Perle Besserman

The doctors in Mexico City learned early not to cry. Sergio, a visiting surgery fellow in our Roosevelt Hospital residency training program, would describe the operations he’d performed in cemeteries without so much as a catch in his voice; and his eyes were dry when he talked about his fiancé being gunned down by riot police during a student demonstration. Though he was only thirty-two when Andrew and I met him, many of his friends were already dead.

Sergio had grown up in the hills outside of Cuernavaca in a villa with a pool bordered by red tiles where he swam every day from the time he was five. At eighteen he was offered a place on the Mexican Olympic Swim Team but chose to join a peasant rebellion instead. The only revolutionary among his three brothers and two sisters, Sergio had left home after antagonizing his father by announcing his intention to become a “barefoot doctor.” (Felipe Ruiz owned the biggest Mercedes dealership in Mexico and feared that his son’s activities would alienate his politically conservative clientele.) Sergio’s mother, a copper-haired Englishwoman born and raised on a farm in Surrey, was the horsy daughter of a French-Jewish millionaire and a devout Anglican Englishwoman who had once been a chambermaid. Alicia Ruiz had adapted well to her new life in Mexico; she simply transplanted her interest in horses to managing her large household staff, playing bridge, and overseeing charitable fundraisers. The Ruiz family took frequent holidays in Europe, visiting on occasion with Sergio’s millionaire Jewish grandfather in the south of France.

Sergio was short and brown-skinned with the quick movements of a jack rabbit. He was shy and wore round, thick-lens glasses with tortoise shell frames that made him look even more scholarly than he was. When he’d been a kid, he said, his teeth were so crooked that he hardly spoke to anyone at school because he was ashamed to open his mouth. His mother made him wear braces and take dancing lessons in the hope of socializing him. Every Wednesday, he and an awkward young girl from a neighboring estate were chauffeured to a dancing school run by a portly French woman in a purple long-sleeved gown with white lace wrist ruffles. Paola and Sergio sat in the back seat of the Mercedes like two cardboard dolls, not talking, each terrified of looking at the other, Sergio in black short pants and an Eton jacket that was too tight across his chest, and Paola in pink tulle and white gloves. Of course they fell madly in love and both went on to become medical students and revolutionaries together, until the day Paola got gunned down in Oaxaca.

Whenever Andrew was on-call, Sergio and I would share a bottle of wine in a funky bar habituated by down-and-outers a few blocks from the hospital in the dappled shadows under the West Side Highway trestle. It was a picturesque and sad place, a fitting backdrop to Sergio’s stories, and, on our off-hours, we soon became regulars. Andrew, whose tastes were more upscale, had joined us once or twice but always found a good excuse not to return afterward.

We were sitting at our usual table, half-heartedly watching a baseball game on the TV above the bar, when Sergio asked me to come down to Mexico City with him to work for “la revolucion”.

“This isn’t real,” I said, “I’m dreaming this conversation, this place . . .”

“I can’t believe I’m here myself,” Sergio gazed, as always, a little past my shoulder. It was his habit never to look me straight in the eye. We were both a little bit in love with each other but didn’t want to acknowledge it because I was married to Andrew.

“Did you always want to be a doctor . . . or did you ever want to be something else?” I asked to change the subject.

Bluntly, almost angrily, Sergio said, “A woodcarver once, when I was a kid.”

Then, instead of lifting his hand from the table and caressing his beautiful surgeon’s fingers, which was what I really wanted to do, I found myself promising to come to Mexico City and work for la revolucion.

“Good. We drink to that!” Sergio poured the last of the wine into our glasses.

I noticed that the bottle was slightly chipped at the mouth and that I was drunker than I thought and would probably be sorry tomorrow for what I had promised so cavalierly.

“We’ve been drinking ground glass,” I said, thinking, damn you, Sergio, and your social justice routine. Why don’t you just take me to your apartment and make love to me?

The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I thought I saw Rosie, a bulky singer of off-color ditties who’d taken a liking to us, expand and float toward the doorway.

“Rosie’s blotted out the sun,” I said dreamily.

“No,” said Sergio, “it’s someone else. Another Rosie.” Was he drunk too?

The conversation trickled off, giving way to the toot of fog horns on the Hudson. Now it was raining outside, though it had been a perfectly sunny day when we first sat down.

“God, Faye, do you realize what a momentous occasion this is?” Sergio grabbed my hand suddenly and shook it hard.

“Looks like Rosie’s going to serenade us,” I responded muzzily. Rosie had in fact approached the bar, placed one purple-veined elephant leg on the brass rail, and was preparing to launch one of her unsolicited performances.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sergio said, his glasses misting over in the now steamy bar.

“Where to?”

“The movies . . . anywhere . . .”

“What about Andrew?”

“Call him and tell him he must come too.”

“Hi, dearie, Rosie cawed at me as I passed her at the bar. And I recognized instantly what I could never have seen while dead sober: Rosie was a transvestite.

“Didn’t you know it all along?” Sergio asked as we were heading cross town toward the Lincoln Square multiplex in a Checker cab papered with stickers denouncing everything but Marine World in Florida.

“That Rosie was a man?”

“Yes.”

“No, damn it. I once even peed in the woman’s toilet with him standing in front of the mirror at the sink applying make-up.”

We both laughed.

* * * *

A month later I was on leave in Mexico City training as a demonstration marshal, studying crowd control, and helping Sergio organize the university’s medical faculty and students in a protest march against the imprisonment of a union leader named Vallejo. I didn’t know it then, but Sergio’s Mexico City demonstration, along with several others around the country, had been planned as a dry run before the Zapatista uprising. Not that knowing what was coming would have changed anything once Sergio had worked his revolutionary magic on me. We didn’t become lovers. I’d half hoped we would, but Sergio was too ethical for that. He slept on the sofa in the living room of the flat in the Pedregal we shared with an older American medical student named Margo who’d divorced her husband and left her two daughters with her mother in North Dakota, in order to attend, as she put it, the only medical school in the hemisphere that would have her. Margo had been an army nurse in the States before deciding to become a doctor. Her porcelain-white skin and baby blue eyes belied her tough anti-American persona, but she had yet to shed her military boot camp training. She’d moved in only two days before me but her side of our shared bedroom was already meticulously arranged when I arrived, everything in its proper place: medical books in sparsely occupied bookcases, spotless desk, personal items tucked out of sight in khaki rayon bags. Margo sat on the edge of her bed eyeing me suspiciously as I unpacked my hibiscus-flowered suitcase and stuffed my things into drawers in no particular order. Later, when we got to know each other better, she confessed that my “Hawaiian luggage and hick outfit” (a checked gingham pinafore and wooden clogs) that first day, had convinced her I was a CIA plant, and I told her I’d automatically assumed that, being military, she was a lesbian—and we both had a good laugh because—-as events later proved–neither of us could have been more wrong.

Every day, we’d join Sergio and his radical friends in a Zona Rosa café called The Laughing Horse. We’d sit there for hours on tiny, cramped white wire chairs around dollhouse-sized tables, planning for the demonstration, arguing politics, stuffing ourselves with soggy guacamole and stale tostadas, and drinking too much Tequila.

It was at the Laughing Horse where I watched Sergio fall out of love with me and in love with Margo. A TV Soap star named Felix unsuccessfully tried convincing me to have an affair with him instead. Humberto, a penniless film director, finished cutting his documentary on the last days of Trotsky in Mexico, to which I had contributed most of my money, and our motley group celebrated the event by cramming into an ancient Volkswagen beetle and driving around the Paseo de Reforma honking the horn and shooting colored streamers out the windows. The documentary’s scriptwriter, and owner of the Volkswagen, got a flat tire and forced us to abandon the car right under the nose of a policeman with a head-bashing baton at his waist and a prominently displayed revolver strapped to his chest. Felix, the black-haired Soap star, had begun pawing in the direction of my breasts, muttering something about existential decisions. Margo, who had drunk too much tequila, pushed him off me, hissing into his face that he and all men were filo da puta. After which, threatening to kill himself, Felix lunged into the mad Mexico City traffic. Fortunately, Humberto snatched him out of the road just in time to avoid being run down by a door-less and windowless bus jammed with farm workers.

On the morning before the march, Sergio announced over a poached egg that he and Margo were going to be married. Margo was out taking an anatomy exam, it was drizzling lightly. I had just closed the door and returned from the hall after having paid the bread man. I placed two fresh rolls on the table in front of Sergio and stood watching him eat. Seeing him sitting there, in his crisp blue denim work shirt, vulnerable as only a man eating his poached egg can be, no longer buck-toothed and shy but still wearing thick-lens glasses and not looking me in the eye, made me want to cry.

“When’s the wedding?”

“Friday, at noon, in the City Hall.”

“Will you throw me out of the flat?”

“Pobrecita,” he said laughing.

“Well, I can’t live here with you and Margo. I’ll have to find a new place,” I said, turning to the stove.

“Of course not, you’ll stay here.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, hating myself for throwing money at Humberto in order to ingratiate myself with Sergio and guilty for no longer being in love with Andrew. I turned up the flame under the coffee pot then poured warmed milk halfway into a mug and waited.

Sergio buttered a roll and placed it on my plate. “You know, I used to sneak the best food from my mother’s pantry and bring it to the peasants who worked on our estate. By the time I was twelve I was an avowed enemy of the capitalist government in the United States, an urban guerilla in my own country.”

The coffee pot hissed. I poured some into my mug, stirred in a spoonful of sugar, set the pot back on the stove, and sat down at the table. Through the curtain-less window, a sudden ray of sunlight pierced the smoggy drizzle illuminating the roll on my plate. “We’ll have good weather for the parade tomorrow,” I said.

As I’d predicted, the sky was blue and cloudless the next day. The air was clear, free of the usual stink of diesel fuel; there were no cars, no scooters, not even a city bus in sight. Everyone was in a holiday mood: even the policemen on their balky horses were laughing. Onlookers were already lining both sides of the Paseo de Reforma three rows deep behind the sawhorses when Margo and I arrived at the designated meeting point. Banners fastened to street lamps billowed lightly in the wind—-red, yellow, royal purple, and dragon green. Office workers leaning out the windows of their buildings signaled their solidarity with the gathering marchers by throwing handfuls of heart-shaped confetti. Sergio was up ahead, testing the sound system on the speakers’ platform that had been constructed in the Zocalo. As principal organizer of the event, he’d been responsible for obtaining a permit and, after bribing the appropriate municipal authorities, a promise of no police harassment.

Slipping on our white armbands and taking up our megaphones, Margo and I began organizing the demonstrators. We had drawn lots for marching partners earlier that morning, and I was greatly relieved not to have drawn horny Felix, but soft-spoken Humberto, who was gay, and whose stylish tweed and leather-patch-sleeved jacket, ever present pipe, and directorial confidence were far more reassuring. Humberto and I had just linked arms and were waiting for the signal to start marching when a low-flying police helicopter swooped down and buzzed the crowd.

“CIA, GO AWAY!” shouted a student in a brown corduroy suit, pumping his fists as he leapt from his cross-legged seat on the pavement behind the sawhorse. His companions immediately jumped to their feet and joined the chant. A young woman pretended to shoot the helicopter out of the sky with her thumb and forefinger: “CIA, GO AWAY! CIA, GO AWAY!” The helicopter was so close now that three men in civilian clothes could be seen peering out of the open door. Oblivious to the jeers of the crowd, two of them were waving enthusiastically.

A small ruckus exploded out of a side street. Word came that horses were being turned on a rowdy cluster of marchers. Together, Humberto and I hurried in that direction to confirm the report, which, it turned out, was only a rumor—but worrisome nonetheless, for, after all the initial gaiety, there was a definite whiff of paranoia coursing through the crowd. Fortunately the marching signal—-a white handkerchief tied to a pole being waved from across the street–prevented it from spreading. With arms locked, in rows extending fifteen across, the marchers surged ahead chanting “Free Vallejo!” The last and loudest line to join us, a phalanx of Labor Unionists, spewed from the side streets, leaving the monument start point deserted. Their hoarse cries demanding Vallejo’s release blended with ours, creating for one fleeting but exalted moment the unearthly harmony of a Gregorian chant.

Directly in front of me a woman pushed a toddler in a pram waving a Che Guevara paper flag. We were just approaching the first cross street when a man suddenly bolted from the sidelines and, aiming directly at the Che Guevara flag, pitched a tomato. Instinctively breaking ranks and pulling away from Humberto, I jumped in front of the child–and caught the splattering tomato’s juice and seeds in the chest. The woman with the pram marched on without acknowledging me; but the Unionists who had seen me take the hit were stomping and hollering their approval. Egged on by their cheers, I turned to face them, dipped my fingers into the mess and pretended to lick off the “blood” before rejoining Humberto in the line.

We encountered our first group of hecklers in front of the Hilton. Flashing my stained chest at them, I shouted “Cowards! Free Vallejo!”—which set the hecklers to booing and the Unionists to chanting even louder and drowning them out. Unaccountably buoyed by their battle cries, I could no longer distinguish friend from foe: the hecklers, the mustached policeman rocking back and forth on his horse alongside me, the woman pushing the pram, the girl with the defiantly bobbing blond pony tail, the fist-brandishing Unionists, the marching band now segueing into an incongruously rollicking version of Guantanamero; however, my moment of ecstatic oneness was interrupted when the music suddenly spiraled out of control, panicked drum beats, short blasts from the tuba piercing the air like cannon fire, and now—unmistakably– human screams coming from the direction of the Zocalo.

Tearing through the seams of our carefully organized formations, the marchers in front of me were scattering. Raising the megaphone to my lips, I shouted for them to get back into line but no one heard me, or if they did, they were too intent on scrambling for safety to regroup. Humberto had grabbed my free hand and was pulling me forward. I dropped the megaphone and felt it crumple under my feet. The girl with the pony tail to the right of me was gone. The scruffy boy in sandals with her had fled too. The woman with the pram had abandoned it and, carrying the child in her arms, was seeking refuge among the dispersing onlookers behind the no longer existing sidelines where the no longer laughing mounted policemen and their frenzied whinnying horses were chasing down onlookers and demonstrators alike through a maze of bunting. Still holding hands, Humberto and I joined the blind scattering mob but were unable to move either forward or backward. Our efforts at threading a sideways path toward the curb were equally unsuccessful. From the Zocalo, clearly now, came the steady burst of gunfire.

Many of the musicians, too, had bolted and were now scattering through the streets. A beautiful black woman holding a trumpet high over her head pressed against me, her hair brushing my face. Tugging at my monitor’s armband, she screamed in English, “They’re shooting! They’ve opened fire at the Zocalo. They’re killing us!”

Flailing their truncheons, the mounted police plowed into the crowd. Still holding my hand, Humberto zigzagged back and forth trying to avoid them. A heavyset girl in a pink dress wasn’t as nimble and, having taken several blows to the neck and head, was bleeding. I reached out to help her but was blocked by a policeman wedging his horse between us. Leveling a barrage of curses and maneuvering the horse only inches from my face, he swung his truncheon first at the bleeding girl, then at me. The girl fell and Humberto dragged me away screaming. Weaving through the melee, he didn’t stop until we’d reached an eerily empty side street behind the Reforma. It was only after he’d propped me sagging against the wall of a cold stone building that he finally let go of my hand. The windows of a nearby shop, an elegant handbag boutique that had been looted, lay shattered on the sidewalk.

“Home, Humberto. Take me home, please,” I gasped, falling against his chest.

Miraculously, Sergio, unhurt, was in the flat when we arrived. His shirt was stained with blood, his thick-lens glasses were shattered but he was still wearing the frames. Margo, he said, had been slightly injured; it was her blood on his shirt. She was in the hospital but there was no need for me to venture out; he’d arranged with the emergency room doctor, a friend, to get her back to the flat in an ambulance—-maybe later, maybe tomorrow. He was leaving for Cuba right away. He might contact me. On the other hand, I was not to worry if I didn’t hear from him for a while. He was being monitored. Then, almost off-handedly, he added, “Andrew called. He said to get on the next flight out and come back home.” Standing for a moment in the doorway, Sergio flashed me the victory sign. “Good luck, Faye,” he said. Then he slipped out of my life as casually as he’d entered it.

* * * * *
Papua New Guinea
2004

I might have caught a glimpse of Sergio again three months later, on January 1st, while NAFTA was being celebrated in Mexico City, the same day the Zapatistas emerged from their jungle training centers and took control of five major towns in the state of Chiapas–where, ignoring Andrew’s tepid recall–I’d joined Medecins Sans Frontieres as a staff doctor. It could have been the thick-lens glasses worn by the serape-wrapped peasant in sandals running past our makeshift hospital tent; or that I needed to see him again, to thank him for teaching me how to serve. Maybe it wasn’t as noble as that, maybe I just needed to prove I was no longer an armchair revolutionary living vicariously through him. Whatever the reason, I can’t say for certain it was Sergio. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Not that it matters.

Benjamin Evans

Just Kids
Patti Smith, Ecco, Jan. 2010
978-006-6211312, $27.00
_______________________________________________________

Just Kids

Deeply personal and insightfully written, Patti Smith’s New York story delivers the emotional narrative that Bob Dylan’s Chronicles left readers wanting. Tracing the relationship between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids explores the thriving artistic community of New York in the 60’s and 70’s and paints a portrait of two eccentrics, two searchers, two creators, as they navigate their way through art, sickness and each other.

It is invigorating to read about the city forty years ago, where artistically, anything seemed possible and collaboration was abundant. Accounts of Smith and Mapplethorpe’s interactions with artists like Salvador Dali, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix are scattered throughout Just Kids. Smith recounts her and Mapplethorpe’s years at the famous Hotel Chelsea where they immersed themselves in poetry, theatre, music, and photography with some of the country’s most exciting minds: Smith writes a play with Sam Shepard, sings a song for Janis Joplin, discusses poetry with Alan Ginsberg.

Most compelling, however, is Smith’s depiction of her dearest friend Robert Mapplethorpe. With a tender candor she walks us through the enigmatic artist’s formative years as he grapples with demons, works ferociously, and strives for recognition. One learns how Mapplethorpe’s own conflicted sexuality and religious upbringing influenced his work and ultimately led him to choose photography as his medium.

Just Kids demonstrates why Smith is a great American storyteller, and the strength of her prose never lets us forget that she began as a poet. This is a book I urge any artist to read, if not to help us recapture the artistic energy of days past, then at least to celebrate it.

Purchase Just Kids here.

Marcos Soriano

“Teach me how to pray,” she says, and gets down on her knees. Becky Sims, a wispy, straw-haired freshman. Eyes blackened with mascara, a wash of rouge painted over blemished skin. You’ve only seen her once before, in the first meeting of your “Mystery of God” course. Now she kneels in front of you, barely a breath away, on the Persian rug that covers your office floor. The resource bookshelf looms at her back, all thick vertical tomes, and for a moment you feel as though the books are prison bars, and you’re trapped in a cell with the girl.

“I want to know the words,” she says, weaving her thin fingers together, holding her clasped hands in front of her chest. She turns those inky eyes toward you. The collar feels stiff at your throat; each cuff a cotton shackle. This isn’t the first time you’ve felt this way.

In seminary you shared a dorm with a ruddy faced boy from Boise: Patrick Brennan. Wistful and shy, the pink in his cheeks like a constant blush, Patrick looked to you for guidance during his first year. You quickly grew fond of him, and began taking him along for hikes through the wooded hills. Marching hither and yon, throwing your arms open to vistas and declaring “This is God’s glory,” you imagined yourself a great teacher. Finally after months of such excursions, you led Patrick to an icy spring, stripped off your clothes, and dove in. He stood ashore, trembling.

“Come in, Patrick. There’s nothing finer.”

Slowly, with eyes cast down at the earth in front of him, Patrick began to remove his clothes. His cardigan, his shirt (freezing up at each button, then willing himself onwards), his undershirt, his belt. When he’d gotten to his briefs, so pale white against the rosy hue of his delicate thighs, he darted a glance at you, and caught the angle of your stare. Face burning crimson, he re-dressed and retreated, leaving you feverish in the cold water. You’d been found out. The swirling current offered no cover from God’s rigid gaze, and Patrick never spoke to you again.

Now, so many years later, Becky Sims kneels before you. Her eyes are shut tight, her hands held together so fervently that white spreads from where her fingers touch. You can see the florid glow rising under her makeup, blooming upon her neck and upper chest. A heat builds in your own cheeks; you grow slightly dizzy; there is a prickling in your loins. This young girl before you, desperate for what you can give.

Before you know it you’re on your knees with the girl, gripping her hands in your hands, praying. A creature lives within all of us, it buries itself in the depths of our bodies, bound by muscle and bone. A creature that yearns for miracle light, but digs like a tick. You hold Becky’s tiny hands in your own moist grip, and say a prayer for her. You say a prayer for Patrick Brennan. You say a prayer for yourself.

Marcos Soriano

Cradled within his palm, slightly brighter in color than the pink of his skin, was a single pill. Roughly triangular in shape, and no larger than a child’s first tooth, the pill had cost him more than the equivalent of a year’s lease on his Volvo V70.

It was love itself.

He’d spent more than three weeks searching for it. He’d met with strangers in dark alleyways and the backs of booming clubs. He’d paid dearly for hints and clues. He’d made telephone calls to numbers with unknown area codes. He’d spoken passwords, and driven to isolated locations, and carried enough cash to make himself feel queasy. And now he had it.

Love itself.

A high percentage of dopamine and norepinephrine, to provoke the euphoria of first attraction. Androgens and estrogens for the heat of lust. Oxytocin and vasopressin to smooth the rush with the dreamy bliss of a long term relationship. A perfect chemical symphony.

He held it in his palm, gazing at it, but seeing Sophie instead. He saw her hair in its morning tangle, her eyes thick with sleep. He saw her in their shower, head bowed and arms crossed as if she were praying. He saw her at the other end of the dinner table, her eyes glimmering in the candle’s flicker. And he saw her as he’d seen her last, a month before, hanged from the banister, her neck stretched long, her bare feet dangling. She hadn’t left a note.

He put the pill in his mouth, and tried to swallow, but his tongue was dry, and the pill caught in his throat. He reached for the bottle, to wash it down. He raised the bottle up, and gulped hard, kept on gulping until the bottle was empty. Even after he’d forced the pill through, and the chemicals had started to do their work, he could feel where it had caught. He could feel it, and it brought the tears to his eyes.

Ryan McCarl

It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I had signed a lease that morning would remain occupied by the current tenant for another month. Profuse apologies from the real estate agent, and for me a restless night in a hotel.

I got a new set of keys and a new one-bedroom, and when the second move was complete I struggled a twenty-five-dollar air conditioner into the window, threw on a fresh shirt and shorts from the sprawled-open suitcase, and sat uncomfortably on the air mattress, sinking to the floor. A chair and desk would have to come later. I knew no one in the city.

Afternoon light filled the window, and the question of the night awaited my response. I had no response and a to-do list that was empty. Louder than the birds and car-horns and air conditioner’s drone I heard the chaos that is in me, the thoughts that will not be centered.

The night approached: I could see it in the window. The world open before me and I open before a world that does not know me.

I made an acquaintance at the bar near Harvard Square. She was curious about what I was writing in my leatherbound journal between sips of a Boston ale.

Three days later she sent me a message and asked if I had plans for the weekend. And I had to give the sheepish response that everything had changed, that I was back in the safety and stasis of my hometown, writing from a familiar coffee house, compulsively checking my e-mail between job applications flung hopelessly out into the ether of inboxes. I no longer lived or worked in Boston; would not be back in the near future, so far as I knew.

How did it come to this? Well, it was a Thursday night, my second or third night in the city. And the real estate agent called to say that the lease for the new room was prepared, the old one was void, and I would need to come in the following morning to sign. Twelve months at eight hundred dollars a month. A good place, overlooking the edge of Harvard Yard. Walking distance to a first job at least as good as any other.

But I am not the sort to comfortably sign twelve-month leases, and I immediately saw my opening, a swiftly-closing emergency exit door. The chaos in my mind rose to a fever-pitch. Memories of other options believed in, pursued, and gone: paths opened and unwalked. Rosy dreams of teaching flashing past images of a businessman in a suit, walking off a plane into some foreign flag-lined airport with a full wallet and a copy of the Journal under his arm.

And the next day it was over. The sun rose over the Mass Pike, hovered forever over the upstate highways of New York, and died as I charged forward into Ontario. The caffeine kept falling off and I kept stopping to recharge, and I fought against the fatigue of a sixteen-hour drive. By the time Flint passed in the Michigan darkness all the hopes of being homeward had passed: I was exhausted and afraid, unemployed and in debt.

I had explained myself over and over to friends and family on the drive, which keeps one’s mind off the infinity of the road but just the same drains our word-exhausted reasons into dust. I had no money; I would have to empty two retirement accounts in a rock-bottom market and swallow the loss to cover the credit card I would soon fill again. God that I might find new work, closer to home.

I am back from Boston and have several homes and none. Other doors have opened and closed. Ladders I have climbed so proud to reach new heights of discontent. I stand and live in the unimagined neighborhoods of the world, I occupy the career-dreams of others, but my heart rages against all reason and I reliably run chasing after something else, no different really than the dogs that destroy the grass in a yard by chasing whatever opportunity happens by.

John Hemingway

I was reading a novel about every three or four days in the beginning and if I had any time between lessons I’d spend it at the Feltrinelli near the Scala. They had a good selection of American and English titles and as I bounced from stories as different as Endo’s The Sea and Poison to Coezee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I found that my tastes in literature were divided into two camps: the authors whose pessimistic vision of humanity presented me with disturbing moral questions and those who had a more “damn the torpedoes,” libertine approach to life.

Perhaps it was because I’d finally abandoned my schizophrenic mother to her own fate when I’d left the States. After years of taking care of her I thought that she could fend for herself, which, of course, wasn’t true. She would never be totally self-sufficient, but it was what I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to think about what I’d done, but like the characters in Endo’s novel, I’d been faced with a choice. Do I protect the weak or selfishly pursue my future as a writer in Europe? I chose the latter and so condemned my mother to years of living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. At the time, no one else could have looked after her, or probably, for that matter, endured her often times extreme behavior, but I didn’t see that as an excuse. She was crazy, and I knew that she would never get better, but I hadn’t been there when she needed me and that was all that mattered in my mind.

To forget about this lack of self-sacrifice, or abnegazione as the Italians called it, I read Henry Miller and Bukowski. I also had copies of two of Ernest Hemingway’s earlier works, The Nick Adams Stories and The Snows of Kilimanjaro but those stories, in my opinion, didn’t have that “in your face” sexuality/escape quality that I was looking for. Which is ironic, when I think that Hemingway had already written The Garden of Eden in the 1950s and that his gender-bending tale of three lovers was certainly more radical than the rather traditional “man-on-woman” action that Miller and Bukowski were offering.

The anarchy and black humor of Bukowski’s Post Office said to me that while I hadn’t written anything that I could hold up and say “Hey, this is proof that I’m a writer!” my life was certainly as screwed up as Bukowski’s and I figured that that was a good start. A writer needed to experience life and then eventually write about it and if it turned out that I didn’t have any talent and that I would have done better to stay with my mother then I would cross that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime, I’d convinced myself that I was creating the raw material that I would later use in my “masterpieces.”

Yet, if Charles Bukowski assuaged my guilt and made me think that perhaps it was cool to live in a dump and do minimum wage work, Henry Miller’s novels were saying that there should literally be no limits to my head-long flight from responsibility. I was reading what he wrote about love, women and sex, and thinking that perhaps I could apply his particular recipe for happiness to my own life. His erotic prose fit in perfectly with the country that I was living in. The Italians were obsessed with beauty and especially female beauty. Scantily clad, seductive women were everywhere you looked. Gorgeous Mediterranean signorine with dark hair and light skin advertising black lace negligees in the Metro and on the trams that I rode to work. It was an endless parade of titillation and while Italian men seemed to take it in stride, for me it was something new.

Another novelty was the way that people looked at each other. Flirting was a national pastime in Italy and everywhere I went women were giving me stares that back home I would have interpreted as “strong interest.” Here, it was just a part of the scenery. You looked at them, they looked at you and usually it never went any further than that. It was a very traditional country and so long as you were aware of this, there was never any problem. My mistake was thinking that I could act like Mr. Miller and get away with it.

The more I read from the man who’d given us Sexus, Nexus and Plexus the more I became convinced that betrayal was the solution to my problems, although I didn’t think of my fantasies as betrayal. No, for me this wasn’t cheating on Patrizia, I was just playing the field, and how could it be wrong if she knew what I was reading and more or less what I was thinking?

It was all out in the open and while I know that some women can be tolerant of their men when they act like imbeciles, when I think back on what I was planning I’m amazed that she didn’t leave me. Subconsciously driven to recreate past events of betrayal and abandonment, it was almost as if I was trying to provoke a reaction in Patrizia when I kept bumping, purposely, into one of her girlfriends at the U2 concert in February, or when I would tell her that I was still receiving and sending letters to a college student I’d met in France the summer before. We hadn’t been together very long (about five months) and had it been me instead of her on the receiving end I’m sure that I would have called it quits.

The cherry on the cake, though, came when one of her school friends invited us over for dinner. Usually we either went out with a group of people or on our own and so when Patrizia asked me if I felt like going I said “sure”. I bought a bottle of Bonarda in the macelleria near our apartment before we left and armed with that we set out to find their apartment.

The building was on a dimly lit street, not too far from Corso Buenos Aires. It was old, but it had been recently restructured and we had to walk up three flights of stairs because there was no elevator. Following Patrizia with the bottle in my hand, I asked her again what her friend’s name was.

“Francesca,” she said, “and his is Ettore.”

At the top of the stairwell there was only one apartment and we knocked on the door.

“Avanti!” said someone from inside and walking in we were greeted by Ettore who gave Patrizia a kiss on the cheek before shaking my hand. He was about my height, 5’9”, and was wearing a pair of jeans and a heavy wool sweater. He didn’t speak much English but I knew enough Italian to be able to follow the conversation he was having with Patrizia. He wanted to know if we’d had any trouble finding the place and said that it was great that we could come and that finally he had a chance to meet us after all Francesca had been telling him.

Looking around I saw that their apartment was tiny. There was the combo living room/kitchen area where we were standing, a small bedroom to my right and an even smaller bathroom to the left of the entrance. Francesca worked at a travel agency and Ettore was a bank clerk, and I thought that like us they too were probably renting but later discovered that Ettore’s parents had bought him the place when he finished university.

Francesca had prepared stuzzichini (small antipasti with speck and other cold cuts) and then a fantastic spaghetti alla carbonara, followed by a roast, and finally a tiramisu for dessert. The dining table in the center of the room was set with candles and crystal wine glasses. I sat facing Ettore, while Patrizia was at the opposite end from Francesca. Our hostess was perhaps a bit taller than Patrizia and had thick, dark hair which grew down past her shoulders. She was certainly an attractive woman and what you noticed first about her were her eyes. They were lively and at the same time vulnerable. They were open to conversation and I could see why she and Patrizia got along. Behind the quick glances and the laughter there was a hint of melancholy and abandon, which I didn’t understand but which added to Francesca’s sensuality.

We opened up the bottle of Bonarda and when that was gone, another bottle from Valtellina that Ettore insisted that we try, a four-year-old Inferno. The dinner was excellent and when Ettore asked if I liked Italian cooking I told him what I told everyone, that it was second to none and that Italy was a great country and then, looking at his girlfriend, that the women were very beautiful. Francesca, whose cheeks were already rosy from the wine, turned a darker shade of red and asked me, after conferring with her boyfriend, if I wanted to see some photographs.

“Just an album that we put together last year,” she explained, looking at Patrizia, “an art book of sorts,” and I was sure that they’d be the usual family vacation pics that Italians were always showing each other.

Instead, when she put the heavy leather album down on the dining table and opened it up to the first photo I was surprised to see her posing like a ‘50s pinup in nothing but a black lace bra and panties.

“It was my idea, but Ettore took the photos,” she told me and when I turned the page there was another woman, slim, blond and buxom, but who instead of black was wearing red. She, too, was striking a pose and the first image that came to mind was of Ettore, alone in a room with the two of them, clicking away as they pranced about him half naked. “Art, indeed!” I thought.

“That’s Eleanora,” said Francesca to Patrizia, “do you remember her from school?” Patrizia did and wasn’t impressed. She may have been getting bored or angry with me, but I wasn’t even looking at her. I was staring at the book and as I turned the pages I felt almost intimidated. It was as if Francesca had pegged me right from the start and was calling my bluff. As if she was challenging me not to be stimulated by what I had in my hands.

“Nice pictures,” I said, after a parting shot of Eleanora licking a lollipop in a sheer silk negligee.

“And we did the whole shoot in one hour” said Ettore.

“Truly remarkable.” I answered, as I pushed the album to the center of the table.

We didn’t stay much longer after that. It was getting late and we had a long ride home. We promised to see each other again and in the days that followed I kept thinking about Francesca and our meeting. I had memorized every detail of her from the photos and the dinner and almost imperceptibly, I’d started to think that I would have to see her again, but this time alone. The whole thing reminded me of Tropic of Capricorn, and of the women Miller would pick up in offices and parties, and at night when Patrizia and I were in bed and talking about what had happened during the day I’d sometimes mention the photos and my fantasies and how it was just like a Henry Miller novel and that perhaps I should take this to its “logical conclusion.”

We were both young and open-minded but I think that Patrizia didn’t throw me and my belongings out on the street when I got “logical” on her because she didn’t take everything I said that seriously. It was one thing to be theoretically in favor of “free-love,” quite another to practice it. She liked me and wanted our relationship to work and probably believed that I was just spouting off and that eventually I’d calm down and forget about Mr. Miller and his ideas. But the more I thought about Francesca the more obsessed I became with my desire to be as free and unhindered as Henry Miller was. Was it or was it not the land of amore? To me it was and so I decided to pay Francesca a visit. I remember that I actually told Patrizia that I was going and that amazingly enough she didn’t stop me. Perhaps after all my emotional acrobatics she’d reached her limit and had written me off as a hopeless case. I don’t think that she was very happy, but in my obsessive state I took her acquiescence as a green light.

Had I bothered to think about it I would have noticed that my behavior had more in common with Hemingway’s than with Henry Miller’s. Like Ernest, I was addicted to the idea of being in love, to the crazy euphoria of the first days and weeks and the way it made you feel, not to the realities of a long-term relationship. I believed like the author of A Farewell To Arms in the supremacy of romantic love, and while Hemingway once said that if you loved a woman then you should marry her, he never remained faithful to any of them for long. He married four times and his second wife, Pauline, was actually a good friend of his first wife, Hadley. On average his interest in any of his wives or lovers lasted about three years. After that, he’d start to look for someone new. He always felt guilty about his betrayals but that never stopped him from doing what he had to do. As he had one of his female characters in To Have and Have Not explain it, men couldn’t help but be the way they were. Women certainly preferred companions they could trust and who were faithful but men weren’t built that way:

“They want someone new or someone younger, or someone that they shouldn’t have, or someone that looks like someone else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde. Or if you’re a blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl … (or) Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what … The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you.”

For me, though, my biggest worry on the tram to Francesca’s house wasn’t any species-wide tendency towards infidelity but that Francesca wouldn’t be there. I had imagined this encounter with her so many times but had never factored in the possibility that she might have gone out. I didn’t have her number and standing in front of her building I almost decided to give it up and go home. Luckily, when I finally pressed the button on the intercom, she answered. I quickly told her who I was and said that I wanted to see her. She must have been sleeping because she asked me if I could wait ten minutes while she put something on.

I walked to the end of the block and back a few times and when ten minutes had passed I climbed the stairs to her apartment. Once inside, she told me that unfortunately Ettore was at work, but that if I didn’t mind just talking with her we could have a coffee together. She then asked why I’d come and I made up some excuse about being in between lessons and with time to kill. I would have had to teach at two but I’d canceled everything that afternoon in anticipation of my great exploit.

She, however, was not playing her part. She may have believed me when I’d told her that I was just passing through, but any credibility that I might have had ceased to exist the moment I asked if I could see the photo album again.

“No,” she told me, that wouldn’t be possible. They only showed it to friends on special occasions and, besides, I’d already seen it once. Why in the world would I want to look at it again?

I then tried to steer her into the bedroom, but she wouldn’t budge from the kitchen. The door was open and I could have a look at the bed, if I felt like it, but she had to do the laundry.

“Put on a record,” she suggested, as I sat on the edge of their bed. There was a stereo on the floor and a jazz collection next to it, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I’d come to try on my new identity as a literary Don Giovanni only to discover that the suit didn’t fit and that Francesca was way ahead of me. The bubble of my free-love obsession had been popped, but just to prove that there’s no end to humiliation once it’s begun, she decided to call her boyfriend and tell him that I was there. She wanted to see if he could make it home for lunch, because, “che bella sorpresa,” I had showed up at their door and it would be lovely if the three of us could eat together again. Ettore, though, wouldn’t be back ‘til four. He had work to do, and when I said to Francesca that I really should be leaving, she begged me to stay until her boyfriend came home. I told her that I couldn’t and when she insisted I finally understood that I hadn’t been wrong the night of our dinner. She was interested in me, but only so long as Ettore was there. They were offering me the chance to make my “dreams” become reality, to live another chapter from Tropic of Capricorn, but by then I’d flunked my first test as a Henry Miller apprentice. My ego had been justly bruised and I’d been forced to admit (if only for a moment) that who I was and what I wanted to be were not at all the same.

Renee Evans

At the breakfast table, Grace sits eating instant oatmeal she warmed in the microwave all by herself. The fake peach scent makes her stomach turn a little, but this is the only thing she knows how to fix and her mother—Diane—isn’t around to prepare anything for her, again. Her father, Frank, is in the shower, weeping and telling himself he needs to stop. He’s got to get to work, got to earn money to pay for things someone convinced him and his family they need or want. But first he must take his daughter to school so she doesn’t have to catch the bus. That was his promise last night. Grace said she couldn’t sleep, and he told her she could crawl into her mother’s empty spot in their bed.

Grace had been lying on the floor beside her parents’ bed, pressing her hand over her mouth to not make noise as she cried, but he heard her. A parent knows his child’s cry, and if Diane had been the one to get up and check when Gracie was just an infant wailing in the middle of the night, his turn is now. He held her little hand and they slept. Grace, no longer an infant, eight years old, will grow up to look like her mother, which will break Frank’s heart over and over again.

But this morning Diane is across town, in a hotel room where the television is bolted down and the toilet runs all night. She watches morning talk shows and tilts a glass bottle into her cup of hotel-lobby coffee. She watches the smiles on the television screen and fights the voice inside that says good mothers don’t leave their children, like she did last night. They don’t watch their husbands drive off with their babies in the back seat. But maybe this will be better. She swirls the contents of her coffee cup. Maybe now she won’t have to anticipate when a husband needs her to stop talking or start talking or when a child needs her to be firm or to coddle. She won’t have to look at that always-frightened look on Gracie’s face, like she never knows when Diane is going to screw up again. She walks through the halls during parent-teacher conferences, pulling on the strap of her purse for some sort of support and people still stare at her, she thinks: What has she ever done to these people? And what business of theirs is it how she lives?

Back in the kitchen, Frank pats Grace’s still-wet head, “Be sure to dry your hair. It’s chilly out. I don’t want you catching cold.” These are the sorts of things her mother would say if she were here. He and Grace haven’t talked about it: the heavy quiet in the house this morning. They won’t talk about it either, not in the way they need to.

Grace can still feel the warm spot from her father’s hand on the top of her head. When she was younger, she always loved it when he would brush her hair after she got out of the tub. He gripped the brush by the head, not the handle, and started at the ends of her hair, running his other hand along her hair behind the brush. He was always so gentle—he dreamed once that he pulled too hard and she came away in chunks of scalp, then pieces of bone, then nothing at all—that was what safety felt like to Grace. She brushes her own hair now; she’s too big for her father to do it for her. She will most likely remember her father brushing her hair, though. She will put it in the corner of her head with other things, like getting into a warm car on a chilly fall day, or the way her mother kisses her forehead to feel for a fever. Some things she won’t want to remember, like the veins in the backs of her mother’s hands. Those blocky hands with their square-tipped fingers. And the way they sometimes shake when she concentrates.

Diane’s hands tremble only slightly as she smokes her day’s first cigarette, even though she has rented a non-smoking room. This is one of the simple things she is supposed to be grateful for: that first cigarette and cup of coffee. But instead, the filter flutters to her lips in a way that is unsatisfying. She should eat something. What if she’s not just hungry and this hand thing is a sign of something else? Diane’s mother died when she was very young, but she has an idea of what she inherited: a tendency toward self-cutting and suicidal thoughts. Was this what it was like for her mother, Diane thinks, did her mother feel this persecuted? Do most people?

She should call in sick to work. Her head hurts and she craves greasy biscuits and gravy. She will miss out on one day’s pay. But it shouldn’t make too much difference in the paycheck; they should still be able to buy groceries. For skipping out, Frank will probably call her irresponsible once again. Last night he was yelling at her, accusing her of being defective. (He was only trying to tell her she’s sick, that she needs help.) Whatever it was he was saying, all she could think to tell him was, “I thought you loved me.”

Last night as the two of them stood there on their friends’ porch—they’d gone over for dinner and drinks, maybe a little cards after, but she just kept drinking—each could see the other’s breath. He tried to get her to come home, it was time to come home, and Grace—she sat in the warming van with the radio turned up and her eyes clamped shut—just wanted her mother in the car with her, just wanted her home with them, just wanted them to be a family and for that to be good enough.

But Diane heard him say she was sick, heard, “You’re not a good mother,” though that may not be what he really said. Still, that’s what she heard. And that’s why she promised—the word seems improper now—she promised to leave him. Them. Out loud she said she would leave when she was damn good and ready. Inwardly, though, she was imagining him staying up all night waiting for her to come home. He was too proud to come get her, and he would just fall asleep while he waited. He would realize how great she was and how lucky he should consider himself since she even chose to date him in the first place and then said yes when he asked her to marry him. He’d plan his apology and then he would treat her good for once, ask her her opinion of him and how much she thinks he’s worth. Or she’d sneak in and crawl in bed with Grace and let him know who she trusted more until he begged her to come back.

When she was ready to leave, Diane called a cab and the driver asked where she was headed. Maybe she was still a little drunk. Maybe that was just an excuse. Maybe she wanted, just once, to see what life would have been like without any of them. For years she secretly wondered how things might be different if she hadn’t gone to the grocery store the day she met Frank.

He’d come running out behind her as she dug through her too-big purse to find her keys. “Ma’am, miss?” He changed his mind about what to call her as soon as she looked up at him. It was her hair. She wore it back in a bun at the nape of her neck, lending her a matronly look. He thrust a sack in her direction. “You left these,” he said, peeking into the bag. Generic orange juice and bread and a box of adult diapers. No, they were not hers, actually. He had mistaken her bun for that of some other old lady’s, and they laughed about it there in the parking lot. That was how it started, and now she was in a cab that reminded her of rotten potatoes and the driver asked her again where she wanted to go. She leaned her head against the cool window and allowed her breath to fog it over.

“Motel Six. That’s cheap, right?”

The cabbie peeked at her through the rearview mirror. He considered asking her if she was okay—it was his nature to be concerned—but he thought better of it. If this lady wanted to go somewhere and cry herself to sleep or numb herself into oblivion, that was none of his business. His business was to avoid traffic, not ask questions, and hope for a big tip. As a consolation, he took her to the second-cheapest hotel in town, on account it was less likely to have bedbugs.

But before the cabbie took this sad and lonely woman into consideration last night, Grace peeked out of the window of the van at her parents, at all that angry breath. They were yelling. He pointed to the van. Grace should not have been born, she knew. Her existence threw off an equilibrium established well before she showed up. She was the wrongness. She’ll probably end up being the one thing they’ve done right together, but little girls don’t know these sorts of things, and she’ll carry the guilt of that night with her. Grace’s guilt will manifest itself in an ever-so-slight tremor of the hands. Maybe she’ll think about why that is. Maybe she’ll remember where she’s seen that before and wonder what on earth her mother must have been going through.

Frank got into the van and tried not to slam the door. Gracie was already crying.

“Daddy?” was all she could say between sobs.

He sighed, shook his head. He put on his seatbelt and put the van in reverse. He looked over his shoulder to back out, and his baby had snot bubbling out of her nose. She knew it was there, but her hands were too cold to wipe it away.

“It’s okay, baby. Mom’s coming home later.” As he pulled out of the driveway, he would not look back at his wife, who he knew still stood on the porch, crying tears that weren’t from just drinking. He was tired. He was tired of all of it. He’d asked her, like he had so many times before, what to do to make her happy. She didn’t know, she said, talk to her. So he told her what he could remember—what he worried about—but that didn’t help, either. He wasn’t the deep, passionate, brooding man she thought she married. So she drank, and it made him tired. He had to be up early in the morning, so he’d said, “Fine,” and left her there on the porch.

He would go home, and she could leave whenever she wanted. She could come home or not. It was her choice. It was always her choice. Maybe they’d do better without her. Bring some stability to their lives.

She was surprised by how easily it happened this time. She stood on the steps a moment for lack of anything else to do. She was hurt and proud and scared and lonely, but she was also giddy in a way that felt inappropriate. She couldn’t yet label her giddiness as that chance to make decisions for her, and kept her feet where they were to think about it.

Grace cried most of the way home, and when they got there, her father carried her—he hadn’t picked her up in a while and now he remembered why—into the house and sat her down, groaning as he did so, talking about how heavy she is and how big she’s gotten, trying to make her laugh.

“We’ll have to put a brick on your head to keep you from growing.” He smiled weakly at her.

She was not amused. “Dad.”

“Okay, maybe not. Listen, I want to talk to you about—”

“When’s Mom coming home?”

And here Frank blinked rapidly several times and looked over his shoulder at the front door. He hadn’t cried in front of his daughter before and she was already terrified enough. He was pretty sure she didn’t need to see this, too. He cleared his throat several times, blinked some more, and sniffed loudly.

“I don’t know, sweetie. When she’s ready, I guess.”

Grace nodded. She wanted hard and fast answers: How would she get home? When—to the minute—would she arrive? Why did she leave? The sooner she knew for sure, the sooner she could fix it and begin focusing on something else. She will probably become a woman who wastes no time with mourning. She will make lists. She will work to cross items off her list, but that’s it. There will be no wallowing.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Mom.” Her voice was quiet. “And why she’s mad.”

If she had been there listening to her daughter explain—this little bit was all that counted for explanation from Grace—how she was sorry she ruined her parents’ lives, Diane would have wrapped her baby in her arms and rocked her. And Diane would reassure her that her life—their lives—were richer because of Grace, and that they’d figure it out together.

But Frank simply reverted to the honesty that befell him when he didn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t know what to do about your mother,” he said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Do I still have to go to school tomorrow?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Do I have to ride the bus?”

“Tell you what.” He stood and offered his hand as he led her to her bedroom. “I’ll take you. How’s that?”

She nodded. “A compromise.”

Frank lay in his bed and Grace in hers, though neither really slept. She knows too much, he thought. She will always know too much. She hugged her stuffed cow, but that wasn’t enough, so she hugged her pillow and cried a wet spot into it.

From down the hall he heard her sniffing and rolled over. For fifteen years he had fantasized about having a bed to himself once again. He could sprawl and kick and roll and tuck and un-tuck and scratch and do whatever he wanted and there was no one to sigh heavily in the dark to let him know in her own way that she was also annoyed with the situation. Nobody to poke him in the ribs or jab him with her elbow or hold his nose to make him stop snoring. God, how he hated when she did that.

But then again, on mornings when they could peacefully sleep in, she snuggled up to him and pressed her body against his. Fifteen years together and he still loved the way Diane felt next to him in the morning. She threw an arm around him and as she breathed in, her stomach billowed and pressed against his back. Those, he thought, were their most intimate moments, and they very well may have been. He held still for as long as his bladder would allow on those days, just trying to keep her there for a little longer.

So many times he felt like she was just trying to escape him, her life, who they’d become.

And she was gone now. Her place in the bed sagged next to him. He felt as if he was falling up into space, as if the very earth shuddered to be rid of him. He reached out a hand and placed it in the empty spot where his wife should have been. The sheets were cold. This was not what he had wanted.

Down the hall, Grace’s breathing slowed. She fell asleep just as across town her mother paid the driver, then entered the hotel lobby. She checked into her room and blinked in the fluorescent lighting of the bathroom. She didn’t look at her face. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to think. She peed first and held her head in her hands. It felt too heavy for her neck. She stayed that way, replaying the night until the nausea overcame her. Diane kneeled in front of the toilet to vomit. Grace awoke in the middle of the night.

Grace was supposed to remember something. When she was frightened and confused in the night, she crawled into her parents’ bedroom to sleep on the floor beside their bed. She had to be quiet, otherwise they’d wake up and send her back to her own room—she was too big to do this anymore. She lay on her back on her mother’s side of the bed, attempting to steady her breath. She listened to see if she was making any noise.

The only breathing in the room was her father’s heavy wheeze. Then she remembered her mother. She began crying again. Frank’s breathing grew quieter as he listened to her try to stifle the noise she made. He called her name and she sat up. In the darkness he could barely make out the top of her head as it appeared just above the edge of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I can’t sleep. Can I get in bed with you?”

“Okay, but you have to go to sleep.” He pulled back the covers and fluffed his wife’s pillow.

She wanted him to hold her and rock her and to tell her he would fix it, but instead she reached across the middle of the bed and took his hand. That was enough to allow them both to fall heavily to sleep.

This morning her eyes burn from all the crying. She rubs them and rubs them with the backs of her knuckles as she sits in the front seat on her way to school.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” Frank let her sit in the front to help her feel better. It sort of worked.

“Can’t keep ‘em open.” It’s not that she wants to stay home today, but going to school seems disrespectful.

“Yeah, crying will do that to you. I’d share my coffee, but you wouldn’t like it.” He sips from his travel mug and they say nothing else until they arrive at the school, when he says goodbye and watches his little stranger trudge into the building.

Instead of going to work, Diane goes for a walk. The air is crisp, but the sun is out and she is warm under her coat. She’s a receptionist, so she doesn’t get to move around a lot. The walking is nice. She used to worry about getting fat and ugly, about being unattractive to her husband, who never seemed to gain anything except bags under his eyes. Each year, her pants have grown tighter and tighter across her thighs and through the seat. At first she stopped eating lunch and dinner and took walks on her lunch breaks. When she wasn’t losing anything and Frank said she was cranky all the time, she gave up. Now she just buys bigger clothes every other season.

She tucks her nose into the collar of her coat and checks the traffic before crossing the street. Maybe she should change jobs. Try physical labor. She would love to work in a greenhouse planting and weeding and doing whatever they do. That work is probably only seasonal, though. She’s got a daughter to think about.

But she’s not thinking about leaving yet. They’ve been through versions of this in the past, and it will probably take her several attempts before she gets it right, before she can leave for good. Each time there will be a big scene and mean things will most likely be said, and each time it will be her fault. As she passes the windows of a strip-mall, her reflection looks lumpy and disheveled. This is not what she meant to happen last night. She has a husband. He’s a good man, and God knows he puts up with the stuff she puts him through. Granted, he could be a little more vocal, a little more involved, but she still considers herself one of the lucky ones. And for some reason, she’s still so unhappy.

She is thinking about change. She’ll change her job, maybe her hair. She should go on a diet again, cut back on her drinking a little.

The day wears on and she makes lists: talk to Grace about sex, tell Grace she is beautiful, compliment Frank more, give Frank more space, make quality time for family. They pile in her head only as ideas, not as plans. It is this lack of foresight that keeps her from understanding that she will never be happy as long as she continues this way. But she won’t make plans for change. She can’t think about that now.

Grace can’t concentrate in school. She keeps seeing her parents fighting and can’t shake the feeling that maybe her mother is lying hurt in a ditch. Her mother is gone and she’s not coming back, and it’s all her father’s fault. But her instincts aren’t true yet. It will be a few years before Grace shrinks from her mother’s hug for the first time since she can remember. Maybe she saw this coming, and she felt the first hints of it when she was eight, trying to read along with Mrs. Clark, who sometimes skipped sentences and whole paragraphs as she read Little House on the Prairie. Out loud, she wants to say, the world is not right.

At lunch, she picks at a tray of chicken and dumplings—her favorite. No one has asked why she doesn’t eat or why she doesn’t want to play or why she doesn’t want to do group work. Grace has always been shy and has assumed people don’t like her. Why would they bother to ask? This is something she’s going to have to face alone.

They are all alone. While he stocks shelves at the sporting goods store, Frank feels as if he might be the last man alive. He remembers that episode of The Twilight Zone where the man emerges from the fallout shelter to find he’s the sole survivor and he can read all the books he wants, but then he steps on his glasses. Frank’s glasses have been stepped on.

“Guy should’ve just killed himself,” Frank mutters as he pulls boxes of golf balls to the front of the shelf. He checks his watch. He’s been here for five hours now. He and Grace didn’t say anything about him picking her up from school, too. With his luck, she expects him to and he won’t do it simply because they didn’t agree about it. Then he’ll be one of those parents.

He pushes a dolly back toward the stock room and it gets stuck on a piece of floor stripping. He shouldn’t say “those parents.” Diane walked out of the grocery store once when Grace was still at the cash register playing with the bagging station. Grace noticed they were separated before Diane did and went running and screaming out to the parking lot. Diane called him at work to tell him the story. She sounded pretty rough over the phone. He spent five minutes just telling her to calm down. It happens. People leave their kids. They leave their families.

Frank wonders what it would be like if he’d been the one to leave. He’s thought about it before. Just take a couple hundred from the bank and go. Then maybe Diane would have to straighten out—take care of the kid. Frank pushes through the swinging doors of the store room, leading with the dolly. He’d miss her. He’d miss them both. But what if he were dead?

He wouldn’t want them to feel bad if he killed himself. Frank drops off his equipment and heads to the bathroom. He’s got to sit down. Really think. His knees are killing him. He hates this job, but it pays well enough. There’s insurance. They’d get some money if he died on the job. He wonders how to kill himself and not make it look like a suicide. Where to find a hit man?

He pictures the girls coming home to find him. He’s all bloody and probably crapped himself. Diane sees a hand peeking from behind the couch and automatically knows he’s dead, only she freaks out and doesn’t have the sense to shield Grace from seeing. And she’s scarred for life while her mother just keeps drinking until there’s no more liver left. Diane is mean to Grace and Grace resents her for it, even after Diane dies too young in a too-painful death and it’s all Frank’s fault.

He washes his hands and chuckles a little. He’s really thinking this? He smiles and cries some. A co-worker enters the bathroom and sees Frank.

“You okay, man?”

Frank just dries his hands and walks out of the bathroom to call the school. He’ll be picking up his daughter today.

When Grace climbs automatically into the front seat of her father’s car, she hugs and kisses him and lets the tears go right there in the parking lot, and she doesn’t care who can see.

Frank hates this. “Oh, baby, don’t cry.”

“But it feels better when I do.” She whispers these words to keep from sobbing them, so he can understand what she says.

“Okay.” He pulls out of the driveway and heads home.

“Dad, I didn’t say anything to anybody all day. I have to tell you. If Mom’s hurt. . . . I want her back. I want her to be home when we get there.”

“I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I know. But I’m just saying.” She’s being honest, and he appreciates that. It doesn’t happen much, but when it does, he feels like he knows her better.

When they get home, Diane is there, waiting. Vodka is supposed to be odorless; it was just a sip. The television is on Jeopardy and she is smoking at the coffee table when Grace enters.

“Mom!”

“Hi, Gracie.” It’s a whisper into the girl’s ear. As always, Diane watches out for the cherry on her cigarette when her daughter is in her arms. She hears Frank enter. “Come sit,” she says to him. Now, everybody is crying. She sits Grace between herself and Frank and they all sit there sniffing for a long moment.

“First I want to say I’m sorry about the way I acted last night.” No one speaks during Diane’s pause. It’s a familiar line. “I didn’t go to work today, but I did do a lot of thinking. Frank,” she says. He is expecting her to leave. She might give this speech again and again, and each time, he will probably expect her to actually leave for good, just as he always has. That is, until she ever really goes; by then he might not believe it’s happening. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay and make things right.”

“Me too,” he says, but she doesn’t understand he was thinking about leaving them, too.

“I’ve got all kinds of ideas that I want to talk to you about. But first I want to say I love you, and I’m sorry. I’d like for us to sit down and discuss our plans.”

They will order a pizza and Diane will do all the talking. She’ll mention family game night and date night and dinners and extra-curricular activities. Grace will be moved to hope by the tone of her mother’s voice. Frank will become worried that he’s never going to have any more free time, and Diane will panic once she realizes they expect her to be the one to organize and initiate all these things.

If Diane finally leaves, she might rent a little green apartment above a garage. A new job working for the state in social work service would finally bring her some satisfaction. She’d miss her family, but she would be grateful they were hers. She could go for walks in her spare time, and because the thinking would allow her to calm down, she might not need as many drinks.

Though Grace would become estranged from her mother, she and Frank might be brought closer. He might even begin to think he knows her. He would become deeply depressed if Diane left. He would stay single for the rest of his life. Grace, on the other hand, would probably go through man after man, trying to find one who seems right. She wouldn’t recognize that “right” would mean just like her father. But she’d continue through them coldly, crossing their names off her list.

But for now, they sit side-by-side on the couch, watching Jeopardy, holding hands, and not knowing the questions to the answers the program gives.

Dylan James Brock

Part 2

22 June 2002, 3pm
Hot sunshine awakens me. On the pop art print across from where I lie, Lichtenstein’s little dots diffuse into solid color, only to sharpen when I focus. I rise from bed, light a cigarette, and play some music. From my bedside coffee pot, I pour leftover, lukewarm java into a dirty mug, and down it in three gulps. After the first chorus of the Mp3 playing, I turn it up and sing along: So you made me come/then you sent me away/like a messenger bird/so I circled the earth/blown away in the wind/but I always return/with some new little song/some sad story to tell/of a brief love affair/with a girl I compared/to you and she failed.

On opposing walls, collaged celebrities face off – doctors and scientists stare down lyricists and guitarists. In this conflict, my sympathies shift continuously. One day I want to heal the world, and the next I want to rock it. Despite these aspirations, I spend far too many hours at a fake-smile minimum-wage service job. But I’m hosting a homecoming party for Trevor tonight, so I’m off today and tomorrow.

Even before the Internet economy collapsed, Trevor was serious about web design and serious about money-laundering, but never serious about e-commerce. He was content making enough pages to clean up his finances and pad his portfolio, but we never recruited clients. After the NASDAQ implosion there were no clients to recruit, and I had to find work I couldn’t do wearing boxers in my bedroom.

When the song and the smoke end, I grab a guitar and head out to the screened front porch to play in the sun. Outside, rays slip between a maple and a pine in the yard, shining on the couch facing the house. I sit in this spotlight and fingerpick with two digits bandaged from workplace nicks. The rising roar of an approaching motorcycle brings me to my feet.

It couldn’t be Lyle – last I heard he was still cruising down the eastern seaboard. But sure enough, the Kawasaki he calls his ‘Cow’ rolls up our driveway. Sitting back down, I lay my guitar on a torn cushion as hiking boots knock a path through the slamming screen door of the porch. Lyle flops onto the corduroy loveseat, setting his patched knapsack and ancient football helmet on the hardwood floor.

“What’re you doing here?” I ask, lighting up a smoke, “Thought you’d still be able to see the Atlantic today.”

Lyle’s goofy smile spreads over a ratty drifter’s beard. “I checked my E-mail someplace in Maine, got your message about the party for Trevor, and I decided to come home a week early,” Lyle replies.

Because he was home-schooled on a commune in rural Newaygo County, Lyle and his siblings speak their own dialect. They use z instead of s and remove alveolar flaps in favor of diphthongs, so “city” is a homophone for “see,” and “decided” becomes “de-sie-ed.” They also have some bizarre verb forms. “Your e-mail remound me that Trevor was gone. We both left at the end of last term, but sometimes I still forget he’s not coming back.”

Then Trevor trots up the steps and onto the porch, gently closing the door behind him. Sometimes, because of his outsized charisma, I forget how small my best friend is – that his head ends at my neck. In the last six weeks, only his wardrobe has changed – he wears the studied casual attire of a surfer out of water. “Paul. Lyle. Lyle! Thought you were driving to that island.”

Lyle says he came back for the homecoming party.

“Rad,” Trevor affirms, then proclaims, “I’m home,” and in one fluid motion removes his shirt.

Trevor has a few habits that take some getting used to – how he walks around the house in pants, pecs, and a six pack, and how he climbs the walls. While somehow scaling a stone pillar that holds up the screened porch, he talks of climbing Yosemite, then asks Lyle how his drifting went.

“Good, good,” Lyle says, “Once you get past Quebec, the QEW ends, and there’s nothing for, like, five hundred miles. Only gravel and markers that say ‘You just crossed the Fee-first parallel,’ ‘You just crossed the Fee-second parallel.’ ‘Course I brought gas, strapped it on, but I had to buy another plas-sick tank. Otherwise I never would’ve made it to the ferry – y’ know, to earn the patch.”

“And how are all things Melanie?” I inquire. Lyle has been infatuated with Melanie since he met her in the fall of 2000. In the summer of 2001, she visited a Newfie friend and brought home a patch for him. The two-dollar speck of blue, embroidered cloth launched a month-long quest. Lyle insisted that wearing this gift would remain hypocritical until he visited the island himself.

“Fine. How are things with Chloe?” Lyle asks. I sigh, stamp out my cig, and shake my head. Trevor climbs down to discard my littered butt while I ask what route Lyle took home. While he speaks of the Atlantic’s edge and Ohio cops, I pick up my instrument and strum.

Seeing the guitar, Trevor asks me when I replaced the one that’s still missing. “Didn’t,” I say, “This is Chloe’s.” He asks to hear something new, so I play and sing. A day without Chloe’s/like a day without food/possible supposing/I don’t care about my mood/or instincts opposing/the lifestyle of a man who’d/for some reason chosen/to faithfully fast and brood/without Chloe. I finish, and he tells me he loves it, asks if she’s heard it. I nod, and light a Marlboro. He asks what she thought of it. “She told me I was the only guy she’d ever met who wrote songs that were good.”

“Oh, I get it – she strokes your ego. Chloe’s super-picky about music, but she likes your shit. That must feel good.” This is how Trevor and I talk about women, analyzing relationships in the vernacular of pop psychology. We become therapists practicing on each other. Using a hodgepodge of techniques, we analyze our behavior in terms of cognition, biology, and sociology. But in the end, our discussions always progress from and digress into musings about specific women. We talk the sun up, babbling psychology and citing song lyrics. At least, we used to – till Trevor went to California, left an aching in my heart.

20 April 2001, three am
A little over a year ago, Trevor and I had our wildest session. By three o’clock in the morning, I was two pots full of coffee, cramming for a nine o’clock Friday exam, but too wired to concentrate. Shooting repeated glances at my bed, I caught the celebrity headshots vibrating on my walls.

I kept scribbling scraps of songs in the margins of my notes – here a clever line, there a chord progression. Throwing my hands up, I decided to get the words out of my system. A few months before, after a brutal argument with my father about my musical aspirations, I had sworn off songwriting to focus on medicine. During my creative abstinence, focus sharpened for the first couple months. But by spring break, the build- up of unwritten lines weighed on me. I’d gone from writing a song a week to a song a semester; it only made sense that the work would be overlong. When I finally took a break to write during that day’s smallest hours, I couldn’t stop myself from crafting an epic. Sixteen verses I wrote, about a girl who’s all but irrelevant now.

I finished at six. The pull of the bed was strong, but I broke from its gravity. I knew if I slept, I wouldn’t wake in time for my exam, but I was crashing and needed a fresh face to talk me through the next few hours. A knock brought Lyle to his door but he shook his head and shut me out before I could say a thing. Frank had passed out only a few hours before, and needed to sleep off a post-exam celebration hangover.

Walking into Trevor’s room, I pleaded for a favor: “I need somebody to keep me going till my nine o’clock.” Trevor grunted, agreed, and grunted again as he climbed out of bed. “Meet me on the porch in fifteen,” I requested. My Marlboro was half-gone when Trevor stepped through the thick oak door. Behind the westward screen, a moon and two streetlights shone the same pastel orange. I looked up while stepping to the sidewalk and spied dippers through branches with buds I couldn’t see in the dark.

“Wait, where’re we going?” asked Trevor, rubbing blue eyes with a thumb and forefinger. I suggested we eat breakfast at the Sherman, deep into Roosevelt City, some miles inland from the college neighborhood of East Roosevelt. “’K,” he said, “I’m driving.”

We climbed into a clean SUV bought with dirty money. The bass of a folksy song boomed too loud for the genre playing. Ooh, get me away from here. I’m dying/Sing me a song to set me free/Nobody writes them like they used to/So I guess it may as well be me.

Walking into the all-night diner, we spotted and sat at a table in the back corner. Next to us, two middle-aged women gabbed too loudly for the hour. They looked like two pieces from a set of Russian dolls – same wide face and brown ball of a hairdo, same round yet solid body, except one was slimmer than the other. Round spoke soft quips while Rounder’s laugh rolled. I could barely make out my inner monologue over their banter.

The diner was a two-man operation before dawn. A methodical, twitching short-order cook never turned away from his griddle, even when there was nothing to grill. Our waitress had rose-vine tattoo sleeves on arms too built for her slight body. “What you having?” she asked both Trevor and me. Her repetition was broken-record precise. He got grapefruit juice and a side of Greektown hash – potatoes with a pile of vegetables heaped with feta cheese. For me – bacon, pancakes, and coffee.

“Chekhov said an obscure artist is like a gambling addict without money: All risk and no reward, or something like that,” I started, and lit a Marlboro, ashing on the floor. “It’s risking time like money, I’ve got none to spend. Words keep me up nights, steal hours from work and sleep. So I stop, say I’m going to focus on Russian or physics or psych, or the fact that somehow I’ve got to get into Med School, but the songs don’t stop, and I still wake up humming melodies, ignore my notes to slant rhymes in lectures. Songs are my obsession, writing’s the compulsion, and burnout’s the only cure.”

“You’re way too insightful to give up Psych – and you know I love your songs. It’s all about balance, y’ know? I mean, dude, don’t write a song every day, but don’t spend every hour working either. Like I always say, work less but harder; write less but better. And chill – dude, you must chill – enough to be cool, without getting all cold. Always remember, I love you, Frank loves you, Lyle loves you, even your parents love you – when your not trying to be a rock star.” An arm, all working muscles and flowery tattoos, slapped a check on our table and receded before I could tell who it belonged to. With his last sip of juice, Trevor stood and picked up the check before I could object. “You got your stuff with you?” he asked. I did, it was in the car. We got our bags and left his SUV to head east, up Liberty.

“So you know how I was saying the sub-striate pathways responsible for blind- sight could be construed as an unconscious mind?” I began, and Trevor nodded, his bleached dreadlocks bobbing. “Well, get this,” I go on. “The other day I’m walking by Dover Drugs, and it just comes to me: maybe it’s chemistry of the synapse, y’ know, neurotransmitters – maybe the biology of the brain is the unconscious Freud was looking for… Dopamine as Id, Seritonin as Ego, Norepinephrine as Superego – that kind of thing…” And we were off again, two future scientists talking in tangents and waking up the sun.

20 April 2002, three pm
A year later, I stood in our front yard begging Trevor not to leap off our roof. The album playing had ended – the only sound was a daredevil’s crowd murmuring in anticipation. He must have heard me over the crowd chanting ‘Jump!” because he made eye contact and shook his head. Frank handed the mailman a half cup of beer. The carrier gulped it down, and shouted “C’mon, little guy – you can do it.” Trevor nodded and flew. Stretching the center of our trampoline almost to the ground, he did a gymnast’s flip, bounced off onto the grass, and stuck the landing with arms to the sky. The few dozen at our graduation barbecue cheered. “Who is he?” Chloe turned to me and asked.

“Y’ know, Trevor,” I told her, “My best friend.” She rolled her eyes and crossed the yard to chat with the stuntman. The mailman congratulated Trevor and continued on his route. I went inside and put on the White Stripes, Chloe’s favorite, but only before the Lego video for “Fell in Love With a Girl.”

I recalled three conversations: all with Trevor, all about Chloe. I’d insisted that the closer I came to friendship with her, the further I’d felt from a relationship. He’d insisted that, while Chloe was rad, she stood five foot nine, four inches taller than him, and that difference too great for her to be worth his pursuit. Yet a few minutes into his longest conversation with her, Trevor was already brushing a stray amber strand from Chloe’s face.

Deciding to eavesdrop, I walked within a few feet of the pair and spoke with Trevor’s Little Brother. Every Saturday afternoon, Trevor used to spend several hours hanging out with a special-needs eighteen-year-old named Ishmael. That weekend, the kid got to attend his first college party. After gathering that Trevor and Chloe were only swapping lab job war stories, I asked Ishmael if he was having fun. “Yeah,” he beamed, “Lots of girls. She’s pretty,” he said, his crooked hand pointing straight at my friend. I introduced Ishmael to Chloe. “You’re pretty,” he gushed.

Chloe thanked him for the compliment and excused herself to fetch a second plastic cup of Oberon, summer ale rare and prized beyond Michigan. Trevor followed her and they resumed their shoptalk. I wanted to interrupt with a story of rat beheading, the real meat of Trevor’s job, but I never got in his way when it came to women, quite simply because I couldn’t. Taking a sip of coffee from my mug, I gave Ishmael some advice: “Chloe doesn’t take physical compliments well. She likes it better when you acknowledge her accomplishments. Tell her that her coffee’s great, her fashion sense is razor-acute – that kind of thing.”

Ishmael chuckled. “Ok, cool,” he agreed, then asked: “Jump on the trampoline?” I nodded, and we bounced for a while. At the peak of my arcs through air, I saw clips through the porch screen – Chloe and Trevor, all laughing teeth and grazing touches. Before too long, Big Brother saw Little Brother playing and left the porch to play along. Chloe followed, and seconds later the four of us were careening around like lotto balls. After a few jumps, I timed my landings to sap energy from Trevor’s bounces. During the third such theft, I flew so high I left the tramp for the knee-buckling ground. “Hey, watch where you’re going, you sloppy drunk!” Frank slurred at me, for big laughs.

I picked up my coffee mug, stood up, and remembered I’d left my guitar on the porch. For a graduation present, I had written a song about each of my housemates: “Trevor majors in hugging and snuggling/Frank’s double major is EECS and drugging/Lyle’s doctorate is in weird anecdotes/class never ends – don’t forget to take notes.” At the barbecue, I had performed on the steps of our house for attentive friends. After singing, I had set my instrument on the porch’s tattered couch and run outside to watch Trevor jump off the roof.

But when the screen slammed behind me, I saw no guitar. Figuring some guy borrowed it to amuse himself or impress a girl, I swept through an entirely familiar crowd and every room in the house. I didn’t find my ancient, pristine Silvertone acoustic with lowered action and a customized pickup. “Have you seen my guitar?” I asked, then begged, then pleaded, going through until everyone had answered more than once. Everyone said no, not since I had played. Everyone except Chloe, Trevor, and Ishmael, I should say – they jumped, oblivious all the while.

Dejected, I sank into a shadowy Lay-Z-Boy in the back of the living room. While chaining cigarettes like Christmas popcorn, I waited for someone to take notice and pity me. Seven smokes later, Lyle and Sara walked in and scolded me for sulking.

“You’re not allowed to be a sad bastard at your gradation party,” Sara sniped. I reminded her that I wasn’t graduating for another year – the party was for my housemates. “Just save the act for your bedroom mirror and come have some fun,” she urged me.

As we stepped back into daylight, Lyle reassured me, promised we’d find the instrument: “There’s no way anybody could’ve grabbed it from the porch when we know everyone here.” For the first time, it occurred to me that someone might have taken it while everyone was watching Trevor jump. The first thing I saw when I got outside was my best friend with a bicep arcing up and around Chloe, while she ripped on the Strokes to the chagrin of Frank. The thought of theft made me want to trade porcelain mug for plastic cup, be drunk enough to forget the whole mess. It only took a beer and a half for me to get wasted.

I don’t really like drinking and I like being drunk even less. I’ve always been the one sober friend of a bunch of party kids – holding girls’ hair and driving boys home. I suppose I could be codependent – addicted to helping the addicted – but that word is like ‘love:’ it’s been used so often to describe so many different feelings that it’s all but meaningless. I go out to people-watch and meet girls, I tell myself.

One of my favorite jokes was to follow a flaky move with, ‘Sorry, I’m totally trashed.’ The next several hours were a blur of me repeating that catch phrase to anyone who would listen. I must have said those three words plus a contraction a couple dozen times.

By eleven I was back to where I started – sulking in my Lay-Z-Boy. I hadn’t had a drink since seven –and that was only a small splash of Bailey’s in my beloved java. When Chloe stepped through the front door, her full lips were stretched into a sheepish smile. She didn’t stop laughing to herself till she hit the lights in the room where I sat and saw me. “Have you seen Trevor?” she asked before checking my expression. After I murmured something about my friend taking Ishmael home, she noticed my thick, frowning eyebrows.

“God, what’s wrong?” – with the face of someone whose puppy just got injured.

“Somebody stole my guitar,” I muttered.

“What?” – with the face of someone who’s broke but still hit-up for change.

“Somebody stole my guitar,” I enunciated.

“I know. I heard the first time. You’re sure?” – with the face of someone still hoping a fact is a joke.

“Almost positive – combed the house, asked everyone about it more than once.” She reminded me that I had forgotten to ask Trevor and her. “Didn’t want to interrupt anything,” I spat. She asked what that meant. “Sorry I’m taking this out on you.”

“Yeah you are. Why? Wait, no – I don’t want to know. Listen, I’ll give you my guitar – I can barely play Cat Power on it anyway, and you know how easy her songs are. Just get up. Everybody’s going to the Grant Street block party. You’re coming, and I’m going to cheer you up – by any means necessary.” I followed her like a twelve-year-old hound – droopy-eyed and slow but faithful.

Sara was waiting on the front porch with a cigarette burning, rolling her eyes. Parties and winos scrolled by as we walked. I skulked along a half-step behind. Somehow we found Lyle, Frank, and Trevor in the teeming mass clogging the road of the bash. By midnight a dozen trashed assholes were trying to flip an eighties-model Ford Taurus. After a half-hour effort, they’d barely tipped the car. Chloe left in disgust. Sara mused that the attempted riot was a symbol for partying in Roosevelt – no matter how hard we tried, we didn’t have the heart to get as wild as the other university kids. At a state school they would have burned the car and a couch. Here at Dover, Frank gave the rioters a mechanics lesson in car-flipping, which was largely ignored. Trevor couldn’t stop laughing.

At both ends of the block red, white, and blue flashed. Maglite beams cut through the crowd, and the flocks scattered. Somehow, I ended up walking home with Trevor after our flight. We plodded southeast down Cherokee. After a block or two, Trevor spoke with me for the first time since early afternoon. “God, at our party today, for some reason I just wanted to make out with Chloe. So bad, dude, so bad.”

“I know, she’s great,” I sighed. “Why’d you think I write songs about her?”

“Yeah. It’s just, I’ve seen her before – y’ know, like, once or twice – and she’s cute, I guess. But today she had this spark, passion, whatever – it just made me want her.” I shot him a stare that should have hurt him. “But, y’ know, nothing happened, of course.”

A pause. “Someone stole my guitar,” I reported. We stopped and Trevor hugged me. His concerned embrace sent insects through my skin. I’ve never met anyone better at casual comfort, but the last thing I wanted was for him to touch me. Trevor felt enough of my exceptional awkwardness to keep quiet the rest of the walk back to our house. He always seemed sensitive.

23 June 2002, twelve am
Our party rages. Orientation children pack the kitchen, staring at our kegs as if they’re too good too be true – a few hours ago Lyle and Frank handed out fliers in South Quad. In addition, two-fifths of the summer’s homeless population is in the house. On our stereo, Michigan’s own Iggy Pop screams “I got a lust for life!” I stand in a kitchen corner, catching up with Trevor, smoking a Marlboro Red, sipping tap water from a glass milk bottle. “So, honestly, what was the deal with you and Chloe?”

Trevor laughs, stops to say, “Funny you ask.” He laughs again and spills it: “I went over to her place tonight and said ‘Sorry.’”

“For what?” I sneer. A Pillsbury Doughboy too baffled to be anything but an incoming student splashes beer on our feet and moves on without apologizing.

“Babies, they look like babies,” Trevor quips with a winning grin. Through our speakers, Dust Brothers-era Beck blasts a guitar-string noose lyric. My best friend segues again: “This song’s great. I love it when he’s like ‘Saving all your food stamps and burning down the trailer park.’ That was my life in Fruiton. Sometimes I forget that shit – being a broke-ass kid playing in underwear between the doublewides.” Surveying him from head to toe, I figure that what he wears now – designer jeans, Italian wingtips, Swiss timepiece, and tailored t-shirt – is worth a few dozen pills.

“But Chloe, Trevor, Chloe,” I remind him, and we’re making progress again.

“Nothing happened,” he confesses, “You know that. Wanted her till she wanted me, then didn’t want her anymore. Still, after the chase, I just ignored her, avoided her, for a couple weeks – till I left in May.” Sara and Chloe burst into the kitchen as Trevor finishes under his breath: “It was a dick move, so I said sorry.” After the tiny dancer ends his sentence, he darts out of the kitchen.

Chloe bounds across the room, throws an arm around me, and hangs off my shoulder like a dress shirt. “I love this tie,” she flatters, tugging at it, “It’s so… so… wooly.” I nod, and question Sara with glances and shrugs.

“You should go Avril ,” Sara suggests. She slides open the tie, pops open my button-down and there I am with a tie around a t-shirt. Usually Sara can hold her booze as well as a Kegerator. Back home in Roosevelt Shores, she held hair for a group of girls who drank spiced rum by the pint. Now miles in from our rolling lakefront suburb, she holds hair for girls with higher SATs and lower tolerances than her hometown crew. Yet tonight even Sara’s tipsy.

I’ve already drunk a half-cup, and that’s plenty for one evening. But I’m besotted with Chloe, who’s quite the sot tonight. “This is the best outfit ever,” she observes. “Guys love the tube top, girls love the hair fountain.” On her crown, she’s pulled her tarnished blond bob into a miniature pony tail that spills up and over its rubber band. She continues: “At first I thought this beer tasted like a litter box, but now it’s just water.” With each sip, she tips closer to me, and I feel sleazy for loving it. “Oh, Talking Heads are playing! Let’s dance, guys.”

Chloe drags Sara and me along the first few steps to the living room. After David Byrne is done bellowing “Wild, Wild Life,” the Beastie Boys and Q-Tip rap “Get it Together.” The tune is only a few beats in before Frank and Lyle beg Trevor to break. He plays it off, thrice declining before he can’t ignore the circle forming around him.

Dropping and pushing off, he bounces up, right hand down, then left, then right again. Popping and locking bare arms, his feet slide underneath as if he were riding an airport walkway. Falling to the ground and curling up his limbs, he spins like a beetle on its back. Pulling his frame perpendicular to the hardwood floor, he finishes the dance with a head-spin and a handspring. Gaping and cheering, the crowd calls for more, but Trevor disappears into the back-patting throng.

Trevor’s circle closes to dance away the song. When “Just Like Heaven,” comes on, however, the couple dozen on the floor clear out. Only Chloe, Frank and I remain. Dancing in the base of a tall bay window, my smallest housemate flails in time. Chloe pulls my tie as a puppeteer strings along a dancing marionette, says “I want this.” For an instant I fool myself into believing she could ever want me. Then I forget my delusions as an adolescent shakes off a wet dream with a celebrity and know she means the tie and only the tie. Taking it off, I loop it around her neck, and we do our best to keep up with the beat. Next, the Jackson 5 funk up “I Want You Back.” Leave it to little Michael to fill a living room within a minute.

Sara and Trevor join Frank to groove on a windowsill of our big old Arts and Crafts style house. A meter from me, Lyle’s dancing to a different drummer. I wonder when we’ll all be in one room again and look at Chloe to ask. My hazels catch her blues, and she’s stilled. Chloe’s eyes close as she tips toward me. I glance at the bay window. While Trevor watches us, Sara points at me. Frank steps down after she whispers into his ear. When I look straight ahead, Chloe’s face is the closest it’s ever been. I give her a peck and scurry outside to smoke.

A group of gawkers brave the drizzle to watch lightning scar the sky. Thunder has been shaking the house for hours, but the earth’s barely damp. I take out a Red and think of a loving candle and wish my room didn’t smell like wax and Boone’s Farm. My eyes leak, but the sky breaks open and falls in sheets, disguising sentimentality. I take my first drag and notice Frank beside me, scratching his non-smoking hand on rock-hardened hair. “You know what’s worse than loving someone who doesn’t like you? Loving someone who only likes you,” he shares. Lyle and Sara gallop through a screen slam into the rain.

After a white flash, Lyle lectures as usual, relating a directionless anecdote: “Heat makes the air electric. Riding my Cow home at dawn, I had this red See sky behind me, the See of Toronto – brightening sky; I chased night. I knew there was going be a storm tonight, y’ know? ‘Buckets of Rain.’ We’ll need “Shell-er from the Storm.” How’s Chloe?” he asked. I shrugged, so my friend continued with the Dylan lyrics: “If you could only go back to when God and her were born…”

After a sky crash, Sara clarifies as usual, relating a thoughtful paragraph: “Just remember, Paul – ‘dance floor kisses don’t count.’ Chloe’s words matter way more to you than yours do to her. She kissed you to make sure you guys were friends. Why d’ you think she hates Trevor? She didn’t get her friendship make-out session, so how could she know if he liked her? I know she said ‘I love you’ – somehow you already told me that twice tonight – but she tells me that almost every day. Kissing means she just wants to be friends.”

“Yeah, Chloe doesn’t like herself enough to love anybody,” I say, and start to sing: “‘Cause everybody knows/she’s a Femme Fatale/The things she does to me/She’s such a little tease/See the way she walks/Hear the way she talks.’”

“Ok, no. Stop. Tomorrow’s parties never come. Stop.” Sara begs, and removes her mesh truck-stop hat to squeeze it onto my head. “She’s not a femme fatale – she’s not gonna kill anyone. You’re just in a relationship with her while she isn’t in a relationship with you. That’s all.” A pause as we put out cigarettes. “God,” Sara giggles, “my hat’s already as big as it gets, and it still won’t fit.”

“I’ve got a big fucking head,” I say, and laughter rolls. My friends couldn’t agree more. “No,” I insist as my foot goes further down my throat, “I mean, it’s really big. I have to get custom hats – eight and three-quarters,” but my details only turn chuckles into cackles.

Calling from our roof, I hear an old friend. I beg Trevor not to jump off onto a slippery trampoline, but he ignores the plea: “C’mon up to the roof – you can really see the storm up here!” My friends and I climb the stairs to join Trevor and Chloe above the earthly stars of a city asleep. Little more than silhouettes to the students below, seven lightning rods stand on the rain-slicked roof.

The Fogged Clarity Interview

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate discusses fiction, race and success.

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Susan Levi Wallach

I was nine years old when I killed the boy, pushing the knife between the soft bones of his chest with both my hands. I pulled it out slowly, not realizing at first the finality of what I’d done. “What’s your name, boy?” I whispered.

He had been playing in the woods behind the motel, just beyond the barbecue grills and picnic benches, out of sight from the pool where both our mothers lay sunbathing with their heads tilted up and eyes closed against the heat. They had no interest in us.

“Go on, find something to do for a little while,” my mother had said. I was nine after all, no longer in need of constant attention.

I had been the one who had begged for this one last weekend out of the city as a family before my sister’s wedding. Because then everything would change.

“I want to go to the farm,” I’d said to my father, who like me was tired of looking at table settings and bridesmaid dresses. “You promised we’d go someday. I want to see where you grew up.”

And so, on the Thursday before school started, we went — a four-hour drive out of the city and onto two-lane back roads.

My mother’s indignation at being dragged away from bridge games and deviled eggs was reason enough to keep away from her. My father had left us on our own for the afternoon to visit old friends. My sister, twelve years older, was in our room with the home decorating guides and bride’s magazines her mother-in-law-to-be had given her. She had drawn the chain across the door, so even though I had my own key there was no getting in.

I had gone around to the back of the motel, where there was a battered swing set, a picnic area and a thicket of trees. That was where I saw him.

He was younger than I and slight, with straight hair like mine, but darker and cut very short. I thought that if I had been a boy I might look like that.

At first, I really just wanted to touch his hair. He had a stick in his hand and was poking at the blackberry vines, their tough, thorny canes twisted around the surrounding bushes.

“You won’t be able to cut those vines with that stick,” I informed him.

“It’s not a stick,” he said, holding it up in the air. “It’s a light saber.”

“But it doesn’t have any lights on it.”

“You just can’t see them,” he said, turning back to the vines, which were thick with fruit.

He must have been pulling off berries and eating them — his hands and lips were streaked with red.

I thought for a moment. It was so still where we were, no one else around and no one to see us. “I have a real light saber in my room. Would you like to see?”

He looked at me, then, gauging whether he could trust me, “Sure. Go get it. I’ll wait.”

I ran back to the pool, slipping out of my sandals before I reached the pavement so I could sneak up behind my mother’s lounge and take her key from the table beside her. When I left the enclosure, I went back to the end of the parking lot. I looked to the boy, relieved to see him still occupied with the berries, pulling a couple off a vine and chewing as he thwacked the stick against the bushes and tables, calling out to foes only he could see.

My parents’ room had a kitchenette and I’d seen the knife there that morning, short and thin, with a sharp tip and fine edge. I rolled it up in the newspaper, centering it across one of the corners the way the florist rolled up the flowers when my father and I went to get my mother’s weekly bouquet of peonies and mondo grass or, for special occasions, white roses and snapdragons. I left the knife in the tall grass outside the pool gate while I snuck the key back onto the table.

The boy, still where I’d left him, pawed at the dirt with his sneaker and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That’s no real light saber. That’s just a roll of paper.” Already he had started back toward the motel, slashing the stick from side to side. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

“No, wait,” I said. “I wrapped it up so that no one but you would see. Come here, I’ll show you.”

I moved off a little, so that I was standing by the thickest of the trees. It was easy to maneuver so that the boy was leaning against it while I carefully unwound the newspaper, hoping the anticipation would keep him distracted and silent. I could feel the cool weight of the haft as I let the newspaper fall away and lifted the knife high above both our heads, his eyes following it until the very last moment.

When my father found me, I had the boy’s stick, using it to make overlapping circles in the dirt. He turned my bloodied arms this way and that, looking for the wound.

“Did you do something, Anna?” he said, agitation rising in his voice. “Show me what you did.”

I pointed to where the picnic tables were.

“Wait here,” he said as he started to walk past the tables, stopping for a moment a little farther on, then turning and walking swiftly back.

He pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything, just grabbed the stick out of my hand and took me hard by the elbow. There was a spigot at the back of the motel, and he pulled me over to it. The water was icy enough to make me gasp. But he held my arms under, rubbing with his hands until my skin looked pale again, albeit chafed from his determination. When he was done he stepped back and looked me over from head to foot, his countenance locked in such concentration that I feared even my breathing would be an interruption.

My blouse was a deep rose with small orange and pink flowers — the small red flecks barely showed, but he told me I’d have to give it to him later, after I’d changed for dinner. For now, he said I should just ball it up and put it in a pillowcase as soon as I’d undressed. “Go on now. Don’t talk to anyone. Tell your mother that I forgot something in town and will be back soon.”

I’d started to skip away when he called me back. He bent down and scratched up a fistful of dirt, then rubbed it onto my hair, blouse and capris with both hands. “Tell your mother that you fell, that you need a good hair wash too.”

My mother had gone upstairs and changed into a bright yellow and white sundress. I could see her through the window as I walked past her room. She was standing in front of the mirror putting her earrings on while swaying to the music from the television set. I knocked on the door to my room and waited until my sister opened it. She immediately stuck out her hand, “Oh no you don’t. Not looking like that. What happened to you?”

“I fell,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, sure now that it was the boy’s blood she’d seen.

“You fell? Not likely. Looks like you rolled. You’re not coming in here. Go knock on Mom’s door. You need a shower. I’ll bring you something to wear.”

“And a pillowcase,” I said, before realizing it.

“A pillowcase?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me ready to pounce, to pick apart any reason I might offer. I rocked anxiously from foot to foot. “Dad said to. He said to put my clothes into a pillowcase because they’re so dirty. He doesn’t want them mixed up with yours.”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything. Just go.”

My father still hadn’t come back. It was another hour before he did. I had on a new dress, bought just for the weekend, and I twirled around slowly for him. But he did not seem to notice me. He just looked at my mother as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. He had a bag of groceries and a six-pack.

“Arthur, what’s all this? You don’t think I’m going to cook dinner here I hope,” my mother jabbed.

“Nope.”

“I hope not.”

“Thought I’d try one of those grills in the back. You know the restaurants around here aren’t any good. Anna, do you have your muddy clothes? Let’s get them into the trunk.”

He twisted the cap off one of the beers and carried the grocery bag out with him. I followed. But we didn’t go to the car. When we got to the foot of the stairs he stuck the pillowcase with my clothes inside into the grocery bag and shooed me away. “Go help your mother with the plates and things,” he said. “We’ll eat at one of the picnic tables. Tell your sister I said to help too.”

Instead of going right upstairs, I watched him as he settled the food on one of the tables. He shoveled some charcoal into the bottom of the grill, sprinkled it with lighter fluid, and threw in a match. I didn’t see that pillowcase again.

Even as we were eating, we could hear voices out in the parking lot. Cars came and went. A woman sat by the pool, crying with a towel around her shoulders. Later, when we started up the stairs, we saw people moving through the woods, their flashlights like fireflies filling the warm night. Every so often a man shouted a name I couldn’t quite make out over the air conditioning. At one point, I heard a siren and started to tremble, fearing they had found him. But the siren passed.

In the morning, I heard my parents talking in low, urgent voices outside the door to my room. It was my father who knocked, and my sister who answered. “Your mother wants to get going back now,” he said. “A little boy disappeared here yesterday, and it has her spooked. So get your things together and be quick about it.”

He looked tired, as if he’d been out there too, one of the men searching the woods.

“What about breakfast?” my sister asked. “It’s so early.”

“We’ll stop once we get on the road,” my father said.

Instead, we stopped in town. My father told us to wait in the car and crossed the street to the police station.

“Oh, I could tell you stories about your father and his brothers,” my mother said. “How on Saturday night the town police would round up half the boys in town. They’d have them sleep off their poor judgment in the jail cells so they wouldn’t get into any real trouble. Everyone looked out for everyone else then. Those boys are probably running things here now.”

After a while my mother got out of the car and bought us all sodas. We had the windows open, the breeze just cool enough to keep us comfortable. My sister and I played hangman and tic-tac-toe over and over. My mother closed her eyes and leaned back on the headrest, as if she were still at the pool.

When he finally came back, my father didn’t offer any explanation, just slid onto his seat, started the engine and pulled carefully into the light weekend traffic. “Too bad about that boy,” he said. “The way these woods are, they don’t think they’ll ever find him.”