Santa Fe Writers Project » 2007

“Still Autumn” by Literary Awards Finalist, Amy L. Jenkins

SFWP — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:00:07 +0000

When I was a child my days were wild and unpredictable, and I sometimes miss the peaks of emotion present in that old life. Most of the time I abhor the drama of my past when my life centered on the loudness of my hard-drinking parents. But that day in the still young wilderness of Milwaukee County’s Schlitz Audubon Center with DJ, during our quiet moments, I wondered if the life we’d built for our last child, this last-chance-to-get-parenting-right son, held all the joy and excitement we wished for him. Was our life too quiet and too correct?

DJ is the ours in our yours– mine – and– ours family. Before marrying Paul, my nuclear family was only a duo, me and my daughter, Andrea. She was born into a marriage of two young kids who hadn’t a clue about how to choose a spouse or build a life. My daughter grew up without her divorced dad and with a mother who was often at work, college, or at home, studying. We did have our intense doses of scheduled together-time, squeezed in between responsibilities while I strained to build a stable life and advance from nurse’s aide to director of nursing. Paul’s three children were more privileged than my Andrea, and they enjoyed the devotion of their stay-at-home mom who grew to be dissatisfied with her often-absent physician husband. So now here we are, Paul, with a history of giving most of his life to his job, and Amy, practiced in allocating her time to the survival needs self-evident in single parenting and career building, and DJ, born to oh-so-responsible older parents.

DJ is eleven and our other kids are all over twenty-five years old. My youngest camped and hiked with me since he was able to walk, and we grew accustomed to our outdoor time together while I served as his Cub Scout den leader. Conceived in a sleeping bag at Mauthe Lake, he’s always seemed at ease in nature. He isn’t, however, surrounded by riotous family fun. DJ’s life has been subdued by the nature and age of his family. At many of our holiday celebrations, we draw our guest list from those who live at Luther Manor Retirement Center. Many of the adults at these geriatric festivals display their wildest party nature when they accept my coffee. They generally drink decaf, but I mix caffeinated beans and decaf to make my brew. Wow, what a night we had last Thanksgiving; Grandma stayed up until nine. DJ’s always loved his older relatives, perhaps realizing that their overlapping lifespans were narrow and therefore precious in their brief commonality. He collected jokes for them, gave cello recitals, and listened to responses to his conversation, which were only phonetically related to the questions asked. And just like he has always been accommodating to the elder set, he’s generally been good about our nature outings.

Even though DJ willingly accompanies me on our walks, he usually wants to know what else is in it for him. This time he settled for a stop at a bookstore and breakfast. Over George Webb Restaurant’s pancakes, DJ kept kidding me about my literary fascination at the store. I’d leaned against a pillar and started to read Hannah Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things. Suddenly hyper-aware of the concentration of dust between my eyes and the pages of the book, I’d read about the little particles we will all become and how many millions were floating in my morning orange juice. Realizations of the matrix in my environment, the tads of camel hair, particles of diamond dust and some creepy minuscule monsters that drank my juice as I did, entranced me. DJ’s chuckle drew me out the book.

He’d been bending in front of me, reading the title. “You’re reading about dust?”

“Yeah, it’s amazing. Some of these particles,” I pointed to a ray of low-November sun illuminating a concentration of specks in the air, “are flakes of skin supporting a village of microscopic life.”

He took the book from my hand and returned it to the shelf. “Someone needs to stop you, Mom.”

I could have held onto the book, picked it back up, or argued the point. Instead I found myself mired in DJ’s judgment of me. Reading a book about dust sounded so nerdy, I had to consider just how big of a geek I’d become.

Before we arrived at the Audubon Center, DJ joked about adding Holmes’ book about dust to my Christmas wish list. While we drove past the wooded lots and symmetrically landscaped front entrances of the immense colonial homes of Bayside, DJ fired off his list of playful ammunition.

“You’ll probably want your star calendar again so you can be sure to make us stand outside in the freezing night when the rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter are visible in your telescope. Dad heard you telling Aunt Julie about the Walt Whitman poetry recording from the library that made you cry, so that CD might be on Dad’s list for you. You want a mushroom identification book, and now probably a book on dust.”

Would you rather I asked for a leather miniskirt and Cuban cigars?” I didn’t give him time to answer before I stepped out into the nearly miraculous warm November sun. With snow in the forecast for next week, this clear fifty-degree day felt like an unexpected last reprieve before the winter tide would cover much of our landscape in a chilling sea of white.

Most of Wisconsin’s undeveloped land teems with hunters in November, so we planned to walk in this protected sanctuary. DJ brought a camera. Oaks, birches, sumac and more had dropped their autumn cover weeks ago and now rested in the spent leaves of summer. DJ looked up the tower of a wide elm and studied the view in his camera frame. I imagined he envisioned the passage of time and recycled life that had been elevated to the open sky above the forest. When I asked him what he saw, he told me the two knots at the middle of tree looked like a lady’s chest. When I looked up, I had to agree.

Between the arbor pillars, the blues of Lake Michigan blended into sky, obscuring the horizon. Ahead of us, stood the observation tower. As we approached the structure, a family with a quintet of vociferous kids scooted around us and ascended the stairs. We followed.

Waiting one level below, while DJ climbed to the highest platform with the others, I looked out to the lake which had formed my sense of direction since I was a child. One hundred and eighteen miles across the lake to Michigan and three hundred miles from north to south, it fills the eye’s view as fully as any ocean. I always thought I was blessed with an innate internal compass, because I could access an inner awareness of my orientation to the lake. The wind on the tower carried a brisk current of lake air, fresh but with a hint of fish odor. This was a smell from my childhood. When we lived in a flat on Milwaukee’s east side, my dad would drive me to Bradford Beach with a six or twelve pack of beer in a cooler and one grape or orange soda for me cooling among his Pabst Blue Ribbon’s. And always in my memory, I see one amber bottle open and wedged between his thighs as he drove. He’d girl-watch while I played in the waves, not really swimming in the cold and strong undercurrent, but teasing the lake by running just to the white hem at the water’s edge as it came to greet me.

Dad’s slicked back black hair, side burns, and crooked sneer gave him an Elvis-type persona. Girls smiled and talked about how cute I was as they flirted with him. He might pat my blonde curls as I sat with my legs in a circle and buried my sole to sole feet with little shovelfuls of sand. A cooler full of empty bottles would clink and thud as Dad and I walked back to the car so he could get ready for his second-shift job.

He’d strut so casually, smiling and relaxed. He might break into song and hug me, or yell for me to “quit lagging behind and walk faster.” Sometimes he called me useless; sometimes he called me peanut. I didn’t know at four or five years old that he was drunk. I only knew that if I didn’t fuss, I could go to the beach. Dad always drove sporty cars, Thunderbird, Mustang convertible, and GTO. I felt cool, because he was cool. In winter or even on a sunny autumn day, like the day at Audubon, he’d sometimes take me to bars or to the local garage to “suck a few beers” with his buddies. They’d spend the early afternoon with their heads under the hood of some hot rod at Scotty’s garage. Dad let me turn the handle on the red metal vending box and crank out a handful of salty peanuts. Garage patrons would walk by me and tell me I was a good girl for sitting so still. I knew the secrets to impressing adults. Don’t ask for anything; don’t touch anything; don’t complain; don’t spill. Any violation could lead to a spanking and certainly to being yelled at. Sitting and watching became my job, but I preferred my outdoor duties, when birds, bugs and plants kept me company. My quiet creed usually worked for me. My parents exacerbated the outrages in each other and their fights could terminate in the emergency room or with dents kicked into the car or with one of them gone for a few days or weeks.

DJ appeared beside me from the upper level of the tower. “Why are you staying down here?”

“I prefer the calm. We’ll have to be quiet and wait for a while to see if any of the birds show up again.”

Is that family bugging you?”

“I know five young kids have to be noisy, but I didn’t come here to listen to people. I’ll just be patient and when they move on, we’ll watch and listen for the birds.”

A scramble of footsteps bounded behind us. DJ elbowed my arm and nodded his head toward the upper platform. He led the way up the stairs, and I remembered being about twelve and coming out of the bathroom to see my dad, pulling down the folding stairs to the attic and climbing them in his underwear and dress shirt. He’d been replacing an overhead light fixture in the front room, and I guessed he had some quick chore to finish in the attic. When the doorbell rang, I walked around the stairs to see my mom open the door to their friends, the two couples they were going out with to hear Jerry Lee Lewis, who was playing at The Annex nightclub. Mom wore high heels and a bright striped mini-dress. Her blond hair was short on her neck but ratted high and smoothed over. She served gimlets and rumacki that perfumed the house with the aroma of broiled bacon. When they asked about Dad, Mom said he was cleaning up. He’d been installing a new light. She pointed to the ceiling. From a hole in the middle of the ceiling, Dad’s head emerged clenching a light bulb in his teeth. They were all so jovial and quick to laugh. Just as they lamented that the fixture didn’t work, the light in his mouth illuminated. Dad had screwed the bulb into an electrical socket with a switched cord that ran up the left side of his face, and mom had seated everyone to the right side of his head. He held the switch in one hand and waited for his cue to electrify the little crowd. By the second round of gimlets, my dad got his pants (I never knew why he didn’t wear his pants to the attic) and quickly caught up with the cocktail count. The drinks seemed to make the story’s retelling even more fun than the actual event. The lady friend explained her shock at seeing the human light, and she reached forward and pinched the rumacki, which I was forbidden to have unless there were leftovers. She held it in front of her face and finished laughing before she delicately nibbled and crossed the ankles of her white stiletto boots.

From the hall, I imagined myself drinking highballs, wearing boots with mini-skirts, and kissing all my men-friends on the mouth like my pretty mom did. I’d grow to have beauty-parlor hair, eat rumacki, throw my head back, and laugh very loudly. I still have a square snapshot that shows Dad’s smile and clenched teeth around the lighted bulb. Most of the family pictures ended up at my home when my parents divorced. DJ has seen all the pictures of my dad as light fixture and the stack of photos of his cars. Our Saturn and minivan don’t have the same appeal as my dad’s fifty-seven T-bird with the port-hole top. He loved to take that T-bird out on sunny days without the hardtop. He said he had to “clean out the engine” and drove pedal-to-the-metal. The wind made whips of my curls, erratically beating my cheeks and eyes. My fear squelched forever in me the enjoyment of speed that others find in motorcycles and downhill skiing. But I always went for a drive with Dad when he asked. I wanted to be cool, even if it killed me. Because I loved him, and because he wanted to be with me.

On the top of the tower DJ and I faced the wind coming from the east and my hair blew straight back behind my head. From this vantage the landscape expanded and blue filled the immense dome of sky.

About a half-mile south, five children and two adults appeared to vibrate slowly, lots of movement and little forward advancement, like colorfully dressed ants on a winding trail. A pair of cardinals low in bushes attracted DJ’s attention. The coming winter had already sent most of our colorful birds adrift, the orioles, tanagers, towhees, iridescent indigo buntings, and ruby throated hummingbirds all took their exotic plumage back to the tropics. The stunning red of the cardinal offered a comforting reminder that all that is bright and beautiful had not abandoned those of us who dwell in northern winters. Wind muffled most of the bird calls, but a loud churrr call with rolling R’s turned our heads to a male red-bellied woodpecker. Over nine inches long, it’s the largest woodpecker generally seen in Milwaukee County.

Standing in the corner of the tower, DJ leaned against me so that even though we were alone on the tower, we took up very little space. He rolled around me, semi-circling from a bit behind me to a bit in front of me, all the while keeping in shoulder to shoulder contact as if we were conjoined.

Startled by a flurry of winged activity, our eyes flitted from trees to ground to bushes. At least fifty birds− what were they? I made my eyes focus on just one, and then the Wordsworth lines came with recognition, “Art thou the bird whom Man loves best, The pious bird with the scarlet breast?” They must be migrating in a flock. Our state bird, yet I’d never seen a flock this large. Busy and bossy, the robins chased each other, establishing dominance for prime resting and eating areas. Most settled in an open area behind the tower, so we turned our backs to the lake and watched them forage and compete for choice limbs on a crabapple tree. These thrushes migrate together and disperse once they reach their destination. Our last robins of the season, we didn’t expect to see more until early spring, when they return to feed on the shriveled rose hips of all the bushes that are not tended by overzealous pruners.

DJ asked, “What’s the big deal about robins? Everybody makes a fuss when they come back in spring.”

“I think it’s the songs, DJ. Robins sing our spring songs for us. Their territorial tunes are loud, recurrent and happy. They sound like spring.”

“You mean they sing for you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m truly grateful for robins, if they sing instead of you.”

We left the tower with DJ spitting over the railing at each turn of the stairs as he tested the wind. He wasn’t afraid to spit into the wind, and this time the wind didn’t return his fire.

I wanted to find the blooming witch-hazel tree and bittersweet vine which both flaunt their vivid blooms into December, so we pushed on to the woods, prairies and ponds away from the lake. DJ kept his camera out and pointed it in all directions in a combination of adolescent energy and curiosity. I tended to look where he pointed the camera.

At first glance the woods looked brown and monochromatic, but when we looked closer the colors transformed to more intense and varied shades. At the base of a dead stump, turkey tail fungus grew loud seasonal decorations. Looking close at the six-inch fans of striped color, we saw shades a kindergartener might choose to decorate his gobbler picture. Arches of tan, brown, orange and purple layered and repeated themselves in beautiful redundancy. The word fungus bears the stigma of something slimy, but these beauties felt like fine worn leather.

Tall red cedars hugged our trail and perfumed the air with a richness that fell just short of sweet. At the prairie, tall stalks of thistle dotted the grasses with deep black seed heads. Forty-foot wide stands of red dogwood posed in flashy clusters before a wide ridge of tanned and dried miscanthus grass that waved and rustled in the cooling afternoon wind. Our trail wandered near ponds of ducks and geese. They seemed to be settling in for the winter as they sauntered in the still water with an occasional push of their webbed feet toward the slowly moving shadow-line that separated day from evening and shrunk the sunshine of their afternoon.

Woodlands and prairie fields alternated dominance and after a few miles DJ put away his camera and started to play with my arm. Whacking the back of my elbow, he’d send the arm swinging forward, then bat it back and slap it forward again in a soft rhythm that didn’t really hurt. He didn’t have to say the words; I knew what he was thinking, How much further?

“It’s less than two miles back.” There was a shorter route back, but I still wanted to see the blooms of the witch hazel and bittersweet, and I felt no need to bring up the option of the quarter mile path to the parking lot.

I might have made a mistake; he seemed to have met his nature quota for the day. He kept swinging my arm and started to sing: “Lucy met the train. The train met Lucy. The tracks were juicy. The juice was Lucy.” He finished that number and went into long rendition about a pirate mutilation. “Being a pirate is all fun and games, ‘Til somebody loses an eye. It spurts and it squirts and it jolly well hurts; you can’t let your mates see you cry.…”

And before long, I sang with him. “Being a pirate is all fun and games, ‘Til somebody loses an ear. It drips down your neck, and it falls on the deck….”

We probably walked right past the witch hazel, chugging our arms and marching in rhythm. We never did find the spidery yellow blooms on a small under-story tree that I’d heard bloomed in the area. As we crossed a paved service road, I saw a couple standing still in a meadow in front of us. I grabbed DJ’s arm and pulled on his wrist like you’d pull on a light chain to turn it off, and he was quiet. I pointed ahead. “Those people are very still, they must see something.”

We walked softly into the meadow and the man, still thirty-feet ahead of us, hyper-extended his wrist and showed us his palm. We stopped. He pointed into some brush on our right. A huge doe ate, chomping and sliding her lower jaw laterally and twitching her ears. She saw us, and we stood as statues. The man pointed again to the brush. We followed his direction an immense buck turned his head to us displaying a shiny twelve-point rack. This buck had rubbed off every bit of velvet cover to polish his antlers. Autumn is the season of love for deer; they pair up and mate when the male is most impressive. His brown shiny eyes watched over his seasonal sweetheart while she continued to eat. They were only about ten feet away but stayed as if they knew this was a no-hunting area. It’s a rare treat to see a couple in love like this. After coupling, the male stays around only a few days to make sure no other male mates with his dear, then, he leaves. Either of those deer could have bounded off at thirty miles an hour, but the female just moseyed away when she’d had her fill of dogwood, and the buck followed, always watchful and never lowering his head to eat.

DJ’s words tenderly entered the quiet space. “He looked like he loved her.”

“Yes, but doesn’t it seem harsh that he leaves her so quickly?”

“Um, you want to talk harsh. What about the poor guy who’s a black widow or praying mantis.”

We both recalled a television show about the Mantis religiosa who, the narrator assured us, was the only mantis consistently cannibalistic during mating. After dancing around each other and turning their thoraxes into graceful undulating S’s the male hopped up onto her back. While he continued his dance of love in rhythmic thrusts, the larger female turned her head toward the camera as if she were an exhibitionist and wanted to be sure we were watching. The mantis is the only insect that has an elongated thorax that looks like a neck and turns its head from side to side like a human. She continued turning her face upward to meet the trancelike gaze of her mate. We knew what was coming, but couldn’t look away while she took three bites of his head. And while she chomped off his entire face and chewed, his abdomen continued to thrust. The voice-over told us, in the religiosa species, head removal is necessary for ejaculation.

We reclaimed our feelings of tenderness for the short-lived romance of the deer and continued our walk. DJ drifted ahead of me. Dried compass plants, whose leaves looked like over-cooked potato chips, bent erratically as a band of purple finches poked at the black seed heads of a plant that had once been a favorite of the buffalo. The reeds of the dry grasses played their wind music as we finished our walk, an audience to the symphony. DJ swung his arms dramatically and walked ahead of me as we each found our own thoughts.

I had learned to be taciturn in my childhood home for reasons that no longer existed. As I little girl, I waited for the time I could be noisy and wild and fun whenever I wanted, and by the time I was a young teenager I joined in at my parent’s parties. Older men noticed me, offered me drinks, and danced with me, and many of them started kissing me hello and good-bye as they did to my mother. My parents were non-reactive to these events. Dad never taught me to dance, but a friend of his did, with his tub of scotch on the rocks gripped in his hand and clinking behind my back as we turned. Once I was attractive to these men, I was included in the parties. I soon discovered I didn’t care to be around these adults as their sophistication dissolved and their vowels slurred. As a small child I did want to be part of my parent’s fun, but by my late teens I found reasons to avoid the parties that had started to feel creepy. As an adult, I realized more specifically that the danger of sexual abuse hovered around me at these parties, but at the time I don’t think I was cognizant of the danger. The drunks who didn’t get loud got boring, and trapped me in my respect-your-elders attention while offering me their incoherent and unwelcome philosophies. I took a lot of walks so as to spend as much time away from the sloshy tumult in our home as possible. My adult interests in astronomy, gardening, reading, birding, and nature were enhanced by the gift my parents gave me as a small child. They taught me to sit upon my throne of silence and learn the comfort and wonders found in stillness.

The cooling air inched winter closer with every step in our walk. Perhaps we would return in the season of snow, when the witch-hazel seed-pods burst and crack like a gun, a trait that changes the name of this tree in winter to snapping-hazel. I tried not to lament the passing season and the expected bitterness of winter weather. Robert Frost loved his Vermont winters, yet he understood the melancholy I felt, as he expressed in the last lines of “Reluctance”:

Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

I will probably spend some winter evenings reading about dust, history, nature, and fictional lives, but I won’t wear a miniskirt or white stiletto boots. Rather than watch me from the hall, DJ will lie on the sofa near my chair and read his new favorite author, Kristin Frankline. Occasionally, we’ll interrupt each other to share a well-crafted line, fascinating fact, or a joke. I could make rumacki. Paul and I can share the moniker of geek, if that means we are quiet more than riotous. DJ can be the cool one in our home and keep us somewhat current on the new song releases from Black-eyed Peas and Outcast. We will host or attend a few parties, and we will laugh and be silly and occasionally a bit loud, but we won’t live the drama that I experienced as a child. I’d forgotten that I’d made that choice decades ago and again sixteen years ago, when I chose to be with my contemplative Paul. This life was the only one I could share with my son.

DJ, still twenty yards in front of me, turned around to face me. “Parking lot’s just ahead.” I nodded and watched his lanky limbs and broad strides carry him away. Only this spring, he’d been in grade school when his voice sounded more like mine than his father’s. His shoulders have grown broader than his hips, and his little love handles just above his belt melted away during his first football season. His growth during the year has been relentless in its message: There is so little of his childhood left.

The grassy path smoothed and widened just before the parking lot and DJ performed a sloppy cartwheel ending with a distinctive thud on the blacktop. He never turned around to see if I was watching; he knew.

DJ and I stood at each side of the car, the doors open, drinking water and lingering in the day’s final rays of sunshine. We’d walked quickly that last mile and our bodies were warmed from the inside. We threw our sweatshirts in the backseat of the car to enjoy the brisk air. A pick-up truck pulled in next to us, and DJ turned to close his car door to make more room in the adjacent parking spot. When he faced the woman in the truck, she smiled and gave him the OK sign. DJ pointed to his shirt that said, “Stop Reading My T-shirt” and nodded back to the good-natured driver who was quickly off for her walk before the sanctuary closed.

Just before I lifted a foot to enter the car and end our autumn, I saw a burst of color ahead. Right in front of our parking space a bittersweet vine glowed in colors of fuchsia and orange. Tiny beacons of seed pods, hundreds of them, blazed bright in front of us. DJ followed me to the vine, and we studied the red arils, little fleshy fruits, and the orange capsules that fold back like petals, so bright they’re almost garish in their celebration of themselves.

We stood silently, each inspecting the beautiful intricacy of the pods– smaller than a pea, but so sumptuous in their beauty it took us several minutes to ingest the diminutive wonders. They seemed almost too fancy for bird food, but then they were also the ripe fruit of sexual reproduction. I watched DJ silently inspecting the capsules and wondered if when he’s grown he’ll remember this day, the blue of the lake, the flurry of robins we watched from the tower, the hike, the deer, the silly songs, the very end of a season. And I wondered if when he recognizes this seed pod in autumns of his future he will remember the quiet moment with me when he first met the bittersweet vine.

Amy L Jenkins holds a MFA in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College. She teaches writing at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI and serves as editor for www.anthologiesonline.com . Her work has appeared in multiple magazines, newspapers, and anthologies including Wisconsin Academy Review, Flint Hills Review, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Florida Review, Earth Island Journal, Generations, Rosebud, Women on Writing, and the recent Seal Press release The Maternal is Political.

“Thornton” by Literary Awards Finalist, Mark Havlik

SFWP — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:40:03 +0000

It was late January when he called. Said his mother had died. I was shocked and told him how sorry I was and if there was anything I could do for him. I had just seen her in October, during the Series, and she looked fine. He said no, I didn’t understand. It was his birth mother. I didn’t know he knew her – I mean her name and whereabouts. He never let on that he did.

“All the research I’ve done just shows his adopted parents – Edward and Sarah Shepard. There’s no public record of his natural parents. The papers were sealed by the courts when he was adopted. So you know who his real mother was … and his father?”

Yeah, I know. Maybe I’m only one of two who does, probably am, I bet.

“So who were they?”

Now listen. This you got to get right. I know how you sports writers are … twisting things around but this … this is important. You got to put it down just like I’m going to tell you. Got it?

“I will.”

Don’t shit me. I want you to write it down just like it happened or otherwise I’m going to come after you with one of my trophy bats and crack open your Ivy League head.

“Jesse, take it easy. I give you my word. I have no reason to distort anything. I told you from the start this is your story, not mine.”

All right, but just do it!

“I will, I promise. Now his parents … can you tell me about his parents? Please …”

Can’t tell you much about his father. Shep was four when his dad died. He told me he was a big guy, but gentle. A real baseball nut – White Sox fan. Bought Shep his first glove. Taught him how to throw a ball, hold a bat and swing it.

“When did he tell you this?”

On the plane. He asked me to go with him the night he called about his mother. I said sure, I’d go. I knew he wasn’t close enough to anybody else and didn’t want to be alone. But it was a big secret – didn’t want me to tell a soul. Nothing about any of it. He even made me swear to it.

“So you went to his mother’s funeral?”

That’s what I thought at first but when I met him at the airport the next morning he said no. Said his mother died a month ago. Just heard about it, and we were going to her gravesite.

“Where did you go?”

Indiana. We flew into Indianapolis, rented a car and drove north for an hour or so – outside some small town. There was a graveyard – kind of run down. Across the road from it was this old brick building.

“That’s where she was when she died,” he tells me.

“The hospital?” I ask, because that’s what it looked like to me.

“Yes. But a special kind … for the mentally ill.” I didn’t really know what to make of it so I kept my mouth shut. He thought because I didn’t say nothing, I didn’t get it. “The insane,” he says. “Do you understand, Jesse? She was crazy.”

I just nodded. He didn’t have any flowers. Didn’t cry. Just stared at that small little headstone. Rose Christensen – that’s what was written on it. I had no idea what he was thinking then. Not that I ever really had a good bead on that, not ever.

I started to shake. It was cold, not freezing cold, but a damp kind of cold that gets into your joints. The sky was gray. Everything seemed gray.

“Let’s go,” he says, “we’ve got another stop to make.” And then he asked me if I was okay. I told him I was just getting chilled a bit that’s all.

“But don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “Are you all right?”

“No.” That’s all he said. I didn’t think he was.

We drove another hour or so all through farm country, pretty remote. Didn’t talk much. I figured if he wanted to say something he would and I didn’t feel like prying. Poor bastard, I kept thinking, but he didn’t look like that sad son-of-a-bitch I thought he would. He looked … disturbed, kind of cranked up, but like it was walled inside him.

I remember we drove past a sign that read Thornton. I guess it was a little after that he made a right turn and we were on a dirt road. It ended by a dilapidated farmhouse. It was boarded up and looked like no one had lived there for years, but the land around it must have been worked – you could tell. There was a barn, too. It was in worse shape than the farmhouse. Part of the roof was caved in.

“Where are we?” I ask him.

“At the beginning,” he answers.

He was always like that … short; know what I mean, in what he said? But that day, it sounded stranger than usual.

“C’mon,” he says, “let’s go in.”

“It’s all boarded up, Shep.” I tell him. “We can’t go in.”

He got out of the car, popped the trunk, and took out the tire iron and started to pull apart the wood boards that were nailed across the front door. Sort of reminded me of the South Bronx when I was a kid – watching the junkies breaking into an abandoned building so they could shoot up. I got out, leaned against the car and looked all around, keeping watch, making sure no one was seeing what Shep was doing. But it was deserted. Nothing for miles on all sides – just crop land. I was still nervous though.

“Do you know why he wanted to go inside?”

Nope. Didn’t have a clue. But he was determined to get in. You could see that by the way he was wielding that tire iron. I told him to be careful with his pitching arm, but I don’t think he heard me with the sound of those boards creaking and splintering. Man, it sounded so loud to me. Finally, he got them off and with his foot up, he kicked the door. Wham! It flew open.

He walked in and I followed but I was still a little jumpy about going in. The place was a mess – crap all over the floor. There was no furniture, at least on the first floor, except for a broken down kitchen table. It had one leg missing, but it was standing up straight. I mean completely straight. There were no chairs; they were all gone.

“This is where I was born, where I was raised, until …” he says, and paused just like that. I was wondering if I should ask him – you know, say it, “until what?” or wait for him to finish it off himself. But he said it first. “… until I was taken away.” He was looking weird. He reminded me – and I know it sounds peculiar, but it’s what ran through my mind at the time – of an animal, prey, smelling the air, sensing something. Danger, I thought.

There was a stairway against the far wall that led upstairs and he took it. I stayed down. Walked around, kicking the debris littered all over the floor to see what was in it. Just stuff – smashed up pieces of dishes and glasses, parts of plasterboard that had fallen from the ceiling and walls. I could hear him up there. He was moving around pretty fast as if he were checking everything out. Then he ran down the stairs. “I’ll be right back,” he yells out. I thought he was going to the car to get something so I didn’t follow him.

I went over to that kitchen table. Struck me odd that it was standing up like that – with just three legs. There were some pages of newspaper on it all yellowed because they were so old. From almost fifteen years ago. Wow! This is some ancient stuff, I thought to myself. The Daily Gazette. That was the name of the paper. I never knew what that meant – Gazette. Why would you call a newspaper that? I knew about the Daily News, The Post, the one in New York and The Washington Post, and even The Times – but I never read that one when I was a kid. But Gazette – small town crap, I figured. I picked up a few of the pages to see what was in them but as soon as I did the table fell. “Shit.” Felt like I had desecrated something. Like I was in a tomb. That’s what the place felt like to me … where something dead was buried. I picked up the table but couldn’t keep it upright. It kept falling over. I must have tried three or four times but still couldn’t make it stand up.

I leaned it against the kitchen wall, but that didn’t work, either. It kept slipping down the side of it. I figured I needed some kind of wedge to put under one of the legs to prop it up. I reached into the pile of junk on the floor while I was holding the table up with my other hand and found a whole copy of the Gazette – old too, from the same time. I folded it in half and shoved it under one of the legs. That did it – the table stayed. But I saw something on the front page of the paper that grabbed me. I could see the name Christensen. I bent down to see what it said. It was a story about this family from Thornton: Rose Christensen-Slater and her husband of two years, and Rose’s son, Jimmy Christensen. I pulled out the paper, the damn table fell, and just as it did, Shep blasted in and ran up the stairs. I glanced up and could see he was holding something in his hand, but he was a blur, and that was all I could see. I read the next few lines in the paper and realized, oh, Christ, this isn’t some hick town thing about a local family and their farm … it’s a goddamn horror story!

Then I flipped the paper over to the top half, and there was a sketch. I guess they didn’t allow no photos seeing how he was a kid and all. But it was just as gruesome. Maybe more because it left something for your mind to pick at. That’s when I heard the thunder – but it wasn’t coming from outside – it was coming from the second floor. I hit the stairs and climbed up – probably took two or three steps at a clip. And there was Shep swinging away with a sledgehammer at this old, gray radiator. It was one of those coiled, steel ones like they had in the apartments on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. But this one was smaller. You could see the marks on it. They weren’t just scratches. There were grooves cut deep into it.

Shep was cursing away. “Shit, bastard, bitch!” I let him go on with it for a minute or two, figuring he had to get it out, and then I grabbed him, wrapped both arms around him. But he went limp all of a sudden, and slid right through my arms and fell to the floor, weeping. I told him it was okay – just let it out. I didn’t know what else to say. There was nothing you could say. I took the sledgehammer from him and walked back down.

I didn’t notice until I came down, but when the kitchen table fell, all the legs broke off, crumbled really, and the tabletop had split in two. Diseased, I thought. Like the whole freaking place. I picked up the paper. The caption under the sketch read, “Little Jimmy Christensen found handcuffed to his bedroom radiator.” He looked … he looked like he was starving. Christ, you could count his ribs. Could see that right wrist bone below the handcuff sticking out. He was just in his shorts. The guy who drew it even put in those patches of funny skin – the scars he had on his upper arm.

“How could something like that happen?”

How? Where did you grow up?

“Shaker Heights.”

Oooh, very nice, I’ve been there – outside of Cleveland. You were lucky – I hope you know that – nothing like that there, too refined. How could something like that happen? Shit, I grew up in the South Bronx and there was all kinds of crap going on. Because of my mother, I was never a part of it. Because of my mother, I never even saw most of it. But I heard all about it. And I’m sure some of it still goes on there. But I got to say I ain’t ever heard of anything as savage as that. Never! She used to tell us as kids, before we went out, that the Devil was all around and you had to watch out for him. That’s how she tried to scare us – warn us, I guess. I never believed it until I went into that farmhouse. Then I believed … you bet your ass I believed. The Devil was out there and he’d spent some time in Thornton.

You getting this all down kid? Getting it straight like I’m telling you?

“Yes, I got it. But I’m not sure I want it. Not this!”

This is just a story to you. To me it’s more than that. But to Shep … it was a part of his life that made him who he was. For two years his stepfather would lock him up like that – handcuffed to the radiator – usually on Friday and Saturday nights while he and Shep’s mom went out and got drunk. He was probably chained there for most of the weekend – figuring when they got back home, whenever that was, they were in a stupor and just slept it off during the day until they went out again that night.

They say he never took it. Not from the first and not until the last day when they found him. I could believe that. He had that stubbornness in him. That’s why his wrist bone was all bulged out. That’s why his right arm was longer than his left because of that jerking, that constant pulling on the radiator with that handcuff on. Then the scars – they didn’t know for sure, but figured eventually he’d tire himself out and fell asleep. And sometimes he’d lean against the radiator and when it kicked on when it got cold outside, it burned him – but not fast. It would take a while and he wouldn’t notice until the damage was done. “Slow cooking flesh,” that’s what the doctor quoted in the paper said. Imagine that, Mr. Shaker Heights?

“Actually, I can’t. And you said he was …?”

I didn’t … but I’ll tell you now. He was barely eight years old when he was rescued, if that’s what you’re wanting to know.

Anyway, I needed some air. It was foul-smelling in there, so I went outside. I felt sick; thought I was going to puke. Shep was upstairs, sobbing away, still. I just let him be. When I got out, I had the paper in my hand. I don’t know why I carried it out with me. Then I understood why. There was something I had to do. I opened the car and pushed in the cigarette lighter, and when it popped out I put it against the edge of the paper until it caught fire. I let the whole damn thing burn to ash. I didn’t want anyone finding it. But it wasn’t just that … I felt it was obscene.

“Did that make you feel better?”

On that day … nothing could me feel better.

“So what happened next?”

Shep was still upstairs. I went up and sat down next to him for a few minutes. “There’s nothing here for you,” I say to him. “Let’s go, c’mon.” He didn’t speak a word and I wasn’t even sure if he was tuned into me or not. Just had his eyes fixed on that goddamn radiator. “C’mon Shep, it’s getting late. Let’s leave this place, okay?” I was practically pleading with him, trying to get him the hell out of there. He finally got up but before he did he placed his fingers over the radiator – the part where he had scraped the paint off and cut into.

“I thought I would have sliced right through it one day,” he says to me. “I figured it would take 437 days to do it. I calculated it out.” Christ, when he said that I nearly lost it. He looked so freaking pathetic.

We walked down and I put him in the car. I drove this time. He was still somewhere else – his mind, I mean. He had spun himself all the way back to when he lived there as a kid. God knows what agony he was going through. Probably reliving the worst of it. And there was more stuff in the paper I didn’t tell you about. Bad things – really bad – that his stepfather did to him. You could look it up if you want. But I don’t want to talk about it. I still can’t say it out loud … not even now, not even after these 25 years. Just can’t.

He didn’t want to stop to eat or drink anything, although I could’ve used a few myself – drinks, I mean. Actually, I wanted to get real drunk. “Just let’s go the airport.” That’s what he wanted. In the car and on the flight back to Washington, I asked him a couple of times if he was all right, if he wanted to talk about it. He said no, almost before I finished asking him. He didn’t seem upset or offended by me asking. He was just quiet, somber. Sort of like he was grieving, I guess.

I tried, and it was pretty stupid of me I got to say, to help him through it by telling him about my father. The miserable bastard that he was leaving my mother and all of us when we were real young. Just left. Took off. Shacked up with some woman, had a kid with her, and then moved on to someone else, and did the same shit all over again. Never gave my mother one dime for support. It was like we never existed. I told him how after a while we never even saw him anymore – not on the streets in the Bronx or anywhere else. My mother found out he’d gone to someplace in the Caribbean, with another woman. And one day – when she felt it was the right time – she let us in on it. Not that it made a big freaking difference to any of us. He was a worthless piece of shit. Hell, I didn’t know if he was still living or not … not that I cared. None of us really cared. But it still hurt. That’s what I told Shep.

But I didn’t think he heard much of what I had been yammering away on. And like I said, it was kind of dumb of me trying to compare my life as a kid to the hell he had gone through. Just before we landed he turned to me, and said something, stunned me, to be honest.

“At least you had a mother who loved you.”

He sounded, I don’t know, more than sorrowful about that. And I thought at the time, just looking at him when he said it, that you can get screwed in a lot of different ways, go on without a lot of things in your life but that – not having what he said I had – wasn’t one of ‘em. I really didn’t have anything good to come back to him with when I saw how he felt when he said it, so I just kept my trap shut since he was right about that.

I had my car at the airport and I drove him to his place in Georgetown. I asked him if he needed anything – now, later, or whenever. All he had to do was call.

He just nodded and then he says to me, just so I wouldn’t forget, “between the two of us, right?” I didn’t forget, wouldn’t forget, and I told him so.

After I dropped him off, while I was driving home, it suddenly came to me how strange after all the talking I did on the plane about my father, he comes out with that knock against his mother. Geez, I guess that’s why I was so surprised by it. I thought he’d at least rail against his stepfather who I thought was the heavy in all this. Maybe not, though. Maybe he blamed it all on her – I mean – marrying that kind of guy and letting him into their home. But shit, I couldn’t see his father, his real father getting involved with someone so bad like he said his mother was. I know he didn’t go on about his father much, but still … I had a hard time making sense out of that one. Christ, she must have loved him once. It was probably her husband dying like that, sudden, and being left alone with a kid. Maybe that’s what corkscrewed her? Had to be. But then again, maybe she was always rotten, and that’s what he really meant. There were people like that out there in the world my mother would always say. Man, she’d spout that out often enough like she was preaching to us. But this time … I just didn’t know. Still, it was odd he never said nothing about his stepfather and I gave him all kinds of chances on the plane to say something about that son-of-a-bitch. But not one word came out of him.

I talked to him a few times before we went down to Florida for Spring Training. He seemed okay – like himself, I mean. Didn’t bring any of it up, and I sure as hell didn’t, either. I have to admit I thought about it … maybe too much. Made me angry, real mad – but worse than that the whole thing turned me upside down. Knowing something like that could happen, did happen to someone I knew. It was enough, I swear to Christ, to make you lose your faith.

“I could see that it might. But you know … bad things happen to good people. That’s an old truth. There’s no explanation for it. Even Shep would’ve told you that, Jesse. He knew it from what you said he read all the time … those philosophy books.”

Yeah, maybe. But I don’t think he accepted it. Knowing is one thing, kid. Believing is a whole different game.

Anyway, we never talked about it. He never even hinted about it – the trip, and all that happened while I was with him in Thornton. When Spring Training started, when the pitchers and catchers showed up first in Ft. Lauderdale like we always did, Shep was there and he was just as sharp as he was last season – probably even a little better if that was possible. He was ready to pitch … aching to pitch if you asked me.

Mark Havlik’s been writing full time for several years after leaving his job as a banker. He has completed three novels. His second novel, The Tools of Ignorance, was a finalist in the 2007 Parthenon Prize for Fiction, (ranking within the top 18 of 355 entries,) and a semifinalist in the 2005 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for the Novel. He has also written a few short stories and two screenplays. The Wall was selected as a finalist in the 2007 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. Masquerade was a first round qualifier in the 2007 Filmmakers International Screenwriting Awards competition.

“Doctor Terror” by Literary Awards Finalist, Robert Begiebing

SFWP — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:09:41 +0000

“You’ve been in touch with your wife again?” one of the suits asked.

“Ex-wife,” I said. The bastards must have been tapping my phone.

We were sitting around the bruised kitchen-work table in my three-room apartment in a former farmhouse in Petaluma, that old hard-working community flirting with the seductive fringes of California wine country.

“We take it she’s living in Big Sur,” the smaller suit said.

“Not that I know of,” I lied. “She told me she was calling on her cell from a friend’s place where she happened to be staying.”

“She’s helping you with a story?” the big suit asked.

“Yes.” I hesitated without meaning to. “She had some leads for me. A feature I’m doing for the Chronicle.”

“Still the gonzo freelancer at your age?” small suit said and snickered.

“Freelancing’s a respectable trade, honest work. And I’m only thirty-three. Probably younger than you.”

“Honest,” big suit said, “unless ‘this reporter’ is meeting with terrorists, knows what they’re up to, and doesn’t notify the law.”

“I’m not meeting with any terrorists. But I’m doing a story on some of these animal rights people. Renegades are my métier.” I didn’t even smile.

“Your métier,” little suit said. “Well, we know about that. Didn’t your mother ever tell you there are better things to write about than a lot of social misfits?”

“Misfits are what I do best,” I said, giving him a shit-eating grin. I decided not to ask if his mother ever told him there were better things to do than harass journalists.

“Do best,” little suit said. “Way we hear it, you’re damned near persona non grata. Way you screwed up and nearly went to jail, and the editor too, for that last little bit of investigative bullwhacky for Mother Jones.”

“Not quite,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve done a lot of work for the Chronicle since I left my staff job there years ago. And on this story, I have a line to CNN as well, for an interview. I’ve made my share of mistakes, but I still get work.” I wasn’t about to admit that work was harder to get these days, that I was looking to this piece for—what?—vindication?

“Look,” little suit continued—a terrier worrying a toy—”you play ball and you don’t get into trouble. You protect these kinds of people and we’ll hand you your ass. That simple.”

Little suit went on a bit longer, but they were not really after me. They were after the people I intended to write about—one Dr. Stephen Rico and his assistant, who happened to be my Ex. There had been a report one day in the San Francisco Chronicle that Dr. Rico was wanted for aiding and abetting domestic terrorists. The article repeated the old speculations that he might be holed up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in the Sierras, in Baja, or in a number of other places. All through the eighties and nineties the government’s attitude toward “domestic terrorism” in the animal rights movement had been toughening: the Animal Enterprises Protection Act had made it a felony to rescue lab and fur animals.

One snag on this story, however, would be that my only real “contact” was Susan. We’d parted without too many recriminations, and to be sure there were other difficulties, but the final shoal upon which the fragile vessel of our five-year marriage foundered was her ever-growing zeal for animal rights.

I’d spent twenty minutes on the line trying to convince her that the paper was hoping to get the doctor’s side of the story, that the government was having a propaganda field day. It seemed, I argued, as if they were softening up public opinion before going in to break heads.

“So, you finally decided to kill your mother,” she said, turning back on me the old line for those favoring the medical research argument: “If it comes down to a lab rat or your mother, who you gonna save?”

Finally she invited me down to Monterey to “look her in the eye” and promise to protect my sources. Meanwhile, she would see whether Steve Rico had any tolerance for my interview idea.

I hated to drive down and spend money to look Susan in the eye, but as sometimes happens after a long time in the sloughs of despair, there’s some vague, at least, promise in the wind.

*****

I threw a couple of overnight bags in the car and, after various avoid-and-escape maneuvers, drove down to Monterey to meet Susan along the Seventeen Mile Drive at a specified turn-off facing the ocean. Had I forgotten what a dark-haired beauty she was? We talked like reasonable adults for over an hour, but she was serious, almost grave. The good doctor had certain terms. I had to live and work with him for a week or two, not just blow in and out like some journalistic parasite who would write up his first impressions. Finally she told me: “If you cross me and him, you’ll make more enemies than you think.”

“Does he know the Feds are coming for him?” I asked.

“He’s not stupid.”

“So he’s finally willing to get his side of the story out there.”

“He’s willing to take a chance on you because he knows some of your work. And, yes, it’s time to get out another side to the story.”

Susan drove me down the coast from Monterey, requesting I go blindfolded for the final hour. When I took the blindfold off, a little carsick, I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and found myself way up on grassy slopes high above the endless Pacific. I recognized the landscape generally, but only a native might have guessed where he was in that 100-mile band of coastal mountains.

“It’s an old ranch house retrofitted to run on solar power,” Susan said, “or on a diesel generator if the sun quits for days.”

Sprawling and shabby from the outside, the house inside was high-tech in the surgical wing and comfortable if simple in the living quarters. On the drive out Susan told me Steve Rico had bought the old place with proceeds from selling his fancy practice in the Bay area.

“We’re real busy right now,” Susan said, as she showed me around. Her brown and white greyhound Gogirl, who appeared to remember me, started weaving between us. “Steve will talk to you later.” She brought me back outside and up to an outbuilding that looked like an old bunkhouse. She opened the door with her keys and let the dog and me in first. The building had been partitioned into one room and several stalls, and the room, she said, would be mine. There was a single large window, a bed, a chair with a table serving as a desk, an open built-in clothes closet about two feet deep and three wide, a small bureau, and a sink. And a little old potbelly wood stove.

“It’s just cold water out here,” Susan said. “But I’ll show you where you can shower in the office, and of course you can always use the rest room in the waiting area. Steve’ll give you a set of keys.”

The view from the window sold me, looking down toward hills just turning from green to early-summer bronze and toward a stretch of redwood forest rising out of a lower ravine.

“We like to eat dinner about seven,” she added. “That’s just after quitting time most days, if we’re lucky.”

I brought in my bags and laptop and arranged my gear to my liking. Gogirl, ears flat, tail whipping, followed my every move, until Susan hurried off with the dog in tow.

*****

About two o’clock Doc Rico came over, a tall forty-something guy with a mustache and a thick head of pre-maturely graying hair. A regular Marlboro Man.

“Of course Susan’s told me about you,” he said. He was affable enough and slow-talking, like a movie Texan, and he wanted me to be comfortable.

“We have to take it as it comes. Sometimes it’s emergency room chaos. Other times it’s just routine vet-office work: our cash income. Pets of trusted locals. Ranchers with cows, goats, or horses. Sometimes I make calls.”

“I’m in, Doctor Rico,” I said.

“Please,” he said. “Just Steve. We’ll be working close.”

“Fine with me.”

“What we could use right now is someone to help out with grunt work to free us up for diagnosis, surgery, and the ER stuff. At the moment we’re having a hell of a time just keeping up with the animals coming in, sheer record keeping, I mean. So entry is important, writing down as each animal’s brought in any info you can. Susan’ll show you the paperwork.”

“Whatever helps,” I said.

“And then there’s feeding and cleaning kennels and stalls.”

“I need the exercise.”

“And sometimes in emergency care situations we need one more hand. So there’s that too.”

I nodded my head.

“But the rest of today why don’t you just follow and mostly watch. Till you see the operation and how we work together.”

“Fine,” I repeated. “When do I start?”

He looked around the room. “Ready now?”

“Ready.”

I followed him and Susan around the rest of the afternoon. In each of the three examination rooms I noticed a framed copy of the “Animal Bill of Rights.”

“Deprived of legal protection,” it read in part, “animals are defenseless against exploitation and abuse by human beings. . . .” Then it urged the 102nd Congress to pass legislation for a long list of “basic rights for animals.”

Steve and Susan didn’t seem to get tired as they labored. About half the work—the animal rescue work—was without remuneration. But the paying customers expected their best as well, so they gave it.

*****

Even after hours, Susan was always thinking about animals. One evening when we were sitting out on the back deck after dinner finishing a second bottle of Cabernet, I asked her whether they took in wild animals. I hadn’t seen any.

“We don’t make a point of it,” she replied. “But we do take whatever comes in, if it’s suffering in some way. Just last week, before you got here, we worked on a coyote whose leg had been badly broken in a trap.”

“They’re still doing that kind of stuff?”

“They’re still doing every kind of stuff, as you’ll see soon enough.”

“What else do you get?” I asked.

“You mean wild?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s always animals that get trapped or shot. We’ve worked on everything from hawks to mountain lions to seals. Usually with the sea birds and mammals it’s some kind of pollution stress or fishing gear tangle up.”

“Mountain lions?”

“They’re a protected species, finally,” she said, looking at Steve. “We’ve worked on a few. More than 5,000 they estimate in California now. But just as they come back, people are moving into their established territories and passageways. So confrontations are on the increase, of course. For us, though, it’s still domestic and research animals most of the time.”

“From labs mostly, you mean?”

“Got your note pad?” she said, looking at me as if wondering whether I was ready for her to go into it. “We get animals from all kinds of situations, Jerry. But if sheer volume is your measure, it’s the labs doing the most damage. Because it’s about 600 million lab animals killed in the U.S. alone. At a cost to the rest of us of about 80 billion dollars a year.” She stopped to let it sink in.

I finally shook my head.

“Temples of Science and Industry.” She laughed derisively.

I’d obviously pressed her button. “Enough to make any complacent, fur-wearing citizen vomit all over her fashionable shoes?” I said.

She looked at me, knowing better than to count me a true believer.

“I guess it’s endless,” I went on.

“Nothing people won’t do for ego or money,” she said.

“But you can’t think about it like that,” Steve put in finally. He had been sitting there on the deck sipping quietly from his wineglass while we talked. “You think about it like that all the time, you end up crippled by your own anger and sorrow. You end up a useless misanthrope; you even start cussing God.”

He looked at us. “So you just go ahead and try to make a small but important difference.” He got up, continuing to look out over the folds of mountains and hills below us. “You don’t care what people think of you. You do it for the animals, the ones suffering. Somebody’s got to take their side. People, the authorities even, can go on thinking whatever they want. That simple. In the end you do a little good in the world.” He turned toward us. He looked right at Susan and she smiled. Then the sorrow came off his face and he finally smiled back. “Makes your life worth living,” he said.

*****

The next day I was coming out of my bunkroom after a mid-day rest when I caught sight of a woman standing alone down the hill from me in the vegetable garden. Two rescued German Shepherds, Jake and Jasper, who spent a good part of their days patrolling the garden and the perimeter of Steve’s compound, were sniffing around nearby, tails down, almost as if they didn’t know she was there. She wore a light tan, full-length gardening dress, and her long copper-colored hair, spectacular enough for a commercial, was beginning to streak gray.

At dinner, a rice and vegetable stew I made in my turn at kitchen duty, I told Steve and Susan what I had seen.

“Oh, that’s our resident ghost,” Susan said.

“Sucks the blood of journalists,” Steve added, as he filled my empty wineglass.

“Well, I didn’t hear a car pull up or anything,” I said. “Didn’t Robinson Jeffers believe in spooks hereabouts?” I had seen Jeffers’s works among their bookshelves.

“Her name’s Jane,” Susan said.

“Jane,” I said.

“You see, after all, we do have a neighbor,” Steve said. “You can’t see her place from here though. It’s an old cabin she’s fixed up down in the Redwoods along the stream.”

“Last year she left the man she lived with three years. One in a long line of boyfriends,” Susan reported. “She says, ‘I can’t live with a man; it just never works after a time’.”

“So she came here to escape men?”

“Sort of,” Susan said. “She’s a painter, and a writer herself. She wants to be left alone, not led into temptation.” She glanced at Steve and smiled. “But we made a deal with her that if she tends our well-manured vegetable garden, she gets to take whatever she needs. She’s the one who planted the herbs.”

“Very Big Sur,” I said.

“More than you think,” Steve said. “She grows marijuana in scattered areas around these parts. Another source of income.”

“Well-manured,” I said. “The FBI is going to have a field day once they finally get up here.”

“Nothing any of us can do about it once they decide to come,” Steve said. “FBI’s convinced having a vet working with the direct action people provides motivation and support.”

“Cutting you out, they believe, will do real damage to the movement,” I said.

“Fools,” Susan said.

I had helped with a few rescue cases. Just that day a small two-year-old female cat was brought in. She lay in a basket as if asleep but with her eyes open in a kind of broken lethargy, the languor of defeat.

Susan saw me staring at the animal. “Behavioral experiments,” she said. “Probably most of her life.”

I reached out and stroked her soft fur.

“She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to respond,” Susan said.

“What’ll happen to her?”

“She’ll probably have to go down.”

I continued stroking her, the eyes closed once, twice, and opened to stare at me. Her eyes seemed to soften. “She’s starting to purr,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “Listen.”

Susan bent her face down toward the cat. “Wow,” she said. “It’s probably the first time she’s purred since leaving her mother.”

There had been others, like a dog, a beagle I think, who had been so traumatized from sleep deprivation experiments that he couldn’t stop shaking, no matter how gently he was treated or how much sleep he was now allowed.

“Why?” I asked.

“God knows.”

“You suppose God knows anything about it?” I said. I knew she had put the beliefs of her girlhood—in God and a heaven for humanity—behind her years ago.

“Jane had worked with us too, a few hours a week, for a time,” she said, “but she couldn’t take it long. A lot of people react that way—even the rescue people, I mean.”

“I can see why.”

“Well,” she said, “at least now you know firsthand.”

“I’ll write an honest piece,” I said. “And as promised, no one will know where you are.”

She looked straight at me. “We’re banking on it.”

*****

Two nights later, while I was in my room working my notes into early drafts, the apparition arrived at my door.

“I hear you’ve been asking about me,” she said.

“Well, I saw you down by the garden and wondered who you were, or are. Jane.”

“That’s me.” She stood there, her hair beckoning, wearing a long India-print skirt and an old maroon sweatshirt over a black tank top. “Going to ask me in?”

“I thought that was dangerous,” I said, “inviting apparitions past one’s threshold.”

“In these parts it’s more dangerous not to.”

“Come on in then.” She accepted a seat and a beer out of a small cooler I kept going with ice from Steve’s refrigerator.

She looked to be in her mid-thirties, with that calm, self-confidant presence of people who study Yoga. She took a sip and watched me as I shut down my laptop.

“You’re writing them up,” she said.

“They filled you in.”

“Oh, I know all about you.” She laughed quietly. “I hope you’ll do them justice. ‘Bout time somebody did.”

“I always try to be fair.”

“Maybe a freelancer can be more honest. The Chronicle?” she said. “You’re from New England, originally.”

I looked at her. “You dig into everybody’s background?’

“Only people presuming to write about my friends.”

“Fair enough. Anyway, I soon learned a beginning reporter is a dogsbody. So I started branching out immediately—worked both staff and freelance for years, mostly from Monterey to Petaluma. Then I finally went national. Took almost ten years before the big boys started letting me into the clubhouse from time to time.” She was watching me carefully. “I hear you write yourself, and paint.”

“Mostly paint.” She looked around my room. “Nice cell,” she said. “Getting comfortable here?”

“In fact I am. But a little sick of damaged animals.”

“I know the feeling.” She took a sip. “They want to make a terrorist out of him,” she added. “You know what that means if they catch him?”

“I know. Doctor Terror. I’m thinking maybe the title of my piece.”

“They’ll find him, implicate him in some of the major rescue and sabotage actions on the West Coast. Lots of the others, the stealthy activists, they can’t find.”

“He’s a sitting duck,” I said. “They’ll screw Susan to the wall as well, of course.”

“That’s why your article might be important, if they get to him. Somebody’s going to have to shine a light on what’s going on up here and why it’s going on. Public opinion sometimes helps.”

“As I said, I’ll be fair.”

“I sure. Fucking. Hope so.” It was the first time her voice carried a kind of intensity, beyond the Yoga-like calm, I mean. Her hazel-blue eyes looked right through me.

“You don’t trust me,” I said.

“I don’t know you.”

“I’m a very likeable guy. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They seem to trust you. Maybe that’s good enough. But they’ve been had before.”

“That’s not my mission here.”

“Forgive me if I withhold judgment.”

“You plan to keep an eye on me.”

“Something like that.”

“And if I don’t cooperate?”

“You’ll play it straight with me if you’re for real. I’m not the outsider. You are.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Honesty.” Her eyes were still looking through me. “Maybe you are a good guy.”

“As good as they come.” I gave her an exaggerated smile.

She laughed, finished her beer in one long pull, and said, “We’ll see about that.” She stood up. “You’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow. Better turn in.” She smiled. I couldn’t read her yet. I didn’t say anything. “Goodnight,” she said, turned, and walked out the door.

Now I felt so completely awake there wasn’t much chance of sleep, so I turned my laptop back on. Maybe ten minutes into the writing there was a tentative scratching at my door. I got up and let Gogirl in. “Can Jerry come out and play?” her big eyes and body were saying.

“No, girl,” I said, “not now. Too late. Where’re your people?”

She made a sweet whimpering sound.

“But you’re welcome to stay.”

She wagged her tail and shot over to the writing table. I returned and patted her while she settled herself on the floor beside me. She looked up as if to say, “I’m comfortable for now, Jerry. You’ll give in and go for a walk with me eventually.”

Before I knew Gogirl I had always thought of greyhounds as scrawny, aerodynamic creatures. But her skeleton did not protrude and her brown and white fur was wonderfully soft and beautiful, except for a black scar down her side, what Susan called “her emblem of the dues she had paid humanity.” She and Susan had been together for a long time, since Susan was a pre-veterinary student at the University of New Hampshire, when she had taken Gogirl as one of those rescued dogs from a Florida racetrack.

I couldn’t get back into the article, so I gave up and went to bed. Afraid Susan might be looking for her later and get worried, I let Gogirl out.

*****

Steve Rico didn’t take to interviews. While we worked, I gleaned a few details about his decision to throw over a lucrative practice. The story was about what I expected—a gradual yet increasing experience with animals from local shelters, leading to animals rescued from all kinds of horrific situations. He began to see so much suffering that he decided there was enough to make a life’s work fighting it.

Talking to him reminded me of the letters Susan had written when we were separated and in the preliminary processes of divorce. I still had the letters. I guess she wanted me to know why she couldn’t live with anyone who did not sympathize, or who could not forgive her zeal.

In one letter she explained her shock one summer working for her father’s nationally based law firm, Boston office. She discovered the firm was representing some kind of NIH research at the University of California. “Worst promoters of vivisection in the country, the NIH,” she wrote. “I got a peek into the vast cartel of laboratory-medical-consumer industries: a huge tax payer-financed network of Dr. Moreaus.” She and her father got into a huge fight, he threw i n her face her upper-middle class life founded on his law practice, so she quit college and ran away to San Francisco to work in the animal liberation network. That’s how I first met Susan, set up on a blind date as two “Easterners” by a mutual friend.

*****

The next night just before I was heading over to the main house for dinner, Susan’s night to cook, Jane returned. “I brought you some reading,” she said, handing me a brown paper bag with handles weighed down by books.

“For entertainment, or because you think my education limited?”

“For both. You might as well know what others have said about the place where Steve and Susan live. Kerouac was too far into the booze to make much out of Big Sur beyond a tragic stage for his operatic self-destruction. Still, I threw Kerouac in too. Along with The Natural History of Big Sur. And Henry Miller, of course. Others on history and folklore.” She pointed to the bag again, which I had set down on my bed.

“I don’t have much time to read here,” I said.

She reached into the bag, fumbled around, and pulled out a book. “Ever read Henry Miller on this place?”

“Like most people, only the sweaty eyeballs urological-gynecological passages, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts.”

“You are an ignoramus then,” she said. She opened the book, a rather fat one held up so I could see the title: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. “You talk about the views, the light.” She was flipping through the pages. “If they are in fact arrested, you’ll want to write not only about what they did but how and where they lived.”

“You think they will be soon?”

“I said if . . . .” Finally, she sat down on the edge of the bed. “Listen to this.” She began to read.

It is an old, nostalgic hue which one sees in the works of the Flemish and Italian masters. It is not only the tone and color of distance, abetted by the magic fall of light, it is a mystical phenomenon . . . .In both dawn and sunset we have what I like to think of as ‘the true light’. . . creating an ambiance of super-reality, or the reality behind reality. . . . Toward sundown, when the hills in back of us are flushed with that other ‘true light,’ the trees and scrub in the canyons take on a wholly different aspect. Everything is brush and cones, umbrellas of light—the leaves, boughs, stalks, and trunks standing out separate and defined, as if etched by the Creator Himself. . . . It is no longer earth and air, but light and form—heavenly light, celestial form. When this intoxicating reality reaches its height the rocks speak out.

“Who’d have thought it?” I said, “Henry Miller the nature writer.”

“It’s a good book,” she said. “An honest book, the likes of which we hardly see anymore. You’ll learn a lot about Big Sur from him.”

“I’ll look into it. Thank you.”

“I brought you another present,” she said. She stood up and unfolded a bag from one of the ample pockets in her full-length unbleached linen sundress. “For your head,” she said and tossed me the paper lunch bag. Inside was a plastic sandwich bag full of grass.

“Thanks, but I don’t do much of this anymore.”

“It’s a gift,” she said. “Look, I’ll roll one now.” She took a packet of papers out of her pocket and grabbed the bag back. “Not anymore?” she asked.

“Rare occasions.”

She looked at me, eyebrows arched, working the grass into tiny flakes.

“Despite appearances, I’m not a kid any longer.”

“Ha—Ha,” she said, prolonging the pause between Ha’s. “Give it a try.” She had a stiff little joint rolled and took out a booklet of matches. Before I could protest further, she was handing me the dube after a deep toke of her own. I sat down and she returned to the edge of the bed. What the hell, I thought.

It was “some heavy shit,” as they say. The thought floated by that maybe she’d laced it with something.

“You don’t want to do anything that requires rational thought or concentration on this stuff.” She offered a wicked smile. “Good?”

“A testament to your green thumb.”

“What makes the crops happy?”

“A labor of love,” I said.

Her copper hair seemed to float slightly out into the air around her head. She was still looking right at me, smiling, as if to gauge the effect of her harvest on a newcomer to her domain. I was strangely in tune with her for the first time since we’d met. Perhaps that was her plan. Some mutual lotus-eater thing she was laying on me.

I slowly became certain that she was wearing nothing underneath the plain, linen dress, as if her body were reading me and beckoning to me while still clothed. All imagined, of course, but no denying the sensation.

She seemed to be waiting for some sign from me, as if to prove I could handle it. These were just thoughts floating by like unflappable, strange, iridescent fish.

“We’ll have a meeting of the minds, you and I,” she was saying, “before you finish your piece. I’d like to help you get it right.”

“Get it right.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Well, that’s my plan.” I didn’t want her screwing around with my drafts, but she might have some good background to offer; she might be able to answer some questions. Maybe.

By then, however, her happy crop had me feeling like a man without a will or mind of his own.

“Jerry!” Steve’s voice suddenly boomed from his deck. “Jerry! Dinner.”

Jane got up and tossed the plastic bag back to me. “Don’t forget to check these out,” she said, pointing to the bag of books. Then she was gone before my brain registered her departure.

*****

For the first two days of that next week the veterinary work—the mundane punctuated by the horrific—continued. But then Susan began putting out for adoption at an accelerated rate some of the rescued animals. The third night, while I was in bed, I kept hearing cars and pick-ups pulling in and out. I looked out my doorway a few times, but from where I was I couldn’t see much. Susan had warned me that I might be hearing some traffic around the place, but insisted that I not spook anybody by my presence.

The next morning I woke up late from being up half the night. Just as I was washing my face in cold water, I heard a knock on my door.

Jane. She came in and sat on the bed while I finished dressing.

“Long night,” I said. “You look as tired as I feel.”

“They’re gone,” she said.

“Gone.”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“They got the rest of the animals out. There’s just a few of the local domestic animals left waiting for their owners to come pick them up.”

“Why?”

“Everybody knew it had to come. Just not when.”

“The Feds.”

“They could be here any time. You don’t want to be around for that either.”

“Where the hell to?”

“Nobody knows where Steve planned to go. As for the animals, those not placed were sent off to a legal sanctuary in Utah. Monkeys, cats, even the rats. You don’t want to know any more because, first, you can’t write about it without endangering Steve’s safety and, second, you can’t write or talk about it without endangering an operation doing good work. And that went out on a limb for Steve.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“And Steve didn’t want anybody to know the details, didn’t want to leave anyone with the responsibility of knowing a damned thing when the interrogations begin.”

That’s when I saw the whole thing before me in about half a second. My article, my fee, my by-line, (like Susan herself): Gone. Wouldn’t publishing the article now jeopardize Steve, Susan, and some holy legal animal farm in Utah?

“I don’t even have a car,” I said.

“You can’t wait around for a ride. Besides, no phone, remember?”

“You think they’ll be here—”

“Soon,” she interrupted. “Or Steve wouldn’t have bolted. It’s getting serious now.”

“I don’t know how I got in here.”

She got up and pointed to my bags. “Better come with me.”

I started throwing in clothes and papers and packing up my laptop. I wasn’t even awake yet but I was sweating on adrenaline.

Her two-room cabin had a kitchen, a fine sitting-and-sleeping room with a large skylight, a single stove for cooking and heating, and a separate small bathhouse, in the Big Sur custom. I settled in, hoping we might look as if we belonged together. By mid afternoon we heard them coming up to Steve’s place, several black SUVs.

*****

Jane had a kind of reading seat on the floor made of old couch cushions and pillows I had been sitting on after supper. I asked if I could make up a bed on the floor. When she agreed, I adjusted the seat into a rough bed and lay down, exhausted, my head on a pillow propped against the wall. We talked quietly for a while about what to do tomorrow.

“Here’s something I don’t understand yet,” I said. “Sabotage, or ecotage, or any sort of destruction of property for a cause.”

“Well, people wouldn’t choose to do it,” she said, “but don’t the circumstances of animal abuse and habitat destruction require drastic measures? Financial disincentives? Serious delay?”

“You’re all convinced there’s no other way.”

“The other ways have all been tried, for decades. But as usual the fix is in. The law has been sold to the highest bidder and the slickest lobbyists. People of goodwill are not given another choice, an equitable system through which to make their case.”

“But the liberation side then opens itself up to charges of violence and terrorism,” I said. “Most citizens, readers, can’t support that. The direct action people end up isolating themselves, even on issues where they’d probably have, initially, public sympathy.”

“Look. The citizens have been milk fed by a government and media that don’t make the distinction between terrorism—the destruction of innocent human life—and direct action. The defacing of property, the liberation of animals.”

“So it’s only the fringe nutcases who go after people, you mean.”

“Sure. Unabombers. Fanatics. Nobody I ever knew in the movement goes after people, or even thinks about it.”

She got up from her chair and went over to a kitchen cabinet, where she pulled out a plastic baggie, then returned to her seat and started rolling a joint.

I looked at her. “Are you crazy? With these government guys sniffing around?”

“They’re tied up just now with more important things. Like the Highway Patrol when they’ve pulled someone over: you can keep speeding along.”

“Tell it to the judge.”

She laughed. “You need some anxiety reduction.”

“I find it paranoia producing, myself.”

“Not this stuff. This is my special crop. Real mellow. Shut up and take a hit.” She put the joint in my face so I went ahead.

“How would you educate the public then?”

“Well, people like you can get a story out. All you can do is report the record, but that’s enough.” She looked at me like a teacher assessing a slow child. “Look for context, see? Start at least back in the seventies. The personal violence has been done to the activists, not by the activists, especially in the environmental movement: Buzz Youens, Jeff Elliot, and David Chain, among others less famous. It’s a little different in animal liberation because the activists operate more by stealth , less by public protest.”

“Historical context,” I said, as if to myself.

“I’ll help. But write about it. Somebody has to present the truth, beyond the alternative press I mean. They’re way too far under the public’s radar.”

She smiled for the first time, crushed out the roach, got up, made another joint and lit up. “Let’s not talk about it anymore for now. I’m getting upset all over again.”

She offered me a hit of the mellow. I shrugged it off. She shrugged her shoulders and smoked it herself. We were quiet now while I watched her enjoy the fruit of her labors.

“You don’t have to sleep on the floor,” she finally said.

Her bed was a single. But I was too far gone to move or act or think what to say. Then in the light of two kerosene lamps she was taking off her jeans and jersey. The next thing I knew she was standing over me in a kind of washed-out red bathrobe, open at the front, ties dangling, and I could see the glow, the warmth and life, of her body. She got down with me on the makeshift bed and I could smell the musky tang of smoke in her hair and something else—some mild, sweet soap—as I began to nuzzle her flesh. We were both at that point in the high where we just went deeper and deeper together into that foggy, ecstatic experience of each other’s bodies, so far under that even now I can’t recall just what we did. Only that it was some sort of cosmic copulation.

*****

By about 8:30 the next morning, they found their way down to Jane’s. We heard them driving down the steep, barely passable dirt road. I slipped out the back and down into a wooded ravine. I sat by a roaring stream a good long time. I wondered if Steve and Susan had asked her to watch out for me. It would have been just like them.

Jane later told me what happened. When she answered the door, there were two guys with federal ID dressed all in navy blue: slacks, hunting jackets, baseball caps, and bullet vests. Black combat boots. They said they were looking for her neighbors up the mountain who seemed to have left in a hurry.

Jane’s line was that she didn’t know her neighbors because they had not been friendly. Almost as if they didn’t want anybody around. No, she didn’t know they were leaving, or anything else about their lives, really. She told me the guy asking most of the questions gave her a look that seemed to say: We’ll get to you later, lady. We’ll find something to make you squeal. Then one of the men handed her a slip of paper.

“What’s this?” she asked and read from the slip.

I have seen a wing-broken hawk, standing in her own dirt,

Helpless, a caged captive, with cold

Indomitable eyes of disdain, meet death. There was nothing

pitiful,

No degradation, but eternal defiance.

“Don’t know,” he finally said, eyeing her. “Found it taped to the refrigerator up at the ranch. Mean anything to you?”

“I think it’s Robinson Jeffers,” she said. “Famous local dead poet. You could stop by Tor House up in Carmel, now a national literary shrine. They’d know.” When he took the paper back and turned it around a bit, she said, “Some kind of last word to whoever came along after they were gone?”

He squinted at her. “Something like that.”

In the afternoon I sneaked up the heights well behind Jane’s place, probably close to the four thousand foot level. From up there in high grasslands I could see Steve’s ranch house below, way off to my left. There was no sign of anyone around the ranch.

I hiked about for some time because I needed to clear my head. I could see the five thousand footers, off in the northern horizon. Susan once told me that the ancients knew the range as the Sacred Mountains.

Finally, I sat down, watching the stupendous coastline on a day of sun and clouds that brought the sea colors out like a travel brochure—aquamarines, deep blues, shadowy grays, and thin white lines of distant, unfurling breakers, as if etched by the Creator Himself. I spotted a red-tailed hawk playing in the thermal currents. He was below me in altitude, and doing all kinds of Kamikaze dips and dives, loop-de-loops, and fancy pullouts. He finally lighted on a dead treetop to rest, or to preen on his own audacity.

Later, I noticed below me a black-tail deer grazing. I watched her for quite a while in the binoculars I had never returned to Steve. Her coat seemed rough, on the gray side. Then in time a yearling appeared, more a shade of brown, and finally three other large full-grown deer grazed up the grassy ravine.

When I stood up to get a better look at them, the first deer froze and looked up at me. We looked directly at one another, motionless, for perhaps three minutes. Putting the binoculars back up to my face must have clarified my intrusion for her. She turned and began to move back down the slope with strange graceful prancing steps, almost as if in slow motion. She hesitated from time to time to look back up toward me. The others began to follow her.

As I watched, my eye caught another movement down the shimmering slopes of grass turning bronze. I couldn’t make sense of it at first, but then I saw a cougar emerging from behind a lone oak tree. I didn’t dare even raise my glasses. I recalled that one of Jane’s books told me the Native Americans called the mountain lion the “Cat of God,” the wild creature who maintained harmony between heaven and humanity.

The big cat hesitated, looked down the slope toward the deer, then up toward me. He was too far away to really see his eyes, but it felt as though our stares locked. Then he looked straight ahead again and began to slouch purposefully through the grass, his powerful shoulders working beneath the tawny pelt. I was able to watch him for all of two minutes before he disappeared. No mistake, he was God’s cat. He bespoke the reality behind reality.

I thought of all the Indian middens Robinson Jeffers had found on his house site up the coast now heavy with residences and shops and eateries. And I thought about the wildlife there even seventy years ago: coyotes, deer, all kinds of hawks, brown bears, and of course cougars. Maybe even a few Grizzlies left back up in the wildest mountains. All held in a balance or harmony no one would live to see again.

*****

Why, after I returned to report to Jane, had I not been able to talk about seeing God’s cat? Perhaps because he had deigned to share his presence with me, and to share it in turn with another human being would have felt something like betrayal. The effect of his sudden presence had been that powerful.

Assuming her dilapidated VW wagon would come under surveillance, Jane hiked from her woods to some neighbors two ridges over. They had a cell phone that worked because their place was situated along the coast across from a monastery that had a satellite dish. She called a friend named Barbara, and they planned our escape. Barbara would meet us at the bottom of the mountain on Route 1. Jane bundled us up with old backpacks early the next morning. Even as we heard the black SUV’s heading our way, we locked the doors and windows, scrambled out, and hauled through the redwoods down the mountain.

By the time the FBI could have called in dogs or trackers we were gone. I suppose they eventually found her crops widely scattered around the mountain. They were the kind of people to find whatever you had.

Once we met up with Barbara, she offered Jane safe haven at her house. Then Jane “went sort of loony,” as a month later she wrote to me, from being away from her cabin. She’d be damned if the FBI would get anything out of her or for any longer scare her out of her home.

Who can now explain why the government men did not return to bother her? Expecting them to, she assumed surveillance and stopped cultivating and harvesting her weed. I’m sure that alone changed her life.

*****

My guess is that I’m on some government list of unsavory journalists. I assume my phone is tapped. But even though I did finally publish my piece in the Chronicle, they leave me alone. And if CNN lost interest, the Associated Press did not. We were able to publish a year later for a couple of reasons. Enough time had passed for the good doctor and Susan to disappear into whatever fastness they had absconded. And then, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. government seemed to lose its focus on domestic activists on behalf of animals or ecosystems. Maybe the Feds had their hands too full to pursue relentlessly, at least for the time being, those who might deface property and save animals but who went out of their way to avoid any damage to human beings.

It’s “very quiet now, and very safe,” Jane wrote to me. Her letter arrived after I sent her a copy of my article. “Congratulations, Jerry,” she wrote. “It is an honest piece, after all.” Like everyone, Jane was distraught by the airliner-bombings in New York. But she included troubling lines from Jeffers in her letter.

We might remember

Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;

And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;

And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

I ponder those words and her letters, but I haven’t gone back to visit Jane. Three years later, I still have unsettling dreams about Big Sur: about damaged animals, about men in navy blue, about Steve and Susan and the terrible risks of their work. Big Sur, I regret to admit, has become for me like one of those places in serial nightmares that you pray you won’t be returning to. The cougars are losing, it seems clear to me now. And how many of us can still believe, as Susan would probably say, that there’s any possibility of our regaining an ancient harmony between heaven and humanity?

Robert Begiebing is the author of six books, including a trilogy of widely-reviewed novels, and 30 articles and stories. His fiction has been supported by grants from the Lila Wallace Foundation and the NH Council on the Arts. He teaches at Southern NH University where he has won three awards for excellence in teaching.

Excerpt from MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS REMAIN by Literary Awards Finalist, Janice Wickeri

SFWP — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:39:15 +0000

The nation lies in ruins,
but the mountains and rivers remain. –Tu Fu

CHAPTER ONE

New York City, June 4, 2001

Ming Chen, devout believer in very little, had gone to church every June fourth for the last seven years. At first Allison went with him, in fact the whole thing had been her idea. But for the past few years, Ming Chen had come to keep his vigil alone.

He stood with his back to the carved wood doors of the church, the late afternoon haze in his eyes and the strong sour breath of the city in his nostrils. The sky had the look of old celluloid, scratchy and gritty like the 1940s Chinese movies he sometimes showed in class. To his right, only trees and street lights rose above apartment blocks. The occasional pitched-roofed, white–sided single-family place sat sturdily on a corner, broad porch with the slightest sag between sturdy pillars like the aprons of his elderly neighbors when they sat on the front stoop on sunny afternoons, age-thickened legs firmly planted before them. Trees lined the tidy street and there was no hint as he looked right beyond the adjoining school of the scuffed and worn places in Queens where garbage collected and cars went to die. Then the W train shuddered along the elevated track just half a block to his left, Manhattan bound, the miasma of oil and metal it threw off scraping the back of his throat. As the train passed the Taiwan Union Christian Church on the other side of 31st Street, the smaller church huddled on its flank, almost dwarfed by its big sign in Korean, came back into view. No one glanced at the inoffensive-looking middle-aged Chinese man on the steps of a Greek Orthodox church as if he shouldn’t be there, as if he should be across the street. No one noticed him at all. He turned and pulled on the handle beside the carved wing of Saint Michael the archangel and the heavy oak door swung open.

He didn’t remember exactly when Allison had stopped coming with him. Maybe after her trip to Beijing. He didn’t really mind coming alone, but after all, he’d started coming because of her. In some obscure way he thought she really ought to be there, if only because of that. He sat in the last pew, settled himself against the wooden back. No glimpse of the red brick houses outside or the school next door was available through the windows, only the late afternoon light set aglow by its passage through the stained glass to fire the gold leaf in the iconographic paintings on the walls. Sound was muted by the weight and density of the building’s massive brick and pierced stone construction. Inside it seemed almost crowded, every wall and the ceiling above decorated with icons, men and women with glowing gilt halos and solemn eyes, large and dark, eyes that held him, eyes that looked left and right and straight through you all at once.

Twelve years. Had it been that long? Was that a long time? Sometimes it seemed to him as real and as present as his commute to the university. Sometimes it was simply a sudden dread that wound its way up his spine and demanded entry to his thoughts. Those twelve years could contract and expand without reference to his conscious efforts. Latent or present, the events shaped his life, sullied lives he touched twelve years later. More and more, the thinking seemed to be that the number of deaths at the square had not been large, that most victims had died in the streets around it and that they had not been students, but ordinary people: workers, teachers, clerks, doctors. It made sense to him. His wife of three years at the time was a doctor. His oldest friend Gu taught at Beijing University. They both died there. Ming had been there, too, running through the darkness and terror, trying to find them, save them. He was alive. His memories of those hours, of the days that followed, were confused and disjointed, reeling through his brain with the relentless jerky progress of a handheld camera: a face here, piles of garbage there. He had seen the dead, so many dead. Were they teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, students? Did it matter? In death they were very much alike. The flashes of tracer bullets slicing arcs through the lightless night sky gave an added horror to the scene as he stumbled on through the panicked crowd. He had heard the tanks approaching, the gunfire. He hadn’t believed it was happening until then.

One thing his father and grandfather had always claimed as solid ground—even in the darkest times they’d known till then, in spite of the political movements that built stealthily through the streets like gathering floodwaters and broke over those who had dared to think things were going to be different this time, swamping them and their dreams—the one thing they were sure of, was that the People’s Liberation Army would never fire on its own people.

Even Gu, schooled in the uncertainty of life and the absurd workings of power by his days as a Red Guard, Gu, who had become the most skeptical and acerbic of social critics, even he had not expected that.

He looked up at the expanse of wall just under the ceiling to his left. The choir loft ended here, opening up a space the iconographer had filled with larger subjects. Every year he looked for the same one. A jagged-topped mountain with three men tumbling down its long surprisingly smooth sides. One went head first as if he had dived straight down from the top. The first time he saw it, he’d asked Allison who they were, why they were falling. She glanced up at it, frowned.

“Well…must be sinners,” she said. She sat for a while, looking hard at the icons. “I don’t know much about the Greek Orthodox,” she finally said, “but I think I might be wrong. I think they’re actually falling down because Jesus has appeared to them and it’s too much for them. They’re not worthy.”

That didn’t make a lot of sense to him, except for the unworthiness.

He continued to think of them as sinners, because as sinners they were comrades. It was good to see they were still there.

The church was quiet, nearly empty. He settled into an almost peaceful reverie. Those sinners sliding and falling down the spiny folds of a mountain the color of milky tea, were fully clothed in long ancient robes, blue, pink, lavender. He’d always found it strange that there was no evidence of blood and gore, no nasty blue or red devils with dripping fangs and white eyes. Their bodies were intact, too, a strong contrast to the tortures and dismemberings hapless sinners suffered in the many levels of popular Buddhist hells like the ones he’d seen depicted in Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong. These sinners suffered no obvious punishment other than their lack of traction. The magnificent, halo-lit Jesus stood on the pinnacle of the mountain. True, it was not a large mountain, proportioned as it was to fit between the arched window below and the curved ceiling above. That wasn’t the point. The point was they would never make it. There was no solid ground on which to plant their feet, no help along the way. He knew them well, these sinners. It wasn’t what they had done, but what they hadn’t that condemned them.

*****

Allison wasn’t much of a churchgoer, though they’d been married in one. Allison, raised Episcopalian—like a Catholic without the pope, she’d joke—suggested he light candles for Liang and Gu in church, a kind of ritual of remembrance. It didn’t matter if he was a Christian or not, no one would ask, it was a way to ease the pain. This one was closest to their apartment in Astoria. It was Greek Orthodox, but Allison said it would do. On the way in, she dipped her fingers in a birdbath thing and crossed herself, then slipped her wet fingers into her pocket and glanced over at him, embarrassed.

The church, when they entered it, seemed smaller than it looked from outside. But all around the walls above his head were the icons, faces of saints with golden haloes, their colors seeming to glow with a dark light, their gilded edges blinking in the dimness, the sorrowful mute steadiness of the dark eyes as he approached. That gaze, collective and unmoving, seemed to hold the universe and everything in it, all the contradictions came together in its depths. There was a hush and dark that sent little shocks up and down his spine. He shivered and Allison slipped her hand through his arm, squeezed it gently. The ranks of wooden pews were punctuated with old women in black, swathed in headscarves.

Allison’s hand tightened on his arm, but just as she whispered, “Watch out for the kneeler,” he stumbled into it, nearly falling headfirst into the tiers of squat white candles set in little glasses. The frame that held them was draped in spilled wax, knobs and whorls of it, running down in attenuated swags, smooth and slippery as he put a hand to it, steadying himself. A chunk broke off beneath his hand, leaving a bare space like bone where the flesh had fallen away. Allison began to replace the candles that had burned down to the small metal disk at their base from a box wedged between the bottom tier and the side of the frame. When she was done she handed him a match from another box and began to feed coins into a small metal box with a slot in the top.

“Donation,” she said. The coins clinked softly as they fell.

Something brushed his arm and he looked down, startled to see the top of a black-scarved head. An old woman had come to kneel beside him, her hands, old woman’s hands, twisted with work and age, spotted, crinkled skin pulled taut where the fingers crossed. Her shoulders shook slightly with the effort of rasping out her prayers. He couldn’t tell if she whispered in English or Greek. The smell of her old woman’s body, like the inside of the suitcases his mother kept winter clothes in, mingled with the scent of burning wax.

He took a deep breath and turned his attention back to the candles, took his match and touched it to one that was already lit. Then he didn’t know what to do. He and Allison had been married in a church to please her mother. That had been his only previous visit to one. He stood there, staring, the match suddenly licked his fingers and he dropped it into the ranks of candles in front of him. Allison handed him another one.

“Ming…”

He looked at her. “What do I do? Am I supposed to pray or something?”

She made a face at him. “Just remember them. Remember…Liang and… Gu. All the others. You don’t have to do anything else. Just remember. People should be remembered.”

He nodded, turned back to the candles and began lighting the unlit ones. He began with the top row, and kept going. The old woman pushed herself up from the kneeler. He felt her standing there, felt her eyes on him. He turned to her, maybe he should apologize for being there, getting in her way. But when he looked into her face, reflected candle flames glittered in her eyes, bright against the pale lined skin framed by the black headscarf. He stared, her eyes seemed to widen and the flames leap, and he was suddenly afraid that they would leap free and consume him. He closed his eyes against the fear and when he looked again she was walking away.

Every candle was burning now. He was afraid to look at Allison, her lashes glistening in the candlelight. He stood staring at the sputtering flames until their edges blurred and there was simply a glaze of light before his eyes.

Allison took his hand. Squeezed it.

“Not enough candles,” he whispered, “not nearly enough.”

*****

Since that first time, he’d come every June. Allison began to refer to it as Ming’s personal Day of the Dead. He wondered if anyone at the church recognized him by now. He didn’t know much about churches, but from what he’d seen here he didn’t think there could be many Asians, ever. Today he’d noticed one of the black-gowned priests in the shadows looking on, stroking his long beard. The inevitable old women in black with headscarves were distinguishable from the priest only in their lack of beards. Otherwise they seemed as interchangeable as the pieces on a Go board. They smiled or looked myopically in his direction, but that was all.

After Allison’s visit to Beijing, there was some excuse, something had come up she said, he hadn’t given it much thought at the time. He’d felt a little bereft that first time alone, sitting there in the pew. Then last year Allison had simply said he would probably like some privacy; she knew she would in his place. Yesterday, the eve of the twelfth anniversary, she hadn’t turned from the lettuce she was washing to say that she had a late staff meeting at school and if they were to be on time for dinner with her parents later, he’d better stop at the church without her. It wasn’t as if she’d known the people as he had. She would be thinking of him. He mentioned bringing Katie, she was nine now. Allison did turn round then, a piece of lettuce shedding drops of water down the front of her dress, sparks of alarm lighting her green eyes.

“You can’t just drag her along there without any preparation, Ming. You should have thought of this earlier. All those staring icons, remember how you felt the first time? The whole thing would be too frightening. It’s just…it’s just…maybe next year, okay? Besides,” head down, rubbing at the front of her dress with a dish towel, “she won’t be home from school yet.”

She turned back to the sink without looking at him again. He came alone.

He still wondered at times about Liang’s last moments, and Gu’s. Wondered if they looked into the guns that shot them; hoped they had not. Hoped it was swift and unforeseen; alive one minute, the next…life was something that easily lost. He hated himself for not being able to find them that night, to cradle Liang’s head as she died—even more, for not dying at her side. Wondered, as he so often did, why he should have walked away from that night when so many lives ended, why he should be here twelve years later, safe, with another wife who loved him and a nine-year old daughter so perfect he could hardly believe she was his own flesh and blood.

Ming Chen closed his eyes, pressed the lids together as tightly as he could, shutting out the eyes all around him. After a while the calm knowing acceptance in those eyes became more than he could take.

Martyrs, people called them. Liang, Gu, so many others. He tried to conjure their faces from memory. Gu’s peasant-dark skin, his burning, mocking eyes, unruly hair and big work-hardened hands. And Liang—her face flushed with concentration, checking his grandfather’s pulse. Her face was thin, intense, too narrow for the classic moon shape favored by the old novels. She had no figure either, small breasts and boy hips. Her magnetism was inner, emotions playing over the fine planes of her face, spilling into her glance. Now when he tried to hold the memory of her in his mind her eyes would seem to hold him in that same unwavering gaze of the saints, but as he looked into them, their depths filled with reproach.

They called him a hero, people here, because he’d been there, at the square. They praised his courage. They never questioned his motives. He never knew what to say to them, these well-intentioned people. He could barely look into their eyes, eyes filled with awe and respect, even more unbearable than the knowledge of the icons or Liang’s reproach. They interpreted his uneasiness as humility and admired him all the more.

Over the years he had learned to live with all that had happened or—as Allison believed—got better at burying it. Sometimes it came unbidden, that sense of loss that was a burning in the heart: the turn of a head or a casual gesture, a certain set of shoulders glimpsed in a crowd, and the memories came rushing back. When he forced himself to remember that night, the old sorrows flooded through him, the pain achingly physical. Most of those he remembered seeing were just faces in a crowd. Of course he’d known others who must have been there, but he hadn’t gone there to search for them as he had for his wife and his friend. He had done nothing for them that night. He could at least remember them here. In memory they were just as they had been, never to age. Their youth, their passion, that raw emotion he’d glimpsed from across the room in Gu’s apartment in Beijing the night before he’d left for Hong Kong was what had stayed with him over the years, that and the sheer crushing anguish of the knowledge that what Liang and Gu shared then had not included him.

For him they would never change or age, but Ming felt every passing year, streaks of salt-gray woven through his hair—Allison convinced him not to dye it as he would have in Beijing. She liked it, said it gave him gravitas. He simply felt old, burdened by time and memory. America should be a new start for you: the choral refrain of Allison, her parents, her brother Tom. But China would not let him go.

He opened his eyes, got to his feet and began to walk up the side aisle toward the votive candles. He knew nothing had changed. There were not enough candles, not nearly enough.

*****

He stepped into a quiet apartment, late afternoon sun slanting through the living room and glowing around the kitchen door, a push and swing affair that stayed open only when propped with a kitchen stool. It was a caught-in-amber time of day, the sunlight burnishing the much-rubbed woodwork. Then he listened more intently. Katie should be home, but there was no sound of computer games or of her high giggle-inflected voice chattering to friends on the telephone.

“Allison?” No answer.

“Katie?” There was always that sudden rush of anxiety, those moments before he knew she was there, moments that had the potential to last forever. Katie, just the fact of her existence, filled him with such joy, joy he was sure he had done nothing to deserve. He didn’t want to question it, but there was always that sharp little jab of fear.

“In here.” He let out his breath, headed down the hall.

When he walked into the room Katie was sprawled on the bed on her stomach, a thickish book open in front of her, eyes riveted to the page. The computer screen saver dipped and swirled and changed color for its own amusement. “Katie is a great reader,” his mother-in-law would say brightly, bragging to her friends.

“Katie, can’t you look up when Daddy enters the room?”

“Hi Daddy.” She did not look up.

A few years ago—when she was four or even five—she would have run to greet him: “Baba.” And pull at his pants leg until he scooped her up into his arms. They would go from room to room and, if the weather was good, for a walk around their block and Katie would recite the Tang poems he was teaching her. Four-line rhyming shi, easy for a child. The same ones his grandfather had taught him. The clipped syllables and lilting rhythm of the lines both stirred and soothed him. Sometimes tears would sting his eyes and he would look away, tell her that was enough for now. Then he would ask her about her day and she would chatter in Mandarin. At that age she spoke the language perfectly and willingly. Now she often hung back. “Nobody in Astoria speaks Chinese, Daddy,” she’d say. She knew perfectly well this wasn’t true.

“Isn’t Mommy here?”

“She went to the store for something. Be right back.”

“Is that a book for school?” He asked her now, perching on one end of her bed, where he could see the street outside their square of red brick apartments. Once this had been a predominately Greek area, Allison told him, and there were still plenty of them here, old ladies and men who sat on sunny days in folding chairs on tiny stoops above equally tiny front yards that boasted painted statues of the virgin. But now there were Chinese and Koreans and Hispanics, Pakistanis and Arabs too. From Katie’s bedroom window, he didn’t see anyone who looked particularly Greek.

“No. Well, kinda.”

“What is it?”

Big sigh. “It’s a story. It’s the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This is my third time reading it.” She gave him a fierce look. She knew he was going to ask her if her homework was done. “Everybody’s reading it. We even talk about it in class.”

He repeated the title over to himself. He wasn’t sure about the second part. “Can I see the book for a minute?”

Huge sigh. She handed it over. “Don’t lose my place. Really, Baba, it’s a good book. The teacher likes it. It’s a fairytale, you know? Good and evil. Good wins.”

The Baba was a concession, sweet to his ears. He was afraid of Katie becoming a stranger to him, refusing to speak Chinese, even growing ashamed of her father, someone who didn’t fit in. More than anything he wanted to connect with her, to recapture the unquestioned harmony that used to exist between them, father and daughter. He remembered now that he’d read something about this Harry Potter in the Chinese papers. He flipped through the book.

“A fairytale? Did Baba ever tell you the Chinese fairytales? Did I tell you about Nuwa who fixed the hole in the heavens with magic stones?”

She grinned at him. “We’ve got a video of all that. It’s good.”

“Well, what about the thunder god in Yunnan province? He runs over the mountains and through the valleys on his huge chicken feet.”

“Eew. Gross.”

“And there’s another wonderful mythical creature—the qilin.” Was there a flicker of interest?

“Qilin? What’s that?”

He cursed himself. He couldn’t remember the English word for it. “It’s a beautiful creature, the most beautiful. It has the body of a small horse and long curving horns, or sometimes only one horn, one long delicate horn.”

“I know what that is. It’s a unicorn. There’s a unicorn in Harry Potter. It’s in lots of the fairytales I’ve read. China probably got it from here!”

He opened his mouth on a quick breath of protest, but she grabbed the book back from him. “Can I read now? It’s just getting to a really good part.”

“You know, I think these books have been translated. You could read it in Chinese.”

“Daddy, I have to read it in English like everyone else. Besides, that would take forever. Can I puhleeze read now?” She softened it with a smile, bent her head to the book and settled herself with a soft sigh.

He was looking back at Katie from the doorway of her room when locks rattled in the living room and the front door opened and closed.

Katie said, “Mommy’s home.”

“Katie?”

“In here,” Katie sang out.

“Well, at least we get an equal measure of your attention.”

Katie turned and stuck out her tongue at him, then laughed.

Allison called from the living room: “Ming. Tom just called. He’s at the subway. He’ll be here in a few minutes. Are you going to be ready? Katie? You know Grandma doesn’t like us to be late.”

Katie looked up at him. “They’ll be there before us, no matter how we try. Right, Baba?”

Father and daughter sighed for their different reasons, and then smiled guiltily at each other. Ming’s heart fluttered a moment free of the moorings of the past. If his mother-in-law walked in right now, he would hug her out of sheer joy for that moment of connection.

*****

Tom was downstairs with a taxi. He bent for Katie’s hug, smiled at Ming and his sister and then folded himself into the front seat beside a turbaned Sikh with impressively broad shoulders and his beard tamed in a hairnet. He nodded and beamed at Katie.

Tom was a pale older version of Allison, taller, all her vibrant color washed away in his grey curls and pale eyes. Allison and Ming got in the back with Katie between them, Allison checking everyone had their seat belts on. Tom ignored her.

The Sikh surveyed them in the rear view mirror. Winked at Katie. “Queens Boulevard, sir, is it?”

“Right. Rego Park.”

“If you agree, Missy, we go.”

“Let’s go; let’s go.”

Katie bounced in her seat, delighted at being out in a car. Street lights played across her cheek and brushed the slightly open-mouthed smile.

“I can’t wait. I can’t wait. Jiaozi. Yum.”

Allison smiled at her, reached across to touch Ming’s arm. “Relax. My parents mean well. They’re just trying to express how much they care about you, the way they know how.”

The taxi wove through traffic.

Tom looked out the window, at the sky, yellow-edged as the light faded, then at the traffic. He shuddered. “God, I’d hate to drive in Queens. You come off that bridge and take your life in your hands. 30th Street, 30th Avenue, 30th Drive. You could get lost out here and never return.”

“Oh sir,” the Sikh sang to him. “It’s not so bad as all that.”

Tom turned to Allison. “Have you ever done it?”

She shook her head.

The driver called to Katie: “Missy, you are Japanese, are you not?”

Tom turned toward Ming. “Are you ready for dinner with the parents?”

“No, no, Chinese!”

“Tom.” Allison grimaced at him. He shrugged.

“Ah, Chinese.” The driver seemed to process this, glancing at Katie, now with her whole attention on him. He nodded, assumed a sage expression, nodded again. “Chinese,” emphasis on the first syllable. “A great country, China.”

Ming leaned forward to Tom. “They won’t harangue me at least, bemoan their fate, the way my mother does. I’m their hero.”

“We’re going to a Chinese restaurant, you know, Mr. Driver.”

“Katie,” Allison said, “Don’t bother the man when he’s driving.”

“Not to worry Madam, not to worry.” He blasted his horn as a delivery van cut into the lane. “A Chinese restaurant, is it, Missy? The food of my country is also very fine. Very fine.”

“What is your country, Mr. Driver? India?” She bounced as far forward as she could.

“Katie. Sit still.”

“They do mean well,” Ming was saying to Tom. “I know that. It just makes me uncomfortable. People died. I lived. Besides I was hardly…”

“Ah no Missy. Pakistan. Pakistan is my country.”

“My Daddy likes dosa,” she announced.

Tom half-turned, shaking his head at Ming. “Fine distinctions as far as the Lawrences are concerned. Relax and enjoy it.”

“Ah, dosa. Also Indian. Very fine.”

Katie snuggled closer. “Relax and enjoy it, Daddy.”

“What?”

He looked over at Allison. She gave him a helpless smile. She would be trying to keep him from dwelling on things. Find closure. Find a reason to celebrate what had survived.

“Sir,” the driver was nodding at him as they sped along. “Ah Sir, if you were not going to a restaurant of your country, I would be very happy to take you to a Pakistani restaurant.”

None of them knew what to say.

“But here you are. The young lady must have her way.” He winked at her.

She beamed at him. “Thank you.”

They got out. Tom paid and watched the taxi drive away in wonder. “Only in New York.”

Tom led the way. Ming watched as he squared his shoulders, holding himself very erect. Mother was waiting. The light at the door reflected off his glasses showing the lenses streaked and smudged. Tom on a good day wore a distracted air, his eyes bleary with long hours of poring over Han dynasty texts and working over his lecture notes for courses in Chinese history he taught to undergraduates at NYU. He was hoping mightily for tenure this year. His mother Kay, Ming’s mother-in-law, would chide him about the state of his shoes, tell him he needed some meat on his bones and ask him when he was going to get married again. She frequently threw in a comment or two about Tom’s former wife—they kept in touch. Such a lovely girl, Ming was given to understand. If only he hadn’t dragged her halfway around the world while he did his graduate research. So isolating for one who doesn’t speak the language, you know. According to Allison her mother always expected Tom to turn up with some Asian girl half his height and no doubt half his age, though she never said this to either Tom or Ming. Ming used to suspect she prepared her script beforehand; now he knew she could perform without one. Tom’s distraction hid a generous heart: it worried him that Ming seemed to have no other ambition than teaching Mandarin to NYU freshmen and sophomores.

The Lawrences were already at a table and Katie ran over to them. Ming caught Allison’s eye. Kay would already have given the place the once over, as she did every time they came, and now she was making the best of it. Her idea of dinner out involved subdued lighting and spotless cutlery, flowers, deferential waiters, not these fast-moving types balancing a huge bowl of hot soup that threatened to slosh over and scald you as they passed. She was sure she would one day have a hot soup shower and shampoo.

She fussed over Katie, Allison, and patted Ming’s arm.

Allison’s father George clapped him on the shoulder.

“How are you, boy?” he boomed over the din. “Mother and I were just saying we don’t see enough of you.”

“When were we here last?” She’d raised her voice to be heard above the din.

“Hmm.” Allison looked over at him, winked. Ming shrugged.

“I know, Grandma, I remember. It was my birthday.” Katie had a mind like a steel trap for anything related to herself. “I think this might be my favorite restaurant in the whole world.”

Kay smiled at her. “So it was. Thank you, Katie.” She plucked at the tablecloth in front of her. “How lovely, children’s knack of seeing reality in terms of their own fantasies. This stain looks familiar, if ever so slightly faded. I suppose it has had a trip through the laundry service? I always sit right here looking at the door into the main restaurant and all those fish in that tank. Tell me why we come here again?”

Ming smiled at his mother-in-law. “It’s the food.”

“Ah. I knew it wasn’t the décor.” She gazed at the discolored plastic panels slanting overhead. “I see the plastic flowers haven’t changed; slightly grimier, perhaps. We always seem to sit here in this questionable bower. Somehow there’s never another table free in the whole place.”

Ming laughed. It surprised him to realize that he was used to her; she didn’t get to him anymore. That he even liked her. That she might even like him. “In Beijing if a restaurant is too fancy we suppose the food can’t be very good.”

Kay looked at him over the top of her glasses. “After ten years I have to remind this man to call me mother.”

“It’s the food, mother. Mom.”

“That’s better. And Tom.” She inspected her son, who seemed to evoke the same feelings as the place setting. Picked up the chopsticks in their paper sheath and waved them at him. “You know I can’t use these to save my life. Would you get me a fork, please—or do you want me to starve? George, what are you doing, squirming around like that? You’ll tip yourself over.”

Allison’s father shifted his chair this way and that as he sat in it, raising first the front legs and then the back, bringing them down heavily. They all watched while he repeated the whole performance.

“George!”

“Damn floor’s uneven. And this tablecloth that’s about three sizes too big is trying to wrap itself around my legs and immobilize me.” He brought his face down to Katie’s where she sat beside him. “I’ll end up a great big mummy.”

She laughed. “We’ll roll you out the door, Grandpa. You can be on display in a museum.”

Ming smiled, glanced around at the other tables, filled his nose, his lungs with the tang of garlic and ginger and scallions and his ears with the roll and pitch of Beijing dialect. He looked around the table. Family. Ming as some kind of dissident. It was never that he had claimed to be one. It was a role, one he had fallen into and couldn’t explain his way out of. His life here, the only life he had now, was built on it. He watched Allison sharing some joke with her father. Katie waved over a waiter and asked him in Mandarin to bring her Granny a fork. They chattered away together and the waiter pronounced her “very smart”—hen congming—with a nod to Ming.

“So, Miss Very Smart,” he grinned at her, “what’ll we have?”

“Dumplings, dumplings and dumplings.”

“Dumplings it is. Can we have some vegetables and stuff with that?”

“I suppose. If we have to.” She waved her chopsticks at him.

“Maybe a few cold dishes? Some…jellyfish?”

“Oh, yes! Jellyfish.”

Kay Lawrence could only shake her head.

The table quickly filled with small dishes of peanuts and chopped smoked duck, a salad of gluey ribbons of pea-starch noodles mixed with slivers of cucumber and scallions and shreds of chicken dressed with soy sauce and sharp mustard: the cold appetizers of the north that were balm to his soul. When Katie was younger she would squeal with delight when the dumplings, boiled, steamed and fried, a platter of each, made their appearance. Now that she was all of nine, she limited herself to a huge grin. She deftly maneuvered three dumplings into her grandfather’s bowl.

“Hah. Saved from certain starvation,” he said. “I never can get these gizmos to work right.”

Ming smiled at his daughter. “Such politeness in one so young. Such restraint.” And watched as she filled her own plate with two of each kind, and a mound of jellyfish.

“Remember they’re very hot.” But she was already nibbling and blowing for all she was worth. Ming flagged down a waiter. “Peeled garlic, please.”

“Now I don’t speak the language, but I know what that was all about.”

“Can’t eat dumplings without garlic, Mom.”

Kay shivered. “Remind me not to get too close to you, after.”

Kay was leaning closer to Allison, listening to something Allison was saying. They both laughed softly and he heard Kay’s “Well,” spoken in a tone that sounded like the prelude to a story at someone else’s expense. George was in the middle of a story, probably one of what he called his tall tales, for Katie’s benefit. They were both enthralled. George could be gruff, a man of few words, but his soft side wasn’t far beneath the surface, especially where his granddaughter was concerned. George had been in “W-W-Two—the Big One, you know?”

“It was the worst, boy. We gave it our best. ‘Course not many care about all that now. But the way I see it, you and I know what it’s like. Fighting for the right thing. Yessir.”

Ming never had to explain anything to him again. He took it on faith. He was proud. George was a straight arrow of the old order and this was the bond between them.

Kay Lawrence was another kettle of fish. He looked over at her, leaning close to Allison, one hand on her daughter’s forearm where it lay on the table. Some family gossip probably. Probably something to do with Tom’s ex-wife, Tom’s mistake in leaving her, Tom’s failure to find anyone new. She glanced now and then in her son’s direction. Another kettle of fish altogether. He liked the idiom because it was completely opposite of anything he’d expect of her. A kettle of fish was the last thing she’d want to deal with. She liked church suppers and doing the flowers for the sanctuary and meeting commitments. She liked lunching with the gals and keeping up appearances. She liked Ming, but he overdid the garlic just a tad for her taste. Still he knew she included him as family; as least she did her level best to.

He took another dumpling, put it on his plate, then put his chopsticks down. He leaned back in his chair, tipped it back slightly, and closed his eyes a moment. With a little effort he could filter out the English conversations, concentrate on the Mandarin, here and there a little Cantonese, Fujianese… Wonderful smells rose and swirled in the air: garlic, ginger, scallions, sesame oil, seared meat and the tang of dark Zhenjiang vinegar.

He glanced around the restaurant, wondered if there were others eating and drinking and laughing here in Rego Park, any of these drink-flushed faces, who had been there, who could not forget. Others who were marked for life. The table next to them suddenly exploded with roars of laughter as a round in a rhyming drinking game was lost. He was terrible at drinking games; Gu always won.

“Ming,” Allison’s voice rose above the din of the drinking game, “Dad’s trying to get your attention.”

George was holding his glass of beer toward him, beaming at him. Oh God, what was this?

“Ming, I know this, ahem, well, this season we might say, is a difficult one for you, and well, we just want you to know we honor your heroism and say how glad we are to have you with us…”

He felt his face burning. He hoped no one at the next table could hear, could speak English well enough to understand what was meant.

Janice Wickeri lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China for nearly thirty years, where she taught translation and English and later worked as an editor with Renditions, a respected journal of translations of Chinese literature. She is a published translator of Chinese literature and now works freelance as a translator and editor. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University.

“Shut-Eye” by Literary Awards Finalist, Quinn Calhoun

SFWP — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:01:12 +0000

Queen Eva-Marie always did say every good-bye ain’t gone and every shut-eye ain’t sleep. Nightfall brings a hush over even the nosiest places and that includes the Quarters. A late spring breeze circulates air already too warm and kicks up limerock dust on the edges of Palmer Road. A slice of silver moon illuminates the sky and the spirit of the family’s matriarch looks over the inhabitants of 26 Palmer. There is a young married woman not even twenty-five yet sleeping in a twin bed with her four-year-old daughter, intertwined tightly as if the warm breeze is threatening their embrace. Their sleep is secure and deep, unlike the sleep of the six-year-old on the sofa in the front room. He is fitful. Twisting, turning, fighting the sheet and others, seen and unseen.

Even when the invaders go away, he is running, searching for the father he hardly ever sees anymore. When he’s exhausted from all the wrestling and running he will fall into a deep sleep joining his mother and sister, unaware of his great aunt rescuing the cotton sheet from the walkway and covering his limp body.

The great aunt, in another bedroom down the hall has carefully prepared for the evening’s rest. Her hair is pinned, secured over pink foam rollers, and wrapped in a blue satin scarf. She has fluffed her feather pillow and secured the window even in this late spring heat so that she can dream in peace atop a high Colonial bed. Even so, she is having trouble sleeping for the third night in a row. An oscillating fan nods in her direction from the armoire closest to the closed window. She hears the crickets and the occasional call of the whippoorwill, but they are not the reasons she cannot sleep. It’s the daughters of the sister and brother gone home before her. One of them is in trouble. She knows the kind of trouble for she has dreamt it often. Now she must find out who. She thinks of the grandnephew she usually keeps but knows he’s safe and sound less than a mile down the road, then she tries again to sleep.

In that house just down Palmer Road, the grandnephew sleeps soundly stretched out on his back. He dreams of flight on the backs of blackbirds, tails of red kites and he smiles, sometimes laughing like he’s been tickled. He will wake refreshed, eager to see his mother. At the opposite end of the hall that runs the width of the house instead of the length, his grandfather snores heavily. He will sleep well for four or five hours in the night then wake up missing the warm body that occupied the left side of his bed for twenty-five years. He’s still surprised when he calculates that he’s been waking at four in the morning reaching for her and finding she wasn’t there for going on eight years now. He will sleep only lightly after that because he worries about his health and his daughters, especially the one who sleeps down the road instead of eighty miles away in the home she shares with her husband, but also the one who just dropped in for two or three days to say hello and see her son. She has seen her son and is across the hall from him now. Although she has completed forty minutes of dance to the mellowest Miles Davis she could locate in her father’s album collection and knows she’s tired, she will sleep light. Always has. But now it’s different because she fears sleep. Fears the night prowler.

He has come every night for twelve nights and she’s afraid to find out why he’s there. She lies still thinking of that first night in years, almost two weeks ago, and silently asks for the strength to keep him away.

The last time he came she knew the approach and the instant paralysis it triggered. The sound. The tap, tap, tap as he slowly moved across the hardwood floor and she fought to free herself before he reached the foot of her bed, but she was too late. He had already taken over. Her body was no longer her own. She felt the weight of his body just beyond her feet. Again, she tried to move anything: arms, hands, legs, feet, head. She opened her mouth and screamed. Nothing. Not a sound. Only silence. “Shoo. Go. Leave,” she demanded but the words were lost soon after she formed them in her head. His only response: the glowing green eyes that stared back at her. She could see fur blacker than a thousand midnights shine under the filtered street light that slipped through the slants in the Venetian blinds and the gold collar glisten around his regal neck. A beautiful creature turned sinister under cover of night. Again, she tried to turn her head, lift a finger, close her eyes. Her will was strong; his was stronger. She screamed; but still, only silence. He was in control and he wouldn’t release her.

“Go away!” she hurled the words. More silence. Finally, exhausted from the fight, she relaxed and sank back into the feather bed. After a while, as if he tired of her motionless body, she saw him stand on all fours and leap to the floor. She felt the mattress rise with the unburdening of his weight and heard the welcoming thump as he landed on the floor and went tap, tap, tap across the hardwood surface. As soon as his silhouette passed through her bedroom door her arms and legs flailed involuntarily in defiance. Unable to control the shaking, she gave in to the tears and wrapped herself in Queen Eva-Marie’s quilt.

*****

Damaris Alexa lay still remembering that after he released her she’d covered her stomach with both hands. She prayed and she asked for the answer to why he comes. With her prayers said, she slipped out of bed and walked to the room across the hall. A night light illuminated the smaller bedroom where her five-year-old stretched out in flight. She kneeled by his bed and traced his hairline as she listened for the pattern to his breathing. She wanted him to be safe, to be strong. She lay her head on the edge of his pillow and wiped warm tears from her eyes. It all seemed so out of her control. Again, she had chosen badly. How many mess-ups would she get? The last time the prowler came it had been to warn her of danger she knew. This time she was afraid of what the unknown might be.

Two weeks before, in Manhattan, the day she stopped by Carla’s gallery after class was one of the saddest days of her life, but she expected Carla’s upbeat, always sunny smile to complement the bright spring day. She wore her new periwinkle pantsuit and stopped in at Nubian Nails to get a manicure. She didn’t have to wait for a chair and the manicurist had a nail color to match her suit and lift her spirits. She left the salon willing to accept the latest detour in the road called her life. She even stopped in at the florist on Bleecker Street and selected a spring arrangement of forsythia for delivery.

She tried not to think about the sidelong glance of his amber eyes when she said she “might” be pregnant. The last thing she wanted was for him to think that she was after him again, trying to get him back. But she knew Carla was right, it was the first thing all men thought. And even if he had seen it a million times before, she would never use an innocent child for anything, especially not to keep a man she knew she didn’t want. So she had expected him to question her intention; but she had never expected him to insult her by throwing his relationship with a twenty-two-year-old Bard student in her face. That had stung the most. And she’d never intended to care. For as long as she could remember, when the debate about men crossing the color line came up, she felt nothing. Carla said it was because she’d never been personally slighted. She said it was because she thought people had the right to choose whomever they wanted –even people as evil as her ex-husband. Plus, usually, the men she found interesting were the type who appreciated the sistah in her. That was part of why she liked them and only a small part of why she didn’t give a damn about him. But there he was, sitting at a cozy little table at her favorite French restaurant in SoHo (the restaurant she chose because she wanted to be relaxed and enjoying herself when she gave him the news) telling her he was sorry but he couldn’t risk losing Lauren over something like this. Of course her next question was “Something like what?” Then she had to know, what exactly had “this” been? She was even prepared for him to say it was a one-night-stand because that was exactly what she called it. But he didn’t say that. He said he would give her money to “take care of it,” and pleaded for her to be discreet. Her answer was a discreet “Go to hell,” with a smile and “Don’t worry. I would never do anything to jeopardize your relationship with your rich girl.” She had to talk herself out of screaming even though she believed he would be getting off easy since she hadn’t slapped, kicked, or shot him, yet. In all her piss-ocity, she did manage to make a graceful exit and slip into the backseat of a cab before exhaling.

It took four days to venture back out into the world. Two days to stop crying, a day to stop cursing, and a day to clear her head in order to be civil to others. Then, on her way to Carla’s in her new periwinkle for spring, she was expecting something positive –anything positive. As expected, Carla met her in the first floor gallery with a smile and preliminary plans to get them invited to some big time bourgie ball. Mari gave her friend a quick kiss-kiss and followed her into the office. Everything was cool until Carla’s fiancé ruined her day first by showing up, then by giving his own unsolicited assessment of her situation with her ex, whom he didn’t know. She knew she should have walked out when Carla was called away to her boss’ office and never looked back. But something in the way Donnie insinuated that she had gotten what she wanted out of the rendezvous stopped her at the door and she decided to listen. She wasn’t surprised that Carla had discussed her business. Other than the time she spent with Carla she had never seen her without Donnie. What she was surprised about was the fact that Donnie waited until Carla left to bring it up.

She walked out and by the time she reached 7th Avenue that she didn’t know which direction she was walking or where she was headed but she was afraid to stop walking. When she crossed Waverly she decided she was close enough make it to the Medical Center at 14th Street before passing out.

After the doctor-on-call convinced her that if she didn’t calm down she would surely bring on an attack. Mari sat still and followed the breathing steps of the respiratory therapist, but when the doctor took out her pad to prescribe a steroid to subvert any subsequent attack, she came clean about her condition and asked for an unplanned pregnancy counseling referral. After taking a cab home and sitting motionless in a dark apartment for hours wondering how she managed to hook up with two of New York’s finest jerks in less than two months, she called the number and the voice on the other end of the line was the warmest, calmest, most reassuring voice she’d heard since moving to the city and she made an appointment.

Ian turned on his side and repositioned his head on the pillow. Mari kissed her son lightly on the forehead and quietly returned to the room she had shared with Ria and then Lynlé for a total of seventeen years. It was lonely without them and not just there and not just bedtime. She pulled the sheet up over her shoulders along with the knit throw and closed her eyes. Her only prayer was to sleep in peace.

*****

When Mari had tiptoed across the hall to check on Ian, Ruby Jean woke up again. The whippoorwill was silent and only the persistent cricket chorus could be heard over the hum and rattle of the nodding fan. She had had the same kind of dream for three nights now. Fish, fish, and more fish. Couldn’t be mistaken about that. On the first night Zacharias and Willie brought two coolers full of catfish from Newnan’s Lake and she fried fish until she was laughing with exhaustion. The second night it was Pearl and Queen Eva-Marie standing in her kitchen describing the big blue-gill breams they were pulling from the river below the bridge on Seminole Road. She made them promise to donate the fish to the church for Sunday dinners. But then tonight she herself stood on the edge of the Kanapaha watching rainbow bass, speckled perch, and shell-cracker breams dance down the river in the clearest, coolest water she had ever imagined but she couldn’t hook a one. All she hooked during a full day was a scraggly cottonmouth and quickly slammed it against a rock. That’s when she woke up. One of her girls was in trouble.

Until last night she had assumed it was LaShaun. The only daughter of her only brother had called her early Monday morning for money –just enough to pay the light bill and maybe some of the phone bill. With that Ruby was sure it was her because she’d been told by more than one reliable source that her niece had visited a doctor in Gainesville twice in as many years to “take care of slip-ups.” But then Shaunie came back last night to repay the money and even Tamar backed up the temporary cash flow excuse. It wasn’t LaShaun and she had asked Tamar straight out if it was her and her niece answered with a quick “no, ma’am” but Ruby knew that before she asked because lately Tamar had spent more nights in Ruby’s house than her own and from what Anna Moses had told Ruby Jean, Tamar’s sorry excuse for a husband wasn’t ever home even when the she did go home. So she was sure Tamar wasn’t the one. And if it had been Ria, she’d have knocked down the door with name books and baby shower wish lists by now. That still left the four that lived out of state. She admitted that she didn’t know enough about her own daughter to make a call and Sha-Sha and Lynlé both would have called her by now. But then there was Lexie. Now it was clear she was as independent and unpredictable as ever, showing up out the clear blue yonder wasn’t no surprise, but since it wasn’t Shaunie or Tamar, Ruby Jean would be willing to put her numbers money on Lexie tonight. It would have to wait until the morning though because she was nodding again.

*****

Zacharias sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. It was four fifteen and pitch dark inside and out. He hadn’t slept through the night or even wanted to in a years. No matter how exhausted he was when he lay down at night, after four hours or so, he was back up. He’d tried everything. After Pearl died he stayed on at NiBlack Roofing full-time but began to schedule more and more carpentry jobs after work. He would put in a full day of tarring, go home and change because he couldn’t expect people to let him in their nice houses to track tar all over the place, then spend five or six hours carving molding for a fireplace or replacing parquet or other hardwood flooring. Soon the carpentry jobs were coming so fast that he was putting in two full-time days and still couldn’t get a decent night’s rest even though he felt like the walking dead.

He could still recall the morning after his last good night’s sleep. He’d had words with his youngest daughter before saying good-bye to his wife and walking out to NiBlack’s truck. He couldn’t have imagined his wife not being there when he returned. After twenty-five years he would never have entertained the thought. He had walked out that morning with her kiss lingering on his lips and although he wasn’t treated with a good-bye kiss daily, he told himself she was being extra nice because he and their youngest continued to have the same argument that had lingered over the house for a week. It was about a boy. At this point he couldn’t remember exactly who the boy was but remembered that the boy was white. So his wife’s endearing kiss was to quell the flame his babygirl had unknowingly lit in the pit of his stomach. But he would have never believed it was the last kiss. He had expected to return home from patching Miss Lucille’s roof that Friday to a beautiful Pearl Ann, even when she was frowning and shaking her head, then laughing and singing “Thank You, Jesus” while she examined his soiled clothes that only hours before had been spotless with a shirt starched stiff enough to stand by itself. But when he arrived home after the sun had set on the Quarters there was no laughter or song, only tears and the heartbreaking silence.

It had been silent almost forty years ago when he came to Meroë for the first time. Since then he had learned that even when it doesn’t proceed it, quiet often follows death. He had come from Memphis after almost three years maintaining military vehicles in South Korea. Near the end of his tour there had been a fatal accident involving one of the Jeeps he maintained. The dead soldier was white and his service to his country was over. He only asked that with his excellent record of service he be discharged honorably. He got his walking papers and a seat on a plane bound for New York City the same day he got a letter from his aunt Hettie saying simply that his grandfather was dying. He came to Florida to say good-bye to the grandfather he’d left in Memphis. He had travel to the other side of the world because it was the law and because Memphis was dangerous for a black boy with time, idle hands, and a racing mind.

It was 1955 when he stepped off the Silver Star and onto the white dust of the limerock road in Palmer County, Florida. His spit-polished shoes and shit-colored suit quickly took on a soft gray hue as the dust seemed to rise to meet him as he walked. The first black man he met directed him to Five Palmer Road with a tip of his hat and a smile. Hettie Charles lived in a wide wood-framed house with jalousie window panes behind heavy cedar shutters. The grandfather who’d been his only family since his mother’s death sent him from Toledo to Memphis when he was ten years old was dying. Right there in the same room he sat in at four in the morning.

It had been a Saturday night and he was just in time to say good-bye. After his grandfather closed his eyes for the last time, Zach had walked the dusty road back to the river he’d crossed at the train depot. He sat on a large oak branch that paralleled the ground until he heard the roosters crowing, then began the slow walk back to his aunt’s house. As he made his way across the field behind Five Palmer Road he saw a church across the pecan grove and decided to say a prayer. He was still dressed in the mustard brown of the U.S. Army when he took a seat in the fourth pew next to his cousin Willie and was mesmerized by the voice of God’s angel. She sang Sweet Hour of Prayer and he knew he would cry. He couldn’t see her face that morning, not just because the tears blurred his vision but also because Darlene and Evangeline Jackson sat in front of him blocking the whole of the choir stand, which turned out to be a good thing because she was only ten that morning he sat crying in the fourth pew and his cousin Willie warned him that Queen Eva-Marie’s wrath was no joke. Soon after that he became the first black mechanic at the Town Tire in Gainesville. From there he got a line foreman’s job at the Sparrow Bus Factory in Meroë and worked until the layoff of ’79.

In 1958, he met the sister of the girl with the angelic voice. In 1961 he married the angelic voice. She gave him five daughters –no two alike and he never got back to Memphis. His oldest he named Miriam Elisabeth, but they never called her anything but Ria. She grew up, got married, and started her own family before he felt like he knew her as anything more than his baby girl. He didn’t realize she was grown and gone until the second one, Lexie who calls herself Mari now even though nobody else does, slipped off the first chance she got. That’s when he began to notice how eager they were to go. “Anywhere” was what Lexie had said when he went after her. But he couldn’t understand why. Lynlé was the third and the only one who wanted to stay, but she couldn’t. The Palmer County Regional Library didn’t have enough books to keep her there. The fourth, Princess Tamar, came into this world with flaming red hair and a .38 hot attitude destined to butt heads with him till the day one of them died. People liked to say Lexie had a hard head, but no, Lexie had a mind all her own. Tamar had the hard head and because of it kept a soft behind. He never thought he could put his child on the street, but when he knew the alternative was to kill her, he asked her to leave. It had broken his heart and probably would have killed Pearl had she not already been dead, but with or without his wife, it was still his house and Tamar couldn’t stay. He didn’t know how quiet it could get until the next summer when Lynlé left for college in Atlanta and his baby Asha went to New York to look out for her sister’s baby. Now he saw his grandsons, four of them, almost every day. But at night when it was time to rest, the silence was almost too much.

*****

Except for warning signs like fish, Ruby Jean always dreamed the same dream: Jerome coming home to her. It had been more than thirty-five years since her high school sweetheart boarded the Silver Star headed North with a draft card in his hand. She received twenty-nine letters in as many months all with his same promise to return home and make her his wife. The proposal was repeated in a blue and white envelope with the patriotic airmail stamp and a page and a half letter on matching stationery about the weather at the border and the food he hated and counting the days until he would return. She had saved them all and read them every day until the next one came. The last letter arrived the Saturday after Good Friday 1959. It wasn’t much different from the others. She read it and put it away because she had Easter pageant practice after dinner.

During Jerome’s absence she had attracted many suitors because there wasn’t a mother in town with an eligible son who didn’t know Queen Eva-Marie Ingram and thought that her daughter Ruby would make a good wife. The most persistent of those women was Hettie Charles. Hettie had already married her only son Willie off to Darlene Jackson, whose first husband drowned in ’57 when his fishing boat capsized on Newnan’s Lake; now Hettie was looking for a wife for her nephew, recently returned from the war. Ruby knew a set up when she saw it and so she went along with Mrs. Hettie and her mother when they insisted that Zacharias walk her and her siblings home from church on Sunday. She welcomed his visits but didn’t waste any time letting him know that she had every intention of marrying Jerome Silas.

Over the next six months she began to look forward to the approaching melody of the harmonica that announced Zacharias’ arrival before he emerged from the maple trees that lined Palmer Road. And even though she would never admit it to anyone, she was jealous when he began to show more attention to her little sister than to her.

It was the week after Easter when Florence Silas knocked on Queen Eva-Marie’s door saying she had news for Ruby Jean. It took a moment for Flo’s news to make sense to Ruby. Jerome’s mother gave her the letter with the President’s seal on it to read for herself. Condolences. The word stood out to her because as smart as she was she had never heard it before. Zacharias told her it was a fancy way to say they were sorry. It didn’t make her feel fancy. It made her feel alone. Jerome wouldn’t come home the way she dreamed of, instead he came home in a pine box draped in the Stars and Stripes.

The day that Florence Silas buried her middle son in Antioch Cemetery, Ruby took the Silver Star to Baltimore to work for Miss Eliza Palmer. When Miss Eliza asked her what was the first thing she wanted to do in Baltimore she said to go to the docks and the library. At the pier she watched the welders eat lunch and saw two tug boats guiding a ship. In the Enoch Pratt Free Library she first found the DMZ on the globe, then she looked up the word “condolences.” After returning to Miss Eliza’s stone cottage on Lombard Street, she put the one letter from President Eisenhower and the twenty-nine letters from Jerome at the bottom of the travel chest Miss Eliza had given her and never read either of them again.

It was 1960 when she enrolled in the freshman class at Morgan State. It was 1963 when she graduated with honors and took a summer trip to Europe in a production of Carmen. In Frankfurt, Germany she starred in a production of Aïda for nine months. There she met Lloyd Ramsey, a British composer who wrote sonnets and sonatas for her. She married him in secret and they had one child, a daughter, Lisa Gayle born the same day as her cousin Damaris Alexa. She called her baby sister Pearl and told her about this charming Briton she’d married and the beautiful daughter who had their father’s eyes but swore her sister to secrecy. Then when she called home in the summer of 1968, after three years of secret life and five years in Europe, her secret was not secret any more. Her mother, Queen Eva-Marie, had been given the news of her British son-in-law by an overzealous journalist and Ruby was disowned.

It would be five more years before she got the call to come home, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant visit. It wouldn’t be a visit at all. Queen Eva-Marie insisted she was dying and asked Ruby to make a choice. Ruby thought she could choose both. She returned to Meroë with her daughter to look after her aging mother and prepared for her husband to join her. But Lloyd never came –at least not to Meroë. He got as close as New York and eventually settled in Los Angeles where he now keeps a home six months of the year. Ruby didn’t go after him. For years she believed he’d come, but in the meantime she had a mother to care for and a daughter to raise.

In 1970 Lloyd filed for divorce and immediately remarried. At sixteen, Lisa Gayle went to London to visit her father and stayed. Now Ruby only gets a call from her daughter on holidays. She misses Lisa Gayle but she has had enough to keep her very busy. Throughout those years in Europe Ruby continued to talk to her sister Pearl almost every week and they always teased each other about Zacharias Strong and his harmonica. At least once during every holiday dinner preparation, the sisters would burst into sudden fits of laughter. For as long as she was around, Queen Eva-Marie voiced her disapproval of these conniptions and insisted that they control themselves. And they tried.

In 1978 Queen Eva-Marie died and seven years later Pearl suffered a fatal asthma attack, leaving Zacharias with three teenagers to manage still. So Ruby focused on caring for her nieces. Not just because the girls were young, she thought just a little spoiled, and missed their mother, but also because she missed her baby sister, too. On the first night of her return to Meroë he came. Being home made her miss Jerome even more and she began to meet him every night in her dreams. Tonight she had almost finished telling him about her favorite niece coming home when she nodded off without saying good-bye.

Quinn Calhoun is an elementary school teacher in Gainesville, Florida. She has also served as an academic advisor and teacher of English and creative writing to high school students in the Upward Bound program at the University of Florida. She received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a B.A. in English from Spelman College. She is hard at work on a novel.

“Blocked” by Literary Awards Finalist, Susan Cushman

SFWP — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:07:00 +0000

They’ve been waiting for months now, like patients on an organ donor list. Two large icons—one of Christ, the Life Giver, and another, The Mother of God, Directress—sit unfinished in my studio. A few well-meaning students have offered encouragements like, “Oh, they’re almost finished,” and “I love the blue highlights on Christ’s inner garment.” But the images are suspended… like embryos stuck in the birth canal. Their faces are expressionless masks; their lips, a ghoulish, green sankir, thirsty for a wash of vermillion red. Their eyes, empty and pale, waiting for the life-giving lights and distinctive black lines which are the trademarks of this ancient Byzantine art form.

My studio is upstairs, making it easier to avoid the anxious stares of my orphaned pieces. About once a week when I’m forced to walk through the second story landing to attend to some business in one of the upstairs bedrooms, I hear them calling out, like neglected children: “Why have you left us? Is there something wrong with us?”

Sometimes I stop and look at the unfinished images with a melancholy longing. The other day I paused before the icon of Christ, fingering a soft sable brush and scanning the jars of pigments on the nearby shelves. There are eggs in the refrigerator, waiting to be broken for Him. Their yolks, themselves a type of life interrupted, are ready to bind the dry pigments and fill my palette with a range of ochres and siennas for the face of Christ. Everything I need is here, waiting for my touch.

Icons in various stages of completion, models used for instruction, surround me. A finished icon of the Archangel Gabriel watches over the desks and work tables arranged along the banisters overlooking the den below. The cathedral ceiling slants down towards the studio and provides natural light through two well-placed sky lights. Closing my eyes, I can see a procession of icons that have come to life on this desk over the years—saints, angels, martyrs, and various types of the Mother of God and Her Son. Opening my eyes to the work on the table which beckons me, I fight back tears, take a deep breath, and walk away. I feel like the Rich Young Ruler when he discovered, with great sorrow, that he wasn’t up to the task. He wasn’t able to sell everything to follow Christ.

Much has been written about writer’s block. We are told to “just do it”—to write something every day. Blocked on that next chapter of your novel? Stuck on a shifting point of view in a short story? Struggling with ethical issues in an essay? No problem. Set it aside and write a journal entry instead. Or just write whatever comes to mind. You can always revise it later.

Unfortunately, writing icons isn’t like that. (Painting icons is called “writing” because you are writing the life of the saint with pigment.) It’s not about what to write. It’s about how… about being prepared. Really, it’s like approaching the sacrament of Holy Communion. It’s spiritual work, bringing these sacred images to life. All icons are sacred, but these two on the tables in my studio are intended for the nave of a church. People will venerate them. They will bow before them and kiss them and light candles to put beside them. Smoke, like incense, will rise to heaven with their prayers.

So what’s blocking me? It would be easy to make excuses. I’ve been busy with other things—writing, caring for a dying friend, traveling. But the truth is, we usually make time for the things that matter most, don’t we? Writing is fun. Caring for the sick is rewarding. Traveling is exciting, and can also be a great escape from real life.

My husband and I just got home from a twelve-day trip to Greece. It was part vacation, part spiritual pilgrimage. We visited many Orthodox churches and monasteries, prayed before the tombs of numerous saints, and venerated scores of icons—some ancient, some miracle-working, and some, simply beautiful. My favorites were actually contemporary works done by the nuns at the Monastery Evangelismos on the island of Patmos. The master iconographer, Mother Olympia, studied under Fotios Kontoglou (d.1965), my favorite contemporary Greek iconographer. (Kontoglou had, among his students, the famous painter El Greco.)

Mother Olympia’s work is prevalent in churches all over Europe. Before she died, she taught several nuns at the monastery, and their work fills the Catholicon (main church) now. As Sister Tabitha gave us a tour, she pointed out the large wall painting of the Dormition of the Mother of God, saying that most of it was painted by the nuns, the students, but that the face of the Holy Virgin was done by Mother Olympia. Writings about her speak of her deep spiritual life, which shows in her icons. They have an other-worldly beauty, a mystical quality that comes from her closeness to God. She was prepared.

Early in the history of the Church, most all iconographers were monastics. They lived secluded lives—away from the cares and temptations of the world—probably more disciplined than mine. You really shouldn’t paint icons if you’re not at peace in your soul.

Perhaps my own sinfulness is blocking my way upstairs to finish these two icons. Students are calling and emailing to ask the dates of my next workshop. I don’t have an answer for them. I’ve been stirred up for several months, allowing some hurtful interactions and difficult situations to disturb my peace. The high road in Orthodox spirituality involves quietly receiving insults, rejection, and even abuse with thankfulness. Humility is the goal, not the praise of men. This self-effacing approach to life goes against the grain of modern secular psychology. It’s an acquired taste, learned through self-denial and the thankful acceptance of suffering.

The life-coach writing for Real Simple magazine would probably tell me to walk away from the difficult relationships that are causing my pain. She might tell me to use my anger to fuel my work… to paint or to write through my pain. Some of the Psalms of the Prophet King David, who suffered much pain at the hands of others and as a consequence for his own sins, are full of anguish. Of remorse. But… anger?

So, I turned to poetry. First I wrote “Benched,” which pretty much described how I was feeling at the time.

Next I explored the possibility of needing to broaden my circle of friends and find kindred spirits in new realms, so I wrote a poem called “Wide Margins.” It was about outsider artists and people who are marginalized by society, which was how I was feeling. This one cried out for a louder venue, so I hand-printed the poem on hot press watercolor paper and illustrated it with gouache, with encouragement from a group of fellow artists at our monthly gathering.

Finally, I wrote one that explores the healing of the pain and anger in verse. I called it “Growing Pains.”

When the poetry doesn’t work, I drink… usually just enough to take the edge off. Alcohol offers a few hours of numbness, but sadly, the receptors for pain are also conduits for creativity.

Sobriety—it’s about more than not being drunk. It’s clear-eyed brush strokes and poetry that knocks your socks off and page-turning prose. It’s Iris Dement singing, “I choose to take my sorrow straight,” and Natalie Maines (of the Dixie Chicks) turning a personal affront into a hit song with, “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice.” It’s Mary Chapin Carpenter singing, “forgiveness doesn’t come with a debt.” But it’s also allowing yourself to be human, and turning that broken humanity into something redemptive with every stroke of your pen or brush or keyboard.

“I’m mad as hell!” Maines croons. So, was she mad when she wrote the lyrics? Was she still mad when she recorded the song? Virginia Woolf said one shouldn’t write while angry—that it destroys all chance of objectivity, or something like that. It was in her book, A Room of One’s Own. She was talking about how Charlotte Bronte’s anger hurt the integrity of her work in Jane Eyre. (Must not have hurt it too badly… I think there are still a few copies of the book in circulation today.) But Woolf’s point, as I remember, was that anger blocks the writer’s view of her characters… of her story. That she will end up writing about herself instead of them.

If that’s true of fiction, how much more important is that concept when it comes to the spiritual work of iconography? If I can’t take communion when I’m angry (and I’ve abstained quite a few times recently,) how can I paint the face of the Mother of God, or of Her Son? Can I just offer myself, warts and all, and climb the stairs to my studio “just as I am”? Would God accept the sacrifice of my art even if it’s offered with unclean hands? For that matter, when would my hands ever be clean enough?

It’s a Catch 22, much like the great hunger and thirst I feel for the Body and Blood of Jesus on the Sunday mornings when I’m not prepared to receive it, either because I didn’t keep the liturgical fast or because I didn’t let go of anger and seek reconciliation first. Seems like that’s when we need God’s healing the most, when we’re suffering the consequences of our own sin. But the Mystical Supper isn’t a sloppy affair. It’s not a “come as you are” event. It’s a feast, and wedding garments are requested. If we lower the Holy Eucharist to the standards of a fast food drive through, it will no longer be Holy. So, how do I get unblocked?

There was a prostitute in fifth century Egypt named Mary. She loved all the wrong stuff. She even got on a ship full of pilgrims bound for Jerusalem to venerate the true Cross, which had been placed in a church there. Her purpose on the voyage was to find customers, and she did, indeed, defile many a young boy on that tumultuous ocean voyage. But upon arrival in Jerusalem, she began to be curious about their faith, and tried to follow the crowds into the church. As she attempted to step over the threshold, an invisible force blocked her way. It wasn’t just because she was a prostitute—God knows how many of us have sold out to people or things or ideas in this life. It was because she was unrepentant.

After several failed attempts, she fell on her knees before an icon of the Mother of God outside the door to the church, asking forgiveness and begging entry. Her repentance was accepted, and after entering the church to venerate the Cross, Mary spent the rest of her life as a hermit in the desert, away from the things and people she had used and abused. It was her path to salvation… to healing.

Like Saint Mary of Egypt, I often cling to the things that feed my appetite for pleasure… including anger, because anger feels better than pain. And for some time now, like Natalie Maines, I’ve not been “ready to make nice.” But oh, how I long to finish those icons. To climb the steps to my studio and fall on my knees and ask God to take away whatever is blocking me. Maybe I’ll do this soon.

But just as I was almost ready to make nice, I suffered another hit. Unintentional, but even accidental gashes hurt, especially when the scab is still new. So, I took off for the beach, where I could stand beside the ocean and be reminded of my smallness. Two days… alone. On the drive down to Gulf Shores I talked with a friend on my cell phone and told her about the dream I had the night before:

Walking on the side of a mountain with a group of travelers, I leave a gate open and a small child falls off the cliff. Certain that I’ve caused her death, nausea over takes me, and grief. The child’s parents find her, miraculously alive, later on in the dream. I approach them to share their joy, but they shun me. Their cold, unforgiving looks freeze my heart.

In the same dream, my Goddaughter, Hannah, who is (also in real life) pregnant, delivers twin boys. So my friend (on the cell phone) tells me this:

In dreams, death is often a good thing. The child that fell off the side of the mountain could be my ego. The source of my anger. My pain. It almost died, which is good. But we are never completely free of ego (pride) in this life. But the dream shows that I’m moving towards letting go of the anger. I’m closer to being ready to make nice. Thanks, in part, to the twins.

Yes, the twin boys represent my masculine side—my strength—which is fueling my two passions, writing prose and icons. When I let the anger (ego) die, I’ll be able to approach the icons again.

But why Hannah? In my dream, Hannah represents purity of heart, and also God’s mercy. Hannah has known suffering in her young life, and has overcome many difficult obstacles without becoming bitter. It is not insignificant that she is the bearer of the male twin boys in my dream. Hannah was actually visited by the Mother of God when she was a child. Humility attracts the grace of God.

As I write these words, waves are lapping the beach a few feet away. It’s my last day here, and I feel the push and pull of the ocean, of life forces so much larger than my anger. I let them pull the anger away, and I remember the words of a song I heard last night at a restaurant in Gulf Shores. The song was “Let Go,” and the songwriter, Bud Smith, sang it with an upbeat attitude, tempered with the humility of lessons learned. I find myself singing it now—when you’re walking through your day, let go.

It almost sounds trite to say that a soft rock song and the beach could play such a big part in something as important as letting go of anger. But they did. I’m home now, and as I walked up stairs today I found the way to my icons was open. The anger is mostly gone, and I’ll start to paint again soon. I’ll probably go to Confession first (it’s therapeutic, not juridical) and get started next week, but I’ve begun the process, the preparation.

One of my favorite writers, the late Madeleine L’Engle, said:

Until we have been healed, we do not know what wholeness is: the discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, or write, is an effort towards wholeness…. The important thing is to remember that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us and which we must humbly serve, and in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness.

An effort towards wholeness. I can do that. What a relief to learn that I don’t have to be healed in order to seek wholeness. Hopefully, I’ll be seeking it the rest of my life. And acquiring a taste for humility. But at least for today, I’m ready to make nice. And paint icons.

Susan Cushman is an iconographer, artist and writer living in Memphis, Tennessee. Her essays have appeared in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life (online version) and skirt! Magazine. She does commissioned icons, teaches Byzantine iconography classes, and speaks on iconography at colleges, churches and secondary schools. She blogs at http://wwwpenandpalette-susancushman.blogspot.com .

“Playing Bridge in Heaven” by Literary Awards Finalist, Elizabeth Edelglass

SFWP — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:28:39 +0000

Susan was writing a story about a teacher who almost lost everything when she had an affair with a married man, the father of one of her students, and Susan’s best friend Frannie, a sixth-grade teacher, was sure the story was about her.

“Oh my god, Susie,” Frannie moaned. “How could you do this to me?”

In Susan’s story, the teacher rendezvoused with her lover at the beach during summer vacation. They made love in her dank motel room while his family slept peacefully in their cottage down the road. Frannie had just returned from a weekend at the beach with her married lover. There was a healthy pink blush across her cheekbones and a crop of freckles on her shoulders and down her slender arms.

“You know he never had a kid in my class,” Frannie said. “But if you write it, they’ll believe it. Anyway, he’s going to tell his wife. He’s going to leave her this time. So then what we’re doing won’t be so… ”

“Sinful?”

“Likely to get me fired is what I was going to say.”

“He said so?” Susan asked. She was tearing up lettuce for salad, sweating between her breasts.

“I can tell,” Frannie said. “So does it have to be the beach, Susie? Everyone knows I go to the beach every July. Couldn’t you write about a ski vacation? Your lovers could be schussing down the Alps. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”

“I can’t help it,” Susan said. “My characters only wear mittens when I’m cold. When I’m hot, they wear bathing suits.”

“So get central air,” Frannie said. “What have you got to eat? I’m starving.” She opened the refrigerator.

“Dinner’s in half an hour.”

“I’m hungry now. I can’t help it if I have to eat when I’m stressed. Don’t you have yogurt? I’m on a diet.”

“You know I don’t like yogurt,” Susan said.

“But I do,” Frannie said, “with blueberries.”

“My parents used to grow it.”

“Blueberries?”

“No, yogurt. In jars. On the kitchen counter. I never told you this? About the Swedish friend who gave them a starter culture? You had to feed it all the time. When we went on vacation, they had to hire a neighbor kid to baby-sit their yogurt. Once we went cross-country for the whole summer, to the national parks, and the yogurt died. By then, the Swedish friend had moved back to Sweden. Frannie? Are you listening?” Frannie’s head had disappeared into the refrigerator. She was bent over, rearranging the mustard, the pickle jar, looking for non-existent yogurt. Her rear end, the body part that always gave her so much grief, protruded into the kitchen.

“Speaking of your mother, how are the love birds?” Frannie emerged from the refrigerator empty-handed.

“Don’t ask.” Susan rolled her eyes. Her father had died last Thanksgiving of a heart attack while on line for pies at the bakery counter at Sam’s Club, and her mother was planning to remarry – on Labor Day weekend, in Susan’s back yard – to a man she’d met playing duplicate bridge. They’d both needed new partners after losing their spouses. “Now they’re shopping for diamonds,” Susan said. “She already has a diamond from Daddy. I suggested a nice sapphire, but Fred insists.”

“Be happy for her,” Frannie said, retrieving a package of chocolate covered grahams from the cupboard. “You know you’re happy for her.” Frannie’s own parents were both dead, and her only sister Judith had married an Israeli and moved to Jerusalem.

“I am?” Susan said. “I should be making Annie’s wedding, not my mother’s.” Annie, her oldest, had just graduated college and moved in with Bryan up in Boston, no wedding in sight.

“Leave Annie alone,” Frannie said. “And promise me,” she added, waving a graham in Susan’s direction, “you’ll only send that story to one of your unknown literary tracts in Montana or Idaho. You won’t publish it anyplace where someone might actually read it.”

“Just because the woman’s a teacher doesn’t mean it’s you,” Susan said. “If I wrote about a Swedish woman, my mother wouldn’t call me up and ask why I’m writing about her old friend.”

“She would if your Swedish character grew yogurt,” Frannie said. “Is she going to get fired, do you think?”

“Who? My mother?” Susan said. “The Swedish friend?”

“No, dummy, in the story.”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” Frannie said. “Nothing bad ever really happens in your stories. Oh, Susie-Q,” she sighed, slumping against the refrigerator. “What am I going to do? He’s never going to leave his wife.”

“I know,” Susan said. She was always surprised at how much easier love was in her stories, characters falling in and out of bed with each other as naturally as breathing.

Just then the back door slammed, letting in a huff of hot air and Emily and Adam carrying groceries. Or rather Adam, who was fifteen, carried the groceries, and Emily, just out of high school, carried the car keys. Susan had sent them for milk, fresh corn, and any junk food they needed.

“Thanks for slamming the door in my face,” Emily said.

“I didn’t exactly have a free hand,” Adam said, dumping the groceries on the counter. It seemed like yesterday he was asking to be picked up, and today he could carry three grocery bags in one arm. “They didn’t have your skim milk, Mom, so we bought chocolate milk instead.”

“Hi, guys!” Frannie’s face brightened into a grin of white teeth and laugh lines. She had a way of greeting people with startled pleasure, as though she hadn’t seen them for months.

“Hey, Frannie.” Adam waved, heading for TV with a glass of chocolate milk.

“What’s for dinner?” Emily said. “I’m starved.”

“Salmon on the grill,” Susan said. She was snapping the ends off green beans. “Go ask your father to light the fire.”

“Come give me a hug first.” Frannie held out her arms.

“Dad!” Emily hollered, taking a cookie from the package in Frannie’s hand. “The grill!”

“That’s not what I meant,” Susan said. “Dinner’s in half an hour.” She went outside to light the grill herself. When she came back, Frannie and Emily were husking corn, their heads leaning together over the trash pail, matching manes of brown hair falling over their faces, Frannie’s lightly streaked with gray.

“I like the blue skirt with the white tank top,” Frannie was saying. They were discussing what Emily would wear to the wedding.

“You have to cover your shoulders,” Susan said, “at least during the ceremony.”

“Take a chill pill, Mom,” Emily said. “This is the 90s.” Then she turned her attention back to Frannie as if Susan had left the room. “Will you be back in time to help us with the rugelach? We have to bake two hundred.”

“What about the caterer?” Frannie asked.

“We need rugelach without nuts,” Susan said. “I’m not taking any chances.” Emily was allergic.

“I’ll help when I get back,” Frannie said. Every August, she visited her sister in Jerusalem for two weeks. “Just tell me one thing, Susie-Q. How’d your mother ever get two guys to marry her in one lifetime?”

*****

On a weekday morning at the end of July, while Susan was screening her calls, working at her laptop at the kitchen table, she heard Frannie’s frantic voice on the machine – “Susie! I know you’re there!” – and picked up.

“You have to meet me for lunch,” Frannie said.

“I’m working,” Susan said. The teacher in her story had just decided to break up with her lover. When she confronted him over a farewell dinner, he promised (not for the first time) that he’d leave his wife, and the teacher threw a glass at him, splashing red wine down the front of his white shirt.

“So am I,” Frannie said. She had a week of classes on values-based education for her continuing-ed requirement. “We have lectures right through lunch, but I’ll sneak out. He told her. And you said he never would.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Susan said an hour later over Greek salads at the diner.

“I thought so, too,” Frannie said, pushing olives around on her plate. “But I’ll lose my job.” Her lover’s wife Marsha was on the school board, a past president of the PTA. Frannie and Susan had once worked with her on the rummage sale for the shul sisterhood. She was short and wiry but unexpectedly strong carrying bundles of old clothes up from the shul basement.

“Does he want to marry you? You could finally have that honeymoon in Paris.”

“Maybe we could double honeymoon with your mother,” Frannie said. “She already invited me to double wedding with her, if he ever asked. All four of us in your back yard. She said you wouldn’t mind.”

“Fred’s taking her on a bridge cruise through the Panama Canal.”

“A cruise is romantic.”

“Romantic? My mother gets seasick on the Long Island ferry.” Susan’s father had only been able to afford Niagara Falls for a honeymoon. “Let’s order cheeseburgers,” Susan said. “You have to eat.”

“Nah,” Frannie said, raking the hair back from her face, smoothing the wrinkles across her forehead like an instant face lift. “I lost two more pounds. At least that’s one thing I can control.”

“Do you want to get married?” Susan touched Frannie’s hand across the table, the skin still honey-brown and warm as if she’d just stepped off the beach, a thread of blue vein pulsing up her wrist.

“I don’t even know if I want coffee after lunch.”

*****

“False alarm,” Frannie whispered into the phone late the night before she was leaving for her sister’s, whispering although no one was sleeping at her house.

“He didn’t tell her?” Susan really had to whisper, with Howard asleep in bed right next to her. “He’s such a liar.”

“I went to the Book Barn today, and guess who was there buying Fodor’s Paris for her? And it wasn’t a going away present. How come you’re always right?”

“Tell that to my mother,” Susan said, “and Emily, and Annie.”

“So I told him it’s over.”

“Mazel tov,” Susan said, with a little too much fervor. Howard rolled over.

“You’re supposed to say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” Susan said, “again.” The last time Frannie swore she’d broken off the affair, her lover won her back by composing a mediocre love sonnet. “Maybe now I can stop trying to think of a word that rhymes with Frannie.”

“Don’t try to make me laugh,” Frannie hiccupped. “What am I going to do, Susie? I love him.”

“I know.”

“Maybe I’ll just stay in Israel with Judith and never come back.”

“You better come back,” Susan said, “and before my mother’s wedding.”

On the day the caterer was coming to finalize the wedding plans, Susan worked all morning in her steamy kitchen fiddling with the end of her story, trying to capture her teacher’s bittersweet relief that the dangerous affair was finally over, sorrow and yet freedom at being once again alone. She had the teacher in bed on the Sunday morning after the breakup, reading the sections of the Times in any order she wanted, ripping out a Lord & Taylor ad even though there was part of an article about Rwandan genocide on the back.

Susan closed her laptop when the doorbell rang and her mother and Fred arrived holding hands. Fred kissed Susan with old-man’s breath. “You don’t know how happy this makes Ruthie,” he said. Susan’s father called her mother Ruth.

The caterer wore a funny blond toupee over a fringe of gray hair around his ears and neck. “We’ll get rid of all the furniture,” he said, sweeping his hand across Susan’s living room, “and bring in round tables. The ceremony can be in the yard, unless it rains. Then we’ll have the ceremony in the living room, and people will have to eat in the family room, on their laps. Either way, the living room furniture has to go.” Susan tried not to look at his toupee, focusing instead on his nose as he spoke.

They decided on cold poached salmon with noodle kugel; Susan’s mother didn’t like cold pasta salads. For dessert, fresh fruit and a real (although small) wedding cake along with Susan’s rugelach. No champagne, because Fred didn’t drink. Susan wondered for a moment if he could be an alcoholic. Shouldn’t she know these things about the man her mother was about to marry?

After the caterer left, Susan offered coffee, but her mother was in a hurry. “Fred’ll just close his eyes on the couch for a minute,” her mother said, “and then we have to go shopping.”

“More shopping?” Susan decided to start coffee anyway. She needed a cup.

“A new bed,” her mother whispered, following her into the kitchen. “I’ll just have tap water. You have ice?”

“That’s nice,” Susan said, measuring grounds into the pot. “A fresh start.”

“Actually, Fred doesn’t like Daddy’s and my twin beds. Last night they somehow spread apart, and he fell right through the crack. I woke up, and he was on the floor.”

“Mo-ther,” Susan said.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” her mother said. “Don’t you laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You know, if Gloria’s bursitis hadn’t been acting up that day, I never would have been paired up with Fred.”

“I know.” Gloria was her mother’s condo neighbor and occasional bridge partner after Susan’s father died.

“It was meant to be. Like it was written.”

“I know, Ma.”

“But don’t you write about me,” she wagged her finger at Susan. “Don’t you put this in one of your stories.” When she laughed, the wrinkles on her cheeks seemed to smooth out, gathering around her eyes.

That night, Susan wrote a long letter to Frannie, hoping she’d get it at her sister’s before leaving to come home. Maybe Frannie would call.

*****

Frannie didn’t call.

On the third Tuesday in August, the sixth day of her vacation, Frannie was killed by a bomb on a bus in Jerusalem. When the phone rang in the middle of the night at Susan’s house, she thought it must be Frannie. What time is it in Jerusalem? she wondered in the dark.

“Susan?” Frannie’s voice, but not Frannie. Susan, not Susie-Q. Frannie’s sister Judith, whom Susan had met several times, once at Frannie’s house for a Passover seder, once in New York when the three of them spent the day at the Modern. She was a younger Frannie, the same startled smile, the same gentle hand gestures as she spoke, as though capturing words out of the air.

“She died in an instant,” Judith said. “They promised.”

How long is an instant?

*****

Susan waits until quarter to eight to call her mother, when she knows she’ll be up. She doesn’t want to get Fred on the phone half asleep.

“Do you want me to come over?” her mother says. “I’m coming over.”

“Don’t come over,” Susan says. “I have to take Adam to the dentist this morning, and you and I have the florist at three.”

“Don’t be silly,” her mother says. “I’ll cancel. When’s the funeral? I want to go to the funeral.”

“Me, too,” Susan says, “but her sister’s burying her in Israel. She’s practically buried already.” The time difference is fuzzy and confused in Susan’s head.

“I could come over.”

“I know, Ma.”

Susan sits with the newspaper spread across the kitchen table. The photograph is on the front page, a color photograph, yet mostly shades of gray on grainy newsprint. On the right side is the crumpled shell of a bus. The text below tells that there were two buses – did the bomber wait until the second pulled alongside, to kill more Jews? – but if there were two, they are now melted into one, sides ripped away, tattered seats exposed, windows shattered, frames bent and mangled. The drivers’ seats and steering wheels are gone altogether, vanished, vaporized – the bomb was near the front. The only color in the photo is orange – the bright orange vests of the Chevra Kadisha, the Orthodox Jews whose job it is to search for body parts, to scrape up bits of flesh, to ensure that every fragment that once was human is collected for burial.

Howard stands behind Susan, rubbing her shoulders. He has made her tea with honey as if she is sick with the flu.

“It was in the paper yesterday,” Susan says.

“It hadn’t happened yet,” Howard says.

“I saw it in the paper.”

“This is today’s paper,” Howard says, pressing strong thumbs against her spine.

“The time difference, Howard. I’m not crazy. There was one paragraph in yesterday’s paper. A bomb in Jerusalem. No further information. I saw it and didn’t pay attention. Then I went to Marshall’s to buy Emily underwear for college.”

*****

Now Susan sees Frannie in unexpected places, in strangers’ faces – something about the swish of a skirt, the movement of a hip, the angle of a head. She thinks about Frannie when she’s in the car, when she’s washing dishes, when she’s standing under the hot piercing needles of the shower where she can pretend she’s not crying.

“I could come,” Annie says on the phone from Boston, as if she is the mother.

“I knew she shouldn’t go,” Emily says. Emily the Worried Frannie used to call her in a way that made her laugh rather than storm out in protest.

“But who’ll teach sixth grade now?” Adam asks.

Susan puts aside the story she was writing, afraid to turn on her computer, afraid to sit so still. Whenever her mind isn’t fully occupied, Frannie fills it. Sometimes, she’ll start out to do errands, as though the day were normal, and then suddenly she’ll catch herself thinking, Here I am in the Stop & Shop squeezing melons, and Frannie is dead. Then she’ll go home for another shower.

Her car takes to driving past Frannie’s house on her way to anywhere. Once, when the threat of rain has turned the air heavy and dark, she parks and lets herself in with the spare key that Frannie left in case of emergency – isn’t this an emergency? She walks the echoing rooms, waters the plants. In the bedroom she leans into Frannie’s closet, just to smell her. Cool Indian cottons brush her cheek, her forehead, her eyes, the only sound the onslaught of a summer downpour pummeling the roof. Then she stands outside in the rain without an umbrella, as good as the shower

At the memorial service at shul, Susan turns away when Frannie’s lover walks past her down the center aisle to a pew up front as though he has nothing to be ashamed of. At least he seats his two children between himself and his wife. He killed her, Susan thinks, HE killed her. Goddamn greedy using son-of-a-bitch. She feels better, for an instant. When the rabbi starts to lead prayers, Susan doesn’t open her book, can’t bring herself to say the words, can’t even mouth along silently as the congregation praises God.

After that, she avoids the bank and the coffee shop, places where she knows she might run into Frannie’s lover. Howard picks up the slack with the banking without asking questions.

At night, she dreams about bombs in familiar places – the dry cleaners, the post office, the mall. Then she wakes Howard to make love in the dark, then gets out of bed to check on Emily and Adam, to be sure they’re still breathing, like when they were babies. She could phone Annie to be sure she’s safe in her bed up in Boston, but Bryan might answer. Downstairs, she flips through TV without turning on a light – she and Frannie could learn to tighten their butts from infomercials at this time of night. Where’s Johnny when she needs him? Retired when she wasn’t paying attention, when she slept through the night and thought she always would.

On the Sunday before Labor Day, Susan’s mother comes to Susan’s house to marry Fred. The caterer’s men arrive early to haul Susan’s sofa and coffee table down to the basement. Then they set up round tables in the living room with white cloths and ice cream parlor chairs, white roses in bud vases in the middle of each table. Susan walks around sweating in her bathrobe, directing traffic. They’re lucky with the sunny weather, but at the last minute her mother decides to have the ceremony indoors anyway. She doesn’t want her high heels sinking into the grass. So the men push the tables aside to make room for the chuppah.

While Susan is upstairs changing, the caterers put out a plate of mints and mixed nuts on each table. As the guests begin to arrive, Susan rushes around with a black Hefty bag tossing in the mints and nuts, plates and all. What if the caterers have ignored her instructions not to cook with nuts on account of Emily’s allergy? Last year there were two stories in the newspaper about college kids, away from home for the first time, who ate things they were allergic to and died. In a few days Emily will go off to college. Susan knows the things you read about in the newspaper can come true.

Susan’s mother wears a beige brocade suit, her hair freshly rinsed to a complimentary silvery beige. She looks happy and almost young, although Susan swears her own hair will never be that color.

There’s an orchid bridal bouquet and corsages for Susan and the girls, Susan’s pulling a tiny hole in the tissue linen of her blouse, Annie’s lost in the rush of her late arrival from Boston. Emily wears hers on her wrist, because there’s no room to pin it to the narrow strap of her white tank top, the one Frannie told her to wear. Adam’s new blue blazer is somehow already too small. “Do I have to wear this tie?” he keeps asking. When he hugs Susan’s mother, his chin rests atop her head so she has to swat him away, laughing, to save the pouf of her hairdo. When did her tall mother get so small?

Now her mother stands with Fred under the chuppah, while Susan is thinking about Frannie. She knows this is wrong, sacrilegious; she should be thinking of her mother, so lucky to have a second chance with this Fred. Or she should at least be thinking of her father, honoring his memory – Sunday mornings when he used to don her mother’s apron to cook pancakes and forbidden bacon, the time he surprised Susan with tickets to the Beatles at Shea Stadium, then sat beside her with his fedora and newspaper while she prayed at the temple of Paul. But instead she is thinking of Frannie bursting through the front door into her living room at this very moment. Frannie coming to help, oddly dressed in the French maid’s costume with the little organdy apron that she once bought on sale after Halloween and then wore to shul the following Purim, even though the only other adult in costume was the rabbi in a rented metallic Elvis jumpsuit. Frannie will help Susan pass hors d’oeuvres, pick up empty cups. And when everyone else has gone home, Frannie will still be in the kitchen washing dishes, her hands protected by Susan’s bright yellow rubber gloves. She knows where Susan stores the big platters in the cupboard above the oven.

Susan stands a few paces behind her mother at the chuppah, where her mother won’t see her weeping. Howard sees and lends her his handkerchief. Fred is slipping the ring on her mother’s finger, carefully repeating the Hebrew words after the rabbi – syllable by syllable, like a special-ed child. But Susan is seeing her front door swing open – over and over – and each time Frannie steps through, with her sudden smile. “Hi, Susie-Q!”

After all the guests have left, Susan and her mother sit in the kitchen with their shoes off, watching waitresses stack glasses in plastic crates.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Susan says.

“I know,” her mother says, turning her hand this way and that to admire her new diamond. Susan knows her mother isn’t thinking of Frannie. “Maybe I could wear this suit again on Rosh Hashanah?” her mother says, smoothing the skirt across her knees. “Do you think it’s too dressy?”

“Ma,” Susan says, thinking of the Rosh Hashanah prayers. “Last year… do you think… do you believe… Daddy wasn’t written in the Book of Life? And that’s why he died? Because of some sin… something he did?”

“Don’t be silly,” her mother says. Her eyes look blurry behind her trifocals. “It was his time. That’s all.”

“So what about Frannie?” Susan says, her voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. “It wasn’t her time. You don’t think… it couldn’t have been… because of… you know… the affair?”

“You know what I think, Susan?” Her mother reaches to clasp Susan’s hands in her own. Even on such a warm day, her mother’s hands are cool. “I think Frannie’s in heaven with Daddy, and with Fred’s wife Ida, and right now they’re asking around for a fourth for bridge.”

That night, Susan takes the newspaper photograph out of her night table drawer, where she keeps it under her diaphragm box. In the foreground of the photo lies a body under a sheet. Susan likes to think this is Frannie’s body, whole, no scattered bits to be collected. The text says the body of the American was found intact. One bare arm extends out from under the sheet, flung back gracefully across the pavement. Susan strokes her finger over this newsprint arm and thinks that it is Frannie’s arm, scattered freckles and sun-blond peach fuzz hairs, neatly clipped oval fingernails shined with clear polish.

When Susan gets back to her writing, she will give the teacher in her story a happy ending. Maybe she’ll win a trip to Paris, or get promoted to principal, or start a new career selling homemade yogurt.

The newspaper says Frannie was on the second bus, the one that happened to pass at just the wrong moment. She would have been sitting near the front, closest to the bomb, chatting with the driver, practicing her Hebrew. She might have been laughing, head back, mouth open, teeth glittering in the sun.

“Playing Bridge in Heaven” is part of a collection of related stories titled The Same Map. Stories from this collection have won the Lilith Short Story contest and the Lawrence Foundation Prize and have been finalists for the New Letters Literary Awards and two Glimmer Train contests. The title story was published in Passages North after nomination to Best New American Voices. Forthcoming publications include American Literary Review, second-prize winner in their Short Fiction Contest, and The New Haven Review of Books. Elizabeth Edelglass is Director of the Department of Jewish Education Library of Greater New Haven and a past Fiction Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

“No Thank You, Otto Titzling” by Literary Awards Finalist, Ana Thorne

SFWP — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:18:56 +0000

(This piece also appeared in the Mount Voices Journal published in April 2008 by Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles.)

Somehow I’d connected wearing a bra with a story on television about a young girl with polio in an iron lung. Her hair, head and neck were all that could be seen of the body inside the machine that breathed for her in place of her paralyzed diaphragm. She talked softly, looking up into a mirror placed above her face, but she couldn’t move. If she didn’t recover from the polio, she’d have to stay in the iron lung forever in order to breathe. My mind made an illogical connection. I thought that wearing a bra might be as constrictive as trying to breathe in an iron lung.

I’d never heard the phrase “rites of passage” and in 1960, I was comfortable in my thirteen-year old skin. Dad had taught me and my younger sister how to use our minds and bodies in concert by participation in activities like tap dancing, skating, tennis, badminton, four-square, lawn croquet, and lots of softball.

Like most other girls my age that I knew, I’d sprouted what my best friend Evelyn, who lived next door, called “nubs” that were starting to poke through the white cotton undershirts and underslips that I wore beneath my clothes. To me, the nubs felt like small rocks or hard seeds trying to sprout beneath the then still smooth nipples.

Sometimes I wore two undershirts in an effort to flatten out the protrusions. Other times, I sat and walked with my shoulders hunched forward to hide them. I wore a thick sweater to the dinner table in case Dad checked and decided that wearing a bra would be the proper thing for me to do. In my heart, I knew these tactics would only delay the inevitable.

I didn’t mind that I was getting teenage girl breasts, but unlike my friends, I had no desire to wear a bra. I pictured my mother undressing in her bedroom. The bra she wore during the day left a pattern of red welts that ran across her shoulders, under her breasts and around her back. A larger red square appeared at the spot on her white skin where the bra clasped in back.

In 1968, I was a young wife and new mother, working full-time, nine-to-five. My husband, George, worked as a chemist and devoted his free time to the black revolution. At our house, the events that marked the Civil Rights era took precedence over news about women’s liberation. My general impression was that white women were protesting over the right to work, which was difficult for me to understand.

In the Valley Homes, where I grew up, a less than square mile “colored” Midwestern neighborhood, the mothers of my friends worked. Evelyn’s mother was a social worker; Violet’s mom a nurse. One of my aunts owned a florist shop and three others worked for “private families.”

Mexican accent notwithstanding, mother’s English was good and she was a skilled seamstress and tailor, but dad said, “My wife doesn’t work.” That rule didn’t apply to daughters. When mother left in 1958, I started making pocket money by running errands, babysitting, and writing letters for the neighbors. Dad dated a cook, a housekeeper and a teacher in succession.

In 1968, the libbers protested the Miss America Pageant by emphasizing the garment constraints placed upon our gender and came up with what was in reality a pseudo-fiery symbolic gesture that played all over the news. When the libbers attempted to burn “instruments of torture” like high heels, girdles, garter belts, hair curlers, makeup and bras, they caught my complete attention.

* * * * *

While the bra and women’s lib both possess murky origins, neither breasts, nor women have always been bound. The corset, a forerunner of the brassiere that dates back to 2000 BCE, opened in the front and left the breasts exposed to the elements (Rose). Earlier, around 2500 BCE, a class of Minoan warrior women on the isle of Crete must have wanted to use their breasts as psychological weapons because they wore a “bra-resembling garment” that pushed their breasts up and put them in full view (Rose). I couldn’t verify whether the exposed breast caused their enemies to surrender in fear, or stand down in veneration. These bra-like scenarios feature the breasts rather than trap them in strapped-cups; the image of the female is one of empowerment rather than an other-defined shrinking violet. This would change as the onslaught of organized cities and states acted on both the breast and the woman.

The brassiere situation got tighter long before it became more relaxed. From about 450 BCE to 285 CE, ancient Greek women were forbidden to wear the corset and instead wore the apodesme, a band of wool or linen that wrapped around the breast and tied or pinned in back (Rose). Its primary purpose was to keep the breasts from moving when women walked (Rose). A breast-binding device was also worn by women in Greek city states, such as Sparta, who participated in sports and exercise (Metropolitan Museum). Underneath their tunics, well-endowed Roman women wore the mamillare, copied from the apodesme, to hide a large bosom, while younger girls wore a fascia whose purpose was to prevent and delay breast development (Rose). Modern civilizations began to organize around what would become the western, patriarchal model, and the fight for the rights to the breast was in full sway.

* * * * *

Too self-absorbed to be suspicious when Dad said he wanted to take me shopping, I allowed myself to anticipate that I’d be rewarded for taking care of the responsibilities I had around the house, including the care and feeding of a younger sister and brother. I envisioned a new pair of shoes, a dress, maybe a skirt and blouse.

We picked up Dad’s friend, Mrs. Smith, in the Oldsmobile and drove the twelve miles downtown to Shillito’s, the number one department store in Cincinnati. I got off the escalator on the second floor that was dedicated to clothes and shoes for girls fourteen and under.

Dad said, “One more floor.”

Now I was behind Dad and Mrs. Smith on the escalator. My eyes followed the dark seams of the stockings that ran down her slightly bowed legs into the black high heels she wore with a light gray, straight skirt, and a pink, short-sleeved blouse. She carried a small black, leather pocketbook on her arm. A light blue shirt complemented dad’s tailored dark brown slacks that hung over slightly onto the back of his brown wingtip oxfords. I saw the flexible wire that hung from dad’s plastic earplug and led to the bulky hearing aid encased in a pocket-like contraption that fit on his chest, held in place with straps that ran across his shoulders and around his chest.

I moved to the extreme right on the escalator to see the third floor rise before me. My armpits heated up and started to sweat. Women’s lingerie. Dad and Mrs. Smith walked directly into the racks and shelves of slips, panties, girdles, and bras to the counter in the back where they talked to a white saleslady. The three of them looked in the direction where I stood, between the escalator and a rack of pointed brassieres. The saleslady’s lips moved and her lips curved upwards. She walked straight towards me. I saw that she held something in her hand.

“Why don’t we just take a measurement,” she said as she unraveled the rulered ribbon.

“Measurement of what?” I asked as I folded my arms over my chest.

“Wouldn’t you like to get a nice training bra?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.” I didn’t want to forget my manners at a time like this. I was walking a thin, tricky line. It wouldn’t do me any good to “show out” in Shillito’s.

“Your father said you’re ready for one.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” I repeated.

She gave me a quick smile and turned back toward Dad and Mrs. Smith. The saleslady was telling on me. Dad looked in my direction. Mrs. Smith put her hand on his shoulder, leaned in close and said something to him. Then she came over near the rack of pointed brassieres where I stood my ground. I knew there could be trouble if I wasn’t careful.

“You might as well face it,” Mrs. Smith began. “You’ll have to wear one sooner or later.”

“OK, later,” I pouted.

“You’ve outgrown those cotton undershirts. You’re starting to show and if you don’t get a bra, pretty soon the boys will say nasty things to you that you won’t like.”

“I don’t care about boys,” I insisted. “I just don’t want a bra.”

“Would you believe me if I said you don’t have a choice?”

“No.”

“Well, believe it because you’re becoming a young woman, and you’ll have to wear one just like the rest of us.”

“What if I don’t want to be like the rest?”

“We’re all suffering sisters under the skin.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re finding out right now. Maybe you’ve got the right idea not to rush it, but your father won’t stand for it. He’s determined that you get a bra today.”

* * * * *

In what may be termed misguided efforts at compliance to societal norms that for the most part have been established by men, women have been complicit in the suppression and stylization of their bodies. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, women wore bodices to flatten the breast. Fashion styles such as long, full skirts, high collars, and long sleeves conspired to cover us up from head to toe, and draw attention away from the breast (Rose).

Women have Catherine de Medici to thank for initiating a Machiavellian torture that lasted for three-hundred and fifty years following her demise (Rose). By banning “thick waists” at the Italian Court in about 1550, Catherine forced women to endure the agony of the corset made of “whalebone and steel rod” laces and stays (Rose). Constraints and compression on the trunk of the body forced rearrangement of the internal organs and made the corset a dangerous device (Smith). It rendered the effect of the artificially small waist and by the 1830’s the “hourglass figure” had become the model body shape for a woman (Smith). Fashion conscious, upper class women whose husbands could afford such indulgences, had the two lowest ribs surgically removed to make an even “slimmer waist” (Smith). The old fashioned notion of fainting is believed to have been induced by “corsets and other garments that bound, contorted and restricted the body” (Smith). The fainting woman is surely viewed as a weak woman, ill-equipped to handle the choices that come with liberation. Please, pass the smelling salts.

* * * * *

The tags remained on the four size 28 AAA bras neatly folded and stacked next to the cotton undershirts in the middle dresser drawer. Even though the AAA cups of plain white cotton with no padding were the smallest size available in the training bra, they were too large for my rocks. At first, I managed to evade Dad’s watchful eyes in the mornings before I left for school wearing an undershirt. For a while, I got away with explaining that it wasn’t necessary to wear a bra at home just to do homework and wash dinner dishes. I was wearing my undershirts on borrowed time.

Evelyn and I walked home together after school as usual. Earlier she’d teased that she had something funny to tell me, and I was excited to hear it.

“I’ve got a new song for you,” she said.

“What is it?”

“You know that song Brazil that your Dad plays on the hi-fi sometimes?”

“Yeah, I know which one you mean.”

“Well, listen to this.”

Evelyn burst into song. She spread her arms wide, danced in circles and clapped her hands. “Brassieres, they’ve got a million down at Sears. They’re hanging from the chandeliers, with dirty fingerprints and smears. Brassieres at Sears. If you’re the watermelon type, they’ve got ‘em big and round and ripe, or if your busts are very small, or if you have no busts at all, the falsies really fit right in. They look and feel and taste like skin, taste like skin, taste like skin. Brassieres at Sears. Brassieres at Sears.”

Tears ran down my face and I fell out in laughter on the small stretch of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. I barely heard the end of the song. “Where’d you get that?” I choked out.

“My big cousin, Ada, sang it for me and I wrote it down and memorized the words.”

“That’s a great idea.”

We stopped and sat on the curb while I wrote down the brassiere song in my notebook, line by line. We sang it several times before we reached home. The “taste like skin, taste like skin” part was sung sotto voce and proved a little tricky, but I finally mastered it. Old Lady Henderson was sweeping her front steps when we passed her house singing at the top of our voices.

“Hello, girls,” she said.

We waved, but didn’t stop singing. When I got home, I folded the piece of notebook paper on which I’d written the words to the brassiere song and tucked it beneath the stack of AAA’s.

* * * * *

The French women of the nineteenth century took a stand against the “iron maiden.” They demanded more comfortable intimate garments than that offered by the “trussed and bound look of the corsets of the day” (Marples). Women’s undergarments loosened up and abandoned the “bones, eyelets, laces or pulleys” associated with the corset (nzgirl). From 1875 to 1913, several new designs and developments created the foundation for the modern bra. Former corset manufacturers designed “bra-like garments” that supported the breasts from the shoulders, offered “separate pockets for each breast” and introduced “hook and eye closures” (Rose). These updated designs allowed for a more satisfying and secure fit for the wool falsies and rubber pads called “lemon bosoms” that came into fashion. In answer to the challenge from the female public, designers and manufacturers have registered more than twelve-hundred “patents of breast supporters” with the U.S. Patent Office since 1863 (Marples).

Vogue first used the word “brassiere” in the magazine in 1907, and the term made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary five years later (nzgirl). The following year, with help from her maid, Marie, a New York socialite fashioned the “first modern bra to be patented” (nzgirl). Mary Phelps Jacob simply refused to wear a heavy corset underneath a “new, sheer evening gown” and from a couple of silk handkerchiefs and a few strands of ribbon created a “backless bra” that all her friends wanted (nzgirl). Even though Jacob patented her creation in 1914, she had no interest in being a businesswoman and sold the patent for $1,500 to Warner Brothers Corset Company who made $15 million on the backless design over the next thirty years (Marples). In protest to the Flapper Era that featured the “boyish look” maintained by a “chest-flattening bra,” Ida Rosenthal went into business with her husband to establish what would become the $40 million Maidenform Company (Marples). Ida developed the idea of cup sizing – A, B, C, D – and realized she could “market bras to girls and women of every age, from puberty to maturity” (Marples). The bra began to wield its own particular brand of sexual empowerment and the personal disempowerment that accompanies typecasting. Thanks to the innovative thinking of women like Jacob and Rosenthal, the bra would become a symbolic contradiction.

* * * * *

“I think there’s trouble,” Evelyn said over the phone.

“What kind?” I asked.

“The Old Lady Henderson kind. She’s over here talking to my mama right now.”

“What do you think?”

“It can only be the ‘brassieres at Sears.’”

“Oh, crap, that IS trouble.”

“Gotta go. Bye.” Evelyn hung up.

I finished my homework and resumed reading the book that I’d been forbidden to read – My Wicked, Wicked Ways, an autobiography of Errol Flynn the movie star. When I heard Dad coming up the stairs, I stashed the book under the mattress. He tapped on the door to my room and came in. He kept up a line of questioning as he walked toward the dresser.

“Finished your homework?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“How was school today?”

“Just the usual.”

“Didn’t learn anything new?”

“I learned the difference between the words ‘adorned’ and ‘bedecked.’”

“How so?” Dad leaned against the dresser, resting on one hand.

“Sister Jean Elizabeth returned our descriptive essays. Mine was about the circus parade where I’d described the elephants as adorned with colorful garments. Sister changed adorned to bedecked, in red ink.”

My explanation had bought me about twenty seconds.

“How are those new bras working out?”

“They’re OK.”

“Do you have one on now?”

“No. It’s after school. I don’t need it now.”

Dad leaned over, opened the middle dresser drawer and scanned its contents. He picked up the small stack of unworn bras and with them the piece of paper with the words to the song. Right then it came to me that I’d have to listen to a lecture from Dad about how those words were a greater sin than not wearing the AAA’s. He walked over to the small desk, took the scissors out of the drawer, and handed them to me.

“Cut the tags off these bras and put one on. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Mrs. Smith was right. No choice. I cut off the tags, discarded my undershirt, and put on the AAA cups. I understood what she meant when she said that we’re all suffering sisters under the skin as soon as I fit the eyes into the hooks, turned the cups around to the front, and pulled the straps onto my shoulders.

* * * * *

Once women escaped from the strictures of the corset, the brassiere, from the French for “undershirt … underbodice or harness,” became simply the “bra” in the 1930’s (Marples). Pre-Madonna, Lana Turner symbolized the “sweater girl” look in Hollywood movies that featured “pointed rigid bras” that kept their shape no matter what rested in their cups (Rose). Manufacturers began to make bras out of synthetic materials when WWII shortages made cotton, rubber, silk and steel hard to get (Rose). The 1950’s brought a new trend in bras that mounted women’s breasts into exaggerated and unnatural cup contours.

Today, women have choices and can select the bra or breast that best fits their lifestyle or the occasion. We can choose the strapless or backless bra, the sports bra, the maternity bra, the nursing bra, the full-figure bra, the training bra, and the push-up Wonder Bra (Marples). Victoria’s Secret and like marketers have transformed the bra into a scintillating and alluring garment intended to attract the opposite sex. The right size and color with a sheer lacy design is guaranteed to be a turn on. If Mother Nature has fallen down on her job, the medical profession has picked up the slack. While husbands and others no longer pay to have ribs removed, they do pay for surgical breast implants for wives and others. Thanks to the libbers, modern women now have the resources to pay for the breasts of their choice.

* * * * *

By junior year in high school, I’d stopped looking for reasons not to wear the bra and my undershirts were used as dust rags to polish the furniture. I’d grown to a size 34AA and was strapped into the same pointed bra worn by all the other girls. With the help of Mrs. Smith and Evelyn, I survived the onset of menses and learned how to handle the monthly task. I wore pointed-toed high heels with seamless stockings held up by a garter belt. I pin-curled and put my hair in rollers. I painted my face with eyeliner, rouge, mascara, and lipstick.

Senior year, I gave my virginity to Lucas Conley after the homecoming football game in the roomy back seat of his father’s 1956 green and white Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Lucas pressed and squeezed the spongy cups of my bra, but he didn’t seem interested in either seeing or fondling the tissue mass that lived inside.

President Kennedy was assassinated. I hoped to go to college.

* * * * *

Medical anthropologists, Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, say that “breast disease is only a problem in cultures where women wear bras.” They include breast cancer in a class of “culturogenic” diseases that can be traced to “damaging personal attitudes, biases, and habits promoted by the culture.” A number of culturogenic diseases fall into three causal categories – “too tight, too flat, and/or too uncomfortable.” The bra as an “invention, not a need” falls into the “too tight” class (breastsite).

Industries profit from such diseases and become invested in the continuance of “damaging lifestyles and/or their consequences” (Singer). A growing, billion-dollar industry, U.S. bras sales totaled $15 million in 2001 (Mintel). Breast cancer “claimed the lives of 4,226” women in California in 2001; for the same year, the “total direct costs of breast cancer … were $279 million” in California (Max).

Environmental and hereditary evidence notwithstanding, minor and major physical hazards exist for women who wear a bra for twelve hours or more each day. Bras with narrow straps that are too tight can cause “nagging headaches” from pressure put on the trapezius muscle (Health Watch). The headaches can be banished and the problem easily resolved by wearing a bra with wider, looser straps, and full-figured women “should avoid spaghetti straps on bras” altogether (Health Watch). The bra promotes heat buildup in the breast, overheating can cause organ damage and could create a higher risk for cancer (Smith). As a binding device, the bra “interferes” with “circulation within the breast” as it alters the shape of the breast by applying pressure to the “soft breast tissue” (Singer). Bras and other kinds of tight clothing can impede the flow of the lymphatic system that drains toxins from breast tissue (Smith). If toxic substances are “trapped in the breast,” breast cancer could develop as a “result of cutting off lymphatic drainage” (Smith). Isn’t that reason enough to “wear bras as little as possible,” or not at all (Smith)?

* * * * *

I was a slim, young thing before pregnancy and the birth of my son in 1968. The twenty pregnancy pounds I’d gained had disappeared by the time I’d come home from the hospital and I was back in a size five in no time. While I didn’t go so far as to attempt natural childbirth and forgo the standard saddle block, I did read Dr. Spock on breastfeeding and decided to give it a try. Dr. Spock advised that breastfeeding was beneficial to the newborn because it provided certain immunities important to good infant health. Breastfeeding also acted positively on the mother’s body. It delayed the resumption of menses, helped in the process of losing excess pregnancy weight, and caused the uterus to contract and regain its natural muscle tone more quickly.

I’m not sure who enjoyed breastfeeding more, me or my son. He suckled with intensity and delight, making loud smacking noises until he drifted off to sleep. I felt the strong contractions in my uterus during feeding times. My son’s toothless little mouth made a warm home for, and provided just the right amount of pressure on my stove pipe hat shaped nipples and areola to make the experience sensual.

For ten months I wore a nursing bra night and day, twenty-four, seven. It was a soft, wide-strapped, lightly padded affair whose cup flaps pulled down for quick and easy access. Pleasure aside, breastfeeding came with a set of requirements the first of which was a large supply of nursing pads. The slightest touch set off the flow of milk and sometimes I wore two pads to absorb the leaking. The hospital staff advised that the most important thing was to keep the nipple clean and free of dried-up milk and germs. This meant sanitizing the nipple, areola and surrounding area with warm, soapy water and allow the breasts to air dry after each feeding. It also meant having at least a dozen more expensive nursing bras to be sure a clean one was always available.

My first outing without the baby came about ten weeks following birth. George and I went to an evening performance at Playhouse in the Park. While he parked the car, four male strangers, one at a time, came over to talk to me as I stood waiting in an area right outside the theatre entrance. They each stared at the 40BB cups that resided on my hundred pound, five-foot three frame, and not at me. I recall one bold fellow said, “I saw you coming around the corner.” New to this kind of attention, I told George what had transpired and he explained in pantomime by cupping his hands under both my breasts. I felt milk spill into the nursing pads, but I didn’t worry because I had extras in my purse. We laughed and went into the theatre.

* * * * *

The single largest myth that exists about the bra is that it will prevent sagging breasts in old age. Dr. Susan Love emphasizes that “you sag because of the proportion of fat and tissue in your breasts, and no bra changes that” (Smith). Doctors agree that age and pregnancy “will naturally cause your breasts to sag” and that there is “no medical reason to wear a bra” (Smith). Drs. Gregory and Claire Heigh agree that “going bra-free can actually cause breasts to sag less” (Smith). They explain that the chest muscles and ligaments can atrophy from “lack of use” because they are “worked less when breasts are supported and confined in a bra” (Smith). The doctors add that when breast weight is borne by “the chest muscles and ligaments … muscle tone returns” (Smith).

* * * * *

All the family came over to celebrate my son’s first birthday. He had a couple of teeth and had been weaned off the teat and onto the bottle. The nursing bras were stashed away in a box along with the maternity clothes. With their milk dried up, my breasts went down to a 32B cup, still larger than they were when the pregnancy began.

I had been a suffering sister now for nine years and felt that as a young adult, wife and mother, it was time to address the bra burning issue brought up by the libbers. The decision to wear a bra was made under parental duress. I had a perfect right to reject the idea of being held in harness. After all, it was the Free Love ‘60’s. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll prevailed. Who would mind or care if I joined the small percentage of women who were shelving their bras?

I broached the subject with my husband. In addition to the sweet smell that defined him, I married him because I thought he was smart and a free-thinker. He didn’t disappoint me now and said I should decide for myself.

When I abandoned the bra altogether a few days later, I wasn’t aware that I was also relieving myself of the concern over the health issues associated with wearing a bra. At thirteen, I resisted the bra for reasons that were unclear at the time, unless you count the iron lung connection. Now, I decided that I just didn’t want to wear a bra and if I had to burn in hell for it, so be it. The devil be damned.

* * * * *

A woman’s decision to “wear or not wear” a bra focuses on “aesthetics,” emotions, or social pressures (Smith). However, built-in contradictions make the line between bra and braless a tight one to negotiate. On one hand, a braless woman is suspected of “trying to make a sexual statement,” or of “being promiscuous” (Smith). On the other hand, bras and other fashion styles are designed to be “sexually alluring.”

Based on male sexual attitudes, the societal ideal requires women’s breasts to “remain in their firm, uplifted attitude, on their own, for our entire lives” (Smith). The feminists may have had good intentions in the ‘60’s about burning the bra, even though the majority of women and young girls continued to purchase and wear bras. Who would want the job of trying to convince the small-breasted woman to abandon her push-up bra, or the large-breasted woman to abandon the bra that adequately hefts her girls day in and day out in varying degrees of dis/comfort?

* * * * *

A few months ago I was shopping to go on a cruise at the expense and invitation of my ex-husband with whom I had kept close contact, even though we lived on separate coasts and had been divorced more than thirty years. I’d vacationed alone for years in the Caribbean and thought I’d try something different. I knew that sharing a cabin with a balcony view on the Lido Deck with my ex would be a brother/sister affair. We’d be on a large ship with a couple thousand other people, a few of whom we’d dine with for seven nights.

Old tapes played in my head. The phrase “public decorum” ran through my thoughts. Would people stare at me without a bra? What would they think? After all, we were both older. He’s bald, walks with a limp from an arthritic hip, and is a non- proselytizing born-again Christian. I’ve gone from a size five to fourteen and color the gray in my hair every six weeks. I found myself in Macy’s lingerie department inquiring about the softest, most comfortable bra available. The saleslady was busy folding panties on a table.

“Hello,” I said. “I haven’t bought a bra in almost forty years and I have no idea what size I am.”

She looked up from the panties, peered at me over the rim of her glasses and scanned my bosom in less than two seconds. “Thirty-eight C,” she said without doubt or hesitation.

She brought several bras in several colors to the dressing room. They fit around my upper body, but my breasts didn’t entirely fill the cups which caused them to collapse a bit in the center. I tried on a lacy, red one that felt itchy on my breasts. The plain, bouncy, beige one cut into my underarms. The hooks on the lightly padded, white one dug into my back. The black one looked sexy, but the front under-binding was scratchy and irritating. I had flashbacks of the previous summer when I tried on six swimsuits in thirty minutes in a tiny dressing room just like this one. My forehead was perspiry. I sat down in the dressing room and cooled off before I took the bras back to the saleslady.

“Did everything fit?” she asked.

“In some places, but not in others,” I answered.

Public decorum be damned.

WORKS CITED

Barroso Ary. Discography Tables for Aquarela Do Brasil. 21 September 2007.

The Breast Site. 21 September 2007.

Health Watch. Women’s Health: Bra Straps. University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. 21 September 2007.

History of the Bra. 19 September 2007.

Marples, Gareth. The History of the Bra. 19 September 2007. http://www.thehistoryof.net/the-histtory-of-the-bra.html>.

Max, Wendy, PhD. The Cost of Breast Cancer in California. California Breast Cancer Research Program. 21 September 2007.

Metropolitan Museum: Ancient Greek Dress. 27 September 2007. < http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grdr/hd_grdr.htm_27>.

Mintel International Group Ltd. Bras and Pants. 2001, 2005. 27 September 2007.

Rose, Jenelle. The History of the Bra. 19 September 2007.

Singer, Sydney Ross and Soma Grismaijer. The Self Study Center. 21 September 2007.

Smith, Ken L. The Purpose of the Bra. 21 September 2007.

Ana Thorne is student, grant writer and grandmother who will complete a Masters in Humanities Program in May 2008, and a Creative NonFiction Writing program at Antioch University in LA in December 2008. She’s a late bloomer academically and creatively, but she’s having fun applying life lessons in the classroom and on paper.

“Imagined Jubilation” by Literary Awards Finalist, Caryn Coyle

SFWP — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:26:56 +0000

The bed is as difficult to sleep in as the house is to come home to. The silence isn’t the problem. She’s used to that. It’s the thought that no one will join her. The thought slams, hard, when she tries to find a comfortable position in the bed. Alone.

As she stands by the rumpled comforter, the sheets she’s just tossed off, Margo’s hand shakes. She’s waited until after Christmas to do this. For a week, she’s worn a pad in anticipation of the sudden rush of red that would soak her if she didn’t keep checking each time she used the bathroom. Nothing. No red. She won’t see it now. The pregnancy testing stick she is holding has a plus sign on it.

Margo’s head throbs and her breasts — full and sore — ache. They hurt when anything comes up against them, like a seat belt strap. Little winking bits of light appear for a moment in her vision. She loses her balance and falls forward onto the bed.

December second was the last time David came home. He walked out of the kitchen that morning, after wiping off the shredded wheat and milk she had thrown at him. He’d stayed out all night. It was seven thirty and she was trying to eat breakfast.

He returned again that evening, and she let him in. Nervous. She didn’t sound like herself. She could hear the shrill at the edge of her voice. David didn’t say much either. He flipped through the mail, turned on the television. He stepped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The routine was familiar to her, and it gave her a headache.

Margo went up to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and let water fill the tub. She remembered the shower — in the same tub — she had shared with David the night before Thanksgiving. She savored the shower throughout the holiday.

When she pulled him by the hand into the bathroom, Margo watched his eyes as they stood on the black and white tile floor. She unbuttoned each button on her soft, flannel long sleeved dress. Steam feathered and curled light white clouds over the tub, and neither of them spoke. He reached for her when she got to the button at her waist. With the palms of his hands, he slid the material down her hips and the dress landed on the tile floor, covering her ankles. Margo kicked the dress out of the way. She had not worn anything else.

His mouth tasted of the clear water pouring down their heads, soaking their hair. Her fingers soaped every part of him and he squinted when she got to his face. Gently, Margo massaged the foamy soap over his cheeks, his eyelids. David shook his face in the water streaming out of the shower head and grasped her firmly on both sides. “I love you,” he moaned, lifting her up and inside him.

His words had rushed out of him in a moment of passing passion. There was no truth in them.

Margo kept the door to the bathroom closed and let the steam heat up the room. When the tub was half full, she turned off the water and crawled in, letting the warmth penetrate her legs, her arms, her back. The headache eased a little, but the throbbing continued. She focused on the pain and the heat seeping through her skin. It was a relief to have something crowd out all her other thoughts. While she lay in the tub, she heard the door to the bedroom creak open and the dresser drawers glide back and forth.

Margo turned the faucet back on to fill the tub with more hot water, and slipped out once to vomit into the toilet.

*****

She first met David at the restaurant he ran, in the Inner Harbor.

It was a bit of a trek around the harbor from the small advertising agency in Federal Hill, where she worked as an account rep. Margo walked there with Wyatt Thunderfire, the agency’s artist, who created the ads, logos and images for her accounts. Curry’s, David’s restaurant, was located in the Light Street Pavilion, on the second floor, where the souvenir shops sold Orioles caps and t-shirts, or anything with a crab on it. David stood near the entrance, greeting diners. He wore a soiled white apron, tied at the waist that hung well below his knees.

Wyatt and Margo sat on tall stools, next to a full length window through which they could see the U.S.S. Constellation docked by the concrete and brick promenade. Margo split a crabmeat pizza with Wyatt.

David reminded Margo of Mick Jagger. A little thicker than she imagined the rock star was, David seemed mysterious, coy. He wore his light auburn hair long and he shook it when he nodded his head.

“That guy, the one at the door. What do you think of him?” Margo asked Wyatt.

Wyatt looked at Margo, who bobbed her head in the direction of the entranceway. He glanced at the door, and shrugged, “Why? You interested?”

Margo looked out the window. A guy in a red baseball cap snapped pictures of a woman, in an orange t-shirt with letters so large, she could read the word, “Orioles” on it. The woman stood on the edge of the brick promenade, a little too close to the water.

“How’s everything here, folks?” David stood at their table, his arms folded, nodding and shaking his hair. His t-shirt read, “Reaganomics: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

Margo looked from the t-shirt to David’s smile. His lips stretched over stained teeth. He smelled of perspiration and garlic. But her heart thumped in her chest. She said the first thing she could think of, “So, I take it you won’t be voting for Reagan?”

“No, never,” David said. “You noticed my t-shirt?”

He was close enough to touch, and she savored his cracked, rough voice.

“All I know is I got five dollars more in my paycheck after he took office,” Wyatt said.

She looked at Wyatt, shook her head.

“Well, enjoy your meal,” David said, glancing at Margo and smiling before he walked away.

“Why in the world did you have to say that?” Margo asked Wyatt.

“What?” Wyatt got up from the stool, pulled out a twenty dollar bill and placed it on the table. “Don’t worry about it, Margo. He noticed you.”

*****

Before she made it back to his restaurant, she found David at a fundraiser, held in a typically narrow Baltimore rowhouse. It had to be over a century old, overshadowed now by the sky scrapers nearby. The brick walls had been resurrected, they looked like they’d been dusted with what looked like white powder. The ceiling was ornate. It had a relief design in the eggshell colored plaster: circles of little fleur-de-lys surrounded the chandelier that hung from the center.

Beside her were two well made up women, possibly sixty years old. Maybe older. They each wore severe red lipstick and one wore her hair in a solid blunt cut. Thick burgundy bangs and layers of hair swung out in a wedge from her head. The other, a harsh, honey blonde, had teased the hair on the top of her head into a single barrette at her crown. The rest of her hair hung in thin wisps just above her collarbone.

Across the room, Margo could hear a loud voice, and watched a man in black ridiculous looking totally round glasses, talking about a scene in a move shot here, “…they closed the street, put the diner right on the empty lot, nowhere near where it was really located back in the fifties…”

A pretty teenager, dressed entirely in black, except for a short, clean white apron tied around her waist, walked awkwardly around the people in the room. She held a tray of mushroom caps stuffed with crabmeat, and the man in the glasses touched her arm. “Yes, please. Oh, these are delightful.”

Margo was startled to see David, also dressed entirely in black, jog through the room and dart in between the two older women. Teal furniture, a loveseat and couch in smooth shiny leather, were grouped by the door, stopping him. She watched him veer around them and head into the next room, a parlor.

Though she wanted to talk to David, Margo wandered anxiously through the house. She thought he might be too busy for her. Glasses clinked. Laughter broke the murmuring she could hear over the Mozart being played by a pianist in the parlor.

Margo felt broken inside. Like something was wrong with her. She imagined she was looking down on herself from someplace else, dark, frightening, she was swimming in blackness.

She slipped out the back door.

Margo was surprised to see David standing in the garden before a brick lined pool of falling water. There were water lilies in the pool. Margo could see them because she did not look up at first when she stopped in front of him. She remembered thinking that the lilies were bright green, that the water looked black because the pool liner was dark. She could not explain why she closed her eyes and kissed him, craving his mouth, his lips, his tongue. She didn’t think about what she was doing. She thought the kisses had the flavor of what she imagined jubilation would taste like.

“Come home with me,” he whispered.

His words were bright in her mind. Like a light had snapped on, her mood lifted. She took his arm and he led her out of the garden.

David shared a run down rowhouse on Guilford Avenue with several others, both male and female. Margo couldn’t sleep on his air mattress. David didn’t appear to care that the sheets were soiled, or that the air mattress took up most of his room. It was about five or six inches off the scabby floor, where wall to wall carpet had once been laid on the hardwood surface. Bits of dusty rose carpet padding still clung to the wood. It reminded her of a price tag that wouldn’t come off. The glue stuck to her fingers like the pink scabs on the floor that held onto the heels of her shoes.

The next time, she took him home with her and he stayed.

The hours David spent at the restaurant and catering business were strange, late. She’d go down to Curry’s and sit with him at the bar, but she had to be in the office at nine each morning, so she’d leave him there and go home, alone.

She knew there probably were other women, but Margo was the one who had his socks in her bureau drawer, his toothbrush next to hers on the counter by her sink. Each night, the “thud” sound her front door made when it opened woke her. She’d wait under the comforter for his cold feet to brush along her thighs. His kisses smelled of cigarette smoke and Margo clung to them.

*****

On Christmas Eve, Margo went to the eight o’clock Mass. She chose a seat in the middle of the church, knelt and tried to pray. She could smell Christmas pine; the altar was surrounded by deep green spruce trees. She placed her head on her folded hands and asked God for a miracle. She wanted David back, and she wanted blood, please. She was seriously late.

She remembered the Midnight Mass she went to with David the year before. She hadn’t noticed the spruce trees by the altar then, because they’d huddled together in the last pew. David had wiggled his hand inside the back of her skirt as they leaned against the wooden back of their seat. She’d kept her coat on to cover his hand, and stayed seated throughout the service, exalting in the sensation of his warm fingers on her skin.

Tonight, the trees by the altar looked like they were bathed in black. Night time shadows enveloped them. None of the trees were decorated, and their stark appearance was somehow comforting. They looked natural, untouched, they turned the area around the altar into a forest.

Away in a manger

No crib for his bed…

She enunciated each word in her mind as she rose from her seat in the pew to go to Communion. Margo grew warm and sweaty when she recognized the back of David’s head several rows in front of her. She had not seen him for twenty-two days.

Her heart beat faster as she walked up the aisle, closer to his pew.

David was kneeling, his head bowed. Margo saw a woman leaning on his shoulder, whispering to him. As she passed their pew, Margo glimpsed the woman digging her left hand into Paul’s back pocket. She could see the spine of the woman’s fingers beneath the black cloth, spreading across his cheek. Her hand stayed there, holding his butt.

*****

Wyatt leans against the rod iron railing on Margo’s front porch. He wears a green, fur lined parka, and his hands are stuffed in his pockets. Wyatt’s hair is long, black as ink, and tucked behind his ears. His black eyes focus on Margo’s. Wyatt’s kindness towards her, especially today, makes Margo gag. She feels a new wave of nausea engulf her.

“Wait,” she mumbles and turns around, running to the bathroom.

Wyatt is standing in the doorway when she comes back, holding the door open.

“You all right?” he asks. Cold air is pushing around him into the small foyer.

“Yes, let’s go,” she does not look at him.

Wyatt was the first person to shake her hand when she joined the agency. She sat caddy corner from him and asked him questions about the accounts she’d inherited and his advice on the new ones she was courting.

“Margo, can we finish this in the morning?” They were frequently the last two left in the building.

“I’m almost through, just one more question.” She would think of the most pressing thing she needed to know. “Why do you think they want to switch agencies?”

“Their ads are stale. But that’s my opinion.”

“And you can do better?”

“Oh, yeah. But not now. Tomorrow. C’mon, I’ll walk you out. It’s dark. You don’t want to be in the parking lot by yourself.”

Wyatt is still the only person at work who knows Margo’s pain. She wonders, sometimes, why she chose to confide in him. His presence in the office near hers was comforting. She’d wander into his cubicle and confide in him, stopping herself in mid-sentence when she realized what she was saying.

“It’s all right. I can keep a secret.” He’d smile at her and she’d believe him, telling him how it felt to grow up without a father, how she often felt an overwhelming blackness creep up on her. There was the ache of wondering what his voice sounded like. How would it have felt to hug him? Margo told Wyatt about a childhood memory of not being invited to a birthday party, and how she connected the shame of being fatherless to it.

She’d watched the other fathers, wincing when she passed one — and she could not remember a mother ever doing this — holding onto the legs of his daughter, seated, giggling on his shoulders. Her small arms would be securely folded around his neck. Just once, Margo wanted to know what it felt like, how the world looked from up there. She wished she’d known that her legs were held in place by strong arms, that her father would never let her fall.

*****

Because he has never turned her away, or told her he’s too busy, Wyatt drives her to the clinic. Through the window of his pickup, Margo watches all the brown and black limbs of the winter trees. She thinks of death.

At the clinic, she takes a seat next to a woman in a white nurse’s uniform. The woman motions to Wyatt, who stands behind her. “You will be taking her home? She won’t be able to drive herself.”

“Yes,” Wyatt says. He clears his throat and places his hand on her shoulder. Anguish pours over Margo. She knows that Wyatt’s wife and son are not aware that he has taken the day off. Margo looks up at Wyatt, who smiles at her. She holds onto the kindness of Wyatt’s smile.

He goes back out to the waiting room, and Margo follows the nurse down the hall. The curtains to a small cubicle are pulled back and Margo is told to take everything off. She is given a flimsy, yellow striped cotton gown that ties at the neck. She puts her shoes in the basket the nurse indicates she should use, and she unzips her jeans.

Her throat tightens and her eyes are wet. She remembers how David ignored her at the Christmas Eve Mass. The shock of seeing the woman leaning on him in the pew — her hand on his butt — hit her so thoroughly, she felt a cramp growing in her stomach, eating at her chest. She cried as she walked up the aisle to Communion.

Margo lies on her back, her feet in stirrups, breathing deeply as she stares at the ceiling — pockmarked square sections of off-white. An Asian doctor in green scrubs appears by her feet. He is frowning. His expression jags at her memory. She’s seen that look before, one grade school teacher after another comes to mind.

Though she has been given a local anesthetic, Margo feels sick when the doctor disappears to sit down in front of her. She turns her head to the right, and then the left, but the sheet covering her legs blocks all view of whatever the doctor is doing.

Margo imagines she feels the suction because she can hear a whirring sound from the apparatus the doctor is using. She tries to pray a “Hail Mary” but can not remember the words.

The whirring noise stops. She can see the doctor again, standing between her legs. He is still frowning.

Wyatt holds onto her as he guides her back outside and into the truck. She feels like a raw egg being placed carefully in its cardboard compartment. Her arms lie limp by her sides, and the seat belt strap still presses down on her sore, swollen breasts.

Neither of them speaks.

Though Margo has confided much in Wyatt, she has not told him that her mother and father never married. Her mother tried to hang herself when she discovered she was pregnant. Margo doubts she’d be alive at all if abortion had been legal in 1953. She rests her head on the cushion above her seat and folds her hands. Wyatt places his right hand over hers, briefly, before he grips the stick shift and backs the pickup out of its parking spot.

Caryn Coyle writes in Baltimore. After a thirty year hiatus, she started writing fiction again and her first stories were published last summer in the online literary journal JMWW. She received her bachelor’s degree from the College of Notre Dame and her master’s degree in liberal arts from the Johns Hopkins University.

“Chuy’s Truck” by Literary Awards Finalist, Al Sim

SFWP — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:04:20 +0000

It was nine o’clock when Chuy Sandoval called home. After a long day, Chuy had a few drinks at Rico’s and thought better of driving. He was far too tired to walk. His wife teased him a little, then rattled down there in her old station wagon and picked him up.

“I’m glad you called me,” Teresa said. “It’s good you didn’t drive.”

“I couldn’t drive if you paid me,” Chuy said.

They drove the rest of the way without talking. It was a warm still night. Only the bugs were busy, chirping and humming in the dark. A low dust cloud trailed out after Teresa’s car as it rumbled along the dirt lanes.

Chuy had rolled a truck once, when he was much younger, after too much tequila. He drank less after that, and drove more carefully. He took very good care of his new truck. It hadn’t been cheap, and the bank still owned too much of it.

Chuy woke up just after dawn. He didn’t remember going to bed. He lay in the dark and thought about it for a few moments, then decided it didn’t matter. While he was tying his boots, he remembered leaving his truck down at Rico’s. He glanced over at Teresa. She was deep asleep, her breathing long and steady.

Chuy put coffee on and looked at the calendar. Thursday, the twenty-first of May. Monday was Memorial Day and it had snuck up on him again. And like last year and the year before, Chuy would work through the long weekend. He shook his head and went out the back door and checked his peppers. It was a good year for peppers. Not so good for beans. But he hadn’t planted beans this year, so that was someone else’s problem.

When Teresa woke up, they went back down to Rico’s to get Chuy’s truck. Chuy had to move some tools and supplies and he wanted to get started. An Anglo lady over in Los Ranchos hired him to patch an adobe wall where it was tumbling down. Teresa wanted breakfast first, but she relented.

Chuy’s truck wasn’t there. Rico’s parking lot was empty.

“Ah shit,” was all Chuy could say.

He said it several times.

“Any chance it was towed?” Teresa said.

They looked at each other and Chuy shrugged, then they climbed back in the old wagon and drove over to the police station. The new station was already ten years old and this would be the first time Chuy set foot inside. It was a square building with tan stucco walls and a red tin roof that extended out over a cement porch along the front. Chuy liked the look of the place. Much better than the prefabricated shed it had replaced.

Inside were high ceilings and everything was painted white and kept neat and clean. There was one officer on duty, a young Spanish woman. Chuy was still surprised every time he saw a woman in uniform. He didn’t know the police officer but Teresa did. After Teresa and the young woman finished their small talk, Teresa said why they were there. The young woman frowned and shook her head.

“We never tow anything parked in a private lot. We see stuff parked overnight at Rico’s all the time. He’s good about not letting people roll outta there drunk.”

Chuy narrowed his eyes and shook his head.

“I wasn’t drunk,” he said. “Just tired.”

The young officer put a hand to her mouth.

“Oh I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it like that.”

She looked to Teresa for help.

“Me and my big mouth,” she said.

Teresa laughed and reached out to pat the young woman’s hand. The police officer turned back to Chuy and looked at him with sympathy. Chuy didn’t like that much either.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Do you want to report your truck as stolen?”

Chuy sighed and nodded.

“Guess I better,” he said.

The police officer turned away and went to a filing cabinet and came back with some forms. Teresa did most the talking. Chuy provided a detailed description of his truck and the license plate number.

When they were out in the parking lot, Chuy asked his wife how she knew the young officer. Teresa explained that she was the daughter of someone Chuy couldn’t remember and that she had been a year ahead of their daughter Marbella in the village schools. Chuy listened to his wife and heard what she said but that didn’t stop him from thinking about his truck.

They climbed in Teresa’s old wagon and went past Rico’s on the way home. The bar’s parking lot was still painfully empty. At home they made breakfast and Chuy picked at his food. He wanted to call Rico and ask if his truck was there when Rico closed the bar, but it was only 7:30. Rico wouldn’t be up till 9:00 at the earliest. Chuy decided he best wait till later and talk to Rico at the bar. The barkeep would be in a better way by then. Chuy knew Rico didn’t wake up so good.

Meanwhile, Chuy could use Teresa’s old wagon to shuttle things over to Los Ranchos. The Anglo woman wanted her wall fixed quickly, for a party that was important to her. Luckily Chuy’s tools weren’t in his truck. He had taken them out to clean them.

Having a plan improved Chuy’s appetite. He told Teresa what he wanted to do while he finished his breakfast. Teresa was done eating. She was standing at the sink, washing their coffee pot.

“I need to go shopping,” she said. “When can I get my car back?”

“Can’t you go tomorrow? I can’t get started over there till I get set up. Tomorrow morning you can just drop me off.”

Teresa rinsed the glass pot and settled it into the dish rack.

“Okay,” she said. “You can borrow my car. But be nice to it.”

Chuy scraped up his last bite, put his plate next to the sink, and kissed the top of Teresa’s head. He went outside and began loading the wagon. To avoid overloading the poor old thing, he figured it would take two trips, maybe three.

It took three. It was 10:15 when he pulled out of his driveway for the third time. On the way back to Los Ranchos, he stopped at Rico’s and found the door unlocked and Rico behind the bar, restocking his liquor supply. He glanced toward the door when Chuy came in, but he kept working and said nothing. Chuy didn’t speak till he stepped up to the bar.

“Did you see my truck last night?”

“Wha’s that?”

Chuy put his hands on the bar top.

“Teresa came and got me last night. I left my truck here, but this morning it was gone. Did you see it last night, when you closed up?”

Rico stopped working and stood up straight. He looked at Chuy.

“You didn’t come get it?”

Chuy shook his head.

“Ah shit, Chuy, that’s bad. It was here when I closed.”

The bar was very quiet.

“You tell the cops?” Rico said.

Chuy nodded. Rico nodded back.

“I’m sorry. That stinks.”

Rico looked across the room, toward the parking lot out front where Chuy’s truck had disappeared.

“It’s a real nice truck,” Rico said.

Chuy nodded some more. Rico offered him a beer, but Chuy declined. Chuy shuffled out into the dirt and gravel parking lot, climbed into Teresa’s station wagon, and continued on to Los Ranchos and the Anglo lady’s place and her crumbling adobe wall.

The Anglo lady was out in the yard looking at Chuy’s tools. She was one of the really strange Anglos, from New York City. She made her money buying and selling what other people made—paintings and carvings and other ugly and useless things she and her kind called art.

“So these are the tools of your trade—eh, Chuy?”

She had a singsong way of talking that seemed childish to him. Chuy nodded and smiled.
“Sí, señora.”

Chuy had learned that Anglos like this one loved to hear him speak Spanish, even though his Spanish was bad, often worse than theirs.

Call her “señora” and she’ll never complain, Chuy thought.

She smiled broadly, her wide mouth full of big white teeth. Smiling made her eyes crinkle. She was pretty, Chuy had to admit. But so were collies and about as smart.

“Well. They certainly are impressive. How long have your people been making adobe?”

Long enough to know better, he wanted to say.

“A long time, señora. A very long time.”

Chuy knew that bullshit answers always satisfied the Anglos who were stupid enough to ask bullshit questions. She made her toothy smile again and wandered off.

Thank God, Chuy thought.

He couldn’t take her today.

Chuy set to work. His hands lifted his familiar tools and he took up the old routines. Work blocked out the wrong done to him. Chuy had been acutely aware of each passing moment since he and Teresa found Rico’s parking lot empty of his truck. Now the moments flowed into each other as his hands moved over the wall.

Chuy peeled back the crumbling adobe, looking for solid bricks he could build on. After he took down a dozen that fell apart in his hands, Chuy admitted to himself that the wall was in worse shape than he anticipated. The adobe bricks in the section he was repairing were brittle, but not ill-formed. He wondered if they were made by the same men who built the wall. He suspected they were purchased from a less scrupulous source. The wall was properly coursed but the bricks were poured from bad mud. To patch the wall, Chuy would have to take down twice as much as he originally planned, maybe more.

Chuy went to the house and knocked on the front door, then led the Anglo lady down to the wall and showed her what he had found. She smiled and nodded, her big mouth full of even white teeth and her pale blue eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Well, you do what you have to do, Chuy,” she said. “I trust you. Can you make it look good for my party?”

Chuy ran his hand over the wall and nodded. Then she invited him in for something to eat.

“Oh no, señora. Gracias. I brought lunch.”

She smiled and tilted her head and walked slowly back to the house. Chuy glanced at her departing form and fumbled with his canvas gloves. He had lied to the Anglo lady. He meant to bring food but had forgotten. He would have to go home to eat.

He didn’t break for lunch till 1:30. He was tired by then, so he took a short rest, sitting with his back against the wall, enjoying the shade from the tall cottonwoods. He squinted up into the trees. The lowest branches were twenty feet above his head and twice that long. He loved these old cottonwoods. It irked him that the Anglo lady never seemed to notice them.

“Why do they come here?” he asked.

He climbed back in Teresa’s old station wagon and headed for home.

Chuy pulled to a stop next to the Anglo lady’s mailbox, out where her long dirt drive met Los Ranchos Boulevard. Traffic ran slow and steady. Chuy watched the road and waited, one finger tapping softly on the steering wheel. His thoughts went back to the crumbling wall and what was needed to keep it standing.

“She should just tear that crap down,” Chuy said.

He didn’t mean it. The words left his tongue sour. He watched the cars and trucks slide past and regretted insulting the old adobe and the dead men who made it a century ago.

A knot of traffic approached and Chuy decided too late that he could have slipped out before it. He was hesitant to push Teresa’s old station wagon. The knot was led by a blue Chevy pickup. Chuy didn’t notice till the truck was right in front of him that it was the same make and model and color as his own. But his was a pretty popular truck. He saw them all over. The driver was some punk with a black bandana over his head. The truck cruised past and Chuy looked to the license plate but it was blocked by a green Acura riding the truck’s bumper. The punk with the bandana was driving slow. No ticket for him from the stern policemen of Los Ranchos who strictly enforced the speed limit along the boulevard.

Chuy pulled out four cars behind the blue pickup. He watched the truck, looked at the back of the cab over the intervening cars, studied the back of the punk’s bandana-ed head. He didn’t like that kid, didn’t trust him driving so slow. He kept trying to see the pickup’s license plate when the curves in the road might have brought it into view, but the Acura hung on the truck’s bumper like it was being towed.

Can’t be my truck, Chuy thought. No one’s that stupid.

The Infiniti in front of him turned right at the next intersection and took its time doing it. A horn blared behind him and Chuy frowned into his rear view mirrors. He looked forward again and saw a cloud of black diesel exhaust fan out from the old white Mercedes that was ahead of him now that the Infiniti was gone. Chuy kept his distance. He had the windows down and didn’t care to breath any more poisons than he had to. The Mercedes’ left flasher came on and it eased into a driveway across the road. Chuy picked up his speed and closed the gap between Teresa’s wagon and the Acura that was tailgating the truck. Then the Acura peeled off quickly at the next right and now Chuy was following the blue Chevy pickup. He stared at the back of the punk’s head for a moment, hating the black bandana folded over the boy’s skull and the life that piece of cloth represented, then lowered his eyes to the truck’s license plate.

His stomach filled with acid and his hands turned sweaty.

“God damn it,” he said.

His face became stone. He put both hands on the steering wheel and turned it with motions that were slow and deliberate and precise. They crossed the village limits and went another mile, then the knot of traffic led by the blue pickup pulled to a stop at the end of Los Ranchos Boulevard, as the traffic light at Route 418 turned red. Chuy lowered his eyes again and reread the truck’s license plate. His knuckles whitened over the steering wheel.

“God damn it,” he said again.

Chuy became so still that he almost stopped breathing. Then he shifted the old station wagon into park, slipped out the door, and stalked up alongside the idling pickup. The punk with the black bandana saw Chuy as he approached and started to open his door. That only made it easier for Chuy to jerk the door open, grab the boy’s arm, yank him out of the cab, and throw him down on the pavement, where the boy sprawled onto his back. Chuy put his boot across the boy’s throat and shouted—

“Why don’t you try an’ guess whose truck this is!”

The kid made a croaking sound, then grabbed Chuy’s boot and pushed. He was strong for a skinny boy, but he couldn’t budge the man that stood over him. Chuy pressed his boot down and the boy’s faced turned gray.

Chuy heard the sirens but didn’t understand their meaning till the sirens stopped. Then he looked up and saw the flashing lights of a cop car that was parked under the traffic signals, out in the middle of the intersection. It seemed to Chuy that only a moment had passed since he threw the kid to the ground. The boy tried to push him off again. Chuy pressed his boot down and the struggling stopped. He looked at the cop car again and saw it belonged to the city police. They were in an odd corner of Corchojo up here, a little tab extending off to the west from the North Valley section of the city, a small strip along Route 418 north of Los Ranchos that the rich people didn’t want in their fancy village.

An Anglo cop appeared before Chuy with his pistol drawn. Chuy raised his hands and nodded down at the kid under his boot.

“He stole my truck,” Chuy yelled. “Check with the Los Huertos police. I reported it stolen.”

A second cop appeared, across the truck bed from Chuy, another Anglo with his pistol out. Chuy knew the cops didn’t like what they saw, a rough-looking middle-aged spic grinding his boot into a boy’s throat. But he guessed they wouldn’t much like the boy either, when they got a good look at him. At least Chuy and the kid were both Spanish. That simplified things. Chuy thought it was a good thing for him the punk wasn’t Anglo.

Walkie-talkies crackled and the guns were put away. Then the first cop waved Chuy off the kid. When he stepped back, the cops charged in, pulled the boy to his feet, and snapped him into handcuffs. While they put the boy in the back of the police cruiser, an unmarked car appeared and a tall young Anglo detective told Chuy they needed him to come with them. They took Chuy back to the North Valley police station in the unmarked car, asked him a few questions, then left him sitting next to the young detective’s desk. The detective went off with the uniformed cop, the first one on the scene, the one who had read the punk his rights.

Chuy used the telephone on the detective’s desk to call Teresa. She didn’t answer. When he hung up the phone, Chuy felt like a fog was lifting. He looked at the palms of his callused hands, then turned them over and put them on his knees. He noticed how loud and busy the city police station was. People were talking, to each other and on telephones. A computer printer ground out paperwork. Someone smacked a telephone handset down into its cradle. A telephone rang and someone yelled out “Hey Bill”.

Chuy called Teresa again. He let it ring fifteen times. He was hanging up when the young detective returned.

“Mister Sandoval, do you have a ride home?”

Chuy looked up at the tall Anglo. The detective did not sit down.

“I can go?”

The detective nodded.

“Don’t you want me to give a statement or something?” Chuy said.

The detective shook his head.

“We’ve got everything we need. Do you want a ride?”

Chuy’s answer was very slow and deliberate.

“I don’t need a ride. I’m going to drive my truck.”

The Anglo frowned and bit his lip.

“I’m afraid we need to hold your truck.”

Chuy took a deep breath and looked down at his hands. He raised his head and frowned at the detective.

“Why?”

The detective looked at Chuy while he picked out his words.

“He was transporting contraband and our team isn’t done going over your truck yet. I’m awful sorry for the inconvenience.”

“He stole my truck and used it to drive drugs?”

The detective looked like someone had stepped on his toe. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Well, I didn’t mention drugs, sir.”

Chuy stared at him. The detective waited.

“When can I get my truck back?” Chuy said. “I need my truck. I make my living with that truck.”

“First thing tomorrow, Mister Sandoval. Nine o’clock sharp. You have my word on that. Our crew will work on it tonight, everything, all the paperwork. We’ll clear it up before we leave.”

They watched each other.

“You can’t wait here for it, Mister Sandoval.”

“I know that. I’m not stupid.”

“Do you have a ride home?”

“Where’s my wife’s car? I was driving my wife’s station wagon.”

“It’s back where you left it. You moved it for us. Do you remember that?”

Chuy frowned again. He vaguely remembered leaving Teresa’s station wagon in a parking lot along Route 418.

“Yeah. Sure. How do I get there?”

“I’ll drive you over.”

A few minutes later, Chuy was back in the unmarked car with the Anglo detective again. “That was a very brave thing you did, Mister Sandoval.”

Chuy glanced at the cop. He was looking straight ahead, one hand on the steering wheel. He had dark glasses on.

“Also very stupid,” the cop said.

“It’s my truck.”

“I understand how you feel, sir. But that kid’s in a gang. He had a pistol tucked in his belt. Did you notice that?”

Chuy hadn’t seen any pistol, but he knew the cop wasn’t lying. Better not tell Teresa about the pistol.

“I’m surprised he didn’t shoot you,” the detective said.

Chuy looked out his window for a moment, then he turned to the detective.

“Maybe he was afraid to. Maybe he thought that would make me mad.”

The detective laughed, from his belly. It was a good laugh and Chuy liked him better for it. They stopped talking. Chuy liked him for that too.

Teresa’s station wagon was in place and intact. Chuy looked at it suspiciously.

“Do you want me to follow you home?” the detective said.

“What? Hell no. I’m all right.”

“Well, if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’m going to follow you home anyway. So don’t run any red lights.”

Chuy shrugged. It probably wasn’t a bad idea.

Teresa was out in their front yard, talking to a woman who lived a few doors over. Teresa frowned when she saw Chuy followed by someone who was so obviously a cop. The neighbor took one look, said goodbye, and hurried off.

The detective was out of his car and next to the station wagon before Chuy even had the keys out of the ignition. Chuy stepped out and looked at his wife. She wasn’t mad. That was good.

“I found my truck,” he said.

Teresa raised an eyebrow.

“Ah,” she said.

She put her hands on her hips and turned this way and that, making a show of looking around their dusty yard. She even stooped a little to look inside the station wagon.

“So where is it?”

The detective laughed loudly and made Teresa smile. Chuy had to admit the young Anglo had a good laugh. Chuy briefly explained to his wife what had happened. He left out the boy’s gun and didn’t mention that he was in a gang and downplayed how close Chuy came to strangling him. When Chuy was done, Teresa turned to the detective.

“Is that all true?”

“Yes, ma’am. Every word.”

Teresa nodded, first at the cop, then at Chuy. She still had her hands on her hips. She turned back to the detective.

“Would you like some dinner? I’m making chicken and rice. It won’t be ready for a while. If you can wait.”

“Oh no, ma’am. I’m on duty. But thank you, just the same. It’s awful nice of you to ask.”

Chuy liked the cop even better for not staying. Teresa smiled at them both, then turned and went inside. She always knew when to leave the men alone. They didn’t talk till the screen door creaked shut.

“Thanks,” Chuy said.

“No problem.”

Chuy nodded toward the two cars.

“Thanks for following me home too. I was a little shaky.”

“That’s all right. It was quite a day you had.”

Chuy grinned and scratched the back of his head.

“Yeah, it was a day, all right. That kid can’t feel too tough about now. Gettin’ his ass stomped by grandpa.”

The cop laughed again. Chuy put his hand out and the detective shook it. The young man’s hand was soft and smooth.

“I’ll be at your desk tomorrow morning, nine sharp,” Chuy said. “You better have my truck ready.”

“It will be, Mister Sandoval.”

The detective got in his unmarked car and backed out into the lane. Chuy was watching the car fade into the dust cloud kicked up behind it when Teresa slipped up beside him.

“He seems nice,” she said.

Chuy nodded. They stood side-by-side and watched the dust from the car rise and swirl. Then Teresa gave her husband’s hand a squeeze, kissed him on the side of the chin, and went inside to finish dinner.

Chuy went around back to check his peppers. He put some plants in early and they had fruit already. The peppers looked real good, firm and plump and shiny. Their stems were thick and strong and their leaves were stiff and dark. They smelled like green apples and warm wood. He enjoyed the smell for a few moments, taking deep breaths and walking slowly down the rows. Then he ambled over to the house and went inside.

Chuy found Teresa at the kitchen sink and kissed the top of her head. He stood behind her for a moment, then stepped close and wrapped his arms around his wife. She put down her work and leaned back against him. Chuy looked out the back window at their garden.

They listened to the day fade into evening.

“It’s a good year for the peppers,” Chuy said.

Al Sim’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train, The Literary Review, and The Greensboro Review. His collection Stories in the Old Style was published by Press 53. He is married, has two children, works in the software industry, and lives in Arizona.