Above the Fog Below the Snow

ABOVE THE FOG BELOW THE SNOW

______

A Project

Presented

To the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

______

Spring 2009

ABOVE THE FOG BELOW THE SNOW

A Project

Lucretia Annelle Fligner

Spring 2009

APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE, INTERNATIONAL, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES:

Susan E. Place, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Robert G. Davidson, Ph.D. Paul S. Eggers, Ph.D., Chair Graduate Coordinator

Robert G. Davidson, Ph.D.

Jeanne E. Clark, Ph.D.

PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this project may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

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DEDICATION

It is with great affection and deep appreciation that I dedicate this project to my husband, Stanley Jay Fligner. Every school day he would send me off with only this reminder, “Have fun at school.” Without his untiring, relentless support I would never have progressed this far and, really, never have even begun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the generous guidance and support given to me through the years by those individuals who are a part of the English Department at The

California State University, Chico, including those persons of its support staff, its administrators, and especially its professors. The English professors at Chico State, in large part, have helped me to develop and shape my writing skills, and no one has been more influential in this way than Paul Eggers. Thank you everyone.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Abstract ...... vii

PART

I. Introduction ...... 1

Familial Influences...... 2 Scholarly Influences...... 5 Theory: Establishing Esthetic Aims...... 6 Establishing Mentors: The Process of Elimination ...... 11 Establishing Mentors: Models to Emulate ...... 13 Modern/postmodern Influences ...... 15 Postmodern: A Process of Elimination ...... 17 Postmodern: A Model to Emulate...... 20 Contemporary Influence: Alice Munro ...... 20 The Epoxy of Place ...... 23 Conclusion ...... 26

II. Short Stories ...... 27

Waiting for Cake ...... 28 Anthropological Move ...... 46 The Parnassus...... 64 Music Lessons ...... 77

Works Consulted ...... 94

ABSTRACT

ABOVE THE FOG BELOW THE SNOW

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Spring 2009

The short stories in this fiction collection, “Above the Fog Below the Snow,” are psychological in nature and character driven, and as a whole are meant to address aspects of human nature that specially pertain to interactions with others.

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PART I

INTRODUCTION

ABOVE THE FOG BELOW THE SNOW

What I mostly wish to say to introduce the following body of my work is that as a writer, and especially as a human being, my development is still in process. Asked

“Who are you?” by the Caterpillar, Alice replied, “I-I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” (Carroll 60). I’ve been changed. This could be the epigraph to my project; there could be no better opening remark.

Since my exposure to the work of an ever-widening circle of accomplished authors began six years ago when I first returned to college, change is the most consistent trait I see in my writing, which makes me hesitate before calling any one of the short stories within this collection finished. Finished to the degree described by Rilke, as that point where one word more or less would make the poem (in my case, a story) bleed, is not how I currently see my collection.

Therefore, these stories can stand only as an emblem of the process they represent—a marker along the way, of where I am now both as a writer and as a human being—and can only point in the direction of where I hope to finally be.

Familial Influences

Looking back on my life experiences in order to piece together those influences, which brought me to where I am today, is more like looking at a great cut of cloth than at a narrow path. This fabric spreads out in many directions (even into my

2 3 future) and contains layers of connections that weave together in ways that are difficult to pull out, separate, and identify. Perhaps the best place to begin is with the influence of my family.

My father was one of the most wonderful storytellers I have ever known, second only to his sister, my Aunt Sophia. Both Southerners, these two people came out of a world that had a strong oral heritage and was rich in folklore. They could spin tales for hours on end. I never tired of hearing about their father’s uncle who, during The

Depression, was the only person in town with a government job (he was the postman), the only person receiving a regular paycheck, and the only town drunk; or hearing about how they could never go catfishing, deep in the Georgia swamps, without taking their dog, a dog that could spot a water moccasin hiding in a stump the way a spaniel could spot a bird in a bush. I could listen to them tell the same stories over and over again because their storytelling was deeply musical—Eudora Welty musical. A song sung, no matter how many times, is never the same song. So, though my family never intended it that way, through their rich oral tradition, they helped to create my affection for literature. They also helped in the development of my ear for the music of literature; and, what is remarkable to me now, now that I make the connection, their influence was also instrumental in the development of my affection for the reader .

Though I myself never lived more than a few years in the South, being raised by two Southerners—who had both lived in Georgia till they were well into their twenties, and who both came from families that had been living in Georgia since long before the Civil War—did have a profound effect upon my psychology and, therefore, upon my writing as well.

4 Like those colorful tales I listened to as a child, the short stories in this collection are all character driven; and they share a type of down-home quality, which I also believe springs from my Southern heritage. But one Southern characteristic that influences my work, perhaps in a more esoteric way, is the Southern inclination toward the genteel.

I say that this is a more esoteric influence because it is more hidden; it colors indirectly how I write by its effect upon how I read. The Southern writer Eudora Welty once wrote, “Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don’t we want and don’t we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and passion, some fresh approximation of human truth?” (28). This is a seemingly generous statement. However, if you understood

Southern , you would realize that she is setting a standard here, one which she keeps and

(this is the important part) one which she expects others, out of mutual courtesy, to keep as well. On a very subtle level the Southerner in me is always calculating, measuring the level of respect an author shows for his or her reader by how much the author appears to wish me (the reader) well: How much attention is being paid to the details in the story?

How finished is the piece? Does it still bleed—or, is it whole?

Perhaps this is another reason why I feel my stories are merely settled rather than finished, since it is a standard I apply to my own work as well. My story “Waiting

For Cake” is a good example of this phenomenon. In its most recent version Mr. and

Mrs. Todd (who previously had been in the story only to give Jessie Harper something to respond to) now have lives of their own. So much so, that Robert Todd is in some strange way becoming another Jessie Harper. Through the process of revision the Todds have become more real, more alive, and the story has changed dramatically.

5 Scholarly Influences

Beyond the familial, the more recent influences upon my work have come to me through the process of acquiring a master’s degree in English. These influences, however, have, and still do, affect me differently. It seems to me that after a particular age (and that age being quite young) external influences no longer have the power to shape, but only to focus that which is already within us. The world becomes a mirror to the already formed psyche. By reflecting back onto our consciousness that which we already know to be true, our experiences reinforce our understandings until we reach a point of clarity, not about the who’s and the why’s of the world, so much as about ourselves. Alice hardly knew who she was at the beginning of her visit to Wonderland; by the end, she knew herself to be a queen—but she was still Alice. My meaning being that by the time anyone reaches college, he or she is already, in one sense, complete; however, not finished. The question then becomes—can the substance of a person be refined? Polished? Can it be made to shine? The best teacher, the best scholar, the best social advocate, the best writer is what emerges, we hope, from a higher education; and it is what I see emerging for me.

Those more recent, scholarly influences, which have helped to clarify my own aims as a writer, have accomplished this for me in many different ways and by many different means. Some have given me goals to aspire to, others have shown me paths I would rather not take, and still others have given me the needed confidence to continue doing exactly what I have been doing, only now to do it with certainty. Perhaps the best place to begin this part of my discussion would be with those writers who have given me goals to aspire to.

6 Theory: Establishing Esthetic Aims

One of the most astonishing pieces of writing I have ever read is Percy Bysshe

Shelley’s essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” This work of art by Shelley demonstrates his high opinion of poetry and poets. He would have the world ruled not by kings but by poets. I would too, if they were his kind of poet. It was reading this essay that made me realize I looked for the same standard to be applied to prose—mainly because of the focus Shelley placed on the relationship between experience and interpretation. It is exactly this point of contact, which Shelley values so highly in poetry, that I believe must also exist in my writing, and in the writing of others. Shelley tells us, “. . . to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation subsisting first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression” (1186). The poet, according to Shelley, must be a translator of the highest order.

Shelley also claims that

Poetry turns all things to loveliness: it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror; grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. (1196)

Poetry, as Shelley understands it, does not distance itself from the ugliness of the world, but through its poetic translation transcends all horrors. It functions to unite, harmonize, and bring beauty into existence. A noble aspiration, but one that can be set for prose as well.

Shelley is not alone in his faith in the power of poetry. Roland Barthes, from his collected essays entitled Mythologies , first published in 1972, tells us that poetry is a

7 language which resists myth as much as it can . . . its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. . . . Hence the essentialist ambitions of poetry, the conviction that it alone catches the thing in itself , inasmuch, precisely, as it wants to be an anti- language. (133)

Barthes believes poetry, with its metaphoric use of language, is the only form of discourse capable of accurately creating verisimilitude.

But surely prose has its own form of anti-language, of speaking the truth

“slant,” as Emily Dickenson claims the poet does. Doesn’t all great fiction speak to us in code, stand, not directly in front of us, but to the side, barely in our peripheral vision, so that the truth can slip into out hearts and minds complete; unbroken; whole— uncorrupted?

I believe that Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill” is an excellent example of just such a thing. Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” demonstrates that prose fiction is just as effective as poetry at translating and putting into words wordless states, translating the untranslatable. Who is not profoundly affected by reading this jewel? We may not be able to put our finger on it precisely, but the truth conveyed by this story lodges in us deeply and colors our existence from that moment on. The reading of Mansfield’s story causes us to become more aware of the frailty not just of a stranger’s existence, or even of our own, but of the entire human race. Her few pages of fiction tell the reader a great deal, but mostly they cry out—God, save me from a life of loneliness! Mansfield’s story is able to capture a primal fear all human beings secretly share but rarely speak about just as effectively as any great poem.

So, like Shelley and Barthes, two men living in vastly different times, who both maintain very high expectations for poetry, I expect as much from prose—fiction

8 that is able to catch the thing in itself and which apprehends the true and the beautiful.

John Gardner in his book On Moral Fiction seems to feel that way as well.

Reading Gardner’s On Moral Fiction was restorative. By focusing on the idea that true art is civilization’s moral compass, Gardner joins the ranks of past literary giants, like Shelley, by giving literature the prominence in our world that he feels it deserves.

Gardner’s book and Shelly’s “A Defence of Poetry” each express deep appreciation for the field of literary arts, giving homage to the power of its force. Both writers agree that the literary arts (specifically poetry, in the case of Shelley) are vital to the healthy survival of our civilization; however, unlike Shelly, Gardner feels contemporary literary art is now headed in the wrong direction. “Most art these days,” Gardner complains, “is either trivial or false. . . . Either [artists] pointlessly waste our time, saying and doing nothing or they celebrate ugliness and futility, scoffing at good” (16).

We might protest against Gardner's complaints, saying that they arise from his being out of step with his contemporaries (while Shelly’s praise came because his sensibilities were in accordance with the artists of his time), except that Gardner makes a good case for his point. Gardner tells us, “Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art’s morality” (14). My understanding of this statement, after reading Gardner’s On Moral Fiction , is that Gardner feels an author must not work from preconceived fixed notions of a story’s beginning, middle, and end, but should instead let fiction come into being through a process of discovery which can occur during the ongoing interactions of the author with his or her text while in the process of writing.

This evolving process of discovery then, where the author sometimes feels like someone else is doing the writing, becomes the spiritual part of writing, the supernatural part. To

9 subvert that process of discovery by applying some fixed concept to one’s writing before- hand will tend to reduce that spiritual element, and, I believe, this is what Gardner feels is happening with most contemporary art.

This idea of subverting the process is a wonderful concept that has helped me understand my own reactions to some contemporary art.

Gardner also feels that the sharing of our common humanity is of the utmost importance in literature, a humanity in which the author too must participate. He uses a quote from John Fowles to illustrate his point:

“No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.” Without will—the artist’s conscious determination to take his characters and their problems seriously—no artist can achieve real compassion. And without compassion—without real and deep love for his “subjects” (the people he writes about and, by extension, all human beings)—no artist can summon the will to make true art; he will be satisfied, instead, with clever language or with cynical jokes and too easy, dire solutions like those common in contemporary fiction. (84)

My understanding of Gardner’s objections lies within his words: by extension, all human beings . All great art must be based upon love, for in truth it is our only common language. For the literary process to remain uncorrupted it must spring from love and speak of love. A great piece of literature, therefore, should not only connect to us personally, it should also connect us with the rest of humanity.

Welty comments on this issue as well: “We do not need reminding of what our subject is. It is humankind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody” (85). The implication from both Gardner and Welty’s statements is that serious writing should be of a universal nature.

10 For Gardner too, the process of writing is not a fixed thing or a formula that can be applied. For him it is a mystical event that reveals itself. To write from such a place of unknowing, Gardner tells us, “reflects a fundamental conviction of the artist that the mind does not impose structures on reality (as existentialists claim)—arbitrarily maintaining now this, now that—but rather, as an element of total reality—a capsulated universe—discovers, in discovering itself, the world” (122). Here again, we return to

Barthes’s expectations, his essential ambitions of poetry , that it might catch the thing in itself , and we return as well to my personal aesthetic sense as it relates to writing fiction, which is that it should be able to do the same.

Clearly this is a high standard to set for literature, and Gardner, apparently working with such a standard, suffered from the use of it. On Moral Fiction , while espousing the virtues of writing, is also a vitriolic attack on Gardner’s contemporaries.

Gardner persistently makes derogatory remarks about other authors’ work by describing them as either ugly, vulgar, elitist, cynical, nihilistic, and even disgusting. And though I would agree with him on many points in this matter, in general I am much more optimis- tic about the state of literature today.

So, how do I personally evaluate literature so as to find suitable mentors to follow? In every instance when reading literature my gauge is whether or not I am illuminated by what I have read. Isn’t this the same tacit promise in every serious poem?

(To catch a thing in itself—to illuminate it, and thereby the reader as well?) And con- versely, whether or not I am annoyed by what I have read (this is the Southerner in me).

Does it apprehend the true and the beautiful? Does it care about me the reader; and,

11 therefore, by extension, all of humanity? If the answer to these questions is yes —then the writing is good and something I would aspire to.

Establishing Mentors: The Process of Elimination

There is writing which for me does not accomplish these goals, and becomes instead an example of what I want to avoid. Carver’s short story “The Bridle” is for me an example of this kind of writing.

There are countless examples in literature of male authors writing female protagonists and, also, of female authors writing male protagonists. This is a customary practice among authors and clearly demonstrates that an author’s gender does not need to be a determining factor in his or her choice of protagonists. This does not mean, however, that the issue of gender can be ignored. How an author handles gender in a story is critical to its success.

Carver chooses a first-person narrator for his story. In itself, this choice is not necessarily a misstep; however, because the language he uses—the short clipped sen- tences with few, if any, descriptive adjectives—is stilted, dry, and extreme in its utter lack of emotionality, my first impulse is to assume that the speaker is male . However prejudicial and/or subjective this reaction may seem to some people, I do believe it would be a common one, which many readers, male and female alike, might easily experience.

To my taste, Carver waits too long before letting the reader in on the fact that the speaker is female. The narrator, after speaking at length directly to the reader, finally says, “I also do hair. I call myself a stylist ” (343). By this point, the realization that the person

12 speaking is supposed to be a woman is a bit jarring, breaking for me the story’s verisimilitude.

Jayne Anne Phillips, on the other hand, lets the reader know by the first line of her story “Country,” that the first person narrator is a man: “We went down there because she was easy” (320). The tone and sentiment of such a statement has a masculine edge to it. We get no such help from Carver. And because of that, a little life goes out of his story.

The reader forgives, but never forgets. Later on in Carver’s story, when Marge says, “First I’ll shampoo you and touch up these roots here” (351), I think to myself—no, that’s wrong. A stylist always does the touching-up first then washes the hair. But why be so hard on Carver? Because he is being careless with the reader. He expects the reader to accept that the narrator is female without putting in enough effort on his part.

The fact that Carver’s narrator is a remote observer seems also a less-than- perfect choice for his story. The reader gets almost no insight into what the speaker is feeling, when she describes her behavior toward her husband: “I wave. I have to,” Marge says. “Harley takes a hand off the mower handle and signals. Then he pulls the hat down over his forehead and gives his attention back to what he’s doing” (Carver 345). Yes, we are all familiar with relationships like this, that have become mechanical and empty, but we get no emotional insights into Marge. How does she feel about it? Why is she worth our close investigation? Speaking of the bridle she finds in a drawer at the end of the story, Marge says: “The bit’s heavy and cold. If you had to wear this thing between your teeth, I guess you’d catch on in a hurry . . . You’d know you were going somewhere”

(Carver 360). Clearly, the reader is meant to feel some sort of pathos or empathy at this

13 final statement, either for Marge, or Betty (who are both obviously trapped in loveless marriages), or women in general, or people trapped by empty existences in general, but there have not been enough emotional connections made previously in the story for this to occur for me. Carver’s emotionally flat canvas does not support it.

Some might argue that this flatness is Carver’s point and the story’s overall conceit. I would argue that Carver is expecting this conceit to do his story’s heavy lifting for him. The story’s stark form does symbolize a type of empty life, but because I have no emotional connection to the protagonists, or any other characters in the story, its symbolism becomes nothing more than an exercise in perpetual self-referencing, the concept of emptiness mirrored in the mind ad infinitum. So, although I can admire his skill in constructing this type of stylized story, I am not illuminated by it; I feel no real love for humanity being expressed through it; and Carver’s relationship to his reader is not one I admire. His style of writing then shows me a path I would rather not follow.

Establishing Mentors: Models to Emulate

James Baldwin, on the other hand, in his story “Come Out the Wilderness” chooses to use the third person limited point of view. Right away this choice has a different effect upon the reader. This allows the reader to observe the main protagonist from a respectful, and at the same time, intimate distance. We are allowed to watch Ruth very closely, but we are not asked to be her or to imagine her as the author either. Surely, though, Baldwin encourages us to meld with Ruth by the many insights into her character that he shows us: She thinks about the poor, that they are “always dancing one step ahead of the devil” (422), and about her lover, who she knows is planning to leave her, that he

14 has “already moved back, crouching to leap” (424), and about Mr. Davis, her boss, whose

“smile was really only the smile, scarcely ever to be encountered anymore, of a man who was not afraid of women” (439), and much, much more. We come to understand that

Ruth is sensitive, intelligent, empathetic, and ultimately trapped, in the way that many human beings feel trapped by their own existence.

Another narrative choice that Baldwin makes is to have Ruth contemplate the relationships she has with other people: her brother, her father, past and present (and possibly future) lovers. These masculine insertions into Ruth’s story are more flat. We never really discover how her white lover, Paul, feels about Ruth, or why her father and brother were so emotionally strict with her, or whether or not Mr. Davis, her boss, feels affection for her. All the male characters are sketches only. It is from Ruth’s self- reflection that we get a sense of what these male characters are going through and how they feel toward Ruth. For example, we learn something about her relationship with Paul when we read: “Then she hated herself; thinking into what an iron maiden of love and hatred he had placed her, she hated him even more. She could not help feeling that he treated her this way because of her color because she was a colored girl” (Baldwin 423).

Clearly, Baldwin’s narrative choices—whether done intuitively or intentionally—came from treating his female protagonist with the kind of attention she deserved.

Baldwin’s artistic choices for writing a story with a female protagonist are pitch-perfect. In the story’s closing paragraph we see the difficulty Ruth is having coping with the complex emotional world society has forced upon her because of its lingering vestiges of slavery. As the story ends, Ruth drinks alone in a bar, avoiding going home to

Paul (who she knows will be leaving her soon), and struggles to make sense of her life:

15 A sound escaped her; she was astonished to realize it was a sob. The waitress looked at her sharply. Ruth put some money on the table and hurried out. It was dark now, and the rain that had been falling intermittently all day spangled the air and glittered all over the street. It fell against her face and mingled with her tears and she walked briskly through the crowds to hide from them and from herself the fact that she did not know where she was going. (446)

The result is a deeply moving story that goes beyond the boundaries of gender or race. By the story’s end, we don’t feel separate from Ruth. She is not black, white, woman, man; she is human. She—we are the same.

Baldwin’s story is a veritable bonfire. Its verisimilitude stands complete; it glows with its apprehension and expression of truth and beauty. To read this type of literature is always gratifying.

Modern/postmodern Influences

It may be useful at this point to discuss how the literature of modern and postmodern writers has influenced my work, since these were the writers Gardner was most concerned about.

It seems that modernists opened a new door of experience for writers, as well as for readers, bringing into play a new instrument by giving form/structure such a strong voice in its musical expression; however, like most overly strong notes it could not be sustained forever. John Barth, in his essay “The Literature of Replenishment,” tells us that modernism

. . . belongs to the first half of our century . . . both because the modernist coinages are by now more or less debased common currency and because we really don’t need more Finnegans Wakes and Pisan Cantos , each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us. (202)

16 What was at first groundbreaking and exciting eventually became overused and tiresome.

Even so, Barth adds this comment: “I deplore the artistic and critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn’t happened…and except as readers there’s no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens” (202).

Barth seems to understand that after the modernist writers broke out of the traditional molds there was no going back. The act of breaking away changed the art of writing forever. It was as if the “fourth wall” between the consciousness of the author and the reader had been discovered and dismantled. You might erect that wall again, but having the knowledge that one can pass through it changes everything.

This concept of not going back seems to be the artistic mode of the postmodern writers. Jostling perspectives, jumping narrative lines, ambiguous plots and meanings are all still delightfully relevant to the postmodern author—with one significant difference: approachability. Barth’s quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which tells how a man facing a firing squad begins to remember “when his father took him to discover ice,” is a very good example of this (198). Personal experience informs the reader, who is able to understand how the speaker could take such an incongruous mental leap because we all know that stress makes the mind behave in strange ways. So even though the speaker’s mind takes a sudden leap, the reader remains on board; and although jarred enough to be put pleasantly off balance, he or she is not jarred enough to be knocked off the train.

Postmodern writers do seem to use some of the modernist’s tools, but they tend to use them with a more compassionate regard for the reader. Structure and form are toyed with greatly and play an important part in the artistic expression but not so much

17 that the reader can’t tell which way is up without the aid of annotations. Barth tells us,

“The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction” (203). Postmodern writing, then, seems to balance the voice of form/ structure with the voice of content/meaning in such a way that neither voice overpowers the other; instead, the two together create a distinctly modern complexity that in the words of Barth “aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal” (203). This classi- fication of Barth’s is really quite perfect, since postmodern writers may startle us with their unorthodox methods (such as Donald Barthelme does in his essay “Not-Knowing” by interrupting his narrative in jarring and unusual ways), but usually their meaning remains comprehensible.

Regardless of the unorthodox methods used by modern or postmodern writers,

I still gauge their usefulness to me by how much respect I feel they have for their readers.

Postmodern: A Process of Elimination

I was astonished by Don DeLillo’s book White Noise —until chapter twenty- six then it seemed to me that his beautifully crafted story began to fall progressively deeper into philosophizing and ultimately became what I might categorize as an existential-cowboy tale. This may be an exaggeration, but it does serve to express my deep disappointment in the slip that I felt occurred in the substance of DeLillo’s novel.

I first noticed this slip in DeLillo’s novel when Babette’s story about the mysterious anti-death-fear pill and her liaison with Mr. Milk were introduced. I had been enraptured by every one of the first twenty-five chapters of White Noise until then. They

18 were full of wonderful descriptions and astute observations about human nature and popular culture. The following are only a few examples: “To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone” (73); “The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted” (82); “There are no amateurs in the world of children” (103); “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own” (120); “The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways” (140); “It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain”

(175). However, once the plot devices enter and the gun arrives, such delicate insights seem to take a back seat.

Or, did DeLillo introduce these plot developments with a smile and a wink, expecting that such a turn could easily be understood as merely a device to demonstrate how destructive plot devices can be? Readers do get this interesting warning from the protagonist, Jack Gladney, when he tells his students:

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot. (26)

Indeed, the introduction of the extramarital affair, the mysterious pill, and the intimations of future rage and possible murder (all cheesy plot devices) did give me a sudden sinking feeling. I too felt, like the travelers who nearly crash landed, that things had taken a sudden downward turn. It is interesting here to note that the narrator called the person retelling that incident of the near plane crash “narrator” (91). Did DeLillo believe that his story, like the almost-doomed plane, would recover successfully? Well, it did not.

19 My feeling is that White Noise could have recovered, if DeLillo had been able to show more restraint. When characters excessively spout out platitudes and prattle on about what things really mean, a story loses its subtlety. Jack, Babette, the children,

Murray, Winnie—a reader can grow weary being “talked at” by such clever people.

However, it was really the nun’s speech that finally pushed me beyond the limits of my patience and brought my simmering irritation to a full boil. Sister Hermann Marie carries on a four-page dialogue with Jack explaining the hypocrisies of religion and the meaning of true faith:

As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. . . . We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. . . . We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your non- belief possible. . . . There is no truth without fools. (319)

The nun’s outpouring seems preachy and Jack’s incredulous response to her seems childish. The scene has the appearance of a set-up, serving as a soapbox for the author.

Such heavy-handed tactics indicate that the author suspects his readers of being dim-witted. Rather than a translator he becomes a critic, an interpreter making a caricature of verisimilitude. In the novel’s great clamor to catalog all the problems with middle-class America, religion, education, human nature, itself even —it ends up merely making a big noise. By the novel’s end its earlier luster had all but disappeared for me.

DeLillo’s novel reveals itself to be more a bag of tricks, literary maneuvers, than art.

Right or wrong, his methods are not what I want to add to my own writer’s toolbox.

20 Postmodern: A Model to Emulate

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities , on the other hand, shimmers; his style of writing inspires me to look at my final drafts again, eliminate the extraneous, and make what remains more interesting and beautiful. I sense from reading Calvino’s stories that he too, like DeLillo, is commenting on the state of humanity as it exists in our world today, but he has no doubts about his readers’ intelligence; ideas are hinted at, implied, suggested. A small excerpt demonstrates his skill: “The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet

. . .” (10). Like any good poem Calvino’s Invisible Cities sparkles with fresh language, while concrete images firmly situate the reader in a world full of everyday things that no longer seem mundane, and ambiguity abounds. It seems to be a trait of postmodern writers that they play with traditional literary forms, and here we see Calvino using the poetic form to write his novel, in the sense that his short stories are so highly compressed and potent that, for example, within a single sentence (as evidenced by the above excerpt), the reader is able to picture the whole political nature of a city. The result is astonishing.

Contemporary Influence: Alice Munro

Lastly, after cataloguing only a few of those more recent influences upon my work which have helped me to set standards and given me goals to reach for, I want to mention Alice Munro because it is her writing that has given me the confidence to continue doing exactly what I have been, only now with more certainty. By this, I do not

21 mean to say that my work is on par with hers, only that her storytelling approach is similar to mine. I find in her a comrade, a friend.

Rather than moving in a linear way from point A to point B, Munro’s stories warp and weave; her style of storytelling is distinctly postmodern. Plot lines, just like her characters, and her points of view are threads which disappear then re-emerge so completely that the reader may lose track, and suddenly ask herself: Wait, what just happened? Her short story “Runaway” is a good example of this type of action (however, almost any one of her stories would do). In this story we do not just meet the two main characters, Carla and Sylvia, we meet their worlds. And each time we enter either one of these worlds it is with such completeness that we almost forget the one we temporarily left behind, or suspended. Yet the stories of these two women work together like musical counterpoint, creating a single song with its dominate feminist theme: the problem of living a male-dependant existence. Subtle and complex, but with its more modern added edge (the hint of physical abuse), Munro’s short story recalls to memory Kate Chopin’s book The Awakening .

It is Munro’s style of weaving stories together that has encouraged me the most, for my style tends this way as well. And the fact that she is not afraid to suspend one plot while developing another is encouraging. This is a skill I understand and can appreciate and one that I hope to continue to improve.

I see in this collection of my short stories varying degrees of Munro-like storytelling techniques, beginning with “Anthropological Move,” which has none of what

I would categorize as Munro-type shifts. This story moves by strictly linear fashion into

22 the future, only using the protagonist’s memory for back-story. The reader always knows where the protagonist is and who is speaking.

“The Parnassus,” however, does shift in ways that remind me of Munro’s work mainly because of the way its protagonist tends to meld her imagination about the characters from her romance novels with her real-life experiences. This slip from reality to fantasy could be classified as a postmodern movement. It can be confusing to readers, causing them to be slightly disoriented, until they begin to understand the story’s structure. It is a similar feeling that Munro creates in her story “Runaway,” as she shifts the center of her story without warning away from Carla to Sylvia then back again to

Carla repeatedly. It is very much like riding a two-headed horse. You’ll get there; but the ride might be bumpy.

I also see some Munro-like movement in my story “Music Lessons.” But here

I see less of Munro’s alternating perspectives and more how she weaves together tales. In

Munro’s story “Chance” we see how people’s lives intersect and how these encounters influence their futures. This is also what happens in “Music Lessons,” where the stories of all the young girls weave together in such a way as to show us the fabric of the narrator’s psychology. We see that she does not want children because past experience has shown her that the chances of surviving childhood unscarred are slim.

It is in “Waiting For Cake,” however, where I see the greatest degree of shifts that I find characteristic of Munro’s style in my own writing. This makes sense, as it was my recent exposure to Munro’s work that inspired my final revisions to that story. Pre- viously, “Waiting For Cake” had been just about Jessie’s life. Now we see instead that the lives of several people weave together (each told from a corresponding shift in

23 perspective), to tell us a story about not only about the individual but about the place where the individual lives as well, which brings me to another Munro technique, which I also intend to utilize.

Munro’s collection of short stories The View From Castle Rock uses a family’s genealogy as a connecting device. By this method she is able to string together several vastly different stories that otherwise seem to have very little in common except for their close examination of the myriad, complex nature of human psychology. It is an effective device that gives her collection a kind of Biblical substance that otherwise might be missing without this underlying unifying element.

The Epoxy of Place

It occurred to me, after seeing how effective this device of Munro’s was, that there must be some way for me to use that technique as well, precisely because of the consistent underlying issue I see in each of my stories, which is how one deals with displacement—whether it is emotional, psychological, physical, imagined, self-imposed, or real. And it was from this understanding of my own work that I realized place could be my collection’s unifying element.

Although a sense of place may not be readily experienced by the reader from reading these collected stories in their current iteration, when they are slightly modified in order to connect them all to the same location, I believe that element will become very clear. I feel confident about this because these stories are all based, at least in some small part, upon personal experiences from my time spent living in the Sierra Foothills and the

24 people I have encountered here. When these stories are finally tied together by place, my hope is that an overarching understanding of this location and its people will emerge.

The Sierra Foothills, which is an area classified by Realtors as being “above the fog and below the snow,” are full of disparate types of people, all living here for very different reasons, coexisting but never melding into a cohesive group. The first people forced from this area were, of course, the Native Americans. It is still up in the air which group will be forced out this time—the eccentrics, the ranchers, the pot growers and methamphetamine makers, or the rich. It is an on-going-however-covert battle, which I don’t believe has been addressed yet in literature.

Adding the connecting element of place to my short story collection will not be difficult, requiring only slight modifications and revision.

“Waiting For Cake” is my collection’s opening story and since it establishes nicely the tone and direction I envision for the entire project (which is to make a collection of psychological profiles), and because it’s action is centered in the Sierra

Foothills, I believe it can remain relatively unchanged.

This story is told from the perspective of three different points of view (a tactic that is characteristically postmodern), which, I believe, is essential to the story’s purpose, since it demonstrates how uncommunicative the disparate social groups examined in this story are. The last point of view shift is especially important since it best conveys the emotional disconnect on which I want the story to end. The coldness expressed by this last scene is meant to emphasize the strong possibility of Jessie’s death.

“Anthropological Move” can easily be connected to “Waiting For Cake” by having Adam’s parents be living in the same Sierra Foothills as those that are central to

25 “Waiting For Cake.” Like the Todds, Adam’s parents will be transplanted city people.

However, in contrast to the Todds, they will be able to retain their “city balance” while living in the country. Their relocation will be a successful one. And Adam, their free- spirited son, will be a testament to that fact.

“The Parnassus” can be connected as well by having Carol, the story’s naïve and emotionally immature protagonist, come from those same hills. She leaves the foothills, hoping to leave behind the painful loss of a childhood sweetheart. She discovers instead that her physical move is not enough to help her move emotionally from the place of her loss.

And finally, all that is needed to connect “Music Lessons” to all the rest is to have its narrator be on her way to the hills, having recently purchased a home in that area with the money from her divorce settlement. Having seen / experienced as much of the world as she cares to, she is now headed for a place of recluse—another reason why many people move to the hills.

Although time and space does not allow for me to include my works-in- progress in this document, I do wish to mention that I am currently working on a short story, which is a murder mystery. This story will showcase another type of person who lives in the Sierra Foothills, those who traffic in illegal drugs. It will also introduce

Robert from “Waiting For Cake” to the narrator in “Music Lessons,” thereby bringing the collected stories full circle and effectively ending their movement from place to place.

The result, I hope, will be to add density of meaning to the overall collection, in much the same way that Munro’s theme of family added to hers.

26 Having said this, I must add that even without the connecting element of place, these stories to me are strongly linked by their underlying emotional themes and psychological profiles. My sense is that these stories will speak to the reader in a very personal way, perhaps revealing to him or her some insight into an aspect of human nature. It is these stories’ emotional content then that makes them resonate together so strongly.

Yet, it was reading Munro’s work that helped me realize how easily my short stories could be threaded together to make a longer work. It is a possibility I had not previously considered. Now, I feel certain that my first book is only a few drafts and revisions away.

Conclusion

And what can I say in summation about my own writing in light of my explication on the fine points of serious literature? All I can say with certainty is that I know my writing continues to improve. To write, as Welty expressed so poignantly, stories of beauty and passion, containing some fresh approximation of human truth —will always be for me both a touchstone and an ambition.

PART II

SHORT STORIES

28 Waiting For Cake

Jessie Harper stood at the threshold of his aging singlewide mobile home, a home by now anything but mobile after years of added lean-tos and sheds, and looked into the azure morning sky, seeing nothing but the pictures swimming in his fuddled mind.

“Today’s the day, Martha,” he said squinting at the sun and smiling. The tip of his tongue pressed impishly through a wide space in the front of his teeth. “You’re right,

Martha. I feel it too.” Either oblivious to the fact or just not giving a damn, he stood there half-naked. First standing on one bare foot then the other, he snapped himself into his

Sunday best shirt—the one with the fake pearl buttons that was now soft as baby chick’s down from wear. His shriveled testicles bounced unrestrained with every step.

“It was there. Right there,” Jessie said gleefully, speaking to the air. “Weren’t it, Martha. I knowd you left it for me. ‘Cause it had every number on it. All the lucky numbers,” and he laughed out loud. His teary eyes spilled water down the sides of his checks. “None of them saw it,” he said, and jangled his weathered hand in the air, puppet- like, toward the gravel road that ran in front of his property as if to conjure up the story for a multitude of listeners.

Suddenly the peahen started up from her nest near the pines when two people walking along the gravel road disturbed her. Both peacocks followed her suit, screeching out an alarm, filling the air with their piercing, prehistoric-sounding cries until safely perched above ground. They proved a better warning system even than Butch, Jessie’s mixed-breed yellow Lab. But that was also why no one raised them—beautiful, but too noisy.

29 On a clear, cool afternoon their shrieks could be heard miles away down the valley. A fault that never bothered Jessie mainly because his wife had always told him it was nothing less than the stamp of God upon them. Meant to keep them from being too proud, she always liked to say. Said it was God’s way of keeping them humble.

She’d been the one who raised them. Didn’t matter to her whether she sold any or not. Mostly people only bought the eggs for decorating, and even then only at

Christmas time, or Easter, and only a few regular customers. But even the regulars lost interest eventually and stopped coming by. Times changed. Handcrafts don’t sell much nowadays when you can buy something just as nice-looking for half the price without any of the bother.

“Yeah, yeah. I hear ‘em too,” Jessie said. It was Jessie’s neighbors, the Todds.

Butch didn’t bother going to the fence to check them out. Instead the dog headed toward

Jessie, who was waiting to catch sight of them as soon as they got to a break in the tall hedge grove that surrounded his property. Then he suddenly remembered he wasn’t wearing any pants.

“Whatcha think, Butch?” The dog was now at his side. “Should I give ‘em a show?” Jessie grinned down at the dog. Butch grinned back, but his big barrel chest and long sloppy pink tongue lolling out the side of his mouth made him seem more kind- spirited or, at least, indifferent about the business.

“No. You’re right boy,” Jessie said, petting Butch and pressing the side of the dog’s head against his bare leg. “Martha wouldn’t want us to do that.” Jessie looked back out toward the road where the sound of people walking was getting closer. “Aw—they

30 don’t ever look this way anyhow.” He scratched behind the dog’s soft ear, still listening and waiting in the open doorway. “Should we just wait and see if they do, boy?”

This time when Jessie went back to listening he seemed to be in another world, hearing some other voices different from the ones now coming down the gravel road. His jaw went slack. His eyes saw some other reality, some other azure morning sky from a time when the rose hedges round his property grew so lush and full they were impenetrable; when countless peacocks, bantams, and guinea fowl roamed freely in the yard, cooing, and scratching the ground; when a lazy tabby lay warming itself in the sunlight near the open door, the tip of its tail twitching ever so slightly, its furry belly turned toward the sun; and a blue-black dog, ignoring all the rest, slept in the sun too. The vision permeated Jessie’s senses. He smelled the cake now waiting for him inside, unfrosted—steaming hot. Saw his wife—her familiar, slight body a black silhouette against the light coming through the kitchen window of the otherwise darkened mobile.

“I know, Martha,” Jessie said to the air. “Can’t come in yet. Gotta wait till it’s ready.

Yeah, I know. A cake’s special like that.”

Butch nuzzled Jessie’s limp hand, wanting the petting to continue. It brought

Jessie back. He cleared his throat softly, like he was in church or didn’t want to break a spell.

“Okay. Okay. You’re right. We’ve got no time for games today, do we boy?

Whew-ee, no. They don’t ever look this way anyhow. They just keep right on going.

Serves ‘em right. If they’d of stopped. Said hello—maybe, but no. All the better for us, huh boy. Otherwise they might have found it.”

31 Jessie knew who the people walking were. They came by his place almost every day—that young couple that moved up from the Bay Area. They had arrived with their money and big-city ways, kicking up dust by driving too fast in their fancy black cars on the dirt and gravel roads. He knew who they were because before they ever bought the property next to his, they knocked on his front door—said they were the

Todds and wanted to buy his property ‘cause it had the best view.

Jessie started up his one-sided conversation with Butch again. “What in the world would you do with my place, I said to ‘em. Knock it down , he says. Just like that.

That’s when I opened the door wide enough for ol’ Blue to get his head out. Blue’s gone now. But that was the meanest dog I ever had, and he didn’t like strangers. You should'a seen ‘em skedaddle off my property.” Jessie laughed so hard at this recollection he almost peed on himself.

A few months later the noise of the bulldozers, saws, and hammers started and lasted all summer long until slowly the new neighbor’s rooftop insinuated itself into the horizon. The groan and snap of 200-year-old pines filled the air for days. More than five acres away but still all that ground churning caused nothing but trouble. The displaced wildlife, including a few old rattlers, sought refuge elsewhere.

Lauren and Robert Todd moved into their new home a year after they bought the property next to Jessie’s. Friends teased them during the process, claiming there were few things able to break up a marriage faster than trying to build a house together. At what other time does the size, shape, and color of a kitchen cabinet knob take on such importance? True—they did stop speaking to each other for three days over the choice of flooring for the master bedroom. Until Lauren finally agreed to accept the cold of Italian

32 marble over the warmth of hardwood as long as Robert agreed to the purchase of two

Persian carpets to cover them—old world, wool, excellent condition, a perfect matching pair. Contrary to their friends’ teasing, their marriage did survive the construction of a new house. Ultimately, it was the living in it that proved fatal.

The problems between them, when they finally showed, proved insurmountable. Whether they had always been there and would have materialized sooner or later even without the move to the country was a question neither one of them contemplated.

“What are you looking at?” Robert asked. He walked into the living room to find Lauren staring up through the expanse of glass, as he thought, into the empty sky.

“Another bird hit,” Lauren said, pointing to a high smug spot on the glass. She didn’t bother turning to look at him. She was tired. And took the bird hitting the plate glass window as just one more bad omen.

“Well, it can’t be helped,” Robert said in a conciliatory voice. “Sometimes it just happens.” He waited briefly to see if she would say something more, but she stood with her arms folded in front of her, concentrating on the view—the rolling green foothills in the foreground and the steel blue Sierra Mountains farther behind off in the distance, marked here and there with little pockets of white, the season’s first snow—so he continued toward the kitchen.

“Our view really is good, isn’t it,” she said, interrupting his escape. “Almost perfect. If you don’t mind that hill there, close by, how it cuts into the sweep of the view just a bit.” Lauren, a small, agile woman, made a swooping motion with her body while saying this, like she was skiing cross-country down easy terrain, but still she didn’t look

33 at Robert. He said nothing, and continued on into the kitchen. It wasn’t until she heard the water turned on at the sink that she stopped to look in his direction.

Robert was a free-lance technical writer who had always worked from home.

And Lauren, a computer programmer for Visa going on eight years, took that option as well, so that since the beginning of their marriage, they were never apart. They enjoyed the same friends, the same foods, the same political views, the same forms of entertainment—“Two peas in a pod,” their friends laughingly called them.

That’s how it was for them, living in the city. But moving five hours north of

San Francisco, deep into the Sierra Foothills, altered the dynamics of their relationship.

Until, like a shopping cart with a bum wheel, the direction of their marriage began to drift in ways neither one of them ever imagined it could.

This drifting had been obscured by the business of building the house up until the last of three liquid ambers were planted along the driveway. Then the quiet settled in around them like an uninvited guest they couldn’t get rid of and couldn’t ignore. It was a new challenge, which they chose to work with in diametrically opposite ways.

“I don’t see why we have to keep driving back to San Francisco every weekend,” Robert said when Lauren brought it up again. “This’ll be the third time this month! I’m not going to call Jen and Peter to get them to invite us to stay at their place again. Last time I did that I felt like a fool. He was hemming and hawing—and I could hear Jen saying something to him in the background—we can’t impose on our friends like that! It’s rude, Laurie. And, really—it’s childish .” This last remark, Robert knew, was virulent, but he expected it to be the end-game remark so busied himself looking through a seed catalogue that arrived that morning in the mail.

34 Lauren did get quiet, but not because of injured pride. It was the change

Lauren had noticed in Robert since moving to the country that caused her to drop the argument. She noticed this change first as an imperceptible shift in his appearance, with him looking a little rough around the edges. He stopped shaving every day, complaining of razor burn and saying there was no need to shave daily since no one would know or care if he didn’t. He stopped wearing his dressy casual clothes, claiming again that no one would notice or care, and that he felt more comfortable in his old jeans and a sweatshirt.

Eventually he traded reading the L.A. Times and the New Yorker for the local gazette. A night out to him became a trip to the nearby town for groceries and a burger at

Chili’s or Applebee’s, maybe a movie, if there was time. He never wanted to be out late any more.

Finally he no longer talked about politics, art, or business—only gardening.

He studied the subject endlessly. And whenever Lauren brought up a different topic, he became inattentive until eventually he brought the subject back to gardening—what would do well in the area, what care it would need, what it would produce, and on and on.

She felt she was living with a stranger. And the stranger turned out to be an incredible bore. Had Robert called her childish before she’d noticed this change in him she would have been furious, but now she only felt sorry for him, thinking him so diminished in stature that his opinion of her had zero credibility.

“Maybe I’ll go alone this time,” Lauren said, her voice sounding calm without any trace of anger.

35 Robert stopped thumbing through his catalogue and look at her with a confused expression on his face as if he hadn’t heard her correctly or, for a second, didn’t know who she was.

“Would you mind?” Lauren continued. “You’d be alone, but—? We’ve got plenty of food in the house, I think. I mean, if you don’t mind being here without me for a few days.”

And that was how it ended. They did continue together for about a year longer, taking their daily walks and discussing the weather, the panoramic view, the local flora and fauna, while Lauren’s visits alone back to the city grew longer and more frequent until the day came when her trips to the country stopped.

Years later whenever Lauren remembered Robert it was usually one of the last walks they took together that she pictured in her mind. Their routine was to “do the loop”

(a mile-and-a-half trek) and pick up the newspaper at the end of the long driveway before heading home. By then Robert had acquired the habit of rolling the newspaper up and forcing it into his back pocket so it stuck up from his jeans like a flag, but Lauren said nothing to him about this. She’d seen how the men, who hung out at the local country store a few miles away—drinking coffee, talking about cows, chickens, and the cost of grain—did the same thing. She didn’t know what significance it had then, and now she no longer cared.

There was a chill in the air that morning, so Lauren wore a jacket, and putting her hands into her pockets, she found four small slips of paper. She recognized what they were without looking at them—Chinese fortune cookie papers, from the last time she and

Robert went out to dinner with their friends, Jena and Peter, in San Francisco. She

36 remembered keeping them then not because they prophesied the usual generic fortunes like Your dearest wish will come true; You have the power to make your own fortune; or,

You will continue to take chances and be glad you did —but because the one Robert got was quite odd, and charming in its childlike expression of benevolence. It said A nice cake is waiting for you .

They had all laughed when Robert read this fortune. It had amused Robert so much at the time that Lauren decided to keep them all—trinkets to remind her of the fun they’d had that evening. The suggested lottery ticket numbers on the back of each fortune meant nothing to them. Their shared beliefs classified such things as senseless superstition and effectively made the numbers invisible.

But on that particular morning when Lauren discovered the fortunes again in her pocket, the memories they evoked were like from a stranger’s past. Not wanting to keep them, she held the papers loosely in her hand, then surreptitiously dropped them one by one onto the gravel road as they walked along. For some reason this made her think of when they first decided to build the house. What was it Jen had said then? There were three major causes of divorce: building a house together, moving, and—what was that last thing? Having a baby? The fortunes fluttered briefly in the air and noiselessly dropped to the ground like so many heavy ashes. Robert never noticed.

They were close enough now that he could hear their voices clearly. Butch pressed against the side of his leg again.

“Okay,” Jessie said to Butch. “Okay. I’m going. Anyway—today’s my lucky day, so what do I care about them.” Then Jessie went inside with Butch and closed the door behind him.

37 As old as he was, it didn’t take Jessie long to do his chores, mainly because through the years he’d been streamlining them—only one horse, one dog, and three birds now. Since the fence fell down about a year ago, none of the peachicks ever survived to the point of adding another mouth for him to feed. Coyotes, raccoons, fox, they couldn’t touch the full-grown peacocks, but the little ones, unprotected, just didn’t survive. He pretty much stopped washing clothes or dishes except when he had to. Most of the food he ate came from out of a can, which he would then rinse and add to his can hill, a pile of rust taller even than his own roof. Saving aluminum was what he did for Martha.

Peacocks too—she loved having them around.

“‘A nice cake is waiting for you—’ Yes. It is.” Jessie practically sang the words as he went about getting himself ready to go. “‘A nice cake is waiting for you,’ that’s just what Martha says every time.”

Finally ready, Jessie went outside to get Daisy. A city person would be amazed to see an old man like Jessie riding a mare along a country road but not the locals. They knew better.

Jessie got Daisy two years ago just after his heart attack when his doctor told him it wasn’t safe for him to drive anymore. “Free to good home. Loves kids,” was what the sign posted on the store’s bulletin board said. They even delivered her. They were so happy someone wanted her.

Daisy stood still, docile as a lamb, while Jessie slipped the bit in her mouth, put the brightly colored wool blanket on her back and finally, with a sharp intake of breath, hoisted the saddle from the fence rail onto Daisy’s back. Cinching the straps as tight as his old-man muscles could, somehow it always seemed to work.

38 It didn’t take long for Daisy to memorize the route and within a few months

Jessie could almost nap on his way to the store. Truth be told, Jessie didn’t have much of a sense of balance left in him. When it came to him staying on Daisy, she did most of the work.

If the weather allowed, Jessie went to the store every Sunday, even though he needed very little. He’d buy a chocolate bar, some oranges, eggs, a few cans of soup and tuna, or a bag of carrots for Daisy. Once a month, though, after his social security check arrived, he bought twenty lottery tickets. Today was different though. He only needed one.

He mused to himself while he went through the motions of saddling Daisy.

“And there it was Daisy,” Jessie said. “Plain as day. Right there in the gravel. And what was on the back, girl? My lucky number. That’s what. But they never saw it, now, did they. No, ‘cause it’s not their lucky day. Yes indeedy do. ‘A nice cake is waiting for you,’ she says—every time.” He hoisted himself up onto Daisy with the apparent agility of a young man, and after a “Giddy up” and a nudge to her ribs, the two of them headed for the store. Jessie practically purring to himself as they went along, “A nice cake is waiting for me today because Martha sezs.”

The sky remained clear. Even though summer was over, the day was still warm. As Daisy plodded along, Jessie did start to nod off. His head tipped back lazily, so that when Daisy stumbled on a rock the motion made his head jerk backwards.

“What? What? What’s that?” For a moment Jessie couldn’t remember where he was. There was the sound of barking dogs off in the distance. “You hear that Daisy?

That pack of stray dogs. Nothing but trouble. Too bad I don’t have my rifle anymore. I’d

39 show ‘em who was boss.” Daisy’s ears twitched as if in agreement, and Jessie chuckled to himself.

The Todds were now long gone. A car or a truck occasionally passed by going slowly, trying not to stir up dust or startle Daisy (something harder to do than most would imagine). Suddenly a distant, high-pitched droning noise came within earshot and made

Daisy snort nervously. The sound grew louder quickly until, before Jessie had a chance to prepare, the dirt bikes reached them.

“Watch out, mister!” the first boy yelled above the roar of his engine. He looked the oldest of the two boys, but wasn’t more than fourteen. The younger boy, careening behind him, seemed less sure of his driving skills, and the back wheel of his motorized bike fish-tailed wildly, kicking up more dirt. All the noise and dust coming so suddenly at Daisy made her side step off the road. Her big brown eyes grew wide with fear. She seemed close to panic.

“Easy girl. Easy.” All Jessie could do was try to keep his horse calm. “Don’t pay those kids any mind. They’ll be gone soon.” He leaned his body close to hers and put a calming hand on her neck. “Hey now. Hey girl—Get on by you boys! Go on. You’re gonna spook my horse, if you don’t—” But they were already gone.

Well off the road now, Daisy was still headed in the right direction.

“That’s right girl, keep on. We got a lott’ry ticket to buy.” Jessie looked up at the sun. “Yep. We got time.” Daisy kept plodding along, but the ride was now rough for

Jessie. Toyon and manzanita bushes scratched against him as Daisy made her own path.

She didn’t seem to mind. But when they arrived at a dried-up streambed, Daisy headed down it. Jessie’s mobile stood at the top of Chaparral Hill. The country store was on a

40 paved road down at the bottom. Daisy’s only job was to keep heading downhill. It was a concept she understood well.

Once in the streambed the ride became easier for Jessie. His mind began to wander. He never thought of himself as old, even though he liked to boast about still being independent at his age. Nobody did nothing for him. Jessie could always brag about being old while still imagining himself to be young.

Daisy continued to meander carefully down the rocky path. The store didn’t close until late. Jessie wasn’t worried. They’d make it there in plenty of time. He then drifted toward sleep again.

But while they were ambling toward their destination, another creature was making its way along too. For ten years the rattler had made its home near a rock pile, which sat on the north side of Chaparral Hill, living all of its life within the same small radius of a few miles—but not anymore. Since construction on the Todd’s house began, the ground shook relentlessly until finally the snake left in search of a quieter place to live. He arrived at the dried streambed and took refuge under a rock jutting over its edge.

Daisy stumbled on a loose rock and roused Jessie from sleep. “Well now,

Girl,” he said, speaking as if he’d been awake the whole time, “we will get that lott’ry ticket and our fortune’ll be made. Better than a goldmine. Hee-hee. Easier too. That’s right. Today’s my lucky day.” Daisy snorted and twitched her ears. “Only need to buy one ‘cause Martha sent me the numbers. Yeah, she sure did. Let’s see. Let’s see.” Jessie reached his old hand into his pocket and pulled out the precious slip of paper to read its message again. “‘A nice cake is waiting for you.’ That’s exactly how she’d say it. Then

41 bring me into the kitchen, making me keep my eyes shut.” Jessie laughed quietly to himself. He started to nod off again.

But for all of Daisy’s placid nature, there was one thing that made her extremely jittery—snakes. At the sound of the snake’s rattle Daisy reared up either to strike it dead or jump out of its reach, Jessie couldn’t tell which; it all happened too fast.

Before he could brace himself, he hit the ground hard—luckily, not in the rocky streambed.

Time passed. Jessie didn’t know how long he’d been lying there. It could have been hours. The sunlight came slanting through the trees now in low, long lines and there was a chill in the air. “Martha,” Jessie groaned. He could hear Daisy nearby, munching on wild grass and swishing her tail to keep the flies off. Occasionally she’d shake them off with a stomp of her foot.

“Daisy? You there, girl?” Daisy didn’t hear him, or maybe she did but had lost interest in going to the store. She kept grazing. Didn’t pay him any attention. But she stayed close by. “Girl?” Jessie struggled to get up out of the bushes where he’d been thrown. Nothing was broken—he could tell, but he was scratched badly. His best shirt was torn now too, which seemed to bother him more than his bloody scratches. “Oh no,

Martha—I didn’t mean to—” Jessie broke off in mid-sentence and started to cry.

“Hey! Old Timer. Are you hurt? Someone was calling to him. “What the heck are you doing back here?” The man making his way toward Jessie was dressed in a type of uniform, not military but company-like, maybe from PG&E or the telephone company.

“I saw your horse from the road,” he said. He was a big man with a gruff voice. “What happened to you? Can you get up?” He picked Jessie up like he was a doll and was about

42 to dust him off when he suddenly stopped. He must have noticed that the Jessie’d wet himself.

“My horse,” Jessie choked out.

“I got ‘em. He’s tied up right over there.”

The man, Jessie thought, wasn’t a country guy or he would have known his horse was a mare. “Daisy,” was all he could say.

“Yeah, okay. So she’s right here. Don’t worry about her. Come on. Can you make it to my truck? I’m taking you to the clinic. You might have a concussion or broken rib or something. Geeze, what’s an old man like you doing out riding alone in the middle of nowhere?”

“I’m fine,” Jessie said with a little vinegar in his voice and pulled away from the man. True, he was shaken up pretty good, but not so badly that he couldn’t make it to the store. “I’m fine,” Jessie repeated but this time with a cocky grin meant to make his point. “Got to make it to the store.”

The big man looked at Jessie for a moment then said reluctantly, “I guess you seem all right.” He checked his watch like he had a scheduled route to maintain.

“Somebody I can call for you?”

“No,” Jessie kept on grinning. “But you can help me back on my horse.” The man hesitated, seeming to grapple with conflicting impulses, then nodded his agreement.

“Tell me old man,” he called out while retrieving Daisy, “why don’t you just get a ride with someone? People go by in cars and trucks on that road over there all the time.”

43 “I used to hitchhike,” Jessie said. “But a coupla years ago people stopped picking me up. They’d slow down and looked all right, but then keep on going.”

The man must have understood something from Jessie’s explanation because he dropped the subject suddenly, like he knew it was a bad idea.

“Well, all right old man. Let’s see what we can do for you.” And he hoisted

Jessie back into the saddle then led the mare and her rider out of the bushes back onto the gravel road.

It was late now, but still there was time. The store was within sight. Daisy was back on track. And after making her way to the fence post at the edge of the store’s parking lot, she stood there waiting for Jessie to dismount. He didn’t. Instead his body folded over the front of Daisy’s saddle like a wet newspaper. It seemed like he should have fallen off, but he didn’t. He didn’t move.

“Leigh! Come quick. I think Mr. Harper is dead!” Sally was a new clerk.

She’d been working at the store for less than five months. While sweeping near the front register, she saw Jessie ride up on his horse, but he didn’t get off. “He’s been sitting there,” she said, jabbing a finger in his direction, “for too long. I think he’s dead.”

“What?” Leigh said. She couldn’t believe the girl’s gullibility. “He’s not dead.

If you’re so worried about him, go bring him in. He’s just here to get his lottery tickets.

That’s all. And don’t you let him get started talking. You hear me? That man just won’t stop.”

“I don’t want to get him. He smells.”

“Yeah, well, ever since his wife died a few years back he hasn’t done the best job of keeping himself together. He’s really old, too, Sally.”

44 “He looks it. Like a hundred or something?”

“How should I know? Go get him. It’s almost closing time. I want to count out the register money and get out of here on time for once.”

“What’d she die of?” Sally asked as she stood staring out the window looking at Jessie. “Old age?” It was starting to get dark.

“No,” said Leigh. She yanked the metal money tray out of the register and fished around underneath it, pulling out all the big bills and checks from the day’s sales.

“She died of pneumonia. There was kind of a stink about it at the time.” Leigh mechanically sorted the checks out from the big bills and put them in order of denomination—smallest to largest.

“The clinic refused to treat her,” Leigh continued, “being a charity case and all. They said she had to go into town for that kind of treatment ‘cause they couldn’t afford to do charity work any more. Of course she died before he ever got her there.

Clinic said she would have died anyway.”

Leigh jammed the metal tray back into the register and turned her attention toward the coins. She scooped out a pile of quarters and started dividing them into stacks of ten.

“Go get him, Sally,” Leigh said, stopping what she was doing for a second to add emphasis. “I want to go home.”

“But, it’s getting dark,” Sally protested. “What if he is dead? I don’t want to touch an old dead guy—in the dark.”

Leigh might have continued in her argument, but she knew it was pointless.

Mainly because between the two of them she was really the adult, and being the adult

45 meant that she couldn’t just close up and drive off leaving the eighty-or-so-year-old Mr.

Harper sitting alone dead or alive on his horse in the store’s parking lot. No. She had to go get Mr. Harper, bring him into the store, and help him buy his lottery tickets. Who knows, she thought to herself as she made her way across the parking lot, maybe this is his lucky day.

46 Anthropological Move

It didn’t sting then, when he was young, right out of college, that his perfectly planned future was derailed by Amy’s pregnancy; that his life was no longer following his design; that right after graduation he had to go straight to work, work, work. Mostly because his design never had a chance to fully form, and being a young man the prospect of fatherhood held an untried promise that thrilled him—he didn’t know why. Had he known then, that his life was turning in a direction that would lead him to where he found himself today, now, at this very moment, he would have—

The cold water sputtered, then came full force into his face. It jolted his body; his eyes and mouth filled with water as his hands frantically searched out the lever.

Violently, he switched the gauge to hot then edged it slowly back. Goddamnit ! What—am

I asleep?

Roger hadn’t been himself lately. He felt off-kilter, odd. Not so much in a fog or even distracted, but more out of step. Out of step big time, a thing he hoped his trip to

Boston would fix. He wanted time alone, away from family, away from the pressures of work, time to look at his life objectively outside of what others wanted or expected from him.

Roger finished showering and went ahead with his usual routine. Standing in front of the sink with the towel cinched at his waist, he diligently flossed and brushed his teeth, plucked an errant hair from the inside of his nose (this always made him sneeze), applied deodorant, then ran the hot water in the sink while he lathered up his face—when he saw something move behind him—something reflected in the mirror. He turned around sharply. Water ran endlessly down the drain in the sink behind him, gurgling in a

47 throaty, hollow way while he stared at the shower stall. But he saw nothing. It was, of course, empty. Still he stood watching, waiting to see if there was something there.

As if cued by his show of interest, a drop of water slipped silently from the showerhead and spilled downward, drawing a white line through the air by the light reflecting off its movement, looking like a tiny kamikaze sky writer.

That is so strange. It was strange. Strange. Beautiful. Mystical even. But

Roger would never tell anyone that—even though he felt it with certainty. People would think he was crazy if he tried to explain to them the drop, the line of light, the moment— when time stood still. That’s the way he would describe it.

Dad, you’re having a flashback, would be his oldest son’s retort. Roger hated that. Once when Sean was fourteen, Roger let it slip that he knew something firsthand about psychedelics—hoping, of course, like any good parent, to steer his son away from those same reckless experiments he’d made himself when he was young. But Roger’s knowledge on the subject didn’t interest his son. Times had changed. Young people’s illicit interests these days focused more on mood-altering drugs, not mind-altering ones.

And even those Sean held in contempt. He was a vegetarian, one of those My-body’s-my- temple types. Go figure. Just as well. Because, honestly, Roger didn’t have much bad to say about the few times he’d dropped illegal substances; and kids—they always knew when a grownup was lying. They might not tell you to your face that you’re a bullshitter, but they knew. This Roger remembered from his own childhood.

Only recently Roger had begun to worry about Sean, that his son might be too perfect, too good, which, of course, wasn’t true. At seventeen Sean still couldn’t keep his room clean or pick-up after himself; he still lost things—his wallet, jackets, Roger’s

48 tools; and he still procrastinated whenever any job had a time limit, always waiting till the last possible moment to start. No, Sean wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t what you’d call reckless either, which now worried Roger. Shouldn’t his son be experimenting? Testing boundaries? Possibly expressing anger at the shortsightedness of adults, the insidiousness of government, or the greed of corporations? But he wasn’t. He had a plan. He was going to make the world a better place by being ecologically responsible . Always checking labels and shunning extravagance or excesses of any kind, he was a modern day flower child. Roger could recognize his behavior as the expression of a revolutionary idea whose time may have finally arrived, but his son just didn’t look like a rebel. Instead he looked too much like Roger. Steady, careful, conscientious, it made Roger nervous to think his son might be following too closely in his own footsteps.

Tap, tap. The knock on the bathroom door startled Roger. His razor hand jerked just enough to ding his cheek; blood seeped out, making a fine scarlet line appear on his face. He wiped it away and opened the door. He knew who would be there. Amy.

She was the door to this universe, the universe he never planned, the one he desperately—if only briefly—wanted to step out of: the three children; the two mortgages; the two (soon to be three) cars; and the window of two weeks a year, within which he was expected to extract some sense of liberation by going on vacation, but which in reality was usually spent visiting some place or some people he didn’t really want to visit at all.

“Just wanted to say goodbye before I left for work,” she said. (It was amazing to Roger how good she still looked after so many years.) “ Hey ,” she said, drawing her thumb gently across his cheek. Roger watched her lose herself momentarily in concern

49 for him. It was a mixture of tenderness and alarm—only a flash, but within it lay that primal push-pull of all human existence. He felt himself start to grow hard under his towel. The cut continued to bleed. “I thought you old shavers didn’t do that,” she said. He would be forty in less than two weeks.

“Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, and leaned closer into the counter. He didn’t want her to know his condition. Not that he was ashamed or shy about it, because he wasn’t, but the fact that it happened to him bothered him. It was one more thing not under his control. “I’m a little off my game.” Roger smiled at her. He suddenly felt self-conscious. Amy did too. They’d been married seventeen years. It was odd for them to react to each other like this.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to take you to the airport?” Amy said. “I could call work. They won’t mind if I’m a little late.”

“No. There’s no reason. Sean won’t need the car and the company’s paying for the parking, so I might as well drive myself.”

“All right,” she said, and stood there smiling at him for the briefest moment, a smile that had a tinge of sadness or worry in it. He could tell something was going on in her mind. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed like she was trying to work some sort of women’s intuition thing on him, trying to decipher coded messages hidden in his behavior. But he was always better at that than she was, especially when it came to reading her . He marveled at how her deepest feelings, attitudes, thoughts, those secret things that she wanted to remain private, would sometimes wash over her, and like a drop of milk in clear water become immediately visible—at least to him.

50 There was another awkward moment. She covered by suddenly brightening.

“Nice outfit,” she said, nodding at Roger’s towel.

“Yeah, I know. It’s my favorite,” Roger returned the banter. “You could still call work. Tell ‘em you’re gonna be a little late—”

“Hah,” she laughed. They both knew that wouldn’t be happening. Quickies were pretty much a thing of the past for them. Kids, work, time constraints, and propriety had all forced that kind of abandon out of their sex life. But, still, the urge was there…

She just smiled, leaned in to kiss him, and mouthed the word “bye” as she closed the door.

On her way out, Amy noticed Roger’s suitcase sitting near the bed. “Roger,” she called, “don’t you want the carry-on? Isn’t this one too big?”

“Ah- I… The weather’s supposed to change. You know how Boston is this time of year.” He heard her laugh a little to herself like she’d just heard a joke she didn’t actually think was funny. Roger knew Amy would think it out of character for him to consider something like changeable weather. He only prepared for certainties—It’s winter, I’ll take my overcoat; it’s spring, I’ll take a light jacket —but he never bothered with more than one possibility. If he went prepared for warm weather and it was cold instead, he’d just be cold. Physical comfort was less important to him than an uncluttered mind. He didn’t like worrying about it, and he especially didn’t like the excess baggage that that kind of concern produced. Amy knew all this from years of living with him. But this time, she just let it go.

“Oh,” she suddenly said. “Chris called while you were in the shower. I told him you’d call him back before you left. He sounded like something was wrong but

51 didn’t want to talk to me about it.” Roger moaned. “Come on,” Amy said. “Be nice. He’s trying. He’s changed a lot in the last year, don’t you think?”

Roger had to agree, his younger brother had changed a lot, but he still had trouble trusting him, so he just said, “Sure, I’ll call him.”

“All right, Hon,” Amy said. “Have a good trip. Don’t forget to call when you get in,” and she was gone.

The house was empty now. He wanted to hear the quiet of it, so opened the bathroom door, wide. Both Suzie and Gail were in school, and Sean was away for two weeks on his senior class trip. Sean went to a small high school. Each year the graduating class went some place significant together. This time it was Yosemite. Conservation was big now. The kids, especially, were worried about it. Roger heard himself sigh. As he turned the hot water back on, his mind slipped into imagination again. He continued to prepare for his trip, but his mind was elsewhere, and before he knew it, he was out of time.

* * *

It wasn’t like him to be late. Cursing to himself, he gathered together the few remaining things he needed and threw them into his suitcase. Shoes, coat, papers, suitcase, keys in hand—he was out the door in less than five minutes; but it wasn’t meant to be. Less than 20 minutes from the airport—he could see the planes taking off. It must have been an accident because the traffic on his side of the freeway came to a standstill.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. People got out of their cars to better see the spectacle. The line of cars stretched way out in front and back of him like some gigantic

52 snake. He waited, helpless, in its belly for release. When it came, it was too late. He missed his flight, had to wait three hours for the next available one and, of course, missed his connecting flight in Dallas too. He wouldn’t arrive in Boston until after 2:00 a.m., if he was lucky.

Christ! What am I, sixteen? Roger had never missed a flight—ever! Early in his business-traveling career fear had been the driving force behind his punctuality later it was pride. He was definitely off his game. When he called Amy on his cell phone to tell her he’d be arriving too late to call from Boston she didn’t pick-up. He left a message.

That’s better. He just didn’t feel like explaining to anyone how a forty-year-old businessman could space out long enough to miss his plane. If he had only kept to his schedule, none of this would have happened. He filled the next three hours with people watching and leafing through Scientific American ; he hated gossipy magazines, and felt cheated whenever he invested himself in a paperback novel—too much time spent in someone else’s world.

* * *

It was late when Roger finally arrived in Boston. The weather had turned, and through the large glass panels he could see the snow coming down on the line of yellow cabs that waited outside the airport. The airport wasn’t deserted, but it wasn’t crowded either. Here and there he saw people trying to sleep on those airport chairs—hard, black plastic and cold stainless steel—but he didn’t pay them much attention. It was a common sight in airports at such an hour.

53 And, yet, while he was waiting to pick up his luggage, he did notice someone, a young man wearing an oversized Army raincoat, curled up in a chair. He was sleeping, using his backpack for a pillow. Roger wasn’t worried about the boy; he didn’t look deprived. He seemed healthy enough; his clothes were no more worn than was customary for kids today. But the sight of him recalled to Roger’s mind a time from his own past, when he was on the brink of a similar path. He imagined the boy touring Europe with a backpack and no firm destination. That was Roger’s plan, back then, when he was about that boy’s age. It was a possibility he’d offered to his own son as a graduation present; but Sean had a girlfriend, college plans, and everything in his future already lined up. He said thanks, but he didn’t really need a trip to Europe.

Roger’s suitcase finally spilled out onto the luggage carousel. He retrieved it and left the airport as quickly as he could. By the time he reached the hotel he was dead tired. He brushed his teeth and went straight to bed, not bothering to unpack, and fell asleep immediately.

* * *

The three days of business he had to conduct went by quickly, as he knew they would. Amy was expecting him back Friday night, but he wasn’t going back—at least not yet.

“What’s up, Hon?” she asked when he called. “I thought you’d be in the air by now.”

“There’s a client who wants me to look at an investment he’s considering—a restaurant in Plymouth. He and his wife invited me out there for the day.” It was a lie, but

54 things like that happened enough that it shouldn’t have bothered her. It did though. He could sense it. “I’ll just come home Saturday night instead,” he lied again. She said nothing. Several seconds of silence passed between them. It had density, it weighed on them, pressed its way into their conversation like a bully. Roger wanted desperately to counter the pressure, to tell Amy everything was all right, but he’d drawn a line for himself he couldn’t now cross. He kept silent.

Finally, in a quiet voice, she said, “Honey… Will you be back in time for your party?” She sounded like she was about to cry. She knew something was going on with him. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. Tears welled up in his eyes, but he only drew back the hotel curtains from the window and looked mechanically out at the still falling snow. It was beautiful. It sparkled under the streetlights. All the sounds he might usually hear when visiting Boston were muffled now.

Why did it feel like he loved her more now, in this terrible moment, than he had ever loved her before?

“Roger,” she spoke again, “is there someone else?” The inevitable question— he didn’t want to have this conversation.

“No, Amy,” he said. “There is no one else.” Silence again. He didn’t want to hurt her. It wasn’t her fault.

“Okay, Roger,” she finally said, “I’ll see you whenever you get back,” and she hung up the phone before Roger could say good-bye.

* * *

55 It was pitch-black. Dirt fell in all around him, filling his mouth, stopping up his nostrils. Reaching for the line of rope, he heard the ship’s whistle blow. It sounded again—closer, and more shrill.

He cried out in a moment of terror or release at the sound of the phone ringing; it was hard to say which. By the third ring he remembered where he was and groped for the phone in the dark.

“Rog?”

He knew the voice. It was, Chris, his younger brother. Roger checked the time. Resentment flooded him with anger, “Chris, do you realize it’s 3:00 a.m.?” It was just like the old Chris to do something like this. Eleven years younger than Roger, growing up the baby of the family made him a brat by the time he was twelve and worse by the time he was twenty. He could never finish anything. He barely graduated from high school and for a long time only seemed to care about sex and drugs. He brought so much grief into the family that he almost destroyed their parents’ marriage. Neither parent could handle him or help him. It almost broke his mom’s heart. But all this Roger only heard about secondhand. By then he had already moved out and was living with

Amy.

He’d had enough firsthand experiences with Chris, though, to know he was a jerk. Amy tolerated him because he was family, but she had never liked being alone with him. He used to enjoy embarrassing her with his off-color jokes. Ten years ago he and

Chris had come to blows in their parents’ kitchen. The fight ended when they both fell into the china cabinet. He’d never seen his mother cry so hard before. The dishes destroyed were irreplaceable. Most of them she’d had since before they were born.

56 Chris could get under Roger’s skin like no other person on the planet. But about a year ago he’d fallen in love with a very nice girl, and strange as it was for Roger to believe, the girl loved him back. The relationship started to have a stabilizing affect on

Chris, and gradually he became less selfish, easier to be with, but Roger still had trouble trusting him.

“Rog,” Chris said again. His voice sounded flat, almost dead. The sound of it made the hair stand up on the back of Roger’s neck. He looked at the clock again. It was

3:03.

“What’s the matter Chris? Is somebody hurt?”

Chris made a sound like a laugh that caught in his throat, and tried to speak. “I just needed to… I – I wanted to tell you something. I…” By this point, at any other time,

Roger would have hung up the phone in disgust, but Chris’s words, slow and stumbling, now seemed to him electric with grief. Roger was overcome with fear.

“What happened! Is somebody hurt? Is Dad—” It could have been their father. He’d had a mild heart attack last spring.

“No—No,” Chris cut him off. “Dad’s okay.”

But still something was very wrong. Roger knew Chris was head over heels for Sandy. He forced himself to ask, “Did something happen to Sandy? Did she break up with you?” The possibility had suddenly struck him as likely, but it didn’t really account for the serious tone in Chris’s voice.

“No, man. It’s nothing like that.” Roger left off asking questions, and Chris finally said, “I tested positive for HIV.” The statement knocked the breath out of Roger.

57 He sat bolt upright on edge of the bed, seeing through the darkness, his brother on the other end of the phone line.

“Jesus! Chris— I’m so sorry!”

Nobody deserved such a terrible fate, but it was the cruelty of timing that struck him the most. Chris and Sandy had planned to marry in the spring.

Now, Roger’s mind raced. What about Sandy? What about all those other

“dates” he’d been on? Who knew how many women he had—

But Roger said quietly, “Sandy’s okay. She didn’t want to get pregnant. She always made me wear protection. Who knew?” he said choking back a rueful laugh.

“Do you know who gave it to you?” Roger asked.

“No. Not yet.” Chris started to cry. “It’s a fucking nightmare, Rog. A goddamn, fucking nightmare.”

Roger sat in the dark listening to his younger brother cry. What could he possibly say? Why were you so reckless? What did you expect would come from living like there was no tomorrow? No, that was too cruel. This tragedy went way beyond that kind of censure. Anyway, wasn’t it only yesterday he’d resented Chris for living the kind of life he never could?

After awhile Chris collected himself enough to say good-night. They seemed so close then, closer than they had ever been before.

* * *

It was a rough week for Roger. Nothing had worked out the way he’d expected.

58 When Saturday morning came the snow had stopped and the sky was bluer than he’d ever seen, and rose above the white expanse of snow like a heavy jewel. The day couldn’t have been more perfect, and Roger was determined to spend the day alone—by himself, for himself.

Roger’s hotel was near the Boston Commons, so after breakfast he walked there to see the gardens covered with snow; they didn’t disappoint.

Only a few people were out yet. Most paths were still unmarred by any footprints. The sound of snow scrunching underfoot and the muffled cries of children playing off in the distance were delicious to hear. The only breeze came from his walking in the cold still air. All of this thrilled him. The park was now a fairyland enveloped in snow, a brilliant white soft landscape, ornamented with icicles. It was so beautiful beyond description that his first impulse was to think of Amy and wish he had a camera to take a picture for her.

Roger suddenly lunged his bare hands deep into the snow—the shock of cold so resembled the burn of fire. It chilled him to the bone and seeped in through his overcoat. He looked around self-consciously to see if anyone saw him. Off in the distance a couple played with a Yorkie, laughing as they pulled it from snowdrifts. The dog must have never been in snow before. It kept yapping at it, diving into it, as if it could capture or eat it. The three of them seemed oblivious to Roger. He shook the wet snow from his hands, and jamming them deep into his pockets, headed back to the hotel.

Roger went straight to the hotel restaurant, had lunch, then went out again. He did what he wanted to do. Took a cab to the museum. Rummaged through some old bookstores. Watched a few shells practicing on the Charles River—they must have been

59 really cold, out there, on the water, but showed no indication of it. Gradually the sunlight faded, and a rosy twilight settled over the city, giving it a false appearance of warmth.

Roger went to dinner then had a few drinks in a bar not too far from his hotel. He should have been happy, content—he should have been.

Tomorrow was Sunday. He had reservations on a return flight and still didn’t know if he wanted to keep them or not.

It was late now. Even so, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to fall asleep. He just knew it was pointless to stay out any longer. He paid for his drinks and left. Outside, the snow was falling again. It made him sad to see how beautiful it was, or maybe it was just the alcohol finally kicking in. But in the middle of slamming himself for not being able to hold his liquor, he heard shouts, then a sharp cry for help. It was a city—full of potential violence—he knew. He should have stayed out of it, but couldn’t.

Roger ran toward the sound of voices. He only wanted to get there to help whoever it was before it was too late. He reached the alley in seconds. Two rough looking men had a young man cornered. He was trying to defend himself. They wanted his backpack.

“I need it!” the kid cried. “I don’t have any money!”

“What’s going on here!” Roger shouted. Instinctively he knew everything in that moment lay in the balance of raw animal power. He’d succeeded in frightening them enough to let the boy go, but they quickly sized him up. One smiled to the other, as if to say he was going to enjoy beating up this meddling old fool. But they misjudged Roger.

They didn’t know what kind of week he’d just had; they didn’t know the stress he’d been

60 under; they didn’t know he was a good man; and, mostly, they didn’t know that he had a son about this boy’s age.

The alley was cluttered with debris. Roger grabbed a board lying nearby and held it with both hands, swinging it back and forth menacingly. “Come on,” he said with calculated aggression. “Give me something empty —to crack open!”

The sociopath stance stopped them again. Roger could tell they were beginning to weigh the costs of their endeavor, when suddenly a siren came within earshot. “Fuck it!” the short one spat out, and they took off running. The siren grew louder—then faded away, but the two punks were long gone.

Roger dropped the board, his whole body trembling from the adrenaline coursing through it, and turned to the boy. “Did they hurt you, son?” The boy was still on the ground clinging to his backpack like a life preserver. Roger went to him. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

“Yeah-yeah, I’m okay. They just knocked me around—trying to get my bag.”

“You should have let them have it!” Roger shouted. He was angry that the kid had risked his life for something so trivial.

“I couldn’t!” the boy cried. “I couldn’t!” And he wept in ragged sobs, which strangely calmed Roger. Parental experience told him these were the sounds of energy released—coming from anger, injured pride—not from any physical injury. Roger looked more closely at the boy. He’d seen him before. The backpack, the green Army-issue raincoat—it was the kid he’d seen sleeping in the airport. His cheek was bloody. His sleeve was torn and he was covered with dirt. He must have put up quite a fight.

61 The boy remained on the ground. Roger was still shaky himself, so he dropped down onto a nearby crate, wondering what he should do next. The boy was shivering. “Come on,” Roger said, pulling him to his feet. “You’re coming with me.”

Roger stood the boy up and made a show of dusting him off, a fatherly gesture that comforted the boy and made Roger’s heart ache to hold his own son. “You look like you could use a hot meal.” The young man now easily gave up his backpack to Roger.

“What’s your name son,” Roger asked.

“Adam,” was all the boy could manage to say.

* * *

The night seemed limitless to Roger, sitting across from Adam, drinking coffee, watching him eat, talking with him. The kid hadn’t eaten since yesterday. And although Adam did remind him of his son, he could see now how different they were.

Adam was edgier, more like some fairy creature than a young man. He sat opposite

Roger with his legs crossed Indian style and handled his knife and fork in such a way that it gave them the appearance of being alien devices. He had an engaging smile, more like a pencil line that turned up at the last possible moment on both ends, but didn’t laugh much. Even so, Roger noticed his teeth, which were small, round and perfect. They looked oddly unused to Roger. Slight for seventeen, with a cheerful, moon-shaped face, and freckles scattered loosely across his cheeks, Roger wondered how the boy’s mother ever let him out of her sight.

As Adam began to feel safe again his confidence gradually returned, making him seem older than his seventeen years. When he spoke he was earnest and sure of

62 himself. When he listened he cocked his head first to one side then the other like a child listening to a new sound or a spaniel locating a birdcall. He told Roger he was on his way home, back from a Kibbutz in Israel where he had been living for the past few months.

Soon he would head back to college in Washington State. It seemed his parents didn’t care how long he took to finish school. He’d always been a good student, was home- schooled, passed the GED when he was fifteen, and had been traveling or attending college ever since.

Adam had done more living in his mere seventeen years than Roger had done in all of his soon-to-be-forty. Roger was surprised that he didn’t resent this fact. It was the way Adam talked about Nepal, Cairo, or Athens; he talked about the people, mainly—their simple everyday lives. Halfway around the world suddenly seemed to hold no better promise to Roger than where he found himself now.

No longer uneasy with each other, they both grew quiet. Roger, lost in thought, aimlessly etched short lines into the white tablecloth with the pronged edge of his fork, while looking over at the boy occasionally to check on him. Adam finished up his piece of cake, then fingered the discarded paper sleeve from his straw, winding it into a small white hoop. It was very late. The restaurant was practically empty, but the candle flame flickered as if it never wanted to burn out. It gave off more than light, made time stand still. The silence they settled into reminded Roger of that inexplicable moment when he’d witnessed a line of light drawn by a drop of water.

“Did you know, Adam, there are no straight lines in nature?” Roger asked, as if he had been contemplating the issue for a long time, which, in fact, he had—ever since

63 he came across the idea in the magazine he read that night while waiting in the airport.

The concept felt significant to him then, but he was only now beginning to understand it.

“Hmm – I guess that makes sense,” Adam replied, as he tried to roll his paper hoop a little way across the tabletop. Funny, Roger thought to himself, that’s exactly what Sean would have said and with the same air of self-confidence.

Trying again, Adam stood his hoop on its side and flicked it over to Roger, who stopped it with his fork, and carefully put the paper circle into the palm of his hand to give it a closer look.

Roger was certain now that the drop of water he witnessed only looked as if it moved directly from point A to point B, but it didn’t. Instead, over and over, each second, each movement was a leap of faith. Its line of reflected light a demonstration of its absolute trust in the mystery of existence.

“So, tell me Adam,” Roger finally said, “what’s so valuable in your backpack that you almost got killed for it?”

“Yeah,” Adam replied sheepishly, “I know, that was stupid,” and he pulled his pack closer by one of its straps and began rummaging through it.

“But—” Adam’s voice was barely audible now with his head burrowed deep into his backpack, and Roger easily pictured him disappearing into it altogether.

“But—I’d been feeling homesick for a while, and—”

Then he had it, gripped in his hand, waving it triumphantly like some get-out- of-jail-free card—his plane ticket home.

64 The Parnassus

Carol closed Farewell to Dreams with such a sense of satisfaction that had she been a smoker she would have lit a cigarette. She couldn’t help smiling. The light had been coming into her apartment for a while now, soft and diffused. It was a quiet illumination, more white than rosy and came through the window from no specific place.

The sun was up, but unless you lived in the Marina District, which she did not, you couldn’t see it. Instead you saw the promise of sun, and it depended upon where you were, and when, and luck, whether that promise was ever kept.

Carol gave a little laugh as she hooked the top button of her coat, preparing to meet the penetrating cold. Funny, she thought, to sometimes see the tourists, especially in summer, wandering around Chinatown in their shorts, confused and pained expressions on their faces. It must be some industry secret. No one ever warns them about the fog.

How else could that myth of perpetual sunshine survive?

The sound of ticking, coming from the kitchen clock, suddenly made her aware of the fact that she had stopped moving, and she noticed she was smiling, but couldn’t quite remember why. She sniffed a little, more to hear a sound in the emptiness than for any other purpose, then found her keys and purse and headed for the door, when the phone rang. She didn’t get many calls.

“Hi, Mom. Sure, I got it.” Carol fingered the open box sitting on the kitchen counter. “Well, we knew he’d get to the garage sooner or later. No, he’s just not sentimental. We know that. Don’t worry about it. He’s right you know. I should have cleared that stuff out a long time ago. Okay. Well, I gotta go. Thanks for saving that box for me. You too, Mom. Say hi to Dad.”

65 Carol took a cursory look at the contents of the box and pulled out an old battered-looking paperback. She could see why her dad wanted to throw the stuff out.

Why in the world did she ever keep this junk? Carol studied the book a moment. The cover was cracked and faded. Its dirty yellow pages were dog-eared and it had a musty smell. She must have kept the book for sentimental reasons. “Oh,” she said out loud. It had to be the first one she ever read, Summer’s End . God! That was a long time ago.

Carol fanned the book’s pages with the edge of her thumb, paying more attention to the little breeze this action created than to the book itself, when she noticed something, some scribblings in her own handwriting. She read the passage at first without remembering why she had written it—Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all, didn’t know anything about either.

“Kevin,” she said to herself. “Now I remember.” She was sixteen when she fell in love with him. He loved her too, but they were only children then.

Carol examined the book more closely, slowly turning it over in her hand.

Summer’s End , she read to herself.

She didn’t remember the story, but the old book drew the focus of her mind back to that time in her life when Carol’s family had to move away because of her father’s new job. Kevin wrote her letters almost every day. Carol was heartbroken then.

But when she was able to move back later that summer, after her family agreed to let her live with an aunt in order to finish high school, she found that Kevin was dating someone new. That was when she bought Summer’s End . At the time, it helped her cope. Kevin came to see her then, once. She might have claimed him back. He came over, she was almost certain, to see if she would.

66 “Why didn’t you write me?” he had asked her. “I sent you so many letters, but you never wrote me back. I thought I’d never see you again.”

He was right. It wasn’t his fault that he had a new girlfriend. Carol didn’t remember what excuse she gave him, or even if she said anything at all, but that was a long time ago. She lost track of him, and no longer knew if he was even still alive.

Carol snapped out of her daydream. The phone call had really thrown her off schedule. Now, if she didn’t hurry, she might miss the 8 o’clock Parnassus. If she had to take a later bus, she would pass by the playground too late to see the children playing at recess, and she didn’t want to miss seeing Michael and Maria for even one day. In a rush she jammed the book back into the box and her hand slid across the top edge of it, slicing her finger. “Shit!” she cried. “God, that hurts!” She squeezed the injured finger, and kept cursing herself for being so careless. The cut was bleeding enough that she could have used a band-aid, but she was out of time. She snatched a tissue from a Kleenex box near the phone and wrapped it around her bloody finger. She was really late now, and she quickly took one last look around her apartment.

Everything was in order, sort of. Intentional disarray better described it. Books and papers were scattered over the desk, the dictionary left open – although suddenly the thought of damaging its binding struck her, and she hurried over to close it.

She didn’t own a television, a fact she was very proud of. Yet the truth of the matter was that she couldn’t afford to buy one, and, more than that, she had a lurking suspicion that she might become addicted to watching it if she did own one. Anyway, she didn’t have time for television.

67 On the far wall, sandwiched between two large windows that overlooked the street below, stood a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, full of paperback novels. Like some garish, modern landscape, the markings on the book’s bindings merged into a collage of color that occupied one side of the apartment with a compelling, discordant presence. All else in the apartment was either a tasteful light pink, or gray. Only the contents of the bookcase spoke above a whisper. Turning her back on the bookcase, Carol slipped her apartment keys jangling into her purse and stepped out into the foggy morning, headed for the Parnassus. Forgetting the pain for the moment, she ran to the bus stop.

For over two years now, Carol had been riding the Parnassus bus to work. It was not the fastest mode of transportation. In fact, it was arguably one of the slowest.

Unlike the glitzy express buses, which hurled themselves and their passengers pell-mell down into the depths of the financial district, in sometimes less than thirty minutes, the

Parnassus was a “milk run” bus. It stopped at every stop. It would take you to the same destination; it would just take you twice as long, or even three times as long, to get there.

But time was not an issue for Carol, at least not when it related to her job. More important to her was the panorama of life, which she viewed from her window seat of the

Parnassus, especially the unfolding romance between Maria and Michael, at least those were the names she had assigned to them.

Carol had been a civil servant for almost four years. She started out as a file clerk and worked her way up to being an examiner. The pay was not great, but neither was the pressure. And since her needs were few, the trade-off seemed fair. Anyway, what she liked best about her job was flextime. Carol could arrive at work any time from 6 to

10 a.m. As long as she put in her eight hours, the government didn’t much care when she

68 arrived, which she never did before 9 a.m. But Carol wasn’t thinking about this as she stood in line waiting for the bus. Instead her mind was occupied with trying to calm the rising anxiety she felt because of the young man behind her who was trying to press ahead of her in line. Why was there always that person who refused to obey line- protocol?

The bus stop was crowded this morning. Some out-of-service buses must have passed by the stop before she got there. The Parnassus appeared from around a corner in the distance, and a sense of panic started to take hold of her, as the young man began to squeeze ahead of her. She realized she would either have to take a stand against him or acquiesce her place in line. Now the slow-moving electric bus seemed like a monster lurching and heaving itself toward her, growing larger with every motion. The pressure in her head had a deafening effect and stopped her ears, or else they were so filled with the fantastic pounding of blood that was racing through her body that she began to lose her senses. The bus eased itself to a stop at the front of the line and the slightest tinge of chaos gripped everyone. Carol and the young man reached the open door at the same moment, when suddenly she heard a strong voice behind her, edgy with irritation, call out, “There’s a line, kid!”

Who said that, she wondered, but didn’t dare turn and look. She just moved ahead of the young man and pulled herself up into the bus. The cold steel of the stair rail in her hand would have steadied her nerves, but instead it aggravated the pain in her hand and made her wince.

When she finally found a seat she looked around to put a face to the voice and saw an older man, maybe in his forties, making his way to the back of the bus. He had a

69 kind face, but paid her no attention, so she wasn’t sure if he was the one or not. He remained standing and looked out the bus window absent-mindedly as people crowded in around him until he was out of her sight. Carol turned back toward the front of the bus and wondered where he was going. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but he didn’t seem relaxed enough to be on holiday. Maybe he was recently divorced, or more likely his wife had just passed away. He did have sad eyes. They never had kids, and now he was all alone.

They met twenty years ago in San Francisco and planned to come back in the spring to celebrate their anniversary, but she died of cancer before they ever could, Breath and

Smoke .

The old Chinese lady sitting next to Carol got up suddenly and, by way of jabbing the curved end of her cane in front of Carol’s face, asked to be let out of her seat.

Carol recoiled from its shinny blackness, as if it were a snake, and let the woman move out into the aisle. The shriveled, grizzled-haired woman pressed past Carol, giving her as much attention as she would have given a turnstile in the subway station. Carol was about to make some condescending remark about her to herself when she realized that the old woman was more like a bird than a woman, she was so frail, and really quite tiny, much smaller even than Carol was. How long did it take for her to become so insensitive, she wondered. How much abuse did she have to suffer before she stopped the world from violating her and walled herself in emotionally, away from it all? Or, was she always like that, even as a little girl? No. She came to America when she was eighteen as a mail- order bride to escape a life of forced prostitution back in Mainland China. The man to whom she was betrothed was three times her age and kept her a prisoner in her own home. He would come home drunk sometimes and beat her. One day, when she found out

70 she was pregnant, she took matters into her own hands and poisoned him. The police questioned her, but got nowhere. She didn’t speak English, and back then, the policemen didn’t speak Chinese. So, after a few hours, they just sent her home. No one really cared what went on in Chinatown. They took care of their own. Who could understand them anyway? They were so mysterious, Dragon Land .

By the time Carol got to work, the office was humming with activity. That

“Good morning” part of the day was long gone, but Rick noticed her coming in. He always did.

“Hey, Carol! Where’s your tan?” Rick asked with a broad grin. The joke was obvious on so many levels that Carol just laughed in reply.

Not that Rick would have even cared if he knew, but she did lie when she called in sick Friday morning, making for herself a three-day weekend. Usually when a person did that it was assumed, depending upon the person’s personality, that they either went skiing in Yosemite or went to the beach in Carmel, but no one assumed that about

Carol. Let alone suspected the true reason behind her absence, which was to finish reading a romance novel. She called in sick Friday morning after she realized there was no way she could possibly leave Tara lying unconscious on a frozen pond with the ice beginning to crack, before she could confirm by reading the last three chapters, that Jack would, indeed, find her the very moment before the ice finally broke, The Frozen Kiss .

No one at work would ever suspect her of behaving so irrationally.

Rick followed her to her desk.

“Some of us are having lunch today at The Golden Cadillac. Want to come?”

They both knew the implications of such an outing. The Golden Cadillac was a very

71 pricey Mexican restaurant, not far from work, that had the best margaritas in the city.

Going there meant a two-hour lunch and coming back light-headed. She hesitated.

“Come on,” he urged. “It’s Jennifer’s birthday.”

“Well.” Carol let the word hang in the air for a moment and Rick persisted.

“Friday’s payday. Come on, no excuse. Anyway, your birthday’s coming up next. Don’t be a spoilsport.” This last remark was delivered with such a silly expression of childish aggravation that she couldn’t resist.

“Okay, okay,” she laughed, “but please, can we get back before two?”

“We’ll see,” he said, acting as if he had pulled the wool over a child’s eyes, and turned his attention toward Paula who had just walked by.

“Hey Paula, are you coming to lunch?” and he was gone.

The body is only a house; the thought sprang to Carol’s mind. Rick was a man in name only, an incontrovertible fact that his friends accepted without difficulty, for no other reason than it was absolutely true. The thought made her a little sad, not for Rick, but for herself. Aside from Rick, the only other male working in Carol’s office was Chan, a man about the age of sixty who had been married for over thirty years and was licentious to the point of being the office joke. She had the uneasy feeling that she swam in a world devoid of certain possibilities. Putting that thought out of her mind, she searched in her desk drawer until she found a lone band-aid. Finally! She breathed a sign of relief. But the sight of the bloody tissue unnerved her so much that she couldn’t leave it in her wastebasket. Of course, it was just silly, but knowing it was there filled her with dread. All of a sudden she pulled it from the basket, as if it were about to self-ignite, and rushed it into the restroom where she flushed it down the toilet.

72 * * *

Tuesday morning came with the completion of yet another novel. Julian had saved the day, Jessica had finally come to her senses, and in the end, they lived happily ever after. With her usual little satisfied smile Carol closed the paperback and slipped it into a vacant spot in the bookcase next to the book her mother had sent, which because of its tired ugliness, stood out from the rest. She stared at the old book for a moment, then, on a whim, took it from the shelf and put it into the pocket of her raincoat.

The bookcase was almost full now. This troubled her – she didn’t understand why. The ticking of the kitchen clock suddenly sounded amplified and alien. It startled her and she jumped slightly. She felt a little on edge this morning. It happened to her sometimes, but usually only at night. She gave herself a sort of mental shake. I’ll just make room for more, she scolded herself. That’s all. Abruptly, she turned away from the bookcase. For some reason she didn’t want to look at it any more, and hurried to the door.

On her way to the bus stop she had an uneasy feeling. The cool gray fog swirled around her silently. She listened for footsteps but only heard the snap and crack of the electric lines as the Parnassus made its way toward her. Her finger hurt even more today. She was beginning to think it was infected. It was red and swollen a little. Everything that came in contact with it felt cold, like her finger had a fever.

The bus stop, thank God, was empty this morning. Carol felt a sense of relief when the Parnassus arrived. She found a window seat easily. When she sat down she felt the paperback in her pocket and pulled it out to look at it. It seemed like some kind of ancient relic. She didn’t bother reading it, but instead absent-mindedly fanned its pages

73 with her thumb and traced its surface with the fingertips of her uninjured hand. The fog was thinning now. The farther the bus went, the more blue sky started to show itself. By the time they passed the park, the sun was clearly visible. She watched the pigeons fly up in unison, around in a wide sweeping circle, then flutter back down to the ground like so many pieces of loose paper. The bus lumbered along its way, lurching from side to side.

Then just before reaching the top of a hill she noticed a second-story balcony where the

French doors were standing open to the fresh air. A kitchen chair made of wicker was propped against the door and sitting on it in a brass cage was a small green parakeet.

Oblivious to his cage, he sat perched on his tiny swing with his feathers all puffed up. He was bending his neck and stretching out his little wings to better enjoy the warmth of the sun. She didn’t think there was any harm in having a bird for a pet, but today for some reason, this image struck her like a knife, and her breath caught in her throat.

The bus jerked to a stop and Carol looked up. They had finally reached the church. Every day she rode the Parnassus it reached this spot just in time for her to see the children at recess playing in the churchyard. It was a Catholic school. This stop always took longer than the others did; it was an active juncture. The children all wore uniforms: white shirts, blue sweaters and slacks, or plaid skirts. The regimental dress hung upon them in vain. They played with abandon. Young ladies in groups, arms intertwined and heads locked together in secret exchange, conspired to rule their domain.

Young men flew like birds gliding on the wind of some impending storm. They rode into battle to conquer, to disrupt, to leave their signature on whatever thing they touched.

Their small teeming world was a place where every little thing was of paramount importance. Their every gesture held magic and the very air around them was potent with

74 power. Their blood ran quick and high within their veins. It illuminated their skin by the glory of its coursing. Not savage, not purposefully unkind, but pure energy and light.

They moved within and around each other like electrons held together by an invisible force, sometimes colliding and sometimes exploding apart.

Suddenly, she was there. The girl. Maria. She was beautiful, luminous, so very young, perhaps fifteen or sixteen at the most. She was running with her friends, like a group of wild ponies loose in an open field. She moved with the group then ranged out apart from them, circling them, watching them, and then looking around herself from a promontory of steps. Then she stopped, frozen for a moment, the energy still spilling from her body like a throbbing filament cased in glass. She remained motionless. And, suddenly, he was there. Michael. How does that happen, Carol wondered to herself? How does one butterfly find another? His beauty matched hers, point for point. Black soft curls and alabaster skin. His cheeks not so red as hers. He had not been running. He must have seen her first.

Life! Carol said to herself. This is why I never read while riding the bus. What a tragedy it would be to miss the unfolding of such an exquisite drama. She had been watching Maria and Michael for several weeks. She had noticed each one of them separately, before they even noticed each other. Something resonated about them both, a music, or language of similarity, which Carol noticed, and which drew them together with more purpose than when the moon draws the tides. She had witnessed the seminal moment of their meeting, when they stood apart from each other in that first vast moment of recognition. Like Cortez or Columbus’s first glimpse of uncharted land, neither was

75 quite certain of what it was they were seeing. Carol was there then. She witnessed it. And since that day, she had chronicled the ripening of that moment.

At first they only smiled and skittered around each other, keeping themselves well within their separate, respective groups. But soon, first he, then she, broke rank, and using any pretext, made contact. The dance started with them rustling closely past each other, then escalated into a kind of playful shoving where the touch of an open hand read its contact message with as much awareness and understanding as that of any blind man.

They quickly became inseparable. Each to the other as necessary as air. To their friends, they became a thing to tease. Carol could see their allegiances realigning. They were slipping the bonds of childhood, while unaware that it was happening, but she knew. She recognized the movement.

The bus jerked into motion and Carol looked up just in time to see the two young people lost in each other’s presence. She noticed they were different today. They seemed totally oblivious to their playmates’ hazing, and the other children, made powerless by this attitude, had lost interest in them as well. So, Carol thought to herself, the great translation was complete. They were together in an abandoned glassed-in phone booth that remained standing near the asphalt playground. Most likely, because it had been vandalized so frequently, they stopped repairing it, and being too expensive to remove, they just left the shell of it there in place. Carol thought it was an odd, yet strangely appropriate, shrine.

All of a sudden, he saw her watching them; Maria saw too. Carol could tell that they recognized her as an intruder, or worse, a predator. They turned contemptuously away from her prying eyes. The shock of being noticed like that unnerved Carol. She

76 wanted to explain, to call out to them by name, but how could she? Her life had been revolving around them but they only knew her as a stranger. The images came one after another, heartless in their precision.

The pain in her left hand began to throb even more. She looked down to see her hands were trembling. “What’s the matter with me today?” A sense of terror began to grip her, and she rose violently from her seat as if pursued by an apparition, sending the empty weight of the paperback unnoticed to the floor. She tried to get off the bus but it was too late. There were too many people in her way. The Parnassus jerked away from the curb. In her mind’s eye she saw the sparks flash as the crackle of the electricity jolted the bus into motion. She was held now by an inexplicable determination; it carried her to an unknown destination. She remained standing on the bus till the end of the line, gripping the steel handrail through the pain in her hand. As people left the bus from the rear door, Summer’s End continued to slip farther underfoot, until it was finally indistinguishable from the dirty bus floor.

“This is it, Miss, the end of the line. You have to get off now.”

Carol descended from the Parnassus slowly, unsure of where she was. She found herself standing in the midst of a sea of people. All going somewhere. They seemed to pass around her like so many pieces of uprooted kelp floating in a vast lagoon.

Carol stood transfixed, plant-like, rooted, while tributaries of people flowed around and past her, out to wherever they were going, not seeing her at all.

77 Music Lessons

The sun, having slipped behind a cloud, made the atmosphere blue with the sudden possibility of a storm. Cicadas kept up their endless circling rhythms. But the birds went silent, and I heard a distant, deep rumble.

It was summer 1987. Dottie came to the screen door with a gin and tonic in each hand and eased it open with the edge of her arm. She didn’t want my help. It was our first visit together since my divorce, and she fell naturally into the role of taking care of her little sister, and I didn’t mind that she did. Mike and I hadn’t been getting along for years now, but still the termination of a twelve-year marriage was difficult to bear, and troubles always pushed us back into old patterns.

“Like clockwork,” Dottie said. She craned her neck, as if trying to see around the screened-in porch into the sky behind us. “By 3:00 p.m.” she said, pointing with her drink and spilling it in the process, “my neighbor over there’ll come blasting out her back door, running after her damn laundry like Chicken Little. The woman’s lived here her whole life.” Dottie stood looking off into the distance like she could find some answer there. “You’d think by now she’d know when it was going to rain. God,” she said, absentmindedly licking the spilled alcohol from the back of her hand, “sometimes I just want to slap that woman.”

I suddenly felt voyeuristic, like I was seeing and hearing things I shouldn’t.

But sisters share a lot sometimes. Sometimes, more than they intend.

Dottie settled heavily into the wicker rocker next to mine and handed me my drink. Neither one of us spoke. We watched while her girls played a loose form of croquet on the back lawn. It was more a skirmish with them than a game. Mostly they

78 knocked each other’s ball into the shrubbery bordering the backyard, taking turns laughing at each other and chasing after balls. When Dottie finally spoke—telling me what I realized later she must have wanted to say since I arrived—I didn’t at first understand her. She was so focused on watching the girls that I assumed she was going to speak about them. Tell me which one, the eldest most likely, might some day be president or bring home the Gold in some Olympic year, if only she’d apply herself. But instead she said, “I guess it was a good thing you never had kids.”

“I suppose,” I said. At least now, I thought to myself, this subject can finally be put to rest. Having two kids herself, Dottie couldn’t believe I never wanted children of my own.

We kept watching the girls. Whenever it was Jenny’s turn to hit the ball,

Sarah, the oldest, would try to rattle her. She’d pretend to look away until Jenny took aim then wiggle her mallet in her line of sight. It was a silly, but highly effective, tactic. I might have called her on it, but Dottie ignored it. So I just sipped my drink and let the gin take effect.

It was a perfect day for porch sitting. You could hear someone mowing a lawn far off in the neighborhood. The constant droning noise had a comforting effect on me, which even though I knew must be a common response, suddenly struck me as odd, unnatural even. I looked at the girls again. It was Sarah’s turn now and in mid-swing

Jenny stabbed the air in front of her with her mallet. For some reason, call it habit, this caught Dottie’s attention. She jumped up from her chair with such force that I thought one of the girls must be mortally wounded and shouted, “Jennifer-Ann! Young lady, you better stop teasing your sister this instant!”

79 “Christ! Dottie, you nearly gave me a heart attack! What’s the big deal?

They’ve both been teasing each other. Didn’t you see Sarah do the same thing?”

“Did she?” Dottie said. “I missed it. These kids, you have to watch ‘em like a hawk.”

A few minutes later, after things had calmed down and we were quietly watching the girls again, Dottie got back to her favorite subject.

“But, you know,” she said, “kids can be a great comfort in times like this.” I was about to respond to this bit of skewed wisdom when I noticed the girls, tired of croquet, had turned their attention to a Chinese jump rope, those long elastic bands that are stretched between two players at the ankles, while a third player, in a sort of Cat’s

Cradle way, jumps one edge of the elastic over the other.

“Dottie,” I said, “look at that!” I hadn’t seen a Chinese jump rope since we were children living in Kansas. It was a game we played while living there, but never anywhere else. Funny, but when we left Kansas, we left the game as well.

“I know—I know. Go figure,” Dottie said. I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen, and Dottie got up to answer it. On her way into the house she said, “I tried to tell them it wasn’t a new game, but you know kids. They think the world begins and ends with them.”

It must have been Bill, her husband, on the phone because she talked on for quite a while. I sipped my drink and watched the girls with their rope, as they tried to set it up with only two players, just like Dottie and I used to do when we were young.

* * *

80 In 1959 our father, a career military man, was taking us with him to Orleans,

France, by way of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Back then the Army liked to keep its infantry on its toes by moving it around regularly. I was pulled, mid-year, out of almost every school I ever attended until I was in the eighth grade. Being uprooted so frequently caused us to bond to each other more strongly than most sisters ever do. We were adrift together, and we knew it. Our whole family was that way. We were like a country unto ourselves, a ship on the water, drifting in and out of communities with their already highly fixed social orders, like anthropologists, just observing as we passed through always on our way to someplace else.

Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, where our family lighted for less than a year, was where I met Rosie and almost met Elizabeth. I really never got to know Elizabeth, but every time I remember Rosie, I remember Elizabeth too. Kids, they always appear to be so resilient, as if they can be stretched and stretched out to some far distant invisible point, a point beyond which, sometimes, they never quite recover.

Our parents were Southerners of the type that never had money, but always seemed as if they should. After WWII, with work being scarce and my father not having a head for business, a permanent career in the Army with all its military dress-blues’ parades and officers’ cocktail parties seemed like a good alternative to remaining in

Georgia. In fact, the prospect of leaving the South was the main reason my Daddy joined the Army. Something kindred in both of my parents wanted to get out of the South— leave to see the world—and happily, never go back. So by the time Dottie came along, and three years later so did I, the program of packing and moving was already well- established in our family.

81 But when we arrived in Kansas, after being in places like Washington D.C. and San Francisco, the thought of living there was a bitter pill our parents could only swallow by knowing that it was temporary. A life in France was less than a year away.

* * *

The block we were to live on for the nine months preceding our move to

Europe had an air of tragedy about it, as if something had gone horribly wrong and it had been mistakenly given someone else’s fate. The road the house stood on was as wide as a boulevard, denoting some expectation, some promise of future prosperity: cars, traffic, the hustle and bustle of healthy commerce. Instead the road was deserted and covered by a thin layer of soft gray dirt. As Dottie and I soon discovered, our block was as good as a dead-end street.

Altogether there were three houses on our block; a couple of vacant lots with bits of old fencing standing in place here and there like they had served a useful purpose at some point in the far distant past; and at the farthest end a general store where the old man never seemed to sell anything but tobacco, candy, and liquor to people who drifted in from nowhere and who Dottie and I never recognized or ever saw twice. Of all the buildings on our block, our house seemed in the best condition. “This can’t be the house,” mother said, peering at it through the car window. None of us felt the urge to get out of the car.

But, it was our house—a single-story, wood-framed house that sorely needed painting. Weathered to such a degree that it appeared to be abandoned. And although it had the customary front porch, it looked anything but inviting: no porch swing, no

82 flowers, certainly no lawn, not even a screen door. All our mother needed was to see some old three-legged dog lying in the road to make her feel like she’d never left Macon,

GA. We climbed out of the car and assembled on the sidewalk to get a better look at it, and waited to see what Momma would do.

Out of all of us, she appeared to be the one most out of place. Every occasion had its appropriate dress for Momma. Travel called for tweedy suits; a hat was never purchased that didn’t have the shoes and purse to match. That day she wore a soft green suit with orange suede pumps. I couldn’t really see her pillbox hat perched on top of her head because it was deep into her curly brown hair, but she clutched her purse like it was alive and had to be petted. She seemed on the verge of tears. Finally she reached a point of acceptance, and smiling at Daddy, said quietly, “It’s only temporary.”

We didn’t suspect then that we were being watched. The prospect of living in such a strange house consumed all our attention. When we finally went inside it was mostly to see what furnishings such a house could possibly hold. Our own furniture had been sent to temporary storage. Never in her life, my mother would say years later, had she ever seen a home more inharmoniously furnished. The fifties-style, imitation-leather living room set was anything but matching. It consisted of two large easy chairs, one lime green, one burnt-cherry red, and one enormous, deep-purple couch. We looked at Mother again. She shuddered almost imperceptibly, then smiled at Daddy and said, “It’s only temporary.” The rest of the house was furnished in much the same way. Daddy supposed that the landlord had an eye for economy and nothing else, a bit of wisdom we all agreed with, since, as far as Momma was concerned, what was in the house showed a lack of elegance that barely skirted being the expression of a dysfunctional mind. But Dottie and

83 I, safe within our family nucleus, weren’t much bothered by the house. It was all the same to us wherever we went.

* * *

Dottie and I first met Rosie a few days later. Across the street she’d been watching us from behind her front porch railing as if we couldn’t see her, but of course we could. Her house looked strange to us, but all the houses in that neighborhood looked strange to us then. They were so worn and neglected. But Rosie’s house, especially, had an aura of emptiness about it. I don’t remember there being a light on in her house, ever.

We never saw her father and only knew she had a mother because sometimes we saw the shadow of a woman moving about in the house. It didn’t seem to matter to Rosie, though, and Dottie and I never wondered much about it then.

At the time, Dottie and I were obsessed with playing Chinese jump rope.

Every day on the front porch that’s what we did. After a few days of watching us play,

Rosie finally made her move. She came down her front steps like water in a mountain stream after a sudden rain. She flowed jaggedly, and quick, then made her way in a zigzagging motion across the street. She may have been playing airplane on her way, as she carried her small body low to the ground and her arms stretched out behind her, but I noticed her hands most of all. Her little fingers were twitching, as if she were playing an invisible piano. We stopped what we were doing to watch her. She was wearing a pink dress. The one she always wore. And she was barefoot—barefoot in the summer and scuffed patent leather shoes without socks in the winter—but, somehow, always the pink dress. There was a grayness about her. Her dirty-blond hair being only a few shades

84 darker than her skin gave her an overall appearance of being tarnished silver. She reached our porch, and rather than come directly to us by way of the stairs, she clamored (with the determination of a small animal separated from what it wants) up the four-foot-high planks that enclosed it.

When she finally made it up, and was able to hold herself, head and arms, on the porch railing, she smiled at us in the most nonchalant manner that Dottie and I burst out laughing. Rosie was unfazed. Dangling from the porch with her blue-gray eyes sparkling, she just looked at us. Finally, with a show of great confidence—as if she were the head of the welcoming committee, come by for a cup of tea—she said, “Whatcha doing?” Dottie gave her a big toothy grin and took off running. Everything with Dottie was a contest, but that was all right with me. I took off after Dottie like I could catch her, knowing I never would, and Rosie fell in running with us, calling out as we raced along,

“Where ya going?” Not knowing where we were going or why, her threadbare dress and thin blond hair streamed through the air as she chased after us squealing with pleasure, but still asking once or twice with the slightest bit of apprehension in her voice before we got to the store, “Where we going?” From that moment on, Rosie was one of us.

Weeks passed and Rosie became a permanent fixture in our household, often having lunch or dinner with us, sometimes both. Dottie and I never thought much about it, but Momma and Daddy must have. The closer our family grew to Rosie the more looks my parents exchanged. Momma took to shaking her head sadly every time Rosie went bounding back across the street to her own dark house. I heard them talking one night, after they thought Dottie and I were both asleep, about trying to adopt Rosie. But I never told anybody what I heard.

85 * * *

The first time I ever saw the inside of Rosie’s house was by accident. I was mad at Dottie about something she’d done. Probably because she cut my doll's hair. She did that sometimes. Dottie was mostly bossy, but sometimes she’d be mean. So, I’d gone out to find Rosie.

I knocked on Rosie’s front door, but got no answer. It was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open and walked in. As soon as I stepped inside a sense of fear began to grow in me. The house was silent. The only light in it came from outside. It streamed in through the curtainless windows and illuminated the dust particles that permeated the stale air. It was too dark to recognize anything other than vague shapes and forms, a table

—maybe, a couch—yes, but what color or condition I couldn’t tell. I suddenly didn’t care. All I knew was that I had to get out immediately, as if my life depended upon it. I heard a muffled voice coming from the back of the house and bolted for the front door.

As I passed over the threshold my hand gripped the wooden doorjamb and felt where it had been splintered and gouged repeatedly by some sharp instrument. I never spoke to anyone about that; I didn’t know its significance then.

This is usually the point where I start to remember Elizabeth.

* * *

It was on the school’s playground, while living in Kansas, that Dottie and I honed our Chinese jump rope skills. I was in the sixth grade then. There was a school on base for Army brats, as outsiders called us (and sometimes we called ourselves), and one

86 day the vice principal dropped off a new student to our classroom. The school year was already well underway.

She was a beautiful girl. Of course we all stared; we would have stared regardless. She wore a dress like the one Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz . I thought she looked like Dorothy. She even had a cockeyed ribbon in her hair, put there by someone other than herself.

The teacher brought her to an empty desk with a kind of flourish that seemed to signify her own importance rather than the girl’s, and announced with confidence,

“Class, this is Elizabeth. She’ll be joining us for the remainder of the year.” But we weren’t so sure of that. The teacher should have noticed that Elizabeth was just a little too still; we did. Elizabeth was standing by her desk looking down at the floor with such determination that it seemed she might bore a hole right through it. I remember liking her right off, remember thinking, if only she’d look up, I’d make eye contact with her, and let her know how I felt. I was already planning my approach—all the stuff I would tell her, show her around, let her know where the bathrooms were and the drinking fountains, who to stay away from, what the teacher was really like, all that stuff—it takes a while to learn it on your own. But she didn’t look up.

“Elizabeth, you can sit down now.” Clearly the teacher was aware now that something wasn’t quite right, but she didn’t seem to know which tactic to use to solve the problem—hard or soft—or even what the problem could possibly be. She chose wrong, and commanded severely, “ Sit down, Elizabeth .”

“No ,” Elizabeth retorted. “ I wanna go home !” A shock of surprise shuddered through the class. We squirmed in our seats, looking around at each other for some sort of

87 confirmation that what was happening was real, to learn from each other how we should respond. Nobody talked back to teachers. And this? Clearly was more than willfulness.

This was mutiny.

There went my hope of having Dorothy and Toto as friends. But I was in awe of this creature now. We all must have been because the whole class, in anticipation of what she would do next, seemed to have stopped breathing.

Elizabeth stood with her hands clenched into fists at her side, still looking at the floor. She was crying, but not from weakness. She had willed herself into an impregnable, immovable force. Our teacher was either too slow or too inexperienced to recognize this fact, and in that moment revealed to us her true nature by her show of increased anger.

“Sit down this instance,” she shouted, her face pinched and red, “or, young lady you will go straight to the principal’s office!”

Now, this was like a threat of execution to us. We were horrified, but

Elizabeth only stamped her foot, so like Excalibur hitting its mark, and said defiantly,

“No—I want to go home!”

Without even appointing a classroom monitor, the teacher swept down the aisle, grabbed Elizabeth by the wrist and marched her out the door, letting it close behind them with a loud hollow clang.

We were all Army brats. We knew the feelings: the resentment that came from having to move countless times; the isolation that came from the severed friendships; the stress that came from having to make new friends over and over again—only to leave

88 them behind or to be left behind by them—the emotional burden becoming harder and harder to bear as the years went by. It wore on us in ways we never suspected.

Something great and wonderful, and tragic, happened that day. But nobody said a word about it, even on the playground later that day. No one joked: What about that crazy girl—huh? We couldn’t. No one had the heart for it. We never saw Elizabeth again.

* * *

It was late. Momma and Daddy were out at a function. They’d left us alone, but Dottie was twelve and I was nine. They weren’t worried about us. And being together, we weren’t worried either. We liked it that way. When left like this, we never put ourselves to bed when we were supposed to. We’d play Monopoly or Clue until the headlights, coming round the corner from the north road, flashed into the living room.

Then we’d scatter, like a couple of blackbirds at the sound of a shotgun, from the kitchen table into our own darkened bedroom. We’d make it under the covers so fast that the squeaking bedsprings would already be silent by the time the front door opened.

Only this time the car lights came on us so suddenly that Dottie and I just looked at each other like we were already dead ducks. But the lights went the wrong way.

A car was leaving from across the street at Rosie’s house. A few minutes later we heard a knock on our front door.

“Rosie!” Dottie said, “What are you doing here? It’s after midnight!” For us to be up past our bedtime was one thing, but for Rosie to be out alone at midnight was too shocking to believe. It was something that just didn’t happen.

89 “Momma’s not herself again,” Rosie said, wide-eyed and trembling. “She left me.”

“Left you?” Dottie said, “No, she didn’t leave you. She probably just went”—

Dottie seemed to suddenly realize that it was far too late for a mother to be going out anywhere, and stopped talking mid-sentence.

“I can’t… I can’t,” Rosie wailed, wringing her hands and hopping first on one barefoot then the other. Dottie tried to calm her down, but Rosie kept crying, telling us she couldn’t be left alone, couldn’t be left alone . We couldn’t get her to come inside either. She seemed to think she had to be home in case her mother came back.

There was no way to get in touch with our parents. They were supposed to be home soon anyway.

Dottie decided she should go back with Rosie to her house, and I should bring our parents over as soon as they got home, but Rosie was more fond of me, and wailed all the louder at this suggestion. As terrified as I was of Rosie’s house, I was more sorry for her and so agreed to go.

It was very late for children to be up, nearly 1:00 a.m.

We were innocents, but still Rosie headed for her darkened house like a gypsy fleeing the scene of a crime with her head lowered, scanning the deserted street, as if mindful of some nearby person ready to discover us and set loose the dogs. The muffled sounds of Rosie’s bare feet padding against the road and the jagged sounds of her child’s breath seemed huge to my senses till we reached her front porch. Suspended momentarily in time at its threshold, we just looked at each other—then plunged into her pitch-dark house.

90 Rosie took me to her bedroom and we both climbed into her bed. If there was anything else in the room, chests of drawers, pictures, lamps, I have no recollection of it; the house was more like a series of caves to me—one bleak, empty canvass after another, suitable backdrops for nightmares. Within minutes a car pulled slowly into Rosie’s driveway. We both heard it, but Rosie didn’t move. She seemed to be listening for something more. We heard the car door open. It seemed open for too long, then it closed.

Rosie still lay there not moving. Her wide eyes looking into mine, not telling me anything. There was a shuffling sound on the porch, then the front door opened.

Rosie, Rosie. We heard a women’s voice, thick and guttural, repeating the name, again and again, softly, as if speaking to herself. Now Rosie smiled at me and started out of bed toward the kitchen, which was where the sound of the woman’s voice was coming from, until we heard a different sound.

“Rah-becca Rose !” The woman screamed this time like she was conjuring up the devil himself. Rosie stopped dead in her tracks. I heard her breathe in sharply. Her eyes were huge with terror now. The state was contagious. Motionless, we both listened.

For what ? I don’t know. We heard drawers slammed open and shut until there was a final drawer opened, and I heard the unmistakable sound of metal blades being shoved around in a drawer, then another quiet, and the scream again, “ Rah-becca Rose! Momma’s calling you, young lady. Come here this instant! ”

When I looked at Rosie for some sort of explanation other than what I feared was about to happen, like a deaf-mute, she just shook her head no. We heard footsteps coming down the hall. Suddenly Rosie grabbed me by the wrist and ran to the window on

91 the far side of her room. I could tell she had done this before. We were out the window and safely on the ground before her mother could open Rosie’s bedroom door.

When our parents got home and heard what happened they called the police.

By the time they arrived, Rosie was sound asleep in our bed, so they let her stay with us until Social Services sent someone to pick her up the next day. Dottie and I never did see

Rosie’s mother. And after that night, I never heard my parents mention adoption again.

The next day an officer and a lady wearing a dark gray suit came by to take

Rosie away. I don’t remember if we cried (Momma probably did), but I know Rosie didn’t.

Dottie and I stood in the middle of the road and watched as the car drove her away. Rosie had climbed up onto the ledge in the back of the car and was looking at us through the window, her fingers dancing on the glass like she was playing an invisible piano.

* * *

The sound of the screen door slamming shut brought me back. The temperature had dropped perceptibly, bringing the air closer to something like spring but still warm, electric in its gathering primordial force. Dottie sat down and gave me a look.

“You gonna be all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, of course, Dottie,” I said.

The wind had picked up. Distracting us both for a moment. We watched as it shuddered through the darkening trees, picking up leaves, anything it could hold onto as it went.

92 “I didn’t mean to stir up any bad feelings about not having kids,” Dottie said,” raising her voice slightly above the wind.

She was still watching the weather. We both were. Leaden clouds crowded the sky like angry, lumbering giants. Grumbling amongst themselves they plotted from a place deep within the throat, in the bowels even. They were coming. Unstoppable. They would have their way. It was a natural spectacle that demanded our attention.

“You know how I am,” Dottie continued. “I can’t mind my own damn business.”

Mechanically, she swirled the melting ice in her drink. I heard it clink against the sides of her glass. It was odd to me that so delicate a sound could reach me over the growing presence of the storm.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I shivered from the cold now, and wished I’d brought in my sweater from the car. “I love your kids. Honestly—that’s enough for me.”

The statement was an obvious invitation to some sort of sappy, sisterly-love exchange, but Dottie wasn’t listening to me any more. She was busy watching her girls, who were amusing themselves in a tug-of-war with the elastic rope, oblivious to the threatening weather.

“Can you believe those kids?” she said. “I told them there was nothing new under the sun. They just wouldn’t listen.”

The clouds suddenly broke into sheets of water, turning the world into liquid grey. The deafening sound of rain overwhelmed everything.

93 The girls, squealing in mock terror, ran wildly about in circles. Their heads back, arms outstretched, barefoot like maenads with their faces turned skyward, tongues extended, drinking in the cold wetness.

Lightning split the air. Thunder followed immediately after.

I jumped from my chair to call the girls to safety, but Dottie just stood there, smiling, as if the sun still shone in a cloudless sky.

Wait , she mouthed without looking at me, her arm extended in my direction as if restraining a child. Dottie’s gaze was fixed on something, but it wasn’t the girls. It went beyond them to her neighbor’s back porch. Wait , she mouthed again. Smiling. Sipping her drink.

Like two madmen contemplating the origin of the species while watching their city burn—we waited for her neighbor’s screen door to open.

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