The Fogged Clarity Interview

The prolific London-born writer sits down with Ben to discuss his process, style, and latest collection, It’s Beginning To Hurt.

The Fogged Clarity Interview

The award winning author discusses the influence and process behind American Salvage, anachronisms, and her days in the circus.

Jessica Johnson

We left a day before my 17th birthday, just when the sun began pumping hazy orange light into a humid Friday morning. Mom was rushing from one room to another, making sure we didn’t forget any small toys or dishcloths, while Dad and I stuffed our sleeping bags into the U-Haul and Keith hunted for our cat. An hour later I sat behind the passenger seat, knees curled over a laptop case and one foot jacked high on a plastic container filled with Legos that I hadn’t seen since 7th grade. Keith was already dozing in the middle beside me, hands clutching an old color Gameboy and a 12-pack of Duracell AA’s; the other window seat was swamped in travel bags and pillows. The car felt smothering and I hadn’t even closed my door yet. I tried not to think about my friends, who’d probably sleep happily for the next four hours, and how Seth saying “God, that sucks” during a Brawl tournament doesn’t really constitute a goodbye. My thumb grazed over the keyboard of my cell phone as I glanced at the time. Not even 8:00.

My mother slipped in up front, clacking on her seatbelt and then turning to see how we were situated. Her brown eyes still seemed foggy from sleep. “Everyone comfortable?” She asked, smiling at Keith’s sleeping form. “Do you need me to take anything?”

As I leaned back against the headrest, I spotted the cat carrier sitting rather forlornly in her lap, our fat old calico squashed inside. It had taken Keith half an hour to corner her, stupid thing, but for a moment I understood what it must be like in there, inside a little box.

“No, mom. We got it.”

When Dad pulled away from the curb, I watched the house (it really wasn’t ours anymore, we’d been sleeping on the floor for a week now) fade behind us. No one saw us off – everyone had said their goodbyes last weekend at the party my uncle hosted – and if it wasn’t for the large U-Haul my father hooked to the tail of our gray sedan, our neighbors might have thought we were going out to breakfast and not moving to the other end of the East Coast. Not heading to Albany, Georgia; one thousand, two hundred and ninety two miles, twenty-one hours and twenty-two minutes away from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was late August, and I had not seen the beach once or shot a single game of hoops with my friends. I’d spent my summer packing dusty photo albums and my great-grandmother’s quilts into oversized cardboard boxes and donating old clothes to Good Will. Tossing a decade of childhood memories in the trash. Karen Sanders had helped with the yard sales at first, until the sun started staining the roads the color of Cherry Kool-Aid at night and the college kids made bonfires on the beach. Then she sorta smiled and shrugged, and stopped coming by.

The thought is bitter, even now. “When’re we stopping for breakfast?” I asked, and watched my Dad glance at the clock on the dashboard. “Once we’ve got a couple of hours under our belt,” he said, “around 10:30 or so, it’ll be more like brunch.” We’d be in Rhode Island by then. I shifted my feet and searched for my MP3 player, the Game-Boy was easy to pry from my brother’s loose hands. The car felt small and over-warm, and my legs were already cramping. Mom rolled down the window as I tucked in my earbuds, pressing herself toward her door like maybe it would open. The wind caught her dark hair and lifted it up like strands of a torn spider web. It was starting to gray, I’d never noticed before. The fading strands glinted like tinsel sticking out of a box. Her face reminded me of my old English teacher’s after a long day–deflated, like a patient who’d been leeched of energy instead of blood.

It felt strange, knowing we wouldn’t be returning to that blue house with the hydrangea bushes in the front yard and the oak deck. It had been in our family for generations. Mom said her grandfather had the house built when he and her grandmother first got married, and it was always passed down to the oldest child. It would’ve been mine, if we’d kept it. I remembered Grandma had filled the living room with family portraits and grave photographs of straight-backed ancestors in grayscale; men with thick, handlebar mustaches and women in high lace collars and pleated skirts. Mom hung pictures of lighthouses in the bathroom and spent six months remodeling the kitchen. My room had a skylight, and when I was younger I thought that sheet of glass was the only thing that kept the stars from flooding my room.

We’d had a trampoline in the backyard, one with a net around it so we could jump onto it off the deck. Mom said it was dangerous, but Dad let us do it as long as we stuck to regulation codes. At my party last year, on my 16th birthday, Karen Sanders jumped into the trampoline for the first time. She had long blonde hair that almost curled, and a body that was as lithe and slender as a cattail. Seth and I had to convince her to jump; she thought the drop was too far, that she’d hit dirt and break a bone. I jumped first to show her it was safe, and when she finally leaped her hair billowed behind her like a flag. She landed on her feet but her knees crumpled, and when she bounced her shirt flew up, showing a flat white stomach and the underside of a bra the color of a blue-raspberry Jolly Rancher. It branded into my mind. I was the only one who saw it. She was embarrassed and flustered but I said it was okay. My mouth dried and my palms got sweaty, like my body didn’t know what to do with its moisture, and I kept glancing around, making sure no one else had noticed. It felt like she’d shown me a treasure.

That was the night I asked her out. She’d smiled quick and bright, like the blink of a firefly, and said yes.

Around 10:00 Dad pulled the car into the narrow parking lot of a small town restaurant called Percy’s Place somewhere in Massachusetts. It was a squat white building with a yellow awning above a door with a red rooster on it. It looked very “local,” I decided. Karen Sanders liked to use that word a lot.

Dad had to park across three spots in the lot in order to fit the U-Haul. As we all disentangled ourselves from the car, stiff and slightly dazed, I realized my father had to let go of my mother’s hand in order to get out of the car. Had they been holding hands the whole ride, I wondered? At the going away party, my Uncle Rob and my mother didn’t speak. She was officially the guest of honor, but when Uncle Rob had my parents stand up he only talked about the house and about Dad’s job. He didn’t mention Mom once, but I had figured it was a mistake.

As we headed into the restaurant, Mom made sure to keep a window cracked open for the cat. Said the next time we stopped we’d have to let it out for a while. The inside of Percy’s was littered with checkered countertops and Norman Rockwell paintings, an attempt at folky that felt almost deceptive. Our hostess was pretty, probably in college, her lips dragging over her teeth in a wan smile that said she didn’t want to be up this early any more than I did. As soon as we’d settled onto our shifting laminated cushions she placed our menus on the table and hurried away.

“Well, this is a neat little place, isn’t it?” Mom glanced at the picture above our table as Dad slipped his hand back into hers. There was a boy and a girl on it, the general scraped-knee-and-pigtails variety that Rockwell usually painted. At the going away party, she’d sat at the table and let him get her food, which I thought was strange because Mom’s really particular about her food, and usually doesn’t let anyone touch it. I’d forgotten about that, I realized, but didn’t think much of it. I was starving, and the menu was a gift from heaven. I was convinced that the “Dapper Dan” breakfast special-eggs, bacon, pancakes, sausage, baked beans, homefries and toast-was named for me, and decided on it with no hesitation.

“Daniel, anything look appetizing to you?” I looked up from the menu and saw my mom’s teasing smile. I smiled back and nodded, tugging my cell out of my pocket to snap a picture of the menu.

Mom shot me the disapproving look that usually preceded an irritated reprimand. “Daniel,” she started, but the waitress arrived just then, settling four glasses of water down with a cheery “Hello!”

When the food arrived I snapped a quick picture of my plate and forwarded it to Seth. He would love it. None of us really spoke as we ate, we’d never been a family for table talk. My food was delicious, and any food was usually enough to keep me quiet. Keith had finished quickly and settled down with his Gameboy, occasionally asking the waitress for refills on his chocolate milk. My Mom and Dad poured over maps and paperwork, making sure we really had everything we needed.

In my back pocket, my cell phone stayed silent.

The weekend before we left, my uncle threw a party so our friends and family could ‘see us off.’ Friends, relatives and neighbors swarmed into his yard, eating hot dogs in white buns and drinking beer out of plastic cups and saying “We’ll miss you ” over and over again. “We’ll miss you, don’t forget to stay in touch.” No one mentioned that my mother and her brother did not once look at each other. After sunset Karen and I stole back to my house down the road and curled up together on the yellow grass where the trampoline had been to watch the sky turn black. “The Egyptians thought the sun died every night, and was reborn every morning.” She told me quietly, eyes on the purpling sky, watching the stars and planets glow faintly, before turning to me and saying in the same breath, “I think we should break up.”

Over fifty years ago, my great-grandfather had a blue house built for a family that didn’t yet exist. He did not know his granddaughter and her husband would single-handedly break the family solidarity. He did not know that she would sell that house after his death, nor did he know that his grandson-in-law would get a job transfer sending the family across the country, breaking the tradition of living close. He would have called them ungrateful, especially my mother. My mother, who set trash bags and boxes into the U-Haul with a mechanical delicacy, wearing blue jeans and a dull gray sweatshirt she normally reserved for days when she was so sick the only thing she could do was sprawl on the couch and down mugs of oolong tea, snuffling into tissues. It was somehow unnerving to see that shirt on while she was healthy.

One day, Keith dropped a swan figurine Mom and Dad got at their wedding. Dad spent twenty minutes making sure he’d swept up all the glass shards, and Keith sliced his palm and cried while Mom got the disinfectant.

“It wasn’t that important, anyway, don’t worry,” she said, but her eyes were already shiny and even Keith knew she was lying. Her grandfather would have chastised her for being so attached to an object. Her grandfather would have reminded her that family and people are more important than wedding gifts.

After we left the restaurant, we rarely stopped again. Dad had thought of visiting D.C. or New York to do some sightseeing, but with the U-Haul clinging to our bumper, the idea was too risky. Most of the day was spent playing “I Spy” games and dozing heavily. Mom said I slept through whole states, and each time I woke up it was in a nostalgic haze. I didn’t really care, Karen Sanders was in my thoughts either way. Was this what it felt like after you passed out or got wasted? I was never brave enough to try when my friends drank, I knew Mom would smell the alcohol on me and I didn’t want to see how she’d react. I wondered, though.

My head jerked back every time my thoughts wandered, and my brain clouded. My eyes landed dully on a square blue sign coming up on the right: Food, Rest Stop 12 ½ miles.

We were somewhere in West Virginia the last time I woke up, and Dad said we were almost at our hotel. Keith was going on about wanting to climb the cliffs on the side of the highway. The banded rocks rose on each side of us like folded layers of melted wax, lines of red and brown and yellow-white, the color of dirty egg yoke, all folded on top of each other. I remembered my geography teacher last year said stuff like that happened during earthquakes, when the rocks get hot enough to bend but don’t melt. Karen Sanders had told me it wouldn’t work out, that she didn’t want to attempt a long-distance relationship. My head fogged again and I leaned against the frame of the door.

When we reached the hotel Keith was out, hand still clenched around his Gameboy. I struggled my way out from under my pillow and jacket, eager to stretch, while Dad popped the trunk. My knees and back popped and my body lurched when I stood, protesting movement after being immobile for so long.

The hotel room was generic: a flat, matted carpet underneath a TV set and wardrobe, and two queen sized beds covered in comforters that crinkled when you sat on them. The bathroom was small and smelt strongly of Febreze citrus. Mom lay down on one of the beds, looking like she hadn’t seen a mattress in days. Dad tucked Keith into the opposite bed and settled beside her, silently rubbing her shoulder. I went to walk the cat.

Mom had bought one of those fancy cat leashes a while back, made the calico get used to the outside before we moved. Idly watching as the feline searched for a place sufficiently like her litter box, the leash loop securely around my wrist, it did not occur to me how strange a picture we probably made. It was dark, she could have easily been mistaken for a small dog.

The parking lot was almost completely empty, and our white U-Haul caught so much light I had to squint. I flicked through my phone, checking to see if I had missed a message during a rest stop. I hadn’t. I checked again.

The cat had finished, and was now chewing contentedly on grass that was growing near the sidewalk. I jerked the leash, and the cat snarled before heading back for the grass. With a sigh I reached down and scooped her up, fighting her claws.

The next morning we all trekked down to the continental breakfast, and I had just settled down with a glass of OJ and a bagel when she walked in the room. She was probably my age, if not a little older. A little on the shorter side, with a slim waist and wide hips. She smiled at me as we passed by, her eyes were the exact same blue as the walls of the old house. She was wearing a blue striped sweater that hung off her left shoulder, exposing a long expanse of uninterrupted smooth, freckled skin. She was wearing a strapless bra. The idea made me clutch at my cup of orange juice, splay my fingers out over the sweating glass in search of relief. I watched as she wandered the room, saving a table for her family before heading to the waffle maker. Earlier, I had decided against waffles, but now I scuttled back my chair, reconsidering.

We stood side by side, waiting for the timer to count down, when I realized how short she was. She barely came up to my shoulders. She leaned down to pull out her waffle and the lax shoulder of her sweater dipped forward like the bend of a horizontal curtain, revealing just enough skin to hint. I stopped breathing, just for a second. I wondered if her bra was blue, like her sweater. Like Karen’s bra that day she leapt onto the trampoline, or blue like her eyes. We didn’t speak, and when I came back to my seat I felt foolish.

“You alright?” My Mom asked. “Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

The night I asked Karen Sanders out, we were both lying on my trampoline long after my party had ended, her head nestled in the crux of my shoulder. She pointed out stars to me and the synthetic weave beneath us dipped and creaked whenever she moved her arm. Her dad studied astronomy as a hobby, she said, and she could name a lot of the constellations. She probably named half a dozen, but her heat struck me on one side, and the almost chill of an August night got me on the other, combined with the scent of her hair in my nose, I really wasn’t capable of rational thought. I laid there and listened, absently drawing circles on her stomach with my thumb, loving the warmth she radiated. In the end, I could only recognize the Big and Little Dippers, but I’d always sort of known those anyway.

We left soon after breakfast without seeing the blue-topped girl again. I think I spent the whole day (outside of rest stops and one bridge we looked over at the South Carolina border) completely asleep. It was dark when I woke up again, and I figured we’d get to the new house in a couple of hours. Mom was driving now, the first time I’d seen her take the wheel this trip. The radio was spewing muted tunes of classic rock and garbled with Dad’s low, rumbling snores. I shifted slightly, readjusting my leg over the box of Legos and pulling off my headphones. The earbuds were giving me a headache. My right leg had gone numb up to my knee, and I shifted and tried to clench my toes. Outside the car the sky was as dark as the bottom of the ocean, and the stars seemed to swim as they reflected off the window. I craned my neck, trying to see over the car, catching the tail end of what might have been the Big Dipper. My breath came a little thicker, as if the night air had leaked through a window like water and flooded the car. Everything felt bigger, almost infinite. I could almost believe that the universe spanned billions of miles and that other galaxies existed somewhere. My brother’s head was sinking into my shoulder and my leg was still numb, and everything inside our sedan was warm and jumbled and close and I knew if I opened my door, I would fall out and maybe never land anywhere.

My thoughts wandered to Karen, with her slender waist and long hair, but the picture in my head came up with brown hair instead, and she was wearing a blue sweater pulled off one shoulder that I knew she didn’t own. All I could think was that Karen dumped me without even trying to make it work and Dad held Mom’s hand all day yesterday.

There was something significant in that I couldn’t place. I sucked in another breath, it felt like inhaling with a damp towel over my mouth. How different would things be in Georgia? We’d have to get a new license plate for the sedan. Somewhere down there was my new school, and I supposed if things turned out I would have new friends. We wouldn’t have winter like in New Hampshire.

For a moment, I opened my mouth and wanted to speak: Hey Mom, where are we?, but my voice had settled in my lungs. It was dark in the car, passing cars and the dashboard lights only dimly illuminating the front seats. The red bulb on the radio threw my mother’s face into relief, seeping into the creases around her eyes and catching her grays. Why had she wanted to move? I felt like I was seeing something important, something profound in my mother’s face at that moment, like the first time you recognize the way the wind feels wet before it storms. My lips closed. Instead of speaking, I pressed my face to the cool glass and kept my eyes open, focused on the yellow lights of passing cars. I would stay awake until we got to the house.

Thomas Matlack

Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead investor in the Art Technology Group, which reached $5 billion in market capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own venture firm from 1998 to 2010, before turning to writing. He is the founder of The Good Men Project.

___________________________

I happened to meet a major vendor of Verizon’s new FiOS effort at a dinner party the other night. He let me in on a dirty little secret: Pay-Per-View is driving the resurgence in the old Ma Bell. And it isn’t Bambi that’s doing it.

Verizon charges $4.99 for its new releases but $14.99 for porn. My buddy is involved in determining the capacity needed for different parts of the day, so he has studied peak load on the system in scientific detail. Guess what consumes over 90 percent of the bandwidth—Porn. Now for the truly stupid part: guys are spending $14.99 for a two-hour story of guy meets girl where they do all kinds of sick things together, but on average, the viewer of porn turns the show off after 18 minutes. Think about how many guys have to watch 18-minute segments to drive 90 percent of Verizon’s bandwidth and you begin to see why they are making money and why we have a problem.

I had this revelatory conversation after Tiger Woods but before Jesse James had been busted for screwing around. So I got to watch yet another national scandal unfold with these facts fresh in my mind. I spoke to another friend, who runs a major organization focused on sports and society, who just laughed at the outrage over Jesse messing with the tattoo girl when he’s married to America’s Sweetheart. “All the guys pointing fingers are just trying to keep the attention off themselves, as they slink off to the nearest strip club.”

I keep asking myself: Aren’t we sick of these stories? Do I really care about the status of Charlie Sheen’s recovery? What I do care a lot about is the state of the average American guy. And for him, I am pretty darned concerned.

John Edwards, Tiger, Jesse, and our obsession with their bad behavior, are a symptom of a much deeper problem that the Groundhog Day feel of the news should shake us all to consider, even if you aren’t privy to Verizon’s pay-per-view stats. Guys in our country are at a crossroads. We are not all cheats and drunks (though I was at one point), but most guys I know are pretty confused.

I’ve spent the last two years interviewing men of all walks of life: black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, urban, rural, famous, and the guy next door. I’ve talked to murderers locked up in Sing Sing and NFL Hall of Famers, stay-at-home dads and reporters on the ground in Baghdad, men who failed at marriage and those that succeeded, dads who lost children or struggled with them growing up, guys fighting for our country and those just trying to do the right thing.

In all those voices I heard one thing again and again: the struggle to stay true to themselves as men. Every guy I talked to who had made it through to some kind of peace of mind had hit a wall of some sort when they lost a wife, a buddy, a job, or got thrown out of the house. They woke to look in the mirror, knowing their world had changed forever. The way they had been limping along in life would no longer do. They had to dig deep to find themselves for real. They had to tell the truth about themselves and hold onto it.

The issue is, in part, cultural. Men in 2010—with more men unemployed than at any time in recent history—are supposed to be present fathers, intimate husbands, and still bring home the bacon. It’s like women 50 years ago. There is no way we can do it all. And yet we don’t like to talk about it. Most guys stay silent and compartmentalize. Men, especially when in pain, don’t like to talk about it. The last thing we want to do is end up on Oprah’s couch crying our eyes out.

So this is where that 18 minutes comes into play. It’s a way of coping, instead of actually talking about it. It takes little shame, and only accelerates the trap that too many guys fall into, thinking we are alone. All these guys doing the same idiotic things, thinking they are the only one.

At least in my case, success and public attention soon meant my public and my private personas would become widely divergent. I failed miserably as a father and a husband. I lied to myself and ultimately everyone I cared about. But you don’t have to be the CFO of a big company, as I was, or be Tiger Woods to compartmentalize as a guy. All of the men I have interviewed talked about it as the fundamental challenge—being the same person in every aspect of life.

As with Tiger, there is no excuse for Jesse’s behavior. The victims are the wives involved. But at the same time, I am rooting that they get better. Being a cheat isn’t a good time. It’s actually quite miserable.

Fourteen years later, I am sober and happily remarried. I hope that these guys get a clue. I also hope that as a country of men, we start talking more openly about the source of these problems rather than having to watch the train wreck happen again and again and again while the media feasts on yet another tragedy.

So guys, stop pointing the finger at the latest celebrity caught with his pants down. Stop suffering in silence and start talking about what is really going on, even if it isn’t pretty. Tell another guy. You might be surprised at how much he can relate to your pain. The 18 minutes isn’t going to solve a damn thing.

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.

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.