, Author at Post Road Magazine

Ma Picks a Priest

by Marianne Leone

“I rest my case.”

My sister, Lindy, thrust a statue of Saint Anthony in my face, tick-tocking him like a metronome. Saint Anthony was wearing a rakish pink scrunchie stuffed with red and yellow artificial flowers around his waist. We were arguing about holy cards and which saint Ma would want on hers. I had pushed Saint Rocco in honor of Ma’s part-time job booking illegal numbers for the local wise guys. I thought I remembered her telling me that Saint Rocco was the patron saint of gambling. He was often depicted as a ragged man with bleeding leg sores being licked by a faithful dog. (I later found out that he was invoked to ward off infectious diseases.) I supported my vote for Saint Rocco with the fact that Ma had a statue of him right by her bed. My sister pointed out that Saint Anthony was there, too. So was Saint Jude, a flame shooting out of his head like he had just been electrocuted, and Saint Francis, decked out like a mad pigeon lady in Central Park with birds clinging all over his monk’s robes, even covering his privates. But Saint Anthony had the scrunchie with the flowers. And Ma had put it there herself.

“Look at him. He’s decorated,” my sister said. We both cracked up. Then we cried. Again.

We had been on an emotional roller coaster for two days now, ever since Ma died suddenly at the age of eighty-four. The doctors said it was a cerebral hemorrhage. She woke up with a headache and was dead by two the same afternoon. Ma would’ve liked the idea of leaving in such a hurry, like one of our childhood Christmas trees that was stripped and tossed every year the day after Christmas, at her urgent behest.

Now my brother Michael, Lindy, and I were orchestrating the wake and funeral, checking off chores with the same haste as we used to devour desserts, Ma waiting impatiently to clear the dinner table. Apart from the quibble about her favorite saint, we knew exactly what to do. From birth to marriage to death, there was a clear trajectory if you lived in the Lake, an Italian-American part of Newton, Massachusetts, where the circle of life had a really tiny radius. You were baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Church, you got your wedding dress at La Sposa, you were laid out across the street at Magni’s Funeral Home, and your funeral Mass sendoff returned you to Our Lady Help of Christians Church.

Andrew Magni led us through the downstairs coffin display. We bypassed the over-the-top one with the carved version of the Last Supper on the cover, paused briefly by the hot pink number so my sister and I could instant eyebrow message each other, and settled finally on a shiny metal canister with a coppery glint. Back in his office, Andrew informed us that none of the regular priests at Our Lady’s were available and we would have a substitute to say Ma’s funeral Mass from the next parish over, St. Bernard’s. The name of the parish rang a tiny, distant bell muffled by my memory of Ma’s last non-encounter with priests a few months before she died.

We were at Newton-Wellesley hospital. Ma had complained of a headache and partial loss of vision in one eye and the doctors wanted to make sure she hadn’t had a small stroke. I stayed with her so that her spotty English language skills wouldn’t make her seem unhinged to the medical staff; they were testing her mental competence with questions about what day it was, what month, and what year. She answered correctly. They asked her who was the current president that year, 2004.

“Eh. I can’ remember his name, but I know he’s a basta!”

I looked at the hospital personnel.

“You can’t possibly question her sanity now.”

Nevertheless, the doctors decided to keep Ma overnight. They sent in a very young, squeaky-voiced hospital clerk, who rattled off a list of questions in a fatally bored voice.

“Religious Affiliation?”

Ma looked at me and shrugged.

“What’s ‘e want?”

“He wants to know if you want to see a priest.”

Ma’s voice was strong, resolute.

“No. No priest.”

I turned to Squeaky.

“You got that? No priests.”

Squeaky didn’t realize that to my mother it was as if he’d asked:

“And would you like to have a visit from the Angel of Death?”

Later, I settled Ma in her intensive care room-there were no beds available in the regular part of the hospital. She relaxed, lulled by the electronic wallpaper of the television mounted in the corner. Restless, I wandered into the hall. I stopped at the neighboring cubicle, listening as a priest droned the “Our Father” to a frightened, demented old woman who was emitting cries of alarm like a baby bird dislodged from the nest. I edged closer. “Home. Home,” the old woman cried. She lay huddled on her bed in a wilted heap, barely distinguishable from the bedclothes. The priest sat four feet away and recited his prayer as if he were alone in the room, as if he were direct-dialing his old buddy God for a dinner date, as if the old woman were already dead.

Ma was right about priests, I thought.

About a month after the hospital event, I was on a flight from Los Angeles heading home to Boston. We were in first class, courtesy of the studio that was promoting my husband, Chris’ film. I sat beside an entitled middle-aged guy who wasn’t about to give up his window seat so I could sit with Chris. That was okay. Chris and I could survive five hours one row apart. And we were in first class. Who was I to complain when there were warm cookies available and I had actual legroom? Just six rows back in the economy gulag there were cramped throngs with serious future chiropractor bills looming and no warm cookies. I didn’t hold it against the window-hugging guy, and over lunch we made polite small talk. I asked him why he had been to LA. He said he was at a religious convention.

“Oh, really? What do you do?” I asked brightly, with only a tinge of heart-sink at the word “religious.” I knew that my own contentious nature and the twelve years I put in as a parochial school POW would inexorably draw me into talking about religion. I was a lemming in sight of the cliff.

“I’m a priest,” he said, with a kind of mock sheepishness, like he was revealing unwillingly his superpowers.

I leapt off the cliff.

“I hope you don’t think you’re more spiritual than I am because you have a penis and can change water into wine.”

That came out so abruptly I almost looked around to see who said it.

The priest raised his arm for the stewardess like he was bestowing a blessing.

“I’ll have a scotch, please.”

Over the next five hours we discussed my theory of the imminent demise of the Catholic church. Well, I scattershot bullet points at the priest, and he dodged them. It was strange. I remembered the worshipful way the nuns would ask the priests if they would give us a blessing back in high school when they visited our classrooms. The nuns would duck their heads girlishly and we students fell obediently to our knees in a thudding horde. They had a glamour then, the priests. They handled God every day. A tiny, retro part of myself wanted the God spillover from the guy sitting next to me in the window seat. But I also wanted him to explain to me why any woman would want to join a club that from birth designated her as a second-class citizen. He talked about the programs he was involved in for troubled youth. I talked about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, the Catholic-run slave-labor institutions for unwed mothers that only closed in the nineties. I asked if his youth programs were like that. He kept ordering scotches. Even though he was the one drinking scotch, my memory of the rest of the discussion is hazy, though I know it touched upon my years of torment in parochial school, the priest pedophile scandals, and my gratitude to renaissance cardinals for commissioning 3-D pornography from artists like Bernini so that we could today view Italian sculptures of women in “spiritual” ecstasy, like Santa Ludovica and Teresa of Avila.

What I couldn’t remember now, at Magni’s Funeral Home was the name of the parish to which my sacerdotal seatmate had said he belonged. But I didn’t dwell on the priest. I thought instead of Ma, her fierceness stilled forever, on display in her burnished copper casket. I remembered asking her on New Year’s Day what her resolution was for 2004, and her growly answer: “to be dead this year.” And then her practiced hold for my laugh, her timing as polished as any late-night comedian’s. Her pitch-black humor, which had taken seed in the arid mountain soil of her impoverished girlhood, was as gnarled and twisted as the Montepulciano grape arbors of that region, and as dry and delicious as the dark wine they produced. I don’t remember ever hearing a belly laugh from Ma. She favored the snort of derision, the head toss, the “ha!” that was more like a spoken confirmation that she got the joke. As measured as her own laughter was, she was sly about amusing her audience. She knew she was funny but she always played it straight. She acted the innocent, watching us laugh, eyelids at half-mast, appraising the reactions. Ma would never make me laugh again, I thought.

On the day of the Ma’s funeral I entered the church as the substitute priest was setting up shop for the requiem Mass he was about to say. [I’m not entirely clear why the paragraph below is separate from the one above. Author’s decision, of course, but my impulse is to make it one.]

It was my scotch-drinking seatmate from the plane.

I snorted with laughter, shaking my head, my laugh a replica of my mother’s. I was wrong about Ma making me laugh again.

Boombox and Neon Flowers

by Abby Savitch-Lew

She walk on Rockaway. She swing purple hips. She buy a bag of green genips like sweetness from the Guyanan people at the corner. The juice gloss her lips, the rubbery rind curl in her palm, the jell ball roll with her tongue. She in 99¢ Century on New York Ave., a plastic crate swing at her arm. She be filling it with pink flip-flops, baby-breath scent candles, cockerspaniel-cookie tins, Nigerian statues, Brazilian masks, and them kind of old time jack-in-the-boxes. With Aunt Cassie anything under five buck belong shelved in her Dumont Brownstone. Thing she seen a million time she want cause they remind her of the old days, and thing she never seen she want cause they be souvenirs of a new life, by Jesus a new, fresh, starched and laced life. She be a widow now and her lover is Brownsville, her fetish is them venders and thrift stores. Money slide out, and the plastic jewelry of oppression slide in. Her family live in Brooklyn long time—she only twenty-five when they came. Long while she work to do, till she could go back then and now to Guyana, her better love. Better and lamented, like that husband that come before Brownsville. This why plastic jewelry taste like oppression when she suck on them beads round her neck. Is not cause she got no freedom or food. She drink sweet sorrel and on her stove be cooking plantains and macaroni.

Five men lounge round a table in the parking lot out of the Key Food. Two got canes and stiff knees. One be saying how he yesterday heave up that god-damn air-conditioning from the basement into his apartment, all by his self. His face still red with pride and gleam with sweat. Another one live behind a curtain a smoke and got bad lungs. Puff, puff, puff, they mock him and call him the black engine and tell him he gonna get a stroke and die. It noon and they’s shoving down pre-made tuna sandwiches thick with mayo, and kiwi fruit salad. Is evening and they talk bout the way kids used to pick up pennies, bout cars without seat-belts, bout Lindy’s cheesecake, bout back in the 80’s when them firecrackers on Fourth of July so loud is sounded like a war going on. Bout the way kids always work too hard now days, and don’t got time for hanging round or mastering real skill—skills like playing dominos or crashing they bikes into peoples’ garbage bins. Then while they’s thinking on wasted summers they think of playing basketball with Runny Joe, and at Runny Joe’s name they eyes get overwhelmed and they’s deciding to split a beer.

Two boys walk on the street step on the cracks on purpose, wondering if they be cursed to hell and die for stepping so. Two boys walk past the community garden where them little toddlers in the day-camp grow corn. Hey they be ducks in here yo, say one boy. And they look through the pentagons of the iron fence like a prison gate trying to see they ducks but they don’t see nothing but a mossy pond and a scarecrow and a mailbox. Hell how the mailman get his mail in the mailbox, say the same one. Teachers say he got a good mind, this one, he always get on so curious-like. The other boy don’t like to talk, only like to chew gum.

Some girl named Amira, she wearing a pink Sunday dress, sit on her porch and read some big fat book by some long-named Russian guy. Her glasses got no lens. Them boys, they’s come by her house to say she a big phony and to tell her she ain’t no friends. They saw some boys do like this on a TV show. In the show one boy get close and hit the girl down, but none these boys going to go so far, though they telling each other to go hit Amira. The other girls left Amira long time ago, they don’t come by no more. They’s done trying to be friends with her cause they all knowing Amira don’t want to be friends with them. Amira, she notice that when she spends time with other girls, her habits and speech and manners all changing. It scare her cause she don’t want to be corrupted. She know she already pure and perfect and pearly like she is, she already been told so many times by many grown people. Everyone always telling you to remember who you are, and that is no less what she trying to do. She don’t want to be the type of person who say “shit” and “fuck”, or the type of girl going behind the school building to be touchy-like with the sixth grade boys. She want to be pure like an angel through and through.

Angels is everywhere. Angels is spread on the sides of brick churches and temples, they holy stone faces like lepers’ faces, with all them holes from the rain. Sometimes when it snow, angels is appearing on the streets and sidewalks. They’s always angels in the kitchens: mommas in bandanas cooking up heaven. You coming home to chili and angel food cake.

One of them mommas got a man named Tommis, and he young and still a beauty. He desperate like a little girl, lone in the world with no papa or bro to walk him safe. He grow up in New Jersey, right by that Wal-Mart which open in Secaucus. Wal-Mart make his Daddy’s business go out like flame. Long time his folks got no money to wager with people in the hood, or buy from people they know. They has to shop at Wal-Mart cause prices come cheapest there. But is all one bitter circle, and by going for the cheap they’s putting out other businesses like they own. So Tommis grow up hating Wal-Mart, and he always tell people that Wal-Mart “de-humanized” him. He say he going to sue Wal-Mart when he older and he ain’t even lying: before he got married he got a job at Wal-Mart pulling up the shopping wagons and he tried to get lock in the store over night so he could sue. Now, he drive a Wonderbread truck in East Brooklyn and his wife never let him go to New Jersey.

On Fourth of July, Aunt Cassie decide she have dinner with her lover, her old and fine-faced Brownsville. So people come out from them tenements on Strauss Street and Sutter Avenue. Then they’s appearing on Empire Boulevard and Linden Boulevard. They all crossing them soft streets, streets wrinkled like old dish towels. They all journeying to Dumont, and they know they reach Cassie’s not by the street signs, but by the yard with them willows sweeping up the night dust. Soon every wall of Aunt Cassie’s house is cake up with Brownsville: that old lover line the hallway, chop in the kitchen, giggle in the bedroom. Soon Brownsville drink sorrel on the porch and in the backyard, and them kids crouch in the alley by the garbage bins and draw with chalk on the cement. Aunt Cassie give a kiss right and left and every which way till she dizzy. Then she serve cold cucumber salad and hamburgers out of tin-foil trays. Everyone stand round and eat from paper plates, and when the kids hear a fire cracker, they climb up the roof trying to see sparks. Aunt Cassie now like the working axle of the whole party, and she tell jokes and sassy stories in her high clacky voice. Meanwhile Aunt Cassie always wonder in her head, if she just to love life and enjoy it without worry bout making something of herself, who in the world would mind? Might Jesus mind it? Might Mama and Daddy mind it? Seems everyone who care bout what you do already long time dead! If life be so sacred, how you supposed to go living by what the dead say, when who know what they really think? She keep thinking it, even while whistling gossip. She feel like she in that nightmare where you ride the subway to nowhere, and when you try getting up you realize you got no power over your body. You can’t say nothing, can’t scream. Got no control of yourself, no more than you has over the rest of the world. She wonder if she even got power in the real world—and if she do, where it gone.

Sam, her Daddy’s friend when he still round, and them men that hang round the Keyfood, they all is here this Fourth of July, rocking in them porch chairs that ain’t meant for rocking. Cassie take the punch and go over to them. She like to see what kind of things is old people like talking bout. She know she getting to be a worn dog, she realize that. She scared she ain’t ready. She ain’t know how to talk, how to walk, how to think like she old. But she find they all just talking bout the holiday. The Nigerian man, he say, All this fun and jazz on Fourth of July, why?

Cause it when the revolution happen and the US come it own nation, say Cortez. He has come long with Sam. When Cortez meet Cassie at the door for the first time, he say he glad to meet her and how he take up his air-conditioning all by his self yesterday. Cassie wonder if he trying to charm her.

But who in hell like the US anymore? Sam say sudden. We has that war in Iraq. I never figure it out. You go one place and you is hearing Bush is there on an oil-hunt. You go another and you is hearing we in a Muslim crusade. I think no one knows what they’s talking bout.

Cassie hear him talking and she walk over to hand him a glass of punch. Old Papa, you don’t waste your time thinking bout these things no more. They isn’t yours to solve, no use getting bugged out. Nothing you do bout all these crazy people killing each other gonna change anything. The old man take the punch and drink her down but he don’t smile, and Cassie feel weird like she gone say something stupid.

The two boys, the one that like talking and the one that don’t talk, they here. They sit on the edge of the roof, looking round when they hear thunder in the cloudless sky. When they’s looking out over the yard, they see many other tight straight yards, and black rusty chimneys, and pink bed sheets flapping on clothing wires. They seeing smoke in every direction. Aunt Cassie’s ain’t the only party on the block. They get up and walk to the street-side of the roof to see if they be kids on the sidewalk bout to set off a cracker. There on the road below they seeing the bum who always squat at the chess tables in Betsy Head Park. He stand outside the house now with his wagon, and his face is all red sinews like beef jerky. The boys watch him but the man keep on without saying a word, without any movement.

Yo, wat you stand there for bum? say one of the boys.

My name is Ben Cooke, son.

Wat you wait there for, Ben?

I is mad hungry. I is smelling the barbecue. It a free for all?

Is Cassie’s house, no it ain’t a free for all. You has got to be invited by some person. They has to have some rules, else any bum off the street be walking in.

I think I get a bite anyway. Is Fourth of July, son. Everything got a right to be free.

If you got two buck you just go to McDonalds. They’s so cheap there.

McDonalds ain’t serving me. I don’t do them. McDonalds, they’s eating up the rainforest. Don’t you know every time you is eating a hamburger at McDonalds, is have another thing of trees being cut down in the Amazon? 50 million acres a year, son! They’s getting rid of the tropics cause they want king-size bedrooms for they cows!

You crazy.

You don’t know that, boy? How come you in school and you don’t know that?

So them boys make Cassie get some meat on a plate for old Ben Cooke, and they is sitting on the stoop with him while he talk bout the Amazon. And Cassie, she watch them from her kitchen window and feel good bout it too. Is nice to see a good patty feed up a hungry man, and she don’t miss a chance to prove her charity before all of them folks.

They got a boombox in the backyard, and someone start playing Keshia Cole loud enough to shake down the Brooklyn Bridge and scare them Manhattan people out of they pants. Cassie go down the porch to where all them folks are dancing in a crowd. Amira, the girl with fake glasses, stand by the fence and look on. Cassie know Amira’s auntie from the Woman’s Club, but every time Cassie try to talk to the pretty girl, Amira get all prissy and turn up her nose. Cassie always wonder what problem she got, and invite Amira over this night to see if she can easy her up. She hoping when all them peoples start dancing like they’s on fire, Amira is gonna get up and act like any other girl, swaying her buns and shifting them feet. But Amira do nothing but watch the crowd like they’s nasty, and when Cassie see this she going over to do something bout it. She loom over Amira, she put her hands on them hips, saying, Why is you standing here by you self, girl?

I ain’t getting dirty, say this child.

How is you going to get dirty by dancing? Cassie reach out and grab them glasses off Amira’s eyes. These ain’t no lens, miss. How is they any help to you?

Amira look down and don’t say no word. All the crowd be laughing and bumping into Cassie while she stand there. They’s all high on grill smoke and perfume. Come, Cassie order, and she take Amira by the hand and pull her under the crowd. Cassie twist and twirl and shake her body like a maraca. Them other women be taking Amira’s hand and trying to move her round too. Amira break free and squeeze her way out. That naughty girl, where she gone? they holler, and they’s all disappointed. But Cassie, she wonder now why she got to make Amira dance like a bad girl. Why is it they all wanting to see her get dirty? Never a soul say they like Amira as she is; they’s always trying to change her into someone else. Why is that? Cassie feel like she been trying to make a tame dog bite.

Ho! Ho! Ho! You all look here! someone say and they be turning off the boombox. Everyone quiet down but them dancers’ ears still ringing. In some throats the laughter goes on bubbling, like those last shoots of water spurting out after you has shut down a fountain. Is the New Jersey boy who spoke, whining pretty Tommis Keat. He long while sit in the den with the wisecracks and cynics, talking in that jaded lisp of old times. Then he come down the porch when he see something catch his eye in the garden patch. You look wat I has found, he tell them. I never in my life believed these guys exist, but see what I see! A jackpot of four leaf clovers! A whole patch of em! Is wat I seeing: hundreds and hundreds of them four leaf clovers! By Jesus I always said not one of them exist in this world!

Honey, we is going to be rich tomorrow, say Tommis’s wife.

Hell, we is going to be the poorest we ever been tomorrow. They’s hired some other driver for the south parts.

You is going to fall into a pot of gold on your way home, say the Nigerian.

You is going to win the Lottery. You be out of town tomorrow.

You all fools talking nonsense, he cry. When I a kid I always collect those pennies with they faces up. Didn’t make no difference. Didn’t keep my Daddy’s store open when that damn Wal-Mart come to Secaucus. Don’t tell me is magic. I don’t go for no Disney Land magic!

Then Cassie step up smiling. How you is saying my four-leaf clovers ain’t no luck if you is never seen a four-leaf clover in your life?

Cassie, you is a fool, say Tommis.

But I has known they’s there all along. Is my little secret.

You lying, whine Tommis.

I ain’t lying and you is only heard the beginning. You can laugh at me all you want but I is going to ask you a question. Ain’t I a lucky woman? I is got friends like a chicken got chicks. I is got nice clothes and pretty things and a big bed and a TV. I is going back every year to see my family in Guyana. Ain’t I the luckiest woman you is ever did see?

You has got those things. That don’t say nothing.

Wat you think I has before I seen them four-leaf-clovers? Them four-leaf-clovers got me through hard times, Tommis! How you think you know everything? You is just fat headed, son! You’s a fool! You don’t know wat they has done for me!

You is crazy. You is a crazy lady.

But you ain’t got proof that four-leaf clovers all luckless. I has got proof all around me!

Then Cassie go squat down on the dirt. She be pulling up a handful of four-leaf clovers in her fist and all them folks can hear the earth rip. Hmmm Hmmm Hmmm, she mutter and she look happy as a cow. She stand up and start passing them clovers out while the crowd all smiling and laughing. Now Amira, she been watching silent all this time, and when she see what Cassie done, she dive for the clovers too. She pick a bunch and her fingernails black up, and her white dress get soggy from the mud. Cassie see her and say, You given up staying clean. Now you is the dirtiest child I ever seen. But Amira don’t pay mind. She smile cause she has four-leaf-clovers, green and shiny, in her palm, and she feel like a princess fairy from a book.

All the people is there till five in the morning, laughing and dancing and eating rhubarb pie. Brownsville is a loud racy thing on a night like this one, loud with rap and reggae, cars and crackers. All the way till dawn time the air is warm and when the smell of meat come wafting down the street, not even angels can plug up—they too is drunk on the night’s electricity. In Brownsville’s backyards, the thread of the talk roll out like yarn from a dropped spool and people’s minds go drifting from thing to thing: 99¢ Century perfume, cigarettes, angel food cake, AIDS in Africa. Cassie notice how they thoughts drifting from place to place easily like feathers on streams, and no one even think twice bout it. As the night goes on, so easy do they voices mesh with them neon flowers of insanity, and words got no sense and stories they jumble. Even so, rising up from this insanity and drunkenness is a kind of understanding, an understanding Cassie see as the best kind of understanding, with more truth to it than the words of them sober.

They talk bout what they know or what they wish they could know, and bout how they’s always hoping certain things to happen which never do. Like finding a pot of gold. Or catching true love. Or changing the world, saving all them orphans in all those mother countries that got no sneakers, no running water, no 99¢ Century. They know these things got to be done but it always look destined to failure no matter how they start bout it. Is mad easier to live for green genips like sweetness and Keshia Cole. They’s just a million fights to fight if you’s gonna be any bigger. Sometime a person just want to hang it all and eat another slice of pie and raise the volume on the radio. But sometime a person can pretend no longer, and they’s angry at all the cynicism they see. They’s so angry they’s even ready to make fools of themselves. Is then that they feel the power rush to they limbs. And they’s standing up. And they’s screaming. And they’s getting off the subway to nowhere, and turning off the boombox,and crushing the neon flowers. And they’s walking right out of humanity’s dream, the one where you is trapped between basket and burial, between today and tomorrow.

Eminence

by Gary Lutz

There was a time I would not hear of women, and a time I looked to them as my betters, and months when my heart went out to anyone done up as a person, but it was usually men I suited: men who liked to keep their words a little stepped back from their meanings and mostly wanted to know whether I was still in school or was hard on shoes. I would awaken to the poundings of one or another of them taking his elbowing ease in the shower stall. The bedside table would of course hold quarters, and a lone dime, out of date and valued-looking, and no doubt a patched-up, gadabout ten-dollar bill—I guess the test was simply how much I would be just the sort of person to take. So I would let pocket change of my own drop to the floor in what I counted on adding up to an answering reproof, then top it with a spruce twenty. I would usually think better, though, and pick everything up, his and mine both, and disappear into my clothes and be gone before he was dry. Still, I suspect that I went unrepresented in much of what I ever did, if I get my drift even now.

There was a father, for instance, who wanted me to help save his daughter from him, or else he wanted to be saved from her—at some point I gave up keeping track of the ones I had been a party to keeping spared. There was a drumble of TV noise from the apartment below; that much is still with me. And he ticked off the points of nervy resemblance: upraised veinage, standout nose, teeth looking stabbed into the gums, arms unfavorable for even the joke sports. A broth of sweat came off him, and I hate it when they talk right into your mouth, but he kept it up until convinced there was nothing set out between my legs other than whichever mishmash he figured on being all hers. (At the time of which I write, circa my youth, there still were glories to be brought out in people behind their backs.) Weeks later I was introduced to the girl at some function I showed for. She was clean-lined, nothing new or unearthly—a desponding thing in a shirtdress, looking care-given and sided with beyond her years. The father was at the steam table, turning over the local foods. He had a tousled smile. “It’s like you never left,” he said.

I had been staying with four or five others thriving compliably on the top floor of a three-story sublet. Freaks of drapery to keep us from the morning sun, double-strength cosmetics and pills of the moment in handbags nailed shoulder-high to the wall—it hardly helped that this was in one of the little cities that had been thrown down at the approaches to a much bigger one once enough people were pinched for time or too moody for the commute. The town had already run afoul of its original intent, and there was a misgiven majesty to the newer, upstrewn architecture that left people flimsier in their citizenship, less likely to put their foot down. So we walked ourselves into recognizability in and around the plazas, the pocket parks, the foremost shrubberied square. You could run your feelings over one unrested person and get them to come out on somebody else a little distance off. There was no need to even come face to face to be stuck in failing familiarity forever.

People eventually answered any purpose or were no skin off my nose.

There was Joeie: clean-tasting but a trace too saline. Colored easily, needed his full eight hours, believed in taking each of his meals in public. His loves were drugstore luxuries and the fitting instant you knew for sure that something was finally finding its way down the wrong pipe. But sometimes the rope I woke up with around my ankles and wrists was only laundry line and the knots weren’t even serious.

And Tarn: He was either off doing somebody a wonder or having something further burned away from his complexion—you looked for the underlying advisory in his motions and let the whole of it lounge in your understanding for a while. Nights I found the key to his car, there was a minor toll bridge I could have just as soon avoided, but I liked surrendering the warmed quarter to the collection attendant in the booth, his arm a sudden, perfected thing of the open air.

It was the night Tarn was first threatening to move out that another came across with a car trunk’s worth of guitars. These were junk guitars, folk-singer styles, with the strings raised penalizingly high above the fretboard. He wasn’t satisfied until one was strapped onto me and he had his hand spread over mine to depress my fingers and get a few dud chords going steadily. When he started to sing, the better part of the lyrics reminded you that with a stepmother and a stepsister, the prefixes alone, if you bothered to do even any of the thinking, made it all but expected of you to walk all over these women and, if you were still up to it, climb them stairwise to a height from which their originals might at least look easier to buy for, easier to mistake for two good eggs. It’s not that I mind it when a pack of lies with real effort behind it gets pitched way over my head to somebody reliably cruel at a remove. But the song was going on and on, with too much yellow smile between verses. He later offered to make it up to us by driving everybody to a party in the city. There was a kid there with an isolating refreshment, something he alone had been given to eat. His fingers kept bringing it up from a plastic sandwich bag opaque with condensation. I was among the least encouraged to get an arm landed lankly on his. One or another of us stayed in touch with him months afterward in notes that amounted to mostly “More soon.”

Some nights, though, we just dosed it out among ourselves. Kept it going round and around our thinned and souring circle. It was illucid and weighed on our speech. There was so much to decide against as one with mouths that stickied! The others would have to doze off before I could begin poring over an iridescence at the inner bend of an elbow, I hoped, or some delicate hingework behind a knee. It was usually Tyner who never fell asleep. I would guide his fingers onto my arm, try to interest them anew in moles so blurry they looked loose, then re-intimate that they were his to slide about to advantage. I was with him the day he won with the instant ticket. I let him use the rim of my bracelet to scratch out the gray antic ellipses, my arm dragging subordinately along. We took the bus to an odd-lots furniture concern for the glass-top coffee table he figured could do the trick. We walked the thing home stretcherwise: there was delight to find in catcalls from the thick civic traffic. The table went to his room, and a tenderness took over in his voice to get the favor finally asked of me. So I got undressed on top of it and tried to be sleepy and unmindful of my petite bowels and bladder while he worked himself up for drawn-out disappointment below.

I do not want to make it seem as if this is all we ever did. There was a neighbor lady’s dog we agreed to feed when employments she could no longer postpone called her far from where she otherwise would have had no reason to keep speaking to us so brightly half the time. It was one of those full-natured, kerchiefed dogs that liked being bossed around. Days it fell to me to fill the dish, I did not so much call his name as thin it out to the scanty inner vowels, but the thing would still put in a complete, gladdened appearance. I would watch him eat, take advantage of his company, draw myself out about things, any part of life I no longer was any part of, just to get listened to without bias or retention. There were also some weak-willed plants to be doused if I thought of it and dresses that were all too tight on me and seemed to smell of more than just one person, though I wasn’t an authority on who all she thought she might be. But I must have liked it over there—I know I liked mooning over the little that came in her mail, even the same circulars that came to our place but which, withdrawn from her box, seemed to enjoy much more shimmer on the type.

As for women overall, though, I went along with what Lorn said about how they were set deeper within themselves and moved about reproductively in a world spaciously different from ours but sharing the same sorry places to meet up for a bite. And it’s not as if I had never at least got myself arranged around one of them, though all I was probably doing was trying to show her out of her body and then not act surprised when my hands slipped right off wherever I tried to unload the things. (Even the older ones are truly as smack-smooth as they are made out to look.) But there was nothing to be held against any of them, either singly or in the dissastisfied aggregate, even if you now and then had somebody’s sister coming forward with rundown makeup and a mugginess to her arms to tell you the only reason you were a waiter instead of a grill man was so you could stand over and above people in couples and make a living looking down your nose. (There were only so many things you could say in return that would come across as both the truth and a dig. I had worked up enough of them to put into conservant, fallback rotation, but lately I just pointed to my groin and explained that if we give them names it’s because they spring from us, we bring them up, we’re forever wiping their snotty little mouths.)

So what’s left? The only other question still worth entertaining should not have to keep being only “Who else?”

Which I take to mean that the answer can’t be parents, or even brothers and sisters, because we all were done with practically the exact same ones. Mother would signal the end of a conversation by saying she could feel inside her skull the precise contours of the space a headache would require, though she did not yet have the actual headache. Father had grown a beard that was more like a black cloud loitering in front of his face. (The beard was purposely mostly air.) The sister or brother was younger and had to have it drilled into the head again and again that it was one house if you came into it from the back and a different one altogether if you came in from the front: the people were the same, they were nice to you to your face, but nobody was being fooled: no one was living here everlastingly.

They were all of them buried neck and neck, so help me, in anything left for us to root against when we set ourselves afresh upon the days.

So that leaves who else to never let you forget the spirit and slants of whichever humidifying proximity must have been solely his? Kittrick? Reese? Malin?

Kittrick: There was a fine-drawn signature of dark hair on the backs of his hands that I had been after him to let me chase away with a razor, on the ground that there should be such a thing as seeing too much spelled out on people. He was a cherisher, true, but there was always something probationary in his regard for whatever he cherished, and he never let you in on how soon he might be through. It was up to me to hold the pocket lighter when he did the bust-ups of his acne with the pin of the name badge he had to wear for work.

And Reese: He went about in low-hanging sweaters and was quick to disappear from whatever he understood of one person and then get going in what might be likelier of the next. I saw some valiance in how he raked us all over the coals. He pointed out the ruthless valedictory business I apparently did with my hands at the close of a meal, something he claimed I brought off under clever cover of separating myself from the napkin and getting up from the table. (I have yet to figure out what he might have meant. I have always believed in rectitude and inexertion as long as any food is still set out.)

But Malin I knew first from only the phone. He had been calling most nights from a wide agricultural county to the north, a modest rural torment in his voice, the voice of a downtaken, suitorly man married full well. My only duty was making sure he dropped off before I finished any cradlesong synopsis I could come up with of a tricky, frugal workshift without deodorant, maybe, or a self-chaperoned tour of the dashier glory holes. But one night he was all revolt and filthied principle. It was suddenly a bone to pick with me that he had married fresh from a haircut, slashes of gloomful hair still on the forehead, down the front of the neck, and that no sooner was the wedding over with than he was less sure than ever of just exactly how he was cut out to be pitted against her, so the two of them had to live first as brother and sister, then as mother and banged-up son, then as women both, with a cuticular bloodiness to whichever hand set the table when neither’s motives were of the best. He must have been making out an invitation in the way I held my tongue, because the next morning he arrived with vague teeth and a tremolant ascension at the end of every sentence: I trailed him to his car when he went for the change of clothes. But before the day was even out, there was a let-up in how he had gone weak around the gauzy waves of my sleeves. I was already expected to shampoo his eyebrows with a tar extract, then see that the minced and runny things he barely ate would crest just so on his plate.

So is that the one time the question stopped being “Who else?” and became only “What other bones do you have in your body?” or “Where are you going to go with all those clothes?”

Because the answer could then be nothing more personal than that at the rebounding municipal college I was a figure of considerable scholastic mystique because I looked over my notes before the quiz and tried not to get cross when the chairs had to be pushed back into a circle. The late-afternoon section of the summer course in speech was mostly boys, because it was mostly boys—repeaters, sweet-naturedly tardy, brush-burned in their undershirts—who had trouble sticking to their points and making it even as far as the middle minute of the three-minute impromptus. But when my turn came, I was slower-hearted in walking them all through how I saw it:

that I was not the good listener everyone kept insisting I was, but I liked hearing people out the way I expected balloons to be quick about losing their air—I wanted the breathy, informative smell on their mouths right afterward;
that the busy signal doesn’t really have to sound like bleedbleedbleedbleedbleed, but even if it does, you can always fall back on the variety of brightwork and wrong-endedness in a day already taking after the night before;
and that I could kick myself every time it did not come out to even so much as a syllogism no matter how often I got it stacked up onto the three needful tiers:

You go with what’s most available on people.
On men it is an eminence that luckily never lasts.
The mess it leaves is nothing that ever bespoke too much or took up any room in what you knew of people a pale day later.

Except there was a farmers’ market open only a couple of nights a week, and I could pick out the one to follow from a produce stand and into the men’s room. There was just the one stall, and the latch was broken: it was up to me to lean against the door to keep up the privacy. Then the unzipping, and we were standing a polite foot apart, my arms retired now behind my back the way his had been first, his eyes already more wishless than mine. We let the things shy off from ourselves, bumble out the way they always did, twinge and dodge and dither a little, until they were kissing unassisted. It was out of our hands, or none of our doing, and then afterward I was at my very best all over again, witnessing the differences from me amassing in him almost instantly.

Two Poems by Wang Jiaxin
(translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

Glenn Gould

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

A pair of hands invisibly
touch the keyboard, and slowly
you step into Canada’s knee-deep snows.
I’m listening: is this still the vast winter day of North America?
No, the scope of silence itself, the music
peacefully rising, entering my body
the moment it stops for breath.
This is the rhythm
set by your trek, each step
longer than a man’s life. This the song
to ears inaudible; only the skull can hear.
A murmur rolling toward us,
played by you, irresistible,
carried off on the fitful shadows of these notes.
Between us, an immense sheet of snow outstretched;
on the scores, your scrawls illegible.
Back from a noisy party, I think of you
in the deepest solitude, not ready yet
to listen. Jammed on a Beijing bus,
or standing forever in a foreign twilight,
wanting to go home,
not knowing how,
you come to me. Who can say
what music’s sought me always?
I hold back, knowing what took you
in the end takes me. Not ready
for death, I hold back as you did,
my angel on its stool, counting silence,
yet still I’m ecstatic, loving life
yet alone. Now that I sit
at last in darkness, is it you there
playing Bach’s fugue—
yes, no, yes,
yes, no.
Such moments startle me,
as if someone uttered “hush”
while the piano’s black bird vanishes, you vanish,
the road to winter vanishes.
This in the end is the music I hear,
arriving like gray hair, or a child born at dawn.
This is winter’s vault, rising in magnificence,
a mother’s love sculpting fog in bitter cold,
a landscape glimpsed en route to the sea and a dead volcano,
the story that begins after all stories end.
This is the pulse of joy,
the forehead burnished by death.
This is the endless telling—you find at last
the one to whom you’ll speak.
This is hymn, in silence the song
loud and resonant,
how I enter a future suddenly broad, open,
crossing the deep snows of time.

Meeting Rain, Wutai Mountain

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

After five hundred li of dusty road,
we drove through a red canyon
as thunder boomed over the mountain,
rain right on our heels.
Mist rose,
the mountaintop temple veiled in the shower.
It came so indulgently, luxuriously,
my teeth chattered.
I recall my parched thirst on the way,
and later, the strange wooden fish in the monk’s hand,
in my dreams a rush
of streaming water.
Awake, last night’s fruit pits tossed out the window
already beaten into muddy earth.
Rain clears, the day’s trees,
the rocks, the temple shining.
Then morning’s windchime,
and across the mountain slope,
a drift of chanted sutras.

Six 100-word Memoirs

Paul Doherty

IRISH

From the sunroom off the parlor, now converted to his sickroom, my father would call out as I left the house, “Remember you’re Irish.” I believed his good-bye to be ironic. Unlike his own father, a zealous Fenian, my father was pleased and proud to be American and had no interest in supporting or celebrating Irish causes.

Another of his valedictions was for any family member heading off to Mass. “Remember me to the Reverend Maurice.” Father Maurice O’Connor was pastor at St. James, classmate and close friend of Cardinal O’Connell. My dad thought both men too full of themselves.

WOODWORKER

My father’s hobby was woodworking. I can just barely picture him at his cellar workbench—when I was a child he was a dying man—but several of his wood creations remain—the massive workbench itself, the miniature toolbox he made for me, and the platform, built so that we could share the workbench. For the beach he made a scow and tugboat. That tugboat is a masterpiece—iron keel, dowel smokestack, intricately carved pilothouse and gunwales. He built a second cellar stair railing, low, at just the right height. I suppose that it’s still there in my childhood home.

“MRS. DOHERTY”

My mother called our neighbors by their surnames—Mrs. McCabe, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Porter. Her life was circumscribed by my father’s long illness, which kept her homebound. Groceries were delivered from the Arlmont Market. When the “Arlmont man” came, he waited in the kitchen until mother had accounted for each ordered item. One year she did venture from the house, enrolling in a Red Cross home-nursing program. Mrs. Riemer told me later that my mother mastered the hospital tuck better than any of the other women. I was not surprised, only delighted that my mother’s extraordinary competence was on display.

IN THE KITCHEN

I was probably seven or eight when I had my tonsils removed by our family physician, Dr. Carl Barstow. The procedure took place in the kitchen of my home.

Why at home? To save hospital costs? A family tradition of home tonsillectomies?

I don’t know. I do have some clear memories of the day. I was placed in a kitchen chair, my folded arms tied to it with towels. Gauze, soaked with anesthetic, ether I suppose, was held beneath my nostrils. All went well. Later that day I walked across to Robbins Farm and watched my friends play tag football.

GLOVE

In 1948 the great Red Sox infielder, Johnny Pesky, conducted a baseball clinic in Arlington. My brother loaned me his Bobby Doerr glove for the occasion. At the clinic, we young infielders gathered around Pesky. He asked to borrow a glove. I held the Bobby Doerr out for him. Pesky fielded ground balls, emphasizing positioning, balance, and footwork. When the clinic ended he handed the glove back to me. “Nice glove, son.” I ran to where my brother had been watching. “Nice glove, son!” He would not have heard that. I was pleased to report Johnny Pesky’s amiable professional judgment.

LITTLE BUILDING

The Little Building, a blocky structure on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, is now an Emerson dorm. But in its heyday between the wars it was Boston’s largest office building. Trips to Boston with my Aunt Molly included a visit to the office of her childhood chum, Nora Hurley. There, in a room cluttered with bolts and scraps of cloth, Nora embroidered—altar cloths, priests’ vestments. But Nora’s eccentric-ities interested me more than her needlework. You could not mention FDR in her presence; you could not convince her that her refrigerator light shut off when the door was closed.

City Kingfisher

By Marina Richie

The belted kingfisher I pursued all summer on a wild stretch of Rattlesnake Creek now perches on a high wire above the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, Montana.

He’s gone urban this winter. How could he have become such a suave, natty bird who seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word skittish in the environs of crows, pigeons and house sparrows? So many times he eluded me in the labyrinth forests of cottonwood and ponderosa by the cold, clear creek.

The bird I thought I knew belongs four miles upstream from Rattlesnake Creek’s nearby confluence with the Clark Fork River, a place the Salish (Séliš ) people knew as Nɫʔay, translated “Place of the Small Bull Trout.” Not so long ago, the sizzling fragrance of fresh trout cooking on a fire permeated their camps, as they caught, dried and stored fish for the winter ahead.

My kingfisher pays no heed to the rumbling cars rattling across Higgins Bridge, the honking of horns, or the thudding passage of walkers and runners. He likely comes from generations of male kingfishers flying downstream in a seasonal pilgrimage to find the ice-free waters with best fishing on a river then unencumbered by a small city of 70,000.

His mate has flown south and will return by late March or early April to the home nest bank along Rattlesnake Creek. By then, my kingfisher will have flown upstream to guard his prime nesting territory from upstart males.

I come to see him often, finding some patterns in his movements. If not on the wire, he tends to be poised on a cottonwood tree limb, or he’s patrolling his mile-long winter territory from Madison Bridge by the University of Montana downriver to the Orange Street bridge.

On one late sunshine day, he scrunches down on the high wire. His feathers appear fleecy gray without a speck of the typical blue. His crest flurries into a peak with that distinctive two-part divide. From a distance, he looks like a baseball impossibly balanced on the wire. Through binoculars, he’s slimmer and alert, snapping his tiny tail and peering at the ice chunks coasting downstream.

He is predictable only in context of the dynamic river and shifting ice. With below-freezing temperatures, the ice expands from the shore outwards. The wire allows him access to the river’s center, where he dives headfirst at an angle to pluck an escaping trout from black waters.

One day as I watch him on his wire perch, I have the feeling of not being alone. I turn to see an unshaven middle-aged man in a torn jacket standing a few feet away.

“A kingfisher!” I say and point where my bird has flown to the limb of a young cottonwood leaning out over the river close by.

“Yes, a kingfisher!” He nods back and we stand together in silent appreciation of the bird with the tousled crest, head cocked forward and bill pointed downward.

A kingfisher doesn’t stand out like a bald eagle swooping down to nab a duck on the ice, or a great blue heron stalking the shallows with long-legged precision, or the mergansers and goldeneyes rafting the waves. He’s more like the man I met, invisible until you become aware of him.

This kingfisher I watch does not divide urban from the wild. By the river’s edge are red-osier dogwoods and willows among boulders that harbor a broken whiskey bottle or a torn shirt. Beavers gnaw trees. The wilds nudge into the city. The city nudges the wild. I’m always cheering for the wild to win, yet acknowledge that if a kingfisher could vote, he’d endorse the presence of wires over the river that give the ideal view of the fish below.