It began when I was small,
ended when I was much larger.
You could hardly see me
through a microscope, then
only through a telescope.
Yesterday I was a sliver,
then I became the moon.
Yesterday I was a point,
then I formed everything.
In between there were treasure
chests, eyeballs, spaceships.
Ghosts and pickled eggs.
In between there were martinis
and olives. Totalities, existences.
I could remember what happened.
I could never recall it all.
My Lips Are Made of Wax, My Teeth Are Furry Blades, and Other Lies
My hair is a bristly statue. My ears
are gramophones; a small dog sits
on my shoulder and cries into them.
My nose is a funnel of love. My lips
are made of wax, sweet and red and chewy.
My teeth are furry blades, chipped and rusty.
My neck is a chicken wattle, a ratchety
bobble and swing and sway. I’m looking out
for an axe.
I am always the brave one,
never fearing fathers, husbands,
brothers, and other gods.
My throat is conch shell, listen
to the city in it, the swoosh and hush;
my breasts are a trio of ringing bells.
My arms are not wings, nor a flight of angels,
nor—. My fingers are mechanical
pawls; my thumbs, blunt sockets.
My fingers are quills scratching words.
My belly is an inkwell—hips are two trains
running headlong into the dry mesa of my belly.
My knees are knocking, but no one can come in.
My feet are ready to answer
but they don’t know the secret word.
O Mary Lou
Mid-summer Mary Lou’s getting hauled
across the way, surrounded by the sweaty men
of Weeks Marina. She sways gently in the lift.
Elsewhere, perhaps the Mary Lou
the ship’s named for walks the halls
of a nursing home to greet the dim light.
And somewhere else another
Mary Lou fidgets with a pile of bills,
pouring herself a second bolt of gold
crisp with the light of this morning’s air
that makes clear not all Mary Lou’s
are imaginary, just as all those songs
must have been about someone real
easy to greet and hard to say goodbye to.
Who’d believe such passion can be sung
to a cipher? But one never knows—
no slur against Ricky Nelson here—
or Dante or Petrarch’s woman of the light
that neither was able to hold as wife.
Who’d complain of longing when
one could linger on for toast in bed?
And all those boats named for women
may not be named after one on land.
Still, across the river, there can be no doubt
men are hard at work on the Mary Lou.
High aloft she swings in twin belts of steel,
creaking like the trees that made her.
Apples or Waffles
After the Super Derecho, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2012
On the third night of the power outage,
we sat in the living room after dinner
trying to believe, as daylight faded,
that the curtains were swaying not because
someone knocked them stretching,
or reaching to the table for more wine,
but because of an actual breeze
traveling on some repentant front
from high up in the Blue Ridge, where it was cold—
an efficient breeze that maybe still contained
enough coolness to lower the heat
by the few degrees that would let us trade
our oven-like insomnia for sleep.
Then I remembered the election game
Amanda taught me: “Apples or Waffles,”
where everyone votes to save just one,
banishing the other option to oblivion.
Majority ruled. By clockwards turns, we’d
nominate contenders. In the first round, apples
beat waffles, 8 to 3. At apples v. peppercorns,
apples won again—7 to 4. By round five, cats
arrived, and would not be toppled, though the vote
was always close—we lost cars, then planes.
But the moon tipped the scales, and Aaron
nearly left the room, as the reigning moon
spread its ghost light, exposing otherworldly shadows
in a dark and darkening caterwaulessness.
Then clothes (why did we cling to clothes?)
beat out the moon, and electricity
(since we’d been living without it for days),
and then clothes fell to music (as they will),
and so did sex, which stunned the minority.
And then came trees. The trees. Three days before,
the lights went out on us at open studios—
we’d blamed the artists’ digital displays. But then
we heard trees snap in half, and saw by flashlight
at the open door, far away, limbs falling
fast as leaves, bowing ballerina-like over the yard,
crossing the exits with a hero-pyre of saplings.
A rainless hurricane—it arrived without a warning.
All over the property, huge trees blocked the paths—
green walnuts blackening like hell-coins on the ground,
the cedar’s ripped pink pith exposed and alien in the sun.
For two days, Aaron cleared debris out of the pool.
In the game, trees outlasted the ocean, and trees
outlasted words (and Janet noticed, every poet
there chose trees). When words were gone,
we ended the game, and someone muttered
“trees or sleep,” and by then the darkness
covered our faces completely, so we couldn’t see
each other clearly, and we walked out of the house
in darkness, under the trees still left, into a world
we were now unsure of, its stillnesses unfixed,
into a world we could not be sure we hadn’t ruined.
Operation (I)
Covert, hardly cordial, came commands
from the quarters, hind
and head. Twin branches of the same
government. My mind: heretic, fiend
for fashion, my rhetoric
a couture magazine, all pictorial
content. Back issues abundant, still,
in the pews, the waiting room,
meant for other congregants hell-
bent on staying empty.
In them, as in me, no creed
but beauty, and a brain pretending scorn
for beauty. Chimes of the church I
worshipped: the unholy body, well-read.
No holes to speak of. No heart.
Pepsi
1.
Because she thought even fish said something about class.
Mud-blooded catfish, for example—fried up only by men who
mow lawns and nail shingles and make their living with dirt
hammered under their nails,
but bass, bass were wild, wide-mouth, pink throats caught by men
with enough money for a boat, their heads taken off by the working man
who works the other men.
And trout? We heard about men who ate a fish called rainbow,
but they were freezing their nuts off up north, hip-deep river water,
reciting poetry, casting houseflies across a stream.
So why would soda be any different? RC was for overall-wearing kids
with runny eyes, a once-a-month Moon-Pie treat after huffing
five miles to the general store.
And Coke? Chugged by the common freckle-face gal across the river
in Indiana—a Hoosier who hived her hair and squeezed into June Cleaver skirts—
Lord, look at her in her Sunday best; she actually thinks she looks good.
Pepsi though? Well, Pepsi was married to Joan Crawford,
Pepsi was a bitch who knew how to ash with two taps from a two-inch filter,
not one nicotine stain on her manicured hands.
Pepsi knew how to walk in Italian leather, how to pin a hair piece
at her crown and let it waterfall into an aerosol nest of
natural, how to glue a strip of lashes to her wink.
Pepsi was a short, zippy drink, and chilled just right, it made a place
for herself in this world, knowing just how easy it is to get a man
and just how hard he was to keep.
2.
Because the sound of the first can
in the morning was the sound of nectar
firecracked,
a sugar sent up
to the sky, a dull liquid
kissed with foam, the sound of ready oil
excited by flour, your gravy being made.
Because in a sweating glass,
it cooled
her knot of hot sleep
to the same crisp
as the air-conditioned room.
Because it was the secret
of lemon and orange and vanillin
tickling the air, a fizz that
whispered,
wake up now, Fanny,
your bad flashing night is through.
3.
Because she was loyal—downright militant—to things she loved, Pepsi was all
she would drink. Rarely water, not juice, not milk, and damn straight, no trailer-trash
beer. She might have coffee later, before her shows came on, but this was the drink
that woke her, the drink that kept her up.
Should you fix her a glass, you might get the full Pepsi Lecture, her obsessive
counting game, because there was a hell of a lot she couldn’t control, but she could
control this:
Make it four pieces of ice—not three, and not five. But four. And I don’t want it too full;
don’t make me spill it all over myself. And use a six-ounce glass, not some big suck-o jug,
not a little old juice glass, but six ounces, that big. I want that glass to be plastic and pretty,
something with flowers, maybe in pink, but don’t give me no ugly cup. And it better be clean too; don’t give me no dirty glass, pull it hot from the washer if you have to, but just four—
count them, four—cubes of ice.
4.
Because in the hospital
we lost her
in the deep folds
of a coma
for days,
and when she finally
woke, she was
confused, looked
around, asked,
What are you all here
staring at me for?
Her oldest answered,
Because,
Mama,
we need you.
Well,
okay then,
she said.
Quit
being so useless,
standing around.
Somebody pour me
a fresh Pepsi?
5.
Because it was not water pulled from the well, water from a place with no pipes,
because it was not water so rich in iron that washing with it was like taking a bucket shower
in blood.
Because it was not a chipped Mason jar filled lukewarm from the tap.
Because it was not milk with a layer of unhomogenized creaming the top,
because it was not tea her mama set out on the porch to brown in the sun.
Because it was not Bowling Green, not western Kentucky, and there’s no need
to ever wait again for the mule pulling the ice man.
No, you have a pocket full of change now, Fanny. It’s 1944 again,
no sense in scuffing your feet, standing outside on the hussy corner of the dime store.
You walk right in, order straight from the fountain if you want.
You’re in Louisville now, you have yourself a man, and you’ll never have to choke down
anything flat again.
Lottie
was the name she called us, and what she meant was clumsy, graceless,
all assholes and elbows tripping up the steps, meaning:
Well, I don’t figure that child’s ever gonna learn to ride that bicycle,
how long she gonna perch stone-still on that thing, propped on the kickstand?
I bet Lottie here is scared she’s bound to bite the dust before she even leaves the drive.
Lottie, meaning, well, Lottie, you done broke your grandmama’s crystal bowl
in a thousand pieces, meaning you ain’t never had a summer in all your life
without scabbed knees, meaning absent-minded, plum-bruised,
the side of my leg catching corners, or meaning, as a book put it,
the absence of pleasure makes one clumsy, or in another text, a person post-
trauma can disassociate, quit paying attention, survive the crash soft-limbed,
like a drunk.
Laaa-Tee, sang two-tone, mountain-style, like a come-and-get-it-supper bell,
at times meaning you did something off-kilter, singed with violence,
like well, Lottie, whatever you did to that boyfriend of yours left dents
in the side of his van, or well, Lottie, I can’t believe you just blew the head clear off
your doll with that firecracker. Because yes, Lottie, you really did it this time, meaning,
at least you didn’t kill nobody.
There was a Lottie once, a real Lottie, way back in the family,
but she was crazy as a loon, spent her whole life at Central State with
her finger up inside her trying to grab men’s things. Lottie the nymphomaniac,
the queen masturbator, the gal that would fuck a snake if it didn’t
have a head on it. Lottie, imagined with wild red hair and mosquito-pocked legs,
the fists of her raw knees peeking out from under her tie-back hospital gown.
Lottie, the only woman who wanted it, who wouldn’t say
I’d rather toothbrush the kitchen floor on my hands and knees, wouldn’t say
I’d just as soon set my hair on fire, wouldn’t whisper
I counted each and every rose on the wallpaper before he was through,
or I’d rather pluck my puss hairs out one-by-one than deal
with him tonight, all said in half-jest, a joke hollered down from their teetering
pedestals, making the men rooster up, all said making one thing clear:
I ain’t no Lottie, ain’t no loosey-goosey hot-pants whore.
But I can’t help but wonder, can’t help but make up something
for our Lottie, something to do with a house on stilts in the holler
and a father who took her right under the floorboards where
her mother stood, but who knows, she could have pulled her budding
breasts out for Captain Kangaroo, she could have smeared herself
with oatmeal and rubbed herself raw on the old tweed couch,
a tarpaper ten-cent trick, for all we know—
which is nothing,
which is Lottie is the name she called us, and if you’re not
a Lottie then you’re hands-and-knees down on the floor, that if
what happened to you
doesn’t make you one way, it will make you
another, that you won’t exist at all
or you’ll be
too much,
you bride, you hole, either tripping up the porch steps
or crawling to hide under them,
hot with a match
catching on the old wood planks.
In Vineland
Nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn just waiting
for a breeze. Mud daubers whispering below the roof eaves.
The whitewashed, weathered tongue-and-groove boards could give any day.
Chancy just tapping the front door jamb, farmhouse that fragile—
nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn. Just waiting
for some farmboy to chuck a rock, send it crumbling into
the heaps of deposit bottles, Depression and Wheaton
glass in the cellar. The last Station of the Cross: the dust-
mark from an up-turned horseshoe that once hung on the lintel.
Nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn. Just waiting.
Still Breathing
Lately, I was afraid of not living
close enough to the seeded
circle of wildflowers,
but now, out the window
I see the verdant, purple
bergamot has jumped
the rock border
nearer the dogwood
where bees mumble
the hummingbird feeder.
Into the red, plastic flower
one bee squeezes, spins sugar
water, its wet, furry body
trembling up to a pocket
of breath, drunk and not knowing
there is no escape from heaven.
Priority Seating for People with Disabilities and Seniors
A list expects you know this: what is separate—item
A, item B, item C—and what implicitly is allowed passage,
but the space surrounding a conjunction slips,
its grey slurry indecisive. And where is my own personal
senior for this bus? On the sign one stick
figure sits in an open circle, all angles,
all bones and acute. The other holds a cane.
In Strunk and White the antecedents for age and ability
are indexed between do not construct awkward adverbs and
do not affect a breezy manner. When the riders
loping between the two quarter-pipe slopes
find air on their compact bicycles
with wide rough tires and shiny rims
where brakes should have been, I keep expecting
them to fall—and they do—
but so gracefully with a flip and a lip trick
with only empty space to draw
rubber to concrete, though, of course, we know space
is never empty. Even in a vacuum something is held:
anticipation or the speed of light. Though what
it holds holds room for ambiguity,
the preposition our lonely connection
between the laws of lift and syntax,
between our vertigo and the lies of electric
impulses swerving into lines like flight.
You Were Made for This Part
Your only line is, “Oh, God.”
There are no small parts….
Try it.
No, not like that.
Where is Lee Strasberg when we need him?
Deeper, let out all the air. No, ALL
the air and say it before inhaling,
before that one more time
that brings the world back in
and keeps the heart afloat.
Your moment of death
you rehearse 20,000 times a day.
I know the line, but I can’t do it,
yet. My mother, at 91, has about got it nailed.
She only says it when she tells the story
of her father, whom I never knew.
(He died out of this world
about the time I died into it.
We swapped worlds in the 40s.)
To get the voice for your own role,
be him. You are a physician.
You sit with your daughter
on the front porch. Sunday in spring.
She is 11, and your practice is solid. You’re considered
the best diagnostician in central Alabama.
You don’t know how you do it.
In early med school, 1914, the teacher would
present a patient who walked in,
sat in front of the class.
Male, age 55, three children, a plumber.
His hobby is painting. That is all you were told.
From skin, walk, posture, eyes, hair,
you had to guess what’s killing him.
Anyway, it is now 1931.
You are in the swing.
Your daughter’s chattering about the birds
competes with the birds.
The town loves you.
On the sweet-smelling sidewalk,
a pregnant woman walks toward town.
Your daughter stops talking
because you’ve stopped the swing.
She sees your skin has changed,
a harder skin, and your eyes
lose all she ever knew in them. Your voice—
and this is the voice you must feel your way into
for your own part—is a voice
your daughter has never heard.
She will remember this all her life,
but she will not tell it until she is in her 80s.
Then she will tell it often.
“Oh, God,” she hears the stranger beside her say,
“Oh, God. That girl is carrying a dead baby.”
The young girl is not your patient.
But she has guessed.
There’s no stillness in the world like that.
She hasn’t spoken of it yet.
To speak it is to make it real.
She can’t birth the word.
You will learn on rounds later in the week
that you were right. She was right.
She knew, and you knew that she knew.
And you couldn’t stop the saying of it
out of your empty chest,
not even to protect the innocence of your own child,
who worshipped you.
That’s not your role but that’s the line
and that’s the voice you’re working for,
a finality in knowing, and not knowing
how you know.
Of course
like all of us, you will have to practice.
With a lover or lost lover, being struck
dumb by what you’ve become,
seeing a Matisse in the next hall
after a dull room of 18th century
American portraiture, or
waking to a morning after sex
with a fool, or the moment of knowing
your kid is just wonderful in so many ways
you didn’t teach him.
You’ll work on it a lot
every day,
all your days.
Notes on Being a Mistress
Names have been changed because even a former mistress needs to keep secrets.
The first time Nick tried to kiss me, I resisted. He was dropping me off at home after we’d stayed at work late, drinking there because no one was left in the restaurant and we couldn’t risk being seen together out at the bars, couldn’t let anyone know that sometimes, when we were alone, we would tell each other secrets and stare at every part we ached to touch. I couldn’t erase the way he looked at me, searing hot blue beneath a predator’s brow, burning like frost bite, like fire. When he asked me to stay and drink with him that night, it felt delicious and forbidden, a slow unfolding of a situation I had been bred to understand.
We reached my house and I opened the car door, then turned to him. He’d taken off his wedding ring. He leaned forward to hug me, his lips tipped towards my mouth, but I threw my face in his way and his clumsy wet kiss landed on my cheek. I feigned drunken stupor and tumbled from his passenger seat, laughing. I didn’t want to give in that easily, knew I had to take it slow because he’d only been married a little while and even before then had always been faithful. I was his first mistress; he’d never done this before. But I had.
My first time, I was in eighth grade. Joey Stevens knelt before me, pants around his ankles, his mother at work. His girlfriend, Nikki, was my best friend. I’d never had sex before. I didn’t know how it worked. He told me to put it in, but I didn’t know what he meant. He dragged me forward on the couch and fucked me so fast I wasn’t sure it really happened, then he pulled out and came on his shorts. Wiped it off. Told me to hurry up and leave, his mom might be home soon.
Two weeks later, Nikki got pregnant. She was fourteen. We were all fourteen. We had no idea what we were doing, but we thought we did. Nikki knew I liked Joey, got close to me because I was already friends with him. I felt no guilt because Joey had been mine first, she had betrayed me, she was the enemy.
He told me that I was his escape; I was the only one he could trust. Even after Nikki got pregnant, Joey and I had sex a few more times, in the woods, in the creaking shells of abandoned houses near the beach. Afterwards he always talked, talked for hours, telling me all the things he couldn’t tell Nikki. I was grateful for that furtive part of him, the access to secrets that Nikki didn’t possess. “You’re my best friend,” he’d tell me. “I can tell you anything. Plus you’re so much better in bed than she is.”
I told myself that I’d rather have this honesty than be the girlfriend who got lied to, told myself it was enough. Eventually, though, she made him choose. Joey came up to me one day after class and told me he couldn’t see me anymore. “I’m sorry, but she needs me,” he said. “I have to be there for her now.”
I nodded. “I understand,” I told him, voice thick, eyelids trembling. “You love her more.” It wasn’t about love, exactly, but I don’t know that yet.
“Don’t get me wrong, Cyn, you’re great,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, staring into my face. I gathered the nerve to look back at him, and he smiled. “I mean, we’ve had a lot of fun. And you’re totally better than Nikki, neck down.”
This phrase would haunt me for the rest of my dating life. I began to believe that the best I had to offer was sex and secrecy.
My mother knew exactly what she had to offer. I’d grown up watching her flirt with married men at work, at a small bus yard in a small town way out on the eastern end of Long Island. School bus moms often arrive with their children bundled and blinking in the chilly morning air; it’s easier to take their kids with them each day than to find a sitter willing to work from six to eight in the morning. I helped my mother tug my sister Tracy along; she was seven years younger than me, was actually my half-sister. Neither of our dads were around. It was usually just the three of us, and sometimes a man would show up in our lives, but never to stay.
We’d all get to the bus yard as the sun was coming up, bright red but still cool, damp gravel crunching underfoot, hands warmed by 7-Eleven coffee. Mom would set her cup down to go smoke one last cigarette before the route and I’d climb into the driver’s seat and play with the handle that opened and closed the doors, watching and waiting for her to return.
Most days, she took her cigarette over to the area where the mechanics were working. She liked to flirt with a man named Bob, a man she was secretly dating. Bob’s wife, a dispatcher at the yard, came to work at noon, so Mom would only flirt with Bob in the early morning shadows. We always had to avoid walking past the bus yard women, sipping from cardboard cups next to the dispatcher’s window in the garage. We’d take the long way over iced stone driveways rather than walk through that gaggle of gossip, the accusing eyes and sharp smiles. The women knew they couldn’t trust my mother, and they gave me the same glares, glares which were probably pity but which I interpreted as judging and hateful, felt that the women were projecting my mother’s sins onto me. These women didn’t trust either one of us. We didn’t trust them either.
Bob wasn’t the first. Years before there had been another mechanic, from a different bus yard, a warm, broad-shouldered bearded guy named Steve. I was about ten at the time, but I was Mom’s only confidant when it came to Steve, and later, the others. She would spill her deluge of secrets, giddy and conspiring, out of her desperate need to share with someone who wouldn’t judge her, someone who would be on her side when the women at work began to suspect, then turn against her.
By the time I had sex with Joey Stevens, I had already learned a number of recited and implied rules from my mother. She’d recount the details of her affairs while she put on her make-up in the morning, the only time of day when I had her undivided attention – or, rather, when she had mine. She didn’t wear much make-up, just a few neutral tones from CoverGirl’s Country Woods palette, dabs of which I would steal while she made coffee. With her baggy jeans and thrift store sweatshirts, she wasn’t often girly, so it was one of the few times I got to experience a mother-like thing that I’d later read about in memoirs and novels, sitting on the tub edge watching her swipe dark shadow in her creases, tap lighter shades on her brow-bone, taking a few careful minutes out of her frenzied morning to make sure that, when she saw Steve or Bob or some other mechanic, she would look pretty, enticing.
My mother was Steve’s first and, as far as we knew, his only affair. They were together for a few years. Steve was handsome, unlike most of the men my mother usually brought home. He looked like a man who I’d want to have as a father: large and friendly with cool long hair and big, calloused hands. What I liked most, though, was that he made my cynical, sarcastic mother twinkle somehow. The night he told her he loved her, she couldn’t stop talking about it, about him, about the things he said. With the other guys she usually only talked about sexual details, even while I was young: favorite positions, whether or not she came, how hard, how long, how many times. With Steve, I got to see her act like a schoolgirl. Almost innocent.
Eventually, his wife found out, and he and Mom had to break things off. She transferred to another bus yard and met Bob, older, intelligent, soft spoken. She still drove past Steve’s house sometimes, would call him and hang up when his wife answered. My mother would call me over the next few years and tell me, “I just ran into Steve at the 7-Eleven by his house, you know, I have to stop there sometimes because the ATM at the one by our place doesn’t always work and besides, his place is on my way home from the bar, and anyway he looks really great, he’s still doing well, he’s healthy…” Mom worried about Steve; he had bad headaches, and she couldn’t call him to check up on him, couldn’t arrange to meet with him, couldn’t run into him at work. She was cut out of his life completely. Well, almost completely. There was always 7-Eleven.
Steve got brain cancer a few years later. Mom freaked out. She couldn’t call him, couldn’t know how he was progressing, whether he was getting better or worse, couldn’t get any information except what she heard at the bus yard water cooler. The man she’d loved and known intimately for years was reduced to common gossip. A decade later, long after the bus yard and Bob and halfway into a new marriage, she got a phone call from Steve’s wife, Joan. Steve had died. Mom couldn’t go to the funeral, of course; a mistress has no place at the husband’s funeral, even my mother knows that. So this phone call was in no way an invitation, but a surprising courtesy, a courtesy that my mother didn’t deserve. I heard parts of their conversation and could feel Joan’s pain, her loss, her desperation to connect with the one other person who had felt for Steve the same way that she had. I’m not sure if Joan’s calm attitude arose from age and wisdom or pain and isolation, though I’m guessing it was the latter. I watched my mother’s face deconstruct, watched her hands wring her lighter in white-knuckled grief, unable to talk even to me, wanting only the comfort of another woman who had loved the same man.
After Joey, I was determined to never again be the other woman, and I avoided relationships through high school. But when I was twenty-two, I met a man named Brad in an amber-lit bar on Long Island. We were both heartbroken, but we made each other laugh. At first there was no shadow, no pretense, though that would all change in a few months when I ran from the east coast to Arkansas and Brad got a girlfriend named Mackenzie. Each time I went home to Long Island for Christmases and summers we would make out in the back of his Impala—a dark parking lot, an empty beach—and we made out for hours, sometimes with clothes, mostly without. We would grind and rub and kiss and moan like teenagers.
Brad became the person I went to first whenever my heart was broken and I needed comfort. He was never jealous, and always knew what I needed to hear: that I was smart, young, pretty, successful; all the things a father would say if I’d had one to run to when some boy hurt me, things no other man had ever said. Lacking that, though, I ran to Brad, the only man whose long-distance shoulder was always there for me to cry on. Well, not always. Only Monday through Friday, nine to five, when he was at work—away from Mackenzie’s watchful eye.
My mother’s dad was incapable of loving her, she often told me. I never knew him. He was a strict, stoic astronomy teacher, Austrian and German, distant and cold and devoutly Catholic. He was never affectionate towards her, only her sister Marian, who was his favorite. Mom learned to pilfer that attention, steal it in quiet, slow increments. When that stopped working, she acted out; negative attention was better than none. Eventually she went too far and got pregnant and he kicked her out and spoke only to Marian, who was still his favorite.
He died when Mom was sixteen. They hadn’t spoken in months. In the movie of my mother’s life, there would be a letter that he wrote before he died, or a speech he delivered to a nurse before his death. But neither of these exist. There is only my mother a decade later, listening to the radio in her shabby VW van, chain smoking cigarettes with tears streaming down her face, left with the absence of the man whose love she could never claim unless she stole it from her sister.
My mother was too broken and unaware to stitch herself together, let alone mend my torn seams and loose threads. I had my sister Tracy’s father, Joe, to turn to, but it was always borrowed time, shared time, because Tracy would glare and pout and wail whenever anybody else had Joe’s attention. My childhood flashes of father-time are limited: watching movies with him and Tracy, them cuddled on the couch, me on the living room floor; her sneer when they would leave me behind to go fishing, when he took her to baseball games and I stayed home with a book; me creeping into the basement to help him fold laundry, his quiet time, and I didn’t want to disturb him by talking so we would sit silent in the damp basement, dryer humming and hot, the sun trickling through wet lint that caught in our lungs. Mostly, though, my memories are of watching Mom and Joe fight, then watching him bolt, tires shooting gravel bullets, Tracy crying at the window, watching her father leave again, and again, and again. No wonder she didn’t want to share him. She barely got enough of him when he was around.
Like my mother, I’ve been stealing love from another woman my whole life.
After a couple of years in Arkansas, I went to live with my mother, who’d just bought a summer home in Myrtle Beach that I could stay in year-round. I started waiting tables at a restaurant surrounded by swamps, suffocated by heavy hot air that tasted wet and salty and smelled like rotting grass. Nick was a manager at the restaurant. He was twenty-six, just a couple of years older than me, and had just moved to Myrtle Beach like so many other Northeast men, after honeymooning there and falling for the warm beach, the breezy palms, the cheap rent. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, despite the ring that sat heavily on his left hand. Maybe even because of that ring. Maybe it was easier to be the mistress, no expectations, all fun and fling and ease.
We started flirting at work, shamelessly when no one was watching, cautiously when they were. He never talked about his wife. She was invisible to me, a ghost, and so it was easy to pretend she didn’t exist. It was easy for me to ignore the very idea of her. When I did think of her, she was the woman who judged my mother at the water-cooler, she was my wailing sister reclaiming her father, she was the monster, not me. This was her fault, not mine. It’s easy to make yourself the hero of your own story.
At first, when Nick would go home to his wife at night, it didn’t bother me. But then he began choosing her over me. She’s tired tonight—she wants me home and I’m sorry, we made these plans a week ago and I’ve gotta open in the morning, I can’t. I would lay awake and daydream about her finding out, about him trying to have sex with her but not being able to get it up, about him confessing that he just doesn’t love her anymore, or, my personal favorite, her leaving him for another man. Nice and clean that way.
One morning he woke up to find his wife, Stacy, clutching his cell phone, crying. “Who the Hell is ‘Cyn’?” she demanded.
He showed up at my place pale and shaking. He’d told her I was just some girl who’d come into the bar at work. There weren’t enough text messages to prove that it was something more; he’d convinced her that it was all flirtatious banter. “She wants to call you,” he said to me. I told him I could talk to her, I could handle it. Then he told me we were over, gave me a trembling kiss good-bye then left to go be with her. I sat quiet on the couch thinking how strange it is that the man you love might be the love of someone else’s life, someone you’ve never met.
I thought that if Nick’s wife and I were to meet we’d probably get along, be similar. If he loved the both of us, how different could we be? I’d had conversations with her in my head, mature conversations in which she said she understood how I’d fallen in love with him—after all, she’d fallen for him too. How could she blame another woman for seeing in Nick what she’d seen? I heard the long talks Mom would have with Steve’s wife, Joan.
When Stacy called, she told me I was a whore. I knew Nick was quivering next to her while she yelled at me. “I don’t care who the fuck you think you are. Nick is my husband. You need to stay away from him. I love him. He’s my husband. You’re just some stupid skank and you have no business trying to steal my man.”
I hated her thick Jersey accent, her nasal tone, her crude slang. I’d pictured her as someone I could be friends with, someone nice and easily hurt, someone I could see Nick loving the way he loved me. But now I was glad to find that she was strong enough for me to hate, and I was glad to find that I hated her instantly, powerfully. I was ashamed of Nick for marrying a woman like that. I thought he’d have better taste.
I muttered something that sounded like an apology. I’m not sure what I said. I let her call me a slut and a home-wrecker, absorbed the abuse knowing it would help her feel better. I owed her that much.
Months later I found out that Nick was leaving Stacy for another woman. He’d been sleeping with this third woman and me at the same time, lying to all of us—his mistress, his other mistress, and his wife. The other mistress wrote to me, asked me if anything ever happened between me and him because there had always been rumors and she knew the way rumors worked, knew that usually they were true. I’d been trained to keep quiet, to be loyal, to not succumb to being one of those petty women, those bad mistresses who threaten their men, blackmail them, spill all their secrets just because it ended, when being a mistress entails knowing it has to end, eventually. Being a mistress means keeping his secrets.
A year or so after Nick left me, I received a text from Brad: Just to let you know, so you don’t have to hear about it on Facebook. Mackenzie and I are engaged.
It was a message I’d been expecting for six years, but the news was still a deep, guttural blow. I pocketed my phone, told a friend of mine to cover my section at the restaurant, and walked across the street for a shot of Patron. The bartender knew me, knew my drink; it was poured by the time I hit the counter. I shot it, bit hard into a lime, walked slow into the bathroom, and burst into tears.
There in the bathroom I thought about the last time I’d seen him, only a year before but so recent in my mind that I could feel that warm voice and slow smile, could see him as he sauntered up the drive, hugged me, said, “You still smell the same.” He said this to me every time I saw him. This time, he buried his hands in my hair, lifted it off my neck, and kissed my collarbone, my shoulder. I smiled at him and asked if he wanted to go for a walk, because I was staying with a friend, and I couldn’t invite him inside. I didn’t ask about Mackenzie, and he didn’t talk about her. We walked down to the beach. He told me how good I looked; I told him the same. We talked about the water, the seagulls, the sand, and then he was kissing me, circling my body with his arms, picking me up and laying me on the gritty pebbles, sea foam pressing through my dress.
Corrida de Toros
My father’s used Town Car was riding on a spare tire, leaning hard to the left as we drove across a bridge into Mexico over the muddy waters of the Rio Grande. It hadn’t rained in weeks, the river looked low, and dust rolled from behind the car as we drove down a border road. I heard the car lighter pop, then my father pulling it from the dash, and I knew he was pressing the red-hot coils against the end of his Winston. He took a drag from his cigarette, filled the inside of the car in a cloud of smoke, and said, “Welcome to Juarez.”
He wasn’t saying this to his wife, Christie, sitting next to him, or to her son, Danny, sitting behind him, but to me. I didn’t say anything. I was looking over my shoulder through the rear window, thinking of how my mother had warned me just days before not to cross the border with my father. My parents separated five years earlier when I was seven, divorced when I was eight, remarried other people when I was nine, and my father moved from Ohio to El Paso a year before now, starting over again with a new family. My mother found out that my father was moving the same day I did, when she dropped me off for my regular visitation at his house one weekend, and an Atlas Moving van was blocking the driveway. Now I was twelve, and after years of wrangling over the conditions of my custody, my mother was convinced that my father intended to take me across the border someday, beyond her reach and the reach of the American legal system. Her fear seemed irrational, but then again, there we were—across the border, beyond her reach.
The bank sign back in El Paso had read a quarter to four and 102 degrees, but my father told me this was a “dry heat,” which I took to mean more tolerable. The forecast called for a slight chance of rain, but so far this afternoon all it had been was hot. The wind was picking up though, and clouds slid across the sky, daubing indigo in white billows as they slipped over the peaks of the Franklin Mountains that divide East and West El Paso.
My father rolled the windows down, letting the cigarette smoke out and the summer heat in, and I could taste the dust rising from the road to meet us. The car’s A/C struggled to compete with the outside air as we passed by a blur of buildings. Dentista. Farmacia. Taquería. As we got deeper into the city, traffic started to bottleneck, slowing us to a crawl. My father looked at his watch, drummed the top of the steering wheel with his thumbs, then turned on the radio. He scanned through static until he hit a station that promised Menos conversación, más música, and a lively mariachi song spilled from the speakers.
After a minute or two of sitting bumper-to-bumper, my father cut the wheel, taking a left down a pot-holed and rutted side street, and I worried about a flat tire. What then? Maybe my mother was right. I trusted my father, but maybe crossing the border was a bad idea.
My father smoked the Winston down to the filter, snuffed it in the ashtray, then craned his head to look at me in the rearview mirror. “This isn’t Cancun or Cabo,” he said as we passed through a graffiti-tagged barrio with barred windows, crumbling stucco, and chipped terra cotta tiled roofs. “This is the real Mexico.”
It was my first time there, and my father wanted to immerse me in the culture. He said he wanted to show me the glass blowers at Casa Mendoza Artesanías, eat dinner at El Presidente, maybe gamble a little and watch the greyhounds run. But first, we were headed to the Plaza de Toros to watch a bullfight.
Christie pressed her palm against an A/C vent, lowered the thermostat as far as it would go, then fanned herself with the Rand McNally. My father took the hint and rolled up the windows. A block or two later, Christie said, in her overly proper London accent, “I need to use the loo.” When Christie and my father first met, she was living in Madrid, recently divorced from Danny’s father, a native Spaniard, but, as my father once said, “She was born and raised a scone’s throw from the Thames.” Christie stabbed at the radio, stopping the mariachi music mid-song. “Did you hear me, Adrian?” she said to my father.
“Where do you want me to pull over?” he said, gesturing through the windshield as we passed vacant lots overgrown with salt cedars and sagebrush, and homes where laundry hung from lines, flapping in the wind. But then he saw a corner store ahead with hand-painted signs advertising hielo,cerveza, licores, cigarrillos, and botanas. There was a baño located at the back of the building. “How ’bout here?”
A gust of wind blew, stirring dirt to life and a tiny dust devil danced across the parking lot, whisking up debris and trash in its path. Christie looked at the sagging cinderblock building, at the cracked window covered in tape, and the cobwebbed neon signs.
“Are you trying to wind me up?” she said, “I’m not going in there.”
My father shrugged. “Then you’ll have to wait ’til we get to the bullfight,” he said, pulling back onto the road.
Christie thumbed through the atlas, stopping on a dog-eared page. “Do you even know where you’re going?”
“Of course,” my father said, poking a finger somewhere below the dotted Texas-Mexico border, but never looking down at the map. “We’re almost there.”
My father knows the way, I reassured myself. He had been to Juarez several times. He used to live in El Paso before now with his third wife, Giuliana, and their two boys. El Paso was also where my father met Louise, my mother, who had a son of her own from her first marriage. In fact, it was my father’s history with this area that made my mother so leery. She was aware of things I didn’t know yet, like how my father sued Giuliana over the terms of child support and alimony after they divorced. He cited jurisdictional issues because she and her sons had moved to Manassas while my father was still living in El Paso. It became a landmark case, making it all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court.
A little more than a decade later, here he was again, my father, moving west and starting over. My mother was suspicious of everything he did, wary of repeated patterns, but my parents didn’t argue anymore. They hardly even spoke.
When we got to the Plaza de Toros, Christie found the bathroom while Danny and I went with my father to buy tickets and drinks, a couple Tecate beers for him and Christie, Cokes for Danny and me. As I watched my father thread his way through the crowd toward the bathrooms to join up with Christie, I was struck by how much the plaza reminded me of being at Riverfront Stadium waiting to watch the Cincinnati Reds play. My father and I used to go to baseball games every summer, even after my parents divorced, a constant that I found comforting. We also played catch from time to time, my father often crouching in a catcher’s squat, punching the inside of his mitt, and saying something like, “Give it the ol’ pepper, kiddo.” But that hadn’t happened for quite a while. After my father moved to El Paso, I would play baseball with other kids in the neighborhood, but even when their older brothers or fathers joined in, we still never had enough players for two teams. So it was common for someone like me to hit a double and yell, “Ghost man on second,” a placeholder for the person who wasn’t there.
I lost sight of my father in the plaza for a moment and stood on tiptoes straining to see over the crowd. Then I found him waving to Danny and me to follow him and Christie in the direction of an arrow that pointed toward the entrance. By the time we found our seats, it was nearly 5:00 p.m., but the open concrete stadium was still sun-scorched and I was thankful my father paid extra for tickets stamped sombra, so we could sit in the shade. The plaza was perfectly round with concentric rows of seats that descended to the dirt ring below, where I could see the fight had already begun.
I would find out later that bullfights are divided into three stages, and that I was watching the last one, the tercio de muerte or “death third.” The bull, slick with blood and sweat, had already been speared with lances held by horsemen, and skewered in the shoulders with barbed banderillas that bobbed up-and-down as he trotted around the arena, looking for a way out. At first, there was a cartoonish quality to this image, and it didn’t fully register what I was looking at. The music, amplifying through the loudspeakers, sounded almost carnival-like, and the banderillas were fringed in festive colored tissue paper, so the bull almost looked like a piñata.
The soundtrack changed to more dramatic music, and a matador entered the arena to a round of applause. He was dressed in green and embroidered gold that twinkled in the sunlight as he took exaggerated strides to the center of the ring and bowed to the crowd. Danny is from Madrid, and bullfighting is Spain’s national pastime, so he watched this like I did the Reds. He was smiling and clapping as though Mario Soto had just taken the mound, throwing warm-up heat to Johnny Bench. After the crowd quieted, Danny leaned over to me. “If he does a good job,” he whispered, “he gets to cut off the bull’s ears to keep.”
I felt the Coke sour in my stomach as I watched the matador unfurl his red cape and shimmy the sateen cloth. The bull was already tired, breathing heavily, and wobbling on unsteady legs. Snot and saliva streamed from the end of the animal’s snout, puddling near his hooves in the dirt. But when the matador squared up to face him, the bull, as if on cue, pawed at the ground, stirring the dust around him. Then the bull lowered his head and charged, narrowly missing the matador, to a chorus of “Olés!” from the crowd.
Vendors walked up and down the aisles, offering seat cushions for rent, flowers for sale, andcerveza fría, but when Christie saw one holding a corrugated cardboard box with the wordsPapas Fritas written in red, she elbowed my father and said, “I’m hungry.” My father bought a bag and Christie and Danny shared the fries as they watched the bull circle back for another pass at the matador.
A gust whipped across the plaza, snatching a man’s sombrero from his head, cartwheeling it across the dirt ring, and the matador shielded himself with his cape for a moment, waiting for it to die down. When the wind quieted, the plaza looked fogged in an opaque haze. The matador wiped his eyes and walked within inches of the bull’s horns. He shuffled his feet in the dirt to the rhythm of the music that echoed throughout the plaza, dancing a silly jig to a smattering of laughter in the crowd. Danny giggled as well, then looked over at my father who smiled back and reached over to tousle his hair like dads sometimes do to their sons.
Done with teasing the bull, done with his dance, the matador turned his back on him and walked away, apparently unafraid of being gored or trampled under his cloven hooves. Then the music stopped, the crowd quieted, and the matador turned to face the bull again. “This is it,” Danny said, edging to the end of his seat.
The matador stood tall and drew his sword just below his chin, aiming at an area between the bull’s shoulder blades. He ran toward the animal, thrusting the sword forward and into its flesh, hitting nothing but bone. The crowd groaned as they watched the sword get stuck for a moment, then drop to the dirt. The bull stumbled, falling to his haunches, but stood back up. The matador picked up the sword from the arena floor, and without cleaning its blade, tried again. He missed the mark a second time, then a third. It was like Soto suddenly couldn’t find the strike zone. Some in the crowd were angry and protested, throwing their rented seat cushions, and a small hail storm of pillows tumbled into the arena. Others, like Danny, seemed more understanding, blaming the matador’s failures on the windy conditions, the sand in his eyes. The crowd didn’t calm until the matador’s fourth attempt when he hit the spot, plunging the sword into the bull all the way to the hilt.
The bull was already dead but didn’t know it. He lowered his head for one last charge, took a couple steps, and collapsed in a cloud of dust. Nearly everyone stood and applauded, including Christie and Danny, nearly everyone except my father and me. Danny tapped Christie on the shoulder. “I want to go down there,” he said, pointing to the people gathering ringside to throw flowers, and hoping for the chance to shake the matador’s hand.
“We’ll be right back,” Christie said to my father as she and Danny shuffled past him, taking the steps by twos down to the ring.
I looked over at my father, sitting three seats to my right, as he cupped his hands around the end of a Winston, shielding his lighter’s flame from the wind. “Well, what’d you think?” he said, looking down at the arena, at the dead bull slumped in the dirt.
“Mom told me not to come to Mexico with you,” I said, looking down at my feet. “She said you’d take me across the border and never come back.”
“Is she nuts?” he said. He shook his head, laughed a little at the thought, then flicked cigarette ash into his empty Tecate can. “I would never do that.”
I should have been relieved, but instead I felt a slight sting, unwanted in some way. It was the same sting I’d felt the day before when my father picked me up from the airport, the first time I’d seen him since the day he left Ohio, nearly a year before. I wondered where I fit into his life, into his new family. “I know,” I said, clearing my throat. “That’s what I told her.”
The wind gusted and dirt rose in the swell, clouding the plaza again in dust and debris. The wind ebbed and flowed, pushing forward, then receding, quieting back down to a breeze. My father looked off into the distance and I followed his gaze to the skyline. We were facing north and we could see the ridge of the Franklins peaking over the rim of the plaza. In the distance a silver curtain of rain fell from the clouds, but it never hit the ground.
“It’s called virga,” my father said, “A dry rain.” He leaned toward me and pointed skyward. “It’s evaporating before it hits land.”
I looked at the swollen clouds, at rain only willing to meet the ground halfway, then down to the arena where the dust was still unsettled. A breeze swept across the plaza as my father took another drag, and the smoke wafted away. He stared at his cigarette for a moment, lost in a thought, before dropping it into the Tecate can. Then he slid down the concrete bench, closing the distance between us.
Halloween Glossary, D-H
DEATH
Halloween is a celebration of death, of dead things and things that kill—vampires and werewolves and zombies—but also a time of literal death, first the leaves and the grass and the millions of mosquitoes and the creatures that feed on the mosquitoes, then the end of the hopes one always pins to summer, the plans to get organized, to spend a romantic weekend in Cape Cod, to finally finish that novel manuscript, to get that scuba diving certification, to go on a safari and watch a lioness as she stalks an antelope. Also the time of year when my dog died, when I took two elderly Welsh Corgis to the local groomer in preparation for a pumpkin carving party and then returned from the groomer with two elderly Welsh Corgis, but Otis, the tri-color, the one with the little patches of brown fur like eyebrows, which invited us to attribute all sorts of human characteristics—empathy and understanding and high-level cognitive skills—was quietly suffering from a ruptured spleen. I didn’t know the spleen was ruptured then, and I ignored his abnormal behavior when he wobbled across the room wheezing and flumped in front of me with the force of a sandbag dropped from the ceiling; I patted him on the head and then left to drink beer with my friends in the city. While I was out, my wife returned home from work and called to tell me Otis wasn’t standing and could barely breathe. My wife—a nurse, normally calm and rational and never panicked (see also: PANIC ROOM PROCEDURES)—was sobbing and I knew that the dog was dying, had been dying in front of me, that his flumping was a cry for help, that the other dog was at home watching him die and was incapable of understanding why she would never see Otis again, and so, four beers deep, I drove to meet them at the animal hospital, speeding at ninety, ninety-five, checking my phone at the same time for directions, and knowing I was endangering others’ lives, hoping only to arrive in time to see the dog one last time and to be with my wife who had grown up with this dog and who had made many unbreakable associations between the dog and her own long-deceased mother, and I remember thinking: I hope if I get pulled over, the cop is a dog-lover. I remember thinking: I hope he understands.
DEPRESSION
The defining emotion of my youth, the relentless anxiety, the certainty that I was not good enough, the guilt for feeling depressed when I knew, compared to most people throughout world history, I had no right to feel depressed, and in fact had more comfort and luxury and entertainment and safety than anyone has a right to dream of, and still, day to day, there was the creeping dread. Every teenager feels it a little bit, the dread, but I fetishized sadness, sometimes sharpied angry words on my arms—I didn’t have the conviction to be a cutter, but I wanted people to know I was tormented—and I entertained sexual fantasies that began with me overwhelmed by the world and addicted to opium and meeting girls who were intrigued by my worldly ennui and my flimsy grasp of existentialist philosophy. It’s possible I played at being depressed and dark and moody for so long that my personality changed permanently, the psychological equivalent of making a funny face and having it stick that way. It’s also possible there’s just something fucked in the chemistry of my brain, and I was born with a predisposition toward pessimism and self-doubt and isolated misery. I have an inherent appreciation, therefore, of Halloween and its contrived gloominess, my general objections to all mass-produced commoditized holidays, with their kitschiness and costumes and manufactured traditions, notwithstanding.
DESTRO
A villain in the G.I. Joe universe, an arms dealer who wears a steel mask. Responsible, presumably, for the deaths of thousands of innocents. A costume I wore for four consecutive Halloweens until my mother told me it was time to move on to something “a little more fun.” (see also: COSTUMES)
EGG
What you do when you want to fit in with the cool kids and don’t think you have anything else to offer besides the willingness to engage in so-called mischief on so-called Mischief Night (see also: UNPOPULARITY, Solutions To). You collectively bombard the first house, but run away so fast and with such an adrenaline rush that you can’t hear the impacts of egg on vinyl siding over the thumping of your heart, so at the next house you force yourself to wait, peeking over the hood of a parked car to see the homeowner, a tired-looking man in v-neck undershirt and sweatpants, standing in his front yard, suddenly spinning in hopes of catching a glimpse of the god damn teens who did this to his house, and you’re afraid but it’s a safe kind of fear, like being on a rollercoaster, because you all know, and he probably knows, that there’s nothing he can do: he’s too old and fat and slow to catch you and even if he does somehow catch you, what’s he going to do? Beat all of you up? He walks turns his back and retreats toward his house, all slumped shoulders, and then you hurl one more egg, which incites your friends to unload the rest of the arsenal on him; for weeks afterward you will laugh about the daring of your mischief, and only a decade later, when your own house gets egged, will you consider that moment from the homeowner’s perspective. Only at that moment do you understand that you and your friends were responsible not just for ruining that man’s night, but for acting as a cruel reminder that his day had passed, that he was beaten and, whatever exuberance and hopes and dreams he’d once had, they’d been abandoned one by one over the years until eventually all he had left was his house and his dignity and then he was egged—egged!—by some shitty kids who thought of him only as a prop in the low-stakes play of their lives.
EVERYONE I LOVE IS DEAD
A song by the gothic metal band Type O Negative, who called themselves “The Drab Four” and whose catalogue is filled with titles like We Hate Everyone, Bloody Kisses, and Halloween in Heaven. A band I took very seriously in high school and college, in the way all myopic and depressed teens take their music very seriously. I wore mostly black clothes then, and assumed a disproportionate amount of pride in the fact that I’d been to and survived the pits at metal concerts headlined by groups with names like Fear Factory and Hatebreed. While some of the bands I loved then were deeply sincere in their anger and alienation, it took me a disappointingly long time to recognize that Type O Negative’s image was performed sadness, that brooding lead singer Peter Steele was just playing a character. The misery was all external. The band was self-aware and dark and funny, but I wasn’t in on the joke. Without the sense of humor, the performance is almost unbearable.
FAT
Halloween is the start of a massive cultural weight gain that continues until the last stale Christmas cookie has been stuffed into bloated cheeks, and then suddenly there are New Year’s Resolutions about weight loss and love handles and bikini bodies, and with each passing year this pendulous bodyshaping routine becomes codified as tradition rather than the reckless support of a sick economic system that cannot function if people reach anything like contentment. I don’t like giving candy to fat children on Halloween, because I was a fat child and am intimately familiar with the shame cycle of binge eating, and I know some of these children are going to go home with their pillowcases full of chocolate and eat until they’re sick—maybe they’ll even be encouraged by parents because it’s a special day—and then the next time they see their peers they will be acutely aware of only one thing: they are different, they are less valuable, they do not belong, which either leads to a few days of frenzied workouts or instead more binge eating and so on. It seems cruel to indoctrinate children into this system so early, but still on Halloween I’m at the door with a bowl full of treats, handing them to obese children, who immediately appraise the quality of the candy because not only is there an expectation of free food but also that the food will be up to a certain standard, but I opt for healthy treats—pretzels, fruit snacks, the lesser of evils. Still, I give the food away because it’s in the social contract and I know parents on the block expect me to give candy to their children. I also know that if I don’t pay the Halloween tax, then local teens—in their half-assed costumes, their smirky self-confidence itself a mask—will egg my house.
FRED
My father-in-law, a surrogate father to me in the decade since my own father’s death (see also: APPENDIX II, “Index of Dead Relatives”) and also the central figure in my wife’s life. A man who represents for me the possibilities of all that can be good in the world, who is more generous with his time and energy than anyone I know, who likes people, and who, unlike me, can effortlessly see the good in them even while they’re doing terrible things (see also: CANDY, That Time Some Older Kids Stole Mine). Fred has often said that he would give up every other holiday if he got to keep Halloween and the family’s annual pumpkin carving party, which has evolved over fifteen years from a small, three person affair to a forty-person blowout at with an octuple-batch of homemade chili and a few gallons of wine and five cases of beer and a full month of pumpkin stockpiling. The ritual of preparation—Fred joining me and my wife the night before to chop onions and peppers and simmer the chili on medium-low heat and set out pumpkin carving tools and so on—is hard work but also one of the most important traditions in our family. The party itself is great fun, although I tend to annoy my wife by drinking too much and talking too loudly. It’s the one time each year when we’re able to gather almost all the important people in our lives, unless there’s a wedding or funeral to attend. The annual group photo both promises stability and denies it. Roughly the same crew is there every year, but there are always minor changes: new spouses, new children, new plus-ones, people aging, gaining weight and losing it, hair graying and creases forming around our eyes, ex-spouses disappearing, broken friendships and deaths. This year, uninvited, but still attending, there is a tumor. There is always a tumor somewhere, even if you’re not yet aware of it. If you manage to live long enough, you get a malignancy to call your own, to nourish against your will, to name and to hate. This year, Fred has a tumor in his breast, still growing, and his surgery is scheduled for only four days before the party, so he may end up missing out on the one day he would trade for all other days.
GHOSTS
Your past and future selves haunting you as reminders of the mistakes you’ve made and warnings about the ones you will eventually make. The fear comes not from rattling chains and flickering lights and creaking floorboards but rather from the moment you come into contact with a vision of who you actually are. The contrast between your invented self and your material being. One of you exists and the other does not.
GRISLY GOTHIC GABLES
A haunted house where I worked when I was thirteen years old, my first actual job, which I took because all of the cool guys in my eighth grade class were working there, and I’d concocted an elaborate fantasy that this would result in me meeting girls and talking to girls and eventually kissing a girl. My first assignment was a spotlight gig that I got for reasons I don’t understand, maybe I volunteered or maybe, I wanted to believe, the manager at Grisly Gothic Gables saw something special in me that warranted such an important responsibility. At the end of the tour, when each group thought they’d safely escaped the haunted house and let their guard down, my job was to plow through a collapsible wall dressed like Leatherface and charge them, screaming, chasing them away from the house, reminding them there is no such thing as safety and security, and no matter how many precautions you’ve taken, there’s ultimately nothing you can do to protect yourself from a lone madman. The sound of the wall crashing against the ground startled them, but after that I was not a good pursuer, was too afraid to unleash the requisite horrifying scream, because a scream like that requires levels of honesty I was not yet capable of achieving. The lack of conviction drew laughter from one group of high school girls, which shamed me in the way only the laughter of high school girls can, and even though my face was covered with a mask, I wanted to hide and never be seen again. After several subsequent failures, I was demoted, then demoted again, until I was wearing a zombie costume and standing inside a haunted jail cell with a half-dozen other zombies who couldn’t hack it anywhere else—as if the thing that would make jail scary is the presence of zombies and not the fact of imprisonment itself. When a group of cool-seeming guys strutted through, and we were rattling the cell bars, I made eye contact with one of them, who laughed and then, through the bars, punched me right in the face.
HELL
(see: OTHER PEOPLE)
HORROR
When my cousin—thirteen years younger than me—learned I self-identify as a writer, he asked me to write him a scary story. Which I said I would, because I tend to make promises I cannot keep. I forgot about this promise until a few months later when his mother, my aunt, asked for the story. Just a few more weeks, I told her. Give me a few more weeks. She gave me those weeks and then a few more and then he graduated from elementary school. I said then that his gift would be the scary story, but still I never wrote anything. The thing I couldn’t figure out: what could I write that was age-appropriate and still actually scary to a fourteen year old? I thought of the classic horror films, the ones that had knifed through my cynicism and terrified me—Amityville Horror and The Shining especially—but I couldn’t replicate those even if I tried. He’s older now and just started college, still periodically reminds me of the promised story, and I realize now the problem is I was caught up thinking about ghouls and goblins instead of allowing myself to face the true horrors of the world, which prevented me from writing an honest scary story, and now, finally, after years of empty promises, I have for my cousin the scariest story I can write:
The universe is larger than anything you could ever conceive and you’re smaller than you’ve ever conceived, and so the universe is indifferent to you at best and openly hostile at worst. You are bad for the Earth—we all are, the planet is much better off without us here, it would exist regardless. We are an inconvenience, a wound that needs healing, a scab the planet wants to pick, and this is why monsters exist; they are nature’s antibodies designed to eradicate the illness by destroying us. Monsters aren’t the stuff you read in stories, the furry beasts hiding in your closet at night. The monsters are in plain sight: they are the high school senior who torments you during your freshman year, making you get on your knees in the cafeteria and bark like a dog in front of everyone; the friend who tries, the moment you leave the room, to steal your girlfriend, who you weren’t planning to marry or anything but come on; the people who you will love but who will reject your love and who will later with their friends laugh at how pitiful you looked when you exposed your soul to them; the once-beloved uncle who creeps into your bed at night and presses against you, whispering that you’d better be silent or your parents will hate you forever; the neighbor who seems nice enough but as a young man committed wartime atrocities, which memories he tries to suppress with a combination of prescription painkillers and cheap vodka; the anonymous strangers on the internet who, in a matter of seconds, can destroy your identity and everything about your carefully curated life; frightened men with guns and no other options; the strangers who wouldn’t even help you if they saw you being pummeled in the middle of the street by a gang of idiot teenagers; gangs of idiot teenagers, who exist only to create mayhem and to record themselves creating mayhem so they can post videos of mayhem-creation on the internet; the governors and congressmen who hold you in contempt and don’t even pretend not to be robbing you; the world powers stacking nuclear weapons on top of one another and using their stockpiles as obvious surrogates for their penises. True horror occurs the moment you acknowledge your own helplessness and allow this newfound self-awareness to cripple you. The world itself is a nightmare from which you cannot wake, and, over time, you become increasingly aware of the monsters who surround you, are forced to recognize that life itself is a series of almost unendurable terrors that we’re conditioned to endure because what other choice do we have?
On Needing
During a recent summer I took up the habit of taking my dog on hour-long strolls around my city, New Orleans. I was fighting the kind of depression that makes you contemplate your existence, and I suspected that my angry, anxious terrier mix, Buddy, might need the release of a long walk as well. Not wanting to be alone with my sad little mind for too long, I typically wore headphones on the walk and zoned out into a podcast or music, not really paying attention to my surroundings.
One afternoon as Buddy and I passed a po’ boy joint on our way to Bayou St. John, I noticed a tall, bone-thin old man standing in the middle of the sidewalk and swinging a cane back and forth into the empty air in front of him. He was wearing sunglasses. He didn’t seem to me to be lost or searching. He was just waving that cane. As we got closer I pulled Buddy to the grass and tried to pass the blind man without him hearing us. The podcast I was listening to was a man telling of the time he was shipwrecked on an island. He volunteered to walk twenty-five miles with little food or water, to try to get help for his friends and himself. The man had decided to go on a sailing trip in the first place to help him come to terms with his alcoholism and the death of a friend who overdosed. The story was just reaching its climax. The man had been forced to drink his own urine, and he didn’t know if he would make it out of the situation alive. He was gaining clarity about the waste he had made of his life. I didn’t want to be stopped by the cane-swinging man; I wanted to cruise wide around him, avoid being stranded with him. But I was wearing my keys on a lanyard around my neck and their jingling gave our presence away.
“Hey,” I could hear the man shout over the din of my ear buds. “Hey, I need help!”
I stopped. I pulled my ear buds out and turned to look back at the man, who, though obviously blind, was staring hard and determined in my direction. Another man, a construction worker, hurried up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He didn’t even glance over at us. I considered ignoring the blind man. Considered walking on, leaving him. And I hate to admit this; I also considered he might be running some sort of con. He was just going to try to mug me or get money out of me somehow. This was New Orleans. This was America. Strangers asking for help are only looking for trouble. I began to step away and leave him.
He heard my keys jingle again as I pulled Buddy along.
“Aw, no. You just gonna walk away from me? I’m blind! Help Me. Which way to the Street car? Ma’am!”
I stopped myself again and reluctantly shouted over my shoulder, “It’s left!”
“What’s that you said?” The man pleaded. “Where?”
I turned around and stupidly pointed to the left, where the streetcar ran two blocks away. It was like that time George W. Bush waved at Stevie Wonder. “It’s left!”
“Ma’am!” the man yelled. “I’m blind! I don’t know no left! Help me there!”
I sighed. I was being an idiot. Why did I want to avoid this man so profusely? I walked back to him. My angry little dog barked and growled as we shuffled to the man who was still arching his cane in front of him. He jumped back at the sound of the barking, but then he settled. He stopped waving the cane and stared down at the sidewalk to where Buddy’s growl emanated.
“Aw, you got a dog, ma’am? I ain’t afraid of no dog. Hush that barking now. Dogs feed off your vibes. I ain’t scared of no dog.”
Buddy inexplicably stopped his noise. He does not typically stop barking when he perceives danger real or otherwise. He’s one of those dogs. He distrusts abandoned plastic bags blowing toward him with the same ferocity as he distrusts large men. But then, there he was walking with me silently, ears tucked back, toward a strange stick-wielding man.
I placed my hand on the man’s unexpectedly muscular right arm. I was flustered by this change of plans. Because I had been facing him, the street car was to my left. Now I was touching his right arm. “The street car is that way,” I said. “Toward this arm. Left. Just up the sidewalk. Two blocks.”
“Ma’am!” he scolded. “You touching my right arm! You said the street car was left. Just take me there! Can’t you just walk a man to the street car?”
“No.” I said, “You’re fine. Just go up the sidewalk that way.” I touched his arm again. I didn’t want to interrupt my walk. I wanted to know what happened to the man on my podcast. He was still walking the island.
“Ma’am, please. Come on? Just guide me that way!”
I sighed. I agreed. I was still scared there was a con afoot even though it was obvious the man really was blind. I knew a better person would have already walked the man to her car and driven him where he needed to go. I stood beside him and he placed his hand on my elbow, then he let go and replaced it heavily on my shoulder. He felt strong, solid. We began to awkwardly shuffle—the man, my dog and I—toward Canal Street.
“Thank you so much, ma’am. Thank you so much. I’ve been blind for thirteen years, but I see with the Lord. I ain’t worried. I’m blessed. You know what I’m saying? You got to trust the Lord. You are an angel that came walking along.”
I laughed at that. I said it was no problem. An angel would not have hemmed and hawed and tried to point a blind man in the right direction. But then, maybe she would. My guardian angel is probably a goofy-ass airhead, getting drunk, and stumbling around after me wondering why the fuck I’m sad all the time. Happiness is right over there, Silly! Get out of your head and go grab it.
We walked by a little neighborhood restaurant with tables bordering the sidewalk and potted plants hanging from the eaves. The man heard customers talking and the clinking of silverware against plates.
“This is Katie’s right?” he said. “I live right around here. I been walking in a circle for God knows how long.” He had sweat beading on his dark forehead. “It’s alright. I see it as exercise.”
We walked past the tables and I knew the three of us were a sight tripping down the cramped sidewalk navigating the chairs and oversized potted plants. The more we weaved, the more heavily the man pressed on my shoulder. I had to let him go at one point because the tables took up so much space on the sidewalk and I needed to get in front of him for us all to fit without bumping into the gawking patrons. I ducked under a hanging fern and didn’t think to warn him about it.
“Ow! God!” he said. “Got shit swinging at my head.”
I apologized and resumed my place next to him. I placed his arm back on my shoulder.
He rubbed his head. “Ah, don’t worry about it. What’s your name?”
“Erin.”
“Win?”
“Erin.”
“Oh, Erin. Like Aaron Neville?”
“Yep, just like that,” I replied.
“But you a woman right?”
“Yep.”
“I used to work at Tipitina’s in the seventies. A bouncer. Well, doorman. I don’t like the word bouncer. I was there when Aaron won that Grammy. That my boy, Aaron Neville.”
Then the man began to sing. His voice was sweet. Smooth and pleading. “Look at this
man so blessed with inspiration. Look at this soul still searching for salvation. I don’t know much, but I know I love you.”
I found myself giggling. I liked this man. I realized I didn’t know his name, but I didn’t want to ask him for it. I’m not sure why. What an asshole I was for trying to leave him stranded.
We reached Canal and crossed to the neutral ground where the streetcar runs. A car was rattling along just as we got there, but because we weren’t ten feet over at the designated stop, the conductor passed us, even as the man waved his arms at the hissing sound of the car’s wheels on metal tracks.
“That lady drove right by us? It was a lady wasn’t it?” he asked as the streetcar, which was, in fact, driven by a woman, lumbered along, ignoring his waving arms. “Yeah, I’ll remember that,” he said.
“Here,” I said. “Let’s go to the bench.” I lined him up next to the tracks facing in the right direction.
“Thank you so much ma’am. You got me headed toward the river, right? Hey, what color my shirt?”
“Yes, you’re going to the river. It’s white.”
“What’s it say on it?”
“Bienville Book Fair.”
The man smiled and nodded. Then he reached in his back pocket and pulled out a stack of cards. He had a Medicaid card and some forms of Identification. I didn’t think to look for his name on the cards.
“Ma’am, which of these my Medicaid card?”
I pulled the right one out of the stack and put it in his other hand.
“Alright. Thank you, ma’am. Thank you so much.”
Then he grabbed my hands in his, bowed his head, and recited the entire Lord’s Prayer in a fast blur: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
I’ve heard the words of that prayer hundreds of times and they’ve never meant much to me. They were empty phrases I was supposed to mumble along with because all the old people in the pews were. And now I wasn’t struck with some great epiphany or religious awakening, but the words did have a meaning for me. They connected me to this man. Made me forget myself for a few moments.
I told the man it was no problem. To have a great weekend. Nothing I said sounded sufficient enough.
“You’re a good woman. An angel. God bless,” he said.
“Bless you too.” I meant it.
Buddy and I crossed the street back toward home as the man shouted his thanks one last time. I didn’t feel we deserved it. But I was happy I’d changed my course.
A few days later I put the podcast back on. The man stranded on the island ended up being rescued minutes after he drank his own urine by a group of scientists who happened to be on the beach studying sea turtles. The way the shipwrecked man deadpanned the story in his gravelly whiskey burned voice, this was a funny moment. Seconds before he’d had us thinking he would die. Then suddenly, after drinking one of the worst things a human wants to drink, nerdy researchers stroll up to save his life. If they hadn’t, surely would have died there on the shore. Sometimes people just cross our paths. I wasn’t plucked from depression ready to return to the world with new found clarity, like the man in the story. But I did realize that simply being here, no matter what our condition, is sometimes enough.
Glass House: The First Moment of Her Leaving
Northern Mariana Islands, 1970
My mother, seventeen, perfumes herself against malevolent spirits. Dabs the scent on her wrists and neck. Everyone in the house is asleep. Her four sisters in the sagging bed behind her, their hair knotted over the pillows like seaweed. The night is warm, moist. The sisters have kicked off the thin sheets. In the bed together, they are heavy-limbed and pale. My mother is the smallest, the darkest. She tiptoes over her three brothers lying, fully clothed, on the floor. She can hear the gentle snoring of her parents coming from the other room. At this time of night, there are no cars bumping down the uneven roads, only the immediate noise of her family, then far off the sound of surf, a dog howling, coconuts falling on the tin roofs.
The sand path to the beach is empty. There is no danger of being caught; most of the island falls asleep before midnight, but still she looks occasionally over her shoulder and hurriedly makes the sign of the cross.
At this hour the tide is low, the ocean peeled back to the reefs a mile out. The smell of brown algae dried from the sun stinks up the wind. Bare feet pick their way through the scurrying hermit crabs.
My mother, a girl in a pink school uniform, does not notice the moon drifting like a buoy in the dark water. She has no ear for surf dashing the reef. She sits instead, facing inland, on the cool sand with her dry arms hooked around her legs. Rolls and smokes four cigarettes, tucks the burnt ends inside crab holes. She waits.
Inside the glass house, lights pop on. One by one. The glow falls onto the beach and tugs at the shadows. My father enters, still young. His wife follows, pale faced, hair the color of wheat swinging down to her hips. On the beach, my mother lets down her own hair, tugs at the ends, dry as grass. Music leaks from the seams in the glass. By now, she has learned all the songs and so she half-sings the lyrics under her breath. The beach is dark, and the water and the sky are dark. The house is lit up from the inside like a shop window. Or else, like a movie screen.
Inside the house, my father and the woman move through the rooms, they smoke a joint and my mother imagines she can smell it. The two inside climb the curving staircase, which will in my mother’s memory build until it winds up at least three levels and in some of her memories even further, in some the staircase keeps going and has no top. On the amber wall behind them, my father’s shadow stretches long over his wife’s. The blond woman says something to him, a scrap of talk thrown over her shoulder.
My mother is seventeen, catching her breath as he pushes the woman up against the clear wall, leaning in hard for a kiss. She holds her breath the length of the kiss, exhaling only when it is over. Something fierce grows inside of her, something that sees only the tableau unfurling in front of her.
Going home with her hair smelling of sea and her bottom caked with damp sand, my mother is a new person. And every night that she can, she walks down to the beach. She doesn’t care that she is learning to sleep less and less, or that at school her head droops over the books. Every night she can sneak out, my mother slips barefoot down the sandy path and waits for the glass house to light up.
Bridging
A few weeks after Tom’s funeral, the lawyer, Mr. Singer, read aloud the part of Tom’s will that gave instructions on how to dispose of his remains: “I request that my body or any part may be used for the purpose of medical education or research. What is left of me shall be cremated and scattered in the bay.”
Mr. Singer paused and looked at her, but Letty remained silent. Clearly, though, the lawyer had been expecting a response, and now he looked upon her silence as a form of resistance. “It is in the will,” Mr. Singer said. “If it is in the will, you absolutely have to do it.”
Letty nodded. There were so many things she hadn’t known before Tom died: such as, how much money he really had. And whether he would be generous with her. When all was said and done, Letty paid very little attention. Instead she stared in curiosity as Mr. Singer’s navy blue bow tie and the coppery sheen of his thinning hair.
The house was quiet—a good quiet, peaceful. She left her purse on the kitchen counter. It pleased her to think she did not have to worry about hiding things now. Tom had developed the habit of looking in her things, trying to “catch” her at something. She shook her head. Too much.
She brought in the papers. Almost every day, the San Mateo County Times published Letters to the Editor complaining of gangs and graffiti.
“In our own neighborhood!” a man complained. “I decided to walk around after dinner, last Monday. It was around nine o’clock at night. I was at the corner of Jefferson and Middlefield, waiting for the light to change, when two teen-agers came running out of nowhere. They knocked me down and stole my watch, my cell phone, and my wallet. I had $60 in cash. They hit my face so hard, I needed 14 stitches. The police have been asking for witnesses. No one wants to come forward.”
The man was probably close to her age, Letty thought. She was 51.
Jefferson and Middlefield was right in front of the public library. Letty used to go almost every week, to check out books. Now she shuddered, upset for the man who had met with such violence. It was shocking.
Why did her son never call? He never, ever called, and she was so lonely.
He had more than enough money, that was why. When he was needy, back in the days when he was just starting grad school, he called often. Tom would be bad-tempered for days afterward.
That night, she dreamed about her husband. Tom said, “Letty, what are you doing? What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just filling the time.”
The Dream Tom snorted. She knew he didn’t believe her.
It was a terrible dream. The worst she’d had in months. She took two Ambien, which was her almost-nightly intake now. She wondered how she’d explain that to her doctor. She thought again about her son, and about Tom’s funeral, and about how hard it would be to keep up the garden, all by herself.
The bills came, she filled them out blankly, without checking her accounts. Truly, she knew she had more money than she really needed.
Tom’s roses were dying. They’d been so pretty. He had tended them carefully. But after he died, she spent less and less time in the garden. She could tell, from the way the stems were gradually blackening, from the buds that never fully opened, that they were sick, starved for something.
Winter was settling in. Soon, the rains would come. But next year…?
“A job’s a job, Tom,” she found herself saying, aloud into the empty bedroom. “Like the 27 years I spent being married to you. And it didn’t even do me any good. Ha ha ha!”
Her dream husband’s face went sour. She remembered that look. He’d only been dead a few months, but she’d completely forgotten. After the dream, she remembered the look again.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, she went, and clutched her head. An ache began to spread from the base of her skull, outwards. It was spreading like a net. It had captured the nerves on her face. She was terrified of getting Bell’s Palsy, which the women in her family had gotten, one by one, after they turned 40 or so. Not a single woman in her family had been spared.
Her mother’s case had been the worst. Afterwards, her mother became fearful and inward-looking. Her aunts complained that Letty’s mother had stopped accepting lunch or dinner invitations. On the occasions when she left her house, she wore large sunglasses that covered half her face and refused to take them off, even while eating, even though everyone could see, whenever she bent over a menu, that there was something wrong with the right cheek. That glimpse was enough. That was all she would offer anyone, that glimpse.
The morning after her bad dream, Letty realized that she might forget Tom’s face, but never his smell. It clung to the pillowcases, even after she’d washed them several times. It had even, she thought, seeped into the mattress. She stripped the bed and began sleeping on the day bed in the guest room. The bedroom was too big, anyway. What she needed was safety, and the guest room, with its smaller dimensions, its hardly-used day bed and lone armchair, felt as if it could provide that.
Letty limped to the bathroom and turned on the light. Again she was struck by how different the face in the mirror was from her own. She scarcely recognized that old woman with the wrinkles, the pouches, the deep furrows on either side of her mouth. That woman looked like an utter wreck.
She switched off the light, went back to bed, and pulled the comforter up to her chin. Then she stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours. Finally, when she saw light slipping beneath the window curtains, she decided to get up and make herself a cup of tea.
Time passed slowly. She thought it was time for dinner, but then she’d glance at the clock in the kitchen and find out it was just 5 p.m. She tried not looking at her watch. She tried reading the papers, or watching TV. The next time she glanced down at her watch, it was 5:26, and then later, 5:56.
She tried to punish herself by saying, “OK, no dinner until 8.” Or she’d say: “No TV if you look at your watch more than three times in one afternoon.”
But she got involved with watching “American Idol.” There was a judge who reminded her of someone she’d known back in high school in the Philippines. Tom wasn’t there to tease and say how silly the show was. She began watching every week, without fail.
She had met Tom in Cebu. She remembered just having gotten on a jeepney. Then a huge American man got in, taking up almost half the space. Everyone stared. Tom stared, too, but only at her. She’d felt a sudden heat creeping over her face and looked away. When she got off at her stop, he put out an arm, as if wanting to be courtly. But his forearm brushed her breasts. She shrank from him, and then he followed her.
They were married three months later, and the following year she was in America.
During her second year in America, she became pregnant. No need for her to take a test: she knew. She had three older sisters, each of whom had gotten pregnant when they were in their late teens. She knew the signs. Unlike her sisters, she had a husband. She felt proud.
When she told Tom, his face became a new face, darkened with anger.
“I will send you home!” he shouted. “I didn’t bring you here to have babies!”
The current President was a man named Bush. She forgot this sometimes. It seemed there were so many people with that name, now.
The two mighty towers in New York were just a hole in the ground. She didn’t understand Ground Zero, had to read articles over and over before it sank in what the reporters were writing about. One day she thought of taking a bus there, just to see. She was fascinated by the thought of the hole in the ground, and how 19 trailers were needed to sift through the dust, hunting the tiniest scrap of DNA. She thought of Tom, and wondered whether that was really him in the porcelain jar she had paid $129 for. Sometimes, she lifted the lid and looked at the gray ash inside. The first time, she had been surprised to discover something sparkly mixed in with the ash. After several weeks, she worked up the courage to dip a finger in the glittery ash. She placed the finger against her tongue. The thought of swallowing Tom was not pleasing. She trembled and spat and later avoided that spot on the carpet. Whenever she happened to catch a glimpse of the spot, she always thought the same thing: I must bring out the Resolve. But now it was months later, and the spot was still there. In fact, it was growing darker. Tom would have been incensed, if he could have seen it.
The one thing useful she had picked up from watching her husband was how to work the computer. It was a shiny gray square which he kept tucked away in a drawer, and the few nights a week he was on it, he would cup his chin in his hand and chuckle. He kept the screen tilted away from the door, as if anticipating that she would stand there and look at him. When she would ask him what he was laughing about he always said, “None of your business.”
“Take my hand, Div, take my hand!” Tom shouted.
They were on the beach in Guimaras. The waves were large at that time of year. No tourists about, but no help either, when a huge wave knocked them both out of the small motorboat Tom had rented for the day.
Water filled her nose and throat, it was awful. She didn’t even know what she was doing, but she seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the ocean. Something slimy grabbed at her arms and she wanted to scream but her mouth wouldn’t open. She thought of manta rays and eels.
Tom’s voice came to her, thick and muffled. She gave one last mighty kick and somehow rose and broke through the water. Tom had an arm about her. His face was red. Somehow, they found the up-ended motorboat and clung to it until a fisherman passing by in a banca came to their rescue. Letty remembered lying on the bottom of the banca, gasping. Tom held her tight in his arms. They never went to another beach.
Letty often wondered if she had been meant to die that day. But Tom had refused to let her go. That was how she had come to marry him, that was how she had come to confuse his stubbornness for strength. Not entirely her fault: She had been 22, younger than her own son was now. She forgave her young, romantic self. She even, eventually, forgave Tom. She was sure, in spite of everything, that her life was not over. There was something yet she was meant to do. She wanted to do it. She wanted to find that thing.
Tom had become small in his middle-age. Not her. She would fight. Life could still beguile, she was sure of it.
The job was only possible because it was something she could do at home. The organization was called The Bridge. There was a toll-free hotline for troubled people. The number was 1-800-U-R-SAVED. The person who had handled the late-night shift: 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., had burned out and quit. Younger people had families, or wanted to keep nights free for their partners. The job was perfect, absolutely perfect for Letty. The person who interviewed her (over the phone) said, “You know we can’t pay you. This is strictly an all-volunteer organization.”
“I know,” Letty said. “That’s fine.”
Only now was she grateful for Tom’s pennypinching. The money in the bank was all hers now. Even after taxes, she calculated it would be (provided she stayed healthy) enough to sustain her for several years.
And after several years?
She wouldn’t think about that. She refused to think about that. She would live in the moment. She would not regret anything.
“Uh, that’s great,” the interviewer said. He sounded young.
The list of rules arrived in the mail three days later: ten pages, single-spaced.
Life was always, Letty mused, throwing her for a loop. Who knew that things would have turned out this well? There was simply no way to prepare for anything. One simply had to endure, or proceed. And hope for the best.
“Don’t despair!” she said. Letty was surprised that her voice came out sounding so trembly and wan. “There is hope!” The wife on the other end of the phone cried and said she felt stupid. She always called, around 10 p.m., when her husband had gone out.
“You’re new,” the wife said.
“Yes,” Letty said. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m here. To help you.”
Her fifth caller had a terrible mother. “Pretend she doesn’t exist,” Letty said. “Only you. Only you are important.”
The caller, a young woman (from the sound of her voice) was silent for a few moments.
“My mother doesn’t exist,” she said slowly, as if repeating a nursery rhyme. Then: “That’s not right. Of course she exists. That’s why I’m always miserable.”
“Make it a game,” Letty said. “Just pretend. You can do that. Anyone can play a game.”
“Ok,” the young woman said.
“Just try,” Letty said. “You’ll see.”
The hardest call Letty took during the first month was from a man (middle-aged, Letty guessed) who said he suffered from Panic Disorder. The caller said the attacks had begun four years earlier.
Letty asked how the attacks usually began.
“They always start with me feeling dizzy,” the caller said. “My wife says I’m probably just tired, but I’m terrified. I always wonder when the next attack will hit.”
“Have you told your doctor?” Letty asked.
“No,” the man said. “I have not told anyone.”
“Why not?” Letty asked.
The caller hesitated a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t worry so much,” Letty said. “I suppose you could say I suffer from something similar. Whenever I hear the words to that Joni Mitchell song—you know, the one about a taxi?—I start to cry. I can’t stop.
The man’s breathing sounded funny. Then, in a low voice, he began to sing the song. Letty let him finish.
“I’ve bought myself a plane ticket,” the man said.
“Where are you going?” Letty asked.
“San Francisco,” the man said. “To throw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Don’t do that,” Letty said, then stopped. San Francisco! Letty had never been to San Francisco, though she longed to.
She didn’t have any more words for this man, this man who wanted her to give him a reason not to go to San Francisco and throw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge.
She then broke Rule #3: she gave the caller her real name.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I’m 48,” she said, and stopped, astonished by her lie. She was constantly surprising herself, lately. But he never called again.
A week after that man, she had a call from a young girl. “Oliver’s gone away,” the girl sobbed. “He was married. I sneaked him into my freshman dorm for three months. My roommate promised not to tell.”
Girl, Letty thought. It’s survival of the fittest.
And then there was the husband who wanted to pull everything out of his retirement plan and spend the money traveling the world.
“Where would you go?” Letty asked.
“Morocco,” the man said. “My dad went in ‘59. He brought back pictures of camels. After that, I’d like to go to the Ivory Coast. A friend of mine went. His wife’s from Abidjan.”
After they had gone back and forth for almost 10 minutes, the man’s voice suddenly dropped low. “My wife won’t let me, though. She won’t let me go.”
“Well, that’s sad,” Letty said. “But it’s not your responsibility to keep your wife happy.”
“It’s not that,” the man said. “But there won’t be anyone to take care of her.”
“And how old is your wife?” Letty asked.
“She’s 44,” the man said. “She’s never been alone. We were married when we were both 20.”
That was certainly very sad, Letty thought. Not for the wife, but for the man.
“She’s not an egg,” Letty said.
“Excuse me?” the man said.
“I don’t mean to make light of your situation,” Letty said, “but your wife’s not an egg. She’s not going to crack.”
“I don’t want to grow old,” said a caller, who revealed, moments later, that she was 67.
“Being old is a state of mind,” Letty said soothingly. “You’ll only be old if you feel old. Trust me.”
A caller: “I can’t stop thinking of that girl in the beauty parlor. I’m 54.”
Another caller: “Should I try speed-dating?”
Yet another caller: “I think I might have killed someone. Why am I telling you this?”
Caller # xx: “I don’t love him anymore. But I’m afraid to tell him. Now I’ve started sleepwalking. Every night. Sometimes I wake up fully dressed, and there are stains on my clothing, mud all over the dining room. Why?”
Caller # xxx: “I watch my neighbors making love. They never bother closing their windows. I have them on video. I want to know how this ends.”
Sometimes, the calls blurred together: “I hit my mother (Or was it my child?)”
Sometimes Letty thought it had all been a trick. “You want my advice?” she would say.
Once, during a call, she allowed her mind to wander off. She was silent. Too silent. The caller said, “Hello, are you still there?” She had no idea what the call was about.
She tried to recover. “When you get your money . . . “ she began, hopefully.
“You have the brains of a fucking pigeon,” the caller said, and hung up.
She allowed the obscenity to rankle inside her, for days. Weeks.
It was another dreary Saturday. Rain fell continuously. She was restless. There had only been one call all night. The man said: “Going to work is like going from one hell to another.” With the recession, such calls were increasingly common.
Letters came regularly from her mother, who had never mastered e-mail. They always said the same thing: Come home. One of these letters had come five days earlier, on a Monday. What kind of a life will you have there, her mother wrote. At least here, you can be with your family.
As if 27 years were nothing. As if she could turn her back on all that, turn her back on her son, who though uncommunicative was still the only person in the whole world that she still loved, loved with the transparency of glass.
Absently, her gaze wandered to the bookshelf and fixed on a spiral-bound notebook, Tom’s “Garden Journal.” In it he would make meticulous record of the plants he had bought, and how well or how poorly they did, week by week, sometimes even day by day. He jotted down the days in which he had applied Osmocote, and how long it took for the first flower buds to appear. When he cared to, he would note particulars of the weather, and observations about butterflies and birds. The first entry began 16 years and two months earlier, and the last was only two days before his first and fatal stroke.
She decided to leaf through it again now.
In the first entry for January, he had written: “Rained all day yesterday and today. Ordered six new tea roses.”
In February, he wrote: “Still chilly. Dug holes, filled halfway with compost.”
On 17 April, three months before his death, he wrote: “Noodle head sprinklers worthless.”
Almost two months later, on the second Sunday of June, he had written: “Effective? Wait and see!” The last word was underlined twice.
A page later, Tom had written: “The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, and shall spread abroad like a cedar of Lebanon.”
Letty stared at the words. They were not Tom’s words, she knew. They were from the Bible. But which part? Which Gospel?
There were only five more entries after that. The roses had faded quickly, that summer. They were nothing but scraggly sticks now. Letty didn’t have the time or the energy to weed and water, the way Tom did.
She recalled him fussing in the garden. What was it about his face when he was tending his beloved roses? Hope—yes, that was it. His face was filled with hope. With her he was bad-tempered, querulous, impatient. But in the garden, he was infinitely patient. Yes. He anticipated reward. He was a man of such narrow joys.
She looked through the window at the garden. Nothing was blooming out there now. She had done it. She leaned back, closed her eyes, and began, for the first time in years, to make plans.
Fireworks
Legal Fireworks.
Well, there were legal ones and illegal ones.
That Christmas, there were legal dads (the divorced ones who might stick around) and illegal dads (the ones who ran off and never came back). Christmas was the butt-end of a year when it seemed like they all left. Now, I remember it was only some of them, but it didn’t seem that way then. I just knew mine did.
And knew, too, like the rest of us, that you probably wouldn’t see your illegal dad ever again unless you were on your summer vacation near Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan 25 years later in some fucking McDonalds, him eating a sausage biscuit and you getting a coffee, and he said good morning as if a quarter-century had gone by like the smoke emptying out of your morning cigarette, and instead of a red plastic laminate table with hard plastic yellow benches, it was back to when you both were sitting down in the breakfast nook to a proper breakfast—two eggs any way you want, grits, thick bacon, a cup of freshly sliced fruit—that your mom had made for you both and hadn’t made since your dad left.
When that happens, you can’t reach across the table and coldcock your dad, although he deserved it, plus throw in that he certainly whipped you enough when you were a kid. No vengeance, but no forgiveness, either, is what some doctor told me and then added: just forget it. I’m a dad myself now, and I can’t.
Illegal Fireworks.
Legal fireworks were like Roman Candles, Colorful Birds, and Lady Fingers.
Illegal meant a certain breed of fireworks, like M-80s and Cherry Bombs. But they weren’t illegal in the same way as the dads who’d skipped out without ever paying alimony or child support (and you were lucky if you ever saw them again). And they weren’t illegal like beer and cigarettes or even going into the no-more-draft army, because with those things, you just had to be of age to enjoy them or to enlist. M-80s and Cherry Bombs were just illegal, no matter how old you were.
Plus, the illegal ones didn’t carry a nice warning on them: “Light Fuse—Get Away Fast!”
Once, Ms. Funchess (my friend Tim’s mom) ratted us out to all the other moms for blowing up things with M-80s and Cherry Bombs in her driveway. We got a curt warning from our mothers, and some said if only our fathers were here. Our mothers didn’t talk to us much that summer, except for the one time, the Talk (about the Lady Fingers).
Roman candles.
We’d buy the 10-ball “Roman Candles with report” as it said on the tube. It took us about a year to figure out that “report” meant “blow up.” With our Christmas money (if you had a rich uncle, a $5 bill tucked inside those little Christmas cards the banks used to give out, a little pic of Lincoln looking out at you), we’d buy fireworks, because they were the one thing that would never end up in our stockings or under the tree.
Because it was the Christmas our dads left. So, our moms had to get jobs teaching high school or working at the department store like they used before they got married and didn’t think they’d need to work anymore.
Under the tree, that Christmas, we might find pellet rifles and little cans of oily .22 pellets, sure. But fireworks, no, too dangerous. We had a good time hunting down birds and squirrels and shooting beer and soda bottles in Chartwell, which we called our neighborhood, but it was just a half-mile loop that doubled back, like a snake eating itself. Or, it was a neighborhood that started and ended with any house you wanted it to.
Lady Fingers
were the smallest conventional firecracker and almost thin enough to slip inside your arteries, like a stint. They explode small—a little pop—but more than a roll of three caps smashed with a hammer like we’d done when we were six, complete with the ear-ringing afterwards. After the explosion, the smoke curls up, in a wisp that doesn’t last long. Both my grandfathers died of strokes, of arteries with a small pop. I am afraid I will go that way, too.
No Smoking.
When we lit our M-80s and Cherry Bombs, Roman Candles and Lady Fingers, we didn’t bother with punks (they look like sticks of incense but smell nothing like them). We lit them with our Marlboros, holding their burning orange ends to the fuses. Better than trying to hold a damn match to them.
“Don’t be a dumbass like me and start smoking,” our dads had told us, before they cut out. Shit. Some of our dads smoked cigars—stogies, they called them—after their doctors told them that their next pack of Viceroys would be their last.
No better way to spend your money
is what it seemed like whenever we bought firecrackers. Everything we spent money on—beer, fireworks, cigarettes—were all things that we used up—and that’s why we liked them.
Ms. Moore and the Colorful Birds.
Colorful Birds were fireworks shaped like a tiny tin can. When they went up to the highest branches of the loblolly pines, sparks of red and green spun out of them. They didn’t explode.
Ms. Moore said they were pretty. Ms. Moore was David’s mother, and she would say this from just inside her garage: she would be at the old freezer where she’d buried—under the venison chops and steaks and hams and big tubes of ground venison carefully stacked there by David’s dad before he left, under investigation for graft from his service laundry company and running around with someone called Aleesha who our moms said was a dancer, and we knew that didn’t mean ballet or tap—a half-gallon of Old Aristocrat Vodka—that she nipped on all afternoon, being sure to replace every few days—and into the dusk when we sent up the Colorful Birds.
David said his mother had some money coming from her family, who owned a chain of grocery stores in North Carolina, and from her run-off husband’s mother, who seemed to like her more than she liked her own son, which was good, because he was one of the illegal dads and never sent his mother or David shit. She also drank about half a gallon of milk a day, David said, to coat her stomach, and she only ate on weekends. Steak and fries with lots of catsup that she put off to the side of the plate and also swabbed with forkfuls of steak. Plus, an iceberg lettuce salad with homemade Thousand Island dressing of mayo and catsup. So, she was pretty thin.
Gloria Moore in her sundress or a halter and jeans and painted nails, would appear in the open garage door and say please don’t blow up any Lady Fingers, but that she loved Colorful Birds. So we sent up all the Colorful Birds we had and said we were sorry that we didn’t have more. With the fluorescent light of the garage screaming behind her, she looked like she wanted us to believe that she was a goddess, and that by standing there in her high-heel mules without falling over, she couldn’t be drinking or be a drunk.
Lady Fingers, and then, the Talk.
Besides being the smallest and weakest firecracker you could buy, Lady Fingers were these dainty and spongy cakes that ladies eat. And that’s what got our mothers to administer the Talk (they had heard about us blowing up Lady Fingers).
The Talk was in the kitchen with the linoleum under your barefeet going a little gooey in the summer heat. The kitchen was our mothers’ place, and most of our dads—before they cut out for good—spent as little time in the kitchen as possible. As you were getting the lecture, looking away or not listening meant the lecture would go on until you started listening, and she, your mother, had all day, mister. Plus, you weren’t listening, the air of the kitchen got all still on you, like you couldn’t hear the compressor on the fridge anymore, or the water slowly dripping in the sink that needed somebody to replace a washer, or the tiny bubbles popping in the simmering green beans when the three strips of bacon got tossed in.
Our mom’s talk was about sex. Which led to being given a booklet from 4-H about bovine husbandry since both cows and humans were mammals, and our mothers saying how they weren’t answering questions about it, that’s what the book was for, but also how if we still weren’t satisfied, we best ask our fathers about it. They got quiet for a while, and then, they told us one thing outright. Don’t ever love and leave a girl, ever. When they said it, their eyes got tight.
We stayed away from girls, but not because we wanted to. We couldn’t get girls to look at us, much less sleep with us. We didn’t know anything about them, it seemed, and the one person who did, our dads, weren’t there. In that still air of the kitchen, way back when, as the Talk about Lady Fingers curled up and away, like Marlboro smoke leaving your nose in a French exhale, well, that was where your mother left you. Where it hurt like hell, not having a girlfriend or your dad anymore.
In a Far Country
The barge arrives late in the rain. The wind drives the rain in gray sheets across the ferry, the river brown and roiling, the liftgate wet and sleek-looking as it touches the quay.
I wipe my face with my hand; pull my raincoat tight around me. I cough. My throat hurts. People are coming onto the quay. Bicycles and motor scooters roll, revving in tandem in their lanes. You can smell the fumes in the rain. The wet dusk glows with the scooters’ headlights. I watch for the next wave of passengers, those on foot. Behind them, waiting, are big, blue trucks. Rain falls slanting and popping on the quay, on the gray-steel hatch. My gaze falls on blurred faces of those hurrying up the quay, nylon bags, pink, blue, in hands, jute bags slung across shoulders. They stream past me, rustling in their nylon raincoats. Around here people bring them when they have looked at the color of the sky, the shapes of clouds.
Then I see them. A girl and a white woman, both wearing wide-brimmed straw hats but no raincoats, lugging their suitcases down the hatch. They are coming toward me as I stand to one side, hunched, on the quay’s slope. I raise my hand, call to them, “Mrs. Rossi?”
The woman turns her head in my direction. “Hello!” she says, half smiling, half wincing from the pelting rain.
I reach out my hand to help her with the suitcase. Instead her hand comes up to shake mine.
“Please, let me help,” I say and this time reach for her suitcase.
“Are you from the inn?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m terribly sorry about the delay. I thought you must’ve left. I’m awfully glad to see you still here.”
“Yes, ma’am. May I take you and your daughter to the car?”
“Yes, of course.” She smiles, wrinkling the corners of her blue eyes. She takes the girl’s hand and both of them follow me to the Peugeot parked on the ramp that winds down to the main street. I can hear her talk to the girl about getting themselves raincoats during their stay, for the monsoon season is here. Though wrinkled and gray, perhaps in her late sixties, Mrs. Rossi has a clear voice. It sounds cheerful.
I put their suitcases in the car trunk, then open the rear door. The girl says, “Thank you,” as she slides onto the seat. She must be Vietnamese, slender, rather tall. Her blue jeans are notched above the ankles, and her light skin blends perfectly with her scarlet blouse, collarless, fringed white. Mrs. Rossi takes off her wet straw hat, shaking it against her leg, and says, “No one here carries an umbrella like where I come from.”
“People here wear raincoats when it rains,” I say as she clears a wet lock of white hair from her brow.
“In Hồ Chí Minh City too,” Mrs. Rossi says.
“Yes, everywhere.”
The rain smears the windshield as I drive through the town. Shop lights flicker. Water is rising on the main street and motor scooters sloshing through standing water kick up fantails in light-colored spouts. Hồ Chí Minh City. The old name is Saigon. A long time ago before the war ended. My eyes straining, I hunch forward to look through the smeary windshield. I can hear rain drumming on the car roof, feel my hands gripping the wheel. Water is rising to the shops’ thresholds, their awnings’ tarpaulins in green, in blue, flapping like the wings of some wet fowl. From the ferry comes the sound of a horn. A barge is arriving.
“This looks like a badly crowded Chinese quarter,” Mrs. Rossi says from the backseat.
“Very crowded, ma’am. You never see the sun when you walk the streets here.”
A surge of running water against the tires sends a shudder through the steering wheel. I am sure they can see through the soaked landscape all the tarpaulins crowding the shop fronts, the merchandise―baskets and travel wear―tossing wildly in the wind from strung-out wires.
“Are you from here by any chance?” Mrs. Rossi says.
“From here? No. And most townspeople here come from somewhere else. Drifters, ma’am.”
“You too?” Mrs. Rossi says with a chuckle.
“Me too,” I say, coughing, my throat dry as sand. I stifle my cough with a fist against my mouth when she says, “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Giang, ma’am.”
“Can you spell it for me?” Then, hearing it spelled, she repeats it. “So it’s Zhang, like the Chinese name?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Catherine Rossi. My daughter here is Chi Lan.”
As I put together her daughter’s pronounced name in my head, I hear a small “Hello,” from the girl. I nod.
Mrs. Rossi says, “My daughter understands Vietnamese. Only she can’t speak it very well.”
“She must not have lived here long?”
“No, she hadn’t. In fact, she became my daughter when she was five years old. She’s eighteen now.”
“You adopted her, ma’am?” I glance up again at the rearview mirror and meet the girl’s eyes. I feel odd asking her mother about her in her presence.
“Yes, I adopted her in nineteen seventy-four. Just one year before the collapse of South Vietnam. How fortunate for us!”
“You came here that year?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Rossi clears her throat. “And what were you doing in seventy-four?”
I give her question thought, then, “I was in the South Vietnam Army.”
“Were you an interpreter?” she asks with a light laugh.
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you must excuse my assumption. You speak English very well. And I’m glad you do. Otherwise we’re all making sign language now.”
She chuckles and the girl smiles as I look up at the rearview mirror. Her oval face, framed by raven, shoulder-length hair, is fresh. Her eyebrows curving gracefully are crayoned black. I remember a face like that from my past. Then Mrs. Rossi speaks again.
“Were you an army lifer?”
“What is that?” I ask and clear my throat.
“Like spending a lifetime career in the army.”
“No, ma’am. Only a few years.”
“Did you teach school before that?”
These curious Americans.
“I was on the other side. A soldier.”
“North Vietnamese side?”
“Yes. That’s where I was born.”
“And then you defected. Yes?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They have a name for those. I’m trying to remember.”
Then I hear the girl say it for her. A hồi chánh. Mrs. Rossi says, “That’s it.” She seems to be deep in her thoughts as we are leaving the town and following the one-lane road north of town toward U Minh district. The headlights pick up windblown rain in sprays and the blacktop blurs. There is no lane divider. Along the road drenched palms toss in the winds that blow wet leaves and white cajeput flowers onto the windshield, and the wipers sweep over them, pressing them to the glass.
“Your victors, the North communists, didn’t like the hồi chánh very much. So I heard.”
“That’s true, ma’am.”
“Did they treat you any different than they did to those they fought against during the war?”
“Sometimes worse, ma’am. I was one of those.”
“What happened?”
“They spent years in reform camps. Very far from here.”
“What happened to you?”
“Ten years, ma’am. Where nobody saw us.”
“Atrocious,” she says and smacks her lips. “So you were released just two years ago in eighty-five? Why so long?”
“Perhaps we were not reformed well enough.”
The road bends around a banana grove and on the other side golden bamboo grow thick, leaning in over the road, their trunks slender and tall, their buff palely glistening in the sweeping headlights.
“Are you here to visit the U Minh National Reserve, ma’am?” I say, half turning my head toward them.
“No.” She stops, then says, “It’s a long story.”
I keep my eyes on the dark road, a road I know very well. But on a rainy night like this, the soaked, windswept landscape loses its friendliness. We are halfway to the inn. Lit by the headlights, yellow flowers of the narrow-crowned riverhemp shrubs seem to float along the roadside.
“Mr. Giang?” Mrs. Rossi calls out.
“Yes, ma’am?” I tilt my head back.
“Is that your last name?”
“My last name is Lê.”
“Leh?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Leh Zhang. I like the way it sounds.” She chuckles. “May I call you Giang?”
“As you wish, ma’am.”
“Giang, do you know this area well?”
“Not really. Any particular place that you want to visit?”
“Well.”
The wind whips. In its rushing sound I can hear her long exhalation.
“I come here,” Mrs. Rossi finally says, “to search for the remains of my son.”
“Okay,” I say with a sudden tightness in my throat.
“My son served in the U.S. Army. Nineteen sixty-six, sixty-seven. He was a lieutenant.”
“He died here, ma’am?”
“Yes. Somewhere here. It’s been twenty years.” Then she drops her voice. “His remains must still be here, I think.”
“What makes you say that?”
“This is where he died, and his body was never recovered.”
“How do you find him? It’s a vast area.”
“I have a map. Someone drew it for me. Crudely, but clear enough. It’s a fellow who once was in the platoon that my son commanded.”
“He saw your son die?”
“No.” She pauses. “No, he didn’t. But he was in the fire fight. When they came upon him near death the next day and did the body count, they said, Where is Lieutenant Nicola Rossi? Well, they counted all the bodies, and all were accounted for except my son’s.”
“Could he still be alive? Nobody saw him dead.”
“He was injured. That fellow saw it. Saw it before a mortar blew up and the next day they found him trapped beneath a fallen cajeput trunk. The Cong didn’t see him or he’d have been dead. They shot all the fallen men in the head.”
I draw a deep breath, suppressing an urge to cough.
“My son must’ve known this.”
I say nothing, keeping my eyes on the wet road, lined with thin-trunked hummingbird trees.
“Are there any local folks I can hire?” Mrs. Rossi asks. “To go out and dig for the remains?”
“The owner of the inn can help you.” I speak with my face half turned. “She’s from here.”
“I much appreciate it,” Mrs. Rossi says. “You don’t know how clueless I am.”
I want to tell her not to raise her hope, but I can’t bring myself to say it. How many unclaimed remains are there in the wilderness? Dug up, displaced by rodents and wild animals. Long scattered, blown away by bombs. Charred by forest fires. Time and nature are cruel.
I am not from here. But I know this region well. I lied to Mrs. Rossi about that.
Carrying in its womb the U Minh vast wetland forest, this region of the Mekong Delta used to be the IV Corps, the southernmost of the four military corps of South Vietnam. During the war it had seen many savage fights. Though the battle carnage might have long been forgotten, some places do not forget. They are haunted.
The roadside inn where I live and work is old. The owner and his wife are in their late sixties. The old woman runs the inn, mainly cooking meals for the guests, and I drive to Ông Đốc town twenty kilometers south to pick up customers when they arrive by land on buses or by waterways on boats and barges. Most of them come to visit the Lower U Minh National Reserve, a good twenty kilometers north of the inn. I seldom see the old man. He mostly holes up in their room. Sometimes when its door isn’t locked, you see him wander about like a specter. The man is amnesiac and cuckoo.
In 1975 when the war was over, there were people from all parts of the country journeying to the Central Highlands and the Mekong Delta to search for the remains of their lost sons, lost husbands. I heard this from the innkeeper. She has lived here all her life.
On the night Mrs. Rossi and her daughter arrived, the woman cooked a fat catfish and a pot of white-rice porridge. Outside it was wet and blowy. I took our guests upstairs with their suitcases and, coming down the stairs, I could hear the sizzling of onions as she fried them. I helped set the table, then waited as she opened the lid, the steam rich-smelling, sprinkled black pepper on the plump catfish now burst open, and stirred the porridge until all the black flecks disappeared.
We ate with only one fluorescent lamp in the center of the oblong table, rain on the window slats. Mrs. Rossi, before commencing to eat, bowed and said a prayer. The girl, too, crossed herself. The old woman paid them no mind as she ladled the steaming porridge from the pot into each bowl, broke a chunk of the now ginger-colored catfish with the ladle, then dusted the bowl with pepper.
As we ate, the old woman slurping and sniffling from the porridge steam, Mrs. Rossi said a “Thank-You” to her, and the girl paused, glancing up at the old woman. Seeing no reaction from her, the girl’s eyes had a bemused look. The empty bowl in my hand, I spooned the broth and tasted its onion-rich flavor. My hand went to my shirt pocket for a cigarette, stopped. I was dying to light one up. I coughed into my fist. The dryness in the throat came back. The old woman went to the sideboard and carried back a china plate. She sat it down by the lamp. Mrs. Rossi exclaimed, “Look at that! Are they longans?”
The old woman, her face impassive, just looked at Mrs. Rossi.
“Yes,” I said. “They are in season now.”
The girl plucked one longan and felt its bark like, yellow-brown thin rind. She looked at me. “How do you say longan in Vietnamese?”
“Nhãn.” I enunciated the word. “You never ate it before?”
“I did. In a Vietnamese restaurant where we live.”
“Where?”
“Rockville.” She smiled, eyes narrowed as she met my steady gaze, then added, “State of Maryland.”
Charmed by her mellow voice, I smiled. “You liked it then?”
“I didn’t eat it fresh. They served it in a sweet dessert. It tasted juicy and sweet though.”
“That’s chè. The sweet-dessert soup.”
Mrs. Rossi peeled the rind and eased the fleshy white fruit into her mouth. Then, eyes closed, she shook her head in pleasure. After eating a few longans, their small, round seeds in shining black held in her palm, she said to me, “Would you mind telling the owner the purpose of our stay?”
Back then, the old woman said, you would see them at dawn heading into the woodland beyond the inn, across the grassland, the rice fields. A knapsack, a spade were all they carried. At dusk they would come back out. Some of them stayed here at the inn. Mostly civilians. Those poor citizens traveled to this land looking for their lost husbands, sons, relatives. Sometimes you would see soldiers, but they didn’t stay at the inn. They would camp in the woodland with their trucks and it would be a week or even longer before they left. There were many soldiers coming to this region. Came in organized groups called remains-gathering crews. Many crew members were war veterans who had fought in Military Zone 9 and knew the region well. They remembered where they buried their comrades in makeshift graves. Before they started searching, they would burn incense and pray so that the lost souls would guide them to where their remains could be found. During the war thousands were stationed in this region, always deep in the swamp forest. Many died. Most of them died from bombing and shelling and ground assaults. Deaths were common back then. In that forbidden swamp forest you had flesh and bones of the soldiers on both sides and the flesh and bones of Americans. All lay under the peat soil.
I told Mrs. Rossi what the old woman said. I asked the girl if she understood the woman. “Yes,” she said with a shrug, “I can follow her, though I don’t get everything.”
The old woman, pointing toward the unseen grassland and the paddy beyond, said, “The people here made a living in the buffer zone after the war. They cleared enough land for raising crops. They burned down cajeput trees and sold their wood. They had no love for them. They needed land to farm for rice and vegetables. But sometimes you would see government officials coming down here to assess the damage to the cajeput trees. I won’t be surprised if someday they order these self-proclaimed landowners to re-grow cajeput trees on their tracts of land.”
Mrs. Rossi asked me if the old woman, or any native, knew the region well enough.
The old woman said, “I have never been to the swamp forest myself. I have no business going in there. They say it is haunted.” She said that on rainy nights following a humid day when the swamp vapors were thick, people in the buffer zone said they could hear human sounds from deep in the forest. If you listen, they said, you could hear the human screams, like when you are burned by napalm bombs, hear them sob, the wind-born wails coming and going sometimes until first light. People here sometimes go deep into the forest to cut trees. They are no woodcutters. But the wood of cajeput trees are worth much money. Their wood does not rot even in humid climates and so they are wanted by people in the Mekong Delta who build stilt houses. People here know the forest, the grasslands and the open-water areas. Half of these folks come from somewhere else, the other half are war veterans. Eventually they settled down in the buffer zone, like they owe their lives to the spooky forest. They broke the land surrounding the forest. Most of it is now agricultural land. You can still see cajeput trees in small patches in the buffer zone. And you can see here and there waterfowl breeding colonies.
Mrs. Rossi asked me, “Do you think any of them are available for hire?”
“Yes,” I said. “They will do whatever you want them to do.”
“I have the map. I think that’ll help.”
“I think it will.”
But deep down I knew it wouldn’t.
During my time with the North Vietnamese Army, we buried corpses under giant trees to shelter the graves from bombing. Flies, wind, sand, and graves. Graves everywhere. Graves we had dug to bury the dead in and sometimes to rebury the dead in when bombs fell on them again. In time weeds and creepers overtook the graves. Then you could no longer tell if they were there at all. Sometimes, though, you could spot a grave from the familiarity of the surrounding, perhaps from a marker you had planted at the grave site, or a tree shorn by bombs still staning in its odd-looking shape. Then you unearthed the remains in the grave only to find nothing there but bones. Always bones because termites had eaten everything else. Whatever was left now gripped and twined with tree roots, and now, carefully you unknotted the roots one by one, so the bones wouldn’t snap, the skull wouldn’t crack.
But it was always only the bones. When you hold in your hands a fragment of bone, or a morose-looking skull marred with spiderweb cracks, you wouldn’t know if it was a Vietnamese or an American bone or skull.
I know a man whom Mrs. Rossi could use as a hired hand. A war veteran. He lives in a hut in the buffer zone. He once told me he had served in the Indochina War. He was with the 5th Battalion Vietnamese Paratroops who fought for the French at Đien Bien Phu against the Viet Minh in 1954. I was six at that time.
To get to his dwelling you follow a canal dug by the settlers to bring in water for irrigation. The canal, long and narrow, girds the forest and protects the buffer zone against forest fires in the dry season. The banks are thick with woolly frogsmouths, their reedlike, pointed leaves bent oddly, and little yellow flowers curl brightly against their rust-colored stems. The canal runs alongside a dirt path that winds through the communes, edging the rice fields, sometimes through low-lying bogs glistening with stagnant water, smelling of mud, where aquatic reeds and spiked sedge sprout freely, and passing by you could always hear the aarf of the dwarf tree frogs.
The last time I went to his dwelling I was drunk when I made my way home in the dark. It was black as tar. You walked listening to your feet and you could hear not the footfalls but the rustle of reeds, the croaking of frogs, and there was a mud stench in the breeze. Strange noises suddenly rippled the stillness, swooshing and ruffling. I strained my ears, lost my bearing and fell into the bog. I sat huffing in the mud, rank and warm, smelling liquor in my breath and a tinge of sweetly decayed vegetation. I just sat there, feeling bone fatigued. I lit a cigarette. The strange noises stopped. I held up the flaming match, saw two herons, standing deep in the bog, their heads cocked, looking toward the little orb of light cupped in my hand. Then wings flapping, heads bobbing, yellow beaks clacking against each other’s, they sparred on. The match went out. I remained seated and fell asleep.
Old Lung, the war veteran, is like me. He was a prisoner of war, sent to a reform camp but only for three years. Unlike me, he fought for the Republic of Vietnam. Most people settling in the buffer zone are soldiers’ widows and war veterans. Former North Vietnamese Army soldiers, former Viet Cong fighters. Enemies of the former Republic. Old Lung fought both the Viet Minh in the Indochina War and the Viet Cong and their brothers, North Vietnamese Army in the Vietnam War. He is like a mongrel dog. He shoots from the hip, but he means no harm. He is simply a drunk. Other settlers cleared several hectares of land to grow rice, vegetables, fruit trees. Old Lung grows nothing on his only acre of land. “The more land you’ve got for yourself, son,” he said once, “the more misery you bring upon yourself.”
When somebody dies, the family always calls on Old Lung to build them a coffin and dress the corpse in its burial garment, a chore nobody wants to do when the body lies in rigor mortis. The arms bent, the legs cocked. Stiff as a board. Old Lung stands looking down at the corpse, his hand clutching a waisted jar of rice liquor, and mumbles a prayer. Then he takes a mouthful of liquor, blows spray on the corpse’s limbs, and starts rubbing them down. Soon the limbs lose their stiffness and after he straightens them, the corpse, arms and legs neatly in place, now looks like a sleeping person.
I heard that other caretakers could never do that and the corpse when casketed lay awkwardly. I asked Old Lung, “Which one did the trick? The prayer or the rubbing liquor?” Old Lung pulled a nose hair, snorting, then said, “Son, them dead people can hear me. The rubdown works ‘cause they trust me.”
Later he told me he had buried many corpses of his friends during both wars, a time when, for days, it would be impossible to evacuate the dead and the wounded from the battlefield. “Sometimes what you bury,” he said, “are hunks of meat and bone. That’s what’s left after a mortar or an artillery shell hits you. You wash them chunks of meat covered with grime, them leg bones with most of the flesh completely burned, gone. Wash them with water from your canteen and then put them together in a hole in the ground. You want to give them a decent burial, though sometimes you can’t. But they sure know you’ve mightily tried. Just smell your fingers after you’re done burying them. Son, have you ever smelled meat gone bad three days in the heat? Never mind the maggots. They can’t smell what they eat. You don’t have liquor with you then to wash that smell away. Scrape them fingers with sand, with leaves hard as you can. The smell stays.”
When they first dug the canal that encircled the forest, a stretch of the canal went through the buffer zone’s graveyard. They had to relocate a number of graves. Old Lung exhumed the corpses and reburied them in new coffins. “You know what, son?” he said to me. “Them fresh graves just a year or two gone by are the worst offenders. Them corpses are still rotting. You break a grave open and it smells worse than a basket of stinking fish.”
I had seen exhumers patiently wait for the dead’s family to take a first stab of the spade into the grave’s soil. They feared to be the first themselves who disturbed the dead from his slumber. But Old Lung feared nothing. He would mumble a prayer, then sink the spade into the yellow dirt. I asked him if he ever left a bone or two behind in the old graves, for stories were told that the dead would come every night after those who forgot their bones until the exhumers were at their wits’ end. Old Lung grunted, said, “Humans, son. Dead or alive. Wouldn’t you fret when a body part of yours is missing? But I always take care of them. Told them so. Said, You must forgive me if I make a mistake, but I don’t make careless mistakes, so don’t bear any grudge against me.” Then, grinning a toothy grin, he looked at me.
Old Lung had that unblinking stare that can catch you off-guard. He reminds me of myself. But I know when not to stare after I have read a person’s thoughts. Old Lung’s bat ears stick out from his inverted-triangle-shaped head. He has a protuberant forehead creased sharply in wavy lines. On his pointed chin grows a tuft of gray goatee. It sets a contrast to his thin black hair, still black, defying age and grayish only in the sideburns.
He said, “Know somethin’ else son? One time I was digging up this grave and it had just bones and a skull, ‘cause everything else done rotted. Here I saw a gold leaf in the skull’s mouth. Pure gold, son. Buried with the body as a farewell gift to be spent in the other world. I gave it back to the family, but no, they wanted it reburied with the bones in a new coffin. I guess as the old saying goes, Good as gold. The fella’s spirit musta never run out of money to spend in the netherworld.”
I thought Old Lung’s sincerity must have kept him in close rapport over the years with the dead. A good heart can ward off evils, they say. Behind his dwelling is a well dug just a stone’s throw away. One night I was too drunk to make it home so I slept sitting up against the side of the well. Sometime past midnight I woke and found Old Lung tapping me on the shoulder. He was holding a kerosene lamp in his hand and its smoke stung my eyes. I pushed it away.
“Why didn’t you sleep inside?” he said.
“I thought I’d just sit here to get my head cleared ‘fore I got on home.”
“Done that myself.”
“Hey, old man, here to your shack is no more than fifty meters. And you quit?”
“I ain’t that old yet. And even when I’m full of liquor I can always find my way back to my cot.”
“Why out here then?”
“To talk to the ghosts. They keep me company. You see ghosts when there ain’t no barrier between you and them. I took care of them when they were dead. They owe it to me. When I think of them, they’ll come.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah. But it ain’t work for you though.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“But d’you know how to see them?”
“Show me, old man.”
Old Lung took the lamp with him back in his hut. I sat in the dark, my head heavy, my mouth dry. Fireflies flickered yellow and green and sometimes just glowed steadily in eerie blue dots. The blue-ghost fireflies. The earth, the grass smelled warm. Just as my eyes began to close, Old Lung’s lamplight glowed in the dark, wavering from side to side. He set the lamp on the rim of the well and, half bent, opened his other hand. In the hazy yellow sphere the lamp made against the night, I was looking at a small banana leaf in his palm. A glob of slaked lime sat wet and white in the center of the leaf.
“Dab this on your fingertips and toe tips,” Old Lung said.
“Huh? What’s all this about?”
“You asked me to show you how to see ghosts.”
“With this?” I glanced down at the glob of lime.
“Lime paste,” Old Lung said.
I looked at his wrinkled face, rust-brown and leathery, and as I met his unblinking stare, I nodded. He kept his hand in one place until I was done daubing lime on the extremities of my toes and fingers. He tossed away the banana leaf, blew out the lamp and sat down beside me, his arms wrapping his knees.
“Now what?” I said, keeping my hands open, palms upward. My legs were straightened out, sandaled feet pointed up.
“Just wait,” Old Lung said.
“They’ll be coming?”
“Quiet.”
I said no more. I could hear myself breathing and him wheezing. A whippoorwill called somewhere in the blackness. When it died out, the night purred with undulating shrills of toads. My head nodding, my eyelids grew heavy. As my eyes were closing I saw lights coming toward us. The blue-ghost fireflies came glowing from deep in the night, coming nearer, together, like myriad stars attracting one another, closer and closer, denser and denser until a blue light began to shine eerily within eyeshot. In the glow were two human figures standing face to face, for just one brief moment, then they lunged at each other. The shorter one was an NVA soldier. I recognized his green uniform immediately. The two button-down breast pockets, the pants with thigh pockets. I had for years worn that same uniform. His cordwood sun-helmet was tipped back, no chin strap. The hat fell as he tried to stab the other man with his AK-47 fitted with a spike bayonet. The other man was an American soldier who wore no helmet. His marine fatigues were coated with yellow dirt as though he had wallowed in it. He had in his hand an entrenching tool. He sidestepped the NVA soldier and gashed his arm with the entrenching tool’s blade. The NVA soldier stumbled. I saw one of his ankle-high green canvas boots come off. He turned, swung the rifle’s bayonet at the American, and his body pivoted wildly.
I turned to Old Lung. “You see that?” I asked him.
The moment he nodded, the scene disappeared. Hung in the night was the blue light only momentarily and it too went black. In the dark I could feel Old Lung shifting on his buttocks, then he struck a match and lit up the lamp.
“You see what I saw?” I asked him with my face turned toward the spot.
“I ain’t blind.”
“But you’ve got no lime on your toes and fingers.”
“I don’t need no lime to see them. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“You think they heard me and disappeared?”
“I shoulda told you to say nothing, not a word when you catch them ghosts with your eyes.”
“They must’ve died around here to show up here again. Right, old man?”
“If them dead people could stand together here for roll call, it oughta be the size of a regiment.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was here back then. Could’ve been dead myself and turned into one of them ghosts you saw time and again.”
Old Lung said nothing as he lit a cigarette. Twenty years had passed since then. Why do ghosts not grow older with time?
I went with Mrs. Rossi to the forest for the first time. We went in a sampan. There were four of us. Mrs. Rossi and me and Old Lung and Ông Ba―Mr. Number Three. Old Lung found Ông Ba, a settler who owns a fifteen-foot-long sampan fitted with a Kohler outboard motor.
We followed the Biện Nhi Canal going east. It is a long canal coming from the coast going inland through the buffer zone, the canal arrow-straight and clear with a paved road edging it on one side and dwellers’ homes on the other side mirroring themselves in the blue water. Ông Ba said it was an elephant road before he was born. It was trampled down by traveling herds of elephants to become a path and whenever there was a dirt path there were migrators. The water in the canal was calm, sky-blue turning gray at times, reflecting clouds, and then a sudden green from water lettuce grown into rails along the lips of the banks. Before long the canal cut through the forest and the water turned ochre, the channel now narrow and dark under the canopy of nypa palms arching twenty feet above the water. When the sun finally broke through on the water’s surface, the nose of the sampan knifed through a long floating mass of water hyacinth, parting the mat of oval leaves cupping blue and violet flowers.
Mid-morning we entered Cái Tàu River, turning south, the river wide and brown, and there were fish stakes pounded into the riverbed along the banks, their wattles wetly dark with watermarks, and the river became fast moving as we turned into another canal going east, moving through another forest of cajeput, and for a while I kept looking at the green of floating water hyacinth, the bright pink of Mrs. Rossi’s umbrella. Then only the drone of the motor and the calls of birds. We reached Trẹm River after an hour on the waterways and turning south we could see the forest on the far right, where we had just emerged, green with white flecks of cajeput flowers and the brownish land beyond the bank. We could see on the left the unclaimed tracts of peatland, the khaki yellow of the soil lambent behind the lush green of banana groves, the fan palms that grew wildly on the bank, the shimmering yellow of riverhemp flowers.
Past a sawmill there were lumber barges moored along the low-lying bank that went up in log steps and far behind the mill, the forest. Ông Ba said, “Yonder it is.” He turned right into a canal, the sampan bobbing on the choppy currents where the canal entered the river, the banks high and thick with bear’s breeches, glossy- and spiny-leaved, and over the bank you could see the sawmill’s brown roof. When we could no longer hear the noises from the sawmill, at least a kilometer behind, Ông Ba brought the sampan alongside the bank where it flared into a shaded cove. Ahead, a hundred yards out in the sun glare was the forest.
“This is the place,” Ông Ba said, cutting off the motor.
I told Mrs. Rossi so. Old Lung simply watched her. She looked at the hand-drawn map and then across the grassy tract of land, brown in the sun. She said, gesturing with her hand toward the open space, “I imagine the American Army base used to be over there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She tilted her umbrella back, her face full of sun now, and gazed into the shadowy space farther downstream where the canal disappeared into the forest, where the water shone before it turned dark out of the sun.
Rain. Falling on the inn’s red-tiled roof that slants sharply over the veranda. Sluicing over the low-hanging edge of the roof, falling and glittering in a white-water curtain. The veranda, deep and always shadowy even on a sunny day, surrounds the inn and shields the first-floor rooms from the pelting rain. Bundled up in my raincoat, I walk quick-stepped onto the veranda and set down the two bags of groceries and household supplies on the cement floor, next to the entrance door.
It’s forenoon now. It rained when I went into town. Rain hasn’t let up. Water started rising on the roads on my way back from the town. On a rainy day like this, Mrs. Rossi stays home.
We have new guests who arrived at the inn three days ago. A couple from Ireland. They drove down from Hồ Chí Minh City. The husband is some sort of a journalist. Since their arrival he has gone around the U Minh region always with a camera, a backpack, and a palm-sized voice recorder. The wife, in her late thirties, made friends easily with us. When she first heard of the purpose of Mrs. Rossi’s visit, she said to her, “Jasus, ye break my heart.”
The door opens with the familiar scratching noise the bottom-edge wire mesh makes against the cement floor. Since I came, I have sealed each door’s bottom edge with a wire mesh to keep out bugs and rodents and even snakes, especially during floods. Chi Lan stands in the doorway, holding a mug in her hand.
“Chú,” she says, “give me a grocery bag.” Her voice is soft with a lilt in ‘chú.’ Uncle.
I put the bag in the crook of her arm. “Where’s everyone?”
“My mom’s in the back with Maggie,” she says. “Washing clothes. Alan went off somewhere in their car.”
I notice steam rising from her mug. “What’re you drinking?”
“Café phin. I made it myself.”
“Black?”
“No. With condensed milk. I can’t drink it black like you.”
“I’ve got you into drinking Vietnamese slow-drip café now, huh?” I get out of my raincoat and hang it on a wall hook, several of which I have put up on the veranda walls, front and back, for guests to hang their raincoats before they enter the inn.
She steps back for me to come in. Barefooted, her toenails look rosy, freshly polished.
“We’ll be even when I get you to quit smoking,” she says.
I smile at her gentle tone. I have indeed thought of cutting back on smoking. It is cool inside the house. Her black T-shirt and black hair blend with the dimness, and her white shorts are the only color bright as the whitewashed walls. My sandals squeak, leaving a wet trail behind me on the gray cement floor. Clean looking as the old woman of the inn demands it. At the end of the big room is a pantry that has a refrigerator. Chi Lan sets her mug on a shelf and puts groceries into the refrigerator. Suddenly she stops and holds up a paper-wrapped baguette.
“Bánh mì!” She sounds as if she’s just found gold.
“Yeah,” I say. “I bought plenty of them for lunch. Hope you and everyone’d like it.”
“I love it. What do we have in them?” She takes off the rubber band, opens the wrapper and peeks inside the baguette. The fillings seem to please her as she sniffs at the pork bellies and liver pâté garnished with cilantro, chili peppers, cucumber slices, and pickled carrots. “I’ve tried to make these at home,” she says, wrapping up the baguette and tying it with the rubber band, “and they never came out like this―the smell, the taste.”
“Because most of the fillings are homemade. The pork bellies in particular. They make the bread themselves too. Didn’t you know that?”
“And because I’m an amateur cook.” She taps her cheek with the wrapped baguette, picks up her mug and sips. “Are you a good cook, chú?”
“I can manage on my own.” I walk to the cupboard that stands by the door into the kitchen. “Alan asked me about a snake dish the other day. I told him before he and his wife leave, I’d cook a snake dish for everyone.”
“Oh my.” She closes the refrigerator. “Did you tell him you used to catch snakes with your father? Did you? And about the snake gallbladder?”
“No. I’ve never told anyone that. Except you.” I set down the supplies bag, squatting on my heels, and inspect the four legs of the cupboard, each leg shod with a tin cup half filled with vinegar. In one cup floats a mass of dead black ants.
The air stirs faintly as she kneels beside me. “Must be the sugar jar in the cupboard that attracted them. Look at them.” She bends closer, sweeping back her hair over her ear. “That looks like a moat around a fortress―the water and the cups. Is this your idea, chú?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a good custodian.”
“It’s not water in those tin cups. It’s vinegar.”
She looks again. “What’s the difference?”
“Ants might survive in water and they’ll crawl up those legs into the cupboard.”
“I didn’t know vinegar kills them.” She turns to face me, her eyes gently holding my gaze. “My mom appreciated having that clothing trunk in our room to store our clothes. I didn’t know why it’s lined with tin till you told us. Otherwise our old suitcases if we’d used them would’ve crawled with moths and cockroaches.”
“I’m going to replace the vinegar in those cups.” I take out a bottle of vinegar in the bag. “When I lift a leg up, can you remove the cup under the leg for me?”
“Go ahead, chú.”
She remains on her knees, head bent, as I plant my feet and slowly raise a corner of the cupboard. I glance down as she slides the cup out, and through the open top of her T-shirt I can see that she’s braless. I hold my breath, set the cupboard back down. She tilts her face up at me.
“What now? Should I empty the cup―and the ants?”
“Yeah.”
Each time I heave the cupboard, despite my knowing what I will see when I drop my gaze at her, I still look down through the crescent opening below her clavicles, holding my gaze on the milky white of her skin, the fullness of her bosom, and what comes back to my mind is a child’s innocent eyes and a man’s disturbed thoughts.
On the rear veranda Mrs. Rossi and Maggie, the Irish woman, are scrubbing clothes in a round rubber tub. The old woman normally does this chore. Though old, she can still scrub and wring garments with her small hands. At times she would tread on them the old-fashioned way while her hands hoist the legs of her pantaloons.
“Giang,” Mrs. Rossi calls to me, “you’re back already.”
Maggie, her face wet, raises her voice with a toss of her head, “Made it back in one piece in this bloody weather, didn’t ye?”
“Roads are flooded now,” I say to them. “Where’s your husband, Maggie?”
“Went to meet his local guide and then off to the jungle.” She meant the U Minh forest. “I said go aisy on a day like this. He’s beyant control. Wouldn’t you say, Catherine?”
Mrs. Rossi shrugs. I step closer and look down at her lower legs. Above her ankles are crowds of deep purple marks like she has been hit with buckshot.
“Leech bites?” I ask her, pointing at them.
“How d’you know by just looking?” Mrs. Rossi looks at her ankles and up at me.
“I’ve got scars on my legs from them.” I pull up my trousers legs. The women and Chi Lan stare at the pea-sized scars on my shins, my calves.
Her face scrunched up, Chi Lan shakes her head. “You got them during the war, chú?”
“From years in the jungles.”
Mrs. Rossi drops a wrung-out sock into an empty basket next to the tub. “Every night when I take off my socks, they’re bloodstained from those suckers. The first few days in the forest I was near tears from putting up with them. Mr. Lung, he seemed unperturbed by leeches and bugs. You know how he got rid of those leeches for me?”
“With his cigarettes?” I say. “Make them drop away?”
“That or I just pulled them off my legs.”
“That’s why you’ve got scars like these.” I sit down on my heels, put my fingertip on her calf and slide a finger under the fingertip. “Do like this. Slide your fingernail under the sucker’s mouth. It’ll break off. Won’t leave any scar mark on you I guarantee.”
“What else is better than that?”
“I’ll get you chopped tobacco. All you have to do is soak it in water. Then soak your socks in the tobacco water and then dry the socks before you wear them. Leeches won’t bother you again.”
“What do you think of that? Does it really work?”
Grinning, I nod. “Or you can cut a leech in half.”
Mrs. Rossi leans back slowly looking at me and smiles. “I’ve heard if you do that, it’ll regenerate itself. True?”
“No, ma’am. And I’m glad Mother Nature is fair to us that way.”
Maggie laughs. “That’ll do us all the good in the world, won’t it?”
She rises with the tub in her arms and empties it over the edge of the veranda and fills the tub with rainwater sluicing like a waterfall from the edge of the roof. I have seen her and Chi Lan washing themselves with rainwater, cleaning and scrubbing themselves until their faces glow. Precious rainwater. When it rains I fill jugs of rainwater for the old woman to wash and bathe the old man, for cooking and drinking, too. Once, while filling the jugs, I told Chi Lan that in the jungles we soldiers used to wait for rain so we could shower, and sometimes it was just a passing shower which stopped before we could get all the suds off our bodies. She laughed.
“Is she sleeping around this time?” Chi Lan looks back into the house for the old lady.
“She’s feeding him,” I say.
“You want me to fill the water jugs for her?” Chi Lan says.
“No.” My hand touches my shirt pocket where the cigarette pack is. “We have all we need for now.”
I catch her gaze at my gesture for a smoke. I leave my hand on my chest and in my mind I see the creamy white skin of her bosom. She squats down and begins scrubbing a mud stain off her mother’s jeans in the tub.
Mrs. Rossi arches her back, drawing a deep breath. “I must say I admire the old lady for washing clothes like this. My back is already killing me.”
Maggie is wringing her denim shirt until veins bulge on the backs of her hands. “That’s why that oul’ lady walks bowlegged.” She shakes the shirt loudly. “Mother o’ God give us a washer and a dryer. That’s wan thing we need here.”
I have told them to air-dry their clothes in the sun once a week so the sun will kill any eggs that might have been deposited in their garments. Books they bring with them too. Shake them out once in a while. On the first day of their arrival I heard Maggie scream upstairs. I saw a trail of black ants that led into their room and heard her say to Alan, her husband, “I won’t touch that thing for the steam of their piss.” So I went in and there I saw a dead scorpion under the dresser. I picked up the scorpion and told them I would get rid of the ants. “Oh you’re a treasure,” she said to me. “Please make the bloody eejit go ‘way.”
Now she hangs up her shirt on the cord strung across the veranda and clips it with a wooden clothes-peg. In her late thirties, she is lean, small-bosomed, her sandy-blonde hair tied into a ponytail. Bony in the face, freckled heavily under her clear blue eyes, she smiles a lot, the ear-to-ear smile that brings a smile to your face. She comes back to the tub for her cotton slacks. “You ever got caught with this sorta rain in the jungle while ye go about yeer business?” she asks Mrs. Rossi.
“Oh I’ve been in those downpours and the misting after the monsoon rains. It’s miserable, Maggie.”
“Tell me, love, how on earth can ye find anything in such a place? In that wilderness God doesn’t plant a sign that says, Dig here! Ye know what I mean.”
Skimming the suds off Chi Lan’s forearm with her finger, Mrs. Rossi smiles softly. Her pale blue eyes blink a few times as they rove from my face to Maggie’s. “Mr. Lung has a method,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “He’s done this before. We divided up the area and we go from one section to the next. We spot a mound of earth and dig. Most of the time we find nothing. A few times we found bones, human bones, and God Almighty I’ve felt myself shaking. And you know something? You can’t tell one skull from another. They all look like they were cast from the same mold.”
Mrs. Rossi coughs a small cough and her white-haired head keeps shaking like she can’t chase away something unpleasant in her head. “One time we found this Penicillin bottle among the bones. It’s closed tight with a rubber cap. Mr. Lung opens it and there’s nothing but a piece of paper inside. Well, he doesn’t speak English like you, Giang, but after a lot of gesticulating and with much pidgin English, he got me to understand that it had to do with a soldier’s identification. Things like name, combat unit, rank, birthplace and hometown. He said back when the remains-gathering crew would arrive searching for the remains of their comrades, the bones they found with no Penicillin bottles would be brought back with those identified and buried in the National Military Cemetery. Except that the unidentified bones would be interred in the section for the remains of unknown Vietnamese soldiers.”
Maggie frowns. “I thought the Americans bombed the bejesus outa the jungle. So what’s left in there to find?”
I cut in. “You rebury the remains. Sometimes all you rebury are a few bones.”
“And if ye find them,” Maggie says, “how d’ye take them oul’ bones back?”
“For mass recovery of bones?” I plug a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it. “They pack them in nylon bags and hang them on tree limbs. Keep them away from termites ‘cause the remains-gathering crew would stay in the forest for weeks. They’d bring all the bags of bones back to the cemetery when their stay was over.”
Her lips puckered, Maggie screws her eyes at me. “Just a funny thought: Say ye stumble on a skull of an orangutan. Can ye tell? Or ye bag it up and bury it in your National Military Cemetery among the oul’ souls of yeer soldiers?”
Mrs. Rossi tilts her head back and from that angle eyes Maggie with an inquisitive yet bemused look on her face. I take the cigarette from my lips. “The men of the remains-gathering crew have a way of knowing about bones. They know how to tell a monkey skull from a human skull. A woman’s skull from a man’s skull . . .”
“Seriously?” Maggie says.
“Yeah,” I say. “They can tell. A woman’s chin bone is smaller than a man’s chin bone. The eye sockets are deeper. That sort of thing.”
“Ah, now,” Maggie says, nodding. “Nurses, aren’t they?”
“Soldiers. Women fighters.”
“We did find a couple of skulls Mr. Lung said were women’s skulls.” Mrs. Rossi lets out a sigh. “He was respectful with the bones we found. You must see how careful he was with those bones when he came upon them. . . .”
“He’s a gravedigger and a undertaker around here,” I say.
“I remember you telling me that,” Mrs. Rossi says. “I admire him for his professionalism but more so for his personal feeling in the way he treats the dead people’s bones. Before he digs he lights a stick of incense. Then you just watch him stab and stab the ground with his shovel and sometimes it hits rocks and sparks fly and then he suddenly stops and looks down and there is a small bundle in the hole, just a nylon bunch tattered and gray and when he runs his hand over it the nylon falls apart. And inside, a skull cracked and chipped like broken china.”
“What does he do with them?” Maggie asks.
Mrs. Rossi’s eyes turn pensive and her voice drops. “He rewraps the bones in a clean piece of nylon he brought with him and shovels dirt over the pit and says a prayer.”
I feel as if she’s living her wish through Old Lung’s acts; to see her son’s remains cared for by a stranger in a time and place unknown. Then Mrs. Rossi speaks again.
“After he reburies the bones and sometimes bones with a skull, Mr. Lung flattens the dirt and removes the incense stick. I asked him why he did that and he explained, well, sort of mimed, that this would wipe out any sign of a grave. ‘God, why?’ I asked. ‘So the bad people wouldn’t come upon it,’ he replied.”
She looks at me. Her wrinkled face, crimped lips hold in them a dogged patience. I tap the cigarette on my thumbnail. “Mr. Lung did the right thing,” I say, resting myself on one knee. “There’re bone crooks who go around digging up bones and sell them.”
“Selling bones?” Mrs. Rossi’s mouth falls agape.
“They’re swindlers. Bone profiteers.”
“Selling bones to whom?” Mrs. Rossi asks.
“To contractors who build the National Military Cemetery.”
“I might be obtuse,” Mrs. Rossi says. “Would you please explain that?”
“These bone crooks go into the forests and dig for bones. The worst of them follow the poor folks after they’ve recovered the bones of their relatives and outright rob them of the bones. Then these crooks sell the bones to the contractors in the city. You see, ma’am, for each tomb the contractors build its cost is charged to the government, so the more tombs built the higher the profit. The contractors would divide up the bones they bought from the bone crooks, and instead of building one tomb for a dead soldier’s bones they build two, three tombs and charge the government for those. For the unknown remains, they’ll end up having several unknown markers for one dead soldier. So instead of being properly buried back home with a tomb and a headstone, a dead soldier will be buried in the National Military Cemetery as an unknown soldier with his bones in multiple tombs.”
Mrs. Rossi nods, her pale blue eyes completely vacant as she looks at me. Maggie taps her forehead. “Aw Gawd I shure never heard of this meself.”
“Me neither,” Mrs. Rossi says. “Who could’ve thought of doing such inhuman thing?”
I gaze at her wrinkled face as she tosses her head back, fanning her face with her hand. Why a Vietnamese adopted child? Did it let her hold on to the memory of her lost son? I like Mrs. Rossi. A retired high school principal. A sweet old lady. I admire her determination to find her son’s remains. More so, I admire her faith. Painful faith. Yet it never dies in her after twenty years.
Liner Notes
All these songs were written for Julia. Note the passive construction—it’s intentional. Sure, I put the pen to paper, cut shapeless feeling into word. But these songs lived in her long before that; I just had to find them. In the wisps of hair over her eyes, in those red scratched cheeks. That whole perfect wreck of a woman cobbled together like some heartworn fakebook. Of course, if Julia heard the songs, she might not like them. She might rage, topple the sculptures cluttering my apartment, shout that this mess wasn’t music. But that was just her way, and if I could calm her—a skill I had once sharpened to a fine edge—she might hear how these songs assemble into a whole. Into us. She might hear how each pedestrian note, each word, each line, each verse, each chorus all meld together. How all the bits of murky heart stuff I poured into this music, and into her, all became one big undeniable force. The same way all the best stuff in life, the things that shudder caged up in your chest, have some kind of alchemy behind them. Like how Julia and I came together that day at the record store.
The shouting—that untethered howl she could scrape out of the bottom of her lungs—was already filling the air when I walked in. And there was Julia. In the Rock/Pop section, smashing Smiths’ discs off the floor, screaming about her old boyfriend. How he loved Morrissey so much he skipped town to catch a show in San Francisco. And how would she feed or clothe herself, she wanted to know. He hadn’t even paid the rent before he left.
I don’t remember moving toward her, or speaking to her, but I got her out of the store and into the café across the street and calmed her over tea and not one but two muffins. There was a warm haze in her eyes, past all that bloodshot anger, a care in the way here eyes smoldered that said this is it, the soft, needing middle of me.
She didn’t waste time moving in and the albums she brought with her in that one cracked crate filled the apartment like so much plush furniture and I forgot my army of awful sculptures shoved into the corners of every room. She’d spin Darkness on the Edge of Town or Tonight’s the Night or Fear of Music and those albums were what I thought of when I bought that pawn shop guitar and when I filled that notebook with words, and when I called Log Cabin Studios and booked time and told them I’d be there for the long haul. Driving out there, I figured I’d make these songs and she’d hear them and come back to me. I thought about how she always said—like always, as in too much—that she’d fuck Dylan’s voice if she could, or how she envied her aunt that time in Champaign, Illinois when she’d slept with Rick Danko. There was this quiver of worship in her voice when she mentioned those guys.
The studio set me up with an engineer, this guy Stan Danford, to man the soundboard. He’d produced two pretty obscure albums—The Shinplaster’s Copies of Frankenstein and Totally Evil’s Totally Evil—and played them all the time during breaks. He’d scream descriptions of them over the playback, call them things like ‘part adrenaline, part Grand Guignol’ when all they were, far as I could tell, were thick frayed beds of distortion. Still, Stan was good enough to teach me a few chords and some scales on the guitar so he wasn’t all bad. I practiced hard, too, and eventually got my hands, which she called lifeless mounds when I worked on my sculptures, moving over the frets pretty good after a while.
Of course, I couldn’t play every instrument myself. That’s where the session musicians came in. I mean, they weren’t cheap. But I had no reason left to penny pinch, as she always called it. There was no future left to plan for. Just blank spaces in pictures where you once were. And yeah, I’ll admit, there weren’t actually any photos. But it’s an emotional image, and that’s what us songwriters do.
It was nice to go call in some players and whip it up with them, and nice to have some people around since I hadn’t seen many friends or family since we started dating. They all didn’t get us, thought she was a mooch—I think my father, at one point, used the term leech—and they’d get offended if I didn’t call them back for a few weeks. If I’d been holed up working on sculptures, if I’d just told that lie, no one would have minded. But they seemed to think she was stealing me from them, or just stealing from me, so they wiped their hands of us. Getting these guys together was like making new friends, ones that I think she’d like. For the most part.
Like Stamper Casp, for instance. He played all the drums for me. A rail of a guy, really, he’d curl over the set with his head turned to one side. Between takes he told me how he toured with all these rock bands in the ‘70s, how he’d crash cymbals and snap fills off the snare. But now he worried that soon he wouldn’t be able to hear his granddaughter’s voice over the phone, and that worry hissed out beautifully in the tiny ping of cymbals, in the shuffle of brushes on the snare. In the hushed tapping of a man clinging to the little he has left.
Stamper was the only drummer I ever needed; no such luck with bass players though. Those guys are a little trickier than percussionists, and I ended up rattling through a bunch of them. They were all the same, really. The way they all checked notes and worried over progressions, how they name-dropped people they’d played with over the years while they tuned and retuned their strings. It all couldn’t help but remind me of Julia, of how she checked labels on the dresses I bought her or how she’d set up shop in front of the mirror, teasing her hair or smudging on make-up. We’d fight—seriously, but in the end playful fights—because I’d tell her that she was plain, the most beautiful kind of plain. That she didn’t need dress after designer dress or all those chalky pads of foundation. I told her that every night, when she lay on that old mattress, she was an undeniable truth laid bare, an axis the world could spin upon. And she’d tease me in response; tell me I could be so much more handsome if I tried even a little. Like if I shaved everyday and maybe cut my hair more than once in a calendar year. Or if I ironed my shirt so the collar didn’t hang there like overcooked pasta. I tried all those things, even if she didn’t really care about it all, but during one of our last fights—if only I’d known then—she told me once she left I’d never have beauty again. But when she hears this record, she’ll see she was wrong. I have these songs that I made, this big beauty of an album to share with the world.
And those goddamn bass players tried to take it over, break it down into parts and strip it away from me. I mean, show me a famous bassist and I’ll show you a guy who tries too damn hard—and that include Rick Motherfucking Danko. I’m sorry, I am, but every bassist that walked in the studio door tried to hijack the whole thing. They couldn’t see the big picture. They spent their time trying to sneak some tumbling rundown into track six (“This is a Goddamn Pipe”) or yelling at me to tune my guitar again. They just didn’t get it—that getting a perfect sound didn’t matter. Or how rotten love can pull the heart’s sound sharp or stretch it flat. How the right note and the true one aren’t the same sometimes. One of them had this busted little amp that squealed whenever he stopped playing and I got a twenty second clip of that to use, which was about all the whole lot of bassists was worth. Until the last guy, anyway. His name was Solomon Tessler, and he was a skyscraper of a man. Tall and black, he looked like he walked out of a Blue Note album cover, and acted just as cool. The guy would let notes ring endlessly off the walls, setting the imperfect heartbeat to the whole album. Solomon really drones on track nine (“You Can’t Eat My Heart with Your Fingers”). It’s some of his best work.
It wasn’t long before money got tight on the album, the same way it did with Julia, when the bit of money I made off my junk metal sculptures dried up after I stopped pitching work to galleries or even scrounging the junkyard for material so I could spend all my time with her. By September, the album had nearly emptied me out. I took a couple days off and tried to get rid of the last few pieces I had left around the house. Called a few old acquaintances from smaller art spaces, tried to sell them my stuff at bottom dollar. But it was no use; no one wanted them. I couldn’t find steady work and I couldn’t call my parents because they’d just insist again that I move home and that hurt bad enough without that relief in their voice, the relief that she was gone. No one, not even my own family, could understand me and Julia. Everyone seems to think love is some sort of give and take, some two-way street. But I know what love is. I mean what it really is: it’s not something to accept, but something that we all pour out, all over, wherever we can. I gave my love over to her and once I did it was ours. Whether she put it in her heart or a paper shredder didn’t matter. We came together and made a complete love, and that was what I wanted her to hear in this album.
Chas, the guy who played all the lead guitar and keys, he got it. Well, he got the size of it anyway, the importance. He was so anxious for the work he played for almost nothing so I let him do whatever he wanted. For nearly a month, he layered six and seven tracks of guitar on top of each other. Puffed up each song with gauzy phrases from the keyboards. It was a bit much, but I knew I could cut it up and keep what I wanted later. And at the end of October, I kicked everyone else out to record my parts and put the whole thing together. The whole time I kept thinking about the day Julia left, about that note she’d laid on the kitchen counter—The cupboards are bare. I spent the rest of that day just wandering around the city and downtown felt like scrap metal. The rebar embedded in the cement buildings, the antennas cowlicking off skyscrapers, the shiny glare of hot dog stands—I couldn’t put any of it together in my head to look like something. I got home at night and measured the seams between the floorboards, I put on This Year’s Model and tried to do that hop dance she always did in the living room, but I felt tethered to the earth. I sang along to the songs, until that phrase, until the cupboards are bare, thinned out and left my head, and then I kept singing, sliding her name into the songs here and there. And when the record clicked off and stopped its spin, I just kept singing, making up my own words. Those words became songs in the early morning hours, and I knew that they could be my love letter to her. A way to pull loose of this heavy feeling and reach her.
Sometimes I couldn’t sing how I felt though, no matter how much I tried. So I’d eat chocolate and smoke cigarettes until I sounded like something dragged across pavement, like Tom Waits low on batteries. Or I would drink only water and eat celery for days to get my voice to a weak trill. I taped a picture of Julia, the only one I had, to the music stand by the microphone. Not that I needed reminding of why I was there. I mean, track fourteen (“Killing Poets”) is just the sound of me sobbing while I lobbed light bulbs around the studio. Stan didn’t like that very much. He kept complaining while we mastered everything down. He told me the early tracks made more sense, probably because they were about me Julia’s first days, those honeymoon days right after I’d met her at the record store when we made sense. In those days she could silently unbuckle my belt in the back row of the movie theatre (“Weekend Matinee”), and we always agreed on wine (“The Power of Merlot”), and she didn’t find out yet that I was cheap and sad and afraid all the goddamn time (“Paying Bills in the Basement”). Later on in the album, the songs fell apart—of course they did—into humming dirges and death blues. The instruments would crackle and fade, wax and wane, scream over each other and shatter into silence. In the background of one tune, I won’t say which one, you can barely hear the sound of me smashing a copy of The Queen is Dead off the studio floor—a little broken gem for Julia to find on here.
“Puff the Magic Dragon” seemed like a perfect cover because it’s clean-sounding and beautiful and, like everything I knew but me and Julia, all a fucking lie. “Puff the Magic Dragon?” Stan said more than once, kind of like when he threw me weird looks every time I asked him to cut up takes and paste them together out of order or loop vocals over one another or run guitar riffs backwards. He said he had no idea where “Keep the House, Lose the Home” was going, wondered why it couldn’t be more like the first song, “Foundation,” which he kept referring to as a pop gem. And then there was the last song, “Tomorrow Morning’s Coffee.” He hated that one, always asked me why it had to sound like I took a chainsaw to a rocking chair. I tried to tell him how all my life I’ve been trying to make something, to built some bridge back to the rest of humanity. At the very least, I figured, this could be my bridge to Julia. This music wasn’t about us. It was us. This is a goddamn pipe.
Especially that last song. I still feel that one in my bones. That morning after she left, I got up and made coffee, that expensive Kona stuff from Hawaii she loved. I made the full pot, like I always did, thinking maybe that would bring her back, that maybe the smell of it would make hope surge in her chest the way it did in mine. It reminded me of the first days, how Julia and I had made something beautiful, something you could truly call love. Two lonely people who’d found each other, finally, in Back Alley Records over a pile of cracked Smiths’ records which, I don’t care what anybody says, is as good a start as any. But not good enough to stop us from tearing it all down, from turning love into a raucous vase-breaking amelodic banging of cooking pots or interminable stretches of crippling silence that weighed down the bed frame. That stripped the cupboards bare, just like she said in her note. I’ve figured it out since then, or at least part of it, the part that occurred to me that morning after she left as I sat and drank that whole pot, each cup more bitter than the last as it say on the burner and scorched. She probably wanted me to get a job, just something regular to bring some money in. That might have solved it. If she’d said anything. If Julia had spoken up about it just once. But she didn’t, and instead it metastasized somewhere deep inside her and worked its way into her heart and she told herself it was too late for us, it was over, and the end came pretty goddamn quick. And as I fumbled around in my own head to put words to the hurt, to fill in the spaces she left empty in the apartment, those records kept playing. Especially Bringing It All Back Home, every spin of the record was a twist of torture. Because it reminded me of how she always played this record, way more than the most, and knew every word—and because Dylan used those words like bullets straight through whatever he decided to catch in his crosshairs.
That was the precision I was after, the aim I wanted everyone to hear when I finished the album. Before I sent it off to her, I invited the players over, even some of those bass players, to give it the album a listen and see what they thought. Only Solomon and Chas showed. As Chas sat down, and I hit play on the stereo, he asked why I called it The Cupboards are Bare, but he wasn’t there long enough for me to answer. Two minutes in, when he heard how I’d cut up all his takes, stripped a lot of those layers down to the bone, he got up and kicked a dent in the fridge and gave me and Solomon the finger and was out the door and gone.
Solomon, though, sat through the whole thing, sunk down in the couch barely nodding his head along. He squinted like was looking off in the distance, but no matter how much I looked at him, my own eyes pleading for some reaction, he never said anything. And when it ended, he just gave one definitive nod and said Blues, man like he would’ve said it about a turkey sandwich and then he left, too. I stood there alone for a few minutes, until it seemed like the echo of the album was still faintly ringing off the wood-paneled walls like tinnitus, then I grabbed it and ran down the street to Back Alley. I left the disc with the clerk and told him to give it to Julia when she saw her next. He shrugged and I took that as a yes, and left. For days after that I walked around in a fog. Everything felt off, on a slant somehow, like nothing fit. The seams between the floorboards were spreading the more I stared at them and it felt like the walls were separating at the corners and the ceiling could cave in at any moment. No one would take my sculptures and they just kind of glared at me from the corners of the apartment like they were fascinated by me, happy to watch me unravel, punishing me for bringing them to near-life, for not getting them close enough to beauty. I’d get out of the apartment but that was no better, since Downtown felt bombed out and gutted bare, just shards of broken things around me everywhere I went. I fought through that feeling as long as I could, almost a week, and then I could barely stand up straight anymore. So I went back to the record store.
I walked in and Julia wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t. Just that same clerk behind the counter, some music grinding and shuffling away in the overhead system—something familiar—and one guy working his way through the used record bin in the back corner. I watched him, brow furrowed, head hunched up between his shoulders, but he was bobbing his head slightly. To this music, this music that was slowly washing over me, the underwater muffled sound of a guitar riff running backwards. A faint crashing sound in the background. That imperfect voice, singing those hurt words—it wasn’t at all as fragile as it felt when I sung it. There was something missing, something alien about the song. I couldn’t hear the ruffle of bed sheets in the back of my mind, the clinking of tea cups into the sink, the fading pink of raw-skinned cheeks. It was just the howl of the instruments, the mumbling of voice. My voice. The guy at the used bin looked up then, saw me standing just inside the door, turning my head toward the speaker up above the entrance, feeling every note bristle on my skin.
“What the hell is this?” he asked. And the clerk looked up to answer, and that’s when he saw me, when he saw the answer. So he pointed at me, and the guy scrunched up his face in confusion but he didn’t ask again. I closed my eyes and stood there, taking it in, sharing it with these strangers, in this silent way. I heard the clerk ask if I was all right, but his voice was lost in the raspy shuffle of Stamper’s drums, in the rumble of Solomon’s underground bass. It all came together and swelled in my head, and I closed my eyes tighter to keep it all there, as the songs came back to me and I felt each note before it sounded.
“She hasn’t been back, you know,” I heard the clerk say somewhere on the other side of the world and I just kept my eyes closed and waved a hand in his direction, as if to wipe his voice away.
“Shhh,” I whispered. “Just listen to this next part.”