We were like two roots in soil suspended blessings that would grow
on trees.
Even when told their veins do grow and dates aplenty, vacant is our fruit.
Spoiled was a root with the jealousy of time what is it that keeps time from
deteriorating?
My brother is over, as always after his Tuesday night AA. I open my apartment door as soon as he buzzes, turn back to the salmon I’m poaching in a cheap saucepan on the stove. My brother doesn’t love salmon. He loves ice cream. We joke about this. “I smell salmon,” he says when he shuffles in the door, blue eyes smiling, backward Whole Foods baseball cap on his head. “Are you practicing your co-dependence on me again?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m trying to fix you until you’re a copy of me! Speaking of me, how does my…?”
“It looks fine,” he says.
“…hair look?” I finish.
“But you’re too skinny. I bought us some ice cream.” He pulls the tub out of the Key Food bag, a generic Vanilla Chocolate Chip, which I know he bought us with his food stamps.
“Just try the yogurt lemon sauce,” I say when we are seated on my Ikea sofa, facing my little TV. My brother and I have three TV shows every Tuesday, Law and Order, CSI and Lost, my brother’s favorite. After Lost, he has to rush to the subway to make his curfew at the three-quarter house in Flatbush. On Thursdays, we have The Office, and My Name is Earl.
My brother obediently dips his fork into the sauce on his plate, flakes off a sliver of salmon. “Mm!” he says with surprise, and eats, even though I know he is mostly waiting for ice cream.
“Look at these ingredients!” I say, peering at the carton when it’s time for dessert. “Guar gum! What’s guar gum?”
I feel ashamed when he blushes. “At least it’s not vodka,” he points out.
My brother has been in New York for seven years. I sent him a plane ticket when I could no longer understand a word he said, usually sobbing, over the pay phone outside the SRO where he was living then, in the same city as our father. When he wove toward me down the airport corridor from the airplane, led by his distended belly, I knew my brother was a hero. He had boarded the plane. From the airport, almost dead, it was to the hospital for emergency detox for a week, then to the fold-out couch I had waiting in my apartment, two days sober, the bar, three weeks sober, the bar, one month sober, the bar, rehab!, six weeks sober, the bar, another rehab, eight months sober!, the bar, kicked him out of my apartment on advice that letting him stay longer could enable him to drink but stayed his best friend, a half way house, three months sober, relapse and kicked out of half-way house, sleeping under the BQE for weeks, almost dead again, I took the subway to Brooklyn and said to him in a diner “tomorrow is still always a new day,” then nothing for weeks until I got his letter from a longer rehab, and now, here in my apartment, on his twice weekly pass from the three-quarter house in Flatbush, eating salmon on my sofa, just back from his favorite East Village AA.
“This is for you,” my brother had said to me, the week before. And he’d handed me his “two year chip,” for that long sober in AA.
“No,” I had said, dutifully remembering my AlAnon. “You earned it. It’s yours, not mine.”
He looked hurt. “I can get another one when I announce it at my other meeting. I want you to have it.”
“Well, okay then,” I said. And my eyes filled as I squeezed the smooth wood disk in my palm.
Tonight I can’t stop my rant about guar gum, until finally I Google “guar gum,” to prove how bad it is. It turns out, though, according to numerous websites, that guar gum is a wholesome, non-harmful ingredient.
“See?” is all my brother says. “See? Mm!” He eats another spoonful of ice cream while I blush.
“Dad loves ice cream too,” my brother says. He fingers his mustache, an exact replica of our father’s, and I rotate my ankle in irritation.
“See the new pictures I put up?” I wave my hand at my wall, the photos of me and my brother, as kids, tots, teenagers, some at our mom’s in California, some at our dad’s in the midwest, some as adults in New York.
“Nice,” my brother says. “I’m a star!”
“Do you ever think about it?” I ask. “How we would visit Dad and take all those pictures of all of them with my little Kodak Instamatic, and then the next visit none of the pictures of you or me would be on their wall, only the ones we took of them without us?”
“Yeah,” my brother says. “I think about it. Just not as much as you do.” He scoops another bite of ice cream. “Dad loves us. It’s just that she…”
“I know,” I say. I do. Our dad always cried, tears sliding into his mustache, when we hugged goodbye after our visits, which our mother always insisted be as short as possible.
I used to think the missing pictures meant my brother and I had no place we belonged, no power. It took years to understand that it was the opposite. Our place had been first; it was that that she couldn’t stand.
Our father is a writer who went to the famous writing school in Iowa. We lived together there as a family. Then he had an affair with the wife of another writer. This wife-swapping was so common, almost mandatory, among the writers, that it was the subject of a well known short story by one of the father-writers of the era, about how the fathers didn’t live there anymore. After my mother divorced him, our father married the wife of his writer-friend, and when we visited, we found our father surrounded by a chorus of older children, calling him “Dad,” and two toddler girls. Once in a while a photo of us would pop up on their wall, but it rarely stayed there long, no matter how many pictures of ourselves my brother and I presented.
There was an exception, the high school years when my brother and I had both moved there from our mom’s. Then our faces nested cozily in the frames with the others. Until some fight over my brother’s college tuition, when I sided with my mother, who, after all, did not live on a trust like our father. It was then that our photos disappeared again, never to return to their walls. It’s not that I want my brother to blame our father, exactly, since our stepmother controlled the home decorating as well as the finances. I just want him to stop idolizing our father quite so much, which I suspect annoys even our father, like a roving spotlight he can’t dodge.
“It’s in the past,” my brother says. “We don’t live there anymore. We live here now.”
He shuffles to the fridge, pauses at a photo under a magnet on the door, our half-sister’s daughters, two blond nieces, the card without a note she sends every Christmas. “How is she?” he asks.
“Who knows,” I say. “She never returns my calls. I always think we’re not in her life, then I get the annual card.”
“Now now,” he says. “No need for a thesis.” He opens the freezer. “Ah,” he says. “More guar gum?”
“How’s Whole Foods?” I ask my brother while we walk toward the subway he needs to catch to make his curfew.
“This one guy is mean to me,” he confesses. “He keeps saying I’m not cleaning enough. And he’s not even in Prepared Foods! He’s in the Meats Department!”
“Maybe you should mention it to the supervisor?”
“No!” my brother barks. “That would make it worse.”
“Aren’t they promoting you anyway?”
“I’m not sure I want that.”
“But…” I force myself to stop talking. This is a conversation for his sponsor, not me. My brother will only feel ashamed if I talk, the big sister with the multiple full-ride-scholarshipped ivy league degrees.
“Sorry!” My brother waves a waft of his cigarette smoke away as we wait for the light. He always tries to walk downwind from me so I don’t breathe it. But sometimes the breeze shifts.
I try not to sound rushed when we reach the Delancey station and my brother lingers. “Remember how Dad used to say ‘Later’ instead of Goodbye?” he asks.
“Don’t miss your curfew,” I say, then I try not to, but I look away as slight hurt tugs downward on the corners of my brother’s eyes. He grins, imitation of our father, lifts his eyebrows, and attempts to meet my darting gaze.
“Later!” I shout at the back of his baseball cap, sinking slowly down the station stairs. Then, though I tell myself I have it all in perspective as sport, I half-run home, to see if my latest spark, this ridiculous Boy, has emailed.
I met The Boy in my Twelve Step Group, AlAnon, for people with alcoholics in their lives. When he slunk into our Sunday meeting wearing a hoody over a visor, a feather earring, and more tattoos than clothes, I recognized him from the East Village dance clubs, since I love to dance. He smiled sideways, and after the meeting asked for my number. Despite, or maybe because of, the red flags all over him, I found myself texting him. As is no doubt not surprising from the cagey outfit, there were immediate issues with The Boy. His denying the flirtation when I called him on it, then texting me all night long, in blatant contradiction of his own denial. There was the confession I made to him when we met for coffee (I arrived first and bought my own), that it was hard to let men buy me things, something to do with my father, only slipping family dollars to my brother or me behind my stepmother’s back. And how, despite this heartfelt confession, in our meeting the next Sunday, The Boy raised his hand and launched into a recital of seeing a beautiful seventeen year old at a diner, and taking the check for her lentil soup.
“Please,” my funniest friend had said, over our usual coffee in the Ukranian diner after the meeting. “Lentil soup? Big spender! And seventeen? What’s he gonna do, take her to the prom?”
The Boy started chatting me up after meetings, mentioned his gig last night at a nearby club. I danced near the stage while The Boy belted out suggestive lyrics I pretended not to hear were off-key, and took off his shirt to reveal a tattoo-covered chest for the crowd. After his set, while I was still dancing to the DJ, The Boy tapped me on the shoulder and invited me home.
Although “invited” is too strong a word. The Boy told me he had to drive instruments somewhere, so he’d meet me at his place. As I walked alone up Clinton toward The Boy’s apartment, came the first snow of winter, the soft white gauze spreading over the concrete, ironically warming the air. I unzipped my long down coat, turned on Third Street and passed my own apartment building, where I knew my brother would be the next night, as always after his Tuesday night AA.
When I arrived at The Boy’s door, after a cursory, “How are you? Take your coat?” The Boy barked a command, “Get in there!” I had to force myself not to laugh. In our flirtations, I had confessed fantasies to The Boy, which apparently he was taking quite literally.
I could hear the strain in The Boy’s voice, trying to force his tone low, because he thought I would like it, because, of course, The Boy was not as suave as I had pretended to believe, and as the plethora of tattoos advertised. “Get on the bed!” he yelled. I dived onto the mattress and he clumsily yanked up my skirt and started awkwardly, non-rhythmically, spanking me.
Quickly it became clear that The Boy was afraid to show affection, to incorporate the fantasy into foreplay, letting just the hint of it enter, say by a barely whispered ambiguous command at the right moment. Apparently The Boy was not so gender-non-biased as his androgynous rock-star outfit promised, and he took the fantasy so literally, that he thought I did not, in fact, need normal affection. I tried to hide my lack of arousal. The Boy picked up on this and decided this meant he should whack me harder. “Let’s get rid of this skirt!” he barked, the loud bravado over the hesitation in his voice reminiscent of the visor usually obscuring his face.
And recalling the scene did, bizarrely, arouse me the next day. I knew the Boy was a boy, but I just wanted it, the game, the temporary forgetting. So after leaving my brother at the Delancey station, I raced through the crowd on First Avenue, on my way home to see if the Boy had emailed.
“Boys just like the conquest,” my brother says, during one of The Boy’s frequent breaks from me. He finishes the last of his ice cream (“mm…”), puts down his spoon, and leans back in my sofa. My Name is Earl has ended, and we are waiting for The Office to begin. “Then they’re over it. Why don’t you play with children your own age? Like my sponsor, for example…” My brother shoots me a sideways look, then sighs when I glance at my cell phone, to see if The Boy has sent a text.
“He isn’t even a real musician,” my brother mumbles, trying to regain my attention while I scan my phone. “Just a poser.” My brother went to music college where he played guitar, real guitar, the notes so soulful people had to look away. He doesn’t have money for a guitar anymore right now. But he hopes to start again, when he can.
“It’s like you’re in graduate school and The Boy is in nursery school,” says my savviest friend, over after-meeting coffee. “But you know that. Why do you act like you forget? Publish those stories, the ones about your brother, and find an equal.” There is a pause and she looks right at me. “WHY do you forget?” she says again. “Why?”
“What I want to know,” says my funniest friend, clanking her cup down on the saucer. “Is when he is going to buy you some lentil soup.”
The snow hides everything, then melts. And my brother is chewing a lot of minty gum. I try not to smell his breath underneath it when he shuffles through my door, try not to remember what he himself told me once, “People relapse months before they relapse.” He starts coming earlier on Tuesdays, saying he would have missed most of his meeting anyway, they made him stay late at Whole Foods.
“And how is Whole Foods?” I finally ask, trying to keep the worry from my voice.
“That big guy always comes into the cooler when I’m in there alone. He says I should clean better, why can’t I learn.”
“But he’s not your boss!” My brother is five foot four inches. I’m trying not to yell. “Anyway,” I lower my voice. “That will be better when you’re promoted. When’s that review thing happening?”
“I postponed it again,” he says. “I’m not ready yet. I don’t know if I want it, telling other people what to do. People hate people with power.”
“But…”
“Lost is starting,” he says. “And this is a really important episode.” He sits back on my sofa.
My brother walks more slowly than usual to the subway that night, pauses outside the convenience store on my corner to light a cigarette, cups his hand around the plastic lighter to block the wind. Click click click until it catches and lights.
He takes a long drag, then strokes his mustache, before he starts slowly shuffling down the sidewalk again.
“Curfew get extended?” I ask, as casually as possible, when we approach the wide intersection at Houston.
“The funding got cut and they let in these ex-cons. Some of them use there. One guy, Charlie, deals out the window at night. So no one’s really watching my curfew anymore.”
My legs turn to spaghetti strands and my rain boot starts to slide on a patch of slush. My brother catches my arm. “You need to eat more,” he says. “I worry about you, you know.”
When my brother doesn’t show up for TV that Thursday, and his cell phone goes to voicemail, and the next day Whole Foods says he’s not there, he called in sick, the person I call with my hysterics is The Boy. It’s not that I don’t remember nursery school verses graduate school, not that I don’t remember that I’ve had fifteen years of meetings to The Boy’s barely one. But I want to forget about graduate school right now, all those crisp-shirted people who didn’t know how to dance casting dirty looks in the library at the slightest giggle or cell phone peep.
“I hope it’s okay I’m calling,” I say, overly demure, when The Boy answers.
There’s a pause. “Of course,” he says. You’ve talked in the meetings about how it’s easier for you to do the Steps than ask for help.”
I tell him how it’s always been just my brother and me, and how his skin is so thin I’ve always been able to see right through it to his trembling heart.
The Boy says some supportive, although not particularly astute things, like, “that’s just an illusion, of course he has skin!”
I pretend not to notice. The comfort I feel is not about The Boy’s words.
That Monday, as I’m coming home from editing work at the library, approaching my corner, my brother’s backward baseball hat and mustache zoom into focus, and there he is, reeling. I stop.
“What happened?” I say.
“There’s no hope,” he spews. “I hab no place to go!” He catches his balance on the arm of the wooden bench outside the convenience store.
“There are always options.” I force myself to remember the AlAnon advice not to take him in, since that could help him drink. “Your sponsor knows better than me. Here’s his number and a quarter. I love you. I have faith.”
I walk quickly away before he can slur out an argument. Back in my apartment alone, I call The Boy. The sound of his bravado fills the empty space.
That Sunday, I raise my hand and report on my brother and how terrified I am. Gasps vibrate through the room. Some of them go to both kinds of meetings and know my brother from AA, others know him from seeing us walking around the East Village together while my brother holds his cigarette downwind, and the rest have heard so much about my brother for years, it’s as if they know him too. “It’s hard for me, but I’m having to use the phone and call people. Especially one person.”
Across the circle from me, The Boy’s tattooed chest inflates.
All summer my brother is on the corner almost every time I walk by. He is sitting on the bench outside the convenience store in his backward baseball hat, holding a can in a paper bag. He is reeling near the garbage can. He is curled up on his side, just as he slept as a child, except now he is asleep in the lobby of my block’s Citibank ATM.
“How do you still have money to drink?” I ask him.
“Dad wires me. Hesshh only tryin to help.”
I’m about to yell, but I stop. “That counselor from Whole Foods called,” I say. “You can have your job back after treatment if you call soon. Your house called. They’re saving your stuff in the basement in case you come back. Your sponsor called. He’ll go with you to detox, whenever you’re ready.”
His pupils expand like lakes of blue fear at the words, “Whole Foods,” “your house,” “detox.”
“I have faith in you,” I say, convincingly. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he always says, his voice rising at the end like a warning.
I walk right home and email my father. I know he can’t help sending the money, anymore than my brother can help drinking with it. My brother’s drinking eases my father’s guilt, even as it increases it. Now the spotlight is on what my brother does, not what my father doesn’t. But more guilt from me would only add to the spiral.
“Please Stop Sending My Brother Cash While He’s On The Street!” is all I say, capitalizing each word.
It’s mid-August, humidity weighing on our heads like a drenched sponge, and my brother is no longer on the corner. I approach and see someone slumped on the bench, but as I near the slump it turns into a teenager in a different kind of hat, not my brother.
A week, then another, passes, and no one hears from my brother or knows where he is.
An AA guy from the neighborhood smiles at me sadly, with a closed mouth, when I pass him on Second Street.
Another week.
Guys glance up at me from their tables, then back down, like they think it’s their fault, when I pass the AA coffee hang-out on First and Third.
I go to the gym to try to not think. As I leave, light-headed with endorphins, my cell phone vibrates, a new, unrecognized number. I push out of the air conditioning and stop on the sidewalk to answer.
“I did it,” says my brother, his voice crisp and sober in my ear. “I got out of detox yesterday. I had to sit in the waiting room two days until they had a bed. But I did it and now I’m out! I just have to sleep in the chairs at all-night meetings until I get a spot in a shelter.”
“Wow,” is all I can say. “Wow.”
And now my brother is famous not only to me. He sleeps in chairs. He gets himself into a sober shelter in Williamsburg, lost his job at Whole Foods and has no money but volunteers to make coffee for AA. Even in my non-AA meeting people mention him. “If someone can almost die, then get sober and stay sober sleeping in a fuckin’ metal folding chair, then who am I to whine that my Nikes got splashed with rain water?”
Now the leaves are falling, crisp and fun and easily crunched under sandals that make way for boots. My calls and texts to The Boy are joyous. “He was elected Chair of the biggest East Village AA!” I brag. “He just texted me that his old halfway house stole all his stuff…but he didn’t drink.”
“Great news!” the Boy texts. “Tell me more when you call tonight.”
The Boy goes to a wedding in L.A. He calls me when he lands. He calls me from the reception. He calls me when he gets back to New York.
Then, I’m not sure who starts it, possibly me, because sometimes I can’t think of pretend things to need, and I don’t call for a few days, and The Boy and I are on another break.
“Maybe he thinks I’m mad and I should send him an email about it and ask to have a talk,” I say to my brother.
“No!” says my brother. “Believe me. Boys do not ever, I repeat ever, want to have A Talk.”
My brother stands, stretches, slowly walks to my TV, and puts in the DVD he borrowed from his shelter. “These new antidepressants make me tired,” he says. Then he sits back on the sofa. My brother and I don’t watch TV twice a week anymore, since he has more meetings now and I don’t want to tempt him away from them, since I’m afraid he’ll relapse again, plus afraid I’ll be the big sister nagging, which certainly won’t help him not drink.
But my brother is over tonight, and we still talk all the time.
“You’re going to love this movie,” my brother says. “I knew as soon as they showed it, that I had to borrow it for you.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m so glad you got a late pass.”
“Yeah,” my brother says. “Me too.”
The Boy has another gig, I dance in the crowd pretending not to look, and it all starts up again as before.
Winter is thawing and I ask my father if he can please help with my brother’s monthly cell phone bill, twenty five dollars a month, so he can call his sponsor and hunt for a job.
“No,” my father writes back. “Not unless we put it on your credit card. It wouldn’t wash with your stepmother if she sees it.”
This infuriates me. I take the opportunity, my upset feeling and the girlish need it evokes, to call The Boy. “Is it okay to call?” I ask, so demure it annoys even me. I brace myself for a brush off.
“You can always call me,” says The Boy. I can almost hear his tatooed chest puff out.
The very next week, my father surprises me by buying my brother a guitar. My brother’s music is not “poser” music like The Boy’s. My brother’s music bursts with notes full of near-forgotten scenes so vivid, I can hardly look at him while he sits on my sofa, strumming. I try not to, but I look away. “Isn’t it time for the subway now?” I say, checking my phone for a text from The Boy. My brother puts his hand over the guitar bridge, silencing it. Now I look. Hurt I will see forever flashes in my brother’s eyes.
It’s my birthday. I have lunch at our diner with savviest friend and funniest friend and then go home to take a nap, so I’ll be fresh for dancing that night. As I lie down, I think about calling my brother. The last time we spoke was a week before, when he canceled an appointment to work on his resume on my laptop. He had sounded anxious. “I’m too anxious,” he had said.
I almost said, “Why?” and “Are you sure you don’t want help today?” But I stopped myself, remembering how bad things got before, how he relapsed even though we were watching TV twice a week, and then how much better he seemed afterward when I didn’t meddle, and, I am ashamed to admit, because I thought maybe The Boy would be calling that night.
“Okay,” is all I said. “Let me know when you want to reschedule. I love you.”
“I love you too,” my brother said, and hung up.
On this day, my birthday, as I lie down, I realize that it’s been a week since my brother phoned and didn’t want to work on his resume. I think about calling him. And then I think no, I’ll do it when I wake up. I put my head on the pillow and the phone rings and it’s a Brooklyn number I don’t recognize. I hesitate, then pick up, and it’s the police.
They tell me my brother is dead.
Savviest Friend prints the flyer at her work. Photos of my brother and me appear all over the East Village, announcing the memorial.
Funniest Friend comes over and sleeps on my sofa, for three days.
I call The Boy and say, in my shock, something that, nevertheless, is true: “I’m lucky my brother died sober. I’m lucky it was always him and me.”
The Boy says, “Don’t give me that stupid phony gratitude shit,” then hangs up quickly, as if frightened by his own words.
My parents are in New York, my mother from LA, my father from his vacation home in Mexico, then my twin half-sisters and one of the stepsisters, the siblings in the pictures on the wall, all pulling me into restaurants, telling me that my brother would want me to eat. No sign of alcohol, the police had said, maybe his liver and antidepressants. My mother repeats this several times but all I hear is my brother, canceling our date to work on his resume, and my silence back. I follow them reluctantly, squint suspiciously at the strange sisters, dart away down side streets to cry. They hadn’t spoken to my brother in ten years. Our photos weren’t on the family wall. I wonder who they think they remember.
My brother’s sponsor has arranged for the memorial to be in my brother’s favorite East Village meeting room, the one where he was elected Chair. I stand in front of the room, with my brother’s journal in my hand, and AA guys and shelter guys and my meeting friends, and my dancing/writing non-meeting friends, two hundred people, look at me, waiting.
I read my favorite part of my brother’s journal, “Continue to love and respect my sister,” he orders himself. “Having realized she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about a lot of the time.”
Everyone laughs and cheers.
“We’re the ones in the pictures now,” I say to my brother when I’m through. I’m shocked to see one of my half-sisters start crying then.
But nothing matters. The memorial has failed to bring back my brother.
I trail behind from restaurant to restaurant where everyone fails to make me eat. My mother cries, then keeps stopping to comfort me, telling me that will be her job now. My father blabbers, tries to say unkind things about my brother, but fails, and cries too.
The half-sister who cried at the memorial keeps repeating something to me, about visiting her and her wife and my nieces in San Francisco. My father leaves when my stepmother calls and insists. My mother leaves a few days later. And everyone is gone.
I pick up my brother’s ashes at the mortuary. I go to his shelter. My brother had earned his way up the shelter sober program to his own closet-sized room, even worked his breakfast shift the day he died, serving eggs and jokes. As I approach his room, big scruffy guys line up along the hall, shuffling feet and looking down. The shelter director hands me my brother’s life belongings, a single green trash bag.
I find it on the inside cover of my brother’s journal. The words, “addiction,” “surrender,” “end this insanity,” and “decision,” are in same writing he always had, still talking to me, while I close my eyes and look away.
I can’t finish a whole banana. Then, even though I know I shouldn’t, I call The Boy.
The Boy’s phone goes to voicemail. I tell him the memorial was wonderful, it’s fine that he missed it, and ask if maybe he could spend the night.
I skip a day, call again. “Can we, um, maybe have a quick cup of tea?” I cringe as I hang up. I’m no longer in control of how demure I sound. The quest for distraction is no longer about entertainment. The Boy doesn’t call back.
Everyone stops talking when I walk into the room that Sunday. Meeting starts, and then, in the middle of her share, someone stops, and gestures to me. “This is ridiculous. We are all thinking about her brother. Let’s just let her talk.”
I talk. People cry, even some who already cried at the memorial.
Then, after a few others, who all talk about my brother and me, The Boy raises his hand. He’ll say he’s sorry, I think, which will be good for him and for me.
“Hi everyone,” The Boy says when it’s his turn. “I have to learn to not be such a doormat.”
Savviest friend is trying hard to catch my eye across the room.
After meeting, people line up to hug me. When I finally go outside, The Boy is walking away up the street with a young girl, who wears a sleeveless hoody and visor exactly like The Boy’s. I call his name. He stops and turns. “Oh, uh, hi.” He looks to the side of me. His unzipped hoody exposes his stomach and tattooed chest. His cut-offs barely cover his crotch, the empty white pockets ballooning below the frayed edges.
“Did you get my message?” I say.
The girl hovers behind him. She can’t be older than seventeen.
“Uh, yeah,” he says. “I couldn’t call back.”
My friends behind me whisper a campaign to make me drink a milkshake.
“Okay. Should I just not call you anymore?” I hear myself say.
“That would be better,” The Boy says. “I’m not your source of support.”
“Okay,” I say. But I have to drink the milkshake. Guar gum and all, that is what my brother would want for me. And for that I need at least a benign ending, so The Boy can linger in my mind like a TV rerun that drowns out everything else. So I offer the fitting cliche. “Thanks for letting me know,” I say. “Of course it isn’t me.”
Now I can go with my meeting friends and drink the milkshake like I should.
But The Boy doesn’t like this ending. “You know what?” he says. “It is you!” He stabs his finger at the air. “There’s nothing here!” He sweeps his hand across the space between us, empty like the hollow in my gut. The very space that I need to be filled with anything but my brother.
“Did you see what he was wearing?” says my savviest friend, when we’re seated at the diner. “That should help, right? Just hold onto the image of that outfit. Can you do that for me?”
“Maybe if he comes back to the meeting,” says my funniest friend. “We can pass the hat a second time…for some clothes.”
My milkshake arrives. My friends nod encouragingly while I suck the thick cold cream up the straw. But when the liquid hits my tongue I hear my brother say “mm,” about my yoghurt lemon sauce when he sliced into the warm salmon.
I push back my chair.
When I get home, the hole in my stomach where the milkshake was supposed to go has hardened into a rock of anger. I write an email to The Boy about how fake he is, and how my brother, now there was someone real, and how dare The Boy ignore not so much me, but the sister of that brother. I rewrite the email so many times, taking things out, then putting them back, that by the time I push “send” I’ve lost track of what I’ve said.
Summer is about to end, and I call my father. I tell him that I can’t eat in New York, and the doctor suggests I go away. My mother is in LA, and my half-sister in San Francisco says she wants to see me too.
I tell my father exactly how much I’ll need to get through this time, which I know is too much to hide from my stepmother. I tell him that asking for this is because I love him, and that my brother always insisted he loved us both.
I brace myself for a no.
“No,” my father says. Then he sobs. “Yes.”
I go to California. My father texts me daily, sends me the money I need, and, as if going back to redo some of my childhood with me, he is my Facebook friend, as are many of the other divorced father-writers from my childhood. There are Facebook chats about a story I post about my brother, whom the fathers had forgotten, but now suddenly remember, from back when we all lived together in Iowa.
The Boy lies low on Facebook, and though I try to remember not to, I can’t stop my imaginings. The Boy looks sad in photos; he must be sorry! The Boy is going to call! This is a long break but we are still in the game! Then one day in March The Boy loads a gigantic photo of himself in his visor and hoody and bare tattooed chest, sticking his tongue into the mouth of a young girl.
I slam down the laptop screen and race to tell my mother.
“Please, honey,” my mother says. “Not that ridiculous Boy again. Not Facebook. Is this what your ivy league degrees are for? You always knew he was a little boy. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yeah,” I say. I remember.
And then forget.
That weekend, I fly to San Francisco to visit my half-sister. The day after the memorial, this sister had taken me out to breakfast. She looked down and grimaced when the plates of sunny bright eggs landed between us. “My grief isn’t so much for him,” she explained. “It’s for you. You lost your life partner.” She pierced a yolk and pushed back her plate. She said she wanted to help me through this time.
So I’ve flown up from my mother’s in LA to visit my half-sister’s family in San Francisco every month that winter. I sit next to her in the SUV while she takes her daughters to school and play-dates. The California sun almost eclipses my nostalgia for grey New York snow, the whistle and whine of radiator steam, the metallic scent of trash cans on the sidewalk. And my friends. My sister buys me coffee and sandwiches and fattening muffins while I cry.
On my first visit I gave my sister a copy of the flyer, the photo of my brother and me in East River Park. “I know he’d be so happy I’m here with you,” I said. She said she’d put it up. Gratefully, I confided how hard it was when my brother and I used to see no pictures of ourselves on our dad and stepmom’s wall. She looked puzzled, as if she didn’t remember that we’d lived there, or understand why I should be hurt, or maybe both. But then, a little guiltily, she admitted she might have an old photo of all of us, when my brother and I lived there in high school, and she said she’d put that up too. On her wall, like on our parents’, there were only pictures of the rest of them.
During a later visit, I asked where the flyer and photo were, careful to sound casual and pretend to examine an organic peanut butter jar as I spoke.
“I just have to rearrange some things,” she said.
Another time I started crying in her SUV, said I couldn’t help wondering if our brother’s progression would have been altered if my stepmom (her mom) hadn’t forbidden our dad from helping with his college, and if our brother hadn’t believed it, that he was worthless.
“But you guys had your mother,” she said. “You know it hurts me when you say bad things about my family!”
I missed my brother more than ever then. But he was gone.
And I visited my half-sister again the next month.
On that weekend, I show my sister and her wife the Facebook picture of The Boy Frenching the young girl. “I’m so angry!” I say. “I’m going to write that stupid Boy an email!”
One of the children yells “Mommy!” and she runs upstairs.
My sister-in-law squints at the picture of The Boy. “You’ve probably heard this before,” she says. “But he’s a child in a Halloween costume. What about yourself, your dancing, your writing, your advanced degrees?!”
I say good night and take my laptop down to the guest room.
I try to concentrate on what my sister-in-law has said, my dancing, my writing. But when I do that, I flash on the terrified ghost in a disguise that The Boy really is, and then what happens is what is happening now, as I move the mouse away, and accidentally click on your resume, which we never did get to finish. I smell you, the smoke, the gum. I hear your voice, “I worry about you, you know.” Quickly I close your resume.
It’s time to write The Boy a letter that will end his childish behavior once and for all! I write and write. I write an email so perfect, that even the stupid Boy will understand. Satisfied at last, I go to my outbox to find The Boy’s address and there it is, the email I wrote to The Boy, months ago. And, almost word for word, it is the same angry email I wrote to The Boy tonight.
I delete it. And I let myself know.
The Boy can’t look at me, because he let his moment pass. He stayed a poser, when it was time to be a star. It is not in the forgetting that we live on.
Ian. Ian Moulding. Ian Stuart Moulding. We are sitting in your room looking at pictures of Dad’s. We are walking down the street in LA to take the best shots into the drugstore for reprints. We are going to make them the perfect collage. This time they’ll put it up and it will be there when we come. But they don’t. And you are weaving your way down the airport corridor to me, to where we live now, where we always have and where I know now, we always will.
I will wake up in the morning and there, on our half-sister’s refrigerator, looming into view as I climb the stairs from the basement guest room, is a photo, eight by ten, and I gasp with joy as I approach. But then I’m standing at the refrigerator and what I’m staring at is not the flyer of us, but a recent picture, taken here on the grass in the back yard, of the rest of the siblings, minus me, and minus you, of course, sent to our father and stepmother for their anniversary last week, and signed by them all. I stare and stare, and finally I see it the way it must look to our half-sister, captured here grinning a little too widely at the edge of the frame. If you and I were there, even I alone, how would she and the others fit? She wants me with her some weekends, and wanted me with you, but she does not see me, or you, in this family frame. She doesn’t even see us missing. For that, everything she thinks she knows would have to be rearranged.
I turn now and head back down to the guest room, my cell phone, already planning the itinerary in my head. My savviest friend, uncanny as always in her timing, texted me yesterday that even now, months later, they are still putting down daisies, old cassette tapes of music you liked, tattered cards with AA slogans, on the cracked cement of my building stoop, and that someone didn’t just tape up the photo of me and you, Ian, heads leaning together, smiling over our foodstamps picnic in East River Park, but wheat-pasted it so it’s still stuck there, on the outside wall of the corner deli, by that spot where you sat on the bench in your backwards hat, week after week, waiting for your sister to come home.
“Can anyone guess what caused this boulder to split in two?” Eduardo mumbled through clenched teeth as he rifled through his backpack. From his mouth, a poorly wrapped joint hung above the dusty earth below.
Our once pasty, now reddening faces turned from our pint-sized tour guide and toward the enormous halves, just centimeters apart from one another.
“Lightning?” I asked, eager to move on and find refuge from the relentless Bolivian sun. I had already endured enough pain in this desert.
Eduardo did not acknowledge my response and only smiled to himself upon discovering the hot pink Bic he had been searching for.
“Some Stone Age tool?” the now blistering, once handsome Swede beside me offered.
“All good guesses, but no,” Eduardo replied absentmindedly. His attention was consumed by the spark-spitting lighter hidden behind his small, tanned hand. After a few more flicks, a weak flame emerged and grasped the tip of the joint. “The Clam Shell, that’s what this formation is called, was actually formed by rain.”
We all stood in silence, staring up at the ten-foot-tall stone masses. Before any of us could reply, he took the joint from his lips and, holding it out before him like the hand of God, gestured towards someone in our group.
“Lauren, do you want a hit? It will help with the altitude sickness.”
Lauren passed our wall of sunburnt flesh, strengthened by the idea of possible relief. Unlike the rest of us, the sun favored her skin. It gave her the appearance of someone in much better health. She took the joint in her mouth and inhaled deeply.
“But we’re in the desert,” she rebutted, smoke pouring from her lips. “How was there enough rain out here to break it in half?”
“It took millions of years and countless little droplets filling a microscopic crack at the top. It was gradual but then…. CRACK!” Eduardo proclaimed with a clap for dramatic effect.
I glanced over at Lauren, both hopeful and scared that we might catch each other’s gaze.
***
I woke up on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday to the sound of unfamiliar laughter coming from another room. It took a moment to realize that I wasn’t in my own bed. I was on a couch in Sophia’s living room surrounded by empty prosecco bottles and frosting-coated paper plates. Across the room, a large suitcase lay open on the floor with its stretchy, polyester contents spilling out over the sides. The laughter stopped and was replaced by the sound of footsteps coming towards me.
The suitcase’s owner glided into the room with her golden blonde hair flowing behind her like a cape. She was beautiful in the way I imagined the president of a sorority might be. In high school, we would never have been friends.
“Oh, you’re awake,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” I replied before clearing my throat. My voice was gravelly from too many cigarettes earlier in the night. “You’re Lauren, right? Nice to finally meet you.”
“Same. Sophia’s told me so much about you.”
We smiled politely as our shared apathy filled the room. It was suffocating.
“Okay, well I better head home,” I said, desperate to escape. “See you around and welcome to Chicago!”
“Thanks. Night.”
***
“Do you realize that today is our one-year anniversary?” I asked breathlessly as I tossed the last of the gold balloons into the pile at our feet.
“Jesus, that’s right,” Lauren replied. “Props to Sophia for forcing us to hang out.”
“I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me that we had the same birthday last year.”
Despite our rocky start, Lauren had evolved into something that had previously seemed impossible to secure as an adult: a best friend. After leaving New York, I had begun to feel like my loneliness was unsolvable. All my childhood friends had drifted away, and I hadn’t replaced them. I knew people, of course, but always from a respectful distance. I believed that children alone — being free of all the shame, pride, and fear of abandonment that comes with adulthood — could open up enough to get past a surface-level friendship. But Lauren didn’t have those hangups. She was fearless and always told you exactly what she was thinking. She proved I was wrong about people.
“So, did you invite him to our party?”
“Yes, and don’t be a bitch. You know his name is Tyler,” she said, unafraid of sounding critical unless it related to her on-again, off-again, undefined, whatever he was.
“I know, I know. I just don’t get his appeal.”
“You don’t get the appeal of anyone unless they’re a pretentious foreigner,” she replied, driving her knife deep into a wound that still hadn’t healed.
“Sorry, you’re right,” I said, eager to smooth things over. “I wasn’t trying to be judg-y.”
I turned away, pretending to play with the floating two and six balloons behind me. I didn’t want her to see my tears eagerly lining up. I wasn’t over my ex, who had dumped me eight months prior. But that’s not what hurt. I was scared that she might leave me as well.
***
“Happy twenty-seventh birthday!” I shouted into my phone. I held my screen close to my face, framing only what I wanted her to see. The sparse state of my unpacked room was too depressing to broadcast.
“Yesterday was our birthday.”
“Okay, happy belated twenty-seventh birthday then!”
As we had planned, we both lifted champagne flutes to our screens and cheers-ed but with differing levels of enthusiasm. Lauren was openly annoyed that I had forgotten to text her back on our actual birthdays, and I pretended nothing was wrong.
My sudden move back to New York the month prior had put a big strain on our already tense friendship. My continued hatred of her gym-rat boyfriend probably hadn’t helped. I would tell her that I didn’t trust Tyler and that he was beneath her. She told me I was projecting, that I was too proud to talk about the fact that I was still hung up on my ex.
Besides an occasional foray into the topic of weight loss, our conversations centered around those men. Gone were the days when we pored over travel blogs seeking out the best and cheapest way to get around Croatia, Belize, or Laos. Instead we stared at old texts from men who hurt us, endlessly dissecting them until they ceased to mean anything at all. Our relationship was like a television show a couple seasons past its prime. All the good jokes had been used up, the characters had become caricatures, and the writers had forgotten what the show was about in the first place. That was us.
“So what did you end up doing for your birthday dinner?” I asked, trying to maneuver our conversation into a safe zone.
Before Lauren had a chance to respond, if she even wanted to, the scream of her buzzer halted our discussion.
“That’s Tyler. I should go.”
***
Lauren and I were both living in New York by our twenty-eighth birthdays but we decided not to do a joint party. We had our own friend groups from past lives, and it felt like too big of a task to overlap them. If I’m being honest, I was happy with the arrangement. I didn’t care for her friends. I found them vain, boisterous, and generally overwhelming. They traveled as a herd, their heels echoing through the halls of impossible-to-get-into restaurants as they sipped their sixteen dollar cocktails purchased by boorish, former jocks. By contrast, my friends sported Birkenstocks and preferred spending their time in dark Greenpoint bars where Lauren felt out of place. To keep the peace, we made an unspoken pact to keep everyone on their own side of the Williamsburg Bridge.
But I was happy Lauren was back in my life. Now that Tyler was no longer in the picture, it seemed possible to get back to where our friendship had been in the beginning. Maybe it was because we were both single again or because our futures felt unknown, but something was different.
“Should we do our birthday dinner on your side of the bridge or mine?” I asked the night before our private celebration. I felt like I already knew the answer.
“Meet in the middle?” Lauren replied through my speaker phone.
“Palma?!” we both shouted in unison before bursting into fits of laughter.
Yeah, we were back in that honeymoon period. Things were turning around. We had a chance to rebuild our foundation and throw away the messy combination of over-discussed and under-acknowledged topics that had been causing our friendship to rot away beneath the surface.
***
“How was your birthday?” I asked Lauren over squid ink pasta from the same Italian restaurant we had gone to the year prior. It was a few weeks past the actual date but this was our first chance to grab dinner since I’d gotten back from Mexico City. “Better than mine, I hope.”
“It was good. Charles took me to dinner…. It’s really weird you didn’t tell me you were in the hospital.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. There wasn’t anything for you to do. I had Montezuma’s Revenge. I didn’t want visitors at home or in the hospital.”
“Noah was there… You could have at least said something. You were totally MIA. I thought you were backing out of our South America trip.”
My desire not to discuss my stomach issues wasn’t a lie, but Lauren wasn’t wrong about my anxiety over our upcoming trip, either. We had booked our tickets three months prior when things weren’t as bad, but even then, a growing part of me feared that traveling to Bolivia and Chile together would be a big mistake.
***
After another twenty minutes discussing the Clam Shell, our tour group was in the car and back on the non-existent road. Despite my frequent motion-sickness, I opted to take the dreaded back row, a place where gravity seemed forever in flux, to get as far away from Lauren as possible.
“So how did you two wind up in Bolivia?” the handsome Swede asked, swiveling his head around to speak to me and gesturing towards Lauren as he did so.
“Uhh… Lauren and I planned the trip about six months ago,” I replied as quietly as I could. I knew that she wouldn’t want to hear her name coming out of my mouth. “I had suggested we come here for our birthdays, so we wound up splitting the trip instead of getting each other presents this year.”
“It wasn’t your idea,” Lauren said from the front seat. Her face was pressed against the cold window to reduce her reemerging nausea. “I was the one that suggested we come to Bolivia and Patagonia”
“Oh,” I replied, dumbfounded. Lauren had not spoken a word to me, or even joined a conversation I was apart of, in over twenty-four hours. “Yeah.”
The conversation ended there. The Swede apparently decided that a moment of friendly banter with me was not worth being my middle row, human dam protecting me from the continuous flow of rage rushing my way. I didn’t blame him. No one wants to be casualty.
By the time Lauren and I had left Bolivia and arrived in Patagonia for the second leg of our trip, an onlooker might assume our situation had improved. In reality though, we were just exhausted. We had been worn down by the countless flights, the lack of showers, the endless flow of vomit, and the thought of spending one more moment with each other.
But it would be wrong to blame all of this on the trip. Our continental divide occurred far above the Southern Hemisphere. I knew it as we were boarding our flight from JFK. I kind of knew it when we booked the tickets. Our friendship had been replaced with a knock-off a long time ago. From the outside it looked like the real deal, but if someone had actually inspected the lining, anyone could tell something was off.
Lauren and I immediately parted ways when we landed at JFK, opting to take separate lines at customs. There was no way we would survive an hour-long line together at 5AM.
By 5:05AM, I was fully submerged in the line and finally able to breathe. Despite spending the majority of the past twelve days outside exploring some of the most beautiful places that nature has to offer, I had been suffocating. Almost every day served me a mixture of feeling attacked, alone, at times genuinely scared for my life (not entirely because of Lauren but mostly), exhausted, and desperate to escape. By 6:15AM, I was waiting in line for a taxi and gulping in the fresh, New York air, thinking that the worst was over.
But then the following week brought a fresh, new type of pain; heartbreak. It finally occurred to me that I had lost one of my best friends. As it turns out, losing Lauren was a million times worse than any breakups I’d had with past boyfriends, even the ones I took forever to get over. And while this ending was harder than others, I did eventually get over it. Now, I can finally appreciate our relationship for what it was; a perfect birthday cake that came with an expiration date. I chose to ignore the date, so it’s on me for getting sick after it went sour, but damn did it taste great in the beginning.
Anyways, our thirtieth birthday is coming up in two months. I know we won’t spend it together. I wonder if she’ll text me “Happy Birthday.” I don’t know, maybe I would text back if she did.
Chilled Fork
Low Cover
Flat Earther in Repose
I have lived amongst creatures, delicate
yet hard as teeth. Honey and milk seeping
from mouths, sticking to our skin. Medusa,
fair maiden of Greece, we are all your three
sisters. How with a single glance each man
crumbled. Give us the stare Gods slit your neck
for, blood sweet with venom. Marble and stone,
grasping gold amidst glistening water,
snakes hissing at our necks. We make our nails
daggers, slash those envious of our being,
carve a trench into fleshy thigh, or for
an itch rip nylon stockings up to shreds
the men now in these trenches, Perseus,
Polydectes, begging us stop biting.
How would you know that my own
head is a burning building
Unless you were inside the dream
where I’m on a boat with a man
I don’t know and he is dying,
the sea nothing but salt and ice.
When I became a woman,
my emotions were met with impatience—
A real waste of time, these insides,
a continual up-down, up-down,
How could you understand, when you ask
if I am crying for a reason and I say no
But what I mean is there are a million
reasons.
How would you see my own
head stuffed with pillows of smoke
unless you knew I said no
to give myself enough space to crawl out
unless you saw the growing tree
in my backyard felled by lightning
the soft peaches becoming bruised
and then small ghosts
Stories in the Worst Way, published in the 1996 with Knopf, first brought attention to Gary Lutz in an era when a few of the big-guns New York publishers still vibed with the mid-century practice of making space for innovative, disturbing writing.
Through the next two decades, this unique writer’s writer continued his language-driven project with four consistent collections published by boutique indie presses such as the visionary yet now-defunct 3rd Bed, as well as Calamari Press, Black Square Editions, and Kevin Sampsell’s long-standing Portland-based Future Tense Books. Now, all of the author’s work is available in this volume from New York Tyrant.
For the uninitiated, Lutz (who has also, in the past, written under the flat, gratifying nom de plume “Lee Stone”) makes short stories with a focus on sentences themselves rather than progressing events or unspooling revelations. These sentences, with stomach-dropping little dictional surprises, draw low-spirited, nervous, and/or masochistic protagonists, most of them nameless and devoid of gender, as they observe their own relationships with wariness and resignation, more or less enduring them, sometimes watching them evaporate. The narrators have no trouble talking or connecting with others, but overall, it’s cold comfort for them. Some of the trouble seems to be the gray setting, a version of our world, from which the narrators’ relationships arise. Simultaneously, intimacy offers these narrators a wealth of minutiae for observation: “She had a frivolity of moles on one arm,” “He was loiny, and pustuled, with an utterness of hair, ginger squibbles of it all over,” “[She was] putty-faced and dressed.”
True, this hardly sounds like a party. But don’t think these stories aren’t hilarious—they are, verbally and situationally. In “Onesome,” the protagonist describes his wife’s work in “a program that reached out to anyone for whom speech had become a hardship. These included the people who said they instead of he or she to jack up the population in their private lives.” Another narrator signs off a paper letter to an ex-lover with “xoxo,” but, in their ambivalence, adds penmarks to the letter’s closure so it resembles a crossed-out tic-tac-toe game.
Even when the stories take place in the present day, Lutz has a penchant for preserving heirloom words and phrases. “Car-coat,” “shoehorn” “frankfurter shack,” a “custard shop,” “business traveler,” “the phone book,” “bric-a-brac,” and countless others tint the writer’s prose to mid-20th Century atmospherics. Meanwhile, numerous verbs, adverbs and adjectives have the propulsion to make language do more, often pointing to that despair and discomfort about the body. A man’s voice sounds “messy, squirky from disuse,” a wife “fumed and soured and stenched in bed beside a husband who himself was a cloud of exhausts and leakages. (I had to head to the urban dictionary for “slurked,” but am unconvinced Lutz sourced it there). The understated humor here is edged by bleakness and distant cruelty.
The church meeting-room, the overlit, shabby rental hall, a corner of the discount store: Lutz is brilliant at setting up blurred glimpses of North American communities’ stale, exhausted grimness and drabness. The language can sound quite Ohio or Plains. In “Am I Keeping You?” the narrator’s aunt “could never see herself outshining a child, but there she was with two daughters, neither of them a marrier.” A woman’s lurking boyfriend in “Meltwater” reveals: “Sometimes I could make out a third voice downstairs, that of a contestant female, just a visitor, no doubt, and a laugher. I never got to meet her and to this day still suspect she had a smoky hood of unshampooed hair and the sleep-buckled arms of a quitter.”
The pleasures of those two sentences are fun to parse: their ricocheting sounds, “a laugher,” and the disconcertingly erotic “hood” of hair. Then there’s the wonderfully visual buckling arms and the deft way they correlate with a “quitter,” and the rhythmic closure.
Lutz packs sentences with his characteristic cadences and maneuvers things so there’s a tang somewhere between ghastliness and comedy. In “I Crawl Back to People,” the narrator, with coldheartedness and a signature Lutzian punchline that feels like a drop into hell, offers, “There was a kind of woman you could spend weeks with, months even, and never get it settled to your satisfaction whether she was on the mend or not yet finished being destroyed.”
“Pledged” takes place in a small city or town. Like many stories in Lutz’s oeuvre, it doesn’t move forward in time so much as rock to and fro. And if it switches between first person plural and first person singular, locales are also neither one nor the other. The narrator, a young woman with a best friend, establishes the setting by stating, “the name of the town depended on which direction you came from. We were approaching form the east, so it was called West Southfork.” The two friends, disoriented for perhaps no other reason than life’s toughness, walk where “grass had been mushed” and “the planeting underneath the dirt felt even mushier.” They drop to their hands and knees and dig into the earth, mud caking their arms and bracelets as if in an actual search for firmer ground. As they pull a pile of graph paper out of the mud, “the planet slump[s] for a sec.” Muddy and “smutched,” they go to a restaurant where a local man leans against their booth, watching them eat with their “abstruse” manners. This causes both girls to not truly eat but pretend to eat. As the leaning intruder’s mouth is “stirred up,” it could be an escalating scene about gender and power, but Lutz is incapable of writing the expected. OCD and nervous, the man yatters at the woman about the way they’re eating: “Is that why you’re doing it? Just to be doing it? For the sake of it? All I’m saying is don’t be picking at it all the time. Leave well enough alone is what I’m saying. You ever stop to think that somebody else might come along and want it? Leave something for somebody else.” The stranger isn’t rapacious, but a Midwest nut overflowing with problems and double entendres. It’s the reliable restaurant server who calls him off.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that Lutz’s fiction comes up sometimes between women readers and/or writers as a topic of discussion along with the sentiment that the writing is sexist–even among those who admire the work. A writer and critic friend summed it up pretty well: “I guess I’m used to feeling pissed off at something or other in men’s work and loving what I love at the same time.” She must’ve been referring Lutz’s narrators’ uninhibited dislike/alarm over female bodies (sentences like “Thirty-eight years of picked-over, furying age she was—brittled hair, a bulwark forehead, a voice that sounded blown-through.”). Descriptions like these can “slap,” my friend attested. This is important to note. However, the narrators don’t spare male bodies from the withering descriptions, either, and…they’re characters. Really damaged ones, too–so it’s all of a piece. Lutz’s work as a whole, domed-over by gray atmospherics of pain, minimizes my response to the narrators’ making verbal field days of women’s appearances—actually it makes me question my own expectation that life should be fair.
Though Lutz’s work makes me laugh more than it offends me, his paragraphs reverberate with the sensation of some sort of serious injury. And most of the stories, which expose little corners of our culture’s cruel, cipher-like qualities, are especially unnerving as the country dips into political despotism today.
The narrators’ bafflements, disconnects, shame, and little humiliations never abate. This is most clear in this book’s final story, “Am I Keeping You?” which describes a seemingly endless series of brute, terribly abusive aunts. No possibility of love, or awe for the universe, soothes any of these narrators’ distress away. But language is there instead: communication, via elaborate, hand-built sentences, tonally fascinating: a complex reprieve.
The writer’s intense interest in words, sound, and rhythm versus fiction’s usual conventions were apparent to me in a workshop he led in Seattle in the mid-aughts. Around this time he also co-authored, with Diane Stevenson, the student textbook A Grammar Reference, which contains sections you’d be hard-pressed to find in Bedford English handbooks: “Indefensible Split Infinitives” and “Special Problems with That.” In both the handbook and his hardworking fiction, Lutz pulverizes the creative writing schools’ injunctions that fiction is best made from lush characterization, painstakingly made beats, and sacrosanct central conflict. I hope this collection of virtually all the short fiction by this legendary writer (including nine new stories), along with a wonderfully anecdotal and contextualizing introduction by Brian Evenson, will bring a new generation or two to Lutz’s mysterious and troubling art.
For the past year I’ve been mentoring a student at NYU Abu Dhabi, Vamika Sinha, on her hybrid project Cranes, which is a mix of poetry and essays, and has to do with identity and moving through the world as a young woman of colour—a 21st flâneuse who’s discovering the failures of cosmopolitanism, the burden of hyphens, and how art is a kind of hunger that fills and sustains us. I’m new to teaching, but I doubt this thrill ever diminishes—when you come upon a voice that feels grounded and wise, that’s looking backwards and forwards at the same time, when goddamit, they’re just beginning. Vamika’s voice has a choral effect because she’s in dialogue with so many artists—Coltrane, Teju Cole, Solange, Gloria Anzaldúa, Yasser Alwan, always coming back to the question, “What am I?” A flautist and photographer, she understands the power of the image, but also knows how to riff and jump octaves. She’s less interested in crescendo, more excited by synchronization and that lovely moment that she describes in jazz as “the opposite of foreshadowing…the proclamation of what came before, the hint of an older tune.” She’s building on all that’s come before by pushing up against it or subverting it or singing it some other way, and by doing so, she’s evoking Audre Lorde. She’s smashing down that house and building her own house, and the result is glorious. I can’t wait for the world to discover her.
–Tishani Doshi, author of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Copper Canyon) and Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury)
blackbrown crush: a sonnet
In praise of all the blessings we wouldn’t get, call upon my breaths,
phone-line gossamer. Make them fervent, & pull
the string in my windpipe, till the monarchs come down
from their clouds into my stomach. In the name of crippled wings,
Messenger, the hours of time split
like filaments on our screens, injera like naan, Hawkins’
‘Body and Soul’, history bleached & sonnets
undone like a corset. For this thread-thing I wait
which is to say, I want you
to wait for me, how long I migrate.
You call & what sun, what slaughter
of delicate, queens toppling & I hope you catch me
with a net as big as the atlantic, sieving
words struggling under the coats of our wings.
(st)ars poetica
in the open city, i move like an eel. i am electric and curved like a smile razored. in the open city, i live on hot food and hot music. i distract myself from weight. in the open city, a man makes a rape inside the womb of a book, and fills it with hot air. the words never deflate. and i believe in wonderlands lying at the bottom of holes, and i believe in blackbrown alices who reach their destination. in the open city, translation is not sold in the shops like rope necklaces. in the open city, i fly without wires making me marionette. look there, some me has fallen and killed their darling self. in the open city, i am flâneuse venus never in retrograde, cinnamon brown flesh and moonless. an open city is the woman itself. free to lay. in the open city, i am a queen on the chessboard, mobile as a dream or dictator. in the open city, memory is no cannibal but a child making jigsaw. in the open city, i can change colors. make blues into hot pink, my brains all alchemist.
self-portrait as nation-state
after safia elhillo
for a language i choose the pen
filled up in red
runny like syrup in spoons
sticky on my lips.
for borders i choose the seam
running across my mother’s
stomach, proof of birth, that
i am i am an aftermath;
that i did not slip into a life that should
not have been, like that
brother of mine who never crowned
any territory, only bled.
for a culture i breathe breath
into plastic dolls
like myself, i give
them songs & color & ink
as thick as what flows within them.
for an anthem, i laugh —
jagged, jazzy, juicing
a child’s voice ripening towards
its own self – colored soul
stained. & for my people i give
them throats full, to speak
i belong you belong i belong to you & to me.
Spooks (poem lined with double agents)They were arguing, stupid fight, about if you were color-blind how many colors would you see. Would there be only black and white? Or is color-blindness something larger in scope, with many shades of color, only re-assigned to objects differently than others see them? Listening to them fight, Elaine thought more than once that you could perhaps characterize the two men by the positions they took on the issue. The one who believed that color-blindness reduces everything to black and white, was he the more romantic one of the two? Or was he the more classical? “Like Balanchine,” she thought vaguely, having forgotten most of everything she ever knew about Balanchine somewhere over the years.
No wait a second, there must be still plenty she recalled about Balanchine. Seemed like she could almost see one of his dances, right in front of her eyes, the hush around the dancers, the andante of the music—live music, as she recalled. Did the City Ballet rely on taped music nowadays, hard to know who to ask. My God, George Balanchine meant everything to me at one point, Elaine thought, trying to work herself into a frenzy, and now I can’t even think of the names of any of his dances.
She sipped a little bit of her drink, then put the glass down on the marble coaster. I love these coasters, she thought.
Balanchine, everything black and white, Allegra Kent in some kind of white leotard with little handles around her hips. The stage all very dark except for spotlights from beneath the stage. It must have been the 70s, she thought. She remembered Balanchine’s profile, the way it looked like a mountain peak, and his long legs. They’d met at a party and she wondered why all the women went for him, then she’d decided the women in question must be a horribly neurotic bunch. Last autumn she was down in Los Angeles for the West Hollywood Book Fair, and a woman was speaking who’d written a book all about her late-blooming passion for anal sex, and Elaine had been puzzled and a little nauseated, and then all became clear when the speaker revealed she had been one of Balanchine’s ballerinas.
It had been a beautiful afternoon, outdoors, the speakers at long tables under tents, everyone wearing sunglasses.
The heat concentrating on the very top of your scalp, so Elaine had guarded it with some kind of flyer for the ballerina’s anal sex book. A discreet flyer, thank God, it could have been far worse. There was something almost dignified about it, just as there was, Elaine realized, about all of Balanchine’s work, no matter if he were choreographing for elephants at the circus (surely he did something of the sort, it was part of his legend), or for these incredibly elegant and soignee analholics like Suzanne Farrell or Vera Zorina. And that woman Joan in The New Yorker who never wrote an article without bemoaning the way the City Ballet had forgotten about Balanchine and treated his legacy like so much flypaper. Nowadays there’s a general cultural amnesia about the past. Why in her dim memory she recalled being taken to the NYCB by her godmother, oh, in the middle of some war, everyone upset outside, but inside a dim sense of peace and money.
“You must know Mary Sue,” Tim was saying, “she’s colorblind and you don’t have to be intimate with her to know, just take a look at her outfits, stripes with plaids, everything five different shades of orange. It’s like, when you go into an elevator and it’s all gray rubber, gray steel? At least this is how I understand it, and say you stepped into a big puddle of blood, you wouldn’t even know it. Gray and red are the same thing.”
“I do know Mary Sue and she has often told me, that she has shoppers who put together her clothes for her. It’s a service for the colorblind, and there’s a whole C-B department at Macy’s or Saks. One of them.”
“Oh, she doesn’t buy at Saks.”
“No, that’s true.”
They thought awhile about Mary Sue. Elaine remembered her from the days when all of them used to act in Beach Blanket Babylon, a San Francisco institution that had been running a hundred years; a revue of songs and topical skits and big, brash satire like Saturday Night Live. Mary Sue often played the big, clownish types like Dolly Parton, Peggy Lee, Imelda Marcos. She always dressed beautifully, in Elaine’s opinion, but maybe she had the Macy’s shoppers working for her even then, or else maybe her disease hadn’t spread up to her eyeballs yet (or wherever color blindness affected you last). She imagined it was in the eyeballs, sort of like cancer except not as painful, perhaps not painful at all. You certainly never heard people give little gasps or clutch hankies to their eyes and claim they had just had an attack of color blindness. It couldn’t be painful, but who knew? That Balanchine woman had evaded the question entirely about whether or not anal sex was painful. This guy who she met through the personals (of The New York Review of Books believe it or not) didn’t like her lubricated. He would come over and she was just supposed to lie there while he plunged into her, without a word, without even taking off his pants, just pulling down his zipper—which he could have done easily, in her foyer—and he’d be out of there in two shakes—so to speak—and leave her rapt, restless, and with another chapter’s worth of anal sex to write up in her so-called “diary of obsession.” So, Elaine thought, if Mary Sue indeed suffered from being color blind—in fact, whether or not she was color blind at all, and she, Elaine, did not think she was, despite what Tim and Gerald were swearing, so united in this one lie, despite being at loggerheads in every other aspect of the color-blindness debate; anyhow, if Mary Lou were colorblind she did not seem to ever have felt pain a day in her life. Save perhaps for the day when she was fired from Beach Blanket Babylon for moving to Oakland’s Lake Merritt. You were fired just for moving out of town? They said it’s a betrayal of the BBB ethic.
“Could we stop the car, please,” she said faintly. They’d been bucking up and down the hills of Pacifica and Devil’s Slide for what seemed like hours, and she wasn’t feeling at all comfortable. The drink she put down more firmly in its slot, above the cunning marble coaster. Tim took another glance at her, over his shoulder, with an unspoken fear in his eyes.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, dear,” she said. “That last drink was just a little on the strong side.”
“That’s Gerald,” he said. “When it comes to pouring out, guy’s got an iron hand.”
Gerald protested, as Tim pulled over to the wide gravel next to Highway 1. “It’s hard when someone else is driving. You can’t anticipate, that’s the problemo.”
Elaine put one foot down on the sand, judging its wet firmness. Thirty yards below, the ocean slopped and howled, a hungry beast prowling the shore. When they asked her if she felt better, she nodded, but the truth is it’s so hard to gauge how well or ill you’re feeling when you’re looking down at this horrible wet ocean that’s suffering its own spectacular storm from underneath. All roiled up as though octopi and squids were fighting it out on the ocean floor like King Kong versus the T Rex. In France didn’t they call nausea the “mal du mer”? That expressed it absolutely, the sea suffering, and “mal” meant—evil.
“I’m fine, Gerald,” she called back blithely while slipping a little mirror from her purse and quickly dabbing on some blush. You’re never so sick as makeup won’t help put a better spotlight on things. She wondered what the colorblind did about blush. Weren’t they always putting weird colors on their face? Maybe that’s what happened to all those women the Germans painted in the Blue Rider school, with deep blue cheeks and green chins. It wasn’t the painters who were colorblind, she flashed, it was the models! She should write an article for Art Notes about it. Tiny flakes of powder dusted her fingers and surreptitiously she wiped them on Gerald’s leather seats, the rich leather he was so proud of. However now the apricot dust was staining the black in a way that reminded her, disconcertingly, of a crime scene.
This wasn’t her first visit to Blanc Marie. She had endowed the sisters with a $10,000 fellowship to say prayers in some sort of universal novena in Marty’s memory.
Tim had not been in favor of this investment at all. And Gerald was, predictably, on the fence, not wanting to hurt Tim’s feelings by being disloyal to him, and yet not wanting to rock the boat so far as Elaine went either, for things had been rocky between them ever since Gerald had picked Tim up at some kind of gay cruise and married him on the steps of City Hall. Tim didn’t understand why she felt it necessary to have prayers said in Marty’s name. “I loved him too, Mom,” he said. “But he’s dead and all the prayers in the world aren’t going to bring him back.”
That was his argument, and how could she say that she doubted his sincerity? But the truth is she knew he would rather she spent the money on what, an extra bathroom on the house Tim was building for Gerald in St. Francis Wood. Not that it was all so black and white, she admitted. Marty hadn’t been the world’s best father, number one, and hell, maybe two men living together (with herself to be installed in this deluxe sort of “inlaw” apartment in what wasn’t actually the basement—but amounted to one)—maybe two men needed two bathrooms. (She’d have her own, of course.) Gerald thought it would be cute to have a bidet in his. She made herself grin when she joshed him about it, but inwardly she was thinking of whether or not he enjoyed anal sex and if so, why and how. She kept looking at Tim wondering how she had raised a son who would inflict anal sex on another, smaller boy.
Well, he was forty. And Gerald close to it. They weren’t boys, they just acted like it sometimes.
Today was supposed to be a nice drive in the country but now, as the two men stood there in twin sweaters, staring at her balefully, she felt alarm, seeing her nice afternoon go up in smoke. “What?” she asked. “I’m not going to feel any better with you two glaring at me as though I were–“ She couldn’t think of what. Instantly they broke their gaze off, as though ashamed. One looked up the side of the cliff; the other, to the rocks below. They might have been two surveyors, in fisherman’s sweaters, assigned to measure cliff erosion. Softly, out of the side of his mouth, Tim said, “Mom, do you want a handkerchief?”
“For what?”
“You’ve got all that makeup on the leather.”
Abruptly she swiveled in the backseat and pivoted herself out of the car entirely, hoisting herself up on her pins. Marty always told her she wore too much makeup. That she was beautiful just with a touch of lipstick. She didn’t need all that junk on her eyes. But what did Marty know? He was the one who said they shouldn’t leave New York, they’d be crazy to leave a place they knew, and at night she would feel the fear in his bones as he lay next to her, feigning sleep, in that awful apartment on the Henry Hudson, their last before abandoning the city for once and for all. That lumpy mattress she could have sworn had bedbugs. Him staring at the ceiling through closed eyes but his pulses jumping like the trotters at Aqueduct.
“Are you awake?”
No reply.
“Marty, you’re not kidding anyone, you’re awake.”
You’d hear a snore, a horribly unconvincing snore, a snore so fake it seemed to signal the very pit of despair, for it didn’t seem to, well, it didn’t seem to care if you thought it was real. Whatever it was, it was not going to then turn around and say, oh yes, I was awake all along. She got up, put her feet in her slippers, padded out to the kitchen, and in the glare of the pink “Pharmacy” neon she picked up her crossword and sat down again at the table, thinking that it would be the last crossword she’d ever do in New York. The sugar bowl was empty, white crystals clinging to its rim. The Daily News printed the most preposterous puzzles, clues so simple little Tim could finish one up by the time he was seven or eight. They did have the Jumble puzzle which has pizzazz, a fairly elegant mess of consonants and vowels you could scramble till they formed a real word. ECRMA. You’d look at that combo and then “cream” would bubble to the surface. She used to tell Marty, “People talk about ‘I love New York,’ all the shops and shows, but all I love is the Jumble puzzles and the City Ballet.”
“Yes,” she said to Tim, “I’ll take a hanky if you have one. I don’t know why I’m so clumsy. It’s just the emotion of the day, I suppose.”
“That’s all right, Elaine,” Gerald said. “We understand.”
“Do you?”
Was there a simper of condescension in his voice? There always is, when the young address the old. But they were neither of them young, neither of them old. Wasn’t there some fellow feeling among the middle-aged, or was your birthdate everything forever?
“Of course we do. Marty was a great guy and you probably miss him to bits. I know I do, and who am I?”
“Yes,” she mumbled. In her fist she was rubbing great streaks into his leather, like a Number Two pencil eraser, till it foamed with shavings. The white of Tim’s handkerchief, the thick black leather. It was like some old-fashioned view of the world she had put behind her long ago when she had become a feminist and taken up International Modernism—the new. No more black and white, she’d laughed to Marty, who shook his head like a rueful cart horse. “Everything new,” Marty said, looking around him at the new place on Russian Hill—well, sort of Russian Hill. She never knew when he was kidding. She only knew when he was afraid of something.
Too, he was the victim of a dreadful pair of, well, you could hardly call them parents, they were just monsters. That’s all, monsters. The Nazis, Goebbels and Goering, were better parents, probably. They gave all three of their kids a loveless childhood and made them feel guilty for wanting to get away from them. They picked on the one boy so much he gave it up at thirteen, expiring in some sordid Coney Island brawl that made the papers. And Elaine could just about remember Marty’s sister, who tried to join the Army during Korea and then disappeared into the bars and clubs of the Village sometime around 1956. And the monsters lived on, as monsters always will, their posture stiff and immobile, ruling the roost and keeping poor Mart under their thumb as though he were still a little boy with his father’s—
“Stop staring at me, boys,” she said. “It’s just not polite. Let’s let this be a happy day, shall we? And when we get to Blanc Marie the sisters are going to treat us to a lunch you’ll never forget.” The food they offered the public was spectacular, that was the only word for it. Pressed by friends to describe it, Elaine could only compare her experience at the refectory table to some great fireworks display, perhaps the one Leopold Bloom describes in Ulysses while he’s melting and rubbing himself over that innocent convent girl. Vaguely she knew, somewhere in her soul, that the voluptuousness of the food was in some direct relationship to the simplicity, some might say harshness, of the nuns’ order, but she couldn’t think why. “Sublimation” seemed too simple a concept, something beneath the register of the experience. She had heard that M.F.K. Fisher, the famous California food writer, had devoted a chapter to Blanc Marie in one of her early books, either The Gastronomical Me or I Ate A Whole Fat Pig, but as of yet she hadn’t tracked down the reference. M.F.K. Fisher—the Balanchine of food writers—joyous, vigorous, sensual, in fact downright sexy.
Gerald had picked up a small stone from the side of the road and was expertly tossing it from one hand to the other. “Well,” he said, “you want to get a move on, Elaine? You’re making me hungry, and we still have quite a hike.”
A hike? Just as though they were walking instead of driving. But that was Gerald for you: imprecise. Sometimes, she thought, dealing with him was like dealing with someone who didn’t speak English very well. His expressions were either slightly askew, or else so vulgar you’d think he’d have dropped them years ago as he rose higher in society and status. “Chunk of change,” for example. To Gerald everything was a big chunk of change. The outlay for Marty’s novenas, of course. The cost of a bidet. He whistled beautifully, like Bing Crosby, but only in connection with mentioning a sum of money. “Four hundred dollars!” he would whistle. “That’s some chunk of change all right.”
“Oh yes, let’s move on, I’m so sorry,” said Elaine, drawing her feet together and lifting them back into the car proper. Tim shut her car door from outside, then walked around the car, grabbing for his keys in his pocket.
“We had a little break, that’s all,” said Gerald generously. He held the black stone he’d found in his palm, gazing at it as though it were worth something. Elaine watched it glisten, catching the pinkish cool light and something of the rigor of the waves far below. All greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft!
“I don’t even know how the sisters get to the farmers market, considering they’re not allowed to talk to men,” Elaine said, looking forward now to her lunch. “Maybe they speak only to the women farmers there, I don’t know.”
“Or eunuchs?” Tim said, pulling the car back onto 101, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. “That would be practical.”
“Hard boiled eggs for lunch?” Gerald suggested.
“Stop it, do,” Elaine laughed. “You two are terrible, terrible.” Tim had grown up with Marty’s sense of humor, an uneasy humor you might say, one that found the wry jest in every awful turn of fate. For Marty, she knew, all too well, such a philosophy had come naturally, for his life really had been tough. Hearing it from Tim, it seemed a little false, for outside of being gay, which in San Francisco was hardly a tragedy, what had he to complain of? It was the same way that the jokes coming out of Woody Allen’s mouth at least seemed felt, whereas the same jokes from Jerry Seinfeld lost punch somehow, or even meaning. Still, nuns were always ridiculous, weren’t they, and the best of them even seemed to concede as much. Mother Hilda always wore a little smile as though she, too, the intimate friend of Loretta Young and Teilhard de Chardin among others, saw how crazy it all was. And good with money too! Tim said that Mother Hilda had the mind of a steel trap, and sometimes she frightened Elaine, just a little; she was utterly pragmatic, hardly spiritual at all in affect. Like a character from one of her favorite books, The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s divine novel about a cloistered order. But then again, the older she got the more Elaine realized that the important part of life, the life of the soul, was all about simple things, and like it or not, the simple things cost money.
You could make a little chart, she thought, about which ballerinas, the ones she’d seen and envied over fifty years, which ones were Catholic girls and which were not. Maria Tallchief, yes. Alicia Alonso, for sure. Janet Collins, probably. Margot Fonteyn, don’t make me laugh. The drive was lovely, but a little dizzying, and it was beyond her now to correlate the data of religious background to the need some lovely dancers seemed to have for anal sex. Maybe after lunch all these columns and lists would add up. In the meantime she applied a renewed vigor to finding a comfortable place on the bridge of her nose for her sunglasses. In the shadowy back seat, she saw what amounted to a stranger—herself—reflected in the tinted glass. A stranger with an expensive pair of shades that looked as though they were biting her nose, as though she were in pain, and a stranger who wore a grimace even on a lovely day.
“Can I roll down the window?” she called up to Tim. “Or are we childproof?” The three of them laughed, just burst out in guffaws, at the incongruity of—of what? That she was no child, and that they had no parental authority over her? That they had no children and they didn’t really want any, so why buy a “childproofed” car? Well that last wasn’t strictly true, for Gerald in fact had three children, apparently, though Elaine had never met any of them. To her they were phantoms, forgettable phantoms, to be trotted out whenever any of them wanted a reminder that Gerald wasn’t maybe one thousand percent gay as he so often seemed. Those three kids, hidden from him by a vengeful ex-wife in Manila or Melbourne, were like the Lost Boys in the story of Peter Pan—they were doing something tropical somewhere, forever young, and noisy, but just about faceless. Elaine supposed that Gerald knew their names but they were so little a part of her life that most of the time she forgot they existed. She had to give him that, he wasn’t one of those fathers who was always trying to show you slides of his children, or JPEGs of their first day at school. Even when he’d downed a few, he never sobbed into his beer about Gerald Junior and the others.
“We’re childproof,” Tim affirmed, and this sent them all into giggles all over again. It was almost as though they had never been at loggerheads, her wonderful son and herself.
“May I see your little rock?” Elaine asked Gerald, raising her hand to his shoulder, pressing her fingers into the wool of his sweater, with what she hoped was a tender sort of touch.
The face he sent back was confused.
“What rock, dear?”
“That little stone you picked up from the roadside,” she said. “It was such a thoughtful souvenir of our day.”
“Did I have a rock?” he said. It was clear he’d forgotten the incident already. “Sure it weren’t no hard boiled egg, Elaine?”
Her nose itched. Sort of a flimsy sensation probably aggravated by the severe bite of the bridge.
“You were tossing that tiny stone around as though you wanted maximum publicity for it,” she said, coolly enough. “I saw it in your hand and for a moment you reminded me of Saint Francis.”
“St. Francis Wood maybe,” said Tim, for that was the luxury neighborhood in San Francisco that he and Gerald aspired to.
“I’m no Saint Francis,” Gerald chuckled.
“Apparently not,” she agreed, with an asperity that afterward dismayed her. Why couldn’t she keep any affection going for Gerald? She would catch it for a second, and she could nurse it for minutes at a stretch, but then like a firefly in her hand it would buzz and flare out, you could almost feel it dying, vacant with beauty. How long did it take to be able to love someone? With Marty it had happened in an instant, like snapping your fingers—or was that the marvelous diminution that time brought with it—everything seemed to have happened in a jumble, fast as thought itself, even falling in love. Or one day she, walking through Flatbush, seeing a used condom on the steps of St. Cecilia’s, suddenly deciding that come hell or high water she would move her family out of New York. And that was that. There were things irrevocable, matters of the spirit, decided in an instant; and then there were men like Gerald who no matter how hard you tried to treat him like a human being, you just kept seeing Tim’s thing in his mouth, his fat little mouth like a daffodil.
“It might be on the floor,” Gerald said. He shook his head from side to side. “The rock thing I mean.”
“You could look,” Tim said.
“Oh it is so unimportant,” Elaine said. “What’s important is having a good time while we still can.”
“Or when we stop I could get out and get you another one,” Gerald said.
“It’s not like they’re expensive,” said Tim.
“Oh, that would be fine,” agreed Elaine. “I wouldn’t want you to be out a chunk of change.”
She noticed, in the side mirror to her right, the cheerful orange and white boxy shape of a U-Haul van in their wake. It was keeping right up; as she thought back, she had been noticing it here and there, in the twisty turns of 101 by Devils Slide, or later, along the bleak Dover Beach seascapes of Pigeon Point, in her peripheral vision that U-Haul van had been almost traveling with them. When they had pulled over for their impromptu “stretch of the legs,” the van had maintained a discreet distance a hundred yards down the highway’s edge.
“Have you boys been watching this U-Haul truck?” she asked, wanting to amuse them. “As Marty used to say, remember Tim? It’s been sticking to us like white on rice.”
“I don’t remember the white on rice thing, Mom.”
Gerald laughed. “What would he say today, when rice isn’t necessarily white, I wonder?”
Tim glanced in his rear view mirror. His lip twitched. “He’d say that the fucking piece of shit was on our ass, is what he’d say.”
“Tim, please,” said Gerald.
“’White on rice,’” he hooted derisively, and if there was one thing Elaine hated it was when someone mocked you by imitating your voice or your expressions—the very things that belonged to you. “Give me a fucking break.”
Gerald leaned over the back seat, cuffed him on the shoulder. “Tim, let’s just try to have a nice day, okay? Our last one for a while, let’s make it nice.”
Last one for a while?
What was going on with that?
“I hurt you, Tim?” Gerald said in a small voice. “Baby, I’m sorry.” Then he must have pushed down a button in the armrest of the “childproof” car, for his window rolled down, nearly inaudibly, but she had always had good hearing and she could sense the atmosphere within the sedan changing, shifting slightly. “I don’t think I hurt our boy, Elaine,” he continued, his voice getting blown about by the wind so that, or so it seemed to her, the syllables in the different words he used seemed to bounce all over them, like the inflatable silver pillows Andy Warhol made for his Factory parties. Those silver pillows she had seen in Time magazine when all New York was talking of Pop Art and Warhol’s Silver Factory, which sounded so elegant. Even in the best of times, Gerald had an affected way of speaking. “He’s made of sturdy stuff as we both of us know all too well.”
Elaine was barely listening to him . . . When she got to Blanc Marie she planned to tuck into whatever rich dessert the Sisters had set aside for her. Too often in the past, she’d scrimped and cheated herself to keep the figure she’d had as a young girl, but we can’t all be sylphlike, so we might as well eat what desserts we may. Look at Violette Verdy! Balanchine had made dozens of dances for her, might as well call them “pipe cleaner dances,” but by the time she retired it was as though someone had pumped air into her like a dirigible so that by the time Reagan became President dear Violette had that silver pillow look herself, like a dumpling wrapped in foil at some dim sum place.
That U-Haul van was really moving. She saw its squarish cabin comically bumping up and down. She glanced at Tim’s knuckles on the steering wheel, how white and old they looked, his fingers knotted around the wheel as though arthritis had molded them into hooks. Poor boy, really. Upset about a tiff with Gerald, no doubt.
A good meal would sort them all out.
“Mom,” Tim said.
Chicken, spinach, chocolate cake—dumplings were in her head thanks to Violette Verdy; maybe there’d be dumplings. Not the Chinese sort, the—
“Mom, it’s not like we haven’t talked this out over and over,” Tim said. He sounded resigned.
She felt Gerald’s paw on her left shoulder.
“Oh, Elaine,” he said. “So awful to see you like this.”
“Don’t pretend you’re, like, all in the dark about the U-Haul, Mom.”
“In the dark?” she repeated. It was like he was being patient with her. An unusual note for Tim. Patience. Something new for our boy. “In the dark about what?”
“About the U-Haul,” Gerald whined. Oh, maybe it wasn’t whining, but his affected way of speaking. No wonder his kids never liked visiting him. Who would want a Dad who talked like Lauren Bacall in an old Douglas Sirk weeper like Written on the Wind? At least Tim had had a manly sort of father, a mensch as they say.
Marty. Buried on a hill, the sea breeze lilting, the stars above blinking out unendurable messages of gravity. A branch of one of those sea-drenched white trees pitched above his grave. Him a suit of bones, as she had used to lie in bed next to him, pressing his skin with her thumb, feeling the bone along his skinny little spine, his absurdly large skull.
“In the dark about what about the U-Haul, can you tell me that?” Elaine cried. “Because I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.”
“Oh Elaine,” said Gerald, patting her shoulder, gently, as though she were some sort of National Velvet. “Those nuns are gonna take such extra good care of you. You’ll be their sugar doll with all your beautiful clothes and manners. Look! I can almost see it now.” Suddenly his face was next to hers, wreathed in smiles. “It’s coming up around the bend, just you wait and see.”
“#imaginary,” “#genuine” and “#phenomena” belong to a series titled with words from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” that I have hashtagged and run through various social media platforms—Reddit and Twitter most often, though Instagram has played a role as well. Each poem is then sculpted from its hashtag’s search results.
#imaginary
Her name was Nadine. She existed solely to blame things on.
I knew what she looked like. But I didn’t see her.
I understood that some people could be invisible.
His name was Business Duck. He was the back half of a tugboat
and the front half of Donald Duck. He would do absolutely nothing
except occupy seats that other people wanted to sit in.
I also had one named Boy for years. I had to intervene
in their arguments many times: you know, kid stuff,
like what to have for dinner or how they should murder everyone.
I used to just talk to people, as if
there were people with me all the time,
even when I was completely alone.
One of them was a skeleton dog.
It would race everywhere, and always be beside me.
I practically had a midget vampire following me.
His name was Splashy. Miss that guy.
I had these black panthers that would run alongside the car,
going into the houses of kids I didn’t like and messing with them.
My best friend and I each had a fleet of friendly bed bugs.
My Mum would often hear me when I was taking a tinkle speaking to them
and thanking them for helping me shake off my junk.
I had a husband when I was four.
He was a giant sweater vest named Herman,
and we had a son named Boobie.
We had two restaurant chains:
Chi Chi Nose Shop, a Chinese restaurant run by mice
in the roofs of cars, and the Nake, a restaurant that you ate in naked.
Alice was pretty tame, just needed to have a spot saved at the table, car, etc.
Then one day, I just got sick of her, and threw her out the car window
as we were driving, saying, “Goodbye, Alice.”
I remember what she looked like (a glow worm)
and I remember having conversations with her.
I would make my parents re-open gates and doors, telling them they forgot her.
I even remember asking her to stop coming around
because I was too old to have friends like her anymore – five –
and when I couldn’t stop thinking about her,
I tried to flush her down the toilet on a few occasions.
After that I had a star with a face that would float around after me,
or dance around during class to make me laugh.
He was a blonde version of me
and we ran around on the edges of grass and pavement.
It didn’t take too long for my dad to inform me
that my friends were the devil’s minions,
and he drew the star I described on a piece of paper
so we could burn it. That was the end of that.
#genuine
Death removes a lot of cover
When you’re covering the world in your thoughts.
It’s not like losing a pen, is it.
That’s not the argument.
These are the sorts of things I say to people.
I work their job for them so they can stay home and grieve.
I know you’re hurting.
I’ll be over Tuesday to mow your lawn for you.
I’m all for your fucking off with your secretly soy self.
I’m talking about YOUR lawn, widow.
Not just some canned cliché that means nothing.
Surely you have more complex feelings about it than “thoughts and prayers”.
There are no words that will fix it.
It’s not about you. Don’t try to make it about you
By being the one who has to say the deepest, most touching words.
I’m Christian and personally don’t like this statement.
My child got run over by a car and is dead.
I’m going to write a facebook post about his death
I’ll be tweeting about his death tomorrow #YOLO
It’s a double standard, and nothing changes: it falls on you.
I didn’t give a damn if they were sincere or not.
You’re just throwing those emoticons everywhere…
protecting yourself from awkwardness
people use it use it on the internet all the time when someone dies.
Hey man. I’ve been thinking about your dead mom.
I talked to Jesus about her for a little while. Mostly good stuff.
It felt like a token comment to make her lower her shields in respect
while her boyfriend was getting a lung transplant
and was in the public eye too much. Shut the fuck up.
I acknowledge you, you’re part of my social group, and I’m not a threat.
#phenomena
A kid I knew lost his backpack and needed a replacement.
He came to school the next day with a big mailbox in his hands
Filled with his books. A couple of days later he added straps to it.
Voilà, he had a mailbox backpack. He made a million dollars!
When women would wear thongs to show high on their hips,
Kids started to spike up their bangs and bleach them.
Grown-ups are sporting plastic decorations on their heads
In the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.
We had a few kids choke on them from chewing on them.
If you survived the rubber band installation alone, you were lucky.
But if you snapped them open and slid them against someone’s skin
It was just like a knife. It had a star on it, so I told the gas station attendant
I was getting another one for free.
She thought I belonged on the short bus.
We wrote a letter demanding reparations
For having tracked down so many star-labeled pops.
They wrote back essentially saying, very softly,
You kids made this shit up, stop bothering us.
Every flea market in Florida still sells these to old people.
Mine looked like it could fit a doll when I took it off.
If you stuck two together, it would make a baby.
I worked at a day care when they got really big.
If someone ripped the bracelet off, you had to perform a sexual act with them.
They were color coded and could range from a hug to anal sex.
Sixth graders said You have to do it doggy style! to each other.
Girls everywhere when I was in elementary school
Wore pacifiers around their necks like a necklace.
Like women who purposely shave off their eyebrows,
Only to draw them back on with a pen.
It was pretty cool to color on yourself with those gel pens.
Have we gotten to the point
Where we no longer understand
How ideas can spread without the Internet?