THE

 

Cedar Review

VOLUME 32, NUMBER 1
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This Issue is

DEDICATED

to the men who started
The Red Cedar Review

jim CASH
walt LOCKWOOD
thomas McGUANE
 

 

red

Cedar Review
volume 32 #1]

The Red Cedar Review is a
bi-annual literary maga-
zine published by Michi-
gan State University for
over thirty years. Sub-
scriptions are available for
$10.00, sample copies for
$3.00. Manuscripts are
read year-round; for sub-
mission 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 Baskerville BT
10 point, titles in
Baskerville BT IT 24
point, authors in Avant
Garde 14 point ; designed
on Aldus PageMaker 5.0.
Cover Photograph, Church
Manhattan, Nevada, by
Robert Turney. Lipman
photograph by Gabriel
Cooney. Printed at Insty
Prints, Lansing, Michigan.

 

FICTION EDITOR
Tom Bissell

POETRY EDITOR
Laura Klynstra

CONSULTING EDITORS
Heather Abner
Mike Jurmu
Laura Redman
Halle Reese
Leslie E. Rose
Renee Sedliar

ADVISOR
Diane Wakoski

PHOTOGRAPHY
Robert Turney

BOOK DESIGN
Laura Klynstra
 

CONTENTS

POEMS |

Rob Keast Turkey Sandwiches
Travis Pinter Neighborhood
Matthew Thorburn Late-Night Groceries/Let’s Call This The Scarf
Matthew Thorburn Something You Won't Want To Hear
Olivia V. Ambrogio Lake Rituals
Anita Skeen Refuge
Anita Skeen Walking the Boundaries
Steve Lapinsky The Treeless Pears
Joanne Hayhurst Collusion
Time Lane ‘The Blue Shield
John Davis Driving Bullock Home From Work
Gerry LaFemina Sea Level
_ Gwendolen Gross Peregrination
David Martin County Fair
Kenneth Pobo Walter, Oh Walter
Brett Hursey Rosebud
PV. LeForge Food Rut
J. Rodney Karr Syrup Rum

INTERVIEW

with Elinor Lipman

STORIES

Andrew Alexander Don’t You
Elizabeth Smith-Meyer Lubrication
Mark Jacobs Fool’s Progress
Pamela Montgomery The Last White Woman On Warsaw Street
Terry Pow Watching Albania
Valerie Brock One-Card Crazy Eights

JIM CASH CONTEST

Heather Abner The Beekeeper’s Daughter
Heather Elizabeth Christian Finding Home
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Turkey Sandwiches

rob KEAST

— for Frank O’Hara

Here our eyes have

Mouths

Letting us take in

Sandstone cliff walls/that rise 70 feet
Straight up from the water; we sit |
At sandstone shelves—above

The lake, flat ike enormous oak
Banquet tables.

Here our eyes have

Teeth

We chew the mash of rocks

The chunky, rust-orange carrots and
The white potato stones.

Our eyes have throats

We swallow the waves of bubbling soup
And, past the spread of beach, we munch
On stretched pines as though they are
Stalks of celery.

All of this passes through our mouths,
Through our teeth, our throats.

The walls of our stomachs

Are expanded,

Pushed outward by the stones

We are first-time hikers of Lake Superior
It is this eating

That has made us so hungry.

Rob Keast

9
10 ~=Travis Pinter

Neighborhood

travis PINTER

We used to watch the black lab

streak through our yards,

dipping in and out of ditches—

like a brush—

at the edges of our road.

Cutting back and forth,

tongue swinging to the four-beat steps,
the creature swept across every blade
of grass, shading yards

dark in the dusk, spreading its ebony fur
until it clung like paint to the foliage.

It slept on our doorsteps

and each of us, in turn, cradled it,
put out blankets, biscuits, ©
stroked the marvelous fur

until slumber covered us,

running wet up our arms and necks,
filling our ears with silence,
pouring down from our foreheads,
over our faces,

thick enough to close our eyelids
when it met them.

Every morning it was gone,

leaving us dry, alone,

stumbling from our houses,

meeting one another with sidelong glances.
We entered our separate vehicles,

pulled out of our driveways in every
different direction,

stretching the land between us,

straining the hub

with our distance.

A Testarosa with foreign plates
blasted through one night before sunset,
turned the lab into cold fur on hot asphalt
Travis Pinter 11

never slowing down. We rushed to the dog,
spread like spokes around it—

the ribs sunken instead of

rising, four legs quiet and

without purpose. Something immeasurable
had been lost in translation

from breathing to dying,

replacing the wet animal eyes

with a dry, white stare.

We struggled for it,

wedged our hands beneath it,

lifted it off the road to find it weightless,

rising from us, spreading and

thinning in the breeze until

the breeze took it completely,

leaving us nothing but each other, converging,
hands and fingers intertwining,

the wheel collapsing to its center.
12 Matthew Thorburn

Late-Night Groceries / Let's
Call This The Scarf

matthew THORBURN

—for H.K.

You buy your soda one bottle at a time
so that each night the pretty girl
behind the counter, short-haired and bored

and tonight reading People
magazine, will be the last person
you see before you go to bed.

Tells you she’s from Italy.

When she asks where you’re from you stretch
out your hand to make a map of Michigan,
point to the center of your palm. Here.

She slips off her sandal,

puts her foot up on the counter.
I’m from here, pointing

to the slow curve of her arch.

Says her name’s Maria Isabella,
after the false saint in her grandmother’s village
whose stigmata turned out to be papercuts.

Then she puts her shoe back on. What else
is there to say? She smiles. saying nothing,

saying something.

Turns out she has a boyfriend.
Wouldn’t you know it? They walk
down the sidewalk arm in arm,
Matthew Thorburn 13

though when she sees you and stops

to talk she lets go of his arm, does not introduce
him or speak to him. He stands quietly,

looking up and looking down

and examining the laces of his shoes.

You look at her, at him, back at her,
but no introductions are forthcoming.

Poor boy, he doesn’t even have a name.

What do you remember most?

How about her scarf,

pink and gauzy, wound once around her neck
and trailing down over her shoulder.

She wore it with a black dress,

seamless it seemed and without sleeves,
her thick-soled shoes putting her an inch
or two taller than you.

And there you are—smile now,

she’s watching—in your jeans and t-shirt,
driving a car with a piece of plywood

for a front grill, hoping it doesn’t overheat.
14. Matthew Thorburn

Something You Won't
Want lo Hear

matthew THORBURN

The figurines on the bathroom shelf
skip a step closer to the edge

each time the front door slams.
Sooner or later they’re going

to take the big jump.

Like a married couple I knew.

One day the husband comes home,

says, “You’re not going to like what I’ve got to tell you.”
Next day he’s gone with half the furniture

to a new apartment and a new woman

with four previous marriages

that hang around her neck

like a constellation of cubic zirconium.

Her husband’s no longer her husband.
She doesn’t know where to go, so she stays.
No proud way for her to leave this house.
It’s best just to stumble, trip, do whatever
has to be done to get out. Slam the door.
Let the figurines fall where they may.
Olivia V. Ambrogio

Lake Rituals

oliviav. AMBROGIO

The autumn people are dancing on the lake
their sharp feet cut waves

and burn blue shadows

on the restless water.

15
16 Anita Skeen

Refuge
anita SKEEN

—for Marcia Aldrich

From the bookstore
where tonight women’s voices
read their lives into poems

between New Releases and Cookbooks,
we walk in the January night,
to the parking lot,

snow flickering about our faces,
flurries chaotic, lost
from their blizzard, frantic for

the pack. Cars zip by
like assassins from Star Wars
and in each deadly beam white crystals

ricochet jubilant and sharp.
We drive on the main street, then turn
up yours, Orchard, where winter freezes

the trees into icy lattice,
limbs lit from within, a tinkle
like expensive glass in the still

night. In the front yard of one house
bizarre snow sculptures
stagger toward the street

and we back up the truck for a better look.
They glow separate and cold.
Five blocks later we pull into your driveway,

your house dark and your family asleep,
snow still churning in my headlight beams.
I turn off the lights and we sit
Anita Skeen 17

in the warm womb of the cab
talking like it is not dark, like I am not
on my way home, like there is time

to say it all, words loose like confetti
in a Christmas paperweight, stories
drifting against both doors.
18 Anita Skeen

Walking the Boundaries

anita SKEEN

Here, by the discarded tarp,

the tire snared in thorns,

the carcass of a wringer washer,

I start. I go north. It is hot,

it is quiet, though I know the trees
hum with things I don’t hear,

hope not to startle. I tug

a bleached limb from the brush, snap it
for a staff as I enter the woods.

In the weeds, movement, and

a black hose, rubbery and wriggling,
disappears beneath twigs. I keep
walking, duck in among the alder
and cedar where shade

soaks me like a wet cloth.

Now the trickle of the creek,

the nostril tickle of damp moss,

the slippery stones. A lattice

of broken branches makes a trap
of the stream. Even in the driest July
in ten years, a still pool,

clear water. I:dip in my hands,
bring them up to my face,

drip from the creek bed

into the ferns, their fronds

gushing a stiff fountain.

On up the hill, the surveyor’s
stake, pink and orange ribbon
startling as flame, |

another fire, then another,

past the spiney holly,

unaware it’s out of season,

down to the rotting cedar stump,
pungent and primordial.

I stop, turn toward the south:

the lake crashes in through the gap
between trees, blue splashes

my eyes. My hands float

to the air like wings.
Steve Lapinsky 19

The Treeless Pears
steve LAPINSK Y

The young girl at the marketplace,
on the sly, stuffs a couple of
unripe pears underneath her shirt
and makes off with them.

- She is trying to be like her

sister, who stands talking toa

boy across the street,

who is also young, but whose
breath seems to turn his hormones
into a vortex,

a funnel cloud that touches down
and razes the area

of her supple frame.

But this young girl only sees

this boy, who is an odd entity

to her like a freak of nature

like the tasty pears.

She wants to sample the jaundiced
meat of his face, and feel

the velour coat of his cheek,

like the skins of the fruit

against her chest,

but the boy hands her sister

his sweater, they round the

corner and enter a thicket

on the edge of town,

the young girl watching

with her treeless pears.
20 Joanne Hayhurst

Collusion
joanne HAYHURST

This tale begins with scratching on the ceiling.
We listen from our bed with open eyes
and hear the digging grind of the intruder.
At nesting time red squirrels have been known
to rip apart pink insulation, wires,
whatever they can pull from padded bones
of human homes.

Your bare back’s warm and damp;
I nestle into you. A jagged scrape
goes deep, startles us upright. The rodent’s
tearing down the house. So now, it’s war.

Outside the bedroom window late that day,
I spot the squirrel stationed on the oak.
She’s staring at a small hole in the siding,
the front door to her home above my head.
She’s out. She’s left her young behind. I call;
you run for boards and nails while I reach toward
the rot through which she dug her hole. She screams
a squirrel’s bark alarm, leaps, flies at me
arms stretched out like Jesus Christ, drops,
crushes spring leaves of wisteria.
We wait,

stone-still, listen to the woods for some
direction. We can’t see. What’s clear is that
we're here with hammer, nails and bad intentions.
I think about her nest and try to find
a way to rescue babies, dismiss it as
a waste of time for there’s no room in war
for sentiment.

Wait. I hear a scrape
on bark. She’s heading up. Oh, can’t you see?

We strike: I hand you nails. You hammer shut
the tomb. The squirrel’s bark’s percussive; she flicks
her tail but changes nothing.
Then we're gone.
Joanne Hayhurst 21

She tears the board with claws and teeth until
they’re dull. She rests, then tries again, again.
She keeps this up for three whole days then stops.

Beneath our pink Ralph Lauren sheets, your back
is damp and fits my belly well, but when

we touch, eyes still closed, the palest stink

of rotting flesh drifts down from the ceiling.
22 Tim Lane

The Blue Shield

tim LANE

The blue light of the television is as hostile

to me
as the relentless assault of heat and noise in the shop

is to him—
or the cold steel and frozen pipes
at winter’s construction site—
but if he has his way I will never know
the drone of the line and the clash of machinery

in the factory—

(a seething hive)—

or the wind’s cat-o-nine-tails
in a trench with busted pipe and ice
beneath the skeleton of a high-rise
which creaks beneath
an exhausted sky. I remember tapping crumpled flannel
on a meaty shoulder as a small child while he dozed through
the evening news—
as persistent as a press
or a drill.

First his arms and legs relax,
and then the eyes retreat, with their dim anticipation
of dinner, while murder and unemployment rates soar, and
guerrillas from
Nicaragua plan to immigrate to Flint
to work for GM, and the Colonel discloses
his original recipe of eleven herbs
and spices.
This,
he claims, |
is an acquired skill that no apprentice could ever learn—
the ability to outdistance the needling pain of exhaustion,
to let the day’s weight drain through the body

like a sieve—

(the evening news like an absurd lullaby

bathing him in the blueness of snow).
This is one speciality—
the ability to withdraw
into his favorite chair and surround himself
Tim Lane 23

with the blue glare
of the TV—
the blue halo of exhaustion that a young child struggles
to penetrate,
like a weary courier traveling miles through storm
to announce left-overs
for dinner—
(while the world burns out like a welder’s torch
with an empty tank). |
This is a gift—
his exhaustion ensuring
that I will never be
as tired—
this blue shield
that a teenager bludgeons
with a hammer
at the end of each day
with unreasonable
demands.
24 John Davis

Driving Bullock Home From
Work

john DAVIS

In my Dodge Dart, Bullock kicks off his purple
spray-painted boots, keeps his lower lip
plugged with chew, uses Killer

and Dude in most sentences, pulls a Band-Aid
tin from his coat, wants me to smoke

ragweed, his greasy, home grown ragweed—
smells like clams, wouldn't keep a striped eel
stoned three minutes.

He rolls up his window, rolls a joint and smokes,
his thin arms rowing imaginary oars, rowing,
bracing his feet on the dashboard, rowing,

says it keeps him stoned, his cheeks

glowing like rose dianthus.

I shift up the expressway, Bullock yelling

Stroke, Dude, Stroke—a sculler rowing out stiffness
from lifting three ton’s weight of garage doors,

his brown hair bouncing off his nose.

Where are the perfect circles

a sculler’s oars leave on water?

I want to see Bullock’s perfect circles on expressway
asphalt between trucks and BMWs.
Gerry LaFemma = 25

Sea Level
gerry LaFEMINA

Because the body is mostly water we suffer gravity:

a pregnant woman’s ankles swell

when standing long; the wounded man in the alley bleeds;
we experience tides as if the moon

dictated more than the sea’s

insatiable taste for sand.

And use my knuckles as an abacus to count
my visits to the ocean—
I blame myself not Freddy Clark in his dad’s four door Chrysler
driving some girl to a state park
after closing
Friday nights.
Saturday’s stories:
All the same.
He’s still telling them,

and I’m still listening, the words remaining long in the hollow shells of mornings
after I cursed him—

seeing a woman I wrote poems for
in his back seat.

That night I climbed the ladder of a lifeguard chair and chose
the maudlin canvas the constellations painted on the waves.
Two hours later I was naked and treading water,
wading...

How common.

More often I rise above sea level,

shedding myself of the undertow. At five,
I raced my building’s elevator to the eighth floor,
up one more team of stairs to the roof. Hide-and-seek
among its congregation of aerial antennae,
behind the ventilation shafts. We played everyday;

From that height, I could watch the street:

stickball, mail deliveries, Loretta

walking the block to join me for a game of super hero-
and-the-saved. Our curiosity a kind of desire.

In school I’d sneak to the roof,
and study trigonometry in the sine curve pattern
26 Gerry LaFemina

a Super Ball thrown to the street would make:

bouncing skyward, a bright rubber sphere, the way the sun caught it
with a glove of brilliance... I’d lose it
high above Eighteenth Street on clear days

tobacco smoke rallying its upward spiral:
a spirit like the ghosts of word problems
erased from the board: Jf sea level increases
one foot per day...

Because the body is mostly water a man falling fourteen stories
strikes the sidewalk like a wet sponge, bouncing once,
twice on the concrete.
That’s me gawking from the street. Seventeen.
I hadn’t heard a thing but had to explain
to the police why my head was down
while I walked,
Why I wasn’t in school.
One cop laughed,
All you kids,
depressed and tough.
Stupid.
I bet you wish you were that stiff:
Shit, he was twice your age.
You kids: all dopes.

Shaking the Coke can in his hand,

he scanned my answers one last time

before telling me to beat it. He must be a detective by now
or retired.

Or dead— |
some stray bullet while enjoying the ripe gallery of family life
with a day off at Rockaway Beach

when three guys got into a fight over a woman or a remark.
Which one had the gun...

On yesterday’s news flood victims rowed boats
along Oak Street, Stuart Avenue. Volunteers
with sand bags by the river bank.
A morning later: silence

followed by the shine of a sump pump running, the slosh of boots
Gerry LaFemina = 27

and damp jeans through ankle-deep living rooms, the occasional expletive

while the river sleeps with the unease of a newborn.

Somewhere someone is drowning
and someone else is breaking surface. It’s coming up for air

I remember. Three, maybe four,
I'd been jumped from behind
by the tide;

I would have given a pocketful of sand dollars,
my imagined pirate’s gold,

to stand with the breakers bowing at my ankles:
Toddler Neptune.

Instead, I crawled the linoleum of broken shells

coughing salt water; crawled past a construction crew of brothers
excavating tunnels for their cars,

young hands steering them through sandy highways; crawled

The brunette girl who could have been Loretta,
her ponytail damp, stringy, and barnacled to her back.
She stared and hugged her Barbie close.

a
Even these are acts of love:
I wanted to dive into the bay after a woman said no.
I was tying my wrists together when I was discovered

on the docks by Battery Park;

I once climbed seven stories
by fire escape onto the roof of a walk-up because of yes.

By then I knew the difference
between love and desire,

knew the two met somewhere:
a hormonal horizon that I can’t see even with hindsight.

When the water bursts, it’s time.

And to water we'll return
28 Gerry LaFemina

go under and feel the pressure in our lungs,
almost libidinal. Listen to the sea:
T want. I want. I want ....

In bathrooms all over the country salt water
gossip echoes in conch shells; even far from the coast
they know the stories: the dead lovers forever dancing on the ballroom
of the Titanic. She wears a gown of sea weed,
and his eyes glow
phosphorous as innuendo,
and intentions.

The sun fires just beyond the horizon. First light
far to the East because the earth is mostly water.
High tide and low tide exchange shifts;

already old men with metal detectors clutter the shore
seeking some pirate treasure that’s slipped through the pockets of the sea,
a declasped bracelet or an excommunicated earring, but they’re lucky
if they find dimes from the years of their birth. Look,
one of them is now on his knees. I can't see
what he lifts to this infantile sunlight
before surrendering it, indifferent.
Only memories.
Those bottle cap and quarter beeps.
Gwendolen Gross

Peregrination
gwendolen GROS §

The mountains are abrupt,
perfunctory, they jut up from
island like elbows and are

as casually awkward—
bruising the tropical sky.

On the foothills, with creases
between the toes, granite
crumbles inward, with

shards of lime trees

and landmass, grunting.
From the ferry she can pass
her wing of hand over the
whole landscape—roll

over it like ink, sink into

the deepest places. She
sticks her fingers in the open
windows of crooked white
houses, squashes apartment
buildings that stand too
stiffly, asks them to bow

to the broad grin of the
Pacific. Then

she paints the sky.
Brushstrokes, fingers
dipped in egg

tempera for Vs, for

curves, for resting places

for the long traveled and
hungry seabirds.

29
30) =David Martin

County Fair
david MARTIN

—for my mother

She smoked cigarettes as long
and thin as her fingers that year,
talked crazy about getting a job
or driving to North Carolina.
Long afternoons we scratched
the railroad tracks for bottles

to buy Salems and cokes. She
drove the big Buick to lakes

and parked under a choke cherry
to watch the heat jangle.

Shut up, she said, “we may be
leaving,” by which she meant our
father. The August wind burned our
lungs and butch heads to sleep.

That was the year we went to the fair.

We started at the livestock pavilion,
stepped high over clumps of straw, the stew
of shit and urine, to watch sheep rumps
and pigs swollen with heat.

We paraded past angry sleepy-eyed
animals, paid a quarter each to see

the world’s largest steer

with the map of Michigan on its hip

and a purple tumor that looked like Christ.
I was alone, walking the dust

and rutted road, looking for the

Buick, my head choked with

noise: the metal grinding whirl-a-gig,

house of mirrors and its crazy laughter,

my head distorted on chrome bumpers
shaped like sharp tits.

I reached the highway and river trash,
walked sobbing on the gravel shoulder
where a man shouted in a high-pitched Tennessee
whine. The gravel roared and mother yelled
to get in the goddamned car. She
David Martin 31

yanked me across her lap and we spun off, dizzy.
I watched her thin arm bring the

cigarette to her lips, her eyes slash

the mirror, and felt as if I somehow

loved her.
32 Kenneth Pobo

Walter, Oh Walter

kenneth POBO

In Oxford

centuries of civilization
cram gargoyle mouths.
Dons dash as history
goes gouty. Go to see

gardens to ask ivy
what it thinks of gray
rain. And to visit
Walter Pater’s grave.
Nothing special—just
another name

ona GRE exam. Walter
and I have a good chat.
He says be more gemlike,

more like angles of sun

on stone. Some say

Walter made a mess

of things, made life

seem too beautiful. What
do they make of moonlight
on an iris? How

do they critique that?

Do they not see beauty
as a fire calling

a single hand

to pass through it?
Brett Hursey = 33

Rosebud

brett HURSEY

Hardly a night passes
that her restlessness fails
to rouse me—

the barely audible sound of bone
rasping close to bone

as she rearranges her aching

joints beneath the sheets and blankets.

Even sleep has become wearisome—
stiffness seeping into her ankles

and knees until she wakes

to the aftertaste of aspirin

and a pain so palpable

it clambers up the curvature

of her spine, or hangs on her skirts
during our daily walks

to the post office.

Sometimes I lie awake listening
for the future—
rattling and squeaking its wheelchair

inevitably closer unul the sound scrapes
the remaining scraps
of cartilage from my subconscious—

the way I dream of her weeping
over swollen, ruddy roses
sprouting from her wrists—
fingers hopelessly twisted and bent
into withered, frost-bitten buds.
34 PV LeForge

Food Rut

p.v. LeFORGE

Suddenly I’m alone in the kitchen again

with tomatoes, French beans, and pasta

as light and fine as sunbeams.

Here are condiments and knives and lots of pots
and it’s here that I boil and bubble

away my evenings.

While others join fitness centers

until their bodies attain the color

and texture of shaved tennis balls,

I puff around my kitchen like a tuba

snapping beans into green mosaics

and grating cheese into mist.

I spread the angel hair around my plate

in soft billows; in the center I place

a tomato sculpted into the shape of an open rose.

Oh, my beloved capellini!

My faithful nightly visitor,

I need no other. Into my soul

I commend your spirit.

I am a shark in a crowded ocean,

a long-tongued wolf on a sheep farm,
the only guest at the birthday party,

And when I hear myself moaning with excess joy,
when my plate is as shiny as a full moon

and the earth has become a speck

on which I teeter like an egg,

I know that I’ve done it all wrong.

What I really want is a smoother face,
season tickets to see the Magic,

a two-car garage, new sheets. I want to be
a figure on a wedding cake.

And I want to be hungry again.
J. Rodney Karr = 35

Syrup Rum
j.rodney KARR

With his stick whip, Witch
lashes sugar maples hung

with buckets. He dips

his fingertip inside a tap

then licks. The trees leak

their sap. The bubbling vat
goes on and on. It is all

too slow, so he punishes

the trees to let them know

it is he who drives the spikes

in November and gathers wood
for the continuous fire. It is he
who loves them, if they bleed.
interview interview interview interview interview

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Elinor Lipman = 39

An Interview With
Elinor Lipman

 

 

linor Lipman has been described as having “the sensibility of

a Jane Austen married to the antennae of Woody Allen,” and
as “one of the writers who can pierce the heart as well as the funny
bone” (New York Daily News). If it sometimes seems perilous reading
an author heralded as “funny,” it is because “funny” Is a label that
begs to be defied by each reader’s idiosyncrasies, for each reader’s
expectations to fall short. “I heard this was funny!” we say, and
throw the book across the room.

So perhaps the most surprising thing about Elinor Lipman’s
novels and stories is that they ave funny: laugh-out-loud funny,
wry funny, sad funny. Of course, only a grim-faced bore would tell
you that being funny as well as a serious writer is incompatible,
and, anyway, to label Elinor Lipman as a “funny writer” is rather
like saying Ghenghis Khan was cranky. It would in fact be difficult
to find another contemporary author who looks at modern life—
such as America’s recent saturation by talk shows, half-wit celebrity
authors, and the trials of small town, mainstreet businesses—with
such a sharp and keen and ultimately forgiving eye.
40 Elinor Lipman

RCR fiction editor Tom Bissell sat down with Ms. Lipman to
talk about MFAs, the dark abyss, the ten million of us who need
The Bridges of Madison County, and the importance of being nice.

RCR: To start with the most basic question: Why do you write?

EL: I write because I like doing it. I like assigning my thoughts
and observations to characters, I like inventing lives, and I love
having books in print, but I continue writing because people want
to publish my work and read it. There’s nothing I'd rather do,
workwise, than write novels, but if I hadn’t been validated
somewhere along the way, or had no hope of being published, I'd
have stopped.

RCR: You've been visiting faculty to various writing seminars, such
as the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. To what extent do you feel
you can “teach” an aspiring writer? In the end, how valuable are
gatherings like MFA programs and workshops?

EL: I think because it’s a craft and not a science, you can point out
mistakes the new writer is making and teach them some tricks.
(For example, point-of-view switches—easily avoided once the
writer is attuned to such non-fatal mistakes.) I think the best
workshops act as kindly editors who want you to develop as a writer
and are willing to put in the time. Beginning writers need feedback,
need an editor’s eye, need encouragement, need tips and short-
cuts, and sometimes just the deadline of a weekly meeting. I was
almost literally taught to write in a workshop. I'd been writing
non-fiction, mostly in PR jobs, and needed to be told simple things
like, “It’s nice to break up the dialogue with a gesture or some
physical act.” I remember my teacher, Arthur Edelstein at Brandeis
adult education, writing at the top of the page, “How about ‘She
took a bite from the radish,’ or some such.” I think there are things
to learn, support to be had, constructive criticism and praise to be
dispensed. But then there is a time when you have to go back to
your room and be your own writing group. I’ve seen workshop
regulars who don’t want to judge their work at all, even to the
point where they quote their writing group’s prescription, and don't
give themselves a vote. I say, “I liked the other version better.
Why did you change it?” and they say, “My writing group made
me.” I always encourage beginners to join workshops, and
eventually tell them to be their own counsel. I can’t speak for MFA
programs, because I don’t have an MFA... and I don’t think I
Elinor Lipman 41

need one.

RCR: A recent review called John Updike’s novel Brazi “a happy
book about miscegenation.” I was struck by how apt a description
that would be for the interracial romance in your novel The Way
Men Act. Is such topic matter best handled in this manner?

EL: I don’t think in terms of “miscegenation” because I don’t like
the prefix—bad, wrong—applied to two people who want a life
together. It feels like a racist label. I don’t see the interracial
romance as something that needs to be handled, and of course I
think all topics are grist for comedy or at least for irreverence.

RCR: John Gardner once said that “good” artists create a “vision
of life worth pursuing,” whereas “bad” artists “are whining or
moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss.”
Do you feel this is an accurate comment on the state of
contemporary literature?

EL: I love this quote; in fact I’m going to memorize it, although
his “good” and “bad” strike me as high-handed. I might edit it to
say that some of us create a “vision of life worth pursuing” because
that’s what we want to read, whereas some of us, thinking it achieves
instant depth, “whine or moan or stare, because it’s fashionable,
into the dark abyss.”

RCR: This is a three-tiered question: What writer most influenced
you? Who, today, is your “favorite” writer? Are there any writers
who continue to astound you?

EL: The writers who most influenced me were writers of funny
stories: Ring Lardner, Max Schulman, Dorothy Parker, Woody
Allen. A writing teacher steered me toward Fay Weldon and Grace
Paley, saying, “They’re funny, but they do so much more.” My
father adored Ring Lardner, and throughout my childhood he
raved about “Alibi Ike” and the rest of the stories in Round Up. He
used to laugh out loud when he read, take off his glasses and wipe
his eyes. I think I came away with the idea that good writing means
writing that is a joy to read.

I don’t have one single favorite writer today, but many favorite
books, among them: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, The Hearts and
Lives of Men by Fay Weldon, Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer,
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, A Summons to Memphis by Peter
42. Elinor Lipman

Taylor, The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, The Razor’s Edge by
Somerset Maugham, The Floating Opera by John Barth, That Night
by Alice McDermott, First Light by Charles Baxter, The Man Who
Owned Vermont by Bret Lott, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin;
Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, A Room with a View. All
of those astound me. I consider each new book by Carol Shields,
Stephen McCauley, and Joanna Trollope a cause for celebration.

RCR: You've said that “meta-fiction”—or the kind of self-conscious
exploration of fictional form—doesn’t really interest you. Why not?

EL: I did? I don’t think the term “meta-fiction” has ever crossed
my lips, but I’ll be a good sport and answer it anyway.

RCR: Thank you. I should say that I’m using “meta-fiction” on
my own volition here, but I remember you saying somewhere that
you were irked by fiction that’s about fiction more than anything
else. A writer like Kathy Acker, say, or some of William Gass’s novels.

EL: I subscribe to John Gardner’s assertion that “a writer’s first
duty is to storytelling.” I don’t want to see the writer’s feet showing;
I don’t want to notice his or her tricks. When I read I want to
believe in every word of the voice and story. I want to believe, to
paraphrase Somerset Maugham, that it is a life I am living, not a
book Iam reading. Another Gardner rule I follow: The author’s
Job is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” in the mind of the
reader. Anything authorial, I feel, interrupts the “vivid and
continuous dream.”

RCR: How many novels had you written, or tried to write, before
you published Then She Found Me?

EL: None.

RCR: Really? That’s interesting, in that you hear so much about
writers—I’m thinking in particular of Robert Olen Butler—who
are said to have written five or six novels before finally selling one.
Well, I guess that sort of leads me to my next question: What
younger writers do you admire and expect great things from?

EL: Younger or older is irrelevant. Authors Id like to see second
books and more from are Wally Lamb, Christopher Tilghman,
Suzanne Strempek Shea, Joan Wickersham, Karl Ackerman, P.
Elinor Lipman 43

Carey Reid.

RCR: Bernard Malamud once said, “The human race needs the
novel. Those who say the novel is dead can’t write them.” Do you
agreer

EL: Can’t write them or would rather read Entertainment Weekly. I
absolutely agree that the human race needs the novel; I only worry
that ten million of that race need The Bridges of Madison County.

RCR: Your fiction is often described as “quirky,” or as being
“comedy.” Does this bother you? To put it another way: Do you
feel that such labels ultimately take away from the seriousness of
your work?

EL: Why would the label “comedy” bother me? You wouldn't be
one of those people staring into the dark abyss, would your

RCR: No, no. I’m a whole-hearted avoider of the abyss.

EL: There will always be people who mistrust humor, who feel in
a very literal, antonym-ish kind of way that “funny” and “serious”
are opposites. They think that writing about loneliness or love, for
example, is serious and “big” enough as long as sadness and loss
prevail. Inject a little hope or happiness or resolution into the

character’s life—and you're writing a comedy of manners. I say, to
hell with them.

RCR: Do the politics of the literary world ever bother you?

EL: I would be an ingrate and a schmuck to complain about the
publishing world. I have always been treated fairly, even fondly,
especially at Pocket Books, where the whole process has been very
warm and personable. I think, if I may preach a bit here, that you
get what you give; that I am reasonable and appreciative, and that
is reciprocated. On the other hand, the politics of the book
reviewing world can get me going. Sometimes you feel that behind
every review Is a disturbing story of who assigned it, to whom, and
why. When I review, I consider the author’s feelings and emphasize
the positive. It’s not exactly politics, but the process of promotion
and criticism results in some terrific authors remaining unknown,
their books sinking like stones, while others, no better and probably
worse, are anointed. [| think it helps writers to remember that the
anointing counts in the very small province of publishing, and
44 Elinor Lipman

doesn’t carry over to readers.

RCR: True or false: If a writer is talented and works hard, he or
she will “make it.”

EL: ‘True.
RCR: On that note, what advice do you have for aspiring writers?

EL: Don’t be sentimental about your work, by which I mean be
flexible about editorial suggestions, but don’t change things slavishly
Just because your friend the slightly more experienced writer tells
you to or because a rejection letter invents a criticism to justify the
editor’s decision. (I once received two rejection letters in the same
day for the same story. One editor had said, “Sorry, but the ending
doesn’t work,” and the other said, “ . . . with exactly the right
ending.”)

Revise, but you don’t spend your life beating the same dead
horse. Sometimes the best form of revision is to start something
new.

Always have the next envelope addressed so you'll be ready
when your S.A.S.E. comes back. Turn it around immediately from
a rejection to a submission.

If you join a workshop, join with a teacher, not just a peer
group, because without a good teacher you'll go home with the
words of the loudest, most opinionated, but not necessarily best
critic ringing in your ears. A group needs a leader to put the
criticism in perspective and have the last word; to say, “I disagree
with all of you and here’s why.”

Write every day (within reason; it’s not such sacred work that
you can’t take days off). Think of writing a novel as getting from
one scene to the next, rather than as a 300-page project. I aim for
two pages a day, and it adds up.

And this: I once called my agent’s office and said to the temp,
“Hi, this is Elinor Lipman calling for Lizzie.” Later my agent was
asked, “Who was that? She was the nicest person I talked to all
day.” It made me wonder what kind of arrogance and rudeness 1s
out there in Authorland that would make a temp think my one
declarative sentence was award-winning behavior.

So, be nice.
stories stories stories stories stories stories stories

Ke

stories stories stories stories stories stories stories

 

 

 

 

 

stories stories stories stories stories stories stories

stories stories stories stories stories stories stories
Andrew Alexander 47

Don't You
andrew ALEXANDER

() n Thursdays, Arthur and I would leave school early and I'd
take him downtown on the new Marta train to his speech
therapist. He was my responsibility then and, although I
complained about it and taunted him by calling it “peach pearapy,”
I loved to take him. I liked the way his brow would wrinkle when
we stepped off the street and down into the new station, fluorescent-
white, tiled, startling as a swimming pool. Even when he was mad
at me, he would need to stick close by in the crowd, clutching to
the back of my bookbag when we threaded our way off the platform
and into the train cars with their smell of upholstery and hair oil.
My little brother would sit next to me, and I would unfold the
subway map and hold it away from him so he couldn’t see; I
pretended that it was absolutely necessary that I knew where we
were at all times, as if our route were as intricate and perilous as
the ancient Silk Road.

His speech therapist had an office in one of the new buildings
downtown. When Arthur was inside with her, I would sit in the
waiting room and read Ranger Rick magazines. Once, when it was
getting late and I went back to check on him, I found the two of
them, my brother and his doctor, playing checkers. When she saw
me, the doctor picked up the board, dumped all the checkers into
a shoebox, and told Arthur it was time to go.

One afternoon—I had been taking Arthur downtown for a
year—we arrived at the office and found the waiting room dark
and empty except for a lone receptionist typing behind the glass
panels. “Oh, yeah,” Arthur said. “I was supposed to tell Mom.
Dr. Morano went to a conference in Washington.”

I threw down my bookbag. “Well, that’th jutht terrific, retard,”
I said. “Mom’s not picking us up till five.”

Arthur shrugged. “That’s all right. We'll take a walk around.”

“A walk?” I said.

“We're all the way down here,” he said. “Let’s just walk
around.” He walked out of the waiting room. I followed.

Outside on the sidewalk he walked a few paces in front of me,
but checked every now and then to make sure I was sull behind
him. He stopped in a drugstore and bought a big piece of
bubblegum in the shape of a record, which—I was surprised—he
split with me. There on the downtown street, two paces behind
48 Andrew Alexander

him, chewing my half, it suddenly hit me how much he had changed
in the last year. He stopped at a sandwich shop and bought a Coke,
leaned his back against a wall like a ten-year-old James Dean to
drink it, and belched when he was finished. He stopped and talked
toa man selling tie-dyed T-shirts from a cardboard box: I couldn't
hear what they were saying, but the man spoke and then Arthur
spoke and then they both laughed.

In the car on the way home I told my mother everything that
had happened, and Arthur and I were both grounded. The next
week, on our way downtown, Arthur told me that he thought the
subway in Atlanta was so simple an ape could use it; one line goes
north-south, he said, and the other east-west. When Arthur was in
sixth grade, he was old enough to go on his own to speech therapy,
and by seventh grade he didn’t need to go at all. They must have
been doing something more than checkers; his speech impediment
was gone.

By the time I finished college, I was nothing to him. Right
after graduation, I went to a friend’s beach house with seven others
to celebrate. It rained the whole time, so we sat inside, watching
MTV, eating fried vegetables, and drinking cheap Margarita mix.
One night, through some combination of boredom and drunken
desperation, I tried to bite the head offa Hummel figurine. Our
hostess cried and said that it was a figurine of great personal and
sentimental value. Everyone, even the people who laughed when
I did it, took her side, and nobody cared that I chipped my tooth.
I refused to apologize, resolving never to speak to any of them
again once I got back home. I changed my flight and left two days
early; I took a cab to the airport one morning before anyone had
gotten up.

“Tm home for good,” I said to my mother when she picked me
up at the airport.

“You'll find a job,” she said. “You'll find something.” She hadn't
turned my room into a study or a lounge or a tasteful guest room.
She’d kept it as it was before I had left: the posters of Pink Floyd;
the stolen road signs; the beer can collection; the fish-empty, algae-
smirched aquarium. It was just like being back in high school except
I had no classes, no homework, no friends, and nothing to look
forward to. I thought I would see a lot more of my brother Arthur,
but I didn’t. He had skipped his last year of high school and had
just finished his freshman year of college. Although he lived and
went to school right in town, I hardly ever saw him. He had a
summer job, a girlfriend.

I bathed a lot and checked the mail. I played our old Atari.
Andrew Alexander 49

During the day I would lower the blinds and turn the AC in my
room up so high that I could lie under a blanket and still feel a
chill. I had arrived home at the end of May, and before I knew it,
it was June, then July.

I might have continued that way, undisturbed until death,
except for one afternoon when my mother was at work, the phone
rang. I never answered the phone because it was never for me, so
that afternoon, as usual, I just listened and waited for the answering
machine to pick up.

The tape started rolling, and then an unfamiliar voice spoke
my name. The way she said it, foreign, almost incorrect, made me
want to hear her say it again. “Hamilton, answer,” she said. “You
are there, I know. Pick up the phone. Pick up.”

I quit my game of Defender and picked up the phone. “Who
is this?” I asked.

“This is Arthur’s friend. Helene,” she said. It was my brother’s
girlfriend, French no less; I had never spoken with her before.
“You are Hamilton, the brother of Arthur,” she said. It wasn’t really
a question, but I answered, “Yes.” I was vaguely aware that Arthur
had told me that they had been fighting lately. “Can you drive me
to Conyers?” she said.

“Why can’t Arthur take your” I said. There was a long silence.
I wrapped a finger in the frayed belt loop of my bathrobe.

“I’m meeting him there,” she said. She explained that some
friends of theirs were having a cookout—a “cooking out” as she
called it—at a farm in the country.

“Can we be back by seven?” I said.

“No,” she said. “You know you're not busy. Come pick me
up.”

Half an hour later when I came to get her, she was standing
outside her apartment building waiting. She wore a pair of dark
sunglasses and a shirt with big wizard sleeves that flapped and flared
as she stalked towards the car. She was compact and pretty, with a
walk like a pair of scissors, full of energy and purpose. She said
nothing to me as she got in.

“Nice day for a picnic,” I said once we were on the road. It was
hot and muggy, and the sky was gray, tornado-brown at one corner.
All the windows were down because my Le Car had no air-
conditioning.

“Nice car,” she said, pointing to the candy wrappers and sticky
cola-grit on the floor of the passenger side. I sat up taller, kept
both hands on the wheel for a moment, then, casually, let one arm
hang out the window.
50 = Andrew Alexander

Half an hour later we were lost. I pulled over onto the shoulder
of the road, and Helene unfolded the highway map and spread it
out in front of her with much elaborate rustling.

“Why couldn't Arthur take you to this cookout?” I said. She
didn’t say anything, but traced the highways on the map with her
finger. I tried to imagine what they had been fighting about. “You
know,” I said, “I don’t think Arthur would go to this party with
another girl. Is that what you think?”

“Stay quiet,” she whispered to the map. Bent over it she was
squat and lovely, thrillingly French and mean in my front seat.

By the time we got to the party, it was almost over. The farm
looked conquered: a barbecue grill near the farmhouse gave off
thick and brutish smoke, a few people lay stretched out on blankets
in a pasture littered with soda cans and paper plates. There was
the sound of feedback from speakers and a microphone not yet
dismantled. A few beers floated in a washtub of melting ice. Helene
and I each took one.

“Where’s Arthur?” Helene asked a girl sitting in a lawn-chair.

“Arthur,” the girl said. Then, “Has anyone seen Arthur?”

The boy next to her shrugged. “I don’t think he ever showed
up,” he said.

The heat splotched my eyes and slicked my armpits. “I’m going
inside,” I said to Helene. “Come get me when the party’s over.”

I n the dark and empty farmhouse living room, I found no
television, no magazines of interest, but from the bookshelf I
pulled down an old paperback copy of The Scarlet Letter. Sitting
next to a taxidermied black bear, I perused the notes and sketches
some dazed high-schooler had made in the margins: drawings of
death’s heads, angels with guitars, contorted cats, scribbled notes
like “Hester = eerie” and “Roses = mankind” and, most
enigmatically, in a tiny, unassuming script at the top of page 124,
the exuberant declaration, “everybody wants me.”

When I looked up again, Helene was standing there in the
room, slightly drunk, not looking at me but wiggling the teeth in
the bear’s mouth with her fingers. She still wore her sunglasses
although the room was so dark. “I’ma very stupid girl,” she said.
“Were you the one who drove here with the stupid girl”

I smiled nervously and closed the book, keeping my place by
folding a page. “Yes,” I said. “That was me.”

She scratched the bear’s tongue, then patted its head. “This
thing 1s repulsive.” She walked over and flung herself down on
the couch next to me. I heard beer slosh inside her. “Arthur never
Andrew Alexander 51

came,” she said.

“IT know,” I said. “I could’ve told you that before we left.”

“Can we go?” she said. She seemed embarrassed, so I didn't
say anything more, just led her out to the car. On the drive home,
she made a catalogue of all my brother’s transgressions: a parcel
of lies, I thought, made lovely by her accent, the halting way she
handled English—it made her sound sad, nostalgic, broken. From
time to time she looked at me for my approval, agreement, even
asking me if I had noticed any such selfishness in my brother when
we were growing up. I said nothing. I nodded.

he next day, I lay in bed trying to read the old copy of The

Scarlet Letter | had lifted from the farmhouse, but it was no
good. I could smell detergent and sweat in the sheets. I tried
calling Arthur, but there was no answer. I bathed again, prepared
to go out.

I went to Helene’s apartment, but she wasn’t in. I waited for
her in my car as I had no other place to go. I kept my mind off the
heat by trying to imagine where Arthur would park when he visited,
which path he would take from his car to her apartment door.

After a while Helene pulled up on her bicycle without noticing
me. She leapt off before it had completely stopped and landed it
in the bike rack. As she was locking it up, I honked my horn.
“Hey. Hey!” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “What are you doing?” she said when she
got to the car.

“Do you want to go for another ride?” I said.

“No,” she said. She looked at her watch, then weighed the
offer in her mind. “Can you take me for groceries?” she said. I
nodded, leaned over and opened the passenger door for her.

At the store she didn’t say much, but tossed items into her cart
angrily. She compared the things with stuff in France: olives,
sardines, artichokes, strawberries, everything was better in France.
In the toothpaste aisle she demanded that I explain the difference
between mint, peppermint, and spearmint gel, but I couldn't. She
opened a tube of toothpaste, sniffed it, and wrinkled her nose in
disgust. “Too sweet,” she said and held it up for me to smell.
“America.”

I didn’t say anything in the store, but on the way back, when
she was searching through the static on my car radio for a station,
I said, “It’s just not as good as the Le Cars they have in France.”
She didn’t laugh, but turned off the radio with an angry flick of
her wrist. “You’re right,” she said. When I dropped her off she
52. Andrew Alexander

didn’t say a word, just grabbed her groceries and walked away.

That afternoon back at home, I picked up a Beginning French
text book from my mother’s bookshelf. It was a big clunky thing
from the fifties, bright and simple, but the acid in the paper had
turned the pages a stiff and moldy brown. The people in the
dialogues were forever asking directions, buying loaves of bread,
touring the countryside, throwing parties; if only 1n the book,
everything did seem better in France.

The next day I waited in my car again outside of Helene’s
apartment. “La chambre est-elle grande?” 1 yelled out the window
when she pulled up on her bike.

She smiled and walked over to the car. “Ow, elle est grande,”
she said.

“Would you care,” I said, “to do something?”

“Do you pay?” she said.

“Tl pay,” I said.

She scratched her wrist and sighed, “All right,” she said. “Let’s

”

go.
“Pardon?”

“It’s already a late hour,” she said. It was five. “Let’s Just go
now.” She and I drove to the Landmark Diner. My French was
exhausted in a few minutes so there wasn’t much for us to say. She
ordered the stuffed grape leaves, although I tried to explain that
you weren't supposed to actually order the grape leaves at American
diners. As we ate, she told me that she had decided that she was no
longer seeing Arthur, and that they hadn’t spoken in days. “He
hasn’t called me either,” I said. “He never calls, and he never comes
home. The jerk.” She didn’t say anything.

“Il parle trés hen, n’est-ce pas?” I asked her on the drive home.

“Non, il ne parle pas bien,” she said. It was just simple French, I
knew, but somehow I felt as though I were learning her own secret
language, and soon, I would be fluent.

When I got home that evening, my mother told me that Arthur
had called. “Where did you say I was?” I said.

“T said I didn’t know,” said my mother. “I said you were out.”

“Well, stay out of my business,” I said. “Both of you.”

he next night before going over to Helene’s I stopped at the
drugstore. She had complained that the pollution in America
was making her joints ache, so I thought I might make her a gift of
some American aspirin. Near the checkout lane was a bin full of
the odd flotsam and jetsam of a discount drugstore: single flip-
flops, cans of off-brand hairspray, sun-faded Garfield stationery,
Andrew Alexander 53

lidless tins of shoe-polish, and—though it was months from
Valentine’s Day—an army of those holiday hair-trolls with haunting,
prenatal smiles. I picked up one that held a plastic heart inscribed
with the words “HotStuff” and bought it along with the aspirin.

When Helene answered the door to her apartment she was in
her bathrobe. It made her look tired and exasperated, lovely.
“Please go away now,” she said.

“Why? Is Arthur here?” I asked. I brushed past her into the
apartment. I looked in her bedroom, her kitchen, bathroom: all
empty. She sat down on her couch as if bored. Since she wasn’t
speaking to me, I started to examine the things she had on her
shelves and walls. “I used to have that poster,” I said, pointing to
one of Sting. Icommented on the things on her bookshelves, “Nice
little pig. Good nail clippers. Macramé, I see,” and then I stopped.

“What is that?” I said. On her bookshelf, next to a stereo
speaker, was a little pink-haired troll. I picked it up. It was just
like the one I'd bought, only in its arms it held a plastic heart with
the words “I wuv you” written in crisp bold letters.

“Arthur gave it to me,” she said. She picked up the remote
control, aimed it at the TV, but then put it down again.

“When?” I said. I fingered the plastic bag in my pocket.

“A long time ago,” she said.

I picked up Arthur’s troll and twisted its head, trying to tear it
off. “He probably got it on sale at Big B,” I said. Actually, I thought,
he probably paid full price. She aimed the remote at the TV again,
and this time turned it on.

The phone rang and without looking at me Helene answered,
waving her hand to keep me quiet. I reached into my pocket to
give her the troll I had brought her, but before I could do it, she
spoke.

Her features were relaxed in a way I had never seen them
before, even her eyes smiled. She turned off the TV. I wandered
into her kitchen then back into her living room then back into the
kitchen, listening; whispered apologies, short, relieved laughter.

“Oh, your brother is here,” she said. Then, “I don’t know. I
think he’s trying to learn French or something. He brought me to
that party the other day. Yes, I went. I thought you would be
there.” I could hear the kitchen clock ticking; I took a drink from
her faucet as if it were a water fountain. “Hamilton,” Helene called
to me. “Your brother says thank you for taking me to that party.”

“Tell him I said you’re welcome a whole goddamned lot,” I
said.

She relayed the message, then said, “He wants to know what
54 Andrew Alexander

you're doing here.”

I walked into the living room. “Tell him I said I’m trying to
steal his girlfriend.”

She didn’t need to repeat the message. I could hear Arthur
laughing on the other end of the line. Then he said something
that I couldn’t hear, and Helene began laughing, too. Without a
word I left.

In my car, I swallowed three of Helene’s aspirin and let them
sit, dry and gaggy, at the back of my throat. I took the troll out of
his bag, and I wedged him up between the windshield and the
dashboard.

I didn't go home right away but drove further into the city.
The streets were bare and clean and ugly. The troll stood smiling,
looking out at the empty road, his expression changing, lightening
and darkening with a rhythm like laughter every time we drove
under a street light. I half-hoped to see Arthur on the sidewalk, in
every doorway, on every crosswalk, nine years old again and
needing me to take him home; he would come running to the car,
worried and waving, crying, and I would gun the engine and run
him down. Although the evening was cool, a greasy, fuggy sweat
was making my hands slick on the steering wheel. I wanted to
have something more to do, someone else to see since I was out of
the house, this far downtown. It seemed unfair, but of course there
was nothing more, nobody else, so after a while I just had to stop,
turn the car around and go home.
Elizabeth Smith-Meyer = 55

Lubrication
elizabeth SMITH-MEYER

he had been thinking of new and varied ways, ever since her

last doctor appointment, and now she tells him, assures him,
rather proud of herself, that she knows what they can do.

He tries to ready himself for her, lying on the bed, wearing
only his underwear. His arm is thrown over his eyes and his lips
are slightly parted. He breathes through his mouth.

She hikes up her maternity dress, kneels on the bed beside
him, and slides the underwear down his legs. He shivers. Her
hands press his legs apart as she situates her pregnant body
awkwardly between his knees. She opens a tube of lubricant and
squeezes a thick puddle of clear gel into her hand.

“It’s cold,” she tells him, smiling faintly.

He’s been complaining of the flu and he sniffles but doesn’t
speak. The air whistles between his teeth.

“Wait a minute,” she says. She blows on the clear gel, trying to
warm it, and it squirms under her breath. “This should be better.
Ill try it now.”

She rubs her hands together and then smears him with
lubricant. He flinches as she touches him.

“Ts it still too cold?” she asks.

His head moves side to side.

“Am I being too rough?”

“If you’re going to do it,” he finally says, his voice pinched
under his arm, rather hoarse from the flu, “then just do it. Don't
ask me so many questions.”

Her swollen fingers stiffen, and she pauses to straighten them
before taking hold of him again. “I just want to make sure I’m
doing it all right,” she says.

“You don’t have to do it at all.”

“Yes, I do. You’re a man. You have to have some kind of
release.”

He waits a moment and then answers in a tone that is not
familiar to her. “It just doesn’t feel comfortable.”

“But this way is better for the baby,” she says quietly. She tries
to see his face, looking for some assurance, but he keeps it hidden.
She says, “Give me some time to get used to this. Then it'll be
better.”

There is no response, and she begins to stroke him. He lies,
56 Elizabeth Smith-Meyer

without feeling, beneath her. She strokes harder.

“Is this all right now? Does it feel better?” she asks, slightly
breathless. Into the eighth month now the baby presses high under
her ribs, making it difficult for her to breath.

“Just finish,” he says.

She strokes faster, hoping to find a rhythm that will satisfy him,
but her hand feels clumsy, ill-conditioned for this angle, this
movement, and he doesn’t get hard. There is a refusal about the
situation that begins to anger her.

“What's wrong?” she asks, releasing him. “Aren’t I doing it
right?” Her hand hangs in midair, glistening with lubricant, slick
and wet and tired. He doesn’t answer, and in a lowered voice she
says, I’m only doing this for you.”

“Then stop,” he finally says. “If we can’t do it the normal way,
I don’t want to do it at all.”

“But how else are you going to get 1t?”

“T just won’t. We'll wait until after the baby comes.”

“No, no,” she says, shaking her head. “That'll add another
eight weeks. You can’t wait that long.”

There is another pause before he responds, “You just worry
about having the baby.” |

She clicks her tongue against the back of her teeth. “Why are
you being like this?) Why don’t you want me to help you?”

He removes his arm and stares at her. “Just lying here, waiting
for you to make me come, is not the way I want it. This wasn’t my
idea.”

She takes hold of him and tries to smile, but her face, although
rounded by pregnancy, is strained, deepened by worry lines around
her eyes and mouth. She says softly, “But it’s the only way I feel
safe doing it right now.”

He stares at her, then closes his eyes and puts his arm back
over his face.

She continues to stroke him until her hand feels dry. He 1s
semi-hard—still not hard enough—dry and red. He doesn’t say
anything, doesn’t look at her, as she stops, resettles her body, and
puts more lubrication on her hand.
Mark Jacobs = 57

Fool's Progress
markJACOBS

I n the summer of 1969 I graduated from high school and became
a fool. Only a fool would throw away a full-ride college
scholarship, fill a duffel bag with clothes, then drive a wounded
Triumph Spitfire non-stop from Albany to Miami. In Georgia, the
steering wheel broke in half, so I held onto the half that stayed on
the column and coasted over the Florida state line. Only a fool
would walk away from the Triumph when it wouldn't go into first
gear at a stoplight in Miami. I did remember to take the duffel
bag. But only a fool would show up asking for a job from a local
hotel proprietor in Miami Beach on the same day that proprietor
was indicted by a grand jury on racketeering charges.

I got the job, which was parking cars at the Lady Luck Hotel.

My first night in town, my new employer took me to dinner
with some friends. Albert was about forty-five, maybe, with thick
hairy wrists and a belly shaped like a Butterball turkey. A kind of
collective doom damped our dinner spirits at Mary’s Traditional
Pasta House that night. Just about everyone associated with the
Lady Luck had been indicted by the same jury, guests included. I
was too young, at that time, to know what the word ethnic meant.
Albert explained patiently why we had to eat our pasta al dente,
and what the cock on the bottle of chianti stood for. I drank enough
to geta headache but kept my mouth shut, my first intelligent move
since walking away from an Ivy League college scholarship for the
intelligent indigent.

So I learned the car-parking business, which is about as
complicated as it sounds. On Albert’s recommendation I split the
rent on a crummy apartment down the road in Hollywood with
the Lady Luck’s chief bellhop, Bert, who was too dumb to be
indicted for anything except a slow-moving traffic violation. From
the start I hated Bert, mostly because of his fruit and vegetable
lists. But I was honest enough to admit he was right about one
thing, and that thing had something to do with my being a fool.

“What you need, Spud,” he explained to me one afternoon in
October when business was slow for both of us, “is you need to get
laid.”

Outside there was real weather—heat and humidity and a sun
that scalded—but inside the hotel the cooled air was as antisepuc
as a space ship. We were killing time at Bert’s bellhop desk. He
58 = Mark Jacobs

had already gone through his first list of the evening.

Before migrating south Bert had worked in a cold storage
warehouse, and he derived a profound satisfaction from writing
down in lists all the fruits and vegetables he had hefted in his
warehouse career. “We had rutabagas,” he would sigh, reaching
for his pencil. You get the idea. I have never seen an adult so
entirely absorbed by so little. The worst part for me was, every
time he came back to his remembrance of fruits past he assumed it
was all new and gripping knowledge for me. He assumed, for
instance, that I would love watching him painfully print out a
subcategory of the various lettuces he had carted around. No one
before or since has ever called me Spud, by the way. Bert never
called me anything else.

I gathered that the main reason Bert stayed at the cold storage
plant for as long as he did was because of the day-shift foreman’s
wife. Bert worked afternoons. I couldn’t turn him off the subject;
every three or four days he got misty-eyed, sinking into X-rated
detail. Unfortunately, it seemed, his future in fruit and vegetable
management was squashed when the day-shift foreman came home
unexpectedly one morning with a hernia complaint.

Not that things were going poorly for Bert in Miami Beach. It
was easy to share the apartment with him. He was never there. I
resented his dumb luck. I resented even more the patronizing,
good-natured way he set about trying to help me.

“I’m dead serious, Spud,” he warned me. “You can’t jack off
in isolation forever. You know what they used to say about going
blind?”

“What about it?” I was hoping hard that a guest would show
up and give one of us something to do.

“What you don’t know is there’s a scientific basis to that old
wives’ tale. I read a study on the plane coming down.”

I tried to think how I might jockey the conversation back to
varieties of apples.

“It turns out there’s a limited number of brain cells inside your
sperm. Don’t ask me how that works, I’m not a surgeon. Anyway,
the fact is the more you pound the pepperoni the more likely you
are to have problem children. They might come out blind, let’s
Say, or idiots, or axe murderers. You name it. It’s a question of
odds, Spud. You want a family someday?”

Maybe it was chance that Jupiter blew by at that moment, but
I'll die believing it was fate. Jupiter was a long-term guest, a friend
of Albert’s from Rockaway. Twenty-five or thereabouts, pneumatic
in an earthy, semi-slatternly way, she had captivated my hyperactive
Mark Jacobs 59

imagination the first time I saw her browning body at the pool.
Mesmerized, I watched for fifteen minutes as she worked suntan
oil into those healthy pores. Her brown hair, long and free falling,
shone in the Florida sun. Her white bikini was understated overkill.
With Jupiter around, no other woman south of the Mason-Dixon
line had the slightest chance with my single-minded imagination.
Passing Bert’s desk, she breathed out something that might have
been “How’s tricks, boys?” in an offhand way that was as provocative,
for me, as fine quality erotic literature, and disappeared into the
Topless Bandit Lounge, which was almost empty at that early hour.
Frustrated, I wished that Albert had given me a job tending bar.

Even a slug like Bert could see my infatuation. He shook his
head reprovingly. The overgrown brush ofa mustache on his Alfred
Hitchcock-style face made him look like a constipated walrus. Hard
to figure his success with women.

“Forget that one, Spud,” he advised me. I hate it when a person
wags his finger in my face. “That one’s got ambitions. She figures
she’s an actress, maybe, or an artist, something glamorous. She’s
looking for a sugar daddy, not a horny teenager. Listen, you look
around, make your choice, and I'll work it for you. On the house.
You don’t want blind axe murderers for kids, do you?”

I didn’t. But nor did I want anybody but Jupiter. Call it a
fool’s fixation. Call it love. Though I had a comfortable way to go
before catching up to Bert, I was growing stupider by the day.

I suffered through October, the first two weeks of November.
A steady rain of tourists began to fall on Miami Beach. Albert and
his co-workers celebrated the success of a legal maneuver that
forestalled their grand jury appearance with an al dente dinner at
Mary’s. I couldn’t go; I had to work. But Albert himself brought
me a pasta doggy bag, and I felt abjectly grateful for his
thoughtfulness. I was beginning to feel at home in the Lady Luck.
Plus Bert hadn’t spent a night at the apartment in three weeks. He
performed his bellboy functions in a fog, exhausted by love. So I
had the apartment to myself. All I needed was Jupiter to fill it up.

I know it was no coincidence that Jupiter found her sugar daddy
at about the same time she began to show a little interest in me.
Marvin was from New Jersey, he was powerful in many senses of
the word, he wore a gold pinky ring. Everybody at the Lady Luck,
including Albert, spoke his name with reverence. “America hasn't
seen a legal mind like that since Daniel Webster,” Bert informed
me one evening when we had worked through the fruits and as far
as summer squash in vegetables.

I was jealous as only a fool could be of Marvin’s instant success.
60 Mark Jacobs

I couldn't turn around at the hotel without seeing him and Jupiter
cooing and billing in their transplanted New Jersey way. Poolside,
they applied unguents and oils to each other’s bronzing bodies.
They brought each other cooling drinks. They made their own
little self-referential world. It was about bodies. Mine was lonesome,
and I never had enough time off from work to get much of a tan.

“Money talks, Spud,” Bert teased me, enjoying my suffering in
his dull way. What he didn’t know was that Jupiter had called me
to her room one afternoon the week before. Her TV set was on
the fritz, she said; would I look at it? It took me no time at all to
plug it in, and there she was radiant in a terrycloth wrap-up. She
offered me a Coke, we sat on her bed, we said some stupid things.
I liked the way the flesh of her legs spread and fattened when she
put her knees together. I liked her perfume-less smell. I could
scarcely tolerate the electric tickle on my arm some stray tendrils
of her long hair made.

We kissed, and I was ready to make unending love. But Jupiter
had second thoughts; she pushed me away.

“You’re a punk,” she said. “I don’t need a punk. I need... I
need something else. Sorry, Silver Boy. You keep shining on. You'll
get what you need, some clay.”

It was all I could do not to slur out a wise-ass comment about
what Marvin needed, and how he got it. But I managed to keep
my mouth shut, and I managed also to embrace that twenty-five-
year-old pneumatic body for a second before I slunk out into the
hard-eyed sun.

Given Marvin's stature at the Lady Luck, it would have been
suicidal for me to brag. I kept my counsel. When Albert mentioned
that the lawyer was thinking about spending the winter with us,
though, I worried big time. If Marvin stayed, I could never compete
with his money. But if he went, he might take Jupiter with him.
That possibility drove me wild, which made me take some foolhardy
risks to get close to her.

Well it worked. One day Albert fired up his Lincoln and drove
Marvin to the West Coast on business, and quicker than you could
say wish fulfillment I was in the sack with Jupiter and nobody the
wiser. The experience, if that’s what you call it, was good beyond
good, it was transport to the stars, it was bodily edification and
nourishment and definition. It was fool’s love. Without it I would
have died. I fell asleep on Jupiter’s breasts listening to the rhythmic
beating of her cheating heart.

What happened afterward only seems outlandish in retrospect.
At the time it all seemed as right and reasonable as secular
Mark Jacobs 61

humanism. Through December and into January Jupiter spent
her public time with Marvin and her private time—not that there
was much of that—with me. Making love with her was like sucking
honey through a straw. Once in a while she showed up at my
apartment in Hollywood. It was high tourist season so Bert was
otherwise occupied. While she was there, we filled up the shabby
emptiness of the place with love.

Fool that I was, I came close to derailing the train of perfection
we were riding every time jealousy overwhelmed me, which was
pretty much every day. But Jupiter convinced me that Marvin was
chronically exhausted and close to impotent, that he only wanted
to wear her like a diamond ring. I had to believe her. What could
I give her except myself? Marvin let her shine.

By the end of January the grand jury indictment had ended in
ignominious failure for the local prosecutors. We had dinner and
unlimited chianti at Mary’s, where Marvin made a gassy speech of
self-congratulation that drove me up the brocaded wall. Jupiter
sat next to him like a bored housewife. We both knew better than
to look at each other, but I almost cried out in pain when Marvin
announced that he and Jupiter were going to hop on a sailboat
and cruise the Caribbean for an indefinite period of time. He
needed a break, he explained to us, and everybody at the table
muttered an encouraging Yeah! Everybody liked Marvin. Jupiter’s
face colored like a blushing bride’s, and the Lucky Lady crowd
clapped like cheerleaders.

Lucky for me that Marvin had no idea how to make a sailboat
go. I didn’t either, but Jupiter convinced him to take me on as a
one-man crew. It was a measure of our success in hiding our affair
that no shadow of suspicion flitted across the flat expanse of Marvin's
mind. I was around, I was available, I was affable. I would work
cheap. I was a fool. So he picked out a pretty little fiberglass boat
he christened the Bayonne Baby, and Jupiter spent two weeks
teaching us the basics of sailing on the safe edge of the Atlantic.
She was a good sailor and a good teacher. Don’t ask me how she
learned to sail in New Jersey; Jupiter was a woman of hidden depths
and I only plumbed some of them. Anyway both Marvin and I
learned to sailin a hurry. Me, I was entranced. The movements,
the calculations required, the instincts involved all became
synonymous in my mind with freedom. Screw the Ivy League.

Funny, it didn’t seem unreasonable to think about the three of
us cruising the Caribbean aboard a boat for months on end. I
thought: We’ll make stops on colorful islands. Marvin will disappear
to make business phone calls and drink expensive pastel drinks in
62 Mark Jacobs

tall glasses with paper umbrellas. He'll take up snorkeling.
Sometimes Jupiter will stay behind on the boat with me.

The day we decided we were seaworthy Albert and the idle
half of the Lucky Lady crowd came down to the dock to see us off
with champagne and salami sandwiches. Bert was there, too. His
uncanny sexual antenna must have given him a sense that
something was up between Jupiter and me. He pulled me aside
on the dock while Albert was saying his official farewell, stared me
in the face searchingly with that walrus-look I hated, and told me,
“Don’t do anything stupid, Spud.”

“What do you mean, Bert?”

“You know what I mean. Don’t let the wrong head do your
thinkin for you is what I mean.”

Too late for that. The wonderful thing was it did work for a
while. We were all northerners. The Caribbean was as exotic as it
looked on postcards, and we fell willingly under its wind-driven
spell. With Jupiter’s even-handed nurturing both Marvin and I
developed into creditable sailors, and the Bayonne Baby moved across
the glassy surface of the sea like a dancer in a dream. We became
explorers. We found islands with white virgin beaches, a billion
coconuts, palm trees that rustled suggestively, hermit crabs, self-
absorbed herds of sea birds, driftwood shaped like the carcasses of
extinct animals. We trolled for our supper, cooked fish whose names
we didn’t know or care to know. We drifted, listened to shortwave
broadcasts and talked politics like civilized refugees, and I realized
for the first time just how conservative many marginally law-abiding
elements in our society can be. In Marvin’s opinion anybody who
resisted the draft and going to Vietnam should have been shot in a
public place for desertion. The Vietnam War was tearing apart the
nation, but we sailed in a cocoon of peace and plenty that went
with us wherever the Bayonne Baby moved.

Every couple of weeks or so Marvin had us park the boat at a
populated island. He went ashore and made phone calls. But
apart from keeping up that minimum link with the world that
owned him he gave himself over to the trip. He developed an
extraordinary, child-like enthusiasm for snorkeling. He spent hours
at it when we dropped anchor in what seemed like an infinite
number of isolated blue bays. With the diligence of a novice he
catalogued the flora and fauna he found under water. He began
to grow gills, and there was a certain waterlogged look to him even
on the boat. Of course he was disappointed that Jupiter did not
share his enthusiasm. She was afraid of being cut on the reefs, so
she often stayed on the boat while he explored his new world. Me
Mark Jacobs 63

too. I was sucking honey through a straw.

Looking back, I think it was the liberating sense of wonder
that Marvin experienced on our voyage that doomed us. It wasn't
just the snorkeling. It was the entire adventure we were living, the
escape into discovery of a wild world of beauty and mystery a million
miles away from New Jersey and business. The upshot was his sex
drive came back to life.

Clean living had expunged a few pounds from his substantial
body, which was turning a rich olive color as though slowly baking
to perfection. Jupiter began to have a harried, bitter look that I
knew too well how to interpret. She refused to talk about what was
happening, but it was plain to me that I had a rival. A rival witha
boat, a bank account, a legal reputation to equal Daniel Webster’s,
and a revivified sexuality that was more threatening than all the
rest put together. Our cramped quarters on the boat didn’t help
much. I was more jealous than I had ever been on land. I wasa
green sponge; squeeze me and I dripped bile. I was primed to
make a stupid mistake.

“What goes on with Marvin—and it isn’t much, let me tell you—
pays our rent,” Jupiter told me. We were sitting on the edge on
the boat watching Marvin frolic over the reefs off the shore of an
uninhabited jewel of an island called Vixen Cay. I was irritated
because she was filing and polishing her nails, a homely task she
took on, I was sure, only because Marvin had asked her not to let
herself go. “What you and I have is different,” she insisted. “It’s
love. You give me pleasure.”

“T can’t stand the thought of him touching you, Jupiter.”

“Tt will pass. This is a phase Marvin is going through. Trust
me.” She crooned and clucked in my direction, but I would not be
soothed. We both knew she was lying. Whatever was happening
with Marvin had the stink of permanence. I was not the least
surprised when we hauled him back on board that he told us he
was thinking of early retirement.

“This trip has been like a religious experience for me,” he
confessed to us, blinking in the blinding mid-morning light.
Unconsciously he flexed his biceps. He didn’t look too bad for a
middle-aged city boy. “It’s scary as shit, people, but it’s exciting.
It’s like I’m making my life go backwards. I’m getting younger
instead of older, and this time around I’m enjoying it.”

It was true. I hated him. I hated anyone who called the two
individuals he spent twenty four hours a day with “people.” He
babbled on about the trip, his new life, the soul-less vanity of
preoccupation with worldly frills and prime real estate and lawyer’s
64 Mark Jacobs

briefs. He had enough money put aside to get out of that world
and stay in this one, in which Nature had begun talking back to
him, whispering some of her secrets into his unplugged ear like a
prodigal lover come home. Remember this was 1969, the summer
of Woodstock, when Joni Mitchell dreamed she saw government
planes riding shotgun in the sky turn into butterflies. Anything
was possible.

He and Jupiter took a vote. I was a non-voting member of the
crew, so I didn’t have any say in the decision they made to stay on
Vixen Cay for an unspecified while. The place was a sunny little
paradise, no doubt about it. Shaped like a half-moon, a beach of
white sand that ran the length of one side of the island, and on the
other side you stepped off into world-class reefs and underwater
delights. But staying meant Marvin would not be disappearing to
make phone calls, which cut into my precarious sex life with Jupiter.

We lasted for a week like that, living half on the boat, half on
Vixen Cay, where we made enormous bonfires at night and Marvin
told gripping stories about his now-discarded shabby life of crime
and money. I became introverted and sullen, but Marvin was so
engrossed in the drama of his own rebirth that he scarcely noticed
my funk. Jupiter shuttled back and forth trying to do some justice
to both of us, but I wasn’t having any of that. I bided my time
waiting for the chance to make a big mistake.

It came one crystalline morning after breakfast when Marvin
left us on the sandy side of the island to snorkel off the other shore.
He had a new project. He was going to learn to sketch, and then to
draw the wildlife he had been observing underwater. He had
already started keeping a journal, and he thought he might want
to publish the journal with his own fishy illustrations in the form of
a book. We kicked around tentative names for the book, which
sounded to me kind of like a Damon Runyan version of Steppenwolf,
but Marvin finally settled on Bayonne on Blue, which I had to admit
was catchy. Anyway he took his snorkeling gear and a sketch pad
and pencils and disappeared leeward. Vixen Cay was Just wide
enough across that he was lost from view, screened by the wind-
bent palms that populated the island.

It didn’t take me long to coax Jupiter onto the Bayonne Baby.
No doubt my boyish pride in my own power of persuasion
contributed to our mutual recklessness. The next thing we knew
we were down in the cabin in Marvin’s bed wrapped together and
frantic, a moving feast of limbs and appendages and seeping fluids.
The second thing we knew was here came Marvin down into his
violated room.
Mark Jacobs 65

In one instant he was transmogrified from the sensitive author
of Bayonne on Blue to the street-smart lawyer who knew more about
racketeering than J. Edgar Hoover. He roared and dove at me. I
escaped only by the aid of one of those adrenaline bursts that
sometimes save soldiers in combat. Jupiter, as you might expect,
screamed. On the periphery of my terrified consciousness I was
aware of how vulnerable and sexy she looked, naked and scared,
her pinkish nipples pointing at me, erect and accusing.

It was pretty clear that Marvin wanted to kill me. In the
confining smallness of the cabin he came at me again and again,
and each time I escaped dramatically. My penis wagged as I jumped
and ran, like a semi-tumescent Exhibit A before the jury. I had
youth and speed and terror on my side, but Marvin had strength
and anger and righteousness on his. For a while we stayed even.
Marvin knocked me around, and my mouth bled, but a couple of
times, dancing away, I got in a token wimpish jab, which only made
his anger still more righteous.

I don’t know how it would have ended if Jupiter had not
suddenly let loose a fierce scream that made us both aware that she
had Marvin’s pistol in her trembling hands. Seeing it, he stopped
slugging and smiled.

“Good girl, Jupiter,” he praised her. “Hand it over now. I'll
take care of this from here on out. You're a good girl.”

“Don't!” I squeaked. “He’ll kill me.”

“He’s right about that,” Marvin said. “And there ain’t a judge
in the friggin Carib that’d send me up for it. Justifiable homicide
is what they call it. Come on, hand it over.” He was breathing
hard; there was a hoarse whistle in his voice as he panted.

Perhaps it was the way, both high-handed and disparaging, in
which Marvin assumed she would obey that led Jupiter not to.
Shaking her beautiful head slowly she retreated backwards up the
ladder onto the deck, the pistol held steadily enough now to give
the lawyer pause. One conservative step at a time he went up after
her. I took a second to pull on my swimming trunks, which made
me feel a whole lot better, then went up after both of them.

Jupiter was standing straight-shouldered, almost majestic, on
the bow. Her armed nudity disturbed both of us; it sent a message
neither of us could quite interpret.

“Toss me my cover up,” she told me. I tossed. Marvin stood
watching, trying to come to terms with the possibility that the woman
to whom he had given so much would consider shooting him.

“Jupiter,” he growled. His voice box emitted a noise like agitated
gravel.
66 Mark Jacobs

“Shut up!” she barked sharply. With her robe on she was easier
to contemplate. “I have to think.”

“Come on, baby. Leave the thinkin to the experts. All you
gotta do is hand me over the pistol and this nasty little
misunderstanding is over.”

“He'll blow my brains out,” I warned her. “Let me have the
gun, Jupiter. I promise you I won't shoot Marvin. All I care about
is him not shooting me.”

“Don’t forget who’s been buttering your bread, sugar,” Marvin
said. “Stick with Limp Richard here and you got nothin, absolutely
nothin. Stick with me and I’ll show you how forgiving I can be.”

Maybe every person born is allotted one such moment on the
planet, in which she or he must choose between two starkly different
lives, two futures, two possibilities. I could see that struggle to
decide crease Jupiter’s face. The options and their ramifications
were obvious to all three of us. I thought Marvin might try to rush
her, figuring she would not have the nerve actually to put a hole in
him, but he must have seen the passion—and I’m not talking about
sexual passion—illuminating her. He was smart not to take the
chance.

“Jupiter,” I said after a decent interval, during which a big fish
leaped like a showoff and a swarm of gulls sent their dark shadows
flittering across the deck of the Bayonne Baby. Paradise lost, I
thought. I will not forget the Caribbean blue of the bay.

“Tt’s not over for you, punk,” Marvin said in an undertone; the
conviction with which he spoke convinced me, anyhow, that he
knew what he was talking about.

But Jupiter had made up her mind. “Promise me you won't
kill him,” she said.

“I already promised,” I told her.

Seeing his odds dwindle, Marvin made his move. He dove
prow-ward toward Jupiter to get the gun, which had assumed the
status of a totem for him; without it he could not imagine living.
For a moment he forgot about me. As he lunged I went up behind
him, hit him low, and drove him over the edge into the water he
had come to love. Glowing with the intensity of having worked
her way to the right choice, Jupiter surrendered the gun to me.
“Promise,” she said, and I promised again.

The safest thing was not to let Marvin on board, which she did
not. While he treaded water and cursed I aimed the pistol in his
direction. How could he be expected to know that I had no nerve
to shoot? I was lucky. Jupiter tossed him a little rubber dinghy,
into which he crawled only because he was too tired to stay afloat
Mark Jacobs 67

on his own power. Then she considerately passed down food, water,
all kinds of supplies, even a deck of cards, taking care not to let
herself get close enough for him to grab her arm.

“You leave me out here, it’s murder,” Marvin blustered. “It
could be weeks before a boat comes by. What am I supposed to do
until then?”

“Write your book,” I thought but didn’t say to him.

Jupiter thought for a minute, gave herself up to her better
impulses, for which weakness I admired her tremendously. She
went below and came back with the ship’s radio, lowered it carefully
with a gaffe to Marvin, who was surprised at her magnanimity.
Not me. Jupiter had grit, she had character. What she didn’t have,
at the moment, was a regular income.

With the radio Marvin knew he was saved, which brought back
some of the anger I didn’t blame him for having. While we hauled
up the anchor and got ready to leave Vixen Cay in a hurry he sat
in the rubber dinghy cursing both of us and making threats he had
the power to carry out. He fondled the radio in his lap.

“Enjoy what you got,” he warned us, “cuz it ain’t gonna last
long. Every law-abiding boat in the Caribbean is going to be after
your tail. There’s nowhere you can hide. Go ahead and screw
each other’s eyeballs out for the next day or two. That’s all you got
left. When I get a hold of you ’'m gonna make it hurt. Real bad,
real slow... .” ,

In self-defense we tuned him out and tended to the business of
getting under sail.

“I’m scared,” Jupiter told me, taking the cover off the mainsail.
I could think of no consoling or manly thing to say that would
have the slightest convincing ring to it, so I concentrated on my
chores. .

It wasn’t until we were away from the island, .out of earshot of
Marvin's threats and vituperations, that we found our voices. There
was only one way to go: run for Key West, ditch the Bayonne Baby
and walk away. On the strength of Marvin’s credit card and a few
hundred dollars in cash he left us we could rent a car and disappear
into America. The prospect didn’t seem too bad.

“I’m glad it happened, sweet one,” Jupiter told me. She burned
my lips with an undivided kiss, and we clenched. “I couldn't go on
the way we were going. Something had to give, didn’t it?”

It had. The wind was freshening. We were moving. It felt like
freedom, though I knew we both felt a sadness we would hide at
having to leave behind the world of the Caribbean. Jupiter took
up the position in the bow from which she had made her moral
68 Mark Jacobs

choice, selecting youth, penury and possibility over age, a magic
wallet, and Bayonne on Blue. That was her power spot. No wonder
she stood radiant in it. The sun, lowering down the afternoon,
made a halo around her bikini’d body. I knew I was a lucky man.

“I made the right decision,” she called to me as from a moral
summit I myself could not hope to scale.

“You made the right decision,” I agreed.

“And I’m going to stay with you forever,” she promised. “We're
in this forever, aren’t we.”

“Nope,” I was surprised to hear myself correct her. It was the
first step into knowing that I had made since becoming a fool, and
I didn’t even know I was making it. “About a year is my guess.”

“What do you mean?” she asked me, but she knew I was talking
truth.

“IT mean we’re going to have one hell of a year. We're going to
see the world, and make love every day.”

“Twice a day!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I mean what if we have
a hangover or something?”

“Twice a day,” she insisted.

“But there’s going to come a day when it’s over. The main
thing,” I said, and I was inventing here a little, “the main thing is
to do everything we do so that there’s no regrets when it’s over.
You follow me, Jupiter?”

She followed. All the way to Key West, where we ditched the
boat as planned and rented a fire-engine-red Mustang convertible
courtesy of Marvin. We drove north and then went into the tumult
and color and beauty of America in 1970. One place to which we
did not drive was Miami Beach and the Lady Luck. Thinking
about the reception our perfidy would entitle us to with Albert and
the gang spooked me. The thing to do was not think about Marvin,
and we didn’t, much. We became our own adventure. And I was
right. In about a year it was over.

Nothing is the way it used to be, of course. For now, I’m living
under an assumed identity in a place with no return address. Even
my body is not my own. At night I walk the streets of our city and
listen to the life that streams there. It is abundant, it wants to
overwhelm. My life is as dense and prickly-textured, as fraught
with complexity and enigma, as that of any middle-class adult
American. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Nevertheless.

For a long time, the longest time, maybe forever, I’m slipping
into a dream behind the wheel of a sleek blue Spitfire. My code
name is Spud, but the only one in the world who knows that is the
Mark Jacobs 69

pneumatic woman next to me in her leather bucket seat. We
synchronize our watches. The little car leaps to life and we race.
We slice the wind. Her hair is blowing free, she looks over at me
and smirks. |

We race. We’re off on a top-down adventure across the
highways of America. Jupiter plays with the buttons on the radio,
tuning through static until finally the music of the spheres comes
in clearly. I could listen to that music forever. I have visions of
fields full of flowers, mountains full of bears, dirty streets full of
lovers and spies, mothers and muggers. And us. “You're a fool,”
Jupiter tells me. She laughs. “I know that,” I admit to her, and she
laughs again. Then Oh! do we drive.
70 Pamela Montgomery

The Last White Woman On

Warsaw Street
pamela MONTGOMERY

M ary Johnston’s mother managed to sit in bed and bellow out
eight last words before she flopped back onto her pillow and
died: “Don’t let the niggers take over the neighborhood.” That
was thirty years ago, and Mary was holding fast, the last white
woman on Warsaw Street.

Standing outside the screen door of her little shotgun house
on a gloomy Saturday, Mary surveyed the neighborhood through
squinting eyes. The breeze ruffled her dress and tickled the long
hairs on her legs. The 9:15’s shrill whistle blasts were doubled by
the standing rainwater that spread across the train yard next to
Mary’s house, engulfing the hatchmarks of the tracks. The reflected
din drowned the squeals of the neighborhood children as they
swarmed the street and the neighbor’s porches like an invading
army of giant black ants. Even Darnell Freeman’s boom box,
perched on his broad bare shoulder, disappeared under the weight
of the whistle and the immense iron grumblings that cracked the
street and made the fragile old houses shiver and groan their
foundations.

As regular as clock cuckoos, the neighborhood women came
out onto their porches, not to wave their husbands off to work as
the Polish neighbors used to do when Mary was a child—not one
husband remained on Warsaw Street—but to receive their mail
into their creased hands.

The mail carrier was a blue man in shorts at the top of the
street, tipping his safari hat at each face on every porch. The
caboose rumbled past, leaving the water to lap and slurp the tracks
in the train’s wake. Mary could hear the mailman saying, “Morning,
Miss Brown ... Miss Jackson ... Miss Freeman... Miss Johnson,”
at last reaching Mary’s house at the bottom of the street: “Morning,
Miss Johnston.”

Mary squinted at him as he opened her gate and strode briskly
to her porch, his knobby knees flexing just below the hem of his
official postal shorts. “Morning, Miss Johnston. Just three today.
Nothing from your broker. Holiday’s got things messed up a bit.”

Mary snatched the mail from him. “No check?”

“No, ma’am. Probably come Monday.”
Pamela Montgomery 71

“But they got their checks,” she said. “I saw.” She squinted up
at him through her bushy black eyebrows.

“Well, now, those checks are different. Those are Social Security
and Family Service checks, now aren’t they. Remember? Don't
worry. IBM won't forget you; they’re more reliable than the
government, if I do say so myself.”

“T know that.” Mary flipped rapidly through the three
envelopes while the mailman waited in the cloudy heat. “Here,”
she said, “you’ve given me Mrs. Johnson’s food stamps. My name
has a Tin it. Remember?” She shot him a glare and told him, “My
mama once said that little T is what separates our family from the
niggers.”

The mailman smiled with half his mouth and said, “Sorry, Miss
Johns-ton,” and tipped his hat.

He was through the gate before Mary could look at her mail
again; he doubled back to the Johnson’s house next door. She
watched as he tipped his hat to the screen door. A long-fingered
black hand emerged to take the envelope, then disappeared back
inside. He tipped his hat again and was gone across the street,
headed up the other side, his voice fading as Mary watched him
approach Lake Avenue. The screen doors banged one after the
other as the women retreated inside with their mail.

“Mornin, Mary.” The voice, deep, rich, and leisurely, came
from the porch next door. Mary squinted through the dark humid
air that pressed down on the neighborhood like a low black ceiling.
She jerked her head eastward, toward the voice. She knew it was
Vincent, Mrs. Johnson’s middle-aged son come — to roost, as
his mother called it.

Stretching explosively on the porch, Vincent flexed his muscles,
popping them all over. With a lazily cocked hand, he scratched his
belly through his undershirt and yawned loud, with gusto. When
he finished the ritual, he rolled his eyes in her direction. “Was that
you I heard screaming last night?” he said.

Mary bristled. “No, that wasn’t me. Possum gotin. Hit him in
the head with my Bible.”

“Oh,” said Vincent, lolling his eyes around the street. “So you
killed him then.” He smiled all over his face; the gold in his mouth
caught the reflection off the rainwater standing in the street.

“No. He run off.”

“Oh,” said Vincent, scratching his chest. “So that was the possum
I heard screamin.”

Mary spun around and went inside. She closed both her doors,
even though it was already 98 degrees on the suction cup
72 Pamela Montgomery

thermometer on the living room window. She wiped the sweat
from her upper lip. Thank God her house had no windows on the
east side; no telling what Vincent might occupy himself with at
night, when she watched her big-screen cable TV in the dark in
her sweaty underwear.

The neighborhood wasn’t safe anymore. Half the time she
was afraid to go to the grocery store—all those niggers swarming
the place like water bugs, always on the fourth of the month, the
day after welfare checks. Not this month, though—Fourth of July
was yesterday, no mail, no checks. ‘Today, they’d all be there,
talking their weird tongue, calling each other honey, and sister, and
girlfriend. It made her cringe to shop alongside them, but she was
out of anything that looked like supper—she would have to go to
the store today.

She unlocked the pantry door, took out her big purse, and
slung it over her elbow. She carried the purse around with her as
she readied the house for her departure. First, she jerked up hard
on the back door to get the stubborn lock to jibe. Then she went
around the rooms closing and locking all the windows. The little
shotgun house would be an oven when she returned, but it was
best to be safe in this neighborhood.

Satisfied, she strode to the front door just as the 9:30 was
thundering past, sloshing muddy water right up to Mary’s side
yard. The front door locked easily; every time she twisted the key
and felt the brass bolt slide home, she felt mad enough to spit:
Vincent had fixed it for her on the sly, and she knew he was waiting
for her to thank him.

“Lock still works good, huh, Mary,” came the deep voice from
the porch next door.

Mary jumped slightly, but covered up by plastering her damp
graying hair back to her skull. “It’s all right,” she answered. She
kept her eyes trained on the swayed wooden steps as she hurried
to the gate. She wished she didn’t have to pass the Johnson house.

As she walked up Warsaw Street, Vincent sprang off his porch
and fell in beside her. She walked faster, and so did he. He had no
trouble keeping up, and didn’t even breathe hard when Mary began
to puff and sweat.

“Here, now, Mary, let me carry that heavy bag.” He reached
for her purse.

“You keep your greasy hands off my purse!” she screamed.
She tried to walk faster but she couldn’t get enough air to fill her
lungs.

“Oh, now, Mary, we been neighbors a while. You know I don’t
Pamela Montgomery 73

mean no harm. That satchel’s heavy, now. What you got in there,
anyways? You carryin around all that stock broker money?”

“None of your business, mister.”

“IT seen your checks, you know. Mailman’s always screwin up
our mail. I seen your checks. What do you do with all that money?
All them zeroes, man oh man!”

“You got no call to open my mail.”

“Didn’t mean to, now, Mary. I thought it was Mama's. Come
on now, you know how I feel about you. Why, if we was to get
married, our mail could get all mixed up, and all you’d ever have
to do would be take that little old T out your name.”

Mary swung on Vincent and caught him upside the head with
her purse. For a minute, he was thrown off balance, but he
recovered by the time Mary’s swing came full circle. His pearl and
gold teeth flashed in a bright smile.

“Why, ain’t you the spunky one!”

“You get away from me, nigger!”

Vincent let Mary put a few paces between them before he took
up behind her. She heard him chuckling back there, saying, “Just
fine back here, now, just fine.”

Mary had reached the old church at Lake Avenue. The traffic
was heavy and she looked around for someplace to rest her eyes as
Vincent sidled up beside her. The church would do, the pink stucco
Baptist church where she had been baptized Polish Catholic forty-
five years ago, right there in the imported tile baptismal font of the
stage. The Baptists used the font for flowers now and dunked
their people in a stock tank under the stage. The tall black minister
was unlocking the front door; soon the hallelujahs would float down
the street to disturb her Saturday peace, doubled and redoubled
by all that standing water in the train yard, until it ended up
sounding like a tabernacle choir under a dome. She could only
hope for heavy train traffic.

Vincent’s voice rang out from her elbow. “Morning, Reverend
Tremont! Choir in good voice today?”

“Let’s hope so, Vincent. Special services tomorrow, you know.
Dr. King’s speech on video, freedom for the people.”

“Hallelujah,” said Vincent.

The minister stepped inside and closed the carved oak doors
behind him.

Mary looked hard at Vincent. “You’re no Christian,” she said.
“You’re Baptist.”

He smiled and chuckled. “You ain’t no Christian neither.”

Mary felt the blood rise to her face. “Am so.”
74 Pamela Montgomery

“Ain’t neither. You hit that poor little possum with a Bible.
That ain’t Christian.” He smiled all the way to his pink gums.

Like a taut string snapping, something in Mary gave way.
Maybe it was Vincent’s persistence. Or maybe it was his closeness,
and the cheery gold teeth that flashed on a gloomy day. Or maybe
it was the rich coffee eyes that pinned her to the pavement. It was
when she caught the sight of her wavering reflection in his eyeball
that her spine snapped to and she made a grab for her dignity.
“Least I wouldn't eat a possum,” she said.

Finally there was a hole in the traffic and Mary darted across
the hot asphalt to the Sack ‘N Save, her run-over rubber thongs
flipping and flopping behind her. Vincent was right on her heels.
She flung open the door and stepped inside the cool store.

“You got shoppin money, Mary? I know your check didn’t
come.”

Mary didn’t answer. She yanked the last shopping cart out of
the corral and started toward the meat case. The cart’s wire body
was sprung sideways. Its rear left wheel rode completely off the
floor, spinning like a tossed coin, and one front wheel was
permanently locked. The other two squealed.

Something bumped Mary’s arm and the cart jerked free of her
hands. Vincent stood staring at her, smiling, his fingers curled
hard around the sticky cart handle. From deep in his chest he
said, “I’ll push the cart.” He started shoving it down the first aisle.
“Man oh man! Like pushin a dead pig through a slaughterhouse.
Why ain't they got better carts?”

“They got better,” said Mary. “The niggers got here first.
They’re taking over the Sack ‘N Save, them and their food stamps
and welfare checks.”

Vincent leaned close into her neck and said, “Boogita boogita,”
and laughed out loud.

As they made their way through the store, Vincent excusing
them around browsing neighbors, Mary didn’t speak a word; she
just threw items into the bottom of the cart. Vincent quietly put
his in the baby seat. Soon, Mary got used to having him push the
cart and was glad she didn’t have to shove the stubborn thing down
the aisles, but every once in a while, she grunted or snorted and
shot him a look, just to keep up appearances for the neighbors,
who were casting sidelong glances.

“One thing, Mary, these here wheels is a natural brake, what
with these floors all slanty the way they is.”

She was reading a pickle label when he said it. It made her
think of the day that she was reading a label and her cart had
Pamela Montgomery 75

wandered off on the sloping old concrete floors. First she thought,
“A nigger stole my cart.” But then she saw the cart at the other end
of the aisle, unmanned, nosing into the Lucky Charms. She had
laughed to herself, and now she smiled, until she remembered who
she was with and she put her hand over her mouth.

“What's funnye” said Vincent.

“Nothin’s funny.” She wasn’t about to get into any real
conversation with him.

“Somethin’s funny. What is it?”

“Nothin’s funny! Are you done shopping?”

“Mama wants some Lucky Charms.”

The laugh was in her belly, making her sick. She had to let it
go.

“What's funny?” Vincent said, already laughing.

“Once I thought a nigger stole my cart, but it went off on its
own.” She laughed so hard she had to lean on the front end of the
cart.

Vincent never stopped enilinn: “You got a strong laugh for a
honky bitch.”

Mary straightened up suddenly and leveled her stare at him.

“Don’t you ever call me that again.’

Softly, he said, “Why, Mary, I didn’t mean ities by it,” and
smiled.

She looked at him long and hard. She suddenly wanted all
her groceries out of the cart, but there were too many. “We're
finished,” she said, and wrenched the cart handle out of Vincent’s
hands. She wrestled the cart toward the check-out.

Mary’s groceries came to $59.62. When she saw the numbers
glowing green on the register, she felt her stomach sink. What had
she been thinking as she tossed item after item into the cart?
Furiously, she fished in her big purse for loose money, but ever
cautious of robbery, she carried very little cash—she found a five-
dollar bill folded into a tiny square and tucked for safety under the
ripped lining.

“Mary, you out of cash? Here now, miss,” Vincent said to the
cashier. “You put all of this together. This order goes all together.
This is all food stamps.” The checker started ringing in Vincent’s
purchase on top of Mary’s.

Mary spun around and charged out the door just as a clap of
thunder split the sky. Thank God there was a lull in the traffic.
She plunged across the street and headed down Warsaw as the
warm rain pelted her. The church choir had started up, all black
hallehlujas and praise-the-Lords and Jesus-save-mes. She put her hands
76 Pamela Montgomery

over her ears and tried to recall the tender Ave Manas that once
floated through the imported pews and washed over her. She was
walking so fast in the increasing rain, it was hard for her wet toes to
keep a grip on her thongs. When she reached the Johnson house,
Mrs. Johnson was standing out on the sidewalk under a red
umbrella looking up the street at her. She stepped aside for Mary,
smiling.

“My Vincent Christopher with you?” she said.

“No!”

“Oh, never mind. Here he comes now.” She called and waved
up the street, where Vincent was a dark head bobbing above three
big grocery sacks bundled in his powerful arms.

Mary was having trouble getting her key into the lock. Sweat
and rainwater ran into her eyes and clouded her vision.

“Trouble with that old lock again, Mary?” Mrs. Johnson said.
She sauntered to Mary’s gate and rested her free hand on top of it.
That’s as far as she had ever gone, and that’s as far as she would
ever go. “I'll send my Vincent over to fix it again. He sure is
handy to have around.” She sniffed the wet air. “Rain again.
Wettest summer I recall. That river coming in the train yard, and
I got bugs and mice trying to get in, get out of the way of the water.
You got ‘em? Next thing you know, snakes.” She shivered and
chuckled.

Mary got the key in the lock just as Vincent stepped up beside
his mother. “Open the gate, Mama, I got Mary’s groceries.”

Mrs. Johnson looked from her son to Mary, Mary to her son,
then gently eased the creaking gate in. She watched big-eyed as
Vincent took the three porch steps in one long stride and stuck his
foot in Mary’s door just as she was slamming it shut.

“Damn, woman! Let me in here with your groceries!” He
shoved hard on the door.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Mrs. Johnson. Under the red umbrella,
she began easing backward toward her house muttering and
shaking her head.

Inside Mary’s house, Vincent closed the front door with his
foot. It slammed so hard the glass rattled in all the windows of the
house. Mary had taken a stand in the arched doorway that led
from the living room to the bedroom, her legs spread in a defiant
stance, arms stretched from doorjamb to doorjamb. Her thin
summer dress was glued to her body by the rainwater, a puddle
forming beneath her. It was hailing now, hammering the windows
and battering the roof, and Mary had to shout over the din: “Keep
out of here!”
Pamela Montgomery 77

“IT mean to bring your groceries to the kitchen,” said Vincent.
He wasn’t smiling; his big jaw was thrust out and his eyes were
slightly crossed. The rain droplets on his taunt arms sparkled.

“Them groceries ain’t mine.”

is |

“Ain’t.”

“l’m coming through.” Two steps carried him across the tiny
living room. He turned his shoulder to Mary and nudged it
insistently into her chest, carefully positioning it over her heart.
She resisted. He pushed harder on her breastbone. She lost her
wet grip on the left doorjamb and had to resort to grabbing his
slippery bicep. The first feel of him shocked her. His black skin
was soft like suede, and hot, thinly layered over muscles that moved
and rippled under her hand. She squeezed his arm as hard as she
could, but even her big hand would not go around it. She could
feel the veins pumping under his skin.

His nostrils flared as he snorted with the effort of pushing her
into the bedroom that stood between them and the kitchen. Sweat
droplets and raindrops were launched on his breath across to Mary's
face; they trickled down her forehead and cheek to her chin. She
braced herself on the bare wood floor, but her feet were sliding out
of her thongs. Sweat ran down her legs.

She wedged a hand between the limp sacks of groceries to push
on Vincent’s chest. The smell of meat-blood and ripe bananas rose
out of the wet paper sacks. Mary and Vincent grunted and strained
against each other, nose to nose, eye to eye, chin to chin. Mary lost
her grip on one thong and the splintered floor chewed her bare
foot. She pressed against his chest. His wet T-shirt clung to him.
She could feel his heart beating fast under her palm as she pushed
hard against it. His breath puffed on her sweaty face.

The center grocery sack fell to the floor between them and
Mary shoved her other hand into Vincent’s hard belly. He pushed
with his hips against her hand, straining forward with his flexing
buttocks. Mary was losing ground. Her other thong popped off
and she dug her curled toes into the wood floor, feeling for a warped
floorboard to cling to. But then, her right hand slipped on the wet
shirt and slid like an oiled fish past his belt, running up hard against
his sharp hipbone.

Vincent dropped both sacks of groceries. A pickle jar exploded,
filling the room with the smell of dill. Their scuffling feet mashed
bananas and sausages into the wood floor.

And then, Mary just caught the mischievous flash of Vincent's
smile as he abruptly stopped resisting, causing the force of her
78 Pamela Montgomery

thrust to drive her straight up against him, chest to chest, belly to
belly. Black arms then wrapped her up and her pale bare feet
came up off the floor.

“Mary,” he whispered into her ear.

li night long, the rain and the hail drummed on the house.

When Mary opened her eyes that bright Sunday morning,
her cheek was resting on a wad of cockleburs brought in by the
possum the night before. She didn’t move. At first she thought
the possum was in bed with her again, stroking her shoulder with
his leathery palm.

New sounds flooded her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut and
covered her ears against them but they forced their way in: soft
breathing beside her, her heart, his heart, water lapping, dripping,
a sudden splash.

Her eyes sprang open. The first thing she saw was a new pattern
on the ceiling. Across the familiar cracks and stains and hanging
chunks of ceiling paper danced glittering reflections, flashing lights,
sparkling patterns of motion. She turned her head toward the
kitchen door. A big silver fish jumped halfway up the pink wall,
then splashed down on its side into the water.

Mary sat up in bed and looked around. Her thongs floated
like gondolas toward the kitchen door. A wooden end table drifted
silently in from the living room. Muddy water lapped at the low
windowsill and eddied in and out the open window.

A black shape moved silently out from under her bed and
through the water, twitching fleshy whiskers and twisting its big
body as it made its way across the room, approaching the floating
thongs. Suddenly the water churned and a thong disappeared; a
moment later it bobbed to the top again.

“Sweet Jesus. What—?” Vincent sat up in the bed. “Why,
Mary, the river’s got out. We’s flooded.” A big catfish twisted its
black body through the door to the kitchen. “Why, he know right
where to go, don’t he? Fish fry tonight.” His laugh filled the little
room and echoed off the surface of the muddy river water.

Mary swung her feet over the side of the bed, clutching the
flowered sheet around her. The cold dark water came almost to
her knees; the brown silt at the bottom felt silky, soothing as balm
on her splintered soles. A turtle floated in over the windowsill and
eyed them before pushing off toward the living room. She stood
up in the water, the sheet spreading around her knees, and turned
to face Vincent. |

“My mama died in this bed,” she said. She looked down at
Pamela Montgomery 79

him. “My mama died in this bed.”

Gently touching her hand, he smiled and drew her down to
his side. She sat with her back to him. At the kitchen door the
catfish captured her thong.
80 Terry Pow

Watching Albania

terry POW

received my first glimpse of Eugene Spizatti as the ancient

Morris Minor crept around the side of the mountain high above
his villa. At least I assumed that the distant figure with a shock of
bone-white hair was Spizatti. He was standing on a terrace and
appeared to be looking out to sea. We were still too far away to be
sure. The car had stopped at the top of a hairpin descent—the
steepest yet—while Mrs. Spizatti thrashed wildly with the gear stick,
trying to wrench it into first.

“Christ,” she said. “Christ, Christ!” It sounded like an
invocation, but the gods were not so easily propitiated. The gear
refused to budge. We remained poised at the top of the hill, a little
island of profanity and grinding metal in the tranquil afternoon
sunlight. I turned my attention to the distant white stone building.
The villa was perched on the edge of a sheer granite cliff like the
bleached nest of some mythical bird. Below, the sea stretched
smoothly toward the faint outline of a landmass to the east.
Through the haze, I could just make out a swelling of bare, dun-
colored mountains. When I turned again toward the Villa Lupus,
the lone figure had disappeared.

I was thinking how splendidly isolated was the Spizattis’ villa—
it was impossible to speculate by what number of twists and turns
the road would eventually deliver us there—when the Morris
Manor lurched forward and we began our descent. Mrs. Spizatti
had been silent during the long drive from the airport. My attempts
to chat had been met with grunts and shrugs, so I’d closed my eyes
and dozed. Now, when the road would seem to demand her
complete attention, Mrs. Spizatti launched into a frenzied verbal
attack on recent visitors to Villa Lupus.

“Piranhas!” she exclaimed, turning on me a pair of large, intense
eyes and waving a finger under my nose. “They try to strip his
flesh from his bones. Piranhas!”

“But surely, having materials of such literary interest will
inevitably—”

“Bastards! Thieving bastards, the lot of them!”

Seeing her now, it was difficult to imagine that this jerkily
animated figure, shabbily dressed, had once been one of Europe’s
most promising young poets. Adele Serrano, as she was then
known, had blossomed into fame with a little collection of poems
Terry Pow 81

entitled Petals. She’d already been living with Paul Valéry for more
than a year. He’d discovered her waiting tables in the Café de la
Paix in the Latin Quarter. On the back of his bill she had written a
five-line poem. Something about the direct, unforced sentiment
of the lines intrigued him. He returned the following night, and
the next, and the next six nights after that. Each time he came
away with a new poem. Without telling Adele, he had them
published at his own expense. He presented the book to her late
one evening, when the cafe was almost empty, and they were sharing
a bottle of armagnac and chatting about this and that. That was
the moment Valéry realized how much he had fallen in love with
this slight young woman with the pale complexion and large, dark
eyes. In the next three years she turned out three more volumes
of poetry, each more praised than the last. The critics were in love
with her too. No poet had revealed the sensuous contours of the
female heart with such touching simplicity. Then Eugene Spizatti
had arrived on the scene.

Although faded now—a dusty scandal concealed in the back
issues of the European gossip columns—it had been part of the
folklore of the late 1920s literary scene. Spizatti the Svengali.
Spizatti the genius. Spizatti the corrupter of youth and promise.
Looking at the photos taken at the time, there was an undeniably
diabolical cast to the face: something cunning, wolfish. When he
met Adele he was still caught up with the Dadaists, reciting his
poems in the cafes of Montmarte, naked with a dead cat draped
around his neck. He was arrested several times, but the outrage
he provoked was tempered by an irresistible charm he could
manifest when needed. Judges invariably let him off with a wink
and a mild warning. Valéry had no notion this outré character
would, in the instant ofa chance meeting, appropriate totally Adele’s
affections. But it happened just like that. She left him with barely
a word exchanged and set up with Spizatti. Valéry was crushed;
Adele and he never spoke again. Soon after, Spizatti’s last great
scandal—involving allegations of sexual misconduct with the twelve-
year-old daughter of a government minister—drew Adele away
with him in its wake. They fled the country, first to Turkey, then
Afghanistan, and on to Algiers, before settling at the remote north-
eastern corner of the island of Corfu. :

The “great scandal.” How difficult it was to picture this “Mrs.
Spizatti”—now lapsed into a sullen silence as the car wound through
a narrow, twisting driveway leading to the villa—as an international
fugitive. Neither of the Spizattis spoke in public again. The zeal of
the French authorities gradually waned after a series of unsuccessful
82 ‘Terry Pow

extradition attempts. The evidence was thin and after a few years
their heart was no longer in the chase. For more than fifty years
the couple lived incommunicado in the Villa Lupus, holding court
with a few expatriate friends from the Paris days. Even these
contacts dropped off in time. So far as I’d been able to find out,
the Spizattis now lived alone apart from an elderly Greek
housekeeper.

What disrupted the slow, apparently contented drift into
oblivion was a rumor that had seeped into the publishing worlds of
Paris, London and New York a year ago. The rumor claimed that
Spizatti had certain letters and manuscripts from the Twenties that
he was prepared to sell. Interest in Spizatti’s own idiosyncratic
productions had long since dwindled to the level of curiosities, and
would hardly have drawn agents from any of the major publishing
houses. No, it was further whispered that the Spizatti trove included
letters and other memorabilia from writers and artists of the period
whose reputations, unlike Spizatti’s, had grown and ripened in the
intervening years. The piece de resistance was an entire section from
Ulysses which Joyce had suppressed from the final manuscript. The
missing section was said to shift the work in a new direction. Of
course, this had seemed too good to be true. Publishers are a strange
cocktail of the skeptical and the romantic, and none of the major
houses was quite prepared to throw its hat into the ring until the
rumors gained volume and a certain credibility from the
independent testimony of a Turkish literary agent. He claimed to
have seen the typewritten section and to have authenticated Joyce’s
correcting style and even his handwriting in the margins. For a
moment, sober heads appeared ready to overlook the notorious
fact that Teluk Begim, the agent in question, had the professional
ethics of a Colombian drug baron. But almost immediately, Begim
closed the door he’d cracked open. He tried to slip away with the
Joyce manuscript stuffed down his pants. This clumsy ploy sent
Spizatti scurrying back into his shell. Other free-lance agents, who
felt inclined to give Begim’s authentication of the manuscript the
benefit of the doubt, were coldy rebuffed when they turned up at
Villa Lupus.

So matters remained for several months. Then another whisper
emerged from this little corner of Corfu. This one was carried—
by an agent deemed trustworthy this time—to the chairman of our
own publishing house. A man of grace and old-world charm, he
had spent his youth in the Paris of the late 1920s. While there,
he’d helped Spizatti out of a small financial fix. Apparently, this
slight gesture had been remembered now that the Spizattis were
Terry Pow 83

again financially embarrassed. Spizatti’s health was said to be failing
and the word was he would be ready to part with the papers for a
reasonable price. Of course, there was no guarantee Spizatti had
what he claimed. But now it seemed worth the gamble. Within
two days I was on a flight to Corfu with a banker’s draft containing
an enticing number of zeroes after the dollar sign. Given Spizatti’s
well-documented unpredictability, I’d been instructed to proceed
cautiously, to let Spizatti raise the issue of the documents and his
notion of a price.

At close hand, Villa Lupus was something of a letdown. My
first impression, stepping out of the car, was one of sorry
dilapidation. Paint had long since peeled from the door and window
frames. Grass grew in wiry clumps up to the house. Four or five
moss-covered roof tiles leaned against the side of the building.

Mrs. Spizatti led the way to the front door. It was not locked,
but swung open with a gothic creak onto a twilit interior. It smelled
musty, but at least it was cooler inside.

“You can wait here. I’ll have Helena bring in your bags.” Mrs.
Spizatti looked at me searchingly with her large crepuscular eyes
then shuffled off through another door. I was in a small
antechamber. No carpets or wall drapings relieved the almost
monastic starkness. Through the soft leather soles of my shoes I
could feel the coolness of the dark floor tiles. In a corner, near a
narrow window that looked out upon a triangle of herbage that
may once have been a garden, stood a small table and a low chair.
Since no one was apparently going to rush me into the formalities
of a greeting, I sat down in the chair and almost immediately felt
sleepy.

I must have dozed off, for when I opened my eyes after what
seemed like only seconds, my heart jumped at the sight of Eugene
Spizatti bending over me. He was tall, though somewhat stooped,
and so thin his corduroy pants and old white tee-shirt hung from
his body in folds. The whole energy of the body seemed to have
retreated into the large head and mane of matted white hair. His
facial features were disproportionately small, except for his eyes.
They were closely set, but like those of his wife they seemed to
bulge from some inner pressure. He said nothing.

In my confusion, I stood up and held out my hand. He took it
without enthusiasm. His hand felt cold and enervated.

“I’m so grateful for your allowing me to visit you—”

He cut me off with a shrug. “Do what you must. It’s really no
concern to me. What can I say?”

The voice sounded dry. And yet I sensed, and I can in no way
84 Terry Pow

explain why, a discrepancy between his words and intent. This
was the first almost imperceptible clue that Eugene Spizatti found
me, for his own imponderable reasons, somehow “interesting.”

The housekeeper entered with my bags. Spizatti muttered
something to her in Greek. She grunted, turned and indicated
with a jerk of her small, round head that I should follow her. As
soon as I reached the room assigned to me and the housekeeper
had left, I stretched out on the narrow bed and fell into a deep
sleep.

A beam of sunlight from the small, high window woke me. I
checked my watch: 6:30. I noticed a tray on a table beside my bed.
It contained a basket of bread and covered containers of cheese
and large, black olives. There was also a carafe of resinous white
wine. Someone, probably the housekeeper, had brought me supper
the previous evening. I broke off a corner of bread and nibbled it.
How long had I slept? Fourteen hours? I could now hear voices
outside the window. I was apparently on the second floor because
the small opening allowed me only a glimpse of porcelain sky. I
could make out Helena’s voice, and that of a male also speaking
Greek. It didn’t sound like Spizatti; this voice was younger and
laughing. Another servant perhaps? I could also hear dishes being
placed: breakfast was being arranged. Anxious to get my business
underway, I washed and dressed and somehow found my way down
to a small terrace where the Spizattis were already at breakfast.

Mrs. Spizatti looked up, fixed me with a glance as if she’d
forgotten who I was, then nodded and returned to the book she
had open at the table. Her husband stared straight ahead. He
held a mug of coffee in his right hand. With his left hand he held
in place a light woolen blanket he had draped around his shoulders.
Though the sun was making encouraging progress in the sky, it
was still quite early and an intermittent breeze carried the remains
of the previous night’s chill. The silence should have been awkward
yet somehow wasn’t. We simply sat. A moment later, Helena
appeared and set before me a bowl of dried fruits, some bread and
a steaming mug of strong black coffee. As I sipped the coffee, I
realized where we were in relation to the rest of the villa. This was
the terrace on which I had spotted Spizatti yesterday, when we
were still high on the mountain road. He had been standing by
the railing, looking across the narrow finger of sea that separated
the island from the distant landmass. No haze obscured the
mountains now. The crystalline morning air brought them into
sharp focus. They still seemed desolate and blunted, yet I now
could make out a telecommunication structure on the top of one
Terry Pow 85

summit, and a track or road that wound its way down and
disappeared into a canyon.

“Albania.”

Spizatti’s voice startled me and I spilled hot coffee on my hand.

“T tried to swim across once. Got halfway when a current caught
me. I would have drowned if a fishing boat from the island hadn't
picked me up.”

“Bloody fool,” muttered Mrs. Spizatti.

Spizatti turned toward his wife. I believe he smiled, though it
was difficult to be sure. The thin lips twitched at the edges, and
the great white head nodded slowly and slightly.

“Why swim to Albania?” I asked. oe

Mrs. Spizatti snorted and threw a piece of bread toward a squat
gray bird that had been watching the table from the edge of the
terrace. A yellow beak jabbed, impaled the bread, and bore it away
toward a clump of tall grass. Spizatti looked sharply at me and
chuckled, a rasp from somewhere deep inside this throat.

“In my younger days I might have said I was inspired to do it.
I was inspired quite a lot back then.” He turned toward his wife.
“I should say, we were inspired, wouldn't you, Adele?”

“Fuck you,” responded Mrs. Spizatti absently. She was fumbling
in a small, tattered handbag. She pulled out an empty cigarette
packet and tossed it on the table. She delved deeper and surfaced
with a single battered cigarette. Her husband pulled a lighter from
his pocket, leaned over and lit the cigarette for her. She nodded
coldly, and leaned back in a cloud of blue smoke.

“T thought it coincidence,” Spizatti continued, “when we ended
up here. After all, we’d been in so many strange places before this.
With the authorities hot on our tail, as they say in the detective
stories. But as the years settled into one another, I realized more
and more that coincidence was just another form of certainty.” He
pointed toward the country across the strait. “Godforsaken looking
place, isn’t it?”

“Somewhat barren, yes.”

Spizatti began to laugh. “I’ve been staring at that ‘barren’
country every day for the past twenty years! It has become my
muse! I read secrets there that would freeze your blood!”

Suddenly he stood up. “If you decide to take a walk, beware
the donkey. A vicious beast.” Without another word, Spizatti
shuffled back into the house.

I sat there for a full minute in silence with Mrs. Spizatti, who
finally said: “Of course, he’s totally mad.”
86 Terry Pow

took the walk and I did see the donkey. It was chewing on a

white brassiere that had apparently slipped off a railing above.
Mrs. Spizatti (I could only assume the item to be hers) had probably
laid it out to dry in the sun. The track brought me near to the
animal. It was tethered by a long rope to an olive tree. The donkey
regarded me with a large vacant eye and, perhaps to mark its
territory, farted as I moved past. Minutes later, when it was already
out of sight, I heard a desperate he-hawing. I wondered if the
poor beast was choking on the bra strap, but by now the track had
descended twenty feet at least, and I didn’t have the energy or
inclination to return to check. Anyway, if the animal was capable
of making that kind of racket it was unlikely to be in any immediate
danger.

Mrs. Spizatti had informed me, grudgingly and vaguely, that
this trail would eventually bring me to a small cove with a pebble
beach where I could swim. What she had neglected to mention
was that the last twenty feet involved an almost vertical descent
down the cliff face. Iron spikes had been hammered into the rock
to provide foot- and hand-holds. I sat on the small ledge and
studied them. The prospect was not enticing, but at the same time
I was hot and sticky. The thought of a swim was tempting. I took
firm hold of the first spike, within easy reach at the edge, and eased
my body over the side. For a moment I panicked when my feet
couldn’t find the next spike. After that, an absurd feeling of bravado
took over as I lowered myself, hand over hand. When my right
foot finally touched the bottom, I felt I had traversed some rite of
passage into a new dimension of manhood. I shook my head and
chuckled.

The sea, silky and almost motionless in the noontime heat, lay
less than twenty feet away. A profound hush pervaded the cove. It
seemed as if I’d stepped into a photograph: nothing stirred. I felt
suddenly alone. The feeling passed as abruptly as it came. I slipped
out of my clothes and stepped into the water.

A t supper that evening, I was surprised to see I was not the
only guest. Also seated at the table was a young man, I should say
in his late twenties. He was dressed in a priest’s surplice, but he
wore it with a kind of gaiety as if it were a costume. Two empty
bottles of Retsina stood on the table. It looked like the three of
them had been drinking for some time. Mrs. Spizatti leaned back
in her chair, eyes closed and legs splayed almost indecently. Her
husband stood up when I stepped onto the terrace.
Terry Pow 87

“Ah, our fearless publishing minion! Allow me to introduce
you to our good friend, Father Gricki—soother of souls, friend of
the damned!”

Spizatti stumped back into his chair to study = effect of his
introduction.

The priest looked up and smiled. It was a hindsnant face; I
could imagine the young women of his parish incurring penances
just for the sake of being near him. He seemed at once out of place
and in a curious way at home at Villa Lupus. Spizatti interrupted
my thoughts.

“You went swimming?”

“Yes.”

Naked? Skinny dipping, as you Americans so quaintly call

* Yes.”

“Tell me, did you get an erection?”

A loud croak came from Mrs. Spizatti. She slumped forward,
slapped the table with her hand and went into a coughing fit as if
she were about to deposit her lungs on her plate. Her other hand
flailed around beside her chair. The priest got up, moved to her
side, found her handbag and pulled out her cigarettes. He opened
the packet, lit a cigarette and passed it to her. She took it eagerly
and in a brief interval between wrenching coughs, shoved it into
her mouth and drew deeply. The effect was immediate and calming.
She opened her eyes, looked at her husband, then sideways at me.
As if on cue, Spizatti continued.

“I'm 72, but when I come out of the water I’m ready to fuck.”

“My dear,” croaked Mrs. Spizatti, “you’re always ready to fuck.
You'd fuck the donkey if you could get it to stand still long enough.”

Later, after the Spizattis had both retired for the evening, I
found Father Gricki standing on the spot where I’d seen Spizatti
on the afternoon of my arrival. He was staring across the strait at
the Albanian coastline, now burnished by the last flare of sunset.
He acknowledged my approach with a slight inclination of his head.

“Do they usually go to bed this early?” I asked.

Father Gricki smiled. “Oh, she'll sleep through till morning.
The Retsina will see to that.”

“And Spizatti?” oo

The priest turned to me. The smile was gone; and in its place
an expression of sudden intensity. “He never sleeps.”

This cut short further conversation, and for several minutes
we stood in awkward silence staring across at the distant coastline,
now almost completely swallowed by a profound blackness. I sensed
88 Terry Pow

Father Gricki relax beside me.

“Have you spoken with him yet about the manuscripts?”

I was a little surprised that the priest was aware of my mission,
but then again I had no idea of the degree of intimacy he shared
with the Spizattis. My information, back in New York, was that
they lived reclusively.

“T thought I’d see the lay of the land first. This is not your
average couple.” |

Father Gricki chuckled. “Interesting word.” Sensing my
perplexity, the priest went on: “Average. From the Italian, avana.
Means ‘damaged good’—a maritime term, I believe.”

“T’m impressed.”

Father Gricki shrugged. “I studied comparative languages. It
has turned me into a bit of a bore.”

Again we lapsed into silence. A breeze began to pick up off the
water; it felt pleasantly cool on my face. There was a kind of magic
to this spot, and I began to understand why Spizatti might want to
spend so much time here, watching Albania. Father Gricki turned
to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Do not take too long assessing the lay of the land, my friend.”

“You think I should be more direct with him?”

The priest shrugged. “There’s an influence at work here that
may not be altogether healthy.”

The words were delivered with such deadpan seriousness that
I was almost taken in. Father Gricki was watching me closely. He
seemed disappointed when I burst out laughing.

“Father Gricki, I’m here to coax some old manuscripts from a
man who is clearly batty. His wife, too, come to that. I’m far too
prosaic to be susceptible to ‘influences.’”

The priest smiled broadly. “Ah, the wonderful American
skepticism.” He looked at his watch. “It’s late, and I must depart
early tomorrow. I will leave you to the evening’s charms.”

He shook my hand and began walking back to the villa. No
lights shone from any of the windows, and the black-robed priest
had already disappeared into the gloom when he called back: “Was
it true?”

“Was what true?”

“About the erection?”

can’t be sure what awoke me. I’d been having a complicated
dream about Spizatti and the donkey. The donkey had some proofs
spread out between its hooves and was correcting them with a large,
thick pencil. Then Spizatti was somehow there. He began arguing
Terry Pow 89

with the donkey about a change the beast had made to the
manuscript. Spizatti wanted the donkey to reinstate a word. In
the dream I knew what the word was and Spizatti’s point made
sense to me though I didn’t agree with it; I sided with the donkey.
Spizatti rounded on both of us. He screamed, his eyes sintered,
and a thick viscous fluid began to spill from his mouth. I wanted to
run, but the donkey stood firm. Its pencil grew, larger and larger.
I heard a voice—Father Gricki’s. That’s what awoke me, I
remember now. I was scuttling naked across a bare, rocky landscape
like a demented baboon. No houses. No people. Only cindered
grayness. My feet bled and I felt a terrible pain in my groin, as if
something had been cauterized there, but I could not bear to look.
Then I saw them. Three figures: the Spizattis and the priest,
standing at the cliff edge looking seaward, toward me. Father Gricki
raised his hand and opened his mouth. Something silvery and
liquid emerged, pulsed in the air for a moment, and moved slowly
across the water toward me. Then I heard Father Gricki’s mocking
words: “Was it true?” '

Opening my eyes, my first feeling was that I’d soiled the sheets
like a thirteen-year-old, and how was I going to explain the mess
to the Spizattis’ housekeeper. I hadn’t fortunately, yet I did feel
terribly hot. I glanced at my watch: 3 a.m. Moonlight filled the
room from the small, high window. I needed to get some air, and
slipped on my bathrobe and padded barefoot down the stairs and
out onto the terrace. The pre-dawn breeze felt good.

At first they seemed like a single dark shadow bunched at the
end of the terrace. As my eyes adjusted, I made out Spizatti’s mane
of white hair. To his left, the stunted outline of Mrs. Spizatti, and
on the other side the tall, cowled figure of the priest. They faced
away from me, motionless, toward Albania.
90 ~~ —~Valerie Brock

One-Card Crazy Eights

valerie BROC K

Y ou don’t play One-Card Crazy Eights so much as you decide
to live in that world for a while, by those rules, by that
commitment. It’s a stupid card game. As if regular Crazy Eights
isn’t tedious enough, One-Card is harder to win, or even to
conclude. Like the ordinary version, the object is to get rid of your
cards. One-Card adds rules—like you have to say “one-card” when
you're down to your last one. If you forget, you pick up the pile.

I spent long afternoons playing it the summer I was nine. My
best friend and I would lay on the floor of her older sister’s bedroom,
listening to 45s, dipping all-day Charms Pops in ice water and
laughing ourselves sick.

We played with two decks, personalized rules, and cat-like
attentiveness. The reward for catching a minor infraction was seeing
your opponent's pile increase. The games were interminable. By
dinner time, our hands were cramped from holding cards, our
elbows were raw from propping ourselves on the floor, and we
were giddy and headachy from giggling.

There were no clear victories. Winning was almost accidental,
and always seemed to occur just as we were called to dinner, or
when we had decided to go to the pool. We would emerge from
the room in a daze, with images of playing cards congealing and
curdling behind our eyes for hours afterward.

Because of my mother, we rarely played at my house. Her
sodden, cheerful omnipresence made my friends uneasy. Now I
know that she was drinking too much, but then she just seemed
goofy, different from other mothers. She didn’t like games, and
always pushed us to play with dolls as she had at our age. I wasn't
interested. I loved games, and as I got older I played them
compulsively. Word puzzles in the newspaper, trivia games on the
radio, even the science questions on the backs of cereal boxes.
Getting them right made me feel in control.

Card games were fads for us. We’d play one game until we
were sick of it, then move on to the next. One-Card Crazy Eights
only lasted one summer, then gave way to the more challenging
King’s Corners. After a brief, dull interlude of making gum wrapper
chains, we moved on to Gin Rummy and stuck with it for years.

Although I never expected to play One-Card Crazy Eights
again, I didn’t forget how to play it. Those long afternoons
Valerie Brock 91

embedded the game in my mind, buried beneath Top 40 song lyrics
and jump-rope rhymes. Fifteen years later, I was able to recite the
rules as if I had a lollipop in my mouth and “American Pie” on the
record player.

One-Card Crazy Eights is a game for children, but last winter
in the Denver airport I explained the rules to an adult. Kevin
could loosely be described as my boyfriend. He and I had started
seeing each other a few weeks before he moved to Los Angeles.
His job brought him to Chicago once a month or more, and he
usually managed to spend the weekend. I had visited him in
California twice, once on a business trip, and once for the hell of it.
We'd been living like that for two years when Kevin suggested the
ski vacation.

It was a big step. We were used to our habits, our guidelines.
Kevin always stayed with me when he was in Chicago, but I didn’t
give him a key to my apartment. He usually initiated telephone
calls. We never asked about other people, but I’ suspected Kevin
had a local girlfriend.

On my second trip to Los Angeles, I had looked in Kevin's
refrigerator for a beer and was surprised to see two cans of Diet
Coke sitting on the top shelf, united by sagging plastic rings. Kevin
hated Diet Coke; he said it tasted the way tar smelled. I held the
cans up, saying, “Have you developed a taste for tar?”

“Oh, I... My friends drink it, it’s left over from a party, I
didn’t buy it.”

He didn’t look me in the eye when he answered, and I knew
he was lying. I set the cans back on the shelf and said, “Jesus, it’s
not like it’s illegal.” |

Later that day, Kevin threw the cans in the trash and we
pretended I never saw them. His deception relieved me, allowed
me to feel much less guilty about the man I occasionally slept with
in Chicago. After that incident, Kevin and I developed something
more than an unspoken agreement. Neither of us wanted to lie, so
we never mentioned love, our relationship, or the future. |

The ski trip unnerved me because I sensed that Kevin was
finally going to cross the line. Something was building in him. He
complained about the Chicago weather more often, especially in
comparison to Los Angeles. He asked me about my career plans.
He pointed out cute children. I couldn’t tell if he was rationalizing
a potential break-up or deciding if he should ask me to move to
Los Angeles.

I liked the way things were. A boyfriend when I wanted one,
being alone when I didn’t. If I was sitting home feeling sorry for
92 Valerie Brock

myself on a weekend, I could argue that I had a boyfriend, and if I
slept around, well, technically it was okay, because Kevin and I had
never agreed that we wouldn’t. People assume that a long-distance
relationship is difficult, but for me it was easy.

The vacation put me and Kevin on neutral ground, in between
Los Angeles and Chicago. It was the perfect place to make a change,
either advance or retreat. If Kevin was assessing our long-term
compatibility, I wanted him to decide favorably. I figured I’d rather
be in the position of turning Kevin down than having him dump
me.

Consequently, I was on my best behavior all week. Cheerful,
but not too cheerful in the morning; enthusiastic, but not too
enthusiastic on the ski slopes. I took fast showers, even when my
muscles were sore from skiing. I was ready to go in the mornings
before Kevin was, and at night I cooked dinner. I gave Kevin back
rubs which he did not reciprocate. By the end of the week, even I
wanted to live with me.

Kevin seemed perpetually on the verge of saying something.
He'd start, “Audrey, I’ve been thinking . . . “ and I would somehow
cut him off. I deflected any sentences he began in that thoughtful
tone of voice. Once I even had to drop my mitten off the chairlift
to keep him from leading me into a conversation I didn’t think I
wanted to have. At last he began to stop himself, exasperated and
I thought I was home free.

Because he wanted to talk during the vacation, I thought he
was probably going to suggest I move to Los Angeles. I knew Kevin.
If he wanted to break up with me, he’d wait until the end of the
vacation to say so. Why spoil our fun? I was pleased that I passed
the test, but I wanted him to ask me over the phone so he couldn't
see my face. Also, it would give me more time to think.

On the drive from the ski area to the airport it started snowing.
Of course, I had volunteered to drive. The rental car skidded a
little, enough that I skipped my third beer. We were drinking the
last six-pack of our vacation because neither of us wanted to carry
it home and it was a waste to leave it in the condo.

“Hey, Kevin,” I said. “Do you think this snow is going to delay
our flights?”

He turned to look behind him. “Nah. Stapleton is set up for
this stuff.” A moment later he added, “Too bad it didn’t come
earlier in the week.”

I agreed. “Fresh powder.”

Inside the Denver city limits I started watching for planes. I
didn’t see a single one take off or land. “This doesn’t look good.”
Valerie Brock 93

Kevin answered, “Mellow out. This airport’s like O'Hare. They
never close it unless there’s a blizzard or something. Can I have
the last beer?” Without waiting for my answer, perhaps seeing that
I hadn't reached for my third beer even though Id finished the
second one fifteen minutes earlier, he pulled the last bottle from
behind my seat and opened it.

While we waited for the rental car shuttle bus I heard a man
say, “It’s supposed to go all night.” The woman he was with
answered, “I’m so glad you got a hotel room.” I looked at Kevin
apprehensively-and-he patted my leg. He was acting calmer than
he felt, I could tell. His face was flushed from more than beer and
sun. I didn’t even want to think about how I looked. My nose was
peeling and seven days of mild hangovers had given me dark circles
under my eyes. The tan helped, but probably not enough. My
skin tone was a major flaw in my presentation of the perfect woman.

The list of flight departures was a mess. None of the flights
even had estimated times. They just said, DELAYED, DELAYED,
DELAYED. We went ahead and checked in, mainly to get rid of
the skis. If flights had been leaving, my plane to Chicago was
scheduled to take off an hour before Kevin’s flight to Los Angeles.
We decided to go to my gate.

After finding seats that were comparatively isolated in the
crowded terminal, Kevin said, “Look, Audrey, you stay with our
stuff. I’m going to see what’s going on. I'll find a TV or something.”
I nodded, not caring. The past week was the longest time we ever
spent together and I wanted to be alone for a while. The strain of
performing was beginning to wear on me; I felt like being privately
surly.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:15; 6:15 in Chicago. My flight
should have been airborne by now. The prospect of further delays
suggested a headache. I pulled a bottle of aspirin out of my purse
even though I was losing faith in the curative power of the drug. I
put two pills in my mouth, feeling them slide past the beer memory
at the back of my throat. My mother had once told me that aspirin
heightened the effects of alcohol.

She had a lot of strange ideas about drinking. Most of them
were expressed in rhymes that she learned in college. I often
wondered about her sorority. They taught her, “Wine then beer,
you're in the clear,” but also, “Beer then wine, you'll be fine.” I
had proved both of these wrong several times, but my mother
believed them.

She lived a dreamy life, teetering on the edge of the world.
She was so proud of me. Proud that I graduated from college, had
94  Valene Brock

a job, and, she was certain, a glamorous life in Chicago. It was
funny. We talked at least twice a week, and I told her almost
everything, yet her perception of my life was completely at odds
with reality.

She envied my control. “Who ever would have thought that
I'd have such a take-charge daughter? You must get that from
your father, the way you just know what you want and go get it!”

My mother always drank while she talked on the phone. I
heard the ice cubes tumble against each other in the glass, and
traced the thickening of her voice. Asking her about her drinking
made her angry, then sad, so I learned not to do it.

She liked it when I talked about men. I had elevated my casual
sex partner into an actual relationship for her benefit, but I hadn’t
told her about Kevin. Either I wasn’t ready for Kevin to become a
conversation topic, or I didn’t want her to think she had raised a
slut. Maybe both. I told her I was going skiing with girlfriends for
the week.

Sometimes after talking to my mother, I thought I should cut
back on my drinking, just to see how much I missed it. But not this
week. It would have been too hard to explain to Kevin why I
wasn’t drinking. After three days, the old “high altitude,
dehydration” excuse wouldn’t have worked. Besides, I wanted to
drink on this trip. It made Kevin and I get along better and I
thought it kept us from talking about what we were doing.

Kevin walked toward me carrying two large cups of beer.
“Looks like we’re in for the long haul. There’s a blizzard moving
up from Pueblo, and we won't get out tonight. The hotels are
full.”

I hated him for ever suggesting the ski trip, but lapsed back
into the ideal traveling companion. “Well, we might as well relax,”
I said. “Can I have a beer?”

He looked down, as if startled to find the cups in his hands,
and said, “Here, this one’s for you. Lukewarm Coors Light, your
favorite.”

I grimaced, almost believing him. “You didn’t really get me
that, did your”

Kevin answered, “Just kidding. Get a grip. It’s Heineken.”
He handed me the cup, then sat down and put his feet on my
carry-on bag.

I picked up my book, but couldn’t seem to keep my mind on it.
It was almost black outside. Sporadic bursts of snow and ice flung
themselves against the window. Unless I deliberately refocused
my eyes, I could see only the reflection of the inside of the terminal,
Valerie Brock = 95

me and Kevin. He just sipped his beer, watching people walk by.
He muttered, “This really sucks.”

I closed my book, feeling responsible for Kevin's petulance and
obliged to entertain him. “Do you want to play cards or something?”
To my surprise, he agreed. I went to the closest gift shop and
bought two packs of cards, one with dogs on the back, and one
with hamsters. Kevin moved our bags together and used my book
as a flat surface for us to play on. I asked, “What do you want to
play?”

“I don’t care, something that takes a while.”

I was already starting to feel a little loose from the beer. I
dicin’t think I was up for the intellectual rigor of Gin Rummy and
I didn’t have the energy for Spit. We needed a long, lethargic card
game. I looked at Kevin. “Ever played One-Card Crazy Eights?”

Kevin shrugged. “Teach me.”

I explained the rules and told him that I’d be lenient in the
beginning. “Do you know how to play regular Crazy Eights?”

Kevin shook his head. “I’ve played it but I don’t remember
how.”

“Each player gets eight cards. You try to discard them by
matching the card on the discard pile, either the number or the
suit. If you can’t match, you have to draw cards until you can. If
you have an eight, you can change the suit, and you can play them
anytime. One-Card adds variations. Twos play double, fours
quadruple, jacks and kings together, say ‘one-card’ before you’re
out, or you pick up the deck.”

Kevin listened half-heartedly. He said, “So you just remember
all these rules and try to get rid of your cards first?”

I said, “Yes, but also watch me to make sure I don’t mess up.
The combinations get tricky.”

Once we started playing, Kevin concentrated. Outside, the
snow blew harder, sending swirls of white against the window. Fewer
people walked by, and throughout the gate area little nests of
travelers began to form. All flights were canceled so the airport
emptied of everyone except the stranded.

I noticed that Kevin and I had been given a wide berth. Families
seemed to avoid us. Kevin thought that maybe our beers made us
look like a bad influence. Using our boot bags and ski jackets, we
established a camp encompassing a row of chairs, part of the ticket
booth, and a section of windows. Twice I saw people start to invade
our territory, then reconsider. Kevin and I looked at each other,
raised our eyebrows, and shook our heads. Kevin said, “If someone
asks, I'll move our stuff. Otherwise . . . “
96 ~—_-—Valerie Brock

Without thinking, I answered, “As long as they don’t have
children. They'll be up all night.” Luckily, Kevin didn’t seem to
notice my anti-family remark. He just stretched, looked around,
and returned his attention to his cards.

During the first hour of the game, I almost won twice. Both
times I was forced to draw new cards. Kevin left to get us beers
and, on returning, announced, “Bar stays open until midnight.
We’re not supposed to drink out here, so be discreet.” I laughed.
Under the circumstances it was hard to imagine airport police caring
about where we drank.

Kevin picked up his hand and looked at me suspiciously.
“There are more cards here now than there were before.”

I tried to look innocent. “Are you saying I’m cheating?”

Kevin eyed me and said, “Let’s just say my hamsters seem to
have reproduced.”

I denied it, but, a little later, when I got up to go to the
bathroom, I took my cards with me.

After two hours, Kevin wanted to quit. I said, “Great, do you
concede?p”

He looked at me for a moment, then said, “When you put it
that way, no. Let’s keep playing.” He then spent the better part of
an hour on the verge of victory. Finally, after I bought more beers,
he forgot to say “one-card” and had to pick up the deck.

We gradually slid from the chairs to the floor. By 11:00, I was
lying on my back, holding the cards up in front of my face. I built
a little pyramid out of the empty beer cups, making a triangular
backwash spot on the gray carpet. Kevin told me I was making a
mess, so I stacked the cups together, right side up. Kevin pointedly
shifted his body away from the damp spot. He was starting to get
a glazed, desperate look in his eyes. Usually I liked that look, but
that night it gave me a sense of foreboding. Anything could happen.

We were playing cards very slowly. I coaxed, “Come on, Kevin,
give up. You'll never win, and once you lose you can go to sleep.”
He stopped answering me. He just played, methodically.

At 11:30 we made a final beer run. We each bought two beers,
brought them back, and set them next to the window. Then,
carrying our cards, we returned to the bar and drank whiskey shots
until just before closing. I had decided that as long as my cards
were protected, anyone who wanted to could steal my carry-on
bag and my ski boots.

My head was buzzing, and the few lights still on seemed very
bright. I wanted Kevin to lose so I could pass out. I mentally
amended my mother’s rhyme from “Drink too much whiskey, you'll
be frisky,” to “Drink beer and whiskey, you'll be drunk.” Back in
Valerie Brock 97

my prone position on the floor, I began droning again, “Kevin
lose, Kevin give up.”

He said, “You first. Give up. We’ve been playing for six hours.”
We were the only people in the vicinity who weren't trying to sleep.
Crabby flight attendants had passed out thin blankets and pillows
hours ago. I had a blanket on top of me even though I was sweaty.

Kevin held up his cards and said, “Look, our hands are about
even. Let’s mutually concede.”

I shook my head. “No, one of us has to decide to end it.” I
couldn't just let it go. We’d been struggling against each other for
so long that to simply stop would have seemed hollow. All that
wasted time.

Kevin said, “I’m going to let you win so we can quit.”

“You can’t, you can’t influence the cards. Anyway, if you want
to quit you can concede.”

Kevin said, “I’m just so tired. We’ve been playing this fucking
game for way too long, and there’s no way to end it.”

“Well, my friend and I used to change the rules to make the
game end. Like the first one to laugh loses, or if you forget to say
‘one-card,’ instead of picking up the deck, you automatically lose.”
I was really drunk. I went on, “You can raise the stakes. It’s like
you do lots of things for a while in this game, then the rules change,
and you can’t adapt, and you lose.”

Kevin's eyes rested on my face. “You mean it, don’t you? I’ve
never seen you like this. Okay, forget to say ‘one-card,’ you lose,
it’s over.”

We played in silence after that. I propped myself up
occasionally to drink my beers. Setting them next to the window
had kept them cold. The storm pounded against the terminal.
From time to time, I’d glance up at Kevin and he was always looking
right back at me.

Finally, we both were down to less than five cards. When I had
two and Kevin had three, I began murmuring “one-card, one-card”
like a mantra. Kevin remained silent. I couldn’t play in suit and
had to pick a card up. Kevin played, then I played. As he laid his
second to last card on the discard pile, I raised my voice, reminding
him to say, “one-card.” Kevin ignored me. He set his last card, a
four of clubs, down with a snap. He could have won, but he just
wanted it to end. He was out.

I set my last card, the ten of clubs, on top of his. We looked at
each other for a long moment, then Kevin slowly stood up. I
gathered the cards and shoved them into the boxes, dogs and
hamsters commingling. Then I drained my last beer and stacked
the cup with the others on the chair above my head. Kevin leaned
98  Valene Brock

with his forehead pressed against the window, watching the snow.

I closed my eyes and felt the terminal start to move. There
was nothing to do about bed spins if you were already on the floor.
I couldn’t remember any helpful rhymes for this situation. Behind
my eyelids, hamsters faced off against dogs, charging, then
exploding in a minefield of hearts and spades. I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke to Kevin standing over me, prodding
my hip with his foot. “Check it out,” he said. I rolled over and saw
that the blizzard had ended. Snowplows were out on the tarmac,
pushing huge drifts to the sides of the runway. “Six feet,” Kevin
said.

I sat up. Around us, families were gathering luggage, blearily
trudging small children to the bathrooms. Kevin said, “You’re on
Flight 816, right?” He looked at his watch. “You’ve got about
hour and a half.”

I asked, “What about you?”

“A little after that.” |

I held out my hand and he pulled me to my feet. My head
seemed to remain on the floor. Kevin laughed at me. “I’m going
for orange juice. Want some?” I nodded and sat heavily in a chair.

While he was gone, I took three aspirin, wishing I’d had the
foresight to take them the night before. The dry pills stuck in my
throat, and I gagged. A tremendous effort and fear of my head
exploding kept me from vomiting. When Kevin returned, I took
weak sips of the liquid. Somewhat incoherently, I asked, “Is my
flight still at this gate?”

Kevin laughed again. “You’re still drunk. Yeah, it is. I’m
going to head on over to mine now.”

He slugged back the juice, looking remarkably healthy and
cheerful for someone who had spent the night on the floor of an
airport. I stood up painfully, setting my juice next to my empty
beer cups from the night before. “Well, I guess this is it,” I said.
Kevin looked at me speculatively. I asked, “Any plans to be in
Chicago soon?”

He shook his head. “No, maybe in St. Louis for a while. The
Chicago project is over.”

I said, “Well, I guess I'll see you.”

“Definitely, I'll give you a call.” He gestured to the floor. “Don't
forget the cards.”

I followed his hand and saw the dogs and hamsters squished
in one box, loose in the other. “No, I won't.”

Kevin kissed me, then he picked up his bags and disappeared
down the terminal.
Jim Cash Contest Winners Jim Cash Contest

 

 

  

 

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Jim Cash Contest Winners Jim Cash Contest

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Jim Cash Contest Winners Jim Cash Contest

—,
 
Heather Abner 101

FIRST PLACE WINNER IN THE JIM
CASH POETRY CONTEST

selected by Kimberly Blaeser

The Beekeeper’s Daughter

heather ABNER

I have always wanted
to come out from my father’s hives —
like a cactus bristling with needles,
glazed with bees.
Their bodies thick
and dripping from my ears,
my throat,
my wrists.
The comb opaque as pearls in my hands.

And today

I came home with a fine pot of honey,
wide as a sunflower,

with the comb floating murky inside.
Each cell concealed.

Dark tongues of honey

frosted over with wax,

like confectioners’ sugar.

All afternoon I sat with it
cracked open on the table.
The fear still sharp in my body.
I stared in it,

as I used to stare into the tops
of the open hives

trying

to get over my terror of them.

I have been thinking of nothing
but bees
102 Heather Abner

all day long.

The hives, tall,

white as wedding cakes
in the grass.

The insects gold banded
and constantly humming.
The sound of them,
slow

like a rolling boil.

Each belly heavy,
vibrating with work

and the love of honey.
Windows of honey
shaded in wax.

So edible.

Yes.

I know

that the only way

to conquer a fear

is to eat it.
Heather Elizabeth Christian 103

FIRST PLACE WINNER IN THE JIM
CASH FICTION CONTEST

selected by Kimberly Blaeser

Finding Home

heather elizabeth CHRISTIAN

here were rumors of cannibalism in Denver. Trees resembled

hands of drowning men reaching up for the last time. Gila
monsters had been seen migrating north. None of the signs were
good. Two terrible events had broken free, the third was waiting
its turn.

No one was quite sure what had happened. No one was
prepared. The most reliable information was that while moving
soine nuclear weapons to a safer storage sight, something backfired,
misfired, fired. Suddenly, everything became a quiet twilight.

F rank and Hestia had been walking for a couple of days,
following I-25 south from Castle Rock, looking for a place
that wasn’t hit as hard, and they had heard rumors that there was
a Red Cross shelter set up in Taos. Frank took charge of the
expedition using the excuse that an older brother should always
take care of his baby sister. Besides, he reasoned, he was an Eagle
Scout; he knew how to survive in the woods using only a compass
and an army knife. Hestia shrugged her shoulders and rolled her
eyes. She didn’t care who led, but she did say under her breath
that a person didn’t need to be a boy scout to follow a four-lane
highway. What she did like was being alone with Frank. With just
the two of them, he didn’t seem as nervous. When he was with
other people, he always seemed to be looking over his shoulder for
that someone who would stab him in the back, or shoot him in the
heart. Maybe now that it was just the two of them, she thought,
there was the hope that he would relax.

Hestia and Frank found the little pre-fab ranch house just south
of Pueblo. Hestia knocked on the screen door. No one answered.
Windchimes made out of soup cans clinked softly on the porch, as
104 Heather Elizabeth Christian

if they were afraid to wake the dead. Hestia dug in her pocket and
offered small bits of oreos to the plaster coyotes and concrete deer
in the front yard, asking for their protection against the evil spirits.

They went in, and while Frank secured the house, Hestia made
small talk with the family of skeletons sitting in front of the TV.
“We really appreciate you having us here on such short notice. —
Don’t worry about us. We can sleep on the floor.”

“Like hell I will!” Frank yelled, walking in from the garage. “I
am not about to give up a bed so you can play house with a bunch
of bones. Shove them in the closet so I don’t have to look at them!”

Hestia leaned over the largest skeleton’s teeth. “He says they'll
be happy in the master bedroom, and we can take the children’s
room.” She looked at the family and then at Frank. “Don’t they
look so happy sitting together?”

“They have no lips,” Frank said. “They have no choice but to
smile. Come on, help me find some food.”

They walked through the small hall connecting the living room
to the kitchen and dining-room. Gray light filtered through a
collection of stain-glass butterflies suction-cupped to the kitchen
window, turning the kitchen into a dusty kaleidoscope. The table
was set. A loaf of Wonder Bread lay next to a jug of grape juice.
The fried chicken waited patiently in its tub.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Hestia sighed. “They were planning on us
coming after all. Could we stay here? There’s a ton of food in the
cupboards, and enough 7-Up to last us until forever. We don’t
need to go to Taos.” |

Frank looked at her and shook his head. “You know we have
to go to Taos, but we can stay here tonight. It won’t put us that far
behind schedule.”

Hestia looked at him and sighed. She knew that once he started
talking about keeping schedules, he wouldn't listen to her. She
quietly opened cans of pork and beans and Bartlett pears. Frank
opened a can of 7-Up and scrubbed his hands and arms until they
glowed pink. Refusing to eat with silverware that might contain
germs, he ate with his fingers. Hestia picked at her plate with a
knife and a salad fork. Her steady cough added a counter-rhythm
to Frank’s smacking lips. “Do you think the family minds not eating
with us?” she asked.

“Jesus, Hess. They’re dead.”

“You never know. Let’s eat dessert with them in the living
room. It could be like a slumber party. I bet they’re just dying for
some good gossip.” Frank rolled his eyes. Hestia laughed which
triggered a fit. She fell off her chair and rocked back and forth in
a ball, unable to stop coughing. Frank watched, frozen in his chair.
Heather Elizabeth Christian 105

fter dinner, Hestia and Frank went to the children’s bedroom
looking for board games. Dinosaur wallpaper peeked out
from under rock posters. “Let’s play Life!” Hestia said. “I'll be a
doctor with three boys. I’ll name them Lazarus, Elijah, and Chad.”

“Hestia, you can’t choose what you want to be. You have to
spin.”

“Who’s going to make me,” Hestia challenged, “the Life police?”

“Why are you going to play if you’re going to do everything
before we start?”

“T just want to get the details out of the way so I can enjoy the
game.” |

“That’s all the game is, is details.”

Hestia paused. “Do my eyes glow?”

No.”

“T hoped that they would. Then they could mutate into lasers
and I could do cool stuff like pop popcorn with my eyes.”

“You are completely whacked.” Frank spun and won $5000.

Hestia looked at the Life board. She picked up her pink car
and began gnawing the heads off her children. “Frank, can I ask
you a question?”

“No.”

“Did you ever kill anyone?”

“You have someone in mind?”

Hestia’s foot began shaking. She kicked her lips and whispered,
“Dad.”

Frank looked her straight in the eyes, “Would you be happy if
I had?”

“Probably.”

“Then, sure, I killed him.” Frank was tired of playing Hestia’s
games. He loved her, and could go along with her when it came to
feeding plastic lawn ornaments, but he wondered whether this was
going a little too far. Yet, he wanted more than anything to see her
happy. Besides, if he could keep her happy, it would be easier to
convince her to keep to their schedule, and not get sidetracked
playing with dead people.

Hestia moved closer to him. Frank tickled her back. He
watched the fine dust escape from her blouse and sail around the
room catching the fading light from the window. He decided to
play. He whispered, “I shot him.”

Hestia moved away. “No, you captured and tortured him,
remember? It was the night Mom went to the hospital for cracked
ribs. Remember? When I was in the kitchen making strawberry
Kool-Aid, you snuck in and grabbed the bastard while he was taking
a pee, and dragged him down to the basement.”
106 Heather Elizabeth Chnistian

“Yeah—that’s right.”

Hestia moved closer, she rubbed his shoulders. “Tell me how
you tortured him.”

Frank almost smiled. “I tied him up and gagged him. Then I
plugged in the iron, and set it to cotton. For every time he hurt
you, I burned him. Then I took a razor and sliced him up for
every time he touched you.”

Hestia brushed her lips against his ear and whispered, “Then
did you stab the fucker?”

Frank closed his eyes and pressed his ear against Hestia’s lips.
“T got the longest, dullest knife in the kitchen. I poked his eyes out
and shoved them down his throat. Then I stabbed him in the gut,
invited you downstairs, and we watched him die.”

“Oh Frank, I love you!”

he moon rose and woke Hestia. She untangled herself from

Frank and walked into the kitchen. The moonlight shone
through her almost transparent body. Bringing a small ‘TV tray
into the living room, Hess opened five cans of 7-Up and poured
them into wine glasses. She sat on the couch in the middle of the
family. “I thought that we could sit up and talk for a while. We
won't stay up long, I promise. I just wanted to ask you to take care
of Frank when I left. I’m hoping he'll just leave me here with you
and stick to his schedule. But lately, he’s been acting real strange.
Like the way a dog acts right before he’s taken to the vet. He
knows something’s up, even though everyone’s trying to act normal.
I know that if he sticks to his schedule, he can make it to Taos.
Then the Red Cross will take care of him. Frank seems to be all
strong, but when he was younger he used to be real scared of our
father. In fact, I was always the one who had to defend us against
him.”

The family stared straight ahead and smiled. They sat perfectly
still, completely attentive and seemed as if they were going to offer
her some tea.

“I remember one time when we were younger,” Hestia
continued, “Frank was about fifteen, and I must have been eleven.
We were hiding out in the barn taking a nap because our father
wouldn’t let us sleep past five in the morning. Frank was asleep
near the door, figuring he could hear my father coming and he
could quick grab a rake and look like he was working. I, on the
other hand, was asleep in the loft, hoping that if Dad did come in I
could just hide until he left. Anyway, my father goes in the barn
looking for a tool and he finds Frank dead asleep. Frank always
Heather Elizabeth Christian 107

was a sound sleeper. So my father takes two drops of hot coffee
from his thermos and pours them down Frank’s ear. Well, that
woke Frank up right quick. Then my father starts beating on him,
slamming Frank’s head into the barn posts and dragging him
around the barn screaming, ‘You might as well be in your grave if
all you’re going to do is sleep!’ All that screaming woke me up,
and when I saw what was going on, I quick went and gota rifle. I
pointed it right at my father’s back and yelled as loud as I could,
“You let Frank go or I'll shoot!’ I was so scared that I couldn’t keep
the rifle steady, but I tried to look as mean as I could.

“You know what my father did? He just laughed. Just stood
up and started laughing at me because I was a scrawny girl trying
to keep a big rifle lifted. I hate being laughed at worse than
anything, so I shot him. It sent me flat on my back. But I got that
bastard in the foot. Boy, was Mom surprised to see all of us at the
hospital again. Strangest thing, though, when he got back he didn’t
wail on me—he got his rifle and handed me a brand-new junior
rifle and said, ‘If you’re going to shoot, you might as well know
how.’ We had a great time, shooting cans and eating chocolate
bars. He never hit us after that, but we all knew that he could
shoot better than us.” Hestia looked at the family. They were all
grinning. They liked the story, they seemed to want to hear more.
She said, “Now snakes is a different matter. Frank could kill a
rattler by stabbing it in the heart. With animals he’s absolutely
terrific. He was always rescuing some wounded critter from the
highway. It got to be quite a menagerie in our barn.” Hestia put a
pillow on the biggest lap, and curled up underneath the bones.
The family created a blanket for her tired body. Hestia coughed.
Blood spattered against a small bony hand. “Sorry about that. IfI
cover my mouth nowadays I feel like I’m suffocating.” She yawned
and ran her fingers across her scalp and shook a handful of hair
from her head onto the floor. It reminded her of aspen leaves in
October. “You know, it’s kind of funny, but I don’t think I’m afraid
to die. Oh sure, I’m going to miss Frank, but he'll be okay. He
always knows the right thing to do.” She took a deep breath, closed
her eyes and sank deeper into the couch. “I’m so tired of all this
walking.” Hestia closed her eyes. “I bet you’re wondering why we
didn’t take cars. At first, we took his Blazer, but when that ran out
of gas, we walked.” Her speech slowed, and her breathing became
deeper. “I wanted to just borrow cars that came our way, but Frank
insisted they had too many germs, that it would kill us to ride in
the cars with all that sickness just waiting to eat our bodies.” She
slowly feel asleep, completely relaxed for the first time in weeks.
108 Heather Elizabeth Christian

F rank woke. He smiled and rolled over. Perhaps it would be
all right, he thought. The Red Cross would be in Taos for a
while. They didn’t need to leave right away. They could stay here
for a few days. See if they could make it, then if they couldn’t they
could always go to Taos. There was plenty of food and 7-Up, and
Hess was right, he didn’t need a schedule anymore. No one would
care if he slept in. There was no one left to care. He would work
during the day, maybe fix up the house and try to start a garden;
when he came back in the evening, Hess could feed him supper
and they could play games. He could teach her how to play chess.
It would be heaven. He lay there and thought about how they
could maybe find some seeds and plant a garden. Everything was
going to be fine. He ran out of the room to find Hestia and tell her
that he had decided they could stay here.

At first he didn’t see her in the living room. Then he could
make her out in the faint light, her body underneath the skeletons.
He hadn’t realized how skinny she had become. Her skin drooped
off her bones, and her hair was almost completely gone. Her ran
over to her. “Hess, get up. We're leaving now.”

Hestia’s eyes flickered open. “What?”

“T said get up!” Frank swept the skeletons off the couch. He
shook Hestia until her eyes were bright. “We have to get to Taos.
If we leave now, we could probably make it before dinner.”

Hestia lay back down. “Frank, that’s stupid!” She took a deep
breath and reached out for his hand. “I’m going to stay right here.”

Frank jerked away. “Get your coat on. We're leaving now.”

Hestia coughed. Her body shook. “Frank, I can’t go
anywhere.”

Frank shook his head. “You're just being lazy. Come on, we're
going to get behind schedule.”

“Frank, listen to me.” Hestia gasped. “I’m sick. I’m going to
die soon. It’s okay, though. Leave me here. Ill be all right. I like
it here. I’m with friends.”

Frank walked into the hall looking for her coat. He shouted,
“You’re coming and that’s final.”

“You can’t make me go.” Her body had given up shaking, and
now it lay completely still except for the shallow movement of her
chest.

“Like hell I can’t.” He scooped her up and threw her over his
shoulder like a sack of feathers.

Hestia couldn't fight him. When she began coughing again, ©
Frank adjusted her so that he held her like an infant, but his grip
didn’t loosen. Hestia collapsed into his arms. She listened to the
Heather Elizabeth Christian 109

determined pulse of Frank’s heart and feet, smelling the dirt
clinging to his sweaty chest.

Frank carried her past the garage, and rocked her in his arms
down the gravel driveway out into the night. He sang to her the
songs he knew from the jukebox and the radio and church. She
lay very still in his arms. Then he sang the songs from when they
were kids. He thought that if he could keep on singing, Hestia
would give up and start singing with him, and if she did that she
would want to tap her feet. Then she would be happy, and then he
could get her to walk with him, and as soon as they got to Taos,
they could fix her up in no time. They would give her a vitamin
shot, and all her hair would grow back. When he had run out of
songs, he didn’t give up. He began to tell her stories. “Remember
that one time, I think it was just after Mom and Dad died, I got so
mad at you that I took off into the woods and didn’t come back for
a while?” Hestia seemed to be sleeping, but he kept talking. She
would always try to tell a story better than him. This would wake
her up. “Well, I never told you what happened. I needed time
away from everything. To sort things out. To figure out a plan.
Well, I guess I was paying more attention to fixing a plan than I
was to the path. I have never gotten to completely lost, and I was
still lost when it was getting dark, but it didn’t matter. I had my
knife and compass. I could survive anything. It got cold real quick.
I couldn't find anything to eat, so I lit a fire and watched the sparks
fly up—burnt a few pine cones. I couldn’t hear anything, which
was really strange. Usually you hear some crickets or something.
It was kind of lonely. On into the night I hear this rustling sound.
I turned around, and here was this mangy dog. I whistled for it,
and it came right up to me. It acted real friendly. It went away
and about twenty minutes later it comes back with this dead rabbit.
Well, that rabbit was looking mighty good at the time, even if it did
look a little diseased. He set the rabbit next to the fire. I assumed
that he was trying to please me, but when I went to pick up the
rabbit the dog attacked me. It got a hold of my arm, and was
tearing it to shreds. I finally pried its mouth off my arm, and
jammed my fist down its throat. It made these disgusting gurgling
gasping sounds, and it foamed at the mouth. But they thing
wouldn’t die, so I kicked its chest until it went completely limp. So
there I was. A boy, his dead dog and a diseased rabbit, all around
a fire. Somehow, I knew a round of ‘Kumbiyah’ and s’mores
wouldn’t make me feel better. I was starving and completely alone.
I decided what I had to do.” Frank’s eyes became glassy. “I burned
the rabbit, ate the dog and found my way back home to you.”
110 Heather Elizabeth Christian

Frank looked down at Hestia. Her body was completely limp,
and her eyes stared straight up at him. Frank took a deep breath
and wiped the spit from the corner of her mouth. He refused to
cry. He turned around and walked back to the house. The coyotes
in the yard seemed to have lifted their heads just to howl for Hestia’s
death. The bowed heads of the deer quietly mirrored Frank’s heart,
and the windchimes were still for the first time in days.

Frank gently placed Hestia on the bed in the children’s
bedroom, and rearranged the skeletons to form a congregation.
He knew that she would want them there. And somehow he felt
better knowing that he wasn’t there alone, that they were there
supporting him, encouraging him. He carefully stripped off her
clothes and bathed her body in 7-Up. He wiped away all the dust
from her callused feet. He massaged the liquid into her dry, cracked
legs. 7-Up bubbled as it ran down her stomach and breasts. Frank
tenderly rinsed out her eyes and mouth. Her slicked back her
hair, so when he was finished Hestia resembled a saint in a Sunday-
school picture he had once seen.

Frank stood there looking at Hestia’s body. He wanted to be
like her, completely clean. Without any scars or dirt. She had
found what he was looking for, a quiet place to rest, a place to call
home. The skeletons’ heads fell forward, then off the body and
rolled to Frank’s feet. They stared straight up at him, calling him,
telling him that he too could be like Hestia, like them. He could be
purified.

Frank stripped himself and bathed in front of Hestia and the
family. He took a knife from the kitchen and carved his name in
Hestia’s chest. Then he carved her name in a beautiful script next
to his heart. Hestia’s eyes seemed to approve of this gesture and
Frank was happy. He lay on her, mixing their blood, smearing it
together so that it became impossible to tell where hers stopped
and his began. Her blood would enter into his body and she would
be with him forever, running through his heart every few minutes.

Frank rolled off Hestia and lay beside her, holding her tight.
He lay there quietly at first. Then he began shaking with anger
and he rocked her back and forth, unable to stop the tears from
leaking out of his eyes. The rocking chair shook loose all that had
been trapped inside him. The tears washed away all the hatred he
had stored for so many years, the hatred his father had taught so
well. The hate had taught him how to survive, how to manipulate
the world so that anything was possible, anything but that which
hate couldn’t control: love. He had spent all his life without letting
Hestia know that he loved her because that would mean that he
Heather Elizabeth Christian 111

had to show her a part of himself that he couldn’t control, and
control was what he needed. Control not to show love, control not
to kill his father. He cried not only for Hestia’s death, but for his
own. He cried and rocked and shook until his body was exhausted.
He fell asleep on Hestia, completely free, but completely alone.

When he woke, the moon was rising. Frank kissed Hestia once,
then went out into the garage where he had seen a canister of
gasoline. He poured a trail from Hestia, over the family, throughout
the house. The trail of gasoline led out of the house down the
porch stairs to the plaster coyotes. Frank flicked a match, and waited
for the flame to appear.

The moon presided over the pyre. The fire started slowly at
first, unsure of itself. Small flames reached the roof, not sure of
what to do next. The moon waited and watched the flames grow
and reach toward her. Struggling, small red fingers arched and
shot up. With each lick, the moon grew bigger, brighter. Bright
blue and white tongues tickled the center of the stars, and stroked
her soft round edges. The fire grew, and eventually swallowed the
moon, leaving nothing in the sky but flames.
 
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BIOGRAPHIES

Andrew Alexander lives in Mississippi. He is a graduate teaching
assistant at the University of Mississippi. This is his first publication.

 

Olivia V. Ambrogio is the editor of Freezer Burn magazine. She is a
sophomore at Grosse Pointe South High School in Michigan. She
has recently been published in Imprints, South’s literary magazine.

Valerie Brock lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. In June, 1996, she
will receive her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. She has
recently completed her first novel.

Heather Elizabeth Christian is in Michigan State University’s
creative writing MA program.

John Davis lives on an island in Puget Sound, Washington. His
work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Poetry
Northwest, and Sycamore Review.

Gwendolen Gross is an editor and writer who has had poems
accepted by several literary magazines, including Southern
Humanities Review and Poetry Motel. She teaches occasional writing
classes and workshops at a local writing center She lives in Southern
California with her husband and an exuberant chocolate labrador

Joanne Hayhurst lives in the Berkshire Hills of northwestern
Connecticut. She has been writing poetry for two years under the
guidance of her teacher, poet Honor Moore. Her work has been
published in Berkshire Review, Blueline, and New Stone Circle.

Brett Hursey is currently working on a PhD in creative writing at
Oklahoma State University. His work has won an Academy of
American Poets Prize as well as national AWP Journal Awards in
1993, “94, and “95. His work has recently appeared in Black Warrior
Review, Boston Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, Hayden's Ferry Review,
Puerto Del Sol, and Mississippi Valley Review.

Mark Jacobs is currently Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S.
Embassy in Asuncién, with experience as a foreign service officer
in Ankara, Izmir, and Turkey. He served in the Peace Corps in tural
Paraguay and speaks fluent Turkish and Spanish. His fiction has
appeared in The Nebraska Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, Buffalo
Spree Magazine, The New Delta Review, and The Atlantic Monthly,
among others. His book of short stories, A Cast of Spaniards (Talisman
House), appeared in 1994.

J. Rodney Karr is in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas
and has recently had poems published in The Iowa Review.

Rob Keast graduated from Michigan State University last August
with a degree in Journalism.

Gerry LaFemina has published two collections of poems, 23 Below
and The City of Jazz and Punk. He has published poems, essays,
translations, and fiction in literary magazines all over and is
currently overworked in Northern Michigan.

Tim Lane is a creative writing student at Michigan State University.
A native of Flint, he now resides in Lansing.

Steve Lapinsky a native of Michigan, was born in Grosse Pointe
and raised in New Baltimore. He is presently living in Lansing,
finishing a degree at Michigan State University.

P.V. LeForge was born in Detroit but has spent most of his life in
Florida. After a fairly typical middle-class upbringing, he attended
college, sold tires, racked steel, jobbed records and tapes, edited
educational materials, and played semipro baseball. His first book,
The Principle of Interchange, was published in 1990. This was followed
two years later by his book of poetry, The Secret Life of Moles. He
currently owns and operates a bookstore in Tallahassee and plays
league tennis at the 4.5 level. A novel and a second book of poems
are in the works.

Elinor Lipman is the author of a collection of short stories, Into Love
and Out Again (Washington Square Press), the novels Then She Found
Me, The Way Men Act (both from Washington Square Press), and
most recently Isabel’s Bed (Pocket). A two-time recipient of
distinguished story citations in Best American Short Stories, Ms.
Lipman lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband
and son.

David Martin’s poems and stories have appeared in a variety of
literary magazines, including The Seattle Review and The Wisconsin
Review. He teaches writing at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and
Design.

Pamela Montgomery holds aB.A. in English from Missouri Western
State College and an M.A. from Northwest Missouri State University.
For four years she published the literary magazineLost Creek Letters.
She currently works as a Kansas Gender Equity Facilitator This is
her first published story.

Travis Pinter recently received his Master’s degree in creative
writing from Michigan State University and is currently living in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His poem “Neighbothood” won second
place in this year’s Jim Cash poetry contest.

Kenneth Pobo’s work has appeared in Hawati Review, Modern Words,
Colorado Review, Nimrod, Confrontation, American Writing, Weber
Studies, and Indiana Review. He teaches English at Widener
University. Osric Press published his chapbook, Ravens and Bad
Bananas, in 1995. He collects records by Tommy James, Jack
Blanchard & Misty Morgan, and The Choir.

Terry Pow worked as a reporter, feature writer and editor with
regional and national newspapers in England befor moving to the
United States with his family in 1983. He now works as an editor
with a Michigan corporation. He is studying part-time at Michigan
State University for a B.A. in English.

Anita Skeen is a professor of poetry at Michigan State University.
She is currently teaching Irish literature in Dublin.

Elizabeth Smith-Meyer teaches writing and literature at the Indiana
Institute of Technology in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “Lubrication” is
the first short story published from a new collection of fiction and
essays entitled Lactation.

Matthew Thorburn attends the University of Michigan, wher he
has served as an International Poetry Guild mentor and twice been
recognized with anAvery and Jule Hopwood Award, most recently
for a collection of poems, I Wanted to Go to Church, But the Poem Took
Me to the Dog Races. He has poems forthcoming in Modern Haiku
and Third Wave and an essay on the poetry of Marilyn Hacker in
SPSMG&H.
 
 

 

 

 
 

  
  

P YEMS by Rob Keas tthew Thorburn ' .
Olivia V. A mbrogio * Anita Skeen * Ste » Lapinsky °

Joanne Hayhurst + Time Lane * John D Dewis *
Gerry LaFemina * Gwendolen Gross « :
David ‘Martin ¢ Kenneth Pobo © Brett Hursey *
PV. LeForge + J. Rodney Karr * Heather Abner
INTERVIEW with Elinor L ipman
STORIES by Andrew Alexander +
Elizabeth Smith-Meyer * Mark Jacobs *
Pamela Montgomery * Terry Pow *

Valerie Brock + H eather Elizabeth Christian