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RED CEDAR REVIE\X/

Winter 2002
Volume XXXVI! Issue 2


 

 

REDCEDAR
R E V I E \X/

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744400£a¢e (flaw/M LAURA TISDEL
SARAH DIBARTELO/VIO

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BRIAN ARCHEY

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8M4£fl6¢4 Manayelz IVIARY ABRAHAM

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ERIN STRADTNER ‘
ANDREA ALEXANDER
BRANDON LAKE

CHAD GROENHOUT
CHRIS PAUL

EMILY OREN

JENNIFER VANJAARSVELD
JON CI-IIT\X/OOD

KEVIN ALPHONSO

KIEL PHEGLEY

LEAH MORIN

MEGHAN MONROE
MENG-MENG YU

RYAN JENNINGS

SHELLY HOUGHTON
TROY ELLER
JULIE BAGLEY

flaiw'wa MARCIA ALDRICH

 

 

 

@2002, Red Cedar Review Volume XXXVII Issue 2


CONTENTS

R E D
R E V

LAURA APOL
gdifiea Realm? 8

MARCIA ALDRICH
60710100 10

EVELYN SHAKIR
74/00 0i/Le0 Name 12

RICHARD MULKEV
7405000014017, 20

KATHERINE SNODGRASS
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GEORGE ELLENBOGEN
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GAIL ADAMS
741000 30

JUDITH MCCOMBS
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CAROL BARRETI
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CAROL DAVIS
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JEANINE HATHAWAY
50mm flflZ6’L’pr/ZGCZ 38

ALAN NEW/TON
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ANITA SKEEN
7/00 @0400 710/000 [I5

 

STEPHEN DUNN
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AMYNOLAN
74 8000 0/ Memwuf . .. 62

KARTIK SRINIVASAN
Kai/00 69

JEREMV CAMPBELL
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PHILIP DACEV
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KATHLEEN SPENCER
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LVN LIESHIN
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AL SIM
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SEAN HOEN
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MARLENE MILLER
44/070000 98

RON MCFARLAND
[30000700 4700 1/00 #0000000 113

TOBY BOCHAN
#040 Z0 91/000 0 M00100 121

SARAH SHUTE
570000 700001 129

OLIVE MULLET
[00 0010000 133


 


NVRQQ


ANITA SKEEN

[Beginning in Fall Semester 1997, the College of Arts and Letters at

Michigan State University made available for incoming freshman a program
known as the Residential Option in Arts and Letters. Approximately 100-120
freshman and sophomores are now housed together on several floors of
Abbot Hall where they have the opportunity to live and learn together in a
number of creative and exciting ways. These include such options as
enrolling in classes together; making trips to Stratford, Ontario in the Fall to
attend Shakespearean theater and to Chicago, Illinois in the Spring to visit
museums and other cultural institutions; participating in foreign language
tables, enrichment activities specially designed for ROIAL students (poetry
and fiction readings, theater performances, lectures, musical performances,
book discussions, film seminars, arts workshops) and community service
projects; attending freshman and sophomore seminars on the arts and
humanities with other ROIAL students each Fall Semester; sharing meals with
MSU faculty members invited to join them for dinner and conversation in the
Abbot Hall cafeteria; and working individually and in small groups with
nationally recognized artists, scholars, and writers brought to the MSU
campus. In the four years of ROIAL’s existence, we have been privileged to
count a number of outstanding writers from across the country among our
Visiting Artists.

This issue of Red Cedar Review showcases some of the work of
some of those Visiting Writers. Not all of the writers who have worked with
ROIAL are represented in this small sampling, nor are many of the Visiting
Artists for whom print is not their medium. Among those distinguished
visitors whose work is not included here are Malcolm Hacksley, Director of
the Literary Museum of South Africa; Dr. Gayle Davis, Assistant Vice
President for Academic Affairs at Wichita State University who is a member of
the Women’s Studies faculty and a widely published art historian; Miriam
Schapiro, whose feminist art has been ground breaking; Isabel Wilkerson,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Chicago; Eliot Singer, Michigan folklorist
and writer; and Martha Bates, Acquisitions Editor for the MSU Press. Fall
Semester of 2001 saw visits from Clarence Maj or, African American painter
and poet whose collection, Configurations, was a finalist for the 1999
National Book Award; West Virginians Colleen Anderson and Julie Adams,
song writers and singers who have won a West Virginia Literature Fellowship
(Anderson) and who performs weekly on the internationally syndicated public
radio show “Mountain Stage” and has accompanied performers Sarah
McLachlan, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and Tracey Nelson (Adams); and Tanya
Hartman, a visual artist from the University of Kansas.

The writing collected here is representative of the many genres
ROIAL students have had the opportunity to learn more about as they


ROIAL Prod m m

worked with outstanding writers and teachers. The two playwrights who have
shared their time and work with us, Katherine Snodgrass, Producing Director
of the Boston Playwrights Theater, award winning playwright, and talented
actor; and Alan Newton, a former MSU student now completing his PhD in
Dramatic Literature at the University of Kansas and winner of this year’s
Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center/American
College Theater Festival, worked with ROIAL students on writing and
performing ten minute plays and dramatic monologues. Each author is
represented here by a short play. Poets Judith McCombs, also a widely
respected Margaret Atwood scholar; Rick Mulkey, Director of the Writing
Center at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Carol Davis, just
returning from her Fulbright year at Jewish University in St. Petersburg,
Russia; George Ellenbogen, Canadian poet and Director of Creative Writing at
Bentley College in Boston, Massachusetts; Carol Barrett, poet and
psychologist on the faculty of the Union Graduate School; and Laura Apol,
poet, children’s literature scholar and critical theorist, shared incredibly
different life experiences through their poems and in their discussions as they
conducted poetry workshops with ROIAL students and gave readings from
their latest publications.

Jeanine Hathaway, whose poetry collection The Self as
Constellation won this year’s Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry, brought to the
ROIAL students her years of study and work on Joan of Arc as well as her
deliberations about the significance of our ordinary lives, which she gives us
in her role as newspaper columnist. The genre of fiction is represented here
by Ellen Shakir, author of Bim‘Arab, a portrait of Arab American women in the
United States, and Gail Galloway Adams, whose collection of short stories,
The Purchase of Order, was a previous winner of the Flannery O’Conner
Award for Short Fiction.

As Director of the Residential Option in Arts and Letters Program, I
would like to express my appreciation to the editors of Red Cedar Review for
their idea of a special issue highlighting the work and accomplishments of a
number of the ROIAL Visiting Artists. I hope this issue will attest to the
quality and diversity of individuals who have given their time, energy, and
talent to enrich the lives of individual ROIAL students and indicate the
variety of creative opportunities available to members of the ROIAL
community. Because of the willingness of artists such as these to personally
encourage and foster talent among novices, I know that the names and
writings of current ROIAL students will soon begin to appear on the pages of
literary magazines, such as Red Cedar Review, throughout the country.

Anita Skeen
Professor of English/ROIAL Director


LAURA APOL

Father Read/mg

Before bed my father read to me

—-— poems that rhymed, their riderless
ta-dum ta-da-dum ta-da—dum galloping
like the Highwayman’s horse by moonlight.
I dreamed red ribbons woven in raven hair,
a man at the window with lace at his throat,
and love.

It was a life I expected:
the romance of the inevitable;
the future a rhyme I could always predict.

So I went to a college he knew,

married a man he approved,

had two blonde children (a boy and a girl).
I cleaned on Fridays, baked on Saturdays,
picked up toys and dirty clothes

at bedtime as I’d been taught:

ta-dum ta-da-dum ta-da-dum

And I wrote what we knew I would:

clean lines, their tidy syllables

prancing past discontent,

the sharp stones of regret, the sheer drop
of anger unanswered.

When truth mattered more than meter
I saw clenched fists around me that
were not mine.

Then they were.

And I heard a different story:

the landlord’s daughter pulls the trigger,
shatters her own breast.

I packed my bags, gathered my words,
let the highwayman ride to his death—


Father Remain/w}

no woman as warning slumped over
the musket’s muzzle.
ta-da-dum

And I wondered:

how could a father embrace a daughter
with lines close as poetic foot and meter.
How could he weave love

with blood red ribbons and lace.

And what of closure, the door
ending the poem with a click——

no click of hot flint striking powder,
but the click of a lock catching
as a woman walks away.


MARCIA ALDRICH

CiroLes

She was not liking pink— her mother was furious. Ignoring her hating pink,
her mother decorated the room in pink. Not just a dash of pink here and
there, a swirling pattern of pink roses on a white blanket, a pink bud vase
she might have stomached. No. Every inch of wood was lacquered the
pinkest pink. Pink hangers and pink liners for pink drawers, a pink shoe
case to hang from a pink closet door, pink light switches and pink
doorknobs, a pink mirror and pink lightbulbs to bathe her in a pink glow.
Even at night from her window the stars seemed pink. She was avoiding her
room, outside in the green as much as possible; her mother wondered where
she was. Down the alley, furrowed in weeds, in the fields, by the rivet;
dropping from trees, she was away; her mother was furious. She was not
liking dolls, especially the expensive Madame Alexander dolls given to her
on her birthdays; she was wanting to put them in the oven and set the
timer, she was wanting to bury them face down in the dirt; her mother was
furious. She was being sent down to the bench for unladylike behavior and
she was having her hands tied toher chair, her mouth was being taped
shut; her mother was pleased. Her mother was pleased with the measures
being taken by the first grade teacher. Yes, indeed, that was the appropriate
response. She was always getting into trouble; her mother sent her away to
camp. She was never wanting to come home, she was running away through
the woods where no one could find her; her mother was furious and found
her. She was being locked in the car for the ride home and locked in her
room for the rest of the long summer; her mother was pleased. She was
where she belonged. She was hating ballet, she was hating Mrs. Fink and
pink tutus, she was clumsy at the bar and flatfooted. She was hating piano
lessons, practicing “T he Typewriter” for two years without improvement.
She would require attention she didn’t want to give, explanations. When
her father returned from business, he would take her to the hospital forX
rays. Things were always happening to her, she wasn’t telling anyone. She
was not always making good grades, but no one cared, her leg was not
healing, more and more her mother was sending her away. Things were
happening to her, things were being taken away from her against her will,
she was not telling anyone. She was being silent, even when things were
being taken away from her that wouldn’t be hers again. She was being sent
away. She was never wanting to go home again. She was having

boyfriends whose names she was not remembering. She was pushing her
plate away as her mother instructed, learning to live on less and less.

She was getting involved. Someone told her parents. Her mother was
furious. She was being raped by her friend is older brother, she was never

./0.


C’wcLes

telling anyone. Someone told her parents, they were not believing her. She
was getting kicked out of college and she was getting married and moving
away. She was being silent at the dinner table and other places; her
husband was furious. Her husband was naming her. She was getting locked
in her room. She was being threatened and she was being choked and she
was breaking away. She was taking a long walk on the beach. She wanted
home to be a phone booth on a beach in Ireland where she heard the sound
of waves and smelled of sea grit. But home was never being there. She was
leaving, moving farther away. Her mother was furious; her husband was
furious. She took jobs and had many names. She lived in different cities and
spoke from phone booths she called home. The authorities didn’t know
what to name her. She was gradually losing everything that had been given
to her and she was glad. Her husband was having her annulled and she
was glad. Her parents were having her annulled and she was glad. She was
pleased with the measures being taken. Yes, indeed, that was the
appropriate response. She went back to school, she paid for it. She
changed her name to X. She paid for it. She did not have any more
boyfriends whose names she did not remember. She said no all the time and
she broke a lot of glasses, she was breaking a lot of dishes and it was
feeling good. She was feeling angry. She was furious. She was telling
people about it at dinner and other places. She loved feeling the anger
come out of her even though many people found it unpleasant. She was not
stopping. She bought more pink glasses and more pink dishes; they were
replaceable. She was working and she was telling people about it even
when they did not want to hear. Her mother was furious, but she didn’t care.
And she didn ’t care. And she didn’t care.

.//.


EVELYN SHAKIR

Alma Other Name

“I got me the only rose on the family tree,” Mitch liked to say.
When they were first married, Dolores took it as a compliment, and she’d
color a bit, looking rosier than ever. But after a while, she caught on that
Mitch was boasting about himself, not her. And, more than anything, was
being mean about her sisters. “The thorns,” he called them to her face, as if
they weren’t just as good as he was.

When the children came along, Mitch found a new twist on the joke.
“Get ready, kids. Uncle Al and Thorn Selma are coming over —whatever you
do, don’t let her hug you!” Or—with a shake of the head—“Your Thorny
Margaret, ain’t she the sharp one!” Now that he’d got hold of it, he couldn’t
let it go. So if one of his daughters answered back or made a face, he’d say,
“Uh oh, looks like we got a little sticker pushing out here!” And if the girl
began to cry and carry on ——“I’m not, I’m not!”———Mitch would laugh and
say, “Where’s my scissors?”

“Papa’s just teasing,” Dolores told them, angry at him for getting
them worked up, and angry at them for taking it to heart. When it came to
hurt feelings, her oldest was the worst, Miss Sensitive of America. “Barbara
the barbarian,” Mitch would mock her, his way to make her mind.

“How could you stick me with that ugly moniker?” she whined,
blaming her mother. Other mothers thought about what they were doing, and
named their girls something pretty, like Rita or Marilyn or Amy. Which just
happened to be the names of the sisters in the yellow bungalow who wore
matching Polly F linders smocks to school, and danskin tights, and black
bands holding back their hair. Were they ever the lucky ones. Finally,
Barbara made everyone she could (not her father or her teachers) call her
Babs. “Oh, great,” Mitch said, “the only Babs I ever heard of was a stripper.’

Next in line was Theresa. “Saint Theresa, holy-moly, cut that out!”
Mitch would yell though really she was the most obedient of the lot. “We
could call you Terry,” was Babs’ suggestion. But Theresa said no, that
could be a boy’s name, like Terry and the Pirates or Terry Donlan, the dumb
kid who sat in the back row and picked his nose when Miss Yeager wasn’t
looking. She guessed she was just stuck like a cat up a tree.

Babs shrugged. “Suit yourself, St. Theresa,” she said.

And then there was the youngest, Ellen. Mitch couldn’t do much
with her name. Except just for fun, to say it rapid-fire: “Ellen, -llen, -llen,”
like the yammering of an idiot.

Mitch had other things he said. Bewildering threats. “When your
brother arrives on the scene, kiddo, he’ll give you what for!” Or sometimes

9

.132.


AWM Other Name

“I’m waiting to see what your brother thinks of his sister acting up like that.”
At first, they thought they really had a brother, off in the old country, where
sittoo came from, or maybe in reform school. When they got old enough,
they understood there was no brother, only the hope of one. But by then,
Mitch had quit making those particular threats.

One time, on his day off, he came home hot and bothered from the
ahwe, the coffee house where he hung outwith other Lebanese. “Sons of
bitches!” he exploded. “Think they’re so big. Hey, one of my girls is worth a
dozen of their retard sons.” You’d think hearing that might give them a lift,
but it didn’t. How could it when he was so angry? Anyway, what did he
mean “one” of his girls? Did he mean any one of them, or did he have a
certain one in mind? With him, it was smart not to feel too good, too soon.

Dolores felt for her daughters. But they’d get over it. The first time
some boy made cow eyes at them, they’d be all right about themselves. It
was herself made her feel sad.

“You should take a baking class,” advised her sister Selma, drying
dishes after Babs’s sweet sixteen. “Learn to frost a wedding cake, stretch
those muscles in your brain. Or here’s an idea, get yourself a job. Look at
me, you never see me bored.”

Dolores frowned. “Did I say I’m bored?”

“Me, I’m all set,” said Selma, “ ‘cause I got a place I got to be five
days a week, rain or shine, cramps or no cramps. If I miss, the whole
operation goes kaflooey.” Selma answered the phone at her husband’s re-
upholstery shop and, between calls, re-shelved the fabric books and
vacuumed up the lint. “Things are changing for us gals,” she explained.
“We got our rights to our careers.”

Dolores couldn’t think of a career and didn’t want one. Or any class
either. She knew the name for what she wanted—flower power. She loved
the sound of it, loved the way it wrapped up two wishes of her heart. Once,
at breakfast, she asked Mitch, “What’s this flower children thing about?”
She was at his shoulder, pouring him his second cup of coffee. “What’s it
take to be one anyways?”

As usual when she asked a perfectly good question, Mitch bugged
his eyes out. “What’s it take?” He twisted his head to look up at her. “You
gotta apply! We got the forms down the post office.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Dolores, turning around to set the
coffeepot on the stove.

“And, oh yeah, better plan on dropping fifteen pounds, not to
mention twenty years. They got their standards, doll.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

He was laughing hard now, letting it out, choking almost on his

toast and coffee.
“And don’t call me doll,” she muttered inside her head. On their

./3.


EVELYN SHAKIR

first date ever, he’d called her Dolly, short for Dolores. “Please don’t call me
that,” she’d asked him nicely.

“What’s bugging you?”

“I just don’t care for it, is all.”

He’d sighed. After that, he called her “doll.” Which was worse, of
course. But Dolores didn’t have another protest in her. Didn’t want him to
be mad. Same thing their next date, when he unbuttoned her blouse without
so much as mother-may-I and got his tongue in there. She kept her mouth
shut, trying not to breathe in the pomade on his hair. Only gasped once
when he pulled her on his lap and began bouncing her, slamming her into his
crotch, fast and frantic, until—his fingers digging hard into her shoulders ——
he let out a howl. When he was through, Dolores didn’t know what she was
supposed to say or do. Mitch pushed her off his lap. “Sweet Jesus Christ,”
he said, “you sure do make a mess, doll.”

Silly to bother about that now. She bought herself a spiral notebook
with a paisley cover and started pasting in pictures from the papers and Time
magazine. The first was one Mitch, himself, came up with. “Here,” he said,
shoving the magazine under her nose, making a point. “See what the world’s
come to!” When he moved his thick forefinger off the page, she saw a girl,
not much older than Babs, curled up on the grass, under a tree, picnicking
with her boyfriend. The boyfriend, leaning on one elbow, was in shorts and
bare to the waist. She was bare all the way but turned kitty corner from the
camera, so you could just see the curve of her cheek, of one breast, the
roundness of her ass up close. She was pretty all over. Like a healthy Much
After letting her hair go straight, the next thing Dolores did, she went
downtown and bought herself a pair of sandals. Not the pretty white ones
with dainty crisscross straps and skinny heels—two pair like that already
sitting in her closet. But Jesus sandals, brown and flat, with sturdy soles
that could stand up to rain and take a person any place they got a yen to go.
At first, not sure they suited her, Dolores kept the sandals tucked away, toe-
to-heel in tissue paper. But pretty soon, except for church on Sunday, she
was wearing them all day and everywhere. Now she could take the dirt
shortcut to the mailbox without twisting a heel, could cut across the damp
lawn and not leave divots, could stand at the kitchen sink and wiggle her
toes.

Mitch didn’t seem to mind what she had on her feet. Selma either,
old eagle eye. Or if she did, she bit her tongue. Dolores felt good. As if
someone had said, “I dare you,” and she’d said, “I dare you back.”

At the kitchen table, with her notebook open in front of her, Dolores
was working on a list: “beads,” “fishnet stockings,” “tie-dyed shirt.” She’d
have to go gradual, so no one would notice. Like growing old, she thought.
The folks who saw you every day didn’t take it in, and then, before they
knew it, you were dead. Except her plan was to go the opposite direction.

./4.


A”?! other Name

She was drawing a question mark next to “granny glasses” when Babs
walked in on her. “Ma, I gotta get my ears pierced.” Without looking up,
Dolores flipped the notebook shut. “Ma, I gotta. I’m the only one left in the
whole class. I need ten bucks right now, they got a nurse at Woolworth’s.”
“You know what Papa said.”

“I don’t care. I’m the only one in the whole damn . . .”

“Language!”

“Sorry. But Mama, if you don’t give me the money,”——Dolores
waited to hear the threat—“I’ll steal it! And you know what else?”—here
came the next threat—“I’ll take Theresa and Ellen with me and get them done,
too.”

“Bring me my pocketbook,” said Dolores. She didn’t want to argue.
Just wanted her kitchen to herself.

Babs reached over and ruffled her mother’s hair. “Good old ma.”

When Dolores heard the screen door slam, she went back to her list.
It wasn’t ‘til later, with the lamb and okra simmering for supper, that she
remembered what Babs had ahead of her. If she knew Mitch, he’d come to
the table, take one gander, and bombs away! “You couldn’t wait to cross me,
could you?” he’d yell. “Didn’t I say N-O, NO? But you had to go out and
do it anyways, didn’t you?” Babs would sit there in a pout, her hands in her
lap, and—if she knew what was good for her—not saying a word.

But that’s not how it played. By six o’clock, Babs was in a mood,
prancing around the house, her eyes shining, every few minutes waltzing
into the kitchen and hugging her mother. When Mitch walked in the door,
she sashayed right up to him, couldn’t wait to show off the evidence, tiny
gold studs that had come home to roost. She lifted her curtain of hair with
her arms, turned her head this way and that. “Papa,” she demanded, “don’t
I look pretty?”

“Ain’t one hole in your head enough!” he grumbled. And let it
drop. In bed that night, Dolores dreamed of young soldiers in granny
glasses nibbling her ears.

The next morning she called Woolworth’s, and the person who
answered said, “Yup, ‘til the end of the week. Come in any day.” She
grabbed her purse and headed out the door. When she hit the sidewalk, she
took a right turn and looked up at the overcast sky. “Might rain,” she
thought, but she didn’t turn back or wait for the bus.

Block after block, she was remembering things. When she was a
girl, you wouldn’t think to pierce your ears, not if you lived to be a hundred.
Once, though, a new girl, as dark as Dolores and with little gold rings in her
ears, came into second grade. She could hardly talk English, and her name
was too long and too hard to say. Mrs. Conlon explained it was the name of
a beautiful lady that a famous poet loved very much. “That was a long time
ago, children. Nobody alive today can even remember.” She led the little

./5.


EVELYN SHAKIR

girl to the front of the room and turned her around to face the class. “I don’t
think our new friend will mind if we just call her Frances,” she said.

Dolores, hurrying toward Center Street, slowed down, shifted her
purse from one arm to the other, then came to a stop in front of a bakery. She
stared at the cupcakes and cream pies and then her reflection, trying to
picture that little girl’s face.

‘What you got on your ears, Frances?” At recess, a fresh boy in
the class came up close and pointed. Frances stood very still, her face red,
her dark brown eyes ready to cry. “I said, what you got??” He was showing
off for the big kids. Two fifth-grade girls shoved him out of the way. Then
reached over and twisted Francis’ earlobes ‘til the tears leaked down her
cheeks.

“Ugh!” said one. “She got nails in her ears!”

“Oh, double-ugh!” said the other, scrunching her face up.

After that, only Mrs. Conlon and the principal called her Frances.

In the schoolyard, she had a naughty new name. “Hey, Fannie,” children
would yell, running circles around her. “Hey, Fannie!” No matter which way
she turned, they were wagging their ear lobes and laughing their heads off.

At Woolworth’s, the lady behind the counter said, “Make yourself
comfortable, a couple young girls are ahead of you.” Dolores sat on a stool
by the jewelry case and leaned over to look at the studs. Tiny crosses, tiny
pearl shapes, teensy daisies. “The smaller the better,” she thOught. The
only jewelry her mother ever wore was her wedding band, cutting into her
flesh. But in the old country a gypsy woman had come ‘round each spring,
with needle and thread, to pierce the ears of the little ones. “Did it hurt?”
Dolores asked. Her mother couldn’t remember.

Dolores had known other women from the village, old enough even
to be her grandmothers. All dead now, her mother dead, too. When she was
small, those old ladies gave her the creeps, and any time they dropped by to
drink Turkish coffee with her mother or to smoke a Philip Morris, she hid out
in her room. But her mother always called her and made her kiss their damp
cheeks and sit quiet while they gossiped in a mix of Arabic and English.
Dolores would pleat her skirt, pull up her socks, untie her Shoelaces and then
tie them again. “Don’t let them talk to me,” she’d pray. She couldn’t bear to
look up at those ladies, to see the shiny vaccinations, big as silver dollars, on
their upper arms; and their nylons rolled down to their ankles in summer; and
the bedroom slippers they wore even to the super market; and especially
their soft gray whiskers. Not to mention the holes in their ears. A long time
ago, her mother’s lobes had knit themselves closed. But these ladies must
have been dumb as dishwater once and put on stupid, heavy earrings every
day. Dolores could tell because their ear lobes were droopy and yellowed,
and showed gashes half an inch long. ‘You could hang a camel from them,”
her father used to say.

./6.


Aug other Name

“You won’t feel a thing,” said the nurse. She was standing at a little
wooden table behind a curtain, and on the table was a towel and on the towel
a metal contraption that reminded Dolores of pap smears. “Don’t worry
about a thing, sweetie. I do this every day and nobody’s sued me yet.”
The nurse poured alcohol on a cotton ball and dabbed at Dolores’ left
earlobe. Threw the cotton in a bucket and started again with a fresh one.

“Tell me what you’re going to do,” said Dolores.

“Well, see I make a mark here, just where the hole should be. And
then I staple the stud in.” She sounded matter-of-fact and cheerful.

“Make a mark?” repeated Dolores, needing to get one thing straight
at a time.

“Unless you’d like to do it, yourself, hon. Some people are very
particular—they want it just so, not too high, not too low, not here, not
there.” Her tone changed. “As if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Oh no, I trust you,” said Dolores. “Then what did you say comes
next?”

“Staple!” said the nurse, demonstrating with gusto. “The needle
jabs right through here”—she kneaded one earlobe—“the soft, fleshy part.
That’s the trick, do you see?” She chuckled a bit. “We don’t want to run
into cartilege.”

“It’s not a big hole, is it?”

“Oh, no, clear.” She was brandishing the contraption. “That’s a
good girl, try to relax.”

“Does it scar?”

“Shouldn’t.”

“You mean it could?”

“You’re a worrier, aren’t you, hon? You know we could have been
done by now.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very well,” said Dolores. “I felt it in my throat
when I got up this morning. You know what? If I’m better, I’ll come back
tomorrow.”

“Whatever you say, hon. But we got this far, it’s a shame not to
finish the job.”

Riding home on the bus, Dolores was confused. Couldn’t tell up
from down, couldn’t tell forwards from backwards. By the time she walked in
the back door, she was feeling the way she used to after a killer math test,
sure she’d got an F and scared what her parents would say. Of course, this
wasn’t the same. If she didn’t want her ears pierced, if she’d thought better
of it, that was nobody else’s business.

In the kitchen, she dropped her purse on the table, then went into
the living room and curled up in a comer of the sofa. She’d forgotten about
Mitch all day, but now she could hear him again in her head. From Day One
of their marriage, he’d told her, “You’re my wife. Be normal, you hear me?

./7.


EVELYN SHAKIR

Don’t call attention.” And that’s what she’d tried to do—what she’d always
wanted even before Mitch came along. When she was a kid, she hated being
almost dark as a colored and having a mother who laughed too loud and
sometimes spit right in the street, and old ladies around who didn’t know the
difference between slippers and shoes, and a father who reeked of cigars and
tipped his hat to her girlfriends. Nobody else’s father did that, not even to
grownup ladies. “Your father has a moustache,” the lady at the corner store
said to her one day. And then the woman laughed, her thin lips thick with
lipstick. What was Dolores supposed to do? Laugh at her father, too?

But out of the blue, after all those years of not calling attention,
she’d gotten this flower-power bee in her bonnet. Wanted something those
girls in the pictures had, though she didn’t know how to name it. She’d
thought—it sounded crazy now, even to Dolores—she’d thought that if she
looked like them on the outside, she could turn into them on the inside. But
she’d only been fooling herself. Because how could she be like those girls
who knew where they were going and weren’t under anyone’s thumb?
Forget they were so much younger and thinner and didn’t have Mitch to
answer to. It was something went deeper. No Old World in their head they
were trying to get clear of. Maybe her girls could make it. “But not me,”
she said to herself.

“It’s all for the best,” she said finally, dragging herself up from the
sofa and into the kitchen. When you came right down to it, she was lucky
she’d gotten cold feet this morning. Now she wouldn’t have to listen to
Mitch say things that made her feel small. Lately he was learning he
couldn’t stop Babs from walking out the door in a mini-skirt, but last week
when Dolores took a chance and raised the hem of her suit just two inches,
he laughed in an ugly way. “Don’t kid yourself, doll,” he said, “just don’t
you kid yourselfl”

Hungry for something sweet, Dolores rummaged in the cupboard
over the fridge. The bag she wanted was right where she’d stashed it, but
ripped open and cleaned out, except for broken bits of chocolate and a heap
of crumbs. “Those were my cookies,” she muttered, shaking the remains of
the bag into her mouth. Her eye fell on a fresh jar of peanut butter, the girls’
favorite brand, that she’d bought them just yesterday. She unscrewed the lid
and scooped out a fingerful, then stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked it
clean. She experimented with thumb, forefinger, ring finger, but her pinkie
seemed to work best. Scoop, suck, scoop, suck, ‘til half the jar was gone and
each breath she took tasted of peanuts.

Almost nauseous, she drew herself a glass of water from the tap to
clear her throat and wash away the taste. Outside, the rain had come, a
vicious downpour. Through the window over the sink, Dolores could just
make out the shuddering clothesline and, in the border along the fence, the
bowed heads of dahlias, mums, and late-summer roses. Could make out,

./8.


Alma other Name

too, where she’d gone wrong. Next time she’d print DOLORES in big, red
letters on a sheet of paper and attach the paper to the bag with an elastic
band. Or with a darning needle. Or with her mother’s six-inch hat pin.

Mitch or the girls, it didn’t matter. From now on, anyone poking where
they didn’t belong, better get ready for a surprise.

./9.


RICK MULKEY

Astra mo ma

“what is the stars, what is the stars?”
—Sean O’Casey

All of a sudden it’s cliched to say they’re made

of the same stuff as we are. This is how

it usually is for me. As soon as I discover something,
anything, a book, a recipe, the latest gossip,

the newest movie or drink, it’s a fad. For years

I drank martinis. The only man in the bar under 35

drinking them, then, before I know it, the whole bar’s full

of twentysomething hipsters drinking martinis

I never knew existed. Once again, I’m left behind.

Now a night in the backyard with a telescope

and my four-year-old son asking me why the moon

has shadows and why stars blink, is enough.

Soon I’m off on meteors, nautical twilight and gravity wells.

It doesn’t take him long to stop listening.

He’s off thinking how the Martian

in the Daffy Duck cartoon didn’t look like us at all.

Or how if I push him high enough on his swing

he can catapult to the moon. Already he’s way beyond me.
Last night on the evening news, I learned cosmologists believe
they can prove the universe will go on expanding, and at ever faster speeds.
Already it’s difficult enough to make connections.

Surely the convoluted calculus of divorce I’ve witnessed friends
go through, the simple equations of love and hate,

fault and blame, are equally as complicated as “String Theory,”
or “Event Horizons.” My friend’s decision to pack it up— the marriage,
the kid, the antique pottery— and head west to Texas

doesn’t expand my universe, but diminishes it.

Still you’d think we’re always connected:

intemet, email, snail mail, cell phones and fax.

How can we imagine ourselves alone ever again?

Yet there’s her husband in his small two room apartment,

and there she is in Texas where even the prairie looks anything
but giant under that vast western sky.

So how can we compare ourselves to those stars speeding

out of our universe and never looking back?

.9”.


Astra mom/t5;

I suppose the truth is we’re not made of the same stuff.

I suppose that no matter what I tell my son, my friends,

those dear ones out searching for love, for that click

of insight that sums up the calculation of desire, of what we are,
the answers won’t carry them off gleefully at light speed,

for they aren’t now, nor never were in the stars.

Instead I’ll lift a glass, one of those midnight-blue martinis

full of sparkle and star shine and the sweet lie of new beginnings,
for me and them and you.

.2/.


KATHERINE SNODGRASS

L’A’w Des Agnes

Characters
WOMAN: 21-years-old, French.
LUCY: Middle-aged, well—dressed, intelligent.

(Sound of train wheels on tracks,
monotonous. A European train
compartment. Door upstage,
imaginary window downstage.
LUCY is well-dressed; her posh
leather suitcase on the seat beside
her, a small aluminum can in her lap.
SHE leans forward, concentrating on
her breathing. A young WOMAN
enters, wearing a bulky winter coat,
carrying a shoulder bag. SHE
notices LUCY. Concerned, the
WOMAN takes a bottle of Evian
from her bag and offers it. LUCY
sips, gratefully.)

WOMAN
Avez—vous mal au coeur?

LUCY
Thank you—uh....(Louder.) Merci beaucoup. That came
on me so suddenly! I don’t usually get sick on trains, but
lately....I thought it was only supposed to happen in the
mornings. (To herself.) But then, maybe it IS morning in
Baltimore. That would make sense. (To WOMAN.) Sick?
No, not any more. (Louder) N0, merci. Uh—Asseyez—
vous.

(The WOMAN sits opposite LUCY.)
It could just be the excitement of travelling, jet lag and
everything. His family would say I told you so. But they
don’t know what Charles would have wanted. I had the
ticket. Just because he couldn’t come doesn’t mean he
wouldn’t want me to go. Bunch of pristine, righteous
idiopaths. I never could stand them. Even Charles thought
they were idiots, and this coming from a man who thought
Ronald Reagan was well-meaning. So much forgiveness!

.022.


L,’ Air has Atpes

Well, I don’t. I don’t forgive them, I don’t forgive Reagan,
I don’t forgive—!

(Sighs. Pause. Holds up can.)
L ’Air a’es Alpes. Swiss Air. We bought this on our
honeymoon twenty-two years ago. (Laughs) Trust the
Swiss to market their air. (Pause) You’re not Swiss, are
you? Uh...(Louder.) Etes-vous Suisse?

WOMAN
Je suis F rancaise.

LUCY
Thank God. Ban! I would have made a faux pas, so to
speak. That’s nothing new. I’m always making them. I
gave Charles heart palpatations. “Looselips Lucy.” I
didn’t do it on purpose. God, no! I just couldn’t keep my
mouth shut. There’s no little censor in there going
“Lucinda, this is not the time.” Face facts, he married me
for it. He liked living on the edge. Yes, and look Where it
got him. Well, take this trip! “Lucy, let’s go back to Mont
Blanc and buy another twenty-two years’ worth!” He did
have a sense of the absurd. But the thought of bringing
him back here, imagine! There would have been the planes,
the trains, buses, snowmobiles, who knows, and the
climbing! If that didn’t get him, the altitudes would have.
It’s just as well, when you think about it....I could have
been alone in a foreign country, buying a coffin, shipping
his remains...

(Pause)
Though it might have improved my French. I think he
would’ve wanted me to use the ticket, don’t you? Oh—
uh—my husband—Mon mari, il est mart.

WOMAN
Je suis desolée, Madame.

IUCY
Mademoiselle, maintenant. Ce 11 ’est rien. Twenty-two
years I took care of the son-of—a-bitch, and now he’s dead.
It’s over. Or at least, it WILL be tomorrow when I finally
get to Geneva. I’m on my own little pilgrimmage, you see,
to buy some air for myself. To let the air in. Hah! Soto
speak. Twenty-two years ago, I would have said never. I
would never do such a thing! Charles would’ve thought I
didn’t love him, and even today....He might hate me for it.
And his family, you know, they’d love to believe that life
goes on—one generation after the other. Believe me, if
they’d known why I really came, they’d have—Well, they’d
have chained me to the bed for the next seven months! We
mustn’t talk about it. I’m not telling anyone. Well, you!
But you don’t count, do you? For myself....myself, I find it

1,23).


KATHERINE SNODGRASS

fitting. Air to air and dust to dust. Let’s finish it where it

began.
(The WOMAN stands, removes her
coat and places it on the seat beside
her. SHE is very pregnant. LUCY
stares. The WOMAN takes an apple
from her bag and offers one.)

No. Non, merci. Oh, my. Now I Me made a faux pas .

WOMAN
Comment?

LUCY
You’re....(gestures)....enceinte.

WOMAN (Smiling)
Oui, c ’est vrai. Je suis tres enceinte.

LUCY
Well. (Pause.) Felicitations.

WOMAN
Merci, Madame.

Mademoiselle, S ’1'] vous plait.

WOMAN
Vous-avez des enfants?

IUCY
Children. Just my husband. (Pause) Seulement mon mari.

(THEY smile. LUCY regards the
window.)
Charles wanted children. He tried, God knows! But he was
always....sickly. As for me, well, it was hard enough taking
care of hi_m, much less...I had to be so careful every second.
The worry. Waiting for that damn piano to drop....
being scared to death it would! Children, no! I thought
he’d given up hope years ago. I certainly had. But after
Geneva, I won’t have to think about it anymore. No more
worries, no more cares, la-la. I won’t be responsible for
anyone but myself ever again.

(Pause.)
Never again.

(Pause)
You’re very young to be a mother. (Louder) Quel age
avez—vous?

WOMAN
J ’ai vingt—et—un ans.

.24.


L’ Air Des ALpes

LUCY
Twenty-one. (Looking at can.) My God, this a_ir is older
than you. I’m forty-four. (Gestures) Uh....quatre-

quatre....Quarante.. .7 Numbers! In another twenty-one
years, I’ll be sixty—five. Sixty-five, I could draw social
security. But if I had a family, I’d never be exactly retired,
would I? A mother never retires. Truthfully, I think the
bastard did it on purpose. He always needed to have the
last laugh. He shot his wad....and then he shot his wad.
(To WOMAN.) You know that phrase? “Shot his wad.”
It’s un idiom —at least it was back in the Dark Ages. It
means he died a little death—une petite mort. And then,
of course, he QM- La grande mort . Charlie’s heart may
have been bad, but his timing was always impeccable.
Ironic, isn’t it?

(SHE looks out the window.)
He thought he was giving me something.

(Pause)
I hope there’s a moon tonight. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s a
beautiful country, Switzerland. Rugged. Difficult. But so
enclosed, all the little people trapped by the terrain. Well,
not SO trapped. After all, elephants crossed the Alps,
didn’t they? Beasts of burden have tough skins. But even
THEY must have gotten tired, don’t you think? “Nous
sommesfatiguée! ” the elephants said. No, it’s not that I
couldn’t carry it, it’s not even that. It’s that I can’t bear to
care that much anymore. Je suisfatiguée. I don’t want to
worry when I’m alone and the phone rings. I don’t want to
memorize one more doctor’s telephone number. I don’t
want to know why the sky is blue. And I would have to
know that, wouldn’t I?

(Looks down at can).

Wouldn’t I.
(Pause)

I will not be left again with nothing.
(WOMAN sits forward,

concentrating. SHE gasps and
reaches for LUCY’s hand.
Concerned...)

What! What is it?


KATHERINE SNODGRASS

(WOMAN places LUCY’s hand on
her belly. LONG, LONG PAUSE as
they feel a movement. LUCY pulls
her hand away, gently.)

WOMAN
C ’est magm'fique, n ’est—ce—pas? Ce n ’est PAS rien.
(Pause.) Madame.

LUCY (Softly)
Mademoiselle. Et oui, c ’est magnifique. Pour vous.
. (LUCY looks out the window,
clasping the can of air.)
I’m sorry, Charlie, I’m so sorry. If you knew,
maybe....maybe you could...
Remember when you forgave Nixon?

(LUCY collects herself.)
Lights. We’re coming to a village.

(WOMAN looks, gathers her coat
and shoulder bag.)
Oh, is this your stop? (Louder.) Uh—Est-ce—que c ’est
votre village?

WOMAN
Oui, Madame. J ’habite ici.

LUCY
Then—Then....Wait—uh—Attendez. (LUCY searches her
carry-on bag.) I want you to have something for your
kindness....something—quelque chose. ...I don’t know....

(WOMAN stands. SOUND of train
pulling into station.)

WOMAN
Please, there’s no need. It was nothing.

LUCY
No, really. I feel—

(SHE looks up in surprise. Pause.)
I loved him, you know. So very much.

WOMAN
J ’ai compris.

(Pause.)

.26.


L’ Atr Des Atpes

LUCY
I want you to have something—quelque (SHE holds the
can of air.) Too much for me to carry. Please. A souvenir.
Pour l’enfant.

WOMAN
Merci. (WOMAN takes an apple from her bag.) Et pour
vous.

LUCY
Merci. Au revoir.

WOMAN
Au revoir, Mademoiselle. Et bon voyage.

(WOMAN exits. LUCY looks out the
Window. SHE waves.)

LUCY
All the little people. The mountains. The moon! The same
moon over Mont Blanc. (Pause.) Look, Charlie. It hasn’t
changed.

(SHE sits, holding apple. LIGHTS fade.)
END OF PLAY


GEORGE ELLENBOGEN

Postal 01th

It was in ’44 when they shot

Harold’s brain or enough of it

so he couldn’t walk

without stooping and he couldn’t hold
a beer without spilling and he shat

his pants like Uncle Edgar

in his last days

Edgar who once flipped flapjacks
fivehanded and wrapped him

in those Saturday morning flicks

when horses had names

and Autry’s songs embroidered dreams.

Released, Harold just sat through pictures, war
ones mainly, or watched the lake spotted

with fish who’d jump and he remembered
guiding hill slopes of line spun

from his reel like filament

before sun smoothed the dawn’s

puffed bed sheets of mist.

The shapes he saw
were the silent company
he casted for, a wand
whipped forward into a world of fish
He imagined their admiration,
the snake leap of line into silence
before it slipped away in full sun.
It kept him there as much
as the trout, speckled things,
one much like another.

Maybe this is what he carried
along the Falaise road,

a silent company that reached
for calvados thrust out at inns
he’d forgotten, tanks
lumbering like rhinos,


Postdateol

the occasional ping

of sniper fire, distant as birds
in distant steeples

always thinning the column
until he was all that remained.

Nothing else but a photo of white crosses
and fatigues in a closet,

both creased,

the mist now returning

like shredded clothing,

sun smothering the dawn.

And he never went to the pictures again.

.29.


GAIL ADAMS

Hive

The Murphy’s, the McClanes, and the Pollitts all lived on the
second floor, all the fourth floor was Lamonts, while in-between were us and
the DelGaddos, whose men all worked for Pepsi Cola and whose women
spent the days boiling pots of pasta and screaming at the kids. Rosemary
Lamont, with a nose that looked like it’s been smashed sideways, always
creaked open the door and behind her Granddad, or some other old huddle in
a wheelchair, screeched shet the door you ’re letting in air.

So where was it the fire began? Smoke haze filled the hall while door
after door finally opened; clank of double bolts, rattled chains, thunk of
security bars-- it took a long time and all those openings together sounded
like a train stopping—— then roiling to the sidewalk a swarm. DelGaddo granny
in her rocker making one of the doilies they sold every Saturday, the
Granddad sold homemade ices, he also fixed shoes; she sat tatting and
lamenting like on a stoop in Sicily. DelGaddo and Pollitt men hustled from
floor to floor banging on doors yelling fire and hell and what the hell and get
out get out now. Levys on the fifth were the last to leave; he worked the deli
on 14th near the Canarsie line and said in his quiet voice that always headed
toward his black brogans smoke rises, but it hadn’t got to them yet.

What a carnival! All the kids hopping around and one howling dog
(even though dogs weren’t allowed) skidded from the Lamont’s apartments.
What a circus when they ran out! “Time for the trolls,” a McClane snickered
as all manner of Lamont citizen, deformed and askew, shouldered through
the smoke. Some in apparatus with wheels, others lurching like a drunken
band— no wonder Rosemary, who sold wigs at Simplicity Salon, was the
only one we ever saw. Firemen in armored hats, shiny slickers, and puddle
boots pumped the heavy hose up the stairs like a carpet runner; they hacked
doors, broke glass, and pushed smoke out ahead of sheets of water.

Of course it had to be one of us—not really us—but the brother of
the guy from Pratt. He’d been Visiting and he was weird; a blond linebacker,
but with glassy eyes. He wasn’t a Camel smoker like all the DelGaddo men or
the hunched Lamonts who all puffed wreaths about their heads. He was a
candle lighter, and no, not the five menorah on Friday like the Levys, or a late
novena light up to which the Murphys prayed. Just candles that he made
himself, candles in weird shapes with strange smells, candles for no reason
other than soft light. Now he was dead on his brother’s bed, and his brother
out on Fire Island doing God knows what a DelGaddo said, did not have a
clue.

A fireman said the boy’d been one day dead, possibly more, before
the candles sent it up. So he was brought down carapaced in a slick rubber

.30.


Hive

bag and sirened off, and the knots of folk abuzz on the concrete streamed
back in. Water rushed the corridors and stairs and smoke sooted all the
walls, but nothing lingered long except in cabinets or those who had the
outside toilets in the hall said sometime when you flushed there was a smell
of smoke. Life surged on. Lamonts took over that vacant apartment, pulled
up the buckled carpet and moved some of their gnomes in; and in a while the
candlelighter was nothing, just a dark heart in this house of houses, and no
one in memory ever spoke his name.

.3/.


JUDITH MCCOMBS

Headta vwls, from the
Post-Combuss’tovgoumats

Inside the head

a landscape shifts, goes under.

In a Netherlands a great sea floods

across the waking dike, where tourists drive,
floods past the inland sleeping dike,

where farms lie safe, and past

the inmost dreaming dike, all bulwarks
broken through and flooded deep.

Stubs of earthworks, pathways gone.

A North Sea cresting, curling, an endless
glittering reach of muddied salt

where tides wash through the cared-for fields,
the small tree-shadowed homes.

A ladder floating, pale wooden
rungs, no hands, no cries.

I wake at two or three or four

each night, stars, moon, blackness
sealing grey. Inside the head

the tilting neuron paths, the reptile
brain set free. In easier times

I seem to stand aside and watch
from some safe place while giant seas
spill through, the deep obliterating
waters claim their own, the crests

of foam play out. A curious pleasure
as the flood breaks through this life
I’ve built, as join and tie give way,
It’s gone, I’m carried, free.

*** *** ***

On the long drive home from Stratford, when my head could not process or
screen out the lights and sounds and vibrations of travel, my daughter took
the back roads mostly, so she could find green, quiet places for us to stop


HeadLa was, from the Post—Concussion JOMYVLOI Ls

and walk, safe from jolting changes, until I could go on for another hour or
so. She was the able one, the comforter. Once, just inside the New York state
line, I saw a sign for a something dam, and had her turn onto a wooded
hillside road along a creek. Paradise Road, the sign said, just before the
asphalt ended. The gravel Paradise wound up past scrubby trees, the
unseen creek on our left, small chained-off tracks to unseen hillside cabins
on our right. No cars or trucks came by. As the way got narrower she
wanted to turn back. We’ve come this far, I said, can we give it another five
minutes? Then a curve, a long slow rise, and at last across the valley a huge
earth wall, the dam. A dam that held, with a glittering lake beyond. At the
side a small white building, almost windowless, no one in sight, Keep Out.

The top of the dam was a gravel road, Keep Out, chain fence with barbed
wire strands. My daughter pulled over and got out, waiting in the shadow of
the car at the side of the road, while I walked sideways down the slope,
across the bulldozed flats of clay and scattered stones, where small brown
weeds could hardly grow. In the dry spillway beyond, low shrubs took hold,
no trees. In the leveled valley where I walked for a long, long time, dry clay
and red-brown split-off stones were everywhere, a host of shards flung here
and there. At last I looked for a stone to take, to remember this still safe
place, but each shard I picked had in its shallow curving underside a spider’s
nest. White threads, small life. I put each back, carefully. The huge wall
held. The waters safe behind, the valley safe below. My daughter, keeping
watch. The ordinary blue-grey sky above. Another chance.

.33.


CAROL BARRETT

ROSOIGBQ

Rosacea: persistent redness or blushing in the middle area of the face.
-- pharmaceutical ad, Better Homes &Gardens

It appeared after years of longing,
this natural flush, when a child

at last divided itself

in the tunnel of my womb.

I woke, blinking,

reveled in the pink

of what was to come.

The blush of pregnancy I thought,
and loved my baby cheeks.

But it stayed past

that ethereal moment

when they whisked her

over my hot face, stayed past
even that final rose

feeding when I had to force
her teeth open, away

from my raw breast.

I was fond of this youthful

visage, recall the summers

straining toward some semblance
of tan. My older sister studeies me,
pales of this alchemy of hormones.
She offers her dermatologist.

Friends tell me how much

I’ve changed, oh late flowering
motherhood. I smile a knowing
smile, pinkly, and they go on
believing in this abundant
face, this mother in me

that suns them.

This blush I carry


RDSDI 06M

is not an easy
embarassment. It does not
signify the fertile egg,

but the fallow ones, dormant
forty-odd years.

I look in the mirror

at my crone’s disguise,
this mask of menopause.

I see What is possible —
and what is not. Rosacea:
my burning, burning face.

.35.


CAROL V. DAVIS

COVéWCl/a Catt/1 ed mt

I remember the bombed-out cathedral

of my childhood, fixed in my child’s mind

like an icon, the mystery of its discovery:

a skeleton of beams and posts, seductive and
frightening, as if they were bones.

Left as a monument to those who died,

bleached and battered by the rains,

vacant sockets of free-standing windows,

the exquisite arched ribs, secret of the confessional
where one could lean in to a nook and hear

the whispers of abandonment and crimes:

a dime-store figurine stolen by a five year old

and the terror of being caught and locked away.
Fear balloons like a weak heart and you

are bound sometime to confess.

The ambivalence of beauty for a Jew.

This a Christian monument and its appeal dangerous.

My classmates convinced me
there were still ovens and I was afraid
to walk by the park where they were housed,
though the incinerators were for leaves and we were
by now in America where there was no possibility,
I was told. (How later, at this same park, I was held
against my will by teenagers; what happened I don’t
remember, but the black vinyl seats of the police car
stuck to my thighs and I wouldn’t retrace my path for anyone.)

My grandparents had gotten out of Germany in time
but when they died the stories went with them

and I don’t know how Carlotta died, she whom

I am named after, or how a great uncle dove
underground and lived out the war, a mixed blessing.
Survival (sometimes) a curse, the embarrassment of it.
So many holes in each family tree

and the imagination eager to fill in the gaps

with lists of horror.

.36.


COVCWCYM Cathedral

I think of this cathedral still with fear,

how the world is divided between them and us

no matter that I was sheltered in a university town.
No matter that the family fled before the war,

there are still the stories and the imprint

of skeletal ruins seared into memory

at the moment of first sight.


JEANINE M. HATHAWAY

Saints Interrupted

I do own a television, but because I am easily distracted, I keep it
under wraps—literally. Draped, my tv squats camouflaged in my living room.
I aspire to live single-minded and free, like Joan of Arc, my patron saint who is
suppose to help me do this by her intercession and example. So, when CBS
aired “Joan of Arc,” the mini-series, I recognized the opportunity for grace
and plugged in.

For two hours on a Sunday evening and two more on the
subsequent Tuesday, I turned off my phone and put on my glasses, skeptical
but old enough to know that God’s ways are indeed strange and what could
be stranger than Joan of Arc as a television star speaking English in my house
in Kansas.

The world outside seemed just as startled as it soon began popping.
Thunder and blazes—Joan, taken by storm! She who tracked unseen powers
was suddenly interrupted by reports from modern radar.

Until I let go of my compulsive need for order, of course I was
unsettled. (I had seen enough before Super Doppler filled the screen to have
relinquished my other compulsive need, for historical accuracy.) As my heart
grew less resistant, things got cozy. Fondly, I recalled my daughter babysat
for this meteorologist’s son. One of the storm trackers had been a student in
my early morning class, and here he was, dressed up and articulate. Joan and
I are such lifelong friends, I could feel her presence on my couch.

Cozy, however, soon led to testy. I let her take on issues of accuracy.
“Snow—in May? They got my father all wrong. There are Dunois and
Alencon? And my brother, he didn’t die in battle. How could God have let
this happen?”

American though I am, I took on the commercial vulgarities of
juxtaposition. The story of a woman burned at the stake sponsored by KC
Masterpiece Barbecue Sauce? Michael Jordan hosting a cookout? S’il vous
plait, put those grills away! Joan, whose trustworthiness rested on her
maidenly modesty, sponsored by women selling underwear in their
underwear? Joan, called by disembodied voices, underwritten by Sprint? Oh,
it went on. When her army camped in the field, we cut to eye allergy medicine.
That wimp Charles VII’s role in the Hundred Years War was interrupted by
Viagra. Never having menstruated herself, Joan was selling maxipads (with
wings). Joan, whose fasting has led some to theorize she was anorexic,
promoted a prescription diet drug.

Even less subtle, previews of other CBS offerings associated her
story with an ad to “feel the fire burn” when Julia Roberts would kiss David

.38.


saints (wtewupted

Letterman on his Monday night show; later in the week a medicine women
would be tied to a stake before a firing squad.

Out of doors, the winds blew and lightning burst and somewhere in
the viewing area hail wreaked havoc. Among the size analogies—dimes,
quarters, pingpong balls—the only one Joan might have recognized was to
hen’s eggs; G.B. Shaw’s play “Saint Joan” begins with a scene using them,
artfully.

The Kansas sky exhausted itself and the tv irregularities exhausted
me. Naively, I had hoped to be able to stay inside the story, to follow the
development of one women’s response to her vocation all the way to
catharsis and insight. But the shifts in and out of her context required a mind
more flexible than my own, less attached to idealism.

How do we train our minds to pay attention when the object of our
attention is so scattered? How can we sense it’s safe to dive below the
surface when the surface keeps changing? There isn’t time to explore one
aspect before another, equally compelling, makes its dramatic demands;
fragmentation invites superficiality. That may end up as the smoke and
mirrors of wit and irony before we figure out, too late, that in the pathetic
conflagration something of substance was lost. It’s ourselves, disappointed,
distracted, burned out. The pitiful witness at the edge of the pyre continues
to lament, “My God, we have burned a saint.”

.39.


ALAN NEWTON

J (At/Lg L8 Love

Characters:
Jordan, 30, a fourth grade teacher, looks tired
Joe, 37, pizza delivery person, looks younger than his age

Setting: A city park shortly before sunset. It’s Fall and beginning to grow
chilly. There are two park benches about ten feet apart and no other props.

[At rise, Jordan is sitting on the stage right bench, checking her watch,
looking angry. One of her fists is closed and holding something unseen. Joe
enters from stage right holding his jacket, lopes in like a child, approaches
her. Suddenly he turns and calls towards stage right.]

JOE: Here she is, guys! Come on! [T urns to Jordan.] They’ll be here in a
second.
JORDAN: Where’ve you been?
JOE: We’ve been climbing. [Lays his jacket on the bench]
JORDAN: You were supposed to be here thirty minutes ago.
J OE: Do you know how tempting it is to walk through a park with these guys?
There are trees, and jungle bars, and fences, and don’t forget the carousel,
geez—
JORDAN: Stop it! It’s too late. You ruined it.
JOE: Ruined what?

[Slight pause]
JORDAN: Everyday on my walk, I come by this spot. And everyday there’s a
couple here with their two girls. Every single day the whole family comes and
rides the carousel together, and then the parents sit on that bench and watch
the kids play. If you had come when you were supposed to, they’d still be
here. We’d have a talk, and the girls would be running in circles, around them,
around us, with their arms held out like 747’s. They’d probably stop at some
point and ask me why I was crying. The littlest one might come up and stroke
my hair. [Pause] Soon as the sun touched the tree line, though, they went
home to eat supper.
JOE: Why would you be crying? [He sits beside her]
JORDAN: Because I would have just told you goodbye.
JOE: What. . .?
JORDAN: Don’t act shocked, Joe. Why else would I have made an
appointment with you in a public place? We live together, for Christ sake.
JOE: Told me goodbye? I thought... [Hesitates]
JORDAN: You thought what?


Jul/L9 Le Love

JOE: It’s a park. I thought you had a surprise — you know — for us.
JORDAN: Why do you do this-?

J OE: The note said, “meet me in the park by the carousel-“

JORDAN: At 5:30 sharp-

J OE: -and we said, “Pa_rk!” We haven’t all gone to the park in ages. They
were so excited — they were going nuts! George started swinging from the
ceiling fan, and Georgia was-

JORDAN: STOP IT! [Pause] It’s pitiful, Joe. It’s like watching my dad in his
last year, when the pain got so bad he’d cry out for his childhood nanny. I
can’t stand it... [Covers her face with her hands.]

[Joes sits, moves toward her, lays a hand on her shoulder. After a
moment, he makes a monkey sound. It should be a ‘girlish ’ sound,
indicating Georgia. From this point on, Georgia ’s voice will be
indicated by small letters, while George’s ‘boyish ’ voice will be
indicated by capital letters]

JOE: ee ee? ee ee?
[Jordan jerks her shoulder in order to brush away his hand]

God, that was mean. EE EE? I don’t know what’ 5 wrong with her, George.
[Makes a crying monkey sound, as in ‘boo hoo hoo.’] eee eee eee. . .It’s okay,
Georgia, Mommy’s not mad at you. She’s upset with Daddy. EE EE? No, I
don’t know why.

JORDAN: [Looks up sharply] You don’t know why-

JOE: Why don’t you guys go play, okay? Mommy and I need to talk. [As in,
‘Okay! ’] EE EE! ee ee! Don’t stay long! [Pause Turns to Jordan] Why are
you treating us like this?

JORDAN: Since you were late, Joe, I’m gonna make a rule. Anyone or
anything we talk about has to be real. [Grabs his arm, squeezes it.] RLal.
Tangible. Concrete. Which means we’re not gonna talk about God, we’re not
gonna talk about E.T., we’re not gonna talk about imaginary monkeys.

JOE: E.T.’s real. . .

JORDAN: What-?

JOE: ET. ’3 tangible! [Jordan looks at him like he ’s crazy] I mean,
somewhere, in some Hollywood stock room, you could see E.T. If you bribed
somebody, you could probably even touch him.

JORDAN: Okay, never mind E.T.-
J OE: He doesn’t breathe, but he’s mal-

JORDAN: Forget E.T.—
J OE: I loved E.T.! That time he got drunk and-

”4/.


ALAN NEWTON

JORDAN: Fuck E.T. [Takes a deep breath] And no, he doesn’t breathe,
because he doesn’t have lungs, because he doesn’t have organs inside his
paper mache skin. He only has package stuffing or wood chips, or toilet
paper! So he’s not a being — he has no life. He’s nothing but a warehouse fire
waiting to combust. But you know what? He’s got more than the monkeys,
Joe. He’s got something.

JOE: [A bit pouty] Yeah, well. The monkeys have plenty.

JORDAN: What?

JOE: They have souls. No bodies, but souls.

JORDAN: Your soul, Joe.

JOE: At one time they had yours, too. [Rises and goes to other bench, turns
his back to her.]

[Pause Jordan opens up her fist, and looks at a key she’s been

holding. Then she rises and goes to the other bench, sits by Joe.]
JORDAN: At first I thought it was charming-I thought M were charming.
My friends could say, “My fiance’s building me a deck,” or “My husbands’
coaching my daughter’s soccer team,” but that seemed so blasé. Only I could
have said-if I was desperate enough-“My boyfriend gave me two invisible
monkeys, and they’re our children, and they’re hilarious! We don’t need
anything else to keep us entertained on a long car ride!” [Joe smiles, turns to
her.] And then the night they almost made you cry-that stupid story about
Georgia having been adandoned on a Senegalese beach, and her learning
disabilities in monkey kindergarten-it was the closest you’d ever come to
crying in front of me. I was grateful.
JOE: I get sad now thinking about it. Little Georgia all alone...
JORDAN: Don’t push your luck-
JOE: ee ee? No, Georgia, go play. We’re not saying anything bad about you.
JORDAN: [Rises] I made a rule, god dammit.
JOE: I never agreed to it.
JORDAN: Then you should’ve been on time!
JOE: I’m here now.
JORDAN: Don’t you know why I brought you here? [Joe shrugs] Because I
wanted you to see a family-a real family, with real kids. You avoid kids, J oe-
you’re scared of them.
JOE: That’s crazy-I love kids.
JORDAN: You are a kid, Joe. [Rises] I want an adult. I want an adult who
wants to marry me, who wants to have kids with me, who wants to be their
father, and not just their playmate. [Goes to other bench, sits. Joe rises,
moves toward her. She unfolds herfist which is holding the kay, then shows
him the key.] I should give you this. I’ve been moving my books out of the
shelves, and my CD’S, too. They’re at my sister’s- have you even noticed?

.42.


Jul/M L8 Love

You could keep my furniture, give away my clothes-I don’t care-I just want
out.

JOE: Geez, Jordan, you’re not kidding. [She shakes her head no.] Oh my god.
[Pause] We’ve been together seven years. [Sits by her, puts his hand on her
knee.] We went through hell in the early days, but we stuck it out. I know
I’ve been restless, but I finally found something I’m good at.

JORDAN: You’re a pizza man, Joe.

JOE: Oh! [Leaps up] So you’re ashamed that I’m a pizza man-

JORDAN: No! I’m not ashamed! I’m depressed. Look, if you delivered Ex-
Lax for a living, and it’s what was good for you, I’d be thrilled! You could
wear a shirt that said, “I’m the Ex-Lax Man!” and I’d kiss you in Times Square
on New Year’s Eve-on television. Pizza man, doctor man, lawyer man-I don’t
care! As long as you’re doing what’s right for you. And what you’re doing
now is wrong, it’s unhealthy, it’s. . .you’re thirty-seven, Joe. Your mind, your
imagination, your vocabulary- all the stuff I loved- it’s all bleeding into
memorizing houses where you get good tips- into kissing people’s ass for,
“Keep the change.” It’s a child’s life, Joe. I teach children and someday I’d
like to raise them, but I can’t marry one. And, yes, I do want marriage.

JOE: Why marriage. What does it stop us from doing?

JORDAN: Oh, Joe. From committing to grow old together, face death
together- from agreeing that the one who lives longer will bury the other, and
mourn, and clean the grave. [Hesitates] From-

J OE: I’ll clean your grave, Jordan. I’ll-

JORDAN: From having children. . .from taking them to the park in the
afternoon, riding the carousel, going home together at sunset. . .[Crz'es.]

[Pause Joe watches her helplessly]

JOE: We have. . .children. That’s why-

JORDAN: If I don’t do this now, I never will-I know it. We’ll go back to that
apartment and we’ll live out our lives and we’ll grow old, but it won’t be
together. I do love you, Joe, but if I go back to that apartment, I get a little
more lost every day until soon I don’t find my way out. [Holds the key out for
Joe to take] Take it, please. I don’t have the heart to put it in your hand.
JOE: What if. . .?

JORDAN: What?

JOE: What if. . .we get rid of them?

JORDAN: Could you do that?

JOE: All these trees, greenery- this is where they belong.

JORDAN: It would be a start, but. . .I don’t believe you’d do it. [Holds the key
toward him] They’re all you have.


ALAN NEWTON

[Joe takes the key, then turns his back to her. She watches him for a
moment, starts to reach out and touch him, then thinks better of it
and slowly begins moving away. He covers his face and begins to
cry. She stops, surprised, then begins moving back towards him.
After a moment, she reaches out and touches him, though he shrugs
off her touch and continues crying]

JORDAN: ee ee?

JOE: What?

JORDAN: ee ee. ee ee.

JOE: EE EE?

JORDAN: 66 ee.

JOE: EE EE EE-EE EE?

[Joe reaches out and touches her face, then strokes her hair. She
reaches for his hand, then takes the key from him and puts it in her
pocket]

JORDAN: ee ee. . .[Shivers, holds herself]

[Joe goes over and picks up his jacket, then returns to her. He puts
it on her, then kisses her forehead]

JOE: EE EE EE.

JORDAN: [Hesitates then speaks softly] 66 ee ee.

[They stand looking at each other, sadly. Suddenly, the lights dim,
almost to the point of darkness. The couple come together and hold each
other, as if in fear of the sudden night. We begin to hear jungle noises-the
distant cry of wild apes, etc. The couple look frightened as the blackout

engulfs them. Curtain]


ANITA SKEEN

The Pia no Tamer

Did I expect
A man whose fingers chime

Like tuning forks?
A man whose voice
Is song? A man

Whose hands like wings
Affirm the vibrating branch?
For an hour he plunks

And thumps; a C

A C again, a D, an E.
But not quite a D,

Not quite an E.

Plunk and thump, plunk

And thump:

A heart limping,

The world banished,
Some lost interior.

A sound rises, drops,
Staggers, gets back

On its feet, stands alone:
I was ten that September

When my mother, in her navy
Suit just home from work,

And with groceries,

Wept inexplicably in the middle

Of our ordinary afternoon.
Now there’s a chord,

A coming together

Of singulars

When the parakeet
Hits the same pitch,

.45.


ANlTA SKEEN

Throws his note
Out into an early spring

Afternoon, over the fence,
Ivories lined up

Like pickets,

Like stolen bases,

The piano tuner
Lowering his finger
Like the slim body
Of a lover

Onto the immaculate
White key.


 


 


.49.

 


 


STEPHEN DUNN

Interview with StBPVIBI/L Duo/w»

Stephen Dunn, the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet of Different Hours, has also
written Loosestrife, Between Angels, Work and Love, and A Circus of Needs,
among other volumes of poetry; his work in prose includes Walking Light, a
collection of essays which is now available in a new edition, with added
material, and Riffs and Reciprocities, a collection of paired prose miniatures
which demonstrates his facility with the language and his flexibility as a
thinker. In Riffs and Reciprocities, he draws on the traditions of Calvino,
Barthes, even Montaigne, but the work remains uniquely his own—his writing
reflects his interest in the human, the everyday, but never the ordinary. It was
with great pleasure that RCR conversed with Dunn on such disparate subjects
as evolution of his own personal style, the difference between poetry and
prose, and the usefiilness of teaching.

RCR: In New and Selected Poems, which was a fairly broad collection,
time-wise, it’s obvious that your work has changed and evolved. As an
outsider, I see it one way, but what I’m really interested in is how you see
it-what changes you see in your own work.

SD: That’s interesting, that you would see so many changes-I do see some. I
know what I consider the main change, which occurred somewhere around the
time I wrote the book Work and Love, which I think was my third book or
fourth. My early poems had been influenced by Imagists and Surrealists. I
was very much writing the poems of my education, of my grad school
education. Somewhere around 1980, when Work and Love got started, I began
to write in a more discursive way, no more reflexive need for a metaphor or
image every moment, which was how I thought poetry got made. I learned that
metaphor and simile are what you reach for only when you can’t say
something directly, when only an analogue will do. And that an entire poem
can be a metaphor. So my line relaxed some, became governed by the
orchestration of sentence and phrase. And then in succeeding books, I
became more and more preoccupied with how to harness that discursiveness,
to find a formal apparatus that would discipline my inclination to “talk” in a
poem. Somewhere around my book Local Time, I think, I started to work fairly
regularly in a three—line step-down stanza.

RCR: Sort of a William Carlos Williams kind of thing?

05/.


tatervtew

SD: Very much borrowed from Williams, the later poems of his, that artful
talk of his, say, in “Asphodel.”

RCR: So did you impose that form, or did it just come about and you realized
that you worked well that way?

SD: I think probably it just came about and then it became a conscious way of
working. It was quite conscious after a while.

RCR: One of your poems that I really personally admire is “A Good Life.”
What was it like to write? How did that come to be? What was the process?

SD: I think it was written around the time that Communism fell, in the late
1980s. Many of my friends are Marxists, or were Marxists, and I’d always
argued with them about the discrepancies between their “good lives” and the
actions that they advocated for others. And there I was with “a good life,”
the kind of life that had its comforts and its leisures. How then to live a
“good life” with your knowledge that other people had terrible lives, awful
lives? I think that poem was my attempt to get at the underside of a good
life, to probe and enact what it means to always want more even when you
have plenty, to live in the world of desire, which also must mean the world of
unfulfillment. That has been, I think, for quite a while, one of my
subjects-desire and its attendant difficulties, a neediness that perhaps
screws up one’s politics. Or, to put it another way, to have the kind of life
where you can afford to worry about something like desire instead of where
your next meal is coming from. Though the politics of what I’m talking about
remain behind that poem, not overtly in it, “A Good Life” was for me one of
the poems in which these various concerns came together.

RCR: In a lot of your work, one of two themes crops up-the romantic
relationship, or the teaching relationship. Since the romantic relationship
usually gets the greater share of the discussion, I’m a little more
interested in the teaching relationship. How has it influenced your work,
being a teacher?

SD: I wrote an essay about that. It’s in my book Walking Light. I think

that it hasn’t influenced my writing much at all. At most, it made me a

better editor, because of years of editing and responding to student work; it
made me alert to the false, to the ungenuine. But it hasn’t much influenced
my subject matter. The best thing that teaching has done for me is to give
me free time. I’ve been lucky enough to never teach a class before two in the
afternoon. I write in the mornings, and I have my summers free. I think it’s
permitted me to do my work.


STEPHEN DUNN

RCR: So you seem pretty positive about creative writing as a discipline, to
think that it does something, that it develops a writer?

SD: It hastens the development of people who already have something. I
don’t think you can teach somebody to write poetry. You can certainly teach
people how not to write poetry. I think that’s the kind of thing we can do-
things to avoid, to watch out for. Most teaching is cautionary: “Don’t do this;
if you make this kind of move it’s going to get you in trouble.” I am positive
about writing workshops because they worked for me. I was a History major in
college. I never took a creative writing course until after college. I went

to graduate school when I was thirty years old. That is, I had read the great
poets, but I hadn’t read contemporaries. My graduate years at Syracuse were
enormously useful years for me. I heard talk that I had never heard before. I
was exposed to how to think about poems. I had great teachers. So, yes, it
was positive, for me. I’m not absolutely sure how positive it is for people

who take workshop after workshop. I think one can get “workshopped out,” '
so that people who take three workshops in their undergraduate years and
then go to graduate school for their MFA’s. . .I have mixed feelings about that.
I think being around like-minded people for a couple of years is a good thing.
How workshops serve the writing after a while, I’m less sure of these days.

RCR: What’s been added to the book that’s being reprinted (Walking Light)?

SD: There’s an essay called “Poetry and Manners,” there’s one called
“Imagination, Experience and the Poet as Fictionist,” and there’s one on
poetry and spirituality. There’s one called “The Hand Reaching into the
Crowd,” which is about both James Wright and the 1993 World Series-it’s
about grace, about the possibility of grace. And there are one or two others.

RCR: Is it kind of an odd project, to go back and add to something you did a
while ago?

SD: You know, it’s not unlike doing a selected. That is, I’ve written many
essays since Walking Light was first published, and I’ve only chosen to
include six or seven. So it feels to me like a “best of.” It doesn’t seem
like an unusual process.

RCR: As someone who has written both poetry and prose, do you find that
the processes are different? Or that they are two varieties of the same thing?

SD: That’s a very interesting question. I think probably the latter. I tend

to write essays, for example, the way that I write poems-that is, not knowing
what the hell I’m talking about and writing myself toward that, discovering

.53.


Interview

what I want to say as I go along. But they are different also, of course; in
poetry I’m very concerned with the line and syntactical arrangements, and in
prose I tend to be more concerned with sustaining an argument and with the
shape of a sentence. Not that I’m not concerned with sentences in poetry; I
am. But I think by degree there’s a different sense of pacing and
orchestration of effect in poetry, not to mention sonics. I’m much more
conscious of the sounds of the words cooperating with each other in poetry
than I am in prose.

RCR: Particularly with “Riffs and Reciprocities”-they’re not essays, they’re
very small, and a lot of the same concerns crop as when you’re writing a

poem...

SD: In “Riffs and Reciprocities”. . .I felt I was writing prose, though I don’t
mind when people call them prose poems. I wanted to write terrific sentences,
one after the other, and to write my way toward what I believed about the
subjects I chose, such as “Cynicism” or “Principles.” So in many ways my
process was the same as when I write poetry, though those paragraphs
seemed to give me more latitude to address and refine ideas.

RCR: You say in the preface that you were thinking of j azz, of improvisation.
Where did that come from? Is it something you set out to do, or did it emerge?

SD: The pieces themselves really taught me what I was doing. I like to think
of it as riffing. It gave me lots of permission-that is, I didn’t have to do
anything that was definitive or complete. I could try to make one paragraph
rub up against another; completion by tangent, if you will. I never knew
what the pairing would be until I wrote the first one. I would allow myself
to sort of riff tangentially off whatever came before. It was the most
obsessive writing of my life-I’ve never been so obsessed. I finished that
book in a year in a half, and I’ve never come close to doing anything that
speedy -I’ve always been able to leave a poem, maybe because I worked on
them in the morning, but I would work on these all day and night. I would be
writing sentences in my sleep.

RCR: You’ve done some really long, sustained poems-the Snowmass Cycle,
for example-and you’ve said that you think the short poem has its own sort of
power. What kinds of freedoms and constraints do the two different projects
offer?

SD: Obviously the long poem permits different kinds of movements. One

needs to think symphonically after a while, whereas the opportunities for
different ways of orchestrating and pacing shorter poems are fewer. You have

‘54!-


STEPHEN DUNN

broader issues of rhythm to solve when you’re working long. It becomes
aesthetic fun, to see if you can make the long piece shapely. In my long poem
“Loves,” for example, how to diversify the “I love this, I love that” rhetoric-
how to diversify the rhythms, became paramount. For me, the long poem is a
much more willful act. I learned some years ago, I think when I was writing an
essay about closure, that in thinking about my own sense of closure, I was a
page, page-and-a—half guy. I was always thinking of closure around the same
time. It became enormously liberating for me to deliberately work against
that- that is, when I got to the spot on the page where I’d normally bring
things home, I’d add a foreign detail. I’d add something that the poem could
not yet accommodate. So the long poems came mostly in that way, willfully
pushing myself past normal closure, seeing how inclusive I could be, trying
not to let the poem become overwhelmed by that inclusiveness.

RCR: So you consciously think about form, then, While you’re writing. ‘

SD: I do, though I’m also quite willing to let the form finally take care of

itself during the revision process- I think it’s useful to keep startling

yourself as much as you can, and then worry later about cleaning up after the
messy party.

RCR: In “Biography in the First Person,” a poem from Looking for Holes in the
Ceiling, you say that your poems are “approximately true.” You’ve also said
that you never look at your life without a mask. How do those two things
work together? Do you consider your work to be autobiographical?

SD: I don’t think of my work as autobiographical, though my subjects are
often personal. I’m not interested in my life per se when I write. I’m

interested in making versions of it. I’d just as soon put in a detail I made

up, if it served verisimilitude, if it served veracity better than something

that actually happened. So my poems are usually an amalgam of things that
have happened to me and that I’ve observed in others, and what I can
usefully imagine. My job is to make them seem true. It’s the persuasive
illusion of reality that I seek, claims that I can embody, that I can formalize into
something that insists on itself.

RCR: A lot of your work comes from an idea that seems very abstract. As a
reader, it’s very hard to tell whether you work from the abstract and work
into the concrete, or the other way around, taking an experience and drawing

that into a concept.

SD: I’ll tell you a couple of ways. In Between Angels, when I was working on

.55.


Interview

those poems-”Happiness,” “Loneliness,” “Sadness,” “Forgiveness”-I think I
had written two or three of them when I decided to see how many abstract
words I could authentically inhabit, how I could give life to them, flesh them
out, make them mine. I think I wrote ten or eleven of them. That was one way.
Lately, a lot of my poems have been generated from notes I take, from my
reading, other people’s aphorisms or well-said notions. So I’m often working
from a pithy remark, from something well-phrased by someone else, often an
abstraction. Sometimes, of course, the moment that began the poem will turn
out to be the twenty-second line of the poem, you know, in that way arrange
and rearrange things. I’m very happy to work from the artificial, to find the
authentic from the artificial.

RCR: So you do a lot of reading of other poets? Of everything?

SD: Of everything, really. Most of the things I put in my notebook are things
from prose, from essays, from nonfiction. From people who are much smarter
than I, who work in a different genre entirely.

RCR: So what is on your bookshelf?

SD: The better question is, what’s on my coffee table? Well, a wonderful
book I just read last weekend called Stirring the Mud: Bogs, Swamps, and the
Human Imagination, by someone called Barbara Hurd. It’s full of terrific
stuff about bogs and swamps, which she is able to talk about in such a way
that it keeps resonating into how to live, who we are, and matters of
aesthetics. It’s just a great read. I wanted to underline half of it. I’m

reading Susan Sontag’s novel that won the National Book Award [I_n
America]. Lots of poetry books-many get sent to me-and lots of magazines.
I’ve been reading Zbigniew Herbert’s book of essays [King of the Ants:
Mythological Essays], and there again is a mind that is so wonderfully
different from mine that I find myself constantly attracted to it. It’s so hard
these days-I think many poets my age would say this-to find yourself really
knocked out by a poem.

RCR: Because you’ve read so much poetry?

SD: Yes, because you’ve read so much, because your standards for what
constitutes the original, the excellent, have risen over the years. So I find

it wonderful when I find a poem that really does it. Which happens rarely. I
just read, in the Pushcart Anthology, the new one, a poem by a poet I didn’t
know very well, Sharon Dubiago, called “How to Make Love to a Man.”
Knocked me out. Just high-risk, wonderful surprise, line after line. I wait for
those things. But mostly I find myself reading poetry these days with a certain

.56.


STEPHEN DUNN

sense of boredom, waiting to be made alert.
RCR: Do you read theory at all?

SD: I try not to. I mean, I have, of course. But I’m more likely to read
essays by poets on poetry, which is where I tend to find one’s full
intelligence is brought to the subject without agenda. The problem with
people who follow theorists, I think, is that they get locked into too many
singular ways of thinking. I think it’s useful to read, for example, as if
there is authorial intentionality - heretical as that may seem these days,
and also useful to think deconstructively. But that’s reading. The poetry
written by people with a theoretical agenda tends to be awfiil.

RCR: Does it change the experience of teaching to have students who are
studying theory? Because often you get students who are in the middle of
study of in-depth theory while they’re trying to write, and you’ll hear a lot
of people say that doesn’t work so well, that you have to put one aside in
order to do the other.

SD: I have a few of them now, in my University of Michigan graduate class,
who, either because they’re reading theory or have read theory, and it’s been
persuasive to them, seem to be writing poems for theorists. I find it
incredibly dull.

RCR: A lot of your poems also seem to have characters, in a way that isn’t
very common in poetry-for example, “Missing,” in Loosestrife, which is very
much a character sketch in the form of a poem. Do you find that these
characters are ends in themselves? Do they just crop up? It’s a curious thing
to find recurring.

SD: I don’t think it is as curious as you say. “Missing” is a persona poem
in the voice of a woman, and there are countless persona poems in the
language. I think it’s quite possible to write poems in the voice of a
different gender, too; we should be able to do that. We certainly expect
every fictionist to be able to do that. It’s not unusual for them, and it
shouldn’t be unusual for poets.

RCR: Is it interesting? From your perspective?
SD: Yeah. One of the things that every writer worth his salt should be able
to do is to take on the other, and other-ness. We do that in our own voices,

of course, but to adopt the voice of another and enter the mentality of that
person is an act of sympathy and a gesture to other-ness. It just has to get

.57. ,


(utter/view

beyond being an exercise. I’ve given those assignments to students, those
“write in the voice of—” assignments. Maybe I’ve even given them to myself.
Assignments are good when they can trip you to your real concerns, and I
think when writing that “Missing” poem, if I remember, one of the things that
allowed me to continue working on it was that I was as much the man who
was missing something as I was not. It became a way of talking about the
limitations of men and my own limitations and the problems women have with
such things.

RCR: It’s interesting that you should mention assignments, because that’s
one of the most compelling and frustrating things about teaching, I think-
finding assignments that don’t come back as assignments, especially in
workshops, things that don’t produce workshop pieces. Do you find that this
is pervasive, or that there are things you can do that encourage students to
break out of that?

SD: It is pretty pervasive, but it doesn’t matter. When you’re giving the
student an assignment, you’re giving the student permission to essentially
practice, invent. So that if it doesn’t turn out to be a whole poem, no big

deal. If it trips them into something they wouldn’t have done otherwise-maybe
they get a few lines out of it-good enough. It’s hard to write a whole poem.
But now and again you do get amazing things from assignments. One that
consistently works for me-well, I’ll give you two. One is to take either

lines, or the poem itself, from a work you admire, and use it as a point of
departure for yourself, or argue with the poem. What it does is take students
away from themselves, so they’re more likely to invent. The other one is-you
know the prose poet Russell Edson? Wacky poet, I think wonderful. I read
them a lot of Edson poems so they see how he starts with an absurd premise
and then gets into the poem which is very logical. I give them six or seven
Edson first lines and tell them to write a poem in the Edson spirit. It’s always
the best poem of the semester-always, for years now-and it’s because they’re
working with imaginative imperatives, where the next line must be found
imaginatively, or there’s no reason to put it in. They can’t work from
experience, so that’s a very useful exercise, I think.

RCR: Is there one particular aspect of being a writer, of being a poet, that
you really like or dislike?

SD: I think when I am writing is when I’m the most happy. That’s when I
really feel like a writer; the rest of the time I feel like a talker, or

something else. I like to be in the middle of poems. I have friends for

whom that very same act of writing, where they uncover stuff about self and
about world which-the act of writing is not necessarily a sanguine act. It

.58.


STEPHEN DUNN

can be disturbing. It really screws up their lives. That really hasn’t been

true for me. It mostly has enriched my life. My life is the better for having
been a poet, certainly better than what it is likely to have been. One’s

poems can instruct one about how to be in the world. Since we write our
poems with our second selves, which are smarter and more moral and have
better judgment than our real selves, then again I know some poets who are
sons of bitches, and if their poems have made them better there’s no particular
evidence of that. In real life I have made all the errors that someone alive
makes To learn what’s true doesn’t mean you can necessarily enact what you
know. But poems give us a chance to be almost perfect. Good poems are
successful illusions about life. They take our entire wherewithal,

everything human and artistic we can bring to bear, if we hope to make them
so.

RCR: Thank you very much for talking with us today.

SD: You’re welcome.

.59.


 


 

w o x @Q é m?


AMY NOLAN

”A Boole of Men/mow”:
Writing a Ebola, Opel/ting a Wat/moi

“Who cannot love herSelf cannot love anybody
who is ashamed of her body is ashamed of all life
who finds dirt or filth in her body is lost
who cannot respect the gifts given even before birth
can never respect anything fully. ”
——Anne Cameron, Daughters of Copper Woman (1981)

* * *

In kick-boxing class, I push my legs into Sidekicks and high front
kicks; my body rises and falls to the hypnotically energizing, pumping techno
beat of the music, pressed on by the shout of the instructor’s voice. As I turn
sharply to the right, I notice a small face peering in through the doorway on
the side of the room. It is a child, a bespectacled little girl of about seven or
eight, and she is intently watching me work out. I try to ignore her as I kick,
punch, twist at the waist—but my mind stays with the girl’s curious image.

A part of me feels protective of this child in the doorway—I want to
protect her from one day believing that she must exercise intensely in order to
feel solidly good about herself. At the same time, I am struck by this lingering
truth about myself. I have been struggling to articulate my experience with
anorexia nervosa, and I am at a point where I cannot think about anything
else. I feel slightly ashamed for working out so intensely in this girl’s
presence—as if she has caught me doing something raw and unsightly. I am
struck by the comprehending fascination in the girl’s eyes, because this is the
gaze that sees the world, that takes it all in, watches from a “safe” distance—
the gaze of_ a pre-participant, an innocent. I cannot help but see myself as a
little girl, watching from doorways, listening against walls with a glass, trying

to appear small and invisible, openly taking it all in.
* * *

Not one week after I drafted the fledgling words of an essay-in-
progress, tentatively entitled, “Appetite: A Journal of Anorexia,” one of my
advanced composition students, M., a well-spoken, frequently absent
sophomore with dark red hair, came in to talk with me about her latest
argument paper. She was worried that it wouldn’t fir the requirements of the
assignment because it had “a lot of personal stuff in it,” and she wanted me


”A Boole of MCVMOVl/I”: Writing a Boom, Opel/Ling a Wound

to read it first. After she left it with me, I read the essay, a detailed account of
M.’s ongoing, violent bingeing and purging episodes, addiction to diet pills,
resentment about being labeled as either anorexic or bulimic, and anger at the
society that forces her to do this to herself. Keeping myself somewhat
detached as I read, I was struck by the clarity of M.’s prose, which comes
across as strong, healthily angry.

Later that night, I had this dream: I am wearing a transparent gown,
feeling clever, as if I ’d fooled everyone. I am huge, monstrous and
dangerous. Suddenly I am in a brightly lit room, legs and arms caked with
mud and blood. I want to touch and smell it, but I can ’t move. I feel a rush of
shame—I have been exposed. Someone has discovered my secret—I am in a
hospital waiting room, and I have sunk to the floor, fresh blood soaking my
gown. I see my distorted reflection in a metal tray my dark, sunken, angry
eyes, hair long, dirty and wild. I am at the point of no return. I am insane,

 

an animal in a cage. I sneer and growl. Unlike my ‘real’ life, in this one I
can impale and maim people with my clear articulation—my only words,
cutting and staccatoed, drip with sarcasm. When I suddenly squint up at the
white ceiling, I see but one word: “ILLUMINATION. ”

The dream demanded I ask myself a lingering question—something I had in
fact wondered about as I embarked on creating my essay: Have I killed ofl
this starving, angry, self-mutilating part of me for good? More clearly, am I
“recovered”——recovered enough to write and clearly know What I am talking
about? Before I am scheduled to speak with M. again, I take another look at
the essay I have been working on. I can trust that I will not lose my mind.
That my mind will both protect me, and dare to take me back there, but as a
visitor, a guest who has already tread there, but will not stick around. The
dream forces me to check myself. I am one of many. The individuality, the
inner landscape of my illness is intact, and yet I am beginning to see that I am
outside it, at least enough to dream about it, to see it emerging in others. I
know because I am writing. I would never dare to speak honestly with M. if I
were not able to realize this. And this realization—the grip, or catch in my
brain, the *click* of clarity—frees me to write.

When M. comes back the next day, I tell her that her essay is fine for
the assignment; it is excellent, in fact. I gently ask her how she is doing, what
compelled her to write about this experience. M. ’s thick, blue-lined eyes
carefully search my own, and I notice that her face is puffy and that her
fingernails are bitten down, raw and crusted. She describes, her nervous

_ words like rapid fire, some of what she has been going through, that she
knows how horrible it is for her, but she just can’t stop—that in the
profession she wants to go into (journalism), all the women are thin, that it is
not fair that she can’t look like Ally McBeal. I instinctively wrinkle my nose a
little at that, and decide to tell her a little about my own experience, and I

.63.


AMY NOLAN

realize, with some sense of vertigo, that I am speaking as I wished someone
would have spoken to me when I was suffering. I am not bewildered and
shocked. I am not placating or maternally worried. I venture only to show
clear concern with my eyes and let her talk. She tells me how desperately she
needs that control, exercise, the pills, the vomiting—that it terrifies her but
also feels so good, that without it she is nothing. I see her struggle to
articulate the contradiction—the desperate need for control pulling against
the near-frenzied wash of need, desire to fill a space that is achingly empty. I
see how afraid she is, and how defiant. I am afraid of her. For her. She knows
very well that control brings a heady sense of wellbeing, but like any high, it
is fleeting. I tell her that this kind of control is a trap, and that when it begins
to turn on us, it doesn’t belong to us anymore. I can’t believe I am saying
this. I speak slowly and quietly. I am both terrified of and grateful for this
young woman with the red hair and snapping brown eyes.

After I refer M. to a counselor and give her a pamphlet on eating
disorder hotlines, I can’t stop shaking. My office mate gives me a hug. I
splash water on my face. I eat my lunch. I drive down to my class in East
Lansing. I teach more classes that week, talk to more students. I make dents
in my anorexia essay, cutting and pasting—but I don’t write anything new for
about a week.

When M. comes to my office a month later, asking me to write her a
letter of recommendation for an editing position, she is smiling, radiant, even,
dressed up in a pinstriped suit. She hands me a review that she has written of
an Ani DeFranco concert, nervously pointing out to me an insignificant
punctuation error, and hands over a tape she’s made for me, of feminist
activist DiFranco’s T 0 The Teeth. I panic. I know what she is trying to do.
“You do not owe me anything,” I want to say, understanding too well the
need to please, to be noticed, to hang on and make it good, be grateful to
anyone who even smiles at me, who acknowledges me in any way, despite my
horrid neediness and flawed perfectionism. But I smile back, write a letter for
her, accept the tape. I still haven’t listened to it.

* * *

Before I knew it consciously, the idea of my essay came about in the
early fall of 1999, when I wrote a four-part poem called “The Ophelia Dream,”
its “shadow title” Waxing Anorexia. The poem insisted I take a closer look at
these memories and images, and I felt a progressively greater need to write
about the experience, though I was afraid, not used to writing this way, except
maybe in my journal. I was afraid of betraying the silence that covers my
family like a heavy, velvet cushion—I was afraid of getting angry, and hadn’t
realized how essential anger as a force was/is to creativity—I was afraid it
would just hurt too much, that if I exposed myself in such a way, people would
think I was crazy, even though I knew full well that the world is full of people

.64.


”A Boole ofMem/torg”: Writing a Ebola, 013mm a Wound

who reveal painful things that have happened to them. Have you suffered
enough to write? whispers my audience-voice. The “once-me” little girl with
wild hair and snapping eyes retorts, Fuck you. And to me, Go on.

Writing as if I were two people—one usually speaking about the
other—has allowed me to gain the necessary distance needed to write
explicitly but not feel too “exposed” or “self-indulgent.” Years ago, when I
couldn’t control the shaking, rush of rage that would sweep through me and
make me sick for having to swallow it—when I felt myself splitting down the
middle into two people—one who complied and followed the rules, the other
who turned inward—I wrote this way. I have no idea where any of this will
take me, even though I can trace the path that has lead me here. In this way,
writing is a desperate, passionate, yet calming act—for me, it is an act of
asserting control, framing feelings into phrases—moving unspeakable images
to a place where I can see them, make sense of them (an excerpt from “The
Ophelia Dream”):

I knew she was alive by the smell

of her hair, white rain—warm

tears standing still on the rims

of her eyes—I stood over her

and remembered dull black stones
staring past mirrors, mother—

a sharp survey of hips, elbows, jaw—
eyes terrible in their nakedness,

horror of what others

call “recovery ”—even I don ’t want .
to witness, watch her grow

bigger, bloated, steel blue

turning beached squishy pink—

titty pink, that color

she tried to run out of her
body, my body, that swam
down to the pelvic floor,
this body that finally began
to work with me,

for me.

I have set out like a detective, searching for clues to the source of my
own affliction—its causes, its ghost-like traces in my own exercise and eating
habits, in my students, in films, books, magazines, music, television. I look for
clues that will illuminate me, at once affirm my uniqueness as an individual
and provide me with the assurance that I was never alone. What I am really
looking for, though, are clues to a life—occasions that both surround my

.65.


AMY NOLAN

body and dip into my soul like a hot blade, hot with the eureka! of insight. I
both rejoice in this knowledge and resist it, tooth and nail. I resist it like I
resist being and having a body. I resist because it means that I must attempt
to find a voice if I am going to speak/write. I resist because I can’t not make
this attempt.

I have always written to make sense of reality—or how I see reality,
with the hope that I would one day come to a kind of “enlightenment,” or
some deeper understanding of pain, or death, or the lack of closure that we so
often resist. More often than not, though, writing only feeds the fire, confirms
what I don’t know, or what I wasn’t sure I wanted to know; instead of moving
in a straight line, I find myself tracing my steps backwards and outwards.
When I have realized the folly of my actions—that I will never completely sort
everything out by hand—it is too late to stop writing, and I discover, with a
sense of seductive inevitability, that I don’t want to stop.

The notion of the act of writing being akin to opening—keeping
open—a wound, draws me into the aspect of writing that I can most clearly
understand: that it can serve as a means for pulling the origins of an affliction
up out of the darkness of memory, but the act itself does not necessarily
assuage the pain of the affliction. I hope it will, though, and that hope is what
keeps me writing. I am, in writing about a disturbing interruption in my life, in
my family’ s life, keeping the wound open—draining it, covering it up,
smoothing it over, making sure it doesn’t rub on anything sharp. At the same
time, I am taking great care to remember that my pain does not warrant relief,
even if I stop writing. And yet, I cannot cease to write, for some relief comes
in the act of matching experience to words; the opiate hope of making a
connection, to pull myself out of isolation, usurps the pain of the act itself.

The work-in-progress on which this paper is based continues to lead
me down a path that is fraught with uncertainty, a surplus of memories that
resist containment, and an inevitable re-connecting with a period in my life
that still resists discussion and reflection. On a social scale, as pervasive as
eating disorders may be in contemporary culture, there is still relatively little
known about them—anorexia and bulimia, and in particular, the combination
of these afflictions. We often do not hear the afflicted speak, for there is a
great deal of shame and secrecy. On an individual level, most who suffer from
eating disorders are so busy trying to control their afflictions that they
haven’t time or energy to reflect on it—what it means on an individual,
familial, or cultural level. As I write my reality through memory, the body
becomes the primary source.

An exercise in the “book of memory” [influenced by Paul Auster’s memoir/
critical work, The Invention of Solitude (1982)]:

She remembers being ten, lying in bed and gazing up out into moonlight on the river at

.66.


”A Boole of Mew/Lora”: Writing a Bod 51, Opel/Limo) a Won/mot

her grandma’s house, moon lighting up the ice. She remembers wearing a red bonnet and
picking blueberries, dropping them into a coffee can, fingers stained purple bruises. She
remembers playing piano, intense-browed, her mind drifting somewhere else, being
astounded that her fingers knew the notes. She remembers howling like a wolf in the
kindergarten bathroom, just to hear her own echo. She remembers the indescribable, not-
quite-vanilla taste of blue moon ice cream, after her brothers’ Little League games. She
remembers getting braces, and her friends were jealous. She remembers swimming across
Bear Lake, looking down and seeing big, long telephone poles on the sandy bottom. She
remembers her older cousin Liz shaving her legs and braiding her hair. She remembers
stuffing cotton balls in her training bra before school. She remembers N. reading her diary
and threatening to tell everyone at school. She remembers having a crush on N.’s older
sister. She remembers her braces cutting a boy’s lip when she kissed him. She remembers
her mother’s Simon and Garfunkel album, how the skip in “Mrs. Robinson” made her
laugh. She remembers trying to make her mother laugh so she wouldn’t be sad anymore.

She remembers herself as anorexic, blowing out the candles of her fifteenth birthday cake.
* * *

On the way home from school that first day I talked to M. about her
essay, I am both helpless and exhilarated, relieved and pessimistic—for I know
that this is only the “tip of the iceberg”: despite the fleeting sense of relief
that I was able to gently reach out to a young woman like M., I am haunted by
the invisible struggle within her—the struggle to resist conforming to the
need to reach an impossible standard of beauty, and the struggle to rebel
against that standard that one knows is a mirage. I see it in 8., another
student, who appears increasingly sullen and gaunt lately; little girls already
carrying that burden of resignation and defiance, dieting at age ten, nine,
eight... and I see increasingly younger, thinner, girls being held up as the
fashionable ideal: a woman who is not yet a woman. As I remember these
seemingly benign images from my own adolescence (during the early to-mid-
eighties), I am saddened by a loss I cannot name, something that sits heavy in
my chest: my own invisibility. Out of that invisibility I write: to perhaps be
one voice to a silence and shame surrounding a disease that baffles a culture
of surplus, where in fact food, obscenely plentiful, comes to represent
abstractions, such as comfort, escape, anger, love, etc., rather than “mere”
nutrition for survival. 1 write as I have learned to eat again, and however

dramatic it may sound, I cannot cease believing that this is my salvation.

It has taken me a long time to realize that without the acceptance of
loss, of wounds, there is no chance of evolving, of ever learning anything,
much less writing it down. One must start from the wounds—the truths—of
memory, the dusty comers that house hidden objects, impressions, and smells
that at first seem random and unrelated—even unrecognizable—but then ring
with resonance.

When something remains partially hidden, it is also protected, “safe”
from examination, reflection, change. In particular, a difficulty I have faced in
writing about anorexia is making it Visible from the inside. Most works on the
disease have been written by psychologists, sociologists, theorists. Only

.67.


AMY NOLAN

recently have I begun to find first-person accounts of the illness, of any
eating disorder. By reaching into the first person account of my affliction, I
come to find that the gap between “who I was” and “who I am” has begun to
narrow. As an adult woman, I can, by looping backwards, come to appreciate
why a fifteen-year-old girl, me, hated the idea of becoming a woman, how she
(I) has had to “grapple” with this most of her life, and I am grateful for her
twisted rebellion. As I look back from a much better place, Where I take care of
myself, inside and out, I am grateful for who I was then. I am grateful for her
silent and misguided protest against a supposedly fleshy identity that terrified
her. I can understand her quest for a spare body that took up little space,
clean as a bone, sharp and clear. I am grateful because now it is Visible. It is
part of who I am—only now I no longer have to starve to get there.

.68.


KARTIK SRINIVASAN

Kattas

Three elder gentlemen gathered around a confronting fire. Beside
them, a restless Swami collected a heap of sweltering ash from the flame. He
took the ash in his bare palms and spread the gray powder across his
forehead. The three elder gentlemen were bewildered as the Swami grinned
and shook the remaining ash off his hands. I looked into the eyes of these
men and saw their shock manifest into an admiration, upon which few men are
bestowed. It was the Swami’s nonchalant manner towards his action that got
their attention, but his willingness to scar himself for God was what led to
their awe.

The elders were no slouches. They had ties to the Americas where
the masses struggled to survive, while fearing the dark abyss of mediocrity.
These three gentlemen were once hard working zealots at the beck and call of
their imaginations, fueling anunrivaled prosperity that was foreign to most
men. The elders possessed the ostentatious amenities that any poor, third
world citizen could envy. So the praises of these men had some merit, at least
to me. I knew, however, that the Swami felt indifferent to their opinions. This
was Kailas.

Nestled between two dusty valleys, a single, snow-covered peak
towered above a desert of mountains. This is where God lived, or so the
people thought. Once bustling with the sounds of religious fervor, the
Chinese had all but wiped out the last traces of divinity that remained in Tibet.
But the effectiveness of this mountain was evident by the religious devotees
who continually flocked to Mount Kailas. So the Chinese ceded their atheistic
stance to the tourists and their mighty dollars.

Religions converged at Kailas. Shiva kept his abode here, and the
Hindu’s would pay homage by hiking around the mountain in a clockwise
direction. The Tibetans, deeming Kailas the center of the world, journeyed
around the mountain in the opposite direction. Instead of walking, though, the
Tibetans would fall to the ground in a prostrate position, get up, and repeat
this process all the way around the mountain. The peaceful coexistence of
these diverse peoples was a by-product of a strictgovemmental
codecomplemented by the mountain’s ability to humble all that crossed its
path.

The people who came to Kailas suffered. Driving through
treacherous roads, they developed numerous altitude illnesses, and embraced
the cold, dusty winds for this opportunity to see God’s abode. Few had the
resources to make the journey, and most were ill equipped for the grueling
pilgrimage around the mountain. With this said, the comforting image of a
cross-legged Shiva—sitting atop Mount Kailas beside his wife, Parvathi, and

.69.


KARTIK SRINIVASAN

and his illustrious, gold-colored staff—permeated through the hearts of all,
and few were bothered by any costs that accompanied this expedition.

I managed a tour to Kailas aimed at older European and American
laborers who felt gaping voids with their present circumstances. It was a
rather lucrative business with the promise of garnering an audience with the
multitude of western intellectuals who were supplementing their rational
presumptions with the spiritual powers inherent in Hindu mythology. This
venture became a unique opportunity to leverage the half-truths of solitary
men and convince them to travel half way around the world to visit an
otherwise barren terrain. Whether they were curious or just had some last
minutes pleas before death, the elders were truly enticed by the folklore that
accompanied this holy place. I merely facilitated their need to be closer to
God. But the elders weren’t satisfied with that; they wanted to see Him, to
feel Him, to touch Him, and then to fall into His hands and slowly ascend
into the heavens. But such events are rare, especially for those who
repeatedly broadcasted their willingness to fall prey to some obscure
mountain illness.

Today was the exception. Fredrich, a gregarious stutterer from the
UK, died in his sleep the previous night. The combination of heavy
breathing, demonized by the high elevation, and his persistent speech
constraints left him unable to communicate. He was unaccustomed to being
silent so he had a tendency of mumbling some cuss words in an English
dialect while lying in bed. All of a sudden he was quiet and I became
optimistic about his condition. The tranquil gesture on his face as he was
lying in his bed gave me the impression that he had fallen into a deep sleep.
Hours later, I came across his stiff body and could only look with horror as
God had taken another one.

The others displayed an unnerving apathy upon hearing the news.
They should have been happy for Fredrich, as their companion was seemingly
apt to be one with God. Instead, the remaining two people in my group were
upset that they were still alive. They hungered for something that was out of
their reach. I could detect the frustration in their eyes, those puppy eyes; like
small, impoverished children making hand gestures to the oncoming
bourgeoisie, hoping that one of them would feel pity and drop some food into
their dry mouths. They often show disappointment as the people were
accustomed to their pleas and were accustomed to ignore them and walk
away.

“He’s so lucky,” one of the elder gentlemen noted, referring to the dead
Englishman. “But what did he have that we lacked? God must be an
indiscriminate man as he has decided to take Fredrich,” the man mumbled
under his cold breath. “But why am I still alive?” I shuttled the rest of the pack
to Darchen so I could deal with the funeral proceedings. Darchen was a town

.70.


KaLLas

located at the base of Kailas, and ended up being the start and end point for
the pilgrims who paraded around the mountain. The town was equipped to
handle the onslaught of tourists while succumbing to the demands of
westerners. Darchen had a police station with Chinese officers who would
occasionally harass the local folks to keep themselves occupied. I arranged
for the two remaining people in my group to stay at a guesthouse for the
duration of our trip. They would keep busy by mingling With the truck drivers
and whores who gathered at the local bar.

Surveying the body, I deliberated on the method of disposal. The
lack of resources in Tibet put a strain on one’s ability to perform a respectable
ceremony for the deceased. I was limited to two choices. The Hindu approach
involved a simple cremation with a sizeable portion of religious oratory of
which I would simply emulate the actions of a Swami. This method was clean
and rather welcomed by most as a good way to dispose of the body. The
Tibetan custom was environmentally friendlier, but it lacked the following
among the westerners I had encountered. It involved chopping the body into
small pieces and feeding those juicy concoctions to the preying vultures. On
rare occasion an overzealous westerner may ask for this type of service, but
those people never died.

It came to pass that a cremation was performed, as that is what I
preferred. With all things religious, however, comprises were made. Instead of
having a procession and allowing the body to burn slowly in a sea of butter,
the natives chose to accelerate the process by drenching the lifeless
participant in petroleum while strategically placing pieces of cow manure
around the torso. But I dared not question them as they had done this so
many times and had a reputation of being stubborn when it came to deciding
thefiner points of the ceremony.

I was disturbed by what I saw. The Tibetans had erected a sort of
cremation machine atop a mountain adjacent to Kailas. This vehicle of death
was a metal frame from the front end of a large truck. The Tibetans had
stripped the upholstery from the vehicle and cut a large hole at the top of the
metal frame. Within this hole the natives stacked a few tires leaving an area
large enough to fit a somewhat husky individual. I still go over in my head the
scene that followed. The natives lifted the dead body and placed it inside the
hole within the tires. The only thing I saw of Fredrich was his bruised head
being smashed against the steel casing as the natives struggled to fit his
bloated body into the metal frame. When they saw the shock in my face—as I
witnessed what was left of his teeth and gums being spattered over the
ground—they quickly placed a potato sack over Fredrich’s head. After the
body was firmly in the metal frame, the natives began drenching their
cremation machine with gallons of petroleum. I repeated some religious
mantras while the Swami handed me a lit match. I approached the metal frame

.7/.


KARTIK SRINIVASAN

and threw the match towards the cremation machine. A mighty flame erupted
from atop this mountain, and well, Fredrich was in ashes.

Fredrich’s death brought about feelings of anxiety and uneasiness
that I had never felt before. Fredrich was a kind individual who often spoke
of the spiritual matters that bonded God with man. “The mountain speaks,” he
would say, “and I am here to listen.” So while most of the people spent their
time exhorting others to high moral virtue, F redrich would perch atop a rock
and listen to the mountain. And I took a liking to this man who was simple and
came to Kailas, not to die, but to explore the splendor of Shiva. Such a person
was foreign to me up to this point, and Fredrich undoubtedly opened a portal
in my mind to the present opportunities that laid dormant. He didn’t belong
here amongst the dying breed, and his death would forever affect my views
on Kailas and amongst the dying breed, and his death would forever affect
my views on Shiva. For if God was the speaking kind, then maybe it was my
turn to listen.

Before I could get back to Darchen, the night came upon Kailas and
the surrounding landscape. I camped near a small river and let the days events
sink in. I thought about the Tibetans whose livelihood depended on the
commerce generated from cremations, and how divided they must be. On the
one hand they were dependent on such business, but surely the natives
could not be happy performing funeral ceremonies for the dead. By the way
they acted, though, it seemed as if death was so natural to them that they
never gave it a second thought. When keenly observed, though, it was
apparent to me that the Tibetans were not immune to the universally tragic
emotions that accompanied death. They cried like the rest of us. Unlike them, I
had the opportunity to escape from Kailas, and I was resolved to do so.

I woke up early the next morning and walked to Darchen. As I
entered the gates I noticed a stark illumination transcending over the long
range of mountains. It had to be a sign, as the sun rarely showed its face in
these parts of the world. Darchen was usually quiet and desolate in the early
hours of the day, but today there was a large commotion around one of the
guesthouses. There was a densely packed crowd, and as it began to diffuse I
could make out what looked to be a large number of uniformed military
personnel gathering around something. Then my heart stopped, as I became
aware that the people were gathering around another dead body. It was one of
mine.

“Winston is dead,” Marcus, the last remaining member of my group
exclaimed. “He died in his sleep, just like Fredrich.”

Winston was a soft-spoken American writer infatuated with
Romanticism. Having written a multitude of bestsellers, he longed to complete
the last chapter of his life with a graceful departure from Kailas. Winston
sought the kind of climactic ending that most authors dream of capturing in
their literary works. He wanted to struggle with the otherworldly forces for

.72.


Kaitas

every extra breath, and then slowly give in to the ecclesiastical powers that
resided around the mountain. This place was a haven for such death wishes.

“I bet you’ve never had this kind of success rate before, huh,”
Marcus said with a cold smile. “This has to be a sign. First Fredrich, then
Winston, I must be next. There must be something special about our group.”

“Marcus mocks me,” I whispered to myself. Having garnered enough
courage to leave this place, these ill-fated circumstances, complemented by
the haughty jests of a worn out man, would undoubtedly precipitate into
further malaise and despair. Then a divine inclination—a sudden,
unmistakable moment of clarity sandwiched between feelings of anxiety and a
state of calmness—awakened an inner voice, compelling me to believe that
some mythical power had caused these events to occur. Shiva heard my
pleas, and this was my time to leave. This is when I had the courage to
absolve whatever duties remained here, and leave Kailas.

“I am leaving,” I told Marcus. I turned around and walked away. I
turned my back to Marcus and his sheepish pleas, him trying to convince me
to stay. I turned my back to Winston and whatever rites he may have wished
for me to perform. I turned my back to the Chinese officers who were awaiting
my arrival and subsequent interrogation. I didn’t look back at Kailas; I walked
through the gates at the front of Darchen and left the premises.

.73.


JEREMY CAMPBELL

Something For Evergowe

THIS MORNING

a man woke up in his bedroom and had a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange
juice for breakfast, and after he had finished with these he showered and
cleaned himself, putting on his nicest clothes, brushing his teeth and, while
looking in the mirror, said, “Today I do greatness.”

IN THE TAXI CAB

A man was asked by the driver if it was going to rain today, if he’d heard the
weather; and he replied, “No, the weatherman hasn’t decided yet, but it looks
like it will—at least if it’s a perfect world it will.”

OUTSIDE THE POST OFFICE

A man dropped the bill payment into the mailbox and smiled at a woman who
wore a yellow jacket as she passed by, first wanting nothing more than to
smile at her but then wanting to speak to her and so he asked her her name
and she hesitantly said May, and he asked May if he could take her to lunch
later.

AT THE PLACE OF WORK

a man was asked what he was doing in on the day off, that he should be out
enjoying himself; and he said he was, he just needed to tell everyone to be
ready, to be ready to run into the street and find him when they heard the
news; and when they asked what the news would be he said he didn’t know
yet, but when he did know so would everyone else—but right now he had a
lunch date to keep.

INSIDE THE NICE RESTAURANT

A man met a woman named May for lunch, and they ordered food that was
actually quite good, and they talked about a great many things—j obs,
relationships, dreams—and whenthey had finished May said to him, “I’ve
never done anything like this before—~no one’s ever just met me like this—
so. . .thank you, I’m glad you asked me.”

STANDING ON THE BUSY SIDEWALK

A man was feeling great about the day, and when he saw a mother screaming
at her child to behave, he asked her to calm down, saying it wasn’t worth
shouting about and that the child was just a child—and the mother screamed
at him and shoVed him into the street where he was nearly killed.

.74.


Sometmwg For Eva/50M

IN THE CLOTHING STORE DRESSING ROOM

A wounded man wept quietly, unable to meet the face in the mirror, and when
the pretty girl that worked at the store asked if he was alright he said, “No, I’m
not alright, I’m miserable and discouraged and -——and. . .”———and she said, very
tenderly, “I’m sorry.”

I N T H E PA R K

A man strolled through the grass while the rain fell, and he watched the
people on bicycles and on foot hurry to avoid the rain; but there were some
who stayed their ground, who didn’t run: he saw two young women by the
pond, talking quietly to each other and watching the ducks, and he watched
the ducks too and wished he could show these women—no, not just these
women, everyone—he wished he could show them all something wonderful,
something they’d never seen before, something that—~. . .and it came to him,
the Idea.

ON THE WAY TO THE BIG BUILDING

A man stopped everyone he could and told them to be in the park at five
o’clock, but he couldn’t tell people why because he was in a hurry to get to
the news people that worked in the big building; so when he saw a teenager
wearing a shirt that said WHY SHOULD I? he told the teenager to spread the
word, to give it to everyone.

IN THE OFFICE

An excited man told the news reporter to bring the world to the park at five
o’clock, but when the news reporter asked why, all he could say was,
“Something’s going to happen that will change everything—there will be
magic and people will feel wonderwdon’t you want that?”

I N T H E S T R E E T

A man knew he was running out of time and at first everyone ignored what he
was saying, but when he stopped traffic at an intersection, in the pouring rain,
people began to listen, even the middle-aged police officer that started to
arrest him but hesitated when he said that something magnificent was to
happen in the park very soon—very soon, and that it was the officer’s duty to
tell people, and—and. . .and the officer got on the police radio and soon every
police officer in the city was telling people something big was going to
happen something very soon and in the park.

ON THE TELEVISION

A man saw a news reporter in a helicopter circle over the park and remark on
the growing number of people in the park, at the number of police officers and
news vans arriving, and that more people were on the way.

.75.


JEREMY CAMPBELL

O N T H E B U S
A man listened to people talk of the crowd in the park and in their voices, like
liquid electric, there was excitement and there was wonder.

OUTSIDE THE MOVIE THEATER

A man found a large group of people and in the group was the teenager with
the WHY SHOULD I? shirt, and the teenager saw him and brought the group
to him and he shouted to the group that it was time, and he led the group
down the street, stopping traffic and attracting more people as they moved
down the street, swelling in size until there was no street, there was only
people, marching through the rain towards the something big and very soon
in the park.

BACK IN THE PARK

A man found legions waiting for him, of all ages, and though the rain had
stopped he could still feel the electricity in the air, a charge waiting to
explode—even when he heard someone say magic is dead, he was not
afraid—even when, and this was very difficult, he walked toward the great
pond’s shore and heard a reporter say, “A man is approaching the pond and
not a sound can be heard”——even then, he was not afraid.

O N T H E S H O R E

A man paused...took a slow, measured breath.. and said, “Today I do
greatness” —and with that said, he stepped out towards the water, and he
smiled, and his foot touched the water, and ...and he fell in, arms flailing wildly
and shouting for help.

O N T H E B E N C H

A soaked man watched his legions disappear, watched them pass by—some
laughing, and all with disappointment and hate in their eyes—until all had
gone but the two young women he had seen earlier in the day, the two who
had given him the Idea, the two to whom he wished to apologize the most, for
it was to them he really wanted to give magic—and there they were, talking
towards him with beautiful faces and—and they were talking to him, telling
him they were sorry it hadn’t worked out, but they were glad, they were glad
he had tried.

AND RISING FROM THE BENCH

A man called out for the two young women walking away from him to stop, to
stay just a moment longer and watch the sun finish its day, it’s on the horizon
and won’t take much longer; and the women said they would stay, but instead
of sitting down on the bench with them he smiled and walked to the shore——
his clothes were still dripping—and without pausing he stepped out onto the

.76.


water. The women watched with wide eyes and then quiet smiles as he took
another step, and another...and did not fall.

.77.


 


$§®®Q  


PHILIP DACEV

R080! Y8

So many mad ants

forming a loop, my Childhood’s
black border.

This is all about fingertips,
how a god can be held thus.

No, a lariat to fling

at a religious rodeo,

lovers’ toy for tying wrists,
found objet d’art to drape
over Duchamps’ urinal.

If rosary’s from roses,

why not red?

The small sound of the beads
collapsing upon themselves,

a percussion of snake vertebrae.

My aunt’s and my sister’s
device for navigating

their convents’ dark halls;
six-shooter slung from the belt
of every Mother Superior.

The crucifix at one end

is like a river’s source

to which the river returns.
Hand-warmer in the casket.

.80.


KATHLEEN WALSH SPENCER

After Mov’mg Out of
CW! vwlma’s House

I
admit
the crystal
swinging on a
narrow satin ribbon
fiom my rear View mirror
is stolen property, twirling
catching headlights of oncoming
cars like flashes of diamonds marking
the margins of lanes as I barrel along at
70 mph, thinking how I palmed it after
I laid on the countertop to write my name
under kitchen cabinets with permanent marker
the Friday I lost the house to the bachelor. He
waited on the porch guarding his stereo speakers
and Naugahyde easy chair repaired with duct tape,
so I unhooked the crystal pendant from the chandelier
that grandma had bought with S&H green stamps she’d
dutifully moistened with a kitchen sponge and pasted into
booklets in neat rows. She took me with grandpa in their
1960 Ford Cornet to select the simulated brass fixture that
She dusted and polished each week as long as she lived yet
the Realtor said I couldn’t take it with me because I didn’t
list it as an exclusion- we could talk about exclusions-and
the buyer was prickly since it was his house now, though he
probably hung a lava lamp or moosehead before I was even
down the driveway so now I ride by his bungalow wedged
between BigFoots and McMansions and not a ray of
sunlight beams through his windows anymore
so every trash day I check his curb
for the rest of the glass
teardrops.

.8/.


LYN LIFSHIN

THE MAD qua, MAKES A MANT‘RA
OF SOMETHth SHE’S HEARD (N A
MOST MN LIKELY PLACE

She says it, scraping snow
off the T Bird she’s half
forgotten how to drive,

at bus stops, at the street
approaching the dark lot

she half expects muggers to
float up from. If it works,

it will be better than Valium,
better than wine. “Be thankful
for stress and tension, sweet
music can’t come from a
loosely strung harp,” or is

it “heart” she wonders,
shaking, terrified to go on
stage, vowing never again
like a Holocaust survivor.
Some days the mad girl is

a piece of yanked off skin,
seems tough because what
was closest to her, now is on
the outside, a mask over
what is knotted inside
strung so tight, even a breath
moving near, a sign in the
front row triggers a rainbow
of sounds she’s startled by


LYN LIFSHIN

THE MAD qua, WOMLD LIKE TO
LOOK AT MORE THEM qe—L,

Something to blur edges, a .
water color wash over details
like in old maps where a
river or the shore bleeds and
feathers outwith no jagged
cliffs or craggy falls. She
sees older women on tv
suddenly losing lines and
wrinkles, wants to have
what’s ahead misty as

a scene in Brigadoon

where who knows what

can happen. Dates and
weight disappear, a chalk
SOS after 3 weeks of
torrential rain so whoever
cares, as she does, too
much, can make what
shouldn’t matter so much
up as they want to


 


 


AL SIM

F601 V of Potltics

They were sitting in the car when the rain started. Big fat drops fell
in heavy clusters, then steadily medium drops slanted in from the south.
They sat and watched the pavement turn dark.

The man in the driver’s seat was in his early thirties. He was short
and trim, wore black glasses and had a neatly crOpped beard. His name was
Jack MacInnis. A stringy twelve-year—old boy sat next to MacInnis on the
bench seat of the old sedan. The boy wore tortoiseshell glasses and bell
bottoms and his straight brown hair almost touched his shoulders. His name
was David Newhouse.

“That’s the only luck we’ve had all afternoon,” MacInnis said.

David looked at him

“What do you mean?”

“At least it didn’t start raining while we were out knocking on
doors.”

“But we’re going back out.”

MacInnis watched the rain and nodded.

“Maybe it’ll stop by then,” he said

He started the car, drove up a hill and down the other side, made a
left and parked along the curb. In that brief interval, the rain stopped.

“See?” MacInnis said, with a pale smile.

David looked and nodded. He had hoped it would pour and force
them to stop. They got out of the car and went to the first house on the
block, went slowly up its cracked cement walkway. The grass was bare in
spots and brown in other places and the evergreen shrubs were starting to go
wild.

MacInnis rang the bell. He hung his head while he waited and Davis
wondered if he was praying. He knew MacInnis believed in God, and that
made him a traditionalist at the Unitarian Universalist fellowship they
attended. David’s older sister called it “the liberal coffee klatch”, and in her
definitive opinion, the coffee wasn’t any good.

The door was answered by a towering elderly women wearing a
floor-length navy blue dress. Her hair was in curlers bunched tight around
her head. She glowered down at them.

“Can I help you?” she sneered.

MacInnis started talking and when he said “Senator McGovern”, the
women waved them off and slammed the door. She yelled something
unintelligible from behind it. When they were out on the sidewalk, she swung
the door open again.

“Communists!” she bellowed.

.86.


F651 1/ of Politics

MacInnis stopped short and David almost bumped into him. The old
women shook a fist at them, then slammed the door again. A dog barked in
the neighbor’s house, then it was quiet.

* * *

The political life of David Newhouse started in front of a television
set. He wandered into his family’s living room one evening and the screen
was filled by the head and shoulders of a man who was sweating like his
shoes were on fire. The man’s eyes were squinted and shifty and David
though that this must certainly be an evil man.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“The president,” his father answered.

“That’ s Nixon?”

“Yup.”

David turned to look at his father. They were sitting next to each
other on a worn out green sleeper sofa. The apartment smelled of frying
potatoes and cigarettes. He could hear his mother mumbling to herself out in
the tiny kitchen. He couldn’t tell what his father was thinking. His eyes went
back to the TV set.

“He looked evil.”

“He is evil.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“Vote Democrat.” .

The camera went tight on Nixon’s face, crept in on the long sloping
nose and the slashing eyebrows. And the sweat, all that sweat. How could
you believe anything from anyone who sweated liked that?

David had a teacher who sweated, a big red-faced ex-priest who
taught geography. David thought about the line of sweat that always went
across the teacher’s forehead, the pack of Marlboro’s always in his top
pocket, always a dark short-sleeved shirt that didn’t hide the sweat stains.
The teacher had made vague statements that hinted at socialist tendencies, an
unpopular stance in their conservative town. David distrusted him, but that
other kids hated and feared him. The class ran like a machine.

The last time David had the ex-priest’s class, it ran late. When he
stepped out of the classroom, the hall outside was full. A boy he knew by
sight, a football player, stepped up close and flicked David’s long hair with a
middle finger. “Boy or girl,” the football player said and didn’t wait for an
answer.

David looked at his father again.

“I can ’t vote Democrat,” he said. “I’m just a kid.”

* * *

.87.


AL Sl/Vl

They started up the stone walk that led to the next house and the
dog that lived there resumed barking. It was a big German shepherd, and it
watched them from a window next to the front door. Its massive head was
close to the glass and its broad paws were up on the sill. David caught the
dog’s eye and it growled and lunged and banged against the window. David
and MacInnis jumped back.

The dog abruptly stopped barking. MacInnis took a slow step
forward and rang the bell. The dog snarled and looked ready to lunge again,
then a deep voice boomed from the bowels of the house.

“Maaa-j or!” the voice said.

The dog disappeared from the window. Sharp footsteps came from
inside. An ugly man in a dark suit opened the door. Major was pacing behind
him, nails clicking on the hardwood.

“What’re ya selling?” the man said.

David and MacInnis stared at him.

“Out with it. You got ten seconds.”

“We’re going door-to-door representing Senator McGovern —”

“You people should all be rounded up and shot.”

He scowled at the long-haired David.

“I can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl.”

“It doesn’t matter till mating season,” David blurted.

The ugly man in the dark suit slammed the door.

* * *

Ten more houses. Another attack dog that barked and snarled from
behind a window. More people who yelled and slammed doors. One old man
who examined then with quiet contempt and slowly closed his door while
MacInnis was still talking. No one heard Jack MacInnis out. They were
called commies and pinkos and degenerates and hippies.

“One last house,” MacInnis said, “then we call this fiasco a day.”

The last house sat farther back from the street than its neighbors. It
was a ranch house built on a gentle slope, with a curving driveway and a
curving cement walk. They wound their way up the walk and MacInnis rapped
on the sheet metal bottom half of the screen door. Behind it a paneled wood
door stood open and the muffled sound of a radio announcer reading the
news came floating out.

They waited. The announcer’s voice stopped and classical music
followed. MacInnis rapped again, a little louder. Steps came from inside and
an old women appeared in the doorway, a small neat women with glasses and
white hair. They looked at her warily and she grew wary.

“Yes?” she said.

MacInnis cleared his throat.

.88.


F801 r of Pottt’tcs

“Good afternoon, ma’am. We’re going door-to-door representing
Senator McGovern.”

“Well you’re wasting your time here.”

It was as much of an opening as he’d had all day. MacInnis leaned
forward a little. His voice quavered slightly.

“Are you familiar with his views on the issues, ma’am?”

She waved her hand

“That’s not what I meant. I’m already voting for him. You’re
preaching to the choir.”

MacInnis wavered on his feet. He grew pale. He took a deep breath.

“Are you alright?” the women asked.

“It’s been a rotten day for us,” MacInnis said. “You wouldn’t
believe what people have said to us.”

The women shook her head.

“My neighbors?”

MacInnis and David both nodded.

“I believe it alright,” she said. “A rotten bunch. I’d like to move but
I can’t sell my house. Had it on the market for a year. Just gave up last week.
Guess I’m stuck here.”

David was dumbfounded. No adults he knew talked frankly about
finances. No adult ever admitted to problems with money, not even indirectly.
If you couldn’t sell your house, you pretended you couldn’t find another you
liked better. Words from his own father’s lips. He looked at MacInnis and
saw the same reaction on his face.

“I’m sorry,” MacInnis said.

The old women looked puzzled.

“For me?” she said, sounding a little cross.

MacInnis hesitated for a moment.

“For all of us,” he said.

His hands were shaking. David looked at the trembling hands, at the
tired set of MacInnis’ shoulders and the weary expression on his face. No
one said anything. The classical music oozed from the radio, inside the old
women’s unsellable house, muted by the intervening rooms. A car swept by,
hissing along on the still-damp street.

That was when David Newhouse realized that Jack MacInnis had
asked him along because no adult would go. The knowledge came with a
short hot stabbing sensation in his stomach. He looked again at the shaking
hands, raised his eyes to the drooped shoulders and the drawn face.

“Thank you, ma’am,” MacInnis said.

She nodded slightly but said nothing. They turned and went slowly
back down the curving walk, MacInnis in the lead. Halfway to the street,
David stopped and turned and looked back at the old women. She was vague
behind the screen door. She had always been vague behind it and he realized

.89.


AL SIM

he didn’t know her face, couldn’t see it in his mind.

“Good luck,” she called out.

Her voice was flat and disinterested. He wasn’t sure how she meant
it. A little chill went up his neck. He heard MacInnis turn to look at the old
women, heard the soles of the man’s shoes scuff on the cement walk.

“Thank you,” MacInnis called back.

She waved, so David waved too. Then he slowly turned away.
When he reached the street he looked back and the door was empty. The
muted music from the hidden radio was barely audible.

He hurried after MacInnis. The car was blocks away and fat
raindrops peppered the concrete.


SEAN HOEN

Owe Aftervwov» 1 Quit Spitt’wtg

In the early weeks, Morad Almari usually guided the load and I lifted
and pushed. He was smaller and could rarely carry his own in the back of the
industrial lumberyard where we knew one another, professionally, for a year
and some odd months. Typically the days were 9 hours, a half hour off-clock
for lunch, or barlife, depending on the employee. Morad and I worked the
back gate, which loaded smaller orders onto large flat-bed work trucks,
usually for independent contractors building replica “colonials” for the
subdivision craze of the Midwest.

Being the youngest men on the workforce, a crew that featured a
deep cast of drunks, junkies, ex-marines, sex offenders, barflies, and probably
an undiagnosed acute-schizophrenic or two, Morad and I were forced into
some form of co-dependence or another. We lifted wood for days at a time
and were confronted by giant men dressed in tattoos, beards, and beer-fats
telling us to “hurry up pussies.” There was the one-eyed biker, clad in leather
motorcycle vest with no shirt for nine months of the year, who insisted on a
weekly basis that we were queer and took turns on one another in the break-
room showers.

“Hey,” he’d slobber, his gumline receding to a yellow crust and film.
“You little girls take it up the mud-trail yet today? You get your little peckers
wet?”

It was the kind of situation where there was no choice but to let
matters slide when one of them said “nigger” two to three times in a sentence,
or when another talked of the “little fifteen year old chicken cunt” he’d “stick
it to” if he could “get away with it”. There wasn’t much forum for diplomacy,
at least not if a barely post-pubescent male wanted to live through the
workday. And in honesty, I didn’t care; amorality was a convenient anecdote
for a heinous workplace. I even laughed at some of their grime, like the
instance where this old fella, I forget his name, who had some strange
bacterial infection that turned the whites of his eyes yellow, brought in a pair
of his stepdaughter’s pink panties and let two or three of the staff sniff at their
crotch. The best bet, I concluded, was to hope, secretly, that one of them just
might flip their car, perhaps decapitating their meathead, or at least searing the
lining of their scrotum, during some excursion of reckless redneck drunk
driving.

The closest reality came to that was the time that Ken Sears, a
particularly husky white “rap artist”, was thrown twenty feet from a moving
vehicle during an accident in which the driver of the automobile was killed.
Apparently, according to Ken’s testimony of “according to the doctors”, he

.9/.


SEAN MADIGAN HOEN

would have died had he not been so heavily sedated. In other words: a) Ken
was so drunk that he slept through the accident and his limbs were, hence, so
limp that he somehow avoided injury, and that b) this information was
propaganda for the favorable correlation between excessive inebriation and
automobiles amongst the other employees. I believe that I even heard him say,
at one point during his boasting, that it was too bad he wasn’t awake to see
that “son of a bitch’s head roll,” when speaking of the respective, then
deceased, driver of the wrecked automobile.

Ken was at work for the 6am shift two days after the crash.

I showed five to ten minutes early every day of the workweek, and
watched the hard old workin’ men shoot warm vodka from bottles they kept in
their trunks, and made sure not to slip up. I was second to last on the
employee status pole and Morad, the skinny little Arab, was dead bottom. By
default, or perhaps the old bullshit-one-liner “adversity breeds camaraderie”,
Morad found some peculiar form of emotional investment in me, or, to be more
realistic, I became his sole source of relevant human correspondence, aside
from his family and the Mosque.

Morad was what those competent in psychoanalytic thought might
call a hysteric, an emotional mess whose perception of reality was filtered
through his very idiosyncratic, very uni-dimensional, very neurotic and erred
version of the “self”. Or is there such a thing as a flawed version of oneself?
Regardless, he talked too much and I learned more than I wanted to about
Mohammad his prophet, Allah his god, and the law of the Koran.

“The fucking Jews bro,” he’d wipe his head and grunt after each load
of two by fours. “The flicking Jews bro they took the land of our god and
wulla on my mother I would kill each last motherfuck.”

He explained that his paycheck went to his father, and then to the
Mosque, and thus to god, or Allah, or the Koran, or something noteworthy.
On occasion he’d sit and watch me load the truck without assistance.

A talent of mine is something I refer to as being able to control a
“slip-on” personality, to perform the act of social-chameleon. For Morad I
played the advocate, the inquisitive and naive white-boy, the all-American
fuck. It’s a form of manipulation, social strategy; it’s a lot like what I imagine
acting to be like only my setting is anywhere in real life and the cast are real
flesh and blood animals, particularly the dumb ones, like little Morad. At its
most rewarding moments, it’s better than the movies.

By the third week he had, involuntarily, moved on from his
harangues about the Koran and the faith of Islam and was well into sharing
his most interesting secrets with me; I played it wide-eyed and pulled a
heartstring or two when necessary. Aside from the occasional “hurry up
faggots” bellowed by a nameless lumber-thug I rather enjoyed the better part
of my days, Morad being an interesting case indeed. He described to me a
dream he had in which he came upon a giant mass of veiny, varicose, cellulite

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Owe Aftermovu I Quit SP’Ltt’u/tq

stricken flesh. The mass, he explained, was the size of a two-story home,
located at the bottom of which was a small opening the size of an apple. This
opening, or hole, this entrance to the inside of the flesh edifice was, he went
on to say, bruised profusely around the perimeter of its mouth. Not only that,
but affixed to the surface of the gristly flesh-house were two iron handles, one
fastened to each side of the opening by industrial size bolts that appeared
deeply studded into the mound of skin.

I paused several times, pretending to pick splinters from my palms,

. hoping to process and retain every image, every last word of his dramatic
depiction. I controlled an interested, yet rather unaffected expression and
asserted “really?” and “Hmm” at a few choice moments.

“And I swear bro,” he went on, ranting more profusely than usual. “I
stepped up to that fucking thing bro, and I fucked the shit out of it! I fucked it
like a white girl bro!”

He was proud of his work, if only in dream, and crusty White matter
and saliva fell from his mouth as he went on about how he wailed and
gnashed his teeth, and smacked his hairless thighs against the great sea of
fleshy tissue, about how the iron bolts seeped with white juice and blood
each time he pulled them. He said he shook those handles so fiercely that he
watched the mass ripple and shake above him in waves of pulsating lard, that
viscous secretions splashed his face, that at one point he pressed his sweaty
face against the surface of the blob and bit at its loose skin, puncturing its
greasy surface with his pointy teeth and yielding a mouthful of wiry little
black hairs and gristle.

Lunch break interrupted him sometime, I suspect, just before he was
about to reenact his triumphant ejaculation. We headed for the break room,
where he drank brown goat’s milk from a plastic bag and ate odorous lamb
sandwiches, and we spoke nothing more of his dream of the giant organism of
raped skin that day.

The staff began to harbor a nasty distaste for Morad and me. We
were summer hire-ons that had stayed months past our time and occasionally
cost them potential overtime hours. In addition to that, Morad was the only
non-Caucasian in the yard, and I’m certain that I heard “race traitor” muttered
my way once or twice under breaths of redman chaw and whisky.

My sessions with Morad, however, progressed rapidly in detail and I
also learned that the faster he spoke and the more enamored he became by his
own accounts, the more he forgot to complain and the faster he worked. So I
prodded and cued, vicariously, for his information and he supplied in epic
portions, in winded dramatic diatribes of perversity and self-expression. Often
times he even stopped acknowledging the giant White men who called him
their “little Arabian honey,” who stuck nails into his bags of goats milk,
causing them to sputter and leak when he’d grab them at lunchtime. I think
that he’d, at times, even forgotten about the Jews and what they’d done to

.93.


SEAN MADIGAN HOEN

Israel. It came to a point where I barely had to say anything to him
throughout the work of the day; no report, no mutual exchange, no dialogue
but... monologue. I simply kept my eyes wide and exclaimed “Christ!” during
the good parts. And he recounted to me his darkest wishes of pain to his
family, his love for money and his fear of Allah, that he liked to stand ear-to—
the-door while listening to his younger sister piss, and he loaded the lumber
onto those trucks at double speed.

He eventually confided to me that, prior to worship on Sunday, he
had a private ritual of sticking pins into himself; tiny little tacks that he stole
from factory-packaged dress shirts he’d try on at local department stores.
Morad would ride the bus to a strip mall, pick out several items of clothing at a
lowbrow clothing store, enter the fitting rooms, and pull each and every one
of those little pins that are used to fasten the cuffs and collars to cardboard
supports for retail display. An interesting behavior indeed; however,
nowhere near as striking as the manner in which he stuck himself with the little
needles.

According to his testimonies, as told there in the back of the
lumberyard, Morad had invented some bizarre form of acupuncture. It was a
meditation “not for Allah but for myself” he asserted. What his ritual was
composed of sounded, to me, like sado-masochism. To Morad it was
something else, his Vicarious masturbation, his method of self-love, a
sublimation of his sexual frustration, something else.. Christ, or Mohammad
rather, only knows.

I don’t think it’s culturally acceptable for Islamics to jerk-off.

“I do it and so fucking what?” he’d say, speaking to the ground,
speaking to the wood, usually with a little black goatee growing on his face.
“I take each little pin and stick it in my big blue vein and I fuckin’ started with
eight and I do fifteen now, fuckin’ fifteen pins in my vein!”

He spoke to me about his fetish for weeks, his shaky alto, with which
he tried desperately for the tenor range, bellowing louder by the shift. I rarely
said anything. I arched my brows and shrugged my head with a “huh, that’s
interesting” motion, and I ate every last word of his bizarre tirades, his oral
journals into sexual perversion, self-righteousness, and theological grief. Our
relations progressed to a point where each day he would begin without formal
greeting, without a briefing on the day’s workload, without even a comment
on the new black eye that “half-life” Ken or some other lumber-ogre had
walked in wearing.

Morad would simply slide his work gloves on, begin untying the
day’s first load, and commence with something like:

“I stick them pins in my flicking cock and I don’t even give a fuck
bro,” white crust spattering into his patchy black chin hair. “I swear to Allah I
do and so fucking what!”

I learned later that the most typical age-range for the onset of mental

.94.


om AftervaI/L l wtt SPL’C‘tLI/Lg

illness is between 19 and 22 for males in most cultures. Morad was 20;
however, I’d deem it much more likely that he was plagued with a rather
dangerous amalgamation of bad American culture, a painfiilly stiff cock, and
the omnipotent gaze and whisper of the great Allah. It can only be speculated
what the equation of a twice-a-day bus ride of malt liquor bottles and bathing
suit billboards, too many afternoons of cable television, secondhand Atari
Video games, liquor-store porn magazines, and ball—busting-harley-davidson-
confederate-flag-tattooed—good-ole—boy-coworkers would calculate to when
introduced to a skinny young Islamic boy who skipped off a plane at age
twelve and prayed to Allah twice a day, bowing east and waiting for his family
to arrange for him an irresistible marriage to a sweet young Yeminese girl
Whose leg-skin had never been burned by the eyes of man.

Word around the yard grew quickly that Morad was a “sick queer
fuck” and that he talked, to me nonetheless, about “fucking himself with
knives.”

By the time our partnership, or co-work, was nearing the year and a
quarter mark my tolerance and interest was wearing thin with Morad. It
occurred to me, more than once, that, by allowing him to spill the bowels of
his mind’s most twisted conscious material to me, I had also backed myself
into a situational corner with the pseudo-personality I had invented for our
relationship. Moreover, any attempts I made to liberate myself from my
contrived social role were entirely ignored by Morad. His interaction with me
perpetuated to such extremities that it had little to do with me or my physical
presence; rather, I was somehow a lucky charm of some kind, a variable that
allowed the porthole of his subconscious energy to open and vomit in the
form of his uninhibited rants.

It was somehow ironic that, just weeks before I walked off the job
site with nothing to show for my work but splintered palms and a head full of
Morad’s evils, there was an incident involving Morad that ultimately led to
our separation, and the end of his oral expulsions. Though his removal from
the back-gate post of the yard came months too late for the emancipation of
my thoughts from the imagery of Morad’s hells, the event leading to the end
of our relations is essential to one’s critical understanding of this tale.

On a particular aftemoon, upon close-up time, Morad stripped and
began his shower as, I assume, he did most of his days there. Typically the
only occasion any of the other employees made use of the provided shower
spigots were when one of them had a meeting with a probation officer, or
when one of them claimed he had a “hot piece of ass” waiting for him. Morad
was the only regular on the tiles. So it was an interesting pairing when the
white rap artist and car-wreck survivor Ken Sears strode into the mist, hung
his towel, and shook himself.

Perhaps there was an exchange or some sort, something like “don’t
be looking this way you little queer” or “I’ll bet you get it on with yourself

.95.


SEAN MADIGAN HOEN

every day in here don’t ‘cha freak” but I can’t be certain. Whatever the
particulars, Morad would have kept his mouth shut and his eyes to his own
skin and hairs.

What I believe to be my most accurate supposition of what
happened next is that, while drying himself and feeling some small sense of
invasion for having been nude and lathered in the same tile cell as Morad, big
Ken glanced up and caught a brief glace at Morad’s skinny, slimy,
uncircumcised cock and went mad.

Ken Sears twisted his towel fiercely, wound it until it was a tight
cotton whip, pulled back and with all his whisky-fighting-mad-deer-hunting-
gusto cracked his makeshift whip with a violent snap, lashing Morad in the
vicinity of his genitalia.

By the time the rest of the crew had'staggered into the employee
breakroom and huddled around the entrance to the shower, Morad’s wailing
and shrilling had stilled to a damp, muffled huffing. I caught sight of him
crumpled on his side on the floor of the shower, water pounding his greasy
hair and oil and tears dripping from his yellow skin. He was holding himself,
his groin, with both hands and was not moving.

Every staff member present was silent, puzzled looks on their faces.
Ken dressed himself, not saying a word, Morad was hacking on every tenth
breath or so. The assistant to the general manager was summoned and walked
in, with a professional strut, tens of minutes later. He walked directly to the
shower, turned the water off and kneeled down to Morad, who had not moved
and seemed to be feigning dead, aside from a sporadic cough or hack.

“Son,” said the assistant to the general manager. “Let me see.”

Morad quivered and shook his head, his ass cheeks and knees
shivering.

“Son, goddamnit let me see!”

And with that Morad peeled back his hands from his crotch and
every last man present groaned and cursed. The bent knees of the assistant
to the general manager shot out, and he sprung up.

“Fucking christ!” he said.

We turned our heads, and in our minds pet our own parts and
thanked the stars, and christs, and Mohammads that ours were safe, that the
stalks of our manlihood were unscathed (aside from those present who had
contracted some STD or another). And then we all looked back, unable to
turn ourselves from spidered red veins and tender pink lashes on the shaft of
Morad’s penis. I thought for a moment that perhaps the tender imposition
made by every last pin hole he’d ever stuck into himself might burst at that
moment and that small pressurized streams of blood and urine and other fluids
might spray from his crooked vessel, that the dirty tiles of the shower walls
would be painted with his foul liquids, spraying wildly from the untrimmed
skin of his sex muscle.

.96.


om Affirm/00m. I Quit SP’Ltt'Ll/Lq

“Jesus, he’s busted a blood vessel!” one of them uttered, gawking,
nauseated.

The assistant to the general manager composed him self, bent over,
and scooped Morad up in his arms, turning his head as he held him to avoid a
direct view of the wounds.

Morad was carried out of the breakroom nude and wet, panting and
squeezing his eyes shut. The assistant to the general manager drove him off
in a work truck and the only aftermath was a group of bewildered men shaking
their heads and grunting in disbelief, a few latecomers strolling in from the
yard to ask what had happened.

The administration assigned Morad a new position, one where he’d
be safe, a task that he could complete at his own rate.

I was assigned a new partner at the back gate of the yard, a failed
rock musician who asked once or twice “what’s up with that crazy Buddhist
who cleans the toilets.”

Ken and the others left Morad to himself, to his muttering about
Allah and his showering alone. About once a week someone would plug up
the toilet with tremendous piles of lumberj ack sized dung and toilet paper
wads, just to hear Morad wail and curse the walls.

He never spoke to me again, not a word of new developments in his
psyche, not even a whisper or two of his pinholes.

I walked off the site, unannounced, a few weeks after the lashing. I
stuck a nail into a bag of Morad’s brown goats milk on my way out the door.

.97.


MARLENE M. MILLER

Ht mg as

Mrs. Claudia Greenwood was closing in on one hundred years but
she had never before heard such a sound. The lowest, longest,
oddest... groan. A single continuous groan, produced by neither man nor
beast. A sort of archaeological groan, coming down through ages and ages,
resonating from someplace deep between the big old rib bones of time itself.

She wondered if she should be alarmed and she tried to be, for a
minute or two. Yet she couldn’t manage even a prickle of apprehension.
Nothing much frightened her, not anymore. It had been years since she made
the passage from being elderly and anxious to being half-ghost and almost
devil-may-care.

Before the odd groaning sound even ended, she went back quietly to
what she was doing. Most of her life she had been a person of quiet, often
silent, movements. Now her movements were also very slow. She really had no
idea how long she had been here, going through her papers. The parchment
of her skin was too fragile now for her to wear a watch on her wrist and it
didn’t seem worth the trouble to go looking for the one she kept in her purse.
Certainly she was in no hurry to get back to the convalescent home. Someone
would be in soon enough to tell her when it was time to go.

Without any difficulty, she let the whole matter slip from her
awareness and concentrated once again with satisfaction and fondness on
the orderly remnants of her days. This was the reward for growing old. All the
great swirling confusion of living, all the choices and defaults, the earnest ‘
strategies and cool evasions, had reduced themselves to the simplicity of a
few papers. Here, for example, was the paper about the plot in the cemetery
next to Mr. Greenwood’s. She saw the grassy rectangle every time she visited
her husband’s grave; her name already on the headstone beside his; one of
the two years that would sum her up already carved into the black marble.
Birth and death. The latter had only to be recorded with the chisel. There
remained nothing fiirther for her to do; the atoms of her body would disperse
themselves into the universe and her future for eons and eons would be
arranged.

And over here were the papers that would see to the fate of her
possessions just as surely. Everything would be going to her last two
remaining relatives, a niece and a nephew, the children of her sister June. She
still saw them each year at Christmas and every so often one or both of them
would spend a day with her in the summer. Whenever they were all three
together, Mrs. Greenwood would at some point or another feel herself on the
verge of drawing back the lid and opening up the past to them like an old
cask. She would so like to know what they made of it. They were both in their

.98.


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fifties now, and getting up there themselves and less apt to blame her. Not that
blame was something stopping her anymore.

Then there was this stack of narrow envelopes over here. They held
the papers that were in fact a large part of what would be going to her heirs.
Even after so much time, they struck her as incredible. Bonds. Her husband
had explained them and later she had read more about them and understood
them, basically. But that didn’t change their strangeness. Every three months,
with a pair of silver pocket scissors brought for the task, she carefully clipped
the coupons and put them in her purse and sent them off the next day to a
particular address and, 10, back would come a particular amount of money and
fly straight into her bank account like clockwork and then fly straight out
again to pay her obligations somehow—she never saw a bill anymore. One
year to the next, all she had to go on was the clipping and mailing, and it must
be a long time ago now that the people in accounting had tried to tell her there
was no need for even this; it could all be handled by electronic gadgetry. She
had stared at them incredulously. Did they really have no sense of the ghostly
need for rituals? No inkling what these pieces of paper connected to? Mr.
Greenwood had been president of this very institution, Voyager Bank and
Trust. Did they, these men and women of the world nodding at her over
immaculate collars, really have no idea what the little coupons must have cost
him?

And this, the large heavy envelope. It held the deed to the house
two doors down from here where she had spent most of her married life. The
house was hers; the piece of paper said so, although she had not lived there
for decades. The rent from it had helped to pay for the assisted-living place
she moved to for convenience when she was seventy-three and then for the
convalescent place where she was now. She had been persuaded to relocate
from one to the other upon turning eighty-five, not because she had started to
feel all that unwell but because she had started to look like she might at any
moment. Oh, that’s just looks, she had wanted to tell them. But how do you
explain to people who believe you are a wisp of straw that in truth you have
become more reliable than ever? How do you explain that when you were
young and beaming, calm as an eternal principle, it was your pleasant face
which hid the ruse completely? And that now when you are old and actually
living that principle, tranquil and steadfast, it is your nervous lips and your
eyes with a tremor in their pale and watery depths fooling everyone.

She opened the box and put the papers back in, arranging everything
tidily side by side. There was plenty of room; the contents of her life no
longer filled even a small container, so distilled were they to the essentials.
She closed the lid and turned the key and rose to her feet, pausing a moment
to gather her intentions and concentrate the physical powers that remained to
her. She picked up her purse with one hand and the box with the other and,
thus balanced, she set off down the aisles of booths and tables and chairs.

.99.


MARLENE M. MILLER

She would make it a point to round up young Ellie Hansen who was her
current favorite among the bank staff. Ellie had been busy with a customer
when she came in and a new person had taken down her box. But arrival
didn’t matter as much as departure. It was when she was done and heading
home that Ellie’s boundless energy had the most importance. Ellie would
immediately relieve her of the box and dash to return it to its miniature crypt
and dash back to call Mrs. Greenwood a cab, then pop down to the lunch
room and make them both a cup of tea so they could sip and have a little chat
while Mrs. Greenwood waited. Ellie did all this without being asked. Mrs.
Greenwood had only to present herself with box in hand. The others, while
very polite, had to be asked each thing, each and every time, as though their
memories were dubious and risky and best not subjected to any strain. This
secretly amazed Mrs. Greenwood who had built her whole world, it seemed, on
a vigilant attentiveness to what came before.

Her careful steps slowed, then came to an uncertain halt. She had
traversed the entire length of the outer vault. Wherever was the door?
Wherever was the wide gap that opened out onto the nice carpeted area with
employees behind their desks? She turned and retraced a few steps and
stopped again. The door had disappeared, it was gone...and then she saw the
circular handle shaped like a ship’s wheel and she realized the door was not
gone but closed. She had never seen it closed before. It took her a moment to
believe her eyes. She put her things down on one of the tables and went to
grasp the handle tightly but it would not budge, not the slightest give. The
heavy door was closed and locked. She went back to her purse and fumbled
around for her watch and drew it out. Six-forty! Quitting time was six! Ellie and
the rest were no longer even in the building. They had forgotten all about her,
there in the back booth, quiet as a mouse. She felt the rage flare up in her.
Why was she always quiet as a goddamned mouse?

She was so furious with herself she stood there in a perfect blaze of
anger. She should have spoken up, made her presence known; established her
part, her claim in what was going on around her. Instead she had hovered in
the background, lost in her little world and only vaguely aware of the larger
one. How like that other time just before a door shut in her life. She hadn’t
even been aware her husband was on the phone at first. He seemed to be
merely standing with his back to the room, gazing out the window by the
desk. Quiet as a mouse she had slipped in to look for a book on the shelf,
intending to get what she came for as quickly as possible and leave without
any sign that she had been there. So absorbed was she in being silent, she
very nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard his businesslike voice ring
out.

“We’re not going to have trouble with the Oak Street loan,” he said
loudly and distinctly. There was a pause as he listened to the response on the
other end.

./w.


HLVLQ as

“How many are we talking about?” he said and there was another,
shorter pause during which he straightened from his relaxed stance.

“You know as well as I do the minute you give credence to
something like that...”

Then he turned and saw her standing by the shelf. Although there
was no outward show of it, she knew he was deeply surprised to discover he
was not alone. They exchanged a steady look. She raised the book in her hand
to indicate what she had come for and he nodded to her with the phone at his
ear. Quietly she left the room.

Something like what? A person fully alive and present in the world
would have asked that question as soon as the call was finished. But she
hadn’t asked it and neither of them had referred to the call again. What was it
she had been tiptoeing around then? What was it still?

She had not felt so angry in a long time and the very extremity of the
emotion made it start to dissipate. She could sense herself returning like a
homing pigeon to a calm that seemed now less trustworthy. So would she be
all right? They had shut her up in the vault, for god’s sake. Would she really
be all right? She down in a chair and took inventory, the way you do when
you find yourself suddenly lost in the middle of a huge airport, to see if you
are still the same person you were before you realized your predicament. Do I
have my coat, my glasses, my tickets, my bag—and my wits, are they still
about me? Okay, you say and quite literally collect yourself so the pieces that
were threatening to fly off could settle down.

Okay, yes, she would be all right, she said to herself, and took a
breath and looked around the room bleakly. She did so long for that cup of tea
and the little chat with Ellie. But she would be all right. The space was
ventilated and not that cold and they would open the door in the morning
because today was Thursday, thank god, and not Friday when the bank
would be closed for two days.

She cast about for something else to bolster her courage and it came
back to her that she had a precedent to comfort her. Mr. Greenwood had had
the very same thing happen to him once when he was deep at work in the
inner vault which held the currency and certificates and such. He had
survived the experience; “none the worse for wear,” he had said, and had sat
down to a big breakfast without another word. She remembered thinking at the
time there should have been more to it, what with the police checking the
morgue and her worrying half to death. But then death was generous and life
was withholding. Even now she knew she would react the exact same way
tomorrow, wanting nothing but that cup of tea and some good buttered toast
and an end to the concerned inquiry.

Her lips curved in a smile and her old blue eyes glinted with mischief
as she thought of the state they would be in back at the convalescent home.
They would have no idea where she was. She had taken a cab to her doctor’s

'/0/'


MARLENE M. MILLER

appointment and coming out afterwards she had seen a bus waiting at the
stop and she had simply boarded it on a whim, the joints in her legs and hips
distinctly creaky but still equal to the task. Mercifully, there had been a vacant
seat right next to the door with a pole on one side to steady her against the '
swaying. After a mile or so streamed by the window, she had noticed they
were coming to a halt in front of Voyager Bank and Trust. Immediately she had
grasped the pole and pulled herself up and clambered down the steps without
thinking of anything other than the fact that the afternoon was still young.
She could visit her precious box with its sparse but very real treasures and call
a cab when she was done and be home in time for dinner.

She reached out a hand now to touch the smooth metal and absorb
from it the familiar reassurance. She slid her chair in closer and raised the lid
and drew out not a piece of paper this time but a tiny velvet case. Inside was a
gold band inset with three diamond chips. Her skin was too fragile these days
even for this, but she could put it on here for a little bit. Much later in their
marriage, Mr. Greenwood bought her a ring with a large stone and a matching
platinum band and insisted on her wearing them for social occasions. But that
was jewelry. This was her wedding ring.

She took out the other velvet case, the one that held the jewelry
rings, and opened it to the light and held it at an angle to catch the blue-white
sparkle of the solitaire. Marriage costs a person so much, she mused,
although she didn’t know what the cost of these had been, could not even
guess. She would never know their worth. They would pass to her niece who
could do with them as she pleased: sell them, recast them into something else,
fit them to her own finger to wear for a while or forever. Mrs. Greenwood
didn’t care what happened to the jewelry rings other than to hope they were
of some benefit. The wedding ring, however, would be buried with her.

Mr. Greenwood, she said to him in her mind, you can rest easy; we
did well by my sister’s children. And she knew she did not have to add: even
if we did not do well by my sister. She did not have to mention anything about
her sister, but still she wanted to. She wanted to find the words, the ones
intended for her husband, sometime before she died. He could not need them
now, of course, but she did, she needed them. For the dream still came to her
and she would like to go beyond it before she died. It didn’t frighten her, not
anymore—after all it was just another form of the memory. Yet while it didn’t
frighten her anymore, it also didn’t let her rest. It came as a messenger bearing
a key to release the words...release her to find them. She had already searched
every inch of the terrain available to her. She would have to be released into a
portion—however modest in size—-—of what lay beyond.

She would have to get outside or past the main scene, to alter it, if
not abolish it. For the dream consisted of just that: the main scene. Those few
pivotal moments. With nothing augmented or embellished by imagination.
With nothing left out. Once again she would see the three people, each of

./a2.


H’L mm as

their faces, each shift of expression, each look exchanged. She would hear the
conversation, first one person speaking, then the other. She would hear her
sister ask her: “Claudia, what do you say? I’ll do whatever you say.” She
would see her sister’s eyes as she spoke, the complete trust and naturalness
that came from gazing all the way back to childhood. They reflected her own
eyes like mirrors. She had no doubt that if the situation had been reversed,
she would have asked the same thing: “June, what do you say?”

For in essence the sisters had always had this question between
them. They were only fourteen months apart in age, June the younger, which
had some significance in childhood and then later on, came to seem as
nothing. Eventually June grew to be the taller one and the one with the more
hearty manner. But through their early years they were similar in appearance
and speech, one often echoing the other in what was said, the gestures made.
They talked together constantly, easily, but they also developed a more
intuitive language, communicated through the eyes. This second language
expressed all kinds of things—secret laughter, approval, warning, awe,
bewilderment, even ill health, even physical states like being full or thirsty,
feeling hot or cold or antsy or tired. Just the eyes could convey so much and
what a handy way to communicate over and around the adults; what a handy
way to give each other signals and bits of information when they were with
their friends. This second language could sometimes say what the first
language could not or would not say. It was like a current connecting them
through sympathy and mutual confidence.

It was this current, this intangible lifeline that had been severed. It
happened in the blink of an eye. In the blink of an eye that did not look out,
but instead looked down. A running-away eye...escaping instead of meeting
and speaking. A mute eye.

The dream always ended in that split second when June began to
understand what had occurred. Life itself went on after that, of course, but the
dream did not; the dream ended at the point when everything stopped being
the same. To this day she did not know whether she had simply been
incapable of maintaining the pretense or whether she had intentionally let
June see through it. For she had known that not raising her eyes would be
filled with meaning. And she had done it anyway, kept them downcast. She
had known it would tell June everything that mattered, or rather it would begin
to tell her, because June didn’t really want to believe it at first, so thoroughly
did it close off an entire realm they had thought of as their own.

Sighing now, she rubbed her hand. Her skin was bothering her. She ,
took off the ring and massaged the impression it left on her finger. Every little
thing seemed to imprint her these days. She had the receptivity of a baby,
without the litheness and resiliency. It made her bone- tired sometimes. And
this had been such a long day and would be such a long night. With difficulty
she leaned forward and pulled over a second chair and stiffly brought up one

'/03'


MARLENE M. MILLER

leg and then the other to rest them on it. Sitting back, she buttoned her
sweater and drew down the cuffs over her wrists for warmth. She gave in to
the fatigue, let it wash through her. Vacantly she stared down at the pattern of
the sweater’s weave—row upon row of interlocking cable stitches in white
yarn. Suddenly, astonishingly, a beautiful drop of rain fell on the yarn and sat
there glistening. Or maybe it was a drop of dew, she thought in wonderment
and had a vivid recollection of the white roses behind the old house in the
morning. Another drop fell and then another and she realized they were tears.
She was crying. An ancient baby crying with weariness. An old Hamlet
knitting and knitting up the raveled sleeve of care, seeking release. She closed
her eyes and let the tears bathe them and finally the tears ceased.

“Ah,” Jeffrey said turning, “Claudia’s here.”

She smiled at her husband from the doorway.

“Come and try one,” June beckoned toward a dish of cookies. “I
made these from a new recipe. Much closer to grandmother’s, don’t you
think? That hint of crispness?”

She went over and selected one and chewed judiciously and
swallowed. “Yep, I think you’ve finally done it.”

“Oh good, now I can die in peace.” June laughed and looked around
at the two men, knowing they were impatient with all this. “Okay, Ed,” she said
to her husband and continued to beam at everyone because she still had
perfect faith.

“Actually, Claudia,” he cleared his throat, “we stopped by to talk to
Jeffrey about the Oak Street project.”

“Did you?” she smiled at him not taking the situation any more
seriously than her sister. Because so what if they had come to talk? It was
only natural. The project had just gotten underway—right on schedule, so
there was nothing to worry about there, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a
lot to talk about. ‘

“They broke ground. The equipment’s out on the site, and a full
contingent of workers.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “I drove by yesterday.”

“But it’s not settled yet. That thing with the planning commission.”

She glanced quickly over at Jeffrey. His eyes met hers steadily and
he spoke calmly, each word balanced and measured. “Ed has been inquiring
about the number of houses going in.”

She looked again to Ed, “Number?”

“There’s a rumor going around that they won’t allow as many as we
had thought.”

“Does it matter exactly how many? A few more or less...”

“No, no,” he shook his head, “significantly less. Not even half what

./04(.


H’L mg as

we thought originally and I have that from a pretty good source, someone
who works for the city.”

Again she looked at Jeffrey and his words were spoken to her
directly.

“I’ve been telling Ed they always go around and around. But the city
honors its commitments in the end. A certain number of homes were agreed to
and the developer proceeded on that basis and everybody knows they’re
going to stick with it, a few homes more or less.”

She nodded and turned to Ed, “It will be a beautiful shopping center,
trees and flowers, good parking, really an asset to the community.”

“I’m not questioning that,” he said stubbornly. “There’s nothing
wrong with the project itself. Hell, it’s great, we’re all in love with it, maybe
that’s the problem. But if enough homes don’t go in, it doesn’t stand a prayer.
It’ll be one of those half-leased ghost towns that...”

“Oh, Ed,” June broke in genuinely distressed.

“I’m sorry, June, but this means a lot to us. It’s a big portion of our
savings.”

“But...”

“I’m only being careful,” he said earnestly. “We can always invest
later, after these issues have been settled and we know what we’re actually
talking about.”

“I’m not sure investing later will be possible,” Jeffrey said calmly.
“Nor would you probably want to. It’s only getting in at this point that makes
it lucrative. If you invest when everybody else does, the return will be nothing
very exciting. You might as well put your money in bonds.”

“Maybe bonds would be the best idea anyway,” Ed said to June and
attempted a little humor. “Maybe we’re not the exciting type.”

June smiled at him uncertainly. “Maybe we’re not. You know me,
Claudia,” she turned to her sister and her smile deepened, “salt of the earth.
You were always the smart one, dreaming up things for both of us.”

She wanted to protest that it only seemed that way because the older
child has a bit of an edge temporarily. She wanted to say that all the bright
ideas she had had when she was young hinged on June, that they didn’t
mean much without her infusion of interest. But before she could formulate
the words, Jeffrey began speaking.

“This whole opportunity slipping away because of a rumor. There’s
been nothing about a change of plan and both the bank and the developer
have far better information than a city employee. Naturally this discussion is
perfectly okay but there really is no reason for it. We’re all losing sight of the
fact there is no reason.”

And this time Jeffrey did not look at her, even though she was
looking at him. She needed him to return her gaze, to somehow reassure
her that she had heard him correctly. Because how could he say there

'/05'


MARLENE M. MILLER

was no reason. None at all...how could he say that?

He picked up his cup on the table before him and took a sip from it
and still did not look her way. Jeffrey, she called to him silently, please tell me.
But he seemed concerned only with his coffee which would be cold by now
and it was so hard to tear her eyes from him, as she knew she must, and turn
to June.

“June?” Ed said.

But June did not look at him. “Claudia, what do you say? I’ll do what
you say.”

She saw that Ed’s attention continued to be fixed on his wife even
though his heart had broken, just a little, just a crack, at the refusal, as
hers had a moment ago with Jeffrey. And who will look at whom,
beseechingly, demandingly, and who will refuse and for what reason?

“It will be a beautiful shopping center,” she met June’s eyes as she
said this and she knew it was the eyes that conveyed her meaning to her
sister more than the words.

“All right then. It’s all right by me. That’s my vote.”

“All right then,” Ed said and he spoke forcefully. In that instant of
hurt, he had made his decision just as she, Claudia, had. He decided not on
the shopping center but on his wife, and he went along with it after that
without much resistance.

Jeffrey, smiling broadly, said, “We’re going to take you two to dinner
because I know Claudia doesn’t feel like cooking and all of this has taken us
to the point where we’re starving, at least I know I am. And how about
dancing? Why don’t we go downtown, someplace nice? Make a night of it.”

June smiled happily at Jeffrey first, and then at Ed, and then she
turned to her sister without the slightest doubt, “I could handle that, couldn’t
you, Claudia?”

“Oh yes,” she said. And she did not look up from what she was
doing, clearing the coffee cups.

She sat bolt upright. Perhaps it was the alien environment. Perhaps it
was the stuffy air or the miserably uncomfortable chair. Never before had she
seemed to awaken with such a start. There was none of the usual grogginess,
the half-deadness of her aged cells struggling to rouse themselves yet again.
She was immediately and terribly on edge. She could hardly contain herself. In
the otherwise soundless room, she seemed to hear someone speaking;
someone telling her to get up and look around; to look closer even though
she had been here many times and had never noticed anything other than the
drab furniture and the walls of metal boxes. “Let’s be alert now, Mrs.
Greenwood,” she seemed to hear her husband’s voice and no sooner did she
recognize it as his than the overheads flicked off, leaving only a small

'/06'


Hit/M Cs

yellowish light on the far wall. And now she remembered him mentioning that
he had had them install a night light, which was to remain on even after the
others were turned off at the master switch by the guard making his final
check. She thought of the guard, another human being in the building at this
very moment, and she was nearly overwhelmed by an impulse to start
screaming and pounding on the walls even though she knew from her
husband it would do no good. The vault was several feet thick in every
direction and soundproof as a sealed-up cave. It came back to her, what else
he had said, years after the event. The one thing that bothered him a little, he
had said, was the total blackness. All at once she realized just how much he
had hated being trapped in this space. All at once she realized more fully than
ever before what a profoundly wary and proud and thorough and determined
man he had been.

“Let’s be alert now, Mrs. Greenwood,” she heard his voice and it
seemed to urge her toward the door of the inner vault where he had been
working. But that was locked too and what interest would she have in the
contents anyway—and even as she thought this, she was walking over to
inspect the door more closely. She began feeling around its curved perimeter
which was surrounded by a facade of smooth tiles. She ran her hands over the
tiles, on one side of the door and then the other, prodding them with her
fingertips, clawing gently at the grout with her nails until she sensed one tile
that was ever so slightly out of line. She began to push on it, at first a little
and then with all the strength she had. Suddenly there was a loud grating
noise and a block of several rows opened out, revealing a set of narrow stairs.
Slowly and stiffly, but without hesitation, she climbed down and followed a
passageway that led after a few minutes to a door edged with light. She turned
the handle and passed into the guest room of the old house. She knew now
that they were waiting for her, just as they had before. She went through and
down the hall and with each step, she became less stiff and slow until she was
actually hurrying along. She came to the doorway of the livingroom and
paused and they all turned, just as they had before.

“Ah, Claudia’s here.”

She smiled at her husband from the doorway. Since he had first
spoken those words she had had more than half a century of remembering and
dreaming. Can you tell, Jeffrey, that not much frightens me anymore?

“Come and try one,” June beckoned and she obeyed gladly and
asked her sister with her eyes: this time I will find another way, won’t I? All
these years, June, I’ve believed there was another way.

“Actually, Claudia...” Ed started in and she was ready and all but
repeating the words with him. I am listening, Ed. With proper attention. It
won’t be like the last time when I thought nothing could ever really happen to
change us. Remember when I had the luxury of thinking like that? Those days
of unearned grace?

'/07'


MARLENE M. MILLER

“They broke ground. The equipment’s out on the site...”

She nodded, thoughtful, neutral, knowing it was not necessary to
smile, to agree. Pity I used to regard myself as charming; it got in my way. I
apologize for the demureness...the frivolessness. Now I know what you were
saying, Ed. What you were being. Mindful, careful, prepared to alter your
course if something shifted, if there was danger, if real life stretched ahead
with its precipices and Whirlpools. I know because your thought process
became my own, though much later. I’ve often wondered how you had that
share of wisdom. Was I so very slow, even then?

“But it’s not settled yet. That thing with the planning commission.”

She glanced quickly over at Jeffrey. Of course it’s not settled, we
know that, don’t we? Canvwe set it in motion now, my darling, this other way
I’ve been hoping for for years?

His eyes met hers steadily. “Ed has been inquiring about the number of
houses going in.”

Strange how, the first time around, she had noticed only June’s eyes
but now it was her husband’s she saw—his eyes that filled the world, or
rather became the world, for her. She saw in them the early light, the ardor of
their first years of marriage, and she caught her breath, taken aback by what
she had forgotten, that early warm spontaneous light in his eyes. She knew it
was the same light that shone unselfconsciously from her own eyes, a clear
light, open and sincere as a matter of course because there was as yet nothing
to doubt, to avoid; as yet no partitions. What exactly had transpired back
then? Was this the precise moment the questioning began, the lost wandering
of her look and tone? Had it been the usual lack of alertness? Or had she
really not understood?

“Number?” she had to ask again just as she had before.

“There’s a rumor....” And yes, she knew there must be. A rumor.
Something vague, circulating in their lives, and in her mind. She was trying to
make it explicit, make it clear, just as Ed had tried. She was even now trying to
determine what counted.

“Does it matter exactly how many? A few more or less...”

“No, no,” he shook his head. “Not even half,” he said to impress
upon her in no uncertain terms what loomed ahead.

Nevertheless she looked to Jeffrey and when he said, “the city
honors its commitments in the end,” she wanted to accept it as an axiom, just
as he wanted to. And now she remembered how much she had tried to bring
Ed over to that vision of it too, over to the lovely story, telling a lovely story,
why not? “It will be a beautiful shopping center.”

“I’m not questioning that...but if enough houses don’t go in,” he
said. Dear stubborn man, insisting on relevance. What a good excuse you had
for bitterness. I’m sorry, I truly am, but even so...I can’t help thinking you
were not the one I hurt most in the end. Nothing I said or did was going to

'/08'


Himqes

force you off that mark of yours .' How unimpressionable you were! You grew
larger, looser—a nice baggy spirit all your own. I envied it more than once.

“Oh, Ed,” June broke in genuinely distressed.

And now somehow it begins for real, just as it did before; the real
stakes...becoming visible. You are torn, my beloved sister, and I knew you
were even then. I did try to save you and keep you whole, as best I could, as I
did not try to save myself.

“I’m not sure investing later would even be possible,” Jeffrey said.
“...you might as well put your money in bonds.”

The strangeness of bonds, that strange dullness. The smoothness of
bonds, the urbanity. The urbanity of poor Jeffrey. You became even more
poised. More formal. The light dimmed in your eyes.

“You know me, Claudia,” June turned to me and her smile deepened.

Yes I do, more than ever. I hope you came to know me too before you
died. I was not always the smart one.

“This whole opportunity slipping away because of a rumor.”

Oh don’t. Jeffrey don’t. Don’t make me choose. You are gambling on
me, weighing the odds. Don’t make me part of the game. How dare you make
me part of the game. “No reason.” Are you wagering that I won’t want to
expose you? Are you wagering that I won’t want to expose myself?

“Claudia, what do you say?”

I say I cannot. I cannot imagine it...the sinking down, the day—to-day
slipping down, the apathy and soumess, the creeping nastiness. I say I
cannot live with a failed man. More specifically, I cannot live with a failed
Jeffrey. He isn’t like Ed. Never would he accept a lack of success gracefully,
philosophically. His position at the bank, his credibility, his string of luck. I
know now clearly what I felt then vaguely: they all hinged on the Oak Street ’
project. Whether or not the investors did well ultimately—and we were among
them too—it was critical that the project get up or the bank would suffer major
losses during the construction period. Already many of the investors were
nervous. He couldn’t take a chance on you and Ed defecting. So he gambled.
He gambled to get it done and sacrificed us all in the process, including
himself, the only difference being his own personal losses were offset by the
success of his career. I shared in that success, I know, but it did not put me
ahead. What counted was it put him ahead ...because if he had not come out
ahead...the rest of our lives...I don’t think I could have withstood it. I’m sorry.
But I knew even then, it would be more bearable for you and for Ed.

“It will be a beautiful shopping center.”

We all went to it every now and then—remember?—although never
with each other. Eventually it did do well financially because eventually the
original number of houses did go in. But that was years after we had all sold
our shares. It was a laggard for a long time. And a property like that gets a
reputation. It isn’t easy to get rid of.

'/09'


MARLENE M. MILLER

“Why don’t we go downtown, some place nice?”

You always were a skillful dancer and I think it was sometime during
the elegance and euphoria of the evening that you started calling me Mrs.
Greenwood. Before long I was doing the same, no longer calling you by your
first name but by your last. Mr. Greenwood. It sounded quite natural at the
time.

“I could handle that, couldn’t you, Claudia?”

How we missed each other. An open wound, covered over by a
charade of public behavior, mimicking the way it used to be. Still, I see now
the thing I believed to be a mistake was in fact my saving grace. I let you
know. Clumsily, cruelly, but accurately. You and Ed ended up the stronger.

“Oh, yes,” I said. And I did not look up from what I was doing,
clearing the coffee cups.

Every tiny movement—stacking the cups, picking up the tray,
carrying it across the room—became slower and stiffer. The tray itself became
heavier and heavier even as it dissolved by gradations into thin air.

By the time she had gotten down the hallway and through the guest
room, she was no longer sure she was going to make it. The vault seemed to
her now a safe haven, a sheltering lair where she could rest and close her
eyes. She longed for the journey to be over and night to come. She longed for
obliteration and a great blaze, not of anger but of sleep, deep and fierce and
rich. ' '

Somehow she managed to reach the end of the passageway and
stumble up the stairs and through the secret door which closed behind her as
soon as she stepped into the vault. She would just sit at a table and put her
head down on her arms and sleep, or die, one so very much like the other at
her age. For in that sleep called death...and she was so exhausted, so bone-
tired, she was dead already or half so.

She would never dream again before she died and just as she
thought this and hoped it with all her heart, the overhead lights flicked on,
bathing the space in a glare so white she was no longer sure if she was asleep
or awake, alive or dead. In the bright illumination, she wanted nothing, no
thought, certainly no question, but one came to her against her will.

“Did the light, the ardor dim because I did not trust you, Jeffrey?”
she said aloud and as soon as the words were out the white lights flicked off
and the yellowish haze returned and she saw with sudden sharpness that she
had lived through the scene all over again and altered nothing because her
motives remained impure. From somewhere in the vault, or in her mind, she
heard her husband’s voice, or maybe it was her own, lowered in register with
age, and weakened to a whisper, until they spoke as one. She couldn’t help
thinking how alike they were after all. They used to talk about their differences

'//0'


Hit/t9 es

complementing each other; but in reality, they were the same in many of the
ways that counted. She heard her husband’s low whisper, or maybe it was her
own, saying finally and at last, “because you did not trust yourself, Claudia.”
And at any other time she might have broken down and cried like a baby but
now the only thing she could do was fall into a sleep so like death that to
come out of it at all was to hear the first sound.

The unearthly groan. Low...long...incredibly odd. Closer, louder, until
it was so full of the future it became a scream.

“MY GOD! Oh my GOD! Somebody!”

There were running footsteps. There were voices and a great flurry
of hands and bodies.

Mrs. Greenwood closed her eyes tighter, then cursed to herself and
groaned and slowly raised her head.

“She’s alive,” someone said.

“Of course she’s alive,” someone else pushed through, “aren’t you,
Mrs. Greenwood? It’s me, Ellie. I’m going to run and get you a nice hot cup of
tea, how does that sound? But first let me help you get comfortable here.”

“I don’t want to get comfortable here.”

“No, of course you don’t. Can you stand up?”

“Certainly I can stand up.”

“Come on, I’ll help you. We’ll go out to the lobby, shall we, to the
comfortable chairs?”

“No. We’ll go to the ladies lounge. I’m fairly bursting as you might
well imagine.”

“Of course. Of course you are. Come on, I’ll help you.”

“Well now, Mrs. Greenwood, some breakfast would be in order, don’t
you think? I’ll call over to the hotel.”

Even before she turned her head, she identified the anxious, staving-
off—a—lawsuit voice of the bank president.

“A big pot of Earl Grey tea,” she said to him, “and lots of good
buttered toast. Make it for two because Ellie will be keeping me company. Tell
them to use their best china. And to put a single white rose in a bud vase on the
tray.”

He had taken out a little notebook and was jotting this down.

“Oh, Mrs. Greenwood,” Ellie giggled when he had gone and they were
starting off across the lobby, “I’ve never heard anyone boss Mr. Draper around
like that.”

“Well, he better make it quick,” she said grumpily. “I’m starved and
very thirsty.”

“Of course you are, you poor thing. I can hardly bear to think what
you must have gone through. Why didn’t you push the emergency button?”

“What emergency button?”

°///'


MARLENE M. MILLER

“The one under the night light. Didn’t you see it?”

She could only stare at the girl.

“The same thing happened to someone else ages and ages ago. So
they put it in with the light—that’s what I was told,” Ellie said and ran ahead to
catch the elevator.

“You did set off the general alarm, by the way,” she continued once
they were in. “I heard them talking. The guards checked around and when they
saw nothing was disturbed, they thought it was electrical—these systems are
sensitive enough even something like a mouse can set them Off. They never
thought of looking in the vault.”

Again Mrs. Greenwood could only stare and this time Ellie stared back,
their eyes locked for an instant. Then the elevator came to a stop and the girl
looked upward to check the number of the floor. She patted the old woman’s
arm, allowing her hand to remain on it lightly. The old woman, however, took a
step away from these gestures.

“Ellie, clear,” she said loudly as the doors opened, “while I’m
freshening up, go see how they are coming with the tea and toast. And have
someone call the convalescent home and let them know where I am. Tell them to
tell whoever answers that I want to be picked up. Tell them an hour and a half.”

'//.2'


RON MCFARLAND

Bagging for the Preacher

That summer bagging groceries at Publix for 75 cents an hour plus
tips that ranged from a nickel to a quarter, when we got anything at all, we
learned to dread certain customers, chief among them being an unctuous,
little, red—faced evangelical minister who preached at a cement-block church
on the edge of town and had at least half a dozen sticky looking children. He
and his fat wife, who always wore a cheap pair of rubber flip-flops and a print
dress that looked like a surplus item from the World War II homefront, would
purchase three heaping carts of groceries, and you could be covering four
other orders just in the time it took to bag their load of canned goods, rice,
powdered milk, baby food and whatever was on sale that day, the first
Monday of every month.

These good Christians never tipped a nickel, but they watched every
move you made, as if they suspected you were part of some plot to undermine
their weird vision of the New Jerusalem, and you were going to start by
stealing a jar of strained carrots or one of their shriveled winesaps. When you
loaded their beat—up brown station wagon, which reeked of sweat and dirty
diapers, they did not even say thank-you, but slammed the doors and rattled
away in a cloud of burning oil that signified a desperate need for a ring and
valve job.

We liked to fantasize the breakdown of that ugly brown beater on
some lonely stretch of central Florida highway Where nothing but swamp and
palmetto greeted their eyes and blood-thirsty mosquitoes tortured their
bodies. But nothing like that ever happened, no matter how often I prayed, so
I lost a bit of my faith in God that summer.

No, the first Monday of every month, there they’d be, the little, red-
faced evangelist, the fat wife with her feet turned dirt gray from wearing flip-
flops balancing a gray-diapered kid on her hip, and a rag-tag brood that
seemed to vary somewhat in age and gender with every visit. How many kids
did they have? It may have been a half dozen, or a dozen, or even more than
that. We always kept an eye out to see if one of them swiped a candy bar or a
piece of bubble gum, but if they did, they were good at it. At least I never saw
them pinch anything. Not that I spent all that much time watching, despite the
instructions of the assistant manager, an eager and ambitious college drop-out
named Pete Ponce, who intimated that if we ever caught anyone shop-lifting
(but especially if it was a fellow employee), we would be immediately
promoted to stock-boy. But who cared? I mean for 75 cents an hour of hard
work, which involved cleaning and waxing the floors after hours, and mopping

up jars of baby food spilled on Aisle 10, and scraping gum from the sidewalk

'//3'


RON MCFARLAND

in front, and (worst of all) cleaning the restrooms—who the hell cared? The
women’s room was the worst. This was before sex ed was around to teach the
sublimities of the menstrual cycle, and I think most of us bagboys were a little
frightened about the whole thing. So if we did manage to catch one of this
preacher’s sticky brats slipping a piece of penny candy into his grimy pocket,
we thought so what? Make a federal case out of it.

Pete Ponce would’ve called in the Gestapo without hesitation, but
then he’d been at Publix for five years and was into profit-sharing and had a
two-week paid vacation. He drove this little gray Karmann—Ghia, which you
could tell he thought was at least as cool as a Corvette or a Thunderbird. He
was tall, athletic, and sandy-haired, and he dated an assortment of beauties
that he picked up by cruising the beach every weekend. “Each one of these
60-pound bags cost 2 ° cents,” he lectured us during our brief training
session. “You see two of them there on the floor and it’s like seeing a nickel.
You’d pick up a nickel if you saw it on the floor, wouldn’t you?” This
question was rhetorical: You could buy a candy bar or a newspaper or a
cheap cigar (a Phillies Cheroot) for a nickel back then. “We’re in business to
make money, gentlemen.” He insisted on calling us “gentlemen” in the foolish
hope that we might actually behave that way occasionally. “We’re here to
make a profit.” He said the word “profit” as if it were holy, as if it were not
what it was, but its familiar theological pun, and it sounded good to me then.
Some days I fantasized about profit-sharing myself. We envied him, but
because he was our boss and liked to assert his authority in many small, cruel
ways, we also loathed him almost as much as we did the preacher and his
mob.

In fact, looking back on it, we had more in common with the
preacher’s little punks than we did with whatever it was that was Publix.
Although we were at the bottom of the corporate totem pole, we knew we
were supposed to feel part of a benign and generous family and when
someone stole from that family, they were stealing from us. Personally. We
were supposed to feel something like righteous indignation. But the fact is
that we were a lot like those sticky little brats. The thing is, though, we
couldn’t see that back then.

So that’s the way it was. It was 1960, and we were sixteen, or
seventeen, or eighteen, and we were trying to support a clunker of some sort,
or a girlfriend, or an eventual college education and a ticket to the good life.
And when the little, red-faced preacher and his fat, flip-flopped wife and their
brood of sticky urchins showed up, we would try to make ourselves scarce. If
you were going solo on a good take-out, you were okay, or if you were
bagging for Marge, who’d been with Publix for more than twenty-five years
(she wore a 25-year pin), you were safe. No one, including Pete Ponce, was
going to nab a bagboy from Marge’s register. She would cuss them out on
the spot. And if you were bagging groceries for her, you’d better be doing

-//4-


Baggiwg for the Preacher

it right—squared up cans on the bottom, double-bags for meat and frozen
foods—~—or she’d cuss you out on the spot. She was fast and flawless, her
hands quicker than the eyes of even the most suspicious customer, and she
would not tolerate a slow or inept bagboy. If she ended up having to bag
some of the groceries herself, you would not be welcome at her register. You
would know you were not welcome by the way she would look at you and the
way she would sling canned goods down the counter trying to crush your
fingers.

But as I said, if you weren’t bagging at Marge’s register, which I
always tried to do because customers liked her and were in a good tipping
mood after she’d rung them up, or if you were just helping some other bagboy
with an order, you could get rounded up and herded over to the Badlands,
where the evangelist’s family bumped about like cattle in a chute. They
always avoided Marge, I suppose because they could not keep up with her,
so they feared being cheated. The preacher and his wife would eagle-eye
every item, stop the checker frequently to dispute a price, send one of their
brats back down the aisles to return an item they suddenly realized was not on
sale, send another one to pick up something they’d forgotten. It was that
kind of thing. Believe me when I say that only the most naive customer would
be so dumb as to get in line behind that bunch. And not surprisingly, they
always chose Peggy Crouch’s register.

Peggy was just out of high school, a drab sort of girl who actually
improved her style when she wore the standard, pale green nylon dress
required of check-out girls at Publix back then. (The checkers were all called
“girls” then, and the baggers and stockers were all called “boys,” even
though the checkers and stockers might be in their fifties. We didn’t see
anything unusual about that at the time, though it seems odd now.) So there
was poor Peggy Crouch decked out in Publix green and dreaming of profit-
sharing, all dumpy and sad, awaiting her fate, and this was because she was
the slowest checker in the store. She was accurate, but very deliberate, as if
terrified of making a mistake. She would hold up a can of off-brand soup (that
is, not Campbell’s) and turn it over and over before discovering the price
stamped right on top where it was supposed to be. She wore heavy, thick-
lensed glasses with awful hom-rimmed frames, so it may be that she missed
the price once or twice around. Peggy Crouch was a Pentecostal herself, or a
“holy-roller” as we called them back then—it was a generic term, and we used
it for the little, red-faced preacher, too. She did not go to his church, but I
guess they were kindred spirits in a way, which maybe he guessed from the
sizable gold cross she wore around her neck. Maybe she was a cousin or
something.

So that night I was caught napping, having been lured to the register
where Billy Randall was working on a small order for a beautiful blonde in very
tight white short-shorts and a red checked halter top. We bagboys always

'//5'


RON MCFARLAND

 

noticed such things, and we theorized that these women knew that we noticed
and had a secret lust to be romanced by an adolescent bagboy from Publix.
Realism was not our strong suit. So along comes Pete Ponce, and the next
thing I know I’m bagging for the preacher.

It’s the usual deal, the fat wife with flip-flops and flab hanging from
her arms, and me unable to keep myself from checking out her feet, which are
gray with dirt, dark gray this time, almost to the point of charcoal. The little,
red-faced preacher nervously paws over the merchandise: a king’s ransom in
Jello and pudding; huge bags of rice, flour, navy beans, and sugar; large jars
of instant coffee and tea; jumbo boxes of off—brand, cut-rate cereals I wouldn’t
feed to hogs; about half a cart-load of bread, most of which they’d freeze; a
colorful circus of canned goods—green beans, creamed corn, hominy,
spinach (1 can imagine the brown-green color and coarse stems), turnip
greens, pork and beans, beans and weenies, kidney beans, lima beans, chili,
Spam, Dinty Moore’s Beef Stew (a rare name-brand item). One problem with
working at a supermarket is that it kills your appetite, at least for any ordinary
kinds of food. Of course they grab a couple of bags of small spuds, on sale
because they’re about ready to sprout, as any fool can plainly see, and a big
bag of those little winesap apples that no one likes much, also on sale
because they’re getting mealy. About four cases of Publix brand soda, the
worst of which is the cola, which tastes vaguely like carbonated cough syrup.

Three huge carts, which takes me about fifteen minutes, and then it’s
out into the heat and humidity pushing one cart and pulling another while the
preacher steers the third cart and his portly wife totes a kid and a bag with
four dozen eggs in it. Well, we get to their brown jalopy and of course fat-wife
discovers a broken egg. Now this gets me, because we always check the
eggs before handing them to the customer, and I remember specifically
checking these eggs, and there wasn’t a cracked shell in the lot. I also
remember her handing the eggs to one of her sticky kids when she went
burrowing into her purse for the wad of wrinkled bills—they always pay cash,
and I doubt that they even have a bank account. The preacher probably
doesn’t believe in banks.

“One-a them eggs is broke,” says fat-wife, and I can hear the tone of
accusation in her voice.

“I’ll go get another carton, ma’am,” I say, with a little extra stress on
the “ma-am,” and I’m thinking, “There goes the profit-margin.” Pete Ponce
loved to talk about the profit-margin, often in terms of paper bags. But that’s
our policy: The Customer is Always Right. So like if they drop one of those
big bottles of soda on the way to the car, we’re supposed to run back and get
them another bottle for free, even though it was obviously their own clumsy
fault, or in this case their kid’s. Also, we have to let the checker know about
it, and of course we have to clean up the sticky mess wherever it is—in the
parking lot, splashed over the green and white terrazzo floors, gooing up the

'//6°


Eagq’mq {or the Preacher

green cement sidewalk in front. The worst is the parking lot.

So I run back with a new dozen eggs, and do you think they’ve
loaded up one box since I’ve been gone? No way. And yes, they always
want at least half boxes, just to be a little more difficult about the process, and
that means a couple of trips to the storage area. So they haven’t loaded one
bag or box. And do you think they bother to thank me for running back in for
the eggs? Nope. All I hear is the little, red-faced guy mumble to fat-wife that
it took me long enough.

Now we bagboys do have a little dirty trick we don’t mind playing
when the occasion calls for it, though I admit that it’s pretty risky. What we’ll
do is sort of slit the bottom of a bag of canned goods with our fingernails just
as we’re easing it into the back end of the vehicle. You don’t want to do this
twice with the same customer, and you certainly don’t want to rig more than
one bag that way, so you have to watch yourself. It’s not like jobs are
growing on trees, and my father says ifI don’t raise enough money to go to
the junior college next year, I’ll almost certainly get drafted. He’s trying to get
me to join the Navy, which is what he was in during WW2, but I’d rather take
my chances with the j.c., even though I don’t care much for school. I figure I
could try some drafting and engineering drawing courses and maybe get a job
out at the Cape, something with Northrup or G.D., one of those outfits.

Of course I was looking for one bag in particular: Not the one half-
filled with cans (we’re not supposed to fill any bag more than halfway with
canned goods)—that would have been too easy—but the one that had the
big bottle of cooking oil in it, along with the jars of instant tea and coffee,
topped off with a big bag of cheap cookies which fat-wife had already opened
in order to appease one of the brats. About the time I located the right one, I
got a break because a couple of the kids started to squabble and pick at each
other, so both the parents were distracted while I carefully worked a tear into
the bottom of the bag. I set it down in the midst of the other bags so that by
the time they unloaded it they would have become less careful than when
they started. I do know a few things about how people behave, which is
another debt I owe to Publix.

The little, red-face preacher and his flip—flopped Wife loaded
themselves into the brown heap, ground the ignition a few times, sputtered
into something resembling life, and rattled off into the evening without so
much as a fare-thee-well, thank-you fella, or a God-bless-ye-merry-bagboy.
Which is just what I expected. But wouldn’t it be nice if, for a change, people
did not live down to your expectations?

Fiendish glee, that’s what I felt. I was elated, beside myself with self-
righteousness and a sense of having had a personal hand in reestablishing
justice and order in the universe. Okay, I confess that at the time I didn’t think
of the matter in those terms exactly, with the exception of “fiendish glee,” that
is. The other terms I learned after reading Greek tragedies at the j.c. I

'//7'


RON MCFARLAND

concocted scenarios of chaos, all of which had to do with that vegetable oil
slurping over instant tea and coffee and crumbled cookies, the whole mess
complicated by splinters of glass. In one scene the bag disintegrated right
there in the brown slug. In another, the fat lady dumped it there on the
driveway, maybe on one of her thick gray feet. (I give myself some credit for
not having envisioned anything bloody. I was a civilized bagboy, after all.) In
the best scene the little, red-faced preacher gets the bag into the kitchen,
holding it absently across the bottom but not feeling the tear, and then he
snaps it up by the top edges, and whoosh! At which point he breaks into a
stream of profanity that would put Satan to shame.

But of course I do not know what happened. I have only fond
hopes. What I did next was zip up to Billy Randall and tell him I had finally
booby-trapped the preacher, and if we were lucky we would never see him and
fat-wife and sticky kids and brown beater again. “No shit,” Billy said. “Cool.
We owe you one, man, I mean it, all of us.” Word got around pretty fast, and
by closing time I was a hero. ‘

Rick, Who was the sort of senior bagboy, came up to me and said
quietly, “I want to shake your hand.” He was the best running back at C.H.S.
that year and had gotten a full ride to Florida State, so it was a proud moment
for me. When I passed her register, I think Marge actually winked at me, but
I’m not sure. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I felt right then that my life was
going to amount to something.

But two nights later (I was working Monday-Wednesday-Friday
nights and all day Saturday) Pete Ponce called me into the office, and I knew I
was in for it. “I understand there was a problem Monday,” he said stemly.

“What do you mean?” I’d spent a restless night thinking about what
I would do if I got caught, and I made up my mind to play it dumb.

He was straightforward about the whole thing. He had heard I’d
booby-trapped a bag of a “valued customer,” or maybe he said “one of our
best customers,” but for Pete Ponce the word “customer” was almost always
preceded by the word “valued,” a word intimately connected with the sacred
word, “profit.” He was not going to fire me, he said, but he was going to keep
his eye on me, and I had to be disciplined. For the next month, any time I was
on duty, 1 was to drop whatever I was doing and clean up any spill in the
store, and on Saturdays I could scrape gum off the sidewalk and clean the
restrooms any time they needed it. If this wasn’t acceptable to me, I could
hand in my nametag and quit.

I was not a rebellious kid, but it was hard not to feel angry. Now I
wanted to lash out at Publix, the whole corporation, which then had more than
fifty stores throughout the state, and at capitalism in general, and at Pete
Ponce in particular. That night I thought of boyish vendettas like taking my
.22 and plinking out one of the big plate glass windows or setting a couple of
roofing nails under the tires of Pete Ponce’s Karmann-Ghia. But of course I

'//8'


Bagging {or the Preacher

did nothing, being civilized like I said, and by Saturday night, after a
miserable day of mopping up five spills of baby food, two soft drink
explosions, and a jumbo bottle of catsup, as well as scraping gum for about
two hours and cleaning the rest-rooms four times, all of which meant that I
made practically nothing in tips, I was feeling like a martyr.

Saturdays always began early for us, before seven, with the mopping
and waxing of the floors, and they ended around ten with another mopping
and waxing. By the end of that agony it was a miracle that we ever felt like
going on a late date or hanging out at the weekly dance at the skating rink,
but most of us doused ourselves with deodorant and after shave and dragged
our weary carcasses back into the real world. I always had a clean shirt in the
car, and I usually had a few bucks in tips to squander, Saturday being our big
day, obviously, but that was not the case this time, and I decided to just go
home and forget about it.

But Billy and Rick had another idea. It turned out that Rick had
copped a bottle of vodka from his uncle, who was on vacation, so we loaded
into Billy’s ’56 Chevy and roared out to the drag strip north of town, which
was as good a place to be reckless as we could think of. It used to be an
airfield of some sort, and the concrete runway made a great strip for drag
racing, and the cops pretty much turned their heads, since it kept us off the
highways. We had in mind, what? Nothing in particular, I guess. We were all
“good boys,” sort of average middle-class American kids of our time, bored,
confused about girls, vaguely resentful about one thing or another, young
and restless. All of the clichés apply. Instead of being in a condition in which
nothing could happen, we wanted to be in a condition in which anything
could happen, the more unpredictable the better, even if what happened
wasn’t so good.

We each took a swig of vodka, which I thought tasted very much like
rubbing alcohol smelled, and Billy roared up the strip, screeching rubber
through first and second. We all felt tough and superior, and for me at least,
that sort of feeling was new and gratifying. We knew we would never become
holy-rollers, and we would never have fat wives, and we would never be
fathers to a mess of sticky kids. And after that summer we would never work
at Publix or at any place like Publix ever again—we were better than that. We
stopped at the far end of the drag strip and talked while Billy’s engine idled.

“I’m going to get glass packs,” Billy said, “then maybe some chrome
headers.”

It was warm and muggy, and the moon was full. We each took
another swig of vodka, but this time I just let the liquid touch my lips and
pretended to take a drink. I wondered if the others would notice, and I saw
that the level of the bottle hadn’t gone down much since our first round.

“What’re you going to do after you graduate?” I asked generally,
thinking of myself and of Billy, who would also be a senior in the fall.

-//9'


RON MCFARLAND

Rick reminded us that he had already graduated, but after playing
football at FSU, he planned to go on to the pros. Billy said his folks wanted
him to go to the junior college, and he didn’t know what after that. He was
thinking of starting his own rock band (he was a good drummer) maybe while
he was in j.c., catch a few gigs out at the beach, maybe cut an album. We
passed the bottle around again, and it was my turn to fantasize by the time the
vodka reached me. I can see it now. Rick hands the bottle to me, Smirnoff
Vodka, and I say something about the Russians, and I’m thinking maybe I’ll
propose a toast to Khrushchev or someone when the bottle slips out of my
hand and shatters on the pavement. I can still see the splinters of glass
glittering in the warm moonlight.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Billy groaned.

“Hey man, don’t get religious on me,” Rick teased, and we all started
laughing.

“There goes the profit-margin,” I said, and we all laughed again.

Irony? We were standing there knee—deep in it, but that was more
than we knew then—the word just didn’t exist in our vocabulary. Billy said it
was “kinda funny,” and I said that was maybe just how it was on the
preacher’s kitchen floor, except it was cooking oil, and couldn’t you just see it
oozing all over the instant coffee? I know each of us was standing there at
that moment trying to conjure the same vision: A miniature Armageddon
there on the preacher’s dingy kitchen floor and the preacher swearing and
taking the Lord’ s name in vain as if he was Lucifer himself.

But I’ll never be sure whether my booby trap really worked.
Everyone knew that Peggy Crouch was a little snitch, so she must’ve been the
one who overheard someone talking about how I’d rigged the preacher’s bag,
and then hotfooted it straight to Pete Ponce with the news. Because if there
was one other thing in that fiery little Pentecostal heart of hers besides the
Holy Spirit, it was the fervent desire to become a full-time checker and
participate in profit sharing.

° /..20 '


TOBY BOCHAN

How to Have a visitor

He is flying in to see you for a long weekend. He works at a place
where you get every possible holiday, a bank or a school or the government.
You don’t know exactly what he does. Something involving numbers. You
have known each other since college, from college. You’ve'seen him once or
twice a year since graduation: same place, same time kind of things. But this
is his first visit to see you, just to see you. He lives far enough away that
driving isn’t feasible. Especially because you hate to drive and he doesn’t
own a car. Thomas, always for you Thomas and never Tom, Thomas lives in
Boston. He doesn’t, he says, need a car. How nice for him! Your car, on the
other hand, has been acting up: making rude noises, stalling. Mornings you
pump the gas (three times three is the magic number) and hope that it will
start. There is really no other way to get around where you live in Texas.
Thomas takes the T, the mass transit in Boston, Massachusetts. You mix up
the words, try to fit it into a limerick:

There once was a young man named Thomas
who preferred to a car the train mass,

And twice a day he

is found riding the T

from his home to his work in Boston, Mass!

Poetry is not your strong suit. It’s not a red power suit. It’s not even
your conservative navy blue interview suit that got you your current crummy
job, copy editing. Poetry is the bargain dress that looks like a suit, but really
is only one piece, a faux suit with a jacket that can’t be removed. 100%
Polyester, but you kind of like it anyway. You wear it occasionally. Play
around with it. Limericks are your new puzzle. Instead of trying to figure out a
five-letter word for fatigued (tired) over coffee at work, spend time thinking of
words that rhyme with Thomas. Make a list: bass, brass, crass, class, gas,
grass, lass, pass, sass. Your big fat ass, impossible to pass after Christmas.
Alas!

Start dieting. Start going to the gym every day, an hour and a half
each time. You want to have nice, flat abs for him. Don’t hope for a
washboard stomach. Okay, hope for it all you want, but know it won’t happen.
You only have twelve days.

Each morning, stand in front of the mirror, stretching your arms
overhead. Check your thighs for cellulite. Whoop! There it is! Go to the mall
and buy an expensive, ineffectual cellulite cream. It is 35 dollars. You don’t

'/..2/ '


TOBY BOCHAN

have this kind of money to spend on a cream, so charge it. At the Clinique
counter, a woman asks if you would like a free skincare analysis. She is
wearing a white lab coat open over her dress. You guess this is supposed to
make you feel like she’s a scientist, like she has a degree in dermatology or at
least has taken a night course in beauty school. The way she has applied her
blush, two peach slashes, makes you doubt that she has. Still, what the hell!
You want to look your best.

Say: “Sure.”

The woman with bad blush sits you in front of a magnifying mirror.
This is not pleasant. And you have good skin! Mrs. Blush 1986 looks at you
and slides the answers to question on a little plastic chart. She slides a silver
knob over so a yellow block that says, Fair, shows in the window labeled Skin
Color. She looks directly into your eyes, squinting. Eye color: Hazel/Brown.

“Is that your natural hair color?” she asks.

Say: “Yes,” but it is not — you think. You think this shade is a little
redder than your natural color, but it’s close enough for her. What color is
this hair? The box said dark copper. You think of old pennies. Your hair is
nothing like the color of any penny. Dark Brown, she slides in, looking at
your roots. '

“Do you burn or tan, or burn then tan?”

“Burn. Just burn.”

She slides another knob over. She has a zit on her temple! Why are
you listening to her? You have, confirmed, beautiful skin. It runs in your
family.

Pore size: Small.

Feel insulted that she has not picked Invisible. Wrinkles: Few. Few!
If she were any kind of sales woman she’d always put none for that one, you
think. You aren’t even twenty-six yet! Stare at the row of answers. Almost
the whole row of boxes is yellow. Yellow, yellow, yellow, you. Pusillanimous
you. Everything to you is a sign. A symbol. You believe in such things
despite yourself. You read your horoscope. You get it emailed to you every
day!

She says, “You’re a type two. You need a moisturizer with sunscreen
to protect you.”

Say: “From what?”

“From the sun,” she says, earnestly.

You think that the sun is the last thing you need protection from.
But buy some anyway. The Blush Nightmare is threatening to give you a
makeover. For free! You need to get out of there.

Buy vitamins, a mud mask, facial bleach, new razors. You want to
look your best. You want to look eighteen again. Or nineteen, the age you
were when you met Thomas. Start cutting back on cigarettes. He is not a
smoker. Plan on quitting a week before he arrives. You do not want to quit

./°22.


How To Have A visitor

the day he arrives. You won’t be able to do it then, and you want to get
withdrawal over before he sees you. You don’t want to be crabby for him.
You want to be happy. Light. Like a thin clean cotton sheet. Do the laundry.

Get your work done ahead of time. Get ahead of your work. Plan to
take a day off work. Try to figure out a way to take two days off: you will
need a day to recoup, regroup after he leaves.

Do all the housework you never do: mop the floors, dust the ceiling
fan blades. You need to keep busy the week before he comes. And there is
plenty to! Hang up all the clothes on the “clothes chair” in the closet. Fold
the sweaters in the closet that are usually tossed in a pile on the dresser.
Straighten the bookshelves. Throw out the old magazines.

Stack a Harper’s and a couple of issues of the New Yorker in the
magazine rack in the bathroom. Throw in an issue of People — the sexiest man
of the year issue. You don’t want him to think you only think about him. But
you want him to know you think. Throw in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly
and an old Science magazine you bought because it was about new
developments in AIDS research. You are an intellect. Never mind that there
wasn’t an article in the magazine you could understand. You just read the
introductions and conclusions, the abstracts of the articles — who cares about
methods and failed experiments? The middle is a long boring passage of time.
Right now you are about results. Beginnings and ends. The beginning: one
night after drinks he kissed you. Confounding factors: neither of you was
single, you were leaving town one way, he was leaving town another.
Methods: you kept in touch through email and phone calls. Results: Here he
comes. Is that the result? The long and the short of it. The long longing of it
— where does that figure in?

When he calls, ask: “Is there anything you want to see here?”

He will say: “Just you.”

Smile and smile and smile and smile.

At work, let it slip that you have a friend coming. Say it with a little
smile, you can’t help it anyway, cast your eyes down. When they ask, what
kind of friend? Say: an old friend. Say it like you were saying: an old lover.
They will be curious. Try to make plans for everyone to go out drinking when
he arrives. You will want to show him off. He is good in a crowd.

When you tell your friend Laura that you have a visitor coming, she
will ask, “Now, will that be a conjugal visit?” Laura assists in human
resources. She is good at asking questions.

Laugh and say: “Yes.” You like Laura. She is frank. Decide she will
be your confidant in the matter that is Thomas. You need another
perspective. You feel more and more that your own perspective is becoming
impossibly warped, your logic the twisted puzzle of an MC. Escher drawing.

./BZ3.


TOBY BOCHAN

“How long have you known him?” she will ask. “Where is he
coming from?”

When you tell her she will say: “That’s some trip just for a booty
call.”

Say: “Well, we’ve been friends a long time.”

“Friends, huh? I bet,” she will say.

Wonder what she means by that.

There once was a young man named Thomas,
Who came out to see a young lass,

He came out to Texas

‘cause thats where the sex was

So don ’t fuck it up like a dumbass.

Shave your legs from here to eternity, or as close as you dare to get
to it with a razor. You wish you had light, sparse, blonde-type body hair, but
no, not you — you of heritage of all lands hairy. Get a body wash and a loofah
and scrub your skin until it is red and raw. New! And improved? Start with a
new razor. Apply your creams. Take your vitamins. Go to the gym.

At the gym, compete with the woman next to you on the Stairmaster.
Sneak glances at the red dot readouts on her machine. If blondie over there
can climb 50 floors, you do 60. If she works off 200 calories, you work off 400.
Never, ever, get off before she does. Your thighs ache all the time.

You need to vacuum. But you don’t have a vacuum! Wonder at
what age one is supposed to own a vacuum. There’s nowhere to put a
vacuum in your apartment anyway. The mop and the broom stand side by
side in the kitchen next to the garbage. You don’t have a broom closet. You
don’t even have a coat closet. You have a little apartment, a two-room space
Texans call an efficiency. Wonder how an apartment can be efficient. Think of
the J etsons, J ane-his-wife pressing a button and Bloop! Out comes dinner.
Still, she had a robot to help her. Wonder what J ane-his-wife did with all of
her free time. Raise daughter-Judy and his-boy-Elroy? Even the dog walked
itself. You would go insane. Still, you wouldn’t mind having Rosie-the-robot
to clean for you right now. Bloop! All done!

Call Laura and ask if she has a vacuum you could borrow.

Laura laughs and says, “You’re vacuuming?” You don’t know
whether she is laughing at the fact that you are vacuuming, or that you are
vacuuming for him. Become annoyed at her for her indeterminate tone.

Say: “He’s allergic to dust?” Laura says Uh—oh! Does she think
you’re lying? Or perhaps you’re making him out to be too much of a pansy!
You’ve told her before he’s sensitive. Why can’t she make her undertones
more overtonish?

1,24 '


How T 0 Have A visitor

Say: “Um, or maybe cats.”

“But you don’t have cats.”

What a pain! Say: “Can’t I just ask to borrow a vacuum?”

“Sure, sure, but—“

Cut her off! “But what? Is it so bad to want to have a clean apartment
for him?” I

“No,” Laura says.

Keep ranting: “I have dust dogs here! Great Danes of dust! Giant
dust horses.”

“Dust horses?” she says. “Well, then I’ll bring it right over. I don’t
want you getting trampled before your big visit.”

Say: “Thanks.”

“Or after,” she says.

Say: “I’m a big girl.”

Hang up the phone. Think maybe your wishes are dust horses and
this is as close as you’ll ever get to riding.

There was a young man called Thomas
Who made plans but never would promise
T o staying quite true

T 0 you or to you

So develop a thick epidermis.

Meanwhile, the transmission in your car is acting up, like a child, or a
blackmailer: I need attention! Fix me! Fix me or else! I need a
fourhundreddollarfix, baby, aarrrr-drr-brrrrrap! Your car is giving you the
transmission equivalent of a raspberry. Brrrap! Brrrrrrrap.

Take the car to the only mechanic in town you know, a big dude who
first introduced himself to you as “Super-Dave.” Super-Dave splits his time
working at this shop and teaching a class on Auto repair at the high school.
Remember when you met him at a party, you said, “Well, that’s super. . .” and
waited for him to fill in his name.

“Dave,” he said, shaking his big and still greasy hand.

“That’s me, Super-Dave,” he said, laughing a surprisingly girlish
laugh.

When Super-Dave asks you, “What’s the problem?” Make sounds
like a kid revving his little toy racecar. ,

Say: “It goes, like you know, brrrrrooooo—rrrrrrooooo. . .” make
circular hand gestures with it, make smaller, faster circles and let your voice
rise up, “brrr—rrr—oooo! But there’s a little hitch there, when it shifts over-
.” Realize you have lost Super-Dave. Notice that his name is simply “Dave”
in red script letters on his blue uniform.

Say: “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

.1325.


TOBY BOCHAN

“Transmission, sounds like,” says Super-Dave. Yell in your head:
Moron! Even an honest mechanic would take advantage of a screwball like
you! Even a screwball mechanic like Super-Dave.
Leave the car with Super-Dave who promises to have an estimate of the
damages (he actually says that! Boy are you fucked!) some time in the
afternoon. Tell him you need it fixed by Thursday. Friday morning at the
latest. He says he’ll have it for you tomorrow, which is Wednesday. Don’t
believe him. The car will be ready late on Thursday. It will cost you 800
dollars.

Thomas’ flight is arriving at 2:37 on Friday. Take that day off too.
Use a personal day. After all, this is personal. Write “2:37” in red ink on your
calendar. Wonder why the airline doesn’t round up to 2:40. Wonder if there is
some kind of formula they use to calculate arrival time so that on average, the
planes are on time, even with delays. Wonder if there are any kind of
standards — could they say it would take eighteen hours to fly from Boston to
Texas if they wanted? But of course, who would buy a ticket for that flight?
Imagine a deep smooth voice announcing:

This is your captain here. Since we ’re in no rush whatsoever; we ’re
just going to cruise real low and real slow...it just might take all night
long...

SomeOne slick and funky, like Barry White or Isaac Hayes, grooving
about a whole night of sweet loving... Lord knows you’re ready for a whole
night of sweet loving! You’re ready to have a night where the highlight isn’t a
new episode of an animated sitcom! Bring on the sweet loving. You’re ready
to start losing sleep with him instead of over him. But you’re not ready yet at
all! There is an impossible amount of stuff you want to get done before he
arrives.

Wish you could increase your air speed to get everything done on
time. But you’ve already released the throttle, you’re full-speed-ahead, baby!
You never understood why planes don’t fly full speed all the time — each time
the captain announces, we’ll make up time in the air, you think this. Why
waste time getting places when you could already be there? The view is the
same from every airplane window —- clouds, the ocean, the unreadable flat
palm of land.

You are doing the dishes Friday when the phone rings. Wipe your
hands on your jeans and answer it.

“I’m here,” he says.

Look at the clock. It is just past noon. He is impossibly early. You
aren’t ready. You wanted to shower.

Say: “You’re here? Here-here?” Here-here? You think. What a
retard you are. Do I like him or like him-like him? It’s bad-bad.

'/.26 '


How To Have A Visitor

“I caught an earlier flight.”

Say: “Do you have any bags?”

“No,” he says. “Well, just a carry-on.”

“Oh, okay,” you say. “Well, I’ll be right there.”

“Where should I wait?”

' “I’ll pick you up at the baggage claim area anyway. I know where it
is in the airport.”

“I’ll wait to be claimed,” he says.

Say: “I’m on my way,” and hang up the phone. Tear off your T-shirt
and jeans — they’re wet, after all, and put on a dress. Wish you had time to
puton makeup. Put on lip-gloss. There. You look very kissable. Go to claim
your baggage.

There once was a young man from Boston

Who took a vacation near Austin,

On a plane he flew—

Don ’t say I love you

If he don ’t say it too then you’ve lost ‘z'm.

Drive to the airport. Your car hums nicely now. Turn on the radio. You are so
anxious you are sweating. You are so distracted you almost miss you exit on
the highway. Steer into the Arrivals lane. Slow down, look for his airline.
There are a lot of people by the curb, waiting for their rides. You drive all the
way down the terminal but you don’t see him. Make the turn around again.
Go slower, even though there is a big angry looking man in a truck behind
you, jerking too close. Wonder after the second pass if he is expecting you to
park and find him inside the terminal. On the third round, finally recognize the
bald man with the green rolling-luggage is Thomas. He has shaved his head.
He is bald as the proverbial ping pong ball.

Laugh. Realize that you‘ve prepared all you can and feel like you’ve
been signed up for the wrong class all along.

Pull up to the curb, still smiling and sing: “Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean,” out
the passenger window. Thomas smiles and waves. You unbuckle your
seatbelt.

“Hi!” he says. He moves to open the door. “I was beginning to
worry,” he says, which makes you laugh again.

Say: “Waitaminnit,” as you get out of the car. Stand on opposite
sides of the car, looking at each other for a second. It’s not just the hair, he
looks different than you thought. Was he taller? Walk to his side around the
front of the car.

Throw your arms around him. Notice all the places your body does
and does not touch his.
Say: “Glad you made it,” and then kiss him.

./27.


TOBY BOCHAN

Since he was not expecting it, the kiss is more junior high school
than you would like. Fumbling at first, tense. Put your hand on the back of
his smooth head. Think he will say, What took you so long? And you will
say, “I didn’t recognize you.” His lips are chapped and full and his mouth
tastes of grape gum.

“Glad to be here,” he says.

Know that he means it, and smile.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” he says.

You silly girl, know as you walk back around to the driver’s side that
the next few days will be nothing like you imagined. But know also that some
tings will be better, and some worse. Decide to let everything ride.

Now get in the car and see where it all goes.

- x128-


SARAH JANE SHUTE

Space ”Wax/6L

The “U” shaped neighborhood nestles in the heart of suburbia, a left
turning, cul-de-sac bulging tumor: one hundred and fifty tract houses, 19505
one story design, square front/back yards, one quarter acre lots. Tall trees
break sidewalks and driveways with their roots, bubbling the yards, a thin
layer of grass covering twisting gray snakes. Naked sun bakes the
neighborhood. Empty stars glint off cars, kiddy pools, a bicycle lying still on
its side. The houses are yellow, brown, green—not pastel, not bright—
designed to blend in with the trees—Magnolia, Japanese Elm, Avocado,
Orange, Lemon, Fig, Kumquat—that stand barren, leafy and light against the
pale blue sky. Their fruit fell with a massive thudding all in one day. It rained
immature avocados. Green oranges, lime-colored lemons, figs that looked like
pears dropped to rot, inert at the base of their trees, hard, bitter, and
disconnected. The sudden fruit shower, combined with the-baby-down-the-
way, became, for the upper middle class inhabitants of the neighborhood, too
much to bear. They packed their mini vans with all their worldly
possessions—televisions, children, dogs, toasters, and moved away.

The-baby-down-the-way and her father stayed. The father, deranged
with pain, confusion, and awe believes the shag carpet in his tract home is the
cause of it all: the fruit, the baby, his wife, the whole thing.

Their house is much like other houses in the neighborhood. Three
slightly different floor plans were used to build all the houses. Every third
house is exactly the same. Their house is three bedroom, two bath, all the
rooms connected by a long hall. The outside is yellow, the trees magnolia, the
minivan Toyota. The man crawls on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom
of his yellow home, looking for an orange glove. The baby cries, the squall
crackling, filtered through a speaker.

The carpet he crawls on is also orange. The room feels cramped, low
ceiling, high carpet, large, matching faux wood bedroom set, a desk for a TV
stand. In a small, pastel green tiled bathroom near the dresser, a toilet runs,
sink drips, mildew grows, grout weakens, walls bubble with moisture. Outside
the room, beyond the six-foot wooden fence, ten feet away, his neighbors’
houses echo furnace hum, beam creak, faucet drip.

The man winces at the baby’s cry and stares malevolently at the
carpet. He thinks, It was the carpet. He pauses for a second in his search to
rest his hand on the carpet under the bed, digging his fingers into the shag.
Orange, he thinks. The glove isn’t there. He gets onto his knees and crawls
across an acre of orange to the faux wood dresser.

It was just here, he thinks, his knees jammed against the nubby

-/.29'


SARAH JANE SHUTE

carpet, hurting as he leans over to look under the dresser. Dust motes, spider
webs, hair elastic, bobby pin, dental appointment reminder, glove. He dusts
the glove off as he pulls it out, his palms itchy with carpet dents. He may
have hid it from himself. He doesn’t remember. He stands slowly, raising his
head last, watching behind his eyes for blackness, measuring speed against
blood flow. Some color returns to his puffy, sagging face, but his skin remains
two shades too pale. He is thirty-five. His wife is dead, died four weeks
before the baby was due, died quickly, loudly, horribly. He wears the bottom
half of a modified space suit—orange, Teflon, without the insulation and
cooling system—and a stained white T-shirt, his skin somewhat too large for
his body, fat disappearing, body dissolving from the inside.

He leans on the bed with one hand and pulls on the rest of the space
suit with the other, pushing his arm through the dark arm hole, thinking that
no one has an orange carpet, not that color, brown/orange/black, rotting
blood oranges, rusted earth. The color deep inside his ear. He should have
known better than to let his wife talk him into keeping it. He did know better.
He had a bad feeling about the carpet from the beginning. He pulls the space
suit over his shoulders, clicking snaps, zipping zippers, creating a seal. He
reaches for the gloves, and a tear falls on his hand. Securing the arm-glove
connection, another tear drops from his chin onto the Teflon suit. It beads,
rolling off like mercury. He sniffles, lets tears collect on his chin and fall. He
feels he might pass out and leans on the bed, lowering himself to his knees,
falling forward, resting his head on the carpet. Blood rushes into his brain;
blackness fades leaving only orange, rot, mildew, rust, decay. Infuriated, he
sobs, sealed from the neck down in an airtight, orange space suit, on all fours
in his master bedroom.

His breath catching, he pulls himself together. He crawls to the desk/
TV stand, pulls from under it a space helmet, complete with glass shield. He
places it over his head. It smells of plastic, sweat, stale breath. In the mirror
above the dresser, he sees himself, an astronaut in his own bedroom, a slivery,
glass bubble over his head, dressed in an airtight, orange suit, surrounded by
yellow walls, freshly painted last year when they bought the house. Yellow,
he thinks. Orange. He regrets it all. In the dresser are his wife’s effects:
bras—underwire, nursing, strapless; underwear—thong, bikini, pregnant
belly. T-shirts. Jeans she hoped to fit into again one day.

He pads toward the kitchen, his orange oxygen tube trailing behind.
He walks through his living room, past couches, fireplace, dead plants, dust.
Removing a metal baby bottle from a pot of warm water, he walks back
through the living room, down the orange and yellow hall to a blinking metal
door at the end. The squalling baby cry comes from a speaker on the door.
The man can just hear it through his oxygen tube. He punches a combination
into a number pad on the door, green lights blink, and an air lock seal breaks
with a pshhh. He spins a metal dial, and the door opens.

'/30‘


Space vaeL

The room is blue. The doctor said it would be a boy. Through dense
foggy air, the man sees a yellow crib and a matching yellow dresser, both
empty, shoved to one side. Peter rabbit jumps around the blue pinstriped
wallpaper. The blue carpet is dotted with hundreds of dime-size black holes,
orange rimmed cigarette burns. The man plugs his orange cord into an
oxygen machine, twisting the metal connectors, holding his breath as he waits
for the suit to fill. A tan hamster runs round and round and round in an
oxygen tent connected to the humming machine. In the center of the room is a
silver metal crib in which a small girl baby cries. A black ring circles the crib
where the carpet has been burned.

The man cannot hear the regulated, rhythmic hum of the oxygen
machine or the frantic cry of the baby through his helmet. He hears only his
own breathing and his heartbeat. He walks to the crib, his orange umbilical
oxygen cord trailing behind, a thick orange rat tail. The baby opens her eyes
and reaches toward her father. Lifting her into his arms, he puts the bottle into
her mouth and notices she has grown smaller. She is eleven pounds, solid,
ten fingers, ten toes, fingernails, green eyes, light brown hair.

The baby will not eat. She cries. She oozes clear liquid from her tiny
pores. It drips off her limbs, falling to the blue carpet, burning fresh holes.
Smoke rises from the carpet like fog. Through the lethal haze, he peers at the
ceiling. He holds the tiny, red baby close to his chest, rocks her gently, puts
her hear on his shoulder, bounces her up and down, sings rock-a—bye-baby
and a tune he makes up about his love for the little, naked, red girl baby. She
cries. She cannot hear him. He cannot hear her. He rocks her, walking around
the room. Taking her to the hamster, he points at the fuzzy ball, running
frantically, getting nowhere.

Recently, she stopped eating and since then has not stopped crying.
For days, the man has paused at the metal door, listened to the endless squall,
turned the speaker off, then on again, then off, put on the space suit, entered
the room, bounced her, rocked her for hours. She will not stop crying, and she
will not eat. The man knows if he does not touch her, she will die, like his wife
and the fruit and the rest of his life. He knows this the same way he knows
the orange shag is the cause of it all, the same way he knows the-baby-down-
the-way is not contagious, and his neighbors, didn’t have to abandon him in
the glinting neighborhood, swings still, streets empty.

Tears run down his face.

He carries the baby to a rocking chair and sits. Despairing, he
unseals a glove and pulls it off. He holds a bare finger out toward the baby’s
hand. He hesitates, holding it just out of reach. She looks at it, stretches with
all her baby strength toward it. Slowly, he lowers his finger. She grabs it and
stops crying. In her tight acid grasp, his finger burns. Her touch, the liquid
she oozes, burns on contact. Pain consumes him, clenching his teeth, tensing
his muscles. The intensity increases, extending, enveloping him, every cell

'/3/°


SARAH JANE SHUTE

affected; his earlobes feel ready to explode. But the baby eats. While holding
his finger, she drinks the milk. He pulls his finger away when the world starts
to spin and go black. Charred black and brown, smoking at the tip, his finger
throbs, but the pain is localized.

The baby stops sucking the milk and cries, her red mouth open as far
as it will go, her fists clenched tight. Impossible, he thinks. Carpet and
Teflon, metal bottles, humming, clicking machine, airtight rooms, suits. Toxic
baby. His heart breaks. He feels it happen, cleave in two, momentary stinging
pain, acute pressure behind his sternum, the pain dulling, leaving him
breathing weakly through what feels like a fist size hole in his chest.

He sits in the rocking chair his wife bought for nursing, rocking his
infant. Liquid from her pores drips off his suit, burning a dark hole through
baby blue carpet, brown carpet pad, wood floor, into the basement where it
collects in a noxious pool on the concrete. Smoke rises through the floor. The
fog is dense. He rocks, giving the baby his fingers, one by one, for as long as
he can stand. She smiles, she eats, she gurgles, she tries to talk. For the first
time in days, she does not cry. The man blacks out periodically from the pain,
but he too feels satisfied. He was right.

By morning, the chair rocks slightly, the man’s glass helmet now
slumped forward on his chest. He is in shock. His black/brown charred hands
dangle over the sides of the rocking chair, dripping blood into the pale blue
carpet. The toxic baby lies in his lap, breathing weakly. The machine hums
rhythmically, baby liquid drips through the floor, splashing onto cement
below. In the back yard, a dog runs around and around in circles making a
huge figure eight astronauts can see from the moon.

./&2.


OLIVE MULLET

Les VOLCW’S

“They are just things. They can be replaced. If that’s the worst that
happens to you, be gratefill.”

Yesterday, the furnace repairman came. He clomped upstairs to
check the meter in the bedroom, calling down to Dan in the basement.
Hearing the stranger’s voice, our youngest cat Minuit, the one who greets
everyone, startled me, absorbed as I was playing the piano. Meowing, she
scratched me as she climbed to my lap. My hand found that she was
quivering.

The call came barely a day after we had arrived. “In that drawer we
kept. . .The cat, the little one, is gone? Gone? Nowhere in the
house. . .outside? You’ve looked?” My husband Dan’s last words, his rising
intonation and echoes of those on the other end, cut through the hot Florida
air in the expansive kitchen.

That night I dreamt that I was suffocating inside a closed room.
Finally I had managed to squeeze out of the bedroom and float from the
balcony to above the street outside where the night before I had heard
laughing voices and someone playing a twangy instrument by a car door.
Half awake at dawn, I could see the curtains blow inward with the breeze.

“It’s your house,” the sheriff had said. “Back from the road, hard to
see.”
Our home, our retreat from work, backed against the national forest,
so quiet except for intermittent bird calls. We had first seen it twenty years
before, when we joined the owners for TM (transcendental meditation). They
had built it for their retirement, according to specifications, red cedar to fit in
with the woods. Then before his retirement, he had had a massive attack on a

visit to Florida and died there. She never came back.
Tennis shoes imprinted in the snow.

“Someone knew you were gone,” the sheriff had said over the
phone. “Write a list of everyone you told.” Friends, friends, but someone
overheard? They told someone who told someone. We did tell the
newspaper delivery people, to stop the papers. Isn’t that what we’re
supposed to do?

February 6: 10 am, 2 pm. and 6 pm. A dark blue, sagging Cadillac

'/33'


OLIVE MULLET

slows down as it approaches the driveway, then speeds up. Only two tracks
come from the house.

“Was there anything visibly different? Can you think of anything?”
The sheriff asked. The driveway—it had been snowing when we left before
dawn February 5. Dan had not snowplowed the driveway, as he always did.

The sheriff rode into the house with a proprietary air, big boots
pounding his approach, the floor creaking weakly. “They are stupid. They
can’t resist talking. Often there is a tip; then we find the stuff, taken months
before, stored in some basement. What are they going to do with silver?
They probably took it remembering some movie they’d seen.” Sniffing, he
added after a pause, “No sense figuring out why they took items. If you ever
find out the motive, it’s likely to be different than what you expect.”

7:30 am. February 7, with the light pearly behind cloud cover: The
cats are awakened by a large noise their owners might have assumed was a
branch falling hard against the wood. The sound comes from the back door,
and so Maggie, Meize, and Minuit shake themselves, jump from the bed, and
assemble around the dining room table, ever eager for food, ready to greet
warm hand silking down their backs, the gentle cooing voice. The sound is
punctuated scraping.

7:32 The door flings open, almost from its hinge, banging the table
edge. Even before the first blast of cold air enters, with the instinct all animals
have, they know something is very wrong.

The French have the right word—voleurs. The best we can do is
BURGLARY with its snarling sound. But the French have an image.
Swooping down in dark clothing, with claw-like grasps of hands, grabbing,
then lunging, flinging all to the floor, and scavenging after that. And then
flight. All movement a kind of fleeing, harkening to the dawn, as the
awakening world presses in, the light ratchets up—they must not be seen.

7:35 The floor of the bedroom becomes a sea of lingerie, shoes on
top of sweaters as though they had slipped crookedly on them, skirts fanning
out from under scarves and slacks, shirts twisted with trousers and pillows
scattered like after a pillow fight. Minuit’s favorite plastic string peeks from
under the bed, lost in all the material. All containers with their covers
dangling, lie face down as though ashamed. The heavy mattress has slipped
to an angle and off on one side as though flung there by a tall wave hitting
the ship.

Two clear lucite boxes revealing the careful order of earrings,
necklaces, and pins are swooped up in one arm. Then the one hears a sound,
making him turn back to look towards the bed. Two rings are rolling from

“/34“


Les voLews

beside the bed, along the wall—one gold, one silver—as though lost, looking
for their home.

Why did I not take the wedding ring, my Florentine ring? I had
paused by the bed before we left. Someone had told me that I would lose
them, taking them off always to wash my hands. With that fear, I never
removed them from the nightstand unless we were entertaining at home.

As soon as spotted, they too are swooped up. Looking around and
hearing the other in the next room, he pockets them quickly.

“The amateurs take what catches their eyes. The girlfriend gets the
rings,” noted the sheriff.

A small rug is tucked under the arm, a white woven circle distinctive
in one corner. “Notice the imperfection in the carpet,” the gentle salesman
with the slight accent had whispered appreciably, running his fingers over the
white circle beside where the weaver had reversed the design. “Perfection is a
challenge to God. Also it is the weaver’s signature. He is very proud of his
work.” The old Afghani had rested on his ankles briefly, surveying his work
lovingly. The first work, after many years, worthy of his signature.

7:46 The living room: Even on smooth rollers, the drawers rammed
and jarred open, one after the other, have a swooshing sound, a slighter
version of the rush of wind behind wheels on the highway outside. The
sliding doors of the cabinet do not allow the large wooden chest to slide out
easily, but it is a frail prevention. Gloved hands grab each door, rock it back
and forth. As well made furniture, the two parts of the sliding doors creak
uneasily before they break loose from their grooves. Half kneeling, the dark
form grasps the fireplace shovel to his right, and the hacking begins. The
carefully polished veneer cracks in one corner, separating into the shape of an
‘ envelope flap, a worn page, pealed upward at last. With a clatter, the doors
bend, falling outwards like oversized cards bursting from their shuffling in an
over full deck.

7:50 With the silence descending for a moment, the inquisitive kitten
Minuit, so ready to purr, approaches to the side. The shovel lifts and comes
crashing to the stone fireplace at the center of the living room.

7:51 Drawers yield their treasure conveniently packaged in tie-string
bags of maroon felt. No look inside to the monogram and delicate curlicue
design on the silver and the year l901—only the need to hear the satisfying
clank of heavy substance.

An unruly pile grows at the back door, the dining room table pushed
hard against the wall on the opposite side, leaving a horizontal gash there.

7:53 My office: No cats come to hear the heavy grunts and panting.
For the first time the two work together. The guts of the machine, the high
tower, attached in the back to the monitor, they wrench and twist, and the

'/35'


OLIVE MULLET

screw flies off hitting the heat register, leaving the dangling connection to
look like a contorted, wordless wound, a gaping mouth. The tower is heavy,
resisting being moved on the thick pile rug. Two sets of hands embrace it,
and the desk above wobbles. Two plants, I rescued from destruction a few
years ago, carefully watered just before departure, and placed by the south
window—fall. The feet, branching for the push and pull, grind the tendrils
with the dirt into the rug.

Both, with a quick shove to the pile at the back door, are needed to
carry the tower like a safe unopened to the car, the old Cadillac sagging in the
driveway. The first birds to the feeder scatter with the explosion of grunts and
curses.

Why had they not taken the entire computer? Even with the tower
the most valuable part, why just that part? Were they just upgrading their
own computer?

In the heart of that tower lay ten years of a novel completed, in the
process of revision. And my old friend, the Journal, to whom I confided
everything, more than to anyone. Is he reading it now, a stranger I will never
see?

“January 1 our friend of 26 years is dead. I cannot cry, I cannot see, I
cannot believe. . .”

“Stop whining. Nothing you can do about it. It’s done, over with.”

7:58 Resuming in the study, between huffs, each pulls out drawers
and tosses. Even a red canister with a large red cat face is dumped, its meager
contents candy.

I remember Mary coming up the walkway—the same way they
entered and left. Mary held in her hands this cat canister, presenting it with a
hug, while I burst into tears. Our 18-year-old cat we had just put to sleep. I
had carried him out of the vet’s in his basket upsetting the new arrivals with
my howls. We buried him next to his sister on the hill behind the house,
saying in unison, “They always liked to be up high.”

7:59 In my study’s closet a large, heavy white plastic trash bag is
lifted, its contents spun from on high over the entire floor, tossed in a full
flamboyant sweep, then rummaged through. Each year, separated with a
rubber band, represents the entire correspondence from our first friend in the
area, who had since moved south. As the waves of motion move on to
another room, the lime green high pile rug is now obscured, embedded with
pencils, pens, a fan of letters, dark moist dirt sprinkled with the tender green
stalks hacked off.

The sum momentarily peaks through the gray clouds, as they scurry
down the walkway to the car with their bundles. The house behind them is
silent, as though devoid of life.

'/36'


Les votews

8:06 The one in the guest room flings open the cedar closet and
noting its depth, throws all onto the bed and onto the floor until the door can
no longer close—sweaters, scarves, coats, suits, heavy wool on sagging
hangers, and behind bedding, bedspreads.

8:08 Pounding downstairs, the other dumps all files on the floor of
Dan’s study. Files kept carefully by month, year and categOry, taxes by year,
careful records. The next room, the library, being underground, has no
windows. The light is flicked on—the only light left on. An arm sweeps
across the library mantelpiece. A vase crashes to the cement fireplace floor,
yielding nothing inside.

The vase used to sit in Mother’s foyer—pale pink alabaster, almost a
translucent color. Heavy as it was, I held it like a baby on the trip home after
her death.

8: 13 The workroom — Not waiting for the knobs to turn, one of them
rams open the metal cabinet doors. The glass jars shake, rattle, tilt on their
corners, and except for the slamming close, would have tumbled to the floor.

8: 13:55 Grasping the door firmly, the last door in the house is
opened—the empty garage, left gaping. Did he step over the welcome mat in
front of that door?

Cold air now floods into the previously warm, cozy home. After the
last slam of the back door (8:15 —all done in 45 minutes!), the house closes in
on itself, the wound now a rusty smell, a dankness permeating.

Beside the pathway taken by the intruders, the painted wooden post
“Spoiled Rotten Cats Live Here”, a gift at the September 60th birthday party,
shakes with the blast of wind to hang for the first time precariously angled,
drunkenly inches from the ground. Maggie and Meize, the two older cats,
have buried one deep in the folds of the bedding inside that cedar closet
below the eaves of the roof, and the other in the closet set underneath the
stairs—places where they have never been before. They do not move, not for
hours, not until the silence means to stay.

Minuit is gone. She came to us, dropped on the highway during a
snowstorm, her cries on the porch finally drawing us to the window. She has
never wanted to go outside again. Linda, our neighbor, taking care of the
cats, encircled the house, clanging on the food dish. She thought she saw
faint paw prints, but maybe only her imagination?

The kitten had a routine of cuddling up between our two pillows in
bed, purring and licking. She draped her paws over my arms as I read, her
nose touching my cheek. She is the only one of our three who ever knew --
before — mankind’s cruelty.

10 am. February 7: Linda drives into our garage, notices the metal
cabinet in the workroom aj ar, mildly wonders, “Did they leave it so?” Even to her
calls when she enters the laundry room, the cats do not appear with their tails

'/37'


OLIVE MULLET

curled upward, mewing for their food. Turning on the light to the staircase, to
call upward, she sees Dan’s office, papers everywhere. Frozen, she hears a
sound upstairs.

“I never knew I could move that fast,” she recounts her screeching
drive to her home.

1 pm. February 7: The sheriff and Linda are down in the workroom
talking quietly, the door to the garage now shut to allow the house to warm up
again. Was that a mewing, heard between their whispered words —— a light
scratching?

When the garage door is again opened, a black streak files by. The
sheriff, only in the house two hours, smiles. Minuit flew to the only escape
where the intruders never went. She had dug her sharp claws into our shoulders
inside that garage, desperately crying, putting her head under a chin, all in that
first week while we looked in vain for her owners. Had she forgotten, or was that
cold, dark place a refuge in her mind?

Yesterday we built a fire in the wood stove. Dan lifted the poker to
stir the ashes, and the cats scattered like leaves on a blustery day.

When will I stop scouring the landscape at every crunch in the
driveway?

Home—my back writhes in the once comfortable bed, the floors
creak more, the walls, already porous, let in even more cold air. The house has
the stability of a screen door with the big bad wolf outside saying, “I will blow
your house down.”

Since our b & e, I have heard of another, one conveniently near the
highway. When the owner returned, even though the dresser drawers were
made of wood, she washed and washed and washed them, and finally moved,
because they could never get clean...

Last night I dreamt of the wedding ring. It was rolling over and over
alongside of the wall by the bed. Again on my knees I searched, reaching,
easing furniture around. I remember when we bought the ring — from our
favorite jeweler. His wife and him, and elderly Jewish couple with an accent
from the “old country”, we invited to our wedding.

It is gold with no stone in it. We were only graduate students then.

It is strange I did not dream of the Florentine ring mother gave me
when I was twelve. A design with the Medici balls that the F lorentines don’t
do anymore. It is time to put away childish things...

“You have too much stuff. You need to get down to minimalist
living. I have only one good pair of earrings which I wear all the time.”
Maybe I should hope for another Home Invasion to bring me to that ideal?

'/38'


Les voLews

“You should be grateful they didn’t take. . .” Grateful —to- whom? —
Surely a matter of luck.

We press our fingers down on black ink, rolling them over and over.
Our turntable plastic cover showed some fingerprints on its surface. How
different from the thrill as a young child squishing my fingers on the pad,
while Visiting the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. On his second visit,
the sheriff warns, “Even with fingerprints, they can deny it... Mostly we find
their house clean, and then the goods are gone—out of state, Chicago.”

So large a city, only 225 miles away. . .

We have received a list of possible silver replacements, at reduced
prices because they have monograms B, G, L. What families are lost in those
letters?

And what does happen to the silver? Not a good market for the
metal now. And with the monogram and date surely not easy to unload...

February 7, 3pm. The silver with the monogram on its way to being
melted down. The other silver in the bowels of the city, in a pawnshop on a
dingy corner of a dirty street. The owner asks no questions, is not hooked up-
to- the police, and knows someone who might be interested...

How can it be found?

June 12, 1901 was a sunny one. My grandmother Olive wore a
flowing pale yellow chiffon, layered gown, her feet barely touching the
ground under the big tent. They were setting up the music stands, as she
floated by the servers in white gloves placing out the food and plates, the
silver and glasses. Her tiny feet seemed to spring over top. the thick grass.
She knew so much more now than at her first marriage, more mature from all
the problems. Happier than ever before, she knew this time theirs was a true
melding of souls. Catching the gleam at the edge of her eyes, she thought
back to the evening befOre, to the, gift of silver from her parents. Olive had
insisted on its being used today—the silver set with her initials on it OGMcL
and the year 1901. She had picked the heaviest silver for a marriage’s long life,
with a more delicate pattern, than the more common large curl floral edges.
Unbeknownst to her, the selection was from the last of that pattern made.

Yesterday, nearly two months after the Home Invasion, sitting in the
living room, Dan was startled by a sound he had not heard before. The kitten
Minuit perched on the windowsill overlooking the driveway — was growling!
When he lifted her, where moments. before she had been purring, now he felt
her whole body taut, heard her continued growling, and saw her eyes focused
directly in front of her. There coming up the path was a neighbor dressed in
black knit hat and black gloves.

How long will this be going on?

439'


OLIVE MULLET

St. Patrick’s Day March 17 I went right to the place to put it on. Oh,
no, not that! The Celtic cross I found in an antique store, just below the castle
twenty years before.

To a childless person, a piece of j ewelry is something like a child to
me, since I know its history.

Unlike a murder, no trace can ever be found —and not just because a
body is more important. From a burglary many more pieces must be recalled,
and like memory itself, they do not come to mind completely all at one time.
Instead they burst in the mind willy nilly, in the middle of a lap of swimming, in
the middle of the night, or on the street five, ten years from now. Each time,
“Oh, no, not that.”

Plus the logistics of finding specific objects boggles the mind. How
could they be traced? Even if the burglar confessed where he took them, and
even if, in my wildest imagination, the fence cared—an unlikely scenario——
how could he possibly remember?

Now I wonder who is wearing my ring, my Celtic cross, and
spreading out our rug, our silver? Do these things now delight as once they
did, gleaming on the dresser, softly cushioning our feet from the bed, gracing
our table? Do the new owners ever wonder who had them before? My arm
stretches its furthest, my hand reaching and clutching at empty air. They
have flown volés — fly in a different orbit now.

More filled in than the chalked-in outline of a murder victim on the
pavement, the perpetrators have a top and a bottom: tennis shoes, black knit
cap, male voices. But to do a rubbing, I see the interior phantasm come out
dark and featureless, the voices long ago dissipated in the air. Too few
certainties to connect the dots for a full body. As visible as the flash of white
tennis shoes against snow. Les Voleurs.

./40.


 


 


§®N§Q§N§s® ,  


CONTRIBUTORS

Gail Adams has had stories and poems published in The American Voice, The
Georgia Review, The North American Review and others. Her collection of
short fiction, The Purchase of Order, won the Flannery O’Conner Award and
has been reissued in paperback. The title story was selected for inclusion in
The Prentice Hall Anthology of Women’s Literature, 2000. An Associate
Professor on the creative writing faculty of the English Department at West
Virginia University, Adams was named West Virginia Professor of the Year by
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (C.A.S.E.). She is
completing a novel and continues to work on short stories, the most recent of
which appeared in Gulf Coast.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton.
Aldrich currently teaches creative writing at Michigan State University and
serves as Advisor to Red Cedar Review.

Laura Apol’s poems have appeared in a number of literary journals (including
The Hudson Review, Sistersong, Bluestone Review, NewPlains Review, Blue
Unicorn, and others) and poetry anthologies (including Claiming the Spirit
Within, ed. Marilyn Sewell, Beacon Press 1997; and In Praise of Pedagogy, ed.
Wendy Bishop and David Starkey, Calendar Islands Publishers, 2000). Her
first collection of poetry, Falling Into Grace (Dordt College Press), was
published in 1998, and her second collection, Crossing the Ladder of Sun,
was recently accepted at the Michigan State University Press.

Carol Barrett holds doctorates in both Clinical Psychology and Creative
Writing. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and
anthologies. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for
the Arts, and Artist Trust, a Washington-based organization. Carol
supervises doctoral students in the arts and humanities through The Union
Institute in Cincinnati. She addressed the ROIAL program in 1997.

Toby Bochan is a fiction writer and poet, with an MFA from the Michener
Center for Writers at UT Austin. Her work has appeared in journals such as
Other Voices, The T hreepenny Review, and Quarterly West, with forthcoming
work in Post Road and The Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in New York

City.

Jeremy Campbell is a fourth year English major at Michigan State University,
who has published in The Offbeat and Oats. His short story, “Something For
Everyone,” was chosen for Red Cedar Review’s New Voices Series. While he
enjoys prose, and is confounded by poetry, his main focus (presently) is
playwriting. His favorite writers include David Mamet and Garth Ennis; he’s
just discovered Mozart’s “Requiem,” and he is trying to better his acting

./M.


CONTRIBUTORS
skills. Everything else is just consequence.

Philip Dacey published in 1999: The Deathbea’ Playboy (Eastern Washington
University Press), his sixth book, and The Paramour of the Moving Air
(QUarterly Review of Literature), his seventh. The Summer 2001 issue of The
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review included a twelve-page feature on Dacey and
his poems about the American poet. The feature included an interview with
Dacey, several of his new poems about Whitman, and an introduction by
Whitman scholar Ed Folsom. Dacey has recently completed a book-length
manuscript of his poems about Whitman, Pagan: Poems on the Life and Work
of Walt Whitman.

Carol V. Davis lives in Los Angeles, California. Her poems have appeared in
many magazines, including Mid-American Review, Roanoke Review, South
Dakota Review, Literal Latte and Kalliope and anthologies, including Nice
Jewish Girls, (Plume/Penguin, 1996). She is the author of chapbook, Letters
From Prague, (Paper Bag Press, 1991) based on the letters of Franz Kafl<a to
his fiancee. Her new book, Its Time to Talk About... was published in St.
Petersburg, Russia in November, 1997, in a bilingual edition. In May, 2000 she
received the Strokestown Poetry Award, 2nd place, in Ireland.

George Ellenbogen is a Canadian poet now living in the Boston area where he
directs the Creative Writing Forum and teaches poetry writing at Bentley
College. In addition to poems in numerous magazines and anthologies, he has
published four collections of poems and been translated into French and
German. He has read on both sides of the Atlantic. He was also the subject of
a documentary film- “George Ellenbogen: Canadian Poet in America.”

Jeanine Hathaway is the author of Motherhouse (Hyperion, 1992), an
autobiographical novel, and The Self as Constellation (forthcoming, UNT
Press), winner of the 2001 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry. Her personal essays
are a regular feature of The Wichita Times, a regional monthly newsmagazine
of the arts and popular culture. She teaches writing and literature at Wichita
State University.

Sean Hoen lives in Kalamazoo, MI, where he writes fiction, creative non-
fiction, and poetry. In 2001 Sean took first place in the Kathryn Swarthout
Writing Contest (fiction) and third in the Jim Cash Writing Awards (poetry).
He is currently taking graduate courses at Western Michigan University, and
plans to attend their MFA program in Fall 2002. Sean is also a musician,
having performed on 5 full-length CDs and toured the US and Canada. A
chapbook of his poetry, While Drinking Alone, was published in 1998 by
Cassworks Press. One Afternoon I Quit Spitting is his first story.

745'


CONTRIBUTORS

Lyn Lifshin’s most recent prizewinning book, (Paterson poetry award) Before
It is Light, published winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow press, following their
publication of Cold Comfort In 1 99 7, was reprinted in 2001. Black Sparrow
will continue to publish a series of her books including Blue Sheets in 2002.
She has published more than 100 books of poetry, including Marilyn Monroe,
Blue Tattoo, won awards for her non-fiction and edited four anthologies of
women’s writing including Tangled Vines, Ariadne is Thread, and Lips
Unsealed. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines
and she is the subject of an award winning documentary film, Lyn Lifishin: Not
Made of Glass, available from Women Make Movies. For interviews,
photographs, more bio material, reviews, prose, samples of work and more, her

website is www.1mlifshin.com

Judith McCombs has three poetry books: Against Nature: Wilderness Poems
(Dustbooks), Sisters & Other Selves (Glass Bell), and Territories, Here &
Elsewhere (Mayapple). Her work has appeared widely, in Bridge, Calyx,
Feminist Studies, Nimrod (Neruda Award) Poet Lore, Poetry, Poetry
Northwest, Potomac Review (Poetry Prize), Prairie Schooner, Red Cedar
Review, Sisters of the Earth, etc. In 1971 she founded Moving Out, the
nation’s second oldest surviving feminist literary journal. She taught for 19
years at Wayne State and Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies, has two
critical books on Margaret Atwood, and has won NEH and Canadian Embassy
Fellowships, and Michigan and Maryland Arts Council Awards.

Ron McFarland teaches literature and creative writing courses at the
University of Idaho where he also serves as advisor for the literary magazine
Fugue and for the men’s soccer club. His most recent book is Catching First
Light: 30 stories & essays from Idaho (Idaho State University Press 2001).

Marlene M. Miller edited the anthology An Intricate Weave and her stories
and essays have appeared in PhOebe, The Dickinson Review and American
Women Writers. She lives in San Diego and is currently at work on a novel.

Rick Mulkey’s poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies
including the Denver Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Southern Poetry
Review and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has received a
Hawthomden Fellowship and the Charles Angoff Award from the Literary
Review. He is the author of Before the Age of Reason. He lives in South
Carolina where he directs the Creative Writing program at Converse College.

Olive Mullet has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in English; she was

a hill professor at Ferris State University for twenty-five years, before
devoting her time to writing fiction. She has a novel in progress and several

./46.


CONTRIBUTORS
short stories. Les Voleurs is her first published short story.

Alan Newton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas. His full-length
play, “Weout,” produced by English Alternative Theatre at KU, won the
2001.-Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Lorraine Hansberry
Awardi‘fiis latest play, “The Bell Before Summer,” recently was given a staged
reading at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Amy Nolan teaches “Chillers and Thrillers” as a Teaching Assistant in the
Department of English at Michigan State University, where she is working on
a Ph.D. in Literature. She has taught writing classes at Central Michigan
University and Alma College, and this past summer had an excerpt of writing
accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where she spent twelve
“summer-camp-like” days in August of 2001. Amy is just getting started in her
writing “career.” This is her first publication.

Evelyn Shakir is the author of Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in
the United States, which combines interviews and her own personal
reminiscence of growing up in a Lebanese American community. Her first
short story, Remember Vaughn Monroe? was published in the collection
Post—Gibran: New Arab American Writers. She has also written a number of
essays on Arab American literature, produced a one-hour documentary (for
public radio) on Lebanese and Syrians in Massachusetts, and reviewed books
for the Arabic Hour television program, produced in Boston. She lives in
Boston and teaches at Bentley College.

Sarah Jane Shute lives in Santa Monica, California. This is her first published
short story.

Al Sim lives in central Virginia with his wife and son. His fiction has appeared
in a number of publications, including Glimmer Train, Thin Air, and South
Dakota Review. He has completed a collection of stories and is finishing a
short novel that he describes as a “doppelganger ghost story interracial
romance.”

Anita Skeen is currently a Professor of English at Michigan State University,
where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program, Women’s Studies, and
Canadian Studies. She also serves as the Director of the

Residential Option in Arts and Letters Program (ROIAL). She received her
MA and MFA from Bowling Green State University and her BS from Concord
College in Athens, West Virginia. She is the author of four volumes of poetry,
Each Hand A Map, Portraits, Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame and The
Resurrection of the Animals, and her poetry, short fiction, and essays have

'fl/7'


CONTRIBUTORS

appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She is currently
completing a new volume of poetry began last year while a Fellow at the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a collection of short stories, and a first
novel, Minor Chords.

Kate Snodgrass is the Artistic Director of the Elliot Norton Award-winning
Boston Theater Marathon and the Producing Director of Nobel Laureate
Derek Walcott’s Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University, where she
lectures in Playwriting. She is the 2001 recipient of the Boston “Theatre Hero”
Award from StageSource, Inc., and the author of the Actors” Theatre of
Louisville’s Heideman Award winning one-act “Haiku.” Her play
“Observatory” is the winner of the 1999 IRNE Award for Best New Play. She
is the National Chair of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre
Festival, and she has taught at the Harvard Extension School, Wellesley
College, Brandeis University, and at the ART. Institute for Advanced Theatre
Training at Harvard, among others. ~

Kathleen Walsh Spencer has had work published or forthcoming in
Clackamas Review, The MacGufifin, Mediphors, 100 Words, terminus,
Inkwell, LUNGFULL!, Driftwood Review, and many others. She has received
awards and scholarships from Michigan State Poetry Society, Oakland
Community College, Cranbrook Guild, and Cranbrook Institute. She is a nurse
practitioner, edits Plastic Surgical Nursing Journal, and lives with her
husband and daughter in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

Kartik Srinivasan is a Finance major at Michigan State University. His short

story “Kailas” was chosen for Red Cedar Review’s New Voices Series. This is
his first publication.

#48-


 


 


Q§m§m§w§§¢

 


 

 

The Allegheny Review

The Allegheny Review, now goin into its 20th year of publication, is one of America's
few nationwide liter magazines de icated exclusively to undergraduate works of poetry,
fiction, creative non— rction, and artwork. Published annually, the periodical showcases
some of the best literature the nation's undergraduates have to offer.

Awards:
0 The Allegheny Review Literature Award: —- $150 is awarded to the best entry in poetry,
fiction, and nonfiction.
o The Alleghen Review ArtAward - $150 is awarded to the best piece of artwork.
0 Literature inalists will be judged by a visiting author participating in Allegheny’s
“Single Voice” reading series.

Contributors:
0 Currently enrolled undergraduate students only.

Genre Guidelines:
9 Fiction — not to exceed 20 pages, double—spaced
o Poetry - u to poems
9 Creative hlbn-fiction -— not to exceed 20 pages, double—spaced
9 Artwork — no limit on number of pieces submitted

Submission Information:

0 All submissions must be ostmarked no later than December 1, 2001.

o A $5 entry fee is require , which covers a one—year subscription. Please make checks
payable to The Allegheny Review. If you would like to send in more than one genre,
please send separately with an additional entry fee.

o All literary work must be submitted in typed hard copy. Artwork may be on disk
(minimum resolution of 300) or in a format that permits scanning.

0 E—mail entries and simultaneous submissions are not accepted.

Include a cover letter containing name, address, school attending, ear in attendance,
and e-mail address as well as pertinent experience and previous pu lications. A short
bio paragra h is also helpful.

Send a SAS for correspondence.

Artwork can be returned, but not manuscripts. Those not published will be recycled.

O

0.

Send Submissions to:
The Allegheny Review
Alle heny Colle e, Box 32

eadville, P 16335

Ordering Information:
0 To urchase a copy of the 2001 issue or to reserve a copy of the 2002 issue, send $4
to t e above address. Please make checks pa able to The Allegheny Review.

0 Back issues, excluding 1985, can be purchase for a discounte rate of $3.
Questions?
0 For more information, please inquire at the address above, e-mail the editors at

Irv—ieflallsgmm or call the office, (814) 332-6553-
. Information can be found on the official website, http;[[rgiewglleghenyedu, as well.

 

./i2.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

FOufihGéttm: "FXfiIor’dtioris in Nonfiction is 21 literary journal devoted

to contemporary nonfiction by both distinguished and emergent
writers, including personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism, and
personal cultural. criticism, with an emphasis on. perscmal explomtion.
Fourth Genre also seeks to encourage an ongoing dialogue about
creative nonfiction. through rouncltable discussions and book reviews.

 

1999 Pushcart Prize awarded for“'Ibw:-rrcl Humility” by Bret Lott (v.1 n. 2)
U’INE Readwiinalist for Writing Excellence 2(X)0
Cited by .Best'Ar-nmriccm 555(9):: 2000:
“My Father Always Said” by Mimi Schwartz (v.11 0.11) - “Ralston” by Stuart Dybck (v.1 11.2) '
“An Apology for Forgiveness’ Close Association will} Cowardice” by Thylias Moss (v.3 n.2)

 

SUBSCRIPTtON RATES (2 ISSUES ANNUALLY)
UNlTED STATES ‘ Individual $20 I: institution $23 0 $510 single issue
INTERNATIONAL . individual $26 - Institution $29 - $11 single issue ¢ air malt: add $16 per year

SUBSCRtPTION ENFORMATION: Journals Department, Michigan State University Press.
1405 South Harrison Road, 2.5 Manly Miles Buiiding. East Lansing. Ml 488236202
tel 517.355.9543 . e-mail anders5'1@msu. edu

 

SUBMISSiON GUiDEUNES: send SASE to Michael Steinberg, Editor, Fourth Genre, ATL Department,
229 Bessey Haiti Michigan State University, East Lansing, Ml 48824. Or email fourthgenroomtmsuodu.
Manuscripts are accepted April ‘1 "June 15 and October 1~December 15.

We) 3%- Jane Easement

 

 

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East Lansing
Monday thru Friday 6:30 AM to Midnight
Saturday & Sunday 7 AM to Midnight
1331 East Grand River Ave.
(near Hagadorn and Grand River)
Phone 517-333-9710

'/56°


'12”

 

REVEEW

Red Cedar Review is a biannual

literary magazine edited by

Michigan State University
undergraduates. Subscriptions are
available For $12 For one year. Sample
copies are $4. Correspondence should
be sent to Red Cedar Review, 17C
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Manuscripts are read year-round. For
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This issue was designed in
PageMal<er 7.0 and printed by
McNaughton and Gunn, Inc, 960
Woodland Drive, Saline, Michigan.
Body text is in Times New Roman
10 point, titles are in Kaulmann 30
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Geometric 10 Point.

Cover art by Joe Acl<er

Red Cedar Review is the literary
digest of Michigan State Univer-
sity. Founded by Jim Cash and
Thomas McGuane, we have

printed over thirty-nine years oi the
best contemporary literature,

including Dan Gerber, Charles

Baxter, Carolyn Forche, Judith

Minty, Margaret Atwood, Stuart
Dybel<, Pablo Neruda, Robert Bly,
Allen Ginsberg, \X/illiam Stallord, and
Diane \X/al<osl<i.


 


 

 

 


IN THIS ISSUE:

POEMS by Anita Sl<een, Judith IVIcCombs, Richard l\/Iull<ey, Carol Davis,
George Ellenbogen, Carol Barrett, l_aura Apol, Philip Dacey, l_yn Lilshin, and
Kathleen Spencer ‘

INTERVIEW with Stephen Dunn

SHORT STORIES and ESSAYS by Jeanine Hathaway, Evelyn Shal<ir, Gail
Galloway Adams, lVlarcia Aldrich, Jeremy Campbell, Amy Nolan, Kartil<
Srinivasan, Al Sim, Sarah Shute, Ron l\/lcl:arland, Olive lVlullet, Toby Bochan,
lVlarlene Miller, and Sean l‘loen

PLAVS by Katherine Snodgrass and Alan Newton

$5.0C