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volume 31, number 1

March 19985

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan
 
area ater ete en e'e" 0.0,

 
 

Red Cedar Review

volume 31#1 & March, 1995

The Red Cedar Review is a
bi-annual literary magazine
published by Michigan State
_ University for over thirty
years. Subscriptions are
available for $10.00, sample
copies for $3.00.
Manuscripts are read year-
round; for submission
guidelines send a self-
addressed stamped
envelope. For additional
information write to The
Red Cedar Review, 17c
Morrill Hall, Department of
English, Michigan State
University, East Lansing, MI
48823.

Text set in Lucidia Bright 10
point, titles in Bell MT 22
point, authors in Hoefler
Text; designed on Aldus
PageMaker 5.0. 400
paperback copies printed at
Insty Prints, Lansing, MI,
and 10 additional hand-
bound, harcover editions
printed.

 

FICTION EDITOR
Tom Bissell
&3
POETRY EDITOR
Laura L. Klynstra
@3
CONSULTING EDITORS
Kristin Knippenberg
Ruth Mowry
Renee Sedliar
Matthew Q. Thorburn
ae
ADVISOR
Diane Wakoski
o3

BOOK DESIGN & PHOTOGRAPHY
Laura L. Klynstra
The

Red en Review

volume 31 #1 > March 1995

 

Poems

JASON STEVEN JONES Kissing Roses 9
HEATHER ABNER Gretel 10
DIANE WAKOSKI Hansel And Gretel 13
TIM LANE Letter to Ivan Lendl 15
NANCY TAKACS Masquerade 16
JOANNA RAWSON Pride 18
ALLAN PETERSON Chrysalis 19
PETER MARKUS Road Song 20
STEPHANIE DICKINSON Scorcher 22
DIANE WAKOSKI The Moon Slides Her Pointed Slipper
Into The Darkening Sky 24

Fiction

TOM PAINE The MilkmanandI 29
TORIE OLSON After Leaving Earth 39
RICHARD DOKEY Lucky Lindy 52
LISA FUGARD Alice 68
RICHARD BROWN Luis My Stepson Sheds a Few Tears 76
W.S. PENN _ from Killing Time with Strangers 88
 
OI

     
 

    

  

 

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Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 : Jason Steven Jones

Kissing Roses

 

Jason Steven Jones

Father, when you found me in the garden
Kissing roses

You didn’t understand

That I had heard them

Singing to me in the yard.

And that mother heard them too,

And sometimes she would dance

Alone in her room

Listening to the roses.

The doctor told mother

She had uterine cancer,

And pulled out all her roots.

He said there would be no more seasons.
No more springtime.

So, you put mother in a vase,

Covered her bed in roses,

And never touched her again.

I couldn’t sleep much after that,

With mother’s rose bed singing all night
And sometimes she would sing too,
Alone in her room

With the roses.

Every morning, you would change mother’s water
And cut fresh flowers to prove

You still loved this rootless woman.

I wanted you to understand

That love is not all stamen and pistil,
Pollination and rebirth. And that

Even the roses on mother’s bed,

Whose roots you stole,

Still bloom —

But I heard the flowers singing in the yard
Opening themselves to me

And I went on

Kissing roses.

9
10 Heather Abner Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Gretel
Heather Abner

Like the step-mother in Hansel and Gretel,
she made you decide between us,

and you chose to give me up

because I was young, -

and because I could take it, |

like I can take on all of January

without a hat or coat.

But that winter the cold air

flocked into me like wrens,

and as sure as ax-blades,

they picked away at my bread-soft heart
until all that remained were stones.

And like the father in Hansel and Gretel,
I wanted to call you back.

I wanted to tell you

that I couldn’t take it.

It was too cold,

and I didn’t have a coat.

But like Gretel, I walked,

as a girl in boy’s shoes must walk,
trippingly all the way,

over my own ankles. _

And I walked without the comfort
of you as my brother,

while the pocket of rocks

inside my chest

rattled with each cough.

At the crest of Sugarloaf Mountain
I met a witch with red, red hair
and blinded eyes.

She offered me sweets,

as your witch offered you life
freed from the hide

of your very own girl.

I chose to eat out of hunger,
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Heather Abner II

not delight, |
just as you chose to leave my body
for your lover’s bread.

The witch, she fed me ginger soup,
and taught me how to chop

out moons of shortbread

from the skins of fattened children.
Like her, I baked girls and boys

and tacked them to the roof.

Each one brown as a cedar shingle,
and held together by the hands
with nails of splintered sugar.

The sweetest house, it was,

with cages in the back for hungry children
to be fed like chickens,

through the wires.

And even in the witch-works, dear,

I wanted to call you back.

I wanted to tell you

that I couldn't take it.

The trembles of the children

as I packed them in the pans,

shook me,

as you used to shake me.

Your voice unlike Hansel’s,

unlike a father’s,

but still as close as a lover’s,

telling me I had to walk awhile,

- and wait, as the ends of the trees wait
for the bodies the wood-cutter has stolen.

Like Gretel, I grew over-fed on dumplings,

and the witch asked me to step up in the oven
and check the temperature for the roastings.
But I am not so loose as that.

] kicked her in head first,

and watched her hair burn lavender to white.
Her blue-striped legs stuck out

like a breeched babe.

Then I let the birdies go.

I unlocked their silver cages and watched
12 Heather Abner Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

while their fat wings, yellow as lemon drops,
changed back to arms.

I unhooked the lovlies from the ridge,
removing them as naturally as you now
undo these garters, and this bra.

And with just a mess of pastry dough
left of the house,

I hitched home on a swan

and found you caged like Hansel.
You said she chopped you down.

And all the stones inside me
muttered and shifted,

and formed the square of a house.
And like Gretel, I said we would be safe there.
And I held myself up to you,

as Gretel held up the box of riches

to a wifeless father.

And she pleased him.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Diane Wakoski 13

Hansel And Gretel

for Heather Abner

Diane Wakoski

 

What would I do

if I thought I had turned into

the parents

in that story? so poor

they had to send the children out

into the woods of a wicked witch? And what did
those people do when the children had gone?

Lie down and die?

Like so many stories, this one

has never made sense to me,

if it’s really about poverty; so we read it for

the wicked stepmother, insisting it was she who

sent the children away. And we focus on the other
wicked woman in it,

the woods-witch with her alluring sugar house,

and of course on Gretel, who’s smarter than Hansel,
able to outwit the cannibal, and what about Heather who
tells this story because the boy she loves wants to be
her brother, while she is

willing to rescue him, like Gretel,

even though she'd like

to eat him up, she thinks he’s so sweet

and tasty.

She’s, in a way, just like the old

woods-woman, though she knows

she’s no witch, just a lover who’s never been chosen by
the boy she loves.

The daddy is the victim, and Hansel

is the one being

fattened for the oven, and all the women

want to be

loved; when they’re not,

they look for sugar.
14 Diane W akoski Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

I am not sure this is a story

we ought to listen to,

we American women who are all overweight and
craving love

while eating sugar,

for there seems to be some sense

that we have to be witches,

though less greedy than the woods-woman.
We all think we are Gretel,

maybe because she’s young,

not yet old enough to be a stepmother

ora cannibal.

Men are weak and helpless,
victims. That’s the message, isn’t it?
If all women are witches?

Good witches are young, beautiful.
Bad ones — you know,
the opposite?
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Tim Lane 15

Letter to Ivan Lendl
‘Tim Lane

 

Who cares about Wimbledon? Throughout a troubled
adolescence of foot faults, bad calls, nagging injuries —
when I was as strong and tireless as you —

I hung on every point, every set,

every match. In a blue-collared world

where tempers flare and exhaustion rules the line,

you were my idea of perfection — _-

(rich, yet hard-working, gifted, but dedicated,
Spirited, yet always composed). |
Man, the way you pound that ball
with blistering forehands,

a cannon-like serve —

the way a press stamps
a Slug of hot steel.

Albeit, Mr. Lendl, you won’t find tennis whites
and the manicured lawns of Wimbledon in an industrial town
like Flint —

(where we crank out Buicks and Chevies —)
you are more than welcome to drop by and visit

a devout fan
whenever you're in the area —

(lucky enough if they give me the gold-plated watch
or the golf clubs the retired shoprat receives
after twenty-five years of rigorous,
monotonous service —
your unmerciful trademark).
16 Nancy Takacs Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Masquerade
Nancy Takacs

 

My aunt gave me her magic dress
she wore when single to some
Knights of Columbus dance:
white net with multi-colored sequins.
She wasn’t that old
when she gave sheerness up.
Her materials nowadays are dark, tailored.
I still have that crown and wand.

A year later I was a witch
allowed to go by myself
in the daytime. At one house
aman picked me up. His wife
lifted my mask and saw
I wasn't the child they knew.
I was crying. They gave me a whole quarter.

] paint on my own |
starlike eyes now and the red band
across them, the mouth
vampirishly white with
just two skinny red drips.
My son used to be afraid of clowns
and wouldn't go to the babysitter’s
because she had on a wig
sticking up straight
in plastic rainbows.

Nine, at the beauty shop where
just a few years ago
I had to buy shampoo for
his sensitive scalp,
he scans the shelf of rubber:
Nixon and Reagan, ghoulish as in real life,
and monsters with complicated holes, sputters.
He laughs now at what
he shielded his eyes from then,
and begs for a bloody mask.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Nancy Takacs 17

I love the idea of disguise.
I] have a painting in my kitchen:
a large white mask soft as homemade paper,
eyes like a jack-o-lantern’s
in front of smaller
tilting masks 7
those kind worn by royalty in costume,
eyes on a stem.

A flock of butterflies darkens

the red-belted leaf below,

upside-down pear, the heart.

My son wants to be nothing traditional.

A friend told me: at nine

they know everything, it’s just the beginning,
and though he still wants to sit on my lap
he’ll betray me because I don’t

understand the gaping neck or bloody gash.

I was never the one to laugh

like my mother’s friend

when the body bounced

from the truck in Psycho.

I still watched while my mother

hid her eyes and said, Oh, no.

Now I wear her mask, her fingers,

but I’m not kidding

when he giggles and I say, Oh no, oh no.
18 JoAnna Rawson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Pride
JoAnna Rawson

It’s this way with the steers my mother raised

from inside winterfat cows so caught by kinked ache
their muscles won’t give.

And her arm white to the elbow in lye

angling in to coax the breech heads through.

Or the still born forms slain by virus and time

she sliced in the womb and delivered into fresh hay.
The way her hand from the birth retreats

to temper the lamp, offering

the rough parent tongue. a while to clean the mess
from its young. There’s a war

on the barn radio so far from town

it’s static. Down her spine,

the braid’s all chaff and sweat.

The tread in her boot erased by manure, no end near.
Still startled blind the sticky calf

kneels toward milk, suckling air.

During the night her best friend’s raped twice

by the tracks, late taken home

and kissed by the date she’ll be wed off to

come summer and swelling. Between each flash

of news, some fancy danceband tunes.

She’s working through night

in her father’s shirt, with a shape in the chest from smokes
he’ll die of, old clothes he uses

for raising his roses. The air says

they’re stealing in ambush toward holds

on the coarse foreign shore,

kids in gear she knew from school

delivering their bodies to fire.

She gives the thing some common name,

knowing the genes bred into its hide

might earn in years some prize

and quiet delight at August fairs.

The high auction price for its dark flank

on the slaughtering block

She'll take with a nod, and drive home all night

when this brutal war’s through.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Allan Peterson 19

Chrysalis
Allan Peterson

 

I understand the skulls that become sugar cartoons in Mexico

are an invitation to continuity but I am feeding October

another double number from my life.

Rain pooling under the jardiniere made the deck soft enough to chew
and the wood ants moved in fleets of their sugar-colored babies.

There’s a reason to worry about this info from the earth.

Cattails are scared right up off the pond bottom like punk hair on end
and I am unwinding too fast from my coil of phosphates and sweet bases.

One hundred plus humidity so we put out a bow! of water

of cut glass for the gaping jays that under these circumstances

will drink & bathe close to the window in the middle of the spectrum
between fear and contentment where the greens should be

and have their legs break up with their bodies into the Russian pattern
and Harvard at once and shatter out helplessly all over the sidewalk.
Lead makes it clear that even in isolation nothing is a plain fact.

All of the water turns black and blue — kaleidoscopically bruised.
This must happen in chrysalis. In minutes a beautiful egg is lifted
from the thirst and Easter process decoratively covered with oceans.
In minutes a new life fluffs dry in the cedar.
20 Peter Markus Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Road Song
Peter Markus

Driving west at dawn out of downtown Detroit

a full tank of gas

our wallets stacked fat with cash

bladders bulging, a 12-pack of canned Blatz picked up
at a roadstop liquor store outside prison-city Jackson
where buckshot-dotted highway signs warned DO NOT STOP
FOR HITCHHIKERS

the sky a hanging cloth of convict-gray

we bought a fistful of amphetamines

off a red-eyed trucker bound for Beloit—

I-94, a highway built for speed.

When we crossed into Gary, Indiana,

four hours later

miles of heavy-metal rust rushing past

a smokestacked backdrop of rising smoke and steam —
sulfur flames burning steady white

like the lights from all those factories

back home — BASF, McLouth and Great Lakes Steel

_ 124 injury-free work days since the last hand was lost—
we tried to find the men hidden in this picture:
pin-striped prisoners carrying cholesterol lunchbuckets
whose only crime and conviction was a lifetime broken
down into fifty 40-hour weeks each year for thirty years
— though all we found was fire and metal

the well-greased pump and grind of that non-stop work song
not another sound for miles around.

Could we then help but think of our fathers

still at work that morning when we had left

leaving behind an inheritance of barstools and hard-hats
last names stenciled on coveralled backs?

Driving west, we rolled our windows down to breathe

in tollway Illinois, I-90 a pot-holed interstate

blinking with tin-drums and diesel fumes

roadkill and fast food burgers burped up at every exit.
West of Detroit, in Ann Arbor, that ivory-tower of angst,
we gave up on rock and roll

the landmark sing-alongs and Cobo Hall flashbacks
after the cheap beneath-the-dash tape-deck chewed

spit back up

 
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 , Peter Markus 21

Ted Nugent, J. Geils, Springsteen, the Doors.
Twenty miles outside Chicago

our conversations burned down to the nub

(a last cigarette shared between lovers)

we were tempted to flatten campervan spare tires
to kill time between mid-day bumper-to-bumper
assembly line tie-ups

— though by dusk we had cruise-controlled
through the Dakotas at a steady 75 m.p.h.

the not-so-bad badlands tamed by darkness

our stomachs burnt by too much speed.

At dawn — in Aspen, Colorado: 32 degrees —

we blew steam from our patch-plugged radiator
drank snow-melt water out of mechanic hands

- from a Rocky Mountain run-off at 10,000 feet.

By noon everything had cooled off.

Back on the road we kept heading west

the needle on the temperature gauge

holding steady between C and H as we descended
into air that was easier for us to breathe.

A day later, the sky above L.A. looked like Gary — —
a gray that only fire could burn away.

That night we checked into a motel called the Palm Tree
on the corner of Hollywood and Vine

California’s version of Detroit’s Cass Corridor.
Detroit was a 48-hour drive, 2400 miles east

of this ocean state of surfers and rollerskates
bodies tanned blonde as the sand. °

We looked like a couple of dough-boys in torn Levi's
tennis shoes that had never stepped foot on a court
that didn’t sport steel rims, chain-linked metal nets.
We looked for work

but didn’t find work. We burned

in the California sun.

The three-hundred dollars between us

didn’t last long.

Two weeks later

while neon bled the dawn sky like chameleon sunlight
we got back on the highway

and we drove

back to the barstools

back to the factories

away from those stars.
22 Stephanie Dickinson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Scorcher
stephanie Dickinson

 

The blue sun. Ran

from the barn across the roof

of the chicken coop

slicking the tin

stopped at the mouth,

not entering the shed.

Inside — sickles

scythes with their scars

dried with timothy

pelts of overflowing bolts
cracking tractor belts.

I was 10, and wandering the shed
that even then echoed

work horses, rising

in their shadows and bridles

bits of alfalfa fattening.

Deeper in, my brother sat
cross-legged, hunched, his young
bald head bent into knees
sweating intense exploration

of the anvil and hammer, and

of my grandfather .

rusted shut in his musket.

I played touch

with mosquitoes shriveled

in their wings,

with the iron wheel of the lost
long-handled wagon.

Then my brother struck with hammer —
A spark, a tendril

innocuous tongue of cob dust
jumped from the gun.

Never to be that girl again

in butterfly glasses and

_ pedal pushers, in toes

with mouth open. Unquestioning,
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

whyless, naked
in the rain of rock salt
and buckshot before

eyes and lungs jumbled.

Knocked out of breath,
I was the panic

of blue sun burning up
the shy smile.

Stephanie Dickinson

23
24 Diane Wakoski Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

The Moon Slides Her Pointed Slipper
Into The Darkening Sky

Diane Wakoski

The man smoking Lucky Strikes,

his desert eyes squinting like Clint Eastwood,

into the darkness of a Manhattan apartment, looking
oh looking for his father’s big handed approval

 

and Steelman, smoking Marlboros,

marine-close haircut outlining his skull, ,
eyes open to every aspect of light, particles, waves,
the Pacific Ocean foaming next to him in my pillow
where we sleep at night

and IJ the Sorceress with gold pouring

off my gloved hands, moon light drifting like

fog or smoke out of my mouth, swirling on some screen
which with trusting eyes I gaze at, like a crystal ball.

Gambler, I’m a gambler/ this stack of poker chips

is moonlight, and the poker hand comes,

the cards click click clicking

like the toenails of a friend’s bull terrier on marbled floors
of Viennese palaces and cafes —

There is no unfilled space, no vacuum, no unfilled void
in this universe. And even our lives which often

seem so slight, so lean of substance,

their very space itself is alive, radiant,

lighted, filled until everything is light and sometimes
light filled with light.

I am the woman who believes in incantations,

spells, sleight of hand instead of death. You'll find me in vast casino
or libraries, or empty bedrooms

where the ocean soughs and echoes. I say

I am looking for light, but what I want to find is

perhaps quite different. “Fill light,”
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Diane Wakoski 25

he tells me, “changes the meaning of everything.”

This is a law of physics: |
each time you pull the handle
of a slot machine you are creating a new sequence.
It is always new, a beginning. Perhaps
every act is connected to the future,
but only randomly. What an effort civilization is
to remember so vividly those random perhaps chains,
perhaps sequences, those maybe-patterns that we feel
must shape our lives.

The twisted wisteria vine drips

‘and drips the message Persephone is waiting
to hear. The moon slides her

pointed slipper into the darkening sky,

fills up the expanse, particulate,

splintered with light,

filled with light.
os
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Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 : Tom Paine 29

The Milkman & I
‘Vom Paine

 

Mother died for the sixth time in six years. The monitor in the
emergency room showed her flatlining. The E.R. team moved as if I
had a gun. They plugged her into Boston Edison, she tried to backflip
off the bed; they shot a wad of adrenaline into the blue lines on her
ivory arm. Mother swam back to her body like a salmon fighting
upstream. It makes absolutely no sense, given our history, but there
I was swimming beside her up the river. I heard her gurgling
underwater, “I’m not going!” A second time they whacked her with
the electric paddles; Mother swam through her chest. “She’s back,”
I said. .
Everyone watched the monitor. I looked at my mother.

“She looks like she just got laid,” I said.

The E.R. team looked at me and then at Mother and caught their
breath. Her flowered house dress lay cut in half at her sides, her
legs were splayed, and her head was lolling off the gurney with her
tongue dangling out, and she had a smile, something I had never
seen on her face. |

“She does,” agreed Dr. Cohen.

The E.R. team cracked up. I guess if you deal with this sort of
shit all day, you get a twisted sense of humor. I know a good joke,
even if it is twisted. My mother was a joke as a mother by the way:
she beat the shit out of me; beat as in concussions, burns, that sort
of thing. I always got the impression she was prejudiced against me
for some reason, to put it mildly. I was the only one of her kids she
beat; I was also the only one still hanging around. Someone beats
you, surprising as it sounds, sometimes you hang around—if only
with the long shot hope of someday getting an explanation for why ©
they hated your face.

di day after Mother was admitted to Beth Israel Hospital she was
stable enough to go through the ritual draining of fluids, known to
doctors and those children of alcoholics who give a shit about medical
terminology as paracentesis.

“No,” said Dr. Cohen. “Don’t do this to me.”

Fluid was spraying across the room from a needle stuck into
Mother’s gut. She was swollen up down there like Dizzy Gillespie’s
cheek. Her liver had been burned into a soggy pink pile by thousands
30 Tom Paine Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

of quarts of vodka. Fluids didn’t pass. It looked like it might burst,
but it was hard as stone. Besides her steel will, it was the only thing
still hard about Mother; the rest of her was eggshell and bird bones.

The spray was arcing across the room, causing a number of
nurses to take cover. I didn’t blame them. Cohen was trying to get
a plastic tube to the collection bag on the end of the needle.

“Nobody light a match,” I said. “That puss is 90 proof.”

They drained at least five liters of fluid. Every admission I told
them they ought to leave the needle in Mother, let her drain herself
at home when she was too stretched. Cohen was catching fluid in
the face now. It would take a day to deflate. The A.W.O.L. nurses
were returning to the bed. Cohen yanked out the needle, hooked up
the tube, shoved it back in. Emergency over, I reached into Mother’s
bag, pulled out a tiny airplane-style bottle of vodka, handed it to
Cohen. I thought he could use a drink.

“Alfred,” said Mother.

It was quite clear she had spoken, although her eyes were still
closed. I looked at Mother’s pure white skin; she was made of milk—
and vodka.

“Did she say ‘Alfred’?” said Dr. Cohen.

“Who’s Alfred?” said one of the nurses.

“Alfred was her husband?” said Dr. Cohen.

“Alfred,” I said. “I don’t know any Alfred.”

Here was Mother almost dead, and for the first time I looked
past the milky skin and the vodka-filled body, past her being just
- Mother with a capital M, and saw her as a sheet-covered stranger
with a history including an Alfred.

Mother was out of insurance four admissions ago. There was no
way | could pay the incredible rates they wanted to insure her, so if
my wife Elizabeth wasn’t one of the Assistant Directors of
Development at Beth Israel Hospital, Mother would have been out
of luck.

“You know this is the last time,” said Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was joking. We were standing outside Mother’s apricot
door on the second floor of the hospital. Elizabeth made sure she
had a private room.

“It’s always the last time,” I said.

“I’m not going!” Mother howled through the door. She was still
detoxing; they weren’t giving her a lot of Ativan. “You hear me,
people? I’m not going!”

“Why does she keep saying that?”
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Tom Paine 31

“It’s new this admission,” I said. “She’s afraid of dying.”

“Alfred!” Mother yelled. “Alfred!”

“Alfred?” said Elizabeth.

“Alfred!” Mother yelled.

“Alfred was the milkman,” I said.

Elizabeth gave my arm a squeeze, shook her head and said, “No
jokes.”

It wasn’t a joke; I had called my sister Peg in San Jose about an
hour before and asked her about it. Peg is the only one of the five
kids who still talks to me. I was the youngest, she was the oldest.
“We once had a milkman named Alfred,” Peg told me. “I think he
went to jail.”

Mother died the seventh and final time three weeks later. She
was reinflating, guzzling down a bottle of vodka a day. I found her
lying on her back in her apartment. I was dropped to my knees by
the stench of death, shit, piss, mothballs, and booze. I dropped the
bag of supplies. I heaved, and then puked all over my hands, all
over the cheap oriental rug I had bought for her a few years before.
Her eyes were open, her lips had tightened and pulled back from
her dentures; she was grinning.

I gathered together the supplies, put them back in the bag. I
went in the bathroom and washed my hands and then came back
and sat on the couch. I looked at the burn marks on the back of my
hands from where Mother once threw boiling water at me. I looked
at her hands; they were thrown up above her head as if she were
surrendering. Her left hand was against the radiator and her diamond
ring sparkled in a shaft of light. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I
would learn later the neighbors both upstairs and downstairs had
heard tapping all night through the radiator pipes of the house.
Mother had survived the night, tapping her wedding ring on the
radiator while she slowly bled to death. Alcoholics usually die of
internal bleeding, their insides hemorrhaging like a hemophiliac’s.
I moved to the hard end of the couch, with my hands in my lap, and
looked down at Mother.

The reason I found her in the apartment was because the five
older children had scattered around the world. “Like milkweed
seeds,” Mother would slur, “with those lovely silk parachutes.” My
wife Elizabeth and I lived down the street from Mother, although
Elizabeth said we should have gotten the hell out of Roxbury. Mother
and Elizabeth and I were the only white faces left. Every Saturday
afternoon for the last five years I’d brought Mother TV Guide, boxes
32 Tom Paine | Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

of donuts, cold cuts, bread, milk. It had only been the last couple of
years that Mother actually talked to me; before that she just sat and
looked out the window muttering to herself in a drunken stupor
while I waited for an answer, and after an hour or two I'd get up and
leave.

After a while I picked up the Boston Globe and read about the Red
Sox and their usual September fall from grace. The pages cracked
as I turned them. After a while I forgot about the smell. Mother had
always said you can’t smell your own body odor; she was proving it
now. If this had been a regular Saturday for us I would have read
the paper to her, and then we would have chewed into pablum any
new shred of news about the five older children, not that there was
ever much news. In the last few years I had begun to make up the
news; it was our own private soap opera. Mother never once asked
me about my wife, whom she called “the wop.”

“The wops,” Mother had said when I told her Elizabeth and I
were engaged, “are one step above the niggers.”

J read the rest of the paper. At one point I forgot Mother was
dead on the floor and said, “Have you heard Matthew got a
promotion?” When you make up stories, anything can happen.
“Sorry, Mother,” I said. “I forgot you were dead.” The light turned
yellow in the apartment, dust drifting around the old furniture. My
brothers and sisters watched me from the faded photographs above
the television. When it grew darker in the apartment, Mother's
dentures glowed. The phone Fang.

“Is she drunk?”

Elizabeth still believed Mother would quit someday, that there
was still hope. I could barely move my mouth.

“No,” I said. “She’s stopped.”

“I knew she could do it!”

“It’s true,” I said. “She’s dead sober.”

“You did this,” said Elizabeth. “Just by iii with her every
week, showing you care about her. She should appreciate you more.”

“No,” I said. “She should have appreciated you more.”

“Old habits die hard.”

“Ves.”

“I'll see you when you get home,” said Elizabeth. “Tell your
mother congratulations for me.”

I must have made a choking sound.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got a few things to straighten out with Mother,
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Tom Paine 33

then I'll be home.”
I hung up, stood and closed the two venetian blinds. I was in
total blackness; there was just the sound of my breathing.
“Mother,” I said. “Just tell me why you hated me so much.”
The grin was invisible.
“Did you hear me, Mother?”
From her bedroom door I heard the faint ticking of the clock.

| walked to Mother’s bedroom, pushed open the door. Inside there
was still enough light to see the trunk at the end of her bed. The
trunk was locked, and I had to break off the lock with a piece of
granite Mother had brought back from New Hampshire one summer.
The whole lock apparatus broke off into my hand with the second
blow. The trunk had belonged to my father when he was in the
army in Korea. My father had come back with a metal plate in his
head. His brains had been left on the ice at Inchon. My brother
Michael and sister Peg once told me that he used to keep a horseshoe-
shaped magnet in his pocket and would amuse them by hanging it
off his temple. “It was about all Father could do,” said Michael a
long time ago. “So we never got tired of seeing him do it.”

Mother’s diaries lay in a golden row. They fit snugly from one
end of the trunk to the other. The rest of the trunk was empty.
Father had bought the diaries for Mother when they were married,
because he knew she liked to write everything down before going to
sleep. There were fifty books originally, each embossed with the
year. The diaries in the trunk covered the years 1953-1977. I was
born in 1967, four months after my father died. The unused books
had sat on a shelf in the dining room, and each year Mother took
down a new one on New Year’s Day. We never saw any of the diaries
again, but we knew the past year had been locked in the trunk.

The year 1966 was under my finger. I played with the binding,
ran my finger up and down the gold leaf. When I raised my finger,
gold dust sparkled on the tip. I turned and held it aloft in the faint
light. In the distance I heard an ambulance. Farther away there was
a gunshot. I plucked 1966 from the trunk and stood. The smell
drifted in from the main room, so I closed the door to Mother’s
bedroom. Mother had three mattresses, and I settled myself atop
this throne. I turned on the light at her bedside. The little oak side-
table was covered with used, knotted tissues. There were a number
of old pill bottles, an assortment of glasses; one had in it a lemon
slice growing a moldy green afro.

For years I had dreams about these diaries, their pages fluttering
34 Tom Paine Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

before me in the wind. When I was a child the pages bled, when I
was a teenager they were usually on fire, recently they had been
blank. Once my father, whom I knew only from photographs, held a
diary out to me. In Mother’s bedroom, I placed 1966 in my lap, and
then adjusted the pillows behind my back. Mother had only the
finest goose down pillows, one of her few luxuries. The diary fell
open to a velvet marker. Mother’s handwriting was rich and fluid,
like black skywriting.

August 4, 1966

The milkman was outside the screen door when I was crying
in the kitchen today. I told him to go away—you never hear
that nigger coming! Then I jumped up and I yelled down the
alley to him to come back, and let him put the milk right in
the fridge. The oldest McKay boy doesn’t stand up straight, I
told him, if he doesn’t watch it he’ll end up in a brace from
head-to-toe!

I flipped to October. Outside I heard a car backfire.
October 4, 1966

The doctors at the V.A. hospital were rude to me today. They
wouldn't even look at me, even when I said it was my hus-
band who did this to me, and that if I asked for money from
him to go to a regular hospital he’d do it again. And he will!
They said if I wasn’t a veteran I would have to go toa regular ©
hospital. At least he never touches my face.

October 15, 1966

I lay my head against Alfred’s chest and got his white suit all
wet. I must have cried for an hour, and he put his hand on
my head and left it there while I cried. Iam so afraid William
will kill me one day.

I stopped reading, just lay with my head on the diary and looked
into space. For a long time I don’t think I had a thought in my head,
my brain was just frozen. It was as if I stepped from my body. The
clock ticked. Someone yelled in the street. My chest was moving up
and down. The diary is under my hand. Mother is dead in the other
room. I have a wife Elizabeth whom I love more than life. Mother
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 7 Tom Paine 35

worked nights. She went to church every morning. She never showed
the slightest interest in any man.

December 11, 1966
I’m in love.

December 12, 1966

Alfred got caught on his zipper, and I had to push him laugh-
ing out the door. William — the Burgerman — came into the
kitchen still wearing his outfit. The door had never clicked
shut, and it blew open with the wind. In my mind I watched
Alfred in the snow, walking back to his truck. William just
stood there and watched me; all I could see were his eyes. It
was so strange to see these two angry eyes in a big rubber
hamburger. He isn’t even able to get out of his suit without
help anymore! He has to walk home dressed like that now!
Lucky for him it’s only two streets away. He turned and left
me, and I followed him into the dining room and said, “I won-
der how you’re going to beat me in that suit.” He spun around
and ran at me. He bounced off me and fell, hitting his face
on the table. He retracted his arms, and tried to get out of the
suit. He lost his eye holes. He started to scream and flop
around like a fish. Ann came downstairs and started to cry. I
tried to get on top of him, calm him down, but he threw me
off, and I hit my head against the wall. A plate fell down and
hit me on the top of the head, and the blood came into my
eyes and I couldn’t see. I jumped on him, and beat him, and
then ran out the back door. I ran down the block in my stock-
ing feet, in the snow, looking for Alfred’s truck.

The last job Father held was at a greasy dive two blocks from
our house called Burgerman. He had lost a number of jobs after
returning from Korea. Michael told me once that as time went by,
“His brain just shut down, like you turn off lights in a house.”
Sometimes he would just forget he had a job, and wander around
Boston until the police brought him home. My uncle was a cop in
those days, so I understand the police were always kind to him.
“They’d ask him to hang the magnet off his head at the station,” Peg
once said to me. “Father was a big hit with the cops.” I put 1966
away and took out 1967, the year of my birth. It was strange, but I
could hear my brothers and sisters talking as if they were in the
other room. A car went by and the lights slid across the wall of
36 Tom Paine Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Mother’s room. I climbed back into her bed. I scanned the pages
and then stopped.

February 8, 1967

Dr. Haggerty says I’m pregnant, as if a woman doesn’t know.
Poor Alfred.

Laying the diary down on my lap, I looked up at the yellow paint
peeling off the ceiling. I had painted the rest of her apartment a few
years back with Elizabeth’s help, but Mother wouldn’t let us in her
bedroom. “A woman has to have someplace private,” said Mother. I
had the feeling Mother was in her bedroom with me now. I turned a
month ahead, the diary pages flipped as if Mother was riffling them
back and forth, and then it fell open as if she had pressed her hand
flat across it.

March 28, 1967

I told Alfred he had to go away, that it was impossible for me
to be with a black man. I told him I loved him. He told me it
was a new age. I said we two aren't part of the new age. He
said if he couldn’t be with me he would die. I said it was just
impossible.

March 29, 1967

Alfred came to the front door last night. Peg opened it and
screamed, she just saw his white uniform, and no head. I ran
from the kitchen and slammed it shut in his face. He kept
calling my name through the door, over and over. The other |
children came downstairs, but I told them to go upstairs and
stay in their rooms. I sent Peg up to her room, but she clung
to my shirt. I tried to quiet him through the door. I told him I
loved him. I said William would kill me if he found him here.
Alfred went around the house, banging on the windows and
screaming my name. I went to the kitchen, and Alfred tried
to break down the back door, and then broke the window in
the door, and reached around to open it. I took Peg and ran
upstairs. I locked myself in the bathroom. Alfred banged on
the door, threw himself against it, screamed he wanted to
marry me. I heard William’s voice and then the banging
stopped and I heard them fighting in the hall. Icame out and
saw Alfred throw William against the wall. I begged Alfred to
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Tom Paine 37

stop, he pushed me aside and beat William over the head with
our family Bible. I heard the police coming into the house.
They beat Alfred on the back a their sticks, and dragged
him down the stairs.

The phone rang in the living room, the sound burning through
the wall. It rang on and on; I knew it was Elizabeth. It was black
outside, and she was worried about me walking home in the dark.
The last time I was mugged I was beat over the head from behind
with the leg bone of a cow. The police showed it to me in a large
plastic bag at the police station. Elizabeth found me in the street
that night, stopped the bleeding with her shirt, screamed until
someone called the police. The phone rang again; I knew if I didn’t
answer it Elizabeth would take her can of mace and go out into the
streets to find me, but I couldn’t move. It was like one of those
dreams where you're frozen, and everything in you is just trying to
move one inch. I was able to move my finger at last, and flipped the
diary forward. The phone rang a third time.

April 11, 1967

William was killed today outside Burgerman’s, run down by a
car. They’re calling it an accident, saying he wandered into
the street by mistake, couldn’t see well in his Burgerman out-
fit. But he told me he was going to do it. People are joking
about it all over Boston.

- Trolled over and turned out the light. I was born August third,

1967. My mother had almost died giving birth to me; she was in bed
for three months. I don’t think she ever touched me, except when
she was knocking me around. Her family had helped support us
until she got back on her feet. When she began to drink she told my
brothers and sisters, “I’ve never been the same person since the last
one was born. He took the life out of me.” They all blame me for
her drinking, all except Peg.

I think I fell asleep. I heard a pounding on the front door. |
thought it was Alfred. I jumped out of bed and ran out of Mother’s
bedroom. I tripped and fell in the hallway. I ran into the other
room and turned on the light. I turned around and saw Mother
grinning at me from the floor, as if she had just told me the punch
line of a joke. I was the punch line. After years of waiting I now
knew why she had beat me: I reminded her of my father, Alfred, the
man she had been screaming for in the hospital. My love, Elizabeth,
38 Tom Paine Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

was yelling my name through the door.

A month later, and we were packing on a Sunday to leave Roxbury.
We were in the kitchen, wrapping plates in old pages of the Globe.
Elizabeth was on a stool, taking down her china from the top shelf.
She had inherited it from her mother; it was white with gold trim. It
was too precious to eat off. I saw her reach up, begin to carefully
slide out a plate, and then turn her head and look down at me.

I said, “I didn’t say anything.”

Elizabeth said, “Don’t break my china.”

We finished packing the china, and then Elizabeth asked me to
go down to Purity Supreme and get some more boxes. As I walked
back to the apartment I stopped at a traffic light, even though there
was no traffic. I looked at the red hand on the stoplight, and then
looked at an old black man who came up next to me. I swear he
said, “Nothing standing between me and your mother but that old
red hand. No traffic coming, but she just wouldn’t cross the street.”
I almost reached out and touched his back. At that moment] started
to cry as if someone strong was shaking me by the shoulders, trying
to wake me up — big heaving sobs. I don’t know what my father
Alfred looked like — but I saw him clearly on that street corner in
Roxbury, his black face breathing into mine — it was him shaking
me. He looked concerned and I cried for him, and for my mother,
my chin on my chest, the tears dropping to the cracked concrete
sidewalk. It was the first time I had cried since I was young. I heard
a young boy’s voice gasping Alfred over and over. Alfred put his
arms around me, then he was gone and [| continued walking, and
came to a Baptist Church — and I thought as I looked up at the
cross: If only they were my age, they might have had a life together,
and all the rest of the shit could have been avoided. Only Elizabeth
knew this about me: that under all my sick cynicism I still had a
pocket of naive optimism. There were five silver-haired black men
standing on the steps of the church in jackets and ties. I stared at
them until one said to me, “You lost, son?” “Sorry, no,” I said. “I live
here.” I must have looked absurd to them: I had two boxes under
both arms, and a box hanging from the back of my head. When I got
back to our apartment, the door to 3B was wide open and my wife
Elizabeth was gone. I sat down among the boxes, facing the open
door and empty hallway, and waited until it was too dark to see.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 | Torie Olson 39

After Leaving Earth
Torie Olson

 

White Jenna waits for her family to rise, she whirls around the
kitchen in flimsy lingerie grinding greasy French coffee beans for
her husband and juicing oranges for her little boys. She makes
herself a cup of mango-flavored tea, looks for lost shoes, matches
socks and irons a white shirt in the sweltering heat. In the margin
of the morning paper, she jots down nine more things to take care
of before and after work. | |

She unlocks the window gate and answers the phone, pinching
the receiver between her ear and shoulder. It’s her mother’s neighbor
calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. Jenna figures the woman is planning
a trip to New York and wants a tour guide. She twirls her moist hair
into a top knot and leans out of the fourth-story walk-up into hot,
yellow air.

“I need to talk to you about your mother,” the neighbor says and
then lowers her voice as if the wrong person might hear. “Claire
walked the dog without her skirt on yesterday,” she whispers. “She
went around the block in her underwear.” )

A catcall from street level causes Jenna to jerk back inside.
Perspiration has made half-moon stains on her chemise and beaded
around her neck like liquid pearls. It’s the fifteenth day of the heat
wave, but Jenna is suddenly chilled. She thinks about what she’s
just been told and remembers this:

The fall when she and her twin brother Jason turned three, they
were caught naked in the neighbor’s front yard. They’d been rolling
voluptuously in a huge pile of autumn leaves. Their mother, Claire,
was across the street, shaking overalls at them like red flags. “Haven't
you forgotten something?” she’d demanded furiously. The twins
looked at each other, perplexed; they’d forgotten nothing. But when
they rose and the leaves fell away, they were covered with shame.

Jenna shudders. It’s their blue-blood mother who’s now trotting
through the streets, head erect and shoulders back, looking very
trim and very naked from the waist down. Things are not as they
were. There has been a shift in parameters.

“It’s very fall-like here, cold and rainy,” the neighbor says as if
hot weather might’ve been a mitigating factor. “You better come
home, dear. And bring your raingear.” And before hanging up she
warns, “Don’t be surprised — Claire’s become...difficult.”

From Jenna’s point of view, her mother’s always been difficult,
40 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

which is why she’s put two thousand miles between them. Despite
Claire’s creative threats and attempts at bribery, Jenna visits only
one week a year, and drags her husband and sons along as buffers.

Her brother, Jason, moved to another continent to avoid their
mother. He worked for humanitarian aid groups in desolate, famine-
stricken areas of Africa until his plane crashed two years ago. Even
in death, Claire hasn’t relinquished control over her son. She’s
twisted him into something perfect and legendary, deified him along
with the rest of the male members of the matrilineal line whose
causes of death were less vainglorious.

Sometimes Jenna feels that her brother’s the one that got away.
Her father’s the one who was thrown away, aS were two other
successive, short-lived husbands. Jenna’s the one who’s called home
to mother her mother. There is no one else.

When Jenna checks in that night, Claire sounds normal but this
is not evidence enough to discount her neighbor’s testimony. Over
the last two years, Claire’s been losing her senses one by one. The
first to go was her hearing so she began talking more and listening
less. Then she couldn’t smell how much perfume she had on or
how old the garbage was. Lately she says the food tastes bland so
she’s down to 105 pounds. And her short term memory has been
taking vacations. She sends holiday checks and postcards in triplicate
and calls ad nauseam with the same information about her orchids,
her dog and her will.

As she flies west, Jenna considers the fact that her mother has
not asked for help and is unlikely to accept it. As she hangs in the
air over heartlands and Great Lakes, she considers catching the next
plane back.

The pilot touches down smoothly on a runway flooded with light.
It’s a harsh light, the glarey kind that often trails big storms and
leaves an impression of impending metamorphosis upon the
landscape. Jenna folds her raincoat over her arm and puts on her
subscription sunglasses.

The taxi drops her at her mother’s house. The door is locked.
Jenna knocks and rings, but there’s no answer. She walks around
the back where the dog barks shrilly and lunges at the gate. She
speaks some soothing words and is allowed entrance, but the Yorky
stays at her heels, yipping with suspicion. Through the big picture
window she sees Claire fully dressed with a string of heirloom pearls
around her neck. She appears somehow diminished, smaller and
grayer than Jenna remembers, and her clothing seems to float on
her body. Jenna taps the window, and Claire leaves the confusion
of papers on her desk, crosses the Tabriz carpet that is as big as a
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 4I

swimming pool, and opens the back door.

“Where am I?” she whispers into Jenna’s ear as she gives her a
hug.

Jenna holds onto her mother to sustain the moment before she
has to answer that question.

Claire breaks away and pats her clothing back into place. A
dark cloud has passed in front of the sun and there’s a warning
crackle of thunder. “It’s like a different world here,” Claire says,
gesturing at her jungle-like back garden. “In 71 years, I’ve never
seen a Minnesota summer so green and wet.”

The sky lets loose and Jenna drags her bag inside. Rain comes
streaming from the eaves. “Don’t bother to unpack,” Claire
commands. “We’re going to the lake.”

- or a change, Claire doesn’t insist on driving. She makes it clear in
subtle, possessive statements that this is no transfer of power, she’s
just misplaced her glasses. Jenna’s sure her mother has no trouble
seeing things in the distance, that her glasses are only for reading,
but she lets it go. Jenna puts on her wire-rims and the world beyond
the windshield comes into watery focus.

She knows the road backwards and forwards, having made this
four-hour trip north in a convertible Thunderbird every summer of
her childhood. After their father left, and in between stepfathers,
she and Jason fought over the bucket seat. What they really wanted
was to be in the driver’s seat. They were in such a hurry to grow up,
to be the ones in control, to give or withhold.

Jenna maneuvers her mother’s Saab through the storm and
wracks her brain for a safe topic of conversation. Weather’s always
been neutral ground, and she asks for details of the summer flooding.

“It’s been raining frogs and fishes. All anybody talks about.
Hear it on the radio, hear it at parties, hear it in church. According
to the minister, this flood’s to remind 1 us of something we’ve
forgotten.”

“What’s that?”

“I forget.”

When Jenna turns sharply, Claire laughs at her and the skin
around her eyes creases like wrinkled linen. “Oh, you know, the
Noah analogy,” she continues. “If we’re not pious, we better be really
good swimmers.”

“Are you still a member of the Loon Club?” Jenna asks.

Claire gives a perfunctory nod. Her paternal grandfather named
her the first Loon-hearted One — the Ojibway term for brave. To
42 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

earn this title, you have to swim across the lake — a feat that requires
kinship with fish and water birds as temperatures rarely rise out of
the sixties. It’s something you have to do at least once a year, if
being loon-hearted is a personal goal.

Jenna and Jason spent a certain portion of every summer in
training. Claire paddled behind them in the canoe as their lips turned
blue, their flesh crawled with goose bumps, and their imaginations
seethed with big-toothed fish, four-foot eels and snapping turtles.
Jenna doesn’t remember ever actually making it across. What she
remembers is the red-eyed loons laughing at her.

Jenna follows the straight gray tarmac past desolate Finnish
farms, their small houses drowning in huge square yards. In between
the compulsively combed rows of corn, alfalfa and soybeans, lay
windbreaks of Norway pine or spruce and an occasional thicket of
- dead-looking tamarack. The landscape flattens her spirits. There is
monotony and more of it. This is suicide country.

Claire tells Jenna that her grandfather used to drive his Pierce
Arrow up here when the road was just a long flat ribbon of dirt. “It
took all day, but the car was so high off the ground I could see
inside all the houses.” She has his red tackle box on her lap. She
opens it like a present and picks through it, inventorying all the
heirloom leaders, poppers, and tufted jigs. She polishes the spoons
on her sleeve and fingers the feathery flies that mimic winged insects.
She points out the ephemeridae in nymph, dun and spinner stages
that have teased the trophy and pan fish to the surface. She takes
them in her palm, caressing their gossamer threads, their wings and
thoraxes of marabou, elk hair and rabbit, as if this gesture will gently
wake each beautiful impostor.

Claire has dangled this box full of lures and tokens of promise
in front of her children and grandchildren at every opportunity.
She told them the family fish stories and made them covet its
contents: “Your great-grandfather caught the four-foot tiger with
this big spoon. This long-winged streamer fly was your grandfather’s
luckiest. In 1938, the caddis fly caught twenty-one fish before
breakfast. Your uncle liked the mayfly.” She made them believe
this was the tackle that would satisfy their wildest fish lust, and a
few other genetic desires as well.

Jenna notices that it’s stopped raining and shuts off the wipers.
The car seems tiny and close even though it’s just the two of them
and the dog sleeping in the back. It’s crowded with the ghosts of
absent people.

Claire locks the box and when she has settled it in the wheel-
well under her feet, she tells Jenna that she’s no longer speaking to
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 43

her oldest friend. “She says I’m getting dotty.” When Jenna makes
no cry of protest, Claire asks, “Well...what do you think?”

“You seem okay,” Jenna answers, “but you do repeat yourself.”

“Can't you live with that?” |

“Sure. Can you?”

“Makes no difference to me!” Claire says, sitting up straight. “If
you're losing your memory, you forget you don’t remember,” she
adds, enunciating slowly. Jenna swallows hard. Claire fingers her
pearls. It isn’t her usual lakewear; she’s just forgotten to leave them
in the city. Jason used to say that each pearl represented an irritation.
They are large and they are many.

Other subjects are broached, some amiable, others
argumentative. Jenna fades in and out as her mother launches
diatribes against Minnesota politicians, gives critical reviews of recent
art exhibits and books, and goes on about the refrigerator repair
man who will not get away with his blatantly inflated bill.

They drive through the Dairy Queen for a buster bar, and Claire
gnaws through her ice cream as if she hasn’t eaten in a week. She’s
unresponsive as Jenna shares her own news: her son’s latest antics,
her husband’s pro bono work, her own boredom in her lousy-paying
job.

“Where are you going?” Claire interrupts as if Jenna has made a
wrong turn.

Jenna is nonplussed by her mother’s sudden disorientation but
she keeps up a pretense of normalcy. “To the lake,” she answers, as
if this is news, too.

After several more miles of flat prairie, Jenna’s privy to a few
more of Claire’s facts: “You know, my mother died when she was
72, my father at 69. So at my age, the importance of memory becomes
moot.”

“Why’s that?”

“Haven't you heard of the Law of Averages?”

“What’s your point, Mother?”

“It’s certainly obvious that at 71, I haven’t got much longer on
this earth.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jenna says, slamming her palm on the ©
steering wheel. “You're in perfect health.”

“Well!” Claire shoots back. “Who says you have to be sick to
die?”

Before heading out to Blackberry Lake, they stop in the nearest
town. The sun is setting in raspberry streamers over the green
44 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

boxcars by the paper factory. Jenna senses this display is only a
pause between deluges. At her mother’s bidding, she pulls into the
Piggly Wiggly parking lot. She pushes her glasses on top of her
head and her eyes take a moment to adjust. She follows Claire
through the electric doors and pushes the silver cart up and down
six aisles of chips and pop, looking for dinner. She’s forgotten the
things you can buy in a north woods grocery. At the deli counter
she inventories glorified rice, pea cheese, five loaves of mystery meat,
not to mention nine kinds of jello salad. They buy a case of beer,
some crackers and a smoked fish.

Next stop is the bait shop at Jackpine Junction, just a mile from
the house. This establishment is full of men in camouflage jackets
and caps. Jenna notices that every time they open their mouths to
say something, their bills rise and fall. The walls are festooned with
bear, moose, wildcat and muskies glaring out of glass eyes.

“Frankly, I’d rather be cremated,” Claire confides, “although there
are people who’d probably like to put my head up there alongside
that bull moose.” She’s not well-liked in this country. She’s too
territorial, and they do not forgive her posted land, her pressed
charges against trespassers, or her campaigns against development.
The hunters stop their jawing and narrow their eyes as if they’ve
spotted a new target. Claire glares right back. Her Wellingtons
squeak on the speckled linoleum as she turns on her heel and says
grandly, “I'll be in the car.”

Jenna takes her time, surveying the bins of bloating frogs, chubs,
crappies, and fatheads wriggling under the big, block-lettered sign
that reads, Guaranteed to catch fish or die trying. Her gaze travels
- up the wall of neon cicadas, red-eyed wigglers, slow-poke jigs and
fuzz-e-grubs. They are not the treasures of her grandfather’s box;
they lack that irresistible patina that comes with age and memory.
Jenna thinks, Any fish with half a brain could see right through
these brassy promises. She buys some Dr. Juice (Jason’s favorite
fish-catching potion) and some live leeches. :

She walks up and down the row of parked American sedans and
pick-up trucks two times to make sure. She rummages in her purse
for her glasses and looks again. Claire has driven off.

Jenna remembers the time she and Jason were forgotten at
school:

They waited hours after everyone had left, scrawling tic-tac-toe
x’s and o’s in the snow and swaying in the frozen swings. They didn't
mention their abandonment; they just filled in the time. When it
started to storm, they sat tight under the eave and played “I Packed
my Grandmother’s Suitcase” six times through from A to Z. They
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 45

were rigid with cold, so rigid they had trouble standing up when
their mother finally arrived. Claire had been busy shouting out the
end of her first marriage in an overheated living room.

Jenna is glad to be wearing rubber boots as she walks the sodden
mile with the smelly bait to Cedar Point. Lichens climb the white
birches like green ladders. The forest floor is rife with red caps and
chanterelles that have erupted through pine needles and leaf mold.
Fireweed, pink vetch, and wild morning glories smell sweeter in the
damp. Rocks have grown moss like pregnant women grow hair, and
the naked stones sweat. A lakeside path that was underfoot is now
underwater. Nothing’s gone; it’s just changed.

The lots here are 25 acre parcels of woodland with lake frontage.
Claire owns four that stretch around a point. Norton, a year-rounder,
hails Jenna as she nears his fence line. He’s wearing a canvas hat
with a lopsided button. When she gets close enough, she sees that
it says, I’m looking for a good piece of bass. Jenna has always found
him offensive.

“Hope you’re cooking tonight,” he says by way of greeting. He
explains about the last supper he had at Claire’s: “Thought the stew
smelled a little funny. Sick as a dog that night. She called me the
next day to tell me her ice wasn’t freezing. God knows how long her
fridge had been on the blink.”

“Other than that,” Jenna asks warily, “has she been all right?”

He looks her over through his Coke bottle glasses. “You’re
thinking Alzheimer’s, aren’t you?” And then he pronounces his own
diagnosis: “Well, I’m thinking Sometimer’s. Mostly, she seems just
fine.”

As Jenna walks to the end of the road, she wonders when
exposing yourself, getting lost, and poisoning your neighbor stops
being just fine. She can see the water through the trees now. She
can make out the big log cabin, boat house and the two-story garage
where she and Jason used to sleep upstairs on the feather beds.
From the gate she can see the Saab parked under the towering cedars
and her mother floating in the canoe.

Jenna walks out the long dock into the watery landscape. The
lake and the dusk are so monochromatic that it’s hard to tell where
one begins and the other lets off. As the duck boards creak and
sway under her footfalls, she looks out over the vast gray area where
the elements are in flux.

Every five summers Jenna’s family has added another ten-foot
section of dock. The staggered dates are marked in red marine
paint, beginning with 1920. Jenna can pin different events to
different sections. She knows the milestones of five generations
46 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

like a litany. It’s like a timeline that way — grandfather died here,
father left here, brother disappeared here. These sections are like
stepping on hot stones, but she knows she can always return to the
place before death and disappearance. Then there are the sections
that mark her marriage and the birth of her sons and these are light
and buoyant steps. Claire always says that when you walk to the
end of her dock, you are walking toward the future.

ae spots Jenna and waves her paddle before heading in with
strong J-strokes. The water glitters like sequins in the scarce light.
A loon lands between mother and daughter, feet first like a pontoon
plane, and then cuts its flat reflection with its beak and makes a
dive.

Jenna has always envied these ancient birds their long breath
and winters in the tropics. She’s been awed by their perfect mastery
of three realms, watching them journey through air, earth and water
with equal grace. She’s studied their methods of escape, especially
a sinking technique where tightly-folded wings compress air inside
a body that disappears without a ripple. She and Jason spent summer
nights practicing their wails and yodels and tremolos. They used
these calls like a thieves’ language to find each other in the dark.
After they were grown, Jason would sometimes call her out of the
darkness of Africa and yodel into the phone.

As Jenna waits for the loon to resurface, she imagines it
plummeting through two-hundred feet of water after jewel-backed
fish. Claire points behind her and the loon emerges on cue. It shakes
its slick black head and preens its necklace of white feathers. They
have played this guessing game for years, and Claire has always
won, never Jenna, never Jason. It’s uncanny how their mother has
always known where the diver will rise.

“Right again,” she calls through the inky dusk.

It starts to pour as they carry the canoe into the boathouse.
They hoist it onto its cradle and race up the swampy path to the
cabin. The lake shivers behind them. The green limbs of birch trees
flail at the air. Claire places a triangle of dry logs in the hearth,
adding strips of paper and a teepee of kindling. The massive stone
chimney is draped with Ojibway medallions beaded round with
flowers, stars and eagles. They hung there as far back as Jenna can
remember, along with a white-dotted loon wing and the family photos
on the mantel. Jenna can remember when her father’s photo was
plucked off the shelf, shredded like some old news and burnt in the
hearth. Jenna’s children have never made it to the mantel, despite
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 47

the scores of pictures sent. She’s only there by the skin of her teeth:
Jenna and Jason at three, fishing with their grandfather. She turns
this photo over and sees their names in her mother’s script, but the
birth date is wrong. All the other photos have been recently labeled
as well, but she has no idea whether they are correctly identified.
Jenna thinks, When memory vanishes, history goes too.

Jenna and her mother tend to the cabin now, turning on the hot
water, making beds with fresh linen, putting out towels and setting
the table, but the ritual seems old and empty. Jenna finds notes
pinned to the linens (Dirty! or Clean!), above the stove (Turn off
burners!), taped to a cabinet (Rat poison not kibbles!), in the wood
box (Open damper!), and stuck to the refrigerator (Freeze
perishables!). She pours month-old milk down the drain, throws
out a lemon coated with green fuzz, and puts her take-out carton of
leeches on the top shelf.

Jason always swore by the old leech-in-the-bottle barometer: If
the leech has climbed into the neck of the bottle, rain is imminent; if
it lies coiled on the bottom, fine weather’s coming. When Jenna
opens the paper carton the next morning, the leeches are climbing
the walls, but the lake is a mirror full of clouds.

Around noon, Jenna and Claire load their fishing gear into the
Alumacraft. Claire turns on the little electric trolling motor and
heads for Seagull Flats. When it begins to drizzle, Jenna says, “Maybe
we'll need that ark after all.”

“We wouldn’t get in.”

“Not good enough?”

“We're not a pair.”

Claire drops anchor amidst green-tipped reeds that are bent like
Indian bows. She takes sections of bamboo rod out of a leather case
and slips them together. Then she opens the red metal box, ties on
a fly and sends it forward and back, slowly increasing the length of
her cast over gray, rain-dimpled water. She taught Jenna and Jason
that fishing is something that takes one’s full concentration. “It
may look like you’re doing nothing at all,” she’d lecture, “but when
you send that line out, you have to put your whole being into it. It’s
the least you can do for a fish that is giving up its life for you.”

Claire dangles her mayfly like candy now, and her eyes dart over
the surface of the water, waiting for something to rise. Right away
she pulls in a sunny with a yellow underbelly and a black spot by its
gill. It’s big enough to be an eater, but she throws it back again
anyway, and Jenna follows the artful script of her mother’s cast as
the line is played again.

Claire whispers while she fishes. During the space of one hour,
48 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

she tells the same stories two and three times. It’s as if she has
become a record, stuck in a groove, repeating a sound. Her telescopic
memory has picked out events that date back fifty and sixty years.
Jenna pulls in two blue gills and later a small mouth, while early
memories fall from her mother’s lips, incessant as the rain.

Claire seems to have lost interest in fishing. Still, she catches a
ten-inch northern. After she has threaded it on the stringer, her
tone changes and she begins to speak of things Jenna has not heard
before: of stealing a garnet brooch, of all the sparrows she’d shot
for nothing, of driving her grandfather’s car through the garage, of
premarital dalliances in the boat house and later deceits.

Despite the urgent, confessional tone, Jenna feels powerless to
absolve her. She’d like to forgive Claire her failings as a parent —
her hot and cold mother love, inflated expectations, broken promises,
but these things are not mentioned. _

Claire pulls a fourteen-inch walleye from the lake and exhibits it
smugly as if it were the very thing she was after. A good fish
compensates for a lot.

Jenna is tired of listening and angry that she and Jason are no
longer topics of conversation. She wishes someone else would tell
their lives back to Claire and record them in memory again. It’s too
painful a task for her, but it’s devastating to be the only one who
remembers. Jenna interrupts the second telling of the stolen jewel
and says, “I want to hear a story about Jason.”

Claire looks away, her eyes on the water with that same darting
look. Although she’s no longer fishing, she’s still waiting for
something to rise. “You tell me one,” she says finally.

Jenna thinks this may be her entrance. “How much longer do
you want to live alone?” she asks. The question has been looming
over them for the past twenty-four hours. Jenna’s glad she has
finally spoken it.

Claire fumes and then bursts out, “I’m not giving up my homes!
I’ve lived here all my life.”

Jenna is conscious of being in a little boat in the eye of a big
storm. “Would you let somebody come live with you?”

“Who?” Claire asks with an incredulous look on her face. “You?
Jason? You're not about to give up your lives to live in my house
again.” Her gaze drops to water level and she focuses intently on
the swirls and eddies that pattern the surface.

“My brother’s dead,” Jenna says, suddenly panicked that it may
be Jason her mother expects to rise — a god-man, blue as the cold
water, returning from the depths.

Claire pleats and unpleats her upper lip like an eccullies and
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 49

the shift in gears is almost visible. Her eyes come off the water and
pierce her daughter as she snaps, “Don’t you think I know that?”

“A companion. I was talking about someone we'd pay to stay
with you.”

“I walk a mile a day! Everyday! Why would I let someone in
white shoes start wheeling me around?”

“I’m just suggesting someone to keep track of details. More like
a secretary.”

“Absolutely not. Totally unnecessary. I have a system.”

“What kind of system?”

“Notes. I write notes to myself.”

“What if you forget to look at them?”

“If you think I’m going to wander off and get lost,” Claire says
with a laugh that’s loud and alarming, “I’ve got a dog who knows his
way home. And if this is about burning the house down, just pray
that I’m in it. When / think I need someone to look after me, I'll call
that doctor with the suicide machine.”

They spend the next few minutes in frozen silence, looking out
in opposite directions. It’s been a long, in and out day. They sky
has cleared now and Claire decides it’s time for a walk. She puts in
at Fox Island.

With some trepidation, Jenna asks if she remembers the time
Jason found the triple egg clutch. Claire is eager to see if the nest is
still there, even though thirty years have passed. Jenna humors her
and follows her lead along the spit of land and into the cedar forest.
Again, she is seized by the need to remind Claire of all the rare
events in her brother’s life. Memory brings things back, she thinks.
Without it, there’s only blank space and blue death.

As they walk among the fragrant trees, Claire picks rocks out of
circles of moss. Jenna is amazed when her mother leads them to a
two-foot-wide tangle of cattail, fern and twigs, contoured to fit a
loon’s white breast. There are pieces of shell embedded in the twigs,
olive-colored shards with brown speckles. Jenna kneels down beside
it, feeling as if time has slipped, and she has been led to a place
where things that happened long ago are most present.

On the way back to the boat, Claire collects other rocks full of
quartz and mica chips. Before she puts them in the pockets of her
hunting jacket, she shows Jenna that they sparkle. When Jenna asks
what they’re for, Claire says she’ll edge a new garden with them. By
the time they climb back into the boat, her hem droops down to her
knees with the weight of stones. “Don’t sink us,” Jenna jokes.
50 Torie Olson Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

After Claire ties up to her dock, she pulls the stringer of fish out
of the water and passes it reverently to Jenna. She lingers to watch
the sun go down.

Jenna’s cold. She goes inside to light a fire. She lays the fish in
the sink and their gills flutter, tails flap and skins flash like precious
metals. They are fish giving up their lives. Jenna squeezes their
hearts into their mouths as Claire has taught her, and tells herself
that fish don’t have nerves.

Through the window she sees her mother walking slowly down
the dock, past the red-lettered dates into the future. She notices
that the house is filling with smoke and checks the damper, but it’s
open. Then she remembers that a window has to be cracked to get
the right draw. She throws up the sash and looks out through the
bug screen, staring at the red sun for amoment before it disappears
below the rim. There is a moment of stillness after brilliance fades.

Jenna spots Claire at the end of the dock. She appears to be
floating on the edge between the water and the air. And then she
becomes a blur. Her arms seem to rise like wings and her head
tucks down. ,

Jenna remembers the pockets full of stones. She leaps through
the door and races down the path. Her mother resembles a black
and white bird, flying over the water. Jenna follows the slow-motion
flight, the lithe form suspended between the heavens and the deep.
It is in limbo for what seems a lifetime after leaving earth. She runs
along the boards that mark out the decades of their lives. She
imagines Claire’s compressed spirit sinking through the brown water
after diving loons. She imagines her mother flooded with the past
and leaving a wake of bubbles, like a string of pearls.

When Jenna nears the end of the dock things come into focus.
She sees clearly that Claire is sitting in a lawn chair, gazing out into
the heart of the lake. There are fishermen trolling in the dusk. There
are scattered wails and tremolos. There is a fingernail moon rising.
Jenna stops short and tries to quell the shaking in her limbs and the
roar of her heart. She places a hand on her mother’s shoulder to
steady herself and Claire does not turn. Jenna is not sure what is
gone and what is left. She has another flash:

Claire finally remembered her children and swung the woody
station wagon into the cul de sac in front of the school. She reached
across the seat, threw open the door and leaned out over the frozen
pavement. Her voice was impatient, short as it got. She said, “C’mon,
step on it,” as if she’d been waiting for them all afternoon. When
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Torie Olson 51

they were home again, she told them their father had left and hurried
into the house. |

Jenna looked for a cue from her brother. She watched Jason lay
down in the middle of the icy yard. “Nothing’s gone,” he said, facing
the dark, spilling clouds. “It’s just changed.” His arms were
outstretched and he licked the crystals as they fell. He tucked his
arms back at his sides and raised them again to make the white
wings. And when he rose, after he had left the earth, there was an
angel in the snow.
§2 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Lucky Lindy
Richard Dokey

We separated and I went to live in an apartment by the freeway.
It was unfurnished. They had cleaned the rug, but you could see
where chairs and sofas had been, and a frayed patch in one corner
where something violent had taken place. The bedrooms were ©
cramped and dark and had those cream-colored pleated cushions
you find in motels. The kitchen, which was small with a counter
that opened into the dining room, smelled of Pine-Sol. The bathroom
had no surface space to speak of and one cabinet with a creaky
hinge. Rusted circles were on the metal shelves.

Moving in was like putting on someone else’s pajamas.

I took a couple of chairs from the house and bought a sofa and
bed at Andy’s Unfinished Furniture. I put an old desk in the spare
bedroom and sprinkled a few lamps and tables around.

They gave me my own Stall for the car. The guy next to me was
divorced and had a red 911, aHonda 750 and a twelve-speed Nishiki
he kept in the storage space next to the communal washers and
dryers. He jogged by my window each morning before work in a
white running suit, while I stared stupidly at the street wondering
what the hell I was doing alone eating stale cornflakes and drinking —
instant coffee.

They had a swimming pool and all the apartments were built
around it like stations of the cross. No matter where you were, if
you got on a sidewalk, it would lead you past willow trees, creeping
jasmine, lily of the Nile, blacktop, parking stalls and finally the pool.

The pool was shaped like a flattened grapefruit and surrounded
by cane furniture, lawn umbrellas and signs that read “No Lifeguard
on Duty.” All the pale gray doors opened toward it, the holy of
holies, the oasis of the damned.

I was fortunate. I had moved in in winter. The pool was only a
flat, blue mirror, illuminated after dark by mysterious underwater
light and during the day by a somber, cold sun. Nobody swam in
winter.

Instead they remained confined to cubicles behind stairwells or
latticed fences that hid concrete pads the size of queen-size beds.
It was too cold even for barbecue. So when I returned home each
night, I met only shadowy forms that, clutching briefcases, coats or
shopping bags, disappeared into their cells like monks. I entered
my own spare quarters in misery and despair. This was the penance,

 
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 53

Icame to learn, which those who dishonor the sacrament of marriage
must endure.

I had chosen the complex because I drove by it each day between
home and work. My home, what used to be my home, for Helen had
put it on the market — she wants to return to New York with our
son — is situated to the north of town in arespectable suburb. I like
my home. It has four bedrooms (we had once dreamed of a large
family). I planted everything but the lawn myself, and I had the
garage just the way I wanted it. We put on a new roof last year.

That was my first act of contrition. The second was solitude. It
is dreadful to live among dozens of people, in such close proximity
that you hear the sounds of their bathrooms above you, the gaiety
of their laughter and music across the water or the odd, slurred
rhythm of their television through the living room wall.

I knew no one, but, after a time, I recognized some of the shapes
that hurried at evening through the wind and rain. I was terrified to
venture into the stark, bare room that contained the washers and
dryers, though I knew this was the one place I would always find
people. It was glare Ys
filled with huge, white porcelain machines that grunted and turned,
and you had to know what you were doing. There were wire carts
and aluminum racks, and people went away and left rubber baskets,
while their underwear and socks spun behind smoky glass portals.
I peered through the door with the same embarrassment I felt walking
down the corridor in the intensive care unit of a hospital.

Yet I had to learn to use the machines. The dirty clothes were
crowding the floor of the hall closet. So one day I bought a green
rubber basket, a box of Tide and a bottle of pink liquid that made
things soft in the rinse. I brought the cleaning stuff home in a plain
paper bag and set them on the sofa. I filled the basket with clothes
and sat down to wait. Presently, with the light low and the curtains
drawn on the sliding glass door that led to my mattress patio, I saw
a figure move along the walk carrying a basket.

I picked up my own and stepped out the front door. The sun
was behind the buildings, and the bare limbs of the willow trees
were like thick webs hanging against the blue black sky. The figure
went into the laundry room.

I crept forward, my basket propped against my hip, and looked
through the glass door. It was the man in the jogging suit. I stepped
back, but at that moment he turned and saw me.

“Hey, c’mon in,” he waved.

I opened that door and stepped in. The room smelled warm and
sweet, and there was the scent of those thin strips of tissue paper I
54 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

used to see twisted into the piles of dried sheets Helen dumped
onto the bed at home. I forgot to get those.

“You’re the new guy in number ten,” he said. “I see you in the
morning when I run.”

“That’s me,” I said.

] stood with the basket on my hip watching him. He was sorting
clothes into two washing machines, the dark into one, the light into
another.

“The name’s West,” he said. “Harry West.”

“Cartwright,” I told him. “Tom Cartwright.”

“First time?” he asked.

I thought he meant the divorce so I got red and nodded.

“Any quarters?” he said.

“Any what?”

“Quarters. You need quarters for the machines. Good idea to
keep a little change jar handy. You know, spare change?”

“Oh, yes. Quarters.” I reached into my pocket and found one.

“Each machine takes two quarters per cycle. The dryer takes
dimes.” .
“Dimes,” I said, watching him put a cup of Oxydol into each
machine. I had forgotten the cup as well.

I set my basket on a cart and wheeled it to the machine next to
his.

“You have change for a dollar?” I asked.

He grinned. “Sure,” he said.

In a minute he showed me how to set everything up, and then
there we were, our machines purring in a row. It was like sitting
over the wing of a 747 next to someone you’d just met. |

“I felt strange the first time too,” he said. “It’s the initial shock.
The whole world’s crazy when you’re thrown into it like that. |
don’t care what they say. It takes time to get used to living alone.”

I smiled weakly.

“Been divorced six years myself,” he said.

I realized how foolish it was to try to hide. Odds were that any
man around forty moving into an apartment by himself was coming
out of a marriage. You might as well put an ad in the paper.

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” he replied.

I could tell by a certain thickening around the arms and neck
that he lifted weights. I guessed him at near forty-five. I wanted to
grin, one of those smug grins when you catch somebody off-guard
doing his dance. With the sports car, motorcycle and Nishiki, his
muscles and flat stomach, he was a caricature worth laughing at.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 55

But I refrained. That kind of thing got me into trouble with Helen,
and I was learning the hard way that if you can’t applaud someone
else’s routine, you should keep your mouth shut.

“Have you met anyone yet?” he asked.

“Well, no,” I said, trying to smile. “I guess I haven't really looked.
Been busy moving in. You know.”

I wanted to say something truly declarative, like, “A relationship
with a woman isn’t everything,” or, “You can’t solve the riddle of
human solitude with someone else’s life.” I’ve often wondered why
we can’t be honest, why we use words to anticipate rather than to
demonstrate. Always we worry what life is doing around the corner
and approach accordingly.

“Some real lookers here,” he said. “Divorced and single.”

I had caught glimpses of women passing in the dusk.

“That’s nice,” I said.

He looked at me strangely. “Still love your wife?”

I hadn’t come to it yet myself, and almost instinctively I felt the
urge to remove my wallet and show my pictures, but put that way,
as it were, objectively, it forced my mind through the wedding, the
motel upstate, the move to the Bay Area, the house, the kid, all the
work, time, the closeness, the disintegration, the arguments, the
unfriendliness, the routine and disillusion, like a movie speeded up.
Then the screen got bright.

“No,” I said.

“You won't catch me getting married again,” he said. “This life
is too good for that.”

The washers shifted gears and began to spin. The plane tipped
over into a dive. ,

“By the way, I’m throwing a little party Saturday night. Why
don’t you come by. Give you a chance to meet people. Bring a fifth
of bourbon. I’m in twenty-five across the pool.”

“Sounds good,” I said, with no intention of going. I pictured
them all together, shallow, ephemeral, snorting coke, smoking pot,
taking turns in the bedroom, a mob of burned-out yuppies who
subscribed to Gentleman’s Quarterly and Playgirl.

“The washers have another ten minutes,” he said. “I’ve got a
dinner in the microwave. Come on over if you need some more
help.” |

“Thanks,” I said, watching him leave. Then I grinned and opened
the cynical crack along my soul that had ruined my marriage. I
couldn’t help it. I had moved into a soap opera, hadn’t I?

But when he was gone, the washers leveled out again, and there
I was, flying in an empty plane over a deserted continent.
56 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

So I went to the party.

It was what you might call a California affair. Suntans in the
dead of winter. Print dresses and boat shoes. Chatter about Hewlett-
Packard, IBM, Nordstrom and Macy’s. Even par, love-thirty, three
walls. Englebert Humperdinck and Debbie Reynolds at Harrah’s.

West’s apartment was just like mine, only he had spent money
decorating it. It was in stainless steel. The arms of the chairs, the
coffee tables, the floor lamps, even the picture frames threw off
glints of silver. It was like living inside your plumbing.

As far as I could tell, everyone was single. Where wedding rings
should have been were mounds of amethyst or sapphire, and the
men, with Polo shirts open above their coats, looked as though they
had just discovered youth. I wanted to grin, but stood to one side
sipping a gin tonic. I felt more lonely than ever.

There was a lot of smoke in the air, which surprised me, for |
thought they would all be into cracked wheat and Reeboks. Even
West had a cigarette in his mouth. I watched him for a moment but
couldn’t catch him inhaling. I began to feel a bit nauseous, and I
worked my way to the bathroom, which had to be the only
uninhabited space in the apartment. The door was locked and, like
a fool, I stood there leaning against the wall. Everything about this
life, I decided, was so damn public.

In a moment the door opened and a rather attractive blonde
stepped out.

“Sorry,” she said, looking up at me.

“What for?” I said. It was time to grin. Then I touched her arm
and said, “Thanks.”

I walked into the bathroom and locked the door. I found the
same muffled rhythm and thud I heard in my apartment and realized
it was coming from the stereo in West’s living room. I rested my
hands on the sink and looked into a mirror just like my own. I
opened the medicine cabinet, which was filled with sleeping pills
and stomach powder. There were little circles of rust.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then flushed the toilet and went
out. :

The hors d’oeuvres were being served. Onion dip and Ruffles.
Assorted crackers, cold cuts, celery sticks and olives. A fondue pan
above a squat, dripless candle. A bowl of diced French bread. Brandy
fruit, stuffed eggs and tiny pink napkins spread out in a row.

In the corner by the stereo the woman from the bathroom was
watching me.

“Hey, Cartwright,” I heard my host call, “come over here.”

I made my way through scents of lilac and musk into the kitchen.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 57

“That drink needs freshening,” he said, clapping a hand on my
shoulder.

“Gin tonic,” I replied.

“Hey, meet someone. This is Honey Baker.” He put his arm
around the redhead standing next to him. “Number twenty-eight,
upstairs.”

“Hello there,” she said.

She was aptly named. Her voice dripped, her breasts were
enormous, and her eyes, set deep in her brown face, were the color
of new pennies.

“Tom Cartwright, ” T replied.

“Number ten,” said West, dropping ice cubes out of the
refrigerator into my glass.

“Oh, downstairs.” Honey smiled. “Back in that little ol’ private
corner.” |

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Did they ever fix that rug?”

“No,” I said.

She fastened her eyes on the hollow of my throat.

For some reason | felt we had exhausted all conversational
possibilities. The scent that rose from her was like nothing else I
had experienced. It was of oil, flavored lipstick, burnt roses, the
Scotch on her breath and sweet deodorant. I felt like a gamefish
swimming deep down in a cold lake, watching this exotic, fluttering
thing pulled toward me by a fishing line from above. When she
showed her perfect white teeth that still had faint marks where braces
had been, I opened my mouth.

West handed me my drink and | raised it to my lips. She was
about to speak when a thick-chested man pushed his way to us.

“Hey, Honey,” he said.

“Billy,” she replied.

Billy looked at me, the way one man looks at another,
automatically, in case hostilities break out and they find themselves
on opposite sides.

“What're ya doing?” he asked her.

I guessed an Oldsmobile salesman.

“Talking to Mr. Cartwright here, whom”— she stressed the sigh
“I’ve just this moment now met. Tom, this is Mr. Billy Mora.”

“Number ten,” I said, tasting my drink.

“How ya doing?” Billy said.

“He doesn’t live here,” Honey said. “He’s just my guest for this
evening.” | |

“C’mon, let’s eat something,” Mora said, eyeing me.
58 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

“I’m not hungry right now.”

“It’s all laid out.”

“It’s not going anywhere.”

His eyes rolled and he said Jesus at the ceiling. I felt as though
I had been gigged in the side and looked about desperately. Through
the opening into the dining room and across the flower divider, I
saw the blonde from the bathroom still watching me. I smiled and
she smiled back.

“C’mon, now,” Billy said. “I don’t want to eat by myself.”

Honey flashed her teeth at me, shook her head as if to say she
had made a mistake, and allowed herself to be pulled from the
kitchen. |

I stood staring at the dials on West’s self-cleaning oven.

But interest in me picked up. Perhaps it was that the number of
my apartment had been spoken aloud. Men turned to me and offered
their hands. Women smiled and said, “Welcome aboard.” I did a
slow 360 on the kitchen floor and said “Hi” a dozen times. When I
completed the circle, I was looking at the blonde from the bathroom.

“My name is Kathy McHugh,” she said.

“Cartwright,” I replied. “Tom.”

“You’re new,” she said.

“Number ten.”

“In the corner.”

I was known. |

In the clean, florescent light of the kitchen, she was more than
attractive. She was beautiful, in that way a rare, few women at forty
are beautiful. It’s what happens to wine or good books. Life passes
through and then, out of grace, decides to stay. What goes on is not
so much age as harmony, and time passes with dignity and
compassion.

She had a broad, lovely head and wide, blue eyes. Her chin was
strong, with a small cleft, and she had high cheekbones, like an
Indian. She wore her hair pulled softly over one eye and rolled
under at the shoulder, and when she spoke, I imagined syllables
lined with velvet.

If you can believe it, these thoughts crossed my mind without
any particular romantic inclination. I have always liked looking at
older women, attractive older women, and when I see one, I become
set in rapt contemplation. I would sometimes find myself staring in
a theater or department store, much to the chagrin of Helen, and I
guess, now that I’m alone, I don’t have to dissemble anymore. A
woman like this, in my opinion, is what nature tries to mean.

“You're staring.” She smiled.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 59

“Tam? Oh, I’m sorry. Habit.”

She laughed.

“Well, are you all settled in?” she asked.

“I’m living here.”

“I understand. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“It’s the first time I’ve lived alone.” :

“You never get used to it. This is the second time for me.”

I looked at her shoulders and then through the alcove into the
dining room, where Honey was helping Mora swallow a Triscuit
covered with fondue. I was stuck with the thought that the one who
dwells inside us plays a peculiar nine innings of the heart. The
game is visible, but the players are ghosts. Nobody knows the rules,
yet it doesn’t matter, because the score is always 0-0. And when the
game is over, you win.

“Two marriages and two divorces,” she said, looking up at me.
“Silly, isn’t it?”

I moved my glass from one hand to the other and took a drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The way things are these days.”

“Don’t be patronizing,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. I
mean to have married two different men and then to have divorced
them.”

“Well, morally, I suppose —”

“It has nothing to do with morality. It’s just silly.”

I blinked my eyes. I was sure they were red from the closeness
of the apartment. “Perhaps being married at all is silly.”

Her face seemed to soften and open a little.

“Do you really think so?” she asked.

“I’m not quite sure what I think.”

“That also happens when you're alone.”

I looked about. The noise seemed to have increased, and I could
see couples leaning on each other, trying to dance. My head began
to spin.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Maybe this drink is too strong.”

“It is a bit close in here. Would you like to go out by the pool for
some fresh air?” |

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”

She took my hand, which made me feel suddenly quite
comfortable, and led me to the door.

Outside, the air was crisp and my head cleared immediately. We
walked over to the pool and sat down. The surface of the water was
glassy-smooth, and the green-yellow light reached all the way to the
bottom, where the drain grill gleamed. To the grill someone had
60 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

tied a red bathing cap.

“Do you have any children?” she asked.

“A boy,” I said.

“Children always get the raw end of a divorce.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“We never had any children, my husbands and I. My second
husband wanted children badly, but it wasn’t a good idea for me.”

I nodded.

“We thought about adopting. Do you think adopting is all right?”

“Yes, I think it’s all right.”

“We were thinking about it, but then we split. Sometimes I wish
for everything to start over again. Do you ever wish that?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“I wish for it to start again, but I don’t know particularly why.
It’s not so I could have children, though having them would be all
right.”

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at the water. Every now and then a thin breeze riffled
the surface, and the bathing cap down at the bottom would twist.

“I’ve been married two times and divorced two times, and after
each marriage I came back here to these apartments to live. I don’t
know why, I just did. I guess it’s like home.”

I looked about at all the rectangular squares of light in all the
cubicles row on row.

“I have a great job in the city as a manger for Pacific Bell Yellow
Pages and I make over seventy-thousand a year and I could live
anywhere, but I’ve lived here after each divorce. I think it’s because
I drove by it every day on the way to work when I was first married.”

I looked at her.

“I work in the city too,” I said.

“How long have you been split?”

“A month.”

“I sensed it immediately. The vulnerability, I mean. It’s the best
time to reach a man, when he’s just left his wife. I’m drawn to
vulnerability, you understand. It’s absolutely essential that there
be vulnerability for anything to succeed.”

I felt as though somebody had turned off all the lights and I had
. Just put my hand out in the dark. ?

“Haven’t you ever wondered,” she said, “what holds people
together?”

“What do you mean?” I tried to see through the teflon-coated
night into her eyes. I had noticed in the apartment that they were ©
jade, but it could have been the contacts.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 61

“I mean what holds people together when what they do in the
end is come apart?”

“I guess some people stay together. I have friends who —”

“But what holds them?”

“Well, they have children. Maybe. They have interests. You
know. They like things together. They enjoy things together.” |
was confused and didn’t know what it was I felt obligated to defend.
“There are lots of reasons why people stay together.”

“Do you know,” she said, “I hate going into department stores
anymore. I hate buying anything anymore. They have cameras
looking at you from the ceiling. The expensive things are all chained
to the racks and somebody has to unlock them before you can try
them on. Everything has a white plastic gizmo clamped to it so you
can’t carry it away without setting off an alarm. There are security
guards and no place to sit down, and I don’t know any of the sales
people because they’re different every time I go in. I hate shopping
anymore for anything.”

I felt odd and distant and then realized that for the last few
moments — the only moments since I had left her — I had not
thought of Helen.

Then I remembered an incident from my boyhood. We lived for
a time in the country on an old two-lane highway, and down the
highway was a small country store. I used to hang out there as a kid
and read the comic books and put my face into the ice cream box to
smell the air. The owner was a man named Slim, and he lived with
his family in the back half of the store. The kitchen door opened
into the aisle between the bread and the canned vegetables, and
often Slim walked back there to go into the kitchen to fix coffee or
to eat breakfast.

The gum and peanuts were stacked next to the register by the
door, and one day when Slim was in back, I put a bag of Planters
into my pocket and walked outside. It was a fine summer day, and
I went down the highway a few hundred feet and sat under a
telephone pole and ate the peanuts. ,

All that afternoon I found life very difficult, and the following
morning, when Slim was in the kitchen, I took some change and put
it on the register where he could find it.

I must have shivered then because she said, “It’s getting too
cold. We’d better get back inside.”

“All right,” I said.

We stood and I touched her arm. I saw her smile up at me, the
pale glint of her teeth in the half dark. Over her head and on the
other side of the complex was the yellow glow from the laundry
62 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

room. I tugged at her elbow.

We walked to the room and stepped in. The machines were still
and the air was warm and filled with the vapors of soap and heated
cotton. I opened my wallet. Putting my thumb over Helen’s face, I
removed the picture and held it out for her to see.

“This is my son,” I said.

She looked at me and replied, “Why don’t you come over for
breakfast?”

Dat was Sunday, and on Monday we stayed in the city after work
to have dinner. There’s a small place called Little Italy on 24th street
that serves tomatoes smothered in a garlic and vinegar dressing
and the best pasta I’ve ever eaten. We drank Chianti, and I leaned
over the red and white tablecloth and pointed at Jack, the owner,
pouring zabaglione into a tall aluminum cup. It ran down over the
sides like thick, yellow oil.

She told me about her marriages and, to my surprise, | listened.
The room was full of people and there was a steamy heat that
reminded me of the Mediterranean in August. From time to time
the black stove where Jack worked flamed, and we laughed as he
stirred a concoction by flipping the dented skillet and then spun
the skillet across the hot griddle.

I was not sure how I should react. Apart from longing, I was a
bit embarrassed by my hunger for her. Sleeping alone, my body had
lost a certain comfort but had acquired a raw freedom. The
experience of flinging my arm across the pillows and finding only
space was frightening but exhilirating, and I did not want to lose the
_ chance of discovering truth in a futile attempt to satisfy desire.

But she was beautiful and a stranger in a life that had become
very strange indeed.

“I like this place so much,” she said.

“It is a good place, isn’t it?”

“It’s simple and clean and unpretentious, like you.”

I blushed.

“It’s funny,” she went on, “how you work in a big city all your
life and always discover new things.”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

I was happy. I smelled the garlic on my fingers and tasted the
slight red bitter flavor of the wine on my tongue. The sound of
laughter and voices was like the lobby of a theater between the acts
of a play. .

“Do you think you'll ever marry again?” she asked finally.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 63

The question bothered me, for I had realized that I had not really
decided to marry in the first place. Marriage had come after school,
the way summer comes after spring. It had been as natural and
unerring as, say, watching the Johnny Carson Show on Friday night.
I felt my mouth wanting to twist into a toothless grin. The thought
of asking someone to stay with me now seemed as impertinent as
wanting to be Pope.

“Well, [don’t know,” I said. Her eyes were round and very bright.
“I guess I’m pretty confused.”

“Once burned, twice shy.”

“I don’t even know if it’s that,” I said. “I don’t feel particularly

betrayed. Or even angry.”
“How do you feel?” |

I thought amoment. “Like Charles Lindbergh,” I said.

She laughed and looked out through the small window. “You
don’t know what to expect from being alone.”

I stared at her. And then the waiter brought the tagliarini.

February passed and the weather got warmer. I had come to
know some of the people who lived in the apartments, and when we
met on the walks, we stopped to chat. Most of them were what are
called “professional.” They read Newsweek and The Wall Street
Journal as BART hurtled them beneath the bay, and on Saturdays
washed the Saabs and BMW’s that had gathered dust during the
week.

“Here,” she said one night, “life is like the office. You’re thrown
in with a group of strangers, all with the same ambition, and you
more or less have to get along.”

I thought of my house, surrounded by redwood stakes, Japanese
pine and golden juniper. In the house I was on a private ship, as it
were, drifting above a wingspan of Bandini lawn beside other ships,
in quiet formation. Living here was like living on the Concorde.

SO we went out.

There is something about dating again, when you've already put
in all that time, that is terrifying, as though what you had in between
was only a dream. This attitude is part of a common fallacy that life
is linear, that is starts at a certain place, goes on through and then
finishes, more of less properly, at the end. Of course, it is actually a
circle, and a man does not know how many times he will have to go
around.

I wanted no part of the desperate adolescence I saw about me. |
imagined myself worrying over the coordination of pocket
handkerchiefs and neckties or lingering near the men’s counter at
Macy’s, splashing cologne on my wrists or having my car detailed
64 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

and getting a haircut and going early into some dimly-lit joint to
wait for Honey Baker to troll by. And it sickened me. If I had turned
360 degrees, it was not to repeat folly.

There were many good places to eat on this side of the bay, and
they were less pretentious. We sat in the restaurants and her voice
was always new and had that funny little push at the back of the
throat that I couldn’t get used to. There was something in the
furniture of the restaurants, something in the people that chattered
around us that was like looking through thin curtains on a spring
day. 7

We sat huddled over swordfish or calamari. Our reflections shone
in the green wine bottle. She touched my hand and I smelled her
perfume and watched the lipstick disappear from her mouth as she
ate. I enjoyed the things she wore and that I had not been there
when she bought them, and I enjoyed all the things she had never
told me before, even when she told them again.

I liked her. I think that’s what it was. She was beautiful and I
wanted her and even after we began making love I liked her. Sleeping
alone in the quiet dark without my wife and son, tucked into my
cabin beneath the stairs, and lingering over a final glass of
chardonnay beside a woman in the summer of her beauty, whom I
hardly knew, seemed so contradictory and rare that I doubted
everything from before. I discovered that I had never really liked
Helen. :

At times I stayed in Kathy’s bed until the stars went down, but it
troubled me to awaken in the morning and walk across no man’s
land to my own quarters. I realized very quickly that the feeling did
not concern Kathy and me but had to do with those others, peeking
from behind pleated curtains, who would confuse my journey toward
truth with their own maudlin loneliness. When I understood, it no
longer mattered what they thought.

It was a constant surprise to make love with someone toward
whom there was no other obligation. Having been so firmly married,
I expected some embarrassment or at least guilt, but there was none
of that. Just this surprise, as though, again and again, I was handed
a gift whose contents I was certain I already possessed, only to find,
upon opening, something I had never been given before.

I was confused. Was it simply that she was not my wife, the way
an automobile is not your automobile, no matter how many times
you might sit behind the wheel in the showroom? Or was it just me,
driving at last upon a limitless highway, whose only horizons were
wonder and fear? |

There was a rose-shaded lamp by her bed and we often lay in its
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 65

glow, listening to the vague sounds of life beyond the walls. In
those moments I knew a kind of serenity, if such a word is correct
for what I was experiencing. At other times, alone in my apartment,
I wanted to laugh, right out loud, because I recalled the saying that
it is the fool who believes he has found something new when he
replaces one woman with another.

One night we lay quietly, talking generalities about the meanings
of things, and the phone rang. She rolled over and picked up the
receiver. She cupped a hand over the mouthpiece.

“It’s Frank,” she said.

I got up and went into the living room. There was only the blue
pilot burning between the metal logs of the fireplace, but enough
light came in from the lamps outside to give a glow to the furniture
and walls. I stood there, feeling the rug between my feet and hearing,
behind the hiss of flame, the rise and fall of Kathy’s voice. .

I was not sad or angry. I did not wonder what they were talking
about. I was not jealous or desperate. A kind of joy came over me,
and I did not know why. I bent down and looked into the blue
flame, and Kathy called me.

I went into the bedroom.

“It’s the divorce,” she said. “It was final Tuesday. I think he
believed I wouldn’t ever sign the papers. I feel so sorry for him.”

I lay down beside her. |

“You like me, don’t you, Tom?” she asked.

Iwas startled. “Like you. Of course. That’s the whole point. Of
course I like you. Very much.”

“I mean more than like me.”

I looked at her. “Yes, even more than that. Yes.” I did not want
to say it, even if it were true. Somehow it was not right to say.

She sighed and stared at the ceiling, where tiny splinters of silver
danced. “Could we just go to sleep?” she asked.

“All right,” I said.

She turned off the light. I could hear far away the click of train
wheels against metal tracks. I pulled the blankets to my chin and
heard her say into the darkness, “He’s so vulnerable now.”

At her suggestion we began to stay in more. She fixed dinner. We
brought in pizza or Chinese from a deli down the road. We rented
old movies for the VCR.

We sat on the sofa and took off our shoes. Sometimes we listened
to the stereo and I read the paper while she thumbed through a
magazine. Our relationship took on a regularity which I came to
66 Richard Dokey Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

enjoy, even though it included, now and again, a trip by Kathy into
the bedroom to answer the phone or one by me into the living room,
where I lingered among the pale shadows until she called my name.

“You enjoy simplifying life, don’t you, Tom?” she asked on an
evening when we had watched Casablanca again.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “You mean, do I enjoy simple
things?”

“Yes, that,” she said, smiling and filling our glasses with the last
of the wine. “But I mean really that you like things to just be ata
basic level and avoid the crazy things in the world.”

“Yes,” I said. “The world is crazy.”

“I think so too. More than ever. The secret is to get it simple
and keep it that way. Like staying here and having dinner and just
talking instead of running around to restaurants and shopping
centers or rushing up to the Lake or down to Carmel or flying off
somewhere stupid and getting exhausted and calling it fun.”

I looked at her. There were tight little lines at the corners of her
mouth. Her eyes were wide and very bright. She sat on the edge of
the sofa.

“What is it, Kathy?” I salced.

“Nothing,” she said. “It just all seems so stupid compared to
this.” She sat back. “This is what really matters in life. It’s what
really counts. And I’m so glad this is the way you really are. And
you don’t really make any demands. That’s what’s so unusual.”

I looked away from her at the framed prints hanging on the wall.
The prints were above the stereo, and there were dozens of records
lined up in the cabinet below. They spilled out onto the floor.

I reached for my wine glass and took a sip. It was a chablis and
it had grown warm. I put the glass down.

So I had been sampled, brought home for a trial run and checked
out. I realized that my emerging confidence and freedom had actually
turned on me, and with a heavy heart I fully expected that, any day
now, my warranty was due to expire.

One night a week later, just after dinner, a faint knock came to
her door. Of course, it was Frank. He looked terrible.

“I've got to talk to you,” he said.

She glanced over her shoulder at me. I was sitting on the sofa
with my shoes Off.

“We've got to talk,” he said. “Please.”

She put a hand on his chest and pushed him away. She stepped
out and closed the door.

They went to the pool and sat down. They talked for a long
time. I did the dishes. When I looked outside again, they were gone.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Dokey 67

A moving van came for the furniture the following day, and when
I got home from work, the men were just finishing. One of them
walked over and said, “Are you Mr. Cartwright?”

“Yes,” I said.

“This is for you.”

He handed me an envelope. Inside was a note.

Dear Tom,

For some reason I can’t stand the thought of being married to
three people, and I was beginning to like you too much. I’ve
gone back to Frank. Please understand and forgive me.

Kathy

I wanted to grin. It would have been appropriate, under the
circumstances. I had not been thinking about love or marriage but
was merely entertaining the notion of whether or not one could
take on a co-pilot for a leg of the long and solitary flight.

I tore up the note and went into the apartment. I had weeks of
laundry to do. I stuffed the rubber basket, walked over to the
washroom and loaded the machines.

Then, as I heard the engines roar and the room filled with the
scent of detergent and fabric softener, I forgot about the human
race and imagined a warm-smelling, familiar aircraft carrying me
far out over the sea to another world where, a parachute strapped
to my back, I would bale out and drift down to a life that hasn’t been |
lived before. .
68 Lisa Fugard Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Alice
Lisa Fugard

On the day of my mother’s breast implant surgery my father got
up before dawn, the first time anyone in our house had gotten up
that early since Christmas. His cologne, a cloying combination of
perfumed insecticide and orange liqueur, billowed down the hall
and drifted into my bedroom, waking me up at six a.m., forcing its
way up my nose until it was snug, nestled in my senses. When |
opened my eyes again at eight thirty I could still taste it in the back
of my throat.

“You'd better get up,” my younger sister Aileen said as she
frantically changed her clothes for the third time. “Dad says we’re
leaving in fifteen minutes.” |

I ambled into the kitchen, dawdling purposefully, determined
not to get caught up in the frenzy of yet another operation day. At
the refrigerator I once again encountered Doctor Bloom, the plastic
surgeon. My mother had cut his ad out of the Sunday paper and
taped it to the refrigerator door:

PUT YOUR FACE IN THE HANDS
OF A WORLD-RENOWNED SCULPTOR.

Above the bold lettering was a soft-focus photograph of a swarthy
man with black tousled hair and piercing eyes, his hands raised as if
he were about to hypnotize someone.

I pulled up a kitchen stool and ate my cereal in front of Doctor
Bloom. The more I studied his photo the more | had the sense that
it was taken ona beach. I thought I could make out a blurry seagull
in one corner. I imagined the wind whipping around him, the gull
lifting off of it. Doctor Bloom was wearing a white lab coat. I could
hear the scalpels clattering in his pocket. Was this the man I would
be seeing after my sixteenth birthday or was there another plastic
surgeon waiting in my future? I took a marker and gave him a small
mustache. I blacked out the word FACE and wrote in TITS.

My mother had fallen out with Doctor Saltano, her first plastic
surgeon, the one who gave her the collagen shots in her lips and
had recently done her eyelid correction. A month after the eye
surgery Aileen and I had crowded into the bathroom with Mom,
watching her as she intricately applied her makeup before driving
to exercise class. Aileen and I did great impersonations of the cartoon
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Lisa Fugard 69

crows Heckle and Jeckle and that afternoon we were paying her all
sorts of compliments in their voices.

“Hey, lady! Lady, you can’t be that old?” I squawked.

“Lady! Lady! Is this your sister?” Aileen asked, pointing at me.

I was fourteen and the previous week, outside the Wild Pair shoe
store, a leering man with an odd-shaped birthmark on his face asked
Mom that very same question.

My mother wriggled with delight. Then she spun around and
gave us each a kiss. I loved the way she flirted with us. Like those
tightly-folded paper flowers that unfurl into extravagant blossoms
when dropped into a glass of water, my mother came vibrantly to
life with the smallest of compliments.

“Lady! Lady, how about a date with an old crow like me?” I said,
hopping behind her.

Giddily, she reached into her makeup case. She caught my eye
in the mirror and winked as she snaked her tongue over the tip of a
tiny brush. She ran the moistened brush over a cake of eyeliner.

“Shhh,” she said. “I have to concentrate for this part.”

“Lady! Lady! Kiss my wing. Please, please!” I begged.

My mother burst out laughing again. “Alice!” she scolded, trying
to compose herself. She leaned towards the mirror, lifted the brush
up to her eyes, and screamed. A split second later Aileen shrieked
as well.

At ten years of age my sister was what I call a sympathetic
screamer—lI flat out refused to take her to the movies and it was
impossible to watch anything scary on TV with her.

“Shut up!” Mom yelled.

Aileen sputtered and gasped.

“Make me laugh,” my mother hissed as she stared at her reflection
in horror.

“What?”

“Make — me — laugh.” She ground the words out.

“Mom!”

She turned around and almost slapped me, her red nails darting
through the air like a cloud of butterflies. “You heard me — make
me laugh!”

“Mom! Mom!” Aileen shot in. “If you’re Russian when you go
into the bathroom and Finnish when you come out, what are you
while you’re there?”

Mom stared fiercely at Aileen.

“European!” Aileen exclaimed, worriedly.

My mother turned back to the mirror and forced herself to laugh,
louder and louder until her eyes screwed up and she began to sob.
70 Lisa Fugard Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

She sank onto the toilet seat, pushing Aileen off.

“They’ve changed —” I couldn’t make out the rest of what she
said as she dropped her head into her hands and gurgled.

I looked at the tiles, at the faint yellow streak down the front of
the toilet bowl. My nose began to navigate through the fog of Mom’s
perfumed accessories and I thought I smelled my father.

“My eyes are almond-shaped. Doctor Saltano’s done something
wrong,” Mom wailed. “When I laugh my eyes look like almonds.”

I quickly came up with another joke and turned Mom’s head to’
the mirror. Aileen and I peered over her shoulders, and we all
laughed.

“See, Mom, it’s nothing,” Aileen said. “You’re beautiful.”

“No, no, you can’t tell now. My eyes are all puffy.” The red
butterflies took to the air once more. They hovered around her
face, flitted into her hair, and landed on her new lips.

“Get me some sliced cucumber,” she said.

My mother walked into the bathroom and pulled the blinds. “I’m
going to try and calm myself,” she whimpered. “Oh God —” Tears
seeped out again.

She lay down, tanned and slim — this was before breasts implants
and with reluctance she’d described herself as being “boyish-slim.”
When she said this she would glance anxiously in my father’s
direction. We covered her eyes, eo slivers of cool cucumber on
her swollen lids.

“Come back in an hour,” she said, “with more jokes.”

We crept out of the room.

My mother forced us to tell jokes all afternoon. We sat in bed
with her and laughed long and loud while she held up her magnified
makeup mirror and compared her eyes with ours. “There’s no
difference,” we assured her. Later my father came home and told a
joke about a whore and a penguin. He slapped Aileen for laughing
and told Mom she was imagining her eyes had changed shape. Then
he kissed her and said, “Don’t worry, I’ve always had a _— for
Asian women anyway.”

In bed that night, after a long silence, Aileen called my name.

“They did get slanty,” she whispered. “They did, they did.”

D, octor Bloom seemed to have inspired more confidence, the fact
that he was a sculptor had my family impressed. On the morning of
the surgery though, no one was paying any attention to the ad and
my graffiti went by unnoticed. The apartment vibrated with hysteria
— my mother complaining that she had to have just a little sip of
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Lisa Fugard 71

diet soda, surely that wouldn’t interfere with her surgery, for God’s
sake. Her breath smelled awful; she had to have just a little
something to get her saliva going.

“Can I have a Tic-Tac?” she pleaded. |

“You'll vomit! You’ll vomit and you'll choke,” squealed Aileen.
Eleven years old and growing an inch a month, she ricocheted around
the kitchen on her stork-like legs, brandishing the preoperative
instructions including the one about no food or drink twelve hours
before surgery.

“My breath,” Mom moaned.

“Oh, go ahead, die!” Aileen spat out. She was on the verge of
ripping up the instruction sheet when my father tornadoed in.

“BRUSH YOUR GODDAMN TEETH, THEN!”

We all stared down at the floor. I could sense my mother
palpitating.

“I’m not supposed to have any water, Earl,” she said at last, in
her little girl’s voice.

Dad stared at her for the longest time. “Fay,” he said slowly,
simply, “don’t swallow. Rinse and spit. That’s it. Just rinse and
spit.”

“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh.”

“Jesus Christ, this is a house of idiots.” He coughed and poured
himself a cup of coffee.

When he left the kitchen Aileen and I stayed quiet. Mom stood
in the middle of the room for a few seconds then walked to the
phone, her high heels clicking on the floor, like Morse code from
someone far away. She wrote something on the message pad, folded
it, and slid it across the counter to me. I opened the yellow triangle:

DON’T SWALLOW. BIG FAT JOKE!!!

I motioned for her to give me the message pad. She’d pressed
so hard I could see the imprint of her note. I picked up the pen but
there was nothing I could write. Dad rattled the car keys. I ripped
off the squares with the imprint and threw them, along with the
- note, in the trash can.

As we drove to Doctor Bloom’s office, the promise of my mother’s
transformation swirled through the car like cotton candy, huge
clouds of pink stickiness we gulped down. Mom, the lucky one, was
going to change her life, come out sexy, beautiful. Dazzling. I was
finally seduced. In my mind’s eye I saw what Mom saw, what Dad
saw, what Aileen was learning to see. The incision in the skin, the
slicing with Doctor Bloom’s clattering steel scalpel. The skin yielding,
yawning open. The body’s sigh, the exhaling, and with it all the
muck and the slime of your life draining away. Then coming home
72 Lisa Fugard Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

with the spell of stitches. Two layers to minimize scarring. Invisible
dissolving ones underneath and a fetish of black ones on top. It
would be my turn soon. There would be a year when Dad would
spend his bonus on me. :

dy he photo of Doctor Bloom, world-renowned sculptor and plastic
surgeon, was obviously decades old. I wouldn’t have even known
that the balding man who came through the door marked surgery,
in the back of the reception area, was him except by the way he
raised his hands. Time had mellowed Doctor Bloom, giving his
gesture a more papal air.

The greeting flummoxed my father, who'd reached out to shake.
His hand hung in the air like an ugly fish before he stuck it back into
the pocket of his slacks and shivered. The room felt refrigerated.

“Tools, tools,” said Doctor Bloom, “these are my tools.” He spoke
with a sibilant s and tapped his fingers against the air.

“These are my daughters Alice and Aileen,” Mom said and shoved
us forward. :

I shut my eyes and ducked my head but I couldn’t hide my nose,
the monstrosity I’d inherited from Aunt Rilda, on my father’s side
of the family. When I opened my eyes Doctor Bloom was staring at
me. He plunged his hands into his wide pockets and I flinched.
Smiling, he rocked back on his heels and filled the air once more
with his whistling s’s.

“Sisters, sisters, surely you’re their eldest sister!”

My mother laughed and laughed. She had it down pat, the art of
laughing without scrunching up her eyes and revealing Doctor
Saltano’s faux pas. In my old photo albums it looks as though she’s
screaming. Doctor Bloom continued to compliment her as he
waddled to the center of the room and removed Aileen from a large
piece of wooden sculpture she’d perched on.

“I find driftwood at my vacation home on the Gulf of Mexico,”
he said, gesturing to the profusion of sculptures displayed around
the office. :

While Doctor Bloom talked to my parents I moved around the
room in a daze, catching snippets of their conversation. The
sculptures twisted and curved, wherever I turned one of them pointed
at my nose. My eyes glazed over Doctor Bloom’s “glory” wall, filled
with framed diplomas, a citation from the Sarasota Artists Guild,
and several articles from Florida newspapers. I saw a photo of him
with his scalpel. I saw a blowup of the photo from the newspaper
ad. The sea gull was more defined and I made out crashing waves
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Lisa Fugard 73

behind him. I saw a photo of him on the beach, dragging a large
piece of driftwood behind him, the piece that now arched in the
center of the room like a giant spasm.

“,.. release the hidden beauty in the wood,” Doctor Bloom
intoned.

I leaned up against a small marble pedestal and my hand sunk
into something soft—an implant on display. Three-hundred and
sixty cc’s of silicone gel that felt like the innards of a jellyfish. I
backed away. Dad coughed, made a rattling, scraping sound in the
back of his throat, and then swallowed whatever he wanted to spit
up. The faint chemical odor of anesthesia seeped’ out from
underneath the door marked surgery and I gave it a wide berth.

Kneeling down next to the spasm Doctor Bloom ran his hands
over its speckled curves. “It’s what I try to do to a face, to a woman,
to awoman’s body.”

I stood in front of a white marble table stacked with light blue
brochures detailing the various procedures Doctor Bloom performed.
I saw close-ups of abdomens and exquisite, tiny noses, silhouettes
of breasts and buttocks. I grabbed a handful of the brochures and
stuffed them up my shirt.

“Time to work,” Doctor Bloom sang out, fluttering us a goodbye.

A nurse, old enough to be his mother, hobbled out from the
operating room. “Come back for her at five o'clock,” she croaked as
she led my mother away.

“Good luck, Mom!” It was only when I saw the blonde receptionist
Staring at me that I realized I’d shouted. :

My mother came back from breast surgery looking as if she’d
been mugged. Barefoot, she staggered up the concrete stairs to our
apartment, holding onto my father, her face woozy, the button-down
shirt she’d borrowed from him suddenly stuffed with breasts.

“Give her room, give her room,” my father barked as he herded
Mom inside.

He shut the door, dropped her heels on the floor, then hurried
after her as she headed for the bathroom in their bedroom. Aileen
and I peered in from the doorway.

The previous month we’d seen Wanda Louden, the divorcee who .
lived across from us, stumble back after her surgery — more
complicated, a lift and implants. We’d hung around the patch of
lawn below Wanda’s apartment trying to catch a glimpse of her. She
lurched out of the car, large and groggy, and her mother shooed us
away.
74 Lisa F ugard Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

“Hi, Wanda!” I called out, waving.

Her eyes rolled over me before she disappeared inside. A few
hours later her eight-year-old son Johnny had shown up with a can
of ravioli that I heated up for him while my mother interrogated
him. How was Wanda feeling? Was she conscious? Was she moaning
with pain?

In front of the bathroom mirror my mother fumbled with the
buttons on the shirt. My father tried to help but she murmured
something and weakly swatted at his hand. To my surprise he
withdrew. Finally the shirt dropped off, revealing a large pair of
breasts snug in a black lace bra. My mother swayed slightly. When
she finally focused she caught her breath. She ran her hands gently
over her breasts. Tears came to her eyes. Stunned, my father
stuttered and shook his head. I stared at him, watching his face
redden, until Aileen jabbed me.

“Look at the tubes,” she whispered.

A thin tube came out of each of my mother’s armpits and entered
into a small plastic bag taped to the side of her body. They were
drainage tubes. Doctor Bloom, the world-renowned sculptor and
plastic surgeon, went in under the armpit. He didn’t want to mar
the surface of the breast, suggesting that it would be akin to
scratching up a brand new Ferrari. This statement finally sold my
dad on Doctor Bloom. Mom seconded the opinion after Doctor Bloom
told her there was a certain ethereal quality to her nipples. She
hadn’t known what the word meant so I'd looked it up for her. Other
surgeons went in below the nipple in the crease of the breast, or as
in Wanda’s case when a lift was involved, actually removed the nipple,
digging it out by its milky roots. Then the excess skin was cut away,
the implant inserted, and the nipple reattached. With the preferred
armpit incision the blood could not be drained completely during
surgery, hence the drainage tubes. The bag was to be emptied every
six hours and measurements kept as to the exact amount of fluid in
it. Aileen beat me to the job. |

I got hair duty. For six weeks my mother wasn’t to lift her hands
above her head so I became a hairdresser and a beautician, roped
into doing everything from hot rollers to pedicures. It started that
very afternoon.

Mom caught sight of the awed expression on my father’s face.

“Out,” she slurred.

I locked the door and put on the bedside lamp as she sat down.
Her head slumped forward.

“Why don’t you lie down?” I touched her shoulder.

She winced and pulled away. |
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Lisa Fugard 75

“What?” I asked.

She frowned. “Nothing, nothing,” she said.

Aileen knocked on the door and I let her in. Notebook in hand,
she wrote down how many millimeters of fluid had collected in the
bag before she emptied the pinkish liquid.

“Alice,” my mother said, “fix me up.”

I brushed her hair, wiped her face with a damp wash cloth.

“More,” she mumbled. “More, I want to look good.”

I chose the softest-colored lipstick she owned and daubed it on.
She lay back down and I pulled the covers over her.

“Night,” I said and switched off the light.

Slow, sleepy laughter came out of the darkness.

“Teeth,” she murmured. “I forgot to brush my teeth.”

The hallway was darkened and out of habit I paused for a
moment. I’d always liked hallways, the brief sense of journey that
I'd get in them, a sense of motion, a sense that things would change.
That evening, as a treat, my father had ordered Chinese food. A
celebration. Aileen and I would eat steamed vegetables from the
Low-Cal part of the menu, and my father would have sweet and sour
pork. I leaned against the wall. To my left, my mother drifting off
in a tranquilized sleep. To my right, my father growling at the
sportscaster on Channel Nine, Aileen calling my name over and over
again.
76 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Luis My Stepson Sheds a Few Tears
Richard Brown

 

Late made me so angry that I wouldn’t lend him any money for a
bus ticket. I was sick of him talking about Ted Kennedy at meals,
upsetting his father. “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.
That’s socialism,” I said. I needed to teach him a lesson. In the last ©
year he’d lost every job my cousins had found for him. I still see red
when I write them out. As a library clerk he’d tumbled a bookcart
down some stairs because it held a biography of the Pope. As a
casino change boy he’d missed two days’ work and told his supervisor
that the reason was sexual. As a car jockey at the Happy Gondolier
Restaurant he’d totaled a Jaguar in a well-lit parking lot.

After I refused to open my purse, he dithered for so many days
about finding a ride to San Francisco that I began to feel sorry and
made a joke about how he might get there for free. “In the fifties we
wangled gamblers’ VIP passes on the casino buses. Other times we
hopped a freight at the yard over in Sparks.”

Luis looked incredulous. “Can you imagine me... ?” That
angered me again. He was too superior to take chances I might’ve
taken.

I started heckling him when we passed in the bathroom door.
“My stepson that never left town.” I had his father cackling in his
beard. “Fraidy cat,” William said. “And queer as a three dollar bill.”
That remark was dangerous though. Luis ran from the kitchen, and
I chased after him to apologize.

I expected he'd be crying, but he was looking out his bedroom
window at the freeway that curves toward the mountains. Colored
spots were sweeping along it like bugs. “How about getting a ride
with one of your nighttime friends?” I said. He shrugged. Maybe
the boys he meets downtown aren’t ones to do you favors, I thought.
I didn’t know, since he never brought them home.

The face was his father’s, and the spout of hair at his throat.
“Do something good now, so William’ll have to change his tune,” I
whispered.

Still the note on the refrigerator surprised me the next evening.
“Found a tourist going my way in one of the bars,” it said. “See you
whenever.”

“I must’ve been napping when he left,” William groused when I
showed it to him. “He couldn’t even wake me, your stepson.”

Luis showed up again the next Monday, unshaven and sweaty.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown "7

He grabbed my elbow and waltzed me over the kitchen floor. |
nodded, and he wheeled William onto the porch so we could talk.
The old man barked curses, but I pretended not to hear.

Laughing, Luis sat at the table and told me about meeting Donny
at a dance club in the City. He needed to meet somebody quick, he
said, because he only had six bucks to start him on drinks. Donny
lived alone, so Luis was planning to pack up his books and move in.
“He hasn’t invited me yet, but I'll write a sexy letter he won't be able
to resist.” He looked like he was waiting for me to approve, but I
ducked outdoors to see about William. If this happens, I thought, it
might be good, or it might be not.

We waited a week for Donny to reply, while Luis got on my nerves
again, arguing with his father. This time Socrates was one sore point
between them and their family history was another. They both had
great memories, which kept them at loggerheads. When William got
wheezy from shouting, we hurried with his respirator.

“Do you want to phone your friend?” I finally said to Luis. “I'll
stand you the long distance.”

I sat on the porch with William, and we discussed mildew on the
delphiniums while Luis dialed. I found him in his bedroom later,
hugging himself and staring at the freeway. “Donny sounded
hungover. I kept circling back to the question, but finally I had to
let him go. God, I just hope he’s sleeping alone.”

Luis stopped walking downtown to the bars at night. He said
the men in Reno didn’t interest him anymore. He wandered from
room to room, humming tragic opera tunes. Until the evening |
found him jiving to the radio when I came in from work. “I got a
letter!” He pulled it from his jeans, but snatched it back when I
touched it. Instead he read out some lines which, he claimed, proved
Donny liked him.

“I won't wait for an invitation now. I'll move in and then convince
him it’s a good idea.”

He sounded so positive that I still didn’t ask the question on my
mind: are you sure you can rely on this person? I would’ve said the
signs about Donny weren’t good; but do gays signal each other
differently? William poured scorn on Luis’s plan, but that just made
me more careful. As a stepmother I had a duty to advise, but only if
I was sure. I chillled some spumanti, and we gave William a glass —
“Lovely, Babe!” he smiled at me — but we didn’t spoil our evening
by telling him that Luis was leaving.

This time Luis found a ride to San Francisco within a day. When
I got home, he was shoving his books into somebody’s electronics
van. He promised me he’d take the first job he was offered, so he
78 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

wouldn't be too beholden to Donny. “Bye, Daddy,” he shouted, but
William’d tented himself under a newspaper and wouldn’t answer.

After the letters started coming, I wanted to see the setup in the
City for myself, but William said we should forget about Luis. I said
his son was a genius who only needed a bigger field than Reno to
get started in. I also said we should be glad if he wanted a higher
class of boyfriends to choose from, though I was reaching for that
point, since his dates here had always been mysteries.

William answered that intelligence had ruined the boy. It’d made
him believe he could live without working. Any friend he found
would be as lazy, only dumber.

“Don’t the weak deserve our mercy then?” I said. “Aren’t we
weak ourselves and in need of each other’s care?”

William got peppery, thinking my question reflected on him, so
I dropped the next argument I’d been making up, about Luis’s
terrified childhood. In September I announced smoothly that I was
leaving William with two of my cousins, Lottie and Pat, and driving
to California for some air.

All the cousins had pitied me for getting Luis as a surprise when
I married, because his mamacita in New Mexico’d given up on raising
him after William left her. Luis was a raw nerve at fifteen, all right,
and I despaired of doing my duty by him with no help from his
father. But the kid noticed my efforts, and pretty soon he rewarded
me by becoming a serious person. It started with a little thing. He
asked about the Italian songs I whistled when I was cooking, so I
taught him the words and explained how the music fit into stories.
He loved the stories. Soon he was bringing me his dilemmas from
school, and we’d sort them out together. High school I’d lived
through, so my advice was usually right; but even when Luis argued
wrong, he’d make me think. However, my cousins’ clucking actually
got worse as he improved, like they didn’t want to believe a gay boy
could ever turn out OK. This seemed grudging, so I wrote them off
as a pack of gossips. Still Lottie was the best of a bad lot, and
cheerful.

William cursed me on the drive to her house, so I wheeled him
inside and slammed Lottie’s door on him. I stood on her stoop,
thinking he was only being nasty because he was worrying that I
might never come back, like sick people do. I started feeling so sad
for him that if I'd been alone, I might’ve gone in and let him talk me

out of the trip. But Lottie saw me wavering through her window,

and she came out and pushed me. She said she’d calm William with
a pot of tea. I knew I'd never get a better chance, so I took a breath
_and climbed in the car.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown 79

I spotted Luis from a block away, gawking on long legs. I hurried
along, because I wanted to tell him about my drive over the
mountains. But Donny shocked me, leaning out from behind a post
and snagging my hand. I tried not to stare, but he had a broken
nose, bubbly yellow hair, and teeth like a bat’s. He clamped onto
my arm like Luis had told him to charm me.

“It’s good you came,” Donny said right off. “Luis doesn’t meet
the kind of friends he needs here.” —_-

I tried to be polite, but he insisted. “I can’t talk to him much.
He’s used to going on about philosophy and stuff I never heard of.”
This surprised me; I’d expected to meet a different type in the City.
It might explain Luis’s chatty letters though. I was relieved to hear
that at least Donny looked up to him, since he might not’ve been
giving Luis pocket money otherwise. Then again, I wasn’t so pleased,
wondering if Luis had fallen into the same trap with Donny that
he’d fallen into with William and me.

Luis bobbed ahead of us along Polk Street, checking the prices
on restaurant menus and waving us away. I must’ve embarrassed
him by announcing that I was treating them to the meal. I pushed
Donny into a Greek place and Luis tagged behind, sheepish. I got a
drink inside him so he’d stopped taking sharp breaths, like he used
to when Willam badgered him. He became pleasant then and started
telling me about his upcoming marriage to a woman named A. I had
no idea about this. Donny couldn’t stop laughing, even when he
stuffed a napkin in his mouth. ° Luis’s marriage seemed to strike
him as a sly trick that only an intellectual could pull off.

Yet Donny’d brought the pair together by coming home from
the warehouse where he worked with a proposition. It seems there
was a man in the warehouse office who couldn’t divorce his wife,
but he really loved this other woman who was in the City from Brazil
Starting up an export business. Only, the Brazillian’s visa was
expiring. If that happened, she and the office guy’d be finished.
She needed somebody to marry her fast, so she could get permanent
resident status. The guy was asking around, did anybody know a
single man?

Luis met A. at a cafe the next night. She wore skyscraper heels
and spoke in a funny accent that Luis imitated for us by pinching
his nose. In half an hour they were engaged. “I could never do that
— it'd be too tricky for me!” Donny piped through his napkin. In
return for the favor, Luis was getting a rent-free apartment owned _
by A.’s boyfriend at the top of Market Street.

Luis lowered his voice for a joke when our waiter came, like he
was afraid somebody’d call the police on him. But the marriage was
80 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

serious business. He’d already declared his intentions toward A. to
the Immigration Service. After they went through the civil ceremony
would come checkups by the immigration cops to make sure they
were living together. “I’m a terrific liar,” Luis winked. “I learned it
as a survival skill when I was a kid in Mamacita’s house.” I saw that
he wanted me to say the deal would go OK.

I enjoyed hearing all the angles, I admit. I'd always admired
Luis’s mind, and he was concentrating now like he never had up in
Reno, before I shoved him out. But I was shocked at the risk, though
I told myself schemes like this must be common. People’d talked
about it openly at Donny’s warehouse, hadn’t they? Besides, Luis
hadn’t found any work yet, so he might want to show Donny that he
could help support them by snaring the free apartment. When I ran
out of these arguments, I blamed myself for urging him to take a
few chances in order to get ahead.

I laughed and said, “I just hope A.’s clever. I know you're clever
too, but you can’t expect to outsmart the feds alone,” and left it at
that. :

I'd figured Donny wouldn’t want to see Rigoletto, so I’d only
bought two tickets. But Luis hummed the tunes for him, a little
patronizing but kind, and said if he came with us, one of them could
do standing room. Donny blushed and said he guessed he should
give opera a try. I handed him some cash, but Luis grabbed it and
ran to the ticket window. He waved at us and went off to find a
place at the rail. I felt miffed, thinking he was afraid to be alone
with me in case I opposed the marriage. But this was unfair. More
likely he only wanted Donny to sit with me so I'd get to know him. |
led Donny upstairs to find our seats. On the way I explained to him
about the wicked duke and the court jester’s daughter. But the plot
baffled him, what with the crowd jostling us and the fiddles tuning
up — I could tell by the hopeless way he sank into the plush.

The music carried me off, and when I came back we went out
and found Luis in the lobby, drinking with three young men in black
T-shirts and jeans. I felt Donny’s arm go stiff.

“Hi, this is Mark, and these are his friends.” I saw that Luis’s
knee was pressed against the fellow’s leg. “Mark interprets the opera
in terms of European monarchicalism,” Luis grinned. “He thinks
the duke’s like the Bourbon kings, or all those Russian czars.”

Mark raised his eyes to me over his glass, but didn’t say anything.

I figured Luis must’ve met him before and was trying to make
an intellectual out of him. But when Mark and the others walked
off, Luis cried, “How could I have missed a sexy man like that? He
Says he goes to the same clubs I go to. He’s really a man of mystery,
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown 81

isn't he? I’ve got to get back to the rail and see if he’ll come home
tonight.” |

My mind didn’t settle down again till Rigoletto lurched into the
duke’s palace and drove the snotty chorus away. At the next
intermission we saw Luis hanging onto Mark’s group, but Donny
refused to go over. “Every time,” he muttered, so I bought him a gin
for comfort. In the last act my eyes kept shifting from the singers
onstage to him slouched in the chair beside me.

Luis was breathless when he found us on the opera house steps.
“You have a car, don’t you? We've got to get over to this bar on
Geary. Mark’s friends are driving him there because I invited him
for a nightcap.” 7

The opera’d been a treat, but I guess it’d worn me out. I felt
impatient with the way Luis was pushing Donny, considering that
Donny was mostly supporting him. Besides, chasing after Mark
seemed rude, with me visiting from out of town.

Immediately I doubted myself, when Donny didn’t protest at
being pulled along to the car. It’s between the two of them, I thought.
I need to let Luis be free. In the bar I paid for a bottle of spumaniti,
and while we waited for the others, Luis chatted about this guy he
didn’t know.

“IT unbuttoned his pants and got my hand inside while we stood
next to each other at the rail. It’s so dark in that opera house, nobody
Saw a thing.”

Donny drank up and called for another bottle. Finally Luis went
quiet, and our eyes met. I saw that Mark had mentioned this bar
only to get rid of him. I looked around. It wasn’t a place you’d
expect a young guy like that to patronize, with its plastic palm and
tinny waterfall. First ] was relieved. Then I felt angry, like the insult
had been aimed at me.

Luis stood up. “Thanks for the wine, madre mia. Actually it was
a blend of cheap grapes. The label lied.”

“Wait, I’m not finished,” Donny squeaked. He swirled his glass
like he was relishing the rotgut. Luis rolled his eyes. To hold him
there while Donny drank off the bottle, I told what I’d thought of
the tenor, but it was talking to myself.

I dropped them at a bus stop near my motel. Luis only gave me
a gruff goodnight. I watched him in the mirror till the light changed.
He was fishing in Donny’s pockets for bus fare, since Donny was
weaving. I didn’t see if he found it, or if they had to walk all the way
up Market to their apartment, dodging the other drunks. However,
I was in one of my gingery moods, blaming everybody for everything,
so I didn’t circle the block to offer them change.
82 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

I got into bed alone for the first time in years, thinking about
William up at Lottie’s house. Of all things, I remembered that Lottie
isn’t much of a cook. William and I’d always laughed about her
crazy noodles. I wondered if his stomach was upset now, and was
he blaming me? Then a tune came into my head, and there was that
second-rate schemer, Rigoletto, finding his daughter in the body
bag and singing the final number with her as she dies, while over
the top of them comes the duke’s bright, evil song from the wings—
"Woman is fickle, like a feather in the wind,” it translates — and I'll
swear, I felt so powerless, aching because I couldn’t help, that it
almost made me sick.

A white Sunday in January Luis rang to say he’d driven up to Reno
for the weekend to show his lover Tony his old haunts. This bowled
me over. Why’d you go to a motel instead of sleeping here? I wanted
to say. How'd you get through the blizzard that’s blowing over the
mountains? Who’s Tony, and why didn’t you write me about him?
Questions people ask, when they want to be included. |

They came by the house in Tony’s Cherokee to take me to lunch.
I made them step inside first and sit on the sofa, so I could see them
by my own scale. William wheeled himself out to the kitchen to
avoid shaking hands. He said he was studying history and didn’t
have time to meet any boyfriends, though I saw he was only reading
the funnies.

Tony was beautifully dressed. Sort of flowing silk bags that
drew in at the waist to show how slender he was. He flashed teeth
at me, but said almost nothing. He didn’t need to make any effort,
with Luis praising him to the skies. I figured Luis was talking so
loud because he knew William must be listening. He told about how
he’d met Tony on a dance floor and they’d had vertical sex that
same night in the shower. Tony ducked his head like he was
embarrassed to have this mentioned. Yet he fingered Luis’s leg
through his jeans till I had to remember to keep smiling, because of
what I saw him doing.

Their bodies strung over the cushions amazed me. The blue
arteries webbing their hands, the smooth roundness of cheeks and
necks. Recently I’d been taking William’s papery skin and rancid
smell for the human standard. I'd felt almost young, bathing him.
But now I was brittle and old.

I fixed William a sandwich, then Tony spun the three of us
downtown through fat wet flakes of snow. On the way Luis bragged
to me about how he was handling the feds. His only worry was if
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown 83

Donny squealed, he said.

“That gimpy drunk,” Tony laughed, like squealing would be too
much work for Donny.

I'd never mentioned Luis’s marriage to William, because the more
I considered, the worse it looked. All sorts of questions had come
to me. What about the wife that’s being deceived? I wanted to ask,
but I was afraid Luis would scoff. The worst would be if he answered,
“The wife’s terminally sick, so let the husband have his fun.”

I darted away from those torments and asked what’d happened
to Donny.

“I had to throw him out,” Luis said. He sounded almost smug.
“He had this jealous streak. You must’ve noticed, the night we went
out to dinner, how he kept making slits in the tablecloth with his
fork.”

But I hadn’t seen any slits. I was shocked to hear about the
punch Donny’d given him when Luis came home with the news that
he’d finally gotten a good job, teaching Spanish and Italian at an
institute. Donny’d sulked for a week, then smashed the frame around
Luis’s college diploma. |

Tony tsked in sympathy. Everything about Luis’s story seemed
to excite him. “You as good as stole that apartment!” he chuckled,
as if baiting Donny in order to get rid of him was part of a logical
plan.

I felt disgusted at all the conniving. Still I didn’t want to argue—
I only had a couple of hours to enjoy my stepson. Looking for a
safer topic, I asked what Tony did to pay for the Cherokee and his
clothes. But Luis interrupted, “So how’s Daddy?” like he meant to
warn me away.

This was the instant that pushed me over the top. I dropped my
polite voice and, in my way, I told Luis off. If we didn’t have time to
make up the quarrel later, it’d be his loss. Why was I so mad? I saw
that he was skating over badly cracking ice. Lots of big questions
were being raised, but only in the form of lies and boasts that could —
turn around and fang you in the tail. I was so disappointed in my
boy that I put on my truth squad hat and walloped him. I took his
phony question about William’s health, which he meant for me to
answer, “Oh, just peachy swell,” and launched into a red hot tirade.
When we got to the restaurant, I kept on charging even when my
mouth was full. Those two kids couldn't get in a word about anything
else. After the plates were removed, they had to play with water
drops on the table while I unloaded on them some more.

I told them about William’s congested lungs, slowing heartbeat,
swollen legs, bad sleeping, bladder leakage, eczema, and different
84 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

colored pills. I said the doctors had started hedging their bets; they
were blaming each other now for diagnosing wrong before. |
described our insurance problems, and quack treatments we were
advised against. I offered seven types of surgery on three different
organs, with the probability rates on each. I had six months of
medicine to cover since Luis had moved away, and I didn’t spare
details.

At the end of the meal I refused to see the bill, so Luis had to
Pay.

They dropped me off without coming in the house for coffee,
and a minute later the Cherokee’d vanished in the snowstorm. |
wasn't angry any longer, but my mouth felt sour, so first I brushed
the lunch out of my teeth. I found William asleep in the kitchen.
He'd wet his pants, but I left them till he woke up. I'd begun to feel
sad about using him to clobber Luis, though I still felt justified. My
stepson figured that with his pretty friend and cushy job, he’d
achieved something grand. But J had a duty to tell him, Happiness
like yours isn’t eternal. How you operate matters more.

My mind curled tighter, and I wondered if the reason the boys
had turned my stomach was simply that they’d looked almost free,
while I was chained here to an invalid, when I wasn’t downtown
sweating on the cashier’s desk? Was I only jealous of the young?

William opened his eyes and asked, “What’d you have for lunch,
Babe?”

“Sliced boyfriend,” I said in sorrow, and he laughed till he coughed
up phlegm. |

| drove to the bus station alone, because my stepdaughters from
New Mexico were busy trying on their dark dresses in the bedroom,
and my cousins were swarming over heaps of food the neighbors
had brought in. It was a relief to sit in the waiting room for a minute
without having to make conversation. If I needed company, I could
watch the panhandlers gathered at the glass doors, looking out at
the streaming March sky. :

The bus’s sides were covered with dirty snow, though our roads
in town were still clear. Luis got off last. He wore a black suit. |
hoped he hadn’t bought it, but only borrowed it off Tony. Otherwise
I was glad to see him. He was the only one I considered real, and
there were things I needed to tell somebody. This feeling surprised
me, since I'd thought we were estranged.

“You look handsome,” I said.

He hugged me, but wouldn’t let go when I tried to back off. I
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown 85

noticed him heaving. “Husha,” I said and stuffed a hanky in this
hand. .

In the car he wept without stopping. I was amazed and wondered
if he was feeling guilty about his father. “Your mamacita’s inside,”
I warned him as we pulled into the garage. “She’s broken up already,
so get a grip before you meet her.”

He inhaled long rattling breaths. I figured if I described William’s
end, he’d be able to take it more as a plain fact. I mentioned the
bloating and grogginess. This sounded disgusting, so for
cheerfulness I added, “He still had your features though. You were
on his conscience. If his mind had been clearer, he might’ve phoned.”

That last remark was a mistake, because Luis started howling.
He was so loud that I got suspicious. I saw now that he was raccoon-
eyed and thinner about the jaws.

“Are you sick yourself?”

He shook his head.

That was good. “You don’t have to take it so personal then,” I
said.

“Tony’s gone,” he muttered.

He told me the story in pieces through a steady stream of tears.
It seems Tony was out of a job when they met and never looked for
one. He lived in Luis’s free apartment and watched TV while Luis
was away teaching. Pretty soon he had to sell the Cherokee to pay
off a funny debt. At night he waited for Luis to fix dinner; then he
expected to be taken dancing. Luis put up with this nonsense because
he felt guilty for wanting Tony to find work. The kind of socialist
Luis was, he thought employment was an “arbitrary requirement.”

To fill his time, Tony started calling up some of his old partners.
He stole cash from Luis’s jeans once while Luis was in the shower.
They fought over that. They were naked in the bedroom, and to
prove some point, Tony pulled out Luis’s underwear drawer and
masturbated over it. This sounds odd to me, but I’ve never known
Luis’s friends. Maybe to Tony it was normal self-expression. William
peed in his wheelchair when he was mad at me, so is there a
difference? Anyhow Luis watched him, disgusted and hurt. When
Tony finished, he ordered him out of the apartment, but now he
was wondering if he should’ve forgiven more. He was still avoiding
Tony’s favorite club, where they’d met. |

I tossed my keys in my purse. Tony was no loss, of course. I
might’ve told Luis that he could find a new friend without money
whenever he wanted, but my mind was moving in a different way.
“I’ve got bad memories too,” I said. “That time I visited you, I planned
to bring back a gift for William to make up for leaving him with
86 Richard Brown Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Lottie. Maybe sourdough bread in a pretty wrapper. But the morning
after the opera, I felt so off-color that I just wanted to get out of the
City, and I forgot to shop. When picked him up, he was cranky like
I'd expected, and I had nothing for him.

“I let down my guard and cried back at him, which was stupid.
When he hit me — a tap was all he could manage — I caught myself
slugging him. I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t see for a minute. If I
hadn't turned off the engine already, the exhaust in here might’ve
wiped us out. We wouldn’t have cared.”

Luis shot a glance to see if the garage door was still up. At least
I'd stopped his tears. However, I don’t think anything I'd said about
William moved him. It was my big confession, but there were no
ears to hear. “There’s something else,” he said, like his mind had
_ hever really left his own trouble. “Donny may have squealed about
the marriage after all.”

This brought me up short. I asked what evidence he had.

“After I threw him out, he made threats around the warehouse
where he worked,” Luis said. “He was upset over losing his share in
the apartment, and maybe he figured he could force A.’s boyfriend
to give him one of his own. But the man called Donny into the office
and pointblank fired him. After that, he disappeared. I haven't
seen him in a gay bar for weeks. Only now A. thinks some creep in
a suit’s tailing her around town.”

“If you’re so worried, you could turn yourself in.” I said this
without thinking. Luis’s eyes popped, and I knew I didn’t want him
in jail.

“A.’s moving in with me for a while,” he said. “We’ll go out
together so we'll be seen, and her boyfriend will lie low.”

One of my cousins, Nicola, opened the kitchen door and cooed
at Luis. Hypocrite, I thought. I frowned, and she pulled her head
inside. 3

“My family are respectable Italians,” I said. “They’ve gone to
dozens of funerals, and they always behave. They don’t carry on
like they lived in an opera. You, though, you’ll be blubbering louder
than the priest. I resent you bringing your other griefs along,
competing with your father. Remember, I made sacrifices for him,
so I deserve good memories at the end.” __

I'd pricked Luis into weeping again. This could get on your
nerves. :

“Daddy was wicked for hating me,” he cried. “I can’t help it if he
reminds me of my other problems. Anyway, don’t worry about the
priest. I’m not going to the funeral; I only came to cheer you up.”
He wept some more.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 Richard Brown 87

After all, I took no pleasure in his distress. I squinted at the
back wall of the garage, thinking up some serious advice. “You got
a job in line with your education,” I offered. “But you went into the
other things too easy. I think you’ve been coasting on being smart
and gay. You saw through people’s platitudes and assumed that
none of their silly rules applied to you.

“Listen: this shady marriage deal, these romances with losers —
how could they turn out any better than they did? What’s more, you
weren't as brainy as you thought. Do I need to point out that the
way you treated Donny, Tony treated you?”

He stared ahead at the wall I'd been looking at, and the tears
just dripped. :

“IT had no money, no frieintis in the City,” he complained. “When
these chances came, what choice did I have? You weren’t offering
advice then, and for good reason. Now you criticize what I couldn’t
avoid.” He lifted his chin. “Besides, some exhilaration was necessary
if I was going to act at all.”

We'd never discussed this factor before, though I glimpsed what
he meant at once, thinking of the release I'd felt just after William’s
death.

“So you'll live with A. for a while and play out your hand,” I told
him, to be brisk. “You’re still plenty quick, if only you’ll remember
common sense.” ;

He looked at me through watery waves. “Even if we get away
with the marriage, what’s it matter to me? A. and her boyfriend’ll
have each other, but I’ve got no one to share.”

“Aren't there any nice fellas at all?”

“I'm nice.” | :

Who wouldn't have felt for him then, with his father’s corpse
not yet in the ground? Still there was no use crying so hard, when
new chances would surely be breaking. He might not know for years
whether he’d done well or ill. Besides, Lottie was yelling at me
through the kitchen door. “You gotta come in here, Babe. There’s a
mess-up about the flowers, and nobody else can decide.”

I started to get out of the car.

“Don’t leave yet, madre mia!” he shouted.

“Come inside and kiss your mamacita,” I ordered. “She’s the
one who should weep today for what she did.”
88 W.S. Penn Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

from
Killing Time with Strangers

W.S. Penn

 

I “

dw gives way to life and after spending the night watching
over Tara Dunnahoe’s restless sleep, I was on my way home. Her
corduroy lover, Mr. Patch, had taken off to elbow others of his species
at some convention on Combinatronics. She was mildly upset
because she suspected he might also be balling one of the cocktail
waitresses or some skeletal female mathematician with breasts the
size of apricots as a change from hers which were so large as to be
the first thing other women noticed about her. Suspicions like hers
are a failure of character and often well-deserved. In her case, very
well-deserved. She should spend her afterlife in the hot places of
suspicion if for no other reason than her fretless feckless recreancy.
But I had not the heart to tell her so. Instead, I had put my arm
across her shoulder and lied to her, told her she was being foolish,
she was needlessly imagining the worst of the man who loved her,
while in my dreaming mind I saw him naked and perverse, walking
from room to room, waitress to mathematician, apples to apricots,
his banana out, admiring himself among his permutations in the
polished mirrors of the Banff Springs Hotel.

In the dawning light I folded up the blanket and left it on Tara’s
sofa, started up Old Paint as quietly as I could in the pre-dawn light,
and began the trip up into the mountains to my four room cabin.
Paint had complained angrily about the trip down the mountain.
He’d been complaining a lot, lately — not out loud like an old woman
wanting attention but more under his breath like someone living
with pains they’d rather hide. So whenever I could, I took Old Paint
out of gear, sort of gave him his nose and let him coast down the
inclines while trying not to imagine, given the noises he was making,
rockets and sprockets shooting out of the engine block to light up
the early morning sky with the fireworks of failure. Hinmot, my
brother who is dead, knew so much about cars and had such a good
relationship with them that he could hear a noise and identify the
problem and pull off the road and fix it without even getting his
shirt greasy.

But for me to fix is to cure and when Paint pulled up lame and
refused to go farther, although I looked into the engine compartment
with the medicinely air of authority, about all I could do was check
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 W.S. Penn 89

the spark plug and distributor wires, stroke Paint’s fender like the
haunch of a horse, and stick my thumb out, depressed at the thought
that by the time I returned, Old Paint would be stripped and burned
by the night-riding younger brothers of my former amigos.
Dejectedly I adopted a non-threatening pose beside the highway,
stuck out my thumb, and hoped that one of the urban missionaries
crossing the mountains to the coast would stop and give me a ride.

Car after car passed me. After a while, they all seemed as though
they were the same car passing me over and over again, circling the
block afraid to stop or park in my new neighborhood, all driven by
the same Mr. Plaid talking sideways to his Missus, both of them
riveting their eyes to the road as though in his steering (and her
riding) concentration, neither noticed me standing there beside the
road with my thumb out.

The morning passed. By early afternoon Mr. Plaid, goaded by
Mrs. Plaid, actually accelerated when he spotted me. He no longer
stared down the distance of the road, but straight at me, as though
my thumb was an insult, a glaring immorality that made him angry
just for me to ask such a thing from him, of all people. Mrs. Plaid
began to point me out to her children — “Lookit, Baby Check; look,
Tartan; look, Kilt!” Checklet, Tartan, and Kilt stared through the
window like I was an exhibit of old bones they were passing by on
the monorail at Disneyland or a crocodile at Steinhardt Aquarium at
which they wanted to throw quarters, aiming for his eyes and nostrils,
trying to make the crocodiles dance.

“Who are you people?” I snapped as they cruised past, feeling a
little like our father La Vent must have when people ignored the
‘needs of his preachments as he sermonized them from the back
deck of his old taxi.

The afternoon wore on. I longed for Hinmot’s company, for him
to be there and for once to be my pal as I had always tried to be his,
for him to give me the perspective of one of his lectures about how
the Plaid family needed to make me a dinosaur of deficiency in order
to moralize their love of rape and pillage and plunderous pollution.
The sun beat down relentlessly and I began to lose myself in impotent
fancies of hot-wiring urinals so Mr. Plaid and little Tartan would get
220 volts up their floorplans the next time they peed.

“They’re only afraid of you,” I told myself.

“I know. I don’t blame them, really.”

“There have been three serial killings in the last six months in
the county alone,” I added by way of forgiveness.

“Yeah. But when was the last time you heard of an Indian who
killed for no reason, let alone a serial killer? It’s always some well-
90 W.S. Penn Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

to-do white guy who turns out to like cutting up thirteen-year-old
boys and eating them after sodomizing and torturing them”

“It’s in their blood.”

“It’s in their stories.”

“It’s in their religion.”

“Indians just kill themselves.”

“It’s in their blood.”

“Nah. It’s in their desire.”

Suddenly, there she was. Amanda. My Amanda. The very
Amanda I’d dreamed all the way through the inquest into Hinmot’s
subsequent, and perhaps consequent, stringing together of neckties
he had saved up over two years of luckless searching for a decent
wage. The same Amanda I'd begun dreaming way back when Mr.
Patch stepped out of his time and into mine, to penetrate Tara
-~Dunnahowe’s imagination. A wondering Amanda of whom I’d
dreamed a decade ago when | first became aware of girls and the art
of dreaming.

She pulled her car over onto the shoulder of the road and waited
while I stumbled up to the passenger window and looked in. From
the very first hint of her smile I knew it was her.

“Need a lift?” she asked.

The dizziness and desire to shout at Mr. and Mrs. Plaid and all
the little Plaid children dissolved. One desire evaporated, replaced
by another. I felt whole in a way that even Tara’s original gumwrapper
note on the windshield of Old paint had never made me feel.

That afternoon, Amanda had dark hair drawn back and loosely
clipped in the back with a rhinestone barrette. She was dressed ina
blue cotton shirt and a dark red T-shirt with foreign letters stenciled
across the breast. Her two dollar sunglasses kept me from seeing
her eyes but not the way of her smile, and it seemed as though she
was happy to find me too.

“Fancy meeting you,” I said. I settled into the passenger’s seat.

“Took you long enough,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder
and pulled back onto the highway. “I was beginning to think the
whole thing was going to be about what’s-her-name.”

“Whozits?”

“Whozits, whatzits. You know who I mean. Them. The sex
without love and love without sex crowd,” She glanced in her rearview
mirror. “You want to stop? Call a tow truck?”

“Nah. I'll maybe call one when I get home.” It was a lie. She
knew it as well as I. Old Paint was gone. Dead. Long before I'd
begun to dream of paybacks to the Plaid family beside the road I
had sung and danced Old Paint’s Death Dance. Even as I climbed
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 W.S. Penn 91

into Mandy’s car I could hear the bold whispers of Magnesia’s little
brother, Benadryl, calling boldly to his buddies as they slipped down
the hilly shale with wrenches, knives, and snips to strip the hide
and hair from Old Paint and leave his carcass to be picked over by
amateurs. I hoped they would be quick about it. Otherwise I didn’t
really mind. Though I was sad to lose Paint, it fit into the cycle of
things. Parts to parts. Rust to rust.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

“So what’s A—B—Pi?” I asked, reading the advertising on her T-
shirt. I hadn’t envisioned her looking like a billboard. But at least
you could say that her billboard was unique and' not some
advertisement for a Taiwanese knock-off that requires you to become
redundant and “Guess?”

“My own club. Alpha Beta Pie. Store Pie,” she laughed. “As
common as Mrs. Smith’s or Sara Lee’s.”

I blushed. Do others dream of lovers as direct as my Amanda
only to wish for a little more indirection?

“What did you think? That I belonged to some herd of girls who
moo over boys with their baseball caps turned backwards? Even
you couldn’t make up that. ‘Course it’s true there’s Advil and
Magnesia. Birch and Ash. Not to mention Mr. Patch. Chengito.
Him, I like.”

“Me too,” I said. “Course he really isn’t mine, if you know what
I mean. More mother Mary’s.”

“How is your mom?”

“Good,” I said.

“Your dad?”

“La Vent? He’s pretty much still the same.”

“Still got the bitters at bay?”

“Yeah. For now. He even seems a little happier, what with
Salamander Niedman to keep him company.”

“You sound worried.”

“Iam. Sally won’t stay forever. She can’t. She’s too needy for La
Vent to make her happy for much longer, and then what'll become
of my father?”

“He may not even notice when she goes,” Mandy said.

I hadn’t thought of that.
“So,” she asked. “Your house?”
“Please.” ,

Amanda pulled into the fast lane and we began to pick up speed,
overtaking and passing the Plaid families before they could circle
back and pass Old Paint and say, “See, Tartan? They can’t even take
care of the things they do have. They just go and leave them beside
92 W.S. Penn Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

the road.”

“Tell me something,” she said. “Seriously. What do you think
they all eat?” She pointed at a Volvo filled with faces pressing against
the window glass, petals on a forest green bough.

“Lettuce. Great big wedges of iceberg lettuce. Heads of lettuce
Chengito’s boy cousins pee on in the fields. Chunks of roughage
that his girl cousins send out unwashed from the kitchens.”

Mandy laughed. She knew where to turn off the highway and up
into the hills of Boulder Creek. Without me offering her directions,
She drove me to my cabin and, well, one International Moment lead
to another until she was wired on chemicals and caffeine and she
stayed the night. I lay there marveling over the way, after all this
time, my Amanda felt real enough to hold.

“Promise,” she said before she fell asleep. “Swear you'll be here
in the morning. That you won’t just up and leave.”

“It’s my house,” I said.

“You know what I mean,” she yawned. She meant imaginatively
there with her and not off chasing ghosts like La Vent or Hinmot,
mirages like Tara Dunnahowe, or any of the other voices that had to
be conflated into singular but generalized voices in order to give
them enough volume to be heard. She rolled over and went out like
a light.

First things first. I slipped out of bed and went into the living
room where I spent several hours beneath a dim light so as not to
disturb her, writing her in, creating a place for her. Later, I would go
back and find the beginnings, and fill in around her place — a process
of dance and dream, song and saying that would have daunted me,
had I known. But for that night, I was relieved and almost giddy
with a happiness that made the task seem light, and after scratching
on pages the black hobo would later burn, I crawled back into bed
and fell asleep in the hope that I would not be gone in the morning
and that she would never pull away from me, even were she late for
the rest of her life.

II
On man,” the Coastguardsman lamented. “Lookit what you gone
come to.” A Coastguard Cutter had anchored out beyond the shelf
of the beach, as close in as it could get without endangering itself
like the whale they were trying to rescue. A small crowd had formed,
sucked toward the whale like conventioneers to Happy Hour.
Periodically, the forward cannon on the white ship let loose with a
volley of seawater and on shore other men worked at their separate
duties. The man lamenting was black, his smoky skin a contrast to
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 W.S. Penn 93

his stark white uniform. He filled a bucket with the inflowing waves
and threw its contents up into the whale’s open but indifferent eyes
to keep the mammal from going blind. The water cannon on the
bow of the cutter fired another arc of seawater and the small crowd
of onlookers tumbled back in unison and then edged forward again
quickly, collectively recognizing the surprising accuracy of the
cannon’s spray.

“What’s wrong with it?” Amanda asked.

There were any number of answers. Sickness from eating fish
that glowed with strontium 90. An unwanted paintjob by Exxon’s
Valdez. Old age. Injury from Japanese gill netters. Whatever the
cause, the whale’s sense of direction had gone haywire and instead
of migrating on its true axis of south to north it had turned east,
against the flow of its history.

“Asian flu,” I said, giving their due to the Japanese, whose formal
disregard for the laws protecting things like whales was positively
American.

Amanda gave me a sideways look which, had it not been for the
voice of my loving pal Tara Dunnahowe whispering “Blah blah blah”
in my mind’s ear would have made me want to explain.

Up close the look in the gray whale’s eye seemed beyond the
emotion of time and the feeling for the world. Several guardsmen,
salt-sodden with cannon spray, scrambled about the whale’s fluke
trying to fasten a padded harness to it so their captain could ease
the ship into reverse and pull the whale off the sand as soon as the
incoming tide lifted its hugeness enough for the harness not to injure
him irrevocably. As many times as the crew had probably done this,
the look in the guardsmen’s eyes was hopeful; they believed that
once it was out in deeper waters the whale would regain its
navigational instincts and rejoin its herd.

The black guardsman had been brought a pressure canister like
the one La Vent used to use to spray chemicals on the cactuses
ringing our old Gilroy house in a bug-proofed imitation of his friends
at work. He filled it with seawater, pumped it up with the handle,
held it like a fire extinguisher, and aimed the plastic tip of the small
corded hose at the whale’s bleary eyes, continuing to keep them
moist. The whale was losing it.

“Oh man,” he said. He paused in his lament to examine his
hands as though they were the cover of a book that hid the contents
in the wrong context, the way Hinmot had once glued “The Tropic
of Cancer” on the paper cover of his schoolbook, A Tale of Two
Cities. “Oh man, oh man,” he repeated.

His name badge said Parker Quink and as he rounded the whale
94 W.S. Penn Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

to wet the other and equally indifferent nether eye, he brushed past
Mandy and me as though he didn’t know me.

“Man oh man, lookit what you gone come to. Why for?” he said
in a sad, caressing voice. It was a voice filled with compassion that
disguised small feelings of anger like a mother might hold and rock
her child while asking as softly as she could why the hell he had
tried to fly by jumping off the roof of the house. Beneath the softness
of the voice were prick-points of furied feeling as sharp as mother
Mary’s rocking song after I told her Hinmot had hung himself.

The crowd milled in closer as though crowding a bonfire to roast
their marshmallows. A lad in a Mets cap tentatively stuck his foot
and tendered leviathan a kick in the fluke.

“You gotta help?” Quink demanded suddenly. “Or as usual you
not gonna get involved?” He sneered me a sneer that made me want
to bust him in the bucket. Then he held forth his hands as though
he were handing me a gift. “Took a fuck of a lot for me to get here,
you know,” he said.

Mandy was confused. I wasn’t. Not like her, anyway. True, the
scene did feel vaguely like a dream, real but with that suffused
humidity of meaning.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Ah hah! Yes!” he exclaimed, throwing a fist into the air like a
fan nodding his buffalo soldier’s head up and down. He grinned
broadly. “Maybe start by keeping the folks back. That kid in the
baseball cap keeps trying to slice off a hunk of fluke with his pocket
knife.”

With an air of authority, Mandy moved the crowd back away
from the whale. I moved in close to the urchin in the Mets cap,
ready to disarm him if necessary. Slowly, measured by inches gained
and inches seemingly lost, the tide slipped back in under the whale
and alleviated the deadness of its weight. The Coastguard
Commander decided it was then or never and while Parker and |
kept the eyes of the whale clear and wet and the harness crew kept
the padding moist and pliable and unknotted, the ship eased slowly
back, drawing the whale into the water much to the disappointment
of some of the watching crowd. Parker and I ended up knee deep in
tide watching the dinghy alongside the still passive leviathan, the
crewmen still working the harness. Once the whale was clear of the
beach and floating, the pressure on the harness lessened by buoyancy
of the water’s salt, the white ship accelerated. We watched as it
grew smaller against the horizon. |

“There he goes,” Parker said as the harness flipped loose and
the whale, suddenly alive, lifted its fluke in the air and then
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 WS. Penn 95

disappeared. :

“Hope he makes it,” I said. Neither of us knowing that nine out
of ten whales that lose their way like this one simply turn in towards
shore and beach themselves farther south. We concentrated on
believing how this would be the one in ten.

When we emerged from the surf, Amanda pointed at the ship
steaming into the distance and asked, “What about you?”

Parker grinned. “I'll catch up with ‘em,” he said. “Say, bro,” he
said, turning to me and laying a ‘aii palm on my shoulder.
“Thanks.”

I nodded.

He held up his hands the way a child catches a ball or a hobo
holds them out to a warming fire, turning them over and back, pink
black pink black, still surprised by their color.

“Strange, ain’t it?” he asked.

I nodded. Laughed. I knew if I cried or even imagined saying
the wrong thing, he’d disappear.

“Hey-uh,” he said. “Maybe you and me, we’ll do something
together one of these days?”

“You name it,” I said, my voice growing weak and hoarse from a
lifetime of wishing. “We could go bowling, if you want. I'd like that.
I'll even let you win.”

He looked down at his hands again. He grinned. “Guess for
— sure we'll do some jazz, huh?” He reached out and gently slapped
the side of my head with his palm, “Can’t stay,” he said. “Gotta
travel on. Thanks again. For getting involved.”

“You're welcome.”

“Feels good, don’t it?”

“I guess,” I grinned. “This time.”

He turned and started down the beach in the opposite direction
Mandy and I would take. 3

I called after him, “Don’t think I’m going to paint some stupid
slogan on signs and go public with it.”

He held up his hand without turning. And then he was gone.

“What was that all about?” Mandy asked me.

“Nothing. Not important. Just between him and me.”

“Come on,” she said. “Tell me. You know him?”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s about how the failures stay with you. They
keep coming back. The successes go away.”

Mandy frowned. But she didn’t push. Some people turn you
into archaeological digs, turning up and dusting off the tiniest
fragments of your character and labeling them with pop psychology.

“You know why you’re so detached?” they’d ask, not needing
96 W.S. Penn Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

you to respond or even wake up for them to slide straight into their
answers like second base. “Because of your mother.” What are you
supposed say to that besides “Hmmmm?” Or are you supposed to
wish for a different mother? If you do, do you admit that then you
— as you are — wouldn’t be here with your Amanda?

I was grateful. Amanda was willing to let my little mystery live.
 
98 Biographies Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1

Heather Abner is a junior studying English at Michigan State
University.

Richard Brown is a professor of English at the University of Nevada
at Reno. He has published a book of short stories, Fishing for Ghosts,
and a novel, Chester's Last Stand, both of which are available from
the University of Nevada Press.

_ Stephanie Dickinson works in New York as a typist by day and a
writer by night. She has completed one full-length play and is
working on another.

Richard Dokey has been published in many journals, among them
The Missouri Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Clockwatch,
and most recently in Triquarterly and Outerbridge. He has had work
cited in Best American Short Stories; published a book of short stories,
August Heat (Story Press); and this year published his first novel,
The Hollow Man (Delta).

Lisa Fugard was born and raised in South Africa. She has been
published in Story, and has fiction forthcoming in The Santa Monica
Review, Outside, and the anthology The Writing Path.

Jason Steven Jones is a senior at ee State University, majoring
in English.

Tim Lane is in the Creative Writing M.A. program at Michigan State
University and is a native of Flint, Michigan.

Peter Markus lives in Detroit. His work has appeared in a number
of magazines, including The High Plains Literary Review, The
MacGuffin, The Mid-American Review, and The Hawaii Review.

Torie Olson lives in Putney, Vermont, where she runs Firefly Farm
with her husband and is the part-time Development Director at a
school her children attend. For the past fifteen years she has also
_worked as a freelance journalist with articles published in national
and regional magazines. A graduate of Middlebury College, she has
a short story forthcoming in the Spring issue of Prairie Schooner.

Tom Paine is a graduate of Princeton University and a fellow in
Columbia University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing. His
fiction has been published in The New Yorker and is forthcoming
from Story.
Red Cedar Review volume 31 #1 | Biographies 99

W.S. Penn teaches creative writing, Native American and Comparative
Literature at Michigan State University. His novel, The Absence of
Angels, is available from the Permanent Press in hardcover and from
the University of Oklahoma American Indian Literature and Critical
Studies series in trade paperback. He is the winner of the North
American Indian Prose Award, and his winning book of narrative
essays will be available from the University of Nebraska Press in the
Fall of 1995. The sections in this issue are from the opening of his
new novel, Killing Time with Strangers. ?

Allan Peterson currently lives in Florida. He has been published in
a number of different literary magazines. He has also had two
chapbooks published and in 1992 was the winner of a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry.

JoAnna Rawson’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review,
Black Warrior Review, Passages North, Antioch Review, and others.
She was a Teaching/Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, where
she earned an MFA in 1988.

Nancy Takacs lives and teaches in Price, Utah, at the College of
Eastern Utah. She has published in literary magazines including
Kansas Quarterly, Weber Studies, Ellipis, and American Literary
Review.

Diane Wakoski has published many volumes of poetry. In 1988
she won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams
Award for her collection Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987.
The Emerald City of Las Vegas — the third volume in her epic The
Archaeology of Movies and Books — will be out this spring from
Black Sparrow Press. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Michigan
State University.
 
 
 
 

 
 

Jason Steven Jones ® Tim Lane & Peter Markus ®& Allan Peterson & Joanna

“Rawson ® Nancy Takacs ®& Diane Wakoski fiction by Richard Brown & Ri-

 

   

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chard Dokey ® Lisa Fugard ®& Torie Olson ® ee ae B WEL Pi