Fellowship by Susan McCarty

  1. Seafood Night

EVERY FRIDAY AROUND FIVE, we stack the sun chairs in the pump room of the Maple Hills Country Club and watch the servers from the restaurant roll giant table rounds down the paved walk between the tennis courts, past the gazebo where we sit in black, regulation one-piece suits, and down to the pebbled pool deck. It takes three servers to handle a single round—to bang the rusted legs into place and hoist the table upright, to toss a white polyblend covering over the entire surface with one snap. The buffets are brought down, the Sterno lit below them. And then: steaming steel trays filled with buttered corn cobs, the garlicky reek of Oysters Rockefeller, yawning mussels and pink whole lobsters, the faint bleachy tang of cooked mollusk shell. Never mind that the nearest body of water is the catfished Iowa River. Every Friday from five to nine, the club is a Cape Cod beach, and we—who have never seen the ocean, but find ourselves drawn toward water on some cellular level—perch on our lifeguard towers as if they are crow's-nests, keeping our eyes on the water not for whales or land, but for children whose fearlessness makes them susceptible to sinking.

We dream nightly of escape. We would like nothing more than to see Iowa rolling out its infinity in the rearviews of our farm trucks, our Civics or Metros (all shamed to street-parking blocks away, to make room for the Lincolns and Caddies of the club guests). We rip through each National Geographic our grandfathers' yearly subscriptions provide. We pay attention to television and the news. Beautiful, violent things are happening a thousand miles east. And if the water inside us draws us to the water outside, in search of equilibrium, this is also true of our dark selves, the mystery of our desires, which can find nothing external to match the pressures they produce in us—not here, in the friendly width of these streets, these fields, these grocery aisles.

 

THE POOL OPENS AT TEN, but I'm supposed to be there at eight to set up deck chairs and check the garbage cans and test the water and fix the mix, if it's off, so the pool can open. today, I arrive at seven. I haven't really slept since last night, when Mom and Dad called a "family meeting." It was pretty goddamned obvious what they were going to tell us. It's why James has been wetting his bed lately, and why I stole the Titanic picture from the family photo album in the living room and hid it in my old copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

Ian shows up at nine, late and stoned. He's a swimmer on the college team and always has his shirt off, even when, like today,, it's too cold. His back is ridiculous, an inverted triangle—shoulders wide and pronounced from all his hunching through the water. I always get a little nervous when he's on the pool deck, on first position, on the stand by himself.

"Hey kid," he says with an easy smile. I'm pretty sure he doesn't know my name.

"Ian," I say, "pH levels are good. I didn't get to the cans yet though, so. . ."

"No problemo, chica." He waves and wanders across the pool deck to the first garbage can. It's not that I haven't checked the cans—in fact, before Ian showed up, I walked around kicking the trash cans, making sure to take all the pressure on the hard rubber toe of my tennies and yelling "Fuck you!" every time, imagining my father's soft, bearded face. He seemed the unhappiest of all of us, and this made it easy to blame him.

In one of the cans, the one by the wading pool, something shifted inside when I kicked. I drew the hinged top back and found two stupid eyes peering up at me. The thing hissed and I flipped the lid back down. I have kind of forgotten about it until I see Ian's shadow fall long into the concrete slab of the women's bathroom, where I'm stocking the toil.et paper with shaking hands, wondering what's going to happen to my brother who isn't yet old enough to realize what huge assholes his parents have become.

"Critter alert," Ian says.

The philosophy of work at the pool is smelt it/dealt it. I let Ian think he's found the raccoon. I grab the skimmer off its hook on the perimeter fence and follow him across the deck and through the little wooden gate to the baby pool area. He kicks the garbage can and there's a skittering, claws on the heavy plastic lining. He'll have to lay the an gently on its side and then get out of the way quickly, in case the coon is angry or rabid. I tell him I have his back and hold the skimmer defensively in front of me like a hockey goalie.

"Shit," he grunts, and squats the can to the ground.

"Get out of the way." I wave the net at the can.

"Jesus, get closer," he says. "I think it's coming out."

As if we're watching some sunny-day, rich-people horror movie, paws grasp the plastic lip and the raccoon emerges, spiky and damp and humping itself onto the length of the can, I an sort of frozen, watching it. I try to shake my head free of the buzz I haven't noticed all morning until now, but my reaction time is messed up.

The coon seems to be checking out Ian, lookin him up and down in a leisurely, half-interest way, and then it lunges toward him. Ian makes a kind of hoarse squawk and jumps backwards. Unstuck by his yell, I leap forward, brandishing the aluminum pole, and get the raccoon's head in the net, while it latches itself, all paws and teeth, onto the skimmer. I run to the baby pool and plunge the thing into two feet of water. The raccoon thrashes and I—or not me, but some reptilian part of me I have never met before—smash the skimmer to the bottom again and again, until I feel a brittle, twiggy snap. The coon goes limp in the netting, its neck probably broken. I feel like I might throw up.

Ian comes up beside me. He cranes his neck to look into the pool. He doesn't want to get too close to me.

"Holy fuck," I pant.

"You killed it."

My chin is starting to do this involuntary crumple that means I'm about to cry. "I didn't mean to."

"You looked like you meant to."

I drop the skimmer and it's so loud on the pavement I have to bring my teeth together to settle the vibration in my head. The coon looks small underwater—no way it was an adult. I look at it and think, I killed that. Ian offers to clean up and I go sit in the gazebo, at the pool entrance, where people sign in and pay their guest fees.

When he comes up later and asks if I want to go home, the question makes me cry harder. And when I shake my head and wipe my nose on the sleeve of my lifeguard sweatshirt, he says. "Come to the pump room," and I do because he looks confused and afraid, like I too might rise up and claw him, and I realize he thinks I'm crazy, all fucked-up over a baby raccoon, and so, when we squat on two bulbous gray metal meters growing out of the pump room floor, I tell him about last night, about my parents. I use the word they kept using—separation—a word that is pointedly not divorce. l I would rather it not be Ian who knows this before anyone else, but there is no one else. .He doesn't say anything. In the dank, chlorine reek of the room, his lighter glows under the joint he's brought for us, and the pain in my chest as I suck in smoke feels like something to be thankful for.

 

TWO HOURS LATER I'M STILL RED-EYED and dry-mouthed, but tear-free, sitting in the club gazebo in a manner I hope conveys both alertness and innocence. To the club mothers of Maple Hills, I want to look like the opposite of a person who would smoke weed on her guard shift. The reflective lenses in my sunglasses help—in my face the mothers see only themselves—but I realize I'm conveying too much alertness when Wendy Comstock glances up while she's signing in and then edges the clipboard nearer to herself as if to protect the privacy of her signature and club number. As if there'd be anything to do with her club number if I did steal it. Maybe a lesson with the golden tennis pro, a tan Swede straight off the cover of a romance novel. I'm imagining him bending me over the net and spanking me lightly with a racket, when a tall boy with large, rubbery features and long eyelashes wanders up to the gazebo and signs in himself and his little brother, who looks like he's about the same age as my brother James. The older one smiles and that's all it takes. The heat, the weed, the thoughts of the tennis racket, and probably, perversely, even the new of the separation have all undone me and I feel hazy and discombobulated and like the only thing that will make it all better is to be pressed against this guy as soon as possible. Phallically, I need a single point of focus. When the boys and their hairless and tawny bare chests have swept past the gazebo, I pull the sign-in sheet towards me and spin open the Rolodex to find their family info: Wychensky, Wayne and Donna. Ted and Liam.

I must have given off some pheromone, because when the third guard shows up at noon and Ian relieves me at the gazebo for my snack bar rotation, the older brother—Ted or Liam?—buys a pack of M&Ms, but manages to look, somehow, like he couldn't give a shit about actually eating them.

"You have to eat them fast, or they'll melt all over you." I try to say this in a suggestive way.

"Actually, M&Ms were invented not to melt. For soldiers in World War II. The candy shell?"

Simultaneously I feel like, You've got to be kidding me, and, I totally want to fuck you. And somehow he gets it, because he blushes, then grins an sticks the bag of candy in the pocket of his damp trunks and walks away. Hours later, I'm on the first position and the little brother comes up to the stand with his hand cupped over his eyes like a sailor. I make him stand there because my whistle and sunglasses and my great height on the lifeguard stand tens to scare kids and I'm not above enjoying that.

Finally, I acknowledge him with a nod.

"I'm Liam," he says.

"Hi, Liam. I'm Sarah."

He's brown as an almond and his hair is curly and dark. He looks like Disney's Aladdin and I'm sure someday he'll be as hot as his brother. Hotter, probably.

"My brother says he thinks you're pretty."

I make no expression and don't even move my head, but I find Ted with my eyes.. He's rubbing sunscreen on his stomach like it's the most interesting and difficult thing he's ever done.

 

TED PICKS ME UP FROM WORK THAT NIGHT in his Chrysler LeBaron, and some time later, but perhaps not enough time, his chewed-at finger tips are fumbling their way past my underwear, and the smell of chlorine is all around us, and all of sudden I have a new summer project which doesn't involve sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

In the next few weeks, we establish a routine: on my nights off we got to a movie, maybe for pizza and then we motor out somewhere more or less deserted and take off our clothes. Soon Ted has nuzzled, licked and put his finger s on and in almost every fevered part of me, but he refuses intercourse.

One night, I bring out a joint after we pull into a fallow field off the gravel road that winds behind a half-finished housing development. The cicada chatter around us and hundred of lightning bugs hand chest-high, at the top of the seeded grass, flashing their semaphore. I bop Ted gently on his beautiful Roman nose with a red Bic and twiddle the joint at him from my other hand. He takes the lighter and throws it out the window. "I'm not down with chicks who use."

"What?" I pull back the joint before he can chuck it too.

"No drugs, babe. Them's the rules."

"Why are you talking like that? Whose rules?"

He looks less sure of himself, his huge Adam's apple bobbing. "Pastor John's."

"Really? That guy?"

Pastor John is a balding twenty-something who specializes in Pear Jam covers on his acoustic guitar and speaks motivationally at our high school once a year. He runs a popular cross-town evangelical ministry for the kinds of kids who have great skin and expensive cars and brand of stupid, beautiful arrogance that almost takes your breath away. They get high on life and go to Very Good State Schools. Ted's one of them—he'll be off to Madison in the fall, which is close enough to pain me with a glimmer of hope that our summer thing might outlast the summer.

"Are you in his. . .teen group or whatever?"

"Youth group, and yes, I go to his Friends and Fellowship Fridays."

Ted sounds defensive and he should be.

This is Pastor John we're talking about. During last year's all-school assembly about self-respect, he preformed a country version of "Ice, Ice Baby," in which he changed the lyrics to Nice, nice baby. He frequently organizes long and awkward trust falls, preaches abstinence whenever he gets the chance. I am mortified for both of us, Ted and me. Pastor John's biggest message is that intercourse is disrespectful of a girl's body and the holy sanctity of marriage. Thank weeping baby Jesus, Ted follows only the letter of this law.

I try, I try, I do. I beg and plead and prance and suck and tease, but Ted is adamant. We seem to reach some sort of stalemate about sex, but I manage to disappear into him anyway. His LeBaron my salvation. Most nights of the week, I slide into my mother's dark house late and pretend not to hear her weeping through her bedroom door and imagine a future for myself full of adult things without adults.

 

2. Trial Separation

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF DIVORCE, when it's still being referred to as a trial separation, it seems that everyone does everything wrong. After swearing we won't, we bring up custody. Some of us wake at night in a cold wet beds and cry out, and other of us ignore those cries, which seem to come from a planet we don't want to inhabit, and which sound to our cringing ears like a symptom of some infectious disease we don't want to come down with. Decisions are made and boxes are packed. Some of us are upset that others of us are taking all the records and hi-fi equipment, but these complaints are deftly turned inside out and become reasons to visit the new place, the new living situation, the new beige and black leather townhouse monstrosity with Berber wall-to-wall and white plastic vertical blinds that hang like blades and dissect the view of the spewing water feature in the center of the pond behind the development.

We seem to be unbecoming a we. We seem to be becoming an us and a them, but even on either side of this dividing line we each stand alone, tucked into ourselves, the distance between us—even those of us on the same side, those of us who did not royally fuck up and irrevocably ruin it for the rest of us—enormous and growing with each passing, teary day. We hear each other's clotted breaths in the night. We no longer eat dinner together. We sit in the basement pushing our injection-molded He-Men against each other (in love or hate we don't know) and wait for the rest of us to join in, but we are scattered and wounded, and in our pain turn away from each other. Others of us see the slinking about and the downward cast of the eyes, and we understand at once. We try to sound patient and convincing: No one has every died from this. Lots of people go through this. We'll all be okay. What we really want is to run away. What we really want is for those of us who are children to stop acting like children, even though this is impossible and, in itself, a childish wish.

For the first time in years, we are truly alone. We clip our nails and toenails carefully—there seems to be all the time in the world, now, for personal grooming. we feel happy for a few days, to finally be free of the dog hair, but after a few more days we realize how awfully we miss the dog. It's the dog that finally sends us to our knees, our hands to our heads in front of the vertical blinds in the long, dogless night. When we look up again, we realize we are staring at the light on the water feature and that the color of the light is changing as we stare. We watch it go from green to blue to purple to pink to red to orange to yellow to green to purple until our lashes dry and our fists unclench.

 

THE SUMMER'S A LONG SLOW YAWN. James and I are at Dad's two-bedroom apartment every weekend, which is actually more family time that any of us have ever spent together. It feels like prison.

Dad doesn't have a couch, just a low glass coffee table in front of the TV, an ancient half-ton wood monstrosity with side panels and knobs, which sits on the floor, like us. James and I eat Cheetos off the coffee table from a family-sized bag. We've already watched our old pirated copies of Beauty and the Beast and Clue. Halfway through Tucker: A Man and His Dream, the TV screen fuzzes over and when the picture returns, there's a topless woman with sky-high blond bangs, kneeling between the legs of a hairy man with his pants around his ankles. The man places one big mitt on her head, crushing the anemone-like structure of her hair. Dad flies up, blocking the screen, and fiddles at the control panel of the TV. A wet smacking sound precedes the silence.

"What was that lady doing?" James asks.

I can feel Dad looking at me for help. He's always been short with us, impatient. His temper was a force that filled our house with its sound and fury, and it seems to me he's been the chief composer of our misery. I do not want to help him, but I feel protective of my little brother, so I ask James if he wants to watch Clue again, which is his favorite movie, and he says yes yes like the six-year-old he is, and when I settle back next to him, Dad gets off the floor and retreats to the kitchen. I don't know exactly what he's doing back there. Pots rumble and the kitchen faucet runs. I hear the fridge smack open, twice. It's not enough though—even from the other room, Dad's shame fills the apartment like a gas leak. I look at the TV screen and narrow my focus to the wavering, over-red images. It's a kind of meditation, except instead of calm and peace. I allow myself to fill with a rage so heavy it pins me to the ground.

It's a long time before I can stand again, and when I do, I find the rage has not abated. I grab my keys and stomp to the door. I tell them not to wait up and snarl that I'll sleep in my own bed, in my own fucking house. James is a perfect replica of my father: the "O"s of their mouths and their eyes like wounds. I open the door and no one stops me, so I slam it hard and feel, for one second, like I have won.

An hour later Ted and I are parked at the spillway. Ted is doing this thing in my vagina where he rubs one finger up and down the other, producing what I imagine is supposed to be some sort of crickety vibrato. I don't know where he gets his fancy ideas, but I don't want to hurt his feelings either. I arch my head back toward the half-open window to get a sniff of the barbeque smoke coming from a campsite downwind. All day, I've only eaten Cheetos. Ted takes my contortions as encouragement and the cricket quickens.

"Hey," I say after a few more minutes of this. "Let's go outside and look at the tube." The tube is a mad explosion of water that rushes over the dam gate at 3,500 cubic feet per second, and though our car is parked slightly upstream, it's a fairly easy walk, even in the dark, up the hill to the banked bridge directly over the outflow. Standing there, you feel as though you might be sucked into its deafening fishy roil.

Recently, before the announcement, but when things were already bad, when Mom and Dad stomped around their bedroom every night and bellowed at each other like a couple of cows about to be slaughtered, I was picking through a family photo album, trying to remember a time when their anger hadn't rumbled every wall in the house, and I found a snapshot of them standing above the tube in a the golden light of an early autumn afternoon, the day we all went fishing together—maybe three or four years ago. I remember James was fascinated by the way Dad hooked the worm and the grieving worm families they'd left behind.

In the snapshot, my mother's leaning against the chest-high chain-link that surrounds the damn gate. Her arms are spread at the shoulders like wings, her hair, longer then and maybe darker, ripples behind her. My dad's hands are at her hips. They're doing Titanic at the top of the tube. I didn't realize how bad things had gotten, until I saw that photo. And now, I can't even be here, can't pretend to enjoy my boyfriend's mediocre fingerbang, without thinking about my parents and wondering what's to become of us all. I sigh and push Ted's hand away.

"Did you hear me?" I say. "Let's go up and watch the water."

"It's dark out—we could trip and hurt ourselves. Anyway, it smells."

In an instant, the rage is back and I am ready to push this thing to the brink. I know what it takes to hurt us both. "Why can't we just have sex like normal people?" I say. "I feel like a fucking freak out here."

Ted frowns. "You know I can't."

"Oh right. Your pledge of chastity."

"It's important to me. You said you'd support me." He turns away, his modest erection wilting in his jeans, and starts the car. I pull up my shorts and thrust my pelvis as high in the air as I can to button them.

"I was just trying to get you to fuck me."

"Pastor John said you sounded like someone who'd resort to pressure tactics. And that I should be careful."

"You talked to him about me?"

"I didn't want it to be true, but now I see he was right—"

"What did you say about me?"

"—and I think. . .I don't think we should see each other anymore."

For the millionth time, I imagine Ted's legs spread out before me as I ride him like a combine; Ted's farm-boy bulk squashing me into the crumb-sharp fabric of his back seat in an ironic missionary; Ted's ass tightening as he rams into me again and again. But now I see something else too: that asshole Pastor John staring at us with heaven's disapproval souring his face.

I elbow the door open and start walking toward the top of the tube, which looks like someplace furtive and ugly in Ted's headlights. Gravel, broken glass. I climb the steep spillway embankment and don't look back. He yells for me twice, then backs his car out and drives away.

Up here, at the top of the hundred-foot drop down to the churning, angry water, is the last place I saw my mother smile at my father. The Iowa River races furiously toward me. Beyond the dam, the reservoir is placid and has the rotten fertilizer smell of something dead.

 

3. Youth Group

IN PLACE OF DARKNESS, there was the fluorescence of junior high hallways. In place of demons, Zach Hellerman's man-sized fist sank into our stomachs. His spit hung, chrysalis-like, from the fringe of our bangs. Our glasses: bow-broken and skittered beneath a locker; our non-existent breasts: shamed; our prematurely large breast: shamed; our ball: kicked back into the cavity of our bodies before they'd even had the chance to fully descend..

After the darkness of our daily existence, the bread of our pain, who among us does not feel a huge unclenching inside, a sobbing relief, as we stare into the linoleum of the church basement floor and hear the stories rushing wild and full from each other like the river across the dam? We feel bathed in light. The peace we've been promised, for years, by parents and various administrators, most likely erstwhile bullies themselves, finally arrives in this unlikely and alien place which smells like the hospitalish rooms in which our grandmothers moan out the ends of their lives. How unlikely seems the bringer of our peace. His mousy goatee, the shaved head that we would later understand as an answer to balding, the way his voice twangs over the top of his acoustic guitar: too precise, show-choir trained, a hickish put-on. How fitting that our savior here on earth, the man who would tell us about our savior up in heaven, would the sort of head we would want to see punched, the kid of cringing attitude that would make us understand, finally, what was so hateful about ourselves.

And so, we have learned to speak forcefully, to repulse the twin evils of drugs and sex—although many of us are still waiting, just waiting, for someone, anyone, to offer either. We've traded our skin-care secrets and exfoliated ourselves to a rosy, Christian glow. We've kissed each other during church lock-ins, and at Camp Galilee, where we also learned that Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi worship Satan, a lesson which Pastor John later encourages us to laugh off, but which nevertheless continues to freak us out. We have begun, some of us, to understand the price that such fellowship is asking—nothing less than our soul at the expense of our bodies. We have begun to fail each other.

One of us, just last weekend, tasted, finally, the seawater tang of his girlfriend's vagina—the Southern Comfort still hot in his belly—and ejaculated into his wrinkle-resistant Dockers. Another welcomed the sweet curl of methamphetamine into her lungs. We have turned eighteen and visited the Pleasure Palace with our non-youth group friends and masturbated furtively into socks. There is, suddenly, a new vocabulary; bong, dank, nug, DP, creampie, money shot, crystal, crank, tweak. Something inside us hungrily expands until we feel larger than our homes and schools and even, or especially, the basement of this church. We wake at night and touch our arms and legs and heads, certain they must have flown from us in sleep. We long to ask each other: Are we being devoured by lions or are we becoming them?

 

THE CORN IS NOSE-HIGH and I'm on my way to a church basement on the other side of town to eat crustless sandwiches and fraternize with the enemy. It's embarrassing, this sudden obsession. I've always prided myself on being cool with guys, less interested in a relationship then they were. The best thing about hooking up was the total-freedom feeling it gave me. Sex was something parents and school couldn't access or control. But Ted has beaten me; he's kept more of himself in reserve than me, has more secret rooms to which he could deny me access. He wouldn't let me in, but he would let in Pastor John. I wanted to talk it out, but my calls went unanswered. I imagined he could hear my anger and desperation ringing out from under the bed, where he kept his phone, and that it repulsed him. He'd stopped showing up at the pool, though his brother still came. I was thinking about sending a note home with Liam, carrier pigeon style, when I realized I could confront Ted, and possibly (in my fantasy) also Pastor John at a Friends and Fellowship Friday meeting. I would expose John as a weirdo and convince Ted to take me back. Dénouement night sex would follow in the pond at my dad's condo development. I got aa sub for my Seafood Night shift and set out to win back Ted.

But Ted has stopped coming to youth group, at least that's what Pastor John tells me when I walk into the basement and interrupt a jam session between him and three groupies. The bongos guy I recognize from school, but the other two kids are strangers, though the girl on the guitar smiles at me. The friendliness of the group flusters me. Instead of introducing myself and calling out Pastor John for being a fraud, I say, "Um. . .where's Ted?" and they look confused.

John rises, his puka-shell necklace slapping against the collar of his T-shirt, and says, "Haven't seen him in a few weeks. What's you name?"

I tell him and think I see a squint of recognition.

He says, "God's casa es su casa, Sarah. Have some snacks. we usually jam until most of the group gets here. Then I call everyone to fellowship."

I nod and walk toward the spread of drinks and food on the other side of the room, trying to avoid talking to anyone while the sunny creeps behind me sing, "I don't need no doctor, all I need is Jesus love." I drink cranberry juice from a Dixie cup and separate a long stick of mozzarella from itself, string by awkward string, as more eager kids file in and take up the joyful noise. When the music stops, I have just dragged a large piece of cauliflower through the dip in the center of the vegetable tray and put the whole thing in my mouth. In this new silence, it feels as if the protective covering around me has been torn away. A tambourine jangles faintly as its master puts it down. Pastor John yells into the calm and heavy air, "My Lord, lift me up to be with you! My Lord, call me and I will answer!"

I try to slow my stuttering heart as I turn from the buffet towards the youth group. They're all sitting there with eyes closed, smiling. John's hands are extended to the ceiling and they jitter, as if he's been struck with a neurological disorder.

"Tonight we thank you for bringing us a new lamb, named for the wife of Abraham! Sarah! Sarah, come here Sarah, and say the Lord's name with us!"

They open their eyes and look at me like puppies, and I realize they've left a notch in their prayer circle open for me on the mat. I point to my bulging cheek and keep chewing as though answering a question no one has asked. They keep looking and I keep standing there, pointing at my face, finger like the barrel of a gun, chewing, chewing, unable now to swallow as they stare, the creamy dip curdling against my tongue. My head is filled with the noise of my mouth, but I can tell the silence that binds us together is very awkward indeed.

"Sarah!" yells John, and a piece of cauliflower lodges itself in my windpipe. There's a long moment, as I try to draw my breath to cough, when nothing happens. My body feels as though it has always been here and always will be and I'll spend the rest of my life in this basement being stared at by Christian youth, me staring back—curiosities to each other, zoo animals watching zoo animals. The guitar girl's mouth moves, and from a distance and sever seconds delayed, I hear the words, "She's choking?" and then I'm on my knees, the cauliflower paste coming out of my mouth as I open it to the ground, and then someone strong and hippie-fragrant is kneeling behind me, enfolding me in a great hug, and the cauliflower is cutting a path back up my throat, and there's the sound of my own wheezing life and pain in my knees and my lonely sinner's blood pulsing hot in my ears. Like a newborn, I breathe and then I cry. The group makes noises around me and someone asks if they should call an ambulance, and then I uncurl myself from the cement floor, clear my throat, and walk out of the worship room like Lazarus from his cave.

I think about driving to Ted's house, but I know what I will find: a big happy family playing Yahtzee, the Rolexed arm of Ted's father slung around his tastefully small mother, their slippers, in the loafer style, parked side by side. Liam would say something child-wise and they'd laugh together like the stars of their own sitcom, like they were on their own cloud up in heaven and had forgotten the rest of us, down here, in our weird, hungry bodies on earth.

 

JAMES IS ALREADY IN BED and Dad's bent awkwardly over the dishwasher when I let myself into the apartment. I take a beer from the fridge and sip it at the kitchen bar. It burns my throat. Dad doesn't say anything about the beer so I tell him about Ted and how we broke up and I say I even went to his youth group, but it's like he's just disappeared from my life. And is this always going to happen, this disappearing? And what about you? Are you going to disappear too?

Really, I don't ask that, even though I want to manufacture a father-daughter moment. I want things to all feel okay again, just for a minute. But I also know this would be a lie.

"Better luck next time," says Dad as he closes the dishwasher door. "I'm going to bed."

Does anything sound cozier than a dishwasher at night? Even in this sad bachelor wreck of a place, where each of us is tucked into our own separate corner like water molecules—bonded for a moment, but always breaking apart.

I open another beer. The VHS tape marked "Tucker" is still sitting on top of the TV. I let the slow motor of the VCR suck the tape into its broad, flat mouth. I turn the volume all the way down. I sit on the floor and listen to the rhythmic slosh and hiss of the dishwasher. I watch through to the end.

 

 

 

Hourglass by Clare Beams

issue681

Found in Willow Springs 68

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A TRANSFORMATIONAL EDUCATION, the newspaper ad had promised, so we'd come to the Gilchrist School, which looked like a 19th century invalids' home. With its damp-streaked stone and clinging pine trees, it seemed ideal for transformations, a place where a person could go romantically, molderingly mad. Here no one would find me until I was done. For the first twenty minutes of my interview, Mr. Pax, the headmaster, poured words upon our heads and seemed to require none from me. I had only to sit while he spoke of the crimes of modern education, the importance of avoiding the craze of the moment and what he called "the great, all-too-often meaningless noise of exhibition," how he thought of teaching as a process of shaping, honing, turning each young woman into the best possible version of herself. My mother, who had never been anything but her own best version, smiled winsomely and told him, "We would just lost to see Melody blossom, that's all." Yes, yes, Mr. Pax said.

But then he inclined his great shining white-ringed head toward me and said, "Well, Melody! You've been quiet, for a person whose name heralds such mellifluousness! Please, tell me something about yourself. What activities do you most enjoy?"

A pause. Then, "Go on, Melly," my mother said, for all the world as if she expected me to rise to the occasion, except there was a little too much brightness in her voice. Had she really expected it, of course—had I ever shown any signs of such a capacity—we would not have been here.

I dropped my eyes to the carpet and scoured my days for things I could speak of safely. School, which I hated. Television, which I knew better than to talk about here. Sleeping, which I liked, except when it ended. Drawing, a loose word for what I did sometimes, tattooing pages of computer paper in rhythmic, soothing swirls of ink. Reading Nancy Drew mysteries, sticking and unsticking the pads of my fingers to their bright yellow, plasticky covers until I knew they were tapestried in whole invisible galaxies of my fingerprints. I never had anything to say about them when I finished them.

"Reading," I told Mr. Pax. The word came out scratchy and prematurely old. I hadn't talked much in the car.

"Superb!" He clapped, actually clapped, his hands. "And what are some of your favorite books?"

Somehow I had failed to foresee this, though the floor-to-ceiling shelves on the wall behind Mr. Pax were lined and lined and lined with books like dull, uneven teeth. If I pretended to have read something impressive, Mr. Pax would certainly roll his chair over to the shelf and pull it out, set it right down on the desk between us for discussion. I could see myself sputtering and flecking the dusty damning rectangle of the book with spittle while my parents sagged.

"Mysteries," I said. "Mostly."

I waited for Mr. Pax's face to fall or flush with anger, for him to throw up his hands and cry, This! This I cannot transform! Instead he gave me a wide, warm illustration of a smile. "Ah, the pleasures of the whodunnit," he said. "The neatness of the ending, a satisfaction that all too frequently evades us in life. You know what I've found to be true, Melody? A taste for mysteries is often the sign of a truly orderly mind."

My mind is truly orderly, I thought, cheeks reddening with a hope and gratitude that dizzied me because I had been so unprepared for them. And next: If this man wants to try to change me, I will let him.

 

WE HAD DRIVEN to Gilchrist intending only to have a prospective-student visit, but after the interview my parents decided to leave me there that very afternoon, before I had a chance to lose something or fail to follow through on some simple instruction and force Mr. Pax to reconsider his assessment of me.

"You don't have to stay forever, of course. Let's just see how things work out," my mother told me at the school's front doors, where my father had already collected his umbrella. "We'll send your clothes and things straight away," she said. She leaned in to kiss me, leaving behind a crisp little cloud of her perfume. I wanted them to go—I wanted Gilchrist to begin on me—but there was something about the idea of my mother sorting through my clothes and boxing them up, my father driving to the post office with them in the trunk of his car, that made me feel as if I had died somewhere alone the way without noticing and would now be expunged. My throat began to close with tears. I told myself that the next time they saw me, I would be so polished I would hurt their eyes.

"I have tons of clothes she can borrow until her stuff gets here," said my new roommate, a girl named Molly Briggs, in a cheerful defiance of the fact that nothing she would own could possibly fit me.

"Well thank you, Molly, that's very nice," my mother said. My father gripped my shoulder. I knew he tried to put things he couldn't say into that grip.

And then the door banged shut behind them and they were gone.

"It's amazing here," Molly said as she led me to the dormitory wing. "You'll see." She swung a door open into a small square of a room, kindly pretending not to notice that I was crying. "I'm super excited," she said. "I figured I'd get a roommate eventually. I was the only one with nobody. Odd number." I went in a sat on one of the desk chairs, trying to whisk my eyes dry with soggy fingertips. "Let's find you a dress for dinner," Molly said.

"That's okay," I said thickly.

Molly surveyed me. "We all wear dresses here, though."

"All the time?"

"Mr. Pax says how you look is the first impression you make on the world." She was in the closet now, pushing hangers aside with a brisk metal sound like the opening of a shower curtain. "And the easiest part to control."

I glanced down at my lumpish, besweatered form. My experience held no support for that idea.

"Here's the one I was looking for," Molly said.

The dress was black and had a forgiving enough stretch to contain me. I sweated through it almost immediately at the armpits, but the color didn't show. Dresses, I thought, as I pulled at its hem. We all wear dresses here.

 

THE HATS I LEARNED ABOUT a few days later, when I tried to take my copy of The Mystery of the Lilac Inn outside for lunch. This was allowed: lunch and dinner were served on gray metal trays that you could take wherever you wanted to go. At lunch you just had to be back at the tables by half past twelve for Assembly. Routine was sacred at Gilchrist—the days were shaped to run in a smooth way that made your level of contentment mostly irrelevant—and so I felt unfairly accused when I looked up from the tricky balancing project of my tray and book and found Miss Caper in my path.

"Where are you off too? Outside?" she asked. tugging on the hat string tied beneath her chin, gazing at me from beneath the brim. The rapid fumbling of her fingers made her look even younger than usual, and always she looked young enough that the first time I'd seen her, standing before her blackboard full of notes on Tess of the D'Urbervilles on my first morning at Gilchrist, I thought she was a student.

"There's time still," I said. "Right?"

"Oh yes. Just—it's bright out there. Why don't you borrow this?" She'd succeeded in working the knot free and before I could respond she settled her hat on my head. It shaded my view of her. She was already moving off toward the faculty table, but I saw her stop and lean briefly over Molly, who looked in my direction and hurried toward me with a tube in her hand.

"Here," Molly said, squeezing something onto her fingers, and then she rubbed it—cold, cold—onto my face. Holding my tray the way I was, my hands couldn't stop her. "Sunscreen," she said. "We wear it when we got out in the daytime. Hats, too."

"Why?"

"The skin," Molly said, "should be like a beautiful blank page."

Outside, I sat under a tree. Nancy was about to figure out what was going on with the ghost, but I was having trouble paying attention. The paper of the book itself was distracting me, its even , frictionless fell beneath my skimming fingers. A caterpillar fell onto my lunch tray, into my salad dressing. I watched it writhe.

At twelve twenty-five I closed the book and carried everything back in to rejoin the thirteen other girls in my year at our table. I banged my knees as I took my seat, and they all turned in my direction, no particular expression on their faces, before settling again into elegant disinterest. I sat there feeling, as always in such moments, my mother's eyes on me.

Mr. Pax rose. Every day he made a speech to start Assembly. I had been listening as closely as I could to each of them, filing away as much as possible in the hopes that it would teach me how to become what everyone was trying to make me. I think that even without the effort I would have remembered whole sentences—he had that kind of voice, those kinds of words. To unlearn an old habit, I believe, takes more diligence than to learn a new one, he'd said to us yesterday. The day before: Remember that the true intellect requires so much energy to sustain that it has none left over to devote to display. It would not have occurred to any of us to equate his speeches themselves with the display of which he spoke. Though Mr. Pax strutted daily before us, shone, dripped words like syrup, everyone knew that this was not artifice. The artifice would have been to prevent himself from doing these things.

Mr. Pax centered himself at the front of the room, and turned to us. "Today, girls, I thought I might share with you a  brief history of Assembly itself."

He waited while small conversations quieted. Molly swiveled toward him in her seat.

"When I came to Gilchrist, more years ago than I would care to disclose"—the faculty, lined behind him at their table, tittered softly—"I came armed with the belief that education is nothing less than the shaping of the soul. Thus, upon my arrival, I had to ask myself: These souls entrusted to me, what form ought they assume? What shape would best suit them? It was question neither asked nor answered lightly, but eventually, an answer did come. I realized that I wished to mold not future citizens of the world as it was, but of the world as it should be. For it is my belief that the world around us has lost the grace and purity it had in earlier times, girls. That does not, however, mean that you need to do so. It was—is—my deepest wish to prepare you to stand in loveliness before eyes that no longer see as they ought, to answer with eloquence the questions of those who may or may not be capable of appreciating what they hear. I believe this sort of deportment has value no matter how it is perceived. At the end of the day the world is not my concern. You are."

The skin on my arms prickled. I ran my fingertips lightly over the bumps, trying to settle them into blankness.

"In light of all of this, I consider Assembly a sort of training ground, if you will, for your lives to come. When you stand and make announcements—even if you are simply questing after lost items or marking the anniversaries of one another's birth—you are practicing being seen and heard. And it is my most cherished hope that you are also considering, deeply, how you wish to appear and to sound in those moments."

I scanned the two lines of girls at my table, the willowy form and smooth smooth faces, behind each of which was fluid voice at the ready. I knew just how I wished to appear and to sound. Any minute now I would understand how it was done.

 

ON A CRISP TUESDAY near the beginning of November, Miss Caper stood in a patch of sun at the front of the classroom and talked to us about Keats and negative capability. We watched her form our desks, which were arranged in a circle and which were the same as the desks at my old school, chairs barred to the tabletops to prevent the tiltings-back of unruly boys. Not a one of us, of course, would have been inclined to tip. Miss Caper wrote, "'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' 1819" on the board, rounding the letters prettily. Then she put down the calk and began to read to us in a low, thrilled voice: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. . ."

She read the whole thing, though we had also read it for homework, while we clicked our pens or wrote the title and date we already knew in our notebooks. When she finished she looked up and breathed deeply. "He was twenty-four when he wrote that," she said. I had been thinking for a couple days now that Miss Caper might be a little in love with Keats.

She asked us what we though the poem meant. I never volunteered at these time, since the potential cost of a wrong answer matter much more to me than the potential benefits of a right one. The other girls were not cruel—we were kept too busy for cruelty—but I didn't trust them. They mostly ignored me, even Molly, who often seemed oblivious of my presence, in a friendly way, while were actually speaking. I had not become the way they were. I tied my hair back into the right modest knot, and I wore the right things, the hats and the sunscreen, the dresses. But my skin had stayed freckled instead of going paper-blank. No new smooth voice had blossomed in my throat. And the dresses did nothing to make me look like the others, who filled their own with foreign undulating shapes.

Miss Caper called on Lila, who was talking about the imagery of the poem, which she really thought was just so powerful, when the bell ran. Lila stopped talking instantly. "'Eve of St. Agnes' for tomorrow!" Miss Caper told us, as we closed our books and began to file away from her. "Answer the questions at the end of the poem please."

"Melody," she said then, shocking me to stillness, "a moment?"

She leaned against the edge of her desk. I walked back and stopped, leaving a safe berth between us.

"Have a seat," she said, pulling one of the desks out of its circle, closer to her. I sat. "I've been asked to speak to you. You've been here over a month now."

Words rose within me, tasting of panic, please for more time and promises of improvement—but I knew that if I tried to release them they would only clog in my throat. I waited. Miss Caper's eyes flicked back and forth between mine, as if the right and left were delivering different messages to her and she were trying to decide which truly reflected my feelings.

"We think you're fitting in nicely. Really we do. You do remember what Mr. Pax says about the outside and the inside, though?"

I tried to call up the words, which I recognized from one of his recent speeches, maybe even yesterday's. Miss Caper gave me only a few seconds before filling in the answer herself. "He says that the outside should as nearly as possible match the quality of what's within. That way, we do everything in our power to give those whom we encounter the right expectations. So a beautiful person, like you, should do her best to look beautiful."

She paused again. "Melody," she said, and her voice suddenly had the same low thrum it had taken on when she'd recited the Keats poem, "how would you like to look a little more like a Gilchrist girl?"

Without waiting for an answer, she walked over and opened a closet I had never noticed in the corner of the room. From within it, she produced a hollow stiff shell, trailing long tentacular laces: a corset. There was flourish in her wrists as she held it out to me. A new form, right in her hands, ready for handing over.

 

AFTERWARD, I SWISHED MY WAY up the stairs, pausing every two to breathe, and into our room.

Molly had been reading on her bed. "Oh thank God," she said when she saw me. "I was getting so sick of having to get dressed in the bathroom. I don't know why they didn't just let me tell you. Miss Caper laced you up?"

I nodded. Miss Caper had, after turning away discreetly while I closed the front of the thing around myself. The pulling of the stays had hurt. I had not made any sound, though. I told myself I was having every faulty disappointing breath I had ever breathed squeezed out of me.

"Let me see." Molly stood and slid a hand down the back of my dress. She tested the stays with a practiced finger. "Not very tight," she said. "I'll do it better tomorrow. We can lace each other now. All year I've been having to knock on Marjorie and Kate's door and get of them to do me."

The next day at Assembly, as I ate with my back straight under the force of the lacing, which seemed to be pulling me together in entirely new ways, Mr. Pax stood and said, "Miss Caper tells me that the ninth grade has just completed its study of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' A wonderful and wise poem: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. . .'" He let his voice linger, "One of the truest, most beautiful lines ever written, perhaps. For our surroundings are so often ugly, girls. Why should we not strive for beauty and bettering where they are within our reach?"

His eyes brushed lovingly over us, then. I could have sworn that they paused for a special instant on me.

 

IT DID FEEL, AT FIRST, as if I were moving within a body I had strapped on. My torso was suddenly unbendable: a stiff column that I had to swivel my hips to move when I walked. I couldn't quite breathe in fully, either. But it's surprising how rarely a person needs to breathe to the very bottom of her lungs in a day. Everything they asked of us at Gilchrist—the essay writing, the graphing of functions, the discussing of literature, the announcing of one another's achievements at Assembly—could be accomplished while talking no more than refined sips of air. It was only when somebody worked herself up that there was trouble: the time that Marjorie had a tantrum over her essay grade in English, for instance, and went very red and then slumped to the floor. Miss Caper produced smelling salts from her desk drawer and stroked Marjorie's forehead while she came around. I watched from my own desk and breathed evenly through the whole thing.

There was some pain: a compressed feeling and a periodic but deep ache in the ribs. I took satisfaction in this. It seemed to me proof of payment. Quickly I came to feel, when I took my corset off to sleep at night, a disbelief that I had once walked around in that state, so unsharpened and unsupported, so greedy in my consumption of air and space. Our lacing-up in the mornings became a companionable thing between Molly and me. She was determined, much more determined than Miss Caper, hampered by gentleness, had been. One morning, after a couple of weeks, she finished pulling at me and then tugged me over, back first, to the full-length mirror on the inside of our door. "Look," she said. I peeked over my shoulder. "See that bump in the laces there? That's as tight as I used to be able to get them." I did see it, a rut of a place like where the lace of an often-worn shoe hits the bracket, easily an inch below where the know was now. Visible proof of what was being accomplished.

I turned back to her. "Tighter," I said.

"Tighter? Mel, it's already—"

"I want it tighter," I said. While she pulled, I closed my eyes to imagine the moment in which my mother would first see me again. Her face before me, her eyes widening at my new swell-dip-swell, her smile knocked out of carefulness.

Other changes came as my shape shifted. The other girls were still not exactly my friends, but I could feel the distinction between us blurring. Sometimes they would call me over in the dining room even if Molly wasn't with me. I wrote letters to my parents (we were big on old-fashioned letter writing at Gilchrist) in a chatty voice I honed with pride. "Math will never be my forte," I told them, "but we all have our limitations! Hope you enjoyed the weekend with the Bermans!" In classes, I now spoke occasionally. I had realized that the teachers were so generous that they would mostly spin a wrong answer right for you. Miss Caper seemed to have taken a particular shine to my reading voice. She called don me more than anyone else in the rotation. I read the Brownings, Tennyson:

A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

"The Lady of Shalott's death," Miss Caper said, "is inescapable once she sees Lancelot, and then rises from her loom and looks to Camelot. Why is this, do you think?" she asks me. "What is the nature of the curse?"

"I guess," I said, "it's like she's supposed to be separate? Because of the weaving? So when she leaves she wrecks it?"

"Good," Miss Caper said.

Then she called on Melissa Clearwater to read "The Kraken." I let my hands drift for a moment to my waist, my habitual test, the patting-down of my dimensions. They were changed, they were definitely changed, and sometimes this brought comfort. Other times, the curve in my waist would feel too gradual beneath my palms, and I would press myself tight in fear. I was not yet changed enough. I would have to do better.

I found, with time, that the harder I tried to resist these tests—the more I tried to reassure myself that they weren't necessary, that of course my waist was becoming smaller and smaller with each day—the greater was my need for them.

One afternoon, a few months into my wearing of the corset, Mr. Pax almost ran into me in the hall. He had his head down, bulleting forth to something important. I sidestepped him at the last instant and wobbled, my balance threatened. He looked up in surprise, then smiled. "Excellent save!" he said, reaching out to steady my slipping books. "My apologies!" He leaned back to look at me more closely. "I must say, Melody," he told me, "that I hear wonderful things about you. I am very pleased."

He moved off down the hall and left me filled with such raucous joy that my heart rocketed and dappled my vision in shimmery patches, and I had to take very deliberate, measured breaths to steady it. For a moment, I felt sure of how far I had come.

 

THREE WEEKS BEFORE the beginning of spring recess, our poetry reading in English took a sudden turn. Miss Caper arrived bearing two stacks of brand new, slim volumes, which she passed around the room.

"Page thirty, please," she said. "This poem is by Su Tung P'o. It is called 'On a Painting by Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling.'"

She began to read: "The slender bamboo is like a hermit. / The simple flower is like a maiden. / The sparrow tilts on the branch. / A gust of rain sprinkles the flowers. . ." Her voice was still hesitant on the new stripped-down rhythms.

When she'd finished, we were quiet for a minute, trying to decide what to make of what had just happened. Finally, Molly raised her hand. "How is that a real poem, though?" she said. "Where's all the description? And the rhyme and everything?"

Miss Caper signed. "There is a very deep, modest kind of beauty in the poem we have just read, girls. It is a beauty that stems from rendering a thing precisely and quietly in words." All of this sounded all right, but she looked somehow off-balance with such a small book in her hands. "This poem is made of a series of perfectly captured moments. I think you will come to understand as we continue to read. You'll be working with pages 32-38 of the anthology for your assignment this evening."

I stared down at the book before me. I lifted it, and its lightness made me anxious.

"But I though we were reading 'Aurora Leigh' next," Marjorie said.

"As did I," Miss Caper told us. "But the headmaster wishes to make a change."

Around this time, one of the sixth graders—Lizzie Lewis, a pixie of a girl with a great mass of black shining hair down her back—stopped showing up for meals, even Assembly. The sixth grade at large reported that Lizzie no longer came to classes, either. Our curious whispers gathered momentum as the days passed until finally Miss Ellison, our math teacher, had no choice but to address them, if she wanted us to focus on the quadratic equations she had written on the board. "Lizzie is receiving special lessons from Mr. Pax," she told us, "for which she requires focused alone time." We could tell from the falsely confident way she said this that Miss Ellison didn't know what was happening, either. Still, Lizzie's continued absence gradually became old news; we stopped talking about it because there was nothing new to add and mostly forgot her.

I spent spring recess at Gilchrist, where I had also spent Christmas vacation. My parents seemed always to be traveling during the times when I could have come home: Bora Bora, an Alaskan cruise. My guess was that they were unwilling to trade the newly poised girl they glimpsed through my letters a flesh-and-blood me who might disappoint them in familiar ways. Time seemed to soften and stretch long in those two weeks. I missed Molly and her lacing. I couldn't get Kate, the only other girl from our year who had stayed at school for the break, to pull as hard. I knew for a fact that the ground I had gained was receding, because I could reach back and feel the from the lacing that I had eased back into the ruts I thought I'd abandoned for a good week, two weeks earlier. When I touched this proof, this record of my spill back over the lines that had been drawn, I was filled with a sense of powerlessness that made me bit my tongue until I tasted metal. At night, I got out my old Nancy Drew books and ruffled their pages, the furred soft sound of the paper like another person's breathing in the empty room, but even they did not let me sleep.

I would feel better once the others were back, I told myself. And anyways I had changed. I knew it. Yet it seemed to me, that in the dark, that nay progress that could be undone in this way was not real progress at all. A nightmare vision haunted me of the first day of summer vacation, being driven home in my parents' car, its smell of leather and bits of food I had dropped over the years as familiar to me as the smell of my own body. I would see in my parents' faces, each time they snuck looks at me from the front seat, the brief flight and then the dead plunge of hope—teaching me over and over that I would always be the same as I had ever been.

 

ON OUR SECOND DAY back in session after the break, Mr. Pax stood up at Assembly and said, "I am sure you have all noticed that Lizzie Lewis has been gone from your midst for some time."

None of us had thought about Lizzie in weeks, but we nodded solemnly.

"Lizzie has undertaken a special project for me," Mr. Pax told us. "This project has regrettably required her temporary absence from your company. But she is, at last, ready to rejoin you, and ready to show you the fruits of our labor. And what fruits they are, girls!" Or will be, when they have ripened fully."

He paused and smiled at us. "You see, Lizzie is on her way to attaining a very ancient form of grace. One that will soon be made available to the rest of you, though it will be a bit more complicated for those who are older and have already grown more than Lizzie. Her initial break has been made, but that is really only the beginning, of course. The binding process itself will take some time, indeed, to achieve the desired result."

We gasped in a united breath, straining our laces.

Miss Caper stared at Mr. Pax, her face rigid. Sweeping the room with his eyes, Mr. Pax found hers; he help them as if this were a matter of will, though he was still smiling. Finally, Miss Caper looked away.

"Recovery is still in the early stages," Mr. Pax said. "There are no shortcuts in a process like this, girls. Walking remains for the future. So you'll pardon our rolling entrance. Lizzie, my brave butterfly!"

He stretched his hand out in a summons. My eyes flew, with everyone else's, to where he pointed. But in the pause before Lizzie appeared, I saw others in the empty doorway, others I knew I was the only one to see. Each came in turn, without hurrying, to take her place in the line. I knew them all instantly. The Lady of Shalott, bent from her loom and yet graceful, one of her ivory arms banded in bright thread. The simple flower maiden, petal-cheeked, lilting as if in a breeze. Nancy, with her blond, metal-gleaming hair and the pressed slacks that fit her like her rightful skin. And my mother, my ever-lovely mother. My mother with perfection itself in her face. She moved, with the others, to the side, and then turned back toward the doorway.

Then came Lizzie, the real Lizzie, in a wheelchair pushed by Miss Ellison. Lizzie bore her abbreviated feet before her, propped on the rests: time hoofs of feet in child-sized slippers of a vivid emerald silk.

It was a slow entrance, a grand one. There was pride in Lizzie's smile. Also pain, but that was the price, as all of us at Gilchrist had already learned. And if her pain was greater than anything we had yet experienced, what she had bought with that pain was proportionately greater, too, I though: a change that was not reversible. Lizzie would never have to sit in her room and tilt her folded feet this way, that way, wondering if a slow slide had begun that would carry them back to their previous dimensions. She would know that this was impossible. Here at last was certainty. Lizzie would feel the proof of her new and more beautiful self with each step she took after this, each hair's breadth of a footprint she left behind her, the way all that had anchored her to ordinariness had been whittled down to a fine, sharp point.

I caught the sight of Miss Caper's face. It had gone very white; her eyes were wide. She saw only the pain, I thought, and not that the pain was for something. I knew there had been agony for Lizzie in getting to this point, but I also knew that nothing could hurt her after this, in any important way.

My mother and the others who had preceded Lizzie into the room were still there, but they were watching me instead of Lizzie now. Their gazes were steady, approving. I turned to look at Mr. Pax, our great shaper, whose face was red with triumph. I though that I was ready to feel my bones break between his hands.

 

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

issue681

Found in Willow Springs 68

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I WAKE UP, a wife and mother, at five a.m. on a July morning in the middle of Indiana, not because my baby cries or my husband snores, but because the birds are going wild. Early bird nothing. They're all early—and their racket shakes memory down from the maple trees in my mortgaged backyard like seeds from a feeder hit by a marauding squirrel. Everything shivers and trills. I'm in a Proustian moment, fifteen years ago, zipped into a tent with my then-boyfriend, Stevie, listening to this same cacophony of whistles and peeps, breathing in the smell of wood smoke and coffee.

Still dark on a late spring morning in Oregon, not much past four and the professor of Stevie's birding class is about to take us on a trek through the woods. I know nothing about birds. Ignorant and cold, I shrug into the requisite Patagonia fleece jacket, duck through the nylon flap at the front of the tent, and join the others following the bearded ornithologist into the dawning forest.

Soft stepping over brown needles, he is our Pied Piper and we his captivated children. When he hears a particular bird noise, he holds his hand up to halt us, twenty or so bleary-eyed college students. Pointing to his ear, then to the source of the sound—sometimes visible, more often not—Bird Man whispers the name of the singer to us: Hammond's Flycatcher, Lesser Goldfinch, Mountain Chickadee, American Dipper, Bushtit. Stevie, and the other students, scribble these names down in birding notebooks. I listen, impressed, and shuffle along behind the group.

I cheated just now with the names, of course, although I did remember Bushtit and Flycatcher and also seeing the spellings of the bird sounds—pzrrt, pip-pip, treip—and thinking, Huh. Bird words. (Stevie majored in biology; I didn't wander far from the English department.) I remember riding in a university van to our campsite and I remember that early morning walk, but the thing that wedges in my brain between Bushtit and pip-pip is the sticky feeling that I didn't belong, the black-tar goo of old insecurity.

I wasn't in the class. I was a girlfriend tag-along, but there was more to it than that. I was the prissy one. I was too much lipstick, and not enough crunch. All of Stevie's bird class friends were of the outdoorsier-that-thou category and I had brought along an inflatable sleeping pad and tiny jar of half-and-half for my coffee. I can't remember anybody ever saying anything, just this sense that somehow I had been mismatched with my dreadlocked, kayak-paddling, pottery-throwing, Teva-wearing boyfriend. I felt girly in a bad way, as if my painted toenails and snug jeans were a romantic liability—no, worse, an identity liability.

 

MY LOVE OF BIRDS hadn't brought me to that twittering Oregon glen: Stevie had to be watched. My adversaries were young women in tie-dyed shirts, hemp bracelets and baggy cargo pants, pockets stuffed with hand blown pipes an big-belled goddess figurines, and I wanted to say, You know what? You want to know oudoorsy? You want to know hippie chick? When I was a teenager I lived on a mountain in a plastic house, okay? I rode a horse to school. We weren't camping. Yeah, I shaved my armpits, but I melted snow in a bucket on the wood stove to do it. 

This was all true. I had come to appreciate the pleasure of a soft bed and creamy coffee the hard, cold way when I was thirteen and my mother packed all our worldly belongings into a Chevy pickup tied down with fishing twine and moved us to a mountaintop in northeastern Washington. We were so far off the grid that in the winter, when the roads were impassable, we pulled orange sleds loaded with our groceries and pack animals. My mother claimed this was the kind of activity that built character, but another lasting effect of those frigid hikes was my reduced tolerance for those who thought a weekend in the woods was roughing it.

Stevie knew my mountain-girl history, of course, but I felt I needed to remind him of the tough girl that lurked beneath my feminine exterior. I wanted him to know that I could feather a soft nest and still hold off the egg snatchers with my piercing beak. Or something like that. Maybe I missed the day in biology where we learned that the females choose the males in the bird world. The males are the pretty ones. Think peacocks. Think the blue bower bird posing on his well-decorated threshold. In retrospect, some careful consideration of the actual facts might have saved me a few proprietary pre-dawn treks into the trilling woods. But like the Bird Girls, and like Stevie himself, mine was an identity in the process of becoming, and we were all involved in the awkward process of molting and feathering, craning our necks to check out our butts and see how our plumes were shaping up.

With more than a little shame, I recognized that the lessons I'd been learning in Women's Studies 101 about the patriarchy perpetuating woman-to-woman competition hadn't exactly sunk in. The Bird Girls weren't my only rivals, and they certainly weren't the crunchiest. The Ceramics Girls got dirtier, the Ultimate Frisbee Girls ran faster, the Kayak Girls, well, the Kayak Girls were tough—even I gave them that.

I tried to be the girl Stevie could love. I listened for birds in the woods, I straddled the pottery wheel and let it spray my jeans with clay juice, and I developed a mean (but ultimately ineffectual) forehand on the Ultimate field. I even paddled a small plastic boat into crushing rapids and thanked all the appropriate earth goddesses that I'd been born bottom-heavy and therefore managed to roll back up to breathe again. But I never felt tough. Worse, I never felt like the girl I was pretending to be.

 

YOU KNOW HOW this story ends. Not long after the bird trip, Stevie moved out, and when he left, as I predicted, he paired up with one of those gritty girls. Her name was Jill. This new Jill was everything that I was not: the anti-Jill Jill. In one of those too-honest, unnecessarily painful, post-breakup conversations, Stevie confessed that he'd felt smothered by my girliness—with me, he said, that was too much feminine energy.

A couple of months after we broke up, the Other Jill approached me on campus—baggy pants splattered with mud, shaggy hair not unattractively mussed, square hands holding a rope leash attached to a giant, drooling St. Bernard. She asked me if I'd seen Stevie. He hadn't called in weeks, she said. Unsuccessfully, I fought the urge to feel pleased.

I shrugged. Nope, haven't seen him. Poor Jill.

 

WHERE ARE YOU, Bird Girls, on this dawning Indiana day? The raucous songs of morning send me back to you, fifteen years and two thousand miles away. Settled, finally, in a nest I know to be mine, do I miss the parts of me that were you in those restless years of feathering and refeathering? Of never really landing?

Where are you, Bird Girls? Are you still sleeping? Perhaps you're lying awake, like me, remembering walks in the woods with birds and boys, all long gone. Maybe you're already up or haven't yet slept—rocking babies, typing reports, finishing shifts.

On this morning in Indiana, the sun colors the sky pink and my baby girl rolls over in her sleep. Having learned to hear my daughter's every shift and sigh, I know how I could have behaved on that forest path, tuning my ears rather than my jealous eyes. On the sidewalk with sad-eyed Jill, I might have said, "No, I haven't seen him. But it isn't you, you know. You're okay just the way you are." But I didn't, and of course, I couldn't. Sometimes we take our whole lives to feel safe in our nests, sometimes we miss that chance entirely. I am lucky.

Hey, Bird Girls, where are you now? Mine was a failure of empathy—for you, and for myself. Where are you?

I am here.

Hello out there. Pzrrt. Pip-pip. 

Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel

issue681

Found in Willow Springs 68

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"Outlaw Mentality"

—that's what the coroner says caught you up,
brought you down. A life of that fuck-that
stalled on the track. Hat on one side,
broken noggin with its go-
your-own-way dream
bled out on the other.

I catch your drift. To wake and stuff it
down. To sleep as it opens out. Me
and my wire cutters; widening
the fence hole. I know exactly
how few snips will
get me through.

*

White-hot, black-hard, the rails return
for mister you and mister not-you—there
on the path that leads to the path. Once
it fit your shoe. Blood-crust and blue-fly hum,
the one who's caught your whiff
slinks through the hole, stands
in the meadow. So like a wave,
the track goes out and comes back. REAL
ON STEEL claims the freight car
clanging into the by and bye.

Alive at the End of the World

(Gnome with Ax)

 

Sand and the glue from dead horses
made me. . .so you'd know me. Thirteen
seconds in a store window—you see
I'm you rowing away in a rogue dream.

Give me the full brunt of sun
on your door stoop. Make me
|the stopper atop the lower city
with its brute animal wails
I'll hear for you, loudly so.

One day you won't have a mind
to change anymore
about where I'll live on, or how,
without you.

 

Because B

Your arrival, admit it, was up
and out of the mud. So what,
here you are. One four o'clock
you walk across the lake.
Its ice creaks: gut syllables,
lingo between fish and fowl.

You'd refused the skates because
A) surely then you'd have to
perform a spin, and B) they could
hurt the ice. You its executioner,
you the handle turning the blade.

 

Last Address

What gold flitter has made of your ear
a hive? Clouds tug loose a last dream

and now the rainfall bears down
your secrets. The question's not

if the river had its way with you,
spit you out as a small inquiry

unfit for the big answer. No,
the question won't pertain to tattoos

or unmatchable DNA, but to what
world, under what sun, in what situ

we go on finding each you, each you,
the not-missed, the never missing.

*

We stand at the foot of you.
Bees and swallows rustle the grass

around half flesh, half bone, half
here, half gone. Dot of earth: nothing

owed or owned. Once you were a bud
in someone's belly. A swim, a sleep,

then to crown your way out. Keep
mum. Keep it to yourself, Little Prince

of the Reigning Question,
the would-you-do-it-all-again
there there, now now.

 

Found on the bank of the
Spokane River at approximately
2200 W. Falls Street. Adult
Caucasian male. This male was 5
feet 11 inches in height and
weighed approximately 161
pounds. His hair was dark brown
or possibly black. Clothing
worn: a pair of black lace up
boots with a brand name listed
as "CORCORAN," a pair of black
socks, a pair of light blue
denim pants with a brand name
listed as "RUSTLER," a pair of
red slightly meshed under
shorts, a dark colored T-Shirt
with the size listed as
medium and a name brand of
"EDDIE BAUER." Dental
Identification information
obtained, no match found.
Fingerprints unobtainable.
#10042 Spokane County
Medical Examiner's Records

 

 

 

 

 

“The Bridge” by Kerry Muir

issue66

Found in Willow Springs 66

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CAMMY TUTTLE IS THE SMARTEST, toughest girl in our whole fifth grade. She has red hair, straw-straight, and wears boys' clothes. Her trademark is a tweed Englishman's cap she got at Hinks department store in downtown Berkeley. She rode the BART train there all by herself, an adventure to Berkeley, to Hinks, and this is what she picked out as a treat—this hat, this Englishman's cap. She wears vests, too. It's 1973 and vests are in, especially corduroy ones with buckles, in earth tones like rust and olive green, colors that look good on Cammy Tuttle—but then, everything does, it seems.

On the playground when we play dodge ball, Cammy slings the ball at whoever's in the middle, hard, with gusto, with glee. But she's good at being in the middle, too. To watch her, you'd think being in the middle is a fabulous place to be. Cammy dances, leaps, and flies in the air. She skids sideways on worn-out tennis shoes. She sings at the ones who try to whack her with the ball: Missed me, missed me, now you have to kiss me. She teases and taunts them, actually tries to make them mad. If they throw the ball at me, I cover my face with both hands. I don't want to see that thing hurtling through the air at me.

Sometimes Cammy's mom subs at the school. Mrs. Tuttle. Her hair is firebird red, whereas Cammy's is more like a fox's. Mrs. Tuttle's hair is not straw-straight, but curly, bushy, and cut in a chic afro. She has spidery, spindly, white-as-moonlight legs, with just the lightest smattering of varicose veins that look like someone drew them there with a toothpick. On her feet, Mrs. Tuttle wears strappy high-heeled red sandals that make her long legs even longer. She wears them in wintertime even when it's cold, wears them with sheer white stockings and a big woolly fur coat.

Mom says Mrs. Tuttle is very ill—that she won't live more than a year. She tells me this because she wants me to be friends with Cammy Tuttle, to play with her, spend time. I think, Cammy is perfect, popular, wins at dodge ball—what does she need me for? But Mom says we should reach out to Cammy Tuttle. Our next door neighbot Mrs. Papini told Mom that Cammy is having a hard time, needs to have fun, needs friends. So Cammy has been invited to my house to play.

I see her in the distance from our kitchen window, crossing the old bridge. The bridge is long—about a quarter mile across. It's wide enough that an automobile could cross it, and probably did, many years ago. But now our house sits at the end of the bridge; if you drove across it now, you'd just end up in our backyard.

I am not allowed to walk on that bridge. Actually, no. one is. The bridge has DO NOT ENTER signs on the chicken-wire fence blocking it off at each end. In the spring, hundreds of ladybugs hatch and spread themselves all over that fence, covering it entirely in red. It's gorgeous. The bridge has holes in its asphalt surface big enough for even an adult to fall clear through. You can look down into those gaping holes and see the brown creek trickling, and rocks, like stepping stones in the water, hundreds of feet below. In bad weather, the bridge swings and creaks, sways on its feeble foundation of long, wobbly wooden stilts clamped to an ancient brace. The brace is corroded and tarnished, rusty and weak—oozing with thick, wet, green pads of moss. I've climbed down the steep slope into the creek many times, sometimes alone. It's a favorite place, of mine. There's a rotting one-room shack down there, just about the water, with the Devil's head painted in red on one side. Long, sloppy drips of paint leak out, dribble down from one of the Devil's horns. In pencil, scrawled along the walls of the shack: Asshole. Fuck. Fuck you. There's wildlife down there, too. My dog Ginger once came home without her collar, wet and muddy, covered in blood and shaking. Puncture wounds from claws covered her neck and throat. Hornets' nests hide in the tall weeds. Once, me and Joanne and Susan Papini happened to step on one; we all got stung in the most terrible way. The bridge used to be painted white, but now only flecks and chips remain. Parts of the railing have crumbled away, so you could fall off the bridge if you aren't careful—or if you had a mind to fall, like Mr. Koshland did.

Back in early October, just about a month ago, Scott Koshland's dad, Mr. Koshland, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. It was in all the papers. Our parents told us to be nice to Scott Koshland because his dad had jumped off a bridge. This haunts me because Scott Koshland's father is like my father—they both have bad legs from polio. Both walk with metal braces on one leg. Both use long metal canes. I saw Dad talking to Mr. Koshland once, on the playground at the school spring fair. They both stood balancing their metal canes, hips jutting out, shifting their weight every now and then—two asymmetrical bookends in loose-fitting khakis and blue plaid. Not even a year ago. Mr. Koshland had seemed normal then—fine. Just like my dad: Normal. Fine.

These days, my normal, fine dad is glued to the Watergate hearings on our black-and-white TV. When the hearings are on, you are not allowed to talk. He sits close to the box, holding the antenna, fiddling with the brown contrast dial. He mumbles things to the TV: Oh for crying in a beer. Good question, Sam. You numbskull. You knucklehead! He turns the volume up loud. You can hear Watergate blaring through every room in the house. You can hear it in the kitchen, where I'm standing, watching Cammy come closer and closer, as she crosses the old bridge.

Cammy walks like an athlete, half skip, half normal walk. She kicks things—dead walnuts, dried-up branches, broken twigs—kicks them like she's kicking a soccer ball. Using two fingers in her mouth, she whistles a boy's sharp whistle that cuts into the air above the creek. She does funny little elfin moves on the bridge—a shuffle hop, a grapevine step, a juggling move, a twirl. A bow to the uppermost branches of a giant walnut tree. She walks up to a pothole and sways over the lip, looking down to see below. With her toes touching the edge, she lifts one leg, balances for a moment, and stretches out both arms. Eventually, she hops over the hole—a hopscotch-type hop—landing on the same leg. When she gets to the end of the bridge, she reads the DO NOT ENTER sign, then flicks it like a booger or a fly.

I open the sliding glass door of the kitchen and walk out. Behind me, the sounds of Watergate: men's voices, tapping on microphones, throats clearing, papers shuffling, southern drawls. It's summer, and my dad, a teacher, is mostly home these days. My mom and sister are out somewhere.

What to do now? Cammy Tuttle is here. What to say? We wander around the backyard, kicking walnuts and twigs, looking at the ground.

You wanna take a walk? 

Cammie shrugs. Suits me. 

I've had two bad secret habits for a while that nobody knows about. One is shoplifting from grocery store. The other is breaking into people's houses and taking a poo or a pee. I don't flush. That's my criminal trademark, not flushing, so they'll know I was there. I never steal from the houses—I just like to look around, see their things, what stuff they have, see their secret lives.

I take Cammy to Craig Wingett's house. An older boy, Craig goes to Alcalanes, the big high school. After knocking on the door a couple times to make sure that no one's home, we enter the Wingetts' through the side door and step into the kitchen. I've never been here before. My face, my arms, the hair on my head feel coated with electricity. My legs are prickly, bursting with energy. I feel wiry, capable, sharp, alive. Things look vivid, dangerous, frightening, bright: the gleam of pots and pans on the wall, the glint of knives in the rack. An old-fashioned was tub sits in the sink, filled with water and suds. Bras dry on a string in the air about the sink. Two plastic angels stand next to a row of containers that say: Sugar, Flour, Salt, Rice, Tea. Cammy finds a round blue tin of butter cookies, takes one for herself and tosses one to me. It's good. We look around, touching everything: the bowl of red apples on the kitchen table, the two place settings on rubber olive-green place mats. I go down the hall—the carpet is gold shag—past photos of Craig at age five, six, seven, eight, nine, until he's about sixteen. I can tell they're school photos because they all have that same swirly blue wall behind his head. There's Craig—or someone—as a baby. Mr. Wingett in Buddy Holly glasses with Mrs. Wingett, beehive hairdo, rays of light beaming behind their heads. A smooth golden Jesus nailed to a smooth golden cross, with a smooth golden crown of thorns upon his head. To my right, a bedroom door is the tiniest bit ajar. I peek in and see a long glass-topped dresser, silver hand mirror, silver brush, comb, perfume bottle with round rubber squirter, golden-cased lipstick. I walk in with my eye on the perfume, give myself a squirt, look at myself in the mirror. I decide I hate my overalls and short hair, wish I'd never let Mom cut off my braids. In the bathroom, I don't turn on the light when I pee.

Back in the kitchen, Cammy's twirling her Englishman's cap on one finger. She throws it up in the air, lets it land back on her finger, keeps it spinning round and round. Says to me, Hey. Come here. 

What?

You have to see the masterpiece. 

Like Carol Merrill on Let's Make a Deal, Cammy points to the center of the kitchen table, between the place mats. The tin wash tub, still full of suds, now has Mrs. Wingett's laciest, blackest bra stretched around it, fastened in the back. There's a big red apple in each cup. Cammy takes suds from the washtub, dots bubbles on the places where nipples would be. We crack up, take bites from the apples, put them, bitten, back in the bra, and crack up all over again.

It takes about five minutes to find Craig Wingett's stash of Playboys, a stack under his bed. We sit on the floor, we crouch, we kneel, we curl up. We open to the centerfold, Miss Whatever-month, an oiled-up blonde on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. From what I can tell, she's in a cabin in Alaska somewhere. She's wearing a diamond choker, black spike heels, and nothing else. Her boobs are bigger than her head. We read the blurb about her in the bubblegum-pink box: her name is Kimberly. She likes warm smiles, riding horses bareback, swimming naked at the beach. Dislikes negativity. l look at Cammy. She is staring at Kimberly the way my dad stares at the Watergate hearings on our black-and-white TV. Leaning forward a little. Not blinking.

There's the sound of a car pulling into the driveway outside, and the squeak of brakes. The electricity in my body wakes up again, shocking me down to my toes. There's a scramble of Cammy and me pushing, stumbling, knocking into Craig's doorway, bumping each other, getting tangled, grabbing, clawing at walls.

Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! God! Go!

We shove each other down the narrow hall, losing our balance, hitting every photograph and tchotchke on the wall: Craig as a baby, Craig as a teen, Craig at eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, and five, the golden Jesus, the kitchen table, kitchen door. Just as we're almost free and clear, Cammy stops, turns on her heel, and runs back in the house again.

Cammy! Cammy! Cammy! Cam!

I dance back and forth on my toes, pounding the frame of the doorway. In a flash, Cammy is back, now clutching her Englishman's cap.

Go! Go! Go!

Sound of car doors slamming. The trunk door opening. Paper bags. Words.

We fly out the back door, clutching each other's sleeves, each other's hands. Cammy shoves me into a hedge, skids down next to me on the ground. I'm on my butt in the dirt, squashed in the space between house and hedge, hand over my face. I want to laugh so bad. I peek out through two fingers at Cammy, who stares straight through the leaves of the hedge. Whenever I start to lose it, she digs her fingernails into my knee. I bite my knuckle, twist my hand. I try to think of something serious and sad, to keep from laughing out loud. I think of Watergate and southern drawls, throats clearing, papers shuffling, microphones tapping. I think of Scott Koshland's dad, the air rushing fast and hard against his face; I think of a wish he might have had, just moments too late, to fly back upward, as if he had wings, to the place he'd stood only seconds before, there on the Golden Gate Bridge. I think of Mrs. Tuttle's high-heeled strappy sandals, her black coat, red hair, long legs, varicose veins, of Scott Koshland at the desk next to me, staring straight ahead. I think of anything, anything to keep from exploding and laughing and screaming and blowing it, getting caught, getting punished, getting put away. Meanwhile, goddamned Mrs. Wingett and Craig are taking about four hours to get the groceries out of their silver-blue Chevrolet. Finally, finally there's the sound of a screen door slamming shut, banging twice. Then silence, a few seconds—and Mrs. Wingett's high-pitched, wailing shriek.

That does it, we're gone, Cammy and me, running wild down Nordstrom Lane, screaming, laughing, crying, panting, sprinting through backyards. In a vacant lot where someone's starting construction, cement mixers and cinder blocks scattered everywhere, we bend over, grab our knees, hit the ground, roll, laugh, pound the dried-up earth, hold our stomachs, scream and scream and howl and cry and scream all over again.

We lie in the dirt, breathing hard in the sun. Cammy presses her forehead into the earth. Laugher bubbles up, recedes. I make a snow angel in some loose dirt. Cammy stands up, walks around. Takes off her Englishman's cap. Stares at it. Puts it back on.

I feel like an excursions, she says. I feel like going to Hinks. 

Right now? 

Yes, now. 

By yourself? 

No, stupid. With you. 

And so, less than an hour later, I follow Cammy across the old bridge, away from my house, toward the road that leads to the BART. The bridge sways and creaks, a great gray elephant's back under our feet. We look into potholes and see clear down to the bottom of the creek. I see the roof of the Devil's fuck-you shack, the muddy curve of the creek, water barely moving. I see the tall, tangled weeds, plants with red berries, thorns. Giant trees loom around us, their branches waving in the wind, forming a lacy veil of leaves over our heads like a canopy.

I follow Cammy across the bridge.

And for one moment it occurs to me, It's possible we might die.

Our odds could be that bad, our timing so crappy, our luck so slim that today might be the very day the bridge collapses and crumbles, the day the bridge falls.

But it's only fear.

Soon Cammy and I will be on the other side of the bridge, walking down Happy Valley Road. We'll ride BART to Berkeley, get off at Shattuck Avenue, go into Hinks and look around at the tall, pale walls. Cammy will get to buy one thing (a gift from her mother, perhaps?). She will choose her one thing from the men's department: a bright red paisley bow tie. I will go next door and shoplift a halter top for JCPenney's, with pale blue and white checks, its neckline a plunging V. We will ride BART back home, her wearing her new bow tie, me fidgeting with the halter top, looping it round and round the knuckles of one hand. The station in suburban Lafayette will be almost empty, the sky yellow, getting ready to turn dark.

Walking home along Happy Valley Road, Cammy will let me wear her tweed Englishman's cap. I'll let her wear the halter top, which she'll pull on over her olive-green sweater. She'll wiggle her hips as she walks and fills the cups of the halter with her thumbs, pretending to have boobs like Kimberly in Craig Wingett's Playboy magazine. By the time we get to the bridge there will be no light in the sky at all. I'll stick very close to Cammy when we walk back across. I will ask Cammy, Don't you feel cold? And she'll say, Nope, not me. I will feel tired, trying my best to keep up. Sometimes Cammy will be a step or two ahead of me, but other times I'll catch up with her and walk next to her, side by side. Every once in a while she'll say Look out. . . or Watch it there. . . , pointing to a gaping pothole. I'll tell her if I see one, too—I'll say Cammy, there's one over there. Over here, Cam. It will take us a long time to cross, but eventually, we'll get to the other side. We'll pick our way carefully, deliberately, down the bridge's pockmarked asphalt center, tiptoeing around all those potholes, so many potholes, floating in the dark.

“International Cooking for Beginners” by Katie Cortese

issue66

Found in Willow Springs 66

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At first, I couldn't help but think of him as the criminal. He chose an apron striped black and white, like the other men in the class, though there were other stripes to choose from: red-and-white, green-and-white, blue-and-white. The class was made up of YMCA junkies, all but the criminal. Last month ceramics, this month me.

The criminal shared a counter with the Norman newlyweds, and his quick hands were good with a knife. He could reduce a stalk of celery to little green commas in seconds. Fresh out of maximum security at Sing-Sing, he told us during registration, the day before the start of our six week course. Just a guy looking for his straight and narrow.

Mrs. Norman stood her ground next to the criminal. She was chatty and slight and looked about my age. Early thirties, with hair the color of a cast iron pot. Also, she was full to bursting with the first child. That was the main difference between us.

During registration I showed them how to make smoothies. Together we watched the criminal feed bananas to his blender one sickle-shaped fruit at a time.

 

WEEK ONE (BREAKFAST): BORDERTOWN EGGS BENEDICT

"First the hollandaise," I said, moving between counters with green granite tops.

We'd begun with a guacamole base instead of egg yolk. Husbands mashed avocado cubes while wives apportioned mayonnaise and lime juice, tossed in Tabasco to taste. The criminal hummed while he worked, something bluesy that made me think of dark nightclubs filled with smoke.

"We'll have to remember this for Cinco de Mayo," Mrs. Norman said. She was pert and pretty and I doubted she'd ever made it out to Saratoga Springs, never mind to Mexico. To her left, her husband stirred dutifully; to her right, the criminal grinned down at his bowl.

"You know what's funny," the criminal said. "Most Mexicans don't celebrate Cinco de Mayo." His teeth were even and yellow, a mockery of perfection. His voice ground out like a tire in gravel. "Most people think it's their Independence Day, but that's really September 16th."

For a few seconds there was only the symphonic plunge and release of spatulas urging mayonnaise mixtures toward liquidation. The room smelled of vinegar.

Mr. Norman turned his head energetically, leaning across the counter so Mrs. Norman was forced to move back. "That's real interesting, bub," he said. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Call me Arthur," the criminal said.

We thought of adobe jail cells. Drug cartels. We don't need no stinkin' batches.

The criminal held his sauce up for approval. He gripped the sides of his bowl, instead of allowing his fingers to hand over the rim. The sauce within had the bubbly appearance of primordial ooze, but on the tongue it was smooth and tangy, an excellent first effort and the best in the class. He smiled like a kid with a gold star while I held out a hand for his paring knife. He gave it to me handle first and our fingertips met at the base of the blade, a quick, rasping touch.

Later, I fed my husband the leftovers. We sawed at canadian bacon, dry from the microwave, while a summer sun set behind the lake. "Have you ever been to Mexico?" I asked.

He looked up from his paper, the reading of which was his main occupation in the summer months when he was not required to profess. A web of blood vessels had burst on the apples of his cheeks since we'd met half a dozen years ago, a change that made him appear permanently jolly. In the last year, his fingers had started to swell after eating, so he'd take off his wedding ring for meals. It gleamed next to his plate now, silver and full of refracted light.

"What?" he said. The Life & Leisure page waffled in the breeze of his breath. Once, he'd been my professor at the college down the road. Our courtship had been a thrilling trespass. He'd order wine by the year and variety without looking at the menu, and tell me stories from his studies of Freud in Vienna, Rorschach in Switzerland. He'd promised to take me back there, to show me the world. But first there wasn't money and then there wasn't time.

I thought of thick blue corn tortillas smothered in queso and chiles so hot my tongue would pulse in waves. Posole topped with sprigs of cilantro and spiked with a freshly squeezed lime. Hearty bowls of albondigas. Tacos al carbon. A sweet caramel flan.

The summer stretched out before us. I said, "Don't you ever want to get away?"

He reached for my hand across the table and brought it to his lips. "Maybe next summer," he said, and then released me.

 

WEEK TWO (MID-MORNING SNACK): HOMEMADE NO-FAIL HUMMUS

"Start your engines," I said, and thirteen index fingers pushed purée.

Twelve belonged to half a couple. Just one to a criminal.

I circulated, watching chickpeas turn into paste and encouraging experimentation. A handful of sun-dried tomatoes here, sprinkling of feta there. Another garlic clove. Pinch of salt.

The test kitchen filled with the smell of lemon juice and olive oil, paprika and garlic and mint. I'd wanted Greece for a honeymoon. Spanakopita and baklava. Lamb souvlakis and carafes of piney retsina. Instead, we flew to Buffalo for a long weekend so he could give a paper on Jung. It snowed the day we planned to see Niagara Falls and we ordered room service at the Ramada instead, feasting on chicken fingers and licking hot sauce from each other's fingers. I told myself Greece could wait.

"I bet this will be yummy," Mrs. Norman said. She scooped up a dollop of hummus and licked it, pink tongue darting blink-and-you'll-miss-it fast. Her eyes closed in appreciation. The baby was getting a taste too. She was shaping its likes and dislikes, its cravings, before it ever took a sip of air. She scooped again and held it to her husband, who swallowed, nodding.

"I'll take that bet," the criminal said. His hummus was dished up already, garnished with a pool of tahini and a pair of kalamata olives.

Mrs. Norman faced him, her smile stuttering.

Then she dipped the spoon back into her bowl and fed him, watching his lips drag over the place where hers and her husband's had been, and set the spoon clicking to the counter. He closed his eyes when he swallowed, a smile etching lines like parentheses into his leathered face.

"Now that's good," the criminal said, Arthur, his name was. Licking his lips.

Then, "Fair's fair." He pushed his bowl her way.

Mrs. Norman turned to her husband, her hands gone again to her stomach.

"Oh, no," she said, smiling wildly. "Thanks, but I've had enough."

"What's the matter, Lily?" Her husband reached over their own bowl and picked up the spoon, thrice used. "It looks delicious."

She blinked rapidly, the whites of her eyes seeming to swallow the all the blue.

Mr. Norman jabbed the spoon into Arthur's bowl and brought it to his wife's mouth.

"Go on, honey," he said. "Try it."

It hovered before her lips, which remained closed while her eyes reddened at their rims.

"Forget about it," Arthur said, smiling with deep wrinkles ringing his eyes. He took a new spoon from the supply drawer and tasted his own handiwork. "Could use some more salt."

I was distributing storage containers for take homes, coming to the Normans' table last.

"Christ on a carousel, Lilith," Mr. Norman said. He thrust the spoonful she'd refused into his own mouth and swallowed violently. "Oh, you're missing out, Lily. That's out of this world."

"A little bland, actually," Arthur said, studying his hands splayed on the counter. Hands that had hurt someone, maybe, wielded a gun, counted a wad of money from some illegal transaction. Hands that were capable of anything, everything, as far as we knew.

His dark eyes glinted from a face almost the color of brink. When he pushed the arms of his pilled brown sweater up nearly to the elbow, you could see the tattoos on his forearm. One a Red Cross snake; one the sight of a rifle. One a bulldog with teeth like a mountain range.

He kept his nails neat, his hands clean, and they were strongly muscled, the veins and bones working in concert with the slightest flex. I watched him fingering his spoon, wondered what those fingers would feel like tripping up and down the vertical crevasse in a woman's back. My back. I inhaled slowly through my nose to clear y head and move to an adjacent table.

The Normans prepared to leave without speaking to each other. She dumped their hummus into a plastic container while he washed his hands halfheartedly at one of the communal sinks. After they left, Arthur and I were alone in the kitchen. He removed his apron.

"May I?" I said. He smelled like sun-soaked sawdust, clean and sweet.

He pushed his bowl toward me and stood from his stool, knees cracking like gunshots.

He was right. It was bland. "I'd try some sesame oil and a little black pepper," I said.

"In the Middle Ages, in England, they thought birth defects were the mother's fault. Pregnant chicks weren't supposed to look at cripples or think about the devil, or else their kid would turn out half-monster." He set his backpack on the counter and unzipped it to slip in the hummus. The bag was filled with towels and boxers, razors and travel tubes of toothpaste.

I forced myself to look back at his face, that sun-crisped expanse. Close up, he seemed a bit careworn, but you'd never guess h'd lived fifteen years behind razor wire. I wondered where he'd been before that. Why he was here now.

"But then you've got your Ottomons," he went on, drifting toward the door. "And they used to say if you keep a mother from eating something she craves, the baby comes out with a birthmark on its head in the shape of the food. So there you go."

Assault. Battery. Rape. What had it been? He had such neat hands.

"Do you have somewhere to stay, Arthur?" I asked. It was the first time I'd said his name.

"Best Western's putting me up. Work release thing. They give me a room, I work in the laundry." He smiled. "Just like at home."

I had no way of knowing if that's what he'd done before prison or in it.

"It's lunch recipes next week," I said.

"Sounds good, Mrs. M.," he said, the "Mrs." rolling awkwardly in his mouth, and then he took off up West Avenue towards Washington. I noticed he wore no wedding ring.

At home, my husband's face turned pink with pleasure at seeing me. I curled into the armchair with him, crinkling the newspaper he'd been reading and kissing a star-shaped pattern against his cheek. "Well, hello yourself," he said, then wiggle out from beneath me and went into the kitchen to dip a triangle of pita into my concoction.

"Too much pepper," he said, and coughed to prove his point. But it didn't stop him from finishing the bowl and licking his pink sausaged fingers.

Later, lying in bed, I watched the streetlight seep in though the window blinds, painting our room with narrow bars of gold that I usually counted, slowly, as a mnemonic for sleep. Tonight, my husband kissed my shoulder. Testing the waters and tasting the salt of me. I turned to him and lifted one of his heavy hands, placing it on my hip where I warmed immediately. He'd kept his nails long once upon a time to pick the banjo in a bluegrass band. I hadn't asked him to quit playing after we were married, but he had anyways. The instrument had been caged in our attic going on five years. He'd never seemed old to me in college, strutting in front of the blackboard in cargo pants and tees, but now I saw the wrinkles gathered in the secret place where his ear nestled into his hairline, and couldn't help feeling the eleven years between us.

A strip of light fell across his nose, another over his forehead, leaving his eyes in shadow. We'd planned to go to London one year, for our August anniversay, but terrorists blew up those Tube trains that summer and he'd convinced me we should cancel our tickets.

"What's so attractive about English cuisine anyway," he'd said.

Steaming plates of Sunday roasts and airy Yorkshire puddings. Fish and chips served in grease-soaked sheets of newsprint. English breakfasts with baked beans and toast fried crispy in bacon fat. Tea and crumpets with clotted cream. Dense, sweet spotted dick.

"Most people would say nothing," I'd said, wondering what was the point of marrying a psychology professor if he couldn't interpret his own wife's mind.

And I wasn't such a mystery. Every place had its own taste. I wanted to sample them all.

"Let's go to Italy," I said now, his hand inscribing slow circles on my lower back, our torsos perfectly aligned. "We could have white truffles in Alba, Tuscan chianti, gelato in Venice from a sidewalk stand."

"Neither of us speaks Italian," he said, laying his lips against my throat, blinking his eyelashes against me in a feathery tickle like what precedes a sneeze. We'd had a five-year plan. See the world, then start a family. But Buffalo wasn't enough for me. It wasn't even out of our home state.

"I know," he said "Let's go down to the city this weekend." To a native Saratogan, The Big Apple was the only city that mattered. "We'll cruise by Little Italy."

He rolled over then, on top, driving me further into the mattress, working both of us further beneath the covers, and I pictured the vars of light and shadow drawn across the white expanse of his back.

 

WEEK THREE (LUNCH): ITALIAN SAUSAGE AND BROCCOLI QUICHE

In mid-June, the heat of summer settled in Saratoga, and with it the tourists, though racing season wouldn't start until the middle of July. In another month the city would double in population and its roads would seem to shrink by half. Saudi sheiks would stride the streets in their white thobes, cotton ghutras swaddling their heads in pure white or red-and-white checks.

Other foreign visitors would be harder to pick out, until you heard them speak at the Price Chopper, lovely elongated vowels and clipped consonants. Ireland and Australia. Germany and Spain. South Africa, Japan, India and Egypt. For two months in summer the world would come to Saratoga Springs, and then, as if we'd woken from a dream, it would leave.

I wanted to follow the world to its four corners, then bring it back home in my recipe book. Each taste better than a photograph. Proof of a thousand possible lives waiting to be lived.

In class, Mr. Norman was without Lily. Arthur noticed before I did. He asked after her over their pans of simmering sausage, the two men catching olive oil splatters on their black-and-white aprons, gabbing like a pair of referees at halftime.

"A little under the weather," Mr. Norman said. "The heat really gets to her these days."

"Tell me about it," Arthur said. "When my wife was pregnant, she sent away for brochures on Alaska. Until the winter hit, and then it was Texas. Somewhere that never cooled."

I lingered by their counter. But their talk dried up with me there. I inspected the contents of their pans, standing between them so Arthur's body heat was a felt presence.

"Very good," I said to him. "You can take them off now. Slice them into thin rounds."

Mr. Norman's sausages actually looked better, but I remember him last week, trying to force feed his wife to assuage his own embarrassment. "You're burning them," I said.

The two men sliced in companionable silence while I handed out premade pie crusts settled into disposable aluminum pans. Two older ladies at the rear counter called me over and I helped them get the body of their quiche started cracking four eggs into the mixer, adding the heavy cream, the pepper, the rosemary, the salt.

When I turned to the Normans' table, their talk had moved on to other things.

"I grew up in the city," Mr. Norman was saying. "Now I've got skiing at my doorstep, horse racing every year. I'd never go back."

"It's a little hoity-toity for me," Arthur said, mixing in cheese and broccoli. I wondered where he'd been born, how far he'd roamed in between. "But my daughter's here, so here I am."

The ovens had reached prime temperature and it was time to put the quiches in, but I wanted to hear a little more. I strolled over with my arms behind my back like a science fair judge, looking down my nose at their counter. I wore a silk scarf around my neck, purchased at the Fashion Bug for class because it featured Pisa's famous leaning tower.

"What's your daughter do?" Mr. Norman asked, dusting his pie with a blend of provolone and mozzarella, a snowy layer of parmesan. My mouth watered at its acrid scent.

"She's at the college," Arthur said. "Studies Asian countries, religions too, it said in her last letter. She doesn't know I'm here yet."

The college only had twenty-five hundred students. My husband would know her, maybe. I could arrange a reunion. They'd both be grateful and Arthur would get back on track.

Arthur looked up, saw me lingering. If he'd been in jail fifteen years, I wondered when his last time with a woman had been. If he'd grown priestlike in there, celibate, or if there'd been conjugal visits, magazine pictures taped to the wall by his bed.

"Time to pop them in?" he said, wiping his hands down the length of his apron.

He was proud of his handiwork. Garnering a repertoire so when he got his own place, he could cook for his daughter, make up for what he'd missed out on in prison. He wore a long-sleeved polo shirt, pushed up to mid-forearm, and I noticed even through the shirt that his upper arms were small, but carved into hard muscles the size of naval oranges. More tattoos covered his neck above and behind the collar of his shirt. One was a woman's name: Claire.

"Is that your wife's name?" I asked, though I'd only meant to think it.

He followed my gaze and brushed at the spot with his fingers as if trying to rub it away.

"She's more like the reason I don't have a wife anymore, Mrs. M.," he said, curt enough for me to walk away, face burning. We loaded the ovens and before long the rich scent of cheese and egg, and flaky, buttery pastry, took up all the space in the room. The students sniffed and smiled, kneaded their knuckles, anxious for a taste.

Later, cleaning up, I apologized. "It's none of my business," I said.

"Don't sweat it," he said. His area was spotless, and still he swabbed the counter with a paper towel as if trying to clean it at a molecular level. "It's all water under the bridge."

I stopped mopping then, gearing up to ask him finally. But he crossed the floor between us swiftly and my mouth snapped closed. I thought he would embrace me, push me roughly against the smooth plaster wall, or come at me with a knife concealed in his apron pocket, the very paring knife he'd used to hack apart an avocado on the first day of class. But he only paused in front of me.

"Excuse me, Mrs. M," he said, tossing his paper towel in the trash behind me.

I began mopping again to hide the flush in my cheeks. "Can I give you a ride home?"

He hoisted his backpack and we moved toward the doorway where I clicked off the lights, plunging both of us into the dim. He dropped one of his hands to the doorknob and held it.

"You have such wild eyes," he said, his free hand kneading the strap of his pack. I couldn't tell if it was just factual, what he was saying, or something else, but my heartbeat picked up and I swallowed with a dry throat. He leaned closer and closed his eyes, then breathed me in. I felt him doing it. My perfume, or just me. I breathed him in too. I felt ready for anything.

"You know, I think I better walk," he said with the flicker of a smile. And then he turned the knob and we both walked out into the dying light. That night, I searched for flights to Italy. I could fly into Rome for $450. Work my way north through Tuscany and the Piedmont region, hook south again and hit Venice, Parma, Bologna, Florence. Give myself a month and do it right. But even hosteling, there would be food to pay for, and there I wanted to spare no expense. I went into the bedroom where my husband snored already in bed, his striated with light.

 

WEEK FOUR (MID-AFTERNOON SNACK): ADIRONDACK RED POTATO CHIPS

"I wonder sometimes, who was the first person to eat a potato. They're not exactly appetizing raw," Mrs. Norman said. Her pretty voice, like her pretty hands, was flitting and sweet. She seemed fully recovered, yet bigger than ever, as if in the next second she'd boil over.

Both Normans stood slicing potatoes thin, as I'd told them to, and tossed them into a bowl without any contact of their elbows or hips, maintaining a cushion of air between them.

Arthur had seemed distracted at first, quiet and self-contained, his elbows held close to his sides as if he were trying not to take up space. Still, he spoke up now, producing a smile like a magic trick. "It had to be some kind of American. North or South. In the Chiloé Archipelago of Chile, they put potatoes in everything. You ever had curanto? They cook it in a hole in the ground. Lots of fish and potatoes. Delicious. Europe didn't even see one until the 16th century. Can you imagine the Irish before potatoes? Or the Russians without vodka?" He shivered theatrically as if the very thoughts were death.

"Pardon my asking, but how do you know all that?" Mrs. Norman said, her voice as high as a schoolgirl's. Anyone listening to them went on slicing, but the noise level sunk right down.

He winked and dropped a handful of potato slices into his wok.

I couldn't imagine him in prison. All that surfaced were movie images of men in orange jumpsuits lounging on metal bunks. Killing each other with shanks in the lunchline. Plotting escape in the exercise yard. Bragging about their crimes.

The frying stage took longer than I'd planned.

"No, no you have to leave them until they're browned," I said, putting all of Mr. Norman's chips back in oil.

"Last week, I'm burning everything. This week everything's supposed to be burnt. No wonder I'm hopeless at this," he said, looking to his wife for rescue.

"Maybe if you'd listen for once," Mrs. Norman said, turning to her right so her back was to her husband, her front to Arthur. But her voice reflected strain, as if she were forcing herself to speak to the criminal. "I hear you have a daughter," she said. "Ours is going to be a girl too."

Arthur went on turning his potato slices in the hot oil. "Her name is Melinda," he said.

"Lily, I need your help over here," said Norman, indicating the pan where the slices really were burning now. Before she could turn, a splattering of oil connected with a superheated metal coil beneath the pan. A grease fire flashed to lief and died out in the next second. Lily stumbled into Arthur, who had his hands up to catch her before she fell.

It all happened so fast, but then, as soon as she recovered herself, Lily screamed—an ice-pick-in-the-ear sound. I half-expected the juice glasses to shatter on their shelves. As it was, several students raised their hands to their ears.

Arthur released her immediately, then let his hands fall empty to his sides. Lily had clamped one hand over her mouth and now stepped backward, bumping into her husband and flinching when he brought a hand to her shoulder. She turned to him and buried her face in his armpit, her back heaving with sobs.

"I should go," Arthur said, shutting off his burner.

"Arthur, wait," I said, reaching for him. The fabric of his polo snagged on one of my fingernails as he passed.

"See ya, Mrs. M," he said, pushing past me and out the door into the wide world.

In his absence, his potatoes continued to fry toward golden brown.

"We don't know anything about the guy," Mr. Norman argued, his face strained as if someone were tugging it from within on a complicated system of ropes. Both hands ran up and down his wife's bare arms where she heaved against his chest. "Or what he's capable of."

The class was a sea of blank faces.

"Now they're burning," I said, removing his wok from heat and fishing out the crispy rounds with a slotted spoon. Mrs. Norman excused herself and returned seconds later, makeup and smile reapplied. She went on slicing, changing the subject to breastfeeding.

After everyone had gone, I swabbed a bleach mixture under each freestanding counter. The mop's saturated gray head encountered some small resistance in the Norman's area, Arthur's backpack, slumped against the rear wall. It smelled of sweat and cigarettes and road dirt, and had been oft-repaired, judging by the paperclip zippers and swaths of duct tape.

The Best Western was out of my way home, but I swung by anyway, carrying Arthur's backpack on my hip like a baby. The lobby had a thin beige carpet underfoot and a clerk who watching something with a laugh track on his boxy computer monitor, reaching occasionally into a bag of Cheetos balanced on his lap.

"I have something for one of your guests," I said, transferring the pack to the counter.

The clerk used a long, orange-stained finger to click his mouse, silencing the laugh track, then typed Arthur's full name in slow, hesitant keystrokes. I watched his gaze jitter over the results on his screen. "322," the clerk said, yawning. "Want to leave it for him?"

The elevator made a sing-song chiming and I turned to face it. "No, thanks," I said, remembering Arthur's hands on Mrs. Norman's white arms. The way his touch had scared her.

Aerosmith played in the elevator, a blast from my husband's childhood, tinny in the small mirrored space. My husband would be getting hungry by now. I could see him in his armchair, scanning the evening news and listening for the sound of my car in the driveway. In our early days we'd gone skiing in the Berkshires, hiking, camping; we'd traveled to Vermont or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania for concerts on a moment's notice. He'd sing to me, his voice high and pitch perfect, and we'd make love on a blanket in our backyard. These last few years though, he'd stopped wanting adventures, except the one I wasn't ready for.

He was full and satiated with experience, and I was endlessly hungry, a bottomless pit.

The third floor was deadly quiet. Arthur's bag weighed on my hip like an actual child, one grown too heave to be carried around. It was a smoking floor and the ceilings had yellowed, the carpets losing their red. I had an urge to cover the peephole with my hand before I knocked, though I knew he'd see me anyway when he opened the door.

"Arthur," I said, knocking softly. I'd expected to wait a minute or so while he roused himself from bed, stubbing out a cigarette on the way over. I'd never seen him smoke a cigarette and it made him seem more romantic somehow, a poor, put-upon James Dean type, misunderstood by the world. Maybe he'd been wrongly convicted of whatever it had been. Maybe he was really an innocent man.

The door swung open almost before I'd finished knocking, but his face—open and inviting before he saw me—arranged itself into a mask of politeness. "Mrs. M," he said, "Won't you come in," as if I'd arrived just in time for tea.

I'd expected tube socks flung everywhere, clothes draped over chairs and surfaces, an unmade bed. I'd expected him to have stripped to a wife-beater and jeans, feet bare, hair rumpled from sleep. But he wore the blue polo shirt and Nikes he'd worn to class, and his room didn't look occupied. A fully packed suitcase stood off to the side and every surface was clear, from the desk to the bathroom counter to the hospital corners intending to stay. The scent in the air was of lemon air freshener. I spotted the can on his bedside table on top of the evening paper, the same one my husband read daily, which was neatly folded along its original lines.

"Your bag," I said, holding it out with two hands.

"Much obliged," he said, taking it from me and setting it next to the suitcase. There was no place to sit but the bed, so he sat on one side, creasing the flowered comforter, and I perched on the other.

This hotel room was made for encounters like this, and had seen stranger couples than us. I hated to think about what might be living microscopically on the comforter.

"I'm sorry about today," I said. There was a good three feet of space between us, as if we'd left from for both my husband and Claire, whoever she might be.

He waved the incident away as if it were a fly. "Don't blame here. For all she knows I went away for rape." He looked me full in the face, leaning slightly over his straight arm, a blue vein pulsing through his inked bulldog.

"You didn't though," I said, feeling confident now, feeling I had him figured out.

He fiddled with the bottom hem of his shirt, staring down. "I didn't," he said.

I wasn't going to get a better window to ask than this one, but he looked so private, sitting there. So remorseful. I picked at a loose plastic thread in the bedspread.

"You didn't have to bring my bag," he said. "It's just crap in there anyway. Just contingency plans." He leaned back on an elbow and lifted his legs onto the bed.

I curled my own legs up so the two of us were on an island. I wished I'd finished his chips and brought them to him now. We could have fed them to each other, crispy and salty and greasy between our fingers and tongues and teeth.

"It was unfair, what Lily did," I said. "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

He cocked an elbow behind his head and lay back into the bed. "You're a beautiful woman. Don't get me wrong," he said. "But I know what I look like, so what I"m wondering, is what's so wrong with your life that you're here with a fuckup like me."

"Does your daughter think you're a fuckup, too?" I felt braver now, sitting higher than him on the bed, the door closed but unlatched behind me.

"She's smart. She says away," he said. "I got some pretty bad habits. They left me in a pretty bad way." He held out an arm across the bed and I thought he was reaching for me so I took his hand, turning the willing victim. Our palms brushed against each other and I felt my heartbeat spike. The country of infidelity was one I"d never thought to visit, a place with no taste—only texture and temperature, pure sensation.

He held his arm stiffly though, curling his fingers tight over mine and turning his elbow toward me so I could see the healed-over track marks, scars so many and deep they'd been made permanent over a decade ago.

"Don't get tangled up with me, Mrs. M.," he said, letting my hand hit the comforter.

I stood and darted for the door, though he wasn't pursuing, was barely getting himself to standing. And standing there, breath coming fast in a painful whistle, I felt stupid, cheated somehow. But also free. Freed. "I'll see you in class?" I said, an attempt at brightness.

"Sure thing," he said.

I took the stairs down to the lobby and stopped at Boston Market on the way home for food to feed my husband, though for once I couldn't imagine eating a bite.

 

WEEK FIVE (DINNER): RUSSIAN BORSCHT

It was normal to drop a few students during the course, but this week only half the class showed up. I'd have to freeze the rest of the pork loins and come up with something creative to do with a dozen extra beets. Arthur was one of the missing.

Mrs. Norman was also absent, and Mr. Norman set about his preparations as if readying for war. While his pork loin simmered, he dashed an onion into a thousand tiny pieces, and peeled and chopped beets until his fingers were stained crimson. He kept swiping his hands across his apron, drawing red streaks against the black and white.

At the end of class, Mr. Norman asked for extra Tupperware. "The wife is staying with her mother a few days," he said. "Pre-baby jitters."

His borscht smelled rich and delicious, and when I inserted a wooden spoon in the center of the pot, so many vegetables were crowded in that it stuck straight up and down, the sign of a very good batch. I helped him split it into two separate containers.

"You're starting to get it," I said. It was hard to stay angry at a good cook.

"Do you have kids?" he said, tightening the lid down on one container and marking it "Lily" with a permanent marker. They'd been married barely a year and it would only get harder. I had no wisdom for them.

"I'm not cut out for motherhood," I said, and felt another burst of freedom.

Even though we'd parted awkwardly, I missed Arthur at the front counter, his efficient, nimble fingers peeling the paper jackets off small, white onions and working a whisk with brisk, efficient strokes. I felt I'd been stood up, as if he'd broken a promise more tangible than his presence in class. I cleaned up quickly and shut off the lights.

Out in the hallway, a familiar backpack had been dropped by the test kitchen's door.

He'd come after all, without intending to stay.

At home, my husband looked up from his Chomsky, while on the television a weatherman waved his arms frenetically in front of a giant cartoon rendering of the continental United States dotted with clouds and sun and rain.

"What's that?" he said, marking his place with a finger still pre-dinner thin.

A student left it. Want to heat this up?" I handed him my tub of borscht and slung Arthur's bag to the coffee table, reached for the much-mended zipper.

"Do you think you should be doing that?" he said. I looked up from Arthur's bag, the mystery contents. He'd left it for me, but there'd be no note on the outside, no explanation.

My husband clutched the tub of soup to his chest, face white and slack in the twilight creeping in across the lake. "I'm looking for an address," I said, "so I can send it back."

He looked at me a minute longer, then slipped like a shadow into the kitchen.

The zipper parted easily, releasing the odor of hard-used socks and undershirts. I pushed aside hotel towels crumpled into damp balls and half-used trail-sized bottles of Suave two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, feeling like a pickpocket as I fished for a wallet or an address book or a prepaid phone. My fingers landed on something boxy and slick, thick as a textbook. I pulled it out, spilling a pair of boxers and a handful of disposable razors onto the hardwood floor.

Instead of an atlas or a novel or a dog-eared Bible, I held a Let's Go Guide to Vietnam.

Vietnam.

I knew they used a lot of noodles and rice, seafood by the coast, and in other places turtle meat and dog. But I couldn't name a single dish. Another country I'd never thought to dream of.

Feeling like a thief, I opened the cover, which was new and stiff, through paperback. I was looking for an inscription, for the corners of pages to be turned down, for any sign that he'd read it, or purchased it for me. There was nothing until the pencil scrawl on the inside of the back cover: Melinda's name, her address at the college down the street, and an email.

"Didn't you hear me," my husband said, emerging from the kitchen with a dishtowel threaded through his belt. "It's ready." Outside the window, a seagull skimmed low over the lake, calling out harshly, an ocean bird that had somehow lost its way.

"Thanks, honey," I said, flipping through the thick paperback, feeling the breeze of its pages on my face. It smelled of glue and laminate.

My husband wiped his hands on the towel, then unthreaded it and spread it on the table like a trivet in preparation for our meal.

It was nearly racing season now and traffic would be humming on 87 up from the city. I pictured Arthur walking that four-lane highway, but heading north toward Glens Falls and Niagara and Montreal and Quebec, where he'd eat candied ginger beef with a side of fiddlehead ferns. Caribou steaks. Fresh venison and sockeye salmon. Saskatoonberries in cream.

He could travel the world again. Go back to those places he'd spoken about. Maybe he would. He was a free man. But I was a free woman too, and here I was, right where I'd begun.

Maybe some cages were harder to shrug off than others. Maybe he hadn't gone anywhere at all.

Through the windows opened to the lake, the birds struck up a chorus now, those seasoned travelers. On the television, the weather had given way to local news.

"I'm not very hungry tonight," I said. My husband held his hand out for the book, then took a seat in his armchair to thumb through it.

He flipped the pages more slowly than I had, his plump face sober and pasty. I watched him puzzle out the complicated city names, heard him whisper their syllables like the mystic words of some ancient incantation. Then he closed the book.

"What happened to our five-year plan?" he said.

I knelt between him and the television, which droned of accidents on the highway, a small fire started and snuffed in a n abandoned home. He wore a pair of old cords soft from may washings and I ran my thumbnails between the worn ribs.

"I'm not ready," I said. "I want to see the world first."

He let his head drop and slid the guide toward me down the length of his thigh.

"Then that's what you should do," he said.

I went to the kitchen to dish out the borscht, though I knew he'd prefer something simpler, something more American, something to his taste.

 

WEEK SIX (DESSERT): VIETNAMESE BO BO CHA CHA

She was still in town for a summer program. Melinda Brown, daughter of Arthur, Asian studies major, journalism minor. I asked her to meet me before my last class, explaining that I had something that belonged to her. Best case scenario: Arthur returned for his backpack and Melinda arrived in the same moment. A joyous reunion would ensue.

In truth, I didn't expect her to show, but I was alone in the test kitchen, prepping the counters with bowls and spoons and ingredients when she stepped through the door, big blond curls bobbing with every step and a purse gripped white-knuckle-tight on her shoulder.

She was fair and unlined. I saw nothing of Arthur in her.

"Melinda," she said, with a hand out. Professional and brisk.

I didn't know how to begin. "Your father wanted you to have this, I think." I handed her the Let's Go guide, waited for her face to break and crumple.

"I already told him I don't want it. Twice," she said, thrusting it back without ceremony. "I don't want anything from him."

I felt betrayed somehow, as if he should have told me he'd already been to see her.

"What about his belongings?" I toed the backpack, which sat at my feet like the last kid at summer camp waiting to be picked up.

"Burn them," she said, lifting solid, swimmer's shoulders in a rough shrug. "You know what he did, right? What he's like? Do you know who you're helping?"

At first, of course, I'd wanted to know, like everyone, what Arthur's crime had been. I couldn't imagine he'd gotten locked away for fifteen years just for being a heroine addict. But I distinctly didn't want to know now. I just wanted to pass the last of him onto the last person likely to care. But now I knew there was no such person.

"Maybe he'll come back for it," I said, trying to laugh. "If he's not back in Mexico yet."

"You must be kidding," she said. "He's never left the states. He never left his state. But I hoped you're right, and I hope he stays down there."

She turned to leave, heels clicking brightly toward the door.

"Are you studying Asia in school because he was in Vietnam?" I said.

She stopped halfway to the door and hung her head, shaking it slightly. "Did he tell you that?" she said. "Well, maybe you can explain to me how he got PTSD from driving a desk at the recruitment center over in Glen Falls. It's just another of his bullshit excuses. Maybe if he'd ever actually been deployed—" She turned to face me and I saw her eyes had gone shiny, though no tears fell. "Actually, no, there's no excuse for some things."

When she turned to go this time I let her, but I stored Arthur's backpack in the supply closet. Just in case Melinda had underestimated him. The Let's Go guide I kept.

And this week only one counter was empty.

I like to think Mrs. Norman woke before dawn and reached over to shake awake her mister. He carried her bag to the car and secured the belt over her stomach. It was dark and they had forty minutes to drive, all the way to Albany, as her contractions spun out faster and faster.

While I led my students in peeling sweet potatoes and rinsing handfuls of screwpine leaves, I imagined Mrs. Norman sweating and swearing and sucking on ice chips, crushing them between her teeth and letting the shards melt on her half-frozen tongue.

I knew how that ice would dissolve slowly, wetting her throat but tasting of nothing.

“Slackwater” by Heather Brittain Bergstrom

issue64

Found in Willow Springs 86

Back to Author Profile

Winner of the Willow Springs Fiction Prize

Jill checks in to the Pioneer Inn under a fake name, shaking her head in the dim light of the office when the manager's son, Clayton, asks if she's from around here. The next night, as they share a few beers beside the motel pool, Jill lies again, telling Clayton she was born and raised across the mountains in Seattle. When he still insists she looks familiar, she swears that she's never even stayed in Eastern Washington before, only flown over it on her way to other places. The third night, thanks in part to the bottle of whiskey Jill bought to speed things up, they migrate from the pool to her room.

The weight of Clayton feels comforting on top of Jill. Her fiancé hates sex missionary style, preferring it standing and not in bed. The slight smell of the potato factory on Clayton's skin, like wet cardboard and dust, also comforts Jill, as does the creak of the motel bed beneath her and the way he holds her hand as if they're dancing or taking a walk together instead of having sex.

"Let's go for a drive," Clayton says as Jill slides from bed to retrieve the pint of Wild Turkey off the table.

"In your king-cab truck?" She laughs before taking a swig. It's the first bottle of hard liquor she's bought in a while.

"Why not?" He shakes his head when she offers him a swallow. "You got a problem with king cabs?"

"Not if you have kids."

He pulls his jeans on under the covers. She remains naked. "How do you know I don't have kids?" he asks. She knows Clayton still lives with his dad in the manager's cottage, probably so he can afford the payments on his four-wheel-drive, king-cab truck. She also knows most men in the area pay almost as much for their pickups as they do the trailer houses they buy for their wives. "Or that I don't want a litter someday?" he continues, sitting up. "I'm only twenty-one."

When he reaches for the lamp, Jill says, "Don't." Clayton works the day shift at the potato factory and hasn't seen her yet in bright light. "Let's smoke in the dark."

He gets out of bed. "It's a nonsmoking room."

"You won't tell your daddy, will you?" She takes another swig. She purposely chose a nonsmoking room so she wouldn't be tempted to light up. Her skin is dry enough without adding cigarette smoke. She's not yet thirty, but probably looks a decade older in the wind and dust of Eastern Washington.

"Let's get out of here," he says. "It's a nice night."

"No, it isn't. It's hot. And there's nothing to see around here but canals and crop-dusters."

"There's enough to see for one drive," he says. When she doesn't argue or agree, he walks over to her stack of books by the phone and asks, "Are you a teacher?"

"Someday, maybe."

He picks up the top book. "Is your real name written inside?"

She almost drops the bottle. How does he know she used a fake name? "The book's not mine," she replies. "None of them."

"I've never been to bed with a woman whose name I didn't know."

"You're young," Jill says, and he puts the book down as if she called him stupid. She's trying not to be mean. That's why she didn't tease him the second night after she asked him what people around here did for fun besides hang out by motel pools—she was hinting they should have sex—and he replied that he didn't know about anyone else, but he stopped at the bowling alley every day after work to shoot darts. "How about driving me out to where you work," she suggests now.

"You got nose plugs?" He laughs. "Turning spuds into fries is stinky work."

"I just want to sit on the lawn is all."

"You mean if it has a lawn." He moves closer.

"Don't all spud factories?" she asks, trying to sound nonchalant, though she suddenly feels lousy. Shit, she even feels like crying. She never cries in this town. She should've packed her bags this morning instead of waiting around for Clayton. She'd intended to stay only one night at the motel before heading out to her parents' trailer to surprise them with the long-hoped-for-news of her engagement. She takes another swallow of whiskey, a guzzle, like she used to chug beer at fourteen when she first started sleeping with boys and men, thinking they were her ticket out of here. And they had been. One man anyway. Though the others surely led to him, or that's how she reasons it now.

 

The sprinklers are on at the factory where Clayton parks his truck alongside the road. With a front lawn as green and spreading as a golf course, the industrial-sized sprinklers run all night, as they do in the alfalfa and potato fields throughout the county. In fact, Jill hates to admit, the steady far-off ticking of irrigation sprinklers has helped her sleep better at the motel than she has anywhere else in years. Up close, though, there's nothing lulling about the sound of the sprinklers. At least they mute the factory's eerie hum, or almost.

When a stench starts to fill the cab, as Jill knew it would, Clayton hurries to roll up the windows. "Don't," Jill says. "I can handle the smell."

"Scoot over here by me," he offers, as if that'll help.

The factory is the largest building in town, larger than the silos and grain elevator by the truck stop. It has lights and gates all around it and five smokestacks sometimes billowing all at once. Jill used to come out here with her mom to bring her dad lunch, until she turned eleven and started complaining that the place made her sick. The factory seems small tonight. It seems smaller each time Jill returns, and usually she likes that, hoping maybe one day it will disappear completely, or she will, never returning to her hometown. But tonight she wants the factory to seem huge—like the skyline of some eastern city she's never seen.

The rows of poplar trees planted to block wind look blurred and spooky in the dark, half lit by the artificial light of the factory. Or maybe it's the Wild Turkey distorting her vision. When Jill was sixteen, she had sex with a guy in the parking lot during his half-hour dinner break and stared at those same trees. He was the one who informed her that scalding steam exploded the skins off the potatoes. Then his crew dug out the black spots with short knives. Clayton told her that he's a loader. Her dad, before becoming supervisor, also did assembly-line work, using his wrists mainly. That's why he slept with Velcro braces on. Jill used to wonder if he took them off to touch her mom.

"Big deal, huh?" Clayton says. "Why'd you want to come here?" She doesn't answer, but when the stench overtakes her other senses, she scoots close to him. He places his arm around her shoulder. Pointing to the parking lot, he explains how during any other season the lot would be full, all three shifts. Sometimes over sixty semis a day deliver trailers of potatoes, but summer is slow. He's lucky his supervisor likes him or he'd be laid off like most of the young guys.

"So, your supervisor's a nice guy?" she asks,, almost certain it's her dad.

"What's his name?"

"Why?" he asks. "You need a job?"

She laughs. "This is no place for women." She begins to rub the inside of Clayton's leg.

"Plenty of ladies work here."

"I bet." She unbuttons his jeans. "And I bet your supervisor has a few favorites among the ladies as well."

"The hardworking ones, sure."

"Willing to stay late," she says, tracing the band of his underwear, "but—in his office."

He grabs her hand. "Things might operate like that in Seattle."

"Oh, please." She scoots away from him, then opens the passenger door.

"Where're you going?" He buttons his pants. "You're drunk."

"No, I'm hot. It's fucking hot." She wants to jump out, but it's along way down. "Don't you hear that humming in your sleep?" she asks.

"Sometimes. Now shut the door."

"Have you ever run through those sprinklers?"

"Let's go." He starts the engine.

"Go where—to the bowling alley?" He doesn't answer. She feels dizzy and irritated that she can't hold her whiskey worth a crap now that her fiancé prefers her to "appreciate" wine instead. Trying not to slur her words, she asks Clayton to help her out with his truck or she'll fall. She says she doesn't know why he needs such a big truck unless he plans to get fat or buy a farm. He kills the engine, walks around the front of his truck and helps her out. "You coming?" she asks, teetering toward the lawn.

"No," he says. "the lawn's off limits to employees." She knows that already and almost turns back to tell him so. As a little girl she always wanted to flip cartwheels on the grass. It was the greenest place in town. A few people came to fly kites. Mostly they stayed away because of the odor of the wastewater pools hidden behind the factory.

The pressure from the sprinklers hurts at first, but the water is icy cold, as Jill hoped it would be. Relieved when her skin goes numb and her nausea momentarily subsides, she lies flat on the grass. If it weren't for the chilly temperature of the water spraying above her, she'd have a hard time believing it's river water—siphoned from the Columbia and pumped through more miles of canals than there are paved roads in this desolate part of Washington.  When she was a teenager, Jill used to borrow her mom's car on summer days and drive to the canals, though her mom thought she was cooling off at the public pool. As Jill swam, she liked to pretend the channels led somewhere other than to the slackwater reservoir and seep lakes south of town where the ducks rested in winter and men fished year round. Sometimes she pretended the larger canals—though they scared the hell out of her and once she almost drowned—were the actual Columbia River, not just fake branches of it and that natural rapids were pushing her along.

When Clayton shouts her real name—"Hey, Jill!"—instead of the name she used to check in to the motel, she sits up quickly. Her head spins, her pulse clunking like the sprinkles. "Jill McKinney!" He must've looked in her purse. Stomach lurching, she throws up, but manages to stand and rinse off before Clayton makes it over to her. She shoves his hand away, but he insists on helping her to his truck. He pulls a flannel shirt form behind his seat. She refuses to wear it, though she's shivering. He's drenched from trying to help her. His arms drip water as he starts the engine. She rests her soggy head between her knees.

"Are you Sid McKinney's daughter?" he asks after they pull into the parking lot of the Pioneer Inn. "My goddamn supervisor's long-lost daughter?" When she doesn't answer, he clicks on the overhead light in his cab. "No wonder you look familiar," he says, "there's a picture of you in his office." All that's left of Jill's drunken state is her nausea and it's suddenly worse. She didn't eat lunch or dinner, though she bought a sandwich earlier at the gas station. The though of turnkey and warm mayonnaise makes her gag. "Shit," he says, still staring at her, in disgust, maybe, or just curiosity. She's too embarrassed to meet his eyes. "I'll be seeing your dad in a few hours. You want me to tell him hello from you?"

She grabs his arm. "No!"

"I'm joking," he says. "It's none of my business."

Walking her to her room and unlocking the door, he asks if she could stay another day, just one more. He apologizes for looking in her purse, claiming he only wanted to confiscate the Wild Turkey so she wouldn't get sick.

"And my driver's license—it just fell into your hands?"

"Yeah, I guess." He grins.

He helps her into the bathroom and sits her down on the floor by the toilet, rubbing her back. He seems too good at this, helping a drunk woman. She wonders where his mother is. She shouldn't wonder. She should tell him goodbye. She shouldn't be inviting him to take a shower with her, asking him to sleep beside her, promising that if he does, she'll stay another day.

 

2

Clayton is gone from the motel room when Jill wakes with a terrible thirst and stiffness in her joints. The phone rings loudly. She heard it earlier, or dreamed she did, but she has no intention of answering it. She has yet to call her fiancé in Seattle, where she currently lives and works, to let him know she arrived here safely. Maybe it's her mom calling, but Jill hasn't talked to her mom—in person or on the phone—since the last time she was in town two years ago. It was late summer then, like now, which happens to be her least favorite season in Eastern Washington: the sky a smoky gray, the soil crumbled to dust and too easily stirred by wind, the sagebrush not yet bloomed. It keeps her from ever being tempted to stay.

Clayton must've crept out of bed early this morning—as her dad used to get up at the crack of dawn to leave for work, her mom rising even earlier to cook him breakfast. Jill used to wake for school to the lingering smells of coffee and bacon. When she started sleeping with boys, barely making it home some nights before her parents woke up, her dad quit looking her in the eyes. By then Jill no longer believed that her dad actually worked late all those evenings when she and her mom ate dinner on TV trays in the living room—Jill thinking it a treat.

As far as Jill knows, her mom has never said a word to her dad about his affairs. She's rarely comments on Jill's behavior either, other than to say, "If only we'd gotten you a horse, dear. It would've kept you from chasing boys." Jill never wanted a horse, not even when her parents bought a double-wide land so they'd have room for one. Instead, bad times came at the factory and year of layoffs and then years of worrying about layoffs. Now she thinks that a few books, not a horse, might've saved her as a girl.

It was in a bookstore in Seattle where she met her fiancé, Adam. She had just started working there and felt terribly out of place in the old Victorian with three floors of used books, velvet sofas, and a mildew smell. But soon she started reading books during slow hours, and then after work, before going to her evening waitressing job. Next thing she knew, Adam was checking out philosophy books for her from the university library. He wasn't discouraged when twice she was denied admission, but he didn't like it when she finally enrolled herself in junior college, deciding to major in liberal studies and teach elementary school. He said it was below her, but actually Jill worries it's above her, considering how she struggles in her classes. Perhaps her high school counselor was right in advising her—and similar girls—to stick to cosmetology or typing classes.

She'd been a regular shit in high school. She was an even bigger shit to her mom during her last visit home. First she refused to sleep in her canopy bed, saying the pastel ruffles made her feel silly. Then she started poking fun at the Tupperware her mom had been buying for Jill for years with her bonus points. She complained that the view from the windows was nothing but ugly sage and that the wind was drying out her skin. When her dad left one evening for an "employee appreciation dinner," Jill took a good look around the trailer's interior, as if for the the first time. Noting the paneled walls, the shelf of JCPenny and Sears catalogs, the cookbooks and craft magazines, the dusty rack of TV trays in the corner, she told her mom, "I wanted more for you."

"I wanted more for you, too," her mom said, not glancing up from her crocheting. "You were so pretty."

"No, Mom, I was just as plain as everyone else in this town—only more willing."

Her mom looked up. "Honey," she said. "We all make choices."

"Or," Jill said, "your husband makes them for you." Her mom frowned. "Is Dad afraid you'll discover a world out there and never come back?"

"Why do you come back?" her mom asked.

"Why does he?"

Her mom threw aside her crocheting and stood, knocking over her yarn basket. Jill bent down to gather the mess. "You look older, Jill," her mom said, "but you're not. You're as spoiled and fidgety as ever. That's what your dad says every time you call home with a new boyfriend and a different address in Idaho or Tacoma or Bend or—"

"Dad can go to hell." Jill shoved the last unraveling balls of yarn into the basket.

"You know he's always provided."

"I work ever day too, Mom."

"Your dad made supervisor at thirty-one."

"He's a supervisor at a potato factory, not a CEO."

"You can make fun of me, honey, all you want, or this land," her mom said, lips trembling. "But don't you dare mock your dad again in this house." Turning, her mom hurried down the hall, shutting her bedroom door, but not before Jill heard a choked sob.

Jill packed suitcase that night. She didn't leave until her dad returned home and she met him at the door with enough whiskey on her breath and stagger in her step to get him to follow her out to car, asking, no, begging her to stay.

She'd intended never to come back.

 

The knock now on the motel door startles Jill. She must've drifted back to sleep. Surely Adam hasn't traveled over the Cascades after her—not she she repeatedly told him she wanted to tell her parents the new of their engagement in person and alone before they set an official date. But she's been promising Adam this for months. Probably he no longer believes her. Though he believes her about so many things. And he asked her to marry him despite his philosophical and social arguments against legal contracts as proof of love.

Jumping out of bed, she forgets she's naked. A buzzing begins immediately in her head, a humming like the factory. Maybe if she stands perfectly still for a second, the humming will go away and so will the person at the door. Maybe if she closes her eyes and imagines she's on a ferry crossing Puget Sound. Another knock, louder. She grabs the first garment from her suitcase, hoping for her bathrobe. It's her black dress, cut low in the front and back, but long, almost covering her ankles. She's worn it only once and isn't sure why she packed it. She scrubs her teeth with her finger. What if it's her mom at the door?

It's the motel manager, Clayton's dad. He's a small man with a turquoise bolo tie and looks old enough to be Cayton's grandfather. "Clayton called and wanted me to bring you this," he says, handing her a plastic bucket of ice. There another one of the ground by his feet. She tries to open the door further, but the sunlight burns her eyes.

"I'll give you money for the room," she says realizing it must be long past checkout time.

"Not to worry." He smiles. "You can still choose the weekly rate."

"No," she says quickly and his smile fades. "I'll need the room for just one more day." He bends to pick up the other plastic bucket. "Come in," she says. They carry the ice to the table.

"It's Clayton who's been trying to call you," he says.

"Oh." She laughs nervously.

Gesturing toward the bed, he says, "Housekeeping has already made the rounds, but there's clean sheets"—he clears his throat—"and towels in the office." He heads for the door that Jill left ajar, but then turns back towards her. "My boy likes you," he says. "He's called me twice to come see if you're okay. Do you like him, too?"

"What's not to like?"

"Good, then." His smile returns. "He's been pining after that gal at the bowling alley for too long. She doesn't love him." He looks her up and down. "You look like the kind of woman who could love a man real proper."

"Sure," Jill says. "But I'll be staying just one more day." She needs to shower and brush her teeth. She needs the humming in her head to stop. So Clayton has a girlfriend at the bowling alley. Playing darts, is he? She needs to put on lotion.

"My son's awfully lonely for twenty-one," he says.

"It's this town."

"I reckon he'd kill me if he knew I said anything." He winks. "But you seem the type who can keep a secret." She thanks him for the ice, locking the door after he leaves.

 

Jill sucks on ice cubs while she waits for Clayton to call again. When he does, he invites her to dinner. He knows a nice restaurant in Ephrata with great grub and dim lighting. He chuckles as he says the part about the lighting. When he asks if she packed a dress, she tells him she's wearing one now. "I wish I were the," he says. "This place stinks and my supervisor's a real ass." Jill laughs. "Six o'clock," he says. "No, I'll be there at five."

After getting of the phone, Jill considers driving to the Columbia River. Even though it's only twenty minutes away, she's never actually walked along its shores. She's only seen the Columbia from the tops of dams and highway bridges. Maybe she'll ask Clayton to driver her there after dinner. For now she heads out to her parents' trailer.

Her mom's car is parked in its place, where her dad's truck usually dwarfs it. He drives a truck with six wheels and though he's never hauled hay or even groceries. Her mom's car looks dirty, not just dusty, and there's a dent on the fender. The blinds are all closed. Even on the hottest days her mom prefers natural light. She hopes her mom isn't sick. So many married women in the area—including Jill's aunts and cousins—retreat into illness to give themselves something to think about and do while their husbands are off fishing or whatever. Jill has always been proud that her mom's end tables aren't crowded with medicine bottles, or that she hasn't given up and gotten fat. She should've told her mom that last time. They've never gone this long without talking.

Why can't she just be brave now and pull her car in beside her mom's? The news of her engagement will mend things between them. Her mom will start right away on Jill's wedding afghan. They can go to Kmart together and pick yarn colors. Jill will even act excited about the Tupperware saved for her in the hall closet. She drives past the trailer again, thinking of the sculpted wooden bowl she bought in Seattle for her mom, the bags of gourmet coffee for her dad. No, she can't. She'll leave in the morning or tonight after dinner. Unless, maybe, Clayton asks her again to stay another day. She's felt a strange tugging at her chest all afternoon sensing he might. Though the tugging could just be this town, staying it it without her parent knowing, as if she's never been part of it, or them. She turns her car around and drives past the trailer one last time, slowly. If her mom feels the same tugging, she'll open a blind or even the front door—then Jill will have to stop.

 

3

Clayton looks surprised when she opens the motel door at ten to five without him having to knock. She wears the black dress and a sheer scarf tied loosely around her neck. He steps inside. "I'd say you look too nice to take out and shar," he says, "but you've probably been told that before."

They eat at the dimly lit restaurant with maroon walls, small framed pictures of cowboys, and wagon-wheel chandeliers. The waitresses wear suede miniskirts and tight fringed vests—and Jill teases Clayton that their uniforms are the main reason he likes this restaurant. He says he likes how she looks in her black dress better. She drinks two glasses of red wine before dinner—red and white being the extent of the list. He orders them thick-cut sirloins and baked potatoes and with the works. She doesn't have the heart to tell him she never eats potatoes and rarely eats beef. Halfway through the meal, the tugging in her chest returns, and she excuses herself to use the restroom. What she really wants to do is visit the bar for a quick shot or three of whiskey.

Clayton stands when he sees her walking back toward their table. He wears pressed jeans and a checkered long-sleeved shirt. He's also wearing cowboy boots that Jill is doing her best to ignore. Apologizing, she tells him she can't eat anymore, though she could use another glass of wine. He finishes her steak and then orders them both a shot of Wild Turkey.

Taking her hand across the table, he asks, "You all right?"

"I drove past my parents' place. My mom's car should have a tarp on it." He squeezes her hand. "This is boring stuff," Jill says. "Thanks for tonight."

"It's not boring." He plays with the tips of her fingers. "And tonight's just beginning."

"You think so?" she says and he grins. She waits a second before asking, "Do you ever see my mom at the factory?"

"She stops in," he replies. "Sure."

"Recently?"

He shakes his head. "If you want," he says, "I'll go with you to your folks' place."

"It's too late." She pulls her hand from his and drinks her entire glass of water, though it's tepid, the ice melted.

"What do you mean too late?"

"They go to bed early, is all," she says. "Or my mom does."

"We could go tomorrow." He reaches up to brush her bangs from her eyes, but she scoots back. Flushed and cranky, she considers telling Clayton for the first time that she's engaged—just to see his reaction.

"I'm heading back to Seattle in the morning," she says.

He studies her a moment without saying anything, then signals for a waitress and requests more water. "It felt weird today at work," he says, "with your dad. He never hurt you, did he? I mean—touched you or anything?"

"He never came near me."

"You look like you're from Seattle tonight in that dress," Clayton says, and she wants to ask him if he's ever been there. Her mom never has. Seattle might as well be Chicago or New York City.

"I'm glad I didn't wear my cowboy hat," Clayton says. "It would've embarrassed you worse than my boots do." She tries to smile. "Let's go," he says and stands up. "I want to show you something."

 

They drive for a while, first on the highway and then on county roads. She hopes he's taking her to the Columbia. Clayton brakes and turns onto a gravel road. Dust billows all around as he pulls off and shuts down the engine. He's parked in the middle of a field of sagebrush, next to a stack of hay bales. "Paradise," she laughs.

"Don't laugh," he says. "It's mine."

"What is?"

"I just bought this land to grow potatoes. I've even got a canal."

"Good for you," she says, trying to sound sincere instead of annoyed. He has a canal and some tramp at the bowling alley, and she has a fiancé who reads her poetry and likes sex standing and preferably in public places like the university library, museums, and every floor of the used bookstore.

Clayton opens his truck door, but tells her to stay put and close her eyes. She hears him climb out of the cab, then open the utility box in the bed of his truck. It takes him a good five minutes before he returns for her. "You ready?" he asks, a bit breathless. He's taken off his checkered shirt and wears a plain white T-shirt now and a cowboy hat that almost makes her wince—as do the ratty sweaters Adam wears trying to look like he's the immigrant from Eastern Europe instead of his great-grandparents.

Clayton helps her walk toward the hay bales, which he's made into a bed with a flowered comforter identical to the one in her motel room. Two battery-operated lanterns burn low, one on each side of the bed, and there's a picnic basket. She feels like Ma Ingalls, but decides not to say so. After they climb onto the bed, Clayton pulls a bottle of Wild Turkey from the picnic basket. Instantly cheered, she says, "My best friend", and reaches for the bottle.

But he won't let go of it. "Don't say that, Jill."

"I'm kidding," she says. "Come on, you're my best friend."  She stands. "This land is my best friend." The wind lifts her dress and almost blows off her scarf.

"Sit down," he says. She does, spreading her legs and climbing onto his lap. They have yet to really kiss all evening. "Wait," he says after they make out for a while. "Listen." He takes a deep breath. "You're quite the kisser."

"I've had lots—"

"Don't," he says, putting his finger to her lips. He hands her the bottle of Wild Turkey, which she quickly opens. "Listen," he repeats.

"There's nothing to hear out here," she says, taking a swallow. "Nothing but wind and jackrabbits. And, oh, wait, do I hear the water in your canal—loud as Grand Coulee Damn?" He starts to push her off his lap, but she clings to him. "Sorry," she says. "I'm sorry." God, why does she act so mean? "I like your property,," she lies.

"I wanted you to be the first person," he says, "to spend the night here with me."

She takes another swallow and hugs him. It feel nice being this close to him again. She missed him today, this morning when she woke up. That's why she's being cruel now. Why doesn't she miss Adam? Why doesn't her mom miss her anymore? "Do you love me?" she whispers into Clayton's ear.

She feels like a fool. She stayed far away from boys like Clayton in high school. She feared they would keep her as ordinary as they were, with their John Deere ball caps and clumsy-looking hands and dusty boots that had never left the Columbia Basin. She didn't want to be understood or loved by any one of them. But Clayton is different. He knows more, somehow, has seen something more, maybe in the rooms of his dad's motel. Certainly he knows more than he lets on—probably saw right through her bullshit on the first night.

Maybe not, she reconsiders as he starts playing with her dress, tracing the low neckline with his fingers, the tips of which feel rough like burlap. She hadn't noticed before. "That's some dress," he says.

"I think your dad liked it, too, this morning."

He moved his hand. "Why do you say things like that?"

"You don't have to love me," she says and takes the bottle from him. "I'm old. Just pretend. I won't hold you to it tomorrow."

"You're not old, Jill," Clayton says. "You have your whole life ahead of you. You'll be a teacher. You'll meet—" He pauses, looks confused, as if not quite believing what he's saying. "One day," he continues, "you'll meet some nice Seattle man and—"

"No," she interrupts. "I am old. I have a hard time concentrating when I'm trying to read books or even when  I'm having sex with nice Seattle men." He sighs, puts both his hands in her hair. "Just say you love me," she says, feeling suddenly as scared as she did the time she almost drowned, unable to find the ladder of rusty metal rungs she'd used countless times before to pull herself up the canal's slippery concrete side. "Please," she says.

He hugs her tightly instead. After a few moments he unties her scarf, unwinds it slowly from her neck. "This is pretty,"  he says. "Can I keep it?"

"Sure," she replies. "Give it to that gal at the bowling alley who doesn't love you."

He pushes her off his lap. "You're something else." He takes another long swallow of Wild Turkey before standing and throwing the bottle as far as he can into the dust and darkness. She hear it thud on the ground. He still has her scarf. He holds it out now in the wind with just his fingertips, as if to let it go. It looks like a ghost or a trail of smoke.

He sits back down, fold the scarf, and places it in the picnic basket. Jill reaches for his arm, asking him to tell her about that other woman. "I'm just jealous," she says, but also she feels more wasted than ever for the amount she has drunk.

"Sounds like my dad already told you," he says.

"I'm sorry."

"Her name's Darlene. She has two great kids. I'm going to build them separate rooms both facing south towards the canal."

"Are you guys engaged?" Jill asks, mouth dry. She thinks of her own engagement ring in the velvet box in her suitcase and wishes it were from Clayton, or that she didn't have one at all. Years ago she got pregnant by a longshoreman and decided on abortion. She wishes she had that baby now so Clayton could build a room for it.

"We're getting married," he says. "Soon."

If only Clayton had known Jill when she was younger, before the longshoreman, before the Hutterite farmer who first got her out of Eastern Washington. He'd been as eager as she was to put the place behind him, but then wound up taking it all out on her in bed, all those years confined to his family's fields, mumbling Bible verses as he bit her thighs.

"Do you love her?"

"I want to provide for her," he says. "She's had a hard go. She needs me. And she doesn't drink like—like my mom did."

"Or like me," Jill says. She lies on the pillows, turns her back toward him.

"No, Jill. I didn't say that." He lies beside her. "Shit," he says and scoots closer. "I care about you. You have to believe me." He rests his hand on her hip. "It was you I though about all day today, not Darlene."

"Then don't say her name anymore."

"It's you, Jill McKinney, that I want to be with tonight."

"And tomorrow?"

He doesn't answer, but after a while he says, "You were right, you know, Jill, about this being no place for women—the factories or the fields. Your mom probably wanted you to stick around here after high school, huh? Stay and keep her company?"

Actually, her mom never asked her to stay.

"I'd stay with you," Jill says, and she would stay with Clayton. She's known it all day. She'd help him grow potatoes. She'd stop drinking. "I'd stay," she repeats.

Not taking his hand from her hip, he says, "I'd never ask."

They lie there a long time, side by side. Jill is afraid to close her eyes, to fall asleep and waste the rest of the night, but neither does she wish to stare any longer into the darkness beyond the lantern light. Halfway closing her eyes, she pretends she and Clayton are resting now on the porch of their new farmhouse. She pretends his hand on her hip feels like enough, feels complete. And it does, almost. Ignoring, for the moment, the lonely sound of the wind through sage, she hears instead the river in the canal, rushing past her on its way to the sea.

 

Two Poems by Todd Boss

issue64

Found in Willow Springs 86

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Still We Like to Imagine

that behind the front
desk of every Quality
Inn and Cracker Barrel
in every hamlet in

America there's a girl
just waiting for some
handsome stranger
to linger after the ring
of her cash register,

look into her eyes and
croon Darlin', this town
is too small for a woman
like you, 
but it's just not
true, some women and

their towns are in fact in
perfect proportion to
one another, and some-
times Who you callin'
Darlin'
is the only real

answer to such a question
—never mind what one
would rather do, or who,
if she did go, would
look after mother.

 

Weren't You a Kid Once, O'Brien

is the question on this sunny
summer Sunday morning
here in the middle of our
block in big block letters in
chalk on the sidewalk in
front of the front walk that
leads to the house of
O'Brien.

An indictment,
almost a condemnation,
a sharp stroke of passion,
it was apparently written
by a parent of neighborhood
children whose practical
antics were enough to anger
one or another elder O'Brien.

It's a rhetorical question,
as those of us who come
to this concrete chalkboard
apprehend without having to
know what mishap happened
under the elms or ceilings, in
the presence or the absence
of O'Brien.
We need only
heed the tone of the accuser
to know that no number of
excuses for bad behavior can
out-shout this dustiest one,
this final appeal for a justice
that must—one feels certain
—inspire, as it does in every
one who comes across it, a
curiously human feeling in
our good man O'Brien,
who,
just as his judge had planned,
will have no choice but to change
into a pair of worn chinos
from church clothes,
unreel
to its furthest reaches the garden
hose,
and stand in the afternoon
hear, in view of us, the members
of his generation
and spray—
till the day's pink neon lesson

is washed into the street and away.

“Labor” by Kim Chinquee

issue64

Found in Willow Springs 86

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I got off at four, he'd come on at three, we overlapped a bit, but he'd be there until eleven. He worked chemistry, I worked phlebotomy, drawing blood all day, mostly veterans on Coumadin, pregnant wives and babies.

He'd come say hi when he got there, looking fresh in camouflage or whites, smelling like the cologne I'd bought him.

This day he told me our dog was probably hungry, and I kissed his cheek, asking what he wanted. He gave me the keys, said he'd parked in the usual.

I went home, meeting Burster, who barked first. I put his food down, then unloaded groceries, feeling the baby in my tummy. Easy, I said, stroking my middle.

I lit the burners, opened windows. It was a hot March in Biloxi. I put the beef on the pan.

I got back in our Camaro.

There were enough helpings for him and his co-workers. I was never big on food, especially what he ate, so I dropped it off and watched them. He was there and a guy he partied with, and another guy who worked hematology. They were tight. And also the supervisor, who was in her forties, who was into nude beaches and swinging with her husband.

They all ate my food, and then said thank you, and my husband kissed me, telling me what a good wife I was. Our baby kicked, so I said, Honey, feel this.

They went back to work, and I cleaned their plates, then left the keys to my husband, since he needed a way home and didn't want to have to wake me. He said he'd bring the plates.

It was a couple miles, and I got to walk along the flightline. The sunset was pretty, shining on the lake, the moon. I liked to smell the fumes, watch the planes landing and descending. I could barely see past my tummy. I tried to watch the tips of my shoes, kind of counting, like in basic training. I kind of started marching.

Halfway, my baby started doing more than kicking. I told my baby easy. I said it wasn't time yet.

When I got home, finally, I sat on the toilet, seeing more than blood, the plug. So I called work, asking for my husband.

The woman answered, saying he'd left early.

"Where is he?" I said.

I went down on my own and breathed hard.

“The Waves Were Low” by Kim Chinquee

issue64

Found in Willow Springs 86

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My neighbor chartered out his boat, catching shark in his net. Days before, he'd taken out my husband.

Now the neighbor's boys sat at the pier with rods and us women sat on benches. The fisherman's sisters and his oldest girl had babies, and so did I. Children ran on the boat and my neighbor told them easy. One woman spoke about delivery and I gave my baby to another, held my stomach, and I tried not to remember my husband on the way to the hospital, his constant scent, the smell of whiskey. Now he was on top of the boat, drinking beer and grilling with the men, and some were lighting sparklers.

It was a long time until dark. The night before, I'd run to the neighbor's with my shirt ripped. Barefoot, and my stitches weren't closed up yet. My baby cried and the fisherman's wife said hush. Hush, as if she were the mother to us all. I had curled over, and my husband banged the door, saying let me in now, and the fisherman neighbor got up and stood there in the doorway. He was big, taking all the door frame.

Now a dog ran in an Elizabethan collar. The waves were low. The men drank more and I heard them laughing. I had no other family. Finally the men came, bringing down the brats and all the corn dogs. My husband sat next to me and I sat rocking.