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Letti gasped when she saw a realtor’s lockbox on the door to the townhouse. Would her key still work? Yes, but inside, the [img_assist|nid=6822|title=The Johnstown Flood by Rachel Dougherty © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=300]darkness reeked of carpet shampoo and fresh paint. She turned on the entryway light and rushed into the empty living room. Then she raced up the stairs. At the top, each door opened onto slices of inanimate space once inhabited by her mother, her stepson, and her husband. She clutched the banister. Unsteadily worked her way down. On the floor by the front door lay an envelope.

Dear Ms. Ferenz:

I write at the behest of my client, Mr. George W. Luciano, who wishes to inform you that he has filed for divorce. Copies of his court papers were provided this morning to your attorney of record.

Your mother is lodged at the Treetop Suites on West Pearson Street. Your dog is kenneled with its vet, Dr. Sandman. Your personal possessions have been stored with Closet-Away-From-Home on Anderson Avenue. Mr. Luciano’s son has resumed residence with his mother, in accord with the terms of custody contingent on Mr. Luciano’s marriage to you. A buyer has made a bid on Mr. Luciano’s townhouse, which remains his exclusive property pursuant to your prenuptial agreement. Please leave your key when you depart the premises.

My client does not wish to speak with you, but he has asked me to convey to the attached note.

Sincerely, Thomas Metzger, Esq.

 

Letti turned the page.

 

Letti:

You have been away sixteen of the last twenty-five weeks. I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute. I cannot even take care of my flesh and blood son. I’m through with this charade. You can’t make me what I am not. We are terminally alienated, but you of all people will know how to survive this disaster. This time focus on yourself, not me or anyone else. George

*

As George intimated, Letti was trained in disaster response. She’d coped with everything from famine to chemical spills to violent conflicts. Her specialty was providing shelter for the dispossessed, and her basic recovery sequence was built on The Four D’s: denial—despair—dialogue—decision. Getting from denial to decision could take a while in places like Bangladesh or Somalia. It was tough in the U.S., too, where, after twenty-six years overseas, she had settled to focus on her own life and the lives of those dearest to her. That meant her elderly mother, Mom-mom; her third husband, George; George’s teenage son, Tony; and Norton the dog—but it progressively included the people she helped as a part-time FEMA disaster response specialist.

These past ten days she had been in southern Virginia, where a storage tank containing two million gallons of jet fuel collapsed[img_assist|nid=6823|title=Bronze Light by Brian Griffiths © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=249|height=166] and overflowed its containment pond, sluicing down local route 460. The red-hot catalytic converter of the first car that drove over this slithering liquid ignited it, causing an instant backflash through the gates of the tank farm. Another jet fuel tank and three liquid fertilizer tanks exploded, sending flames a thousand feet into the air and shattering windows four miles away. Total combustion: nine million gallons. Seven people dead, fifteen injured. Nine houses lining Rte. 460 destroyed. The groundwater that fed the wells of another thirty-one houses compromised. So she had her hands full. The only fun had been a helicopter ride she’d finagled for an overhead tour of the disaster site. Fires of that intensity tended to stay put, etching the earth with sharp-edged artistry.

Wink’s Mill was the nearest untouched town, so she stayed there in a battered old brick hotel with a sagging wooden front porch painted battleship gray. Cell phone service was vagrant, but most nights she spoke to George who said nothing about what he had in mind. “Letti,” he did say one night (without her detecting either the surrender or anger in his request), “what’s the song today? Sing me your aria.” By this he was inviting her to tell him about the procession of dislodged supplicants who, in their destitution, always reminded her of defeated churchgoers in the cathedrals of homelessness that encircle the globe, no roofs over head, no floors under foot, no possessions or effects. She’d sit there in her office trailer feeling humbled and enriched by the way their eyes scribbled distress messages in the air. Hymns, actually, not arias. Things she’d remember at night: the red creases around a man’s eyes, the hush of children who’d be better off playing outside but wouldn’t leave their mother’s presence, the impact of telling someone it would be three weeks until any modular units could make it from Arkansas when one day was eternity and two days hell.

Letti was gifted at this, yet guilt-ridden about it. She could not say no to a FEMA call just to keep a lunch date with George, or take Mom-mom to the mall, or walk Norton. She would pack the car and drive however long it took to meet the trailer in the dangerous regions of destitute America where the poor always seemed to be the ones who were burned, poisoned, and tornadoed. This was better and worse than the Philippines or Guatemala. There, the wailing went on for days, but she was insulated by strangeness from the depths of agony. Here, she was affected so deeply by the misery of people with whom she really could communicate that she had to shut down their agony fast. She’d look a victim in the eye and say firmly, “Now talk to me. I’m sitting here to help you decide what to do, and remember this is today, not yesterday. Talk to me about today and decide what you want to do.”

Saying things like that took it out of her. She could barely make it to bed at the end of the day, so she thanked George for asking but sang him no songs. “I’ll tell you when I get back,” she promised and remained conscious for just a few seconds longer in the high-ceilinged hotel room with its tall casement windows, drafts, and moody mixed glow of street lamps and the Pizza Hut across the way where she’d eaten dinner. Fifty-seven years old, short, thin, blonde, rigid as a clothing store manikin. Out cold, until the alarm at six and another coffee-fueled day in her chilly trailer, where what she thought about her own displacement didn’t matter. It was only temporary.

*

First, she went to Dr. Sandman’s to try to retrieve Norton, but Dr. Sandman’s strip mall clinic was closed. Then she drove to Treetop Suites.

“Were you surprised?” Mom-mom asked, meaning about George having the townhouse repainted and the carpets shampooed. She was wearing her blue cardigan, the one that felt so good because of the way it warmed her arms. “He didn’t want me to tell you that’s why he was clearing us all out.”

Awash in humiliation, Letti was unable to come out with it. Definitely surprised, she answered.

“That George is always doing things,” Mom-mom said.

“That George,” Letti agreed. She finished mixing a vodka and Coke from bottles she found in the courtesy refrigerator. “But his cell phone isn’t working, and the note only said you’d be here. Where’s he staying?”

“The Hilton. Better workout room, he says.”

“With Tony?”

“Tony’s with his mama. I think they’re getting along better.”

“Whoa,” Letti moaned, easing herself onto the little sofa by the window and pulling up her legs.

Mom-mom looked at her through her almost cosmic convex lenses. She asked how the disaster had gone. Letti said it was pretty hard at first. The tank field was a chronic safety violator that neither paid its fines nor corrected its flaws. The jet fuel tank was one of the few that had been updated—the 1936 rivets were switched to welds in 2003—but that led to the structural flaw that caused its collapse.

“The day you left I saw some coverage on the news,” Mom-mom said. “Poor Letti, I thought, she has her hands full this time.”

If by force of will or experience with marital failure, Letti were able to leap out of the chasm of denial and despair into which she had plummeted, that would get her more quickly to dialogue and decision, but there was Mom-mom, eighty-eight years old, a plucked-chicken of a woman with multiple miseries who didn’t know—or did she?—that Letti had done it again.

*

Even though Letti did not believe in God and equated faith in providence with supine passivity, she had encouraged her first husband to prepare for the ministry by becoming a missionary. “This is something you could do wherever I go,” she had coaxed him, wanting so badly to make things work. The fact is she was crazy about Gerald. She loved his slow, murky, uncertain lovemaking and credulous faith in what he called “the theater of the divine.” But fifteen months turned out to be the romantic limit to Letti and Gerald’s reckless self-endangerment. The memory still broke Letti’s heart: two twenty-somethings at war with each other in a rotting house in Léopoldville, Congo, in 1968. Prayer meetings in the huge living room from which Letti would escape by playing Big Pink very loud upstairs…no food, but plenty of gin, dope, tar-thick coffee, and Mom-mom’s Famous Boiled Water…and Gerald determined to cure himself of dengue fever by reading Psalms. When he did recover, he returned to the U.S., where he sued her successfully for his share of common property, including her small inheritance from her father.  He had died at fifty-one in Lackawanna, New York, from which Letti and Mom-mom were permanent refugees. Letti called it Slagville in honor of the Bethlehem Steel plant’s horrific waste. She was haunted by childhood memories of mountains of snow growing blacker and blacker outside her bedroom window as the winter progressed. Lawns, fields, rooftops, and even woodlands were encased in metallic sheets of frozen soot. Who wouldn’t leave and never go back?

The second marriage, nine years later, was to a fellow humanitarian relief specialist, Franklin. Shouldn’t that have worked, especially since Letti’s guilt about her first marriage led her to urge Franklin to put himself first and climb the bureaucratic ladder, even if this meant that he took USAID assignments in Washington when she went overseas? Yes, Letti loved Franklin’s steadiness and practical idealism and ex-Marine physique, but she had acquired habits of personal accommodation during her nine years as a divorcee, and she clung to them during their separations. Getting wind of this, Franklin countered with accommodations his own. Divorce again. Another decade alone before the homing instinct fooled yet again into thinking if she tried one last time, she’d finally get it right. She’d do it for Mom-mom. She’d do it for her old age. She’d do it because they couldn’t spend another year in the waste regions of their wanderings, always talking about where next, always uneasy about their lives among strangers, kind or indifferent, interesting or boring.

But how could she talk with Mom-mom and bypass George’s reproach: I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute? It wasn’t Mom-mom’s fault. Letti knew this; she was the one who put George through the Chinese water torture of knowing the exact temperature Mom-mom liked her coffee…of Mom-mom’s scandalized attitude toward spots on drinking glasses…of Mom-mom’s excruciating pacewhile walking: three steps, stop, look around; three steps, stop, look around. Perhaps if George had not had a teenager on his hands. She thought of Tony—he had a face like a chickadee, black hair and white cheeks—storing food in his room under the bed and in drawers and on the windowsill so he wouldn’t be exposed to conversation when making continual trips to the kitchen. And she thought of how she encouraged George to retire from the IMF, swallow the requirement that he give his first wife half his pension, and accept a new job, at sixty-one, as advisor to the Islamic Alternative Bank, guiding a mismatch of billionaire Bedouin backers and hotshot young Arab financiers as they accommodated themselves to the restrictions and prejudices they encountered trying to do business in the U.S.

“You were meant to do this: think of your Arabic. Think of all your experience in the Middle East and Washington. And I’ll be right here, no more work overseas,” she promised. “We’ll scrimp until we build up our finances. Mom-mom and I take up zero room. The townhouse will be fine for now.”

George accepted her arguments with almost fathomless desire and credulity. He wanted his son back and needed a new wife to persuade the court. So he said he was willing to put up with Mom-mom if Letti put up with Tony. Besides, he adored Letti, her spunk, her resourcefulness, her worldliness. Was this love? Letti thought it might be. Sitting with him over a glass of wine before dinner in a nice restaurant, she noticed that he no longer habitually wrung his large hands together as he talked, his big thumbs kneading his meaty palms and hairy knuckles. She also noticed that he would watch her every step of the way back from the ladies’ room. Would not start the car until she had her seatbelt fastened.

But the exciting, unpredictable, exhausting separations piled up, making perfect sense to Letti, none to George. She had long lived in a world that always collapsed; he had had the world collapse on him once—his first marriage—and didn’t want it happening again. They had spats, loathsome spats. She couldn’t bear his ornate, self-hating progression from complaining to moaning to giving up.

“We goofed,” he’d say, enjoying the way that word, “goofed,” belittled their attempt at playing house again in late middle age. “We’re each entitled to the air we breathe, but breathing the same air together is asphyxiating us. I’m thinking this can’t last, Letti. I don’t know how to be married to you. You don’t want to be married to me. Off you go all the time, saving the world. It used to be Suriname, now it’s Appalachia. God knows why. What are you running from? What is out there?”

“People in pain are out there.”

“We’re not in pain?”

“They have no homes!”

“You call this a home? You don’t want a home. Why are you dragging me through this?”

“So divorce me,” she challenged him at last. Yep, she had said it. The tremendous affection she felt for the man and fear of being cast back out on the streets of the world wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut. And bingo, she got her wish.

*

Letti fixed another vodka and Coke, pouring the silvery Smirnoff first to make sure there was room to get it all into the plastic glass before adding the gelatinous Coca-Cola. She knew she wouldn’t be able to turn George around, unsell the townhouse, and get Tony back as easily as she would get Norton from Dr. Sandman.  She was a schemer, but not that good a schemer. And to do what? Hole up in suburban Washington and die?

Mom-mom sat there quietly with her thin, speckled hands folded in her lap. Letti wondered if you could call this,though silent, a dialogue—like a silent auction or a silent movie—about her denial and despair. She asked herself, too, if that was the essence of her place in the world, a glimmering vault in which she flew soundlessly, never finding a broken window through which to escape

“Well, dear,” Mom-mom said at last. “What are you going to do?”

“He may have been the best of the three,” Letti said.

“I don’t know. I really liked the Preacher.”

“But Gerald never had a son to fight for, and he never took on anything like that crazy Islamic bank,” Letti said. “I think George deserves a lot of credit.”

“I ought to go live in a nursing home,” Mom-mom said.

“You know I would never allow that.”

“Then I suppose you deserve some credit.”

Letti made a dismissive sound, “Pah.”

The women sat a while, ruminating. There couldn’t be an explosion because that would be too hard on Mom-mom. The sadness did leak out, though, and pool around their feet, and under the sofa, and in the corners of the room. Back to disorientation, Letti thought. Time and again she’d counseled people to let it go; it was over: get to dialogue, make a decision, move on. And now once again it was her turn, but she did not want to listen to her own advice.

Robert Earle was born in Norristown, PA and educated at The Hill School and Princeton.  His short stories have been published in dozens of literary magazines across the U.S.  His first novel, The Way Home (DayBue, 2004), is set in Raponikon, PA (a fictionalized Norristown).  He is also the author of a memoir of a year as a diplomat in Iraq, Nights in the Pink Motel (Naval Institute Press, 2008).

Rafael’s job in Philadelphia was simple: keep water glasses filled, put bread on tables, bring forks, clean messes, clear plates. [img_assist|nid=6830|title=Purple Bunny by Nicole FitzGibbon© 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=159]But his unstated job, the one that no one spoke of but everyone understood, was the most important: be invisible. He kept his mouth shut and his body moving, swift and silent in black, pedaling his bike through the narrow South Philly streets, weaving amongst the tightly packed tables at La Strada, slipping between conversations and bottles of Chianti. He was good at it now. He had been practicing from the moment he stepped through a hole in a razor-wire fence and into a hostile desert where helicopters scraped the night sky with searchlights, rifles waiting.

Tonight was busy. Thursday is the new Friday. That was what Carlo said before the shift. We’re going to be packed, so keep things rolling. It’s hot out. Make sure nobody runs out of water. And Rafael did. The woman at table fifteen was getting down to a few centimeters above her ice cubes. Rafael moved in with his pitcher. She thanked him between bites of broiled fish. In the desert there had been no ice cubes. No pitchers. No thankyous. Just the heat, that unbelievable ceiling of heat pressing them down as if to crush them into the sand and be rid of them. The crinkle of an empty water bottle, the last warm drop on his parched tongue. Table eleven had ordered. Time for bread. Rafael walked back to the kitchen, scooping the empty plates off of table eight on his way. Thank you, thank you. In the kitchen there was a clatter of stainless steel.

Ant’ny, what’s this mod on table nine?

She don’t want basil.

Yeah, I can read. But the pesto’s the focal point. Without that it’s shit. You know better!

Javier caught his eye at the bread warmer. Fourteen needs a new napkin. Rafael nodded. The water, the water. His pitcher was empty, and the lady at twelve needed water. He filled his pitcher while he waited for eleven’s bread to warm. You want more water, eh? I’ll give you water. Rafael breathed in, breathed out, opened the oven, pulled out the bread with tongs and popped it in a basket. Out on the floor voices rose, ebbed, and collided, their tones warm like the candles that glowed on the tables. Wine glasses clinked. The lady at twelve’s glass was perilously close to empty. Rafael dropped the bread at eleven and a napkin at fourteen, and just as twelve finished her last sip, he appeared by her side with the pitcher, an angel bearing water. And into this image tore the rough voice, teeth stained with tobacco, eyes red from the sand and casually vicious. I’ll give you something to drink.  Rafael flinched as he turned away from the table. Javier caught his eye. Rafael lifted the corner of his mouth up and gave a slight nod. Bien bien. Everything bien.

Last Wednesday he’d been sent home early with nothing to do. Apparently Wednesday was not the new Thursday. When he’d [img_assist|nid=6829|title=Up The Bridge by Robb McCall © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=151|height=200]stepped into the apartment he’d heard Inocencia sobbing through the bathroom door. Everything bien bien here in el Norte. He’d slipped out without a sound to the bar down the street. When he came home hours later, drunk, she pretended to be asleep and he pretended to believe her.

Seventeen had finished their appetizers. Appetizer—he had taken this word apart, and it meant something you ate to get hungry. In the Arizona desert, heat and thirst stretched hunger into a thin, secondary concern. In the dusty plaza in the Sonora border town where the bus had finally left them, the coyote had told Rafael and his friend, A few kilometers through the desert to your ride. A day or two at the most. My guys, my polleros, will take care of you. Rafael cleared the plates from seventeen and replenished their water, the ice cubes tinkling in their glasses as he poured. Thank you, Rafael had told the coyote. Thank you for your help. But really, it was thousands of dollars that did the thanking, thousands of hours in the Puebla fields, thousands of maize cobs piled in Rafael’s baskets. By the second day across the desert trails the blisters on his feet had begun to bleed. They rationed their water: no one got more than two bottles a day. It was around noon on the third day when the woman from Guadalajara asked for more.

Rafael watched Anthony describe the specials to table five. Anthony’s grandparents had come from Naples. Rafael had searched for Naples on his cousin’s computer and it looked like a nice place to live, with palm trees and beaches and plentiful pizza, and Rafael could hardly imagine that it had once been so poor that people had fled it, as Anthony told him, in the rat-infested bellies of ships that took three weeks to cross the Atlantic. Rafael imagined, sometimes, when he heard Anthony speaking his few phrases of Italian to Carlo, that his own grandchildren would grow up speaking only snatches of Spanish, forgetting Mixtec entirely, and have nothing of their homeland but a headful of stories selected by their elders and retold so many times they had crystallized into fables. They would scoff at the thought of going back to the small town of San Mateo Ozolco, would probably never even make it south of Mexico City, would know nothing of Mexico but hat dances and mariachis and tequila. No. He and Inocencia were only twenty. They had time. As soon as they had saved enough money they would return to San Mateo and build a house with a real roof and a refrigerator with food in it, there between the two volcanoes, the silent snow-covered Aztec emperor’s daughter, Iztacchihuatl, and her forever fuming lover, the warrior Popocatepetl. Everyone knew the story. The emperor had sent the lover to battle in Oaxaca to get rid of him for good. But the emperor’s daughter died of grief, and when her lover returned, he carried her out and buried her, and the gods blanketed her grave with snow.

The four people at twelve were on dessert now. They were finishing their second bottle of wine, and the joke must have been good because the woman with the curly dark hair threw her head back when she laughed. Inocencia had laughed like that. Rafael had known her family, of course, but had met her when he got work unloading the truck at her uncle’s store. Rafael was a wisecracking skateboarder, his hair spiked, always blaring punk rock CDs his cousins brought back from Mexico City on his headphones.Inocencia was a reserved sort of girl, even, her words gently witty, her face calm as she weighed tomatoes and counted bulbs of garlic. It had taken him three weeks to get her to laugh like that, three weeks of her left eyebrow raising and the corner of her lip turning up, each time making him want it more, until finally he got it, her smooth throat stretched back, and that warm strong laugh let loose for him., and he knew he wanted to hear that laugh forever. Inocencia didn’t laugh these days.

The woman at table twenty was on her third glass of water, and she shook her head to her friend as Rafael refilled it. God, I’m just so thirsty! On the third day they had hunkered down in a dry creek bed for a bit of shade, and that was when the woman from Guadalajara asked for more water. She was in her twenties, maybe, a city girl with a missing tooth and a husband waiting in Los Angeles. She had been panting all along the trail that morning, falling behind, and the polleros were getting impatient. Rafael had lingered toward the back of the group, trying to urge her along, and was the only one who saw her slip on a rock as they climbed a hill. He gave her a hand up. Está bien? She nodded, bien, and Rafael saw blood on the knees of her jeans and fear in her eyes. And now she had finished one of her two bottles for the day already and was begging for more. You want something to drink, eh? Ha ha! She shook her head, but they took her behind the mesquite trees, and Rafael watched the last drop of water roll around in the bottom of his plastic bottle. In the kitchen water flowed into his pitcher, cold, clear. Everything clear. When he had told Inocencia on the phone that he didn’t want her to come across, there was just silence for a few seconds on the line, the quiet volcano. She said that she was coming. That they would be together. And he knew there was nothing he could say to stop her. Or maybe there was, but he’d wanted that raised eyebrow, that laugh, the strong smooth bones of her hands wrapped around the back of his neck as she kissed him, so bad that he could imagine it was only birds shrieking behind the mesquite trees. That the woman from Guadalajara had wandered off and found work on a ranch somewhere out there. Anthony gestured to him. The bar needed ice. Rafael started to fill a bucket, the scoop grating against the ice. The ice was in his stomach now, the way it was when he’d come home to hear sobbing on the other side of the bathroom door. That sobbing was a new sound, in the same voice as the laugh, his laugh. But this terrifying sobbing was not his, and never could be. And as Rafael remembered how he’d crept away from the door, out of the apartment without a sound, invisible, his face burned with shame and he threw his shoulder into the scoop, grinding it into the ice harder, louder. He felt the power in his shoulders, bigger now from the weeks of pressing the dumbbell he kept at the foot of their bed. Every Monday he added more weight. Javier appeared by the ice machine, his face concerned. Qué haces, wey? Tables thirteen and eighteen needed water. Fifteen and sixteen needed to be cleared. The bar didn’t need that much ice. Rafael hauled the bucket to the bar and poured it into the bin, the sound like stones clattering down a mountain. In the late afternoon of the third day on the upside of a slope, the woman from Guadalajara vomited and collapsed to the ground, her eyes rolling up like white balls on a pool table, her breath quick and ragged. When Rafael and another migrant tried to pull her to her feet, she just moaned. Rafael wanted to try to carry her, but the pollero would have none of it. Get up, he said, or we leave you here.

Leave me alone, then, you bastard, she said. Déjame en paz. In peace. And so they did. Don’t worry, La Migra will find her, the pollero said as they scrambled on over the mountain. And so they did. They found her two months later. Rafael had checked the Phoenix Spanish-language news websites every few days, that chill clawing in his stomach, until one day, there it was. Badly decomposed, wearing a blue t-shirt, missing one tooth. In peace.

And that was what Inocencia said, in the first week after she’d arrived in Philadelphia, her face closed and her eyes somewhere[img_assist|nid=6831|title=Self Portrait, Chemo by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=259] else, in the desert maybe, searching for water in the scorching sand. Or maybe it was that he’d gotten so good at being invisible. He’d tried to kiss her for the third night in a row, slipped his hand around her waist under her nightshirt, trying to reach to wherever she was, and she sucked breath in fast through her nose and looked at him and asked him to please, Rafael, for now, just déjame en paz. In peace. Rafael imagined that if peace was anywhere, it was at the top of Iztaccihuatl, sleeping forever under her blanket of snow. But not here. Table fourteen needed more water, and Rafael poured the glasses nearly to the brim. The graceful middle-aged couple dressed mostly in black thanked him. They were going to the theater, had to be out by eight-thirty, Anthony said. By the time Rafael got home it would be past midnight, and Inocencia would be home from her job at the taquería, sleeping, or not sleeping, her hair spread on the pillow like black silk in the light from the bathroom, her long lashes resting in the dark hollows under her eyes, and instead of asking her the question he could not shape into words, Rafael would grab the case from where he’d stashed it in the back of the hall closet, sling it over his back, and walk a few blocks to an alley where he would enter a dank basement littered with electronic equipment and empty beer bottles and take out the used Stratocaster inside, holding its cool smooth body in his hands. You know how to play this thing? the guitar’s original owner, a guy everybody called Joey Z, had asked. Rafael shrugged. I played an acoustic back in Mexico. But I can’t make noise in our place. Joey Z laughed. Don’t worry, I’ve got a soundproofed basement. We usually finish up band practice around midnight. Come by tomorrow after work and I’ll show you how to use the amp. Rafael did come by, and he came by the next day too, and hit the riffs he knew again and again and again, and although it might not have been good, it was loud, just for an hour it was louder than the screeching behind the mesquite trees, louder than sobbing, louder than the echoes of that full-throated laughter, louder than anything he’d heard this side of peace.

Marleen Hustead is a 2008 graduate of Rosemont College’s MFA program. She teaches English at Philadelphia University and Temple University. She lives
in Philadelphia with her Chihuahua, Pepita, and is hard at work on a novel. (Marleen, not Pepita, that is.)

I am the first child my mother never wanted. [img_assist|nid=6459|title=Warm Autumn Sun by Madeleine Kelly © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=251]

That I have two brothers and a sister is a testament to her docility, not her change of heart. My earliest memory is of her perfume, an exotic, spicy scent, and of her dark hair swinging down around her pale and pretty face when she rescued the hem of her dress from my grasp. I was always reaching out for her. This is not selective memory. In photos she is ever lovely, and I am ever longing—one chubby arm outstretched—to touch her. One day (I must have been five or six years old and whining for her attention) she told me, “I’m not your mother.” And, for a moment, I believed her. It’s when I noticed for the first time my mother’s dreamy blindness and deafness, inhabiting what world I didn’t know. All I knew was that she was unhappy when summoned back to mine.

For all his faults, my father was the one who took care of us when we were sick, staying with us until we fell asleep. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” he’d chant over and over, but I’d resist, waiting once more for the “Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines,” loving the sweet cadence of his voice, his hand on my forehead.

Since he walked out on her, it falls to me to be my mother’s caretaker, not that she needs one yet. But if it comes down to that, it will be me. My brothers live on the east coast and my sister Sharon, who lives in Vancouver—Washington, not Canada—and close enough to drive down in a few hours, hasn’t spoken to our mother in years. “You’re a sap, Suzanne,” she tells me. “You can’t change the past.”

I’ve taken today off from my job at the Puget Sound Views to drive my mother to a cardiologist in Seattle for a consult about a condition that causes her heart to slow and lurch disconcertingly. She and I live on opposite sides of the Narrows Bridge; I’m in Tacoma and she’s in Gig Harbor. I leave early enough to first drive down to Point Defiance Park to walk the waterfront, a salve for the resentment I will inevitably feel when she fails to evidence any interest in those parts of my world that do not intersect with hers.

A mile long crescent of walkway snakes from the parking lot at the boat launch to the beach along Commencement Bay in the penumbra of the Cascades. Mount Rainier wears a corona of clouds, so I can’t see its distinctive ram’s head shape, even though the weather is unusually fine for December. That’s where I planned to be today for my ritual respite after the jumpy rush of making another deadline—up in Mount Rainier National Park on a small island in the middle of the Ohanapecosh River, at the Grove of the Patriarchs, filling my lungs with oxygen from the ancient trees. That stand of Douglas fir, western hemlock, and red cedar has been growing undisturbed for nearly 1,000 years, the river protecting the Grove from fire, the gods protecting it from all else. I am fascinated by the elegant symbiosis of the nurse logs, which perpetuate that lush forest. The fallen trees decay by degrees into a carpet of mosses. Then lichens, mushrooms and fern transform them into nurseries for cedar and conifer seedlings. There are nurse logs here at Point Defiance as well, along Five Mile Drive, but I’ve run out of morning.

There’s no bridge traffic at this hour so I can easily hazard glimpses down at the choppy swells and the blue-gray ropes of rip tides in the Narrows. On the other side of the bridge, I take the second exit and drive around the harbor where the marinas are filled with masts soldiering in the breeze, before looping onto the access road to my mother’s house. I turn left at the crooked Madrona tree, drive down the unpaved lane and park on the gravel. Her house, rented since my parents’ divorce three years ago, is shoebox plain with dated appliances and drab carpeting but situated on a sandy spit of beachfront amid grander homes. Inside it smells pleasantly of bracken from the stones and shells and driftwood she has placed on every windowsill, in every shallow bowl, her only contribution to this furnished house. Her decorative stamp is outdoors, in the whimsical sculptures, the tiles embedded in the pathways, a hot tub enclosed by a filmy forest of pampas grass.

My mother beams her hello from the open doorway. Nothing personal, it’s the same smile she offers everyone. She used to be beautiful, with a hint of animal wildness peeking out in the otherwise buttoned-up old photos, her belt tied askew at her cinched waist, a bit of tooth bared between the dark lips, her hip cocked and knees aslant, as provocative as she dared, it seemed to me.

Even now at nearly seventy, she is prettier than I, with her thick hair—streaked and cropped spiky-short—and espresso eyes. She wears an ivory silk blouse with a narrow black skirt and a light wool jacket the color of plums. Two-inch heels and tinted stockings show off her elegant ankles and calves. I am raggedy with lack of sleep and rumpled for lack of clean laundry.

Both my daughters were home over Thanksgiving break—Elise from Boston, where she lives with her father during the school year, and Kit from Ann Arbor, where she lives with her lover, also named Kit, also a woman. When the girls are home, except for work, I put the rest of my life on hold. Not out of obligation or sacrifice but because I enjoy their company; Elise’s mordant wit and discerning intellect; Kit’s dead-on mimicry, her hilarious political rants. I’d like them even if they weren’t my daughters.

We cook together and scout thrift stores, ride the ferries and walk the waterfront. Sail in good weather. They catch up with their friends and each other when they’re home. But they’ve stopped visiting their grandparents. My father berates my former husband to Elise, who adores him, and crudely mocks Kit’s relationship. “You just haven’t met the right guy, honey,” he told her.  “Believe me, he’d change your tune.”

My mother, on the other hand, pretends that neither the girls’ father nor Kit’s lover exist.

“I had a bad night,” my mother tells me, offering her cheek to be kissed.

“You look wonderful.” I say this as if it were an accusation.

“Oh, well . . .” she waves her hand, dismissive. “I felt it though.” She rests her fingertips in a cage over her heart.

“What? What did you feel?” I always have to shape her language to understand her. She’s maddeningly vague.

“My heart,” she says.

“Felt it what, Mom? Stop? Slow? Hesitate?”

“Just different, you know. Like it’s been.”

My mother has unwittingly chosen my profession. I untangle syntax, un-mix metaphors, interrogate reporters until I know the story as well as they, so their articles will read with clarity and grace. I sigh. It doesn’t matter what she says, anyway. We will have empirical evidence soon. The exam, EKG, the labs.

My mother waits until I pull onto I-5 and am dodging traffic before she tells me she has been seeing my father. The way she says it, I know it isn’t for coffee.

“He’s married,” I say, although that’s not what worries me.

“Maybe it’s better this way.”

“Why? So he can beat her up and date you?”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Suzanne.” Her tone is mild. “Your father never struck me.”

When I feel compassionate, I remind myself that she was constricted in every possible way: by poverty and gender, education and class. What she had in abundance was imagination. It was how, I understood later, she could pretend my father was exhausted or worried when he was overbearing or cruel. How she could reframe his badgering as concern, his insults as instructive. The dreamy quality that kept her at a remove from me, from us, was how she survived. The pity was she couldn’t imagine herself free.

 

The cardiologist is bald except for a low-lying fringe of wooly grey hair, and is extremely tall. Tall, and good-looking in a coarse, sensual way. His fingers are thick, his mouth wide. He swivels in his chair and rests one ankle on the opposite knee, his thigh a long and solid plank, his shoe like a small boat.

“I haven’t seen you before, Mrs. . . .” he glances down at her chart, “ . . . Garner, have I?”

“It’s Ms.,” my mother says. “And yes, I had a consult in August.”

He puts down the chart and studies her. “I think I would have remembered you.”  He manages to make this sound provocative.

He stands and extends his hand, “Come, let me listen before we do the EKG.”

He helps her onto the examination table, tells her to unbutton her blouse. She is, I see, wearing a lacy camisole. He slips the stethoscope under its frothy trim. Her breast disappears under his cupped hand.

“Fifty beats per minute,” the doctor says. “Any dizziness? Nausea?”

“Sometimes.”

“Which?” he asks her. “How often?”

Good luck, I think, trying to understand my mother.

He takes her hand and tries again. “How about now? Do you feel lightheaded now?”

It infuriates me that this man is flirting with my mother—and not in a patronizing way. Some remnant of her glory days clings to her, some superannuated estrogen patch or pheromone. My boyfriends, my husband, all of them were taken with her. I don’t know how my father stood it.

No, that’s a lie.

My father is the sort of man who likes his women beautiful. Beautiful and frail. He does, of course, resent them for it later.

“Christ, Adele, must I do every little goddamned thing for you?” he would say after my mother handed him a light bulb or a recalcitrant pickle jar.

“Of course you must, Mitchell,” she’d say, and laugh as she rubbed up against him, the sensuous gesture revolting to my teenage self. Was it that or the way in which my father was captivated?

He always got the best parts of her. And when my father was away, at work or on a business trip, it was as though she went away as well. From the time I was twelve, I became the woman of the house in his absence, signing permission slips, helping with homework, defrosting the ground beef for dinner. My mother wore aprons fussily, like a wardrobe in a play. Pots got burned and dinners ruined amid chapters of a book.

I am fulminating about all this when my mother blinks three times then slumps to the floor.

The doctor kneels beside her, bends his ear to her mouth. When he places his hands between her breasts, it takes me a second to realize it’s CPR. 

“Get my nurse,” he tells me. “Now. Move!” 

I intercept the nurse in the hallway. “My mother collapsed . . . he wants you . . . ”

The placid-faced Filipina races past me into a room, then pops right back out, like in a cartoon, dragging a red metal cart behind her. She summons another nurse who rushes into the same room and wheels out a gurney.

It’s only minutes before the doctor is running alongside the gurney, two nurses in attendance, the Filipina straddled across my mother’s chest, her hands like pistons revving up my mother’s heart. I run behind until they disappear into the service elevator at the end of the corridor. I’m punching the elevator buttons when the receptionist tells me they’ve taken my mother to the Cardiac Care Unit.

“Fifth floor,” she tells me. “Bear right.”

           

I call Sharon from the family waiting room. “I’ll come down,” she says.

I know she means for me, not our mother. The kindness undoes me. “Okay,” I manage through the knot in my throat. “Good,” I whisper.

“Suze?” 

I can’t speak.

“Suzanne. You’ve done your best.”

“Her, too,” I say, and hang up before Sharon can tell me that’s bullshit.

While I wait, I close my eyes and conjure the hushed embrace of the Grove of the Patriarchs, immerse myself in its green glory until I am as tranquil and still as the trees themselves, and so I can’t believe it when the handsome doctor comes out with that look on his face, the one that says everything isn’t okay and never will be again.

           

The room has a ghoulish green glow, all fluorescence and scrubs and easily washed plastic chairs. Everything else is white, the crib-like hospital beds, the linens, the bathroom fixtures exposed to passers-by.

I edge past the patient in the bed closest to the door, my heart knocking in my chest, to look for her but the second bed is empty. I double-check the slip of paper in my hand. Room 3605-A. The first bed. I spin around. I didn’t recognize her because this time she has gone so far away that she’s never coming back.

I know this even before the doctor arrives and tells me it wasn’t her heart, after all, but a burst aneurism that caused the stroke, which has spared her heart but ravaged her brain.

My breaths seem to enter my chest through a long narrow tube, one cold milliliter at a time. I back out of the room grateful for the obligation I have to call the others. I call my brothers first. They take it in stride. To them our mother has been as impartial and reliable as a nurse log, giving off nutrients but little else once they took off on their own.

“I’m sorry, Suze,” they tell me, acknowledging that the loss is mine alone.

I call Sharon but she’s not home so I don’t leave a message. I call my father last, reluctant to subject my mother to either his scrutiny or his lack of regard. Until I can make contact with Sharon, I walk the streets, wandering over to Pioneer Square, then into the lobby of the Alexis Hotel where I buy a pack of cigarettes in the gift shop. It’s been a decade since I’ve smoked but I decide I’ve been prudent for too long, that I should have been bolder and said my piece when I still had the chance. Three cigarettes later, I throw away the pack and dial Sharon again.

She cries when I tell her. Great gulping sobs, which astonish me. I’d expected her to comfort me, but it’s the other way around. When I hang up, I realize that she must have harbored the same secret hope all the years she’d been ridiculing mine.

 

The hospital room is dark now, except for the frenetic flickering of the TV. The remote is pinned to the sheet near my mother’s head, the stagy voices and static-y soundtrack leaking onto her pillow. I can’t tell if she’s listening but she’s not watching the screen, her eyes are closed. Wait. If she turned on the TV, then perhaps she’s trying to work her way back to speech, back to comprehension.

The nurse’s voice startles me.

“We turn it on for them. Sometimes it helps,” he says as he fastens the blood pressure cuff onto my mother’s arm.

“Is it helping now?” I ask, a tendril of hope taking root in my chest.

He shrugs. “Hard to tell.”

As soon as he leaves, I stand close to the bed.

“Mom,” I say. “Mom. It’s me.”

She looks up at the sound of my voice. Her gaze slides down my face to my hand, which she seizes in a fierce grip.

“Mom,” I try again, and this time she doesn’t even look up but just tightens her hold on me until my hand aches and her nails inscribe their hieroglyphics in my flesh.  One by one, I pry her fingers loose and cradle them between my palms until they slacken.           

“It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here.” I tuck her in and brush the damp hair away from her still lovely face.

I station the green plastic chair where she can see me and settle into its cool, unyielding embrace, prepared to stay until she falls asleep. She reaches for me through the bedrails. I take her hand and begin, “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques.  Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”

Grace Marcus has been published in The Bucks County Writer Magazine, TheWritersEye, and Women on Writing. Her novel, Visible Signs, was a semi-finalist in the 2007 William Faulkner Writing Competition. She lives in Bucks County, where she is working on a second novel and a collection of short stories.

I’d moved to Atlantic City to take care of my father. My sister Daphne had called from Tampa Bay to say that his number was up.  [img_assist|nid=6458|title=Rittenhouse Square by Nancy Barch © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=183]

“What are we going to do?” she asked me, like we talked all the time, like we was a thing.

“How bad?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Jillian had left me. I was living in a basement apartment in Bensonhurst whose only window looked out to a dry cleaner’s vent. She’d run off with the guy, Nick, who’d fix our car; they sparred together at the zendo. Jillian was a brown belt. She’d go to the zendo morning and night, and suddenly our car was never in better shape. I was most likely gambling, as I gambled every day. I always had a bet on. That was my fix, my way of getting through this life that is supposed to bring happiness before the inevitable fold.

I’d been in Gamblers Anonymous for six months before my sister’s phone call. We didn’t talk much, which is to say we didn’t talk at all. Daphne had run off when she was just seventeen with an Iranian guy who sold jewelry. The guy, Danny—Danny! I remember my father saying, What kind of a name for an Arab is that? Danny?!—was more than twice her age, and he took her to Tampa Bay where they’ve been happy ever since. They go on cruises and have Danny’s mother over for dinners, and the last time I had seen Daphne—maybe four years earlier when I was in the middle of my master’s thesis on Joyce, Yeats, and Synge, and an Anaheim Raceway horse-betting binge—she had told me they were thinking of children.

I don’t know what happened with her plans. I didn’t follow up. There was my teaching assistant money from the English department going to football and basketball and the track, there was a short, six-month bout with drinking, and then Jillian’s pregnancy, our marriage, and the miscarriage. And then the move back East where we lived with Jillian’s mother—herself addicted to mah jong and juicing—and the trips to Atlantic City to visit my old man (who’d been born there of all places and who’d moved back to be near the casinos). And the jobs I could not keep—men’s suits, ice delivery, shoes—and then the final blow, where I found myself washing dishes in the back of a Brighton Beach Ukrainian discotheque. The owner’s brother had busted one of my shins and had said he’d bust the other if I didn’t make him back the money I’d borrowed to put on a sure thing.

For better, for worse, my father did not survive long after I moved in. He was taken care of by the guy, Mr. Stottlemyre, who lived across the hall. The whole building, The Sea Crest, was out of another era. No one in the building was under 70, except the blacks who, Mr. Stottlemyre said, were in there either on behalf of the state government or the Atlantic City Improvement Council.

“You can’t blame the shvartzes,” Mr. Stottlemyre said, running a mop around my father’s baseboards. “Where else are they going to go?”

Stottlemyre was 81. He’d lived in Toronto and then moved to Providence and eventually he’d ended up at the Sea Crest, floor seven, just across from my father and the room that had the lady with all the cats.

Stottlemyre was in costume jewelry. That’s how he put it, I’m in costume jewelry, such that I checked to see if he was wearing it. He told me how Providence was the costume jewelry capital of the world, and when he said it his eyes bulged wide and the veins stood out from his neck with conviction. He’d flail his arms to make a point, and then sit in a chair and say nothing. He smoked constantly, whatever he could borrow. He’d escaped the Nazis with his brother, who’d died packing fish in Toronto. And he was a member of the Atlantic City Polar Bear Club. Somehow, he’d gotten my old man to join. Every Sunday, at eight in the morning, they plunged in and swam.

My mother died when I was twelve, so my father had long been a widower. He never remarried. He worked in the train yards for the MTA, the big yard outside of Bensonhurst. I remember him always fixing things and always working. I went to St. Stephen’s in Bay Ridge and my sister to St. Mary’s, and when I’d get home she’d be out with a boyfriend and my father would be out at the yard, though I soon understood that he wasn’t working at the yard as much as drinking. Drinking killed him. He had cancer of the bladder, and because he didn’t get it looked at until too late—and he’d have to have been pissing blood for a month—the cancer got into the surrounding muscle and lymph nodes, and that was it. He carried a scrap of shrapnel in his shoulder his entire life—sometimes it would set off the metal detectors at airports when he flew to Florida to see Daphne and Danny at Christmastime—so I guess pissing blood did not seem too much of a big deal. The one time he came to see Jillian and me in Pomona he was drunk the whole trip. But we did get him into the Pacific—he always loved to swim—and he put Jillian’s niece up on his shoulders—you could see the thick scar from where the metal went in—to show her the seabirds in the sky.

He drank to the inglorious end. He’d get cheap drinks at the casinos, especially the older ones, which were being taken over, so nobody cared. If you ever want to knock off a casino, get them when they’re being sold, when the employees feel betrayed.

Stottlemyre, on the other hand, used the casinos as an upscale walking track. He got my father to come along: a small group of oldsters power-walking from one air-conditioned lobby to the next.

In the casino lounges, my father would start with beer and end with gin, and Mr. Stottlemyre would extinguish the cigars and turn off the living room lamps and pull a blanket across my father, who always had the windows opened in a building whose super used the heat sparingly.

For years after my mother died, I’d come down in the mornings for school and find my father asleep on the sofa. He slept only sporadically in the bed he’d shared with her. They were dancers; they’d met at one of those vast VFW dances, when my mother was just eighteen. She worked at Bell Atlantic until her death, and her death was a lingerer. She was in pain for nearly two years. That’s why my father didn’t call my sister until near his own end, I think. That and the drinking. He didn’t want to remember. At the end of my mother’s life, he’d go straight from the yard to the hospital, and she would have one roommate after another, in various stages of agony, and he’d sit in the visiting chair, and he’d wait for my mother to wake, running for the nurses if she wanted even the simplest thing. Thinking of it now, the panic in his body must have been crippling without a drink

Daphne and I were there when she died. She died with an intern yelling—really yelling—into her ear to see if she’d come back to life. I hid behind the silver wrap-around curtain, and my father found me and picked me up. His face was wet, and he told me I was a beautiful boy.

On the day my father headed to the big Caesar’s Palace in the sky, I was at a GA meeting. We’d got him so he could die at home, such as it was, at The Sea Crest. A male nurse came in once a day. Mr. Stottlemyre was there all the time. I wondered about Stottlemyre’s family. Stottlemyre had kids all over the place, as he put it, but in the five months I’d eventually live at the Sea Crest, I never saw them visit even once. Stottlemyre cooked and took my father’s sheets to the laundry and one time when I came home they were smoking cigars and he was covering my father’s hand with his own.

They talked about the War. My father had never talked about the War before, with me or my sister, as far as I know, and I don’t think much with my mother. I heard my father tell Mr. Stottlemyre that until he’d fought beside one, he’d never liked Jews, had heard they were stand-offish and yellow. Stottlemyre shrugged, said he’d heard all Irish were drunks. And he told me a story, one night when neither of us could sleep, when the Giants game was over and the TV reception was frazzled by a shore-line lightning storm, how in 1945, in northern Italy, with the War for all intents over, a German soldier no older than fifteen had shot at him. My father said he couldn’t believe it. He let the German kid get away, staring right into the kid’s face so the kid would know his benign intentions, and then the kid fired a second shot at my father—my father, an old man sergeant at twenty-one, who’d nearly bled to death from shrapnel in the neck, whose eardrum was punctured by mortar. The German kid leapt onto the back of a hay wagon, pointed his rifle right at my old man, and my father fired and killed him with a single shot to the head, the boy’s head bursting, he didn’t have to say it, with the lightning outside the window, with the glass untouched on his knee, all over the dry hay.

At the GA meeting, I talked a little about Jillian. About the late miscarriage, in the sixth month, how we’d feel Shea practicing kicks in the womb. Flying Monkey, Jillian would laugh. Horse Scraping the Hoof. I’d place my ear to Jillian’s belly to hear our daughter. I’d sing to Shea. Born to Run and Dirty Old Town. Jillian would read her stories. Maybe she came to know the fighting; maybe she came to know how in her name I was betting her upbringing away.

My sponsor, Bob A., a former card shark who’d had his teeth literally kicked in when he tried to hustle the larger games—we all had our little indignities—told me that Jillian hadn’t left me, but that I chose to let her go. Although I’m not the type, I nearly decked him.

When I came back from the meeting, Mr. Stottlemyre was reading a Bible and had covered my father’s whole body with a blanket. He didn’t look up when I came in. He sort of bobbed there, leaning over my father, praying, two water glasses half-full with seltzer, a cigar still smoking in the ashtray. The broken television set, the framed photograph from his wedding, the dusty sea bass mounted on the wall. I excused myself fast and headed for the bathroom.

I splashed my face with water. There were cigar ashes on the tap. My father would sit on the toilet and tap his cigar ash into the sink. I remember this as a kid, my mother complaining, It’s like living with Groucho. My father with, It’s the only place I can sit in peace!  She was a duster, she always had the feathers flying. The house could be on fire, my father would say, and you’d run back inside to straighten! Once, winking at me, she’d vacuumed his chest hair when he’d fallen asleep eating crackers on the living room sofa. He jumped so high and laughed so hard that our cat leapt out the window onto Twelfth Street.

When I looked up from the ashes on the sink, I stared into the complete whiteness that I had experienced the time I was wrapped in the hospital curtain while the intern yelled into my dead mother’s ear. Out the opened window, an ambulance sirened. And then I realized that Stottlemyre had covered the medicine cabinet mirror with a towel that my father had swiped from the Holiday Inn. In the mirror, where my face should have been, was a casino in terry cloth relief.

I turned to the window. I hoisted it higher. The cold snapped in. Past the low roofs of Pacific Avenue banks of light swirled with the storm clouds; snowflakes flashed red, green, and gold. Beyond the lights, white caps crested the ocean. I looked down to the Avenue. The rows of air conditioners, the square windows each the same, dropping toward the street, where the ambulance’s lights whirled in front of a pawn shop, Gold Bought Here.

In the living room, Mr. Stottlemyre’s eyes were shut, the Bible open in his lap, the window shade pulled tightly behind him.

“Did you call someone?” I asked.

For a moment he seemed as far away as my old man. “Call your sister,” he suddenly said, and without opening his eyes he made a karate-chopping motion with his hand.

I pulled on my coat—a heavy coat that in fact had once been my father’s—to get out of there, and I walked up Kentucky Avenue fast. I walked past St. Joe’s, where my father had been confirmed in 1937, snow falling across headstones as in every Irish novel, past Dino’s Grinders, his favorite, Real Gravy Served Here. I crossed Atlantic and Pacific and up along Baltic and cut through the shitty little park the casinos built—seagulls clustered on the waterless fountain, a homeless kid slipping a bag over his head—and out onto the frigid boardwalk, and I wish I could say that I dove straight into the dark water like one of Stottlemyre’s bold cronies.

Instead, I sat on an icy bench—all the benches in Atlantic City have their backs to the sea—and watched two bronze horses guard two minarets. A couple of dealers came out, leaned on the concrete railing at the top of the flashing escalators, the Taj Mahal bright behind them, the gold plate, the lapis-like archway, inside the clashing of chips, the whorls of slots and roulette, the clean snap of blackjack and the tumble of fresh dice.

When my father was home from the Army for a few weeks and thinking about, I imagine, what to do, he drove down to Alabama to visit a guy he’d served with. He spent the night sleeping on a roadside in South Carolina, only to be awakened before sun-up by a cop about his age, rapping on the windshield. You can’t sleep here, son. He says it was the son that did it. My father stepped out of his car and decked the cop who merely looked up, lying on the ground on his back, and let my father drive away.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

The dealers lit cigarettes. When I called Daphne, Danny answered. He was in their back garden, in Tampa, spraying their lemon trees with soap.

Jeff Bens is author of the novel Albert, Himself and many short stories. 

    You smell the scent.

    It’s happened before. The first time, when you and your wife Claire cut through the cosmetics department at the mall, your heartbeat soared with such trepidation that you clutched at your chest, startling her. Another time, alone in line at a coffee shop near your house, it came up behind you like a wind on a blustery day. Both times you experienced the same physical sensation – the fleeting but intense pounding of the muscle that signaled life – but it ended as soon as it began, when your mistaken assumption quickly (and with much relief) became apparent.

    Those other times, no touch came on the heels of the scent. Neither the girl at the cosmetics counter nor the woman who stood behind you in line at the coffee shop knew you intimately enough to touch you.

    This time is different. It happens so fast. So fast that your brain doesn’t have time to think, “Someone wearing the same cologne must have just walked the same path I’m about to walk.” No time to reassure yourself, “It’s nothing more than a scent.”

    It’s late. Almost midnight. You’ve just left the law library at the university, a spot you now frequent to escape the incessant demands at your office. You don’t resent the demands or the people who make them, but you appreciate the solitude you find at the vacant library, hidden from sight between the stacks. Most students and lawyers do all of their research online now.

    At this time of night, you could have stayed at your office and experienced the same quiet. It’s a government office; come five o’clock, your attorneys and staff would have been long gone except, possibly, the newest assistant prosecutor, Briana. She has her first trial the next day, a simple assault and battery, and she’s nervous about it. You stopped by her office on the way out and ended up staying another hour just to let her talk about the case. This helps your attorneys, to talk it out, to pick your brain for ideas.

   But you have another case on your mind, one that mesmerized the city when the crime first occurred two months before and will turn into a full blown circus once the imminent arrest is made. A husband murdered, his wife the prime suspect. On the surface, it sounds like so many other domestic murder cases, but your instincts told you something about this one was different. Perhaps it was the fact that the man was the victim, the woman the presumed perpetrator. Perhaps it was the manner in which the murderer had disposed of the body, or maybe, even, it was simply the pictures of the couple in their younger, happier days, but something made you decide it would be irresponsible not to handle it yourself. This decision didn’t sit well with some of the more experienced prosecutors, who hoped for their moment in the spotlight.

    So while the office would have been quiet, you’ve learned that your mind isn’t so accommodating, not when surrounded by the files and memos and post-it notes that clutter your desk. For better or worse, you’ve come to require the large, clean mahogany table at the law library.

    You walk across campus and enter the pedestrian tunnel that will take you to the other side of Forsyth Avenue, where you parked your car. Your footsteps become louder in the tunnel; your eyes glance at the blue light above the emergency phone attached to the tunnel wall, but other than the simple recognition of its existence, you don’t think twice about it. You’re not thinking at all, really, and it’s nice, the respite from the noise in your head.

    If a hand unexpectedly reached out of the dark and touched you at midnight on a deserted college campus, your first response would probably be fear. Your first instinct would be one of two – fight or flight. But not when the hand touching you has already left its mark. Not when, in the split second before you feel the touch and hear the voice, you smell the scent that has the power to weaken your knees and make any protective
response impossible.

    No, in this case, your response is altogether different. It’s still instinctive, but it’s not the response that will save your life.

   “Jack, it’s me,” comes a voice from the past, barely a whisper, its owner unseen, but known.

    You’re left with only one response. Just one.

    You turn, and without a beat, you submit.

Julie Compton is the internationally published author of two novels, Tell No Lies and Rescuing Olivia. An attorney by profession, she gave up law to pursue writing full-time when her family moved from Philadelphia to Florida in 2003. She now lives near Orlando, where she is writing Keep No Secrets, a sequel to Tell No Lies. Learn more at www.julie-compton.com. This excerpt appears in the latest PS Books title, Prompted, an anthology of work from Alison Hicks’ Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio that explores the human condition via poetry, personal essays, and fiction.

    When your sister calls from Johannesburg and says, “I’m in the hospital,” say, “Hold on a sec,” then point to your phone and mouth important to the hostess, whose jeans are too tight and lipstick too bright for a five-year-old’s birthday. Glance over at your kids, who are intensely focused on the artwork they are creating, little jewelry boxes covered with paints and beads and baubles and rustly bits of tissue paper. The little one will be poking out her tongue like she always does, gluing, cutting. They won’t miss you. Step outside.

   [img_assist|nid=6109|title=2nd Bank Fresco by Thomas Johnson © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=225|height=150] Pay attention to the daffodils. Were you really waiting so long for a sign of spring this year, or does winter always feel this way? Say, “What happened?” Say, “Are you okay?” Remember to breathe—in out in out, yes that’s it. She will say she is okay, but you will know immediately that she is not. She will say she was attacked. She will say the word you don’t want to hear. You will feel like crying. Don’t.  Wait.

    Don’t be scared that you don’t know who she is for a second, that she sounds like she’s completely out of it; she is, it’s only the drugs they gave her so she can rest, get some sleep. The good news is she won’t need surgery. The guard came in time, before they could do whatever else they could have done with the rope, the knives. Breathe—that’s it, breathe. Say, “Do you want me to come get you, come be with you?” Say this even though you have no intention of getting on a plane, no intention of leaving your kids long enough to make a trip like that.  Say it anyway. Say, “Who are you with? When are you coming home?”  Make sure she is safe. Make sure she has someone with her. Say, “I love you.” Say, “I’m here for you.” Let her hang up first.

    Stay outside for a minute, even though the skies have burst open, engorged clouds exploding like the leaking breasts of a new mother. Get wet. Feel the rain. See the daffodils—yellow, green, white. Go back in, to glitter and bright latex and hands and lips that are stained with chocolate and princess-pink frosting. Don’t think, yet, that anything can happen to these lips, these bodies, these little-girl hands. Even though your sister said, “It could have happened anywhere,” pretend for a moment like it can never happen here.

  [img_assist|nid=6076|title=Back Bay by Anna Marie Zabielski © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=162]  Say yes to a slice of cake. Eat it all, even though it turns to sand in your mouth. Thank the hostess. Schedule a playdate. Buckle the girls in—one, two, three. The third isn’t yours but sometimes it feels like she is, she’s with you so much. You like her. She has a tiny body and a big voice. She sizzles with way too much life for that little body. She’s fun, usually, to have around. Once, when you dropped them off at school, she asked you for a kiss good-bye; now you always kiss her, too. She will be staying for dinner, so pick up an extra pizza. If you cooked tonight nothing would taste like it’s supposed to.

     Put on a DVD. Tell them if they don’t agree on which one, they can’t watch anything; they’ll agree. DVDs are a big deal since they usually aren’t allowed. Go in the bathroom and close the door. Call your husband.

    Tell him what happened. You can probably cry now, but you won’t. Love him for offering to go find them and kill them, even though deep down you know that’s really just a stupid thing to say. Love him even more for offering to go get her, too. Love him when you realize he’s pulled over, on the side of the road with hazards blinking, in as much shock as you. Love him the most when he knows without saying that you won’t be having sex with him tonight, even though he picked up a bottle of wine and the hottest peppers he can find to make the nachos, even though wine and sex and snacks is what you do on Saturday nights since you had the kids.

    Wait. Wait and wait and wait. She calls you from Tanzania, then Malawi. Ethiopia. She is staying with friends. You want her to come home, but she won’t. “Home is here,” she says. “This is home now.” Worry about her, constantly. Feel relieved that she is still far away, that you don’t have to deal with it. Feel relieved that she doesn’t want you to come. Feel relieved that her job is giving her a year of paid leave so she can cope. Wonder if her job feels guilty for only paying for guards at night when it was already too late anyway.

    Try to remember what you learned when you worked the rape crisis hotline ten years ago. Remember what it was like to walk in to the ER with core-shattered women. Remember how different they all were. Some calm, some hysterical. Not one of them would ever be the same. Hate yourself for a moment for thinking you were doing something to help. Hate yourself for whatever it is that you said to their families, to them. Forgive yourself for thinking it’s all bullshit. Most days, bullshit is better than nothing.

    Be careful who you tell.

    When you finally see her, be extra kind. Meet her at the airport with an ice-cold Snapple, her favorite, something that she can’t get over there, something refreshing after her long flight. Laugh with her about the care packages you sent even though she always told you not to because they never made it to her intact; the only thing she got last time was an empty box filled with cookie crumbs, not even the popsicle-stick picture frame was left. Laugh about some postman in South Africa enjoying your cookies and People magazines. Have dinner already made, at home, and make the table with linen and china and flowers. Move the little one’s bed into your room so she can have her own space. Don’t panic that she trembles constantly. It’s just the meds, she says, the meds that help her sleep, get through the day. Don’t panic that you can still see the scar on her neck, deep, whitish on the inside, pink all around it. Don’t think that is where they pressed the knife. Don’t think you need a better explanation when she tells your friend that she fell on the plane on the way over. Who falls on a plane? And if you did fall on a plane, how could it cut you like that? Don’t panic that she looks like she is fifty years old and so skinny that your five-year-old could snap her in two. When she tells you she is seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, believe her. Trust. She is smart. She is resilient. She’s a doctor, for god’s sake. She knows what to do, where to get help. 

Try to do the normal things. Go see the Sex and the City movie even though you saw it already. Get butter on the popcorn even though you hate butter. Go to Target. Take long walks. Say, “I’m here for you.” Tell your daughters, “She’s sick. She got sick in Africa.” They will be confused: Why is she sleeping all the time? Why doesn’t she play with us anymore? Try to convince her to stay, but in a respectful way so she doesn’t feel like you think you know better than she does, even though you know you do. Feel sick and sad but relieved when she goes back anyway.

    Pray. Even if you never have before. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do, the only thing that helps you finally get to sleep at night, when you lay smooshed between your husband and your daughter who comes in every night around midnight, when you lay with your heart beating in your stomach and your throat on fire and know for sure more than at any other time that we are all completely powerless and there is nothing anyone can ever do.

    Agree. When she calls and says, “I’m coming home. Nothing good can ever happen in Africa,” agree. You have lived in Africa, too, and you know the good things that can happen there and the good things that can happen here are totally different kinds of good things, and you weren’t even working with people who were dead and dying, like she does. Invite her to stay with you; she won’t. The kids are too much. Invite her anyway. [img_assist|nid=6077|title=Unhealthy Obsession by Colleen D. Gjefle © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=223]

    Go see her. Leave the kids with your mother-in-law for once. One weekend of high fructose corn syrup and non-stop TV won’t kill them. Practice your speech the whole way there.  The speech about how you’re worried for her, she needs to be in treatment, she needs help, she’s not recovering from this on her own. How you would want her to say this to you, if the situation were reversed. The words will freeze on your tongue, melt into your throat the minute you see her, angry, pacing. When she snaps, “I had a bad day,” listen. She is looking for work, now, depressed. Her life can’t possibly have meaning unless she is living it right on the edge. Don’t tell her that children in New York or Miami or San Antonio need help just as much as the children over there. Don’t tell her that she needs to help herself first, even though you want to say this more than anything. Listen. Just listen. Be there. Eat spicy samosas and savory lamb korma and go to the mall. Buy sheets of stickers with flowers and kittens for your girls, a small bag of peppermints for your mother-in-law. Help her pick out a blouse. Don’t say that she looks like your eighty-three-year-old grandmom from behind, all skin and shoulders. Say, “It’s nice. That color looks good on you.” Plan another visit; she’ll come see you this time.

    Don’t be surprised that she doesn’t. When she calls you from the airport, say okay. Don’t be surprised. She’s going back. Of course she’s going back. You already knew that, she already knew that, it was just a matter of when.  “There are lots of doctors here,” she says. “And hardly any there.”  Say, “I understand.” Say, “Whatever you need to do.” Say, “I’m here for you.” You don’t know what that means, how to be here, or where here even is. Say it anyway. Say, “I love you.” Say it. That’s all.

Kathleen Furin is a social worker, childbirth educator, and the co-founder of the Maternal Wellness Center, www.maternalwellness.org She was a regular contributor to The Mother magazine from 2005 to 2007. Her work has also been published in Literary Mama, The Mother’s Movement Online, Midwifery Today, the anthology Operation Homecoming, and other journals.

[img_assist|nid=5881|title=Solitaire by Anne Buckwalter © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=199]Nature trumps nurture. Ellen believed it even before science arrived at the same conclusion, believed it even after science changed its mind again. Believes it now. Even so, she hadn’t expected her adult daughters to divide between them every characteristic she’d found objectionable in their father. Ardis and Jilly, oil and water, but each in her way Artie’s child.

Ellen grabs a towel and steps from the shower, notes the stretch marks silvering her belly, more prominent since she shed those ten pounds. They never did fade much, and now they’re like ski trails seen through spring ice. Any minute Jilly will arrive with her pal Renée and Renée’s toddler, Hannah Rose. (Or not. Jilly’s relationship with the clock is casual.)

When she was pregnant with Ardis, Ellen floated the name Hannah, but Artie vetoed it as too biblical. Typical Artie. If they’d had a son he’d have insisted on Joshua Arthur Draper, Jr., found some obscure reason why Joshua was not actually biblical. Back then, before you could find out the sex ahead of time, you chose a name for a boy, a name for a girl. Two arguments instead of one. Artie knew who he was, though; you’d have to give him that. And early on he knew he was not meant to be a dad. After he fled New York for Miami, Ellen came to prefer the clear dimensions of single parenthood. She’d kept her job at the ad agency through both pregnancies, and that was good—no back-to-work adjustments. As the most skilled of the department’s artists, she liked her job and earned a reasonable wage. Once a year Artie sent a check to cover child support, except when he didn’t. Eventually he’d make it up, and she let it go at that.

Ellen turns on the hair dryer and scrunches her waves into place. In the mirror her skin is blotchy and her highlights are inching toward unappealing ochre. Or maybe it’s just the light. Artie Draper, what a piece of work. Among other things, Ardis inherited his contentiousness. When Ellen met him in 1965, she’d found this trait admirable, a nice change from the men in Missouri who took pride in their reticence. It soon got old, but not soon enough, not before she married him. Cock-sure and proud of it. First-class bullshitter, ditto. At times Artie would catalogue his flaws as a kind of foreplay, chuckling over them with a dreamy fondness as he and Ellen snuggled on the sofa. It was arousing in a weird way, like watching masturbation.

Artie still believes Ellen came up with the name Ardis as homage. In truth she’d kept it in mind since her teens, when she went through a phase of reading British novelists. It seemed at once both sturdy and exotic, a fine name for a firstborn daughter. But perhaps it had been unwise, so similar to “Artie”, encouraging Ardis to identify. When she’s annoyed, which is often, her voice takes on Artie’s bullying edge. She looks like him, too, something on the plus side. At thirty-one she’s tall and fair, her jutting chin either noble or assertive, depending on the situation. This is probably an asset in her job as an oncology nurse.

Ardis is married to a recreational hunter, and animal parts—haunch, chops, the occasional liver—dominate her diet. She defends this by pointing to something she read that links diet to blood type. Ardis is Type O, the most ancient. The literature, as Ardis puts it, ties Os genetically to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. They require meat. Grains and vegetables are dietary no-nos for the roving O. Ellen is the same type. Her failure to adopt Ardis’ regimen is a bone of contention. During increasingly frequent raids on her mother’s East Side walk-up, Ardis thinks nothing of flinging open the refrigerator to inspect for signs of conversion. “Mother,” she says, shaking her head, “it’s small wonder you’re anemic.”

Ellen has been unapologetically vegetarian since college, though she cheerfully cooked meat for her daughters when they decided they were not. Except for a bum knee from an old ski accident and a mild tendency toward anemia, she enjoys excellent health. This bugs Ardis no end. “We’re talking long term here, Mother,” she says. Lower the voice an octave and you’d swear it was Artie.

A few years after he decamped, Ellen let her daughters adopted a cat from the city shelter. They chose an amiable tom that Ardis named Moosey. Feeding and litter box duty were part of the deal, and the girls were pretty good about it, especially at first. But when Moosey developed urinary problems, it was Ellen who took the bathmat to the basement laundry every night. She paid astronomical vet bills without complaint until Moosey expired on a late-night emergency visit to Animal Medical Center.

“You never wanted him in the first place,” Ardis accused, stoically dry-eyed while Ellen bawled along with Jilly in the backseat of the cab.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Ellen sobbed, but even as she spoke it was being writ large on the tablet of her failings.

Yes, Ardis is tough—but easier to take than Jilly, still demanding as a two-year old, chronically broke, and a newlywed for the second time in six years. And where the heck is she, anyway? It’s after four already. Both of her husbands, past and current, are easygoing men, attractive in the same athletic, balding sort of way. Jilly’s spoiled-brat behavior seems to attract men, but it troubles Ellen. She’d been an attentive but even-handed parent, encouraging kindness and a sense of responsibility. Ardis is responsible. Neither one is kind. If only she didn’t love them.

Like her father, Jilly keeps her options open. Lately she’s been hanging out with a group of new mothers, which is how she met Renée. She can spout off the merits of every park in Manhattan. She’s an authority on strollers. No job, but that’s nothing new. Maybe she’ll become a lactation consultant. Her present spouse, Ira, says he doesn’t want her to work. He wants her to ease up and learn to be happy. Good luck, Ira, thinks Ellen. She could kick herself, but there you have it.

If only her girls were not so constantly in her face, couldn’t she be more patient? Lately she’s dreamed about moving a breathable distance from New York—Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore.

Ellen pulls on her favorite jeans, newly comfortable and proudly baggy. Later she’s meeting Pradeep for dinner in the East Village. She’s picturing his long back, his questioning eyes. She’s in no big rush to sleep with Pradeep, though they’ve been seeing each other for months. Apparently this is mutual. Sometimes she wonders, though. He’s younger, late forties. Possibly she is not his only interest?

Pradeep shares Ellen’s love of antique bottles and fifties jazz, enjoys hanging out in flea markets. Jilly and Ardis are unaware of him—a small closet of privacy not yet ransacked by her daughters. Would they like him? Probably not. Both prefer less cerebral types. They’d never get his sense of humor.

The first time Pradeep asked her out Ellen assumed he was kidding. His musical speech pattern tends to make whatever he says seem ironic. That’s part of his appeal, but it can be confusing. All that week he had been helping Ellen customize new software to prepare layouts. It was beyond frustrating, the program seizing up and an hour’s labor vanished. Nice of Pradeep; he had his own deadlines. “So what about dinner tonight, mein Schatz,” he said. They had worked again past nine.

“Der Chinese,” answered Ellen, staring at her monitor. Pradeep had to wave his hand in front of it, make clear that he wanted to take her to dinner, not order out again. Even so, she felt like Chinese. They found a new place nearby and ordered without waiting for menus. A comfortable silence blanketed their fatigue as they drained the first pot of tea. When she tasted her eggplant with chilies, Ellen nudged the serving plate in Pradeep’s direction. He took a bite and smiled into the air as if at an invisible face. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Oh yes, I see.”

What a lovely man. Why hadn’t she noticed him?

Revived by the tea, Pradeep had regaled her with tales of his student days in Munich, where he toiled nights as a waiter in a beer garden. The patrons treated him poorly, mistaking him for a Turk, the lowest rung at the time on Munich’s social ladder. But he loved Germany—the mountains and forests, the medieval cities. Even the food, though he, like Ellen, is vegetarian.

When their plates had been cleared, they snapped open the fortune cookies. “Blue is not your color,” read Ellen, peering down at her navy turtleneck. “What happened to Confucius?”

“I don’t think it means that kind of blue,” said Pradeep. He intoned his fortune like a newscaster from the thirties: “A dead duck is still a duck.” Not that funny, really, but something about it triggered a mutual giggling fit they couldn’t tamp, even when people at nearby tables began to frown. They had just about pulled themselves together when Pradeep slouched deep in his seat, garroting himself with his hands. “Still a duck,” he squawked, eyes bulging. They stumbled into the crisp night, laughter erupting every few steps until they had to rest against a building.

Ellen invited him up for coffee. As if they needed more caffeine, but what the heck. How shabby the apartment looked all of a sudden: the walls needing paint, that grubby cotton bolster. It had been months since she viewed her surroundings through another’s eyes. Pradeep perched on the sagging sofa in a manner that seemed European, alert, and slightly formal. Unlike her other (infrequent) male visitors who were more apt to sink back on the cushions with a proprietary ease that irked her in a way she could never explain. “Tomorrow, then,” he said at the door, brushing her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Ellen had closed the door, run her own knuckles over her cheekbone, continuing the sensation. It occurred to her then that what made Pradeep’s accent so unusual was its tinge of German.

A melting pot accent; she likes that. And she likes hearing snippets of his background piecemeal, whenever they happen to come up: a jigsaw puzzle of a man.

Jilly leans on the buzzer while Ellen jogs barefoot to the foyer. “Jesus,” says Ellen, “look at you! Where are Renée and Hannah Rose? It’s six o’clock!”

“The Lord’s name is not to be taketh in vain, Mother.” Jilly wipes her tear-stained face, heading for the sofa.

“Sorry, honey.” Jilly and Ira are newly fundamentalist, struggling with Biblical grammar. She keeps forgetting that. “Anyway, you look like hell—what happened?”

“I’m pregnant, Mother,” says Jilly, as though Ellen might be implicated. She has recently adopted Ardis’ habit of speaking in italics.

A grandchild? A little fin of hope swims by, but Ellen keeps her face neutral. “So, not good?”

 “Well of course it’s not good, Mother. We’ve been married six months! This was supposed to be the fun period.” Jilly buries her face in the bolster, shuddering silently.

“So I guess it was,” says Ellen. She can’t help noting the scratched parquet—it’s bad here in front of the couch. Maybe she ought to get the floors redone.

“I can’t believe this happened. What am I supposed to do?”   

Someone needs to be the voice of reason here, but Ellen’s tired of the role. Let someone else be the damned Voice of Reason for a change. She combs Jilly’s hair with her fingers, smoothing back platinum ringlets that spring forward as she releases them. Artie’s curls, Artie’s green cat eyes. “Okay,” she says, hefting the load because sure as hell no one else will. “Let’s start with what you want, Jilly. Let’s figure this out.”

“Ira wants a child. Like it doesn’t matter what I want. I’m just the little hostess for this occasion.”

“Mmmm, I see.” Ellen gets up and steps into the bathroom to a find a washcloth.

“And according to Ira, abortion is out of the question,” Jilly says, mimicking Ira’s resonant bass.

“But you knew Ira wanted kids right away. He told you when you met him. He even told me.”

 “Et tu, Mommy?” says Jilly, rolling her eyes.

“How far along are you?” 

“Nine weeks. My gynecologist has reserved a bed at Roosevelt. He thinks there could be complications.” Jilly stiff-arms herself off the couch and scuffs over to the window, swabbing her face with the washcloth. Ellen follows, pauses a step behind. Snowflakes are blowing sideways and swirling away on an updraft. How can that be, when there isn’t a cloud in the sky? “

“Can’t you give this more thought, honey? You’ve had two abortions. Ira’s your second husband and–”

 “Is it necessary to remind me of these obvious facts, Mother? Can you have a little mercy?” Jilly leans hard into Ellen’s shoulder. “I’ll need you to come with me. You’ll have to take me home.”

A wave breaks below Ellen’s breastbone, rises into her throat. It’s snowing harder, the sky suddenly dull. Winter, the time of beginnings.

 

Pradeep’s sentences trail off as he stirs lazy eights into his lentil soup. Okay, probably a girlfriend, just as she suspected.

“Well,” he starts, but pauses again.

“Well, what?” says Ellen. Why make it easy? She’s pressing her thumbs into her temples, trying to stave off a headache.

“Well, I’m thinking of going back to Germany.” His melancholy eyes lift. No guilt there.

Ellen sighs and releases her thumbs. “So, that’s what the matter is. Why?”

“I’ve been renting my apartment to a cousin, but he’s taken a job in Oslo. Also, my visa will soon expire.” He shrugs in that waifish way he has, making him look much younger, like a boy.

Should she touch the tip of his nose with her finger—is that too dumb? She does it anyway. “I’ll miss you.”

“I will miss you as well,” says Pradeep, looking like he means it. They fall silent, spoon up their soup, considering this. Ellen concentrates on tightening her forehead muscles, a headache-busting technique she learned in biofeedback training. Clench, release. Clench, release. Jilly’s predicament slogs through her brain like a swamp creature.

“I was wondering whether you might like to come with me,” he continues.

Ellen halts her spoon mid-air. “To Germany?”

“Cologne.” That musical inflection, the faint gurgle of laughter.

Clench, release. She’s been to Cologne—a group tour of Europe’s great cathedrals. Begun in 1248, the Cologne Cathedral is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe . . . that ability to remember guidebook details, useless but occasionally amusing. “We barely know each other, Pradeep,” Ellen says. “We aren’t even having sex.” The Voice of Reason.

“We are peaceful. Very comfortable,” says Pradeep, pronouncing all four syllables of comfortable in his Indo-German twang.

“Agreed. But.”

“Would the rest be a problem?”

“The rest? What’s this, some kind of proposal?”

 “Marriage, do you mean?” Pradeep purses his lips. “If you would find it more suitable we could consider . . .”

“I don’t seem to have an aptitude.”

“Me either.”

“I didn’t know you’d been married,” says Ellen.

“Well, once almost.” He shrugs again, leans forward. “But what’s that you were just saying, Ellen, that you and I should be having sex?”

“No. I was just pointing out that we aren’t.”

“Well, possibly we should,” he says, brightening, as if this hadn’t occurred to him.

Oh for god sake, talk about timing. “I guess my biggest concern would be getting a job over there,” Ellen says, more to herself than Pradeep.

“Do not be concerned. I have excellent connections.”

Ellen cups her eye. An anvil has sunk itself into her brow, and a zigzag border is forming around her vision. “You know what? I need some time to absorb all this.”

“Of course. Plenty of time. What’s going on with your eye?”

“Migraine.”

“Oh, too bad. We’d better get you right home.” Pradeep cranes his neck, looking for the waiter.

“When are you thinking of leaving?”

“Next month. I’ve purchased my ticket.”

 

[img_assist|nid=5882|title=Phone by Julie Laquer © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=175]“Cologne?” shrieks Ardis through the phone. “Honestly, Mother, you never cease to amaze. What can you be thinking?”

“You can visit me. Think bratwurst, think schnitzel.”

“Seriously!”

“Seriously, why not?”

“Well, for starters, who is this guy? What do you know about him?”

Ellen switches the phone to her other ear. “I know he’s a German citizen.”

“Great, Mother. A German. They’re barbarians.”

“Listen to you, Ardis. Your Grandpa Koester was German.”

“I’m talking Nazi resurgence, Mother. And if that doesn’t freak you out, how about terrorism. Don’t you read the newspaper? There are big problems over there.”

 Ellen sighs. “There are big problems everywhere, Ardis. And Pradeep is a very peaceful man.”

“You’re going to Germany with an Indian?”

“Name does sound Indian, doesn’t it?”

“I’m coming over.”

 

Ardis marches in, armed with a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, a sack of roasted cashews, and beef jerky wrapped in cellophane. “Offerings!” cries Ellen gaily. She pecks Ardis’ cheek and goes off to search for the corkscrew, while Ardis prowls the living room, slouches into the Windsor chair. She runs her hands up and down the wooden arms, caressing the carved paws.

“Ardis, don’t look so grim,” says Ellen, returning with the opened wine and two stemmed glasses. “This is not the end of Western civilization. Let’s have some of your nice wine.”

“You’re an adult, Mother. I’m not here to insult your intelligence.”

“Excellent.”

“So don’t insult mine. This is unreasonable.”

 “Unexpected, perhaps. Why unreasonable?”

“What are you going to do for money?”

“Got it covered.”

Ardis straightens, remembering her mission. “You understand that his mother will own you. You will wash this woman’s feet.”

Ellen nibbles her bottom lip to suppress a smile. “You’ll be relieved to know that Pradeep’s mother has been dead for fifteen years, Ardis, so I doubt there will be any foot washing to speak of. Besides, we have no plans to marry. We haven’t even decided whether to live together.”

Ardis frowns, sniffs her cabernet. “You’re in love with this Pra-deep?”

“You might call it that.”

It occurs to Ellen that this is the first time in years she’s glimpsed uncertainty in her eldest. It’s refreshing. Touching, actually. She’s about to reach for Ardis’ hand, say something conciliatory, when the buzzer signals Jilly’s arrival.

Without taking off her faux-leopard coat, Jilly flings herself on the sofa. “Tell me this isn’t permanent!”

 “Don’t know, Jill. Could be permanent. Why not?” says Ellen, sitting down beside her. She strokes Jilly’s coat, so silky, so close to real.

“Because it’s too friggin’ far!”

 “Didn’t God make planes? Didn’t He create phones?” Ellen grabs a handful of cashews. She hasn’t felt this good in months.

“But you know Ira and I are separating. I was thinking of moving back home for a while.” The crestfallen face, the desperate eyes. Ah, Artie.

Silence dangles like an apple, waiting to be plucked. “Well,” says Ellen, reaching for it. “I don’t see why you couldn’t.” She leans forward for a moment, hands on her thighs, then rockets up, propelled by an unfamiliar energy. “They can’t prove you ever left, can they? You could move right in, Jilly. No sublet!”

Jilly shoots Ardis a look.

[img_assist|nid=5883|title=Wissahickon Winter by Marita McVeigh © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=176|height=144]“You can get a job, move right in,” repeats Ellen, waving an imaginary baton. “It’s still rent-stabilized.”

“Alone?” says Jilly, drawing out the “o.” Artie getting ready to work the angles, Ellen hears it immediately.

“Or, find yourself a roommate, get married again, whatever.”

“Get married again?”

Both girls are staring now. “She’s going,” says Ardis, her mouth full of beef jerky.

 “And don’t forget there’s Ardis a mere subway stop away.” Ellen heads for the kitchen to find another wineglass, calling over her shoulder as if across a great body of water. “Right here at home, Jilly, all the comforts. And Ardis ready to advise on almost anything.”

“What’s that about?” says Ardis, gripping the paws of her chair.

 “How should I know?” says Jilly, but already she’s redrawing her bead. “You’re the big expert.”

Ellen roots among the shelves above the stove. There’s got to be another wine glass in here. Oktoberfest, wouldn’t that be something! she’s thinking, or did she say it aloud? Bayreuth! Kirshekuchen like mom used to buy at that little bakery in St. Louis. Her disembodied voice wafts into the living room.

“What did she say?” says Ardis. “Sounded like and dim sum!”

“We can’t hear you mother,” calls Jilly. “What?”

Head and shoulders in the cabinet, Ellen hums the final bars of “Lili Marlene,” all she can remember from when her daddy used to sing it after the war. A newly-minted citizen, he’d fought with the Americans, the only guy in his battalion who knew the words in both languages.

“Shush, Jilly! Shut up!” says Ardis, learning forward, cupping her ear. But there’s nothing now except the urgent ring of glasses being jostled—a bit roughly, perhaps, but not to the point of breaking. 

 

Juditha Dowd lives north of Trenton on the Jersey side of the  Delaware. Her work has been published in The Florida Review, Perigee and AARP Magazine and been featured on Poetry Daily. She performs in  the tri-state area with the ensemble Cool Women and is currently working on a second novel.Juditha Dowd lives north of Trenton on the Jersey side of the  Delaware. Her work has been published in The Florida Review, Perigee and AARP Magazine and been featured on Poetry Daily. She performs in  the tri-state area with the ensemble Cool Women and is currently working on a second novel.

Arrive to the morning team meeting twenty-three minutes late, balancing multiple aspects of your life – papers, raincoat, laptop, handbag, umbrella, breakfast, gym clothes, lunch – so that you look like a circus performer.  An untalented one, as your hot venti nonfat no-whip mocha tumbles into the lap of the Vice President of Corporate Affairs.  As he gets up to go tell his secretary to ask his wife to bring a change of clothes, let him know that the stained suit wasn’t actually very becoming anyway, so it’s probably for the best.

            Take a seat and chew your garlic bagel loudly and conspicuously, especially when you are talking.  Say things like, “I really disagree, Roger,” so that your words emerge in bagel-speak as “Ah wih-we disagwee, Waga.”  Smile broadly to display bits of soggy half-chewed bagel stuck to your teeth.  Ask the Vice President of External Relations seated next to you if he’d like some bagel, offering him a bite-riddled piece framed with red lipstick stains.  When he politely declines, say, “Oh, come on, Henry, I know it’s better than the PB&J your wife packed you for lunch.”  Laugh maniacally, revealing the disintegrating chunks of bagel in your mouth.

            Distribute copies of your presentation, uncollated, so that each person must pass around and sort through thirty-five unnumbered pages of slides.  Ensure that there are only enough copies for a third of the people at the table, so that each person must share with two others.  Make sure you’ve peppered the presentation with important text printed in a minuscule size at various significant points, so that even after people fidget for their reading glasses in pockets and briefcases and purses, it is still impossible for them to read the type.  When they ask what it says, tell them you don’t remember, but you’re fairly certain it’s something good.

            Include a table or two in your presentation with percentages that add up to more than 100, so that the CFO and the Senior Financial Analyst have an opportunity to show off their superior mathematical knowledge and attention to detail.

            When the Vice President of Corporate Affairs returns in a new suit, let him know that he’s missed all the important stuff in the meeting, that it’s impossible to convey what he missed, and that the first suit was much more flattering than this one.  Fill the empty silence with more maniacal laughter.

            Whenever anyone makes a comment, say things like, “You can’t possibly think that,” or “Are you kidding?” and accompany these phrases with an exaggerated eye-roll.  During the presentation by the Vice President of Marketing, tap your pen against the edge of the table at a gradually increasing speed.  When you’ve reached the fastest tempo possible, slow the tapping down before breaking into a pen-tap rendition of “Jingle Bells.”  Close your eyes and feel the rhythm.  Let your entire body move with the music.  Then spin around in your chair and laugh maniacally.

            When the VP of Human Resources asks if you are OK, ask her if she’s OK.  Let this dialogue play out in a “Who’s on First” fashion, making sure never to actually answer her initial question.

            As the CEO begins to explain this new phase of strategic planning, reach for the hands of the executives on either side of you and suggest, “Why don’t we all sing, ‘Kumbaya’?”  Don’t wait for an answer – just start singing.  Keep singing, even when they take you from your chair and have the security guards escort you from the building.

 

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR READ THE STORY. 

Jenny Lentz is a transplanted Southerner residing in Philadelphia. Her  fiction has won awards from The Baltimore Review, Writer’s Digest, Writers Notes Magazine, Main Street Rag, Spire Magazine, and The New Writer, among others, and her writing has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.  She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College.

           Ackerman traced the fiber optic cable leading from the control unit under the customized sofa-lounger to the I/O port in the side of Mrs. Frimmel’s skull. The coldness of the metal connection surrounded by soft hair and warm skin always felt weird to him, but Ackerman had become used to it by now. More or less.

            The filaments of the cable pulsed with faint colored light as the unit monitored and decoded her cerebral activity. The connections were okay, which annoyed Ackerman. Usually with this kind of glitch, it was only a bad cable or damaged data port, either of which could be fixed in just a few minutes. 

           Mr. Frimmel sat next to his wife, quiet and still, like a good potato. They were a neat and pleasant middle-aged couple, and obviously had money, judging by their fancy house. Ackerman never knew what made people like this volunteer to be jacked-in. It wasn’t like they needed the compensation: ten grand and deep discounts on the products of the Omnifax agency’s client corporations. But he was there to fix a bad data feed, not make sociological observations. 

            He squatted down to check the screen on the control unit. FRIMMEL, MARIANNE A. TRANSFER RATE AVERAGE 420 TB/MINUTE, 67% BELOW NOMINAL. HARMONIC INTERFERENCE 2 x 105.  

           So much for his lunch hour. After setting up the test rig, he stole a minute to take in the show on the flatscreen TV that filled the entire wall opposite the sofa. It was the only source of illumination in the room.

            Goddamn commercials, Ackerman thought as he keyed in a test program. That’s all the potatoes watched, 24/7, for weeks or even months on end. Drugs and neural stimulation slowed down their normal physical functions, while the Omnifax maintenance techs came in every day or two to see to other necessities. All the while, the subjects’ brain responses to various stimuli were tested, evaluated and recorded, and the data collated and analyzed.

            All to make better and ever more effective commercials.

            Mrs. Frimmel began losing the blank and contented facial expression of a good potato. She trembled, her neck and facial muscles twitched, perspiration formed on her forehead. Ackerman started the next diagnostic, hoping that her shakiness was just the usual post-installation reaction. But the records on the Frimmels showed that they’d been jacked-in for about three weeks already. She should have settled down by now.

            “Not good,” Ackerman muttered to himself, as Mrs. Frimmel’s movements increased in intensity. A trail of spittle dribbled from the corner of her mouth, her expression pained, eyes squeezed shut. 

            Beside her, Mr. Frimmel continued to soak up input, blissfully oblivious. And everything was coming up green on the diagnostics. It didn’t make sense. Nothing was wrong with the equipment. Otherwise Mr. Frimmel would be displaying the same reactions. Which meant that Mrs. Frimmel had to be —

            “FRESH, CLEAN AND FREE OF EMBARRASSING ODORS!” somebody shouted in Ackerman’s ear. “WHY SHOULD YOU SUFFER FROM –”  He was startled for a second until he realized the voice was booming from the TV. Probably a stray voltage spike somewhere in the line kicking up the volume. Ackerman scuttled crab-like across the floor to the flatscreen and fumbled for the hidden panel along the bottom, then jabbed his thumb on the RESTORE SETTINGS button. The ad spot mercifully returned to its low murmur. 

            He leaned against the wall and glanced over at the Frimmels. At least Mrs. Frimmel seemed to be calming down. For a minute there he’d thought she was–

            Son of a bitch. 

            Her lips were moving. And potatoes weren’t supposed to talk.

            On hands and knees, Ackerman crawled back beside the Frimmels’ sofa. 

            “Embarrassing odors,” said Mrs. Frimmel in a low monotone. “Embarrassing odors. Free from. Why suffer?”

            She was quoting the goddamn commercial.

            Ackerman got up on his knees and leaned on the arm of the sofa. Mrs. Frimmel was still shaking and sweating.

            “QUIRTEL!” she shouted. “QUIRTEL! ODORS!”

            Knowing it was useless, Ackerman began checking everything again:  connections, interface, power supply.

            Nothing.

            “QUIRTEL!” Mrs. Frimmel repeated. “BETTER!”

            Better?

            Wait a minute.

            Ackerman punched up the reception records for the Frimmels’ connection node. A listing scrolled up on the control unit screen, lines of cryptic words and numbers in digital hash. Records of everything over their feed for the last twenty-four hours. Every single ad spot or infomercial or whatever the hell they saw on that screen had its own I.D. flag, with the time it was transmitted, its length, and the name of the company for which Omnifax made the ad. Ackerman hit a key on the control unit keyboard, halting the scrolling lines, then backed up a bit.

            “QUIRTEL!” Mrs. Frimmel proclaimed.

            Ackerman tapped his finger on the screen, nodding in triumph. One of the data lines read:  5934BIFIDBIOS/DATATR0325:42:53/ SR48729DS/QUIRTEL[HT38632jd337].

            “QuirTel,” he said softly.

            “QUIRTEL!” Mrs. Frimmel echoed.

            He glanced back at the screen and turned up the volume. Elaborate computer animation was transforming a depressed-looking couple into new people, remaking their faces, their bodies. “Here at QuirTel, we’re pioneering the next wave in custom gengineering,” said a cheerful voiceover. “QuirTel is in the forefront of exciting new genetic technologies that can correct almost any flaw in your body, your health, your appearance–and that of your children and children-to-be!”

            “Any flaw!” Mrs. Frimmel exclaimed. “Children-to-be! QuirTel!”

            “QuirTel,” said the voiceover. “Where DNA is only a suggestion. And don’t forget our line of personal hygiene products–”

            The QuirTel ad ended and a new commercial promptly took its place. Ackerman turned to watch Mrs. Frimmel. She was calm and quiescent again, her mouth no longer moving, body no longer trembling.

            Ackerman muted the sound and glanced at the screen. Different ad. Different company. As he’d expected.

            He hit the comm button on the test gear panel. The screen flickered and the tech dispatcher’s annoyed face appeared.

            “You’re interrupting my lunch, Ackerman,” he said.

            “We got a tater treat here, Macafee. Totally fried, it looks like. Selective stimulatory fixation.”

            “Oh, shit,” Macafee groaned. “That’s the third SSF this month. You sure?”

            “I’m not a goddamn amateur.”

            “You’re on the Frimmels, right? Which one’s the tater?”

            “The wife.” Ackerman glanced over at Mr. Frimmel. “Husband looks okay. No crosstalk between them.”

            “Good, then maybe we can still salvage something.” Macafee looked down, as if checking a note. “What’s she’s hung on?”

            “QuirTel Biotech. I did a download trace, and every time a QuirTel ad comes up, her biosigns go snarky. Plus I saw it happen myself just a minute ago when a QuirTel spot came over the feed.”

            “QUIRTEL!” Mrs. Frimmel yelled.

            Macafee frowned. “What was that?”

            “That was her,” Ackerman said, checking the TV. “It’s not one of their spots coming over now, so she must have responded to hearing me say the name.”

            “Auditory response too,” Macafee said, shaking his head. 

            “Yeah,” said Ackerman. “You better tell QuirTel that whatever new mindfuck’s in their ads, it’s serious hoodoo.”

            “That’s the point,” Macafee snapped. “Grab them by the balls. Bypass the filters of the conscious mind.”

            “Save me the company sales pitch, Macafee. It’s one thing to grab people by the balls, but you got to give them a chance to think, too.”

            “We want them to think about buying the product.”

            “We’re fucking with people’s heads.”

            “Nothing new about that. We’re just doing it more directly. The future of advertising.”

            Ackerman shook his head. “It wasn’t like this before Omnifax bought out the agency.”

            “Spare me the crap about the good old days, huh?” Macafee scowled at him. “I shouldn’t tell you this, Harry, but some of the bosses think you’ve developed a bad attitude about the work.”

            Ackerman shrugged. “Sometimes I think about the big picture. So what?”

            “Your job is the little picture. Maintaining the data feeds.” He paused. “We’re pioneers in this field, you know. You should try to be more excited.”

            “Yeah, yeah. When I can retire in seven more years, then I’ll be excited as hell.”

            Macafee finally gave up. “Okay, Ackerman, we’ll get a crew out there ASAP.” He glanced down at his notes again. “I think we got another subject we can plug in with Mr. Frimmel. Same demographic, and probably a better match for him anyway.”

            “Another subject?” said Ackerman. “I don’t think that–”

            “You better stay there, just in case she spazzes out,” Macafee interrupted. “We don’t want her to get hurt if she’s still recoverable.”

            Recoverable, Ackerman thought. Right. Fill her full of drugs and numb her with synaptic therapy, and if that doesn’t work, QuirTel puts her up in a home somewhere.

            “Probably be a couple of hours,” Macafee continued. “Get comfy. Crack a beer or something.”

            “Bite me,” Ackerman snapped, closing the line. Well, at least now he wouldn’t get any more service calls until the installation team came. 

            Wearily, Ackerman stood up, joints cracking. He parked himself in a comfortable-looking chair.

            His eyes settled on the Frimmels. Test subjects. Potatoes. One of which now had to be replaced, because it was no longer optimally functional. 

            But no problem, because Omnifax had another willing subject all ready to plug in. Good thing, because the setup was configured for two people of a particular age, sex, and physical type. Take out one and you had to take out both, or plug in somebody else who was demographically similar. Otherwise the data got all screwy.

            He stared at Mr. Frimmel. Poor bastard. The guy had lost his wife, and wouldn’t even know it until he woke up with a stranger next to him. Or maybe not. Sometimes when two strangers got hooked up into the same node, they developed a weird emotional connection, which lasted even after they got out. But the warranty had expired for Mrs. Marianne Frimmel.

            For the first time, Ackerman noticed that the Frimmels were holding hands. Loosely, of course, because of the lax muscle tone from being jacked-in, but their fingers were intertwined. Probably they’d done it right before the installation techs had thrown the switch and they went under. He imagined them glancing at each other, smiling, saying it would be all right.

            Kind of sweet, he thought. And the cozy sofa, the way they were snuggled close. A lot of potato couples sat in separate chairs.

            Ackerman wondered if the installation techs bringing Mr. Frimmel’s new companion would join her hand with his. Probably so, because any prolonged change in a subject’s state could futz the data. The precise sensory input patterns had to be preserved. If they were jacked-in hand in hand, they had to stay that way.

            The thought made him sick.

            Ackerman got up and knelt down next to the control unit again. He keyed in a quick sequence to put the unit on standby, then opened up the panel.

            It would be easy. Reroute a few connections, create the crosstalk he’d told Macafee wasn’t there. Then call up a QuirTel ad from the storage buffer, jack up the signal strength.

            He worked fast, making sure to finish before the standby kicked off and the unit began to record his tampering. Twenty years of poking around data units came in handy. He was done inside of three minutes.

            Ackerman closed up the unit and started to pull up a QuirTel spot. The last one was only a few minutes ago, so it was easy to find.

            He hesitated. Once he did this that was it. He couldn’t reverse it.

            No, he thought. It was the right thing. It was the only thing to do. The only way to be sure they’d stay together.

            He knew it was the way they’d want it.

            Ackerman pushed the button.

            “…the latest in genetic control of glandular secretions,” said the TV screen. “Permanent freedom from social embarrassment, thanks to QuirTel.”

            “QUIRTEL!” Mr. and Mrs. Frimmel sang in unison. “FREEDOM!”

            Ackerman leaned back and watched them, both shaking, twitching.

            “QuirTel,” said the TV. “Where DNA is only a suggestion.” 

            “QUIRTEL!” they said. Together.

            Ackerman knew it was a risk. If Mrs. Frimmel had been permanently damaged, now her husband might be, too. But if she was recoverable, then he’d be okay.

            Either way, they’d be together. It might not be company policy, but Ackerman liked togetherness.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR READ THE STORY. 

Mark Wolverton is a science writer for magazines such as Air & Space Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Scientific American; a playwright whose work has been produced in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere; and an author whose latest book is A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer from St. Martin’s Press. He lives in Bryn Mawr.

AP Service:  Dateline: Milan, Ohio

 

            A break-in during cherry festival last week at the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison left the sleepy town of Milan, Ohio perplexed. 

            “Nothing appears to have been stolen,” George Conklin, chief of detectives said yesterday. “In fact, we seem to be dealing with some kind of vigilante maid service.”  

According to docents familiar with the historic site, papers placed on Edison’s desk had been straightened, and one mirror appears to have been wiped clean of fingerprints and dust.           

           

I’d been working the bar at Coltrane’s, in Ft. Myers, Florida for maybe two months before Alva and I talked. Alva was [img_assist|nid=5683|title=The Silent Body Melody by Orna Ben-Shoshan © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=167|height=250]Coltrane’s, had been working there since the place opened, and no one—not the bartenders, not the big, slow-witted busboys, not even the owner, Mr. Harvey Synell himself with all his money, ever messed with Alva.

I was the new girl at Coltrane’s. I’d come down from Jersey for my grandfather’s stupid-ass wedding and couldn’t figure a reason to go back—Mom gone, my brothers all married and cheating, just like every guy I’d been involved with. I got sick of angry, big-haired wives coming by whatever CVS I worked in that week and getting me fired. I think I could have put up with the guys with the bad toupees and the smoker’s breath sliding their rings in their pockets before asking me out for coffee, but after Mom died, I couldn’t take the way there was never a woman to cry to. New Jersey’s a small state if you’re past thirty-five and you find yourself in bed with other people’s husbands.

The manager at Coltrane’s didn’t ask for references, only if I was strong enough to carry trays of drinks without spilling. I said sure I was. I have never been afraid to work up a sweat, I said. But I was thinking, just don’t ask me to deal with people or vermin.

 

            “Well, will you look at the tail on that one?” Alva said to me the night a rat moved right out from behind the twelve-burner stove in Coltrane’s kitchen.    

            I glanced at what looked to me like a line of thick electrical cord, bundled and bound with gray electrician’s tape circled tight around and around until it came to one nasty little point what looked like yards from that nasty rat’s ass. That was my view from my vantage point up on a counter. I didn’t have a clue how I got up that high, one leap; the only time in my life I ever vaulted anything.      

“Jesus. You scared of a little four-legged creature of God that I could smash with a broom handle?” Alva laughed when she saw where I landed. 

            That rat was the size of a full-grown cat.

            And then Joe’s screaming. “Freya! Table four is waiting on their nachos and the guy with the scotch looks pretty damned hot about it.”

            Oh great, I’m thinking while Alva’s leaning against the wall near the door by then, getting ready to light an unfiltered Camel even though any other waitress would be afraid of being fired if she broke the no smoking in the kitchen rule.

            “You want me to take that table, Freya?” After that, Alva’s the one thing in my otherwise dim life that shines.

           

For a town where the bulb and filament were perfected right in a lab on the main drag, Fort Myers surely is no bright light. Coltrane’s is smoky, blue-gray haze hanging over tables of desperate out-of-towners over-paying for cocktails. No jazz, despite the restaurant’s pretentious name. The usual night’s entertainment is some group of overweight bikers doing bad covers of Dylan songs. There’s always some girl channeling Janis Joplin, throwing back Southern Comfort and showing her navel ring to a bunch of guys who would probably rather be taking each other home.  

            “Just like every one else around here–a real riot,” Alva commented to me the day we saw the photos:  Edison on a camping trip, Edison on the porch sipping lemonade, Edison fishing with one of his six children. Tie and jacket, pressed pants and straw bowler hat present in every shot.

 

It was my idea to tour the Edison and Ford estates. The only place I knew well was Jersey. I wanted to be a tourist when I was off work. Alva had lived in Fort Myers all her life, never bothered with the city’s stars: Edison, Ford.

“You’re a decent sidekick, Freya,” Alva told me. “But sometimes you have the strangest ideas of what constitute a good time.”

Then she came into Coltrane’s one night and told me what I catalogued as one of her bigger whoppers. 

            “He’s no biggie,” she told me the fifth time I harangued her about how important T. Alva E. was. “Only really important thing he ever did was me, indirectly, I mean.”

            She had me, I admit, though all I did was raise an eyebrow.

            “Oh. Didn’t I tell you he’s supposedly my illegitimate grandfather?”

I thought she was humoring me. All either of us really wanted to do was get the highball glasses dried and put away before the first set started and the customers were screaming for service. It was the end of a particularly draining week, the chiropractors and Barcalounger salesmen in town at the same time for their conventions.

“No shit, your grandfather?

“No shit at all,” she said.

 

“Well, that just sounds good to me; I would give one of my flabby arms to be able to claim kin other than the ones I own. My grandfather? His last stroll down the proverbial aisle’s what got me down here. Too bad you couldn’t have come to the wedding,” I said. “A real psycho ward home movie.”

When my grandfather remarried, it was to Vera, a woman more than thirty years his junior and for sure, he wanted to please her. Vera wanted to get married by water, and though she and Granddad had moved from New Jersey to Florida by then, they lived in a trailer park in the flatlands in the state’s center. So Vera’s daughter set up one of those blue plastic swimming pools in their backyard, and, to mimic those fancy old hotels in Miami, her son put a spouting whale in the water.  The gray plastic whale swam in circles, growled its mechanical little wind-up toy growl, and every few seconds spouted a stream of not so clean water onto the hems of the wedding party.   

Even now I can hear how, over that growl, my relatives talked about Vera, about what a gold-digger she was to marry this deaf old man and him with Parkinson’s pretty advanced.  Really they were angry, my three brothers especially, because we all learned the morning of the ceremony that Vera had been having an affair with Granddad for twenty-two years before Grandma died.

“Jesus Christ.” Alva hooted, when I described the scene. “As if she wasn’t going to get the worst maybe two years of your grandfather’s life and end up wiping his butt to boot.” Alva is my go-to girl for perspective, alright.

Later she admitted she only confided her grandfather thing to shut me up about going on a house tour. A house tour of the Edison winter estate was Alva’s idea of how God would punish a truly shitty bar waitress on her one day off. 

 

Somehow I prevailed. “Well we gotta’ see if you have his eyes.”

 

            Edison on the docks with his straw bowler and a white linen jacket. Edison with the president of the United States and his friend, Henry Ford, sitting by a campfire his servants built, the great inventor in that white jacket even here.           “You think he left his jacket on and had the servant press his pants while he boinked Grandma?” Alva said, like she knew exactly what I was thinking. I remember how two white-haireds moved away from us then, looking at us like we were something they’d scraped off their shoes.

            But when we got to the inventions room Alva got animated all of a sudden.

            “Freya,” she said, dragging me from phonograph to bulb, from display case to display case. “You gotta’ see this.”

            Turns out Alva was a bit of a science freak as a kid, before her father beat it into her that she was a girl and that it was her destiny to wait tables to salesmen for the rest of her life. “Think I could be an inventor?”

            That question stayed with me. Alva with ambitions. Who’d have thought?

 

            “You really wanted to be an inventor?” I asked during our next shift. “I mean, I know you’re smart enough and all, but inventor?”

        “Sure,” she said, coloring a little and then looking out over the usual crowd.

“Right now I’m inventing full heads of hair and decent sports jackets on those guys at table three. This morning I invented a deeply satisfying mouth feel and taste for my Special K and diner coffee.”

            I know she was embarrassed, but I watched the way she held her tray after that. I watched the way she carried her head up too. I thought she was maybe inventing some truth in her being descended from T Alva himself, and I felt something. Pride? In my most secret heart I guess I also have one ambition; I always thought I’d make a good one of those what they call motivational speakers. Look at that, I thought, watching Alva that night. She seemed to grow a couple of inches taller after that smart enough remark.

 

            Now, back in Jersey, I’m wondering when did my motivational speaker’s triumph turn so crazy. I have to park back of the Oasis, unlock the kitchen door, and drink my first cup of coffee in quiet before I can face that question.

            “You sitting here in the dark for a reason?” Gladys says, flicking on a light. Gladys is my first waitress to show up every morning.

            “Yeah,” I say and get up off my stool, top off my coffee with hot and sit again. “I was just thinking of Alva.”

            “What’s got you thinking about that nut-job friend of yours?” Gladys is saying. Everyone in my diner’s heard a bunch of Alva stories. I flip her the paper, that Ohio thing.

 

            After that first trip to the estate, Alva wanted to go back and then go back again and again. Visiting the relatives, she called it, smirk-faced, while Gee at the bar thought she’d become all saintly spending so much time with family. I was the only one at Coltrane’s who knew.

            “You got any family to speak of, Alva?” I asked once when we were hanging at her place.

            “God forbid!” The line of ash from her cigarette glowed when she took a pull on it. It dribbled onto her kitchen floor, just missing Leon, her part dachshund, part hell-knew-what, who stood as close to her leg as he could without going up her jeans. “Except, of course,” and she got hyper-smirky here, “Grandpapa Edison. How about we head off and catch the last tour, Freya?”

 

            Jeezus, but how many times did Alva take that tour, I’m wondering as the first customers settle into the Oasis booths. I could have spoken the whole guided flaptrap with the docent after my third trip, but Alva went back every Thursday. After a while, even I began to believe it when I heard Gee and the others at Coltrane’s talking about how Alva must be at the nursing home visiting that make-believe failing aunt she told Gee of; what a saint she was for putting up with that old woman. It seemed more logical than believing she was back at the estate. How was I to know she was casing the place? 

By the time she found the photo, she knew the schedule of every guard and tour guide, knew which bathrooms were locked up[img_assist|nid=5686|title=Underneath by Kristen Solecki © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=160|height=250] first and by when the gate snapped shut. She knew the first moment of opening time and a quick route out while the first visitors came in. I don’t know how she learned these things, or how she came to evade security. God help me but there are things you don’t want to know, even on behalf of a really good friend. 

 

            “You got to get here quick.” When Alva called about the photo, it was past midnight and I was just off a shift serving Venetian Blind salesmen and tolerating blue-grass covers. I hadn’t even pulled out of the Coltrane’s lot.

            “It’s important,” she said. “Otherwise, you know I wouldn’t bug you.” 

            I admit even if she hadn’t said that, I would have been made curious by her tone. Serious. Excited. So Not Alva. 

I drove directly to Alva’s and found her wide-awake, her kitchen table strewn with old black and white pictures.

            “Look here,” she said before I had even parked my tired ass in a chair. “Evidence.” 

            She stuffed an old photo of a gray-haired woman—sharp, but not too young—under my nose. “Evidence of what?” I asked trying to see the photo like a detective might. It was taken by a cheap camera; that much was for sure. The edges were serrated the way photo edges always came out a long time ago, before processing got so fancy. The woman was pretty, looked a little like Alva around the eyes and had a sneer on her lips, like whoever took the photo she was probably flirting with. 

            “Look. Here. And here.” She pointed to the hand the woman had laid in her lap. She held a magnifying glass over that section of the photo so I could see the ring on the woman’s finger. It was a signet with a big E on it. And under the hand lay a straw bowler hat.

            “Who is she?” I asked, though my head told me the answer.

            “It’s my infamous grandma,” Alva said, “And look. His ring. His hat.”

            I knew she wouldn’t hear any contradictions or what ifs, so I didn’t offer any. “What are you going to do with this—evidence?” I feared a big scene: Alva chaining herself to the gates of the TAE winter estate until someone acknowledged her genealogy, or Alva hiring a fancy lawyer and taking the family to court, but what she did, well, that just plain astonished me.

“I’m putting my grandma where she belongs,” she said.

           

            When I tell this story at the diner, someone always asks didn’t I ever find out how she pulled it off and the answer really is no. There are times you don’t ask for too much information. I know Alva left for the Edison estate one late afternoon, telling Gee the old aunt was sick as hell and she had to take off early. And I know she wasn’t home all night because I did like she asked and went by to feed Leon. Knowing there was no old aunt, I decided I’d better wait at her place till she came home or till the police called, but the police never called. I fell asleep with my head in my hands on her kitchen table and she woke me sometime after 9 a.m., wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before.

            She never breathed a word of what she did and I didn’t ask. But the next time she went to the estate for the tour, she dragged me along and there it was: a really sharp 9 by 12 reproduction of Grandma, ring, hat and all framed and parked along one wall in the photo room. Edison on the dock in a hat and jacket. Edison camping with Henry Ford. Alva’s grandmother laughing into the camera. I had to cough to keep her from asking the docent giving us the tour who the woman in the photo was. The tour cruised right by the picture and for all I know, it hangs there still.

 

            I was afraid Alva couldn’t leave it at that, and you know she wouldn’t have, but as luck would have it, before she got herself arrested, I got handed an opportunity to get her out of town.

            “Holy shit!” I think those were my exact words when I opened the official- looking envelope that was special delivered to Coltrane’s during one of the few really crowded lunch rushes I ever recall serving. “Holy good God damn.” 

It turned out my grandfather, who’d passed—not quietly—a year after the infamous nuptials, hadn’t left everything to his child bride Vera, like the family feared he would. Nope: The Oasis Diner came to me. 

            I’d forgotten about the Oasis, nearly forgotten Trenton, New Jersey. Turns out my grandfather’s wife was more than happy to [img_assist|nid=5687|title=Stream Off Route 82 by Deena Ball © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=155|height=250]forget Trenton herself once she found herself in Florida, even in the ugly part in the middle. “I told him I’d give away the business rather than have anything to do with that butt-hole city again in my life,” I think the lawyer said were her exact words. So there I was, an heiress.

            I wasn’t too crazy about making the move north myself, but Alva told me I’d be crazy not to.

            “Freya,” she said, maybe a dozen times before I finally agreed to it. “You can’t pass up this opportunity to get out from under. Look, Kiddo, your very own business.” We could both be motivators when we wanted, Alva and me.

            “Imagine me as someone’s boss,” I said. Alva was probably the only soul who knew I’d actually imagined that once or twice myself. “But you come too.”            I wasn’t sorry to quit Coltrane’s but I knew I was about to miss Alva something fierce. In the end, it took less convincing than I thought it would to get her to at least drive up with me. I guessed she was going to miss me too.

            God we had laughs on that drive, the U Haul towing my Nova behind it and so many really bad songs on the radio. Alva insisted on playing the worst oldies station in every state between Fort Myers and Trenton. “So you won’t miss the bands at Coltrane’s just yet,” she’d say.

            I put her in charge of the AAA books and finding cheap motels, which is, I’m afraid to tell you, how she found out about Menlo Park.

 

            The breakfast rush is over. I’m thinking about Milan, Ohio. Too early to call Alva. If she’s back in Florida, she’ll be out cold after a late night on the drunkards shift. Worse yet if she isn’t home to answer. 

            “Alva, you take too many chances,” I told her when she told me about her plans for Menlo Park and she snapped right back, “What do you mean you? It’s we, Babe. You’re driving the get-away car.”

 

            Thomas Alva Edison’s known in New Jersey as “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” I wish I’d remembered that when I gave Alva the Mid-Atlantic AAA book. By the time we got to Maryland, she’d picked up every cheesy brochure on the Edison labs up there in North Jersey and was determined to go. The moment we unloaded the U Haul into my new mobile home out Route 1, she left me to unpack the kitchen and took off for her first tour of what she called “Edison’s North.” The second tour she took me on, and the third, but at the end of that one, at just about closing time, she said for me to go ahead, she’d meet me outside.

            “Just wait by that back alley I pointed out when we came in this time. I’ll be there,” she said.      The voice on the P.A. had announced closing time already and I knew this was not a good sign. 

            “I just have to go to the bathroom,” she said. Her eyes were glinting like they were throwing sparks off a disco ball. She had brought a bigger handbag to the labs that day, I noticed, big enough to hold a framed 9 by 12 photo.

“Don’t go getting yourself arrested,” I said to Alva. “I hear Jersey cops can be mean sons-of-bitches.”

 

            There are two of Jersey’s finest at my counter for lunch, nice guys really. One of them notices I’m distracted and even asks if everything’s okay. 

            “Yeah, where are you today, Freya?” Gladys comments after I put the wrong sandwich down in front of the wrong cop.

            I don’t tell Gladys that I’m back in Menlo Park, watching from the back alley into a locked historic site and praying my best friend doesn’t find herself in Rahway State Prison by morning.

 

         I watched Alva’s shadow pass around the flashlight lit room, saw through the gauzy curtains as her shape moved to the wall opposite the front window and stopped in front of a painting hanging there. For a moment I thought she was about to remove it, but she just straightened the picture, stood back, and straightened it again a couple of times until it appeared she was satisfied and could move on to another part of the room. Then she was out of my view altogether. 

            The second hand on my watch jerked in large, exaggerated motions, each minute passing as if it was a decade until Alva suddenly appeared at my passenger side.

“Drive.”  

I remember she said it like it was nothing, and then I was off onto the open road.

“What happened?” Silence.

  It’s like a movie in my head when I replay it now:  Alva’s bottle-red hair has come loose from its clips and is blowing wildly around her face. I’m afraid she’s going to catch a piece of it in the ash of her cigarette but I know better than to say anything about that. I merge us onto the New Jersey Turnpike, am halfway back home before I try again.

            “What happened back there?” 

            Alva’s finished two Camels, lit one off the last, and started on a third.

            “You do not want to know, Freya.” 

            And yeah, I tell my regulars when I retell the story. Yeah, after the tearful goodbye, after Alva took the train ticket I bought her and headed back to Fort Myers, I did drive back up to Menlo Park, and no, I don’t know how she did it, but sure as shit, Grandma was there.

 

            I turn the dinner hour over to Carmen. She’s old and doesn’t want to do early or late hours; serving up stewed tomatoes and macaroni and cheese, the AARP special I added to the menu, is just about her style. On the drive home, I’m sitting in traffic as usual, so I’ve got plenty of time to figure what I’ll tell Alva.

“Hey, Alva,” I’ll start, casual like, if she happens to be, by some miracle, sitting at my kitchen table when I come home for the day. When she left to go back to Fort Myers, I gave her a key. You never know when someone like Alva’s going to need a place to sleep, or maybe hide. “Hey Alva, what’s new?” I won’t let on at first about how worried I’ve been for her; I wouldn’t want to drive her away. I haven’t met too many people I can really talk to yet in Trenton and Alva sure would be a sight for sore eyes.

            “You got anything worth eating in this place?” That would be her idea of a greeting and I’ll say, “Well, hello to you too.”

            But sure she’ll be hungry. Milan, Ohio’s a long way from Trenton. Not just in miles but as to a whole life, I’d like to tell Alva. Here you’ve got Formica-boothed diners and traffic circles, guys in hoody sweatshirts coming off a night shift road crew out Route 1, coming in for a cup of coffee black, and as hot as you can serve it. At the counter of the Oasis they’re like as not to be sitting next to some hotshot MBA with his first job up there in the State House, his suit jacket shoulder right up against that construction worker’s shoulder and him asking for a skinny latte.

            Better make that decaf, the hotshot kids always say here in Trenton.

            “As opposed to?” Alva will say. She hates when I presume to know a place I don’t.

            As opposed to how I see Milan:  lily white, cream and two sugars and Alva crazy enough to think she fits right in, her with her fire engine dye job and those stilettos she always wears when she’s serving anything with three olives in a stem glass to a regular.

            When I tell her my picture, Alva will say, “Freya, I swear you have become a cynic since you came north. You lacking sunshine or just sad you went missing the Barcalounger salesmen in February?”

            In no time at all she’ll have me laughing as she’s spinning the scene: all that polyester in light blue and who knows how many hair pieces sliding further and further with each round of drinks.

            “Stop it before I pee myself,” I will have to say. I’ll be laughing but inside I’ll feel a little sad, thinking my way back to all those smoky blue nights at Coltrane’s.

            A bar in Fort Myers is a long way from a diner in Trenton. I’m missing Alva, missed her the moment she went back to serving martinis and left me here to serve up two eggs, scrambled, but keep them dry and rye toast, jelly, no butter. 

            Trenton’s even a long way from the Trenton I remember when I was a kid, the place my grandfather cheated on my grandmother for twenty-two years, the place where any self-respecting diner customer never met a cholesterol he wouldn’t shove in his face.

            I pull into the mobile home park—no rental cars with Ohio plates in sight—and I’m sad to say no lights on in my unit. Alva’s out there somewhere and who might that be driving the get-away car? Alva’s crisscrossing the country leaving her mark in state after state. Claiming my heritage, she calls it. I’m unlocking the door and getting set for a quiet night, all the lives I’ve left behind me spooling out over highways—Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Ohio Tollway, or straight down 95 to Florida. All the lives I’ve left behind.

“Cut the violins and shit, Freya.” I hear that husky smoker’s voice in my head. I pick up the phone and dial a number more familiar than my own.

 

Liz Abrams-Morley is the author of Learning to Calculate the Half Life (Zinka Press, 2001,) and What Winter Reveals (Plan B Press, 2005). Her second full-length collection, Necessary Turns, is due out from Word Press/WordTech Communications early in 2010. Liz’s poems and short stories have appeared in nationally distributed journals and anthologies and have been featured on National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council and the Ragdale Foundation. Co-founder of Around the Block Writing Collaborative, (www.writearoundtheblock.org) she is an adjunct gypsy, part of the MFA in Creative Writing faculty of Rosemont College, and serves as a poet-in-residence in area schools.