Donhiser, Fiona – Page 4 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 92: Molly Giles

APRIL 8, 2023

ISADORA ANDERSON, POLLY BUCKINGHAM, BLAIR JENNINGS, SHRAYA SINGH, & ALISON WAITE

A TALK WITH MOLLY GILES

MOLLY GILES' WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant as if they couldn't have possibly ended with any other configuration of words and emotions.

Giles is the author of five short story collections, the first of which, Rough Translations, was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. The stories were described by the Houston Post as "tiny gems, carved from real American life, precise and identifiable." Giles' other collections include Creek Walk and Other Stories, winner of the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book, originally published by Papier-Mâché Press, reissued by Simon & Schuster in 1998; All the Wrong Places, winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction (Willow Springs Books, 2015); and Wife with Knife, winner of the Leap Frog Global Fiction Prize Contest, 2020. She has also published two novels, Iron Shoes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and The Home for Unwed Husbands (Leapfrog Press, 2023). Her autobiography, Life Span: A Memoir, is due out through WTAW Press in 2024.

Giles' work has been included in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaiʻi in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Molly has also worked as an independent editor for many authors, including Amy Tan.

We met with Molly Giles on Zoom on Saturday, April 8th to discuss how her shift from poetry to short fiction, the unlikely circumstances that started her teaching career, seances, and the inspiration behind her work—including which stories were overheard, divulged, or completely fabricated. In a serendipitous turn of events, several of us had the pleasure of a second meeting with Molly Giles at the Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, California where Giles was on staff. This time, Giles was the one asking the questions. Giles was exceedingly thorough and generous with her feedback. Her command of story structure, pacing, and knowledge of exactly when to include a humorous quip was sincerely appreciated. Some of her signature zingers you'll find throughout our conversation.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

How are you doing? I know you had hip surgery recently.

MOLLY GILES

Yes, both hips are full of hardware now, but they're getting me where I need to go. I do walk with a cane, and I'm trying not to point with it. One of my friends said, "It makes you look like an old lady," and I thought, well yeah. I like my cane. I would like to have a little stiletto on the end of it.

BUCKINGHAM

Like Ida's wooden leg.

BLAIR JENNINGS

Ida in Iron Shoes and The Home for Unwed Husbands has leg issues. I was wondering if your leg issues might have inspired that.

GILES

No, not mine. But my mother was a double amputee; she was very brave about it, though she did sometimes take her prothesis off and wave it at the grandchildren.

BUCKINGHAM

That leg up in the top of the closet after Ida dies—I couldn't help but think of Flannery O'Connor.

GILES

Yes, "Good Country People." That is a great story.

SHRAYA SINGH

What's your favorite piece of your own work that's been published so far, and why do you like it?

GILES

Probably the very last story in Wife with Knife, "My Ex." It's about how you feel after divorce—that combination of fond nostalgia and absolute fury and continued incomprehension. I've been divorced twice, and I wish I could divorce both exes again. Once wasn't enough. So the enigma of the relationship continues long after the relationship itself. That story is two pages long and and took me two months to write. I was very happy with the end.

BUCKINGHAM

I'm so impressed with your endings. Even in Iron Shoes, there's that turn where she discovers what a louse her husband really is. In the writing process, where do those turns come from? Do they come late? Do they come early?

GILES

I think they come late. That's a good question, Polly, because it's so hard to answer. My main trouble is with beginnings. I think there were about fifteen first chapters to Iron Shoes. By the time I got into the world of it, I could see my way better. When I start a novel. I have to ask, is this going to be a tragedy or a comedy? ls there going to be a wedding at the end or a funeral? I know what direction I'm going in, but I never know where I'm going to end. And in novels the big pressure is to have somebody end with some form of acceptance or redemption, even though that's not often true in real life.

BUCKINGHAM

Before you came in, we had a long discussion because I had read Iron Shoes and they read The Home for Unwed Husbands.

SINGH

We were wondering about the overlap of characters and whether it was going to be declared as an official sequel.

GILES

I think The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone, and, to tell the truth, when I wrote it, I never had the guts to reread Iron Shoes. Iron Shoes is a dark book, and I wanted this one to be a comedy. It started off as a comedy, and then my ex-husband moved downstairs, and it didn't stay funny. He lived with me, in the basement, but I worried about him all the time, and a light-hearted romp it was not.

BUCKINGHAM

The beginning of Iron Shoes, Ida with her legs cut off, is just so gruesome. It really brings you in. And there's that piece at the end where Kay remembers the games she played with Francis—it's a tender memory but the games are terrible, really mean. So it's not one-hundred percent redemptive. It's still pretty dark. You know she's not done.

GILES

That's why I felt Kay needed another book. She's still under her parents' thumbs; she still hasn't grown up. I felt Ida needed more time too. She has a lot of my mother's characteristics, but my mother was so much nicer. And the Kay character is sort of based on me, but I'm not half as nice. I have never been as generous nor as thoughtful, no. Most of the characters I made worse, and Kay I made better. I think that's an author's prerogative, right? I hope that The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone but I would love it if it leads anyone back to Iron Shoes.

SINGH

You said that divorcing someone once wasn't enough, and I think I remember reading that exact line in The Home for Unwed Husbands. I remember underlining it and thinking, this is pretty funny. I wanted to know why you write about so many unsuccessful romantic relationships and marriages.

GILES

Revenge.

SINGH

That's a great answer.

GILES

I have a little candle that says lucky in love, and in many ways, I have been. I stress the bad parts because I was raised to believe that only trouble is interesting. That's what we used to be taught when we were writing. And I find it's pretty true. So I do stress the negative. I do no accent the positive. My present partner could not be sweeter or lovelier, but I can't write about him—there's nothing to say. He's perfect. So no, it's hard. Don't ever be too happy. It's not good for writers to be too happy.

JENNINGS

That's good new for all of us, I think.

GILES

Are any of you poets? I mean, poets make a career out of being unhappy.

ISADORA ANDERSON

We know you used to write a lot more poetry. What impact did that have on writing fiction?

GILES

I never published a poem until maybe ten years ago. I love poetry. I read it constantly as a child. But the poets I was drawn to were telling a narrative. I loved T. S. Elliot, not because of "The Wasteland," which I still don't understand, but because of J. Alfred Prufrock, a character I related to. As a child, I loved Tennyson. I think if I went back, I would still love Tennyson. I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay—I'm not ashamed of that. I think "The Ballad of the Harp Weaver" is gorgeous. And later on, I loved Dylan Thomas and William Blake. A poet I still love and read is D. H. Lawrence. I love his poems about animals. But I recently took an online course about W. S. Merwin. The course was taught by two other poets. And what they loved about Merwin is that they didn't understand him, and they went on and on about how great it was not to understand things. I think Kevin Mcllvoy said the same thing [in a previous Willow Springs interview], how he loves chaos. Not me. I am the sort of person who, if I start a book and get anxious about what's going to happen, I have no qualms turning to the last page just to find out if they live or if they die because, otherwise, I will not be able to continue. After I know, I don't give up the book unless it's badly written. But I do like to have all my anxieties soothed. I still love W. S. Merwin, even after six weeks of failing to enjoy not understanding him.

BUCKINGHAM

I do think poets, in general, are happier in uncertainty than fiction writers are.

GILES

Definitely. The one poem I did publish, about ten years ago, is the last piece in Bothered, "Young Wife on the Arc." I rewrote it as prose, dropping the line breaks but keeping the rhymes. I didn't start writing short stories until my late twenties. I was married, I had two children, and I was living in Sacramento. I didn't know any other women who wrote or read. I felt isolated and depressed. I took a correspondence course through UC Berkeley, which was wonderful training. I wrote my first short story through that correspondence course and sold it to a magazine that promptly went out of business the same month my story was slated to come out. But I was able to submit that story to the Community of Writers, and they gave me a scholarship. So I was thirty by the time I was around other fiction writers—it was heaven.

BUCKINGHAM

Can you talk about the shift in your work from short stories to micro-fiction?

GILES

In that correspondence course, the teacher made me count my words. One piece had to be five-hundred words, another could only be twenty-five words. It felt a little artificial, but I was amazed by how much I liked compression compared to expansion. I'm drawn to the shorter forms of prose. My pieces tend to be narratives. I want them to be understood. When I read somebody like Lydia Davis, I am impressed by the intelligence but often puzzled by the story.

The first flash piece that really worked for me was 'The Poet's Husband," which was written maybe thirty years ago. It was based on going to a poetry reading and watching this beautiful young woman get up and talk about everything that her husband and she shared. And he just sat there nodding and smiling, and l thought, my God. I don't know about you. but if somebody I'm close to gets up, for instance, and starts to sing. I blush. I'm terribly embarrassed for them. But this woman was very self-confident, and she was talking about her affair, her suicide attempts, her unhappiness. And he just sat there smiling. That's what inspired the story.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to ask about the title story in Wife with Knife. There's this adage in writing, you have to write four hours a day, or however long, every day. But "Wife with Knife" suggests that this is perhaps a male perspective. Some writers I love, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, have small but mighty bodies of work. They never had a time in their lives where they could write all day every day. They couldn't afford that. One thing I heard your story saying was that this is kind of a myth; it's not that people don't do it, but it's kind of a selfish thing. The life we live is important enough that we have to live it, and that doesn't necessarily give us long writing periods. But it does give us the writing. In an interview you said something like, "I've raised kids alone, I've had a gazillion jobs, I've taught, I've edited, I didn't have time to write every day. That isn't my process." Could you speak to this?

GILES

I've never been able to write every day. I mean, I got married at nineteen. I had children right away. I've always had to work. I didn't go back to school until I was in my thirties. I was working different jobs all the time. I only started teaching at forty because my professor was an alcoholic and couldn't finish the course. The chair of the department didn't know who to ask and he just tapped me. I stepped in and was there for the next thirty-three years. As a teacher, I wrote mainly in July. As a young mother, when the children were little, I wrote during their naps. I have scraps of ideas on the back of utility bills that I'll find stuck in my purse. I'm talking to you now from a cottage on my property that I used to rent out. I recently took it over as a writing room, and I feel guilty about it. I don't come out here very often. I'm retired now, the children are middle-aged, I've got what I always longed for, a room of my own, and I'm still scattered.

I do better with deadlines. Rough Translations, my first book, is my MA thesis. It was done because the stories were due in workshop. In our real lives, nobody's standing over you saying, "We have to have this." Nobody cares. Unless you're Stephen King. Well, Stephen King writes every day, even on Christmas, so he doesn't count. I've always had a lot on my plate until now. And now, I have everything I've ever wanted, which is part of my philosophy in life—you get everything you need, just never when you need it. I finally have this great space. And I'm coming to the end of my career. I doubt I will ever write another novel. I want to get my memoir out. And I'm still writing short stories. But the energy for a novel is not there. There is irony in almost everything, I'm afraid.

When the University of Georgia press nominated Rough Translations for a Pulitzer Prize, they wanted to interview me. I got a phone call from a guy with this lovely southern drawl: "Now," he says, "I've noticed that you started college in 1960. And I noticed that you finished in 1980. That's a lot of unaccounted-for time." And I thought, yeah. But unaccounted-for time is often a woman's world. Often a man's, too, but I think more of a woman's. Now that I have nothing but time, I find I'm addicted to the New York Times spelling bee. That takes at least a half hour every day. And then I garden, I putter, I cook; I'm enjoying myself. I love life. But no, I'm not sitting down and writing four hours a day. I never have.

I think it was Grace Paley who said her best advice to writers was "love your life." And I think Keven said the same thing in his interview. He said to look at what's around you and pay attention and be mindful to what's actually going on in your life. All of us here could write a Russian novel just about what's happening since we got up. If you think about all the stuff that's been going through your head and the people who flit in and out of your consciousness and what you see on the street, it's all material. It's just hard to pay attention to all of it—you'd go nuts. But it is there.

ALISYN WAITE

You mentioned your memoir. To what extent do you draw from your own life in your writing? I know some authors like to keep things very separate, where others prefer to be open about the fact that the story is based on their lives. Do you have your own balance?

GILES

Yeah, and it's a balance. "Wife with Knife" was literally me listening to a friend talk. I listen hard to my friends. A lot of my stories are stolen from people who are naïve enough to trust me with their stories. I don't think you can edit yourself out of every story—I'm in about half, I think. The memoir is all me. I'm trying to be as true to my life as possible. I was born in San Francisco, and the book is based on crossing and re-crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It is titled Life Span and is comprised of flash pieces—none of them are longer than three pages—every year from 1945 to the present. It will come out with WTAW in 2024. It's amazing to me the things that have happened on that bridge and the relationships I've had. One thing I still have to do is go through and soften some of the portraits of the people I've known. I don't want to hurt any-body. I know I don't like looking at myself depicted in other people's writing, especially not my own. As I said earlier, the character Kay is based on a really nice Molly—I was never that good to my parents. I've always been snippy, and I've always been lazy.

BUCKINGHAM

We all have a hard time believing that.

GILES

Don't. I can think of specific stories in Wife with Knife where I could say, "Yes I'm in there" or "No I'm not." "Accident," that happened to me. I was rear-ended in Arkansas, and I had such mixed feelings about living in the South. I was dating a guy at the time who was a musician. He was ranting about the Yankees, and I said, "Do you think I'm a Yankee?" And he said, "Oh no. You're a foreigner." Because the South was foreign to somebody who'd grown up in the Bay Area. I made the character much younger than I was and gave her a different life. But the incident happened. "Church News"—I do apologize. A friend told me that story, and I went and wrote it. And then I tried to get her to say, is this ok? And she wasn't sure. Still isn't. "Deluded" is cruelly based on a friend of mine who doesn't read. "Assumption" is sort of a rural myth about a body tied to the top of a van. I nabbed it. "Dumped," I didn't even change the names. I just used my friends. "Life Cycle of a Tick" is very much about a relationship I had. "Not a Cupid"? I was once on a bus in Mexico, and I saw a woman, an American woman, petting this sullen little boy who looked trapped. "Just Looking" was about doing all this weird shopping but never buying anything. "Eskimo Diet" is a fairy story. "Married to the Mop" was about a time I cleaned houses but the character isn't me. "Banyan" is me. "Ears," me. "Paradise," a friend of mine who talks to spirits all the time. "Rinse, Swish, Spit"—I live in terror that my dental hygienist will read it. "Two Words" was based on a tenant I had. I was sitting here in the cottage—I would come back in summer and stay in the cottage and rent my main house out when I was teaching in Arkansas—wondering what on earth to write about, and I saw this little, fat, naked man run out to the garden. He wore a pink feather boa around his neck, and he picked up a garbage can lid and started fighting the deer in my yard and I thought, Okay. "Underage" is totally autobiographical. "Hopeless" I made up because I liked the little kid in it.

JENNINGS

I'm curious now. What inspired "Talking to Strangers"?

GILES

I live at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. A few years ago, a serial killer was on the loose, violating women hikers and murdering them on the trails up there. I loved hiking that mountain alone. When I realized I couldn't do that anymore, I felt angry. I was sitting at my desk, trying to finish a grad school assignment, and the first lines, it was scary, came to me. It was like somebody was speaking directly to me. It was the only channeling experience I've ever had. It's something writers pray for. I heard this voice, and I just followed it. "I know you don't know me," the voice said. And I knew it was a dead girl speaking. I don't read that story at conferences because it's triggering. There are too many women who have been assaulted.

The only other time I've ever had a visitation, if you will, was at the end of my most anthologized story, "Pie Dance." I had no idea how I was going to end it, and it just came to me. You write forty different ends, and you think, I can't I can't I can't. And then it just comes. You had asked earlier about ends; that end was a gift of grace. It's not going happen if you're not there. You have to be with your story; you have to sit with it. Sometimes, magic happens. And sometimes it's black magic. I'm not a spiritual person, but those were two times where I just didn't know what to say except, "Thanks."

JENNINGS

I've been known to write some dark things. It can affect my mood and throw me into a very deep depression while writing and a couple weeks after. I'm wondering how you get through that and still edit it enough to make it turn out well-crafted.

GILES

I think I'm shallower than you; I don't stay depressed long enough. When I am depressed, I write. If I can't create, I journal. I have journal after journal, and they're all full of crap. The self-pity is incredible. Pages and pages and pages of it, since I was nine. I think of my journals as my puke bags. My daughter has promised me she'll burn them all when I pass. I'm always horrified when someone like Hemingway dies, a beautiful writer who chose one beautiful word after another, and then when they aren't there to revise, their journals or their rough drafts are published. You know, it's just not fair. It does a real disservice to the writer.

I've only had a real depression once in my life, and that was because I wasn't writing, wasn't reading, wasn't going to school. The children were little, and I couldn't take care of them. I cried a lot, and I thought about getting rid of myself. I was in my late twenties—I think the twenties are a terrible time. People in their twenties need to know that things get better. You lose your looks, you lose your hips, but things get better.

BUCKINGHAM

I've been thinking about John Cheever as you've been talking and how some of your perspectives are kind of opposite. I love John Cheever, but he had the writing cabin and the ability to go, "Well, I'm off to the cabin and Mary and the kids can fend for themselves." And also, he wrote his journals to be published, and then they were.

GILES

Well, they're wonderful. I love those journals. They break your heart. And I love his stories. He does something I admire—he'll leave the here and now, and slip sideways into fantasy. He does it effortlessly. I've tried that a few times. I don't always get away with it, but I do admire the way he did it.

BUCKINGHAM

Yeah, I saw that in Iron Shoes with the fairy tale and with the blue horse. Like Cheever, you're also writing about a time period in which the cocktail party is really big, and these casual cruelties to children are part of the culture. I wonder about those casual cruelties younger people might be appalled by, and whether the world has changed.

GILES

My three daughters all have children, and I'm looking at the way they have parented; they're so good at it. My parents came out of the Depression and out of the war, and they wanted their own lives. I think they felt they never had a chance. I was writing more about my parents' generation than my own generation, which is a generation of dopers and maybe inept parents but not cruel parents. I don't think we really took parenting seriously. I had my first daughter when I'd just turned twenty; there's a picture of me holding her on my hip like she's a football I'm about to dropkick.

Somehow, all three of my daughters turned out great. All are professionals. One is a geneticist in Amsterdam, another a cannabis publicist, another is an attorney. They are wonderful parents: tolerant, loving, interested in their children. The granddaughter who's living with me now, twenty-one, is going to go home and continue to live with her mother and father in the Netherlands when she goes to college. I would no more have lived with my parents after the age of eighteen than I would have flown; it was unthinkable to me. I grew up in the forties and fifties and my parents had better things to do than parent. It was like that Philip Larkin poem, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." And it all goes back to the mom and dad's mom and dad, so you can't assign blame. You just try not to repeat the same patterns with your own children.

JENNINGS

As I read your stories, I thought, all these men are so horrible. I'm wondering whether you've seen a change in men as well. Are they any better, or are they still the same?

GILES

I think men get better as they get older, and the testosterone dies down. If we could get rid of testosterone for a week, you know how easy the world would be? The Middle East would come together, the Ukraine war would end, the population explosion would slow. It's a terrible, terrible hormone. I found that I at least can talk to men more after the age of fifty-five; they'll talk to you about what they're cooking, what their shopping list is like, their aches and pains. They'll open up. The men of my generation were singularly silent. I remember reading Saul Bellow to find out what men thought. It wasn't clear to me that men did actually think because the men in my acquaintance were charming in many ways, but mute. It was very frustrating. I remember thinking, especially in the D. H. Lawrence novels, florid as they are, oh, this guy's thinking about something that I'm thinking about. It was new to me. I think men are chattier now. I hope so.

One of my early stories is "A Jar of Emeralds." I was married to this beautiful guy, he was just lovely, but he never talked. And one morning he woke up and turned to me and said, "I feel like a jar of emeralds," and I thought, wait a minute, who is this guy? I want to know him. He's a treasure chest I don't have access to. I do apologize to the male characters I write about because many are one-dimensional cartoons. I'm very aware of that, especially in the last book; I meant it to be a comedy, and I wasn't looking for rounded and deep characters.

ANDERSON

Regarding the unwed husbands, I found myself so frustrated with all the men anytime they spoke to Kay, Neal constantly calling her "Babe," Victor being religiously judgmental, Francis disapproving, and Fenton just not saying anything. How did you ensure that each unwed husband sounded different and interacted with Kay in a different way, and what was your process for writing the dialogue for each one?

GILES

Fenton was easy because, as you say, he doesn't speak. I deliberately gave Francis the best lines because he's just plain mean. He's a terrible human being, but he cracked me up. With my own dad, if you'd hurt yourself—say you'd fallen down and scraped your elbow—he'd stomp on your foot and say, "Now how does your elbow feel?" It was that kind of Irish "humor'" I grew up with. Neal was the easiest because of the irritating oh Babes. I'm really embarrassed about Victor.

Biff was easy. I really liked the guy Kay met in Greece. He was nobody I had ever met, and I liked it when he talked. But I got rid of him fast because he was going to take over.

SINGH

You mentioned that all the characters from the most recent novel are like cartoons or caricatures, and they're meant to be really unlikeable. Do you have any advice on how to write unlikable characters but still have your reader engaged with the material?

GILES

I guess the best advice would be to try and be that person. Every character in a story has his or her own motivation, their own sense of justice, of who they are. To try and actually be your antagonist and try to see things from their point of view takes a real leap of faith, but I do think that listening hard helps, and knowing your character's background. For each of those characters, I wrote a couple of pages on where they were born, what foods they liked, what they wanted to be. I tried to understand who they were. It didn't make me like them, but it did help me see where they were coming from.

JENNINGS

The short story "The Writers' Model" has the fascinating concept of women being physically examined and questioned by male writers who want to write authentic women yet never overcome their false impressions of them despite their interrogations. This reminds me of a discussion among liberal creatives right now. Do we only write our own gender identity, sexual orientation, disability vs. ability, or race so we don't accidentally write something offensive because we can never truly understand another lived experience, or should we become as educated as possible about what each type of lived experience is like and write as many inclusive characters as possible with the guidance of one of those who've lived similar lives?

GILES

You guys are really walking on eggshells in your generation with this stricture you're under, to be authentic, to only write your own gender, to only write your own sexual preference, to only write your own nationality. It seems so unfair. You want to be careful, yes, but the imagination was given to us. It's a great gift. I just can't imagine having to stick with yourself all the time—who wants to? It's wrong. I think that's one of the great delights of slipping away from reality and writing fantasy because if you write fantasy, you can have green people and pink people and purple people, and you're not offending anybody. You can actually say what you want to say about the world. I don't write it myself. But I think of a writer I adore, Ursula LeGuin; through fantasy she can say things about the world she couldn't say otherwise. My feeling is, thumb your nose at the authorities and write what you want to write. I don't know what workshops are like now, but I'm sure they're scary as shit because everybody is saying, "You can't say that" or "You can't say this." I find it very Soviet. I don't like it. Be mindful of others in your speech, and to hell with them when you're writing. I am delighted that it's opened the door to trans writers, and I'm really glad that I'm reading things that weren't available to read even ten years ago. There's so much new, fascinating stuff coming out.

ANDERSON

How do you balance withholding information to keep the suspense while at the same time establishing trust with your reader so that they are along for the ride no matter where you're taking them in the story?

GILES

Wonderful question. That's part of the reason why we can't teach writing. You'll know when you get into a story yourself what to do, but it's really hard to come up with a rule for anything. I love workshops, mainly for the comradery and the deadlines, but there are some things I don't think I've ever been able to talk about or teach, like tempo in a piece of fiction. You can look at the way other people do it. I love Alice Munro, and I've been looking at the way she withholds information, and I thought, I'll take one of her stories apart and study it; that's easy. But you can't really diagnose her; she's too sly. It's up to you as a writer to feel your way towards what you need to do. And cover your ears—try not to listen to what other people tell you. To deliberately withhold and then put it in there later is very mechanical, and that's not the way we work. I taught for thirty-three years saying, "Show don't tell." I don't believe that anymore; I like to be told. We used to diagram things on the blackboard about how a story arc should go. That's a bunch of hogwash; I never did like that.

I don't envy anybody teaching creative writing now, but I love creative writing classes. I love the community that comes together; I love the way people push each other and inspire each other and give each other heart and hope. I'm in a writing group now. Almost every writing group I've ever been in or every class has a certain undefinable magic just as writing itself does.

WAITE

Can you talk more about your own experience teaching?

GILES

I stepped in scared to death. I was so conscientious the first three years that I would write single spaced typed pages of my critiques of the stories. Students would just throw them out the window as they went, and I don't blame them. I don't have a good speaking voice. I was often told to speak up. I had been reading more than I had been talking, so I couldn't pronounce words. Oaxaca, I couldn't pronounce it. I couldn't pronounce quaaludes. Students would help me a lot. What I loved, and still do, is the fact that when you're teaching a creative writing class, you're getting to know people in an intimate way that you couldn't if you were teaching history or chemistry. That is a real gift, that willingness to be open. Most of us are pretty shy in person, but in writing, you can access each other. I always liked giving prompts. The prompt that has always worked in class is to write for twenty minutes with just the phrase "My mother always" and then follow with "My father never." The responses are amazing.

By the time I retired, I was developing an allergic reaction to student papers so I knew it was time to quit. I know I could never have mastered remembering who's they, who's them, and I would never want to be insulting to anyone in the class. I call my children by the wrong name; I'm sure I would get everybody's gender mixed up. And I didn't want to be that politically aware because I'm not. I was tired of teaching. I had said everything I had to say. So, time to quit. But I still love looking at individual stories and telling people what's wrong with them, especially if there's a way to fix it.

BUCKINGHAM

Have you done work with other writers like you did with Amy Tan?

GILES

I worked with Amy for a long time and it was a joy. I've worked off and on with Susanne Pari, whose wonderful second novel just came out, In the History of Our Time. I read my friends' manuscripts all the time. I'm still getting letters from students I taught twenty years ago who are now just getting published, and that gives me so much hope. They might be in their late thirties, early forties because it takes a long time. They make me proud.

BUCKINGHAM

You've published with both smaller and bigger presses, and Amy Tan is with really big presses. What is your sense of the contemporary publishing landscape and where we're headed?

GILES

I don't know what's going on in publishing today. I do think books are vastly overpriced. Amy Tan is a phenomenon. Few writers hit the big time so fast—she's an excellent writer and has earned every accolade, but she should not be taken as the norm. Many excellent writers fail to succeed in publishing. They may never get used to rejections but they do have to live with them. I've had more rejections than I can count. After an especially bad siege of them, I'll just stay in bed for an afternoon and then get up, rewrite, resend. They never feel good, rejections.

It seems to me it's women my age who buy books. Bookstore readings are filled with middle aged and elderly women. I go to a lot of readings, and I look around and everybody has gray hair. That's not true of the less formal open mic and coffee and dive bar readings I like to go to; they are buzzing with energetic youth. I want to support writers, so I buy. I get to take it off my taxes. I probably buy $3,000 worth of books every year. I'm trying to think of what I've just bought. Solito by Javier Zamora. It's nonfiction. There seems to be a trend towards nonfiction. And there's a real trend, of course, for émigré stories. This is about a nine-year-old boy from San Salvador who gets to America on his own. It's very moving. Are any of you writing for television? I would urge that, or movies. There's a market for writing games. Writing short stories is great, but it's no way to make money.

BUCKINGHAM

There's some really brilliant writing on TV right now.

GILES

Yes, The Wire is beyond brilliant. Sopranos, of course. I think when everybody's out of the house later today, I'm going to watch Succession, but I'm not going to tell anybody.

SINGH

Succession is so painful to watch.

GILES

Because they're horrible people. They make my characters look like angels.

BUCKINGHAM

What's the difference in the process for you between a novel and a short story?

GILES

I love reading novels. But I like writing short stories. Both of my novels have been written like a series of short stories where one, hopefully, flows into the next. I'm trying to think of a novel that I've loved that has that flow in it. Oh, I know. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. Oh my gosh, it's so good. I recently read a short book by a black writer, she's gorgeous. Gayle Jones. The Bird Catcher. It was like reading jazz. And Claire Keegan's Foster. Perfect. I like all the Irish writers. I love Sebastian Barry. Niall Williams' This Is Happiness is a wonderful book. I can't get enough of them. I just think they're onto something. I listen to novels a lot when I walk. I'm listening to The Rabbit Hutch now. But in answer to your question, the difference between short and long. I don't have the vision, really, for a long novel. I'm not a long-distance runner. I like to go a block, sit down, have a cup of coffee.

WAITE

In an interview with Emily Wiser, you mentioned that the voices in Rough Translations are "pretty naïve, self-conscious, and smartass." How has your narrative voice changed throughout the years? How would you describe the voices of the characters in your more current works?

GILES

I do think the voices are smartass in Rough Translations. Then in Creek Walk, I was mainly writing about death, divorce, and depression so it's a darker book. I think what I've done as I've continued to write is experiment with other people's voices, rather than with my own. If you hear your own voice on your answering machine, don't you just hate it? I think it's still probably smartass, but older. I've always doodled. And I've always doodled the same woman's face. The woman's face has aged. I think I do have a distinctive voice. But I don't want to know what it is. I don't want to be told, either.

JENNINGS

The Home for Unwed Husbands has gothic horror elements, even though it's definitely not gothic horror—castles, ghosts, mental health issues, toxic relationships, and unresolved trauma. What inspired you to use these things?

GILES

I don't know if people are still reading fairy tales, but I definitely grew up on fairy tales. And I do believe in ghosts. So it was natural to me.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to hear more about '"I do believe in ghosts."

GILES

Oh, don't you?

BUCKINGHAM

I totally do. I see that a little bit in your work. I'd love to hear more.

GILES

Well, I've lived in an old house for over forty years. It's in a little rural community off the highway. l was told it was a bordello. And then I was told that it was a train station. I've always had this feeling of people passing through it. Years ago my youngest daughter came to the door and said, "Mom"—it was about three in the morning—and I realized the temperature dropped maybe forty degrees; it was freezing. I said, "I know. Get in bed." And we sat there and huddled. We felt whish whish whish going through the room, and then it disappeared. I think it was a traveler, either that or a prostitute, and it was on its way out. When I was three or four I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a goblin sitting on my feet. I went to grab it, and I could feel it twisting out of my hands. I believed far too much in fairies as a child. I know I did. At eleven I was still looking under creek beds. That's one reason I loved teaching in Ireland. They actually have little fairy wells in the hills. Probably for tourists and children, but they worked for me.

I'm writing a short story now about a writers' séance. A poet sitting next to me had brought a photograph of this pretty woman in a fur coat. The medium was a frazzled blonde who warned us that we might be contacted by the dead via a physical sensation, our hearts might catch or we might feel a pain in our lungs. Then she closed her eyes, said we were surrounded by spirits, and began to say things like she saw a windmill over the head of a certain famous writer whose upcoming trip to the Netherlands had just been written up in the society pages or she heard someone calling out a message in Spanish to the writer from Latin America. I thought, what a crock. And then suddenly, the poet next to me with the photograph, myself, and the woman to my left all felt like we couldn't breathe. Our throats filled with acid. Tears were running down our cheeks. And we were all coughing. We didn't know each other but we felt as if we were being gassed. The poet's photograph was of a relative who had been killed in Auschwitz. I ended up thinking, no, couldn't be, yeah, it could be, no, it couldn't. But, yeah. it could. Why not be open to it?

JENNINGS

In Three for the Road, all three protagonists leave their current homes in hopes of finding new lives or because they feel like they have no other options, and in The Home for Unwed Husbands Kay is changed by her trip to Greece. Why are you drawn to this type of story arc?

GILES

I don't know; when it comes to fight or flight, I flee. Don't you think it's so much more fun to just get out of there? I'm horrified in my own stories to see how many of them end with someone in a car getting the hell out. I don't know what's wrong with me. I want to pinpoint it before some critic comes in and says, "Hey, she uses a lot of cars." I adore the end of Huck Finn. Lighting out for the territory? What could be better?

ANDERSON

Just for fun, what's on your writing desk when you do get down to business and find the time to write? And are there any tools or habits you feel you can't write without?

GILES

I used to smoke. I'm so glad I quit, but I used to think that if I did, I wouldn't be able to write. Then I found that I wrote just as badly when I wasn't smoking as when I had and it was a relief. It's amazing how when you come to a part in your story that's really going to open it up or push it forward, you suddenly wonder if there's anything in the refrigerator. Or you have to pee. There's some instinct that makes you push back from the computer just when you're about to nail it. I'm restless. I get up and come back and get up again. One thing that's always in my writing room is a couch. I like to crash, and sometimes just meditating or dosing your eyes for a few minutes will help refocus you. I also have a little green Buddha on the desk. So how about you? Do you have any superstitions?

SINGH

It's not my habit, but I was listening to a podcast with Ocean Vuong. He apparently wears boots every single time he writes.

GILES

That's interesting. I love Isabel Allende's process. She starts a new novel on the Epiphany, January 6th, every year. Bharati Mukherjee, who grew up in a crowded house in Calcutta, kept a TV blaring in every room when she moved to Berkeley. We all have different needs. I like having a crossword puzzle book when I get stuck, especially one with the answers in the back.

BUCKINGHAM

The title story in Rough Translations is about a dying woman. Did she have anything to do with the creation of Ida?

GILES

No. She was just a dearly loved friend. Ida was loosely based on my mother. Have any of you tried to write about your mother? The first story that I published was "Old Souls," from Rough Translations. It came out in a magazine at that time called Playgirl. It had a naked man in the centerfold. You couldn't get it at the regular magazine stand. You had to ask for it. My story was sandwiched in between ads for something called Sta-Hard Cream that looked like Elmer's glue. I wanted to show this story to my mother because I was proud of it, and it had been published, so xeroxed it and cut it out column by column between the ads, but I worried she would recognize herself as one of the characters. She read the story, and then she looked up all starry-eyed and said, "Darling? Who's the bitch?" "Diane's mother," I peeped, and she nodded and said, "I thought so." So that was my first published story, and it was an introduction to shame. I don't think dignity is a word that writers can claim. We submit. When your work does come out, you can be proud for the moment. But if you're in a magazine, you may be read on a toilet and thrown away. You just learn to walk tall. And wear boots! No wonder Ocean Vuong wears boots. Good idea. These boots were made for writing, and that's just what I'll do .

Two Poems by Sara Burge

Found in Willow Springs 92

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Sexy Fish

One way to begin a new life is to be miserable in the current, so miserable you fantasize about opening a bar or food truck, anything to fool yourself more easily into believing a morsel of what yo do matters. You do a few shots on the first beautiful Saturday night of spring and they go straight to your fingertips while your husband, two drinks deeper fires up the grill and you think about a riverside bar you drank at a few years back, how it's up for sale, how you had years of restaurant experience and are still a pro at gauging the ebb and flow of a crowd, knowing how deep in the weeds the fronts and back of the house are and how to smile when you want to spit. That bar and seafood has always been your favorite, so you decide to open a seafood bar right there riverside, open air patio, little bubblies on the water, where you'll plant sunflowers and daisies and black-eyed susans and you feel yourself surfacing in your drunkenness, in the first dream you've entertained in years. A dream like a fish undulating underwater, serene in its own fishiness. You want to dive down among slick stones, into the clarity of rapids where you've always trusted your body's instincts. You will call your restaurant Sexy Fish. At Sexy Fish, all that matters is eating some fish by the river, knowing you're sexy, having a couple drinks too many until you dip a toe, an armpit, a thought into all that water, trying not to cry at all those bright splashes passing you by.

Harry Styles is The Way

I didn't care one way or the other about Harry Styles
until I noticed him smiling at me
from the sunroom of a house I used to pass by

back when we were all going somewhere.
It was startling until I realized
he was a lifesize cardboard cutout.

At Halloween, he wore a Chewbacca mask
At Christmastime, Harry was
decked out in a Santa hat.

He smiled at me for a couple years.
He never aged.
I started looking forward to him.

He became a custom, a strange jolt of comfort
when the days were too stagnant, too cruel.
Then he disappeared.

I wondered if the family moved,
or a child took Harry to college.
I kept waiting for his comeback.

Despair invaded every breath.
Every turn of the ignition.
Every window passed.

I started overcooking my eggs.
The cosmos called and said Harry would've stayed
but a lot of people didn't like the way he dressed.

A lot of people started crying in my office.
I smiled and nodded empathetically.
We all felt his absence and knew

we had to go home until he returned.
Some CEOs were brought on board.
They told us to keep going out,

even with no Harry Styles watching over us.
They assured us that there was no danger
as long as we're not afraid

and pretend everything's the way
it used to be, even though
Harry Styles is still missing.

I kept hoping he'd return
at Christmas when the son or daughter visited
or someone dug him out of the basement.

But he hasn't come back.
That sunroom is just a room,
and I don't look anymore.

That's a lie. I look every time.

Issue 92: Sara Burge

About Sara Burge

Sara Burge is the author of Apocalypse Ranch (C&R Press), and her poetry has been published in or is forthcoming from CALYX Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baltimore Review, The Louisville Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and elsewhere. She’s a three time Best of the Net nominee and teaches creative writing at Missouri State University, where she serves as the Poetry Editor of Moon City Review.

Sara can be found on Instagram as @das_burge and on Facebook as Sara Burge.

Read more of her works online at The Good Life Review, Pacifica, Atticus Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, as well as at her website.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Sexy Fish" and "Harry Styles is the Way"

While these poems aren’t Pandemic Poems, they were written during quarantine, so that time’s vibe seeped into them. “Sexy Fish” grew out of a tipsy conversation with my husband about how much we missed the comradery of the restaurant industry. We met working in restaurants, and while we’d long been out of the biz, the community that came from being in the trenches with other humans—all working toward the singular goal of getting through a shift—was something we sorely missed. This was during lockdown when everyone was isolated and questioning life decisions and turning into little rabid caged animals. So, “Sexy Fish” started as an inebriated quarantine fantasy about trying to make life worthwhile and beautiful again. To have control. We came up with a business plan and everything. Then we went to bed and Sexy Fish the restaurant turned into “Sexy Fish” the poem.

At its core, “Harry Styles Is the Way” is about missing the comfort provided by seemingly trivial things once they’ve disappeared. Nothing new, right? Very pandemic-y. It started out as a more straightforward ode to a Harry Styles cardboard cutout (“standee,” I’ve since learned they’re called). Every time I drove by him, I smiled and said, Hey, Harry Styles! It was like the thrill you get when you hear the owl in your neighborhood and think, There’s our owl! But Harry vanished, and then the pandemic hit. Not seeing Harry on my once-a-week trip to get groceries amplified a sense of hollowness a lot of people were experiencing. I so badly wanted to see him again. Harry Styles as missing savior.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

My husband was a chef for years, so I am blessed to get fantastic food on a regular basis. That man doesn’t just follow recipes. He chefs. Hard. My favorite thing he’s made for me recently is his chile relleno.

I’m mostly a vodka gal, but when fall hits, it’s either Piney River Brewing Company’s Black Walnut Wheat Ale or Mother’s Brewing Company’s Winter Grind. Both breweries are based here in the Ozarks and make all kinds of tastiness. Shout out.

I’m going to get a tattoo of a praying mantis soon—my husband got me a gift card to a local tattoo shop because I’ve been talking about getting a praying mantis tattoo for years. I already have a cat tattoo on my shoulder. It’s a black cat, like my beloved black kitty Maeve (Sweet Kitty) who passed away last October. We now have a gray tuxedo kitty named Lucifurr who lives up to her name, though she is finally allowing me to give her affection without immediately clawing me to bloody shreds.

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“Coffee With Werewolves” by Teresa Milbrodt

Found in Willow Springs 92

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LEAVING TOWN IS AN ESCAPE in slow motion. As I load boxes into the back of Lee's Ford Maverick, it feels like we're in one of those horror movies she loves, fleeing danger when we can't see who's chasing us. With Vietnam, Watergate, and all the Soviet nuclear business on the radio, running away from an additional monster just adds another layer to things that could go wrong.

But nothing has yet," Lee reminds me. "The point is to get out before something does."

I know that's the case, but hearing Lee say it aloud is scary. I'm getting used to the idea of Lee and me, me and Lee, that we have a stake in each other, though neither of us have said We're a couple. We're going to stay with Lee's Aunt Florence and rent her extra bedroom. Aunt Florence knew Lee wanted to be called "she" before Lee mentioned it, and she's never asked questions about the change in pronouns.

I have a new job since I managed a transfer from my old bank to a local branch. Lee is less intent on finding work and more on locating a doctor who'll renew her prescription for estrogen and a therapist who won't tell her she's crazy. Her current doctor and counselor are five hours away in Chicago. Lee would rather not have the long drive but says it's not too far for understanding. She's been on hormones for six months. Any doctor will want her to live as a woman and take estrogen for at least a year before she considers surgery.

"More hospitals are performing them so there's less chance of being denied by some stupid board," Lee says hours later as we hang blouses in our new closet at Aunt Florence's place. "But I'll need enough money to pay for it, and who knows how long that'll take.

Lee has read everything she can find about transsexuality, which amounts to three good books, five stupid ones, and a scattering of magazines. She saw six asshole therapists in three states before she found the one in Chicago who asked non-insulting questions: Is Lee willing to give up her job and take a drastic pay cut? Is she willing to lose friends and family? Is she willing to risk the possibility of assault if someone decides she's not passing well enough?

"She's up front with me," says Lee. "There's no easy path. but I'm done lying. At least when I lose my family, I won't be the first person who's been disowned for stupid reasons."

"You have Aunt Florence and me," I say, though I know that's cold comfort.

Lee kisses my forehead. I feel her mouth strain into a smile.

AFTER THREE DAYS and a few evening chats with Aunt Florence, Lee applies for a bank teller position so she can gather references and practice being a woman in the world full-time. We bought more skirts and dresses for her at Goodwill, and Aunt Florence says Lee can have some of her old clothes. Lee is five-eleven and Aunt Florence used to be that tall before she started shrinking.

"I think of it as condensing," Aunt Florence says.

"At least we're both small-chested." Lee fingers one of Aunt Florence's sweaters as we peruse her closet.

"Give it time," says Aunt Florence. "You're blossoming."

"I'm wilted today," Lee says, rubbing her lower back. I give her a backrub before bed, turning on the radio so Diana Ross can soothe us. Lee was in a car accident ten years ago that messed up her spine. She has the kind of persistent pain that makes doctors shrug and tell her to take more Tylenol.

"The corset helps," she but murmurs I like into the her pillow. "I thought it would be uncomfortable, but I like the pressure. It reminds me to have good posture. Someday I'll get the boobs to fill out the top."

"I don't have the boobs to fill out the top," I say.

"But nobody looks at you twice when you walk into the grocery store," says Lee.

"It's because you have cute clothes, perfect makeup, and you're model slender," I say.

"If you insist," says Lee. "I still worry about my voice every time I open my mouth. It's not just speaking breathy or in falsetto. It's the cadences, the pauses, the rhythms. It'll take a while to figure out."

I massage her shoulders with the heels of my hands. For someone like Lee, vaulting between terror and defiance is a logical course of emotion.

ON THE DAY OF HER JOB INTERVIEW, which is my first day of work at the new bank, Lee gets up an hour before me so she can put herself together. I roll on my stomach and clamp a pillow over my head to steal extra minutes of rest, After a week and a half of sharing a bedroom, I know her routine. She stuffs the top of the corset with pantyhose, shaves her arms and legs (every other day), and spends forty minutes on makeup. Lee pastes down her eyebrows with a glue stick, smooths on foundation, lightens the dark areas under her eyes, dusts blush on her cheekbones, draws in clean eyebrows, brushes on two colors of eyeshadow, adds definition with eyeliner, and fills out her mouth with lipstick and lip pencil. She accessorizes with two bracelets and three rings.

I get up in time to dig a skirt and blouse from the closet and smear on pink lipstick. Behind my round glasses frames, nobody cares about my eyes.

I don't know how rigorously they interview tellers at the bank, but Lee comes out of the back offie smiling. She's never been a teller, but after being employed as a loan officer for fourteen years, she's familiar enough with the system to fake it. Lee spends the afternoon training with me and Jenny who works at the window on my left and has been at this bank since the beginning of time (according to Jenny). She looks to be in her mid-sixties, about as old as Aunt Florence, and calls Lee and me "Sugar." We wade through the day one customer at a time, supporting ourselves with five-minute coffee breaks and little stools. When we don't have customers, Jenny and I discuss our favorite brands of shoe insoles.

What did you think?" I ask Lee that evening when we debrief in Aunt Florence's kitchen with a beer.

"So much standing," she says. "I'm not used to it."

"It takes a while," I say. We need to get better shoes for Lee, comfortable, stylish flats. I changed into jeans and sneakers like usual after work, but Lee kept her blouse and skirt.

"It's nice to be in this body full time," she says. Before our move when she was still dressing as a guy, Lee stripped her shirt and tie after work and put on stockings and a dress.

On evenings when Aunt Florence isn't pulling a late shift at the diner, she works with Lee on refining her female mannerisms: keeping her legs together, crossed or uncrossed, swishing her hips slightly when she walks, gesturing with her hands when she talks. Lee has practiced these things for years and I think she does fine, but she wants more feedback.

On nights when Aunt Florence works, Lee and I have a quick dinner then drive to a bar near the edge of town where it's easy to be anonymous. I order a beer, Lee has a glass of red wine, and we practice our voices. I'm trying to speak in a lower register so people take me seriously. That was after one of the tellers at my old bank compared my tone to a cheerful pixie. I think she meant it as a compliment, but I was appalled. I want to be a dusky alto who commands respect.

"I'll go doctor hunting next week," Lee says. "That or drive back to Chicago like I said I wouldn't do. I also didn't think I'd be a bank teller."

I pat her hand across the table. "It's a start."

"I didn't burn all the bridges at the old job," she says. "Can't throw away that schooling and experience. Yet."

"Would you ask them for references?" I say.

"When hell freezes over," she says. "But stranger things have happened."

AT WORK LEE PRACTICES her voice in comfortable snatches:

"How may I help you?"

"Would you like ones or fives?"

"Thank you for your business. Have a lovely afternoon." She pops Tylenol in the break room—I think her feet and back give her more problems than her voice—and she stays with the teller job for a month before quitting. The work is repetitive, there's not much problem-solving, and wearing a plastic smile is tiring.

"I have to be okay with making less money," she says to herself and me when we go to the bar. "It's a stupid economic reality. But I need to find something less mind-numbing."

"Gee, thanks," I say.

"You're used the rhythm," she says. "And you want to save energy for your artwork. I need something with more substance, but none of the higher-ups at the bank are women."

I nod. Welcome to girlhood.

'Two days later, Aunt Florence a job lead. One of her regulars at the diner said an office position came open at the insurance agency where he works.

"It's mostly customer service and paperwork," she says. "But I know Steve, the guy who owns the agency. He's a good customer and a fair tipper." Aunt Florence puts in a good word for Lee as an organized person with office experience. After a fifteen-minute phone chat with Steve, Lee wins an interview for the following Monday. She can't sleep the night before, tosses and turns beside me, but lands the job after a half-hour conversation.

"They were desperate," she tells me that evening. "Steve was was overjoyed I could type forty words a minute."

By week's end, she's answering phones, gathering forms, relaying questions to agents, and getting paper cuts. Aunt Florence hears through the diner grapevine that Lee is a hit.

"She has a reputation for retaining customers who call with questions about increases to their premiums," Aunt Florence tells us at breakfast.

"It's not difficult," says Lee. "You help people imagine the worst thing that could happen and say you can help them avoid it."

There's no sales pitch like old-fashioned fear. Over the next month Lee makes an uneasy peace with the job and devotes more time to thinking about her gestures.

"There's so much to remember," she says. "Like your head tilt. Do you think about your head tilt?"

"I have a head tilt?" I say.

"Exactly," says Lee. "It's a very feminine head tilt."

"What's the difference between a feminine head tilt and a masculine head tilt?"

"What masculine head tilt?" she says.

Before Lee and I became friends, my only concern with gender was when I could wear jeans, when I couldn't wear jeans, and when I had to wear makeup. Now I know she watches me shuffle around the kitchen as I make grilled cheese sandwiches and move like a girl, though most days I don't feel very girly.

Before we moved, Lee dragged me out to go roller skating or hiking on the weekends, but being a woman in the world exhausts her. She's started spending Saturday afternoons at the library where she shares cigarettes with Nance, the local history librarian, and checks out books about local ghosts, monsters, and assorted demons.

"Nance wrote two of them based on legends she collected from older folks," Lee tells me. She loves any story that could be the plot of a B horror flick, so I'm not surprised when she asks if I want to take a road trip on Sunday.

"An hour and a half east of here there's a cemetery where one of the stones doesn't want to stay put." Lee coughs. "They move it to the back of the graveyard, but a week later it's by the front again. It's supposed to be the ghost of a young woman. Worth checking out."

WE DON'T TAKE FLOWERS to the cemetery but Peanut M&Ms, which Lee likes, licorice whips, which I like, and Lemonheads, which we both like. We need something to eat on the drive, and something to leave for Gudrun, the girl with the wandering headstone. She was twenty-seven when she died, younger than me, though I know medical care wasn't good at the time.

I'm in charge of our maps and rub my hands together as we drive.

Lee glances sideways at me. "You achy or nervous?"

"Achy," I say. It's not a lie since my joints are stiff from the week at work, though graveyards make me anxious. I blame Lee offer dragging me to scary movies, though I never declined the offer of a ticket and all the Junior Mints I cared to eat.

It's three in the afternoon when we reach the cemetery. Lee had cranked up Carly Simon and Stevie Wonder on the radio, which makes the graveyard seem less imposing until she turns off the engine. The cemetery is appropriately gothic, with ivy-covered wrought iron gates, tombstones with engravings so weathered it's nearly invisible, and no other car in sight.

Lee parks along the shoulder, I grab the bag of candy, and we begin our hunt for Gudrun. Many of the markers are a century-and-a-half old. Some are tiny, and others are much larger and look like four-foot-high replicas of the Washington Monument. Lee and I wander for a good twenty minutes, peering at faint letters until an older lady wearing coveralls and a wide-brimmed blue gardening bat comes tromping through the grass.

"You looking for Gudrun?" she says. "That's usually the case when folks seem like they don't know where they're going. Guddie is real popular."

"We brought licorice for her," I say holding out the bag so she knows we come as friends.

"And Peanut M&Ms," says Lee.

"Aren't you the sweetest," the lady says and introduces herself as Tilda, the cemetery groundskeeper and archivist.

"Guddie's over here," she says, marching us toward the front of the cemetery. "Least for the moment. I'm sure they'll move her back, but the maintenance department is getting sick of it. Takes them longer to come every time. I figure one day they'll just leave her be."

"Why won't they do that now?" says Lee.

Tilda shrugs. "They say the stone has to go with the body. I say it don't make much difference long as they're both in the cemetery, but town council don't mind me on those matters. They want me to keep the records straight and the grass mowed."

As we walk, Lee lights a cigarette. Tilda takes her own pack of Marlboros from her pocket and asks for a light. After an appreciative puff, she tells us more about Gudrun. There are at least eight different stories about how she died, and probably more that don't get repeated as much. In one version she succumbed after childbirth—the county doctor was a twit—and she wanted to be near the front of the cemetery so he'd see her stone every day when he drove past in his buggy.

Another story claimed she died in the county asylum after she was sent there by her husband. He wanted to get a divorce and had her ruled insane, then hid her tombstone in the back of the cemetery after she passed.

A third tale suggests she was run over by a carriage owned by one of the richest men in town, who also had the largest and most expensive stone at the front of the graveyard. Even in death, Gudrun wouldn't let him upstage her.

Here she is," says Tilda, stopping by a rounded marble head-stone with an angel sitting on top. "The angel chipped one of its wings a while back, but that hasn't stopped Guddie from flying where she pleases. That stone may look small, but it's over three hundred pounds. Harold's got a bad back and Guddie's wearing him down. She'll have her way in the end.

I place three pieces of licorice in front of the angel and wonder what kind of expression she had when newly carved. She looks like she's kind smirking, but maybe that's my dream of poetic justice. Lee adds a handful of M&Ms to my offering, then gives some to me and Tilda who nods her thanks and tells us to have a lovely whatever-this-is.

There's a lesson in that," Lee says after Tilda resumes her grass-tending duties. "Someone tries to put you in your place, you just move. They put you back, you move again. And again. And again. Until their back gives out."

"How do we make their back give out faster?" I say.

"Numbers," says Lee, eating another Peanut M&M. "The more of you there are, the harder it is to move you."

NOW THAT SHE'S befriended a historian with a penchant for the paranormal, Lee has a new destination for us every weekend.

"We have to go to this town where there are mutant people living in the woods," she tells me one evening at the bar. "They were victims of a government experiment."

"Its sounds like a movie I saw with my cousin Roger when we were in high school," I say. Lee flips through her notebook undaunted.

"There's a lizard man who lives along the river near Loveland, a ghost dog that haunts the lawn around a county courthouse and sniffs people's rears, and a haunted pond with a farm at the bottom," she says.

"A ghost dog that sniffs rears?" I say.

"The pond was created when a hydroelectric dam was built." says Lee. "This farmer was kicked off his land and wasted away with grief. Now he sits on the bank looking mournful. If you see him, you're supposed to give him a beer."

"What kind of dog?" I ask.

"There's also a haunted bus just outside of Youngstown that picks up passengers and doesn't drop them off. We might not look for that one." She flips to the next page. "A couple of years ago in Defiance, people reported there was a werewolf running around shaking the doors to their houses and trying to get inside."

"How did they know it was a werewolf if they didn't open the doors?"

"The newspaper article said it was a hairy, grunting creature," says Lee. "We could hang out in a park around dusk and see what happens."

"We'll never be seen again," I say. "Except maybe for smeared blood."

"We'll get burgers for dinner," she says. "And an extra for the werewolf. Maybe it would like to chat, but everyone runs away screaming."

"I dunno," I say. "At least a couple of them might be pissed and vengeful."

"You bring the silver bullets, I'll bring the burgers," she says. "This weekend it'll be an easy drive. About an hour from here, there was an old orphanage that burned down a century ago. The ghosts of the kids who died leave handprints on your car if you come at dusk."

"Why can't we go see the dog?"

"That's the weekend after next," says Lee.

ON FRIDAY EVENING we spend a half-hour at the grocery store debating what kind of candy to buy for ghost children. Wrapped or unwrapped? Hard or chewy? Fruity or chocolate? Peanut butter, caramel, or peppermint? We settle on butterscotch disks, peppermints, and Lee's Peanut M&Ms.

"Did the legend explain why the kids died?" I ask Lee on the drive. "Didn't anyone yell an alarm?"

"I don't know." Lee wrinkles her eyebrows. "I'd prefer to think it I was a smoky fire and they drifted off in their sleep."

I nod. The other option is too terrible to consider.

"What if we bring a ghost kid home?'' I say. "They might be bored of hanging out in a field."

"We'll but leave I imagine candy so we they're not tempted to be hitchers," she says, but I imagine we could still get invisible riders in the back seat who'd sneak cookies from Aunt Florence's kitchen and spread crumbs across the floor. We'd need to have a séance. Maybe the kid would be willing to chat. I'd like to know what they thought of the world seventy years after they died, now that we have cars and televisions and radios and indoor plumbing and microwaves and environmental degradation and public service announcements with pictures of mushroom clouds. Maybe after a couple evening news broadcasts about Soviet summits, broken arms reduction treaties, and Vietnam, the kid would go back to the forest.

LEE HUMS IN THE MORNING when she puts on her makeup and kisses me after breakfast, but when I pick her up from work in the afternoon the color has drained from her cheeks. This new life must be a combination of euphoria and fear. She can wear skirts and dresses and cute shoes. She can reapply her lipstick mid-day. She can walk into the ladies' room at work because there is only one toilet, but she worries she'll forget to lock the door. When she orders red wine at the bar, the waiter replies, "Yes, ma'am."

As we wait for our drinks, I note the tension in her shoulders, her fingers, her mouth. So many reminders must be pealing in her brain: Sit up. Tilt your head. Legs together. Cross your ankles. Don't take such a large swallow. At least for now, she can't break the fragile myth of what womanhood is supposed to be.

I ENJOY OUR TRIPS down graveled roads, passing cornfields and barns and country churches with graveyards populated by wildflowers and scattered tombstones. We roll down the windows and turn up the radio, nodding to farmers in pickups. I watch for cop cars and sheriffs' deputies, anyone who might pull us over for going three miles past the speed limit.

For years it's been easy for me to float under the radar as a brand of tomboy. My last romantic relationship was with a guy who seemed vanilla until he turned hippie and moved to California to experiment with psychedelics. But now I'm with Lee. In love with Lee. Terrified at what some guy who says he's in law enforcement might do if he stopped us. I've never confronted this pressure of fear, but the police are more frightening that any ghost, lizard man, or werewolf.

Lee asked her doctor in Chicago to copy part of a letter that Dr. Harry Benjamin described in his book The Transsexual Phenomenon, which she's read three times. It's a note he gives to patients undergoing estrogen therapy:

To Whom it May Concern: This is to certify that the bearer, __________, is under my professional care and observation. This patient belongs to the rather rare group of transsexuals, also referred to in the medical literature as psychic hermaphrodites. Their anatomical sex, that is to say, the body, is male. Their psychological sex, that is to say, the mind, is female. Therefore they feel as women, and if they live and dress as such, they do so out of an irrepressible inner urge, and not to commit a crime, to "masquerade," or to "impersonate" illegally. It is my considered opinion, based on many years' experience, that transsexuals are mostly introverted and nonaggressive and therefore no threat to society. In their feminine role they can live happier lives and they are usually less neurotic than if they were forced to live as men. I do not think that society is endangered when it assumes a permissive attitude, and grants these people the right to their particular pursuit of happiness. Like all patients of this type, __________ has been strictly advised to behave well and inconspicuously at all times and to be careful in choosing friends.

Lee's doctor signed the note at the bottom, a scrawl I can't read, but it looks official. She keeps the note in her purse and has four Xerox copies in a folder in case anyone snatches the original. That's happened to people with similar notes.

"Some cops will rip it up in front of your face," Lee says, but I'm glad for the insurance, no matter how small. I also don't want her traveling alone.

LEE DOESN'T LIKE that I refer to our road trips as the Tour of Terror, so I only do that in my head. This time we're going to a pond where a school bus rammed through the metal barricade and disappeared into the water. No one board bus was seen again, but locals claim the children who were on that bus grew fins and gills and turned into mer-kids.

"Why are so many legends about dead children?" I ask.

"People like tragedy," says Lee. "Have you ever listened to folk songs? Everybody dies."

Twenty seconds later, my heart speeds up when a pickup races past us, skirting too close. A cop car with blazing lights is quick to follow. Lee pulls to the side of the road as we watch dust from both vehicles settle. We glance at each other, exchanging a wordless expletive. She keeps a steady two miles under the speed limit as we continue the drive.

There's a metal guardrail along the road beside the pond and a white wooden fence around the bank. There are no monuments, markers, or battered silk flowers, but Lee says she's sure this is the pond we're looking for. She parks on the shoulder just after the guardrail. We wade through the grass and undo the latch on the gate, then spread our offering of lemon drops and peppermints at the water's edge. Lee skips stones across the pond while I think about being a kid on a field trip, drowsing in my seat or trying to read as some jerk behind me yanks my hair, then sensing the sudden swerve, my body jolting as the bus crashes through the guardrail—

Would there have been time to scream?

The kids must have panicked, then . . . they grew fins? Gills? Morphed into mer-children, their tears mingling with the pond as the gift from a forgotten water spirit changed their bodies into ones that could survive under the ripples?

"How long would it take to get used to eating algae?" I ask Lee. "Once you were part enchanted fish, would it be gross or taste like a cheeseburger?"

"They're only part fish," says Lee. "I'd think cheeseburgers or algae would be fine."

I'm not convinced it would be so easy, but I'm a picky eater. Perhaps the mer-kids expanded their palates and still enjoy peppermints. Can they poke their heads out of the pond to get the treats we left? I was never good at swimming so if I turned into a mer-person it would have benefits, but the algae-eating leaves me unnerved.

On the way home we stop at a silver pillbox diner. The white tile floor looks like it hasn't been mopped for a week, though the smell of French fry grease is intoxicating. The walls are decorated with photographs of the Little League team the diner sponsors, and each table holds a milk glass vase with a red carnation. Behind the counter a solo waitress with gray curls chats with a couple old guys. She waves at us and the expanse of booths.

"Sit anywhere," she says. Lee wears her new pink Vans, trying to cultivate a slight hip swish without the reminder of dress shoes. The waitress brings iced tea. She nods when Lee orders a tuna melt with French fries. I order a cheeseburger, but Lee gives me a long gaze.

"I thought you were easing up on cheeseburgers; she says.

"Mom wants me to ease up on cheeseburgers." I shouldn't have told her about my mother's latest theory that red meat exacerbates hereditary arthritis. I didn't think Lee would take it seriously. "I thought you were easing up on smokes."

"Not while I'm researching local history," she says. It comes in handy that we both have vices.

LEE ISN'T HAPPY TO DISCOVER that the Lizard Man near Loveland is also the town mascot. Drawings of his slim form and a couple grainy photos are featured on T-shirts, postcards, and shot glasses sold at the gas station. They also sell homemade jams, and we buy one for Aunt Florence since we need something to show for our drive. The lady working the register says gooseberry is her favorite.

"Dammit," Lee says when we get back to the car. "I don't feel like looking for the Lizard Man since I've seen him on a T-shirt."

"I'm not surprised they've commodified him," I say. "Look at Halloween. Spooks, sugar, and capitalism."

"Guess we need to find less popular legends," says Lee. "How do you feel about axe murderers?"

"I prefer the Lizard Man," I say.

"It's only two o'clock," Lee says, meaning the gooseberry jam won't be enough for this weekend. We drive an additional three hours to search for the ghost dog that wanders around the county courthouse. The sun is too high when we arrive-the dog only appears at dusk-but we walk the grounds, sit on iron benches, and anticipate the poke of an invisible wet nose.

At six thirty, Lee allows that we can take our jam and go home. She doesn't mention looking for axe murders, which is fine since I'm haunted by too many things already: my stupid joints, fear of being fired if I miss too many days at work, fear of Lee being assaulted in a dark parking lot, not being able to get surgery, or surgery being too expensive.

Maybe the Tour of Terror is Lee trying to direct her search for danger and distract herself from dangers we can't avoid. That's the logic I turn to the following weekend when she convinces me to look for werewolves. That amounts to us sitting in her car in a park at dusk. waiting for something to happen.

"Do you think the werewolf was hunting," I ask Lee, "or being hunted?"

"That's what I want to ask." says Lee.

According to Lee's newspaper reports, the werewolf was going around town pounding on doors late at night. There are many reasons for door-pounding.

Let me in! Something's chasing me!

Let me in! I'm in danger!

Come out! Someone is in danger!

Come out! You're in danger!

How do you distinguish any of those kinds of pounding from I'm a danger!

"What if the werewolf was looking for a safe place to hide?" I say to Lee. "How would you know unless you opened the door? But who'd open the door for a werewolf?"

We pause and listen to the cicadas.

"I don't think I could," I say. Speaking that idea aloud makes me feel strangely ashamed, but it's easy to imagine the werewolf going for my throat.

"I want to say I'd crack the door to see what the werewolf needed," says Lee, "but I forget how dark small towns can get at night."

"You're willing to look for the werewolf now," I say.

"Yeah." She reaches for the Peanut M&Ms in her purse. "While we have a getaway car." I hear the crinkle of the M&M bag, the crinkle of the letter from her doctor, and consider what I'd say if a werewolf came loping by.

"Have some licorice," would be the first thing, which would give us a moment to pause and chew. Not talking can be more difficult than talking, but after we got used to the werewolf and the werewolf got used to us, it might not look that scary. We could go from there.

Issue 92: Teresa Milbrodt

About Teresa Milbrodt

Teresa Milbrodt has published three short story collections: Instances of Head-Switching, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities. She has also published a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories, and a monograph, Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality. Milbrodt earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, and her PhD in English from the University of Missouri. She is addicted to coffee, long walks with her MP3 player, and writes the occasional haiku. Read more of her on her website.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Coffee with Werewolves"

I started work on a novel-in-stories about Lee and Mattie at the beginning of the pandemic. I'd been researching the disability rights movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, and when I chatted about my project with a friend they wondered aloud what the experience of queer disabled people might have been at the time. That question launched me into a series of stories about Lee and Mattie, all of which are tinged with a sense of loss and displacement. Since beginning this project I've done research at queer archives, a fabulous experience which made it easier and more difficult to evoke the mood of the time. While some communities were fairly progressive regarding queerness and queer politics, those often existed in small pockets. It's been challenging to strike a tone that feels authentic without duplicating harmful stereotypes or my 2023 sensibilities. Overall, though, this is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I've had as a writer.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Nine Things that Bring Me Joy and/or Peace (in no particular order):
1. Growing cherry tomatoes, giant zinnias, and kale.
2. Taking long walks with my partner during which they explain the intricacies of their latest tabletop roleplaying game.
3. Inventing cookie and brownie recipes during episodes of stress baking.
4. Washing dishes to ‘80s music.
5. Repairing my partner's jewelry.
6. Drying zinnia heads to save seeds for planting next spring.
7. Daydreaming about picking up various skills like how to do plumbing.
8. Appeasing my cat by letting her drink from the bathroom sink (my partner taught her that).
9. Texting hugs.

“Coffee With Werewolves” by Teresa Milbrodt

By Donhiser, Fiona | October 25, 2023

Found in Willow Springs 92 Back to Author Profile LEAVING TOWN IS AN ESCAPE in slow motion. As I load boxes into the back of Lee’s Ford Maverick, it feels like we’re in one of those horror movies she loves, fleeing danger when we can’t see who’s chasing us. With Vietnam, Watergate, and all the Soviet … Read more

Issue 92: Julie Marie Wade

About Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Catechism: A Love Story, SIX: Poems, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History, out now from New Michigan Press, and Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize, out now from Autumn House.

Check out her website and Facebook.

More on Julie can be found here, here, and here.

Denise Duhamel, Julie Marie Wade, and Maureen Seaton (left to right) at their joint book launch in 2021.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "What is Far From Heaven" and "What is Rear Window"

These two poems, "What is Far From Heaven?" and "What is Rear Window?," belong to the “Spoiler Alerts” category of my new manuscript, This Is Jeopardy! I grew up watching Alex Trebek host Jeopardy! every night on our tiny television set in the kitchen. If we finished dinner early enough, we got to watch on the bigger screen downstairs. In a home where much was fraught much of the time, Jeopardy! offered us a televisual neutral ground. Everyone could agree that Alex Trebek was a good host and that responding to questions with fixed answers was a safe activity.

Some of my best memories are of watching Jeopardy! with my parents during dinner, or afterwards with popcorn and Shasta, learning things I didn't know already and feeling pleased when I got the answer, in the form of a question, right. Years after I left home, I dreamed that my parents and I were the three contestants on an episode of Jeopardy! I didn't like the idea that only one of us could win—that two of us would have to lose in order for a single winner to emerge—but in some ways, that condition also mirrored the dynamic in my first home.

Of the dream, I only remember that the Final Jeopardy! category was "The Future." None of us knew the right answer, which is to say none of us had the right question in mind. This dream inspired me to begin writing my own poems-qua-clues.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I've been listening to Dolly Parton's cover of "Let It Be" a lot recently. I love Dolly Parton in general, and I love the song "Let It Be," so the combination of artist and song is a double love. My friend Maureen Seaton--who, long before I ever even knew her, was a poet whose work inspired me to stretch, to innovate beyond what I thought possible in a poem--passed away on August 26th. No doubt many readers recognize her name and work, are missing her presence in this world just as I am.

For several years, I was lucky to live in South Florida within walking-running distance from Maureen's home near Hollywood Beach. Now that she is gone, I still run past her small apartment on Hayes Street, just a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Broadwalk, almost every day. I listen to Dolly Parton, who reminds me of Maureen: the talent, the vitality, the boundlessness of spirit.

I think how Maureen helped teach me how to write a terza rima, which I never imagined I could write—and likely couldn't on my own. With Maureen's long-time friend and collaborator Denise Duhamel, now my long-time friend and collaborator too, we wrote a terza rima for Dolly Parton: 75 lines for Dolly's 75^th birthday. I wrote the middle lines, the center of each tercet, turning the language between my two great poetry heroes. It reminded me of how generous they are, how they had made a space in their friendship to include me.

Two Poems by Julie Marie Wade

By Donhiser, Fiona | October 25, 2023

Found in Willow Springs 92 Back to Author Profile What is Far From Heaven? $800 There’s a blue car as long as a boat-Melancholy motorized & sailing. There’s a woman in a red coat with a lavender scarf who always looks ravishing, especially when she stands on the platform watching a salient train depart. Ravishing is the word she’ll convince … Read more

Two Poems by Julie Marie Wade

Found in Willow Springs 92

Back to Author Profile

**What is Far From Heaven? $800**

There's a blue car as long as a boat—Melancholy motorized & sailing. There's a woman in a red coat with a lavender scarf who always looks ravishing, especially when she stands on the platform watching a salient train depart. Ravishing is the word she'll convince her husband to use as she coaxes a dance floor compliment: "It's a ravishing dress & a ravishing girl to go with it," he says, looking the part in his fancy white tux. That's how they ring in the New Year—1958—with a twist & a kiss & a lie. Her husband doesn't want to ravish her, in any archaic sense, & he isn't ravished by her, in any modern. He can see how pretty she is, how worried she is, how much she longs to please him, but as we know too well, it's the body that serves as a polygraph for all of our desires. Not what the words say, not what the clothes say, but how the flesh ignites in the presence, or even at the mention, or one desired. This film came out the same year I did. A friend saw it & said "Don't go. It's so depressing." The star is a woman I'd admired for years, not just with my head but also my body. What was that in the presence, or even at the mention, of men? Of course I went to the movie. When Frank sobs on a sofa in the dark, then tells Cathy, "I've fallen in love with someone," my first thought was How sad to be so sad about love! But hadn't I, just a few months before, wept on a sofa in the dark, then told the man I'd promised to marry, "I've fallen in love with someone"? Another friend said, "You'll really like this film. I mean, you were basically raised in the 1950s, with your family's whole generational time-warp thing." Maybe, in 2002, I wasn't as evolved as I thought. Were any of us then—and are we now? Frank still sobbing in the dark: "I tried . . . I tried so hard to make it go away!" Was it like that for me, too, a conscious denial, detecting my own lies & then grinding them down like guilty cigarettes into the earth? Or was I the Cathy of my story, murmuring "I don't understand" & meaning it. She's in the dark, & there's this whole other part of herself she's struggling to admit exists, whether or not her husband ever comes out. Desire, as we know too well, has a way of ravishing us, by rapture & by force. "I think of him, I do," Cathy confides in her friend, & by him, she doesn't mean Frank, & by think, she doesn't mean only with her mind. Anyone watching can feel the swarm of bees humming, can see the hot flush come over her face as she insists, "Nothing happened . . ." And that nothing she protests too much is about Raymond, a Black man in a barely integrated town who becomes her gardener & her friend, who opens the red door of his pick-up for her just that once—the only time he ever picked her up—which led to vicious talk, which led to violence, which led to Raymond & his daughter leaving everything behind as they climb aboard that salient train bent for Baltimore. Cathy didn't seem to know that two men could desire each other, even when she walked in on her husband in another man's embrace. She didn't seem to know that people of different races could desire each other, even when she was one of the ones who desired. On a street corner, uncoaxed by anyone, & harshly scrutinized by a group of white pedestrians, Cathy tells Raymond, "You're so beautiful." This is true, but not the whole truth. She means but doesn't say: "You're so beautiful to me." Afterwards, she runs away weeping. How sad to be so sad about love! I, too, come from a sad, beautiful place. Blue cars everywhere & Fauntlee Hills echoes those homogeneous Hartford vibes, strapped to a past that is perhaps more with us today than we would want, or are able, to recognize. In exchange for the illusion of safety comes that danger Raymond names—"mixing in other worlds." His eyes are wet with tears as he conveys to Cathy his regrets. I wonder: what do we lose, what do we gain, when we realize "things are pretty well finished for [us] here"? And what do we lose, or gain, when we realize here is pretty much everywhere?

**What is Rear Window? $1000**

Pretend the blinds in the film are theater curtains. They rise at the start & fall at the end, with the smooth efficiency of a stage play. For the audience, everything is clearly demarcated—our living room, his living room; our neighbors milling about; his neighbors mills about. Note elements of the mise-en-scène: Courtyard. Flower bed. Fire escape. Note the extras, whom we now call background artists: Cat scurrying up the stairs. Sleeping man supine on his balcony. Woman brushing her hair before the bathroom mirror. And there's our protagonist in his wheelchair, left leg rigid in a cast. No chance of conflating ourselves with his story, which makes it a safe place to be scared. In fact, it's the kind of place a girl can follow her father to on a Saturday afternoon—popcorn with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! spray, Shasta in sweating cans—as they begin to lose their easy way with each other. No need to talk about anything but the movie, & no one in the audience to shush & scold them as they do. It's a grisly tale of dismemberment without a drop of blood. It's a sly romance without nudity; no covers undulating with the faintest suggestions of sex. Most of all—& what the girl won't realize for many years—it's the ultimate adventure in meta-viewing: this prolonged occasion of watching someone who's watching someone who doesn't know he's being watched. Until the final ten minutes, that is. (Talk about a quick climax! But don't.) You could argue that productions of stage & screen are consensual acts of voyeurism. The character doesn't know you're watching, but the actor does. In fact, the actor desperately hopes you are. His success depends on your unwillingness to turn away. But this one's different. The whole premise is how rubbery our human necks are, bendier & bendier until they run the risk of being snapped. Jeffries isn't just bored in his last home-bound week with nothing to do but gawk & stare. HIs long career as a photo-journalist confirms he's a scopophile from the start—just as I am, just as you are. Remember the moment early on when he tells his nurse, "Right now I'd welcome trouble"? (Words he'll shortly wish to rescind.) Well, I wanted it too—that trouble. A mystery to solve. A triumph to claim. Some means of making myself useful. This longing to sleuth was something my father always humored in me. He played along with all the whodunnits & howdunnits & whys. It was easier, I suppose, than facing our actual mystery (my mother, his wife), the story we were living that we couldn't quite allow ourselves to believe. Jeff's nurse, Stella, tells him in a thoughtful moment I necessarily stowed away: "We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house & look for a change." I thought she meant it as a metaphor: Detect yourself! Maybe even meant it biblically: Take the plank out of your own eye & so forth. But then I recalled those lines many years later, slumped down in my seat, idling in a car outside my parents' house before circling & circling the block. I couldn't go in, you see. I couldn't even consider the possibility of a knock. But I could watch. Around the corner was my grandmother's house. I saw the light on in her den, the room where she played Solitaire, left the television blaring. She was hard of hearing in her old age, & I told myself I didn't want to scare her by pounding on a window in the dark. (Convenient alibi for my own fragile heart.) This film's arc spans only four days while min spans twenty years, continues still without an end in sight. No insight either. So when I say I was outside my own house looking in, I don't mean once, & I don't mean metaphorically. I mean, every time I fly across the country, it's the first thing I do. Rent a car at Sea-Tac. Take the back way down slick, suburban streets, wet light puddling in potholes. No intention of going in. No point rehearsing what to say. Just looking, just scanning the landscape for all the hard familiars—camellia tree in the mise-en-scène, weather vane that bears their changeless names. What if Jeffries's inmost truth is that he actually wants to be seen, which is to say confronted, caught? He'll face his consequence in flashbulbs, a string of frantic lights. At least then, when he plummets, he'll be looking up, gaze locked with a knowing stranger's eyes.

“If You Only Knew” by Bill Gaythwaite

Found in Willow Springs 92

Back to Author Profile

BEFORE MY FATHER RUNS OFF, he suddenly showers us all with attention. It's jarring at first, like having someone crowd next to you on a bus when there are plenty of seats in back. There's something desperate about it, but I'm not thinking this at the time. I'm just thrilled to be part of his world, because up until then he has been a shadowy figure, a supporting player in our lives. He's a busy executive, a senior vice-president at a famous insurance company in Boston, coming home late most nights from work after my brother and I are in bed. I wait up for him, for his late-night, one minute check-ins, first to Wiley's room across the hall and then to mine. He stands at the foot of my bed as he loosens his tie, squeezes my big toe.

"You awake, Sport?" he says.

I always make sure to keep my toes peeking out from under the covers so he can grab one, but because of pride or stubbornness I never say a word before he walks away.

He goes to the office most weekends as well, and when he doesn't, he leaves the house at dawn to play golf, which he tells us is work-related, too. For business contacts. He calls golf a necessary evil, as if he's talking about a flu shot in the ass.

It is 1975.

He calls my mother every afternoon, usually to say he'll be taking the last train out of the city to our little suburb.

"Why does he do that?" I ask her once after she puts the phone back on its hood. We are standing in the kitchen, the afternoon sun coursing through the windows, spilling over the Formica countertops. "Like he's telling you something you don't already know."

I have just turned thirteen and am getting a mouth on me.

"He likes to keep me informed," Ma says.

There might be an edge to her voice when my mother tells me this, or I might be remembering it that way, adding it in after the fact, like a sound effects engineer.

"Anyway," I tell her, "you should suggest he save his calls for some really big news, like when he's planning to make it home in time for a meal with his family."

"Now, Kevin," she sighs, "don't be so dramatic."

I already have a reputation.

"Ma!" I shout. "He's never here! Wiley pointed to the weatherman on Channel 4 the other day and asked if he was our father!"

My little brother, of course, has never said such a thing; because he's ten years old and knows better, but I still see the impact of my wise-ass words flash across Ma's face like brush fire. Soon after this, it is summer, and they are remodeling my dad's offices and he is suddenly home full time, and this is when the attention starts. He lavishes himself on us. When it happens, I am willing to forgive everything that has come before. I am powerless against it anyway. It's like a natural disaster. He's my dad.

He takes Wiley and me to Fenway three times during those weeks to watch the Red Sox play. We win every time. At least my memory has it that way. My dad gets chummy with the guys selling concessions at the Park, introduces himself to everybody sitting in our section and makes up nicknames for total strangers. He slaps people on the back too, as if he's running for political office. but like with real candidates, this routine seems to divide the crowd. He makes an impression alright, but I notice a few folks tum away and shrink back as if from an exposed power line. My brother 15 crazy out of his mind for Fred Lynn that summer, the rookie center fielder for the Sox who is having a phenomenal season. Every time the big guy comes up to the plate or lopes out to his position, Wiley stands up, waves his arms like a castaway and yells "Frrreeedie!!!!" in his shrill little voice. I am at the age when I get embarrassed by anything that causes strangers to look in my direction. I smack Wiley with my baseball glove and tell him to shut up. We always bring our gloves to snag foul balls, but they never come anywhere near us.

Ease up on your brother, Sport," Dad says and softly cuffs my ear. It is tough to be angry at Wiley. He is a sweet-natured, cheerful kid and we rarely fight, which even then I realize is beyond miraculous for brothers. We love all the usual things about Fenway, the hot dogs, the hum of excitement, the quirky beauty of the place. Some years later, when I am flying over Ireland on my first trip abroad, I finally see colors that can compete with my lush green memory of that painstakingly maintained playing field. In Dublin I buy a postcard with a standard aerial shot and send it off to Wiley at Bucknell, scribbling "Frrreeedie!!!!" on the back. I know he'll understand. We're brothers. We have joint custody over certain memories, visitation rights.

My mother doesn't come to the games, but she loves to hear us talk about them when we get home. Wiley spins with excitement, almost frothing at the mouth with it. He can remember every play, every moment and he acts it all out like a stage production. And Ma says "oohhh" and "ahhh" in all the right places, like she's been waiting her whole life to hear such stories. Dad and I hang back a bit, off to the side, his arm draped across my shoulders, while we watch the show with big wide grins on our faces.

WE DO A LOT OF THINGS TOGETHER as a family that summer. It's just ordinary stuff, but it's more than we've ever done before. We go to the Stoneham Zoo and the Aquarium at Central Wharf in Boston and a Mel Brooks movie which my mother worries about being too adult for Wiley and me.

"Lighten up, Gwen," Dad tells her in the refreshment line, as she gawks nervously at Teri Garr's cleavage prominently featured in the lobby poster. He gives Ma a friendly hug. Then he looks over her shoulder, catches my eye and winks, like we are sailors on shore leave.

We drive up to a beach on the North Shore during the week, when it isn't so crowded. Dad does a perfect backflip on the sand, teaches us how to body surf. The ocean is freezing and Ma forces us to get out when our lips turn a phosphorescent blue. On our way home we are sunburnt and gritty with sand, our hair stiff with salt. An announcer on the car radio mentions the first rendezvous in space between the Apollo and Soyuz spacecrafts. a hopeful sign for U.S. and Soviet relations and it adds to the optimism of the day.

At home that summer, after dinner, which we once again are sharing as a family, my father can't sit still. He moves and moves around the living room, telling jokes, doing his card tricks.

"Pick a card, any card, any card at all," he bellows, fanning the deck out in front of us like some Vegas hustler.

The tricks are lame, and I begin to figure them out, but Wiley ogles my dad as if he's a celebrity. And sometimes I can't help myself, so do I. My father was a jock in high school and college and he still has an athlete's muscular grace. He is handsome and confident, but it goes beyond his good looks, his golf tan and perfect teeth. He is a hot-shot businessman who is used to working a room. We are, I suppose, not unlike the people who report to him, a captive audience. Even that night I am aware he is performing. He wants something from us. Perhaps it is simple adoration, but much later the possibility will occur to me that we aren't in his thoughts at all.

My mother watches him too. She looks pretty and young in a pink sundress, wavy blonde hair falling across her eyes. She has always been quiet, and her movements are often slow and deliberate, like she is trying to coax small animals out of the woods. Like Wiley and me, she seems to be enjoying herself. as if she is giddy with good fortune. Though I wonder now if she was also on to my father in some way, but helpless in the face of his summer onslaught just like me.

The remodeling of my father's office is completed, and he goes back to work. We slip quietly into the old patterns, but the summer memories are fresh and real and they linger. We're still happy for a time. It is late August when I come downstairs and find my mother sitting at the kitchen table. She rarely sits around in the morning, so this is already suspicious. Usually she is preparing breakfast, putting it out for us, clearing it up. On this morning, though, she is dressed, but something isn't quite right about her. I think for a moment she is sick, but that would be truly unheard of. The dress she is wearing buttons up the front, but the buttons and holes aren't lined up right. I can see tiny ribbons of pink flesh through the material, the white of her bra. I am humiliated for both of us.

"Ma," I say, trying to advert my eyes, "your buttons are all messed up."

That's when she tells me that my dad has walked out. Her voice is flat and shocking, not like her own, or anyone's.

"Your father is gone," she says.

I know right away she doesn't mean he has simply left for work, but I ask her anyway, if that is what she means. She sits up very straight.

"He has a new job," she tells me, "a sort of promotion, a transfer to California. I didn't know until he started packing last night. He took all his clothes except the winter things. I have no other way to say it, Kevin, so I am just telling you. He's not coming back. Its not about you or Wiley, obviously nothing you could have done. He needed to leave and that's where we are."

She has rehearsed this in some manner, I think. It sounds fake, practiced, like a bad script. Or something Dear Abby might advise—what to tell your kids when your husband suddenly bails on you. She must have been saying it for hours, over and over in her head, while waiting for me to come downstairs, and this is the terrible way it came out. It is totally ridiculous.

I make her say it again.

I ask if they had a fight, and she says no. She says he told her after Wiley and I had gone to bed, after his nightly check-in. I try to think if he waited at my door or held my toe a little longer, but I can't remember. I might even have been asleep. After the summer we just had, I felt bloated with attention, almost sloppy with it. There had been no need for me to wait up for him anymore.

"Didn't you tell him to stay?"

"I suppose I did," My mother says carefully. She has slumped back down in the chair now, like the air has been let out of her.

"You suppose? Why didn't you kick and scream and make him?" I ask.

I'd seen plenty of TV dramas by this point and that's what jilted women usually did, but that wasn't Ma's style. A year before this she ran up and down the neighborhood cheering and waving an American flag when Nixon resigned, but that was a rare display of emotion. Usually, she's unflappable.

"Kevin, he's been plotting it, okay?" she is saying. "The company has rented him an apartment out there already. He has a brand new address. It's happening. He's on the plane right now. It's final"

She says this as if she can't quite believe it herself. I notice we are both shaking. I can hear the wall clock ticking off seconds above our heads, a reminder that our lives are moving on without us.

"Does he want to marry someone else?" I ask her.

In those same television movies men were always deserting families for other women.

"He wouldn't say," she tells me, but averts her eyes.

I take that as a yes.

I can hear Wiley pounding around upstairs.

That's when she slips me a plain sealed envelope. I honestly don't remember what my father had written. I know it seemed as phony as what my mother had told me, something about being a man, how I'd always be his son or some other foolish crap he scribbled down on his way to the door. What I do remember is the twenty-dollar bill that floats to the floor when I open the envelope. I let it land there. I don't pick it up. When I finish reading, I hand the note back to my mother without comment. I think she expects me to tear it up into tiny pieces or toss it down the garbage disposal, ever the little scene stealer, but it is totally worthless as it is. She stares at me and her eyes begin to well up. She is sorry for me. I can see that, and that is when I feel my own tears coming, unstoppable as a seizure. .

MY MOTHER HAS NEVER EVEN WRITTEN A CHECK before my father leaves for California. She has to get books about household finance out of the library. She takes it all very seriously and begins to get organized. About a week after my father leaves she gets a small blackboard and writes out assignments and duties for all of us.

"We never had to help with laundry before," I whine, scanning the list of chores under my name. "Neither did dad. You're passing off your own work."

"I have other things to worry about now" she says. "I need your help and your brother's. We have to be like a team."

"Sure, coach," I say, snapping my heels and giving her a salute.

Wiley is looking up at us both with a worried expression on his face.

"I'll help," he chirps.

"Pussy," I mumble at him.

My mother slaps me hard behind the ear, an unimaginable occurrence until that moment.

The three of us stand there stunned, unrecognizable, like visitors from another country, unsure of the official language.

"Do we understand each other?" my mother finally asks.

"Not really," I tell her, but she doesn't hit me again.

IT'S TRUE MY FATHER LEAVES for that promotion my mother mentioned. But I'm right too. There is a woman named Delores Cantwell, a junior executive at his company who is being transferred to California at the same time. She has blown up her own marriage to be with my dad, but not as gross on her end because she doesn't have any kids to ditch. Perhaps she was one of his weekend golfing buddies. I never meet this woman. A few months after my father and Delores arrive in San Diego, feeling, as one can imagine, optimistic about their future he is investigated for some financial and ethical improprieties. It's not quite embezzlement and the company does not press any charges, but my father is fired an finished in the insurance industry. Delores dumps him soon after. But instead of crawling back to us, my father stays in California to explore his options. He's a man who believes in making his own luck. I don't know all this at the time, but the essentials are pieced together later, as I get older, like the clues in a mystery novel.

We have the house, a three-bedroom Cape, in a modest neighborhood. My mother always refers to this as a mixed blessing. For years my father had been saying we'd move to a bigger place, in a more exclusive town, something more fitting with his growing importance at the company. He was only waiting for the right moment, but then he takes off for California before it every comes about.

The house has a number of problems, a leaky roof, air in the pipes, a crumbling foundation. It groans at night like someone in the terminal ward. My mother checks out more books—How To Be Your Own Electrician, How To Be Your Own Plumber. We all get pretty handy, in a general way. We can recognize all the tools and tackle the minor repairs ourselves. For the longest time Ma whispers "I can do this, I can do this" over and over, like it's her personal mantra, even if she is only changing a light bulb. And sometimes she mutters it as we pass in the hallway or sit at dinner, when there are no repairs in sight.

When my father loses his job in California, his checks stop coming, so my mother goes to work as a secretary in a law firm and takes classes part-time so she can become a teacher. That's when she is pleased we don't have such a fancy house. She'd never be able to handle higher mortgage payments on her own. I am worried about her becoming a teacher. I am in junior high now and teachers are known to have nervous breakdowns right in front of a class. Once, in Physical Science, we are passing a Playboy under our desks when a substitute, a tiny disheveled woman named Mrs. Hand, discovers it and starts calling us a bunch of dirty little bastards. She is screaming like the building is on fire, waving her arms about. The assistant principal finally has to come and drag her away. The last thing she says before she is led out the door (the magazine rolled up tight, like a baton, in her fist) is that she is planning to pray for us, for our immortal souls. Needless to say, we never see her again. But for months afterwards my friends and I greet each other in the hallways with hoots of, "How's it going, ya dirty little bastard?" while making the sign of the cross.

"You're not going to work at my school, are you Ma?" I ask one night when she gets home from class. It is my night to cook dinner, macaroni and cheese. Wily is setting the table. He has his own system. He doesn't like anything to match. The plates and glasses are an assortment of sizes, the silverware is from two separate patterns and each napkin is a different color. Since Dad left, my mother doesn't care about this stuff, so long as we eat.

"Don't sound so terrified, Kevin," she says.

"I'm not terrified. I was only wondering."

"Well, beggars can't be choosers."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I need to work."

"But Ma," I say.

"For Christ's sake, Kevin, if l get a job at your school I'll take an assumed name and wear a goddamned veil over my head. Okay?"

"You never used to swear."

"It's a new day," she tells me.

A YEAR OR SO after my father leaves us, my mother is still busy constructing our new life, and it is clear we are all going to survive, but that doesn't mean I am prepared for the next development. I come home from soccer practice one Saturday afternoon in September and find Oliver Voolich, the deli man from the First National, sitting on our sofa in the living room. It is a surreal moment for me, Voolich next to my mother, his hair slicked back, dressed in ill-fitting jeans and a plaid shirt. I am used to seeing him at the grocery store, paper hat perched on his head, greasy apron cinched at his waist, shouting our numbers for the next customer in line.

"Kevin, you know Mr. Voolich," my mother says, nodding in his direction.

"Yeah?" I grumble, but it comes out more like a question.

"You can call me Oliver," Voolich tells me.

"Hello Mr. Voolich," I say.

"Oliver has been kind enough to offer to help us put up the storm windows this year," Ma says.

Voolich appears to be blushing furiously, or perhaps his skin just looks blotchier out from behind the deli counter. He has the round, pinkish face and squinty eyes of a newborn. There is definitely something soft and infantile about the whole package, even though I place his age at forty-five or so. He is of average height, though slightly stooped, with wide hips, a mess of curly brown hair, and no discernible chin. When I later find out he lives in a single room above Shoe Town, this feels just about right and completes the picture.

At the deli counter, Voolich is patient and composed, good with difficult customers, scrupulously honest while administering the meat scale. But out here in the real world, hanging out in my living room, he is simply dull as rocks, so dull it hovers over him like body odor.

"We put up the windows by ourselves last year," I remind my mother, making sure not to make eye contact with our visitor.

"And we almost lost our lives in the process," Ma responds.

She has a point. The previous fall I had balanced precariously on top of the ladder while Ma hoisted windows up to me on the second floor. Wiley had steadied the ladder directly beneath us. We were like mountain climbers tied to one another. We knew we were in harm's way.

It's obvious that Voolich wants to be of assistance, but naturally I question his intentions. We don't need anyone new in our lives. The truth is we are doing okay. The three of us have found a certain groove of living together. If l consciously miss my father, it is in the evening when I remember his nightly check-in at the foot of my bed. Unlike most children of divorce, I hold no illusions about my parents reconciling. Although, since Wiley and I now are somewhat aware of Dad's financial scandal and the break with Delores, we half-expect him to show up one day on the doorstep, shame-faced and eager to be forgiven, like a runaway pet. This never happens wither. He barely keeps in touch with Wiley and me, while he's on his own twisted journey. Gifts arrive late, three months after our birthdays or Christmas. We suffer through phone calls laced with awkward silences. We get goofy, bizarre postcards from the guy. If you only knew how much I miss you, my father writes.

In the end, Voolich helps us with the windows, but the gawky sight of him on a ladder, drenched in sweat, laboring mercilessly, puts no one at ease.

"Good work, Oliver," my mother shouts up to him in an encouraging, anxious way as he finishes fastening the last one.

"Yeah, it's poetry in motion," I say quietly to Wiley who gives me a look like he doesn't want me to start anything.

After this, Voolich apparently feels confident enough to insinuate himself into our lives a couple of times a week, often arriving with a smoked ham or a cold cut platter. He is a deli man. If he were a carpet salesman, he might come bearing throw rugs and vacuum cleaner bags. Of course, by showing up with food, he can always count on an invitation to dinner, a fact he must have figured out for himself. My mother is always polite to him, but I notice she makes no other concession to his presence. When he joins us, she doesn't put on lipstick or tell Wiley the table settings need to match. Still, I can't be more disturbed than if my she were sitting on his lap and sticking a tongue in his ear. To my way of thinking, she is treating him far too casually, the way she does Wiley and me, her own family, the fixtures in her life. And I hate the notion of Voolich becoming a fixture in my life. To my now fourteen-year-old brain, his florid face and sagging body represent failure and despair. I am worried about what my friends will saay if they see him out with Ma. I can already hear a litany of hide the salami jokes.

Though my mother is the main attraction for Voolich, he often makes uneasy attempts to engage Wiley and me in conversation. He tells the same stories over and over again, droning accounts of his day behind a deli counter, with one day not any different from the last.

Once again it is Wiley who handles these situations gracefully. He politely answers idiotic questions concerning homework or sports, two subjects Voolich feels compelled to discuss. However,, I don't think the man is ever comfortable around us. He regards us, perhaps the way he views all children, with caution, as if looking over his shoulder in a rough neighborhood. This is brand new territory for him.

Privately, even my super sweet brother admits to his own reservations.

Yep, he is a bit of a freakazoid," Wiley tells me on our way to school one morning.

"Exactly," I say.

"But that doesn't seem to bother Ma," he adds quickly.

"No," I say. "It sure as shit doesn't."

Voolich has been coming around for over a month when I decide it is finally time to confront her about the situation. I approach Ma late one evening as she is seated at the kitchen table, course work spread out in front of her. It's her favorite spot for studying. Books and pencils are spilling out everywhere. I notice she is wearing her hair longer, wilder, less like a housewife's and more like a student's.

"What can I do for you?" she asks, without looking up from the notebook she is scribbling in.

"How long is this going to go on?" I ask.

"What are you talking about, Kevin?"

"You know what I mean. Voolich. Meat and cheese man. Is he going to become a regular thing around here?"

She looks up at me then and I can tell she is slightly amused, giving me a prim, tired smile. She has hours of study ahead of her, the house to pick up, a new day looming tomorrow.

"He's a nice man," she says predictably.

"He bores Wiley and me under the table." I don't mind enlisting my brother in this campaign.

"Really?"

"Don't you think he's boring?"

"Kevin, I've heard enough sparkling conversation to last me a lifetime," she says.

And when she says this, I know she is referring to my father.

"Look," she goes on, "I don't really expect you to understand, but Oliver listens to me. He truly listens to me when I talk about my day, my time at school. This is a pleasure, and something haven't really experienced before with another grown-up. It has never been easy for me to meet new people. I enjoy his company."

"Maybe it only seems like he's listening, because he's too tongue-tied around you to form actual words in the English language."

She doesn't respond to that, so I keep at it.

"Do you love this guy or something? Are you going to marry him?" I am horrified as I even say these things.

"Don't be ridiculous, Kevin," Ma laughs. "He's a friend. It's a harmless situation."

"Is he in love with you?"

"No," she answers cautiously, "Of course not."

I can tell she is weighing my question, maybe afraid to really look at it, like a puncture wound. I pause for a moment, the way a television anchorman switches gears before delivering the really serious news.

"Well, I just wanted you to know your sons are unhappy about this."

"Point taken," she says, but in such a way as to make it clear she has no intention of doing anything about it.

A couple of weeks after this, she comes into the living room where Wiley and I are watching an episode of Baretta. She announces that Voolich has phoned and wants us to join him for an outing the following weekend.

"He wants to take us all to an amusement park, to Treasure Island," Ma say. "What do you think?"

We haven't done much in the way of amusement since my dad left town. Our finances and my mother's schedule don't warrant it. The term entertainment expense has not found its way into our weekly budget. So despite my feelings for Voolich, my anxiety over his future role in our family, I can't help but look forward to the getaway he is offering us.

"Better than a wiener factory," I sigh, and even Wiley can't help but laugh.

When the day arrives though, our adventure doesn't start out well. Voolich shows up earlier than expected and loiters around the kitchen as we finish our breakfast. He follows us from room to room, bites his lip. jangles the car keys in his trousers as we grab our jackets and put on our shoes.

"Are we in a hurry, Oliver?" my mother asks him.

"No, no, no. Take your time," he says, in the sort of clipped, nervous tone which only gets us to move faster.

Voolich is so impatient to get on the road; I make sure to buckle my seatbelt as soon as I settle myself in his car, a worn-out Plymouth. I think he might want to make up for lost time and risk our lives in the process. But once behind the wheel, he reverts to type and we inch our way to the park, practically traveling in the breakdown lane. Treasure Island is located on the South Shore, half way to the Cape. We pass a number of signs for the place on the trip down, advertising water slides and a roller coaster. And on each colorful billboard the park's official mascot, a pirate with an eye patch and a hook for a hand is featured, slyly beckoning to us.

Wiley is excited, bouncing lightly up and down in the seat beside me.

"Do you have to shit or something?" I ask him. But I am smiling when I say it, because I am excited too.

Then we get there.

Treasure Island is not even an island. It sits swelling like a festering blemish at the edge of a faded resort town. It's basically a huge parking lot, with some worn tents and kiddie rides strewn about, all enclosed by a rusty chain link fence. There are about two dozen unsmiling people, grim employees and unsatisfied patrons alike, milling about under the bleak October sky, which has grown more overcast from the moment we pile out of the car. While Voolich goes to the gate to purchase the tickets, I glare at my mother with my arms folder across my chest. She's enjoyed herself on the trip down, chatting easily in the front seat with Voolich about her upcoming midterms, happy to be taking a break and to get out of the house. But now faced with her sons' disappointment, I can see she is concerned.

"I don't know what to say," she tells us, gazing around at our depressing surroundings. "But we're here now. We'll have to make the best of it."

"Okay," Wiley says.

"Dumbass!" I snap at him. "There's nothing for us here."

I get tired of my brother's perfect-little-man-routine sometimes.

Voolich comes sauntering back, oblivious as hell until he takes one look at us and asks what the matter is.

"Treasure Island isn't exactly what the kids expected," my mother says diplomatically. "Not quite what was advertised on all those billboards."

"It's off-season, Gwen," Voolich tells her, as if this explains anything.

"You have to admit, Oliver, that it looks like the place has fallen on some hard times."

"More like hard times have fallen on it!" I say.

"I used to come here as a child," Voolich says, taking a long look around him, blinking at his own precious memories. "I suppose it has gone downhill though."

"And there's no roller coaster," Wiley actually volunteers.

"I asked the fella at the ticket counter about that. Apparently there was an accident a few years ago and they had to tear it down."

We all stand there for a while contemplating mayhem and disaster.

"Well, we don't have to stay," Voolich says in a quiet, defeated tone. I am ready to turn back toward the car, but he continues, "Or we could stay and give it a try."

"That's exactly what I told the boys," Ma says brightly.

The three of them turn and stare at me, waiting for my reaction, but since I don't really have a vote I just roll my eyes and storm past them toward the entrance. Voolich clamors in front of me, back in his anxious mode. He leads us to the basketball toss and the roulette wheel, other games of chance, talking the place up like a
press agent.

"Look at the prizes! There are some fine prizes to be had! Step right up, Wiley! It's on me! Go for it, pal!" Voolich gushes, rubbing the top of my brother's crew cut.

There is a ride called The Scambler, the only one which isn't too infantile for us. Voolich has us ride it three straight times until he gets a smile out of me. He has my mother go to a fortune teller and afterwards he buys her a French beret from an old woman hawking them near the refreshment stands. I can finally see how much this day means to Voolich. He is rushing us like a frat pledge, needing to belong. Whether my mother has figured this out or not, I don't know.

He buys Wiley and me cheeseburgers, hands us ten-dollar bills for the arcade, ushers us to the men's room, all things he considers to be fatherly behavior. No matter how hard he tries, he isn't up to the easy confidence the task requires. I can't help but remember the last summer with my dad. He was lobbying hard then too, but at least he had actual charm on his side.

Voolich is shiny with flop sweat as he continues to drag us from one so-called attraction to another. The half-empty park seems to be shuttering to a halt before our eyes. The wind has picked up too and now it's just a cold autumn day. Voolich's forced jauntiness only serves to accentuate the worst of all this. When he affects the posture and accent of the park's pirate mascot, we all know it's time to go home.

Back in the car, after we finally make our exit, I am almost content. Voolich's failure has been so complete and indisputable; he won't be around much longer. He'll be sent back to his gloomy life above Shoe Town. At least there's that. But on the way home, my mother, still wearing that idiotic beret, resumes their conversation about her exams as if nothing has happened and Wiley sits next to me happily consumed with the Etch A Sketch he'd won at the roulette wheel. It suddenly occurs to me they are going to forgive him. Worse yet, I see that they think there is nothing to forgive. Before we're on the road five minutes, Ma and Wiley each thank Voolich for giving us a fine time, how it turned out perfect after all. I am stunned into silence until Ma turns around from the front seat and glares at me until I mumble something tolerable in Voolich's direction.

Then I slump back down in my seat, looking out the window for the rest of the drive, as the South Shore drifts by. I sit there thinking about Ma's fierce optimism and her efforts to reinvent herself, how she has willed us all to move on and how she has pulled it off. And I think about Wiley's knee-jerk cheerfulness and how his perfect-little-man routine isn't a routine at all. I wonder how I've lander here among these people, like an alien spore in a science fiction movie.

Ma doesn't marry Voolich. They remain friends for another year after Treasure Island until he eventually stops coming around and hooks up with another woman, a cashier from his store. There will be other men in Ma's life, but nothing too serious as far as I ever know. She prefers not to get tangled up with anyone else's dreams, she tells me once. She is devoted to her studies, getting her teacher's certificate and taking more classes part-time, eventually earning a doctorate in education and becoming an assistant principal at a high school in South Boston, before she retires happily to New Mexico, to a clean white-washed house on the edge of the desert with cottonwood trees and scorpions in her yard. She just turned eighty, volunteers in the local library, dabbles in watercolors, and still wears her hair too long. Wiley refers to her as Our bootleg Georgia O'Keeffe.

My brother will remain grounded and kind. Kindness is Wiley's special gift. It will follow him around for the rest of his life. He grows up to run a social service agency on the Cape, making a business out of his sweet nature and good intentions. He settles down with a wonderful guy named Grady who sings in a bluegrass band, as if it's still the '70s. They adopt and raise three amazing kids, who I refer to as Wileys Embarrassment of Riches. He's a grandfather now. Like Ma often tells me, Wiley gives and gives, but he gets so much in return. But it's not until we arc on our way back from Treasure Island, in Voolich 's car, when I realize I'm not like them at all, with my high-strung nature and ticking complaints.

It's my father who I resemble. Not his swagger or smooth charisma, but the restlessness, the impatience, the always wishing for something better and just out of reach, all of which will lead to my own failed marriages, an erratic sales career, and a grown daughter who rarely returns my calls. Sometimes I still imagine my dad standing over my bed the night before he leaves us for good. The need to start a new and different life is clinging to him like a wet sheet. Something is propelling him. It's not Delores exactly or the promise of sunny California, but it's something. And I can almost make out the jagged shape of it, feel its clumsy weight, as he backs out of my room for the very last time.

Issue 92: Bill Gaythwaite

About Bill Gaythwaite

Bill Gaythwaite grew up in Boston and is the author of Underburn, (Delphinium Books/HarperCollins 2023). His short fiction has appeared in Subtropics, Chicago Quarterly Review, Puerto Del Sol, South Carolina Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. Bill has worked at Columbia University since 2006, where he was on the staff of the Committee on Asia and the Middle East and is now the Assistant Director for Special Populations at Columbia Law School.

You can buy Bill's debut novel Underburn here

His website (with selected short stories) is billgaythwaite.com

His recent essay on the writing process can be found here

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "If You Only Knew"

I have a special feeling for this story because I wrote most of its first draft while my son was an infant. Large chunks of it were written in the middle of the night with him in my lap when he couldn’t sleep. I cradled him while typing with one hand. These memories are forever linked. Considering that my son is now 26, I suppose this piece also represents persistence. "If You Only Knew" was a finalist in various contests and came “close” at other magazines, but it was never offered publication. I didn’t give up on it though. I just kept revising it through the years. The story itself was always a pleasure to come back to. Kevin’s sardonic voice remained in my head. In the revision process, I did cut a long scene at the end between Kevin and his estranged father, a “Kill Your Darlings” strategy. It was a really tough decision for me, but I think it helped the story overall. I still do much of my writing in the middle of the night, given other schedules and responsibilities, but sadly my infant cradling days are in the past. I’m so pleased that when "If You Only Knew" found a home it was at Willow Springs!

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I’m a movie guy. I’ve never been a music guy, so when it comes to music I depend on my partner Tom and his all-encompassing Spotify playlist. Without him, I would only be listening to Kelly Clarkson covers, which are fantastic, but there’s something nice about getting some music education on a drive to the grocery store. Unlike Tom, I really only listen to music in the car. I’m always pointing to the dashboard and saying, “Who is that again?” and Tom will grimace and say, “It’s Pat Benatar, how do you not know that?” We listen to everybody from Frank Sinatra to Troye Sivan, from The Rolling Stones to Years & Years. On our drives, I get acquainted with groups like Public Enemy or The Go-Go’s, who I should have been listening to in my youth but I was too busy watching old movies. Tom will sometimes stop the music and tell me facts about a particular singer or about the first time he went to an Elton concert or when he saw Diana Ross at Radio City or the time he met Kenny Loggins after a show. I like these little biographical interludes. It’s like when he lets me pause old movies to explain why Barbara Stanwyck was considered Hollywood’s most cooperative actress or why Humphrey Bogart’s Oscar win was so popular. I guess we each get points for patience.

“If You Only Knew” by Bill Gaythwaite

By Donhiser, Fiona | October 25, 2023

Found in Willow Springs 92 Back to Author Profile BEFORE MY FATHER RUNS OFF, he suddenly showers us all with attention. It’s jarring at first, like having someone crowd next to you on a bus when there are plenty of seats in back. There’s something desperate about it, but I’m not thinking this at the time. … Read more

Two Poems Translated by Suphil Lee Park

Found in Willow Springs 92

Back to Author Profile

日已午

BY KIM SAMUIDANG (金三宜堂)

日煮我背汗滴土
細討茛莠竟長畝
少姑大姑饗麥黍
甘羹滑流匙
矮粒任撑肚
鼓腹行且歌
飮食在勤苦

勸酒歌

BY KIM SAMUIDANG (金三宜堂)

勸君酒
勸君君莫辭
劉伶李白皆墳土
一盃一盃勸者誰
勸君酒
勸君君且飮
人生行樂能幾時
我欲爲君舞長劒
勸君酒
勸君君盡醉
不願空守床頭錢
但願長對眼前觶

ALREADY NOON

TRANSLATED BY SUPHIL LEE PARK

The day scalds my back
Drops of sweat to the ground
The furrow of buttercups
And foxtails, plowed
My in-laws bring out
Some barley to feast on
Our spoons too thirst
For the sweet, sweet broth
I help myself to the tiny grains
Drumming my belly, I go singing
Food shall follow us the hard workers

WINO'S SONG

TRANSLATED BY SUPHIL LEE PARK

Drink up, love
Please, no more excuse
Li Bai is among the dead
Who'll pour you drink after drink

Drunk up, love
Please, without restraint
In a second goes life's joy
I'll be your long sword dancer

Drink up, love
Please, heed no bounds now
Why mind if your wallet's safe
This glass is all I want

Translator's Notes on "Already Noon"

This poems is a milestone in the history of ancient Korean poetry. While many ancient Korean poems feature farmers or sing about the modest lifestyle of the lower class, they were always written by male aristocrats who had nothing to do with farming and who often romanticized life on the farm, which they considered a mode of abstinence. But Kim Samuidang, a fallen aristocrat, had to work on the farm herself along with the rest of her family. She brought the honest reality and firsthand experience of a farmer's life—from the perspective of a woman—to the world of Korean poetry.

Translator's Notes on "Wino's Song"

This kind of poem was recited and written widely by courtesans as a way of making their guests drink. It was highly unusual that a woman from an aristocratic family, though fallen, would write this kind of poem addressing her husband in a playful, suggestive way.

Li Bai, known as Yi Tae-baek in Korea, is a famous Chinese poet who was known for his lyric poetry and for having been a big drinker.