Volume 14 issue 1 spring 2002

erar

• :agaZ111. 1 spring 2002 volume 14 number 1

1 NO

Editors-in-Chief

Staff

Emily Weiss

Emma Winger

Zachary Weinman

Jessica Wheeler

Designer

Ted Sink

Tim Gambell

Evelyn Shih

Allie Stielau

Katya Poltorak Adviser to the Designer

Steven Nam

Elizabeth Prestel

Ri Pierce-Grove

Publisher

Hilary Hammell

Morgan Babst

Jason Farago

Meredith Kaffel

Nicole Dixon Circulation and Events

William Clattenburg

Helen Phillips

Dawn Chan

David Gorin

Emily Anthes Yakubu Agbese

Poetry Editors Caolan Madden Lise Clavel Art Editor Andrea Hill Senior Editor Emma Snyder Associate Editor Jennifer E. Russ

Contents

4 untitled photograph Eli Feiman

39 Elegy for an Elegy

6 Riches

40 Story Cycle: Tamer Sex,Wilder West Max Moody

Mark Angehr 9 Just Me (Rating: 8.4 Votes: 193) Anne Weber

Ted Sink

43 untitled photograph Hannah Whitaker

10 in the glass Lejla Hadzic II You Want to Know What Decided It for Me Allie Stielau

12

Herbarium Caolan Madden

18 In Winter Jennifer Russ 19 Calle 4 Sur, Morning After the Party Danica Novgorodoff zo 24 Hour Body Shop Lisa Gross The winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for 22

Interview with Susan Orlean

Poetry is "You Want to Know What Decided Itfor Me" by Allie Stielau.

28 Geology: Lecture II, Metamorphic Rock Ri Pierce-Grove

The winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prizefor Fiction is "Riches" by Mark Angehr.

29 A Hole in the Ground Morgan Babst 37 untitled photograph Emi Lesure 38 Lindsey 1995 Ben Crotty

.aut

Riches

My name is Joseph Giamatti, I am twenty-three, and this all happened when I was two weeks from completing the Naval Officer Training Program in Quantico. Virginia, the birthplace of my father. Out in the South Field, I stepped on a landmine on the far edge of a ditch. It shot paint on my pants and I lay there dead as the other platoon took our flag. The next morning,I bought a one-way ticket to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Last I heard, that's where my sister lived.

It was August, and the crape myrtles at the base had already lost their pink flowers. It got cooler as I went north through DC, New York, and Concord. I kept the window open and tried to get glimpses of the coast, which has always fascinated me.The real ocean is something compared to the frog ponds at Quantico.

One time I shied away from a mud puddle, and from then on the Barracks Sergeant made me roll around in the slop and wash my uniform each night before roll call.

Nine hours later the bus came to a stop at Portsmouth.It was eight o'clock. The sky had lowered and things were wet. I ducked into a little spot, the Seaside Bar, which had a fisherman's net tied to the ceiling and paintings of sailboats that reminded me of those in hotel rooms.The bartender told me Pine Ave. was a cab ride away, and he called me one to take me there. I didn't want to show up at Frances's smelling like booze,so I waited on the street next to a post office drop box and watched people walk past me.

I had gotten Frances's address from Ronny, her old boyfriend. Her senior year of high school she went to live with him on a boat tied up on West End. I went to the docks and spotted the thing because it had My Boat written on the side. Ronny was on the deck mending a sail line. He gave me Frances's address in Portsmouth and told me she still owed him two hundred dollars and told me the P.O. box she could mail it to.

She lived on the second story of a sewing store. It was on a ridge that looked out over the Hodgson that went out to the Atlantic. I had a green duffel bag that I bought before I left for Quantico because I thought it looked military. When I got there, they gave me a black

6

one that was so plain I felt foolish. I set it down and rang her bell — F. Giamatti.

'Hello?' a voice came through the intercom.

'It's me, Frances,' I said.

'Joey.' she said. Then she repeated it,'Joey, I'll ring you up.'

A light came on over the steps, and I saw her come down.She had on a red T-shirt and plaid flannel pants.

She opened the door for me and gave me a look up and down. She rubbed the top of my shaved head.

'Hey, Colonel Sanders.'

'Hey, Frances,' I said.

'You don't need any money,do you?'

'Not exactly. But I'd like a place to crash.'

'For how long?'

'Not too long. Why,do you have some guy here?'

We started up the steps.

'No.' 'Are you gonna be all right with this?'

'As long as you don't need any cash to get along.

Because God knows I don't have it.'

I put my bag inside the door. The slant of the roof started just above the couch and spanned the length ofthe living room,so everything had a hooded feel that had me ducking when I didn't need to. There was a blouse on the coffee table and a sewing machine and a few white boxes filled with costume jewelry.

In a hallway leading to the kitchen there was an aquarium with black rocks on the bottom and five or ten fish swimming in and out of miniature castles and archways.Perched on the windowsill was one of those Navajo sand contraptions filled with alternating levels of blue, violet, and white.

'I got that in New Mexico,' she said. I never knew she had been to New Mexico. She ran her finger over the glass encasement and I realized I was dealing with someone I knew very little about. Her hair was in two long braids and had beads threaded through them.She was very pale.

'New Mexico?' I said.'When were you in New Mexico?'

'A while ago,' she said.'It was hot and dry and I didn't like the food.' She smiled. I imagined she had

constructed some sort of life philosophy, a roll with the punches kind of approach that makes you look

her sponge.

on the bright side ofthings — the most heartbreaking

you will have to work for them.'

'Cut the crap,Joey.'

approach you can come up with.

'So when did you leave Mississippi?'

'About six months ago.'

I had tracked her down in Picayune, Mississippi to tell her that our mom had died of kidney failure. She said

'I see many many riches in your future,' I said.'But

'Ronny says you owe him two hundred dollars.'

'No,I don't.'

'That's great then.'

she wasn't coming down for the funeral because Mom

'I don't owe him any money. I don't.' She looked over at me and I spread my hands apart. It was important to

wouldn't have wanted it, and she didn't either. Before we got off the phone,she told me she wanted Mom's

her that I believe her.

'And by the way, where's Mom's jewelry?' she asked.

jewelry. She said that I could have everything else, which amounted to not much more than zero since our dad had disappeared when we were kids, and Mom spent most of the savings on my college and her own health bills. Frances told me exactly where Mom kept it and named every piece from memory.So I put it in a bag and took it with me to Quantico.

I walked over to the coffee table and picked up a fake amethyst. Frances went to the kitchen and started on some dishes. It was one of those moments when life went on in a way that made all talking a little useless.

'It was stolen.'

She put the sponge down,and I walked out of the kitchen and into the living room.The fish were floating in and out of their miniature glowing city.

Two suckfish were swimming side by side through a fluorescent green archway that led to a plastic treasure chest with a seat of coruscating tin gold.

'Tell me you're lying,Joey.' She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.'Because if you aren't, you can leave right now.'

'Maybe if you ask me where I was I'll tell you what

I walked over to where Frances was and sat down on a stool next to the sink and let the light refract in

happened.'

the stone.

'Look, Frances, I'm a fortuneteller,' I said.'This is my

know if you're lying.'

'You know I don't lie, Frances. And besides, you

crystal ball.' She was doing dishes in the sink.

'You were never great at that,' she said.

have loads of the stuff right here.' I pointed at a box of amethysts on the coffee table.'No one can tell the

'Things are different now. I can see your future.'

'Maybe you can start with your own.For one, what

difference. Real or fake. It's all the same.'

'You came all the way here to tell me you weren't

are you doing here?'

'I came to see you,' I said. That was partly true.

'I'm not concerned about what happened. I want to

giving me the jewelry?'

'Tell me why you need it so bad.'

don't have a juicy inheritance to live off.'

'Maybe I'll make some jewelry like you.' I held up the

She went back to the kitchen and I walked to the window. Across the street there was a boutique with a coffee shop next door and a travel agency after that.

amethyst and looked at her through it.'Sew some lacy-

At the far end ofthe street, a car and its headlights

type numbers and put big fat stones in them. It can't be too hard.' She had said her life on the boat with Ronny was like living on a commune. She worked and

went by.

I had taken a conflict resolution class at Quantico.

There was nothing like a soldier telling you how to

he worked and there was food on the table and it was great. Maybe we could do the same thing here.

solve problems. You must look him in the eye. You must begin sentences with 'I feel' and 'I think' and

'And what about a job? Vacation's over, you know. We

She reached for the detergent and put more goop on

not make accusations. We role-played situations like

7

.,

one soldier stealing boots or ratting somebody out for sneaking off the base. The best got conflict resolution

There was a map of the Northeast with little blue dots to show the other bus stations. It only went down to

badges — CRE, Conflict Resolution Expert — and they mediated disputes that came up between trainees.

Maryland. Virginia was off the map.I had a moment of

I sat down with three other guys because they were riding me all the time for slowing the squadron up.

I got jumped when I was smoking a cigarette in the mess hall. The CRE did not care one iota for conflict

panic that I couldn't get a ticket that far south, but if they sold me one to get there, they would probably sell me one to get back.

741

resolution. He told me to shape up and put me on dish detail.

'My boyfriend's coming home later,' Frances called from the kitchen,'and maybe you can explain to him what happened.'

I opened my duffel bag and took out Mom's jewelry.

Over the running water in the kitchen, Frances couldn't hear me dump it in the aquarium. The necklaces and rings and pendants sank steadily and the fish got out of the way. The level of water rose a good inch because of the sheer volume. A set of pearls got stuck on a ceramic tree whose branches were as thick as its base. A single banded ring floated by a silverfish that was having trouble getting its fins to move.

I went down the steps without saying bye. When mom died I started putting less stock in family formalities.

I walked for half an hour until I got to the docks. It was foggy and my headway was slow. The streetlights were greasy bulbs that made the sky orange. The air was low and all around me. Usually the ocean made me feel small and free, but that time I felt landlocked in its grasp. There was a ship on the harbor that had a Greek flag and those strange letters on its prow. It was unloading sand to be taken to the surrounding beaches. The bulldozers had quit working for the night, and the huge pile, as big as a football field and a third as high, would have to wait until tomorrow to get where it was going.

I went to the bus station, and the place was empty except for a janitor who was mopping the tile floor and an elderly couple with hats drawn over their faces. I sat down on a wooden bench.To my right, a store selling drinks and magazines was shut up with an iron grate.

8

41

Just Me Rating: 8.4 Votes: 193

in the glass

i!

Ai 1. ; i1

I

1;( 1 i • 11 i I tti.i i I ;,. ii'l •ft it

11' '1 1 PI I 1., i 1 :1.1

1 1 It i i/1 jr I' i!t. I irri

l

1" .

1 i ,!

1 141 10 Al 1110

iiii2J; or! lit a..1 ip•loi

foil 1,t d

ift1;: Pik: :311t 1%111 41 if oti I i • '.. ,111/ fit( II p1,' ! • i . . 1144' i k !kg, 'Ikttlit ',I! I Ikiii lig .:ill 1 st .:.i!

i

1 /.1%1 lqlf•I

You Want to Know What Decided It for Me

It was the moth that night in August, knocking around the bare bulb.

You were reading. I was assassinating mosquitoes, smacking with a tubed weekly until your blood, my blood, constellated the naked walls. Upstairs, the swamp fan and through the screen, crickets pulsed, the smell of wild grape singing.

Remember how it flailed as if chained to the light, how you stood half-dressed and reaching, a six-year-old enthralled, for its gray frenetic wings.

This dust blossom on incandescence captured, you held it like desert water, opened our window, poured it streaming into the night then came back to bed as though this should be unremarked upon, unremarkable as all those times you set the parking brake,shut the flue, swept a carpet clean of broken glass when I'd forgotten.

But already I had clambered back through bone bars to loose for you my heart because I wanted always its small green commotion caught fluttering like that in your cupped fingers.

II

Herbarium

1

like a good ruby through the storm, and his hands were wide and clean and the shallows of his palms

had been able to look ironic. Instead she just looked perfect — primly thrilled, clutching her white roses, keeping her lips closed because her teeth were a little horsey, even though the corners of her mouth were corkscrewing wildly towards her ears. Rebecca kept

i

were faintly salted, and his long wrists were knotted with veins. Mostly she focused on these hands, because

the picture because of David. He didn't look like David in the picture: he looked nervous,a little dull, kind

his head bobbed above her like a pale sweet balloon, that nose in the darkness, the careful epicurian gleam of his spectacles. When they walked she curled her fingers around the smooth ridge of his hip,just over the waistband of his tweedy pants.'Does this embarrass

of unattractive — but you could make out the curve of at least one of the cheekbones, high and warmly

Being in love with the tall man was difficult: kisses were complicated, like a Rube Goldberg, Rebecca thought. Ring the bell, she thought; his nose gleamed

you?' she asked, the first time. He laughed and squeezed the triangle offlesh between her neck and her shoulder.'Yes,' he said.

It had been a long time since Rebecca had been in love with anybody. She still kept a couple of pictures of her and the baker's apprentice hanging in a plastic shopping bag in the back of her closet, wrapped tightly with green and pink rubber bands.There were crumpled movie tickets in there too, smeared with lipstick because lipsticks came uncapped in Rebecca's

1

purse and drew on everything: her car keys,important letters and electric bills, pale suede gloves which had been a Christmas present. Sometimes Rebecca's mother would notice the pink smudges on the index finger of the left glove and swear never to buy Rebecca anything again. There were some quarters in the bag, and a postcard she had addressed to her maiden aunt in Maryland, and also three matte photographs with white margins of three different friends at three different proms: Elizabeth in a long green dress shot through with gold like a dragonfly, half an inch taller than the intense and well-groomed Cuban boy she was sleeping with junior year; Valerie, the only really good friend ofthe three, in one of those lilac-satin Jessica McClintock ball-gowns you could get at the mall for seventy dollars, grinning beside her borrowed date, who snorted Ritalin after the dance and bet her thirty-six dollars that she wouldn't show him her tits; and finally Corinne,in a powder-blue vintage dress that would have looked amazing if only she

12

round and smooth and beautiful. And you could see that wry turn of the lip, like he was embarrassed to be thinking anything at all, or embarrassed to be looking at you; but he was thinking about something nice, like swimming,and you were so fascinating, and your ankles were so sweet and white and shaven.

Usually Rebecca forgot that David was in the same bag as the baker's assistant, with his fuzzy whiteblond hair and his large, soft lips, pink and tender as a woman's. If anyone was talking about love, she talked about the baker's assistant — how she had waited for his phone calls, how he had ambled by her house at two in the afternoon when he got off work, with a white waxed paper bag full of macaroons, how they had left notes for each other in orange chalk on the pavement near the bakery — 'damn, that oven is hot,' his would say, in boyish chicken-scratch letters, and she would reply:'somewhere in this country there has got to be pink lemonade, but you don't know where.

So sad, so sad.' And when anyone talked about sex, she talked about him,too. It didn't matter that they'd never had real sex, or that she'd never had an orgasm with him,or that she'd only given him one blowjob and that she'd been sick afterwards for three days, not because the blowjob was unpleasant but because she had just been sick — probably it had been a virus, but afterwards she never wanted to do it again. This collection offacts and impressions served her perfectly well in conversation with other girls: she could refer to him casually as'my ex-boyfriend' and the other girls would imagine a long ribbon ofex-boyfriends, scrolling behind him and in front of him, boyfriends with bad teeth and good manners, boyfriends with cleft chins

4

who made good coconut curry, boyfriends who drank too much and pawed at her female cousin on New

flower meant'mature elegance,' so Rebecca was going

Year's Eve. The girls would remember their own ex-

what they looked like, but it was important that the flowers meant something, and 'mature elegance' was a

boyfriends, ten or fifteen of them, and Rebecca would

to draw some on a birthday card. She didn't know

commiserate with them: boys were so awful and they never put the toilet seat down and they never wanted

funny, tongue-in-cheek way to commemorate a fiftieth

to talk about problems in the relationship and they

sketchpad and a nice pen and a pack of wintergreen gum to look for flowers. The book was technically

always got terrible haircuts. And yet it was so lonely to be single, the girls would say, and it would be so nice

birthday; so she had come to the library with her

called a herbarium, or a facsimile of a herbarium, and

to wake up with somebody in the morning. Rebecca would agree. Then she would take a sip of her beer (if

it was huge and old, with thick, dry paper printed with photographs of plants: whole leaves and stems,

they were at a bar)or her orange juice (if they were at work)and remember the baker's assistant's face when

full ofsick, smashed-looking blossoms, tiny juiceless buds, cross-sections of berries and drupes, and large,

she told him she was too busy to go to the park for the fifth time that week,and didn't invite him in for a

splayed-open flowers. Everything was beautifully assembled on the page, kind oflike a Dada collage,

sandwich like she usually did when she was busy. And she would remember how she walked by the bakery

kind oflike Victorian decoupage, but at the same time it was precise and exhaustive and scientific: every

with her head lowered for the rest of that summer,and how she got used to that one strange diagonal crack in

possible view,so that you could understand the secrets offloral anatomy,so that you could diagnose flowers

the one square of pavement that was a kind of a putty color instead ofgray, and how she always imagined

as you walked around in the springtime — this one a magnolia, with its funny alien-shaped bud; this one a

that she could feel his eyes burning into her side, and how she wondered, when she had finally crossed the street, whether she was going to end up with the

nasturtium, with its bright, spurred petals.

When the tall man came into the room, and sat down across the table from her, she was chewing on the cap of her pen and tracing the branching pattern of alpine

stigmata because her side burned as if a lance had been

they would say'Man,it's been way too fucking long,' and Rebecca would realize that it had been a long time

laurel(Kalmia microphylla) with one finger. The buds developed on little red stems that curved out from the central stem like the branches of a menorah.The book described this as 'corymb inflorescence.' She murmured

for her, too, much longer than it had been for any of these girls, who had gone for two months without

the words under her breath and thought ofa bonewhite mermaid combing her long hair on a moonlit

sex and five months without mutual, comfortable,

rock, her skin as brilliant as an incandescent bulb.

'What did you say?' said the tall man from across the table, and Rebecca looked up,embarrassed. His face

thrust into it. And the girls would say, 'It's been so long' or 'It's been way too long for me,' and sometimes

cuddlesome love, and who couldn't take it anymore, and needed another beer.

When Rebecca met the tall man she hadn't been thinking about sex, or love, or the baker's assistant, or even David (she thought about David all the time now, because there was nothing else to think about). Instead she had been leafing through a large-format book about the flowers at Oxford University, looking for a good picture of a pomegranate flower. Rebecca's aunt was turning fifty on Saturday and the pomegranate

was almost level with hers, because he was slumped low in his chair, his shoulders hunched and his neck craning forward a little. His face was as clean as a bar of soap, but Rebecca could see small rosy pores all over his nose and dirty-looking stubble all over his face. His eyes were very wide and set far apart from each other; they were a clear, pale blue with large black pupils, and there was almost something repulsive about how black

13

and thick the eyelashes were against his blue eyes as if he were being attacked by spiders. He hadn't opened

She thumbed hastily through the pages, settling finally on the densely-printed index in the back.

his book yet: it lay under his open hands in its plastic-y gray-painted cloth binding, and Rebecca couldn't make

'Punica. Punica punica punica granatum, 132. Of course.

132.' She laughed and found the page with blunt

out the title. He was wearing a tweed jacket, which seemed absurd.

fingers.'There it is. So dumb that I couldn't find it.'

The pomegranate flower was enormous and cardinal-

'Um, nothing,' she said, and she twisted one side of her mouth into a smile.'Just reading out loud, I guess.'

red, with large, papery petals and aggressive-looking stamens and pistils. She was going to have to color the

She laughed nervously.

card in with watercolors when she got home. A couple of round shapes bled wet circles on the page. The neat

'Really,' he said.

'Yes,' she said. She turned back to the book. She couldn't tell if he was still looking at her or not. She

handwriting, black and perfect, read:'Seeds with pulpy crimson arils of tart flavor.' She looked up at the man.

opened her sketchbook and took the pen out of her mouth, uncapped it, tested the point on her index

'I think arils is a nice word.'

finger. She held the pen poised over the blank page, cocking her head to one side, remembering very hard

man said.

what she was supposed to be doing.

The tall man's hands shifted on the cover of his book.

He turned it clockwise so that the spine faced her, but his fingertips covered the title. She could read the call

Rebecca's heart froze and heat poured over her eyes and her palms opened and closed in her lap.'What?'

'I never understood that. Or the part about the breasts like gazelles. Terrible as an army with banners, I

the side of his thumb.

guess I understand that.'

'I don't know anything about the Bible,' she said, looking down again. His hands were still folded over

'I said "corymb inflorescence,"' she said. When she looked up, he was looking at her again. He rested an

the book. There was a large beige callous on the middle finger of his right hand. He said,'I don't know anything

elbow on the book.

'What's corymb inflorescence?'

about botany.'

number: PQ2063 S33 Z6 1991. He lifted the cover with

'It's the way blossoms are arranged on a flower. The pattern they bloom in. Corymb looks like this, like a — candelabra.' She didn't want to say'menorah,' in case he was Jewish and thought she was presuming too much.'Candelabrum I mean. Anyway, I shouldn't be worrying about this one. I need to look at Punica granatum.'She had looked up the Latin name up in the

That night when they were washing dishes together her mother said,'You're in a good mood tonight.' Rebecca grinned.

'I told you you should get out more,' her mother said, and that night Rebecca went bowling with Valerie and two other girls, and she drank three beers and turned the red-marbled ball over in her hands

dictionary.'Pomegranate.'

before she dropped it down the middle of the lane.

The girls complained about how it was impossible to

'Why the pomegranate?'

'I just need to look at it for class,' she said, in a sudden burst of inspiration.'I'm a botany student,' she

find a good man anywhere these days and Rebecca was quiet and smiled. When she went home she

went on. She was thrilled. She had always wanted to tell lies to a stranger — the kind of lies that a stranger, knowing nothing about her or her habits or her flaws, would have no choice but to believe. 'I need to study the inflorescence of flowering trees. For next term.'

14

'Thy temples are as a piece of pomegranate,' the tall

drew four pomegranate flowers arranged in a little diamond shape, and memorized the twelve types of indeterminate inflorescence: corymb,compound corymb, spike, raceme, panicle, umbel, compound umbel, verticel, spathe and spadix, thyrse, catkin, and (most prosaically) head.

The tall man had an apartment in a questionable house with a small ugly porch and three tin mailboxes

She rarely spent the night, since his bed was just a single mattress covered with a blue-and-white-striped sheet, and it was easier to go to work from her own

screwed up next to the front door. She went there after work a few days a week,and every Sunday morning.

house, and it was awkward explaining things to her mother, who was thrilled that she was leaving the

She liked the kitchen: it was large and bare and clean, with pale yellow floor tiles patterned with tobacco-

house once in a while but was still a mother. One

neighborhood, on the third floor of a narrow frame

•

colored chickens. The windows in the kitchen looked

Saturday night she did, though, and at three a.m.she woke up on purpose and watched his still features in

out on a brick wall, but it wasn't depressing: the wall

the blue light. The flowers she had dried hung over the

was usually lit up by the sun, brighter and warmer than a real sky. She sat at the aluminum-legged card

bed in pale bundles. She said,'I think this is love, but it's so weird,' and the darkness swallowed the words as

table and drew detailed diagrams offlowers while

soon as she said them.She looked around the room to

the tall man stood by the stove and made scrambled

see if her words would emblazon themselves in small

eggs in a big pan. When the eggs were finished he always rinsed out the pan and boiled water in it for

phosphorescent letters on the wall, or hang suspended in the air like spiderwebs. Instead, the room was

tea, because he didn't have a kettle. When the tea was ready he poured it into two metal cups and opened

quieter than before, and she slipped back into sleep, tucking her feet behind his knees. He was very tall.

his library book and read. He stared at the page with a silent intensity Rebecca would have found absurd if she ever looked at his face across the table, his eyebrows wrinkled and his nose pinched, the nostrils flared.

Sometimes he brought Rebecca flowers to cut up and draw: electric-blue orchids, birds-of-paradise, striped tulips. They sat at opposite ends ofthe card table but their hands or their feet always touched, and she could never get over the pressure of his foot on hers. They barely moved and barely spoke, but she didn't get used to his foot the way you get used to wearing new shoes; she could never ignore it. Instead her foot would slowly get warmer and warmer,and she felt a dim tingling behind her knees, as if butterflies were stirring there, her body an irregular chrysalis. And her head swam vaguely, and her shoulders relaxed, and she moved her pen across the paper, tracing the spreading veins of the geranium leaves with a steady hand even as her face flushed and her breath got shallow and irregular. She watched his hand as it lay flat against the margin of a page in his book.The sun cut a white stripe in the skin, so that the hand looked electric, lit from within and haloed with fine, floating dust. In between the white knuckles there were darker, shadowed grooves. She imagined her love pooling there like honey.

She spent at least two afternoons a week away from him. Sometimes she brought a book to the park and sat in the warm grass reading and drawing little tattoos on her ankle-bone with a Bic pen. Once,the sky was a pale apple-green, with patches of pink, and the whole park was carpeted with tiny fallen blossoms. They were dry and whitish, like the flowers from her mother's First Communion bouquet, but they reminded her of the yellow-green polleny buds that came off the trees in early April, and the sky and the damp,scented air reminded her ofApril, too. It was mid-July and it seemed too late for anything to blossom, too early for anything to fall. She kicked a black path for herselfin the blossoms and sat down on a bench and opened her little copy of The Language ofFlowers to see ifshe could identify them,but The Language ofFlowers had only charming incidental sketches of pansies and buttercups in the margins. She scooped a handful of the little flowers up from the pavement and dropped them into her purse. A couple of them clung to her damp palm. At the other end of the park,somebody was taking a pair of medium-sized dogs for a walk.

It was David. Rebecca brushed the last wet petals from her hand and wondered if he would recognize her:she wasn't wearing any makeup and she had lost

'5

thirteen pounds since she had last seen him,and she never expected David to recognize her anyway. She opened her book across her lap.

David said,'Hey.' Rebecca smiled as casually as she could and said 'hey' back. Her voice rattled in her throat a little, and she thought that maybe she had smoked cigarettes the night before, but then she remembered that she hadn't spoken for three days.

'How long have you been back?' David asked. He was wearing a pair oflong khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt.

The dogs were yapping away at his feet but he wasn't looking at them; he kept a firm hold on the leash and looked down at Rebecca. David was tall too, but not quite as tall as the tall man.

'I think forever,' Rebecca said.'Since December. I took the spring term off.'

'That's cool,' said David. He wasn't surprised; a lot of their friends had taken one or two years offfrom college.

'Did you graduate this spring?' Rebecca asked. David was two years older.

'Yes, I did.' He grinned.

'What are you doing now?'

'A little landscaping at the cemetery,living with my mother, walking the dogs. I'm probably moving back to New York in the fall.'

'Well, that will be fun,' she said, lamely.Then she said,'White Owl Cemetery?'

'Yeah, it's cool.'

'Do you get to take care of all ofthe flowers?'

'Mostly I trim hedges and shit. I like it. When it rains I get to hang out in this weird little house with all of the other landscaping guys.They're all, like, fifty and Italian and really crazy.'

'It's beautiful there,' she said.'All of the flowering trees, and the hydrangeas. All I think about now is flowers.' He gave her his sweetest quizzical look.'It's just all I can think about. I've been reading all about them — all of the different kinds, the shapes, the leaves can be cordoform, that means heart-shaped, and reniform, that means kidney-shaped.' She looked up at

16

the apple-green sky. She wondered if her face looked apple-green to David.'It's funny.'

'Are you still an English major?'

'Who knows,'she said. She was acting like an idiot.

The dogs tugged at the two leashes in David's hand and he fell forward a little bit. He shook his head and smiled.'Guess you should run along,' she said, and she looked down at her hands.

'Are you around this summer?' he asked. He was

4

looking straight at her. She wondered how it felt when somebody proposed to you. Or when a sailor told you to wait for him, after he shipped out.

'Yeah,I'm around,' she said. She wondered ifshe was lying. On the back of her hand was a little pink welt shaped like a half-moon, like a reniform leaf. She had tried to make tea in the pan yesterday, and a little of the water had splashed out onto her hand. The tall man had put an ice cube in his mouth and then put his lips on the burn, because he didn't have a towel or a cloth napkin on hand to wrap the ice in, and because he enjoyed gestures like that.

David gave her a sober nod and followed his dogs. The nod meant,'I'll see you around.' Rebecca opened her purse and saw that the flowers were crushed against the cloth lining. They left pale, rust-colored stains which looked nice against the dark-blue inkstains and the terra-cotta lipstick smudges that were already there. The flowers were the only things in her purse besides her housekeys and an uncapped pen and three bicentennial quarters. She cleared her throat and waited until David had disappeared down a side street; then she got up and went across the park to the lemonade truck that was always there.

Rebecca took a lot of walks with the tall man, mostly downtown,after the sun had set, especially when it had been raining and they could see the streetlights reflecting in the wet streets. She thought that their walks were the only time she could imagine that she loved him fiercely, as she thought women loved men sometimes, not wanting to let go ofthem, not wanting to lose them to the shimmering darkness, the roar of passing traffic or the long sighs ofthe pneumatic

i

brakes on the buses, or the cold wet breath ofthe wind which rose up from the street and struck Rebecca in the face and made the tall man's nose so red and splendid. She thought the outdoors made him perfect, something she could hold onto,something that could protect her, and carry her anywhere,tucked under his 4

•

wing or his arm or his heart. This was when the kisses were difficult; this was when love was complicated, strange, and ridiculous, when she felt that she was Don Quixote and he was a windmill, that both ofthem were fighting in their way against the brutal wonderful power of nature. Once or twice they took walks when it was almost cold, and raining very hard, and they went to the library and got a parcel of good-smelling children's books and read them silently in a Chinese restaurant over thick, greasy chop suey. When they went on walks she hardly talked about flowers, and he never called her Pomona or Persephone, the way he did sometimes, absently, in his apartment.The tall man wrote her poems which she didn't understand, not because she didn't catch the obvious classical references but because they were spare and imagistic and the stanzas were very short. She liked meat in poems, but when the tall man wrote her one she would smile and put it in her purse with the wilted blossoms.

She hadn't identified them yet; they were too wan and brown and crushed to really tell what they were.

They were on a walk when she told him she was going back to school in September. He looked surprised. She realized she hadn't ever told him where she went to

and his voice came out small and broken. She said,'I'm sorry,' and she sounded stupid. She remembered the baker's assistant standing on her porch with his bag of macaroons. She took a sharp breath; they kept walking.

She stopped and put her hands at the small of his back.'I love you,' she said, in the way she thought girls were supposed to say that. She reached up to his face and it was wet, but on the other hand it was raining.

She dropped her hands to his; he put his foot on her foot and they stood there for a while and she looked down at their hands and the plastic bag full of library books and the picture of a dogwood blossom she had traced on the skin between her index finger and her thumb.

When she went back to school everyone was happy to see her, though they thought it was strange that she was so quiet and didn't wear any makeup,and weird that she took only three classes so that she could audit lectures at the botany school, and went for long walks alone in the woods, and filled the top shelves of her bookcase with twigs and dried-out leaves. But eventually she started talking again, and she drank beers with them,and joined in when they complained about men.She still talked about the baker's assistant's macaroons and his ugly haircuts, but sometimes she would mention the tall man and his pan of water and the crazy things we do for men,how we change without knowing it, and everyone would agree, because they were crazy like that too.

school, or implied that it wasn't in town, and that he probably thought she went to one of the local colleges.

He asked her if she had been working on any of the paperwork for her project, and she remembered that — when she was still telling him the botany stories, back when she narrated anything to him at all — she had said she was going to do a senior project on grafting pomegranate branches to apple trees. She had implied that it was partially a sculpture project.

Yes, she said, she had done all the paperwork at home.

He asked if he could look at it, and she said it wasn't interesting, and then he asked when she was leaving,

17

In Winter

Walking on a cold night, we see still, black branches, close, and,set in the farther hedgerows, white Christmas lights crossing while we walk our paths: a twinkling clipped, lapped in dark, and in one step, plain parallax brings back the far sight.

So a gossamer shimmer emerges, the branched shadows and fine beams flickering, rain in the wind.

The boughs, as we pass,

f

seem to play on the lights, a score of pebbles setting off waves that a floating presence wakes.

Calle 4 Sur, Morning After the Party

E,44t7e

,

:erview with The Yale Literary Magazine met with Susan Orlean in New York City in March. Ms. Orlean is a staff writerfor The New Yorker and the author of the bestseller The Orchid Thief, as well as three other books: Red Sox and Blue Fish, Saturday Night, and, most recently, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

Her current project is an expansion of her recent New Yorker profile of a tiger collector in New Jersey. Like much of Ms. Orlean's work, the book will take, in her words,'an oblique look at American culture.'

f

Yale Literary Magazine

In your writing, you show a fascination with contemporary American culture. Do you feel that you are celebrating it, or just describing it? Do you consider your writing patriotic?

Susan Orlean

There's a timelessness to the American character.

I do write about mass culture — my recent article about the popular artist Thomas Kinkade is an example — but I'm attracted most often to the timeless elements in contemporary society.

Even when I'm writing about foreign cultures, I'm more interested in the way that American culture imposes itself on other cultures.The word patriotic is complicated. I'm loyal. I'm proud to be an American. But growing up postVietnam,Watergate.... To say that my stories celebrate American culture sounds too much like boosterism. But I'm fascinated, intrigued, drawn to the American character, the American way.

Do you consider what you write to be literature?

The best description of what I do would be literary non-fiction. Is it journalism? Yeah, I guess. It's a funny genre. It's not a new form or style — people as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville used it. But

1

Susan Orlear there's a new appetite for it. People want to know about the real world, and through a voice that's more eloquent and creative than the news.

There's a vitality in non-fiction.

Did you ever have a professor in college who pushed you in the direction of literary non-fiction, or nonfiction in general?

In college, no. I was an English major and I had some wonderful teachers who really inspired me. But they were academics, and what they thought about was academia.The kind of writing I wanted to do wasn't a very palpable profession.

I went to the University of Michigan, where they have a really good daily newspaper. People who wanted to work for dailies got a great training there, but I never had any interest in writing for a daily. It's a totally different thing. I'm almost lucky that I didn't fall into that, because it wasn't really what I ever wanted to do. But there was no other direction. I wrote poetry that was published in the poetry magazine, I was very serious about my concentration in literature, but there was no college outlet for what I thought I wanted to do.

And you knew at that point what you wanted to do?

1

Well, I had read enough of The New Yorker to think,'This is what I want to do.' But I had no clue about how you went about achieving it. I remember even mentioning it to a few of my friends who worked a lot for the Michigan daily and who I think just thought,'What? How would you do that?' And then, even more than now, The New Yorker was the Kremlin.You didn't even

know who worked there, or who wrote the stories, or anything.

How did you go about actually getting to write for The New Yorker?

I had heard through a roundabout conversation that The New Yorker might be looking for new 'Talk of the Town' writers, and I just picked up the phone and called. I got an editor on the line who gruffly agreed to let me drop off my clips, which I did the next day. I didn't know what to expect, but to my great surprise I got a call from this same editor inviting me to come down to the office and talk further. He liked my ideas and let me take a crack at a 'Talk' piece — an idea of mine about how Benetton teaches its employees to fold sweaters — which I did immediately, and it ran the following week. I started writing "Talk' pieces regularly from that point on.

In The Orchid Thief, how did you create a voice that was technically accurate and yet still conversational in tone?

In that book, the factual stuff had to be very crisp and clear. It was important to make people understand through my tone that this was factual, this was not me speculating and being colloquial and being hyperbolic. By contrast, when I'm talking more casually and more informally, I make statements that are conversational. I think that those sections coexist comfortably, but the tone is very clear between one and the other. It's almost the way you would be telling a story to another person,just describing a situation, and you'd say, 'I went to his house,the house was at such-and23

.. March 4, 20 such address,' and you're very technical and very specific, and then you say,'We went in, and he had like a thousand pieces of furniture in the living room.' It's not jarring if the tone that you're using sounds consistent. I put up enough signs to the reader that'This is factual,' This is me chatting.'

In the opening section of The Orchid Thief you write that John Laroche, the title character, became obsessed with turtles;'then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils... then abandoned them for something else — lapidary I think — then he abandoned lapidary and became obsessed with.., old mirrors.' Is it important when you're writing non-fiction to know all the details?

Sometimes when you're talking about people, the lack of really knowing is the truth. I think admitting to the reader that you don't exactly know is fine. I'm comfortable doing it. I'm saying to the reader,'I'm experiencing this sort of the way you are.' I don't know everything and I don't even think it's important to know everything. I do think it's important to feel that you've come to understand someone,or a situation, which is different from knowing it. I say this a lot when I teach: Writing isn't that different from sitting in a group of people and telling a story. And what engages people isn't the encyclopedic, detailed information about the topic, but something more than that, a personal feeling that you're telling a story that you,the teller of the story, are engaged in, and that you know that other people will be

24

interested in. Somehow the telling of it echoes the story itself.

Do you ever write about ideas, rather than people or places?

I don't do it that often. Essay writing is very difficult and I'm a little intimidated by it. I'm not sure I know how to do it. I'm not very interested in doing opinion writing, even though I have a lot of opinions. I started as a music critic, actually, when I was first writing, in Oregon, and in addition to doing reported pieces I was doing music criticism for a long time. But I don't really like it. I just don't feel like I've got the language of criticism. I can talk endlessly about why I like something and why I don't like something else. But I don't feel that comfortable writing it.

Do you ever write about controversial issues?

I don't avoid controversial subjects. Most stories that I'm drawn to don't have that inherent in them,because they're more descriptive or they're more oratory. But people are controversial.

I thought the Thomas Kinkade piece — you know,that's writing about someone who people have such strong feelings about. I had a lot of arguments before the piece came out about why I should even bother doing it, and I made a strong argument for why I thought it was stupid to think that you shouldn't write about someone just because you thought their art was bad. When they're selling millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of art every minute. I don't avoid

2, 10:00 those stories, at all. But I don't think people would think of me as someone who tends to write about controversial stuff.

Did you get reactionary letters after the Thomas Kinkade piece came out?

I

No, actually. It's funny. And I didn't hear from him, which didn't surprise me. I thought I might get some letters from people who love his work, but then I started doing some calculation in my head, and thought that the overlap in audiences probably isn't that great, and that it was more likely that our readership either hadn't heard of him or thought that his work was just horrible.

But I also didn't get any mail saying,'I can't believe The New Yorker's writing about Thomas Kinkade,' because I think the piece ended up justifying itself. I'm very interested in writing about mass culture, and I think that the best place to do it is in a magazine like The New Yorker, because there's a squeamishness among people who think of themselves as intellectuals about looking at or thinking about mass culture, taking it on in a nonjudgmental way. I like doing that and I even like it if it really irritates people. I like saying to people,'Think twice before you think you know about the world around you.' It's very easy to dismiss things out of hand, and it's much more interesting and more rewarding to try to look at the world nonjudgmentally and see what's really there rather than what you think is there.

How do you go about interviewing subjects? Do you use a tape recorder?

a.m.(_

I take notes. But I'm not a great notetaker. I am a great absorber. And I feel like I've put a lot more value on actually being in the moment and listening to the person; I care less about using lots of quotes. I absorb, and I pay attention, and I process what the person is saying, and at the end of the day I have a sense of what I experienced.

If someone has a funny,interesting way of expressing themselves, I like to write as much as I can,because then I know I'll use more quotes.

But usually I find that I'm spending more time just having the experience, and taking notes about things that I need to remember. It's when I sit down to write that I begin thinking,'Oh,now I know what I want to remember,' not at the time that I'm with someone. Because I almost always end up using stuff that I didn't think was going to be that important. It's a little like packing for a trip. Either you can pack everything, and chances are you'll use what you've brought, or you can pack very little, because you don't know until you're there what you're really going to need, and then you either make do with what you have or you find that somehow,intuitively, you brought something that is just going to be fine.

What are book tours like? Do you enjoy doing them?

I do like doing them. First of all, it's just fun to be on the other side of it, and it's very gratifying to see this thing that you've created, existing in the world. And it's very flattering to feel that people want to talk to you. I like doing readings, partly because I feel like I'm good at it, so that's fun, and I don't have any stage fright and it's a real high

13rd

St. and RivE

for me to read and feel that people really respond.

And now that I've written enough and had my books out enough,the only thing I don't like is the fear that no one will show up. I can't stand it. I experience it before every single reading — I think,'There won't be anybody there, and I'm going to be humiliated.'That becomes less and less likely just as you write more and people know your name more. I would much rather find that there were two thousand people than two people.You get tired. You get worn out, for sure.

But it's fun.

You've said you prefer interviewing people who aren't used to being interviewed. But do you ever interview people that do get interviewed a lot? How do you get them to really say anything? What are your tricks?

It's funny.Thomas Kinkade was the first time in a while that I talked to somebody who was so controlling and packaged. I was told how long he would give me, where it would be, what the circumstances were.This was a new experience for me. I don't have any tricks. I'm not sure that there are any tricks. The only thing that I do that might qualify as a trick, is that I go less prepared than you'd think you'd want to be, because if I'm superprepared, and they're superprepared, all we're doing is having a prepared exchange, and it's not really worthwhile. But I'm sure that could backfire terribly. If I'm interviewing a politician for instance, or someone like that — which I haven't done in a long time — my only trick is to try to get as much time with the person as I can. Once you've been around someone for long enough that they begin dropping their guard, 26

you're more likely to have a real exchange. But you can't always get that. If you're given half an hour with Laura Bush, you're going to get what you're going to get, and I think the important thing is to not do the story pretending that you're getting any more than you're really getting.

And that's actually probably the best trick,just to say,'Really, what are you experiencing? Are you having an insightful conversation with this person? No.You're having a different experience.'

Think through what that experience is, rather than trying to ratchet it up into some other category, which is,'I really saw into the soul of Laura Bush.' And to me that's the biggest failing in most writing: it's inauthentic.You have a twenty-minute press interview with somebody, and you pretend you've done a psychological study. I mean,that's phony. If instead you write about your twenty minutes with Laura Bush and really write about what it was like — that's an interesting story. I mean you can make something out of that. And boy, I can see a story and read it, and maybe I'm not always right, but I can almost always tell you exactly how many interviews the person had, or how long they spent.You can just smell it.

So most magazine stories are based on very short interviews?

When you've written for celebrity-profiling publications, you are unfortunately taught to make much of nothing.The publicist sets it up with the celebrity wrangler at the magazine that you're going to have a forty-minute slot with Madonna, and then you have to write a cover

irerside Drive

•

story with it. It's not that you're evil for doing it, but that's what ends up being expected. It's a great watershed moment for a writer — it certainly was for me and I'm sure it is for a lot of people — when you suddenly feel like what you need to do is write about what you really experienced, what you really thought. Don't make more or less of it.

Do you find that your subjects are usually very willing to talk to you?

People don't get heard as much as they'd like.

It was a great realization for me as a writer that people really want to be listened to. They are surprised that someone is interested, really interested. And you have to really want to hear somebody. A big part of it is tapping people's natural desire to be listened to, especially since they know they'll never have to deal with you again. It's the same principle that underlies therapy, confession, conversations with strangers on airplanes: it's a kind of duty-free intimacy that people really crave. If you can provide it without tricking people — because it's not duty-free; it gets published — you can tap into that incredible appetite. It's more appealing to talk with someone you'll never know. It's almost like talking out loud to yourself. And there is no limit to how unnoticed people feel by the media. It's just the nature of what is considered newsworthy. If a person is living a life that is not newsworthy, it's appealing to have someone say,'I want to hear your story.'

Most people say,'Really, really? You really want to hear?' And people have amazing stories.

27

Geology: Lecture II, Metamorphic Rock

This quart of stones that glistens on his bench was brought to spur a tired bridegroom's will.

His worried nephew stacked them on the docks, fretting in tidepools while the children fished.

Behind them sat a crate of mud-green crabs whose claws probed through the plastic lattice shone anaerobic blue, and then fell back helpless as vegetables.'Wedding crabs.'

The children chose a name which stuck.

It lasted past the day they saw them snapped translucent as a fingernail and served on tiny forks to girls in silver satin pods and boys who folded neatly into suits like pinstriped envelopes in shale.

Each child took home her table's favor; a greenish candle in a cube of quartz.

The groom took four. His new wife struck a light beneath the fairground swoop of streetlamps which led into his lab, and lit the wicks.

He saw one liquid cased inside another balanced in between their boiling points and cored by spines of string which ate the air and dropped his dress shoes, slowly soaking up a cooling melt of silica and water.

They set the wax to drip on basalt chunks he'd dredged from young volcanoes underseas and spent the wedding night, absorbed, in glass.

28

A Hole in the Ground

1

that she'd spend the night, and he smiled up at me

My mother crossed herself steadily in front of me as Taps's funeral mass began, the wool of her charcoal

softly. As soon as I closed the door, I heard the stereo click on — all ofTaps's beautiful multi-levered stereo equipment with its big cloth-faced speakers that I would sit in front of when I was small, my hands on

jacket creasing in parallel lines to her shoulder, then her hip, then her tricep.

I'd been sitting in Taps's office at the college for hours on the day that Kitty died. It was one of our Sundays; we were full from the breakfast Kitty had made for us — pecan waffles and café au lait — and we listened to Wagner together with our feet up on his wide mahogany desk. The oaks out the plate glass windows shifted slowly in the wind before the midday storm, and their shadows stained the Japanese scrolls that hung from his bookcases. We did not speak all morning.Taps listened with his eyes closed. The phone's ringing had come like an alarm bell, and that was the end of it.

As the priest shifted into the responsorial, my uncle Tom entered down the center aisle. My mother continued to speak the responses in her strong, slightly affected voice, as ifshe had not even registered his presence. He pushed into the second pew next to me — there was no room for him in the first — and kicked my heel by way of greeting. I hadn't seen him in twoand-a-half years. My mother had hauled our horses out of his barn before I came home for Thanksgiving my sophomore year at college. I hadn't asked her why when she'd called me from her cell phone, the sound of heavy tires on the highway behind her sobbing. I'd tried to calm her down.Something about a seven-page letter on the door to the feed room. Her overreactions irritated me.

I kicked Tom back and spent the rest ofthe service scuffing the toe of my shoe on the pew in front, trying to rub off the mud that had come off the paddock boots he had worn into the funeral home, this nondenominational orange box with its accordion doors that led to the room for the wake, where Aunt Martha had cried her pink handkerchief red.

My mother had done her sobbing five years ago, when she moved Taps into the home.I'd kissed Taps on the forehead when my mother told me to go home,

the vibrations. The needle scudded across the face of a record, and Mahler's Requiem began to seep into the hallway. After my grandmother died, it was the only record Taps played; he would say over and over as we cooked dinner for him,sat down with him,ate, washed the dishes, that it was all he wanted for a funeral when he died. There was one evening when 'I want a hole in the ground and the Requiem' was the only thing he said. I listened to it again, standing in the hall, the pops and scratches in the record that were by then part of the music for me, until a chair creaked and the stereo clicked off.'Now I wonder who turned on that sad music. We don't want sad music in here. Who's that?

Listen, I want you to remember — we don't want sad music,' Taps said, and I heard my mother cry.

Every so often I had gotten a letter from her at school with Taps buried somewhere amongst news of my little sister Liz, reports on the couple of club players we knew who'd gained a goal rating in West Palm, gushings about how good the new translation of The Mad was.'I think he gave up when Mom died, Ren,' she wrote.'You remember how he sat through her funeral so quiet, like his whole world had ended. Do you think he's trying to block out everything about her? Is that why he can't remember who I am?"Everyday, Ren, I have to introduce myself. He sits there and pets Sister Louisa's cat and smiles at me.' Do you know how badly those hallways stink? You would think they could keep the patients from spilling on themselves, or at least they could wash the clothes. It's appalling. And Taps is getting fat. He was never fat.' Eventually, I started getting funeral plans. In the last letter that mentioned anything about it, she wrote,'He was doing very badly today. I don't know if he's going to make it much longer, and I don't want to have to worry about these plans when it comes to that. I think something simpler might be better. I worry about all of that fanfare with

29

the police and the limousines from downtown to Lake Lawn. We'd have to get on I-10. It might be better if we just did it all at the funeral home. Don't you think? It's been such a long time since he said what he

the dashboard.

wanted. You know, I don't think he even understands death anymore, Ren. Have you ever though about

than I remembered.

when wishes expire?' And so Mahler's Requiem and St. Patrick's had disintegrated into the funeral-package organist and this lurid room.

'Hey Laura. Could I get a ride?' His voice was far lower 'Sure. Hop in.'

'How are you, Ren?' he asked as I sat up and turned in my seat to see him vaulting into the back.

'Yeah. Fine. It's been a long time.'

Lizzie was mopping her eyes beside me. I was doing

'True.' It was strange to see him. Our relationship

badly; I kept catching my sharp heel in the carpet while I scuffed my toe under my mother's pew. When

had been such that I'd nearly forgotten he was Laura's nephew, and I'd never really expected to see

the bread had finally been broken and prayed over, I slipped over Tom's knees to take the Eucharist. And the

him again. I hadn't thought of him as if he were an

mass was ended, and we all went quietly into the fall afternoon, the casket aloft on the men's shoulders.

As my mother and Liz ducked into the first limousine, I stood and watched my father and Tom,together with my four boy cousins, bend under the casket and slide it into the hearse. My father stayed crouched, trailing his fingers on the flagstones for a few seconds after Tom and the cousins had moved back to the second limousine. He smiled up at me oddly and stood, squeezed my arm as he walked past.

actual breathing person in two years; the memories, completely cut offfrom life, were too nice. He leaned up into the space between the front seats.'How's Boston?' he asked.

'Oh, fine.' The line of cars had started to move off slowly through the parking lot. I couldn't remember where he was in school or anything he was doing.

'Did you give your mother that message when I called the other day, Riley?' Laura asked, shifting gears.

'Yeah, yeah.'

We'd entered the cemetery, and I watched the tombs

there wasn't a seat. Wendy, the new wife of my cousin

for awhile, as the pebbles popped under our tires. I started to babble.'Up north, they have graveyards

John, pulled her skirt together and started to stand up,

like you imagine graveyards — you know, hills and

saying,'Oh, Ren, Ren,I'm sorry, I thought you were in the first limo with your mom.Here...' Her mascara was

headstones. These seem so weird now,like little cities.

See the street signs?' Willow, Elysian Fields, St. Charles

running a little under her big eyes.

in little white letters on the corners of the roads that

'No, Wendy, you sit,' I said, and I walked back along the line of the cars of the less bereaved until I found

angelic statuary, their brass flower vases affixed beside

Laura's little convertible. Laura had been my mother's friend since she moved to New Orleans when the two

the doors. There were a few flowers in the vases, and they made me sad. The Boudreux and Foleys they were

of them were twelve years old. Lately, when I was home

for — I marked the dates — had died, some of them, twenty-five years ago.'When I was little I was always

I ducked my head in the second car and found that

on breaks, she would keep me on the phone for nearly an hour before she'd ask to speak to my mother.

'Hey, Chickie!' she said and smiled. She'd tied a bright scarf around her hair that this time she'd dyed a little too red.'Sit, sit. Are you doing okay?'

30

Someone slapped the car door.

'Riley!' I heard Laura say, and I stayed ducked under

run past the front steps of the mausoleums with their

so scared I'd find a dead body floating in the front yard when it flooded. I think it was Taps who told me that there was a hurricane a few months after Bienville had buried Iberville in the ground, and when he went out onto his porch while the eye was over them, he

I popped open the door and sat.'Yeah, I'm all right.

It was time. It was absolutely time,' I said as I bent and

found the corpse floating on the flood waters. They had

finally managed to get the mud off the toe of my shoe.

to wade out and bring the body into the house so he

wouldn't wash away, and then they buried him again in a mausoleum,above ground. Bienville had to burn up all of the pictures, and no one was allowed to say Iberville's name in his presence, because he couldn't remember what Iberville had been anymore,except as a rotted corpse bloated with hurricane water.'

'Ugh, God, Ren,' Laura said.'Why would he tell you that story?'

'I don't know. I guess it could be true.' We were idling in sight of my grandmother's grave as the cars found places to park along the road.

'I guess that's why they have these things,' Riley said.

He was resting his chin on my seat, and I tried to move away from him.It was bad enough I'd had to see him again. I was worried he might try to touch me.

Laura parked the car in front of a tomb whose steps were covered with gardenia blossoms.'God, your poor mother,' she said, and we all got out and walked to the grave.

When my grandparents bought their plot, they decided against a mausoleum.The cost was too high, they'd said. My grandmother was scared of ostentation.

Instead, when she died, we buried her in a higher part of the cemetery, in a grave that was wide enough for my grandfather when it was his time and a bit raised itself, bordered by long strips ofshined white granite.

When my mother had sent the angel-flanked headstone to have my grandfather's name engraved into it, they'd dropped it carrying it into the store. So my mother had changed her order, and now a piece of granite lay at our feet, as long and wide as the grave itself, with my grandmother's name and dates etched in gold along the right side, Taps's on the left.

The coffin lay suspended on the lashes that would lower it into the ground. My mother had forbidden the funeral workers to bring out the sheets offake grass they ordinarily draped over the open graves, and we could see the raw clay walls of the hole. Father Joseph was already praying again when Laura, Riley, and I walked up. My mother was saying the words with him as she looked steadily into his face, holding Lizzie's hand so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. I walked up behind her and watched Tom softly kicking

the edge of the sheet ofgranite while the priest said the blessings.

When we'd all said 'Amen'and crossed ourselves for the last time, everyone began moving off towards their cars, except my mother, who stood talking to the funeral director and Father Joseph. My father and I turned around in the road and walked back to her. Liz sat with Laura and Riley on the hood of Laura's little car.

'I know it's not standard!' my mother was saying when we reached her.'But I want to see you lower him.

I want to see the grave closed.'

'Mrs. Bethany,' the funeral director said, in falling tones.'It's going to take a bit of time to fill the grave and close it. The workers are still with another at the moment,and it may be an hour before they make it here.'

'All the more,then,' my mother said.'This is my father. I am going to stay here until I see him properly buried.'

My father waved around for her hand.'Mag, you didn't eat anything this morning,and Laura's got all of that food from Martin's waiting at her house. Don't you want to maybe just go there for a bit, have some turtle soup and a glass of wine, and then we'll come back when the workers have made it over. Wouldn't that be better than sitting here? It's going to get chilly.'

'No, Peter. I want to see my father properly buried in the ground, and I want to see the grave marker clipped over him.You go.You both go, Ren. Go.' 'No. I'll stay here with you then. Renny, go take care of your sister.'

The funeral director had gotten two folding chairs out of the back of his van, and he set them up beside the grave. I retreated. My father sat down to wait but my mother remained standing, staring at the casket raised on its lashes over the hole.

2 Laura's apartment was on the top floor ofone of the old buildings in the warehouse district. Liz, Laura, Riley, and I rode the elevator in silence. The rest of everyone had already arrived and had been shown in by Laura's

31

housekeeper. There was a sudden, anxious hush when the door opened.The kitchen help, set off in their white, came and went silently through the kitchen doorway with their platters of tomatoes and tureens ofsoup.The light in the apartment seemed to settle at

'Cemetery,' I said and began making a meticulous white mountain roll, tomato, too-much-creole-mustard

the bottom,on the plane of the lamps Laura collected, made of Chinese urns — green and yellow in the living

sandwich.

room,blue and white in the library — illuminating the people's faces strangely, picking up the scars in the raw wood columns.The blinds ofthe long warehouse

say he was resurrected?'

'What the hell, Tom.Just leave her alone.' The tomatoes were bloody beautiful.

'You also think I'm evil incarnate, I see. The ham is

windows were drawn.The guests at the door turned, looking over their wine glasses, saw that it was us and resumed their conversations. My cousins were talking with the aunts and uncles in the library, and Tom was at the buffet eating slices of ham with his fingers. They could only have been afraid of my mother.

Even after the highway drive in the convertible, Lizzie looked panic-stricken. It was only when Laura put a hand on her back to guide her away from the door that I realized that this was the first funeral she'd ever been to. When Kitty died, she had been eight, and my mother had thought it better to let her stay at summer camp and tell her when she returned home.The next year, she snuck across the road every Sunday afternoon and called home from the gas station there, to make sure everyone was alive.

When we reached the bar, I started to uncork a new bottle of white.

'Damn it,' Laura said and took the bottle from me.'Your mother called Martin's and had my order changed. She knows I hate her Chardonnay.' She put the bottle back into the big silver bowl of ice on the bar.

'What do we think, milk punches, girls?'

I nodded. Poor Lizzie had shifted away from us and was staring at a lamp — a red and yellow urn for the dining room — clicking it on and off with its little chain. While I shook the drinks in the cocktail shaker, Laura poured an extra shot of brandy and another spoonful of sugar into Lizzie's glass, put her finger to her lips. When I'd poured — it was whole milk and the foam was thick — and grated nutmeg over the glasses, Laura brought Liz hers and they walked together into

32

the library. I stared across at the buffet laid out on the dining room table.

'Where's your mother?'Tom said, licking his fingers.

'Why? You think she's afraid they'll steal his body and

quite delicious.'

I grabbed a fork and walked out. They were Kitty and Taps' forks — the ones that were going to be for my trousseau, Kitty said when she was going through a morbid phase, putting everything in boxes. Not that it mattered. I went to sit on the sofa. Riley walked in with a bowl of turtle soup and what looked like a bourbon and stood near the corner ofthe coffee table. I had to look up and give him a little smile.

'Can I sit, Renny?' His cocktail napkin was detaching itselffrom the bottom of his glass.

'Yeah, yeah, go ahead,' I said, waving my hand at him, and he sat down in an armchair.

'Are you really upset, or what's up?'

'Oh, he was going to die sooner or later. It was a little bit later, I guess, is what I'm thinking.'

Riley raised his eyebrows at me as he bent over his bowl on the coffee table, eating.'You're being a little harsh.'

'Yeah,so what if! am,Riley. You're not a part of my life. I don't think you really should be saying much about it.'

'Okay, okay,' he said, blotting his lips with his cocktail napkin and rising.'I'll, um,go talk to Laura.

I'm sure you'll excuse me.'

Alone, I ate and thought about eating. The Requiem was in my head.

Then Torn was back.'Have a ham sandwich, really.'

It was oozing mayonnaise and big fatty tags of meat hung from the bun. He put it on my plate, on top ofthe asparagus, and perched himself on a little chair.

'Yeah, fuck you,' I said and took a big bite of the sandwich. I hadn't eaten meat in three years. The ham was sweet.

and she started screaming,' he lowered his voice,'and she pushed me into the limo and sat down in the grass, and so I came here. She won't let me console her; what

'Well done,' Tom said, with the same cruel appreciation he'd say it would every time I won one of our polo battles when I was in high school. We'd play

can I do? I want the turtle soup. Is there turtle soup? Is there some scotch to be had?'

chukkas together every other day on his gray ponies.

To teach me to ride off better he'd grab me by my belt with his rein hand, hauling his pony into mine while at the same time making sure I kept on him until I'd ridden him over the line — if I didn't, as I failed to do

Martha to the bar.

'I am so worried about your mother,' Laura said.

'I'm worried about Liz.' I'd just caught sight of her,

the first time he grabbed me, he'd hold me until he'd wrenched me out of my seat and dangle me as far into the play as he could before his arm tired and he let me down in the midst of the ponies and mallets. They were always only practice chukkas, on his own field, and nobody ever called him on it. The vet would usually give me a dixie cup of scotch in praise of my survival.

'Martini?' Tom asked and stood.

'Yeah, what the hell.' I balled my paper napkins on my plate and brought it to the kitchen. Tom was shaking the drinks when I came back out. He poured, and we stood against the bar watching everyone mill around.

'So who are you sleeping with nowadays?' he asked and sipped.

'Couple of people,' I said.'But shut up.There are too many bored Catholics afoot.' I scratched my calf with the toe of my shoe.'And we're supposed to be thinking about death.'

'Freud would say we are.' He tinkled the ice cubes he'd put in his glass.

'0, God save us,' I exclaimed into thinner air. The door had opened. My father walked in and shut the door behind himself quietly, as people resumed their conversations. Laura went up to him and handed him the lace cookie she was carrying around. He dangled it.

'She won't leave,' he said as everyone resumed their conversations. Martha and Laura and I listened.'They say they're not going to be able to close it for another two hours. The men are on break? I guess there's a union. I was trying to get her to come have turtle soup

He patted me on the shoulder and walked with

sitting very Raggedy Anne with her mascara streaks and her mussed red hair on one of the big library chairs.'You should've seen her with him. She'd read him stories and they'd draw. When we brought him to the house they made macaroons together. All the things she used to do with Kitty and him when she was small. It was all very strange and reversed. God.' '0 my,' Laura said.'Time to put someone to bed.

Maybe at least she'll have forgotten everything by tomorrow.'

Tom walked up, munching another ham sandwich, as Laura went to Lizzie.'Your dad's drinking all of your endangered turtles and he's poured himself a nice scotch. Guess he deserves it, dealing with your mother.'

'It's chicken, not turtles.'

'In Long Beach it was turtles. Anyway, you want to go ride a little? I got a couple new three-year-olds since your mother hauled out. Sold Bête and had to put Blue down. We should play them. It's been awhile since I got to beat you up.'

'Yeah.Yeah, sure,' I said and drank off the martini.

3 The ride across the Causeway was too short, so soothing was the rhythmic thumping of the junctures of the concrete. The sun was high but falling and the lake was lit up silver. The longest continuous over-water bridge in the world and I wanted to stay sunk in the corner of Tom's truck, smelling the warm smell of the manure on his boots over the eighty-mile-an-hour wind that came in through our windows.We didn't listen to the radio and I didn't talk to him. He didn't talk to me.

Tom's farm is back in Folsom — thick wood country and rolling for Louisiana. He pulled up at the gate and

33

L___

I got out to unlatch it. It was November and the leaves were only just beginning to fall. In Boston everything was already bare. They drifted slowly like moths between the rows of trees, and I lifted the gate over the

and bridles.'Was that Riley kid actually pissed at you,

gravel and brought and chained it back again once Tom had passed through. I climbed back in and we rode up

or should we have called him on dangerous riding?'

'Pissed.' I hadn't told him when I was going away

to the barn, the rocks popping under our tires. In the pastures to both sides the marbled ponies were shifting

off, they were a goal down. I told him tomorrow and he

over their grass; they did not look up to watch us.

'Are your whites still upstairs?' Tom asked as we got

asked, when will I see you, and I said, never, breathless, his pony pushing back against Blue hard, and she was

out of the truck.

doing her best, but I had to really drive my leg into her, and I said, I told you it was a summer thing, and he

'In my locker with my mallets, I think. Probably

until we were in the middle of a play, I was riding him

did she?'

said he didn't care and elbowed me, and I sang 'sorry' at him, that things sometimes just have to die, and

'How should I know, Ren?'Tom unlocked the stable door and we walked through, flipping on the lights.'Do

I was gritting my teeth because we were coming up on the ball, and I almost had him over the line, and

you remember your combination?'

'No. I need the wire cutters! think.' He was putting

he pushed me back with his body and his mallet and kicked his pony so hard that she squealed and steadied

Blue's halter on one of the new ponies, a very dark gray, still with a bit of her baby chestnut in her coat.

off and rammed herself into Blue who stumbled so that my jersey got caught on Riley's spur, and he hit me as

not even reeking anymore. Mom didn't take my stuff

'In the hay room.'

I fetched the cutters from among the brooms and climbed the ladder to the loft. The locker room was the same as it was three years ago. The same sawdustcoated cobwebs in the corners, the same footprints on the bench, a new generation of feral kittens crouched on the lockers, watching me. I clipped the lock and pulled out my gear, all of it, so that as I stripped I could hang my black funeral dress on the hooks. I pulled on the white jeans, the white jersey with its gray stripe, shook the spurs out of my tall boots and put them on over my stockings, strapped the knee pads, grabbed my white helmet, my favorite mallet from the thicket of them on the floor, and climbed back down.Tom was tying the second pony's tail.

'You're bloody already,' he said.

'What?'

34

'It was that club down from Jackson the last night before you went to school, wasn't it,' Tom said as I went back and forth from the tack room, getting the saddles

he was coming down with his mallet, and then Blue got up again but only so that we could all go down, both ponies and I. my shirt and my side attached to Riley's heel.'I still don't get it,' I said as I cinched the girth on the first pony.'He couldn't possibly have cared that much. Anyway, I got my scotch from Dr. Brekman.'

'Yeah, you should've owed us a case.'

'Not when the fall wasn't my fault,' I said. What happened to Blue, anyway?'

'She colicked when we were in Florida. Sandimpaction.'

'She was a good pony.'

'So are these. Get on.'

The air was clear and the ground taut so that we could hear our ponies' hooves rattling across it, tearing up clods. The ponies were well-matched and high from the cool. After Tom scored the first goal I stood

'Look at your side.' I looked. Under my arm and running halfway to the middle of my back was a rip I

and pulled off my spurs. My pony was surging, Tom's keeping abreast of her always, and I was hitting my

had somehow not noticed in my too-big jersey. There were washed-out circles of brown below it. I'd gotten

shots and she followed them well, steady. It had been a long time since I had felt that sort of clean November

used to the scar.

air on my face, like drinking water. It was not a

question ofsmiling or mourning. We all worked to lather.

After we had hosed the ponies down we led them back out onto the field. Night was coming on and their

dreamed me,and fuck that. I wanted to keep him like he was.' He ground his heel to seal another patch.'He

bodies steamed in the cool and the strange light. Tom

died a long time ago. Your mother just didn't realize it.'

'She resurrected him every day,' I said and we walked towards the barn, its lozenge windows oflight planted

and I bent and began stopping divots.

in the darkness.

'Why did she take the horses away?' I asked him.

'I don't blame her she didn't tell you,' he said, picking up a divot.'When Taps started losing his memory I was glad. He'd been miserable for so long. But it was hard to go there every time I did and to explain to him who I was.' Tom pressed the clod ofearth into the ground with the heel of his hand.'He would shake his head, he would say,"0,I am so sorry," and he would hug me.

I hated to see him cry; his old man cheeks would get so wet it bothered me,and his voice got high and he whined.It was disgusting. It wasn't my father.'

The ponies did not graze. They stood behind us with their ears pricked, watching the trees move, the darkness settle at the hem of the clearing.

'So I began to tell him stories,' Tom said.'About himself. I told him there was an old gentleman I knew who'd been in the war. I told him about the Japanese and the professorship, and the beautiful woman with the oil money, and the children and the grandchildren, and how they all lived forever.'

We both walked a bit further. I carried a divot in my hand.It was wet and cool.

'And then one day your mother walked in while I was telling him the story. He was laughing. She grabbed me by the wrist. You know your mother's grip is like death.

Her knuckles look like they're going to come through her skin. She dragged me out in the hall and started whispering at me."Our father is not a toyl" Tom was lilting it and I began pulling apart my bit of earth.

'Apparently she would visit him after me and explain too much and he'd cry again. You know, I just walked out on her, and she came in on the Saturday morning and hauled your horses out. She left me this note on the feed room door. You should see it; it's brilliant. But I stopped going to see Taps. I did. He didn't remember who I was, whether I'd ever been there, whether he'd

4 We ate cheese sticks from the Sonic as we drove back across the Causeway.Tom had in the Beatles. Propped in the corner of my seat, I watched the cars speed the northbound span through his window.

'You know, I've never been able to just burst into tears when I get pulled over. I should have Mom teach me.' I took a bite of cheese, cheap marinara.'When I was little, maybe once a month,coming back from your place — I'd be lying in the back seat, watching the lake, and the blue and red lights would flash, and I knew that meant I was supposed to sit up and buckle my seatbelt.' Tom was looking at me.'You want another cheese stick?' I asked him.

'No, not really.'

'Once I remember waking up when we were stopped in one of the turnarounds, and I could feel the lake air coming in from Mom's window. She was telling the police officer I was sick and she was trying to rush me to Oschner.I think I was terrified we'd all be arrested, but he just said something about taking better care, that it was obvious she loved me,and we were off again.'

'She was always very good at crying. When John Lennon was shot ... Oh,give me ...' He waved his right hand at me without looking around. I marinaraed the last cheese stick and handed it to him.

'I miss strawberries,' I said.'Is that guy on the Folsom Highway still there with the Pontchatoulas? I haven't had a serious strawberry.... I used to eat pints of them coming across this thing with her in May. God! We never did fast food. We always had Pontchatoula strawberries. I don't think I've ever had a cheese stick except in your presence, Tom.They really are nasty — Jesus, fried cheese? Requires a great deal of character to defy death like this.' My fingers were coated in grease.

35

-

'Ah,so I have given you the strength of character to be immortal? Or is it mortal?'

Tom popped the last bit of cheese into his mouth

'Why are you scared of me?'

'Oh,Jesus!Just hand me a fucking napkin, Tom.' Twelve mile markers later, he reached over and put a

1

and flashed a quick smile at me,then he wrenched the wheel,sent us skidding at ninety into the turnaround,

hand on my shoulder.

i

and stopped the truck tight under the advisory board.

His headlights lay like the mouths of tunnels into the

you could deal with it.'

dark lake.

'I'm sorry, Ren. I was just playing with you. I thought 'Am I supposed to deal with everything?' I turned back towards him in the seat.'But it's okay. Do you

'You fucking jackass! What the hell, Tom!Jesus!' I kicked him in the shoulder with my bare heel, and he

have a cigarette?'

grabbed my ankle,squeezed it so hard that I wanted to scream. But I just sat up straighter, and he let me go.

I took one and lit it with my matches. I smoked out of the window, the lake wind making a knocking noise

We pulled out again into the southbound stream, and Tom started going on,something about my mother

in the created vacuum of the truck, like a giant bird

and the White Album.The lake flashed by between the breaks in the guard rails and I could see us sinking, the

'The pack's in the ashtray.'

flapping its wings.

'We're okay, Tom,' I said.

'Sure.'

water, marble-smooth now, opening up. '... all she did was just sing over and over under her

We turned on wwoz and blasted jazz out of our windows for the last few miles of bridge, down the 1-10,

breath,' he was saying. And then he started singing, '"Doc, it's only a scratch, and I'll be better, I'll be better,

until we turned off onto the service road that fronts the cemetery. The headlights painted the gaps in the iron

Doc, as soon as I am able."'

'We should pick her up,' I said,'if she's still at the cemetery. And turn the music up. I don't really want to

fence green, lit up pieces of glass among the gravel.

The gates to the cemetery were closed, but as we drove

listen to you.'

darkness and came over to my window.

'Good evening, ma'am,' he said, one hand on the side-

He turned the music off.'0 fuck, Renny, get over it.'

'I'm not playing anymore,Tom.This is one thing too many to get over today.'

up closer, one of the security guards popped out of the

view mirror.'Are y'all here to pick up Mrs. Bethany?'

'Yes,' I said.'That's my mother. She's still here?'

I turned on the radio. Tom turned it off.

'Drowning me out's not going to do it, Ren.'

'Still sitting with her father. She said her husband was coming to fetch her, but it's been a little while.

'Yeah, well you nearly fucking drowned us.'

Figured I could spare a few more minutes before

'But I didn't.'

locking up for the night.'

'You nearly fucking drowned us.'

'You were asking for it.'

'What, am I always asking for it? Do you always have to challenge me? You used to try to get me killed on a regular basis, and then Dr. Brekman would give me a drink and it was all okay. You pretend you're driving us both into Lake Pontchatrain, and you expect me to get over it,just because. You hand me a ham sandwich. I'm a fucking vegetarian, Tom. How tough am I supposed to be?' I was not going to cry.'Why do you need to prove over and over again that I'm scared of you?'

'Thank you,' I said.'That's very kind of you.'

'It's no problem. Here, let me open up the gate for you.'

He walked into the clear beam of the headlights and lifted the gate over the shining gravel, remained standing with it open as we drove past him into the cemetery. Tom clicked on his brights and drove slowly between the tombs. The light picked up the shined brass flower vases and the wet petals of the gardenia blossoms. The oak branches arched above the road in relief against the pale dark sky. The only sound was the slowing crunch of the gravel as we approached

36

.IMENImmi

Taps's grave, covered now, the white slab of marble glowing like water. My mother sat on her folding chair, clutching her knees to her chest. She turned her head towards us, her features effaced in the light. I stepped out of the car.

'Mom,'!said, walking towards her.'Mom,it's time to go home.'I gave her my hand. She stood.

I held her and she seemed to grow steadier as we walked. She stood at the truck's flank until I'd gotten in, and then she stepped up after me and closed the door softly. Tom turned to her.

'We're both orphans now,' he said.

My mother watched the darkness. She nodded.

37

-

Lindsey 1995

EI mi NI • in • NI NI si El emir-

mu

JENNE.

Elegy for an Elegy

The shower is the only clean place In the whole of my ancestral home.

I look to it for corrections.

Naked in a clean room, Before a poem Fastened to the wall By manufactured mist, I nibble my pen-tip And write in shivers.

It makes my roommate giggle As she wonders what A poem has to do with long showers: An open body, awapuhi Detanglers, soap, concealers Ofscent left leaking The musk of lovers In apple orchards So near, my eyes sting.

Everything here Is fresh, if artificial.

'The minute you step in,' It's always something.

Feeling naked, Sharon phoned me, Talking poetry While the shower ran.

I returned to a full tub, Overflowing, a poem Had drowned In an end lending

The ink remaining Bluer than the water.

Then the surface broke My poem, wringing it Through the tub In ribbons and flecks Like unbraiding hair.

Its heavy bobby pins Rode the white Tips of minnowing strips, As letters pressed on To pulp in the drain.

It had been my shower poem The poem this poem Was meaning to be, the one That kept me on the phone, Its own elegy. Under pressure It must have believed itself Mad,or suicidal, a hero Holding the front line That had held Until I touched it.

Even then,some fragments held Water from the drain.

So that the tub brimmed to its spigot, And twisted our shower to a bath Before my notes moved on.

Their sheet flown apart To immature jellies.

Substance fading before color.

Urgent significance To what had passed before.

(I'm not sure I wanted it rescued.)

But I was gentle, Pressing the others Against the wall, I bent my whole body Down through the rippling Lines, below the page.

My fingers tugged the margin Like a child trailing a skirt,

39

Story Cycle: Tamer Sex, Wilder West

Martha Kay, Minneola, Texas, 1972 1 The small room reeks of urine despite the fresh bed linens. Her incontinence is an affliction of both bladder and brain. One will notice the tiny movements of her

say her death bed was as hot as hellfire to burn a gentle woman.

lips before pausing to hear the almost inaudible speech spilling from her mouth,words that would only be

Jutta Hinkley, Sacramento, California, 1988

detected in a room as desperate for moving air as this space. Her tiny sound reverberates off the interior faces

There are two kinds of girls in the world. Those who pee, stand up,and flush. And those who pee,flush, and

of a sterile white cube,eight feet, by eight feet, by eight feet. The space would simply spin in its equilateralness were it not for the single window which anchors her

then stand up — their waste whisked away before they

room in a world with rooted trees and benign suburban landscape. With her back to the landward view she sits facing the length of her bed,seemingly staring at the items on her nightstand: a handful of unshucked pecan nuts and a lidless, black lacquer jewelry box.The staff at the home tried everything to get her to drink out of a paper cup, but she would only take her water from the jewelry box. One of the night nurses found she could quell the woman's fits ifshe slipped the nuts into her hands and let them roll around on the ancient skin of her palm, but not before she had thoroughly wet the bed. Their shape seemed to soothe her more

ever see it.

1 On a brilliant Sunday afternoon during jumping practice young Gretta sits her horse with grace and insouciance over four fences. Over the fifth she pulls up too late and they crash, horse and rider, through fence into ground, the proliferation of dust disallowing any further description. At long last the slip of a girl emerges from the dust, like Siegfried, like Roy, stepping quickly, great posture, no damage done here, braids still tightly set; it pastes its smile on thick. It marches out ofthe ring. What a showman. Coach and mother are quick to attend it. The arena door slams shut, a crop

il

is thrown,a scream, a cuss, bawling.

And what remains, as the excited dusts settles, are the patient and deep breaths of what was left behind.

Rudy take us pecan hunting for four days in a row my sister Flo and me was all together up on the back

He is large and foreign and gray. A stable boy finds him in the late evening,long after Gretta has showered,

of his big old black horse with two sacks of pecans hanging off the saddle like two big swelled up tits after birthing a hard labor went blind for pretty near

changed, and left in her mother's Peugeot for piano.

He is quite broken and issuing a small amount of blood

than any sedative.

two weeks after I birthed my second boy lost two teeth and had to cover my stinging eyes from the sun that come in through the house windows for crying so hard when my husband brang me a pearl necklace from New Orleans and sat by my bed and put it in my hands

40

to smoke cigarettes so she smoked in the dark after he was long dead asleep when she caught fire he tried to smother her but her sheets took to the heat and they

from his flares, his lips, a gash under his eye. Inhalation rises slowly and falls fast, wet and unnatural. The boy goes to the stable mistress but there will be no tranquilizers, no meds, no veterinarians on Sundays, no others to help decide what should be done besides

to show me what he had brang to his loving wife but sister Flo never had naught come out of her barren

mistress and boy.

It is almost midnight when the shotgun goes off.

Perhaps it is the deafening sound of the firearm, or

belly and people said Rudy set a fire to her while she was to sleeping but I knows she had taked to smoking

perhaps it is the far louder knowledge ofsomething so large dying, but the momentjust before discharge the

cigarettes in her bed cause he never approved of a woman smoking it was for whores and Okie womans

stables and all its inhabitants are silent. All braying

-

and bucking ceases. Not a neigh. Not one whinny. The woman does not cover her ears when the boy fires the gun. It hurts a bit when the blast hits her face.

Ii • Piss, flush, stand • High riding with proud and cold posture • Up one, up two, up three, up four • A failed fifth jump •The moment of waiting

the odd dishes her mother prepared for her and begged her to eat.

II As a young girl Jeayuen was fed walnuts for a healthy brain and boiler onions for good eyesight.

As she became a young woman the mother fed her bamboo for long legs, quinces for round cheekbones,

• A scream

scallions for a slender body, parsnip for white teeth, oysters for large earlobes, oranges for firm breasts, and lychee fruit for red lips.

Jeayuen found a husband shortly after moving out of

• Bawling •The attentiveness of a doting mother and well-paid

her parents' home.On the night before her wedding her mother pulled her into the kitchen and fed her

• A survivor with a crooked helmet

coach • Settling dust, moving ever slower • A troubling discovery • Slow breaths from a fallen animal • An absent rider •The disheveled tack •Two brains,four hands, one firearm •A still and quiet crowd • A loving shotgun • Piss, stand, flush Jeayuen Hong, Tacoma, Washington, 1994 1 Jeayuen's mother fed her walnuts when she was a girl.

Her mother was a thin woman,a smiling woman who spoke no English, only walnuts. Every morning the daughter ate at least five before school, three upon her return, and three more at bedtime. She ate them until they tasted stale and her throat had to be tricked with juice or soda to swallow the chewed-up paste.

Jeayuen's mother believed that certain foods — because ofshape or texture, color or size — aided the body in the development ofits various attributes. This was, as Jeayuen soon learned from her teachers at school, a

squid for prosperous hands and mung bean sprouts for many children.

When Jeayuen's husband beat her until she couldn't walk,she came home to recover. Her mother fed her carrots for big muscles, red peppers for a sharp tongue, garlic for a large heart, ginger for stable feet, and straw mushrooms for good listening.

Jeayuen now sits at her own kitchen table late in the night, sick with worry. In her belly she carries the children of another man she's left. Her own mother is long since dead, but the daughter feels her mother's approval as she pours herself a glass of milk, remembering what her mother believed milk was good for. The woman wonders if this is what her soul must look like, white and thick, taking the shape of the vessel holding it.

Will it sour?

Will it turn?

Or will she feed it to her babies? Dole it out to them until there is nothing left but a smiling residue of skin and bone.

Miranda Avon O'Brien, Regina, Saskatchewan, 2002

mere superstition. Foods are nutritious in many ways, but the physical appearance offood has nothing to do with its utility once digested. For this reason,Jeayuen

1 Stanley Marcus is dead. Miranda has been sad for exactly seventeen hours since she first heard the news.

She has been grossly overweight for exactly thirty-

rejected her mother's claims, but still conceded to eat

seven years, eighty-eight days, and sixteen hours since

41

the baby fat never melted away as the doctor had so fervently promised her parents it would. Exactly three hours and thirty-four minutes ago she stewed some cabbage(savoy) to ease the pain. She's been packed for exactly forty-three minutes and has been waiting for exactly twenty-one minutes for her taxi to whisk her away to Regina International Airport where she will take an emergency flight to Dallas, Texas for Stanley's funeral (via Missoula, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake, Albuquerque, and then directly to Dallas; a ticket specially priced for a woman living on the humble salary ofa produce vendor).

On the way to the airport she nibbles a pear(d'anjou) and thinks of his kind eyes.

Miranda is the picture of grace: chocolate colored muumuu and espadrilles cinched around plump, stubbly calves. Women of such girth are often softspoken or demure as some sort ofcompensation for their size, but not Miranda. She blows into the Regina International Airport with all the presence of a show horse, stepping high and landing hard with each footfall. Between the sliding doors and the security gate she downs an entire apple (braeburn)and drops the

Eager to comply with the airport authorities, Miranda raises her large bag by the bottom so as to spill out the contents of its swollen belly. A veritable cornucopia sallies from the sack. A nest of cherries(bing)gives way to onions(leek, vidalia, and pearl), followed by tangerines and yams(satsuma and minneola, beauregard and garnet), preceding a cluster oflovely tomatoes(hothouse large and small). Radicchio, rapini, and rhubarb.Persimmons, pineapple, and plums. A mĂŠlange of ripe squash (patti pan, acorn, and golden nugget)tumbles out ofthe now-limp membrane. Lastly, the most recent issue of Neiman Marcus's The Book slides onto the table with the placid thud of a coffin settling into its grave. She can feel a tear forming in her eye. Her love made real. Bound and brightly colored.

Pathetic Miranda is not. Her love has not gone unrequited. Like a doting and prosperous father (albeit far off) Stanley Marcus sends her a book every season.

The Book he calls it. In it he includes lavish photographs of the clothing, accessories, and other wares offered in his stores. On the top right corner is a price, $10.

However, Miranda's The Book is always gratis, a gift from afar. Someone realized her stunted glory, someone could see she was a raving beauty on the

core in her bag.

As a rural Canadian, Miranda has never before been stricken with impatience. So when this foreign anxiousness descends upon her while she waits at the

desert island we call Saskatchewan. And that someone was Stanley Mar —

security checkpoint she is quite perplexed and decides it best to quell her fretting limbs with some segments ofgrapefruit(oro blanco).

After exactly nineteen minutes it is finally Miranda's

questions.

'Why, yes. It is. Are members of the squash family not allowed on board? Is this going to be a problem? Can

turn. She gingerly extracts three small figs(calmyrna) from the corpulent bag(so as not to let them bruise) before placing it on the x-ray machine belt. She feels his warm and gentle breath in her ear as she moves through the metal detectors,'No watches or beltbuckles here. Nothing to make a beep. Not one bobby pin. Not even one penny.' Every step draws her closer.

'Pardon me,but is that a Kabocha?' the guard

you stow my squashes with the other luggage?'

'Not a problem,' he replies. They both reach out for the Kabocha, and for a moment their hands meet on its rough, earth-hewn husk.'I just love Kabocha.That's all.'

'I didn't know anyone had an appreciation for...'

'My name's Ferdinand.'

'Miranda.'

'This must sound forward, but would you like to have dinner some...'

II

'We'd like to search your hand baggage please, ma'am,' requests a short and combed-over security guard.

42

In a brave new world a woman blushes, a ticket is lost, and a dead man smiles.

43

-

The contents of The Yale Literary Magazine are Š2002. Copyrights remain the property of individual contributors. No portion of the contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights are reserved.

The Yale Literary Magazine is a non-profit, registered undergraduate organization at Yale University.The

John Crowley, Susan Orlean, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else who helped.

views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editors or staff members.Yale University

The designer would like to thank Elizabeth Prestel, Leslie Kuo, Lejla Hadzic,Tim Davis,John Gambell,

is not responsible for the contents of this magazine.

Joe Maynard,John Robinson, and GIST

Subscriptions to The Yale Literary Magazine are available for $15 (individuals) and $35 (institutions).

Please make checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund and send to: The Yale Literary Magazine PO Box 209087 New Haven,CT 06520 www.yale.edu/ylit Library of Congress catalog number 7-19863-4 The judge for the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Poetry, Spring 2002, was Wes Davis. Wes Davis's introductory essays on fifty recent Irish poets are available in The Milberg Collection of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1998). He also co-edited and introduced The Milberg Collection ofJewish American Writers. He is Assistant Professor of English at Yale and is also a member of the American Studies faculty.

The judge for the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Fiction, Spring 2002, was John Crowley.John Crowley's latest novel is The Translator. He is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed novels and the winner of, among others, the World Fantasy Award in 1982 and 1990. He teaches fiction and screen-writing at Yale.

44

The editors would like to thank the staff of The Yale Literary Magazine, Audrey Healy and the English Department,Joe Maynard, Dean Philip Greene, Arthur Golden, Master Steven Smith,Wes Davis,