Volume 5 issue 1 fall 1993

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fittiOt

November 2

Accidents Chatham and Back

yahlin chang

lorin stein

21

lorin stein

1

19 Newton Kaneshiro Newton Kaneshiro 1_ 8 etching and aquatint

Cover

etching and aquatint

A Comedian's Notebook 31

Uncle's Story

John hodgman

John Meyer silver tone photograph 20 astrophile michael mccullers

22

33 Barney Latimer silvertone photograph

30

A. Jane Johnston

32

silvertone photograph

Lhc Yale Literary vagazin VOL V., I. You Don't Always Have To Say Something

Just Born Kody utistave elliott

36

Activists 56

peter kessler

michael mccullers

42

A. Jane Johnston silvertone photograph

Newton Kaneshiro 5etchings and aquatint

z Crazy 15 packer

Brownstown Carrie iverson

Julie Puttgen

69

er t one photograph

The Odyssey simon michael greenwold

70

72

Y

.1•111.mr

ACCIDE

telyoj a story about my sister.

I'll try my best, but already I have doubts. How can you

understand, do you have a sister?

Mine taught me to play the piano—did yours? She taught me to drive, to roller-skate, to walk—did yours?

"Everyone should have a baby sister," Rachel would tell her friends, putting her arm around me. "This is mine." You won't understand unless your sister, too, watched you all night long as you lay weak and unprotected in your crib—loved you before you were conscious, loved you first.

I want to tell you a story about fault.

This is what happened and this is who did it and this is why—Because Stories are supposed to have causes and effects and reasons for things, overarching themes—motifs, as my English teacher Mrs. Levine says—trace the motifs through The Great Gatsby—e yes and God and fast cars—but I don't know where the becauses are in my story or how we got here, to this point-

y a hl in chang

-where Rachel lies in a white sterile room, holes poked in her arm, tubes feeding her from humming machines. She doesn't know how she looked when they found her: bruised and dented, hands crushed by the dashboard, head thrust through the steering wheel. She doesn't know about her broken ribs, broken leg, and broken hands...at the least. We're still waiting to hear.

Papa will sue the auto shop, vengeance against the men who worked on the car. It's their fault, he believes, and "it's their livelihood," he says, "which is what I want."

It's true that they rushed, skipped the tests, but it was Papa who threatened not to pay in full unless he got the car back

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at the end of this week. If they had time, they would have discovered that the engine would race and the car would accelerate unpredictably, unexpectedly. Then they could have said We're sorry Mr. Muller we have to keep the car for more repairs. They could have said We're sorry but how would you like to see your $40,000 red 300 SE launch your beautiful daughter Rachel through the iron fence surrounding your driveway and catapult her down fifty feet leaving her mangled at the bottom amid twisted steel and broken glass?

How do I know that you won't finish reading this story and conclude about the state of contemporary society: Technology: that's the problem! you'll say, throwing the story down, that's where the blame lies.

IN THE GUISE OF A SIMPLE STORY REVOLVING AROUND A RED 300SE MERCEDESBENZ, MONICA MOLLER HAS WRITTEN A MODERN FABLE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY, A FAMILY EPIC, A WORK THAT BEGS THE QUESTION: WHAT IS LIFE ABOUT IN THE CONSTANT ONSLAUGHT OF ACCIDENT AND CIRCUMSTANCES WHIZZING BEYOND OUR CONTROL. And I will point the finger for you. "Technology and its bedfellow, rampant materialism, are ripping apart families and ruining lives," I will say. "This German invention caused war in our family. This is a story about a girl—a martyr—who lies in a hospital bed, a sacrifice to the great god of automotive technology and testosterone that drives the blood of men to distraction, [pause], to destruction.'

You could say that the blame lies with the person who got into the accident in the first place, who landed the car in the shop. You could say it was me... but you'd have to understand this first. I wouldn't have been driving that quickly in the cold and sleet with my wheels crunching against the gritty snow then hitting that solid patch of ice and careening into the car next to me if—if it weren't for Papa's uncontrollable temper in the first place.

Back to Papa. I want to tell you a story about fathers.

How far back do you have to go before you can start a story? To make it make sense and explain why...

Why Papa has this temper. After Rachel, he wanted a boy but got me instead. Mother

died. He gave up music. And I'm a bad driver.

But I've only just turned sixteen.

Sixteen years ago in Bayreuth, Germany, at the beginning of Wotan's Farewell, the last piece in Die WalkOre, the second four-and-a-half hour long cycle in Wagner's four-cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen and the only reason anyone sits through the first four hours and thirteen minutes of Wagner's perpetual stream of music, the much-loved and celebrated Maestro, Bertrand Muller, dropped his baton.

He had never done this, in public or in rehearsal. Some members of the orchestra tried to continue. They discovered that Wotan's Farewell is impossible to play without a conductor.

The instrumentalists shifted visibly. Ten or twelve people in the audience began to cough. One man who had been asleep for two hours awoke when the music stopped and began clapping.

His neighbors glared and his wife told him she would never bring him to a concert again.

Wagner, an autocrat of the orchestra, disdained the Italian-derived 'opera,' and supplanted it with the 'authentic German music drama' that allowed no musical stopping points, no breaks for applause or the bathroom. An endless melody, a seamless musical flow, he commanded. He built Festspielhaus, a personal opera amphitheater, to his own specifications. In this musical shrine to himself, only his work could be played, continuously, unceasingly for days. One hundred years later, in the summer festival designed for this purpose, the conductor ruined everything.

The concert master picked up the baton and handed it to the Maestro. The Maestro straightened, paused. Regained his dignity. He raised his head and the violinists picked up their bows. All eyes on him, he raised his baton. On the downbeat, he dropped it again.

The director of the festival, who had been agitated since he received the phone call from the doctor, took this opportunity to run on-stage. He whispered to the Maestro that his wife had been in labor for the last three hours and that there were complications.

This was not any audience. 80% had traveled to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival; 45% of those came from outside the German borders. They saw this anticlimax as the worst ingratitude to Wagner's genius. Impatient for the Farewell, a release of all the tension that had

been painfully building for the last four hours, they began to clap and stamp in largo tempo, strict four/four time. The amphitheater shook: pound. stop. pound. stop. pound. stop. pound.

"Complications?" the Maestro whispered.

"They were not specific."

Audience tempo doubled time: pound, pound, pound, pound. The Maestro turned his back to the director. Without warning, he began. The orchestra rushed to catch up.

When it was done, he bowed for the first round of perfunctory applause. The encore applause was left unacknowledged; he took off for the hospital on Dussel Strasse as the Germans, French, Italian, and English grumbled about the pomposity and presumption of the eminent conductor.

The reviewer for the Munich Daily's morning edition said that it was the worst performance of Wotan's Farewell that he ever had the misfortune to sit through. The editor issued his apologies in the afternoon edition, and wrote a 500-word in memoriam for Helen Muller, Bayreuth's much-loved and celebrated pianist. The two boxes ran next to each other on the Births & Deaths & Marriages page: the obituary for Helen Wier and the announcement that the one-day old Monica Willer was joining the family of Bertrand Muller and his five-yearold daughter, Rachel.

It took three years for the Wagner Festival to finally discharge Maestro Muller. Three years is a long time to keep on a conductor who does not conduct. He listened to music, he listened obsessively to Wotan's Farewell, but he threw a dust cloth on top of the piano and closed the doors to his wife's studio. When Rachel snuck inside to play, he would shut his own bedroom door or leave the house.

One of his long-standing patrons offered him a position at the New York branch of the bank Credit Suisse Agricoleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; more money than he had ever made before. And he was happy, he needed to escape. He closed up the house, sent Mother's furniture and clothing to government charities. Before he could touch Mother's music books, Rachel packed them away in padlocked trunks labeled "To U.S.A.."

Mother's black Boesendorfer grand piano was shipped across the Atlantic. "For the

money, we could just buy a brand new Steinway in New York," Papa said, but Rachel insisted.

That was when Papa bought his first Mercedes-Benz, when he fell in love with the music of the turbo-diesel engine and the rising and falling phrases of curving chrome and steel.

Now he stands over Rachel in her hospital room pulling at his hands, remorse in his face. And he's asking the same questions I do: why is she here, who's fault is it, who's to blame, how did this happen? I can't help thinking of Wotan, standing over his sleeping daughter Brunhilde, singing his farewell. He deprived her of her godhood, put her to sleep on an exposed mountain top, and encircled her in a ring of fire— as punishment for disobedience.

• It was Rachel who fed and changed me. When she wanted me to sleep, she put Chopin's Lullaby, played by Mother, on the stereo next to my crib.

"You were not a healthy girl," Rachel told me. I did not cry or scream: I choked. I was trying to keep my crying back, I think. Even as a baby, I knew to be careful. My fragile family had already suffered enough shocks and intrusions; they did not need any more disturbances from me.

Rachel had to watch me all the time. I would stop breathing, you see— she would look over at my crib and just like that I would be all blue in the face. She would lift me up and pound my back until I opened my mouth. Slowly a pallid pink would replace the purple-blue.

Now, for her, every breath is a struggle. Now it is she who lies there, and I who am terrified of her silence.

• In New York City, even in the good section of town on the upper East Side where we lived, you could only find green on thin, ailing trees. They were protected by a circle of iron bars at the base, planted on two-square-foot plots of dirt at regular intervals along the concrete.

In Bayreuth, you could sit on long stretches of soft grass as you listened to the music. Here, cabs screeched up to the curbs. You could hear the sirens and gunshots even from far away.

"Can't sleeep," I would moan, four or five years old. I'd come out into the kitchen

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where Rachel would be reading and climb onto her lap. She was waiting for Papa until she too got tired; sometimes he didn't come home. Holding my hand, she would lead me back into the bedroom and wrap me up in the down comforter. Arms around me, she would tell stories in her soft, singing voice until I fell asleep.

"You gave us scares when you were young, little one," Rachel said, tapping me on the head. "At 18 months we still had no idea what your voice sounded like. Papa thought you were a mute. He was going to send you to doctors to fix you."

I shuddered, then snuggled closer to her. "One day I was practicingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;" she continued, "â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Satie, and I heard a strange ringing? coming from the direction of your room. I stopped playing, heard nothing. I started playing again, and I heard it again. So I pressed the soft pedal all the way down and played very lightly in the highest register. This time I thought it was some sort of humming... or singing?

"I couldn't check because every time I stopped, it stopped. I ran over to the record player and put the Satie on, very high. The sound got louder as I walked in the direction of your room. And there you were, standing straight up in your crib, swaying back and forth. Humming away."

She smoothed my hair, and kissed the top of my forehead. Getting up, she said, "Mother loved French music, too."

Papa met Mother when he was 20 and she was 12, an American student at the summer music festival in Bayreuth. He was the music teacher for the younger students and she played the bells in his band. He thought she was cute and that she had talent; he singled her out and coached her in piano. At the end of the summer, before she flew back to the States, he gave her a glass music box in the shape of a piano. It played Chopin's Lullaby. "I will hear you play this piece when you are older," he said to her, gripping her hands to him, "when you come back."

When she graduated from the Juilliard Conservatory ten years later, she returned to Germany and married him. He went on to become the orchestral conductor at the Wagner festival. She became a successful pianist who didn't even have to take on students.

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Other pianists have tried to imitate her from the reruns of her performances on television. The curve of her fingers, her method of phrasing, the way she dropped her arm in a circle from high above for a richer, fuller sound. Her only student ever was Rachel. And Rachel has taught me.

We have tapes, records, newspaper clippings, and posters. Mother sitting in a black frilled dress coming down to a V on her chest, arms folded, Papa standing in back of her, one hand on her shoulder, the other holding a baton. She's smiling, he's stern. Papa always means business.

Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 2, the poster says. She loved Saint-Saens, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel. Papa preferred 'true' and 'serious' music written by Germans, not by the frivolous and sentimental French. Wagner's 'singular' music dramas and the melancholy tones of Mahler filled our house. Rachel and I had heard Mahler's funereal version of Frere Jacques before we heard the real nursery rhyme. The teacher played it for us in kindergarten. That was when I found out that it's a harmless song.

We have a tape of Mother playing Liszt's Inferno. It's said that Liszt forgot the shape of the human hand while composing it: few people play it and those who try contract almost immediately a severe case of tendonitis. Mother did not miss a note of it, of Dante's spiraling descent through the rings of hell; the music tells you everything, from the angels through the fire to the pit at the bottom, the frozen, crystallized, static, doom.

"The first piece I heard Mother play was the Chopin Nocturne, op. 9, no. 2," Rachel said.

"This one?" I hummed the melody. The beginning fifth, the slow turns.

"All I wanted was to play that piece. Mother said I had to learn the basics first: how to count, how to read notes, how to practice hands separately. How to curl my fingers over the keys for the best sound." " Never play with flat fingers," I mimicked her.

"She made me start with the Leila Fletcher book. I hated it too."

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I nodded. The bright orange Leila Fletcher Book of Beginning Piano Pieces with Alouette and Three Blind Mice. You didn't get to play hands together until the end of the book.

Every piece had a stupid picture of children skipping or swinging or throwing a ball at each other. They printed finger numberings on top of each note. You could fool the book by translating in your head: 1 is C, 3 is E, so you wouldn't have to learn to read the notes.

"Just like you, I wanted to use a book with no pictures or numbers, just small notes running on every page from top to bottom. When I was five, I took her Chopin Nocturne book and found Opus 9. There were too many notes at the same time, and the counting, to me it was like trying to understand multiple fractions or something.

"So I wrote letters and numbers above each bar, faked the counting from what I remembered she sounded like. I marked up the first page in her Henle Verlag editionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the one she used in performances."

"Oh, no! Did she get mad?"

"At first. But eventually she pulled a chair over to the piano, placed me on the bench, and said, 'Show me what you learned, then.' I played the first eight bars. I had been working hours all afternoon just to get the notes in the right hand.

"Mother moved over to the piano bench and played the left hand part. And I couldn't believe it, because together, I thought we sounded just like when she played it alone. When we finished, she looked over to me and said, 'I think you can do this, Rachel.'

"It was the first time I played music."

Rachel showed me how to fit my left hand around the chords of that Nocturne. She played the melody on top, and I played the accompaniment below. I didn't know the counting and I couldn't read the notes. I copied Mother's tape, imagined the two of them playing it together. I had never memorized before, but this music was too difficult to read. Rachel would not have approved if she knew that I was playing by ear and not by sight, by imitating what I had heard instead of trying to recognize the notes on the page.

I worked more on the left hand chords for that nocturne than on any of my own solo

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pieces. I still have those chords memorized. I've never tried playing it alone. I could probably pick out the notes on top if I tried, but I haven't. â&#x20AC;˘ When Papa got promoted at the bank, we moved out of the city, onto Saxon Woods Lane in Westchester. We needed more space; the super of our penthouse building would not let him keep more than two cars in the cramped, dank basement.

In the suburbs, Rachel and I converted the small den off the living room into a studio, where we placed Mother's Boesendorfer. Papa was not often home; on weekdays he worked and ate dinner in the office; on weekends, he went to the race-car track or the house of a woman friend.

We were safe when we heard the distinct prrt-prrt-prrrter of the Benz turbo-diesel engine start up. It was designed so that the driver inside could not hear it though everyone else would know you were coming. His leaving meant we could play the piano without being afraid.

Rachel and I would watch from the windows above, catching a glimpse of the garage door opening and the car pulling out of the garage, slowly in reverse, speeding up the incline of the driveway. I had learned early that Papa does not say good-bye.

Papa tried to teach us to appreciate the beauty, the dignity, the integrity of the Mercedes-Benz. It has its own melodic line and harmonic progression, he would say, do you hear the crescendos of the engine gearing up.

Yes, Papa.

Note its accelerandos.

Of course, Papa.

0 to 60 in 5 seconds.

We understand, Papa.

The house in Westchester had its own two-car garage. Papa built two more, one on either side of the house. An acre of forest behind our house sloped downwards at a steep angle; when Papa enlarged the driveway, he ordered an iron fence to be built around it because the new driveway jutted out into the woods. Rachel and I would hold onto the iron bars, our c Literary

d,

feet poking out in between them, and look down into the woods. It made me dizzy to look: it was a fifty foot fall.

Papa pulled the brown 300SD out of the garage when we were done washing the silver 420SEL. Rachel, who was twelve, emptied out the bucket of old suds and refilled it with warm water, squeezing in the liquid soap. I rinsed off the towels we had used in hot water. The stream warmed my cold hands.

"Quickly," Papa said, coming in. "The weather report says that there's a 30 percent chance of snow." He screwed the nozzle of the hose to the hot water faucet. "If we don't finish, the water will freeze on the cars. Come out, now."

He refused to go to car washes, even during the winter. Wrapped in wool scarves, down coats, and gloves, we moved quickly to keep our blood circulating. Papa rinsed, soaped, rinsed, dried, waxed, then polished the ext using toothbrushes and soap to scrub thf

Rachel and I had already finished the tires, .s off the Mercedes sign on the metal

hubcaps.

We talked inside the car as w The door to my left opened. towel from my hands. He stood fo

the leather down with the softest cloths we had. d finished rinsing. His arm reached in and took the ,econds, I could see his fingers playing over the

cloth.

"Come out here now," he said.

We scrambled. "Papa?"

He looked at us, standing still for a moment. "Do you ever learn, Monica?" Suddenly he slapped my towel against the car, Thwaack. Water droplets flew onto the car, onto us. "It's wet. This towel will ruin the leather. If you're too weak to wring it out, ask your sister."

His hands twisted the towel, straining the fiber to the breaking point. He let go, regripped the towel, and twisted again.

"Feel how dry this is," he said, throwing the towel at me. "Now you do it." He took the towel from me and dropped into the bucket. I pulled it out, folded it, and wrung.

"More," he said, "harder. Use your strength." He placed his hands on top of mine.

His rough palms chafed my skin as he twisted the towel and my hands together. I saw my hands turn red and my knuckles whiten.

He had me drop the towel into the bucket and wring it out five times. Papa believes in repetition: every time you make a mistake, go back and do it again five times. This technique had worked when he was a teacher and a conductor.

We got back inside, wiping the leather in circular strokes as he had instructed.

"Why do we need to have such expensive cars anyway," I said softly, so only Rachel could hear.

"Benzes are the best-made cars in the world. It's worth the price for safety and luxury. They're crafted with attention to the finest details," Rachel said. Rachel memorized the brochures that came every month; Papa kept them all in the magazine stand in his bathroom. For example, they're childproof. Good for you, Monica." I was seven, I fit in the child category.

"I don't drive," I mumbled.

No, but kids can hurt themselves in many ways in cars. But not in a MercedesBenz. Here's a test: see how every corner in this car is rounded?

"I challenge you to find a sharp corner."

A test? "Bet I can." My hands groped along the back seat, fingering the edges of the belt buckles, the seats in front of me. They slipped off the curved leather. I clambered to the floor.

"Don't hurt yourself," Rachel said from the front.

"Childproof," I said, reaching underneath the passenger seat. I felt a sharp edge and scraped my hand against it twice. "Rachel." I lifted my hand. "Rachel. See?" Some blood trickled down my arm and I grinned.

"Monica!" She grabbed my hand and wrapped her sudsy towel around it.

"I'm... I'm sorry," I said. Her face scared me at this moment, trembling lips and furrowed brow. I looked down. Drops of blood stood crimson against the tan leather,

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working their way in. Papa... I jerked my arm away from her and moved to scrub away the stain. As I turned, my leg caught the edge of the bucket on the floor and overturned it. Suds splashed across the back seat.

The water that had been streaming down the sides of the car stopped. Papa had finished rinsing. He opened the door.

"What is all this about?"

Tears came. I flattened myself against the far door but he reached in with one arm and pulled me out.

"Papa, I knocked over the bucket by accident," Rachel said. She pulled at his coat. He did not loosen his grip. He knew that it was me, always me.

I couldn't catch up with his long strides. Dragging me along by one arm, my legs trailing behind, we crossed the length of the basement. "How do I teach you girls to respect, to learn, to do a job well without making a mess? Can you tell me how to do that?"

My eyes were closed. I knew he was bringing me to the garage on the opposite side of the house. He opened the back door to the 420 SEL and pushed me in, slamming the door behind him.

I would be there until tomorrow morning. In several hours, after Papa had gone to sleep, Rachel would come down to me, with blankets, pillows, and food, like always.

It wouldn't be terrible. We had just washed this car and the leather smelt new. This garage had a heater. And I had learned to entertain myself by practicing my pieces on the dashboard, fooling with the controls on the stereo. Later, Rachel would climb into the back seat of the car noiselessly. She would wrap me in the comforter she brought and hold me until I fell asleep.

I flung myself down on my stomach in the back seat, my head scrunched into the side, and waited.

• That was the background. Was that enough—have I gone far back enough? Because I want to tell you the story I want to tell you now. I mean, show you the story I want to show you—show don't tell—Mrs. Levine says, and then marks the paper in red—confusing

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motivations, weak characterizations—I need you to continue reading without those interruptions, thinking those things, because... I've told you what I know. And now, 1 need—I mean—I would like...

I would like to tell you a story. It's about my sister. It's about fault. It's about fathers and a 300SE. It's about why she's here, and how she got here, and what Papa did... how I...

I'm waiting for the doctor's report. Papa's in the hospital cafeteria drinking coffee.

I'm waiting for Rachel to wake up.

I got my license last week. Rachel's home for winter break, and I wanted to show her how I had improved since my birthday last summer. She had taken me to the empty Lord & Taylor's parking lot at 6 a.m., and made me drive in reverse. "If you learn to go backwards first, going forwards will be a piece of cake," she had said.

I was backing out of Shopwell's parking lot in the 3005E when it happened. She was telling me about a boyfriend of hers from high school who encloses self-addressed stamped envelopes with his letters, and I must have been laughing or something because I did not notice the hydrant until I heard the loud thump.

The dent was 3" wide and 2" deep, underneath the license plate and above the bumper. Rachel took out her handkerchief and wiped away the yellow marks from the hydrant's paint.

"C'mon, she said, one arm around my shoulder. She walked me over to the passenger side, opened the door, and gently pushed me in. "It's not that bad. Don't worry, Monica. I'll tell him I did it."

"No." I stared at her. "Why would you do that."

She closed my door. I heard her take the bags out of the trunk and put them in the back seat. She got in and started the engine. "I'm going back to school in a week," she said, "and you'll be in his house for another year."

Papa was in the garage waxing the 420SEL when we got back. As soon as she shut

off the engine, Rachel opened the door and shouted, "The groceries are in the back seat," but he had already gotten to the trunk.

We stood on either side of him. The trunk was open. He looked at us, then leaned down, tracing the dent with his fingertips.

"Someone must have hit us when we were in the store," I blurted out.

"Here? on top of the bumper?" He stared at me, his voice low. "Is this the story you're telling me? Because it looks like it was this car that hit something."

"Papa, it was an accident, I backed into a fire hydrant by accident," Rachel said quickly.

Papa froze for a moment. Then he straightened and slapped her across the face.

"You... you girls," he sputtered.

"No," I said, pulling his arm back. "I was driving."

He turned to me. "Do you know how much this will cost?" he said, his voice low. "I'll have to replace. the whole back side, this whole piece." He pointed from one end of the car to the other. "You've made a mess that now I have to pay for."

He gripped my arm. "Follow me," he said, turning around. We walked quickly through the basement, up to the front hall. Rachel walked behind me. "Papa," she said, "please stop."

"Do you see me go into your things and break them, or spill things on them?" He let go of me and I slipped on the tile floor of the front hall. I knocked my head against the banister of the stair case, and stood up, dizzy.

"Stay there." He bounded up the stairs. A few seconds later, he returned to the landing between the first and second floor. He held the glass music box from my room, the one in the shape of a piano, the one that played Chopin's Lullaby. I watched him from the hall below.

"Now you can clean up my mess," he said. I closed my eyes, hearing it fall. Shatter into pieces.

Rachel had run into the kitchen and now she returned with the vacuum cleaner.

"No!" he commanded. "She'll pick it up."

I knelt down, trembling, trying to pick up the slivers of glass. Glass sliced into my

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hand. Small cuts and blood appeared. Rachel knelt down next to me.

"Rachel. Leave her. He left the landing, went into his room, and shut the door.

I straightened, and looked at Rachel. The sounds of the breaking glass reverberated through the silence. I could not stop hearing it.

"Monica..." she whispered.

I ran to the kitchen and pulled one of the car keys off the hooks in the pantry. I stumbled down the spiral staircase leading to the two-car garage, Rachel following me close behind. "It's icy," she said.

I tried a car door but the key wouldn't turn. I ran to the other car. "Don't drive like this," Rachel said.

The door opened. I turned the key in the ignition and pressed the garage opener. The terrible roar of the engine turning over, the loud, reluctant gaspings and creakings of the garage door.

"Wait," she said, but I pulled out of the garage and left her.

It was not five minutes later when I hit that patch of ice. It was waiting for me, I think.

I totaled the other car, and the left side of the car I was driving was mangled out of shape.

I got out. A thin, fifty-ish man sat in the other car with his head in his hands, his arms propped on the steering wheel. At my knock on his window, he turned to me. He had large, frightened eyes, long lines running down his face. "I'm sorry," I said. "It was my fault. I'll call the police.

We had collided on the bridge over the Hartsdale train station. I walked down the stairs to the platform and phoned Rachel. "The insurance stuff is in the glove compartment," I told her.

By the time she got to the car, I had already started walking down Fox Meadow Road.

Mrs. Levine lives on this road; it cuts across the whole town. The symmetrical, red brick houses are closer together than they are on Saxon Woods Lane. When the weather's nice, you can see and hear the children shout "Out!" and "Spud!" as they play on the front lawns; on my road, the houses are set far back and hidden by thick groves of trees that absorb all the noises.

Most of the people have grown-up children who don't visit. Sometimes their grandchildren will come and set up croquet in the back yard, if the house doesn't have a pool or a tennis court.

Snow had begun falling by the time I reached Mrs. Levine's door. Her dog MacDuff always comes to the door when he sees me, nudging me to pet him. She let out a cry when she saw me and pulled me in. "I'm sorry, I said, looking down, "I'm dripping all over your carpet." I didn't know why she looked so upset until I looked into the mirror in her front hallway. A purplish bruise had spread across my forehead. There was blood on my neck. I raised my arm to wipe it away, my hands covered with scratches of dried blood from before. I got into an accident," I told her.

Later, sitting in her small library with MacDuff and a blanket tucked around my knees, I said, "I guess I have something to tell you." She handed me a cup of steaming tea and milk, and told me I could stay with her as long as I wanted.

Rachel and I agreed that she would come get me in a weekâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; that's today, this morning. We didn't talk about where we would go. I decided I would stay in her dorm for a while. She's a junior and doesn't have any roommates. She could sneak me food from the cafeteria and I could read and listen to music in her room, use the practice room in the dormitory's basement, write on her computer. To me, it seemed like a good plan.

She got into the 300SE. I don't know why she picked that one. It had gone into the shop and come back too quickly. It crashed through the iron fence and speeded off the driveway. I don't know if she heard the engine roar before it accelerated in reverse, if she felt the car lurch backwards and realized she was falling. I don't know if she was conscious of the glass from the windshield sprinkling over her. She's not conscious now, as two nurses work over her, picking the glass slivers out of her body with tweezers, one by one.

She had to play the victim to my stupidity and Papa's anger. That's the way good stories go, Mrs. Levine said, when I asked her why we had to read Sylvia Plath and Eugene O'Neill, they're depressing, that's tragedy. Unhappy endings.

Papa doesn't know I still have the key to the house. When I called Rachel last week, I

heard him shouting in the background, that since I left I could never expect to be welcomed into his house again.

Papa didn't leave any of the lights on and my vision is blurry. I think I can hear the empty house creaking, settling in. It was built in 1910 and it is still settling in. My heels click and echo on the cold marble and tile floors of this large, hollow house. I stumble into his baement workshop, grab the first large metal thing hanging on the wall. A wrench.

I work from the west to the east side of the house, from the garage on the left thru the two-car garages to the one on the right. I am methodical. First the driver's window, the front seat passenger, back right, back left, three even strokes of the same weight, raising my arm then dropping each time with equal force keeping strict 3/4 tempo. pound pound pound pause. pound pound pound pause. The glass flies back, there's some in my hair but still I move to the next car, and the next. I check them off as they were drummed into my head: 420SEL, 560SE, 300SD. These are the best-made cars in the world. They were crafted with attention to the finest details. Pay attention, appreciate the beauty, the crescendos of the engine, the melodic contour lines, the rising and falling phrases of the curving chrome and steel. Are you listening?

I'm telling you something...

Listen. I need to tell you a story.

newton

kaneshi ro

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jima

Chatham and Back after E.Bishop's "One Art" You notice some misplacements never last: the midnight note left underneath her door just hours before, forgotten! (as we passed from room to room along the crooked floor and lit the logs and figured out the flue) like details of a distant drunken scene.

(We watched the little windows turning blue from pillows propped against the firescreen.)

Seductions of the towel and flesh above, and solitary ambles into town to buy the Times (yes lost, forgottenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; love!) and orange juice. Then comes the drive back down where lost is more, and found is nothing less.

What's left to learn? The art of loneliness.

2.

When lost is more and found is nothing less, new keys, new jealousies, new wasted days, what's left? To learn the art of loneliness.

What's lost comes back. You unpack, you undress and guess plays host. The gentle stranger stays now lost is more. And finding nothing less

'Olin

stein

you recognize the bed you left a mess for vagaries: returning from your haze what's left? To learn the art of loneliness.

Accept goodbyesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; but second tries' duress?

To court disaster in a straying gaze if lost is more and found is nothing less, the fingernails finales to caress, and hearts' desires merest shadow-plays; what's left? To learn the art of loneliness.

Long live the love! the love isâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; dying, yes but oh, the odd, the overwhelming ways that loss unmoors and founders, nothing less.

What's left, learn it, the art of loneliness. for A.

o h n m

e

y

er

November 2 lorin

stein And even if one day she understood what excess brought her coffee up the stairs with milk, it wouldn't do a bit of good.

If he still left her cold and she would brood no longer on the old undone affairs, and even if one day she understood how friendship wings its way back to the rude old parts themselves, the tatters and the tears it mends, it wouldn't do a bit of good.

If she wished to forgive (and if she could), if honor might spring up among betrayers, and even if one day she understood the petty claims, the hands held in a crowd, that love would burn what shade the body bears with it, this wouldn't do a bit of good.

Your inner eye still sees them where they stood on their way out, still fills the two close chairs; and even if, one day, she understood, she'd know:

it wouldn't do a bit of good.

UN LE TO

e sit in the food shop in International Arrivals at Kennedy

I

t, waiting for my father to return from his trip to Korea.

Ev ryone else waits patiently for the Korean Air flight downstairs in front of the customs exit. We pick at the sesame on the buns of the ugly hamburgers we have bought and stare outside at the flurries. My mother and I do not have serious conversations often.

I wonder what I should say, something to say, so that we can pass the time. I think of my relatives in Korea. My father has five brothers and three sisters, but my mother doesn't know too much about them. She has three sisters and one brother; I remember him better than the others. I met him in 1983, the last time my family went to Korea together, the last time I was there. We were visiting him at his apartment, a severely cubical four-room abode with a nice view of the Han River. He wore thick metal-rimmed glasses, and smelled of alcohol and smoke. He smiled at me once, with yellow teeth, and he took his glasses off, showing me that the yellow of his eyes was not the tint of the lenses. During the get-together, he

ken

moon

and his family played a Mozart trio for us. His son played violin, and his daughter played piano, while he sat in an old Queen Anne imitation playing a dark brown cello. A "musical family."

A few days after the visit, my uncle showed up at my aunt's home, where we were staying, and asked to see my father. My mother dragged me away from him, repeating that he was drunk, and that I shouldn't go near him. She was speaking rapidly in Korean; I couldn't tell whether she said "drunk" or 'sin. I allowed her to pull me into a side room where she told me to stay until my uncle left. Listening through the

Mirons,

door, I could hear my uncle asking my father for some money, while everyone scolded him for being intoxicated. I don't know whether my father gave him any.

I take a sip of my Sprite. "Mom, can you tell me a little bit about uncle?"

"What, my brother?"

"Yeah."

She starts to pick at her lips. You know Kenny, your ah-joh-shi had a bad life.

He did fighting in the Korean War, you know?"

I nod, more at the way she repeats "you know" and pulls skin from her lips than at what she is about to tell me.

He loved to sing. His tenor, as his mother often said, could attract moths and spin silk. He hoped someday to study music in Germany, and eventually become an opera singer. His father discouraged him endlessly, telling him to become a doctor like him. In protest, he took a job as a janitor at Seoul University, and paid for voice lessons with his earnings.

He also played the piano quite well. Often, he would go to the university's auditorium at the end of the day and practice on the Steinway with a black satin finish that sat perfectly at the center of the stage. Sometimes he stared at the strings inside it, poking his head under the large wooden canopy, whispering on the thin silver triplet of the high C, running his fingernails gingerly along the segments of the thick copper string of the lowest A. After learning Schubert's Ave Maria, a piece of simple arpeggiations and distinct melody, he went to the piano and sang while he played. His voice soared like a feather above his undulating hands, gentle and loud. A few people in the hallway heard the music and stepped inside the auditorium quietly. They listened to the boy as the vibrato of his voice climbed into their laps and ears and the piano relaxed their bodies. When he finished his duet, the small audience applauded. He stood up and smiled, and took a short bow.

On his seventeenth birthday, his father made him join the South Korean army, to make him realize how useless singing was. His mother made him a black scarf that they

1.1t,1,11

took away from him on his first day. A month into his training, North Korea crossed the 38th parallel. Seoul would be taken a few weeks after the invasion. Every day he and the other soldiers fought a little, but mostly retreated, across rivers and between hills. The first Americans to arrive didn't know what to do, either. They ran south for two months, finally forming a stable line of defense around the southeast corner of the peninsula. The Americans started calling it the Pusan Perimeter, even though Pusan was over fifty miles away to the south.

Every day he sat in shallow trenches dug along small rivers and on hills.

Many men in his division were shot while taking a look over the sandbags or dirt walls that shielded them. Once, near Taegu, he heard the breaking of glass, and turned to see a man fall to the ground, blood pouring from his right eye and the back of his head. His hands clutched a pair of shattered binoculars. Maybe he looked north not for enemy troops, but for his family. No one knew anything about their homes and their loved ones. What might the communists be doing to them? Too many stories floated around the front like forgotten ancestors, haunting the sleep of the men who dreamed of raped sisters and brothers lying face down on the sides of roads. Sometimes he closed his eyes and saw himself in an anonymous grave, leaving his now son-less family storing away his sheets of music. He didn't want to share a grave with the men around him; they seemed to revel in their sweaty odors and they smoked too much. He wanted his voice to remain perfect even after death, so that he could sing for God and his angels. None of these men listened to him when he sang. Maybe his father had told them not to.

On a certain day, the fighting became especially intense. He and the other men crouched behind a line of stones, waiting for a chance to fire across a flooded rice paddy. Bullets smacked against the rocks and pierced the water with muffled splashes.

For a moment the firing lessened, and the boy popped his gun over the stones and fired without aiming. When his ammunition was expended, he pulled his gun back down and hugged it while he searched for another magazine. As he fumbled through his pack, a picture fell from one of his pockets. A girl, six years old, her front teeth missing, hair done in a tight black ball on top of her head. A black and white photograph of his baby

sister smiled at him.

Quickly he prayed to God, and raised his right hand above the stone fence, hoping for a bullet to pierce it. He wouldn't be able to pull a trigger, and might be sent south, away from the fighting. As he waited for the pain, he saw images: a large, wrinkled hand whose skin slowly stretched and became young, then the bullet piercing it, shattering it into millions of jagged rubies; then a paler hand, translucent, blood from the stigmata radiating from the hole in perfect, even lines. He jerked his hand down and stared at it.

His piano would be angry. As he looked at the wrinkles of his palm, the redness of his fingertips, a bullet hit his sternum and lodged itself in his trachea.

I look up at my mother, surprised. I did not know my uncle had been shot.

A sudden urge to see the wound rises up in me, to see the disfigured skin stretched across his chest, the center of the scar where the bullet had entered.

"Did he tell you what it felt like?"

After the initial shock of pain, he slowly began to realize what had happened. He could hear a steady bubbling noise from inside his shirt, and tasted blood at the back of his throat. A nosebleed? Lapsing into unconsciousness, a vision filled his mindâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a valley of rice fields, tendrils of morning mist dancing around the thin green stalks of rice. A pink sky, purple clouds, and an oblong sun settled in between the hills. The landscape was a mirror mosaic propped against the horizon, the hills forming bas-relief patterns of tree and green and peach blossom. Tiny waves of water, sound waves, singing of the home village. Roses of Sharon tugging for freedom from the bushes that sustained, suspend them. He had expected heaven to be blinding white, not a scene from some ancient landscape screen.

Voices faded the vision; he could hear, faintly, through the snoring of his wound, English words. He recognized a few, like "Christ" and "Shit." Ten minutes later, having forgotten to listen and rapidly returning to his vision, a soldier stuffed a rag into his chest, stopping the bubbling, causing him to cough blood, staining his teeth.

Litvtoly

Eventually a UN crew picked the group of men up, and retreated with them to Taegu. Two weeks later, he regained consciousness in a small room, a tent. Slowly, he sat up. An American wearing a white gown walked quickly past him; he tried to say something to the doctor, and felt pain rip through his chest. He collapsed back onto the cot, banging his head against its metal frame, and cried for the second time in his life.

Seoul was recaptured, lost, and recaptured for a final time by the U.S. Eighth Army on March 15, 1951. He returned to Seoul soon after recovering, leaving his unit, which had continued northward, now fighting against the Chinese as well as the North Korean army. It would stay there for the next two years. The city itself was completely destroyed. It almost looked like Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs. He couldn't imagine that so much concrete could become dust. In the rubble, people sat and tried to sell vegetables or cook food, staring through the steam from their pots at his shaved head.

Children wearing nothing but shirts ran around the few standing slabs of concrete, their hands covered with cuts and abrasions from trying to lift rocks and scraps of metal, the blood's flow stopped by dust clinging to the wounds. And always, a line of dirty, tired people heading south, covered with blankets and pans, unable to trust the permanency of this second UN occupation. The city had collapsed four times now under the weight of black boots and tanks that spread their cancer of bullets and ideology, dropping stillborn children onto the pavement. Four is an unlucky number. Maybe after the fifth time it would end.

I have a book that says the Korean War was the first war in which the U.S. felt the need to bomb cities in recapturing them. Seoul's devastation was accomplished for the most part by American bombs. There are stories of fairhaired outcast children and dead mothers. There is a picture in the book of an old man walking along a dirt road, destroyed buildings in the background. He has a massive wound on his forehead, and his right eyelid is swollen completely over his eye. Blood stains the crotch of his white pants, which are torn and tied around his thighs to keep them from falling. Behind him walks a small girl in a sack-cloth, in a pose identical to that of the anguished old man. I don't think she is making fun of himâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; she stares at the ground. I cried when I saw this photograph.

[.terry

M..â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

"Mom, why don't Korean men cry?"

"Sometimes they cry."

"I've never seen dad cry. And uncle only cried when he was dying."

"They don't cry because they sweat too much when they're a boy."

As he approached his home, he saw his sister in a traditional dress giving some Americans cigarettes in exchange for bubble gum. He ran up to the them and grabbed her, dragging her away from the confused soldiers, leaving the still-wrapped pieces of gum scattered on the ground.

His home had survived the communist invasion, though black soot covered its walls. His sister whispered to him that the red bandits had tried to burn it down because they kept the door locked. They wanted to take father away because he's a doctor. They broke the doors but he hid in the toilet pit, and mother gave them all our food and cigarettes to make them go away.

He walked through the doorless entrance, and stepped into the courtyard.

Everything was immaculate, even the small round roofstones his mother arranged along the perimeter of the walls. She sat in the center of the courtyard, scrubbing wet clothes against the concrete. Upon seeing her son, she stood up and rushed to him, and hugged him, tears falling from her creased eyelids, repeating his name over and over again. His father sat on the steps to the main room, pointing north, anger flowing from his sagging cheeks.

"Do you know we live like animals while the army takes care of you?"

In answer, his son shook his head. No. "Do you know that we have nothing to eat?"

No. "Do you know they have killed your uncle and all your friends who went to the University? Aren't you lucky I sent you to the army? At least you get to fight, instead of suffering in silence."

Literary Elf

4 MI,1

His pointing hand shook. "Why don't you say anything?"

The boy took his shirt off, slowly, and revealed the bandage wrapped around his chest, then unwrapped it carefully and showed his parents the stitches and enormous bruise surrounding the wound. His sister ran away, his mother tried to rewrap her son's chest. His father lowered his arm, and his hand settled into his lap and relaxed, no longer pointing.

I stare out the window, at the hundred cars parked outside, all gathered together and empty. My mother stares with me, continuing the story as the taxis drive by below us. She speaks rapidly, sometimes in Korean, letting her brother's story flow like a suddenly-remembered dream, the words misting the cold window in a growing, hazy circle.

I have an urge to write my name in the condensation.

The next week, he decided to visit the piano, to play on it and remember and cry. On the doors of the auditorium, amid bullet holes and dust, were notices for everyone to keep out. He pushed against the door, and found it stuck. Kicking it a few times, it finally opened enough for him to squeeze through.

Inside, piled among the velvet seats, were bodies, white eyes, thin hands, and dried blood. The auditorium was being used as a morgue. Looking behind the door, he saw that a corpse's hand had jammed it. He vomited, welcoming the sharp, burning taste which helped to cover the odor of the bodies.

With respect and haste, he made his way to the stage, where only a few bodies lay piled, and sat down before the Steinway. Its black surface had faded somewhat, and the keys were covered with fingerprints. At first he wondered if the dead had been trying to play the piano, but realized that the people who had brought the bodies here had probably hit a few notes out of curiosity.

He wiped the keys with his sleeve, huge dissonant chords erupting from

0 2

the piano as his arm pressed into the keyboard. He played a few scales, warming his fingers, and tested the pedals. Then his left hand began playing arpeggiated chords, his wrist rising and falling gingerly with the music. Then the right hand joined in, playing single notes, a melody. The piano sang slightly out of tune, but with energy and relief. It had waited long for a gentle harmony. The sound filled the auditorium hesitantly, unsure of where to go among the soft, uneven surfaces of the bodies. As he approached a strong crescendo, the boy took a slow, deep breath that straightened his body, and tried to sing.

"Ave." He stopped playing, jerking his hands away from the white keys, and looked carefully at his palms, then at his panting chest, then at the silent audience.

The announcement of my father's flight interrupts us. My mother and I get up and throw our uneaten food away, and proceed downstairs.

"I tell you some other day about the end of story."

"I already know it. Ahjohshi's an alcoholic, and everyone's ashamed of him."

My mother responds in Korean, "His tears are clear."

Literary

III

:T.

4

barney latimer

JIM

A COY_ED

Bar Joke 1: T

g ys talk nt a bar. The first guy orders a beer.

a RLJlooks at 1 1 0you just jut th

wo of them and goes "Why don't

Three Religions A priest, a rabbi, and an Indian chief are in a boat together on a fishing trip. It is a beautiful day and they all have good luck. Four or five fish each. On the way back, the Indian chief sings a song.

The European Community An Englishman, a Frenchman, and an Irishman are all on the same plane. There is trouble with the motor and the plane begins to dive. The three discover that there are just enough parachutes to go around.

The Animal Kingdom A duck walks into a pharmacy. He says to the guy behind the counter, "I need some ointment to put on my wings." The guy says, "We have nothing for ducks here."

iohn hodgman

Bar Joke 2: Misunderstood A guy walks into a bar. He has a dog with him. The dog is blind in one eye. The guy says to the bartender, "Ask me about my dog."

The bartender has heard it all before. He is tired of sweeping up after bad puns and unlikely misunderstandings.

He begins to feel he is being taken advantage of. After his shift is over, he quits. He spends the evening in the room above the bar drinking beer and listening to the radio.

a.ja

n

e

ohnst on

Q)

Cl) I.

CD -

•

1•

she led me to fields not far outside new haven: down middletown avenue past the greenhouse to half moon road, past, and through the stop sign.

o

a) co _c 0

L.

4--i

Cl) co

E

she laid her stone barn-jacket over the wet straw pressed in a wheel's T tread, the rotting pumpkins painting a northern smell across the tops of the brush. she said look there and arched her arm like adam's across the rust sky, a michelangelo curve you know, pointing to the dingy house, and to the tool shed leaned against it, edging rugged and dispirited onto the field, soot from the chimney a guard against nostalgia. see there how a hill can protect a home.

2. the tall plain-spoken girl from sarah lawrence, hair parted like hay lying feathered in the sun— drying, waiting to be smoothed and bailed and tucked away. hair slightly green in the rain, but not in a bad way, persimmon when the sun shined rarely through it. freckles.

and pear-shaped breasts.

and that white skin.

her best gesture a shrug; like her face when she said I love you, or anything difficult. like when the sun hits her shoulders and she pulls her sweater over her head— the same movement as every night's undressing; hunches her shoulders and off it comes with a let's get to it rustle, and she is plain-spoken and tall and not at all happy.

3. her arm then, like adam's across the rust sky. more power there than in landscapes, she knows.

I look at her until her strength gives and she folds

herself around her knees.

precipitate ash lands

on the collapse, coal-black, spots herâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a snow woman as thin as onion skin or tracing paper.

blue veins glow

dimly, as through milky quartz or alabaster. whiling away the time with arms and vistas I count myself lucky.

I am ash anyway.

she cries into her wrapped arms.

across the plain

of her sinewed trembling neck and shoulders the ash mixes with sweat and mottles grey like running mascara.

4. this is my hometown and I should be able to make myself happy here. she says.

I know all the roads and all the good places

the skeleton of a bird lies pressed in the mud.

summertimes I used to walk around town in shirtsleeves peeking through everyone's open doors, watching their tv. bones cleaned of muscle and glowing white against maroon.

on the promontory we'd scrabble down the rocks to the water and watch sails float across in russet shadows. pebbles from behind gravestones,

we threw

the pose of flight.

the music from the anchored boats drifted across the water.

and the people laughing.

wings beat in my ribs,

rary

I

4III

and the smell of gin.

the future fossil interred between us.

5. we were first in the field outside new haven as students, only second as lovers, we made a pretense one night to drive.

-she was the astrophile. the moon hung low and bellyfull behind malevolent clouds. the equinox had brought it nearer than usual I supposeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; she was the astrophile. it hung low like a bloodstone so, startled, I stopped the car. she laid her hand on my chest. you are scared, she got outâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; she was the astrophile. she whispered the constellations a map of far-reaching horizons and memories, she ran her finger along orion's belt. she was the astrophile then.

6 neither as students of the stars, since it is day, nor as lovers, since I am tired of trying to make her happy. she has stopped herself we are returned,

she looks directly at the sun through the cracks between her fingers. the sun, her meditation vessel, she rocks on her heels, picks apart straw.

from crying.

do you remember when you used to call me astrophile?

I find her face with my hands. her face cool like china. a kiss:

her mouth more like a payoff than a celebration.

do you remember the moon sinking? yes astrophile, I can see it. do you remember I gave you the sky? yes astrophile, like a handbook of double stars.

yes astrophile, I remember.

Literary

A

E

Just1 3orn_

saddler creek

KODY loved the apple trees. Not the apples, 0C thYre bitter.

He loved the trees. And then the blossoms in the spring. Newly fallen snow of petals and plumes. And sometimes the wind blew them over the drive and into the lower orchard.

They were pleasurable then, but not always. In the winter the trees could be bitter too. The toboggan would start slowly and bank; bank turning through the wells of snow beneath them. As it sped down the bank and over the road and into the air as it leapt into the lower orchard and came, too quickly, to the tree-well, and at the wrong angle. The splintering and biting cold and the aches told it more slowly, but with less reverence.

His mom was there too. In her boots; the ones the boys talked about. Green-eyed and his mom. She had followed him in the woods the first time he rode horseback. Spying through the

j.

gustave elliott

trees. And guarding.

Once a year she worked at the trees. When there were no blossoms. She would kill them a little bit saying, "They won't bear fruit if you don't." She often spoke like that. Things had to be cut back in order to grow.

Kody did not like them. They were not sticky and sweet like an orange. They stung in his throat. Made his eyes water.

And he smeared the juice on his bony cheeks. The dirt there muddying his face. The juice stinging his eyes more. He ran those fingers through his hair.

L._

2 orange

THERE was a time, earlier, when Kody remembered them both. They were together then.

He came up the stairs with Blue Dog behind him. Pushing at his legs. From the garage, he had heard them fighting. He pushed the door, which had no knob, open with his foot. And Blue Dog ran in. The stove puffed smoke. Opening the door did that.

The socks were mostly dry above the stove. And the frost was frozen into tricky patterns at the edges of the window panes. Kody's father stood in the kitchen. Mom by the table. His father said something which could never be said again. Took two steps toward the table.

On the table there was the bread-bowl with fruit. His father took the orange from it and pressed it, twisted it, against her forehead; dripping. She, for a moment, absorbed it. And then sat. Cried.

Kody comforted her for a moment saying he knew how she felt. He did not. And she told him that. His father had stepped bulkily from the room.

3 in the volkswagen

AFTER Rick was when they lived there. Only for a while. In transition. It sat behind the Falls Inn tavern. A room or two. No view. A hot plate and a refrigerator near the table. But the roar of the falls made it nice. The men rarely came back near the house. And Kody slept in the windowless loft.

She awoke him in the middle of the night. They got in the volkswagen without speaking.

The men behind the bar were quiet. The slamming doors hurt the ears. Men pushed the car. It would start. Kody climbed in the back seat. Smelling the human odor of the seats. And fell asleep.

Bumping up a curb and stopping. In a lot. Kody sat up and did not ask.

"Stay here."

"How long will you be?"

"A long time.

"Why?" "Go back to sleep."

"I want to come."

"They won't let you in. Stay here."

Kody watched his mother walk toward the light at the back door. Others came and went.

Someone held the door and she went in. She never wore her boots in places like this. He saw people going in. Coming out. Until the windows fogged up. He lay back down on the seat. His cheek stuck some to it. Shadows moved back and forth in the fog.

Kody climbed behind the seat and pulled her jacket over his head.

4 neighbors

THE nearest neighbor was probably Balloo, but the road to Don DiPiertro's was shorter.

Balloo lived behind the house by about a quarter mile or so, but Kody had never been able to see his house through the trees. Balloo lived alone. Was the last real cowboy. Wore chaps and a beard. Shot Agnes Pigness in the butt when he found her in his garden. They found the arrowhead when they ate her.

Don didn't visit much. But Kody visited him because he ate white bread and bought cookies. Dad hadn't liked Don much, but that was only because Don reported him to the FBI. "If you can't trust your neighbors . .

Dean lived nearby too. Probably closer than the rest. But he seemed liked family. The orange dot bobbing across the field at night. Reflected in the spectacles. Clomping up the stairs.

Hugging Kody goodnight with a prickly chin and smelling of cigarette smoke.

Just down the road were the Grassidonios. They came mostly in the summer. With their daughter Athena. She played with Kody and got in a lot of trouble with him. John Grassidonio was almost a lawyer, but he was caught growing pot. Reni was diabetic and poked herself with needles

er.ry '2

in front of them all.

Fort Salish was owned by the Evans. It was built as a replica of the old western fort.

Some idea for a resort. The money ran out. But John Evans went every day to town. To get a paper for the Mrs. The kids offered a ride to the school bus, and when the road was bad, they were the only ones driving in and out.

Wally and Dot lived by the fort And they had cookies too. But were old. They talked about old things. Sometimes their son was there. But he was old too. He didn't talk about old things. He drove fast. And ran over Kody's tricycle. He drove fast in Corvairs. And wrecked.

The Hannahs owned the big place that named its intersection. There was a cattle chute that came through the fence near the road. Kody could climb off of his horse and onto the chute to get down. Les Hannah helped him sometimes when he came to visit Ben. They left before too long though, and the place was empty.

5 at school

SOMETIMES when he got to school, Kody would be muddy. The trip to the bus was often a mess. And there was no easy way to clean up. The kids laughed. They laughed at his boots too.

The mud. And he was quiet sometimes. Mrs. Berry asked him once, in the morning, to wash his face. Kody stood, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. And for the first time saw himself. Dirty.

Long hair. Poor.

He swept the hair from his eyes and cleaned his face with a rough paper towel. The soap burned some. He picked the mud spots from his jacket. And his face reddened. He walked draggily into the classroom and hunched his shoulders so that he would not be five feet tall. Later he would lie about his height. Now he lied about his birth. Wanted to seem short but important.

Other kids left him alone. Mostly. Except for Traci, who though he was a fighter. Kody fought him once. Traci pushed him and he tripped. Turned around and set into him. Hard as he could. And walked away.

I

le1,11),

He thought of the other boys some. Admired them some. Hated them too. Watched them play. Kody liked cars though. He played with them in the dirt until after the bell had rung. He dug car tunnels in among the tree roots. In the corner. Near the fence.

a. o

AL_

1

a

n

e

hnst on

YOU D0,- , —\

Let's face it— I don't know shit about Faulkner r agging verandahs or cicadas, I don't know what gnolias smell like, I don't diphthong single vowels,

ALwAys HAVE TO S SOvET — mInn

.ve never been to the Spoleto festival, my

grandparents don't live in white houses with columns, I don't know any crippled or deaf or dwarfed people, I don't know any cantankerous but strangely wise women named Miss Amelia, I was never invited to a

debutante ball my mother doesn't make her own t have especially close and maternal

relationships with older black women, I don't hide my

emotions or act any more polite than anyone else, I don't like RC Cola or Moon-Pies, I don't eat hush puppies, and I don't call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. I certainly don't have much regard for feminine virtue when that only means virginity, and I hold doors open but only because it makes me nervous to walk into a room first.

micha el

When I first came up here, people listened As if being from Alabama made my stories worth listening

mccullers

to. As if I were going to tell a different kind of story.

The kind of Southern story we've all come to expect.

But the real South is a parking lot. It's a stripmall-Putt-Putt-Golf-car-dealership-pick-up-the-drycleaning-at-the-drive-thru-and-get-some-Chic-Fil- A-onyour-way-home-honey-white-collar-service-industry-schmuck driving an air-conditioned Volvo wagon. Cellular phones, golf clubs, big-screen TVs. Most of all, places

42

to park. A bunch of rich, white, boring people living in places called Southbrook, or Brookdale, or Forest Brook. That's what I'm about— the suburbs. My South. The call of the cul de sac.

Around and around. Errand as raison d'etre.

That said, here's a real Southern story. It happens in parking lots:

When I think of Birmingham now, I think of free parking. Hot, stifling, and ugly in many places, spread out over the hills surrounding Red Mountain, my city's no place for pedestrians. You only feel you're out in the fresh air when you climb into a car.

I remember in my pre-sixteen years walking around endlessly in malls, watching two movies at the theater, waiting— on parents and siblings— to pick me up and take me home. I remember spend-the-night parties where we ordered pizzas, watched the Go-Gos on MTV, mixed the light-colored liquors in the cabinet into a drink for ourselves, and talked about those goddamned cars.

We all drove at sixteen— nobody failed except metal-heads and girls. It was the vogue to handicap yourself for the test, to go without glasses or use a stick-shift car— it made a better story. A lot of us drank already, so I had a screwdriver the morning of my test, joining in maybe the only true Southern tradition. They said at my high school that any fool could keep a car in a straight line, but only a truly competent driver could drive drunk and drive well.

As if it were a matter of honor.

My father didn't think so, being a fundamentalist-type Southerner (though he would never admit it), so there I was spending my last high-school summer working off the debt I owed him for the DWI I got the night of the prom. Working another summer at Famous Ted Pizza, in a strip mall right off 280 on Green Valley, in the suburbs. We did a small but lucrative business hitting the yuppies and the elderly invalids in the neighborhood; a Subway anchored the other end of the strip and the stores in between went in and out of business— florists, hair stylists, video stores. The Western across the street was a big draw, and the Grub Mart catty-corner from Famous Ted sold us beer and cigarettes because we gave them free pizza.

I crouched in the shade of a Mercedes 300E with its doors open and Drivin and Cryin'

AL

playing on the stereo. Gale sat in the driver's seat with her legs sticking out of the car and I kneeled beside her on the ground laughing. She had on short cut-offs, a tank top, and beads— costume de rigueur for Birmingham summers. She had thrown her Birkenstocks on the gray leather back-seat because she drove bare-footed. Gale's folks let her drive as long as she didn't go out of Mountain Brook, their suburb, where she wasn't likely to hit anyone they didn't know. She read Tom Robbins that summer, didn't work, and had an unabashed tan, still treasured in Birmingham. She was running her bare foot up my leg. I was laughing. "Catch the Wind" played on the Blaupunkt. Gale kissed me on the mouth and I felt the Freon cold on the back of my neck as she breathed in my ear.

It was truly an outstanding car.

I was sitting in the parking lot trying to tell Gale to go home. I had work to do. She was too young. It was too hot. But I was laughing, and I was hard under her foot, and when she kissed me again I whispered in her ear, order a pizza, and she drove off.

Instead of underwear that summer she always wore bikini bottoms under her cutoffs. I rang her back doorbell and she answered peeling off her shirt and shorts. She walked back to the pool, her hair down her back. She hated bras, hated swimsuit tops, hated tan lines. She took off my Famous Ted t-shirt and the matching red baseball hat. Lying on a thin beach towel spread on the concrete patio, I felt every shift in weight in my hips and ribs as Gale pressed down on me, as we rolled around, as I pushed myself up on one elbow and kissed her neck and breasts. We kept our eyes shut against the glare from the white patio. Sweat wet our hair, rolled into our eyes and down our backs. Tiny beads dewed on the fine golden hairs that trailed from her belly to her neck.

I kissed the sweat away, kissed her breasts over and over, kissed down to her belly. We were slick with sweat and I kept thinking to myself that I would faint it was so hot. I rolled us into the water, locked together— into the deep end. We laughed. So far, it was a summer to laugh.

I came back to work wishing I hadn't gotten stoned at Gale's place. Driving can be a hassle and the dope just made the heat worse— so hot that the mall throbbed as I pulled into the parking lot, shimmering like gas fumes over asphalt. That goddamned heat— my car just sat in the lot between runs, absorbing it, steaming up. There wasn't a tree within a mile, just parking lots. I

44

get in the car and all I can feel is the heat from the pizza box rising in my face, and it feels alive, the smell, like it's trying to smother me. I get out of the car and go into the store and the two ovens have the whole place on fire no matter what we do with the air-conditioning, and the smell is there, too. Worse in the store. You can't get away from it except in the walk-in freezer where it's cool and smells like ice. We sat back there a lot, eating Greek salads and smoking cigarettes.

If we ever ate a pizza, it was a pineapple pizza. I've talked to a lot of people who worked in pizza places and it's the same everywhere.

I was in the freezer eating a raw green pepper and smoking a cigarette when my manager opened the door. I put out the cigarette, but didn't hurry; Tim wasn't stupid. He didn't usually show up there until six. I asked him about it and he said he had to meet somebody. I didn't press him. Tim dealt a lot of coke from the store and I didn't want to get him nervous. I don't know a single delivery place in Birmingham where somebody wasn't dealing. Everything was there— a delivery set-up, lots of cash transactions, a bunch of dumb kids. Tim had it down. He coordinated; he dealt. We just drove. He never cut us in on the money, but we didn't care. He'd get us high or sell to us at a discount— that was enough. We were just delivery boys.

Tim offered me a line in the freezer and I took it, surprised. He didn't usually break out any coke at work until closing, when it was just you and him doing the dishes or sweeping up.

He'd give you a line or two, enough to keep you awake, then he'd snort about an ounce and dance around singing to the radio and bake a special calzone. It wasn't so bad, closing. So when he offered me the line in the freezer I was surprised, but I took it. I figured it might pick me up from the dope. I asked Tim what was the special occasion and he said the shit was just so good he had to let me in on it right there. I snorted another line and agreed with him, numbness spreading across my face. He asked me if I wanted to buy an eight ball and I said, what makes you think I've got that kind of cash, and he said, your loss.

Tim gave me a break until the dinner rush— about an hour away. I went outside to see what was up and met Trip and Zane showing up early for their shift. I could tell they were both stoned as hell and I asked them what they'd been up to, which was nothing except driving around and getting high. We had three places— the old covered bridge off 280 farther south, the

botanical gardens behind the zoo, and the park around Vulcan. I knew from Trip's wet hair that they'd been at the bridge swimming. All those guys ever did was drive around and get stoned.

Zane asked me if I wanted a surprise and I said, depends on what. He opened his trunk and pulled out a hibachi, one of those tiny grills. He said he stole it from a patio at the condos down the street where young, Prelude-driving legal assistants live. We walked over to the Western and bought some burger patties and some charcoal and fired the grill up right there in the parking lot. We stood around in our cut-off Duckheads, eating burgers and laughing like three old Mountain Brook dads at a Fourth-of-July party.

We were about through with our burgers, about ready to start work, when a couple of girls drove up in a blue Acura. We couldn't see them at first because of the sun glaring off the windshield, but we didn't need to— you can tell what someone's like in Birmingham from their car.

You can tell what part of town they're from, what kind of music they listen to, whether they get high, whatever. I drove a boring Toyota that everyone called the Uncar, Zane drove his brother's old Honda which was so ragged-out that you could shift without the clutch, and Trip had an old International Scout— which sounds cool, but he didn't even own the top, so it was a pain in the ass.

From this blue Acura— no tinted windows, a few plastic Mardi Gras necklaces hanging from the rear-view mirror, a very discreet Bob Marley sticker on the side window— we could tell that these girls went to Mountain Brook High, that they drank beer but not liquor, that they got high with older guys occasionally, that one of them was a virgin and one of them wasn't, that they probably wore Laura Ashley, and that we probably didn't have a chance in hell with them.

The girls were pretty, both of them— money does that. One's name was Karen, the other's Paige. Normally we wouldn't have talked to them, but all three of us were fucked-up so we invited them to sit down. They did. I guess we could be funny when we wanted to and so they hung out a while, listening to our stories, until we had to work. They probably liked us because we were different— they listened to the Dead, we listened to REM— but not too different.

We had to work and they got up to leave. We said we'd see them. They bought some frozen yogurt at the Grub and drove away in their Acura. Trip decided he liked Paige, Zane decided

46

that he'd better stick with his girlfriend, and I decided to stay out of it— I was leaving for school soon anyway.

Mileage. I kept track of how much I drove because I got paid for mileage at Famous Ted. I drove almost two hundred miles every day that summer. After work, after seeing the same fences and houses and yards, I'd get in my car and head off. Drive to Zane's house, then to Trip's. Back to Famous Ted to see what was up with Tim. Then over to Vulcan, why not? In my car alone, delivering pizza on a long run, I'd listen to some slow depressing song and the road would stretch out like a terribly cliche dream. And then at night my dreams would stretch out into a road. Not a highway— usually just that long run between the store and River Ridge. You never made money on that run.

It was the Fourth of July and all three of us had to work. We didn't do any business because everybody was barbecuing and didn't want any goddamned pizza, so we just sat around in the store listening to the radio. We used the speed-dialing on the Famous Ted phones to win Doobie Brothers tickets.

We had run into Paige and Karen a couple of times in the last few days— they were making themselves easy to run into. Paige lived in our delivery area and lately we had seen her name and address come in on the printer more and more. We sat around the store and thought of plans.

At about dusk, the assistant manager came in and let us all off early. He had about five kids and he needed the extra hours. We were wiped-out from work, for no reason, and didn't really feel like doing anything, not even trying to find Paige and Karen. We sat in the parking lot smoking cigarettes as night fell. It was actually a pretty nice night— the breeze was good and some rain had cooled things off. We watched the assistant manager's kids play around in the lot. Their mother sat in their shitty station wagon with her head leaned on the window. She sat that way the whole time the guy worked. The kids were running all around and yelling, but there wasn't anybody to bother. We'd call at them if a car was coming, but otherwise we just let them be and watched them.

Literary

4

g

After a while we couldn't stand it anymore. We pooled our tip money from that night and walked over to the Grub Mart. They had set up a Crazy Bill's fireworks shack next to it, so we bought one of those assorted bags of fireworks and a twelve-pack of Milwaukee's Best at the Grub and walked back to the store. It took about ten seconds for those kids to tear into the fireworks. We drank some beer and watched the kids blow up everything in the parking lot.

Three-quarters into my second beer, Paige and Karen drove up. Trip and Zane and I sort of laughed— it was such good PR, with the kids there and everything. The girls each had a beer and we gave each other looks about that, too— we weren't used to giving away beers. They asked us if we wanted to go to a Mountain Brook party and I said, hell no. They were making fun of us for being scared, and we were sitting around laughing, when Gale drives up.

In a story you're supposed to lie to make yourself seem more mysterious than you are, or more interesting, and you're supposed to show and not tell, but I don't always feel like it. So I'll tell you— when she drove up I was embarrassed and I blew her off. She drove away crying, and I figured it was because she was upset with me.

That's not nice, it doesn't make me look good, but there it is. If you want a nice story, I can give you one any time:

One night, in early August, we were hanging out at Vulcan— the world's second-largest cast-iron statue and Birmingham's biggest tourist attraction. We climbed the pedestal up to his toes and sat down, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels. Whiskey's expensive, but Zane's brother had just joined the Air Force Reserves and vowed to stop drinking, so he gave us a bottle he'd been saving. We were in a pretty good mood. Trip had gone out with Paige some by then, usually with the rest of us tagging along, but a couple of times alone. He was going to Birmingham Southern next year and Paige had another year in high school, so they weren't in any rush. I was the only one who wasn't going to be around— I was supposed to leave for school in less than a month.

From just the toes of Vulcan you can see the whole of Birmingham at night. At least downtown. The center of the city lies in Jones Valley between two great iron-ore mountains, or what we call mountains. The Expressway, which splits Red Mountain down the middle, fed

LICerary

downtown every morning and drained it every evening. At night the gash in the mountain bled light from all the cars rushing into the suburbs. It was a good place to come and watch traffic; Birmingham looked beautiful from there.

We were a little drunk off the Jack Daniels and the wind was clear and cool up on Vulcan, and it made us want to have an adventure, just because we felt we could. Trip and Paige had gone to the B-52s concert the week before, so I said we ought to go to the botanical gardens and get her some flowers. We could take them over to her house and leave them on the door. It seemed like a decent idea and it was getting time for the guard to make his rounds, so we went ahead.

We coast up into the parking lot of the gardens with our lights out. Trip and Zane in the Scout and me in the Tercel. We go to the edge of the fence and sit down at the pagoda where we usually sit. No one's around. Trip gets up and walks along the edge of the fence, and after a while he calls out and we get up and follow him. He shows us a bunch of flowersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I'm not sure what kind, big and yellowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; sticking out through the fence. He starts to pick a few but I stop him. I know where there are some orchids in the Japanese Garden. We've never broken in before, just hung around outside.

We climb over the chain-link fence, no trouble. You just have to be careful of the barbedwire at the top. We're all pretty skinny, so we just slip on through. We poke around in the bushes for a while until I find the little pond I'm looking for. It's filled with Japanese goldfish, little gold streaks through the coppery water, and crossed by a wooden bridge. We take the bridge to a perfectly round island in the middle. We sit for a while and smoke a cigarette and pass around the Jack Daniels again. After a while we pick some of the orchids and get ready to leave. Trip throws down a cigarette butt and we're telling him how uncool that is when a voice yells at us, what are you doing here. We don't know what to do, so I just answer, nothing. The guard is on the other side of the bridge, just waiting.

Then Zane laughs and hops in the water, Trip and I follow him. We splash to the other side and I see all the goldfish darting away from us. By the time we get out of the water, the guard has run around the pond and almost caught up to us. We all run to the fence, holding flowers, and try to climb it one-handed. We aren't getting anywhere that way, so Trip and Zane drop their flowers

and climb on over. I pause to toss mine over the fence and then start climbing. That gives the guard time to reach me and I hear him say, come here asshole, and he grabs me. I pull away, ripping my shirt, and get over the fence. I go so fast that I don't mind the barbed-wire and it cuts me in the face, right under the eye. But we're all laughing and I gather my flowers and we drive away.

We have to leave the Jack Daniels, of course, so we drive to the Grub to get a six pack.

We sit a while in the parking lot of Famous Ted to decide what we want to do. Trip still wants to leave Paige some flowers, so I give him half the ones I have. I go into the store where Tim is closing up, looking happy as usual, and I ask him if we can have some yard-bombsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; those packets that businesses make up and throw on your lawn. Famous Ted yard-bombs are a Ted cup stuffed with a sheet of Ted coupons, a Ted balloon, Ted refrigerator magnets, and a pad of Ted sticky reminder notes. I take about ten and a pen and go outside again. Trip and Zane think I'm crazy or drunk, but I explain my idea. We write a while and then drive over to Paige's house.

We stick the magnets and the sticky notes all over her Acura and blow up the balloons to put on her front porch. On every sticky note we write a word so that all-together they make a letter to Paige. Trip wants to spell her name on the porch with flowers but he doesn't have enough, even though I gave him half of mine. He asks me what I'm saving the ones in my hand for and I say, / have to go, and drive off.

I get to Gale's house and it's almost dawn. I go around to the back where her bedroom is and climb the porch to her window. I just have to make sure I'm gone before her Dad leaves for work and I'll be fine. I knock softly on her window and she wakes up right away. I haven't seen her in over a month, since that night at Famous Ted. Orchids are her favorite.

She's so mad that she's crying, silently, and she won't say a word to me. I hand her the flowers and I whisper that I'm sorry and she whispers that it's not enough. I point to the cut under my eye and whisper, I went to war to get you these, and she starts to smile. I kiss her on the neck under her ear and when I pull away she's grinning her giant, crooked grin, but she's still crying.

All her long blond hair is gone, of course, and she's thin, her body not like I remember it. I

50

ask if I can touch her head and she nods yes and the hairs growing back are like gold silk even though they're so short. I kiss her on the forehead and kiss her eyes shut. We don't talk about the chemo or anything, just catch up with each other. I tell her she should go to sleep, and she's too exhausted to argue. I have to carry her across the room to her bed; I put her in and take the flowers out of her hand. Before I leave I cover the bedspread with sticky notes— eight, one for each letter. When she wakes up she'll read it.

That's a nice little story— it's got a beginning, middle, and end; it's got a little sad twist, some irony— but it's a lie. That night ended when we put the notes on Paige's car. That part's for real— I thought of that. We did it, and the next day Paige called Trip and said it was just the best thing, and very clever, and they've been going out ever since. But I didn't go to Gale's house, though I thought about it, though I knew which window was hers, though I did save the flowers.

All I did was drive around and look at my favorite houses on Southside. I listened to the classic rock station play a whole side of Pink Floyd. I stopped and got gas. I thought about Gale, but big, fucking deal— everybody thinks all the time.

Here's the true story. It's not as good:

I knew Gale was dead. They had told me that. I was at work. Just a car wreck— like could happen to anyone. They said she was dead right away, broken neck. Not wearing her seat belt— going too fast, drunk or stoned. Hit the guard rail by the bridge going at least fifty. On that narrow road. That heavy Mercedes— just plowed right through the rail, wrenching the metal out of its concrete supports. Flipped upside down into the creek. She was already dead, with no seat belt and everything. Not even a Mercedes. I knew Gale was dead. They told me that. But they didn't tell me where. And when I saw the wrecker's lights, and the crushed 300E, and the creek flushed with the workers in yellow coats moving through it, I was surprised.

The last time I really saw her we went for a drive. She was into her first course of chemo, that part's true. She was terribly skinny and her hair was gone. I never asked to touch it; I tried

I! itt,, dry

not to look. We skinny-dipped in the creek and she made some bad jokes about how we wouldn't have to wait for her hair to dry. She told me all about the chemo, tried to explain the special way it hurt— not the worst hurt ever, but different. She never really threw up after the second time.

When she climbed out of the water was when it hit me that she was really sick; the headlights made shadows on her body where I'd never seen shadows on her before. She wasn't the kind of girl where a rib or a collar bone sticking out looks right. I was so used to seeing her hair wet down her back when we swam.

We drove to the covered bridge to drink some beer. The odds were even on the chemo.

The truth is that she never got mad at me for not calling. She never cried in front of me except that time in the parking lot at work, and that was the day she got the test results back. She spent a lot more time with her family after she found out. Her mother was a Jesus-freak and prayed all the time anyway. After about five beers, Gale laughed and said, the worst things always happen to families that pray.

So we went for a ride. Gale was as drunk as I was and she drove. She turned off the airconditioning and opened the windows and sunroof. She turned on the stereo loud to Steel Pulse.

I would've felt like a big cliché riding around in my little Mercedes, bare-footed, stereo on, hair blowing in the breeze. I said that to her and she said, you asshole, I don't have any hair, and grinned at me. Took off my Famous Ted baseball hat and threw it out the window.

The Mercedes is in beautiful shape, the V-6 humming, and we cruise down the Expressway at 90. That late at night no one's on the road and Gale lets the car drift across the empty four lanes. The wind sucks our words out the windows. She drives with one hand and grabs my neck with the other. I guess I expect her to be weak, and when her hand grips my neck I'm surprised at the great strength in her fingers. She pulls me to her and kisses me. I open my eyes and see that hers are closed; the car keeps down the highway; her kiss is strong and it's her tongue in my mouth and her teeth mashing against my lips. I pull away and look up. We're almost on top of this little pickup in the right-hand lane. I yell and Gale stomps on the brakes.

We skid to a stop in the gravel on the side of the road. I open my mouth and she puts her finger across my lips—

I only realized after that summer, after I went to college, that I tell stories. Not that I got brilliant all the sudden, but I realized that I was telling stories that people wanted to hear. Stories that I'd been taught to tell. Things happened slowly in those storiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; they were lyric and sad; they were ironic. But things happen incredibly fast where I come from, or sometimes not at all. A car hurtles down the road, hits a bridge. Cancer wrecks a girl's bones. Some guy and his friends sit in a parking lot and drink beer, night after night. One mall is like another; one parking lot is another parking lot. I never change.

Literary

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newton k an eshi ro

ACTIVI

ni D d ley its on a shifty futon reciting his tree poetry

for Laura in a lugub ious whisper. He is always this way when he visits her apartment under the pretense of a strategic consultation, as he does every other day, and Laura knows that he will bring a worn sheaf of scribbled pages along with his pamphlets for the cause. The futon seems to be in a perpetual slow shrug so he hunches to keep from sliding off, clutching the poems to his waist dramatically as though he were a sizzling, black bean. There is no escape once the phone rings and the question is sprung, "Will you be here tonight"â&#x20AC;&#x201D; only waiting again for the knock on the door, the details that he claims cannot be asked over the phone, the murmuring of a day and a time, her considered and often ignored response, the tawdry smile and the reams of poetry slipped from the inner lining of his raincoat.

If the stay runs long she boils water for peppermint tea, which he kindly accepts with half a nod and an eyebrow raised ambiguously. There is much trapped energy in the curve of the eyebrows, so carefully blow-dried for bushy effect. He sips from the mug she has decided is his, a cow shaped mistake from a college

peter k essler

ceramics class that he unfailingly compliments before reading.

"Cute mug. You'll love this poem." Laura sighs, sinks into her chair and fights to keep herself from dreaming.

We wound our God and Mother Nature, We crush her babies in the womb, We strip her forests for unused toothpicks, We break our world to shards of glass...

She has learned not to fall asleep while he drones. It would hurt him only a little. In the past she has woken at two A.M. with him asleep on her couch, stone-still until the morning, always with the excuses: he was too sleepy to drive, the danger of catching cold in the nasty fall air, the impossibility of sleep where he knows they are

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watching him. She has learned to stay awake, to touch his arm with sisterly grace when he finishes and rises, sometimes an hour later ... to gently pull him to her door and to ask, not too warmly, if he needs a shot of caffeine. Dudley jingles his keys and wonders, lips wet with tea, if she desires him.

There's no hesitation in saying "no." She supposes he tacitly acknowledges this by leaving, though even at "no" he never loses that gleam and he still stands too close to her at the door. â&#x20AC;˘

You don't have anyone else," he tells her, "and you enjoy listening to my poetry. Some

day ..." Laura hasn't the heart to say that she hears better recitations from drunk veterans each poetry night at Sammy's Place. It serves him well enough at the rallies, crooned over the wind to people whose rumps have gone stale against the earth. Once she tried to let on that she needed sleep. "Poetry is about life," he told her, is that too strong for you Catholic school girls?" Still he returns.

"Thank you, again," she says. He exits in contorted blushing like a sunburnt baby. Laura will not steal that pride from him, for he is an important man of great and fragile ego who has organized many people, hatched many subtle plots and successful demonstrations, and drawn many to the cause. Then her involvement in the group has always been predicated on her resemblance, in Dudley's mind, to "that kind of New York woman," and her willingness to play the role. You are very beautiful," he tells her. It disturbs her to realize that he considers her all the more beautiful for her stage persona, the fallen woman trapped in the half-light of an unwanted, ill-begotten pregnancy.

But her devotion to the cause redeems the indignity of his continued admiration, and his devotion, stronger than hers, underlies her undaunted respect for him. If he is vain, dogged, he is nevertheless an energetic man who sleeps each night under a hostile video camera.

Some days she wakes to the phone, leaves the city and drives to the suburbs where the ranch houses are widely spaced like peas squashed on a child's plate. This is how she earns a living.

The elementary school kids need a substitute teacher in any number of towns, someone dependable, always capable of bending the corners of her mouth into a rude scowl and squelching someone's hopes for a circus day. Somehow she has slipped into this after college, directionless as she was, armed only with the hazy determination to bide her time in a useful way and finding this way as a substituteâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; before she had met Dudley at the sing-in, before it was less biding her time in anticipation than biding her time against it.

School days, she stares from a rude chair and repents her wrathful silence, pondering her love for the ones who hang their heads toward their desks and cover their foreheads with dirty

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hands, readying themselves for martyrdom. A moment of silence. They tug at her skirt when she relents for a puppet show. So much preciousness! They carry cartoon lunch pails from which they offer her carrot sticks; from tiny purses the tight-jeaned third-grade girls offer her unicorn stickers; the small boys admire her silently. "You got long nails!" shouts a boy in the first row. She feels that she hardly knows them. Other days, outside the schools, she remembers them and wonders if they are the reason that she slipped into it all.

What does it mean to act like "that kind of New York woman?" It means that those other days she volunteers herself to Dudley, painted and primped, in a full-body purple miniskirt, billowing with the aroma of roses, her nails manicured by old Edith Nash under Dudley's expert eye. Laura strides into the clinics, scouting the doctors and the routine. No woman in the clinic looks as beautiful as she, a point of irony which always presses in, the women with as yet unswelled bellies, alone, some in shabby blue jeans with circles grooved under their evasive eyes; some not yet grown with baby fat filling out their cheeks, breasts barely peeking from a junior high school sun-dress, feet jittery on the clinic linoleum; some in their twenties, in gray business blazers, their gazes undaunted and aggressive.

She dresses up for demonstrations. Like a mouse she scoots in under escort, cowering in sunglasses and lipstick with the bearded fellows swearing at her, "dumb bitch," hurling their cardboard signs into the air, old Edith Nash growling, "murderer! murderer! murderer!" and flipping spit onto her cheek. Laura is sympathetic to the battered police. Despite the hazy yelling and the demonstrators hissing, milling against them with rude fists, they shake their heads and push her through. Always she shivers. Edith presses toward her with a quivering red face, Dudley snarls "Thou shalt not kill" through a megaphone into the chanting crowd. Inside she collapses to the floor, rifles through her purse, loosens the smoke cans. Pandemonium! The breaking of glass!

Beside Lawrence, on the grass, she limps her body. The police lift the sedentary protesters running sticks under their shoulders or with rubber gloved fingers digging rudely up their nostrils. augment Edith gets a nose bleed--an old woman! The outrage of this brutality the victims share and among themselves much like the wind speeds the slow growth of a forest fire. Don't forget the blood! Dudley invokes the beating of the young Gandhi and the Nazi's execution of Martin gently Niemoller. To ease the monotony of a spartan jail, some thirty sing the night away while Edith it converts a guard to the cause. It is not Laura's first arrest, nor does she worry at her record; with proves her convictions, "a red badge of courage" as Dudley likes to say. It eases her to realize

Literary

each arrest that while she has overstepped the boundary of legal activism she has not overstepped the limits of her own conscience. At daybreak they pay their fines and skip home.

Dudley assigns her the same role at the next demonstration, the operating excuse for another night-time visit when the smoke can clunks onto the sofa amidst a flap of poetry spilling from his unbuttoned coat. The next day comes, she drops it before the arrival of police and it sends the waiting room into panic, a thin doctor wheezing and clutching his head, a bulky woman hacking on her knees by the magazine carrel. Nobody touches Laura when she slips from the arena with her velvet handbag bouncing at her hip. Outside, the uninitiated protesters cheer her purported change of heart, behind them already the vague screams in the entrance and the murmur of smoke. She glides past a distraught woman in the flower sundress unable to walk toward the smoking door for the ardent sister clutching her leg. "Stop the Holocaust," someone screams. Laura turns back to watch the woman in the sundress now immobile, gawking at the clinic belching smoke from doors and windows, staring down at the sister stuck to her leg like lint. The woman stares back at the clinic, stretches her hands and moans like a trapped child.

Laura's dimples run long and sour, even when the waiting car has whisked her from the site and an anxious hand reaches back to pat her arm. She winces. At the debriefing they tell her that in the hazy disruption Dudley has run in and ripped the telephone jacks from the front office. That night the group drinks champagne at Edith's house, toasting the salvation of what Dudley estimates to be seventeen children. He recites a small poem atop a plaid ottoman and cites Revelations.

She resigns herself the following week when he returns to her room and forces his way past her to her futon where he relaxes, wordlessly, as she sets the tea kettle on the stove. The day has frittered away among school children and an afternoon stroll past the chipping jungle gyms and the sunken swamp land where the high school children disappear for the afternoon with cigarettes and booze. This day a reticent third grader has presented her with a valentine and a sticky candy, prodding her thigh gently with his hand and murmuring, "You're pretty." She has allowed herself a smile until she realizes that the child will not let go. Then she has sighed and unpeeled the fingers of his hand, bellowing "thank you" with guttural gusto before pushing him toward his seat. Wryly she imagines that someday he will carry a cellular phone like Dudley, coax from a megaphone and corner women in their own apartments. What can one do? However forcefully he speaks in the field, however warmly he recites his poems and fingers the cross about his neck . . .

Dudley smoothes his hands along the top of the futon, eases back and beams complacently.

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Does he know he is becoming a great man? Laura has tolerated his enthusiasm these months out of the hope that he would tire of her thin, sparkling dresses, her frustrating ignorance of scripture, her latent suburban Catholicism and her persistent refusals. His stories amazed her in the early days when she was fresh in the world, wandering and vague. Even tonight he will drop his poems on the table, lean across and clasp her hands.

"I was seventeen when I left home for Austin," he will say. Without a stutter he will tell her again of the Mother who ferreted through his garbage can and read aloud at the dinner table the letters of his that she had found laying crumpled and torn, or inquire of him upon finding a used Kleenex if he had contracted a cold. Laura envies his faith. Something happened to him in Austin that he will not relate to anyone, though he admits that he had not eaten for days and that he had been too insensitive to God to pay any mind when He tugged his shoulder in alarm. Edith suggests he was raped by a trucker and left for dead; Lawrence suggests they threw him in rehab for heroin addiction and that it took a prison sentence and methadone for him to be reborn as a preacher. Dudley will finish speaking, give her a squeeze, arch his eyebrows and leave it to her to fill in the blanks. In two years he has risen from Austin up through the ranks of the evangelical circuit. In Baltimore they can't do a talk show on abortion anymore without inviting him to speak, be it on militant activism or on Fundamentalism. "They're the same," he'll say, so emphatically that she smiles.

Not that she feels rebirth tugging at her skirt, she has other vague ideas about why she has thrown herself into the causeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it's the Pope and Dudley, and the film she saw in eighth grade, the stern sisters, perhaps the polite skirts and the stark, evenly spaced trees lining the walk in front of her childhood home. It gave her direction. And the sensation, at last, of laying on the brink of pertinence. They called her often in the first months, nothing else for her to do but return their calls, visit their houses and their guitars and punch bowls, and they welcomed her into their homes with the ecstatic self-assurance of righteousness so that soon she felt that no other place in the world was so important as Edith's house, Dudley's car, the jail cells or the clinics.

Usually she balloons with conviction. Then come those times when the protesters let themselves be dragged across the ground by dumbstruck shadows or when gentle

=MI>

Lawrence, like a well-groomed celery stick, ogles her after a rescue and says in all kindness, "You cut a fine figure out there today, Laura." Then, then...

"We are going to save a lot of babies tomorrow," Dudley tells her over tea. "Mothers betray their wombs, Mother's dual betrayal..." It is late and she drives him in his car to a clinic twenty minutes away, another squat stucco building set like a wart beneath the moon. He shuffles to a.postage box twenty feet past the clinic and inserts a brown paper package, then winks. He rides with her once around the block, passing the clinic again before squeezing her shoulder to stop some fifty yards from the building. He is gone with a shovel and another package for only five minutes before huffing back, the shovel now wrapped in two garbage bags and laid to rest on two more garbage bags taped to the back seat of his car. He grins at her with a raw joy, crimson and ripe between the faint light of street lamps. Up the street, three hundred yards from the clinic they pass a bathrobed man walking his dog. Both the man and the dog peer inside the windshield at the passing car. Dudley brushes her cheek with his lips, caresses her hand on the gear shift. "Better for him to think we're lovers," Dudley says. A vague aftershave stinks up the air. "I would believe it."

She bristles, sweat prickles her underarms. Her skin feels cool and wet and she imagines herself chafing in the air. "You are a bit too coy," he says. "A woman needs a man and a man needs a woman." She feels him examining her from his seat, tracing her curves because he can, intent upon her breasts. She will refuse his accompaniment to her door.

The explosion makes lead story on one of the networks. At Edith's house they gather for deviled eggs, red wine and cookies. Bobby strums a guitar, Zinia slaps a tambourine against her hip, the group holds hands but there is no confession. Lawrence swaggers to Dudley, pats his back and booms, "I don't even want to know." It came before noon, shattering all of the windows, closing the clinic for the remainder of the day. A nurse, caught by the flying glass, has taken forty stitches in her face and arms. Earlier that day, a postman reported half-frozen fetal remains in the post office box closest to the center. People are whooping, dancing about Edith's carpet, giggling wine down their throats. Laura refuses Lawrence's hand. "Why so glum?" he asks her, "One nurse, maybe ten babies . ." and he shrugs.

"It's a long way from glueing up keyholes," she says.

"I admire your virtue," he says, cupping a hand beneath her chin.

So the phone rings the following evening and the weight of her body slumps in the chair. If she makes a decision it's not born of logic but inertia, the rosary wound too tightly about her fingers

and the clock too entrancing until the answering machine picks up. "We're being watched." Dudley comes to her door later, when the lights are all off, pounds five minutes, jimmies the door knob until a man peeks from another apartment and tells him to pipe down.

Nor does she pick up the next night, nor the next, not after the network news, another explosion in Baltimore, this one stronger, the front entrance blown away and two doctors with lacerations, one in and out of coma. The following day, returning home, she finds flecks of paint stripped from the edge of her door frame, but her apartment is unoccupied and undisturbed. What does she think? She ponders, looks back over her shoulder when she takes long walks, examines the rear view mirror when she drives. She fears the finger on her shoulder, the pat on the head.

After a week Dudley has ceased calling and she slips into brooding, into indifference, not thinking much at all.

Into deepening autumn, she does not wash her hair, letting it collapse, slowly, into strings.

People stare at her less, and she begins to like it that way. Late into the afternoons she strolls the suburbs, eyeing the houses and the uniform trees, the shorn hedges and monstrous weeping willows. She buys housing magazines at CVS and pages through them in her bedroom with the light low and the shades tightly drawn. She never refuses a substitute slot.

In the evening she frequents Sammy's Place. The bar rumbles with juke box noise on all days other than Wednesdays, poetry night, when a mix of the haggard and tidy, the hideous and the comely grasp the open mike to read. She reads herself— a poem about eating disorders in a Catholic day school which elicits tears from a certain woman in the audience who later introduces herself as Gloria, her head oblong and oily like a black olive. It turns out that Gloria went to a Catholic boarding school where the sisters rapped her knuckles with rulers if their postures ever faltered, whether in the meal room or at their desks. Gloria crosses her legs and smokes a little, though she's been trying to quit since she was fifteen. They trade cards at the bar— "Penny Poker"— and Laura hums, with her voice approaching a gurgle.

In passing weeks, through autumn into the beginning of winter, they see one another more frequently, always chatting at the bar about nuns and priests, apartment life, careers. Sammy lays out beer nuts and chips which Gloria refuses because they inflame her acne. Is Laura happy? It has ceased to be a matter of biding her time. Only passing day to day, each day like the next, comfortably aimless. One evening a folk guitar medley filters out of the juke box and they dance together across the floor, spinning each other and laughing so that people at the tables are clapping

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and hooting and Laura and Gloria grow red in the face. Laura relishes the heat at the ends of her fingertips and the skitter of sweat under her arms.

If a man approaches one, the other knows to shuffle away after a few minutes of the right smiles, the hand extended toward the chest and easy nodding, toothy gleaming, and now and then they are approached, softly, more easily. Afterwards they discuss the men who've taken their numbers, disappointed at how seldom they seemed sincere, especially those approaching Laura. A man named Hugo succeeds in taking her hand, fixing her with quick, gray eyes, setting up a dinner which he attends well-dressed, freshly shaven, though they leave in separate cars. He calls again.

She doesn't hesitate, late in the evening, to answer the phone and speak to him.

Then mostly nights pass in front of the bar television, chatting about the day, Gloria's coming promotion to area manager for Haber and Haber textbook sales, Laura's decision to teach next year full-time. The news mentions no more bombings, occasional glances at the papers turn up no mention of arrests nor anything other than forgetting. Soon, her memory hardens and she imagines that Edith and Lawrence and Bobby and Zinia and Dudley and the others have neither ceased work nor continued, only that they have frozen into position where last she saw them, at Edith's, all of them holding hands in song, eating brownies while Dudley hectors the earth from inside a dream.

And one night Hugo arrives at the bar already a bit drunk. Not that this bothers her greatly, for they have seen one another four times already, quaint meetings, heated kissing afterwards in the parking lot, strong man's hands playing aggressively across her back, how strong his interest, and anyway they have plans to meet again in a few days. She thinks nothing of it this particular night.

Gloria moves to the end of the bar, into conversation with a short man in a cardigan sweater. It's early in February, with the moon stuck somewhere between half-empty and half-full and Hugo talks of movies, his gaze so tender and his hand a little rough. So he insists on escorting her home, rubs his hand over her shoulders and buries himself in her hair, mouthing "beautiful, beautiful, beautiful" though she protests that that's not it at all. Now what of it, she tries laughing a little and he insists she remove her blouse, Dudley's games now flicking through her mind, Hugo so raw and red-faced through it allâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; now what of it, with the recollected shadow figure of the mute woman in the yellow sundress, hands outstretched like a child's and Dudley now passing through her memory and gone, now the furthest thing from her.

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CRAZY Do you know what I mean? It was the summer of my nineteenth year of life and I was crazy, back then. At eighteen I had finally quit my grandmother's Pentecostal church. Just never went back. They're still all asking about me. Those fundamentalist Christiansâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;sure you can talk about them all you want, but have you ever been to one of the churches? Have they ever made you fried chicken and pecan pie, when there was nothing in the world that you ever wanted more than that and Jesus?

So here I was with Gideon now, and he's Jewish. I never told my mother that I was living with a Jew, although she'd like that better than just living with any old white guy.

Gideon is not a beautiful man by any means, but you know how sometimes people like you and you just have to respect them for having the guts to like you? It was something like that.

His thing this summer was crickets. I don't know why,

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packer

but it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed with the sky too hot and the screen window tears, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs to make music. Crickets were sexy insects.

I could sleep through just about anything but Gideon was an insomniac. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he were successful he would put it in one of those little Hickory Farm jam jars only

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New Yorkers bought to make themselves feel as though they were getting back to nature. He had pre-punched holes in the lid.

"Come back to bed," I'd say.

"I'm coming!" he'd say, and leap into bed, his skinny body trying to work its way around my fetal position.

"Come closer," he'd say. And I'd want to and then again I wouldn't want to. He hadn't even washed his feet.

Sometimes I'd stare in the mid-darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he'd bruise dark pink and you'd be able to see it even in the dark. I was very dark compared to him. He was so white I'd be disgusted sometimes. I'm sure he'd say the same about me. Being black, that is.

"I admire my mother," Gideon said as we ate bad three-bean soup at a gourmet place on Audubon. I was not about to ask "why" because I never liked hearing reasons for statements like those. In my opinion, they all grow out of that fifth-grade syndrome to make your mother or father the person you most admire. I've never admired my parents. My father's a drunk and my mother's schizophrenic.

"Why do you admire your mother," I ask.

"Oh, because she does wonderful things. She's a teacher. She could have made a lot of money but she decided to be a teacher," says Gideon. Gideon is looking at me. He really thinks I'm beautiful.

"I've never admired my parents much, " I say, "they love me and shit, but is that a reason to admire anybody?"

"Of course it is," Gideon says.

"That makes your admiration for the person rely on how the person views you, not on the merit of the person himself. Admiration is a one-way street," I say. Gideon doesn't believe me. I take out money to pay for the meal, but Gideon pays for it anyway. Sometimes he pays when we go out.

Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't.

Gideon brought some fish in from the pet store one day. He'd already named one Rasputin. He's leaving the other one for me to decide what it should be called.

"I don't care what it's called," I said. It was the thirteenth of July and I was supposed to be in China by that time, happily suffering through my first intestinal disorder or counting to ten in Mandarin. But I was not in China. My aunt Ruby was not going to teach in China and thus she would not have a place for me to stay so I didn't go.

"Name it China," I said finally. I knew that would make Gideon feel even more sorry for me if we named it China. Ruby and Rasputin sounded too trite. I'm no fan of alliteration.

"We'll call it China...aren't they cute?" I looked at them. I didn't think they looked cute at all. The fish were both orange and looked exactly alike. I think Rasputin was the one that was shitting. The cricket in the glass jar beside the fish looked like it was dying.

"I'm going to buy some books tomorrow," I told Gideon. He approved. I didn't really do I anything much but work at Pita Delicious two days out of a week. The Lebanese liked me, and think that's why they let me work there still. Business is bad for the falafel industry around Audubon, I guess.

We had not had sex in three days or so, and I sort of missed Gideon. I sat on top of him I had not but he only howled and made me get off. The sensitivity of that organ was something Sally yet reckoned with. By his bedside were almost nine jars, some Miracle Whips, some in Mansfield jams, some Vlassic pickles, some squat relish jars. All had noisy, chirping crickets them.

knew

I "Why don't you get rid of those crickets? If you love something set it free!" I yelled.

Gideon didn't operate that way. He loved me and he gave me a place to stay for a

too. hundred a month. That was a fifth of what he was paying. He bought all the groceries,

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When he loved something he fed it and clothed it and kept it alive. He would make a great father. But I wouldn't want my kids to inherit his nose. Nor his bushy eyebrows. I would never marry this guy, I thought to myself as I sank down on the bed. Not in a million years. Not if he paid me a million in cash.

The pregnancy test came out negative. Gideon hugged me. He had on cutoffs and a tshirt that read "Another Male Feminist."

"What would we have done if it had been positive?" he asked. We hadn't talked about that. When the condom broke I cried and went into the bathroom. When my period hadn't come I made Gideon buy a pregnancy test. We ate peanut-butter and jelly on bagels when the verdict was negative.

I thought of all possibilities, but had no idea which one was possible. All I could think about was being back in Fairdale, Texas. In one corner of my room back home was a big stuffed dog that my uncle won for me at the Fair. On my bookshelf was my Bible, underlined in varying degrees of hi-liter brightness. If I were still a fundamentalist Christian I wouldn't even be having sex. If I were a fundamentalist Christian I would have had no dealings with the Jews in the first place.

By the end of the summer all the crickets had died or gone south or whatever they do.

Our bedside smelled like the smell of other people's sex and Gideon had wrapped the dead crickets in a bed of Charmin before placing them in the wastebasket. He left the jars empty, unwashed, and perspiring with August heat and cricket juice.

I went to the bathroom and closed the door. He'd used all of the Charmin.

"Couldn't you have used the 1 -ply?"

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He smiled at me before drinking his Gatorade. He drank Gatorade before going to bed now. He says it helps him fall asleep better, but there aren't any crickets to keep him awake anymore, and I think the Gatorade actually makes him hornier. I didn't feel like doing anything tonight. The Lebanese at Pita Delicious were horny too, although I don't think I ever saw them drink Gatorade and I don't think they could really do anything because they're Muslim and unmarried.

Gideon put his arm around me and licked my shoulder. His nose ran around the dark outer ring of my breast.

"Quit it," I said, and turned over. I should have felt bad for doing that but I didn't.

Gideon was crying now, his soft sobs making his body quiver like some drummerless drum.

"Do you think we'll last through the fall?" he asked, blowing his nose.

"I don't know, I haven't thought about it," I said. I wasn't thinking about that then. I was thinking about the Lebanese being Muslims, not even having sex til they're married.

What's the point of being in a religion if you can't have sex, I say. You might as well be a cricket in a jar, all alone, dreaming of the one chirping next to you. All alone, driving you crazy.

0 w

(:::)

Nothing too remarkable at first— a hallway filled with buckets of fish, the cement walls cool, women standing in its embrace, idly talking— The movement between the rooms is slow; the fish slide with ease from

their buckets, trailing water, while in the light of the closed room next door two enormous cow heads strain on a board between two tables, L._

their tops sliced off, eyes rolled back, their smell filling the vacant room—

Rows of metal mesh stalls, shadows of birds held up by twine, outlines of entire cows sliced in half against the windows, (:::)

•.

legs spread above them like wings.

. and now, this dragging afternoon, immobile on a green balcony,

where the weight of the air hangs heavy as the trees low to the water, leaves trailing on the sharp white rocks, the wet glare a skin

of glass stretched tight over an ocean of frantic darting fish— Drifting in a boat at night, those fish flicker in the shadows, amazed at the beam of light cast down from the boat's edge, shining down in clouds,

:Ltuight and delicate, probing the floor.

Literary

Later, a memory of that drifting boat rocks her bed, water on land, and the fluttering of the sheet in the fan gives the bed wings, flapping, rising into the airâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

For in the faint expanding light of night an abrupt noise startles her from the coldness of sleep, the plaintive sound of a dog, a sound of grating metal, chairs banging and scraping

on a cement deck, the click of a door and its promise wild as the rainâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

And she is asking for deliberation,

for an encircling glance, for the measure of that terrible vastness

of the space between the cloth of the couch hanging and the floor.

And in this thought

of that space pressing down, in this thought of this loss of her body

which floats as though tied with twine, stretched and gutted, slipping from the comfort of circling memory, she recalls another story, moving enclosed and deadly

for days, a family in the winding paths of a swampAnd she thinks it is easy to imagine the beginning of their circling drive; it is like this drifting of her body, pieces of it fading a little at a time.

It is the stretch of Florida highway, the grey dust of the road turning to swamp, the enfolding, impossibly luxuriant, green moss hanging from the trees, changing to darkening clouds with the blurring darkening sky.

And the massive trunks lean in, silhouetted against the pale grass and murky water, the car windows are down, the car a dark metal box drifting through the trees, the insects swarming through the sweltering air, and they are landing now, buzzing at the last, resting on the smooth leather seatsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Literary 111'2 4 V

X

THE ODYSSm

Owen Gabriel's family's land is cold and brittle much of

the ear. The s ring shoots that manage to take root during the e in the winter. For several months every year r fre snow bleaches the earth, stealing landmarks, erasing paths, piling white flurries of doubt. Entire worlds rest beneath the drifts, silently conspiring to burst forth at the first thaw. The delicately crusted banks are two feet deep today, deeper where they lean against a tree trunk or stone wall. To walk through the forest is to lift your boots to unnatural heights before returning them to crunch crisp ovals in the whiteness. It is dusk, and the forest sounds lonely. A few isolated birds who forgot to fly south are whistling softly to themselves. The breeze stirs the branches just enough to pull down handfuls of snow in a muffled chorus of thumps. It is unusually cold today, and the trees have stiffened, frozen to the core. From here on the periphery of the forest, evergreens stretch for twenty identical miles, covering the sleeping land like a dream.

About a hundred yards from the edge of the forest, a picket fence pokes out of a drift, encircling a small, warm home,

$im on

whose steep roof seems ready to give way under a mountain of

gr eenwald snow. The hinges on its gate are reluctant, iced over, and whine softly as the gate sweeps out a quarter-circle of the occluded brick walkway that leads to the house. On either side of the door, mullioned windows scatter yellow hall light into the depths of evening. Both windows are frosted over, revealing none of the house's secrets. It is not too late to turn back. /X Owen's large older sister, Carrie, is in the living room chewing on her fingernails as she watches television. She is

noticeably overweight. Fleshy folds ripple underneath her baggy clothing and jiggle a little when she shifts herself. Her thick lips are tinted slightly blue. (They never regained a healthy color after the day she resolved to eat all of the snow in the back yard. She had to have her stomach pumped, and her lips nearly froze.) She takes air in enormous, rasping lungfulls, and lets it go noisily, exhausted from the metabolic processes necessary to maintain herself. Her thoughts wander toward the kitchen. She may have to watch another game show before it is time for dinner.

The kitchen is to the right at the end of the front hallway, where Owen's mother, Suzy, hunches over the stove and agitates a bubbling stew with a huge wooden spoon. Her eyebrows arch high over her dark eyes and seem to move independent of one another. She confines many of her emotions to her eyes, and when she blinks she still feels the back of her father's hand across the bridge of her nose. Little, anemic Suzy knows better now than to second-guess a man. She has learned to seek revenge quietly in the recesses of her own mind. She has taught herself the woman's subversive artifice of innocence. Now she is muttering something, which she breaks off every few minutes to shower another ingredient into her cauldron. Her head bobs slightly with the rhythm of the boil, and it seems likely that she will dip the ends of her stringy, black hair into the brew if she is not careful. She spends much of her time in the kitchen, particularly during the winter as the days shorten into one continuous meal. She learned her grandmother's mother's recipes from her mother, and has practiced them on the family as it grew to include first Carrie, then hideous Owen. Tonight's stew is a particularly powerful potion which will turn them all into grunting swine, and then, within the hour, put their docile tonnage straight to sleep.

Kitchen smells fan through the house, thinning and mixing with wood smells and dog smells. All of these tug at the attention of Owen's father Paul, who reclines in a huge leather chair in the paneled study, holding yesterday's newspaper too close to his face. He has his shoes off and his large feet up on the coffee table between the New Yorker and the TV Guide.

Danish is Paul's first language, and it shows in the set of his brow and tiny movements of his lips as he works his way through the front page. He is six feet tall and overfedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;his little wife has domesticated him. Paul had been a heavy drinker all through college. In fact, he was drunk

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the night he met Suzy. He lost a fight with a smaller, sober man and swore the stuff off forever. Or at least the week. It didn't really matter to Suzy, who was happy enough to marry a man who wasn't her slow, lobotomized father. Now, when Paul is home, he hardly ever leaves his study, and he saves his deep, distant voice for his occasional flashes of temper. He has, by now, turned into Suzy's father, but she doesn't blame him. It's really her own fault for having become her mother. Families cycle until something like Owen happens.

Owen the monstrous inversion, born feet first, is writing again. Today he has written "Is is not," which is shorthand for "That which is, is not." That truth is subjective has been something of an obsession for Owen ever since he first announced it in an elevator at the age of three. His parents, unable to distinguish prodigy from a fortuitous accident of syllables, were amused. They were less pleased when he began to deny their existence, but that was of little concern to Owen. At seven he finally understood that his happiness is contigent on his ability to cause suffering, so he began to write. Now he is fourteen. Thousands of pages of manuscript are stacked in leaning piles on his floor. He knows them all by heart and he hates them. His latest project, a history of narrative fiction, starts from the end of time and works backwards toward the present. He is only six hundred pages into it, and already all of his characters have become his family. That is his perpetual problem: No matter how hard he tries to escape the confines of his squalid reality, his fiction reverts to it. The best he can do is pull at the corners of truth, warping it until it threatens to snapâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but it never does. It just stretches, wrapping around his hands and clinging to his wrists like handcuffs. He will continue to write until he is caught in a sudden blizzard in Winnipeg, in which not two, but three identical snowflakes fall. He will understand that art does not imitate life, but vice versa. Fiction is truth: That which is not, is.

VIII Dinner finds the family crowded around the oval table, each in his own world. Carrie is eating voraciously. Her head bent low over her plate, she shovels the stew into her mouth as fast as she can chew it. She drinks her milk in heavy swigs and wipes her mouth on her sleeve.

Owen is not eating at all.

"Owen, honey, why don't you eat something?" His mother appears to be genuinely

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concerned.

"Why?" "You have to eat. You can't expect to have any energy or grow up right if you don't eat enough." She has misinterpreted the question. What Owen meant was not "Why should I eat?" but "Why do you care?"

"Do like you're told," Paul adds.

"It's good," volunteers Carrie, her mouth full of meat.

"I've already eaten. I've eaten a hundred times today. If I eat any more, I'll probably burst and spray you with guts." For a moment he believes it, and he finds the thought vaguely humorous. It would be an excellent way to go.

"Alright, damn! I am sick tired of this thing. You will eat the food." Paul's accent becomes heavier as he loses his temper, and his command of the English idiom abandons him.

"Eat you!" he roars, which, to Owen's ears sounds hysterical, and he determines to include it in something.

V// Owen is wary of his mother's spells, particularly the ones involving dead cows. She stalks cows. She stands naked in the pasture. The nuclear sun screams down all over, yellowing the grass and air, irradiating her skin. She gets down on all fours and moos. She smears herself in dung that bakes to a crust within minutes in the blinding light. The majestic cows nod their heads in slow acceptance and continue to chew their cud. She swarms with flies and wanders among the cows unfeared. She picks a magnificent specimen, fat and pure white save for a single black spot in the center of her forehead. Suzy circles in the heat, waiting for the sun to dip behind a cloud. Then she leaps up and strikes. The rest of the herd startles and flees as her teeth meet hide. She tears at the neck, ripping skin, muscle, tendon, artery. Blood splashes her face and soaks into the turf in crimson currents. The cow struggles for a few more minutes, but Suzy clings to her neck, tearing new holes to make the life leak out faster. When the huge yellow eyes roll up into the head, and the carcass sways like a tree, Suzy lets go and falls to the ground. The thud of the animal's body on the soft earth brings the sun out from behind his cloud. He curses Suzy and hurls his searing beams at her back until

she blisters. He will never warm her home again, which is why it is cold all the time. The witch has offended the sun.

While it is true that Owen's mother, the witch, is ultimately responsible for the death of the cow, Owen too is guilty. Pernicious ingrate. It is he who turned his mother into a witch in the first place. The weight of the cow falls equally on him. He has blotted out the sun.

Owen, master tactician, author, polutropos, you are accountable. In this, your world, you have conjured no end of malice. You have sat far too long in your little white room thinking in knots and conundrums. You see what comes of that?

Yes, Owen and his mother must share the burden of their deeds, but, just as Owen is guilty for Suzy's transformation, so is Paul guilty for Owens creation. It was Paul who dragged Suzy into his cave and took her roughly on his stone bed, who turned a blind eye to God and had his obscene way with her. When Paul was young he mistook Santa Claus for Christ. His prayers ascended to the North Pole. One Christmas he hid on the landing and waited for God to come down the chimney. His faith was shattered before he understood what it meant to believe. All of this deception had been practiced on him by his parents. His father had been God all along. It wasn't easy making a good Christian out of him after that. Santa Claus doesn't exist, but Christ does? Between two equally improbable constructs, the one who doesn't bring you presents is the real one. It's a lesson Paul learned early, and he carries it with him along with a scorn for religion and a hate for God. And so it came to pass that when Paul took Suzy, she conceived in blackest sin and bore him a son, a hideous feet-first perversion, Owen the Antichrist: holy retribution on Paul the heathen.

The laws of supply and demand incriminate one more suspect in the death of the cow.

It is Carrie, primary consumer, anchoring the food chain, who necessitates such meaningless slaughter. She opens her mouth and drives the market. She tears the living flesh from the earth with an invisible hand. She draws in her breath and inhales whole herds of cattle, still bellowing to the skies. She exhales entire fields of skeletons and pitted turf. She who seems guilty only of gluttony wallows in far more serious transgression. The cow is dead on her account as well.

They are none of them guiltless. The family stands convicted. They are individually, and as a family accountable for the black of murder and the white of snow.

76

V/ Suzy's potion has done its sinister work, and Paul is in his study again, snoring loudly.

His head, tipped to the right, makes a comfortable indentation in the great leather chair. Owen stands in the doorway moving his head around to cast shadows onto his father's face, and into his dreams. Owen once again considers killing him. It is an issue a son must deal with. How do you kill your father? Do you simply wear him down until he dies naturally, or do you, like Oedipus, help him along. Oedipus, of course, reminds Owen of questions of knowledge and guilt. Maybe we must kill our fathers by mistake. How shall I kill this beast who has not mastered the tools of language and civilization? I will kill him with words. Owen, author, weaver of stories, nobody.

V Odysseus dangles his hairy legs over the lip of a rock. He looks out over the deep blue Agean and thinks in knots. What if I hadn't come home to lthaka? What if I'd just stayed on Ogygia? He kicks at the rock and his left sandal falls off. He watches it bump twice on the stone before it is swallowed by a whitecap. Charybdis. What good is an epic homecoming if all you can do afterwards is retell the same story? He wishes he could make up new ones like he used to, but ever since he came back and slaughtered all the suitors, people know what to expect. Not a day goes by that some stranger doesn't come to the house seeking shelter. Then after dinner invariably he will say, "Oh, wise king, tell me the story of your homecoming," and look up at him with eager boy's eyes as if he has not heard it a hundred times. Odysseus is living his own death. The story has stolen his life. Every morning he walks down to the shore and sits on the rocks and tries to invent a new tale to tell. But it is no use; he always reverts to the same cast of characters: Kirke the witch; Kyklops the languageless ogre; Charybdis the all consuming mouth; and Odysseus, spinner of tales.

Odyssseus scans the water for his lost sandal. He feels that it represents the last of his dignity. What kind of an epic hero has to sulk back home in one shoe? Sometimes when he is very drunk or tired he still calls Penelope Kalypso. Maybe it is his fame tapping him on the forehead, telling him that it is time to step aside. Maybe it is his time to journey inland and plant an oar.

/V The moon spreads fuzzy blue fingers of light into the sleeping house. Everyone has gone to bed. Owen has finished writing mid-sentence tonight. "If I am..." it reads. Paul awakes with a startled whimper and catches his breath for a few moments. He sits up and slides out of bed trying not to wake Suzy. He is thankful for the full moon as he dresses by its sallow light.

Twice tonight the same dream has come to him. It can be no accident. No, the danger is present and real. Paul closes the bedroom door carefully behind him and decides to visit the garage first. He is sure that the creaking of the steps will wake the entire family. He can see them gathered on the landing watching him, wondering what he is up to. Owen, the satanic beast, must know. In the garage he discovers the coil of rope he was looking for under a spare tire. He loops it over his shoulder and steps back into the house. His trip back up the stairs is even noisier, and he tries to think of a plausible excuse for the rope. When he reaches the second floor, he paces softly to Owen's door and stands outside for two minutes breathing shallow diver's breaths. Then he turns the cool metal knob and steps inside.

"Owen."

"Uh. What?" Owen is not yet fully awake. "What? What do you want? What time is it?"

"Hey, guy. Come with me, eh? Come on."

"What do you mean? What's going on?"

"We must to go into the woods now for wood."

"We have plenty of wood. Why are we going in the middle of the night? What are you doing?" Paul grabs Owen by the wrist and pulls him from his bed. His father's face has lost any trace of humor or concern.

"Come with me now." It is an order. "You understand later." /II They make a strange pair, the two of them high-stepping through the forest in the middle of the night. Paul has secured six or seven logs of firewood to Owen's back with the, rope from the garage. Hunched over with his load, Owen bobs his head more than a foot below his father's. Every few minutes, they have to stop to let Owen rest his load against a tree. Why

78

isn't Paul carrying anything? He dares not ask. The two of them walk deeper into the forest.

The snow begins lightly, an almost imperceptible sprinkling of crystals. One flake of peculiar size and beauty lands on Owen's nose. He brushes it off without seeing it.

As the flakes began to fall faster, Owen can feel his mittens begin to soak through. Paul's eyes narrow in the wind, and he leans forward, letting it support a fraction of his considerable weight.

Within the hour, the snow has begun to blind them both. It is falling thickly now, drawing a curtain over their faces, and filling in their footsteps behind them. The wind screams past their ears and tries to freeze them. They have been outside for almost an hour, trudging into the heart of the forest. Owen can no longer feel his ears or nose. Although he has a hood, snow is blowing into his face and hair, and little rivulets of snow-water run down his neck. He may be crying now, but he can't really tell. Paul has lowered his head into the storm, and walks with his chin to his chest. A few more minutes.

The trees huddle together for warmth, quaking in the heavy gusts. Snow bends branches. A huge limb snaps and falls a few feet behind them, throwing up chunks of ice and frozen dirt. The snow is now so heavy that Paul and Owen can no longer see their own limbs in the white air. Paul leads them, holding on to Owen's rope, and stepping around trees when he collides with them.

Minutes later, they stop. The cold has deepened, but the snow has let up a little bit, and they can see that they are in a small clearing with an enormous boulder in the middle.

The drifts are now about three feet deep, and walking has become almost impossible. Paul reaches over to Owen and unties his bundle of wood.

"Come help me with this," he says as he begins to dig the snow off of the top of the boulder.

"Why are we here?"

"Where?"

"Here. Why are we here in the forest?" Owen is sure that some of the water freezing on his face must be tears. "I can't feel my hands."

"Use your arms then. Help me here." Within minutes the surface of the rock is clear.

"Lie down." Paul commands.

"What do you mean? What are you talking about? I want to go home. What are you doing?"

"Lie down on the rock." Paul's Danish accent has disappeared, replaced by a deep authoritative Canadian voice. He takes Owen's arm and pulls the boy down on the surface of the boulder. "Don't cry." He deftly binds Owen's hands and feet to the logs with the rope. He shoves the wood under the rock and secures it by kicking it in hard, pulling on Owen's limbs.

Owen considers the possibility that his father has tied him down to save him from the Sirens, but all he hears is the rush of wind and the creak of rope as his father tests the knots. Another huge snowflake descends, an exact duplicate of the one that fell on Owen earlier. This one is Paul's. It lands on his left hand. "Look Owen," he says. He pushes his hand in the boy's face.

"Isn't it beautiful? You already had yours but you missed it. Don't worry, there's still one more."

Paul tilts his face to the sky and squints his eyes.

"I'm cold," Owen stammers. "You can't do this."

"Why not? Because you didn't write it? Guess what, smart boy, I can write too. But I can do more than that. I can read. You made me a monster, didn't you?"

"No. Dad. No, I'll never do it again."

"No, I guess you won't. I'm not stupid, Owen. Did you really think you could kill me with words? Who's writing now? Who's the ape now?"

"What you mean?" Owen is appalled to find himself forgetting the world. He is speaking a foreign language. "What you doing to me?"

"I never thought it would come to this. I was willing to play along until you killed me.

How could you? Your mother was right. You are actually evil."

"No, please Daddy." /1 Morning's first rays meet Owen bent backwards with open eyes. The cold is extreme.

The storm's final flakes are falling. The third identical flake dislodges from the sky, and hurtles at the earth, a cannonball from heaven. It collides with the tip of Owen's nose and does not melt because his blood has frozen. His brain has splintered open. Shards of it stick out of the top of his head, and reality pours out like steaming water. It weaves words into intricate stories

Literary

80

which get stuck in the trees as they float up in the frigid morning air. All around him the earth is wrapped in the sticky cellophane of fiction.

Sing in me, Muse.

Literary

81 _4

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