Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English Spring 5-10-2012 Who Cycles Into Our Valley Benjamin M. Solomon Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Recommended Citation Solomon, Benjamin M., "Who Cycles Into Our Valley." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/130 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 WHO CYCLES INTO OUR VALLEY STORIES by BENJAMIN SOLOMON Under the direction of Sheri Joseph ABSTRACT The twelve stories in this collection chart a course between the United States and India. Some are set wholly in one country, while others form a bridge between the two. Uniting them is a shared attention to memory, isolation, and loss. In their own idiosyncratic ways, each of the characters in these small fictions is struggling for human connection in a hostile and lonely world. INDEX WORDS: Fiction, India, Isolation, Loss, Short stories 2 WHO CYCLES INTO OUR VALLEY STORIES by BENJAMIN SOLOMON A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012 3 Copyright by Benjamin Solomon 2012 4 WHO CYCLES INTO OUR VALLEY STORIES by BENJAMIN SOLOMON Committee Chair: Sheri Joseph Committee: Josh Russell John Holman Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2012 iv Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude to Sheri Joseph, Josh Russell, and John Holman. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................iv 1. Who Cycles into Our Valley..................................................................................................1 2. This is Called Prowess.........................................................................................................14 3. Grief Station........................................................................................................................29 4. The Wife..............................................................................................................................45 5.Slippage.................................................................................................................................60 6. This is Why I Live...............................................................................................................69 7. The Swallow........................................................................................................................79 8. Friends of Babies.................................................................................................................87 9. It’s Bobby DuPont, From Ohio............................................................................................99 10. Men Who Pause...............................................................................................................113 11. Physiognomy of a Quilt...................................................................................................126 12. His Last Endless Sentence...............................................................................................144 1 1 Who Cycles Into Our Valley The countryside in this part of Spain is one of undulating hills, deep amber with stubbled and unruly grass. There’s a single asphalt road, weathered to pale gray, that wanders here as if lost or uncertain, dropping into narrow valleys crowded with adolescent winter corn and climbing to vistas of scattered oak trees, and from a distance these trees look like heads of bulbous broccoli, though up close they grow gnarly and formidable, and their tangled branches enclose a darkness uncanny in the full light of afternoon. Visitors here are few, mostly itinerant storks who pass through in pairs, stopping briefly at brooks to drink, then moving along to towns where they will roost atop steeples to guard the citizens of this Catholic country against malevolent winds. And though the nights this time of year often dip below freezing, the days if sunny are warm. Today the sky is a glassy blue, whitening at the horizon so it looks like wispy clouds cover the road ahead, and yet these clouds seem to dissolve as the father and son pedal their tandem bicycle along the meandering road, leaving the sky infallibly blank above them. The faces of the cyclists at this moment are splotchy and red. Their garish cycling clothes are ringed with sweat. The chain on their tandem squeaks as they strain to push themselves over the gentle crest of another hilltop, where, for just a moment as they stop pedaling and begin to coast, they lift their heads and take in the countryside around them. The father is a retired American teacher, recently divorced, newly expatriated to the country whose language he has taught for thirty years, and looking at the hills he notes with pleasure how the oak trees gradually thicken in the valley before them, then become an unbroken cover of scrub, and finally thin out again at the top of the hill exposing a round meadow. On one 2 distant hilltop little brown clusters shuffle across the clearing and the father knows that these are pigs. Earlier they passed a slaughterhouse and its cloud of stench clung to them for what felt like miles as they struggled to pedal away from it. Revolting, thinks the father, and yet the ham in this region is so good. The father writes about the ham and the countryside, the sunsets and the even the smell of the slaughterhouses in the letters he sends to friends, and always he worries about sounding too picturesque, lest he expose his loneliness, for who but the very alone, he thinks, makes the landscape the center of his correspondence? And still sometimes he can’t help it, because the sunsets are incredible here, the sandstone cathedral does burn a brilliant ochre-brown in the early morning light, the shadows really are so stark and black they look like voids, and so at the end of his messages he adds a balancing detail of the mundane, the annoyance of uninterrupted jack- hammering on the street below his apartment by day, or the sounds of shouting and breaking beer bottles at the downstairs bar by night. The son, who is visiting his father for week before flying to the States, is an English teacher in India. He chose India because it was the farthest place from home that he could imagine, although having been there now for two years and settled into a life with a woman, he understands that actually he is closer to home in India than he was ever in the States, and that in fact home becomes inevitable when you arrive in a place lonely and decide to stay there. He tries now to construct his girlfriend’s face in his memory but it refuses to assemble, and he can only think that she was unhealthily skinny when he left, and that she was angry at his leaving, and her anger made her look wasted and ill. Tonight he knows he will examine again the digital pictures of her body on his laptop, the image of her breast that continues to transfix him, and that in the week of absence has become her stand-in, a reduction that makes him sad when he realizes that 3 while her face eludes him, the precise contours of her left nipple are mapped indelibly in his mind’s eye. As the road begins a gentle descent and our cyclists relax for the coast down into a long ravine, each now finds himself paused in his private thoughts, and for the first time since they left this morning, both feel disposed to conversation. So momentarily connected are father and son that both instinctively know the other is just about to speak, and yet neither produces an utterance, patiently awaiting the words of the other, and then like strangers on a sidewalk attempting to pass one another but veering in the same direction, both the father and son find themselves a little jarred by the unexpected silence, and each thereafter feels suddenly bereft of what he was planning to say, though just now it had been on the tip of his tongue. And like that the moment passes, the road inclines, and they begin to pedal hard against the steepness. Had he spoken, the son would have shared a memory about something that happened years ago when he was a child, on his first visit to Spain with his father while they were driving across the countryside. They had stopped somewhere for gas, and when the father went inside to pay, an old man came out to wash the windshield, and after they drove away the father said, Oh I forgot to clean the windshield, and when the son told him about the old man the father said that was impossible because there wasn’t any old man at the gas station, just an old woman who said her husband had recently died, and then the father had said, Look how dirty the windshield is, and it was dirty, and the son, when he was older, would swear that he had seen a ghost that day, and that the ghost had tried to give him a message, but he would stop telling that story after his father once laughed and asked What was the message? and then in a spooky voice said, Kee-eep yo-or winnnndows cleeeeeen! 4 The father too, it so happens, has been thinking