Number Fourteen/2015 Number $10.00

poemmemoirstory 2015 Amye Archer Amye Braziel Mozelle Tina Cohen Brooke Janna Cohen Kaplan Stephanie Denise Duhamel Eliza Gilmore Hadaway Davies Meredith Hertenstein Jane Christine Higgins Kate Hovey A. Kelly Kathleen Landis Catherine Dell Lemmon MacLeod Annie J. Marzano-Lesnevich Alexandria Bethany Mitchell Carmen Nieto Rindo Jenna Schwartz Claire Stanton Maura Christine Stewart-Nuñez Tacconi Brittany Thompson Kathleen Wade Marie Julie Wrinkle Margaret Lisa Zerkle ..

PMSpoemmemoirstory

2015number fourteen Copyright © 2015 by PMS poemmemoirstory

PMS poemmemoirstory appears once a year. We accept unpublished, origi- nal submissions of poetry, memoir, and short fiction during our January 1 through March 31 reading period. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, we ask that you please contact us immediately if your piece is published elsewhere so we may free up space for other authors. While PMS is a jour­nal of exclu­sively women’s writ­ing, the sub­ject field is wide open. We strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with PMS before submitting. You can find links to some examples of what we publish in the pages of PMS 8 and PMS 9. We ask that you limit your sub­mis­sion to either five poems or 15 pages of prose (4,300 words or less). We look forward to reading your work.

Please note: PMS submissions are going all-digital this year on Submit- table. Our reading period remains the same, and there is now a $3 fee, which covers costs associated with our online submissions system. Please send all submissions to https://poemmemoirstory.submittable.com/sub- mit.

For any other correspondence, contact us at poemmemoirstory@gmail. com.

PMS poemmemoirstory is a member of the Council of Literary Maga- zines and Presses (CLMP) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Indexed by the Humanities International Index and in Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, PMS poemmemoirstory is distributed to the trade by Ingram Periodicals, 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000. patrons

College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Margaret Harrill Robert Morris, M.D. C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D.

friends Sandra Agricola Andrew Glaze Dail W. Mullins Jr. Daniel Anderson Robert P. Glaze Michael R. Payne Rebecca Bach Randa Graves Robert Lynn Penny George W. Bates Ron Guthrie Lee and Pam Person Peter and Miriam Bellis Ward Haarbauer William Pogue Claude and Nancy Ted Haddin Kieran Quinlan & Bennett John Haggerty Mary Kaiser Randy Blythe Richard Hague Jim Reed James Bonner Sang Y. Han Steven M. Rudd F.M. Bradley Jeff Hansen Rusty Rushton Mary Flowers Braswell Tina Harris John Sartain Jim Braziel Jessica Heflin Janet Sharp Karen Brookshaw Patti Callahan Henry Danny Siegel Bert Brouwer Pamela Horn Juanita Sizemore Edwin L. Brown Jennifer Horne Martha Ann Stevenson Donna Burgess William Hutchings Lou Suarez Linda Casebeer Lanier Scott Isom Susan Swagler Alicia K. Clavell Joey Kennedy Jeane Thompson John E. Collins Sue Kim Drucilla Tyler Robert Collins Marilyn Kurata Catherine Danielou Ruth and Edward Maria Vargas Jim L. Davidson Lamonte Adam Vines Michael Davis Beverly Lebouef Daniel Vines Denise Duhamel Ada Long Larry Wharton Charles Faust Susan Luther Elaine Whitaker Grace Finkel John C. Mayer Jacqueline Wood Edward M. Friend III James Mersmann John M. Yozzo Stuart Flynn Will Miles Carol Prejean Zippert staff editor-in-chief Kerry Madden managing editor Bethany Mitchell senior editors Halley Cotton, Poem Bethany Mitchell, Memoir Sarah Jennings, Story assistant editors Xenia Bethancourt Laura Simpson Mary Doss Cheyenne Taylor Christia Givens Jennie Tippett Melba Major Chance Turner Jamie McFaden Jason Walker business managers Pamela M. Parker Bethany Mitchell administrative assistants Sarah Jennings Bethany Mitchell cover design Michael J. Alfano cover art “World War II Postcards.” Submitted by Dell Lemmon from her grandmother’s collection of old postcards. production/printing 47 Journals, LLC contents from the Editor-in-Chief 1

Bethany Mitchell The Tension of Opposites: An Interview with Margaret Wrinkle 5 poemmemoirstory Claire Schwartz uncoaxed 37

Dell Lemmon Anti-postcards 38

Stephanie Kaplan Cohen The Cross Dressing Canteloupe 40

Jenna Rindo Step Over Cracks 41

Kate Hovey Out of Air 43

Christine Higgins When I Go 45 Having a Daughter 47

Brittany Tacconi Easter 1999 48

Kathleen Thompson Lament on Distance 49

Tina Mozelle Braziel The Afterlife of Pine 50 Laurel Knob 51

Carmen Nieto City 52 Which Memories Will Our Children Have? 54

Eliza Gilmore Book of Hours 55 On Watching My Older Brother Read Moby-Dick 57

Kathleen A. Kelly She Ought to Know Better 59 About the Bed We Share 60 The Third Thing 62 Mr. Ninda’s Business 64 contents…

Lisa Zerkle Transformation 66

Meredith Davies Hadaway Wash Day 67 poemmemoirstory Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade Green 71

Amye Archer Slow Motion 78

Christine Stewart-Nuñez Culinary Alchemy 85

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich Opal 91 poemmemoirstory Catherine Landis Speechless 99

Maura Stanton One Hundred Famous Views 104

Janna Brooke Cohen The Doll Maker’s Tale 115

J. Annie MacLeod American Gothic 125

Jane Hertenstein Heartbreak Wall 138 contributors 148 f r o m t h e editor-in-chief

Dear Reader,

I thought I would begin this issue with some advice from Harper Lee, who once said: “Well, the first advice I would give is this: hope for the best and expect nothing. Then you won’t be disappointed.” Her words resonate today for every writer submitting work, although honestly it’s easier said than done, don’t you think? Who doesn’t, after all, hope that each time they sit down to write a story or a poem or a memoir that one day it will find a loving home and readers? As a writer, I have despaired over the seas of “no thank yous’” that lap upon the shore with each sub- mission, and as an editor, it’s often very difficult to say no to the good work that pours in during each reading period. But what is the alternative? Not to write? Not to submit? To give up hope? Flannery O’Connor wrote: “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.” As writers we have to find those slivers and slabs of hope, but even more than hoping, we have to devote the hours and time in the chair, letting our imaginations run wild on the page and giving our hearts and minds to the work at hand. We also write for those who have not given up hope because they are our readers. And so on that note, I am very grateful that Margaret Wrinkle did not give up hope when writing her novel, WASH, which took her over two decades to complete. Working as a filmmaker, artist, and teacher with roots deep in Birmingham and the world, Wrinkle always returned to the story that haunted her as the rumored ancestor of slave breeders. Haunted by her characters, she found a way to atone through fiction to her give her characters a life on the page. Bethany Mitchell’s interview with Wrinkle delves deeply into her process, and as writers and readers, we can all learn from her struggles and courage during her journey to create WASH. PoemMemoirStory is also overjoyed to have the poems of Dell Lemmon, Stephanie Kaplan Cohen, Tina Mozelle Braziel and so many others. This is an issue packed with poems from all ages and experiences in the landscape of verse. From Dell’s grandmother’s postcards to Cohen’s

PMS.. 1 cross-dressing cantaloupes to Braziel’s granite domes and piney trees that scrape the Southern Appalachian skies, their words and so many others fill these pages with stunning vistas of grief, joy, and redemption. Each poem in this issue is a tiny, magnificent world unto itself—from freckled knees to the Greek sands of Amorgos to an ode to distance, and how the distances can often tyrannize our lives through years, miles, and silence. These poets give us a sense of beauty and connection as readers seeking connection. James Baldwin wrote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” The first memoir piece is a collaborative essay by Denise Duhamel and Julia Marie Wade called, “Green,” which opens at the green grave of Dylan Thomas in Wales and covers miles and years of stories filled with green and longing. The second is “Slow Motion” by Amye Archer, the tale of two wildly different sisters on the streets of New York riding the subway, which reeks of “hot garbage soup” and begs the question of belonging and who gets to belong and who doesn’t. Finally the third memoir is “Culinary Alchemy” by Christine Stewart-Nunez, about a girl determined to cook for her sweetheart’s family, which calls upon kitchen witches and heart-shaped tomatoes and the visit of wrecked dreams of a mother who cooked for a father who preferred Wild Turkey to roast beef and potatoes. In the stories we have the luminous prose of Catherine Landis whose excerpted work from her southern novel, SPEECHLESS, gives us the tale of a woman who has decided to stop talking to see if anyone will notice. In Maura Stanton’s story, “One Hundred Famous Views,” we traverse the world to Italy where an artist survives by living on the cheap and teaching other aspiring artists how to paint the most beautiful city in the world. She also struggles to find a place to live and muses over all the possibilities, landlords, and the myriad other details that go into poten- tial places we may call home if only for a time. From “The Doll-Maker’s Tale” to “American Gothic” to “Heartbreak Wall,” these stories reveal the human condition hiding inside all of us along with the choices we make and don’t make day after day.

2 PMS.. And so dear reader, thank you, and we leave you with hope and sto- ries and much love as always. If you are so inclined to submit a story or poem or memoir, please know that our reading period is January 1st to March 31st every year, and we would love to hear from you. I would also like to thank Russell Helms for his design and dedication to each issue and for Linda Frost who began this literary journal almost fifteen years ago, whose vision we always try to maintain in these pages. We thank our incredible contributors and artists, who have made our covers so beau- tiful over the years. I’d like to also give a special shout-out to Bethany Mitchell, who worked so tirelessly on this issue and spent months craft- ing the interview with Margaret Wrinkle and to Laura Simpson, who transcribed the interview, and to fiction editor, Sarah Jennings, who gave so much of her time and energy, too, along with Halley Cotton, our wonderful poetry editor, and so many others. We’re also excited to have Melba Major on board as our new managing editor. Finally, part of PoemMemoirStory’s vision is to encourage stories and reading for the future young readers and writers. At each PMS publica- tion party, we collect children’s books for the “Aid to Inmate Mothers Story Book Project” at the Tutwiler Women’s Prison in Alabama. This project enables incarcerated mothers to record stories for their children, fostering a hope and connection that transcends prison walls. Have a wonderful year of stories, and thank you with all our hearts for your support of PoemMemoirStory.

Yours truly, Kerry Madden, Editor-in-Chief

PMS.. 3 Margaret Wrinkle Bethany Mitchell

The Tension of Opposites: An Interview with Margaret Wrinkle

About Margaret Wrinkle Born and raised in Birmingham, Margaret Wrinkle is a writer, film- maker, educator, and visual artist. Her debut novel Wash reexamines American slavery in ways that challenge contemporary assumptions about race, power, history, and healing. Published by Grove Atlantic, Wash recently won the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize and has been named a Wall Street Journal Top Ten novel of the year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an O magazine selection for “10 Books to Pick Up Now,” and a People magazine 4-star pick. Margaret earned a BA and an MA in English from Yale University and studied traditional West African spiritual practices with Malidoma Somé. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and lives in rural New Mexico. Her award-winning documentary broken\ground was fea- tured on NPR’s Morning Edition and was a winner of the Council on Foundations Film Festival. It was made with Chris Lawson about the racial divide in her historically conflicted hometown of Birmingham. It should come as no surprise that others have crowned Margaret Wrinkle with so many awards and honors. Her novel, Wash, has exploded into the literary world like a cannon shot, obliterating what people thought they knew about slavery and the South. This story cen- ters around a 19th-century enslaved man named Washington, or Wash for short. His owner, General Richardson of Tennessee, struggles under financial pressure and turns Wash into a breeding sire. Importantly, Wrinkle does not sugar coat, hide, or dismiss racial tensions that have haunted America in the past and still do so today. Instead, violent truths bleed out through the pages of Wash even as the characters struggle to find healing and resolution. Consider this moment as Wash compares himself to a stallion fight- ing in vain against his bindings: “I saw myself rearing against the rope wrapped round my middle. I saw myself striking at that wall stretching

PMS.. 5 out forever in front of me, till I finally saw the only thing giving was me, over and over, till finally it was plain old tiredness that rescued me. Taut turning to slack, and then my breath coming long and slow, carrying the trembling away and washing me clean while I stood in the quiet of Richardson’s barn” (Wrinkle 211). Here, the reader experiences Wash’s internal and physical struggle as he reflects on his captivity. The words of Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Cove, echo in this passage. Rash calls the novel “bold, unflinching,” something that is “certain to haunt the reader for a long, long time.” While speaking about her novel during UAB’s Visiting Writers Series, Margaret Wrinkle said, “One of the many things that happened during American slavery was that traditional African indigenous reality collided with modernizing Western European reality to create a new country. This collision between two very different ways of being is still reverberat- ing, still unfolding, still happening now.” In this sense, Wrinkle uncovers the wounds of the past in hopes of a future healing. But for healing to take place, there first must be pain. Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row, repeats this idea. He states about the novel, “Wash tells a chapter of our past that we would rather look away from. Margaret Wrinkle makes sure that we cannot.” In a way, Wrinkle chains us to the text; we cannot stop flipping the pages. We must know how it all ends. In my position on poemmemoir- story’s staff, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview a writer unafraid to tackle some of society’s most uncomfortable topics. I hope you enjoy my discussion with Margaret as she connects us with her characters, with history, and with the shadows within ourselves.

6 PMS.. Interview with Margaret Wrinkle

BAM: Let’s start with what everyone’s talking about: your first novel Wash. Or maybe I should say your jackpot—a Wall Street Journal Top Ten novel of the year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an O magazine selection for “10 Books to Pick Up Now,” and a People magazine 4-star pick. That’s pretty impressive. What does it mean to you that your first book has hit it big?

MRW: It’s very surprising, and it’s very heartening, but I think I just had to deal with what came to me, the story that came to me to be told. What happens to the book when it goes out in the world— it’s really not our business as writers, you know? Obviously, it’s very gratifying when it does well, and it’s very frustrating when work is not seen. Luckily for me, Wash took so long to write and to find an agent and a publisher that, by the time it was published, there were more people who were ready for it. The whole conver- sation about race in this country has moved forward in the past five years, even to a point I would not have been able to imagine earlier. I do remember worrying about why this book was tak- ing so long to come into the world, wondering whether there was something really wrong, but the timing was perfect. Wash came out in 2013, which was the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement and the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. I think some of the positive reception has to do with the fact that more people have become more ready and able to talk about these challenging subjects. When I was first work- ing on this story, one friend and I had this joke that there would be six people who would be up for the experience of reading this book, and I was prepared for that. But I’m also really glad that there are more than six!

BAM: I think it’s safe to say there were a few more than six. But for me personally, success ironically creates a new outlet for self-doubt. I question myself and think, “This was just a fluke. Can I be as good as I was in that moment?” For you, how does your novel’s success make you feel when considering a new project? Is it intimidating, or does the desire to meet that level of success again spur you on?

PMS.. 7 MRW: I try not to think too much about that aspect of this process. Of course, it’s validating to be seen and heard when you’ve invested as much time as I did. And yes, this kind of reception gives you a certain credibility that allows you to talk about even more tricky and important things. It’s kind of like in the traditional indig- enous world: the elders give you a task, and when you’ve fulfilled that task, you think you’re going to get a break. But then they give you a bigger task! But that’s ok, because there are so many diffi- cult issues that need to be discussed these days.

For me, the most important thing is to keep my focus on my rela- tionship to the world the story comes from. When I’m focused on keeping that relationship authentic and powerful I can’t worry too much about the rest. If I did, it would just make me crazy. The work comes to you to be made, and you wrestle with the work; you forge the story the best way that you know how. Whether people like it or don’t like it is really not up to you and it’s none of your business, as long as you know that you have served the story fully.

BAM: So it sounds like you leave readers to interpret the novel however they wish. Is that your intent?

MRW: It’s not so much the meaning of the novel as the evaluation of it that needs to be left up to the reader, in terms of the reviews and the critics and all that. But I do think it’s important to give the reader lots of room. I cut a lot from the book, and I think it was partly because, in the process, I learned that you need to leave enough space for the reader to come towards the story, that every- thing shouldn’t be completely spelled out. That way, the reader can co-create the story with you. I grew up without a TV. I read a lot, and I read books multiple times. I like complex books that are different every time you read them, where your understanding deepens each time. But this story will always have certain definite meanings for me. Readers will draw their own conclusions, but obviously I want their interpretation to be somewhat in the same neighborhood as mine as to what the story’s about. It’s the critical

8 PMS.. reception of a book that isn’t really any of the writer’s business. You do the best you can, but what books get attention and what books don’t is so fluky that you can’t get too invested in it. Your job is with the writing.

BAM: I think a lot of writers should probably keep that in mind. We get so lost trying to make it perfect for our readers that we forget sometimes it’s out of our hands how they’ll interpret it.

MRW: In my experience, the material is coming from another world to the writer. The writer then crafts that material for the reader. But the power and intensity of that material depends on the writer remaining deeply connected to the world the story comes from rather than becoming too focused on the reader. I think you do have to think about the reader and you have to be clear and everything, but this is where the editor comes in, whether it’s your actual editor, or your agent, or your crucial early readers. The editor is much closer to the reader; the editor’s the one who helps the writer make sure that the reader can keep up. That’s why the whole author/editor relationship is so important. I think a lot of writers, especially newer writers, myself included, can tend to resist everything any editor says at first because our primary alle- giance is to the world of the story. But it’s the editor’s allegiance to the world of the reader that becomes essential in making the story accessible to a broader audience.

BAM: How did your upbringing inspire you to write a novel concerning slavery?

MRW: I think being born in Birmingham, Alabama in July of 1963 set some sort of template for me. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Birmingham the citadel of segregation, and he chose the city for his campaign that spring because it was so segregated. I’m a seventh-generation Southerner with slaveholding ancestors, but, like a lot of white children in that era, some of my strongest early bonds were with the black people who were being paid to take care of me. So I grew up in a racially charged landscape while

PMS.. 9 maintaining deep connections on both sides of the racial divide. In fact, my relationship with Mrs. Ida Mae Lawson Washington, who came to work for my parents when I was seven years old, shaped the way I see the world. Even though she passed away in 1989, my ongoing relationship with her family inspired me to work toward racial reconciliation and eventually to write Wash.

While teaching in Birmingham’s inner city and making our docu- mentary about contemporary race relations in my hometown, I spent years crossing back and forth between Birmingham’s black and white communities. That’s when I started to get the haunt- ing sense that many of our current racial dynamics and racial landscapes stem all the way back to slavery. And too many of the young black men I knew and taught were living in what seemed to me to be a genocidal situation. In order to understand, and hopefully help unravel, this dangerous dynamic, I knew I had to trace these threads all the way back to slavery. There are so many troublesome parallels between then and now. Too many of the challenges and dilemmas Wash faces in the course of his story are eerily similar to the challenges facing too many young black men today. And people like Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson have been calling mass incarceration the new slavery.

BAM: If such a thing can be pinpointed, where did the inspiration for Wash’s character come from?

MRW: What specifically inspired this story was the rumor that one of my slaveholding ancestors had been involved in the breeding of enslaved people. If I hadn’t had that potential personal connec- tion, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near this volatile and contro- versial subject matter. I never found any proof of that allegation, but once I knew that this practice had happened, I felt it needed to be explored.

I started out centering this story around Richardson, the slave- holding character, because he’s the one I thought I had the right to write about. He’s inspired by this slaveholding ancestor of mine,

10 PMS.. but he’s also a composite of several white men who were out on the frontier at that time, trying to build empires. I knew it would be important to write about a slaveholder as if he were a relative because that builds a bridge.

Then I finally found a three-line quote from an interview with a survivor of slavery who was asked directly about the breeding of enslaved people. I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “Yes. There was this one man. He was tall and kept to himself. He got to sit in the shade of the willow and he got the extra bacon. Then he was sent away to this place where, nine months later, all these children were born.” Once I did more research, I found out that these men who did this work were called “traveling negroes.”

When I started thinking about that one man who was about to be sent away on that particular Friday, that’s when Wash’s voice emerged. He was so clear and so psychologically sophisticated that I had to know more about him. Who had raised him and how did he come to be this remarkable person? Once I had Wash’s story, I had to weave it together with Richardson’s because I knew they had to be together. My interest was in the relation- ship between these two very different people and the two very different cultures and traditions that these two people come from, the ways in which the relationship between them encapsulates the clash between their two different cultures.

BAM: Is that why numerous perspectives—including those of Wash, Richardson, and a female character named Pallas—coexist in the novel? And why the usage of first and third person point of view varies throughout? Because your emphasis is on showing how they have become who they are, bridging cultures?

MRW: Yes, the issue of perspective is a huge issue in a story like this. I did start with everything in first person, hearing from Wash, then Richardson, and then Pallas. The voices were tremendously important. They were what I heard first and most clearly. And I knew I had to have all three differing perspectives on the same

PMS.. 11 story. I think growing up in a segregated place taught me to listen closely to all the ways people talk about each other, all the ways in which the very fabric of reality can be contested.

In our documentary about race in Birmingham, one of the people interviewed says, “Your truth is not my truth.” Another states, “I come from a place where I believe all people are created equal; however, when society is such that people are treated differently based on race, then they have different experiences that then cre- ate differences.” This whole idea that our differing perspectives shape the reality of what we see—the fact that we’re all experienc- ing different realities—was so profound to me that I felt it was important to try to write something that would allow readers to experience this truth for themselves. For example, Richardson’s security depends on dehumanizing Wash, whereas Wash’s survival depends on resisting that dehumanization. And that’s just one huge tension between those two characters.

I knew that I had to have all these different first-person perspec- tives on the same story because each differing perspective makes it almost a different story. But I started to feel all those voices were becoming too claustrophobic. I needed to step back and, almost like a filmmaker, get a long shot and see the landscape these people were moving through, see everything the characters weren’t telling me. Because when someone is speaking to you in first person, telling you a story, you should automatically assume they’re not telling you the whole story. I wanted to have that abil- ity to stand back and see from a distance.

I knew intuitively that the story needed both first and third per- son narration but it was a long time before I understood that integrating those two differing ways of telling would be the key to integrating the indigenous and the modern ways of seeing.

BAM: Speaking of writing Wash, how long do you think it took you to write?

12 PMS.. MRW: It took so long it’s embarrassing, so I don’t tell anyone. A decade is a conservative estimate. I was doing other things along the way, and I discovered that you have to grow up enough to understand the story that you’re writing. You don’t always understand it at the beginning. I had a great deal of the story written pretty early on but the real struggle was finding my way to the right structure. Also, as you go along, you learn more; you become a better writer. The back half was more well written than the first half, so I had to go back and get everything up to the same level and that takes awhile.

Here’s a testament to how long I was working on the book. When I first started, it was kind of against the rules to combine first and third person. Now that’s completely normal. There was an editor early on who was interested but she wanted me to get rid of all the voices and put the whole thing in third person. I knew that wasn’t the right thing for the story, but I also doubted that there could be one third-person omniscient narrator who would know enough about all these characters’ different realities to tell the whole of their stories. I wanted to question the whole idea of omniscience because historically it has been this false neutral. For example, until very recently, most documentaries were narrated by a middle-aged white man of a certain class and background. It’s only recently that somebody like Morgan Freeman could become that voice. I wanted to question the supposed neutrality of omniscience by using the first person voices to place the reader in these very different realities long enough and authentically enough so that they could feel how different they were.

I didn’t really understand it at the time, but when I look back, I can see that I’ve structured—well, I shouldn’t say “I structured” it because I didn’t do it intentionally, I just followed my intuition. But when I look back, I can see that the novel is structured almost like a documentary film. You have alternating narratives cutting in on each other to create a conversation. Then there’s archival footage rolling in between. Those are the third-person scenes. But I didn’t know I was doing that in the beginning. I think the most

PMS.. 13 important thing is learning to follow your intuition and your gut even though you don’t understand why you think it should be that way. That was the biggest challenge for me, learning to trust my instincts.

BAM: What were your concerns about being a Caucasian woman writing from the alternating perspectives of both a male Caucasian slave owner and a male African American slave? Because some people might be a little intimidated.

MRW: Well, yes, I was terrified. But this goes back to what you and I talked about earlier—how to separate your writing space from all the issues of publication. With material this volatile, I knew I had to separate those two realms and be vigilant about keeping them separate. I had a small writing group that was working in the method developed by Pat Schneider, which focuses on accessing the subconscious. To paraphrase again, Schneider believes your strongest material lies within your subconscious, already power- fully symbolic and structured. If you can access those depths and bring those potent images up from down there, you won’t have to do as much intentional crafting of your own. Her methodol- ogy creates a very generative safe space, and I wrote a surprising amount of my first draft in that group.

I remember other writers in the group struggling with various blocks, worrying about what their families might think, and I remember blithely saying, “Just worry about it later.” It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think that the book I was working on would ever be published but that I knew I could not think about both of these things at the same time. I could not think about the truth of my story and how it was going to be received with the same brain and with the same heart I had to live from in order to write it. I could not do those two things at the same time. So I consciously pushed the thought of my work ever being out in the world way, way back. I just said, “I’ll worry about it later.” Then later came, and it was completely and utterly terrifying. I had a lot of anxiety about it. I drove all my friends—and sometimes my editor—crazy. But by then I was so invested that it was too late to back out.

14 PMS.. BAM: It’s a catch-22, because the stuff you really don’t want to write is what you need to write. It’s the honesty, I think. The brutal truth. I was very curious about when you decided to actually pursue pub- lishing your novel.

MRW: You know, I think courage is required whenever you’re writing something real; authenticity requires courage. They tell you from first grade on, “Just be yourself.” But they don’t tell you how hard that is. Authenticity, being authentic, is one of the hardest things to do, and it’s one of the things that gets talked about the least somehow. All I know is that you have to consciously build and maintain your courage.

I knew that being a white descendant of slaveholders writing about something as controversial as slave-breeding in the voice of an enslaved black man would be problematic. Each one of those things by itself is a problem; together they create a political night- mare. All I knew was that these three alternating perspectives had to be put together on equal footing, on shared neutral turf. And I knew I was uniquely qualified because I’d been listening to black and white people talk about race my whole life.

I also knew that whoever wrote this book, because it is about bridging differences, would have to write outside of his or her zone of experience. But there were many times when I panicked, fearing that I didn’t know enough about traditional West African ceremonies, for example, but then I’d realize that the person who would know that part, who would be completely inside that paradigm, wouldn’t know enough about the destructive planta- tion mythology that still creates so much craziness in the South. I knew this was a huge issue, and it was scary. It was terrifying, but that’s why I dealt with it by having the discipline to not let myself think about it until it was too late.

On the gender issue, Nadine Gordimer says every real writer must be androgynous. And I think it goes back to Whitman; we all contain multitudes, and living out the truth of that is in some ways what we’re called to do. I think there was a necessary period

PMS.. 15 of time where we went through identity politics, in part because we had to break out of the default setting which was that false neutral of the straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class man. Now we’ve come into a time where many of us are trying to write across these divides from all sides.

And yet, there is still the very real problem of access. Who has access to media? Whose voices get heard and whose voices get published? Who decides who gets to write from whose perspec- tive? I’ve heard this problem called “the unbearable whiteness of publishing,” and it has everything to do with power. Who’s in con- trol of our shared narrative and why?

This is another huge question and one that inspired me to write Wash. The book centers around questions of power. What is it? How is it best used? How is it gained and lost? I’ve always been interested in what happens when people are put in a position to abuse their power. What do they do? And when people are in a position of feeling powerless, how do they respond? The truth of the matter is that every person, no matter what gender or race, has been in both of those positions: a position to abuse their power and a position where they feel powerless, for various rea- sons. These are pretty universal experiences.

BAM: That’s a very interesting idea about power. Was that one of the main themes you were trying to keep through the novel as you were writing it, or did you realize that was even coming up?

MRW: Another big question. I remember being in ninth or tenth grade and having to write yet another English paper, tracing the themes in A Passage to India. I remember wondering if E.M. Forster intended these themes and whether he put them in on purpose, or if they just happened. I’m sure the answer may be different for different people, but now that I’ve written a novel, I know that for myself, it just happens. If you’re lucky.

I believe that every story is a living being with its own logic and

16 PMS.. its own rhythm: its own structure and its own beauty. And if you go deeply enough into that reality and surrender as fully as you can to the writing process, then all those bigger symbols and themes will come through you. Along with a bunch of extra stuff which then has to be stripped away.

I remember hearing Antonya Nelson talking about a short story by Michael Cunningham. Her explanation of his process felt true to my experience. First you surrender fully and you get what you get. Then you look closely at what you got. That’s when you rec- ognize the themes running through it that came from your sub- conscious, themes that you may not have initially intended. Then you can trim away the underbrush and clarify these themes. You find ways to highlight the underlying structure that came as a gift through your subconscious.

BAM: What would you recommend to writers seeking to create authentic voices of characters who are far different from themselves, as you have done in Wash?

MRW: I think empathy and imagination are crucial, but they must be grounded in real life experiences. The first thing I would say is to spend time with people who are different from you. And spend that time in an open, nonjudgmental, questioning, and welcom- ing way. I think the more often you can leave your comfort zone, the better. Keep your mouth shut in the beginning and keep your ears open. A lot of people, when they leave their comfort zone, need to make themselves feel safe, and too often they do so by talking, which defeats the purpose because they’re still controlling the space instead of discovering anything new.

I was lucky in that I had this strong bond with Mrs. Washington, who worked for my parents when I was small. She was so impor- tant to me that her death in 1989 left me sort of adrift. Her family was generous enough to let me spend a great deal of time with them, both then and over the years since then, and I’ve learned so much from them.

PMS.. 17 As diverse as the United States is now, I find that a lot of people— particularly white, middle-class and upper-class people—don’t spend very much time around people who are not like them. And there’s the intellectual crowd, which can be its own clique. But I was kind of traumatized by my education, and maybe to balance that out, I’ve always spent a lot of time with people who don’t read that much, who didn’t necessarily graduate from high school, or who were maybe self-taught. They’ve taught me the most.

BAM: What about research for Wash? What trouble did you have with researching?

MRW: I remember hearing Edward P. Jones saying that he got all the books that he thought he needed to write The Known World, which is about black slaveholders, but that he never read them. I was a little bit that way. I spent a lot of time in the library at first, before I realized that the written history of slavery is very prob- lematic because it relies so heavily on primary sources. But many of the players in this particular situation had a vexed relationship to the written record. They came from an oral culture, they were denied literacy, and their lives were controlled by written docu- ments. The written historical record will always be inadequate because there are so many primary sources that don’t exist.

I did find certain helpful things in the library—runaway slave ads, court transcripts, personal letters and journals of slaveholders— but I had to leave the library pretty soon and go to places where slavery was lived on the land. I spent lots of time looking for lost cemeteries, where the enslaved people are buried.

And I did go to what I guess you’d call plantation museums because they are open as museums and tourists come. But most of those places are still spinning a false narrative about what happened during slavery because they are still caught up in that destructive plantation mythology. You have to continually ask who’s controlling the narrative. If your tour guide is wearing a hoop skirt, you need to take everything she says with a grain of salt.

18 PMS..

There is one place in North Carolina which is curated by descen- dants of people who were enslaved there. At Somerset Place, I felt I was getting some truth about the complicated reality of what went on. My experience there was so compelling that some of the historical incidents at Somerset Place inspired fictional incidents in the novel.

In the very beginning of this process, I was lucky enough to come across a quote by Toni Morrison about writing Beloved. She said all she’d had to go on was a two-line newspaper article from that era about a mother killing her child, but she didn’t want to know more than that so she could imagine the rest. I’d also read Mona Simpson saying she’s a great believer in research, but only after doing the writing first. Hearing that really helped me trust my imagination and my intuition.

I approach my writing practice through prayer and meditation, using rituals I designed to get myself into the world of my story. I found if I did those things right, then I was just there and I could see everything happening. It’s kind of like spelunking or scuba diving: you travel into another world, and you stay there as long as you can. Then you come back, carrying with you as much of what you saw there as you can. Then you work fast to get it all written down before you lose it.

My own spiritual practices were what led me down the rabbit hole, and once I got there, Wash was clear and insistent. Pallas too. Ironically, I had to work hardest for Richardson. In fact, Wash’s presence was so strong it scared me. That’s why I went to Malidoma Somé for help. He’s a West African traditional teacher and healer, and he taught me a lot about working with the spirits in an indigenous paradigm. In that paradigm, what was happen- ing to me made perfect sense. The ancestors seek a reciprocal relationship with the living. Everything that’s ever happened is here all the time and accessible through prayer and ceremony. Everything is animate and interconnected, as opposed to a mod- ernizing Western viewpoint where everything is increasingly

PMS.. 19 secular and linear, disconnected and separated into categories. Those two different ways of being are what collided during slav- ery to create a new country.

As a Southerner, I’d always instinctually known I couldn’t write a novel about American slavery without equally representing these two different ways of being, but after working with Malidoma, I gained more understanding about the ancestral dynamic of what was happening for me while I was writing. The writing process is a mystery and writers must find their own ways of working with that mystery. I just know that, for me, there’s a strong ancestral component to what’s happening with this particular story.

BAM: You chose to represent the spiritual elements in a certain way in this novel. Why did you choose that way?

MRW: I think it’s really tricky to write about spiritual matters because certain spiritual truths resist articulation. I also felt that the pro- cess of writing this book was a journey of discovery for me, and I wanted to write it in such a way that readers might experience a journey of discovery as well, instead of my just telling them what I had learned from my own journey.

I remember one agent along the way who was interested but she wanted the book to be shorter, more linear, so she asked, “Can’t you just get one African character to tell another African char- acter all that African stuff?” But in the indigenous perspective, it would be seen as dangerous to give a bunch of abstract knowl- edge to a person who’s asking for it when you don’t know whether they’re equipped to handle this information. What the indigenous elders would do instead is to set up a situation where that person could move through the experience. And if, in the process, that person proved themselves worthy of carrying the knowledge they seek, then they would have forged that knowledge for themselves along the way. So I tried to stick more to that model, where I’m creating an experience that the reader moves through. If they piece together everything I’ve left on the trail for them, then they

20 PMS.. know. And they’ve created that knowing for themselves so they truly own it. It’s more organic and more authentic that way.

BAM: Rather than just spelling it all out to them in one chapter.

MRW: Right. For example, I was asked to deliver what’s called The Chenoweth Lecture, an annual event at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I was very honored, but I had to say in the beginning that I couldn’t really deliver a lecture about the process of writing Wash because the book centers around this duality created by these two differing cultural paradigms coming together, and the lecture for- mat itself comes from only one side of this duality; it comes out of the modern Western way of being, where I stand up front and say everything worth knowing, and the audience sits there, passively receiving it. But I don’t know who you are and you don’t take part in the co-creation of the experience. From an indigenous perspec- tive, that’s a very vulnerable and dangerous position for me to be in and for the audience to be in as well. Reciprocity is one of the basic energetic laws of the indigenous universe, so it’s destabiliz- ing and unwise to have all the energy going in one direction. It felt important to point out that even the lecture format is a cul- tural creation and it’s culturally bound.

BAM: It sounds like we’re going back again to the idea of how power is channeled, or where it’s channeled.

MRW: Yeah, it’s energy and power both. I went into my first indigenous ceremony thinking I was going into it just for research because half of my characters came from a largely ceremonial reality in traditional West Africa. But then of course the ceremony affected me personally and it became a different story. Basically, most indigenous cultures are sensitive to how energy moves in any situation because this is a kind of power. Energy and power are related, so I’m equally as interested in the movement of energy as I am in the function of power.

BAM: I’m curious about readers’ reaction to the novel. How have your readers responded?

PMS.. 21 MRW: I think the main thing, I’d say overwhelmingly, is that readers from all walks are resonating with the experiences of the people they had thought were very different from them. That has been the most rewarding feedback.

One interviewer on a radio show in the Bay Area said, “It’s not even really a book! It’s more like you’re sitting around a campfire and somebody is telling you a story. And somebody else comes in and says, no, it wasn’t like that, it was like this. And then somebody else says, no, it wasn’t quite like that, it was like this.” His reaction resonated with me because this story has always felt more like a play than a book to me. And I was happy about his feedback because when you grow up in segregated places, you hear people tell stories about each other that can be so damaging. It was very rewarding for me to create an experience where, when someone tells a story about someone else that’s not accurate, that other person can step up and tell their own truth to contest that projection.

I have had such great reactions to the novel. Recently, one black woman said she’d heard about Wash and she’d been very critical of the whole project. Then she looked at my picture on the back and thought, “Why does this woman think she has any right to tell this story?” Then, after reading the book and hearing me speak to a Jungian group about my experience with the ancestors, she said she felt the book had clearly been a spiritual transmission, and she thanked me for writing it. In terms of feedback from various aspects of the black community, there’s often an initial skepti- cism that then shifts. However diverse this community may be, as a whole, it tends to have more awareness of these spiritual and ancestral dynamics.

While wrestling with the manuscript, I took a class on revision with A.J. Verdelle, who is an incredible writer. One of the exer- cises she had each of us do was come up with one sentence that would encompass our whole endeavor. Initially, I thought my sen- tence was, “Slavery wasn’t how we think it was.” But then I real- ized slavery isn’t even “was.” From the indigenous perspective of

22 PMS.. timelessness, everything is now. The dynamics of what happened during hundreds of years of slavery have been passed down and these patterns are still affecting us. That energy is still moving. The energy of the ancestors is still moving through us and has the capacity to determine our behavior—unless we decide to temper that energy.

When I talk about this slaveholding ancestor of mine, many people say, “You shouldn’t feel guilty,” or they ask “Do you feel responsible?” I don’t feel guilty or responsible; I just feel con- nected to a story that needs to be told. If anything, I feel that the ancestral energy of this slaveholding ancestor of mine—which has to do with power and domination and control—can be inherited and has the power to come down and move through me. But I have the power to choose to either reenact that same destructive energy or to temper it with something else, like empathy or com- passion. The only thing I feel responsible for is what I choose to do with the energy I inherited.

One element of the book that readers seem to appreciate most is how certain characters learn to create that inside place that helps them survive. There are characters in the book who are totally dispossessed. They’re enslaved. They’re in a position where they have to learn how to manage their energy in constructive or destructive ways. That’s one question that has always interested me. What do you do with what you are given? Not that I designed it this way, but, as I wrote the scenes of Wash and Richardson in the barn, what was interesting to me is that Richardson is suppos- edly the one with all the power. But in those encounters, Wash is the one with the power, between the two of them, because of how he chooses to relate, both to Richardson and to himself. A lot of readers have resonated with that fundamental question: how do you manage your own energy so that you have a solid place to live from? BAM: Are there any echoes of Asian culture or others in the novel with this notion of energy and of harnessing it and so forth?

PMS.. 23 MRW: Yes. These dynamics are of concern to every major ancient cul- ture, even as modernity has been homogenizing everything. I don’t know that much about Asian culture but I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Most of his work deals with a similar duality between two ways of being—the ancient and the modern. He usually has those two dif- ferent realities going on at the same time.

BAM: And that’s possibly why this novel can speak to so many people in so many different ways. Because it has these themes that are so relatable to other cultures as well.

MRW: Yes. I think if you go deep enough in your writing process, you will bring up a whole thing, and that whole thing will be related to every other whole thing because everything is interconnected. David Lynch has a great book about creativity. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. He talks about going deep—that’s where the power is. Because when something is whole, it contains all these relationships within it and it has all these reverberations.

BAM: It’s a broader spectrum.

MRW: Because it’s a whole thing and not just part of a thing. It has everything within it; therefore it can relate to every other whole thing. And it stays with you.

BAM: Do you think that helped in getting Wash published, even though there’s a lot of controversial focuses?

MRW: I think the controversial aspect worked both for and against the book. I remember my agent telling me that—because I hadn’t published anything and I was kind of a nobody, and nothing was selling—the manuscript had to be perfect before she sent it out. I did lots of revisions for her, which I’m so grateful about now. Then, two days after she sent it out, Borders went bankrupt. It was really such a terrible time.

24 PMS.. I do think the fact that the book centered around slave breeding, which hasn’t been written about that much, was one of the rea- sons that Wash got the attention that it did, but the subject mate- rial also worked against it too. Some editors who were interested in the book couldn’t get it through editorial meetings because of corporate fears about potential controversy. But Grove Atlantic doesn’t have that issue because they’re independent, and they’re known for being daring and taking risks, for publishing chal- lenging work. And there’s an interesting backstory to Morgan Entrekin’s connection to this book. As I understand it, his ances- tors fought on both sides in the Civil War. There were thirteen brothers in one family. Six fought for the Union, and six fought for the Confederacy; but one stayed neutral. That one who stayed neutral became a judge, and he’s Morgan’s ancestor. To me that says a lot about having a lineage of holding the tension of oppo- sites, which is really what Wash is all about.

You asked at one point about the biggest challenge of getting this book published. I would say that it was learning to trust my intu- ition. I had to sort through a lot of feedback about what I should change, all along the way. While Morgan is a Southerner, none of the people at Grove who worked with me on the project were Southerners, and my agent isn’t Southern either, so I had to really trust my gut about what to fight for during the whole process, from editing to publicity to the cover of the book. For me person- ally, learning to trust my intuition about what the story needed was the hardest part of this journey.

But I do believe that if you turn your attention fully to the life of the story and surrender completely to that connection, if you write the best thing you can, then get people you trust to give you feedback, then work as hard as you can to incorporate the feed- back that resonates with you, you will get published. Networking is important, but it comes much later. Try not to worry too much about networking too soon. That’s just a distraction. Most of what you need is inside of you.

PMS.. 25 BAM: Is there anything you wish you could change about the publishing industry?

MRW: Like I said earlier, the unbearable whiteness of publishing. I think there are a lot of reasons for it, but it’s a huge problem. There’s an awful lot of white people deciding what everyone gets to read. I think it has to do with the class issue, too. A lot of jobs in pub- lishing don’t pay well, especially entry-level jobs, so I don’t know what the answer is. I just know it’s a huge problem.

BAM: What about the cover of your novel? Did you have to fight for what it looked like, and did you win?

MRW: Yes, and I was nervous about it because I was also in the middle of editing and I didn’t want to use up whatever leverage I did have because I didn’t know whether I’d need it for other battles. But Grove is incredibly responsive and they understood that we couldn’t afford to make a misstep with material this volatile. I had to force myself to speak up, but I’m so glad I did, and they heard me. I will say that initially I didn’t want a figure on the cover because the story is about all three of them—Wash, Richardson, and Pallas—and the traditions that they each come from, all coming together. I didn’t want to put too much of the focus on Wash. Yet it is his story, and without a figure on the cover the title “Wash” is too abstract a word. Is it a storm? Is it about erosion? The trouble is that with fiction, you want the figure somewhat obscured so the reader still has room to imagine the character. However, when you have a figure that you obscure, you’re also dehumanizing the person, and slavery is about dehumanization, so it was a tricky process. I just wanted an image where the figure carried an inherent power and agency and I feel lucky we found it.

BAM: Is there anything you wish you could change about the way you write? I tend to overwrite and must painstakingly chop my work down to size. It would be so much easier if I didn’t try to give myself carpal tunnel.

26 PMS.. MRW: No, I’m kind of like you. I write long. I write long and then cut away because if I start censoring too soon I don’t get the good stuff. I think it has to do with pacing, too. If I started questioning whether I could cut this phrase or that one while I’m writing, it messes up my stride. Once I start hesitating, then I’m doomed. I have to go back and reread writers who have the pacing that I love – like Jim Harrison in Legends of the Fall. It’s a novella that covers an enormous territory. It’s very short but each sentence has such a long stride, like a racehorse. So there might be things I wish I could change about the way I write but I don’t think it would be wise to try to change those things. You just have to work with what is given to you.

BAM: Do you ever feel like your work is complete, in the full sense of the word?

MRW: Well, I think it’s hard because stories are beings, from an indig- enous perspective. They’re living beings that are moving and changing all the time, so it’s automatically artificial to freeze that moving thing into one unchanging printed book. You’re stopping time, which is unnatural. But I realized that I could be working on this book and making it better for the rest of my life. So at a certain point you have to say, “The thing that it is on this day, that’s what it’s going to be.” Because if you didn’t do that, it would keep morphing through the following week or month or year. It would probably—maybe—keep getting clearer, but it could just keep morphing and breathing and being, when it also needs to go out in the world and have the rest of its life.

BAM: Where is your preferred “writing zone”? I prefer to write in a very quiet environment, which is often problematic. What about you? How does your environment help you get in a creative mindset?

MRW: Since a lot of my work is about the rhythms of the natural world, it’s important for me to be in a place where those rhythms are not too interrupted. Being in the city is increasingly hard for me because there’s too much interference. I live out in the middle of

PMS.. 27 nowhere because I feel like I’m listening to something that I can barely hear. I do need quiet. And I need the big cyclic rhythms of the natural world. The moon, the seasons, the lengthening and shortening of the days. The animal tracks and visitations. But I think different phases of the process are different. When I’m writ- ing new, when I’m getting the shape of a story down, that’s the most important time. When I’m doing more revision, it’s less of an issue. But I can’t do much in a coffee shop. I just can’t. I also find that when I’m struggling with something, I can struggle with it for two hours. But if I get up and take a walk or take a bike ride, the answer comes in the first five minutes. Movement often brings the solution.

BAM: Who are your literary heroes, and how have they encouraged you when you felt like giving up?

MRW: I would probably say one of my favorite books is The Bone People by Keri Hulme, because it’s about the Maori and the Scottish, the whites. It’s the same dualism that I’m dealing with, that whole question of whose reality is operative and when. And I’ve relied heavily on Leslie Marmon Silko’s work, Ceremony and especially The Almanac of the Dead. Her lineage is German and Pueblo, so it’s that duality again. Her work and what she has to say about her work really helped me. She got stuck in the middle of Almanac and hearing what she did to get unstuck was hugely important to me. There’s a series of books by the University of Mississippi Press that are collections of interviews with various writers; the whole volume is dedicated to interviews with one writer. The one on Silko proved very helpful.

William Faulkner and Toni Morrison have been very important, along with Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, and Nadine Gordimer. And playwrights too, especially Athol Fugard, August Wilson and Harold Pinter. Caryl Phillips writes a lot about the Diaspora and his work has been such a guide, along with that of Randall Kenan, Paule Marshall, Robert Farris Thompson and Credo Mutwa. When I

28 PMS.. read Octavia Butler’s book, Kindred, I thought, well, she’s done it so perfectly there’s is no point in continuing with Wash; I should just walk away. Probably the one person whose work has helped me the most has been Malidoma Somé. I’m sure there are more, but reading interviews with writers has really helped me. The University of Mississippi Press ones and the Paris Review ones. The Paris Review interviews have been collected and reissued as a four-volume paperback. I have reasons myself for not getting an MFA, but those collections of interviews were my MFA.

BAM: So do you go to those interviews when you’re struggling with something?

MRW: I went to them when I needed to build my nerve. Some of the best parts of Wash happen to actually be pretty close to the first draft. There was a lot of the middle part that was written later or re-worked, but some of the strongest parts came out that way because I really threw myself in deep when I went to my desk. The writing life is very solitary. I couldn’t really see people or talk to people too much before I went into the writing zone, but I could have these companions. So I would read around in those interviews before I’d start writing to give myself courage.

BAM: I think that’s a great idea. You learn so much about the way a particular person approaches writing, which is so different for everyone, and that in turn should encourage everyone. It encour- ages me, at least, to know that even famous authors struggle with things and that they all have their different ways of handling writ- ing’s challenges. You can read what they’ve said about how they write to see if you can pick up tips or just learn about how truly unique the process is for everyone.

MRW: Right. And I think, too, it helps so much to hear so many people say they have no idea what they’re doing. Even Bob Dylan—his memoir Chronicles helped me so much because he talks about how he had no idea where that stuff was coming from. And I remember hearing A.J. Verdelle talk about a part of her book The

PMS.. 29 Good Negress that she didn’t really understand. She felt like maybe she should cut it because she thought she should understand everything in her book. Thankfully, some mentor told her, and again I’m paraphrasing, you don’t have to understand everything in your book. If you love it and it really resonates and you don’t understand why, you don’t really have to wrap your mind around it for it to be real and valid and worthy. And that section of her book turned out to be many readers’ favorite part of the book, very poetic and associative and intuitive. I think the main thing is learning how to tolerate not knowing, so you can find your way to something new.

BAM: There’s this connotation that writers sit down at their laptops or with pen and paper and they already know what they’re going to say. They just have to work on getting it correct, but it’s not really like that, is it?

MRW: It’s not like that for me at all. I’m writing along as Pallas talks about Phoebe, and I’ll be thinking “Who’s Phoebe? Who’s Phoebe?” and suddenly there’s a little more about Phoebe and she’ll start to take shape. I would have written the book a lot faster if I could have seen more about where I was going, but the story didn’t come from my mind, it came from another world, some bigger place. You kind of have to be lucid dreaming. The book I finished reading this morning, All the Birds Singing, has such a powerful feeling of mystery to it. As I was reading along, I kept wanting to know what happened. But I got the sense that the writer didn’t quite know what was happening either while she was writing it. To have that feeling of discovery in it, the mystery has to be happening for the writer and reader at the same time some- how. Books that are very well-mapped and outlined and that are an execution of an idea—they’re not as compelling to me.

BAM: What about your future plans? Are you going to be working on another book?

MRW: There are always stories in the pipeline, waiting for my atten- tion. But I’ve been pretty focused on getting Wash out to as wide

30 PMS.. an audience as possible. This country is still so segregated that it takes kind of a duel push—you have to work in both the white and the black worlds to get this book to its audience. In some ways, this book has been serving as a catalyst for a conversation about race that people seem increasingly able and willing to have, and this feels like work I can do that’s important. I’m happy to help this conversation move people along, but as an introvert I’m looking forward to holing up again. I’m ambivalent because it’s a huge surrender, as you know, to the world of the novel and all the lives of all the people in it. But I have three friends who are on chapter three of their novels, and I’m so jealous. They’re just far enough in to have a secure feeling, with so much discovery still ahead.

BAM: In the meantime, you can enjoy spreading the word about your novel. Is it like sharing your heart a little bit?

MRW: Yes, it is. It’s very gratifying. I don’t feel like I created the charac- ters, or had much to do with the writing of the book at all, really. They’re these remarkable people who came to me, and I enjoy watching them go out into the world. I like visiting book clubs, hearing what people make of the story and of the characters. That’s very rewarding. When you put so much into a book it’s really nice to see people engaged with it.

BAM: To wrap up, what is the one thing about writing that you would like fellow writers to take to heart?

MRW: The degree of surrender. The potency of the work is directly related to the degree that you are able to surrender to the process. I also think we’re each given our little part to say. It’s not our busi- ness what somebody else is given. Tell your own part.

BAM: I think, if I’m rephrasing you correctly, you’re saying that we’re all a matter of our circumstances, and those shape who we are? Like, my story to tell is very different from your story to tell.

MRW: I guess I’m saying that the whole story depends on each one of

PMS.. 31 us telling our part of the bigger story. What I’ve learned from Malidoma is that everyone is given a gift to deliver into the world, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be writing. It can be anything, but you don’t get to choose what gift you’re given to deliver. All you get to choose is whether or not you’re going to deliver the one you’re given. You can’t take it back and get another one. That’s not an option, and I think a lot of people don’t understand that. I wish I’d understood this a little earlier. And it’s not about your holding onto your part, caught up in trying to judge whether it’s good enough or not. That means it’s not moving, and it needs to move.

But that’s not to say you should just write a first draft and send it out into the world. I remember hearing Dorothy Allison talking to a roomful of writing students. Everyone was shocked to hear her say that anyone in that room could send her their manuscript and she’d read it. We were all thinking, she’s going to get inun- dated. Until she added, “as long as you’re past the tenth draft.” I was probably on the third draft at that point, and the tenth draft seemed impossibly far away. But by the time I finished the book, the tenth draft was so far behind me I could hardly remember it. I think you should make your story as good as it can be.

32 PMS..

poemmemoirstory

Claire Schwartz uncoaxed the throat is a thousand birds & the bones of a thousand birds this fossiled flight this chiseled breath this name stitched to the cheek’s soft meat makeshift & holy wholly & gone

PMS.. 37 Dell Lemmon

Anti-postcards

My grandmother collected postcards when she was young.

I died when she was young.

I lied. I grew up and she died when I was young.

I cried when I was young and old and no one ever told why she died so young.

I have the postcards she collected.

Hundreds of black and white photographs

38 PMS.. of Europe decimated after World War I

One site / sight after the next bombed to oblivion

Who sent those postcards to whom and why?

And how is it now the world has been pieced back together, but my grandmother’s anti-postcards look so contemporary like the future rather than the past.

I died when she was young.

PMS.. 39 Stephanie Kaplan Cohen

The Cross Dressing Canteloupe

Cantaloupe likes to fool the crowd, wears a mask and feet dressed up in ballet slippers.

At night, when the lights are dim it does the hula, and sometimes, even a teasing strip in which it peels off skin and bares its coral flesh.

It even invites a few to come and take a taste, but none do dare except for carrot who takes an occasional lick.

As the sun comes up Cantaloupe covers itself and hopes it looks good enough to eat.

40 PMS.. Jenna Rindo

Step Over Cracks so I don’t break her back or her mother’s before her who stands four-feet-eight. She has permanent ridges furrowed into her shoulders from the weight of triple D against gravity. Even so she two-steps a polka. Smells the stink of bad karma. Scours the rust-stained sink with blue Ajax. Vases peppery roses to light duplex gloom. Births five babies upstairs in the middle bedroom with or without a midwife. I watch amazed as she strikes a wooden match to flare the gas flames blue, studs a ham with cloves in star patterns, then bastes it with Mountain Dew. Roasts a cheap cut of meat ‘til it falls from the bone. Works third shift at the Xerox plant. Walks the dogs, rocks the cradle, entertains all variety of strangers. Chants in Latin, cusses in German, throws back a cold beer. Brings down the sudden onset of fever. Alters the atmosphere. Shovels the walk, throws seed to the birds, marks the inside cover of paperback romances with a code before returning. Hopes for a

PMS.. 41 heaven brighter, lighter than her private Ohio, frozen litter in layers, memories muddled, infused in jam and sauerkraut jars, lined up on shelves, basement stairs too steep for her to descend.

42 PMS.. Kate Hovey

Out of Air

A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future. —Coco Chanel

White Shoulders, ghosts in a bottle: jasmine, gardenia, tuberose, lily, traces lingering like silvered trails across lurid, moonlit summer lawns. One whiff and I am wilting at my grandmother’s swamped vanity as she spritzes me on my wedding day, her mottled hands trembling, something old, borrowed. Something new: Charlie, pure platform-shod 70s, fizzy aldehide floral top notes with enough cut grass and crushed leaves to turn short divorcees into long-stemmed world beaters, hair cropped like the Halston-clad model in the ads. Or something curious (blue): Tabu and teddy bears, hermetic joke gift of professors twice our age, but we steeped ourselves in spiced ylang ylang, neroli with woodsy mid notes, ambered musk and who didn’t want to smell like Ava Gardner? Men loved buying perfume—you gave me L’Air du Temps, remember? Because, you’d said, this little Dutch chick on the plane... forgetting basic chemistry. I’d detected it months before, science of shirt sniffing—whole years lost to Klein’s Obsession. And now? Lady Vengeance by Juliette Has a Gun. Great patchouli-rose marriage, edgy bitter-orange base.

PMS.. 43 But I no longer wear it, ancient habit overruled by the newly scent-intolerant holding their heads, gasping for breath. One in ten, research shows, the numbers rising. Roomfuls of women choking on their own fumes.

44 PMS.. Christine Higgins

When I Go

I don’t want fire— the body burned down to white ash and grey silt like my mother’s before me and the dog’s before her. I want dirt— the turning over, the loaming, the grubs and worms, and caterpillars. The laying of eggs and larvae, and excrement upon me.

I would prefer muslin or cheesecloth, easily permeated, not some fancy casket like my mother-in-law’s cherry furniture, a high polish with brass handles. How silly they are, these boxes lined with satin, complete with a pillow for your trip.

I don’t want to be in a teak box sitting on the mantle, while loved ones tussle over where to fling me or who will babysit me in the next century.

Take my organs, especially my eyes if they’re still good for seeing. Then leave me in the woods, covered in twigs and leaves that the rain turns into mold

PMS.. 45 and we decay as one and the decomposing happens ever so slowly.

Leave my shell and bones to feed this earth that did so well in feeding me.

46 PMS.. Christine Higgins

Having a Daughter

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and when I called my dad after the golf game he said, I don’t deserve those compliments, your mother did more than I did. I remember the drapes drawn, her sleeping through breakfast, making my own lunch, taking two city buses to get to school. Arriving home my college-educated mother with medals in French and History would still be in her pajamas, absorbed in the NYT crossword puzzle.

Sometimes, my own mothering seems nothing more than making up for what I did not get. My daughter has a room full of books, t-shirts with kittens on them, notes in her lunchbox, markers and construction paper, ribbon and string, and endless good-night kisses.

You think she’d be made strong and secure by all the affirmation, but no, she’s just like me: cries for the dead dog in the movie, works so hard at erasing her mistakes, she makes holes in the paper, as if the child I once was is seeping through.

PMS.. 47 Brittany Tacconi

Easter 1999

I was eleven and found out my mother used. The grass overgrown itched past my Mary Janes, laced socks, and bared knees to time-stained swings made of tarnished links bound together in a Virginia reel: faces blushing red rust, and liver spots, groaning over my weight.

48 PMS.. Kathleen Thompson

Lament on Distance

—a prose poem for Nicholas at eighteen

I hold the slide of your mom between my thumb and forefinger up to the kitchen light, her baby blonde hair shimmering as she smiles in the reflect- ed sun from sugar sand, her body stretched out and wiggling like a min- now in the shallow water. The air is so still and the water so calm that she might be smiling from the edge of a wading pool, details of her pink suit clear through the water. No murkiness. No seaweed. No age at all on her face. No red strings of jellyfish stinging like her absence and yours. You’ve each taken a part of my dreams to Syracuse and Savannah, like a nickel tied in the corner of a hanky. My kitchen is as quiet as an empty tomb. My friend Betty’s face arises like a dream but I won’t think of her final part- ing, that dread email in Paris last July. Too far away to attend the burial, I reached out anyway. The thin curtain between then and now is so shim- mery. I reach out again. I touch a warm hand. Whose? Not Betty’s. Not your mom’s. Not yours. I pick up a pear from the wooden bowl of pears. It transports me to Grandmother’s where you’ve “fed the cows.” Your mom fed cows there. So did your Uncle Stephen and Victoria. Now his Will is old enough to feed the three Black Angus cows that are living behind the rusty barbed wire fence. Will races us back and forth from the pear tree up the hill to the pasture. Joy inhabits his whole body. The palpable joys. Betty’s love of Anthurium and Ikebana; of our neighborhood luau around our pool. I won’t think of parting. Not Betty’s. Not your mom’s. Not yours. I’ll peel the pears. Make pear preserves or pear butter: a palimpsest for days that grow long.

PMS.. 49 Tina Mozelle Braziel

The Afterlife of Pine

Once hewn and planked, an oak savors its past in relics of sap: line after line rivers down a board’s length; rings circle rings at each end sanctifying an acorn’s drop. In Raleigh long ago, horsetail brushes combed a faux finish of oak over pine banisters and walnut walls—workmen even costumed the rectory’s oak doors with their own oaken flourish. Even now our house-frame resurrects pine: the studs branch at right angles and nails dam boards into running flush. Yet hands that seek to cloister fail to preserve wood’s fluidity: how trunks sway, twigs fork, leaves spill, how trees well up, flooding the sky.

50 PMS.. Tina Mozelle Braziel

Laurel Knob

In the bare-limbed wood near Panthertown, saplings’ lavender buds drift like clouds between the oaks. I stumble over a maple tree that spills around a boulder, bends along the rock’s edges. Ahead, the granite dome of Laurel Knob swells above the hills that wash to the Atlantic. The sky leaks thin rivulets of silvery light down the dome. I lean against the rigid curve and trace lines that water has etched into granite. All I grasp of this or any stone are its weaknesses: the cracks, flakes, broken edges, and grooves water has worn, I scale. Emerson says an ocean is a large drop and a drop holds a small ocean. I long for that undulation in everything, all that appears as wavy as an antique mirror: the buds that soon dissipate like morning mist, that maple bending round rock like a river diverted, even the steadfast stone. May it crest, trough, crest again.

PMS.. 51 Carmen Nieto

City

Plastic sprig and a wooden rose. We won’t go to the countryside because you are not able to live without the lights, because I’m the smoke, the grease of the windows. But I grow fresh mint on the sill and a creeping plant in my ribs. We could read there, watch all we have pending, rescue the skin from the halogen. Everyone will be far away and I don’t know if I will know how to come back or if anyone will come to visit. Now, neither the house is bustling, nor the phone. We come and go watering the ficus, the geranium, eating flax seeds, caressing other’s dogs or smoking rolled cigarettes. Nobody wants to meet although they live 3, 4, 5 stops further, they think of the first bonfires or in the time, in the books they want to read but never remember which are. They also eat whole wheat cereals, I do too sometimes,

52 PMS.. and they smoke a lot and drink too little or the opposite, like me. Some of them have a dog, at least they have a dog.

PMS.. 53 Carmen Nieto

Which Memories Will Our Children Have?

Grandpa had a gun and slept with the gun, twelve men in a four-people cell. He smashed street lamps in Vallecas, barricaded in Pacífico, awaiting orders in the dark remembering his mother who died breastfeeding. He became a bullet and used to sew suits in return for fruits, legumes, bread. He saw the sea for the first time with another man’s name. He came from the steppe, the cold, from the den. In jail the mild breeze of the orange tree fed him for a while, the memories satiated some pain, some grief.

54 PMS.. Eliza Gilmore

Book of Hours

Maybe it’s the impulse of deliverance plucking me like marionette strings.

In Avignon, a slow return to English follows the curve of a harp body.

My love for the livre d’heures turns winding and medieval.

In other words, I stutter at ma belle and find shrew bones on the cobblestones.

There is something natural in the untaming of letters, and the untangling Shakespeare.

My word, dangling.

At a hostel in Marseille I write numbers in soft pencil on a bathroom wall and move into the moonlight of an American bar.

Trying to translate Eliot, I think maybe not everything is referential. My love, cross-culturally deficient.

PMS.. 55 Still, I cross myself in a Chartres cathedral believing God knows no words.

56 PMS.. Eliza Gilmore

On Watching My Older Brother Read Moby-Dick

Want you to see the mollusk scene beneath macrocephalus, beyond the Atlantic, the old sand rashes in sepia, the little rocks still stuck in my throat, you are just a floating head in Melville’s beard, remember once you laid a body in a tide pool grave, remember once you cried for forgetting to feed, repeating

“mussel” like the gum flesh really slid over your baby tongue, want you to see me there young, in calico catching letters in fishnets, driftwood splints to build words and clam shells for parentheses, I was opening, closing, a shoreline epitaph (here lies loveliness, a great crab, here lies forgetfulness)— now remembering. Who can blame you for following tides, still I’m thinking of the first time you saw Leviathan, spitting form and lexicon, tempting you

PMS.. 57 to plunge in ocean’s ink. That night, I beached dry like a pilot whale still singing the moonsnail’s song.

58 PMS.. Kathleen A. Kelly

She Ought to Know Better

—after Elizabeth Bishop’s “Wading at Wellfleet”

On the Greek sand of Amorgos, she pebbles her feet, tip-toeing as if by instinct, due east. Jutted rocks jab at a spartan tree line.

Trees phalanx a monastery, white-walled, bone-white like relics glinted in gold. The island’s wind, the meltemi— stings her nostrils. What’s that smell? White pine?

Out of breath and wind-thirsty, she mutters her curious disappointments. Is that Ares, strapping on his shin guard, caught in an intimate act of war? Or is it her husband, pulling on his socks, lacing his boots (after love), calling wait for me, just give me a minute? She ought to know better than to soldier on without him, defiant of her vertigo. It’s not white pine, but incense, a dense fog clouds the chapel air— rosemary and arum lilies wreathe the Virgin. She genuflects, kisses Mary’s feet. Her Grace (now sated), caught unawares, a coup de grace. Disarmed by her naked despair.

PMS.. 59 Kathleen A. Kelly

About the Bed We Share

It’s not my feet, to be fettered, but my six-year old sister’s. My junior by three years. Corrective shoes. Her choices:

black and tan oxfords or navy Mary Janes, stitched in red thread. My toes wiggle in Buster Brown sandals.

The foot doctor, young and shaggy-haired like Keith Partridge, whispers to my mother. He woos her, reassures her.

She jiggles her charm bracelet, her four-leaf clover. Our birthstones—garnet and emerald— jingle. Disjointed.

He stresses discipline— meticulous use of the metal brace. Mary Janes snapped in place. Trapped in its jaw, its teeth. Tight. Every night. The red stitching

itches, welts my calves, my ankles. My sister thrashes, flops her tethered feet from side to side, our bed sheets drenched in sweat, salty-sweet. I don’t dream. I don’t sleep.

60 PMS.. I don’t dare complain about the bed we share, the bruising, my pain. As my parents often remind me, my sister’s is

much greater. The cool summer breeze lifts the curtains, our thin cotton sheets. My toes wiggle freely, breathe.

PMS.. 61 Kathleen A. Kelly

The Third Thing

Grandma Agnes, like me, believes all things bad come in threes.

My father’s recovered love of whiskey, Uncle Virgil’s violet- blue eyes in milky disguise, the late May twister churning at our cellar door. Hinges contorting like Comaneci’s saltos and somersaults.

Silos gouged, groaning— holding their sides. The auger mangled.

Yet her sweet peas survive, thrive even, tendrils twine in lazy daisy curlicues—like her precise French knots. We shell the peas, a colander nestling between my freckled knees. Her legs crocheted with spider veins, calamined mosquito bites. I don’t want to disrupt the quiet,

62 PMS.. to burden her with my trip to the pawn shop, hocking her white on blue cameo, or about the third thing, unintended, not yet showing.

PMS.. 63 Kathleen A. Kelly

Mr. Ninda’s Business

Wheeling his minivan along sun-baked interstate— mesas, sagebrush, and grazing pintos, Mr. Ninda’s business is death. Maynard Dixon clouds— zaftig, cotton-white— line the Texas panhandle.

He’s not the grim reaper. He’s a funeral director, a travel agent arranging trips to the next world.

Along I-40 heading west, 22 miles outside of Amarillo a red-tailed hawk perches, clawing to a cottonwood tree. Wind-weary, its branches bowing like a cypress in Ptolemy’s Geography. An undecipherable augury.

Is it a hawk or Horus? He places the funerary mask on his leather car seat, checks on his passenger. Maquillage intimately

64 PMS.. rouges her drawn face. This is Honora. Just Nora she’d insist when introductions were made. Her laughter crests like a wave, washing over a sand of shag carpet, unlucky bingo cards, smoke-filled taverns. A toast: Slainte. A ritual: the clinking of glasses. Vodka slushes on the billiard table’s red felt. Calling the corner pocket, she sinks the 8 ball. A clean shot. Stoli catches in her parched throat. She chokes. Her lowball glass shatters.

He lingers, shows mercy. Gloved fingers circle her claddagh ring and shamrock bead rosary. Her hands clasped together. A gesture of pleasure, her circumstances for the gods to judge, to bear.

PMS.. 65 Lisa Zerkle

Transformation

Summer road. Ripe possum. A mortal reminder no sooner passed than forgotten.

What loves a cadaver?

Nature’s undertakers are born a mass of wriggling hallelujah for food, teeth on the gears that spin the world. Marvel how their hunger moves the blob, bit by bit, from tarmac, leaving only a flat scrap, a tuft of fur on leather.

Later, they’ll fuel reincarnation, when the body rises, fly by possum-powered fly.

66 PMS.. Meredith Davies Hadaway

Wash Day

The dead are decomposing everywhere— you can smell their slurry of rain and paperwork, cold tea, apricots weeping in damp air. Their odors cling to vacant sweaters, lurk in cars, swivel in office chairs. Remind us we must eat, wrestle, mate—collect the laundry. As I stuff the sheets you left behind into the washer, they bloom again the wrecked perfume of you. Despite detergent and a splash of bleach, nothing comes clean— it all tumbles from the dryer in waves of urgent heat. Fold—crease—repeat. Between each stretch of white, the small scents float— leather, orange, ash, and Ivory soap.

PMS.. 67 poemmemoirstory

Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade {a collaborative essay}

Green

*

When I was twenty, I went to Dylan Thomas’s green grave in Laugharne, Wales. I’d chosen to study abroad in Cymru specifically so I could visit St. Martin’s graveyard. Thomas died when he was only thirty-nine, which seemed old to me then, but young to me now. I slipped on the moss visit- ing the nearby boathouse where he wrote poetry. Wales was the greenest place I’d ever been, as it was always drizzling that spring. Every hill glistened—like his “Fern Hill”—almost neon, against the white sheep that outnumbered people. You could say I was green as I boarded my first plane, an interna- tional flight. I carried travelers checks that I would deposit in a bank in Carmarthen so I could take out pounds, bills that fascinated me because they weren’t green like ours. My Uncle Will had helped me fund my study. He was “green” before the Green Party, trading in his truck for a moped. He was sure we were going to run out of oil, or ruin the planet trying to get at it. Chlorophyll content, what made green leaves green, was reduced in polluted areas. We needed plant life, he’d say to anyone who’d listen. We breathed in oxygen, breathed out carbon dioxide. Plants took in carbon dioxide and put out oxygen. Or as Thomas wrote, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age. And Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

*

When I was twenty, I traveled abroad for the first time. I left the lush bounty of the Evergreen State, traded the gleam and glow of a West Coast city for the grit and stench of a time-worn metropolis. “Why London?” my host-mother asked. And because I wanted her to think well of me, I quipped that I came for the fog.

PMS.. 71 Duhamel & Wade

“No, really—” she said, pouring our tea and peering at me with her curious, olive eyes. Because I could only answer in partial truths, I told her, “I came for the poets.” “Shakespeare?” “Yes,” I said—“but Blake especially.” She handed me a saucer and a chocolate bikkie. “You’ll have to remind me about him.” “He was a visionary. Lived and died in London, largely unrecognized in his lifetime, buried now in Bun Hill Fields.” “I expect you’ll be going there then?” I nodded. What I wanted to say was, Like Blake, they don’t understand me at home. Unlike Blake, I have made myself unwelcome there. I know I will not end where I began, but I cannot imagine where I will go from here When I arrived at his grave, I knelt near the stone. Picnickers spread their checkered cloths. Children played rugby on the rocky ground, root- ed through patches of grass for four-leaf clovers. I made a wish I wouldn’t tell, and Blake’s words came to me: Such were the joys / When we all, girls and boys, / In our youth-time were seen / On the echoing green.

*

Truth be told, I went to the green hills of Wales to escape small town life. Why are you going all the way over there to study English, Deborah asked, when you can learn English right here? Suzanne was even more confused—Wales? Like Shamu? Shamu was a mammal, not a country, but what was the point of explaining? I was sure I was superior to my friends who were content to become moms who’d read Green Eggs and Ham to their kids every night. I wanted to be worldly, whatever that meant. I felt boxed in, not unlike Shamu, who threw off the human who rode her for the crowd at Seaworld, then grabbed her leg so hard the orca’s jaws had to be pried open with a pole. Sure as God made little green apples, I was going to make something of my life, make the mean girls who tortured me in high school green with envy. In Wales, I dyed my hair green with Jell-o, a trick I learned from the Welsh punk kids who wore Doc Martens. I kissed a boy from Cardiff—I gave him the green light, even though I had a boyfriend at home. Maybe I was hoping that my small town sweetheart would become a green-eyed

72 PMS.. poemmemoirstory monster when I came back to confess, but he had kissed someone too— an ordinary American—which made us even. So I decided to escape again. Sometimes, on the other side, the grass was indeed greener.

*

I always had the feeling I was outside, looking in, the real world of hijinks and heartbreak unfolding right in front of me—on the other side of a two-way mirror. “A bunch of us are going to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day,” my host- sister said. This was not an invitation to join them. “Would you mind watering my plants?” she asked, gesturing to our windowsill. While she was away, Tina’s boyfriend sent a box of key limes from Florida. “Love you, Babe,” the card read. I discovered a channel that played nostalgic American television and became briefly addicted to Green Acres—the humorous spin on displacement, the strange comfort of canned laughter. I read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and wept openly in Paddington station. As March was going out like a lamb, I flew to Ireland and spent a day hiking the rolling green hills of Bray. In town, I found a two-screen cin- ema showing American Beauty and The Green Mile. I chose the movie with roses on the poster, romantic as I was. Afterwards, I drank a sum- mery Pimm’s at the local pub, garnished with cucumber and mint. I chat- ted with girls I met at the hostel. “Green genes?” a young man asked, raising his pint in greeting. Then, to clarify: “Are ya Irish?” “I wish,” I smiled, admiring the pretty freckles on his hands. Before he left, he kissed my cheek. “Here’s hopin’ you have the rub of the green just the same.”

*

When I moved to New York, St. Paddy’s was my least favorite holiday. Green beer. Splotches of green puke in the streets. For a time I lived on West 23rd, right across from the Chelsea Hotel where Dylan Thomas spent his last days before dying in St. Vincent’s Hospital. He was green around the gills from binge drinking and conducting an affair with his host’s assistant. When his wife Caitlin flew in from Wales to say her

PMS.. 73 Duhamel & Wade goodbyes, she came to his bedside in a drunken rage, threatening to kill John Brinnin, the poet who’d invited her husband to America for this reading tour. She was forced into a straitjacket and committed to a pri- vate psychiatric clinic on Long Island. I’d had enough of drinking and started to hate it. I still loved Thomas but, by now, loved New York City more than any verdant hills. I’d started reading Frank O’Hara—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. I quoted him whenever anyone asked how I could live in such a tiny, noisy hellhole. Or how I put up with soot, violence, trash, or rats. O’Hara would die young, too—only forty, after being run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island. I wonder if his spirit still exists, and, if so, what he would say about the lush lawn above him in Green River Cemetery.

*

Back in the States, I lived in a place called Parkland where there were no parks, just a small university in a neighborhood deeply weatherworn. Greenery inevitable in the Pacific Northwest, but oh how I longed for the moody seasons, the trees deciduous as my heart. Wednesday nights we met for seminar, performed our taut analyses of Eliot and Levertov—those poets so important two countries came forth to claim them. Frost was to me then the quintessential American. He said, “Nature’s first green is gold,” and I believed him. We were green as grass, my friends and I, but oh how we longed to be golden! St. Patrick’s Day, 1999. Emerald City-bound in Kara’s Volvo station wagon. Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” blaring on the radio. Then: Pistachio brûlée at Dilettante Chocolates, three ramekins heating over a flame. Then: Transvestites in chartreuse boas and shamrock heels stum- bling through the door of Twice Sold Tales. Slogan on a pear-shaped shingle: We’re open if you are. “Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?” Kirsten wanted to know. It was midnight in Pike Place Market, tomorrow already on the cobblestone roads. “In the green room,” I grinned, “after reading to a sold-out crowd.” We were sleepy. We rubbed our faces and smeared the glitter around our eyes. We wrote our names with jade Sharpie on the jumbled, graffiti

74 PMS.. poemmemoirstory wall. We toasted “spring” and “Frost” and “greener pastures.” Then dawn went down to day. And nothing gold could stay.

*

Growing up in New England, I’d seen Frost’s birches. Those brief gold bursts before the leaves turn green, like pre-innocence, pre-spring. I only recently learned that green bell peppers—I never liked their bitter flavor—are simply unripe red ones, which I adore. I always spend the extra money on yellow or orange or red and eat no peppers at all if I can only afford green. Their taste reminds me of the hard little pears I picked from a neighbor’s tree when I was a kid, pears which led to a stomach- ache and my confession of trespassing. The bell pepper is the only pepper that doesn’t produce capsaicin, the chemical that stimulates pain receptors in the mouth, making green chili peppers, jalapenos, and pepperoncini taste hot. The burning sensation, raising a diner’s heart rate, is also an aphrodisiac. In Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30, a gelatin silver print, I saw an athlete sitting, his back to the camera, his brawn puffing from each side of his spine, sinewy all the way up to his shoulders and arms: trapezius, deltoid, pectoralis major, his hands in boxing gloves resting on top of his head. Weston would have been frustrated with me as he was frus- trated with all the analyses of his peppers during his lifetime, saying, In them has been found vulvas, penises or combinations, sexual intercourse, Madonna with child, wrestlers, modern sculpture, African carving, ad nauseam! It’s nothing but a mild bell pepper, he insisted, a pepper that is green.

*

Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, my favorite place to travel was Back in Time. I hiked the verdant Alps with the Von Trapp family and rode the streetcars around St. Louis the year they hosted the World’s Fair. Once I saw Thoroughly Modern Millie, I turned perpetual flapper for Halloween. I liked the bobbed hair and the beads, the jitterbug and the tapioca. But most of all, I was smitten with this scene: Muzzy, with her vast smile and raspy voice, tells Millie how she set out to marry for love, not money: “Mr. Van H., he gave me this great big

PMS.. 75 Duhamel & Wade old green glass brooch. And I lent it to my girlfriend one night so she could impress a new beau. Well, […] the new beau turned out to be a jeweler! And the green glass brooch turned out to be emeralds.” Her poor fiancé was actually a multi-millionaire, but Muzzy wouldn’t let his green go to her head. “While I truly do prefer emeralds,” she says, “we could have made it on green glass.” I bought a green ashtray at a yard sale to remind me of the metaphor. I burned the names of boys I liked and kept the ashes. For girls I liked, I never even wrote the names down. Love, I reasoned, was going to be tricky—costume or otherwise. At fourteen, I was still looking for a brace- let that wouldn’t turn my wrist green every time I got caught in the rain.

*

I too always felt more akin to the past, as it was buttoned down, and everyone knew how to think about it. Captain Kangaroo’s sidekick Mr. Green Jeans sometimes turned into “The New Old Folk Singer,” hoisting his sousaphone onto his lap, then strumming it as though it were a gui- tar. Mr. Green Jeans loved nature—the katydid and lizard, the frog and turtle. Once, on set, after a tiger bit him, he put his hand into his overalls’ pocket until the skit was done. Captain Kangaroo was broadcast in black and white, but I never doubted for a minute that Mr. Green Jeans wore green. This is not to privilege the past of my childhood with its avocado appliances, lime green shag carpets, and green bean casseroles with French’s canned fried onions sprinkled on top. When I was in that past, the 1970s were the present so I wound up obsessed with the sock hops of my mother’s 1950s, teal poodle skirts with turquoise sequins. This is just to say that sometimes I have felt as though I was perform- ing before a green screen, projecting an idealized past upon it. Before I found poetry, I had my cousin’s record player, the psychedelic Lemon Pipers—Now listen while I play my green tambourine. Before I found Dylan Thomas, I found poetry where I could, Richard Harris’s surreal mixed metaphor—MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain…

*

76 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

For me, it was Mister Rogers, not Mr. Green Jeans. I wanted a closet full of sneakers, a cardigan in every color. I wanted the kind of neighbor who never said, “A hedge between keeps the friendship green.” Instead of Captain Kangaroo, there was Oscar the Grouch in his dent- ed can, Jim Henson and his menagerie of Muppets. I must have loved Kermit best when he sang “It’s not easy being green,” a sad ballad that laments how “people tend to pass you over…” It seems in retrospect my childhood was minted green. My mother with her green thumb: the ferns and jade plants spilling from their boxes. My father, his green and generous heart: “wick” as the untended shrubs in The Secret Garden. A row of poisons under the sink—Cascade for the dishwasher, Comet for the tub—each marked with a Mr. Yuk sticker. On television, the daily parade of green products: Jolly Green Giant vegetables, Pert Plus 2-in-1 conditioning shampoo, twins in shiny honey- dew swimsuits with two sticks of Doublemint gum. On holidays, we ate Jell-o salad known simply as “the green stuff.” I couldn’t get enough. I loved pickles, too—the salty bite of the brine. In school, we learned the riddle of the Magic Green Door: puppies can go through, but dogs can’t…The pleasing answer was that only words with double letters could pass. Then, the great riddle of my life began: Once Dorothy leaves the Emerald City, will she—can she—ever go back?

PMS.. 77 Amye Archer

Slow Motion

My sister belongs here and I don’t. We are in Manhattan, having just exit- ed the 7 train and scurrying towards daylight through a massive under- ground walkway that promises to spit us out onto 42nd Street. Jennie, my sister, blends right in. She skips the steps two at a time. She slinks to the right when she should, hugging the smooth white subway tile which hasn’t been its original color in probably close to sixty years. She snubs the homeless man playing an old guitar with only four strings. I cannot help but stare. He is blacker than anyone I have ever seen. His skin is mud. His eyes are charcoal. His hands, almost yellow on the bottoms, strum across the strings. His voice slips out of his throat almost by accident, but it’s beautiful. I stop to watch him and am immediately hit from behind by a stroller wheel, followed by a purse, two guys speak- ing Arabic, a cane, three backpacks, and finally, my sister who has circled back for me on a recon mission. “Come on, keep moving,” she instructs me. The tunnel smells like hot garbage soup. It’s sweat and vomit and possibly urine, all at once. People walk in ropes. The right is heading towards the street. The left is descending further underground. We move so fast it looks like we are standing still. We are a machine. We create a hum. We are gears sliding back and forth under dim lights and hundred- story buildings overhead. Twenty minutes ago we were on the 7 train from Queens into Manhattan. We were passing an old warehouse with busted out windows that had been taken over by artists as loft space. The shell of the building was covered in graffiti art. Not tags, not anti-Bush sentiments, but actual art. Twenty-foot-high portraits of Snoop Dogg and Batman sat next to volcanoes spewing body parts and suns setting behind silver clouds. “It’s majestic,” Jennie pointed out. She sat across from me on the sleek air-conditioned train. “Yeah, it’s awesome. Look at the Al Pacino! It looks just like him!” I shouted over the metallic squeal surrounding us. “No, I mean what the artists are doing. They are taking industry and

78 PMS.. poemmemoirstory making it their own, taking it back and making it work for them,” she said.

Now, I can’t keep up with her. I pant and huff and puff my way through the crowds. The tourists are the ones who stop right in the middle of the procession, Jennie told me when I first arrived, the important thing was to keep moving. That seems to be the rule in this city of a million dis- tractions, keep moving. Moving about the city, navigating its subway sys- tem, transferring trains, and calling cars. It’s what consumes those who live here. It becomes a battle within yourself to find the most efficient way to travel to your destination. Jennie and her friends spend up to an hour plotting their route before they even leave the house. We find an exit and climb the twenty or so steps from the tunnel out onto 42nd Street. Around us are a million people from every nook and cranny of the country. Lights flash, horns blare, profanity floats through the air tangled with exhaust and expensive perfume. Jennie stares at the city around her. We have our father’s hair color, jet black, almost blue in the sun. Jennie’s hair frames her face, poker straight with severe bangs. She wears jeans and long sleeves when it’s ninety degrees out, as most locals do. She has long earrings, longer than most necklaces I’ve seen. They feather out into delicate silver fans that cascade down into water- falls over her angular shoulder blades. Her eyes are tar balls, dark and slippery, staring lustfully at the buildings around her. The same look she wore the summer she discovered boys in 1988 and ejected me from our clubhouse. It was a dilapidated structure that the kids in our neighborhood spent all summer building. Everything about it was unsafe. We stole rotted plywood from a garbage dump near our house, rusty nails from a neighbor’s garbage can, and built our shanty on the side of a steep hill. It creaked and cracked when you walked over the floor, and if you stood for too long to one side, you could feel it lean. Jennie was fourteen and dating a neighborhood boy who was about two years younger. I spied through the wide gaping hole in the door as Jennie’s teased hair, normally held a foot straight up in the air with gal- lons of aerosol hairspray, leaned precariously to the side as they kissed. The sucking and slurping sounds got louder as the boy laid on top of her and tugged at her clothes. I was eleven and had no idea what was going on. Soon, his hands were disappearing under the acid washed jeans we had worked so hard to button earlier that morning. They were so tight I couldn’t imagine his hand slid under them with ease.

PMS.. 79 Archer

After that, Jennie was gone. She spent her days at school chasing boys, and her nights at home on the phone with them. Our clubhouse went from an innocent meeting place for neighborhood friends, to a den of inequity where Jennie and her friends could slip tongues and slide hands over sexual organs. Our parents made us rip it down. I see that same look again in her eye tonight. Standing over three hundred miles away from our home, she is at home here. She is one of them. She is a New Yorker. She is a mural of culture and diversity. She has liquefied into the melting pot of Manhattan. She has heard its call, felt its pull, and forgotten us. And I realize, I have lost her yet again.

Jennie lives in Greenpoint. It is a part of Brooklyn that has seen better days. If you ask her, this neighborhood is on the brink of something big- ger. It’s Chelsea waiting to happen, SoHo in its infancy. To me, it looks like a street from Bosnia in the 1990s. The bums on the corner have moved in. They have set up shanties made from weakened cardboard boxes, old flannel shirts, and discolored newspapers. Their urine streaks and stains the brick exterior of the building behind them. The cops, the social workers, the bleeding hearts with no money, walk right past them. No one complains out loud. After all, it’s their home now too. Across the street from Jennie’s apartment building is a poultry slaugh- terhouse. There are no windows, no glass door, and no invitation to peek inside. Metal grates climb the façade and a small handwritten sign hangs on the door marking it “Poultry Slaughter.” The smell of poultry being extinguished floats through the neighborhood on hot summer mornings. The first time I saw her neighborhood, this war zone of potential, was almost nine months ago. She moved in during a slip slop December rain. It was a Saturday and my mother and her new husband, Joe, had just careened a Jeep with an attached U-Haul trailer from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We slithered through the Lincoln Tunnel, squeezed our way across 34th street, and finally snaked through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, emerging in the soaking waters of Brooklyn. “Ohh this is cute!” my mother said, staring at the ten identical brown- stones that inhabit the street. They each had a stoop with decorative touches: plastic flowers in hand-thrown pots, painted garbage cans, and fabric covered lawn chairs. People made these stoops their own. People loved this street. The sidewalks were lined with beautiful drooping trees

80 PMS.. poemmemoirstory hanging like a cool canopy over the concrete. “This isn’t it, Mom. My street is the next one over,” Jennie answered from the backseat. We turned the corner into what looked like a war zone. “Oh. This is...nice too.” But it wasn’t. It was a collaboration of poverty and crime. It was bar- ren of trees, desolate of greenery. The only living things on Jennie’s street were the bums. It was more than a street over, it was a world away. Now, nine months later in the heat of early August, I have grown accustomed to the grime. This is my fifth visit and already I’m feeling at home. I saunter down the street not even flinching at the homeless woman singing a lullaby to a half empty bottle cradled in her arms. Hush little baby don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. Her voice is squeaky like worn down brake pads on a Buick, but the bottle doesn’t seem to mind. The night provides the anonymity I need to ignore her, to pretend she doesn’t exist, to resist the urge I always have to empty my purse and share with her every last dime I have. This morning Jennie was pissed when she caught me with a wrinkled five dollar bill in my palm, sliding it into the basket on the floor near the woman’s cardboard front door. Jennie is convinced she is buying crack with my money, I pre- fer to think a morning coffee from the corner Barista. The walk to the bar is long and hot. The heat lies on our backs like satchels full of wet blankets. I pretend not to feel it. I am on a high. I have come here to this city on a mission. I am here to show off my new body. I have just finished what felt like years of starvation and exercise to reach my new goal. I have lost one hundred pounds. I have shed a whole person, or at least a hungry supermodel. And now, I’m walking down Greenpoint Avenue in the middle of August with my sister, and for the first time in my life, I am within twenty pounds of her weight. I am normal. The last time I weighed this much I was in ninth grade, just off a bout with mono, which helped me drop a quick forty pounds. I feel sexy, desirable, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like a woman. “Two Hefeweizens please,” Jennie whispers to the bartender. “And a shot of Jager,” I add. In her neighborhood, as in most of the boroughs, you can whisper in a bar and still be heard. There are no local bands with out of tune instru- ments or a whining lead singer. People are not raising voices to be heard over a large neon jukebox that plays a variety of Bon Jovi music. The

PMS.. 81 Archer bars here are laid back and peaceful. They are places of Zen. They only get loud towards the end of the night, when people are debating the best routes to travel home. We are in a bar called The Pencil Factory. It’s a small space with only candles to provide the lighting. The tables, of which there are only four, are large slabs of unfinished wood. I run my hands over our table repeat- edly, almost consumed with trying to get a sliver. There are no chairs, only benches. The floor is dusty and dirty and looks like it belongs in a western saloon. I would not be completely shocked if someone walked through the plate glass door wearing chaps. Jennie and I sit and watch the people around us. I am fascinated by their casual nature. One girl wears what looks like pajamas as she leans in and whispers to a man wearing shorts and no shirt. A couple by the door have brought their dog. A large white mutt who sleeps with his slobber- ing mouth on the girl’s sandaled foot. They are at ease in this space. Two or three girls sit at the bar chatting with the tall thin man behind it. The bartender knows their names, their drinks, and probably their marital statuses. Glasses clank, feet shuffle across the barren floors, an occasional chuckle wafts through the air, but it’s not loud. It’s a smooth rhythmic noise.

Twenty-five minutes later the room is beginning to spin, my legs are starting to feel warm and fuzzy, and my lips long for the taste of a men- thol cigarette. “I’m going for a smoke,” I say and leave Jennie, her face illuminated only by the screen on her Blackberry. My sandals are flat and worn out, and they flip and flop across the floor like bedroom slippers. I have been working on my walk. I’ve heard from some friends who have traveled to Europe that American women do not know how to walk like real women. The proper way, to saunter back and forth, is not conducive to our hurried nature or slouched pos- ture. But on this night, in this low lit bar, I walk like my hips are twirling a hula hoop. I pass the couple near the door with the dog and the man glances at me from the corner of his eye. I feel his eyes on me as I walk, my thighs burning together under my short jean skirt. The Pencil Factory is on a corner with a stop sign right in front. I am the only smoker, ostracized to the street by the no-smoking-in-bars law that has made being in a bar in New York City breathable again. I am not

82 PMS.. poemmemoirstory fearful as I stand here by myself with a thin line of white exhaust leaking from my lips. I do not flinch when a group of young men, strong and imposing, walk past me with their eyes locked on my breasts. I do not care that the nearest street light is a block away, and the only illumina- tion I have comes from the neon beer advertisements in the windows behind me. The door to the bar stays open at my back, another oddity you would never find in Scranton. It’s inviting and warm. Before I can finish my smoke, a large black SUV pulls to the stop sign in front of me. The four guys inside wear bandanas drenched with sweat and are talking over loud music when they spot me standing on the corner in my short skirt and tight top. For what feels like five whole min- utes, I enjoy them looking at me, objectifying me, imagining me naked, having their way with me. I imagine if I was more daring I might go home with one of them, let them ravish me, and sneak out in the morn- ing before daybreak. I imagine if they were in the bar behind me, I might let one buy me a drink, or pretend to be too drunk to notice their hands on my breasts. I stand there, eight eyes on me, feeling as sexy as I have ever felt, when the passenger in the front sticks his head out the window and, with the whole bar listening through the open door behind me, yells at the top of his lungs. “WOW! That’s a whale even I would fuck!” Then, just like that, they are gone. My cigarette falls to the ground, my stomach flips. I suck in the night air and regain my composure. I want to chase after them, to explain to them that I have lost weight. I could show them a before and after picture. “See? See how fat I used to be? 265 pounds! That was fat! This, 165, this is not fat! Trust me!” I would force them to look. I would show them my stomach, the stretch marks, the hanging skin, the proof of a fatter existence. Then, maybe I would kill one of them, stab him to death with a shard of glass after I bust their windows out. Maybe I could light their fancy SUV on fire, or find out where they live and kill their pets. “What happened? You okay?” Jennie asks, emerging from the bar. “I’m fine,” I answer, choking back tears, and walk a straight line back to our table without a wiggle in my hips.

The next night, I am on a bus cutting through the Pennsylvania moun- tains like a yo-yo being sucked back onto its string, heading towards Scranton. The mountains surrounding the Delaware Water Gap are like

PMS.. 83 Archer the breast implants of Pennsylvania. Huge, imposing, and unnaturally large, they dwarf the soft subtle bosom of the rest of the state’s worn down peaks. The Water Gap is the entrance to Pennsylvania from New Jersey, and also marks the halfway point of my bus ride home from New York City. It’s pitch black around me and all I can think about is how I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t belong in the enormous city behind me, and I don’t belong in the small city in front of me. I don’t belong in my marriage and I don’t belong in the single life. I don’t belong to fat, and according to four boys in an SUV, I don’t belong to thin. I’m suspended in time. Stuck in a moment. Lost.

84 PMS.. Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Culinary Alchemy

When my new sweetheart’s parents arrive in town, I cook. At midnight on Friday, I roll out egg noodles to dry, the chicken already boiled and deboned. Saturday morning, I bake rolls and select the apple cake recipe. By late afternoon, I’ve baked that cake and I’ve cut carrots and green beans for a side dish. Two of these recipes are my mother’s staples, but two are new, concoctions I’ve snipped from magazines along with thousands of others. I cut lists of ingredients for Provençale Kebabs and Tomato Basil Soup; directions to mix, spread, and layer for Pumpkin Lasagna, Enchiladas Florentine and Chocolate Banana Loaf; substitution suggestions for Wild Mushroom Ravioli; preparation details for Braised Tofu and Quinoa-Stuffed Squash. A bit of this, a dash of that, grate and scrape, slice and separate become incantations that bind the sensuality of food to memory. As other collectors seek rare books, elephant figurines, and vintage photographs, I treasure hunt for recipes so I may reproduce their power, so I’ll know what they know—how to dazzle, nurture, sus- tain.

Initiation I knock on the kitchen door, fumbling over “recipe, borscht, please.” In the soup served by my Polish host, Mrs. Gebala, beets spoke the soil’s language of mineral and rain, not the familiar tongue of tin can. Mellow, magenta medallions floated in broth, slices of hard-earth hearts sweet- ened with cream. I felt as though I spoke the sound of zippers, but Mrs. Gebala understood. Kitchen witches rarely perform for an audience; culinary spells work best when a person yields to the mystery of taste. Perhaps Mrs. Gebala felt sorry for me, the professor so far from home. She held two crimson beets in the air, pretended to slice them, scribbled “30” in my journal, and pointed to a pot. From the refrigerator to the stove, Mrs. Gebala strode with a lemon, carrot, and clove of garlic in hand. She added fresh- churned butter and cream, charade-style, to the empty pot. Sprigs of dill

PMS.. 85 Stewart-Nuñez sprung like a bouquet from her sleeve. With a pinch of salt sprinkled in, she cast another spell—I believed I could mimic her magic.

Seduction “For the salad, select two domates—firm, red,” Sezen Hanım said. Domates, I whispered, repeating the Turkish word. I pushed into the smooth skin, unsure how it would respond to the arrow-tipped blade. The tomato opened with little pressure and I arranged the heart-shaped slices on a plate. “What’s the word for ‘heart’?” I asked. “Kalp,” she replied. Kalp, kalp. I committed it to memory. Sezen Hanım described those close to her own. I knew her husband from work, but she also had a son, Sunkar, my age. “Sunkar is a doctor,” Sezen Hanım said. “His job leaves him little time for social engagements. May I invite my family over for dinner after your next language lesson?” “Sure,” I replied. Sunkar, Sunkar, Sunkar. “And what’s next?” “Salatalık,” she said, as she pulled three cucumbers out of a bag. “Peel like this.” Her knife flashed; ribbons fell into the sink. While I diced them, Sezen Hanım minced parsley. “Toss the vegetables with lemon juice,” she said. I handed her a nip- ple-tipped lemon and she rolled it back and forth across the countertop before slicing it in half and squeezing four tablespoons into the salad. We added olive oil and salt. At my table, we took eager first bites, crunching the crisp vegetables. Fresh bread added chewiness to the meal. We ate slowly, the conversation ranging from our favorite books to our favorite food. We both pushed our plates away with satisfaction. The next day Sunkar called. “Hi,” he said. “I want to introduce myself. My mother was happy to meet you. She says you like to cook?” The spell of Turkish salad: seduction by proxy.

Apprenticing Sometimes recipes rely on a cook’s experience, such as understanding the shade of green steamed broccoli achieves before turning mushy. Sometimes they assume a working knowledge, such as the difference between “chop” and “dice.” The most experienced spell-casters, like my Grandma Welby, perfect spells over time and make it seem easy. On any given Sunday afternoon of my childhood, I would scour her kitchen for

86 PMS.. poemmemoirstory peanut butter cups and milk; there wasn’t much more besides jars of pickled pig’s feet and Miracle Whip. Yet in a kitchen the size of an ample closet, she made meals: butter and bread, dill pickles, mashed potatoes and gravy, roast beef or pork, green beans, and pie. It seemed she could always make something from nothing. To understand how she summoned all that food, I consumed reci- pes. At age eight, I labeled Strawberry Shortcake’s Cooking Fun with days of the week for a menu; thirty-two years later, I’m still collecting. I tape recipes onto index cards and gather food into albums of feasts: Heavenly Earth Burgers, Sesame Soba Noodle Salad, and Ratatouille in “Vegetarian Dishes;” Yellow Pepper, Egg Drop, Golden Winter, and Harvest Minestrone in “Soups;” Lemon Ginger Muffins and Scottish Oat Scones in “Breads.” A recipe may ask me to coat a sauté pan with olive oil, apply heat, add onions and garlic, and cook until tender. Will I add peppers or celery next? Fennel or cumin? At each step, a recipe can move toward alchemy. Possibilities unfold when I blend one-fourth cup sugar with two-thirds cup butter and beat until fluffy, when three-quarters cup bittersweet cocoa is measured out and stirred in. The best alchemists learn from their mistakes. My sophomore year of high school, I picked through my mother’s index cards until I selected a proper meal for a boyfriend: Shrimp and Wild Rice Casserole. I thawed the frozen shrimp, diced the onion, and cubed the Velveeta. To that I added Campbell’s Condensed Mushroom Soup, butter, lemon juice, wild rice, and two tablespoons of ground pepper. That’s right. Two. Tablespoons. Anyone with an appreciation for basic seasoning would know that “gr” in front of “pepper” meant something else. Sometimes kitchen witches muck up something, but the intention makes the recipe work anyway; sometimes, even the best spell-casting fails.

Bait-and-Switch My mother used to can food on the stove, the overhead vent sucking up steam, the steel pressure cooker shaking and whistling like a living cauldron. She canned homegrown tomatoes for spaghetti sauce and she canned salmon that my father brought back from Canadian fishing trips. As a table sorceress who cooks from scratch, she uses time-tested—or friend-tested—spells to distract my father from his other loves. Once, my mother believed that if she plated the pot roast, potatoes, and carrots the second my father walked through the door after work,

PMS.. 87 Stewart-Nuñez the aroma would make him forget about the Wild Turkey in the liquor cabinet. Or maybe a tender steak procured from the East Side Locker would be too filling—less space for a six-pack. Maybe the food would arrest an alcoholic’s starvation. Maybe it would satisfy his roving hunger, a hunger so sharp his words become blades and so democratic that a simple phrase or facial expression can spark its urgency. Now, with my father’s retirement, my mother creatively adapts to vodka—so easy to hide and sip throughout the day. Perhaps even the most potent spells lose their power; perhaps they don’t always manifest in the ways a woman intends.

Safety In the mountain village of Çamlıyayla, Turkey, Feyza simmered tea in a samovar. Her brother, Ahmet, and I visited her to escape the sweltering city heat. On the table, she’d arranged a bowl of cherries, turning any blemish on a piece of fruit inward. I imagine her up high on the orchard ladder. Cherries tip the wrists of green-leafed branches, the twinned bulbs close to bursting. Thud, thud, thud. Pairs drop into the bucket. She plucks by touching the stems, not the fruit, so her hands won’t look bruised. And they weren’t when she served us tea. So where did I expect to see the marks her husband left? Everyone suspected. Ahmet’s father had invited Feyza and her children back into his home, but she hadn’t gone. Feyza appeared to do everything right. Around the wooden table, she tiptoed. Her hands didn’t waver as she poured boiling tea into her hus- band’s hourglass cup. Her four-year-old son grasped her hand when his father’s gruff voice demanded cubes of sugar, but she didn’t flinch. Plunk, plunk, plunk. With a baby secured to her hip by one hand, she stirred until the sugar dissolved with the other. Not a strand of hair escaped her headscarf. Two years later, when I learned that Feyza had died at age twenty-six, I wondered when the spell failed to work. How can the magic of care and order dissipate bleeding in a brain?

Glamour My former mother-in-law violated all spell-casting principles except one: the illusion. She’d unbox pollo francesca, bistec a la parilla, and pernil from Styrofoam boxes that she’d brought home from Estrella del Caribbe,

88 PMS.. poemmemoirstory a restaurant she owned. Her brother-in-law, Jesus, did the actual cooking. Millie might sprinkle slices of mozzarella and tomato with vinaigrette, but otherwise she ironed a linen tablecloth and set the dining-room table for her four children and husband. In the kitchen, she’d scoop out arroz blanco, arroz amarillo, moro, tostones, maduros and ceviche onto her best china, bowls we traded around the candle-lit table. I always thought her spells lacked sparkle and strength because I knew her stovetop and coun- ters were clean, her refrigerator packed with leftovers, not ingredients. I changed my mind when she died; her children never gathered around that table together again.

Transmutation In a Polish farmhouse, Kasha dazzled me by transforming flowers into an elixir that conjured a long-forgotten memory. She stuffed a pot with twenty clusters of elderflower blossoms clipped from a bramble of asters, clover, purple comfrey, buttercups and roadside grasses. Like a forest sprite bent on mischief, Kasha swiveled between the stove and table of supplies: canisters of flour lined up against wrinkled wallpaper, fresh cream in a vase, eggs nestled in a basket. She tore open a paper bag and dumped in two kilos of sugar, grains cascading over the wire-thin stems like sand sliding from a plastic pail. Stirring with a wooden spoon, she poured in two liters of boiling water. The sugar and blossoms pinwheeled in the pot, heat extracting the tangy flavor. Was Kasha’s bubbling laughter the key element in the transmutation? After it cooled, she strained the elderflower-infused syrup and stirred in lemon juice. When its perfume wafted into my nose, I recalled plucking petals from purple thistles and sucking the sweetness from the white-tipped ends. When had I forgotten the recipe of wild simplicity? Kasha offered a brief toast to elderflower and we gulped summer into our throats.

Effects What makes cooking alchemy is the possibility of transforming common ingredients into valuable experiences. And the possibilities for surprise, for failure. As I survey the empty plates after my sweetheart’s parents leave, I wonder about the effects of my spell-casting. I’ve practiced reci- pes long enough to know that I usually forego “dazzle” in favor of “nur- ture.” For this meal, I intended comfort, welcome—the essential atmo- sphere for good conversation. I planned for ease, eliminating recipes with

PMS.. 89 Stewart-Nuñez distracting, pungent ingredients. Did I accomplish this? They smiled at the presentation. Between storytelling and jokes, we took second help- ings of chicken-and-noodles, sopping broth up with buttered rolls. We left only crumbs of the generous pieces of cake. Over cups of tea, we laughed. I heard sighs of satisfaction as the meal concluded. This was one successful spell. Yet power can fall from the cook’s hands as easily as spilled salt. The complex chemistries of vegetable and mineral mirror those of social interaction, and both can alter tastes and textures. So I’ll continue to collect recipes and continue to cook, even though I’ll never be able to completely account for what slips in the experience of food moving between plate and lips.

90 PMS.. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Opal

Long and white and shaped like a bullet, the gemstone at the center of the ring is as thick as an infant’s finger. A band of silver and faceted stones secures it, but time has loosened the band and loosened the opal in its setting. The ring must have belonged to my mother. She must have taken me by the arm an afternoon I don’t remember and led me to the waist-high chest that my father had made for her. There she would have pressed the ring into my palm, the way she has pressed her jewelry for years, as though bestowing the past. The ring is her style. It is showy and commanding, like my mother. But when I see the ring I think of my grandmother and when I wore it I wore it to be close to her. I have other items that belonged to my grandmother, among them a pinky ring of filigree gold flower with a single chip of diamond in its center, the chip approximately the size of a pencil point or a period. That ring is what I know of my grandmother’s style: it is small, it is floral, it is unobtrusive, and it matches both the fine print of the pink and blue floral housedresses she wore often in my childhood and always now wears in my memory and the tight set of the tiny pink foam rollers in which she curled her gray hair, undyed. She was unobtrusive in family lore, once served a charcoal briquette by my father instead of the extra well-done hamburger she’d requested that he was tired of having to ruin good meat for. She had, famously, not complained, but accepted her unpalatable lot, complimenting my father at the end of the meal on what a good hamburger it had finally been. Like so much else told in my family, that story cannot be true. If she was dutiful enough not to complain she must also have been duti- ful enough to raise a fork and poke the hamburger with it, to make a semblance of eating the meal for which we’d all gathered on the summer lawn, citronella candles burning and Vivaldi soaring from the speakers my father had strung up in the trees, my grandfather slumped on the bench beside her in a short-sleeved plaid button-up and khaki trousers stained at the crotch. She would have noticed that the tines of the fork did not dent meat, that indeed it was not meat.

PMS.. 91 Marzano-Lesnevich

And my grandmother was not dutiful. She said what she thought. When the only Puerto Rican family moved onto her block she said spics, and it did not matter who amongst us tried to hush her. When the Chinese family came, chinks. And once, after an outing to see a movie with her Golden Age club, my grandmother reported that the movie had seemed like an odd choice for a group of senior citizens and that afterward she and my grandfather had learned they’d gone to the wrong theater, but no matter, she’d enjoyed the movie. What was the movie, I asked? “Oh, something silly,” she said, waving her hand. “There were bugs in it. Spiders. We had a good time.” She’d seen Arachnophobia, a horror movie I, at fourteen its target audience, was too scared to see. She was small but fat and feisty. Her fat sat on her like gristle on a pork chop, set apart from the meat and the bone. She was fine-boned and even at her heaviest small-faced but her waist bulged. The fat of meat was her vice; she would cut it off a piece of chicken and give us the meat. We needed the meat, she would tell us. We were growing. What was left behind would do just fine for her. She’d sit at the end of the long white table in my parents’ kitchen long after we’d left the table and eat the cut-away fat small forkful by small forkful, penitential concentration on her face. Years after my grandmother died a friend told me that when we ourselves were old we would sit side by side in rockers and pluck bonbons from a tin passed back and forth, finally past caring for appear- ances. I would remember this look on my grandmother’s face then and see, for the first time, the determined pleasure it held. That she was fat no longer mattered. She would eat what she enjoyed.

But she was not, it turned out, fat. A doctor finally diagnosed water retention around her heart. My mother was inclined to blow up like a puffer fish when she had too much salt, her eyes once or twice swelling closed after bad take-out, and now it was explained that the inclination, shared by every female on my mother’s side, shared by me, was genetic and had been operating deep within my grandmother, the swelling hid- ing in her midsection. The doctor prescribed diuretics and overnight my grandmother deflated like a pricked balloon. In two weeks she lost more than half her body weight. She’d been frail, it turned out, beneath it all. Never before seriously ill, over three days she fell, had a stroke, and died. I sang her “The Rose” in the hospital room, between the stroke and the wiring-up and her death. Some say love, love is a river. Some say love,

92 PMS.. poemmemoirstory love is a razor. I had never seen anyone die. It seemed impossible that we would not again play checkers or laugh together. That she would never again be so bluntly and heedlessly herself. Then Emily Marzano, neé Zanne, went into the ground. Sometime after, I got the ring, the ring that was my mother’s but that has always made me think of my grandmother. I wore it daily for two years, missing her. Now it sits at the top of a box of jewelry that I do not wear and do not think I ever will. I see the ring each time I open the lid and each time I remember the slip-side of the stone against my finger, the constant light awareness that the opal was loose and that I must take care not to lose it. I could never relax fully with it on my finger, the way, I suppose, I can no longer fully relax in my memory of my grandmother or in the pres- ence of my mother, realizing now that there was a choice to be made and that both of them failed to make it. There was something happening in the house where my grandfather slumped beside my grandmother, and where he went to bed next to her at night. He left that bed each night, left her lying next to an empty space I realize only now she could not fail to feel. He left her bed, and came to mine. Still I wore the ring for two years and still I have it. What do we do with the past, when we begin to face the pain it carries? Where do we place the complicated anger?

Down the stairs from the study where I am writing this is a kitchen, and when I left my computer to visit it I counted six ladybugs on the floor. Four looked dead, though none moved, and all might have been. When I came back up to my study there was another bug lying at the entryway, brown with curled limbs. It looked to be the same oblong shape and, sure enough, when I flicked it upwards with my fingernail it had the distinc- tive dotted shell, this one not quite red but a burnt umber color. It, too, was dead. To be interrupted by a profusion of dead ladybugs in the middle of writing an essay about grandmothers and mothers and daughters, the matrilineal line of caring, seems like it ought to have meaning. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! Your house is on fire and your children are gone! goes the old rhyme. A scolding of motherly failure, of motherly dis-care. The feminist in me regards the rhyme skeptically, something sung to reinforce the danger for women of working outside the home, a rhyme chanted to keep them in their homes.

PMS.. 93 Marzano-Lesnevich

And yet. What the women in my family missed in their homes. My grandmother stood between my mother and college, between my mother and a life beyond the immigrant neighborhood of her youth. This was my grandmother’s great betrayal, according to my mother: to choose what she saw as duty over my mother and to demand my mother choose the same. When my mother speaks of this time, her face twists. The schooling she had to sneak out at night to receive, the job she had to lie about. The mother she longed to be close to. The life she had to both build and hide away, that for years she could not wear as openly as she would one day wear her rings. But when my mother learned what her father had done to me, it was her turn to be dutiful, to tell me to hush up, to never again to speak of what had happened in her house. My deco-flash mother did not choose the noise and attention of the showy ring.

Between she and I—between my mother and me—there exists the unspoken memory of my grandmother. She slept on a nubby green sofa bed at the foot of the stairs each night that she babysat with my grandfa- ther when we were children. That bed had old metal joints that creaked when my father set up the bed. They creaked again when my grandfather rose from the bed and my grandmother stayed still beside him. The stair- case he climbed was next to where they slept, its old creaky wood so loud I could hear it all the way in the back of the house. So loud it announced him coming. My grandmother slept through those sounds, or did not. She slept through those sounds every time for five years, or did not. She knew, or did not. She kept her mouth shut. I can no more know than I can secure the stone in its setting. The ring cannot be fixed, the jewelers I’ve showed it to say, and my grandmother is dead and has taken what she did or did not know to the grave with her. What do we do with the dead, when they can no longer answer for their lives or for our own? What do we do with the anger? Legend puts the opal as the stone of invisibility, the stone that can hide a person as thoroughly as silence. Legend also has the opal as the stone that portends death. If I misremember always to whom the opal first belonged, making the ring my grandmother’s and not my mother’s, perhaps it is because I must make it belong to the one who is already

94 PMS.. poemmemoirstory unknowable, already dead, the one with whom the stone of the past can never be fixed. So it is for my grandmother that I keep the ring, and for myself that I leave the ring in the velvet bed of its tray. For my grandmother I keep the ring, though I will never again wear it. I keep it because it is beautiful and I keep it although it is broken. I keep the ring. I keep this hard stone memory of her.

PMS.. 95 poemmemoirstory

Speechless

Catherine Landis

Chapter One I quit talking on Tuesday. Porter came home, he said, what’s for dinner, but he didn’t notice when I didn’t answer so I quit talking some more. All night, just about, I didn’t say a word. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, and Porter on the couch watching the TV news said, you going to answer that? I shook my head, so he got up and did it. It was a man wanting money for the Veterans. I would have said no but Porter prom- ised twenty-five dollars. This morning when he comes in the kitchen I’m drinking coffee two-handed in my green bathrobe, leaning with my back against the sink. I look like Gumby in my green bathrobe. Porter was the one who thought that up and it was funny when he said it and I’d laughed, too. I am Gumby holding the coffee cup with both hands, poking my face into the steam when he stops, banana in one hand, thermos in the other, and looks at me. “You okay?” I nod, which is like talking, so he goes ahead and leaves. You can’t keep this shit up all the time, but you would be surprised. I stand at the sink and listen at his car pulling out of the driveway. Lucky is watching me. She’s done eating the cheese I mixed in her food and now she’s wanting more, but she can’t have it. The vet says she’s too fat. The muscles in her little legs are twitching, eyes locked on my face, watching me, watching to see if I’m going to put down this coffee and make a move toward the refrigerator. Porter gives her ice cream. He knows better, and I’ve told him not to but he does it anyway. I don’t look at her. If I look at her I can’t promise I won’t be breaking out that bag of cheese again. I take another sip of coffee and try to think about what do I want to eat. Nothing. Not one single thing sounds good. It’s like I’m sick but not really, like a piece of gunk has got caught in my throat that might or might not make me feel like throwing up but I’m going to have to eat something, I know it, I can’t go to work on nothing. Already this coffee’s scraping against the walls of my empty stomach. I have got to think. Not

PMS.. 99 Landis cheese, that’s for sure. Eggs, too greasy, not oatmeal, neither. You can’t trust oatmeal not to turn slimy and you can’t trust cereal not to get soggy, not even Frosted Mini-Wheats. What I want is a cigarette. In my purse is a pack of Marlboro Lights. I dig through until I find it and pull out a cigarette and snap off the filter. Loose tobacco rains down on my green bathrobe and I brush it off in the sink then bring the end to my nose and sniff. It smells like dead leaves or mud or old leather, it smells great. Hard to believe it’ll kill you. Lucky thinks she wants to smell it, too, but she don’t. She turns her nose away when I stick it down there. “Smart dog,” I say, hearing the catch in my voice. It’s not a stutter, exactly, it’s more like I swallowed a load of air, or I’ll tell you what it sounds like, it sounds like a dog that’s been kicked. I hold the cigarette back over the sink and roll it back and forth between my hands, back and forth, loosening the packed tobacco from the grip of its thin paper tube. When most of it’s out, I turn on the faucet and wash it down the drain then throw the paper and the filter in the trash. Saltine crackers. That’s about all I can stomach this morning, crackers and cold can of Coke to chase the coffee and then I get ready and go.

I work on the support staff at Preston-Long Insurance. There used to be ten of us but now we’re down to six: me, Birdie, Chip, Ashley, Danika, and Stephanie, all six of us under Paulette, our supervisor. We’re like sec- retaries in that we file and type and enter data and make copies, but we’re not supposed to call ourselves that. Once when I did, Paulette said, not quite, as if secretary might be one notch above what I am. At least I think that’s what she meant, you never know with Paulette. Half the time I have no idea what she’s saying. All of us who work at Preston-Long Insurance are not supposed to park in the front, we’re supposed to park out back and come in the back door. This morning, like every morning, Lou the security guard is sitting in his car in the parking lot, windows open, radio screeching. Aerosmith. He likes to park directly in front of the back door so every- body has to pass him on their way in, but that’s about as much effort as he’s going to put into this. He’s supposed to get out of his car and walk around the building but he never does. He’s supposed to be watching out for Eddie Porcella who supposedly carries, or at one time carried, a gun in the truck of his car. Me, personally, I’d never seen nor heard of any gun but other people swore they had, and somebody told Mr. Little.

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Eddie Porcella worked for Preston-Long for four years and in all that time nobody ever thought he was dangerous but Mr. Little said you can’t be too careful. Eddie was the second person Mr. Little fired after he was put in charge, the first being poor Todd Dean, who used to sit next to me. That was two people in six days and both were purely random as far as any of us could tell, and that’s why, if it looks like everybody around here’s on edge, they are. Lou the security guard has got his seat reclined and his eyes closed, and this morning as I walk past I rap on the wind- shield. He opens his eyes and looks at me but then closes them again. The time clock don’t start until 8:30 but Mr. Little says we have to be here by 8 and he stands in front of his office every morning making sure and, I guess, taking names if you’re late, I don’t know, I ain’t about to test it. When I get to my desk it’s 7:58. Melanie must have been waiting for me because before I even sit down, here she comes with pictures for me to scan. She plops them on top of the stack on my desk. She says, “It’s the Spartanburg case,” as if I don’t know. “I need it by noon,” she says. But no, she don’t. She don’t need it until Friday, we went over this whole thing yesterday when I told her I’d get to them by Thursday, latest. I told her, like I’ve told her a thousand times, that I work first-come, first served on pendings depending on when they’re due and that does not mean dropping everything when Melanie makes a fuss. It is her mission to have at all times fewer pendings than anybody in the office, and she don’t see why that ain’t my mission, too. The woman’s like a child when she don’t get her way, she won’t give up. I’ve been called stubborn and hard-hearted, but I’m sorry: it ain’t fair, plain and simple. Yesterday when she pulled this, I stopped everything just to take the time to write her an email, thinking she might hear better if she read it, asking her nicely—I swear—if she wouldn’t mind, in the future, to take turns like everybody else, for Pete’s sake. Then I copied Paulette. That’s when the trouble started. I copied Paulette so Melanie would know somebody else was clued in, somebody who might, if she had half a brain, think I have a point, some- body who could, if she had a spine, back me up. Now I’m just kicking myself, I mean, to think Paulette might help, I don’t know, I must have been high. After I sent the email I never heard word one from Melanie, not a peep, but Paulette, she called me over right at the end of the day when I was busting my butt to get out by 5, which was going to happen only if

PMS.. 101 Landis certain people would quit interrupting me. She called me over to show me she’d printed out my email and pulled a chair up next to her for me to sit in so we could look it over together. It was fresh out of the printer and freshly marked up with a blue pen, royal blue, Kentucky colors, blue and white: scratch outs, strings of words in Paulette’s teeny tiny block letters marching over mine, arrows pointing to more words coiled in the mar- gins. It had been a short email. Dear Melanie, In order to fairly accommodate everybody, please include dates and times with your claims so I can work on them in order of their impor- tance. I would also appreciate it if you would email me when you need something. Thank you, Rheta What I did not say, but could have, was: Dear Melanie, In case you can’t count, there are 4 teams of 6 adjusters plus their supervisors all wanting their shit done at the same time. You are not the queen. You people have got to take turns, already. Make a fucking list, for Christ’s sake, and how about emailing it to me, because every single time you come over to my desk—or call me on the stupid telephone!!!!!—you slow me down. Ding dong! Don’t know why you can’t figure out you’ll get your pendings done faster if you don’t interrupt me! Thank you, Rheta

If Paulette wanted something to correct, I could have given her some- thing to correct, all right. Paulette didn’t call them corrections. She said edits. Just a few edits I might benefit from, she said, before pointing out certain words she didn’t like (fairly and appreciate?) and the fact that my first sentence didn’t agree so it was confusing. But no, it wasn’t, not even a little bit, unless you’re a moron. Then she proceeded to explain how she would have writ- ten it, which was exactly what I’d said. Exactly. She held the paper out in front of us as if we ought to be taking time to admire it. “That’s better, don’t you think?” I didn’t know what to say. I said, “I’m.” But then my throat clamped shut. I looked at her to see if there wasn’t a smile in there somewhere, but

102 PMS.. poemmemoirstory the expression on her face was as earnest as the day is long which upset me since I’d have understood better if this was a joke. My throat shut down and my mouth quit working and I can’t swear I’d have been able to speak even if I’d known what to say. It had happened before, that one time, when I’d go to open my mouth but nothing came out, or sometimes a word would make it or a half a word or a half a sentence but the rest would crumble. I would crumble and my voice would crack and fall apart or sometimes I’d watch as the words turned to air and floated away. “I’m …” She handed me the piece of paper and I took it. “You know, Rheta,” she said, and she did that thing where she reaches over and touches my arm. I hate that. I wanted to slap her hand away. I wanted to tell her, don’t do that, stop it, cut it out, but say such a thing to Paulette and she’ll make it sound like you’re the one something’s wrong with. “You …” She offered to help me with future drafts the next time I go to write an email. “No one’s above a little improvement,” she said. Oh yeah? Really? How about Melanie? But I didn’t say it. I tried to work after that, I did, I really did, but I was steaming. Up to here in bullshit and no shovel. What does she think, like I’m some kid, easily distracted, like I’m a kitty-cat she can play with? You got to hand it to Paulette: that was some neat trick she pulled, I mean. That was one neat trick. When she left for the day, like five minutes later, slipping on her neat little yellow jacket over her neat little yellow skirt, she stopped at Ashley’s desk to see if Ashley was going to watch what she was going to watch on TV that night. Paulette and Ashley and them, they were all going to watch the same thing, and then she turned to me. “What about you Rheta?” For the love of Pete. Forget it. I ain’t talking. Something, I don’t know, but it broke like it done before and I decided right then and there, I’m done. I quit. I ain’t talking and she can’t make me, nobody can.

PMS.. 103 Maura Stanton

One Hundred Famous Views

That winter morning when I shut the door on my landlords, I felt fright- ened. I had no lease. For six years I’d paid the Lamberti’s in cash every month so they didn’t have to pay taxes. Now they wanted me out by the end of January. It was already early December. Their renovators were scheduled so there was no leeway. I told myself not to panic as I paced about looking at views that would soon not be mine, that I should have painted years ago but never got around to as I was too busy painting other views. I got by in expen- sive Venice by teaching week-long plein air workshops for people who wanted to paint in the most beautiful city in the world. I also taught a summer course in artist books for undergraduates, sponsored by the University of Minnesota. But my art as well as my livelihood depended on living in Venice. I was working on a series of oil paintings called One Hundred Famous Views of Venice after Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. I was only up to thirty-four. My apartment was on the third floor of a relatively modern 19th cen- tury building on a small canal in a working class neighborhood far from tourists. Now I would have to find another one. Venice was my home now, and my subject. I couldn’t leave. But the rents in the city had risen astronomically as more and more apartments were fixed up and rented to tourists by the week. By the following Wednesday, I knew even more, and I was feeling existential despair. I only had three apartments to consider, and then I was going to have to face the worst: leaving Venice and going back home to Minnesota. Apartment #1 was a tiny place not far from where I lived. It was being rented by a friend of a friend of the nice man who owned the art sup- ply shop where I bought my paints and canvases and paper, the man who had introduced me to Venetian Red when I stopped by his shop years ago when I first came to Venice on a fellowship. He’d insisted that Venetian Red, a warm earth tone made from iron oxide, was a color I’d need to paint in Venice. Now it was the mainstay of my palette.

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Apartment #2 was scheduled for renovation in two years, and I could live there for low rent in the meantime. It was owned by an out-of-town business man, and managed by a local rental company. It was the only apartment on their list that I could possibly afford. Apartment #3 belonged to Jan, my boyfriend. He’d called yesterday to ask if I would feed his cat while he went to Paris for a few days for a Web designer conference. I’d done it before and had a key. It was time to find out where our relationship was headed. I was about to turn thirty-five. My college friends were all posting baby pictures on Facebook. Some were divorced already, deep into their real lives. But I was still living like I was in my twenties. I’d had a string of boyfriends and hookups over the last few years, but I was fixed in Venice and the men were just passing through. But Jan lived here. Perhaps I could move in with him. He was smart and funny and good in bed. Trouble is, he’d let weeks go by with- out calling me. He was Dutch, so I’d always put his mysterious on-again, off-again aloofness down to a cultural gap.

Apartment #1 Signore Celati wanted to meet at a café on the Strada Nova. It was a cold, blustery day in December, and the windows were steamed up. The place was almost empty. I spotted an old man drinking cappuccino in the corner. He had a creased face and wore a padded winter jacket which he had unzipped but not taken off. He looked familiar, and I wondered if I’d passed him on the street at night, walking his dog. I knew he had a dog because when he stood up his trousers were covered with small white hairs. We shook hands. He was surprised that I spoke Italian, and looked anxious when he discovered that I already lived in Venice. And as he held the door for me, then led me around the corner into a narrow dark street, past the high walls of a school where I could hear boys shouting at soccer, then over a wooden bridge, then along a canal embankment, then across a small square with a well head and then down the ramo—a narrow street that ended at a canal—I understood why this worried him. The apartment he unlocked for me had a living room and bathroom on the ground floor. A steep stairway led up to a small bedroom and kitchen. The place smelled of fresh paint but when I touched the wall the plaster was soft and crumbly. He knew I knew. “The high water doesn’t come in too much,” he said. “And not often. Not this year so far. My mother lived here until she was

PMS.. 105 Stanton ninety-two. She always said the stairs kept her young.” I nodded. I smiled. But I saw it all. I saw how I’d have to come down those steep steps at night to use the toilet. During high tide, I’d have to step into a foot of water, maybe more. I’d have to move all my canvases upstairs whenever I heard the warning sirens go off. Plus it was dim down here. It must have been a workshop at some time. The large barred window looked out directly onto the narrow street. But I climbed the stairs. I had to duck my head near the top. The bedroom had two high windows. I pushed one open, and saw that I was looking directly at the neighborhood shrine to the Virgin Mary set into a niche in the wall on the other side of the street. It was freshly decorated with holly. “My mother kept an eye on the shrine—she made sure the candles stayed lit on feast days,” Mr. Celati said. “She said her prayers here.” “It’s a great view,” I said. And the kitchen up here was modern, big enough for a table. I could live up here—except for the bathroom. The rent he was asking was rea- sonable. “How did your mother manage with the bathroom at night?” I asked. “She used a chamber pot,” he said. “I could get you one.” I concealed a shudder, and told Signore Celati that I’d think about it. We shook hands again. I left him to close up the apartment, and began trekking across Venice. The next apartment was in Santa Croce, which meant I had to cross the Rialto Bridge, something I tried to avoid doing in the middle of the day. When I reached Campo S. Bartolomeo, I was stuck for a long time in a slow moving herd, edging forward behind some girls eating gelato in mittens. But they were blocked by a Swedish family wearing heavy sweaters and backpacks that were following a Russian tour group in down vests and fur hats. When I finally glimpsed the Rialto Bridge, it bristled with people going over who were trying to avoid the other people coming down. Many people carried red shopping bags from Coin, the big department store. Once over the Rialto Bridge, I chose a back route where I only encountered an occasional tourist, happily lost. I hadn’t been in this part of Venice for a while, and it brought back memories, for I used to walk this way to the railroad station when I was a student. And then I recog- nized the street. Oh no!!

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Apartment #2 The rental agent, a blond woman in a short skirt and stylish jacket, was pacing in front of the big wooden door. She spotted me and smiled approvingly at my scarf and heels. Another handshake. Her name was Elena and she told me again, as she had on the phone, that the apartment would only be available for two years. That’s when the owner had scheduled the restoration. He lived in London and didn’t want to be bothered with the details right then. So the apartment—don’t be surprised, she added--is not in very good shape. But the rent makes up for that, yes? We started up an elegant marble staircase. Other apartments in the building must have been already renovated, for I noticed fresh blond oak doors and brass knobs. But when she stopped to open a battered painted door, I tried not to show my horror. The apartment was a wreck. The floor was scarred and speckled with bits of falling plaster. Holes were gouged in the walls. There was an ancient sink in one corner, a laugh- able stove from the 50s, no fridge. The tub in the bathroom sat on claw feet, and was filled with more plaster bits. I glanced away from the pee- stained, seat-less toilet. “Of course we will clean this up for you,” Elena said. “We will sweep and paint and fill in those holes. The owner has authorized basic repairs. And look, a Murano chandelier!” I looked up. The ceiling was high. But it was just the usual Murano chandelier that you find all over Venice, a few twists of pink glass shaped like tulips where you screw in dim bulbs. But there was a lot of light coming in the tall windows that over- looked the street, even though the street was narrow. It would be a good space to paint. I might even have rented the place if I hadn’t known bet- ter. I opened the window and leaned out to look at the view. Down in the street, on the other side, was an anonymous corrugated iron door. It looked harmless. But at 5 p.m. the owners would roll up the door. Some couples from the neighborhood would gather for drinks. Picturesque and pleasant. But more and more people would start dropping by, milling around with glasses, leaning against the wall. They would sit on stoops. More would come. The students would come. By 9 p.m. fifty people would be chatting and shouting, by 10 p.m. one hundred loud drunken voices would fill the street. And it wouldn’t matter how cold it got.

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I knew all this for I used to be one of them. I remembered sipping a glass of wine in the street, looking up indifferently at an occasional angry face above, watching people slam their shutters. Some nights there was live music, too. Venice is a quiet town. This was the only street in the whole city where anyone howled. As recently as last month, I heard the roar as I was crossing the Campo de S. Giacomo dall’Orio on my way to dinner at La Zucca. I felt haunted by my younger self—that brash twenty-something capa- ble of staying up all hours, confident, selfish. “So, what do you think?” Elena asked. I shut the window, and turned back. “Why are there so many holes in the walls? It looks like someone took a hammer to them.” She adjusted her scarf against the draft I’d just let in. “We’ll fill those holes, of course. You see, somebody broke in here last month. But don’t worry,” she added, catching my expression. “It won’t happen again. It was because some workmen found a helmet full of rings when they renovated an apartment near here last year. Now everyone is looking.” “A helmet full of rings? What kind of rings?” “Wedding rings. From 1935. It was called the Day of Faith. All the women in Italy donated their wedding rings to the patria. Italy was under an embargo from the League of Nations because of the war in Ethiopia. My grandmother says all the women lined up at fascist’s headquarters and dropped their rings into helmets. Some corrupt official must have stolen a helmet, and hidden it away, then died or forgot where. Then the workmen found it. It was in the paper. But now everybody is looking— people who weren’t planning to renovate are renovating, hoping to find rings hidden in their walls. And would-be thieves have broken into a few empty apartments.” “Well, they certainly made a mess.” I glanced around. I wondered if my own landlords had heard about the rings. Maybe that’s why they’d decided to renovate. Maybe I should take a hammer to my own walls. “Here’s my business card,” Elena said. “Thanks,” I said. I noticed her ring, an emerald circled by diamonds. “How beautiful,” I exclaimed. She smiled. “I’m getting married in April.” “Congratulations,” I said. We shook hands again, and I promised to call her when I’d made a decision. I set off for Jan’s apartment.

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Apartment #3 The Christmas Market in the Campo S. Stefano was lively and crowded. The booths were bright with Murano glass ornaments and gingerbread houses and nativity sets and colorful linens and decorated tote bags. People were drinking hot mulled wine at one booth, hot cider at another. There was a mime dressed as Pinocchio who had attracted a crowd, and on the fringes a group of African men had set out some knock-off designer purses on tarps. Christmas carols were wafting from some- where. It occurred to me that this might be a good time to buy Jan a Christmas present. We’d never given each other any presents before. We still paid for meals separately in restaurants. Sometimes we cooked for each other. A present might be just the thing to push our relationship to another level—or at least allow me to figure out what level it was on right now. But what could I buy him? A scented candle? Some angel chimes? Coffee beans? I could think of nothing that wouldn’t seem weird and bourgeois. Did I want him to give me a ring? Was that what I had in the back of my mind? Just then a pretty young woman in tall boots and leggings, who was coming toward me in the crowd, stooped down and picked up something at my feet. She held out her hand. “Did you just lose this?” she asked in English. On her outstretched palm shone a gold wedding band. I stared at it in surprise, open-mouthed. It seemed to have appeared like magic. My face must have revealed a flicker of desire, for the woman immediately came closer. “I’m so glad I found it. Here,” she said, trying to put the ring in my hand. I pushed it away. “No, it’s not mine,” I said. “But I just found it.” She smiled at me. “What shall we do? Here, you take it.” “No,” I said. “I don’t want it.” I knew she must have been a scammer or a pick-pocket. Ordinarily I would not have been approached, as I don’t look like a tourist, but I must have had a dazed look on my face just for a moment as I stared at the Christmas market, and she’d taken me for a mark.

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“Oh please!” Her face was friendly and sympathetic. “It might be valuable. But I’m leaving town right away, you see. I know, we’ll share it. Why don’t you give me twenty Euro for it, then you can take it to a jewel- ers tomorrow.” She put her hand on my arm. I pushed it off. “No, please leave me a l on e .” I hurried off. She called out something in another language that sounded nasty and I walked faster. Jan’s upscale apartment was on a narrow street near the Guggenheim Museum. I climbed up the swept marble stairs to the fourth floor and let myself in. Hooper came running, and was butting his head against my legs before I’d even had time to shut the door. I stooped down and gave him some hard pets along his backside. His tail shot up and he started to purr. He was a broad striped tabby with sturdy legs. “Come on, Hoop,” I said. “Let’s get some dinner.” He followed me to the kitchen, butting and purring. I picked up his dish, rinsed it out, and grabbed the can from the stack on the countertop. I dished out his tuna, heated it for six seconds in the microwave, and placed it on his rubber cat mat. He started chomping. Then I filled his water dish. Back in the living room, I looked around and, not for the first time, imagined living in Jan’s apartment. The light in this room was good, and there was a little terrace where we sometimes had a glass of wine in the summer. Jan’s desk with a large computer screen and various laptop com- puters and other electronic equipment took up a whole wall. This was where he spent most of his time, working. The phone was blinking with many messages but he’d always told me to leave them alone, he’d pick them up from his mobile. The rest of the room was the living area. The wood floor was pol- ished. There was a nice contemporary sofa, nubby beige, two stylish chairs, and a bookcase where the books had been arranged by size and color. I knew it would be a great place to paint—but if Jan were sitting there at his desk, he might not like me working right behind him with a dripping paint brush. I glanced into the bedroom. The Queen sized bed where we screwed—and it wasn’t that often, when I thought back, we usually went to my place--filled up most of the space except for a tall wooden ward- robe. I opened the wardrobe. Jan’s expensive shirts, sweaters and pants,

110 PMS.. poemmemoirstory carefully organized, hung neatly on molded plastic hangers. The second bedroom was even smaller. Here Jan had stored a lot of computer equipment. There were boxes piled up, and a mess of cables and wires everywhere. The room was dim. I almost stepped into Hooper’s litter box. The one window opened onto a gloomy shaft. I threw myself down on the sofa. Mentally I imposed my own things over Jan’s things. My shampoo and conditioner and face cream and body creams pushed out his shaving cream. My boxes of herbal teas hid his coffee beans. My piles of prints filled the negative space under the sofa. My many scarves—my drawers of pencils and erasers and sponges and paint tubes—my stacks of canvases—my stacks of books—the old issues of art magazines I needed to keep because I might need to look some- thing up—my pillows—my purses—my dozens of pairs of shoes—my drafting table—my easel—my jars of brushes. . . Hooper jumped up and began to butt my neck. His breath smelled of fish. He was purring loudly. The phone rang. The answering machine clicked on. I listened to Jan’s crisp greeting in Dutch, Italian and English, then a woman began leaving a message. She spoke Dutch in a breathy way, and she kept saying Jan, Jan, Jan. She sounded upset. I dumped Hooper off my lap, and went over and pressed the but- ton on the machine. She was still talking. I figured if she was Dutch she spoke English. “Hello,” I said. “Are you looking for Jan? He’s not here.” “Ah,” she said. I heard her gulp. “But who are you?” “I’m here to feed the cat.” “Ah, yes,” she said. “And who is this?” I asked. “This is Anneke.” “Who?” “Anneke. Jan’s fiancé. So he’s already left for Paris?” “Yes,” I said, hoping she hadn’t heard me gasp. “I was supposed to meet Jan in Paris. But I can’t get in touch with him. He’s not answering his mobile. I’ve left a dozen text messages. Do you know where he’s staying in Paris?” “I have no idea,” I said. I glanced at Jan’s desk, but the surface was neat, everything cleared away as usual. No scrawled notes or print-offs of hotel reservations. I slid open a drawer, but all I saw were paperclips and rubber bands and tape and pencils.

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“Has he called you since he left? Or sent you a text?” “No,” I said. “He never does.” “But what would you do if something happened to the cat?” “I’d call him—is this the number you have?” I recited Jan’s number. “That’s right,” she said. “He doesn’t answer. I’ve left messages over and over. I don’t know what to do now. I’m in Paris. He was supposed to let me know which hotel.” “His phone could be broken.” She made a distress noise, a sort of gasp or gulp that sounded like the one I had made. I felt sorry for her at the same time I hated her. How could Jan have a fiancé!! “What’s your ring look like?” I asked, trying to keep my breathing steady. “My ring?” She sounded startled. “Yes, I was just wondering. I’m getting a ring soon.” “Oh, congratulations,” she said. “Well, my ring is simple. White gold with diamonds. The setting is lovely. I’m sorry I can’t describe it. But could you do me a favor? If Jan calls there, would you call me?” She gave me her number, and I wrote it down on a post-it note with one of Jan’s neatly sharpened pencils. “Thank you,” she said. She sighed heavily. “What are you going to do,” I asked. “Walk around Paris. Find a hotel. Did he tell you the name of the con- ference he’s attending?” “No,” I said. “There can’t be too many Web designer conferences in Paris.” She sounded more upbeat. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll find out where the confer- ence is and I’ll run him down. How’s Hooper?” “You know Hooper?” “Why of course. Hooper and I are old friends. I’ve often stayed with Jan in Venice.” “Hooper’s fine,” I said. “How long have you and Jan been engaged?” “Two years. It’s a long time, I know. But I wanted to finish my stud- ies. We’re getting married next summer.” She laughed. “If I can run him down, that is.” “Well, good luck,” I said. I hung up. I’d met Jan over a year ago at one of the Biennial parties. So he was already engaged—the smug asshole!

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Hooper was standing up on the sofa, looking at me longingly, purr- ing, encouraging me to sit down again. “Betrayer,” I said. “I bet you let her pet you, too. Anneke! Anneke! She’s got a romantic name, too.” I threw myself down on the sofa. My eyes and nose and throat felt stuffed up, as if I were getting a cold. I knew I wasn’t going to cry though I had some symptoms. Hooper got on my lap again and stood on my thighs, looking up. As I stared into his large grey-green eyes, I realized that I loved him more than I loved Jan, so what I was feeling wasn’t a broken heart, it was self-loathing—I’d been tricked by my own vanity and greed. It was Jan’s apartment I wanted, not him. I petted Hooper’s back, and stroked the fur under his chin until I felt better. Then I picked him up and set him down on the sofa. He curled into a ball at once, ready for a nap. I opened the balcony doors and stepped out into the raw cold and took a deep breath. It gets dark early in Venice in the winter, and it was already twilight. The misty pavement below shimmered mysteriously in the glow of a shop window down at the corner. An arched window made an attractive shadow. Here was another view I hadn’t yet painted. Then I felt something against my cheek. Something brushed my fore- head. I looked up. In the faint light I saw that it was snowing. Snowing in Venice—I had never painted snow in Venice, though I remembered a few other times when it snowed, dusting the Piazza San Marco with fairy glit- ter. I always thought I had plenty of time. I stuck out my arm. A few flakes settled on my sleeve, then melted away. Was this a sign that I should go home to Minnesota, move in with my parents temporarily, find a job teaching painting in a junior college, learn to drive on icy freeways, meet my old girlfriends for lunch and lis- ten to stories about their kids, make a down payment on a two-bedroom townhouse in one of the cheaper suburbs, and paint water and pilings and gondolas and arched windows from photos and from memory until I reached my One Hundred Views of Venice and could begin on my next series Ten Thousand Lakes—all painted plein air, the work of a lifetime. I went back inside, gave Hooper a goodbye pet as he slept and snored, and let myself out of Jan’s apartment. It was snowing harder down in the street, and flakes stuck to my eyelashes. I tilted my head back to let some

PMS.. 113 Stanton fall on my lips. They seemed to burn, like ashes, and I knew I couldn’t go back. My heart started pounding wildly as it came to me. I was too old to be kept awake by noisy students, but if Signore Celati’s mother had man- aged to go up and down those narrow stairs for ninety-two years while she lived in Venice, then surely I could do it, too—or at least I could do it until I painted my one hundredth famous view.

114 PMS.. Janna Brooke Cohen

The Doll Maker’s Tale

The children at the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association were chatty and effusive, and, left to their own devices, they clamored about the well-appointed art studio with that curiosity so characteristic of the Jews. Claude found them polite and dedicated, spritely and silly, rather outspoken, and happy to learn the skills he would teach them for the next ten Wednesday afternoons from three to four-thirty p.m. His consistent kindness was his penance, even to the nannies, the black and brown ladies who lined the back wall and spent the session fiddling with their cell phones and each other—as if on some Sunday picnic—rather than focusing on their charges. They let the little ones run amok, never admonishing them or properly spanking. Without his permission, his mind evaluated how the clever Jews (really their obses- sion with thrift) spurned proper au pairs or governesses, furthering the creation of more imprecise and spoiled generations. He called the class to order, and the children found their seats and looked pleasantly up at him. He enjoyed his pupils, even liked them, and he taught them his craft as he’d been taught as a boy in Berlin, where he’d made his own first doll seven decades ago, stuffed the body a bit at a time, all the way into the wrists until the torso was abundant and even. In 1938, for his superior Aryan traits, The Officer approved three- year-old Claude to join the war effort. By ’44 Claude the apprentice had so mastered his craft that when field exercises and studies were accom- plished for the day, he was ordered to teach his Jungvolk squad—entirely made up of orphans from the Home—how to make dolls of The Führer. The Officer sold them to German civilians to raise funds for the most enviable uniforms the Hitler Youth might obtain. Like The Officer, Claude wore the embroidered lightning bolts of the Waffen SS the following spring to fight in the Battle of Berlin. He paid no mind to the strain of his gray-green short-pants over his growing body or the frostbite on his knees as he ran amidst the crocus and cherry blos- soms that exposed their happy colors in the city parks and gardens as if they hadn’t been warned of the invasion. He shot at shadows in the great

PMS.. 115 Cohen clouds of dust with the Astra 600 handed to him by a dying soldier, all the while believing—even as he came across The Officer, dead in a gutter with steam rising from his wounds—that Hitler was invincible. Claude scanned the faces of his beginner class, little girls with bloom- ing cheeks, well-fed limbs, almond eyes, and curly dark hair. Without meaning to, Claude noticed that their brows looked heavy, the tips of their noses grew criminally down. Only one male pupil this session, the sort who loved dolls, not for the artistry, mind you, but for the pink, puffy make-believe. During the war, The Officer called such a boy “e Tunte.” Fairy. Claude had a vague memory of a boy in the Home, Hans, a thoughtful and gentle boy who had been sent away for such a defect.

*

Marie’s birthday would arrive in less than two days’ time, and between now and then, Claude had the twelve- to sixteen-year-old advanced class to teach, dry-cleaning to pick up, some repairs to make in Apartment 5B, Marie’s dress—in miniature—to sew, and the porcelain to mold. The list was a great deal to accomplish for the wobbly old Claude, this week espe- cially, with his being weighed down with so much remembering. Claude first set eyes on Marie the day she arrived at the displaced persons camp in 1947, so, yes, yes, they’d both have been twelve. She sat upon a bench at one of the outdoor tables, sipping broth with the other new arrivals. Claude was a camp veteran by then, and because his job was to serve the food, he was well-known and revered by the ever- hungry camp children. The others slumped as they gobbled and slurped, but Marie met his gaze and sat up straight, raised her bowl to her mouth with balletic arms. Imprisoned in ruin, Marie was ever a debutante. Forgotten by the world, she remembered her graces. By the time she emptied her bowl of its broth, he loved her. Claude felt such pride as he snuck her out of the camp in 1950, hav- ing found them both passage on a ratline to Lisbon. Two years later, he made her his wife, and she looked to him, with eyes brighter than his own, hoping to return home, even as they boarded the steamer in Portugal. “Oh, Claudy, müssen wir diesen Ort verlassen?” “Yes, my sweet Marie. We must leave here now.” Her blond ringlets reflected enough golden light to be a second sun, and Claude squinted to

116 PMS.. poemmemoirstory make out their every glimmer. The war was long over, and not a single soldier in the world came with Lucky Strikes and Hershey’s chocolate bars to liberate the Nazi orphans. Each year on Marie’s birthday, as Claude sat at his workbench paint- ing the doll, he replayed Marie’s displeasure. “Aber wo sollen wir leben?” When he heard her long-ago query—Where will we live?—his arthritic hands, once so steady, began the tremor, and the doll’s face changed, dif- ferent than he’d intended, right before his eyes, but how could it be? The luminous, pale skin tone he mixed for Marie’s cheeks flushed a sickly greenish violet, and the rosy mouth rolled her bottom lip to pout; her lids came down and shaded her eyes navy blue, even as he glazed them aquamarine, and droplets pooled at the corners, ready to spill over and ruin her elegant neck. Claude always used a new brush, still stinking from its plastic packaging. He painted at night, when his hands were most steady. No matter. Year after year, the doll Marie cried until she ruined her face. Claude labored to fix her, but the doll Marie fought and whimpered, causing the stitched heart on her wool-stuffed torso to heave up and down beneath her linen skin. Each year he sought and failed to achieve perfection. He bought new brushes and swept all dust from his molds. He hand-mixed the liquid slip in der einzige Weg, the only way, the right way, how The Officer, who led toddler Claude away from the mother and father he no longer remem- bered and took him to the Lebensborn Home,* first taught him to mix the clay that soft-fired into the whitest porcelain. In their first rented room in New York, Claude tried to console his wife. He had come across a copy of Life magazine in the barbershop and sounded out the English letters beneath the smiling Aryan woman on the cover: Starlet Barbara Bates was a doppelganger for his Marie. He showed her the photo. “Sie werden in Amerika, Marie berühmten,” he said. You will be famous in this place. He believed this promise. He couldn’t yet read English and never opened the issue to the article about the Allies rounding up war criminals—tracking monsters even in the fifties, and Claude and Marie, so young during the war, were no longer children.

*

With one day left, Claude readied the workshop to mold the doll Marie’s

PMS.. 117 Cohen face. He blended the slip to the consistency of heavy whipping cream, and then strained it again through one of Marie’s old nylons, to remove all of its pollutants, leaving unalloyed, exemplary purity. Then he poured the substance into the spotless molds, sealed the gaps, set the timer to let it dry into the perfect face and head and the most delicate hands and feet. Claude set his kiln to fire before heading out to the dry cleaners. He could never avoid the shame he felt walking freely down the streets of Manhattan, where people smiled when they met his gaze, never suspecting how proud he’d been as a boy to hand-embroider the swastika on the armband of a hundred dolls of the Führer. When he arrived home, he had a little nap and then a shower before changing into a starched white shirt and clean, pressed slacks, which he secured to his round middle with leather suspenders before he walked next door to 5B and rang the bell. “Coming, coming, come-ing!” He heard Esther Rosenzweig’s pretty voice sing from the kitchen. Esther was a decade younger than Claude, but also widowed. Whenever Claude walked Esther to her door after an evening spent together, she touched the silver mezuzah on her doorpost and kissed her fingertips before entering her home. She never invited him in for a night- cap—only in the day, to change light bulbs and fix leaking sinks and run- ning toilets. Of course, he would have had to refuse any such invitation for his promise to Marie, and because Esther spent one dinner telling Claude of her father’s escape from Sobibór. She explained that even after he fled the extermination camp, her father starved in the woods and suf- fered two separate ambushes from his Polish countrymen, armed gueril- las who fed and helped the emaciated escapees, but opened fire on them once they began to eat. “My father learned to play dead.” Sobibór, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau: These names Claude learned in America. Not until he lived in New York did he look upon photos of skeletal men and women standing barefoot on frozen earth next to heaps of rawboned corpses with cheeks so hollow they no longer looked human. Marie liked to explain away such accounts. “Sie inszeniert,” she said, though Claude knew she was wrong. The photos were too many, the faces too hollow, the landscapes too vast and familiar. So many little boo- ties, the same as he’d worn as a child. “My God, Marie, this was NOT staged!” He’d come to see that it was Life magazine that was staged. Starlet Barbara Bates was a brunette who

118 PMS.. poemmemoirstory only appeared to be blond in the photos, a fact he once shouted to Marie when she denied the Holocaust and waxed sanguine about The Führer. As she stormed out of the room, Claude hollered, “You were there, Marie, waving the flags at the trains as they rode to the camps. You were right there, Marie!” In remembering, Claude felt only more guilt for pressing her to mod- ernize her thinking. Though they would not discover it in time, the can- cer was already present inside her, replicating and feeding on her bitter- ness, infiltrating her systems, invading and systematically destroying her, one cell at a time. Her displeasure festered along with it, increasing her cruelty to Claude and her disapproval of his dream to be the best custom doll artisan in America. Claude found no purchase in their confronta- tions and chose instead to let his love ebb away, a grain at a time over decades, each particle taking its own ratline to a far-off land. And then, Claude looked on Marie, in her casket at sixty-three. She lay sublimely still in the absence of her anguish, and try as he might to search out the lithe, doe-eyed girl he so adored, she hid deep within the well of his memory. He stood at the pulpit and eulogized his departed wife, telling the paltry scattering of mourners (mostly neighbors, a few families of his students, and a couple of longtime customers) stories of how Marie prepared strudel and arranged flowers. He was careful not to reveal the truth of his harrowing, depraved relief, which delivered a more complicated, concentrated strike to his consciousness than the pain of simple sorrow. Claude created the first Marie doll that night, knowing he had no grains of love left in his heart, even as he stitched hers upon her chest.

*

“Hello, Claude.” Esther’s loveliness liked to sneak up on him. She was petite but plump, and she cloaked her roundness in loose, sparkling sweaters, with rebellious little threads of gold and silver dancing wildly atop the ordered knits and purls. “The godforsaken window lock is jammed. I need some fresh air in this place.” She smiled at him. “I’ll take a look,” Claude answered. He felt no arthritis in his joints when within the walls of 5B. Something about Esther, her softness, her melody, how she stood nearby with a tumbler of seltzer and a plate of his favorite lace cookies; something moistened his bones and breathed

PMS.. 119 Cohen its way through him from the inside out, until he throbbed with the sort of warm wiggle that pushes a timid boy across the room to ask a girl to dance. Claude knelt down and opened his toolbox. “Thank you, dear,” he said, taking a cookie. “These are my favorites.” He paused on her face and wondered how brown eyes could appear so lively. He perceived their glee each time he took a cookie, and for the joy it brought Esther, he made sure to eat several as he tightened two screws and applied a smidgen of lubricant to the rusty lock. “Good as new.” “Thank you, Claude. What would I do without you?” Esther had a grown son and daughter who shared her large, rent-controlled three-bed- room, and another son who lived in Connecticut and worked downtown but couldn’t be bothered. “It’s nothing, dear, a pleasure.” She never called him in to fix anything any one of them couldn’t eas- ily figure out. “My son called to say that my daughter-in-law is pregnant with her second,” she said. “What news! How wonderful,” he answered as he replaced the oil and screwdriver in his box. “Thank you. Yes. A blessing. But, you know, those two only make an appearance at Passover. Would it kill my son to catch a cab uptown for dinner once a week before he heads home? No it wouldn’t.” She led him to the kitchen, pointed to the drawers she marked with masking tape, and he tightened the five pulls. “Maybe you ought to take a nice trip out to Connecticut to visit with them? I could see you to the correct train, maybe accompany you for the ride,” he offered as he finished. “She doesn’t let me alone with my grandson, Claude. What does she think I’ll do to him but eat him up and spoil him like a grandmother should?” “Hm. Well,” he answered, patting her shoulder, sending up little clouds of sweet perfume. He understood her devotion and disappoint- ment, and how it felt to be marginalized by those who ought to love one most. She sniffed once. “How’s about we catch a late lunch and a picture this afternoon? You up for some deli and a picture show?” Esther smiled and held out the lace cookies, and once more, Claude indulged.

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He found the movie more insipid than amusing, a trifling bit of rub- bish about people who fall in love over the computer, yet Claude counted it as one of his favorites because Esther giggled the whole way through, even held his hand on the armrest. She’d been so melancholy before, and Claude took great pride in diminishing her sorrows—something he never did well with Marie. Their stroll back to West 89th Street was even more pleasing. The air held an odd chill for August—it might have been seventy degrees—and even with her theater sweater, Esther allowed Claude to tuck her into his side, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, their soft, ripened bodies piecing nicely together, and that sensation shimmied up again, thunder and light, a storm that ends in a sky-sweeping rainbow. “Good night, Claude,” she said in her flirtatious cadence, before kiss- ing her mezuzah and tiptoeing inside. Claude envied Esther’s ritual respect for her home. He wished he could touch the mezuzah and kiss his own fingertips, but doing so would roll Marie in her grave. “Good night, darling,” he whispered back before walking the twenty paces to his own door.

*

With Marie’s birthday on the coming dawn, Claude worked late into the night. Why did he make the doll over every year, for himself or for his long-dead wife? Claude could no longer make the distinction. Sixteen years passed, sixteen dolls ruined. Time and truth had polluted his love’s virtue until he believed his heart incapable of a trustworthy decision, and this left him with nothing but his routine. Another birthday. Another attempt. Fresh out of the kiln, with no eyes to look and no mouth to speak, the little porcelain head lay white and silent. Claude cradled it in a clean kerchief. He thought of Marie at the tender age of fourteen, how he dried her tears after that Russian soldier took her off and had his way with her. Her bruised arms, her trembling finger pointing to the place on her cheek where he spat upon her when he was through. He thought of her mature beauty, a free American woman, and how she chose to scorn and waste their new beginning. He chose instead to recreate Marie’s expres- sion the moment he asked her to marry him—Germany behind them

PMS.. 121 Cohen and America yet to come—to paint her raised, hopeful eyebrows and work downward to the eyes and nose. He told himself he did not want to smudge the delicate lines, but, really, he left the mouth to last for the silence and the prayer that this year she would end smiling as Marie had that day between worlds, when the ocean breeze flushed her cheeks to pink. He spent ample time on her eyes, replicating every glint of yellow- white reflected from her aquamarine irises, and applied the horsehair eyelashes one by one. He was right to begin with the eyes, and he sat back and admired his work. He then lay the porcelain head on his workbench cushion, aimed the gooseneck lamp, and began to attach head to body, first with the adhesive, and then, using the signature of his art—by now, well-known to serious collectors and even imitated by lesser artisans—cerulean embroidery thread sewn through eight tiny holes he bored at the neck base before firing the porcelain. The girlish, twinkling eyes he’d painted remained delighted. The full, soft chest and little stitched heart lay still. Claude sewed Marie into her wedding dress, and as he popped the final pearl button closure through its loop of satin, he noticed a surge of strength in his back and musculature, urging him to hurry. Nothing left now but to paint Marie’s mouth. He changed his pattern, working quickly, oddly thinking of Esther, and wishing to be finished. Patience, he thought joyfully, the lips must be impeccable. Almost done… “How can you think you will be happy?” the doll seemed to say through the wet, peony glaze of her lips. Behind him he heard a door slam in the hallway. “You know,” doll Marie went on, “that Claudius means ‘lame’? You were too lame to be a good German. Too lame to give me children. You’re even too lame to make it in America!” With his own unsteadiness, Claude blighted Marie’s face from pure and hopeful to faithless and craggy, himself pulling out the strings that threaded to a younger place inside him, to a time when the stolen and misplaced orphans had liberated themselves with love. Startled by sudden, loud footfalls in the hall, Claude set another ruined Marie on her pillow and waddled over to his door to check on the commotion. Reflexively, he looked left to Esther’s door and found the hall empty and quiet, but when he turned to head back inside, a woman stepped out from the corner shadow. No. Not a woman.

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“What the fuck do you want with me? What’s your problem?” This was not the first time that Mr. Mitchell, the nutter from the first floor, walked the building in drag. Tonight, he wore a pair of high heels, teetering a bit with his feet flopping well over the backs. His nude stock- ings blurred the dark hair on his legs, and his short satin dress stretched at the seams. He stared at Claude through dazed eyes. Maybe he is sleep- ing? Claude wondered. Poor man. Then Claude heard The Officer in his mind calling Mr. Mitchell e Tunte and wishing him away. And in the next second, Claude thought of fixing Mr. Mitchell’s made-up face, so smeared with perspiration. “Oh! Eh, Mr. Mitchell, you, uh, surprised me,” Claude managed. “What?! Who the fuck do you think you are?” Mr. Mitchell’s chest heaved and raged. He opened his hand and sent a forceful slap across Claude’s right cheek, turning him around and chopping him to his knees, only briefly, before his closed fist leveled Claude to the hardwood floor. Claude’s head rocked side to side for several more blows, until an explo- sion of white-hot pain knocked him out cold. In the darkness, Claude was reunited with Marie. There she sat, a girl happily floating with him in between worlds, her golden ringlets dancing over her shoulders in the wind. Claude knelt, intent on proposing, but in lieu of a ring, he held in his hands the perfected doll—Marie, in her glory. Marie smiled. “She’s beautiful, Claude.” She cradled the doll in one arm and stretched the other to Claude, beckoning him to embrace her. Claude smiled back at her. “I’m so glad,” he said. “Good-bye, Marie.” Bright light flashed in, then buzzing voices, ears ringing, terrible pain, too much energy bursting from inside, throbbing and burning. He heard his own moaning, along with Esther’s frantic shouting, as the men lifted him onto the gurney. “That lunatic from downstairs,” he heard Esther say. “He just attacked. Get the police. Oh my God, I just…will he be all right? Claude? Claude, can you hear me?” Funny, though, Claude felt wonderful. As they pushed him past Esther’s door toward the elevator, he managed a whisper. “Esther, dear?” “Claude? Oh, Claude!” She leaned closer to him. “Yes, yes, what is it, sweetheart?” “Kiss the mezuzah for me please.”

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Esther floundered. “You’re shivering. He’s shivering. I’ll get a blanket,” she said, and through the slits of his fast-swelling eyes, he filled his mind with her. “No. It’s okay. I’m all right now,” he said. “It’s very good.”

* According to the Jewish Virtual Library, by 1939, Nazi SS officers had kidnapped hundreds of thousands of children in occupied coun- tries into the Lebensborn Program. Many were stolen from their parents’ arms because they matched the Nazis’ Aryan criteria. Thousands were transferred to the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) centers in order to be “Germanized” and forced to reject and forget their birth parents. Those who refused the re-education were beaten and transferred to concentra- tion camps to be exterminated.

124 PMS.. J. Annie MacLeod

American Gothic

Tomorrow morning Virginia will undergo her first elective procedure, but today she will visit the Vietnam War Memorial for the first time. It seems impossible that she, Virginia Wellington, the lifelong Iowan and olive-drab housewife, just barely forty-three (a tired and tight forty- three at that, her on-line picture mistaken by Dr. Snowe for forty-six or -seven) should board a plane yesterday from the wasted Iowa fields to step outside today into the electric shock of a big-city morning. And then to walk into a Dupont Circle café to buy a coffee and a bagel before mak- ing her way to the Mall—impossible, impossible. Impossible to her, at least. For Virginia has never been anywhere but Iowa, and while she loves how the fields fill first with snow, then shoots, then stalks, then cobs, while she’s bought her share of sensible shoes at the Des Moines mall and watched many a happy-ending movie at the Main Street Theatre, and while she’s even car-tripped across I-80 to hear Sharon Olds read poems of bodies and birth at Prairie Lights, until yesterday afternoon, Virginia had never been in an airplane, had never seen the stretch of Iowa’s quilt spread below her, the fields stitched with frost. And when the attendant brought her kitchenette miracles of warm cookies and hot coffee, pat- ting the headrest as she passed like soothing the back of a small child, Virginia had thought of Harlan—her husband, dead now two weeks— and how he’d always said he’d fly again when hell froze over. A pilot in Vietnam, Harlan never said one word about the war except this line about hell and flying. Even so, Virginia knew pilot was a polite word for bomber. Virginia sipped her coffee and traced her finger on the plane’s plex- glass along the rivers patterned like branching veins. She said “spider- belly head” and “web of veins” out loud, words from an Olds’ poem about a dead child, killed in a foreign war. “Her mother’s face,” Virginia whispered, “beaten and beaten into the shape of a plant,” the double b’s and t’s as thrilling to her as the horror of the image. Now, though, Virginia walks toward a DC café with soft bread stacked

PMS.. 125 MacLeod against a plate-glass window. Breathing the raw air, her face seems to freeze, a water-tightness of skin and pores. Her crows’ feet, her smile lines, even the deep V between her eyes harden into granite, into the smooth black marble of the Memorial she’s read about in her visitor’s guide. Like a scene in a foreign film, Virginia imagines the mmm of a cello and a close-up of a beautiful face, an older woman’s face, one that fits the mood of winter, still and suspended in the camera’s eye, while all around her car wheels crack the gutter’s ice, awnings snap, and people hunch into their scarves. Virginia wants the flannelled woman up ahead, a Pomeranian at her heel, to step out of her way, to applaud as she passes. Tomorrow I’ll take up space, Virginia thinks, and it makes her feel like someone else—all makeup and smart casual, someone with a square to her shoulders, a rise to her breasts. The posture of a surgically modified woman. But Virginia isn’t an aging beauty—she’s not even an old looker, that perfect rose with curling brown edges. Her face is plain, at best, American Gothic in drugstore-brown bangs. In their on-line consulta- tions, Dr. Snowe has promised that he can change all that. His practice is called Cosmetic Magic.

*

Early July, 1916, and Dr. Harold Gillies sweats as he cuts another skin flap from a soldier’s thigh to rebuild a nose. Yesterday, despite the godfor- saken heat, Harold had managed to remake two eyelids, part of a cheek, and a passable bottom lip—but the broken boys just keep coming and coming, a rotten stream of suffocation, gangrene, and hemorrhage, boys trying to tell nurses to “Kill me—kill me,” their jaws or faces shot away by German snipers. This particular case, though, is fiddly: beneath the soldier’s eyes is nothing but a raw hole. When the boy was admitted, his uniform had been pinned with a label bought by Harold himself, one reading “facio- maxillary injury—Cambridge Hospital, Aldershot.” Medics working battlefields in Belgium and France had been instructed to affix these tags on any British boy with a devastating wound above the neck. Such cases were sent directly to Harold. When he had first specified those two words, “faciomaxillary injury,” they had been more sound than sense, with their soft consonants and

126 PMS.. poemmemoirstory odd rhythm, like a phrase from one of those modern poems in The Egoist Harold loved: “Deft Gillies’ art, his catlike ease, his hawklike pose, / his genius for fixing faciomaxillary injuries.” But now, surveying the actual damage before him, this dark cavity of a face, like a goose wait- ing to be stuffed—the comparison to poetry seems badly chosen. As this young boy’s head had slowly surfaced over the trench line at Somme, a sniper had shot off his nose and most of his mouth. Without an upper palate, the soldier couldn’t even say the consonants of his own name before Harold’s assistant administered the ether. Now a nurse wipes Harold’s brow, his chin dripping, heavy as rain. The doctor is young, although not as young as the soldier, but he will age well. In five years, he will help found the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, and eventually the Queen will knight him for work that, even now, earns him the nickname Miracle Man. For Harold is doing some- thing no one else ever has: he’s remaking jaws, lips, eyelids, and noses, excising tissue and bone from other parts of the body, applying them like bits of clay, thumbed into place. Sometimes Harold thinks of himself in this way, as a Medieval potter over a wheel, repairing a cracked bowl. For even if this soldier manages to avoid sepsis or internal bleeding—even if the boy doesn’t have to wear a crude mask to buy his milk—Harold knows how he will look. His face will remain a broken pot, roughly mended. No miracle.

*

Stepping into the bakery’s warm light, Virginia’s face loosens. The brown loaves light a lamp of happiness in her chest, their salt and sugar, as Jane Hirshfield would say, runs through her body like current through copper wire. Virginia might be common as bread now, might not be noticed by the whip-thin girl behind the counter, but soon—soon. “Excuse me,” Virginia says, tapping the counter with the beat of a tiny heart. “What are those? The twisted rolls?” Yes, the evils of white bread, Virginia has heard, but she’s sure these rolls will fill her with warmth. The girl is a bird, eyes too big for her face. A crow or a raven, the kind of bird Virginia spent her childhood chasing out of the sweet corn. “Challah rolls,” the girl says. “Egg bread.” “I’ll take one. And a coffee, please. Small.” In another month or two, Virginia thinks, my smile would yellow a flush up this bird-girl’s spine.

PMS.. 127 MacLeod

“Four-fifty-eight,” the bird-girl says, fingering the bills, counting them as if it takes all her focus. Curling the coffee against her chest, Virginia steps back outside, the cold sharp as a scalpel. A wind against her face, Virginia waits to cross the Circle. She decides to walk. She’s from Iowa; she knows cold. How to wave down a taxi, anyway—big, like a kid’s greeting? Or with a single hand, turned sideways like a queen’s? On all sides, people stand solid and sure, someplace to go, someplace they’ve already been. Virginia tries to stand square in her good shoes (not even on sale), thinking that the chal- lah bread tastes a little too much like bread. With a good clip, she crosses the street (she knows how to walk well), past small shops that pulse a complicated rhythm with their m’s, p’s and b’s. Brooks Brothers, Macy’s Metro, Pizza Paradiso: every name is a poem. Stanton is just a one-horse town at the bottom of Iowa, no beat, no buzz. In Stanton, Virginia’s walk is dull—the thud of a bass drum. Despite the cold, the morning is bright for looking, the sky a single shade of blue. Winter blue, Virginia thinks. The blue of illness, of veins in a hand or up a neck. She hasn’t told anyone about the four-week surgery package, airfare and hotel expenses all included. For two years before his death, Virginia skimmed the cream from Harlan’s disability checks for some adventure or other (back then she wasn’t sure exactly what), and now her neighbors think she’s treating herself to a much-needed vaca- tion, a chance to see the nation’s Capitol.

*

November, 1936, surgeon Max Thorek takes a photograph of a naked Negress in a small, second-story room above Ellington’s Cotton Club. Whenever he can, Thorek visits Harlem, where he believes, like Langston before him, that he can fling his arms wide in the face of the sun. Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Thorek comes to Harlem to whirl with any black woman who will have him—loud-laughing, big-breathing women he prefers to the pale, corn-colored ones of his native Midwest. Once developed, this photograph of his Negress will look like a pencil sketch, the woman’s shadow seeming to smoke the long cigarette pinched between her fin- gers. Decades from now, Thorek’s “Harlemesque” will sell at Christie’s for $10,000. Colleagues call Max “complicated.” He speaks Russian and French,

128 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Hungarian and a little Polish; he plays the violin, writes books, dabbles in poetry, collects art. Last year he founded the International College of Surgeons. “I have sighed deep,” he likes to say, “but I have laughed free.” And yet, even though Max will go back to Chicago—to his surgery and his pictorialist books and of course to his photographs—in the coming years, he will return again and again to the perfection of the Negress’s nose and neck, her arched back and double profile, her breasts turned and smiling at him with their own, odd mouths. During the war, Max had made a name for himself working on American soldiers whose faces were burst open by artillery shells. He had called his medicine wizardry. Itchy days, those—days when he’d cut sleep, hands prickling to wire the shards of a soldier’s jaw or make vulcanized rubber splints for another, toothless. Such short twenty-four hour days! How could he do all he wanted in the operating room? In the study? The darkroom? The bedroom? To others, Max calls himself Dr. Thorek, but ever since the war, in his own mind he is The Wizard. For a woman, Max believes, years are a kind of explosion. He likes this metaphor, even uses it at an American Association of Plastic Surgeon’s conference, saying, “A woman is ravaged by the shrapnel of time.” And why not—why not freeze the curves of youth, Max thinks, setting his camera down on an end table with a patched leg. It’s true that poor Passot’s first papers on facelifting were universally disparaged; he was dubbed a charlatan for accepting vanity as an indication for surgery. And then there were the difficulties, of course, of course—skin-flap necrosis, damage to the facial nerves, sloped smiles like the hang of meat in a butcher’s window. But the successes—the successes! La grande opera- tion and suddenly turnip women were pomegranate gorgeous. Nothing risked, nothing gained. The Wizard offers his Harlemesque a drink. She says, “Yes,” but doesn’t smile. Why not fix a woman, Max wonders, looking intently at the unsmil- ing beauty before him—fix her like a photograph?

*

Virginia’s husband hadn’t managed his health. Stanton’s single mail carri- er with his small, silver van, Harlan hardly ever walked to the mailboxes, not even in the sun much less in the sleet or snow, and his favorite

PMS.. 129 MacLeod dinner remained corn-fed steak. Two years ago, his fifty-odd years of meatloaf and sedentary mail delivery caused a stroke, Harlan falling down one morning right next to the bed, still as stone. In her rush to get to him, hearing the thud while standing at the sink, watching the blue-black morning through the window, the fire gleaming under the kettle like night’s one blue eye, Virginia had caught her big toenail on the steps. She hadn’t even felt it until she’d noticed it at the hospital, much of her nail already black, poking above the top of a sandal she’d slapped on despite the cold. As the doctors and nurses and EMTs ignored her, Virginia sat in the waiting room with her winter coat and summer sandals and examined her toenail, now pitch-painted, no longer a clear window to pink skin. It looked like a beetle. Unlike a painted nail, this toe wouldn’t complement her fashion, she thought. It wasn’t a frosted purple to match the shimmer of a short skirt (she didn’t own) or to peek out of a pair of sleek sandals (she’d never buy). The black toenail belied her low cholesterol and sharp eyesight, the round health of her egg-beating forearms. Death, Virginia has always feared, is blindness—having her eyes put out. A common nightmare, she will see the paperclip or the needle inch- ing toward her eye and then awake, a hiss through her teeth like the w of wish, a hand to her face. Her black toenail guaranteed her death. It won’t kill me, she thought, but something will. Something will make me fall cold and dead, my lips still and pale as Whitman’s Captain. Finally allowed to see Harlan, sleeping in the hospital bed, Virginia thought he looked stuffed. When the doctor told her Harlan would have to give up his mail delivery, go on disability, he didn’t even look at Virginia. “He’ll have physical therapy each week,” the doctor said, check- ing his watch. “But the left side of his body won’t ever come back to full range of motion. He’ll have to walk with a cane. Or a walker.” A match more than a marriage, no children (she hadn’t been able to), four decades of scrubbing, rubbing, washing, dusting, mending, stir- ring, baking, and folding, and now a husband on permanent disability: Virginia’s coming days piled themselves thick and white like fat off a cut- ting board. The very next week she got herself a secret bank account, three- hundred dollars a month that Harlan never noticed. At first she wasn’t sure what the money was for—maybe just the means to waste the sun on some beach, ordering a drink with tropical in its name. But every time

130 PMS.. poemmemoirstory she paid the bills and held back another $300, Virginia remembered that toe, how her body would eventually flake away like charred paper. That black toenail was not an aberration, something that would heal. She would go to it, she knew.

*

On December 5, 1945, at a speech given before the annual Southern Surgical Association conference, Dr. John Staige Davis describes the importance of sustaining the plastic surgery centers he and others estab- lished during World War II. “As there are a large number of men, wound- ed or injured, in World War II, who require plastic surgery,” John begins, “it may be timely to look into what is being done for these patients.” He notes that there isn’t an open seat in the ballroom, wide as a cave. Eyeglasses glint from every corner. The year before, John had treated a fighter pilot with a face burnt black as a dropped match. The soldier’s B-17 had caught fire above Cassino, his head hitting the control panels, cracking the bones under both eyes, popping teeth. Utilizing the brand-new skin bank at Bethesda, John had performed extensive skin grafts, but the results were poor. While the pilot’s face was no longer charred, he still looked like a quilt, hand-stitched. Seeing himself in the mirror for the first time, the pilot had said, “Doc—there’s no way I’m going home like this.” So John had hired the prettiest nurses he could find and started the first plastic surgery rehabilitation center in Baltimore. He formed a Guinea Pig Club among the patients, the pilot its first president, who even came up with a drinking game called “Scars.” Eventually, John’s pilot had four skin grafts. After the fourth, the soldier had asked John for a face-lift. “I got enough of somebody else’s loose skin for an elephant. You’re a genius, Doc—come on, give me that windswept look,” he’d said with a laugh as hard as a slap. “Skin me like a fish; you know I can take it. Otherwise I’m never going to find a wife.” John had said no, then yes. He himself had a wife, three kids. And the pilot’s plea made him think of an odd little poem from when he was a child: “He often expressed / A curious wish / To be interchangeably / Man and fish.” After the fifth surgery, however, the pilot’s sutures had become infected; he’d developed septicemia and died a week later. John

PMS.. 131 MacLeod had named a new wing of his rehabilitation center for the pilot, paying for his family to come down for the dedication. “The object of military plastic surgery is primarily the restoration of function and comfort,” John continues, his voice steady as a pendulum, “and incidentally with the improvement of appearance.” The other sur- geons nod, take notes, for John is the first American surgeon to devote his entire practice to the plastic arts, and after 78 articles as well as the flagship textbook on this new medical specialty, he is now the Chairman of the American Board of Plastic Surgery. John shows his before-and-after slides of the burnt pilot, and as he does every time, he thinks that the picture after the fourth skin graft shows a normal, if well-worn, face—a face, John is sure, some nice girl would have loved.

*

Harlan had died well. For those two years after the stroke, Virginia had brought him the garden tomatoes he loved, read him whatever words she could find (newspaper, novel), tried to make her voice a waterfall of words, easy and constant. In the evenings, she thought about her bank account and where she might go—or if she’d go. Then one evening when she was replacing Harlan’s pillow with a clean one, thinking of the poet’s pillow with its curve of horseshoe luck, he had put his thumb and finger around her wrist. Harlan had simply closed his eyes, and that was that. By then she’d saved $8,000; it was time. And so Virginia did her homework (forty-three meant patience and a library card), spent two full weeks surfing the web from the library’s computers and considering it all: walking the Great Wall, hiking Pike’s Peak, snapping photos of Mayan ruins, drinking wine at Italian cafés. What Virginia finally settled on was Dr. Albert Snowe in Washington DC, who offered a face lift, nose job, cheek implants, and lip injections along with a plane ticket, a four-star Dupont Circle hotel, and four weeks of follow-up care—all for a single, flat fee of $8,000. When Virginia first clicked on the Cosmetic Magic site, she’d exam- ined the before photographs of middle-aged women, the ones with the air of discarded wrappers, and she’d thought of a poem she’d read in high school. Back then Virginia had been an onion, round and white—a girl to go with anything.

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“Beauty’s truth. Truth beauty,” she’d said out loud, the guy at the Sci-Fi wall glancing around. Human poetry, she remembered her high-school English teacher say- ing, tapping the book with his rhythmic seriousness. What would human poetry look like? Certainly not Virginia, sandpaper rough and red in the cheeks. Human poetry was Snowe’s website. Expansion and rejuvenation, firmness and smoothness, youth and glow, the slim and the stylish. For aging Hollywood stars in their forties and fifties, everyone knew it was chemical peels, Botox, brow lift, lipo, nose job, tummy tuck, and fat transfers. Virginia knew the lingo. She’d read her share of magazines, watched a little reality TV. A bit silly, she knew, but she loved the tempo and the rhythm of plastic promise: “Foto Facials,” “Stars’ Secret Weapon,” “Quick-Fix Lasix,” “Scalpel Slaves.” Virginia had never really hungered to see lions in Africa or glaciers in Alaska. Her entire life, she’d been a lamppost or a telephone wire—visible but unseen. When Harlan had asked her to marry him, he’d said, “You’ll do. You’ll do just fine,” with a wink and a laugh. Now Virginia wondered what it would be like to be a jaguar rather than a lamppost—the atoms slitting a wake in front of you, sewing it up behind. Leaving the library, a printout of Dr. Snowe’s homepage under her vegetable arm, Virginia made up her mind. She felt as good as she’d ever felt, better in fact, big in her skin, a surge of pure love for the summer marigolds, the gritty kid lurking by the bicycle rack, the rusty Plymouth parked by the door, a poodle panting out the back window. She was ready to embrace the world, to move in it and through it—but she’d need beauty if the world was going to embrace her back. She must lure its love, and not rush headlong and naked, mad for the marigolds and the poodle and even the gritty kid. For such magic, she must wait. She’d start with Dr. Snowe’s basic package—a nip, a tuck, a slim stalk of a nose, flared at the bottom like a pinned butterfly. Then, eventually, who knows, a chemical peel, maybe lipo and a tummy tuck, perhaps even implants, why not, a set of silver stars. Just how far might she go, Virginia doesn’t yet know.

*

In April, 2003, a new intern, Dr. Ahmed Fadhli, treats eleven civilians

PMS.. 133 MacLeod in one month at the Al-Babtain Center for Plastic Surgery in Baghdad. Called “collateral damage” in the American press, the patients include a six-year-old girl with a blast injury to her torso, a thirteen-year-old boy whose upper limbs were severed by a rocket-propelled grenade, and a forty-year-old male who lost much of his face to a stray bullet, including the partial loss of zygoma and maxilla as well as a fracture of his nasal bones—meaning his face had been emptied like a blueberry squashed between two fingers. Ahmed and another senior surgeon, Dr. Ibrahim Ghoneim, work round the clock in four surgical theaters. The burns are the worst injuries Ahmed has ever seen—deep dermal, with exposed pink muscle like on the plastic models he used in medical school, but here the edges aren’t clean at all, the soft tissue nothing like synthetic skin. Here the wounds are wet and red like ragged, open mouths all over the body. Over the course of twenty-seven surgeries, Ahmed tries procedures he’s only ever read about: skin grafting, bone grafting, local flaps, free flap reconstruction. The teenage Iraqi boy is the most difficult, with amputation of both of his arms and 35% of his trunk, flank, and shoul- ders burned black as earth. It took three days for his brother to bear the boy through the war zone to the Center, and by the time he was admit- ted, he had anemia, shock, sepsis and severely infected third-degree burns. Ahmed operates, performing his very first escharectomy and an homograft skin cover (refrigerated skin as a temporary dressing), his fingers shooting sparks as they cut and sew. Dr. Ghoneim says, “Ahmed, your sutures are superb,” and a week later, he performs yet another sur- gery, this time replacing the homograft with autograft skin sliced from the boy’s back and posterior thighs, cut in tidy rectangles like the dough Ahmed used to carve out for his Turkish grandmother’s sigara börek— his favorite treat. The nurses apply cream to improve scars, and Ahmed puts in an order for limb prostheses. The boy will survive. “You have performed magic,” says Dr. Ghoneim. “You have given that boy a second life.” Ahmed shuts himself in a supply closet to cry his joy. Ahmed thinks nothing of the boy’s future—how he will eat or shit or turn doorknobs with hooks for hands. When lucid, the boy says “Fuck you,” thrashes on his cot, refuses food. Without arms, he looks like a python, wriggling on its back. Ahmed assumes that, upon release, the boy will be recommended for some form of psychiatry to treat

134 PMS.. poemmemoirstory post-traumatic stress disorder, will figure out his life. He’s a miracle, after all. In the words of Ahmed’s favorite American rap artist, he has burned this boy a goddamn miracle. One, two, three, four and five—the boy’s blood had run cold, but now he’s comin’ alive. Ahmed is taken with his new ability to raise the dead. By 2007, he is the first surgeon to open his own plastic surgery practice in Iraq, where he calls himself The Shaman and offers to turn Iraqi women into the thin, tall, small-nosed, round-eyed American models that sell Coke and Levis on billboards across Baghdad. Ahmed becomes adept in boob, nose, and eye jobs. He can work a liposuction cannula like a wand. For the richie-rich, he performs house calls for Botox parties with up to ten of the client’s closest friends. For radish-shaped calves, he severs nerves behind the knees, atrophying legs into super-slim stalks. For shortness, he saws through shin bones and inserts metal braces to stretch shins two or three inches taller. For aging vaginas, he plumps labia with silicone, and for wannabe virgins, he reforms hymens. At night, Ahmed surfs the Surgeon & Safari website, wonders if he could offer his own vacation package to wealthy Westerners, “The Best Boobs and Booty in Baghdad.” Although most of his procedures go well, sawing women in half leaves its marks. Sometimes a patient’s body attacks a breast implant as a foreign object, encasing it in tissue that Ahmed must chisel out from the chest wall. Facelifts create long scars, the incisions can get infected or an earlobe might slide downwards. Once Ahmed sheared too much skin, like a close-cropped piecrust, and the patient wound up with a tight, alien face. Permanent scars, burst implants, severe reactions to injectables, blood-clot deaths—these things happen. But when he’s over an open body, Ahmed’s hands hum, the operating table trembles, the air vibrates. It’s not walking on water or splitting the moon, but it’s the clos- est thing he’s found to touching God.

*

Walking stiff and straight from Dupont Circle to the Mall, Virginia tries to think of the right words to explain her transformation—for she has no idea how she’ll explain it to the residents of Stanton when she arrives back home a month from now. She imagines their eyes dilating and hopes their faces will open like fields. As a child growing up on a farm, Virginia would often sit in a hay

PMS.. 135 MacLeod field while her parents worked the ground or the animals, looking through her small fingers to the horizon, shaping meadows with her hand, pinching clouds. She’d pretend to mold the small copse of trees around the pond or consider what it would feel like to cup the barn in her palm. She loved how the world made and shaped itself, especially in the spring—the cherry trees creating little globes, the pear trees little hourglasses. Virginia watched the cows give birth, a whole, miniature cow pulled through a black hole to nowhere, like a magician’s trick. Not having her own children, Virginia never knew what it was like for her body to shape something from nothing. She wondered how it felt to flower, to grow heavy with leaves and fruit—so heavy the boughs can’t even move in the wind. And then the coming of the new, that throb and utter exhaustion, only to fold back in, to return to what you once were. It amazes her, still, the thought of such transformation, from seeds to shoots. “The opposite of all this,” she says, the pale buildings like grayish snow. All these memorials she read about back at the hotel: the Lincoln, the Washington—the Korean, World War II, and Vietnam War. The cen- ter of the nation’s city is one, long graveyard. Marble columns, smooth domes, a giant white obelisk thrusting itself into the sky—nothing more than sculptured bone. Skulls and kneecaps arranged carefully in the ground. “Colossal wrecks,” Virginia says to no one. All this solid heaviness, Virginia thinks, the soldier’s names in regular rows, Peters and Toms and Davids carved in mica so that they sparkle like the heart of light. Such sparkle—and all of it a lie. The illusion that dust and dirt, fissures and cracks are but a passing nuisance. Forty-three years of housekeeping, and Virginia knows that dust is elemental. In a magazine she’d read to Harlan while he died, Virginia learned that people eat two pounds of dust a year, just breathing. Tiffany Tavern, Decadent Delights, Marvelous Market—now she’s close; she checks her map. Two more blocks. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” she says, fitting each syl- lable to the click of her heels, and finally she’s there, the Memorial, like a farmer’s dark furrow through a field. Harlan’s name won’t be here, of course, but he would have known some of these men, heard about their girlfriends back home, the jobs they had waiting. He might have sat with them while they died, with their lost limbs, lost eyes—might have

136 PMS.. poemmemoirstory watched the pattern of leaf and light from a banana tree move across their faces. Walking down the ramp, the soldier’s names at her heels, then her shins, then her stomach, and finally level with her face, Virginia says, “I wish you could see me, Harlan. You wouldn’t recognize me,” pressing her palm flat on the stone. She feels ready. Yes, Virginia is ready for the woman she will become tomorrow morning when Dr. Snowe says “count backwards from twenty” and makes the first cut.

PMS.. 137 Jane Hertenstein

Heartbreak Wall

Mette looked up from scooping water into her buckets. Out on the water a dark speck was growing closer and closer. Squinting through the glare of the white-hot sun thrown up by the gleaming waters, she wondered if perhaps it was a raft of logs bound together, drifting over the open water with gulls resting on top. Steadily the logs became a small boat and the gulls turned into men whose arms pulled on the long oars. Soon Mette could hear the banging of the oars against the gunwales and the swishing of water as the rowboat churned into the harbor. It was not often that strangers came to the island. Fishermen and traders usually came in much bigger vessels. On such a small island most of the families were connected by marriage, everyone knew who you were either by name or the name of one’s father or grandfather. From the five or six founding members of the community eleven or twelve homesteads had spawned, sprinkled like wildflowers over the twenty-two square miles of rock and timber, pasture and meadow, hillock and bog. “Ahoy, there,” the harbormaster called out as the two threw a line out to him. One of the men wore a crushed felt hat like something she’d seen in the “Monkey” Ward’s catalog. The other man, sitting in the prow of the rowboat and holding onto the seesawing sides, wore no cap or hat. Thick chestnut hair blew into his eyes and he had to push it back with both hands. He seemed younger than the other man and protective of a sack in his lap. Mette fastened the full buckets to the wooden vassåk and carefully fit- ted it onto her shoulders, letting the wool-padded collar settled into place before straightening her legs up from a squatting position. She steadied herself by taking a quick step backwards. The even weight pressed into her, grinding her bones and the hollows worn into her shoulders from years of fetching water. Slowly she began to walk the path back to the cabin she shared with her father and two brothers.

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Espen was sixteen, one year older than Mette, and Børre, the baby, was thirteen. Their mother had died last fall, leaving Mette the woman of the house. Because there was no well yet on the farm, every day she had to make the one-mile trip to the harbor to collect water. It made no sense to Mette, to be surrounded by so much water, indeed trapped and cut off by a great body of it, and, yet, have to struggle to satisfy their thirst. None of the precious water she hauled got wasted. What they didn’t drink was used for washing and the filmy water in turn was poured out into the garden. The path was level until it joined with a wagon track that cut uphill to the center of the island. Mette walked in the green raised middle between the deep dusty grooves of the track. She met no one along the way. The sky was a blue enamel bowl overturned with speckles of white clouds. She stopped for a minute to catch her breath. A split-rail fence lined the road and then continued on to demark the Klingerberg’s farm that adjoined their property. A black-faced cardinal, sitting on a fence post, seemed to mock her by calling out, “purty, purty, purty.” In the field beyond, bees and butterflies flitted from blue thistles to black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. Their soaring and dipping movements reminded Mette of a ribbon fluttering in the breeze or a scarf like the one knitted by Matilda Klingerberg, her best friend. Yarns of dark red wool dyed using beet juice. Mette closed her eyes. Memories similar to the pictures cast from the magic lantern upon a white sheet at Mendersen’s General Store flashed mentally before her. Her mother’s hands. Though she was only in her early thirties when she died, her hands were that of an old woman, veins like a net criss- crossed the back, calluses, hard and yellow, studded the palms, knoblike knuckles made her hands huge, so big in fact, that she never wore a wed- ding ring. Mette saw her mother’s face, sun-browned and cloudy like the Saturday night bath water after the whole family had washed. She had sharp hollows in her cheeks, where as a much younger girl there used to be apples, rosy and round, flushed red. Her mother’s eyes—an intense blue almost like the steel of a new plow blade—cut right into Mette. Don’t, she would say, don’t end up like me, my sweet girl. As Mother lay shivering beneath a thin quilt and coverlet, the life nearly drained out of her, she whispered through clenched teeth, Kom deg vekk herfra, Mette. Come away from here, Mette.

PMS.. 139 Hertenstein

“Hey, there.” Mette, startled, opened her eyes. Sigurd Sigurdson stood before her in the road, his white-blonde hair catching and reflecting the sun. Sigurd was the son of Ole Sigurdson who had come over from Sweden only a few years before her father, Otto Morgansen, had arrived from Denmark. “Did ya hear?” He spoke in the singsong way of the island. “There’s to be a shadow play down at Mendersen’s. Two men just came over from the Point this morning. Come at dusk and I’ll save ya a seat.” “Oh yah,” Mette answered. Sigurd followed Mette in the track, swinging his body as he walked. He hid it carefully, but he had a stunted arm, having had his sleeve caught in a potato grader and his arm sucked into the teeth of the machine. By the time his uncle had managed to stop the horses Sigurd’s arm was fleshed and flanked, the tendons snapped in two never to func- tion again. He carried his useless limb tucked into his shirt, bent at the elbow and bound to his chest to keep it out of the way. “I’ve seen them once before over on the mainland. The puppet shad- ows told about a boy with magic seeds. The plant it grew all the way up to heaven and the boy climbed on up into the clouds where he discov- ered treasure. He was very happy until a giant came and chopped down the stalk. Then…shrrr.” Sigurd made a whistling sound and with his one good arm motioned from side to side. “Timber! Down came the boy.” Mette adjusted the yoke on her neck. “So was it a good story or bad story?” “Huh?” “One with a happy end?” Sigurd stopped to think. “I don’t recall. Just that there was a confusion of shadows.” Mette continued walking. The water was heavy, and the gravel road cut into her bare feet. That was the way, the way of life. There were no happy endings. Even with some good there always came along something to cancel it out. As they approached her father’s property, the rail fence gave over to a stone wall. “So, will ya come tonight?” Sigurd asked. Mette nodded her head.

A stone wall grew along the edge of the potato field. When Otto Morganson acquired the field there of course was nothing—the timber

140 PMS.. poemmemoirstory had already been harvested. The only thing left was stubborn stones and stumps. Once the stumps were removed then Otto set to getting rid of the rocks. Clearing the land was like rowing the sea, one step forward two steps back. Every day he would go out walking, bent over, picking up rocks and tossing them into piles. But at night the rocks would grow back. By the next morning there would be just as many rocks as ever. There seemed to be no end to them. It was the children’s job to organize the stones, sort them by size. The biggest ones on the bottom, one long row of them, next came the medium-sized ones, until finally the smaller ones were stacked on top by Mette and Børre. The wall was triple thick and ran the length of the field. At night Mette’s hands would be curled stiff, still gripping rocks in her sleep. The wall and its stones signified more than hard work. It was where her two oldest brothers, just babies one or two days old, were buried. Her mother also rested there in the shadow of the wall. At night after supper and doing the dishes, after tossing the dirty dishwater into the vegetable garden, Mette visited the wall. She would stroke the smooth stones, sit down and lean her tired back into the cold dampness of the rocks, and reflect back upon her mother and her dying words. She’d get away. Someday she would leave the island and this rock wall. Leave them far behind her.

The picnic grove down at Menderson’s store was cluttered with island- ers. Here and there families had pitched blankets on the ground. The air was dense with the smell of pine. Dusk came quickly beneath the tulip trees. The sun, after lingering all afternoon, distilling the mote-filled light through its searing rays, finally settled into the bay off to the west where orange and pink tissue clouds gave witness. Fireflies emerged, twinkling from the berry bushes and growing bolder as darkness edged in upon the waiting group. Children ran heedlessly across the blankets playing Hide- n-Seek, Run Sheep Run, and Drop the Handkerchief. Adults clustered together, men with men and women exchanging small talk amongst themselves. They were all waiting for the show to start. Mette waited, too. She lay on her back, resting her head on her hands and gazing up into the sky. Dim stars were beginning to fill the night- time canopy. She quickly located the North Star and the Big Dipper and the three stars in a row that was Orion’s Belt. But where were the Seven

PMS.. 141 Hertenstein

Sisters, lost or hidden behind a clump of trees? The gods were lucky. They had so many children they could afford to turn their daughters into constellations. While here on earth there was always too much work, butter to be churned, eggs to be collected, rocks to be hauled that Mette couldn’t imagine her father cutting her loose. Soon lanterns were lit. The smell of match sulfur and kerosene wafted over to where Mette sat next to Sigurd Sigurdson. Her brothers Espen and Børre sat on the ground next to them. “Ladies and gentlemen.” A man came out from behind a wide sheet, actually two sheets stitched together down the middle, and introduced himself as King Dominic, purveyor of fine entertainment, the best in all of Wisconsin. His speech grew and grew, each word a link in a chain that soon caught hold of the group, drawing them. Mette recognized the man, now hatless, as one of the men in the boat. “We have for you all this evening a classic love story.” A titter ran through the audience. Mette shifted uncomfortably next to Sigurd. He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette and the tobacco glowed like tiny embers. He held the cigarette between the two fingers of his one good hand. He was handsome enough, but whenever they talked he quickly ran out of things to say. She could have counted it as shyness, such as her brother Espen possessed, ducking his head in reply instead of answering his elders. When her mother was alive and they still attended services at the kirka Mette was used to speaking up for him, greeting the folks after- wards. The problem with Sigurd was that he only liked to talk potatoes and farming. The man continued. “It’s the story of a pretty young girl and a young man, such as…” He peered into the crowd and pointed to Van Klingerberg. “Such as yourself sir.” Even in the flickering lamplight Mette could sense Van blushing. While in school Van was the boy she’d liked the most. She and Espen and Van and Matilda used to walk down the lane together to the small clap- board school in the center of the island. At the spelling bees it was always Mette and Van left standing, one mistake separating them from either victory or defeat. Last spring on the way home from school a storm had come up real quick. There had barely been enough time for the children to dive into a haystack. The wind and thrashing rain passed over them. What Mette remembered most, though, was the pressure of Van’s hand

142 PMS.. poemmemoirstory on her back, pushing her beneath the hay, and the warmth of his body next to her as she shivered in her wet cotton dress. After her mother died Mette stopped going to school, as she was needed more and more on the farm. She had to satisfy herself with only occasional visits to the Klingerberg place next door. “The girl is kidnapped by a beast and taken to a cave hidden in the mountains, and well, the rest of the story is taken up with her rescue. So without further ado.” He bowed deep, touching his stomach with one hand and flourishing the air with his other. Subsequently, the man retired behind the screen and a hush fell upon the audience. For a minute or two the only sound was the constant chirp- ing of crickets beneath a pile of logs stored in an open-sided shed. Then came the tinkling of a bell and a shadow stick figure singing in a falsetto voice skipping merrily along a path. The character was obviously a femi- nine one as the exaggerated outline portrayed curvy hips, a slender waist, and a buxom bosom. She also had long eyelashes that she frequently flut- tered while picking flowers. From behind a shadow-tree another figure peered, watching the girl and talking directly to the audience of her per- fections and beauty. Suddenly, there boomed the thunder of a drum and the jingle-jangle of a tambourine as a giant loomed, consuming the entire screen. Mette gasped and reached out for Sigurd’s arm. He had only the one and it was on the other side. The beast with several feathered heads carried the girl away captive to his mountain home. Børre clapped loudly and hallaballo’d when the prince swooped in and a fierce battle ensued. There was the conflagration of gongs and drums and a wobbly of sheets of tin to give the impression of all nature in disarray. Mette craned her neck forward to try and see better, to try and see into the future. It was just past midnight when the lamps were extinguished and the folks gathered up sleeping children to carry them home. Mette walked in between Sigurd and Espen back along the dirt road. The moon was up, just a sliver, but it shed enough light upon the upward path. Børre caught up with them after saying so long to his friends. All together the boys talked about the flaming arrows and the feather-headed monster. Mette silently considered the girl in the play. She recognized her as a shadow of herself, a captive, desperate to escape. For Mette it was the rocks that held her back, weighing her down. The girl had only gotten free by mar- rying a prince. Mette wondered if there was any other way.

PMS.. 143 Hertenstein

Later that night she crept out of bed. Just beyond the curtain partition her father and two brothers slept. Their heavy nasal breathing whistled in and out like the rise and fall of the steam kettle on the back of the iron stove. She glided down the stairs using the chinked wall of the cabin to guide her. She carried with her a bundle of clothes and a few green pota- toes. Carefully opening the door, squeak—she spit on the hinges—she slipped out and ran across the moonlit field pitted with white rocks. When she stopped to catch her breath she pondered what her family would think when they awoke to find her missing. Espen with his sad, black eyes would come back from searching the island, pour himself a cup of coffee, and sit down at the pine table downstairs. Otto might not even know she was gone. “Where’s Mette? Call her down. I haven’t had my breakfast. What is it, boy?” Espen would shake his head, the realiza- tion that she was gone just then sinking in. Even though she had helped raise Børre, he had always been independent. He would manage quite well without her around to tell him what to do. More and more he’d been spending his nights away from Otto and the cabin, carousing with his friends, knocking over outhouses, drowning cats by throwing them into the lake. After a while Otto would learn to cook his own eggs and supper. He’d pull a rock out of the ground and toss it aside; a glancing memory of Mette might pass before his mind but then disappear as it merged with all the other stones. No she wouldn’t be missed. Mette hopped over the stone wall and began to cut across the Klingerberg property. Their two-story house stood out in the pale moon- shine almost like a beacon. Mrs. Klingerberg had been kind to Mette and, since her mother’s death, had taken her under her wing. Whenever Mette could get away she’d join Matilda and Mrs. Klingerberg in baking pies together, sifting the flour, cutting in the soft white butter, and rolling out the crust. The Klingerbergs had cherry trees in their back field. They also grew Christmas trees, which they shipped down to Chicago at the end of the year. At first some of the islanders made fun of Mr. Klingerberg for growing Christmas trees when, well, pine trees were everywhere, not really a crop, but after Mr. Klingerberg sold those trees for a hefty profit, others considered doing the same. The Klingerbergs ran a successful farm. They kept cows, chickens, and bees. Mrs. Klingerberg traded but- ter, eggs, and honey at the general store. They kept a vegetable garden that fed them all winter long after the canning was done. Rocks grew on

144 PMS.. poemmemoirstory their farm, studded the hillsides like pearls, but they weren’t a nuisance because the trees found a way around them. No, the stones didn’t get in the way and the Klingerbergs barely took notice of them. Mette stubbed her toe on one in the dark. “Ouch,” she called out, throwing down her bundle and hopping around on one foot. “Mette?” She heard someone whisper her name. Mette squinted. A figure came out from between the Christmas trees. He reminded Mette of the blurred shadows cast upon the sheet down at Menderson’s store. “Van?” “Yah,” he answered. “What ya doing out here?” Mette swallowed, at first scared to tell the truth. Then she got up the nerve to ask him the same. “Why are ya here?” Van laughed and took a seat on a boulder. “I guess I’m still keyed up from that play tonight.” Mette sat down next to him. She brushed the hair out of her eyes. It was that time of night when all the birds had finally gone to sleep, and the noisy crickets had quit their harping, and silence fell with the dew, shrouding the fields like a damp blanket absorbing all sounds. In the hush of deepest darkness the world seemed to stand still, waiting on the edge for dawn. Mette sighed. Van must have felt the shudder of her body next to his. “What?” he asked. Mette tried to put into words this feeling she sometimes felt, like slog- ging through damp fog or dragging her pails along the surface of water about to turn to ice. Where what is isn’t all there is. “There are times when I think Mother is here, with me, sitting beside me.” Van swung his head around to look behind him. Mette went on. “Not like a ghost or a memory, but like a fever. This ailment comes over me and makes me want to run, run as fast as I can. That this life, living on an island, on a farm, surrounded by a stone wall—that I have to get away.” She stood up. Perhaps it was this same urge that drove her mother to America to forge a new life. “Or I’ll burst, bust my seams.” She sat back down. “I’ve never been to the Point, over to the mainland.” She rubbed her arms; the morning chill was settling in. “Here,” he said, helping to adjust her shawl around her shoulders. For a minute he stared into her eyes as he faced her. She remembered how they had competed against each other for first prize. She had stumbled

PMS.. 145 Hertenstein over the word “chameleon,” which Van spelled correctly to win the spell- ing bee. The sky was beginning to soften in the east, faint gray light pooled at the horizon. From the treetops came the twitter of birds. “I was thinking, maybe, I might catch a ride with the shadow play troupe.” Suddenly she felt silly. But Van didn’t laugh. He took her hand. A flush of heat radiated out of the part of her hair, all the way down to the tip of her braids. She noticed once again how his lips were like thimbleberries, full and red, and wondered what it might be like to kiss those lips. Her heart jumped around inside her chest. After a moment of resplendent silence, he gave her a playful smile. “Be careful. They might kidnap you and take you to their mountain lair!” Mette stood up with her bundle of clothes. “I’m not saying I am doing it, just that I was thinking about it.”

Seagulls circled the harbor following the fishermen as they pulled out in their sailboats. From the safety of a clump of trees Mette observed the shadow-play actors loading their rowboat with the familiar sack of props and puppets. The men talked in loud voices, their conversation floating across the bay in waves. She caught every other word, construing a dis- jointed story about an incident at the island tavern. They broke off into raucous laughter. Sid Fletcher, a newcomer to the island, was down in the men’s row- boat. He seemed to be outfitting it with one of those new contraptions, a one-cylinder motor. He poured gasoline through it and pulled on a cord to jump-spark it. The men on the dock backed away a step or two. A mosquito buzz filled the bay. She would miss this place. As hard as home was, it was home. The fir trees a banner swaying against the blue sky. The pebble beaches lead- ing down to water clear and cold. Even the rocks, splattered by gull shit, bleached by the sun, they were all she knew. It was hard to imagine a land not hedged by stone walls. She’d miss her brothers. As much as Børre made mischief, he also made her laugh, laugh until her gut hurt. No one else could do that. When her fingers bled from where the sharp stones bit her, he’d mimic Otto and the stooped way he walked, as if behind a plow. They’d pester the chattering chipmunks by tossing dirt clods at them. Espen would

146 PMS.. poemmemoirstory take it especially hard as he was the one always catching the back of her father’s hand. Otto liked to say he was shaking the stardust out of his head. Mette caught her breath and held it. Don’t let him defeat you, she wished she could tell him. She thought of her mother. Her face flushed with fever. The steely blue in her eyes draining right out of her. Kom deg vekk herfra, Mette. Could she actually leave her mother behind? To grow into the walls like climbing ivy, to eventually spread like lichen over the stones? Leave behind her brothers to do all the work, to grapple with her father? It seemed nothing or no one could ever make him happy. Don’t end up like me, my sweet girl. If she hurried, she’d get home just in time to put the kettle on, make some hot oats, wake the boys up. There was a strip of sunlight that broke through the trees and flooded the panes of the east-facing window right when she was done readying up the dishes after breakfast. Sometimes she waited, just to stand in the bright light like a shining speck of dust to twirl and spin, before climbing the stairs to make the beds and air the duvets. The mere idea caused her to panic. She sprung up from behind the bushes. The two men, the one with the crushed felt hat and the one with the thick chestnut hair, climbed inside the boat. Not too late! Mette emerged just in time to see Van Klingerberg stroll down to the men. She couldn’t hear them over the whirling of the motor, but Van quickly settled into the center of the boat with a small square cardboard suitcase. Words choked inside her throat. She wanted to call out, but her mouth was glued shut. Sid tossed the rope back into the boat and slowly it sputtered out of the harbor. Mette watched as it turned into a black speck, bobbing along on the thin blue line separating the dome-sky from the forever expanse of water.

PMS.. 147 contributors

Amye Archer has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Twins Magazine, Provincetown Arts, The Ampersand Review, H_ngm_n, Boston Literary Magazine, and Hippocampus. Her first chap- book, No One Ever Looks Up was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her latest chapbook, A Shotgun Life, was published by Big Table Publishing in 2011. Her novel, Fat Girl, Skinny, is represented by the Einstein Thompson Agency. Her first play, Surviving, was produced locally as part of the Jason Miller Playwright’s Project. She is the winner of the first Scranton Storyslam, and she hosts the reading series Prose in Pubs. You can learn more about her at www.amyearcher.com.

Tina Mozelle Braziel, a recent graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals including Poetry South, Santa Clara Review, StorySouth and the anthology, Family Matters: Poems of Our Families. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building on Hydrangea Ridge.

Janna Brooke Cohen lives on a farm in the Hudson River Valley with her three young sons, one husband, two dogs, and eight chickens. When not writing, she eats while driving a minivan. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Amarillo Bay, and upstreet, among others. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Stephanie Kaplan Cohen is the author of In My Mother’s House (Woodley Books 2008), a memoir, and a book of poetry, Additions and Subtractions (Plain View Press 2010). She is a columnist for the Alzheimer’s Association quarterly and an editor of the Westchester Review. Her work has been nominated for a pushcart prize and was featured on NPR. She lives in Westchester, New York, and is the proud mother of three children, three in-law children, and eight grandchildren, all of whom are exceptional in all ways.

148 PMS.. Denise Duhamel is the author, most recently, of Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001.) Her work has been anthologized widely and appeared in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and New Ohio Review. She was the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

Eliza Gilmore lives in New York City after a year of teaching in rural France and backpacking around Europe. This is her first publication.

Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of Fishing Secrets of the Dead, The River is a Reason, and At the Narrows (forthcoming from Word Poetry, 2015). Her poems have recently appeared in The McNeese Review, Nimrod, and Passages North. She is currently the Rose O’Neill Writer-in- Residence at Washington College.

Jane Hertenstein is the author of over 60 published stories, a combina- tion of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. She got the idea for “Heartbreak Wall” while on a bicycling trip around Washington Island off of Door County, Wisconsin. “I passed so many old farms, and every one of them had a stonewall. I imagined that great physical effort went onto each one built by generations prior.” Jane is the author of a YA novel, Beyond Paradise and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady. Her blog can be found at memoirouswrite.blogspot.com.

Christine Higgins is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She is a McDowell Colony fellow and a recipient of a Maryland State Individual Artist Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as Pequod, Lullwater Review, Eleventh Muse, Naugatuck River Review. Her chapbook, Threshold, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. You can visit Christine at www.christinehigginswriter.com.

Kate Hovey is the author of three award-winning books of poetry for young readers: Arachne Speaks, Ancient Voices, and Voices of the Trojan War, published by Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon

PMS.. 149 and Schuster. A contributor to Mythology and Modern Women Poets: Analysis, Reflection and Teaching (forthcoming from McFarland), she was awarded second place in the 2014 Women’s National Book Association Poetry Contest, was named runner-up for the 2012 Paumanok Poetry Award, and has been a finalist for the Tor House Prize for Poetry and the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared most recently in The Bookwoman, The River Styx, The Ledge and The Comstock Review.

Kathleen A. Kelly, an editor and poet, has received residency fellow- ships and literary awards from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (Taos) and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in North American Review, PMS poemmemoirsto- ry, CALYX, and Nimrod International Journal, among others. She divides her time between Oklahoma and California.

Catherine Landis is the author of the novels Some Days There’s Pie (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) and Harvest (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2004). She is the mother of two grown sons and lives in Knoxville, TN, with her husband and dog.

Dell Lemmon was invited to read her poems at Poetry Project’s 40th annual New Year’s Day Marathon Benefit. Her poems have been pub- lished in The Straddler, an online journal, WSQ, published by the Feminist Press, and another one is forthcoming in Mudfish #18. She also has a PhD in performance studies. Her art criticism has been published in Women and Performance, and she spent over 20 years involved with contemporary art in various capacities from studio manager to collector.

J. Annie MacLeod is Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she specializes in fiction writing, women novelists, feminist literary theory, and the literatures of food. A selection of her critical publications include a writing textbook for advanced students, Advancing Rhetoric; a collection of previously unpublished letters by Anglo-American women authors, Kindred Hands; and an anthology of food literature, Books that Cook: The Making of Literary Meal. A for- mer Fulbright scholar to Slovenia, MacLeod is also a contributor to Ms. Magazine as well as a Reviews Editor for Literary Mama. In addition, two of MacLeod’s short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and

150 PMS.. she’s been published in venues from Another Chicago Magazine to So To Speak to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2013, MacLeod was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for fiction.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing. Her work appears in The New York Times, Oxford American, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly Online, and many other journals, and has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She lives in Cambridge and teaches at Harvard and Grub Street. Read more of her writing online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.

Carmen Nieto is a sociologist, writer and poet. She was born in Poland in 1983, although she has lived most of her life in Madrid, Spain. Her grandparents were Spanish exiles as a consequence of the Spanish Civil war, an event that marked her family’s path and anatomy. At the moment, she lives temporarily in Buenos Aires working as a photographer for art and film magazines and studies social media. She has worked for a few years in Market Research where she learned to listen and sharpen her eye. Later, she moved into the creative world of children’s literature. She’s been writing poetry since she can remember. Poetry is her passion. Some of her favorite voices are Neruda, Miguel Hernández, Luis Cernuda, Fernando Pessoa, José Hierro, Bukowski, Emily Dickinson, Carver, and many others. Her poems are originally written in Spanish.

Jenna Rindo lives in rural Wisconsin with her husband, children, a flock of Shetland sheep, Rhode Island Red hens, and other less domesticated creatures. She worked as a registered nurse in pediatric intensive care in hospitals in Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin and now teaches English to Hmong, Kurdish, Vietnamese and Spanish students. Her poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Shenandoah, the American Journal of Nursing, Bellingham Review, and others. She has work forth- coming in Tampa Review and Storm Cellar Review.

Maura Stanton has published a novel, Molly Companion, and three books of short stories, most recently Cities in the Sea with the University of Michigan Press. Her short stories have won the Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune and an O’Henry Award for 2014. Her stories

PMS.. 151 set in Venice have appeared recently, or are forthcoming, in The New England Review, the Antioch Review, and Fiction International.

Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Snow, Salt, Honey (2012); Keeping Them Alive (2011); Postcard on Parchment (2008); Unbound & Branded (2006); and The Love of Unreal Things (2005). Her piece “An Archeology of Secrets” was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2012. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Arts & Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and Shenandoah. She teaches at South Dakota State University.

Claire Schwartz is a PhD student in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her poetry has appeared in a number of jour- nals including Cream City Review, Front Porch Journal, Tuesday; An Art Project, and Stirring.

Brittany Tacconi graduated from the University of Houston. Her works have appeared in Glass Mountain, Houston & Nomadic Voices, The Oklahoma Review, and The Concho River Review. When she is not busy avoiding the suburbs you can find her at home dancing to blues with her pet turtle.

Kathleen Thompson holds a BS from the University of Alabama and a MFA in Writing from Spalding University. She is privileged to have in her possession for placement the two remaining boxes (53 lbs.!) of the papers of Alabama writer Helen Norris whose fiction was the subject of Thompson’s thesis, An Ageless Bewilderment: The Matrix of Helen Norris’s Fiction. Kathleen has three poetry books published, two novels in manu- script, and a collection of short stories in manuscript. Her current writ- ing projects include a series of linked stories and a memoir structured in the essay format. Her passion for the 18th Century essayists was kindled long ago by a seminar with Dr. August Mason at the University of Alabama, and the memoir in essay, more recently inspired by Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Her poetry has always been comprised of chunks of her heart.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010),

152 PMS.. selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature; and Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. She lives with her partner Angie Griffin in the Sunshine State and teach- es in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Margaret Wrinkle’s debut novel Wash was published by Grove/Atlantic, won the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize, an American Book Award, and has been named the fiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Wash was also awarded the Griot Award from the Dora Franklin Finley African American Heritage Trail of Mobile for storytelling of diverse cultural heritage.

Lisa Zerkle’s work was featured in Nimrod and in Press 53’s Spotlight anthology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, The Ledge, Charlotte Viewpoint, Sixfold, poemmemoirstory, Crucible, Main Street Rag and Literary Mama, among others. She has served as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, community columnist for The Charlotte Observer, and editor of Kakalak. Heart of the Light, her first chapbook, is available from Finishing Line Press. She is currently working on a collec- tion of poetry based on the production of energy.

PMS.. 153 PMS 14 is dedicated to the mothers and children of the “Aid to Inmate Mothers Story Book Project” at Julia Tutwiler Prison.

For Miss Alice Finch Lee 1911–2014—“Atticus in a skirt”