poemmemoirs tory Number Eleven/2011

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Gay Baines Mary Jo BangJan Beatty Constance E. BoyleCarys Bray Mary Crow Tracy Lynn Darling Heather Dundas Amy Eisner Mara Faulkner, OSBLilace Mellin Guignard Natalie Harris Jennifer Horne Sabrina Ito Sheila MacAvoy Kyla Marshell Michelle McMillan-Holifield Brittany MichelsonLeslie NipkowMary Elizabeth ParkerLisbeth PrifogleEhren ReedMarilyn RingerBarbara SaunierSonia ScherrHilary SiderisDenise TurnerSarah Harris WallmanLaurin B. WolfJessica Young

PMS. .

poemmemoirstory

2011number eleven

Copyright © 2011 by PMS poemmemoirstory

PMS is a journal of women’s poetry, memoir, and short fiction published once a year. Subscriptions are $12 per year, $15 for two years, or $18 for three years; sample copies are $7. Unsolicited manuscripts of up to five poems or fifteen pages of prose are welcome during our reading period (January 1 through March 30), but must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope for consideration. Manuscripts received at other times of the year will be returned unread. For submission guidelines, visit us at www.pms-journal.org, or send a SASE to the address below. All rights revert to the author upon publication. Reprints are permitted with appropriate acknowledgment. Address all correspondence to:

PMS poemmemoirstoryHB 217

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

College of Arts and SciencesThe University of Alabama at Birmingham

The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Margaret HarrillRobert Morris, M.D.

C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D.

pa t rons

f r i ends

Sandra AgricolaRebecca Bach

George W. BatesPeter and Miriam Bellis

Claude and Nancy Bennett

Randy BlytheJames BonnerF.M. Bradley

Mary Flowers BraswellKaren Brookshaw

Bert BrouwerEdwin L. BrownDonna BurgessLinda CasebeerJohn E. CollinsRobert Collins

Jim L. DavidsonMichael Davis

Denise DuhamelCharles FaustGrace Finkel

Edward M. Friend IIIAndrew Glaze

Robert P. GlazeRanda GravesRon Guthrie

Ward HaarbauerTed Haddin

John HaggertyRichard Hague

Sang Y. HanJeff Hansen

Jessica HeflinPamela Horn

Jennifer HorneWilliam HutchingsLanier Scott Isom

Joey KennedySue Kim

Marilyn KurataRuth and Edward

LamonteBeverly Lebouef

Ada LongSusan Luther

John C. MayerJames Mersmann

Will MilesDail W. Mullins Jr.Michael R. Payne

Robert Lynn PennyLee and Pam Person

William PogueKieran QuinlanSteven M. RuddRusty RushtonJohn SartainJanet Sharp

Danny SiegelJuanita Sizemore

Martha Ann StevensonLou Suarez

Susan SwaglerDrucilla TylerMaria VargasDaniel Vines

Larry WhartonElaine WhitakerJacqueline Wood

John M. YozzoCarol Prejean Zippert

editor- in-chiefKerry Madden

assistant editorsXenia BethancourtSara CampbellShelly CatoAlicia K. ClavellNancy Rutland GlaubTina Harris.Mary KaiserSue Kim

Jared MealsLaurel MillsCandice ReyesLaura SimpsonLauren SlaughterKira StewartJessica TerrellDonna Thomas

business managersHeather MartinNikkia Austin

administrat ive assistantsXenia BethancourtLaura ClementsJared MealsPaul PickeringMariah T. RushingKira StewartJessica Terrell

cover design Michael J. Alfano

cover photosfront: Approximation by Ehren Reedback: Buffer by Ehren Reed

production/printing47 Journals, LLC

s t a f f

from the Editor-in-Chief

poemmemoirstoryLauren Slaughter Interview with Mary Jo Bang 5

Poetry FeatureMary Jo Bang Canto xxvi 13

Jan Beatty adventures of birthmother [texas chainsaw massacre] 22 adventures of birthmother [die hard] 23

Amy Eisner After 24

Mary Elizabeth Parker Appetite 25 For the Young Girls 27

Constance E. Boyle bi-polar ii 28 Partial List of Startling Things 29

Michelle McMillan-Holifield By and By 30 Love Affair 32

Mara Faulkner, OSB Creation Story 34

Lilace Mellin Guignard Detour 35 Lost in the Homeland 37

Gay Baines Diagrams of the Heart 39

Hilary Sideris Donatello 40

Marilyn Ringer Element 41

Mary Crow From Her Blood: A Winged Horse 42

con ten t s

Barbara Saunier Memento Mori 43

Tracy Lynn Darling Threads 44

Laurin B. Wolf First House 46

Sabrina Ito Hafu 48

Jessica Young The Jabberwocky 50

Kyla Marshell Germ 52 The Two Fridas 53

poemmemoirstoryDenise Turner Chasing Euphoria 56

Brittany Michelson Connecting the Dots 65

Natalie Harris After the Late Night Phone Call 73

Leslie Nipkow How to Kiss Like a Movie Star 79

Lisbeth Prifogle Pretty 83

poemmemoirstoryJennifer Horne 1957 94

Sheila MacAvoy The Apricot Tree 100

Sonia Scherr To See Your Face 105

Carys Bray Bed Rest 115

con ten t s…

Sarah Harris Wallman You Don’t Have to Call Me Merle Haggard (Anymore) 124

Heather Dundas Trivial but Numerous 135

contributors 146

con ten t s…

f r o m t h e ed i t o r- in - ch i e f

Welcome to PMS 11! It’s the first time to have an interview in these pages, and we’re so pleased to have Lauren Slaughter in conversation with internationally esteemed poet Mary Jo Bang, whose first collection, Apology for Want, received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for first book of poetry in 1996. Along with the interview, we’re thrilled to be fea-turing Bang’s beautiful work, “Canto xxvi.” We’re also grateful to include the poems of Amy Eisner, Constance E. Boyle, Sabrina Ito, Maura Faulkner, Gay Baines, and many other poets who make these pages sing with their extraordinary voices.

Our poems touch on a variety of subjects, but a theme of displace-ment can be seen in the fractured settings of so many of poems, mem-oirs, and stories. Displacement is in the air these days with families being uprooted and broken, often to the running soundtrack of our age of information overload.

From the isolation of a nursing home in the words of Sonia Scherr to Heather Dundas’s operatic machinations of airport security to Lizbeth Prifogle’s wrenching tale of trying to feel beautiful while on active duty with the Marines to Jennifer Horne’s raging teenage daughter of a racist, our authors transport us and generously shine a light into their worlds where home is only something intangible, a whisper of the past.

The memoirists in PMS 11 take us from the harrowing world of drug addiction in a beautiful daughter by Natalie Harris to a crazy revelation at a Hallmark store by Denise Turner to Naima Coster’s vibrant love and grief in the heart of her Dominican New York to Brittany Michelson’s words on anxiety. Each essay is its own personal journey and gift to the reader.

The cover art by Ehren Elizabeth Reed delicately stitches together the very essence of PMS 11 with her stunning quilted maps that explore lay-ers of possibility and story.

It’s all these voices that make PMS 11 such a special issue and joy to celebrate. But I’m certainly not alone in selecting or trying to put the magazine together. I want to thank my tireless interns and unofficial co-editors, Laura Clements, Candice Reyes, and Jessica Terrell, who worked with me in every capacity from reading to the publication party to the Alabama Book Festival to helping me shape the issue. I could not have possibly done it without them.

I want to also thank all my interns who were fabulous readers and offered so much at different stages this past year. They include: Jared Meals, Nancy Rutland Glaub, Xenia Bethancourt, Shelly Cato, Kira Stewart, Sara Campbell, Laura Simpson, and Donna Thomas. I extend my deepest appreciation to Laurel Mills, Mary Kaiser, Tina Harris, Jim Braziel, Paul Pickering, Heather Martin, Jeane Thompson, and Danny Gamble for their guidance and support in helping me keep the beating heart of PMS alive and well.

Finally, PMS would not exist at all without the financial support of Dr. Peter Bellis and the UAB English Department and all of the Friends of the Creative Writing Program. I would like to thank Nikkia Austin who helps me with the bookkeeping, and I’m grateful for her kindness and thoroughness.

PMS looks so beautiful because of the design of Russell Helms, who tirelessly helps me in the final stages of putting the magazine together with constant edits and double and triple checks to make sure everything passes muster. Thank you, Russell! I would also like to give a big thanks to Linda Frost, the previous editor, who created a magazine now in its eleventh year, and my goal is to keep her vision alive.

A big thanks goes to Dean Thomas DiLorenzo for his commitment to the Creative Writing Program at UAB along with Allison Crotwell and Jennifer Ellison. I so appreciate their interest and support that sus-tains the creative arts at a university like UAB. I also am very thankful to Catherine Danielou and Patty Pilkerton who support PMS at every event, and I so appreciate their kindness and love of words and stories.

I would also like to thank President Carol Garrison and our new Interim Dean, Linda C. Lucas, for their correspondence and continued support of PMS, which is tremendously appreciated.

Last year’s PMS publication party also included a collection drive of new children’s books to give to the “Aid to Inmate Mothers Story Book Project” at the Tutwiler Women’s Prison in Alabama. We collected over 30 books for moms and kids to read together. I want to thank Tina Harris for putting PMS in touch with Larnetta Moncrief, the director, and we hope to bring even more children’s books to this amazing pro-gram where incarcerated mothers can read books to their kids.

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Anybody who has survived his child-hood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Eudora Welty said, “Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction.” With the words of Flannery and Eudora in mind,

I hope you have a beautiful 2012 filled with stories, and I would like to thank the contributors of PMS 11 whose strong sense of setting and voice have breathed life into their words for us. They are truly the storycatch-ers. Thank you!

Finally, this issue is dedicated to Dr. Sue Kim and Tina Harris, who spent a decade as PMS readers and editors, offering so much thoughtful feedback and support to the magazine since its inception. Dr. Kim and Tina Harris recently left UAB but their love of words and passion for sto-ries make this dedication one from the heart.

–Kerry Madden,Editor-in-Chief

poemmemoirstory

5PMS. .

Interview with Mary Jo Bang

Lauren Slaughter

Q: Who (or what) is Beatrice?

A: That’s a funny question, isn’t it? Because who knows what Beatrice was to Dante? Whomever/whatever she/it was—morbid attach-ment, orphic muse, memory-prompt—he kept including her in his work. What is attachment? Do we go in the direction of motivational salience mediated by the dopamine/amygdala system? Or discuss the poetic style called the troubadour school? Or put Dante on Freud’s couch and talk about a boy who loses his mother early? Beatrice can’t ever be fathomed. What interests me is how Dante writes as he does. He clearly felt compelled to make something that was insistently new. Beatrice seems the smallest part of that, a symbol in a sea of symbols.

Q: So, we love—or crave—what we can’t catch. This conundrum seems present in much of your own poetry, would you agree? If so, how has your work translating Dante informed or changed the pursuit of those figures in your own writing that you can’t, finally, ever really “fathom”?

A: I wouldn’t say desire requires unrequitedness but unrequietedness certainly does tend to keep desire focused on an unattainable object longer than it might otherwise. And that focus can indeed become obsessional, or neurotic (to borrow from Freud). And, yes, neurotic desire can imprint art. A concern with desire is present in much of my work, however, I’d like to think it’s not my sole preoccupation. What I was saying before is that the deconstruction of any particular desire can’t ever be considered fixed or complete because any attempt to ana-lyze desire can never be more than merely conjectural. While it may be entertaining to twist one’s mind around why someone desires this or that, the only thing that sort of mental work can yield is practice at analysis that will prove more useful elsewhere.

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In terms of my translating Dante, I’m not sure whether that engagement has had an effect on my own poems, nor what, if any, it might have in the future. Over time, I have become aware that my poems are often the result of my conjuring small scenes in which a character (who may look like me but isn’t) acts, speaks, thinks out loud, etc. The resulting poem is rather like the trailer for a movie, with the promise of a more complete narrative glimmering behind the series of set-piece moments. The Inferno is also very filmic; it’s made up of a series of joined scenes, each containing dialogue, characters, backdrop scenery, and all contributing to one of several narrative arcs. The narrative remains linear and Dante tracks the action almost continuously: I said this, Virgil did that, we walked here, then we descended there, and here comes Geryon, and we get on his back and he takes us down to the next ring, etc, etc. In a limited sense it shares an affinity with my way of working. Perhaps my immersion in a poem that operates in this way simply feels comfortable. And therefore I’ve stayed at it over these past five years.

Q: So could you take us a bit through the intricacies of your process translating Dante? You would sit down at your desk. Then…

A: I would sit down at the computer and click onto William Warren Vernon’s two-volume Readings on the Inferno of Dante: Based upon the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola and Other Authorities; I used the second edition which published by Methuen (London) in 1906 and is available through Google Books. The book is a literal prose translation that traces the commentary on the poem, line-by-line, all the way back to Benvenuto, a lecturer at the University of Bologna who was born shortly after Dante died and whose commentary on the Divine Comedy was one of the earliest. I would first read the entirety of Vernon’s translation of whichever canto I was working and all the commentary. I would then read the prose translation by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton University Press, 1970), and then compare Singleton’s version to that of John D. Sinclair (Oxford University Press, 1954). Singleton relied so heavily on Sinclair’s that there is very little differ-ence between the two. Because of that, I was always curious about

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those few moments when Singleton didn’t follow Sinclair. I’d often go back to the Vernon to see what choice he’d made at the same moment, and I’d re-read the surrounding commentary. At some point in the process, I’d be begin to make my own translation; then I’d compare my attempt to at least six other trans-lations, mainly: Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Anchor Books/Random House 2000); Mark Musa (Penguin 1984), Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam Classics 1982), Michael Palma (Norton 2003), and Ciaran Carson (New York Review of Books Press 2002). I would frequently also look at the translations by John Ciardi (1954, Signet Classics 2001), Robert Kirkpatrick (Penguin 2006), the Carlyle-Wicksteed (Modern Library 1933), and the online side-by-side presentation of the translations by Longfellow (1867), Charles Eliot Norton (1891) and Henry Francis Cary (1814) at danteinferno.info. If I still had any questions, I’d do a word-by-word dictionary translation for that tercet and the surrounding ones using the Sansoni Italian/English English/Italian dictionary (Third Edition) Sometimes I would do entire pages of word-by-word dictionary translation. I would also read whatever notes were available for that tercet in Charles S. Singleton’s separate volume of Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1970), and read the notes to any of the above transla-tions that had notes. Singleton replicated many of Vernon’s notes and added to them. The Hollander notes were especially helpful because they occasionally added to Singleton’s or contradict Vernon’s inter-esting ways. I would also read critical texts and sometimes go to the online Dante Encyclopedia to see what it had to say about various characters mentioned in the text. Once I felt I had a solid understanding of the tercet, and had devised what I was fairly certain was an accurate translation, I would begin to play with the music of the lines, or I might see an opportu-nity to modernize the line without sacrificing accuracy, or I might see an place where I could weave in a line from a poem the way Dante had woven in lines by Virgil, Ovid, and other poets he admired. I’d work to relax the language and make it better conform to spoken English. As I went forward, I’d read over what I’d just done; I wanted to keep the tone and the music consistent throughout. And as soon as I did another canto, I’d go back and read the previous ones. But now I fear I’ve made the process sound as if it was highly patterned when

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it was really very fluid! Especially since I would go back, over and over every word, and continually revise. Also, my attitude toward the translation changed over time. I became more and more committed to accuracy. And more and more concerned with blending in the con-temporary references so the gesture toward modernity wouldn’t stand out so much that it undermined the poem’s pathos. What I wanted to do was to create a readable translation that was still Dante’s Inferno but that felt less like a literary artifact from a distant era and more a work that was one with the reader’s moment.

Q: With the exception of the translation by Robert and Jean Hollan-der, yours will be the only translation written by a woman. Is that important?

A: There is, in fact, another translation by a woman. Dorothy L. Sayers published a translation of the Inferno with Penguin (titled Hell) in 1949. She went on to translate Purgatory (published in 1955) and began Paradise but died before she was able to finish it. Barbara Reynolds completed the translation and it was published in 1962. Sayers’ translations all maintain the original terza-rima rhyme scheme. However, in terms of the question, are you asking whether I would have translated the poem differently if I weren’t a woman? My answer would be, undoubtedly—although I can’t say what those differences might be since I can’t imagine myself as anything other than myself. Dante positions himself as a very sensitive observer in hell—he cries, he even faints twice when he’s overcome by extreme emotion—and his attitude towards Virgil is both deferential and warmly affectionate. As the point-of-view character, he’s far from what one might consider culturally hyper-masculine. One doesn’t have to bend the poem very far, if at all, to express attitudes that might be considered culturally feminine. The landscape of the poem, however, is very masculine; most of the people with whom Dante and Virgil interact in hell are men, the stories of their sinful past lives often take place in the medi-eval-era all-male societies of church and state. Beatrice, of course, is there in the background; in the poem she’s the ideal mother figure who, the moment she learns of Dante’s plight, sends Virgil to rescue him at the beginning of the Inferno. And Virgil

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invokes her later as that one who will eventually make sense of the ominous warnings Dante receives while he’s in hell. Meanwhile, she’s up in heaven with Lucy and Rachel in a seemingly all-female society. I suspect I’ve de-gendered Dante in my mind. He’s one-third me, one-third the Inferno persona named Dante, and one-third my idea of a thirty-five year old contemporary American poet of no particular gender, just a stylistic norm. But perhaps you were actually asking whether a translation done by a woman would be received in the world differently? If that’s the question, my answer is that I can’t imagine that anyone in today’s world would take issue with the fact that I’m a woman. Any resis-tance, I think, would more likely be based on my amateur status and the unorthodoxies of my translation. That said, the Irish poet Ciaran Carson’s translation was highly unorthodox but was published in 2002 by the august New York Review of Books Press in the US, and by Granta Books in England. And Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders co-wrote (and Birk illustrated) a narratively faithful adaptation that set the Inferno in contemporary LA; that translation was published by Chronicle Books in 2004. So oddity is clearly sometimes welcomed.

Q: You mention that Dante is “one-third you.” Which third?

A: I think it will be clear to readers that to some degree I’ve allowed of my own writing style to cover Dante’s. Plus, the cultural references are obviously mine—Superman, “truthiness,” “The Ballad of the Thin Man”—as well as the post-Dante literary allusions. All of the allusions and references are the result of a life lived at a particular historical moment. My own emotional knowledge also covers that of the Dante persona. So I’ve undoubtedly hung some of who I am and how I think on the scaffolding of the poem. Of course, the poet named Dante remains himself.

Q: Is there an ideal reader for this particular translation?

A: I don’t know that there’s an ideal reader. I hope the poem will appeal to many different readers—those who might already know the poem in the original, or in translation, and are curious to see what choices I’ve made, but also readers who haven’t read the poem because they

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assumed that the work/pleasure ratio would be too skewed toward work. I hope by reading my translation they might feel better pre-pared to read a more literal one. I’d like to think the translation might also find readers who are interested in issues of translation. Plus read-ers who enjoy reading contemporary poetry and are curious to see what an ancient poem might look and sound like if it were adapted into the language and music of the day. And of course regardless of the translation, the Inferno is interest-ing because of the way it poses questions about moral responsibility and ethical behavior, both in the private and the public sphere. The poem is timeless in that regard and as relevant today as it was when it was first written. It’s very interesting that Dante reserves the lowest circle in hell not for those who commit violent crimes, but for people who betray those who trusted them. I think at least one aspect of the poem’s enduring success is that he created a narrative frame that is very novelistic and filled with recognizable characters who have, in varying degrees, our faults; it’s rather ingenious, the way he creates a netherworld with perfect punishments for the crimes we routinely commit, as well as the more extreme ones. His carefully constructed hell mirrors our world and invites us to imagine our future selves in it.

poetry feature

Mary Jo Bang

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Canto xxvi

Enjoy your braggart status, Florence—you’re so greatThat your wings flap over land and sea,And your famous name echoes in the halls of hell.

I found five of your noblest denizensAmong the thieves, which mortifies me, A Florentine, and brings you no great honor either.

If what one dreams just before dawn is, as they say,What will be, you’ll soon feel the bruntOf what Prato, among others, ardently wishes for you.

If it had already happened, it wouldn’t be too soon. Which is to say, I wish it had, since it has to be, And the more I age, the heavier the burden will be.

We left there by way of the stairs Formed of the rugged escarpment we’d come down; My teacher climbed and pulled me up after. 15

As we made our way up the barren pathAmong the splintered boulders and jagged rock,Our feet required help from our hands.

I was sad then and I’m sad again now As my mind returns to what I saw; I crib and confine my intelligence

So it won’t go where virtue doesn’t guide it.If a lucky star, or even better, has given me this gift,I’d hate to lose it through misuse.

As many as the lightning bugs a farmer sees in summer,When the world’s lamp tucks its face away from usThe least longest, and at a time of day

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When flies give way to mosquitoes,As he lies on a hill above the valley Where he may pick grapes or tend acres, 30

That’s how many flames flickered Throughout the eighth crevice, as I could seeAs soon as I reached where the bottom was visible.

Like the mocked one avenged by bears,Who saw Elijah’s fiery chariot departing—Horses rearing, Hi-Ho Silver, and rising up to heaven—But could make out nothing with his naked eyeExcept a single flameSoaring ever upward like a high-flying cloud of fire,

Like that, each flame moves along the maw Of the chasm, not one reveals its theftAnd yet each conceals a sinner.

I was standing on the bridge, dangerously near the edge—If I hadn’t steadied myself by grabbing onto a rock I would have toppled, even without a tap on the back. 45

My teacher, seeing how intent I was,Said, “The spirits are inside the flames,Each wrapped in a blanket that burns it.”

I said, “I’m certain now that you’ve said it;I had thought that’s what it was And had just been about to ask you

Who’s in the flame that splits in two at the top?It makes me think of the double-tongue fire that roseFrom the funeral pyre of Eteocles and his brother.”

He said, “Ulysses and Diomedes are punished in that one.They’re tormented together Since that’s the way they once incurred the wrath of God.

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Inside their flame they go about ruing the strategy Of the wooden horse that opened the doorThrough which Rome’s great founder exited. 60

Within it they say they’re sorry for their subterfuge,Because of which dead Deidamia still mourns Achilles,And they serve time for stealing the sacred Palladium.”

I said, “If they can project a voice from the flame,I beg of you, and then re-beg, Where each ‘I beg’ equals a thousand more left unsaid,

That you won’t say we can’t wait right hereUntil the forked flame reaches us.You must see how drawn I am to it.”

He said, “Your begging deserves applause. So, yes, I agree to it,But keep quiet.

I’ll do the talking since I know what you want to know,And, since they’re Greeks, They might just dismiss whatever you had to say.” 75Once the flame arrived at the point My teacher deemed was just right: perfect time, Perfect place—I listened, as he said:

“You two who are sharing a single fire,If I deserved anything when I lived—If I deserved a little, or a lot—

When, in the world, I wrote my famous verses,Then wait up and let the one tell us where,After having been lost, he went to die.”

The larger offshoot of the ancient flameBegan to wuther and fretLike a wind-battered candle in an open window.

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Its tip lashed back and forth, As if it were a talking tongue.It threw a voice, which said, “When I 90

Left Circe, who had seduced me Into staying alone with her for over a yearNear Gaeta, before Aeneas had named it,

Neither affection for a son, nor a son’s devotionTo an aging father, nor the love I owed Penelope,And which would have brought her happiness,

Could overcome my wanderlust And want of knowledge of the ways of the world,Its virtues and its vices.

So I set out to sail the wide seaWith only one ship and a small crew,Of the few who hadn’t deserted me.

I could see the coast of Europe and the shore of AfricaAll the way to Spain, to Morocco, and Sardinia And the other islands the sea makes rings around. 105

My men and I were old and brokenBy the time we reached the narrow straitWhere Hercules had erected his mountain-markers,

Pillars which warn one not to sail past.On the right, I was leaving Seville behind,On the other side, I’d already left Ceuta.

I said to my men, “Men, you’ve enduredCountless dangers to reach the west,In the little time that’s left To feel something, don’t deny yourselvesThe chance to seek new life beyond this sun, To go where no one has gone before.

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Think about where you came from; You weren’t made to live like animalsBut to cultivate virtue and the life of the mind.’ 120

With this little talking-to, I made my men so excited to travelI could hardly have held them back.

Turning our stern toward morning’s east, We went west—our oars were the wings Of our insane flight, advancing always on the left.

Now at night I could see all the starsOf the other pole; those within our ownWere so low they didn’t rise off the watery floor.

The light on the moon’s underside had been re-litFive times, and smothered the same number, Since we began our Jules Verne journey,

When we could see a mountain Dark and distant, tallerAnd more massive than any I’d ever seen, 135

We broke out the champagne but soon our delightTurned to tears; a whirlwind that began On that unknown landmass struck the ship head-on.

It spun her three times, and all the water with it,On the fourth spin, the stern tilted up, The prow dipped, which is what Another willed,

Until the sea drew its curtain closed over us.”

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NOTES FOR CANTO XXVI

2. That your wings flap over land and sea: Meaning, dominance over the land and the surrounding waters.

7–8. If what one dreams just before dawn is, as they say,/What will be: A medieval belief.

8–9. what Prato, among others, ardently wishes for you: Prato may refer to the neighboring town of Prato, although commentators state there was no known animosity between the two, or it may allude to Cardinal Niccolò Prato who was sent to Florence in either 1303 or 1304 by Pope Benedict IX, successor of Boniface VIII, to try to reconcile the city’s war-ring factions. When he failed, he excommunicated the inhabitants and departed in anger. Afterward, a series of disasters occurred, including the collapse of a wooden bridge where a large crowd of viewers had gathered to watch a stage show that depicted Hell. This was followed, not long after, by a fire.

21: I crib and confine my intelligence: William Shakespeare, Macbeth (III.iv. 27–28):

Macbeth. But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound inTo saucy doubts and fears.

34–36: Like the mocked one avenged by bears/Who saw Elijah’s fiery chariot departing—/Horses rearing, Hi Ho Silver—and rising up to heaven: According to the Hebrew Bible, when the prophet, Elisha (Eliseus to many, and Al–Yasa to Muslims) was called “Baldy” as a taunt by a group of boys, two female bears came out of the forest and mauled forty–two of them (2 Kings 2:23–25). Elijah and Elisha were walking one day when a whirlwind with a fiery chariot with fiery horses engulfed Elijah and raised him to heaven (2 Kings 2:11). At the end of each episode of The Lone Ranger, a radio and television program set in the American Old West, the masked Texas Ranger (named Reid) would shout to his horse, “Hi–Ho Silver”; the horse would then rear up and gallop off.

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53–54: It makes me think of the double–tongue fire that rose/From the funeral pyre of Eteocles and his brother: When Oedipus, King of Thebes, was expelled for having killed his own father, Oedipus’ son, Eteocles, became king. Eteocles was supposed to take turns ruling every other year with his twin brother, Polynices. However Oedipus had prayed that there would never be peace between the two. When Eteocles refused to abdi-cate when his term was finished, Polynices sought help from Adrastus, King of Argos and thus began the war called Seven Against Thebes. In one of the battles, Etocles and Polynices killed each other. When they were burned together on a single funeral pyre, evidence that their intense hatred continued, even after their lives were ended, was found in the fact that the smoke as it rose from the fire, divided into two plumes.

55–57. Ulysses and Diomedes are punished in that one. They’re tormented together/Since that’s the way they once incurred the wrath of God: In Virgil’s Aeneid, Ulysses and Diomedes, through treachery, steal the Palladium, a wooden statue of Pallus Athena, upon which the preserva-tion of Troy was said to depend.

58–60. Inside their flame they go about ruing the strategy/Of the wooden horse that opened the door/Through which Rome’s great founder exited: In the Aeneid, it is Ulysses who is responsible for the deceitful strategy of leaving a large wooden horse filled with Greek warriors at the gates of Troy. Dante adds Diomedes into the story. When Troy falls as a result of the wooden horse, Aeneas leaves and eventually founds Rome.

61–63. Within it they say they’re sorry for their subterfuge,/Because of which dead Deidamia still mourns Achilles,/And they serve time for stealing the sacred Palladium: As a young boy Achilles had been con-cealed (possibly dressed as a girl) in the household of Deidamia’s father, Lycomedes, king of Skyros in order to avoid being conscripted for the war against Troy. When he reaches adulthood, he takes Deidamia as a mistress. Ulysses and Diomedes penetrate Achilles’ disguise; Ulysses then persuades him to abandon the pregnant Deidamia and join the war. She dies of a broken heart and is consigned to Limbo.

85. The larger offshoot of the ancient flame: Ulysses is the “larger off-shoot;” throughout the poem, size denotes stature.

20 PMS. .

90–93. When I//Left Circe, who had seduced me/Into staying alone with her for over a year/Near Gaeta, before Aeneas had named it,: In Greek mythology, Ulysses (Odysseus) was the King of Ithaca. He is the hero of Homer’s Odysseus and also figures in the Iliad. His story is told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and by Virgil in the Aeneid. On his return home after fighting the Trojan War, he stops on an island where Circe, a witch, changes his men into pigs. He deceives her into changing them back and remains with her for some period of time, fathering one or more chil-dren with her. Aeneas first named the area Caieta for his nurse who died there.

94–95. Neither affection for a son, nor a son’s devotion/To an aging father, nor the love I owed Penelope: Ulysses’ son with Penelope was Telemachus; his father was Laertes; Penelope was his wife and Queen of Ithaca, a faithful woman who refused for twenty years to accept her husband’s death and marry one of the many suitors who courted her. She finally agreed to choose a new husband when she finished weaving a cloth on her loom but nightly ripped out the new stitches in the hope that Ulysses would return.

97–99. Could overcome my wanderlust/And want of knowledge of the ways of the world,/Its virtues and its vices: Both Cicero and Horace attribute Ulysses’ wanderlust to a noble “love of wisdom” and “passion for learn-ing” (Cicero, De fin. V, xviii, 48–49 quoted in Singleton, II).

107–111. the narrow strait/Where Hercules had erected his mountain–markers,//Pillars which warned one not to sail past…I’d already left Ceuta: The “Pillars of Hercules” define the strait that separates Libya from Europe—on one side is the Rock of Gibraltar in Spain and on the other side, Ceuta on the coast of Africa. Legend had it that they were originally one mountain until torn apart by Hercules. It was believed this was the farthest west one could go and still return alive.

117. To go where no one has gone before: Star Trek, an American televi-sion series created by Gene Roddenberry that ran for six seasons begin-ning in 1966, spawned an industry of films, computer and video games, novels, and a permanent Las Vegas theme–attraction, as well as a cult fol-lowing. Beginning in August of 1966, Star Trek television episodes were introduced by the following, spoken by an off–camera voice–over:

21PMS. .

Space: The final frontier.These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise;Its 5-year mission—To explore strange new worlds,To seek out new life and new civilizations,To boldly go where no man has gone before.

In 2009, the last line was changed to the more inclusive, “where no one has gone before.”

129. they didn’t rise off the watery floor: John Milton, Lycidas I, 167:

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.

132. our Jules Verne journey: Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French author who helped establish the science–fiction genre. His novels include: A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. “Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before navigable aircraft and practi-cal submarines were invented, and before any means of space travel had been devised. Consequently he is often referred to as the “Father of sci-ence fiction,” along with H. G. Wells.” (quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne)

142. Until the sea drew its curtain closed over us: William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth (III. iii. 31–32):

King Henry. Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close;

22 PMS. .

Jan Beatty

adventures of birthmother [texas chainsaw massacre]

just like leatherface in the basement[mask and chainsaw]

she’s two inches from “baby”her breath hot and sour mouthpryed open

[bobbypins in her teeth]

baby prisoner wants to runbut can’t even walk yet

cannibal mother: a mothflies out from her deep dark mouth

[bastard-chain-saw-massacre]

23PMS. .

Jan Beatty

adventures of birthmother [die hard]

holding the baby hostage,she thinks: where aremy detonators?

wants to blowthe roof off the sucker

(the baby giveaway)

baby thinks: [yippee ki-yay, motherfucker]

but can only say: wah!

[yakatomi plaza for unwed mothers]

24 PMS. .

Amy Eisner

After

There will never be a time of turmoil like this like that

However mild the murderdeliberate the rapeexact the sentence

the stones in their arc falling toward a womanalready wrapped

and partly buriednot standing but proppedan earthwork

pressed for airthe time must be considered normal from now on

25PMS. .

Mary Elizabeth Parker

Appetite

That girl with her stomachpartially removeddreams of groaning boardsrife with gelatins and cakesand meats and cheesesshe can’t eat.

Food in all its cracklingsits like a tauntbeyond the broken-field obstacle(if she played shoving sports)of dozens of others party-goersidly talking, reachingcasually for a plate, a bite.

She who’s learned to live onhummingbird dew (or whateverher still-glad heart calls the nurturancethat slips through tubes)sits, statuesque, for light to fillher rapidly-hollowing cells.

Her womb was removed last week,one more bauble given up,un-cradled like a jeweled eggfrom the monarchy of her body—

she’s being pluckedas negligently as if partswere feathers—gives herself overto hands doing this,

26 PMS. .

as if to turn in the gyre of forceswere as easy as turningover in bed—

lightening, receivingthe chance to be spiritwhile resident stillin the body—

Her hands gather inthe paper cranesfolded for her own healingand she sends them offto others losing parts,

lofting paper wingsto carry over the chimney-potsof Europe and into the densestBlack Forest copseto the house of magic.

But where is her silver gownfor when the white bull arrivesto gallop her over the Seven Seas—fingerlings small as Morse codeflipping in the warm waves below her—

to gallop her over the massive flanksof continents sending up their stinkfrom the scale-bright fish marketsof the world, odors reaching even into the body’s rocking sleep—She can not eat. She can not eat.

27PMS. .

Mary Elizabeth Parker

For the Young Girls

In Athens the unclaimed dogs are well fed. No telling how long this state will last before the agora fills with feral maws and the balance of civilized flesh falls back into hunger. Here women wax big—lifting stiff hennaed heads, striding on thick black pumps—but who knows what powdery pink spots they shrink to in private rooms? A beautiful face is a beauti-ful soul and vice versa—insisting against all theology that spirit resides in the flesh, that subcutaneous down-sliding is proof of demons in the bone. For too many years their tables have sagged with too much. It spills, flows, crusts—mountains and canyons of food—the hung haunch-es and fruits of the markets, intricate salads awaiting flies. You must eat, it is good for you, how else will you stay strong? But thelo,she wants the skin of the dancer whose face bears no press of a man’s earnest fingers; she wants the lungs of the young diva who sips tendrils of smoke from that cigarette just as a plant sucks in tendrils of rain. Oh, she could leach every faith, framed like that against the Valencia oranges, the tangle of vines where the wild cats creep. She is walking away, voice cherry-red as the lipstick that paints her mouth too hard but breaks soft when she smiles with her white teeth. The diva will sing later, a tendril of sweat from navel to pubis inside her glittery gown—rough-handled by the Romany men who play her music, eyes insistent that her beauty will take them with her.

28 PMS. .

Constance E. Boyle

bi-polar ii

every 2 days I run to the grocery—toss berries black/red /blue/ zucchini/more garlic a tubful of spinach/Swiss chard in my cart sacks of peaches from summer 192 ounces of olive oil make dates I can’t keep appointments overlap blast O sole mio on the player drive 80 mph in a 55—stopped, I don’t get a ticket

I rewind play the Italian song 10 15 times

bi-polar it’s back from a memory I can’t bare but do awake all night conversations whir in my headhigher and higher transcending

today on the phone speeding through words a friend hears me laugh long blackboard scratches

I hang up calm down notice how I blurted grandstandingsoloist drowning the tenor

laughing too much—whenI wasn’t

29PMS. .

Constance E. Boyle

Partial List of Startling Things

1) B’s candor unlaces me, until I feel exposed I the naked one

2) are you naked A asks does he mean stark-in-the-dark can you be at night in the dark— 3) come here N says slides his garage door open nails minnows to the wall we watch them flail he sets fire to their tails

next weekhe follows me to the woods shows me hisI drop my shorts, let him look he’s 17, the boy next door I’m 11

4) G’s tears unclothe me, open me until I’m weeping too he wants to come home can we risk

5) without generosity

30 PMS. .

Michelle McMillan-Holifield

By and By

In ceremonial swoosh, the netted fish loops and loopsand drops, weighted and furious. His skin, old as history is old, gray as a memory, airs slightlyso one scale is dryand beside it, one moistlike a pallet, dollops of the same color in varying statesof rest—or unrestof ever-motionof a constant thing beingwhile it dies, while it knowsit is dying.The odor is riverous, so ancientit is the same smell, surelyas the few fish that fed thousandsand so pond-inspired, my grandmotherinhaled the same as her head dipped back in baptism and she emerged magnificentdripping in the sun in that languid moment being, while knowing that we must one day bait the hook and the next be the fish, the food.Eventually our bones finalizeinto salt spirits, minerals, mud, the frothof rivers that churns like arterial cogsover the bodies of those who come after usover spiny fans of fins, over flickering fish wings.

31PMS. .

In the scud and scoff, the silt sifts and settlesand shifts over fish, between the toesof swimmers wading as far as they dare, thrushes under the boatswhere fishermen bait and cast and net, where the ceremony of sun and tide and timeonly seems to stop, where the moment is not a moment, but an ever.

32 PMS. .

Michelle McMillan-Holifield

Love Affair

He loves her. He lovesher mellow lull

across the lake, the hookof her jaw dipping

into the slum of dark current. The moon glints on the surface

and flickers light-glory around herlike a water-halo. She lifts,

and settles down again. With her,a subtle tidal wave of grace, almost ballet

swirls outward on the waterin a sinuous rippling of tendrils.

She dips and bows below the sea moss. A move so languid, it might be slumber.

It might also be her manner: simple, complete, generous, gliding away

from the shore, eventually disappearing beneath the downy plane.

He believes in her. He believes in the long curves

and straights of her body, in the space where her back

33PMS. .

bends and arches slowly in the froth-fringed frolic.

She is more than mystery. She is mist and she is history.

Who knows when she might resurface.She may never in his lifetime.

He may sit stout-hearteduntil the earth around the loch

is worn smooth from his visits,until the topography of the land

contours around the path he makes day after day

to lay eyes upon her, until maps of continents

bear his footprints and history is written around his heart.

34 PMS. .

Mara Faulkner, OSB

Creation Story

For the girls and women of Afghanistan

In the beginning, before learning was squeezed small, prettily packaged and tagged, and forcefed to sated students, the spoon grating against clenched teeth,the children of Ireland were starving, having been forbiddenthe old stories and the magic of words that lilted like jigs and reels.

They were, after all, barely human, potato eaters,white niggers whose barbaric brogue murdered the fine English tongue,receptacles too crude for poetry.

Hungry themselves, brave priests came in the night to the classroomsof hedgerow and ditch. In whispers, taught Chuchalain,taught Jesus Christ, taught Shakespeare.

Their mouths green with the succulence of words, they taught barefoot children to break the iron shackles of law. Amidst the gibbering of Empire, where prison bars grew like starveling trees, in the cold rain, in the dark,

there was paradise.

35PMS. .

Lilace Mellin Guignard

Detour

On the phone with Dad, I explainhow I tore out the toiletand ripped up the bathroom floor,borrowing a pipe wrenchto twist loose hot and cold.Good for you, he says.I tell him the last guyglued the flange to the sewage pipe.I used a hack saw!Whatever it takes, he says.I like to talk with himabout repairs, show I’m not hiring out. Trouble-shootingis important; he’s taught me this.Then, if you need help,ask—but be careful. Some professionalstry and tell you what’s necessary.You must know yourselfor you’ll likely get taken.It had rotted below, I continue,wood soaked through.That was the smell. That’s whyI felt into crevasses,cracks turned to soggy canals.

Now it’s his turn,but he doesn’t mentionthe house or river ducks.He took a stress test—just for kicks—he says.How could he flunk?The doctors made him come back,

36 PMS. .

shot dye into his groin and mappedits travel like the Liquid-Plumr adsin which a see-through elbow pipereveals the clog. At the word “by-pass”my mind snaps up a sceneof highway construction:Detour 2This Ramp Closed signs, Take Next Exit.There are no symptoms, he says,why should I have the surgery?Still, a faulty warning systemscares us more—like sensing your floorgive way as you stand at the sinkfacing the mirror, like finding your hometownremoved from the freeway signsand there’s no one to tell youhow it just disappeared.

37PMS. .

Lilace Mellin Guignard

Lost in the Homeland

Just another person trying to fit into yesterday,tugging her childhood on like high school jeans.I land on the brick wall across from my first street.A woman comes out to readjust the sprinklerin the lawn I grew up raking—says her kidsclimb the old magnolia too, but years agoblight snatched the backyard dogwoods.She leads the tour, apologizes for landscapingthey’ve yet to do. I think the woods look groomed.Their Dalmatian launches his love at me,larger than any dog we owned.

Inside, rooms pass like men in a strange countryI recognize. In the master bedroom,the same light globe with colonial dancerslooks out of time with the arts and crafts decor.I spin in place, confused by what’s familiar.The couple lets me climb through their closetsto find hidden doors I thought were dreamswaiting for their children’s games. In the next roomI pause—“This wall was moved.” They hadn’t known.Younger than them, I brim with the past. Downstairs,

I reach a high cabinet where cereal should be.“Does this door get left open? Do you bump your head?” I ask the man nearly tall as my dad.“All the time,” he grins in pain, and I feel gladthat echoes of my father’s curses (the first I ever heard)still ring here—like I’m glad, when looking at my body,to hear my mother tell the teenage mehow thankful she was I’d filled out more than her

38 PMS. .

(though my B’s are nothing I brag about).Someday I’ll be old, time will have redecoratedeach room of my flesh in a style I’d never choose,

but I’ll bear it and hear Mom’s voice as I runwrinkled palms over the unfluffed pillows of my chest, knowing inside those casings once perched firm, clueless mounds of youth. And not far behind themwill pulse my truest landmark left, slightly modified—the doors in and out smaller, the walls yellowed.Where is everybody? it will wonder. Lost in the homeland,it will stay put so others can find it, calling outat regular intervals (in case a search party’s been summoned)I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

39PMS. .

Gay Baines

Diagrams of the Heart

At eighteen I could draw one in fifteenminutes: fretted arteries and veinsclearly limned in black, chamberscolored blue and red. Watching the

technician wield her cursor, gazing at thescreen, I thought How messy it is,its sound so sloppy, wet, inefficient.I think of the robber scientists gazing at thereal thing, how they must have felt, theirhearts falling in their young chests. The awfulreality of it, globs of fat clinging andswimming, the flapping of valves. Worsethan the catacomb of the intestines, worse than thesinister hollow passages of the cheesy brain.

We are not marvels at all, not evenpieces of work or design, meremeat in a prism of bones.

40 PMS. .

Hilary Sideris

Donatello

He made his name with an Annunciation

carved in blue-gray stone, in bas relief:

the virgin shaken by the angel’s sudden

entrance & confusing news (an offer who’d

refuse?) turning, her robe’s folds hinting

at the figure under, as if to consider.

41PMS. .

Marilyn Ringer

Element

Bring on your calipers. Measure the space of without, the reliquary emptied of a heart enflamed.

The question of a calculation,its exact weight not included on the periodic table.

No atomic number, no law explains the elemental muscle pumped full of the inexplicable.

Bring out the scale. Heart heavier than a feather, the devil takes your measure.

All hope held in a hologramthat tilts: the face of Jesus, the face of Jesus winking.

42 PMS. .

Mary Crow

From Her Blood: A Winged Horse

When she spoke, I saw rainy fir trees, wet bracken on the ground, her voice as if froma body wounded, face monumentally sad, gray curls snaking around her temples. She told me how women lived with the weather, horses and geese, how they wove patterns by eye—And so chaos keeps its hidden order, I thought, an island born from churning sea—a black fleck on the horizon.She seemed to be calling between veils, gesturingwith golden hands and I saw bronzewings through the watery air or through wavesof intense heat and then I remembered,“A blank page is the flag of a secret conflagration.”

Something in her met something in me, a burningunderground from root to root, smoldering like low vowel sounds, a fire snake issuing from its hole.And I thought how unfair life had been to her,once so beautiful she would boast about her hair,golden curls coiled in braids on top, and dance a world into existence. Now her thin hands were brass claws, her hair tangled and hissing, her few teeth like tusks on her lower lip.When she glared at me I felt turned to stone.Still, I pitied her, how rejection beat like a hurricane over her and her eyes stared unblinking, how she’smade her home where sun and moon can’t reach.

43PMS. .

Barbara Saunier

Memento Mori

after photographs by Otto Ping,1908

Before the living soil makes room for him,she weans herself off the milk of calling his name, of nursing forth his prayers, to bathe him with tepid casts of the cloth and dress him in nightclothes claimed from lullabies.

Her remaining thirst to tend she cools by tucking him again into fresh-plumped linens and combing his hair.She would not suckle six children into the ground without learning the hazards of a vacant breast: an itinerant faith goes where the work is. Under her smoothing hand his collar will lie flat for the man coming to make his picture.

Threadbare as an obituary, the last of his migrating vapors settles his likenesson the photographer’s plate, reminding hershe too will die, and not leaving their afterlife to chance.

44 PMS. .

Tracy Lynn Darling

Threads

Didn’t have enough money to pay off the humidity entrapping three sisters in onebedroom with flowered wallpaper andnightgowns sewn by an aunt’s hands and shippedmidwest to southeast just like our daddy to our mama

We would unbutton the ruffled napes of our necks seeking the cold sides of pillows sharing space in a double bed lying flat and bare chests, a request whispered into the weighted air of childhood“Tickle my back, please.”

Barriers of modesty removed down to the innocent skin eighteen months younger than the fingertips gently gliding and cooling and loving the little sister to sleep with the heavier thoughts of the burdened older sister left to escape through the open windows of the Southern night on her own

I sometimes call my daughter by my sister’s name on my tongueon my mind like mine she wraps her nighttime anxieties reaching all the way to my neck in her pink-sheeted bed I lie until our love heats the trapped space between mother and daughter and we pull apart to see with eyes holding onto what we felt with hands still linked and me teaching her to sew

45PMS. .

dresses for her stuffed animals, to stitchher mouth tight using the same strong thread I used for mine

my mouth and hers will be just the same

and that weighs heavier than any humidity or burden I want to escape the South again

46 PMS. .

Laurin B. Wolf

First House

No many how many times I stopat the red light, the building staysthe same. At the end of Tunnel Way,its filthy brown brick & scallopedarchways rise four stories highoff of Route 51 where diesel engineshum & grind against the concrete.On this two lane road where the BlueBelt follows the river & Silky’s Gentleman’s Club lingers, my housepreoccupies. Although I don’t rememberliving here, I know my mother heard my father’s footsteps like sirenscoming & coming, closer & closerto her as she lay strapped to the bedpostslike they were an electric chair. She twisted& turned like a tourniquet wrapped tautin the cook of an elbow. Inside the comfortof a pulled out dresser drawer, I learnedwanting is an instinctual as any hunger.Mother, when I was in the womb did I hiccup,attempt to develop my lungs, or did I alreadyknow how arbitrary they would become?Useless to scream or even ask, my larynxsnapped a long time ago. Was the structureto blame? My father on top of my mother,sinking like quicksand, all that muscle and so much bone broken at the joints. If you could talk house, would you sayyou delivered me like Moses to my grandparents?When they came for me after church, there was a struggle. On the balcony,

47PMS. .

forty feet above the railroad tracks, we werealmost casualties—two women & me swaddled.My grandmothers tugged & tore at one another,and if the railing were made of wood, it might havesnapped, sent us swirling like a paper airplane off a building. In the slipstream, I imagine echoeslike church bells signaling the hour, floating downthe long corridor & out as if I had wings. No matter how many seconds I wait to turnright at this unavoidable stoplight, the house always lingers, steady as rampage.

48 PMS. .

Sabrina Ito

Hafu*

the cherry blossoms on this street are white in morning they release cloudbursts lucent petals cling to pale cheeks like love-starved children I remember school-day walks to the bus-stop in Japan the pavement flecked with slick buds how I’d love to smash out their bloom my pink Mary Janes ran far ahead of my mother

Gaijin! Gaijin! fat, stupid girl!**

Yve’s parents were French he’d wait for me like punish-ment his flaxen hair his dead blue eyes he’d drive punches into my ribs arms and thighs bruise me from inside the whole way to school but I was grateful for the silent conspiracy my offering generous I thought I was good at staring ahead not crying just pretend that I was invisible

Years later I became a Canadian and made mud pies in the

49PMS. .

dirt showed my Gaijin friends how to suck the poison out of red China berries until they were gleaming and shriveled and white.

* Japanese term for “half-race’ **foreigner, or non-Japanese

50 PMS. .

Jessica Young

The Jabberwocky

a translation

It was necessary, and the silky poisondid work and warp in my womb;all misshapen was the thing,and my mother watching, waiting.

“Forget the thing, my child:the other’s pulse felt, the heart ensnared!That it happened, forget, and in a whileforget your flesh was grown and shared.”

I took the snakeroot in my hand;a long time kept it sitting, still—my mother sat with me by the willow tree,and warned I would soon feel ill.

And, with unstill hands, she sat,my mother, all insistence.I tried to plead, but None of that.So withered my resistance.

Three, four, five, six flowers on its stem.The small plant with its satin hide,leaves in shapes of long, thin spades,and thick veins on its underside—

“And do you think the deed is done?Come to my arms, my dear brave child!O frightful day! Blight done away!”she spoke, as if so mild.

51PMS. .

It was necessary, and the silky poisondid work and warp in my womb;all misshapen was the thing,and my mother watching, waiting.

52 PMS. .

Kyla Marshell

Germ

to my parents

the lie, purple-deep, a tangled secret that i cannot say.the vine of me, the ivy madness, the wild secret sprawling& tangled, catching so much detritus in its vine arms.

the germ of me—little sprout, little maggot sprout,i grew, the babiest of buds. i fermented—my sweet liquor, my drugging smile.

i think my mother lay there, all filled up, wonderingabout the body. little miracle, she called me. out of nothing,something. she drowned in belief.

the gist of me, or anyone, patented already. the bones, & the meat,only tweaked: under the sun, nothing new can grow without roots.

in her notebook, a hundred dreams jotted down. her maybes, her nos. one giant red checkmark beside my becoming. one doodle of a smile.

like any good story, i was premised on love.

53PMS. .

Kyla Marshell

The Two Fridas

no one body can bear all that breaking. the painting in utero,the woman. the splitting, then again, & again. the body, burst into unison. the new body made from pure self.

*

if you hold your own hand: you are pure light. in the tightrope woods: empty, bottomless space on either side, an airless death. you must keep to your light, every branch illumined

by what you are becoming: you, you.

*

you hold the brush, you hold his portrait, you hold the shears.one red line from your pincered heart to the other, one hand assured.

*

remember: you are peerless light. to be your very own; to guide one self through the swimming ocean of the other—there is no match for this.

& when you place the final stroke; & when you step back;& when you see it, so whole, your one tiny spore unraveled into twinned beauty

you lapse into being

poemmemoirstory

56 PMS. .

Denise Turner

Chasing Euphoria

My life is about to change. Or so I think. I’m sitting on a bench in the shopping mall, staring into the Hallmark Greeting Cards store. A Muzak version of Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” wafts from the mall’s speakers, its woeful melody grinding a hole in my gut. I barely have the courage to do what I’m about to do. The song isn’t helping, but then the melody shifts and climbs, reaching its dizzying, euphoric crescendo, and this somehow convinces me that what I’m about to do is not so much daring as it is epic. If I can muster the courage to enter Hallmark, my life will be transformed in miraculous ways.

So I stand up.Folded neatly in my hand is a letter for one of the sales ladies. Before,

I only had a name. Now I have a face, because I went in there yesterday, pretending to be a customer so I could scope out nametags. Linda is the middle-aged brunette with ample hips. She is beginning to gray and I find this beautiful. I’m captivated by women of a certain age; women with fine lines fanning out from eyes that are no longer wide and naive, but quick. Perceptive. Magnificently fierce. It implies a wisdom I do not yet possess, but crave. I’ve never met Linda, but her graying hair has me convinced of her insight. Maybe this is why I don’t understand the horrid consequences of my impending actions.

I glance at the letter one final time. It’s handwritten. Notebook paper. Not a single mistake. Crisp edges. Folded neatly. Her name is lavishly inscribed. A gentle swoosh beneath. The letter goes something like this: Dear Linda, There is no easy way to say this. For the past eight months, I’ve been having an affair with your husband…

I believe it’s the right thing to do. With all my heart I believe this. In my fantasies, this sage brunette forgives me. Not only does she forgive me, but she invites me out for coffee where we talk for hours. In the end, she hugs me. Thanks me. We become friends.

I have no idea that my letter will completely destroy her; that when I show up the next day for my imaginary coffee date, Linda will see me and panic. Her lovely blue eyes will narrow to sharp points. She will call

57

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me a liar. Liar! How dare you! The other Hallmark lady will march for-ward, positioning herself between Linda and me like a sentinel. She will point to the door. Demand that I leave. Leave now! Do not ever come back here again!

I will be cast out of Hallmark. How completely rotten do you have to be to be thrown out of a Hallmark Greeting Cards store? But I will leave, shocked, shaking, trembling and sprinting out the nearest exit to the parking lot.

At this moment, with the letter in my hand and Barry Manilow’s rhapsodic serenade, I don’t know that it will all go so horribly wrong. The only thing I know is that I have to tell her. Something more powerful than me drives me to do it. Tell her. Only then can the healing begin.

So I take a deep breath. Cross the faux cobblestone. The second I enter the store, I’m engulfed in potpourri and scented candles. The aro-mas seem to leap from the shelves, choking out any disagreeable stench that might drift in from the mall. Stale air and deep-fried treats are immediately replaced with country rose and vanilla musk. Doey-eyed cherubs beam at me from shiny glass shelves, miniature harps in their hands and golden halos floating above their flaxen flocks. The environ-ment deludes me further, trying to make me believe in a perfect, flawless world. And in this moment I want to believe. I really, really do.

Linda is at the cash register, unpacking porcelain figurines. She looks up. Smiles.

“Hello. Can I help you find anything?” Her voice is melodic. Unbearably cheery.

I move closer. “Linda?”“Yes?” She is still smiling, her blue eyes glistening, and I think, Jim

does not deserve her.“This is for you.” I hand her the letter.“Oh.” She takes it, smiling, then looks back at me, confused. “What’s

this…?”“Please,” I say softly. “Just read it.”I walk out the door. Breathe a sigh of relief. I feel exceptionally good. Little do I know: I have just unlocked the gates of hell.

Dating a married man seems perfectly natural to me. As natural as a dose of electric shock seems to a rat who is trapped in a maze. Disorienting, yes. At times, horrifying. Like the time Jim said, “I don’t know what to

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do about you or my wife.” A few minutes later, he shrugged and added, “Maybe I should just kill you both.”

That one rolled over me like lightning, sending jolts of raw panic down my spine. It was a sensation I ignored, however, because fifteen minutes after he said it we were having sex in his car. Looking back now, I see that I was out of my mind. And quite possibly very lucky that Jim never made good on his threat. Was that my reward in this twisted mess? Not the thrill of infidelity, but the thrill of cheating death? The spine- tingling exhilaration of escaping my demise, only then to seek it out again. I’m twenty-two when I start fucking Jim, but it feels like I’ve been doing this most of my life. I want it to stop, but I don’t know how to make this happen.

The letter to Linda is my attempt, however strange and insane, to end this savage cycle. I’ve convinced myself that telling her about the affair will set us both free. If I had any kind of self-awareness, I would know better. I would feel the violent hammering in my chest, recognize the familiar knot forming inside. I am unconsciously trying to resolve the past by repeating it.

It makes me sick that I did it this way, that I did not see the beating heart inside this woman. It’s not that I viewed her as the enemy. On the contrary, I now know that I saw Linda as one might see a movie star. A pop icon. The Virgin Mary. I attached qualities to her that no human being could possibly possess, even under the best of circumstances.

Which is why I’m in for a very painful reckoning.

I show up at Hallmark the next day, smiling, still believing in our imagi-nary coffee date, when Linda sees me and comes wildly undone. Her coworker charges, yells. In an instant, the store’s atmosphere changes from heavenly peace into something closer to hell. Even the porcelain cherubs seem to lose their hospitality. They glare down at me from sharp ledges, furious that I’ve tracked in filth. A trickle of sweat slides down my back. Whatever scent it holds is quickly purged by Lush Gardenia. “And do not ever come back here again!” the other Hallmark lady screams. I back up, tripping over a display case. My face goes red. My hands lose feeling. I can barely maintain my balance, but I turn and run.

I race through the shopping mall liked a crazed rat looking for a way out. They will arrest me, I think, fully expecting security guards to rush out of nowhere with handcuffs. Because this is part of the cycle: the firm belief that I deserved to be punished, the dread of knowing said

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punishment is coming, the thrill of escape. By the time I get to the park-ing lot, my trembling is out of control. I can’t hold on to my car keys, can’t stop my knees from trying to buckle. It’s surreal, this emotion surg-ing through me, like someone has punched a hole in a massive dam. First comes a trickle. Then an explosion. I’m exploding now, waves of memo-ries rushing over me. Fear. The fear I will drown if I don’t run. So that’s what I do. I jam the keys into the ignition and peel out of the parking lot, waiting for the high that follows whenever I run from moments like this. But the high doesn’t come. My panic sends me in an unfamiliar direc-tion. I have a sinking feeling that the worst is still in hot pursuit, that it’s all going to come crashing down.

And I’m right.Hours after I’ve been banished from Hallmark, after I have driven

around aimlessly, weeping and hating myself for it all, I come home to find a phone message from Linda. The woman who called me a liar, who never wanted to see my lying face again, now wants me to come to the house. Her voice is frazzled. Splintered. Livid.

“You must come over here,” she wails. “Tonight!” It does not occur to me that I can say, “No.” It honestly doesn’t enter

my brain that I can refuse whatever is waiting. The reason it doesn’t occur to me is because I have nothing to base it on. As a child, I wasn’t allowed to refuse conflict, no matter how dire or frightening. Saying No is not an option, even at the age of twenty-two. I can’t do it. I simply don’t know how.

So, I get into my car again. The trembling has stopped because I’ve gone completely numb. The numbness disturbs me, so I plunge into the fantasy that Linda’s had a change of heart. This is part of the cycle too: perilous fantasies which I expertly build and climb, ignoring the insur-mountable height. The shaky ground beneath. The imminent fall.

The drive is long, but I know exactly where I’m going because I’ve been to their house before. Jim and I had sex on the living room sofa. It was during the middle of the day. Everyone was gone. Linda was at Hallmark, the kids at school. He gave me a tour afterwards. Or maybe it was before. There were flowers on the kitchen table. I remember thinking how tidy everything was. So pretty. So nice. There was a pang of jealousy, a quiet wish that I could somehow belong to such an unsoiled family.

This time, when I arrive at the house I don’t get further than the front lawn. It’s dark. I stand, car keys in hand, my heart suddenly and inexpli-cably pounding like a jackhammer. Jim is standing there in his button

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down Oxford, arms folded across his chest, his silver-gray hair sparkling beneath the stars. He is looking surprisingly…calm. He is astonishingly unfettered by all of this. Linda, on the other hand, is looking victorious. She sneers at me under the porch light. I can tell she’s been crying, but her sadness has already turned to rage. Her rage is all over me, hostile and crushing.

“You’re a little liar!” she spits. “Jim told me the truth! How you keep coming on to him at work and he keeps rebuffing you!”

It takes a moment for the words to sink in. When my mouth finally falls open, nothing comes out. I am literally stunned into silence. How is this happening?

I look at Jim. He is serene. Collected. He casually adjusts his bifocals. Clears his throat and adds this: “You’re a nice girl. But like I told you before, I’m married.”

His voice is kind. Excessively kind. It is sticky sweet saccharine, drip-ping from his lips. Even his eyes are benevolent orbs, shining in the dark. His kindness toward me infuriates Linda.

“You see that!” she yells, arms flailing. “He’s married. You need to leave him alone!”

“But… I… I’m not…” It’s the first time I’ve tried to speak, but I mumble.

So Linda cuts me off.“What’s the matter with you?” she chides. “Can’t you handle

rejection?”Tears surface. I blink them away. I try once again to find my voice.“But I’m not lying,” I tell her. “I promise, I’m not…” My words are

small, tiny things that float into the darkness. Disappear.Jim shakes his head, as if he is witnessing a tragedy. A car accident,

perhaps. Or a brutal slaying on Channel 9 News. He shakes his head back and forth. Lets out a long, deep sigh.

Linda continues to yell. She yells that I am delusional. That I need psychiatric help. That I need to get the hell off her lawn and never come back.

I stand there for a minute, not quite believing, until Linda repeats her order with unbearable fury.

I wince and turn. Shrink down the lawn. Climb into my car. Too stunned to cry, or vomit, or scream. Something about this is all too familiar for me. Is it the betrayal? Lies? Maybe it’s the undone nature

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of a wife and mother. The cruel serenity of her husband. The twisted craziness of me. How did I ever come to learn this vicious game?

I drive home on auto-pilot. Shut off. Shut down. Quietly collapse.

Jim calls the next morning.“You got me in a lot of trouble,” he says. His voice is as smooth as gla-

cial ice.I do not give him my rage: the rage at being betrayed; at being turned

into an insane and idiotic woman on his front lawn. I don’t give Jim any of my anger because, at the moment, I’m not even aware that it exists. Instead, I do what has been hard-wired into my brain. I apologize. Ask if I can do anything to make it better.

“Yeah,” Jim says. “You can.”He instructs me to write another letter to his wife, telling her that I

lied about everything. Then meet him after work.I write two letters. One is a declaration: I did not lie. I will not lie. It is

all true! The other is a rambling apology. One letter I keep. The other I throw away.

We meet in his Suzuki Samurai. A crescent moon hangs in the night sky, its light bleeding into the

parking lot, washing over my skin, illuminating the gray hairs on Jim’s arms. I can’t help thinking how he smells like Hallmark; like synthetic peppermint, and rolls of gift wrap, and cards for every occasion.

Jim reads the letter twice. Tosses it on the dashboard. Switches off the interior light.

“Good,” he says. “Very nice.”“I did it right?”Jim nods. “I think she’ll believe it. You’re a good writer,” he says. “I’ve

told you that.”I start to thank him for this compliment, when I see that Jim has

other intentions. He unbuckles his belt. Unzips his pants. Grabs the back of my head

with his hand. “Now,” he says, reclining in his seat. “Give me a blow job.”

And I do.The emergency brake pokes into my ribs. My head thumps against

the steering wheel. I pull his cock in as deeply as I can, sucking and

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tickling the tip with my tongue. Jim groans. His body begins to quake. Tremble. Ecstasy. He is in ecstasy.

I’m the only one who’s in hell.If I were to be filleted open with a pitchfork right now, it could not

hurt worse than this. This is beyond insane. Beyond humiliation. This is self-degradation. It is self-imposed craziness.

It’s a pattern I’ve been repeating, in one way or another, since I was ten years old. I haven’t yet realized that my sexuality belongs to me, that it exists without shame. At twenty-two, I’m still having flashbacks that come over my body like waves. As soon as I push one away, another breaks the surface. One memory comes so often, it threatens to split me apart with grief. My mother and I are sitting in front of the Post Office. We’re in the El Camino and she’s wearing her navy blue windbreaker with the white lining. The clouds are swirling above the mountains, tiny drops of rain splattering across the windshield. I’ve just told her. Just said the words: Mom, he touched my breasts. I have just gotten them, these breasts. I can hardly say the word without blushing. They sprout like unripe nectarines from my chest. My stepfather pawed them in the liv-ing room, while she was in the kitchen, squeezing them so hard it hurt. That is what I am telling her in front of the Post Office: It hurt, Mom. He touched them and it hurt.

Her deep brown eyes pull away from mine. She searches the dash-board first, then the sky. This is what my mother does when she’s waiting for God to give guidance. At last her eyes trail back to mine, but they gaze upon me like I am a stranger and not the daughter she’s raised for ten years.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “You must have done something to lead him on.”

We sit quietly for a while and then my mother exits the car to go get the mail. When she returns, we drive home in silence. It’s never spoken of again. The touching soon gives way to rape. “Quit crying,” he tells me. “Quit yer damn cryin’!” So I do. I learn to quit crying and screaming and pushing and kicking. I learn to lie still. Still as the moon that shines through the window. Still as his breath which clings to my neck. Still as the sweat which pools beneath me.

It goes on for years.I came to believe that my stepfather would kill me. Not just physically

end my life, but splinter my mind. Shred my existence into unfixable

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fragments. But I woke up each morning alive and, as far as I could tell, unbroken. And there was this euphoric sensation that rushed through me again and again, as I recalled the terror of the night before and real-ized I was still here. All the dead parts of me resurrected. Every nerve ending pulsed electric bliss.

I became addicted to this feeling. At ten years old, I was hooked. Warnings became invitations in my life. The greater the risk, the

higher the high. I start with cigarettes in fourth grade, but this becomes too tame. So, I graduate to pocket knives. I carve shapes into my skin. At twelve I’m in the bathroom, purging meals. When I try to run away from home, when I hold a blow-torch over my hand, when I swallow my first fistful of pills, my mother throws her hands in the air and cries, “Why do you do this? God has given you so much! What is wrong with you?”

I say nothing in reply. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t have the words any-more. Besides, I am uncontrollably addicted to my own disaster. The pursuit of it lessens the blow of an existence without boundaries. I can’t say “no,” or “stop,” or “help.” But the electrifying high that I will get in the aftermath becomes my compensation.

I wish I could say that this moment in the car with Jim is what finally awakens me, that my self-destruction ends that very night. In truth, it’s a pivotal moment, but not the moment.

Because I will do it again. In just two short months, I will do almost the same exact thing with

another married man. His wife’s reaction will be harsher than Linda’s. She will demand that I get tested for AIDS. She will not contract any filthy disease I may have given her husband. So I will get tested. Of course I will. I will do anything to please, anything to close these cavernous wounds. When the test results come back negative, I will beg the clinic to call this woman on my behalf and tell her. Tell her what? That I am not dirty, or filthy, or wrong… But they will refuse. The nurse will scan me with quick, perceptive eyes. She will utter a single, resonating statement:

“We will not betray your right to privacy.”Maybe it is something about the word privacy. Or the idea of having

rights. Something in the nurse’s statement will be like a forty-watt bulb flicking on in a very dark house. And somehow, I will see it. My brain will recognize that dull light.

But not in this moment.

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In this moment, I am bent over, sucking cock in a parking lot, fight-ing tears and nausea. The euphoria is absent. For the first time, it’s gone. I am hollow. Broken. Inconceivably lonely. And falling. I am careening toward the bottom of my existence. When I finally crash and begin sift-ing through the ruins, I will find everything I thought was lost. The flashbacks will end. My life will begin. For whatever reason, I just have to get through this moment first. This shameful, crushing moment, when disaster is losing its appeal.

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Brittany Michelson

Connecting the Dots

In adult discourse the phrase “connect the dots” can be used as a metaphor to illustrate an ability (or inability) to associate one idea with another, to find the “big picture” or salient feature in a mass of data. (Wikipedia)

Growing up, I lived in two worlds. One was full of wonder and curios-ity. The other was filled with a constant chatter or inner dialogue that ping-ponged back and forth in my mind. Not too long, not too slow, not too harsh, not direct, stuck, repeated, focused. It was out of the corner of my eye, quick, short, indirect. This dialogue was automatic, habitual, and necessary. I would do it when the sun reflected off shiny surfaces like windows, mirrors and metal, to ensure the light would not cause damage to my sight.

I would also do it when I was close to chemicals or cleaning agents. I worried about germs. I worried I could catch cancer from the next-

door neighbor. I felt I was wired differently. It’s as if I inhabited a secret space, and

somehow, it felt shameful.One could argue that phases or episodes of worry are natural for kids.

It’s common to think that illnesses such as cancer are contagious, or dis-ease can be transferred through germs on public door handles. For me, however, a noticeable pattern played out past childhood.

We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are. –Anais Nin

I am standing hands free in the middle of a boiling subway car as it bar-rels through a dark tunnel. People grab metal poles in the center or plas-tic handles that hang like rows of teeth from the ceiling. It is August in Manhattan—my first visit to the city—and the subway exhales sweat and dirty feet.

Germs, infection, disease. A chunky teenager strangles a sandwich with bare hands. A small boy

chews on his thumb as if it’s a piece of beef jerky. A man leans against

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the window, his lip touching scratched glass. It smells like mildew and armpits.

Germs lead to infection, leads to disease. My sister stands at a nearby pole. All five of her fingers—not three,

not four, but five—curl around it. I count eleven people around that pole, and one man with a wide-open mouth stands dangerously close to my sister, his yellow tooth just inches from her shiny white ones. Spit could hit her face.

I have a scratch like a comma on the back of my hand. It’s small and closed, but sneaky germs can slide in.

Disease is transferred through cuts.I pretend I’m playing a balancing game, so I don’t have to touch

the pole. I am twelve and can get away with such things. Mom sits on a bench, hands folded on her lap. I am trapped in here with saliva and sweat and bad breath. With other people’s scratches and cuts.

The subway halts. I hold my arms out like a surfer and my fingers graze the fabric of a random jacket. I recoil them like they’ve been stung.

“What?” my sister hollers as we follow the crowd out of the subway station.

“Are we turning right or left on thirty second?” Mom’s words punc-ture my eardrum.

Everything is amplified. Not too loud, not too long, not too close, not too harsh.

In the middle of a sidewalk full of rushing bodies, I stand still. My hands feel strange against my ears. They have been exposed to thou-sands, no millions, of germs.

Public door handles are criminals. “Come on, let’s keep moving!” Mom calls. “Let’s stop by the market to grab a few things for dinner!” my sister

yells. I stay distanced, protecting my ears from their harsh voices. Not too long, not too loud, not too close, not high-pitched, not repeated. Something pulls at my stomach and chest—something I’m feeling a

lot more of lately. My body is pinched and twisted. I must say it to move past it. In a therapist’s office, when I am sixteen, I will learn the word for this feeling: anxiety.

In my mid-twenties, I began to question if being on anti-anxiety medi-cation had stunted my personal growth. Was it a quick fix in the

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convenient form of a pill? Since I’d taken medication on and off since I was sixteen, had it prevented me from accessing my authentic self? Deep down, a voice was telling me to try being medication-free. Like the insis-tent three-year-old that lives somewhere inside us all, I wanted to do it by myself. I was asserting independence and didn’t want to rely on a pill for freedom from my mind.

In July 2007, I stopped Paxil, the anti-anxiety medication I was then taking. I was twenty-five and had just finished my second year of teaching high school. I’d resigned from my job to take a position teach-ing English as a Second Language in Ecuador and would then apply to graduate school. I was in a relaxed and adventurous phase of life. I was also newly dating someone and was concerned about the numbing sexual effects of the drug. One morning, I didn’t take the little pink pill at breakfast. The next morning, and then the next, I conveniently forgot. I was on summer vacation.

Quitting Paxil cold turkey unleashed a slew of reactions: panic attacks, dizziness, disorientation, brain zaps (electric shock-like sensa-tions, which feel like a fizzy substance dissolving in the head), nausea, numb fingers and toes, terrible headaches, and acute insomnia. When I did fall sleep, I was pursued by nightmares. There was the reoccurring one of my dog running on a chaotic freeway, then getting hit by a truck and bleeding, while I ran in slow motion, unable to save her.

To describe the anxious state of mind, the holistic therapist I’d started working with used the visual of two curled hands pulling at each other in opposite directions. Emotion represents one fist; logic represents the other. These two forces fight against each other. Like Chinese handcuffs, your fingers get stuck the harder you pull. To get out of the trap, you must let go a little.

In December 2007, I went to Los Angeles to stay with my sister and get the help that wasn’t available in my small town in Arizona. I had received a variety of opinions on how to “cure” anxiety, but my agitation had only escalated.

I pull the light cord in the bathroom and look hard in the mirror. A wild animal stares back—absence, flight.

A mirror can’t lie.Therapists, psychiatrist, family—they don’t know what they’re talking

about. They think it’s all in my head, but they’ve got no idea of what’s at stake.

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I survey the physical evidence—touch the thin shadow of hair with hand. Pale face, pupils huge and black. Eyes heavy and out of focus.

The electromagnetic radioactive heat from the cell phone has seeped into my brain. Barely eating, not sleeping, and being under acute stress for over four months, has given me cancer.

It’s in these bones.It’s in this head, tumors pressing on optic nerve. I strip my clothes off and stand naked in front of the mirror. My

body is an old lady’s—skin yellowish, toenails dirty. I am much too thin. The insidious smell won’t go away. It emanates in wafts, clinging to my clothes, towel, and toothbrush. The smell of poison everywhere—in small traces—a sour, fetid smell of death.

I fill the bathtub to the rim and slip in. The pipes in this house are old, like everything now—old and gray. I turn the cold water off and let only the hot run until heat waves rise and the bathtub is smoking. I stick my foot under scalding water. I sink down until my whole body is sub-merged, now my face—all except mouth and nostrils. Fall asleep under water.

There is a discharge leaking out of me, expanding and discoloring the clear water—a chemical. I scan my whole body—toenails, thin legs, sag-ging knees, shrunken breasts—then drain the bath and watch the water swirl away, sucking toxic discharge down the drain. Toxins flow out to the ocean with sewage and dead skin.

I’m arthritic stepping out of the tub. I dress in the same clothes I’ve been wearing for days. Smell of poison in towel.

There are more things that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality. –Seneca

We are tethered to reality. It’s in our natures. So what happens when the reality we swear by is altered so profoundly that it no longer con-sciously exists? If our thoughts do not make us up, what do we cling to? Without our own minds, what can we claim as our own?

When under the influence of severe anxiety, the mind feels like it doesn’t belong to the body, as if it’s a separate entity. Reality becomes threatening to the point where it feels we’re no longer living in the real world, so the mind makes up stories to which our very existence becomes bound.

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When I hit the deepest chord of anxiety, the loss of myself was a sort of death. It was an internal disintegration—the kind that takes you all the way through, instead of around, the darkness. At the point when my thoughts had become overtly paranoid, a psychiatrist insisted that I be on a combination of medications to balance my chemicals and stabilize my mind. Since I’d already experienced the withdrawal effects of Paxil, and had tried to fight anxiety without medication for some months, I felt that I was back to square one. But I had no choice. Anxiety had gone too far.

Never did I have any idea that my mind could be so powerful. I’d heard of people having delusions from street drugs like crystal meth and acid, or from illnesses like schizophrenia, manic depression, Alzheimer’s, or dementia. I also knew a guy who’d been up for days and nights on end guarding post in the army and became delirious. But I didn’t fit into any of those categories.

I now know that my breakdown was a synergy of events that com-bined to form this collapse. Prolonged anxiety, weeks of sleep depriva-tion, and a combination of two antidepressants, a sleep aid, and a tran-quilizer culminated in a singular episode of psychotic depression.

Psychotic depression stems from a biochemical process. When the system undergoes severe stress, it causes the depletion of the chemicals serotonin and noradrenalin, which results in changes in the brain tissues. The mind begins to function irregularly, as the powerful organ of the brain is in distress. This is why, when I’d looked in the mirror, I had seen walking death. I’d been convinced that the pale, sickly girl staring back at me was dying.

Anxiety creates a lens, changing one’s view of the world. It sometimes feels as if the whole of reality has shifted, as if the very cells in your body have rearranged. Though it alters your internal landscape, it does not alter reality.

You feel you have transformed physically and mentally. Your brain runs its own court case: every possible angle is presented, every side argued. But the only one on trial is you. You are both the judge and the condemned. You find yourself guilty for caring too much. You hold your-self hostage for being human.

I’ve often wondered about the why of my anxiety: Is it chemical, physio-logical, or situational? Does it stem from family history? Does it connect with my maternal grandfather’s manic depression? Or does it come from

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experience—from somewhere in childhood? Perhaps the holistic thera-pist was right when he said there is wisdom in anxiety and that it comes from somewhere deeper, from somewhere beyond consciousness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron says, “I shall never learn what ‘caused’ my depression, as no one will ever learn about their own. To be able to do so will likely forever prove to be an impossibility, so complex are the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior and genetics.”

I’ve been told I have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), general-ized anxiety disorder (GAD), GAD with OCD tendencies, the O in the OCD equation. The brief handwashing phase when I was sixteen isn’t enough to categorize me as full OCD. How is my mind classified? Would I find peace or freedom if the right letters of the alphabet were applied to my experience?

I have a condition. It doesn’t need to have a title or a specific label. The name is not important unless it helps me determine a definition in order to understand my path. My path has always seemed less linear. I am simply a person who deals with anxiety, sometimes acute, sometimes subtle. The labels are facets under the same umbrella. They are attempts to make sense of something that’s as old as the human mind.

In An Unquiet Mind, a memoir on manic depression, Kay Redfield Jamison asks herself whether, if given the choice, she would choose to have manic depression. Without medication her answer is no. But with lithium having saved her life, she says that strangely enough, she would choose to have it. Minus the “death infringed, dark depressions” she’s endured she believes she’s “felt more things, more deeply” as a result of her illness. Even when delusional, she has found “new corners in her heart and mind.”

Similarly, I wouldn’t choose to completely do away with anxiety. The thought of living with the absence of anxiety’s relentless and unceasing hum is appealing, but if it were to be completely wiped out, I would be missing something that, in a large sense, is valuable and necessary for my life as a creative person. I believe that anxiety is often responsible for the energy that motivates my artistic expression. It incites productive streaks and jumpstarts new projects in order to place the restless energy somewhere. Consider bareback riding. Without a saddle, you feel every

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tension and release of the horse’s movement. Riding a horse with a saddle provides security and control, but is less thrilling a ride. The anxiety that allows for creativity is like riding an unsaddled horse. There’s a certain freedom in the danger.

It is within our struggle that we are most alive. It is within our separate-ness we are unified. –Brian Gianelli, musician

Perhaps the reason for my anxiety breakdown was due to my on again off again relationship with anti-depressants, family genes, or the transi-tion from adolescence to adulthood amidst a brain wired with imbal-anced chemicals. Or perhaps I’ll never know.

Anxiety is both separate from me and is in me. I’ve resolved to the fact that I needn’t pursue an answer for my particular experience. After years of fighting against it, I’m finally able to identify the feeling without attaching an automatic thought. Instead of blaming a specific detail, or a story, I simply note that I feel anxious. I’m learning to accept this feel-ing without letting it define me, which allows me to view it as an exist-ing force that has brought tenacity, drive, motivation, productivity, and empathy. I’ve also discovered ways to cope that do not include medica-tion. I find solace in yoga, hiking, and deep breathing, as well as the skills I learned when I was in therapy (this includes being an observer of thought, rather than a reactor, and being able to identify when emotion is taking the place of logic).

I used to see my anxiety as a weakness, as something that was wrong with me, something I couldn’t control or handle, but perhaps it is a gift—something that has taken me to places I wouldn’t otherwise visit. I know now that it’s not a flaw in character. There’s no weakness to combat.

Essayist Joan Didion says you have to pick the places you don’t walk away from. Sometimes it is not a choice. Anxiety requires me to stay and examine, prod and knead all possibility from the yolk. It has asked me to remain inside the cocoon for longer. Anxiety is the subject matter I’ve studied the closest, the animal I’ve most thoroughly dissected, and the lover I’ve always slept with.

At twenty-eight-years old, I know anxiety well enough to know it will continue to knock on my door from time to time, arriving early for a

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dinner it’s not invited to, like a neighbor that shows up empty-handed, bringing only his annoying, familiar self. But because I have learned to accept its fleeting presence, I am, to a large degree, liberated.

It’s about self-respect. I look back at that little girl averting her eyes and measuring the angle of the sun. I see her using the fabric of her shirt to open a public door, and balancing in the middle of a shaky subway train, determined not to touch the pole. There she is again, asking so seriously if she can catch cancer at the next-door neighbor’s house. I see her cover-ing her ears with her hands, then washing those hands that are already scrubbed clean. I see myself as that little girl again, and I feel tenderness for her and for all little girls who worry about the sun’s rays and disease and germs.

I flash forward and see a young woman at twenty-five years old, pray-ing to a God she hadn’t prayed to in years, sunglasses hiding dilated eyes, the face of a stranger and the body of cancer reflected in the mirror. I see the conviction in those eyes, the fear in slumped posture, and an absence across her being. I may not love that part of her yet, but I feel compas-sion instead of shame. I accept her and then I set her free.

In her book On Faith, Sharon Salzberg talks about trusting one’s own deepest experience. I identify with anxiety more than any other dynamic, aspect, or inherent quality of being. It is something that has been with me since my earliest memories, and has shaped the way I view and respond to the world. So here are my choices: to fight it or to embrace it. I choose to embrace and trust my deepest experience, knowing that I can live and thrive despite an intense and complicated brain.

The anxious mind is a maze with no exit, the game of tag with no freeze, a dog chasing its tail.

You fight your mind like the betta fish fights his own reflection. You seek to make a puzzle out of pieces that don’t fit, an outline out

of unrelated ideas, to force a square peg into a round hole. It’s a search for anything to grab onto, like the only fork in the middle of hundreds of knives, and you think if only you have that fork, everything will be all right—that your hunger will diminish.

I’m no longer searching for that elusive fork in the drawer. I’ve con-nected the dots.

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Natalie Harris

After the Late Night Phone Call

I open the door to my study and find candles burning everywhere—more than a dozen of them, dotting my burgundy carpet, poised on my cherry wood desk, tucked into the shelves of my built-in bookcases, rest-ing unevenly on the faces of Incan gods carved into the wooden table I call my altar. Wax is beginning to drip onto the carpet. Presiding over the glowing landscape is our eighteen-year-old daughter, Alison, leaning back in my recliner, her eyes glazed, her nose and lips dusted with white powder.

“My God. What did you take?” My voice is powered by horror and accusation.

“Nothing,” she slurs. Her head droops.The overpowering smell of scented candles and sticks of burning

incense is cloying, nauseating.Mike, our then fifteen-year-old son, with whom I’ve spent the after-

noon away from home, approaches the doorway and echoes my question, tone, and volume. “Alison, what did you take?” he demands.

With powder smeared on the chair as well as on her face, and strength clearly seeping out of her, she finally admits she’s taken every-thing.

“What do you mean ‘everything’?” She sputters out a catalogue of finds, gathered in her ransacking mis-

sion through our bedroom and bathroom drawers—old pain medications my husband forgot to discard after an injury, Ambien I use for occasional insomnia, and I have no idea what else.

“Why?” I ask. No response. “What are you doing, Alison?” Mike asks, insistently.“I was bored,” she says. Then she drags her diminutive self—barely five feet, two inches, and

not more than one hundred pounds these days—out of the chair and staggers into the kitchen, bumping against walls and holding onto coun-ters to keep from sliding to the floor. She mutters that she wants to go up

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to bed, and it strikes me, not then, but later, at the hospital as they fill her stomach with charcoal to neutralize all the toxins she’s ingested, that had my son and I been away even a few minutes longer, Alison might simply have crawled into bed. And I might not have known that what looked like sleep was a drug-induced coma that could well have killed her.

Because she was bored?That’s the answer I deserved, I guess, for asking an addict why she

decided to load up on drugs. But I didn’t get it then—what it was to be an addict, to be atop a runaway horse after losing hold of the reins. Nor had I even begun to absorb what it was going to be like to be the mother of that rider, how far beyond my grasp her reins and horse had traveled.

Just weeks into the second semester of her freshman year of college, Alison phoned us late one evening from her dorm room in Connecticut to say we had to come help her. She was addicted to amphetamines and didn’t know what to do. She had run out of money for drugs, her heart was racing so fast she was afraid she’d die, and she had no idea how to unstrap herself from the rocket that was about to crash. She agreed to go to the college infirmary right away. We phoned the head nurse, and once we had been assured that our daughter would be safe for the night, we arranged for our trip to her campus the next morning.

We found a frightened and frightening figure—gaunt, sluggish, and aggressive—in Alison’s dorm room the next day. After a shame-inspiring and doom-decreeing meeting with the nurse, the dean, and our belligerent daughter (who had just energized herself with secretly snorted drugs), we packed up the remnants of her bright college dream—numerous pairs of jeans and sweatshirts, textbooks on Eastern religion and on the brain and human behavior, the computer that seemed to serve as her closest companion—and drove back home to Maine, a four and half hour trip that Alison slept all the way through, just as she would sleep through most of the days that followed as we tried to put aside, as much as we could, our grief and shock at the death of the hopes all three of us had shared.

My husband and I did little else in those weeks after our daughter’s return from college than try to arrange for her treatment. We researched treatment centers, made phone calls to doctors, to representatives of our health insurance company, and to anyone we could think of who might offer advice or help us negotiate the maze of our new world. It seemed

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that one or both of us were always on a phone—the home phone, my cell, his cell, all charged and ready.

Alison, gifted with wisdom wrested from the edge, said, “If I’m home I’ll be able to get drugs. I have to go away someplace.” But because our daughter had never been hospitalized before, had no prior drug record, was not a risk to herself or others (that is, she did not wish to commit suicide or homicide), our insurance company would invest only in outpa-tient treatment. Alison knew in her bones that she would not, could not, turn away from any substance that promised to quiet her overwhelming cravings. She knew what took us longer to absorb—that, yes, she was an addict, a defining word that she needed to claim, to insist upon as hers, even later, once the cravings were gone, when the disease was arrested, when the sun shone anew, even though that word fell so far short of sug-gesting all that Alison, or any addict, was and could be.

What it finally took to get what she needed was what Alison did next: she landed herself in the hospital, and not only the ER, but also Intensive Care for three days, after the drug overdose that Mike and I discovered on the afternoon we’d been away long enough for Alison to get “bored.” This was not a failed suicide attempt, but rather an act of desperation from an addict who needed, as she insisted, to be in the kind of extended treatment facility that offered her the best chance to heal.

At the ER, we ran into a doctor we knew as a soccer dad, one of a group of us parents who cheered regularly at the weekend games of our sons’ teams. He looked at Alison, who lay unconscious on the examining table, then at us, and after a brief moment of silence during which he put the jagged pieces of the puzzle together, said, “She’s your daughter?” He probably didn’t mean to imply that we didn’t look like the parents of an addict. And what do such parents look like? What do addicts look like?

I can say what our particular family looked like: white, highly edu-cated professional parents with a stable marriage, two children separated by the then thought to be ideal three years, a large comfortable house in a small New England college town, a devoted dog. Alison and Mike played on their high school tennis teams and were honor roll students—Alison, in fact, graduated sixth in her class of about one hundred fifty students and was intellectually ambitious, determined to go to a good college, major in psychology, and then perhaps go on to graduate school. She volunteered for three years during high school at a community day program for mentally impaired seniors, where they loved her and she

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loved them back. She also loved animals, was kind to her elderly grand-mother, and could be very funny and playful.

But there had been storms, severe and damaging ones, in our family’s path: Alison could rage with frightening ferocity, sending her brother and us into our respective bedrooms for shelter. She frequently used her exceptional intelligence to manipulate us and others to get what she wanted. She began, at thirteen, angry episodes of cutting, lining the insides of her forearms with lasting scars, wiping—on one unforgettable occasion—her blood across her father’s face. Her moods ruled the house-hold. During high school, she snuck out frequently during the night, stealing away to the house of a boy three years older than she who lived down the street. She drank and smoked pot earlier than we ever guessed. She was impulsive and reckless and ruthless. We took her to therapists, and Alison chewed them up, one after another. One prescribed mood stabilizers for her when she was fourteen, which she’s been on ever since; they have helped her, this uncommonly intelligent and beautiful young woman who suffers from the double slam of addiction and bi-polar dis-order.

So when we got that phone call from college signaling her distress, we were shocked by the extremity of her situation, but not completely broadsided.

What has risen from the ashes of those February flames? I don’t much share a feeling that I’ve heard expressed occasionally by fellow members of Al-Anon: gratitude for having an alcoholic or addict in their lives because of all they’ve come to learn about themselves and others. I am not grateful for addiction or mental illness. I am not grateful for the life-long challenges Alison faces. I wish that sort of searing struggle on no one, certainly not my own flesh and blood. And yet, the burns our family suffered have transformed us, especially Alison.

Now twenty-five, she has so far beaten the odds, helped on her way by almost seven weeks of care at the Meninger Clinic in Houston, followed by local intensive outpatient treatment, ongoing psychotherapy with a compassionate psychiatrist who earned her trust, and active participation in AA and NA. Clean and sober for over six years now, she serves as a sponsor for another young woman who is in recovery from addiction—this service work being a gift both for her and her sponsee. A heavy smoker since her time at Meninger, Alison recently cut herself loose from

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that addiction, too—a decision she made only when she felt certain she had the strength to carry it through.

When people ask Alison what she’s doing now and she tells them she works as a CNA (certified nurse’s assistant) at a nursing home for patients with dementia, they often cringe and say how depressing that job must be. But they’ve got it wrong. Of course, Alison is sad when a resident from “her neighborhood” dies (she’s attended a number of funerals during her two years at the facility), but she speaks of “her residents” with surges of affection and even joy—“X ate all his break-fast for me this morning,” “Y followed me around in his wheelchair all afternoon,” and “Z threw up all over me today,” this last accompanied by laughs as she pulls off her brightly colored but stained scrubs and tosses them into the washing machine.

During all the years she lived at home, Alison was a night owl, nearly impossible to wake in the morning for school. Now, prompted by noth-ing more than her phone alarm and her wholehearted devotion to these elderly folks who need her, she rises five days a week at 5:15 a.m., show-ers, and drives half an hour from her Waterville apartment to Augusta, often contending with slippery, snow-covered roads before the plows have even gotten out. While there are residents who can be ill-tempered and sometimes even slap at their caregivers, none of them seems to up-set our daughter, who understands that they suffer from a disease that causes them to act the way they do.

Alison’s empathy, along with her research and communication skills, enabled her several times to serve as an advocate for her favorite resident—I’ll call him “Ronald”—a ward of the state who was mentally disabled his whole life. (He recently died at 89.) Ronald’s physician con-sulted Alison whenever Ronald had a problem—and he had many, some of them major—since she was the person who knew him better than anyone else. After Ronald’s death, the doctor wrote Alison a long note of appreciation, expressing how fortunate he was to have had her watch-ing so closely over him, and emphasizing how she had both enriched and lengthened Ronald’s life. My husband and I feel fortunate to have a daughter who cares so deeply for people in need, a depth of caring that I believe has roots in her own awareness of what helplessness feels like.

What Alison has learned since she stumbled off the bright college path onto a much darker, shadowed road exceeds in many ways what she is likely to have learned in school. I say this as a professor who has

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devoted her working life to higher education. My husband, who is also a professor, and I place high value on a college education and feel that all who are able to should take advantage of its many opportunities. And at the same time, our values, as well as our daughter’s, have deepened and broadened. When Alison was in high school, she looked down on classmates who didn’t go to college—“townies,” she and her friends called them. While I remember cautioning her about snobbery, I know that I shared (and, no doubt, was a source of) her bias. Little did she or we imagine that she would later be living in her hometown, working at a job requiring only a high school diploma, and yet drawing on what is best in herself to better the lives of others.

The world Alison is living in today seems narrow only when viewed narrowly. In the past, when she was leaving the house to meet some challenge at school—a presentation, a test, a tennis match—my husband would say, “Let your light shine.” So close to having been extinguished, her light is shining now, guiding her along her path, brightening ours, and radiating compassion for those who are helpless against the darkness that steals hope from their eyes.

79PMS. .

Leslie Nipkow

How to Kiss Like a Movie Star

The first time a guy stuck his tongue down my throat was behind the movie screen on the cruise ship Monarch Star. I was twelve years old. At five-feet eight, with long, dark curls, green eyes and a fierce commitment to future movie stardom, I looked sixteen.

My parents decided a cruise liner was a safe environment for a pre-teen. I couldn’t go too far or get myself kidnapped, and there would be plenty of activities to keep me out of their hair. They decided against tak-ing a family-friendly cruise, because they didn’t like children. So, while mom and dad drank pina coladas and read Solzhenitsyn on the Lido Deck, I signed up for ballroom dancing.

A gaggle of middle-aged ladies and I sat ringside around the portable parquet dance floor, among leftover glasses half-filled with last night’s backwash, smushed limes and tiny forgotten parasols in Caribbean colors. The ladies wore tennis skirts and beach cover-ups. Their hair screamed of Sun-In. I called them the Raisinettes.

The only man was our instructor, Rudy, in a white sequined shirt-vest combo, open to the waist, that fit like a second skin. He looked like a spangled snake.

Rudy wielded his Austrian accent like a whip, as he demonstrated the Mambo. The only dancer without a fruity-drink hangover, I quickly mas-tered the footwork, mirroring Rudy’s undulating hips while trying not to look too closely in their direction. To teach partnering, Rudy took me in his arms, whispering into my newly-pierced ear with its tiny bluebird earring.

“Just let my hands take you over.” A flock of butterflies let loose in my lower belly.

Following didn’t come easily. I stepped on Rudy’s feet with each change of direction. Circling my hips, I felt the cotton of my dress whis-per across the front of his skin-tight pants. As the dance continued, I began to count steps in my mind. It was safer to be in my head than in my pelvis.

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Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao. Mambo, Samba, Cha-Cha-Cha. I sunned and swiveled, dipped in the pool and on the dance floor. At night, Rudy danced, while I sat with my parents and a Coke, pink paper umbrella tucked behind my ear, listening to their conversation. And then he was there, hand extended. I looked to my father.

“Go on,” he prodded, as if it were impolite to keep Rudy waiting.Cocooned within the crush of dancers, Rudy pulled me close, flat-

tening my new breasts against his slippery shirt. He manipulated me in graceful loops around the crowded dance floor, not looking where we were going. I had to trust him; there wasn’t enough room between us to see my feet.

“Relax,” he whispered. His seductive tone made me giggle. We were going too fast. My feet were no longer beneath me. I slipped, but Rudy held me tight. My Buddha belly slid underneath his rib cage. Off-balance, I let him lead. As we twirled, the other couples became a sherbet-colored blur of polo shirts and caftans. The centrifugal force took me out of my head and into my body, as Rudy spoke.

“Tomorrow, are you going ashore?”“It’s Martinique. I want to practice my French.”“Stay,” he crooned. I glanced at my parents. They were kissing. “Meet

me at three o’clock. The movie theater. The door on the right.” Before I could answer, Rudy took the mike to start the limbo contest.

The next morning, I tried unsuccessfully to catch Rudy’s eye across the breakfast buffet. Maybe he’d thought better of our date. Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. As my parents explored Martinique, I sat anxiously by the pool, basted with baby oil. At three, dressed in my navy sundress with the smocked bodice and flirty straps, I waited by the the-ater door. A porter slowed for a drive-by leer.

“Are you lost, honey?” “I’m waiting for someone.” Five, fifteen, thirty minutes went by. I

should be wandering a tropical island, impressing mom and dad with my French. I hated them for letting me stay behind. I hated Rudy. I hated myself for believing him. I’d be damned if I’d show up for tango class. Then the door swung open with a violent thud. Rudy grabbed my wrist and dragged me, startled, into the empty cinema, toward the screen. Beside it was a door.

“I said the door on the right!”

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Embarrassed, I gestured behind me. “I thought you meant that one—” But by then we were inside the movie screen. Here were popcorn fixin’s, extra theater seats, real live film canisters. It was the best hideout ever. As Rudy turned off the buzzing fluorescent tube lights, I wondered how old he was. Thirty, maybe more. Maybe older than my mom. I was doing everything she’d told me not to do. I was with a stranger. I forgot to bring my ID. Nobody knew where I’d gone. If my mother found out, she’d tell me whatever happened was my own fault. My dad would simply look away in disgust.

“Did anybody see you?” I shook my head nervously. The lights were dimmer now, but I could still make out the movie advertisements leaning against the walls. There was my inspiration, Julie Andrews, arms flung wide with joy, free from the convent, alone in the hills. “This summer the theater back home is doing Sound of Music and I want to play Liesl—you know ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’—even though I’m not sixteen yet but I look kind of like the actress in the movie—”

“Shhh.”Rudy looked annoyed. He sat me beside him in a pair of interlocked

theater seats. He smelled like Coppertone. He ran his hand up my thigh.“What sign are you?”“Sagittarius.”“Sagittarians have very long femurs.”I didn’t know what to say. All I could think about was his hand under

my skirt. I needed to exhale, but worried my Tic Tacs had worn off, so I just sat, stiff as a handful of uncooked pasta. Rudy clutched my leg and leaned in. Our noses overlapped. Our lips followed.

Everything I knew about real kissing came from classic movies. I was Vivien Leigh. The back of my hand was Clark Gable. This was my first human-on-human kiss. Lips tightly puckered, I waited for whatever was supposed to come next and wondered what all the fuss was about.

Rudy looked like he was about to eat me.“Do you want to learn to kiss like the movie stars kiss?”I nodded. The armrest dug at my bottom rib. “Relax,” he cajoled. I tried desperately to un-tense my face. The sec-

ond kiss was softer, followed by the intrusion of his slimy tongue. My shocked counterpart retracted so hard I nearly choked. I regrouped, playing it cool, as Rudy’s hand slithered up my skirt. Suddenly, there was

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too much sensation to keep track of, and, as the Atlanta of my innocence burned, I snaked a graceful arm around Rhett’s manly neck and tilted my head. Rudy’s tongue played with mine, and I wondered if my parents had heard of this. I flicked my tongue across Rudy’s bottom lip then back, iguana-style, then made another tentative foray, checking out his teeth, without knowing why. Until he snatched me closer, pulled my head back, and kissed his way down my throat toward the neat navy smocking of my favorite sundress.

“What happened to your lips?” my mother asked.I shrugged, enjoying their secret, dull blue ache. I expected her to

look at me and know, but she stepped into her sandals and headed to the pool. That night I did the tango.

Rudy gave me lessons all the way back to Miami, risking discovery in the performers’ restroom, in nooks and crannies marked “crew-only,” and, on the final afternoon, below decks on his narrow bed. I cried as we kissed. With practice, I’d learned to tolerate the tongue, and, because it was our last time together, I let Rudy take off my clothes. Too awk-ward to want him looking at me for long, I was relieved when he pulled me underneath him. I liked his weight on top of me, and the fact that he couldn’t see my belly. He worked his knees between mine. I tensed, knowing this could be sex, and terrified of getting pregnant. I wanted to run, but I wondered what would happen if I stayed. I couldn’t leave. Rudy was too heavy, and he had me pinned. Just as I began to feel trapped, Rudy stopped kissing me and looked me dead in the eye.

“Never let a man get you in this position,” he instructed, then hugged me like a kindly uncle and handed me my underwear. Just like that, I was dismissed.

Soon after we got home, an envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was a photograph of Rudy, arm raised like a magician presenting the girl he just sawed in half. He wore black stirrup pants and his shiny shirt opened all the way down. Now I knew: it snapped in the crotch. On the back of the photograph was a note written in silver magic marker: “To Leslie, I know you have learned much.”

I had. Sagittarians have very long femurs.

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Lisbeth Prifogle

Pretty

EnemiesCampVictory,KuwaitJanuary2008

I pull back my long wet hair, it’s soft and healthy, I wonder what it will look like after six months of slicking it back into a tight bun or pinning it up in braids. I wonder how long my gallon bottles of specialized sham-poo and conditioner will last and what brands they will have at the PX, a small convenient store on base, for me to choose from once these run out. Someday this will seem like a silly thing to worry about, but dur-ing the first shower of the deployment, after traveling from California to Maine to Ireland to Kuwait, I don’t know what else to worry about. After some of the steam evaporates through an open window, I notice something on the long mirror above a line of sinks. I run my finger over the large red loops, lipstick. I take a step back and slowly start to make out what it says, “For the females going home; how does it feel to be ugly again?” I roll my eyes wishing I was on my way back home and mumble to myself, “Women are our own worst enemy.” I leave the message for whoever has to clean the bathrooms to wash away, finish getting dressed and exchange the humidity of the shower trailer for dry, sandy desert air.

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SecretGirlBehaviorAlAsad,IraqFebruary2008

“Ma’am, I paint my toenails pink so at the end of the day, when I take off my boots, I still feel like a woman.” I’m in the chow hall with one of my female Marines, Sergeant Browning.

“I like to take at least one night or Sunday afternoon to wash and dry my hair and leave it down so I remember what it feels like to be a civilian,” I tell her, confessing my own secret girl behavior, before tak-ing another bite of spaghetti. We are in DFAC III, the largest and most central chow hall on base. I usually go to a smaller chow hall to avoid the crowd of general officers, colonels, sergeant majors and the odd civil-ians that always go to DFAC III for the larger selection of food. However, Sergeant Browning only eats here, so I’m sitting in the huge cafeteria with sports banners hanging from the ceiling and large televisions airing the news, sports and sometimes The Simpsons. I came to dinner with her because nobody else wanted to eat and it is a well-known fact that you never go anywhere alone on base as a woman.

I learned early on that in order to survive the Marines, you have to be tough and hide any trace of femininity from the outside world. It’s not something they teach at boot camp or officer candidate school, but maybe they should. I learned later that this means you have to indulge in girlyness on your own time in order to keep your sanity and estrogen in check. I think they should teach us this, too. Sergeant Browning picks the occasional nail polishes out of care packages so she can look at pink toe-nails after a long day in boots. I dry my hair and leave it down one night a week to monitor its health and length. We both know that we have to hide any behavior that would make us stand out more than we already do, so we practice these behaviors when we’re alone at night. Ever since we arrived in country, I have tried to blend in and stay under the radar, in fact this is the only time in my life I have tried so hard to go unnoticed and at over six feet tall in uniform with a ratio of female to male Marine officers 1:5, this is impossible. In spite of the unfeasibility of the hercu-lean task, I try.

There are those girls. I suppose there will always be those girls. As I walk around base, I see young female Marines, sailors and soldiers wear-ing make-up on a military base in the middle of the desert. We’re in a

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combat zone and they look like they are getting ready to go to prom in camouflage. As a lieutenant, I refrain from saying anything. My female staff sergeant has informed me many times that this is the role of the Staff Non-Commissioned Officer (SNCO), but it kills me when she’s not around to “mentor” them. Don’t they know what the men are saying behind their back? Calling them whores or accusing women of having no business in combat because to them it’s just a beauty pageant. I have never actually heard a man say this, of course, but it’s what I imagine they must say. Why do those girls want to draw even more attention to themselves? I sigh as I walk by them, keeping my mouth shut as instruct-ed. They are like gazelles wearing pink tutus in a grassy field without any idea of the target they just put on themselves? Or maybe they painted the target on purpose. Do they like the attention? Do they realize the target they’ve put on Sergeant Browning and me as well?

I don’t want to feel pretty in uniform. I want to yell at the girls with blue eye shadow, “Who the fuck are you trying to impress? We are in a fucking combat zone. You are a Marine, not a woman!” I just glare instead. Back in the real world, I don’t even wear make-up often. I am blessed with fair skin and the occasional blemish so there is no need to spend extra time pampering in the morning. I give the girls in their late teens/early twenties a break if they are merely trying to cover up acne, but caking on layers of eye make-up is just unacceptable here. Sure, it is important to remind ourselves of who we were back in the real world, but not in public. Part of joining the military is conforming, giving up individuality to be part of a group. I have struggled with this since day one, but came to the compromise of leading according to my values and morals and leaving my gender and opinions at the door. If I see myself as different, the men will see that as inferiority.

In the chow hall, as I enjoy my meal with Sergeant Browning, a man’s voice breaks our conversation, “Excuse me, Lieutenant.”

I hate it when people call me “lieutenant;” it usually indicates that I’ve fucked something up. Other lieutenants and captains call me Libby. Officers higher in rank call me a variation of my first name that they find appropriate without asking me what I prefer, “Liz,” “Beth,” or just “Sup O,” short for “Supply Officer.” The enlisted Marines call me, “Ma’am” or “The Ma’am” when talking or referring to me. “Lieutenant” is reserved for reprimand. I look up with a mouth full of food awaiting a look of dis-approval, wondering what part of my uniform I failed to inspect before

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walking out of my barracks room or which officer I failed to address properly while looking for two empty chairs in the busy cafeteria. I’m met with the eyes of a man I do not recognize and who is not in uniform, so he can’t be scolding me. My body instantly relaxes, but my heart is still pounding in my chest; he could still be correcting me. A week ago, I for-got to put my rank insignia on and a civilian who must have recognized me asked when I was demoted to private. I try to be discrete and touch my collar to make sure I hadn’t done it again.

“I’ve been here for two years and I’m getting ready to go home in fourteen days.” His hands shake. “You’re probably married or engaged, but I just had to tell you, you are the most beautiful woman who has stepped foot on this base.” The middle-aged civilian stares at me waiting for a response.

I chew my food trying not to choke. I stare back at him because if I look at Sergeant Browning I know I will laugh, spit spaghetti through my nose and then choke to death. I picture the headline, “Female Marine dies in chow hall after choking on spaghetti.”

“I’m shaking, I’m so nervous because I’ve never done anything like this, but I just had to tell you that you are the most beautiful woman I have seen in two years.”

Chew. Don’t choke. Don’t laugh. Just chew. I look at the man, not sure what to say and try to swallow my food in one giant gulp, so I can respond and end the deafening silence. I can feel my face getting warm, and I know I’m turning red. My ears block out the television and dinner conversations polluting the air, and I fear Bin Laden can hear me swallow my food in a little cave somewhere in this stupid desert.

“That’s all, I just had to tell you before I left,” he says, breaking the silence.

“Thank you, sir,” I mumble, trying to swallow and gasp for air simultaneously.

“Well, have a safe deployment Lieutenant,” he says and walks away. To my relief he doesn’t seem embarrassed or upset at my response.

Sergeant Browning starts laughing even harder once he is gone. “Browning!” I say in my Ma’am voice. “Stop it!”“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” she says, mocking him. “You are soooooo

beautiful.”The next day, I am in the chow hall with Sergeant Browning and

some of the other Marines from our shop. They suspiciously watch me

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eat, wait until I take a bite and then announce in perfect unison, “Excuse me Lieutenant, you are the most beautiful woman to step foot on this base.” I give them one of my Ma’am looks, but they are too busy giggling as I blush.

When I get back to our office I sit down to check emails, bank accounts and the other random things you think to do when you are stuck on a military base in a combat zone with all your daily tasks com-plete. It’s Sunday and I decide to call it a day. I go to my barracks room and strip down to my skivvies and grab my shower supplies. It’s time for my weekly ritual of washing the gunk out of my hair and giving it a deep conditioning treatment before drying it straight.

With my hair down, I look into the mirror and wonder why the man approached me. I’m no different than the other women on base. I don’t wear make-up or try to make myself stand out or look more appealing in uniform. Why did he pick me out of the crowd? Other than being unusually tall there is nothing that makes me stand out more than any other woman in uniform. Sergeant Browning and Sergeant Bonilla are much more beautiful and confident than I am, but he chose me. I look at myself and run through all the things girly magazines and TV ads have trained me to hate about myself. My eyebrows are overgrown, I have dark circles under my eyes, my stomach isn’t flat enough, are those stretch marks on my thighs? I force myself to stop. He thought I was beautiful, I think to myself, so what if he was old enough to be my dad. He thought I was pretty.

I try to relax the next time I see a girl with foundation and eye shad-ow, she just wants to feel pretty, I tell myself, is that a crime?

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WinterinIraqFebruary2008AlAsadAirBase,Iraq

When you tell someone, “I’m a Marine.” There are various reactions. If you are the stereotypical Marine —tall, young, male, athletic—I imagine the response to be, “Oh thank you for your service, we’re so proud of you.” If you are the less stereotypical Marine, the response is much dif-ferent. People usually look at me and ask, “Really?” Do they forget that women are allowed to serve, or do I look too girly in my sundress with my long hair down? Strangers are appreciative and respectful, but the initial reaction is always disbelief. If it’s a man he will then make a state-ment connecting himself to the service. “My [insert male relative] was in the [insert military service]. I was going to join, but [insert various excuses].” As I stand before them, a woman in the service, I make them look in a mirror, ask themselves why they didn’t step up and serve so the young woman standing in front of them wouldn’t have had to volunteer. I make them question their masculinity because they chose not to serve. Women almost inevitably ask, “Didn’t they make you cut your hair?”

When I was preparing to leave for Iraq most people assumed the des-ert was going to be hot. “Make sure you drink water and wear sunscreen,” friends and strangers both warned me, forgetting the basic definition of desert has nothing to do with heat, but rather precipitation. Still, I wear sunscreen and drink plenty of water because the sun is intense and the air is dry. Today it is cold. I wake up at 5 a.m., like I always do, and go outside to check the weather. This is how my day always starts. My alarm goes off, I pry myself out of my pink sheets, make the bed with hospital corners, place my pillows perfectly in the center, lay my pink (or at least it started out pink over twenty years ago, but now is more of a dingy grey color) teddy bear in the middle and step outside. The fresh air wakes me up after inhaling stale, dirty air all night in my enclosed warehouse room. I do a 360-degree security check in the dark with a knife and flashlight in one hand and my 9 mm in the other. After I check my sur-roundings, I let myself relax enough to enjoy the moment. I walk into the middle of our street. It is a dead end street so the only traffic is coming and going from one of the four units in the compound. I walk into the street and look up to find the moon. The night is longer than the days for now and the moon is full in the center of the dark sky. There is very little

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outdoor lighting on base as a security precaution, so I can see all the stars and constellations. The sight is breathtaking, and I wonder if I’ll get tired of counting the stars out here. In this moment, I feel alive. There are no phone calls, emails or work to be done. There are no emails from friends or my mom asking how I’m doing and why I don’t write. In this moment, I realize that I am nothing more than one person on this base. I pick out one of the billions of stars and whisper, like you, I am nothing more than a speck in the sky. I exhale and see my breath. I am only in skivvy shorts and flip-flops, but my body is still warm from my bed. I linger in the moment, paralyzed by the freedom of being alive and being alone. The cold air pierces my lungs and goose bumps pop up on my legs, making me feel mortal, which reminds me how alive I am—even here, even now. Like each star in the sky, one day I will fade away.

As I stand, the stars start to fall, dancing on their way down like fire-flies in a summer sky. The first flake of snow hits my cheek and melts. I smile, remembering the joy of seeing the first snow of winter as a child. I decide to skip my morning run and retreat to my room to email every-one the unusual news—it’s snowing in Iraq!

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PrettyCampVictoryKuwaitAugust2008

I’m in the same shower trailer that I stood in six months ago. My hair is brittle and in desperate need of a cut. I have special hair products that I ordered online to try to save what I could from the dry desert heat and gobs of gunk required to keep my hair within regulation, but I seem to be losing the fight for my long locks. The last time I stood here the air outside was cold, now it reaches up to 130° degrees F by afternoon. The days were short then, but now the sun rises early and sets late. In the mirror, my face and neck look tan despite my compulsion to apply SPF 50 two or three times a day. My face looks thin, and I stand sideways in skivvy shorts to examine my shrinking waist. To me it looks the same, but people have started commenting on my weight, or rather lack there-of.

Six months ago when I stood here, I had no idea what to expect. I was going to war, so I expected the kind of war you see in the movies and on television, with explosions and gunfights captured with elegant, but iron-ically beautiful cinematography. I thought there would be blood, death and destruction, but there wasn’t. The last time I stood here and washed my face, there were big, loopy letters in red lipstick that read, “For the females going home, how does it feel to be ugly again?” It seems like so long ago, I wonder if I dreamt it. I get it now, as I look at my gaunt figure and tired eyes. Am I ugly? Was I only pretty here because the ratio of men to women was in my favor? I pull my hair back into another bun. Despite the attention I received on a daily basis, ranging from random encounters with foreign men to American men staring at the gym or chow hall, I never really felt pretty. Special on occasions, but I have never felt pretty.

I slide in metal bobby pins that will dig into my scalp all day, apply sunscreen over my moisturizer even though it dries out my skin and try to remember what I look like with make-up on and my hair down. I slide my legs into dirty cammies one at a time and try to remember what it feels like to slip on my favorite pair of jeans. Will they even fit? In uniform, my body looks so scrawny. I haven’t lost any weight, just turned what little fat I had into a little muscle. The uniform designed for a male Marine’s muscle and mass doesn’t do justice to my female curves.

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A potato sack would probably look more flattering. I shove my foot into my boot and pull the laces tight, daydreaming of my favorite pair of flip-flops. I put my blouse on and straighten my dull lieutenant bars. When we go back, the Marines on base will have their sleeves in crisp rolls. I panic; do I even remember how to roll my sleeves so they fit snugly around my biceps without the excessive material bunching up? I pack my shower bag and fold my towel. We’re leaving in a few hours to go back through Germany, then Maine and finally California.

The entourage that dropped me off six months ago has disbanded. Allen, my boyfriend when I left, dumped me over four months ago, and I haven’t talked to him or his roommate since I read his email saying it was over. I’ve emailed my friend Jill every day, but I haven’t talked to anyone else since they dropped me off so long ago. Alone, Jill will pick me up on base. Will she think I look tired, worn down, ugly? I’ll have to pick up my things from Allen’s apartment. Will he tell me I’ve gotten too thin? Will he have a prettier girlfriend now?

I leave the shower trailer and ask myself, will I be ugly again?

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Jennifer Horne

1957

When I first learned that the face of the angry, hate-filled woman in the photograph of crowds trying to prevent African-American students from attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September of 1957 was my mother, I ran to the bathroom and vomited up the meatloaf and mashed potatoes and corn she had cooked and served our family for dinner that night.

It was 1972 and I was thirteen years old and being bused to Carver Jr. High, a long, low building made of bricks the color of an old scab, surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire at the top, like a prison, and squeezed in between the interstate and a perpetual-care cem-etery dotted with faded plastic bouquets.

I was reading my history homework assignment on the 1957 deseg-regation crisis at Central when I looked at the photo and felt a strange sense of recognition. I walked out into the hallway to look at my parents’ wedding photo that same year, then back across the green shag carpeting to my textbook, and then I ran down the hall to the bathroom.

Mom and dad were watching TV and my brother, Dell, was in his room. After I threw up, I went down the stairs, out the back door through the kitchen, across the back yard, and slipped through the large wooden doors into the old garage, where I kept my cigarettes and mat-ches in an old coffee can half full of nails. Ever since my father had gotten emphysema, he didn’t do yard work anymore, and my mother relied on random yard men who knocked on the front door during the summer. Every once in a while she’d bribe me or Dell to rake leaves or trim hedges, but our yard had a perpetually scraggly look. Some of our neighbors made remarks, but we weren’t the kind of family to care about that sort of thing.

I took a seat in the old white curved-metal chair and lit up. A row of windows ran across the top of the wall above the doors, and I could see a network of branches, leaves, and deep-blue dusky sky through the cobwebs and dust collected there. I had forgotten until now, but I used

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to like to think about space, the universe, infinity, back then. It made me feel small and insignificant and large and important at the same time —small because I was such a speck compared to infinity, large because my mind could contemplate such vastness, as though the universe existed inside my head, in all its mystery and complexity. Back then, though, I probably just thought to myself, “Space is cool.”

I was a little shaky that night. Discovering that your mother is a racist is not exactly a happy moment. If I had been pressed, I probably would have said that yes, my parents thought black people weren’t as good as the rest of us, but I never thought my mother was the kind of racist who would go to the trouble to get herself down to Central High and stand on the street and yell obscenities at a bunch of high school kids—kids just a little older than me—to keep them from going to school with white kids.

I hated her then. Hated her with the pure, righteous, one hundred percent certainty of adolescence. I was judge, jury, and executioner. But I never spoke of it. I just decided she was a hypocrite, doing what she had done and still going to church twice a week as though she was a good person. For the next four years I compiled a mental dossier of her failings until, the minute I could get out of the house, I did, going to the univer-sity on a scholarship for pre-nursing students and then on to nursing school, until I got a job at St. Vincent’s, where I have worked for the last twenty-four years in the cardiac unit.

In my freshman year, my dad died of the emphysema. At the same time my friends were taking up smoking, I quit. I got a little fat and stayed that way, but it doesn’t hurt a nurse to have an extra bit of heft. People trust a plump nurse.

My dad was the strong, silent type, and then he got sick and became the weak, silent type. After he died, Mom got scraggly, like the yard. The year before, Dell had somehow gotten into the Rhode Island School of Design and, though he found ways to pay for it, he didn’t have any extra to come home on. We’d thought he would go to the liberal arts col-lege down the road, but a friend of his had a bad experience there and he changed his mind. I tended to stay in Fayetteville unless I absolutely couldn’t figure out anything else to do. One Thanksgiving I claimed I’d been invited to a friend’s house, and instead I found an open 7-11 and bought Vienna sausages, crackers, and beer for my holiday feast. I tried to be jaunty about it, but it was depressing, and after that I decided I was

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better off at home, despite my mother’s religiosity and packrat habits that made my old room hard to maneuver in.

Dell surprised me by moving home after a couple of years in New York, where he’d gone once he’d finished at RISD. Said he missed a south-ern accent. I think maybe he had a bad love affair, but he doesn’t talk much about that stuff, even now. I think I knew he was gay even when we were kids. I knew he was different from other boys, anyway. He lives with a black guy named Arthur, a lawyer, and works as an art therapist at the VA. He has a show in New York every five years or so, and his work sells. You might think he’d never see our mother, but he goes over there every Sunday afternoon like clockwork, without Arthur of course, and does little chores around the house, changing a light bulb here or ham-mering a nail there. Dell’s and Arthur’s lives might as well exist in a par-allel Little Rock universe, occupying the same space as my mother’s but in a different dimension.

Dell’s given name is Darnell Lee, after our grandfather. From age four on, however, he insisted on being called Dell, which is what I’ve always known him as. Sometimes people mishear and think his name is Dale. He corrects them the same way every time: “Not Dale, Dell. Rhymes with Hell.”

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1957 crisis, and I saw in the paper the other day that there were a lot of activities planned to mark it, some at Central, some at the Clinton Museum, and a rally against pres-ent-day racism, down at the Capitol.

I hadn’t thought about that photo in a long time. I guess I’d more or less forgotten about it, repressed it, some people would say. On impulse, I picked up the phone and called my mother. It was Saturday morn-ing, and unless she’s gone to the grocery store for something she needs on Sunday, she’s usually home. I don’t know what she does. Not much. Television, knitting, inspirational reading.

She picked up. “Hello?” Sounding like her voice hadn’t been used yet.“Mom, it’s me. I want to ask you something.”“Yeah? OK. What’d you forget?”“1957. Central High. Were you there? Is that you in the pictures?”“1957,” she said, emphasizing the fifty. “Cissy, that was fifty years ago.”I waited.“But yes, I was there. They were trying to make white children go to

school with nigra children, and I didn’t think that was right. Isn’t that what they like to call exercising your freedom of speech?”

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“Mom, there are pictures of you. In history books. Yelling at those kids.”

“Are there?” she said. “Never saw ’em. Those civil rights photogra-phers, I guess. Making us look bad.”

“It was bad, Mom. Do you still not see that?”“Cissy, what I see is society breaking down. The Bible tells us that

Ham sinned and was condemned to blackness, and so God is telling us that the black race is inferior.”

“Mom,” I said, getting angry, starting not to care what I said. “What about Arthur? Dell’s friend. You know about him, whether you admit it or not.” I had moved out onto my little balcony and was watching a squirrel twitch his tail in sharp, flicking motions at another squir-rel infringing on his territory. Or maybe at me. What do I know about squirrels?

“That nigger?” she said. “That queer nigger? I don’t know what he’s done to Dell, brainwashed him I guess. The Bible says men aren’t to lay down with men, which I tell Dell every Sunday when he comes over—”

My brother is a saint, I thought.“—because Dell isn’t one of those, you know, he’s just too nice to kick

this nigger queer out.”“Oh, God, Mom.”“I’ll thank you not to take the name of our Lord in vain,” she said.“God damn it, Mom!” I said, and hung up. I wanted a cigarette so bad

I could taste it.This was not the end, of course. It is never the end with family.I called her back that afternoon to apologize for hanging up on her. I said I was sorry. She said: “I’m seventy-five years old, a poor widow

woman with a bad back, piles like bunches of grapes, and an ungrateful daughter who blasphemes. Tell me Cissy, what do I have, if I don’t have God?”

I said I didn’t know, I was really sorry, and she said: “When are you going to find a nice man and settle down? Who’s going to take care of you when I’m gone? Do you want to be old and alone, like me? Is that what you want?”

“Just haven’t found the right man, Mom. You know how hard it is to meet people, the hours I work.” What she either doesn’t know or won’t acknowledge is that I’ve been Dr. John Wilson’s mistress for the last twenty years—in this she is like Dr. Wilson’s wife. But what neither of them knows is that I have no intention of marrying him or anyone else,

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even if he should become available. I like my life and my apartment tidy, I like to wake up in the morning with my own thoughts, I like to cook and eat what I want when I want. This suits me, suits John, and may even suit Gretchen Wilson. It does not, however, suit my mother.

“You could meet some nice men at church, if you would go.”“Tell you what, Mom. I’ll go to church with you tomorrow if you’ll

come to the 50th anniversary of the Central High desegregation with me.”“Well,” she said. “I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”“Same here,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”The next morning I went to church, where I didn’t fall in love with

Jesus or any other man.On Tuesday afternoon I picked up my mother and drove her to

Central High. The auditorium was packed, so we took a seat near the back.

First the mayor spoke, then one of the original students who had tried to register for school that day in 1957, and then lo and behold Arthur came up to speak. Looking toward the front for Dell, I thought I recog-nized the back of his head.

Instead of Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson style, Arthur was quiet, plain-spoken but powerful. No wonder he is successful in court. He had that audience in the palm of his hand, and I was so caught up in what he was saying I forgot to even look at my mother until I heard a loud, raspy inhalation in my left ear. She was snoring. In the middle of the speech. I was humiliated, then pissed. The woman on the other side of my mother looked towards me, and my face was halfway on its way to an “I’m so sorry, this is hideously embarrassing, can’t take her anywhere” grimace, when I looked at her face, a kind face with brown eyes framed by brown hair. Her expression was gentle and said, “We’ve all been there before,” as she looked at my mother the way you might look at a small child.

And then I saw what she saw: a tired older woman with a funny gray cowlick, slightly crooked lipstick, and an unfashionable sweater with a small gravy stain on the placket. My heart lurched open, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to close it again.

She slept on, snoring, until the end of Arthur’s speech and the applause that surged up in response. I felt her perk up next to me and saw her open her eyes alertly. She patted my arm to get my attention

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and whispered loudly into my ear, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

We drove home mostly in silence. I was thinking about a couple of black nurses I know, and how I’ve never really tried to connect with them as people, even though I am always friendly. I had some errands to run, so I just dropped my mother at the curb. She got out, shut the door, then rolled her wrist in a circle to signal me to open the window. When it was all the way down, she put both hands on the frame, her arthritic knuckles bulging, and said, “Cissy, I know about your doctor. Just be sure he treats you right, at least.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I don’t think she wanted any other reply.She walked toward the house and up the flaking concrete steps to the

wooden porch, using the metal railing to steady herself. When she reached the top, she turned back and stood there for a sec-

ond, raising her arm in a gesture that might have been a wave, or might have been a dismissal, or maybe was just shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun, strong now on the west-facing house.

I waved back, just in case, and drove away.

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Sheila MacAvoy

The Apricot Tree

Summer again, their sixth at Schneider’s Park. Everything grew here—more leaves, more fruit, more flowers. In their plastic beach chairs, they surveyed the scene from Space number eighty-five, a place in one of the better trailer parks, just south of San Jacinto. Beyond the cyclone fence, the granite bulk of the mountain rose, clean and solid. They were a long way from Astoria, Queens. Behind the coach they had a patch of ground, five by eight feet, with flower beds on three sides and a bluestone walk-way next to the trailer. The lawn was smack in the center and, in the middle of the lawn, grew an apricot tree. Everybody, including the realtor, said the same thing—apricots don’t do well in Southern California. Too hot, too dry, not enough winter chill to set the fruit—etcetera, etcetera.

James remembered, himself and Fionulla, wandering through the trailer park, six years ago. They had lived in cities all their lives, in apart-ments without air or sunlight, on streets where nothing green could survive. Here, they would be homesteaders in a high desert aerie. The cheesy odor of mouse droppings would mix with the spicy scent of dying grasses and the apple winds from the big mountain. It reminded them of the stories they heard as children, of village houses back home in Cappoquin, of cottages at a crossroads, of kitchens with dirt floors and with taps leaking in the scullery.

Poking in cupboards, scuffing the shag rug, flushing the john, not talking, they hummed and mused as they looked around. They smelled the soil and the sweet decay of leaves rotting under the coach floor, leaves driven under by the Santa Ana winds.

Six years ago, standing next to the frail metallic walls of the trailer under a fierce June sun, they thrilled to the intensity of the weather. In summer, they would swelter in the heat. In winter, it would blow and rain, flailing like a two-year-old. There would be a few earthquakes. Small ones. They would sit paralyzed before the telly in their matching Barcaloungers, watching the drapes’ ballet. They would have none of that in Astoria, Queens. So they bought the trailer, bought the weather, the view of the mountain, and the barren apricot tree.

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The leaves on the tree were small, perfectly shaped, and invalid pale. A stone fruit tree in the high desert was a sickly child. For years James rode to the rescue. He treated the borers with a Popsicle stick tipped with kerosene, like a dentist probing cavities. He sprinkled lady beetles over the tree and watched the ladies dine. He watered, pruned, and fertil-ized—he pinched, plucked, and coddled. Still there was no fruit.

“What is doing with this damned tree?”

Fionulla had rounded arms and a broad behind, which creased the cot-ton fabric of her blue house dress. Her seams fell opened and frayed. She mended.

“You sewing holes together, woman?” said James. He didn’t mind. He liked the way she rocked from foot to foot at that ironing board.

She loved to iron, even in tropical weather. A washerwoman in her genes. She stroked and pressed the GE electric, a Christmas gift from James, into the padded board—napkins, undershorts, towels. Nothing was unironed. Sweat ran down her neck, darkening the collar of the blue house dress.

Fionulla was liberated by ironing. It was real work, producing stacks of clean, pressed cloth, growing at the edge of her kitchen table, and, as a bonus, she could watch James in the garden, tending his flowers and beans. Ironing allowed her to think. Everything was perfect here in the high desert, except for the doggone apricot tree.

Maybe it was time to give up.“Should we get rid of her, James? She’s as helpless as a ewe on its back.”

Fionulla ironed. James talked to himself.“So I went out there and I looked at the thing and I say to Fionulla,

I say, ‘Fionulla, the time has come. We should take her down.’ And she says, ‘James, I think we should. She’s barren as a fifty-year-old virgin.’

“So we got to bed and we feel pretty good about our plan. The next day, we’re gonna chop the shit outta that apricot. Next morning, I get up and its one of those days, soft gray mist coming over the ridge, the kind of morning you stand and look. Fionulla makes some coffee and comes out into the back with a cup for me and a cup for herself. It’s real quiet. It breaks your heart.

“‘Should we maybe give her one more chance?’ says my wife, and I look at Fionulla and there is a funny, swimmy look in her eyes. Fionulla

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and I never had any children. The best we could manage was an old dog we adopted from the streets. And after he died, no more. She said she couldn’t stand it.

“Right then, I put down my coffee cup and I go into the garage and I come out with a hatchet and I slap the blade of the hatchet on my palm—whop, whop, really loud—and I say to that tree, ‘Now you listen here, you listen hard. You get one more chance, just one, and then it’s curtains, it’s finis, over, the end. Understand?’ I’m talking real serious, yelling right at the trunk, right in there where the branches from up top join the main trunk going down.

“And Fionulla, so help me God, Fionulla, goes off to, I don’t know where, then comes down the back steps and around the path and she’s got this broom, this old broom she uses to sweep the kitchen and some-times to sweep the sidewalk in front of the place. She takes this old broom and she goes up to the tree and she starts beating, I mean really whacking the shit out of that apricot tree, all around, knocking off branches and hitting the trunk and everywhere. I don’t think I remem-ber when she got so fired up about anything and didn’t say a single word until she was all done whipping that tree and then she said, ‘You got that?’ and walked back into the house dragging the old broom behind her, breathing hard.

“We didn’t do any more for that tree. We just quit on her and figured, next summer we’d cut it out and put in an apple or one of those orna-mental pears that aren’t to make fruits anyway. We felt bad about it, but we knew it was a worthless, miserly, she-donkey of a tree.”

September, October, the apricot leaves curled up early. James didn’t water it extra. The only irrigation for that tree was whatever sprayed over by accident from the other beds. By early November, the leaves on many trees in Schneider’s Park were turning red and gold and brown, but the apricot, it shriveled up and dropped gray, curled up things on the ground. Limp and disgusting. That tree looked like it was shedding worms.

In December, it rained for three weeks, just like its supposed to in the high desert country. More rain in January. In February, it started to come down serious, gray rivers of water spouting out of the sky. One night they woke to a roar like they were on the rim of Niagara Falls. Three in

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the morning, the sound of water running somewhere big. They yanked on Wellingtons and the foul weather gear they had saved from back East; they walked toward the noise. It was howling from the creek a half mile from the park. They leaned into the rain. At the creek bank, they watched the water pile-drive by. A mattress, a refrigerator, the bumper of a ‘69 Chevy passed on the muddy shoulders of the creek.

And then, next day, the sun came out. Soon it was Easter and then it misted a bit. By the middle of April, a gray fungus devoured James’ shoes and the pig skin valise stored in the back of the closet. They spread mothballs to camouflage the smell, but it made the fungus pungent as Roquefort cheese. Finally, the weather settled.

The big leaf maple flowered, the ironwood, and then the golden chain. Catkins littered the driveways and sidewalks. Fionulla rubbed the hibachi grill with stove black and planted basil and tomatoes by the tool shed. Horn worms bulldozed the tomatoes. James backed the Chevy over the hibachi grill. The apricot slept.

Then a change. They didn’t stare, didn’t dare to look; they hummed and sneaked a peek. There was a change. The branches of that apri-cot tree puckered, softened, whipped around. Then, those branches, they let go. Overnight there was a fury, an explosion of dainty blooms. Everywhere, white eyelashes. Bees, moths, wasps, lady beetles, hum-mers—all leaned in and drank. A feast.

James and Fionulla tiptoed around the grass patch, clipped the edges with a scissors. The blossoms dried and wilted and nascent apricots began, tiny green fruits, creased and shiny. Soon they were right-sized, pale gold, then peach—fuzzed and plump like a baby’s behind. Freckles blushed on the sun side.

Fionulla tested the fruit, pressed the gleaming flesh between thumb and forefinger. When the first batch seemed ready, she gathered them into a basket lined with cloth, one layer deep to avoid any bruises.

The fruit slid from the knife in slippery half moons. In the glass dish, juice accumulated and the kitchen reeked of apricot. They sat side by side, spectators at their own banquet. He shifted in the chair and raised the spoon to his mouth as the refrigerator churned, starting on its afternoon journey. She cut a wedge in half with the edge of the spoon, chewed and sucked the fruit.

“You know, James. This tree is a good listener.”

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They both laughed between bites. When the pile of golden apricots disappeared from each glass dish, they stood together at the sink, cold water running over sticky hands. He used the tail of his shirt. She used a dish towel.

“Let’s go to bed,” Fionulla said.They stripped and dropped their clothes on the floor. There was sand

on the sheets and a blue bottle fly rasped on the windowsill. James held Fionulla close. They were both old and slack, their toenails yellow horn. They were friends of long standing.

The flowered curtains rose and fell with the faltering breeze, each breath heavy with apricot perfume.

“Why?” asked James.“She wanted to stay,” said Fionulla.

105PMS. .

Sonia Scherr

To See Your Face

Evelyn was afraid the chaplain would ask if she believed in God.She stared hard at his chin and gripped the top of the blanket that

covered her so that her body was a small fold in its bulk. She imag-ined she could see through his cabled v-neck sweater to the white wall of her room, bare except for a clock and two family photographs her daughter must have hung three months ago when she’d driven Evelyn to SeaView Home for the Aged, recently renamed SeaView HealthCare and Residential Community, though everyone in the county still referred to it simply as “the home.” Evelyn wondered what would prompt someone to call the place SeaView, given that it was nearly a hundred miles from the ocean. But now that she thought about it, any name with the word “home” in it was even more incongruous; she almost laughed for the first time since she’d been brought here from her real home an hour’s drive away. She swallowed instead and made a sound like a choked cough.

“Mrs. Jacobs?” The chaplain cleared his throat.He had knocked on her door a few minutes ago, explaining that he

was the new interfaith chaplain at the hospital attached to the home and that he planned to stop by periodically to talk to the residents. She looked at his unlined face, his tentative smile. He’d called her Mrs. Jacobs, as the students and most of the teachers had when she worked for thirty-five years as a secretary at Willowside Elementary School. Not Evie, as many staff at the home did. She would flinch slightly, recoiling at the intimacy, though she never said anything. Only her father had called her Evie.

“I hear your daughter is coming to visit this afternoon?” the chaplain asked.

“Yes.” Her voice was barely audible.“All the way from ah…ah…California?”“Washington state.”“Wow. Three thousand miles. That’s a long way. She’s coming by

plane, I imagine?”

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“No, she’s driving cross-country. It’s her vacation. She’s seeing the sights and staying with friends along the way. But she’s taking a quick detour to New Hampshire to see me.”

“It sounds like your daughter has an adventurous spirit.”Evelyn was silent. The coverlet moved up and down as she breathed

oxygen from a portable tank beside her reclining chair. Michelle was coming with her partner, Jon. Why the hell did her daughter always insist on calling him her partner, anyway? They’d been married two years, for god’s sake.

The chaplain tried again. “I understand your daughter is a counselor of some kind?”

“Michelle is a medium,” Evelyn said, a bit loudly.“A medium.” The chaplain reddened. “You know,” she continued. “She receives messages from people who

are dead or far away.” Evelyn took secret pleasure in his discomfort. “Well,” he said brightly, shifting in his folding chair. “And has she…

does she practice on you?”“No. I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”Actually, Evelyn had gone to a medium once, years ago. Corrine

Thresher, a fourth-grade teacher with whom she ate lunch each day, had lost her nineteen-year-old daughter, Tina, to leukemia. One September morning she asked Evelyn to accompany her to the county fair for a ses-sion with a medium. “Five dollars,” read the wooden sign outside the tent. After scanning the fairgrounds to make sure they didn’t recognize any students, they slipped through the tent’s slit into the musty darkness within. The medium was a slight woman with wire-rimmed glasses and a flower-print dress she could have worn to church. No one said anything; the medium nodded curtly toward a metal stool. Evelyn stared as the medium placed her hands over Corrine’s and shut her eyes.

“I see a girl in a sundress walking toward a garden. She has reddish hair, just like yours.”

“Tina,” Corrine breathed.Evelyn fought an urge to snatch Corrine’s hands from the medium’s.

But when it was her turn, she let the medium take her hands and watched the woman’s eyes flutter behind closed lids. “Nothing’s coming to me,” the medium finally said, releasing Evelyn’s hands. “I’m sorry.” Though she knew the whole thing was hokum anyway, Evelyn was glad there’d been something about her that the medium was unable to penetrate.

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“Mrs. Jacobs.” The chaplain’s voice was gentle. Evelyn realized she had closed her eyes. “I’ll let you rest. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.”

He held out his hand, and Evelyn shook it. The chaplain had green eyes, like her husband’s. Evelyn had blue eyes that appeared even brighter now that other facial features had faded with age, her brown hair thin-ning and turning to grey, her tan complexion draining to a blotchy white.

Evelyn suddenly wanted to correct the impression she’d given the chaplain, to explain that she actually had gone to a medium, once, though nothing had come of it. But he was already walking toward the door, and she couldn’t remember his name to call him back.

She idly wondered what kind of chaplain he really was; after all, she was quite sure one didn’t start out as interfaith. But Michelle had informed her that religious affiliation didn’t matter these days. It was spirituality that counted.

One of the two photographs on her wall showed Michelle, her only child, as a teenager in a pink tutu at a ballet recital. When she was thir-teen, Michelle took over the part of Clara in a regional production of The Nutcracker after the girl who’d been cast in the role became ill. Afterward Michelle’s teacher said none of her other students could have done a better job of it. Evelyn had gone to work at Willowside partly to pay for Michelle’s dance lessons. Evelyn would have done anything for dance les-sons when she was young.

She had once imagined her daughter would go on to dance profes-sionally, or at least teach classes. When Michelle seemed to lose interest in dance toward the end of high school, her teacher hinted that the true problem might be a lack of confidence. Whatever the reason, instead of a career in dance, Michelle had gotten an associate’s degree from the local community college, worked at a gay bookstore in San Francisco, trained as a hairstylist and…Evelyn had lost track. Now her daughter, well into middle age, was a medium who temped as a hospital receptionist to earn enough money to live on.

Evelyn’s glance skipped over the other picture, a photograph of herself and her husband on their wedding day, some sixty years ago. It alighted on a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary that sat on an otherwise empty shelf over her bed. The Virgin’s head, covered with a blue shawl, tilted forward slightly; she looked serene, emotionless. That Evelyn, who was Jewish, should have a statue of the Virgin Mary in her room amused her. Since it was there when she arrived, Evelyn had wondered if some

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well-meaning soul had put a statue in everyone’s room, like the Gideons place Bibles in hotel rooms. More likely, she decided, whoever had stayed in the room before her had left it behind.

Evelyn noticed that the Virgin’s right ear was slightly chipped. She was never one for religion herself. Oh, her father took her to Hebrew school when she was a girl; she had believed in the way that young children accept their world without questioning it. At age nine or ten, when she’d wandered into the adult section at the library, ignoring the disapproving look the librarian aimed her way, she’d seen a National Geographic cover showing a human skeleton embedded in the side of a cliff. Evelyn had stared, fascinated, until the librarian came over and led her back to the children’s area. That’s how she’d pictured God in her mind during her childhood years, the shards of yellow bone glinting from the dark rock.

When she was sixteen, her father died suddenly of a heart attack as he was walking home from the clothing store where he worked as a sales manager. He died as he’d lived, quietly, with no apparent struggle; by the time an ambulance arrived he was gone. Then Art, her husband, died of cancer when Michelle was thirteen. Evelyn’s loss of faith was gradual, so that one day she woke up and realized it had slipped away, as one notices an empty hourglass long after the last grains of sand have fallen to the bottom.

Silly. What had made her think about this? Ah, the chaplain. She shut her eyes. Nothing was worth looking at in her room. She breathed in the odor of starched sheets, the bleach used to clean the floor, and a medici-nal scent she hadn’t been able to identify that permeated everything, so that she seemed to smell it even when she slept.

“Sorry to wake you, sweetie.”Dolores was standing over her, gently winding the blood pressure cuff

around Evelyn’s arm.“Ashley’s driving me insane again,” Dolores said heartily. “Didn’t come

home after school like she was supposed to. Spent three hours hang-ing out with some kids near the gas station across from the school. I know because my husband saw her when he was driving home from the garage. Sometimes I can’t believe the kid’s only eleven. They say it just gets worse.”

Dolores’s words seemed to flow past Evelyn, comforting because they demanded so little. Her hair was dyed streaky blonde and her nails painted a shiny silver. Unlike most of the nurses and nurse’s aides, who

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had absorbed the odor of the nursing home, Dolores smelled faintly of perfume. Lilac perfume, Evelyn decided.

“You know what else?” Dolores rapidly inflated the cuff. “I smelled cigarette smoke on her clothes. Real strong. When I asked her what the hell she was doing smoking, she flat out lied. Said she picked up the smell because other kids were smoking.”

“Hmmm,” Evelyn sympathized. “It’s difficult raising children. Especially girls.” She watched Dolores record some numbers in a chart.

“That’s for sure. What bothers me most is she wasn’t honest about it. Like I told my husband, we all make mistakes in life, but you got to be honest.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to be honest.”“Oh sweetie, it ain’t hard for you.” Dolores squeezed her shoulder.But sometimes it had been. In junior high Michelle was practicing

pirouettes at a makeshift barre in her room when she became frustrated by her failure to do them perfectly and hurled her science textbook at her window, cracking the pane. When Art came home, Evelyn told him she’d been hanging a picture above the window and it had slid out of her hands. He never did find out what really happened.

“Your daughter’s still coming today?” Dolores asked, putting the blood pressure cuff away.

“As far as I know.”“Ain’t that nice.” Dolores frowned, then reached for the tubes through

which Evelyn breathed oxygen. “I think we can get these a bit more com-fortable.”

It seemed to Evelyn that she was needing them more lately.

Michelle was wearing a skirt that reminded Evelyn of those crepe paper streamers with which she used to decorate the living room for her daughter’s childhood birthday parties. It would be just the two of them today, Michelle said, because Jon was taking advantage of the weather to do some fishing. Evelyn almost asked her daughter how Jon was doing with his job search, then thought better of it. Instead, she asked about Michelle’s trip.

“I kept worrying about you, driving all that way in your old car. What if it had broken down?”

“Oh, Mom. Jon’s with me, and we both have cell phones. The trip’s been phenomenal. Especially the Badlands. The park has these red- dish rock formations that loom up from the prairie. It’s like walking on

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another planet. I felt like I was in touch with aspects of my being that I’d never even been aware of before.”

Evelyn tried to imagine the rocks, but instead saw the gray boulders that littered a field near her childhood home in Acton, New Hampshire. “I wouldn’t mind looking at some pictures.”

“Actually, I thought we’d continue with our storytelling project. We only have a few hours together before I have to leave.”

Evelyn watched as Michelle placed a small camcorder on the night-stand beside her bed, peered through the lens, and adjusted a black knob. “I don’t know if I feel up to talking much today,” she said.

“Please try,” Michelle said, giving her a hard look. “I want a perma-nent record of your stories. You know I can’t get out here to visit you as often as I’d like.”

Evelyn had last seen Michelle when her daughter brought her to the home in March.

“Why only two suitcases, Mom?” Michelle had asked more than once as they were preparing to go. “There’s plenty of space in the car.”

Evelyn refused to take anything but some clothes from her house on Tremont Street, which she and Art had bought two years after they’d married. She’d been managing all right these past few years, despite heart failure, but then she suffered a stroke the previous winter. It partially paralyzed her left side so that she struggled to walk from one room to the next in the house where she’d once moved easily, thoughtlessly.

Now Michelle was fiddling with the camcorder. “Almost ready,” she muttered.

Evelyn leaned against the pillow on her recliner. Over the past year, since Michelle had taken a class on electronic scrap booking, each of the three times she’d visited Evelyn she’d brought along the camcorder. And each time Evelyn had dutifully recalled an incident from her child-hood. Evelyn had never been a storyteller. The way she saw it, she’d spent so much of her life trying to move forward that she found it difficult to think about the past, as if, even at this late stage, she might somehow lose her grip in the present and tumble backward.

“There,” Michelle said. She tucked a wisp of hair behind Evelyn’s ear. “You look great, Mom. Why don’t you start by talking about your life right after your dad died.”

“Oh, I don’t feel like getting into that right now.”“Well, talk about something else then.”

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Evelyn sat silently for a minute, clenching and unclenching her fists under the blanket.

Outside her window, the afternoon sun glinted off the cars in the parking lot. On days when the silence in her room seemed unbearable, she’d count the cars, saying each number aloud. It helped calm her some-how. Now she noticed that a red canoe was strapped to the top of a mini-van parked near the entrance to the home. What did that remind her of? Ah, Michelle’s boat. She hadn’t thought of it in years.

“Remember that red rowboat you used to paddle around Lake Caralee?”

Michelle looked at her blankly.“You know, when we had those picnics at the boat launch, with Uncle

Steve’s kids.”“Aw, Mom. I want you to talk about your childhood.”“The red rowboat Dad made for your thirteenth birthday,” Evelyn

persisted.Michelle sighed. “Okay. What about the boat?”“That’s all, really.”“That’s all? C’mon Mom.”“I’m sorry.” With difficulty Evelyn pushed the camcorder to the oth-

er side of the nightstand, but its unblinking red eye continued to stare at her.

“Geez, Mom.” Michelle’s voice cracked. “I wish you’d make an effort. You’re always withdrawing.”

Withdrawing. Michelle loved to hurl those fancy words at her, as if they explained everything.

Evelyn stared at the ceiling, feeling the stifling silence press against her.

“Have you been going to afternoon activities, Mom?”“From time to time. I went to a movie yesterday.” The words felt

strained, as if it weren’t her speaking at all.After a while Michelle said she should probably go. “We have to make

the return trip in five days. There’s no way I can miss work on Monday.”“Of course you need to leave.”Evelyn closed her eyes, willing her to stay.

She heard a car engine start in the parking lot and knew it was her daughter’s Jetta. The engine sputtered, caught, accelerated and died away.

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It seemed their visits always ended like this. In a day or two her daughter would call from the road, her voice fading in and out on a cell phone. Perhaps she’d apologize for the way things turned out. Then she’d show up again in a few months with that blasted camcorder.

Evelyn wondered if Michelle remembered that boat, which Art had labored over for weeks. The summer after he died, they took it to the annual family picnic at the boat launch. After the barbecue, the other adults decided to take a walk, and Evelyn was left alone for a while to mind the children. It was the first time Michelle had used the boat. She slipped it into the sun-speckled water while Evelyn watched from a strip of sand. But before Michelle could climb into the boat, her cousin Bess and Bess’s friend, both two years older, sprinted toward her and, giggling, took the red paddles that lay on the sand. Despite Michelle’s protests, they clambered into the boat and pushed away from shore.

“Mom,” Michelle wailed, running over to her.Evelyn put her arms around her daughter. “It’s okay, Michelle. They’ll

come back. Let it be.”Michelle shook free of her grasp. “Mom, do something! It’s not fair.”“I can’t, Michelle. They’re too far from shore.”“Take the canoe and get them to come back,” Michelle yelled.“Have a seat at the picnic table until you settle down.” Michelle started crying loudly. Her feet churned up sand as she ran

across the beach and into the woods that fringed the lakefront. Evelyn watched the trees swallow her daughter.

Now, sitting in her reclining chair, Evelyn felt a twist of unease in her chest, as she had long ago when Michelle disappeared into the woods. Michelle had been contrary even before Art died. She seemed to react with greater anger than other children to life’s small injustices. Art could usually calm her simply by saying her name sternly and putting his large hand on her shoulder. After Art’s death, Evelyn thought she could help Michelle grow more resilient by not always taking her part. That’s why she hadn’t confronted Michelle’s cousin and her friend on the beach that day years ago. But had something else prevented her? Evelyn was never one to make a fuss; Steve, her sister-in-law’s husband, didn’t like it when other people disciplined his kids. It had been easier to let the girls take the boat. Perhaps she should have stood up for Michelle more often.

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Outside her window the early fall light illuminated the top of a distant ridgeline so that it glowed in the fading day. Evelyn felt as if she were back on that beach, waiting for Michelle to appear.

But she hadn’t. The adults returned from their walk and Michelle still didn’t emerge. “Don’t worry,” Steve said, smiling at Evelyn and patting her shoulder. “She’s just waiting for the s’mores.”

He used a Swiss Army knife to whittle the tips of several sticks into sharp points to spear marshmallows. Evelyn stared out at the lake’s sur-face, once glittering but now opaque as the sun set. She glanced at her watch. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since Michelle ran off, though it felt much longer.

“I think I should go look for her,” Evelyn said.“Need help?” Steve asked.“Not right now. I’ll get you if I can’t find her soon.”She walked along the edge of the woods, calling her daughter’s name.

She imagined she could hear a slight echo mocking her.A wave of dizziness enveloped Evelyn so she needed to lean against a

tree. She took a deep breath and the world stilled. The woods were sand-wiched between the lakeshore and the road. Which should she follow? Then Evelyn noticed an overgrown path leading into the woods. She took it.

“Michelle?”Evelyn stumbled over roots. Bushes nicked her legs. Her throat

burned.“Please let me find her,” she whispered.The woods became thicker. She pushed back the branches that clawed

at her face, as if conspiring against her. Trees had fallen across the path where the forest was reclaiming it. She couldn’t see the lake anymore but she knew it was there, on her left. On her right she heard a car approach, saw a flash of chrome between the trees. Her mind flitted from one image of disaster to another, incapable of coherent thought. She tripped over a rotted log and fell, hard, onto her knees. Quickly she got up and continued walking.

She called her daughter’s name again. Her voice sounded small and choked. She squinted, trying to see through the foliage that seemed to obscure everything. Darkness was descending more quickly here than by the lake. Evelyn stopped again, wondering if she should fetch Steve and some flashlights.

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Then, just off the path, she glimpsed a patch of white against a dark tree. Her daughter, asleep. Michelle’s braid had come undone; bits of sand clung to the dark strands of hair that fell across her eyes. Evelyn knelt down before her and tucked the hair behind her daughter’s ears so she could see her face. She was beautiful.

In that moment, she had believed completely.How long ago that was! Evelyn looked toward the window. The sun

had set. Night was entering her room, settling in it, blurring the pictures on her wall so she couldn’t make out the faces of her family. She pushed the blanket down to her waist and sat up straight in her reclining chair. More than anything, she wanted to tell Michelle about finding her in the woods. She was certain she could tell her now; reliving that moment had made Evelyn unafraid. Perhaps recounting the story could expiate whatever hurt had been inflicted earlier that day and across years. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her limbs, though she wasn’t feverish. It was as if she were secretly in love and simply must reveal the name of the person she adored. She had to tell someone before she slept, before the memory faded, before her courage withered. Who? She was alone with the indistinct photographs, the decisive ticking of the clock, the chipped statue of the Virgin Mary. But perhaps one of them would return: Michelle or Dolores or even the chaplain.

In the gathering darkness, she waited.

115PMS. .

Carys Bray

Bed Rest

We’re just pulling the curtains around so as not to frighten the other parents.

That’s not what she says. But it is what she means. What she actually says is, “We’re just pulling the curtains around for privacy.” The curtains go shush as they horseshoe around, hiding us in a thick pocket of privacy.

I stare at the curtains, rather than the incubator. They are criss-crossed with local landmarks in green and beige. They must have been made specially. It costs so much to watch television in hospital nowa-days, but in Exeter you can watch the curtains instead. I trace the fabric map of the city with gritty eyes: the Cricklepit Suspension Bridge, the cathedral, the clock tower and the river as it bends and curls around and in-between them all. Right at eye level is a picture of the hand operated cable ferry that runs across the river about a mile away from my parents’ house.

The summer I was seven it was hot and the weeks spread out in a buttery stretch of yellow. Our small garden buzzed and twitched with thousands of wriggly, crawly things. What was left of the grass was brick-warm and dust crusted. Lying on it had me in big trouble with Dad for making more washing. The bright evenings were fraught with leg ache and sleep-lessness, occasionally broken by the manic chimes of the ice cream van.

“Stupid van,” Dad used to say. “Waste of money. I’ll kill him if he wakes your mother up.”

The ice cream van came round in the day too, and it stopped almost directly outside our house. Children burst out of front doors all down Burnthouse Lane. Like the rats in the Pied Piper, they swarmed around the van, pushing each other to be first and chasing down the street as the ice cream man drove away. Emily and I used to watch from behind the garden gates. We weren’t allowed to play out with the other children.

“What sort of parents let their children roam the streets?” Dad said.We peered through the gates and watched the other children playing.

Sometimes they came and chatted to us through the bars.

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“Why don’t you just come out?” they said. “Just open them up.”But we didn’t dare. We didn’t want to make things worse. The agreement to keep quiet was unspoken but nonetheless binding.

Neither Emily nor I mentioned Mum to anyone. We barely mentioned her to each other. Mum had been in bed all summer. She was having bed rest. She had preeclampsia—preeclampsia, I thought at the time and I imagined her stomach eventually opening like an enormous white shell to reveal the baby hiding under her stretched skin.

Mum was confined to the master bedroom where she lay in a passive, swollen pile. We weren’t allowed in the room unless Dad said so. When we did go in she would graft a smile on, but it was temporary and usu-ally peeled away within minutes. It smelt bad in there. It occurred to me that Dad didn’t like the smell either because he was sleeping on the sofa. I thought that he shared my disgust of her as she lay sweating on the bed, full of my brother. But I was wrong. Whenever I tried to ally myself with his repulsion he flattened me.

“What smell? What are you talking about? Don’t be so rude.” It seemed like my brother was expanding into Mum’s arms and legs,

growing furiously in the heat like the ponderous, baby-headed sunflow-ers we’d planted in the early spring. Her lack of restraint was frightening. What if she grew and grew like the enormous turnip or the dog called Digby who was the biggest dog in the world?

“Don’t be silly,” said Dad. “It’s natural, it’s just biology. Everything will get back to normal.”

Dad’s high school biology class might have found his confidence reas-suring, but I didn’t. Mum used to be small and neat. She was ugly spread out all over the place and she just kept on growing.

While it was my prerogative to imagine the worst, it was Emily’s to act as if it had already happened.

“Your sister is sensitive,” Dad would say, as if it was something wonderful.

Emily was delicate, easily hurt. She sucked up emotion like a vacuum cleaner. At times she was puffed with it.

“What’s wrong?” we would ask.Sometimes she would share her sadness, but it was carefully rationed. “What’s the matter darling? Come on, tell us,” Mum and Dad said.

They spent many enjoyable moments engaged in this form of alchemy, searching for the correct combination of reassurance and placation to heal Emily’s wounds.

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In the early days of bed rest, Emily and I used to sneak upstairs and crawl into bed with Mum. She listened to us chatter and sometimes read us stories. But as it got hotter, Mum got fatter and more tired and Dad said enough was enough; we weren’t to bother her.

Emily continued to sneak up the stairs on her own. Sometimes Mum didn’t mind and Emily would be gone for a while. Other times Mum rang the bell on her bedside table and Dad stomped upstairs to remove Emily.

“It’s too hot,” he’d say to her. “Mummy’s uncomfortable and she’s sore from the injections. You’re five—a big girl now.”

The nurse came every day to inject iron. She was due on the day near the end of the holidays when Emily made a final attempt to invade Mum’s rest. Dad was emptying the washing machine with seething impa-tience, dragging the tangled intestine twist of clothes into the basket. He lacked Mum’s patience. He cooked the meals and vacuumed aggressively. He chuntered as he ironed, remonstrating with the creases.

Mum’s bell rang and Dad huffed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He returned with Emily in his arms and planted her on the floor next to the washing machine. Immobilised by hurt, she lingered like a little ghost. I gave her a push then a pull into the garden.

She wouldn’t play explorers or collect brown-tipped rose petals to make perfume. She wouldn’t come and look when I started turning over stones to check for beetles and woodlice. Even the frenzied chimes of the ice cream van failed to elicit a response. She was stiff with mis-ery. So when the ice cream van pulled up I snuck through the garden gate, crossed the road and stood in the wriggling swarm of children. Eventually it was my turn.

“I’d like an ice cream please,” I said.“Do you have any money?” I’d forgotten about that.“No. But if you just wait here, I’ll go and get some.”I ran back across the road, through the gate, past the catatonic Emily

and into the kitchen, colliding with Dad who was on his way to hang out the washing.

“The ice cream man’s waiting.” I said. “I told him to wait while I get some money. It’s not for me, it’s for—”

He dropped the washing basket.Maybe the blood rushed to my head as he lifted me in the air and

flung me over his knee. Perhaps I was looking at the geometric pattern

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on the linoleum as he hit me. When I remember it though, I am standing next to Emily, my mouth a big O of surprise, watching myself flailing and shouting as the ice cream van tinkles into the distance and Dad expels five weeks of bed rest frustration on my backside.

Emily cheered up after that. The nurse came to give Mum her injec-tion, and after lunch Dad produced a doll which was probably meant to be a present from my baby brother when he eventually made an appear-ance. “It’s been a rotten holiday,” he said by way of apology as he handed the doll to me. It was clearly a bribe, offered in exchange for my forget-fulness, but I was determined to exact revenge by remembering. Seven is old enough to bear a grudge.

The doll had a soft body and plastic hands and feet. Her head was also plastic and her hair poked out in waving, ash-blonde tufts. Her eyes opened when she was upright and closed when she was horizontal. She was wearing a pair of blue corduroy trousers and a knitted sweater.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Dad said. “Just down to the river.” And that’s the trip I remember as I stare at the cable ferry, suspended

on the hospital curtain in front of me.

My baby is in the transparent incubator that already resembles a coffin. Apparently it’s for the best. It’s just a matter of time. It’s no longer if, but when. That explains the curtains. No dying in public, please.

Emily is murmuring into the incubator’s half open porthole. I can’t hear what she’s saying and I’m glad. Andrew called her when I went into labour. I caught snatches of his, “Far too early,” his “What are we going to do?” and his, “Please come,” in between contractions. Of course she came.

Andrew is sleeping in the parents’ room. I can’t sleep. “Just go and have a rest,” one of the nurses says. I nod

and she leaves me alone.Mum and Dad popped by three times yesterday. They tried to make it

sound as if they’d only come because they happened to be passing. “We’ve just come to say hello,” Dad said. “James sends love to you and his little niece,” Mum said each time, as

if my brother had phoned from university between every one of their vis-its to send another piece of his love.

As I scrutinise the curtains Emily, sits in what has become her chair. She has soaked up all the grief around us like a piece of blotting paper. If she jumped on the spot, I bet I could hear it sloshing around inside her.

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This ward is tucked away on the top floor of the hospital. It hides here like a terrible secret. When they first brought my baby up from maternity last week, she was lying on her front. She was conscious and her shoulder blades stuck out like tiny wings. Her skin was baggy—as if I’d made it too big on purpose, for her to grow into—her arms and legs translucent, spindling out of her prone body in capellini threads. She seemed ancient: a tiny, old woman covered in whorls of beardy hair.

Now she is on her back, floored by kidney failure. Every spare fold of wrinkly, baby skin has ballooned with fluid. She is pearly smooth, shin-ing as she stretches. The respirator expands her pneumonic lungs with the steady thwack of a hiccough. Tubes tentacle everywhere.

Emily talks to her. I can’t say anything. Shameful thoughts have been creeping around my mind all morning. If I open my mouth, they might erupt into words. Thoughts like this one: although it’s written on her tags, I can’t call her by that name. It wasn’t meant for a baby like her. It’s my favourite name, and now I’ll never get to use it. And this: I’m going to have to change banks. There’s this cashier at my bank. He was so friendly. How long now, love? I never want to see him again.

I’ve stopped touching her through the porthole in the side of the incubator. I’m actually a bit scared of her. I hope no-one expects me to have the coffin at home. What happens when people do that? Where do they put it? Perhaps people might want to come and see her. Well they can piss off.

While I was mooching around, swollen and smug, chatting to strang-ers about due dates and ultrasound scans, it was all about to go wrong and I didn’t even know it. All that benevolence and self-satisfaction, basking in the outpouring of goodwill, watching myself in shop windows, entirely unprepared for the trick my body was about to play on me: stu-pid cow.

“We’ll just whizz her up to special care,” they said after she was born. “Help her breathe. Give you a rest.”

Special care, whizz: Intensive Care, rush. She’s going to need a little bit of help: Shit, this baby’s even smaller

than we were expecting. Nothing to worry about: We’re very worried. You can hold her in a minute: We’re taking her away from you. There is no time or geography here. The air is warm and withering,

thick with beeps, hisses and whispers. There’s no window in our

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cordoned corner. Only the curtains hint at a world outside with air and sky and a cable ferry.

I carried the new doll with me as we walked by the river. The afternoon hummed with heat and insects. When we reached the pub opposite the cable ferry crossing, Dad bought a pint and two small glasses of lem-onade. We sat at a picnic table. Emily and I sipped our drinks through bendy straws and watched the ferry creep towards and then away from us across the width of the river.

I asked Dad if we could go on the ferry. In likely anticipation of bath time and the unprecedented sight of his finger-stamps blooming across my backside, he agreed. He gave Emily and me 10p each, enough for a return trip and nodded and waved to the ferryman as we paid our fares.

The ferry had bench seats down the port and starboard sides. There weren’t any seats in the middle so that the ferryman could pull the boat along the thick cable that was attached to a post on either side of the river. A rail tracked behind the seats, like the back of a chair, a nod to safety that seemed sufficient back then.

We waved to Dad on the outward trip. He sipped his pint and gave a salute. I lifted the as yet nameless doll from the seat between us and waved her too.

When we reached the far bank, we were stationary for a couple of minutes while the ferryman helped people alight and collected money from new passengers. Emily and I swivelled around on our seats, kneel-ing on the warm, soft, wood, resting our elbows and chins on the slender metal safety rail.

I have always thought that there are two types of imagination: hope-ful and inoculating. Even as a child, I tended to avoid the hopeful kind, so as to evade disappointment. I dodged happy daydreams out of the same superstition that causes people to sidestep ladders. I preferred to use my imagination for prevention rather than cure, a means of injecting myself with enough disappointment and terror to protect against a future epidemic. It seemed that imagining the worst might prevent it from ever happening.

On that August afternoon the river was liquorice soup. As we leaned over the rail, it occurred to me that it would be easy for Emily to slide under it into the darkness. Within seconds it would be unclear where to

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dive, where to clutch and snatch. It would be like blind man’s bluff. Emily would sink deeper and deeper and deeper, into the black silty bottom of the river, tangling in the tightening reeds as she struggled. A flip of my stomach warned of an imaginative overdose. Too late. Emily’s drowning face floated through my thoughts with impunity.

“What will you call the dolly?” she asked as the boat began its return trip.

“Not telling,” I managed, blinking the fabrication of her struggling, waterlogged features away.

“She has to have a name.” Emily let go of the rail and reached for the doll on the seat bet-

ween us. I grabbed the doll with one hand and seized Emily’s arm with the

other in an attempt to force her elbow back onto the rail.Emily wobbled. There was a splash.

“It’s very sad.”I don’t realise that Emily is talking to me until she says it again.“It’s very sad.”“I know.” “It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” “Me too,” I say, as if I am a casual observer. As if I am watching the

news or a documentary about neonatal care.“Very sad.” She looks as if she might cry. If she cries she might leave.

She might need to get tissues or a cup of tea from the canteen. And I will be alone.

“Look at the curtains,” I say.“The curtains?”“Look. They’re like a map. See the cable ferry?”She shakes her head at me. “Remember that summer…” I stop talking as she stands.“I’m going out for a bit,” she says.“Don’t—”“I need to,” she says and swishes the curtains open. “You should be

sitting there.” She points at the chair then closes the curtains behind her.The empty chair gapes accusation at me. I sit down. Sitting here like

this is beyond my imagination. When we were small and we got tired

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and upset Mum used to say, “You’re beyond.” I’m beyond; pushed further than the limits of my imagination.

I tried to vaccinate myself against something like this. As a teenager I read Dad’s embryology text book. It was locked in the glass cabinet in the lounge, next to The Body Book with its well thumbed central pages: line drawings of a man and a woman jigsawed together in what seemed, back then at least, like a progression of intricate exercises. The embryol-ogy book was Dad’s from university. He said it was in the cabinet because it was upsetting. I spent many immunising hours examining the mag-nitude of human deformity: a baby with his insides out, another with a nose in the middle of its forehead, fists without fingers, supplementary limbs, onion eyes, partially formed genitals, polycephaly. I thought it was enough. Prematurity and multiple organ failure weren’t in the book.

She’s sedated, not in pain they say. I haven’t asked if pneumonia is like drowning.

They can’t say when, but the swathe of the curtains suggests that there won’t be a tomorrow for us, suspended on the third floor of the hospi-tal. I open the porthole in the side of the incubator and fold my fingers around a swollen arm: Jennifer’s arm.

I let go of the doll. At that moment it seemed the most heroic of gestures, the doll instead of my sister, a choice that had to be made in an instant. Let the doll drown, let it not be Emily.

Splash. The ferryman slowed his pulling but the momentum of the boat pushed us past my bobbing doll. “On the way back, sweetheart,” he said to me. “On the way back, I’ll see if I can’t just scoop her out.” But everyone could see that she was drifting in the lazy current, downriver, towards the weir.

“What was her name?” Emily asked, rubbing her arm where I’d clamped it tight.

I leaned close to her ear and whispered it there.Dad was waiting on the bank. He looked like he was going to say

something, but he stopped as he registered Emily’s misery-pinched face. “What a day,” he said wearily. “The sooner we get home the better.” He set off at marching pace. Every so often he stopped and turned around. “Come on,” he called. “Hurry up.” He broke into a run as we neared home and saw the ambulance outside the house. My brother had been

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born while we were out. James—Seven pounds, three ounces, Dad wrote later on a piece of paper that he taped to the front door.

But even the sight of the ambulance couldn’t hurry Emily. She daw-dled along the road, nursing her upset. And all the way to the front door, her sombre lips mouthed, “Poor, poor Jennifer.”

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You Don’t Have to Call Me Merle Haggard (Anymore)

“You sounded like a chipmunk,” was Tanner’s first response when Lucy came off the stage flushed and sweat-kissed and unable to keep from grinning when she ran up to him to say, “Well?”

“Oh.” She opened a beer. She felt aware that her hair was frizzy.“It’s no big tragedy,” said Tanner. “You’re just using the wrong register.

Your voice is much lower than you think.”Lucy nodded. She had taken vocal coaching for two decades, but she

couldn’t tell Tanner that. He’d turn it against her.On the stage, a group of ladies in extra-large souvenir t-shirts were

hollering out a collective take on “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).” Lucy hoped Tanner would say something snide about how there was enough woman up there to take on the 1985 Chicago Bears, but apparently they weren’t worth it.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.Lucy’s eyes widened, “What if Buck needs me?”Tanner lit a cigarette and used it to gesture at the owner, a fat man jig-

gling and coughing over the witticisms of a blond in half a tank top.“Trina’s here,” said Tanner, “If Buck needs a ringer he’ll pass her the

mike.”“I’m a better singer.”Tanner shrugged. “She’s got a better ass.”Lucy followed Tanner out of the bar. She didn’t stop to collect her

share of the tip jar, which was the only pay for being a ringer at Buck’s Kountry Karaoke.

In the morning, Lucy put on a cardigan with deep pockets and became Miss Carnahan again. At recess she whispered to Miss Mitchell about Tanner. His scuffed boots. Her head on his shoulder in a slow dance, breathing the cow smell of his jacket. The solid feel of their goodnight gropings (up until the moment she demurred).

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Miss Carnahan and Miss Mitchell shared secrets every recess. Miss Mitchell was the only one who knew about Miss Carnahan’s headshots and demo tapes. Miss Carnahan was the only one who knew that Miss Mitchell brought men home from bars and dressed them in costumes. They confided in each other when they were winging it with no lesson plans and a slight buzzing in the frontal lobe, or when they had used air freshener instead of a dry cleaner to rid their blouses of bar smoke.

Sometimes they spoke of going out together, breaking hearts, etc., but it had never happened. They never made any real move to see each other beyond the fence. It didn’t seem right.

“You’ve known him, what, two weeks?”Miss Carnahan nodded, pleased to have sparked interest. “So you broke that dumb rule?”“Soon.”Lucy had accidentally told Miss Mitchell that she, as a rule, didn’t

have sex with the men she dated until some kind of profession of love was offered. Even if the offer proved counterfeit under scrutiny. Such was her sentimental side.

“So you might get some cowboy ass in spite of the prude code?”“Breaking the rules might be fun,” said Lucy. “I think it’s just what I

need to get back into song writing.”Miss Mitchell rolled her eyes. She didn’t like sex stories to be uplift-

ing. She didn’t write songs or possess records. At one o’clock they stood and blew their whistles to summon the chil-

dren from the slides and swings. “First grade! Line-UP!”Miss Carnahan couldn’t help but notice the difference in the two

lines. Every year Miss Mitchell seemed to get the cutest kids, like Amanda Culpepper with those eyelashes like ravens’ wings.

A small palm forced itself against Miss Carnahan’s. “I’m line leader!”Grace Gregory, smiling up at her with the following features: flat par-

allelogram nose, cleft-palate scar, and if that weren’t enough, red-framed glasses whose sun-sensitive lenses stayed dark for hours after a moment’s exposure.

“What’s in your hand, Grace?”The girl looked away, “Something I found.” It was a flat plastic sea horse, a miniature comb, actually, though miss-

ing most of its tines. Lucy recognized it as an accessory to a now-recalled

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mermaid doll that had been popular a few years before. Kids tended to chew its pliable fins, nibbling off chokeable bits.

“Grace. Have you been trading?”The girl seemed to ponder her chances of passing off a lie. “Trading”

had seized the first grade like a fever. For weeks, the swings hung unswung while the children lined their small possessions up on the play-ground’s train-trestle border, creating a miniature souk. The practice had been declared illegal after a girl traded her birthstone ring for a pebble alleged to be a baby dinosaur egg.

“You know the rules,” Miss Carnahan put out her hand. After a moment of silent mourning, Grace surrendered the comb.

“I’m still the line leader, right?”“You sure are,” Miss Carnahan answered. It was easier to love children

that looked like puppies. But no matter how many smiley faces you drew on the weekly progress reports, love was not necessarily part of the job.

Lucy’s hair threatened to make her late for the amateur showcase at the Dead Horse. The first conditioning treatment didn’t take. Tanner was fooling around with her stereo and he had found one of her really old demo tapes, from when she first moved to Nashville. It sounded like he was rewinding her flat crescendo in “I Will Always Love You,” which she knew now was not her song, but at the time she wanted to recover it from Whitney Houston.

There was a lot Tanner could teach her that she had thus far failed to learn. Her sisters had been wrong about how to get a man. Her vocal coach had not been able to tell her what made Patsy Cline special. So she listened to Tanner. For now.

In her peach-toned living room, he looked like an intruder from a scruffier planet. Sure, she’d bought a barb-wire star at a craft fair and hung it over the TV, but it was outnumbered by generic Monet prints she’d had since college.

“That’s an old tape,” she said. “It’s awful.”“I said it was old. I was barely out of high school.”“You sound like…” Tanner was rarely at a loss for words, but the flat

notes over-powered him.“How do I look?”

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“Nice,” he said and swatted the bubbly outline of her thigh. The outfit was supposed to draw attention away from that particular feature of her silhouette.

The other teachers, the type who wore clogs and holiday sweaters and repeatedly buzzed the break room to see if the mothers’ club had left cupcakes, were always assuring Lucy that she was skinny, and their tone was not completely friendly. Lucy understood that in their world she was slim and attractive and likely to attract malice when she lunched on mini-yogurts. But if you’re going to be in the entertainment indus-try you have to be entertainment-industry skinny. The only piece of the entertainment industry available to someone like Miss Overholser or Mrs. Abernathy was on the sidewalk outside some morning show’s window, and to get there they’d have to spend their spring break in New York making posters and screaming endearments at a fat weatherman. Lucy envisioned herself on the other side of the glass, with a flamboy-ant hairdresser and a Russian makeup artist, and even the million-dollar hostess tending to her, apologizing for the early hour, asking if the suite at the Plaza had been to her liking. Sometimes the fantasy didn’t work; she could only see Faith Hill’s face when they turned the chair toward the mirror.

“So I look okay?” she said, widening her eyes slightly to reduce squint wrinkles.

“Look ain’t your issue.” Tanner rattled the tape at her and Lucy wor-ried that he would damage it. It was fragile.

In the car he continued to cast about for adequate deprecations.“You’re doing this thing with your voice,” he said. “A covered quality.

Like Natalie Merchant or Louis Armstrong or…like, a Muppet.”“You’re making me nervous,” she said.“It’s just the Dead Horse.”Tanner had actually been paid to sing at the Dead Horse once. He’d

been the opening act for someone who was now famous enough to wear sunglasses at the mall. Unfortunately, during a post-show drink, a whis-keyed-up Tanner had mentioned that the ascendant star’s lyrics in “Wild Times” didn’t ring true. The ascendant one, who was in recovery and drank only simulation beer, did not appreciate constructive criticism. So Tanner didn’t get invited on The Tour That Started It All.

“These people are too clean,” said Tanner as they entered the club.

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There were too many women in the line-up of hopefuls. Their cowboy hats were spotless and perfectly creased. They had probably anchored the hats to that perfect spot at the rear of the skull using little combs, as one might a tiara.

“If you stopped defining yourself as an amateur you’d stop being an amateur,” said Tanner.

Lucy’s eye was drawn to Trina in the front, looking like a Barbie still in the box. In a few more years it would be time to get someone like that to sing Lucy’s songs. Lucy would have to trash her headshots and take the “singer” and the slash off her title, but perhaps she would get to share donuts with the tech guys and make snide comments about the pretty girl behind the sound-proof glass. She could still say she’d followed her passion when her hometown newspaper interviewed her. They had file photos of her on the stage of the high school auditorium, tall hair and sweet looks and plenty of people in the audience carrying carnations or even roses to give her after the show.

“This place makes me need to get drunk,” said Tanner.Lucy ordered whiskey for two and paid. She knew Tanner couldn’t

afford to get drunk here. It was an upscale place that had been outfitted (at great expense) to look like a honky-tonk dive.

He worked for UPS during the day, so when he made her feel bad she had only to think about how he must feel in brown shorts.

“Did you work today?” Tanner asked.She nodded and let some of the afternoon’s narrative spill. She’d failed

to explain the concept of continents and sent the kids home unsure whether they lived in North or South America. (Most of them figured South.) Meanwhile, Miss Mitchell’s math lesson had more than once inspired the students on the other side of the wall to shout “yeah!”

“Not that shit.” He meant song-writing then. “Your life’s work.”“I tried.” She’d scribbled some lines in the workroom while the kids

were in PE, but Miss Mitchell had found her and numbed her senses retelling a romp with a bank teller dressed as an Old West robber. “Nothing worth repeating.”

Trina was on stage. She was covering “Blue Kentucky Girl,” but hadn’t realized that the song was a lament and not a Miss America platform.

“How about you?” Lucy said, though it was always risky to inquire about Tanner’s songwriting output.

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“I’ve been thinking about inconstant women.”“What about them?”“How their eyes sizzle like hot chicken fat.”“I wouldn’t know.”“That’s your whole problem, darlin’.”Lucy had to teach the next day and before that she had to sing a song

about love that she hadn’t even believed when she wrote it two years before. “He Loves His Guitar (And He’s Fond of Me)” was about a guy she’d dated, a sixth grade teacher who claimed to write novels at night (for songwriting purposes, she’d reimagined his word processor as a gui-tar). She got used to make-out interruptus when he needed to rush to the computer and thrash through some ideas. She was happy to sit on the couch in the next room thrashing through her own ideas, as if his duplex were a conduit of creative mental energies. Then his family staged an intervention; it seemed he was addicted to internet role-playing games. They called her an enabler; her presence on the couch on Friday night (not to mention their occasional sex) allowed him to pretend he was maintaining real world interactions.

Over at the bar, a guy who wore sunglasses indoors was paying a lot of attention to Trina, who lit up when she was paid attention to. Like a battery-operated baby doll, Trina cooed and blinked and pursed her lips for a suckle. Lucy slid the remainder of her whiskey across the table to Tanner, who shook his head like this was hugely disappointing.

“To write a country song you have to be a country song,” he said, and bolted the liquid like he actually liked the taste.

She excused herself early, certain that a kiss mixed with whiskey would crack her right open, and she wasn’t sure what would come out: tears or ecstasy…maybe just her soul in a sad, short hiss like a demure fart.

Miss Mitchell and Miss Carnahan had an unspoken agreement that they would not talk about their plans for the upcoming Grandparents’ Day pageant. Everyone knew that Miss Mitchell’s class always put on the best show. She made the elaborate costumes herself. Last year it was a tribute to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The children dressed in wigs and wings and glitter and eyeliner, like cherubic glam-rockers. Miss Carnahan’s class did a version of “Walking After Midnight” with hand motions. She had

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played the guitar and soloed on some of Patsy’s more difficult vocal riffs. In Nashville, even at an elementary school Grandparents’ Day pageant, you never knew who was watching.

This year, Miss Carnahan had wanted to compose a kind of twang-opera version of “Old MacDonald’s Farm,” but lost her inspiration to write kiddie music around the time she met Tanner. She was probably just going to go with a Disney medley.

“How’s your cowboy?” said Miss Mitchell. “Kind of mean.”“Ooh,” Miss Mitchell leaned against Lucy to share a shiver, “I love

that.”“He doesn’t like my songs,” said Lucy. “He says I’m writing about

being “lonely,’ and mistaking that pathetic notion for being “lonesome.’”“He wants you to be lonesome?”“Lonesome is romantic. It’s what you feel when you hear a wolf howl.”“I like a little howling. I’ve been thinking about putting together a

werewolf suit.”“That’s disgusting,” Miss Carnahan managed to sound as if she didn’t

mean it.“I know. The fur is so hard to clean.”

At three-thirty on Friday, Lucy should’ve been rushing home to bury her alter ego under several pounds of blush and hairspray. Unfortunately, Grace’s mother was late picking her up and the after-care lady refused to bend the rules. For a while, Grace asked questions about the Grandparents’ Day pageant, and when Miss Carnahan didn’t respond, came up with various speculations and suggestions, most of them involv-ing enchanted princesses. They soon fell to staring out the window.

“My mom drives a red Thivic.” Grace had a slight lisp, probably relat-ed to her formerly cleft palate.

No red cars as far as the eye could see. “What are you and your mom going to do this weekend?”

If her teacher’s cheerfulness sounded forced, Grace knew enough not to acknowledge the strain.

“Friday is payday,” said Grace.“It’s my payday too,” said Miss Carnahan, “Does your mom take you

somewhere special with her check?”“The Tavern,” Grace said without blinking, “It’s by the laundromat.”

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Grace lisped out a cheerful depiction of waiting for her mother to get drunk enough that she no longer withheld the peanut bowl on sanitary grounds. Grace loved peanuts and didn’t believe they really had traces of urine on them from people not washing their hands. Apparently, the best part was when her mother let her wander over to the laundromat, where there was a Mexican girl with a doll.

“Maybe Marta could come be in our clath,” said Grace, launching into an explanation of how she was teaching her friend English with the help of the doll. Lucy began to notice that Grace’s wonderment seemed practiced, like she’d watched too many movies about plucky orphan girls. “You could be her teacher too. You’re really good at it.”

“So you like hanging out in bars?” Lucy asked.Grace shrugged. “Whatcha gonna do?”Lucy thought she recognized the catchphrase from a sitcom the kids

were always bringing up when they got restless with lessons.“What do you want to be when you grow up, Grace?” Teacher, prob-

ably, thought Lucy. She’d make a better one than me.Grace beamed. Her eyes might have sparkled, but her glasses had

grown opaque from proximity to the window. “An actress.”“Do you think you’ll be good at that?”“Uh-huh! I practice in the mirror all the time.”“And when you were telling me about The Tavern just now, were you

acting a little bit?”Grace bent her head.“Grace?”“Maybe a little bit.”Miss Carnahan took a deep breath and prepared her most honeyed

voice to hold forth on the difference between acting and lying. Then she changed her mind and retrieved the broken comb from her desk.

“See, you told me the truth about this, so I’m going to give it back.”Grace blissfully snarled the thing in her hair and looked for a reflec-

tive surface in which to admire her work. “Way cute,” she declared, squinting into a framed poster of Where the Wild Things Are.

“What did you trade for that thing anyway?”“My thoo-lathe.”Lucy looked down and was horrified to see that for a week Grace

Gregory had been walking around with the tongue of her left sneaker flopping about. Suddenly she recalled that Jeannie Nichols, a dimpled

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child with waist-length hair, had been playing “doggie” with Jack Simon all week, using a “leash” of the same stringy gray lacing Grace’s right shoe. All Lucy had done was warn them to “be careful” and return to a conversation with Miss Mitchell.

As Miss Carnahan considered the possibility of an apology, Mrs. Gregory appeared, looking more feral than she had at parent conferences.

“I’ve been searching this damn school forever,” Mrs. Gregory shouted. She was panting. She had lost the middle button on her blouse, which gapped to reveal a bra that was gray and lint-pilled.

“Well, this is her classroom,” said Miss Carnahan.“Don’t tell me what to do.” Mrs. Gregory took a threatening step forward.“Mommy, I’m going to get a big part in the Grandparents’ Day show!”Both women turned to look at Grace. She had put on her coat and

backpack and stood with her arms spread, ta-da style. The kid could improv.

“That’s great,” said Mrs. Gregory. “You’re my little star, baby.”“Will I get to wear makeup?”The Gregory’s turned to look at Lucy.“Sure,” she said. “Why not.”“You’re going to look beautiful, aren’t you?” Mrs. Gregory’s face was

flushed and a little sweaty, but she was clearly a believer in makeup.“Yeth I am!” shouted Grace.“Yesss,” corrected Mrs. Gregory as she led her daughter out the door,

“Yes, you are.”

Lucy didn’t go to Buck’s as planned. Between Trina and the tourists she’d barely get a slot and it was all covers anyway. Nothing new at Buck’s.

A good wallow seemed more feasible than going out. She wanted to give in to that least reputable of human sadnesses: that of the woman in sweatpants too disconsolate to transfer ice cream to a dish before scarfing it down.

Somewhere in the night Miss Mitchell was probably bouncing happily on some strange lap, wearing nothing but a soiled cheerleading skirt.

Tanner might be sleeping with Trina. It had happened before, a few years back. When they first met, he’d told her all about it, right down to the pink cotton panties that might still be in his couch cushions. It hadn’t meant anything to him.

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“Sometimes,” he’d told her, “You’ve just got to take what you hate and fuck it hard.”

Lucy pulled her guitar into her lap and turned on the channel with old made-for-TV movies about women in compromising positions. During commercial breaks she strummed a few chords and improvised soulful re-workings of the jingles for cat food and vaginal disinfectants. That was what this network was selling for the most part.

She imagined that on Monday Grace’s little desk would be empty and she would have to explain to the children about drinking and driving and how in heaven Grace would be beautiful and eternally line leader. Lucy managed to get misty-eyed over this vision, then ruined it by imag-ining that the class would have to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” for Grandparents’ Day.

All those sincere first grade faces contorted into miniature Bette Midlers. It was grotesque.

So she started to write a more appropriate musical tribute to Grace. It was a half-octave lower than “Ain’t That Something,” the last song she’d written, and it stuck to proper English. As she sat in her darkened den and finished off the chorus of “Small Angels,” a real tear ran all the way down her cheek, and she didn’t even know for sure that Grace was dead. She was onto something.

When Tanner staggered across his yard at 3 a.m., Lucy was waiting on the front steps.

“You come to serenade me?” She shook her head and followed him into the house. “I think I wrote

a song.”He snorted as he poured drinks. “Told you.”“What?”“Stick with me and you’ll write your little fingers off. I’m your god-

damn honky-tonk muse.”“Can I play it?”“As long as you don’t go all Alvin-Simon-Theodore on me. I’m startin’

on a headache.”She played “Small Angels.” It lacked whiskey and boot-scootin’ and

inconstant women. It was relentlessly sentimental; this time through she wasn’t tempted to cry. He was going to hate it and that made her want to sing it louder. She defied him to insult a dead kid with a lisp who just wants to be a star.

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“There,” she said.“Well,” said Tanner.“Well?”He walked over and kissed her forehead.“Your song’s a load of pony crap,” he said. “I mean, it’s cute; it sounds

like a love song, but no one’s in love with anyone. There’s no couple.”They kissed, then looked in one another’s eyes and saw lonesomeness

and loneliness and temporary salve. Tanner would be good in bed; he was the most conventionally attractive person Lucy had ever had access to. In the morning he’d fill the sheets, rotten whiskey wind blowing from every orifice. But she was under no obligation to tell Miss Mitchell that part of the story.

“Cute.” Lucy wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “But I know it will sell.”

135PMS. .

Heather Dundas

Trivial but Numerous

She should have spent the fifty dollars to upgrade her seat, Leonora thought, stepping off the long-term parking bus. At six a.m. the check-in line already stretched out the door, past the skycaps’ increasingly irrel-evant stand, and beyond the end of the terminal building. Six a.m. in Los Angeles is chilly, no matter what the season, and Leonora pulled her ugly blazer shut as she rolled her carry-on bag to the end of the “economy” line.

Why did she resist it? Surcharges were part of the à la carte experi-ence of travel these days. When she flew to a conference, she never thought twice about adding the extra charge so she could use the busi-ness class line. But this trip was only a quick weekend in Boston with Lucy. When she was paying for herself, paying even more just to avoid a line seemed excessive. She should have said no to the trip, she thought, shuffling forward. Lucy could manage fine without her. She had gotten pregnant without her, after all. You’re going to be a grandma! she had said when she called. This still made Leonora shudder. Grandma?

Her phone buzzed in her purse.“Mama?” Lucy sounded like she was underwater. “Are you at the

airport?”“Just got here. What’s up?”“I’m so sick. I can’t keep anything down.”“Have you tried frozen waffles?” Leonora looked for her reflection

in the terminal glass. Her dark suit faded into the gloom, leaving just an image of red clogs and a pale bespectacled face floating uncertainly above a magenta silk scarf. She pulled in her gut and adjusted the scarf. Grandma?

“Yes, I tried frozen waffles. I threw them up. Just like I threw up crackers and mashed potatoes and toast.”

Leonora inched in the door of the terminal. The line continued up an escalator and around the edge of a balcony overhead.

“Trivial but numerous, darling.” Leonora remembered her own obste-trician describing the trials of pregnancy with these words. It had seemed

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comforting when he said it, but grew progressively more offensive as the pregnancy wore on and the indignities mounted. It felt downright mali-cious when Leonora finally experienced the full, bloody horror of labor and delivery.

“Trivial but numerous doesn’t help.” Lucy had heard the story many times. “You need to get here and take care of me.” There was the sound of retching on the phone. Leonora wondered, not for the first time, where Lucy had gotten her melodramatic streak.

“Lucy?” More retching. Leonora stepped onto the escalator and pulled her wheelie onto the step below. She thought of Lucy, her bright hair streaming as she ran. Lucy had always seemed like the Technicolor ver-sion of herself. And she was always running to something or away from something.

“Lucy?” And now Lucy was pregnant and she would learn how hard it was to be anchored in place.

“Lucy? Okay…bye.” Leonora waited another moment, then hung up. She turned right off the escalator and inched toward the busy hive of security lanes up ahead.

She had planned for the inevitable screening by wearing heavy wool socks and clogs. Her dream was to one day glide through security with-out breaking her pace: kicking off her shoes, slipping the plastic bag with toiletries out of her carry-on bag in one smooth motion, padding through the scanning machine in her socks.

Every trip was a chance to refine her technique. Leonora had learned the hard way to wear a bra without underwire after a particularly embar-rassing wanding session—was it in Cleveland?—during which the screener prodded her with the wand like it was a giant vibrator. She knew to wear only elastic-waisted trousers–it was simply unthinkable to wear a skirt and leave her naked thighs available to the probing of the wand—and a shirt that could not possibly be mistaken as a jacket.

This last part about the shirt was harder than one might think, given the fashion requirements of a post-menopausal figure. Since she no longer had a waist, it was necessary to wear things that flowed over the top half of her body. If she arrived at the screening area wearing a tunic blouse with a camisole underneath, she would inevitably be ordered to remove the blouse, despite her protestations that it was not a jacket.

“The jacket, ma’am,” the screener would say. “The jacket.” Cardigan sweaters also would require removal, she had learned,

revealing the old, stained, too-tight camisole underneath that rode up

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and left several inches of soft flesh exposed. She balked at wearing a sweatshirt…the day might come when a sequined or commemorative or otherwise decorated sweatshirt might find itself in her wardrobe, but she was fairly certain that her hard-won and perhaps rather late entry into the professional class (her students called her “Professor” even though she was but a lowly lecturer at the university…still, it was better than nothing) would prevent her from actually wearing such a garment in public. A zippered sweatshirt, with no logos or messages of any kind, might perhaps be acceptable but would be ordered into the gray X-ray bin for certain, and even if it wasn’t, the zipper would incite wanding. It was problematic.

Through trial and error, Leonora discovered that if she arrived at the screening point wearing a blazer over her shirt and camisole, removing the blazer alone would satisfy the screeners. No need to remove the shirt as well. This had worked a half dozen times, and she felt confident in her technique. So this morning she was wearing the blazer she saved specifi-cally for this purpose, an ugly black polyester thing, which radiated “I am a bank teller,” and which she would never actually wear to any facul-tymeeting or reading or anything that had any real relevance to her life.

As she slowly moved toward the checkpoint, Leonora looked at the crowd in front of her, behind her. There were, as usual, lots of backpack-wearing college students resplendent in bright layers of sweaters and hats, stainless steel water bottles clipped on and dangling, legs in opaque tights looking thin and fragile, like bird legs. The students huddled in laughing clusters or hunched over their phones, always part of a group, flocking. Booties were back, she noticed: good. They should slip off in no time. She dreaded finding herself behind a student in hi-top Converse sneakers…it always took forever to unlace the shoes, and then there was always a stench.

Interspersed with students were the families, moms and dads push-ing strollers in which little kids lolled sleepily, some still in their pajamas. Leonora remembered this sort of travelling: the shock of having to buy three plane tickets to go anywhere. No wonder they were in the economy line. Who could afford to pay extra for a quick check-in when there were diapers, strollers, Cheerios to buy?

Harder to see somehow than the bright young people were the older couples in line, wearing the windbreakers and virgin sneakers that marked them as retirees. They stood quietly, not talking to each other,

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clutching their boarding passes and drivers licenses and looking anxious-ly at the screening station up ahead.

Hardest of all to see were the middle-aged women travelling alone; it was only in scanning the crowd for a second and third time that Leonora picked them out. She marveled once again at the ability of women to become invisible at fifty. Yet once spotted, there they were, her waistless sisters, sensibly shod, grizzly with gray, looking not old exactly but defi-nitely not young. Each one a little lacuna of desire. Were they travelling on business, or were they, like her, on a family mission? Why were they alone? Did they have husbands at home? Were they divorced or had they, too, already buried their husbands?

Her pocketbook buzzed again. “Lucy?”“Mama, where are you now?”“Almost there.” This had been their refrain when Leonora called home

before leaving work. Leonora smiled, thinking of her daughter in a series of snapshot flashes: Lucy graduating from college, Lucy at ten in her wood-nymph Halloween costume, Lucy at three in Harry’s arms, waving at her from the door of the house as she drove off to work.

“I’m bringing your scrapbooks, Lucy.” “I miss Dad.” It had been six months since the funeral. Leonora

thought of Lucy sobbing as the coffin slid away through the velvet cur-tains at the funeral home.

“We want the baby to know who she is.” Before that, it had been three years of treatments. Lucy had missed those, and Harry hadn’t wanted to talk about it much when Lucy called home from Boston.

“I said, I miss Dad.” “Yes. I heard you.”Leonora held the phone to her ear as she shuffled into place in a secu-

rity station. Lucy cried in soft snuffles. “Hurry, Mama. I need you.” “Almost there. Bye.”Leonora stuffed her phone back in its special pocket in her purse, and

found herself behind an elderly woman who was having trouble unlac-ing her shoes. Leonora kicked off her clogs and felt the reassuring thick-ness of her wool socks on the hard linoleum floor. She picked up the clogs and placed them in the bin, putting her handbag next to them. She swung her carry-on bag (black nylon, with a snappy red strap) directly

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onto the metal table, unzipped it, and pulled out her laptop. It went into a bin of its own.

Leonora pushed her items down the table, just nudging the old woman’s bin, which contained a plastic purse and a bottle of water—she groaned, that would be a delay—forward. She jiggled a third bin free from the stack and placed it on the table, ready to hold her blazer and scarf, but not yet. She needed to be directly in front of the screener before she would remove these items.

“I have to be at my sister’s wedding!” said a voice just behind her. Leonora saw a pretty young woman with coral-colored nails pointing at the water bottle.

“I was bumped from my flight two days ago, and I’ve been trying to get a seat since then. I just ran out to pick up a dress”—and here Leonora noticed that the girl had a shopping bag in her gray bin—“because I think my bag is lost. I want to see her get married and my flight leaves in ten minutes!”

“Oh dear,” murmured Leonora. This was not her problem.“Coming through!” They turned to see an extremely tall airport employee pushing a well-

dressed man through the crowd. The old woman paused, one clawed hand shaking over her shoe. The girl who was about to miss her plane hissed through her teeth.

The attendant had to hunch over to reach the wheelchair handles; his upper body hung over the chair like a sail. The man in the wheelchair was youngish, in his thirties maybe. He held a leather briefcase in his lap and nodded apologetically at people in line as he passed them.

“Coming through!”The attendant reached a long, skinny arm down to unclip the stan-

chion rope and shoved the chair ahead.Leonora wondered what it would take to acquire a chair and an

escort to the front. It would be rather nice, to be whisked ahead. She could stand up to the withering looks of the back of the line if it meant she could spend an extra hour in bed and still make her flight. And how much of a move was it, really, to admit that her feet hurt, that standing in line made her back ache and head throb, and that the ankle that had been bothering her was really actually painful if she let herself think so? She bent her knees and felt her joints crackle. Was it arthritis? Her father had had a hip replacement; how old had he been? It was the year after

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her wedding, which meant that her father was…fifty-five. She thought of her father at her wedding in white ducks and a Panama hat, a charming anachronism, she had thought then, of an earlier age. But he was only fifty-five, Leonora’s current age. And when, she wondered, was her own lovely daughter getting married?

Leonora looked over her shoulder at the girl who was late for her sis-ter’s wedding. She stood protectively by her belongings on the metal table awaiting the X-ray machine, a bit of coral silk slipping out of the J. Crew shopping bag and pooling in the gray bin.

“Step aside!” The attendant jostled the wheelchair up to the table just behind Leonora.

Leonora felt a metal footrest slam into her left ankle. She hopped away and slid on woolly feet, arms flailing. Her bad ankle twisted under her and she went down. Pain lit up her ankle and filled the space behind her eyes.

“Are you hurt, ma’am?” the attendant asked, looking down at Leonora. His voice was high and weary. She rubbed her ankle. What would hap-pen if she admitted it? She might be taken out of line, there could be paramedics, and she might be separated from her bags. She could miss her flight. Disappoint Lucy. And she could see the line stretching behind her, impatient and now rumbling with curiosity.

“No—I’m fine,” she said, heaving herself up. “Are you sure you’re okay?” The man in the wheelchair smiled at

her as he opened his briefcase and transferred his computer into the waiting bin.

Leonora nodded at him, but didn’t smile back. She concentrated on walking without a limp back to her bag. Why did infirmity rank over age? Really, he looked fine as he shrugged out of his expensive jacket and folded it into the bin. He removed his watch—also expensive, Leonora noted—and a wedding ring. Into the bin.

“Here goes,” the young man said, and put the brakes on his chair. He pushed himself up to standing. Leonora—and probably everyone else in the line, she thought—felt a wave of distaste. He could stand! What a fraud!

The tall attendant folded the chair and handed it through the gate. He straightened up to look over the heads of the waiting throng, then pulled a phone from his back pocket and hunched back down to attend to it.

The young man moved toward the machine, his feet sliding awkward-ly across the slippery floor.

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“Shoes,” sighed the attendant, not looking up from his phone.“They’re not shoes,” replied the young man. “They’re my braces; I

need them to stand.” “Shoes!” barked the agent at the machine.“I can’t,” said the man. “I can’t walk without them.”There was a muffled announcement and the girl groaned. “Seriously, I am going to miss my flight.” She fiddled with her hair

and then smiled at the chair attendant. “Hey…I like your phone.” The attendant nodded. “It’s great…my boy-

friend used to have one like that, but not nearly as nice. I mean, before we broke up. I used to love to, um, play with it.”

Leonora wanted to gag. She watched as the girl, stroking her collar-bone, looked up through her lashes at the uniformed man. He continued to thumb his phone, but bright splotches appeared on his neck. He was not much older than the college students, Leonora decided, judging from the acne pocks on his forehead.

“Anyway, this is all theater, right?” the girl continued. “All of this secu-rity stuff. It’s just here to make us feel like we’re doing something. You know. It’s a show.”

Without taking her eyes from him, the girl slowly unzipped her hood-ie, revealing a tiny, ripped t-shirt with a purple bra visible underneath.

“As relevant as Kabuki,” she said, smiling, “Vaudeville. Cooch dancing.” The oldest trick in the book, Leonora thought, and one now unavail-

able to her. Leonora knew what would happen if she tried to bat her eyes at one of the young guards. The guard would either get mad or would call his buddies over and start laughing. Either way, it would end with an unpleasant episode with the metal-detector wand.

The young attendant remained hunched over his phone, but Leonora noticed that his thumbs stopped moving. As the girl shrugged out of her jacket, his bony shoulders mirrored her movements. The girl folded the jacket and placed it in her bin. She stepped carefully around the old woman, and then eased herself past the young man who was still arguing with a guard about his leg braces. She paused in front of the metal detec-tor, coral nail polish on her bare toes bright against the dirty floor. She smiled back at the attendant, waiting.

The young attendant swept up the girl’s bin and put it into the machine. As she stepped through the metal detector, the girl glanced back at

Leonora and wiggled her fingers goodbye. The attendant lifted his hand but she turned away.

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The crowd was growing restive as the argument between the disabled man and the screener got louder.

“So how do I get through? Crawl?”“Sir, it’s a federal regulation. I don’t make the rules.” This screener

looked tired, too, as tired as the disappointed chair attendant. What time did they have to get to work?

“Can I see your supervisor?”The screener muttered into his shoulder-mounted microphone. “I’m going to call my attorney,” said the man. “I’m calling the LA

Times.” He began his step-skid walk to the bins on the table. The screener took his bin and jammed it through the machine. The man watched helplessly as his phone disappeared through to the other side.

“Step aside!” A phalanx of TSA agents appeared, and lined up in a bright blue stripe along the wall at the far end of the X-ray machine. A large red-haired guard with extra stripes on his shoulder strode through the machine to the waiting crowd.

“Is there a problem?” Leonora watched as the abandoned attendant diverted the line behind

her to an adjacent security station. “This way, ma’am.” He motioned her to the front of the line. Leonora

stacked her bins into a wobbly tower.“Ma’am?” The young man called to Leonora. “Ma’am?”Her ankle ached. “May I borrow your phone?”Oh, no. The guards all turned to look at her. Her phone was in the

middle bin, tucked into an interior pocket in her purse. “I—I don’t…” Leonora stammered. The bins were beginning to slip

out of her grasp. All she wanted was to get through the line and get on the plane.

“Please. May I use your phone?”No, fine. She set the bins down and began rummaging. Her purse

flopped sideways and her travelling pharmacy fell out: her face cream, eye cream, soy pills, fish oil, Benazepril (for her heart), Paxil (for her sad-ness), Ambien (to sleep).

“Whoa,” said the chair attendant, looking at the little amber contain-ers rolling around on the floor. “Lady, so you have a prescription for all this?”

Leonora found the phone.

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“Here!” She handed it to the man, but her ankle buckled again and she grabbed the edge of the metal table for support. The phone clattered to the floor, and the guard kicked it through the machine.

“You can get it on the other side, lady. Now, we need your jacket.”Leonora unsteadily unwound her scarf and wadded it into the plas-

tic bin, and then pulled off her black blazer and placed it in the bin as well. She looked down at herself. Stripped of accessories, her black pants and white blouse were blank and anonymous. She limped toward the machine, favoring her good ankle, trying not to look at the young man who had sunk to the floor and was apparently unfastening his braces.

“Your jacket.” A new agent appeared in front of her.“I just put my jacket in the bin.”“That jacket.” He pointed at her blouse.“It’s a shirt.” The TSA agent folded his arms and stepped in front of

the machine.Leonora could see over his shoulder, straight through the security

portal to the point where travelers were reunited with their belongings. As she watched, the wedding girl gathered up her things in a great swirl and set off at a run toward the gates, bags swinging from her shoulders.

Slowly Leonora unbuttoned her shirt while the guard stared at her. She slid the shirt off her shoulders. Her camisole was tight, and she felt a cool breeze on her belly. Oh, God. She was exposed. She shrugged her arms out of the shirt and flipped it into a rough fold. She scuffed in her fuzzy socks back to the bin, and placed her folded shirt in. She tugged the camisole down, her face burning.

“Okay?” The guard stared at her for several humiliating seconds, and then slowly stepped aside.

“Can you put these in the bin, please?” The young man held out his shoes, which had steel sticking up out of them. Leonora tossed them in, and pushed it through.

“Let me help you up,” she said, limping over to the man on the ground.

“I can’t stand up.” And he scooted on his behind like a baby toward the machine. His

face was grim. He got to the machine and stopped. “This may take a while; would you like to go first?” Leonora smiled her thanks, and carefully stepped over him, her arms

crossed over her chest in an attempt to make herself invisible. Her ankle

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throbbed. She waited for the guard to give her a signal to proceed. In the distance, beyond the machines and the screeners, she could see people tying shoes, buckling belts, tucking wallets into pockets, restoring their normal identities before heading down the terminal for a cup of coffee and a bottle of safe water to carry onto their flights.

The guard nodded her through. Next to her the young man sat on the floor, his twisted feet pointed

toward the security machine. An image of Harry popped into Leonora’s head; Harry who looked so small and frail as he headed into the CT scanner, the PET scanner, the gamma knife machine. There are some machines, she thought, that you would rather not enter.

Her glasses slid down her nose. She glanced back at the waiting crowd, now in soft focus. The old woman had managed to remove one shoe. Perilously bent at the waist, she gripped the metal counter with one gnarled hand and pulled arthritically at the laces of the remaining shoe. Bins rattled and the counter shook.

“This isn’t right,” she said to the guard. He stared at her. She remem-bered that she was nearly naked. She thought of Lucy, waiting for her in Boston. Again she looked through the portal. Leonora smiled at the guard in front of her, pulled off her glasses and folded them.

She sat down on the rubber mat next to the crippled man. “I’m Leonora,” she said.“Peter,” he replied. Leonora reached out her hand, and Peter took it. Together they lay

down in front of the security machine, blocking it. Leonora felt the cold floor on the small of her back. I’m sorry, Lucy, Leonora thought. I’m almost there.

There was a roar and they were surrounded by soldiers. Leonora closed her eyes.

“Get up!” This was a new voice, close to her face. She kept her eyes tightly shut.

“Nice to meet you, Peter,” she said. They lay holding hands. There was more running, an announcement. Leonora felt hands on

her ankles, tugging her away. She hung onto Peter and felt him clutching her arm. The tug became a jerk and pain shot up her leg. She screamed in pain and having screamed, she found that she could not stop. So she opened her eyes and screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

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Between the legs of the soldiers she could see the crowd, pressing forward to look at the fat lady and the crippled man entwined on the ground in front of the machine.

The college students joined them first. Leonora saw them snapping photos and clicking out messages to the world beyond the airport. A flash went off, then another, from the phones the students held aloft on spindly arms. Then there was an explosion of flashes, and then, without any discussion, the students began to set off their flashes in a ragged synchronicity. Then, with their backpacks and fleece mufti and dangling water bottles, the students clanked to the floor right in the line.

The retiree couples were suddenly tall and visible to Leonora above the sprawling students. They shook their heads at the spectacle in front of them. In the flashing light, the running TSA agents took on a jerky quality, like a strobe-lit vaudeville act. Looking exhausted, the retirees sat down on their rolling suitcases. One couple sank with effort to the floor, to the cheers of the students. They drummed their white sneakers on the linoleum floor.

Families with small children huddled together. A few picked up their kids, broke out of the line, and headed for the door. No flying for them today. Other families pulled their children close and sat down, forming circles. Mothers found tiny juice boxes in their packs and passed them out. Cheerios went hand to hand around the sitting crowd.

The last to sit were the business people. Some headed for the security machine and, thrusting their boarding passes at the guards, tried to push their way through. The guards swatted them away. Others, and Leonora couldn’t help noticing that it was mostly the forgotten-looking older women, dithered, looking nervously at the door, at the guards, at the sit-ting families and children. Then, one by one, they pulled themselves into focus and walked their sensible shoes up to the front of the line, crunch-ing through Cheerios. They slipped between the soldiers and surrounded Leonora and Peter. There they sat, adjusting their scarves.

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Gay Baines lives in East Aurora, New York, and is a member of the Roycroft Wordsmiths. Her poetry has appeared in RE:AL, Ratta-pallax, Cimarron Review, Slipstream, Poet Lore and other journals. She is co-founder and poetry editor of July Literary Press in Buffalo. In 2002 she published her first novel, Dear M.K. Her collection, Don’t Let Go, was published in late fall 2010. She is working desultorily on a chapbook, The Book of Lies.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six books of poems including Elegy, which was awarded the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Bride of E (2009). She teaches in the creative writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2012.

Jan Beatty’s books include Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River (Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, on public radio NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring national writers. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, and teaches in the MFA program.

Constance E. Boyle was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and resides in Arvada, Colorado. Completing an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College in 1994, she writes poetry and short stories. Connie will have a poem in the Spring 2011 volume of Melusine. Her chapbook, Double Exposure, placed first in the 2005 Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Connie was a physician assistant in Community Health (Denver Health) for twenty-eight years, the last eighteen in a school-based health center, providing primary medical care to adolescents. Currently, she teaches creative writing to adolescents.

Carys Bray lives in a seaside town in North West England, not far from Liverpool. She has a BA in Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. She is currently immersed in preliminary PhD research. Carys writes

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short fiction, but hopes to stretch her attention span and plotting skills into novel dimensions during the coming years. She has been published in New Fairy Tales, Black Market Review, and Flash Mob: Flax 026. In 2010 she won the MA category of the Edge Hill Prize and so far this year she has been shortlisted for the Strictly Writing Award, the Once Upon a Time Modern Fairy Tale Competition and the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook Short Story Competition’. She blogs about writing at postnatalconfession.blogspot.com.

Mary Crow, former Poet Laureate of Colorado and author of eleven collections of poetry and translation, has a new book of poems, Addicted to the Horizon, due to appear in 2012. Her book of translations of the poems of Roberto Juarroz (Argentina) appeared in 2011. She has just returned from a residency at El Gouna Writers Residencies in Egypt.

Tracy Lynn Darling ditched the Southern accent on the side of the runway years ago, but carries around a little bit of Southern sass in her right index finger and uses it from time to time. She’s been hiding out in the suburbs of Southern California cleverly disguised as a soccer Mom with three child-actors in the back of her mini-van. Her writ-ing has appeared or is forthcoming in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The Tower Journal, Heavy Bear, Global Graffiti Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, Maintenant, Psychic Meatloaf, Red River Review, Rapid River Arts Magazine, Up the Staircase, Summation III, San Diego Writers Ink Anthology Volume IV, and Because I Said So: Poems on the Happiness and Crappiness of Parenthood. Her poem, “Offering Up the Main Course,” was chosen as the First Place Winner in Rapid River Arts Magazine’s 14th Annual Poetry Contest 2011. You may contact Tracy at tracydarling.thewriter@gmail.com.

Heather Dundas is a College Doctoral Fellow in Fiction for the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. In earlier incarnations, she was a playwright, producer, lyricist, teaching artist, adjunct lecturer in playwriting, writer of cooking shows, editor of medical textbooks, and other things. Her stories and essays have been published in Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, The Los Angeles Times, and The Loudest Voice Anthology: Volume 1, among others.

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Amy Eisner teaches creative writing and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her poems are forthcoming in Washington Square, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and American Literary Review.

Mara Faulkner, OSB, teaches writing and literature at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, MN. She has published three books, Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen, Born of Common Hungers: Benedictine Women in Search of Connections, and Going Blind: A Memoir. She is a member of St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph.

Lilace Mellin Guignard’s poems have appeared in journals such as Calyx, Ecotone, Patterson Literary Review, and Louisiana Literature, as well as anthologies. She was a 2003–2004 recipient of a Nevada Artist Fellowship. Lilace currently writes from her home in rural Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, son, and daughter.

Natalie Harris holds a PhD from Indiana University and an MFA from Warren Wilson. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction work-shops at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, Eclipse, Red Rock Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Ascent, and Witness (forthcoming). She recently completed her first collection of short sto-ries, The Pressure of Blood, which was selected as a finalist for this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and for the George Garrett Fiction Prize.

Michelle McMillan-Holifield studied poetry writing at Delta State University in the Mississippi Delta where she received her BA in English. She currently lives with my husband Jody in Lena, Mississippi—far enough out of town to immerse themselves in the almost silence that is the blessing of country life.

Jennifer Horne is the author of a collection of poems, Bottle Tree (2010), the editor of Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003), and co-editor, with Wendy Reed, of All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2006), and Circling Faith: Southern Women on

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Spirituality (forthcoming 2012). She has received an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship and has been a Seaside Institute “Escape to Create” artist in residence. She currently teaches in the University of Alabama Honors College and serves as poetry book reviews editor for First Draft Reviews Online.

Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Sabrina Ito currently lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, with her husband, Victor and her dog, Truman. A beginning poet, Sabrina’s work has appeared in The Coachella Review and is forthcoming in Slipstream Magazine.

Sheila MacAvoy grew up in New York City and obtained a Law Degree from St. John’s University. After a move to California, she worked for the next eighteen years as a lawyer in a large corporation in Los Angeles and now writes full time at her home in Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Writers’ Forum, Chiron Review, Red Rock Review, Northern Review, RiverSedge, Peregrine, Weber, and Passager, among other journals. She has appeared in several anthologies: The Next Parish Over, published by New Rivers Press; Scrap Magic, published by FISH in County Cork, Ireland (Editor’s Choice); All the King’s Horses, published By FISH in conjunction with the Historical Novel Society of Cambridge, England (Prize Winner).

Kyla Marshell is an alumna of Spelman College. She is the winner of the Edith A. Hambie Poetry Award, given at Spelman through the Academy of American Poets, and the Zora Neale Hurston-Langston Hughes Award, endowed by Alice Walker. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center artists colony, and is a Cave Canem fellow. Her poetry and prose appear in Mythium, Zora & Alice, XhibitP.com, and The Revivalist, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, and attends the MFA program in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. You can visit her at hellonmars.wordpress.com.

Brittany Michelson graduated from the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles is December 2010. Prior to that, she taught high school English for two years in Arizona, and English as a Second Language in Ecuador. Her short prose is published in several online jour-nals including Sleet Magazine, Glossolalia, Flashquake, and Every Day Fiction. This is her first print publication.

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Leslie Nipkow’s essays have been published in O: the Oprah Mag-azine, the New York Times, Written By, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, FreshYarn.com, Ducts.org, and the New York Post. Her piece, “A Long Day’s Journey into Lip Gloss” is anthologized in NYU Press’ More New York Stories, the Best of the New York Times City Section. She turned her experience playing Erica Kane’s prison guard on All My Children into a one-woman show, Guarding Erica (anthologized in Vintage Books’ Talk to Me: Monologue Plays). An Emmy and Writers Guild Award-winner, she is currently working on several book-length projects, including an essay collection titled: “How to Kiss Like A Movie Star.”

Mary Elizabeth Parker’s poetry collections include The Sex Girl, Urth-ona Press, and two chapbooks, Breathing in A Foreign Country, Paradise Press, and That Stumbling Ritual, Coraddi Publications, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in journals includ-ing Notre Dame Review, Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Madison Review, and Kalliope, and in Earth and Soul, pub-lished in both English and Russian in the Kostroma region of Russia.

Lisbeth Prifogle served her country as a United States Marine for four years, including a deployment to Iraq in 2008. She quietly left the Marines in February 2009 in order to travel, write, and pursue other endeavors. In June 2010, Lisbeth graduated from Antioch University with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing can be found at the Sylvan Echo, The Splinter Generation, and In the Know Traveler. She has climbed Mt. Massive in Colorado, Machu Picchu in Peru, spent a week in a village along the Amazon River and much more. When Lisbeth is not gallivant-ing around the globe, she is soaking up the sun in San Diego, California, and can be followed at www.prifogle.blogspot.com.

Ehren Reed was born and raised outside of Chicago and graduated with a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She has resided in San Francisco for the past eleven years and received a BFA with High Distinction in Painting & Drawing from the California College of the Arts. Ehren’s recent work relies upon books, maps, and found photographs as she blends together traditional craft and contem-porary media to investigate memory, contemporary culture and interper-sonal relationships. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the Bay Area at Donna Seager Gallery, Geras Tousignant Gallery, SOMArts,

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Bedford Gallery, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, among oth-ers, and nationally at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York. More infor-mation is available at www.ehrenreed.com.

An Oklahoman by birth, a Californian by choice, Marilyn Ringer retreats to an island in Maine for a month each year to hike and write. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Nimrod, Red Wheelbarrow, Eclectica, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Quiddity, Eclipse, RiverSedge, River Oak Review, Poet Lore, Porcupine, Left Curve, Milk Money, and numerous other journals.

Barbara Saunier is happily retired from teaching at Grand Rapids Community College in west Michigan. Her work is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, and South Loop Review. She recently turned sixty and does not know how that happened.

Sonia Scherr will begin an MFA program in creative writing at the University of New Hampshire this fall. She previously worked as a journalist.

Hilary Sideris holds an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared recently in Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Salamander, and Tar River Poetry. Her third chapbook, Gold & Other Fish, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Denise Turner’s work has appeared The Sun, Skirt Magazine, Progenitor and elsewhere. Her short memoir “The Dark” received the Writers Studio Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2008, and her essay “A Family Comedy” won a spot in the 2010 Writer Advice Flash Prose contest. She serves as a judge for literary contests and is currently working on a book-length memoir.

Sarah Harris Wallman teaches in the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut, where she only occasion-ally pines for her native Nashville. She honed her fiction-writing skills at the University of Virginia, the University of Pittsburgh, and all the ter-rible jobs she had in her twenties.

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Laurin B. Wolf lives and plays in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has an MFA in creative writing from Kent State University and a BA from the University of Pittsburgh in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh’s City Paper, Two Review, and Madwomen in the Attic, An Anthology. She was also featured on the public radio show Prosody. Her book reviews have appeared in Whiskey Island, and her interviews can be found on the Wick Poetry Center website. Laurin teaches high-school English in Pittsburgh.

Jessica Young teaches at the University of Michigan, where she held a Zell Fellowship for poetry and completed her MFA. Her undergraduate work was at MIT. Her Pushcart-nominated poetry has appeared most recently in Bellingham Review, Copper Nickel, and Versal.