Made in M ic h ig a n The Women Wi THE WOMEN WERE LEAVING THE MEN M a d e in M i c h i g a n W riters Series General Editors Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University Advisory Editors Melba Joyce Boyd Wayne State University Stuart Dybek Western Michigan University Kathleen Glynn Jerry Herron Wayne State University Laura Kasischke University of Michigan Frank Rashid Marygrove College Doug Stanton Author of In Harm’s Way A complete list of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu THE WOMEN WERE LEAVING THE MEN Stories by Andy Mozina Wayne State University Press Detroit © 2007 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. A ll rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 111009 0807 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mozina, Andrew, 1963- The women were leaving the men / Andy Mozina. p. cm. — (Made in Michigan writers series) ISBN-13:978-0-8143-3362-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10:0-8143-3362-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Intimacy (Psychology)-Fiction. I. Title. PS3613.O96W66 2007 8i3’.6-dc22 2007005250 This book is supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. 00 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Book design by Lisa Tremaine Typeset by Maya Rhodes Composed in Meta and Proforma For Madeleine: young person, young reader CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Cowboy Pile i Privacy, Love, Loneliness 7 The Enormous Hand 2 2 My Way of Crying 51 Beach 76 The Arch 81 Moon Man 103 The Love Letter 119 The Women Were Leaving the Men 136 The Housekeeper’s Confession 147 My First Cake Was a Failure 167 Lighter Than Air 177 Admit 202 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my earliest writing teachers who sent me down the trail: Arthur Morey, Sheila Schwartz, and Leslie Epstein. Thanks to all who read various drafts of these stories, especially Bonnie Jo Camp­ bell, Lisa Lenzo, Mike Stefaniak, Julia Hanna, Mary Winifred Hood, and Jeff Schwaner, with an extra cold Pabst Blue Ribbon raised to Mark Wisniewski, adroit editor and indispensable coach. I’m also indebted to M. W. Hood and J. Schwaner for publishing some of my earliest efforts in Captain Kidd Monthly. Thanks to Byrd Leavell for his above-and-beyond efforts on behalf of this manuscript. Thanks to my father for giving me the books without which this book wouldn’t exist, and thanks to my mother for her support. Thanks to my wife, Lorri, also without whom these stories didn’t and wouldn’t exist. I’m also grateful for the generosity of Kalamazoo College, es­ pecially support received through the Marlene Crandell Francis Trustee Professorship. People ought to know that the hair shirt scene in “The House­ keeper’s Confession” takes off from a somewhat similar scene in J. F. Powers’s novel Wheat That Springeth Green, a book to which I am indebted for certain factual aspects of priestly life in the sixties and seventies. It should also be noted that while “Moon Man” is based upon some details surrounding the Apollo 16 mission, my story and X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS characters are entirely fictional. The actual Apollo 16 mission was launched April 16,1972, and included crew members Captain John W. Young, commander; Lieutenant Commander Thomas K. Mat­ tingly II, Command Module pilot; and Lieutenant Colonel Charles M. Duke Jr., Lunar Module pilot. I gratefully acknowledge the magazines in which these stories have appeared, usually in slightly different form: “Cowboy Pile,” Be­ loit Fiction Journal; “Privacy, Love, Loneliness,” originally published as “Ten-Inch Tommy,” West Branch; “The Enormous Hand,” Beloit Fic­ tion Journal; “My Way of Crying,” originally published as “We Love Each Otter,” The Florida Review; “Beach,” The Massachusetts Review; “The Arch,” The Massachusetts Review; “Moon Man,” Alaska Quar­ terly Review; “The Love Letter,” Fence; “The Women Were Leaving the Men,” Tin House; “The Housekeeper’s Confession,” Third Coast; “My First Cake Was a Failure,” originally published as “Effigy,” Ram­ bunctious Review; “Lighter Than Air,” Maisonneuve. Cowboy Pile ut on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of Ohuman cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then somebody lies across him, and then a third guy piles on. Then one after another. Sometimes you’ll see a pile from the Interstate. If the wind’s right and your window is down and your engine’s running gently, you might hear six guns fired into the air or the barely audible hooting and yowling of a convocation of cowboys. If you’re lucky, ahead of you on the highway you’ll see a pickup with a pair of men wearing ten-gallon hats. Follow those gents. Exit. With about twenty or thirty guys, the cowboy pile is at a turn­ ing point. By now the cowboys on the bottom are suffocating, dy­ ing. They may wonder why they’re in a pile and not rounding up wild horses, or punching dogies, or branding calves. Many pilers, no doubt, are thinking immortality or at least a flash of glory: more than most people, cowboys are subject to the lure of legend. After a memorable cowboy pile, it’s the guys who started it that get sung around the fire, and if sustaining a collapsed rib cage or even dying is a way of proving you were on the bottom—well, so be it. A few have grown up in cities; they’ve done phone booths, Volkswagens: they’re known as “seeds.” They’re a little older. Tend to be suffer­ ing under various intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The rest 2 THE WOMEN WERE LEAVING THE MEN are young guys usually. Guys with maybe some spurs to earn. Guys with maybe no spurs to lose. (Have cowboy piles been treated in the legal arena? Once, a pile set off a “wrongful death action.” Guy on the bottom had left a note on his kitchen table saying his foreman had mentally harassed him and driven him to suicide. Cowboy pile was the best way to go, he figured. Lawyers for the cowboy’s estate argued that “the suicide directly resulted from the foreman’s intentional infliction of emo­ tional distress.” The judge, however, said that “suicide constitutes a break in the causal chain,” that it is never “reasonably foreseeable under the circumstances,” and so the harassment could not be the “proximate cause” of the suicide. [See The Estate of Chet Edwards v. Stanley Meat Consortium, (1989) 79 Tex.jd 179, 182 27 S.W.2d 793, 796.] In the end, strange to say, the cowboy pile itself was not an is­ sue in the case.) The great saguaro cactus can grow ten men high. A great cow­ boy pile can grow as many men high as men can stand men. The turning point is mainly a battle between exhilaration and qualms. Exhilaration that the pile is significant with the potential for being a whopper. Qualms due to screams of pain, bones breaking, cow­ boys weeping, regrets. You know: “Get the hell off me!” Or: “I can’t breathe!” It ain’t a cartoon, somebody on top thinks. We’re for real. Then he makes a choice. Does he give in to reality or does he go for legend? He’s on top of the pile, riding tall, so to speak. He stands to gain, it would seem, if the pile keeps piling. More than your average folk, cowboys are subject to the lure of lore, the love of legend. The guy may stay on and a guy on the brink of death may die, and so his wailing stops. Maybe two wailers die. If the remaining cowboys are COWBOY PILE 3 reckless enough, they’ll willfully interpret the end of the wailing as an end of the pain; therefore, no need to depile. (This apparently irrational phenomenon is now under study by experts in paranor­ mal perception, mob dynamics, religious ritual. Writing in Omni, Benjamin Halsted, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, calls it “a headlong rush to annihilation, driven by the pleasure of loss of self in community, accompanied by an intense realization of our collective oneness, a sense of The All-In-All. Paradoxically, this need for oneness is showing up so acutely among a class of indi­ viduals widely known for their independence of spirit.”) And so the qualms level drops and the exhilaration level crosses the line into frenzy. Eyewitness News may be on hand by this time, the reporter like a sanctimonious hockey announcer when a fight breaks out on the ice. (Seven percent of cowboys are former adult amateur or professional hockey players.) The reporter’s righteousness may, of course, spark some spite among the snakeskin-boot crowd within the viewing area. They may head for the cowboy pile to show Wade “Son-of-a-Bitch” Barley, Eyewitness News, just what he can do with his lack of respect for legend and lore. So say it swells. Forty, fifty guys. Just as talk of a record pile gets going, the police drag themselves in. Though it surprises almost everybody, the one interprofessional brotherhood in the world that really matters is the one between policemen and cowboys. (Thirteen percent of all cowboys have at­ tended at least two weeks in an accredited police academy.) And cops protect their own—even if it means letting them kill them­ selves.