here in dust and dirt

His wife reminded him, it wasn’t as if they had nowhere to go. But he knew where that was; he nodded, and took his head out of his hands as if he were comforted, but when she was gone he rested his arms on his knees again, squeezing one fist inside the other.

His children loved the beach. He loved the smell of their hair after they were spent and fell asleep in his lap under their umbrella, the seal-like sheen of their arms and legs. Everything seemed to fit together, the umbrella in the sand, him in the wooden folding chair, the daughter asleep in his lap, as if her life were meant only for ending up there.

And he could get them there again; he liked the school in Santa Rosa where he had lectured a couple of years ago. They liked him. They had hinted then at interest in employing him. But he told them he was devoted—he was called—to be where he was. At the time, the suggestion of this other job had warmed him, like a confession of love from a woman not his wife. He thought of it now, of how he could tell the kids, we’ll be able to go to the beach every Saturday.

They loved their cousins’ house in France, too. He thought of the long Sunday afternoons, lazy, half-sick from food and wine, watching the apricot haze deepen and fall into grey dusk at ten or eleven at night. Adeline was probably telling them, even now, and they would be happy. He put his head in his hands.

Commencement had been a job. At the faculty brunch, he drank mimosas one up another, ostensibly to celebrate. But Adeline knew. He saw her choose not to say anything about it. Of course she knew, he laughed bitterly—he hated sweet alcohol. He hadn’t tasted it.

As he passed the queues of robed students, he saw the bird-like redhead who had toasted him at the senior banquet. Following another drunken tribute to drunken friends, she had risen from her seat and taken the podium, lifted her glass and wished to thank the professors who were moving on to bestow their gift of knowledge to other students, who needed them badly in other places. Her speech was brief, and stilted, he might have called it prissy if he had not felt its direction toward him. Everyone dutifully raised their glasses and drank. It was a small thing.

But as he passed her in the commencement queue, he gave her a little tap with his fist, a gesture of the “go get ’em, tiger” kind. Ordinarily, he disdained bonhomie like that; but what else could he do?

She turned slightly from her group of friends, and looked at him with surprise.

-----

It was really better, he thought, that the other faculty didn’t address it with him. It was a small thing, that happened all the time. It happened to people with more personal investment in the college than he had. But he couldn’t think of an occasion that it happened to someone with a family to support. However, he reminded himself, that was not the college’s fault.

Then, he reminded himself, it was not a fault at all.

His children had reacted with slow-dawning comprehension and dread of the unknown, until Adeline wisely told them that not only would they be spending the summer in France, but also Christmas. Think of Christmas in France! With Tante Nadine and the cousins! Then, of course, they were ecstatic. Christmas in France! Sledding with the cousins! What kinds of cake would Tante Nadine make?

He drank more wine, shielded from Adeline’s attention by the children’s uproar of glee.

It ran through his head: “Opening bottles is what makes drunkards.” Where had he read that?

-----

The town slowed down in the summer, became completely torpid, in fact, except for the floods of tourists on the weekends. Adeline had started to pack and pushed him out of the house with the children. “Do anything,” she insisted. “Get ice cream. Feed the ducks.”

He longed for the summer to be over, for the recourse of the beach. By the dock, the air pressed heavily around. His children did not seem to notice the oppression. He thought of stopping into the pub, buying them French fries or ice cream…but they would tell Adeline if he had a beer. It would not occur to them that it was a sign of harm. And if it did occur to them, though they would say nothing, it would be no better.

He threw a bit of bread toward the ducks that had stopped over in the stagnant water. Surely they would be on their way soon.

-----

Adeline had gone out to pick up Chinese food. He lay on the sofa, trying not to think about an early glass of wine while she was gone, trying not to think about the faculty reappointment meeting that had decided his fate, trying to think impartially of the dean and the committee; failing that, trying not to think of any of them at all.

Marianne, the six year old, padded softly in from the front room. He looked at her.

“Don’t you like the movie?” he asked.

She nodded. “This is the scary part,” she said.

He pulled her onto the sofa beside him, against his stomach, and tucked his arm around her. It was not hard to stop thinking when he could listen to her deep, healthy, contented breaths.

-----

“I’m not going to hide the wine from you,” said Adeline to him, that night. “But I’m not going to buy any more.”

He nodded.

“It’s just another month.” Her palm pushed in deep circles over his hunched back.

He raised his head. “Until what?”

She smiled encouragingly. “Until France!”

He smiled back, his forehead pierced with the effort not to speak.

Her brow furrowed uncomprehendingly. “Why, what?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s not so long. We’ll make it.”

-----

The children helped him carve out a path that they took every day, from the house to the playground, to the dock where the ducks sometimes met them—apparently having no sense of or trust in routine, to a bench in the little courtyard of the public elementary school, circling through the back garden of St. Mary’s toward the main road, then cutting off it to spend more time at the playground before they came home again. At Danny’s insistence, they stowed a basketball between the hedge and the firehouse. He was surprised to find how it improved his morale for that brief hour, watching the ball sink unexpectedly through the chain basket. It helped, too, to buy small things for the children—Popsicles, ice cream, yo-yos or paper dolls or sidewalk chalk. They asked him to draw on the sidewalk with them, and he tried manfully, sincerely, to comply. The only thing he truly enjoyed was the blind physical work of lifting them, catching them when they jumped, pushing them on the swings until they shrieked “Too high!”

-----

He knew he could sit for hours in that same space, if he wanted to. He smiled to think that, maybe, he would. He could drink all four bottles of wine that he had found in a box, hidden in the closet under the stairs—Adeline lied, or changed her mind—and still have time to sleep them off before she and the children came home from their weekend. She was with her girlfriends from the translation office, the children were farmed out among their friends from school or church. He had been assigned to go fishing with a group of men that he didn’t know—a sort-of friend from church had invited him through Adeline, or perhaps she had suggested it. He did not know. But the sort-of friend had called him the night before to say that he was ill and would not be going; he should still go, of course; of course he would, feel better soon. He said nothing to Adeline and he was alone on the couch, with one open bottle and three more to qualify him as an alcoholic, if he chose. Where had he read that before? The question was one of pacing. If he drank too slowly, he would not sleep soundly and would wake up too early the next day, and have to get through a good many hours before he could start drinking again. Say what they will about opening bottles being what makes drunkards, he was steadfastly against heavy drinking before the sun gave signs of setting. It might not be diagnostic but it was simply uncouth.

But if he drank too fast, there would be nothing to drink tomorrow. Anyway, it was his prerogative to decide. His space to decide to remain.

-----

He was not deeply religious, but was devout. That was how his students described him. They saw his sincerity, no matter what class they had him in. They saw his inner light, the ethical desire that drove his efforts beyond the response that seemed to reward them little. That was why he had not taken the Santa Rosa school’s offer, though drawn by its appeal. Life was not a matter of finding what you liked best to do, but what you were supposed to do. It is workers, not enthusiasts, who are rewarded. Enthusiasm is its own reward, a life of endless trivial joy. There was nothing wrong with that, but when you clearly knew you were supposed to be doing something else, when you clearly saw a challenge meant for you, it was only cowardice or laziness that would shy from a challenge to seek a life contented moment by moment.

-----

The basketball was safe in the hedge, where Danny had left it. Danny was short for his age, which made him well-coordinated but not very fast, little effective in school sports. He made no comparison between his own efforts and those of others, and none either between their efforts that failed and those that succeeded. If someone shot the basketball and it sank, he commended it as a good shot, never as lucky or improved, never at all qualified.

The chain jangled satisfactorily. He waited for the ball to return to him. At length, he realized it had flown under the hoop and rolled away from him, jangling the chain as it passed.

Danny’s face made people believe he was older than he was. Sometimes it worried Adeline. He had never worried, never questioned it. He loved his son’s gravity, present even in joy. He understood it. Life was grave, even joy was grave if you knew it was joy, and not just happiness or ecstasy. He looked at his son’s face and was gladdened by the knowledge that he would have a confidant sooner than any other men his age with sons.

When Danny shouted encouragement at him for shooting the basketball, he knew it was not childish adulation. When Danny took his hand as they walked back from the park, he knew it was decisive.

He hid the ball again in the hedge and walked back to the house, crossing from pool to pool of sallow streetlight.

He took the three unopened bottles of wine to the school, in a basket, with a ribbon round the handle, and laid it all in front of the dean’s door. He cooked a filet mignon in the empty kitchen and ate it with the last of the opened wine. To his great pleasure, there was an all-night marathon of Hitchcock movies on the TV. It was a small thing, but it was pleasing to him.



first published 6/28/07, 9.24am

the chippie

We were only talking.

“Graham!”

“I see you, Sophie love. Be up in a jiff.”

Sigh. We were only talking. But I suppose that’s the way of it. Don’t need him to keep me company, anyway. Graham is good for a chat, if I want it, and I don’t want it generally. He was a bit of a talker, that one. Sometimes it was all you could do to make the bugger keep shut. Best he’s gone…

Oh hell. “Graham!”

“Yes Sophie! Here y’are, my love. What you wanted?”

Dear old Graham. It’s not on to make him cross, he works hard.

“Thanks, darling. They’re lovely.”

Well. He need not sniff that way. Here to wait on folk, isn’t he? But um—these are lovely. Graham’s right enough.


What’s meant by gone, anyway? It’s a chippie, isn’t it? Open to the public isn’t it? And suppose he’s off on an assignment for work—what was it he did? Pharmaceutical engineering. Fittings for orifice applicators, wasn’t it? That would be as likely to take him out of town for a time. Not likely to be many who can serve in that field. Quite good at his work, too, I think. He said as much; rather, he never said as much but you could read between the lines. Might equally be that he’s on holiday. We used to talk a lot about that, didn’t we? He was keen to go to Ibiza. Neither of us had been, just heard a lot from old schoolmates, would be fun to see all the sots carousing on the beach, like we never were. There was just the matter of the bikini…

We talked about going there together, didn’t we? Played it like it was a joke, but… It came up bit too often for only a joke…I should think. Didn’t it?

“Graham! Another, if you please.”

“Of the same, Sophie?”


Yes, just the matter of the bikini. We talked about that a little, too. It was a relief to find that some men think about other things. Like what’s in the heart. He really cared the most about that. At least I know there’s some men about like that.

And that some men know what a challenge it can be. That’s the thing of it—he wasn’t any Adonis himself, was he? I mean, good looking. Quite good looking, for a heavy chap. He was heavy, no getting round that. And didn’t help that he was always coming in here for a basket of chips. But if he hadn’t, we’d never have…

Hell. “Graham, when you have a moment.”

“Aye, Sophie?”

“A couple packets of tartar sauce. And…”

“Aye?”

“I think...”

“Would you fancy a beer, love?”

Sigh. “A Flowers, Graham. Thank you.”

“Aye, Sophie.”


All the flowers I get, come in a pint glass. Got to get them myself. Get them for myself. All the flowers I’ll ever get. Not the sort anybody buys a Flowers for, me--not even in a pint glass. He never bought me a beer. Paid for a couple baskets chips, I think. That was just conspir…consp…just a dirty trick, I guess. To get me heavier than he was. And now he’s gone.

Just a damn public chippie, isn’t it? He might be back next week. Shouldn’t wonder. But I won’t speak to him. Not first. If he wants to speak, he can speak first. He can buy the bloody Flowers.

Sniff. Seemed like the type to buy the real flowers, sometime, if he…if he fancied the girl.

Suppose he’s in Ibiza, with some other heavy girl, watching the sots carousing on the beach. Suppose he uses that line on them all. Makes you feel sort of special. Bet she swallowed it whole. Didn’t I?

“Graham!”

“Another of the same?”

Shouldn’t.

“Yes, please.”

(first published 6/28/07, 9.35am)

sturdy legs

“Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of Frenchwomen….It was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore long skirts, that I realized what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That is what makes the French such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.
That is what makes all the French able to ride up hill on bicycles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedaling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms.”
—Gertrude Stein, Paris, France, 1940

Today is also the one-week anniversary of me and my little blue bike. I love my little blue bike! I love it in spite of the horrible pain it puts me in. I’m a fool for its punishment. I’ve ridden it every day but one this week—to my friends’ house, to the drugstore, to the library, and yesterday the long haul—to the church and the grocery store. That was a challenge, a pause-giving consideration. Not of the bike’s powers but of mine, and also of the relationship. I bought it not only for love, but also for practicality—everywhere I need to go this summer seemed reachable by bicycle. Including church and grocery. But the thought of actually making the journey last evening, after a full hot day of trekking around town already, made me wonder if I had been idealistic. I am that, on rare occasions.

But do you know, it wasn’t a battle really at all, in the sense that it was not a real question of whether or not I would go forth on my little blue bike. The only doubt was of how far I would get before I passed out or something. The commitment was there, it had been from the moment I set eyes…well, hindquarters, actually…on the bottle-blue fat-tired fifty-year-old Mercury, the commitment to go nowhere without it, even if it meant forgoing the most direct route. As in the present case of church and grocery.

There is a lot to be said for pain at the beginning of something, as opposed to having it come later. It lets you know what you’re getting into. This morning I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. My body is sore in places that it will be no consolation to have callouses in. But yeah, yeah, as soon as I can move about and get a shower, I’ll be back on that little blue machine. I don’t anticipate that the pain I’m undergoing now is only for a time, that I’m getting it out of the way early. This bike only has one speed. It’s just less painful than paying for gas. That is freedom, I think—being able to choose what brand of suffering you will live with.

Love.

(first published 6/29/07, 9.08am)

reminiscing about st. john's

i’m trying to get a handle on what that magic is, that signature nostalgia that threatens to engulf me there, what chords in me does it particularly pluck that i haven’t learned enough about to enjoy and submit to?

that palpable air, humid because it’s the South but tempered by the salt of the bay? the bricks look a little moist, everything does. none of the trees nor the buildings are very thick or very tall. that sailboating air pervades, so that it can’t be quite country, but the smallness and the hicky-ness of maryland generally keeps the officiousness genial and the preppiness a little faded and worn so that it seems more genuine. it’s rich but it’s down-homey money, invested in the home, more trips on the boat with family to see family, better food and booze to entertain, and there aren’t enough people to overwhelm your entertainment of quite as many people that you like as those you don’t.

the familiarity, because even if you don’t recognize somebody you’ve probably shopped in their store or eaten beside them in a restaurant. the smallness, the manageability…

oh, the memory hurts! hurts so gloriously! what is it touching?

i knew it and i knew who i was. i felt no competition. the whole world was in my head and annapolis and st. john's were just a place i was passing through. and now i have passed through, God help me, and now I’m lost in the biggest jungle in the world and nobody knows who i am. i sometimes recognize them but nobody recognizes me. i mean nothing here and i don’t feel anything is manageable. there, anything i did stood out. there were so many people for such a small place that it was quite likely someone i wanted to impress or someone i was impressed by would be right around the corner, or at the same party. now it doesn’t matter where i go, no one will notice and i will notice only in passing without hope of finding out. maybe that’s why writing comes so damn easy here—it’s a way to get to know all the people i’ll never get to know.

but when i first got there, was it like that? everything was just there, and i sort of coasted along and i remember sitting under the gaslight on the next-to-last night of the school year, when i was a freshman, and thinking, i won’t be like those people, terrified of leaving, i have other places in mind to go.

when i think that someday, if i were to go back after proper ripening of time and maturity, misters p. and k. and h. and ms. k. won’t be there—they’ll be dead or retired—or that they just won’t remember me… it won’t be anymore what it was for me. can you believe it’s the same campus that A's parents went to, that they can walk around and see the same things? the buildings stay the same, but it’s the people i want to see! that’s the problem with knowing people isn’t it?

when i first got there, i felt faint stirrings of envy of those who knew so many people but i just thought it wasn’t worth my time. and then i was so depressed and alone my second year because i didn’t know anybody. and then it was fun and also dreadful, because other people knew me, too.

anybody might be around the corner, or out on the quad, and usually they were. people noticed me. drama and intrigue everywhere.

i’m not lonely here but i do feel strange. i had no reason to come except that God seemed to call me. okay...here i am.

purge

I have too much stuff and I’m going to move. And I’m just wondering, as I survey my four garbage bags full of clothes, why have I kept so many of these? I wear the same four garments over and over, with a change for an occasion more or less formal than usual. It’s not that I don’t like the clothes I don’t wear—I just don’t wear them. They belong, I suppose, to someone that I used to be. They are discarded cocoons. And for that reason, I hang on to them, to remind me of where I’ve been.

But I’m moving and I don’t want to pay the price in coin or trouble to bring them all along with me. The memories are in my head. So I’m cataloguing my old clothes, to preserve the shades I have grown out of.

Starting with—the large white industrial-strength t-shirt that says “surfer” across the front in olive letters. I love that shirt until I actually put it on. No matter how many times I’ve washed it, it doesn’t get soft. It came from Glenn, a surfer nearly twice my age who used to come in to flirt with me at the coffee shop where I worked the summer between freshman and sophomore year of school. When he found out I was going back to school, he took off the shirt right in front of me and gave it to me—I’d admired it before and said I wanted one like it. And he gave it to me. He had nice eyes and bright blonde hair, and a girlfriend that nagged him and also had a kid.

My Joe’s Jeans. The first pair of designer jeans I ever owned. They didn’t ever fit quite right, but I still wore them every day because they were designer, and there was a bird embroidered on the back pocket. I remember staring at the “distressed” patch just under my right hip, while I sat on the dock with the first boy I loved under the stars, almost nauseous with longing and fear of what he might do to me. And he did it, too. But I guess I survived, didn’t I? Goodbye, jeans.

Little black chiffon skirt with tiny white pindots. Bought with a “gift card” that came with the caveat that I open a credit card at the Limited, in an attempt to get something for free—I ended up paying more for it than the price advertised, on account of the company not canceling the card and charging me late fees. Lesson learned.

Pale blue striped pajama pants—only because I fear I will never find another pair as perfect, have I held onto these old faded practically transparent things. Fear is not a good reason for doing anything.

Gauzy white top, long sleeves and scoop neck, perfect for layering but not anything else, really. I like the long seam down the back. But come on. It reminds me of the body I used to have. If I’m ever to have that body again, it will probably be when I stop reproaching myself for not having it. And this shirt remains as a reproach.

The pale blue, square-necked shirt with three-quarter sleeves that has always been a little too short for how I like them. My first Free People purchase. And my souvenir of my first summer in New York City. I bought it at Filene’s Basement on Union Square. I wore it a lot during the duration of the summer in France.

Flowered tube top from A & F. Stupid. Trying to take my mind off the misery of the summer after I graduated from college. Wore it to a couple of Bible studies. Constantly tugging at it to stay where I wanted it.

Grey cashmere zip-up sweater with hood that I stole from the closet at the fitness studio where I worked for a hot second. Sayonara, Physique57! Happiness to you and Kelly Ripa.

Royal blue Mary Green bra—I mean, who buys a blue bra and wears it?

Lots of Mary Green bras—I wore them out. So comfortable. But it’s time for something new.

Black velvet pants—lots of dancing in them. Lots of parties when I was feeling fat. Pants that were too heavy for dancing, really. I’ve changed. I bought them as an homage to Christy Turlington, who was wearing them in a Christmas edition of O magazine, with a white tank top. I never looked like her, alas. The pants could not accomplish that.

Black sateen skirt gathered on the sides like a theatre curtain with cheap lace and sequins dangling on the ends of the strings. Bought it to look vaguely rockabilly and MoulinRouge-esque. I guess I did. Should have worn it more often while it fit. It didn’t fit for very long, did it?

Blue and white striped t-shirt from J. Crew that says C’est La Vie, which is why I bought it, in a size too big. Do you really need a shirt that says that?

Little black boxer shorts with white polka dots. Bought in the hope that someone would be around to see me get out of bed in them. Dumbass.

Kneelength charcoal shorts with pinstripes. So long, so wrong.

Black undies bought against better judgment—too cheeky. Trying too hard.

Here’s to clothes I like and that like me.

the escapist

“I’m worried about Tess,” said Janet, lacing a frying pan with melted shortening.

Her husband traced his finger along the line of newspaper print.

“I just…” She sighed, frustrated not with the effort to express herself, but with having to do so unsolicited. “I don’t think it’s natural for a girl her age to write stories about the devil.”

“The what?” Terence was still looking down at the newspaper, but his eyebrows came together encouragingly.
Janet continued,

“What if she brings up something of that nature in her school work? Can you imagine how Ms. Fusz will react?”

Terence looked up. The bags under his eyes distended with incredulity.

Janet moved toward him beseechingly. “You see what I mean?”

“Her teacher’s name is Fuzz?”

“F-u-s-z. Yes, that’s her name. You know, that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Terence sat back, contemplating the mystery. “I just can’t understand that.”

“Six is a tender age.”

“You’d think somewhere along the line, somebody would have wanted to change it.”

“A lot takes shape in these years, particularly in the thought life.”

“At least the pronunciation. It could rhyme with ‘fuse.’”

“What does that say about our parenting? That’s the real question they’ll be asking.”

Terence was silent, meditating. Janet looked at him, her face etched with concern.

“I know I’ve never talked to her about devils. No books, no TV." Her face puckered in consideration. "I don’t think she even has any red clothes,” she murmured.

Terence shook his head. “I mean, think of all the names they changed at Ellis Island. How could they let that slip by?”

With her fingers, Janet pulled apart a log of ground beef and let it drop, sizzling, into the pan.

“I’ve never heard her talk about anything like that, either.” She stared up dolefully at the wallpaper. “If there’s something hidden in her thought life, way deep down, that she broods on constantly but never mentions… But how could it get there?”
She looked at Terence. He had gone back to the newspaper.

The beef flung up juices onto the wallpaper, where it joined the greyed stains of other suppers of the same kind. Tess was six years old, younger than the rest of her first grade class. She was average for height and weight, but being intellectually advanced made her appear undersized. She played nicely when invited, but was alarmingly content to stand by the school wall or under a tree, muttering to herself.

Ms. Fusz had hinted tactfully at analysis. That was a number of weeks ago, before Janet found the devil story on Tess’ bed. It was four pages long, carefully scrawled in her best penmanship. At first, Janet thought it was a folktale that Tess copied from a book. Certain misspelled and unorthodox words made her approach Tess, which she did with all appearance of casual inquiry.

“Tess, what’s this?”

“It’s a story that I wrote.”

“Who wrote it?”

“I did.”

“Why is it about the devil?”

“Because that’s what I thought.”

“You thought about the devil?”

“No.” Tess was coloring a picture. “I thought about Margaret.”

“Margaret?” Janet paged through her mental index, finding no entry of any Margaret. Was it, she wondered, an imaginary friend? Was it the name of an ethereal fiend who whispered in her daughter’s ear?

“The girl in the story,” Tess murmured unwillingly.

Janet looked down at the page; indeed, “Margret” figured prominently. “Yes, okay. But why did you have Margaret talking to the devil?”

“Because that’s what happened.” Tess got up from the table.

“Where are you going?” Janet almost shrieked.

“I’m going to get my other crayons.”

Janet approached Terence.

“Ms. Fusz suggested that analysis might be…”

Terence looked up.

“Analysis?”

“Yes.”

“It might be what?”

“A good idea.”

“For Tess?”

At least, Janet thought, he had forgotten the newspaper. “She just hinted tactfully.”

“She was clear enough that you understood.”

“Of course I understood.”

“Tess writes one little story about the devil and Ms. Fusz thinks she needs a shrink.”

“Ms. Fusz hasn’t seen that story!” Janet cried. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Then what is she talking headshrinkers for?”

“Because Tess is different.”

Terence sat back on the barstool. He threw his hands in the air. “Of course she is! She’s always been.”

“No, Terry. She’s different.”

He looked at her helplessly.

“She’s not like the other kids her age.”

His eyes begged her like a dumb animal.



The next morning, he woke up at three-thirty. For once, he did not reach out for the snooze button; he was groomed, dressed and on the interstate by five. The sun was climbing sluggishly through a filter of clouds, grey and fibrous like the poly-fill that leaked from the corner of their sofa.

He had come to accept, over time, the unpredictable occurrence of whimsical thoughts such as this, and their indication that somewhere within him lurked a fragment of a poet's nature. He was glad to have it; for one thing, It allowed him to connect to his daughter in a way that, he recognized, Janet could not. Janet as he first met her would have, possibly, intuited something significant and philosophical about Tess' story.

He called to mind an image of her in former days, with long hair that fell in waves, the furrow in her brow so cute because it looked out of place on a young, smooth face. He remembered the fine angles of her collarbone that held shadows as if they were pools of water, in the hot afternoons when they sat on a blanket, their eyes desperately clinging to the vague white shapes practicing baseball, so to avoid being caught looking at the other.

The furrow was etched in Janet’s forehead now; the collarbone had effectively disappeared. He drove a truck now, to leave the confusing mutations at home, to hide from panic in nonspecific memories.



The school yard, even full of running children, looked brown and barren in the onset of summer. Janet stood in the parking lot, shielded by a car not her own, and tried to pick out Tess. It was not hard, she thought grimly, seeing the bare shoulders hunched slightly forward, the hair that grew too far over the face, no matter how she tried to keep it cut back. She cringed at the thought of Tess’ eyes staring out from under a curtain of bangs, like a waif in a crowded street. Every month she trimmed them back, chattering hard and bright to Tess about how everyone would now see her friendly smile, impelled by Tess’ grimace to go higher with the scissors; last time she might have cropped them to fuzz, before Terry stopped her. The fringe bristled out from Tess’ scalp for several days before barrettes or hair products could mend the damage.

Janet saw Mrs. Fusz come out from the building. A man joined her at the bottom of the steps. They stood with a manila folder between them, their faces solemn and their mouths tight. Mrs. Fusz stared out at the school yard, the man rifled through the folder on his own. They parted ways, Mrs. Fusz back into the building with the folder in her hands, the man toward the parking lot.

Janet intercepted him as he was unlocking a grey Nissan.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He looked up. His eyes were ringed with the shadows of sleep deprivation, and his moustache was stained with a recent consumption of mustard.

“I…” Janet felt choked by the parental ineptitude that, she was certain, her face must advertise. Nothing, she thought, could sink her any lower. “I saw you talking to Mrs. Fusz.”

The man’s eyes shifted toward the school, then back to her. “Yes?” he said noncommittally.

“I’m Tess’ mother,” Janet told him harshly. He did not blink. “I can’t say I’m surprised she spoke to you, though I’m a little…miffed that she did it without telling me first. Oh,” she felt near to wailing, “maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to be honest, I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’ve done everything I know, and I do know a lot. Believe me, I’ve read so many books; it’s not like I’ve just let this go. But you can’t deny that Tess is special. I mean, in some ways she’s far, far beyond other kids her age. But along with that comes some things that are…unusual. Difficult to handle. To know what to do with. There’s not a book for every single child, is there?”

He had not made a move to say anything back.

“I mean, God!” Janet flung her head back in frustration. “Can you people honestly read a folder of a teacher’s impressions and decide a child is in need of analysis? What if she’s just going through a stage? There’s so much we can’t know about anybody, let alone a child who’s only seven, who might have just had a funny dream or heard a chance remark…”

“Ma’am?” He laid a hand on her arm. The hard callous of his palm arrested her in mid-sentence. “I’m Roy Anistakis. I’m a private investigator.”

“A what?” Janet croaked, aghast.

“A private investigator,” he repeated patiently. “Meredith…Mrs. Fusz…is employing me on a personal matter. The folder we were looking at has to do with my investigation. I don’t know your daughter, if it’s your daughter you were talking about; Mrs. Fusz has never mentioned her to me.”

Janet was at last breathing regularly. She looked up at a lumpy cloud highlighted by the relentless sun, wishing she lived someplace where it rained more often. Somewhere like Seattle or Portland, where people went into coffee shops to wait out the weather and soft music played on the radio.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s my daughter I was talking about. Tess. She’s seven years old, and she’s very…” Janet looked at Roy Anistakis, into his nubilous grey eyes. “Different,” she finished. “She’s different from the other children.”

He smiled. “Well, what kid isn’t?” he said, tossing his hands up carefreely. Her arm felt cold where his hand had left it.

She shook her head, with a sad smile. “It’s not that simple,” she informed him.

“Oh, I don’t think that,” he responded. “I’m a private investigator. I know nothing’s simple.”

“You think it will be, when you’re young,” Janet said, her eyes straying again to locate Tess. “You think you’ve got yourself all ready to handle whatever comes along.”

“It’s the one thing you haven’t thought of that you end up having to handle,” said Roy. “I know. Whatever you get ready for, you never have to deal with.”

“It’s true!” Janet gawked earnestly at him. “I read all about investments when I was in college. I thought, when the time is right, and we’ve saved a little money, I’ll keep my eye on the market, and we’ll buy some savings bonds and get ahead a little. Maybe get into real estate.”

“But you haven’t.”

“No! Just the opposite. My husband drives a truck.”

“Does he.”

“And look around here. There’s no real estate. ConAgra owns all the land. What is there to invest in? But my daughter…” Janet laughed bitterly. “She writes stories about the devil.”

“Does she.”

“Look!” Janet thrust the scrawled pages at him. “She wrote this and my husband doesn’t think it’s anything to worry about. She’s seven years old!” Janet insisted to Roy Anistakis’ impassive face. She was satisfied to see him raise his eyebrows appropriately—not enough to signal a judgment on Tess, whom he did not know, but to indicate recognition of the situation’s distinctiveness.

He ran his eyes down the first page. “Seven years old,” he repeated.

Janet laughed incredulously. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s normal for a wholesomely raised seven year old girl. And believe me, there are few kids around here who could boast of a better childhood than Tess. I was reading to her when she was six months old. We did flashcards.”

He was nodding intently. Janet saw over his shoulder that the school yard was thinning out. Mothers were departing with their children into the parking lot.

“I have to get Tess,” she sighed.

“Wait.”

He put out a hand to stop her. They stood side by side, facing opposite directions, his hand pressed against the ball of her shoulder. She looked down, finding stiff black hairs on his hand.

“I have to go,” said Janet in monotone.

“I’ll give you a ride,” he said.

“No,” she answered.

“You’ll be okay,” he told her.

“It’s all wrong.” She shook her head impatiently. His hand lingered on her shoulder until she moved beyond his reach.



Terence sat at a counter, tracing his finger in the grease. His coffee was cold, but summoning the waitress would bring an end to the story she was confiding to the line cook through the order window, a story Terence was enjoying, mostly because he was not meant to.

When he was dating Janet, she would have sudden imperative urges that he thrilled to fulfill. One such was a craving for waffle house food: coffee from a Pyrex urn, ketchup on an order of hash browns, English muffins with ancient grape jelly. Terence thought of watching her eat, every bite a lunge that sent her hair swinging across her forehead, while he was completely ignored. It was her and the fork on those occasions; he was there to pay and to record it in memory. When he mentioned that was how it felt, she laughed and began calling him Alice B., though she never explained why.

Occasions like those convinced him that Janet loved him. She would unreservedly expound her ideas to anyone; it was only in front of him that she ate like a hog. Had he ever learned that she was being accompanied to Pizza Heaven by some other guy, he might have gone and bought a gun.

He tried to remember when she had changed. He supposed other men would blame the child as the organ of change, but Terence dismissed that with a smile. When Tess came, Janet was ready with an itemized schedule for the next twenty years. That was her way; he was not surprised by it.

That left him with the consideration that it was he who had changed, but that idea was no more illuminating than the first. He loved her no less. He understood her no more than when they sat side by side at other greasy counters, long ago.

The difference was that he did not long for her, as he used, to be sitting beside him now. He had discovered that it would be no help.

The realization came with no great feeling.

The waitress was going strong still with her story; Terence had kept apprised of it, despite his private reflections. He swallowed the dregs of his coffee.

His cellular phone buzzed against his thigh. The number was not one he recognized.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Tess?”

The waitress and the line cook looked up at him indignantly. Terence slid away from the counter and ambled toward the door, apologetically ducking his head at them.

“What’s up, honey? Where are you?”

“In the principal’s office.”

“Really? What are you doing there?”

“Mommy’s not here yet.”

“She’s not? What…is everything all right? Are you in trouble, honey?”

“No. I’m not in trouble.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“Mommy’s not here, and school’s out.”

Terence looked at his watch. “School’s out. How long have you been waiting?”

“Um…an hour and sixteen minutes.”

Terence pushed through the glass door into the restaurant foyer. He leaned a hand against the window.

“Did they call Mommy?”

“Yes. They called lots of times. Mrs. Fusz already went home. Mrs. Pullman is calling again.”

“Calling Mommy at home?”

“Yes. They said I should call you to come get me.”

“Oh. Oh, honey, I’m in Wyoming.”

“Really? Yeah, I told them you were on a trip. But they said call anyway.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Where are you going? California?”

“No. Oregon, this time.”

“Where?”

“Salem.”

“That’s the capital.”

“Is that right?” Terence caught his fingers drumming on the window. He stopped them. Irritably, he let them start again. Then he put his hand in his mouth and bit down on it.

“Mrs. Pullman hung up. I guess Mommy’s not there still.”

“Do you know where she might be?” Terence waited. “Honey? Tess? Are you still…?”

She came back into his sentence. “Mrs. Dipple says ask if you know any phone numbers of neighbors or friends they should call.”

Who were all these women? Terence thought wildly, and why didn’t they know what to do? He was in Wyoming, and they were there in the same state as his daughter, and his wife.

A cold little thought coursed like a lone goose through his head.

“Let me think.” The neighbors closest down the road were old people; the wife he suspected of alcoholism, and he wouldn’t trust the old man with a female puppy, let alone his daughter. He had no idea who Janet’s friends might be. “Do you have a friend at school you could go home with?”

“All the kids have already…”

“That’s right, that’s right. Let’s see.” He shook his head to clear its gathering storm. “Honey? Tess? I’m going to do this: I’m going to hang up with you for just a minute, and go through my cell phone to find someone who can help. Okay? You can call me back in ten minutes. Okay?”

“Okay. I love you.”



Janet rolled over on the pillow. The black hairs tickled her nose.

“There’s a beautiful irony at work here,” she informed Roy.

He lifted the cigarette from his lips, smiling.

“Do you see it?” she persisted. “You see what I mean?”

He turned his head halfway toward her; his eyes rolled the rest of the way. “You talk too much. You know that?”

She should have been accustomed to his lazy causticism by that time. It still made her wriggle with pleasure, the suppressed discourse knocking about inside her for release.

Roy blew smoke at the ceiling. “Did you see that?” he said, pleased. “I can do rings. Watch.” He did it again.

Janet willed herself to keep silent, fascinated by each moment that she found she could endure without speaking her mind.

“But I can only do it on my back anymore. It used to be part of my act…I was a magician.” He looked for her full attention. “Before the whole private eye thing, I was.”

“Really?” she encouraged him hoarsely.

He passed her the cigarette. “Sure was,” he said. “I played conventions and some Vegas hotels.”

He took the smoke back from Janet, who had held onto it out of courtesy.

“You always think about getting a little farther than you do,” he said. “I kept thinking how was I going to learn escaping. I practiced putting shivs in my heels. That’s what Houdini did. Lock picks in his mouth, wire in his hair. Friend who went to prison showed me how to do it.” He looked over at her again. “You know what I’m talking about? Tanks of water, getting tied up in a trunk.”

Janet nodded vigorously.

“Yeah.” He poised the glowing butt against his lips. “You need money for that.”



Terence sat on the foyer banquette, his elbows on his knees. A group of five elderly people squeezed past him, intent on entering the restaurant abreast. Tess had called him twice; each time he anxiously signed off for another ten-minute interval. There was no one in his address book to call.

It occurred to him very little to wonder where Janet was, after the first shock of her delinquency. If she wasn’t dead or hurt somewhere, then she was all right, and there was, in any case, nothing he could do. It was that incapability he mused on, and on the strange pleasure it gave him. Though he agreed with the office women that the predicament lay on his hands, he found himself foolishly smiling at the thousand miles that separated them.

Who am I? Terence thought incredulously, pulling at the unkempt hair around his ears. What kind of father? What kind of man? But the words, like the responsibility, were impalpable.

It was unthinkable to go back to the motel and watch Nick at Nite, as he had vaguely thought of doing before Tess had called. He could no more do that now than he could, on any other work night, find himself a hooker. Yet he knew many fathers who did so, men who would have twenty numbers to call if their daughters phoned from school to say that their mothers were mysteriously absent.

The cell phone jangled again, twice, before he answered it.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, honey.”

She was quiet, waiting for him to say something.

“How’s it going?” he asked, trying to sound bright.

He heard her sigh with wry good humor. “Mrs. Pullman went home. Mrs. Dipple keeps asking questions about Sesame Street.”

“Sesame Street?”

“She thinks I watch it.”

He gave a wry chuckle. Tess said nothing.

“They still haven’t found Mommy yet, huh?”

“No. I guess you’re pretty far away, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yeah, sweetie, I’m a long ways away. I can’t come and get you.”

“Yeah. I know.”

They were both quiet for several moments. Terence listened to Tess’ breathing, wondering desperately what she was thinking, unable to say anything more himself. I’m sorry, he thought, hoping it would transmit from his adult mind to the one she would have someday. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Being far away changes love. You don’t know what it’s like, far away, where no one sees you.

She spoke again, this time in an undertone.

“Mrs. Dipple wants to go home,” she said.

“Yeah,” he hoarsely croaked.

“Well,” said Tess, “she makes good brownies. She brings them to all the classes on Valentine’s Day.” She paused for several moments. “’Cause I guess I’ll go to her house, if Mommy doesn’t get here.”

“You will? I mean, you think she’ll…”

“I don’t know. She took Greg Hoffmann to the hospital when his mom got in a car crash.”

A designated collector for the school strays, Terence thought. He pictured himself spreading his hands in helpless apology before a woman wielding a chocolate-stained spatula.

“They asked if our neighbors could help,” said Tess, “but I’m not going over there.”

“What? Why not?”

“I don’t like them. Mrs. Baxter is mean and Mr. Baxter is funny. I decided if they try to take me there I’ll throw a fit.”

“Tess,” said Terence admiringly, “you’re the smartest girl I know.”

“Mommy’s friend said that, too. Do you think I should be a doctor?”

“Sure. You should be anything you want.”

A gang of flannelled truckers barreled into the foyer, pushing each other and barking laughter.

“What’s that noise? Where are you?”

“I’m in a restaurant. I was having some coffee when you called.”

“In Wyoming?”

“Yes. It’s dinner time now so everyone is coming in.”

“Is it a trucker stop?”

“A…yes, it’s a truck stop. How did you know that?”

“I just guessed. We were shopping last night, and we drove past a restaurant, and it said they had French toast special, and I wanted to eat dinner there, but Mommy said no, it was a trucker stop, and you can’t have French toast for dinner, only for breakfast.”

“Well, Mommy was wrong,” said Terence, watching through the glass as the truckers bandied with the waitress. “You can have anything you want any time of day.”

“Really?”

“If you were here,” he said, “eating dinner with me, you could have French toast.”

“What would you have?”

“Chicken soup and meatloaf.”

“I’m hungry,” said Tess.

“Well, soon you’ll be having delicious brownies.” He immediately hated himself for saying it.

“Do you think Mommy’s okay?”

He could not speak.

“They were whispering before Mrs. Pullman left, and they called the hospital.”

“Really? Did it sound like...” He stopped, wondering how he could think of asking his daughter to gauge the likelihood that her mother was to be found in the hospital. “I’m sure she’s fine.” There was simply no alternative to offer.

“Do you think I could be a magician?”

“What?”

“You have to be smart for that too, don’t you?”

“Sure. Really smart.”

“I learned a magic trick. I can show you when you come home.”

“How did you learn that?”

“Mommy’s friend showed it to me. When are you…”

He heard a muffle of commotion on her end of the line. Her voice came back after a moment.

“Mommy’s here!” she crowed. “Oh, I gotta go. Wait. Do you want to talk to her?”

Terence found his voice. “Does she look okay?”

“Yeah. I think so. Mrs. Dipple’s talking to her now.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “That’s okay. I’ll talk to her after you get home. I’m glad you’re okay now, honey.”

“Yeah. I love you. Whoa, Mrs. Dipple just yelled. Okay, I love you, Daddy. Bye.”

Dark had fallen around the glass walls of the foyer. Dion and the Belmonts issued plaintively from the jukebox against the far wall. Terence bought a pack of Kool Lights from the vending machine and, when he returned to the motel, changed to a smoking room. He burned determinedly through the pack, one by one, staring at the shades of grey on the silent television screen--Rob Petrie shouted with muted fury as Laura flung her skinny arms about. He ought to break one of those skinny arms, Terence thought, snap it like a matchstick, it would be so easy, and then no need to shout anymore. He smiled at his own assurance, stabbing the cigarette into the ashtray. He ought to have taken the phone to Janet when Mrs. Dipple was through with her. A man's home should not be compromised while he was away, providing for it. Clearly, it was time he commanded her full attention.

not into it

i was one of those babies, of whom i have heard and witnessed a number, who are entranced by the sight of their own face. my brother was the same way--we used to hold him up to the bathroom mirror and laugh incessantly at the subtle changes of expression he would present to himself. he would look straight into his own eyes, and the communications of his face were as obvious as those in a silent film:

"oh! i'm sorry, i didn't know anyone else was here."

"gee...i don't mean to be untoward, but you are arrestingly good-looking."

"oh, stop! you flatter me."

"your smile is simply enchanting."

"what luck to have met you here...i'll remember this encounter all my life."

to be fair, he was a devastatingly cute baby. we all worshiped him for his good looks--maybe that is why my dad spends so much time smacking him down as he matures.

but i was not a good-looking adolescent. i had blunt features and limp hair and an undeveloped body perpetually dressed in a big t-shirt and soccer shorts, both in saturated primary colors. (the same colors, you ask? or different? would either way make it any better?) i knew i wasn't good-looking and played to great effect a character that didn't care about it.

nonetheless, while we were holding my baby brother, with his useless feet propped against the bathroom counter, and laughing at his existential antics, my eyes continually slid over to examine my own reflection.

"this is what it looks like when i'm laughing."

then would come a break, in which some nether corner of my mind adjusted the attitude i had just encountered, like an artist playing with the pose of his model.

"so with my chin angled this way...just a little so no one will notice...but when i do that my hair curves around my brow and i look sort of mysterious..."

and inevitably i would practice these poses later, in front of my own mirror.

maybe my sisters are better-adjusted people because they shared a room and didn't have as much solitary leisure. no matter what you're doing when you're alone, you tend to be distracted by the fact that you're doing it. you know what i mean? your great virtue in studying, for example, the wrenchingly pitiful sound of your own crying.

the consciousness of how i look has always been the greatest foe to my self-expression. "The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have," according to F. Scott Fitzgerald...and, by the way, "When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm." i guess i've always known these things, instinctively--not to say you didn't; good writing tells the world what it already knows. some people are self-conscious about how loud their voice is, or that they don't have a college education, and assume those things must stick out a mile. for me, it's my physical features that stick out a mile, that i suppose everyone must be looking at and thinking, "what in the world helps her get out of bed in the morning?"

ugh. it's just how it is. i feel i could bear anything if i just looked all right, and that my faults would all be a little more forgivable. i want to forget about myself; i try to do it. that's why i like to stay busy. that's why i like to play characters.

we've all got this character inside us that we're pretty sure we could be, if it weren't for this one thing holding us down, that makes us available to all the other petty impedimentia. we're born with an instinctive motivation for flight, and also with a ball-and-chain. is it an excuse? is it a demon? is it a gift in disguise?

if it went away, would we all be better people, or would we be a world of Narcissuses? would we really be able to forget ourselves?

st. germain is deserted

The shadow of St. Sulpice bends over the river, and the street hurts my eyes with its brilliance under the two o'clock sun. Low echoes fall, like water dropping in a cave, from the empty windows above the street. People are sluggishly moving from room to kitchen, and back. The cafés are full—their hushed conversation escapes like a rat across the cobblestones—but the shaded windows hide from me the shopkeepers and businessmen taking their break.

The boulevard is clean, forsaken, blank of sound and even smell. The rowhouses hunch together in sullen confederacy. Fragmented music from a sightseers’ barge drifts through an alley, mocking the somnolence. In a storefront, the figurine salt-shakers and painted porcelain bowls lift their shiny glazed faces in a garish sob. The woven scarves trail listlessly upon the pavement. Behind me, two men in black suits emerge from a door, cross, and dissolve in the narrow shadows.

The American bookstore is closed. My friend left the city yesterday. I have no money. I stand in the broad sunlight, shaking.

(first published 6.28.07, 9.38am)

the winter carnival

Ardith Dutton had been writing to her English correspondent for seventy years. The two met through a pen-pal exchange devised by their schools, about the time that the Allies were reaching wary hands of partnership across the waters. When the bombs dropped on London, Ardith could not be pried from her post beside the Zenith Stratosphere.

"Dear Fredericka," her letter entreated, "are you all right? I am beside myself worrying about you, and I will not sleep a wink until I get a letter back in your own hand. I have been with my ear to the radio all this evening, lisetning about the boms in your city. My dad he wanted to make me come to dinner, and he bellered so loud I could not hear the radio hardly, then he tried to pick me up and carry me in to dinner but boy I fought him, I do not hardly know what posesssed me, and do you know he let me loose and stay there. And now he is calling me Spitfire. So it is like I am a plane and I wish I was a plane, Fredericka so I could fly over London and rescue you.

Ardith's mother was a woman well-disposed to the drama of their relationship; she added to the family income by the writing of lurid dime-store novels. This vocation afforded Ardith two advantages in her correspondence. Not only was she able to type her letters on an Underwood Three, but also she was encouraged by her mother to preserve the carbons of the letters she sent across the sea. Consequently, Ardith again read the foregoing to herself in the kitchen of her home on the edge of Gopher Road, only a few days before her eightieth birthday. During the occasion made of it by her nieces, nephews and cousins, and all their children, she felt fairly old. But when she was alone, moving in her rounds of daily life, she did not feel any older than she did at twenty-eight. At twenty-eight, she had not felt particularly young, nor old, either. She was simply herself, five feet and five inches tall, gnarled, like a tree in a windbreak, with hard knots of muscle along her limbs. She perseveringly fed her chickens and horses, drove her truck, walked in her fields, pulled up weeds in her garden, shoveled the snow off her walkway, and hung her laundry to dry in the wind. Her mother had passed when she was forty-two, her father when she was fifty.

By a strange coincidence unknown to either of them, the letter that Ardith read, as she baked her own birthday cake in the quietness of her kitchen, was also was the letter that Fredericka Wolsey read some few days after her own eightieth birthday, on the morning of the day that she died of renal failure.

Ardith set aside Wednesday afternoons as her time to write to Fredericka. She did a tidy amount of work during the morning but did no shopping or errands or visiting. She spent the noontime pondering different turns of phrase as she ate her lunch. At two-thirty, she would settle herself wherever it felt most apt for writing that day--sometimes the swing on the back porch, sometimes at the kitchen table, sometimes at the little secretary facing west in her bedroom, sometimes tucked into her bed. She had done that once and felt quite naughty for it; she meant to do it again one day, and chuckled to herself at the thought of it. She usually began to write in earnest at three, and seldom finished before five. She would mull on the letter all evening and night, and the next day she would copy it over on the typewriter, on proper stationery, inserting the improvements she came up with in the twelve hours preceding. The letter would be posted by noon on Thursday, which meant that Fredericka would receive it, if all went as it ought to, on the Monday that followed the second week from the date it was posted.

Avery Simms collected the mail on Gopher Road until his stroke, after which his nephew Jamison took over the route for him. Ardith was ill pleased by this change. It was Jamison who told her that the Gopher Road route was likely to be closed soon, and she would have to pick up her mail in town.

"Why on earth?" Ardith asked him, in clipped tones. "Don't I pay my taxes, state and local?"

"All the houses that useter be on thisyer road are selling out, getting pulled down," said Jamison Simms, gesturing languidly eastward. "Farms are getting bigger and folks don't wanter live so far out ther way."

"Whose houses have been pulled down?" Ardith knew the answer, even before she asked it, but she demanded a explanation of him.

"Phippses, O'Tooles, Gertlers, Paleys. All 'em building nice new places close to town, with air conditioning and whatnot." Jamison shrugged. "Ts'more convenient."

Ardith took her mail and shut the door in his face. She never used to wonder whether her letter would reach Fredericka on time, with Avery Simms carrying it. She did not always like the persistent friendly questions he made of her--"London, England, Miz Dutton? Waterloo Road? Miz Dutton, how d'you come to know somebody in London, England? D'you ever go there, Miz Dutton? Miz Dutton, I'd venture to suspect it was an admirer you have there!" But Jamison asked no such questions, never gave a second glance to the letters she gave into his care. Not surprising, she thought, if he doesn't think this route is worth his time, he's hardly likely to think an individual letter is worth his notice.

She wrote to Fredericka about the impending change. "I've never felt the pressure to sell out my house," she wrote. "It will be a cold day in hell before they buy up this land to build tract housing on it. The only possible inducement for anyone to leave this place would be of their own devising. The insolent young surrogate postman says that my neighbors have been building houses closer to town, for convenience's sake. It certainly doesn't make me eager to follow suit. But it does give me a strange feeling that I do not relish--that of being left behind, of being forgotten. I'm sure you must have felt something similar upon being sent to Canada. I'm sure your family must have felt the same, watching you leave them for how long no one could guess."

Fredericka's response after the onset of the Blitz was highly unsatisfactory to Ardith, as it came from somewhere on the sea, far to the north.

"Sweet darling Ardith," it said, "Mummy sent me your letter and that I must write to you straightaway. You are a dear and a sweet angel, thank you, I am quite well and now I am living in the town of Saint John, which is in the province of New Brunswick in Canada. It is a very pretty place now but they say it will become terribly cold in the winter and if they make me go to school here I do not know if I shall survive."

Ardith stewed in her own choler for weeks, wondering how the authorities who determined Fredericka's asylum could have been so dimwitted as not to send her where she would be best looked after. In Waring, Nebraska, the climate was temperate and the town so deeply couched in middle America that Nazis were likely to never know of its existence. She repeated the idiocy of the assignment to her mother and father every night, hinting strongly that they might exercise their adult rights to rectify the situation. "All they would have to do to find her is look across the ocean, and there she is! She's right by the sea!" Even a look at the world atlas, which showed that Saint John was well sheltered by the neighboring province of Nova Scotia, did not avail to assuage her feelings. "She would feel so much more at home here," Ardith insisted. "She doesn't know anybody in Canada." As she said this, however, she was assailed by a deep, insinuating dread that Fredericka might possibly know someone in that faraway country--that she might even have a pen pal of the same age as Ardith, even one who lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. "I'm her best friend in North America," Ardith declared, more staunchly than she felt, as the possibility occurred to her that given a choice of asylum, Fredericka had elected to stay with the Canadian correspondent. She went to bed stormily that night, and considered that she might never write to Fredericka again; "I don't want anyone else to see the letters I write for her," she told her mother each day that week. However, habit and curiosity were too strong for pride to break; on Wednesday she wrote again, perhaps more reservedly, in case interloping eyes were casting judgment on the missive. And the response was overwhelmingly rewarding. Fredericka reported that she was staying with a couple who were older than her parents, who ran a dairy farm, who had two grown-up sons, one who lived apart with his wife and the other who lived on the farm to help his aging father, and had a nose like Jimmy Durante's.

Ardith had little to say to Jamison Simms after his proclamation on the fate of Gopher Road. Her resentment grew in the weeks that followed it, and she wondered how long she might have to put up with his presence on the mail route. One rainy Thursday in April, as she was making the exchange of outgoing and receiving mail, she snipped at him, "How is your uncle coming along?"

Jamison blinked at her; it had been some time since she had done any more than sniff or grunt at him. "Coming along?" he said.

"Is is his health improving?"

Jamison shrugged. "Can't talk too good," he said. "Gets around all right, so long as he don't strain hisself trying to do too much."

Ardith had a sudden, stark picture of Avery Simms sidling feebly through his family's house, attempting to lift a pail or open a window, struggling with it until someone condescendingly guided him away from the effort and deposited him in a rocking chair.

"It's a terrible thing for the old to admit defeat," she murmured reproachfully. She shut the door softly and stood with her back against it, her chest rising and falling with unaccountable severity. Her fingers played against each other frenetically, her glance swung from one corner of the hall to another. The screech of cicadas outside pressed nervously against her, and the noise of a flight of crows swelled like a blood vessel swifting its expanding urgency toward the unsuspecting brain. She dropped her received mail on the sideboard and tripped up the stairs to her writing desk.

"Dearest Ardith, it is unimaginably cold here. I do not know how the weather is in Nebraska, but I cannot imagine that it is colder than here. I am not attending school anymore because I came down with a cough in October and it did not go away for several weeks because the building suffers terrible draughts. Instead I do my lessons beside the hearth, wrapped in a blanket. Mrs. Johns makes them herself. She is very kind. I am feeling much better now that I can stay warm always. Mr. Johns says I must get used to the cold soon, because they want to take me to the Winter Carnival, which is in Montreal, in the province of Quebec. I have asked them what it is, but they will not tell me! They say I must get strong and used to the cold, so that I can see this wonderful thing."

Ardith scribbled feverishly across the pages of her loose-leaf, her thoughts brief passages across the intransigent vision of Avery Simms' face, red and strained with effort, or pale yellow like a faded leaf against a window fastly closed.

Avery Simms, who was so friendly all their long acquaintance, had wanted to marry her once; after she gleefully refused him, he remained staunchly friendly. He married another woman he met in France, while he was in the service. She had not liked Waring at all, and they never had any children, and then she caught pneumonia one winter and died.

The following Monday was stormy and sullen, by turns. Unable to go about her usual errands and chores due to the weather, Ardith stayed in bed, with the covers pulled over her head, and dozed heavily through the morning. She awoke with a start when a window shutter banged against the window frame, and with an astonished look at the clock, though she remembered choosing to stay in bed and sleep late, she pulled on her clothes and made her way down the stairs.

Thinking of the reactionary, extraneous letter she had written, she smiled wryly to find the letter from Henley-on-Thames, where Fredericka had retired to with her husband since 1972. She perused it cursorily, as she always did, using the first pass to get a general sense of what it held before she delved into its particulars. She turned on the stove flame under the kettle, and set the letter beside the coffee mill so she could look at it as she turned the handle.

Ardith reckoned that she would not send the extra letter she had written. In light of Fredericka's cordial, dispassionate prose, it seemed to overstep the crafted parameters of their correspondence. They were always frank about their opinions, but impartial about their validity; they wrote no emotional propaganda, betrayed no effusions of vitriol or despair or enthusiasm. Ardith did not fear that Fredericka would think ill of her for reacting as she had, but she wanted to spare her the chore of deciding how to respond. Growing old was a fact, like snow was a fact, like weeds and horse shit. You could shove it out of your way, or you could wax eloquent about how it made you feel.

She set her coffee cup before her and began to read in earnest.

"Dear Ardith, Happy eightieth birthday! Everyone will tell you--no doubt has already told you--what a milestone you have reached. No doubt you are sick of hearing congratulations. Do they suppose we have learned everything at our age, and are sitting smugly on the wisdom we have amassed? I, for one, have quite the same lingering doubts about life and what is to be done with it, as I had when first we began to write, and the older I grow, the more they seem to insinuate themselves into my thoughts..."

She understands, Ardith thought, pleased and a little amazed. Perhaps--she read through the rest of the letter, and found this idea growing stronger--perhaps we are old enough to change. The following Thursday, she sent the letter she had written the previous week, with some addenda pertaining to week since.

Once the ground froze over and there was nothing to inspect in her fields, Ardith took long walks down Gopher Road. She went eastward, toward town, if she wanted to buy anything or see anyone. But usually she went west, with her shoulders back, her head toward the ground, and her boots uncompromising on the muddy ice. It did not signify that she paced over the same steps each day; the road in winter bore no vestige of its character during the rest of the year. The old live oak that had been split by lightning before she was born looked no different from as the maples that were planted as a windbreak only the previous spring, and like them were the slender silver birches that lined the road just off the drive from the Paleys' former place. The sky reduced everything that stood on the earth under it--growing, reaching things made feeble as a cry in the wind. Whatever in other seasons might mark the distance she went, was shrouded by a blinding sameness of light; Ardith often found herself startled by sudden darkness, as the sun dropped after unnoticed hours she spent plodding forward, her teeth and her fists clenched in defiance of the cold.

"Fredericka, today I walked for what must have been three hours or more, over the frozen road. I might have gone farther, I'm sure I have before, except that I happened upon a pearl necklace lying by the side of the road. I do not understand how I came to see it, for as I said the ground is all frozen and the reflection off the snow and ice practically blinds me, anywhere I look. But there it was, lying in the snow. I stood there and stared at it for some time. I suppose it must have been dropped by someone going past in a car, or perhaps it was being carried by a bird sometime in the year previous. How long might it have been lying there?

It made Ardith sick to think what she had written afterward, halting attempts at understanding some bedridden emotion that could not assert itself fully, only lurch about in her belly. She brushed away tears of angry shame, thinking how she had suddenly snatched up the necklace, hurried home with it in her fist, mincing hastily over the slippery road, and upon arrival had taken the necklace upstairs and shut it out of sight, into a drawer. She wondered at herself for scribbling such overwrought drama, and resolved that if Fredericka forgave it and condescended to write back, she must never again subject either of them to it.

She opened the door on a drippy Monday, but not to Jamison Simms. It was a woman of about thirty years old, with a square haircut and soft, sensible clothes, her shoes covered in mud, and a face like a sheep.

"Hello," said the woman to Ardith.

"I'm not buying anything today," Ardith said, more curt than even her wont, for she had a bad cold.

"No! I'm not selling anything." The woman's speech had deep, open o's and soft, upturned a's.

Ardith blinked at her, and they both stood in silence for a moment.

"Who are you?" Ardith said. Before the woman could answer, she hurriedly said,

"Is Fredericka all right?"

The woman's eyebrows shot up past her eyeglasses. "Yes!" she quickly answered. "That is...that is to say..."

They sat in the kitchen, facing each other. The light was muted and undemanding around them, having much to do with spring's hard effort outside.

Ardith faced the woman imposingly, unwilling to speak.

"I am Nigella Allan," she said, proffering her hand with some trepidation.

Ardith took it momentarily and gave it up.

"Are you here to tell me Fredericka is dead?" she asked.

The woman took a halted breath. "I...yes."

Ardith stayed upright, but her eyes dropped to the surface of the table. "When?" she gruffly demanded.

"Er..."

Ardith's eyes snapped back up, arresting the woman in her prevarication. "When!"

"Last April!" the woman blurted, terrified.

Again they sat in silence. Then Ardith's hands flew together and clenched, until the knuckles showed bone through her skin.

"April!" she croaked. "April!" A tingling sensation rushed up her arms, over her face, over her scalp; it seemed as if she could feel her hair turning its final white all at once. "A year ago!"

"April. Yes." The woman's face was flushing as pink as a young crabapple. "Ardith...Miss Dutton...please, forgive me. I've been...it's been me, writing to you. I'm Fredericka's granddaughter. She showed me your letters when I was a little girl, and we always read them together; when she died, I couldn't bear to have them stop coming. They've meant the world to me in the last few years...Ardith." She looked for permission to go on using the familiar name.

Ardith said nothing; she stared at the wall over Nigella Allan's head. The news hung in the air and dropped softly, like snowflakes falling with a mild, dissolving burn upon her skin.

"I suppose," she said, one word plodding relentlessly toward the next, "it helped you feel close to her, after her death."

"Oh! It was...more than that," said Nigella, miserably pink. "That was part of it, of course, but really it was you, Ardith. The things you wrote about were so...they helped me to understand life. Especially in the last year. I couldn't bear to lose all of that." She looked about her in despair. "I only came because...in your last few letters, you seemed to wish you had done things...gone places... And I thought, perhaps, if you couldn't go to them, being old..." She stopped, her face shrimp-colored and contorted with shame.

Ardith looked up, startled, with a thunderous frown.

"Did I say that?" she demanded.

"No," Nigella squeaked meekly. "But...I thought, perhaps it might cheer you up." Her gaze dropped to the ground; she seemed to be looking for a crack to crawl into.

The rain went about its business outside with a noise that did much to forgive the painful awkwardness created by their congress. There was a sudden, sharp noise that made them both jump; it was caused by an involuntary motion Ardith made in her chair. She had felt a creeping sensation deep within her bones, something alien and much too proprietary.

Ardith looked at Nigella determinedly.

"Where do you come from, exactly?" she asked. "Henley-on-Thames?"

"No," said Nigella, yet more shame-faced, "I posted that as the return address, but... I live in London."

London... Ardith had only a mental picture of a radio, and fish-shaped bombs falling--they fell incessantly toward indistinct spires silhouetted on a red sky.

She thought of all the foolish things she had said, in her letters, and wondered whether Fredericka had read them also to her husband, to her other friends, as well as this grandchild. She thought of foreign eyes looking at the things she felt, talking about the things she hardly understood.

A milder climate, she considered, must make people different from us. We are raised to expect the cold, and endure it. But, she thought, it seems we live a longer time.

hoping devoutly for an implosion, however slow

there is this place i know of, that is remarkably free of any kind of pressure. it isn't home; but then, what is?

when i am there, no one is watching, and somehow i'm able even to stop watching myself when i'm there. whatever is going on around me is held off just a hand away, sinking into a wrap-around ambience of mild warmth and white noise. the air is lightweight but palpable, like fog in a tropical dusk. sunlight and starlight reach in but only to paw the window glass. whoever is there doesn't mind that i am there, even if they are not there while i am there.

how did i find this place? how did i know i could go there, when i've always been so cautious in every other place and opportunity? what made me think i had a right? how did i not get myself ejected from it, in justified outrage at my outrageous confidence of entitlement to it?

it's always a late afternoon vacation in that place, no matter what the outside weather suggests.

i wish i was there now. i wish i somehow could be there all the time, when whatever is inside me can rest and forget about the parts of me that hold the reality down, heavily earthbound.

i feel this place deep inside my heart, and i blow on the spark encouragingly, hopefully, with my eyes closed to stop the analytical inclination to reduce it to a sum of parts.

certain people encourage its slow, exponential emergence; others make me forget its existence.

maybe, by writing this down, i can help myself remember it.

i know this place isn't reality, but it holds off the competing realities and affords some rest to the reality i am prone to forget, so it can regain its strength. there are always blankets on that couch, always a fire in the stove beside it, usually a cat or a dog at hand, always music or a subtle, intelligent voice on the radio. good night, sweet prince, and stay as long as you want.

dedicated to j, and w, and k and m and s. you will never, never know the extent of my love for you.

scene from home life

“Goddamit, Frank!”

The screen door slammed.

“Jeez, what?” He set down his coffee and, for a very brief moment, watched the liquid settle in the cup upon the table’s equilibrium.

“Frank!” She swished into the kitchen from the front hallway. “Frank!”

She looked at him with the weirdest mix of accusation and pleading, much how Joan of Arc must have looked when they stepped back from lighting the pile under her, he thought.

“Well, what?” His chin rested on his shoulder. No point in rushing the process, he thought.

“You can’t set the garbage can on the bricks like that.” She chopped her hand back and forth in the air. “They’re uneven? Next to the step?”

“Well?” Wait, he thought, that was not right. “I’m sorry.”

"Well! Well!?"

It was only fair, he thought. He had said that first.

“I went to put the last garbage in and the whole thing tipped over. On the sidewalk. And they’re not going to pick it up off the sidewalk. The whole thing is spilled across the bricks”

“Honey!” he moaned. “It was full already. Of course it tipped over.”

“It tipped over because you put it on the bricks that are uneven. I’ve told you. You know that.”

“But…” He knew before he said it that it would not work. “…I balanced it.”

“Frank!” Her hands on her hips made her look taller. It defied reason, he thought, looking at her. The skirt of her muu-muu flared out from under her hands. Why did she wear that? He wondered. It was old lady clothes. And yet she looked like a tropical flower, dangerous and seductive.

“Frank!” She knew he was not paying attention to her words. He smiled to think of what if she knew what he was paying attention to.

“Frank!” Again, pleading and accusatory. Amazing. Joan of Arc never got very old.

“What do you want me to do?”

“The coffee grinds are all over the sidewalk!" The import struck her suddenly. “You put coffee grinds on top of the garbage can! It was full! Frank!”

His hands turned out, palms up. “You put the paper bag on top when it was full.”

“But the coffee grinds are all over the sidewalk now.”

Amazing, he thought. He sat back and looked at her. Her face was glowing with the humidity that was already expanding the air, though it was barely seven in the morning.

“Frank, are you listening to me?”

He smiled.

“Frank!”

“Yes?” he said, still smiling.

“What in god’s name is so funny, Frank?”

He turned his body toward her, in the chair, to get a better look.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

”Come here,” he said.

“The coffee grinds are all over the sidewalk.” Before she had quite finished the sentence, she stopped. Suddenly she understood.

(first published 7.9.07, 7.24am)
dedicated to my dad

oppression

In the summer’s heat, she gets a really bad case. It used to alarm us but now we expect it. There will be a few thunderstorms at the end of May, and we sit and watch them from the veranda. They are beautiful to see. And then she rolls her eyes at me, and we smile, and we go upstairs to make love as much as we can, because soon the heat will fall.

Her belly swells up as the rest of her body drains its fluid and flesh, like wax dripping from a candle. Her eyes become like diamonds rimmed in coal, deep sunk in her face, and her face is blackened by the sun and hollow. I keep bringing bottles of water to her in buckets of ice.

It might not be so bad if she were married to someone else. But we wanted to start this inn together—she said it made her fall in love with me. So what could anyone have done? I could apologize, I could try to make her go for her own good. When I look at her to say something like that, she looks up from the stove at me and presses her lips together, her eyes soft in her dripping face. I come and kiss her as gently as I can, and I pray that the summer will be short and that it will rain much.

She is like an ostrich with her long skinny legs and long skinny neck, and her midsection swollen like a balloon. She throws her head back to drink—she can take half the bottle of water in one go, clutching it in her bulbous knuckles. Every ten minutes, she turns off the stove, drops the spoon, and strides from the kitchen with the face of one spellbound, aware and yet helpless to resist. She comes back and resumes the cooking.

We have girls to do the beds and the laundry because the heat upstairs, or coming from the vat, would probably kill her. Once we had a girl who laughed at her, at my wife. She would see her leave the kitchen suddenly and then come back, and she would look around at the other girls and laugh, throwing her head back sometimes to cackle, the way my wife does when she takes a drink. In the house my wife would walk past and the girl would put her hand over her mouth, her eyes full of mirth. I didn’t know what it was about until one night, as we were lying side by side, my wife said, “I would like to dismiss Pilar.”

I said, “Why?”

My wife said nothing for a moment. Then she sighed quietly. “She makes my belly sore.”

I really did not know what she was talking about, but the next day I looked at Pilar as I was going into town, where she was doing the laundry over the steaming vat with the other girls, and saw her looking toward the kitchen and laughing. I stopped my truck, I got out of it and walked toward them, I took Pilar by the shoulder and slapped her across the chin, as if she were a naughty child. She stared at me with innocent eyes that were filling with tears.

“Go and get your things,” I said. “I will wait for you in the truck and take you to the train station.”

I met my wife in the city, in Valencia, when we were both very young, young enough to think that we would never really fall in love with anybody. It seemed the time had passed. I met her at a party, and we talked. Other people interrupted us and we talked to them, of course, thinking we would never see each other again, that the time had passed. But then we would find ourselves talking again. I guess I must have sometime told her that night how I would like to open an inn in the country, with only a few rooms, and a bar, and serve the simplest tapas to travelers and whatever local people would accept a newcomer. Because that is what I love in the country—nobody lies in order to be your friend. It is their prerogative to accept or reject you. They won’t run you out if you don’t give them cause, but they have no reason to trust you or like you unless they choose to. I have never lived in the country, I was not brought up that way, but I wanted to live among such people because that is how I am. That is how I am with everyone except for my wife. I did not choose to trust her or like her. If you ask me now, I am not sure that I do trust or like her. I look at her, standing over the hot stove with the weather pressing in on the walls that surround her, looking down at the beans in the pan and stirring them, her brow low but calm, her skin molten, her clothes soaked with sweat, her hair piled like smoke above her head, which looks shorn naked because of the black scarf that surrounds it to hold her hair back.

Does a man choose to trust God? Does a man choose to love Him? Maybe, after a time, he says that he trusts and loves Him, that he is grateful to God, that he wishes to obey Him. But he knows all the time that God has him by the scruff of the neck, holds him like a toad in His fist. If he forgets this, God will remind him soon.

That is also how it is with my wife. When I look at her there at the stove, I am surprised to find that I don’t feel anything. I feel numb.

At night, she is so grateful to fall into bed, but she cannot let me caress her. “Not with my big belly,” she says, because she is ashamed. So I sleep as near as I can without making the heat stick between our bodies, I stroke her arm, and I smell her. She smells like everything you want—the food she has been preparing all day—coffee, chorizo, long beans and black beans, garlic, tomatoes, oil, figs, chocolate, bread, and more coffee from early in the morning, which she must have to wake up, though it hurts her belly; she smells like wood smoke and ash, like the breath off the fields of barley, like the olive-oil soap she washes her hands with all day; she smells like the peonies that sit in the window beside the sink; she smells like the perfume she dabs on her neck in the morning; she smells like sweat and that civet musk that all women excrete; and she smells a little, as she fears, like the pain in her belly.

All summer, all I can do in the night is lie awake, for it is too hot to sleep, and go half mad with smelling and not touching more than her arm. I pray for her in the night, and for rain, and autumn, and winter.

(first published 8.9.07, 11.43am)