SPRING 2014

Ben Wexler was observing the one-year anniversary of his wife’s bailing from their marriage by having breakfast at Rosenblatt’s, the kosher deli Victoria despised. It seemed a fitting way to mark the occasion. Quietly spiteful, darkly ironic. She probably didn’t think of herself as anti-Semitic.  She had married a Jew after all. Though she may have thought of it as her own personal pogrom, destroying the race one man at a time.  There had been little comments when they first started dating, Ben’s overhearing Victoria reassure her daughter on the phone that Ben wasn’t “very” Jewish.  He didn’t take it as malicious. Coming from her sweet and unassuming face, he chalked it up to her being raised in a family of Irish alcoholics, whose small-minded prejudices had seeped unexamined into her psyche.  (Unlike Ben, whose loftier mind would never sink to reducing anyone’s family to a cultural stereotype.)

After two previous marriages, one short, the other of significant duration, Ben was confident he had nailed it this time with Victoria. All the obvious battlegrounds were neutralized.  They were age appropriate, they were in good health, had good jobs, zero debt, their habits of hygiene, tolerance for spontaneity, need for privacy, and sexualappetites were all remarkably compatible.  They were done with raising their kids from previous marriages– Ben’s two warring sons, Victoria’s plaintive, well-married daughter.  So the ending, which had been brutal and cold as the month of February, completely blindsided him.

Everyone who’s been through a few relationships knows that the one they are in probably won’t last forever.  Out of this empathic understanding that all of us will one day be the leaver or the left, a kind of implied Geneva Convention has evolved that establishes a hierarchy of civility by which the bad news ought to be delivered, ranking the various choices from classy to shithole.  Up at the top is the face-to-face. You put your hands down at your sides.  You don’t duck.  You take the full shit storm of anger because they deserve at least that.  Below the face-to-face in descending order of courage comes the phone call, the letter, the email, the emissary.  Way down at the far low end would be things like murder, posting sex tapes, forging letters from the Board of health naming his or her ex-lovers as people who have tested positive for HIV.   Not far above those extremes is the text message.

Ben was trapped at a weekend-long departmental retreat when his I Phone pinged.  He was Director of Athletic Communications up at the university.  Driven by the spate of sex scandals at other institutions, a phalanx of lawyers from the chancellor’s office had imposed a mandatory Preparedness Workshop.  Ben was nearly comatose from the eleventh PowerPoint presentation, this one aligning seriousness of offence with frequency of occurrence to yield appropriate responses, when mercifully (he thought) there was a diversion.  When he logged on, the following message appeared on his screen.

When you get home today you will
            see that I have moved out. Send any mail
                     for me back to the Post Office. Let them figure
it out. There’s nothing more to say.

Her message contained neither salutation nor signature, nothing to fan the slightest current of warm air to its icy body temperature.   Ben tapped his colleague Daniel on the shoulder. They were down at the far end of the conference table, out of direct eye contact of the square-shouldered, middle-aged black woman who was leading the current segment.  Daniel furrowed his forehead into long disapproving rows of irrigation ditches.   “Is this a joke?”  His gravelly voice was louder than he meant it to be and drew a sharp rebuke from the chairperson that this was a serious matter, and if one did not believe it, one had only to read the papers or to look at TV.

Victoria had never liked the food at Rosenblatt’s.  The soup was too salty, the eggs were too dry, the pickles were mealy, the atmosphere garish.  All the things that made Rosenblatt’s Rosenblatt’s.  Late nights she preferred the 24 hour chains; Norm’s or Denny’s or DuPars.  She liked tuna and chicken salad.  Sandwiches with mayonnaise.  He knew she would not recall his quirks with nostalgia.  And he was equally certain she was unaware that today marked their relationship yahrtzeit, the one year anniversary of its death; that its subtle awareness did not creep up on her in the preceding weeks as it does with the death of a parent.  It puzzled him that he still thought of her as often as he did, was so keenly aware of places he might drive past that they had been together.  They had not been married for all that long.  Single digits counting dating and a few months cohabitation prior to the wedding.  They had seen each other through no profound loss.  The indentation into the heart muscle should not have been deep.  It should have reassumed its original shape like those new foam mattresses did once the weight-bearing body vacated.

It bothered him that he could not get to the bottom of it. He was a literal-minded, cause-and-effect kind of guy.  Anything that happened needed to have a reason.  Newton’s Laws of Motion applied to relationships.  Every action had an equal and opposite reaction.  Bodies in motion tend to remain in motion at the same speed and direction unless acted upon by an outside force.  The thing with Victoria had different weights, different sums on either side of the equal sign.  It didn’t add up.  Her departure had come at the end of a week of skirmishing: The flash point of the battle had been over a gripe that one or the other of them had raised over some done or undone act of overt or unconscious intention, which within very few back-and-forth strokes across the net had escalated into the patterns their arguments usually took—His anger, his lectures, his analogies, his silence. Her avoidance, her changing her story, her apparent surrender, her exaggerated penance.  He knew the rules of that game.  Where the unexploded ordinance was buried, how close he could come to the brink without triggering the doomsday machine.   But he could not find the trigger that had made it go nuclear.  She had self-detonated.  And she had refused to tell him anything.  Would not open his written letters, deleted his emails, consigned his phone calls to voice mail.

Even now, in the truce around a reasonable divorce settlement, he’d have thought that whatever source of nameless anger she had held then would have dissipated, and that she’d want to examine the past like two old friendly adversaries.  Now that nothing at all was at stake.  But still she avoided any personal exploration.  It was maddening.  He remembered those early, openhearted days, when Victoria wanted him to know her.  She had invited him to attend her AA birthday meeting. When Victoria was called to the podium to accept her cake for twelve years of sobriety Ben was surprised at the professional panache with which she told her story:  How it was when she was drinking and falling face-first into suburban rose bushes, forgetting to pick up her kids at school, or flirting with their male teachers.      All this madness had happened years before Ben knew her.  Hearing her describe that life, it seemed to Ben like another person talking about yet another person.  But it made him feel intimate with her and on the verge of love.  Then at her thirteenth she told the same story nearly verbatim.  With the same pauses, the same intonations.

Clusters of people were waiting at the front of the restaurant alongside the bakery and appetizing counters to be seated.  Ben felt self-conscious about dawdling.  He mopped up the remaining shards of his scrambled egg whites and onions with the last eighth of his buttered bagel when he saw an elderly man get to his feet from a booth at the back end of the restaurant.  The guy had to be ninety, dressed as many elderly Jewish men did, in a dapper sport coat, a pressed white shirt and slacks, a trim necktie, and all topped off with a jaunty chapeau. It may have been a flash of sunlight across the man’s glasses, but Ben thought he caught a glimpse of an alert sense of humor.  The long arduous journey to the front of the restaurant could have mirrored his ancestors’ crossing the Russian Steppes. Ben’s booth was about the halfway point between Vladivostok and Petersburg, and when at last the old man came into range, Ben elevated from his perch and sang out “Uncle,” a respectful greeting he remembered from reading Sholom Aleichem stories in his youth.

The welcoming gesture was somewhat tempered by Ben’s nearly toppling over, the result of the circulation in his bent leg having been cut off. The old man was startled at first, then fearful that he should know who this person was but could not place him.  A relative, God forbid.     Ben touched the man’s shoulder as though his frame might be made of spun glass.   “I thought you might want to rest.  Sit.  Have a cup of coffee.”

“A cup of coffee?  This is all you’re offering?  Coffee I can get anyplace.” Ben was taken aback for a moment.  The man’s face shook very slowly. Ben realized he was witnessing mirth played at one-tenth its normal speed.  Bracing one hand on the back of the booth and the other on the edge of the table, the old man lowered his chrysalis of a body slowly down.

“So.”  He looked across the table to Ben.  “You’re Jewish?”

Ben nodded robust assurance.  “Vu den?” These were the first words of Yiddish Ben had ever uttered in a conversation, and probably represented sixty percent of his full vocabulary.

“You go to temple?’

“Well…not so much lately.  God can probably do without me.”

“What God can do without is not the kvestion.”

The waitress was a tall stocky blonde of fifty who had taken a few wrong turns off Easy Street. Her nametag said Sunny, which had to be a joke.            “Anything else?” She had the check in hand ready to slap down on the table. Ben nodded to his guest on the other side of the booth.

“Oh, it’s you?” she said when she saw who was sitting there.   “I thought we were rid of you today.”  Her voice carried a gruff familiarity.  Like a daughter-in-law who after thirty years of being constantly irked by her husband’s father, comes to love him more deeply than the man she married.

“A nice glass of hot tea would be nice,” the old man said.

“A glass of tea?”

“Tea.  In a glass.  Like a human being.”

Ben turned to translate the order to Sunny.

I know what he wants,” she said.

“Friendly girl,” Ben joked after she had wheeled abruptly away.  He extended his hand across the table and told the man his name

“Ben?”  The old man seemed amused. “A very modern name.”

“No.  Wasn’t Benjamin somebody in the bible?”   He was suddenly feeling the need to assert his Judaic identity, which he had previously cared as much about as being right-handed.

“If I’ll tell you what’s a name…Alexi Ivanovich Balabanoff.  This is a name.”

“That’s a name all right.”

“And if I’ll tell you what they changed it to, the goyim at Ellis Island? To Alan Bland.  This you call a name?  This is an affliction.”

“I’ll tell you another name that’s an affliction.  Victoria Baines.”

“Baines?  He said the name like something was caught in his teeth.  “What did they change it from, Bialistock?

“From Wexler.”

“From Wexler?  How do you change a name to Baines from Wexler?”

“It’s simple.  You divorce Wexler.  You want to see something funny?”  Ben pushed his Iphone up in front of Alexi Ivanovich’s with the text message blared across the screen.  “That’s how you change from Wexler to Baines.”  He was used to people reading the message and blowing  ‘whew’-shaped gusts of air from their mouths.  For a while those downdrafts were all that had kept Ben afloat.

Sunny returned with the glass of hot tea.  She served it in a saucer with a long spoon and four sugar cubes. Alexi Ivanovich set two cubes in each side of his mouth, then inverted the sugar dispenser over his glass and let it pour straight down for five, six, seven seconds.  Ben scolded him with exaggerated severity.  “Don’t you know all that sugar’ll kill you?”

Alexi jabbed his index finger toward the glass. “When I was in a Nazi death camp nobody had sugar.”  Before the sugar had stopped cascading the old man was telling the story of his breathtaking escape from Auschwitz in the arms of his father. In his offhand manner he described living off whatever they could find to eat in the forest, pursued by the German SS, and how one day they came upon an abandoned gypsy camp with a ham still roasting on the open fire, and even though they were starving his father would never let them eat pork.  “You know what’s tref?”

“Yes, I know what tref is!  My name is Ben not Brian.”

Alexi Ivanovich took a sip of his tea and added more sugar.  Ben restrained the impulse to point out that the tea was already supersaturated and could not absorb any more.   Young Alexi and his father miraculously made it to Moscow, to what they thought would be safety. But now they found themselves fleeing from a regiment of Russian infantry who thought they were German spies.  They were just emerging from the manhole into Red Square when Sunny returned and plunked down their amended check.  “I’ve got people waiting.”

Ben politely deferred to his companion.  “Can I get you anything else? A Danish? A bagel?  A piece of strudel?  I want to hear the rest of the story.”  Sunny waited like she had been enduring a debate on C-Span.  “I guess not.” Ben finally said.

“You pay up front.”

“I know where I pay.  I’ve been coming here for twenty years.”

Alexi began to gather himself.

“Wait.  You left me in Moscow with you and your father coming up out of a manhole and half the Russian army waiting.  I want to know what happened!”

“What happened?  What could happen?  They killed him.”

Ben’s head snapped back.  He had been so geared toward an unexpected miracle that when the ending came so ghastly and sudden, he blurted out some idiotic response like, “How can that be!”

“This was also my thought at the time.”

“What did you do?”

“What does a person do?”

“I don’t know! What does a person do?”  It sounded like a supplication.

Alexi poured another spume of sugar into his tea, stirred it.  The crystals whirled around in centrifugal currents and eddies.  He tasted it.  A smile burst over his face.   He raised his index finger above his head like a man who had found the lost chord.

Ben did not want to appear unworthy of the wisdom being imparted to him.  “So, are you telling me that the question isn’t how to avoid unbearable catastrophe?  Because there is no avoiding them?  But that the question is how to recover?”

“You’re a very smart boy.”  Which he may have meant as a compliment or a reprimand. He thanked Ben for the tea and began the arduous effort of getting to his feet.

“But you’re not going to tell me the secret?”

“Boychik, what secret?”

“How do you recover?”

Ben sensed a trace of impatience in the old man’s voice that he needed to be taught such a basic lesson.

“Listen to me.  In my village of Simbirsk there was a boy I went to school with.  This boy was such a trumbernik like you shouldn’t know.  A bondeet, do you understand?  Rules weren’t made for him.   In the capital, the Czar Nicholas III, he should rot in hell with vermin crawling in his chest, had been murdered.  Stabbed to death.  You understand that to the Czars, Jews were like so many pieces of charcoal.

Ben nodded solemnly that he knew.

“Spies had told the palace guard that the assassin’s brother lived in our village.  So one day a regiment of soldiers rode into Simbirsk. They rounded up all the boys, brought them to the town square and said they would kill us one by one, the smallest one first, if someone did not confess the identity of the scoundrel who shed the beloved Czar’s royal blood. This was after they had ransacked the storehouses, burned all the grain, razed the schoolhouse, and turned pigs loose in the synagogue to show us that they were not here on vacation.  Of course nobody spoke.  Who did they think we were, their cattle, their goats who would bleat at the point of a knife?

“So they pulled the youngest boy out of line and forced him to his knees.  The major himself held his sword high above the head of the child.  In the next moment he would be dead.  But if I’ll tell you what happened next?  The boy they were looking for, the boy whose brother had killed the Czar, was hiding all along up in a peach tree in the center of the square.  Such a peach tree this was like you never saw.  Every year it produced fruit for the entire village.  Hundreds of peaches. Thousands of peaches.  So sweet like you wouldn’t know.

“He stood up in the notch between the two boughs where he was hiding and called out to them:  ‘The one you are looking for is here.’  The branches were dark as iron from the rains.  His head slammed into the branch directly above him and stuck into the soft spot in his scalp.  So when he jumped down out of the tree, a whole umbrella of branches, like deer’s antlers, was embedded in his head.  He stood in front of the Cossack major, with his gold buttons up and down his uniform and a mustache that looked embarrassed to be growing on such a face.

“The boy spit on the ground at the major’s boots. ‘This land belongs to everyone,’ he said.  ‘Russia is our mother and we are all her children.’   The major could not appear to be frightened, but if I’ll tell you that man was frightened to look at that boy.  From the top of his head was a peach tree. But in his eyes was a look so fierce the devil would run from it.   With his scimitar the major swiped at the tree.  His blade flashed this close to the boy’s face and cleaved off the ripest peach.  The boy didn’t flinch.  The Major took a bite.  Then he lowered his sword.  He knelt down and kissed the earth and said ‘thank you mother Russia.’

“He sent the regiment out to clear the swine from the temple, to rebuild the schoolhouse, and put the grain back on the stalks so it would ripen.  The swine from the temple they could clear.  The schoolhouse, they can start to rebuild.  But you can’t put the grain back on the stalk.”

“So what did you do?”

“Boychik you’re in America too long. What you do is you do without. When it comes time to plant again you hope you’re still alive and that this time the Cossacks don’t come.”

Ben’s voice was tender with understanding. “Was that you?  Were you the boy with the peach tree growing from his head?”

“Me?  No.”  A roguish twinkle shone through his wrinkled face.  “But if I’ll tell you who that boy was.  The boy with the peach tree growing out of his head?” His voice attained magnitude. “That was Leneeen.”

Ben’s jaw hung.  “Are you telling me you went to school with Lenin?”

Alexi’s shoulders came up to meet his earlobes in a timeless Talmudic shrug.  “Who knew then from Leneen?   Until then he was just Ulyanov, a boy with a terrible handwriting. You understand what I’m saying?”

Ben nodded a tentative yes.  In his own childhood, he had been a boy with a peach tree growing out of his head. He had lived in Brooklyn in a small house with a neat little back yard.  Rose bushes on both sides. And smack in the center of the yard was a huge peach tree. Every summer it produced an incredible bounty. He remembered the juices running down the hollow of his neck and that he had thought of it as liquid summer.   When his mother got pregnant they needed to move to a bigger place. It was early May.  The new crop of peaches was just starting. All fuzzy and green and hard, the size of olives.  On moving day Ben climbed up into the crevasses of the two largest boughs and watched the guys come and haul everything out.  He wanted to watch them load up the truck. The bough was slippery.  His head bashed against the branch directly above him. The nub of a twig became embedded right into the baby spot.  He tried to pull it out but it was really stuck and he was afraid if he tugged too hard it would tear off the top of his head.

He had watched his mother put peach pits into jars of water, and after a while they would start to produce roots. He pictured the same thing happening in his head.    The thing spreading veiny tentacles down into his brain, a whole root system taking it over.  Now he saw Alexi looking at the upturned cell phone like it was the moral of the story.  “I see.  You’re saying I should delete her text.  Is that it?”  The phone was in the palm of his left hand.  “That’s it, isn’t it?  It’s not about the avoidance of disaster, it’s about recovery.  Thank you!”  He read Victoria’s text message one more time, swallowed it whole like a cyanide pill, and then pressed DELETE. The words existed for one more moment of afterburn on his retina display. And then they were gone.

A thickset woman with heavy features had come into the restaurant and was waiting for Alexi at the cash register.  She berated him as they went out the door together.  He put his arm on her shoulder. She brushed it off.  He put it back.  She shook her head at him and let it stay.  On his way back home, Ben remembered he was out of milk.  He stopped at his local market and came home with apples, raisin bran, pumpkin ravioli, toilet paper, and brown rice. He made coffee before he realized he had forgotten to buy the one thing he had gone there for. It made him picture the look Victoria would have given him if they were still together.  He was surprised as he pictured her face, to recognize for the first time how clear it was that she simply had not liked him.

Her green coffee mug was still in the cabinet.  The one she had bought on their honeymoon in Corrientes.  It was not an oversight that she had left it here.  She was too meticulous for that. Ben took it down from the shelf and tossed it into the trash.  It nestled on top of a wad of paper towels at the top of the garbage can he had used the previous night to mop up a minor juice-making incident.  There was more of her stuff here than just the cup.   It was like he was suddenly seeing with a night vision camera all the things he had allowed to settle into the environment.  He purged the Mixmaster, a set of steak knives, some Tiffany cut glass wedding gifts. He gathered them up in his arms, walked deliberately outside and set them outside at the curb.

He held on to one of her books.  Not as a sentimental keepsake. He had never seen her read it.  It was just interesting.   It was called The Time Tables of History.  The pages were set up in columns, listing all the events in the arts and science and politics and history that happened simultaneously, starting from Early Man and going right up to the present.  He had always liked knowing what went with what and where things were in relation to other things.  As a kid when he had gotten a new globe for his ninth birthday he had traced circles of latitude around the globe to see which cities were at the same latitude.  He was shocked to discover that New York and London were not parallel.  Not even close. London was as far north as Moscow.

He wanted to see what else of monumental importance had happened on the day Victoria had left him.  But the book only went up to 1985.  He flipped back idly through a few decades.  Maybe Russia was on his mind after hearing Alexi Ivanovich’s tale.  He discovered an amazing pairing of symmetrical events that happened in 1849:  The California gold rush AND the Communist Manifesto. The defining events of the two combating ideologies of the twentieth century, Capitalism and Communism, conceived simultaneously.   What, if anything, should be made of that?   Was the synchronicity of events due to cause or coincidence?  That was what made him crazy.  He knew which one he wanted it to be.  If you know why things went wrong it would be in your power to avert them.

Maybe.

He remembered on their trip to Argentina when she read the map wrong and got them lost in the mountains and he had said it was ok, absolving her by his largesse, but not by pulling to the side of the road, pressing both her hands in his and telling her how ecstatic and grateful he was that she was in the car with him exploring this beautiful unknown place, and that as long as they were together they couldn’t ever be lost.  He knew he could have done that right then, and didn’t.  Couldn’t.  Wouldn’t.  And if he had?  Would everything that followed that moment have been different?  Or, would every moment his of life that preceded that moment need to have been different for him to become the man capable of doing it?  Or did he just not love her enough, even then?

Ben was not consciously looking in the Timetable book for anything about Lenin.  But when he came upon his life history he stopped to read about him.   Lenin was one of those topics you think you know about, but you really don’t.  Like how the Electoral College works or photosynthesis.  Lenin was born Simbirsk, just like Alexi Ivanovich had said, in the year 1870.  His name was originally Ulyanov. He became Russian Premier in 1922 and then.    Ben had to stop for a moment and look back at those dates.  Born in 1870?  If Alexi Ivanovich had gone to school with Lenin they had to be somewhere around the same age. So, born in 1870.  School in 1878.  That would have made him sixty-five when he escaped from the Nazi prison camp in his father’s arms and saw him gunned down in the Moscow sewer system?  How old would that make him now?  A hundred and forty?  The holes in the old man’s narrative cascaded around Ben’s ears.  What the hell was that cockamamie story about Lenin having a peach tree growing out of his head? He had a horrible spasm of panic that in getting rid of Victoria’s remnants and deleting her text he had done something horribly irrevocable.  He ran outside to the curb to retrieve her things.  But everything had already been scavenged.

He came back inside in a fog.  He pulled out his phone and pressed buttons in every combination looking for a way to retrieve her deleted text.  Each effort was politely taunted by a message onscreen that said MESSAGE.  The screen sat in his hand, a dead cold organ. What could he possibly do?  Dive into cyberspace and gather up the disintegrated phosphor?  Put the wheat back on the stalk?  What was cut was cut.  He’d have to wait until spring to replant, if he lived.  And until then, to do without.

Hal Ackerman has been on the faculty of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television since 1985 and is currently co-area head of the screenwriting program. His book, Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way, is in its third printing, and is the text of choice in a growing number of screenwriting programs around the country. He has had numerous short stories published in literary journals including North Dakota Review and New Millennium Writings, among others. His short story “Roof Garden” won the 2008 Warren Adler Award for fiction, and “The Dancer Horse” received a Pushcart Nomination in 2011. He is the author of two mystery novels, Stein, Stoned (2010) and Stein, Stung (2012).

Return to menu

The baby is delivered to me at my apartment by a caseworker named Sandy, who has called three times to tell me she’s lost. She sounds annoyed, as if my apartment building isn’t cooperating. The baby is four days old and has just been released from the hospital; his mother is not allowed to keep him because she dropped her last baby out a third story window to try to get the devil out of him. On the phone this morning, Sandy announced that there’s an aunt who was previously unwilling to get involved, but seems to be changing her mind.

“We have to check her out, of course. That could take a few months.” She says it with a barely concealed exhaustion that I’ve witnessed in every caseworker I’ve met. There’s also a defensive quality to her comment, as if she’s expecting me to balk. I worry that she doesn’t like me.

When she arrives I open the door and there he is, asleep in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a blue nightgown that gathers at the wrists and at the bottom where his feet have poked through. The way she holds him makes his lower lip push out and I wonder if he can breathe correctly, but what do I know—this is the first time I’ve ever had cause to wonder such a thing. Sandy hands me the baby and steps past me into the apartment to lay out all his gear: formula, diapers, some clothes that will last me a few days in case I need to get some of my own. She talks about the stipend, and his first doctor’s appointment, and I’m hoping she’ll either write all this down or call later to confirm it. Sandy doesn’t email. I show her the car seat with the hesitant pride that a school kid presents a model volcano to his teacher. I get jumpy after a few minutes because I remember Seth is on his way over, and I wish there was some clue that will make him wait outside or pretend to be a neighbor. He wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my home study; he isn’t mentioned in most areas of my life. As she talks I keep looking at the closed door as if it might burst open on its own.

“Okay, well, good luck!” Sandy says when she’s through, sort of smiling. “Call if you need anything.”

She makes tickling motions on the baby’s stomach and then leaves. When she goes out to the elevator I hear her speak to someone. “Excuse me,” she says, and then Seth appears around the corner. His face breaks into a grin and I hold my free hand to my lips and cock my head in the direction he just came from. I had told him about this baby, but as with most people, it’s the sight of such a tiny being that makes it real. As he walks down the hall toward me I look down and sigh with a mixture of awe and something else, something sad, but I’m not sure of what it is until Seth reaches us and takes the baby’s foot in his hand.

“Hi, little guy,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you. This lady will take good care of you.”

When he says it, the sadness turns to panic.

Seth stays for about an hour helping me organize the apartment since I’m afraid to put the baby down. His mother named him Paul, but I cannot seem to attach a name to him yet, it feels too intimate. Seth takes charge of mixing formula with some water I had boiled that morning and stashes the bottles in the fridge. He makes a grocery list by wandering around my kitchen and goes out. He enjoys this, playing the quiet hero, and for now I appreciate it, but it will soon feel like something dramatized.

•••

 Most friends were remarkably reserved when I told them I was applying to be a foster parent. They asked practical questions about my having help, and taking time off. They told me to save up vacation and sick time, and gave me names of local day care centers. My sister, on the other hand, told me to go to a sperm bank and have a baby of my own, as if it were about that— having something of my own. My friend Rachel, on a bad day, sighed and said, “So I shouldn’t ask you to go with me to Brazil next winter?” The night I went to the information session was bitterly cold, the room we were in was overheated and I was distracted through most of the descriptions of the forms and fingerprinting process by the corn muffin in my bag. I was weak and sick to my stomach by the time I stood up an hour later to sign up for the foster parent training classes. When I explained the process at work the next day, my coworker Mike stuffed a French fry in his mouth and said, “Volunteering at the hospital isn’t enough? It just sounds like a lot.” His wife had just given birth to their third child, and he already spoke wistfully of the evenings when he could stay at work late. He longed for winter and then spring, when we’re all required to stay until all the applications are read, the financial aid packages prepared, the parents reassured and the deposits indicating their child’s desire to attend our small college have been received.

 •••

 The only classes I could go to were held on four consecutive Saturdays, all day, out on the Pennsylvania border in a Presbyterian church on the side of a hill in a town full of small bungalow-style houses and ranches on large, treeless lots. As I drove through town that first morning, the grass was still dewy and the volunteer fire fighters were standing in the road holding out their boots to passing cars. I heard someone yell the word “hero” out the window of their SUV.

The class was small enough that we all fit around a conference table. A heavyset woman who introduced herself as an Assembly of God minister talked far too much, while the quiet couple next to her just smiled and spoke so softly that I learned nothing about them. Then there was the couple who wore matching Mets jackets and complained bitterly about the bureaucracy of social services, and a Black woman in her sixties who talked about raising her granddaughter. Two of the women were a couple: one looked warily around the room until her partner leaned over to speak to her as if she was promising they could leave soon. Leading the class was a muscular, earnest guy about my age who laid out magic markers and paper that made me fear we would have to do “exercises” and “share.” Judging by the looks on the faces of my fellow classmates, they were afraid of the same thing. When he promised pizza at noon, the mood lightened considerably. Now we all had something in common.

Seth and his wife sat together across the table from me and smiled politely throughout the first day. She was an ICU nurse, he worked for a pharmaceutical company, and they hoped to adopt. He looked down at the table as he said the last part, as if he were saying something embarrassing; she looked at the wall across the room. I made assumptions about them—that they were conservative, possibly religious, that they lived in a hollow new house with tiny trees staked in the front yard. He was taller than I expected, his height all in his legs, and there was something about his eyes—light blue, lashes that curled at the outer edges—that made him seem like he was always about to smile.

•••

 Seth usually comes over on Sundays, after his wife heads to her shift in the ICU. This detail about her, about the work she does, makes me feel even worse—it would be easier if she did something a little less selfless. He tells me they’re working out the details of a separation, that they’re essentially through, that the rest is administrative. Only finances keep them both in the house, and yet, he never sees me unless she’s working. I met her one other time after our classes were finished—before this all started and before I admitted to myself that I thought about him constantly—and even then I couldn’t look her in the eye. She was in line at a coffee shop near the Division of Family Services office, and I was waiting for my drink, so I was stuck there as she leveled me with a tight smile and a once-over.

Since the baby, he’s come over more often—every other day. He brings dinner and stays for a little while, usually until the baby falls asleep—the first time, anyway. We never have sex anymore and I figure this is like having a baby of my own.

It took a few months after those classes before I was cleared as a foster parent, and in that time I spent a lot of hours with Seth and at some point began to picture myself having a baby with him. I had a fantasy of nursing an infant in my bed while he looked on from the doorway, contented and silenced. I almost told him about it lying beside him one afternoon, but I decided not to, fearing he’d pull away or gently remind me of our shared reality. The sky was a steely gray getting ready to snow, and I wished we could stay that way even as I looked at the clock and knew he had to head back home. It bothers me, all the things I keep secret, but there’s some voice in my head that tells me it will all work in my favor someday.

•••

 On Tuesday, Seth arrives at my apartment while the baby is screaming. His little face is red and squished into a frown; he pushes his lower lip out and stares at me as if pleading for me to do something to help, then gives up, opens his mouth wide and wails. The doorbell rings just as I realize I break out in a sweat every time he cries. When I answer the door I’m rattled and angry. I want to hand the baby to Seth, or I want him to take him from me, but I see the look on his face. Not tonight.

“This isn’t a great time,” I say loudly. My right ear is ringing.

“I can see that.”

“What?”

“I said,” he shouts. “I can see that.”

At the same instant we both suggest that he come back some other day and as we come to understand that we’re both sending him home we stop and watch each other. Something changes between us; I want him to offer to stay. I am furious, tired and sad; he looks guilty and defensive.

“Call me tomorrow,” I say, letting him off the hook.

He nods and backs away with a flicker of an apologetic grin, then turns on his heel and walks to the end of the hall with his head down. I wonder what would have happened if I had handed the baby to him.

A few minutes later, once I’m sure he’s gone, I wrap the baby in a blanket and take him outside, hoping the fresh air will calm him down. I put a hat on his tiny head and hold him tight as we step out into the darkness. In the distance, I can make out the silhouettes of the teenage boys who hang around at night and for the first time I’m afraid of them, feeling vulnerable with this infant in my arms, who is still screaming even though I’m halfway around the block with him. I am sure that people can hear him as we pass each house, and I want someone to come out and tell me it will get better, it will change. It’s not until we’re back inside the building that he stops crying, suddenly, as if nothing happened. His face is pale and splotchy and his eyes are rimmed with red, even though he’s not able to make tears yet. He looks into my shoulder as we make our way up the stairs and sighs as if he’s bored.

He finally nods off about twenty minutes later, between bouts of thrashing and fussing, his hands windmilling against my chest. Once he does finally sleep I have time to realize how useless this situation is between Seth and I, how this relationship may collapse, and how it should really, if the universe behaves fairly. Then I wonder about the other man in my life, the one who’s sleeping soundly, his legs splayed, his fists curled beside his head. How long will we last together?

The next day, Seth returns and spends hours with the baby, taking him for a walk, feeding him, letting him fall asleep in his arms.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” I say.

“Oh come on, what’s the harm just this once?”

I want to tell him that the harm will come the next time he wants to sleep in someone’s arms and Seth isn’t there. I want to ask him not to make it harder on me. I want to say something about the terrific flaw in the logic of “just this once,” but I walk away instead, tense and distracted. In the meantime, Rachel calls to tell me about the trip she took to Costa Rica alone instead of Brazil. She talks about the beach, and the books she read, and the booze she drank.

She asks about the baby and promises to come meet him soon, maybe watch him while I go for a walk.

Later, Seth makes dinner while I put the baby to bed. It seems I am always putting the baby to bed. He is a few weeks old now and he and I are getting used to each other’s moods and habits. He likes to grab the collar of my shirt as he nods off, as if it will keep him from falling. Yawning, he nestles his head in the crook of my arm; we have been at this for half an hour and I am losing patience with him, with this process, with this “stage.” I’m also hungry. I watch him as his attention drifts, his warm brown skin, his eyes still so black I can’t see the pupils. People tell me his hands are big and that he’ll be tall. I still don’t call him anything besides “young man,” or “sweetie pie” or “wiggle worm”—words I assume will be used by the people who want to raise him. It’s not that I don’t want to raise him; I don’t know if I do or not. I wonder if every parent feels this ambivalence and then wonder how they feel when they realize the situation is permanent. Does despair set in? The baby thrashes in my arms and makes snorting sounds as he struggles to get back to sleep; I have kept him up too long in the interest of watching Seth with him, and now he’s overtired and frustrated. I should know this by now.

He slips further down along my arm and I boost him up closer to my shoulder, which wakes him and makes him cry. These are the moments when I understand how people throw their babies out of windows. I bounce him a little, but the pacifier falls on the floor and he begins to cry and my arms tighten. I bite my lip. He is screaming now in fast shrieking cries and I can’t take it, so I put him on the bed. A few seconds of space, that’s all I want, but as soon as he realizes he’s not being held he opens his eyes wide and wails as I walk out the door. It takes the wind out of him and he goes silent, then starts again with a piercing cry that makes me run back into the dark room and scoop him up.

“I’m sorry, sweet boy,” I say, holding him close. “Mama’s sorry. Shhh…I didn’t mean to scare you. Please, little one. Please.”

He stops crying and I give him a clean pacifier as I sit on the bed with him. He stares at my shirt, blinks, and looks almost quizzical. Then he tips his head back as if he knows what he’s looking for, sees me and slowly smiles, spitting out the pacifier. I smile back.

“Sweet boy, go to sleep.”

He tucks his head down again, but after a few seconds he arches his back, finds my face and grins again. He makes no sound when he does it. It happens two more times and each time my stomach does a flirty little flip as I realize he’s happy to see me. He falls asleep minutes later.

•••

 Seth’s been sitting patiently on the sofa in the next room watching CNN as if he has no place else to go. It is seven o’clock—a Sunday—and I wonder if he would still be with me if his wife were home. I’ve been desperate for him lately, lying awake in the middle of the night after I’ve given the baby his bottle. I slip out of my pajamas, hoping to make it feel like he’s there with me, then scrambling in a sleepy haze to get dressed when I’m called in the morning.

Standing in the doorway, I wait for him to notice me. It doesn’t take long, and the television goes silent just as his eyes meet mine. He cocks an eyebrow and smirks at me, then some other look comes across his face. “You sure about this?”

“Get in there,” I say, casting a glance over my shoulder toward the bedroom.

It takes me a while to calm down, wondering if the baby will wake up again and worrying that we’ll get a surprise visit from Sandy while my legs are wrapped around him. I also think about Seth’s wife, but that’s nothing new, it’s just that these other two issues bring that fear into even sharper focus. We start out with him on top, then I’m on top, then we switch again because my hair keeps getting tangled in his face. The longer it takes for me to get into it, the more aware he is of how preoccupied I am, and I know it won’t be enough to tell him that I’m just happy to be with him. I start to make sounds that I hope will distract him, and just as I begin to believe them myself, feel my hips soften, my shoulders relax, he stops and rolls away.

“I’m not sure about this.”

I pull my knees up and try to slow my breathing. “Is it the baby?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It just feels weird.”

I’m afraid to admit to him that it feels strange to me, too, because to admit it means I’d have to tell him that I’m afraid I’m obsessed with him, that I’m in love with him and that I want him to leave her and be with me, even though I also think that’s not quite true, either. To admit it might lead me to tell him we have to have sex so I know he’ll come back, so I can have a little more time to think. I long for an hour to collect my thoughts about the most mundane things, like whether I need more oregano, never mind wondering whether I love this guy who’s straddling two relationships.

“He smiled at me.” I say to the ceiling, thinking of the simplicity of that moment. “Just now, as he was falling asleep.”

“Of course he did. You’re his mom.”

“I’m not his mom. Don’t say that.” I hold perfectly still.

“Why not?” He says dismissively. “Isn’t that what you wanted when you signed up? To be a mother?”

He’s accusing me of something, but I don’t know what it is. He’s not having this argument with me. Maybe he’s having it with himself, but I’ve spent all day remaining calm, for a more worthy audience. I sit up quickly and turn to face him.

“You know as well as I do that he’s probably not staying with me. So what makes you think I want to talk about being his mother?” I’m gritting my teeth and my heart is pounding.

“So why’d you do it then?”

“Why’d I do what?”

“Get involved with this.” In the darkness I swear I detect a smirk.

I draw as deep a breath as I can manage and say slowly, “Please go home.”

He barely says goodbye, and I’m not sure if he’s angry or shamed. I nearly stop him as he opens the front door, but everything I might tell him would be useless, because all I want him to do is promise that he’ll stay with me.

After he leaves, I go in to check on the baby. His mouth has fallen open and his pacifier is stuck beneath his ear. I put my hand on his chest and feel his ribs expand beneath my fingers; he wriggles a bit so I take my hand away and go back to bed, lying diagonally across the mattress.

•••

The first day of our classes in the Presbyterian church, the leader said, “Here’s this kid in your house, and you fall completely in love with him, and all he wants is to be able to fall completely in love with you, but he can’t, because he figures he’s leaving soon. You see the dilemma?”

When Seth asked me to have coffee with him that first time, I assumed we were just meeting as fellow classmates, but over the course of the next few weeks, he told me they had been trying to have a baby of their own for three years, with monthly trips to a fertility clinic, shots, hormones and constant disappointment. He told me that it brought out qualities in her that he didn’t like; she became a woman who talked about nothing but her resentments. He even began to wonder what ever made her become a nurse, and in his less charitable moments decided it was little more than a need to prove that she was going out of her way for other people. They went to the foster parent information session together and had a terrible argument in the car on the way home. She didn’t want a sick baby, she said. She didn’t want the uncertainty of being a foster parent.

I should have kept my distance; I should have been the friend he needed. There were things I could have done to prevent it long before it got to this. I shied away from talking to friends about wanting a child, distanced myself from people who had become parents and then found myself alone, frightened and determined to do it anyway. There was even a guy, a good guy, who I put off preemptively because I thought he wouldn’t understand. I let this happen. I blame myself for where we are now.

****

 Two months after he was dropped off, the baby—I now call him Paul, since he is still with me—is picked up by Sandy and taken to see his mother’s aunt. The state will make her go through the same classes and answer the same questionnaires. They will ask her about her feelings on masturbation and how she’ll handle her anger. It’s strange to think now of who I was when I answered all those questions about my attitudes towards sex and discipline and morality and who I have become in what seems like no time at all. I feel as if we are two different women, and that maybe I should write out the answers to the questions again. Then maybe they’ll see they’ve made a mistake.

The aunt will be fingerprinted, as will everyone else living in her house, including her youngest son. There is a suspicion that he is dealing drugs, which would disqualify her, and I’m conflicted as to what I hope they find when they check out the family. I imagine the boy, a teenager, lanky and handsome, with beautiful brown eyes that once found someone’s loving smile for the first time. I want to meet him.

I dress Paul in a red and blue suit with rocket ships sewn up one side. He tries to grin at me from the bed and sticks his arms straight out when I want him to bend them. His toes strain a little against the feet in the suit, and I decide I will use my afternoon off and buy him some larger clothes, after I see Seth. We haven’t spoken since I kicked him out, but he texted me to say he wanted to talk.

I count the snaps on the suit: “One. Two. Three. And…” I struggle with the last one near his chin. “Four. What a handsome boy. My goodness, won’t you make a good impression on them.” He tips his chin back and coos, then a true smile breaks across his face. “Remember to say your ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’.”

I pick him up without saying any more and kiss him on his cheek, letting my lips rest there for a few seconds until he squirms. Then I buckle him into his car seat and head out to meet Sandy.

After I drop him off I call Seth at work.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About the other day. And probably a few other days, too.” I hear him rattle the pens in the cup near his computer, something he does when he’s thinking. “This is a lot.”

“Meet me,” I say. “I have the afternoon to myself.”

We go to a motel out on the highway that is sandwiched between a printing company and furniture store that sells cheap recliners and gaudy brass bed frames. The room has a mini-fridge beside the bed and one chair. I sit on the edge of the bed and let him take my boots off.

“What if they take him?” I ask. “What if that’s the best thing?”

I shrug. He stops and sits back on his heels. “You knew this going in.”

“He smiled at me.”

“You’re good to him.”

“I love him.”

Seth puts his hand on my knee and I watch his face for a reaction. There isn’t one, except for a steady gaze, as if he’s waiting for me instead. A depression washes over me and I take his hand. I close my eyes as he pushes me back on the bed and kisses me. Then he lets me cry in the crook of his arm until I fall asleep.

When I wake up, the room is dark and I’m searching the covers for the baby, convinced he’s smothering. I swear I feel the weight of him between us and in my half-conscious frenzy, I am digging for him, convinced he’s lost. By the time Seth takes my hands I’m breathless and sick.

“He was here,” I say into his chest, as he rocks me slowly, shushing me. “I know he was here.”

Hope Coppinger has been previously published in North Dakota Quarterly and was invited to participate in the reading series of the National Women’s Studies Conference in 2005. As a result of working for a nature preserve, she is composing a novel about failed foragers.

Return to menu

Maddy spent the drive to Hilton Head Island telling me all about her recent sexual discoveries. She was daring in the way she volunteered information, as if the best way to bridge the gulf of years since we’d last seen each other would be to brag on about her conquests. The last time we were together neither of us could drive; we had yet to smoke cigarettes or drink anything beyond a sneaked sip of beer for which we hadn’t developed a taste. But even when I saw my cousin in the terminal, hopping up and down at my arrival, there was something about her. She had a palpable air, an unmistakable stride that screamed of doing it. She had filled out, made up and dressed every bit like the woman she was meant to become.

Under my baggy clothes I still felt like a stick figure, a caricature of something that a girl was supposed to be—shy, quiet. Covered up. I was doing my best to look like Angela Chase, the girl from My So-Called Life with maroon hair and plaid jumper dresses. But my mother wouldn’t let me dye my hair, and anyway they cancelled My So-Called Life before the first season ended, and I hadn’t seen all the episodes.

I felt as false as the things I was trying to get away from: the grinning, happy kids at school who were fine with the world around them. The West Texas ethos that said conformity was the best way to get along, that you should be sure to go to every football game and potluck and church every Sunday, lest someone believe you to be unhappy, no matter how unhappy you may be.

Back then I thought I was the only person in the world capable of thinking this way, and that Canyon, Texas was the only place on earth like it—stifling and frustrating and hypocritical. I know now that this is untrue. But there’s something to say about a place. Years later someone showed me a quote from a singer who grew up in Lubbock. He said that in Lubbock he learned that God loves you and you’re going to hell, and that sex is wrong and dirty and you should save it for someone you love. That’s about it right there.

When Maddy picked me up in Savannah it was the beginning of Summer, and I was hoping that it would cut off what had turned out to be a very bad spring.

By the time Aunt Melinda set the dinner table I had been caught up on six years of gossip and rumor about people I either didn’t remember or had never met. When my aunt asked me how I was doing, there was a distinctly conspicuous hint of sadness and concern in her voice, knowing that I had been through so much in the last year. She thought it was my boyfriend who had died, and went on and on about how hard it is to lose someone close, especially at such a young age, and she wouldn’t know what to do if something so awful had happened to young Madeline and one of her boyfriends. I tuned her out until she stopped talking.

“It’s okay,” I said. It’s all I ever said about the matter.

“Drowning must be an awful way to go,” she said. She was magnificently tanned.

I smiled like a sad little trooper, and told her it wasn’t as bad as people thought. “You blackout pretty quickly when you can’t breathe. And when you’ve got that much pressure on you.” Aunt Melinda’s smile went a little crooked. She was putting salad into bowls for us. “Actually,” I said, “it’s not so bad if you drown accidentally, from what I can tell. If someone’s holding your head underwater, like they do in the movies, well, I figure that’s pretty bad. You probably feel all of it that way.”

She shuffled around the kitchen for a minute, unsure of what to tell me. She started to speak a couple of times, a series of short glottal sounds, each time raising a finger as though it would help her along.

“Well, Maddy, be a dear and get your cousin something to drink.”

I asked for water.
I could care less who Paul Jennings or Tommy Baker were, with their white-boy sweater vest names and expensive cars, but I got a small thrill hearing about Maddy going down on them in parking lots and getting fingered in her school’s auditorium. When she found out I was still a virgin, she took me on as a project.

Days we usually spent on what they called the boardwalk, a row of restaurants and gift shops ending in a pier. She’d show me to her friends and we smoked cigarettes and lounged in front of coffee shops, stretching the limits of how much time at an outside table a single cup could buy you. It was sunny most of the time, and I bought sunglasses and started wearing less. I had perfected what Maddy’s friends called the grunge look, and they could not in good conscience let me mope around with my hands hidden away in flannel sleeves. I became the recipient of borrowed sleeveless shirts and casual summer dresses. I was girlier than I’d felt before, but since I’d probably never see any of these people again, except for Maddy somewhere down the line, I didn’t mind.

God, they all wanted to get me laid. We’d spend hours hanging out with morons playing video games in pizza shops, or playing touch football and volleyball in the park by the boardwalk. They all seemed to have blond hair and halogen smiles. I couldn’t remember any of their names. They were all Chad or Tad to me.

His name was Neville Ward, but everyone called him Alan. I met him at a baseball field, at night. It was still hot, even during the night. I never remembered such humidity. Aunt Melinda pretty much let us have free reign of the island. On those nights wanderers belonging to the same school and family groups converged according to age. Melinda had her backyard parties and white blues clubs, Maddy had the boardwalk and what I thought was an ever-growing number of structural nooks that were magnets for these island kids. It amazed me that these kids were never run off or arrested. Maddy and I would walk aimlessly through neighborhoods or behind businesses and run into someone our age with a bottle, or a joint, as though it were somehow penciled into our nights.

Alan was, I guess, more attractive than the rest of them—at least more my type—though I wouldn’t have given him much thought in Canyon. For a week I’d heard nothing from Maddy and her purse-carrying friends that it was my time, that it was beyond my time, and I had better get to screwing or I’d never get anything out of college.

He had shaggier, darker hair than his friends. When they introduced him, he came off as shy and looked at the ground when talked to me. He was with some of the volleyball boys; they were sitting on bleachers and held tall beer cans in little paper bags. Maddy and her friends were an allied front—their game was perfect. They swooned in all the right ways; they were vocally impressed that these kids had beer. She had a way of standing in the right spot, with her butt pointed the right way, that put me down on those bleachers, made me sit there, next to Alan. There was a spot for me sit, right there next to him.

They were not the defiant losers I was used to spending time with at home. My friends were people whose attitudes and ideas and generosity made them beautiful. I remembered that as I sat on those bleachers with beautiful people. The fact that would be leaving soon, though, helped me not to care about that for a while. In a week, I’d be back in Canyon amid cotton fields and vacant lots and used cars. I figured I might as well try and enjoy this moment, under that white southern moon and next to the slightly grungy guy with the twenty-four ounce Coors Light can.

He was a cleaned up version of those television rebel heartthrobs. He had taken his cues from the dangerous guys on all the right shows and movies and made himself somewhat of an amalgam of that character: the aloof one who had a motorcycle, was quieter than his friends and had slightly shaggier, darker hair than his friends. He was a bit of an artist, he told me. Maddy knew he was the closest thing to my type on this island, and had no doubt put me in his path.

I ran into him a lot after than first night, and I liked him better when I’d find him alone, walking through town to get to the coffee shop or waiting to run into his friends. It was obvious, though, that he was waiting to run into me. I found Maddy’s ability to orchestrate these social situations strangely admirable. Everybody needs a skill.

I let myself become part of the dance, watching how our routine adapted, creating convenient exits until Alan and I were alone. We mostly walked, and I’d laugh at his real name and he’d laugh about my cousin. I knew she told him to be this way for me, but I didn’t mind. He said he wanted to make album covers and band posters for a living. The drawings he showed me had no promise, but they were sincere enough. He had drawn out copies of album covers I’d seen, but didn’t own. Canyon wasn’t a good place to buy tapes. He had made these posters for bands I’d never heard of, and he told me they were local bands and that they used the posters to advertise their shows. The bands’ logos were scripted carefully, each different from the next, but the pictures in the posters were rude sketches of brooding teens, or non-sequitur images like eggs splattered against a wall or a buffalo in the middle of a busy street. I couldn’t tell him that I really wasn’t impressed by the drawings. They seemed to be all he had, the way he talked about making art. I wasn’t sure, though, that this was really art.

He was going into college undecided. I told him I was going into a career of undecided, and I knew from the drawing and his parents’ beachfront ranch house that he’d be a fine accountant like his dad.

We ended up at that house by the beach after spending most of the night sipping those magic beers on the beach, those volleyball players and Maddy and her shopping friends and Alan and me. His parents would be gone for the most of the night, and he wanted to show me some new drawings he had. He showed me in the low light of his room, sitting on the floor. There I was, scarred from too many eraser marks and deliberate lines, looking very much like Angela Chase. I believe now that seeing those portraits, how distant they were from the real me—though he couldn’t possibly have seen the real me—are the reason that I never dyed my hair, never got cable, and never again bought a t-shirt with any kind of logo or brand displayed across the front. Alan had bought into these things, these ideas of who you’re supposed to be, how to be rebellious and hip and young. But I didn’t feel young, and I knew that fucking Alan would be no act of rebellion. I knew that’s what he wanted from me, and even though we had similar tastes in music, in fashion, that no amount of Pixies or Jane’s Addiction cassettes could make us the same.

There were a few of these portraits, these terrible renderings of some idea of me, and I looked like a sad, sexy sprite in each one. He had worked hard on them, I could tell, and they made me look like a girl I had never been, a comic book version of myself with oddly feminine powers. My eyes were too big. I had more curves on those pages than I did in three dimensions. I wanted to laugh, and couldn’t. Alan was hinging on this moment. This was either his big chance at having me or he really wanted me to see how hard he had worked at these pictures. I couldn’t laugh at them, and I couldn’t be sincere and tell him how much they didn’t really mean to me. They were shit, both technically and in representation of their subject.

“You can keep them, you know, take them back to Texas,” he said. His voice, I now noticed, was high and unsure. Everything he said sounded tentative.

“What?” I said, as though I couldn’t hear him.

“I mean, you know, I did them for you, because I think you’re pretty awesome.”

I had no response. There was nothing I could think of to do that would stop his assessing me, and I could only think of Maddy and her incredulousness that I had yet to do this. If she could take what she wanted from any guy, and give him what he wanted in return, what was the harm? I would never see this kid again. I could only kiss him, pulling him down to me and on top of me.

The light went out soon, and the rest I would have to remember, so I could tell Maddy every detail.

He had me undressed and I wanted him to look at me more than he was looking at me, to turn a light on. I wanted to see him, as if I could see us both, onscreen, projected at a drive-in theater or some other piece of America that I had yet to experience, and until this moment, like this moment, thought I never would. He was gentle enough and had his hands everywhere on me. If anything he was too much of a gentleman through most of it, and I could tell from the way he didn’t look right at me that he was stifling the need to apologize, for not being perfect, for taking too long, for not taking long enough. For being my first. He slowly lowered himself over me, adding more weight and though I felt him and thought what we were doing was right I knew I lay too still and thought too much, while his weight pinned me and his chest, still growing that first coat of hair, hit me over and over, rubbing against my face and contorting it. I could barely breathe under him, though he was hardly substantial enough to ever crush or smother me.

Since it was my first time, I guess, since I was lost in thought and analyzing the situation from the wrong perspective, thinking of drive-ins and first-time movie sex scenes and listening to him breath, I noticed only too late that he was not wearing a condom. I asked him to stop when was ready, that we couldn’t have any accidents, and for some reason I trusted him enough to go along. And I lay there, still as ever, and thought of every girl in Canyon who had done this ceaselessly in truck cabins and at parties, and I felt for once like one of them, like one of these southern island girls, and then I thought of how I would put on my best sly face the next day when I would pull Maddy aside and say “I totally scored.”

The first thing I wanted to tell her about was the way he came, on me, how it brought everything to a weird stop and again he wanted to apologize, though he seemed paralyzed for a minute. Like he wanted to make the moment somehow poignant, even though I had this goo on me, that, while I guess I did my best to appreciate its significance, I kind of wanted him to wipe it off me gently, quickly, I didn’t care, just now. God, he had this puppy-dog glow about him too. It wasn’t that I felt particularly bad about it, or about him, but how many other girls have the same stupid story? Dear diary, it finally happened! Shit.

Maddy was more than willing to hear all about it, and I did get to the part about him running to the bathroom and back with toilet paper to clean me up. In spite of how cheap and dirty I felt, at that point, Alan still had a kind of stupid charm about him. “Aw, you wanted to clean me up,” I said, in a babying voice I’d never used before. He shrugged and told me it was the gentlemanly thing to do, which was wrong, since the gentlemanly thing would have been to warn a girl before releasing all over her stomach. I forgave him that, too because it he didn’t know any better. No one had taught him, and it wasn’t up to me to be the girl to tell him, either. I was sure this was sure this was the royal treatment compared what Maddy and her friends usually got in the backseats of Civics and Firebirds.

Maddy asked me if it hurt, and it did, and I told her, and that was that.

After, I still had the thrill of being naked in front of him, of seeing all of him, too. We could see the outline of each other from the bathroom light. He was the second person to see me without clothes, and I told him that. I stood up, turned on the light by the bed, and stretched out my arms, palms up, on display. I did a ballerina twirl in for him. He didn’t say much, couldn’t. Anything he did say would remove what dignity and luster he had left and made him stupider. I shushed him, with my finger, close enough for our bodies to touch.

The lamplight reflected us in the window, and in the shadows on our bodies in that moving picture I could see the dunes, the beach, and the water beyond. My hair had grown out, and in the makeshift mirror I was girlish, a figure that I couldn’t make relate to myself. I was incongruous. Blue dunes ridged through the darkened parts of me. The island slept, it seemed, and I opened the window by Alan’s bed. I stretched out through it; the humidity from the ocean, the salt air, went over my arms and back and bare chest. “Come on,” I said, and slid through the window, falling in the grass of his parents’ lawn. Without looking to see if he was behind me I ran down the wooden walkway to the beach.

He followed me slowly, but only after he had grabbed a towel or a shirt or something to cover himself with. It was late, and no one was on the beach. “Sam!” he whisper-yelled, “someone might be out here!”

I turned around to see him. He was curled over, trying not to expose himself. Feeling how much the salt air had cooled down from the hundred-degree day, I stretched out and threw my arms back. “Take a risk, Neville,” I said.

“What?” he said back, his turn now to pretend he couldn’t hear.

I walked back to him, slowly, swinging what little hips I had, and touched his stomach with my fingertips. “Your art,” I said, “isn’t what you think it is.” He didn’t say anything back, but he looked a little scared. I giggled a little, and thought it was the most girlish thing I’d ever done. “It’s okay. You just need to realize that you don’t make art. You make commercials. Maybe you should think about marketing as a major.”

Alan didn’t say anything. I pulled my fingers away from him, and walked backwards, knowing he was still trying to take me all in. After a few steps I quickly turned around, skipping through the sand, feeling it bounce off of my ankles. In the water I let the tide take me to where I could fall deeper and deeper and I could no longer know which way I was falling.

All I could hear was the pressure of the water, and when I tried to listen to it, it went away.

Andrew M. Howard is a graduate of Texas Tech University and Georgia College & State University, where he earned an MFA in fiction while teaching GED courses in the nation’s oldest mental institution. His fiction has appeared in Southwest American Literature, Kaleidotrope, Clapboard House, and on the short list for the Carve Prize. He currently lives and teaches in Washington, DC.

Return to menu

“Are you having your period this week? In college I always matched up with my roommates after a couple of months of living together.”

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” “Your cheeks look funny.”

“I like shadows, don’t you?”

I really should move, I thought. It wasn’t as though moving would be a protracted ordeal. I had so few things I wouldn’t even need to label my boxes. Yet I couldn’t summon any real energy around the idea. The sour aroma of Jorie’s ever-simmering vegetable broth made me feel lethargic. Although the second I had that thought – the crazy broth thought – I realized it was something she would say, which made me want to run screaming into the street.

Yet my flat in Jorie’s house was nicer than the average apartment and I paid lower than average rent and I was allowed my one cat, Topaz. My credit sucked and I lived more or less paycheck to paycheck, making my student loan payments and falling further and further behind on the credit card bills that had eventually found their way back to me.  Jorie hadn’t checked my credit and had let me move in without a deposit.

I’d stayed for two years and she expected more. “You’ve been so loyal,” Jorie said, daring me to contradict.

***

Our mothers had failed to survive – a double blow to their breast cancer support group. They had died within a week of each other, one-breasted, gallant, hospiced. “You two should be friends,” my mother, usually a keen judge of such things, urged. Jorie’s mother’s advice was surely more helpful. “Seize her,” I could imagine Nora rasping. “Use her.” Mom-inspired or not, Jorie had made it her job to bend me to her will and her will was that I would remain a tenant in her house until she’d finished her dissertation on the sociological implications of the Jamestown Flood and subsequent relief efforts, a project whose date-of-completion estimates ranged from six months to the advent of the second coming.

***

Every time I flushed I felt Jorie wincing downstairs, imagining the no-good I was up to.

 “You’re not flushing tampons are you?” “I told you about Angel Soft, right?”

“You tell your guests, don’t you? About only flushing little bits of toilet paper?”

What guests? I had one local friend, Suzette – friend by coincidence, default, and her insistence. We had lived on the same floor of Busey-Evans during my first two years of college in Urbana, but I hadn’t seen her again until I ran into her at Target shortly after I moved to Edwardsville. I remembered her as a shy girl who changed majors every semester.

“I taped a note on the toilet seat lid,” I told Jorie.

“Loco landlordus,” Suzette said. “As gruesome a species as rattus rattus.”

“She’s just being careful,” I told Suzette. “Not every tenant is harmless like me.” It wasn’t hard to understand how the picture of human excrement and hygiene products bobbing in your basement might impede your concentration.

***

“What do you think about me planting some marigolds?”

“Marigolds are okay,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be marigolds. If you have a bad association with them or something.”

“Do you know how rare it is for a landlord to not raise the rent every chance she gets?”

The thing was to not ask any questions, thus avoiding a disquisition on menstrual synchronicity or toilet paper dissolvability statistics or the symbology of bedding plants.

“How about this – I’ll give you a two-year lease for the same rent?”

As per the previous year, she amplified the attention she paid me as the day approached when I would either give notice or sign another lease. I only had a month left to dither.

***

“You don’t owe her anything,” Suzette told me. Suzette’s basement apartment was entirely carpeted – walls, ceilings, and floors. Just enough light came through the dirty half-windows to appreciate the carpet’s stains. There was a rodent problem, too. Her only perks were free cable and day-old bagels from the shop where her landlord baked. But I was the illogical one for sticking with Jorie.

“You’re like two miles from the bus line, right?” Suzette asked.

“More like two blocks.”

“Two long blocks. You feel sorry for her, don’t you?” Suzette asked. “Wake up – she’s using you.”

“You can’t tell me it wouldn’t screw up her plans if I left now,” I said.

“I’ve got three words for you: not your problem.”

It’s not that I was fond of leases. I could see for myself where promises led.

Meanwhile, I knew Suzette would pounce on my apartment if I moved out.

***

That vestibule! If only I could enter my apartment through a back window. Awful and unavoidable, with its nostril-tickling stuffiness, grubby white octagonal floor tiles, and intricate green paisley wallpaper, the latter of which so often mesmerized me as I stood holding my single piece of junk mail, the cue for Jorie to swing open the door.

“Any big checks? Love letters?”

This was hardly the only opportunity for entrapment. Disposing of a toxic tub of cottage cheese and hanging soggy clothes on the line in the basement suited Jorie’s purposes just as well.

***

“Your hair is so curly.”

“Your cat’s eyes give me bad dreams.”

“It’s not true that fresh air is good for you, you know.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the dryer. I did two loads last night and it was fine.”

“You’ll never find a place better than this, not even for $200 more a month.”

“You look like you could use a bowl of broth. I heard you sneezing last night.”

***

Not only did Topaz have “spooky” golden eyes, he was mischievous as well. Paperclips, lipsticks, pens, and flash drives were all a source of great merriment. He’d knock a matchbook off the counter and bat it across the room like a star soccer forward until losing it beneath the refrigerator or a closet door. If I cared to, of course, I could have tucked these items away in drawers or cupboards.

“What does your cat do up there?” Jorie asked.

My needling Jorie would have disappointed my mother, but I was always happy for an amusing distraction. Not only had I told my mother that I would try to be friends with Jorie, I had promised I would have myself genetically tested for the BRCA mutation and, if it turned out I had it, take “the next logical steps” such as having my breasts and ovaries removed.

“This needs to stop now,” she’d said, referring to the string of deaths in our family due to breast cancer. She’d lost her mother, three aunts, two great aunts, and her grandmother. Two cousins and her sister, my aunt Marti, had already been through one round of lumpectomy- radiation-chemo. This latter group was a staunch lot. They weathered the harsh treatments pretty damn cheerfully and then marched forward, going years cancer-free, though no one had yet to reach the magic seven-year mark. Mom’s pronouncement carried a lot of authority, being issued as it was from her goddamned deathbed, but. . .

“There’s always a but with you,” she would scold if she could speak from the grave.

But why was I to be ruled by probability? She was the one who’d finally prodded me from the nest, told me that life was all about taking chances. And what did it really mean, to be friends with Jorie? Couldn’t an argument be made that having me as a stable tenant actually made it easier for her to procrastinate on her dissertation? Would a real friend be such an enabler? Besides, the equation could be flipped. If Jorie was a real friend wouldn’t she kick me out, urge me to get on with my life?

I set my alarm clock volume to low, I didn’t shower after 10 p.m., and  I never wore shoes in the apartment, but once a week or so I banged my cupboard doors open and shut, to keep Jorie on her toes, to make a sound louder than the thud of my heart in my chest.

***

“You don’t look thirty,” Jorie said.

“Those are interesting boots.”

“How would you feel about new carpet on the stairs?”

“This month’s tea is incredible – an organic Emperor’s red from the Fujian Province. I’m about ready to put on a pot.”

“It’s cool how we’ve got this symbiotic relationship going.”

“I think we should decorate the outside of the house this Christmas.”

It made me nervous how she studied my face. “I know you like it here,” she said. “You can’t tell me you don’t.”

She’d ease up, I knew, if I just said yes, yes, sign me up. But for some reason – because she wouldn’t ease up? – I couldn’t.

***

Jorie was a scrappy little woman with scrawny, muscular arms and a flat chest. She parted her limp dishwater blonde hair in the middle and pulled it back with tiny plastic barrettes. Did she feel like her body was a time bomb waiting to go off? Did she feel that there was more to her destiny than genetic code? Was it possible she’d had her own breasts lopped off, her ovaries yanked? Or was her interminable research on the Jamestown Flood a way of putting off the inevitable –  a life in service to  Ten Things You Can Do to Improve Your Odds Against Breast Cancer?

We all die. We all die, Mom.

She fought to the death but I had often wished she’d been less tenacious. Her sickness had disgusted me, her chemical and human smells, her diminishment, her blotchy, puffy skin and pink scalp. Inside I was all grimace and gag, all day every day. She was a shrewd woman. In retrospect it was hard for me to believe she’d been taken in by my meek ministrations. I wondered if she had ended up regretting her request that I move in with her so she could spend a few more months at home. Perhaps my mother’s insistence that I befriend Jorie was a form of punishment. One way of looking at my situation was that I had exactly what I deserved – just desserts for my insincere bedside manner and reluctance to keep a promise. Another way of looking at it was that I had far more than I deserved.

***

“Are you unhappy?” she asked. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

“Jorie! I’m fine. Where do you get this stuff?”

“You’ve been drinking more wine lately, have you not?”

“You’re keeping track?”

“When you drink wine your walk is heavier. And you scuff.”

“I scuff?” I made my voice as menacing as I could with a word ending in ff.

She blinked. She’d momentarily forgotten her mission. “Do you want to paint? Your walls, I mean. I’ll supply the paint, of course.”

I vowed to collect my empties and dispose of them elsewhere. I wondered which would be worse – if Jorie really did know everything about me or if she didn’t know one damn thing.

“I’ll help you paint,” she rambled on. “Did you know that if you buy high quality paint you don’t usually need a second coat? Provided you choose a light color. A pretty pale yellow would be cheery, especially in the afternoon. But whatever color you want is fine.”

“I’m not talking that toxic crap. I’d buy ultra-low VOC, you know? So you won’t get high or nauseous or anything.”

Paint was one of Jorie’s new areas of expertise. She’d recently begun a romance with another grad student – a painter who worked weekends at Burkmenter’s Paint Store.

“He just loves paint!”

“He’s really into blue right now.”

Stuart the painter was ostentatiously paint-spattered. I was suspicious of his artfully blue- flecked bangs. Stuart’s fucking blue period – ha!

“Do you like this color? Do you think Stuart will like it?” She thrust a skein of shimmering azure yarn into my face, as if I needed to smell it.

***

“You have a lovely chin.”

“Clara Barton was 67 years old when she arrived to help the flood victims.”

“Do you eat a lot of bananas?”

“Bananas?” I asked, in spite of myself.

“I’m getting a really strong whiff of banana peels. If you put the peels in little plastic bags before you throw them away they don’t get all stinky in the garbage can.”

“So noted.”

“You should come to Knit Night with me. I think you’d find it very therapeutic.”

“I’m not much of a craftswoman.”

“You don’t have to knit anything complicated. You could start with a scarf. Or a washcloth.”

“I’ll think about it.”

***

Topaz licked the inside of my left arm while I drank bitter, over-steeped Earl Grey tea. Below, Jorie’s teapot whistled shrilly, ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute, and then thump, thump, thump – sturdy Stuart ran to cut off the burner. Before Stuart, I hadn’t noticed how quiet a neighbor Jorie had been. Now I heard murmur of conversation throughout the day, chairs squeaking against the linoleum, NPR playing in the morning while Stuart clanged about in Jorie’s kitchen, Stuart bellowing for his lover from two rooms back, “Jor-reee!” I hadn’t even known Jorie’s teapot had a whistle, having never taken her up on her invitations to share a pot. I was coming to understand that these sounds were part of our negotiations – Stuart’s brand-new presence a reminder that I wasn’t indispensable.

***

“I hope I didn’t offend you the other day,” she said.

Which time? “It’s forgotten.”

“I care about you, you know.”

The vestibule was a convection oven in the summer. I could feel sweat from my fingertips seeping into the envelope containing my phone bill.

“How’s the dissertation coming?” I surprised myself by asking.

Jorie picked at a curled up corner of the wallpaper just above the mailboxes. “Stuart’s landlord won’t let him use refrigerator magnets. She says they can scar the surface.”

***

How did she ever expect to finish her dissertation with a boyfriend and a new hobby? I knew for a fact – because I wasn’t above doing a little mail-rifling – that below-market or not, my rent covered Jorie’s mortgage payment. Jorie had inherited a literal asset that was also a roof over her head, whereas I’d quit my job as assistant development director at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and moved back to where I’d set out from at 18 as the skinny, bookish, underconfident daughter of a single mother. I spent eleven months sleeping in the fetal position on my mother’s loveseat, depleted my nest egg-lette, and landed in a less lofty, less remunerative, but related job at the community arts center. Instead of helping mastermind fundraising campaigns and courting rich connoisseurs of glass, I planned small-town fundraisers and held the hands of volunteers. It was no great fall, mind you. But.

***

“So,” Jorie said.

“So.” It was two days before the deadline. The flowerboxes in front of the house were still empty.

She gave my face a once-over, but if she saw a blemish or a flaw in my cosmetics she kept mum.

“You could just tell me what you plan to do.”

What if she actually wanted me out? What if Nora had made Jorie pledge fidelity to me? I wondered if I still had any leverage. Would she have the bathtub reglazed? Replace the goddamned clothes dryer? Knit me a scarf for my birthday?

I did want marigolds, I thought – big, fat, orange and yellow ones flecked with red. And Granny Smith green walls in my bedroom. And lots of fat-bulbed multi-colored lights hung on the bushes for all of December and January.

Suzette had grown tired of my dithering, too. “This whole ‘will I stay or will I go’ refrain is a sham,” she’d told me over a pleasantly cool but tasteless $8 a glass Pinot Grigio at the local wine bar. “It’s pretty obvious you’re not going anywhere.”

“What are you waiting for?” Jorie asked. She kicked at the wooden staircase. A small patch of grey paint fell off. She sighed.

Suzette had asked me the same question about dating. Undeterred by a .100 second date record, she had just renewed her online matchmaking service membership. “I don’t remember you being the type for the nunnery.” Which pointed to the point, kind of. Drinks with a man led to dinner, which eventually led to sex, second dates or not. My current day-to-day life allowed me to entertain the illusion that I was little more than an abstract idea of a woman. Embarking on any sort of anything with a man required concreteness, and my body didn’t feel like a going concern.

“Have you had the test?” I asked.

Jorie’s eyes bugged. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Fucking genes,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I’ll tell you in two days.”

***

Mom lived in a crummy, small apartment, just a few quality steps above Suzette’s. It smelled stale and vaguely uric even before she got sick and I moved in with Topaz and his litter box. She’d worked for years as a secretary for an old-timey real estate investment firm. Her employers were three bachelor brothers who chomped on their cigars and whistled show tunes and dictated their letters to my mother, who sat with her taupe pantyhosed legs crossed neatly at the ankles, hand sliding deftly across her steno pad. What I’m saying is that I could never figure out what my mother was fighting for. Another luncheon with the brothers Razykowski at Bella Milano on Administrative Professional’s Day? Discussing Ian McEwan’s latest with her book club? Her annual visit to Aunt Marti in Tampa?

The men in my family were itinerants and alcoholics. The women led puny, truncated lives: associate degrees, church group memberships, craft hobbies, 3-day cruises, clerical jobs – the kind of life you might make if you didn’t much count on hanging onto it. (As compared to the vast, rich tapestry that was my life!) But then there was that wondrous tenacity, their fierce hanging onto the puniness, just in case or just because.

***

“It’s sort of like renewing our vows.” Jorie seemed giddy. Well, why wouldn’t she be? She bobbed in her chair like a toy boat, buoyant at the prospect of our two-year future. Then she went serious. “You should get the test,” she said. “I’ve got to think it makes a difference to know what you’re up against.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to put on the kettle. Stuart’s holed up painting all weekend. He’s got a group show in a couple of weeks.” She gave me a sort of pleading smile. “You could stay for a cup, at least.”

“What’ve you got?”

“As it happens, I just received Oolong Symphony #18.” She cocked her head toward the ceiling. “Do you have a new clock? I keep hearing this loud ticking, like Captain Hook’s crocodile.”

“Nope. No new clock.” Just new batteries for one of my mother’s old clocks.

“That’s weird,” she said. “I swear I never heard it before a few days ago.” She looked at me squarely. “Your blusher is too pink,” she said. “You should go with something peachier.”

Above us came the skitter-skitter-skitter-whump of Topaz batting what sounded like a tube of lip balm across my front room and under my coat closet door.

I shrugged and shook my head: what can I do? “That cat,” I said.

I’d paint the living room walls a deep shade of amber, an amber that matched Topaz’s eyes. I’d have the last word.

Valerie Vogrin is the author of Shebang. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Zone 3, The Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. In 2010, she was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Vogrin is currently an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where she serves as a prose editor of Sou’wester.

Return to menu

I lied, promised I would learn to drive
stick, which you couldn’t do—otherwise,
you wouldn’t fly to Oslo with me. When the
green VW Bug stalled, then stalled again
at the airport car rental lot with the
likes of me at the stick, I cajoled you,
shamelessly, into trying to drive it, then
lied and promised I would love you
forever. I got away with all of it because
lying was habit, the sex was good, and you
wanted to believe me, though you already
suspected I couldn’t possibly mean it.
You hadn’t yet fully learned how unreliable
cars and women could be. Together, we
marveled at fjords, read pamphlets on ice
flow, skerries, visited medieval post and lintel
wooden churches before that neo-Nazi
rock musician started arsoning them down.

You wrestled that damn little car
north because I dreamed of seeing reindeer,
because you still wanted to please me. I lied and
promised this was the best vacation ever, that
when we got home, I would finally quiet down.
Though I never did learn to drive stick,
I did figure out that for me, going smoothly
was the tricky part. It didn’t require
as much skill to come to a safe stop: just
depress the clutch, firmly hit the brake.

Susana H. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology. Her photos have appeared in San Pedro River Review and Blue Hour Magazine, among others. Author of several chapbooks, her Slapering Hol Press chapbook, The Scottish Café, was published in a dual-language version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Poland’s Opole University Press. She authored the books, Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions), Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press), and Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press). 4 Rms w Vu is forthcoming from Mayapple Press in 2014. Please visit her online at: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shcase/.

Return to menu

There were days, lazy days
in early Spring when you played
so long your head went light.

Charles Denby’s air-vented head
sat on the maple credenza,
held the bills paid for 1957.

Uncle Tony sucked a raw egg out
through a pinhole made with his knife.
then let out a yelp like a hungry coyote.

Dropped the yellow cat’s-eye
into the hole in the lid of Phillies Sweets,
dug in left pocket and took out shooter.

Two punched tickets to the Museum
of Science and Industry, bus tokens
line the bottom of a Muriel Magnum.

Hook shot after hook shot after…
till the sun went down, fading
across the lane with a runner.

Breaking into the basement of the Selky’s
abandoned house next door,
finding a Beck’s and a Dutch Masters.

Becky climbing the Mulberry Tree
looking all the way up her skirt,
with her standing on my shoulders.

Climb onto Otto Schmidt’s
homemade mule drawn cart,
pitching corncobs into the hog pen.

Handelsgold, Sonnenreifer Tabake,
a bit dry, but clean, smooth burn
with a slight aftertaste of corn silk.

Fabrica de Tabacos, Habanos,
decades searching for a good smoke,
Mercantile, Red Dot, 5 cent Idle Hours

Satch Dobrey has a B.A. in English from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and an M.A. in International Affairs from Washington University in St. Louis. He has recently won First Place in the Chesterfield Arts Writing contest for 2012. Dobrey’s poetry has previously appeared in the September 2012 online issue of Bluestem Magazine, and is forthcoming in the Spring 2014 edition of Rampike. He currently works as a librarian and freelance writer, residing with his wife in Southern Illinois on the old bluffs of the Mississippi River.

Return to menu

will be played. Nevermind
that you never
auditioned for the role. Nevermind
that you swore you’d never be
that woman who cries
as the school bus pulls away. Nevermind
that your child is not
even on the bus yet, that you
are looking out the window of your apartment
with your infant in your arms.
Just the thought is enough motivation for you now.
The part
of the mother must be played.

Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks: The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Point Loma Press, 2013), Tea with Ezra (Boneset Books, 2013), and I Awake in My Womb (Yellow Flag Press, 2013). She lives in the Los Angeles area and teaches poetry at Azusa Pacific University. She is especially fond of tea and board games. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

Return to menu

I tell you of a dream I had: a man cuts
into a loaf of soda bread, and from the slight tear,

a small bird flies out. I decide it’s something to do
with the sure fact of my leaving.

We let the windows open, listen
to the heaving of trees

and before I raise my head to the turning
clouds, the rain wets the ground.

We pull the clothes from each other (a low,
inelegant song), unhinge our brassy mouths, stare

long enough to think we’ve figured the other out.
If someone were to arrive, just outside, they’d see

all the animals hiding, see how the living behave:
filling spaces for brief periods of time.

Our breath fills the room.
My ankle meets your ankle.

Erin L. Miller earned her MFA at Bowling Green State University. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Sugar House Review, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, Prick of the Spindle, and others. She was awarded a Devine Fellowship and was a finalist for The Tusculum Review Poetry Prize as well as the Rita Dove Poetry Award. She lives in Ohio.

Return to menu

Miho Nonaka is a native of Tokyo and a bilingual poet.  Her poems and essays have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, American Letters & Commentary, Iowa Review, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House and American Odysseys: Writings by New American (Dalkey Archive Press).  She teaches English and Creative Writing at Wheaton College.

Return to menu

Charlene Perrizo, Irving’s wife, used ketchup for spaghetti sauce.
Her daughter Mary Jo played “Yummy Yummy Yummy
I Got Love in my Tummy” for me on her flip and play record player.
When the music stopped I heard Irving call my mom
“Swivel Hips.” I was just a kid but I remember everything
about visiting the Perrizos as slightly sexual.
Mary Jo had a headful of thick black dull hair,
like an animal’s pelt. Charlene had thick hair too,
that special orange tint from a bad dye job.
The women were petite; Irving tall and lanky
with a pair of Buddy Holly glasses, a close talker.
There was a special buzz driving to the Perrizo’s,
a complicit silence on the long way home.
I don’t remember doing anything “wrong,”
but being close enough to see the fine black hairs
laid down on the creamy white skin of Mary Jo’s upper lip.
I remember red pills on the kitchen table,
cigarette smoke, the way my parents
never laughed at home, the solemn way Mary Jo
moved the needle over vinyl as we played
while the grownups drank.

Andy Roberts lives in Columbus, Ohio where he handles finances for disabled veterans. He has two Pushcart Prize nominations, three published chapbooks, and poems forthcoming in Lake Effect, Mudfish, and Slipstream.

Return to menu

1.

It’s snowing again in Knoxville
and still the braindead daffodils
open their sun-bright mouths

to the wet. Seven months
in this globed city,
and my husband tells me

this could never be
home, and I agree,
though I can’t say why—

I love the ravished Europa
and her lunar cow that cavort
in the square,

the butter light
of our living room,
the high ceilings

of textured white making
shadows of everything.
The chalk-line hills

that lick up in the wispy winter,
the skeletal poplars
that drop their summers there.

2.

A week into the season,
I think to clean the flower
beds of leaves.

Beneath, the small shoots of hostas
have thumbed their way through.
We amaze ourselves

with what sun and rain can do.
I can almost see them grow,
he says, as I watch the small

nameless birds peck at snails.
Nine months married and I hate
and marvel at the weight of a ring

the way its absence – in sleep,
in work, in the hot of deep
bathtubs – is a type of fear. So many

anecdotal losses and how do you replace
a metaphor? An allegory? The strange
attachment of a ring to a hand.

3.

Our chainlink neighborhood
goes alive with dogwood.
Petals cover lawns

like the drawings
of unicorned little girls
who pencil the same house

with the same two boxy windows
under a smiling sun.
I drew these houses too once

and now in the margins of my books
I dog-ear anything that licks my brain
past the single triangle tree

that grows out
of some horizonless white,
or the crepe myrtle, very real,

maturing into its own unflattering bush
all pink pistons of flower
and the grass limp beneath.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts, as well as the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. Among other things, she also teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Return to menu

It was January and hot. I was walking toward St. Genevieve Cathedral on Bayou Liberty like I did every Sunday morning to attend Mass, alone. I was dressed in my Catechism clothes, a blue plaid short sleeved shirt and khaki pants with Buster Brown shoes. The sky was overcast but it was a light gray, a high wind blew above the tall pines, the highway I walked on toward the Cathedral had wide and deep ditches on either side, and I was always worried I might fall into one of them as I walked the mile from the large wooden house where I lived with my mother and her boyfriend. The highway was notoriously dangerous; it was said to be one of the most dangerous highways in America to drive on. A few months earlier my favorite Irish Setter (I had three at one time) was hit by a truck and I found the dog myself trembling in agony with its back broken. It had just returned home after a six month absence. That summer it became rabid and I remember the day it ran away; it was foaming out of both sides of its mouth but it didn’t appear hostile at all, on the contrary, the dog seemed euphoric and it jumped up and down like it was celebrating its newly acquired disease. Before it disappeared, it ran in circles for the whole of the evening and no one dared to stop it as it jumped over the chain link fence and raced off to no telling what kind of adventures.

There were enormous pine trees that lined the highway where I walked to Mass. The trees were covered with arm thick Passion Vines that grew at the top of the trees, and all but blocked out the sun along the highway. The high wind had a strange effect on me, no wind has ever felt quite so good to me, perhaps it was the first strong wind I remember. It felt truly wonderful just to be alive.

I’d just lost my first front tooth a couple of nights earlier and the Tooth Fairy, whom I didn’t know at the time was really my mother, left a dollar under my pillow and now I had a dollar bill stuffed deep in my pants pocket. The wind, the blowing vines at the top of the trees, the thought that I would soon dip my child fingers into the Holy Water and hear spoken Latin phrases by a virgin man, Father Lombard, who would call upon me at some point during the Mass, all of it made me want to collapse before the dead, bronzed Christ that was splayed large on the wall behind the altar of the Cathedral. As I walked, I looked down into the fetid ditch and was pleased to see real glass bottles of Barq’s root beer, an empty box of Lucky Strikes, a tarnished gold doubloon, and a knot of faded tangled Mardi Gras beads; I was sweating a bit from the thick humidity of that January morning, then, I took notice of something I’d never seen before, a snakefish looking thing that moved very slowly in the oily ditch water. It looked like an earthworm to me except it was a couple of feet long and as thick around as a child’s arm and it was gray like an eel.

For years, I didn’t know what I’d seen. I secretly thought I’d discovered some kind of lost species that no one knew about, but years later when I was failing out of high school biology, I saw a picture of the creature in the depressing biology book I was forced to study from; it was a salamander type animal called a amphiuma. They’re common enough in the Deep South but they’re largely nocturnal and rarely seen, sort like a bobcat or a coyote is rarely seen. The amphiuma is the only amphibian that possesses actual teeth, a full set of them, mind you, a bite from one of them can take off fingers! Imagine some other amphibian, like a frog, with razor like teeth and before it attacks you it whistles a sweet song with its wide and complex mouth; a song, like the Sirens of Greek Mythology, the music is quite pleasing to the ear, but dangerous to the listener who lacks awareness; you are drawn to the amphiuma and then he lurches at you to perhaps rip a chunk out of your wonderful face—that would be the hallmark of anyone’s life, if it didn’t drive you mad or cause you to go mute forever.

I walked sideways down the ditch to get a better view of this amazing worm. The amphiuma moved surprisingly quickly away from me with every step I took toward the bottom of the ditch. I did not hear it whistle as the Cathedral bells rang profoundly through out the fishing village. The closer I got to the amphiuma, the more I thought of the Virgin Mary. High above on the road a carload of juvenile rednecks rained insults down at me, calling me fag and whatnot and one of them threw a piece of 2×4 and hit me on the back. I tripped the rest of the way down the ditch toward the stagnant water and caught myself before I fell all the way in. The crawl back up to the highway was difficult; the upper half of me was bone dry but I was soaked from the waist down with ditch water.

I decided to go to Mass anyway instead of walking all the way back home to change. On the way, I stopped at Pynchon’s Grocery to buy fifty cents worth of Now-Or-Laters with the dollar I got for losing my front tooth. Now-Or-Laters were an absolute obsession with me when I was a child and sometimes I would eat them deep into the night while sitting up in bed in quiet darkness. It’s safe to say that I was as obsessed with Now-or-Laters as I was with the Virgin Mary who I often confused with my own mother, a virgin of a different sort, and with whom I competed for the attention of two males, my real father and my impending stepfather. I handed the fat man who ran the cash register the dollar for the Now-or-Laters; the dollar was dripping wet and covered in a brown scum from falling into the ditch. The old fat man behind the cash register found this to be particularly amusing and he busted out laughing as he held the dollar. His hands were ugly with large brown warts at the tips of his fingers. He kept laughing as he handed the dollar back to me and said to keep the dollar and to pay him when I had some dry cash.

I left the store humiliated but now more determined than ever to make it to Mass. High winds blew even harder through the Passion Vines. On the way to St. Genevieve, all I could think about was the amphiuma and the Virgin Mary who, despite all evidence to the contrary, was in truth my own mother.

1977

Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, a non-profit arts organization based in Oxford, Mississippi. His memoirs, The Gar Diaries, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2008.  His Collected Works, will be published by Xenos Books in 2015.

Return to menu

I borrowed a pair of Mom’s dressy church shoes until we found the four-inch iridescent silver heels on a mall clearance rack with matching hand-written $18 tags on each sole. A strap ran horizontally across the creases of my toes, and a thinner strap wrapped around my leg, just above the bone of my ankle. A buckle, as delicate as the clasp of a necklace, held the adjustable strap in place.

“They’re pretty expensive for a pair of shoes you’re probably only going to wear once,” Mom said. I slid my hands through the straps and put the soles together, lining up the thin heels. Then I begged, promising to wear them more than once. I promise, I promise, I promise.

Mom worried I’d break my ankle, so I carefully buckled them and practiced walking the long hallways of our house in them when we got home— from my parents’ room to the kitchen, from the living room to my room, across the driveway to Dad’s racecar shop.

Liberty Middle School’s principal nicknamed herself “Mama Givens” and established “The Italian Dinner” as a reward for kids without discipline strikes. My eighth-grade group of friends made a reservation for one of the tables that lined the school’s hallways. Mama Givens wore makeup like Mimi from The Drew Carrey Show, dimmed the lights, and served us donated lasagna. There was no dance, but it was the dressiest event our middle school had to offer. My friends and I pretended we were getting ready for prom.

After track practice, we convened in Kim’s basement, and her mom brought down every curling iron she owned. We plugged them in to walls, countertops, and their family computer desk. My mom, a Mary Kay representative, brought her tackle-box of makeup and brushes, and we lined up for makeovers. We pinned curls and soaked each other in firm hold hairspray. One by one, we shimmied into the prom dresses we’d borrowed from cousins and siblings and zipped each other up.

The black dress I borrowed from my cousin Sherri fit tight across my thirteen-year-old chest and ribcage but flowed into a wide taffeta skirt with cascading rhinestones and silver threading. Mom helped me buckle the strappy silver heels and asked me one more time, “Are you sure you can walk in these?”

I let go of the taffeta folds and they brushed the tops of my feet where the rhinestone buckles were still visible, and I swished the skirt.

“Uh huh,” I said.

***

Rumor had it that Brody planned to ask me to the fall homecoming dance. He lived a mile and a half from me—even farther out in the country— and the summer before we started high school, he started referring to me as neighbor girl. As a childhood wrestling club star, he’d developed athletically before the other boys in our class, and there was talk of him playing on the junior varsity football team instead of being on the team with the rest of our class.

In first hour freshman band, he crossed the room from the percussion section to where I sat as last chair flutist. When he was a few steps away from me, I realized my hair was tangled in my sunglasses. I pulled the hair a few inches from my head then buried the nosepiece just above my bangs. He stood on the band riser above me with his hands in his pockets, and I couldn’t get him to meet my eye contact.

If he hadn’t been asking me to the dance, I would have nodded excitedly at whatever else came out of his mouth. All I could think about were the rubber nosepieces digging in to my scalp.

He and I were the same height without shoes. In the waist-up pictures, we look perfectly matched with the purple sparkles in my dress and his button-down shirt. In the full-length pictures, you can see that I’ve rocked my feet off the silver heels and slightly bent my knees. We stood nearly a foot apart and our hands sagged like a knot tied on a string between us.

We were still holding hands when we gave our tickets to the teacher at the entrance, but when I sat on the bleachers to take off my heels, he disappeared into the dark group of people at the center gymnasium. Before the first slow song played, I saw him between the bodies on the dance floor, grinding with an upperclassman. In the flash of the strobe light during a rap song he lifted one hand from her hip in a wave and gave me a weak smile.

When the dance ended, I stood on the bleachers with my best friend, Amber, looking for him. Only a few people remained on the dance floor. I sat on the bottom row in my short dress and kept my knees together, trying not to cry. Amber helped me buckle the smallest buckle of my silver heels. We climbed into my mom’s Suburban.

“Where’s Brody?” Mom asked Amber. “He got his own ride home,” I said.

***

The Christmas lights were still up in Lemon’s Park when Bruce asked me to my first prom. We’d just walked a lap around the lighted display and sat down to drink our hot chocolate in the gazebo when he asked.

“But it’s your senior prom,” I answered.

He laughed. “That’s why I’m inviting you. I saved the best date for my last prom.”

I tried to tell him that taking a freshman date would waste his senior prom. He needed to spend time with his friends before he graduated and everyone moved away.

“I want to take you as my girlfriend.”

The lights on a nearby reindeer flickered. A car’s headlights scanned us, and I nodded.

His mom served our table at the restaurant on Main Street where we went to dinner before the dance. I kept asking when the dance started because I didn’t know people didn’t go to dances early or on time. I didn’t want to miss anything.

He drove his mom’s Cadillac that night, and I almost cried when he parked on a pier at the county lake after dinner. I worried about the things people said about senior boys dating freshman girls and held up my hands in a stop motion. They were wrong, wrong, wrong.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

He opened his door and came around to open mine. We held hands and walked toward the water at the end of the breakwater. I wondered how dirty my feet would be and hoped the rocks weren’t scratching the silver from my shoes as we walked. Where the rocky pier ended, a mattress-sized concrete slab leaned toward the water. He stepped on to it and pulled me against him.

After kissing me my first long kiss, he sang the classic version of King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight” into my hair while we moved together in a swaying slow dance. When he stopped singing, I didn’t want to get back in the car and go to the actual dance. I wanted him to myself for the rest of the night, even if we didn’t have real music.

His friends met us outside the gymnasium doors and walked through the cardboard tunnel made to look like a castle. We only danced to the slow songs, and just before the lights came on at the end of the night, I remember committing “You’ll Be in My Heart” to memory as our last dance. The finality of the thought made me stop breathing for a second.

 ***

I piled the blue and purple dresses on top of the one Mom had handed over the curtain to me. It hurt her feelings that I laughed at her choice, a dress that mimicked the fire I chalked on the motorcycle picture for my dad in art class. With an orange beaded bodice and a red and yellow fold at the waistline, I hoped she was joking when she gave it to me.

Finally, I stepped in to it. The dressing room attendant zipped me in to it. At the store’s tri-fold mirror, I slipped my silver heels on. The dress gapped in the front just enough to see the rhinestone buckles.

The seamstress asked if these were my prom shoes. Mom said I needed new ones because I’d worn the same ones for six homecomings and two proms so far.

I pulled my long, highlighted hair on top of my head and said, “I’m wearing these.”

I gathered the folds of the dress at my knees and dropped my rear into the passenger seat of the black Shelby Mustang. Justin’s dad thought it was my first ride in that car, but we’d stolen it once that previous summer while he was out of town. With me still in my cheerleading practice clothes and him in the neon orange Department of Transportation hat from his summer sign- holding job, he had accelerated down the hills of Lake Road. He’d dusted it with the California Duster from his dad’s toolbox when he parked it back in the garage.

The only time we separated during the dance, he reappeared during the opening riffs of “You Shook Me All Night Long.” He air-guitared his way through people on the dance floor, mouthing to me as if I were the “Yeah, You” of the chorus.

The last song didn’t feel final, and when the lights came on they made me blink hard. I tried to miss the cracks in the red brick road on the way to his car, and we flew down those same hills from the summer before to loop around the lake. He rested his hand on my knee and smiled at me. The light from the dash put a kind of shadow on his face and I imagined us as adults and wondered what it would be like to marry him. I smiled.

Something darted under the car and clunked twice against the undercarriage. It was the size of a baby bear, and even after we decided it was a badger, he kept mumbling, “I hit a bear. I hit a bear. I hit a bear.” We were afraid to stop and check the damage.

In August, I stopped smiling at what it would be like to marry him and broke up with him. He knocked his graduation picture from his family’s fridge when he fell against it crying.

***

One of the bases of our cheerleading squad dragged me to her college boyfriend’s cross country meet after our practice. When he crossed the finish line, we joined him and a friend near the train station part of the park play area. After a conversation with Danny, I was angry at myself for finding such a Florida cliché attractive. Blonde hair and blue eyes had never made me swoon before, but I invited him to the homecoming dance with me before I could stop myself.

“I have to go because I’m on the homecoming court, but the principal changed the rules for dancing,” I told him, “so it might be lame. It’ll be really conservative.”

In the pictures before the dance, I bent my knees so I wouldn’t tower over him. We look like siblings with our blonde hair and identical height.

Three non-rap songs in to the dance, we left. Amber’s brother helped me stand in the bleachers after buckling my own shoes in a short black dress. Danny stood with his hands on his hips and watched the few people still dancing.

We went to someone’s garage and a hatchback car played music from someone’s CD collection. The dirt floor and the grit between my toes made the whole place feel dirty: the bass vibrating from the car, the streetlight beside the garage, and the guy with his arms around my waist wasn’t the same one I’d taken to every school dance the year before.

I loosened his grip enough to turn and face him, but he couldn’t hear me. I motioned with my thumb, let’s go.

He lived in the dorms at the community college on the edge of town and didn’t have a car, so I drove him home. We parked in front of his hall, and he invited me up. “I don’t go to guys’ dorm rooms,” I said. We made out in my car instead.

When he disappeared through the building’s front doors, I pulled off my silver shoes and spread my toes to wipe the dirt on my floorboard mats. On the eight-mile stretch of highway, I accelerated until the car’s speed governor kicked in and slowed the car down to a hundred and five. With my bare toes, I accelerated until it shut my power down again and again.

***

While bartending through college, I dated a line cook named Adam with sleeves of tattoos. A purple and green graveyard stretched from his bony shoulder to his even bonier wrist. I traced the swirls from the moon to the headstones to the blades of grass down his forearm. Once, I asked if the graveyard represented the death of his mother at a young age. He seemed surprised I’d made that connection and shook his head. No, it didn’t.

I flew home for my cousin’s wedding over Memorial Day weekend and ended up dancing all night at a club with friends from high school. A boy I’d almost dated in middle school was there and he pretended to be my boyfriend all night, keeping the hands of strangers from my hips. I nearly kissed him good night when I got out of his car, but I handed him my phone instead.

“Take my picture,” I said. My parents’ porch light turned me into a doorway shadow. I pulled my leg up in dancer pose, and my fingers hooked on the thin heel of the silver shoes.

The middle school almost-boyfriend handed me my phone and said good night. My heels clacked on the entryway tile, syncopated as I touched through my phone.

I sent the picture to Adam and then called him. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might ask who snapped the picture for me at three AM until it started ringing on his end.

“Nice shoes,” he said, instead of hello.

I giggled.

“You should wear those for me when you get back,” he said.

The bars in his time zone hadn’t yet closed, and I knew how he meant it.

He picked me up at the airport in my car, and when we got to my apartment, he told me we had nothing in common.

I crawled around my living room and filled a garbage bag with his things while he finished breaking up with me.

“I can’t carry that on my bike,” he said. “Get out of my house,” I said.

The apartment’s open doorway and the Phoenix sun behind made him a silhouetted collage or road bike tires and lanky limbs. Arms, legs, spokes, and handlebar brakes. He sniffed, but I couldn’t see any tears.

He watched me from there. “Out,” I said.

The next day after his shift ended, I dropped the garbage bag on the sidewalk. He loaded it into the car of a girl with sleeves of chrysanthemum tattoos. She stared straight ahead and pretended not to see me.

As they pulled from the parking lot he lifted his fingers in a wave, and even from that distance, I knew the what lettering tattooed on that hand said. His bike bounced along on the rack behind her car.

***

“I don’t see why you’d look any longer,” Dad said. “Nothing could be better than this.”

I traced the sweetheart neckline with my fingernails and ran my hands the rest of the way down the bodice. My engagement ring caught the dressing area light and sparkled like the rhinestones and pearls of the ivory wedding dress. I breathed in and held my hands at my waist where the boning hugged the curve of my hips. From there, it draped into ivory folds and fabric roses.

With my family in the tri-fold mirror, I stood on the fitting area podium. I stretched to my toes and rested flat-footed again. The hem of the dress moved with me.

Mom’s lips were pursed in her cry-face, and she held my shoes out in front of her.

“Shoes?”

We decided that since I only had one appointment with the dress shop consultant, I should only try my shoes with dresses I really loved. I tried shoes with the first dress, a drop- waist white gown with spiraled material flowing from the horizontal seam. I hadn’t needed shoes for the second, third, and fourth dresses. No shoes, not yet.

For that dress though, I nodded. Yes. Shoes. Please.

My sister lifted the hem of the front of the fifth dress. Mom clunked the shoes down in front of me on the hollow podium and slid them toward me, one at a time.

I pointed my toes into the blue satin peep-toes and settled into them. The material on them gathered, leaving the royal blue looking more saturated in some places and glossy in others. Oversized rhinestone bows draped across the outside edge of each foot and covered the creases of my toes.

Early in the wedding planning process, Mom talked me out of wearing the silver heels I’d worn to the eighth grade Italian dinner, eight homecoming dances, four proms, two homecoming assemblies, two cousins’ weddings, and two dance clubs in college.

I thought it would be perfect to wear the heels I’d worn in every misstep toward marrying the right guy, but Mom thought I needed a fresh start.

Something new and something blue, all at once. Those silver shoes could stay in my closet—just this time.

On our wedding day, the organ music played and Dad pushed the door that opened onto the grass of Curtis’s family’s backyard. I looped my arm through his, and Curtis waited at the end of the aisle. The bouquet was heavy in my shaking hand.

My legs brushed against the thick under-material of my dress with each step, and I thought about Curtis and me at ages eleven and twelve. Our families always shared a cabin on summer lake trips to a bordering state. We rode in the family Suburban together looking for letters on license plates; he always found the Z. He made up jokes, and we laughed until he fell asleep on my shoulder just past the state line.

We sat at the top of the cabin’s playground slide and talked about what we would be like as grownups. Would our marriages be like our parents’? Or would our future relationships be completely different because we knew so much from watching them do some things right and other things not-so-right?

Sophomore year, we sat in my neighbor’s hammock for hours. Curtis rocked us with his leg that hung over the edge. Neither of us had cell phones, and he had to run to his car to be home for curfew once we finally looked at what time it was. For hours, our hips and shoulders rested against each other, but we kept our hands in our laps.

On vacation the summer I turned sixteen, we took the piña colada mix our parents hadn’t added rum to yet and snuck down to the dock and listened to the radio on his step-dad’s boat. We played cards and it made me jealous that he could do the bridge when he shuffled. A Kenny Chesney song came on and we two-stepped on each other’s toes down the dock’s walkway and back. Someone was already sleeping in my bed when we got back to the cabin, and Curtis gave me his instead. He lay on the floor, and we whispered over the edge. He held up his hand while we talked, but I was too afraid to hold it.

When I reached the end of the aisle, I could see Curtis’s lip quivering. He put his hand to his face to try to stop it, and we laughed together. In a moment, we were eleven and twelve, fifteen and sixteen, and twenty-three and twenty-four—kids, friends, and husband and wife.

Karly Little has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. She served as the Creative Nonfiction Editor for Lunch Ticket, reads creative nonfiction for The Citron Review, and interns for The Rumpus. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Free State Review, Drunk Monkeys, and Spry Literary Journal. She coordinates community education and teaches English at Barton Community College. Karly lives, writes, rollerblades, and watches sports with her husband in a north-central Kansas town of 172 people.

Return to menu