Melissa Boston poemm emoir story Number Thirteen/2014 Elya Braden Jenny Burkholder Kristi Carter Alison Chapman Melissa DeCarlo Stephanie Dickinson Heather Dundas Lauren Fath Yolanda Franklin Naoko Fujimoto Madelyn Garner Inez D. Geller Juliana Gray Mary Grover Judith O’Connell Hoyer Jessica Jacobs Carrie Jerrell Suzanne M. Levine Callie Mauldin Victoria McArtor Heal McKnight Antonya Nelson Christina Nettles Inés Orihuela Tina Parker Shobha Rao Cynthia Ryan Mia Sara Sonia Scherr Julia Shipley Hilary Sideris 2014 Susan Terris Whitnee Thorp $10.00 Julie Marie Wade Diana Wagman ..

PMSpoemmemoirstory

2014number thirteen Copyright © 2014 by PMS poemmemoirstory

PMS is a journal of women’s poetry, memoir, and short fiction published once a year. Subscriptions are $10 per year, $15 for two years, or $18 for three years; sample copies are $7. Unsolicited manuscripts of up to five poems or fifteen pages of prose are welcome during our reading period (January 1 through March 30), but must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope for consideration. Manuscripts received at other times of the year will be returned unread. For submission guidelines and to submit online, visit us at www.pms-journal.org, or send a SASE to the address below. All rights revert to the author upon publication. Reprints are permitted with appropriate acknowledgment. Address all correspon- dence to:

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PMS poemmemoirstory is a member of the Council of Literary Maga- zines and Presses (CLMP) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Indexed by the Humanities International Index and in Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, PMS poemmemoirstory is distributed to the trade by Ingram Periodicals, 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000. patrons

College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Patti Callahan Henry Margaret Harrill Robert Morris, M.D. C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D.

friends Sandra Agricola Andrew Glaze Will Miles Daniel Anderson Robert P. Glaze Dail W. Mullins Jr. Rebecca Bach Randa Graves Michael R. Payne George W. Bates Ron Guthrie Robert Lynn Penny Peter and Miriam Bellis Ward Haarbauer Lee and Pam Person Claude and Nancy Ted Haddin William Pogue Bennett John Haggerty Kieran Quinlan & Randy Blythe Richard Hague Mary Kaiser James Bonner Sang Y. Han Jim Reed F.M. Bradley Jeff Hansen Steven M. Rudd Mary Flowers Braswell Tina Harris Rusty Rushton Jim Braziel Jessica Heflin John Sartain Karen Brookshaw Patty Callahan Henry Janet Sharp Bert Brouwer Pamela Horn Danny Siegel Edwin L. Brown Jennifer Horne Juanita Sizemore Donna Burgess William Hutchings Martha Ann Stevenson Linda Casebeer Alicia K. Clavell Lanier Scott Isom Lou Suarez John E. Collins Joey Kennedy Susan Swagler Robert Collins Sue Kim Drucilla Tyler Catherine Danielou Marilyn Kurata Maria Vargas Jim L. Davidson Ruth and Edward Adam Vines Michael Davis Lamonte Daniel Vines Denise Duhamel Beverly Lebouef Larry Wharton Charles Faust Ada Long Elaine Whitaker Grace Finkel Susan Luther Jacqueline Wood Edward M. Friend III John C. Mayer John M. Yozzo Stuart Flynn James Mersmann Carol Prejean Zippert staff editor-in-chief Kerry Madden managing editor Bethany Mitchell senior editors Bethany Mitchell, Memoir Taylor Crawford, Fiction Cheyenne Taylor, Poetry assistant editors Neil Bagley Jordan Price Halley Cotton Laura Simpson Sarah Jennings Jason Walker business managers Heather Martin Nakia Lee Bethany Mitchell administrative assistants Taylor Crawford Bethany Mitchell cover design Michael J. Alfano cover art “La Iglesia” by Inés Orihuela, watercolor on canvas. production/printing 47 Journals, LLC contents from the Editor-in-Chief i poemmemoirstory Madelyn Garner The Garden in August 7 Victoria McArtor A Good Seasonal Depression 9 Inez D. Geller Taffeta 10 Judith O’Connell Hoyer Folding Sheets 12 Jessica Jacobs Black Abstraction 13 Hilary Sideris My Bluff 15 Melissa Boston Edna, Sleeping at Grand Isle 16 Mia Sara Sonny Jim 17 Tina Parker Sunday Night 18 Raising Jesus 19 Susan Terris O’Keefe Country 20 Suzanne M. Levine Eve, Poland, 1942 22 United Air 23 Carrie Jerrell Love Poem for Route 66 24 Love Poem for the Tallgrass Prairie 26 Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip 27 Julie Marie Wade red 28 Elya Braden Sweeter than Today 30

Jenny Burkholder New Year’s Eve 32 Kristi Carter When a Ghost Touches Your Body 33 Naoko Fujimoto Electric Bills 34 Whitnee Thorp Coal Sweet 35 Yolanda Franklin Vindictive Grace 36 contents…

Juliana Gray The Mobled Queen 38 Thrift 39 Ophelia 40 poemmemoirstory Alison Chapman The Paradise Within 43 Heal McKnight Traffic 57 Lauren Fath My Hands, Remembering 65 Christina Nettles Death of an Independent Bookstore 77 Cynthia Ryan Rough Edges 81 Stephanie Dickinson New Jersey Noir 88 Mary Grover Love for Jumpy Insomniacs 103 Julia Shipley Let Us Now Praise Rural Women: The Things They Jettisoned 110 poemmemoirstory Shobha Rao An Unrestored Woman 117 Callie Mauldin Temp 124 Melissa DeCarlo The Rosary 133 Sonia Scherr Pearl 135 Heather Dundas House Menu 152 Diana Wagman Rom Com or Rose and Jack Live Happily Ever After and We Are Not Really Surprised 167 Antonya Nelson In the Land of Men 172 Kerry Madden Interview with Antonya Nelson 183 contributors 195 f r o m t h e editor-in-chief

Dear Reader,

My grandmother, Elizabeth Baker, slept late every day and ate a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup with crackers for breakfast while watching The Young and the Restless followed by the noon news for weather, more soaps, and an early bird supper around three o’clock. She said three rosaries a day and went to evening Mass at five with my grandfather so long as the weather held up in Leavenworth, Kansas. When it didn’t, she kept a home supply of the Holy Eucharist near her statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She did crosswords in the evenings, drank a watery highball, and smoked a cigarette with an ivory holder and ended each day with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. When Meals on Wheels started coming to their home, leaving brown bags on the doorstep with sad peanut-butter sandwiches and bruised fruit, I knew it was the beginning of the end. It made me anxious to think of losing them, but my grandparents didn’t seem bothered by the sacks of lunch on the porch next to the glider where we’d sit in the eve- nings if it were cool enough. And it was on that porch in Leavenworth that my grandmother, Elizabeth, told me stories. She told me about playing Kate from The Taming of the Shrew at Saint Mary’s College in Leavenworth as a young girl and how she’d heard someone in the front row say during a quiet moment, “She likes the sound of her voice.” Then my grandmother paused and said, “And you know what? I did.” She talked about visiting her big sister, Maime, in the nursing home, who was eighteen years older, and in and out of dementia at the time, but Maime woke up long enough that afternoon to see Elizabeth—a spry age of seventy-five—and say to her, “Sister, you need to lose that stomach.” Elizabeth loved stories and books—mostly volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and always the latest Catholic Digest and mysteries too. I tried to read her a Flannery O’Connor story once but she made me quit. It was too much. But she loved telling stories, and she taught me about the power of stories, not only in the telling, but in withholding juicy and critical information too. “You don’t need to know about that,”

PMS.. i she’d say, even when I’d beg for more details. But her devotion to stories and her love of me taught me to adore stories and to crave more, which is what we have here for you, dear reader, in this jam-packed issue of poems, memoirs, and stories in our new issue of PMS 13. Amongst the poetry offerings, we have Susan Terris traversing through O’Keefe’s country to Suzanne M. Levine’s boxcar in Poland to Jenny Burkholder’s New Year’s in Beebe, Arkansas. We linger in these luminous poems and so many others, including Juliana Gray’s trilogy of quintessentially southern loss—a canvas of marriage and death in quick succession, grieving sisters, and mourners bearing Publix chicken. We even have Carrie Jerrell taking us along Route 66, through the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas, and on other childhood family trips where the pos- sibilities of the future are etched big and bright, nourished with pudding pops and Wonder bread. Alison Chapman’s sequel to her PMS 9 essay, “Milton’s Captive Audience: Teaching Paradise Lost in a Maximum Security Prison” returns us to Donaldson prison once again in her new essay, “The Paradise Within.” She revisits the friendships forged with inmates serv- ing life sentences paralleling the death of her beloved father. In “Rough Edges,” breast cancer survivor Cynthia Ryan takes her studies of breast cancer in homeless populations to a more personal level as she inter- views her friend Edwina, a breast cancer survivor from the streets of Birmingham or “Bombingham,” as the city was termed at the time during the 1960s. In another Alabama-based story, Crissy Nettles of Monroeville details what it’s like to watch the dream of an independent bookstore shutter in the hometown of Harper Lee and Truman Capote due to lack of interest even with shoppers like the Lee sisters themselves, Miss Nelle Harper, and Miss Alice. We have fiction from Heather Dundas’ wrenching story of a marriage when illness strikes mean and hard; Diana Wagman’s tall tale of Jack and Rose; Sonia Scherr’s story of a little girl, Pearl, searching for her real self among adults; and Callie Mauldin’s story of fragility in the heart of New York City with a backdrop of seafood-themed restaurants and a temp job in the Empire State Building. We are also most fortunate to have a reprint of Antonya Nelson’s “In the Land of Men” and a wonderful inter- view with the author herself, who visited the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s campus to talk to students in the spring. ii PMS.. I’m so grateful for my amazingly generous staff of PMS interns and editors, especially my managing editor, Bethany Mitchell, whose tireless efforts gave me tremendous peace of mind as she gathered together this new issue of PMS 13, tying up loose ends and reaching out to our won- derful contributors. I also appreciate the hard work yet again by Heather Martin, who helped us with our subscription base and kept things orga- nized and has been with the literary journal for over a decade offering insight, grace, and humor. I would like to thank the entire PMS staff for their careful reading and selection of work in our new issue, especially Cheyenne Taylor, Taylor Crawford, Halley Cotton, Jason Walker, Jordan Price, and Neil Bagley. A big thanks goes to Laura Simpson for so carefully helping me to transcribe the Antonya Nelson interview and also for typing up Nelson’s story all in the midst of a crazy spring. I am most appreciative of Nakia Lee for her financial services; Dr. Peter Bellis, Chair of the English Department, for his vital support of PMS; and Dr. Rebecca Bach for her championing new voices in literature. We could not publish this maga- zine without the help of the university supporting our creative efforts. I would also like to thank our dean, Dr. Robert Palazzo, for ordering 28 copies of PMS 12 and delivering the issue to department heads across the UAB campus, including the Medical School. And as always, I have to thank our incredible designer, Russell Helms, for his tremendous patience and attention to detail, and of course, Linda Frost, whose dream of PMS is still strong because of her vision in its inception in 2000. I’d also like my creative writing colleagues at UAB, Lauren Slaughter, Randy Blythe, Adam Vines, and Jim Braziel, as always for their continued sup- port and encouragement of our journal. A note on the cover of this new issue: Inés Orihuela is an artist born in Peru, but who currently studies at Studio-by-the-Tracks, a place of art and creativity for autistic adults, headed by the incomparable, Ila Faye Miller, in the community of Irondale, Alabama, which happens to also be Fannie Flagg’s old stomping grounds. Every day, autistic children and adults gather in this former gas station—now converted to an art studio—to paint, sculpt, and draw their stories and worlds. I am so very grateful to have Inez’s beautiful work on the cover of PMS 13. And a spe- cial thanks goes to artist and professor, Doug Baulos, for suggesting Inés’ art. This issue of PMS 13 is dedicated to the director of Studio-by-the-

PMS.. iii Tracks, Ila Faye Miller, for all of her incredible work in the autism com- munity and for creating a safe and nurturing environment for children and adults with autism, providing them with free classes year-round to discover their talents and voices as artists. Most of all, I’d like to thank you, dear reader, for your tremendous love and support of what we do here in Birmingham, Alabama to bring you stories. May you each have a full and jam-packed year yourself of stories that feed your heart and fill you with joy, and when those stories fall short, may you find new ones to offer you solace and comfort too. And if you’re ever thinking of submitting a story to us yourself, our read- ing period is January 1st to March 31st every year. We would love to read your work.

With love, Kerry Madden, Editor-in-Chief For Ila Faye Miller and Studio-by-the-Tracks

&

Thank you so much, Inés Orihuela, for sharing your radiant artistic vision and love with the world. poemmemoirstory Madelyn Garner

The Garden in August

1.

Afternoon brings my neighbor outside in her florid pink nightgown, exposed breasts like pendulums as she kneels in the gravel speaking to an empty planter. As the two of us wait in the kitchen for her children, it is clear her thoughts float from the back of the skull to the front.

Unstoppered bottles. Pills on the table: blood pressure cholesterol diabetes arrhythmic heart insomnia dispensed out of sequence from the calendar of forgotten days.

2.

How resigned she seems to the eviction notices her body is receiving, the way a daughter sags against the door jamb.

Family members speak in code about selling the house.

PMS.. 7 3.

Because she is a system of bone and pulse

Because her hands are rusted hinges

Because wisps of spider web float behind eyelids

Because her heart leaks and something has palmed a piece of one lung

Because her body is test tube

4.

Tomorrow she will be outside again, offering up her sweat to the sun as she tends the perennials and sluices water, working her garden, which is purpose, which is happiness— even as petal and pistil we fall.

8 PMS.. Victoria McArtor

A Good Seasonal Depression

With the oneiric gun at my head, the trigger leaks sun

shine.

PMS.. 9 Inez D. Geller

Taffeta

My flesh then apricot pink, my flesh then pressed tight against a cousin’s dress fitted close around my waist, fiery rubies of dubious taste, bolted in lobes above Hollywood curls, bouncing, bouncing on wartime girls.

Wartime girls sweetly fragrant exuding Evening in Paris scent adorned with gems fake opulent.

Emerald green, blue-flame sapphire, flamboyant Five & Dime glass finery, flaunting eager callow desire, a pretense sophistry guileless smart, to capture a sailor’s gaze, seduce a soldier’s heart. I danced too fast in a neighborhood park, wide skirt billowing in shades of dark. Moonlight green in the magic Bronx night, a ghetto girl gorgeous under natural light. Taffeta, taffeta, your silk faded too soon,

10 PMS.. I wanted more from the summer, much more from the moon. More from the music, the erotic tango beat, more from the wild perfume of my body’s heat.

PMS.. 11 Judith O’Connell Hoyer

Folding Sheets

I do remember folding sheets with her winter stiff from the line. They’d wilt inside. She held two corners. I knelt and found mine. We stretched it tight. The sounds were flitter and flap. She was my opposite, my mother. We brought the ends together and pulled again. I stepped toward her. She took the sheet pinned it under her chin and brought the bottom up to meet the top a kind of curtsy. It never got better than that.

12 PMS.. Jessica Jacobs

Black Abstraction

Georgia O’Keeffe (en route to New Mexico; 1935)

Past the land buzzcut for spring planting, stray husks skittering the hard-packed road, past

Missouri smokestacks panting gray-edged prayers to the fields that lie empty as waiting walls. Days my window-propped elbow grows shades darker than the rest of me, I would crush every passing thing—rust-red silos, scrub oaks’ hardscrabble green, the mountains blue with distance— grind it to powder I could cut with this sky’s titanium white to paint it all whole again.

I’ve never known you to make a trip to photograph. While the men speak of America and never travel west

PMS.. 13 of the Hudson, I want to take the country in and make it me. Far from New York, which is brighter by night, I cross into Texas where the dusk ignites marigold and smolders fast to bone black. A hard right brings me to desert. I stop. The air is cold but the car’s bonnet is warm beneath my shoulders. So dark there is no horizon: all feels like sky. In such nowhere, my eyes can hear: the ticking engine, lowing cattle, loud light of the stars.

14 PMS.. Hilary Sideris

My Bluff

I built up speed on Temple Hill, breathed in heather & gorse, flew my bike over glory bumps, into craters dug by Satan’s bombs on London’s burnt periphery, a puny yokel with a monkey face, out-pedaling Huns.

PMS.. 15 Melissa Boston

Edna, Sleeping at Grand Isle

What else could she be but body parts laid out, naked, on white sheets that swallow her?

The sea-mouth dampened by sweat, I would part only those lips to save her. With the single touch of my finger- tip to that soft sea the salt would gather into a solid mass. How many creatures, us included, would come to lick it down when awakened? Her body breaks into water only to dry into the winding sheeted-sea.

16 PMS.. Mia Sara

Sonny Jim

Wind has chapped me. Moon has struck me. Swallow your bile, the taxi is waiting. Waste, Waste, Waste, I pull at the threads, I, who was copied and pasted this morning. It is 5:15 p.m. in Hollywood, and I am stalling, and here’s that horizon I want to break the back of with whiskey and wine and ginger; down the hatch. O’, Sonny Jim, who runs before walking, the ground beneath us will swallow you up. But he’s not having it, not any part of it. What is there left for me to do? I’ve needled my mind and hit pay dirt; I have only myself to blame. Over the yard arm, when I am buzzed again, sitting on my hands, because I love him. Might as well watch CNN! Heave, Heave, coiled and useless bloviations. Truth is here, in the doldrums. In the dark we make our bones, and a child will deliver us into the dust.

PMS.. 17 Tina Parker

Sunday Night

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. —Matthew 25:40

I locked the car door fast. He stood there a moment longer. His hair unwashed, eyes streaked red.

It was Jesus. I was sure. Just as our church lesson said: he was there among the least of us, and what would I do to help him?

My mother fumbled for her keys. I searched his eyes for what he might need. His hand went low, yanked the zipper. His body opened to me.

My mother’s fear fogged the glass and we drove off. My eyes blinked tears for what I could not ask: did this make us the first who shall one day be last?

18 PMS.. Tina Parker

Raising Jesus did you pin his arms and hold him down Mary did you smack his legs did he ever make you cry Mary did you take a deep breath count to ten Mary I bet you just held it in didn’t you Mary did you hear him say mama again and cringe and sigh were you relieved when it was a temple day Mary did you dream those dreams Mary where you see him hurt or worse did you wake in prayer Mary did you ask God to let you die first

PMS.. 19 Susan Terris

O’Keeffe Country

Tanque verde and mesquite. Saguaro and chollo. Atop an ersatz O’Keeffe skull, crosshatch of a bird’s nest. Spider on the wall, lizard in the path, thumbnail frog, his body rust-speckled. Here, oleander spikes its lethal pink, and paper wasps kiss the porch roof.

Beyond—brown-sugar canyons, chink and whine of unseen creatures, shimmer of mirage.

Then return to the cul-de-sac. Hear whispers of confusion, cushioned steps. See the just-built house, alignment of new towels and sheets, plates and bowls, tables without rings, mirrors with no reflection. Control is a factor. Safety comes at a price.

Heat of the sun, cold half-moon, whisk of coded words: buy me, love me, make me a story.

Breathe chlorine fumes on a sunken treadmill, but do not grieve for what has been lost. Don’t notice the dead dog’s leash by the door, drips beneath the monogrammed golf cart. Ignore the air conditioner’s defiant hum and how the potted palm sheds its fibrous leaves.

This is a desert Brigadoon—scene that unfolds as you approach. Believe and it will endure.

20 PMS.. Phones ring. Help comes. Peace has its price, and language begs for understanding. Wasps, poisoned and paralyzed, fall to the deck. The bird’s nest is undone, yet the lizard stays camouflaged by oleander. Frog waits by the dark pool beneath the golf cart.

Spider lurks in a light well, spider who will write the morning’s secrets in her web.

A white-tailed kite screes across the sky. Nothing here has substance except the chollo and saguaro, except mesquite and tanque verde. Trees are crouching, the cactus poised to strike. A mirage within a mirage. Unreel the real. Blink and all else will vanish.

PMS.. 21 Suzanne M. Levine

Eve, Poland, 1942

In this boxcar, I stand against the rough collar of an old man’s coat. How close we are with my son Abel, his boy-face blank, looking far past seven years, pressed hard to my belly. If you see my older, hazel-eyed boy with the runaway curls, tell him I see him in sun motes through the cracks and reach to keep him too.

22 PMS.. Suzanne M. Levine

United Air

Lines of flocking birds on electric wires perch evenly abreast because proximity determines the distance between peace and discord. In Fenwick, ruffled feathers are private affairs, except when September swallows the humidity of summer, and sex under the skirted umbrella tree seems innocent and worlds away from a deep August kiss lit by Perseus shooting fireballs and stars into the almost oblivious Sound when the little death comes.

PMS.. 23 Carrie Jerrell

Love Poem for Route 66

I knew you from the womb. I grew with the ghost towns you ran through, but I recall you beautiful in your tragedy, trimmed in sinking trinket shops and the too-blue, unguarded motel pools of Flagstaff, Needles, Tucumcari. Every morning, you spoke to me through the tabloids. You gave me a new name: Meryl, Sigourney, Farrah. I fooled filling station attendants. I charmed the diner waitresses. What is the sublime if not a bank of violet clouds draped over your horizon? If not the luxury of days spent gazing into landscape, inventing another life, then another? Oh Mother Road, Mother Road, where I saw my own mother, so often trapped in my mind as a cook in our kitchen, cradle a coyote pup the way she cradled my brother; where I watched my father fire a pistol into the saguaro— each day with you is a Rückenfigur still framed in my memory. How blissful it was to be frightened by you. How wild you made us to ourselves, how wild to each other.

24 PMS.. Bethany Mitchell, 2013

PMS.. 25 Carrie Jerrell

Love Poem for the Tallgrass Prairie

Dear wind I wish to succumb to, I find in the curves you carve from fine-grained loess the contours of my very own face, and I admire this landscape’s devotion to longing. The buttonbush longs for the river. The Flint Hills long for green blades. The bed tamped deep in big bluestem longs for the warmth of the buck last seen in a long-ago year without fire. I have lain in that bed, its shape like the whorl of a man’s shorn hair, and longed for the mercy of lightning. Could I know the prairie now as it was before the plow, before the knife, before the wagon and rifle, I would plunge headlong into switchgrass and ask it to swallow the length of my shadow, to thresh the longing from me. I would ask the blaze struck by the sky to bleed me red and real as the bodies of bison used to be, here in this invisible riot of roots, this furious ground, these coarse hills the flames’ blue lust burns each spring into blooming.

26 PMS.. Carrie Jerrell

Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip

Summer meant a cooler packed with pudding pops, ham and cheese on Wonder white, sweet tea brewed in bottles on the dash, Teen Beat, flip-flops, I Spy, and Def Leppard on cassette. Pursued by wanderlust, Dad taught us to map the route, heads bowed as one over the Rand McNally in pilgrimage to tourist shrines from Butte to Birmingham, Disney to Death Valley.

Now, it’s eighteen blocks to work and the landscape never changes. I long for yesteryear’s long hauls: my little brother’s off-key singing, my sister’s knock-knock jokes, the hopeful shape of Polaroids and roadside souvenirs, back when I looked forward to what the future was bringing.

PMS.. 27 Julie Marie Wade red

Take red, for example:

If you prick me, I bleed red I bleed bread and butter on hot days I bleed boys —and girls —and girls —and boys (tomboys sometimes) and schoolgirls and touchstones and trigger-happy gunmen I bleed red as Mississippi dark as the Mason-Dixon line red-dirt wide-eyed red-eye wide crying circle crying vine

If you prick me, split me open, shut me down, close me up like a clam, like a fan, shut me up, shut me down, (again), shut me down,

See how easy I bleed: cut free, cut loose,

28 PMS.. cut down to size, cut out of a catalogue, cut from a stained cloth, from a soiled rag— a red rag rusty as a broken nail, nailed to the wall nine times nine a clock cut into quarters and dimes times, dates, and places a clock without hands, without faces the spaces between minutes are still in time still in line with my rag time—

red red brown red white

PMS.. 29 Elya Braden

Sweeter than Today

I keep the ginger too long. It shrivels inside its snug, red mesh bag in the blue bowl on my speckled kitchen counter with the sweet yellow onions, the bulbed garlic cloves, and a solitary potato sprouting tender green buds, its allover eyes watching me, asking me, When? Each morning I glance at the ginger and imagine myself peeling it, slicing it, releasing its pungent flesh, boiling water in the crimson kettle on the black stove and pouring the steaming liquid over the spicy root, steeping its essence, quartering a fresh Meyer lemon picked from the gnarled tree in my backyard, squeezing in the juice, licking the tart, sticky residue off my fingers. But instead, I measure six cups of water into the stainless-steel coffeemaker, scoop six dark tablespoons of preground beans from the airtight canisters nested in the refrigerator door, flip the “on” switch and wait. It’s easier this way. The thought of all that peeling and slicing, boiling and pouring, picking and quartering and squeezing overwhelms me in the morning, when it’s all I can do to find my glasses, bundle myself into my winter robe, don my sheepskin slippers,

30 PMS.. and tromp down the stairs into the morning chill. So why do I hold on to this daily fantasy of ginger tea as I watch the ginger shrivel with age and neglect? It’s not too late, I must tell myself each day. I can still do it tomorrow. Is this how I stayed, one day, then another, and another in a withered marriage, imagining a tomorrow steeped in warmth, sweeter and spicier than today?

PMS.. 31 Jenny Burkholder

New Year’s Eve

Beebe, Arkansas 2011

Thousands of red-throated blackbirds drop from the sky, land with a thud against frozen packed mud, on car hoods, and empty streets, their imprints purpling the whole town. Nobody notices. Somewhere a helicopter hovers over a car crash on a desolate highway. Somewhere teens kiss with sloppy tongues in darkened closets. It is a beginning and an end, an Ouroboros. Like stones they litter open fields. Their red-blackness like the curves of a throat. For many the last day of the year has the scent of lemons, a divine prophecy: you will be sent a boat upon which you must sail.

32 PMS.. Kristi Carter

When a Ghost Touches Your Body

We wanted what any young couple wants: to have sex and for everything to be simple. But it wasn’t so. The river freezes over in winter and the washcloth dries twisted, like a ghost, after it touches your body—coiled in dermis and soap. I’d like you to have a picture of me looking the way I caught myself in the mirror today—my hair askance as if under clear water, the mole on my right ear over-pronounced, and my face, caught off-guard but not surprised. The same way I must have looked pinned under the men my mother prophesized, the ones whose shadows cast so far and long that even your fluorescent smile couldn’t dispel them. My love, what we wanted, we wanted a lie. A dream sold to us by movies and the smell of the ocean coming in through the curtains. Where fuck me and I love you are both copacetic. Where the dishes, the laundry, and our unborn children can all wait, wait, wait until we are dead and then, we are satisfied.

PMS.. 33 Naoko Fujimoto

Electric Bills

after the tsunami on 3/11/2011

You are part of a white field under wet sweaters. A tin box is tangled in your hair. In the box, there are electric bills that say, Have a bright day! If it is your spiritual message, I want to turn off the light.

I need a chair that my body drops into so I can dream about the smell of your neck.

Somebody yells, Is anyone alive?

…no, it snows here and it is difficult to close my eyes.

34 PMS.. Whitnee Thorp

Coal Sweet my mama recalls stories of her father whose lungs were black as the coal that weighted down his coffin on the day he died in july a man who drank milk with blackberries, packed his pipe with a nail-less thumb and she can’t remember shedding a tear or what hymn he’d hum in the truck or which flannel was his Sunday-best, but does remember it was the day she tasted cinnamon for the first time.

PMS.. 35 Yolanda Franklin

Vindictive Grace

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ / That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. —I Corinthians 12: 12 / 25

In the South in the Black South in the Black Southern family in the church in the Black church in the Black Southern church there are rules: there’s no church without Sunday no Sunday without school & no bypass without family or funerals without menus or Styrofoam plates of collards, cakes, & cornbread-hymns in the Black Southern church sermons to side pews, where collections of black ties & hats hum hands hold Popsicle-stick fans with advertisements & gossip

36 PMS.. in Dolby surround sound where funeral programs full of picture biography & still so what if you attended a Black college & studied electrical engineering & then were hired at Georgia Power & were a member of the union just to be close so you could drive to visit your daughter an hour away & only worked on weekdays & every other weekend the deacon & pastor still will say there’s just no heaven without a church home.

PMS.. 37 Juliana Gray

The Mobled Queen

From what honey-drenched dreams she woke, I cannot say; nor how long she clenched her bridegroom to her breast before she felt his sandbag weight, his softly cooling skin. She ran, looking half a ghost herself in her white gown—ran barefoot up and down the hall, knocking on the hotel doors. Frantic as Sue was, her knocks were soft; even then she hated to wake the guests so early. Her wedding dress the night before had been the color of champagne, but now, as I walk out and she whispers, “I can’t wake up your father,” her widow’s streaming gown is white.

38 PMS.. Juliana Gray

Thrift

Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.

We shower, make tearful calls, delay as long as we can, then drive to Sue’s to mourn with strangers, our unfamiliar family. Already the well-wishing mob has landed with food, plastic cups, a cooler of ice, as if tailgating for a team doomed to lose. Beside the pulled pork, buns and slaw left over from the wedding eve’s party, sit casseroles, chunks of watermelon, four storebought tubs of potato salad, an oblong box of Publix fried chicken. Already I am sick of sorry. I drink a beer, hold a plate of cold shrimp (another leftover), thinking if my hands are kept full, no one will try to hug me. Already I am sick. Some chatty woman reads the labels. New York Potato Salad? You’re from New York, aren’t you? What makes it New York style? I’m from Alabama. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that before. No, I live a long way from the city, five hours’ drive, the country, my father wed last night and died this morning, I don’t know you people, I don’t know.

PMS.. 39 Juliana Gray

Ophelia

One role my sister never played, though once she scrubbed at her hands on the most depressing stage in Atlanta. When she cried, “Out, out!” I hoped it was my cue to leave. But afterward, waiting for the Lady in the lobby, Dad looked wistful and said, “I know I’m biased, but I think she was the best thing in the play.” I bit my cheek—there was a best thing?— and clutched the congratulatory roses we’d bought.

Now her grief is real. She struts and frets across Dad’s empty patio, smoking, drinking wine, pouring into her phone some sad soliloquy I can’t hear. Through the kitchen window I see her pace, sobbing, her red hair streaming mermaid-like. Her fingers tremble around her glass. She lifts it high and hurls it down, another smashed to shards, so everyone can see she’s drowning.

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Alison Chapman

The Paradise Within

I drove from my office to the prison, idly watching the rural Alabama landscape and swallowing down my usual anxiety. After months of driv- ing this road, I had identified a series of worry landmarks. At the Church of God of Prophecy in Maytown, my stomach would still be calm. Ten miles later, as I passed the old barn with the wheel-less tractor inside, I would have mild butterflies. And at the left-hand turn just after the feed store and the Life Abounding Evangelical Congregation, I would feel a touch of queasiness. My stomach was letting me know how it felt about a regular teaching gig in the state’s worst prison. Months later on my drive out to Donaldson, I would swerve suddenly into Life Abounding’s empty parking lot. We were due for our last dis- cussion of Paradise Lost, the ending of Book 12 where Adam and Eve are expelled from bliss. My father had died two weeks before, and as I drove toward the prison thinking about the inmates, my dad, and Milton’s last image of fallen Adam and Eve wandering east of Eden, I had started to come undone. The tears fell quietly at first, but soon my escalating sobs made the steering wheel jerk in my hands. I veered half-blindly into the lot, parked at a cock-eyed angle under the marquee (“Free Trip to Heaven! Inquire Inside for Details!”), and waited for my inner storm to pass. After twenty minutes I gave up. I left a shaky message for Dr. Kathy Allen, the prison’s psychologist, and then I started my car and headed for home.

The William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility lies down a dead-end road about 45 minutes from the University of Alabama at Birmingham where I teach sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. The state of Alabama has several maximum-security prisons that merit a four on the five-point scale that ranks prison security levels. Donaldson alone gets a five. In the time I had been teaching there, class had been canceled three times because of inmate violence and once because the Department of Correction’s paramilitary squad had made a surprise visit to search for contraband.

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I was teaching at Donaldson because the inmates had asked me to. Specifically, Omar had asked me although I had not known his name at the time. He was just an older black man in the back of the large meeting room where I had been giving a talk on the English Reformation, part of my university’s annual prison lecture series. Paradise Lost came up briefly during the Q&A in context of writers working in adverse condi- tions (Milton was blind when he wrote it), and at the end of the evening, when I asked for one last question, Omar raised his hand and asked, “Would you come back and teach Paradise Lost to us?” He didn’t frame this absurd question or elaborate on it. He just delivered it straight and quiet, and then he sat very upright, regarding me steadily over the heads of the men sitting between us. For reasons that I could not explain, he reminded me immediately of my father. I held his eyes for several long heartbeats, and I knew that the answer would be “yes.” So began a dream-like period in which the literate minority of Donaldson’s inmates had a choice between reading seventeenth-century iambic pentameter with me or studying GED skills. State law at the time barred men serving life without parole sentences from taking Basic Education classes (presumably on the grounds that these skills would be wasted on them), so most inmates had a choice between Milton or stay- ing in bed. I’m sure the overcrowded cell blocks housed men who would have matched my worst stereotype of inmates as brutish, but the men who walked into my classroom were whip-smart and ready to learn. The class met in the “East Therapy Room,” a euphemistic name for a tiny cinderblock square right off the main corridor. The thick metal door was prone to lock shut if bumped from the outside, which pass- ing inmates often did in a spurt of malice, and my students had told me of being locked in for hours until a corrections officer thought to look through the palm-sized window. To keep the lock from engaging, the men kept the bolt hole stuffed with hard candies, the kind where the wrapper looks like a strawberry with a twist of green leaves at the top. The day we were to discuss Book 9, I was wearing black pants, a blue sweater, and a patterned silk scarf. In contrast, the plastic chairs were white, the cement walls were white, and the inmates wore white cotton uniforms, each man’s last name stenciled on his left breast. I had been cautioned not to wear white myself so that in the event of an emergency, officers could readily distinguish me from the inmates. I always felt like a peacock.

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I took my chair and saw that Omar, as usual, was right across from me, facing the door with his big hands cupping the ends of the armrests and his knees wide apart in a posture that reminded me of the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Kathy Allen had once said that Omar came early and took that seat so that he would be the first to see trouble coming in the door. He had touches of gray at his temples and shoulders that looked as wide as a yardstick. Whenever I entered the classroom, the inmates met me with a loud chorus of greetings, but Omar just raised his chin a few degrees and started his big, slow-motion smile. That morning, we were discussing the part of Book 9 where Satan enters the body of the snake. In a brief soliloquy before approaching Eve, Satan actually admits that he will not benefit from what is he about to do. He only hopes “others to make such / As I, though thereby worse to me redound.” He adds, “For only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts.” I had noticed before how much my inmate students identified with Satan’s self-justifications and moral evasions. Now I was curious to know if the Satanic psychology expressed here matched their experience in other ways. “Has Milton gotten it right?” I asked the group. “I mean, is there a point at which human beings want to destroy for the sheer pleasure of destruction, even if it means more pain for them?” Conversation had been lively to that point, but now most of the class sat silent, looking down at their texts. John, an older inmate with a grey crew cut, said vaguely, “I’ve seen some bad dudes in here….” Then he looked around uneasily and trailed off. “Yes?” I said expectantly, encouraging him to go on. John looked down and shifted in his chair. Then Omar said in his deep orator’s voice, “We are here to celebrate life.” Leaving his elbows on the arms of his chair, he raised his hands so that his fingertips pointed upward. At first, he didn’t look at me. Instead, he sent his eyes around the circle, waiting for a nod of agreement from each inmate. Then he gave me a look that said “Alison, you shouldn’t ask these things.” My cheeks burned with embarrassment on the drive home, and I hardly noticed the usual houses and roadside litter. What had I been thinking? I forced myself to look dispassionately at the reasons for my intrusive curiosity. Here was my Donaldson dilemma: I increasingly

PMS.. 45 Chapman looked forward to that grim little classroom, but the more I enjoyed myself, the more urgently I wanted to understand my students. Were they sociopaths and child molesters, men simply putting on a convinc- ing show of human decency for my sake? Or had they once made bad decisions that they now regretted? Or some combination of both? Omar made my dilemma more acute. When I walked in that classroom and saw his brown eyes soften, I felt a profound and inexplicable sense of rec- ognition. He was so like my father. But it was also unnerving to be fond of a man serving life without parole in a prison specially built to house violent repeat offenders. I was left with two irreconcilable statements of fact: “I care for this man” and “I know almost nothing about him.” And now Omar himself had just firmly cut off my attempt to learn more about these men, which was fundamentally an attempt to learn more about him.

In hindsight, I’m pretty sure that my father knew that he was dying the day he went to Donaldson with me. A retired surgeon, he couldn’t retreat into rosy medical fictions, and I think he guessed that his persistent fatigue and malaise meant that his lymphoma, in remission for years, was inching back. Despite my enthusiasm, Dad hadn’t liked the idea of me teaching at Donaldson. He had assumed that an officer sat in the room with me, but when I told him it was just me and the inmates, he asked, “What’s to keep one of them from taking you hostage with a paper clip?” When I mentioned his concern to Kathy, she said “Why don’t you bring him to the next class? I’ll arrange it with the warden.” As Kathy, Dad and I waited for the huge, radio-controlled riot gates to slide open and allow us access to Donaldson’s main corridor, I glanced sidelong at my dad to see how he was taking his surroundings. Kathy acted as prison tour guide, and I trailed behind the two of them, listen- ing to her running commentary and watching the passing inmates. Most of them looked back over their shoulders at us. I had grown accustomed to being stared at inside the prison (women in street clothes are a rare sight), but these looks were different—less predatory and more wonder- ing. Later, when I asked Kathy about this, she cocked an eyebrow at me and asked, “Alison, when’s the last time that an obvious father/daughter pair walked down these halls?” When Dad and I stepped into the East Therapy room, the hum of conversation stopped abruptly, and fifteen pairs of eyes widened in

46 PMS.. poemmemoirstory surprise. Gratified at the reaction, I said with a self-conscious smile, “Hi guys. I brought a guest this week. This is my father, Lee.” At this, Omar suddenly stood, as if forcibly tugged from his white plastic chair. He faced my Dad, and I noticed that they were the same size and build—over six feet with long arms. I thought they were prob- ably the same age too, late sixties. Then Omar inclined his head forward in a dignified little bow, somehow making the old-fashioned gesture seem natural. Straightening, he said, “Sir, I want to speak for all of us and say that we are honored to have you here today.” He laid extra stress on the word “honored,” and his voice cracked a little as he said it. During class, Dad sat four spaces to my right, his head bent atten- tively over his copy of Paradise Lost like the rest of us. I was proud of my inmate students. They made especially intelligent comments that day, and I grinned to myself at the realization that they were showing off for their visitor. At the end of class, Dad and I got up to go, and I fielded the usual questions about the upcoming reading. Omar stood up again, stepped toward my dad, and I heard him say, “We really appreciate your daughter coming here.” I saw Dad’s head swing around sharply. He studied Omar, and Omar stood and accepted the scrutiny, meeting my Dad’s assessing gaze with an open one of his own, as if to say, “You see that my intentions are good.” Then something in the look between them deepened and changed. My dad was white and highly educated. He was a devout Protestant, a father, a husband, and a respected doctor. Omar was a black, single, high-school dropout who had converted to Islam in prison and become an imam. Yet as I looked at these two tall, calm men looking at each other, I sensed a fundamental kinship between them, as if each man looked at the other and saw what he could have been under other circumstances. And then I sensed that they were both aware of me regarding them and that each understood and approved the other’s thoughts. Dad didn’t say much on the way home. I drove, and he looked out the window with the distant stare of one not really seeing the landscape. At first, I wanted very badly to ask what had happened between him and Omar, what messages had been sent and received. But whatever strange connection had flickered briefly into being in that grubby classroom would not become more real for being discussed. So after ten minutes of companionable silence, I simply asked Dad, “Are you still uncomfortable with me teaching there?”

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He was thoughtful for a moment, and then he shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”

A series of tuberculosis outbreaks put Donaldson on quarantine for the next three months. The day I drove out to teach Book 11, a new officer at the main entrance regarded me suspiciously and took five minutes to decide that my silver loop earrings were not a security violation. Kathy looked harried. She said that the quarantines had put everyone on edge. As we walked down the corridor, I could see Omar in the distance stand- ing at an intersection where a side hallway leads through the musty law library. We neared him, but instead of his usual broad smile, he gave me only a restrained little nod, and then he pulled Kathy aside for a whis- pered conference. I waited for them and watched the hall officer yelling to a group of inmates coming out of a cell block. Twice Omar tilted his head toward me, and Kathy glanced at me in surprise. I heard her say, “Of course I’ll tell her if you want me to.” Omar turned and looked at me with sad eyes, and then he strode off. Kathy led me around the corner into her office, an oasis of tatty bureaucratic normalcy. I sat in the plain metal chair at the end of her desk, glancing at the crammed bookshelf that serves as one of Donaldson’s main lending libraries. “Omar wants you to know that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer,” she said. “He had the final meeting with the oncologist yesterday.” I sat quiet for several seconds, and then I asked, “How long does he have?” “It’s hard to say. The tumor is pretty big, so maybe just three or four months. He hadn’t been feeling bad, so the diagnosis was quite a shock.” She added, “I’m surprised that he asked me to tell you. He’s keeping it a secret until we know more. He told his sister, of course, but only one inmate knows.” I looked out Kathy’s narrow office window. Her view perfectly framed one of Donaldson’s tall perimeter watchtowers. “What does death …look like here?” I asked, gesturing at the walls around me. This was my clumsy attempt to ask about the logistics of dying in prison. “We have a new hospice unit in the infirmary, so Omar will move there once he gets too sick for the general population,” she said.

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Because of the nationwide trend toward longer sentences, more inmates are dying in custody, and so a few states have begun experiment- ing with internal hospice programs. Without these, terminally ill inmates are shipped out under double guard to area hospitals where they die handcuffed to a bed. Donaldson’s new hospice program allowed long- term inmates to die at home, such as it was. As Kathy printed out an attendance sheet for the class and attached it to a clipboard, she added, “There’s a chance that Omar could be released under a new medical furlough law. He meets all the criteria: he’s over 65, terminally ill and in for non-violent crimes. But it’s a brand new law, and the procedures for applying it haven’t been created yet. So it all depends on whether the state office can create the paperwork and get it signed by the governor in time.” I hesitated and then asked cautiously, “Will you tell me more about Omar and why he’s here?” Kathy considered the question and then nodded. She put her clip- board down, settled back in her creaky office chair, and told me what she knew. Omar had been raised in a clean, quiet home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by an emotionally distant mother. He was a good student with a nice girlfriend. Then at eighteen, he discovered cocaine. After two convictions for forgery and a third for burglary, he was sentenced to life without parole under Alabama’s notorious Habitual Felony Offenders Act. He had been at Donaldson for the past 26 years. Kathy concluded, “He’s tried very hard to be a good man.” Omar came late to class that day. He stepped across the room in two big strides and sat in his usual chair with his head leaning back in fatigue against the cinderblock wall. In Book 11, God sends down the archangel Michael to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden: “Without remorse, drive out the sinful Pair.” Michael is also charged to give Adam a vision of the future. The warrior angel says, “know I am sent / To shew thee what shall come in future days / To thee and thy Offspring.” In the visionary film reel that follows, Adam sees first one son murdering another and then all the forms of ill- ness, lust, betrayal, and war that will afflict his descendants. Michael says that this vision is intended to help Adam learn “True patience,” but the instruction is a brutal one. Adam’s fallen task is to walk serenely into the future knowing exactly what miseries it will bring. As the class talked about the tragedy of knowing the future, I

PMS.. 49 Chapman occasionally glanced across at Omar. He sat watching me, his dark choc- olate eyes thoughtful and affectionate, and I found it hard to look away. At the end of class, I stood up and said my usual goodbyes, and I turned toward him. I had been forbidden to shake hands with the inmates, and since his illness was a secret, I couldn’t say anything in front of the oth- ers. So for a few long seconds, we just looked at each other, and then I turned and left.

I didn’t go back to Donaldson the next month or even the month after that, although I thought of the men often. About a week after I heaved my heart into my eyes and looked at Omar, Dad entered hospice care as his health followed cancer’s steepening parabolic arc toward death. Four weeks later, I fell down the stairs and shattered my left ankle. The first of my three surgeries was particularly hideous, and since my prescribed Demerol was hardly touching the pain, Dad sent over a vial of his mor- phine and a slip of paper with dosing instructions. I later teased him on the phone about trading illegally in narcotics. He chuckled and said, “So what are they going to do to me?” A week after the second surgery, I still wasn’t fit to be left alone, but my husband needed to get back to work. The solution was for me to spend the day at Mom and Dad’s house. When my dad had retired from surgery, he and Mom had sold their home in an upscale, azalea-filled suburb and had bought a nearby town house. With the steady advance of illness, Dad’s world had shrunk to the master bedroom with its king- sized bed and two floor-length windows framed by long linen drapes. Every day for the next two weeks, Dad got one half of the bed, and I got the other. We watched TV together and took naps. I read a mystery novel, and Dad read the paper. Mom moved in and out with drinks, food, and icepacks for my leg. The second morning, Mom brought in a tray that had two glasses of ice water and two neat rows of pills, one for me and one for him, each on its own paper napkin. Dad looked at the rows of capsules and tablets, and then he surveyed the two of us lying parallel on the bed. He said, “We sure planned this well, didn’t we?” I gave a snort of laughter and then had to work to keep it from turning into sobbing. To my surprise, we never discussed his impending death. There was no denial here. Both of us knew that while I was healing, he was dying,

50 PMS.. poemmemoirstory and every day his face looked more haggard. Nor did we talk about religion. Dad had the kind of profound Christian faith that showed itself more in actions than in words. I had grown up wrapped in a thick, warm blanket of belief, but although I still went regularly to a Presbyterian church, I thought a lot about the verse where God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways,” concluding that any idea I had about God was probably wrong. Instead of the big questions, Dad and I talked instead about the gentle realities of life—dogs, children, memories of family trips, food, and music. Most of all, we worked cross- word puzzles together, the hardest ones Mom could find. Dad was always the scribe since he had neater handwriting, and I nestled close to him like I had as a child when he read to me at night. We bickered content- edly over possible answers, and when we finished the last square, Dad would lift up a shaky, gaunt hand for a high five. By the middle of the second week, I felt well enough to bring my lap- top and The Riverside Milton with me. I propped the big book up on my knees and thought about how to structure the next semester’s Milton syllabus. I looked over at Dad and saw that he had fallen asleep with his hand still cupping a pencil. I gently slid it free and laid it atop the crossword puzzle book at his side. As I did so, I found my thoughts going to Omar. I had called Kathy Allen a few days before, and she said that Omar had been moved from his cell block to the hospice wing. “Any chance I could visit when I get more mobile?” I had asked. “Alison, no officer is going to allow you into this place on crutches,” she said. Since then, I had worried daily that Omar’s liver would fail before my ankle knit itself back together. I had broken the prison’s rules governing contact with inmates and had sent Omar a sympathy card. Now, thinking about the ravages of illness, I paged through Paradise Lost until I found the passage in Book 11 where Adam is shown a vision of a hospital “…wherein were laid / Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies / Of gastly Spasms, or racking torture, qualmes / Of heart-sick Agonie.” Adam cries out at the realization of what he has inflicted on his progeny: “O miserable Mankind, … Why is life giv’n / To be thus wrested from us?” “What are you thinking about?” Dad asked in a weak, raspy voice. I looked over and saw that he had woken and was watching me.

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“Just reviewing what I’m going to teach in a few weeks,” I said. Dad was quiet for a long time, and I noticed a sheen of sweat on his cheekbones. I wondered if we needed to raise the dose on his morphine. “Remind me of that inmate’s name,” he asked suddenly. I knew who he meant. “O m ar.” “Tell me what you know about Omar.” I told Dad all I knew about Omar’s past, and then I described his liver cancer and the possibility of medical furlough under the new law. Dad nodded, and we fell quiet, pursuing our own thoughts. Then he said, “The next time you’re at Donaldson, tell Omar…” He trailed off, and I waited. When he didn’t go on, I looked a ques- tion at him. Dad rolled his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes, and said toward the ceiling, “Just tell him that I think of him.” A few minutes later, Mom came in with his morning dose of morphine, and he was soon asleep. Within a day or two, I was well enough to stay home on my own, and my dad got his big bed to himself, his own form of solitary confinement. Within two weeks, he was too weak to sit up on his own, and so Mom replaced the king-sized bed with a rented hospital bed. I made daily vis- its, crutching down the hallway to his room. He grew more lethargic each day as his body chemistry spiraled out of control and his mind hazed over. The afternoon I was being fitted for a walking cast, Mom called and said, “Can you come now? I think this is it.” When I arrived, Dad was unconscious. I sat quietly beside the bed and simply watched his chest rise and fall until it didn’t anymore. Three hours later, the bustle was over. Dad’s body had been wheeled out by funeral home attendants, and his medicines counted and flushed down the toilet by the hospice nurse. I gave my Mom a hug and drove home, realizing that I felt curiously light-hearted, happy for all our sakes that the suffering was over.

A month later, I drove out to Donaldson to teach Book 12. I had finally graduated from the walking cast to a cane and a lace-up ankle brace. Kathy had told me that the cane wasn’t even an option and that even a visible limp might get me turned away at the front gate—visitors had to be able to move quickly in the event of an emergency. So I swallowed four extra-strength Tylenols, disguised the brace under thick socks, and tried to walk into the prison as normally as the pain levels would allow.

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When I saw Kathy in the main building, I asked, “How’s Omar?” “He’s still in the hospice unit,” she said. “He’s been pretty sick, but he’s better now.” “Any news on his furlough?” “No,” she said. “We’ve submitted his application, but there’s been no word from the state’s end.” She didn’t say much as we walked down the hall. Then as we neared the classroom door, she asked, “Do you want to drop by after class and see him?” Two hours later after a poignant discussion of the last scenes of Paradise Lost, I stood behind Kathy as she tugged at the heavy steel door labeled “Infirmary.” We walked past a line of men in handcuffs wait- ing for sick call, around a corner, then past a row of open toilets. Kathy paused outside a door labeled “Room B” and said, “I’m not supposed to let you in here without an officer present, so we can’t stay long.” “I brought someone to visit you,” she announced as she walked into the room. Omar was lying in a hospital bed, a white sheet drawn up to his waist and a newspaper open on his knees. He looked up blankly as the door opened. It took a long moment for him to register who his guest was, and when he did, he put his head back and laughed out loud. The hospice ward at Donaldson consisted of just one room. A win- dow looked out on a corner of the prison grounds. Omar was the only patient. A middle-aged white inmate with gang tattoos on his bald head was serving as his attendant, and he slipped out to refill Omar’s cup. Kathy sat on one of the empty beds while I stood right beside him, my left thigh touching the side of his mattress. This was the closest I had ever been to him. “You are the very person I have been thinking about,” he said to me, beaming. “I knew you were here today, but I just couldn’t make it to class. What did I miss?” It had been strange not to have Omar in the classroom that morning. By the end of Book 12, Adam says he has finally learned the lesson he should have known all along, to obey God and be content with what he has. The archangel responds that if Adam can add to this knowledge all the forms of human kindness, “then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far.” “The guys asked me to come back and teach some Shakespeare,” I said.

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He chuckled. “We started hatching that idea months ago. What did you say?” “I told them yes,” I said, remembering that earlier lecture when Omar had made a similar request and I had given a similar answer. “How are you feeling?” I asked. Kathy and Omar talked about his condition, primarily for my benefit. Kathy said, “At the moment, Omar’s stable enough to go back into the prison’s general population. But since the news of his furlough applica- tion is out, the warden thought it would be safer for him to stay here.” I looked a question at her, and she clarified, “There are men here who would hurt him because he has a chance of getting out.” I stood very still at this, as if physical immobility could help me understand the enormity of what she had just said. Kathy and Omar gave each other a look that told me that they knew precisely who and what she was talking about. I said to Omar, “I have been treated with such courtesy in this place that it’s easy for me to forget what must really go on here.” He said with pride, “My goal has been to protect you from knowing what goes on here.” Kathy glanced at the door, and I knew that she was ready to go. “Have you been doing much reading?” I asked. He shrugged. “I’ve mainly been thinking. I’m trying to get myself organized.” He enunciated all three syllables of “organized,” and I knew that he meant he was thinking about death and the dwindling likelihood of release. “Now that’s a big job,” Kathy said with a grin. She stood and reached for the door handle. I looked at Omar and said, “My father asked about you before he died.” Omar opened his mouth, but at first no sound came out. “He did?” He suddenly looked on the edge of tears. I smiled and nodded. Then his words came in a sudden rush. “Alison, you cannot imagine how much I wanted to impress your father that day. It just came over me when he walked into the room. I wanted him to know how much we all respect you, and I wanted him to respect me, even if it was just a little bit. And I think he actually did. At least, he looked like it.”

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Then he added, “That was the best day I’ve had in the last twenty y e ar s .” I didn’t know what to say so I reached out and placed my hand on top of his knee, feeling the smooth fabric of the sheet, and beneath that, the hard bone of his kneecap. It was the only time I ever touched him. Then I turned and followed Kathy out. As the door swung to, I tilted to the side a bit so that I could get one last look through the narrowing crack. Omar was looking at me with that same steady tenderness, and then the door closed.

A month after putting my hand on Omar’s kneecap, I sat in the Donaldson’s front atrium waiting for Kathy to escort me into the prison. The inmates and I were due to begin our series of Shakespeare plays, and I had decided to start with King Lear. Kathy and I made small talk until we passed through the double security doors, and then I asked the important question. “How’s Omar doing?” I was hoping I might be invited into the infirmary to see him again, and I had rescheduled a midday meeting so that I would not have to hurry back to campus. Kathy stopped short and looked at me with widened eyes. “I thought you knew,” she said. “He died ten days ago.” “No, I had no idea!” I said. “No one told me.” “Alison, I’m so sorry. I simply forgot to let you know.” And then I asked another question, dreading the answer: “Did he die here?” She smiled and shook her head. The two of us stood in the middle of the corridor, and I hardly noticed the inmates streaming past us. Kathy said that the warden had had a call from the state office saying that Omar’s medical release had been approved and he was free to go. He was too weak to walk, so Kathy and two officers had physically lifted him into the backseat of his sister’s waiting sedan. Omar’s sister took him home, and that evening, when she came into his bedroom with a drink of water and his medicine, he looked around the room, smiled, and said, “This is my sanctuary.” The next morning, he was dead, the first inmate in Alabama released under the medical furlough law.

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Although I have never visited his grave, I understand that Omar was buried in an Islamic cemetery, his head facing east toward Mecca. I have only been to my father’s grave once, on the bright, dewy morning when we buried him near a spreading live oak at the back of the cemetery. I honor these two men instead by thinking of the places where they seemed so improbably at peace: a king-sized bed with a crossword puzzle book lying on the bedside table, and a prison hospice room with thin sunlight streaming through the single window.

56 PMS.. Heal McKnight

Traffic

The sun’s going down, sliding unceremoniously out of a newsprint-col- ored sky, and the two of us are walking together past piles of grimy snow. Rennie’s boots clump against the sidewalk, laces flopping, and her down jacket makes a puffy noise each time she swings her arms. Otherwise, she’s mostly silent beside me. Her coat’s unzipped and crooked, her back- pack a complicated bulge of half-finished math papers jammed in with her doll, her doll’s blanket, and her clothes from Saturday. We’re walking toward the busy street that separates my house from her other mom’s. Ren’s in second grade. She’s been growing out her bangs all year, but they still won’t quite stay tucked behind her ears. She pushes them back now with her mittens, and the static sticks them to her forehead, right in her line of vision. I hear her sigh. Seven seems to be a year of physi- cal chaos, hands that suddenly struggle with pencils and shoelaces and other kids’ new glasses. A medley of baby teeth and adult teeth. A body between eras. She’s wearing fuchsia leggings with a white streak of sci- ence experiment spilled down one side and a left knee that’s mostly hole. She believes they are beautiful. In second-grade terminology, ‘beautiful’ is something I’ve given up on understanding: it’s these leggings, the glit- tery shoes Jasmine has for gym, a red plastic hair band so glamorous you have to walk differently when you try it on. We make this same walk every weekend now, back to Shelley’s by five on Sundays, and once a week after Thursday dinner. Most nights we run, Ren speeding ahead while I chase her, whinnying and snorting, and I wonder what to make of it. I can’t quite tell whether we’re running for fun, one last burst of muscles to close down our time together, or whether she really wants to get away and back to Shelley’s house, wants me to see how she looks as a speck on the horizon. Sometimes she looks back and sometimes she doesn’t; sometimes she waits for me before the last corner and other times she takes it on flying feet, and I have to hustle to catch up. But this particular time, we’re walking side by side and slow. “I have a plan for in case I ever run out into traffic,” Ren tells me once we can see

PMS.. 57 McKnight the house we all used to live in. “Here’s how it goes: I make it across the first half of the street, because I’m really really fast. When I get to the yel- low line, I freeze.” She freezes, arms glued to her sides, her hands in sud- den fists. “Cars going this way can’t get me, and cars going that way can’t get me. Nobody can drive on the yellow line because it doesn’t really belong to anybody. So I would be safe.” I imagine the blunt city buses and family sedans, Ren stock-still in the middle of it all. Most side mirrors would whiz past her chin-high. I try to touch her shoulder, and she walks a little more quickly. “I dunno, Bub,” I say. “The yellow line doesn’t seem all that safe to me. What if you just didn’t run into traffic in the first place?” “I would be safe.” Her teeth are clamped. “I would be fine.” We wait for the break in traffic, and she makes the usual disgruntled noise when I ask her to hold my hand across the street. Once we’re on the other side she barely slows for the kiss I leave on her head. She still smells like a puppy. “I love you, Bub,” I say, from the sidewalk, as close as Shelley allows me to come to the house. “Have a good night. See you Thursday.” She says nothing back, just the slap slap slap of her feet, and then the fast bang of a storm door and the click of the porch light some- body always turns off right away.

Shelley and I are working out custody stuff on our own, I tell people. We should clean up our own mess, I say, and Family Court isn’t exactly hospitable to lesbian families breaking up. I’ve talked to a lawyer who’s explained the terrain, most of which I knew already: If one of us were a man Rennie would be legally linked to both of us, whether or not we were both her biological parents, whether or not we were married—if we’d both acted like Ren’s parents, we would both be Ren’s parents. If we were a straight couple splitting, court would compel us to share Ren’s time equally. She’d belong in both households, even when those house- holds don’t feel much like sharing. It’s not that way for lesbian families. Our state won’t recognize two legal parents of the same sex. So it doesn’t matter that Shelley and I planned Ren together, starting early in our ten years as a couple. It doesn’t matter that Ren’s called us Mama and Mimi since her first few words, or that she had both our last names hyphenated, or that until this last year we’ve teamed up pretty well even on the difficult days. The state statutes are clear: Shelley gave birth, so she’s the sole legal parent. I could

58 PMS.. poemmemoirstory file a suit in Family Court, the lawyer said, burning through a few thou- sand dollars just trying to convince a judge to hear our dispute. The best I can hope for, the lawyer said, is the legal designation “parent-like rela- tionship.” I’d likely get visitation with Ren…it’s just that no one knows how much. That’s the big risk here, the lawyer said—once you bring court into the process, you’re bound by a judge’s decision. You might get a homophobic judge. You might be awarded time that’s only symbolic, so you could wind up seeing Ren just once a year. It’s happened, the lawyer said. So I tell people Shelley and I are trying to figure things out on our own, though that sounds more cooperative than it really is. Our beliefs about Ren’s best interests don’t overlap much these days, and Shelley’s e-mails usually end the same way—I am the legal parent. I will decide what’s best.

When I walk back to my apartment the sky feels one shade darker. Ours is the kind of neighborhood that smells vaguely like car trouble, a neigh- borhood people drive through because they’ve discovered a shortcut or move to because it’s one of the last places they can afford a house. Some blocks are on a slow, halting upswing, but around the corners most hous- es are still waiting. We’ve got fixer-uppers with soggy porches. Federally- funded housing for senior citizens. A liquor store by the train tracks. A big blocky Vend-A-Bait machine out front where people buy nightcrawl- ers for $1.50 in change before walking out on the railroad trestle, fishing illegally from the tracks, drinking illegally from 40-ouncers. I got the apartment cheap, the slope-roofed upper floor of an old house that gets good sun in the late afternoon. It’s a block and a half from where Shelley and Ren still live, just around the corner from her school, and when I found the place I pictured her stopping by on her way home, grabbing a snack, maybe asking me for a ride somewhere later. Or calling my name when she and her friends walk past on their way to the playground. So I signed the lease and settled in. The place is covered in fluffy carpeting, the variegated kind downstairs landlords put in to disguise noise and spills, the kind that when you first lie down on it, it smells like too many other people, but then quietly becomes the smell of something resem- bling home. I knew, but didn’t exactly want to know, that spontaneous dropping- by might never happen and that Shelley would start requiring Ren to

PMS.. 59 McKnight take the long way to the playground. I didn’t know about my old jour- nals, which Shelley photocopied and read to the neighbors, who told me later that they felt awkward about it but couldn’t seem to stop her. It’s all wrong anyway, Shelley says. The stuff you wrote about us, about me, she says, half of it never happened. The other half of it didn’t happen that way. All lies. I have proof. I’ve called lawyers.

I stayed for ten years. I stayed for Rennie, for the house Shelley and I fixed up together, because our time had started out sweetly enough, because in my Midwestern family we are mature about disappointment. I stayed because I wanted to do this right, to be an enthusiastic family lesbian, the kind people on buses smile at and librarians compliment and grandparents show pictures of. I stayed because moms stay. Then I couldn’t. Leaving was hard to defend after willing myself so hard to stay. But I fell completely out of character when I found I could imagine loving someone else and being loved back. When I felt myself falling fast. When I left.

I left over a year ago, in January of Ren’s first grade, when kids’ lunch- boxes start looking worn, right after the second round of book orders on thin floppy paper, when teeth rain out of classmates’ mouths and get put right away into tiny plastic treasure boxes from the nurse. On a Friday after school I went to Ren’s classroom, scuffed and cluttered with the tools of learning, rumpled workbooks and permanent colonies of small scissors, an aquarium with a turtle on loan. I sat down near some construction paper projects about cells, listened to my own bloodstream in my own ears, and told the teacher what was happening in our family. Shelley and I are separating, I said. I’ll move out soon. Rennie will know this when she comes back on Monday. I watched her think about Rennie—maybe imagining the minutes I couldn’t imagine then, when Rennie would get the news for the first time, and then all the minutes before it would really start to sink in. “This is so hard for kids,” the teacher said. “She’ll need to talk about it.” I wished the teacher wanted to know more. I wanted to tell her how hard I tried with Shelley—or how hard I thought I was trying, because the try- ing felt so hard. I wanted her to know about the trudging afternoons of counseling, the therapist suggesting I could just reframe things. Shelley can’t tell you much right now, said the therapist, so try thinking of her as

60 PMS.. poemmemoirstory a foreign traveler, one you find really interesting. You like people from other cultures. Shelley can’t touch you now, she can’t be touched, so what other things could you count as touches? Smiles? We say smiles can touch us. Try that. You’re creative. So I told Shelley I’d try harder. It seemed like the only thing I could do. Plus Shelley appreciated that approach—it felt better than the slow and gluey depression, she told the therapist, better than all the times she could only feel bad about what she couldn’t say or show or feel. It was her first note of relief in a long time. And then I just couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t think there’s any way to explain all this to the teacher, though, and I’ve just heard the word “overshare” for the first time, and I don’t want to seem desperate. In two weeks, when I’ve moved into a friend’s spare bedroom, Shelley will tell the teacher that everything was fine until I fell for a woman at my job. She’ll tell Ren, too, despite our agreement that she shouldn’t know that right now. I knew none of that on the day I talked to the teacher. “She’ll need to talk about it,” the teacher said again. “I’ll let her tell in Sharing Time on Monday, if she wants to.” I didn’t know what to picture when I tried to picture Sharing Time. I didn’t know how to tell when the conference was over, or if I was supposed to say more or less, or if there were cues I wasn’t quite getting. Eventually, I just put on my coat and thanked her and left.

Now, a year later, I see Ren for five careful hours on Thursday, 24 hours on the weekend. In between I see the woman from my job and she and I take things fast and hardly cautiously. We don’t work together any more but we sleep together nearly every weeknight, showing up at each other’s house at dinnertime with backpacks of our own, cooking together with the exuberance of people just starting out. We talk probably too much about Ren, what she’s said and who she’s becoming, whether she’s okay. We know how much better things could be. I read books about divorced families, about encouraging your child’s relationship with her other par- ent and making sure she has a picture of your ex at your house, about attending the same school activities. My girlfriend reads The Idiot’s Guide to Stepparenting. Shelley’s already changed Rennie’s last name, removing the part that is mine: “That name seems like a lie,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I hated

PMS.. 61 McKnight having to write it on school forms, because it seems like such a lie.” Shelley excised it one morning in her lawyer’s office, the same way she’d changed her own name at fifteen when her father left.

“That’s my new name,” says Ren, writing it large with a crayon the next Thursday. “Saves me time.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking for blue-green, which recently took over for her previous favorite color, which was green-blue. “I don’t always have to write those two parts. Just one. That’s who I am now.” “Shelley e-mailed me about that,” I say. Her backpack and her soc- cer ball have already been altered with a permanent marker, my name replaced by a big black box. The divorce books say ‘Be honest with your child about your own sadness, but spare her details she’s not ready to hear.’ I don’t always know how to tell the difference. “I feel sad about that,” I tell her. “I liked it when our names showed that we belonged to each other.” She finds the color she was looking for and pulls it out of the box. “I like it. Easier for me,” Ren says. She continues coloring, rhythmi- cally kicking the stool she’s perched on. “Anyway. You have a girlfriend. Shelley needs me on her side.” My ears feel too far away from my brain, so that my own voice barely reaches them. I say what I know I’m supposed to say, what our family counselor told me I should say consistently, even when I find it hard to believe. “You don’t have to take sides. I know you want to help. But Shelley and I will work out the stuff between us.” “Shelley hates you.” She’s already yelling before I finish. “She loved you perfect and you left.” Her eyes—big and brown and the opposite of Shelley’s—look totally different to me when she yells. “That’s why Shelley never wants to even look at you again.” The last part comes out like a little song, her head dancing and her eyes focused just past me, powerful in what they won’t see. She goes back to the crayons. We’ve been here before, where I feel sunburned inside my head. “I know Shelley’s mad. Mad that I left.” I’m trying so hard to say the counselor’s words that it feels like I’m not saying anything at all. It must feel that way to Ren, too, whose eyes are rolled toward the ceiling. “But remember what we talked about last time at the counselor? About people feeling mad for a while, and then working it out?” “It’s not like that in our hearts, Mama,” Ren says. She’s coloring harder

62 PMS.. poemmemoirstory and more defiantly around her name on the page and her voice is getting louder, sealing me out. “Me and Shelley, once we get mad at somebody, that whole chunk of our heart is wrecked.” Now she’s yelling. “Wrecked. It can never be used again. That’s how people really are. You and that counselor are wrong!” She stomps off down the hall, loud enough for the landlords to hear through the carpeting, and slams the bedroom door. The air feels dusty and dense and far too still. I hear my girlfriend let- ting herself in downstairs—we’ve started having dinner all together on Thursdays, dinner and a card game, the same dinner always, new card games each week. I don’t hear anything from the bedroom—no kicking or pounding, no dialing Shelley’s number. The counselor’s words won’t work for either of us right now, so when I go talk to Ren I make up far too much as I go. I say something about healing, about the rebounds I think hearts are capable of, even when you think they aren’t. I tell her she’ll be okay, that her heart will knit back together, though of course I don’t really know this. She is sprawled face- down on the bed, absolutely silent. She doesn’t care whether I rub her back or don’t, and I have no clue about what’s happening in her head. Hearts recover, I say one more time. I want my words to slip quietly into her bloodstream, store themselves in some small secret place inside her, something like those tooth boxes from the nurse. Something she can open later when we’re all a little better at this. Ren interrupts to ask about dinner and whether my girlfriend is here. She leaves the bedroom, and I hear her saying hello. A chance to start over.

We have our usual Thursday pasta. Ren joins us in the kitchen, ricochet- ing off our hips and laughing, goofing around with uncooked noodles, trying to teach us a new song they’ve been learning at school. We eat in the living room on a blanket spread on the floor, trying not to kick the milk over, trying to finish early enough for cards, trying not to always look at the clock. Ren runs to the bathroom in the middle of the first hand. We get up too, carrying dishes to the sink. My girlfriend walks over to Rennie’s lumpy backpack, unzipped and spilling its contents on the carpet outside the kitchen door, and quietly slides out a purple folder. “I saw this earlier,” she says. “Look.” She points to where the last half of Ren’s old last name has been blacked out. She holds the folder by the

PMS.. 63 McKnight window in the thinning evening light, so I can see them: big letters in Ren’s handwriting, my letters, our last name in wide shiny pencil written back in on top of the big black box. “She’s trying so hard,” she says qui- etly.

I hear water running, and we slip the folder back where it was. We play two hands of Go Fish before the last-minute scramble of leaving my house, and then Ren and I walk out into the flat grey night, around the corner, and across the street again.

64 PMS.. Lauren Fath

My Hands, Remembering

Five years ago, on a visit to Bend, Oregon, I wandered into a yarn shop called Gossamer. Its framework bore signs that it had once been a barn, though the wood walls and rafters had been whitewashed, and the con- crete floor, too. Light poured in through wide, high windows and ren- dered the room near-blinding, like sun on snowdrifts. Colorful yarns stacked on tall racks beckoned against the alabaster background. I lin- gered before a section of alpaca yarns in what seemed like endless shades. Green was her favorite color, this I knew—but not any of these greens. Her green was an indescribable tone, not mint, not lime, and not sea green, but the color that robins’ eggs would be, if they were a shade of green and not blue. I had, though, seen her wear eggplant before, that deep purple like a mixture of blood and chocolate. So I picked up three skeins of the yarn in eggplant; better the right purple than the wrong green. To be honest, I wasn’t an accomplished knitter. Though I’d taught myself years before, I was always too timid to venture past basic knit and purl stitches, past making squares and rectangles—washcloths, scarves. I shied away from written patterns, favoring, instead, mindless projects that flew between my fingers as I listened to public-radio news. I was forever afraid of making a mistake I couldn’t fix, not knowing what I do now: that most anything, in knitting, is fixable with enough stubborn- ness, a quality I’m not short on. But humbled by the simplicity of my scarves and washcloths, I had never attempted to make anyone a gift. I somehow suspected that whatever I made would not be good enough for its recipient—in this case, the green-loving Myra. Myra was my professor and thesis adviser in the writing program where I’d just entered my second year. Yet for all the time I spent with her, I longed to know her more. Something about her remained seques- tered behind her quick but understated wit and tortoise-shell glasses, beneath sweaters that hung loose on her slender shoulders. I’d been thinking of Myra as I trekked around Bend, somehow sensing that the coarse high-desert vegetation and washed-out winter skies would appeal

PMS.. 65 Fath to her sensibility, to her penchant for the Gothic and uncanny. I cradled the small bag of eggplant yarn the rest of that day and evening. I handled it gently, the way I would anything of Myra’s: my hardback copy of her memoir, my manuscripts with her comments and coffee stains in the margins, a copy of Proust’s Swann’s Way she had loaned me, its edges softened by the oils of her fingertips.

*

In her first memoir, Myra writes about moving into a home with a vast garden—a garden she finds herself unequipped but quietly compelled to maintain. In my favorite scene, she has been given purple poppy seeds by a neighbor, who harbors dark secrets that mirror Myra’s own. The neighbor instructs her to wrap the seeds in a wet paper towel, seal them in a plastic bag, and tuck them in the furthest corner of her china cabinet. She does as told, and three days later, lying awake at midnight, remembers her tucked-away seeds. So she rises, and by moonlight, digs her small hands (I have added that detail, for I know her hands are small, even smaller than mine) into the wet soil under cover of dark. I relish, revel in, this nocturnal scene, picturing my diminutive men- tor crouched in the dark. I feel, in her aloneness, in this moment, that I have seen something no one else has. After all, I had chosen my Oregon university for Myra’s presence there. She wrote as I wanted to, in a beguiling tone and calm voice that felt as if it spoke only to me, as if it told me secrets no one else could be trusted with. But I wanted more. Myra, the dark, and poppies were only the start. There were other secrets she didn’t tell me, but which I found out from the program’s more seasoned students. She had left that house with the garden, left the husband with whom she shared it, too, for another professor, a lanky, quiet man with impressive eyebrows. There was some- thing exhilarating about knowing Myra’s stories without really knowing her. It turned her past into a fairy tale, something whose secrets might always remain under lock and key, whose explanations might always dwell in fantastic, far-off realms. Even in that early proclivity toward Myra, I couldn’t have possibly known how, in the approaching years, my life would come to mirror hers, especially in love: how my husband would leave me after two years of marriage to continue his covert affair, how the first man I loved after my divorce would be a married colleague. I could only know, then, that this gift was my way of asking her to speak

66 PMS.. poemmemoirstory to me in the same hushed tones as she wrote. It calls into question for me, now, the nature of the gift: Do we give to give, or to hint at how we long to receive? Even the pattern I’d chosen to make for Myra seemed to expose my intention, for it showed a long, diaphanous stole in eyelet lace, its fabric knit just loosely enough to let slip a view of the skin beneath it. I was undeterred by the complex charts and three pages of instructions. For the lace pattern, which from afar looked almost like leaves, was the only one appropriate for someone who gardened by night.

*

Myra and the professor, now married, lived in a Craftsman-style house close to campus. In its dim quarters, everything seemed to be made of mahogany and stained glass. This secretive cottage played host to par- ties when visiting authors came to town, or for no reason at all. After the most recent one, just after the start of fall classes, I had lingered to help clean up. I had reveled in being the last guest, drying dishes, opening cupboards to figure out where things belonged, covering leftover food and wedging it into the full refrigerator. When the kitchen was in order, Myra walked with me through the hushed living room to the front door. We stood facing each other. She is shorter than I am, but otherwise my slender size. She has chin-length, thick brown hair, and her tortoise-shell glasses frame lustrous green-gold eyes. When she put her small hands on my hips and leaned toward me, she smelled like lilacs and vodka. I put my small hands on her hips, too. For a moment, we just smiled. I wasn’t sure what we were sharing, what she meant by this, but perhaps there was no sense to be made of it. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “For staying.” And then she leaned in even closer and whispered, “I’m a bit drunk, I confess.” This was her secret, her gift to me, and I held it close during the dark, slow walk home, my hips remembering her hands, my hands remember- ing her hips.

*

In Oregon, in winter, the rain didn’t fall in thick sheets, but rather, in a persistent mist that collected in puddles and soaked through my leather boots. Most nights, I stayed inside, knitting in the warm breath of my

PMS.. 67 Fath electric heater. As I worked in the dim light, I felt a certain allegiance to Myra—my knitting akin to her gardening. Like her garden, the scarf beckoned to me in the middle of the night, so that I would crawl out of bed and thread its velveteen yarn through my fingers. Its dark dye stained my fingertips and cuticles a slight maroon, so that it appeared I’d been slicing beets, my skin soaking in their blood-juice. I couldn’t help but think of the soil that must have lodged itself under Myra’s fingernails as she planted those purple poppies. I liked to surmise, as I knitted by night, that maybe Myra was still awake, too, presiding over the last of her garden’s blooms, that maybe we were in silent synchrony, relishing what could be done only under the cover of dark. In early spring, about the time the camellia tree outside my front win- dow produced generous, magenta blossoms, I finished the scarf, casting off the final stitches and tucking in the stray ends with a darning needle. I wrapped it in carefully layered tissue paper: red atop purple—apple over plum—folded and taped the ends, and tied it with a length of real satin ribbon. But it seemed I was incapable, by some unknown force, of giving her the scarf. I was afraid of what it would say, or of what it would ask for in return. I thought of it, tucked away on the top shelf of my closet, each time I sat in a cozy downtown gelato shop, watching from the balcony as customers came in and out of the early twilight. I waited for Myra, who was always the slightest bit late. The gelato shop was our haunt for weekly discussions of my thesis, meetings I arrived early to and awaited with restless paper-shuffling and sweaty palms, though I had no need to be nervous. I heard the heels of her cowboy boots, quick clicks on the wood floor below, and then saw her come up the stairs. She was windblown, glasses wet and suddenly fogged by the warm indoors. She carried my damp manuscripts and an armload of books. She was radiant—but maybe it was just the rain. For it seemed, always, to rain on Thursdays at 5 p.m. On these Thursdays, I came to know Myra’s easy laugh, the slight slouch in her posture, the way she brushed aside her bangs when they hung in her eyes. On these Thursdays, she learned that I have steady hands, that I am an amateur calligrapher, that my eyes turn a brighter blue when I am sad. She did not learn that I could knit, or that I was keeping hidden a gift. But I now see that something in my stance must have betrayed my attraction—the way I leaned faintly toward her, the way my voice

68 PMS.. poemmemoirstory softened, the way my gaze stayed upon her too long when I thought she wasn’t looking. For as we left these evening sessions, exiting the gelato shop into the rainy-night dark, we lingered by the row of meters where her car was parked. She put her hands on my hips, and I put my hands on hers. She kissed me goodbye, though these kisses were quick taps, never prolonged, decidedly unromantic. But on the cold walk home, I didn’t feel the rain on my face, didn’t consider opening my umbrella.

*

I graduated after that spring, and the still-wrapped scarf moved back to Chicago with me, into a closet in my new sewing room, in a new apartment with my new husband, the man whom I’d been dating for eight years, but who would leave me after two more. The ungiven gift seemed to carry Myra’s presence into the two-bedroom apartment with its exposed brick walls and a peculiar, diffused light that favored certain corners. For, within weeks, I began my own humble attempt at gardening in a back yard made mostly of concrete. When I went to plant bulbs in our one small, abandoned strip of landscaping, I found the ground—and myself—hopelessly unprepared. The bed was filled with weeds, so established that even when I tugged at their bottoms, trying to dislodge the roots, I managed only a few stems that bled green in my palm. The thorny weeds were cause for even more concern, as I had no gardening gloves. I resorted to ski mittens and a slotted spoon from the canister of kitchen utensils and burrowed my way into the soil. I gasped and drew back each time I encountered an earth- worm slinking beneath the dirt’s surface. I dug up urban detritus: a beer bottle missing its bottom, the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs. For reasons Myra hadn’t explained, I now understood the need to do this at night, hidden from the daylight’s knowing gaze. But I carried on, digging holes in even rows with my serving spoon, tucking the bulbs gently in their winter beds. Snow blanketed the bulbs a few months later when Myra visited for a writers’ conference. She brought the Oregon weather with her: Chicago’s below-zero temperatures suddenly rose to the balmy forties, and then came the rain—that assiduous mist. Our meetings in the vast, cavernous conference hotel were unplanned, coincidental, as if born of some secret force in the warm weather. Amid a crowd of thousands, we would pass

PMS.. 69 Fath in the hallway, too separated by the throng to stop and talk, but close enough to exchange glances. I boarded one of a dozen elevators to find she was already in it. These moments distracted me during the sessions I sat through afterward. My conference notes are peppered with references to the scarf, to the secrets she might reveal if I revealed mine—the one I now am certain she already knew, but which I struggle to put a name to, even now. For certainly she saw the way, in those chance meetings, I withered under her gaze, the way my words failed me, the way a slight flush crept up my neck and face and the room suddenly became warmer. But no, I couldn’t tell her, and I had left the scarf at home, accidentally on purpose. After she left town, I unraveled the scarf, wound it back into three balls. But with the purple yarn like poppy seeds tucked away in the dark- est corners of my closet, evidence of my failure—failure at what, exactly, I’m still unsure—I began to regret my decision. I vowed to make up for it, to stitch something, this time, so lovely I would have to give it to Myra, far too lovely to be kept or, God forbid, unraveled. I recalled that, one particularly cold Oregon day, she had shown up to teach class in a pair of green fingerless mittens. Someone complimented her on them, either for their beauty or, in this case, their practicality: In the creaky old building where we met, strange gusts snuck through the windows, whisk- ing papers to the floor. Myra had responded that the mitts belonged to her teenage daughter. But she couldn’t resist stealing them, just for a day, she said with a laugh. It felt like a secret. I recalled that secret, the stolen mittens, as I began my search for a pattern. I perused books and websites, searching for one that was just right. At last, I found the pattern for a pair of fingerless mitts in worste weight yarn, with small, delicate cables circling the wrists and knuckles. These, I mused, would be perfect: not too ornate, but not entirely simple, either. While I wasn’t yet an adept cable knitter, the maneuvers the pat- tern called for didn’t seem nearly as daunting as that blood-chocolate scarf had, years before. I bought new yarn, one-hundred percent merino wool in green— Myra’s green—which the label called “Lettuce.” It was a quick project, this one, especially because I carried it with me everywhere. Even a half-hour on the subway added substance as I knit around and around on three small needles, joined to form a circular shape. I took delight in the rows that required cable knitting, not the least for how easy it seemed, now,

70 PMS.. poemmemoirstory what would once have been a struggle. In just a couple of weeks, the mit- tens were done. I tied off the ends and slipped them on my own small hands. They fit perfectly. Almost too perfectly; I would have kept them had I not gotten an e-mail from Myra the next day: She was coming to Chicago in just a few days for the Chicago Humanities Festival. So the day before Myra’s arrival, I wrapped this second gift even more carefully than I had the first. I began with a layer of blue tissue paper, in which I enveloped the gloves and taped off the ends. Over that, a small strip of Japanese-print paper wrapped once around the outside. And atop that strip of delicate, green paper pocked with cherry blossoms, a green ribbon as close to the color “Lettuce” as I could find, tied in a bow. I tucked it in my purse before I could change my mind. We were to meet at Daley Plaza, a marble-paved, buildingless down- town block, its centerpiece a looming red sculpture by Alexander Calder. Waiting restlessly at the sculpture’s base, I saw Myra and the profes- sor crossing the broad plaza. By the time Myra reached me, she had removed her black wool coat and flung it over one arm, the day surpris- ingly warm. It was hardly the time, I thought, to give someone mittens. Nonetheless, after the hugs, after she had appraised me, hands on my hips—a feeling I still wilted beneath—and pronounced me “just as beau- tiful as always,” I felt my stomach turn at the approach of my imminent task. I opened my purse. “I made you something,” I said, thrusting the gift into the hand that wasn’t holding her coat. “What for?” she asked, but gave me a knowing sideways glance. “Open it,” I said. She sized up its wrapping, turning the small package over in her small hands. I looked down at my own. “I can’t open this,” she said. I sank. “Only you could wrap a gift so that it’s utterly unopenable. You should get a doctorate in gift wrapping.” But slowly, she untied the ribbon and slid off the Japanese paper with- out ripping it. She untaped one end of the tissue paper, leaving the rest intact, and slid out the green mittens. She handed the wrapping to the professor. “Save this,” she said. And then she put on the mittens. They fit perfectly. She hugged me, something in her frame’s bony defense giving way, to let me sink in, to let her be sunken into. “The shade of green—it’s perfect,” she said, as we stepped back from each other. “You know me far too well.”

PMS.. 71 Fath

*

For years, I reserved that eggplant-colored yarn for Myra. But I could never find the right pattern for it—or, that was my excuse, my reason to prolong the longing that yarn evoked. The three small balls had migrated toward the bottom of my basket as other projects took priority. The yarn’s dormancy was something I became accustomed to, came to like, even. For as long as I hadn’t made the scarf, as long as I hadn’t given it to her, there was still room for anticipation, for possibility, for fulfillment— although I now recognize how the ache of longing constitutes its own fulfillment. With that yarn always there, stored deep down, I couldn’t help but think of Myra, her purple poppy seeds buried, her thrill more in the waiting than in the blooms she never describes, but which must have sprung up, eventually. Shortly after Myra’s visit, after I gave her the mittens, I was accepted to a PhD program. My husband and I moved into a small, white house in a small Missouri town, where the low notes of his upright bass colored our own home secretive and somber, like Myra’s Oregon bungalow. The first thing I did in Missouri—still thrilled by the prospect of lawn care— was to start a garden. August is too late to begin a garden, some books say, but others are optimistic, claiming vegetables that germinate quickly and resist frost can produce well into winter’s first months. Zucchinis are good, these books say, and peas and green beans. So I pulled up the weeds in our front flowerbeds—the only vegetation there, to date. Planting, it was advised, should be done in the evening, since the scorch- ing August midday could damage and dehydrate the seeds. So at sun- down, I sowed even rows in the dirt, then covered the seeds with moist topsoil. Within weeks, the white blossoms of green bean plants rose tall at night, drinking of the air’s humidity. Nasturtium shoots appeared in haphazard clusters, and beside them, a small bunch of pansies with flat, rounded petals. But by September, I had killed our garden with remarkable efficiency. Around that time, Myra told me that her new book was due out soon— “sort of a weird thing: partly a garden journal, too,” she called it in an e-mail. This news prompted me to forget my failed garden and dig out the eggplant yarn, to search for a new pattern. I wanted something with a garden theme, something subtly leafy, perhaps; that was all I knew. And I found it: a crescent-shaped “shawlette,” a hybrid of a scarf and a shawl,

72 PMS.. poemmemoirstory whose edge was framed with intricate lace leaves—cedar leaves, the pat- tern said they were. I began the scarf as the trees started to turn. I worked with the win- dows open, letting in a wind turned colder each day, and heard the leaves rustle with a new insistence. With that susurrus outside came new impetus to finish the scarf: a note from Myra, urging me to come to Washington, D.C. in February for an annual writers’ conference. If begin- ning the scarf again did not rekindle my longing, this invitation did. It had been a year since I’d last seen her. My urgency had faded over time, though I still allowed myself to pine over e-mails signed with “much love,” allowed myself to misread exclamations of being “sorely missed,” allowed myself to linger too long over each letter, until I had memorized Myra’s delicate words, which I cherished as if they were her. So begin- ning in October, I planned this trip, basking in hopeful anticipation as I checked off another plan laid: flight, bed-and-breakfast, an alumni dinner for the night I was to arrive. All of this for the scarf, the eggplant scarf now nearly five years in the making.

*

February came slowly. I finished Myra’s scarf two days before I was sup- posed to leave for the conference. Anything lace—such as those cedar leaves—needs to be set in place with a process called blocking, which opens up the stitches and sets their shape. I soaked the shawl in water just long enough to saturate its fragile fabric, then laid out two garbage bags, edge to edge, on my office floor. Then, with painstaking care, I lay down the shawl and shaped it into a crescent, a waning quarter-moon. Around the periphery, I secured each leaf’s edges with three metal pins. These leaves, which had been curled upon themselves, unfurled in the pinning, and in this sudden transformation I found more excitement than I ever had in the first leaves of any real garden. Just about that time, as I was crouched on the floor with my pins, my husband turned on the radio. We had heard rumors of snow, but now it seemed more serious: A bona fide blizzard, they were calling it, would blow in the next day, bringing two feet of snow to this town crip- pled by winter weather. We listened in disbelief. I phoned the airline and moved my flight up a day. As it turned out, that one day would make no difference. Central Missouri’s small regional airport would shut down for

PMS.. 73 Fath a week, its three departing flights a day reduced to zero. As snow piled up, obstructing roads and turning the city white-silent, I knew I was stuck. For three days, snow blew against our small house, accumulating in drifts that held shut the front and back doors. It turned the world a gran- ulated white, cast different hues by the rise and fall of daylight. And right then, I was glad I had stayed, glad to see the way the sun hung on the walls at the golden hour, the way it consumed everything for such a short time. Then white darkened to lavender, like moth wings, then to the hue of purple poppies and finally, to what we can no longer see, but what we believe, on faith alone, is still there. Holed up, safe from the cold and accompanied by the hum of the gas furnace, with Myra’s scarf still pinned to the floor next to me, I sat down at my sewing machine. I wanted to make the wrapping for this gift even better than the Japanese paper that I had used on the green mitts. Paper wouldn’t do; only cloth would. I cut out two squares of flower-print calico fabric and two lengths of linen ribbon, and from these, fashioned a drawstring bag. I unpinned the scarf from the floor, and the leaves held their shape, unfurled for good. I folded the scarf and slipped it into the bag. It should have been a moment of fulfillment, the completion of this scarf so many years in the making, the embodiment of a love so many years in the imagining. Instead, it seemed like I had lost something. For while there was green merino—the green that robins’ eggs would be, if they were green and not blue—and purple alpaca—like plums past ripe— running through my fingers, there was anticipation for what it could become, and for what would become in the giving of it. This felt like an end. Nonetheless, I mailed the package. I waited—two days, three. I pic- tured the box on Myra’s porch, pictured her picking it up, puzzled, and carrying it into that secretive mahogany-and-stained-glass bungalow. There, perhaps on the bench of the entryway grand piano, or on the dark, imposing dining table, or maybe on the kitchen counter, beside a bottle of red wine, she would remove the tape, open the calico pouch, and run her fingers over the delicate cedar leaves. She would wrap the soft shawlette around her small shoulders, the room suddenly warmer, her face faintly flushed. I imagined this scene, over and over, when I read and re-read the note she sent me a few days later:

74 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Lauren, Yesterday I got your mysterious package, and late late last night I opened it, and was completely blown away by the beautiful, delicate, beyond right for me scarf. Scarf seems the wrong word here … it is far too ethereal for such a dowdy word. It reminds me of the lace pieces worn by Jane Austen’s char- acters, but with such depth and variation of color. It is both comforting and magical, and that, for me, is the ultimate combination. You seem to know this, you magical creature! Anyway, upon my soul I am thrilled, and thank you. Much love, and I hope it is not too long before we see each other.

*

It wouldn’t be long. In late May—three months after I sent Myra the scarf and just two weeks after my husband told me he was leaving me—I went back to visit my small Oregon town. The trip’s timing was merely a coin- cidence. I’d booked it months before. Myra and I went to brunch at a home-style spot she’d picked, a short drive into the rolling hills outside town. We sat on a heated porch, cov- ered by a green plastic roof that rang from the hard rain outside. She wore her shawlette draped loosely over her shoulders, and the eggplant yarn was lustrous against her face, in the way that all colors are exagger- ated against gray, storm-torn skies. I picked at my bacon and eggs, stumbled over my slow words. I didn’t understand, I said, how my husband could be so set on leaving without giving this a second thought. How could he declare something broken without trying, first, to fix it? Myra looked at me knowingly. She had, after all, been in the same situation when she left her first husband. “I’m going to tell you what you don’t want to hear,” she said. “He’s too far gone.” She said she had been in the same position when she left: She wasn’t willing to work it out, wasn’t willing to look back. In her words I saw that I had doubted my husband’s sincerity, had thought I could somehow bring him back to me. But no matter how many times I’d heard the truth, it only seemed true coming from Myra. After breakfast, we ran to her car in the pouring rain, giggling at how quickly our hair became drenched and dripped on our slender shoulders.

PMS.. 75 Fath

As Myra drove me back toward town on winding country roads, the rain slowed, then stopped, and the clouds parted. Sun fell down on the green- glowing fields around us and shone brightly on the still-slick roads. In her memoir, Myra writes of a restaurant she swears exists—at a bend in a road near some railroad tracks—but which she can’t seem to find again. In this restaurant, the vinyl booths were a peculiar shade of green, her green. The restaurant, Myra writes, reminds her of cities we know we won’t return to—cities that would save us, if only we could go back. And so perhaps, then, only Myra herself can give me the words for what remains. For I love her not the way of cities I’ve seen and will never go back to, but the way of cities I will never see, but long for, nonetheless.

76 PMS.. Christina Nettles

Death of an Independent Bookstore

Let me sell you a story.

I want to look into your eyes, and have you look back into mine, even though we are strangers, and then I will say, Tell me the most amaz- ing thing you’ve read in the last three years. These are my magic words, and your reply will begin winding a spell around both our feet and legs and hips and hands and hearts that ends when my lips part and I say, You must read this as I place in your upturned palms the book that will change your life. We need each other in a desperate way, which makes me sorry and sad to tell you that my magic is gone. It flew from my fingers in the notes that passed through them. The building that housed my bookstore, my childhood dream made real, still stands, but all the stories have been carried away. The pock- marked pine floors are swept clean. The chunky mortar between the bricks that make my long, tall walls peeks through in places. The light cascades down from the transom, finding its path on gloomy days. Even the furniture and the shelves are where I left them. There are tenants, who are mostly helpful and kind, and I am grateful for them, but they brew your coffee, they do not seek your soul. Six years ago I opened Beehive Coffee and Books, in Monroeville, Alabama, in a building I rescued from ruin, stocked with books I had begun collecting with money from free-lance writing jobs, facing the cupola of the very courthouse Hollywood memorialized in its excellent version of To Kill A Mockingbird. It was the prettiest place in town, and it felt like the most necessary, important, valuable, and meaningful job I had ever done. I had lived in New Orleans and Oxford and overseas, and it seemed that if I wanted a place here to read and write and think and meet people with interesting minds, I was going to have to create it myself. I also desperately missed strong, good coffee and spent a year researching it from burlap bag to perfect shot. I spent that same year creating a business plan, which seemed logical as I pitched it to the bank

PMS.. 77 Nettles loan officer but felt entirely sinister and ridiculous the night before I was scheduled to open. I had a panic attack at the dinner table and stood up, clutched my chest and asked my husband in a shrill, terrified voice, “What was I thinking? I don’t know anything about running a bookstore. We have three small children! I can’t possibly do this!” I expected him to say of course I was right, we had both been crazy sinking all the money we barely had into a half collapsed storefront with a leaky roof, and we needed to face reality, halt the process immediately, and act like grown-ups. Instead he looked at me and very calmly said, “Well, you’re pretty deep into it now, and I think you’re going to have to open that place tomorrow. I don’t think you have any other choice.” The next day was May 20, which was also my wedding anniversary. At noon my husband sent a huge bouquet of roses to the door of my lovely new shop, with a perfectly written encouraging note, and I knew we had done the right thing, and I was grateful to be married to a man who knew how important it was for both of us to make our own dreams come true. I loved it when people walked in and looked up and around and then at me with eyes full of wonder and said, You are living my absolute dream. I am a champion of charm, and happy to chat politely about your genealogy if it pleases you, but what I really want to know is how your mind works and why we as human beings do the things we do. I want to feel connected to you and with the world in a larger way, moment by moment, and I realize this is a strange way to do it. We take a book, written by someone in quiet isolation, and then we read it in our own solitude, and then we strangers feel instantly connected by thousands of words we have shared, even though before this moment we have never met. It’s just not the same as discovering we have both visited London, or are the youngest of five, or share an insane passion for goat cheese. When you tell me what you have read and how it has changed you, you tell me something about yourself that accelerates the conversation between us two. Years from now, you will think of me, and I of you, and I will won- der, young widow, if you are remarried, and if Joan Didion or Calvin Trillin helped you get there. I will wonder what happened to you, lonely and awkward engineer, if you went out to one of those big box stores and bought the Yeats I wouldn’t sell you because I worried you were depressed. I made you buy Pablo Neruda and Billy Collins instead. I will wonder what happened to all those copies of Serena and Bloodroot and

78 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Mudbound and The Long Night that I sent out into the world, bouncing inside kraft paper bags that floated my logo at hip height until they were folded into car trunks and laundry baskets and used as overnight bags for spontaneous vacations and ill-advised affairs. After years of sinking an incredible amount of money and energy and time and creativity, I realized I could not continue in that vein, because I was out of all the aforementioned resources. I smiled politely and shook my head when yet another person gazed at my menu of coffee and pas- tries and asked forlornly, “Can’t you just do chicken salad?” I continued to foster the illusion of success through my town’s strange little tourist season, and then I became a tourist on my own, a better parent than I have been for the last decade, hopefully a better writer, certainly a better wife, sister, daughter, friend, and self. I don’t owe anyone an apology, except possibly myself, for not having the courage to walk away from this space before for fear of disappointing a handful of people, some of whom continue to love me despite their dis- appointment, and many who resent me for taking away something they came to treasure. If only there had been 200 more of you. But if there had been hundreds more of you, I would not have had the time to discover your stories. Or ask you to listen to mine: the inconti- nent dogs; the boyfriend who left me to become a Franciscan but became an attorney instead; my mother’s choice of post-divorce paramours and my father’s attempts to kill them with an oyster shucker; my pathetic high-school reunions; peacocks outside my office window and in my sister’s yard; my brush with mud-wrestling; the Halloween I dressed as Tippi Hedren from The Birds and no one glanced my way as I swept the sidewalk, fake blood pouring from a ratty dollar store raven, rednecks avoiding my dust cloud on their way to the meat and three. There are stories I have not told. How lovely it was to be the one to unlock the door in the mornings, and how hard it was to walk away. The way it sounds when this old building leaks in the rain and how it feels to wander under a few spots in the ceiling with a crumpled beach towel in my hands trying to catch the drops before they hit the books, the antique tables, the ground. The way my elbow hurt when my staff changed and I spent weeks training new faces that might not get what I was trying to do beyond the quirky dance of the espresso machine, and who very likely did not read anything of virtue. The ache when reading goodbye letters from my favorite employees when they moved on for

PMS.. 79 Nettles college or careers or love. The way the world disappeared when it rained on a slow day and I sat inside that warm, wooden dream with a cup of coffee and a book of my own. The day I looked outside my rear door to see a local attorney escort- ing the Lee sisters inside. They sat and drank black coffee and browsed, choosing titles about strong women and reporters. Nelle Harper Lee smiled up at me and said the words, “You have such a lovely place. I hope the whole world beats a path to your door.” The joy that comes from finding the perfect book at the perfect moment for someone I may have never met before and may never see again. The disconnect that grows when I have no book to share, either because someone came looking for something I refuse to sell or because I cannot afford to carry a variety of such titles anymore the way I did when the doors first flew wide open. The irony and pity when I closed for a month last year and people asked in the grocery store if I was closed, and when I mentioned the posted sign explaining my absence, they all, without a trace of humor or embarrassment, mentioned they hadn’t read the sign. And I replied, with a trace of humor and embarrassment, and a shred of bitterness and deni- al, that’s the problem with bookstores these days: nobody reads anymore. I hope if you are reading this that you think fondly of a bookseller or a librarian or a mentor who one day, gave you a story that changed your life. I hope you can picture every detail of the cover of the book that held it. My need for connecting with people like you has not gone away. It is here, percolating inside the same ticking chest that stalled in panic at 2 am on all those nights when I wondered how to keep afloat my dream of shoring up reality with imaginary worlds. My dream has disappeared, but my words keep me alive, and awake at night, waiting for the right moment to find their place in your open, upturned hands.

80 PMS.. Cynthia Ryan

Rough Edges

“I grew up being bad,” Edwina told me one afternoon as we sat talking in her apartment on the west side of Birmingham. Born in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, Edwina had grown up in a poor African American neighborhood in Pratt City on the outskirts of “Bombingham,” a slur stuck in the national memory right alongside images of Police Commissioner Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace. For the first time in her life in 2010, Edwina was handed the keys to a place of her own in a building that had been donated to the Methodists. Church leaders figured she deserved one of the units since she had been struggling with Stage 4 breast cancer since 2009 and had been clean and out of trouble with the law for more than a year. The place was pretty run down, but Edwina had fixed it up bit by bit. A used, brown chair positioned near the window let in enough light for Edwina to sit and do her word search puzzles. A worn mat- tress and washer and dryer she’d gotten from Miss Ann, a volunteer down at Church of the Reconciler, a congregation serving the needs of Birmingham’s homeless, provided the means to rest and refresh. Over time, Edwina added a few stuffed animals and dolls to the shelves in her front room for something to look at and for the kids who wandered in and out of her apartment to play with. She also set out some family photos that she’d never had a place to display properly. In December of the first year she lived in the apartment, Edwina put up a Christmas tree and had a ball picking out lights and ornaments during a trip we made to Walmart. “What do you mean ‘bad’?” I asked, inhaling a breath full of fumes from a half-smoked cigarette sitting in the ashtray next to Edwina. Our friendship had begun in 2009 when I heard about several homeless men and women in Birmingham who had been diagnosed with cancer. A breast cancer survivor for close to 17 years at the time, I’d stepped in to listen to their stories and find out how in the world they’d managed to survive cancer and the streets at the same time. Edwina was the first of many from the community I talked to, and she and I bonded immedi-

PMS.. 81 Ryan ately. She was funny, outspoken, stubborn. A gentle soul. “Ooh, Miss Ryan, I used to fight a lot.” She backed up a bit to give me the big picture. “When I turned 15, I got raped. There was this guy whose grandma had a store on Carline Avenue in Pratt City, and I was standing on the street talking on the phone one night and he took me downtown to the A.G. Gaston Hotel, that’s what it used to be called, and uh, he raped me and beat me with a towel and a clothes rack and he told me he was gonna take me back to Georgia to make him some money. So I took a heel that I had on and I hit him in his eye and I run outta the door to this white man sittin’ back in his truck and he took me all the way back to my momma’s house back on Carline. And when we went to court and stuff, the guy who raped me went to jail and he got 25 years. But when he got out he tried to rape some other girl and somebody killed him.”

The spot from which Edwina was taken by the man who raped her (Cynthia Ryan)

“I’m sorry. That must have affected everything in your life at 15.” What was there to say, really? “Yeah, sure did. Then me and my sisters, we fought all the time. One day, my sister Wanda, she scratched me across my face and she went and opened up the freezer to get her something out of there. I came up

82 PMS.. poemmemoirstory behind her and I shoved her head right in the freezer door and started pushin’ it closed. Tried to stop her breathin’. It took my brother Joe-Joe to get her outta there. I was tryin’ to kill her.” “Why do you think you acted like that?” “You gotta understand that we didn’t really get raised by my momma and daddy. They was both alcoholics, so it was more like we just livin’ in the same house, raisin’ ourselves.” “Sounds like you got along with your brother a little bit better than your three sisters.” Joe-Joe had become a common fixture every time I visited Edwina’s apartment, and she usually had nice things to say about the time she spent with him. “Well there was this time when I was standin’ on the front porch wearin’ these short shorts my momma told me not to be wearin’ and Joe- Joe told me to go on inside and take them shorts off cause I know what momma said but I wearin’ them anyway.” Edwina’s voice began rising, just like it must have on that day Joe-Joe tried to offer some unwanted advice. “I cut him ‘cross his arm, from here [pointing to her elbow] to here [ending at the wrist] with a box cutter. He had to get 180 stitches! I was real bad back then, Miss Ryan.”

All five of the kids living in the Sanders’ house, fathered by three dif- ferent men, were left to fend for themselves. Edwina’s mom, Bessie Nell Thomas Sanders, and father, Eddie Lee Sanders, didn’t offer their brood much more than stern language, whippings, and the promise of instabil- ity. For most of Edwina’s childhood, her family stoked a Big Boy with any scraps of wood they could find to stay warm, since they couldn’t pay the gas bills that came to the house. There wasn’t much food, and the kids learned to be resourceful. They did whatever it took. As Edwina continued to argue her case for being bad, I thought about how well preserved the details of her past seemed to be. Like any of us, she had mastered the telling and re-telling of those scenes that helped her to make sense of her life. They’re familiar, those tidy narratives strung together to explain who we are from the time we enter the world until the time we leave it. Somehow, they offer comfort no matter the ending. Rags to riches. Good girl gone bad or bad girl done good. Learning from the past and turning

PMS.. 83 Ryan a life around. Finding something or somebody to care about and figur- ing out, finally, who it is we’re supposed to be. Selectively recalling the moments we want to remember and discarding those that we’re expected to tuck away, someplace safe, far from prying eyes, including our own.

Aerial view of the Ryan farm (unknown)

In my family, we kids were supposed to turn into something good. The Ryans had deep roots in the small Illinois community where I was raised, and we were expected to play by the rules. My dad was a fourth generation farmer, growing corn, soybeans, and the occasional crop of wheat. He and my Uncle Buddy worked together planting and harvest- ing, talking grain prices, arguing over troubles with the combine or dis- agreeing about whether the soil was too wet to get in the fields. On Sundays and holy days, my parents, older brother, and I went to mass at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. We spent holidays with family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. Several times a year, we headed back to church for a wedding or a funeral, a Christmas pageant

84 PMS.. poemmemoirstory or social. We knew how to prioritize. If we were too sick to go to church, we weren’t going anywhere else all day. Every summer, after the crops had been planted, we took a family vacation. Dad loved the West, prairie towns and open roads. Wherever we traveled, we knew we’d have a pillow under our heads and food in our stomachs. Same when we returned back home. Our town was small, and my brother and I weren’t always good kids. I discovered fast cars and boys. My brother discovered drugs and alcohol. I kept moving forward, away from teenage temptations. His life stood still and then spiraled downward. I’d love to say that my memories reflect the way it was growing up, but they don’t. No more than Edwina’s story, both how she told it and how I’ve taken the liberty of weaving her words into something cohesive, is complete. If only our lives could be as clean and simple as the stock narratives to which we social beings are drawn, I could wrap up this piece right here and now.

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In Cancerland, stories are important. When a malignancy is removed from the breast, for example, there’s talk of its character (size, grade, receptors fueling its growth) and its projected path (where it’s head- ing and what sort of timeline it’s on). Survivors of the same kinds of cancer are encouraged to identify with one another and fight the good fight together, to stand as sisters in pink. Similarly, survivors diagnosed as early-stage are treated differently than those with late-stage cancers. The early birds have on average more promising prognoses, while the latecomers sit in wait of recurrence. Cancer characters are consistently unpredictable, however, keeping us all on the edge of our seats awaiting a reappearance from stage left or stage right. It’s hard to say from which wing the antagonist will emerge and how powerful his entrance. One predictor of possible recurrence, and certainly a key to determin- ing the course of action to be taken in response to a cancerous intruder, is the status of margins surrounding a malignancy. Everybody wants clean margins, a report from pathology stating that the tissue circling the tumor on all sides is free of cancer. The prevailing assumption is that a cancer enveloped within safe borders is less likely to form distant colo- nies elsewhere in the body. Put another way, the environment in which

PMS.. 85 Ryan a tumor is born and in which it is nourished has a lot to do (we think) with how it (oh, and the body in which it resides) turns out. Sound familiar?

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One thing that Edwina and I had in common when we were diagnosed with breast cancer was the realization that neither good girls nor bad girls get through the experience without a little self-modification. Edwina figured out that she couldn’t fight her way out of her disease by wielding a weapon and making trouble for anybody who got in her way. Used to pushing people away, Edwina needed to ask for help for the first time in her life. She started with the associate pastor at Church of the Reconciler, whom she’d pulled a knife on just a few weeks earlier when she needed some money. “I was down at Church of the Reconciler and I had to ask Miss Rachael if she could help me get a nightgown and some slippers ‘cause I had cancer and had to go into the hospital. She told me she’d help me and then she prayed with me.” Edwina thinks of this moment as a turn- ing point, one that represents her transformation from bad to good, from sinner to servant of God. By the time I came into her life and she into mine, Edwina was already a softened version of her former self. She was free of crack cocaine and was starting to seek something different for her life—a place of her own, friends she could trust. She wanted to be able to tell another survivor that she was scared and didn’t want to endure the pain and uncertainty of cancer. Like some of the breast cancer survivors she’d seen on TV and around the clinic at Jefferson County Cooper Green Mercy Hospital for the Sick Poor , Edwina wanted to wear a pink ribbon and claim a femininity that I’m not sure she’d ever felt deserving enough to embrace. My own transformation was well under way when Edwina and I first met. After a few early years of survivorship spent yearning for a happy ending to my diagnosis, attempting to feel gratitude for the opportunity to share my story with others and to join my sisters in the fight against breast cancer, I’d come to the conclusion that a) cancer sucks, b) there’s nothing to be cheery about when it comes to cancer, and c) being a good girl and quietly accepting what’s happening to your body and your life

86 PMS.. poemmemoirstory thanks to breast cancer is definitely not an empowering or terribly useful role to play. I’d become a bit of a bad girl, challenging the status quo in the breast cancer awareness movement and doing it loudly. Edwina and I have some rough edges. No clean margins separating the good from the bad. What kind of story would that be?

PMS.. 87 Stephanie Dickinson

New Jersey Noir

“Murder cases are generally of interest to the extent they suggest some anomaly or lesson in the world revealed.” —Joan Didion, “LA Noir”

Here in my East Village apartment it’s Sunday and soon the bells calling us all to repentance will ring from the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Orthodox Church. The bells ring fifty times. I am writing a letter to a girl who can’t be reached by e-mail.

1. Don’t Walks I first know of my friend’s existence in July of 2006 when Krystal Riordan’s face adorns the cover of the New York Daily News. SHE LET HER DIE the headline reads. “Killer’s girlfriend saw it all but did nothing to save Jennifer.” Three days prior, the face of another girl occupied the same space. TEEN MISSING AFTER NIGHT OF CLUBBING. “The last moments of Jennifer Moore’s life continue to be a source of what if’s,” the lead article pointed out. Like all New Yorkers, I am shaken by the disap- pearance of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Moore. I follow the missing girl’s night of underage drinking. Read of bar- tenders and bouncers who’d seen Jennifer, the petite, five-two, 102-pound teen in the white mini and black halter top. Earlier she and her friend Talia had come to the city from Harrington Park, New Jersey, to dine. Afterwards, they decide to go clubbing. Driving deeper into Manhattan, the island city must mesmerize the girls with its lights. The skyscrapers shimmer like silent film goddesses. Who can’t feel the come-on excitement in the string of traffic? The tun- nel’s push onto the West Side streets? It is midnight or shortly after when Jennifer and Talia walk into Chelsea’s Guest House. They think this is the heart of nightlife, its pulsing muscle. Dark. Loud. Red stitched leather chairs, swivel cush- ions. Red walls. They use fake IDs. Soon, they have drinks in front of them. They’re doing shots. Blue drinks. Blue Curacao. The liquor looks

88 PMS.. poemmemoirstory cool—miniature swimming holes—but tastes hot. Like blue licorice. More drinks. Black Rose shooters. Neither girl is counting. They dance. Jennifer’s body listening to the beats feels liquid like she is swimming. With the drum machine in her head, it’s a bubbling red-blue world. Another galaxy. Around and around she spins. That’s how it might have happened. After last call, Jennifer and Talia leave the Guest House. Their eyes shine like the dance floor is still flashing its brightly-colored squares. Weaving across the street, they stare open-mouthed at the empty spot where they’d earlier left the red Dodge. The city that a few hours ago twinkled with nightlife and excitement is blacking out. “Oh, my God,” one of them says. Talia’s mother’s sedan parked in a No Standing Zone has been towed. They hike to the tow pound on 38th and Twelfth Avenue. The Manhattan sky is the color of pebbles, a lighter shade than the behemoth buildings that seem to walk with them. After Tenth Avenue, the taxis and people recede, along with the delis and restaurants. Gone are the Tahoojo Body Works, the Flying Puck, Lenscrafters, and the Tick Top Diner, open 24 hours. Two Jersey girls. Too drunk. The Impound refuses to release the vehicle to them. When Talia pass- es out in the lot and falls to the ground, an ambulance is called. I learn through a friend of Talia’s family that the girl suffered a seizure. Instead of getting into the ambulance with her friend, Jennifer slips away from the tow pound and disappears into the 3:00 a.m. She fears the police coming to the hospital. Jennifer is alone. The girls separating might be the fatal mistake. The sidewalks she trudges, all the Walks and Don’t Walks, lead nowhere. Millions of lit windows have turned themselves off, letting the warehous- es of grimy brick and scarecrow water towers do the looking out. Her purse is locked in her friend’s car, and she clutches her cell phone. Does she regret coming into Manhattan with Talia? Who could resist the city that from a distance shimmered like liquid rubies and sapphires?

2. City of Dark The New York Post and Daily News’ reporters feed the city hungry for more of the story. For a day, no one knows the whereabouts of Jennifer. The missing teen is captured by security cameras as she ferries herself on foot across the in-bound Lincoln Tunnel lanes. One tabloid reports she’d made a call on her cell phone to Talia. “A nice man is helping me,” she’d

PMS.. 89 Dickinson said. Later she places a frantic call to her boyfriend. “A man keeps follow- ing me. He’s offering me drugs.” Her boyfriend advises her to take a taxi. Jennifer stumbles between far apart streetlights. Perhaps she stands under one and holds onto the light before plunging back into the shad- ows. A sliver of a crescent moon shows in the sky above the mountain range of warehouses. The overpass looks down onto the train tracks. The brush growing on the embankment is encrusted with rust and grit. Once she crosses the railroad bridge, she’s entered an underbelly of tire repair shops and second hand auto parts. She is drunk. Frightened. Otherwise, she would understand about the bridge that divides two cities, one a city of light, and the other a city of dark. And it is from the city of dark that a man emerges. He follows her. So big that at first she thinks he’s part of the building. She walks faster, harder. He calls out to her: “Wait up. I’m not going to hurt you.” Does he mistake her for a prostitute? Prostitutes are a weakness with him. Around them are empty parking lots topped by razor-wire. “Let me help you,” he says, closing the space between them. Tires settle in pools of oily water. The man finally cajoles her into sharing a cab with him. I picture the taxi cruising West Side Highway. Maybe the cabbie’s radio is tuned to Newark jazz and a saxophone wails. They’re leaving New York City just as the sun begins to creep into the sky. Pinkish like those dyed-roses cupped in white cones and sold in delis. A plaza of tollbooths appears. He tells her they’ll take the cab to Weehawken, New Jersey, where he lives with his girlfriend. Maybe he tells her his car is parked there. They call his girlfriend with Jennifer’s cell phone. The Hudson seems to fol- low them, most of the river swimmable except around the sewage plants. Water that won’t catch aflame like inland rivers. Weehawken. The taxi stops on a potholed street in front of the Park Avenue Hotel. In the air, a forest of power lines that look like rope clotheslines. He doesn’t have the money to pay the driver but he’ll send his girlfriend down. He helps Jennifer out of the cab. Does she hear a bird underneath the splash of traffic? A really tiny one. Like those humming- birds. Maybe one of those birds beating its wings so fast until it sounds like song. All by itself, a red bird twitching like a shred of heart. It’s the warn- ing beating in Jennifer’s chest. In all young girls’ chests. Do not go with this man.

3. Video The following day, police trace calls on the missing girl’s cell phone.

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The calls lead to the suspect who, until very recently, resided at the Park Avenue Hotel. A small-time pimp and prostitute are arrested at a seedy hotel in Harlem. An ex-con named Draymond Coleman makes the Daily News’ cover. The Park Avenue Hotel hands over its security videos to the police. The detectives see: Jennifer entering the lobby. The eighteen-year-old, hardly able to stand up, leans on the thirty-five-year-old’s arm. He half- carries her. The video shows his girlfriend meeting them on the stairs. Krystal Riordan, age twenty, blond, baby-faced, and tall appears angry. They argue. Coleman sends her down to pay the taxi, while he and Jennifer continue up the stairs. The security camera captures a pretty girl. Jennifer follows Coleman into the room and does not appear again. When Krystal returns, she too enters the room. Later Krystal visits the bathroom. Still later, she takes the stairs to the lobby where she buys a soda and snack from the vending machine. It looks like she’s avoiding the room but has nowhere else to go. The video makes it clear she has the freedom to leave and call for help. The room is dingy, a continent removed from the Guest House’s red wall of candles and black leather couches. It might have happened like this. Once Draymond’s gotten her inside, he asks Jennifer to sit by him on the unmade bed or pulls her there. She tells him, “Please, don’t.” In a cold rush she understands this isn’t a Good Samaritan, that the words ‘no’ and ‘please’ will have no power here. When the blond girl returns (nothing real- ly bad can happen with another girl in the room, can it?), Jennifer breathes a sigh of relief. Yet, she’s no closer to Harrington Park and her bedroom. And there’s no cell phone charger here, no car. Dray asks her to dance for him. He’s Dray to his friends. “Dance,” he repeats. Finding the rhythm on the dance floor’s indigo and maroon squares was easy. This is harder. There’s no music. The room smells. Even drunk she can smell it. The air conditioner blows hot air. At the club, her body listened to the beats and felt liquid like she was swimming inside a bubbling blue world. Dray orders Krystal to dance too, and since she’s used to obliging him, it’s a threesome. Jennifer stumbles. Like after she’d swallowed the blue licorice drinks. At what point does Draymond Coleman stop being the nice man? Once the teen enters the room where he controls even the air? Or now just as the dance ends and Jennifer tries to disappear from him, prying herself slowly free? “Please,” she whimpers, turning her head to find the blond girl. The word “please” doesn’t work. Remember? When does he begin hitting Jennifer? She won’t stop fighting. Krystal turns the TV up loud so she

PMS.. 91 Dickinson doesn’t have to hear. “Why are you hitting her?” she asks. His answer: “I’m proving my love for you.”

The Daily News announces the discovery of Jennifer’s body in a dump- ster not far from the Park Avenue Hotel.

4. Aftermath There are calls for some accountability from the nightclub, i.e., a sus- pension of their liquor license. At first the tabloids love the story—the triangle of sex, violence, death—a teen beauty, a rapist ex-con, and a young prostitute. There are calls for the death penalty for both pimp and prostitute. Bloggers question what role class and race played in the rape and murder. As a daughter of exclusive Harrington Park, Jennifer rarely encountered sons of the foster care system like Draymond Coleman. The teen’s African-American boyfriend is from the upper middle class. Krystal’s part defies easy explanation. Adopted at an early age by a pros- perous Connecticut family, she grows up in comfortable circumstances. That Jennifer’s boyfriend is black and respected by her father contribute to the anomaly of the case. The facts don’t fit tidily into the paradigm of racial paranoia—black versus white, poor versus rich. The day after the murder, police sources tell the Daily News that Krystal Riordan posted an ad on Craigslist billing herself as “Lisa.” Her ad offers a “$150 special.” We learn the couple had a child together.

5. Bats Nothing’s quieter than a dead girl who can’t speak for herself. As a teen I’d been Jennifer, the college-bound daredevil who thinks she’s invincible and pays a stiff price. I was eighteen and shot at a party. My face is still scarred, and I lost the use of my left arm. I’d been Krystal as well—the self-destructive one. Once the arrests are made, the Jennifer Moore murder slips off the front pages although not before commentators on Fox News castigate the victim. “How smart is walking alone on the West Side Highway in a halter and miniskirt? At 2:00 a.m. every predator in the world is going to stop for that.” Feminist bloggers attack Fox, yet soon they go silent. Sharing tabloid space with the Jennifer Moore murder is the White-Nose Disease afflicting New Jersey bats and causing mass deaths. 5.7 million. We are warned that bats face extinction if the disease can’t be halted. Bats bear their young live. They are friends to farmers. They feed on insect pests that harm crops.

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6. Mug Shots In her headshot, Jennifer, soon to attend college in the fall with plans to become a nurse, exudes a confidence befitting the captain of the Saddle River Day School’s soccer team. Yet her narrow face and almond-shaped eyes make her seem exotic. Mysterious. The highlights in her silky hair are like rain trickling between rocks sparkling and catching the light. There are blogosphere rumors that The Post has aryanized her appearance, touching up her olive skin and portraying her dark eyes as pale blue. Krystal’s mug shot surprises the viewer. Pale skin, blond hair, per- haps needing a shampoo, bewildered blue eyes (or are they hazel?), and petal lips. The lips are more expressive than the eyes. It’s a face you’ve glimpsed in sepia. Like that of a nineteenth century innocent. The cap- tion reads, “Riordan allegedly watched Coleman rape, beat and kill Moore. She was with him when he was arrested by the NYPD.” Draymond (“Dray”) Coleman’s features bristle with menace. Over six-feet-three-inches tall and 260 pounds, his dark eyes shine with an acrylic sheen. Pitiless marbles. Looking into them, your gaze reflects back, eyes with no way inside. “Please,” will not work with them. The accused killer’s sheer massiveness strikes you. At the Park Avenue Hotel, Coleman’s known for liking drugs and alcohol and prostitutes. Always on the lookout for girls, threesomes are said to be his obsession. He has a record. Two assaults. Five years in prison for selling crack. Has he killed before? A month ago he was a suspect in another murder. A sixteen-year- old African-American girl in Brooklyn named Chanel Petro-Nixon. The pockets in his jeans were ripped. Blood on his sneakers.

7. Sentence I start to write about an underage girl who goes clubbing for pleasure and finds death, and a girl who watches her boyfriend bludgeon another girl. It becomes an unfinished novella—Love Highway. Two years pass. Jennifer Moore fades into her Wikipedia entry, forever eighteen and lost on West Side Highway, forever excited by Manhattan’s night skyline of cliff-dwellings with many lights—the stars you can’t see overhead. There is a death in my family and Love Highway goes on the back burner. Another year goes by. Belatedly, I Google Krystal Riordan and discover EX-ORANGE WOMAN SENTENCED. Draymond Coleman has been given 50 years without parole. In the elevator transporting him to court, he head-butts another inmate and knocks out the inmate’s front teeth. Clad in an orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed behind his back, he’s still a Goliath. The prosecutors offer Coleman a plea bargain if he’ll implicate

PMS.. 93 Dickinson his girlfriend. He does. No plea deal is offered her. Why? Is the sin of omission worse than the sin of commission? At Krystal’s sentencing, Jennifer’s mother Candida Moore reads the Victim’s Impact Statement and asks the judge to give Krystal the maxi- mum sentence. “She stood there while Jen desperately struggled for her life. She stated that she was present for Jen’s last breaths. She was the one who felt for Jen’s pulse and declared her to be dead. At one point in the video during the vicious assault, she voluntarily left the room, but once again instead of obtaining assistance or calling the police, she goes downstairs and obtains a soda and snack from a machine and then returns to the room.” —Candida Moore, Victim Impact Krystal has gained weight. She stands head to head beside her public defender. He has assured her if she pleads guilty to charges of kidnapping and accessory-after-the-fact the judge will give her 15 years—the mini- mum. The judge delivers his verdict—30 years—the maximum. He tells Krystal she’ll not walk down a street feeling the sun on her face in her twenties, her thirties, not until her late forties, but Jennifer never will feel the sun. “I’m not a bad person,” Krystal says, weeping. Her soft face, her height and weight, make her the ideal of nineteenth century beauty. How has she stumbled into a twenty-first century murder trial? Krystal’s adoptive parents sit in the courtroom. Present, too, is the 102-pound Jennifer fighting for her life with everything she has, clawing at whatever holds her down. She’s no match for Coleman’s forearm across her throat or his fist hitting her face. What right does he have to make the moon go out? To extinguish the stars and her entire universe? The snack seals Krystal’s fate. She pictures herself walking into the lobby. The glass doors haven’t been washed in years. The lobby deserted except for wobbly end tables, love seats, and two vending machines. To the vending machine she goes. Like a zombie. She hits the button for Coke and goes to the next machine and buys M&Ms. She returns to the room to eat and drink her snacks. 30 years.

8. Edna Mahan Correctional Facility I Google the New Jersey Department of Corrections and find the state’s women’s prison located in Clinton. I contact them and ask if Krystal Riordan is incarcerated there. They e-mail me her prison numbers, i.e.

94 PMS.. poemmemoirstory what you must use when addressing a letter. I don’t know how #661287 will respond. Perhaps, she won’t answer or if she does she’ll be the cold- hearted girl portrayed by the media. A 98 on the depravity scale. My first words to Krystal are: “I have been thinking about you since I first saw your photograph in the Daily News.” She answers my letter, and I tell her I am trying to understand what happened in Weehawken and that I’ve written a novella, Love Highway, loosely based on the case. I’m interested in her and what she is thinking and feeling. Krystal seems willing to speak frankly about herself. “I’m a people-pleaser,” she says, “and I doubt that will change.” The phrase “people-pleaser” stuns me as I also am a “people-pleaser.” Pleasing oth- ers often seems a camouflage for self-doubt, a weakness, not a virtue. People-pleasing often leads to passivity and friendship with men and women who like to take charge. At Edna Mahan, she’s lost all the weight she gained at county jail. Forty pounds. She works outside cleaning, raking, and painting. She likes the physical work. “Yes, I was a jock girl. Basketball and softball were my sports.” Newport’s used to be her cigarette of choice but now she’s switched to Midnight Special rolling tobacco. Soon smoking will no longer be allowed. What all the inmates look forward to is the 50 pounds of real food they’re allowed to buy once a year. It costs $300, and so the money she earns each day goes toward its purchase. We write once a week, sometimes more. When Krystal encloses old snapshots I make copies and return the originals to her. Via Amazon I order her a copy of my novel Half Girl, an autobiographical fiction of a girl shot with a 12-gauge who survives. Only the publisher or Amazon can send a book to the correctional facility, and they must enclose a packing slip or the book will be destroyed.

9. Eva and Charlie “I saw my real mother two times,” Krystal says. “She came to visit and wanted me to go buy her some beer. When I got back she was gone and had stolen all my money. We never spoke again. I was so disappointed because my whole life I’d held her in such high regard. She wasn’t the mother I dreamed of.” Eva, Krystal’s mother, is of French descent. Her glossy black hair matches the anthracite of her eyes. A striking woman whose face appears so youthful, it’s difficult to reconcile her with the life of prostitution and drugs she’s apparently led. This mother allegedly allowed her boyfriends to fondle

PMS.. 95 Dickinson her daughters. Krystal’s father, Charlie, is a wiry man with reddish hair and glasses, whose forebears emigrated from Ireland. His t-shirt pictures a motorcycle and the words RIDE HARD. A slight parting of his lips passes for a smile. His is the grey look of smokers approaching middle age. He claims that Krystal has been brainwashed into believing she was molested. He denies it ever happened. The apartment they inhabit looks temporary and barren as if only partially furnished by the oars of a ceiling fan and the door’s deadbolt.

10. Three Sisters Three sisters sleep in the same bed. Beautifully named like expensive jewelry or delicate stemware, Tiffany, the dark-haired eldest, is seven; Krystal, five; and Nicole, three. The eldest sleeps in the middle because the younger girls cling to her. They are each other’s world. There’s little to eat in the house and when the younger girls cry from hunger, Tiffany finds them food. Cold Spaghetti-O’s and dill pickles. Five-year-old Krystal enters kindergarten. She’s so pale you can see the scribbles of blue veins at her wrists and temples. The girl hangs back and then walks into the good-smelling classroom where the best thing she learns is the carton of white milk that arrives in the middle of the morning and once a week the carton is chocolate. The teacher notices she comes to school unwashed, in dirty clothes. She startles easily, like an animal when a hunter enters the woods. Be still, wait, and allow her to trust you. The signs of neglect are evident. When the girl scratches her head, the school nurse is called. Lice. The day the three sisters are separated, Krystal remembers hiding behind the couch while police lights twirl in the window. The younger girls are screaming when policemen find and carry them to a waiting car. The eldest girl is taken to a different car. Tiffany writes to Krystal in prison, regretting that the three of them weren’t kept together. She believes things would have turned out differ- ently for Krystal and Nicole if their big sister had been there to guide them. The day they are separated, the eldest sister says, was the worst of her life. Tiffany, age 28, is the mother of four beautiful children. Krystal, age 26, has served six and a half years of a 30-year prison sentence. Nicole, age 24, is in jail.

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11. The Riordans Prominent in Connecticut politics, Krystal’s adoptive father is a found- ing partner in the accounting firm that bears his name. Krystal’s adoptive mom is also an accountant. The Riordans have one biological child, Emily, a lawyer. The couple’s motives for adopting two girls, age five and three, are not known. Did they want sisters for Emily, a larger family? And who could resist the innocence of Krystal and Nicole, their faces like lilies or summer clouds or doves? “I never accepted them as my parents and did a lot to push them away,” Krystal admits. Adoption is the trickiest of paths for both parents and children, especially children who remember their home of origin. “You’re not my real mother!” is a knife in the hands of a child. “You’re not my real daughter,” is a knife in the hands of a mother. The night is dark for five-year-old Krystal in the spacious Connecticut house. She hardly knows how to speak. Her adoptive father later will describe how she screams in her sleep and wakes the house, often not stirring herself. The school years pass, and Krystal begins to for- get the sharp outlines of her birth parents, the boyfriends, and the hunger. Her new mom talks too much and too loud. She gets along better with her dad. In the beginning, she tries to please her new parents, but reaching ado- lescence, she starts to test them. The Riordans become her persecutors, and Eva and Charlie, the half remembered real parents, her saviors. Only in prison when her adoptive mom undergoes treatment for throat cancer does Krystal realize she doesn’t want to lose her. “My adopted par- ents are good people,” she says. “No matter what I did they were always by my side.”

12. Photographs

First Easter In a dress with puffy sleeves and a wide sash, Emily holds the hands of Krystal and Nicole. She’s older and more self-confident. A tulip tree’s bloom. In white frocks and white stockings, the sisters try to smile at their first Easter. There’s a faraway look on the wan blond child’s face. Her skin’s pink as a captive rabbit’s eye. Or is the child a rabbit, trem- bling, ready to bolt and hide? Three adorable girls in lace and ribbons. It’s a gloriously hopeful picture. Knowing all you know, you think “how per- fect!” What a beautiful family.

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Black Dog Hugging a large black dog named Finnegan are three girls in Catholic school uniforms—grey sweaters and plaid skirts. Krystal faces the cam- era, her clear eyes are somber and her cheek presses the dog’s body as if she loves him more than her own self.

Krystal #13 In a maroon St. Mary-St. Michael’s letter jacket, Krystal #13 stares straight through you. The solemn oval of her face is lit by blue eyes. The sparkle in their depths is of a blue star sapphire. A vivid intense blue— the most desirable color. It would take an evil clairvoyant to conjure this eighth grade girl’s future from the blamelessness of her gaze.

Bake Sale Here are four tanned, long-legged girls, their blond hair tied back in pony- tails. The tallest and prettiest is unsmiling Krystal. She and her teammates will soon be on their way to Florida for basketball nationals. They’re raising money for the trip—red velvet cupcakes and brownies. College coaches are already scouting thirteen-year-old Krystal. “I was very good,” she says. Some of her teammates will make the U.S. Olympic Basketball Team.

13. Elan Krystal is sent to Elan, in Poland Springs, Maine, the expensive and contro- versial boarding school for troubled teens. Once there, she says she’s made to write a letter telling her parents the truth of all the bad things she’s done. Although she says she’s never really done anything, she says she’s forced to tell lies about herself. Krystal says she is a virgin, who’d been molested before age five, and that she is made to confess to having had sex, to using drugs and drinking. Yet she says she’s never had a boyfriend. “It was a lock- down therapeutic boarding school. I was there for three years. If I’d never been sent there, I might have had a full basketball scholarship,” Krystal writes. “We all went to group therapy to talk about this stuff. It got to the point I actually started to believe I’d done all those things.” Elan closes in 2011 due to a negative Web campaign after survivor reports begin circulating on the Internet. These stories speak of student abuse, almost unbelievable corruption, and tuition of $42,000–$56,000 a year. Many investigations by the Maine Department of Education cleared the school, but it could not recover from the negative publicity.

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According to the damaging testimonies, the students performed all the janitorial services, i.e. scrubbing floors on hands and knees, cleaning toilets, grounds keeping. The academic classes themselves were consid- ered of secondary importance. Therapy might consist of a teen standing alone in a corner while hundreds of fellow students yelled, cursed, and called him or her names, sometimes staff or senior students egging the crowd on. Krystal explains the “ring” where students fought. “I was one of the last people to get a ‘ring.’ I fought two huge girls and a boy for one minute each. It may not seem like a long time but when it’s happening it is,” Krystal says. “I spent the first two years in the corner.” A ‘haircut,’ another therapeutic tool, would be performed by three students yelling and calling you names. Krystal tried to tell her parents about the school. They didn’t believe her.

14. Dray After graduating, Krystal leaves the boarding school without a place to stay. Her parents will pay for her to go to college, but after the strict regime she’s lived under she wants her freedom. Ready to stretch her wings, she calls a girl she knows from Elan who shares an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend/pimp. Yes, Krystal can stay with them under the condition she’ll work as a prostitute for her boyfriend, too. In the beginning the work feels glamorous. “I never felt so beautiful,” Krystal admits. “Men paying to have sex with me and sometimes they’d take me out to dinner, and we wouldn’t even have sex.” This is before Dray. When she can spend her own money and go shopping. She buys a truck. She wears cream-white dresses that fit like sleeves. Tighter. Madonna long ago set the siren standard for the younger generations of chanteuses and teen beauties. The prostitute/call girl is her own celebrity. The pimp has his own set of friends, one of whom is Draymond Coleman. Fifteen years older than Krystal, tall, muscular, with the pumped up physique of a football player, he showers her with attention. Her friend’s boyfriend decides to sell her to another pimp. “That’s when Dray stepped in,” Krystal says. “He fought for me.” His fighting for her left an indelible mark as if the most chivalrous of acts. He is now her pimp. She leaves with him and stays with him. In the beginning, she claims they get along great. When she works the street he goes out with her, and she thinks he cares. Mostly, they live in cheap hotels and eat from vending machines. “He was funny and liked to laugh. He was really attentive when it came to me.” Those first months

PMS.. 99 Dickinson they cuddle in bed, and she loves waking late in the afternoon and buy- ing their breakfast from the vending machine. “It was like I was brain- washed. I thought I couldn’t live without him.” When Krystal becomes pregnant with his child, he forces her to keep working. She had hoped they’d marry and Dray would get a job. Instead, he rents her to dealers to pay for his crack. Rock. The drug isn’t pretty like the hot blue shots or the chocolate martinis that sing as soon as you swallow. She does things she’s ashamed of. She gives birth to a healthy girl. One night she returns from work to find her daughter gone. Draymond has called Children Services tell- ing them to come for the ‘unwanted’ infant. She stops caring. There’s not enough strength in her to fight for her daughter or leave Coleman. Getting high is the only way to deal with the pain, and she focuses on the crack pipe, the beige chunk on wire mesh, the Bic. White smoke floods her with light—a calla lily on fire—and she keeps swallowing more and more smoke. It never lasts. The twenty-year-old is under Draymond’s control. She is his robot. “My relationship with Dray is hard for me to think about now,” she says. “He was my first real boyfriend. My only one! I thought he loved me.”

15. Trinity Sade Coleman The daughter of Krystal and Draymond is a spectacularly beautiful child—a mix of white, black, and Hispanic. She inherited her mother’s long legs and expressive lips—lips like eyes. The photograph shows the adoptive mother sitting with her arm around the two-year-old. The light- skinned brown woman is pictured from her neck down, but her face either accidentally or purposefully has been cut off or left outside the frame. “My daughter has been adopted by a good family and I don’t have any contact with her. It’s painful for me. The last picture I saw of her was when she was two. Now she’s seven. When she’s older she’ll look for me like I looked for my mother,” she says. Perhaps, the most inexplicable of Krystal’s actions besides not helping Jennifer is allowing Draymond to give her baby to Children’s Services.

16. Prison Whites Krystal wears the white t-shirt and shorts, white socks and white sneak- ers—the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility uniform. Even in a maxi- mum detention facility the slender, blond, All-American girl is aglow.

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Free of Draymond, her blue eyes shine. She goes to group therapy where she’s learning not to be so weak-minded. She has made friends. Dara, sentenced to 70 years for shooting and killing a man on the streets of Atlantic City, is one. Nicole, a pretty Latina from Newark serving a 40-year sentence, is another. She was pregnant at the time she shot her eighteen-year-old neighbor on high school graduation night. The neighbor girl, celebrating her graduation in front of her house with her friends, had called Nicole a lowlife. Krystal often thinks back to that morning—the impossible one— when she’d been up all night waiting for Draymond. The hairs rise on her neck when he gets out of the taxi, and then a girl follows him. A very young, pretty girl. Footsteps on the outside stairs stop, start again. Her eyes burn. Why is he bringing her here? After her arrest, it’s Krystal who takes the detectives to Jennifer’s body. The morgue van pulls up behind the squad cars. It feels like she’s walking on the silent-pitted moon. The parking lot’s asphalt is cracked, and grass sprouts up from crevices. The air smells of vegetables and rotting cantaloupes and something meatier. “In there,” Krystal says, pointing to the far end of the lot where, next to some sticky weeds, stands the dumpster. Flies and gnats buzz. The sun, no longer directly overhead but close enough to call it early afternoon, makes it about the same time as then, except that day had been cloudless. Sun kept beating down. Dray had cursed it. She remembers Dray stuffing Jennifer into the duffel bag, having to bend her legs so she’d fit. An ambulance waits behind the morgue van. Could it be possible that Jennifer had taken another breath and then another? What if she’d lived for awhile in the dumpster like people in olden days inside their wooden coffins? They knew because of the scratch marks. Or, what if she is still alive in the duffel bag? The men in white hazmat uniforms surround the dumpster and glance at Krystal like she is the garbage that deserves to be thrown out. They find the duffel bag, but the girl inside will never breathe again.

17. The World Outside Here it is Sunday and the bells are ringing, silencing the flesh-buyers and sellers, the homeless eating from the Big Fat Gyros street cart. I finish my letter. Bells are calling us all to our higher selves—to redemption. I have hope for Krystal Riordan in her imperfect struggle toward the light. And

PMS.. 101 Dickinson if much of what she reveals casts her younger self in the role of victim, I don’t feel it’s my right to judge. The state, Jennifer’s family, and a host of others have already done that. Half of her life has passed under some form of external control—Elan, Draymond, prison. In all of the many words that have passed between us, I notice she rarely complains or criti- cizes. At her core, there’s a bruised gentleness. A court date lies ahead and the possibility for a reduced 15-year sentence. Someday she’d like to counsel young prostitutes. It is often for love, not money, that girls find themselves hooking. Is it worse giv- ing a three-minute blow job or standing for eight hours as a cashier at Rite Aid? That’s the question boyfriend/pimps ask. In our hyper-sexual, hyper-materialistic culture where everything is for sale—air, water, the view from a bus window painted over with ads—why not seems more the question to many girls than why. How was Krystal’s destiny changed by being adopted into a support- ive family? Did it make any difference or was it already too late? Did Krystal consciously choose to follow her prostitute birth mother’s profes- sion or was it something subliminal? Those indelible first five years of neglect, so destructive to her personality that Draymond Coleman could look like a safe harbor.

*

I imagine Jennifer and Krystal in summer when it is still light. They walk through a hail of sirens and gusts of arguing, past a tulip tree surrounded by sidewalk. If either were those branches how unhappy she’d be with wanting to fly into the open sky. Birds overhead spread their wings like laughter. Feather-scented bodies slip through the dusk. The sky explodes behind the old warehouses in crème de mint greens and brooding indi- gos and the last of the sun setting fire to all the colors. The two girls have grown together. They are Siamese twins.

102 PMS.. Mary Grover

Love for Jumpy Insomniacs

My father, a medical doctor, treated my first bout of insomnia, which came of anxiety over long division. (Remainders!) Instead of reading me a bedtime story or giving me a daddy-daughter pep talk, he pressed half a Valium into my upraised palm. “This will help you to sleep,” he soothed, handing me a water chaser in a plastic cup. One-hundred percent effective. And as I softly dropped off, I felt loved. Over the years, the triggers have varied—Paul Davis, for example, who never asked for a second date; apprehension over incipient cold sores; far too many chocolate covered espresso beans; fear of Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter, fear of the SAT, GRE, and the IRS; any number of ABBA songs; the prospect of mega volcano eruptions and mega tsunamis; and most recently, in my 40s, the actuality of hormonal mega tsunamis. When it comes to my lifelong struggle with insomnia, however, the constant has been a longing for comfort from Dr. Daddy, whose early intervention forged a strong psychic link between prescription medica- tion and TLC. Whenever I pop a sleeping pill, I feel the love. Also, I feel like a placated hysteric. Crying, in fact, is an excellent way to get a pre- scription. Not that I have ever faked a crying jag to score drugs. In my thirties, after the death of my mother, sitting opposite a very nice doc- tor, my complaint the insomnia of grief, the grief of insomnia—I wept authentically—and scored some Ambien. Whereas my very first dose of pharmaceutical TLC cradled me with solicitude, Ambien KO’d me with love. There were a few moments to sigh—Ah, such a nice doctor—before meeting with sweet oblivion. Looking down with tender approval, my mother also sighed with relief. Although she had not been a wound-up insomniac, she had wrung her hands a lot, especially whenever I got upset. And at that time of my life, I was very upset—in graduate school and unable to focus on my studies, motherless. In a way, the Ambien released us both. Soon though, my little supply ran out. Bedding down for the night, I

PMS.. 103 Grover got itchy. The rattan chair in my room made Rice Crispies’ sounds. And my pajamas—how­ dare they!—kept rubbing against my skin. Melatonin, Valerian, Benadryl: useless. Over Christmas, the first without my mother, I visited my father, who was at that time single and alone in the house. I couldn’t find sleep in my childhood bedroom, even with its updated color palette of mel- low browns. The wee hours wretchedly scraped along towards morning, when I emerged, raw and dazed, to find my father energetically cleaning house. The roar of the vacuum cleaner competed with “Bad Moon on the R i s e .” “Dad.” I tapped him on the shoulder. “Dad!” Startled, he switched off the vacuum cleaner. Creedence Clearwater Revival kept up the assault, and I fumbled with the stereo knobs to lower the volume. “The music, it keeps my spirits up!” he said. There was a note of manic cheer in his voice. “Dad, I can’t sleep. Do you have anything?” He was off to the medicine cabinet. As he rummaged through his store of remedies, I nearly cried with anticipated relief but contained myself because I knew tears would have put him at a loss. “Ambien!” he announced, exuberantly pleased to help. “I keep it for trips.” He doled out three pills into my upraised palm. “Take half a pill at bedtime.” I took a whole pill at bedtime. So lovely was my deliverance that I pilfered a few more pills before I left. Dad won’t be taking a trip anytime soon, I told myself. After my return home, though, I ran out again. Desperate, I found myself looking for love in a medicine cabinet that was not my own, perusing amber-colored bottles for…Zolpidem Tartrate! With a frisson of guilt and desire, I wrapped two tablets in toilet paper and stuffed them into my pocket. Later, as I put up a front of polite conversation over dessert, I fingered my concealed treasure—the precious—feeling all the while like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. My own corruption appalled me; I therefore devised more honest means of acquisition: Surely, a junket to the cheese department at Whole Foods could legitimately be termed a trip—at least that’s what I reasoned when telling one doctor, and then another, that I needed some Ambien for a trip. Supply problem solved. Zolpidem Tartrate, however, can have unpleasant side effects. Some people who take Ambien or other sleep hypnotics may experience head-

104 PMS.. poemmemoirstory ache, dizziness, tingling of the tongue, unusual dreams, flatulence, and etc. Others, it has been reported, lapse into a catatonic state of arousal and engage in sexual acts with someone who is not their partner. While I have never had occasion to use this alibi, chronic Ambien use turns me into a brooding zombie, continually hung over from chemi- cally induced sleep. Also, after taking Ambien for too many nights run- ning, I develop a furtive and embarrassing relationship with a spit hanky because the drug gives me cotton mouth, inciting compensatory saliva- tion. I tried to quit. I caved. I tried to quit. etc. I staunchly removed the temptation, sequestering my stash in a friend’s backyard, under a flower pot where I keep a spare set of keys in case of emergency. On many occasions, deciding it was a case of emer- gency, I retrieved a pill, my friend’s cat glaring at me with disdain as the scrape of terra-cotta downgraded my stealth. Then, before the neighbor children could go after a stray ball, discover the precious, OD, and make me famous, I repossessed my supply and reverted to zombie. There was, I confess, a kind of self-abandoned contentment in my depressed, drooling state. The truth is that I did not want to let go of the love in the drug, never mind the ill effects. The pills transported me to a bed in a house where the fridge was always stocked and the bills always paid, where I heard talk of mortgages, IRAs, and a need for new brakes but had the luxury to focus on more interesting things, like my bottle cap collection and the next episode of the Partridge Family. What finally gave me the willpower to abstain were ominous findings gone viral, first published in the British Medical Journal. A study found that people who took more than fifteen sleep hypnotics a year faced greater risk of death, and at higher doses, cancer. Even after pre-existing medical conditions were accounted for, the correlation remained signifi- cant. While it is quite possible that Ambien eaters court death because they simply don’t get enough exercise or roughage, I am a paranoid believer, which keeps me up at night. Determined to kick the habit, I consulted several self-help books for the sleep challenged, which advised me to smell lavender, hum, wash my sheets, play the hypnosis CD (sold separately), and practice alternate

PMS.. 105 Grover nostril breathing and altruism. I was also warned not to watch violent TV programs such as CSI before bedtime—though I prefer Battlestar Galactica, which threatens the annihilation of humankind in each epi- sode but does not brandish such grisly corpses. The author of Restful Insomnia seemed to know that I am single, and her tip—“Cuddle up to a favorite old stuffed animal for comfort”—made me even more depressed than an Ambien binge. The Women’s Book of Sleep told me that it’s a bad idea to go to bed in my new exercise outfit (I agree). The title of one coercive book—I Can Make You Sleep—compelled me to resist with combative wakefulness. The core philosophy of many such guides is sound, though: Instead of medicating, I learned that I should dissociate from my inner hysteric by calling it something else, since being called a hysteric is enough to make anyone hysterical. In this renaming and self-soothing project I was especially aided by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, who in his book Say Good Night to Insomnia introduced me to NATS, or negative autonomic thoughts. Those of us caught up in the insomniac’s vortex of anxiety are not hys- terics. The NATS are to blame, as they “cause us to lose perspective, get locked into one-track thinking, accentuate the negative, and view stress- ful situations in an inaccurate, distorted fashion.” NATS subject us to awfulizing and catastrophizing, for example, “If I can’t get remainders, I will never make it to the fifth grade” or “I am going to die without remainders” or “I am going to die with remainders.” In the first stages of sleep, I lose lucidity but not the knack for freak- ing out; the emblems of anxiety simply become more absurd: Charles Manson smears ABBA lyrics in blood on the wall. Math problems on the GRE necessitate baroque calculations involving chocolate covered espres- so beans. Such imaginings stir longing for Dr. Daddy love. But I heed Dr. Jacobs and “substitute more realistic, accurate thoughts about stressful situations”: It’s Charles Manson’s followers who slaughtered the Tates; therefore, I needn’t worry about Charles Manson, per se. Chocolate- covered espresso beans are monochromatic, and problems on the GRE usually involve things that can be multicolored, such as jellybeans, of course, also hats, and threads in quilts. Scientific thinking in excess stunts emotional growth, but after con- ducting some research, I have found that a scientific perspective can defang anxiety over sleeplessness. Now, whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and go into a tailspin of catastrawfulizing, I find reas-

106 PMS.. poemmemoirstory surance in a fascinating study featured on the Nova special, What Are Dreams? Patrick McNamara and Erica Harris, researchers affiliated with Boston University, found that the dreams we have during deeper stages of sleep tend to be positive and emotionally restorative, while those we have during REM send our cars careening off cliffs or else our moth- ers into our bedrooms during especially private moments. It is perfectly normal that I wake from REM in the middle of the night, beset by dream demons. Because each sleep cycle is about 90 minutes long, concluding in REM, it’s quite possible to wake four to five times a night in a state of paranoid apprehension. Usually, however, I wake up in this state only once, since I can’t get back to sleep when I feel that an incipient cold sore is an apocalyptic event. But when this happens, I calm myself by say- ing, “This is REM-induced NATS,” and then smear on the prophylactic cold sore salve I keep in a bedside dresser along with the Melatonin and Valerian. Also thanks to my research, I no longer feel isolated in my condi- tion. I share solidarity with the hapless fruit fly subjects in studies that investigate the genetic basis of insomnia. Insomniac flies, it seems, carry a mutated insomniac gene (while it is aggressively senseless to call a gene that does not cause insomnia the insomniac gene, I try not to get NATS over it). Paul Shaw, PhD, in a particularly sadistic experiment, discovered that flies with the mutated gene are hyper-responsive to stimuli. To single them out, he stunned sleeping subjects with a bright light. Of course, while the insomniacs woke up and remained awake, the other flies soon dozed off, just as my father did whenever my mother would sound a nocturnal alert—often at the moment I placed my hand on the bedroom doorknob. “WHO’ S THAT!?” she’d shout. “I had a baaad dream,” I’d complain, piteously. Really, I had been lying awake in the dark, on the alert for the child-seeking predators that populated my mother’s night- mares. Insomnia may in fact be linked to a highly tuned startle reflex, which our ancestors needed for survival. Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, in his book The Emotional Brain, argues that it’s an evolutionary legacy to make ready connections between predators and the snap of a twig. Like early humanoids and my mother, I am hypersensitive to acoustic stimuli, above all when the rattan chair in my room makes the Rice Crispies’ noises just as I am drifting off to sleep. WHAT’S THAT!? I bolt awake, and then I have to tell myself, again, that the bamboo in the chair

PMS.. 107 Grover is simply…relaxing? Ledoux, drawing upon the work of Arne Öhman, speculates that some individuals are genetically predisposed to anticipate threats, super- prepared to acquire fears. I am certain that in prehistoric times, easy-to- startle clan members acted as early warning systems while others, like my father, snored away in the back of the cave (or up in the tree or in the lean-to). Clearly, individuals who now identify as twitchy insomniacs are genetically, or at least temperamentally, chosen to ensure the survival of the group. However, because we are no longer prey for bear-sized hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and other large carnivores, our contribution often goes underappreciated. New research, though, provides grounds for vindication. Until more recently, it was thought that insomniacs who complain a lot suf- fered from “sleep misperception”—the insomniac’s hypochondriasis: “I never sleep a wink!” was unconfirmed by EGG’s, which showed that whiney subjects had in fact passed through various sleep stages during the course of the night. But a study conducted by Maria Corsi-Cabrera and her colleagues at the Cuban Neuroscience Center shows that while self-identified insomniacs do cycle through deeper stages of sleep, their awake-state brain waves remain active, comingled with their asleep-state brain waves. These persistently awake brain waves emanate from the pre- frontal cortex, the center of conscious awareness to external stimuli. For those of us whose brain wave patterns remain on yellow alert as we sleep, random pops or snaps emitted by relaxing furniture are hostile intruders bent on harm!!! A predisposition to stay on edge in the middle of the night is some- thing that our culture has pathologized. I maintain that sooner or later, this special capacity will be essential for the survival of humankind. My premonition was reinforced when, after listening to a talk by the cuddly and charismatic astrophysicist, Neil de Grasse Tyson, I was compelled to ask the following question, even though I knew the answer would surely add to my list of insomnia triggers: “What is the probability of a giant asteroid slamming into Earth and wiping out 99% of life?” “It’s not a question of if,” he replied, “but when.” (A kindred soul, he went on to talk excitedly about how at present the number of peo- ple monitoring Earth-crossing objects is woefully small, the size of a McDonald’s staff.) Jumpy types filled with prescient apprehension know that in the event

108 PMS.. poemmemoirstory of a global holocaust, survivors will find themselves battling for scarce resources in a Mad Max dystopia. Yes, and alert insomniacs therefore need to keep the edge of their readiness keen. Sleep medication not only harms our health, but takes away our sense of purpose. Truth be told, I backslide and take an Ambien now and then (for trips), but most always, rather than taking pills to knock me out, I con- trol my environment to persuade my prefrontal cortex that, at least for the time being, there is nothing to fear. A white noise maker has muffled my rattan chair. I recently moved into a multi-unit apartment build- ing, on the top floor, where it’s difficult to gain access from the street. Neighbors on lower floors will most likely be attacked by marauders first, giving me time to call 911 and make my escape. My environmental defense system, which is external rather than internal, helps me to let go of the nocturnal anxiety experienced by the chosen. But I have it on tap, just as my fruit fly and human confederates do. Our day will come, and eschewing pills, we will be ready. I still seek Daddy love from my father, but not Dr. Daddy love: Two years after my mother passed away, my father met a lively, generous- hearted woman. When I visit, I am warmly welcomed into their home. Once again, he is happily married, but he is not the same. He has always had much to give in the way of support besides meds—sage advice on car maintenance and tax preparation, for example. But these days, he hugs me for a moment or two longer at the airport. And there is more now, in his smile. Age and loss have deepened its warmth, a balm to soothe what pills cannot fix.

PMS.. 109 Julia Shipley

Let Us Now Praise Rural Women: The Things They Jettisoned

The only requirement to pitch an iron skillet with all your might and maybe win a blue ribbon for it, other than paying your ten bucks at the entrance to the Lamoille County Field Days, is that you be a female. The urge to vent a frustration, assert your prowess, expand your influence, project your greatness, well, those are optional. For the past eighteen Julys in East Johnson, VT, rural gals of all ages, from two years old to none-of-your-business have picked up the pan, stood behind the line and let ‘er rip. The Ladies Underhanded Skillet toss was added to the Fair’s roster of tractor pulls, horse pulls, ox pulls, and arm wrestling as an event strictly for the fairer sex when Pearl Earle, a former board member of Field Days, observed women hucking skillets at the Fryeburg Fair in Maine and thought, “Gee, that looks like a lot of fun.” The objective of the contest is as straightforward as flipping a pan- cake: stand behind the line, and hurl it (underhand) as far as you can. Your score is a composite of the total distance thrown minus how far away it lands from the center line. In 2012, as 49 participants stepped up on a Saturday afternoon to give it a whirl, there were females from nearly every decade of a human’s life span, from toddlers to Medicare recipients. And as the pan changed hands, moving up through the ages, I couldn’t help wondering what forces fuel these exertions?

*

We throw showers, we throw parties, we toss wedding bouquets and pitch pennies into fountains and, in a different mood or spirit we throw down the gauntlet, throw a hissy fit, throw a tantrum, throw the baby out with the bath water. We throw our life away. We throw up. We throw our lot in with another. We have ideas and then, we throw them out there.

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Could it be that the gesture of launching a skillet—while the country band thumps a ditty and sooty smoke drifts over from the tractor pull— is an act of ambition? Joie de vivre? A mighty fury? If the skillet were a kind of penny you fling into a fountain, what would you wish for? And if the skillet were something in your life you could banish, jettison never to know again—what would that be? Gathered behind the Blooming Onion, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Maple Shack, the $5 leather belts, and air-gun arcade, the skillet toss ladies are surely indulging in both amusement and diversion, something fun to try on a sultry afternoon. But what if the event is slightly subversive? What if the thing they’re hurling away, casting out, flinging is not just an iron frying pan?

*

The pan itself is heavier than it looks. Even though it resembles the one you have in your kitchen, a four-egg omelet deal, it weighs 10 pounds, a reinforced skillet made specifically for this event. It’s a substantial thing to fling, and over the course of an evening it will crash land about 100 times, not including the pre-event practice throws. One year, as the event’s organizers Jessica Chauvin, Stacy Hubbell, and Angel Prescott unpacked the Field Day storage shed to prepare for the event, they couldn’t find the skillet. In a panic they drove around and purchased every skillet they could find in Lamoille County. By the time they issued the final ribbons and trophies, nine skillets had been rendered scrap metal. Angel Prescott, who works at Hardwick KwikStop and Deli, is her- self responsible for the destruction of two, earning herself another blue ribbon for the trouble. Both she and Stacy Hubbell, who works at LWI Metalworks where the special skillets are made, step out of the judges’ booth to compete annually. But how serious are they? Do they practice at home? “Nah,” says Angel casually, sitting with her clipboard list of names and distances. While skillet tosses can be found in other states, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Indiana, and incor- porated into other celebrations like dairy days, county fairs, and apple festivals, the oldest flying-kitchen-object event may well be the National Skillet Throw held in Macksburg, Iowa. In this variation of the skillet toss, begun in 1975, the contestant whips a cast steel pan (not iron) at a

PMS.. 111 Shipley dummy 30 feet away in an attempt to decapitate it. The homicidal innu- endo is even less subtle in video footage from an unspecified fair where a woman is actually pitching the skillet at a man. Her marksmanship requires him to shift left to avoid getting beaned. It could be easy to cast this skillet toss as pure catharsis, as release, as a radical act of rejection. In one swift sweep of my arm, I once threw a wine glass at the sliding door to the porch (not my wine glass, not my porch), infuriated by a friend’s coy remark. My teacher once confessed she carried the favorite vase of her lover to the second floor window and flung it to the asphalt. Then there is Lois Wilson, the wife of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, who once whipped a shoe at him as hard as she could, and upon regaining her composure, realized she needed a strategic program akin to AA to maintain her emotional sobri- ety. (And thus, Al Anon, a 12-step program for friends and families of alcoholics, owes its beginning to the chucking of a shoe.) Less propulsive but equally graphic, according to environmental art- ist and critic, Lucy Lippard, an Eskimo culture offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape: the point at which the anger is expressed is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage. On the other hand, hurling can also be an act, not of loss of self- control or vehement rejection, but of aspiration, courage, and affirma- tion—such as when one “throws their hat in the ring” and launches a business and catapults to the top of the best-seller list; “success” itself can be described as “soaring,” which is just what the black pan does after it leaves the lady’s hand. So what, exactly, is unfolding on the cordoned-off field beneath the flailing legs of riders on the Tilt-a-Whirl?

*

Callie Bushnell from Eden, Vermont, participating in the Peewee Division (ages 1–6), picks up the junior two-pound skillet, draws it back, and pitches it eight feet, then flings herself to the grass where she has returned to cuddle with her dad. Her face is painted like a cat with whis- kers and a black nose, which she buries in her father’s stomach, especially when she is asked questions. Does she throw things at home? Her dad helps: “Callie? Do you throw balls, Frisbees, toys?” No response. How

112 PMS.. poemmemoirstory old is she? Callie raises two fingers. Her dad counters, she’s three. Callie insists two. What do you like? What don’t you like? She wipes her hand backwards across her face as if by doing so she can wipe interrogators out of her vicinity. Nine-year-old Amanda Moore from Burlington, a contestant in the Pre-teen Division (7–12), is more forthcoming. This is her first skillet toss ever and she is participating because her brother, Jakob, 11, said, “Impress me.” I ask what it was like to huck an iron discus by the handle, which earned her 15 feet 10 inches and seventh place. She confessed, “I was nervous.” What would she throw away? Old shoes. Her wish, her dream? Fly! Fifteen-year-old Iva Wright, from Craftsbury, Vermont, is the cousin of organizer Angel Prescott and has come to join the Teen Division (13 to 19). Iva’s answers are frank. She abhors it when adults do not respect the autonomy of young people. And she is quick to emphasize that she is not referring to her own parents in this case. “It’s complicated,” she said decisively. “My dream? To speak every language. I just think that would be so cool. And then I could get a really good job.” Iva admits her turn with the skillet made her anxious, “My first throw was a dud: 24 feet. But then I doubled it: 40 feet. Well, it was actually 50 feet 2 inches but they deducted 10 feet. As the Mrs. Division (ages 36 to 55) gets underway, a woman who has seemed merely a concerned observer, sitting by the judges’ stand in a folding chair she’s lugged along, stands when her name is called and leaning heavily on her cane, processions to the field for her turn. Fifty- four-year-old Jinny Bogni-Lemay, from Johnson, Vermont has been practicing at home with a one-foot diameter skillet (as opposed to the regulation 10-incher). But she’s fairly disgusted with her 32-foot two-inch throw and leaner 28-foot five-inch second throw. Fourth place is no con- solation to the southpaw who became world champion in her age divi- sion for the hammer, shot-put, heavy discuss, and javelin at the World Games in Korea in 1993. She is throwing skillets, she reports, because her husband dropped dead of a heart attack next to her in the car and she knows she’s got no time to waste. She’s got sort of a bucket list—she’s gone up in a hot air balloon and her pictures of such are on display in the arts and crafts tent; she would’ve done the arm wrestling last night but they didn’t run the women’s division till the end and besides, she’s left-handed. She uses a

PMS.. 113 Shipley cane because her legs are full of blood clots. What would she throw away if she could? No question: the blood clots. And her wish? She’d have her husband back beside her in a second, Richard Lemay, Trader Dick they called him. After the final awards have all been handed out—the ribbons and the little mounted skillet trophies for first prize winners—Stacey­ and Angel start dismantling the course. While Stacy winds up the boundary tape, contestant Susan Southall approaches Angel with a request. “There’s a lot of years between 55 and the rest of us [in the Young at Heart]… what about a new division called the ‘Aged and Infirm’ or simply ‘The Medicare Division?’ Angel is busy collecting the clipboards. “Um, that’s something we can think about.” Angel, who will be 25 in December, has been involved in Field Days for 20 years, since she was five. First, she helped in the Animal Tent with calves, ducks, and piglets, then in the Discovery Tent with the goat pet- ting zoo and the scavenger hunt, and now, for more than a decade, this. The first time she ever threw the skillet, she was 13 years old. She hurled it and won first place. Two months later, she lost her trophy when her house burned. The following year they dedicated a special trophy to her. Last year, she hucked that skillet 68 feet, picking up her ninth blue ribbon. “I’d love to be able to sit and relax,” she says, brushing off the skil- let and depositing it in the Rubbermaid bin. “Every year you think it’s going to be easier, but no matter how organized you think you are, it just doesn’t get any easier. But if the Skillet Toss didn’t exist, there’d be no activities just for the women.”

*

In the unforgettable novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien describes a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam and the superfluous things they lug through the jungle. The gesture of carrying things—ten- ounce love letters and comic books and glass jars of peaches, of holding these things close, in their own packs and hearts, seems secretly mater- nal. Conversely, the sorority of 49 females here tonight could appear to be performing an archetypically masculine act as each holds something close to her body then dispatches it, expels it, jettisons it with all her might out into the world: her moxie, her surrogate, her skillet.

114 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

Shobha Rao

An Unrestored Woman

Neela, on the night she learned of her husband’s death, sat under the banyan tree outside their hut and felt an intense hunger. It was on the night of the train accident. No, not an accident, she corrected herself. Not at all. She felt this same hunger on her wedding day. She was thirteen years old, and she sat on the altar wearing a sparkling red sari and the gold mangal sutra around her neck—thin, even by the reduced standards of the impoverished northern village—and tried desperately to silence her growling stomach. The hunger on her wedding day might’ve been caused by the tempt- ing mountains of food stacked around her. Fruits, coconuts, ladoos, twisted piles of orange jilebi. She’d never seen so much food; her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten since early morning and that had only been a meager helping of rice and buttermilk. Neela eyed the bananas and mangoes piled on the plate between her and the priest. He was reciting Sanskrit prayers. Her soon-to-be husband who sat beside her, wiry and dark like a dry summer chili, was turned away from her talking to a man she didn’t recognize. In truth, she hardly recognized even her groom. Her red veil obscured him from view. Besides, she’d only seen him once before; she’d stolen a glimpse when he’d sat talking with her father, both of them bent and pecking over the details of her marriage like two crows over a piece of stale bread. Her father had said it was a good match; he’d given her future hus- band—who was 24 years old and owned a tea shop catering to the com- muter trains between Amritsar and Lahore—two cows, a trunk full of pots and pans, a bag of seed, and a green woolen blanket. Even the thick- ness of the gold necklace had been negotiated. Babu, her groom, had scowled at its flimsiness and had only been appeased when Neela’s father had said, “Look. Look at that girl. Strong as an ox. She’ll bear you no less than ten sons!” Neela stared at the plate. She obviously couldn’t eat one of the man- goes, but why not a banana? If only she could sneak it from the plate then she could manage peeling it under her veil. Her bent head would

PMS.. 117 Rao hide the chewing. She extended an arm forward surreptitiously. Then a little further. She sighed. It was just beyond her reach. Someone would notice. She pulled back, weak, hungrier than ever. The plump yellow of the bananas called to her. Their smooth skins were the edge of a sunrise. They were the voice of her mother. She’d died giving birth to Neela, but Neela had imagined her voice many, many times, flawless and brave, and cool like the banana skin. Just then, the priest shifted his legs and jostled the plate. What luck! It bumped closer to Neela. This was her chance. Her arm darted out, plucked the outermost banana, and whisked it under her veil. The first bite slid down her throat and into her empty stomach. Her eyes widened with delight just as her husband’s had when he’d opened the trunk full of glistening pots.

The details of the train wreck trickled down to Neela. First over the news wire, heard by the men of the village over the transistor radio in the home of Lalla, the village elder. He brought the news to her mother-in- law, who Lalla came to see as soon as the news program ended. “Those ugly Muslims,” he said, “They would torch a train full of children as long as they were Hindu.” Her mother-in-law—nearly blind, kind and gentle compared to most mother-in-laws Neela had heard stories about—had only looked up at Lalla with her sad, unadorned eyes and said, “Every mother will tell you: that train was full of children.” The events, as Neela peeked from behind the bamboo screen separat- ing the main room of the hut from the kitchen, followed many of the sto- ries of madness in the months after partition. The train had been travel- ing its eastern course, the last evening run to Lahore. Babu had gotten on with his kettle of tea at Wagah, and that was the last anyone had seen of him. The train had been ambushed a few kilometers outside of Wagah by a horde of Muslim men. They’d torched each of the cars one by one, back to front, as if lighting a row of candles. “My son’s body,” Neela’s mother- in-law asked slowly. Lalla shook his head. “They were laid out like rows of roasted corn,” he said indecently, “No one can tell them apart.” Then he rose to leave, handing her mother-in-law something Neela couldn’t see. “Enough for both of you,” he said, closing the door behind him.

Her mother-in-law, bent by a long and pitiless life, entered the kitchen. “Finish your tea, beti,” she said, “Then we’ll take care of your hair.” Neela

118 PMS.. poemmemoirstory nodded. She would soon be bald. She would never again be allowed to use kumkum or anything else to adorn her face. She would not be allowed to grow out her hair or go to the temple or to ever wear anything but white, the color of death. Even the thin gold mangal sutra she slid off her neck and handed to her mother-in-law, who buried it deep in the bag of rice for safekeeping. Though none of this Neela minded, not very much, not as much as she’d minded the nights with Babu. They hadn’t been so bad in the beginning. He’d seemed just as shy as she was when he’d reached for her in the dark. There had been blood and a little pain but that had soon passed. It was only after a few months that Babu had become rough. Tugging at her sari, pushing himself inside her, slapping her if she resisted. She knew it was her duty, a part of being an obedient wife, and she bore it without a word of complaint. But what she didn’t understand was why he never spoke to her. Why he ate his dinner without a word. Even when the jasmine bloomed lush and fragrant in her hair, and she served him tea in the evening shade of the banyan tree, he’d hardly look at her. “Will you build me a swing,” she’d once asked, a year after they’d been married. “It could hang from there,” she’d said, pointing to the lowest branch of the tree. He’d looked up towards where she was pointing, into the wide cover of green, leathery leaves and hoary branches, and said, “Swinging is for monkeys. Are you a monkey?” Neela thought of monkeys and of bananas and realized—with a clar- ity that was surprising in its force—that she recognized the man sitting in front of her no more than she had on their wedding day.

Her mother-in-law looked at her. Her hand trembled as it reached for Neela’s. How different they were: Neela’s moist and smooth, her mother- in-law’s tough and wrinkled like dried dates. She was crying again. “We’ll drink this tonight,” she said, slipping a thick bottle into Neela’s hand. The bottle was made of dark brown glass and filled with liquid. “What is it?” Neela asked. “Something to make us sleep,” her mother-in-law said. And Neela understood. Her father-in-law had died years ago, she’d never even met him, and now Babu was dead. What good were two women, two widows, alone in this world?

PMS.. 119 Rao

“Lalla said it would be quiet, peaceful, like falling asleep in a mother’s arms,” she said. Neela bent her head and wondered what that might feel like, to fall asleep in a mother’s arms.

Neela woke the second morning after her husband’s death with a pound- ing headache. She was groggy; her muscles ached. She was confused. Her mother-in-law had drunk half the bottle then handed it to Neela. She’d sipped it, not more than a drop or two, and held it in her mouth. Neela had waited till the old woman had closed her eyes then ran to the back of the hut and vomited. She’d then slipped into the kitchen and buried the bottle in the bag of rice. Now, in the grim morning light, she turned to look at her mother-in-law. Her chest was still. Neela reached for her then snapped her hand away. Her mother-in-law’s body was cold. Her eyes were open and lifeless, staring in the direction of the banyan tree. Lalla came by later in the morning. He did nothing to hide his dis- gust. “You fool,” he scowled, “You think that bottle was cheap? You spit it out, didn’t you?” He eyed her with a cold stare. Neela wrapped her pullo tighter around her shoulders. “No,” she said, “I didn’t spit it out.” Her face grew warm. What if he asked to see the bottle? “Give me your mangal sutra,” he finally said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Neela went to the bag of rice and dug her fingers into the kernels. How pleasant: the cool of the rice. Her hand first grazed the solidness of the bottle. She kept her expression unchanged; Lalla was watching her. She wriggled past it until she found the necklace. When her hands came up they were coated in a thin dust as if hundreds of butterfly wings had brushed against them. She handed Lalla the necklace. He returned an hour later and told her he’d secured passage for her on a bus headed for a nearby camp. It was set up by the Indian government, he said. “For what?” she asked. “For items that are useless,” he said, “Like you.”

When the bus pulled into the camp, some four hours after it’d set off from Atari, Neela noticed the small handwritten sign posted on the gate: “Camp for Refugees and Unrestored Women. District 15, Punjab State.” Beyond was a row of tents. She was assigned to a small, dirty cot in the largest of the tents. Neela set down her bag, containing only her mother- in-law’s white sari so that she’d have a change of clothes, and a pair of socks and chapals for when it got too cold to go barefoot.

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She met Renu on the first night. She was Neela’s age, maybe a year or two older. Her wide eyes were lustrous and pretty even under her shorn head. She was as thin as a reed, and Neela realized they’d been assigned to the same cot due to lack of space. Renu took one look at Neela and burst out laughing. “Do you know you have the silliest bump on the top of your head?” she asked. Neela shook her head. “Haven’t you looked in a mirror since your head was shaved?” Neela shook her head again. “It looks like a hillock in my old village,” Renu said, “The one our temple is built on.” She pulled a handkerchief from her bag, knotted it into a wide dome, and balanced it on Neela’s head. “There,” she said, “Now you have the temple too.” They were inseparable after that. They ate together, did chores togeth- er, gossiped together. They played among the tents and fetched water from the nearby well in the mornings. Sometimes they slept holding hands. Renu told her about her husband. He’d been a farmer. They’d had three acres and a pair of goats. The Muslim mob had burned everything, including her husband. Renu said this with tears in her eyes, and Neela knew she should feel sad for her, but she didn’t. She did feel awful that her husband had died, but she was also glad that he had; how else would they have met?

During their fifth night in the camp, Renu and Neela lay on their cot talking in whispers. Since the camp had no electricity or kerosene they slept soon after their dinner of one thin roti and a small spoonful of potato curry. Most of the other women were already asleep. Renu had snuck in an extra roti for Neela, and she nibbled it while Renu talked about their lives. “It wasn’t the actual, you know, chum chum that was nice,” Renu said with a sigh, “It was how he held me afterwards.” Neela stopped chewing. Renu looked at her in the dark. “Didn’t yours?” “No.” “Put the roti away. I’ll show you.” Neela stuffed the remaining piece into her mouth. “Lie on your side,” Renu said, turning onto her back and slipping her arm under Neela’s while guiding her towards her shoulder until Neela’s head came to rest against her neck. “Like this,” she said. Neela closed her eyes. The warmth of Renu’s neck, the scent of her body, left Neela aching. Hollow. It was a feeling she could not describe.

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Though she could describe what it was not: it was not lonely, it was not sad. It was keenly felt but it caused no pain. It was not the skin of a banana. Nor the leaves of the dusty banyan tree. It was not hunger, not anymore.

On Neela’s ninth day at the camp, Babu came to fetch her. She was ush- ered into the tent by one of the camp administrators. “Your husband is here,” the woman announced. “That’s impossible,” Neela said, “He’s dead.” The woman nodded towards the far end of the tent. And there he was, exactly as Neela remembered him: dry and depleted, as if he’d been left out in the sun too long. She blinked and blinked, and then she felt faint. It couldn’t be. All the blood drained from her body. Her mouth filled with the bitterness of the liquid in the dark brown bottle. “But I thought—” “I was never on that train,” he said, “A whole week in a cell without a window. Stripping a man just to see if he’s a Muslim. Lying, telling me my mother is dead. Those bastards, they’re no better than animals.” He reached for her absently as if reaching for fruit on a high branch. For fruit he barely wanted to eat. It occurred to her in that moment that her husband had not died. He had not. And that her life had taken yet another turn: she was no longer a widow. She heard the laughter of the women in the camp. The sound came to her as if through a long and airy tunnel. She listened for Renu’s. What reached her instead was Babu’s voice saying, “Get your things. The bus leaves in ten minutes.”

The hut was just as she’d left it. Babu’s pants still hung from the nail by the door. The reed mats were still folded neatly in the kitchen. The bag of rice stood untouched. Even the banyan tree looked as if not a wisp of wind had troubled it in the nine days Neela had been gone. For dinner that night she made rice and dahl and subzi with the egg- plant Babu had purchased at the market on their way home from the bus stop. After they’d eaten, she made two cups of tea and took them out to the banyan tree. Babu was sitting cross-legged beneath it. Earlier she’d noticed his eyes glisten with tears when he’d discovered that the police hadn’t lied: his mother was dead. He’d stood at the door, stolen one quick glance at Neela, then left the hut without a word. Now he was bent over

122 PMS.. poemmemoirstory something she could not see. When she handed him his tea, she saw that it was her mangal sutra. She sat down beside him. Babu took a sip of his tea. “I’m glad I found you,” he said. Neela turned to look at him. He was? A sudden warmth flooded her. She’d been wrong. He cared for her after all. He’d been lonely too. He just hadn’t known how to show it but now he would. Now they’d show each other. “That’s the only way Lalla would give the mangal sutra back,” he con- tinued, “He said, ‘Why do you need it? She’s gone.’ You should’ve seen the look on his face when I told him I’d found you.” He finished his tea and held the empty cup out to Neela. “Hope that hair doesn’t take long to grow back,” he said, “Your head looks like a melon.” That night Babu took her, as Neela knew he would. Then he turned over and went to sleep. She lay awake for a long while afterwards. They’d moved their reed mat outdoors because of the heat. The branches of the banyan tree swayed in the hot wind, and Neela lay in the dark looking into them. How long had it stood there? Maybe hundreds of years. She thought of her mother and wondered whether she’d been cradled in her arms for even a moment before she’d died. She thought of her father. Then she thought of Renu. She felt her eyes warm with tears. With hardly a thought, almost as if the decision had been waiting there all along, Neela rose soundlessly and walked back into the hut. She dug her fingers through the bag of rice and lifted the dark brown bottle out of the ker- nels. And so there was one thing that was different: it was not as bitter as she remembered it. She went back to the reed mat and lay down next to Babu. He was snoring lightly. She looked again into the branches. They fluttered and hummed with her every breath. The stars beyond spun like wheels. The branches reached down, and just as she closed her eyes, they gathered her up onto their shoulders and held her as she had always dreamed of being held. As she would never be held again.

PMS.. 123 Callie Mauldin

Temp

On the fourth day of my new temp job at Fells Linens, I figure out how to make a pyramid out of paper clips. I’ve already counted seven boxes of brightly colored men’s ties, defective high-end labels that are mis- shapen, missing a stripe or a polka dot. They will get dispatched to one of the many strip malls in Nowhere, America where helmet-haired, lac- tating moms push their asteroid-sized babies in big-wheeled strollers: an ecosphere designed for life-after-breeding. I try to expel the thought by lighting a cigarette and installing another clip to the crown of my pyramid. One of the only perks of working at Fells is that you’re allowed to smoke inside because it’s on the seventieth floor of the Empire State Building. This might be the sole reason that Fran Goldfarb works at Fells. Fran, the receptionist, sounds like she’s got a coal lung, yet she stock- piles cartons of Pall Malls. Smoke creates columns that buttress her retro, jet-black beehive. She’s a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, including the six-inch hair hive and Dolly Parton sized breasts. And by day four, I have figured out that she wears the same outfit everyday: a pink, velour track suit. It matches the pink headset she sports behind the welcome desk. The desk is covered in pictures of her singing in different nightclubs and bars. In one of them, she is coated in blue light so that her hair hive looks Superman black and blue against her red sequined cocktail dress. She is one of those women who could be fifty-something, but looks seventy- something. And, apparently, Fran is pretty well-known in the Queens and outer-borough Karaoke set. She’s won eight titles and has a reigning championship at a bar named Lucky Lou’s in Astoria. She’s constantly asking would I like one of her Pall Malls and how long will I wait to get married. I keep thinking there has to be a formula for the incidence of marriage proposals decreasing by the number of Pall Malls smoked. “There’s no rush,” she says, and then pauses, “but you wait too long they stop chasing you.” And because my period is a week late, I have little tolerance for these pint-sized self-help sessions, so I try to look preoccupied with my paper clips, but I can feel her stare grazing the nape of my neck. She doesn’t 124 PMS.. poemmemoirstory know about Dennis Sanders, who I’ve been seeing for almost a year and a half. She doesn’t know that he brings me Hallmark cards with orange and white kittens pawing at yarn balls. She doesn’t know that I bring the cards close to my face, smell him on them, and store them in a suitcase under my bed. She would never guess that a nice girl like me is seeing this married man, Dennis, who lives in Connecticut, sleeps next to his ninety-eight-pound wife, who holds a JD from Columbia but chooses to stay home, and tucks in his dimpled children at night. Stella and Nan: they sound like Christmas cookies. Their house has red shutters; I saw it once in a drive by. But I’ve imagined sleeping there. The sheets are soft, thick, at least 1,000 thread count. They smell of lavender or rose and faintly of sock sweat. I’ve discovered that the trick is to get a handful of paper clips, stretch them out so that they’re almost straight, and then ply them back together; if you almost break them, they’re easier to manipulate. Around one o’clock, I abandon my pyramid, and I start writing the hours left in the day on the back of a blank, white envelope. I check my cell phone to see if Dennis has texted. Yesterday, he was going to tell her about us. Yesterday, he was going to tell her that he was leaving her, but today I’ve yet to hear from him. “Whatever you want. Anything you want,” Dennis whispered, just five days ago in my studio apartment, in deep deep Brooklyn. The afternoon light was transformed by the blinds, creating rotating striped isosceles triangles that moved across our limbs; together, we had become sponta- neous art. Our bodies unmoving and stitched with sweat, he traced the motion of light with his index finger along the insides of my thighs. On my lunch break, it takes me half an hour to get down the eleva- tor—full of tourists and their fanny packs pushed out from their fat bel- lies—to get to a pharmacy. Once I buy the pregnancy test, not the generic kind, I stuff it in my coat pocket and run across the street to Liquor World. I can’t help thinking they should offer pre-packaged gift sets with one ninety-nine percent accurate pregnancy test and three vodka minis: the adulterers’ do-it-yourself baby shower. When I take a swig of vodka, I’m convinced the gods of pregnancy will strike me down, but they don’t. When I finally make it back to the seventieth floor, wearied from fighting the fanny pack tourist mafia, I don’t have a lunch break left. “One of these days I’m telling you you’ll be jealous. One of these days, I’m going to make a record,” Fran says, mayonnaise swirling into the crevices of her deep-lined mouth. She’s smoked so long that there’s a

PMS.. 125 Mauldin monkey-ish quality to her features; her eyes look sunken in, her jaw jut- ting out from the rest of her. “I don’t think they’re called records anymore, Franny,” I say. I pick up a white-striped pink tie and make like it’s a bowtie, like I’m an old-timey jazz singer. “So jealous I’m not gonna rub it in,” Fran says. She offers her yellowing Tupperware dish that is fringed at the edges from use. I shake my head. She pushes it into my hand, presses her palm over mine. Her knuckles are enormous on her tiny hands; almost wood- en, carbuncular and twisted, which reminds me of that wise old tree in that children’s book. “Finish it. Phone’s ringing,” she says. And I realize I didn’t get any lunch and the baby probably wants more than gummy bears and vodka. Without substantial nutrition, the baby could end up asthmatic, sugar- addicted, armless, and eventually…homeless. So, I force feed myself the mayonnaise mix. When I have two hours to go, I press the power button on my cell phone; it jingles, and the screen goes black. Goodbye is stenciled in hot pink. I press it again, it jingles again, and the same hot pink cursive spells Hello. I just want to make sure it’s working, that Dennis can text me, that we can. That maybe we can. That we will be. Something. Almost two years ago, on the stairs of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Arts Center, Dennis looked lost. He wore a black blazer and a white button-down shirt even though it was late summer and the heat was oppressive. I wore a tank top and cut-off jeans. My pearl necklace held a large gold heart, which kept getting tangled up in my hair. “Is this the rehearsal space for All the…” “Little People? Yes. I’m headed there, too,” I said. “I’m the whore. Who are you?” “Jacob, the hunchback,” he said. He fumbled with the buttons on his blazer, trying not to look me in the eyes. “At least you get a name. I just get whore,” I said, feeling immense self-hatred at my word vomiting. “And I get to wear a hunchback for two and a half hours. So I guess we’re even.” We laughed. I patted his arm near the crook of his elbow and let my palm linger. In that moment, we conspired together. That night, during the read-thru, I had a hard time trying to avoid

126 PMS.. poemmemoirstory catching his eyes. He was so different than anyone else I hung out with; he was steady. He looked like someone who paid his taxes early and didn’t use his refund check to pay his overdue rent. He smelled clean, like soap, despite the heat. But, he was also cherubic with his soft, blond curls that neatly brushed his eyelashes and green eyes. Dina, our producer, said they’d gone to school together, somewhere Ivy League and that he’d been the department star in college. She thought he missed the energy of the theatre, but I thought maybe she meant the people involved. He worked in advertising at Ogilvy, where he said he’d mastered the art of managing expectations. Four weeks later, we went to the Guggenheim, drank our take-away coffee in silence, and looked at obscene, phallic-shaped sculptures. We held hands on the top floor as the rest of the museum unfolded beneath us. When I cut my upper lip on the white plastic lid, he rubbed his thumb over the cut and pressed against it. He held his red print up like a little flag. We kissed. Our own honeycomb hideout. On my fifth day at Fells, I check my cell phone at least thirty times during the first half hour of work, but I don’t hear anything from Dennis. I eat forty-two gummy bears and manage to give all of them potential baby names before incinerating them in my mouth: Adelaide, Alexander, Amanda, Beatrice, Clerval, Diaphala, Ella, Franklin, George, Harriet, Henrietta, Helga, Horatio, Ingram, Imogen, Gilda, Gina, GORGON. I imagine Dennis and I raising Helga George together, walking it to the Montessori school in the West Village in Manhattan, feeding it green, slimy peas from a jar, putting cream on some terrible rash, a little red insignia that colors its left bottom cheek. And the Christmas cookies come to visit. They are in love with me and they are in love with Helga George. They hold it with their tiny skin mittens and pat it on the face. We are a family. The first night Dennis and I were together was after a rehearsal. We stalked the halls of the arts complex, fingers laced, until we found an unoccupied dance rehearsal room overlaid with mirrors and cut neatly into squares by a ballet bar. The mirror reflected the evolution of our nakedness: coats, then button-down shirts, then pants, and finally under- wear. His hands harnessed me from the cold wood and held me against his pelvis in a frantic embrace. He said later that his wife hadn’t touched him in two years. Food and sex didn’t appeal to her anymore. My heart charm clinked and made an impression on his chest. I fingered my big

PMS.. 127 Mauldin silver heart as I walked home relishing my delicious secret. That some- one needed me. That someone like Dennis needed me. On my sixth day at Fells, there’s work to be done. There are three hun- dred boxes that need to be counted when I arrive. I clutch the pregnancy test with my left hand in my left coat pocket. I haven’t washed my hair in two days; it’s beginning to smell like greasy lamb leftovers. And I’m feel- ing deliriously obsessive. It’s become a game of chicken. I refuse to take the pregnancy test until I hear from Dennis, but I’ve gotten desperate. I called his house and hung up last night. One of the Christmas cookies answered. Immediately, I felt terrible. I’m a cookie monster. Thinking of it, I start to cry. “I’m a fucking cookie monster,” I yell. “What the hell?” Fran runs into my work station. I can see the main phone lit up with multiple red lights. “What the hell is wrong with me, Fran?” I bury my head in a pile of pink and yellow and blue ties, which feel like peels of cold skin against my cheeks. “And these are all fucking nursery colors.” I start grabbing at the ties, tearing them out of their box at a reckless pace. “Honey honey, come on,” Fran sighs. “Hold on.” Fran leaves and comes back with her carton of Pall Malls, the red lights now extin- guished. “How did I become a cookie monster?” I pull a tie over my eyes like a blindfold; I don’t want her to see me crying. “You know what,” Fran says, lighting a Pall Mall and putting her other arm around my shoulder. “What? I might be pregnant with my married boyfriend’s child,” I say, taking the tie off of my eyes and looking at her. “Don’t think you’re the first,” Fran says, without blinking. “To carry around a heart that’s cracked up like a walnut.” And she pauses. “Ralphy.” She starts. “Ralphy Donovan. Now he was a dream cake. Eyes like a diamond mine. Muscles like a Thoroughbred. Had an ass like one of those exotic dancers…don’t think I don’t know,” she says, punctu- ating her words with puffs from her cigarette. “These guys today. Eh. You don’t know if their little girls or little boys.” I nod my head. “Ralphy wasn’t like anyone. Wasn’t clamoring to get into your pants and wasting time on whores. He was, I dunno, a deep thinka. We fell in

128 PMS.. poemmemoirstory love. You get the score. The whole thing. The man could read my mind. I couldn’t think a thought he didn’t know it. We were together thirteen years. Thirteen years. And then he’s tired. His legs hurt when he walks. He’s losing weight. There are doctors. Five years of doctors. And he’s mashed potatoes and broth and then tubes and then he’s not here one day. Not here. All of his stuff is here, but he’s...gone. And I want to kiss the back of his neck and tell him those hateful things I can’t tell anyone else. That if they heard it they’d think I was a bigger bitch than they thought already. Those are the things that made him laugh the hardest, made him love me the most.” We sit in silence until the air conditioner clicks on again and hums. Fran inhales like a scratchy vacuum. “But you just keep waking up, you know. You just keep waking up.” I watch the smoke travel to the ceiling, spread out, thin, and then dis- sipate. The phone’s ring breaks the silence, and Fran stands up, strokes my head, and walks into the other room, followed by a trail of smoke. My phone blinks red. Dennis. “I was worried you weren’t going to call,” I say. “I haven’t heard from you. I was worried. I thought something happened.” “I need to tell you something,” he says. He sounds rehearsed. Hollowed out. “Amy is pregnant,” he says. I swallow and hold my breath. I imagine Dennis perched on the lid of his toilet seat in the dimly lit guest bathroom, whispering so Amy can’t hear, fidgeting with his wedding ring like I’ve seen him do a hundred times. Pushing the ring up and then down his finger, over his knuckle, and then pulling it off, staring at it. “Are you there?” “Yep.” “Say something. Please.” The faintest bit of panic in his voice flares up like a match. “When did you fuck her?” “She’s my wife, Rachel.” “Forgot that part, I guess.” I imagine him thumbing his wedding ring, sliding it back on. “Come on, sweetheart.” “This is some fucking game to you.” “It’s not a game. I’m in love with you, but,” he says, sounding impa- tient, sounding harsh.

PMS.. 129 Mauldin

“There shouldn’t be a but in that statement.” “You’re right. You’re the one I’m in love with.” And suddenly, I know that he’s not. His tone is coddling, manipulative, cool. He’s confident that he’s won me back. That he can have everything he wants. “Don’t call me again, Dennis.” Silence. And then the sound of swallowing. And Dennis is pleading, but I’m not listening. I’m holding the phone away from my ear and then pressing it together. I’m closing it. I almost expect it to say Goodbye. During my lunch break, I hide in the third stall of the Ladies’ rest- room. I sit on the toilet seat listening to women commiserate about a lecherous boss for fifteen minutes before pulling the smooth white preg- nancy test from its pink packaging. Two stripes you’re pregnant, one stripe you’re not. Careful not to drip urine on my knee, I wait the three interminable minutes for one or maybe two stripes to appear. One. But it looks like it could be one and a half. Because the directions on the pack- age are unclear, I check again and again to see if there’s a multiplication chart or some long division table I’ve missed. I imagine nursing a baby with an extra half of a body, two heads clamoring for milk. The heads stretch my nipples in opposing directions until both are satiated. I bite my lip to keep from screaming. In the office, I ask Fran if she’ll go with me to the doctor. “I don’t do kids, but yeah I’ll go.” That afternoon, I break some kind of counting record. I write the number down in check marks on the back of a white envelope: 425 check marks. I re-assemble thirty paper clips to make Fran a fake microphone that she wants to tape to the wall. I tell her it’s a sweet thought, but I hardly want to display my paper clip art. I ask her if we can leave early and she says yes, honey, take it easy, honey. She smiles and puts her microphone next to the photograph of her with the fuchsia award. In the waiting room, I am still crying and convinced that I’m even more pregnant because I’m crying so hard. Fran squeezes my hand with her big-knuckled palm. I notice the bright brown dime-sized age spots that stipple her leathery skin. The babies and toddlers in the waiting room look like little mutants covered in snot, shouting hateful things. One kid, who can’t be taller than a magnum-sized bottle of wine, is run- ning around non-stop shouting, “I own the world.” Before I can politely sidle up to his mother and ask for a respite, the doctor calls my name: Rachel Hynes.

130 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

“You’re gonna live to see another day,” Fran says, and then turns and swats at the future megalomaniac. “Get some goddamn manners.” His mother looks horrified, but Fran, unfazed, goes back to reading her magazine. I change into the thin cotton gown and wait for the doctor. The room is cold. I think of Helga George’s small dimpled hands tugging at the hairs on the back of my neck. I imagine the weight in my arms, the skin softer than 1,000 thread count sheets. Miniature ribs pushing into skin making miniature stripes. A tiny heart. Wet breath on my neck. And then the door opens and the doctor tells me that the test was negative. That stress or hormones can sometimes cause a delayed period. That I should get my hormone levels checked. And just like that. There is no baby. There is no Helga George. There is no Dennis. There is only me. And me. And me. And I want to get as far away from me as possible. When I get back to the waiting room, I don’t have to say anything to Fran. “Come on, honey. Let’s get a drink.” I let her lead me by the arm to a bar in midtown Manhattan. The air is soggy, the end of summer trying not to become fall. It is early, but it is dark inside. And there is a smattering of people. Some businessmen, in variations of businessman-blue, laugh; an older woman in the back talks to herself; and a young cocktail waitress checks her cell phone in the arched doorway of the kitchen. A deep red lava lamp pulses at the end of the bar. “Give me something dark and strong like I like my men. And this one wants one, too.” She pats a new pack of Pall Malls on the edge of the bar, pulls one out and taps it on the fat inside of her palm, and lights it. “Thanks.” I pull the drink to my lips, take a sip, and it burns my throat. I cough. “Whiskey. An acquired taste. You’ll get used to it.” “I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s like I’m…” “Empty.” Fran turns on her stool to face me and tilts her head. “Yeah. It’s like everything’s changed. Gone.” “And tomorrow it will look different. And then the next day. And the next. And then you’ll realize something has changed in you, honey, something. And you won’t love him anymore.” “I wish I could feel that now.” Fran places her large palm on my back and then pats my shoulder. I

PMS.. 131 Mauldin stare at the lava lamp anchored to the wooden bar. Red globules propa- gate, bond, rise to the top, and then create smaller circles that eventually dissipate. “It just takes time.” I fixate on the circles. How they float, connect, and then dissolve. Over and then over again. I slide off my barstool and find my way to the bathroom. On the back of the stall door, there’s an audition notice for a play called Women of Desperate Measures, and I can’t help but laugh out loud until I cry, until the tears begin streaming down my cheeks. I tear one of the paper strips and push it into my pocket. When I come back out, Fran is on stage. “This one’s for Rachel,” she says, as she nods her head down. The red and blue lights shade her figure, making her pink velour suit look purple and velvety. Regal almost. She looks a foot taller on stage. Her voice echoes into the room, a deep alto. She sounds like Sarah Vaughn, Janis Joplin, and maybe a little Rod Stewart. Her mouth opens wide to belt out what sounds like a fighting old blues song. There is nothing self-con- scious in her performance. There is nothing hidden. It is deep and strong and longing and desperate and heartbroken. I stand in the doorway. In that moment, she is beautiful. The hair hive seems to have transformed itself, too; its jet black cone-shaped splendor swirling to the lights. And concealed by her shadow, I see the faintest dust of smoke around her, intoxicating everyone in the room.

132 PMS.. Melissa DeCarlo

The Rosary

I know that you go through my things. I find them subtly out of place, and not from the sort of movement that dusting would require. My shoes, for instance, a pair I haven’t worn in months suddenly on a dif- ferent shelf. Do you try them on when I’m not home? We wear the same size. I know this because you wear an old pair of mine to work some- times, the pair I got paint on and threw in the trash. I was ashamed the first time I saw you in them. Not that you were wearing them, but that I hadn’t just given them to you rather than throwing them away. Or maybe that I hadn’t thrown out a nicer pair for you to take. It’s a part of the shame I feel for having so much when I know that you have so little.

*

I was surprised to see you at the church, in the back row, your brown face a respite from the crowd of pink flesh. Did you say a rosary for my boy? The priest found one in the back pew; he brought it up to me later. With its polished wooden beads and the silver Jesus suffering, it looked similar to one that once belonged to my mother. But I suppose all rosa- ries look a little alike. I think it was yours; I hope so. I couldn’t bring myself to ask among my friends; I couldn’t bear to watch as they thought of the church, the flowers, my boy asleep in that tight wooden bed. I couldn’t imagine having to see the pity on their faces. I didn’t want to see it on your face either, but more than that I couldn’t bear the idea of someone who has so few things having even one less. So I drove to your house that night and rang the bell. The boy who answered wasn’t as tall as my boy, and his hair was darker, his brows thicker, his eyes shaped like yours. But when I stepped up to him, closer probably than he wanted, I took a deep breath and found a little bit of my son—smoke and sweat and the full moon, the smell of nights spent leaning against a fence, laughing with friends, try- ing out their new voices and puffing themselves up to look like danger- ous men. PMS.. 133 DeCarlo

He ducked his head, his hair falling over his eyes, a gesture so familiar that it broke my heart all over again. I held out my hand, and so he held out his as well, and I put the rosary in his palm, the dark polished beads, the suffering Jesus shining under the porch light. “I think this belongs to your mother,” I said, slowly, the way I always do when I speak to you about the laundry, or about how the vinegar you like to use on the wood floors will ruin their finish. He nodded. “Would you like to speak to her?” There was only the slightest lilt in his words to hint at another language once spoken, and I flushed, knowing that he had picked up on my exaggerated slowness. I wished I could go back and say my line again, this time as if I’d been talking to my boy. “No,” I said. “No, thank you.” And then I went to my car. He was gone from the porch when I looked back.

*

I’m ashamed to go shopping when you’re at my house. Even groceries are hard. If I buy new, soft bread to replace a loaf, still almost whole, but get- ting stale, do I throw away the old bread? I cannot bring myself to offer you my stale bread, but even though you would never say a thing, I feel a silent judgment from you when I am wasteful. I wonder sometimes, if the situation had been reversed, if it had been your dark haired boy in a box, would I have gone to your church? Would I have sat in the back, my pink face shining in a sea of brown? Would I have run my fingers over my mother’s rosary? I’d like to think that I would have. Sometimes, in my imagination, I put myself in the back row, and you up front, your head bowed, your stomach turning at the sweet- rot smell of the lilies. I let myself pretend that I ache with sorrow for someone else, and for those few seconds I feel glorious. You’ll be here soon, so I walk through the house, stacking the unread papers, the unread books, the unread mail. I pick my robe up off the floor, and then I spend a minute in my closet, wondering why I have so many shoes. And I wonder, when you walk past my son’s room—empty, but still holding just a little of his smell—will you pause a minute and think about your son? Will you look at the folded towels, the bed still made from the last time you came, and feel shame for having so much when you know that I have so little?

134 PMS.. Sonia Scherr

Pearl

They were eating dinner at the kitchen table when Pearl’s dad announced that he’d been rereading Walden and Thoreau was right on the mark and what they needed to do, all three of them together, was get outside. Pearl wondered what her dad meant. They lived four miles from town on a road that turned to dirt before their house. She had to walk half a mile just to get to the school bus. Her mom aimed a look at her dad, eyebrows raised and lips pressed tight. Pearl’s stomach clenched. It was all part of a secret language her parents sometimes used around her, though this time Pearl was pretty sure she understood: Her mom thought her dad’s idea was dumb. Pearl went back to picking the artichokes off her slice of Greek pizza. She’d told her dad she disliked artichokes, but he’d obviously forgotten when he’d stopped by Big George’s Pizzeria on his way home from the engineering lab. Her dad took another slice of pizza from the box in the middle of the table. He didn’t look at her mom. Pearl felt the silence swell beneath the jabbering of the little countertop TV her mom had left on again. She tried to concentrate on the shiny-haired newscaster who’d said the Vermont National Guard was preparing for the possibility of war in Iraq. The camera cut to the CostumeMania storefront, then back to the woman, who lifted the corners of her mouth into a pinched smile. “Now for an inspiring Halloween preview for those of you getting a head start on your costumes: Generic witches, monsters, and ghosts are out, story- book characters are in.” The camera panned the costume aisle, settling on a gauzy sequined leotard below a glittery black eye mask. “What in God’s name is that?” Her mom took off her glasses and blinked. “Not like any storybook character I’ve come across.” “Christ, it’s August,” her dad said. “The last thing I want to hear about is Halloween. Marla, where’s the remote?” Her mom shrugged. He fumbled through the stack of newspapers in the middle of the table. A glossy insert with pictures of trucks slipped off the table and under the refrigerator. Pearl retrieved it with her toe. “Things have a tendency to get lost around here,” her dad said.

PMS.. 135 Scherr

“The remote’s right there,” Pearl said, though she didn’t really want him to turn off the TV, “on top of the cutting board.” “Thank you, Pearl.” He pointed the remote at the screen, and the pic- ture shrank to black. He turned around to face them again. “I’m serious. We should take a family camping trip to the White Mountains. It’s a slow time at work, and Pearl doesn’t start school for a couple weeks.” Her mom speared a piece of cucumber with her fork. “You haven’t been camping since you were kicked out of Boy Scouts for forgetting to wear your uniform to the VFW parade two years running.” She bit into the cucumber and turned the tip of her fork toward Pearl’s dad so that it hovered in midair. The gesture reminded Pearl of the way her mom held her hog’s hair brush in front of her canvas while deciding where to place the next stroke of paint. “Not kicked out,” Pearl said. “Decided to leave. Right, Dad?” “It was a mutually agreed-upon separation.” “Dad’s been hiking, though,” Pearl said. “He climbed Mount Garfield last weekend.” “I wish you two had been there. The view was outstanding.” Her mom lowered her fork to her plate. “I swear, Gil, you’ve got a Thoreau complex.” She smiled, but it was like the newscaster’s. Pearl asked who Thoreau was. “Thoreau was a guy who was really into nature,” her mom said. She took a bite of pizza and chewed rapidly. Pearl’s dad started to speak, then stopped. “I’m done,” Pearl said. “But sweetie, you haven’t finished,” her mom said. “I don’t like artichokes.” “Since when?” “Since always.” Her mom folded her napkin into smaller and smaller triangles. Finally, she looked at Pearl. “All right. You’re excused.” In her bedroom, Pearl grabbed the T volume of EveryFact Encyclopedia from her bookshelf. Suddenly it seemed important to know all about Thoreau. She’d discovered recently that her parents often failed to tell her what was most interesting about a topic. Just yesterday, when she’d asked her dad about cryogenics, he’d said it involved studying what happens to things at very low temperatures. He hadn’t mentioned any- thing about freezing dead people. More and more she’d had to check her

136 PMS.. poemmemoirstory parents’ answers against the encyclopedia with its gold-edged pages, a gift from her dad for her eleventh birthday. Now, skimming the entry, she discovered that it was pretty much like her mom had said: Thoreau was a guy who was really into nature. She needed to be sure, though, so she started reading it again, word for word this time. “In early 1845,” the second paragraph began, “Thoreau built a rustic home on Walden Pond, a glacial lake near the vil- lage of Concord.” Pearl rested her chin on her hand. She imagined the lake was fresh smelling and aquamarine and very clear. Translucent fish darted through the water, their feathery fins brushing against her arms and legs. An old sailboat lay on the sandy bottom. She dove down to the deck and found rusty fishing rods, unopened cans of ginger ale, quarters from a hundred years ago, a hammock tied to the rails. She’d only ever been snorkeling in Kelly’s pool, where the chlorine made her sneeze and there was nothing to look at but the see-through, puffy undersides of plastic floats she pre- tended were jellyfish. Maybe they could all snorkel. Recently her mom had been painting water scenes, or at least that’s what she said they were. The pictures had grown bigger and bigger until they were as tall as Pearl and no longer looked like anything she could name. Her mom brought the canvases to a shop in town she’d previously refused to enter because they sold wood- en maple leaves whose curving wire stems held toilet paper rolls. She’d changed her mind about the shop after running into the owner at the fifth-grade open house. “It’s your mother’s blue period,” her dad had said earlier in the summer, watching from the kitchen window as her mom gently laid a painting in the trunk. Pearl pushed her door open and ran downstairs. From the guest bath- room came the clink of wood against glass. Pearl paused for a moment in front of the closed door, breathing in the sharp smell of turpentine. Her mom had been washing brushes nearly every night since she’d quit her job at the bank. “I want to paint,” she’d announced at dinner, and Pearl’s dad had been quiet until she’d asked him what he thought. Once Pearl had tried to help with the cleaning, but when she’d mashed the bristles on the bottom of the jar, her mom had snatched the brush from her hand. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she’d said, “but that ruins it.” Pearl edged closer to the door. Her mom was humming a song she didn’t recognize. It had no words, just notes that glided one into the

PMS.. 137 Scherr other, like a lullaby. She wrapped her arms around herself. The humming made her want something, though she wasn’t sure what. “Pearl?” her dad called from the kitchen. “The dishes await your dry- ing prowess.” She backed away from the bathroom door and turned the corner into the kitchen. Water streaked the front of his plain gray t-shirt. He tossed her the dishtowel. “Be careful with that glass bowl,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.” She left the bowl in the drying rack and picked up the pan her mom had used to make eggs for breakfast. It was heavy and left a dark mark on the towel. She let it drop onto the counter. The thud was louder than she’d expected. “Careful.” Her dad kept on scrubbing a plate. She didn’t want to be careful. She was tired of being careful. “How about we go to a lake?” Her dad looked at a chip in the plate. “It’d be like Thoreau.” “That’s true.” He smiled at her but his eyes were sad. “So?” “You heard your mom, honey. I’m afraid she wouldn’t thrill to the idea.” “She likes water. What’s she been painting all summer?” “I don’t—” “Dad, you said you wanted to get outside.” She felt her voice tremble and took a deep breath. “I did. I do.” He shut off the water and wiped his wet hands on his shirt. “Go get your mother.”

Pearl’s hand was on the latch before her dad shut off the engine. She peeled her legs from the vinyl seat and jogged toward the lake, pine needles pricking her bare feet. It looked like someone had dropped glass beads on top of the blue-green water. They were glinting in the sun. She thought of the snorkel, mask, and flippers she’d bought at Walmart with the birthday money she’d saved. Finally, she’d get to use them. “Pearl,” her mom called. “The lake will still be there when we get the car unpacked.” “I know,” she called back. But she had to see it now. A stone jabbed her toe, and for a moment, the pain blocked out everything else. She’d

138 PMS.. poemmemoirstory left her drugstore flip-flops in the car. She hobbled a few steps before breaking into a run. She passed a picnic table and grill then veered down an overgrown path. The lake came right up to the grass. No sandy beach. She stopped. Up close, the lake was pale brown. Little ripples nibbled at her painted toes. She inched her feet further in until she could barely make out the red polish. With her hands she scooped up some water and held it to her face. Sand settled on her palm, along with dandelion-sized tufts of feathery green slime. She flung it all away and wiped her hands on her shorts. What was the point of snorkeling? There’d be nothing to see but dirt and weeds. At least the canoe was here, like her dad had said. Gray aluminum, it lay upside down on the grass, a big, hairy rope trailing from the bow. She trudged up the bank, pine needles clinging to the bottoms of her feet. This time, she watched for stones. When she raised her head, she saw her mom walking toward the cabin, carrying only her purse. Her dad was leaning over the Corolla’s backseat, half inside, and when Pearl called to him he didn’t reply. She heard rustling, followed by a clanking thud. He swore softly. Usually she would have left him alone when he was annoyed, but he needed to know that he was wrong about the lake. She opened the door on the other side. He was picking up tuna fish cans from where they’d rolled under the front seat. “Dad, you said it would be clear.” “What?” A drop of sweat fell from his beard. “You promised.” “Promised what?” “We were going to go snorkeling.” “Not now. We need to unload the car.” “That’s not what I meant.” She felt her face get hot. “I said, the water… is… dirty.” “Oh. The murkiness is probably sediment resulting from erosion near the shore. Rainfall has been well above average this summer.” Sometimes she hated his scientific explanations, the way they seemed to answer everything and nothing. He looked up. “It’s a large lake, Pearl. Thousands of acres. We’ll take the canoe out and explore. Find a spot that’s good for snorkeling. Okay?” She nodded. She’d never been canoeing. At the cabin door, her mom was glaring at a can on one of the cinder-

PMS.. 139 Scherr block steps. RAID, it said, in bright yellow letters. “A welcome gift,” her mom murmured, picking up the can. “How thoughtful.” “I don’t think we’ll be using that.” Her dad frowned. “They really should provide greener options.” “The environment isn’t my main worry right now,” her mom said. Her dad turned the key in the lock, and the door shuddered open. The place smelled like damp towels that had been bunched up too long. Pearl left her parents near the door and walked around the cabin, touching the greasy coils on the range top, opening the small refrigera- tor, punching the pillows on the lower bunks, pulling cords that turned on bare light bulbs, flushing the toilet in the bathroom. There was no shower. “Where’ll we take a bath?” Pearl asked. “The lake’s your tub,” her dad said. “But—” “Don’t worry.” He gave her arm a light punch. “There are coin show- ers down the road.” “I had a feeling it was going to be like this,” her mom said. “It’s not that bad,” Pearl said. “Look, soft mattresses.” She plopped down on one of them, bouncing gently to make it squeak. “I’ll bring in the duffels and food,” her dad said. Her mom peered at a crack in the wood where the wall met the floor. “I knew it,” she said. A single ant was crawling from the crack toward Pearl’s bunk. Her mom aimed the can. “Don’t tell your dad.” Pearl felt a little sick. She grabbed her mom’s elbow. “Stop.” “Let go, Pearl.” “Don’t kill it.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s enough. I mean it.” She pried Pearl’s fingers from her arm. The can hissed. Pearl turned away. The smell made her gag. “Why’d you do that?” “I know you don’t like this, sweetie, but where there’s one there’s a hundred. Trust me. I’m going to spray the corners, too.” “I’m going to help Dad.” He wasn’t by the car, though. She called his name but heard only a sound like an angry bee way out on the water. What looked like a snow- mobile shot across the far side of the lake. Except it wasn’t really the far side of the lake, her dad had told her—just the other side of a cove. Once

140 PMS.. poemmemoirstory you were out in the middle of the lake you couldn’t see anything but water. She ran behind the cabin but there was nothing there besides a giant propane tank. And then she saw her dad’s red cap against the white bark of a birch. He was facing away from her, toward the lake. “Dad,” she said, breathless. He turned around slowly, a cigarette in his hand. “Why are you smoking?” “Sorry, honey.” He leaned away from her and blew smoke out his mouth. Then he stamped out his cigarette on the ground, picked it up, and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Pearl felt for the carton there. He hadn’t smoked since she was a little kid. Smoking was the worst for paintings, her mom had said. It coated them with gunk you could never get off. She refused to sell to anyone who she knew smoked. “Where is it?” Pearl asked. He took the open carton out of his jeans pocket, and she grabbed it. “Thoreau didn’t smoke.” “That’s true. Not Marlboros anyway. How’s Mom?” “She’s all right. Cleaning.” Through the trees, Pearl saw her mom walking toward the car. She slipped the carton into her shorts pocket. Her dad was looking away, toward the lake. Pearl watched her mom open the rear door. When she closed it, she was cradling her box easel. Her dad stepped into the clearing. “Marla?” “I’m going to do a little painting before dinner, while the light’s still good. The rest of the unpacking can wait.” It was the idea of painting outdoors that had gotten her mom to agree to the trip. She even had a special word for it, something in French. “Don’t worry,” Pearl said. “Dad and I’ll unpack.” She looked at her Dad. “Right?” He was still looking at her mom. “Fine,” he said. “What?” Her mom clasped the easel with both hands. Her dad shook his head. They stood looking at each other while Pearl silently counted to three. The secret language.

The cabin still smelled sickly sweet when she and her dad brought in the first load from the car. He wrinkled his nose. “Jesus, I told her not to use that stuff.”

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“There were ants,” Pearl said. “Ants won’t hurt us.” “If you make dinner,” Pearl said, “it’ll cover up the smell.” He shook his head. “This isn’t like home, honey. Here, on a beautiful day, we cook outside.” After they’d finished unpacking, he poured lump charcoal into the grill and stuck green fire-starter sticks through the pile. Pearl lit the ends with a long-stemmed match and watched the red flame crawl toward the pieces. She took deep breaths of smoke and pine. Her dad stared at the lake. The glittering glass beads were gone. The water was heavy and dark. “It looks different from before,” Pearl said. He nodded. “Almost like molten lead.” “That’s a good way to describe it.” She’d never seen molten lead, but she pictured it like gray lava. “Have you heard of Theo … Theophrastus? He lived in ancient Greece.” “I think so. The father of botany, right?” “He wrote about plants. Hundreds of them. Kind of like Thoreau.” “It is like Thoreau.” Her dad flipped the grill over the charcoal. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” She loved these times with her dad when it was almost as if they were co-workers in his lab. A few weeks ago, she’d told Kelly that the knots in the branches of an elm looked like elbows, and Kelly had made a face like she’d tasted something sour and said, “That’s so weird.” But her dad never seemed to think what she said was weird. “Where did you learn about Theophrastus?” he asked. “The encyclopedia.” That reminded her. She sprinted toward the cabin, her dad calling after her to get the hot dogs and sweet corn. She returned with the food and her backpack. She pulled out the T volume; it fell open to the Thoreau entry. She skimmed until she came to the part she was looking for: “Thoreau recorded his detailed observations of the natural world in a voluminous journal. He even noted the exact days when trees bloomed.” She returned the encyclopedia to her pack and took out a fresh note- book and a pen. At the top she carefully wrote, “August 23,” “5:40 p.m.,” and “Sandown Lake.” She walked down the path and dipped her hand in the water. “Color: brownish with green bits,” she wrote. “Temperature: cool. Contains: Sand, weeds.” She bit her lip. Something was missing

142 PMS.. poemmemoirstory from the description. Her dad called to her and she closed the notebook. The smell of meat wafted from the grill. Pearl lit the half-melted citronella candle on the picnic table. Her mom came from the cabin carrying plates and three bottles of pink lemonade. The tip of her nose was sunburned. At the picnic table, her mom chewed her hot dog slowly. “This really is delicious,” she said. Her dad gave a little bow, like he used to do when her mom praised his cooking. “How was drawing?” “I haven’t painted outside since college,” her mom said. She ran a piece of curly blonde hair through her fingers. “It’s beautiful, but I’d for- gotten how the light is always changing.” Her dad smiled. “Pearl and I were just talking about that.” “Right now it’s gold,” Pearl said. “A gold net on the water.” “That’s lovely,” her mom said. “It must be hard to paint something that changes,” Pearl said. She’d had to stay very still when she used to pose for her mom, her head tilted just so, her back perfectly straight. “It is.” Her mom looked thoughtful. Pearl took a big gulp of lemonade and stretched her arms in a giant Y. She felt good tonight. When her parents argued, it was like she couldn’t be her real self. She had to explain things that shouldn’t need explaining. She had to keep quiet when she wanted to talk. “What are your plans for tomorrow?” her mom asked. “Snor-kel-ing,” she sang. “Dad’s going to take the canoe to the middle of the lake because the water’s gross right here.” “Are you comfortable wearing your new mask?” “I am. I’ve practiced.” Pearl lifted the mask and snorkel from her backpack. She spit on the lens and polished it with her finger. “What are you doing, sweetie?” Her mom looked amused. “Watch.” She slipped the rubber strap over her head, careful not to pull her hair, and clamped her lips around the tube. Her parents were a little blurry. “Ay nohrhuling,” she said. Her mom giggled. Pearl stepped onto the bench. The snorkel made a whooshing sound when she breathed and tasted like plastic. She bent over and traced a breaststroke with her arms. “Fish,” she said, though it sounded like “Ihhh.” Both her parents were laughing now. She didn’t think it was that

PMS.. 143 Scherr funny, but she was glad to see them happy. She bent lower, pretending to explore the lake bottom. As she pushed the water aside, something skittered onto the picnic table. Again it happened. For a moment she had no idea what it could be. Then she looked down: the cigarettes. Before she could stop them, the rest came tumbling out of her pocket. Her mom stopped laughing. “Pearl, why do you have these?” She shrugged. Her dad was looking at his lemonade. Her mom stood up and leaned over the table toward Pearl. “Take off that stuff and answer me.” Pearl’s hair caught in her strap when she pulled it over her head. “Ow,” she said loudly, though it didn’t hurt that much. “They’re mine, Marla,” her dad said. “Pearl took them from me.” Her mom whipped around. “God, are you smoking again, Gil?” “Not often.” “Why?” Her mom’s voice shook. “Why are you doing this?” “I’ll quit, okay?” Her dad got up quickly, knocking the edge of the table. Pearl’s plate careened off the other side. Her knife, fork, half a hot dog, and an ear of corn lay in the grass. Her parents didn’t even look. “I’ll quit right this minute. Is that good enough?” “I don’t understand.” “Me either, Marla.” Pearl banged her snorkel against the table. She didn’t care if it broke. “Stop,” she yelled. Her parents stared at her. “Why can’t you both just be normal?” Her mom looked at her dad. “This is so wrong,” Pearl said. She dropped the snorkel and ran toward the cabin. “Pearl.” Her dad calling, then her mom. She opened the door to the cabin and flung herself down on the clos- est bunk bed. The bed hadn’t been made yet, and the bare pillow smelled like old laundry. She lay very still. Laughter drifted from across the lake, and she heard a woman’s voice say, “That truly is unbelievable.”

With the morning sun behind a hill, the lake was the same light silver as the beached canoe. Pearl gripped its cool metal bow. Her dad, standing at the opposite end, counted to three and they heaved it onto one side

144 PMS.. poemmemoirstory and then righted it. Two paddles clattered loose from beneath the seats. When Pearl tucked the stray rope beneath the bow deck, cobwebs clung to her hand. She brushed them away on the damp grass. Her dad peered into the canoe, running his hands along the seams. “She’s a little scruffy,” he said, and Pearl held her breath until he smiled and added, “but she’ll be lakeworthy.” He spread a poncho in the middle of the canoe. Pearl looked toward the cabin, where her mom was latching the door. She wore a red straw hat that bobbed as she walked. One arm was raised in front of her to prevent the black plastic trash bag she held from dragging on the ground. Before leaving the cabin, Pearl had stowed their snorkeling gear in the bag, and her dad had added sunscreen, peanut butter sandwiches, tow- els and sweatshirts. Last night, her parents had told her they were sorry. “Tomorrow, we’ll all go snorkeling together,” her dad had said. They’d paddle to an island the map showed, in the middle of the lake. “We won’t argue,” her mom had said. And when Pearl said she didn’t believe them, her dad drove to the camp store three miles down the road, where he found a child’s snorkel he said would fit her mom. As her dad retrieved the paddles, Pearl pushed against the canoe with both hands. It moved only a few inches. “I’ll help,” her mom said. “I’ve got it,” Pearl said. She leaned all her weight against the front end until the canoe edged forward. When the stern dipped into the lake, she lifted the bow. Now the canoe moved easily, sliding almost on its own into the water. Pearl felt lighter as she stepped into the lake, then heavier as the cold water coiled around her shins. Her feet sank into the sandy, slimy bottom. Quickly she reached for the side of the canoe. Before she could swing her leg over, it plunged down and nearly capsized. “Watch it,” her dad called. He was knee-deep in water, lashing the bag to the rear of the canoe. “Step in the middle. Keep your body low.” He held the front steady, and she tried again. The canoe rocked but she kept her balance, easing herself onto the hard seat. The chilly air pricked her wet arms and legs, as if she’d shed the thinnest layer of skin. She zipped her windbreaker over her lifejacket. Her mom got in next, stepping onto the poncho, and the canoe wob- bled once more. Pearl laughed. It was fun once you got used to it. She bounced lightly until her mom told her to stop.

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Her dad took the seat behind her mom and they pushed off from shore. His paddle swept the water, turning them in a half circle until they were facing away from land. Pearl, in front, tried to follow the instruc- tions her dad called from the back. Her paddle slapped clumsily against the surface. She strained to pull it alongside the canoe, but the water pressed back, harder than she’d expected. What if she dropped her pad- dle? Would it float? Or would the murky lake hide it? “Relax,” her dad said. After a while, she did. The paddle made a little splash as it sliced the surface, in time with the sound of her dad’s. They were moving faster, the canoe gliding toward the mouth of the cove. Already the lake appeared larger. A rock in the water that had resembled a gray finger from shore loomed above them like a tower. The sun had polished the water’s sur- face so that Pearl felt like she was peering through a kaleidoscope at a dancing, iron-blue mosaic. She thought about trying to paint it, the light spots turning to dark and then back to light. She figured her mom would be watching the lake, too, but she was resting her chin in her hand, gaz- ing at her lap. “Mom?” she said, turning to face her. “Mom?” Her mom looked up. “I’m right here, sweetie. You don’t have to shout.” “I’m not,” she said. “Is everything all right?” Pearl nodded. After a while her right arm ached and she moved her paddle to the other side. Pearl looked for the island, but there was nothing besides water. The shore was a green line far away. “Where’s our cabin?” she asked her dad. He pointed behind him with his paddle. “Don’t worry. We won’t get lost.” She’d read that hundreds of years ago, Indians had canoed here. She imagined that the scratched aluminum was smooth birch bark and that its welded seams were root lacings. Instead of metal on her palms, she smelled cedar and spruce. They’d been paddling for many miles with a bag of raccoon furs for trading. Now they were deep in the wilderness, heading toward unknown territory. A loud whine made her turn around. A white motorboat was tearing toward them, cutting the water into a churning, billowing froth. “My God,” her mom yelled. “Are they going to turn?”

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“Stop paddling,” her dad commanded. The boat swerved to their left. Pearl suddenly felt like they were float- ing on a piece of driftwood. She craned her head upward and glimpsed the striped green bikini of the woman at the wheel. In back, two men in swim trunks laughed, then turned away. A black Jolly Roger flag flew from the rear deck railing. The wake rushed toward them, a foaming white mouth. Her dad plowed water behind him in a big arc, and the canoe slowly turned to face the wave. Pearl shoved her paddle between her knees and gripped the sides of the canoe. The wave seemed to move faster and faster until it was upon them. As they seesawed over it, her body went light, then banged against her seat. Water rained on Pearl’s arms and thighs. “Some people think they own this lake,” her dad said, maneuvering the canoe back on course. Her mom wiped water from her face. She’d taken off her hat. “How far to the island?” “Almost there,” he said. “Just past that outcropping.” Pearl’s arms felt like weights. She let her paddle rest on her lap and groped for her water bottle next to the bow deck. The floor was wet, wet- ter than it should be from the wake. She looked down. A dark vein of water was seeping from the seam that ran from bow to stern. When she put her weight on the spot, the vein widened. She wiped it away with her hand, but it came back, dribbling toward her seat. Panic rose in her chest. She glanced behind her. Her mom was leaning back, eyes closed, and her dad seemed to be squinting into the distance. Neither had noticed. Pearl fumbled with the zipper on her nylon windbreaker, then yanked the jacket over her head. She pressed the wadded-up windbreaker over the leak, planted both feet on top, and plunged her paddle into the water. She pulled it toward her, hard. Nothing mattered except getting to the island. “Someone’s got her second wind,” her mom said sleepily. “Look,” her dad said, pointing with his paddle. A few trees sprouted in the middle of the lake, still far enough away that they seemed magically to float there. Pearl’s right palm stung. She paused mid-stroke to blow on it. The windbreaker felt wet against her toes. Harder, she told herself. Paddle harder. Behind her, Pearl’s mom shifted. “Something’s wet,” she said. “Is your water bottle leaking, Pearl?” “It could be.” Pearl pretended to screw the top tighter. If they’d only

PMS.. 147 Scherr just get to the island, she would give up sleepovers at Kelly’s, chocolate ice cream, her dream of winning first prize in the sixth-grade science fair. “I don’t think it’s your water bottle.” Her mom was on her hands and knees, leaning over the metal bar behind Pearl’s seat. Pearl clamped her feet down on the windbreaker. “Your jacket is soaked,” her mom said, snatching at it until Pearl lifted her feet. Three veins of water were now trickling from the seam. Her mom spun around. “Gil, this boat is taking on water.” Her dad leaned forward, pushing aside the black trash bag. He exam- ined the leak over her mom’s shoulder, frowning. “Pearl, how long since this started?” “Not long,” Pearl said. “Let’s just get to the island,” her dad said. “I’ll take a closer look there.” “So we’re just going to keep going in a boat with a hole?” “What would you suggest, Marla?” Her dad’s voice rose. “Sit here and wait till we need to bail?” Her mom was quiet for a moment. “Didn’t you check over the boat, Gil?” “I did. While you were taking your time in the cabin, I was checking the boat. Okay?” Her mom winced. Her dad started to paddle again, splashing louder than before. Pearl dipped her own paddle into the water. He was pad- dling fast and she couldn’t keep up. They were no longer in sync. Her lips tasted salty; she hadn’t gotten her drink. She was sweaty beneath her life- jacket, and her shoulder tingled every time she lifted the paddle from the water. It seemed like they were getting nowhere. She closed her eyes and counted to one hundred. When she opened them, she saw a sliver of beach in front of pine trees. She paddled harder, her strokes once again matching her dad’s, until they were a few feet from shore. “Stop,” her dad told her, and they let the canoe slide onto sand. Just beyond the beach, in a small clearing, was a fire pit heaped with empty cans, cardboard boxes, a filthy blue towel, a folding canvas chair. Pearl thought about the boat with the Jolly Roger flag, but the water was smooth and empty. Squinting, she was sure she saw a dark point far across the lake and wondered what it was. “If I had some fiberglass cloth and epoxy, I could patch it,” her dad said. He’d dragged the canoe onto the beach and was on his knees peer- ing inside.

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“But you don’t,” her mom said. She stood behind him, looking down over his head, the hat hiding her face. Her dad slapped the side of the canoe—a hollow sound that made Pearl jump. “Dammit.” Her mom rummaged through the garbage bag and removed a small plastic purse Pearl had never seen before. She took out her cell phone and stared at it intently. After a moment, she said, “No bars.” “A lot of boats come through here,” her dad said. “I think the ranger makes patrols as well. We’ll flag one down.” Her mom stood looking at her dad, shaking her head, a funny half- smile on her face. Pearl turned her back to them. She was sick of the secret language. The lake gleamed like it had when she’d first seen it yesterday. She tore off her lifejacket and fished through the plastic bag until she found her snorkel, mask, and flippers. “Let’s go,” she said. Her parents looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. She held up the snorkeling gear. “Oh, sweetie,” her mom said, “we can’t go snorkeling right now.” Her dad rubbed his chin. “But we’re here, aren’t we?” Pearl said. Her mom sighed. “I guess you can snorkel for a few minutes. Your dad and I need to watch for boats.” “We were all supposed to snorkel,” Pearl said. Her voice sounded high and choked. “Maybe I can go with her,” her dad said. “Mom, you were going to snorkel, too.” Pearl grabbed her hand and tried to pull her into the water. “Pearl!” her mom said, tugging her hand away. “Why did we canoe for miles across the lake to this stupid, trashy island if we weren’t going to snorkel?” She glared at her mom and then her dad. Her throat burned. “You promised you were going to snorkel and now you’re not going to snorkel. You said you weren’t going to argue and now you’re arguing.” “This wasn’t—” Her mom stopped and shook her head. Pearl and her dad looked at her, waiting. A kingfisher trilled, a loud, rattling sound. “We’ll all go snorkeling for five minutes,” her mom finally said in a tired voice. “Then we have to get out. Do you understand, Pearl?” Pearl nodded, though she wanted to toss her snorkeling gear aside, to

PMS.. 149 Scherr tell her mom she didn’t really care. She crouched down at the lake’s edge. The water, no longer jarringly cold, soothed her chafed hands. It tugged at her legs, nudging her away from shore. She hopped out and put on her flippers, mask, and snorkel. Then she waded in up to her chest. Already she felt lighter than before. She dipped her mouth below the surface, test- ing the breathing tube. It seemed important to wait for her parents before going all the way under. Her dad took a long time adjusting her mom’s mask. “It pinches,” her mom said, grimacing. She took it off, and her dad tried again. At last they started into the water, her dad striding ahead, her mom cautious. When they got close, Pearl pushed off the bottom in a long shallow dive, stretching her arms until the soreness melted away. Gliding, she stared into blackness. It took a moment for her to realize her eyes were closed. Gradually she opened them. The lake was honey-colored near the surface, greenish-brown below. She saw fist-sized speckled stones on the bottom and the bright blue of her own bathing suit. Green spiny plants tickled the tops of her feet. A triangular rock, sharp and slick, pointed upward like the sail of a sunken ship. She lifted her head and gazed up into a face that was all eyes and mouth. Startled, she nearly spit out her breathing tube, then realized it was her mom, wearing giant purple goggles and biting on her snorkel. Her dad looked funny, too. It was like her parents were strange aquatic creatures she was observing for the first time. She watched them for a moment, then scissor-kicked past, weightless and free, letting herself drift in a world where the only sound was her breath. Looking down, Pearl thought she glimpsed a fist-sized cluster of small yellow eyes. She stopped and scanned the lake bottom until she saw it again next to a mat of weeds. She realized it was the top of a dark rock flecked with gold. It was different from any rock she’d ever seen. She wanted to pick it up, to turn it over in her hands, but it was too far below. She wondered if she could reach it with her flipper. As she extended her leg, the rock elongated and grew a curving fin. For a moment Pearl stopped breathing. The yellow dots were so thick on its back that it appeared to be turning from deep green to gold. She didn’t want ever to look away. The current was carrying her forward, though, and as gently as possible she raised her arms from her sides, pushing herself back. She hovered over the fish, trying not to move her limbs any more than neces- sary. Though part of its body was still hidden, it had to be almost as long

150 PMS.. poemmemoirstory as her arm. She searched for its eye, leaning down as far as she dared, and thought she spotted a glint of black. Her parents—they needed to see this, too. She couldn’t glimpse them in her side vision, so she turned her head slightly to the right. Still noth- ing. She looked back toward the fish but saw only a tangle of grass. Her eyes raked the clumps of vegetation, which now all looked alike. At last she saw the yellow dots, almost directly beneath her. The fish had moved far enough from its weedy shelter to reveal the white tip of its tail. She gestured behind her while fixing her gaze on it, but no one appeared. Finally, she turned around. The strangeness of her parents’ masked faces jolted her. They were waving to her—no, they were signaling for her to come. She pointed, tried to speak through her mask, to tell them to look, please look! But they kept motioning toward her and then toward shore. She turned back to the fish and stared at it for a long moment, memoriz- ing its downward sloping head, the pleated fin, the jutting tail.

Pearl felt heavy and awkward as she followed her parents out of the lake, her flippers making a slapping sound in the shallow water. She shaded her eyes against the bright sun. Her dad dropped his snorkeling gear into the canoe and stared at the empty horizon, his face scrunched. Her mom found a towel in the garbage bag and dried herself vigorously. “Well,” her dad said, “I guess it’s okay we didn’t have much time to snorkel. Not a lot there except waterweed.” “You’re right about that,” her mom said. “Maybe we can have a campfire tonight, Pearl,” her dad said. “When we get off this island,” her mom said, looking at him. Pearl shivered. Suddenly she knew she couldn’t tell her parents about the fish. They wouldn’t understand what it was like to see something alive and golden in the deep, deep water. Her mom handed her a towel. “You’re awfully quiet.” Her dad looked at her. “See anything in the lake?” Pearl shook her head. “We need to watch for boats,” she said, and leaving her parents by the canoe, she walked slowly along the shore.

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House Menu

To distract ourselves, we talked about the most disgusting tapas we had ever eaten. Will and I had discovered long ago that tapas can be just about anything, and we traded off descriptions of the awful delica- cies we’d encountered: pig knuckles, pig ears, suckling lamb intestines wrapped around sticks, baby eels, also known as angulas, which we twirled up with our forks and ate like spaghetti. I harbored a special dread of bacalao, the dried cod fritters that are ubiquitous in Spain—so Will, who found them delicious, described the greasy smell and the tough chewiness of the flesh until I thought I would gag. “Seriously, are you twelve?” I asked as he smirked at me. With his new white beard he looked a little like Sean Connery. “Can we please have a conversation about Spain that doesn’t make me sick?” We’d been to Madrid several times before we had children and only once, disastrously, with Helen and Frankie in tow. We had imagined that the children, toddlers then, would frolic in a plaza while we drank sherry and ate salty Spanish ham. Instead, Frankie crawled around the tiled floor of the tapas bar snacking on discarded peanut shells while Helen spilled Orangina in my lap. “Remember how we’d kiss up to the bartender to get what they had hidden behind the counter?” Will asked. “And how then we’d have to eat whatever horror they put in front of us?” I remembered how the tiled floor crunched with those peanut shells and the odd shrimp tail. I remembered jamon hanging Calder-like over the bar, shrimp pinkly quivering at the end of little wooden picks, tiny fish pressed together into salty fans, home-made bread with Manchego cheese and scented tomatoes all accompanied by icy fino. “We could go back,” said Will. “You can skip the bacalao.” I thought about it. There was a lot to keep us in town: my job, Will’s job, school. But Helen was at summer school and Frankie suddenly was even old enough to drink in Spain…. “Let’s just do it!” said Will. “Let’s just pack up and go.” While we talked, Will picked at the new Band-Aid on his port-a-cath.

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It had all turned into a rather dull routine by then, eighteen months along in our “journey” (as our treatment coordinator referred to it). By that time, we had already gotten tired of the scans, the sad looks, and the sentence, We had hoped for a better outcome. We chatted in the examination room to distract ourselves from, among other things, an expensively framed sepia landscape that hung over a cabinet designed to look like a dining room sideboard. Both the art and the furniture offended us. The first time we waited in here, Will rolled his photographer’s eyes at the easy sentimentality of sepia tone. Still, he could not help but get up close to the landscape, nose to glass, to see the resolution of the image. This was his habit when encountering a new photograph. In our early years together, I was embarrassed when he did this in public, but by then this mannerism seemed as unremarkable as breathing, and I noticed it only when I saw the startled look of an aide walking past the doorway. “Cheap offset reproduction,” Will had pronounced about that particu- lar sepia print, “not even a giclée.” He didn’t need to finish damning the photo; the crime of office art was one we didn’t discuss anymore. We had discussed it for twenty years. I found the faux sideboard to be disturbing in a different way. It still bothers me when I think about it. It made me think of our own side- board in our dining room: papers and bills stacked on top; yellowed linens, a few pieces of inherited china, a bottle of gift wine left over from a dinner party, and some old flaking artwork stuffed inside. However, I remember thinking this sideboard in the doctor’s office must hold— what?—latex gloves, swabs, needles, knives? I thought it was sneaky to try to conceal the clinical implements of an exam room in such a homey article of furniture. An attempt to “human- ize the environment,” I decided. (In the evenings, I had been reading up online and knew all about the latest in therapeutic design.) But did hid- ing the reality of what went on in this room really make it easier for the people inside it? That particular day, as usual, our conversation dried up before the doctor arrived. I sat thinking of the smoky interior of a tapas bar while Will unfolded a fresh copy of the L.A. Times, our second line of defense against the hideous room. He pulled the Calendar section for himself and offered me the rest of the paper. Since it was Wednesday, I opened the Food section to see if I could steal any ideas, but my eyes slid past the recipes and out the window. June gloom coated the Santa Monica

PMS.. 153 Dundas morning, obscuring the view to the ocean. A dismal landscape, but a transient one: I had lived in L.A. long enough to know that the moist weather would soon give way to the bleached and desiccated heat of summer. Will glanced around and let out a martyred sigh, and I knew that he was once again seething about the bad art in the exam room, or perhaps about bad art in general. We were a couple of ungrateful snobs, I know that, possessed of some warty perversity that prevented us from accept- ing the domestic fiction of the landscape and the sideboard, despite the trouble and money that went into creating it for us. Would it have been better to be sitting in a linoleum cubicle with scrub-green walls? Of course not. But I still don’t know how we stood it. Eighteen months of waiting, looking at bad art, talking about trivia, pretending to read the paper. I forced myself to think about work, about What’s For Dinner. I thought of it exactly that way, with capital letters, because that year we were shooting two shows a week, and I was always under pressure to come up with menu ideas. People don’t understand how much work a food show is, especially for the producer. I was always thinking about food. I didn’t set out to write cooking shows. I set out to be an artist, working in “media traditionally associated with women,” which sounds ridiculous now, of course. When the kids were small and Will and I were on the rocks, I pitched a weekly set of “Bitter Feasts” to the alternative paper. These were meant to be satiric, meals that embodied heartbreak or revenge. The paper ran them in the classified section, near the horo- scopes, surrounded by ads for escorts. I thought of my columns as comedy, or maybe a kind of personal performance art. One column I was rather proud of, called “Dust and Ashes,” featured live crabs dropped one by one into boiling water, a tum- bler of smoky single malt scotch, and a pomegranate, symbol of love and fertility, stabbed fifteen times with a knife. PETA wrote letters; Fox picked up the story; and before I knew it, I was in a meeting at the Food Network discussing host personalities. Before actually making it onto the air my idea got blanded, of course; the Food Network wanted kooky instead of bitter. But they offered good money, good enough for Will to quit his unsatisfying second job, and this made it possible for us to reconcile. With the cookbooks spun off from

154 PMS.. poemmemoirstory the series, we even had enough to make the tuition payments for both kids. Now, of course, I’m so controversial no store will sell my cookbooks, but that year What’s For Dinner was doing well. Still, I couldn’t help sometimes wishing I could go back to my original performance art idea. That day, for instance, I thought of a tapas menu suitable for an oncol- ogy suite: angulas, definitely, in honor of the snaking IV tubes used for chemo; the thickest, sweetest sherry around, for the viscous liquid drip- ping through the tubes, and whole truffles, which seem to me to be the closest food comes to tumors. I thought I knew so much, then. For instance, I knew exactly what would happen when Dr. Maeby finally entered. He would shake our hands and sit on his little rolling stool. He would angle his body so that his knees pointed neither at Will nor at me, but at the Hollandaise- colored wall between us. He would place his thick folder on the faux sideboard and look at us sadly, folding his soft hands in his lap. He would begin, We had hoped for a better response. Then he would talk about new treatments that he hoped would work better. I knew Dr. Maeby would outline three or four options, and would present them as a choice, like special entrées on a menu. Will could choose Aggressive Chemotherapy, even though he’d already had that sev- eral times and it didn’t do much for him, rather like the skewered lamb intestines of treatments, I thought: something to choose when you’re feeling macho but realize is a mistake the moment you actually try to eat it. Or he could choose Clinical Trial, with its grab-bag uncertainty and overtone of social service. This made me think of an earnestly healthy soy loaf: something that better people enjoyed, but which I knew would make Will uncomfortable, dry-mouthed and resentful. And at the end of each list, I knew I would hear Do Nothing, which always felt peaceful to me, like a custard, but which I even then suspected was not nearly as sweet in the end as I hoped. Will would ask about each option in some detail. I’d take notes while they talked about dosages, and FDA approval dates, and the difference between a Phase II and a Phase III trial. Later on, Will wouldn’t remem- ber the details, but I would have them in my notes, crisp and precise to the decimal. Dr. Maeby would say there are no wrong answers and you need to choose what’s right for you. He would never say guarantee or cure. It

PMS.. 155 Dundas would be a slippery conversation as my husband tried to lure the doctor into making an unqualified statement. The doctor, who presumably had much practice being simultaneously upbeat and noncommittal, would elude him. Eventually, Will would run out of stratagems and be forced to plead directly “If it were you, what would you do?” This is when I would put my pen down, because I knew the doctor would recommend, tepidly, a new course. I didn’t want him to say do nothing—we knew what that meant—but I hoped he would show mercy and refrain from suggesting another nightmarish three months of intes- tines. I knew that whatever he said, Will would climb on board, get with the program, think positive. And then they would both look at me. Did I have any questions? This was who Will always was, you see: an enthusiast. I was always the one following him, asking the questions. In the doctor’s office, I had learned to ask about side effects. I would smile when I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. Dr. Maeby was a nice man. He talked about his children sometimes, and they were about the same ages as Helen and Frankie. When we first met him, it seemed important that I talk to him at some length about the furnishings in the room, displaying my knowledge of Mission furniture and the evo- lution of the American dining room. I’m not sure why I did that…I guess I wanted him to think that Will and I were like him. Fellow members of the chattering class. The quality-sideboard class. I wanted him to see us, to see Will. As it turned out, Dr. Maeby was not at all interested in furniture but was quite impressed when Will mentioned in passing his connection to the museum. So my goal was achieved, but not by my own efforts. No matter. I thought if the doctor saw us, he would speak candidly with us, give us all the facts. In the beginning, I thought having all the facts would be an advantage. That was before I spent my nights on the internet, pretending to work or shop, but really wading through site after site of oncology papers. Before the five-year survival rates dropped into the single digits. In this meeting, I knew that Dr. Maeby would list the expected, the unusual, and the rare and life-threatening side effects, and I would write them down. As I did this, I would know I was recording mere sugges- tions of side effects: ideas, sketches…and I would wonder how the reality

156 PMS.. poemmemoirstory would actually manifest. I’d think about the slight numbness that ended up with Will’s toenails turning black and his having to use a crochet hook to fasten the buttons his immobile fingers could not. I’d remem- ber that possible sensitivity to cold resulted in a 911 call when his throat closed up after reaching into the fridge for some orange juice. Most of all, I’d think of the most recent side effect, skin rash, that had resulted in open oozing pustules from Will’s waist to his elbow. I would think, but not say, how I had started to inch away from my husband at night, worried that an inadvertent sleepy embrace would tear his fragile, weeping skin. Lying on his side, with his t-shirted back to me, Will’s outline was the same as it had always been. Until recently, when I woke up at night I’d roll over so my stomach fit against his back and my head rested in the hollow space between his shoulder blades. Clinging to him like that, smelling his familiar sleepy smell, I could forget he was a patient and fall back to sleep with the man I married. Whatever comes next, I remember thinking, whatever the next treat- ment is, at least his skin will get better. I would remain positive. But none of that happened on this particular gray day in June. Instead, Dr. Maeby strode into the room, followed by the aide, the nurse practitioner, and even the treatment coordinator. Dr. Maeby looked the same as always, our age more or less, and he was wearing his usual pain- fully-starched cotton shirt. Instead of greeting us with a solemn hand- shake, though, that day he dropped onto the stool and skidded across the floor to where Will and I were anxiously folding our newspapers. Dr. Maeby slapped the thick folder on his knees. “Comprehensive lack of progression!” he announced, smiling at Will, and then at me. Will and I returned his gaze stupidly. The three assistants jostled around behind him to beam at us. There was a long silence. “Lack of progression?” asked Will slowly. My ears buzzed as if the nearby Pacific had just coursed through the room. Will put his hand on my knee. He was so shaggy then; he had grown a beard because it was hard to shave his raw skin. I tried to take it in. “That’s good news, right?” “It’s great news!” replied Dr. Maeby, shuffling through the file. “No new metastases, and no noticeable growth of the existing tumors.” I looked at Will: shaggy, shirtless, smiling. He always drew sideways glances, coy banter, and flirtatious touches on the arm. It used to make

PMS.. 157 Dundas me furious. In the early years of our marriage I got very good at chasing women away from him. “The disease isn’t going away, though?” I asked, my voice sounding too loud and too accusing. Now cancer, the bitch, was making a play for him, and I couldn’t seem to get rid of her. “It’s not progressing. A very positive response.” From what the doctor was saying we were still talking about a single- digit chance that he would be alive in five years. I wanted the man I mar- ried back. I wanted him back so badly that I had to stare very hard at the sepia print to keep from jumping up and screaming. “What do we do now?” Will asked. “Stay the course!” said Dr. Maeby. “Any questions?” I remember that Will’s lips and nose were slightly purple that day. I wanted to ask happy Dr. Maeby about that, but I didn’t want to ruin Will’s moment. I had to be careful not to ask any questions that Will didn’t want to know the answers to. We shook hands with the assistants and accepted their good wishes, and they all filed out of the room. Then I remembered Spain. If we went, Will would miss a couple of weeks of treatment. Maybe that was a bad idea, now that he was finally on a treatment that wasn’t failing? “I love Spain!” Dr. Maeby said. He waved his hand over the chart, as if dismissing it. “Oh, yes, yes, of course go to Spain! Don’t worry about any of this and just go!” Then he asked Will if he wanted some sleeping pills for the trip. Will declined, of course. He was a seasoned traveler—travel was part of his job at the museum—and he viewed sleeping pills in particular and jet lag in general as the province of amateurs. “Well then,” Dr. Maeby said to Will, “you should just fill the scrip in case Marta needs them.” “Wouldn’t you like that?” the doctor said, turning directly to me so Will couldn’t see that he wasn’t smiling. “Oh yes,” I replied, not sure exactly what I was agreeing to. “Yes, I would.” “Done then!” he said, still looking at me. “And there are several others I can prescribe if you don’t like these. Just let me know.” Scrip in hand, Will loped off to the chemo room to get his cocktail and flirt with the nurses. I went home to work. I spent the rest of the day creating a “Menu for Healing” (organic vegetables, brown rice, miso soup, and for a kooky antioxidant finish,

158 PMS.. poemmemoirstory blueberry-turmeric truffles) and a “Tryptophan Slam, aka Sleepytime Eats” menu (turkey, milk toast, honey custard, toddies). But when I started thinking about our own dinner later in the day, our celebration dinner, I realized that I had no ideas. Lack of progression? Hard to make a menu out of a negative. For inspiration, I opened my cupboard and surveyed the swag of hav- ing a food show on the air: tin after tin of the highest quality spices; jars of delicacies pickled, brined, and salted; bags of fancy nuts and grains and pastas; all sent to me in the hope that I would find a place for them on my show. I donated most of the samples to a food bank, but often enough my curiosity—or maybe it was gluttony?—compelled me to hold some things back. Looking at the bounty in front of me, I decided that my mind was in Spain. I wanted to prepare for our trip, I wanted to cel- ebrate, and I had been toying with the idea for another show. (This was the beginning of the travel shows, of course, though I didn’t know that then.) That day I just wanted to make something sunny to cut through the gray day, through the buzzy emptiness I had felt ever since the doc- tor’s office. So I set about making a Catalan almond sauce, first toasting the spices and almonds in a frying pan and roasting the peppers over a burner. At one point, I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, my no-longer- girlish figure wrapped in a dirty apron and smeared with red paste, a housewife to the core. I opened a bottle of cheap-ish red and poured myself a glass. By the time I ground everything together in the processor the house smelled warm and exotic, and when I finally called Will and Frankie in to eat I was flushed and licking my fingers. Frankie attacked the meal with the desperate hunger of a teenage boy. He finished one serving, and then two, and I knew he would wipe the bread around the plate if I weren’t in the room. Will, after a few bites and hearty compliments to the chef, pushed the food around without actually eating it. I poured myself another glass of wine. I talked about the meats and cheeses of Spain. I offered my son a third serving, which he accepted sheepishly. As I passed him the serving platter, something about his straightforward appetite struck me. It was so uncomplicated, so trusting, so fleeting—my eyes welled up. Immediately Frankie, who at that age found any emotion alarming and my emotions particularly troublesome, turned to his father. “How did it go today, Dad?” he asked, “at the doctor?”

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Now Will looked alarmed. He said all along that he didn’t want to burden the children with his health issues. I agreed with him, at first. “It went fine. There could be some comprehensive advancement by the time we go to Spain.” Will obviously had learned the art of optimistic non-talk from the doctor. “Cool. Can I go out tomorrow night?” Frankie had no idea how sick his father was; we had done a good job, too good of a job, protecting him from it. I pushed my chair back, reached for the wine bottle, and left the room. I went into my office, where I could think. Several hours later, the kitchen was empty, the pots and pans washed and put away, the dishwasher humming through its dry cycle. At my desk, I had e-mailed in my show ideas. I transferred some money to Helen and sent a cheerful little note to let her know it was on the way. I Googled “tapas” and started a proposal to the Food Network to claim the trip to Spain as a business expense. I started to read the caregivers chat board but gave up after a few minutes. I finished the bottle of wine and decided what I needed to say. I fished another bottle of wine out of the sideboard—the gift wine, the expensive bottle we’d been saving for a special occasion—and headed up to our bedroom. Will was standing with his back to the full-length mirror. His shirt was off, and when he saw me he motioned me over. “Look in the mirror,” he said, and as I was doing so he held his digital camera up over his shoulder and took our picture. I recoiled from the flash, but he put his arms around me and held the camera so I could see the screen on the back. I saw my face, lumpy and tired, next to the scarred skin on his shoulder. “Look,” he said, “I’m keeping a record.” And he scrolled through shot after shot of his back, the rash seeming to recede and shrink as he moved backward through time, until he got to photos of his raw cuticles, and black toenails, the side effects of the drug before last. I looked at him. “Why?” “I’m not sure,” he replied. He opened a drawer, and took out a box, and showed me prints he’d made of the devastation visited on his body. At the bottom of the pile were photos of his scar, growing redder and fresher as he flipped toward the beginning. Some prints were beautiful,

160 PMS.. poemmemoirstory most were awful. “I want to be able to remember. I want documentation.” I imagined myself looking at these photos in a year, in two years, in five. I knew I wouldn’t be looking at the rash on his back, but rather at his face, turned sideways to aim the camera, at the bits of the room reflected in the corners of the mirror—there’s his shirt on the bed, the one I bought him for his birthday…oh look, I forgot we had that photo on the wall. Looking for all the little forgotten signs of normalcy, of the life we had before. Before what, I thought, and I remembered what I came in to say. “The children—they need to know.” He slapped the top on the photo box and glared at me. “Need to know what?” My mouth opened but nothing came out. “Look,” he said. His voice was cold. “I’m not going anywhere. You got that? I’m still here. I’m not going away.” “Of course not,” I assured him, “but even so—“ He cut me off. “If there is an elephant in the room, it’s standing very quietly minding its own business. I’m fine with it, and we don’t need to talk about it.” He looked at me. “I need you to be on my side on this.” “Your side? What is this, a game?” “Don’t do this—please—” “You’re not being fair!” He lifted the box containing my children’s horrible inheritance and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me with it. “Fair?” he yelled, inches from my face. “You’re going to tell me about fair?” He dropped the box and looked at his pockmarked body in the mir- ror. “Just be on my side on this. Sickness and health. Elephants. The whole deal. Please.” He disappeared. I sat on the bed and stared at the large portraits of the children and me that Will had hung on the wall. I thought about sickness and health. There’s a sort of bargained exchange in marriage—a quid pro quo—I’ll see you through sickness, if you see me through sick- ness. You’re not supposed to keep count of who gets sick more. But, I realized, on some level you do.

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Not fair. Not fair. In a minute he was back. “Look what I have,” he said, and he showed me the first joint I’d seen in years. I gaped at it. “Where did you get it?” He put on his mysterious troublemaker look, and alluded to the fact that he still had some connections. Twenty years earlier, he had an entire closet full of marijuana plants, and though he never admitted it, I’m pretty sure he grew them to supplement his income. I made him get rid of them when I moved in. He closed the bedroom door and lit up. It smelled like high school. I grimaced—what if Frankie smelled it? Will waved away my misgivings. “I’m a sick man,” he said. “It’s even legal now.” “Not really,” I pointed out, getting a towel from the bathroom and stuffing it under the door. “Not nationally. Not according to the FDA.” Why was he so irresponsible? “Shut up,” he said, and took a pull at the joint. He drew in his chin and held the joint out to me. I don’t like getting high; the few times I tried it in high school I got paranoid and then giggled uncontrollably for hours. But I looked at him and thought—well, why the hell not? Why should I always be the mature one? I coughed as hard as any other novice dope smoker. He took the joint back and showed me how to smoke it gently, and I tried to follow, and tried to forget how foolish we were. At our age. With a child in the house. When there were serious things we should be talking about. I felt my joints fizz and the room went into soft focus. Why the hell not? I flopped onto the bed next to Will and lay next to him, holding hands. After a minute, or maybe five—I was watching the ceiling fan swirl—I started to think of a menu. “Stoned Love” I’d call this show, and the menu would be easy, because suddenly everything sounded mighty tasty. I thought about going down- stairs to the cupboard, opening every single jar of fancy preserves, and feeding them to my husband with my fingers. Maybe I’ll just do that, I thought. I started to giggle at the idea. But Will was saying something. “How long have you known?” he asked me. “How long have you known and not said anything?”

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The kitchen fell away and I was back in the room with the elephant. I had known for months. Will looked at me. I knew I should talk about the in-sickness-and-in- health vow I took twenty years earlier and how I planned to stand by it, no matter how unfair. I knew I should talk about the children, till death do us part. But I didn’t. I was stoned. I was stoned, and instead of being a good wife I started keening “I can’t do this! I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” It echoed around the room, and underneath the self-pity and the stonedness I could feel the betrayal. But I couldn’t stop. The elephant was out; the elephant was breaking the furniture; the elephant was sitting on my chest and squeezing the life out of me. “I can’t! I can’t! Who will take care of me?” I was sobbing. “Shh,” he said, “Shhh, Marta, shhh,” and I started to roll to him but then I stopped, not wanting to touch his broken skin, afraid I would hurt him. I lurched back to my side of the bed and thrashed there, flounder- ing on my back, wailing like an infant. And then he touched my face and it was all I could feel. I felt my flesh leap forward at his touch, my appetite as greedy and immediate as a teenager’s. No, I thought: no. And then I was weeping for another reason, because this desire felt like another betrayal. I closed my eyes and let him touch me. I wouldn’t touch him back, I decided; I couldn’t hurt him if I didn’t touch him. He rolled on top of me, and I felt his bones, newly sharp against my solid frame. My body was hearty, smooth; my husband’s hand on my face was rough and dry. In sickness and in health, I thought; who has betrayed whom? And then he was unbuttoning my shirt, and all I knew was in my skin, and I sank away, my brain sank away, as the pot and the wine allowed me finally to disappear and leave just my body under the pres- sure of his hands. I woke up a few hours later with a pounding head. I could see Will’s shoulder outlined in the moonlight. I lay awake and listened to him breathe. When I woke up again, he was gone. Sun poured through the win- dow, which meant that the marine layer had broken up and heat was on the way.

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I spent the day working on one of the cookbooks: What’s For Dinner…For Kids! The day’s chapter was “Surprise Inside”: foods that concealed, transformed, or otherwise hid their true nature. I decided to include a meatloaf that sliced to reveal bright circles of hard-boiled eggs; I could imagine children happily squishing bready meat around the warm slippery ovals. I was ready to reject the bunny made out of a canned pear with sliv- ered almond ears—I didn’t want to include any canned fruit; I had some foodie pride, after all. But then I saw that the nut-eared rabbit crouched over a single maraschino cherry, and I realized that any child would be delighted by the kitsch of a bunny offering its red heart as a surprise treat. The bunny stayed in. Looking forward to surprises, trusting that they will be benign, is one of the defining characteristics of a child. It’s only as you get older that the words I have a surprise for you are met with fear. For instance, I never imagined that the What’s For Dinner books would become col- lectable, that was my surprise, or part of it. I checked last night and the kids’ cookbook is selling above sticker price on Ebay. They tell me that my supporters buy complete sets to display in their living rooms—but how can I take any joy in that? The whole controversy is absurd. I didn’t do anything that doesn’t happen every day, and it was just my bad luck to become a figurehead. That was the other part of my surprise. I finished my work before Will got home that afternoon. By the time he banged in through the kitchen door I had hauled out the ancient food processor to make pesto. I wanted to use up the basil before it bolted in the coming summer heat. He had stopped at the pharmacy on the way, and he laughed as he pulled a bottle of sleeping pills out of his jacket pocket. “Look at how huge!” he said, shaking it. The bottle was amber in his parchment hand. Sepia tones, I thought. “He prescribed a hundred doses!” chuckled my husband, “and six refills! You can sleep all the way across Europe. Enough for ten trips. A hundred trips. Or—maybe we can sell a few, make some extra cash.….” He grinned at me, and it was the grin of the probable-pot-dealing itinerant photographer I met twenty years ago. He put the bottle on the counter. The shiny newness of the prescrip- tion bottle accentuated the dings and stains on the processor. It must be twenty years old, I realized; I bought it to make baby food for Helen.

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“That was fun last night,” Will whispered, leering at me ridiculously, and I laughed in spite of myself. “I can’t believe you,” I said, “a fiend at your age.” He kissed me with purple lips. My hands flitted around his shoulders until I decided his wrists were a safe spot and settled them there. “You could always put some plants back in the closet,” I said, “Grow your own. Why the hell not?” I’m on your side, I thought. “Maybe I will!” He kissed me once more, and turned to go. He called back, “Because what are they going to do, put a sick man in jail?” I watched his broad back as he walked out the door. When we met, his back was smooth and freckled and his blonde hair curled just above his collar. Now I could see pinpricks of blood on his shirt, where the rash had bled through. I wondered how much longer he could stand this treatment, and wondered what the next treatment—because there would be many, I realized—would do to him. I already knew what the disease would almost certainly do to him. I closed my eyes and conjured his warm, smooth shoulder blade under my cheek. I waited for the room to stop spinning. And then, just like that, I knew what the doctor was saying to me the day before, when he pressed the sleeping pills on us. Just let me know, he had said. I opened my eyes and picked up the prescription bottle next to the processor: Ambien CR (zolpidem tartrate extended-release). I could feel the line ahead, even though I didn’t know the names then: Vicodin, Oxycontin, Ativan, Fentanyl, morphine. The tablets would sound like coffee beans in the processor, I realized. With applesauce? I wondered. Is that how it’s done? I knew how to find out, but—my thoughts were bouncing ahead into unfamiliar territory— I wouldn’t use my own computer; I would use the one at Kinko’s. Not the nearby Kinko’s, I decided. And I’d pay cash to rent the internet time. Something chocolate, I thought. He loved chocolate. Not applesauce. My thoughts kept rushing ahead. He would have to ask me, I thought, and knew without a doubt that he would ask me. Not now, I thought. There was a lot of time still. I tried to think about the pesto for dinner. I tried to think about going to Spain. I wanted to go to Madrid and eat tapas before I thought about this.

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I stopped: not Spain. I couldn’t think about Spain; that trip would always loop back to the amber bottle, which, I realized with disgust, was still in my hand. I threw the bottle across the kitchen. It rolled toward the dining room, coming to rest in the doorway. I realized that it wasn’t information that I wanted from the doctor, when I made sure that he understood that we were his kind of people. No: I wanted him to break out the special fail-safe cures that he kept hid- den for family and special friends. I wanted the insider’s advantage, the special house menu. He understood me, it seemed. And it seemed that when you wanted to order off the menu you had to prepare your own. Not now, I thought. I wasn’t ready. I needed to finish my cookbook. Will needed to grow some pot in the closet. We needed to talk to the children. I needed his skin to clear so I could roll against him and sleep at night. Ambien, Vicodin, Oxycontin, Ativan, Fentanyl, morphine. I need- ed to put that bottle where I couldn’t see it. I picked it up and tossed it deep into the sideboard, and then I turned back to cooking.

166 PMS.. Diana Wagman

Rom Com or Rose and Jack Live Happily Ever After and We Are Not Really Surprised

She was blonde. No, she was brunette. No, yes, she was a redhead. No. Scratch that. She was a brunette because she wasn’t standoffish and she wasn’t a whore, she was someone friendly, that we can take seriously. She has brown eyes of course. No, green. No, blue, unusual with her dark hair. The prettiest cornflower blue, the blue of summer days with perfect temperatures. It is rare for her to sweat. She is graceful, but she is not tall. She is not striking or exotic. She is pretty. He looks like your brother, if you had a brother, if a brother could be not too handsome and not threatening at all, but friendly and sexy and good-looking in his own unusual way. Some women wish he looked like someone else, and he does his best to look like what every woman wants. There she is. There he is. They meet in a class, at a swimming pool, she is hurrying to work, she spills her briefcase, he catches her papers as they fly. She leaves a book in a cab, he finds it. He’s a magician, she’s a clown, he’s an architect, she designs furniture. They hate each other. He’s dating her best friend. She likes his col- lege roommate, a guy we know is not worth her time, whose eyes are too small and close together. They like each other. He’s dating her sister who treats him badly. She wishes her sister was nicer. She wishes he would ask her out. Everyone knows that they should be together. It is only a matter of time. Only ninety minutes from now. How will that happen? It seems impossible. Of course unbelievable. But we wait, we want it so badly. They have never met. Her name is Daisy, no, her name is Lily, no, of course her name is Rose. Rose, but not in any ethnic sense. She is a flower. Her sister’s name is Jewel. They come from a family of nouns. His name is Rob. His name is Tom. His name is Jack. Yes. Jack. Strong, mas- culine, nothing ambiguous about it. He drives a bus. A big city bus. He wears a uniform. But he’s really a

PMS.. 167 Wagman musician. He plays the guitar. He sings. He composes. He drives the bus to support his music. He drives the 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift so when he’s done playing—if he gets a gig—if he ever gets a gig—he can still get to work on time. He’s a night owl. He only gets sleepy in the afternoon. She’s a baker, she owns a bakery, a fabulous bakery, the name of it is so clever, The Bun Also Rises or Yeast of Eden, and everything she makes is rich and sweet, but not fattening. Still—it’s not going well and when her car breaks down she can’t afford to have it fixed so she rides the bus at 3:30 AM every morning to get to the shop and start the blueberry scones, the cinnamon twists and coffee cake, the cookies for later with cappuccinos and drinks with straws cutting through the fluffy whipped cream like clouds. There is flour on her skin and sugar sparkles in her hair. One day she falls asleep in the bus. She is beautiful. She is cute. No, she is beautiful. At this moment, pink lips softly parted, throat exposed, the neon lights they pass coloring her perfect skin, she is as lovely as she will ever be. She does not drool. The bus is clean. Morning after morning, Jack wears his bus driver uniform and she doesn’t notice him, but he notices her. How tired she is, how worried, how pale she looks in the green fluorescent light of the nighttime bus. He doesn’t talk to her. Someone else talks to her, a wise and happy Latina on her way to work at a big hotel. Every night Jack drops Rose at her special stop and watches as she walks into the dark. Where does she go, he wonders? What is that lovely white dust in the creases of her elbow? Then one morning at 4 a.m.—with the colorful, funny black man in the back of the bus complaining about the change to the route—our hero drives his bus down a side street, barely squeezing between parked cars, to see where Rose goes. He sees her bakery. She is rolling up the gate. She is turning on one soft yellow light. She feeds the homeless, she feeds the pigeons, her bakery looks like his mother’s kitchen—the mother he might have, probably has, because he is such a nice guy. Oh. His mother is dead. And his father is sad. And his father is dat- ing inappropriate women. No. There are no other women. His father is lonely. He’s coming to visit his son in the big city—coming from Iowa, coming from Pennsylvania, coming from a small town in the pines way north of the big city of Seattle—where Jack and Rose live, where we see the water and people are friendly and there isn’t too much traffic. Dad thinks his son is a musician with the symphony. He doesn’t know Jack drives a bus. All those years of music lessons, his father says, for what? For this?

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But maybe that is a different story. But maybe that is this one. Maybe this is part of Jack and part of his pain that runs so deep. His mother is dead, he has disappointed his father, and just after we meet him, his girlfriend leaves him too. He is driving his bus and he sees her, tall and blond—she doesn’t even know how to make toast—but he is crazy about her sharp angles in white jeans and hard shoes. He is about to beep the horn, to break the rules and call out the window to her, when he sees her put her arm around a real musician, a rock and roller with a chain, and black boots, and a chest with hair. Now the bus driver’s music is sad. It’s raw. It’s filled with pain. He misses his mother. He’s sorry about his father. His heart has been broken and he sings his failure and his fading future. It’s a new song and people listen. One night, the next night, Rose is walking home by a club, by a low- budget bar, by a coffee shop of some kind, and she hears his song. She has chocolate frosting on her face from that morning, that’s how sweet she is, so sweet it doesn’t even melt. That’s how oblivious she is to her own beauty, to her faded jeans with holes in the right places and her round and perky ass, oblivious to her tank top falling off one flour- covered shoulder and the curve of a breast—just a mouthful as white as coconut—barely glimpsed, oblivious to the small but tasteful yet erotic tattoo she has of a single rose. No, a single Hershey’s kiss. No, too com- mercial, a single chocolate chip. No, might look like poop. No, no tattoo at all—she is waiting with empty skin to write his name. She is walking by that club and feeling sorry for herself as she sees the pretty girls lined up outside, the short dresses and teased hair, and she hears his music. His beautiful music. She looks in, she tries to see, but the bouncer shoos her along and she walks slowly away listening to a tune that she can only say is more true, yet more melancholy than a frosted lemon square. She doesn’t know it’s her bus driver. Yes. And it is that next morning in the dark, still dreaming of the mel- ody she heard, she falls asleep and misses her stop. And now he wakes her at the end of the line. She is confused. She is scared and frantic. There is a sprinkle of cinnamon across her nose. There is music under his fingernails. We can smell the yeast rising between them. She begins to cry. She will lose her bakery if she doesn’t pay the rent. She must pay the rent. He has a gig, a big gig, opening for some other act—his ex-girlfriend’s rock and roll boyfriend. It was a crumb thrown to him, more than one crumb, an entire cupcake. He offers Rose his pay- check. He hardly knows her, but we’re not worried. He will be with her

PMS.. 169 Wagman for the rest of his life as soon as these ninety minutes are over. Years from now, when we are sitting on the couch in our living room, or lying propped up in bed beside our spouse, the man we’ve been with for 25 years, we will see Rose and Jack on TV. We will watch and smile, secure that they are still happy, even if we aren’t. Even if we met the man lying beside us at work, at school, on Match.com. In any of the ordinary ways. And even if the light never catches his curls and only reflects off his bald head and we are tired of making pasta, much less making love. Even if the idea of baking never occurs to us. Even so, we know that Rose and Jack are in love and perpetually young. We reach to turn off our light and notice the skin drying and sagging on our arm, turn to the man beside us and see the hair in his ears, the softening of his jaw. We try to fall asleep before he starts to snore. And when his snoring and the snick snick snick of the air in his nose wakes us up, Rose and Jack are still flickering on the TV. Even mute, we know what they are saying to each other. We can sing it with them. The bus is parked in front of the bakery. He wants to kiss her so badly he stands on his tiptoes. He is a rocket ship waiting to blast off and if she will just kiss him, she will see the stars. We want her to, but not really, because the most delicious part is the fragrance, the warm smell from the oven, the anticipation of melted chocolate and butter and sugar and eggs coming together in an all new way. Of course it will be the same old way. The eating is never as good as the wanting. So we’re glad when she turns from him, the check in her hands, and lets the temperature rise a little. She’ll pay him back, she’ll make it up to him. He knows she will. They almost kiss. Almost. The gig goes well. He is suddenly a star. He goes to Atlanta, to Nashville, to New York City. He has a tour in Europe. She walks by the water. She waits. Her best friend—the one who never gets the guy, who works for her, who works in the flower shop next door, who is not as pretty, has short hair, wears a sweater all the time—she tells Rose not to wait. Her sister, Jewel, with husband and two adorable children, tells Rose not to wait. The phone doesn’t ring. The texts don’t come. The in- box is empty and her cookie dough refuses to rise. Rose goes out with her ex-boyfriend. They sit across from each other. He’s handsome. He’s happy to see her. She drinks chardonnay and remembers with her bus driver she drank PBR. After dinner, the ex gives her a kiss—no reason not to, been there done that—and they almost sleep together, then she hears Jack’s music on the radio, or she sees a city bus go by, or she trips over an empty beer can, and she can’t.

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Jack’s father comes in to the bakery. Jack’s father has a date. No, Jack’s father says he’s heard of Rose. He tells her Jack is confused, he tells her Jack is troubled—but not very. He says Jack is waiting for Rose just as he waited for Jack’s mother for two years to make up her mind. She did not disappoint. Yes, she is dead, died a long time ago, but in her death she is perfect. She never saw the hair in his ears or the sag of her own arm. And of course, we know Rose won’t die, not this time, and none of that will ever happen to her either. Jack will never snore. She will never get a bunion or a single gray hair. Honestly, truly, that is what we love most about her. She serves Jack’s dad a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie. He says it’s the best he’s ever had. So she waits. Jack comes back. Jack thinks she doesn’t want to see him. It’s a mis- understanding. It’s a case of missed signals. The guy who delivers the fresh fruit, the blueberries and strawberries and peaches, feeds her a bite of peach and scoops up the drips on her arm with his finger. But he is really her brother, no, her sleazy brother-in-law, no, an autistic child she helps on the weekends. Jack sees and doesn’t understand. She sees Jack on TV with his arm around the ex-girlfriend, she in skimpy clothing that stretches and glitters across her jelly roll sized breasts, and doesn’t under- stand her tears are for the rock and roller, not Jack. The person getting married is not Jack. The woman on his arm is not even someone he likes. Now we are concerned. Now this could go too long and begin to burn. Nobody wants those crusty black edges; everybody wants them to melt in your mouth. We’re afraid to open the oven door. It’s too late, we might make the whole thing collapse. But it doesn’t. Rose takes the cookies out at exactly the right moment. Jack appears in his bus driver’s uniform at exactly the right moment. She has flour on her shoulders and sparkles of sugar in her hair, a sprinkle of cinnamon across her cheeks. The light catches the curls of his hair and his eyes are large and he is singing to her—in harmony. They kiss, finally, finally, and it tastes almost as good as we imagined. We reach up, to turn out the light. No. We put our empty popcorn container on the floor. We shake our heads and stand up, stiff from ninety minutes in the cool air-conditioned dark. We hold the hand of the man who is not Jack, who spends a long time in the bathroom with the newspaper, who complains about the dog, who picks the Milk Duds from his teeth. We will live ever after, sometimes happily, sometimes a little over done, and one day we will miss our stop and there will be no one to wake us.

PMS.. 171 Antonya Nelson

In the Land of Men

Since my attack last year, when I get off work at night one of my brothers is always waiting for me in our family car, the rusted boat, engine idling, double-parked on Halsted right outside Mizzi’s, where I wait tables. No one asked them to do this, and we don’t talk about it, but when I emerge from the steamy restaurant into the biting, steel cold of Chicago, my heart offers up a grateful sigh at the presence of one or the other of my brothers’ placid, safe faces. Tonight they all three show. Sam, nineteen, the oldest boy but four years younger than me, sits on the hood with his pointed black ankle boots wedged between bumper and car. An inch of bare skin is exposed where the boots and pants cuffs don’t quite meet, which is Sam’s style. It is zero degrees out, according to the radio, factoring in wind chill, but Sam doesn’t wear a coat. “Too cool to feel cold?” I say. He shells out a pittance of a smile. “Let’s go.” He hops off the hood to hold open the front door and presses my back with his palm. Sensing his eyes casting about protectively behind me, I catch my first whiff of some- thing gone awry. “I love a warm car,” I say, settling in the passenger seat with my hands in front of the blowing heat vents. My other two brothers sit in the back the way the youngest always do. I say to them, “Hey.” Sam slams the driver’s door and jerks us out of park. He moves as if our transmission is not automatic, shifting into low neutral frequently, keeping one hand active on the thin metal stick. Even as his older sister, I stay a certain nervous distance from Sam. Beneath his meticulously maintained smooth surface is a rage that can erupt and break windows or punch walls. For a time I just ride along in the warmth, quietly losing my waitress aches. Lately I’ve found real comfort in these pocket-like moments of heat and peace, which can be as refreshing as deep, unconscious sleep. I breathe out, at last, hating to end it, but knowing I must. “So, what’s the occasion?”

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Sam grimly says nothing, flicking his eyes to the rearview. I turn, catty-corner, to Donald. Seventeen, the worrier, he looks alarmingly pale in the passing streetlights. His hand is in a fist under his nose as he bites a fingernail, staring desperately at the sidewalk and storefronts like a trapped dog. Donald has ulcers, migraines, all the ailments symptomatic of early adulthood. Beside him, Les, the family baby, seems more rosy- cheeked than usual, as if he’s siphoned off Donald’s color to top his own. But even happy Les has an uncertain smile on his face and watches Sam for cues. His teeth chatter, despite the car’s abundant warmth. Without taking his eyes off the panel van in front of him, Sam says tightly, “You got any plans tonight?” I point at my chest. “Me? You’re talking to me?” “That’s right. Anything you were going to do?” “Is something wrong?” I ask, simultaneously anxious and annoyed that they are protecting me by withholding. “Is it Dad? Has something happened to Dad?” “No,” Donald says, looking at his watch. “Time for WBN News at Nine. Pistachios and beer.” From behind me, Les pats my arm soothingly. “Dad’s cool,” he says. Sam catches my eye, and we share an older siblings’ smile as if over Les’s head. “He’s fine,” Sam says. “And here you guys are. So what could it be?” I sit back relieved: My family is alive. Lesser scenarios occur to me. A surprise party. An unex- pected friend waiting at the airport. A trip to the police to clear up some minor infraction before my father discovers the offense. But here we are, enclosed and fine and balanced. I enjoy, for a second’s suspense, tantaliz- ing luxury. “So when do you tell me, guys?” Sam stops uncharacteristically at a yellow light. We rock forward with inertia, rock back. Pedestrians, loaded down with afterwork, early Christmas shopping, plunge into the crosswalks, heads ducked in irrita- tion against the cold. Telltale forest-green Marshall Field’s sacks swing from their gloved fingers. It’s late, and they’re homeward bound. A man carries his paper funnel of flowers, shielding it with his chest, turning his back to protect this gift for some woman. Ashy snow blows up the six- way intersection, sings along the cracks in our car doors, and the taxi in front of us decides to turn left; a signal begins flashing. Generally, this draws a heavy lean on Sam’s horn, but tonight he simply waits. “You have a decision to make,” he says.

PMS.. 173 Nelson

Les adds excitedly, “A very important decision. Mega-important. Man, it’s big, really big. Life and death, you could say.” Sam frowns into the rearview mirror at Les, his profile so sharp and grown-up I have a sudden moment of wonder: My brother’s a man. I quickly look at Donald—has he, too, crossed the line? But no, Donald has no beard, no jutting jaw, no buried rage. He shakes his young head pessimistically, eyes still glued in appeal to the passing world. The light changes. “We got your perp,” Sam says to me as we take off again and slide around the taxi. He shifts his eyes momentarily from the road to my face. He’s a dangerously handsome man, the family heartbreaker, and his direct gaze has a life—volition, power—of its own. “My perp?” “Perpetrator!” Les shouts gleefully. “We got your perpetrator! That guy! He’s in our trunk.”

*

Last year on a night unlike tonight—that is, a night in which one instant knifed the odds of my otherwise fair life—a man looped his bright red wool scarf over my head lasso-style and pulled me to his chest. Fast and easy. He was right behind me, and I could feel the serious metal cylinder of a gun at my back. “Let’s walk,” he suggested, “and not make too much racket.” We’d been the only two people waiting for the bus, and I hadn’t looked closely at him. His red scarf had been woven around his neck, and his hair stood up comically in the back as a result. A cane hooked over his forearm. That’s all I remembered. Innocuous. Maybe he wore a long camel’s hair coat. Behind me, he matched his footsteps to mine so exactly that if I looked down I could see his right galosh’s toe coming forward just behind my own. There weren’t many people on Fullerton Avenue that night and those who were seemed to misread my frantic blinking eyes. What could our peculiar closeness have appeared to be? He took me as quickly as possible to an alley. I heard our bus pass with- out stopping, its upward-shifting gears, feeling furious with the driver, who knew my name, who knew I always rode home with him… “Got any money, baby?” the man asked as we hastened down the alley, leaning near enough to my ear for me to feel his eyelashes kiss it.

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I stumbled, but he led me through my clumsiness like an expert dancer. We were approaching the back of Mizzi’s, and I prayed for one of the busboys, Danboy or Rudy, to be outside smoking a j. But it was too cold; they would be up above the walk-in refrigerator, in the airspace between floors. There wasn’t a soul in the alley. I heard the muffled clatter of dishes and the motor of the Hobart, could easily imagine that lively, hot kitchen only a few crucial feet of space away from me. “Money, babe?” he reminded me. I nodded in my scarf sling. “I do. Take it please, in my bag.” I lifted my right shoulder carefully to draw attention to my purse hanging there. He said, “Good girl. You a good girl? It would be in your interest to be a very good girl, you know.” He had a precise British accent, cheerful and civilized-sounding. Could I have felt relief? We’d stopped, and he posi- tioned me face first against the rear wall of the empty storefront down the block from Mizzi’s. It would be open in a month, its front windows claimed. A comedy club. I’d passed the sign a hundred times. Open mike on Wednesdays, no cover, two-drink minimum. He pushed me gently to the wall, nose to brick, and told me to grab onto the black window bars on either side. “You hang on for dear life, do you hear me?” I certainly did. His gun, that metal erection, pressed into my lower spine, sending its insinuations to every part of me. Without lowering the gun, he dropped his cane to the ground and told me to put a foot on either end of it. I concentrated on the rubber tip and the curve of its worn handle. The worst thing that could happen, I told myself, was not going to. Then he drew my head back by the hair and slammed my forehead against the bricks. I tasted red wool.

*

Donald says, “He can probably hear us, you know. The trunk is right here.” He pats the seat behind him, leaning away from it. Les looks star- tled and also tips forward. Even the remotest possibility of this man’s presence has made me queasy, and I clutch the door handle, as if waiting for the right moment to escape. “You can’t be serious,” I say hopefully. “Serious as a heart attack, sweetheart,” Sam says.

PMS.. 175 Nelson

We’re heading west on the Eisenhower. Magnificent, colorful Michigan Avenue has given way to gloomy industrial warehouses. Traffic is light and, for the second time in my city life, I wish it otherwise. Cars, humanity, witnesses—but to what? I say, “How can you be positive it’s him? I mean, did you ask him?” “We didn’t talk to him,” Les says. “God, it was hard enough to find him. We’ve been watching him for a long time. He had that England accent. Plus the cane.” My feet arch reflexively at the mention of the cane, the dry texture of scarf once more in my mouth. “What do you mean, you’ve been watch- ing him? What are you talking about?” Donald says, “They. These two have been staking out this guy since last winter. Not me. I was ready to let the police do it.” “The police,” Sam scoffs. He shakes his head once. “That’s right!” Donald says. “The cops. You can’t just go around being above the law.” Sam says, “Says who?” “I thought about dressing up like a girl,” Les tells me, and new images unreel before my eyes at a dizzying speed. “A decoy. But I would have looked like Bride of Frankenstein, and I kept thinking, what would Mom have thought?” “Mom,” Donald says, “would have wondered where you guys were all those nights. Mothers know where their kids are. With Dad, it’s like, ‘Oh, Sam and Les? Huh. Studying in their rooms, I guess.’ Mom would never have let you out the door.” I say, “What are you saying?” “They chased the guy,” Donald explains. “We tailed him,” Les corrects. “There was no chasing. Chasing means running.” “Whatever. They tailed him. They—” “We waited until he was alone,” Les says. “We saw him at the same bus stop, you know…” He clears his throat to indicate discretion in allud- ing to my rape. “And?” I say. “And we followed him home.” “On foot,” Sam says pointedly. Since he’s had his driver’s license he’s hardly walked anywhere. Les bounces on the seat as he talks. “We know where he lives!”

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“Pricey,” Sam adds. “Yuppie.” “After we found out, we watched his walk-up, we saw him through the curtains. He’s got those see-through kind, the one Mom always said were a bad idea on the first floor. But we couldn’t get him alone. He would walk out the door, and we’d start to get out of the car—here comes some people. Man, it was frustrating. I don’t see how you could make a living doing it.” Sam says to me, “It is weird how hard it was to find him by himself.” The car is silent for a moment, all of us meditating on my rapist’s extended good fortune. Then Donald says, “Those two have been out asking for it, just asking for—” “We had a gun,” Les protests. “He didn’t have a gun—” “Luckily for you,” Donald interrupts. “—but we did, see, that’s the whole point. We were in charge. Once we got some privacy, the rest was so easy you couldn’t believe it. He comes out to get the paper, nobody around, and bang, Sam’s there with the gun.” “Bang?” I ask. “Bang? Oh guys, you didn’t shoot him?” “Not bang like that, just bang, like, get in the car, bud, let’s go for a cruise. We didn’t even have to tie him up.” “But he had a gun,” I say. “Last year, he had a gun.” Sam turns to me. “Nuh-uh. Piece of pipe. We’ve been watching, like Les said. We saw asswipe’s weapon. Carries it in his coat. Jesus. Little six- inch pipe.” Donald, relinquishing his role as the voice of reason for a moment, says, “Saturday night plumber’s special.” They all laugh, a frightening expulsion of breath. “Please tell me you don’t have a man in the trunk of this car.” “Sorry,” Sam says. “No can do.” His coldness, his assuredness—the way the thrust of his strong righteous jaw seems to drive the very car— these things let me know they not only have a man in the trunk, but the right man. I now feel his weight, as if the back end of the automobile were notably lower in the road. “They’ll turn him free,” Sam says. “Right now we have him, he’s ours, but they’ll set him free.” “You know what the problem is?” Donald says speculatively. “The problem is overcrowding in jails. I’ve been thinking that they should just stick the smaller-crime guys in the army. You know how the army always needs recruits? Two birds with one—”

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“Dumb,” Sam says. “Put that guy in the army?” “Not him. He’s in prison for life. I said, small-crime guys get in the ar my.” “Dumb,” Sam repeats. “Why? It could work,” Donald says, then adds, “But now it’s too late to go to the cops. Now we’d be in trouble, even me, accessory after the fact. This is a no-win situation.” “We followed him on a date.” Les leans against my seat, elbows on either side of me. “Movies at the Biograph, coffee at the French place. We could see him through one window, and you waiting tables right across the street through another window. Was that bizarre, or what?” “We thought about getting him and his date,” Sam says. “See how he’d feel about that.” “I can’t believe we finally got him!” Les says in awe. “We waxed his ass. We showed him!” Donald shakes his head at the sorriness of Les’s logic. “Right. Let’s talk counting chickens before they’re hatched. He’s still here.” He indicates the trunk with his thumb. “We haven’t shown him thing one.”

*

For two weeks after the rape, I didn’t go back to work. I didn’t often leave the house, and if I did, I was escorted to and from like a politician or criminal. I read the Trib every morning looking for other attacks. They seemed to be epidemic, but what doesn’t, once it’s happened to you? The cops told me my assailant sounded like one they’d been after for months. They liked to name their rapists; this one was Big Ben. He did have a British accent. He did speak in complex sentences. I saw a coun- selor. She’d been raped before, too. It was like a club. I prepared myself for nightmares, as instructed, but never had any directly related to that night. The signs in my dreams were more oblique. I would be pursuing a seemingly safe course on a road, then suddenly I would look around— where were the landmarks of civilization? Billboards, buildings, traffic lights? Surrounding me would be blank, cool air. High as an airplane, I would suddenly realize even my vehicle was gone. Nothing kept me from plummeting. The road, my world—all of it snatched out from under me, and it was then that horror would return. I took sedatives. I slept like something dead.

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And then two weeks later I was back at work. I’d been emptied but other things began inevitably to fill my life again, so that the attack was, soon enough, supplanted. Or, at least, shuffled into the deck. Still, it was the marked card, the one dividing before and after.

*

“I could kill him,” Sam admits calmly, and I realize he’s speaking the truth. He could. “If it was me, I’d kill him, but you decide.” He turns to his brothers. “We’ll do what she decides.” We’re parked a few yards from an off ramp, in front of the boarded windows of the Five Cents Free- Germ Cleaners. Inland from Lake Michigan, the snow falls more heavily and soon the car is its own late-model Ford igloo of isolation. “I thought we were definitely going to kill him,” Les whines. “I thought we had a plan. We had a lot of plans. Tell her about the Dumpster plan, Sam.” “Shut up,” Donald says. “Really, just shut up. The right thing to do is turn around and go back to his house. We have to let him go. Otherwise we’re all in trouble. Doesn’t that make sense, Sam? He doesn’t know us.” “We pull up, dump him, say, ‘Hey, sorry, pal, just a joyride’?” Sam says this snidely, whirling in his seat to face Donald. “Who do you think is going to press charges at that point? We kidnapped him, basically.” Donald puts his finger to his lips. “He might be listening,” he whis- pers. “You’re giving him ideas.” “What about the drive-the-car-into-the-lake plan?” Les goes on. “That was good. We get a new car out of it, too, so it’s a double good plan.” His teeth, crooked and spotted with minuscule notches from his braces, chat- ter loud enough for me to hear over the sound of the wind. “Or castrat- ing him. We talked about that.” “Jesus,” Donald says. “What if he’s dead?” Les says suddenly, his teeth still. “What if he suf- focated back there?” Sam nods solemnly. “Back to the Dumpster plan. Dead, we don’t have a problem.” “Man, if he’s dead, we have about ten million problems,” Donald says, forgetting to whisper. “But alive,” Sam continues, “alive, I’m not sure what to do with him.” He turns to me. “Like I said, it should be up to you. What do you want?”

PMS.. 179 Nelson

“Shoot him,” Les pleads. “Choose shooting.” “Shut up!” Donald orders. They all three look at me. The car has grown so cold I can see their breath. It would be colder still in the trunk. I review my options: Turn him loose, maim him, kill him, variations thereof. The moment I say the word, we all move into the future. For now, however, we’re in one of those pockets. Of course I have wanted this man punished, but I never went further than hoping he would get what he deserved, a concrete wish with only abstract underpinnings, one I would have been happy to let someone else make real. I never saw the man’s face—maybe if I had I could have declared the perfect retribution, hollowed the perfect scar—but as it was, he might have been any man, and any man might have been him. “Maybe I should look at him,” I say, stalling. “Yeah?” Sam takes the keys from the ignition and spins them on his forefinger. “Yeah?” “I want to see him,” I decide. Sam reaches across me and pokes the glove compartment open. “Okeydoke,” he says. “You want it, you got it.” “He’s ugly,” Les warns me as he clambers out. From the outside, our car looks like one abandoned, the four swung- open doors leaving gaping holes in the storm. Feeling a curious and appealing sense of déjà vu, I imagine our walking away, four children on a long winter trek. But, of course, passive as it is, even walking away is doing something. Les whisks the snow off the trunk with his bare hand and raps on the metal. “Anyone home?” “Listen,” Donald says. “Okay, we don’t let him go, that won’t work. But…” He ticks off steps on his fingers. “We drive to the police station, we say Les and I got the guy—we’re under eighteen, so it’s a juvenile crime—we know he’s the one, the cane, et cetera, and she”—he nods at me—“she identifies his voice. She makes him say what they said to her last year, he sounds like Prince Charles, they book him. It can happen. Okay?” He moves his head up and down as if he can coach us into agree- ment. “Finished?” Sam asks. Donald sighs. “You are all crazy, I swear.” Sam tries to hand me the gun. “I don’t want that.”

180 PMS.. poemmemoirstory

“Yes,” he says, “you do.” He nudges my fingertips with the cold handle. “I’ll hold it,” Les volunteers. “Let me hold it. I haven’t gotten to hold it yet.” This from my fourteen-year-old brother, the one who, until he was at least twelve, cried when he saw dead animals in the road. “Give me that,” I tell Sam. I use both hands and find myself with my knees bent like a TV cop. “Ready?” he says, key to the trunk lock. I shake my head no. It’s funny, but even with a gun in my hands and the lid locked I don’t feel at all invulnerable. Donald turns and begins walking away from us. Sam yells to his back, “Keep a look out for cars.” Donald stops at the street, his shoulders drawn, as if trying to decide whether to step off the curb and keep on going. “You watching?” Sam calls to him. A horn blows in the distance. When Donald turns our way, I admire his loyalty to his brothers’ bad cause. He nods to Sam. I aim the gun at the back of our car, quaking. Then I say, “Now.” Without taking my eyes off the bumper, I blink rapidly so I won’t have to when the lid flies up. The man lies fetuslike, filling our trunk, back to us. Expensive camel’s hair coat. A cane thrown on top of him like an afterthought. The little light inside shows half his face, one closed eye, which, while I stare, opens. “Shut it!” I yell at Sam. “Shut it! Shut it!”

*

Our mother died three years ago. We worried all along about the wrong things. We fretted about her recovery from cancer, chemotherapy, and the fluctuating number of months her doctor had thrown around as her life expectancy. But those things never turned out to be relevant. Some percentage of people slip away under anesthesia. It’s a risk of every oper- ation, a posted figure, like car accidents, like crimes. After my mother was gone, with only my brothers and my father and me, I thought, Here you are in the land of men. I never missed her more, I never felt more outnumbered, than when I came home from the police station last year. I told myself growing up meant losing things, but then it didn’t feel so much like loss as it did theft. “What do you want us to do?” my brother Sam asks me patiently. He

PMS.. 181 Nelson must know that patience, or its illusion, is a grown-up virtue. Back in the driver’s seat, he is tired, his duties in this territory of his own kind so mercilessly never-ending. “We can’t just leave him there,” Donald says. “For one thing, this is our car. What if we want to go somewhere? For another, it’s cruel and unusual punishment.” Les, brave and savagely young, proclaims, “He could rot in there, for what he did to our sister!” “That’s true,” Sam agrees. “He could rot…and he could not. You want him to rot?” he asks me. I look out at the blanketed and beautified ugly buildings around us. Is there any wish made more often than the one for time to stop? But the snowdrift forming around our car has gotten deeper, and soon, if we let it, it will trap us, all five of us. What I want is for him to disappear, but I consider my real choices and also the misnomer justice in an unjust world. Soon I will insist on driving the car back into the city, back to the lights and signs and authorities created by mankind to keep us civilized. Meanwhile, my brothers wait. “I’m thinking,” I tell them.

182 PMS.. Kerry Madden

Interview with Antonya Nelson

Q: How do you approach writing a short story? Do you circle back again and again to the beginning or write it from beginning to end in a rush?

A: It’s kind of a different process every time. In general, there is some central image or character or situation. And I attempt to figure out pretty early on the length of time the reader needs to spend with the characters, which lets me know how to pace the story. That is, whether it needs to be the duration of a phone call or the duration of a weekend or the duration of a relationship. It begins with people meeting, and it will be over when they part ways. Or, in the instance of a river rafting trip, it begins with the characters getting into the water and ends with them getting out. As long as I can figure out the pace, I can start to figure out what the story is going to be about, the subtext as opposed to the machinations on the surface. And that’s really the biggest thing to figure out, the story’s clock. Somehow knowing that the story could take place over the course of a wedding makes it then possible for me to weight the moments. How much trouble has to happen now? Should there now be an act of God?

Q: In your story, “Or Else,” where did the inspiration for the character David come from, the amazing liar? The character claims his childhood family friend’s cabin in Telluride as his own, brings a woman there, and then the family shows up. It’s both wonderful and awful hearing those voices at the door.

A: I got a lot of mail from people claiming that that character was them, which was kind of interesting to me because I always felt like that character was me. I’ve always been a pretty big liar. I started that story because I was sitting in my chair where I sit in Telluride to write. There is a window in our house there that’s always unlocked and anybody who knew could come in. I started conceiving of the

PMS.. 183 character who would do that thing—like being the character who would actually perform that action—and then I could pull from my own family’s history in that house. That story really started from setting, which is not usually where stories start for me, but that one did. And I know Telluride so well as to be able to imagine going around the town showing it to somebody like a tour guide. That story came about fairly swiftly once I had the notion for it. But that isn’t usually the case. In most instances, I’ll have a situation or character or some image; I’ll have a character who needs a fate, or a fate that needs a character. I mull a lot. I consider various scenarios. I wander around trying to figure out how to torque the material in such a way that it works. Then it might be a matter of a month, a matter of a semester to actually write the story, but it comes fairly quickly after I’ve figured out how the planets align. Sometimes that happens when I’m reading some other writer or when I’m listening to a book. Something will happen on the page or on the audiotape, and I’ll recognize that that’s a solution to the problem I’m having. It’s not a direct correlation; it’s just that I see some move or I recognize that something the writer has done is really useful to me, and I can apply it.

Q: When you are in the thick of writing, do you ever find yourself trying to block out other writers’ voices? Are there ever times when you don’t read so you can just focus on your own work?

A: No, I’m always reading! Sometimes I need to read a lot of detective fiction, or something—I need to read something that’s not great literature because when I read great literature I’m often very discouraged. I have a sort of “Why bother?” feeling. Most of the time I’m happy to be in the company of really great stories and authors.

Q: I grew up in kind of a football house without a lot of books - just Sports Illustrated and Good Housekeeping and a book called Dare to Discipline, I remember that one. But my mother would get us books at the library. As a child, were you a voracious reader? What books spoke to you?

A: [My parents] were both English professors and incredibly literate, so of course the house was full of books. But not just full of great

184 PMS.. books, actually; it was full of crap books, too. So I was reading MAD magazine. I was reading Harold Robbins. I was reading my father’s porn library. I really could read anything and everything. “Voracious” is one of the words, but also I just—I read a lot.

I can’t remember distinguishing too much between the so-called “great books” and other books that just seemed one-note and perfectly fine. But I do remember books that were really powerful. I read Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding when I was pretty young and really loved it. And I was a big fan of not so much Catcher in the Rye as Nine Stories by Salinger. And Valley of the Dolls? It’s kind of a trash book, but kind of not. There’s something about it that’s pretty poignant. I always defend that book as being a book that was telling a truth about the world, especially the world of girls and women. Even if it wasn’t in the best prose style, there was still something powerfully political about it. And there were classic texts like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights that I really loved too. I read a lot of detective books. I remember going through one or so a day when I was about 14 or 15, especially the Evan Hunter/Ed McBain 87th Precinct series.

Really, my reading was kind of all over the place - comic books, highfalutin’ texts. I’ve always been a big reader. It makes me anxious not to have a book. In fact, I just ran out of reading material [on this trip], and it was a little scary, like oh my God, I’m in this hotel room and all I have is the Gideon Bible. I don’t know what I’d do all day if I didn’t read, what I’d think about, how I would be in the world. It’s really unthinkable.

I probably ought to cut my reading in half and go do good deeds. I ought to volunteer in a soup kitchen instead of reading about it. There may be something wrong with reading as much as I read.

Q: What are the comfort books you turn to now? The writers that you need close by? I read that William Trevor is one of your touchstones. What others?

A: Eudora Welty is one of my favorite writers. Mavis Gallant and James

PMS.. 185 Salter. Deborah Eisenberg. E.M. Forster. These are books I’m always really happy to be teaching, turning people onto, since a lot of them are writers that the students have not read. It feels nice because you get some sort of collateral credit, some reflected glory. It’s as if you wrote the books you’ve turned your students onto.

Q: Does your heart ever ache for your characters and what you put them through? For instance, did it hurt to have the mother in, Bound, wreck three times in a day after three decades of great driving and die in the third wreck? She was listening to The Heart of Darkness while in a cell-phone stand-off with her daughter, and this daughter just thinks they’re in a fight and that’s why her mother isn’t calling. It’s wrenching. Is it painful to go to these dark places with your characters? Do they haunt you?

A: I wouldn’t say it was painful to go to dark places. I’m pretty capable of doing that. My imagination runs that way. I think somebody said it first, but Flannery O’Connor repeated it—about the habit of art. Once you’ve habituated, if that’s the proper verb, you then wander around the world always being available for what might be of use to you. It’s the only way I know how to walk through the world thinking what could happen or would happen. And it interests me in the way a puzzle or curiosity [would]. In the beginning, Bound came from when I was listening to Heart of Darkness [while] driving. For whatever reason, I was driving barefoot, and I was thinking, ‘God, if I had a wreck and didn’t make it I would be found barefoot with this tape playing. What a weird thing that would be.’ And then that of course leads to, ‘well, what if a character did do that?’ And that leads to ‘who would it be, and what would be the worst thing?’ And [constructing the idea that] the kid thinking the mom wasn’t calling on purpose, and what a terrible thing that would be. The “what if” is all of it. That’s the reason most writers are on a lot of pharmaceuticals: the anxiety, the depression, the really over-active imaginations, the capacity to invent what is entirely possible but doesn’t manifest all that often.

Q: I picked up your third novel, Living to Tell, which opens with your character’s fear of flying, which is painfully funny and all-too-real. I

186 PMS.. related because my own fear of flying is both irrational and ridiculous, and you captured Winston’s fear perfectly. Are you afraid to fly? Where did the inspiration for this story come from? You travel all the time right?

A: I do travel all the time, and I’m not afraid to fly any longer. When I was four or five years old, my family was in a tornado. [We were] in a car that was turned over by the wind, twice, in a parking lot in Wichita. I fly all the time, and you’re either going to have a heart attack worrying about it or you’re going to make peace because there isn’t any other thing to do. It’s such a waste of time to continue to be frightened. So I realized somehow, intellectually, that I had this visceral, physical fear. It’s not on takeoff, and it’s not on landing. It’s turbulence in the air, which is not even the most dangerous part of flying. But it was just that sensation of being in a craft that was at the mercy of the wind. I think that it triggers in me, or did, maybe a sort of PTSD reaction that dates back to the tornado when our car lifted and turned and lifted and turned. My parents, my three brothers, myself, and my sister, who was in utero. My mother was eight months pregnant. My sister is the only one of us who wasn’t afraid of flying, which made me realize that perhaps all of us had this PTSD response to that tornado. That sensation of being at the mercy of the wind in a vehicle was not going to be something we were ever going to be comfortable with. And as soon as I realized that, I started to have a better relationship with flying. I really am completely blasé about it now.

Q: Katherine Paterson says, “The very persons who take away my time and space to write give me something to say.” Could you talk about motherhood and writing? Were you careful about using your two kid’s lives as material?

A: Yeah, I guess that’s why I don’t write that much nonfiction. When I start a story that’s based in something that’s happened I make sure I’m not in the mood of revenge. Mostly, it’s in the mood of trying to understand something and usually it’s something about myself. But when I’ve used certain events from my kids’ lives I’ve always interrogated material to such a degree that I’m confident that I’m not

PMS.. 187 exposing them. For example, if there’s a troubled teenage girl and I’ve set the story in New Mexico, I will pull that story apart. I have done this to relocate it to Kansas, change the gender of the child to male, make the mother divorced…I feel like I manipulate circumstances so that I can still write about what I want to write about but that I’m not betraying some really important relationship. That’s true of friends whose foibles occur in my work, spousal whatnot, always in an effort not to hurt anybody. There are people I’d be happy to hurt, but I’m not interested in writing about them.

I like writing about people I actually care about. I care about the characters I make, and they are often based on people I care about. And yet, I still have to figure out how to manipulate the material so that I’m not doing injury to my real life. I was less careful about that when I was younger, but I’m really aware of how painful that can be. I really didn’t think anybody was paying attention to or actually reading the material, that anybody would read it and be affected—really, why would you? It always seemed to me as if I were writing in a—I don’t want to say a vacuum, that doesn’t sound right. Just that I never really thought anybody would be reading the stuff I wrote.

Q: When you were younger, did you come across people who recognized themselves in your stories?

A: I can remember my father being quite wounded by a story, but not because he felt that he’d been mischaracterized—just that he was sad that I felt the way I felt. He said to me, “Is this really how you feel?” It was clear that it was painful to him to be exposed to some sincere feeling. I’m not sure I can ever guard against that, but it did make me see that he was reading carefully and attentively.

I’ve had other people misrecognize themselves in stories, which is the worst of both worlds, right? There are some relatives who just won’t read the book so I don’t send it to them. We’re maintaining this whole relationship of don’t send, don’t read…Occasionally, they’ll say kind of hurtful things to me. They’re joking, but the phrase I really hate hearing at the dinner table is “Be careful what you say, she’s a writer.”

188 PMS.. It makes me feel like they can’t trust me. And maybe they can’t. It’s kind of unfair because I have two other siblings who are psychologists. I sort of feel like they too are taking notes, making little diagnoses— even though it’s not going to be in print…

Q: Did any of your siblings become writers?

A: No, the closest are the two psychologists. They were English majors as undergrads, and then they went into psychology. They’re also readers. Based on what we talk about to each other, I think maybe we’re the three who think the most in terms of scrutinizing why people do what they do. Their angle of approach is different, but it’s not really terribly separate. The way they hear and receive and respond to stories is different from the way I do it, but we still have similar interests. I feel closest to them in part because human nature is just so fascinating.

Q: What role does your husband (author Robert Boswell) play in your writing life? How did the two of you meet?

A: He’s seven years older than I am, and he had returned to graduate school after having been a counselor. We were in a workshop together. It was his last year of the program and my first year, and I was just straight out of undergraduate school. [He commented on] the first story I handed in to the workshop. He was in favor of the story and everything, but he had gone through the first page of it, circling all the “to be” verbs. There were like, fifty. It was crazy.

But it was a fairly dramatic example of what an MFA program is good for—it instantaneously makes you aware, and then you have to write differently. I was charged with going through and not making that mistake ever again, and I never did. That’s a big thing.

Q: So he’s one of your first readers?

A: Almost always. If we’re driving, I read out loud to him. He can’t do it in the car; he gets sick. I like to read out loud.

Q: So you write across states. I’m especially drawn to this because I’ve

PMS.. 189 lived in twelve states, and I go back and forth between Alabama and California. When you’re in a certain place, when does it start to become what you would call home? How does that influence your choice of setting for a story?

A: It’s funny because I don’t really feel as if any one place is now my home. My mother still lives in Kansas, and I go a lot to see her. The family house I grew up in is still there and that feels like home. The house I raised my children in is in New Mexico and that feels like home. And then the place where I actually make a living and probably know more people than anywhere else is Houston, and that, too, feels sort of like home. It’s hard to say. If I had to choose—and I don’t, which is good I don’t—I don’t know what I’d choose, actually. The advantage in writing from such a stance is that if I need a tiny resort town, I’ve been in that in the mountains where nature is the overwhelming force. I have Telluride to write about, and I have such a long history with it that I can write it with a kind of insight that might be necessary. And if I need a place where somebody is a misfit and feels out of the general gestalt of the area that might be Wichita where I lived as a teenager. I can evoke that place fairly easily. If I need a large city—a larger landscape—for a coincidence of crossings by characters for a story to take place, I now have Houston to fall back on. Houston is very useful because not very much fiction is written about Houston, and it’s a really big city. It’s the fourth biggest city in the country. It’s kind of nice to feel like maybe that’s something I could do that would be vaguely unique.

Q: Last year in an interview with The New Yorker about your story, “Chapter Two,” you said about one of your characters, “Bergeron Love has my sympathy and respect. A younger version of me would have written her off.” There is such a beautiful humanity that runs throughout all of your stories, in spite of how flawed and desperate many of these characters are. I have taught creative writing for pretty much all ages. Right now, I’m thinking of the typical eighteen-year- old in a workshop who is just starting out. How has your writing changed from that of your younger self? How have your sympathies shifted or deepened toward these characters over time?

190 PMS.. A: I think it’s probably in the same ways that my sympathies in the world at large have changed. The older you get, the less certain you are of judgments you might have had, or misconceptions you might have held about what it meant to become a grownup. I guess I feel like I’ve always been waiting for adulthood to descend, as if there were going to be some sort of formal moment. And, of course, it doesn’t really seem to descend on you like that. As a result, I’ve just grown more sympathetic to the foibles that I always recognized in kids. Everybody’s really sensitive and nervous and self-conscious and insecure, and I know that’s one definition of childhood. But I also think it’s a definition of adulthood. It’s been revelatory to me that people don’t just turn a corner and become solid citizens. They’re always pretty vulnerable. And I didn’t think I recognized that when I was younger, that people would just continue to be really vulnerable…

Q: A lot of people—like Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates—are all writing YA. Did you ever think of writing for younger audiences?

A: No, I don’t know why. It would be a good idea, I guess, but I just don’t want to. I admire that work a lot, though. I love reading out loud to kids, and I love great kids’ books. But I don’t think I’m cut out to do it. I’m a little too irreverent or something, or maybe a little naughty. I just think I would go off on some tangent.

Q: Were you ever subject to pressure from agents to write a novel?

A: There’s a lot of pressure to write a novel, inasmuch as in a writing life there’s pressure of any sort. But yeah, everybody would prefer that you wrote a novel.

Q: You talked in an interview about distinguishing the truth and the factual. Do you ever see yourself writing a memoir? I’m thinking of the beauty of language in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and Emily Rapp’s Still Point of the Turning World. How do you approach fiction and nonfiction?

A: Well, I was just talking to Emily, who is a friend of mine, about fiction and nonfiction. A misconception, at least in her mind, is that

PMS.. 191 nonfiction is so exposing. That the thing about nonfiction, for her, is that she can curate what she exposes. She’s really actually quite private as a person and chooses what she exposes, and in that way controls the flow of information. Whereas, she said, writing fiction, she feels as if she’s not quite in control of the flow of information because she doesn’t know what she’s exposing, which I thought was a really interesting insight.

I would say that my fiction is very autobiographical if people had some way of translating it, but the fact that they don’t protects me. I usually just write occasional essays. Somebody will contact me and say, “Do you want to write 1500 words about” - whatever that topic is. If I respond to the prompt, it will usually go kind of swiftly. It moves not like fiction for me where you have to establish setting and erect a cast of personalities and give them character traits. In nonfiction, for me, as I’ve written it so far, it would be like, for example, “What does this tattooed wedding ring mean?” It would be the core sample history of my decision to get a tattoo, but I would not be responsible for describing much about the dramatic personae.

Nonfiction moves more in the way of a poem. The narrative is a lyric one rather than plot driven or a narrative. It’s more like that core sample where you just take a topic and dive straight down rather than moving linearly through scenes and character relations. It’s shortcuts. So I don’t find much relationship at all between fiction and nonfiction but that’s just because of the way I’ve compartmentalized those two genres. And I haven’t written anything that makes me have to see the overlap. If I ever wrote a book-length memoir, and I can’t imagine I’m going to, I would have to figure out the larger narrative arc, and I would have to decide who I was ready to throw under the bus, and I’m not willing to do it. But you listen to Emily talk about the creation of her book and it makes perfect sense to have written it the way she did. I have a friend who probably has a dozen memoirs in her, and so far has written two of them. Prioritizing what material and what story you’re telling is a novelistic trait. Deciding to tell the story of one of her four children in a memoir and then another of them in another memoir, in that way pushing aside the other three or pushing

192 PMS.. aside the earlier memoir…it is a novelistic gesture, that long-form nonfiction.

Q: What would you say to young writers today, or even brave writers who are stepping into a creative-writing classroom for their first time in their 30s and 40s after, say, a decade in the service, or 30 years at the telephone company? In particular, what advice would you give to the latter group?

A: Well, I think having what is usually called ‘life experience’ means that there’s a body of knowledge on one hand, the practical hand. The body of knowledge that’s not directly related to school or to youth is hugely useful for writing. Knowing something besides a classroom is enormous, and expertise and authority outside of school, outside of the university, is a huge and important source of material and perspective.

If I could go back and advise myself—which is not the same as advising somebody in their 40s—I would have recommended that I figure out earlier, or at least be open to the notion, that my temperament was going to be that of a short-story writer rather than a novelist overall. And that my attention span is a little abbreviated and that my interest is in intimacies between people in fairly close quarters and in smallish circumstances, rather than what the novelist has to do—which is to engage a larger group and culture and community. If I had known earlier that I was more temperamentally suited to the short story, I would not have wasted as much time feeling as if it were the apprentice genre, the stepping stone to writing the important thing which, in my dumb young mind, was the novel. Today, I realize that these are two very different art forms and that people in general are not able to do both equally well. So that’s something I try to encourage my students to understand about themselves. That they’re probably going to be better at one than the other, and to embrace the one that they’re good at and not to try to make novelistic inclination conform to short-story page requirements. And on the other hand, not to try to stretch out a short story into a very baggy novel.

PMS.. 193

contributors

Melissa Boston is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas. “Edna, Sleeping at Grand Isle” is her first publication.

Elya Braden has been a writer, actress, and singer since early childhood. She took a long detour from her creative endeavors, including fourteen years as a stressed-out corporate lawyer. After leaving law, Elya returned to singing and acting and later moved to Santa Monica to pursue her love of writing poetry and memoir. When she’s not writing, Elya creates col- lage art and leads workshops for other writers. Elya’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Cultural Weekly, Dogwood, Echoes Poetry Journal, Euphony, Forge, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Willow Review, and Scratch Anthology (Volume 3).

Jenny A. Burkholder’s poems have been published in The Prose-Poem Project, Emerge Literary Journal, New American Writing, Glimmer Train, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. She teaches high school English at Abington Friends School, a Quaker school outside of Philadelphia. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her two young girls, reading, or prac- ticing yoga.

Kristi Carter has poems published or forthcoming in journals such as Spillway Magazine, So to Speak, CALYX Journal, and Hawai’i Review. She is originally from the foothills of North Carolina. She currently lives in Nebraska.

Alison A. Chapman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is currently working on a book about Milton’s Paradise Lost. In between work and parenting three boys, she still volunteers at Donaldson prison.

Melissa DeCarlo lives in East Texas and works as a grant writer/newslet- ter editor/graphic designer for a non-profit organization. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Connotation Press, Petroglyph, and a New Texas anthology. She is currently working on a novel. Her website/blog can be found at melissadecarlo.com.

PMS.. 195 Stephanie Dickinson, raised on an Iowa farm, now lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil. Port Authority Orchids, connected stories for young adults, has just been released by Rain Mountain Press. Her work appears in Hotel Amerika, Mudfish, Weber Studies, Nimrod, SubTerrain, and Under the Gum Tree. She is the winner of New Delta Review’s 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize, judged by Susan Straight, and a finalist for the 2012 Starcerone Book Prize for Innovative Fiction. Visit her at stephaniedick- inson.net.

Heather Dundas is now studying at the University of Southern California for a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing after a career in theater. Her story, “Trivial But Numerous,” was published in poemmem- oirstory 11. Visit her at heatherdundas.net.

Lauren Fath is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where she holds the Creative Writing Program Fellowship. She received an MFA in nonfiction from Oregon State University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in Post Road, First Inkling, and the South Loop Review, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “My Hands, Remembering” is the title piece in her first collection of essays.

Yolanda J. Franklin’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review’s American South Issue, The Hoot & Howl of the Owl Anthology of Hurston Wright Writers’ Week, SPECS: Journal of Arts & Culture’s Kaleidoscopic Points Issue, and Kweli Journal. Her awards include a 2012 Cave Canem fellowship and sev- eral scholarships, including a summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Indiana Writer’s Week, and Colrain Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Her collection of poems, Ruined Nylons, was a finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. She is a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA Writing Program and is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. She loves salsa dancing, baking, and krav maga.

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. She is currently working on her chapbook “Cochlea” with her original artwork. About 12 pages of the book will be available on her blog at naokofujimoto. blogspot.com.

196 PMS.. Madelyn Garner has worked as a creative writing instructor, administra- tor, and editor. Her awards include the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, an Aspen Writers’ Conference Fellowship, the D.H. Lawrence Award from the University of New Mexico, and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference Poetry Prize for 2010. Recent work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Water-Stone Review, Bryant Literary Review, Saranac Review, and the anthology Beyond Forgetting, Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. She is co- editor of Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined.

Inez Geller’s work has appeared in many publications, including Inkwell, Arrarat, The Writer, Eleven Voices, and most recently in the literary jour- nal, Quiddity. Her plays, Vodkalogue and Solitary Waltzers have been staged in Westport, Connecticut, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Ms. Geller says of herself, “I live on love on the edge of the sea and write passionately about passion.” She is a graduate of The College of New Rochelle and Manhattanville College.

Juliana Gray’s most recent poetry collection, Roleplay, won the 2010 Orphic Prize and was published by Dream Horse Press. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from River Styx, 32 Poems, Blackbird, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and is an associate professor of English at Alfred University.

Mary Grover lives in Oakland, California, and teaches college writing and literature at UC Berkeley and Laney College. Her writing appears in Calyx, Salon, and the online journal Memorious.

Judith O’Connell Hoyer is a retired school psychologist active in sev- eral Boston area poetry groups. She was a member of the Wayland Reads Poetry Committee for 2013. Her poetry has been published in the anthology Surrounded: Living with Islands, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, and the nature journal Avocet.

Jessica Jacobs’ poem “Black Abstraction” is from the manuscript Pelvis with Distance, a collection of linked poems responding to the life, art, and writing of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her work has most recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and Rattle.

PMS.. 197 Carrie Jerrell is the author of the poetry collection After the Revival, 2008 winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her poems can be seen currently or are forthcoming in Unsplendid, Birmingham Poetry Review, Exit 7, and Zone 3. She teaches at Murray State University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the MFA program and the Coordinator of undergraduate creative writing.

Suzanne Levine’s first poetry collection, Haberdasher’s Daughter (Antrim House, 2010), was a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Award. She has poems in Drunken Boat, Bellingham Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Permafrost, Quiddity International Literary Journal, New Delta Review, Front Range Review, California Quarterly, and many others. Suzanne holds an MFA from Vermont College and teaches the craft of memoir writing with her husband, writer Lary Bloom. They live in Chester, Connecticut. She is a co-founder of Writing at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, and Praiano Writers, a writers’ conference held in March on the Amalfi coast. For more information, see praianowriters.com and suzannelevine.net.

Callie Mauldin holds a M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is an alumna of the 43rd Annual Squaw Valley Community of Writers Fiction Workshop. She is currently at work on her first novel, tentatively titled Whiskey in a Teacup. She also teaches and performs improv comedy.

Victoria McArtor is currently pursuing a MFA at Oklahoma State University while also pursuing her securities licenses while working at Mutual of Omaha. Her poems have appeared in H_NGM_N. She is thankful that the market is improving and the majority of the wine in her refrigerator is effervescent.

Heal McKnight holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She recently relocated to the West Coast with her wife Maggie and their two-year-old daughter. She’s at work on a book about parenting two different kids in two different relationships in two different centuries.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels and seven collections of short stories, including the forthcoming Funny Once (Bloomsbury, Spring 2014). She lives in Houston, Texas, and Telluride, Colorado.

198 PMS.. Christina Hall Nettles lives with her husband, three children, and enormous dog in Monroeville, Alabama, where she recently closed her beloved shop, Beehive Coffee and Books. She has a BA in philosophy from LSU and a MA in English from Ole Miss, where she was lucky enough to learn from Barry Hannah, Ann Fisher Wirth, and all the men- tors Oxford, Mississippi, had to offer. Her last published poem appeared in PMS.

Inés Orihuela was born in Lima, Peru, on August 13, 1983. She came to the United States in 1995 with her parents. She began third grade at Thompson Elementary: however, after three months she transferred to Oak Mountain, and continued in the Oak Mountain school system until the spring of 2004. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Inés began taking art classes at Studio By The Tracks. She and her family found their way to the Studio through a doctor who worked with young adults with autism. Inés always loved to draw, and showed a great deal of artistic abili- ty. God gave her the talent, but she would have never had the chance to use it if not for Studio By The Tracks where, in Ila Faye’s words, “Inés demon- strated the potential to grow and excel in painting and illustration. Despite her challenges, she has utilized every opportunity to become an artist of tremendous skill and talent, and she shows no sign of slowing down in her pursuit of art as a career and life choice.” Inés’s works have been included in exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Bare Hands Gallery, Folk Fest 2003 in Atlanta, and The Gallery at HAI in New York.

Tina Parker grew up in Bristol, Virginia, and now lives in Berea, Kentucky, with her husband and two young daughters. She is a stay- at-home mom, writer, and gardener. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Still: The Journal, New Millennium Writings, Appalachian Heritage, and Now and Then. This year she received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women to edit and seek publication for her full-length poetry manuscript.

Shobha Rao was born in India and moved to the United States at the age of seven. Her work has been published by Tincture, The Missing Slate, Gorilla Press, and in the anthology Building Bridges. In 2013, she was awarded the Gita Specker First Place Award for Best Dramatic Monologue by the San Francisco Browning Society. She lives in San Francisco.

PMS.. 199 Cynthia Ryan is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She’s written for scholarly journals including Journal of Medical Humanities and Journal of Poverty, and her articles and essays have appeared in newspapers and national magazines includ- ing USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and Cancer Today. In 2011, Cynthia won a Clarion Award for magazine feature writing and two Society for Professional Journalists Awards for the story “Homeless with Cancer.” She is the founder of Street Smarts™, a breast cancer education program for homeless women, and blogs at cancerhitsthestreets.wordpress.com.

Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine, Pank, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review, Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, among others. For more, please visit wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com.

Sonia Scherr’s fiction has been published in Aura Literary Arts Review and previously in poemmemoirstory. She recently received an MFA in writing from the University of New Hampshire, where she won the Dick Shea Memorial Award for excellence in fiction. She would like to thank Peggy Rambach for her feedback on “Pearl” as the story developed.

Julia Shipley is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Herd (Sheltering Pines Press, 2010) and Planet Jr. (Flyway/Iowa State, 2012). Her first prose collection, Adam’s Mark: Writing From the Ox House is forth- coming. Her poems and essays have also appeared in CutBank, FIELD, Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, and Passages North. She lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where she works as an independent journalist, raises her food, and operates a Writer’s Retreat on her six-acre farm.

Hilary Sideris’ chapbook, Sweet Flag, is available from Finishing Line Press. “My Bluff” is the first poem in her new manuscript “Most Likely to Die,” poems in the voice of Keith Richards.

Susan Terris’ book Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems was pub- lished in 2013 by Marsh Hawk Press. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry, fourteen chapbooks, and three artists’ books. Her jour- nal publications include The Southern Review, FIELD, and Ploughshares.

200 PMS.. She had a poem from Field in Pushcart Prize XXXI. She’s editor of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor for Pedestal Magazine and In Posse Review.

Whitnee Thorp is a native of Lexington, Kentucky, where she attended the School for the Creative and Performing Arts and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. Whitnee is a graduate of Western Kentucky University and currently attends Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Whitnee is the former Editor-in-Chief for the literary journal Jelly Bucket. Whitnee currently resides in Box Elder, South Dakota, with her boy- friend working as a web content writer. She has had work appear in Splinter Generation, Ninepatch, Inscape, Emerge, and Tom Hunley’s book The Poetry Gymnasium.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), select- ed for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series, Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, and Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. Her forthcoming collections include Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize, and When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014). She lives with her partner Angie Griffin in the Sunshine State and teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University.

Diana Wagman is the author of four novels. Her second novel, Spontaneous, won the 2001 PEN West Award for Fiction. Her latest, The Care & Feeding of Exotic Pets, was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. Her screenplay, Delivering Milo, was produced, starring Albert Finney and Bridget Fonda. She has been published in many literary journals, most recently Conjunctions and The Colorado Review, and is an occasional contributor to the Los Angeles Times.

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