FAR HILLS

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Jennifer C. Dunning

August 2006

This dissertation entitled

FAR HILLS

by

JENNIFER C. DUNNING

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Darrell K. Spencer

Professor of English

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

DUNNING, JENNIFER C., Ph.D., August 2006, English

FAR HILLS (210 pp.)

Director of Thesis: Darrell K. Spencer

This dissertation consists of a collection of short stories, many of which foreground the relationship of character to place. A number of the stories are set in

Ellisville, Ohio, a fictional town with similarities to Athens and surrounding southeast

Ohio towns. The critical introduction explores the use of omniscient narration in contemporary short fiction. Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, from his essay

“The Storyteller,” the introduction considers how the presence of the storyteller’s voice in fiction might shape narrative.

Approved:

Darrell K. Spencer

Professor of English

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Ohio University English Department for the opportunity to spend four years thinking about writing, teaching, and literature. I would especially like to thank Darrell Spencer, Joan Connor, and David Lazar—Darrell, for sharing with me his ideas about stories, for giving me new ways to think about stories; Joan, for her keen insights into story architecture; David, for the gift of the essay.

I am grateful to all those people in Ellisville who shared their lives with me (and whose mailing addresses might be Athens, Amesville, Albany, Shade, Ohio) and to the wildflowers and trees and rocks and creatures of southeastern Ohio which, like Ginnie, I can’t yet imagine not living among.

Finally, thank you to my family, my husband Steve Longfellow, my parents, and my children, Claire, Rachel and Tim, for their patience, generosity, suppport.

A few of these stories have been published or accepted for publication in literary magazines, for which I’m very grateful—“Reva” in CutBank, “Appliance Repair” in

Beloit Fiction Journal, “Tenderloin” in Harpur Palate, “Live Another Year” in Short

Stories Bimonthly.

for Steve, without whom these stories wouldn’t be 6 Table of Contents

Page

Acknowledgements...... 4

In Defense of Omniscience: The Voice of the Storyteller...... 7

Far Hills ...... 48

Soup Kitchen...... 63

Sky Lab Summer...... 80

Commuting ...... 95

Appliance Repair ...... 114

Reva ...... 124

Dogwoods ...... 137

Live Another Year ...... 151

Tenderloin...... 163

The Far...... 175

Slump Rock...... 195

7 In Defense of Omniscience: The Voice of the Storyteller

The use of limited points of view has become standard in contemporary fiction, so much so that other options are infrequently discussed. In this essay I hope to present a more balanced view. I want to explore how the limited point of view, meaning narration that communicates only the thoughts, perceptions, and opinions of a single character, tends to be used in contemporary fiction and how the strategies employed might shape or even limit stories. Second, I want to explore examples of omniscient narration and consider how the overt presence of the storyteller might shape stories. I offer these ideas as a perspective that might be presented alongside more standard ideas about using limited points of view in fiction writing classrooms.

Third-person Limited Narration

Craft books on writing fiction devote much attention to the problem of point of view and, implicitly or explicitly, tend to promote the use of limited points of view over omniscient narration. Janet Burroway, in her popular introductory text Imaginative

Writing: the Elements of Craft, for instance, advises writing students that limited omniscience is “the usual” perspective for third-person narration today: “In the twentieth century it became usual for ‘the author’ to assume the more modest capability of the limited omniscient, able to go into one character’s mind and to tell us objectively what, if 8 we were present, we would be able to perceive for ourselves, but not to leap from the mind of one character to another” (52).

Burroway’s discussion proceeds to set an example of what she terms third-person limited omniscience side-by-side with an example of omniscient narration, a passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. I will discuss Burroway’s characterization of omniscience later in the essay. Here I want to note that what Burroway presents as typical of third-person limited is actually only one end of the spectrum. She cites a passage from a contemporary work of fiction in which, as she says, “‘the author’ is an unvoiced presence, seeing and remembering through the character’s eyes. It is the character himself looking back who ‘realizes,’ ‘feels,’ and ‘smells’” (52). Lynna Williams terms this technique “third-person unified” and distinguishes it from “third person limited.” Third- person unified, she says, is narration in which the point-of-view character is the consciousness of the story (117), while third-person limited blends the character’s perspective with objective narration (120).

My interest here is not in terminology so much as what the conflation of the two ends of the spectrum indicates about contemporary fiction1. In third-person narration,

fiction conventions allow the voice of the narrator, an essentially expository voice that

tells the reader what happens, to be blended with the vocabulary, syntax, and thoughts of a point-of-view character, a convention known as free indirect discourse. But this technique encompasses a broad range along which the character’s voice may be more or less evident in relation to the narrator’s voice, in other words, the range of Williams’s

1 Burroway’s treatment of third-person narration does go on to discuss objective narration, which she describes as a journalistic stance (52-53) rather than as narration that moves between character and narrator’s voices as in Williams’s breakdown. 9 “third person unified” in which character voice predominates through her “third-person limited” in which the narrator’s voice can have a strong presence.

Contemporary fiction is diverse and there are exceptions to every trend. However, in literary journals generally, stories in which character voice predominates are very prevalent. In Best American Short Stories 2005, the majority of third-person stories employ narration that privileges character voice over narrator’s voice. Perhaps the most extreme example, is Cory Doctorow’s ingenious story “Anda’s Game,” a story that takes place largely in the virtual world of an online game. The story opens in the voice of a narrator, but moves quickly into narration heavily infected by the vocabulary and syntax of the point-of-view character, an adolescent girl:

Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped

avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf because

her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an

instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive

would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only

girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell,

cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge

buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-

armor. Bintware, she called it. (223, my italics)

The narration employs invented words and slang typical of adolescents, italicized in the passage; syntax, too, as the paragraph progresses, becomes more characteristic of teenagers. From the middle of the opening paragraph on through the story, the narration remains close-to-character. 10 For contrast, consider the overt presence of the narrator’s voice in the following passage from Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,” at the point in the story when Félicté has just learned of her beloved nephew’s death:

Liébard looked at her and sighed. Mme Aubain was trembling

slightly. She suggested that she should go and see her sister at Trouville,

but Félicité shook her head to indicate that there was no need for that.

There was a silence. Old Liébard thought it advisable to go.

Then Félicité said:

“It doesn’t matter a bit, not to them it doesn’t.”

Her head fell forward again, and from time to time she

unconsciously picked up the knitting needles lying on the worktable.

Some women went past carrying a tray full of dripping linen.

Catching sight of them through the window, she remembered her

own washing; she had passed the lye through it the day before and today it

needed rinsing. So she left the room.

Her board and tub were on the bank of the Toucques. She threw a

pile of chemises down by the water’s edge, rolled up her sleeves, and

picked up her battledore. The lusty blows she gave it could be heard in all

the neighbouring gardens.

The fields were empty, the river rippling in the wind; at the bottom

long weeds were waving to and fro, like the hair of corpses floating in the

water. (37) 11 I choose Flaubert because, while not the first writer to use free indirect discourse, he is considered a pioneer in its use. In this passage, however, he uses access to character consciousness very selectively. The objective narrator, Flaubert’s “everywhere present but nowhere visible” narrator, narrates most of the scene, reporting on events as they occur. Only with “catching sight of them through the window” do we enter Félicité’s consciousness, and then only briefly; the “lusty blows” are heard not as perceived by

Félicité but objectively. And then, we enter Félicité’s consciousness deeply, perceiving the fictional world changed by her grief, in her vision of the aquatic weeds as “like the hair of corpses.” The immersion into Félicité’s consciousness here is all the more powerful because of Flaubert’s restraint up to this point.

But how different is Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse from Doctorow’s.2

Flaubert would not have recognized, or likely approved of, contemporary use of free indirect discourse. In fact, Flaubert criticized Zola precisely for narrating in the language

of his characters in his novel Assommoir3.

I intend no value judgment as far as where on the spectrum of narrator voice to

character voice narration should be. On an individual basis for each story, a writer must

decide where to position the narration—the question of where the story comes from.

However, in my experience as a longtime participant in writing workshops, and now a

teacher of writing workshops—as is evident in Burroway’s discussion of third-person

2 Strictly speaking, the narration of “A Simple Heart” would be considered omniscient; at the end of the story, particularly, the point of view cannot be Félicité’s; however, in this part of the story, the narration shifts between the objective narrator and Félicité, approaching Williams’s “third-person limited.” 3 Flaubert’s criticism of Zola’s novel is discussed in “Listening Power: Flaubert, Zola, and the Politics of style indirect libre” by Gilbert D. Chaitin (The French Review 72.6 [1999]: 1023-1037). 12 limited narration—writing instruction encourages the use of narration on the character end of the spectrum.

There are good reasons for this. When the fictional world is rendered from the unique—and often quirky—consciousness of the point-of-view character, the individual’s encounter with the world becomes part of how the world comes into being. Such a world is already particularized and is a world never wholly shared with any other character, which models the contemporary perception of the multiplicity of experience.

In my own classroom, I have seen student writing improve markedly when students grasp the concept of “rendering the world from character consciousness.” The strategy helps students create a unique voice for each story. Further, in so far as the

“rendering of the world” involves interactions between character and setting and between point-of-view character and other characters, the story is intrinsically more animated.

Another characteristic of much contemporary third-person narration is that the narrator’s voice, when present, tends to be unobtrusive and unparticularized. In this, we follow Flaubert’s literary lineage—“the everywhere present but nowhere visible” narrator. Student writers are warned against using long passages of exposition or drawing attention to the voice of the narrator. In Where the Stories Come From: Beginning To

Write Fiction, for instance, Sibyl Johnston advises: “One of this book’s early reviewers wrote that ‘exposition should take place all the time; a good writer will make it as unobtrusive as carpeting.’ [ . . . ] Exposition is something you don’t want readers to notice” (74). A side effect of this effacement of the narrator is to lessen the sense that a reader has of being told a story.

13 Many of my stories in Far Hills exemplify the strategies typical of so much contemporary fiction—employing close-to-character narration and an unparticularized, unobtrusive narrative voice to supply necessary background information. For example, consider the opening paragraph of my story “Appliance Repair.” The story begins in the rather flat voice of a narrator and shifts quickly, perhaps as early as the end of the first sentence, toward character voice, where it stays through the remainder of the paragraph and much of the story. The emotionally biased tone of this narration belongs to the character, as do the populist politics and the simile at the end of the paragraph:

Snyder pulled into the driveway of 3619 Manasota Key Road, his last call

of the day. The house was another castle on the sea, this one a yellow

stucco with porches and gazebos and a tin roof, an impersonation of a Key

West cottage gone awry. Just looking at it made Snyder angry, reminded

him of how much his taxes had gone up since little Englewood, Florida,

had become a sunbelt destination, the cheap waterfront property drawing

outsiders like a rubber grub to snook.

First-person Narration

First-person narration, another form of the limited point of view, presents a slightly different situation. In a first person story, the fictional world is rendered through the (fictional) narrator’s consciousness and experience. The narration does not imbed movement between narrator and character. Typically, the narrator’s voice is highly particularized. Furthermore, the “I” narrator implicitly or explicitly addresses the reader. 14 Even in a first-person story that ostensibly addresses another character—as in Jhumpa

Lahiri’s story “Once in a Lifetime,” which is punctuated by references to “you,” the son of family friends who stay with the narrator’s family—the reader stands behind the character addressed. In a first-person story, then, the act of narrating itself becomes part of the story.

However, contemporary first-person short stories tend to emphasize scene over the narrating voice, although the narrating voice is also present and individuated.

Johnston advises, “You may have to resist the impulse to ‘tell’ all the narrator’s thoughts and feelings as though you were chatting with a friend” (91). Similarly, another craft book author, John Dufresne (The Lie That Tells a Truth), writes, “You must influence your narrator to show and not merely tell. We want scene, not exposition. Drama, not explanation” (227).

As with the push toward character voice in third-person narration, there are good reasons for employing this strategy. Going “in-scene” allows the reader to enter the story, to see what’s happening for herself and make her own assessments. Thus the maxim of the writer’s workshop is “show don’t tell.” Beginning writers often narrate or, in the language of the writing workshop, “tell” at the expense of developing scenes, the writing workshop’s “show.” Although this also occurs in third-person narration, it can be especially problematic in first-person stories because the “telling” voice is incorporated into the story’s narration.

To address this tendency in my fiction workshops, I introduce students to Plato’s terms “mimesis” and “diegesis,” with mimesis being pure drama or scene and diegesis being pure narrative in which “the poet ‘himself is the speaker and does not even attempt 15 to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking’” (Plato as quoted in Genette 162).

There are gradations of mimesis and diegesis; the inclusion of descriptive details pushes diegesis toward mimesis. Especially in first person stories, students benefit from being encouraged to use as much mimetic detail as possible in narrative passages and to shift into fully developed scenes whenever able. But there is a potential drawback too: the voice of the first-person narrator, the storyteller, may end up being less developed.

I notice this pressure toward mimesis and the resulting privileging of scene over the narrating voice in both published stories and my own work. For instance, in the opening paragraphs of “Until Gwen” by Dennis Lehane, included in Best American 2005, the narrator does virtually no telling at all (this story is written in the second person, but the “you” substitutes for “I”):

Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with

an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in

the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in

the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of

the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and

tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her

calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

You go, “Books?”

“Books.” She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line off

your fist and up her left nostril. “Screenplays!” She shouts it at the dome

light for some reason. “You know—movies.” 16 “Tell him the one about the psycho saint guy.” Your father winks

at you in the rearview, like he’s driving the two of you to the prom. (18)

In my story “Live Another Year,” one of the earliest stories included in Far Hills, diegetic narration rarely extends for more than a sentence or two; scene predominates.

There is little sense of being told a story. In my later first-person stories, I experiment with letting the narrating voice have a greater presence. This shows in the structure of

“Reva,” a story narrated in the first person plural, in which the events of the week encompassed by the story are related not in chronological order but in thematic groupings—trips the narrators took with Reva, followed by other activities, by housekeeping concerns, etc. In “Slump Rock,” I allow the narrator’s meditative direct address, an essayistic voice, to carry much of the story.

There are first-person stories which have a more overtly “told” quality. I think of

Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur,” for instance, a story written in the form of a diary that relates a fictional, all-female expedition to the South Pole in 1909-10, before historical male expeditions gained the Pole. The narrator’s voice carries this story, even in the absence of the development of round characters or any kind of traditional, suspense-driven plot. Le

Guin describes in an interview the composition of this story as having been like “taking dictation from a nonexistent person” (205). The narrator, Le Guin says, simply “began to tell me the story, very directly, plainly, and without pausing for questions” (204).

I am not suggesting that the fiction workshop abandon its emphasis on showing or on including fully developed scenes. However, the benefits of foregrounding mimesis in 17 a first-person story should be balanced against the value of developing more fully the sense of the story being told in the individuated voice of the narrator.

Omniscient Narration

The use of omniscient narration was discouraged in most of the writing workshops I participated in as a student, particularly early on. Even as I make this statement, I find myself wondering if I took this idea away from my classes mistakenly.

But when I review a sampling of fiction craft books to see how they present omniscience,

I find my experience confirmed. In Where the Stories Come From, Sybil Johnston emphasizes the importance of establishing a pattern of alternation between limited points of view when using omniscience and warns that “unless this technique is done extremely well, [ . . . ] it tends to be confusing and to look like a mistake” (97-98). This concern with “looking like a mistake” reflects the anxiety over control of point of view that I experienced as a beginning writer. To be called on a point of view slip in a workshop was, I recall, very embarrassing.

But the problem with omniscience as presented by many craft book authors has as much to do with cultural paradigms as with control of a difficult point of view.

Omniscience, craft book authors imply, does not adequately represent the contemporary worldview. Thus Janet Burroway describes omniscient narration as “holding all the answers” (Imaginative Writing 52) and, in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, as being like God (257). Concerning the trend to avoid omniscience in contemporary fiction she writes, “It is one of the manifestations of modern literature’s movement 18 downward in class from heroic to common characters, from external action to the psychological action of the mind, that authors of realistic fiction have largely avoided the godlike stance of the omniscient author and have chosen to restrict themselves to fewer areas of knowledge” (Writing Fiction 258). Tellingly, most of the authors I consulted turned to Tolstoy—a wonderful but hardly contemporary author—for examples of the use of omniscience. The message is clear: omniscience has had its day.

As with other advice common in writing workshops, there are good reasons for beginning writers to avoid omniscience. Omniscience is easily abused. Beginning writers often enter different characters’ points of view randomly and without realizing that they are doing so, which can be disorienting to the reader; when omniscience is used sloppily, readers cannot tell where the narrating voice is situated. Further, omniscience, especially in inexperienced hands, can get in the way of the project of rendering the fictional world from character consciousness by not getting across enough of the characters’ perceptions.

But it doesn’t need to.

There are contemporary authors—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Rick Bass, for instance—who frequently use omniscient narration without it seeming “godlike” and without sacrificing the ability to render the fictional world from character consciousness.

I would argue, too, that authors such as Chekhov and, yes, Tolstoy, do not employ

“godlike” omniscience, though that discussion lies outside the scope of this essay.

Further, in response to the assumption that omniscience cannot represent postmodern

(and post-postmodern) experience, there is an alternate perspective: namely that to overtly acknowledge in a story the author-narrator’s role in constructing the fictional world, which necessarily involves positing the experience of others beyond herself, 19 involves an authenticity of a different sort. We are storytellers, after all. Isn’t foregrounding the voice of the storyteller, in that sense, inherently honest?

Lately, in my classroom, too, I have begun to question the value of insisting that students use limited points of view, which I currently require. Let me share a situation that came up in my classroom recently. A student, despite my “rule,” turned in a story for workshop that employs an omniscient narrator. In my comments to the writer, I identified the use of omniscient narration as one of the key problems with the story. But when the student read aloud two pages of the story at the beginning of his workshop, I realized that the narrator’s voice, which combines elevated diction with a tongue-in-cheek tone, is one of the story’s best features. The other students and I laughed out loud at the voice. The story has some deficiencies, but now I’m wondering whether the use of omniscient narration is one of them. The writer, it is true, does not always use omniscience with subtlety; often the narrator gives away too much information too soon. But, there is that compelling voice.

The general bias against omniscience in writing instruction has caused me, I now realize, sometimes to misread omniscience in contemporary fiction as either serial limited narration (narration in which the point of view switches between characters but enters only one character’s consciousness at a time) or as “for-the-most-part” limited (my term, meaning narration limited to a character’s, or characters’, point of view in which a narrator’s voice might surface occasionally). Such misreading alters a story, centering it more on character interactions rather than on the narrator’s shaping of the story and its value. When I first read Eudora Welty’s story “No Place for You, My Love,” for example, I initially understood the narration as serial third-person limited, switching 20 between the man and the woman. But when I read the story with a more open mind, I become aware of the presence of a narrator who infects the man’s and the woman’s points of view to differing degrees and who sometimes narrates outright. And, unlike the narrators in my third-person stories, this narrator has a distinct, recognizable voice. In fact, as I become aware of “her” (to my ear, she is female), I “hear” her voice as similar to the voice of the actor who recorded Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter, that of a sophisticated, intellectual Southern woman.

To illustrate this range of narrative modes, consider the following passage, from early in the story. The narration begins in the man’s point of view, moves in the second paragraph into the narrator’s voice, notable for its abstract, Latinate vocabulary and characteristic mix of formal and informal syntax, and in the third paragraph returns to the man’s point of view:

Did he dream of making her disloyal to that hopelessness that he

saw very well she’d been cultivating down here? He knew very well that

he did not. What they amounted to was two Northerners keeping each

other company. She glanced up at the big gold clock on the wall and

smiled. He didn’t smile back. She had that naïve face that he associated,

for no good reason, with the Middle West—because it said “Show me,”

perhaps. It was a serious, now-watch-out-everybody face, which orphaned

her entirely in the company of these Southerners. He guessed her age, as

he could not guess theirs: thirty-two. He himself was further along.

Of all human moods, deliberate imperviousness may be the most

quickly communicated—it may be the most successful, most fatal signal 21 of all. And two people can indulge in imperviousness as well as in

anything else. “You’re not very hungry either,” he said.

The blades of fan shadows came down over their two heads, as he

saw inadvertently in the mirror, with himself smiling at her now like a

villain. His remark sounded dominant and rude enough for everybody

present to listen back a moment; it even sounded like an answer to a

question she might have just asked him. The other women glanced at him.

The Southern look—Southern mask—of life-is-a-dream irony, which

could turn to pure challenge at the drop of a hat, he could wish well away.

He liked naïveté better. (588-89)

The narrator’s voice in the middle paragraph stands out from passages narrated primarily from the man’s point of view; that voice is more abstract and it is not grounded specifically in the man’s thought process. But even the narration of the man’s thoughts includes words and phrases that seem infected by the narrator’s Southern voice, rather than the reverse, as is more usual in contemporary fiction—the word “dominant” used to describe his spoken comment, for instance, and the phrase “life-is-a-dream irony,” and the adjective “pure” to describe “challenge,” which seems particularly Southern. The narrator, here, emerges as a character, though a character whom the reader can only know through voice and orientation to story material.

The narrator serves as source and organizer of the story. “No Place for You, My

Love” tells of a man and a woman, initially strangers, who meet at lunch and end up driving together south from New Orleans, along increasingly smaller, poorer roads, until they reach a café and can go no farther; after eating, drinking, dancing, they drive back to 22 New Orleans and part. While the man and the woman (we never learn their names) are both Northerners, the narrator is Southern and familiar with New Orleans, as this passage shows: “The stranger in New Orleans always sets out to leave it as though following the clue in a maze” (590). And she knows these characters better than they know themselves.

This comes through, for instance, when she comments on their dancing at the café, which she describes as “like professional Spanish dancers wearing masks” (599):

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the

touch of one another, or all is lost. Their arms encircling each other, their

bodies circling the odorous, just-nailed-down floor, they were, at last,

imperviousness in motion. They had found it, and had almost missed it:

they had to dance. They were what their separate hearts desired that day,

for themselves and each other. (599)

The passage gets across both disconnection and connection; even as their arms encircle each other, the man and woman remain impervious, their hearts separate. The final line in particular articulates what the characters don’t know—and, in the timeframe of the story—never realize about themselves: that they could have forged a meaningful connection with each other.

Welty’s narrator has a deft touch: she knows when to speak and when to allow the characters’ interactions to speak for themselves, namely throughout the majority of the story. Her voice only emerges fully at key moments, moments that require her exegesis for the story to be the story it is. One such moment occurs when the characters find their bearings after having gotten lost on their return to New Orleans. As depicted in-scene, these characters’ relationship is one of often extreme restraint; despite their close 23 proximity, they hardly interact and when they do it is with great hesitancy. In this scene, their relief at coming upon a street they recognize is understated: the woman sits up straight; the man turns the car around, mutters “We’re all right now,” and allows himself a cigarette (601). It is not a moment the reader might recognize as significant without the narrator’s subsequent commentary: “Something that must have been with them all along suddenly, then, was not. In a moment, tall as panic, it rose, cried like a human, and dropped back” (601). Even here, the obscurity of the narrator’s comment prevents it from being “telling.” The reader must still interpret for herself what this means. For me, the

“something” starts out as the panic one feels at being lost in a strange place, then metamorphoses into a personification—“like human,” yet not human—of the possible connection between the man and the woman that now will never be.

The omniscient narration in this story exists alongside rather severe restrictions in point-of-view. Although the narration accesses the characters’ thoughts, these are limited, until the last line of the story, to immediate circumstances. Little about these characters’ lives before or after their encounter and the drive they take is revealed. The effect is like pressing one’s face so close to an object that one cannot see the whole. The bruise on the woman’s temple suggests her involvement in a violent relationship—and the story hints at an affair rather than a marriage; the man is long—and we guess unhappily—married.

But the story never confirms these suspicions.

In effect this narrator is not all-knowing so much as all-seeking. I stated earlier that the narrator’s overt presence in a story shifts its center from character interactions to the narrator’s shaping of the story and its value. In “No Place” the story ends up being not about the man and the woman’s failure to connect but about the narrator’s perception of 24 that failure and, by extension, of the loneliness of existence. It is the narrator’s need to translate into language and narrative this loneliness that drives the story. And she, I find myself believing, needs to tell the story as much as a reader needs to hear it. A sentence from near the end of the story keeps drawing me back; I frankly don’t know what it means: “A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told—returned to the world it came out of” (601). To tell a story, then, is to return it to where it came from, to return it to narration itself, to storytelling. This sentence, the first following a section break, is an anomaly in the story in that it is not directly related to the narrative flow. The sentence that follows this one, in the same paragraph, consists of the narrated thought of the man, but this sentence I can only read as the narrator speaking directly to the reader. Strange.

And lovely, if obscure.

When I step back from this story, I realize that it could have been told no other way. What makes these characters’ failure to connect so poignant is their inarticulateness—but that very inarticulateness requires a narrator, if one who is often opaque. Neither character could tell this story because neither could see that the possibility of meaningful connection was there all along. In the story’s final line, the narrative shifts, at least ostensibly, into narrated thought (the man’s) and, for the first time in the story, delves with specificity into the past: “As he drove the little Ford safely to its garage, he remembered for the first time in years when he was young and brash, a student in New York, and the shriek and horror and unholy smother of the subway had its original meaning for him as the lilt and expectation of love” (602). This shift into the past is all the more powerful because it is unique in the story. The image of love as the “shriek and horror and unholy smother of the subway,” a notion that we know the man’s life has 25 not borne out, changes how we understand the encounter between the man and the woman: their failure to connect, like her illicit relationship and his marriage, is seen to be another failure to realize the potential he once perceived in love. But notice that even now he doesn’t understand. The language of the memory—“unholy smother,” “original meaning,” “lilt and expectation of love”—exhibits the high degree of abstraction characteristic of the narrator’s voice. The story, as it has all along, belongs to the narrator.

I am not sure that beginning fiction writers don’t benefit from writing in a discrete, limited point of view. I continue to believe in the importance of rendering the fictional world from character consciousness. However, my recognition of omniscient narration as a present and viable option in contemporary fiction allows me to see that omniscience can be combined with the project of rendering the world as the characters experience it. In Welty’s story, I enter the world of the man and the woman, aliens in the

Southern world of New Orleans, alien to each other, as well entering the world of the

South the narrator knows and the world of human loneliness the narrator perceives.

I have been admittedly naïve about omniscient narration in contemporary literature. And I believe that my misunderstanding reflects a lack of balance in regard to omniscience in most fiction-writing classrooms. Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My

Love” shows me what I’ve missed: the subtlety of omniscience used selectively.

Certainly, “No Place” is a very different story read as a narrator’s attempt to articulate human loneliness than as the characters’ failure to connect delivered via a serial limited point of view. Janet Burroway, in her discussion of point of view in Writing Fiction, 26 describes what she terms “limited omniscience,” in which the author can see events objectively but limits her access to characters’ thoughts to the mind of one character.

Burroway characterizes use of this point of view as a contract with the reader as part of which, if the author stepped in and announced what the character couldn’t know, the move would be perceived as “an abrupt and uncalled-for authorial intrusion” (258-59).

But isn’t that just what Welty does to such wonderful effect? Perhaps the omniscient narration in Welty’s story might best be called “selective omniscience.” And perhaps writers, even student writers, might benefit from considering “selective omniscience” as a viable option in their stories.

Reflections

What drives me in this essaying is, at bottom, dissatisfaction with the kind of stories I know how to write. This essay itself has been a struggle for me to write, perhaps the most difficult writing project of my graduate education. I set out in early drafts of the essay to explore story shape with the idea that a deeper understanding of story shape would help me move toward writing the stories I really want to write. By identifying and exploring the primary structural tensions at work in fiction, I thought I could shift the balance of these tensions in my work and in so doing move in the direction of a different kind of story. By structural tensions I mean such factors as mimesis and diegesis, transparency (those aspects of fiction that contribute to the reader’s construction of meaning) and opacity (those that don’t), discourse-related aspects of the text and those that develop characters’ lives in time, direct and indirect modes of representation, closed 27 and open narrative forms. I expected to be able to develop correlations between these tensions. But instead, I ended up tracking them through several stories without being able to draw conclusions from my analysis; not only couldn’t I develop correlations, but my analysis did not lead me to a new understanding of how to write the stories that I want to write.

I realize, now, that these structural tensions, while they certainly exist, won’t break open for me the stories I most admire or lead me to the stories I want to write.

These are stories in which the narrator’s voice has a strong, individual presence, stories that foreground where they come from and why they need to be told, stories that unfold gradually, come into their story-ness indirectly. “No Place for You, My Love” is one of these stories. But for me the story that—since I first encountered it as one of John

Updike’s selections in Best American Short Stories of the Century—most exemplifies this type of story, is Willa Cather’s “Double Birthday.”

Julio Cortázar distinguishes between stories in which the intensity is “obtained by the elimination of everything which does not bear directly upon the action,” such as

Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and those stories that unfold gradually and in which “one feels immediately that the facts themselves are of little importance, that all that matters is in the forces that unleash them, in the subtle web which announces them and accompanies them” (251). John Gerlach discusses at length these two types of stories, which he terms direct and indirect, in Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the

American Short Story. Gerlach’s analyses focus principally on the structure of indirect stories, particularly on the range of alternatives to plot-centered closure these stories feature. As insightful as his discussion is, I wonder if he doesn’t pass too quickly over the 28 overt presence of the storyteller as a shaping force in some of these stories. It is this topic

I will explore in the second half of this essay.

Cortázar invokes the tradition of Argentinean gauchos telling stories around the campfire in his discussion of the second kind of story, stories that enchant by means of the “subtle web that announces and accompanies them.” He connects the storyteller’s voice in these stories directly to the tradition of oral storytelling. Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, “The Storyteller,” pushes more deeply into this connection and into the unique orientation of the sort of story that foregrounds the voice of the storyteller. It is to Benjamin that I will turn to open up the magic of Willa Cather’s

“Double Birthday.”

A point of clarification before I move on, however: I don’t mean to suggest that stories that foreground character voice are exclusively of Cortázar’s first kind; stories are infinitely diverse and most attempts to classify them structurally oversimplify. Nor do I mean to suggest that the stories that students in today’s writing classrooms are encouraged to write are inferior—only that writing instruction should also make room for the storyteller.

Benjamin’s Storyteller: the Narrator of “Double Birthday”

The narrative voice that comes to mind in response to Burroway’s characterization of omniscience as “godlike” is the narrator of Robert Coover’s story

“The Magic Poker.” True-to-postmodern-form, Coover’s narrator parodies godlike omniscience in not only knowing all but creating all: 29 I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for it, and trees—pines and

birch and dogwood and firs—and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its

abandoned shores. This, and more: I deposit shadows and dampness, spin

webs, and scatter ruins. Yes: ruins. A mansion and guest cabins and boat

houses and docks. Terraces, too, and bath houses and even an observation

tower. All gutted and window-busted and autographed and shat upon. I

impose a hot midday silence, a profound and heavy stillness. But anything

can happen. (20)

Coover’s parodic omniscience serves well as a foil for Cather’s very different use of the strategy. In contrast to Coover’s narrator, notice how un-godlike the quiet wisdom of Willa Cather’s narrator is in “Double Birthday.” The story begins in the narrator’s voice,

Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem

all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the

same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the

times—there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are

disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen. (77)

Walter Benjamin’s characterization of the storyteller as one “who has counsel for his readers” (86) describes the orientation of Cather’s narrator here better than the adjective

“godlike.” A storyteller’s tale, Benjamin states, “contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim” (86). Moral seems too simplistic a notion to sum up the impact of “Double Birthday,” but Benjamin’s assessment describes Cather’s 30 narrator in the sense that from this opening paragraph on, she (Cather’s narrator does not seem particularly gendered, but I use the female pronoun for convenience) clearly has something to teach the reader: she offers new insight into American society and to the value of the past in the present.

The adjective “godlike” implies a delivery as though from above. While that sense comes through Coover’s narration, though parodically, it does not reflect the narration in Cather’s story. Benjamin writes, “A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship” (100).

Again, Benjamin’s characterization captures the experience of reading Cather’s story: that of a companionable intimacy between reader and narrator.

The orientation of Cather’s narrator to the story material in “Double Birthday” is more that of chronicler than inventor, as with Coover’s narrator. The term is one

Benjamin uses to describe the storyteller, in contrast with the historian. While the historian seeks to explain circumstances, the chronicler displays them “as models of the course of the world” (96). “Double Birthday” operates in just this mode. Thus the movement from the general comments of the opening paragraph into specific scene and characters—the steps of the Pittsburgh courthouse, Judge Hammersley’s encounter with

Albert—suggests an exemplary relationship between generalities and specifics that recalls Benjamin’s phrase.

Chronicler also describes the narrator’s manner of recounting the story. One never senses, in “Double Birthday,” the machinations of plot. Partly this lies in the structure of the story, in the way it appears to wander in the beginning and to find of its own accord its primary subject, which I will discuss further below. But this effect arises as well from 31 the way in which the story seems to be told “simply and naturally,” a phrase I borrow from the story: late in the story, after the judge’s daughter has agreed to stay for the birthday dinner, the narrator tells us that she “sat down beside the Doctor, accepted one of his cigarettes, and began to talk to him simply and naturally about Marguerite

Theisinger” (97). Yes, just like the story itself. “Simply and naturally,” in this story, means that the narration never underlines or draws especial attention to any element of the narrative; there are few overtly literary effects such as repetition of images or overarching metaphors. No details ever seem planted.

In two instances, the story references events which have not yet been discussed: the doctor’s great loss and the fate of the pianist Joseffy. In the hands of many writers such references would function as foreshadowing. But in Cather’s story, the references seem simply an artifact of the narrating process, the inability to relate the parts of the story all at once. The first reference to the doctor’s loss occurs when Albert notes the look of deep sadness that comes over his uncle’s features as he listens to Albert’s piano playing. It is then that the narrator supplies, “Doctor Engelhardt had had a heavy loss late in life. Indeed, he had suffered the same loss twice.” The loss is mentioned again a paragraph later, and then the narration breaks off and recounts the story, beginning many years earlier, of the doctor’s singing protégé who died at twenty-six of throat cancer after showing such promise. It is a tribute to the “naturalness” of the story that this analepsis, or back-story, seems to work forward rather than backward; it doesn’t explain the doctor’s melancholy as flashbacks tend to do but deepens our understanding of it. The analepsis is integral to the unfolding of the story, not tacked on. Perhaps the effect I am 32 describing is simply a result of the narrating of the story having taken precedence over the events narrated.

The first reference to Joseffy, a renowned pianist and Albert’s teacher, occurs during the narration of Albert’s thoughts as he gazes on the prosperous homes of his childhood friends and thinks that his life, with all the artistic and intellectual excitement of his youth, has been the better one: “He wouldn’t at this moment exchange his life and his memories—his memories of his teacher, Rafael Joseffy, for instance—for any one of these massive houses [. . . . ]” (91). The reference to Joseffy blends seamlessly with

Albert’s meditation. The reader would not miss anything if that were the only reference to Joseffy in the story. But near the story’s end, the name comes up a second time, again very naturally: conversing with Albert about shared memories, the judge’s daughter

Marjorie says, “Do you remember the time you took me to hear Joseffy play the second

Brahms, with Gericke? It was the last time I ever heard him. What did happen to him,

Albert? Went to pieces in some way, didn’t he? (97).” The question prompts Albert to tell of his last visit to Joseffy after the pianist suffered a breakdown.

The ability to communicate experience, is for Benjamin, the essence of storytelling: “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn” (84). It is this ability to communicate experience that constitutes wisdom for Benjamin, thus he states that “counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom” (86-87). In “Double Birthday,” at every level of the story—between the characters themselves, between characters and reader (in so far as the reader listens in on the characters’ conversations), between narrator and reader (in the telling of the story 33 itself)—experience is exchanged, just as in the conversation between Albert and Marjorie about Joseffy.

In the fiction classroom, writers are often advised to avoid long passages of dialogue and to avoid using dialogue to convey information. The story of Joseffy, however, is conveyed entirely through the dialogue between Albert and Marjorie. Yet the conversation never bogs down or seems informational—because authentic communication occurs between the characters, as it does between narrator and reader in the story as a whole. I quote here the end of the exchange:

“Would he give you a lesson?” [Marjorie asks Albert.]

“No. Said he wasn’t giving any. Said he was sorry, but he wasn’t

seeing people at all any more. I remember he sat making patterns in the

gravel with his cane. He frowned and said he simply couldn’t see people;

said the human face had become hateful to him—and the human voice! ‘I

am sorry,’ he said, ‘but that is the truth.’ I looked at his left hand, lying on

his knee. I wonder, Marjorie, that I had the strength to get up and go away.

I felt as if everything had been drawn out of me. He got up and took my

hand. I understood that I must leave. In desperation I asked him whether

music didn’t mean anything to him still. ‘Music,’ he said slowly, with just

a ghost of his old smile, ‘yes—some music.’ He went back into the house.

Those were the last words I ever heard him speak.” (98)

Every time I read this passage of dialogue I find it deeply moving. Here the character,

Albert, acts as surrogate storyteller, providing his audience at both the story and extra- story levels the details and context that allow us to see the conversation for ourselves. We 34 see Joseffy absently tracing patterns in the gravel, see the hand that formerly played the piano so masterfully lying inertly on his knee. We see him rise to Albert’s mention of music and then, having failed to leave the private world he now inhabits, turn and reenter the house. We experience what Albert experienced through his dialogue.

Communicability has, as Benjamin accuses, gone out of fashion. Most contemporary stories make much of characters’ inability to communicate. Indeed, Eudora

Welty’s story “No Place for You, My Love” does so.4 Certainly that strategy can be

powerful in fiction; Cather’s “Double Birthday,” however, enacts a very different project.

There is another facet to the communicability of experience. In a true exchange of

experiences, the one who transmits the experience speaks on equal footing with her

listener. Already, I have discussed the companionable intimacy of the narrator-reader

relationship in “Double Birthday.” But to take the idea further, the transmitter of

experience must show the degree of respect that leaves room for the recipient to make her

own assessments, as one would in an actual conversation in which one shares an

experience. This is not a matter of inviting conversation so much as leaving room for response, reaction. The pleasure of exchanging experiences is foregone when the speaker passes judgment for her companion, as Cather’s narrator understands. While she may

compress and summarize for the sake of efficiency, she always leaves the reader space to

draw her own conclusions.

The impression of Judge Hammersley the reader comes away with is of a stiff,

rather narrow-minded, conventional—yet well-meaning—man. This impression,

4 Welty’s story, I should perhaps clarify, fits into John Gerlach’s category of indirect stories, and exemplifies some of the strategies Benjamin discusses in “The Storyteller,” but the omniscient narrator of “No Place” is not a “storyteller” in the sense Benjamin intends. 35 however, is not handed down fully formed by the narrator; rather it emerges gradually from the combination of description, access to thought and mimetic scene. The judge is described as stiff and frowning (77); the narration dips into the judge’s thoughts concerning Albert, whom he considers a failure, a man who squandered his family fortune (78-79); during a conversation with his daughter, which is presented in-scene, the judge shows himself to be unnecessarily critical of Albert (80); specific details about his regimented routine and dry reading preferences (81) fill out the portrait. The reader’s assessment of the judge follows from the accumulation of all these specifics.

Benjamin approaches this need to respect the reader as an equal from a slightly different angle. He contrasts the storyteller’s exchange of experience with passing on information as in a report. It is worthwhile to quote the full paragraph in which Benjamin introduces this idea:

Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in

noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us

without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by

now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything

benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a

story free from explanation as one reproduces it. Leskov is a master at this

(compare pieces like “The Deception” and “The White Eagle”). The most

extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest

accuracy but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on

the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands 36 them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

(89)

What a rich passage! To explain, to connect the dots between cause and effect, shuts down a story. A story achieves amplitude only when cause and effect, psychological connections, are not pinned down. Unlike information, which “does not survive the moment in which it was new,” a story “does not expend itself” (90)—and this is precisely because it leaves itself open to interpretation.

Benjamin offers the example of an anecdote told by Herodotus about a captured king who does not react to seeing his enemy’s triumphal procession or his daughter performing the duties of a servant or his son on the way to execution but breaks down at the sight of his old and poor servant among the prisoners. Because Herodotus offers no explanation of the king’s behavior, the story still “arouses astonishment and thoughtfulness” (90). And as this subsequent passage from Benjamin’s essay makes clear, it is only when events are reproduced without explanation that the exchange of experience, here the integration of related experience into the listener’s own, can take place:

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than

that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the

more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological

shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of

the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience,

the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday,

sooner or later. (91) 37 That “chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis”: this phrase shows the fiction workshop’s maxim, “show don’t tell,” to be an oversimplification. Benjamin advocates “telling.” “Telling” is where stories begin. It is rather in holding off from explanations, especially psychological explanations, that the art of the storyteller lies.

To return for a moment to Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love,” recall the way in which the obscurity of the narrator’s diegesis left room for, required even, interpretation. The passages in the story in which the narrator’s voice could be heard did not expend themselves but rather invited further involvement by the reader. Telling is not the issue—it is how one tells.

A scene in “Double Birthday” illustrates the difference between explaining and

Benjamin’s “chaste compactness.” In the conversation about Joseffy, earlier than the passage I quoted, Albert’s uncle, the doctor, interrupts Albert’s description of the broken man with the accusation—“Drugs” (87). The doctor’s accusation attempts to explain the pianist’s sudden decline. But Albert rejects the explanation: “‘Nonsense!’ Albert shrugged in derision. ‘Or if he did, that was secondary; a result, not a cause. He’d seen the other side of things; he’d let go. Something had happened in his brain that was not paresis’” (98). Albert’s response dismisses possible simple causes—drugs or paralysis— of Joseffy’s condition and insists on what cannot be simplified, the experience of “seeing the other side of things.”

The characterization of the doctor, Albert’s elderly uncle, in “Double Birthday” is especially notable for its “chaste compactness.” When first introduced in the story, by means of inquiries the judge makes of Albert, the doctor is presented as a much respected figure. And the narrator never directly tells us anything to contradict that opinion. 38 However, as in life when one becomes aware over time of the shortcomings of a person whom one has long looked up to, details pile up that present an alternate view of the man.

A bachelor all his life, the doctor thinks of himself as a ladies’ man and, we realize, participates in a bit of self-promotion on this count: the narrator tells us, “The Doctor had always flattered himself that he resembled a satyr, because the tops of his ears were slightly pointed; and he used to hint to his nephews that his large pendulous nose was the index of an excessively amorous disposition” (82). In similar vein, the narrator tells us the two versions of the origin of the scar that runs across his throat—a wound inflicted by a jealous husband and an injury incurred when the doctor stumbled into the cold frames after drinking too much (83). The narrator, however, leaves the determination of which explanation is the most likely to the reader. As the story progresses, the doctor’s comments show him to be a bit of a bore—when he makes the “old joke,” as the narrator allows, about the landlady’s granddaughter’s skinny arms (95), for instance—but the narrator continues to refer to him as worthy of respect. At the close of the story this disjunction is especially evident. The doctor quotes Martin Luther without realizing he is doing so and Albert stops him: “Albert began to laugh. The old man wasn’t often banal.

‘Why, Uncle, you and Martin Luther—’” (99). Even as Albert tells us his uncle isn’t usually banal, the alternate version gains credence. Perhaps, I find myself thinking, the doctor’s career was not so illustrious as it was made out to be. I recall that, after all, he accepted cases for little pay, retired early, and now lives in genteel poverty with his nephew.

What a different story “Double Birthday” would be, however, if the narrator were to state outright that the doctor is full of himself and was never half the man he makes 39 himself out to have been. Certainly, the final scene between the doctor and Albert, which

I will treat further below, would have none of the poignancy it does.

How does the overt presence of the storyteller-narrator in “Double Birthday” shape the story? John Gerlach’s discussion of indirect stories in Toward the End provides useful context here. Gerlach cites Mark Twain’s advice from “How to Tell a Story”:

“‘The humorous story,” [Twain] contends, in what could serve as a definition of the indirect mode, ‘may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular’” (61). Form, or the manner of telling such a story, is more important than content. And the circuitous approach to the heart of the story, as Cortázar makes clear, contributes to the power of such a story: Cortázar describes these stories as having “an intensity wrought because the author brings us slowly to what is related. Even while we are still far from learning what will occur in the story, we cannot escape the story’s atmosphere” (251).

While Cather’s story is hardly a humorous tale, it does share with Twain’s stories a structure that appears to wander initially and that never presents the reader with a clear central conflict. The structure of “Double Birthday” is particularly circuitous: the story opens with the judge’s encounter with Albert, largely from the judge’s point of view; follows the judge back to his home; introduces the reader to his daughter Marjorie; shifts to Albert at home in the evenings, playing the piano for his uncle; shifts to the story of the doctor’s protégé and Albert’s youth; describes the doctor’s daily routine now; returns to Albert in the present, to his visit to the judge during which he is given wine for the birthday dinner and encounters Marjorie, whom he has not seen for years; and finally narrates the birthday evening, during which Marjorie stops by to pay her respects and is 40 talked into staying for dinner. The winding route of the story, however, does not rely particularly on the associational logic or internal patterning that Gerlach notes in Twain’s story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and which he finds typical of indirect stories. Rather the shape of Cather’s story seems to be determined by the presence of the storyteller herself, the need to tell the parts of the story that need to be told in the order they need to be told, an aspect of narrative that Gerlach does not discuss directly.

Benjamin invokes Paul Valéry’s discussion of old-fashioned crafts such as lacquer work as a model of the way in which a storyteller structures a story: Benjamin quotes Valéry,

“He speaks of the perfect things in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied,

matured wines, truly developed creatures, and calls them ‘the precious

product of a long chain of causes similar to one another.’” The

accumulation of such causes has its temporal limit only at perfection.

“This patient process of Nature,” Valéry continues, “was once imitated by

men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest

perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or

paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed one on top

of the other—all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are

vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man

no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.” (93)

The phrase “a long chain of causes” describes aptly the understanding of life that underlies Cather’s story, with “causes” here being not psychological explanations but the 41 lived experiences of her characters. Had Cather eliminated everything that doesn’t bear directly on the action, there would be no story: because the story consists of the piling up of thin, transparent layers—the bits and pieces of the lives of these characters who lived in Pittsburgh during the Prohibition years—and the exchange of experience between narrator and reader.

As the story progresses, the “double birthday” party of Albert and his uncle emerges as the story’s focus. The birthday evening takes up the final six of twenty-two pages. By the time the narrator reaches this evening, a sense of story-ness has developed; from this point on, the narrator steps back and scene predominates. In his discussion of indirect stories, Gerlach details a number of alternatives to closure employed in these stories—endings that rely on antithesis or the “poetic evocation of a state of mind” (101), on the suspended or truncated ending, for instance. But none of these quite captures the moment on which “Double Birthday” ends.

After the exchange about Martin Luther cited earlier, the doctor says to Albert,

“But don’t fool yourself; one like her always knows when a man has had success with women!” (99). Albert tells his uncle that he certainly had success with Marjorie and informs him that she will take him for a ride tomorrow (“after your nap, so you must be ready” 99). Having come to know the doctor for ourselves through the course of the story, we recognize Albert’s words as affectionately patronizing just as we recognize that the doctor accepts them at face value. There is, then, irony, one of the options Gerlach discusses as contributing to closure in indirect stories. Still, the emotional impact of the story’s final passage lies not so much in its irony as in the listener’s recognition that eventually we will all end up in the doctor’s place, whether or not we have an inflated 42 sense of self-importance. The passage is depicted in-scene, with the full measure of chaste compactness: “The Doctor passed his flexible, nervous hand lightly over the thick bristles of his French hair-cut. ‘Even in our ashes,’ he muttered haughtily” (99). The doctor’s gestures, the detail of his stylish haircut, betray his vanity. Yet his reference to death resonates with the deaths told and anticipated earlier in the story: that of the doctor’s protégé after her long illness; Joseffy’s decline; Albert’s intuition of death as he left his office earlier that day and thought of his own birthday—“if one stopped to think of that, there was a shiver waiting round the corner” (93, my italics).

This final moment simply cannot be reduced to a structural effect. It can be appreciated only as the culmination of the piling up of thin, transparent layers, all of them essential to the story. Gérard Genette’s sometimes overly technical discussion of narrative in Narrative Discourse introduces the poetic idea of a class of narrative

“typically Chinese: that of narrative written with a very fine brush” (188). Willa Cather’s story is that kind of narrative. The richness of detail in “Double Birthday” astounds: the sooty flakes on the white sheets hanging to dry; the glittering gravel of Albert’s childhood yard; the doctor’s fondness for three ailanthus trees in the bricked courtyard. I list these particulars, and omit so many more, to suggest how they evoke the wholeness of a fully imagined world rather than serving an identifiable purpose in the story. Every brushstroke, each intrinsically developed character (for a short story, there are many—the judge, Marjorie, the doctor, his protégé, even the landlady’s granddaughter, Joseffy,

Albert) is integral to the story that emerges, which is not about events or characters’ lives only but is about the particular “model of the course of the world” that the storyteller yearns to get across to the reader. 43 Benjamin contrasts the ending of a novel, a genre he sees as tied to the book rather than the voice of the storyteller, with that of the kind of story “Double Birthday” is: “The novelist cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’”

(100). The novel, then, ends definitively and only in its ending reveals its full meaning.

Interestingly, the example Benjamin chooses to illustrate the effect—the end of

Éducation sentimentale in which Frédéric and Deslauriers reminisce about bringing flowers to the patronne of a bordello as boys, a moment they declare the finest of their lives—is simply an earlier version of the close of Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love,” an ending that was resonant and satisfying. But Cather’s ending of “Double Birthday” does something entirely different. Instead of looking back on life nostalgically, the doctor’s comment looks forward—but forward in such a way as to acknowledge death.

Rather than the death that gives meaning to life that Benjamin identifies in the novel’s trajectory, Cather gives us life in the presence of, alongside the inevitability of, death.

In contrast with the novel, Benjamin emphasizes that the story in which the storyteller’s voice is pronounced does not close down: “Actually,” he writes, “there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate” (100). For a word to describe this effect, I turn to Ronald Schliefer’s discussion of Grace Paley’s work, a turn that seems appropriate in that Grace Paley may be the contemporary writer who most exemplifies Benjamin’s storyteller. Schliefer says of Paley, “Both little disturbances and enormous changes are brought together at the close of her stories to create a sense of ordinary ongoingness that eschews that melodrama of closure. Instead of articulating the meaning of life, her stories attempt to address ongoing life” (37). 44 Although Cather is a very different writer from Paley, “ongoingness” captures my experience of the end of Cather’s “Double Birthday.”

There are contemporary writers who employ omniscient narration to good effect and writers who foreground the storyteller’s voice. I hear the storyteller in Grace Paley’s work, in Rick Bass’s, in Kate Haake’s, to name a few.

Often these writers are favorites of writing instructors. However, in the writing classroom, one hears little about the possibility of foregrounding the storyteller’s voice or about how to use omniscient narration effectively; too often, writing instruction oversimplifies the spectrum of options available in third-person limited narration that uses free indirect discourse. In my classroom, I am beginning to address these omissions.

It may seem odd to present an essay entitled “In Defense of Omniscience: The

Voice of the Storyteller” as an introduction to a story collection in which only one story employs omniscience (“Far Hills”) and none allow the storyteller’s voice to shape overtly the story in third-person. Perhaps—just as Derrida acknowledges that every preface is in reality an afterward5—this essay better serves as an orientation to the stories I have yet to

write than the stories that follow. For all that, my discussion has achieved what earlier

5 “The preface would announce in the future tense (‘this is what you are going to read’) the conceptual content or significance (here, that strange strategy without finality, the debility or failure that organizes the telos or the eschaton, which reinscribes restricted economy within general economy) of what will already have been written. And thus sufficiently read to be gathered up in its semantic tenor and proposed in advance. From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which recreates an intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which, under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future” (7). From Dissemination by Jacques Derrida (Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981). 45 drafts did not: a different way to understand how a story might be put together, a way that relies on narration as speaking rather than listening. 46 Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:

Schocken Books, 1968. 83-109.

Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. New York: Longman,

2003.

- - - . Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. New York: Longman, 2003.

Cather, Willa. “Double Birthday.” The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Ed.

John Updike and Katrina Kenison. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 77-99.

Chabon, Michael and Katrina Kenison, eds. The Best American Short Stories 2005.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Coover, Robert. “The Magic Poker.” Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions. New York: Grove

Press, 1969. 20-45.

Cortázar, Julio. “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed.

Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. 245-255.

Doctorow, Cory. “Anda’s Game.” Chabon and Kenison. 223-250.

Dufresne, John. The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction. New York,

Norton, 2003.

Flaubert, Gustave. “A Simple Heart.” Three Tales. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York:

Penguin, 1961. 17-56.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 1980. 47 Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story.

University: U of Alabama P, 1985.

Johnston, Sibyl. Where the Stories Come From: Beginning to Write Fiction. New York:

Longman, 2002.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Once in a Lifetime.” The New Yorker 8 May 2006: 62-73.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Sur.” Mandelbaum. 185-202.

- - - . “Ursula K. Le Guin Discusses ‘Sur,’ Setting, and a Place of Remote and Terrible

Beauty.” Mandelbaum. 203-211.

Lehane, Dennis. “Until Gwen.” Chabon and Kenison. 19-34.

Mandelbaum, Paul, ed. 12 Short Stories and Their Making. New York: Persea, 2005.

Schleifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness.” Contemporary American Women

Writers: Narrative Strategies. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, eds.

Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985. 31-47.

Williams, Lynna. “And Eyes to See: The Art of Third Person.” Creating Fiction. Ed.

Julie Checkoway. Cincinatti: Story P, 1999. 115-124.

Welty, Eudora. “No Place for You, My Love.” You’ve Got to Read This. Ed. Ron Hansen

and Jim Shepard. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. 588-602.

48 Far Hills

That first evening in the new house, over a take-out supper of moo shoo chicken and lo mein, Logan and Nell kept coming back to the poppies. The precise shade of orange-coral was a color Nell had never seen before. What impressed Logan was their resiliency—so vigorous despite the weeds that had taken over the rest of the garden. All afternoon, carrying boxes of the fragile items that Nell had refused to entrust to the movers—her mother’s antique tea set and the hand-blown chandelier—and the supplies purchased from the True Value down the hill, they trudged back and forth past those poppies. Nell wondered if she could replicate the color when she got her papermaking studio up and running. Logan saw the garden in full glory, like a picture from his catalogs, color and height blending in an undulating wave of continuous blooms. City dwellers for their thirty-eight years of married life (for that matter, Nell’s entire life), and now here they were, retired young enough to do those things they’d always longed to do, here in Ellisville, Ohio, some twenty miles from the farm where Logan had grown up.

“But I already miss my Hong Kong Bay,” Nell said. “The moo shoo is reheated.

And the lo mein is half grease.”

“No matter,” Logan said, “I’ll do the cooking—Chinese, Italian, whatever you want, fresh herbs from the garden to boot.”

Then they were back on the poppies.

That night they both lay awake for a long time. There were glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the ceiling of the master bedroom. “A weird detail,” Logan said. Nell suggested 49 that the wife, the woman they had bought the house from, might have put them up for her husband when he became ill. Only in his thirties, the husband had discovered a soft cell tumor in his thigh; three months later he was dead. The realtor, they both agreed, had been shifty about passing on this information, mentioning it only after they had put in their bid. The stars glowed long after the lights were turned out. Logan wasn’t superstitious but the stars gave him the heebie-jeebies, a word that came back to him from childhood. Nell insisted on sleeping with the windows open. Lying there, Logan could make out four different pitches and rhythms of frog calls, sounds that brought back nights on the farm he would rather forget. More familiar urban sounds too—the highway, a train, occasional sirens. Then underneath it all, that same strange, mournful tone that had frightened him so as a child.

The next morning, Nell still couldn’t make up her mind where the couch should go. In front of the long windows, against the blind wall—it didn’t look right anywhere.

Logan couldn’t shake the feeling that the neighbors were staring at them. He had never seen so many people walking dogs. Any time of day, some dog (they were all indistinguishable fluffy, black mutts) would be lifting his leg on Logan and Nell’s mailbox post while at the other end of the leash the dog owner peered intently into the picture window at the front of the house. Not a soul had welcomed them. “I thought small-town folks were supposed to rush over with casseroles,” Nell said. Logan shrugged and looked up the number of a blind company, only to remember about the delay hooking up phone service.

Logan couldn’t wait to start on the garden. Maybe Nell was right—working the land was in his blood, though his father would turn over in his grave to think of him 50 working a flower garden. His father had run cattle, grown feed corn. Logan had wanted none of it; he had gotten an engineering degree and moved to Chicago. But for all those years in the city, the soil pulled at him, though he had to make do with a few patio pots and the catalogs. As far as he was concerned, the derelict perennial beds that ran the length of the long drive and cut across the front of the house were the big draw of the

Farhills Road property.

First thing was to clear out the weeds. Logan set to work with a hoe, cutting through the tangles of pennyroil and bedstraw and ground ivy, scraping below ground to unearth the tenacious dandelion and plantain roots. Wild onions and lambsquarters flourished. Lambsquarters. His mother used to pick the young seedlings and steam them, like spinach; seeing the plant, recognizing it after so many years, made Logan unaccountably tender. His mother had died when Logan was eleven. Standing there, the weed stalk pinched between thumb and forefinger, he felt her absence acutely. Then he let the weed drop and started back hoeing, working around the few surviving daffodils, blooms long done, the leaves sloppy.

Nell took a glass of iced tea out to Logan and found him knee deep in clay off on the edge of the property. “What in the world? Are you digging your grave?” she said, before Logan could explain that it was the pit for his mulch pile. Her voice took on that irritated edge, which she had so far into the start of their new life kept at bay. Back in the kitchen, she kicked the half emptied box of bowls and butter plates that sat in the middle of the room. All this unpacking still to do, and Logan was digging himself a mulch pit.

She dented the box with a second, harder kick. Toe smarting, she left the room, went downstairs to start on her studio. No reason to wear herself out organizing the house if 51 Logan was going to be stuck on that garden like he’d always been stuck on his work.

Retiring to Ellisville hadn’t been her idea in the first place.

The big, walk-out basement room was the only reason Nell had agreed on the house to begin with. No more grants or fundraisers, or the endless classes to organize for the art cooperative she had managed in Chicago. Here, she was going to be the artist, a papermaker. She stacked her assortment of molds and deckles, and the su and geta for

Oriental paper, on the built-in shelves along the back wall. Then she reviewed her plans for the rest of the space: a bathtub-sized sink to the right; two large worktables; and on the far wall, the press and beater. No window coverings for the huge rear window or

French doors that backed up to the woods. Flinging both open wide, she breathed in green. An impertinent little bird with its tail bent upward scolded her from a low branch.

In the city, birds meant the pigeons and starlings she never paid any mind. But this bird made it personal. Nell watched her bounce from branch to branch, never letting up on the squawking. Then, back at work, Nell fetched bucket and rag, opened the storage closet where she would keep the finished paper. There, sitting in plain view on the shelf was a box labeled “Ant. Andrews Personal Effects.” The dead man. She carried the box upstairs, intending to drop it off at the realtor’s.

A week later, the poppies had dropped their petals. The house was in the same, partially unpacked state. Logan had worked ten forty-pound bags of cow manure into the garden soil and planted iris, columbine, delphinium, phlox, his favorite early-season bloomers. “Hydrangeas,” he said into the silence of their morning coffee. “Hydrangeas 52 below the picture window, and around the side too.” Nell, staring out the window, didn’t respond. It had been hydrangeas all along the front of the farmhouse when he was growing up, the blooms so heavy they bent low under their own weight. He saw himself standing there with his mother, slim and young beside him, as she cut the giant blue umbels and lay them down in his arms, then strung them from the barn rafter for drying.

Coming across them, his father had said, “Sissy work.” His father was a hard man, a man who never liked any woman.

When the doorbell rang that afternoon, Nell was just about to cut open the dead man’s box, which still sat in the front hall. A boy of eleven or twelve was at the door, his head down, bangs covering his eyes, shoulders slumped. Before Nell could say a word, he thrust a paper plate of cookies at her. “Here, my mom made these,” he said and as soon as Nell’s finger’s gripped the plate, he turned away, ran back across the street. Kids.

Logan was wrong about her and kids. She did like children; it was them—they didn’t like her. Nell dumped the cookies in the kitchen trash. Just outside the window, she saw a doe and two spotted fawns, their legs so spindly Nell didn’t know how they could stand.

Riveted, she watched them until they moved out of view. Still elated, she returned to the dead man’s box, lifting the flaps to find a man’s empty leather wallet on top of rubber- banded paper records—cancelled checks, utility bills, car service receipts. She sunk onto the floor. She had expected diaries or photographs, even drawings. Fetching a heavy plastic trash bag, she emptied the box’s contents into it. When she tried to fall asleep that night, she couldn’t get the boy out of her mind. He was a double for Logan at that age.

Every day Logan pulled junk mail for Anthony Andrews out of the mailbox.

Andrews must have contributed to every charitable organization in existence—Save the 53 Children, Oxfam, Habitat for Humanity, you name it. Logan had waylaid the mailwoman, who instructed him to write “deceased” on the envelopes and put them back in the mailbox; if there wasn’t a forwarding address filed, she said, she had to deliver it all the same. Logan wondered where the letters ended up, incinerated or stored somewhere?

After three days of marking letter after letter, he started tossing them into a laundry sack he hung at the back of the hall closet. He thought about making contributions in

Andrews’ name, imagined matching the free return address stickers each organization sent with the correct envelopes.

Nell’s press arrived. A near-antique, it weighed close to a ton. The men had to block the cart with chunks of wood, inching it down the hill and then taking off the walkout basement door to get it in—no way they could get it down the interior stairs.

Logan, who had just cleared the hill and seeded it with native wildflowers, held his breath. When the guys dragged the cart up the way they’d come, he exploded, calling them good-for-nothings, local yokels. Nell left, spent the afternoon browsing in the bookstore, bought herself a copy of Peterson’s bird guide, a photo-filled coffee table book on white-tailed deer, a recording of bird songs, and a star wheel (in the Ellisville sky, the whole universe was visible). Though Logan had made wild mushroom ravioli that morning, Nell lingered over quiche and salad at a little café uptown with her deer book for company.

Two days later, the whole scene repeated itself when the beater, an unwieldy oval tub with a hole in the center and a hand-cranked paddle on one side, arrived.

* * * 54 The deer had a trail through the woods by the house. They crossed the road at the dip and traveled along the back side of the ravine, leaped a beaten down fence leftover from when this must have been pastureland and cut across right behind the studio. Nell learned to distinguish them from each other and gave them names: the doe she had seen first she called Dora and her fawns, Darcy and Damien. Dora grew bolder as the fawns got sturdier. She passed through at all times of day, especially now that she’d discovered the corn Nell scattered on the ground to attract juncos. Another, smaller doe, Dior, appeared regularly with her single fawn Danner.

Between the birds and the deer, Nell hadn’t pulled or pressed much paper. A moldy smell pervaded the basement now, from the vats of pulp sitting out. The deer stood in one place and collected every kernel in reach, gathering them up with delicate, mobile lips, then moved on.

Suddenly there were kids everywhere. You could hardly back the car onto the street without hitting one of them, the way they raced up and down on skateboards.

School must have let out for the summer. Their presence cheered Logan. He savored the beat of the basketball on the asphalt from sun up to down, the shouts when one of them sunk a basket. Across the street, the boy hit a baseball tied to a post for a half hour at a time, the metal bat tinging with each contact. A younger kid often blew on a long plastic horn that only played one note. Logan liked all the noise, even the rap songs that blared from the older kids’ boom boxes. When the kids were outside, he hardly noticed the woods sounds, which he associated with his mother’s death. 55 As a young man, Logan had dreamed of having a large family. And then he met

Nell. Logan was digging a hole, planting a butterfly bush, and he thrust the shovel into the soil with sudden vehemence when his mind turned to Nell and children. All those years she had held off, saying they’d try after they caught up with finances, after Logan was promoted, after the co-op was on its feet, one excuse following another. Then she hadn’t been able to conceive. That’s what she had told him. But the truth was, she had never wanted children. He jammed the shovel into the earth, his anger raw and new.

Bitch. He said it out loud, yelled it across the yard: “Bitch, bitch, conniving little bitch.”

Then he looked up to see a girl in a too small, brown Girl Scout uniform cutting across the lawn toward him. Abashed, he handed over twelve dollars, an advance on an order of cookies he didn’t want. At dinner that night, Nell scoffed, said it was a hoax. Girl Scout cookies weren’t sold in the summer.

Another doe and fawn pair regularly visited Nell’s feeding area now. Desi had a scar across her left flank, so she was easily distinguished from Dora. It seemed to Nell that the fawns Dixie and Dunkin had a bit more mischief in them than Darcy and

Damien. This afternoon, when Desi moved off, they stayed behind; she had to circle back for them, making little grunts so that Nell, overhearing, felt like she’d been let in on something. Transfixed, Nell didn’t see Logan come around the corner with his wheelbarrow until the deer had fled. “Logan, the deer,” she called out the window.

“You’ve scared them off.” Logan proceeded on without acknowledging her, dumping his load of branches in the middle of her bird feeding area. She had been pounding kozo with a wooden mallet before she noticed the deer. Now she resumed, pounding harder and harder. And with each stroke her bitterness toward Logan grew. Why had she stayed in 56 the marriage? They had never been good together. Finding herself pregnant in the second year, she had said nothing to Logan; she visited her mother for a week and had the abortion in New York. Again and again she threw the mallet. Somewhere out there was the life she should have led. Nell had paper paste stuck up and down her arms, across her smock. The mold smell clung to her, even after she bathed.

Logan and Nell had been in the house several weeks when the next-door neighbors, Penny and Stan, showed up with a bottle of wine. Answering the door, Logan flushed when they stalled in the foyer, sniffing at the odor which turned out to be some god-awful fiber Nell had simmering on the stove. Logan ushered them out to the deck that cantilevered off the side of the house, jutting out over the ravine fifteen feet in the air, like being in a tree house. Nell joined them. Logan brought out brie and pepper crackers and served the wine, a Merlot with all the complexity of milk. “Wonderful spot you have. We’ve never been up here,” Stan said.

Odd, Logan thought. “Weren’t the Andrews sociable?” he said.

Penny, her voice hushed and breathy, said, “He was sick, you know?”

Nell interrupted, “Look, it’s Dior and Desi. Together.” Logan watched the single- file line of deer wend along the game trail. This morning, he had found the center leaves of his hosta plants, the newest, most tender leaves, nibbled down to the stalk; the deer had done it. And here Nell was, giving them names.

Just then, shouts rose up from the street and a parade of bicycles turned onto the game trail. Each rider plummeted down the steep incline and whooped in turn, rising up 57 from the little jump at the base and bounced, hitting ground, before zooming off. Penny was one of those nervous women, too fluttery for Logan’s taste. Hands at her mouth, she made a squeaky “Oh” sound. “Did you see that, Stan? Stephan was second, behind that

Randy.” She turned to Nell and whispered, “I found that Randy in the rec room closet with our youngest boy, Seth, both of them with their pants down.”

“I don’t know why you can’t just leave that alone, Penny,” her husband said.

Rising from his chair, he drained his wine and stomped down the deck stairs with his wife rushing after him.

The deer had melted into the woods. “Those deer,” Logan said. “The kids can chase them off any time they want.”

That night, Logan’s snoring was louder than usual. Wine always worsened his snoring. Nell lay awake in the glow of the phosphorescent stars. After the awful neighbors had left, she had gone across the street to get to the bottom of the Girl Scout business. There was a sign stuck into the flower pot beside the door that read “WILL

BITE.” When a woman answered Nell’s knock, she only cracked the door. Just behind her, a dog snarled. Nell asked if the woman had a child in Girl Scouts, started to explain about the cookies. The woman cut her off, saying her daughter had quit after Brownies, and slammed the door. Lying there awake, Nell heard footsteps along the back and side of the house, each footfall distinct against the leaf litter. She listened harder, separating the steps from Logan’s snores. She made out the sound of twigs breaking directly beneath the open window where Logan had planted one of his hydrangeas. She pictured Dior nibbling the tight blue buds. 58 The store wasn’t even open yet when Logan pulled in, determined to purchase whatever they had in the way of deer deterrents. He might not get any blooms at all out of what was left of the hydrangeas. And the day lilies, one of his mother’s favorites, which he had planted just the day before, a profusion of colors from pale yellows to rich pinks—eaten to the quick. You would never know each bloom lasted only a day, for all the flowers the plants had thrown up on the farm. But these wouldn’t come up again next year. Waiting, Logan sniffed at his fingers, smelled decay. He spent an hour grilling the shop owner about solutions. Finally the guy told him to piss on his flowers, that was as good as anything. Logan left with garlic oil and some rotten-egg-and-hot-sauce concoction; the store didn’t carry coyote urine, but he could purchase it mail order.

Nell’s trusted IBM Selectric was not in any of the five boxes labeled “home office” that she emptied out on the living room floor. Then she remembered packing it with Logan’s winter sweaters, to protect it. Leaving a trail of sweaters, she set the typewriter up on the dining room table, struck each key forcefully. She had had enough.

The infernal pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of those guns drowned out the bird songs she loved so well and left splotches of orange and blue on the house, the trees, even the flanks of her does and fawns. Paintballs or bullets, guns were guns. She wrote, “Gun-toting children with war paint all over their faces run through the woods behind my house day and night, right here in town, shooting at everything in sight. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The

Ellisville Eagle was a far cry from the Tribune, but it would have to do. 59 Strangely, the deer paid the kids little mind. The band numbered fourteen now: another mother and fawn appeared regularly, and last season’s yearlings had joined the band. Larger groups, her book explained, were the norm as summer went on. One yearling, Dawn, appeared to have lost her mother, probably to collision with a car. Along the highways, dead deer in the most unimaginable contortions lined the breakdown lanes.

Nell cried at the sight of them. Fearful of hitting one, she avoided the highways altogether now and never exceeded ten miles per hour on Farhills Road. She’d rather hit a kid than a deer. Let the neighbors honk all they wanted. As she sealed the letter, another barrage of fire rose up from the woods. The bursts went on and on.

By mid August, Logan had had enough of Nell feeding the birds and every other critter besides. Finding her stash of corn-and-seed mix behind a vat of pulp, he lugged the bag out to his mulch pile. Nell had gone down to City Hall to complain about the paintball guns. Himself, he couldn’t see the harm in them. Pulling off the plastic cover, he poured out the bird food, then pitched it under, along with the salad and stir-fry leftovers from Nell’s dinner plate; Nell ate like a bird these days. The mulch pile was

Logan’s pride. Such satisfying work, turning the rich, black loam (he’d added a good portion of cow manure, to jumpstart the decay process). He felt the heat rising up off it.

No chance the birdseed would sprout, not at these temperatures.

Bending down to pick up the pitchfork, Logan startled at the deer. Middle of the day, and they were marching right through the yard, nonchalant as you please. Must have been fifteen of them. One reached down without slowing to bite off a sprig of bee balm, a 60 plant they weren’t supposed to eat. “Hey,” Logan shouted, rushing them with the pitchfork. The procession sped up just enough that the last in line bounded out of reach of the fork as Logan thrust it forward. Trampled the liatris and the veronica spicata both.

Logan knelt down, patted the soil around the plants, tried to undo the damage by fingering the leaves, but the blooms and stems were crushed. As much work as Logan did, the deer undid. He hardly slept any more. He could have closed his eyes right there in the bed, laid alongside his ruined plants.

Nell pulled the “WILL BITE” sign out of the front flower bed for the third time.

Rather than tossing it across the street as she had before, she took it out behind the house and broke it up with her kozo mallet. These kids were out of control. Didn’t parents supervise children any more?

She spotted her first buck from the blind she rigged up from the remains of what must have been a child’s tree house, back in the woods. A six-point—his rack messy with peeling velvet. She had used pallets she found next to the neighbor’s garage. From the looks of it, they’d been there some time; it didn’t seem like they’d be missed. The hard part was getting them up in the tree house, which Nell accomplished by tying a rope around each and pulling from above, resting a while in between. Then she arranged them against the branches so that she couldn’t be seen from the spot near the game trail where she’d spread apples. Seeing the buck thrilled her, made her tingle like the first time she was with a boy—not Logan, a boy from high school. The buck nibbled the apples, then, spooked by a child’s shout, bolted.

Logan couldn’t see that the garlic oil or hot sauce treatments put the deer off any, although it had been raining so much—something to do with being in the foothills of the 61 Appalachians, the man at the gardening shop told him—the residues were always being washed off. There wasn’t anything left of the lilies, or much else. What the deer didn’t eat, they trampled. They even got his autumn joy sedum, which the garden man had promised they wouldn’t touch. Only the coreopsis—too prickly-leaved to be palatable, even to deer—survived, but the puny yellow flowers were a sorry version of the lush blooms Logan had imagined. Day or night, he didn’t care—whenever he felt the need, he pissed on what was left of the hydrangeas.

He spent nearly all his time outside now, working the soil, or when it rained, patrolling the yard. He’d quit cooking. Being inside made him uncomfortable. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed it before: there was a presence in the house. Logan had rigged up a makeshift roof and screen so that he could sleep on the deck off the bedroom.

All night long, the deer carried on in the woods behind the house. Their feet pounded the ground. Logan imagined their antlers clashing and grinding together as they battled each other, rearing up on their hind legs. Neither Logan’s yells nor the air horn he had purchased had any effect. He never slept.

Nell was spending her nights in her tree-house blind by then, although even out there Logan’s air horn woke her at all hours. Every night, Nell followed the same routine.

With Logan dumping her birdseed and apples in his mulch pit as fast as she could buy them, she had taken to keeping them locked in her car, which she had had rekeyed. Late in the afternoon, she spread apples and corn below the tree house and put out a saltlick.

Well before dark each night, she situated herself in the blind. When it rained, she fitted a tarp over the frame she had built and listened to the pitter of the rain on the vinyl. But on clear nights, she waited for the kids to gather in the woods after nightfall, with their 62 music boxes and blankets. Careful to make no movements that would give away her presence, Nell spied on them as they fought with fists and feet, once even a knife blade that gleamed in the moonlight. As the night progressed, they paired up on the blankets.

On moonless nights when it grew too dark to see, Nell listened while, through a gap in the tree canopy, she made out the summer triangle—Vega, Deneb, and Altair. 63 Soup Kitchen

When Anton cooked the world dropped away. Nothing remained but the space between work surface—cutting board, mixing bowl, mat—and stove, or platter. Every press of palm against knife handle, every scrape and scoop and dip was necessary and purposeful. Energy conserved. Anton existed only as agent of the task.

Anton lived to cook—but not just to cook. To feed, to feed those in genuine need.

Need and want. When Anton’s daughter Ester was learning to talk she mixed up the words “need” and “want”—“Etta need juice,” she used to say; “Etta need cookie.” She couldn’t pronounce her own name until kindergarten. Now she was twelve.

Cooking for those in need—that was the impulse behind the Soup Kitchen,

Anton’s movable kitchen-in-a-trailer that was finally, after all these years, becoming a reality. Between global warming and terrorism, disaster could strike anywhere, anytime.

And you couldn’t count on the big guys stepping in. Local preparedness. A community could depend on that.

Along the driveway of the house where he was renting a room, Anton had assembled his food supplies: five-gallon buckets of sushi rice and black beans and pancake mix; liter tubs of raisons, sesame seeds, freeze-dried vegetables; vacuum sealed bags of ground, fair-trade coffee he had gotten from a local coffee house in return for carpentry. He was emptying out the Soup Kitchen trailer, taking inventory, so he knew what he still had to acquire before ERSATZ, the emergency simulation that was to take place ten days from now. ERSATZ: he hadn’t been able to work out the acronym in the regular way—EmeRgency SimulATion . . . and the Z had stumped him altogether, but he 64 stuck with the name. He liked the sound of it. His idea was that the event would serve as combination fundraiser and PR effort—get out the news, show what the kitchen could do in a real emergency.

He piled up his equipment on the right. The tool box with its bottom drawer full of spices, middle drawer for peelers and paring knives, top for large wooden spoons, whisks, his chopping knife. Compost bucket. Dish racks. Wash tubs. Trays. Funnels.

Colanders. Cooking for pay didn’t satisfy. Anton had worked in the dining hall kitchen at

Coventry College—cooking for rich kids you could never make happy. Saucy’s, the fancy restaurant kitchen, hadn’t been any different. Anton’s ex-wife Felicia didn’t get it.

He still heard her voice goading him: What did you go to culinary school for if you weren’t going to get a job cooking? And the question buried underneath that one: what did I pay the tuition for? She hadn’t understood about not finishing the degree either. But when he had learned what he needed to know, he was done. Pots, stacked one inside the other from the biggest stockpot to the little butter warmer. Two cast iron woks that he had inherited when Saucy’s invested in new carbon steel pans. The French-manufactured commercial mandoline, still in its box, that he bought from eBay.

When his beeper went off, Anton jumped, upsetting a milk crate full of mugs. Not until he saw Felicia’s number did he realize it was Wednesday, his night to have dinner with Ester. He hadn’t told Ester or Felicia about his new, temporary living arrangement, the room he was renting from Mrs. Kreider until he could catch up on bills incurred getting the Soup Kitchen up and running. Felicia would be at his old place (nothing fancy but at least he had the whole house to himself, and a bedroom for Ester). He would have to call Felicia, ask her to meet him at the hot dog place in town. He caught the screen 65 door before it bounced against the jam, wended his way around the café table where Mrs.

Kreider was a fixture, playing solitaire in her housedress. Mumbling about a mix-up meeting his daughter, since Mrs. Kreider didn’t like him to use the phone—when was the last time he had addressed anybody as Mrs., let alone thought of her that way?—he dialed

Felicia’s cell phone.

When he pulled up, Ester was already waiting on the bench outside Pinky’s Dog

Haus, her skinny body lost in baggy black jeans at least two sizes too big with chains hanging off them. A black tee-shirt so large the sleeves went past her elbows. Anton didn’t know what this new style was all about. Had to be ninety degrees even with the sun slipped down behind the buildings. What was wrong with the shorts and lime tank top she had worn about every day last summer, until he teased her about looking like a slice of watermelon, the red of her hair with the green? A horn tooted and he looked up to see Felicia waving at him from her hatchback. He wanted to ask Felicia what had happened, where their Ester had gone. But a purple Camero with spinning hubcaps—

Anton wasn’t sure if it was a townie or college kid, he couldn’t tell the difference anymore—had taken her parking space.

He sat down beside Ester and for a minute neither spoke. Then he said, “Sorry about the mix-up, Pumpkin.”

Ester swung her legs back and forth, kicking higher and higher.

Anton extended his hand to still her legs.

“Okay,” she said, “since you asked, we won. We’re in the play-offs.” 66 He had missed the game. She played rollerblade hockey on a unisex team. Decked out in all her gear she looked like a midget lineman, huge pads on her shoulders, chest, legs. The helmet. Even her jaw squared off, the way she bit into the mouth guard. Anton said, “I missed it, didn’t I? Got my head up my butt with this ERSATZ thing. Lost a day.

All day, I thought it was Tuesday. I’m sorry, Kiddo.” He scratched the thinning hair on the top of his head, a habit, and went on, “But you won. Buy you a beer to celebrate?”

Inside, sauerkraut squishing out his bun into the flimsy basket, Anton asked her if she would design a flier for ERSATZ. Ester had her mother’s knack for art, and access to her mother’s graphics software.

“Write down the details for me, Dad.”

She made it sound like a business deal. Used to be him and Ester against the world; now he might as well have been asking her to diagram sentences. But he needed the fliers. He had advertised in The Eagle two weeks running, a box ad in the classifieds.

Still, he wanted something colorful to post on the campus bulletin boards, staple to phone poles. He borrowed a pen from the server and wrote it all out on a napkin. What he had in mind was an impromptu art festival, folks selling earrings and candles and soap, things they had made. And he’d be there ladling chowder and passing around mini-muffins, maybe even his famous California rolls. He would have a chance to talk to people about how important the kitchen was for the community, hand out the cards he had gotten printed: The Soup Kitchen in fancy gothic lettering, his name and beeper number at the bottom. And of course, he would have the donation jar at the ready.

Scribbling on the napkin, he missed what Ester said. Had to ask her to repeat it. 67 “I just thought you might want to hear about the game,” she said. “Coach called me the most valuable player. Because I made their best guy so mad.”

Ester was about to take a giant bite of dog. “Most valuable player sounds good,

Kiddo.”

Ester played defense like a burr stuck to a dog. He didn’t know where her tenaciousness came from. Talking with her mouth full, she described how she hassled the kid until he lost it and tripped her, flipping her over backwards so she landed splat, wind knocked out of her, and the ref gave him the max five minutes in the penalty box and a dressing down.

They clinked congratulatory mugs full of draft root beer, but the performance felt scripted. The far wall of the dining room was covered with hotdog theme photos—a very pregnant woman stuffing her mouth, I-like-Ike holding a dog; above their table, a jumble of snapshots covered every inch of wall—pictures of local patrons, all of them parents with kids. Ester and Anton came here two, three times a month at least, and had had their photo snapped twice, but hadn’t made it onto the wall.

In the truck when he was driving Ester back to Felicia’s, she said, “You don’t live on Glenn Street anymore, do you?” She was staring straight ahead as intently as if she was playing that video hockey game she liked.

Anton didn’t say anything.

“There’s a ‘For Rent’ sign in the yard.” 68 He turned left at the flower shop, rolled through the four-way stop sign and came to a halt in front of Felicia’s small, brick Colonial.

Ester turned to face him and tucked her legs up Indian-style. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you tell me you were moving?” she said.

Anton had to make himself look at her. “It’s like this, Pumpkin. I don’t have my own place right now.”

“It’s an apartment?”

“Just a room.”

“Like in a hotel?”

“No. A room in a house.”

“So, what’d you do with my stuff?”

“It’s stored at Bill’s,” he said.

She shrugged. “I don’t really care about most of it any more.” She kicked her legs free and opened the door of the truck, jumped to the ground. “See you Saturday.” She started to shut the truck door but stopped in mid swing. “So should I bring my sleeping bag?”

Anton’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. He spoke through his teeth.

“No overnight guests. I didn’t know when I moved in. But she won’t make an exception.”

Ester was already running inside, slamming the door behind her, by the time Anton got out, “A month or two, that’s all it will be.”

* * * 69 A perfect world. Anton had an image of people bustling around, everybody busy at something, the parts fitting together without friction to make the whole. Everything fluid, like a stream, the path of least resistance. He could do no right tonight. Forgot his dinner with Ester. Had to tell her she couldn’t stay overnight with him. And now, after finally getting his supplies and equipment resecured in the trailer, he was late to work. He worked eleven to seven at the Coventry College Inn. Night auditor was his job title— fancy name for desk clerk. A job, nothing more.

Penelope, the prissy college girl with the creepy boyfriend waiting for her in the lobby, stared Anton down. “I’m off at eleven. It’s eleven twenty.”

He said, “Something came up with my kid. Sorry.” He sat down at the computer, started the system shutdown so he wouldn’t have to look at her. She didn’t have to worry about anyone except herself and Mr. Pimples out there. What did she know?

The minute Penelope left, a couple came in. When she made the reservation, the lady explained, she had specified late check-in; she had held the room with a credit card.

But when Anton pulled up the reservation, he saw that Penelope had reassigned it.

Probably did it on purpose. He had to upgrade the couple to the suite, which Littleton, the manager, would give him flack for.

The Soup Kitchen had been Felicia’s idea in the very beginning, back when they were AmeriCorps volunteers, both of them believing in something beyond the consumer lifestyle. But you don’t think she could be happy for him, now that the kitchen was happening. No. Now his not owning a house at age forty-one was a sign of irresponsibility. He could just imagine her response when Ester told her mother she couldn’t stay over any more. 70 Night rounds. Leaving the “Back in 5 Minutes” sign on the counter and locking the door behind him, Anton set out: patrol the first floor corridors; pick up a tray of dishes outside one of the rooms and leave it in the kitchen; check that the restaurant door was locked; take the elevator to the second floor; walk those corridors, tracing the letter

E, except that the bottom rung was twice as long as the top two; then walk down the broad staircase, pausing to pick up a discarded gum wrapper—why couldn’t people pickup after themselves?—then out the rear door and around the periphery of the building. Nothing going on in the parking lot. Anton turned the corner and there it was, plainly visible in the dim glare from the kitchen door floodlight, right next to the dumpster: a six-burner commercial stove. Now, he placed it—the old stove sitting in the back of the storage room, piled high with boxes and on top of those, broken chairs up to the ceiling. Hadn’t been used for years. Anton forgot about everything else. His mind only had room for the stove. He walked around it, ran his hands across the top, fingered each of the six burner grates, pulled open the oven door, breathed grease and char and dust but smelled in its place hot bread just baked, the way scent fills the air with nutty browned crust, butter dripping, home, love.

No point to sleep. By quarter past seven, Anton was knocking at his buddy Bill’s door. Keesha, Bill’s shepherd, greeted him with deep, imposing barks, or he would have gone ahead in. Bill never locked the door; he didn’t need to, not with the dog. As it was,

Bill took his time and then grumbled about the early hour, but started a pot of coffee. Bill and Anton went way back. AmeriCorps. Best man at each other’s weddings. Their 71 daughters Ester and Lily born the same year, best friends from the beginning. Their marriages fell apart about the same time too. And now Lily was living down in Port

Charlotte, Florida, with her mother; Bill saw her for a week at Christmas and a month during the summer.

Sitting at Bill’s rickety formica table, hands cupped around his mug, Anton asked what Bill’s schedule was, whether he could help him move the stove.

“Can it wait until after six? I’m at the store all day today,” Bill said. He managed

New to You, a secondhand shop.

But Anton couldn’t wait.

“If you come by the store, I can let you have a come-along and the four piano leg dollies,” Bill said. He sipped his coffee. “So, Ester see your new place yet?” he asked.

“Nah. Not yet.” The dog circled tightly and settled down with her head and paws across Bill’s feet. Bill was really asking if Ester knew that she couldn’t stay the night.

Bill would have done anything to see his Lily every day; he couldn’t understand how

Anton could let anything get in the way of his time with Ester. Initially, when Anton and

Felicia split up, Ester alternated one week with her mother, one week with Anton. But the night clerk job nixed that arrangement. Anton said, “She knows. Didn’t take it well.”

“Lily comes in next week. We’ll have to get the girls together,” Bill said.

Nodding, Anton said, “Sure,” but the truth was the girls had little in common any more. Ester had moved on to a different set of friends, kids who wore black and dyed their hair funny colors, though Felicia wouldn’t allow Ester to do that.

* * * 72 Nine-thirty and Anton was back at the inn with the trailer, which he had emptied out. No problem with taking the stove off Littleton’s hands; the tax write-off beat paying someone to haul it away. Anton was on his own moving the thing, though; the staff was all busy setting up for a conference. Anton took apart what he could—grates, the three top panels, the oven door. Then he tilted it forward, set a piano leg dolly under each rear leg. Nothing else but to lift the front legs onto dollies. Sucker was heavy. But then he was home free. Snap one end of the come-along to the ring in the back of the trailer, other end to the strap belted around the stove, and winch, up the ramp, all the way to the rear of the trailer, where he secured the strap.

Took Anton the rest of the morning to scrub it down, clean out the carburetors so the burners worked; none had caught the first time he tried. He replaced the three missing knobs—went with red, since he already had the red wheels. That was the most difficult part: drilling holes in the legs for the bolts, laying the stove on its back, transferring the five-inch industrial wheels from the piece-of-junk Amana kitchen stove that he had used up till now. He steadied the stove with the come-along while he laid it down. The day was a scorcher, one of Ohio’s best—sun burning down, sizzling the humid air so it hurt to breathe. Anton was drenched with sweat. Mrs. Kreider came out and made a fuss about the mess in her yard, so he had to leave off in the middle of the wheel project, pack everything up in the trailer even though he would have to do the job over again when he put the stove in, since it had to go in the back where he could tie it down. “I tell my renters there’s to be no working on cars in the drive here, but I never had nobody work on a cook stove, never had a policy about cook stoves,” Mrs. Kreider said, hands on what must have been hips under all that fat. But nothing could deflate Anton’s happy mood. 73 He even set up a mini-kitchen once the old lady went back to her solitaire, mixed up a bowl of ORP batter (oatmeal-raison-peanut butter, all-in-one complete protein), spooned it onto cookie sheets and baked a test batch, right there in the yard. The oven worked fine.

Kept true temperature, true enough.

Something about baking, even in the open air, such a hot day. He didn’t have the cookies out of the oven before every kid in the neighborhood was there to sample them.

Until now, actually, Anton hadn’t noticed many kids in this part of town. Around here it was mostly student rentals empty for the summer and a few holdouts like Mrs. Kreider.

Sometimes he saw a couple of teenagers smoking behind the next-door neighbor’s shed.

But here was a whole mess of kids, bikes thrown down every which way on the curb or left in the street, skateboards tipped up against the scraggly maple tree beside the road.

They were like a gang, mostly in black, tee shirts emblazoned with skulls, hair shaggy.

The girls looked just like the boys. Not that Anton cared. Hadn’t he gone through his hippy days?

“Got any to spare?” asked a tall, skinny boy, the leader apparently.

“Sure, sure,” Anton said, “have at them.” Spatula in hand, he slid one from the baking sheet into the boy’s waiting hands.

The other kids jockeyed for position, formed an ever-shifting line. Anton knew satisfaction: this offering of food, nurturing food, to the hungry.

“Good cookies, Mister,” a younger boy said. “How come your stove’s out here in the yard?”

As soon as each had wolfed down his cookie, he was back on bike or board. Girls too. There must have been twenty of them. The ones on bikes raced up and down the 74 street a few times while the skateboarders headed down the public stairway that led to town, on their boards, not a moment’s hesitation. Watching them, Anton caught sight of a figure standing back from the stairs, obscured by trees. Red hair. Unmistakable red hair.

He started toward her. “Ester,” he shouted, “Ester.”

He didn’t see the skateboard until she was on it, bumping down the steps.

As he turned back toward the stove, fatigue hit Anton like bricks. It was all he could do to set up the wash station—three tubs, wash water, disinfectant, rinse—and clean up. He didn’t unload the trailer to put the stove away properly either. Just pushed it up the ramp and jammed it in, jammed everything in, and locked up the trailer. What did he have, four hours to sleep before he had to be at work?

At least Anton would see Ester’s play-off game. He was there, sitting on the bleachers alongside the rink, before the kids finished suiting up. They came out, circled around the ice—it wasn’t ice, but he thought of it that way (he’d played ice hockey in high school, once upon a time). Orange cones appeared, and the kids wove in and out, sticks swishing, pucks moving in front like little dogs. Now the other team was out too, the rink swirling with kids. The other team’s players were huge—height wise, they had three, four inches on the Eels. Didn’t seem fair. The game wouldn’t start for a few minutes, and Anton couldn’t sit still, now that he had seen the horde of giants. Sidling in front of the couple next to him, he made his way to the aisle.

He hadn’t seen or talked to Ester since the day he handed out cookies to the kids.

Felicia was standing in the lobby. 75 “It’s only for a short time,” Anton said.

“Your life. She’s disappointed, that’s all.”

The game was about to start. Anton followed Felicia in and sat when she nodded for him to take the seat beside her. He could smell the honey-almond soap she used. In the old days, his hand would have been resting on her thigh.

“Brian’s not going to make it,” she said. “Problem at the office.”

Brian, the guy from Columbus she was seeing—like it mattered to him. He looked out at the rink. Ester, underneath the bulky costume in jersey number eight, was in the defensive position behind the face-off player. Then the puck was in play; the skaters scattered. When he found Ester again, the puck was already near the Eels’ goal, the giants bearing down, number eight going for the man with the puck. By the time Ester got there, smacking his stick hard with hers, the puck was gone, slipped to his teammate, who tucked it into the net. Ester was a featherweight next to these players. No girls on their team either, as far as he could tell. Maybe there had been a mix-up; maybe they weren’t in Ester’s league.

With the score four-zip, Anton could see that Ester’s frustration was mounting; her skating had gotten sloppy. The biggest kid was taunting her, waiting until just before she was on him to flick the puck to a teammate, or once, to flick one high and behind the goalie, into the net. When she had the opportunity in the third quarter, score six-one,

Ester body-checked him into the glass. They fell together and she went after him, punching at his face and jamming her stick between his legs. On the phone later, Felicia told Anton that he had called her a “fucking cunt.” Ref kicked her out of the game. The

Ellisville Eels lost nine to one. 76 * * *

The next afternoon, when Anton wandered outside, his cup of coffee in hand, he saw “I HATE YOU” spray-canned black across the side of the Soup Kitchen trailer.

When he first acquired the trailer, he and Ester had painted it with lime green automotive paint, using a rented spray gun; they had used stencils for the gothic letters that spelled out The Soup Kitchen. Nausea rolled through him. Felicia had phoned him at the inn the night before to say that Ester wouldn’t be meeting him for dinner this Wednesday. “She’s upset,” Felicia said. “She needs some time to work through it.” Anton sunk to the ground, spilling the coffee.

ERSATZ Saturday, and Anton didn’t much care if anyone showed. None of the local crafts people he had contacted weeks earlier had committed one way or the other.

When Ester hadn’t come through with a flier, Anton went without. Still, seven a.m., he was there at the fairgrounds, setting up, because canceling would have been more trouble than not. He had parked the trailer defaced side toward the rear. Now he unpacked: placed a table out front for coffee, another in the middle for a work surface, the stove next to that; filled the dishwashing vats with water from a hose bib and carried them to the makeshift washing station, two planks of wood supported by milk crates. Starting in with the chowder, he chopped onions and garlic, celery and carrots. Couldn’t get his rhythm right. Kept missing the vegetables with the knife. The silk stuck to the ears when he shucked the corn. He skinned a finger peeling potatoes. Not his day. If he hadn’t made 77 the donut dough ahead and frozen it, he wouldn’t have bothered. As it was, he singed the hair on his arm firing up the turkey fryer to heat the oil. That awful, acrid odor of burned hair.

The event was to begin at ten. By nine-forty, the chowder was assembled and simmering, though the potatoes were sticking to the bottom of the stock pot. He put water on to boil, filled the cone with filter and coffee, and set it over the air pot. Anton’s rusted- out Dodge Prospector was the lone vehicle in the lot. Maybe Ester’s gang would show up for the food. Using a small glass jar, he cut out doughnut holes, then readied a plate of cinnamon sugar to roll the hot balls in. Beyond the fairgrounds, an occasional car drove down State Street. He stirred cream, salt, pepper, the reserved whole corn kernels into the soup and turned the flame down as far as it would go. Five after ten. Again, he scanned the horizon.

A line of cars, vans, minibuses, bumper to bumper like a funeral procession, was moving down State Street toward the fairgrounds. Sure enough, the parade turned left and snaked up the access road to the hilltop. Anton had never seen anything like it: jalopies pulling homemade trailers full of furniture, boxes, all tied down with rope; rusting minivans with chairs tied to the roofs, rear doors ajar, roped down; a VW bus with a psychedelic paint job; a van with every inch of body surface covered by bumper stickers.

They slowed to a crawl at the top of the hill, then fanned out to separate spots along the road, the whole production smooth like it was part of a drill team maneuver. Next Anton knew, folding tables sprouted and filled with stuff—vintage costume jewelry, mismatched china, antique eye glasses, electronics parts, some still in boxes. 78 A man, white-haired and burly, approached Anton with his hand outstretched.

“McDonald,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. This here your show? ERSATZ, whatever you call it? I beeped you earlier in the week but didn’t get a call back.”

It turned out the assemblage were folks from up north of Columbus who traveled to various venues around the state. A long way from the local support Anton had looked for. He didn’t bother to explain the Soup Kitchen; McDonald didn’t ask.

At ten-thirty, no one besides the flea-marketers had appeared. Anton wondered if they would buy each others’ stuff, a moveable market in which goods circulated perpetually. A bicycle pulling some kind of cart labored up the hill. Another of the gang, apparently. The guy was hauling a dozen clunker bikes; he had to be pulling three hundred pounds in super-low gear. Anton was thinking he would go ahead with the doughnuts and soup, since he had already made them, and then pack up. He wandered over to McDonald’s table, picked up a couple of items—an amp meter, a telephone junction box. “Doesn’t look like you’ll get much of a crowd,” he said.

“Aw, they’ll get here,” McDonald said. “We advertised it eleven a.m., seeing as we was coming from such a ways.”

“Advertised it?”

“We got an internet mailing list we use. Folks clear across the state,” McDonald said.

Sure enough, when Anton looked, the parking lot below was filling up; people were trudging up the hill. Setting the junction box down, he headed for his kitchen. A bike was leaning up against the trailer—Ester’s green Schwinn with the dented front 79 basket. Anton couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. There she was, bending over the turkey fryer, lifting out doughnut holes with a slotted spoon, tipping them onto a terry towel.

Grace. Anton didn’t believe in God, but he repeated to himself the words, thank you, thank you, thank you. He had screwed up, but she was giving him another chance.

She rolled each doughnut hole in cinnamon sugar and, when the plate was full, set them next to the air pot and mugs.

Taking a deep breath, Anton stepped forward. He ducked under the canopy, said,

“Hey, Kiddo.”

Busy dropping holes into the oil, Ester hummed in response.

The water was boiling. Anton slipped on oven mitts, took the pot from the stove and poured a slow stream into the coffee filter. 80 Skylab Summer

When I saw the face smooshed against the window, the nose flattened out, the lips an obscene scream, the gaping red of the mouth, and all around, the streaming rain, I thought it was him: Wild Man. I was sitting in my “office,” a ’63 Chevy Nova, a city car that didn’t run, and I imagined him lifting it, King-Kong style, and shaking me loose. I closed my eyes and braced myself. Then I recognized Brooks’s voice shouting at me.

“Open up, Bianca.” Popping the lock, I propped open the door, which groaned, and slid over. Brooks was soaked. “Took you long enough.”

“I thought you were Wild Man.”

Brooks opened his eyes unnaturally wide, growled, and shook his hair, splattering the books I’d been reading.

I dried them against my jeans. “Cut it out.”

Brooks grabbed them. “The Stranger,” he said. “In French and English. Aren’t we smart.”

“Smart would be French only,” I said, taking them back, throwing them on the seat behind me. “So’d your boss get some, or did you have to work today?” This was the question I always asked when Brooks met me at the park for lunch. I’d never been around people who spoke openly about sex before, as the people we worked with that summer did—not only Brooks’s boss but also the guys on the city landscape crew I’d been assigned to. I was a virgin and the idea that sex could make that much difference fascinated me. 81 “Killer morning. His wife stayed up watching some late-night movie.”

“Sorry. Maybe he’s gotten it out of his system now.”

I hadn’t actually seen Wild Man, just heard about him from the crew. Posted to

Bicentennial Park in downtown Columbus, I worked solo most days, except for Brooks’ company at lunch. A few days ago, when the crew stopped by, they told me Wild Man was making his way across the city from the east—last spotted in German Village.

Rumor was, he’d shot up water buffalo in Vietnam and ended up on the streets when

Reagan shut down the asylums. This was the summer of 1979.

“Oh, man. My cookie.” On Brooks’ lap, brown mush lay mounded on the sodden paper sack.

I extracted his sandwich, wrapped in Saran Wrap, from the bottom of the mess, blotted it with my napkin and handed it to him. “Looks dry inside.” My sandwich— cream cheese, sunflower seeds and alfalfa sprouts on whole wheat—spilled all over when

I bit into it. Brooks picked up a seed and flicked it into the backseat; the pressure of his fingers on my thigh burned. I wasn’t sure what was between us—in high school he had barely noticed me, but this summer we were the only two around.

“Rabbit food,” he said. “You’re going to live forever.”

“Probably get killed right here in the park, cushy summer job and all. Wild Man’ll get me. Or . . . ” I nodded at the hard hat in the back seat, my defense against stray pieces of Skylab that might land in the park on my shift. The space station was expected to fall somewhere in North America that summer and, not taking any chances, I had borrowed a helmet from one of my dad’s construction sites. Though I certainly hadn’t told Brooks 82 about it, I had also gotten fitted with a diaphragm. He gave me a hard time about the helmet. “Awww, not if you’re protected.”

“I like sunflower seeds.”

Brooks looked at his watch. “Time to go. No long lunch breaks with the boss in one of his moods.” He cracked the door, letting the rain spit in, then turned back to me.

“Hey, my mom’s going out of town Saturday. I thought I could make you dinner.”

Did he mean a date? Heart jumping, I said, “I guess. Okay.”

“Good. See ya, Bianca,” he said, throwing the door wide open.

“Ever heard of an umbrella?” I called into the rain.

The weather cleared an hour later. It was too wet to work in the flower beds, so I strung up the flag and picked up trash along the sidewalks: soggy McDonalds bags, soiled tissues (I wore rubber gloves), gum and gum wrappers, the infernal strips of cellophane from cigarette packages and, worst of all, the butts—as many as I cleaned up, there were always more; I didn’t smoke and hated anything to do with cigarettes. The whole time, lightheaded from repeatedly leaning over, I thought about what I should wear over to Brooks’s. We hadn’t been out together. One night we’d played tennis on the indoor courts, but I beat him, which I realized later might not have been strategic. He hadn’t asked me to play again.

“Hey, don’t that helmet mess up your hair?” The voice came from the bench at the back of the park. I looked up to see Peaches sitting there in a short skirt with his/her/whatever legs crossed and her body twisted sideways. Not my idea of provocative, but each to one’s own. My supervisor didn’t like me talking to the bums, but as lonely as it was, I ignored him. The job had been my father’s idea in the first place. 83 Peaches always tried to draw me into girly talk. “What do you think of this nail color?” she asked me yesterday, displaying her fingers like they were fit for a Palmolive commercial.

“I wash my hair after work,” I told her. Jake, another park denizen, had related

Peaches’ story: he’d found her holding onto the railing of the Town Street Bridge, saying no one could ever love her for who she was, yada, yada. Jake told her he loved her, just to get her off the bridge and then he was stuck with her. Jake’s wife had kicked him out and he slept at the Y when he had the money, under the bridge when he didn’t. Since he worked the labor pool if he was up to it, he had booze money and was everyone’s best friend.

Peaches patted her hair, a loose afro. “It can’t be good for your hair,” she said.

“Jake working today?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s working.”

I thought about asking Peaches whether I should wear jeans or a skirt, but all I said was, “Better get back to it.”

I wore a skirt. One bought for the occasion. Olive green and slit most of the way up. I was self-conscious about my figure—my small breasts and wide hips—but this skirt, with its broad waist band and slight flaring over the hips, looked good on me. I bought a ribbed tank top to match, realizing too late I didn’t have a bra I could wear under it. 84 Brooks pecked me on the cheek when I arrived, and then had me sit by myself in the living room while he finished preparing dinner. By the time we sat down at the table—the room dark except for the flickering candles, carnations sloppily arranged in a bowl—I’d drunk two glasses of white wine.

“This is beautiful,” I said when he laid a plate in front of me. The whitish mound quivered when I tested it with my fork. Around it a thin, gray sauce ran into the vegetables and rice.

“My mom’s recipe,” he said. “Chicken breasts and Campbell’s Mushroom Soup.”

I shaved a small bite from the edge where the meat was most cooked. “Delicious.

Do you cook a lot?”

“Not much.”

Neither of us said anything. I nibbled at the rice.

Then Brooks brought up Descartes. Even though he was pre-med, he was thinking about majoring in philosophy. “All of twentieth-century thought proceeds from

Descartes,” he said.

I’d read Discourse on Methods for one of my freshmen classes, and hadn’t been impressed. “Circular logic, if you ask me. He started and ended with his preconceived idea of God.” I cut up some more chicken and moved it around my plate.

“You’re dismissing him too quickly. It was brilliant, what he did, wiping the slate clean, shucking off that rigid adherence to the ancients.” Brooks’s authoritative tone reminded me of my father. You don’t know what you’re talking about, it said. 85 “I’m more of an existentialist, I guess. Descartes’ faith in reason is naive.” I drank more wine. How had I gotten into this discussion? The last thing I wanted to do was argue.

Brooks mopped his plate with his dinner roll. “That’s impractical. You can’t get anywhere thinking that way.”

I recalled that Brooks’s father had committed suicide—maybe existentialism wasn’t the best topic. I wasn’t going to change his mind about Descartes anyway; he had it all figured out. “This is wonderful,” I said, “but I can’t eat another bite. I think I’ve drunk too much wine.”

Brooks cleared the plates, again not letting me get up, and returned with some kind of pudding in little glass flutes with strawberries arranged around the edges. It tasted grainy, but cool.

When I set my spoon down, he said, “The stereo’s better up in my room. Want to listen to some music?”

He caught me when I stumbled on the stairs.

In his room, I sat on the edge of his bed while he put a Dan Fogelberg album on the stereo. Don’t share your opinion of Dan Fogelberg, I told myself. I felt woozy, like I might float away. Lying back, I focused on a mobile of the solar system Brooks must have made when he was a kid; I couldn’t decide if the planets were moving or my head was spinning. Then Brooks was kissing me, his mouth everywhere at once. The boys I had dated in high school, their kisses had been tentative, all lips. But Brooks pushed hard, forced my mouth open, crammed his tongue down my throat. 86 He paused to say, “You look really great in this outfit, Bianca.” An odd comment, considering his present vantage point: on top of me. Brooks was a big guy—six three with a wood-block body like my father’s. Between his weight on me and the wine, I knew the exact location of my bladder. But at least the floating sensation was dispelled.

Next thing, his hands were underneath my shirt, which had come untucked, kneading my breasts. There was something mechanized about his movements, like he was operating according to a plan. He sat up, straddling me, and bent over to take a nipple in his mouth. First one, then the other.

Lying there in the universe of Brooks’s bedroom, I tried to reconstruct how we had ended up here. Up to this point, we had disagreed about everything. Where was the union of mind and body? My idea of sex was of a fluid, reciprocal, . . . existential force.

Wasn’t André Gide supposed to have achieved some kind of other-worldly high from sex? But here I was all too aware of my bladder and my sore lips. Brooks’s erection pressed against my crotch. And all I could think about was my supervisor at the Parks

Department, an old man from Czechoslovakia whose name all the crew members pronounced Valter, imitating his accent: back when I was on the planting crew at the beginning of the summer, Walter had demonstrated the proper use of the trowel. “You know how to stick it in?” he asked.

Finished with my breasts, Brooks stretched out alongside me again and his hands moved up through the slit, under my skirt. His fingers were on the soft inside of my thighs, tugging at the elastic of my panties. This was the moment, but it was all wrong.

Intimacy? I hardly knew Brooks. He hadn’t even talked to me about what it was like when his father died. Panicked, I sat up and said, “Stop. I’m not ready.” 87 He pulled me down, his hands holding my hips.

“No, I don’t want to.”

He took gulping breaths. “They hurt. Don’t you know about blue balls?”

“No.”

“When you’re so close. When you’re hard for a long time.”

Was that why his boss was so grouchy when he didn’t get it? I stood up. “I didn’t bring my diaphragm,” I said.

That next week, even though it was only early July, we got one of those

Midwestern temperature inversions. It didn’t rain, but you couldn’t say it was sunny either. Just gray haze. And hot. Especially in my helmet and gloves. Brooks didn’t come by for lunch—in fact no one came to the park that week. Usually at lunch time, the park belonged to the business crowd. They’d bring their take-out meals—groups of women in hose and pumps and too much make-up; couples, the men without their suit jackets; sometimes families meeting dad in the park. But not that week. It was just me and the folks who lived under the bridge.

First thing in the morning, I was supposed to phone Walter from underground. A three-tiered fountain served as the focal point of the park, and below it, there was a pump station. I hated going down there because I couldn’t lock the grate behind me. That

Thursday, when my dad dropped me off at the park, a bum I’d never seen before was making the rounds of trash cans. More like an orangutan than a man, he had stiff orange hair and a heel-first, arm-swinging shuffle. Was this him? Wild Man? I couldn’t see his 88 face. But with no one else in sight, I was too afraid to go down the hatch to call in.

Instead, I locked myself in the Nova and watched as the man-ape fished his hand through each can, came up with a partly eaten Big Mac, the stub end of a Hymies sub, and put them in his mouth whole. I shivered, imagining his hairy hands holding me down in the dark pump room.

I didn’t call in until 9:20, almost an hour late. Walter chided me and told me to clean the filters and then pick coins off the bottom of the fountain. “I don’t vant you to fall down from the heat,” he said.

Cleaning the filters involved hosing off these large screens, sliding them back into place, and pouring bags of noxious powder into the system. The powder consisted of microscopic glass slivers, the diatom tests I’d looked at photos of in Intro. Bio., magnified however many times. Even though I wore a face mask, I figured I’d end up with cancer from the stuff. I pictured the tiny glass shards slicing through a textbook diagram of overlapping circles, my alveoli.

I finished and donned the waders Walter kept down there for getting the money, then climbed up the ladder. The fountains hadn’t been off ten minutes, but when I pulled out of the hole, there was Bev in the middle of the lowest pool, taking up her own collection.

“Hey,” I yelled, “that money belongs to the city.”

Bev put her hands deep in the pockets of her too big, water-logged jeans. She and her husband Mac kept apart from the others. They were older, a rural couple fallen on hard times. They slept under the bushes at City Hall. 89 I thought it over. The money I collected was supposed to go to a food pantry, if it even got that far. Why shouldn’t Bev take a few dollars? I shrugged, and turned away to start in the highest pool. It was slow, moving through the water in those boots, even if it did only come up to my knees. I had dispensed with the gloves, though not the helmet, which made me feel even more off balance, moving through two mediums—water and air. Brooks probably believed in the four Greek elements, he was such an antiquated thinker. I was counting on the massive doses of chlorine added to the water daily to counteract any contaminants. I bobbed up and down. Scanned and bobbed. Scanned and bobbed. There weren’t many coins, not enough to pick up more than one at a time.

I was angry with my father as well as Brooks. My father said I had a soft heart and no common sense. “You’ve never had to live in the real world,” he said. I had asked him to give Edward, a runaway who had showed up in the park on Tuesday, a job. I’d been snipping canna blooms in the riverside bed. The kid stood there watching me the whole time. He was wearing overalls, and he didn’t look as grubby as the others. Maybe it was just that he was new. When I went to empty my basket into a leaf bag, he followed me.

“You have the day off?” I asked.

“Passing through. Left home. Left school. I wasn’t no good at it no way.”

“So, what are your plans?”

“Just see.”

“You staying somewhere?”

He nodded toward the bench I’d first seen him sitting on. 90 I gave him my lunch that day and bought myself peanut butter crackers in the vending machine in the old brick armory building that had been converted to an art center across the street. My father said he wouldn’t touch a kid like that, he had enough low- lifes working for him already. Didn’t need to get in with another one he’d end up bailing out of jail. Besides, he said, kid was probably under age. Just because he said he was sixteen didn’t mean anything.

I moved on to the middle pool. I had never felt so alone. Since leaving Coventry

College after my exams, I hadn’t heard from anybody. And I hadn’t kept up with any high school friends. Except Brooks. But that was over, apparently. I had expected to work on a crew, not by myself down in this riverfront no-man’s land. Even in the cool of the water, I was unbearably hot. I looked up at the gray, thinking maybe I should just forgo the helmet. But the sky was thick; it couldn’t be vapor, so opaque as that. And I couldn’t be sure, but I saw something in the murkiness. Just a faint outline. But surely some object—I could almost make out the fan-blade solar collectors spiraling toward me. Four dollars, ninety-three cents total. Not worth it. I’d leave the last pool for Bev. I shucked off the waders and dropped them down the hatch into the pump room before heading over to the armory. Armories were built to withstand assaults; I’d be safe there.

That next week, Walter came down to Bicentennial Park to have a “talk to me.”

There’d been comments down at City Hall, he said. I would have to stop fraternizing with the homeless people. And stop wearing the helmet. It sent the wrong message to park 91 patrons. “You are a nice girl,” he said, pronouncing each word distinctly in his heavily accented English, “I would not want you to terminate.”

Nodding, I took the helmet in my hands and held it against my stomach. But as soon as Walter’s Chevy Luv pick-up was out of sight, I put it back on. City Hall couldn’t tell me what to do. It was just a crummy summer job anyway.

That night I borrowed the car, told my parents I was going to a movie. But I drove down to the park. It was still light when I got there, that light that seems like it won’t fade because the sun is already below the horizon and you can’t see it sinking further. Jake and Peaches waved me over. Jake cradled a brown bag I assumed held a bottle. Mad Dog was what they drank—I knew because I picked up the empties. Peaches hung on his shoulder.

“What are you doing down here this time of night?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be out with your friends?”

“Nobody felt like doing anything,” I said.

“You come on and sit with us then,” she said. As I seated myself on the bench, she shook her head. “Still wearing that helmet.”

I looked at Jake. He had shaved recently, so he must have been staying at the Y. I couldn’t read any emotion on his face. “How’s life, Jake?” I asked.

“Same,” he said. Then he went on, “Hey, we were about to go down by the river.”

There was a concrete revetment along this part of the riverbank, but on the far side, our crew had planted begonias and ageratum in a pattern that formed the state shield 92 if you looked at it from a distance: red, white and blue. That was where Jake and Peaches headed—over the Town Street Bridge, and I followed. Dark had fallen, I realized, as we lay back on the grass. No light from the street lamps reached the bank.

Nobody said anything for a while. I was thinking about my father and Brooks and college. I wouldn’t go back, I decided. I was tired of the pretense of it all, how my father only had room in his life for people just like him, how Brooks was so full of himself. I doubted I’d ever hear from him again. Jake and Peaches, they were real people: people who had faced the abyss and kept going. Despite the heat, which had hardly lessened with the night, the damp of the grass against my bare legs chilled me. I couldn’t see any stars, just that eerie glow of the city lights reflected off the haze.

“Here, have some,” Jake said, nudging me with the bag.

I sat up partway, took the bottle, unscrewed the top. As gross as it was to put my lips over where theirs had been, I rationalized that alcohol killed germs. This was a test. I wasn’t going to be the same person; I wasn’t going to be an affluent white girl anymore.

It tasted like cough syrup, thick and sweet and fiery as I swallowed.

“See, I like you,” Peaches said.

It occurred to me that neither one of them knew my name. I wanted to ask Jake if he thought he’d ever go back to his wife, live a regular life, but that would hurt Peaches’s feelings.

Jake passed me the bottle again and I took two swigs this time. I liked the sweetness, how dark and hot it tasted. 93 “Nice night,” Jake said. He was half-sitting, leaning back on one elbow. He raised the bottle to his lips again, took a long drink. Then his free arm circled back and the bottle lobbed over my head, made a plop as it landed in the river.

So much for keep our city beautiful. I looked out over the bank, the river, the city stretching out beyond. Somewhere out there, Wild Man prowled. I shuddered.

“I’m thirsty, Jake,” Peaches said.

He rummaged in his pocket, for money, I realized.

I pulled out ten dollars. “Here, my turn.”

Jake took my money, handed it to Peaches, and she got up without a word.

He watched her go, rotating his head slightly to keep her in his view as long as possible. Maybe he did really love her. Maybe all they had been through together added up to love. I felt content, there on the riverbank, a good kind of warm in my gut. Then

Peaches was out of sight and Jake turned to me.

“College girl,” he said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I might not go back.”

He didn’t have anything to say about that. The moist air chilled me. I clasped my arms around my shins, pulling my legs into my stomach for warmth.

Jake shifted too, hooching closer to me until his hip touched mine. “I’ve never known a rich girl,” he said, his voice thick.

Every muscle in my body tensed simultaneously. What was I doing here? The dark was dense and stunk vaguely of sewage and plants that grow in stagnant water. My eyes had adjusted to the night and I could see everything clearly: Jake’s fingers tugging at his pants and then his penis, fat and stiff, and his hand closed around it, moving up and 94 down. He was breathing hard—I could smell the sour of his breath. When he put his other hand on my thigh, I lurched upward and ran for the bridge.

Halfway across, I looked back. Beyond the lights of the bridge was just blackness.

But at least he wasn’t following me. I grasped the railing with both hands, looked down at the water shimmering with tiny gold crescents from the street light. As my adrenalin rush subsided, the blood seemed to pull back from my heart and muscles. Nausea washed over me. The helmet—I was still wearing it—pressed against my head. Skylab? Who cared? I lifted the helmet in my two hands and shook it at the night sky where that ungainly mechanical spider might at any time materialize. I yelled, “Fuck you. Fuck you,

Skylab”—and threw the helmet as straight and high as I could. It rose, hung immobile momentarily at the apex of its trajectory, and then plummeted, hitting the Olentangy

River with a loud thwack. As I walked fast toward my father’s car on the far bank, I could see it bobbing along in the current like a small, lost moon. 95 Commuting

At loose ends in the morning before leaving for work—none of the usual arguments to get through over what Abby will eat for breakfast or wear to school—

Elizabeth finds herself sifting through words in the dictionary that still sits open on the table. Compass, compart, compare. Elizabeth’s daughter Abby was hospitalized two nights before. For months Abby has washed her hands until raw, taken showers at all hours of the day, refused to eat off the china. Over the past week what has emerged is that

Elizabeth herself—Elizabeth and anything she touches—is contaminated. Sunday night, when Elizabeth grabbed Abby by the shoulders in frustration, Abby became hysterical; she coated herself with antibacterial soap—her skinny bare legs, her arms, and swabbing underneath her tank top and shorts, her torso. When Elizabeth tried to stop her, Abby threw the dishes stacked by the sink on the floor, then the dishpan of water. Thinking there was an intruder in the apartment, Mrs. Schaller from next door called 9-1-1. Abby, ten years old, was taken against Elizabeth’s protests to the Bayside Center for Behavioral

Health.

Elizabeth sits at the kitchen table, amazed at the bar of sunlight that angles as on every morning through the kitchen nook window, pools on the polished wood tabletop. In

Ohio where Elizabeth grew up, gray days predominate. But here in Florida, the sun shines day in, day out, oblivious. The dictionary, the unwieldy Webster’s New Universal

Unabridged, lies open to the same page as two nights before when Abby had refused to look up her vocabulary words because Elizabeth had touched the book. Now Elizabeth’s 96 eyes come to rest on the word commute, a few entries above Abby’s vocabulary word compact. She reads,

Commute [L. commutare, to change]. 1. to exchange; to put (one thing) in the place of another; to give or receive (one thing) for another; as, to commute pain for pleasure. 2. to change (one penalty or punishment) to another of less severity; as, to commute a sentence of death to life imprisonment. 3. to substitute (one sort of burden to another), especially to substitute (money payment) for the performance of a payment in kind or a compulsory duty; as, to commute tithes. 4. to pay in one sum, instead of in installments; as, to commute a pension. 5. to travel daily or regularly by train, etc. between an outlying district and one’s place of work in the city.

The meaning she thinks of first is listed last. To change, then, to change one thing for another, one place for another, one burden for another; payment—a pound of flesh demanded, the flesh closest to the heart. Commute. The word stings, presses its sharp tip against Elizabeth’s heart. This, Abby’s problem, is Elizabeth’s punishment: for not telling

Vincent about the pregnancy, for not living her life properly.

Elizabeth commutes, forty-five minutes each way, from Venice to Punta Gorda.

She had asked for the week off—a family emergency, she told Mr. Ginsberg, senior partner of the law firm where she works as office manager—but the hospital staff has informed her that visitors are only permitted evenings from six to eight. Without work, without Abby, the day is too long; yesterday afternoon she phoned Mr. Ginsberg to say she would be in after all. It’s an easy drive: to the stop sign, turn right, left at the next, right at the next and straight, through two traffic lights, to the interstate on-ramp; take the interstate south toward Naples; set the cruise control at seventy-seven, remember to bump down to seventy going under the overpass where city police cruisers typically hide, then 97 inch up to full speed; on the long bridge over the Peace River, accelerate, as if she could drive right into another life like an airplane takes off. Unlike Abby, Elizabeth longs to be airborne. She pictures the rise of the bridge extending to infinity, an image that takes her back to fourth grade math class, stern Mrs. Salowitz’s explanation that a line never ends.

But then, the notion doubles back on her: once started upon, a path extends infinitely.

Which is it? Multiple possibilities or random inevitabilities?

What if she and Vincent had married and brought Abby up in a two-parent home, or if she had returned to Ellisville and Abby had grown up with grandmother and aunts nearby? Would this have happened? And what of the future? Is this obsessive compulsive disorder the line Abby’s life must follow, or might the path branch?

Vincent. At first, she had been flattered that he had picked her. Always in the limelight, he wasn’t the class president but rather the guy who spent a summer retracing the trail of Lewis and Clark. Being with him was exhilarating and exhausting. He craved attention, and there was something else she became aware of as she got to know him, a peculiar rigidness. Once she cooked him dinner in her mother’s kitchen and he handed the salad she had arranged so artfully back to her, requesting that she cut it up and toss it.

Elizabeth had talked her sister Kate into driving down to Florida for spring break, for some time apart. When her period didn’t come on schedule, she assumed it was just the disruption of the trip. But mid-week when all her sensations were intensified—the tang of cilantro in the air at the Mexican restaurant and the gritty sheets in the motel bed nearly unbearable—Kate insisted on a pregnancy test. Elizabeth’s first thought, when the 98 window turned blue, was that she didn’t want Vincent to know. In defiance of sisters and mother, Elizabeth remained in Florida. She got a job temping at the same law firm where she worked still; she couldn’t allow her life be subsumed into Vincent’s.

Her foot off the pedal, Elizabeth lets the car slow on the bridge decline, the acceleration not enough to compensate for inertia, until the cruise control kicks in and she feels, briefly, suspended. Then, her exit in sight, she signals, veers to the far right, releases the cruise control, slows to thirty-five, brakes at the stoplight. She turns left on green, hits several more lights, and arrives at the bank high-rise where Ginsberg and

Solomon, P.A. leases the top floor. The commute is accomplished.

Seated at Elizabeth’s desk, Paula looks surprised to see her. “You have the week off. What are you doing here?”

Elizabeth shouldn’t have told Paula. But the day before she had burst into tears, uncharacteristically, and opened up when Paula tried to console her. Now she says, “The staff doesn’t want the families to come by in the day time.”

When the phone lights up, Paula answers it, asks the caller to put the quote in writing and fax it over. To Elizabeth she says, “So? You need time for yourself. Get a facial, a massage. Walk on the beach.”

Elizabeth picks up the stack of letters on the desk, fans through them. “Still no word from Mrs. Simmons,” she says. Mrs. Simmons had retained the firm to handle her husband’s estate after his death but hadn’t kept her appointment, hadn’t answered phone 99 or mail inquiries. Elizabeth likes to think she just up and left, perhaps on a cruise to the

Grecian Islands.

“Oh, Liz,” Paula says in that breathy way of hers, “you’re too much. Here, have your damn desk.”

Elizabeth winces. She’d been Lizzy as a child, but now no one calls her anything but Elizabeth. Paula brushes past her and Elizabeth sits, puts the pen Paula was using in the drawer, makes a single pile out of the papers spread across the desk surface. She logs onto the computer and, waiting for it to boot up, pulls the phone log file out of the drawer.

When Abby was admitted, the nurse gave Elizabeth pages of forms to fill out.

Questions about Abby as a baby—when she walked and talked, toilet training. There was only space for short answers, no place to write how Abby had rarely smiled, never played peek-a-boo, how at one year, she played mother in pantomime to her stuffed polar bear.

Abby didn’t ever baby talk, simply began to speak in sentences at a year and a half, and she could write her letters before she turned two. Elizabeth had wondered if she were a kind of prodigy, though it has turned out that she is frustratingly slow at her schoolwork; her teachers don’t know what to make of her. She fares little better with her classmates.

When Elizabeth tries to arrange play dates, the other children tell their mothers they don’t want to go; Elizabeth can hear them over the phone.

Even Elizabeth’s mother doesn’t much care for Abby, her only grandchild. Gana was upset last summer when Abby put aside her expensive gift, the American Girls 100 Colonial doll Felicity, saying that “Ellen” didn’t like dolls. Ellen, Abby insisted, had switched bodies with Abby, who was back home in Florida. At the time, Elizabeth had been carried away by her conviction that Abby was special, so inventive, so bright. But now she fears her attitude left too much room for Abby’s peculiarities to develop.

Obsessions. Elizabeth shapes the word in her head, fits it over Abby’s behavior during that visit to the lake cottage.

Uncomfortable with the mildewy upholstery, the ever-damp rag rugs, Abby refused to sit down all week. When she eventually took up the doll, she played standing up at the dining room table. Abby spoke in a bearing down, parental voice—though not a voice Elizabeth ever used. “It’s a tea party. You can’t wear a plain dress to a tea party.

Stand still while I undo the back.” She worked at the dress meticulously. “Now don’t spill anything. And only one tea cake. You hear?” She sat the doll down on the table, legs spread, and offered her a small pebble. When it fell from the doll’s stiff fingers, Abby slapped her hand. “Leave it there. It’s dirty.”

Elizabeth’s mother is a brittle woman, so thin her collar bone and hips stick out.

Elizabeth hears her say, “If you ever acted that way, I would have taken that doll right away from you. Imagine. Telling me she doesn’t play with dolls. Nary a thank you.”

Elizabeth can fill in the unspoken end of the harangue: what was she doing raising Abby without a father, wasting her brain in that office, and in Florida for God’s sake, Florida is for old people, not Elizabeth. Elizabeth has not told any of her family about Abby’s hospitalization.

* * * 101 Vincent could have tracked her down if he’d wanted to. When Elizabeth wrote him to break it off, he never responded. Elizabeth told herself that she would have informed him of her pregnancy eventually, if he had written back. When Abby was the age to read picture books with mother-father-child families, she asked about her father.

Elizabeth just said not all children have fathers. Then last year the third grade teacher told

Abby that, of course, she had a father. The school counselor suggested Elizabeth take

Abby to therapy, for help dealing with her sense of loss. But why would Abby feel loss over someone who had never been part of her life? As if to prove the point, Abby never brought up the question of her father again.

Tuesdays the office staff orders lunch from Zach’s Deli. At eleven, Elizabeth makes the rounds, noting orders. For herself, she marks down turkey and Swiss on rye, but her stomach turns at the thought. Has she been wrong not to tell Abby more?

When the delivery boy arrives with the sandwiches, Elizabeth passes them around. Paula brings her sack over to Elizabeth’s desk and dumps out her sandwich, pickle, mustard and mayonnaise packs. “You have to eat,” she says.

Elizabeth points to the unopened sack beside the computer monitor and Paula reaches for it, extracts and unwraps the sandwich. “Want anything on it?”

“No thanks.”

Paula leaves the room, then returns bearing two steaming mugs. “Mint, isn’t that what you usually drink?” 102 It strikes Elizabeth, when she smiles in answer, that she hasn’t smiled since all this started. A few weeks ago, Paula invited Elizabeth to the Auturo Sandoval Trio performance at the Sarasota Jazz Festival. Though she hadn’t been able to go because of

Abby’s ceramics class, the invitation pleased her. She hasn’t made any real friends here in Florida.

Paula pulls up a chair and opens her lunch. She squirts blobs of mustard and mayonnaise on the roast beef, uses the top slice of bread to spread them. When she bites into the sandwich, mayonnaise oozes out the side and plops on the desk. Elizabeth stiffens as Paula dabs at it with her napkin. She wishes Paula had eaten in the break room with the others.

When she bites into her own sandwich, Elizabeth gets only crust, which tastes like paper. The pound of flesh has been taken from her gut.

During the afternoon, Elizabeth works on inventories, counting boxes of letterhead and blank-page stationary, file folders, copy paper, post-it notes and all the other products that fuel the legal paper push. She calculates and orders the requisite supplies, from pens to toner cartridges. Repeatedly, she loses track and has to start her counts over, an atypical lapse.

There isn’t any need to invoke absent fathers to explain Abby’s problem. School is enough. The other children’s dislike. The increasing difficulty of the work. Abby reads laboriously, stalling on each unfamiliar word; homework ends up a power struggle between her and Elizabeth—the teacher said this or that, it must be done this way. And 103 somehow through all of this, Elizabeth has become the problem, not the assignment, or

Abby’s interpretation of it.

Bedtimes. Over the past month, each evening has been worse than the previous.

Nine, nine-thirty, Abby still isn’t settled in bed. She takes forever in the bathroom, with the door locked so Elizabeth can’t check what she’s up to. The shower goes off only to be turned back on. She won’t answer when Elizabeth calls to her. Elizabeth ends up in the kitchen, cleaning out the silverware drawer or dusting cookbooks, anything to keep occupied.

Then, finally, Abby comes out of the bathroom dressed in pajamas, but it isn’t over. The bed has to be changed. Abby, near tears, pulls the sheets off, her breaths ragged. “They’re dirty. I can’t sleep on these.”

Saturday, the night before she was hospitalized, was the worst yet. When

Elizabeth brought the fresh linens from the closet, Abby recoiled as if Elizabeth had hit at her. She screamed, “You touched them. Now they’re dirty too.”

This was new. What was going on? Elizabeth recognized the pink satin pajamas dotted with candy hearts. She recognized the slight figure and the tangled blonde hair.

But she didn’t know the child who backed away, her hands held to her nose as though smelling Elizabeth on them.

“Abby, this is crazy,” she said, then censored herself—not that word! “I’m going into the other room while you do what you have to do.”

“No, you have to help me.” 104 It went in circles like that until Abby was hysterical and Elizabeth rigid with frustration and then, finally, Abby too exhausted to go on, it was over. She was in the bed.

Standing in the doorway, as close as Abby would allow, Elizabeth blew her the goodnight kiss, willed it to be a distillation of all her magic, fix-all love, but it was only used air dispersed into space. How she longed to hold her daughter tight, her beautiful girl, her blonde hair a fan on the pillow now, the white sheets; she longed to squeeze out of her this nonsense about things being dirty. Elizabeth’s toes stopped at the imaginary line in the doorway, the line she must not encroach on and she steadied herself against the doorframe.

Elizabeth is driving again, driving north. Not home but to the hospital in Sarasota for visiting hours, more than an hour’s drive. Sometimes she listens to books on tape, never fiction, which turns her inward, but history. She’s started on Jeremy McInerney’s lectures on ancient Greek civilization, twenty-four installments in which Jeremy (she thinks of him as someone she knows) sorts through the archeological evidence and the literary record to lay out so clearly what is right and wrong, known and guessed at and unknowable, distinct little piles—like the pebble hills, the ambers, greens, reds Abby assembled as a little girl at the lake cottage. Elizabeth likes history because the outcomes are known, they have already come to pass. From the vantage of the present patterns can be discerned. It’s all about sequences, what precedes and what follows, cause and effect.

The tapes have progressed to the collapse of the Bronze Age, the fall of Mycenaean 105 Greece. Jeremy posits an internal upheaval, the servant class taking over the elite.

Driving, the road humming beneath her, moving her forward like a river current, she has to rewind the tape and listen again when her mind wanders.

The questionnaire didn’t ask about imaginary worlds. At three and four, Abby spoke constantly of the place she called Lavender. In Lavender, there were no scolding mothers, there was no hateful broccoli or beets. If Elizabeth corrected Abby for playing too roughly, Abby said that in Lavender people greeted each other by hitting. If Elizabeth showed Abby how to cut properly with scissors, Abby already knew how because she’d done it in Lavender. Elizabeth was fascinated but also discomfited.

On a May night, the moon full, Elizabeth took Abby to the beach to watch for sea turtles. They crossed two crawls, trails left in the sand by the turtles’ passage. Both times,

Elizabeth lifted Abby in her arms and jumped wide so as not to disturb the trough, at least three feet wide, which seemed to her a kind of message from an ancient world. Then, as they neared their car, they spotted a dark form in the water where the waves broke.

Elizabeth pulled Abby back and they crouched down together. The huge turtle emerged from the ocean and traversed the sand. Time stopped. Moving remarkably fast, the turtle propelled herself with strong flippers. Midway across the sand, she stopped and turned her head in their direction. The turtle’s huge eyes met Elizabeth’s. She held Abby tighter, stopped breathing. The turtle continued on to the dunes where she turned in a tight circle, then, flippers working furiously, began to dig. Several times, she paused. Small gusts of warm wind rippled across the sea debris on the beach. The turtle paused a final time and 106 then, with as much determination as she had shown moving up the beach, returned to the water, slipped under the waves.

In the car heading home, Abby was unimpressed. She had seen the whole thing and more in Lavender—turtles, eggs, baby turtles; alongside Jesus, she helped make the baby turtles.

This Jesus business must have come from Gana, who tried to make up for

Elizabeth’s lack of religious instruction, though Gana wouldn’t have recognized Abby’s intimate companion in Lavender as her Jesus.

On the tape, Jeremy explains the origin of Greek written language. The alphabet is not Greek at all but Phoenician. In its original form each symbol meant something— alph, ox; bet, house—but the Greeks borrowed only the sounds, not the meanings. They used the symbols to record the sounds of their own words, an innovation that could only have come from the encounter with a foreign language. Remarkable. Now any word could be written, not just those few important enough to be a pictograph. Gray, mauve, a shocking wine-red streak across the western sky—the sun has already sunk below the horizon.

At Bayside, an older, heavy-set woman with hair sprouting from her chin sits in an anteroom behind a sliding glass window off the lobby. Elizabeth waits for the woman to open the window. 107 “Yes, can I help you?” the woman says, as if there could be any number of reasons why a person would come here, as if they hadn’t gone through this same routine just the night before.

Elizabeth has to say, “I’m visiting my daughter, Abby Phillips.”

“Code?” the woman asks.

What would happen if she couldn’t supply the code? Would they let her in? But the code is there, indelible, like a tattoo. “Three-two-zero-eight,” she says.

Unable to sit, Elizabeth leafs through the pamphlets in the rack mounted on the wall—“Mind Over Matter: the Brain’s Response to Nicotine,” “Parents and Peer

Pressure,” “The Truth About Alcohol,” “Leaving Drugs Behind,” “Sexual Abuse and

Chemical Dependency.” Nothing about obsessive compulsive disorder. Abby’s got to learn to talk back to her OCD, the nurses tell her. She’s got to want to beat it.

The heavy steel door opens and a man in bright blue scrubs leans into the room.

“Mrs. Phillips?” She doesn’t correct the Mrs., she never does. When they come to a double door, he unlocks it. Another key enables the elevator, and another, the locked door beyond that.

“She’s in her room,” he says when they’re on the ward.

“How’s she doing?”

“I just came on tonight, but Sandra said she still isn’t eating. Couple of cups of orange juice is all. She’ll break down by tomorrow.”

He speaks as though she’s no one’s child. Elizabeth heads down the hall. On the door hangs a collage—shades of pink with torn edges, none of the teen stars or pets or race cars the other children chose. She knocks, then cracks the door. “Abby?” 108 Abby sits stiffly on the bed.

They play Scrabble. Here, Abby seems unconcerned about contamination. She fishes in the vinyl bag for letters, holds it out for Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s hand grazing

Abby’s elicits no reaction. As there’s no place to set down the letter rack, Elizabeth holds it in her left hand and moves the letters into different combinations with her right. A A C

H D L I. Not much to work with. Abby spells MOON and claims the double points for the first word. Elizabeth could spell CHAIN, but she dislikes the connotations; she settles for CHIN, thinks of the stubby gray hairs on the woman’s chin downstairs.

Abby’s talkative this visit. She tells Elizabeth about the other patients, mostly older kids. One boy has bald spots where he has pulled out clumps of hair. A girl tried to kill herself, swallowed her mother's sleeping pills. Another carved her boyfriend’s initials into her breasts, on videotape. Abby shouldn’t know people do things like this to themselves, not yet. A spasm of anger courses through Elizabeth, tumbling her letters off the rack, exposing her J. She has failed to protect her child, her fragile, special child.

How can being with such disturbed children help Abby? She's not like them. The doctor, a man, younger than Elizabeth, has offered neither explanations nor predictions.

“There are no norms for this sort of thing,” he said the first night. “Some people struggle all their lives with obsessions, others snap out of it and don't have a recurrence. You just can't know.”

When Elizabeth asked what he is doing for Abby, he said what they all say: “She has to want to get better.” The medication he has prescribed, which takes weeks to build 109 up to effective levels, won’t erase the behaviors, just make it easier for her to overcome them if she wants to. He suggested Elizabeth remove all the liquid soap from their home as a precaution.

He never said the words she needs to hear: it’s not your fault. There may be a genetic predisposition, he explained. But no one in Elizabeth’s family is like this. And

Vincent’s? She doesn’t know. Has she been too selfish with Abby? What was it her sister

Kate had said on her last visit two years ago? “You don’t let anyone in.”

She allows Abby to win the game. By the end they are playing cooperatively, their letters turned out for both to see. “Here,” Elizabeth says, “put your A on top of the

X and your I below. You’ll pick up the S and spell AXIS, that’s a line on a graph; you’ll get the triple score.”

Abby, who hates to lose, is pleased. For Elizabeth, there’s the satisfaction of connecting the horizontal words with a vertical one, adding stability to the structure.

“Visiting hours are about over,” a nurse says through the door.

When Elizabeth stands, Abby grabs her by the waist, grips, squeezes. “Don’t leave me here.”

She’s touching me, Elizabeth realizes, and hugs back. Thank you. Thank you.

Then she’s driving again, heading for the highway, setting the cruise control.

* * * 110 The sun is out. Another day. Jeremy's crisp intonations sound reassuring. So exact, solid. He’s talking about Greek drama now. The plays were preformed as religious rites; the actors wore masks and heavy robes. The catharsis was delivered through nuanced variations of meter and rhythm and language patterns. Controlled. Nothing like modern theater.

The dinner meal had been a disaster that night. Already tense over the vocabulary homework, Abby accused Elizabeth of breathing on the lasagna, contaminating it. She refused to eat anything, even when Elizabeth served it on the paper plate with the plastic fork which she was ready to replace if a tine broke off. When Elizabeth placed her hands on Abby’s shoulders, Abby screamed over and over that she could never get clean. She pumped antibacterial soap into her palms, smeared it across her body. Then she flung the dishes one by one at Elizabeth’s feet. By the time the police knocked on the door, the floor was littered with shards of china and slick with soap and water. Slipping, Elizabeth caught herself on the counter.

The police should never be first on the scene in such a situation. Elizabeth should have barred them from entering. As soon as he stepped through the door, the first officer, a short thick man, took charge. He ordered Abby to move away from the sink. When she said back, “I don’t have to,” and threw the dish brush in his direction, he marched into the kitchen, china crunching beneath his boots, and grabbed her by the wrists. “You need to sit down in this chair,” he said, pulling a chair from the table into the middle of the kitchen. Elizabeth doesn’t have time to say it was the wrong one, her chair. In his grip, 111 Abby twisted and kicked, kneed him in the groin. He tightened his hold on her and nodded at his partner, a woman. “We’re going to need paramedics,” he said.

The paramedics arrived, one a woman with a quiet voice. Crouching, she asked

Abby about herself. Abby told her about school, something about Florida history,

Panofila de Narvaez, some explorer who led his men into the wilderness never to be heard from again. But when the woman asked Abby if she would wash off the soap,

Abby refused and the policeman crowded in. Abby screamed.

They consulted. The police, the paramedics. Elizabeth was a bystander now. The woman paramedic told Abby she would be going in the ambulance. She asked if she could go calmly, or would they need to strap her down?

“An ambulance?” Elizabeth said. “Why? She’s ten. Ten years old.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Abby said.

That’s when Elizabeth learned that Baker Act, in the state of Florida, is a verb. To

Baker Act is to take control of. “She’ll be under a doctor’s care for three days, Ma’am, and then the staff will determine her placement from there.” Before Elizabeth knew, the second paramedic had wheeled in the stretcher and the police had Abby by hands and feet while she twisted, spit, tried to bite them. Abby yelled out words Elizabeth had no idea she knew—“You fuckers. You shitheads.” Then Abby was strapped down, crying,

“Mom, Mooommmmmm” and Elizabeth could do nothing.

In the car, driving south on the interstate with Greek history moving forward through time, Elizabeth bears down on the pedal. Once Abby explained her Lavender 112 birth as an arduous journey between the two worlds, a treacherous, year-long descent through a dark, long tunnel. At the time, Elizabeth couldn’t fathom how Abby had come by this image. Now Elizabeth pictures herself climbing upwards inside an ancient, hollow tree—vertical and dark and so slick she slips again and again, an interminable, heartwood birth canal. As if from the force of Elizabeth’s mental efforts, the car accelerates. She so wants come out into a different life. Her ears ring; she can’t hear Jeremy’s voice. Could she be having a nervous breakdown?

But no. The ringing is police sirens. Three cars, coming alongside her. Glancing at the speedometer, she reads eighty-nine. She instructs herself: lift foot off accelerator, tap brake, signal right. But as she slows, the cruisers swirl around and leave her behind.

They aren’t after her. Maybe Abby’s illness is enough, maybe her sentence has been commuted.

She continues to drive, more slowly now. As her car crests a slight rise, she sees traffic stopped in the road ahead of her. Decelerating, she drifts to the shoulder. Her steps, when she gets out, are unsteady. The police have barricaded the highway. Across the median, the northern traffic is also halted.

Elizabeth sees the problem: along the expanse of asphalt bands and the tall grass, cows mill and graze. Cows. But not the sort familiar to Elizabeth. These cows have humps over the top of their necks, giant deer-like ears, and skin that hangs loose off their frames. Transfixed, Elizabeth walks closer. The cows tear at the grass, amble forward, chew, tear again. A calf—it couldn't be more than a few days old—looks up as its mother wanders away and then gambols toward the cow, whose udders hang low and heavy. The 113 calf touches its nose to the cow’s flank and then grabs at a teat. After a minute, the mother pulls away, and the calf trots off.

“Hey, lady,” a policeman yells, “get away from those cows. Get back in your car.”

She ignores him. She walks in amongst the cows who raise their heads, ears twitching, and then return to feeding. They bend, take grass in their mouths, pull, chew.

Another calf suckles. Elizabeth draws in the warmth of the huge animals, the grass, the dust. 114 Appliance Repair

Snyder pulled into the driveway of 3619 Manasota Key Road, his last call of the day. The house was another castle on the sea, this one a yellow stucco with porches and gazebos and a tin roof, an impersonation of a Key West cottage gone awry. Just looking at it made Snyder angry, reminded him of how much his taxes had gone up since little

Englewood, Florida, had become a sunbelt destination, the cheap waterfront property drawing outsiders like a rubber grub to snook.

He shifted into park, propped open the van door. Might as well get on with it.

Stuck home in the wheelchair like she was, his wife, Leonore, would be wondering what was keeping him. That disease he couldn’t even pronounce had wasted her body. No fair shakes in life, not for him and Leonore. He stepped down carefully and collected the work order, his toolbox, and started for 3619.

From within the shadow the sinking sun cast against the house, Snyder looked up.

At least twenty steps led up to the front door—there ought to be a height restriction on these places. No business building them on the barrier islands in the first place. And the people in these mansions, they act like they’re kings. Treat him like shit they stepped in.

Sometimes he’d charge them extra for their attitude, even though the company pocketed the difference.

The call before this, the lady of the house tried to insist he take his shoes off.

Lady with her eyes pulled open too wide from one facelift too many. He refused outright.

A few years ago, he had dropped a compressor on his foot and crushed all the tendons— still gave him trouble, always would. He told her, “Lady, I can put in for another 115 technician if you want. Might take a couple days to get you back on the schedule.” She had left it at that but demanded he wash up afterward in the laundry tub, as if he weren’t fit for better. This house would just be more of the same.

He took the steps slowly, feeling every inch of his six-foot-four frame, every ounce of the 280 pounds he carried, as he took each rise with his stronger right foot and pulled the other, the one he’d crushed, up behind it. The toolbox weighed down his left arm. A climb like this winded him. When he’d gotten a physical to qualify for the life insurance Leonore insisted he get, the doctor had said he had some hardening of the arteries. Leonore’s health being what it was and them having no children to pass it on to, he hadn’t seen the point of the insurance. He figured, the less he knew about his health, the better. Hell, his arteries weren’t the half of what had hardened on him. He climbed the final step, stopped to catch his breath a moment, and rang the bell.

A pretty, young woman, her gold-streaked brown hair falling around her face, answered the door. She wore tattered shorts with a loose white top—probably a maid or some kind of secretary.

“Here to fix the washer, Ma’am,” he said.

He followed her through a tiled foyer, empty except for a lush fern growing out in all directions, into a kitchen as big as his whole duplex. “The laundry’s right in here,” she said, her voice hushed and breathy though surprisingly deep, considering her slight build.

She slid open a pocket door. “It fills up with water, but won’t spin.”

Snyder grunted. “I’ll take a look.”

When he turned, she was gone. He loosened the screws that secured the front panel and crouched to examine the insides. Not one of the newer models. He stood, 116 turned the controls to start the cycle, then moved the dial forward to the spin function. He watched from below. Yep, just as he had suspected: the transmission was shot.

When he stepped out of the laundry alcove to find the young woman, he noticed the baby sleeping in a bassinet, a wicker thing with frilly blue and white trim, standing in the back of the kitchen. The baby was very small and little sounds, half cries, came from his throat as he slept. Snyder supposed it was a boy, with the blue and all. He knew something about babies because Leonore’s niece Marlee had one now, though she acted like he was too rough to touch it. Looking around, Snyder found the woman in the next room, bent over a sewing machine that was set up on a card table. He approached her, conscious of the noise his boots made on the tile (Marlee was always telling everyone to keep quiet around her baby).

The woman didn’t glance up until Snyder had stood before her most of a minute.

“Oh, sorry,” she said when she noticed him there, “I’m trying to finish these curtains before he wakes up. He’s not much of a napper.”

“The noise?” Snyder asked.

“Oh, they say you should accustom them to ordinary sounds, the vacuum, the sewing machine. Makes them more adaptable.”

He wondered if this woman was some kind of nanny. Seemed like Marlee might learn a thing or two from her, but then Marlee always thought she knew more than anyone else, especially now that she’d gotten married and religious. Thinking about

Marlee—holier than thou, that was Marlee all over, even before she got in with Jesus—

Snyder forgot for a moment, what he had needed to say. Then it came back to him and he told the woman about the transmission, said he had the parts in his truck and could fix it 117 today if she wanted. He started to say it would be $150 plus parts to do it, but switched the number to $100. Even if she just worked here, she wasn’t nasty like most of the clients. He wouldn’t jack up the price.

“Go ahead then,” she said.

The baby slept through the whole operation, though Snyder kept peering out to check on him. The baby, his restless slumber, the pretty woman sewing—Snyder could not stop himself from imagining the kind of mother Leonore would have been if things had turned out differently. He pictured her young again, leaning over a sleeping infant.

But then he forced the image aside. His mind was a wall of little drawers like the safety deposit box in the bank vault where he’d put Leonore’s rings when she couldn’t wear them anymore. That disease, it made her skin go stiff and hard, left her hardly able to move. Leonore had wanted children, but after she miscarried and almost died from the hemorrhaging, Snyder hadn’t dared take any chances. Marlee had been like a daughter to her, had even come to live with them at fifteen when the differences with her father got to be too much. She treated Snyder like a clod, same as her dad, but Snyder put up with her out of obligation to Leonore. Maybe they should have tried again, but then he wasn’t one to think about what he couldn’t change. Close the drawer, lock it, keep it under guard. He hoped Marlee had stopped by to check on Leonore—he’d give her that much, she was good to Leonore, visited most days and brought over casseroles and such.

He turned his attention back to the washing machine. The thing was already disassembled, the bad transmission removed. As a boy he’d loved to take things apart.

Then he hadn’t known how to put them back together. Now, this was what gave him the most pleasure, like doing a giant-sized jigsaw puzzle. He lifted the new transmission, 118 feeling a slight pull in his heart at the effort, inserted it into the drive basket, let the shaft slide into the hole. Methodically, he tightened the three bolts that secured it. Then he reassembled the other parts: remounted the drive motor and the pump and reconnected the wiring to the motor. From the top, he reinstalled the spin basket and snapped the clothes guard on the outside of the tub. After screwing the cabinet back on the appliance, he started the unit to test for leaks and make sure it was agitating properly.

At the rush of water, the baby cried. From within the alcove, Snyder watched as the young woman gathered him to her breast, soothed him with soft words, stroked the fine hair on his head. Marlee wouldn’t let Leonore hold the baby with her hands curled up the way they were; Leonore never objected to Marlee, only to Snyder after she’d left.

With the baby in one arm, the young woman ran water in the kitchen sink and, testing it against the wrist of her free hand, wet a cloth. She lay the baby on a pad spread out on the counter facing Snyder and unsnapped the legs of his outfit. It was a one-piece suit with mittens built into the sleeves like Marlee’s baby wore—to prevent him from scratching himself, she had explained.

“Such the impatient boy, Jonathon,” the woman cooed. “Wanting your milk before your clean pants.”

Snyder resumed work on the washer, looking underneath for any water, and sneaking peaks at the woman and baby.

She scolded softly, “Oh, look what you’ve done now. Gotten yourself all wet.

You'll need clean clothes.” She placed a hand on the baby’s belly while she reached underneath the counter and extracted a clean pad and outfit. With smooth, efficient movements, she pulled the soiled suit off the baby, wiped his belly and underneath his 119 butt, slipped the new pad beneath him, secured a new diaper. All so fluid. No wasted motion. Only when she fitted his little arm into the fresh garment did Snyder see that the child was deformed—nothing but stubby knuckles where the fingers should have been.

The water roared. The woman brushed her lips against the misshapen fist, the briefest of movements, before she tucked the mitten around it. Snyder had to lean against the washer for support. He saw Leonore’s hands: the hardened claws the disease had made them. She kept them buried in the pockets of her house dress mostly, because he couldn’t help but flinch at the sight of them. He did his best by Leonore, but he couldn’t stand to look at her hands.

Then the woman was standing before Snyder with the baby in her arms, asking about the bill. She needed to nurse her son, she said. Would it be all right if she mailed in a check?

Oddly, Snyder found himself wanting to prolong the encounter, but at the same time, the mention of nursing embarrassed him. She was a client, even if she wasn’t who he first took her for. He stammered something about a signature and pointed to a line on the form on his clipboard. Shifting the baby to her left arm, she signed where he indicated. By the time he finished filling out the rest of it, the mother and baby had gone upstairs.

As he backed his truck around, Snyder rehearsed his stops before heading home.

Leonore’s prescription had to be picked up at the pharmacy. And she had asked him to get some cream at the same time. What was it? He braked so he could fish in his pocket 120 for the scrap he’d written the note on and squinted to read it. The late afternoon sun angled through the windshield, hurt his eyes, despite the sunglasses he wore. Oh yes, cortisone cream, for her itching. Seemed every day Leonore needed something. She made a game of it, protesting that she was fine, that she didn’t like to impose on him, but eventually she’d come out with a list. This morning he’d lost his temper and yelled at her:

“Goddamn it, just tell me what you need straight out. You think I read minds?”

Shriveling from him, she had turned aside, the whole act off kilter in the wheelchair and all. He had to apologize, cajole her into naming the items, put on his own act of guilt when what he really felt was burning mad—at his wife’s little games, at the whole unfairness of life—and yes, remembering now, he did feel guilty too; his chest tightened with it.

He substituted for the recollection a picture of the aisle in the drug store, the cortisone cream on the shelf with the first aid things. He knew his way around the drug store, these days. All quiet by then, she had asked if he’d mind stopping at the Publix for one of those roasted chickens and a loaf of gluten-free bread. That was one of the foods she wasn’t supposed to eat now—it was always something new.

He didn’t pull into his carport until nearly seven. There had been lines at the pharmacy, at the grocery store. The damn tourists taking over. The store was sold out of chickens so he had to get frozen entrées instead—some sort of turkey thing and another with beef. Then it had taken forever for the clerk to bag up the bread at the bakery. He pivoted before climbing out of the van, so he could step down with his right foot. He 121 clasped the plastic sacks in his left hand and his keys in the other. The way the neighborhood had gone down, he mustn’t forget to lock up the van.

He fumbled with his keys at the front door (they kept the house locked at all times, as a precaution). It was dark now and the front light wasn’t turned on, so Snyder had to find the right key, the square-topped one, by feel. As he put the bags down beside the potted plant, he noticed, even in the dark, the droopy leaves, which meant Marlee must not have stopped by. Pulling the door toward him, he turned the key. The bolt stuck.

Usually Leonore would open the door before he got to this point, calling out first,

“Snyder? That you, Snyder?” Come to think of it, she usually had the light turned on.

He pushed the door back, stooped to retrieve the bags, and stepped in. The house was dark too. He called her name and heard a moan from the kitchen and ran, as nearly as he could run anymore, his stiff-legged lope, toward the sound.

She lay on the linoleum floor in the gloom, a form he could just make out. Her knees bent into her stomach. Her ample mass, spread out beneath her housecoat, seemed without firm shape, like a sea creature washed up on the beach.

Snyder was there, on his knees, beside her, the bags somewhere behind him.

Her voice was barely audible. “It’s the brakes. I forgot to fasten them. I needed that bowl up high in the cabinet.” She clutched for breath every few words. “The chair got out from under me.”

Snyder leaned over his wife. All the drawers of his mind flew open. On the top row was the one about the brakes, about how he should have adjusted them like he’d been meaning to. And alongside that, spilling out over the top, sheaves and sheaves of resentment—that they didn’t have the money for someone to care for her during the day, 122 that Marlee only showed up when convenient, that Snyder couldn’t afford to retire even though he was going on sixty-seven. There was the one from when he first met Leonore, out there on her cigarette break with her girlfriend and how Leonore acted like she was something else, twittering with her friend, made out if she did meet him after work it would just be a ruse. She was too—he thought she was so beautiful, the swell of her body beneath the little jacket, the way it fit tight around her waist, the skirt that clung to her hips below. He thought if he only had her, he'd have everything. And when they went to

City Hall four months later he didn’t know if she’d go through with it until she did. She still acted like it was a joke. Didn’t want her family there. Didn’t want a real wedding.

Shared the bed, but slept in that high-necked gown and wouldn’t let him touch her, not at first, until she came to like it. And they were going to have the baby. He could see their whole life laid out in front of them. There were all those drawers of what might have been. And in the bottom corner, the baby. Stillborn at six months. She’d named it,

William Michael for her father and brother, buried it in the plot near her parents. And it came to be his fault they didn’t have another, even though it was the doctor who said she wasn’t built for it, might not survive a second one. He was up on the top row again. The one with Leonore’s talk about ending it all—weren’t there some pills she could take too many of or, if only they had a garage, that was the cleanest way. And these times she wouldn’t be talking directly to him, not looking at him anyway, but he knew she wanted him to hear because it was his fault somehow. And sometimes he did want to be through with it all, with his own life too. Let Marlee realize he meant something to her. Wasn’t he as close as she had to a father after the things her own father had done?

Leonore lay there below him, her cheek collapsed into her face beneath the untidy 123 gray hair, the formless bulge of her bosom and just beyond, her hands, her useless hands.

He was closing the drawers. Forcing each one shut, pressing his whole, giant body up against them. There wasn’t time to look inside. It didn’t do any good. He had Leonore’s fall to handle. She’d fallen before and he knew what he was supposed to do. The procedures formed a mental array, neat and ordered like the steps to repair a machine, not like the mess of drawers. He would dial 9-1-1 for starters. But he still bent over her.

“My back feels hurt,” she whispered.

He took up her hands in his.

“I thought you’d never come,” she said, her breathing slowing.

Snyder, kneeling in the dim light on the floor beside his wife with her cold, stiff, curled-in fingers between his own callused palms, felt his heart go soft. For all his rigid arteries, his hard-used, unyielding body, there was this: her flesh, still flesh, her two hands in his.

124 Reva

We knew something had changed before we got downstairs. Our house didn’t smell like morning. On the stair landing, the three of us paused to sniff, gathering ourselves up the way you do before entering a place for the first time. We bunched the loose fabric of our matching nighties in our hands, the nighties with tiny roses on them that our mother had laid out on our beds the night before.

The air, as we crossed through the living room, was thick and smoky. In the corner, the branches of our Christmas tree drooped and the ornaments looked dull in the dim light from lamps that had been draped with tapestries. A murky, strange smell mixed with the pine scent. A cat—we didn’t have pets—streaked across the room and disappeared under the sofa.

In the kitchen, a woman we didn’t know sat at our table with her back to us.

We were used to sitters, usually college girls who looked like we wanted to look one day: long hair in feathered, Farah-Faucet cuts, sparkly make-up, designer-label clothes we were still too small for. We knew how to get these girls to do what we wanted.

We told them about how we never knew when we’d see our dad now that he’d moved in with his secretary, about how our mother had gotten a job working for a podiatrist, a word we had learned to pronounce in four careful syllables—pod-i-a-trist—and how she went to school nights for nursing. Then the sitters would go along. They gave us the answers to our homework and ordered pizza in the afternoons and took us to the ice cream parlor near campus. If they hesitated, we’d start to dial our mother’s work number. 125 But the woman in our kitchen wasn’t a college girl. Even from the back we could see that. Her backside bulged out beyond the chair and her hair—we’d never seen so much hair. The single loose braid, dull brown mixed with gray, couldn’t hold it all in.

From the doorway, we could smell the sour dough smell that we later came to associate with her, but maybe that’s wrong; maybe what we smelled then was the absence of our mother, the gardenia scent that always preceded her and lingered after she was gone.

The woman spoke without turning around. “I’m Reva.”

We stood at the door, waiting. When the tea kettle on the stove whistled, she rose from the chair and lifted it, streamed steaming water into her mug. Despite her bulk, she moved like someone walking through water, all the layers of clothes she wore swishing— three skirts on top of each other, from what we could tell, and a lumpy blouse with a lopsided cardigan, one sleeve and one bottom edge longer than the other, as if made for two different people. “Your mother,” she said, cupping her mug in two hands and turning toward us, “has gone away for a rest. She’ll be back on New Year’s Day.”

The youngest of us, Lizzie, started to whimper. How could we adjust to any more changes? But Reva paid no attention. She sat down again and sipped her tea as if we weren’t there. Not knowing what else to do, we sat across from her and stared at her face, which was, like the rest of her, oversized, sloppy and fleshy, like soft clay that might be reshaped; you could see the pores in her skin.

No one spoke until, finally, one of us said, “Our mother fixes our breakfast.”

“I’m not your mother,” she said. 126 Eventually we put our own pop-tarts in the toaster, but the aroma wasn’t comforting like when our mother did it. In that strange atmosphere, the pastries smelled too sweet.

It was the last week of Christmas break, when we would usually have played with friends, slept over at each others’ houses, met at the mall in the bigger town just north of ours. But we didn’t call our friends or pick up the phone when it rang. We went where

Reva went, places we’d never been even though we’d lived in Ellisville our whole lives.

Sitting on the torn-up back seat of her old green van, which didn’t have seatbelts, we slammed against each other in one direction and then the other as she drove the curving roads; our stomachs jumped, then settled, jumped and settled, when the van plunged and rose over the hills.

Reva took us to graveyards—but not those like where our grandma was, in our mother’s words, laid to rest, a place with grass mowed short and vases of plastic flowers in front of each stone. No, the cemeteries Reva took us to were untended. The ground dipped where the graves were. To get to them we had to tromp across winter woods and pastures, past sticker bushes, up steep stairs cut into rock.

In the oldest ones, the ages of the dead were listed to the day: Joseph E., son of

J.O. & Ana Giles, died 1 Oct. 1856, aged 1 year 2 ms. 13 ds. When there were only dates,

Reva subtracted them, pointing out the graves of children who had died at seven, nine, eleven, our ages. 127 In one place, the stones lay flat on the ground in even rows divided into two sections. We read the names aloud, doing our best to pronounce them: from one side,

Melvin Orloff, Rene Goethals, Goldie DeGarmo, Alva Throckmorton, Floyd Hambin

Joseph, George Bakerich, Ernest Elk, Walter Limbiewicz, Mike Kubala; from the other,

Willa Leport, Dorothea Maynard, Ophelia Brancks, Laberta Liberatore, Mary Swazcy,

Sadie Postlethwait, Teresina Veeney. “Why,” we asked Reva, “is it girls’ names on one side and boys’ on the other? Why are all the last names different?” Our grandma, we knew, was buried next to our grandpa, who had died before we were born; they shared one stone—the second date for our grandma had been left blank for all those years.

“Their families didn’t want them,” Reva said. “They lived most of their lives in the asylum, and were buried here when no one claimed them.” Descending the stairs, we clustered close to her, tripping up in her skirts, and she paused for us to sort ourselves out. Even in the cool air, that sour, yeasty smell rose up from her.

Christmas had been warm for Ohio—so warm we had worn tee-shirts outside in the lulls between rainstorms—and it had rained every day for more than a week. The streams running alongside the roads Reva drove had swelled over their banks; they looked crayoned-in gray over whatever was there, trees and other things we couldn’t see.

The water tore downstream, carrying along branches and bottles and styrofoam cups and even whole tree trunks.

On one of these drives, a barricade blocked the road ahead of us as we dropped down a steep hill: DANGER HIGH WATER, the sign read. The engine of the old van sputtered as Reva slowed, and we held our breath, hoping she would stop. She leaned 128 forward, almost touching the windshield, and, as if she had been able to see something we hadn’t, swerved around the barrier.

Ahead, the wet road glinted. “We shouldn’t . . . It said . . . ” we protested.

“Nothing risked, nothing gained,” Reva said. Her voice was deep and raspy, like water running over gravel.

When we crossed the flooded road, we held our feet in the air, as if that might keep us from stalling. And we didn’t stall. The van skated through, held down by the weight of Reva’s body.

When Reva finally pulled into a parking area and we piled out, the sensation of solid earth under our feet took us by surprise. She never discussed our destinations ahead of time, nor any purpose, but we had a vague sense that she expected us to extract some lesson from these outings. We were at some sort of state park, and, as usual, Reva set out without commentary while we scrambled to keep up. Big as she was, Reva never got winded. When the trail split, she took the right fork, the one that went straight up. Every so often, there were signs warning hikers not to leave the trail and not to climb the rocks.

Our mother would have called our attention to these, and we would have ignored them, thrilling at her shrieks when we climbed up the sheer faces or tottered on high ledges. But with Reva, we knew better: she wasn’t going to protect us. We kept to the trail, struggling with each step to lift our stone-heavy legs.

Reva stopped when she reached the trail’s high point, and breathed out a stunned

“oohh.” Catching up, we stood on the rim of a jagged cut of rock that plunged down so far that the trees at the bottom looked miniature. Reva smiled, showing her yellow, crooked teeth. “It’s called a hollow,” she said. 129 She continued on, along what didn’t seem to be a trail at first, only the rocks that formed the cliff. We walked as far from the edge as possible, letting bushes scrape against our legs. Reva got ahead of us. When we caught up, she was standing in front of a ribbon of bright yellow tape, peering down into the gorge.

“There,” she said as we reached her. “That’s where he fell.” Clutching her skirts, we looked where she was pointing. Halfway down, on a flat rock jutting out from the cliff we could see an uneven pattern of red-brown blotches outlined by yellow tape.

“Did he die?” we asked. In the woods, a high-pitched kuk kukkukkeekeekeekee- keekeekeekuk kuk rang out and we huddled closer.

“He did,” she said.

“When, when did it happen?”

“Yesterday.”

She didn’t know who he was.

All week, temperatures had been falling. The damp of our sweat from the climb, now that we had cooled down, chilled us. We pressed up against the warmth of Reva’s torso. Although we had learned complaining went nowhere with her, when Lizzie said, near tears, that she wanted to go home, Reva turned back, retracing our steps rather than leading us the longer way around.

On the day of our final outing with Reva, temperatures had fallen to below freezing and snow dusted the trees and grass. A gray skin had formed over the flooded fields we drove by. On the path she led us down, ice made the way slick and we fell on the inclines, slid down to bottom and pulled ourselves up by grabbing hold of a nearby tree. The waterfall we passed had metamorphosed into a tangled mane of ice, each strand 130 a braided glass rope. Breaking off spines from adjacent icicles, we let them melt in our mouths.

There were only a few stones, hardly a cemetery really, at the place where she stopped, on a thin level strip projecting from the ridge; it wouldn’t have taken much for them to topple down. One was knocked over. Letters were carved into it, so eroded the only ones we could make out were f-o-l-l-o—follow, we decided, tracing the possible w on the stone.

We hadn’t noticed the backpack Reva was wearing until she slipped it off and extracted a roll of thin, black paper and chunks of gold-colored crayons. Giving us each one, she spread the paper over the stone. “Go ahead,” she said, “hold the wax on its side and rub back and forth.”

Each of us starting in a corner, we did. When our gold streaks met and filled the space, we pulled back and stared. The words stood out clearly:

Remember man as you pass by As you are now so once was I As I am now so you must be Prepare for death and follow me.

Our parents had not allowed us to attend our grandma’s funeral, but our mother had taken us to the funeral home to say goodbye. “See,” our mother had said, lifting us up one by one to peer into the box, “she’s just sleeping. She’s smiling a little, see there?

That’s because she’s going to wake up in a better place.” Our mother had given us each a pink carnation to lay on Grammy’s chest before blowing her a goodbye kiss.

We read the poem aloud and when we got to the last line, to the word prepare,

Reva lay down alongside the grave. The narrow ledge of ground was just wide enough to 131 accommodate her large body. One by one, we joined her, oldest to youngest, stacked up against the hillside, absorbing each other’s warmth.

As the week progressed, the Christmas tree dropped its needles on the living room rug. Our new dolls grew disheveled, their clothes torn and hairstyles ruined. Dirty laundry mounded on the floor where we’d thrown it. We no longer wore clothes in the coordinated combinations we’d selected at the stores, but put on anything we could find—summer tee-shirts underneath the ripped sweatshirts our father had left behind, tights and knee socks under capri pants when we’d run out of jeans, reds with greens and yellows, stripes with plaids. Uncombed, our hair—all three of us had long, wavy blonde hair that our mother would brush out each morning and evening and braid in two tight braids—formed knotty clumps.

Bowls and plates lay all around, on the coffee table, the floor, under the beds. Any remnants of food had been licked clean by Reva’s cats. We couldn’t tell how many there were because they scattered as soon as we came into a room. They dug into the underside of the couch to make a den and spread the stuffing around the house. Their muddy paw prints edged our tub. We caught them lapping from the water glasses beside our beds.

When we opened the door, they darted in or out, sweeping between our legs. On our pillows, they left tiny carcasses—birds and moles, once the head of a mouse with black bead eyes, its bloodless heart bulging out its mouth. The smell of cat pee on the piles of dirty clothes pinched our noses. 132 Reva liked to play games: chess, Scrabble, Chinese checkers, Yahtzee, Parcheesi.

When we moved carelessly, not thinking past the next play, she did not raise her eyebrows dramatically or clear her throat as our mother might have, but took control of the game. Nor did she peer over the stands that held our letters to suggest possible words when we were stuck, or urge us to move a piece to safety, or allow us an extra roll when our dice didn’t add up to anything.

For meals, there were pots of soup she kept simmering on the stove that tasted sweetish and spicy and foreign. We ladled the goop into bowls; when we swallowed, the slimy parts slid down our throats before we could chew them. We hunted out the packages of cookies and leftover Halloween candy our mother had hidden in the backs of the cupboards, and ate all the ice cream in the freezer. When that was gone, we just ate

Reva’s soups, with the odd flat bread she baked.

At night we watched shows our mother never would have let us watch—Ghost

Story and Night Gallery and Sixth Sense, shows that made us grab each others’ hands and close our eyes. We fell asleep to Johnny Carson’s voice on The Tonight Show, and woke up frightened from our dreams.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, we found Reva rummaging through the box of rags our mother used for cleaning. She reached in and pulled them out one by one, shaking them loose: our father’s Ohio State tee-shirt, torn squares of sheets, an apron, a pair of boxer shorts, a night gown we had each worn as toddlers. “This will work,” she 133 said, when she got to the night gown. “And this”—she plucked out a baby-sized pillowcase, pink with gold edging.

Next we knew, she had the sewing machine set up and was stitching shut the bottom of the gown and the sleeves. Along the top of the pillowcase she sewed some yellow fringe she found in our mother’s sewing basket. Then she told us to ball up sheets of newspaper for stuffing. She attached the head to the body with needle and thread. She used a marker to draw eyes and an O mouth.

Finished, she held it up to us. “What do you hope for the New Year?” she asked.

We all wanted the same things: we wanted our mother to return home, home the way it used to be—we wanted our parents back together; we wanted our mother there when we got home from school; we wanted to hear her fluty voice singing our questions back to us; we wanted to breathe the smell of Grammy’s kitchen, ripe peaches and gingerbread baking; we wanted to sit the three of us balanced on our father’s knees listening to stories about Ginnie Giraffe and Katie Kangaroo and Lizzie Llama.

On the floor in front of us Reva spread out colored markers. “Write it on the doll,” she said.

We wrote it, everything we could think of—we wanted a little dog; we wanted all

A’s in school; we wanted more friends, different friends; we wanted no chores; we wanted a mall, right there in our town; we wanted a foot of snow, a week of snow days; we wanted double chocolate chip brownies; we wanted our favorite teacher for every grade; we wanted the carnival to set up permanently; we wanted watermelon jelly beans; we wanted new clothes, only new clothes; we wanted summer all year round; we wanted caramel apples; we wanted Saturday mornings every day; we wanted to ride roller 134 coasters, bungee jump, and spelunk. Our lettering, the same shapes formed in different sizes, covered the skirt, the back, the chest, even the face of the doll; the sprawling lines overlapped until none of it was legible.

New Year’s Eve night, we sucked on candy sticks, the flavors changing from tangerine to blueberry to bubble gum to root beer as we worked our way down the spirals. That afternoon, Reva had taken us to the candy shop and let us pick out whatever we wanted. We ate ourselves sick, scraping candy dots off paper rolls with our teeth, gnawing on jawbreakers, plying caramel off the roof of our mouths with our tongues.

An hour before midnight, Reva asked us to carry up logs from the woodpile out back. We didn’t use the fireplace, we told her, not since our father had left. “Just get the wood,” she said and when we brought it up, one or two pieces at a time, she built a tower, alternating the layers so the logs lay crossways, front to back, and crossways again. She said, “Fires need plenty of breathing room.” Then we scrunched up newspaper and stuffed it underneath. It lit with a whoosh that subsided once the paper had burned, but the bark still smoldered. She blew on it, making it flare up in spots.

Pulling out a box of sparklers, she led us outside to the front lawn where she held matches to them and handed them to us. We danced and wrote letters in the air. When the box was empty, she said, “Now it’s time.”

Inside, she retrieved the doll.

“What will we do with it?” we asked.

“Burn it. Are you ready?” 135 Without answering, we followed her back to the fire, which was now smoldering, the logs glowing red.

“It’s too big to fit,” we said. But she was already shoving it in, jabbing it with the iron poker. Flames engulfed it and, suddenly, the whole doll shot up the chimney. The flames died back and large black flakes like pieces of bark circled in the space at the base of the chimney; below, the red-hot embers crumbled into ash.

The last time we had seen our father—a night he took us bowling—he told us he wanted to be cremated. We thought at first that must have something to do with sweets.

“I won’t be buried with your mother and grandparents now,” he explained. “What I want is for my ashes to be scattered over Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, where I used to hike with my uncle.” We hadn’t known he had done that. He’d never told us.

Now, as our wishes ascended on boats of ash, and turned into smoke that caught in our throats, we wondered what happens when one thing becomes another: does it still exist? Maybe even then we knew that we would not grow up to be who we had thought we would.

“Reva,” we asked, “what about our wishes now?”

If Reva responded, we didn’t hear because we were listening to the sirens grow louder and louder. Outside, fire trucks pulled up in front of our house. We ran out the door and when we turned, flames were shooting from our chimney and falling, dancing on the roof like fireworks. Yellow-suited firefighters swarmed across our yard, some pulling hoses from the truck closest to our house, while others crossed the street to the fire hydrant. A giant in full gear—all glossy black and yellow, a metal tank gleaming on its back, face masked, looking like nothing human—approached us. When a gloved hand 136 removed the helmet and pushed the hood back, a woman’s face was revealed. Squatting down at our level, she asked us if anyone else was inside the house and, when we shook our heads, told us to sit on the bench swing in the front yard, well away from the commotion, and not move. Reva, standing on the other side of the yard, appeared small, insubstantial. We watched as silver arcs shot up over our house and rained down on the flames. In the cold, steam rose from the water. Breathing, we tasted smoke and mist.

137 Dogwoods

Edgar Gould crouched awkwardly. As he lowered himself before the rhododendron bush where the soil had been turned up, pain shot through his bad left knee. This was where she had put it, he was certain. The nerve. To disturb the roots for some luck charm. He jammed the trowel into the ground, clayey despite all the peat he’d added over the years, and wiggled it, feeling for the foreign object. Nothing. Doctor wanted him to slow down, but he couldn’t let this go. He dug more, a hole deep enough for a tulip bulb, and levered below that. Bingo. He felt something. He worked the trowel underneath, was finally able to pry it out: a plastic Saint Joseph, head down, the flutes of his robe caked with orange. Tossing it aside, Edgar refilled the hole and spread leaves over the disturbed area. Not that he believed a buried piece of plastic could sell the house.

And not that he didn’t want to sell the house. Elaine had him all wrong on that front. It was simply that the house had to go to the right people, people who would take proper care—tend the garden, appreciate the workmanship that had gone into the place.

Patting the soil, he retrieved the plastic saint and, with effort, stood. There, five feet back was his granddaughter Audrey. Ordinarily, he would have been pleased to see the child; she liked to watch him, whatever project he was doing. But now, her presence made him feel almost criminal.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

She reached out for the Saint Joseph.

“You can’t have that.” He held it behind his back. 138 Audrey’s lips tightened and she looked down.

He didn’t have to worry that she would tell her grandmother because she didn’t speak. Dyspraxia, was what the doctors called it. Something to do with the speech muscles. Elaine was always dragging her off to specialists, but Edgar figured she’d talk when she was good and ready.

Audrey met his eyes.

“It wasn’t in the right place,” he said. He glanced around as if deciding where to rebury it. Actually, he didn’t know what to do with it. Although neither he nor his wife were churchgoers, he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, particularly now that he had a witness. The shed, he supposed. Until he could come up with another option.

He pulled the light cord on and looked for somewhere to stash it. Rifling through some bric-a-brac on a back shelf, he came across the For-Sale-By-Owner fliers Elaine had put together and grew infuriated all over again.

13007 Sunnyside Drive 3 bedroom, 2 bath brick home on 1 acre lot close to town. Mature landscaping. Lots of custom touches.

Below the abbreviated description were photos, amputated versions of the living body that was his home. The snapshots didn’t begin to convey the house that he had breathed life into, project by project, all these years. There were the bookcases in the living room that he had built himself, dovetailing the corners and sanding the wood until it was smooth as marble. And the fireplace mantle he’d constructed out of crown moldings, adding each crenel individually. And the second bathroom he’d put in downstairs, plumbing it himself, laying the tile floor. The bricks he chiseled by hand to match the original front façade when he converted the garage into a master bedroom. And the yard, 139 his pride, his joy. Four-season landscaping. Spring bulbs poking up through the earth from last frost on, forsythia, his dogwoods—a stand of them, magnificent every April; and all the summer perennials—the poppies; every shade of day lily; the phlox, delphinium, foxglove, astilbe, coreopsis, bee balm, too many to list; and the golden blush of the maples in fall; the acanthus berries, hollies in winter.

He knew them, these people who came traipsing through the house with muddy shoes and twitchy noses, their half-hearted glances inside the kitchen cupboards, the closets—not one of them perceived the heart of the house. They fussed about the air conditioning, which worked perfectly, albeit consisting of window units, but window units discretely, cleverly mounted in the wall at floor level. Or the kitchen, vintage 1960s and original to the house (he and Elaine had never been able to agree on a renovation plan so had left it alone), but perfectly functional. Selling it himself was his way of screening buyers; it wasn’t because he begrudged Stacia—Elaine’s closest friend, a woman he disliked—her cut. But after a spring and summer without a single offer, Elaine had gotten her way.

Elaine must have put the fliers here in the shed to goad him. Lifting the top off the garbage can, he slammed them inside, shoving them down into the debris. He opened the step ladder and climbed up, stepping first with his better knee and pulling the other behind, holding a shelf for support. Then he placed the Saint Joseph inside a stack of flower pots on the top shelf. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Audrey standing in the open doorway. Again, that feeling of having been caught out. Ridiculous. She was only a three-year-old kid. Clutching the ladder, he let himself down carefully, refolded it and 140 stored it along the back wall. He didn’t say anything to Audrey, just snapped off the light and closed up the shed.

When Edgar pulled into the driveway, returning from a trip to the Tru-Value,

Stacia’s car, with its tacky Town & Country Real Estate magnetic signs on the sides, blocked his parking spot. He parked along the street, annoyed because it meant carrying the sack of grout mix and the wet cutter that much farther.

Once inside, he set the sack down in the corner, bending over as they advised against to avoid further straining his knee. Upstairs, he could hear Elaine and Stacia yakking away. He knew they would be talking about him, and would have heard him come in. But that wouldn’t stop them.

“He should never have retired.” Stacia’s pronouncement. And a sore point with

Edgar. Complications with his surgery had kept him out of the classroom two months.

When he returned, his honors algebra sections had been reassigned—those are the parents you have to keep happy, his principal said; Edgar took early retirement.

Then Elaine—“No, he shouldn’t have. But still, we had decided to put the house on the market before all that.” Edgar leaned back against the wall, felt it steady him.

“How’s his knee?”

“Oh, you know Edgar. He just can’t ease up. Doctor’s been saying he shouldn’t climb stairs, let alone take on the work he does around here. Since before the surgery, he’s said it.” 141 “Well, things will be back to normal as soon as the house sells. That couple who want to come through a second time, I told them when they first came to me, this was the house they’d end up in. Just took a while to sink in.”

Edgar shuddered, the movement seeming to come from the wall itself.

“It’s more than that though,” Elaine continued. Then her tone shifted to the high- pitched sing song she used to address Audrey: “Do you want Nana to get you something, honey? Do you want noodles for your soup?”

Edgar knew the rest of it even though she didn’t go on: he didn’t feel like a man anymore. A self-help book addict, Elaine was always ready with a diagnosis; best to lay everything out on the table, she was always saying. Everything except her own dirty laundry that was.

“Say noo-dle for Nana. Then you can have some. Nooo-dle.” It drove him crazy the way she baited the child.

They never spoke of Elaine’s indiscretion ten years before. The other man was

Stacia’s real estate partner. Elaine had decided in the end that she had too much invested in her life with Edgar (invested was the word she’d used, like she’d been making deposits) and put the whole thing behind her.

Edgar stomped up the steps, wincing at each twinge in his knee. He walked around Elaine, who was holding a box of pasta spirals just out of Audrey’s reach, and snatched a bag of elbow macaroni from the cupboard. He tipped some into Audrey’s cupped hands. When she grinned at him, he winked back. She dumped it in the pot of water that sat in the middle of the floor and stirred it, spilling. 142 As she tore off a paper towel, Elaine said, “Edgar, the therapist says she should have to ask for what she wants.”

“The therapist doesn’t say you have to put words in her mouth.”

“Hello, Edgar,” Stacia said. “Nice to see you too.”

He nodded at her and grunted. “I’m working in the foyer—you’ll have to use the back door the rest of the day,” he said.

“What, another project? Edgar, the doctor said. And we’re selling the house.

Can’t you leave well enough alone?”

He was going to install slate in the entranceway. “The mud’s ruining the carpets,” he said, already starting out the door to the deck. As he opened it, he turned back to

Stacia. “When you bring them through,” he told her, “have them take off their shoes.”

Although the project only involved a small area, the work went slowly. Edgar loaded the boxes of slate onto the dolly and wheeled them, one at a time, around to the front of the house. Then there was the business of setting up the saw: fixing the horses, readying the hose, the extension cord. And, on his knees (he wore pads), the carpet had to be cut, pulled up, the sub floor cleaned of tacks and debris. By afternoon, he had the slate unpacked and laid out along the side. Audrey was sitting on the stairs, halfway up from the bottom, her thin arms wrapped around her legs. The slate came in two sizes, larger squares and half-width rectangles; colors varied from gray to mossy green. Edgar experimented with configurations, laying the tiles out where they would go, careful that grayer stones abutted greener. 143 He forgot about his sore knee, the ache in his back—he had strained it, lifting.

The task absorbed him, the design, the way the corners of the squares were offset a few inches, the alternating of patterns such that the whole appeared random. And the colors, how he scanned the shades, selected the perfect one. It was a ministration, this operation, a gift to her, to the house. His fingers swept across the stones, caressed them. He established a rhythm, swinging between the fans of tiles set behind him and the bed of stone growing before him.

But he looked up at the sound of Audrey bumping down, a step at a time, on her rear. She pointed at the spot where he intended to place a tile next. “You go upstairs with

Nana,” he said. But she tiptoed across the loose stones, and he stiffened when they shifted. Then she lifted a tile, held it out to him. He didn’t want that tile. “No,” he said, and grabbed for it, batting his left hand dismissively. She let the tile fall, then darted up the stairs on all fours. Bending down to pick up the piece of slate, he noticed it had chipped. He had already seen where it would have gone—if only she had just watched from the stair. But he regretted being so harsh with her too.

Later, he went upstairs for a drink. As soon as he entered the kitchen, Audrey, who had been coloring at the table, left the room. He flipped on the burner under the kettle and called her back. “How about some butterscotch?” Taking the toffee—their shared treat—from the drawer, he unwrapped a piece. “Audrey,” he called. But she didn’t come for it.

144 Audrey was playing with her dinner, stirring the cut-up ham and string beans together with her fork and eating none of it.

“You’re not hungry, are you, honey?” Elaine said.

Not if you tell her she isn’t, Edgar almost said.

Getting up from her chair, Elaine lifted the child out of her booster seat. “You go play then. You can have a snack later.”

Edgar cleared his throat. Elaine knew how he felt about children sitting at the table through the whole meal.

“Just let her be, Edgar.”

“She needs structure.”

“We were too strict with Cecilia. Look what good that did.”

Edgar forked a piece of ham and chewed deliberately. He wasn’t going to get into that discussion.

Elaine sipped from her water, set the glass down, and started in as if the interchange hadn’t taken place. “Stacia told me the house next door’s not going on the market after all. She’s going to keep the house in the divorce.”

Shrugging, Edgar reached for a roll and the butter.

Just then the phone rang and Elaine leaned forward, perked to the voice recording on the answering machine. “Elaine dear, Elaine and Edgar”—Stacia—“we’ve received an offer.” She drew out the word offer as if dangling a toy in front of a kitten. “Call me as soon as—“

Elaine picked up the phone. 145 The offer, it turned out, was a slap in the face—$20,000 under the asking price when they were taking a loss even at full price. Snooty Stacia had kept repeating that it wasn’t what you had into a house that mattered, it was all about perceived value. And how today’s buyers held every home to the standards of the new models. Some standards.

Oversized boxes on postage-stamp lots with twigs for bushes and pre-fab craftsmanship.

Which was precisely what Elaine wanted to move into—something on one level, one of the maintenance-free units, and with children nearby for Audrey to play with. How many times had he heard her spiel?

Elaine wanted to counter and Edgar refused. “The list price is too low as it is.”

“You have to discount. In this market, you do.”

He lay his fork and knife across the plate, scooted his chair back.

Elaine said it was an offer at least and went on about the house she wanted to buy in the new subdivision, how if they put a deposit down now, they could specify paint colors, choose some of the (so-called) custom trims.

He stood up to go.

“It’s just moving on,” she said, “accepting that we’re getting older and leaving the past behind.” She was pleading.

Exiting the room, Edgar stepped on some toy of Audrey’s, which cracked under his weight.

Edgar was annoyed, a few days later, to find his favorite gardening trousers missing. When he asked her, Elaine said she thought he’d been done with that for the 146 season. “They’re in storage,” she told him. “A house sells better if the closets aren’t jam- packed.”

He dressed in a pair of khakis too good for the work he had planned: thinning the hostas (they had outdone themselves this summer and now the plants crowded each other). Starting for the kitchen, he reconsidered when he heard Elaine in there with

Audrey—“Just tell Nana what kind of cereal you want for breakfast. Say ‘O’s.”

Outside, the day was crisp, a foretaste of winter. The late fall garden depressed him a bit—the waste of it all, the blooms desiccated and nodding on their stems, the tattered leaves, or somehow worse, those plants (the heleniums, for one) that threw out blossoms desperately, as if it were now or never. Getting down on his knees was the worst of it; he touched the trowel to the ground to catch himself. Then he got to work, digging around the most cramped plants, lifting them to the ready box. He didn’t know what he’d do with the extras; his beds were all bursting. He took each root ball in his hands and arranged it in the box, fluffing the leaves through his fingers. With the plants remaining in the bed, too, he ran his hands across the leaves, untangling where they had grown crooked. He lost track of the pain in his knee.

Edgar’s heart made a little jump when he realized Audrey was standing nearby; she had ignored him since the slate incident. But when he turned to her, she was watching the neighbor, the one whose house wouldn’t be for sale now. The woman was squatting at the base of the maple tree that marked the border of the two lots, ineffectually stabbing among the roots with a small spade. Concerned for the tree, Edgar headed toward her, noting the net bag of bulbs, daffodils from the looks of it, on the ground beside her. 147 “I’m not making much progress,” she said, standing. “My grandmother had a tree like this and I remember in the spring, the whole underneath was a mass of yellow. I wanted—”

Edgar couldn’t think of the woman’s name. “Here,” he said, “you’re too close to the trunk.” He sounded gruff. In a softer voice he added, “They’ll pop up if you don’t plant them four inches down.”

“I’m not a gardener.”

He tapped his foot on the grass several feet out from the trunk. “This is where you want to put them. But not with that.” He nodded at the implement she held. “Wait here a minute,” he said.

When he returned with a bulb planter and a bag of bone meal, Audrey was still there. He kneeled, careful not to display any discomfort, and demonstrated how to use the tool: push it into the ground, twist it in half-circles while bearing down, lift it up to make a straight-sided hole of the proper depth. “Much easier this way, and less disruptive for the maple’s roots.” He sprinkled a pinch of bone meal into the hole, placed the bulb there root-down, and replugged the hole by knocking loose the soil in the planter, grass lid intact. “There.”

“Oh, how ingenious. You’ve been so kind.”

Embarrassed, he turned to go. From a few feet away, he called back, “You can just put them both up by the shed when you’re through.”

But he found himself checking her progress from his hosta bed. She was in her forties, he supposed. Too bad about her marriage. He returned to his job, eased the trowel into the soil, repeated the motion in a circle around a hosta plant. Then he loosened it, 148 reached his hands around it. Though the day was cool enough for gloves, he preferred to feel the soil, the plants, against his bare fingers. Surveying the bed, he calculated—just two more, and that would do it this time around. In the neighboring yard, the woman was still at her daffodils. He would give her the hostas, for along the north side of her house, where he had noticed some skimpy pachysandra.

He felt shy walking over there with the box held before him. Audrey was still there. He didn’t like her hanging around the neighbor.

He motioned her over, whispered at her, “You go home now. Go on.” She grabbed at the fabric of his pants and he pulled back to free himself. “No. Go home.” He swatted at her, not to hit but to shoo her.

She bolted toward the house.

Edgar passed the stand of dogwoods between his property and the woman’s. On each branch tip, next spring’s bud swelled, full.

Nearing the woman, he heard her grunt slightly with the effort of pushing the gizmo into the ground. She raised her head when she realized Edgar was there. “Oh.”

“I don’t have anywhere to use these,” he said—not what he’d intended to say.

“What are—?”

Of course, she wouldn’t know much about garden plants. “Hostas. They’re shade lovers. I thought maybe around the far side of your house.”

She had stood up and now accepted the box from him. “Well, thank you. I’ll try.

You can see, though, my thumbs aren’t green.” She set the box down and pulled her hand from her glove, turned her fingers so he could see her manicured nails, painted a coral color. 149 He was flustered. “Should I? Would you like me to plant them for you?”

“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant. No, thank you. I appreciate the thought, Mr.

Gould.” She bent to return to her bulbs. “Almost through here.”

Mr. Gould. The formal address said it all: he was an old man to her.

He managed to say “Welcome,” and left.

Heading back, he saw the doors to the shed swinging open. Odd, he was sure he had closed them. As he got closer, he made out Elaine on the top step of the ladder, while

Audrey pointed up at the pots on the shelf.

Edgar abruptly changed directions, detouring toward the car, but Elaine called out to him.

“Just how do you explain this?” She climbed down and strode toward him, the

Saint Joseph held up in her hand.

Edgar didn’t turn around.

“Whatever has gotten into you? I don’t care about the little superstition—it was

Stacia’s idea. But to think you would dig it up and hide it.”

Enunciating each word distinctly, Edgar said, “I’m not selling.”

“We’ve gone over this, Edgar. We can’t keep this property up, not at our age. Not with your health problems. We agreed.”

But that was all Elaine. Elaine had decided. Elaine had made out how bad his knee was, how he ought to watch out for his heart. Elaine did all the talking for everybody.

Edgar crooked his right arm above his head, like doing her Audrey ballerina pose, and pivoted to face his wife. He lifted one leg and then the other in a funny little jig, 150 lopsided from holding the one leg straight. As he danced, he sang out, “I’m not selling;

I’m not selling; I’m not selling.”

That night, with Elaine asleep in the twin bed beside his, Edgar had a waking dream. Or so it seemed to him. He was listening to the sounds the house made: the heat coming through the vents (frost had been predicted and he had turned on the furnace), a vague electronic hum, and the cycling refrigerator compressor upstairs, but beneath all that—a kind of suspiration, all he could think to call it, that he pictured as a repeated, barely perceptible expanding and release of the walls, the roof, the skeletal structure of the house. This breath became more and more pressing until he couldn’t hear the ordinary sounds. And, as he lay there, he found himself breathing in sync with it. Then the intervals between inhalations became shorter and the movements of the structure more exaggerated until he was breathing in short gasps, matching the rhythm, rising. His entire body prickled with sensation, with the mounting tension. And, unable to hold out longer, he peaked.

The pressure subsiding, he felt the presence of the house settle in around him, matched to his own still quickened pulse. 151 Live Another Year

I could have been spending my afternoons shelving library books or organizing groceries at the food pantry, but no, I had to sign up for the cat shelter: sift cat shit, sweep and mop floors. I was expecting to be nursing the sick ones and feeding the orphans, like a veterinarian’s assistant, not some middle-aged woman working off community service hours for a DUI. They make me attend AA meetings too, even though I’m not an alcoholic. I go along with it all for Philip’s sake. Philip, my son, my missing limb.

The work’s never done. Soon as I finish the last box, here comes the big orange tom, scratches away in it. A lot of these cats are skittish, stressed out from overpopulation—the place reeks. But the tom rubs up against me when he’s done, purring and making his rear end quiver. Despite myself, I itch his ears before moving on to the front room. In my life, I have the opposite problem: it’s just me in my apartment, no pets allowed and Philip only there alternate weekends. Bill has custody of him.

When he was two, Philip got his pinky stuck in the car door and pulled so hard, he left the tip behind. I knew enough to put it on ice. With the snip of flesh in my lap on a pillow of ziplocked ice, I rode to the emergency room in the passenger seat while Bill drove and Philip screamed from his car seat. You have to know what you’re looking for to notice the funny bend in the finger now that he’s six. The doctor said he might have reduced sensitivity in the tip, but it wouldn’t be an impediment unless he wanted to be a clarinetist. 152 Maxine is settled at the desk in the front room, busy at some paperwork. These old ladies that run the shelter are so damned sanctimonious. Sanctimonious: that’s one of those words I memorized from “Word Power” in Reader’s Digest the last time I was on a self-improvement kick. Funny how the useless stuff sticks with you.

Just as I crouch before the row of litter boxes along the back wall, the buzzer rings. The shelter’s not open for adoptions Thursday afternoons so I look to Maxine for my cue. She weighs about three hundred pounds and isn’t about to budge. “Go ahead, unlock the door, Denise,” she says without looking up.

Standing so quickly makes me woozy for a minute and I have to catch myself against the wall. Maxine probably thinks I’ve been drinking. Her opinion of me is clear from the way she draws out my name so deliberately it sounds foreign. Well, live and let live. That’s what the AA folks would say. There are two sets of doors, a safety feature to keep the cats from shooting out and getting run over on the four-lane highway in front of the building. Still, I have to maneuver carefully through the throng of would-be escapees.

When I unlock the outside door, a scruffy-looking man and a girl young enough to be his daughter barge right in. The girl is holding a carton against her stomach, her arms wrapped underneath it.

Maxine gives them the once over and says, “We’re not taking new animals right now. No room at the inn.” Then she’s back at her paperwork.

Mewing and the sandpapery sound of cat paws brushing cardboard come from the box. I lean close, but can’t see anything through the towel draped over the top.

“Well, what if we was to leave it outside the door?” the man says. “You’d take it then, I reckon.” 153 Maxine’s all business. “You’ll have to try the Humane Society. We’re a no-kill facility and we’re filled up right now. Can’t exceed capacity.”

Setting the box down on a chair, the girl peels back the towel and lifts out a pure white kitten, probably not three weeks old. I don’t know whether she puts it in my hands or I reach for it. It’s always the same story with me: I’m drawn to anything little, weak, sick or needy. Already, I imagine feeding this tiny thing canned kitten milk with an eye dropper. The creature has the same idea. When I hold it to my chest, it digs its paws as though nursing. My breasts actually tingle at the sensation, one of those muscle- memories, I guess, even though I only breast-fed Philip for a few weeks. Bill couldn’t stand me smelling like milk and spouting like a geyser every time the baby cried.

As soon as I’m holding the kitten close, the man yanks on the girl, saying “Come on.” They bang through the doors so fast the cats don’t get a chance to make a run for it.

From the parking lot, I hear him say, “You’re lucky I didn’t put it out on the road.”

Maxine heaves herself out of the chair. “You can tell a lot about a man from how he treats animals. That one’s no good. And that girl doesn’t have a whit of backbone.”

Bill believes houses are for people, not pets. When I left him, a year into our marriage, what turned out to be temporary, I got a dog. At first he seemed to like her, but it didn’t stick.

Maxine’s coming at me. She’s so big, I instinctively back away, cupping the kitten in my hands. “I could feed it,” I offer.

But Maxine is already pinching its little neck, taking it from me. She sits it in one of her fleshy hands, strokes it clumsily with the other. “You’re just an itty bitty one, aren’t you?” she coos at it. 154 I feel usurped. Another one of those stupid vocabulary words. But I do. It’s so lonely in my body, all of a sudden, I don’t want to go on. Not with any of it. The volunteer hours, my job at the Pack & Ship, the visits with Philip that only make me more aware of how I’m just tacked onto his life now.

When Philip climbs into my car Friday afternoon, I’m surprised like I always am at how small he is. While we’re apart, he grows bigger in my mind. When I kiss him, he pushes me away and reaches down on the floorboard for the plastic monsters from the fast food meals that have sat there since his last visit, starts them right in hammering on each other like the time between was just a commercial break.

He didn’t have school today, one of those professional days. Pack & Ship wouldn’t give me the day off so he’s been at Bill’s office until now, probably playing

Gameboy while Bill was wheeling and dealing, the phone an extra body part attached to his ear. So, I’m already feeling guilty. When we drive past Galaxy Lanes, Philip asks if we can play and I agree, even though we usually wait until Sunday afternoons when the games are half-price. Galaxy. As far as I get to anywhere is the bowling alley with the cosmic name. All day, packages pass through my hands on their way to exotic places—

Buenos Aires and Kodiak, Alaska today—but I stay in place.

Philip jumps out of the car as soon as I’ve pulled into the parking space and dashes for the front door without looking for traffic. I know he can’t hear me but I yell anyway: “Stop, look and listen.” When I catch up to him, he’s already at the counter getting his shoes. He asks for ones even though they’ll be too big. 155 I dish out the money before noticing that the place is full of children, must be the

Salvation Army day camp for all the kids out of school. No bumper lanes available.

Before we even find our lane, Philip gets into it with a boy who’s a good head taller than him. The boy—they must know each other from school—leans down into

Philip’s face, spits out, “Jerkhead.”

Philip throws it right back at him: “Stinker.” Stinker, now where did he come up with that one? That’s not a word Bill or I use, not since Philip was a baby with a full diaper and it was a kind of endearment. My hands are on his shoulders, steering him toward our lane.

“Leave it alone now, buddy. Let it go.” Philip can’t stay out of fights, even though he always comes out on the losing end. He’s small for his age. Neither Bill nor I are particularly tall, but Bill’s one of those thick-muscled men, just looks strong. He bought

Philip a set of boxing gloves to teach him to put up a good fight, but Philip’s style is to kick and run.

Lane six. The noise and commotion getting on my nerves, I type our names into the electronic score pad. All around us, kids are running and screaming, the boys doing that dance they do, that feint and thrust, the soft punch on the arm. I’ve gotten in the habit of coming here at night sometimes when my apartment feels too small. I don’t play, just get a cup of coffee and watch from a table in the concession area: the bounce of the ball when it hits wood, the smooth advance, the surprising-every-time whacks of pins falling, and then, magic—they’re standing again, ready. League nights are best. The lanes filled.

The rhythm unbroken. 156 Philip’s up first, his “P” blinking. After the fact, I realize that I listed myself as

“D” for Denise instead of “M” for Mom.

Lugging a ball that’s much too heavy for him, Philip looks pathetic. He limps across the approach and drops the ball at the foul line, from where it spins into the gutter and comes to a standstill. Pivoting toward me with his hands on his hips, looking so combative and so puny, he says out of the blue, “Sandy moved in with us.”

I’ve known about Sandy. Sandy was the reason Bill wanted out of the marriage, not the DUI he said was the last straw. Still, the announcement floors me, just like Philip knew it would. He has this instinct—to go straight for my heart. He says it when he’s down, when my heart is laid open. All I can think is: will he call Sandy Mom?

He’s still standing there facing me, waiting for my reaction. But I’m on ice. I push the help button and snap, “Don’t go get that ball, the wood’s too slick,” even though I know he knows better.

And what comes into my head is this old Jewish woman I sat next to on the bus to work when I’d lost my driving privileges. She went on and on complaining about her son, how since he’d gotten divorced, he never visited and she never saw her grandchildren.

Then she started on some religious service she’d attended the day before, the day the

Jews ask to be written in the Book of Life for another year—but what do I have to live for? she asked me. Then, stepping off the bus, as if she hadn’t said any of it, she called out, “I hope you live another year.”

Alcoholic or not, I’m still on the one day at a time end of it. Not that I dwell on suicide anymore than the next person. What I fantasize about is packing myself up at 157 work in the largest shipping box available with the address label made out to Bora Bora, or maybe Reykjavik, Iceland.

Philip’s dropped his hands now, indicating a truce. I move toward him and he hugs me the way he does—hard, grinding his head into my stomach. Bill claims he turns into a mama’s boy around me. Maybe so. I long to save him from himself. He’s pushing against my stomach, but I feel it in my heart, which is squeezed tight.

A scrawny teenager with bad skin comes our direction, straddles the gutter, walks on the edges to where Philip’s ball sits. “Hey,” I say, breaking free from Philip’s grip,

“why don’t you try one of the orange balls?”

He goes off to get one and then it’s okay again between us. Philip knocks over five pins on his second bowl and the scrunched-up expression on his face relaxes. When he gets another gutter ball, he raises his hands in that win-some-lose-some gesture he’s copied from Bill. I get a spare on my last frame, and let Philip take my extra bowl. He tumbles seven and grins.

On our way out, I give him a couple of quarters for the arcade, which he uses for this battle game that pits one souped-up superhero against another. Apparently, there’s no skill involved. All he does is press the fire button non-stop and move the joy stick in endless, jerky circles and his guy wins each match.

Leaving the bowling alley, I turn right instead of left. I have this vague idea about getting a cat, something to make his visits with me special, something I’ll have over

Sandy. I’ll keep it confined to the apartment. The landlord doesn’t need to know.

“Where are we going?” Philip asks. “This isn’t the way.”

“I want to show you something.” 158 At the shelter, I let Philip ring us in. The lady who admits us isn’t anyone I recognize, so I resolve to work up to the adoption slowly. “I volunteer here,” I tell her.

“We want to check on one of the kittens.” Taking Philip by the hand, I head for the back room. His head swivels at the cats that are all over the place—perched on top of bookcases, asleep on chairs, hiding inside the scratching post cubbies. Every so often, they swap places.

The kittens are in cages stacked against the side wall. I look into each, trying to find the white one. Meanwhile, Philip runs after one of the heavy-weights, a one-eyed tabby with a gut that hangs to the floor.

She’s haughty, with a mouth that turns down and leathery skin, this woman who let us in. I can feel her watching us from the doorway.

“What happened to the tiny white one?” I ask, afraid it hasn’t survived—but I have to know. The phrase “failure to thrive” occurs to me. That’s what the nurse said about Philip at his one month check up when he still weighed less than seven pounds, although he was fine, just small.

From close range, Philip grabs the tabby around the middle and the cat twists back and bites his arm. He lets go and rubs the bite mark with his fist but doesn’t cry out.

The woman smiles unpleasantly. I can see this notion of adopting a cat won’t work. We would never qualify. She turns back to me. “Don’t know about that one,” she says. “When’d it come in?”

“Thursday.”

“Oh yeah, Maxine’s day. She sent it out to be fostered. Wouldn’t nurse from the mothers we have in here. Lady’s bottle feeding it until it starts taking solids.” 159 Ridiculous as I know it is, I feel it again: that sense that something’s been cut away from me, like I’m less whole.

Philip’s holding his nose. “It stinks in here.”

Back at my apartment, I fix Philip’s favorite meal—made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese. Philip digs out my photo album. I’m not much for pictures, not one of these parents who memorialize every milestone. But I did claim my half of the photos when I moved out—ten years that take up hardly that many pages.

“Mom, who’s this?” he asks, right when I’m drizzling the milk into the roux.

I glance at the page he’s holding open. It’s me, but nothing like I am now. My hair is long, light brown and sun-streaked, and my arm is thrown over a dark chocolate pointer-lab mix. I kept her about a year. Gentlest dog. Would lay her head in my lap when she wanted attention, not ask for any more than to stay there a bit. I stir the sauce so vigorously globs fly out of the saucepan.

“Who’s this?” Philip asks again.

“It’s Belle.” I gave her to the first person who responded to my ad, didn’t even ask what kind of pet owner they’d be.

“I never heard of that for a name,” he says, his finger stabbing my face on the photo.

I move the pan off the burner and pull close. “That’s me. The dog’s name is

Belle.” But he squirms out of my embrace. 160 “That’s not you,” he says, and shuts the album, leaves it in the middle of the floor.

He goes off to play super heroes and bad men.

When I start to pick up Spiderman in order to set the table for dinner, he yells.

“Hey, don’t move him. He’s waiting for a transplant.” So I leave the toy alone, set our places off to the side.

Philip complains about the meal. He doesn’t like broccoli anymore. He doesn’t have to eat food he doesn’t like at his father’s. And Sandy’s macaroni is better—mine is mushy. Kid stuff, I know, but it still hurts. I should have just bought him fast food.

I turn on Wheel of Fortune without bothering to clean up. Sometimes Philip watches with me and acts impressed when I get the answers before the contestants.

The camera pans tonight’s crew. “Who do you want to win?” I ask. “How about that lady, with the horsy smile.”

“I guess,” he answers, sending one of his bad guys careening across the room.

The horsy woman lands on “lose a turn” and the round passes to a slick-haired man who racks up $4,600 when he supplies the phrase: change of heart. I had it figured out as soon as the vowels and the “H’s” were turned up.

I take Philip home early on Sunday. His hostility is getting under my skin. I can’t seem to do anything right and it doesn’t help to tell myself it’s not my fault: I didn’t cheat, I didn’t walk out. Because, it is my fault. I screwed up by picking the wrong guy in the first place, going back to him, having a child. I’m the one who drove when I had no business doing it. No wonder the judge sided with Bill when I hardly make enough 161 money to support myself, let alone a kid. When it comes down to it, I’m the one who isn’t there anymore, even if it wasn’t my idea.

A silver Grand Am is sitting in the driveway next to Bill’s van when we pull up in front of the house. Sandy’s. I can’t face her answering the door. “You go on in,” I tell

Philip.

He’s slumped in the bucket seat with the seat belt cutting too high across his torso. I want to hold him tight, breathe my love into him. But in the shadow of this house that used to be my home, the car that isn’t mine, I can’t move an inch.

“Go on.”

He doesn’t look at me. He releases the seat belt, pushes the door open with his foot and drags his duffel out behind him.

“Wave if it’s all right,” I call as he slams the door shut.

There are a few cigarettes left in a box stashed in the glove compartment.

Lighting one—telling myself I’ll quit again tomorrow—I watch him struggle with the front door. It takes him forever to depress the latch and get it open. He doesn’t glance back.

When the cigarette’s down to the filter, I pull away. Here’s where I could just keep driving, stop wherever I run out of money, start over.

That next week, I quit working at the cat shelter, tell the probation officer I can’t take the smell. I’ll finish my hours shelving books at the library. At Pack & Ship, I’m so surly my supervisor talks to me about my attitude. 162 Wednesday afternoon during my break, a cigarette between my lips, I pick up the phone receiver, start punching in Bill’s office number to let him know I can’t make dinner with Philip tonight. One of those suspended moments.

Before Sandy was in the picture, I took Philip to the pediatrician for his kindergarten check-up. While we waited for the doctor, he insisted I help him get on the latex gloves he had taken from a box on the counter. His fingers had gotten stuck in the wrong parts. I pulled the glove fingers free and refitted each of his too-small fingers individually. The crooked pinky was the trickiest. Finally, he was satisfied. “Lie down,” he ordered. “I’m the doctor.” He plunged his hands to my chest, twisted them against my sternum and announced triumphantly, “There, I cut your heart out.”

Now, in that gap between punching the final digit and making the connection, I imagine my heart beating on without me. I imagine it lying on ice a styrofoam box, on its way to a transplant recipient.

But I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Kvetching, that’s the word that comes to me.

Enough. At the same time, I stub out the cigarette and disconnect the call one ring in. I put my hand on my chest, rub hard against the bone that covers my heart.

163 Tenderloin

The cookbook lies open on the granite countertop. “Tenderloin,” Leah reads, “the pampered inner muscle at the small of the back.” Pinching the soft flesh behind her own waist, she is again, for a moment, inside her body; she feels so light today, as if she might float away. Close the book. With all the meals she’s prepared—the family suppers, formal dinners for Roland's clients, the holiday feasts for twenty, twenty-five, his entire family—there should be no need to consult a recipe. Sear first, to seal in the juices. She sets the oven to four hundred degrees and lights the burner beneath the cast iron skillet, the one thing she refused to discard from her life before Roland swept her into his and instituted his sanitized version of domesticity (he objected to her not washing it with soap). As the pan heats, she considers the sauce. Shallots, she decides. None of the more pungent alliums. Only the mellow shallot. Perhaps sautéed with duxelles, the mushrooms minced tiny with the liquid squeezed from them.

Send Haley to pick oregano and basil from the sunny pots on the patio. No,

Haley’s not here. Haley and Eli both are with Roland’s mother Vivian. “You’ll want some time to yourself, dear,” Vivian had said—the dear part of the lace she trimmed their relationship with, though little love was lost between the two—and bustled them into her leather-upholstered sedan. “Don’t give us a thought. We'll be fine.” Vivian has an old- fashioned view of children: they should be seen but not heard. Usually, Roland took them for Sunday afternoon visits. Uncomfortable with the way Vivian pulls and fusses at their clothes and continually wipes their hands with washcloths, Leah found excuses not to go.

Once, when Vivian took them to the Children's Theater, Haley didn't make it to the 164 restroom in time. But now Haley is seven, and Eli five. Leah hardly knows who they are any more. Her own life is half spent.

She had worn the navy dress with the quarter sleeves and the buttons at the neck, the top fitting trimly around her slim waist like a short jacket, the skirt hem modest at mid-calf. Instead of the showy pearls, a hand-dyed scarf, blended greens beneath a batiked blue trellis. The scarf hid her small breasts that, lately, Roland complained were more girlish than womanly; she needed to eat more. In wave after wave, the sympathizers approached her. “Oh, darling. You poor thing,” one said, patting her shoulder energetically. Another reminisced: “Honey, I was in your boat. Two children. Their father hung on three days after the explosion. Korean War. You'll make out all right, though,” she went on, wagging Leah’s arm the whole time. “We do what we have to do, we women.” The next hugged her, oblivious to her brittleness, and said, “He was a good man, darling. You can take solace in that. A good man.”

Their touch made her draw back. They didn’t know. These were the old-lady

Chamber of Commerce volunteers, women he humored and flattered by treating them like they were still young. His gift was to be whoever people wanted him to be, a different person for every occasion. Was that what you called charisma? It’s what got him elected Chamber president, what made him a man-about-town. But he wasn’t good, and she wasn’t like them; he had suckered her into living the wrong life. He had charmed her as he charmed them, only showing his true self after their marriage when she was already pregnant. 165 The men came too, with their wives. They squeezed her palms, laid their hands on her arm. These weren’t the men Roland entertained at their home, the brokerage clients who complimented the meals she prepared and later, loosened up with Roland’s single malt scotch, slipped their hands beneath her skirt, squeezed the inside of her thigh and, in the hallway, pressed their erections against her belly.

Like a banquet laid out for guests, the casket sat at the back of the room, table height, the blue satin of the lining plump and fresh, the raised lid its frame. Haley wouldn't leave his side. Ahead of time, the funeral director had taken Leah and the children on a tour, showed them the room full of new caskets and the collection of swords mounted on the walls of what he called the consolation room, explained they could come here if they wanted during the viewing hours. On the table he left partly- crayoned Sunday school coloring books—line drawings of Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus at the last supper, Jesus on the cross, and then Jesus ascending through geometric shards of would-be light, these already colored in waxy, garish tones; Leah flipped through the pages as he explained to the children that in death the body was just an empty shell left behind. She should have stopped him, offered them her concept of good or bad karma extending to eternity. But she feels only a circumstantial connection to these children that as babies she never put down. The pregnancies created a hollow within her, a space she cannot fill, this need to be needed that grows more insistent as they become separate selves, their touch no more than a brief pressure against her hand. She stood there turning the pages. Then, in the so-called chapel—a large, sparsely furnished room—he told the children they could touch the body, that it wouldn’t hurt anything. All through the viewing, Haley, in the gauzy pink dress she insisted on wearing with her blonde hair 166 pulled to the side in a lace-covered barrette, stood sentinel at his head, her hand against the ceramic cold of his cheek. Curious, Leah touched him herself, but turned away, unwilling to step between Haley and her father. When Vivian cajoled her granddaughter to say hello to all the nice people who had come to say goodbye to her daddy, Leah snapped, “Let her be.” Vivian had never thought Leah good enough for her son—too thin, too quiet, he’d be able to run rough-shod over her, and what was it her father does for a living? She had not attended their wedding, had called Leah a whore once on the phone, a night her speech was slurred from too many martinis. Only after several years had they come around to a tenuous peace, brokered by the children. When Vivian was hospitalized, something to do with her thyroid, Leah had even taken the children to visit.

Now, Vivian jumped back at Leah’s uncharacteristic remark, but left Haley alone.

The pan heating, she goes to pick the herbs herself, out through the French doors of the house behind the gate that swings shut like a cage door, kitchen scissors in hand.

The August air is heavy with night coming, the chance storm. In the dimming light, the blue house looks gray. What kind of house is this, this walled monument? What kind of life has she led here? She should never have married, nor had children. To cultivate plants would have been enough, the nurturing touch that passes between her fingers and the green tissues. She imagines: light flecked through age-clouded windows, filtered by the multi-shaped layers of leaves, the room a Victorian glass cathedral; heavy-limbed, hundred-year-old trees buttressed by vines, epiphytes crowding the branches and strange flowers bushing below, the whole a weaving together of tropical life that surges 167 roofward, as though the northern winter weren’t just beyond the glass; the space, incongruously, an aviary as well—the birds not exotic-plumed species, but rather drab sparrows that sought warmth through a broken pane and could not find their way free.

Here Leah would traipse across stone footpaths to prune and shape, feed and water, her hose a fountain spray. But, on her Southern patio, she has only these few herb pots to tend. With one finger inserted into the loose grains of soil, she reaches for the nearby watering can, floods the pots until the water percolates through and bubbles out the bottom. Now she crops the herbs, her small, sustainable harvest and, in the kitchen again, rinses the leaves, lays them on the counter to dry.

She dribbles oil into the heated pan, then turns to the chunk of flesh resting on the butcher paper before her. A vegetarian since her teens, not out of political or health convictions so much as a repugnance to taking flesh inside her body, she is accustomed to preparing meat for others. It is something she does without allowing herself disgust; but now, she tells herself, this will be the last time. Season. She dashes salt across the meat, then grinds pepper from the wooden mill taller than her forearm. He gave it to her.

Roland. He would have her stand tableside, offering the spice like a servant. How often she imagined hitting him over the head with it. She stabs the tenderloin with a fork, flips it over, seasons the back side. Water flicked in hot oil flashes to steam. Leah lifts the meat, feels the weight, the freshness of it in her hands; blood, thin as wine, pools below.

As she sets it in the pan, the oil hisses at the intrusion and sends up a spray of sizzling droplets, but she barely registers the pricks against her arm.

* * * 168 For a time, when the guests flowed relentlessly toward her, stalled her with their sympathies and stories (the idea occurred to her that they were here to mourn parts of their own lost lives, nothing at all to do with Roland), Leah lost track of Eli. As people dispersed, she found him: stretched out rigid on the sofa. She didn’t need to ask to guess he was in his own casket, the stiff yellow brocade his imagined final bed. Enough was enough. Twining through the hangers-on, she went first to Haley, pulled her hand from the corpse, warmed it between her own two, pushed hard against the flesh so that her blood might flow in the child as it once had. “Come, time to go,” she said. Bundling

Haley’s slight frame before her, she approached the sofa where Eli lay. She reached for her son, fully a mother for that instant, lifted the resistant form to the breast that had nurtured his pliant baby body, held his face in the crook of her shoulder so that he might smell her milky skin.

They left, walking hand in hand, three across. The older part of town centers around a square green, the funeral home on the north side, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on the east. Their progress seemingly haphazard, Leah and the children passed the church where already people lapped at the doors, turned down Main Street and pulled up short at the ice cream parlor. “Come on,” she said when the children, looking back toward the church, hesitated at the door. They ducked as they entered, perhaps to avoid Vivian’s imagined oh-no-you-don’t as she plucked them by the collar. Leah heard Roland’s voice as well: “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” When the door fell shut, the sugary smell overwhelmed her; her stomach cramped.

Eli’s face was so serious as he stood before the heavy-set man in the white apron.

“My daddy’s getting heaven ready for us.” 169 Leah pictured Roland making beds in a sunny room, arranging a vase of flowers on the nightstand, the disparity of the image amusing in the moment before her anger reasserted itself: surely he would go to hell if there were such a place.

The man was staring at her. “Whatever they want,” she said.

“Chocolate sauce and sprinkles?”

That would have been Haley. “Anything.” For a moment the store went wavy and dark, then resolidified.

Haley ordered bubble gum ice cream with chocolate sauce and rainbow sprinkles.

When her mother didn’t protest, she added gummy worms.

Unimaginable. Leah couldn’t think of eating.

“The little boy?”

She prodded Eli with a pat on his shoulder.

Looking at her rather than the man, Eli said, “Cookie dough. And Oreo’s.” Then asked, “Can I have a cone?”

While the children ate, Leah sipped water from a paper cup. She ignored the mess of Eli’s ice cream melting down the sides of the cone and dripping out the bottom. It was

Haley who, playing the mother, blotted the cream globs from the Tasmanian Devil on his clip-on tie and brushed cookie crumbs off his lap. Leah was replaying the faces at the viewing, wondering if anyone had known she had filed for divorce a week earlier. He had said she would never make it on her own; he would see to it that she didn’t.

Eli rubbed his mouth on his sleeve and asked, “Where did they get the man that looked like Daddy, that man in the box?”

170 * * *

Leah rotates the meat, using the fork and a wooden spoon, oblivious to the splattering oil. While the peripheral flesh crusts deep brown, she strips silky skin from the shallots. He wasn't good, only a good actor. Those people didn’t know the Roland she knew, the Roland from behind the gate, within the walls. The man who couldn’t be outwardly ruffled but, when angry, would go through the house in the middle of the night turning on the lights, the music, the televisions so that she would have to settle the screaming children. The shallots set out on the wooden cutting board, the one he specified only be used for vegetables because bacteria might lodge in the scratches (his voice again, grilling her, when was the last time you bleached this?), she reaches for the chopping knife. Under the heel of her palm, the knife’s mincing rhythm chips at the small bulbs. She despises his voice that speaks from within her. She must excise it.

Charry meat smells fill the kitchen. Her hunger is inside out—the odor both draws and repulses her. Again, she turns the tenderloin so the last remaining section of raw flesh contacts the heated surface. More chopping, the rhythm soothes. Scrape the shallots onto a small plate. Now the herbs, their pungent flavor released to the air: tiny green specks hilled beside the shallots.

Innumerable times she had imagined his death: his car veering off the road as he raced to some meeting in another city, or returned home after too many drinks; the improbable plane crash. Always, herself blameless. She wipes the debris-mottled mushrooms with a damp towel. Chops them also, collects them in a cloth and wrings the moisture from them. Her gut cramps again. She couldn’t eat in the ice cream parlor, sweet as death—he smelled like nothing in the casket, faintly chemical. Nor later, at the 171 reception, all the little cakes and cookies, the plates of crustless sandwiches, which had appeared from who knew where. Only the routine of herself in the kitchen, the familiarity of tasks, grounds her. Now she lifts the tenderloin, so heavy her wrists dip and strain, onto the broiler pan. Setting the pan into the oven, her grip almost gives way. She swoons at the rush of heated air that escapes from the oven’s gaping mouth. But then, closing the door, she regains some strength. Stupid bitch, she hears him call her—in front of his friends, the children—stupid bitch.

The sauce again. She mounds the shallots, mushrooms, oregano, basil in the pan where tiny browns of meat pop in the oil. Too hot—she adjusts the flame, then stirs with the wooden spoon. Quickly, the shallots grow translucent, the herbs limp. Heat is no more than the speeding up of time. And what is death? Leah believes in no god, no medieval layers of afterlife. The only judgment is regret, the impossibility of undoing what has been done or of regaining lost years. She scoops flour into her palm, lets it snow from meshed fingers onto the sauté. She stirs the roux. From a bag in the freezer, she takes several ice cubes of rich vegetable stock. Her kitchen is well-provisioned, as if advance preparation could protect her. She adds them to the pan singly, stirs to incorporate them with the sauce, then sets the pan aside.

She sorts through the foodstuffs on the shelves of the refrigerator, in the drawers, looking for something to accompany the meat course. There is a little potato gratin readymade in a lidded glass dish. When had she prepared that? Two days before, could it be only then? She had made it for him, the two of them going on with things as if the dissolution of their marriage were not underway, as if she was not to move to a house on the other side of town with the children—a house on a quiet street of similar houses, the 172 yards flowing into each other without barriers, not even picket fences. It had been easier for her to go on as usual, him asserting that she wouldn’t go through with it and her, as for so long now, letting the anger gestate. She extracts the casserole, places it in the oven beside the roast. Then, rifling through the vegetable drawer, she selects a sack of green beans.

The cold water streaming over her hands as she rinses the beans shocks her a bit, reminds her she is still muscle and veins, nerve and sensation. She glances up. To the left of the sink, finely ground carbon steel knives gleam dully from their magnetic rack.

When they designed this kitchen during the first year of their marriage, when she was still awed by Roland’s assumed expertise, he had instructed her on the importance of the working triangle: supplies and implements, sink and stove, should be at arm’s reach from a central pivot. But after all, he had not been able to plan it out, not the part she would play in his life, no more than his death. She can see him still, his slumped body at the kitchen table. Water continues to rush from the faucet. “Gran says something’s not right with you.” Was that how Haley put it at the ice cream parlor? Perhaps Vivian would sue for legal custody of the children; the thought hovers, but evokes no response. Leah reaches for a paring knife and trims the stems from the beans, several at a time, cuts against her thumb, presses the edge into her skin, and, feeling nothing, pushes harder.

Red mixes with the flow of water. It is so easy to penetrate flesh. Then, with her thumb bandaged in a paper towel, she fills a pan, lights the burner to boil the water.

* * * 173 The service had already begun when Leah arrived with the children. Pulling them so their feet skimmed the marble floor, she made her way up the aisle to their reserved front-row seats. The robed priest was chanting, his song the voice of centuries: “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself . . .” Leah had deferred the arrangements to Vivian, but here, in the midst of the old-fashioned liturgy, Vivian’s choice seemed ridiculous. Roland had believed in nothing but himself. If he occasionally attended church services, it was only to garner political support. At the front pew, Leah pushed Eli ahead of herself and pulled Haley behind. They brushed past Vivian, who reached out in passing to retuck Eli’s shirt, then to straighten the bow on Haley’s dress.

Under Vivian’s stern gaze, Leah stared straight out at the priest, at the sway of his white robe visible beyond the lectern. “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of

God . . .” A lone shaft of sunlight illuminated a rectangle of marble floor beside him.

Next to her, Eli squirmed. “The top’s down. Is the man still in there?”

Leah shifted her focus to the coffin heaped with flowers in the center of the platform. “Hush,” she said, laying her hand over his in his lap. The congregation was sing-songing the psalm, their tones rising at the line-ends; Haley sang along with made- up words, a birdsong that diverged from the congregation when the phrases ascended.

Leah could only make out fragments of text: “My tears have been my meat day and nigh . . .” and “Where is now thy God?”

Again, the priest’s voice filled the sanctuary. A passage from Revelation: “The

Lamb . . . They shall hunger no more . . .” Leah couldn’t make herself attend. The words flew like swallows between the pitched, dark-wood rafters of the hall. Leah would be the words, would draw in flight the calligraphed forms. 174 Then drumming, close in. But no. That was only both children’s feet hitting the pew base. She stretched her arms across their legs to still them.

So familiar were the words now, they carried only rhythm, no meaning. Of course, Vivian would have specified a communion service. Leah pictured an antediluvian stone altar. Standing, placing herself behind Eli, she steered the children toward the rail.

They knelt in a row and Leah’s hands formed a cup to accept the wafer. Haley shook her head no; she flinched when the priest marked the sign of the cross on her brow. Eli spat his out, wiped it on his pant leg.

The meal sits before her on the cream-colored plate with gold rim—the beans in sheaves tied with carrot twine, the bubble-crusted gratin spooned alongside, the meat sliced and sauced, the dun of the sauce pooled with the meat’s running pink. Wine too, a fruity red, translucent in the fluted crystal goblet. A cloth napkin, gold-handled silverware. Take, eat. But she doesn’t know if she can, or if this will be enough. If she ceases the effort required to remain in this chair, at this table, she will transform into a bird. A white bird, the kind whose feathers were once sought out for hats. 175 The Far

We are never more human than when we are dogs. —Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

Not until he saw Moll, his beloved ’74 Subaru wagon, sitting in the high grass at the end of the gravel drive, did Sully know for sure where he was: at The Far, the commune where he had lived during the eighties. How he had gotten here, he couldn’t say. He had been in the Ellisville Middle School gym, intent on his star volleyball player’s back swing into her serve, the first serve of the division quarterfinals, the furthest his team had ever gotten, and all due to Carly, who had power, smarts, moves, the whole package. There had been a tremendous noise—an earthquake? the roof collapsing? but since when did southeastern Ohio have earthquakes? And now he was somewhere out past Amesville at The Far, which for all Sully knew had died of natural causes years before.

Moll. She looked the worse for wear—but then Sully had never known her otherwise. Her blue paint was so faded it wasn’t really a color, as much rust as paint anyway; driver’s side window consisted of a piece of plastic attached with duct tape; rear license plate dangled from one loose screw—OHIO DFS 6629. But oh, how good to see her again. He ran his hands across her body and then tried the door. Unlocked. He jerked up and pulled back, the only way to open the driver’s side door. Climbing in, he breathed the car’s smell: musty and damp, heady and sweet at the same time; foreign and homey, 176 like that first whiff of pussy. God, how he loved women. The key was in the ignition—

Sully pictured open road stretched out before him. Popping the glove box, he extracted his map of the continental U.S. with the routes, his escape routes, highlighted in orange marker. He spread it out on the passenger seat, let his left foot find the clutch, his right give just enough gas, the touch a muscle memory in his toes, the ball of his foot. But rotating the key, he got “chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga”; the engine wouldn’t catch. He was grounded.

Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an unfamiliar envelope of heavyweight, cream-colored paper in the still open glove box. “Mark Andrew Sullivan” was scrawled in shaky cursive across the front, and the handwriting was unmistakable: that of his fifth grade teacher, Miss Biddlethwick, who had sent home daily missives about his misbehavior (looking up girls’ dresses from under the stairs, leaving a water-filled condom in the girls bathroom, calling Miss Biddlethwick a dried up old prune—even then he had been unoriginal). The woman couldn’t be alive still; she had to have been in her nineties back in 1968. When Sully tore open the envelope, he found a single sentence in the same handwriting: “Mark Andrew Sullivan is hereby instructed to find the family dog.”

The family dog? What dog? What family? Sully was on marriage number four.

Family? He had, what, three kids of his own, the same number of step kids, or ex-step kids. He tried to keep in touch. Good intentions anyway. Not like it sounded: he had married for love and left for love, left before he stopped believing in the possibility.

Never cheated. Couldn’t even explain it to himself. Good at beginnings, not middles, that’s all. 177 The family dog? Each time he left, the loss of the dog had been the hardest part, the part that stung most. No dog licking him awake or jumping all over him when he got home, carrying on about a walk, a ball, a treat. He especially missed sleeping dogs. Under the bed, on the bed, under the kitchen table; farts and dream-whines; belly bared and legs up—the position of vulnerability, trust. A sleeping dog. That meant home, when you got down to it.

But now he couldn’t come up with an image of an individual dog. Their features blended: runty, spindly-legged, powerhouse bear of a dog; tawny, blue, black, brindled, matted, bushy, silky, wiry-coated dog; long and narrow, stub-nosed dog; pointy, floppy, up-and-down-eared dog; pink, black-spotted, quick, little darting, sloppy, drooling- tongued dog. Cash, Gretchen, Jade, Ginger, Max, Jezebel, Stinky.

Sully looked to the left. There was the old farmhouse, right where it always had been. Twenty years at least since he’d lived here with Eileen—the years when Avis and

Coulter were born, man, those were crazy times—and from what he could see, even through the obscurity of Moll’s filthy windows, nothing had changed. Peeling paint. A slate roof tile missing here and there. The whole structure slightly canted. And the front porch more than slightly. Probably the same family of possums still lived underneath the porch. The Community House, they used to call the place. Where they gathered for group suppers, the commune’s council meetings, and the solstice parties—now, those had been parties.

Stepping out of the car, Sully closed the door gingerly. He was surprised to hear people sounds coming from the house. Who could still live out here? Nobody ever knocked at the Community House door, so Sully pushed it open, finding the door wobbly 178 in its frame as always. He stood in the hall a minute, stared up at the green floral wallpaper, remembered how he and Ray and Paul had stripped the old paper off—one of those bouts of refurbishing the place. When they peeled the paper down they found a list of names, Wyatt, Johnson, McEwen, the date 1939, and what each had done—plastered, wired, roofed. It had been Eileen who had dug up old newspaper reports of a tornado that had cut a swath through Trimble and on down to Stewart. Must have torn the roof off. To think how many generations had lived in this house, each leaving behind traces—the hatch-mark record of a child’s height, initials cut into a floorboard, doodles on the back of a closet door. Good kitchen smells jolted Sully out of his reverie: baking bread and a tangy, savory odor. Gals used to cook up vats of Mulligatawny stew, veggie chili. He strolled down the hall, cut across the meeting room, stood at the edge of the kitchen.

They were all there—Eileen, Penny, Sheila, Brett, his four wives. Beautiful women, each in her own way. Eileen so willowy. Penny soft and warm, those love handles. Petite Sheila. Brett—God, she was pregnant; he hadn’t known. The kids were there too. Avis looked to be about five, her red hair tangled, freckled face peering into a box on the floor. “No, Coulter,” she was saying as she plucked marbles out of the carton,

“box turtles don’t eat these.” Sheila’s older kid, Sully’s stepson, sat at the table. Head in a book, as usual. And Penny’s twins were singing “Miss Mary Mack,” banging their hands together and giggling over by the stone fireplace. Oh, Oren, his boy Oren: lying stomach down, coloring, pressing down hard, staying in the lines. That child couldn’t do anything half-heartedly. The most intense student she’d ever taught, one teacher had said. None of this made sense, when Sully thought it through. Avis had graduated from high school last year, was taking a couple of business courses, figuring out what she wanted to do. And 179 Coulter. Just a few weeks back, Sully had made the trip up to Lancaster where Eileen and the kids were living now, Eileen a nurse in the dialysis clinic there, to take Coulter to the

B.M.V. for his driver’s exam. Oren was in second grade, tearing through math books, teacher couldn’t keep him busy enough.

They all saw him at once. “Daddy, Dad, Papa, Sully, Sull, Sully.” The last

Penny’s shrill singsong. And then they mobbed him. Coulter gripped his left leg and held on, while Avis grabbed his hands and tried to walk up his right leg. Oren tugged at his sweatshirt, whined to be lifted up. The twins moved in. And the women, all of them, threw their arms around him.

“Whoa, back up there. You’re going to knock me over. A little space. Let me breathe.”

Avis jumped up and down in front of him. “We can’t find Jade,” she said.

“Ginger and Jezebel have been gone for three days,” one of the twins said.

“Papa, Stinky’s missing.” That was Oren. Mournful, like he already knew life as a series of disappointments.

Eileen added, “Cash and Gretchen have been gone a week. I put the three of them out Sunday morning and when I whistled, only Jade came. And now she’s missing too.”

He looked at Brett. Brett, whom he was married to now, or had been. “Max too?” he asked. And in the next breath, “You’re pregnant.” She was a good four inches taller than he, what they call statuesque; he tilted his face up to meet her gaze.

“Yes, Max too. I’m sorry, Sully. I was planning . . . I was going to surprise you.”

Eileen shook her head at him. “Sully, what are you doing here?” 180 For once, Sully knew the answer. He pulled himself up tall and said, “I’m here to find the dog. Find all the dogs.”

Sully couldn’t believe his good fortune. One big, happy family: his four wives, the four women he had loved most, all in the same room. And happy, even happy with him. Eileen, Penny, Sheila, Brett—each acted as if her feelings for him hadn’t soured.

Such abundance. He didn’t know who to go home with.

Sated after two bowls of miso-minestroni soup and millet bread eaten hot out of the oven, slathered with Amish butter, Sully sat at the big table in the kitchen with the kids. He had built this table himself—from a lumber-yard picnic table kit, but he had sanded the surface smooth and rubbed it with varnish until it shined. They were making posters. Even Denby (the boy’s name had come back to Sully) had shucked off his sullenness and joined in. Works of art, these kids were creating: “Lost Dog” across the top, or “Help Us Find Stinky,” “Friendly Dogs, Come to Ginger and Jezzie.” Using those crayons from France you dip in water, probably a gift from one of the grandparents, each child drew a bright colored portrait of the beloved pet, or pets, below their text. As the images emerged, the distinct features of the dogs sorted themselves out in Sully’s mind, though the actual dogs bore little resemblance to the children’s renditions. They captured essences. The twins drew Ginger and Jezebel as bright yellow cartoon dogs, yet Sully saw them as in life—overweight Ginger, part lab, part retriever, tail wagging so hard she could hardly walk, and more-chow-than-not Jezzie, dense reddish-blonde fur matted and muddy, front paws against Sully’s chest. Little Coulter could only manage colored marks 181 on the page, and that only with Avis holding his hand; Avis’ Cash and Gretchen looked like potatoes with legs. Sully pictured collie-dog Jade, the laughable mixed beagle-basset

Gretchen, and Cash—a brindle streak across the meadow. There wasn’t another dog as fast as Cash. All chest and hind quarters. Oren instructed Denby on Stinky’s features:

“Do his curly tail, Den. Make him white and black and gray. Now his black nose. His ears, the way they point up.” This was a first, Denby letting his brother tell him what to do. Sully saw the little terrier, a Benji look-alike, barking at a tree trunk, oblivious to what a ridiculous figure he cut. Sully himself made the poster for Max, but didn’t attempt to draw him. “Shepherd Mix Lost,” he printed in block letters horizontally across the page, and pictured graceful Max leaping and twisting in the air to snatch a frisbee.

Periodically, one of the women wandered over. Penny looped her arms around his shoulders and whispered, “Sully, I’m so glad you’re here.” The pressure of her lips against his earlobe tingled. Brett gave him one of those head massages he so loved, a head itch, she called it; her fingers pressed circles into his temples, feathered across his bald spot and sunk into the deep of his neck. Heaven, he said to himself—and then wondered again where the hell he was, what was going on. Eileen sat facing out on the bench, took his hand in hers. “Sully, it’s so nice to see you. For the children too. Avis adores you. They both do.” She squeezed his hand. Gave him a peck on the cheek when she rose to continue peeling apples for pie. Penny, when she drifted over, poked him in the soft of his gut, giggled as he pulled her close and pressed his head against her cushiony bosom. Too good to be true.

* * * 182 Eileen as it turned out: the one he went home with that first night, Coulter riding on his shoulders. As he mounted the stairs made of sections of railroad tie held against the hillside with long spikes, stairs he had built himself, Sully swung Avis before him and trumpeted like an elephant to the tune of “The Mexican Hat Dance” until he was too out of breath to take another step and collapsed, laughing, with both children on top of him.

When they entered the cabin, Eileen ducked around to switch on a lamp and, in the dim light, Sully saw it all—exactly as he remembered. You walked into the big room. Same ancient couch with the stuffing showing through on the arms, couch you sunk into so deeply you could hardly get up again. Toys everywhere you looked. Huge fireplace in the middle of the room, open on both sides. Kitchen extended out behind the fireplace—gas appliances “vintage” even back then, pots and pans suspended from the ceiling, dishes stacked up wherever. Sleeping loft, for the kids, hung over half the room. Bedroom to the right. Through the open door was the waterbed in the frame Sully had constructed. The bed he had shared with Eileen for eight years, his longest marriage. He closed his eyes, pictured the place as he had intended it to be—wide-plank floors laid, secondary heating system (a wood-burning furnace he was rebuilding) up and running, working plumbing with actual hot water, insulated walls finished off with salvaged barn boards, cupboards hung in the kitchen, tile countertops where the pieces of plywood were nailed down for now. He shivered. Place was freezing. No insulation, and the windows were salvage—let in more air than light. “How about I get a fire started?” he said.

Eileen turned her hazel eyes on him, ready to eat him up. “Sure, Sully.” And what a night. As soon as the kids were asleep, Eileen tugged him into the bedroom and dove under the quilts where she hooched up, wriggled around, and deposited each of the 183 articles of clothing she had been wearing on the floor. Sock. Sock. Sweater. Turtleneck.

No bra, of course. Jeans. Panties. Then the whole of her emerged just long enough to pull him to the bed, where she removed his jacket and shirt but lost all interest in stripping him once she got his pants open and down around his hips because she took his cock in her mouth. Sully couldn’t ever remember her being so crazy for it. He came, and she didn’t give him a moment to bounce back; she was all over him, rubbing his thighs and his chest and kissing him. After the third time, all he wanted to do was sleep. He started to call the dogs into the bed the way they used to, bodies against bodies for warmth. But of course, the dogs were gone.

Morning. A squat rectangle of sunlight from the single high window pooled on

Eileen’s jeans, splayed like a dead animal on the plywood sub-floor. Avis and Coulter climbed in the bed and bounced on him as though he were a piece of playground equipment. He was exhausted. He could hardly hoist himself up from the jello of the waterbed, and then he recoiled when he hit the frigid air. Avis slapped at him. “Daddy, you have to get up and find Cash and Gretchen and Jade. Come on, Daddy.” Then Eileen poked her head in the room. “Oh, Sully. You’re up. Listen, before you get hunting those dogs, I just have a few little projects around the house.”

The afternoon was well along before Sully and the children set off on their search for the dogs, daffodils in bloom everywhere you looked. Sunny. Couldn’t ask for a more beautiful spring day. They began by hanging the posters. Nola and Nora, the twins, claimed the huge sycamore tree that grew along the creek, next to the bridge, for theirs. 184 Sully held each girl aloft so they could hammer the tacks. “Jessie’s going to have babies, that’s what Mom says,” Nora said, the first Sully had heard of it. Avis wanted hers to be hung on the trees that grew along the road leading up to the house: Jade, on the chestnut oak; Gretchen, on the sugar maple; Cash on the buckeye. Oren insisted his go inside the

Community House, taped onto the row of mailboxes in the front hall, despite Denby’s argument that The Far’s residents already knew about Stinky’s disappearance. To hang the poster for Max, Sully hiked all the way down Potter Road to where it joined S.R. 550, a distance of a mile or so, partly to get off by himself. Walking back, he could have sworn he saw Cash running in the field on the far side of the valley. He called for him, but when he looked again, there was no dog.

Still worn out from the previous evening, and from splitting and carrying wood all morning, he avoided Eileen’s glances across the dinner table that night. When Penny brought him a mug of hot chocolate at the end of the meal—spring greens salad with

Penny’s famous vegetable lasagna—his eyes met hers. She had never been as demanding as Eileen. He would go home with her.

Sully was surprised to wind up at the row house he and Penny had lived in when they’d moved up to Columbus, a house that didn’t belong at The Far. The sides, when he detoured to look at them, had chunks of drywall and framing boards, an inch width of oak flooring, still attached, as if a huge saw had shaved off the other units. He climbed the stairs onto the front porch, finding Nola and Nora already there, wildly shoving the porch swing from one end to the other. “Girls, girls,” he said, “it’s not made for that. You’ll rip it right out of the ceiling.” No sooner had he said it then the one side wrenched loose and the swing fell, rested at an angle against the porch floor. Was it Nola or Nora who 185 screamed, “See what you did. It’s your fault”? Sully left them to it, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Inside, he tripped on a stray boot and landed hard on his ass, spooking the cats asleep on the back of the couch. From the floor he surveyed the place: cartons that had never gotten unpacked the whole two years they lived there stacked up in the corner, unfolded laundry wadded in a pile on the couch, homework spread out across the coffee table, notebooks open on the floor, papers spilling out from the girls’ backpacks. Penny never had been much for housekeeping. On his way up the narrow stairs to the bedroom,

Sully peeked into the kitchen, setting off the cockatiel in the corner. The new gas stove he had bought Penny when he left stood pulled away from the wall, cardboard still packed around the burner plates. Now that he was here, he’d help unpack, get the stove hooked up. Mounting the stairs, he had to lift his legs high to accommodate the non-standard risers; he rubbed his ass where he had bruised it.

“Penny, you up here?” he called.

She didn’t need to answer. From the top of the stairs he could see where she was just fine. Lying on the bed in what God gave her. How he loved the heft of her full breasts, more than he could hold in one hand, and the large brown rounds of her areolas.

How he loved the line of darker hair that drew him from her navel, down the soft of her belly. “Oh, honey, it’s been so long.”

He kicked the door shut with the back of his foot and had his clothes off before he reached her. “Man, I’ve missed these.” He took each breast in turn, lifting it in both hands, nuzzling, kissing, sucking. Kneeling above her, he moved down, his hands rediscovering every tiny crease, every millimeter of flesh. His hands, and then his tongue. 186 Coming up for air, he thought to ask why she’d never had the stove installed.

“First thing it says in the manual, Sully, is not to use it near pet birds. Big block- letter warning. Something about fumes.”

“You and your critters.” As if two dogs weren’t enough—and Sully loved dogs—

Penny had the cockatiel, and more cats than he could ever keep track of.

He bent down to her again. Having all these creatures to care for, that was her thing. Not his problem. She was like Boston cream pie.

Bangs, stomps and shouts ricocheted off the stair passage and bombarded the door.

“Nora kicked me.”

“Nola did first.”

As they broke into the room, shoving, jockeying for position, Sully wrapped himself up in the bedspread. Penny didn’t even register his departure, bedspread and all.

He plucked up his clothes on the way out and had them mostly on by the time he got outside.

A near full moon that night, but cool. Temperatures must be in the low forties.

Might be a frost by morning. In the old days when The Far gardens accounted for most of his and Eileen’s income, he would have been worried about the spring crops. Not a bad life, his and Eileen’s, or any of it. Would have been different, he supposed, if he’d stuck things out—women, jobs (he’d done bartending, newspaper work, owned a little pub for a bit, ended up of all things a shop teacher back down in Ellisville, still working on the certificate). Different but not better, not necessarily. The leaving, all the leaving, that’s what hurt. He was walking down the lane, away from Penny’s. Twisting around, he saw 187 lights on in every room, the whole place alive, and him out in the cold. He turned back around, peered ahead, wondered where he should go. The extra rooms at the Community

House were all full, Eileen had said. A group from out of state. He turned left on a path he didn’t recall and headed for the lights he glimpsed through the trees.

Brett’s place, oddly enough. The very same 1931 bungalow they had bought in

Ellisville six months ago—stone on the first level, front porch with a half-stone wall and stone pillars, and wood on the second story, half repainted the aspen green color Brett had picked out. Sully knocked on the door. He waited, knocked again. Finally, the light came on and Brett’s face peeked out from behind the sheer curtain. Then Brett in the flesh: “I didn’t think you were coming, Sully. I went to bed without you.”

Sully was expecting the pout she wore when displeased, an expression that made her look childish and old at the same time. He shouldn’t have knocked. Shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have. The whole story of their relationship. But, she was grinning, all mischief.

He returned the grin and stepped in. “Darling.” Her hand, which held together the two sides of her robe, dropped to her side, and the robe fell open. Brett was gorgeous. A goddess, he had called her when they were dating. She worked out, took it seriously. Big, but sculpted. No fat. She could crush him with her thighs if she wanted. He placed his hands on her hips, slid down her firm buttocks, squeezed. “Oh, darling.”

They wound up on the couch, Sully on top, when he remembered. “Oh, babe.” He shifted to the side and rubbed his hand across her belly. “Why didn’t you tell me? How far are you?”

“Almost five months, Sully. I wanted to tell you. I meant to.” She stroked his face. “I was waiting for the right moment.” 188 He knew what that meant. A time they weren’t arguing. Which was most of the time lately. His erection softened.

She tangled her fingers in his chest hair. “You’re not angry, are you, Sully?”

“It’s wonderful news. I’m happy.”

“I just thought, you know, the way you’re always complaining about paying the child support.”

So that’s what it was about. He moved Brett’s legs over and sat up. Feeling old and fat and ridiculous, he pulled the afghan over his middle. She had known they weren’t going to last, known this baby would mean him mailing out another check every month, swapping the diaper bag and suitcase alternate weekends. What he didn’t understand was how he hadn’t noticed the pregnancy. Her belly was round where it had been flat. Her breasts—he stared at them—were humongous. “How could I not have seen it?”

“I didn’t want you to, Sully. I was careful about what I wore, careful not to let you see. It wasn’t hard, as much as you were away. Always something with that volleyball team of yours, your Carly.”

“Now, that’s not fair.” Here they were, starting up all over again. “I’m not the kind of guy who’s interested in kids. You know that. I was the one who said you were too young for me, remember?”

“All I know is, you weren’t home.” She was pulling on her robe, cinching the belt high, accenting her belly.

Sully began to dress. “I’m sorry,” all he could say—sorry he had knocked, sorry he had married her, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry-ass Sully. And he was out on the porch and 189 down the stairs, at the bottom of which he stumbled over the ladder that jutted out from the bushes. Another unfinished project.

Sully’s problem with marriage, with houses, boiled down to the same thing. It wasn’t a lack of imagination. Sully wasn’t one of those people who couldn’t see potential in a fixer-upper. No, his problem was too much imagination. He saw nothing but potential. And then every time, new projects and problems arose faster than he could complete the ones he’d started with until one day he woke up and saw everything for the mess it was, saw that he would never get it finished or even closer to finished, knew that deterioration, resentment, discord would win out. The only option was leaving.

Sully spent the rest of the night on the Community House couch, a piece of foam over a wood frame that he knew every knot and warp of by morning. Then that next day, all the long day, he traversed the ridges and valleys of The Far. The morning drizzle turned into heavy rain by noon. Sully wore a plastic poncho he found hanging on the coat rack at the Community House. He came across signs aplenty of the dogs: fresh piles of shit, including a line of small turds that could only be Stinky’s—Stinky the one who couldn’t sit still long enough to finish shitting; clumps of hair—he recognized Jezzie’s red-gold fuzz, even flattened by the rain; muddy cavities of newly exposed clay, evidence of Cash’s obsession with ground squirrels. About noon, Sully heard a piece of wood snap not twenty yards from him and looked up to see what had to be the white flag of Jade’s up-turned tail. He shouted, “Jade, here girl. Here, Jade.” No Jade came. Later, it was Max who crossed just ahead of him and then melted into the rock ledge. The cold deepened. 190 Passing the sycamore tree, Sully noted that the color had washed out of Nola and Nora’s posters, leaving soggy, blank pages. Sully turned off the road. As he leapt the creek, he slipped and soaked one boot. His foot squished with each step. Stuffed inside his pockets, his fingers were numb.

The rain became sleet and then snow. Huge flakes swirled around Sully’s face, settled on his two-day growth of beard. He stopped back at the Community House for the wool jacket he’d passed up earlier—a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket, not that Sully smoked. At first, the snow dissolved into the last-year’s leaf litter dotted with new green shoots, but after a couple of hours of steady snow fall, it began to stick.

When, at dusk, Sully saw lights through the trees, though he didn’t recall any cabins on this hillside, he turned that way. He was exhausted and famished. Approaching closer, he recognized the third-floor apartment he’d shared with Sheila and Denby, and eventually, Oren. Weird. There was the apartment all right, but just the single unit, fake

Tudor trim and all, sitting on a knoll surrounded by woods. The fire-escape ladder rested against the hill, evidently the way of getting in and out, since the elevator and corridor were missing. He climbed the ladder, knocked, and wasn’t surprised when Oren opened the door.

Oren stood there looking down at Sully, who still held the ladder rungs. “You don’t have Stinky,” he said.

“So I can’t come in?” Sully asked.

Oren stepped aside and Sully climbed in. He smelled pizza. Every one of his wives could cook. Sheila’s specialty was pizza—crisp crust topped with whatever she 191 had around, even beets or potatoes. Sully’s mouth watered. A beer and Sheila’s pizza.

That would hit the spot.

“Oh, Sully.” Sheila looked up from the crossword puzzle she was working on. “I didn’t expect you. Denby just ate the last piece.”

Denby shoved a final, too big bite into his mouth as she spoke.

“Not much else in the house,” she said. “Bag of pretzels you can munch on, if you want.”

Sully checked the fridge, but couldn’t find a soda, let alone a beer. He ate a few pretzels, which were stale.

Oren had sat down at the table, chin resting in his hands.

Sully joined him. “What’s the problem, bud?” Sully rubbed Oren’s shoulder.

“It’s my fault Stinky left,” Oren said, shrugging loose from Sully’s hand.

“It’s not your fault.”

Sully was thinking the boy might have stepped on Stinky’s tail, or tripped over him. He started to explain that dogs’ memories aren’t like people’s, that dogs don’t hold grudges. But Oren interrupted him. “If Stinky really loved me,” Oren said, “he wouldn’t have left.”

Sully’s hands fell to his sides; his forehead sunk to the table. Sully’s life had been a series of demolitions. He’d left nothing but carnage behind. He hadn’t been fit for marriage, for domestication. He should have lived as a hermit. There was nothing he could say to his son. Nothing he could do to make up for having walked out on him. Sully was hardly aware of getting up from the table or moving toward the door, shutting it soundlessly behind him. 192 * * *

Now what? The snow was letting up, but it must have dropped to twenty-five degrees. He headed in the direction of the Community House. At least it would be warmer there. But he found a man he didn’t recognize already asleep on the couch.

There was always Moll. He crossed the high grass, opened the driver’s side door and climbed into the back seat (the rear passenger doors had been jammed since before he’d owned the car). There, he curled into a ball and tried to sleep, the cold of the vinyl upholstery and the damp air chilling him. Dust and mold spores clogged his nostrils.

After an hour, he gave up. He was too cold for sleep, and the weather had cleared; with the full moon high in the sky, and the new snow, the night was as bright as day.

Sully set off down the road, thinking he might be able to hitch a ride into Ellisville, at least once day broke. Then, not a hundred yards from the house, he came across tracks, dog tracks, and he was crouched on hands and knees, studying them. The three largest must be Max, Ginger and Cash; the ones positioned like sideways colons, those would be

Jade—her gait was all bounce and pop; the smallest must be Stinky—such silly, dainty feet; Gretchen’s prints overlay the others—of course, she’d be in the rear. But where was

Jezzie? Sully would know Jezzie’s prints anywhere. She’d been hit by a car, and her left hind foot dragged.

His knees creaking as he rose, Sully took up the trail. A mile, two miles deep into the woods, he plodded forward. He strained to reach the top of a knoll, and then drew back from the scene before him: a deer carcass, blood splattered everywhere, the story of struggle written in the fresh snow. Could the pack—of course, they were a pack now— 193 have brought down a deer? An appalling idea. But a pang of hunger shot through Sully’s own gut. Those pretzels had been the only food he’d eaten all day. On the back side of the hill, the deer’s stomach was torn open; the one haunch was gnawed clean to the bone, and the other, apparently, had been dragged away. A gust of wind sent snow thudding off the tree branches. God, it was cold. Cold as hell. If only he could light a fire. Then, laughing out loud, Sully patted the pocket of the borrowed jacket, extracted the lighter and rubbed his thumb against the flint wheel. It lit.

Ten minutes later he had enough tinder piled up for a sizable fire, the wood damp but not green. He found a few dry twigs under a deadfall and managed to get the logs smoldering. Then he set on the deer carcass, tugged free a few hunks of meat and roasted them, weenie-style. He ate them charred on the outside, raw on the inside. Ate them with relish.

What a night. Sully was overwhelmed by the beauty of the snow, the woods, the sky. He added more wood to the fire, coughed in the smoke, but resisted moving away.

For the first time all day, his hands and feet were warm, his belly full.

A long, mournful sound rose up from the hillside. At first, Sully thought it must have come from himself. But no. More parts came in. The dogs, his dogs, were howling.

Each voice sang out, recognizable, yet strange—feral. He distinguished Gretchen’s deep and slow hound-howl. Jade and Stinky’s yips harmonized. Ginger and Cash barked in tandem, every few beats holding one note longer than the others. Underneath and beyond the other voices, Max sang forth, his a true howl, drawn out and soulful, the pitch of a siren. When Sully and Brett had adopted Max from the pound, that first night together, 194 the three of them had sat on the front porch of the bungalow and howled. Now, alone by the smoking fire, Sully raised his voice to the chorus.

By the time the howling session wound down, Sully’s throat was dry and sore.

His fire had dwindled to ash and he was cold again. And alone. He started down the other side of the hill, picking his way carefully on the steep slope in the wake of the dragged deer haunch. His boots filled with snow.

At the bottom, the trail disappeared where the snow stopped, up against a wall of sandstone. Hands touching the rock for balance, Sully made his way along the ledge. His hands encountered open space and he crouched down, duck-walked into the recessed opening, about four feet high, in the rock. A strong smell washed over him—rank, warm, milky. Hands outstretched, Sully continued on, deeper into the cave, drawn by the warmth, the smell. It was Stinky he came upon first, his fur so bristly it tickled. With both hands, Sully dug his fingers into the back of the dog’s ears like Stinky loved. From the dog’s throat came the peculiar almost-purr he made when contented. Sully plunged his hands into the middle of the mound, made out Ginger’s soft coat, Jade’s silky. He circled around, found Max’s long, stiff hair, and the sleek hard flank of Cash. He continued to inch around the mass of dogs, searching for Jezzie. At the far side, he found her: greasy, dense coat unmistakably Jezzie’s. She slumbered, backside pressed against the other dogs, body curled around—Sully’s hand explored with gentle pats—yes, here they were, one, two, three . . . six tiny little pups.

195 Slump Rock

Look at the sky just as dawn breaks in Ellisville—you’ll see a criss-cross of contrails coming from all directions, going all directions. Ellisville, Nowhereville. Virtual center of the world. Spokes running toward Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, New

York, Toronto. From the air, Ellisville isn’t even a point of reference.

I’m the last one anybody imagined would have stayed in Ellisville, but thirty-nine years later, here I am. As a child, I was always devising ways to escape. At five and six, I used to stand on the manhole cover in the middle of Water Street, waiting for the flood waters to push it up and suck me away to my imaginary underwater world. That was when we lived in one of the low-lying Ellisville Brick company houses, back before the

Corps of Engineers rerouted the Ramps River to prevent flooding every spring. By junior high, my tactics had shifted. Friday afternoons, the Trailways buses arrived to take the

Coventry College students home to Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati. I would get on, place my school pack overhead, and hope the driver would forget to check the tickets; eventually, he came to recognize me and stopped me from boarding.

Yesterday I agreed to take a job in Green River, Utah. Cook, naturalist, teacher, you name it, at Kids’ Café, a community resource center for low-income children. My friend Meryl, who has been working there for four years now, talked me into taking the job. Meryl, Cara and I, the three of us were the founding members of The Baker’s Guild, the co-op bakery I’m still part of. Ever since Cara and I split up two years ago, Meryl’s been trying to get me to leave Ellisville. “You need a fresh start, Ginnie,” she says.

“Someplace where you don’t run into the past everywhere you turn.” 196 But the truth is, I don’t know if I can leave Ellisville. It’s not Cara. It’s the landscape. Maybe that’s why I wanted to get out so badly when I was young. Maybe I already intuited that this land, this water, would seep into me, would become so much a part of me that I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else. I am this place: the atoms that make up me, atoms from food raised on Ellis County farms, were once this rock, this water.

What runs but stays in place? A river. A clock. Me. Hike, run, skate, bike, kayak, drive—no telling how many miles all together. One way or another, I’ve traveled every road, every trail, every creek with enough water to float a kayak in Ellis County, over and over again, always circling back to where I started.

Three days out of the week, I bake; by the time dawn breaks, I’m already into my second round of dough. When I look up, all I see are exposed vents and pipes that criss- cross the ceiling of the community kitchen where the Guild bakes bread.

For the past week, ever since I said yes to Green River, I’ve had a recurring nightmare. In the dream, I’ve left something behind. I don’t know what. Three, four times a night, I jump up, actually get out of bed, and start to retrieve it before I realize that I can’t remember where it is. I almost remember. Each time, I’m closer to remembering.

My dog Tiny, who has such a hard time lifting his arthritic hind end to a standing position, drags himself up after me. Half lab, half newf, Tiny was tiny when Cara and I got him fourteen years ago, just a little, black ball with disproportionately large paws, one 197 of them malformed; we named him Tiny Tim, knowing what the big feet portended but never guessing he would end up one hundred plus pounds.

Maybe I won’t really leave for Green River. I’m training Colin to take over my

Guild job, but there’s plenty of work for all of us if I stay. Although my house is for sale,

I set the price high so the bids will come in low, leaving me an out. Cara’s still part owner (I’ve been buying her portion bit by bit); I had to track her down in Louisville, where she and Helen are, ask her to fax her signature on the contract. All-business these days, she didn’t say a word about my moving. “You’re two-thirds owner. You handle it,

Ginnie. Just send me the check when it sells.” I know she needs the cash, even though she acts easy-going and never complains about the months I can’t send her anything. Still, it hurts that our relationship has degenerated to a business transaction. Thirteen years we were together. I didn’t mention my asking price, and apparently she didn’t notice, or didn’t want to talk about it.

What wakes me up Sunday night isn’t the nightmare. It’s a crash so loud the house trembles. I know what must have happened: a piece of rock from the cliff above the house has broken loose like we always knew it could; slump, they call it. Water seeps into joints in the rock, freezes, causes small cracks to expand, and then what seemed rock solid breaks. Once, while hiking in the woods near Ellisville, Cara and I heard a tree fall.

A two-hundred-year-old white oak, it turned out. You can’t imagine the magnitude of that sound unless you’ve heard it. So much mass crashing to the ground all at once, taking everything in its path down with it. And then silence. Or not silence—wood 198 sounds, the leaves rustling, trees groaning in the wind, the shrill kuk-kuk-kuk of the piliated woodpecker, the crows’ warning caws.

That is what the slumping rock sounds like, only even grander, and afterward, after it comes to rest, more silent, town-silent—cars on the highway, a siren, all of it far off. Strangely, I’m not worried about whether it has hit the house.

Tiny doesn’t start barking until he’s heaved himself up. He’s barking at me, insisting that I get up—because I’m still lying in bed, thinking about how it hasn’t really happened until I see that it has. Thinking about how I could have dreamed the crash. Two realities, just like when I was a child, living as much in my imaginary world underwater as the world of family and school. Tiny’s barks intensify. “Okay, okay,” I tell him. “Let’s go see.” Grabbing my robe and my coat—temperatures are in the twenties, cold for

Ellisville in late March—I let Tiny out the side door and follow. I feel the rock’s presence, mass where there had been open space, before I reach it. My eyes not having adjusted yet to the scant light from the cradle-moon, I can’t see much of anything. Tiny sniffs at the ground. Hands outstretched, I take tentative steps until I encounter the vertical plane of rock, rough and solid and cold against my fingers. I can just establish its dimensions with my reach: stretching up, my fingers curl around the top, and with arms straight out, each edge. Tiny ahead of me, I feel my way around it, patting my bare hands against it. While the rock is more or less rectangular, its surfaces aren’t identical; two sides are crisply sheer, while two are crumbly to my touch. By the time I work my way to my beginning point, my eyes have adjusted enough that I can make out the shape: it’s as big as the van I deliver the Guild bread in—and the nearest corner is no more than fifteen feet from the house. Lifting his bad leg, Tiny pees on the far front corner. 199 Back inside, I put the water on for tea. Apparently, nobody else heard the crash.

My house sits on a ledge most of the way up Redbud Ridge, overlooking the town of

Ellisville. Mine’s the only house on the skinny part of the ledge; my next-door neighbors’ houses, above and below, are situated where the ledge broadens, two hundred feet on either side of me. I don’t have front or back yard, just side. In front of the house, a steep hillside thick with wild rose and honeysuckle, the occasional stunted locust tree or the redbuds the ridge is named for, gives way to a gentler incline crisscrossed with residential streets. The rerouted Ramps River snakes, naked in its new bed with graded grassy sides, no trees, through the bottomland. Above my house, behind the road, a sandstone cliff rises a hundred feet straight up. There’s a bench at the very top where lovers go, where

Cara and I often went.

I want more than anything to call Cara, to tell her about the rock. We used to sit in the yard on beach chairs and gaze up at the cliff, imagine possible paths the slump might take. But it’s three-thirty in the morning and Cara has put our life together behind her.

“We don’t want the same things any more, Ginnie,” she told me—after she had already gotten involved with Helen. Meryl says I have to forgive Cara, let my bitterness go.

When the kettle whistles, I fix tea, my favorite sage-hibiscus blend. Most people aren’t capable of true commitment. All around me, I see people lying and sneaking around, ducking out on each other. My neighbor Pat, the closest friend I have left in Ellisville— her husband just announced that he wanted a divorce. No reason given. He doesn’t want to talk about it. Or about arrangements for their five year old, Olivia. I stir my tea to cool it and to release the flower and herb aroma. It’s Monday, a baking morning. No reason not to go in. The rock isn’t going anywhere. 200 * * *

Ten years, I’ve been baking. Two hundred loaves each bake day. Six hundred a week. Over three hundred thousand all together. Usually, I’m the first to arrive; before

Colin and Janice show up, I like to have three vats of dough mixed and rising. Starting in,

I scoop whole wheat and unbleached white flour, cupfuls of salt, oatmeal, pecans into one of the big mixers, add water and yeast. No need to measure. I bake by memory, by feel.

While the dough mixes, I paint baking tins with oil, pause to add more flour, return.

On my way into work, I looked over the rock with a flashlight. The crumbly sides are encrusted with lichen; those would have been the exposed surfaces. It’s a good thing I drive a small car. I almost couldn’t maneuver around the gash—a five foot trench—in the road the rock made on its first bounce. The rock isn’t going to help sell the house, that’s for sure. When I get home this afternoon, I’ll call the city, the realtor, the insurance agent, see what can be done. I’m into a batch of birdseed bread—millet, sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, poppy seeds—before I realize I haven’t turned the music on: I always play

Billie Holiday until the others arrive.

I love the feel of the dough. Colin shows up just as I’m tipping the risen dough out onto the worktable. First thing, he switches the music (he has permission). Tracy

Chapman. Then he washes up and dons his hat, a bouffant-style affair sewn from bandana swatches. Mine is a batik kerchief. While we work tandem, rolling the dough into logs, cutting sections, weighing them, forming balls, I tell him about my rock. Colin’s into astrology and Tarot and is always trying to sound profound, quoting some Zen master or another. Now he says, “Dogen says that only when water falls down to the ground does it 201 manifest the characteristics of rivers and oceans.” I know better than to ask how that relates to my rock; he’ll give me an earful.

The kitchen smells warm, heavy with yeast and flour dust. When we’ve finished cutting and weighing the logs, we shape each ball into a loaf: push flat, fold up, roll over, tuck in seam, place in pan; push, fold, roll, tuck, place; push, fold, roll, tuck, place.

I’ve never let Colin read my future. It’s not that I don’t believe prescience possible so much that I’m afraid of bending what will happen by anticipating too much, by not letting things take their natural course, like the Ramps being shifted into the man- made channel. The new channel is silting up, and sometimes I imagine the bed will fill up completely, and the river will find its own way again.

Janice insists I go home as soon as she hears about the rock. When I get there, my neighbors, including the elementary school kids whose bus is due any minute, are gathered around the rock. One boy climbs on another’s back and tries to pull himself up, but Olivia beats him to it. Olivia’s a little monkey. I’m as proud of her as if she were my own.

The adults fire questions at me before even I reach them—when did it happen? did I hear it fall? what am I going to do about it?

The father of the boy who is still trying to get on top of the rock points out the severed trunk of the rhododendron bush, a bush that used to be taller than I am, alongside the house. I hadn’t been able to see this damage in the dark, and I’m upset. Lying there, the buds bulge, full and waxy, at the branch tips, as if unaware they are dead. I can’t 202 imagine May without these flowers. “Must have deflected it, see?” Matt says, gesturing toward the cliff face. “Sucker fell straight down until it hit that mound there, then slid and rolled. I’m guessing it revolved a full 360 degrees. The road absorbed a good bit of the force. Then your bush there. If it weren’t for that bush, this rock would be in your living room.”

We hear the school bus straining up the hill.

Olivia shouts out “Ginnie” just in time for me to brace and catch her, one of our routines—she jumps from jungle gyms, tree limbs, any high perch. Wriggling free, she runs for her backpack.

The bus stops and the driver gets out. Shaking her head, she walks around the gash in the road. No way she can get through. She radios her supervisor. In the end, all the children disembark, wait for her to back the bus down the hill, and reboard at the bottom.

By the time I get through to Leila, my realtor, she already knows about the rock.

Her phone’s been ringing off the hook about “that listing you’ve got up on Redbud

Ridge.” She says I need to get it removed. She can’t sell a house that just missed being destroyed by falling rock.

I call the city first. The mayor’s office tells me to call the water and sewer department; they handle trash removal. But the water and sewer folks don’t pick up two- ton rocks. I try another angle: consult the town plat map to figure out who owns the cliff, which turns out to be the couple in the house at the end of the road above mine. The folks 203 at the office of code enforcement tell me I’m unlikely to win if I sue them, which would take too long anyway; unless I can show negligence, a rock isn’t their responsibility any more than if a neighbor’s healthy tree fell on my property. My insurance agent won’t even come out to look at the situation. If the rock didn’t damage the house, he can’t do anything about it. The policy covers houses, not property value.

Flurries in the forecast. A spring snow. Usually, I drive out of town and run on the rural roads, preferably gravel, but because of the weather I opt for city streets. In my head, I work out a five-mile route. Follow the public stairs down the ridge to College

Avenue and zigzag along the streets bordering campus, down to the river; then run along the bike path beside the river, follow it up past the re-engineered part of the Ramps, to where the woods are so thick you can only see the river in winter when the trees are bare, then cut back across town through West-End Park, where I used to play softball as a kid, and where I kissed a girl for the first time in tenth grade, then home the back way.

Snow starts falling when I reach the bike path, big wet flakes. An inch has accumulated by the time I’m on the wooded part of the path, although the snow dissolves under the pressure of my footfalls. A swampy backwater of the Ramps extends to my right, the actual river just visible through trees beyond. As I approach, a great blue heron—in March, in Ohio!—lifts up from the shallow water, wings beating in slow motion, and flies off. Winters in southern Ohio are unpredictable. Here I am in a blizzard, but the woods are busting with spring. Toothworts and spring beauties poke through the leaf litter, and the understory buckeyes are leafing out. How can I leave this behind? I 204 might learn to read the seasons out in Utah (I suppose the desert has seasons of some sort), but I can’t imagine Ohio’s spring, the changes I have always known intimately, taking place without me to witness them. My life here in Ellisville is a web of roads and paths and stories, a map of memories. I’ll phone Meryl, tell her I can’t go through with it.

The rock stays. After a week of making phone calls, I’m giving up. I found a demolition company in Columbus willing to blast it, but they won’t guarantee the house against damage. And there’s no other way to remove it. But me, I’m not sure about.

Meryl calls me every night with reports from the Kids’ Café. She’s got the teens delivering Meals on Wheels, meals Meryl needs help cooking. The deal is if the kids get snacks or homework help or a trip to the movie theater in Moab, they have to give back somehow—do chores at the center or take meals to the homebound. There were fourteen pregnant teenagers when the Café opened four years ago; this year, zero. When I come,

Meryl says, we’ll be able to take the kids on weekend field trips—go rafting or hunt dinosaur bones or explore Goblin Valley. Even Pat says I should go, although she’ll miss me. I’ve offered her a deal: I’ll go if she learns to drive.

Pat’s terrified that she’s going to lose custody of Olivia because she doesn’t drive; she never got her license. Her husband has only said that his lawyer will be in touch.

After all Pat went through to adopt Olivia—years of trying to conceive, fertility treatments, convincing Rick to adopt in the first place, and then a Chinese baby—being a half-time mom isn’t an option. She’s been studying the Motor Vehicle Laws booklet that

I picked up for her. Today, she takes the written test and gets her permit. 205 * * *

If anything, the rock has increased interest in my house, at least among the curious. The Ellisville Eagle ran an article on it. They interviewed my insurance agent who said that he wouldn’t hesitate to write another policy on the house. No danger, now that the unstable rock has fallen, not for another five hundred years. Tiny’s going crazy with all the people coming through—he stays at Pat’s now, when Leila shows the house.

One couple has been through three times.

Even if I could find a way to get the rock moved, I wouldn’t do it. The rock is like the Ramps, an event that mere humans have no business interfering with. Wednesdays, we do a small baking, just for our local outlets; the delivery route takes me less than an hour and I’m home by noon. I let Tiny out and, as on every day, I finger the rock’s newly cleaved surface while Tiny pees on the same corner as on that first morning. For once, the sun is shining. I change into hiking boots and, leaving Tiny behind despite his whines, head up the public stairs toward the top of the cliff. Partway up, I turn off on a hint of a path beaten down by the neighborhood kids, which I take to the cliff face. Rock climbing is nothing I’ve done much of. Up and down never interested me as much as traversing the earth, my endless concentric and intersecting loops. This summer, though, Meryl has signed us both up for a rock climbing workshop, since that’s one of the activities we’ll do with the teens.

The clay soil on the slope below the rock is slick, still wet from last night’s heavy rain. Unable to find purchase on the steep slope, I pull myself from tree to tree, balancing on the webs of roots that anchor the trees to this unlikely substrate. Working my way 206 cautiously, I reach the place where my rock broke off. I stand on the narrow ledge left behind by the slump and press myself against the sandstone, run my hands across its surface. If I expected a wound, a scar, some visible rent, there is none. Some of the rock is smooth, almost crystalline, while some, made from softer deposits, is pockmarked with small cavities. Inside these I find piles of fine sand, which I sift through my fingers and scatter below.

It takes another week before I can talk Pat into her first driving lesson. In a church parking lot, I get her settled in the driver’s seat, show her how to adjust the mirrors, go through the turn signals, wipers, gear shift. “Go ahead, turn it on. Give it a little gas,” I say.

She starts the car and shifts into drive. The car putts forward. I don’t realize for a full minute that she’s got her left foot on the brake and her right on the accelerator. But she gets that straight and then does fine tooling around the medians in the parking lot.

Stop, start, reverse. No problem. I ask, “Ready for the road test?”

“No.” She continues to drive figure eights in the lot.

“Yes,” I say. “Now pull to a stop at the end of the drive and put on your right turn signal.” I don’t know what she’s so terrified about. She told me about her driving lesson when she was sixteen: a near miss, a car that came out of nowhere when she was turning left, the instructor’s first-ever use of his emergency brake. But I keep thinking there’s got to be more. 207 Finally, she pulls free of the figure eight and turns onto High Street. Then when she gets to the traffic light at College Street, the main road through town, she freezes, refuses to drive another inch. After three light changes, I walk around the car and take over.

The weather’s been wacky. Snow a few weeks back, and now it might as well be summer. On days I don’t bake, I take the kayak down the Ramps. This time of year, the

Ramps is a muddy brown from all the rain, and the trees along the shore show up on the river’s surface as darker brown shadows. Come summer, though, there will be days when the river runs so clear that the reflection has as much substance as the trees themselves; clouds will move across the river-sky. My two lives. My real life in Ellisville these last two years since Cara and I split up and the life I had imagined ours: baking for the Guild,

Cara’s karate classes, and like Pat, becoming parents of a Chinese baby girl. But I realize now that being a parent was my dream, not Cara’s. Perhaps my two lives are here, where the seasons will continue with or without me, and in Green River.

I’ve told Pat I need her to get that license before I leave at the beginning of May so she can pick me up at the bottom, save me paddling back up stream at least once. May.

Meryl wants me there in time to get ready for the summer program. Kids will be at the center six days a week once school lets out. Six weeks more in Ellisville. I tell Meryl I’m coming, but I still think about backing out.

208 Olivia comes over with a pile of picture books to read to Tiny (only in kindergarten, and she’s already a good reader)—the Carl books, and McDuff, Pinkerton, and of course Miss Bindergarten. When she gets tired of that, I throw Tiny’s bean bag bed on top of the rock for her to sit on. We end up—Olivia, Pat, Tiny and I—picnicking on bread I’ve brought home, a braid of varieties made from whatever doughs were left over. We talk Olivia into sharing our blanket on the grass, convincing her that Tiny would feel left out if we all climbed up on the rock.

When I suggest going for a practice drive, Pat puts me off.

Olivia jumps up and tears around the rock, then plops back down on the blanket.

Tilting her face up close to her mother’s she asks Pat pointblank why she doesn’t know how to drive.

Pat runs her hands through her long hair and says, “Neither my mother nor my grandmother ever learned to drive.”

Olivia’s mouth is full of bread. “I’m going to drive race cars when I grow up,” she says. Her father is a NASCAR fan.

I can’t believe three generations of women in Pat’s family have had to depend on others, on husbands, for transportation.

Pat says, “It’s genetic.”

But I shake my head. “No, it’s a family pattern.”

“Maybe if the streets weren’t so narrow. If there weren’t so many parked cars.”

That makes me think about my Uncle Louis and his Midget Motors car, four feet shorter than a VW bug but a real car, street legal. The cars were manufactured in

Ellisville until the mid sixties. Louis tours the country in his, attends these jamborees 209 every summer. He loves an excuse to get it running. When I phone him, he says he’s not busy and next we know, there he is, pulling up alongside the house, unloading the midget car from his trailer.

It’s been years since I’ve driven the car. Olivia jumps in, grips the steering wheel in both hands, and toots the horn. She wants Louis to take her for a ride, but Louis insists that Pat is the only one allowed to drive it.

Eventually we convince Pat to get behind the wheel; I sit in the passenger seat,

Olivia on my lap. The car has two gears, forward and reverse. All Pat has to do is turn the key, press the starter button and give it some gas. She starts it, and we sit there for at least ten minutes, putt-putting on the side of the road, before she presses the gas, stutters forward, jerks to a stop. After a few false starts, though, she finds her rhythm and we leave the house behind, head down the hill into one of the student housing neighborhoods.

Pat’s driving!

The students are out on their porches or splashing in wading pools on their lawns, a beer in every hand, bottles accumulating on the porch rails. They hoot after us. The car can go fifty miles an hour, but we’re doing about ten. For the length of a block, students clap as we pass; the applause keeps pace with us, swelling and fading before and behind us. A boy sprints to catch up and runs alongside us. He asks Olivia why she isn’t driving.

I expect Pat to turn back, but she keeps on, bumping over the brick streets through the campus and then back onto College Avenue. On the other side of the Ramps, College becomes an overpass and leads toward a strip of fast-food places and subdivisions; I can’t figure out where Pat’s going. Sirens sound behind us. Fire trucks—three of them. In 210 formation with the other cars, Pat pulls into the breakdown lane and stops. The trucks roar past us. But when the other cars pull back onto the road, Pat stays put. She switches off the ignition and climbs out, stands on the bridge, looks out over the highway below.

Holding Olivia in my arms, I join her.

Below us, Route 50 stretches west: to Chillicothe, and Cincinnati; past Carlyle

Lake in Illinois and on through the Lake of the Ozarks region; crossing the Mississippi

River in St. Louis; on to Kansas City, Topeka, Dodge City; following alongside the

Arkansas River across Colorado, over the Continental Divide to Green River.