ESKIMO NIGHTS AND OTHER STORIES

By

ANN BRONSTON

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2003

Copyright 2003

by

Ann Bronston

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is wonderful to have a chance to thank people out loud, so to speak. I thank Padgett

Powell for liking my stories, encouraging me to come to Gainesville, and for teaching the importance of honesty, clarity and surprises in stories. I thank David Leavitt for calm and kind support and wonderful editing. I thank Jill Ciment for perceptive reading and attention to structure.

I would like to thank my father for spoon-feeding me his love of literature. I believe I owe any ability I have for putting words together, to my father’s reading (the best reader)

Shakespeare, and Burns, Whitman, and Forster, and of course Lewis Carroll, to me.

I would like to thank my mother for her great generosity, courage, strength, and unwavering love and kindness.

Finally, I thank my husband John Flynn, (the other best reader) for his sense of artistry, his honest critiques and his (always surprising) love. And Caitlin and Walker for just being so wonderful and helpful.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... iv

RERUNS...... 1

FIRE ...... 12

OBEDIENCE SCHOOL ...... 18

SISTER FIVE BY FIVE ...... 35

OULIPO ...... 54

SMOKERS...... 60

AIR ...... 78

MR. BUBBLES...... 93

TAMPA ...... 103

EARTH...... 123

ESKIMO NIGHTS...... 130

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 150

iii

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

ESKIMO NIGHTS AND OTHER STORIES

By

Ann Bronston

May 2003

Chair: David Leavitt Major Department: English

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied: “at least—at least I mean what I say— that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter.

These are not necessarily the stories I meant to write, but having written them, I find they are the stories I mean.

iv

RERUNS

The marriage went south, the kids went north; I moved into a trailer on a side street of what’s left of rural Tampa. My neighbor to the right lives in a trailer too, and has two dogs and a goat. Her name is Barbara, and she scares me, because she looks old and worn out. But she is my age. My lasered skin and dyed hair don’t impress her. She feels sorry for me, because I am always needing her handyman skills and because my trailer is always messier than hers and because I always look scared when she sees me.

I don’t know my other neighbors because they all live in solid houses, with pink and white flowers arranged around the doorstep. I live for the day when one of them stops me in the supermarket, and never suspecting I am the woman from the trailer down the block, says, “Oh my God. Didn’t you used to be on that TV show about the

Revolutionary War, Yankee Doodle? You were so wonderful. I’d recognize you anywhere.”

But of course that will never happen, because I was just a background character and no one ever recognized me even when the show aired almost twenty-five years ago.

No one in Tampa knows about my Hollywood past. We moved here eight years ago. My husband was once a lowly second Assistant Director on Yankee Doodle while I was the ‘talent,’ as the actors are called by production. Then he became an executive producer and I became the ‘wife of,’ as spouses are called. Universal sent him to

Orlando. We hated Orlando and thought Tampa would be a better place to live. We

1 2 were wrong. Though it was better for the kids. My daughter had friends for the first time who didn’t have orange and lime hair. Their worst trait was that they wore crosses and went to church.

I don’t go to any church. I don’t belong to any organizations, and the friends we had in Tampa, we had because my husband had ‘Hollywood’ connections. Maybe he still sees them. I don’t. I don’t see many people. I don’t work. I don’t need to work. My divorce settlement gave me alimony and our home in Tampa, which I sold. I knew of rich Malibu wives who, after their divorce, though they could no longer afford mortgages and travel and facelifts, couldn’t control their appetites. They ended up homeless, spending their days in museums and libraries and shopping malls and sleeping in BMWs.

My alimony pays for the trailer, my laser treatments, eyelifts, teeth bonding and weekly spa treatments. And thanks to the sale of the house, there is money for future facelifts.

It might be nice to work, to have a place to go, to have associates. But I can’t think of any job I would want to do, or could do.

I loved acting, but not as much as I loved being an actor. When I was young I saw some old character actor on the Johnny Carson show. He said he loved being an actor so much that if he couldn’t be a working actor, he was still happy to be an out-of- work actor. I know now all he was saying was if he couldn’t hang around a set all day, eating free food and bullshitting with the other actors, he was just as happy to hang around a bar eating free peanuts and bullshitting with the other actors.

Once a month I meet with some ‘bridge buddies’. That’s how they advertised themselves: Bridge Buddies seeking new members, informal games, smokers okay. All levels welcome, no beginners. At fifty-six there is not much I’m a beginner at.

3 Two old ladies, Clara and Ruth, organize the games. I call them old because I like to think I’m much younger than they are, though I suspect we are not more than ten years apart in age. But they’ve lived in Tampa all their lives and that makes me think that they expected to grow older. They understood a certain order in the universe.

Clara is short and wide, short gray hair, wide large glasses, wide nose, short fingers. She is the doer. She serves the iced tea, with coasters. She adjusts the temperature of the room three or four times a game, and she whistles, a thin airy noise, without purpose or melody – or none that I can discern. Ruth is quiet and coiffed and seems to find everything just a little distasteful. Clara laughs at my jokes. Ruth doesn’t.

There are about six other women who are members of this club. But there is no regularity to their attendance, and often only one foursome gets to play. The left-overs eat and watch television and complain about their husbands, if they’ve got them, and smoke.

It’s nice to be around other smokers. When I smoke alone in my home, I feel secretive, worried that some electric company man or some phone man will surprise me.

Even late at night, I’m afraid of being discovered, seen as cigarette smoking, TV watching, beer drinking trailer trash. I drink good whiskey, but to the ignorant it still translates as trash. I come as much to play bridge as I do to smoke in a tidy, two story house, with other coughing smokers.

One afternoon only Clara and I are the television watchers.

“Can I ask you a question, Rachel?” Clara says, without looking up from the pistachio she is struggling to open with her short fingers.

“Sure, Clara.” I reach for my cigarettes.

4 I can’t imagine what Clara has in mind to ask. We don’t know each other well;

I’ve only been a bridge buddy a few months. I partnered with Clara a number of times, and that is always a bonding experience, if you play well, and we both do.

She stops fighting with the pistachio and asks, “How old are you?”

Bitch, I think.

“Fifty-one,” I lie. A four o’clock news brief is coming on the television. I can’t help myself; it would have been as if you’d spent hundreds of dollars on lottery tickets and didn’t check the winning numbers. I have to ask, “How old do I look?”

She smiles so sweetly that I know any answer under fifty would just be patronizing. Before she can speak, the anchorman on the TV says, “And on a sad note,

Gabriel Turner, who started his career in the television series Yankee Doodle, died today.

Mr. Turner earned two academy award nominations, most recently for Mister Fool, a bittersweet love story, about a retarded man and an immigrant female cabdriver. He was sixty–one.”

“I slept with him,” I say, taking a drag on my cigarette. For a brief second, time wrinkles, and I am twelve years old giving the finger to my bunkmates who are only ten and eleven, but all at least half a foot taller than I am. I did it to establish my superior worldliness, lest anyone think I belonged with such babies.

“Oh. Ruth’s sister used to go out with him, but that was before he was a newscaster. Poor Gabriel Turner. I used to love Yankee Doodle. They don’t have good shows like that anymore. Just such crassness. Do young people really think about sex all the time? I don’t remember everything revolving around sex when I was in my twenties.

5 That’s why I loved Yankee Doodle, people were thinking about fighting a war, not hopping into bed.”

Surprisingly, I don’t mention that I was on Yankee Doodle, nor do I correct her misconception that I slept with Neal Mendino of WKPQ. “I think all this crassness about sex is just what we need. I think it is probably the best birth control society has ever offered. It makes sex so unappealing. I can’t imagine any teenage girl wanting to say anything but ‘no way’. We were lured by the scent of mystery and the promise of something called love, which was supposed to be the definition of great sex.” I say all this as if Gabe were still alive, as if I am unaware of how the room seems to be changing, unaware of the silent vapor of sadness seeping through my pores.

“You have such a funny way of looking at things, and you are so right,” Clara says as she walks to lower the temperature. Her steps are heavy as if she were limping on one leg, than another. Her walk in fact reflects her personality--direct and dutiful.

Getting the coasters or changing the thermostat is never an inspiration or a moment’s decision. It is a necessity, a task to be performed. I try to imagine her as a young woman. Cast by Hollywood, her wideness becomes a supple innocence, her fingers childlike and eager. She is a milkmaid, her bright apron lifted by a breeze as she walks toward the barn, her steps deliberate, believing Master Peter’s hands will guide her through a grey mist to some brilliant rainbow. But as Clara turns back to the couch, the movie becomes dark and gritty. I see only a stout milkmaid walking dutifully toward the cows, unaware that she is about to encounter real evidence of the great mystery that will leave her swollen and sore and cynical. But Clara can’t play cynical, I wish she could,

6 we might be better friends. Master Peter’s rape will leave her character swollen and sore and dumbfounded.

I put out my cigarette. Clara clears my drink and ashtray from the glass coffee table. As she walks to the kitchen, she announces to the others that Gabriel Turner is dead.

“How did he die?” Ruth wants to know.

Probably fucking some twenty-year-old, I mutter to myself.

“They didn’t say,” Clara answers. “I guess we’ll get more details on the five o’clock news.”

“I loved that series, Yankee Doodle," Ruth says. “ I don’t suppose they’ll ever show it again. You know, like the way they show The Beverly Hillbillies, or the old

Fugitive.

“Rachel used to date Neal Mendino.”

“My sister used to go out with him, that was a long time ago, after her divorce, before she married Douglas. I couldn’t stand him. He was so insincere.” I am out of

Ruth’s line of vision but I know she is speaking to me.

“No, I didn’t like him much either,” I say. I catch Clara’s eyes on me; she looks sad.

“Did you see Mister Fool?” I hear someone at the card table ask. I reach for another cigarette. My hand shakes as I try to light it. All of a sudden I feel very cold. As

I exhale the smoke, my teeth clatter. I’m annoyed at Clara for lowering the temperature.

I want to leave.

7 “Did you see Mister Fool, Rachel?” Sharon, who I know is younger than me, though not by that much, asks loudly. I don’t like Sharon. Her fingers are grabby and she plays too aggressively. She likes to sound smart and uses too many words to say very little on too many subjects. She is the only one of us who has never been divorced, and though we see it as a failing on her part, she thinks we envy her.

“Yes, I did.”

“Well? What did you think?”

“I thought they were badly matched. She wasn’t very credible…”

“Exactly,” Sharon interrupts. “I mean give us a break, she was way too young and beautiful for him. Plus, I don’t know, I just don’t enjoy watching retards, it’s very unsexy.”

“Gabriel Turner is sexy no matter what he plays,” Ruth says, she doesn’t like

Sharon either and her opinions are not to be argued with. But Sharon hasn’t caught on to that yet.

“Well, to me, he’s too old.” She is smug about being the youngest. “I mean was too old… for the part. He was young to die, of course.”

“He wasn’t retarded,” Clara has brought in a fresh pitcher of ice tea. “He was playing an innocent. I heard him tell Regis that when the movie first came out.”

I had meant they were mismatched because she was such a bad actress and was so unbelievable in the part. I expect myself to mention my role on Yankee Doodle, I was the sister of Gabriel Turner’s love interest. People remember the part if you describe it to them. I don’t tell them though. 8 When I was seven, I used to bring a small stuffed toy cat into the classroom. I hid it in my desk. I would look at it and feel my life become less ordinary. Dowdy and grandmotherly Mrs. Miller was transformed to a menacing villain. And I was as courageous as any hero who hid their beloved from those that would separate them.

Eventually I told my friends my secret. And soon after, it all seemed ordinary again. No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer find any peril in Mrs. Miller’s dim eyes. I knew I was just pretending.

“Are you all right dear? Clara asks. “You look cold all scrunched up like that.”

“Well, you keep lowering the thermostat, I’ll have to bring a damn mink next time I come.”

“The rest of us are comfortable,” Ruth is unsympathetic. “Maybe you’re sick.”

“I feel fine.” The conversation moves on to dinner plans, recipes, engagements; neighborhood restaurants, best supermarkets, best meat packers, Deitz and Weston, or

Healthy Choice. The cold flash passes--until the 5 o’clock news comes on. I know I must leave. I don’t want to hear about Gabriel’s death, sitting next to Clara, so far away from where I once was.

I begin to gather my things, my lighter and purse. I crumble my empty cigarette pack and throw it away. I have no cigarettes for the drive home. Asking if anyone has a cigarette used to be rhetorical question. Now no one volunteers, and if you ask by name, they actually count the cigarettes they have, and then decide if they want to give any away. I’d rather smoke a butt from my car ashtray. 9 It is the end of April in Tampa, and every hot day threatens to be the first wave of an unrelenting assault. But as I close the door, I am happy for the blanket of warmth I feel. My jaw begins to relax.

I search for a long-enough butt in the car’s ashtray, spilling other butts onto the floor. I light it and drive home. I turn on the radio and hear again that Gabriel Turner is dead. A heart attack is mentioned this time. I knew he died of a heart attack, because naked and sweaty, his heart swooshing loudly under my ear, he told me of his father’s death. Gabe, who was only six at the time, thought his father’s heart had wrapped itself around the inside of his throat and choked him. How else would a heart attack someone?

And then, his voice trailing into long pauses, he told me that his brother had died only a year earlier, at thirty-four, of a heart attack.

I am shivering again. My bones feel jagged and sharp. The thought of a blanket and a bottle help me steer towards home.

Bent and looking old-ladyish, I walk from my car to the trailer’s door, crushing dead flowers along the path. My affair with Gabriel didn’t last very long. I knew I was miscast. I was working too hard to fit the fantasy. With the second assistant director

(eventually my husband) I could believe myself in the leading role.

I’m glad I have no pets to feed or walk. I undress as quickly as my shaking body will let me, leaving my silk blouse and Ralph Lauren blazer and linen slacks to lie on the floor like miniature landforms on a giant map. I put on stained sweat pants and a baggy tee shirt. I light up again. I pour eighteen-year-old whiskey into a glass. My daughter was five, eighteen years ago. My son was three. It wasn’t so long ago. I take the blanket from my bed and sit in a fading yellow armchair.

10 ‘I slept with him.’ That’s what I said when I heard Gabe had died. ‘I slept with him.’ Even if they understood whom I meant, they wouldn’t have understood what I was trying to say. Clara would have simply said, “Oh.” Sharon would have mentioned that while she was in college in California she dated Lee Major’s younger brother. And Ruth would have told me her sister slept with Gabriel Turner when he performed Streetcar in

Tampa.

Whiskey is a secret place of misty gold fog, it creeps through my body, softening the edges of my bones, so that they no longer rattle against each other. I am warm again. My hair falls against my cheek, the whiskey makes my lips feel full and wet.

I slide back in time, into a body with breasts that turn upward and skin so new it is shy without clothes. It blushes at its power to draw hands towards it. Or perhaps it only pretends to be shy.

One time before we had been lovers, Gabriel reached across a restaurant table to touch my face. I instinctively drew my head back. I made some joke about being a boxer in my last life. He looked at me as if he could see my father’s hand, with unexpected speed, hit my face. Then his breath turned to a soft, comforting, shh. He continued to move his hand toward my cheek, and said, “Yeah, we’ve all been boxers in one life or another.”

My father, a high school math teacher, with delicate, almost effeminate hands, did slap me in the face a number of times, hoping my mother would feel the sting, hitting a child being more acceptable than hitting a woman. But I don’t think I moved my head away from Gabriel’s hand because I remembered being hit. I moved it because I knew a

11 current of desire would run through my body if he touched me then. And because pretending to be afraid heightened the pleasure, made it a scene from a movie.

I breathe in the whiskey. I love the rainy, woodsy smell of it. I drink it deeply.

A few months ago, I was in New York. I had read Gabriel was filming a movie there. I looked for him in every restaurant I went to, on street corners, in the audience of shows I saw. I fantasized running into him. He would remind me of my Hedda Gabler- done in a small sixty-seat theatre, near the beach, which nobody came to. He would tell me how wonderful I was. People around us would be listening, watching us, wondering who I was. Then he would offer me a cameo in an upcoming movie. And at fifty-six, I would hold carefully cupped in my hands, like a child protecting a wisp of dandelion, that breath of what might still be.

But Gabriel Turner died today.

I take the glass of whiskey and with firm breasts and supple skin, I walk to my bed, and again Gabriel moves to touch my face.

FIRE

Things happen that you can’t explain. The fig jam disappears.

Mrs. Bennett checked her purse for bus fare and just as she was about to leave the house for her doctor’s appointment, she stopped to look in the coat closet. Not that she thought the jam could be there, in fact she had already searched through the closet three or four times. But still she opened the closet door.

For the next few days, Mrs. Bennett understood that she would be opening drawers, feeling through pockets, searching under the bed, in the linen closet, behind the curtains. She would do this without thinking, sometimes not even remembering what it was that she was looking for.

Things appear and disappear. Once she found a child’s left-footed sneaker in her dresser drawer. She has no children and all her nieces and nephews were teenagers at least when she and Mr. Bennett moved into the house. Once a necklace she gave to her mother, who lived with Mrs. Bennett’s brother three thousand miles away and had never visited, turned up in a toolbox in the garage. The question is always, where did that come from or where did that go? But whom do you ask? Eventually you just stop wondering.

Over time you’re not sure if you really found a child’s sneaker in your drawer or was it something someone else told you, or did it happen in a different house, or was it part of a dream?

12 13 Mrs. Bennett wondered if the grocery receipt she’d found in the zipper pocket of her purse, showing a jar of jam sold for $2.97, might have been some other person’s receipt that she had picked up by accident.

There are explanations, even if you don’t know what they are. For example, when she found two train ticket stubs to Philadephia in Mr. Bennett’s pants’ pocket, and he said he had no idea how two train ticket stubs to Philadelphia could possibly have gotten into his pants pocket, she didn’t think anymore about it. Five years later when he told her he was leaving her, she understood the explanation for the train tickets.

As she walked to the bus stop, Mrs. Bennett was surprised by how warm it was outside. It was late September in Trenton, New Jersey, and the days seemed to be getting warmer instead of colder. Mrs. Bennett knew it was warm because people were wearing short sleeves. Of course it felt warm to her, but that was why she was going to the doctor, because of the heat inside her. In her stomach.

“So you have a burning sensation in your stomach, do you?” Dr. Landis was young and round and his cheeks were smooth with a soft blush.

“No. I have a fire in my stomach.”

“Hurts that much, does it?” Dr. Landis smiled gently.

“It doesn’t hurt at all. But it’s hot. Sometimes I can feel the heat on the outside but mostly it’s just on the inside.” Mrs. Bennett missed Dr. Steingold. Dr. Steingold had treated her for thirty years, but he had retired after her last visit—a routine check up. He had told her she was remarkably healthy for 65, but to stop smoking because it was

14 bound to catch up with her, and then he told her good-bye. He put out his hand and she clasped it and then he pulled her towards him and awkwardly kissed her on the forehead.

Dr. Landis pinched his lips, and looked at her. It had been a very long time since anyone had looked at her with concern. She was sorry she was old and overweight. But she was, and she made herself look back at him with the small square hardness of a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

He asked her about her diet and if she had any other pains.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she repeated.

“Right,” he said. Then he asked her to lie down and felt under the paper smock she wore.

Mrs. Bennett stared at the white ceiling. His fingers were wide and they pressed into the flesh of her stomach. She closed her eyes. With each pulse of pressure she felt her insides glow, as if his hands were the breath that illuminates a burning ember.

He couldn’t feel anything unusual, the temperature of her skin felt even and cool throughout her torso, he said. He sent her to another room for a blood test.

It was late afternoon as Mrs. Bennett boarded the bus to go home. The sun was low in the sky. The bus was fairly empty and Mrs. Bennett sat by herself in the last row.

The windows of the bus, opened in the warmth of the day, let in a steady wind of cool air.

The fire in her stomach did not spread heat throughout her body. It didn’t make her sweat or fan herself. It didn’t rise and then subside. It burnt constantly in one spot, like a piece of charcoal. Mrs. Bennett bent her head low and placed her hands on her stomach.

“My little furnace,” she said, and smiled to herself.

15 When Mrs. Bennett got home, she put her purse on the small table in the hall.

She did this everyday, very conscientiously, when she first came into the house. A purse was too valuable to lose without knowing at least where it had disappeared from. Then she opened the coat closet and stood on her toes and felt around the shelf at the top of the closet.

She made herself a cup of tea, searching the refrigerator as she took the milk out and again as she put it back. And she peered in the garbage can when she threw the teabag out.

She took her tea to the living room, sat in her orange and gold armchair, felt under the cushion, and lit herself a cigarette.

Dr. Landis said he would let her know the results of the tests, “but for now it is a mystery.”

“I don’t like mysteries,” Mrs. Bennett had told him, more as a point of fact than about her stomach. “I never read them.” Then she added, “I don’t mind surprises. I like a surprise now and then.”

Drawing in the smoke from her cigarette, Mrs. Bennett thought again about how she didn’t like mysteries. They made you think there was always a solution, if you were just smart and lucky enough or just smart enough or just lucky enough to get the clues.

Mrs. Bennett didn’t think of herself as lucky, not unlucky, but not lucky. She’d still have been married if she was lucky, they would have had children if she was lucky. And she knew she wasn’t smart. That had been settled in high school.

She hadn’t done well in math or science, though she was good in geography, and one year she’d gotten straight A’s in English. Mrs. McClaren always commented on how

16 beautiful her penmanship was, how clear her sentences were. Mrs. McClaren recommended she take an honors English class the next year.

She worked harder than she had ever worked in school for that class. She read the stories two, three, sometimes four times, and still she could not find the sentence that explained the answer to the teacher’s questions. In Mrs. McClaren’s class, the questions were always about the plot or the setting. But in the "honor’s" class, the teacher asked,

Why did so and so do such and such? What clues does the author give us to anticipate the ending? Mrs. Bennett’s penmanship on the tests was stressed and scribbly. Her answers jumped around and the sentences didn’t seem to relate to one another. She always ended her essay answers with: “But it’s a mystery to me.” By January she was back in the regular English class.

Mrs. Bennett dabbed her cigarette against the saucer and turned on the television. Her mind drifted back to her old English class. She imagined herself, as she was, a woman of sixty-five, pudgy and gray-haired, standing in front of those honor students as they were then. She writes on the blackboard: Plot. And then writes, Mrs.

Bennett was a good wife. When they found out they couldn’t have children, Mr. Bennett said he was content, just the two of them. Mrs. Bennett never screamed out her despair in front of him. She would slip out of their bed, letting him sleep undisturbed, and muffle her tears in the bathroom. Finally they were too old to have children. Mrs. Bennett loved the trips they took, once they went to Italy. She was sad when he stopped reaching for her Saturday mornings in their bed, but she thought it was just age catching up with him.

She didn’t want to make him feel worse by letting him know how much she missed his hands pulling her toward his chest. Mr. Bennett was never angry at Mrs. Bennett, he

17 never thought she was flighty or careless with money. They had made plans to take a cruise when they retired. They paid off their mortgage. One day Mr. Bennett gave Mrs.

Bennett his life insurance policy and drove away. Question, Mrs. Bennett imagined herself writing on the blackboard, Why did Mr. Bennett leave? What clues does the author give you to anticipate his leaving? Do not refer to the tickets to Philadelphia.

That night, as Mrs. Bennett slept in her armchair under the blue light of the television, smoke rose from her stomach. Her eyes opened, but before she could even wonder, her upper body was consumed by flames. The chair she was sitting on and her left leg remained, blackened, but otherwise untouched by the fire. Other than a circle of soot on the ceiling, there was no damage to the house or furniture.

A few days later the doctor’s office left a message on her answering machine telling her that the tests were negative. She should try taking an antacid and if the pain in her stomach persisted she could call back in a couple of weeks.

For Mary Reeser, Helen Conway, Olga Worth Stephens, Jean Lucille Saffin and

Agnes Phillips, all older, single women who spontaneously burst into flames.

OBEDIENCE SCHOOL

I have been saying fuck to my children a lot lately, not out loud, not usually. But in my mind, under my breath, I hear myself saying, Because it’s too fucking expensive, that’s why. You don’t fucking talk to me like that. Get it the fuck yourself. My children are seven, twelve and fourteen, all boys. I imagine soon they’ll be doing the same to me, if they’re not already whispering inaudible fucks. I listen for it sometimes. I walk past my oldest, James, so close I am aware of the scent of his oily skin and scalp, but all that rides out on his breath is the smell of Doritos. I’m not surprised. I don’t really expect him to let loose that kind of language, not even timidly, under his breath. He seems too lost and confused, too passive to focus his anger, too depressed. Nor do I really expect it from my middle son, Jeremy, who just seems too happy to harbor unspoken fucks. Why do families do that, name their children with the same letter? I guess we thought we were uniting ourselves, gaining control of randomness, creating children who wouldn’t disappear from each other in the endless sea of other schoolchildren. But in fact it only seems to confuse people as to who’s who. And as I get older it trips up my brain, and when trying to reprimand, I struggle to pronounce the right name, so my anger escalates as I stutteringly yell, “Jason!” He is the one. He matches my anger breath for breath, unspoken words filling the air, clouding the space between us. He’s only seven.

There are times when the softness of an earlier age—his four-year-old self for example, shows on his face. It might be in his eyes as they widen to some startling

18 19 revelation—“Mom, did you know the oven stays warm even after you turn it off?” Or around his lips as he still calls spaghetti bagetti, or forehead forthead. It is in those moments that I feel not just the ache for that smaller body which folded easily into my chest and shoulder, hanging with just enough weight to make me feel strong and capable, but I feel a rush of love for his now seven-year-old self, and the relief of hopefulness.

We haven’t gone too far. From this distance, that small boy is still visible. I reach out to touch him, to bring him close, to smell the fresh boyness in him before his glands take over. But he pulls away.

I want to touch my children. I can’t touch Jeremy (the middle one) because he’s never home. He spends most of his time at his best friend’s house. It is probably the secret of his happiness. At his tenth birthday, his friend’s mother wrote on his birthday card to my “adopted” son. It didn’t disturb me, in fact I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction, as if I‘d gotten him into a good school. He was well placed and I took credit for it. I am afraid to touch James (the oldest), afraid to do anything that might somehow add to his disappointment in me or himself or love—the children’s father and I are divorcing.

My arms feel empty around my children and I find myself thinking more and more of getting a dog. I imagine my hand nuzzled with reverence as I walk from room to room picking up dirty underwear or plates with old food caked on them. I imagine a life of order and obedience—an unwavering schedule of sunrise walks with a dog that would heel and come faithfully every day of his life.

In fact, from the moment I understood what “the marriage is not working” meant --the euphemism initially confused me, was my husband saying it was unplugged

20 or broken? -- the idea of owning a large, devoted dog has helped me sleep for a few hours at night. I did not mention the prospect of a dog to the boys then. It wasn’t the right time.

If any of the boys had let me lie with them, my hands mothering their bodies, my head bent to inhale the dizzying smells of their varying levels of manhood, the dog fantasy might have leveled off instead of becoming this growing desire.

I had a dog for a few months when I was nine years old. It was a small terrier mix with shaggy hair, a stray that walked up to me with all the implied mystical destiny of a Hollywood movie, or so it seemed to me. My family was not well off, however, and a dog seemed an unnecessary luxury.

The spring weather of Poughkeepsie, New York, allowed us to let the dog hang around our unfenced yard. I fed the dog constantly and secretly, I did my homework on the stoop to our house, and I sneaked him into my bed late at night for a few hours. I buried my face into his neck and inhaled a warm, musky, soothing aroma. Threads of his hair touching my face wove a soft veil of comfort.

And the dog learned tricks—a trick. He sat when I said, “Sit”. I was the third youngest daughter in a family with four children, yet the dog sat when I said, “Sit”. That he rarely sat for my sisters and younger brother meant more to me than my good grades in school or any of the special compliments I received from my parents.

This partiality surely marked his doom. My sister, overzealous and impatient, tried to force him to sit, and he snapped at her. A few days later, when I came home from school, my mother told me that the dog had run off, “to find his real family.” Painful as it was, I believed her, until my father—never one to credit dogs with much intelligence—

21 told me later that day that the dog’s real family came and got him. My dog did not betray me, my family did. Somehow this made more sense to me, even then.

Quickly, too quickly, the divorce becomes final. The many elements of change settle—not settle, but are understood—not understood, never understood, but are at least semi-arranged. The boys have returned from their first official “summer visitation” with their father like bedraggled Confederate soldiers coming to grips with the fact that the war is over, they lost, and there is nothing to come back to.

It is two weeks before school starts, and in this searing Florida heat there is only

Cartoon Network to distract the boys from the empty, sickly feeling of homesickness.

We are all homesick. What had been home seems to be moving further from our reach each time the light and heat of day takes us from our dreams. I try to make plans to go to a museum or park or some advertised event, but we always wake late, and petty distractions or disagreements hold us to the house. In truth, we are afraid to leave, frightened of how adrift we might feel, afraid that being among other people would only deepen our disappointment in ourselves. Our house and Cartoon Network seem like needed shelter. I am convinced a dog would only enhance our sense of shelter.

Even as exciting an event as going to the animal shelter to pick a puppy doesn’t rally us enough to leave the house until late in the afternoon, dangerously close to the four o’clock closing time.

22 For some reason, the only animal shelter the operator could find was the county shelter in Brandon, a forty-minute drive from Tampa. We arrive—after driving past it three times—at ten minutes to four.

After arguing about the definition of “closing time,” the woman at the front desk, a heavyset, earnest volunteer, goes to the back offices to find a higher authority. I suspect she is just seeking a place to hide for ten minutes.

James (the sad one) sits on a padded metal chair, his arms folded across his chest, his head hanging from his shoulders. He sighs a couple of times and occasionally closes his eyes for a few seconds. Jeremy (the happy one) contents himself with the copies of old Dog Fancy magazines that lie on a low table in the center of the waiting area.

Jason (the angry one), with obvious control, is kicking things—the legs of the table, the soda machine, the chair his brother sits on. Finally, with full intention to miss, he kicks dangerously close to my shins.

“You lied,” he says. “You said we were going to get a dog today. You didn’t even know how to get here. You never do what you say you’re going to do. You always mess things up for us.” I know he and the others believe I am the cause of the divorce.

My husband Jonathan never apologized for anything, whereas I was always saying I’m sorry. “I’m sorry I forgot to wash your black jeans for today.” “I’m sorry, I thought you wanted tuna fish.” “I’m sorry you didn’t get picked to be on Henry’s team.” Of course, to them, the one who apologizes is the guilty one, thus I must have been the one to mess up the marriage. Jason kicks the table again, this time knocking over a half-filled can of soda that someone had left there.

23 “Dammit,” I say, looking for some way to clean up the mess, finally throwing a

Dog Fancy magazine over the puddle. “You made us late, not me. You had to watch t.v. after I asked you a hundred times to get ready. You couldn’t find your shoes because you never put them away. You just do everything the way you want to, it doesn’t matter what anyone else wants.” And thinking of his dad, I add you fucking brat silently in my mind.

When the soda can had begun its downward tilt, even as my frustration was turning to rage, there was a quiver of a second in which I enjoyed watching Jason’s eyes shift from a horizontal anger to a vertical “uh oh.” Now I feel only despair as I watch them fill with hate. Tears stream down his face, but there is no sadness in his expression.

He looks at me with a hard, steady glare.

His voice is low and clear and rapid. “I was in the car before you.”

I look at him and think, if you can’t be happy like Jeremy, why can’t you be silent and sullen like James, sitting on some chair, knowing things won’t work out? That way I could feel sorry for you or ignore you, as I choose.

Surprisingly, the woman returns. Her pudgy face softens when she sees Jason’s tears.

“It’s all right, young man. Mrs. Donovan said you could look around, but only for a short time.”

We light up, as if we’ve been showered with fairy dust, the fairy dust of expectation. As we walk through the doors that lead to the kennel, we are all imagining ourselves playing fetch—but with different dogs.

Despite the large selection, each of us quickly gravitates to a particular puppy, as if we recognize old reincarnated friends that vanished from our lives over the

24 centuries. I imagine James saying to the fluffy poodle mix, “Marcus, not since Rome…

But a dog? What happened?” Or Jason saying to the tiny blonde puppy that seemed to be part Chihuahua, “You were the best mom.”

The people working the kennel area do not rush us. They want us to leave with a dog, and not one that will come back. One by one, we each take our dogs to the play area and try to convince the others why this dog is the one we all should want.

Only I am enthusiastic about the large black part Rottweiller, part Shepard male that promises to grow into a sleek, sexy, sinewy, hundred pound dog. A dog that would escort me as I did late night grocery shopping or would wait non-judgmentally in the car if I ventured into bars at night.

Under pressure Jeremy abandons a small spaniel mix, probably an ex-lover, and petitions with James for the fluffy poodle mix.

By four-twenty, Jason and James are still with “their” puppies. Jeremy has left

James and his poodle and has gone off to look at the kittens. I am still convinced that only a large dog could quiet my heart and calm my stomach, both of which feel as if they are being continually twisted, like wrung rags.

“Guys, you know, I really was thinking, for lots of reasons, a big dog is a better choice.”

“Why?” James says.

“Because they’re better watchdogs.”

“You don’t know that,” he counters.

“Well, even if they’re not, they look scarier.”

“You said lots of reasons, what’s another?” 25 “A big dog is more sedate.”

“You don’t know that.” This time it is Jason speaking. You don’t even know what sedate means,

I think.

James knows he is no match for my power or Jason’s passion. He wilts under my pleading, his final words on the matter being, “Oh fine.” I don’t think about how his heart feels as he walks away from his puppy’s cage, the dog’s expectant eyes steadfast on

James’ back. I think instead, James knows I love him and that will carry him through all life’s hard and disappointing moments.

Jason doesn’t know I love him. I have often promised James and Jeremy and

Jason that a mother always loves her children, even when she’s angry with them. But in truth I haven’t always loved Jason. There have been times I have hated him. Sometimes in the dark hours after midnight, I bruise my heart, piling stone after stone of remorse on it. Often it is some incident with Jason that sits hardest against my heart.

Now I want to make up for those secret nights. I want to give Jason something he could love and that would love him. I want it to be evidence of my love.

We get Jason’s dog. That’s what I called the blonde Chihuahua mix, “Jason’s dog”. I had meant for us to get a “family” dog, but each of us has too strongly aligned ourself with a particular puppy. I thank James profusely for being understanding. I promise Jeremy a kitten for his next birthday. And I believe Jason’s promise of responsibility and vision of happiness.

The puppy snuggles close on Jason’s lap as we drive back home. She seems a calm puppy, and Jason is happy. For the first time since Jonathan walked out the door with his prized Gucci suitcase and practiced expression of remorse, I feel a wave of

26 comfort wash over me. If I manage not to look in the rearview mirror, and don’t catch

James’ hurt and sullen shape bent up against the passenger window, I can hold on to that sensation.

How is it that you wake up each morning hoping to move forward to some more comfortable place, to some sense of calm and accomplishment but instead, having no clue what direction to place your feet, you end up stepping into the still indented footprint of all the other mornings? Tomorrow, you think, you will find the map, or some event will occur that will wash your old footprints away, and you will be forced to set off on a new course. I tried to see the divorce as that event, but if anything it seems to make my old footprints deeper and muddier.

For the first week of puppy ownership, we are all enthralled. Her accidents are mere dribbles and easily cleaned (by me). Her teeth are tiny and harmless. She sleeps often, sweetly cuddled into one of the children. Our spirits lighten. James adopts the puppy as if she had been his first choice. But even more important, Jason hugs me many times that week. His arms tight around my waist, he draws me toward him.

When he was four, he and I sometimes played hide and seek while the others were at school. Usually I hid in the same two or three obvious places, behind a door or under a table. Once, thinking that he would like the challenge of a longer search, I hid behind the undrawn velvet curtains in the living room. It is hard to judge time from a child’s perspective. I could hear his voice, thin as an echo, calling “Mom?” Still I waited. Then I heard nothing. The house, two story and four bedrooms, felt eerily empty. Standing behind those drapes, I felt disengaged from everything I knew, like a

27 child playing hooky from school, who imagines the other children somehow continuing her life, walking around her desk, working on projects she had helped to make. There was a power in being so dangerously alone. I did not want to step out from my hiding place.

Then Jason’s voice was close again, high pitched and quivering, “Mom... Mommy...”

Something in me thrilled at his fear. Finally I pushed back the heavy fabric of the curtain and said, “You found me.” He buried his face in my stomach. I bent my head down beside his and kissed him by the ear. His bones trembled. We held on, relieved to have been returned to one another, back from some more dangerous place. I whispered,

“Don’t ever worry if you can’t find me, I’ll always find you.” It was the right thing to say. I don’t know if he could believe me.

I make a puppy feeding chart for Jason and he feels proud of himself—for the first week, maybe two weeks. Too soon though, the puppy ceases to be fascinating to everyone but me. Feeding him becomes harder and harder for Jason to remember: “In a minute.” “After this cartoon.” “ You always yell at me.” I don’t want this to become another issue between us. I just take over the care of the puppy, happily. She is my dog.

Surprisingly, if the dog really is part Chihuahua, it was a distant relative that was the

Chihuahua. In reality, I think she must have been a very young puppy, possibly six, not eight weeks old, when we got her. She grows. By the time she is six months old she weighs nearly forty pounds. Her coat, a tawny wheat color, is short and coarse, and her teeth are no longer harmless.

As the boys watch television, I am often in the background sprawled on the floor, my arms around the dog, my face buried into her neck. I’m sure it is a

28 disconcerting sight, a forty-two-year old woman cooing and sniffing into a dog’s fur, trying to find again the comfort of that musky aroma. When the boys do glance over, my sheepish grin confirms the awkwardness of the scene. Jason’s indifference—and the others as well—turns to resentment. The dog, named Jedi by Jason, is now seen as another sibling, someone else I favor over him. He is constantly telling on Jedi. “She tracked mud on the rug.” “She ate my X-man comic book.” “She chewed my bike tire.”

The dog does extensive damage throughout the house. If those sunrise walks are late, she pees on the Oriental rug. If glasses of milk are left on the coffee table she spills and breaks them. The picture window in the den is scratched deeply. The leg of the mahogany dining room table is scarred with teeth marks. Pillows are eaten. Often I blame the boys, usually James, because he is the oldest and because he would give me the least resistance. Why weren’t you watching? You know not to leave food out. Couldn’t you see the dog needed to pee? The sense of chaos seems endemic. I feel anxious and angry and addicted to sniffing the dog as she sleeps.

Finally in a rage, I announce, “I wasn’t the one who wanted a dog in the first place. We got the dog you wanted, Jason, and you don’t do anything to take care of her.

I’m taking the dog to obedience school and you’re going with her.” He doesn’t protest. I think I hear a vague suction sound, as if a shoe were being lifted out of mud.

The obedience school is at a local Y, in a room that is also used for toddler gymnastics. Plastic climbing structures and rubber mats are pushed to the corners of the room. Large yellow and red beanbags line the side walls. Along the back wall are metal folding chairs, open and waiting. Jason and I are the first to arrive. The trainer, a

29 man about thirty-five, muscled, with shaggy blonde hair, greets us with a quick “Hello,

I’m Bob King.” Then he goes down to his knees and rubs Jedi’s ears. His face lights up,

“Who have we got here? Yes, you are a handsome dog, aren’t you?” I am beaming with pride, thinking this man of experience sees in Jedi the potential of a Lassie.

“Her name is Jedi. She’s my son’s dog.” I add that information so that I will not be held accountable for the dog’s present behavior. But Bob King’s attention is already on another arriving dog. “Take a seat,” he says and repeats his greeting exactly to the next dog. The role of ownership now occurs to Jason, and he wants to be the one holding the dog’s leash. I’m not sure he can control the dog in this situation but I feel obligated to hand the leash over to him.

The next ten minutes are a whirl of straining, choking dogs, jumping on each other and whoever walks close to them. I sit in one of the chairs against the wall and watch Jason partake in the chaos. He follows Jedi around the room as she ecstatically greets her long-lost cousins, thinking we have arranged a fabulous doggie surprise party for her. Jason is caught up in the excitement as well, petting anything that will hold still long enough to be touched. Jedi’s eyes take on a sharklike quality, as if there is no one home in her brain. The corners of her mouth extend to her floppy ears in a grin.

Bob King insists everyone get control of their dogs and sit down. Jason, with all his strength, pulls Jedi across the linoleum floor. As her rump slides along the floor, Jedi continues grinning.

Most of the dogs have settled down in the time it takes Jason to drag Jedi to our seats. Bob King begins talking. Jason sits and tells me he’s bored, then lets the leash drop. Jedi races down the line of dogs, stopping at a spindly, all legs Irish Setter puppy.

30 The setter bounces like a basketball. I apologize to the owner, the most together-looking man in this varied group. He is very gracious. When I return to my spot, Jason is stretched out across both seats, and I imagine Bob King is putting us in the ‘should- never-own-a-dog’ category.

“Dogs are very social animals,” Bob King says, “but their society has a strict code of hierarchy. It is made up of alpha and sub-alpha and then beta and sub-beta dogs.

These traits are inborn and dogs know their place.” I am wondering if beta dogs are ever envious of the power of alpha dogs, or if they just hang out with sub-beta dogs in order to feel good about themselves. As Bob King goes on, it is clear that the beta dogs in fact seek out the alpha dogs, they look for leadership. I think of my marriage. I look at Jason.

His young seven-year-old face is serious and attentive. I don’t know how much of this he takes in, but I am sure he is feeling his father’s absence.

“To your pet, you are all the alpha dog and they long for you to take control. It is my job to help you do that.” And Bob King smiles. I am attracted to him, because he likes dogs, because he is not an unattractive man and because at least in this situation, he is clearly the alpha dog. I realize how deep my beta-ism runs.

The class goes quickly; we practice “Sit,” “Down” and “Stay”. Any successful command thrills me, making me feel I have a power that transcends species. Jason remains on the chairs, saying he is too tired, but he’s watching the class with interest.

There are seven dogs in the class, and the range of ability to pay attention varies greatly, the Irish Setter being the most distracted of all the dogs. His owner is patient and calm, making the rest of us seem humorless and self-serious.

31 It is a cold Tampa evening when the class is over. The trees are blowing and it feels as if rain is coming, though it’s hard for me to tell because the sky is already dark at this hour. I like rainy nights. Nobody leaves you on a rainy night. Jason and I see a bolt of lightning. I imagine a seam in the universe is being ripped, revealing a hidden sky of blinding white energy that we glimpse only for a second. I say to Jason, “Did you know that Tampa has more lightning than any other place in America?”

“You told me a hundred times, Mom.”

“I guess I think it’s kind of exciting. So what did you think of obedience school?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“How do you think Jedi did?” I ask.

“I don’t think Jedi thinks you can control her.” A surprisingly soft roll of thunder follows his remark.

“I thought we did pretty well. What about that setter? That puppy seemed pretty out of control.”

“What dog? They all sat.”

“ The red long haired dog, it’s called an Irish Setter.”

“ I know,” he answers quickly. Then adds quietly, “You said ‘sitter.’ ”

“Well, I meant to say ‘setter’. He was pretty wild.”

“Maybe it was a girl.”

“Maybe. Do you remember its name?”

“Happy.”

“That’s right, very good. I forgot. That’s a fun name. It was a happy dog, wasn’t it?”

“That’s because it didn’t get yelled at all the time, like Jedi.”

32 I cross my eyes and furrow my brow in a lighthearted expression of incredulity.

Large, slow drops of rain plunk against the windshield.

“What do you mean? I didn’t yell at Jedi.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I don’t think I was yelling at Jedi.”

“Yes, you were.”

“I mean, sometimes maybe I said things in a strong voice, but she has to understand I’m in charge, and it’s not time to play around. I wasn’t yelling.” Give me a fucking break.

We watch the rain gain force, pounding the windshield.

The next Saturday, after taking the dog on her sunrise walk, I return to my half- empty bed. Awake for hours, I lie there, trying to breathe my pounding heart into a less painful rhythm. Then my husband, my ex-husband, calls. He has an emergency at the hospital, he’s an internist, and won’t be able to take the boys until this evening. The conversation is quick and emphatic. I want him to ask, “Is that okay for you?” I want him to say, “How have you been? Are you all right?” I want to hear his voice just a few seconds longer.

After he hangs up, my body feels loose and shaky. I think about the fact that I am made up of spinning, bumping atoms, that there is nothing solid in me. I am wishing it were raining.

33 I tell the boys. James (my hound) just shrugs his shoulders and nods. Jeremy

(my spaniel) asks if he can play at his friend’s house and Jason (the terrier) slams the door to his room.

Later, as I am clearing the breakfast plates, I try to think of something I might be able to do with James and Jason that afternoon. I look out the kitchen window and see

Jason trying to teach Jedi to stay. I am pleased and self-congratulatory.

But soon I hear the anger and frustration in his voice. “No. No. Stay. Stay.

No. I said to stay. Stay. No. Stay you fucking dog.” I look out again and see that

Jason is about to hit Jedi. “Jason,” I shout. “Stop it!” He sees me staring out at him.

He starts running towards the gate. I put Jedi in the house and run after him.

He is halfway down the block by the time I reach him. I am about to yell at him, “Don’t you ever...” but as I turn his body to face mine, I don’t recognize him. His face is twisted in sadness and rage. He looks like a little old man, Rumplestilsken, the moment he has to give up the child. As if Jason is aware that his face is revealing more than he intends to, he raises his hands to cover it.

“Let’s go home,” I say gently. I put my arm around his shoulder. He keeps his hands on his face and we start to walk back. We get only a few feet before he just sinks from my fingers and is lying on the sidewalk. Little sobs float from his body. “Come on

Jason, get up.” His sobs grow deeper and start to come so fast I think he can’t breathe.

His body shakes.

I go down to him and cradle him in my arms. We rock, a simple motion of forgotten comfort. He turns his body in my arms, hugging my neck, nestling his face on 34 my chest. His tears are a strange flow of warm then cold on my skin. His sobs gradually slow, and he moans a continual “I can’t. I can’t.... I can’t....”

“You can’t what, sweetheart?”

He just repeats “I can’t’..I can’t.”

I know. I know, my sweet baby. Like the seam of the sky opening, in these few moments I believe I see inside Jason.

I don’t know what to say to him. What part of this universe can he control? not who he was born, not the family he was born to, not the thoughts that scare him at night, not the emotions that spring full blown and uninvited, not the dreams that tear him from sleep, not the strange moments of sheer fate that rush at anyone. But I tell him, “You know, a lot of children your age think that they are all powerful, that they can make things happen, they can cause good things and bad things, but you know better, you know a secret that it takes most people a long time to figure out. You are very strong and solid and brave to know this secret, to not be afraid of things you can’t control. And you will learn what’s important and what thoughts and feelings to ignore. You will learn how to choose the things you want to do.”

It is the right thing to say.

SISTER FIVE BY FIVE

Katherine’s name is still on the blackboard. It’s Wednesday and her name written in Sister Five by Five’s curling script is on the upper corner of the blackboard.

And the baby Jesus, his tiny hands reaching from his bed of straw, is still on the Sister’s desk.

Every week Sister Five by Five puts a student’s name on the blackboard, and if that student does everything right, and doesn’t come to school late, or forget a pencil, and her homework is not wrinkled or smudged, and she doesn’t get caught talking, or being dreamy, or writing with her left hand, then her name doesn’t get erased and she will receive the sacramental. This week the prize is the teeny baby Jesus. It is much better than the St. Christopher medal or the small statue of the grown-up Jesus that Matthew and Kimberly won. It is the end of October and so far those are the only two students who have kept their names on the board for a whole week.

Sister Five by Five is drawing circles on the blackboard. The chalk is hidden by the Sister’s wide fingers, and Katherine imagines chalk lines magically flowing from

Sister Five by Five’s fingertips, allowing her to write on blackboards or concrete walls or even draw hopscotch lines on the sidewalk whenever she wants to. She imagines Sister

Five by Five chalking crosses or checks on children’s foreheads, the way the Priest marks people’s head on Ash Wednesday.

35 36 Then Katherine thinks about King Midas, how he couldn’t control his power.

What if the Sister couldn’t control the chalk oozing from her fingers, what if she has to leave a white chalky dust on everything she touches?

Katherine thinks of all the things Sister Five by Five touches, rulers and pens, forks and knives, papers, books, the rosary beads, her crucifix. And children.

Sometimes Sister Five by Five pulls children into her body, hugging them because they remembered every of and and in their recitation. Her hands are very strong.

When she hugs you, you feel her black habit sweep around your face. It smells like flowers, and you can pretend you’re a baby flower safe inside a seed.

Sometimes she grabs children off their seats or out of line, her fingers pressing the flesh of their arms, leaving a red imprint of her hand on their skin. If she left a chalk mark you could just dust it off. The red imprint lingers long after she has let go of you.

Once, Sister Five by Five grabbed Katherine. It was during choir practice, the

Sister was arranging the children in size order. Katherine was watching Joey, who had already been grabbed out of line for blowing on Peter’s neck, and made to sit on his hands in the pew. His head was bent over the arm of the pew, and Katherine could see his mouth tightening into a snarl. Joey had left bite marks all over the classroom, on the book shelf when he’d been made to stand in the corner, on the leg of Sister Five by Five’s desk when he’d been told to sit on the floor by her desk, on books, on crayons, on pencils. It was like a treasure hunt finding his marks at St. Mary’s Help of Christians.

Katherine was thinking how in a few weeks she might forget that Joey bit the arm of the pew. Then she would be surprised if she accidentally discovered his bite marks. But she wasn’t sure if she could forget watching Joey chomping on the pew’s 37 arm. The more she thought about it, the more she was afraid she would always remember it. She tried closing her eyes. But she was still thinking about it.

Suddenly she felt a pressure around her upper arm. Then she was being lifted and pulled. She had to stand on her toes to keep her balance as she was dragged three

spaces down the line and pushed in between Jennifer and Steven. Sister Five by

Five held her arm and shook her. “Get off your toes,” she said. Katherine was pulled out again and moved into the space ahead, now between Jennifer and Mary.

Katherine was pleased to have obviously grown, though it seemed to displease

Sister Five by Five. Maybe Sister Five by Five didn’t like the children to grow. There are already a few children who in the third grade are almost as tall as the Sister’s five feet.

That’s why she is called Sister Five by Five, because she is five feet tall and five feet wide. Or that’s what everyone says. And if you don’t count her head, she does look like a black square box. And if you do count her head, she looks like a small square box sitting on a big square box and all covered with a black tablecloth, like the beginning of some magician’s trick.

Sister Five by Five is dividing the circles into pie slices. Katherine looks up from her paper and sees the lowered heads of her classmates, like a field of browns and golds with little blooms of red, and a small dark lake where the Puerto Rican children sit.

Sister Five by Five keeps them together so Domingo can explain to the others what the

Sister lost patience trying to get them to understand.

Katherine glances at the blackboard. Sister Five by Five has already filled in four circles and Katherine is still copying the first circle. Without taking her eyes off

38 Sister Five by Five, she switches her pencil to her left hand. It isn’t a sin to write with your left hand, it just isn’t allowed. Last year, if Sister Ludmilla saw Katherine using her left hand, she would sometimes make her rewrite her work, even if it was neat – usually neater. Sister Monica the year before would just tell her to switch hands. No one had been as strict as Sister Five by Five. “And that was the problem,” Sister Five by Five said. That was why in the third grade she was still writing with her left hand. If Sister

Five by Five caught her writing with her left hand, she called her to the front of the classroom and told her to stretch out her arms.

The first time this happened, Katherine wasn’t very frightened, though she had seen what happened to other children with out-stretched arms. Katherine expected a lecture about learning to use her right hand for penmanship. She thought the Sister might put tape on her left hand as a reminder of which hand was which, as well as a reminder to everyone else that Katherine was someone who didn’t know her right from her left. But then Sister Five by Five told her to turn her palms up. She did.

The slap of the ruler stunned her. For a second Katherine didn’t even feel the pain. It was like the pinball game at the pizza restaurant, there is a moment when the ball is struck and it moves quietly up the aisle. Then Katherine felt it.

She could have made it back to her seat without crying if the Sister hadn’t kept her up there with the question, “Do you know why I did that, dear?”

Katherine stood mute, hoping that by keeping still she might hold back the tears a few seconds longer, maybe long enough to make it to her seat.

“Do you know why I had to use a ruler, Katherine?” The Sister’s quick breaths made a faint slurping sound. “I’m waiting for your answer.”

39 Katherine shook her head.

“Well, take a guess dear.”

Katherine noticed how the Sister’s chest rose with her shallow breaths.

Katherine started to move her lips. The tears fell.

“Oh goodness, goodness,” Sister Five by Five said. Then, turning to the class, she asked, “Do third graders cry?” And the children answered with the smug relief that they were not the ones crying this time, “Noooo.”

Smiling, Sister Five by Five asked the class, “Who knows why I had to use the ruler with Katherine?”

Four hands shot up. Luis, Steven, Paula, Nicolas, all eager to prove they knew the answers to some things.

“Yes, Luis.”

Luis stood up, pushed his chair in, and said, “To punish her for writing with her left hand.”

Sister Five by Five was quiet for a moment; she wrapped her fingers around her crucifix and lifted it barely an inch off her chest. She rolled her eyes toward the plaster head of Jesus that rests on top of the file cabinet by her desk. “Oh dear Jesus, they never understand, do they?” Then as if in response to Jesus’ reply, the Sister shook her head, chuckled, and said, as if it was the hundredth time Luis had given the same wrong answer, “Sit down Luis.

“No, not to punish Katherine; to teach her. Children, the Lord Jesus loves you, and I love you. We don’t want to punish you for all kinds of little things. We want to teach you. I don’t want Katherine to be writing her letters wrong for the rest of her life. I

40 want her to learn the right way to do it – and I want her to do it the right way, with her right hand.” Sister Five by Five changed herself into someone’s grandmother and twinkled at her little joke. “Sit down now, sweetheart.” Katherine heard the Sister’s chest wheeze as Sister Five by Five kissed her on her forehead just where her bangs ended.

Sister Five by Five’s back has been to the class for a while now as she sets six circle graph problems on the blackboard. Luis, short and squirmy, sitting near the front of the room, has turned two of the circles on his paper into faces in profile with puckered lips stretching towards each other. Over one head he has written “Margaret” and over the other he has written “Steven.” He turns toward the back of the room and holds the paper over his head. Steven is just adding legs to the three circles he had labeled Midget

Matthew, Luis the Loser, and Tubby Thomas, when John pokes him and points to Luis’s picture. With the swiftness of a snake to a frog, Steven slinks through four rows of desks and snatches the picture. He crumples it in his hand, sits back in his seat, and holds his own artwork over his head.

This was the rhythm of the classroom. When Sister Five by Five turned to face the classroom, the children sat with arching backs and planted feet. But when her face disappeared, and only the black of her habit was visible, when for instance she wrote on the blackboard, or when her head drooped forward, as it did every afternoon at two o’clock when she would fall asleep at her desk, then the children would let their bodies come loose.

Every afternoon at two o’clock when the spelling or grammar lesson was over, the class would take out their geography workbooks. They were to read about a country

41 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Sister Five by Five sat at her desk, her prayer book propped in her hands. The children worked silently, listening as the Sister’s short breaths grew longer and began to rattle in her chest. They waited for the prayer book to knock against the desk, signaling that Sister Five by Five’s head had bent downward, like the dead bloom of a flower, and the curtains of her habit hid much of her face.

It always makes Katherine angry the way the class becomes noisy and unruly. If they would just keep quiet, the Sister might sleep until the three o’clock bell, and they could read their comic books, or take the pass from her desk and walk through the empty halls, looking into other classrooms or studying the dark paintings of bleeding saints, some with their clothes falling off their bodies. Or the boys could take the pass and go to the bathroom and pee without worrying that Sister Five by Five would barge in with her long pointer and slap at their calves because they had been too long, “most likely joking around, misusing their toilet time and now they would just have to zip up and suffer for their nonsense.” Katherine could hear Sister Five by Five’s voice, thin and flat, taking those quick-sucking breaths. Secretly Katherine liked to watch the boys running out of the boy’s room when the Sister had gone in after them. They reminded her of ants racing from their hole when you threw a lighted match at it.

But Katherine’s classmates were never quiet. Something happened to them when the Sister fell asleep. Sometimes it even happened to Katherine. A whole mix of feelings came into her. It was a little like feeling confused, not remembering what you were supposed to do or why you were supposed to do it. And it was a little like being scared, and excited, like when you play musical chairs and the music is going fast and

42 you start racing around the chairs, you can’t stop, but you know soon someone’s going to lose. And it was a lot like being happy.

Even when Katherine tries to shush people, she sometimes just starts laughing because she’s all keyed up. That’s how her father would say it, “Watch out, young lady, you’re getting all keyed up.” And Katherine feels like there are a hundred cold metal keys tickling her body, unlocking little spaces of flesh so the giggles can come out.

But then the Sister wakes up, and if she sees you, or worse, if she sees your empty seat, you get dragged to the front of the classroom and you get the pointer across your backside. It doesn’t matter if you were just telling someone to be quiet, or you just wanted to borrow a crayon or sharpen your pencil; if the Sister sees you when she first lifts her head up, you get the smacking.

Sister Five by Five turns from the blackboard; the children straighten in their chairs, “What all nonsense is going on? Are you children looking to lose your recess time? Now have a look at this first circle.”

Before the Sister can look back at the first circle, Bridget raises her hand.

Bridget sits next to Katherine. She has a new front tooth just popping in, and her red hair is in tight curls that frazzle at the end, leaving threads that wiggle in the air like thin spider legs.

“What is it, Bridget?” Sister Five by Five does not like Bridget. You can tell by the way the Sister always lets out a heavy breath when she calls on Bridget. Or how she never smiles when Bridget gives the right answer. Bridget says she loves Sister Five by

43 Five, even after Sister Five by Five erased her name last week when she came in late, even though she had a note from her mother.

“Sister, Katherine was writing her math problems with her left hand.”

For a second Katherine thinks she couldn’t have heard Bridget right. She feels the coolness of the air on the roof of her mouth and she realizes her mouth is open as if she were about to sing, “Oh come all Ye faithful...”

“And how is that any concern of yours, Bridget? Do you think Jesus likes to see children trying to get other children in trouble? You just watch out for yourself and let me watch out for the rest of the children.”

Bridget’s cheeks flush in splotches of red, but her voice is confident, “I just didn’t want Katherine to do it the wrong way.”

“Sure, and I’m Saint Peter. God always knows what you are thinking.” The class laughs and the Sister faces the first circle on the blackboard. Katherine’s name is untouched. But Katherine knows that Sister Five by Five will never let her win the baby

Jesus now.

In the afternoon, Sister Five by Five hands back the spelling tests. If you get below a seventy on a spelling test your mother or father has to sign it.

Sister Five by Five gives Katherine her test. There are four red xs and sixty is written on the top in large red numbers. Katherine quickly folds it and pushes it in her desk. She doesn’t want Bridget to see it.

Sister Five by Five writes Geography on the blackboard, and then writes

Greenland underneath it. The children take out their books. Sister Five by Five sits at

44 her desk and picks up her prayer book. The room is very quiet. The Sister’s breaths are short and slurpy, then they get longer and you can hear them bouncing in her throat.

The children are copying the questions from the geography book into their notebook. Soon Sister Five by Five’s head drops forward. Faces rise up and look around the classroom. Then the breaths settle into a steady rattle in her chest. More heads lift up.

The children are wiggling in their seats, turning their bodies to search out which pocket of the room will provide the most entertainment. Finally the prayer book falls.

Surprisingly, it is Lupe who is dragged to the front of the classroom. She is one of the Puerto Rican children. She sits at the end of the second row, smiling and nodding her head whenever the Sister is talking. She never raises her hand. Katherine has never heard her speak English, and when she does speak to the other Puerto Rican children, her voice is whispery. But there she was eating a cookie she had kept in her desk since lunchtime, as Sister Five by Five was waking from her dream. When Sister Five by Five lifted her eyelids to take in the real world, Lupe looked up and stared straight at her.

Sister Five by Five had always told the children that she didn’t have favorites, that she was always fair, just as God was always fair. It didn’t matter how good you had been in the past, if you sinned, God would punish you. He judged the priests the same as

He judged the thieves. So she might be thinking that she is showing the children how fair she is when she smacks Lupe across the backside. For the first time Katherine closes her eyes when someone is being hit.

45 As she steps onto the school bus, Katherine remembers the spelling test that she left in her desk. She gets off and pushes past the swarm of children filing onto the buses.

She rushes back to the classroom. There is no one in it. When Katherine arrives in the morning the classroom feels cold and smells like the air smells before a snowfall. But now the classroom feels warm and swampy, and it smells sweet like paste and almonds.

She puts her spelling test in her binder. She notices the baby Jesus on Sister Five by

Five’s desk.

At home, Katherine is lying on the carpet, her head is resting on one of the couch pillows and the baby Jesus, blanketed in one of her handkerchiefs, lies on another pillow. She is watching cartoons on the television. She has turned the volume very low so as not to wake her baby sister, though she hears the baby crying from her crib in her parent’s bedroom.

Elmer Fudd is sitting on the limb of a tree that hangs over a cliff. He is waiting to drop a small round bomb on Daffy Duck. He doesn’t know that Daffy is behind him, that Daffy has sawed off the limb of the tree, that he is floating in mid-air. He turns around and sees Daffy waving good-bye to him. Katherine’s mother turns the knob of the television and the screen goes dark, leaving a bright star to linger a few seconds longer in the center of the screen.

“Wash your hands for dinner,” Katherine’s mother says. She is carrying the baby. The baby is all pink and damp looking. Katherine thinks it looks like Elmer Fudd if someone stepped on Elmer Fudd and squished him up.

46 Katherine carries the baby Jesus with her. At the table is a plate of macaroni and cheese, an apple by its side, a glass of milk.

Katherine sets the Jesus down by the milk. Her mother is changing the baby’s diaper in the bedroom, and her father is away on business. He sometimes goes away on business. It seems to Katherine he has been away a long time.

Katherine doesn’t feel bad about taking the baby Jesus. Since Monday she has thought about having the baby Jesus with her in her home. She thinks of the baby Jesus alone in the classroom late at night. She thinks how the round tops of the chairs might look like a graveyard, making you think of the people who are not there anymore.

Katherine imagines ghost-like children sitting at their desks in the dark. She knows the baby Jesus would be scared in the classroom, and cold. But she will protect him. And the grown-up Jesus will love her especially, more than any of the other children in the class. She touches her finger to the baby’s tiny arms, she feels light around her.

When Katherine goes to bed she puts the baby Jesus on top of her blankets and kneels down before him to say her prayers. She lays him next to her pillow when she slides under the covers.

The window is open just a crack and through sheer, graying curtains Katherine can see the night sky. She hears the trees rustle. Then the curtains sway and lift.

Katherine thinks they are reaching towards her, like the thin, wavy fingers of God.

Katherine feels God’s presence like a steady moan filling the room.

She feels her heart gasp, the way it did the time she heard her baby sister choking, and she remembered she hadn’t put her marbles away when her mother told her to. Now she is remembering she stole something. She has stolen God’s child, she has

47 stolen him from Sister Five by Five, God’s holy bride. God’s voice is in her head demanding she say the eighth commandment, over and over.

Katherine doesn’t close her eyes all night. She feels the hand of God pressing her heart, punishing her for her sin.

On the bus to school, Katherine tells herself that Sister Five by Five will not have noticed the missing sacramental. She has only to sneak it back to the desk, and go to confession. The Priest will not make her tell Sister Five by Five because there will be nothing to tell, the Sister wouldn’t even know it was stolen.

When Katherine enters the classroom, she sees that Sister Five by Five has written on the board in her precise curling script,

Someone has stolen the sacramental Jesus

Someone is going to hell

Someone must go to confession

Someone must return the baby Jesus to my hands.

Katherine sees her name is still written on the upper corner of the blackboard.

The children are putting their bookbags away very quietly and sitting at their desks. Sister Five by Five is standing by her desk in the front of the classroom. Her head is slightly bowed and her eyes are closed. Her fingers are around her crucifix. Except for her chest rising with the sucking sound of her breath, she is motionless.

Katherine wonders if this is what purgatory is like, feeling all scared inside and just waiting.

48 Finally Sister Five by Five opens her eyes. She pulls in a heavy gulp of air. Her voice is flat and even as she speaks.

“All night I have been praying.” She looks to Jesus’ head on the file cabinet.

“Haven’t I Jesus?” She nods after a moment, then continues. “I asked God to reveal the sinner to me so that I could save their immortal soul from hell. Do you know what he answered?” The Sister pauses. Luis raises his hand. The Sister grabs the ruler from her desk and slams it against the leg of Luis’s desk. “Put your hand down, Luis. You don’t know what He answered.” Her voice becomes even again. “He told me I was to be patient, to wait, that His ways would be revealed. Some child in this classroom is sitting here scared stiff because they know they are destined for hell right now. And you know, children, once you go to hell there is no way out, for all eternity. Your mother can’t help you, your guardian angel can’t help, Mary can’t help you, not even Jesus can get you out of hell.

“Maybe that person is thinking, well I’m just eight or nine years old, I’ve got time to confess this sin before I die. Well I’ve got news for you; you are loony tunes if that’s what you think. It could happen any minute, and if you don’t get right with God now, it will be too late. If you don’t think there are eight and nine year olds in hell, crying and screaming, their flesh burning for every second of eternity, then you are full of poppycock.

“Children, it hurts my heart to think one of you would steal the baby Jesus; and I am going to keep praying every night for the Lord to show me which child needs my help.

49 “I am also putting a blessed statue of the Virgin Mary on my desk. If Katherine can keep her name on the blackboard today and tomorrow she will earn this sacramental.”

At lunchtime the class is brought to confession. Katherine tries to keep a song in her head. She repeats zippity’doo’dah zippity’day, in her mind as she waits to enter the confessional. She is afraid if she doesn’t sing, someone will see her fear.

The Priest tells her it is a mortal sin that she has committed and her soul is in grave danger. She is to return the sacramental Jesus, apologize to the Sister, and say five hail Marys.

During recess Katherine approaches Sister Five by Five. She feels her throat tighten. She cannot get enough air to speak. She makes herself cough. She then asks for a pass to see the nurse. She doesn’t feel well, she says.

That night, when Katherine sees the baby Jesus wrapped in her handkerchief, lying on her pillow, she feels hate rise in her eyes. She hates that stupid baby. She hates how he lies there not caring for her. He looks just like a stupid baby. She cries until she falls asleep. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, she prays to be forgiven. She prays for the courage to tell Sister Five by Five.

The next day she puts the baby Jesus in her book bag. She is determined to return the baby Jesus to Sister Five by Five first thing in the morning.

The classroom is cold. At eight o’clock in the morning the sky is gray and drizzly. Katherine holds the baby Jesus in her fist. As she walks up to Sister Five by

Five, Katherine feels weakness, like a wire, thread through her body.

50 “Yes, what is it?” The Sister’s eyes are stern and impatient. Katherine whispers that she has forgotten her pencil. Sister Five by Five tells her she will have to write with a crayon. Then she erases Katherine’s name from the board.

All morning Katherine tries to remember the rules and figure out a way to save her immortal soul. Her penance is to return the baby Jesus and apologize to Sister Five by

Five. But she knows she will never be able to apologize to Sister Five by Five. So how can she be forgiven? Only when the Sister is dead can Katherine be free from this mortal sin. Then, when the Sister is dead, Katherine will confess again, and no one will tell her to apologize to the Sister; instead she will say a hundred Hail Marys, and pay a million dollars to the church and she will be forgiven and she won’t go to hell.

Or maybe, Katherine thinks, if the Sister has a stroke, like her grandfather did, then Katherine could visit her in the hospital and put the baby Jesus in the Sister’s hand, and apologize. Katherine just has to make sure that she doesn’t die before Sister Five by

Five does. If she dies before Sister Five by Five, she will have to go to hell. Katherine tells herself that she will be very, very careful. She will always look both ways before crossing the street. She will always wash her hands and brush her teeth. She will never swim in the ocean or the deep end of a pool. She wouldn’t even go sleigh riding. And she will always send Sister Five by Five a Christmas card so that someone will let her know when the Sister has died.

At two o’clock the Sister writes Geography on the blackboard, and underneath it she writes Lapland.

The Sister sits at her desk and picks up her prayer book. Very soon the children hear a few rattlely breaths. Then the prayer book falls to the table. 51 For the last two days the children have been suspecting and accusing each other of all kinds of mortal sins. Memories reach back to second grade, and unanswered mysteries of missing marbles, and dollar bills, and pencils with fancy erasers.

As Sister Five by Five rests, the room grows rowdier than ever, fights break out, desks are overturned in an effort to find ‘stolen’ objects. Everyone knows that when the

Sister wakes up there will be more than one sore backside.

Steven opens a window and invents the game of throwing crayons on people walking by. Joey sneaks past the Sister’s desk and opens the file cabinet door. He takes the jar of Hershey Kisses that she has hidden there and starts eating them. Bridget and

George beg him to share some.

Matthew dares Nicolas to go up to Sister Five by Five and touch her. He does.

He touches her elbow and runs back to his seat. Then Matthew creeps up and touches her fingers. Joey gives anyone who touches the Sister, a Hershey Kiss. Even Bridget touches the Sister’s head.

Luis is beside himself with excitement. He is jumping around his desk like a wind up toy. The noise is so loud in the classroom Katherine feels dizzy. But still Sister

Five by Five sleeps.

Then the door of the classroom opens as if a gust of wind threw it back. “What is going on here?” Sister Angelica screams. Everyone freezes. Sister Angelica sees

Sister Five by Five sitting at her desk. “Sister Rita,” Sister Angelica calls. She walks up to Sister Five by Five. “Sister Rita?” she says louder. Sister Angelica touches the

Sister’s shoulder. Sister Five by Five falls forward. The children gasp. Sister Angelica puts her fingers by Sister Five by Five’s neck. 52 Sister Angelica looks up as if she can’t remember where she is or why she is standing next to Sister Rita. She reminds Katherine of a child who is called on to give the answer when she wasn’t paying attention to the question.

“Children,” Sister Angelica finally says, “God has called Sister Rita to her heavenly reward.” .

Some of the children forget not to say “yea!” as they race out of the classroom.

Katherine is stricken. She believes she is to blame. Now she is not only a thief, she is a murderer too. God knew what was in her heart. He knew how she wished for

Sister Five by Five to die. Now he has killed her, saying to Katherine, “Is this what you wanted? Is this how you hoped to save yourself? Do you think I will forgive you now?”

Katherine feels her feet evaporating. Sister Angelica holds her. Katherine is too frightened to cry.

Sister Angelica carefully walks Katherine out of the room. She tells Katherine to wait in an empty classroom until she returns.

Katherine lets her head rest on the desktop. She watches surges of wind bend branches as the sky darkens for rain. Katherine thinks how Adam and Eve tried to hide from God after they disobeyed Him, how Cain tried to hide after he killed his brother.

But there is no place in the whole universe you can hide from God. Only in hell are you hidden from God’s light.

When Sister Angelica comes back, she tells Katherine not to feel sad for Sister

Rita. She tells her that Sister Rita is happier now than she has ever been. She has entered

God’s heavenly kingdom. She says that there is no better death than to leave your temporal body holding a prayer book. She tells Katherine that even though she knows

53 Katherine will miss Sister Rita, she should not think selfishly, but she should be happy that God has heard Sister Rita’s prayers.

As Katherine lies in bed that night, she watches the curtains blow into the room.

They reach for her like open arms. She feels God’s presence, but this time it fills the room with a music sound, like the sound of singing from a far away radio. For the first time in two days she isn’t frightened. She feels God’s lips brush against her cheek. She sees Sister Five by Five smiling over her bed. Her heart warms, like a cinnamon bun spreading itself as it heats in an oven. She understands. God has answered her prayers, just as he answered Sister Five by Five’s prayers. The Sister said that God reveals himself in mysterious ways. Sister Five by Five said that God is always speaking to us, but we don’t know how to listen. Katherine knows she is listening now. She knows that of all the children in St. Mary’s Help of Christians God has revealed himself to her, that by answering her prayers he has especially blessed her. He has called her to him.

Katherine gets out of bed and takes the baby Jesus from her book bag. She wraps Him in one of her party socks with the lace around the ankle. She climbs back into bed and closes her eyes. She has the most wonderful dream. She dreams she is sitting on a cloud with Sister Five by Five. They are both wearing white habits made of silk. Sister Five by Five says, “Thank you Katherine”, and then hands her the ruler. All the children float by and bow.

When Katherine wakes up she kisses the baby Jesus. She thinks about how she once asked her father what she going to become when she grew up. And he said,

“Whatever you dream.”

ULIPO

No i

To celebrate the day my mother bore me, my aunt (my mother’s clone—one egg, one sperm, two embryos) meets me for lunch. By gene count, three-halves of my mother and one-half of my father gather at a crowded restaurant.

The restaurant seems to swell from sounds, the clatter of forks and spoons on plates, arguments spat across tables, laughter; all make me feel unbalanced.

My aunt puts her glass of sherry down and speaks loudly, “Just understand the cosmos speaks to us all, you can’t know what you want to do next, just because you want to. Pause, and an answer comes.”

My pause has lasted two years. My aunt (no husband, no son, no daughter) allows me to stay at her guesthouse. My presence makes her less lonely. She pretends my two-year pause doesn’t seem odd. She pretends she doesn’t envy my mother, an actress of some renown. She pretends she cares about me.

Before my appearance at my aunt’s house, there was a journey to Turkey, then a nose job, then a “let go from” job. Then my mother could not stand to watch me pause any longer, and suggested a move to my aunt’s house. And before all that a fetus was aborted.

54 55 My aunt reaches for a smoke from a gold case. Her hands are small, wavy blue streams run across the backs, and last week’s splash of ruby red color now peels. But as her hands move around the case, she lets the grace and power of an elegant object transform them.

“For example,” she says, and tells me more about how the cosmos works, aware of the effect of her gestures and speech on me, “Once, when Henry was my husband, there were two sparrows on the balcony off my bedroom. They caught my eye through the French doors. One sparrow pecked gently at the other one, to groom her or seduce her. She seemed to enjoy what they were up to. Then they saw me. They knew they should fly away, they knew there was danger present, but they stayed. Those sweet pecks felt too good. They watched me watch them. And then, some part of me understood, so clearly, that my rendezvouses avec Ted, my yoga teacher, needed to end.”

She taps an ash as she stares at me. She hopes to detect from my bland face some clue as to my response to the news that she and her yoga teacher slept together.

That’s not news to me. My mother told me years ago. She told me that Henry found out about the yoga teacher and left her. So the cosmos wasn’t really much help.

Maybe the cosmos wanted her to leave Henry and she wrongly understood the message.

A breath of smoke floats between us.

Do the unborn fly beyond the cosmos?

Her face changes from the observer back to the observed. Her head lowers and leans just barely away from me. Her elbows rest on the table, her hands gently cup her face, to mask the downward pull of age. She wants to convey a sense of herself as

56 sexual. She wants me to see what hasn’t, she hopes, been lost to my glance. How strange to see my mother masquerade as someone else.

The sway of the smoke from the ashtray calms me, and the murmur of the restaurant becomes a vague pulse. My aunt speaks, her words sound drowsy, “ Funny, but sparrows seem to connect with me, somehow. They’ve been part of my dreams.”

The dream she wants to tell me she has told me before. She takes her anecdotes, remembrances and dreams out from some well-kept closet and parades them around as clothes she loves to wear, sure the styles she loves never change.

She tells the dream: She was a sparrow. A hunter shoots her. She wants to be mortally wounded, to no longer be a sparrow. She wants to become a person. But God tells her the wound was not fatal, and he wants her to stay a sparrow. She begs to be someone else. At last God agrees. She takes a human form, has money, fame, a husband, babes, but her heart flutters as a sparrow’s.

As she talks, my thoughts have begun to rummage around my own closet, to look for clothes that were once comfortable to wear. Only shredded sleeves and frayed hems are found. There must be a secret door, a moveable panel, a passage out.

My aunt tells more of the dream. She stays a sparrow/person, and ends up among old women and hungry cats. At last, desperately lonely, she moves to the hollow of a tree, and curls herself beneath her feathers. Snow falls and flowers grow around the tree. The dream ends.

Do mothers dream themselves sparrows?

My aunt snubs her smoke out. Her mouth draws downward. The dream unnerves her as never before.

57 Softly she says, “Perhaps we can’t be other than we are.”

And she reaches for her gold case.

No you, no I, no why

He dreamt he was alone, he told her. Lost. The landscape barren and cold. Snow fell. He was scared, then not scared. The snowflakes began to weave together and became a blanket. “The blanket floated over me.” Cora doesn’t hear that. She had fallen back to sleep. Tom watched her nose expand and compress as she breathed.

The motel room felt hot. Tom got off the bed. He was seventeen. She was seventeen when he was born. She had a son, ten, named Emmett. Emmett was caramel- colored, the color of a tanned deer. Cora was a maple-brown.

Tom dampened a face towel, the water smelled of rotten eggs. He placed the towel on a pale neck and walked across the room.

He drew the shades down, then watched them roll themselves to a scroll. He pressed the pane open and felt the cool of darkness enter the room. Far off a car sped down a desolate road. Tom wanted to remember the dream. A blanket of snowflakes floats over me. He repeated the words.

The two of them woke late. The Kansas heat held them to the bed. Tom placed a hand on the warm slant of Cora’s sex. She moved closer, her legs spread. Her hands moved as shadows across Tom’s back. He felt her heart beat beneath her breast. Tom’s own heart raced.

After, Cora took a shower. She sang to herself.

Naked and sweat-cooled, he made coffee.

58 Cora opened the bathroom door, she wore jeans and a sleeveless top. She looked older clothed. “Get dressed babe,” Cora told Tom. “And leave off the coffee, that’s for grown people.” Her teeth showed as she spoke, and her cheeks rose.

Tom walked toward her, she moved from the bathroom door. He watched her get herself some coffee. She doesn’t look back. She started to pack. She’s someone’s mother. “Get showered,” her back was to Tom as she spoke.

Cora worked for Tom’s grandmother, cleaned her home once a week and shopped for food. When he came to Kansas (after Tom’s mom and her lover left for

Vegas and never came back) he was too anger-molded to even talk to Cora, except to tell her what to do. Cora was someone to be mean to, and no one cared how he treated her.

Cora let Tom be. She knew that a teenager who had to share an old woman’s home, on the flat landscape of Kansas and had to hear the wheat moan all Fall, was gonna have a great need for comfort before too long. She talked soft to Tom. She let Tom boss her because she knew he’d then feel safe to want her. She had a plan she told herself.

For the past twelve months, Tom and Cora drove down lonesome roads, once a week, and as the moon crossed over the motel, the two of them folded themselves onto each other.

Cora remembers her long ago plan now. She forgot how sweet new manness was. She had meant to revenge herself on Tom for the meanness he showed her. She wondered whether she hadn’t better protect her own heart.

As Tom showered, she crossed herself, and swore to make an end.

Tom spoke to Cora from the bathroom, “Next week let’s go somewhere, there’s a rodeo come to Wellton, that’d be good to do.”

59 “Emmett hasn’t seen me one whole weekend for months, he needs a mom too.”

“What does that mean, he needs a mom too.” Tom stood wet and naked before her.

“Means he’ll also be a teenager soon.”

Tom doesn’t speak. He feels an abandoned dog now.

“Don’t throw me no love-stares, Tom. People roll on bedsheets don’t mean more than two people want to forget how lonesome the world makes them feel. ” Cora grabbed her bag and went to the car, the door closed after her. She felt released from some strange haze of anger and want.

Tom stood, feet planted on damp floorboards. He wanted not to be so scared, he wanted not to feel how the noon heat spread, a hot breath, and he wanted not to feel that no matter where he went, he’d be blanketed under the glare and vacantness of a hot Kansas noon.

SMOKERS

We smoke. We all smoke. Thursday evening and we sit on folding chairs in a room on the first floor of Building C of Bellemoor Psychiatric Center and smoke. The room has a church basement feel to it, as if it could accommodate a bake sale, or toddlercare, or after-service refreshments or a bible study class, or whatever the religious equivalent of a support group for present and former mental patients might be.

We come in, unfold our chairs and light up. We wait for Dr. Steiner to arrive, and talk about how we really must quit smoking, as if we’re as sane as the bank teller we see smoking on his break. “God, I’ve really got to cut down”, we love to say, curling our yellow-tipped index finger around a Marlboro or Newport, pretending we are like all the other smokers in the world.

There are six of us in Dr. Steiner’s Thursday night group right now. We are all

Belle Morons, being either alumni or current residents of Bellemoor Psychiatric Hospital.

I am an alumni. I have been coming Thursday evenings for almost a year. I have the best attendance record of anyone, including the inpatients, even though I have to drive over twenty miles to get here. I have arrived on nights the group has been canceled due to snowstorms or hail or rain. I come because if I don’t show up someone might suspect I have begun the always anticipated downward spiral- and they might be right.

60 61 I have southern cousins who to this day, refer to the Civil War as the recent unpleasantness between the States. That is how I refer to my breakdown. Although I am also fond of the word “breakdown”; it is accurately and somehow elegantly self- explanatory.

Pre-breakdown, you are an intolerable person with irrational fears and moods, and everything you do is dangerously inappropriate. After you’ve been institutionalized, everything you do is pathetic, but honorable. You’ve joined a subset of people of whom no one expects much of. I look around the room and think how Suzanne in her purple polyester pants with thin white stripes and orange floral blouse epitomizes who we are.

Suzanne is meek and orderly, she has a little round belly, slouching shoulders and short gray hair. On my good days I see her as a cautionary tale, on my bad days I see her as a success story.

Dr. Steiner is in his fifties. I can’t imagine him ever being younger, or older.

He is not tall, he is not slim. He has dark hair and a salt and pepper beard, in which cigarette ash is often camouflaged. Dr. Steiner smokes. I smell it on his breath when he comes up to me during break, and asks me how I am doing. I am his favorite, because I am white and Jewish and college educated; because I answered his questions in the beginning, thinking the others were clueless, and I could help them with my insights and honesty. And because I bathe at least once a day, usually three or four times a day.

Dr. Steiner’s shirts are wrinkled, and often there are little coffee colored spots near his midriff. His fingers are pudgy. I picture him at a desk crowded with papers and files, an ashtray hidden beneath some open medical journal, his cigarette ash remarkably balanced in air, holding its form, until he turns his head and it sprinkles onto his beard.

62 He is too important, too busy, too concerned with his patients, to even notice. But we notice, we his patients notice the ashes in his beard, or the stains on his shirts. We notice things like that.

Dr. Steiner responds to every comment with, “How do you feel about that?” and answers every question with, “Why is that important to you?” Dr. Steiner turns our pleas for justice, into evidence of our inability to perceive our own mental inadequacies. He is a balloon of self-importance, in a State Mental Hospital in the far suburbs of a run down city in the otherwise wealthy state of Connecticut. But he is my lifeline. I live to impress him. I judge myself by his approval. If, for example, I say I am planning a trip with my two sons, (their father has custody) and his silence before he asks “How do you feel about that?” is longer than usual, I will cancel the trip; knowing that the only reason I even decided to travel with the boys was because I thought it might impress Dr. Steiner.

My sons are ten and eight. I see them two Saturdays a month, and an occasional longer week-end.

My investment in Dr. Steiner’s perception of me makes me feel at once, the most cognitive and competent of the group and the most hopelessly needy. Suzanne, doesn’t seem to need anyone. She sits quietly, often with a dim, tight-lipped smile on her face, hiding her very lovely set of false teeth. Talking to her is like standing before a placid lake, the smoke from her cigarette rising like mist off still waters.

Estelle, who seems permanently drunk, though I assume she’s been sober for at least the past year, keeps herself alive with distain for almost everyone, but especially Dr.

Steiner. She interrupts or mutters out loud. She has a drunk’s paranoia, not that anyone likes her, but we are not stealing her stuff, or lying to her, or spreading rumors about her 63 sex life. She smokes like a drinker, her cigarette hand is animated while the other arm hangs low and limp. Surprisingly (if she is to be believed), she seems to do very well in the real world. She is a tax librarian at a large law firm.

Suzanne and Estelle and myself are the graduates. The others are currently inpatients at Bellemoor. Rachel is very young, in her twenties, very pretty, and seems perfectly normal until you try to talk with her one on one. Then she smiles broadly, and repeats everything you say or she says, two or three times; me: “How are you Rachel?”

Rachel: “Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, I’m good. I’m good. I’m good.” She wants to be a smoker to fit in, but she isn’t very convincing, she barely inhales. I haven’t a clue how she feels about Dr. Steiner, though I find myself watching when he talks to her, and gauging his responses to her. I feel a small stab of fear when she sounds lucid and vulnerable.

We all (except for Jim--also an inpatient) feel that William doesn’t belong in our group. He can barely focus; he is always agitated with issues of what goes on in his ward. He reminds us that we are at a State Mental Hospital. He even smells like a State

Mental Hospital, damp and moldy and reeking of tobacco smoke. He treats Dr. Steiner like the civil servant he essentially is, sometimes handing him a list of what he wants Dr.

Steiner to accomplish for him, everything from better bedding, better food, portable televisions that can be brought to one’s room, to the use of electrical cattle prods, which he believes would speed up everyone’s recovery, including his own. When our hour and a half is up, there is always a thick pile of cigarette butts surrounding his chair.

Jim has no respect for Dr. Steiner, or consequently for me, I imagine. It’s hard to know what Jim thinks because he rarely speaks. In fact, even though he’s an inpatient, 64 his attendance Thursday nights is sporadic. He comes only often enough to keep from being officially dropped, thereby maintaining his day pass status at Bellemoor.

He sits by the window. His face is weathered, he wears an eye patch over his left eye and a cowboy hat covers his indented forehead, the result of two self-inflicted wounds. Gun cleaning accidents, he insists. He must be close to fifty as he served in

Vietnam. His body is still spare and hard. After the war he was a ranch hand in

Wyoming until his mother became too old to manage without him, and he returned to

Connecticut. That is about all I know of Jim. He has never spoken to me, not even to bum a smoke, or ask for, or offer a light.

I watch him sometimes; he listens carefully as each person tries to explain their desperately inexplicable lives. If our stories are too sad, I see him close his eye to the pain.

When I drive away, I often notice him walking with someone from our group, usually Rachel or William, but sometimes Estelle, or Suzanne. Occasionally he will stand facing them, his hands on their shoulders.

I know Dr. Steiner dislikes Jim. Periodically, when Jim is not present, Dr.

Steiner tries to warn us about him. He tells us that Jim has been in Bellemoor longer than any of us. That he is oppositional and manipulative, that his intelligence makes it easy for him to rationalize delusional thinking, and to be persuasive with others, especially people whose own difficulties perceiving reality make them vulnerable to destructive behaviors.

65 The evening ends on a sad note. Suzanne tells us that her mother died about a month ago, but she only found out last week when a notice of unclaimed funds from a bank in Cincinnati arrived in her mail. Dr. Steiner asks her how she feels about it. She says in her usual soft and even voice, that it’s okay, she hadn’t had contact with her family for almost fifteen years, she’s just a little sorry her brothers hadn’t tried to reach her. But it wasn’t as if they’d ever been close. Then she adds, her voice rising with a surprising anger, “But still…” Dr. Steiner suggests that perhaps in her unresolved hostility towards her mother, she had orchestrated her own alienation from her family.

That is one of the ironies of institutionalization. When you are just a person in therapy, you are told over and over that you are the innocent victim of other people’s abuses.

Once you’ve been committed, you are suspiciously guilty of provoking abuse.

Estelle interrupts, accusing Dr. Steiner of using us to feed his narcissistic, not to mention financial need. Dr. Steiner asks Estelle why she is trying to divert attention from

Suzanne? He says perhaps she has narcissistic needs that she is projecting onto him, and she should think about that during the week because it is time to end.

After we fold our chairs, I go to the bathroom at the end of the hallway to wash my hands. Jim has followed me out, and asks if he can catch a ride to Bridgeport with me. Earlier, in response to Dr. Steiner’s query about job related issues, I said that I had put together my resume and planned to drive to Bridgeport, to explore job possibilities at the community college. I have a Master’s in American History, and community colleges are often looking for part-time academics to teach some assortment of freshman classes, or in their adult outreach programs.

66 I hadn’t really done any work on my resume, other than buying special paper to print it on. I had no specific plan to go to Bridgeport and Dr. Steiner’s slow response to my announcement, disturbed me. I wasn’t sure if Dr. Steiner thought that it wasn’t a good idea, or if it was just that he didn’t believe I would actually make the trip.

“I’ll probably go Tuesday”, I tell Jim, thinking I am putting it off long enough to not have to make any real decision about whether or not I should go.

“Okay, I’ll meet you in front of Building C at ten,” he says, and walks away.

My apartment is small and neat, very neat. I don’t even allow myself to smoke inside it. I like cleaning. I like to sweep. I like putting things in order. I iron my bed sheets everyday because they wrinkle in the night. Keeping things in order is time consuming. Things get old and worn, broken or scratched with use and need to be replaced. My days feel full. I don’t know that I have the time for a job.

I understand the pathos of my need for order. That it underlies a fear of what I can’t control. That my need for order is itself what I can’t control.

In the months before my breakdown, I started dreading the weekends my boys would come. All I could think about were the left open markers, the glops of toothpaste on the sink, the crumbs and candy wrappers from their pockets, the whining, the fighting, drinks leaving permanent rings on tables or spilling onto the carpet.

One night I gathered everything of theirs that was not put away neatly. I opened drawers and pulled out clothes that were not folded crisply. I threw it all into the hallway of the apartment building. When the boys went out to retrieve their things, I locked the door behind them. A neighbor called their father.

67 I am better now than I was. Now, when the boys come over, I act as if I don’t feel my veins heating with tension. I smile at them and say nice motherly things: “Would you like a snack? How was school?” I say, “I love you”, or kiss their heads. Isaac, my oldest, will have none of it. He says, “Don’t” when I reach to pat his back, or kiss his forehead. I think he knows that these gestures are meant to mask other feelings. It is

Daniel I worry about. I think he trusts me, I think he still believes in me.

I finish my resume and it gives me confidence. It speaks of academic excellence, of conferences and of the publication of two articles, one in the Wilson Quarterly. My lack of employment could be easily explained by marriage and children. On paper, I am not an embarrassment at the age of thirty-six.

I woke later than I intended Tuesday morning. I had fallen back to sleep after the alarm went off. I had slept poorly during the night, and was afraid to take a pill, thinking it might cause me to oversleep. It’s very distressing for me to oversleep. I don’t have time to iron my bedding. I have to leave my sheets wrinkled under the bedcovers.

Driving to Bellemoor to pick up Jim, I can’t stop myself from thinking about the sheets. I picture my thinly creased bedding, waiting in dowdy silence for my return, and

I feel surges of rage.

I cannot look at Jim when he gets into my car. My lips are tight and my cheeks are drawn in. He says, “Hi”, and we drive in silence. In my mind, I accuse Jim of manipulating me into taking this trip.

Heavy gray clouds move across the sky. After fifteen miles of silent recriminations, I begin to feel sorry for Jim. I know how difficult it is to be trapped in a car with a woman who is inconsolably angry about the creases in her bed sheets.

68 Though possibly Jim is unaware of my thoughts and is enjoying the silence, and the solitary feeling of a sky darkening with clouds.

“I ‘m gonna take 95 straight through. We should be there in less than an hour.

I hope it doesn’t rain.” He doesn’t answer. In daylight, standing by the guardhouse, in worn jeans and a fading flannel shirt, wearing a crusty cowboy hat, that would look out of context anywhere in Connecticut, but looked truly insane in front of a psychiatric hospital, Jim seemed forlorn and hapless.

The highway moves quickly, the dark sky deepening the colors of the trees and brush that line the road. When I was young, I couldn’t understand what made the world look so different before a rain. It was easy to understand how seasons changed the way the landscape looked: snow, no snow, green leaves, bare branches, flowers, no flowers.

But how did the colors of the leaves change within minutes before a storm, and then back again after the rain? It wasn’t just that they changed colors, but something else had shifted as well, something inside yourself. As if you were listening to a story and all of a sudden you think that the house in the story isn’t just an everyday house, but a deserted stone cottage, and the doll in the story isn’t just a Barbie doll, but a porcelain doll. And then a little while later, when the sun comes out, you’re thinking no you were wrong, it was an ordinary house and a plastic Barbie.

The rain holds off. I haven’t thought of the bed sheets for almost twenty minutes. The dust which I know is starting to collect on my shelves and table tops isn’t upsetting me. I feel the weight of self-importance grounding me to a persona I am sure

Dr. Steiner would approve of. It really hasn’t been so hard to do this, I think. True, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing, I hadn’t set-up any interviews or spoken to anyone

69 at the college, but this is a significant first step. I will see the place, get a sense of what is there, get names of people to contact, and leave off my resume.

I imagine myself employed and making this trip on a regular basis. I want a cigarette, because it seems like the right accessory. I want to smoke like an employed professional, accentuating the moment the cigarette comes to my lips, my head lifting slightly as I draw in the smoke. But I don’t allow myself to smoke in my car.

Jim appears to be sleeping. I can’t tell because his eye patch covers his left eye.

But his head nods forward and his shoulders are soft and rounded. His hands rest on his pants, his fingers occasionally twitch. I notice how the faded blue threads of his pants are separating and nearly white above his knees. His posture is similar to that of all the other men dozing and drifting in and out of wakefulness in the day room of Bellemoor; men I am familiar with from my own three months of inpatient life. It is odd to me that until today I hadn’t thought of Jim in that context.

Then Jim’s shoulders do a quick darting movement, and he sighs. He lifts his hat for a moment and runs his hand across his head. Now that I am no longer angry, the silence between us seems awkward.

“So you’re a cowboy,” I finally say. It sounds more patronizing than I intended.

“Yeah, pretty much. Was.” He jogs a cigarette out of his pack. I don’t say anything. My stomach tightens. I expect him to ask if it’s all right if he smokes in my car. He strikes a match and bends his head into the light. I imagine myself telling him not to smoke. But when I try to say it out loud, I can’t think what to say. Then I wonder if I might ask him for a cigarette. I think maybe it is okay to smoke in my car. Maybe when I am driving to work, I will let myself smoke, to make the trip go faster. 70 I watch him place the match in the ashtray. I know it will leave a brown speck on the metal.

Jim smokes like a cowboy- other than lighting his cigarette, he hardly ever uses his hands, letting the cigarette hang comfortably from his mouth. When he does use his hands, he cups the cigarette, holding it between his thumb and the rest of his fingers.

Jim cracks the window open. The air feels sharp and the rising trail of smoke separates and disappears. The sound of each passing car seems to accentuate the silence between us. I am growing uncomfortable in Jim’s presence. I feel as if we are on a see- saw, and I am becoming lighter and lighter. I force myself to speak.

“Is it because you’re a cowboy that you don’t talk much?” I put too much emphasis the word “cowboy”.

“Yep,” he says, with an exaggerated drawl.

I smile. A surge of wind bends the branches of the trees. I notice the cars coming in the opposite direction have their wipers going. “So how come cowboys are so quiet?”

“It’s an image thing.”

“I read that it’s a power thing,” I feel weighted again. “That by not talking, people maintain power.”

“Be a pretty quiet world if that were the case.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. I glance to check his ash.

“No, it’s a gun thing,” he adds.

“What do you mean?”

71 “When everyone’s got a gun, you wanna keep your mouth shut.” A few drops of rain fall in intervals on the windshield. His ash dribbles onto his shirt and he brushes it away.

My hands tighten around the steering wheel, I know the ash will settle in the blue fabric of my car. “Is that why you shot yourself, to shut yourself up?”

He doesn’t answer.

The rain comes faster and I speed up my windshield wipers. Jim stubs his butt out in the ashtray.

“It was an accident,” Jim finally says, his voice quiet, almost apologetic.

“Oh,” I say. His cigarette butt is bent and broken at the filter. “Shrinks don’t believe in accidents.”

“I believe every second from the first breath we take is an accident,”

“Well maybe the truth is somewhere in between.” I say.

“We’re not talking about the truth, we’re talking about beliefs. They don’t often go together.”

I roll my eyes at the pretentiousness of this, knowing his patch prevents him from seeing my reaction. But I am enjoying our conversation; it has been a very long time since I have talked like this with anyone.

The rain suddenly begins to downpour. I have a hard time seeing the highway clearly. Other cars speed past me. I keep slowing down because I can’t find the white lines. My body is hunching over the steering wheel.

“You know, it’s more dangerous to slow up in this kind of weather. Maybe you should get off the freeway.” Jim is calm, but I know he is concerned.

72 I try to speed up, but every time I press on the gas petal, I immediately shift to the brake.

“See that exit up there,” Jim says pointing to a barely visible white sign about a hundred yards ahead. “Get off there. It will be okay to drive slower down those roads.”

I feel a rise of fear settle in my throat. “Look,” I say, “I’ve driven in worse weather, I’m fine.” But cars keep whishing past me, occasionally honking me back between lines I can’t see.

I put on my blinker. I intend to exit.

My sister and I, when we were little, used to lean against a wall, extend our legs, and sink our weight into them. We each tried to be the slowest to slide down the wall. Sometimes our bodies would move so slowly we couldn’t be sure if we had even begun to slide. Then we would feel movement; but we could still stop ourselves from falling. Finally we yelled in panic, and delight, when we knew we had crossed the line and gravity’s momentum pulled us helplessly to the floor.

There is the moment before, and the moment after, and between the two is only enough time to recognize that the moment before is gone. I cannot do it. I had looked at a map and planned my route to Bridgeport. I cannot deviate. I am afraid of crossing a line.

“Shit,” I hear Jim mumble as the exit disappears in the sheets of rain.

The rain continues pelting the car, making me feel as if I were a wrongful intruder in the world, and I deserve to be beaten back and taught a lesson. My pleasure in imagining myself a professor, and my arrogant confidence in my conversation with Jim, begged for cosmic retribution. I was riding for a fall. My parents would always warn me

73 whenever I began to experience that great release of childish excitement, “Watch out,” the threat in my father’s voice commanding, “You’re riding for a fall.”

I think now what an apt warning, riding for a fall, for that is how I have come to imagine myself- a rider on a horse that takes all my energy to control, a horse I cannot trust. I envy Suzanne for her years of electro-shock, and Estelle because she knows she is right, and William for the energy with which he pursues his agendas. I envy Rachel because she is young, and she smiles broadly. I envy Jim because I think he is perfectly sane and is freeloading on the State and whomever else he can. I envy Dr. Steiner because he will never cross the line. I envy anyone who is not terrified of who they are.

Jim taps another cigarette out of his pack.

“Please don’t smoke in my car,” my voice is clipped and sharp.

“Oh lady, you are too much. At the next exit, let me off at a gas station.

Despite what Dr. Steiner thinks, I actually want to live.”

We inch along. I try to follow the tail lights of the car ahead of me, but I can’t keep up with it. I think how familiar news reports of pile-ups on freeways are, how it isn’t delusional or paranoid to consider that such an accident might happen to me. I think of Daniel and Isaac of course. In my mind they are very far away, unreachable, grown, and I am forgotten, and they will never know the mother I intended to be, or that for a time it was different.

A few miles down the road, the next exit appears.

“Get off here and drop me at the first gas station.”

74 “I can’t.” I’m not sure that anyone can hear my voice, because I have been swallowed by the rain, and the noise of rustling trees and hissing cars, and I have been swallowed into some vaporous inner space, far away from my actual body.

“What?”

My mouth is moving but I don’t think I have spoken.

“Put your blinker on.”

I do.

I drive past the exit.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Somewhere I am laughing because I believe I will expose the insane Jim. Dr.

Steiner will prove right. My world will be back in order. I will need Dr. Steiner and I will cautiously drive to Thursday night meetings. Dr. Steiner will embrace me like a forgiving father. I will promise not to question his judgment again.

Jim has reached over and turned my emergency lights on. I have gone so far away from my body that I can now look down at myself. I see myself sitting at the wheel of my car, looking like a grown-up stuffed into one of those kiddie cars outside a supermarket. My face mirrors the face of the children after they’ve put their quarter in the slot, and without actually moving forward, the car lets them imagine that they are coasting down some freeway. They have that wonderful expression of sincerity and concentration, and delight in their own grown-upness. I loved watching my boys faces assume what they believed to be the very essence of adultness, as they mimicked driving a car, or talking on a toy phone, or scribbling what they considered to be an important message which they would translate for me, “Mom, this says…” 75 Seeing myself with that same expression is a very funny sight. I am laughing so hard that I know tears are running down my face. It is a wonderful laugh. I am laughing like a balloon that has just been released from someone’s fingers. As the air is rushing out, I am dancing in crazy loop de loops, I am giddy.

I can faintly hear Jim speaking.

He is telling me that he is going to sit with me, or on me, or in me, and we are going to drive the car together. This fills me with more laughter. I imagine the two of us driving a bumper car together.

Now I can feel Jim’s body, pressing me tight against the door. He tries to release my hands from the steering wheel, I don’t let go. I am no longer laughing. He places his fingers on top of mine, the car moves forward and then off to the right. The car stops and Jim takes the key out of the ignition.

Just rain. That is the only sound for awhile. I am aware of the sensation of Jim’s body against my own. I have not been touched by anyone, expect a few tenuous gestures from Daniel, in a very long time.

Jim finally says, “I’m gonna get out, walk around to the driver’s side and you’re going to move over to the passenger seat.” He says it matter-of-factly.

When he opens my door, I move over to the other seat. He is very wet and I notice the seat darken with water. He takes his hat off and wipes his face. I have never looked at him so closely. Above his right eyebrow his skull slopes all the way to the bridge of his nose. The skin is strangely smooth and pink. I want to touch it. I think it will feel like candle wax. Around his mouth is gray stubble. I want to touch it, because it

76 will feel exactly the opposite of his brow. I want to touch them both at the same time and hold the two sensations in my fingers. I want to see what they feel like together.

Jim starts the car. Soon we are driving away from Bridgeport and towards

Bellemoor.

When we get back to Bellemoor, the weather has cleared. Jim asks me if I am okay to drive home. I say, yes.

He smiles at me, “It was fun. We’ll do it again.” He reaches to touch my shoulder, I move away.

Thursday evening Jim doesn’t show up. Estelle begins the session by saying that Dr. Steiner drove past her house several times during the week. And she saw him waiting at the elevators in the lobby of the building she works in. Dr. Steiner asks why she didn’t go up to him if he was, in fact, in the lobby? She says she was trying to escape from him, why would she go up to him? William is heavily medicated and stares blankly at the door, I think he is hoping to see Jim enter. Suzanne thanks Dr. Steiner for helping her to work through her feelings about her mother’s death. Rachel speaks in short non-repetitive sentences, and Dr. Steiner beams at her. I see how much she revels in his attention now.

At the break, as I am smoking my Marlboro, Dr. Steiner asks me if I went to

Bridgeport last week. I smell the tobacco on his breath. I offer him a cigarette.

He says he doesn’t smoke. For a second I am unbalanced. I feel a rush of air through my body, as if I had no weight.

“Did you go?” he repeats.

77 I tell him yes.

He asks me how I feel the trip went.

I say, “Fine.” And then add, “We’re planning to go again soon.”

“We?” he asks.

“Jim and I,” I say--exhaling. I watch the smoke travel toward Dr. Steiner and imagine him disappearing behind it.

AIR

You forgive yourself, sooner than you think you will, sooner than you should.

Not at first of course, at first you think you will never be forgiven. A girl is dead beneath your body; you believe you’ll never speak without crying, you’ll never hold food in your stomach without swallowing hard, you’ll never taste anything without the sour tint of fear in your mouth.

Then, after a while, it doesn’t make sense to remember, so you let yourself forget.

Her name was Lonnie.

How is it that now, after almost forty years of forgetting she has come to sit with me, sharing an armchair that is stained with my wife’s henna hair color, my son’s cigarette ash, and thinned by years of holding my spreading body? “Are you surprised to see me?” she might have asked that first night she found me, a pale round figure swirling a scotch in its glass, in the strange blue light of sleepless nights. But she doesn’t speak.

And though it has been four nights since she first sat with me, I haven’t had the courage to speak out loud to her. I’m afraid she might disappear, the way a reflection in the water ripples away with a breath of air.

78 79 The summer I graduated high school I joined up, as I liked to say, with Fun City

Extravaganzas Inc.; a traveling amusement park, five Kiddie rides, a Ferris wheel, a parachute drop, a Viking ship that swung people back and forth up in the air and the lizard boy, a one-man freak show. Fun City was a caravan of trucks and trailers that traveled the Eastern seaboard, staying through two weekends in towns that would not be gentrified for another thirty years.

My mother was upset by my summer plans, and until the day I left she pleaded with me to take the camp counselor job her boss’s friend had held open in case I changed my mind. At the dinner table I drank my milk but refused to be a camp counselor.

Instead I imagined myself becoming muscled and dense, moving with a certain weight through the world.

The night before I left, I heard my mother in the kitchen at three in the morning, making a cup of tea for herself. My father left my mother before I was born. And in the last few years of high school, I looked at my mother through what I believed were my father’s eyes. The way she walked, talked, scratched her head, clicked her teeth, the way she always laughed in a silence, waiting for someone to ask her what she was thinking, or the way her voice got sharp and sarcastic whenever she asked you do a chore, everything was evidence to me that my dad was the smart one for getting out.

I had heard about Fun City through the cousin of a friend of mine. I’d met the kid a couple of times before he’d had his summer adventure, and he hadn’t struck me as much of anything, mostly kind of lazy and dumb. But after his Fun City summer, his laziness and dumbness had been shellacked with an attractive coating of sexual confidence.

80 I contacted Herb Strauss, a short guy with a barrel chest and an easy but sure manner, filled out an application, forged my mother’s signature – I wouldn’t be eighteen until November – and waited for June 24 to roll around. It never occurred to my mom that I wasn’t legally old enough to get a job without her consent.

The morning of June 24th , I sucked in my gut for courage and climbed into the passenger side of a truck loaded with poles. Zach Morrill, a muscled and dense, balding, thirty-four year old, with tobacco breath and yellow teeth, was the driver. We shook hands His thick calloused hands promised to take me far from the middle-class suburb in Queens where my mother carried a comb in her purse, and used it to brush back my curls in the most public and humiliating places.

And where was Lonnie, as Zach and I shook hands? Sleeping, I imagine, almost

800 miles away in Dunbin, South Carolina. Dreaming, undisturbed.

By the time we arrived in Dunbin, we had been on the road for four weeks. I had watched but not been able to emulate the physical ease of the other ‘carnies’. I was awkward, and generally ignored, and stuck behind the cotton-candy concession. But my hands calloused and my arms muscled up as I unloaded trucks and helped construct the rides. I was happy riding beside Zach, eating in diners, watching backyards with wading pools, or sheets hung on clotheslines, drop away as I listened to stories of sorry women and bruised men, people who had mistakenly thought Zach was someone they could fuck with. I was happy imagining telling people back home that a boy who had his tongue surgically split to resemble a lizard’s tongue was my new best friend. And I was happiest at night, standing on a pier, hearing beneath me the lapping of the ocean and smelling seaweed and rotting wood mixed with lemons and popcorn, looking out into the darkness

81 of ocean and night and feeling, not safe exactly, but very much alive under the colored lights of Fun City. And yes, safe, safe from having supper with my mom while the day was still light, the noise of the television left on in the other room distracting us from the silence between us, then riding a bike through the same blocks I had ridden for ten years, finding a friend here or there, to whom I could say the same things we had said before, neither of us knowing how to enter our lives.

In the town before Dunbin, the Ferris wheel man left us. Or we left him, he wasn’t on the trucks when we pulled out at seven Monday morning, and he didn’t catch up with us. A local kid was hired for the concession booth and I was promoted to the

Ferris wheel. My hips sank a little with a new sense of weight as I checked out the seats on the wheel and I carried a pack of Camels in my rolled up tee shirt sleeve now that my hands would be freed from serving food and making change.

It was three in the afternoon, and the pier was still roped off when she called out to me from behind the ropes, “Hey, clown-boy.”

I looked up and saw a girl, of about fourteen, thin as a rail, pale with freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her hair was light and hung in a chin-length blunt cut. She was wearing jean shorts and a madras blouse knotted beneath her barely existent bust, revealing a long, smooth, very white midriff.

“Come here a sec.”

I walked toward the rope with a studied slowness pretending I had run Ferris wheels for years. “This isn’t a circus, you know.” I said. “There aren’t any clowns or stuff like that.”

82 “There’s always clowns, don’t you know. I think you’re a clown, a really handsome clown.”

I wasn’t sure if I was being insulted or seduced. My saunter was too new to risk, not for some girl who had a faint resemblance to Howdy-Doody, naked stomach or not.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing, just wanted to say, hey, that’s all. See you later.” And she turned and left.

For the past four weeks, as I had watched my body change, my thoughts of sex had been focused on remote scenarios, and futuristic plans. Now that I was the wheel- man though, I figured I should be looking among the teen-age girls who hung out on the piers and beaches where we’d construct Fun Cities. Thanks to Brenda Freedman and a semester of leadership training weekends, I considered myself pretty experienced, though still a virgin.

That night, as I closed the bar over people’s knees, as I directed them on or took them off the wheel, as I pulled the lever and looked up to a sky of dangling legs that I had sent into orbit, the idea of getting laid seemed almost irrelevant compared to the feeling of completeness that I had. I was complete in my power and happiness. Standing at the edge of a shore, looking upward, I felt as if my body had relaxed into its own strength without effort.

Around midnight, I saw her in line. I tried to catch her eye but her neck was arched and her gaze was fixed on the wheel. Her mouth was open and I saw her teeth.

Her front tooth was chipped and her upper teeth overlapped each other in a couple of

83 places. As she got closer in line, while the wheel was doing its spin, she looked toward me, “Hey, you gonna let me ride your Ferris wheel?”

“You got a ticket, you can ride.”

“What if I ain’t got a ticket?”

“No tickee, no ridee.”

“Come on, you’re not gonna be a jerk, are you, clown-boy?”

“Quit calling me that.”

“Okay. You’re not going to be an ass-hole, are you clown-boy?”

“Do you have a ticket or not?”

“Not.”

“Sorry.”

“Fuck you, clown-boy.” And she started to leave.

“You’d have to be a lot cuter than you are to fuck me.” It came out just how I wanted it to sound, not harsh but sure of myself. It was something I couldn’t have said four weeks earlier. She stopped. She turned back to face me. She was smiling and even with her crooked teeth she looked kind of pretty. “Don’t you know you can’t insult me,

I’m insult-proof. And you will fuck me, on this here Ferris wheel I bet. Catch you later.”

That night I kept thinking about her turning and walking away from me. The smooth nakedness of her back and the sway of her ass, swelled my dick. I imagined my hands untying her blouse, cupping small pillowy mounds, pressing them into my palms, the small pink nipple between my fingers. Lying in bed, I held my dick in my hand and imagined her stroking it, then spreading her legs and confidently placing it where it had never been before. 84 Around eight the next night she showed up on the Ferris wheel line. She was wearing the same blouse and cut-offs. I was surprised how young she looked, after a night fantasizing about her, I had remembered her as about as old as I was, and I’d forgotten about her crooked teeth. Again she kept her gaze fixed on the Ferris wheel until she got closer in line. When she looked at me she smiled, and I felt a thick warm wave, like a lava lamp wave, crest in my gut. I escorted her to seat 28 of the wheel, my hand resting on the small of her back. When I lowered the bar onto her seat, she lifted and spread her arms, her neck arching and tilting to one side.

After the usual five rounds, I walked up the ramp to let her off. She looked very solemn and shook her head. I let her continue going round, catching her eye every so often in case she should signal that she was ready to get off. Most of the time she wouldn’t look at me, and when she did, she was smiling and shaking her head. I let her ride all night.

After the wheel was emptied of everyone else, I walked up the ramp to lift her bar. She watched me walking toward her, holding her eyes on me, she let her mouth part slightly, and I could hear her breathing. I lifted the bar and she made no movement to get up, but brushed aside what looked to be no more than a fingernail of a joint from the seat.

I sat next to her. Neither of us said anything for a while. We watched Fun City close up for the night. Then she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Thanks."

I sat there, not sure I could, or should, or even wanted to do any of the stuff I’d been dying to do for the last twenty-four hours. I took the cigarettes from my sleeve and lit one. I felt some of my confidence come back.

“Hey how about a smoke for me?” she asked. 85 “Sure. What’s your name anyway?”

“Lonnie.”

I lit her cigarette. She lifted her head, blew a smoke ring toward me and held her mouth in a soft pucker. Bracing my hands against the back of the seat, I leaned in and kissed her. She whimpered and let my lips press against hers as she drew her body back against the seat. I was afraid I might hurt her, pinning her against the seat, but her mouth was moving with mine and her body was taut and tense and arched against my chest. She smelt sweaty and sweet with marijuana, like cut grass in the rain.

“You’re beautiful,” I said. It wasn’t something I had thought or planned to say, it just came out. She was grinning and her crooked and chipped teeth were inches from my nose. For the first time, I understood how easily sex could make you a liar.

“Come on, let’s get some beer,” she said still grinning.

“I don’t know if we can, I’m not eighteen yet.”

“Damn, I thought you was a grown-up. You kiss like a grown-up. Well, what the hell, I’m nineteen, emancipated from the state and free to do what ever the fuck I want.”

I knew I should have been relieved to learn that she was nineteen, but for a moment the news robbed me of some of my assurance. The truth was that I liked thinking she was just fourteen, it had made me feel protective of her, sure I would end up telling her she was too young to have sex, it would have saved me having to deal with buying rubbers and stuff I wasn’t sure about. Whether or not to fuck her or not was up to me if she was just a kid. Now it felt different. 86 I gave her money to buy beer, took a tarp from a Kiddie ride, and set ourselves up under the boardwalk.

We drank, I asked her questions about herself, but she said very little and asked nothing about me, not even my name. She just liked to talk about Ferris wheels, different ones she’d been on, the differences in their heights and speeds, the widths of the seats, the different designs and colors. She told me stories which she swore were “the gospel truth” about little kids who had slipped through their parent’s grasp and fallen safely the length of three seats, or about a man who had thrown his girlfriend off the top of the

Ferris wheel and then, because a wind came up, she landed in the sand and didn’t get hurt and ended up marrying him. It was all bullshit, but she told it not only as if she believed it, but as if it held great truths. She would finish a story then turn toward me with a kind of knowing look, like, did I get it? Did I understand what was really being told? Mostly

I just said, “Wow, no kidding.”

Then she stood up and started taking her clothes off. I stood up too, not sure how I was supposed to make the night happen and wondering why my dick wasn’t rising, worried that it was tired from being hard all day.

“Come on, clown-boy, let’s go swimming.”

I caught her arm as she turned to go to the water. “Why do you call me that? I don’t like it.”

The way she looked at me, how she kind of lowered her head, almost afraid of me, but her mouth was soft, made me keep holding her arm. I could feel my cock swell.

“Because it makes you grab for me and hold me hard.” 87 I understood what I was supposed to do next. Her body was fluid and easy and folded and shaped against mine. She rarely raised her hands to touch me, keeping her arms splayed across the tarp, but she arched and throbbed beneath me, bucking and moaning to my touch. With Brenda my hands had felt sneaky and clumsy, but with

Lonnie they knew things I didn’t know they knew. It was like I wasn’t me anymore. It was like the end of some magic trick when they lift the sheet and the kid who had a tendency to hunch his shoulders, is revealed fucking like a porn star.

Being inside her, feeling her close against my cock, I understood for a quiver of a second why the earth was revolving through space and why I was along for the ride.

That night as I lay on the tarp, watching the sky, remembering the few dayglo stars still glued to the ceiling of my bedroom, their illumination long spent, I thought that if I could just stay here with Lonnie, cupping her breast in my hand, feeling her rest against me, I could believe forever that I was strong and powerful and unafraid.

But Lonnie got up, dressed, and kissed me breezily on my mouth, saying,

“Catch you later.”

Other than breathe, all I did the whole day was think about Lonnie. My hands pulsed with the memory of her, and my body held the sensations of making love.

When she didn’t show up by eight that night, I was terrified I would never see her again. I tried to tell myself it was just sex, that I would now be fucking my way to the tip of Florida. But I couldn’t imagine anyone else ever making me feel the way Lonnie had.

I was desperate to see her face, to look at her, and to kiss her hard on the mouth.

I was tortured for four hours. Around midnight I saw her, still wearing the same madras shirt knotted under her breasts, and the same jean shorts. I drew in a long breath

88 and heard myself exhale. I felt like a kid who had just spotted his mom in a crowd or something. She walked straight up to me and kissed me lightly. She then got in line and stared up at the wheel, grinning as it went around and around. Again I was surprised by how small and young she looked, and how crooked her teeth were.

After Fun City closed up, we got beer and sat on the grounded seat of the wheel.

I wanted to know all about her, where she was from, what her parents were like, if she was working or at school. Her answers were brief and matter of fact. She didn’t know her dad. After the age of twelve because her mother’s drug habit got so bad, Lonnie had spent the next six years in foster care. Now she was between jobs. I told her my name but I don’t remember her ever using it. Finally she said, “Come on clown-boy, follow me.” And she started climbing up the Ferris wheel.

It was a moonless night. I watched her moving up the spokes of the Ferris wheel, her arms and legs and back, pale as bones.

When we got to the top seat, I was out of breath, but felt thrilled to be up there. I pulled in some air and let out a kind of cowboy yell. Lonnie laughed and for the first time reached her arms toward me, and kissed me on the mouth, letting her tongue part my lips. She whispered, “Didn’t you say something about fucking me on this here Ferris wheel?” The seat swayed as we talked.

“Lonnie, I don’t think that’ll work, one or both of us are going to fly off, I mean considering the way we do it. You know what I mean?”

She pulled from her back pants pocket two cords of twine, each about a foot and a half long. “Tie my hands and neck to the pole.”

89 I can’t pretend I hadn’t jerked off to images of defiant, buxom women, their blouses torn, handcuffed and subdued, but I never imagined I would ever actually tie a woman up. Putting a rope around someone’s neck wasn’t something I would have ever considered, not even as fantasy.

“Lonnie, you don’t want me to tie your neck to the pole, that’s really dangerous.

I mean, you could strangle if I tied your neck.”

She put my hand to her throat and I felt a shiver. “I want you to put the rope around my neck.”

I started kissing her and undoing her shirt but every few seconds the seat would sway and my body would jerk as if I were having a falling dream.

We climbed down. She was half naked. I was carrying her shirt and the ropes.

Under the boardwalk Lonnie again put my hand to her throat. Her eyes fluttered and she started breathing all sexy. Then she told me how she wanted me to wrap the twine around her neck and keep tightening it, not to pussy out, but to watch her body twitch and hump like a banshee, then feel the fireworks in her cunt. She wanted me to do it until she passed out.

The first few times I was scared. As her face reddened and her fingers clawed the air, I would loosen the rope. But she wanted me to keep it tight

It was like half her body was desperately fighting for air, trying to twist itself free of me, and half her body was thrusting toward me, hot and wet, tightening around my cock. It was the same with me, half of me was hurting her and half of me was loving her. 90 It just wasn’t how I imagined love was supposed to feel. I found a hardness in myself, not just in my cock, but in my self, a hardness that I wanted to have. The way she’d try to fight me off, yet keep raising her pelvis toward me, made me feel a kind of power I hadn’t been sure I would ever have.

By the time Fun City came to its last weekend in Dunbin I realized that Lonnie was living out of a friend’s van. I had only seen her change her clothes once. Her hair was often stringy looking and I noticed how dirty her fingernails were.

I tried to make plans with Lonnie, thinking of ways we could hook-up during the rest of the summer. I wanted her to come to New York in the fall. I wanted to find her a job in Queens.

She seemed to have no interest in any of things I was saying. “Don’t worry so much, somehow there’s always a tomorrow,” she said, before letting herself drift to sleep as I kept talking.

That last Saturday night, she came to the wheel around nine o’clock and rode until closing. She had cleaned up and her hair was shiny and smelled jasminy, like the tea my mom drank. She had even colored her nails.

Under the boardwalk we drank, not beer this time, but Southern Comfort bourbon. I had never had any alcohol other than beer before. The bourbon was thick and it burned in my mouth and made my nose feel hot. And soon it made my heart ache. I wanted to kiss Lonnie gently on her eyes and ears, under her breast, I wanted to lay my head on her stomach and cry because I knew her life was hard and it was a part of my life now. I wanted her to brush the curls from my forehead with her fingers. I wanted her to kiss me with love-what I used think love was. 91 But when I kissed her gently on her eyes, she made a face. When I stroked her arm, she drew it back as if I’d hurt her.

It made me angry. I knew what she wanted. I felt humiliated, because she was always calling the shots. I wanted to walk away. But I also wanted what she wanted.

As she lay naked under me, her alcoholic breath, her crooked teeth, and her chipped front tooth made it all just seem so pathetic. I couldn’t remember how it felt to love her. The feeling of hardness in myself was turning to something ugly. Everything was slipping away from me and I was scared. I took my tee shirt off and covered her face with it. Her hips rose in excitement. This new hardness said, Trust me. I wrapped my hand around her throat, she moaned, “Yes.” I pressed harder. More than anything I wanted to remember how it felt to be in love with her. The muscles of her neck moved with my fingers. I pressed harder. I was coming. I felt the cords of her throat bend under my hands as I sank against her.

Blindfolded Justice can only grope. There was no one who missed Lonnie.

She was an adult, I was a minor. My endless tears and perpetually slumping body, my good grades at school, my attempts at resuscitation and my mother’s pleas-- by the next fall I was a freshman at Queens College.

I’ve grown too heavy to leave my bed in the middle of the night without waking my wife. “Go back to sleep,” I say as the floorboards creak beneath me. I walk down the stairs, holding the banister to steady myself. When I turn into the living room I see only the TV guide on the chair.

92 I am too sad to keep standing. I let myself sit there on the floor. Over the mantle of a fireplace that has never been used are pictures of my wife and son and myself at various ages. I can’t remember where they were taken or what we ever said to each other. I think how little life asked of me. In the end I just had to show up and it moved along.

My son grew up and my wife and I grew old. I try to remember something funny my son did as a kid, but I can’t. I remember he smoked as a teenager. I don’t remember proposing to my wife, I don’t remember if I ever loved her.

I remember how Lonnie smelt like jasmine, I remember how small her wrists were, how white her skin was, how crooked her teeth were.

MR. BUBBLES

My sister and I, if we were not sisters, would not notice each other crossing paths in a supermarket or shopping mall or even a bookstore. I would be too plain and unattractive for her to take in and she, in any of her incarnations, would be too much for me, too sexy or too disheveled, too lost-looking or too unintelligent. I would let her walk past me, seeing nothing but a body in motion.

Our daily lives don’t touch on each other, either. Time and distance have left us only the fraying thread of infrequent catch-up calls in which our news is basically so unchanging we don’t remember any of it after we’ve hung up. But once in a while, there will be a night for my sister, or myself, when the darkness fills with other people’s dreaming, and the only sounds heard are far off and distant, a dog barking or the noise of someone’s car engine fading. On those nights we know that sleep and comfort are slipping from us.

In that late hour, the things that hold us to our present lives - my desk, the guest towels folded months ago and hanging neatly on the bathroom rack, my too-functional shoes by the door—or my sister’s unmade bed, and next to it her sherry bottle with aluminum foil covering the top—these things that define our present and mask our past begin to blur. On these nights there is a need, understood by both of us to look for something to hold onto.

93 94 If it is my late hour, I will lie in bed and whisper the beginning of a letter to her:

“Do you remember the picture of the princes in the tower? At grandma’s house? The ones King Richard had killed...?” But I am never sure what I want to tell her about the princes, and I drift from the letter into the living room of our mother’s childhood home.

Dark and cool, even in summer, the house smelled of mahogany downstairs and camphor upstairs. My grandmother, small and delicate, and smelling always of Camay soap, would read to my sister and me from old children’s books. As she turned the pages of a Child’s History of England, I would make her stop at the picture of the princes. Two fair-haired young boys stood holding hands in the dark and murky Tower of London.

The text read: “Notice how Edward stands slightly in front of his younger brother, shielding him with his shoulder. If you look carefully you can see an ominous shadow on the wall of the stairwell.”

By morning, my house is quiet and the letter remains unwritten. The light reveals the clean edges of the guest towels, still folded, and the shoes, still blunt and ugly.

The dark Tower of London is forgotten.

If my sister is the one awake some late night, alone on a bed that serves as a kitchen and bar, she’ll telephone. And so she did.

“Did I wake you?”

“No” I say, but the truth is obvious in my voice and I feel foolish for lying.

“You sure I didn’t wake you?”

“Really, I was up.”

95 “I’m sorry, I know it’s late.” She inhales deeply. I can almost smell the cigarette smoke. “Do you want to go back to sleep? I’ve nothing to say, just wanted to check in.”

“Really, I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Okay... good. So, how are you?”

“I’m fine, I’m good, things are fine here, nothing much to speak of. You know.

Everything’s okay. And you? How are you doing?”

She tells me about our brother, half-brother, actually. He broke up with his girlfriend. “But it’s what he wanted,” she says.

We both agree the girlfriend wasn’t right for him. “She moved too fast,” my sister says. “He’s like us, he needs to rest between activities. I mean, I liked her and all.

I mean she was smart and, shit, for some reason she liked me, and you know, you always feel obligated to like people who like you. But it wore me out just listening to all the projects she was organizing or chairing or whatever. Fuck it, just getting the kids to school on time tires me out for the day.”

“How are the kids?”

“Miserable. We fight all the time. I don’t think we ever make up, just go from one fight to another. They want to live with their dad, and sometimes I want them to.

It’s basically kind of a mess right now, since you asked.”

She goes on for a while trying to find amusing ways to say how unhappy she is, and I am wishing that I could have admitted I was sleeping. I listen without much interest, knowing that soon she will weave me into some memory of our mother or, more likely tonight, a story about our brother. I will add bits of information or insight to the 96 memory, and from this she will take some comfort. There is nothing in her conversation that prepares me for what she says next.

“Sometimes I really miss Mr. Bubbles.”

Mr. Bubbles is our own twisted version of “Harvey”, and his sad story makes us laugh, and we carry with us the faith that it will always do so. But somewhere we both know that the day may come when the story will sound stale, the painful parts, tiresome and the laughter will be forced. When that happens, it will strip us naked and we will see parts of each other’s bodies that we have never seen before, nipples turned to breasts, skin no longer smooth as petals, hair in surprising places. We will realize that without our clothes we don’t recognize each other. We will finally know how strange and unfamiliar we have become. Mr. Bubbles is not a story we risk lightly.

“Oh, God. Mr. Bubbles, I haven’t thought of him in ages.” I want to sound light, maybe find a way to bypass the story. “Oh god, Florida, what a fiasco that was, remember the red ant attack when...” But even as I speak I am feeling her six-year-old fingers and the wet cuff of her sweater press into my hand.

“Have you seen him?” she interrupts.

“Who? Mr. Bubbles?” The possibility of her being drunk occurs to me.

“No, Dad. What did you think? I meant Mr. Bubbles?” She is upset.

“No. I didn’t know who you meant. I was just joking, did you think I thought you meant Mr. Bubbles for real? Jeez.”

She is silent for a moment, then says, “Sorry. So have you seen him?”

“A few months ago, in October.” 97 I do visit him occasionally because he is old, and because he is the man I call

Dad, although in truth he is our stepfather. I visit him because I have always been the good one, the dutiful daughter, and there is no one else. Distance and anger, and in my mother’s case death, have kept everyone else away. Though I suspect fear, too, keeps my sister from seeing him; fear that there might be between them a moment that forgives, and fear that there might not be.

I visit him because I can now see him as the pile of crumpled clothes on the chair and not the shadow of a monster on the bedroom wall.

When I leave, I feel safe knowing he is sitting slouched, his head nodding forward, his legs crossed in an unfamiliar way, his cigarette burning marks into the wooden armrest of his chair, and his once swift belt, looped tight and left to dangle limply. I visit him because I know he will die soon and because, whatever else, he is the man I call Dad.

But I wonder when I think of his dying if in death he will gain new powers. No longer old and confined to a chair, he will appear in unexpected places. He will be as he was in the time of Mr. Bubbles, a young man of thirty-five, moving his family from

Delaware to Florida, proving to himself and his wife that, having joined Bell Telephone as an electrical engineer, he was at least as good as the family he had married into.

The night before the move was late August hot, and my sister and I sweated in sleeping bags, as all the sheets had been packed. We slept in our clothes so that when six o’clock came around we’d be able to roll up our bags and roll ourselves into the car and be on the road without having to waste time actually waking up. It was eight o’clock

98 before we were in the car. The day was hot already. I had settled into the back seat surrounded by my stuff, comic books, a few different tee-shirts to change into, snacks, games and a copy of Jane Eyre which was beyond my ten-year-old comprehension but served as a badge that read, ‘Very bright child, treat with respect.’ My mother sat in the front with my infant half-brother.

My sister stood in front of the open back seat door refusing to get in because there was no room for Mr. Bubbles. Mr. Bubbles had been her friend since she was two.

Maybe he’d been with her since birth but we had only become aware of him when she could clearly say his name. She was six-and-a-half now and he was wearing out his welcome with the rest of us. I was not in a very accommodating mood, having been awakened too early and then having been yelled at all morning to hurry up. I wasn’t about to move any of my stuff.

As we were shouting “no” at each other, I saw my dad walking toward the driveway. No one hated Mr. Bubbles more than he did. Perhaps if Mr. Bubbles had been child-sized it would have been different. But we all knew Mr. Bubbles was at least as tall as my dad.

From inside the car I watched as my dad drew closer, his head and feet disappearing from my view. He stood behind my sister and said nothing. His silence was unusual and unnerving; I could only imagine his face. I knew that in this situation, as in most, I would be spared his temper; it was my sister I was worried for. It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid of him herself. She would climb over me in my bed at night, sandwiching herself between me and the wall, and whisper, “I hear him coming up the stairs. He’s going to punish me.”

99 But her instinct to protect what she deemed important blocked any other incoming messages.

“Oh fine,” I said and threw some shirts and comics on the floor under my feet. I assume Mr. Bubbles got in, then my sister did, and the door slammed after her.

I never asked my sister what Mr. Bubbles looked like. I guess after four-and-a- half years my own image of him was so clear I didn’t need to ask. He was tall. He wore a blue suit, sometimes a very blue suit. He didn’t usually have hands or feet and his head was a large clear bubble. He had two clear eyes that could project like soapy water blown through the hoop of a bubble wand, no nose, and an always grinning mouth. He had a kind of underwater walk. He never ran.

As familiar houses and stores began to vanish, the car became very quiet. Soon however, my sister began her babbling to Mr. Bubbles, and my brother began what was to be a constant wail, fortunately muted by the hot breeze. I was happy to look out the window, feeling superior to everything that was rooted, glad that my young life was at last in motion.

We stopped at a park for lunch. The egg salad sandwiches made the park smell like my school cafeteria. I knew school would be starting soon and I knew I didn’t want to be there. I hadn’t been happy in Delaware. I thought by moving away I was leaving my old self behind and I looked forward for the chance to become someone more outgoing and popular, someone with lots of friends, who told jokes, who impressed the teachers by carrying a copy of Jane Eyre and whose fingernails were kept clean and even.

But most of all, the thought that my real dad might some day come back- he had walked out on us five years before - and find us gone, had given me a kind of pleasure I 100 hadn’t known before. The night before, as I lay on the floor of my room watching for the last time the silent dance of the branches and leaves outside my window, I imagined him ringing the door-bell and discovering another family living in our house. A family of fat people with three fat boys spilling chocolate milk on the carpet as they chased their mange-eaten dog with sticks. I imagined him sinking to the doorstep, then crying in remorse. This scene played in my mind over and over till it finally melded into a dream.

Now, under the glare of the noon sun, in a strange park in a strange town, the pleasure I remembered and hoped to find again began dissolving into a kind of dread. I began to worry that my father might actually come back and then never be able to find us again. I started to feel more then ever like my old anxious self. My sister went off to the playground. I looked out at the road and beyond to the laundromat and hardware store across the street. Places that belonged to the people who lived in this town. I watched the few cars that drove past and wondered what grownups did when they drove around in the middle of a weekday. I knew I had the sickness of homesickness and tried to figure out how it made my heart hurt. Was it in my blood and carried to my heart, or did it stay in my heart and ache with each beat?

We crossed into Georgia at the end of a long twilight. Deep forests lined the road, the trees standing tall against the dimming light. We would stop as soon as we came to a town. My brother was sleeping and my parents were lost in that deep grown- up silence that leaves you wondering how their bodies continue to function without anyone inside. My sister was engrossed in conversation with Mr. Bubbles, and I was wondering if Ellen Cleary would write back to me if I sent her a letter. 101 Then, as the trees disappeared into the night, the darkness seemed to call us all back to the present—all except my brother, who slept on, and my sister, who continued her conversation with Mr. Bubbles. Only now she was saying, “I know you don’t want to move. I don’t either. It’s not fair they’re making us do it. I hate him, don’t you?”

If it had been overheard by only one person, even my dad, it would have passed by. But the fact that it was so public a statement was more than my dad could bear.

He swerved the car off the road, got out, opened the back seat door and pulled my sister out with such force that she fell to the ground. Then—and this is the moment in the story that my sister and I count on to dissolve us into each other’s laughter—staring at thin air about a foot and a half above my head, he said, “Get out, Mr. Bubbles.”

I tell my sister how I must have looked like Alfalfa on the Little Rascals doing a double take, how I suddenly thought I was the only one who had never seen Mr. Bubbles; how I thought my dad was going to reach into his pocket and offer Mr. Bubbles a ten dollar bill and say, “No hard feelings, eh, big guy?”

The memory does carry us like a wave into suspended time, time in which we are somehow entwined. Finally we stop laughing and sink slowly back to ourselves, relieved and satisfied, having once again found a way back to each other. I think to myself that maybe the world is simpler than we know, and just having each other to laugh at it is all we need.

“I got a letter from him,” my sister says.

“From who? Mr. Bubbles?’ I laugh.

“No,” she says, without humor. “Dad.” 102 I hear her cigarette lighter click. As I wait, I imagine her name written in his now unsteady hand.

“It said,” she continues, ‘Dear Margaret, Jesus loves you. Dad’”

I don’t know what to say to her. How to shield her with my shoulder as Prince

Edward did. I want to leave it all, let it all go away, but I am somehow back on that

Georgia highway—the princes in the tower. Though there is no reason to tell any more of the story to each other, I am still remembering. I remember my dad dragging my sister back to the car, slamming the door and speeding off, my sister kneeling on the back seat, facing the rear window and screaming.

I did see Mr. Bubbles that night standing on the roadside, in his very blue suit grinning bravely for her sake, waving goodbye in that slow motion kind of way.

I looked at the back of my mother’s head and wondered how she could stand all this screaming - my brother had awakened as well. Wondered why it didn’t just make her burst out of whatever held her back, cross her foot over and press down on the brake and say, “Get out, Bill,” then tell us he wasn’t ever real and that we could turn around, pick up Mr. Bubbles and drive home.

Finally my sister curled up against the back seat passenger window, her face red and puffy, the cuffs of her cotton yellow sweater wet with snot and tears. Too afraid to say anything, I held her hand.

Later, in exhaustion, her head came to rest against my shoulder and she slept.

TAMPA

Three months ago I received a brochure from the Virginia Hartwood Institute of

Adolescent Studies, informing me it was holding a conference in Tampa. My family used to live there, my brother lives there now. It seemed to make sense to go.

We moved to Tampa when I was fourteen and my brother was almost twelve.

None of us liked Tampa. We felt isolated and lonely. It was unbearably hot. And though we hadn’t noticed it at first, we were decomposing as a family. My mother jokingly called us the Pinocchio family, because it seemed as if we were trapped inside some whale’s steamy intestine. At least we thought she was joking.

When I called my brother to let him know what time I would be arriving in

Tampa. I expected him to offer to pick me up at the airport. Instead he suggested we meet at a Denny’s restaurant not far from where we used live.

For weeks I had calmed my anxieties about going back to Tampa by remembering some of my favorite restaurants. I was conscious of not letting my voice rise in pitch, as I asked if we could go somewhere else.

“What the fuck is wrong with Denny’s?” He sounded beleagured. Then he continued, “I mean, it’ll be late in the afternoon, it’s not like a lot of places are going to be serving.”

I didn’t want to meet and eat in the late afternoon. I wanted to be driven to the hotel and have drinks and go out for dinner the next night. But he thought he had

“something happening that Saturday.” And though I could think of at least ten other places that would be open, I said, “It’s fine.”

103 104 Some relationships survive on pretext. As a marriage and family counselor, I find it vaguely antithetical to say that, but I work as a school psychologist, and it is often the best advice I can give the students.

I have tried, many times, to talk with my brother, but he is always sullen and angry with me. I imagine his anger like some tired old Mafia bodyguard he constantly pokes to keep awake, “Hey Luigi, wake up, I need you, my sister’s on the phone.”

We agreed on Denny’s and said good-bye. Then I went to the kitchen. It is newly tiled—a deep custardy yellow—and painted white, with a subtle hue of lemon, a

30th birthday present to myself. I tugged a sticky cabinet door open and unleashed a strong pocket of fresh paint smell. I breathed deeply.

+

My sister’s got some problem with Denny’s, but I like Denny’s. There’s always old people there. The same old people that were there ten years ago, sitting in their booths, with their Bozo gray hair, floral pattern blouses, hacking coughs and polyester slacks. Sometimes you might spot a young couple, travelers, people just passing through, off the freeway for a bite; the town is strange to them, but Denny’s is familiar.

Got the generic geriatric smell, from the sisters and brothers of the old people the travelers saw three days ago in Mississippi.

The best thing about Denny’s, though, is they serve breakfast at any hour. It’s the land that time forgot. You can wake up at three o’clock in the afternoon, drive over to your closest Denny’s, get a booth, bypassing the canes and walkers, and wait for the chunky, thirty-year-old, waistless waitress to take your scrambled egg order. That’s 105 where I like to be, in some forgotten place. Some place where there are no memories, cause it never changes. I love Denny’s.

+

I found the Lindt chocolate bars I had “hidden” behind the spices. I put together a double boiler and started making pudding for dinner, which really is no more calories than a baked potato and chicken breast. As the chocolate started to sink into a dark puddle, I thought of Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Then the next thing I knew I was laying myself down on the cool, clean tiles of the kitchen floor, my arms spread away from my body, palms up.

I have been praying lately, not in a religious way, more as a kind of cognitive- meditative therapy. It helps me organize my thoughts, define what I want to have happen and give myself positive reinforcement. A few years ago, I had read a double-blind study that revealed a power of prayer beyond the placebo effect.

In truth, I pray hoping to feel, someday, the sensation of my heart opening.

From the floor I looked up to my pale lemon-white ceiling. I thought I saw molecules of air dancing, molecules of air and paint. I breathed them into my nose, slowly, one nostril at a time, holding the smell of newness as long as I could.

106 I tried to pray, but I could get only as far as Dear Lord, because I kept hearing

Margaret Hamilton saying, “I’m melting, I’m melting.”

+

I don’t see my sister much. Every few years I’ll go up to New York and visit my buddy, Paul. If I let my sister know, she usually comes down from Connecticut to see me. I don’t always tell her, though. This time she’s come to Tampa, for a conference on

Adolescent Eating Disorders. She’s a guidance counselor at a private school and she’s fat…still fat. She’s always been fat, but every time we arrange to meet, I come expecting her to look, at least a little, like our mom. Mom was tall, kind of willowy. If you were a kid with an eating problem, would you talk to a fat lady about it? I mean what’s she gonna say? It’s not like she’s got any answers.

+

My brother and I meet at Denny’s. We know our kiss is obligatory and it feels awkward.

My brother is wearing English Leather cologne. For a second it pulls me back in time, but not unpleasantly. I remember him as a kid. I am pleased he put on cologne. It is a surprising gesture.

We sit in a booth by the window. The restaurant is almost empty, except for an old couple at a table near the door. Denny’s reminds me of the coffee shops attached to cheap motels, on slow boulevards, in out-of-the-way towns.

“It’s strange being back,” I say to my brother. “I haven’t been here in…what? Eight years?”

+ 107 My sister orders cottage cheese of course. You never see fat people eat, they’re sneaky that way. She says there’s nothing on the Denny’s menu that she would want to eat—come on, that menu is almost two feet long! She’s pissed that I brought her here. What the hell? I get the eggs, scrambled, on the soft side, toast and home fries. And coffee.

+

My brother orders. “The usual,” he says. The waitress is bored and clueless. “And what is that, sir?” He seems shy for a moment, and asks for eggs.

Then he watches the steady stream of traffic out the window. I move the utensils around a few times, breathe loudly, study the chip in my nail polish. Finally, to keep up the illusion of a conversation, I say, “Tampa’s changed a lot.” He says nothing. He seems tentative, almost nervous. I continue, “Well, not really. It’s very much the same, just more of it. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

That’s all he says, “Yeah.” Our order arrives. He looks hungrily at his plate of eggs. With his fork, he tries balancing the eggs on his toast. But they jiggle off. Soon two or three napkins are scrunched up around his plate. He makes noises as he eats, mmms and hmms. He makes a chortling sound when ketchup from his potatoes drips on his chin.

“The strip malls are like kudzu vines,” I continue.

“Well, hey.” He sips his coffee.

“Well, hey, what?”

108 “You put the strip malls down now,” he answers, “but wait til it’s two a.m. and you want an aspirin, or a condom, or a No-Doze. Then you’re thankful your 24 hour supermarket or pharmacy or liquor store is just around the corner.”

“What do you take No-Doze for?”

“It’s just a ‘for example’.”

“Oh,” I say, not entirely convinced. For a moment I try to imagine what he might want to stay awake for. I have to admit I rarely think about him when I’m back home.

Occasionally he will be in my thoughts, usually late at night, when all those many moments of regret line up to kneel before you. On those nights I will remember him—a fat kid, barely 14, sitting in my car on a windy October night, a wind that made even Tampa promise a new season. My brother was crying, trying to tell me things I didn’t want to hear; that our mother wore a gossamer scarf, tight around her head, everyday, that she didn’t change her clothes, talked to the radio, bit her nails and cuticles till they bled. I told him not to worry, she’s never not been weird. It wasn’t serious. He was scared and he wanted me to be Gretel to his Hansel, to be in this story together. But I was a freshman at college, home for the weekend. I thought of the fresh sheets on my bed, and the dinner of roast chicken with crinkly skin and mashed potatoes with garlic that my mother had prepared, all evidence that she was functioning as well as she needed to. The two pies in the refrigerator further reassured me. I didn’t judge my mother’s drinking by the number of glasses of wine, but by how gracefully she walked to her bedroom with a gossamer scarf slipping off her head. I didn’t look my brother in the eye,

I only said, “She’s fine.”

109 It always surprises me how handsome and muscular my brother has become. I don’t see him often and I always hold that pudgy 14-year-old in my mind. But now he reminds me of our father, except he has dark hair like our mother. I imagine him with slim, firm girls, their hair wild and strangely colored, girls who drink and dance in Ybor City, who want him to be slow and solid and unafraid of their gyrating loins. But I have never seen him with a girl, and he’s never spoken of anyone.

+

She tells me I look good. I do, I work at it. We were both porkers as kids, but I’m not anymore. No one could ever match me with pictures of myself before I graduated high school. I am so unrelated to the kid in the yearbook, you would have to think I adopted myself. I want to say something nice to her, tell her she looks good too, but I think she’s gained weight since the last time

I saw her. She is wearing a white nylon blouse with a small dark stain by the neck. Her lipstick is too pink and the mascara around her eyes is flaking. Her hair is styled and stiff and some color of red that I’m figuring she found in a magazine. Then I notice a pin she’s wearing, a green plastic- looking pin, but pretty. It looks like a little bowtie. It’s a happy shade of green, not fake-happy, just old fashioned. I tell her I like it. She told me it was in one of the boxes of Mom’s stuff that she took to Connecticut after Mom offed herself, almost ten years ago.

+

“You look good too,” he says. “That’s a pretty pin.” His eyes almost meet mine but he turns toward the window. 110 It was a Bakelite pin, very deco. I tell him that it had been our mother’s. It’s the first time we mention our mother. I draw a quiet breath, giving him a chance to acknowledge the moment between us.

He reaches for the Ketchup bottle.

+

Outside I see a convertible driving past with four girls in bathing suits in it, waving their arms around. A chubby, red-skinned guy in swim trunks is driving. I figure he’s gotta be gay, cause he fits in so comfortably with them, just flabby and happy, driving with his girl friends.

Stuff happened between my mom and me that nobody knows. It doesn’t really matter, things would have turned out the same anyway. Mom was already knocking on the door to boozer’s paradise.

You can’t let yourself think about the past, there are no answers there, that’s a hundred-dollar-an-hour bullshit talking. You just deal with the things you have to do, and don’t sit home slurping milkshakes and wondering whose fault it is you’re so fat. If you have bad dreams, stay up. You’re not gonna die from lack of sleep, believe me, never happened. I feel sorry for my sister. I do. It’s like she’s trying too hard to pretend she’s doing well. But she’s fat.

+

I am not thirsty, but I pick up my glass of water. I rattle the ice as I bring it to my lips, hoping the clicking sound will distract us from our disappointments and allow us 111 to say something easily to each other. I noisily drink almost half the glass. It makes me cold.

“So…” I begin, not knowing what to say next. I put my fork into a mound of cottage cheese, hoping I don’t end up commenting on the summer heat outside.

+

Things happened. I was 14 and fat...and living in Florida. I think our father was hoping Mom would refuse to move. He had lost interest in her, and I think he was planning on being free in Tampa. When he discussed the move with us, he mentioned that he could travel back and forth and we didn’t all have to live there if we didn’t want to.

Mom wanted to move, not for herself but because her children were fat and unhappy in Chicago, and her marriage would not survive the separation. She was in love with Dad, like a schoolgirl. “Sshh, you’re father’s resting... Don’t you eat that piece of pie, it’s for your dad... Did your dad call while I was out...? Do you think he’ll like those pillows?”

He didn’t give a shit about the pillows, he didn’t call, and he never ate the pieces of pie. Her children were now fat and unhappy and hot in Florida.

Mom was drinking in Chicago, but I don’t ever remember her drunk. In fact I always thought that the smell, which I know now is alcohol, was the cologne she’d put on before leaving for her job. She worked for a small publishing company. In Tampa, the drinking, over time, became drunkenness.

112 By the time I was 14 I was almost as tall as Mom. She would lean into me when we walked together. Her body was light and loose from the alcohol. We moved easily. I didn’t feel big and clumsy. She didn’t feel like my mother.

+

My brother watches out the window for a while. When he turns back to the restaurant his face looks blank, as if he forgot where he was. He hunches over his plate of eggs. I start to say, “It’s a good day for the beach.” But before I can finish, my brother with a mouthful of eggs says, “Do you think it was Tampa?” The question takes me completely off guard, though I know exactly what he is asking. I put my forkful of cottage cheese down. I look across at him. He is focused on dipping some fries into a small pool of Ketchup, as if he never asked the question. If I say nothing in response, his expression would not change. He has practiced this moment, I think.

There have been so many times in the past I have wanted to have this conversation

with him, to be the sister, but not in Denny’s where I am hungry and cold, not in

Tampa. But I say, “What do you mean?”

+

For a second I didn’t recognize my own voice asking, was it Tampa? I concentrate on my fries, taking a moment to catch up to myself. But even as I dip them into a glob of ketchup, I am remembering this porky kid trying to decide what shirt to wear to his mother’s funeral, terrified that if he doesn’t know which shirt she would have

113 preferred, she won’t ever forgive him. I try to speak again, but my throat feels like it’s turning to stone.

Finally I say, “Hell, she was a loon. She’d have done the same in any city with a lake. I mean it was gonna happen eventually.” I am still seeing that kid at his closet.

He reaches for his blue shirt. His arm feels light. His body has no weight. The shirt is tight on his skin, but it is the right shirt, he thinks. He checks himself in the mirror, what he sees is a round, pasty kid whose terrified eyes beg him for help. He walks away, he feels a wave of nausea rise in the emptiness of his body. He vomits, and has to change his shirt.

I look for the waitress.

“I’m tired,” my sister says.

“Sure, fine.” What the fuck did I expect her to say? It’s just as well, she never really listens to anyone anyway. She does look tired, old in a way I didn’t expect. I think about a Little Rascals episode where the grown-ups are shrunk down to child-size. They look like children, but old.

+

“I don’t know, I mean it was gonna happen eventually, right?”, my brother says. Then he makes some weird joke about her being a loon and living on a lake.

It’s like he just closed the two sides of the suitcase together and walked away, not noticing the contents slipping out the middle. And he gets so used to carrying an empty suitcase he assumes it was always empty. He doesn’t know my mother.

114 I don’t have the energy for this conversation. I can’t help but think that it is ironic and unfair that he should ask about it now. It doesn’t feel safe for me to talk here;

I have to work so hard not to be pulled into the memories. Driving past the Movie

Theater on my way to Dennys, I could see my mother, standing in the dark, drenched from the rain, furious, shouting at me in front of the other girls, “Why? Why do you call and then keep me waiting? How dare you treat me this way? How dare you?” I hadn’t called her that night. I told her I was going to sleepover at a girlfriend’s house. My friends walked away. I wanted so badly to be with them, to be in their kitchens, drinking sodas and eating cookies and chips, talking about the other girls. As my mother and I drove home, I swore I would never forgive her.

+

I catch the eye of the waitress. She doesn’t ask if I want more coffee, she just rips the check off the pad. I would have asked for coffee anyway, but my sister looks cold and ready to leave. You have to carry sweaters in the summer in Tampa. Every place you go is freezing. They know no one can bear the heat and they don’t want people lingering inside, so they freeze them out.

+

“They always have the air conditioning on so low in these places,” I say, as I reach for my sweater.

“Move 'em in, move 'em out,” he says. Whatever that means. I hate that he’s a Denny’s guy. I hate that he stayed in Tampa, that he’s a mechanic. It’s like he’s playing a joke on me. 115 “So, is there any way, we can see each other again?” I ask.

“You’re the one with the busy schedule,” he mutters.

I feel as if I am supposed to apologize, “Well, tonight’s not good, because it’s the keynote address and all, and tomorrow’s seminars all day. I’m missing Sunday as is, because I want to be back north in time for a wedding. You’re sure I can’t drop by tomorrow evening?”

He shakes his head.

“Well maybe later this evening, we could have a drink,” I suggest.

“Call. If I’m around, sure.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

“Not really.” He is vague. I want to shout, “What does that mean?” But I don’t.

“Oh.” I say instead and drink the water. I keep my hand wrapped round the glass, as if it needed my warmth. I want to tell him something, but I don’t know what. Maybe I want to tell him that there have been remarkable studies on the power of prayer.

+

My sister reaches for the check, which pisses me off in about ten different ways. Mostly because paying for a fucking Denny’s lunch is too easy. If she wants to slide into her ‘Mother for a

Day’ redemption role, she’d skip a fucking seminar--I’d let her take me to Bern’s Steakhouse, she can afford it.

+

I offer to pay. Harshly, under his breath he says, “That’s big of you.”

116 “What are you saying?” I ask. “I would have been more than happy, believe me, to have gone some place fancier. You’re the one who wanted to come here.”

“Right. So I’ll pay for it.”

“Why are you feeling angry?”

“I’m not angry.” He puts money on the check and stares out the window.

“Will you please look at me?”

With the speed of a whip cracking, he turns toward me, the words rush out, “Why the fuck does everything have to be on your terms?”

“You think coming to Denny’s was on my terms.”

“What the fuck is wrong with Denny’s?” And in a gesture of exasperation, familiar from my father, he raises his hands, then lets them fall. It was how my father would end any discussion he could no longer tolerate. “I give up, I don’t know what you want,” my father would say and walk away.

We wait for the waitress.

Once, my mother repeated the phrase “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” for three days. I wasn’t home then. It was a short time after the

Christmas break; I was back at college. My brother had called me at my dorm, and told me. He sounded like an eight-year-old, I didn’t know who it was when he said my name. Our father hadn’t wanted him to call me. There was nothing I could do, it was just an episode, my father said. She would get treatment. It would be all right. I never called my brother during that time.

I shouldn’t have said, I’m tired, out loud.

117 The waitress takes the money. I try to joke about the check. I don’t want to be angry at my sister. I don’t want her to leave just yet. We just sit.

+

I reach my hand across the table; it lies close to his. Quietly I say, “I don’t think it was inevitable. If I thought things were inevitable I wouldn’t be a therapist.” He shifts his head sideways as if he were about to say something.

“Oh well,” he says with long breath. He knocks on the table with a one- two beat and gets up. He walks to the door. I put a couple of dollars on the table and hurry to catch up to him.

“Gad, maybe it was Tampa,” I say as the heat and heaviness of the air push against us, making it hard to walk to our cars.

“What does Tampa mean anyway?”

“Don’t really know,” he answers. “People like to say it means fire sticks, but nobody knows really. It’s part of a forgotten language—it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Nice car.” He adds sarcastically. The car is bright lavender with dirty gray seats. It was all that the agency had, and it was too hot to make the effort to go somewhere else. That’s what the heat does to you, makes you accept things you don’t want.

“Hey, it could have been pink.” I add. It was hard to keep talking, the air is swallowing my breath, like reverse CPR.

“So, I’ll call tonight.” I’m literally melting. Make-up that I have used, hoping to create cheekbones is now on my fingers.

“Sure, if I’m home, we’ll go out. Bye.” And he walks away. He doesn’t turn back. I feel the blood slide from my heart as I watch him leave, his stride even and distant. Finally he is

118 swallowed in the glare of the late afternoon sun. I know he won’t be home when I call later. Before

I leave Sunday he will have left me a message saying, “Sorry we didn’t get together again, too bad there were so many seminars, have a good flight back.”

+

I kiss my sister good-bye and we make plans to go out later. I drive away, a Tampa sunset beginning on my right. Miracle light is anointing some used car lot down the road. Mom used to call the shafts of light that break through the clouds, “miracle light”. She told us to say a prayer, because it would slide up the light beam and go to heaven, special delivery.

Bit by bit my mother was slipping into some other world. Her clothes were often slept in, the pillows and cushions were fraying, even her voice was getting thinner. But every morning she would wake me for school. She would have a lunch ready. She would find clean socks for me.

+

In this heavy hot air, there is a familiar fragrance. I can only identify it by memories, my brother and I swimming late at night in the warm gentle gulf, my mother waiting for us with melting ice cream cones, I can smell my mother’s ‘Summer Always’ gardenia perfume in the air.

I miss my mother. The mother I choose to remember. I wish she were here. My brother and I need her to keep us from disappearing from each other.

+

119 School began at seven. Waking me when the morning was still dark, was not an easy job.

I slept deep. In my dreams, my chunky sluggish body was lean and restless. The evidence of its nightly prowess had been revealed a few times on my sheets. I slept deep. Mom would come into my room, barely able to face the day herself, and she would slip into bed with me. She whispered,

“It’s time, sweet boy.” She kissed me on my forehead and on my ears. “All right, five more minutes, Sweetie. We can sleep for five more minutes.” And she lay against me. I slept deeply. I dreamt I was parting lips with my tongue; my hands, cupped and beggary, were being filled with warm breasts; and the hardness of my penis was pushing itself in and out of black holes that stretched it each time it pulled away. I slept deeply. Mom’s warm hands rested on my chest. I dreamt of breasts and lips and warm pulpy flesh that my tongue slivered over. My lips pulsed with greed. I wanted so badly to taste those things and I knew no one would ever want to let me. Only in my dreams.

I rolled over and my mouth pressed against my mom’s mouth. My hand brushing against her breast.

She pushed me off. I curled into myself. I kept my eyes shut. I lay there, trying not to breathe, thinking my very breath would prove my consciousness. We both listened to the seconds disappearing, like crumbs thrown to the ground and pecked by birds, leaving no path back.

Finally she got off the bed. Her voice clear and toneless, she said, “Come on sweetie, you need to wake up now. It’s getting late.”

She never lay down with me again. From that time on, she woke me from the doorway and left me money for lunch and she went back to bed.

120 That happened in March. By the summer, she was no longer with us.

+

It is the beginning of a long summer sundown. I open my car door and feel like, of all people, Gretel, testing the witch’s oven for her.

A few months after my brother’s woodchuck call, he called again. This time he no longer sounded young and scared. His voice was hard, and his speech was broken by quick pauses as if he were spitting the words at me. He thought I should know...and he told me that our mother had been calling 911 for weeks, reporting various alligator sightings all around Tampa. The police came to the house. To me it seemed as if he were telling a story of people put under evil spells. I would wait for the next installment, when a hero comes who knows who to fight and how to restore the kingdom.

There was no hero, and in the end I was like the Japanese fisherman who was so enchanted by the underwater kingdom, he lost his sense of time. When he returned to his home he discovered that he had been away much longer than he intended.

I went home for the summer. My mother was already in the hospital, that’s what we called it, a hospital. I visited her, but she wasn’t really there. Her eyes were fixed on peripheral objects, her tongue licked her lips and her jaw was drooped to one side. Thorazine land, my brother had called it.

None of it seemed real to me. I was the child, passive and powerless: it was my right to be. There was nothing I could have offered my mother, I told myself. It felt as if I had lost my sense of balance, but was expected to walk a tightrope. All I could do was wrap my hands around the rope and hang.

121 I lied about praying. I started praying years before I read the study on prayer. I imagined my mother in the air above me, in the clouds, in the stars, floating around ceilings, rustling the top branches of trees. I would pray to her. If I saw a sunbeam, I would send my prayer towards it, because my mother once told us that it was a straight route to heaven. I would whisper, Dear

Mommy, I love you and I miss you. Please forgive me.

+

I follow the miracle light to the used car lot. I get out of my car and walk around. I look up to the sun. I can no longer see the trails of light because I am inside them – the special delivery route – Mom’s pneumatic tunnel to heaven.

I keep walking around the cars, I don’t want to leave this lot. I imagine it’s the windshields of these cars with their urgent messages, Buy me, Good as new, Take me home today, that holds me here. I’m sweating and my head is getting swimmy. I rest my outstretched arm against a green, 90’ Honda Accord, and lean into it. My palm burns on the metal. I leave it there.

The guy comes up to me, short, jacket and tie, probably younger than me. He looks fresh and eager, like he’s got air conditioning in his suit. “Can I help you, sir?” he says.

“No,” I say, “I’m just trying to pray.”

“We have lots of payment options,” he says.

“Thanks.” I say.

+

122 I take a very early flight back to Connecticut. Even at dawn, the air is warm and steamy. I expected to be happy to leave Tampa, but instead I feel as if I am slinking away, leaving surreptitiously. In a few hours, when I am landing, my brother will still be sleeping and the conference people will be beginning their seminars. I don’t imagine anyone missing me.

I settle into my seat on the airplane. I prop the small pillow against the window and pull down the shade. An older woman sits next to me. Her hair is dark and neatly pulled into a bun. She wears a white linen jacket and linen slacks. She smiles briefly at me, leans back and falls, almost instantly, asleep. Her long thin neck somehow remains erect, and her mouth barely slackens. I feel round next to her. I remind myself of my accomplishments and acquisitions, my degrees, my painted kitchen, my rare quilts, my

Smith and Hawkins four-foot wreath. These things made me feel thinner. This woman however, isn’t just thin; she is elegant and fastidious. My mother had actually been an elegant woman. Even when she wore wrinkled clothes and old scarves, she had an air about her, as if she were a princess forced to dress in beggar’s rags.

Seated behind me are a mother and her young son. As I close my eyes, I hear her reading to the boy. I recognize the story of Pinocchio. I listen for awhile but soon the story starts to sound strange. I am slipping into that murky pool that lies between the borders of consciousness and sleep. I think I hear the mother saying, “Every time you tell a lie your penis will grow longer.” I smile. I feel the undertow of sleep pulling me deeper.

In my dream my brother is sitting next to me. I say to him, “Unless you tell the truth, you will always be a woodchuck.”

EARTH

A year ago she would not have left the house. Having woken from sleep in the dark and quiet of the night, Diane would have stayed in her bed, her thoughts becoming fears, her fears, recriminations. But she would have stayed in bed, because it was night, because she expected to fall asleep again, because there was a rhythm to life.

But that was a year ago. Now Diane liked to wander at night. She rarely went to bed, instead she’d take a sleeping pill around eight o’clock and watch television until her eyes closed. She usually slept three or four hours. Then she’d get up, turn the television off, put her coat on, and go out, heading for the woods about a mile from her house. Instead of walking on the sidewalks, Diane enjoyed going through the landscaped yards of her neighbor’s homes, catching glimpses of silhouettes in bedroom windows, or watching the blue light of the television pulse on and off, making it seem to Diane, as if in the cover of night, houses were sending coded signals to each other, and she, their only witness.

The more exhausted her nightly roaming made her, the easier it was to sit in the courtroom, she could give over to the dreamlike quality of her life, watching Jonathan, her son, shuffle to his seat, his thin frame lost in orange prison clothes, his fingers delicate, and his nineteen year old face, red with pimples. He always kept his head lowered until he was seated, then he would look up, his eyes searching and confused, until he found her.

123 124 Diane loved him at that moment, because he was her son and he was frightened.

It was a feeling fierce with instinct and it comforted her to know that she could still love him.

She tried not to look at him after that first contact, because as the courtroom settled into testimony, all she could see was a dull boy, who seemed unimpressed by the scope of pain around him. His jaw would be slackened and his mouth slightly open, his gaze watchful, looking-out, but not really taking anything in. His eyes never grew wide with discovery, but always held a hard horizontal slant on the world. An ache of disgust settled in her then.

At night, walking through her neighbor’s yards, she felt herself at ease in the world. As a child she used to be afraid of the night, not because of murderers or rapists, but because the world seemed so strange, so unfamiliar at night. In the darkness, she had felt the world constricting, leaving no safe pockets. Sleep transported you to bizarre, lonely places where you had to negotiate a world whose power to frighten was infinite and beyond all human resources to defeat it. And staying awake left you just as lonely, in a world that seemed haunted with other people’s dreams.

Now Diane loved the nights. In the daytime she imagined no one could look at her without pity or judgment. In the daytime she might mistake someone for Steven, the boy who was Jonathan’s friend. At the supermarket, in a passing car, at a bus stop, in the hallway of the courtroom, she would sometimes spot a young man with long brown hair, an angular nose, a handsome chin, and her heart would skid, sure it was Steven, and she could wake up, because he was alive, and this had been, as she always knew it was, a mistake, or a dream that was at last settling itself into a happy ending.

125 At night there was no one to mistake for Steven. There was no one to stare too long at her. At night she could move easily. Often she would rest in a neighbor’s yard, sitting on their lawn chairs. Lately she had begun using their gardening tools to weed, or cut dead flowers, sometimes replanting their garden, moving flowers from one bed to another. She would dig carefully, her fingers following the thin tendrils of the root. She felt guilty for how much pleasure it gave her to pull the flower, and feel that moment of release, as she held it above the soil, its roots surprised by air. She took the plant to an opposite flowerbed, dug a warm hole, reburied it, and then moved on.

This night the moon is the thinnest sliver of itself before it disappears. Diane has not slept at all tonight. She has taken two pills and still her heart is racing. He will be sentenced tomorrow. Earlier she heard her husband talking on the phone to an attorney, a new attorney, the one who will handle the appeal. He was arguing, she heard him saying, “ No, we don’t want that.” His voice was definite, almost harsh, he was fighting for his son. She thought how high pitched her voice has become, how she has to take quick breaths when she speaks. She thought if she were talking to the lawyer how quickly she would relinquish control.

Diane’s husband is always reminding her that she cannot allow herself to think about the other boy (he never refers to Steven by name). It is Jonathan who must be helped. He is sick, he made a terrible mistake, but he must be helped, that is their focus.

But she doesn’t know how to stop herself from thinking of Steven, Jonathan’s college roommate, the boy who had been so kind to Jonathan, who had tried to include

126 him in evenings out, invited Jonathan to sit with him at meals, lent him his car occasionally.

Jonathan knew how to be rejected. For twelve years, Diane watched other children standing together in small clusters as she drove through the car line to pick up her son from school. Her breath held in anticipation that she might find him standing comfortably next to some other child. But always she found him standing within the mix of children, but never actually close to another child. Sullenly, he would walk to the car, his book bag scrapping the pavement. “Please don’t drag your book bag like that,” she invariably said, though she meant to say something different – something kinder.

The children that had ignored him, he felt no anger towards, but Steven had been kind, had included him. Jonathan’s letters were full of Steven and me plan to.., when Steve gets.., Steven told me he wants…, How much of it was fantasy, Diane would not let herself even wonder. Rather, their friendship had let Jonathan believe, had let

Diane believe, that his life might begin to change. It was like a tree graft, which after years of nothing, surprises you with the small hard nub of a fruit.

Their lawyer had hoped to imply Steven and Jonathon had been lovers. “A jury can understand that kind of betrayal”, he told them; but how could he explain that

Jonathan stabbed Steven as he slept, because three weeks before, Steven informed him that he didn’t want to room with him next semester?

They were sitting in her husband’s office-the thirty-sixth floor of a Century Park

West building in Los Angeles. Her husband worked for Viacom entertainment, as general console and senior V.P. Jonathan’s lawyer continued, “I mean that’s insane, and we don’t have what we need for an insanity plea, not in this climate.” 127 Diane let her eyes follow a single cloud in a remarkably blue March sky. She felt a familiar rise in her throat, but it wasn’t for tears this time, it was words. It felt as if a thousand words got jumbled in her throat and there was no way to sort them, or get the right ones out. If she could only put them in sentences, she could explain why she understood it. Why there is only so much loneliness a person can live with.

Diane continues walking and gardening until she reaches the wooded area, six acres, of as yet, undeveloped land. Here the trees dwarf her, leave her feeling powerless and sheltered.

Someone once told her that in Dante’s inferno, the suicides became trees.

Because they had squandered their choices, they were forced to remain rooted, without the freedom to escape from a cutter’s axe, or to swipe away a wood pecker, or to move away from a land gone dry.

She thinks how lucky it would be to become a tree. To reach your roots down toward the heart of the earth, like a child reaching to grasp their mother’s body, to be held firmly to another. Or to look up to a sky at night, and see a universe so great that you can believe how little your choices mattered.

Diane wonders if it is after midnight, if it is now the day on the judge’s calendar when he will meet them again in the courtroom. It is such a simple room, prosaic, functional, as if decisions of guilt or innocence, in what home a child will live, who is entitled to what property, who walks free, who lives in jail, who dies, were clerical issues, determined in masses of paperwork, in a wood paneled room, with fluorescent lighting.

128 She has tried to imagine how the judge might say it, but all she can think of are the words, hanged by the neck until dead, or sometimes when she’s not thinking she hears the judge say, “I now pronounce you dead.”

It will not happen, she has been assured by everyone. Even Steven’s parents have asked that Jonathan be spared a death sentence. The lawyer says, if it did happen, it could only give their appeal more weight.

Diane hears the lift of a bird, an owl probably, but this night is too dark to distinguish what is moving around her. As she walks, Diane listens for the sounds her feet make touching the earth. Walking on grass, she doesn’t hear her steps, walking on the pavement her steps become a dull rhythmic tapping , but in the woods, if she listens for it, there is a conversation in her movement, a twig might snap, a leaf rustle, a mouse skitter off in response to the swish of her coat. It amazes her, that until this year, she never witnessed the phases of the moon, one following the other.

Diane sits on the root of an oak tree. Her fingers carelessly glide in the dirt, then with an instinct of their own, they dig.

When Diane was twenty-seven, she got pregnant. She and her husband had been living together for four years. They hadn’t discussed marriage in any real terms. They weren’t sure. They were both still finding careers, and applying to law school, and wanting to travel, and wondering if they were good enough for the other, or if they were too good for the other. But her pregnancy seemed to make all her indecisions appear trivial. She felt the pregnancy as a current that would now shape her life. Though he tried to share her certitude, she could see the tenseness between his eyebrows, and in the long

129 silences as they ate or watched television, or went grocery shopping. Finally he said, as if they’d been discussing it for days, “So what do you want to do about it?” None of their friends had children, not even their married friends, the financial burden would be great, they couldn’t both, maybe neither of them could, go to law school. He’d support her decision of course, but what did she want to do? After the abortion, she never thought about that pregnancy again. Five years later, as their friends began families, and their doubts had been swept up into the greater fear of being left behind, they too married and she got pregnant, again.

Before Diane had the abortion, she considered giving the baby up for adoption.

But that would make her a mother, a mother whose child was somewhere in world, and she would wake up every day for the rest of her life, as all mothers do, and worry that her child would be all right that day. It was so much easier to relinquish herself from motherhood.

Diane sees she has made a small hole in the ground. She leans her head toward it. The dirt almost touches her lips. She whispers into it. She wants Jonathan to die.

Diane thinks how in a few years, when these woods become houses and landscaped yards, someone’s children will be running to catch a ball, or practicing a pirouette, or dressing a doll, over her secret.

ESKIMO NIGHTS

Neither my sister nor I had many friends when we were children—or have many friends now, for that matter. In my sister’s case the reasons were obvious. She was extremely timid in public, her eyes rarely left the ground and she smelled, not of body odor, but of gasoline. She was in love with cars. She didn’t love them the way boys love cars, for their design and mechanics. She loved them the way some girls love horses. She patted them as we walked past them on our way to school. She wiped their windshields and pressed her chest against the front passenger windows and whispered, “Good

Whistler,” or “Digby”, or “Red Fox”, or whatever she had named them.

In the summer, she would climb on the hood of Panther, our yellow Pontiac, spread her towel, and in her too-small blue and white two-piece, her ten-year-old stomach protruding more than any breasts might hope to, she sunbathed.

On occasional Saturdays, as other mothers took their daughters to dance classes or tennis lessons, my mother, in a rare gesture of self-satisfied parental attention, drove my sister to the Mobil station. There she was allowed to “work” for a few hours. As the cars guzzled their gasoline, my sister’s shoes and socks, sweater and blouse cuffs became saturated with what leaked from the pump.

My own lack of friendships baffled me. At twelve, I bathed religiously and then splashed on Jean Nate cologne, my aromatic bridge to adulthood. I struggled against my own timidity and thought myself as different from my sister as anyone with the same nose and hair color could be. Yet nobody ever said, “Sit here,” or “Do you want to be my

130 131 partner?” or “Let’s go ice skating Saturday” to me, though it seemed they often said those things to the person standing next to me.

By mid-October of my final year of elementary school, my friendless state left me vulnerable to a wave of new and uncomfortable feelings. Empty branches against a grainy gray sky or the smell of wood made me feel older than I wanted to be. As I walked home from school the changing afternoon light pulled at something inside me.

The three o’clock bell made me desperate for someone to say good-bye to or “I’ll call you” to—anything that would lessen the effect of walking home with my car-kissing sister, and the sun slanting west in an autumn sky.

Inside the school classroom we were multiplying and dividing fractions and putting the letter x in odd places. The more advanced students— I was not one –read -

Great Expectations. The less adept of us struggled through the sheer boredom of an abridged version of The Last of the Mohicans. And we studied Central America in social studies.

Each Central American country was assigned to groups of three or four students.

I was assigned Nicaragua with Rhonda, Emily, and Nancy.

Miss Manning, armed with new theories of education, required that we present our information on the industry, geography and government of each country in a creative context. She recommended we give our reports while frying bananas on a hot plate, or while dancing around a hat.

Rhonda decided we should do a skit for our report. She and Emily would be lost tourists, and report on the geography. Nancy and I could be Nicaraguans who gave 132 them directions, while simultaneously reporting on the industry and government of our country.

Rhonda was a short, thin girl, with effortless, straight blond hair, worn in a simple blunt cut. Never uneven or stringy, Rhonda’s hair, like Rhonda herself, seemed to attract and reflect light—hillside snow on a bright afternoon.

Recently, at that dread school lunch hour, when the truths of friendships are revealed and the unwanted few are left like dazed-looking losers in musical chairs, I walked straight to Rhonda’s table. We had gym together. Earlier that day, I had made a basket for our team and she said, “Nice shot.” I thought it meant she noticed and liked me.

“Hi Rhonda, can I sit here?” It came out too energetic and eager.

Rhonda said nothing. She stared at me while three other girls held their breath and stole glances off each other, their lips tightening.

“We’re pretty crowded as is, maybe some other time. Okay?” she said finally.

As I walked away I heard someone say, “I don’t know. She’s so secretive, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t know what she meant, or what about me made her say that, though I rather liked being thought of as someone with secrets. I just didn’t know what those secrets could be.

My dad was the proverbial traveling salesman at a time when America believed in its own innocence and was easily sold to. He sold “paper goods”-industrial 133 strength toilet paper and paper towels-to large companies, schools and building complexes.

The traveling-salesman jokes were just jokes, we believed, and our lives seemed as solid as anyone else’s in suburbia: two parents, two kids, and a Pontiac for a pet.

When my dad wasn’t on the road, he would sit in the living room armchair, his dark hair and wiry body like a shadow against the puffed pale-yellow cushions. The

Rochester Times lay across his lap, the headlines unread as his dark eyes traveled past the picture window for glimpses of himself in places more intriguing.

His life was apart from us, and we children knew little and cared less about it, just as it seemed he knew little of our lives. His physical presence mattered a great deal, though. It assured a certain order: our mother woke us at six forty-five and we arrived at school on time. The house was cleaned, our beds were made, and fresh laundry was piled neatly on them when we came home at three. Dinner was at seven, and we all sat down to it together. And we never had an Eskimo night when my dad was home.

Eskimo nights were my mother’s invention. Though they always ended in the same sad muddle, the power of my mother’s imagination never failed to draw my sister and me into their tantalizing premise. We were to be like little Eskimos, cozily trapped in our igloos, sheltered from the howling winds and sub-freezing temperature of the desolate Arctic north.

“But what fun we could have,” my mother would say, her eyes already glazed,

“munching popcorn and watching TV, playing cards together and having snacks, eating

TV dinners on the floor….”

134 That was the premise of an Eskimo night. The reality was that they were simply my mother’s excuse to hide in the house and eat. My sister and I were then left to fend for ourselves, which usually meant watching television into the late night, the stench of stale farts the only remnant of my mother’s presence. An Eskimo night could last days for my mother.

As with all true addicts, my mother believed her own lies. And like the alcoholic who says “Let’s have a party!”—genuinely believing it will be fun for everyone—there was no thought of ulterior motives or unhappy endings in my mother’s invitation to an

Eskimo Night. She held fast her hope that in an Eskimo night there might be, for one brief moment, the filament that would produce the soft glow of family we would then carry in our hearts through all the ties that break. Thomas Edison tried thousands of different things before he discovered the right filament. My mother tried one thing a thousand times.

I began work on my Nicaraguan report a week before it was due. I lay on the floor of my room. My notebook, the encyclopedia, and the travel brochures the teacher recommended we send away for were spread out around me.

The world downstairs disappeared as I imagined warm Pacific beaches, lush exotic forests and ancient volcanoes with gusts of sulfurous clouds still rising from their hidden furnaces. I read about extinct civilizations buried under the ground by earthquakes. I pictured happy brown peasants, sometimes I pictured naked brown peasant boys, living in a prospering, non-communist country. I worked until Rochester, New

York, called me back for dinner.

135 My father was home that night. He sat at the head of the oval mahogany table in the dining room. My sister and I were across from each other, and my mother, when she did sit, sat next to my sister. Most of the meal my mother spent serving, clearing, cleaning, replenishing and cooking whatever hadn’t been quite finished.

“Bonnie,” my father called to the kitchen, “there’s no cheese on the table. You can’t have spaghetti without cheese, right girls?”

My mother brought a bowl with parmesan cheese in it and then hurried back to the kitchen to check on the garlic bread.

The bowl of parmesan had no serving spoon. I watched as my sister used her fork to bring heaps of cheese to her spaghetti, most of it spilling through the spaces of the fork.

“Jesus, what’s she doing?” my father said, angrily enough to bring my mother rushing back.

“Oh dear, sorry,” my mother said as she wiped the cheese from the table into the cup of her hand. ”I forgot a serving spoon.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “These children have no manners. It’s disgusting… and wasteful. What do you do when I’m not here? Let them eat like pigs?”

My mother was silent the rest of the meal. Her anger, sullen and cold, went ignored or unnoticed by my father.

After dinner my father went to his chair, his newspaper folded on his lap—a ticket to those places somewhere else.

136 The day before our Nicaraguan report was due, Rhonda, Nancy, Emily and I gathered together at three o’clock to go over any last-minute changes and remind one another who was bringing what props. Emily suggested rehearsing at Nancy’s house. But before that was resolved, we began criticizing the previous reports.

“I know,” I said in response to Rhonda’s mentioning that you couldn’t even hear

Anita, and I added, “Can you believe Steven didn’t even know how to pronounce

Guatemala?”

I had struck a chord of common contempt. Encouraged, I continued; “I mean really, and Louise forgot…”

Before I could finish, my sister, head bowed and sweater sleeves dangling, came up beside me. Even I noticed the gasoline odor. Had she been Rhonda’s sister or even

Emily’s sister, the others would have laughed at her and been sympathetic to poor Emily or Rhonda. But my sister just reminded them that they didn’t like me. They walked away and, I suspect, rehearsed at Nancy’s house.

When we got home my sister and I knew we were in for an Eskimo night.

Entering into the kitchen through the back door, we saw the breakfast dishes still on the table. Earlier they had reflected the chaos of the morning rush, as we raced to find or finish homework, dig through piles of clothes for matching socks, and eat without dripping too much on ourselves or our papers.

Now the table seemed eerily calm. The half eaten toast, bits of egg, and clumps of jam sliding from the sides of the plates had vanished, as if someone had washed them and, not knowing where they belonged, put them back on the table exactly as they were—only clean.

137 But they weren’t clean—only licked. A thin film of ketchup left the plates sticky, patches of greasy butter lay waiting for someone’s unsuspecting sleeve and flecks of orange pulp dotted the glasses.

The kitchen sink also warned of an Arctic storm. It was piled high with dishes slick with mayonnaise, spoons coated with peanut butter or chocolate syrup, and candy wrappers still wet with drool.

If either of us had had a friend’s house to go to, we would have left before the screen door whacked shut. Instead we just waited listening to the scurrying of feet upstairs. Soon we heard the sound of water running and then there was a few moments of silence. Next we heard footsteps descending the stairs; finally my mother entered the kitchen.

“Oh my,” she said, as if surprised to see us, as though we were distant relatives dropping in unexpectedly instead of her children returning from school.

She hurriedly cleared the table as we stood by the door. That done, she said,

“So.” And she sashayed over to kiss us, her rancid breath seeping through the faint odor of toothpaste. Her fresh Paris Nights lipstick branded my sister with a dark red stain above her left eye.

She was thirty-four. Her face, not delicate but thin, looked drawn and tired despite the fresh make-up. The shape of her body seemed to change with what she wore, though I never thought of her as fat. Her hair was Monroe blond, with an ever-widening line of dark roots. She never brushed her hair on Eskimo nights, but with nervous energy would puff it and push it toward her face with her fingers.

138 As my mother stepped back from kissing us, her eyes seemed particularly small and unfocused. But her lipstick and blue eye shadow begged us to believe with her that the past six hours were just a minor lapse in good judgment.

We might have believed, if only her fingers would be still. Thoroughbreds at the gate, those long, delicate, perfectly manicured fingers could not be contained. They rolled over any object within their grasp, they tapped on counters, they clawed and drummed the air. They had been the only truly functioning part of my mother that morning, unwrapping candy bars, whipping ice cream into a cold soupy drink, spreading mayonnaise on toast, all with a frenzied energy that could not easily be called back.

. “You dollfaces must be hungry.”

She set about making us sundaes, throwing the used utensils in the sink, leaving the syrup and banana peels on the counter, her fingers in constant motion.

She ate nothing as she served us our snack. She stood by the sink as we ate, her fingers puffing and pulling at her hair. She never looked directly at us as she asked the usual questions, not registering any of our answers.

“How was school today?”

“I failed my spelling test, you need to sign it.”

“Oh. Did you go on that field trip to the botanical garden?”

“Two months ago, Mom.”

“Was it nice?”

All through my mother’s attempts at conversation, my sister, chocolate syrup dripping from her chin to her shirt, babbled nonsensically under her breath, imitating

139 Donald Duck. The ice cream sundae sprayed from her mouth and I shoved her shoulder in disgust.

My sister’s public timidity was, I’m sure, based on the worry that if she relaxed for even a moment, her true angry and spiteful self would be revealed. She pushed me back, hard enough to put me off balance. My head knocked the table leg as I went over my chair.

Squealing with the thrill of assault and fear of retribution, my sister ran to my mother and buried her syrupy face into my mother’s belly.

In her clean one-size-fits-all housecoat and fresh make-up, my mother had tried to hide her bloated stomach. Now all pretense began to crumble. Her nails dug into the flesh of my sister’s upper arm, and she pushed my sister from her body as if she were some ugly insect to be flung away.

My sister wailed, I was thwarted in any hope of extracting my own brand of revenge, and my mother was panicked and apologetic.

But she saw her opening. Rather than try to stem the tide of her desire to overeat, my mother convinced herself of the curative powers of an Eskimo night.

“Oh, my babies,” she said as she cradled and comforted my sister. “Oh sweeties, we all need to just relax. We need to do something fun this afternoon. I’m thinking,” she paused for effect. “Eskimo night.” Then, moving away from my sister, she began clearing the sundae plates into the sink.

Her joy as she spread the bright green and yellow floral sheet on the living room floor, was almost infectious. But we had been trapped by the promise of fun before. 140 My mother gathered all the pillows from the beds and the couch and the armchair and spread them around the sheet.

She placed a large bowl in the center and instructed me to make the popcorn while she ordered the Chinese food—“We’ll get extra, that way we won’t have to cook tomorrow, either.”

She brought the playing cards, an animal bingo game that we’d had since I was seven, and the television section of the evening paper to our island in the living room.

If I had said to her that I needed to do homework and that maybe I would join her in an Eskimo night some other time, thanks for the offer, she would have been genuinely crushed.

“Oh sweetie, we can’t really have an Eskimo night without you. It’s been months since we’ve had a fun time, just the three of us. I’ll write a note to your teacher.

Sometimes being with your family is more important than doing other things.”

I stood by the stove. I was full from the sundae and the smell of oil and popcorn was making me nauseous. I remembered how excited I used to become when my mother made popcorn with us. My sister and I were amazed (and my mother pretended to be) by the magical and musical transformation of the little hard kernels into big, puffy, tasty balls.

My mother ordered the Chinese food and came back into the kitchen.

“Oh God, we haven’t had fun like this in a long time.”

When the popcorn was finished, my mother poured it into the big bowl in the center of the sheet. My sister and I went off to change into our nightgowns.

“Why do we always have to wear nightgowns?” my sister asked.

141 “I don’t know,” was all I wanted to answer.

“Are we supposed to pretend we’re sick? It always makes me feel like I’m sick.”

“You are sick,” I said and shut the door to my room.

Of all the illicit behaviors involved in Eskimo nights—overeating, staying up late, not doing homework etc.—wearing nightgowns in the afternoon felt the most deviant to me.

When I returned to the living room, my sister was snuggling into my mother on the sheet. “This is so cozy,” my mother said, and she put her arms around my sister and bent her head toward my sister’s face. “Oh gosh, you need a bath, don’t you?”

My sister grunted her displeasure.

“Well, maybe we’ll get up early and have one in the morning. But sweetie, could you move. I need some room.”

My sister grunted again, and barely moved. I sat on the depillowed couch above the floral sheet.

“What? You can’t sit up there,” my mother said. “Come here, pumpkin, I want to give you a hug.”

“It’s too smelly down there.”

“Stop it. It’s not that bad and you know it. Please don’t be like that. Just come on and sit with us.”

I wanted to stay on the couch, if only to find out if it was possible to say “no” out loud.

142 But I could only mutter a small “I don’t want to.” And even that lacked conviction, because the truth was, I did want to, and would always want to sit beside my mother, lean into her shoulder and imagine I felt safe as her arms enclosed me.

Grudgingly I slid down off the couch.

My mother held me tight, her fingers hot and pulsing against my back. “Thank you darling,” she said, and her chest heaved a sigh. Her breath smelt like thick dough gone moldy. “We’ll have fun, you’ll see.”

I reached for some popcorn in an attempt to move away from her.

“Well, what shall we three do, while we wait for the Chinese food?”

“Bingo,” my sister said.

“That’s a good idea, maybe we can have a game a little later. Let’s just see if there’s anything on TV now.” She picked up the television section of the paper.

My mother was thrilled; “The Lady Vanishes” was scheduled to start soon. We turned the TV on in anticipation. “Oh girls, this is perfect. It’s a great movie, you kids will love it.”

It was British and black and white. My sister and I, confused and losing interest, turned to the popcorn. My mother dipped her hands into the popcorn bowl, as if trying to cool burning fingers. Often she stirred the popcorn around or took a few kernels out. These she rolled around or pulled apart with her fingers—she didn’t eat any at first. By the time the Chinese food arrived, she had the popcorn bowl on her lap and was trying to chew the unpopped seeds.

The night wore on, the movie ended, other shows played. 143 My sister and I stopped eating, our faces glistening with grease, our bellies stretched to the point of pain.

My mother never stopped eating. Her breathing was loud and quick. Her eyelids were puffy and heavy. Her fingers worked like efficient pincers and her mouth kept a steady rhythm.

Late into the night she said, “Girls, I need to lie down for a bit.” Without explanation, she put any cartons that still had food in them on a plate, and took them to her room. We heard her door shut.

My sister lay crumbled in a heap on the floral sheet, her pudgy body like a pile of dirty laundry, her right arm stretched overhead, her fingers draped over the edge of a plate. Her eyes were closing. Her mouth, like a small moon, emitted quiet, breathy grunts. The television’s light set her aglow. A pretty woman sang, “Better coffee than a millionaire’s money can buy,” and my sister drifted to sleep.

The next morning my mother woke us late. In her one-size-fits-all, now wrinkled, with her face puffy and red, she looked utterly confused and somewhat put-out.

I imagine her thinking, “Why do they keep sending another day? I told them to put a hold on my order, but every morning it’s here. I just can’t keep up.”

“Just get your clothes on, girls, there’s no time for breakfast, I’ll bring some bread in the car. Hurry, it’s really late. We’ll go to bed early tonight.”

I forgot a sombrero I was going to wear for my knowledgeable- about- government Nicaraguan peasant. I also forgot the map of Nicaragua I had promised to make for Rhonda. Without the map, our skit got off to a shaky start. When the tourists came to ask me, a sleeping peasant, for directions, I surprised them, and myself, by

144 answering in a Spanish accent that sounded a lot like Topo Gigio, the Italian mouse on the Ed Sullivan show. The class was hysterical with laughter. Never before or since have I been so funny. I even managed to include the required six facts about the government, without losing a laugh.

Despite my exceptional performance in social studies, I received a demerit for not having done my science homework. It was my third demerit for homework. A note went home informing my mother I would be sent to detention the next afternoon.

My mother, her face now chalky and her fingers shaking with exhaustion, was devastated and apologetic. She could still write the note, she pleaded, and I wouldn’t have to go to detention.

I had not done detention that year and I secretly looked forward to it. It was the closest I had come to being included in an after school activity.

Detention was held in the remedial reading room, which was similar to a regular classroom but smaller. There were two chairs to every desk. The desks filled up in an orderly fashion, as students from different grades staggered into the room.

Kevin, also a sixth grader, and I arrived together. Rhonda, who had written the answers to a math test on her wrist and was caught when she raised her hand to answer

“La Paz,” as the capital of Bolivia, was alone at a table. I may have been unpopular, but

Kevin was a boy.

Rhonda psssed at me and waved me to the seat next to her.

I had no illusions what purpose I served for Rhonda, but that in no way diminished the rush of excitement I felt at having been invited to sit with her. 145 “Oh god, I was afraid Kevin was going to sit here. Excuse me while I gag. Just thinking about it…ugh.”

“Yeah” I answered. Then there was silence. There seemed to be nothing more to say. I expected Rhonda to turn away from me, open her books, and start her homework. But she didn’t.

“You were really funny in social studies.”

“Thanks.”

“You sounded just like the mouse on Ed Sullivan. You know, Topo Gigio.

He’s so cute isn’t he?”

“Yeah, except he’s Italian. It would have been better if I sounded like that

Mexican guy, Jose Jimenez.”

“Oh. Well it was probably funnier, you know, sounding Italian. Edd da deeeee kissa mee. I don’t think that Mexican guy’s so funny anyway.”

The teacher gave us a sharp look. It seemed to delight Rhonda. She pulled her mouth into an exaggerated frown. Then, with a conspiratorial glint in her eye, she looked at me and smiled.

We continued our conversation with notes, whispers, and muffled giggles.

Rhonda loved television as much as my mother did. She recounted favorite programs, mostly Ed Sullivan shows. I usually limited my written responses to yeah, yeah!! or didn’t see it. But Rhonda could make me laugh. It turned out, that she had as cynical an eye as I did. But she had the wit to make use of it. Cynicism without wit is a depressing talent.

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The next day, I joined my mother on the couch. I began to appreciate her ability to give herself over to the television, to relinquish expectations, of the programs, of herself. I saw in my mother what I thought of as patience and trust. Watching television for me was not that easy. I often felt confused and frustrated, unsure how I was supposed to react to situations that seemed preposterous. But I watched nonetheless. And it became the thread of my friendship with Rhonda.

A few weeks into my television regime, the day came when the people standing next to me were making plans to go to the movies on Saturday. Rhonda asked if I wanted to come. I tried to sound nonchalant, and said, “Well, okay.”

We were to meet at the movie theater, then go a few blocks away to a new cafeteria-style restaurant.

The movie theater was not more than five miles from my house and I took the bus to it. The Ten Commandments was playing. Throughout the movie Rhonda ad libbed for one of the characters, throwing in a lot of oys. Her irreverence almost got us kicked out of the theater, we were laughing so loudly.

My face ached from happiness. No one had tried to time her entrance into the row of seats in order to avoid sitting next to me. When Nancy came back from the concession stand, she passed out candies to everyone, including me. Emily offered me a sip of her Coke when I started to get up to get a drink for myself.

By the time the movie was over, the afternoon had turned crisp. We ran to the restaurant without putting our coats on, shivering and laughing with pre-adolescent smugness. 147 The restaurant was fairly crowded, cafeteria-style was a novel idea in the neighborhood. We threw our coats, gloves, purses if we had them, over the chairs surrounding our table, and made our way through the line.

There was an enormous variety of foods. The choices made it hard for us to limit ourselves. We all tried to out-do each other, piling our trays with pudding and banana cream pie and a brownie and … and…

When we reached the cashier, we didn’t have enough money to pay for it all.

This predicament seemed even funnier than piling the trays with desserts. Quickly and carelessly, often purposely bumping into one another, we put the food back. Our trays finally matched our appetites and money supply.

As we walked back to the table, Rhonda and Emily, who were trailing behind

Nancy and myself, noticed something.

Nancy and I had already removed our trays and begun to eat, when Rhonda and

Emily, leaning over trays held midriff high, came scurrying over. In an excited whisper, they said, “Look at that woman in the brown coat.” We had to look over our shoulders to see her, but there she was. Her one-size-fits-all peeking out from under a shapeless brown overcoat. Her face without make-up and pale. Her hair unbrushed and the black roots shining under the cafeteria lights. But what had caught Rhonda and Emily’s attention was that her tray resembled our original trays, and then some.

She was hunched over it, her face not more than three inches from the table.

She looked like a giant brown cockroach, her delicate fingers like antennae, busily picking at her food. My mother (with what struck me as great irony) always ate as if she were on a diet. She would scoop out the inside of a piece of pie and eat it first, hoping to

148 avoid the fattening crust. Then invariably she would pick at the crust with rapid fingers until it was gone. She would take the cheese off a pizza, intending not to eat the crust.

But soon, bit by bit, the pizza crust would disappear. She would take the top bun off a burger, lay it aside, divide the bottom bun in half and place one half on top of the burger.

But soon it would all be eaten.

“Oh, gross,” the girls said in unison.

“Now girls, that could be us if we hadn’t had to put all that food back.” Rhonda said.

“Very funny,” answered Emily “not in my worst nightmare would I eat like that.”

I heard those words, but it was as if they had to travel a great distance to reach me. I was frozen still. And yet at the same time I was convinced my body was visibly trembling. I had to fight with all my concentration to keep myself from swirling down the dark hollow tunnel of my stomach.

For what seemed like a long time, I kept my eyes on the salt shaker. A few particles of white salt lay precariously balanced on the top of the shaker, just outside the holes. Finally I was able to say I had to go to the bathroom.

I stayed in the bathroom. I put the toilet seat cover down and sat staring at the pink cupids on the wall, my eyes wide and my breath shallow. Eventually a customer knocked and I had to leave.

As I returned to my seat, I saw my mother leaving the restaurant. A bag with a doggie’s tail painted on it was under her arm. She was eating a cookie as she walked.

Her departure did not go unnoticed. The comments began anew.

149 I knew I was obligated to say something. Following Emily’s “What a cow,” I added “Yeah really, what a cow.”

At that moment I realized I would have said or done anything to keep hold of that spider-leg-thin thread of acceptance.

Soon the other mothers, with heavy perfume and clicking heels, came to pick-up their daughters. Each one offered to drive me home. I explained that my own mother was on her way. When I was sure everyone was safely gone, not returning for any forgotten glove or dropped ring, I walked to the bus stop.

The late afternoon sky was beginning to darken. The air was cold and I shivered as I waited for the bus. I had found out my secrets—and they were kept hidden, this time.

Now the day was over. In this gloaming hour, I saw the evening star, which I knew was really the planet Venus—and I was going home—to safety, which in the end was all I wanted: to be safe.

As the bus rode through the neighborhood, it passed the Mobil station where my sister liked to spend time. I envied my sister her cars. I envied the way she could caress them and share her secrets safely, sunbathing on their hoods.

I leaned back in my seat and stared out the window. I thought of Eskimos, real

Eskimos. I wondered if they got into pajamas at night, and if they did where did they change in a one-room igloo? I wondered if Eskimos living in an igloo could ever really get warm.

Soon the bus rattled through streets with houses on both sides. I watched as one by one kitchen lights were turned on—soft yellow windows.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ann Bronston lives in Tampa, Florida with her husband and children. Her stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review and the New Millenium, and online in the ezines,

Serpentine and The Southerner--Portal to the South. She has won the 1999 fiction prize from Mississippi Review and has won the 2001 New Millenium fiction prize. She was a finalist in the Missouri Review, and Glimmer Train. She was the Edgar Hirschberg award recipient from USF. She was the first place winner at the Weekly Planet annual short story contest, and the Bayboro fiction contest.

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