us began to fade.

One weekend we went to pick up Pop for lunch. He answered the door lugging a duffel bag.

“Teddy bears,” he said, in response to our faces.

“What about them?” I asked, taking the bag from him.

“After lunch,” he said, with a slight wheeze, “we’re taking them to an orphanage or somewhere.”

And so we did. The woman there gave us a suspicious look when we showed her all the bears. She was thin, with short white hair and the trace of a mustard stain on her lapel. From the way she talked it seemed like she didn’t trust us, but she took the bears.

Brett and I noticed, as Pop emptied the suitcase, that the Giants bear wasn’t there.

“Hanging on to the bear Brett gave you?” I asked.

“Of course!” Pop laughed. “I could never part with Robbie. He is one well made bear.”

We knew Pop was kidding us, but I could see Brett was pleased.

“What a good idea,” he said, as we drove home. “I bet those kids will really love the bears.”

“I hope so. They’re nice teddy bears.”

Brett didn’t say much more, but he was smiling. I looped my arm around his as he drove.

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fiction

J

ust when Pop seemed to have made a full recovery, and Brett and I had settled back into a comfortable routine, Pop fell on one of his walks and broke his wrist. The fall could have been worse, but it still severely limited what Pop could do for himself. He spent a lot of time in bed, and because he didn’t feel like doing anything, he got weaker. Then, because he was weak, he didn’t feel like doing anything. I didn’t have time to take care of him, and I tried to convince him to move into a retirement home not too far from where Brett and I were. When I mentioned the idea to Brett he said it had already occurred to him, but that he hadn’t wanted to suggest it himself.

Pop didn’t go for it.

“I’ll stay right here,” he said. His arm was in a sling. He held Bernie in his lap.

“Pop, I can’t take care of you.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right.”

“No, you won’t. How does this not make sense to you?” I was starting to feel desperate.

“Donna,” he said. He frowned. I had expected him to get pissed off, but he looked serious, somber even. “I worked hard for fifty years. I provided for you and your mother. I have earned the right to die in my own house.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, and so I left.

I

snapped at Brett all that week. He took it. For weeks he’d had a trip to New York scheduled, to meet with investors. Neither of us had brought it up for fear of starting a fight, but two days before he was scheduled to leave, I lost it. I cursed him and cried at him.

“What am I going to do?”

“It’s going to be all right,” he said.

“I can’t take care of patients and take care of Pop and take care of myself,” I sobbed. “It’s too much. It’s way too much.” I hated how I sounded.

“We’ll get through this,” he said. He put a hand on my back. I brushed him off.

“And don’t come back with a fucking Yankees bear,” I spluttered.

“A Yankees bear?” He looked away,

confused.

“Oh you know, Pop’s hurt and Donna’s pissed, but a teddy bear will make it all better.” I said the last bit in a singsong.

“I’m not going,” he said. “I thought I told you…I asked Jen to go instead after Pop had his fall.”

“You’re not going?”

“I’m not going. I’m staying right here.”

I collapsed onto the bed, feeling exhausted and relieved and very, very stupid.

T

ime moved differently after that. The days were long and yet the weeks flew by. Every day after work, Brett picked me up and we went to Pop’s. We took him for walks, though he could never go far. We cooked simple dinners for him, spaghetti or soup or sandwiches, and made sure there were enough leftovers for Pop to fix himself lunch. A lot of the time we picked up takeout on the way. On weekends, we spent the whole day in Evanston, playing cards with Pop and trying to cheer him up. Every now and again Brett would banish me from Pop’s bedroom, on the pretense that the two of them need to have a “man to man talk.” I would sit down on the sofa, pick up a stuffed whale or elephant, and promptly fall asleep.

Sometimes Pop fell asleep during our visits, and Brett and I would put on a movie and sit together. Often, we fell asleep too.

Brett leveraged his big sale in Austin into a transfer out of the sales department and into marketing, which meant he would only need to travel once or twice a year. I loved him for it, but it wasn’t enough. Pop had another heart attack. He spent nine days in the hospital. I used up my vacation days to be with him, then my sick leave, and after that we hired someone to look after him, at least during the day. Pop couldn’t get around without a walker.

Even that took it out of him. After a few weeks with the walker he gave up and bought a wheelchair.

30 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

P

op’s birthday, his eightieth, was in August, and Beth, to her credit, threw Pop quite the party. I’d told her that Pop was in a bad way, confident she would spread the word whether I asked her to or not. She coordinated with Joan and the rest of the family to rent out a block of suites at the Hilton.

Cousins I hadn’t seen in years flew in, and Brett and I invited as many of Pop’s friends as we could track down.

For the night of Pop’s birthday, Beth rented one of the hotel’s ballrooms. The family mingled over miniature hot dogs and Prosecco. I introduced Brett over and over, which he took more or less in stride. After dinner, several toasts were made to Pop, who brushed them off with a gruff smile.

Before dessert, Beth had a surprise.

“I know we haven’t exchanged gifts for decades,” she said, “but everyone insisted we pitch in and get you something. But what to get for the brother who has everything?” She beamed out at the family. “I thought long and hard, but I think I’ve found just thing.”

She motioned to a bellboy, who stepped out of the room and returned with a huge golden teddy bear sitting on a luggage cart. Its fur gleamed and its red bowtie shone. The thing must have been six feet tall.

Pop caught my eye, gave me a wicked grin. And then, with Brett’s help, he stood up.

“Thank you all,” he said, “for being here. It means the world to me.

Thank you, Beth, for wrangling all these knuckleheads to come wish me a happy birthday. And thank you for this remarkable bear. I think I’ll call him…Henry. Or maybe Josh. I’ll let you know at my eighty-fifth birthday party. Thank you all again. Thank you so much.” As he sat down Beth started us in a rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

L

ate that night, after Beth and the rest had gone to bed, Brett, Pop, and I found ourselves alone in the hotel lobby with the huge bear.

fiction It stared vacantly straight ahead. It seemed to have the faintest ghost of a smile.

“That thing gives me the creeps,” Pop said.

“Me too.” Brett looked the bear up and down.

“I don’t know if the foster home will take this one,” I said.

“Well I don’t want it. You two better take it,” Pop said.

“We don’t have the space,” I protested.

“Wait,” Brett said quietly, “I have an idea. I’m going to get the car. You two stay with the bear.” He trotted out the front door of the hotel.

It was late, and I was tired, but my boyfriend had disappeared into the night with a gleam in his eye and a plan to dispose of my father’s life-sized teddy bear. Some things are worth staying up for.

Brett pulled the car around. He and I helped Pop into the front seat. Then Brett helped me clamber into the back with the bear. We set off at a leisurely pace, even though Brett seemed excited.

Pop was excited. I was excited. The bear was enormous.

Brett drove us past Millennium Park and across the river. We looked up at the skyscrapers on the Magnificent Mile, seeing them as if for the first time in the wee hours of Pop’s eightyfirst year. As Brett looped back onto Lake Shore Drive I knew where he was headed. Sure enough, the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel rose up before us, and out we drove, as far we could go. When we had to stop, Brett and I got Pop’s wheelchair out of the trunk and the bear out of the backseat. We continued on foot, Brett pushing my father as I lugged his teddy bear until we found a gate we couldn’t open. Brett brought Pop over to the railing.

“How’s here?” he said.

“Now that’s my boy!” Pop roared into the Chicago night. “Now give me that bear.”

I passed it to him, or rather put it in front of him. I set it down facing Pop, and as Brett helped my father to

his feet for the second time that night, Pop looked the bear straight in its extravagant glass eyes. Then my father summoned strength I didn’t know he had, and hucked his birthday present into Lake Michigan. The bear bobbed for a moment, then sank as its plush, extra-huggable fur and downy, super soft stuffing absorbed water. We stood there as Pop cackled like a loon. Then, spent, we walked back towards the car and the glittering city.

stories about what I’d been like as a girl. Pop was still frail, but he seemed energized.

After Brett asked me to marry him, I called Pop. “Christ, Donna,” he said, “One minute you’re kissing boys and next thing I know you’re marrying them. ” “I don’t know what to tell you, Pop. We tried to take things slow.”

“Okay fine, congratulations. Put Brett on.”

T

P

he next months were calm.

Brett, it turned out, had a knack for marketing, and quickly got promoted. Taking care of Pop was still a challenge, but Pop took a real liking to Paula, the in-home nurse who came by on weekdays. And when Brett and I were with him he was often in good spirits, laughing and telling Brett

op passed away, asleep in his own house, not long after the wedding. The house in Evanston went to Joan, but Brett and I took Bernie and the rest of the animals.

We boxed them up and put them in a closet, but we knew, from the hints we’d dropped to one another, that we would want them soon enough.

FREE * BOOK * FREE Nixon’s foreign policy advisor: “9/11 Unveiled . . . is the best short summary of what most Americans and virtually all of the rest of the world consider to be the 9/11 mystery” The author, Enver Masud, managed the National Power Grid Study, and the National Electric Reliability Study for the U.S. Department of Energy. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and The World Bank.

Google 9/11 Unveiled or download from http://www.twf.org/911Unveiled.pdf yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

fiction

Coffee spoons third-place fiction

by Sophie Haigney photography by Alex Schmeling

I

told my therapist that the reason I was going crazy was because of how many stories I read everyday that consisted mostly of conversations between a first-person narrator and his unnamed therapist.

I explained that the character is always named Frank or Bill and he has a tragically ordinary life. Frank or Bill probably smashes a plate, or drowns a rabbit on purpose, or is haunted by his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s miscarriage which is actually somehow his fault because he was screwing his secretary while simultaneously thinking about screwing his younger sister. The therapist always

says something vaguely unhelpful and then bills him for the hour. Frank or Bill is annoyed and returns to watching Brewers games while fantasizing about his secretary and drinking beer or possibly whiskey and making cryptic observations about sunflower seeds or maybe his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tomato plant, which is wilting. He might go for a drive later and make even more cryptic observations about people he passes. He might talk to someone in a bar, but more likely he will sit alone and describe the grainy wood on the barstools in a fairly creative way. He will then go see his therapist again.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

fiction It’s a cheap trick, I told my therapist.

It’s just a way of showing exactly how neurotic Frank or Bill is, and how he’s a different kind of neurotic than every other character featured in the short stories that end up in the slush pile at The Review but how he’s at the same time very ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that the reader ought to sympathize with him despite his neurosis, and scorn the therapist’s advice. Inserting the therapist creates what seem like moments of conflict and tension into a story about some guy’s wife’s miscarriage. Then the author doesn’t need to create any real conflict or tension and he can just write about Frank or Bill’s ordinary and neurotic thoughts, and his ordinary and neurotic routine, which are probably actually the author’s own ordinary and neurotic thoughts and routine.

My therapist looked at me blankly. She asked me if there was any significance to this Frank or Bill character, and if perhaps he had something to do with my brother. I said no, and she billed me for an hour.

My brother is dead. His name was not Frank or Bill.

I

went home and read T.S. Eliot for a half hour and then felt like a good person because I’d been reading T.S. Eliot for a whole half hour, though I hadn’t really been reading it so much as skimming it and thinking about if I should pick up my dry-cleaning or wait and get it later.

Then he said something about mornings and evenings and afternoons, and then there was this line: “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”

I stopped reading there because something tugged in my stomach. I spent the evening imagining the line.

What it would be like to lay coffee spoons down, in a long trail stretching right from the couch in front of my TV back, back, back to a beach in New Hampshire where we stood in November and the freezing ocean in

after-the-rain light, and then back even further to a cornfield with tissue-paper husks and a treehouse with cigarettes stuck in the floorboards and an open roof that we insisted upon. I imagined walking along that glistening trail of spoons that would perhaps be crusty with brown-stained sugar, which would be okay. I wondered how many spoons it would take, to go back that far. Twenty years, forty years—how many spoons?

I went and picked up my dry cleaning then.

I

told my therapist two days later that the other cheap trick in the stories I read is when the author pulls in some small portion of a famous author and tries to make it relevant to Frank or Bill. Look, Frank or Bill read Nabokov and it explains something very important about his neurosis!

I then told my therapist I’d been reading T.S. Eliot, mostly to impress her. I told her about the coffee spoons line, and how I liked to picture it. She seemed not that impressed by the T.S. Eliot thing but pretty interested in my description. She wanted to hear more things that I wanted to walk back to, besides the beach and the cornfield and the treehouse, so I told her that I would lay spoons around the perimeter of that lake we used to drive around late nights when we first got back to Iowa from Vietnam and neither of us could sleep.

She said that this was very interesting, and she could tell a lot of things from my descriptions. Like what, I wanted to know. She said it was important that I told all of my memories from the “we” perspective, without ever mentioning who I was with. I told her that the name for the “we” perspective is the first person plural. She looked at me with raised eyebrows and said yes, but who makes it plural? Your brother?

I ignored her and told her I needed to leave early, because I had plans. She raised her eyebrows and billed me for

34 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

an hour anyways.

I

went home and I thought about reading more T.S. Eliot, but I didn’t have the energy so I turned on the news. Watching the news also makes me feel like a good person, but not quite as much as reading T.S. Eliot.

The news said: BUSH TO ADDRESS NATION TOMORROW in big red letters. Then it said: CASUALTY COUNT HIGHER THAN REPORTED IN AFGHANISTAN and there were pictures of helicopters and fire in the desert. I started to feel dizzy so I reached for the remote. I had forgotten why I never watch the news.

I

was at work on a Wednesday and the other three readers and I were drinking coffee and reading, like every day. I like the other readers, who are all much younger and smarter than me. Addie especially, who must be still in college, or barely graduated. I think she went (goes?) to Michigan because I don’t know why else she would be reading unsolicited submissions at a literary magazine near Ann Arbor for very little money. She seems like she’s been other places, or else she’s just beautiful which I confuse with worldly.

I would like to take her on a date if she were not something like thirtyfive years younger. I probably would anyway, if I weren’t afraid to ask, and if she’d say yes, which I doubt.

I was in the middle of a vampire story, which was getting very gruesome very fast. It was not the sort of thing that gets published in The Review, so I was doodling in the corners with my red pen while I read and didn’t absorb.

Addie asked me what I was drawing.

I showed her my picture, which was a coffee spoon. It just looked like a regular spoon, though, so I had to explain. I’ve been reading T.S. Eliot, I told her. There’s that line about coffee spoons.

She said, “Mmm, I know that line.

What is it? I have known them all already, known them all, have known

fiction the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” She smiled.

I thought about her naked and then I was embarrassed so I started talking a little too much about how I wanted to line up the spoons in a long row and then I stopped because my rambling embarrassed me even more.

She smiled, and said, “That’s funny, that’s so interesting, that’s not how I picture the line. I like to think about dipping a coffee spoon into a pool that is kind of my life and measuring it out in big spoonfuls.”

Colin, another reader, who I also like except for the fact that he is in love with Addie, said, “Addie, you have such a vivid imagination.”

He is not handsome, I don’t think, but he is young.

She laughed quietly, and said, “Oh, no I don’t, it’s Eliot who has the imagination, I just like to read.”

And I could tell Colin was thinking about her naked too, so I went back to reading about Esmerelda sinking her teeth into Jorge, who screamed silently, while they talked a little bit.

I

told my therapist during our next session that another stupid thing in most of the stories I read is how Frank or Bill is always thinking about sex. Like, he’ll see a fifteen year old girl in a gas station and think about her naked and then spend a while feeling bad about it. Or else he won’t feel bad about it at all, and he’ll figure out some way to get her to go home with him. Those are the stupider stories, because you’re basically just reading the author’s sexual fantasies which are never very imaginative and often gross.

The girl is always younger and the sex is always unfulfilling because Frank or Bill is neurotic and guilty and hates his ordinary life, but he still thinks about it all the time or does it all the time because that’s just how he is.

My therapist was not as embarrassed by this as I thought she would be.

She asked me if I thought sex was

unfulfilling. I said I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t having any. But you’ve been thinking about it, clearly, she said, as though she knew. I was annoyed that she knew, so I said no, I’ve been reading about it a lot. The weird part was that all of a sudden I started thinking about having sex with her. I hadn’t noticed before that she was attractive, but she had these big eyes that were kind of blue and kind of green and I thought about her naked.

So she couldn’t tell, I told her that my sister was coming over for dinner.

She smiled, and said that’s good, that’s good, are you looking forward to it?

I wasn’t, but I told her I was, and then I thought maybe I should ask her to dinner with us. Then I thought that would be inappropriate, and so I asked if she was doing anything for dinner. I think it came out a little weird, because we’d just been talking about sex.

She said, no, I don’t have any plans, I’ll probably make myself some food.

Nothing fancy.

I wanted to ask her if she lived alone but I thought maybe that wasn’t a normal question so I didn’t. I had this sudden memory of looking into a window when I was a kid. This woman’s back turned away from me as she sliced cucumbers—tomatoes? Thin arms and a bony back, hair pulled up.

I couldn’t remember who the woman was, or where, but it made me think of the therapist making nothing fancy for dinner. I didn’t tell her.

M

argaret was already there when I got home. Hi, we said to each other, and then she said she brought dinner. “Have you been eating okay? I really wish you would call me more,” she said while she started taking things out of her bag.

“Okay,” I said.

It’s Margaret’s fault about the therapist. Last time she came over, she said that I was emotionally scarred, and that, God, it’s been five years and

what am I doing with myself and that even Mom and Dad have dealt with this, why can’t you? She said a lot of other things, because I made her cry when I said her boyfriend probably wasn’t calling because he didn’t love her. She said I should get a job, which I have, but she said she meant a real job, because I was smart and I had almost finished Princeton before I didn’t on account of the war, but that still counted for something. And how my life was a mess because I couldn’t let go and it was terribly sad, she knew it was terribly sad, that loss was an awful thing but we’d all lost someone and God, I should see a fucking therapist because I needed to get it together and stop taking it out on her.

I just kind of stood there and said, yeah, I’ll see a therapist. Okay, Margaret. I should have felt a lot worse than I did. I was mostly just annoyed about the whole thing.

“How’s the therapy going?” she asked, after only a minute in the kitchen.

“I like her,” I said. This was half a lie and half true, but Margaret is not good at telling those things apart.

Sometimes that’s a good thing.

“I’m so glad,” she said. “Are you looking for a job yet? You know, I could help.”

Margaret is not a teacher but a professor at Michigan, like both my parents who used to be farmers but who are now also professors because they co-wrote a surprisingly successful book about small-town farming, which was really what they knew about and academics took it as interesting social commentary.

“Oh,” I said, “thanks, but I’m just going to see what comes along. I like where I work.”

“You barely get paid,” she said, peeling potatoes over the sink. The skin wrinkling off of them made me queasy, so I tried not to watch.

The only thing that I have trouble affording is my therapist, I almost said, but didn’t.

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fiction

“I’ll think about it some more,” I said instead, and thought about it. I liked my job.

“What’s for dinner,” I asked.

I was hungry and I wanted her to stop peeling potatoes because even the sound of the knife skimming the potato made me feel sick.

“Chicken and mashed potatoes,” she said.

I sighed and she looked up at me, so I smiled a fake smile. She smiled back.

A

fter Margaret left, this time not in tears, I thought about Addie’s interpretation of the coffee spoons line. She was probably right that this was how Eliot meant it. I thought about my life this way, as kind of a pool.

I pictured dragging a very large coffee spoon through it, fishing the important things out from the soup of days.

I would draw up spoonfuls of sunlight in the fields and games of hide-and-seek, the two of us pressing ourselves giggling into shadows and our knees webs of scratches. And the first beers we stole and itchy pants from Sunday church. I would fish for long stretches of highway, for trees screeching in the wind that have probably been cut down by now, for the fights we had about Dickens, the leaves back East, and Annabelle, who we were both in love with. I would sift through nights in rice patties that were no more

than swamps and the smell of flesh burning which I remember us agreeing was not unpleasant until we learned what it was. I would measure those spoonfuls carefully so that they didn’t overflow. I wouldn’t spill a drop.

But the problem with this interpretation is that there are things I wouldn’t want to see, if I caught them on the edge of a coffee spoon. Especially things in the years after we came back. I would like to leave those behind in the kind of pool that is my life.

So I decided that even though Addie definitely understood T.S. Eliot much better than I did, I would keep thinking about the spoons in a kind of path that winds backwards in time, stopping in some places and skirting around the

36 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

others that never see again.

I

I hope I’ll

told my therapist during our next session that another of my least favorite writing tricks was avoidance.

And by avoidance I mean when you read a whole story, and there’s something terrible that has happened to Frank or Bill, like his wife’s miscarriage, but you don’t ever find out what it is, or you kind of have to guess based on some clues.

Here’s a hint: there is a pink room upstairs where Frank or Bill and his wife will not go. What could it have

fiction unpleasant.

You avoid her too, she said.

She was right about that, which is too bad.

I don’t know what to say, I said, because I really didn’t know what to say.

Anything, she said, looking at me hard still.

So I started talking about lining up coffee spoons again, and the path I would make. I could tell that wasn’t what she wanted me to say, but she didn’t tell me that, so I kept talking about the old places I would visit and not talking about the old places I wouldn’t.

After a while she said, you know I can’t help you very much if you won’t tell me anything, and I nodded. I felt a little bad because I knew she was trying and I wasn’t trying, and also because she was pretty and maybe lonely. Actually, I wasn’t sure if she was lonely at all but it kind of seemed like it. I noticed when I was leaving that she didn’t have a wedding ring even though she was past what seemed like marrying age.

T been—a nursery? But the author won’t say that, and instead goes and explains more about Frank or Bill’s daily life. Maybe how he wants to have sex again, even though last time it made him feel bad.

She looked me in the eye when I said this, in a hard way. I was still having the problem of thinking about her naked. You are a master of avoidance, she said. You haven’t told me one thing about yourself since we’ve started these sessions.

That’s not avoidance, I said.

Yes, she said, it is. You aren’t dealing with your brother’s death. You’re avoiding it.

You sound like my sister, I said, which wasn’t what I meant. She didn’t sound like my sister but she was saying things my sister would say and that was

he thing is my brother hung himself in my garage five years ago after we got in a fight about sending troops to Iraq. I said it was pointless and a waste of lives, and he said it was necessary and a lot of other bullshit about America. This was an argument we had had many times. He stormed out. I didn’t hear him drive off so after awhile I went outside to see if he was still there.

And he was there, except he was hanging from the rafters, kind of swinging from his belt. I didn’t understand what was happening at first because I’d seen a lot of bodies but never a swinging body. Something about the way it was suspended was kind of comical. I started thinking about those things at kids’ birthday parties that you hit with a baseball bat and trying to remember the word for them when I thought, that’s my brother. I realized I should try to get him down.

He was already dead. That’s the thing that I’m avoiding.

A

t work on Thursday I read a beautiful story, which almost never happens. It’s so surprising that I doubted it at first, waiting for it to become silly or sad. But it stayed beautiful all the way through.

It was about two little girls who are running around in a field. It didn’t say where the field was, but I assumed it was a Midwestern field, which is perhaps my own prejudice. Anyways, they are running through the field, which is filled with wheat and they are looking for something. It didn’t say what it was at first, and I got worried because I thought the author might be trying to avoid saying it and ruin the story, but then you find out they are looking for their dead mother, who is buried in the field. Only the girls are so young that they think it is simply a game of hide-and-seek, so they are laughing and running and their father is watching but he doesn’t know what to do. They get tired of it after a while and they come inside, where their father is crying silently over the sink because he doesn’t know how to make dinner since their mother always did that. The girls go back outside and I was worried they would find their mother’s grave and it would become too tragic to be beautiful, but instead they bring back peaches to their father. Here, one of the girls says, look Daddy. Look what I found.

And that’s the end. I showed Addie when she came back from her lunch break. I told her it was the best thing I’d read in a while, besides T.S. Eliot.

I watched her face get soft and sad when she was reading the story, and I knew she knew what I meant. “This is stunning,” she said, after a minute. “It’s like a coffee spoon full of this family’s sorrow.”

That made my stomach jump because it meant that she’d been thinking about coffee spoons also, possibly even at the same time as I had been thinking about coffee spoons.

And then she got up to use the bathroom.

Colin asked if he could read it, and

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

fiction I said sure, even though I wanted it to belong to me and Addie. I passed him the manuscript, which Addie had left on her chair.

“God,” he said after a minute.

“It’s incredible,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but Addie. Her mother died when she was young.”

“Oh,” I said. I wondered how he knew that and what else he knew about her.

“I hope she’s okay,” I added, because I wasn’t sure what else to say.

Alexandra, the third reader, who is quiet and not pretty but nice, asked if she could read it. I handed it to her.

“The end is perfect,” she said, after reading it. “We should pass this on to the editors.”

Colin agreed and I nodded, though it had lost some of its beauty already after they had read it, and all I was really thinking about was Addie whose mother died when she was young and how very little I knew about her compared to Colin and probably so many other people.

When she came back her eyes were a little red, which Colin and Alexandra and I pretended not to notice. She agreed that we should pass it on. I felt like talking to her a little, so I asked her what her favorite line from Eliot was. After I did, I felt like that was a stupid question, but I couldn’t take it back.

She seemed okay with the question.

“In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” she said. She went back to reading.

L

ater, I was in the parking lot about to drive home, or drive to the grocery store because the groceries Margaret had bought me were running out. I was getting in the car when I noticed that Addie was sitting on the curb. Her hair was hiding her face but I knew it was her, so I said, “Hey, Addie.”

She turned around. She was smoking a cigarette, which caught me off guard.

“Oh, hey,” she said, and half-smiled but I couldn’t tell if it was a good half or a bad half.

I walked over to her. “What are you

doing?” I asked, and then thought that was a dumb question.

“Just waiting for my ride,” she said.

She looked down and I thought maybe she’d been crying again.

I couldn’t help it so I asked, “Are you crying because of that story I gave you?”

She looked up. “What?” she said, and exhaled a stream of smoke. She sounded kind of angry that I’d asked, and I’d never heard her sound angry before.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought maybe.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said and she shook out all her hair and she was very beautiful. “I’m not crying.”

I stood there for a minute and watched her smoke. “Okay,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

She looked up at me for a second.

“Yeah, bye.” There was still the angry edge in her voice, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the cigarette either and I felt a little queasy about the whole interaction. I got in my car and turned on the radio but the music made me feel queasy too so I turned it off. I started imagining different ways our conversation could have gone, if I had done it better. I could have asked her if she wanted a ride and she could have said, yeah sure that would be great. Then we could have driven around and maybe both gone to the grocery store and I could have asked more subtly about the crying and her mom and maybe, if I’d been feeling like it, I could have said something about my brother. Most likely not. I think I would have regretted doing that because it would have been too much.

But I didn’t have the chance to say it, or anything else, so I turned the radio back on, and drove to the grocery store.

I

told my therapist about how a lot of stories have to do with unfinished encounters. Like, how Frank or Bill is kind of in love with this girl and he wants to tell her something really important, something he never really says to other people, and he gets his

38 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | Wallace Prize 2015

chance to but he doesn’t. And the point of that is just to prove that he has this burden and he doesn’t know how to tell others and he can’t really connect with people because his mind is such a trap that he can’t get out of. It’s a cliché, I said.

She looked at me. All encounters are sort of unfinished, aren’t they?

That surprised me, and I had to think about it. Well, yeah, but some are more than others.

She said, like which?

And I thought back to all of the ones. Addie, yesterday, and my brother, which is obvious. That girl in college and the people in the grocery store and the other people in my unit in Vietnam.

And Margaret, sometimes. It was hard to measure which ones were more unfinished than the others, because all of them were over.

It’s a cliché, I said again, but I don’t know if I really thought that.

Maybe, my therapist shrugged. She wrote something down and her hair fell into her face and I wanted to touch her hair. I wanted to say something about my brother because I knew that would make her happy, but the time was almost up and it didn’t feel like the moment. We were mostly quiet until the hour was up.

I walked out into the parking lot and it was crackling cold. It was becoming winter, though I hadn’t noticed this happening. It was maybe 5:00 and dark.

There was s a streetlamp making a pool of light. I stood outside my car for a little while and my breath made steamy clouds. I could see into the window of my therapist’s office, on the second floor.

The light was on, and I could half-see the side of her body. She was writing on her notepad and she stretched to itch the back of her neck. I wondered who was coming to see her next and felt a strange twang in my heart like when Addie and Colin talked.

I thought about going back in and telling her all the things she wanted me to tell her, but the hour was over so I thought maybe next week.