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KAYLENE CAN’T DRIVE: STORIES _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by AMY DAY WILKINSON Dr. Trudy Lewis, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2009 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled KAYLENE CAN’T DRIVE: STORIES presented by Amy Day Wilkinson, a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, English, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. ___________________________________________ Professor Trudy Lewis ___________________________________________ Professor Samuel Cohen ___________________________________________ Professor Patricia Okker ___________________________________________ Professor Marly Swick ___________________________________________ Professor Mary Jo Neitz For Nathan and Sylvie. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to my committee, in particular Trudy Lewis and Marly Swick. Thanks also to Naeem Murr, Sherod Santos, and Lynne McMahon, and to the editors of literary magazines and anthologies where some of these stories appeared, often in slightly different form. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Introduction: East 24th Street 4 Green Cubes 34 Warden 47 Kaylene Can’t Drive 55 A Professor’s Wife 63 Sister Sister 66 Cutting 83 Thirty Seconds 85 Ice Breaker 88 Pheobe 91 Weather 98 The Rachel Stories 122 Hiding from the Puppet Woman 156 Case 162 Hunter’s Crossing 174 Curriculum Vitae 196 iii Introduction: East 24th Street 1. When I lived in New York City in my youth, which is how I refer now to the period between 1998 and 2001—I arrived when I was twenty-two, left when I was twenty-five—I lived for the most part in a 225-square-foot studio apartment on East 24th Street. I described the apartment to family outside New York as smaller than a one-car garage, which it was. I owned four pieces of furniture, all from IKEA: a plastic coffee table, a two-seater bistro table, a bedside table (my only drawer), and a futon, which, when opened, just about filled the apartment. There were three plywood shelves attached to the wall that I painted white and used for books, though they filled quickly, and I stacked spillover on the floor. There was one standard-sized closet with a squeaky, accordion door that I jammed with clothes, clothes for every season, plus I was a businesswoman then, so I had work, weekend, and going-out outfits. I didn’t do much cooking in my youth. I used my kitchen cabinets for sweaters. The apartment was expensive—it’s hard to find one in New York that isn’t—but businesspeople are overpaid, so I had enough money to always have cut flowers. I’d buy them at corner delis and the Union Square farmer’s market. Tulips and roses. Hyacinths in season. I also made a garden on the fire escape 4 outside one of my two windows. The apartment faced 24th Street. There was a comedy club across the street, a dive with a rusted metal awning that curved out over the sidewalk and, inexplicably, had a hole burned through the middle. I kept lots of plants in my fire escape garden, fifteen or sixteen, a real fire hazard. There were herbs, annuals, perennials. I didn’t pay much attention then to names. A couple of the plants were in hanging plastic pots but for the most part I transplanted them into varying sizes of terracotta. I lived on the third floor of the building, a five-story walk-up, red. I especially loved my fire escape garden from the street, looking up. I bring up East 24th Street and my New York City youth because it was during those years, living in that apartment, that things really changed for me. It’s embarrassing to admit, but before then I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the world and my position in it. At least not specifically. As an undergraduate I had a realization one day that I wanted “to teach women.” Then I spent four years going to the bar. I can identify several reasons I became more conscious in my early twenties. I was supporting myself for the first time, living alone for the first time. The über-suburban life I’d known as a child had been troubled in unexpected ways. It had imploded, really. In June 1995, my father, a businessman, had been arrested on twenty-two counts of various white-collar crimes. In December 1995, he’d gone to trial and been convicted of nineteen of the charges by a jury I can picture members of to this day, the foreman in particular, a slight white man of the sweater-vest-khakis school of dress, bald on top with a fringe of reddish- 5 brown hair, glasses; he reminded me of a math teacher. In May 1998, after years of failed appeals and one month before I moved to New York, my dad reported to federal prison, where he’d spend the next six years, and my mom, who deserves more admiration than my dad, though you wouldn’t know it from my fiction, began her life of selling things, and having things repossessed, and scrambling to find work, and driving, forty-five minutes each way, twice a week, to visit Dad. So there was that. But there was also the fact that I was living in New York City, a place I love more than any other, a place that gives me a thrill just about every time I walk out the door because you never know what you’ll hear, smell, see. The clinking of fork to plate as someone eats. Cupcakes, fresh bread, curry. A dusty basement window crammed with puppets. New York City played a starring role in my learning to think. Really, I attribute the change in perspective to the visual arts. 2. During my New York City youth and residency on East 24th Street, I spent Saturdays on the other side of the island, going to art galleries in Chelsea. A friend introduced me to the cluster of showrooms on those blocks abutting the Hudson—some of them twelve by twelve squares; others whole buildings; one a former garage whose top had been sliced off and raised, its clanky, steel curtain of a door replaced with an elegant brushed aluminum one, enormous, but a breeze to open—and I was hooked. I’d spend afternoons zigzagging south from West 26th Street to West 14th, entering gallery after gallery, looking always to be surprised. 6 Once I walked through a filmy white maze, wide enough to accommodate one, tight, therefore, when another person needed to pass. Playing in the background was a recording of a woman whispering. Another time I walked into a warehouse-like room, empty but for boxy cement sculptures arranged in neat rows and columns. Upon closer inspection I saw they were castings of the spaces beneath desks and chairs. One day I walked into a gallery, around a partition, and I was surrounded by Andreas Gursky photographs. I started to cry. The reaction was a surprise. The photos were beautiful, certainly. Gursky makes wall-sized prints of images that draw attention to patterning. There was a shot of a rock concert taken from a bird’s eye perspective, the stage and performers a mere sliver on the left, the majority of the image filled with thousands of concertgoers, the slogans on their T-shirts discernible, their arms raised and pointed towards the stage in a way eerily reminiscent of Nazis saluting Hitler. And another of a ninety-nine cent store, the top fifth of which was mirrored ceiling, the bottom four-fifths aisle after aisle of bright, almost luminous packaging, with the occasional solitary consumer reaching for a bag of Twizzlers, or scratching her head choosing Gatorade. And then squeezed between sprawling landscapes was a close-up of Van Gogh brushstrokes, presumably from one of his wheat fields, printed the same size as the others, revealing similar patterns and symmetries. Before his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin gave a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was later published as an essay titled “The art city our fathers built” in The American Scholar. In the essay, Kazin describes many 7 pieces of art, among them Early Sunday Morning, an Edward Hopper painting that “haunted [him] as no other New York painting ever [had]” (Kazin). Kazin asks himself, “Why does that row of low brick houses on lower Seventh Avenue rivet me?” (Kazin) He responds: “It is because the street has entered into Hopper’s consciousness in a way that transcends realism. He has made the drab and the commonplace beautiful through the force of belonging. Every detail in the street belongs to us and we to it” (Kazin). I felt similarly about Gursky. The photos, as I said, were beautiful, their content was thought provoking, the juxtaposition of images was exhilarating, but it wasn’t any of these things that prompted my emotional response. Rather, it was that work like this existed. That a person in the world saw the world this way, that this is how it entered his consciousness, and then he made photographs, thereby transferring specific details to me, the viewer. Standing there looking at Gursky’s photos I felt like I was in communion with the artist, getting a glimpse behind the curtain of his mind, and the feeling was astonishing. Several things happened. I went to more galleries and museums, hoping always to see a piece of work that made me feel, suddenly, connected to the artist.