[Here's the conclusion of B.N.'s story]
May G-d Bless And Keep You Always
Inez stood for an instant in the kitchen door, dressed only in Julian’s black silk robe. Claude was already up drinking coffee and there was someone named Patrick involved in preparing a very elaborate—something.
“Nutmeg?” he said cheerfully over his shoulder.
“In the cabinet over the stove.” Claude said not looking up from the paper. Claude cleared a place for Inez.
“He believes breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Claude said to Inez.
“It is.” Patrick responded brightly, as he spun around cradling a bowl while whisking away the contents. He looked just like Tin Tin in the cartoon. Claude had moved into middle age somewhat gracefully she thought—perhaps not as gracefully as Julian but he seemed less strident, calmer. For years he had often struck her as facile and easily stirred—reading some new pop psych idea and applying it all over the room—the chairs, the door, the sink—everything would have a ridiculous reason something he read and just applied freely—this was honest, that was not—Robert Bly—beating a drum, half naked, or buck, inner children, howling men, sweat lodges, howling at the moon, nursing old wounds—facile—as useless as applying a band aid to the spurting jagged stump of the torn off limb. The question that pushed to the front of Inez' mind was why was he still here, living in the back of the house. But by all rights why not ask her why she was still in Flatbush, living over Mrs. Mermelstein.
At the exact moment Inez poured her mug full of coffee, Patrick started listing all the violations he had endured; immediately it was proving to be very tedious. With singsong authority he was explaining his issues in the work place; Inez doubted he had the need to work, or even a particular aptitude for anything. He may well have been merely showing up everyday to attend to the issues. The right to marry whom he chose, which Inez thought a remote possibility given what she was seeing—but she was not a morning person. He talked with strain, like he was pitching words over a fence. Long story short, he struggled, at a summer camp in the Berkshires and again at boarding school in Vermont. “It was painful very painful.” Oh God, Inez thought. Where’s Patrick, weren’t you watching him? Was the gate up? He just toddled out to stand out in the wide dangerous world—a four-lane highway. Had he never even seen a photograph of let’s say Babi Yar, Rwanda? Did he not also jump out of his skin when a jet passed overhead?
Her head was shot through with painful hoofs stamping—wild beasts. He looked at Inez for a response—which she had none, save to turn to Claude. “Tylenol?” she said flatly. “Hall medicine cabinet. I’ll get it,” he said.
Patrick kept talking. Enough, she thought, please, little one—shut the fuck up. Had she just said that, or just thought it. She was not sure. She looked at him to try to read a response—his eyes radiated the self-importance of a nocturnal creature that had just stepped into the night and had the whole jungle to himself—aroused glandular eyes—black and gold—shining.
He’s high. Inez thought.
She gulped the pills, chasing them with coffee. As they were standing side by side next to the kitchen counter Inez could not help but assess the age difference between Patrick and Claude. It was vast, decades. It made her feel grim and sad. In the never ending conversation that her mother had about this country, the city, and all the flaws of the American people, the goyim mostly, the neighbors sometimes, she had once turned to Inez when they were out walking and a man who had been feeding pigeons approached them. At that moment as he passed them on the sidewalk her mother added an item to the list: In America nobody seemed to notice that there was nothing in this life sadder than an old faygale. Her mother always used age as the great equalizer. Actually, Inez could think of a few things but for the first time in her life Inez had reason to recall the statement.
“So where’s Julian already?” Patrick asked smoothing the pocket of his light green pants. “Breakfast is done and I need to be pushing off. Tell him I left the shirt in the closet—it didn’t work for me. I’ll call him—have fun, gotta give her credit she keeps trying.”
When the door closed behind him, Claude turned to Inez and said, “You can tell Julian the coast is clear he can come out now. I am sorry. I better go check on Miranda.” He made “the reefer” sign with his fingers to his lips.
Her face went hot with hurt. No, Nathan was not the last blow.
In her room Miranda played on email
Ya ya sistas & bros—made it to Dad’s. Bored crazy. Aunt’s wedding—love my dress, shows da girls in their best light—ha ha. Gotta find something/somebody to do here. Hpe there are gr8 guys at the wedding—for real
I’m hot you’re not
Lov ya all.
She hit send. The machine made a whoosh sound.
Claude knocked at the door holding a sleeve of cookies two paper cups and a jug of milk. He sat at the bottom of the unmade bed. “Cookies for Breakfast?” Miranda flopped back against the bed. “They’re your favorite,” he says twinkling a cookie between his fingers. She felt for an instant outside herself—like she was outside her window and not actually in the room. She noticed she gets this feeling whenever she smokes that stuff that Emily bought from that guy on West 86th. It made her watch herself at a distance. Then, she feels like she is in an old TV sitcom, canned laughter, applause— Claude wanted her to just start pouring her heart out and then they’ll hug. Yup the whole tedious story right there on the tip of her tongue—like her mother wasn’t on the phone to her father, like her father just happened to forget to tell Claude—Miranda here forever. Mom is getting treatments so she may not die. She burst out laughing—“where’s the remote.” Laughter filled the room—like fistfuls of gold confetti.
“Oh by the way, I will play private chauffer to your SAT.” Claude said as he playfully tossed a stuffed toy rabbit from the dresser to Miranda.
The wedding was in the gardens of a former estate, a gray stone mansion up on a hill that overlooked the water. Julian walked Cleo down the aisles. At the reception the settings were ludicrous when they only meant to be witty. There was a long white tent stretched out on a lush green lawn. The reception felt subdued and dreamy—women gliding by with pastel pink and green drinks. Handsome waiters bearing trays of champagne. The tablecloths were trimmed in gold trim to match the guests. Miranda bounced and skipped on the sweeping lawn next to the elegant white tent. She was holding a glass of champagne and laughing a loud dirty laugh. Each time Inez looked she was gripping her father’s elbow and then reaching for a greedy grab at trays as they passed. When Inez stood next to them, Miranda leaned over and hugged Inez across the chest and placed her hard candy mouth right next to Inez’s ear.
Inside the tent Julian sipped the wine and watched dust sparkle in a diminishing patch of sunlight on the lawn. Maybe it was the wine. These small sips gave him time to reflect—sometimes he could catch a glimpse of himself, as he was, as he thought he was—either way they were nothing like who he had expected to become—all the photographs in his mind—untaken. Great art and artifacts had passed through his hands. Relics surely people had died for and some that had rescued others. Once he held in his hand a tiny Ruben, its sale saved a whole Jewish Family. Another time, he found behind the frame of minor Flemish painter a stash of letters—yes, lives were lived in his “transactions”
He was older this night, last week and a year ago, than his father had been when he died. What had this age given him anyway? Not new worlds—Not love, even that was a bawdy, freakish parade float of money or politics. He refilled the glass and his thoughts loosened a bit more—what we believe today we may not believe tomorrow or the day after. Surely, somewhere, he thought someone is on the brink of a very large truth, a new reality. In the bright light of the future a new truth will be spoken —one without hurts or wounds. He could hear sounds falling out of the darkness—the rustling of some beast crouching at the door. Pointless. Nobody knows. What makes anyone love her and not her, or him and not him? The truth for now is that we don’t want to know either.
With relief he thought that soon Claude would be stepping off the ferry onto the little island where the trees were knotted and stunted by the sea air. Tonight there would be parties with sangria and bluefish salad. Miranda would come crashing through the door—all that spun confection. He would let her into the world, just not yet. Cleo and her new husband would rise and fall to each other.
He listened to the music. Horses horses, imagined hoofs on the cobblestones—Fear? No, just footfalls.
In the back of the imposing gray Mansion there was a large bluestone terrace looking out over the water. Inez rounded a corner and went through an archway of pink fairy roses, a bower with the last bits of daylight breaking through. It stretched like a hallway and lush flowers hung like strings of beads, bits of costume jewelry.
What had the child said to her?
“You’re all up in the Kool-Aid and don’t even know the flavor. Don’t think my father is going to sleep with you. You’re not his type.” That’s what she said, leaking irony from both corners of her red mouth. All the coarse bravado, the carnal insight slashed Inez across her face like a straight razor.
Yet in this moment there were still the tender night noises, and the vista. Actually the view was maybe the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The water so wide and dark, she knows she can’t cross over. The boats, sails waving like the banners of ancient tribes. Inez loosened her shoes and freed her feet to rub her toes out and hung the green silk scarf over the back of a chair. She waited, for the sea change, a hundred little crayon colored sailboats drifting past. How the boys gravitated toward her now, held in that orbit. Would there be many or few? Who could know? Which would stay, if any? Poor girl, little mouse, will be all alone. Inez waited; soon night would darken the world into an unrecognizable form. Tonight meteors, not planes streaking past would hiss and sputter as they hit the water.
B.N.
© 2010
Showing posts with label BN writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BN writing. Show all posts
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow (part 4)
[Here's part 4 of B.N.'s story]
If You Lick My Heart You Would Die Of Poison
The house was on tree lined well-tended quiet street in Cambridge. It was narrow and creamily quaint in the last moments of daylight. The wooded twin doors were huge, heavy. Inez blinked in the entranceway. On the table was a half a glass of ice tea with mostly melted ice—she looked around for the owner. A shirt was draped over a chair with a tie. There were fruit bowls the color of mercury—fluid shapes filled with bright citrus. There was a note on the side table under the gilt mirror—Call Adelstein back.
Julian stood in the doorway of the bedroom and when Inez turned around he was unbuttoning his shirt. It wasn’t unexpected, hadn’t it been hoped for, in part why she came. With his finger her traced her collarbone and laid his head on her shoulder.
“Its been a long time, I’m sorry you’re unhappy,” she thought he said.
“Do you remember the first time, at my parents house, my mothers bed?” he asked.
She remembered her apartment, a day at the lake, in the stacks late at night in the library. His mother’s house?
“We were alone, nobody home,” Julian said.
“Put on the dress, leave your underwear off, that dress is so lovely on you.” He sighed and said softly. Julian slides his hands over the dress and then under. “Lie back” he whispered.
“Don’t forget you need to call Adelstein,” she said before they were too far along. Then he pulled her down to the bottom of the bed and positioned her legs on his shoulders. His forearms looked sculpted and elegant. She was grateful he wanted the dress, such a kindness for him to not expect her now after so long to stand or even lie naked.
She must have drifted off to sleep. For an instant she could not remember where she was. The cocoon-like softness of unfamiliar sheets against her skin. She dreamt of the Rabbi, several in fact bearded in black hats and frock coats. They were shouting at her to jump. She was standing on a ledge with granite angels on either side of her. What had awakened her? The fear of falling. Voices? From where, the kitchen? The hall outside her room?
“Just go if you said you were going.” She was sure she heard that. The voice was rubbery and bounced in her range of awareness. Like when she was a child tugged out of bed in the middle of the night holding the frayed end of her parents' hushed voices behind the closed door. Out in the hall standing only in a robe she found hanging in the closet.
“Does it mean anything? Why? You always do this.”
“Can’t it wait?” she heard Julian’s voice trail off. She heard the rush of tap water.
“Patrick is going to be here any minute.”
“So just go”
Then. “Hallo—anybody home? Come out come out wherever you are.”
She heard a door close at the front of the house. Inez went back into the room and sat on the bed and then quickly, blessedly fell back asleep. Again she was on a ledge of the very high building. So high that now she could see into the windows of planes as they flew past. She could see the confused terrified expressions on the passengers’ faces, mouthing words to her. She was trying to read their lips, but could not make out what they were saying. The granite angels were crying, tear stained, and a lone tiny Rabbi very far below was gesturing at her to jump.
In the morning she awoke early to the sound of water moaning through the pipes. Julian stepped out into the hall wrapped in a towel and shook his mane like a lion emerging onto a riverbank. In the small guestroom Inez took the dress from the closet and held it against her body—letting it fall, just so against her shins. She closed her eyes, in gratitude, in prayer, in fear. After all these years there was still possibility. Julian had insisted, insisted that she get that dress.
Light from the bay window was just starting to seep into the living room. She picked up a framed photograph from the piano. Julian and somebody blurry in sun glasses, the Taj Mahal in the background. “Oh India last Fall, that flesh color spot— Claude. Julian startled her— had he been sitting in the chair all night?
“What a nightmare, a hell hole, animals in the street, huge crowds, heat, smells, I got so uncomfortable that I just left the whole continent and went to sit in rainy Amsterdam to medicate and attend my stomach cramps with modern plumbing. Claude stuck it out—All that local color—he even went trekking. The Sherpa would have had to carry me to base camp and back. He clamed to have a good time.”
Over the years Inez constructed Claude in her mind in several ways. Claude, poor old, good old, hope-against-hope Claude. He had been an adjunct since their first week of school freshman year. She remembered how he appeared in the dorm hallway holding an imported beer and wearing a mock colligate outfit—a blue and gold University sweat shirt, chinos, right down to the brown deck moccasins with no socks.
How was it Claude ended up there, now it seemed he had always been there, or nearby, waiting in the hall, on the library steps, in front of restaurants?— she had to force herself back to the chronology—there was law school at Columbia, then the opportunity at the Kennedy School, like his father and brother, also clerking for a judge—something had happened, was it a scandal or a heartbreak? Then a job at firm in a high glass tower—paper in, paper out.
Julian had the house, huge. Suddenly, the crazy Vera left him with baby Miranda, gone so fast there was not even a vapor trail. She recalled that in New York, nightly Claude would fold himself like an origami swan into the small jeweled, velvet lined lacquered box that was his apartment.
“Move to Brooklyn” she would tell him. Brooklyn is the new Manhattan—No, he wanted to see himself reflected in the dilated pupils of so many men like himself. Then poof—Vera was gone—like a gate opened wide. He saw it as a sign—so mistaken, it was a sign—that Vera was very very unstable. No, he wasn’t crazy. At times Julian seemed responsive— sure there were women too of course but everybody had those, well almost everybody. Claude thought with time Julian would settle the matter and Claude would be the settlement. Oh god how absurd his imaginings must have been in retrospect, coupling, partnership, Julian—whatever it would have looked like or been called. How long did it take him to realize that Julian was, let’s say, limited in his partnership potential and abilities in human interaction? Well, once he was there not that long, but longer than it should. Julian was content, more than content with a good fuck every so often but even those become sad, torn down often drunk exchanges. Oh the mornings, pure hell. What did she remember? Claude had told her years ago that when he had called, Julian’s voice was etched with something dark—shock maybe.
So earnestly Claude had said “I’m worried” and with that took her into his confidence in her at a dinner in Queens, “really he can’t handle an infant alone” then Claude pulled out of his brief case a copy of Your Infant, Your Toddler, Your Child—“good stuff in here” he said. She said not a word.
In truth, Claude at twenty seven did not need to be offered twice— As far as she knew what Julian had said was, “Yes a large back room, just till you get your own place—I have room, 15 to be exact—know how to change a diaper.”
Nothing ever happened—well of course some things happened sometimes but it never became the blossoming flower Claude had hoped for and neither did it crawl away to die. After time Claude was forced to think that maybe Julian was content to fill his clients lives with articles confiscated from people with inner lives. Maybe Julian was his own best client. Sometime, rarely, Claude still imagined that there was a chamber of Julian’s heart filled with shadows like photographic negatives—the image is in the absence of the image—a perfect celadon bowl, a mortar and pestle, two young men. Then for many years there was Miranda sucking her thumb—“ducky ducky,” Claude would quack as he toweled her freshly washed hair. Julian off someplace buying something to place on someone’s shelf or wall. Still some hope. But there were the photos of little Miranda—a bobble head infant all tipsy and fat. She looked so much like her mother Vera in dark complexion and the black eyes, but had Julian’s bone structure. No Claude there.
Little Miranda pranced like a trained pony in and out of rooms. Her manicured nails clicking out everything she wanted and all her parents’ failings on some invisible table. Her forearms stacked with thin bangles that clicked and clanked with every wave of her hand.
No doubt it was a bad time, maybe the worst for Claude to just bow out. He could smell the smoke on Miranda’s hair and clothes see her bloodshot eyes. He knew she was tearing it up with sullen neck tattooed boys that hunched waiting across the street or in the park. What he wanted to do or say was not even possible. He had watched Julian turn into more of hoax each year. “Julian, you are a fraudulent honking goose, a condensing puff of bad breath.” The silent pantomime of waiting first for Vera to return to sanity, then for the right woman and then filling in the gaps. Now, it was rare that Claude remembered what it had been like when it seemed to be close to perfect. What he understood is that perfect leads to nothing.
Nobody would have called it innocent at Julian's parents large white house while they were away. They were just twenty and had been drinking. Music was blasting Van Morrison from a stereo downstairs and they were in of all places Julian’s mother’s bedroom. Claude had maneuvered the whole weekend into being like a master strategist. By Saturday afternoon Julian came all over his mother’s bedspread and again on the green velvet settee and against Claude’s neck. Then, not a word was spoken about his mother’s bedroom, or Claude’s apartment or the motel rooms. No more strategies were ever needed. Ah be careful what you wish for.
Claude let go his expectations like a kite string. The back of the house was enough for him. As for Miranda, she could not remember her parents “together” nor even imagine it. Summer visits, airports, tickets, that whole rigmarole. All those times her father was away on buying trips. Claude had read her Madeline, privately she used to imagine getting sick in the middle of the night and being rushed, wrapped in a blanket, to the hospital. And then walking after a very dangerous surgery to her parents—worried, smiling, loving. Real parents, not these misshapen creatures that try to reach out towards her like lurching ghouls in some old movie. Her parents were both such hypocrites—sad, really. Her mother running around with a pack of Euro trash half her age—all claiming to be political. Whatever. Then she stopped taking care of herself—poof, she would walk around in sweatpants and gray tee shirts, 3 to a pack, that were so long they fell mid thigh. Her hair hung in thin strings around her yellowing face. Her mother seemed to be shrinking. Miranda almost pleaded with her at times, to wear something else. All the hair on her legs and armpits. It got to the point that she could never bring a friend home. Her father with his good straight American teeth— who was he kidding, did he think she was an idiot?
The curtain lifts and the play begins.
Her father bringing a different woman to every possible occasion, and some not so possible occasions. All so hopeful, with their cute ears pitched forward like little forest bunnies—pick me, pick me, they cried silently and in unison.
The way she saw it after smoking some of her new stash of loud, and what she told her friend Rena when they were hanging out in her bedroom last week was that her parents were like her hamsters—sniffing and scratching rodents. They did ridiculous things, anybody could see that. For example that guy Alex that her mother brought home, OMG he was half her age and wanted to “protect,” “save” whom? From what? Seals, snowy owls. What he really wanted was to stand naked in his black ankle socks while her mother held him and stroked his hair. For real, that’s what he wanted—all he wanted. Next time mom you may want to shut the door. The sad thing is her mother did not even . . . not an idea, not a clue. Oh that’s her mother. She cooked and preened for him until one day in the market she saw him—acting normal, laughing and juggling lemons for a young blonde girl.
When Julian opened the front door that morning of the wedding there was Adelstein lying on the matt. All over the morning paper—a lawsuit brought by his sisters, a pair of Gonerils with hair sculpted into king cobras’ mantles. Julian had been stocking their homes with expensive, rare and above all special objects, that if hadn’t been for how much they paid would have been more appreciated and better understood at the bottom of a well. The sisters were quoted as saying—it's not the money, but the principle—they looked like eels flashing the muddy bottom. Julian noted that some people, more that you would think, just don’t embarrass—as he read over the paper he wondered if they were so obtuse as to imagine anybody could ever mistake them as “principled” by any definition of the word. What was it Adelstein wanted?— or wanted more of, and how much would he pay? Julian left the paper on the kitchen table and went into his study. He picked up the black cordless phone, no, bad idea, he realized, still too early, could get touchy—he opted to email
Adelstein had undergone a recent religious awakening and wanted Judiaca. 18th century German and Holy Land antiquities. Did this correspond in any or all ways with his current “troubles”? The man could no doubt afford the Sarajevo Haggadah and he wanted menorahs—Kiddush cups that held a quart adorned with tumorous clusters of grapes, clay oil jars. It was better when he just wanted a floral still life by Degas or worse, cubist dancers—you know he said—those ballerinas. Are you fricken kidding me, Julian had thought. Julian ran his hand over the smooth cool of his own bent wood chair—so simple and perfect in design.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check back for the story's conclusion tomorrow]
If You Lick My Heart You Would Die Of Poison
The house was on tree lined well-tended quiet street in Cambridge. It was narrow and creamily quaint in the last moments of daylight. The wooded twin doors were huge, heavy. Inez blinked in the entranceway. On the table was a half a glass of ice tea with mostly melted ice—she looked around for the owner. A shirt was draped over a chair with a tie. There were fruit bowls the color of mercury—fluid shapes filled with bright citrus. There was a note on the side table under the gilt mirror—Call Adelstein back.
Julian stood in the doorway of the bedroom and when Inez turned around he was unbuttoning his shirt. It wasn’t unexpected, hadn’t it been hoped for, in part why she came. With his finger her traced her collarbone and laid his head on her shoulder.
“Its been a long time, I’m sorry you’re unhappy,” she thought he said.
“Do you remember the first time, at my parents house, my mothers bed?” he asked.
She remembered her apartment, a day at the lake, in the stacks late at night in the library. His mother’s house?
“We were alone, nobody home,” Julian said.
“Put on the dress, leave your underwear off, that dress is so lovely on you.” He sighed and said softly. Julian slides his hands over the dress and then under. “Lie back” he whispered.
“Don’t forget you need to call Adelstein,” she said before they were too far along. Then he pulled her down to the bottom of the bed and positioned her legs on his shoulders. His forearms looked sculpted and elegant. She was grateful he wanted the dress, such a kindness for him to not expect her now after so long to stand or even lie naked.
She must have drifted off to sleep. For an instant she could not remember where she was. The cocoon-like softness of unfamiliar sheets against her skin. She dreamt of the Rabbi, several in fact bearded in black hats and frock coats. They were shouting at her to jump. She was standing on a ledge with granite angels on either side of her. What had awakened her? The fear of falling. Voices? From where, the kitchen? The hall outside her room?
“Just go if you said you were going.” She was sure she heard that. The voice was rubbery and bounced in her range of awareness. Like when she was a child tugged out of bed in the middle of the night holding the frayed end of her parents' hushed voices behind the closed door. Out in the hall standing only in a robe she found hanging in the closet.
“Does it mean anything? Why? You always do this.”
“Can’t it wait?” she heard Julian’s voice trail off. She heard the rush of tap water.
“Patrick is going to be here any minute.”
“So just go”
Then. “Hallo—anybody home? Come out come out wherever you are.”
She heard a door close at the front of the house. Inez went back into the room and sat on the bed and then quickly, blessedly fell back asleep. Again she was on a ledge of the very high building. So high that now she could see into the windows of planes as they flew past. She could see the confused terrified expressions on the passengers’ faces, mouthing words to her. She was trying to read their lips, but could not make out what they were saying. The granite angels were crying, tear stained, and a lone tiny Rabbi very far below was gesturing at her to jump.
In the morning she awoke early to the sound of water moaning through the pipes. Julian stepped out into the hall wrapped in a towel and shook his mane like a lion emerging onto a riverbank. In the small guestroom Inez took the dress from the closet and held it against her body—letting it fall, just so against her shins. She closed her eyes, in gratitude, in prayer, in fear. After all these years there was still possibility. Julian had insisted, insisted that she get that dress.
Light from the bay window was just starting to seep into the living room. She picked up a framed photograph from the piano. Julian and somebody blurry in sun glasses, the Taj Mahal in the background. “Oh India last Fall, that flesh color spot— Claude. Julian startled her— had he been sitting in the chair all night?
“What a nightmare, a hell hole, animals in the street, huge crowds, heat, smells, I got so uncomfortable that I just left the whole continent and went to sit in rainy Amsterdam to medicate and attend my stomach cramps with modern plumbing. Claude stuck it out—All that local color—he even went trekking. The Sherpa would have had to carry me to base camp and back. He clamed to have a good time.”
Over the years Inez constructed Claude in her mind in several ways. Claude, poor old, good old, hope-against-hope Claude. He had been an adjunct since their first week of school freshman year. She remembered how he appeared in the dorm hallway holding an imported beer and wearing a mock colligate outfit—a blue and gold University sweat shirt, chinos, right down to the brown deck moccasins with no socks.
How was it Claude ended up there, now it seemed he had always been there, or nearby, waiting in the hall, on the library steps, in front of restaurants?— she had to force herself back to the chronology—there was law school at Columbia, then the opportunity at the Kennedy School, like his father and brother, also clerking for a judge—something had happened, was it a scandal or a heartbreak? Then a job at firm in a high glass tower—paper in, paper out.
Julian had the house, huge. Suddenly, the crazy Vera left him with baby Miranda, gone so fast there was not even a vapor trail. She recalled that in New York, nightly Claude would fold himself like an origami swan into the small jeweled, velvet lined lacquered box that was his apartment.
“Move to Brooklyn” she would tell him. Brooklyn is the new Manhattan—No, he wanted to see himself reflected in the dilated pupils of so many men like himself. Then poof—Vera was gone—like a gate opened wide. He saw it as a sign—so mistaken, it was a sign—that Vera was very very unstable. No, he wasn’t crazy. At times Julian seemed responsive— sure there were women too of course but everybody had those, well almost everybody. Claude thought with time Julian would settle the matter and Claude would be the settlement. Oh god how absurd his imaginings must have been in retrospect, coupling, partnership, Julian—whatever it would have looked like or been called. How long did it take him to realize that Julian was, let’s say, limited in his partnership potential and abilities in human interaction? Well, once he was there not that long, but longer than it should. Julian was content, more than content with a good fuck every so often but even those become sad, torn down often drunk exchanges. Oh the mornings, pure hell. What did she remember? Claude had told her years ago that when he had called, Julian’s voice was etched with something dark—shock maybe.
So earnestly Claude had said “I’m worried” and with that took her into his confidence in her at a dinner in Queens, “really he can’t handle an infant alone” then Claude pulled out of his brief case a copy of Your Infant, Your Toddler, Your Child—“good stuff in here” he said. She said not a word.
In truth, Claude at twenty seven did not need to be offered twice— As far as she knew what Julian had said was, “Yes a large back room, just till you get your own place—I have room, 15 to be exact—know how to change a diaper.”
Nothing ever happened—well of course some things happened sometimes but it never became the blossoming flower Claude had hoped for and neither did it crawl away to die. After time Claude was forced to think that maybe Julian was content to fill his clients lives with articles confiscated from people with inner lives. Maybe Julian was his own best client. Sometime, rarely, Claude still imagined that there was a chamber of Julian’s heart filled with shadows like photographic negatives—the image is in the absence of the image—a perfect celadon bowl, a mortar and pestle, two young men. Then for many years there was Miranda sucking her thumb—“ducky ducky,” Claude would quack as he toweled her freshly washed hair. Julian off someplace buying something to place on someone’s shelf or wall. Still some hope. But there were the photos of little Miranda—a bobble head infant all tipsy and fat. She looked so much like her mother Vera in dark complexion and the black eyes, but had Julian’s bone structure. No Claude there.
Little Miranda pranced like a trained pony in and out of rooms. Her manicured nails clicking out everything she wanted and all her parents’ failings on some invisible table. Her forearms stacked with thin bangles that clicked and clanked with every wave of her hand.
No doubt it was a bad time, maybe the worst for Claude to just bow out. He could smell the smoke on Miranda’s hair and clothes see her bloodshot eyes. He knew she was tearing it up with sullen neck tattooed boys that hunched waiting across the street or in the park. What he wanted to do or say was not even possible. He had watched Julian turn into more of hoax each year. “Julian, you are a fraudulent honking goose, a condensing puff of bad breath.” The silent pantomime of waiting first for Vera to return to sanity, then for the right woman and then filling in the gaps. Now, it was rare that Claude remembered what it had been like when it seemed to be close to perfect. What he understood is that perfect leads to nothing.
Nobody would have called it innocent at Julian's parents large white house while they were away. They were just twenty and had been drinking. Music was blasting Van Morrison from a stereo downstairs and they were in of all places Julian’s mother’s bedroom. Claude had maneuvered the whole weekend into being like a master strategist. By Saturday afternoon Julian came all over his mother’s bedspread and again on the green velvet settee and against Claude’s neck. Then, not a word was spoken about his mother’s bedroom, or Claude’s apartment or the motel rooms. No more strategies were ever needed. Ah be careful what you wish for.
Claude let go his expectations like a kite string. The back of the house was enough for him. As for Miranda, she could not remember her parents “together” nor even imagine it. Summer visits, airports, tickets, that whole rigmarole. All those times her father was away on buying trips. Claude had read her Madeline, privately she used to imagine getting sick in the middle of the night and being rushed, wrapped in a blanket, to the hospital. And then walking after a very dangerous surgery to her parents—worried, smiling, loving. Real parents, not these misshapen creatures that try to reach out towards her like lurching ghouls in some old movie. Her parents were both such hypocrites—sad, really. Her mother running around with a pack of Euro trash half her age—all claiming to be political. Whatever. Then she stopped taking care of herself—poof, she would walk around in sweatpants and gray tee shirts, 3 to a pack, that were so long they fell mid thigh. Her hair hung in thin strings around her yellowing face. Her mother seemed to be shrinking. Miranda almost pleaded with her at times, to wear something else. All the hair on her legs and armpits. It got to the point that she could never bring a friend home. Her father with his good straight American teeth— who was he kidding, did he think she was an idiot?
The curtain lifts and the play begins.
Her father bringing a different woman to every possible occasion, and some not so possible occasions. All so hopeful, with their cute ears pitched forward like little forest bunnies—pick me, pick me, they cried silently and in unison.
The way she saw it after smoking some of her new stash of loud, and what she told her friend Rena when they were hanging out in her bedroom last week was that her parents were like her hamsters—sniffing and scratching rodents. They did ridiculous things, anybody could see that. For example that guy Alex that her mother brought home, OMG he was half her age and wanted to “protect,” “save” whom? From what? Seals, snowy owls. What he really wanted was to stand naked in his black ankle socks while her mother held him and stroked his hair. For real, that’s what he wanted—all he wanted. Next time mom you may want to shut the door. The sad thing is her mother did not even . . . not an idea, not a clue. Oh that’s her mother. She cooked and preened for him until one day in the market she saw him—acting normal, laughing and juggling lemons for a young blonde girl.
When Julian opened the front door that morning of the wedding there was Adelstein lying on the matt. All over the morning paper—a lawsuit brought by his sisters, a pair of Gonerils with hair sculpted into king cobras’ mantles. Julian had been stocking their homes with expensive, rare and above all special objects, that if hadn’t been for how much they paid would have been more appreciated and better understood at the bottom of a well. The sisters were quoted as saying—it's not the money, but the principle—they looked like eels flashing the muddy bottom. Julian noted that some people, more that you would think, just don’t embarrass—as he read over the paper he wondered if they were so obtuse as to imagine anybody could ever mistake them as “principled” by any definition of the word. What was it Adelstein wanted?— or wanted more of, and how much would he pay? Julian left the paper on the kitchen table and went into his study. He picked up the black cordless phone, no, bad idea, he realized, still too early, could get touchy—he opted to email
Adelstein had undergone a recent religious awakening and wanted Judiaca. 18th century German and Holy Land antiquities. Did this correspond in any or all ways with his current “troubles”? The man could no doubt afford the Sarajevo Haggadah and he wanted menorahs—Kiddush cups that held a quart adorned with tumorous clusters of grapes, clay oil jars. It was better when he just wanted a floral still life by Degas or worse, cubist dancers—you know he said—those ballerinas. Are you fricken kidding me, Julian had thought. Julian ran his hand over the smooth cool of his own bent wood chair—so simple and perfect in design.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check back for the story's conclusion tomorrow]
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow (part 3)
[B.N.'s story continues]
Yonder Stands Your Orphan With His Gun
Bob Dylan
Julian was waiting at the gate holding a loose bouquet of blue lace cap hydrangeas and white delphinium. She spotted him leaning against a pillar, cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. “Miranda,” he mouthed nodding and eyeing the phone. Ah, Miranda, little baby girl, that they all fussed and cooed over like some rare species of exotic bird—who was what—now sixteen? The only child of Julian’s brief marriage to some Persian queen. “She’s in for the wedding, well for the shopping too, maybe the whole summer. Things with her mother are rough right now. Who knew—that was still up in the air. It was a real illness this time, no postpartum nada—cells splitting wildly. We have to talk about that,” Julian said.
Well, her aunt certainly provided her with ample wedding and shopping opportunities. What was this for Cleo now, wedding number three, maybe four— did Inez miss one? Had she married that Brazilian or did they just run a ranch together in some backwater place in the Amazon? Julian— his face now edged in the silver of a close trimmed beard— the years just revealed more perfect bone structure. He reached out fondly, warmly and kissed her cheek.
Flight okay?
“Up for some shopping?” he said, leading her by the elbow. He certainly was.
“My friend Elly has a shop with some of the most fantastic stuff in the city, in North America. She is waiting for us and will get you something “fabulous” for the wedding.
“She used the word “fabulous'?” Inez asked, “Are you serious?”
At the shop Inez sat on a tufted teal ottoman as Elly and Julian surveyed and gathered arms full of possibilities and things to enhance those possibilities. It seemed here that nothing stood on its own merit and there was nothing that the correct accessory could not shore up. There was a blue shawl as fine as gossamer—looked like it had been spun out directly from the underbelly of some large but benevolent insect—glossy iridescent sheen. Then a black jacket with grosgrain ribbon trim that was so perfect in the cut and cuffs. Inez imagined the clothes blooming on her like jungle flowers, a flock multi-colored birds aloft —a wild impressionist woman, barefoot and biting into exotic fruits.
“A wedding, I am sure they will have a long happy life together.” Elly chimed as she put the clothes into a garment bag that signaled how very special and costly the shop was. Inez thought it a bit late for long life together and maybe for happy also.
Inez has noted that so many people she knew could talk about their lives with all the polished surface of a fable. All her friends, and her friends' friends placed themselves squarely in the center of everything that came their way. Improving whatever corner of the world they occupied. They sat not just dutifully, but with a real sense of commitment on committees to improve their children’s schools, their communities. Just convinced that somehow they made the world a better place, by just being there and doing the things that benefited them—their challenges were universally, primordially simple—the child that failed to form sentences or to make eye contact, the wife stealing small items from the drug store, the man that drove one hundred miles to expose himself in a public park. Not human failing, not frailty, never lapses in judgment, but rather some larger code like a moral tale—how was it that they were perpetually the ant and not the grasshopper?
Miranda, of course, was late meeting them at the restaurant and Inez thought she could have sat a bit longer on the ottoman. They were seated at a small table under old photographs of men’s sports teams—the crew team 1922, the football team 1910, baseball 1870. Julian took the menu and ordered—limited and familiar. The restaurant was a mix of academic and business diners—all subdued and eating and speaking studiously. They sat hunched over plates if they were officiously completing a task while a supervisor observed with a stopwatch.
No doubt about it, the atmosphere in Boston was different—the air and mood not as fraught and complex. The cobbled streets of the neighborhood seemed indifferent—the winds were gentle, not tainted with the scent of burring flesh and cinders—dust was dust, not human remains. In the few brief blocks from the shop she noticed the darker skinned residents were all but absent. Holed up behind heavy oaken doors in the ivy towers, she thought, in fear of fellowships disappearing, thanking gods that they were not driving cabs in Manhattan. The few academic types in haute couture she saw did not seem to wear the same countenance of fear and shame as they had to adopt in New York to just get from point A to point B. In New York their new country had turned on them like an abused dog growls and snaps back at a benevolent owner.
Part of the year the city had put on a happy face—a bright yellow smiley face as creepy as a harlequin or weeping clown paintings— a “nothing is going to stop New York” kind of stance—yet every time she rode the subway she could not help thinking gas attack, bomb, something. The papers made hash of the situation every morning—words were flying—justice, enemy, freedom. What did those men feel when they boarded the plane? They were after the all the most elite and privileged of their countries. Did they also taste injustice bitter in their mouths, where did it come from? Were words flying in their countries also? Did their mother tongue swell with hurt and rage? Does a sense of entitlement gone haywire burn with the same indignation reserved for oppression? These questions confused Inez because on a very fundamental level she could not always make out the difference between us and them.
The slender waiter in a white waist apron brought out a pretty glass pitcher of water with lemon slices and then placed a basket of bread and a white ramekin with butter.
When Miranda arrived she looked like she has been caught in a sudden rain shower, the ends of her hair wet and limp, her bangs plastered to one side of her forehead. She had on the heavy “look at me” eyeliner that girls her age start with until they get tired and realize that getting looked at was not really what they had wanted or expected. Almost every finger flashes a ring. She collapsed into a chair, pulled out a phone and started to text.
“Oh I am so hungry,” she said, eyeing Julian’s salad.
“Here take this,” he said and pushed his salad in front of her
“Ranch? Right?” she said. Julian nodded and looked over his shoulder for the waiter.
Julian raised his glass of water and tipped his head graciously in Miranda’s direction. “Here’s to a great summer, a good tan, and the SAT prep class I signed you up for.” For an instant she looked crestfallen but then her eyes flickered with indignation.
“But me and Claude were going to . . .” She said.
“Well it is only three weeks long, I’m sure he can rearrange his schedule.” Julian said
“Does this make you feel like a parent or something? I mean, why do have to try to ruin my summer?”
Miranda pushed the plate to the side and leaned into the table with both elbows. Inez touched her arm. Miranda turned to Inez and gave her a withering look
“I need shoes.” She said flatly. Julian looked down at her feet and again he saw the same hard candy red coating that was her lips. True enough, the child was there in a pair of flat straw sandals. Inez forced a thin smile. How could Miranda be expected to know, that in some parts of the world girls this age at the very moment were screaming with labor pains, or carrying on their heads jugs of water back from the river to the red-earthed village? Not possible. This girl sitting, just sitting next to her father; was somehow under the table rubbing the world against her thigh.
“Let’s see what you bought” Julian said.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check back tomorrow for part 4 of All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow]
Yonder Stands Your Orphan With His Gun
Bob Dylan
Julian was waiting at the gate holding a loose bouquet of blue lace cap hydrangeas and white delphinium. She spotted him leaning against a pillar, cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. “Miranda,” he mouthed nodding and eyeing the phone. Ah, Miranda, little baby girl, that they all fussed and cooed over like some rare species of exotic bird—who was what—now sixteen? The only child of Julian’s brief marriage to some Persian queen. “She’s in for the wedding, well for the shopping too, maybe the whole summer. Things with her mother are rough right now. Who knew—that was still up in the air. It was a real illness this time, no postpartum nada—cells splitting wildly. We have to talk about that,” Julian said.
Well, her aunt certainly provided her with ample wedding and shopping opportunities. What was this for Cleo now, wedding number three, maybe four— did Inez miss one? Had she married that Brazilian or did they just run a ranch together in some backwater place in the Amazon? Julian— his face now edged in the silver of a close trimmed beard— the years just revealed more perfect bone structure. He reached out fondly, warmly and kissed her cheek.
Flight okay?
“Up for some shopping?” he said, leading her by the elbow. He certainly was.
“My friend Elly has a shop with some of the most fantastic stuff in the city, in North America. She is waiting for us and will get you something “fabulous” for the wedding.
“She used the word “fabulous'?” Inez asked, “Are you serious?”
At the shop Inez sat on a tufted teal ottoman as Elly and Julian surveyed and gathered arms full of possibilities and things to enhance those possibilities. It seemed here that nothing stood on its own merit and there was nothing that the correct accessory could not shore up. There was a blue shawl as fine as gossamer—looked like it had been spun out directly from the underbelly of some large but benevolent insect—glossy iridescent sheen. Then a black jacket with grosgrain ribbon trim that was so perfect in the cut and cuffs. Inez imagined the clothes blooming on her like jungle flowers, a flock multi-colored birds aloft —a wild impressionist woman, barefoot and biting into exotic fruits.
“A wedding, I am sure they will have a long happy life together.” Elly chimed as she put the clothes into a garment bag that signaled how very special and costly the shop was. Inez thought it a bit late for long life together and maybe for happy also.
Inez has noted that so many people she knew could talk about their lives with all the polished surface of a fable. All her friends, and her friends' friends placed themselves squarely in the center of everything that came their way. Improving whatever corner of the world they occupied. They sat not just dutifully, but with a real sense of commitment on committees to improve their children’s schools, their communities. Just convinced that somehow they made the world a better place, by just being there and doing the things that benefited them—their challenges were universally, primordially simple—the child that failed to form sentences or to make eye contact, the wife stealing small items from the drug store, the man that drove one hundred miles to expose himself in a public park. Not human failing, not frailty, never lapses in judgment, but rather some larger code like a moral tale—how was it that they were perpetually the ant and not the grasshopper?
Miranda, of course, was late meeting them at the restaurant and Inez thought she could have sat a bit longer on the ottoman. They were seated at a small table under old photographs of men’s sports teams—the crew team 1922, the football team 1910, baseball 1870. Julian took the menu and ordered—limited and familiar. The restaurant was a mix of academic and business diners—all subdued and eating and speaking studiously. They sat hunched over plates if they were officiously completing a task while a supervisor observed with a stopwatch.
No doubt about it, the atmosphere in Boston was different—the air and mood not as fraught and complex. The cobbled streets of the neighborhood seemed indifferent—the winds were gentle, not tainted with the scent of burring flesh and cinders—dust was dust, not human remains. In the few brief blocks from the shop she noticed the darker skinned residents were all but absent. Holed up behind heavy oaken doors in the ivy towers, she thought, in fear of fellowships disappearing, thanking gods that they were not driving cabs in Manhattan. The few academic types in haute couture she saw did not seem to wear the same countenance of fear and shame as they had to adopt in New York to just get from point A to point B. In New York their new country had turned on them like an abused dog growls and snaps back at a benevolent owner.
Part of the year the city had put on a happy face—a bright yellow smiley face as creepy as a harlequin or weeping clown paintings— a “nothing is going to stop New York” kind of stance—yet every time she rode the subway she could not help thinking gas attack, bomb, something. The papers made hash of the situation every morning—words were flying—justice, enemy, freedom. What did those men feel when they boarded the plane? They were after the all the most elite and privileged of their countries. Did they also taste injustice bitter in their mouths, where did it come from? Were words flying in their countries also? Did their mother tongue swell with hurt and rage? Does a sense of entitlement gone haywire burn with the same indignation reserved for oppression? These questions confused Inez because on a very fundamental level she could not always make out the difference between us and them.
The slender waiter in a white waist apron brought out a pretty glass pitcher of water with lemon slices and then placed a basket of bread and a white ramekin with butter.
When Miranda arrived she looked like she has been caught in a sudden rain shower, the ends of her hair wet and limp, her bangs plastered to one side of her forehead. She had on the heavy “look at me” eyeliner that girls her age start with until they get tired and realize that getting looked at was not really what they had wanted or expected. Almost every finger flashes a ring. She collapsed into a chair, pulled out a phone and started to text.
“Oh I am so hungry,” she said, eyeing Julian’s salad.
“Here take this,” he said and pushed his salad in front of her
“Ranch? Right?” she said. Julian nodded and looked over his shoulder for the waiter.
Julian raised his glass of water and tipped his head graciously in Miranda’s direction. “Here’s to a great summer, a good tan, and the SAT prep class I signed you up for.” For an instant she looked crestfallen but then her eyes flickered with indignation.
“But me and Claude were going to . . .” She said.
“Well it is only three weeks long, I’m sure he can rearrange his schedule.” Julian said
“Does this make you feel like a parent or something? I mean, why do have to try to ruin my summer?”
Miranda pushed the plate to the side and leaned into the table with both elbows. Inez touched her arm. Miranda turned to Inez and gave her a withering look
“I need shoes.” She said flatly. Julian looked down at her feet and again he saw the same hard candy red coating that was her lips. True enough, the child was there in a pair of flat straw sandals. Inez forced a thin smile. How could Miranda be expected to know, that in some parts of the world girls this age at the very moment were screaming with labor pains, or carrying on their heads jugs of water back from the river to the red-earthed village? Not possible. This girl sitting, just sitting next to her father; was somehow under the table rubbing the world against her thigh.
“Let’s see what you bought” Julian said.
B.N.
© 2010
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow (part 2)
[Here's the second part of B.N.'s story]
Looks Like Freedom But Feels Like Death Must Be Something In-between
Leonard Cohen
Twenty five years ago light poured through the leaded glass panes of the patrician tower, collected in pools around them and reflected back off the polished stone floors, their radiance, their blessing, potential, and of course money. How they seemed to float just inches above marble floors, holding sweating glasses of wine—chalices really. Nobody bothered to notice, or were too polite to say that in contrast Inez ground her way, flint to stone, through college and then graduate school, as grim as Jane Eyre at Lockwood. She worked hard, unencumbered by the curses of imagination, talent or family money. She borrowed their light briefly. And what did she see illuminated? Her own plainness, as plain as freckles on the fat girls’ arms. Then the light was gone, the music silent, the room empty.
What remained? That constant nagging feeling of her parents’ immigration in her stomach—heavy, like cabbage and root vegetables. Her father locking the chain link fence behind him as he closed his salvage yards as she watched for the sidewalk. The feral cats that would scatter nightly when he closed the lid on the dumpster. Her parents were unwashed field potatoes. Oh, how Tante Raizel had pleaded their case—family lore had it that she, already in America for a few years, practically an American, went from office to office pleading, begging and flirting when necessary for their rescue. She sought out the Red Cross, the Jewish agency, every congressman she could corner. Years later, they lacked the warm deep golden polish of having been in America for generations. How had they repaid her? Scorpions, they stung Tante Raizel by never accepting their adopted homeland. They huddled in Brooklyn like they were hunkered down in a bunker waiting for the occupying troops to leave the city. When she died in New Jersey, the whole aging community of Yiddishist Bolsheviks mourned—the funeral was a pageant of old men with violins. After the cemetery her father loaded the borrowed station wagon with all the art from her house, (take the GW Bridge—cousin Louis directed,) and he drove it into Manhattan right to the address on the card of the auction house and dropped it all off. Cocking his head and squinting at the gilt ornate framed contents for one last time.
Were her parents arriving on the Saturnia as it sailed into New York harbor the same day as Julian’s mother walked through Central Park in tiny white gloves with faux pearl buttons eating ice cream and holding a pink balloon? The first time Inez met Julian’s mother she felt almost like she should have curtsied. She looked like she had stepped out from a Sargent portrait. Tall and regal in a sea blue dress with a sweep of graying auburn hair clipped effortlessly by combs. She remembered his mother’s well-established garden, spikes of pink foxglove, visited by bumblebees. Her own mother had some clay pots out on the fire escape. In that other life the garden moved with precisions. The early spring jonquils and hyacinths gave way to lilies that gave way to the mid and late summer anemone; and then bellflowers with the precise blue of Wedgwood—not the burdock of empty lots, not pots of mere marigolds. The grass formed the perfect cushion under foot. She was just another friend from college, they all pretended to have come from the same pool— glistening water.
They had all had the same control over their lives and outcomes. It followed then, that they proceeded in their chosen direction—ever upward. But that was not completely true. Outcomes for Inez were a sidewalk game with shells—the marble was under the other shell—not the one she picked. What was this mystery of life? In other countries and at other times they called it by name. Class. Unbelievably, it took Inez years to figure it out. All the people around her shied away from ever speaking in real terms about what would decide their futures. Nobody spoke the more common truth, in America you either inherited money, married it, or stole it. Plain and simple. Tra la la la, Inez is studying folklore—little fairies houses made from cookies and cake. Well, her parents were not singing. Go for teaching, her mother, suggested, accounting, nursing. She had a shaky position as an instructor at a City College— So, Julian again.
She put aside the article she was working on. She canceled her Friday class, office hours, and poured out enough food and water to keep the cats alive until she came back. The blue and white sashed dresses of girlhood were gone. What could she offer up? This morning she wore a linen suit, already wrinkled. The whole flight she gave herself to easy thoughts— It would be nice to catch up with people. Nice to get away.
Did Julian he have an eye for art or a head for business? She could never quite know, having neither herself. There was a period when he had either built galleries from raw industrial spaces or stepped in to save them from the brink of ruin. Then he hit the mother lode. A large, obscenely rich, oblivious family in the Midwest. To prove to her his transformation he even learned the phrase “the shmatah business.” Now he built private collections, collected collections for these clients that had all started collections. They would pay pay pay for something to hang on their wall that would make their friends go slack jawed when they heard the price and then stare in disbelief at the wall. They practically had price tags on the wall next to the frames.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check back tomorrow for part three of this five-part story]
Looks Like Freedom But Feels Like Death Must Be Something In-between
Leonard Cohen
Twenty five years ago light poured through the leaded glass panes of the patrician tower, collected in pools around them and reflected back off the polished stone floors, their radiance, their blessing, potential, and of course money. How they seemed to float just inches above marble floors, holding sweating glasses of wine—chalices really. Nobody bothered to notice, or were too polite to say that in contrast Inez ground her way, flint to stone, through college and then graduate school, as grim as Jane Eyre at Lockwood. She worked hard, unencumbered by the curses of imagination, talent or family money. She borrowed their light briefly. And what did she see illuminated? Her own plainness, as plain as freckles on the fat girls’ arms. Then the light was gone, the music silent, the room empty.
What remained? That constant nagging feeling of her parents’ immigration in her stomach—heavy, like cabbage and root vegetables. Her father locking the chain link fence behind him as he closed his salvage yards as she watched for the sidewalk. The feral cats that would scatter nightly when he closed the lid on the dumpster. Her parents were unwashed field potatoes. Oh, how Tante Raizel had pleaded their case—family lore had it that she, already in America for a few years, practically an American, went from office to office pleading, begging and flirting when necessary for their rescue. She sought out the Red Cross, the Jewish agency, every congressman she could corner. Years later, they lacked the warm deep golden polish of having been in America for generations. How had they repaid her? Scorpions, they stung Tante Raizel by never accepting their adopted homeland. They huddled in Brooklyn like they were hunkered down in a bunker waiting for the occupying troops to leave the city. When she died in New Jersey, the whole aging community of Yiddishist Bolsheviks mourned—the funeral was a pageant of old men with violins. After the cemetery her father loaded the borrowed station wagon with all the art from her house, (take the GW Bridge—cousin Louis directed,) and he drove it into Manhattan right to the address on the card of the auction house and dropped it all off. Cocking his head and squinting at the gilt ornate framed contents for one last time.
Were her parents arriving on the Saturnia as it sailed into New York harbor the same day as Julian’s mother walked through Central Park in tiny white gloves with faux pearl buttons eating ice cream and holding a pink balloon? The first time Inez met Julian’s mother she felt almost like she should have curtsied. She looked like she had stepped out from a Sargent portrait. Tall and regal in a sea blue dress with a sweep of graying auburn hair clipped effortlessly by combs. She remembered his mother’s well-established garden, spikes of pink foxglove, visited by bumblebees. Her own mother had some clay pots out on the fire escape. In that other life the garden moved with precisions. The early spring jonquils and hyacinths gave way to lilies that gave way to the mid and late summer anemone; and then bellflowers with the precise blue of Wedgwood—not the burdock of empty lots, not pots of mere marigolds. The grass formed the perfect cushion under foot. She was just another friend from college, they all pretended to have come from the same pool— glistening water.
They had all had the same control over their lives and outcomes. It followed then, that they proceeded in their chosen direction—ever upward. But that was not completely true. Outcomes for Inez were a sidewalk game with shells—the marble was under the other shell—not the one she picked. What was this mystery of life? In other countries and at other times they called it by name. Class. Unbelievably, it took Inez years to figure it out. All the people around her shied away from ever speaking in real terms about what would decide their futures. Nobody spoke the more common truth, in America you either inherited money, married it, or stole it. Plain and simple. Tra la la la, Inez is studying folklore—little fairies houses made from cookies and cake. Well, her parents were not singing. Go for teaching, her mother, suggested, accounting, nursing. She had a shaky position as an instructor at a City College— So, Julian again.
She put aside the article she was working on. She canceled her Friday class, office hours, and poured out enough food and water to keep the cats alive until she came back. The blue and white sashed dresses of girlhood were gone. What could she offer up? This morning she wore a linen suit, already wrinkled. The whole flight she gave herself to easy thoughts— It would be nice to catch up with people. Nice to get away.
Did Julian he have an eye for art or a head for business? She could never quite know, having neither herself. There was a period when he had either built galleries from raw industrial spaces or stepped in to save them from the brink of ruin. Then he hit the mother lode. A large, obscenely rich, oblivious family in the Midwest. To prove to her his transformation he even learned the phrase “the shmatah business.” Now he built private collections, collected collections for these clients that had all started collections. They would pay pay pay for something to hang on their wall that would make their friends go slack jawed when they heard the price and then stare in disbelief at the wall. They practically had price tags on the wall next to the frames.
B.N.
© 2010
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow (part 1)
[Here's the first of five installments of B.N.'s powerful new story. The story will run thru Thursday 10/28]
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow
Alainu Prayer/Issia 45.23
Voices rolled over the vast white and glass terminal, pinged into columns and were then cut short by utilitarian architecture and human bulk, boarding calls, squalling infants, announcements and safety instructions. From where she was standing next to a magazine rack Inez watched shows of easy emotions—oh my god I am so glad to see you—kind gestures of reaching down to lift another’s bags. As she moved deeper into the terminal past the gift and souvenir shops stocked with mugs and tee shirts what she saw were whole fat families in shorts and T-shirts, boisterous, mean-spirited and spiteful towards each other, slouching in flip-flops and shorts. How worn down everything felt, everyone looked.
That whole autumn and well into winter, she feared every cloud would let loose an acid rain that could melt bone. Images kept popping up like a jack in the box . . . the monkey thought it all was in fun—. Just when the merry music called you closer, lulled you: Boom. Suddenly somewhere the herd startled, changed direction and stampeded the fields where the women and their children tended the crop of sorghum. Upriver the villagers had taken sick—mysterious fevers that turn innards to gore soup. Someplace at every moment great suffering was occurring—horrible injustice fanned out like a deck of cards. She remembered her own mother’s moods and how she watched her face as she pushed back the images of jackbooted thugs goose-stepping in the town square; how she feared it would no doubt in time be right down 13th Avenue. “Mom, it is America” she would tell her. “All that was a long time ago, we are so safe that we’re bored stupid.” She knew her mother fought back the specters with small realities of meat on sale, upcoming weddings. Like a machete cutting back the jungle undergrowth, she wielded an imaginary blade and whacked back the python of her moods of their past.
Don’t even ask the question. What was the future? Snarling hellhounds moving in packs at the edge of the city.
Each day the newspapers and the military experts on television assured the jittery public that guilty parties would be found. The axis of evil was pushpins in maps. Reports said he had been sighted on a mountain trail; the best intelligence said he was holding up in a cave—dangerous mysterious terrain. He was a shape-shifter—video images were authenticated or dismissed—sinister forces at work with daggers, or box cutters. Detention centers were set up. Weapons grade plutonium moved by pack mule over borders that only existed on maps. Land mines were disguised as children’s toys.
Yes, lately the whole mood of things was different. Every time she left her apartment, she told herself, just a run to the corner market—2 peaches a croissant and home. Now, she repeats just a weekend, only a weekend.
She slid into the molded plastic chair and waited for her boarding call. Her fellow passengers began to move downstream to collect at the gate. She clutched two forms of photo id, and she arrived four hours prior to scheduled departure.
One of the first things she noticed was that a new breed of people had evolved and left the primordial broth. “Homeland Security” had recruited the entire population of the indifferent and the brutish to strip all the others down to their stocking feet, to confiscate, knitting needles from old ladies and plastic nunchucks from small children. She watched people trudge doggedly toward the boarding gate door, heavy with an invisible burden, some talking into cell phones or wearing headphones— Airline representatives on cue moved in from behind counters with walkie-talkies. She was still trying to gather her things back into her purse from the final security check. It had all felt like a gust of wind and she was bits of paper that went flying. Just last week she drove past what the future was supposed to be—the 1964 World’s Fair Globe—one world—futuristic, easy and benign as moving sidewalks that transported the weary. Her stomach was in a roil of twists. How complicated was the new millennium? On a personal level barely indistinguishable from the old, except for the heightened sense of sheer terror she now has at flying. How different is a plane from a missile anyway? Cargo. Human.
That day she was in the 40’s near 5th Ave and the morning sky had the perfect pitch of blue, autumnal and very warm. It was a beautiful day. First, she noticed people packed into bars and restaurants watching televisions— Why was she even in midtown? The latch on her bracelet had broken and she was just going to have it repaired. Then she heard the talk, saw the confused and quiet faces. She could see all the way up 5th—that was how clear and perfect the day was. And she saw the tower just collapse.
That first week she went with Mrs. Mermelstien to a Shiva house—the pile still burning. Those on the upper floors above the impact used their cell phones to call out. The few Orthodox men working that day in the towers called the Rabbi in Brooklyn, the main possek—he answered the most difficult questions concerning the laws of life and death. How had they formed the question—did they even need to speak the words? “Jump,” the Rabbi said, what else did he say to them? Well, he never spoke about those final conversations. They called their wives—those last details—where she could find the keys to the safety deposit box, the ethical will for the children.
The whole winter was bitter and complicated. People were sifting through toxic ash looking for bits of bone and teeth. Spring brought a little relief. A few weeks ago, when Julian had called, he had to leave a message. When she called him back the person that answered the phone said he was “out on the Island” for the weekend. It was not until the middle of the week that she actually spoke to him. At which point she was already worn thin, and after the train home from teaching her class; looking at her small white cartons of oily Chinese take out, she was sure she had no past and certainly no future. But then his voice—a warm velvet curtain of invitation. Did she leap up at the chance? No, she imagined graceful back flips of her body agile, supple.
“Sure I’d love to,” she said. She was so absorbed in the possibility of stepping out of own life even briefly that it hardly registered that Julian’s sister Cleo was getting married again. All Inez felt was the world once again had potential and would welcome her, if not with roaring cheers then with polite applause. The passage of decades was erased.
In graduate school when they were all still living in the area, Julian used to coax her out of her dreary basement apartment, the card table buried under a half finished, thesis on—what was it? Folk-tales, Gypsy melodies, Child Ballads. She drank frothy cups of cappuccino, ate flan with just a hint of amaretto—here kitty, kitty, come sweet pussycat, and she would stretch and rub against him. Did she purr? God she hoped not. Now it was so nice of him to invite her and of course it was all right if he brought a guest—his sister’s wedding, okay not his sister’s first time to the fair.
Last summer she felt finally, after ten years a life about to begin she and Nathan were looking for a house together. Not too late. She imagined strollers. Then he came home from a weeklong conference in Scotland, bitter and distant and covered with a strange rash. “Did your paper not go well,” she asked? “Maybe you need to see a Doctor.”
How did he put it? What had Nathan said, scratching his arm, that he was attracted to women, to some men, and just not to her? Uhm, attraction, a notion she turned over in mind as quickly as one turns her head to avert her eyes from a horrific car crash—a severed head rolling in the gutter. Two decades of therapy, ten of her life and he did not even feign contrition. He left to live with a 24-year-old graduate student, who had stayed after he presented his paper to ask some questions. Inez helped him pack— except for one photograph of Nathan together with his mother. That, she cut up and placed in bits into an ice tray filled with water, now pushed into the back of her freezer. Her mother had once implied that she was merely a courtesan or was it a cover?
Almost a year after Nathan decamped Julian called her out of the blue. He was in New York on some business and he wanted to “do” lunch. When she first told Julian that Nathan had left to move in with a 24-year-old, Julian reached over and touched the top of her hand. It was after all Julian who introduced her to Nathan. She remembered, Julian said that Nathan seemed to want the same things in life as she did. Even that day having lunch in a place that Julian picked because of its reputation for Vietnamese noodles, she saw people gravitated toward Julian; how many times was he given refills on a hardly sipped drink. Okay, she was teary and ragged, relating the whole story, and not looking like anyone to just strike up a conversation with, but was she invisible? Over the years she had heard that professionally, he was sought after. His intuition and knowledge on art and artifacts mattered, his keen eye had in fact made him almost rich, which he was to start with; but he did not lose any ground. Her own vision had gone blurry after Nathan left, maybe it had been dimming slowly all along. She had the mind numbing relentless repetition, work getting home to the shoebox apartment that was “only temporary” what was that, twenty years ago?
She could not even sum it up any more. And nobody ever asked her to. Food tasted like ash, colors drained out of objects. Exchanges became fraught, defensive. Was this age? Was Nathan the final blow? Her life, a dowager’s hump— weekends at home watching old movies. With friends and colleagues there were still parties, but they grew increasingly more infrequent and more detailed, everything stood for something else— orchid centerpieces, and complex seating arrangements—things needed to addressed, redressed, divorces, affairs, plain old bad feelings. She thought she would have it too in her hand. It no longer seemed to matter how graciously she had pressed through the period of baby showers and then Bar Mitzvahs, graduation parties. In place of the smoky illicit parties of college students trying to be badass, there were the occasional twenty-fifth anniversaries—white tablecloths with canvas umbrellas waving in the breeze.
Julian—they had tried—something. What was that about? Everybody was trying something with everybody else. Who knew? Back then things did not require explanations as they do now. All that clumsily fumbling in the dark or the light. Had they crossed a boundary that should have not been crossed? Had they taken it too far because they could? Or was it that she felt that just her proximity to him added a dimension to her that she did not have on her own, that she could never have on her own, that made her better, made her more? Briefly, even Julian’s petulant artsy crowd dressed in combat boots and go-go skirts treated her better. Then they tried it again. Another decade, tried it again.
Inez bought three magazines at the kiosk, breath mints, and a granola bar—she did not know if they even gave peanuts anymore on short flights. She wondered whether or not these would be taken from her at the final security. Her fellow travelers began to collect at the boarding door. For the most part they seemed ill-tempered, frazzled, a man in a navy blue business suit and a red tie sticking out from a side pocket elbowed his way to the front of the snaking line, a baby in an outfit with a large yellow sunflower bawled and sweated in his mothers arms. Why hadn’t she taken the train?
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check back tomorrow for part 2!]
All Knees Shall Bend And Every Tongue Shall Vow
Alainu Prayer/Issia 45.23
Voices rolled over the vast white and glass terminal, pinged into columns and were then cut short by utilitarian architecture and human bulk, boarding calls, squalling infants, announcements and safety instructions. From where she was standing next to a magazine rack Inez watched shows of easy emotions—oh my god I am so glad to see you—kind gestures of reaching down to lift another’s bags. As she moved deeper into the terminal past the gift and souvenir shops stocked with mugs and tee shirts what she saw were whole fat families in shorts and T-shirts, boisterous, mean-spirited and spiteful towards each other, slouching in flip-flops and shorts. How worn down everything felt, everyone looked.
That whole autumn and well into winter, she feared every cloud would let loose an acid rain that could melt bone. Images kept popping up like a jack in the box . . . the monkey thought it all was in fun—. Just when the merry music called you closer, lulled you: Boom. Suddenly somewhere the herd startled, changed direction and stampeded the fields where the women and their children tended the crop of sorghum. Upriver the villagers had taken sick—mysterious fevers that turn innards to gore soup. Someplace at every moment great suffering was occurring—horrible injustice fanned out like a deck of cards. She remembered her own mother’s moods and how she watched her face as she pushed back the images of jackbooted thugs goose-stepping in the town square; how she feared it would no doubt in time be right down 13th Avenue. “Mom, it is America” she would tell her. “All that was a long time ago, we are so safe that we’re bored stupid.” She knew her mother fought back the specters with small realities of meat on sale, upcoming weddings. Like a machete cutting back the jungle undergrowth, she wielded an imaginary blade and whacked back the python of her moods of their past.
Don’t even ask the question. What was the future? Snarling hellhounds moving in packs at the edge of the city.
Each day the newspapers and the military experts on television assured the jittery public that guilty parties would be found. The axis of evil was pushpins in maps. Reports said he had been sighted on a mountain trail; the best intelligence said he was holding up in a cave—dangerous mysterious terrain. He was a shape-shifter—video images were authenticated or dismissed—sinister forces at work with daggers, or box cutters. Detention centers were set up. Weapons grade plutonium moved by pack mule over borders that only existed on maps. Land mines were disguised as children’s toys.
Yes, lately the whole mood of things was different. Every time she left her apartment, she told herself, just a run to the corner market—2 peaches a croissant and home. Now, she repeats just a weekend, only a weekend.
She slid into the molded plastic chair and waited for her boarding call. Her fellow passengers began to move downstream to collect at the gate. She clutched two forms of photo id, and she arrived four hours prior to scheduled departure.
One of the first things she noticed was that a new breed of people had evolved and left the primordial broth. “Homeland Security” had recruited the entire population of the indifferent and the brutish to strip all the others down to their stocking feet, to confiscate, knitting needles from old ladies and plastic nunchucks from small children. She watched people trudge doggedly toward the boarding gate door, heavy with an invisible burden, some talking into cell phones or wearing headphones— Airline representatives on cue moved in from behind counters with walkie-talkies. She was still trying to gather her things back into her purse from the final security check. It had all felt like a gust of wind and she was bits of paper that went flying. Just last week she drove past what the future was supposed to be—the 1964 World’s Fair Globe—one world—futuristic, easy and benign as moving sidewalks that transported the weary. Her stomach was in a roil of twists. How complicated was the new millennium? On a personal level barely indistinguishable from the old, except for the heightened sense of sheer terror she now has at flying. How different is a plane from a missile anyway? Cargo. Human.
That day she was in the 40’s near 5th Ave and the morning sky had the perfect pitch of blue, autumnal and very warm. It was a beautiful day. First, she noticed people packed into bars and restaurants watching televisions— Why was she even in midtown? The latch on her bracelet had broken and she was just going to have it repaired. Then she heard the talk, saw the confused and quiet faces. She could see all the way up 5th—that was how clear and perfect the day was. And she saw the tower just collapse.
That first week she went with Mrs. Mermelstien to a Shiva house—the pile still burning. Those on the upper floors above the impact used their cell phones to call out. The few Orthodox men working that day in the towers called the Rabbi in Brooklyn, the main possek—he answered the most difficult questions concerning the laws of life and death. How had they formed the question—did they even need to speak the words? “Jump,” the Rabbi said, what else did he say to them? Well, he never spoke about those final conversations. They called their wives—those last details—where she could find the keys to the safety deposit box, the ethical will for the children.
The whole winter was bitter and complicated. People were sifting through toxic ash looking for bits of bone and teeth. Spring brought a little relief. A few weeks ago, when Julian had called, he had to leave a message. When she called him back the person that answered the phone said he was “out on the Island” for the weekend. It was not until the middle of the week that she actually spoke to him. At which point she was already worn thin, and after the train home from teaching her class; looking at her small white cartons of oily Chinese take out, she was sure she had no past and certainly no future. But then his voice—a warm velvet curtain of invitation. Did she leap up at the chance? No, she imagined graceful back flips of her body agile, supple.
“Sure I’d love to,” she said. She was so absorbed in the possibility of stepping out of own life even briefly that it hardly registered that Julian’s sister Cleo was getting married again. All Inez felt was the world once again had potential and would welcome her, if not with roaring cheers then with polite applause. The passage of decades was erased.
In graduate school when they were all still living in the area, Julian used to coax her out of her dreary basement apartment, the card table buried under a half finished, thesis on—what was it? Folk-tales, Gypsy melodies, Child Ballads. She drank frothy cups of cappuccino, ate flan with just a hint of amaretto—here kitty, kitty, come sweet pussycat, and she would stretch and rub against him. Did she purr? God she hoped not. Now it was so nice of him to invite her and of course it was all right if he brought a guest—his sister’s wedding, okay not his sister’s first time to the fair.
Last summer she felt finally, after ten years a life about to begin she and Nathan were looking for a house together. Not too late. She imagined strollers. Then he came home from a weeklong conference in Scotland, bitter and distant and covered with a strange rash. “Did your paper not go well,” she asked? “Maybe you need to see a Doctor.”
How did he put it? What had Nathan said, scratching his arm, that he was attracted to women, to some men, and just not to her? Uhm, attraction, a notion she turned over in mind as quickly as one turns her head to avert her eyes from a horrific car crash—a severed head rolling in the gutter. Two decades of therapy, ten of her life and he did not even feign contrition. He left to live with a 24-year-old graduate student, who had stayed after he presented his paper to ask some questions. Inez helped him pack— except for one photograph of Nathan together with his mother. That, she cut up and placed in bits into an ice tray filled with water, now pushed into the back of her freezer. Her mother had once implied that she was merely a courtesan or was it a cover?
Almost a year after Nathan decamped Julian called her out of the blue. He was in New York on some business and he wanted to “do” lunch. When she first told Julian that Nathan had left to move in with a 24-year-old, Julian reached over and touched the top of her hand. It was after all Julian who introduced her to Nathan. She remembered, Julian said that Nathan seemed to want the same things in life as she did. Even that day having lunch in a place that Julian picked because of its reputation for Vietnamese noodles, she saw people gravitated toward Julian; how many times was he given refills on a hardly sipped drink. Okay, she was teary and ragged, relating the whole story, and not looking like anyone to just strike up a conversation with, but was she invisible? Over the years she had heard that professionally, he was sought after. His intuition and knowledge on art and artifacts mattered, his keen eye had in fact made him almost rich, which he was to start with; but he did not lose any ground. Her own vision had gone blurry after Nathan left, maybe it had been dimming slowly all along. She had the mind numbing relentless repetition, work getting home to the shoebox apartment that was “only temporary” what was that, twenty years ago?
She could not even sum it up any more. And nobody ever asked her to. Food tasted like ash, colors drained out of objects. Exchanges became fraught, defensive. Was this age? Was Nathan the final blow? Her life, a dowager’s hump— weekends at home watching old movies. With friends and colleagues there were still parties, but they grew increasingly more infrequent and more detailed, everything stood for something else— orchid centerpieces, and complex seating arrangements—things needed to addressed, redressed, divorces, affairs, plain old bad feelings. She thought she would have it too in her hand. It no longer seemed to matter how graciously she had pressed through the period of baby showers and then Bar Mitzvahs, graduation parties. In place of the smoky illicit parties of college students trying to be badass, there were the occasional twenty-fifth anniversaries—white tablecloths with canvas umbrellas waving in the breeze.
Julian—they had tried—something. What was that about? Everybody was trying something with everybody else. Who knew? Back then things did not require explanations as they do now. All that clumsily fumbling in the dark or the light. Had they crossed a boundary that should have not been crossed? Had they taken it too far because they could? Or was it that she felt that just her proximity to him added a dimension to her that she did not have on her own, that she could never have on her own, that made her better, made her more? Briefly, even Julian’s petulant artsy crowd dressed in combat boots and go-go skirts treated her better. Then they tried it again. Another decade, tried it again.
Inez bought three magazines at the kiosk, breath mints, and a granola bar—she did not know if they even gave peanuts anymore on short flights. She wondered whether or not these would be taken from her at the final security. Her fellow travelers began to collect at the boarding door. For the most part they seemed ill-tempered, frazzled, a man in a navy blue business suit and a red tie sticking out from a side pocket elbowed his way to the front of the snaking line, a baby in an outfit with a large yellow sunflower bawled and sweated in his mothers arms. Why hadn’t she taken the train?
B.N.
© 2010
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 3)
[Here's the conclusion of B.N.'s story, Still Life with Girl]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 3)
By the time the grandmother arrived the house was strewn with trash. They had eaten raw rice from a box and pasta. They drank maple syrup. The grandmother screamed the mother’s name through the house—“Aliza, she yelled the stairs and down into the basement. The mother was gone. This was not the first scandal to hit the Village of Ramapo. There had been the scandal about kosher chicken, one about meat and an entire dairy had been closed by the department of agriculture. There were scandals that unraveled from 47th street all the way up the Turnpike and the Garden State. There were the brothers that sold the same lot to five people and then decamped to Jerusalem. This was different.
On the day the grandmother went to meet the principal she aimed to be prepared. She wore a sky blue dress with a belt that matched, a hat with bright red plastic cherries and a blue band. As support her girlhood friend Rebbitzin Gruner accompanied her, the one who supplied school clothes and shoes, who had some weight in the community. And who also had if needed, a check book and her husband’s word that tuition would be paid. She came fully made up, with a wicker handbag and dressed after all not to plead and not to offer an explanation, because she had none, but rather to attempt to assure the girl a place. Seated in the inner office the first thing the principle said to the grandmother was that he knew for a fact that Mrs. Leiber was in Canada under the care of professionals, resting and making a fine progress and he had no reason to not expect her to return to her family soon. This was not just merely a piece of information passed from one to another in casual conversation, it was an opportunity, a chance, that in fact she had no chance of grasping onto. The grandmother understood this and felt that forgiveness was a wave that hit the shore and quickly went back out to sea. Finaly with no tone of regret he said the truth was many people knew the story and he had other children to protect and donors to consider.
The mother would call sometimes and demand things—her books, a silver sugar bowl, a worn carpet. The grandmother cleaned the house and parsed through the children. When she called the grandmother said that she did not know where the things were. The boy sent to other relatives with money who could raise and educate a boy and the girl and baby stay with grandmother. They moved out of the house into a small apartment closer to stores and a new school that would become one of many. The grandmother made friends with the neighbors in the new neighborhood. She graciously accepted their cooked dishes the week the moved in, the invitations that followed and even the shared duties of watching children play. The grandmother’s affiliation with Mrs. Gruner also carried freight along with curiosity. Her willingness to converse in Yiddish and to hem a dress here and pants there were well appreciated. The women admired the grandmother’s eye for decorating, for adding small details to a room, a vase, a golden and blue throw pillow. They admired her upright stance, the fact that each step was measured. The truth was they still eyed the girl at a distance, unsure what she knew, what she had seen, how much she understood. And they after all had their own children to protect.
Once the grandmother took the girl to visit the mother in a house on a lake and there was a small row boat turned upside down next to a small dock. They walked from the road where the taxi had left them off up a gravel and dirt path, the whole time the grandmother saying, “ How do you find such a place? Who could find such a place.” The girl sat on a lumpy torn couch with her feet dangling across from the mother in a captain’s chair that she recognized. The mother did not offer anything to eat or drink and did not ask her about school. The mother just sat and gave the girl a long hard look. There was another woman there, older than the mother and she stood behind the mother’s chair. The grandmother stood with her back to them staring out a window that looked on to the lake—she said something about the view. When they left the grandmother turned for an instant, just outside the turn and was about to say, “Please Aliza, please.” But before she could speak the mother looked at her and said “don’t start.” And closed the door.
Invariably they settled into a routine—a poorly mended rag doll family, flopping awkwardly through town. Those times when the girl offered that she had not been invited to yet another one of her classmates parties, and had been crossed off every possible list real and imagined, and not counted in the tight social tally the grandmother would nod. She did not offer to comfort or compensation by way of an alternative treat, never saying they would do something themselves that would be just as fun. Except once the grandmother drew a long breath. Just then girl wanted to say she hates this town, these people, having to be alone, but she knew if she said that it would sound to like her mother who they never mentioned and just the mere hint of startled the grandmother. By this point she had matured enough to understand the pairings required in this life. She could see the line of demarcation drawn, that outer distance, the tree line half way up the mountain, an off limits boundary where nothing could grow, where her mother stood, both hands blowing mock kisses. The opportunity for return receded into the distance growing smaller and smaller until it was a faint speck. It was that breath taken from the air pocket.
Nobody could see the whole, some reactions expected, predictable, others a variable. How far the tale traveled and how distorted it may have become and how crudely it may have been interpreted and internalized were random. By that time the world had not changed and the grandmother bought her a new outfit for the holidays. It was a white skirt with orange and brown stripes and a matching brown button-down shirt with a collar. The entire neighborhood had the sukkas out decorated with plastic grapes and construction paper chains. Across the street from their apartment was a boy’s Yeshiva. A perfectly square building with a flat roof, a brick flash cube had the largest succah in the parking lot. The girl never crossed the street to the school’s side except this once when two boys singled to her and shouted in Yiddish, “ve koift min fish?” She in fact knew where the fish market was and she crossed the street to point them in the direction. The parking lot was empty, the school out for the holiday. It seemed odd that boys would be sent to buy fish so late in the afternoon and in the middle of the vacation week. These thoughts just skimmed across the surface of her mind. They both wore the identical uniform of black pants and white button shirts, with stiff black shoes. One had his shirttails out and bright red hair. When she came closer she saw that one was loosening his belt and had his hand in the top of his white underwear and was pulling. At first the girl though he was retarded, and she was about to tell him kindly but firmly that he can’t undress in public and to go home. Before she could speak they pulled her behind the school.
What he was holding had a slightly different complexion than the boy’s pale frecked face, darker, more the color of lips. One of them circled around her and somehow maneuvered her up against a heavy metal door. When they pushed on her shoulders she slumped to the pavement, with her back against the door. The redheaded boy’s pants were around his ankles and he landed on top of her and pushed her new sweater up to clear a space on her exposed stomach. Nisht z’vishen der baineh “Not between the legs” the other boy ordered and kept speaking in imperatives hurried speech that she could not understand, firing off commands. The redheaded one held her arms back and then lunging back and forth against her exposed stomach until she heard a faint grunt and that sigh. On her stomach he left something wet and milky and she suddenly imagined it to be puss from a wound, a terrible disease, a sickness that was killing him and now her. After, he stood up. Looked straight at her, and said in perfect English. “Tell your mother.” How could she explain it? The skirt for the holiday was ruined from the dirt on the ground and all the leaves that had collected near the door were all over her, all over her.
B.N.
© 2010
On the day the grandmother went to meet the principal she aimed to be prepared. She wore a sky blue dress with a belt that matched, a hat with bright red plastic cherries and a blue band. As support her girlhood friend Rebbitzin Gruner accompanied her, the one who supplied school clothes and shoes, who had some weight in the community. And who also had if needed, a check book and her husband’s word that tuition would be paid. She came fully made up, with a wicker handbag and dressed after all not to plead and not to offer an explanation, because she had none, but rather to attempt to assure the girl a place. Seated in the inner office the first thing the principle said to the grandmother was that he knew for a fact that Mrs. Leiber was in Canada under the care of professionals, resting and making a fine progress and he had no reason to not expect her to return to her family soon. This was not just merely a piece of information passed from one to another in casual conversation, it was an opportunity, a chance, that in fact she had no chance of grasping onto. The grandmother understood this and felt that forgiveness was a wave that hit the shore and quickly went back out to sea. Finaly with no tone of regret he said the truth was many people knew the story and he had other children to protect and donors to consider.
The mother would call sometimes and demand things—her books, a silver sugar bowl, a worn carpet. The grandmother cleaned the house and parsed through the children. When she called the grandmother said that she did not know where the things were. The boy sent to other relatives with money who could raise and educate a boy and the girl and baby stay with grandmother. They moved out of the house into a small apartment closer to stores and a new school that would become one of many. The grandmother made friends with the neighbors in the new neighborhood. She graciously accepted their cooked dishes the week the moved in, the invitations that followed and even the shared duties of watching children play. The grandmother’s affiliation with Mrs. Gruner also carried freight along with curiosity. Her willingness to converse in Yiddish and to hem a dress here and pants there were well appreciated. The women admired the grandmother’s eye for decorating, for adding small details to a room, a vase, a golden and blue throw pillow. They admired her upright stance, the fact that each step was measured. The truth was they still eyed the girl at a distance, unsure what she knew, what she had seen, how much she understood. And they after all had their own children to protect.
Once the grandmother took the girl to visit the mother in a house on a lake and there was a small row boat turned upside down next to a small dock. They walked from the road where the taxi had left them off up a gravel and dirt path, the whole time the grandmother saying, “ How do you find such a place? Who could find such a place.” The girl sat on a lumpy torn couch with her feet dangling across from the mother in a captain’s chair that she recognized. The mother did not offer anything to eat or drink and did not ask her about school. The mother just sat and gave the girl a long hard look. There was another woman there, older than the mother and she stood behind the mother’s chair. The grandmother stood with her back to them staring out a window that looked on to the lake—she said something about the view. When they left the grandmother turned for an instant, just outside the turn and was about to say, “Please Aliza, please.” But before she could speak the mother looked at her and said “don’t start.” And closed the door.
Invariably they settled into a routine—a poorly mended rag doll family, flopping awkwardly through town. Those times when the girl offered that she had not been invited to yet another one of her classmates parties, and had been crossed off every possible list real and imagined, and not counted in the tight social tally the grandmother would nod. She did not offer to comfort or compensation by way of an alternative treat, never saying they would do something themselves that would be just as fun. Except once the grandmother drew a long breath. Just then girl wanted to say she hates this town, these people, having to be alone, but she knew if she said that it would sound to like her mother who they never mentioned and just the mere hint of startled the grandmother. By this point she had matured enough to understand the pairings required in this life. She could see the line of demarcation drawn, that outer distance, the tree line half way up the mountain, an off limits boundary where nothing could grow, where her mother stood, both hands blowing mock kisses. The opportunity for return receded into the distance growing smaller and smaller until it was a faint speck. It was that breath taken from the air pocket.
Nobody could see the whole, some reactions expected, predictable, others a variable. How far the tale traveled and how distorted it may have become and how crudely it may have been interpreted and internalized were random. By that time the world had not changed and the grandmother bought her a new outfit for the holidays. It was a white skirt with orange and brown stripes and a matching brown button-down shirt with a collar. The entire neighborhood had the sukkas out decorated with plastic grapes and construction paper chains. Across the street from their apartment was a boy’s Yeshiva. A perfectly square building with a flat roof, a brick flash cube had the largest succah in the parking lot. The girl never crossed the street to the school’s side except this once when two boys singled to her and shouted in Yiddish, “ve koift min fish?” She in fact knew where the fish market was and she crossed the street to point them in the direction. The parking lot was empty, the school out for the holiday. It seemed odd that boys would be sent to buy fish so late in the afternoon and in the middle of the vacation week. These thoughts just skimmed across the surface of her mind. They both wore the identical uniform of black pants and white button shirts, with stiff black shoes. One had his shirttails out and bright red hair. When she came closer she saw that one was loosening his belt and had his hand in the top of his white underwear and was pulling. At first the girl though he was retarded, and she was about to tell him kindly but firmly that he can’t undress in public and to go home. Before she could speak they pulled her behind the school.
What he was holding had a slightly different complexion than the boy’s pale frecked face, darker, more the color of lips. One of them circled around her and somehow maneuvered her up against a heavy metal door. When they pushed on her shoulders she slumped to the pavement, with her back against the door. The redheaded boy’s pants were around his ankles and he landed on top of her and pushed her new sweater up to clear a space on her exposed stomach. Nisht z’vishen der baineh “Not between the legs” the other boy ordered and kept speaking in imperatives hurried speech that she could not understand, firing off commands. The redheaded one held her arms back and then lunging back and forth against her exposed stomach until she heard a faint grunt and that sigh. On her stomach he left something wet and milky and she suddenly imagined it to be puss from a wound, a terrible disease, a sickness that was killing him and now her. After, he stood up. Looked straight at her, and said in perfect English. “Tell your mother.” How could she explain it? The skirt for the holiday was ruined from the dirt on the ground and all the leaves that had collected near the door were all over her, all over her.
B.N.
© 2010
If you'd like to read more poetry & fiction by B.N., you can search the label B.N. writing; you can also read an interview with her here.
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 2)
[Here's Part 2 of B.N.'s story Still Life, with Girl]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 2)
The world separates as neatly as a sheet torn from the top of a tablet. There are good people and bad people. Nixon is bad, the mother says. Vietnam is bad. Martin Luther King was good, he was shot. The FBI reads peoples’ mail, they have lists, the mother is sure she is on a list and her mail is read. Whenever a piece of mail had the slightest crease the mother held it to the light, convinced that it had been opened, read, resealed by an entire team of government underlings hunched over an expansive dark wood conference table. The people in this small community are bad, they are, she did not even hate to say it, little petty Jews. They are not on a list. The mother comes from a big city, several in fact, and studied at the Sorbonne, she speaks languages. Not Yiddish, that is not a language, more of a vulgarity. Even though nothing in the house matches or is a set such that the neighbors at first asked when the furniture would be arriving she has silver flatware and trays and a sterling tea set and candlesticks as if to prove her lineage. She is elegant but that is not important. The mind is important. The mother has no mother or father and no brothers or sisters. Only a mother-in-law that she calls my soon to be former mother-in-law. She is waiting for peoples’ minds to open in new ways as her’s had. Then she will assume her rightful place wearing the crimson mantle. She reminds the girl of this often. She reads and shakes her head. They get the Village Voice and New York Times. Stonewall was amazing. Then she calls a friend that comes over. More friends come, they drive up from the city and hold poetry readings in the play- room. Sometimes they bring food, strange gooey concoctions from Chinatown, bits of red floating in a brown sauce eaten with black lacquered chop sticks. They sit on the counters in the kitchen with legs dangling or Indian style on the floor using cups for ash trays. They blast music and open windows Like a memorized dialogue the girl hears about Jacques Brel and Lotta Lenya and living in Greenwich Village.
“Do you see what I have going on here? “ the mother says to her friends.
“You drove in, did you see them, it is like an ant hill, and they don’t even speak English, It is a nightmare…. Well I made one friend” And with that the mother would flop into a chair and pick at the stuffing leaking from a tear in the upholstery.
The mother savored hating the community, delicacies served up in Waterford bowls, relished (just a small bite) hating Chassidim, and without expanding on it—just plain hated the grandparents and the father and maybe the children. Not the littlest baby named Freda, which means happy. The mother refused to call the baby by her name and cooed to her in French. The baby smiles and smiles a world of smiles, soap bubbles of smiles.
What sent it all careening out of control and over the cliff was the day at the dress store on Rt 59. The mother went in and bought Mrs. Leiber crinolines and petticoats. In fact after looking through the racks, she took the whole new Fall line, piled them on the counter told the lady at the cash register to have them delivered to Mrs. Leiber, as a gift. She then asked for a card to enclose. The lady at the counter looked over the huge pile at the mother with an expression of confusion. “These aren’t your size.” The woman said. The girl recognized her as the mother of a classmate. A comet streaking past the mother flashed her a fierce and haughty look. “I told you to pack them and deliver them, and if you must know they are a gift of love for my lover. So nosy, why are you so nosy” It will be this look that caused the woman at the counter to recoil. To turn instantly away from the grey cash register and, to reach for the phone the moment the door closed behind the mother. The woman at the counter made three well-placed calls. She calls the Rav in the shul off Rt. 45, she calls the principal of the school, who was the brother of the Rabbi of the shul off Rt 45, she calls her own husband to come and pick her up—right away.
In the car the mother slaps the girl across the face, even though the girl has said nothing. The mother drives the girl home and leaves her at the end of the driveway and then turns the car around. The girl watches as the car snakes back down Viola Rd. The men are out walking with the boys, the street begins to fill. The girl runs into the house. There is no mother, no father. The babies are flushed from screaming and their hair is matted with sweat and dirt to their heads. The girl takes a bag of frozen peas and sprinkles it into the cribs for the babies to pick up and eat. By this point they were greedy and smelled. She remembers that Freda needs a bottle, that she props up for her by wedging it between the crib slats—like a water bottle in a gerbil cage. They pull and strained against being lifted. There are no diapers. The mother, a rogue pigeon escaped from the cote, did not return. The girl ate raw meat because she has been warned never to go near the stove with her long hair. The first few days the girl imagined that they were like a land-locked Robinson Crusoe, on an adventure. She felt safe in the house during the day, at night each tap of a branch against a window sent ribbons of fear through her. After a few days, the days got bad too.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the final installment!]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 2)
The world separates as neatly as a sheet torn from the top of a tablet. There are good people and bad people. Nixon is bad, the mother says. Vietnam is bad. Martin Luther King was good, he was shot. The FBI reads peoples’ mail, they have lists, the mother is sure she is on a list and her mail is read. Whenever a piece of mail had the slightest crease the mother held it to the light, convinced that it had been opened, read, resealed by an entire team of government underlings hunched over an expansive dark wood conference table. The people in this small community are bad, they are, she did not even hate to say it, little petty Jews. They are not on a list. The mother comes from a big city, several in fact, and studied at the Sorbonne, she speaks languages. Not Yiddish, that is not a language, more of a vulgarity. Even though nothing in the house matches or is a set such that the neighbors at first asked when the furniture would be arriving she has silver flatware and trays and a sterling tea set and candlesticks as if to prove her lineage. She is elegant but that is not important. The mind is important. The mother has no mother or father and no brothers or sisters. Only a mother-in-law that she calls my soon to be former mother-in-law. She is waiting for peoples’ minds to open in new ways as her’s had. Then she will assume her rightful place wearing the crimson mantle. She reminds the girl of this often. She reads and shakes her head. They get the Village Voice and New York Times. Stonewall was amazing. Then she calls a friend that comes over. More friends come, they drive up from the city and hold poetry readings in the play- room. Sometimes they bring food, strange gooey concoctions from Chinatown, bits of red floating in a brown sauce eaten with black lacquered chop sticks. They sit on the counters in the kitchen with legs dangling or Indian style on the floor using cups for ash trays. They blast music and open windows Like a memorized dialogue the girl hears about Jacques Brel and Lotta Lenya and living in Greenwich Village.
“Do you see what I have going on here? “ the mother says to her friends.
“You drove in, did you see them, it is like an ant hill, and they don’t even speak English, It is a nightmare…. Well I made one friend” And with that the mother would flop into a chair and pick at the stuffing leaking from a tear in the upholstery.
The mother savored hating the community, delicacies served up in Waterford bowls, relished (just a small bite) hating Chassidim, and without expanding on it—just plain hated the grandparents and the father and maybe the children. Not the littlest baby named Freda, which means happy. The mother refused to call the baby by her name and cooed to her in French. The baby smiles and smiles a world of smiles, soap bubbles of smiles.
What sent it all careening out of control and over the cliff was the day at the dress store on Rt 59. The mother went in and bought Mrs. Leiber crinolines and petticoats. In fact after looking through the racks, she took the whole new Fall line, piled them on the counter told the lady at the cash register to have them delivered to Mrs. Leiber, as a gift. She then asked for a card to enclose. The lady at the counter looked over the huge pile at the mother with an expression of confusion. “These aren’t your size.” The woman said. The girl recognized her as the mother of a classmate. A comet streaking past the mother flashed her a fierce and haughty look. “I told you to pack them and deliver them, and if you must know they are a gift of love for my lover. So nosy, why are you so nosy” It will be this look that caused the woman at the counter to recoil. To turn instantly away from the grey cash register and, to reach for the phone the moment the door closed behind the mother. The woman at the counter made three well-placed calls. She calls the Rav in the shul off Rt. 45, she calls the principal of the school, who was the brother of the Rabbi of the shul off Rt 45, she calls her own husband to come and pick her up—right away.
In the car the mother slaps the girl across the face, even though the girl has said nothing. The mother drives the girl home and leaves her at the end of the driveway and then turns the car around. The girl watches as the car snakes back down Viola Rd. The men are out walking with the boys, the street begins to fill. The girl runs into the house. There is no mother, no father. The babies are flushed from screaming and their hair is matted with sweat and dirt to their heads. The girl takes a bag of frozen peas and sprinkles it into the cribs for the babies to pick up and eat. By this point they were greedy and smelled. She remembers that Freda needs a bottle, that she props up for her by wedging it between the crib slats—like a water bottle in a gerbil cage. They pull and strained against being lifted. There are no diapers. The mother, a rogue pigeon escaped from the cote, did not return. The girl ate raw meat because she has been warned never to go near the stove with her long hair. The first few days the girl imagined that they were like a land-locked Robinson Crusoe, on an adventure. She felt safe in the house during the day, at night each tap of a branch against a window sent ribbons of fear through her. After a few days, the days got bad too.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the final installment!]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 1)
[Over the next three days we'll be serializing B.N.'s story Still Life with Girl. It's a very powerful piece of writing that I'm proud to have appear on this blog.]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL
It was as if they were in a submarine and the air lock had been breached. When the water rushed in, each hoped for an air pocket to keep them alive. Nothing more. The truth, the family was different especially the mother, and as such they were approached with caution and viewed as suspect by their neighbors. She wore her hair long uncovered and loose, a mane of the dark brown, that would always catch the slightest breeze and cause her to toss her head back and with one hand sweep the hair away from her face. Other married woman wore their hair under a wig or covered by a scarf. Such are the requirements of Orthodox women in communities and most women meet these requirements at least in part.
Suburban conformity spread into the rural, a mediocre idea that grew. The remains of an orchard that had sustained generations of landowning, hardworking Gentiles reduced to an apple tree in every other front yard. The house a remnant—a moss green caricature slanted at the roof, leaned against underbrush and overgrown trees, an inlet of neglect. Twice removed from the newer mirror image split-levels that flanked it on either side.
Inside, thumbtacked or taped to the walls were posters from distant farmer’s markets, Frank Stella exhibitions and quaint products, elixirs not sold for half a century, if ever. Throughout the house stacks of books created an obstacle course, so moving from room to room had to be done with care. The furniture mismatched and quirky, at the tables, chairs were unpredictable, some were whole, others are not, like lame animals allowed to remain out of kindness. A slight shudder shifted all of them, like the seismic plates, under the crust of the earth, imperceptible at first, save a slight trembling of a glass of water at the bedside—a fault line that ran down the center of their lives. It was more than the chafing between assimilated and unassimilated, more than a value placed on secular humanism and the possibility of world citizens. The mother asserted that she was educated and cultured and as if one thing followed from the other, showed little interest, in the color or length of curtains or in the price of eggs or in the latest trends in child rearing. She told this to the girl often. She would not interact with the neighbors and had turned down invitations so often that they stopped.
In contrast, the other mothers watched children play in tight yards and talked to each other. They shared ingredients and knew each others’ anguish at every toy stuffed inquisitively down the toilets. They exchanged easy bright smiles. Yet nothing humbled her, not the initial warmth at door, not the meals sent over when they first moved in, not the offers to share in a car pool. Aliza Ahronson Berg would not go and join them. She had not lowered herself to that. She would not even give them a second glance when she backed the car (like a bat out of hell) out of the driveway getting out to get the mail dressed in a fringed brown leather jacket and peasant skirt with mauve ribbons tied in little bows and stitched around the hem line.
Long afternoons they sat inside, the mother read poetry and advised the girl to have a critical mind. She repeated lines from poems—“ Do I dare to eat a peach” or “ I have measure my life in coffee spoons.” Wisps of wordy smoke. After she read she looked up and directly at the girl waiting for some mysterious response. A fixed gaze. Her eyes implored the girl—say something, say something, you dimwit.
Mrs. Failkoff said today that there was a giant hanging on Noach’s ark,” the girl offered because it was what she was thinking about, since it had just started to rain.
“And they pay her a salary for this?” the mother said.
There were multi-colored maps of the world hung on walls and she is told they are in the world. Lands conquered and claimed. Independence fought for and won. Maps prove the world has changed, borders change when the world changes and then the maps change. Taped to the fridge was a picture of the President under which it said “would you buy a used car from this man?” Alongside it were pictures of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.
Aliza Ahronson Berg dabbled in domestic trickery and meals were a whole other kettle of fish, sometimes a whole dinner of artichokes or chocolate sandwiches. With an emotion stronger than any ordinary envy the girl wanted, longed for what she had seen others have on their plates for meals, she would ask for mixed canned or frozen vegetables, a confetti of color, or even meat with a sauce, or a soft white bread sandwich. Once the mother agreed after the girl hoarded the frozen vegetables in the back of the freezer. She attended school with some of the other girls on the street. A small worn to the bone school with dingy ceiling tiles that hung slack. The girl often late or not there at all. When she was there, most of the teachers overlooked her, one openly objected and one was nice and let her sit beside the big desk. She watched the other girls the way she might have watched fish sliding behind glass in a aquarium. The mother did not ask her about school and did not look up when she pushed the mimeograph worksheets under her nose, did not react as she repeated something the teacher said.
The girl could walk home from school or take the bus. Most days she walked as it eliminated the seat dilemma. The bus was a complex social situation, based on family, older siblings, cousins and what a father did. She would just as well walk herself over the railroad tracks and past the store with takeout chickens turning on a spit in the window. Even the newest stores still with Grand Opening Sale hung in the window already looked ratty. When the long driveway snaked at the pine tree the girl would cut across the yard to the back kitchen door next to the bay window. Always through the ice lace on the pane she could decipher the mood she was about to enter. Dirty dishes on the table meant nothing, a book open and out signaled the mother had gotten out of bed and moved through the house.
It was March; there were still some patches of snow on the ground and the lawn pitted with small pools of melted brown broth. Through the window she saw them both standing in front of the white refrigerator. She recognized Mrs. Leiber from the library. Her mother’s hand around Mrs. Leiber’s upper arm and the other plunged, splayed fingers into her hair, their lips touching and Mrs. Leiber’s head tilled back as if she was looking up but her eyes were closed. Mrs. Leiber’s sheital, not just a wig but a stylized blond affair with outward turned curls on either side, was not on her head and she was dressed in the mother’s blue and white striped robe and stood barefoot.
When she opened the door from the entranceway she heard them a Morse code of sighs. Although she could only intuit it on the most general level—each signaling the way the girl’s life would change. “ I’m so wet.” Mrs. Leiber said before she noticed the girl standing there. These sighs, the sound that rose over the hum of the refrigerator would replay in her mind over and over and would precede ten thousand harsh stares in school, on the street, in stores. These, notes of human music that would follow the girl escorted out of schools that had previously made a place for her. Each time she carried all the contents of her desk and her coat. As a principle would drive her silently home. Each time she knew she would never see that school or those teachers again. A scene repeated itself with some regularity. That day Mrs. Leiber fled the kitchen and then reemerged fully dressed and sprinted out the back door. “She’ll be back.” The mother said as she closed the screen door after her.
She was the oldest, the other two were babies—one could walk with a tipsy gait, the other did not even sit up and only took a bottle. They each mostly slept dressed only in an undershirt and diaper. They never went and there was neither stroller or carriage. They both always smell funny like rusty nails. The mother wanted to go to a protest, she said that they would write a lawyer’s number on their arm with a ball point in case the cops arrested them.
The mother’s mood lightened, she put combs in her hair like a Spanish dancer and said, pointing to a map, “The world is changing and we will be part of it.” She did a little dance around the dining room adjusting the volume to Joan Baez on the record player: "you got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself, ain’t nobody here can walk it for you, you got walk by yourself…” each chord loosening the knots in the coarse ropes of conventionality.
Men left a footprint on the moon and in the summer they closed Rt 17 and the New York State Throughway because of Woodstock, the counter culture just a few miles away, and about to knock on the door. About to usher in a new value system. The mother listened intently to the music like at the festival. Sad plaintive folk songs about love and loss, louder rebellious protest songs about war and death, and songs about taking, smoking or drinking enough of whatever that anything yelled at the top of the lungs sounded worthwhile.
Mrs.Leiber always walked home down Viola Rd, passed the twisted rows of apple trees on either side and crossed 306 to the intersection passing over the invisible boundary into the area where the women wear small pillbox hats over their sheital, where English was only spoken by outsiders. The style of her dress was such that she never looked disheveled, smart European suits favor by the wealthy Chassidic women, crisp lapels on the jacket, a mid-calf skirt of the same material and her wig frozen into style. She returned to her children, to the maid, to the cooked foods in the kitchen. Mrs. Leiber spoke German with her mother, sometimes French. They both spoke many languages and lived in other countries.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the next installment!]
STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL
It was as if they were in a submarine and the air lock had been breached. When the water rushed in, each hoped for an air pocket to keep them alive. Nothing more. The truth, the family was different especially the mother, and as such they were approached with caution and viewed as suspect by their neighbors. She wore her hair long uncovered and loose, a mane of the dark brown, that would always catch the slightest breeze and cause her to toss her head back and with one hand sweep the hair away from her face. Other married woman wore their hair under a wig or covered by a scarf. Such are the requirements of Orthodox women in communities and most women meet these requirements at least in part.
Suburban conformity spread into the rural, a mediocre idea that grew. The remains of an orchard that had sustained generations of landowning, hardworking Gentiles reduced to an apple tree in every other front yard. The house a remnant—a moss green caricature slanted at the roof, leaned against underbrush and overgrown trees, an inlet of neglect. Twice removed from the newer mirror image split-levels that flanked it on either side.
Inside, thumbtacked or taped to the walls were posters from distant farmer’s markets, Frank Stella exhibitions and quaint products, elixirs not sold for half a century, if ever. Throughout the house stacks of books created an obstacle course, so moving from room to room had to be done with care. The furniture mismatched and quirky, at the tables, chairs were unpredictable, some were whole, others are not, like lame animals allowed to remain out of kindness. A slight shudder shifted all of them, like the seismic plates, under the crust of the earth, imperceptible at first, save a slight trembling of a glass of water at the bedside—a fault line that ran down the center of their lives. It was more than the chafing between assimilated and unassimilated, more than a value placed on secular humanism and the possibility of world citizens. The mother asserted that she was educated and cultured and as if one thing followed from the other, showed little interest, in the color or length of curtains or in the price of eggs or in the latest trends in child rearing. She told this to the girl often. She would not interact with the neighbors and had turned down invitations so often that they stopped.
In contrast, the other mothers watched children play in tight yards and talked to each other. They shared ingredients and knew each others’ anguish at every toy stuffed inquisitively down the toilets. They exchanged easy bright smiles. Yet nothing humbled her, not the initial warmth at door, not the meals sent over when they first moved in, not the offers to share in a car pool. Aliza Ahronson Berg would not go and join them. She had not lowered herself to that. She would not even give them a second glance when she backed the car (like a bat out of hell) out of the driveway getting out to get the mail dressed in a fringed brown leather jacket and peasant skirt with mauve ribbons tied in little bows and stitched around the hem line.
Long afternoons they sat inside, the mother read poetry and advised the girl to have a critical mind. She repeated lines from poems—“ Do I dare to eat a peach” or “ I have measure my life in coffee spoons.” Wisps of wordy smoke. After she read she looked up and directly at the girl waiting for some mysterious response. A fixed gaze. Her eyes implored the girl—say something, say something, you dimwit.
Mrs. Failkoff said today that there was a giant hanging on Noach’s ark,” the girl offered because it was what she was thinking about, since it had just started to rain.
“And they pay her a salary for this?” the mother said.
There were multi-colored maps of the world hung on walls and she is told they are in the world. Lands conquered and claimed. Independence fought for and won. Maps prove the world has changed, borders change when the world changes and then the maps change. Taped to the fridge was a picture of the President under which it said “would you buy a used car from this man?” Alongside it were pictures of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.
Aliza Ahronson Berg dabbled in domestic trickery and meals were a whole other kettle of fish, sometimes a whole dinner of artichokes or chocolate sandwiches. With an emotion stronger than any ordinary envy the girl wanted, longed for what she had seen others have on their plates for meals, she would ask for mixed canned or frozen vegetables, a confetti of color, or even meat with a sauce, or a soft white bread sandwich. Once the mother agreed after the girl hoarded the frozen vegetables in the back of the freezer. She attended school with some of the other girls on the street. A small worn to the bone school with dingy ceiling tiles that hung slack. The girl often late or not there at all. When she was there, most of the teachers overlooked her, one openly objected and one was nice and let her sit beside the big desk. She watched the other girls the way she might have watched fish sliding behind glass in a aquarium. The mother did not ask her about school and did not look up when she pushed the mimeograph worksheets under her nose, did not react as she repeated something the teacher said.
The girl could walk home from school or take the bus. Most days she walked as it eliminated the seat dilemma. The bus was a complex social situation, based on family, older siblings, cousins and what a father did. She would just as well walk herself over the railroad tracks and past the store with takeout chickens turning on a spit in the window. Even the newest stores still with Grand Opening Sale hung in the window already looked ratty. When the long driveway snaked at the pine tree the girl would cut across the yard to the back kitchen door next to the bay window. Always through the ice lace on the pane she could decipher the mood she was about to enter. Dirty dishes on the table meant nothing, a book open and out signaled the mother had gotten out of bed and moved through the house.
It was March; there were still some patches of snow on the ground and the lawn pitted with small pools of melted brown broth. Through the window she saw them both standing in front of the white refrigerator. She recognized Mrs. Leiber from the library. Her mother’s hand around Mrs. Leiber’s upper arm and the other plunged, splayed fingers into her hair, their lips touching and Mrs. Leiber’s head tilled back as if she was looking up but her eyes were closed. Mrs. Leiber’s sheital, not just a wig but a stylized blond affair with outward turned curls on either side, was not on her head and she was dressed in the mother’s blue and white striped robe and stood barefoot.
When she opened the door from the entranceway she heard them a Morse code of sighs. Although she could only intuit it on the most general level—each signaling the way the girl’s life would change. “ I’m so wet.” Mrs. Leiber said before she noticed the girl standing there. These sighs, the sound that rose over the hum of the refrigerator would replay in her mind over and over and would precede ten thousand harsh stares in school, on the street, in stores. These, notes of human music that would follow the girl escorted out of schools that had previously made a place for her. Each time she carried all the contents of her desk and her coat. As a principle would drive her silently home. Each time she knew she would never see that school or those teachers again. A scene repeated itself with some regularity. That day Mrs. Leiber fled the kitchen and then reemerged fully dressed and sprinted out the back door. “She’ll be back.” The mother said as she closed the screen door after her.
She was the oldest, the other two were babies—one could walk with a tipsy gait, the other did not even sit up and only took a bottle. They each mostly slept dressed only in an undershirt and diaper. They never went and there was neither stroller or carriage. They both always smell funny like rusty nails. The mother wanted to go to a protest, she said that they would write a lawyer’s number on their arm with a ball point in case the cops arrested them.
The mother’s mood lightened, she put combs in her hair like a Spanish dancer and said, pointing to a map, “The world is changing and we will be part of it.” She did a little dance around the dining room adjusting the volume to Joan Baez on the record player: "you got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself, ain’t nobody here can walk it for you, you got walk by yourself…” each chord loosening the knots in the coarse ropes of conventionality.
Men left a footprint on the moon and in the summer they closed Rt 17 and the New York State Throughway because of Woodstock, the counter culture just a few miles away, and about to knock on the door. About to usher in a new value system. The mother listened intently to the music like at the festival. Sad plaintive folk songs about love and loss, louder rebellious protest songs about war and death, and songs about taking, smoking or drinking enough of whatever that anything yelled at the top of the lungs sounded worthwhile.
Mrs.Leiber always walked home down Viola Rd, passed the twisted rows of apple trees on either side and crossed 306 to the intersection passing over the invisible boundary into the area where the women wear small pillbox hats over their sheital, where English was only spoken by outsiders. The style of her dress was such that she never looked disheveled, smart European suits favor by the wealthy Chassidic women, crisp lapels on the jacket, a mid-calf skirt of the same material and her wig frozen into style. She returned to her children, to the maid, to the cooked foods in the kitchen. Mrs. Leiber spoke German with her mother, sometimes French. They both spoke many languages and lived in other countries.
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the next installment!]
Writers Talk with B.N.
B.N.'s work has appeared in the following publications: Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, The Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Memphis State Review, Seneca Review & Timbuktu. Speaking of Timbuktu, the production of another dear old friend, Molly Turner, you can read B.N.'s poem "A Story" from that publication over at the Writers Talk blog.
Without further ado, here's B.N.
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I wanted to write from an early age—maybe 12. I grew up in a home with thousands of books. They were perhaps the most significant possession—certainly afforded the most space. Books were sacred objects. This came from a history of the Holocaust—Nazis burned books. I understood pretty early, maybe six, that books were what separated the clean from the dirty, the compassionate from the brutish, the sacred from the profane.
My identity as a writer—me calling myself a writer has waxed and waned over the years. At points I found it deeply pretentious—would rather call myself a wife, a mother. I think that is because I am an Orthodox Jewish woman and our identity in our day to day lives is much more based on family.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
I write reams—or it feels like reams. How I picture the character in a certain situation. I will also have themes—class and money, sexuality and age. In fiction I never plot—although I love an O. Henry twist, these days very out of fashion. In general my creative process will involve one piece of music—a song over and over until a draft is done. As I work a very dull day job, I write small notes all day long and then when I get home I type them into the computer. I review them every few days to see what I can still use.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
I have had very limited relationship with publishing. For some early years I published a couple of things a year—both poems and stories. Those few publications a year required me sending out a lot. This became costly both in money and energy. Then I had a family and had to support the family. The last thing I ever wanted to see in those days was a rejection note from a grad student that said something to the effect of—nice stuff but not today. That would have just been too much. My favorite line is: “this just does not meet out needs.” I always have a vision of little grimy editors trying to satisfy their needs—black Lycra.
In truth, I think there is so much great stuff published—much more in fiction than poetry but then there is also a lot of crap—a lot. I can’t figure it out. Taste and trends are not something I have ever had a handle on. It seems that much of the fiction I see published is articulate, not super ambitious and invariably makes gestures toward some third world life in traditional garb. A cult of the exotic—change the characters names to Joe and Dianne, set the whole thing in the rust belt and nobody, nobody would give it a second glance. Unfortunately it does speak to a poverty of imagination that is American—and not very exotic at all. This scares and saddens me. What we take as diversity only (which is morally good) and giving other voices is only happening because to a large extent there are few voices emerging.
Logistically, publication is a challenging. I am also not a very record keeper. It has happened that something was accepted that I do not remember sending, and once I just received a copy of a journal and lo and behold there was something of mine in it. I essentially gave up the whole notion of publication
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
It may have made me more difficult to live with and more messy as there are sheets of paper every place. In reality I am not sure it has had such a huge effect.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
I have a few “writer” friends and those relationships are “virtual,” meaning email and phone. They are like any other “long distance” relationship in that in some ways they are more precious than my day-to-day relationships. For people who live far from large communities or cities where there are other writers they are essential.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
I want to write the best book of short stories to hit the world in the last 50 years—I want it to knock socks off.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
Oh it would have to be something with broken strings. It is hard to be a mediocre violin. What else has strings?—not a guitar—they are too sexual—maybe some kind of dulcimer
THE LOST TRAIN (part 4)
[Here's the conclusion of B.N.'s story The Lost Train. if you missed any installments, you can click on "The Lost Train" label to see them all. Enjoy!]
FIVE. THE WANDERING OF THE SOUL
There are stones like souls, that are flung down on the streets. But once the new houses are built, then one will fit them into holy stones. Then the marriages within the houses turn to bliss and the children to angels.
Meta Tannenbaum
Late at night I still sometimes think that what I learned to want was the love that drove men into the foreign legion, the will power to lose trains in forests, to hear the jingle of a choke chain, and to be a woman in a seaside town who never needed to understand why anybody would ever say something like, "There but for the grace of God go I." So when I go downstairs, out the door, and stand on the front lawn in my nightgown I feel for an instant that I've come close. People taking the train to Scranton could look out of their small windows at the house as they sped past, and feel that all was well in the house.
In the morning, between 10:30 and 11:10 A.M., I will introduce my fourth grade class to the three stages of transformation. An elaboration, and a possible understanding—some multicolored chalk pictures drawn on the green blackboard, 'the egg, the larva, and the chrysalis." Each stage ensures a strictly scientific and explainable transformation and redemption. Each child will imitate me with lines traced onto construction paper, cutting carefully with safety scissors the different stages of a life.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
FIVE. THE WANDERING OF THE SOUL
There are stones like souls, that are flung down on the streets. But once the new houses are built, then one will fit them into holy stones. Then the marriages within the houses turn to bliss and the children to angels.
Meta Tannenbaum
Late at night I still sometimes think that what I learned to want was the love that drove men into the foreign legion, the will power to lose trains in forests, to hear the jingle of a choke chain, and to be a woman in a seaside town who never needed to understand why anybody would ever say something like, "There but for the grace of God go I." So when I go downstairs, out the door, and stand on the front lawn in my nightgown I feel for an instant that I've come close. People taking the train to Scranton could look out of their small windows at the house as they sped past, and feel that all was well in the house.
In the morning, between 10:30 and 11:10 A.M., I will introduce my fourth grade class to the three stages of transformation. An elaboration, and a possible understanding—some multicolored chalk pictures drawn on the green blackboard, 'the egg, the larva, and the chrysalis." Each stage ensures a strictly scientific and explainable transformation and redemption. Each child will imitate me with lines traced onto construction paper, cutting carefully with safety scissors the different stages of a life.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
THE LOST TRAIN (part 3)
FOUR. TWO LANGUAGES
There are those who can utter words in truth so that the words shine that shines of itself. And there are those whose words are only like a window that has no light of its own, but only shines forth out of the light that it admits.
The Bratslaver
By 5:00 A.M. I was so restless that I got up and sat in the chair next to bed and watched Adam sleep. He lay there with the sheets coiled around his waist and twisted through his legs like a rope climber.
As a child I would lie in my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest. At night there was something reassuring about the street sounds of the city. The radio next to my bed played softly and outside my window the cabs, cars, and couples all stirred. If I left my bed, went into the kitchen and stood there in the doorway, my grandmother wouldn't notice me until I said, "I'm going back to bed now." Later, my grandmother would be in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, waving the smoke away from her face.
We played this game. At eight o'clock I went to bed with a glass of milk, a glass of water, and four cookies. Then, after about an hour, my grandmother would say that I could sneak out of my room for a quick snack as long as the landlord didn't catch me. The landlord became an omnipotent figure in our household. He knew every move we made, and had a rule about children being out of bed, eating snacks, after eight o'clock. My grandmother said that if we were caught doing this, we risked eviction and the loss of all our possessions. Then we would have to go on the subway to a stop that she pronounced with contempt. Outsmarting the landlord gave me my first sense of power.
Up and down the street it used to be, "Nu, Meta what can I do for you. Oh you look so beautiful—you could even shorten that skirt a bit." There were the neighborhood men with names like Max, Isador, Abe, Herschel. Their sons named Marvin, Barry, and Sammy. I never really understood why our neighbors on the block sometimes felt a shy need to explain my grandmother. More than once someone pulled me aside and said things like: "We understand, and accept. I mean who knows what we would do. All I have to say, is 'There but for the grace of God go I.'"
At the fruit stand Meta stuck her thumb through the top of a melon. "Nu, look at this, half-rotted and he wants full price," she would say loud enough for all the other shoppers to hear. "Hey Herschel what about giving a widow and orphan a few pennies off on your rotten melon." The response was always the same. "Take the melon, take two."
In restaurants she poured all the sugar, salt, and pepper into small paper bags hidden inside her large bag. She took all bread, den, and some utensils from the table. Still they always gave free bowls of soup and extra large helpings of rice or noodle pudding. Sometimes she said under her breath, "See, even they know who I am."
Once, when my grandmother was out on a shopping expedition down Canal Street, I brought Sheila Katz home with ma I showed her all the secrets of the apartment. The closets stuffed with canned food and toilet paper, the crated boxes of soap, the Flow Blue China-the music clock with tiny figurines going around on the top every hour. I explained how rare and valuable they were, and as Sheila looked in awe I again felt a warm sense of control. Later that winter, I began to take my friends on tours through the apartment. I told them the building was built by J.P. Morgan. After his indictment, and her death, I was forced to admit that it was built by Grosso Construction. It was about that time that I swore I would not marry Barry, Sammy, or Marvin.
When she visited, my grandmother sat in my kitchen fingering a brown construction paper caterpillar I made for our classroom bulletin board. I was laying out colored chalk that I would use to introduce a new science unit called "The Insect World." Her attention was focused on a small fourth page UPI filler article "Mass Grave Uncovered in Russia."
"See, they come back like unopened mail," she said.
I imagined them as the people dug out of the ruins of Pompeii, or the fens of Northern Europe, caught in the attitudes of daily life—arms outstretched, or the palm of one hand resting under one cheek as they lay on their sides, girls asleep with their hands between their legs. Perfectly preserved young men with beards of soft stubble, the contents of their last meal still full in their stomachs. Their skin tanned bronze from the effects of the peat bog. The women's breasts flattened. And somehow I could not connect my grandmother with the dead. Even though I sat with the body until it was buried. I watched as each finger was wrapped in white gauze, and there and then it was just a lifeless corpse—as if a shadow had passed over and stopped. Now it seemed the shadow dispersed like thin trails of smoke. She died the first winter I went away from home. All through her illness a cousin of hers had called me in the college dorm. I remember holding the receiver of the black pay phone a little away from my ear and watching from the window as Amherst filled with snow.
"Enough, already. Please come home. Do you know what you're doing?" she said. I did not know.
When the sewer workers uncovered that pit, all of those people's shadows were lifted—and suddenly they were free to rejoin the life they left—finish their noon meal, lovemaking, letter writing. But they preferred to remain lying out in the open air with their eyes fixed on the sun overhead. And to say, See, here we are all rare hybrids. Flowers that open once in fifty years for only a few hours. I never went home, even though the cousin phoned at least once a day.
“Do you know what you've done?" the cousin asked when she died.
I kept bits and pieces of my grandmother's things. I have copies of Huckleberry Finn in Yiddish, the Flow Blue China, a few bars of old yellowed soap.
I’m not sure why I hurt her like that.
AT THE MECHANIC'S three pit bulls pester their mother to nurse. When she snaps at the most aggressive brown one, the white and black one jumps. Afterward, on the way home, I'm sure the car hasn't been fixed. When I pull up alongside Adam at the traffic light he is drumming the dashboard with one hand, and through the half-open window I can hear him singing My Baby Does The Hanky Panky."
That night in bed I expected Adam to turn to me. As I sat in the chair next to the bed I concocted brief scenarios for Hannibal: he has gained admission to the training school for seeing eye dogs; he graduates in the top of his class and spends the rest of his days leading people through life; he's been taken in by a family with children; he is fiercely protective of them; he joins with a pack of wild dogs; he is the leader; they run deer for sport and food—run them until their fine-boned, elegant legs give way and crumble beneath them—they fall in heaps in a dark forest. I've thought a lot about that story my grandmother used to tell. I wonder what happened when somebody noticed they lost a train.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for the conclusion!]
There are those who can utter words in truth so that the words shine that shines of itself. And there are those whose words are only like a window that has no light of its own, but only shines forth out of the light that it admits.
The Bratslaver
By 5:00 A.M. I was so restless that I got up and sat in the chair next to bed and watched Adam sleep. He lay there with the sheets coiled around his waist and twisted through his legs like a rope climber.
As a child I would lie in my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest. At night there was something reassuring about the street sounds of the city. The radio next to my bed played softly and outside my window the cabs, cars, and couples all stirred. If I left my bed, went into the kitchen and stood there in the doorway, my grandmother wouldn't notice me until I said, "I'm going back to bed now." Later, my grandmother would be in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, waving the smoke away from her face.
We played this game. At eight o'clock I went to bed with a glass of milk, a glass of water, and four cookies. Then, after about an hour, my grandmother would say that I could sneak out of my room for a quick snack as long as the landlord didn't catch me. The landlord became an omnipotent figure in our household. He knew every move we made, and had a rule about children being out of bed, eating snacks, after eight o'clock. My grandmother said that if we were caught doing this, we risked eviction and the loss of all our possessions. Then we would have to go on the subway to a stop that she pronounced with contempt. Outsmarting the landlord gave me my first sense of power.
Up and down the street it used to be, "Nu, Meta what can I do for you. Oh you look so beautiful—you could even shorten that skirt a bit." There were the neighborhood men with names like Max, Isador, Abe, Herschel. Their sons named Marvin, Barry, and Sammy. I never really understood why our neighbors on the block sometimes felt a shy need to explain my grandmother. More than once someone pulled me aside and said things like: "We understand, and accept. I mean who knows what we would do. All I have to say, is 'There but for the grace of God go I.'"
At the fruit stand Meta stuck her thumb through the top of a melon. "Nu, look at this, half-rotted and he wants full price," she would say loud enough for all the other shoppers to hear. "Hey Herschel what about giving a widow and orphan a few pennies off on your rotten melon." The response was always the same. "Take the melon, take two."
In restaurants she poured all the sugar, salt, and pepper into small paper bags hidden inside her large bag. She took all bread, den, and some utensils from the table. Still they always gave free bowls of soup and extra large helpings of rice or noodle pudding. Sometimes she said under her breath, "See, even they know who I am."
Once, when my grandmother was out on a shopping expedition down Canal Street, I brought Sheila Katz home with ma I showed her all the secrets of the apartment. The closets stuffed with canned food and toilet paper, the crated boxes of soap, the Flow Blue China-the music clock with tiny figurines going around on the top every hour. I explained how rare and valuable they were, and as Sheila looked in awe I again felt a warm sense of control. Later that winter, I began to take my friends on tours through the apartment. I told them the building was built by J.P. Morgan. After his indictment, and her death, I was forced to admit that it was built by Grosso Construction. It was about that time that I swore I would not marry Barry, Sammy, or Marvin.
When she visited, my grandmother sat in my kitchen fingering a brown construction paper caterpillar I made for our classroom bulletin board. I was laying out colored chalk that I would use to introduce a new science unit called "The Insect World." Her attention was focused on a small fourth page UPI filler article "Mass Grave Uncovered in Russia."
"See, they come back like unopened mail," she said.
I imagined them as the people dug out of the ruins of Pompeii, or the fens of Northern Europe, caught in the attitudes of daily life—arms outstretched, or the palm of one hand resting under one cheek as they lay on their sides, girls asleep with their hands between their legs. Perfectly preserved young men with beards of soft stubble, the contents of their last meal still full in their stomachs. Their skin tanned bronze from the effects of the peat bog. The women's breasts flattened. And somehow I could not connect my grandmother with the dead. Even though I sat with the body until it was buried. I watched as each finger was wrapped in white gauze, and there and then it was just a lifeless corpse—as if a shadow had passed over and stopped. Now it seemed the shadow dispersed like thin trails of smoke. She died the first winter I went away from home. All through her illness a cousin of hers had called me in the college dorm. I remember holding the receiver of the black pay phone a little away from my ear and watching from the window as Amherst filled with snow.
"Enough, already. Please come home. Do you know what you're doing?" she said. I did not know.
When the sewer workers uncovered that pit, all of those people's shadows were lifted—and suddenly they were free to rejoin the life they left—finish their noon meal, lovemaking, letter writing. But they preferred to remain lying out in the open air with their eyes fixed on the sun overhead. And to say, See, here we are all rare hybrids. Flowers that open once in fifty years for only a few hours. I never went home, even though the cousin phoned at least once a day.
“Do you know what you've done?" the cousin asked when she died.
I kept bits and pieces of my grandmother's things. I have copies of Huckleberry Finn in Yiddish, the Flow Blue China, a few bars of old yellowed soap.
I’m not sure why I hurt her like that.
AT THE MECHANIC'S three pit bulls pester their mother to nurse. When she snaps at the most aggressive brown one, the white and black one jumps. Afterward, on the way home, I'm sure the car hasn't been fixed. When I pull up alongside Adam at the traffic light he is drumming the dashboard with one hand, and through the half-open window I can hear him singing My Baby Does The Hanky Panky."
That night in bed I expected Adam to turn to me. As I sat in the chair next to the bed I concocted brief scenarios for Hannibal: he has gained admission to the training school for seeing eye dogs; he graduates in the top of his class and spends the rest of his days leading people through life; he's been taken in by a family with children; he is fiercely protective of them; he joins with a pack of wild dogs; he is the leader; they run deer for sport and food—run them until their fine-boned, elegant legs give way and crumble beneath them—they fall in heaps in a dark forest. I've thought a lot about that story my grandmother used to tell. I wonder what happened when somebody noticed they lost a train.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for the conclusion!]
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