Between Us and All by Caitlyn Davidheiser a Thesis Submitted To

Between Us and All by Caitlyn Davidheiser A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2019 Copyright 2019 by Caitlyn Davidheiser ii Between Us and All by Caitlyn Davidheiser This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Ay~e Papatya Bucak, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. Eric Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, English Department M~~~~ Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Apri\ ~ 2.019 Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Date 1 Interim Dean, Graduate College 111 Acknowledgements Sincere thanks to Florida Atlantic University’s Creative Writing department and for the guidance and insights of Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Susan Mitchell, Adam Bradford, Kate Schmitt, and Mary Sheffield-Gentry, without whom I could not have completed this collection. Thanks, also, to my mentors at Rutgers University: Belinda McKeon, Rachel Sherman, Carolyn Williams, and Mark Doty. I am forever grateful for the privileges of time, attention, education, and inspiration that these writers and scholars have given me. Thank you. iv Abstract Author: Caitlyn Davidheiser Title: Between Us and All Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Ayşe Papatya Bucak Degree: Master of Fine Arts Year: 2019 Between Us and All is a collection of fictional stories addressing themes of gender, religion, family, class, and sexuality. A portion of this manuscript is a linked collection of short stories, following the fictional Kelly/Sullivan family through their daily lives in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania. v Between Us and All Uninvited ............................................................................................................................. 1 Free to a Good Home ........................................................................................................ 31 Sun and Heir ...................................................................................................................... 54 Open Home ........................................................................................................................ 65 Pretty Circles ..................................................................................................................... 78 Spread ................................................................................................................................ 86 Live Women! ..................................................................................................................... 92 Spitting Distance ............................................................................................................... 97 When I Die (Hallelujah) .................................................................................................... 99 Genesis ............................................................................................................................ 111 Birthright ......................................................................................................................... 121 What We Do For Work ................................................................................................... 137 vi Uninvited The front door opened without a key and Maggie tripped into her apartment. Since her brother’s arrival, she was a ghost in her home, dispossessed and slipping through walls like this, howling without answers. In this neighborhood,? and, We’re on the first floor! were returned with shrugs, if at all. Ryan was new enough to the house that she tried not to blame him and, at this hour, there was no one to blame; he was out picking up fares. She was alone in her unlocked house. Maggie checked the window for Gabe but the street kept no memory of him. He must have already driven home to his own bed without her. This set-up was supposed to be more practical than personal, Gabe had work in the morning; their separate leases couldn’t be broken. But, one year had become six overnight and now she was twenty- nine, over a decade past the age her mother was when she birthed Maggie. Tonight was a new moon, which meant another empty sky. The new age self-help books urged Maggie to view this emptiness positively. Maybe the black silent air was the necessary circumstance of newness; the vast empty meant space to be filled. Potential. She clutched her stomach. Potential inevitably shed, Maggie wished she hadn’t thought it as soon as she had but the damage was done. The universe hears all and manifests. And, now it heard Maggie for what she was and would always be. Lonely ghost. Maggie inspected her altar, the short table of neo-pagan artifacts that she had kept in the office before it was Ryan’s room, and was now between the living room sofa and 1 the front doorway. The altar itself had been criticized with each reveal, first to Gabe, who had laughed, then her mother and father, who both sighed dejectedly. Ryan ridiculed it daily now, alternating between calling it hocus pocus or bullshit depending on how vicious his mood. Maggie extended all these criticisms to herself, how laughable, exhausting and ultimately fraudulent her family thought she and her goals were. She became suspicious that others might dismantle it piecemeal, whenever she left it alone, as a kind of test or joke. The anxiety consumed her and now Maggie counted each item on the altar whenever she passed, sometimes three or five times a day, tapping the items as she tallied. Twelve. As she had left it. Samhain was tomorrow. This was the pagan new year, the best time for spell work. Maggie spent the past week preparing her fertility ritual. The book called for an athamé – a ceremonial knife – something Maggie had never needed before, so she had provisionally substituted a steak knife. Everything else she gathered was letter-of-the law: the candles (inscribed with masculine and feminine sigils), a chalice embossed with a pentacle, a ripe pear, a banana, an Empress tarot card, rose quartz cut like Venus of Willendorf, a St. Brigid’s Cross she had made herself with broom corn, dried hawthorn leaves, and the Celtic Motherhood Knot that Maggie had traced in fabric paint upon a square of organic cotton during her latest ovulation. Only the knife looked out of place. Maggie’s spiritual doula, a man named Oley that she had met in the New Age section of the Barnes and Noble off I-80, would consider this insufficient. He might say, These tools set our intentions and all we will reap, why skimp out on your fate? between 2 his endless sighs of fruity Juul vapor clouds. He might be right. If she really believed this had any chance of working, shouldn’t she also fear that she might completely botch it and ruin everything? Would her spirit guides or ancestors or deities or whatever was in that Otherworld, conspire to damn her with some ironic punishment a la The Monkey’s Paw? Something like when, in grammar school at All Saints, Sister Mary-Katherine feigned hearing loss whenever Maggie asked questions she wasn’t meant to have conceived of yet. How Maggie’s compulsion to read ahead exposed her impatience, an ugly vice worthy of punishment. Eve after the apple. Seems doubtful that anything powerful enough to change the course of reality would care about the hardware and, worst case, a steak knife athamé might mean what? A baby too sharp-tongued, too utilitarian, too hungry? Isn’t any child of Maggie’s already destined to be all those things? Or, was the athamé meant to be a phallic symbol? Would a crude icon damn her conception to be – violent? The house had been left unlocked all day; she might not be alone. She stopped, else the universe would manifest. Maggie took the knife off the altar and with her to bed. # The Halloween party was an apology for Ryan, though Maggie did not tell him that. She had taken immediate pity when he had called to say that their father, James, evicted Ryan on his birthday this August. The eviction was something the Kellys were not shy about promising their children knew would inherit it. Maggie had seen it her whole life, like fine family crystal precarious in the curio cabinet of inevitabilities, but, like Ryan now and soon Dara, its threatening shine collected dust over time, obfuscating 3 its heavy edges until just when it was completely out of mind – homeless. Ryan was better off than Maggie had been, making it all the way to his twenty-first birthday, compared to her eighteenth. On the phone, Ryan claimed to have no alternatives. This was a lie. They both knew that their mother would have let Ryan stay at home forever. Women like Tricia always try keeping their baby boys chubby, stupid and dependent, a weakness they would never afford their daughters because, well what good would that do anyone. Gripping the receiver, Maggie knew she had said nothing for too long and felt guilt scratch through her, even for only a few moments of hesitation. She took Ryan to make his key that night – in the same hour that he had asked – despite not wanting to share her home or life with anyone who wasn’t Gabe. Maggie needed the party to be a fresh start, to assuage her own guilt for all the times the past two months that she had imagined murdering him. Of course it wasn’t a real

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