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Chapter One

 

Lucy took the oxygen tubes out of her mother’s nose and turned off the tank so they could share a last cigarette together. Marge’s last cigarette.  It was October 30, Mischief Night, the day her mother Marge had chosen in the hope of being buried on All Souls’ Day.  She chose the time, around 11:15 p.m., so that she could watch the lead story on the 11:00 news; she no longer cared to hear the five-day forecast.

They sat in the dining room, which had been converted into a makeshift hospital room with an adjustable bed, a commode, a TV tray covered with prescription bottles, and the oxygen tanks.  Lucy held the brown cigarette to her mother’s mouth.  The smoke hung about Marge’s face.  Her lungs could barely pull it in or force it out, but she still enjoyed the smell and taste.

The lead news story had proven a disappointment.  The “werewolf boy” from South America had plastic surgery at Children’s Hospital to remove the thick hair covering one side of his face; skin grafts were required.  Instead of after pictures of the boy’s face following the procedure, they aired pre-surgery video.  Dr. Eugene McCormick, a man in his early fifties wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white medical jacket, outlined an area of the boy’s face with a black marker, while the anchorwoman stated that the boy was recuperating and in stable condition.

“He is the same,” Marge said through parched lips, as she turned her face away.

She had motioned to Lucy that it was time.  Reluctantly, Lucy let go of the aluminum foil-covered antenna of their old television.  She didn’t want to kill her mother.  She didn’t know whether she could kill her mother.

Lucy took a drag and then offered the cigarette to her mother again.  Closing her eyes, Marge parted her lips and sucked ever so slightly on the filter.  She opened her mouth to let the last of the smoke escape and studied its rise.

Then Lucy tapped out the cigarette in the ashtray until every ember was extinguished.  She went into the kitchen to empty and wash the ashtray, a ritual Marge insisted upon after each cigarette.  One that Lucy was grateful for now; it gave her a just few more minutes.   “Smoking doesn’t have to be a dirty habit,” Marge would say.

As Lucy returned to the dining room, Marge pointed to her purse.  Lucy knew what she wanted-the index cards with Marge’s final to-do list.  Each step of her mother’s death was printed clearly, ingrained in blue ink, on its own index card.  In the past few weeks, she’d meticulously jotted down notes while watching reruns of Columbo and other detective shows. From these notes, she created the concise, detailed to-do list.  For as long as Lucy could remember, index cards were how Marge ordered the days, weeks, and seasons of her life.  She kept all but these final ones in a recipe box on the kitchen windowsill.  Mostly they were instructions on keeping house, some recipes-Marge’s parting gift to Lucy “so she wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every morning.”

Protest was futile.  Lucy cautiously brought up that some in the Church might consider it a mortal sin.  Marge said, “I’ve got that covered.”  Lucy pleaded that she wasn’t up to the task, maybe there was someone else, perhaps Marge could do it on her own?

“I gave birth to you.  This is the least you could do for your poor dying mother,” Marge replied. The conversations ended always with Marge’s standard end-of-discussion scowl.

Lucy sat next to her mother and when Marge nodded, she read from the first card:  “Number one.  Place pillow over my face and apply firm but gentle pressure for a minimum of five minutes.”

Marge reached for the pillow behind her head.  Lucy took it with one hand and looked for a place to set the stack of index cards.  Finally, she decided to put them on Marge’s lap, then she stood.  She wanted to say something or do something meaningful but Marge seemed eager to get on with it. Afraid she’d fail her mother, Lucy started, “Mom . . .”

Marge calmly waved her off and motioned for the pillow.  Lucy took a deep swallow, put the pillow over Marge’s face, bending its ends around her head, and held it tight.  Her mother’s body became rigid.  Her fists pushed into the mattress.  Marge had warned Lucy not to break her nose.  People would suspect foul play.  And she didn’t want black eyes for her funeral.  “It’s not that I’m vain,” she’d said, “I just want to be presentable.”

After a few moments, Lucy’s hands were wet with perspiration; her joints ached from the pressure, the tension.  Her mother lay still.  Lucy had forgotten to check the time before starting.  How did she get stuck doing this?  Who else would do it?  Her father was dead.  Her sister Anne would never have agreed to this; and Marge would never have asked her.

Lucy lifted the pillow.

“Mom, are you there?”

Marge’s eyes opened, startling Lucy, then Marge began coughing.

“Are you okay?” asked Lucy.

Her mother moved her head.  Lucy couldn’t decipher if she was shaking it or nodding.

“Do you want a glass of water?”

Marge’s coughing subsided and she glared at Lucy.

“Get the egg timer,” she whispered with what was left of her voice.

When Lucy returned, Marge set the timer for five minutes.  Pushing aside prescription bottles, she positioned it on the TV tray next to her.  Then, she pressed the button to recline the bed.  She motioned for Lucy to place the pillow over her head again.

“I’m not sure I want to do this!”  Lucy started crying.  Marge patted her daughter’s shoulder and reset the timer.  She pushed the pillow to Lucy.

“Okay, okay,” Lucy mouthed.  Right before she put the pillow over her mother’s face for the second time, she noticed Marge blowing air out of her mouth.  Her hands lay across her chest, her gnarled fingers neatly intertwined and pressing down.  Death could not come fast enough for Marge.

Her mother had been ready for death since her husband Joseph died twelve years ago.  She’d curled into herself like a pill bug only her armor left showing.  Marge never forgave Joseph for dying so unexpectedly, so poetically, and so well before her.  His dying was not in the plan.  He’d broken their agreement.  He’d abandoned her.

Joseph Pescitelli was a house framer.  One day on the job, he stopped hammering, clutched his chest, and slid down a wood stud until his tool belt clunked against the plywood floor.  It was all one fluid motion.  He died with one hand on his chest and the other still holding his hammer.

Theirs had been a May-December romance.  Joseph was twenty-two years older and a confirmed bachelor when he met Marge.  But he had always acted younger than his age and she, older.  It was as if, in marrying Joseph despite her family’s disapproval, Marge O’Connell had committed her one act of youthful passion and been done with it.  At the young age of fifty, Marge seemed to welcome the cancer, having grown bored and frustrated with living.  She was furious that she was confined to a hospital bed with oxygen tubes up her nose, peeing in a pot in the middle of the very same dining room in which she conducted Christmas and Easter celebrations for thirty some years.  Her dying was neither poetic nor quick.

The egg timer ticked the seconds.  Lucy stared at the white pillow covering her mother’s face until she saw spots.  Then she looked to the window and saw the reflection of the simple circular chandelier, hovering in the darkness.  A lone white feather that must have escaped the pillow slowly swayed back and forth making its way to the bed until Lucy blew it away.  Marge’s body was tense and shook slightly.  Lucy stood, her arms straight, pushing down.  Her elbows and knuckles ached.  The dark hair on her arms stood on edge in contrast to the brightness in the room.  Everything seemed alive and watchful.  The egg timer, the feather, the chandelier-all witnesses.  Lucy turned her face away and stared at the twisted zigzag lines of the television screen.  Her vision was already blurred with tears as she tried not to notice her mother’s feet twitching under the blankets like two land-bound fish.  Voices from another channel cut in and out.  She couldn’t make out what they were selling.  The health reporter spoke with great earnestness about the merits of drinking tea.  The elderly British people she interviewed proclaimed that their religious consumption of tea was the reason for their longevity.  Many had grandparents who had lived well into their nineties.  The Pescitellis were coffee drinkers.  Marge’s body jolted, once, twice, three times.  Lucy held tight onto the pillow letting her tears fall from her jaw.  Her throat ached, trying to release a cry.  She swallowed.  Next up on the news was a man who had invented a device for yanking trapped plastic bags from tree limbs.  The news took a break to advertise the following day’s 6:00 news.  The egg timer buzzed, rattling against the metal TV tray.

Lucy lifted the pillow and held it against her chest.  Marge’s milky blue eyes were open.  Lucy hadn’t expected that.  She waved her hand in front of them; they didn’t blink.

“Mom?  Mom?  Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Are you dead, Mom?”

Number Two:  Make absolutely sure I am dead.

            Lucy lay her head on her mother’s chest.  Sometimes when she was little, Lucy woke up to the sound of her father snoring in the front bedroom and the noise of the television downstairs.  There her mother had fallen asleep in her recliner, the flickering light on her still body.  Quietly, Lucy climbed on her lap and listened to her mother’s heart beating, her soft murmuring in her sleep.  Now, there was no sound, no motion.

As instructed, Lucy placed a hand-held mirror in front of Marge’s nose and mouth.  It didn’t fog up.  She couldn’t make the call to the doctor unless she was absolutely sure Marge was dead; her mother had emphasized that several times.  Lucy checked for a pulse in her mother’s wrist.

“Mom?  Are you there?”  Lucy stood above her and gently shook her shoulders.  Marge’s body was limp.  Lucy placed Marge’s hands on her chest, as they did at the funeral home where she worked.  Her mother’s hands were rough.  The perpetual cycle of scrubbing, washing and scouring had left her hands with the swollen, bruised look of a fisherman’s face after decades of exposure to salt air.

Number Three:  Place pillow under my head.

            After closely inspecting the pillow for any traces of bodily fluid, Lucy returned it to its place under Marge’s head.  She straightened Marge’s faded strawberry blond hair with traces of gray.  The muscles in Marge’s face were relaxed, but Lucy could still see the line between her eyes.  Oddly, in death Marge appeared younger.  For a moment, Lucy considered holding her mother in her arms, embracing her, but her mother’s eyes were still watching.  Instead, she quickly kissed her forehead, something she would never have done while her mother was alive.  In her mother’s house, love was clean underwear, not hugs and kisses.  When she stroked Marge’s cheek, she was surprised by its softness and the light peach fuzz.  She assumed her skin would feel more like burlap than silk.  Her sister Anne bore a very strong resemblance to Marge-tall, slender, and fair with freckled skin and thin lips.  Lucy took after her father, which meant she was shorter, rounder, her skin olive.  Her dark hair was noticeable on her upper lip and sideburns, more pronounced on her arms and legs than the average woman’s.  Lucy couldn’t help but wonder if Marge’s interest in the werewolf boy was an indirect slight at her.

Number Four:  Reinsert oxygen tubes.

Lucy released a heavy sigh, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.  The tubing rested on Marge’s throat.  Lucy carefully inserted the prongs into her mother’s nostrils and turned the oxygen tank on.  When Dr. Cuchinnati arrived it was to appear as though Lucy was so in shock that she left her mother untouched.

Number Five:  Open window and release my soul.

            Lucy opened the window next to the bed.  Marge had told her to say a prayer for both of them.  Lucy heard the Million Dollar Movie theme music coming from the TV.  Beyond the alley, in the moonlight, the clothesline shimmered,  a shooting star against the cinder block walls of the backyard.  In the upper pane of glass, she could see her own dark reflection and the white brightness of her mother’s blankets behind her.  If she stood perfectly still and concentrated hard enough, she thought she might see her mother’s soul leaving her body.  “God forgive us,” she whispered.  A chill traveled up the length of her spine.  Had her mother left?  Turning away from the window, she watched her mother’s motionless body.  She grabbed the index cards and her mother’s purse from the foot of the bed, then slowly backed into the kitchen.

Number Six:  Call Dr. Cuchinnati.

            Marge’s purse was heavy, twenty years old and camel-colored faux leather.  Sometime during the Seventies it was available for purchase exclusively on television.  It had compartments specifically designed for a matching checkbook, address book, cigarette case, and key chain.  When Marge saw it, she knew it was the perfect purse for her- a place for everything and everything in its place.  The pages of the address book crinkled like old parchment from the stress of Marge’s printing as Lucy searched for the doctor’s information even though she knew the number.  She needed the prop. The line rang and rang and Lucy envisioned the octogenarian slowly making his way to the telephone.  Finally he answered.  She could hear her mother’s voice in her head as she recited her lines:  “She went peacefully in her sleep during the 11:00 news.  I called to her from the kitchen to see if she wanted anything and there was no answer.”

 

With Marge’s purse in tow and the index cards folded into her palm, Lucy waited for the doctor on the front stoop.  Being alone with her mother frightened her now, despite her years of practice keeping the dead company.  Since the doctor lived several blocks away and stubbornly refused to take a taxi, Lucy knew she’d be waiting for some time while he hobbled over.  The coolness of the marble step seeped through her threadbare sweatpants.  She reached into her mother’s purse and pulled out the matching cigarette case.  Some of its color had crumbled away.  Her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette.  Then, she began to pull at the hair on her forearm; the pain grounded her.

She looked over at the darkened row houses across the street.  Her entire life had happened on this narrow street in South Philadelphia.  She knew every neighbor at least by sight.  The houses were all the same-two-story red brick fronts, a bay window on the first floor, two windows on the second.  Tonight, they resembled yawning faces.  Some neighbors had opted to install aluminum siding over the brick front; others stuck artificial grass to their steps, perhaps in an attempt to bring some green to the lawnless neighborhood.  While Marge disapproved of these embellishments, her pet peeve was the adornment of the bay windows with Virgin Marys, or cat and dog figurines, or plastic flower arrangements against white vertical blinds.  The Pescitellis had sheer curtains and heavy, dark mustard-colored drapes.  A single crystal lamp lit the window.  On this night, many houses had seasonal cardboard decorations of ghosts, witches, and black cats taped to the windows.

Only a few trees were on the block.  In front of their house, at the base of their stoop, was a square of mismatched cement.  When her father lived in the house alone, before he’d met her mother, a tree grew there.  In the spring, it produced white blossoms.  Marge had it removed, fearing it would fall on the house or tangle its roots around the sewer pipe.

Lucy slipped off her black flat and stubbed out her cigarette in its soft foam sole, which resembled a waffle from wear.  Marge didn’t like butted cigarette marks on the sidewalk and Lucy didn’t want to reenter the house alone to retrieve an ashtray.  Through the vertical blinds, Lucy spied the purple-pink light of televisions in some of the houses.

The street was quiet.  She lit another cigarette and stared at the burning embers and the smoke drifting up.  Since it was Mischief Night, she thought she might see some kids making mischief.  At twenty-nine, she’d never seen it happen.  But every Halloween morning, without exception, she awoke to see soaped-up car windows and doorways and store fronts splattered with over-ripened tomatoes and raw eggs.

A couple approached; they weren’t from the neighborhood.

“Those’ll kill ya, ya know,” the woman commented as they walked by.

“Yeah,” Lucy said, “I know.”

She took a deep drag, then blew the smoke out in a steady stream.  So far the day had gone exactly as planned.  In the morning she had finished some minor household tasks before the visitors for the day arrived.  Fr. Reed heard Marge’s confession, gave her Holy Communion, and seemed to suspect nothing out of the ordinary in their behavior.  Jack Kelleher arrived in the afternoon.  Marge had respected and trusted Jack as a friend and a lawyer and because his aunt, Mrs. Garrity, who lived across the street, was her best friend.  Jack was in his late thirties and had gone away for law school but returned to the neighborhood.  Something graduates rarely did.  He was the opposite of her sister Anne who only returned for funerals.  Lucy lit another cigarette with the last one.  The folded index cards were damp from being clenched in her fist.  Despite this, the lines and dots Marge had embedded into the cards still felt like Braille.  When Marge first reviewed them with her, Lucy felt demeaned by their simplicity and repetitiveness, but they had proven a comfort this night, allowing her to focus on tasks, not the implications of her actions.  She unfolded them.  The next card gave instructions for calling Anne.  Lucy wasn’t to do this until Marge’s body had been taken from the house.  Marge didn’t want Anne coming over and asking questions while she was still there.  Lucy flipped to the last card.

Number eight: Destroy to-do list.

            The final item.

St. Peter’s loomed large over the squat houses.  Its muted bell rang out midnight.  Her cigarette had burned down to the filter; it singed her fingers.  For a moment she absorbed the pain.  Then she ground the butt into her shoe and shoved the cards into her pocket.  The sound of footfalls echoed down the deserted street and Dr. Cuchinnati’s elongated shadow appeared before he turned the corner.

 

Excerpted  from When Love Was Clean Underwear by  Susan  Barr-Toman  (www.susanbarrtoman.com), winner of the Many Voices Project’s Fiction Award 2007. The  novel  will  be  published  by  New  Rivers  Press  in October,  2009.

 

Susan  Barr-Toman  teaches  writing  at Temple University and  holds  an MFA in Writing  and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

[img_assist|nid=4777|title=Eddie by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=269]Tupperware, Ziploc, Rubbermaid. Circle, square, cube, cylinder, shallow rectangle, deep rectangle, long rectangle, almost-a-square-but-not-quite rectangle, big circle, small circle. Circle with the little spout thingy. Rectangle with the clicky edges. Green, orange, clear, clear with blue tint, clear with green tint, translucent blue, sickly sea green. Permanent, disposable, semi-disposable, Chinese soup takeout. Warped, melted, scratched, grated, scraped.

It was inevitable, but all the same he hadn’t thought they would get there so soon. Not one lid would match up with one receptacle. They had reached perfect Tupperware entropy.

Let’s make sure I’m not being premature, he thought, and so began to sort into the broad categories. Circles on the stovetop, lids on the right front burner. Rectangles on the kitchen cart, lids propped between the trivets and the cutting board. Squares on the little strip between the stove and sink, lids balancing in a pile over the edge.

He’d have to be careful not to knock them over.

He knocked them over immediately.

He picked the lids up and put them on the little bit of dishwasher that projected from beneath the microwave instead. The deep ones he piled by the coffee maker on the other side of the sink, lids propped between the olive oil and vinegar.

He stood in the center of the narrow galley that they pretended was a kitchen, all of them laid out within his reach, and checked them. He checked each circle container against every circle lid, and even when it was obvious that it wouldn’t fit, he went through the motions, pressing lid to container lip despite the inches that gaped between them, just to be sure.

But it wasn’t quite as precise as all that. The lids for the squares might have been rectangles, and the deep cylindrical containers could also be circles, so those all had to be cross-checked as well. There was one circle that kind of fit, and might even have been the original lid—he checked, and the brand was the same—but it had been so warped and stretched that he couldn’t make them come together.

Actually he could, but the slightest touch popped them back apart again. 

And so, half an hour after he had started, he gave up and put them all back in the cupboard.

And that was when it hit him. Even if they got a new piece now, it would have to go back in that cupboard. Even if she found one—and she would find one, briskly, efficiently, in those early hours before he was even awake—it would eventually go back into the cupboard and be lost to him (if not to her). All he could do was shove them back into that space where they angled and jostled against one another and the rest of the dishes, big lids below and small lids tucked in on the side, always threatening to spill over and knock the drinking glasses to the floor.

He could take them out and throw them all away, but they were hers, really. So many of them had preceded his residence in the house, so who was he to relegate them to the trash? What if a lost lid turned up in the dishwasher or under the kitchen cart? There might still be one that fit, and his rashness would have lost it.

Twenty or thirty pieces. Two people. Ten years. Moderate use. Potlucks, takeout, Christmas cookies from one or the other set of parents. And none of them fit together any more.

He thought about chucking them all and going to the store to get new ones, but then he realized that in another ten years he’d be right back in the same spot, so why bother? And the next ten years would go by faster than the last—a smaller fraction of a life, after all, a more-or-less quarter versus a more-or-less third. And once another decade had gone by, he would be standing in the same spot looking for lids, wondering where this one had come from, how this other one had gotten so badly mauled, why none of them would fit, and how she kept finding ones that did.

He opened the cupboard again. Cramped kitchen, cramped cupboard, the house itself too small. It had always been too small, though it hadn’t seemed that way back when they still came together with a satisfying snap on the sofa, at dinner at the kitchen table. When they still fit so well together in the bed, arriving at the same time, the bedtime ritual after the late news and maybe some stupid show with cops and lawyers or a bunch of doctors whose names she could remember but he never could, the do-si-do in and out of the tiny bathroom, the arm that fit beneath the pillow, the nose that fit into the small hollow at the back of the neck, the hips that pressed up into hips from behind. The fit of his dreams and her aspirations, hers still well formed, his scratched and warped and melted and maybe not fit for fitting anywhere anymore.

Laptop, cellphone, camera bag, hard drive. Car keys, office keys, passport, wallet. Toothbrush, medicine, deodorant, toothpaste. Sport coat, rain jacket, winter jacket, sunglasses. Underwear, trousers, jeans, socks, dress shirts, t-shirts, sweater. Manila folders, books, notepads, manuscript. Pocketknife, favorite pen.

J.A. Klemens  is  a biologist who lives in Philadelphia.

[img_assist|nid=4528|title=Who Do Your Think by Kristen Solecki © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=284]I went to the beach in a blindfold today, because once you asked me to. I wore the scarf you chose for me by touch: the one I wore often. The same one I told you I loved, and never mentioned the garish pattern made me cringe. Tied around my eyes, I could not see the pattern any more than you could when you chose it. It was a fitting penance.

After writing nearly forty pages this morning, I needed to go out and get some air. No one opposed me. I could not stay in the house a moment longer. The glaring hole in the line of books on the shelves marked the former resting place of your Braille poetry. The furniture was rearranged. The pages of my manuscript stretched across the floor from my desk to the living room.

Guiltily, I turned to neaten the house. But then I remembered it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was free. I was so selfishly free. No one would slip on the pages. There was no dog to wrinkle them. The stereo remote sat on the kitchen table. No one would complain. I could safely leave a dirty carving knife from dinner last night in the sink.

Every object oppressed me. Each change I have made since you left weighed on my conscience. I had tried to change; did I really try hard enough? Maybe I am selfish. Maybe I pushed too much for what I wanted.

Your last morning here, when I finished work, I should have offered to read to you. I knew you hated the dry computer voice of your electronic reader, and that you got a headache from your headphones. I needed silence to write, so you had no opportunity to use the stereo.

But I wanted sun and wind. I didn’t feel like escaping from the pages of my own book to be imprisoned in someone else’s. So I suggested the beach, wheedling and cajoling while you stood firm. I pushed too hard. You raised your voice.

“If you want to go to the beach, I certainly can’t stop you. I wish you could see how it is for me. Go to your beach once the way I do; see how much you like it then.”

And then I made my last mistake. Apollo, uneasy at our argument, barked loudly. Thoughtlessly, I crouched down and held out my hand. He walked away from you to receive the caress from me. I soothed him without thinking, sliding my tired fingers through his inky black hair.

You froze. I saw your discreetly grasping fingers register his absence. You knew what I had done. I made him my pet, depriving you of your guide. You could never forgive me that.

Some days I wish I hadn’t petted Apollo. I wonder how it would have been. Some evenings I fall asleep wishing I had conceded more, wishing that I had tried harder to change. But some mornings I wake up feeling liberated.

When I stepped outside the car, the heat baked me in a moment. Barefoot, I shuffled awkwardly to the cooler surface of the steps. The wood of the stairs crunched loudly, like when I spill sugar on the kitchen floor and am too busy to clean it up. You always told me I should be neater, and I did try. Stepping off the bottom stair was like landing on the moon: a bounce and a quiet “whooph.” But if the sand is sugar, the moon is flour. Or at least, that is what I imagine, but I do not know any astronauts to ask. The sugary powder beneath me shifted with each step, creating an unaccustomed strain from ankles to calves.

Coming around the dunes, the wind hit me like a punch, abrading my face with tiny stinging missiles. I kept walking, and after the first attacks, the wind became docile and refreshing. I heard a throaty chuckle, which became a series of staccato shrieks as the gulls swooped in. I smiled up at the hungry gathering that wheeled in the air above me. Each pass of a seagull intercepted the sunlight on my face, a shadowy caress.

Further down the beach, I caught the hiss and lap of liquid fire. The damp chill came seeping up from the sand between my toes. I flinched when I stepped into a slimy mound of seaweed. You always kept your shoes on at the beach, because you were afraid of fishing hooks and washed up syringes. Peeling it from my toes, I cast it aside like a discarded streamer, and approached the water’s edge. The sand changed to pebbles beneath my feet.

My heel was pricked by a sharp edge, but it was not the cast-off of some junkie. It was a shell. Groping in the sand, I picked up clam castanets, which I clacked together while improvising a flamenco dance. No one was there to laugh at me. The empty shells withstood the abuse for a few minutes, and then the last filaments were torn asunder. I held two halves in my hands and they stank of salt and decay.

Then, a roar! A hissing angry snake of water boiled around my legs, and numbed them instantly.  I felt it shove past me impatiently, charging up the beach, and then return to flirt with my feet, trying to lure me into the ocean. Standing there I remembered that poem you loved, which was too long. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.” They did not sing to me either, though I stayed all day, blind and alone.

I have a confession to make. The sunset was not the same when it was merely waning warmth on my skin, and I did not love it as I usually do. But I did not hate it either.

 

 

  Mary Kate O’Donnell is a nineteen-year-old sophomore English and biology major at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. This is her first published piece.

            He used earth words and planted gardens and liked going down south and road trips to nowhere. He had tattoos of the Devil on his forearm, and looked like God, with big gentle blue eyes, open, steady and true, able to see beyond the simple human spirit. He was a great kisser. Like me. But quiet. And deep. Not deep in a click-your-fingers-at-a-coffeehouse deep; and not the kind of temporary deep you think you see in the face of a student of philosophy. He was deep like rivers that cut through canyons as old as the brachiopod lingula and the horse shoe crab.  

            I met him when I was young. In a bookstore. Buying war novels for my father. I liked to call him Mr. Smith, but his name was Steve. His hair was long and kinky and I remember I could smell his clean, hippy, 25-year-old smell as he flushed spines in the history section.  He said: “You see, you have this calming affect on me. I actually want to struggle with you.” And I thought to myself, I want to run my fingers through the algebraic recipe that cooked up the lines of your hair. I was on fire. I perused picture books of the American desert and listened to Navajo tunes. I bought a dress covered with flowers that came down to my ankles and I wore sandals.

            He struggled with me. And then he took off. Restless. One day in May. He rode with some friends in an orange VW bus out to a reservation in New Mexico to study art and history and eat mushrooms and pledge a vow of celibacy to the Great Spirit in hopes that one day he would understand the differences between love and lust.

            I waited. But he didn’t come back. The Spring was over. The warm, tired, lovesick days of August too, and eventually the fall and then the winter.

            I fell for a waiter. I made love to a Jew who became a Rabbi. I danced meringue with Paul Garcia in a club named Brazil. I kissed Doug, Scot and Eamon and the Twelve Apostles and a Moroccan named Arie. And I gave myself to a drummer one Leap Year because I lost count on how many times he said: you are so beautiful, baby.

            I married a Spaniard who barely spoke English and barely brushed his teeth. He was tall and lanky and had a long face like El Greco and chased me around the bedroom. “Come here, wife. My sex is hard for you.” We lived in a piso on the 4^th floor of a rundown building in Vallekas, a gypsy suburb of Madrid. I made tortillas and arroz con leche and sometimes crouched on the terraza under the hot sun and watched stray cats fuck on rooftops. I cried for home. And dreamed of humidity and the green, oxygen pine trees and grass that grows with dew stuck to each blade like a rock climber descending a cliff.

            I became a woman. Desired. Pedestaled. Unwoven. Torn. Shredded. Real.

            I made two babies. Moved to Jersey. Bought a home. Divorced. Years passed. In the Spring of ’04 I spread my father’s ashes across the jetty down on Nebraska Avenue. Saying goodbye to the man who taught me how to love. Boyfriends came. Boyfriends went. Sons grew up.

            I bumped into Mr. Smith at a record store one night in February. He was buying vinyl and I was perusing the CDs. I barely recognized him without his long hair. But he still talked smooth and his tattoos were all black and green. And I thought, if I had my own tattoos they wouldn’t be the face of the devil. They’d be words. Words that save me from myself, where God, not man, is the Second Coming and the Third and Fourth. Words when strung together become the only thing in life that’s real—forming a straight line like Time to a Westerner.

            We talked about books for a while. The west.  He didn’t remember much. And so I shrugged when he asked if I wanted to go for a drink. No, I said. Maybe another time.

     

Tracy Shields graduated from Rutgers University, magna cum laude, with a degree in English Literature and Journalism. She has been Concept Editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly since 2001. She’s been published in Word Riot and is a continual contributor to six sentences. She currently works and writes from home in NJ and has two beautiful sons, Daniel and Julien. Please visit her at http://sevenperfumes.wordpress.com

 

[img_assist|nid=4529|title=Blue Mist by Lee Muslin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=267]They woke together at a rest stop on the interstate, car windows dimmed by frozen breath and through the glass, anemic blue dawn swelling over Wyoming.

She struggled out of the sleeping bag, wrestled with the nest of blankets and pulled at the door. She poured herself out into the empty lot and shuffled a few paces from the car before she buckled over a strip of grass and vomited. It slapped the ground and steam rose from it. The man got out of the car and went to her and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her, to hold her. She heaved again, just water and foam.

"Get your hands off me."

"What can I do?"

"This isn’t your problem." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Drive. We shouldn’t have stopped."

They got back into the beaten silver Saturn and pushed the blankets to the back seat, which was piled with unpacked clothes, some still on hangars, some tangled at the floorboards.

"Jesus, Peter. Why don’t you just hate me?"

He started the car, which struggled in the cold. The engine knocked and shuddered. He drove.

*          *          *

She slapped his hand away from the radio and it stung, and when he pulled away it made him swerve over the line, into the red gravel shoulder, which probably made her hate him all the more.

"Christ. Learn how to drive."

"You hit me."

"I hit your hand."

"I was turning it off."

"I’m listening."

"There’s nothing to listen to, Annie. It’s just Jesus radio. There’s nothing there."

She folded her arms and turned to the window and was sullen for a while.

"I thought they might say something about it."

They were silent for a long time more, listening to AM static rise and fall because Peter was afraid to touch the radio and upset her again, and Annie was too proud to admit that she had been wrong and there was really nothing on the radio about this horrible thing that had happened. Just hallelujah. Just praise the Lord. 

And so it was the End of Days through the long Wyoming desert.

Eventually, when the voices faded, Annie turned off the radio and there was only wind and the hiss of the road.

"This is crazy," she said.

"Yep."

"Yep? What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I was agreeing."

"Yep. Are you a fucking cowboy?"

He didn’t answer. He shifted and drove with one hand.

She didn’t look at him. "Which part?"

"What?"

"I said this was crazy and you agreed."

"Yep."

"Which part did you agree to?"

The road was empty and wide, and so he turned and stared at her. "All of it," he said.

"Keep your eyes on the road."

He turned back.

"And that isn’t an answer. Tell me what you think is crazy."

"That there are no radio stations. That we haven’t been through a town in sixty miles. There’s a storm coming and we don’t have anywhere to stay. Everything."

"What’s everything?"

"Everything that’s happened. Every goddamned thing, Annie. You and me. New York. All of it."

She nodded. That was enough.

Then it was back to the radio.

Annie hit scan and it rolled through the entire AM band without stopping. It started again and stopped on static. She switched to FM and hit a station. Christian. Like everything.

The voice was rattled. It said, What will become of the children?

There were coughs in the pause and shuffling papers.

In the final days when God’s wrath is descended over the Earth and the horsemen have strode among us. What will become of the children?

Annie drew back her hand.

Some say that children are the innocent, but God almighty, the child will pay for the sins of their fathers and death will befall them as it did the children of Pharaoh, and locusts will consume their flesh and flies will fill their eyes.

"Jesus Christ, Annie. Turn it off."

"No."

Peter flicked his finger over the volume knob and the radio went dead. He looked at her and waited for her to scream or hit him again. But she was silent. And then tears came.

"I hate you," she said.

"That’s probably true."

"This is such shitty timing."

"The worst."

"We can’t have a baby now."

He took his hand from the wheel and shifted it toward her. He put it on her leg, covered by the bloated down coat, which he loathed, and had always loathed. She put her hand on top of his and they held each other this way while the long desolation passed outside, while miles of fences flickered by and the morning sun settled on the land like ash.

"I still love you," he said. "I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I do."

"It does." She squeezed his hand. "I don’t know why, but it does."

*          *          *

Miles piled upon miles, and the exits were useless and barren.

"No Services," he said as another sign slipped by.

"How can there be no services? How do people live here if there are no services?"

"I think they drive a long way for services."

"Stop saying services."

"Sorry."

"Fuck this place."

"We’ll find something."

"Fuck you too."

They were quiet for a while.

"I’m hungry," she said.

"Me too."

"I mean it. I’m really hungry."

"When we get to an exit, we’ll see if we can find some services."

"Go to hell." She folded her arms and leaned against the window. "Why didn’t we bring any food with us?"

"Because we were in a hurry. And yesterday I didn’t think we’d have trouble finding some."

*          *          *

They did come to an exit, which wasn’t a town, just a clutter of lots and gravel to either side of the highway, two gas stations, a junkyard, and a McDonald’s.

It was a nameless settlement that had sprouted simply because one old local road rambled out of the country and crossed the interstate.

They came off the highway and crept to the top of the ramp, slick with ice and snowblown. The car slipped and then caught the pavement again.

The station at the end of the ramp had put out orange barricades and a slab of plywood that said NO GAS. They turned left and the tires slipped as they moved onto the overpass and skidded down the other side.

At the other station, a long line of pickup trucks had stacked up at the pumps.

"There’s a McDonald’s," she said.

"You never eat that shit."

"I need to eat. I don’t care what it is."

The snow on the local road had gathered in eddies and he drove slowly over black ice where the tires had no grip. He turned into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

"I don’t want to get caught in the storm," he said. "I think we can make it to Laramie before it hits. If we hurry."

She nodded. "Yeah. Alright."

They got out and the dry wind bit them. Snow blew around their ankles and packed in dusty drifts at the edge of the lot. They shuffled for the door.

Inside, it was yesterday in America. Yesterday, when nothing had happened at all.

Annie ordered breakfast, but the kid behind the counter, an Indian with long black hair and bad skin, told her that it was too late, so she muttered under her breath and walked away. Peter ordered for her.

The kid disappeared into the back and Peter waited. The place was bright. The place was warm. It was good to be warm after the bitter winter night at the side of the road.

Annie sat in a booth against the front window, staring at her open hands. She pulled off her dowdy knit hat and frazzled hair splayed out in wild directions. When Peter had met her, she had been so prim and ordered. Her hair precise, her clothes immaculate, her body angelic.

But this had changed and she had become tangled and wrecked, as they together had wheeled wildly off the rails, and whatever they’d been once, they were no longer.

At the end, they cheated on each other ferociously, for vengeance, to push the other away, to disgust the other and bring the thorny bramble of their undone love to a permanent, fiery end.

And it had worked, and they had ended, squarely and without remorse.

Then on Monday came into their lives news of the baby.

Then on Tuesday came the end of the world.

The kid came back to the counter. "Sorry it’s taking so long. A lot of people didn’t show up today."

"It’s alright."

"We don’t even got the guy that cleans the shitter."

"Damn."

"Just didn’t come in." The kid looked around to see if he was being watched. He leaned in and almost whispered. "Hey. You heard anything?"

Peter shook his head. "No."

"They don’t let us turn on the radio or nothing. So I ain’t heard. But if you heard something–"

"I haven’t. Sorry."

"Okay. Yeah. I’ll bring it out to you in a minute."

[img_assist|nid=4536|title=Untitled by Nicole Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=255]Peter left the counter and walked to the table by the window. He hung over Annie for a while. She looked up at him, regarded him, exhausted and confused, the same way she had looked at her hands. Perplexed by her appendages, baffled that he was still attached to her, and she to him.

He sat across from her. "I have a plan."

She stared.

"We eat. Then we find gas. We can wait in line over there. Then if we drive all day, we can make it to Omaha. If we drive hard, we could make it to Chicago by tomorrow night. We’ll be there for Christmas. Everything will be okay when we get home."

"That isn’t a plan, Peter. That’s just what we were doing anyway."

"It makes me feel better to say it."

The kid came over with a tray of Big Macs in their greasy boxes.

"Sorry it took so long. Some of ’em might be a little fucked up because the guy who knows how to put them together on Tuesdays didn’t show up today, so I just guessed from the pictures."

"It’s okay," Annie said, which was unusually kind.

He lingered, then shuffled back to the counter.

There was honking. A lot of honking and Annie craned her neck to see over Peter’s shoulder.

"What is it?" He turned.

At the gas station, two men were scuffling. One pushed the other and a clumsy swing landed them both in a pile of snow.

From the passenger side of one of the fueling pickups, a woman dropped down, drunk and morbidly obese, shouting incoherent obscenity. While she ranted, she pulled the nozzle from the tank and dragged the hose to the opposite side of the pump island, dousing the truck that was parked there.

A couple of burley men tried to stop her, but they were driven off by a spray of gasoline to the eyes. They howled and scuttered away. She grabbed at one of her breasts. She flipped her middle finger as the gas pooled around her.

Peter switched places at the table. He sat next to Annie so he could watch.

The rest of the pickups in the line started to scatter, banging into each other, honking, jamming up against the wall of the station, against the pumps and islands, steel slapping steel and glass snapping.

The woman chased a few trucks to the extent of the hose. She turned circles and wrapped her legs in it. She fell, struggling, rolling in the gas. She untangled herself and stood and held a lighter to the grill of the truck.

One of the men in the snow, all battered now and dripping with blood, stood up and yelled. He might have been trying to reason with her. She couldn’t hear or didn’t care. She sparked the lighter and lit the pickup on fire.

The flames flashed back up her arm and burned the gas that had soaked into her sweatshirt. People ran from the tangle of trucks as fire chased out over the slicks that had gathered.

The woman screamed and ran and flailed her arm, but the fire jumped to her hair and covered her body. She set fire to the ground as she ran.

The next pickup in line caught fire. The station was a roiling black cloud, a filthy billowing torch, all alight in the snowy morning.

The bloody man tried to stop the burning woman, but she was frantic and slapped at him, and some of the flame jumped across to his coat and his hair.

He tried to get away, but walls of fire rolled up from the pools on the ground. He ran through it but was consumed and collapsed into the snowbank. The fat woman fell behind him and burned.

Annie had taken a bite of the Big Mac. She put it back in the box and pushed it away.

"Why is this happening?

"Why’s what happening?"

"You know what."

"They’re fighting over gas."

"Not that. All of it."

"The usual reasons, I guess."

Annie took the Big Mac and bit it. She stuffed her mouth with it.

Peter felt the heat of the fire on his face through the glass.

He said, "If it would have happened a month ago, would we have broken up? Do you think we would have been so terrible to each other?"

She worked pieces of food around in her cheeks as she thought. "No. No, I don’t think so."

"Why not?"

"We need different things now. Things are different."

"What things?"

"We have new priorities." She looked at him and wiped her mouth with a bunched paper napkin. "It changes everything."

The glass rattled and rumbled. A broad and sucking bulge of fire rose up over the gas station.

"So what do we do?"

"We do what we have to. We make it work."

"Wait," he said. "Wait, are we talking about the bomb or the baby?"

She shook her head. "We’re talking about us."

*          *          *

They left the place behind. The fire department never came. As they slid by the gas station, Annie pressed her hands over her eyes. The burned bodies stuck in Peter’s periphery like shadows, black and stiff against the snow which melted around them in the heat of the soaring fire.

They crept out onto the ramp and back to the interstate.

"We can make it to Laramie," he said.

"Don’t you think we should find gas?"

"Look at the gauge."

"It’s on E."

"Exactly."

"Exactly what? That means it’s empty."

"No, it means we probably have sixty miles left on this tank."

"Sixty miles? It’s on empty, you asshole."

"We’ll be fine, Annie."

*          *          *

At the side of I-80, where the car had run out of gas, Annie paced along the muddy red gravel shoulder, clutching her hands and doubling over, and cursing in a way that kept her warm with hellfire.

Peter sat in the car and waited for her rage to pass.

"You stupid fuck!" She kicked the ground and a hail of gravel hit the car. She turned and walked off.

On the crests of the rocky brown hills around them, pumpjacks nodded in slow succession, draining oil from the earth, scattered across the washes and ridges.

[img_assist|nid=4532|title=Repose by Suzanne Comer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=257]He watched her walk away and thought, as terrible as she was, as bad as they had been to each other, she was the most important thing left in the world.

He opened the door and called after her. She stopped and turned back.

"What are we going to do, Peter? We don’t have any gas."

"We’ll wait for somebody. We’ll wait for a car."

"There are no cars. There’s a storm coming. Nobody’s driving except us."

"We’re not driving either, actually."

She bit down hard.

"It’s warmer in here," he said. "Just get in the car."

*          *          *

The storm did come, and it consumed them.

They sat together in the back seat on their clothes, bundled under sleeping bags and blankets. The car rocked and shuddered in the wind.

The last pale sun came through the deepening snow on the glass, blue and icy light.

"There’ll be a plow through soon. Or maybe highway patrol. We’ll be fine."

"It’s getting dark."

"It’s just the snow on the windows."

"No. It’s late. The sun’s going down and it’ll get colder."

"We’ll be alright. We can still make it to my mom and dad’s tomorrow night. We’ll have Christmas. It’ll be normal. Everything will be O.K. when we get home."

"It isn’t fucking normal."

"I’m glad you’ll get to meet them."

"Were you ever going to introduce me?"

"Of course."

"When? We’ve been together for eight months."

"They live fourteen hundred miles away."

"You could have figured something out."

"What about you? I’ve only met your mother once, and she lives in Vegas."

"Once is enough for anyone."

"I liked her."

"That’s because you were both drunk and disgusting."

Annie shifted and brought herself closer to him. "Do you think she’s alright? Do you think she’s safe?"

"Definitely. She’s on vacation."

"So?"

"She’s out of the country. I’m sure everything’s fine in Europe."

She put her head on his shoulder, heavy and smelling of wool and sweat. The ridiculous ball on top of her hat tickled his cheek.

"What if they don’t like me?"

"They’ll like you."

"But what if they don’t? Or what if I don’t like them?"

"Annie, everybody is going to like everybody else. Everything is going to be fine."

"But that isn’t true, is it." She slid her arm behind him and held him. "Everything isn’t going to be fine."

"Things will be different, that’s all. It might get harder for a while, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. It doesn’t have to be."

"Are you talking about the bomb again?"

"No. The baby. Weren’t we talking about the baby?"

"I’m cold," she said. "Do you want to make love?"

"What?"

"Do you?"

"I didn’t know that was still an option."

"Well, it is."

"Then yes. Yes, I do."

*          *          *

They did make love, with their clothes mostly on and swaddled in blankets. The windows gathered fog, which froze and glowed in the dusk.

When they had finished, and all of the light had gone out of the sky and the snow that covered the glass had gone dark, they sat together and thought of home.

Sound came from behind them. A slow vibration in the ground became a shudder and a quake. The growl from the highway became a torrent of raging engines and rattling steel.

"Jesus, what is it?" She sat up and scratched at the ice on the rear window.

Headlights burned through the snow and filled the car. Peter wrestled with the blankets and pushed his shoulder against the door to break the seal of ice that had formed. Clumps of snow fell over his freezing hands.

Standing in the gravel with his back to the wind, he watched the tanks pass with armored trucks and Humvees heading south. The headlights on the highway snaked back along the road for miles.

Annie climbed out, still wrapped in her blanket. They watched the convoy pass, too loud to speak over the whistling and growling and screaming of machines.

Annie waved her arms. She moved closer to the road, but none of them slowed.

Eventually, when the end of the convoy came, and the road was silent, a few military semis brought up the rear. A tanker passed, and another pulled to the shoulder and stopped behind them, flooding the place where they stood with light.

[img_assist|nid=4533|title=Guggenheim by Gary Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=202]The engine rattled and knocked. The driver dropped down.

"Are you in need of assistance, ma’am?" The soldier jogged toward them with hands deep in his coat. "They called back and said you were trying to flag us down."

"We ran out of gas," she said. "What’s happening?"

"Gas? Not a problem." He turned and shouted into the light. "Diaz. Grab a gas can."

The passenger door opened and slammed and there was a shuffling in the gravel.

"What’s going on?" Peter said.

"Can’t say."

"Do you know anything about New York?"

"Really can’t say."

The other soldier hustled toward them lugging a brown plastic gas can. She was small and wore thick glasses.

Peter had to pry the frozen gas tank door with a key.

He twisted off the cap and the soldier started to pour.

"Where are you two headed?" she asked.

"Home," Peter said.

"Where’s home?"

"West of Chicago."

"How far west?"

"Suburbs."

She nodded. "Where you coming from?"

"Salt Lake."

"You picked a very bad time to take a very long road trip."

"We’re going to see his family for Christmas," Annie said.

"Have you spoken to them?"

"We couldn’t get through."

The soldier who had been driving scraped his boot in the dirt. "No one can," he said. "Are you married?"

"No," Peter said.

"You two should get married. Make it right in the eyes of the Lord."

Annie took Peter’s hand.

"So," he said, "you planning to take I-80 all the way?"

"Yeah," Peter said.

"Well, maybe when you get to Des Moines, you should quit the interstate."

"Why?" Annie squeezed harder.

"I think you might find the old U.S….uh, the old U.S. highways a more scenic way to travel."

"We’re kind of in a hurry."

"Then you better quit the interstate at Des Moines. You follow?" He stepped closer. "This thing ain’t over, brother. Do yourself a favor and stay off the highway."

He turned and headed back to the truck.

The other one finished with the gas can and put the cap back on the tank.

"I don’t know what kind of mileage you get, but that should get you to Cheyenne. You can find gas there."

"Why are you doing this?" Annie said.

"We’re just here to serve, ma’am."

"That isn’t true."

The soldier stood for a while, quiet and staring, the last of the snow falling between them.

"Sins," she said.

"What?"

"It was Jackson’s idea. To make up for the sins we gotta go do now."

"Diaz! Let’s roll."

"What sins?"

The soldier turned away and jogged back to the truck.

"What fucking sins?"

"Annie, shut up."

"Why?"

"I don’t know. Just shut up."

The engine growled and knocked and the truck rattled back onto the road, heading south.

They stood alone in the dark at the roadside, smelling ice and sage, silent for a while. Too long.

"Start the car," Annie said. "I’m cold."

"I love you," he said.

"I’m cold," she said. "I love you, too."

*          *          *

They sang. They were beset by the madness that comes on long ribbons of American road. They sang through the snarled and snowblown streets of Cheyenne, they sang through the last of Wyoming and six more hours into Nebraska. They told stories about their lives all the way to Omaha.

They laughed and were giddy and then fell into silence in a 24 hour Wal-Mart parking lot which bustled and hummed through the night as lines backed out of doors for generators and palettes of bottled water and Band-Aids and all of the other things that had suddenly become the stuff of life.

They slept in the white glare of mercury vapor lights and in the morning Annie was sick again before they set out at dawn.

Civilization began to coalesce along the road, exits with new frequency, populated by chain restaurants and big box stores.

The radio, which had possessed her the day before, was silent. They had decided, without saying so, that neither cared to know what new and terrible things had happened to the world in the night. All they needed to know of that came from emergency vehicles flickering past and clusters of military trucks at intervals on an otherwise vacant highway.

At the edge of Des Moines, she said, "You never asked me what I was going to do."

She fiddled with the vents and the heat controls.

"Do with what?"

"If I was going to keep it."

"I just assumed."

"How could you assume something like that?"

"I don’t know. I just did."

"You were right. I just mean that I’m curious. That’s all. Why did you think that?"

"It was the way you said it."

"How did I say it?"

"You didn’t say, I’m pregnant. You said I’m having a baby."

She shook her head. She flicked off the heat. "No, I didn’t."

"Yes you did."

"No I didn’t. I said we’re having a baby."

And that was true. She had.

*          *          *

They came to signs that warned of a roadblock. Not the usual orange construction fare, but olive and white military signs which were clearly not suggestions of caution, but statements of very serious intent.

They left the interstate, off onto the snowy, vacant surface streets of the suburbs. The soldier in Wyoming had told them to quit the interstate, and from an overpass, they saw why.

A tangle of trucks and flickering lights scattered across cordons. Semis were being searched, minivans turned inside out. An entire living room had been assembled on the side of the road from a moving truck that was being taken apart. Lamps and sofas and an oversized television in proper arrangement in the snow.

*          *          *

On old U.S. Highway 30, things were clear. The wind had kept the snow off the road, blown into drifts and culverts.

They drove all day through old America, town after tiny town forgotten when the interstate had opened and sucked away what traffic had flowed through these old veins. And surrounded by wide, white fields were main streets lined by storefronts, now vacant, and other streets that crept off to the edges, shaded by broad old oaks that covered dignified, forgotten houses.

The sun fell behind them and winter dusk came early again, and then finally they came to the Mississippi and Illinois beyond.

They stopped so that Annie could piss.

There had been no town for miles, and there wouldn’t be for miles more, and even when they found one, nothing would be open. So this place was as good as any.

She walked away from the road, crunching snow out into a field. Peter leaned against the car and looked down the road, out into the strange silver dark, which wasn’t dark at all. The light of unencumbered stars and sliver of moon on the snow which had gathered against the broken stalks of harvested corn, and in the still he heard in the air a river of traffic from the interstate, two or three miles away, a brief stretch of reprieve, unhindered by barricades after Davenport.

It was this way that he remembered home. Still and perfect in winter, the smell of snow, if there was such a thing, and the rush of traffic somewhere out in the dark.

And then a light swelled in the sky.

The sky went blue like day. Annie was forty feet away, squatting in the field in sudden noonday. She fell backward and scrambled to her knees and then the light faded. It drew back across the sky, painting stars again as it receded to the east.

He heard Annie struggle in the snow, then saw her again, jogging toward the road.

"What the fuck? Peter, what was that?"

He listened.

"Peter?"

He listened and watched the sky, but there was nothing. She moved forward and fell into him. He held her, squeezed her in his arms. She was shaking.

He had stopped counting by thousands when the sound came, a low roar a minute late, which was the end of Chicago.

*          *          *

They drove and said nothing.

They drove until the places they passed by and through became familiar to him, became places he had been before, roads he had driven once, roads he had crossed twice, and then places that he called home.

They stopped in front of his house, which was an average sort of American house in an average American suburb, part of the sprawl pressing fingers out into the fields.

The lights were still on. That was good. Strands of Christmas lights lined the eaves and angles. A tree glimmered in the window. The lights wouldn’t stay on forever, but tonight at least, they were bright, and they were home.

A woman came to the glass and cupped her hands over her eyes to see outside.

"Is that your mother?"                                                    

"Yep."

"Fucking yep. Honest to God."

"Don’t be nervous."

"I’m not nervous. I’m scared."

"Yeah. Me too."

They got out of the car and walked together toward the house. His mother disappeared and he could hear her yelling to his father somewhere inside.

To the east, the sky was burning red, and at its edges, orange light broke through strange clouds, all black and scattered out over the horizon.

A breeze had swelled toward them, but it would shift by morning. He was sure that it had to. He was sure of it.

"Everything’s okay now," he said. "We’re here."

"Yes," she said. "We’re here."

"We shouldn’t stay outside though."

"No. We shouldn’t."

"Come in."

She took his hand. She squeezed it. They walked together out of the cold and into the house.

DJ Kinney is the author of The End of Oranges, an unpublished collection of short stories which examines themes of love and calamity under difficult, often surreal circumstances. Stories from The End of Oranges have been published in Eureka Literary Magazine, Eclipse, Puckerbrush Review, Allegheny Review, Vincent Brothers Review and others. DJ lives and works in Portland, Oregon with his miniature dachshund John R. Crichton, Jr.

 

There is a homeless man living in our house.

I can’t really complain, I suppose, since we walked away from the house two months ago, and when the gavel falls at the Lancaster County Courthouse in another ten days and turns it into the property of JeffFi Mortgage, it won’t be ours anymore. But until that happens, my wife and I are still on the deed, and it’s still our house, on what was our block, where our son played in the backyard with our dog Libby and our neighbors’ kids. We used to live here, in this house, on this block, in this development across from a retention basin where frogs make froggy noises at night. Hence Jeremiah Place: our developer thought naming the development after the old Three Dog Night song was the height of cleverness.

But even though it is narrowly, technically, still our block, I’m not sure what to do about the homeless man living in our house.

That’s not entirely true. I do know what to do. I can call 911. Or I can call JeffFi, assuming I can ever get someone on the phone who isn’t from Bangalore and knows what to do when I call. Hell, I could just walk in the door. After all, I still have the key, since JeffFi was too stupid to change the lock even after I sent them two letters saying change the damn locks and winterize the damn house—it’s the middle of February, you asshats.

Just to clarify: I did not actually use the word “asshat.” It’s a word I learned from my 16-year-old son. But, given the circumstances, it seems to fit.

Eight months ago two guys in khaki colored shirts and brown pants served Gwen the foreclosure notice at 9:15 in the morning. Gwen worked for County Children and Youth, and she’d been up all night, taking an abused child into custody. She’d not quite fallen asleep, and I had told her when our financial problems first started that nobody would ever be coming to the door like this, that I’d take care of it before things reached the level of sheriffs and courthouses.

When we’d received the first notice, the one that my lawyer called an “Act 91” letter, I tried minimizing its importance. This was not easy, given the fact than an Act 91 was designed by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking to be written in a manner precisely so you will not minimize its importance. It’s meant to make you piss yourself.

But I’m good. I brushed it off. So I figured I could do it again when she came to my office.

Here’s how that conversation went:

“I almost hit a duck.”

 “Gwen?”

“A duck. I almost hit a damn duck.”

“Gwen, what’s wrong?”

“You told me this wasn’t going to happen.”

I guessed this had something to do with the mortgage even before Gwen said that, but I didn’t let her know. Denial is a gas, a vapor. It seeps into everything if you let it.

“Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

I meant the exact opposite of that. Don’t talk to me. I will only have to find some other form of emotional defense.

“We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re going to lose the house.”

When Gwen gets angry, she mixes crying and rage into one, mashed-up, superheated emotion. She tears up, but she doesn’t cry, exactly. No sobbing lamentations, not even understated sniffling. The cry does not move one inch beyond her tear ducts. At the same time, she shows me the serrated edge of violence. Maybe she’ll throw something. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just slam shit around. Like the paper in her hand, thick with legal-sized documents folded to fit the letter-sized pleadings they were attached to, making the whole of it look thicker, plumper, and all the more intimidating—like its accusatory language couldn’t be contained on mere paper but needed to spill out and beat me up.

“We are not going to lose the house. Jesus, Gwen, I work at a bank. I know how this goes. I know how this game is played.”

Which was true. I did know how the game was played. I knew we’d lose the house.

Now that we no longer live there, there’s no reason to drive past our house except anger or revenge. It’s not near any of my life’s touchstones anymore—not where I worked, not near the house we now rent, not near Jason’s school, not especially close to anything, really. Which is why I’m surprised to see anyone living there in the first place.

I drive past, slowly but not too slowly, like a stalker whose heart isn’t quite in it. I had left the basketball stuff in the driveway, thinking that the ghosts of Jason and his friends might still want to shoot a round of H-O-R-S-E, but now the only thing there is a mid-80’s Buick. So I pull up behind it and get out of my car, but then what? What do I do? What’s the protocol? I’ve been going to work earlier and earlier so Gwen won’t have to look at me, but for Squatter Guy I have no coping mechanism.

I stand by my car for maybe 45 seconds. I fiddle with my BlackBerry, looking for some newish email to distract me. Finding none and hoping it’s not because they cut my service, I put it back in my pocket and start heading towards the door, trying to walk very softly, then realizing that it’s still my house and I’m not the trespasser here.

I don’t go to the door, though. Instead, I cut across the lawn, which is just starting to look unkempt, to the window. Squatter Guy has the blinds pulled down only half the way. I walk right up to the window. Torso up, I see a vague silhouette of a man, like the blinds are keeping him in a witness protection program. Torso down, gray sweats.

I stare at the window, waiting for him to pull the shades in either one direction or another. He doesn’t. I spend about 45 seconds like this then walk back to my car.

 

I had seen plenty of legal captions and documents before, but never one with my name on. I’d always wondered what it would be like, but now I didn’t have to. I stared at the paperwork that Gwen had thrown on my desk moments earlier, reading that caption, over and over again:

In the court of common pleas of

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Civil Action-Mortgage Foreclosure Charlotte National Bank, As Trustee of Jefferson Financial Corporation, Asset Backed Pass Through Certificates, Series 2005-r-7 Under The Pooling And Servicing Agreement Dated As Of September 1, 2005 Without Record

vs.

You, Seth Weinstein and Gwendolyn Weinstein,  Deadbeat Losers, Who Took Out Too Much Loan Than You Could Possibly Afford And You’d Have Known That  If You’d Have Not Had Your Heads Up Your Ass And Actually Looked At The Adjustable Rate Which Was Going To Go Up To 9.5% On A $388,000.00 Mortgage But You Figured You’d Be Able To Refinance It Because Housing  Prices Always Go Up And Ha, Ha, Ha You Sucker, Lost That Bet Didn’t You, But So Did We Because We Sold That Mortgage, Then Sold It Again, And Now  Jeff Fi Is In The Crapper Along With Everybody Else, So We’re Both In This Together, Aren’t We?

Husband and Wife.

  

When we moved into the house in Jeremiah Place, Jason was nine, I had just jumped from residential to commercial, and Gwen was working as a sales rep for a company that sold used construction equipment. She drove to various places in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, often wearing her trademark hard hat with a Hello Kitty decal on the front. She made more money than me, more money than any of the men who were sales reps at her company, and, with all that, we could finally afford a really great house.

Two years later, she was back at school, finally completing her Bachelors Degree at Millersville, then driving back and forth to Temple to get her Masters, all so she could work more hours for less money—way less, gaping chasms less—doing what she really wanted to do, which was to rescue kids with cigarette burns on their genitalia in the middle of the night. 

I could have had a conversation with her back then. I could have pointed out that we’d purchased a whole lot of house. That we needed her money to afford it. That what she wanted to do didn’t make sense unless we sold the house, took the equity we had, and put a really big down payment on a smaller place. It’s what the lending officer in me would have done. Here’s the thing, though. The socially unacceptable secret. There aren’t many ways to randomly display testosterone when you’re a middle-aged loan officer with bad knees and a receding hairline. But they do exist. In my case, those ways involved home equity loans. And credit cards. And refinances. And credit cards again.  Debt was great. Debt was wonderful. Debt allowed me to be both stoic and supportive. Debt rocked. 

[img_assist|nid=4526|title=Leap by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=Jayne is a Philadelphia native who has been actively showing her art since she graduated from the University of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in painting. She has recently returned to UArts to receive her masters in Art Education.|link=node|align=right|width=344|height=604]

  I leave early again. Gwen doesn’t ask why. She’s in the kitchen, pouring cranberry juice. Jason—I’m not sure where Jason is. In his room, maybe, with the boxes from the move still mostly filled with stuff.  Gwen kept telling him, half-heartedly, to unpack them before she finally gave up. Only the computer and the Game Boy have seen light. The sheriff’s sale is nine days away.

I drive from this house that I rent—a house that I will not call “our house,” or “my house,” not yet, not today, not tonight—and pull to the end of this development, which doesn’t have full-grown trees. Granted, my old development didn’t have full-grown trees, either. But here I notice and resent their shortness, their lack of maturity.  There’s lots to resent here, including the fact that I took this place so Jason would graduate next year in his same school district and on his same basketball team, and I thought I’d get some kind of credit for that.

I am about to confront a strange man in a familiar place. I pull up in the driveway. This time, if there are any ghosts still here, I imagine my tires rolling over them, cracking their incorporeal bones. I get out of the car.  I consider honking the horn, announcing my presence, but decide against it. I don’t need to announce my presence. This is still my house.

I then notice that Squatter Guy’s car is not in the driveway. Or maybe I noticed it subliminally, as I was pulling in, and the thought that nobody would be there to confront me made me fearless.  Regardless, I’m here. I pull out my key, wondering if it will work.  It doesn’t. I stand in front of my door, hovering between panic and rage.

Then I turn the doorknob without thinking. It opens.
I’m in my house. Again. Still.

There is furniture in my house. Not mine. A loveseat by the wall where my bookcase used to be—greenish, worn, kind of velvety. A thirteen-inch TV-VCR combo, early 90’s vintage from the looks of it, sitting on a wooden chair—also greenish, but with some sort of yellow in the paint mix. A coffee table, oddly placed closer to the TV than the loveseat.  Recent copies of People and Sports Illustrated, and a not-quite-recent copy of, what, The Weekly Standard? What the fuck? Do I have a neo-con squatter here?

Into the living room. A card table, two chairs, both the same as the wooden chair the TV was sitting on. More magazines. Another People, a Rolling Stone. Against a wall, two boxes, long and narrow—one lying on its side against the molding, the other vertical, its top resting where a picture of Jason hitting a three-pointer used to hang. IKEA boxes. I look inside, trying to figure out what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled, but I can’t tell. It’s just a bunch of birch.

I start to look into the kitchen but stop. I am close enough to see a white refrigerator, but I don’t want to look further. I’m suddenly afraid of looking at his refrigerator magnets.

I leave my house. I try to lock the door behind me, fail, then run to my car. 

   

I’m worthless at work. I want to lash out at someone, but I am not a lash-out kind of guy. I have a software financing package on my desk, and some lease syndication deals that need attention, and I really wish I were a lash-out kind of guy. It would help me, I think. I could do all sorts of rage.  People would live in fear, trying to work around me, manage me, plan things so the rages didn’t happen, but, of course, none of those coping devices would work because I’d be as unpredictable as a tornado, a tsunami, a housing-price-fueled recession.

But none of that is true, so I settle for being useless.  And if I’m going to be useless, I may as well be useless at my own house.

I get in my large, red, stupid, SUV. There is a duck—one single, loveless duck—standing in front, staring at the grille. I honk the horn. I wait for the duck to honk back. He doesn’t. He just stares. I honk again. Nothing. He is not moving.  He just stands there in the parking lot, daring me to make him move. I could back out. There is no car in the adjacent parking space.

Instead, I inch closer. I think to myself I am playing chicken with a duck. I smile at that thought. It’s the most confrontation I’ve had with any creature in months, maybe years. I kind of like it. But only for a second. Then I start to feel something truly awful. I’d like to say it’s compassion for the duck, and revulsion at the thoughts I just had towards it. I know neither of those are it. I back out through the adjacent parking space, and I head to my house.  

[img_assist|nid=4544|title=Brooklyn Bridge by Greg Lamer © 2009|desc=Greg graduated from Montclair State University. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri where he sells books and takes photographs of people and buildings|link=node|align=left|width=450|height=299]

Today, I have it mapped out.  I am going to confront this man. I have an outline, a plan of attack. I will grab something, something heavy and capable of causing a body to gush blood, and stick it in the back of my car. I will pull into the driveway. If Squatter Guy’s car is in that driveway, I’ll box the little fucker in. I will go inside. I will tell him he has to leave. I will not have to use the heavy object. Displaying it will be enough. That and my forceful presentation. I am a peaceful guy, but I am capable of faking menace.

He will leave. I haven’t figured out what happens after that, but he will leave.

By the way, if you’re ever thinking of getting a homeless guy out of your abandoned house by force, cars don’t have crowbars anymore. I find this out when I go to check the trunk. Nothing heavy. Nothing metallic and unforgiving.  My car knows me. It knows I have a cell phone and a Triple A card. Crowbars are only for bad movies now. I shut the trunk. I open it again, thinking I might have missed some other dense object, but no, not unless I want to throw a miniature spare tire at Squatter Guy. I shut the trunk again. If it were my old house, I’d look in the garage for something, but I don’t have a garage. I look in the back seat. There’s a clipboard. On the floor is a pen with no cap and a large paper clip. I think about fashioning them into weapons, then smile, then laugh, then abruptly stop laughing.

Just me. It will have to be just me and Squatter Guy.

  

I am here. It is 11:30 in the morning. In two hours, the county sheriff will ask if there are any bids to my house. The only one who will bid will be the bank’s attorney. A gavel will hit a wooden plate, not too firmly, not too softly, somewhere between a click and a pound, because there are 41 houses on the list today and a guy could get carpal tunnel if he kept swinging that thing too hard.

That’s okay. I don’t need two hours for this. I will be back at my office soon. This will only be a long lunch.

I pull behind the old ’80s Buick. Right behind it. Practically grinding against its bumper. I walk away from the driveway, onto the grass, which is starting to look a little ragged.

I knock on the door

I wait. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.

I knock again, then hit the buzzer. I’d forgotten I had a buzzer. I never had to buzz my own door, I guess.

Seven, ten, fifteen seconds. Buzzer again.

I hear muffled sounds, speaking, footfalls. The door opens. Squatter Guy is real. He is taller than me, which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. He’s younger, but not by much, either. More hair, less fat. Round-rimmed John Lennon glasses. T-shirt with the insignia of the Iowa Hawkeyes and blue gym shorts. As a Penn State grad, I have an immediate, visceral dislike of that. He doesn’t deserve to be wearing a Big 10 t-shirt.

 “This is my house,” I say, in a voice that may or may not be calm 

 “Come in,” he says, in a voice that’s definitely calm. I resent that even more than the t-shirt.

I look around. He has started putting together some of the IKEA stuff, but it’s only partially assembled. I think it’s a bookcase. Or maybe an entertainment center.

 “How long have you been here?” I ask him.

“A while, a while,” he says. I focus on the accent. Not Central Pennsylvania, not at all. A little bit Jersey, north but not too far north. He sits down on the loveseat. “Do you want a tour?” He smiles. It’s not a nasty smile at all. That unnerves me even more 

“Look, this is my house. You don’t belong here.”

 “You won’t either soon.”

I start to pull one of the empty wooden chairs towards the loveseat, but stop. Instead, I take the thirteen-inch TV off the chair it’s sitting on, put the TV on the ground, and use that chair.  “I want you to leave. Now.”

 “Aren’t you the least bit curious what the hell I’m doing here?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to ask.”

“Why not?” He leaned back, practically being swallowed up by the loveseat in the process.

 “This is my house. For the next 90 minutes, it’s my house. I want you out of it.”

 “I’m not going. And you really can’t make me.” He has the same tone of voice I used when I was denying someone a loan. No, more than that; when I was denying a customer who was already into us, who needed more money, just a little bit more to cover expenses, a little extension on a line of credit, and I’d say no. We can’t. We just can’t. It’s not personal. Though I’d never say that last part, because I was already condescending to them just by the denial itself.

I get up and walk towards the pile of IKEA wood. I grab a plank of something light colored and smooth, and begin smacking it in my hand. “Look, you’re trespassing. I want you out of here now.”

“I’m not going until the sheriff comes and changes the locks.”

Still no anger. Still no reaction. 

God, I want to hit him first. I want to hit him with this goddamn Swedish wood. I want to crack his head open with Blaarg or Kräppi.

“I think you should leave,” he says in a voice that seems almost kind.

I swing the piece of wood, aiming for the television, but I have to aim low since I placed it on the floor. The mechanics of my attempt at destruction throw me off. I hit the side of the TV, not the tube. As my right knee buckles, I pitch forward, onto the top of the TV, into the coffee table, scattering books and magazines.

He grabs me while my head is spinning, and I’m still in a daze, not sure if he’s helping me up or throwing me out. I get my answer when he lifts me under my right arm, opens the door with his left and gently deposits me, standing, outside. I think I hear him say “I’m sorry,” but I could be wrong.

I crumple to the ground. I’m dizzy, and I notice blood coming out my nose. I stay on the ground a while, a long while. I want to throw up, but I can’t. I want to cry, but I don’t. I just pant and gasp and stay down, down so far I don’t even notice a township police cruiser pulling up in the driveway, and a cop walking up to me.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“What?”

 

[img_assist|nid=4527|title=Wayne by Corey Armpriester © 2009|desc=A native Philadelphian, Corey Armpriester grew up in a military family bringing new places, people and influences frequently into his life. At the age of fifteen, photography became his medium of expression.|link=node|align=right|width=375|height=562]

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I look at the kid in front of me. Can’t be more than 23, 24. Tall, about 6’3”, he’s leaning over me, trying to figure out whether I’m a victim or a perpetrator. Maybe I’m giving off the vibe of both.

“I’m alright. I just, well, tried to get into my house.”

“What do you mean?” I sense a shift in the cop’s voice. I realize I’d better pull the threads of middle class respectability together quickly. I stand up, haltingly, with some imbalance and fuzziness, but I stand.

“This is my house. I left it. I’m being foreclosed on. Today. In about 45 minutes, it won’t be my house, since it’s going to sheriff’s sale. But I just wanted to look around one last time.” I feel something in my eye. I hope it’s dirt, and not tears. I pull out my driver’s license, showing him both the old address and the little slip of paper from PennDOT showing my new address. He glances at them, hands them back to me, and stares at me.

“Is there someone in that house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We’ve been having a problem with people moving into foreclosed houses. Bandos, they’re called. Short for abandoned.”

I didn’t realize I was part of a trend.

“Is there someone in that house?” he asks again. “Is that how you got hurt?”

I think for a moment. No, that’s not true. It’s not really thinking. It’s synapses reacting, firing madly and off-key.

“No. Nobody’s in there.”

“Then how come there’s two cars in the driveway?” 

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But there’s nobody in there.”

“Well, if you say there’s nobody in there, and it’s not going to be your house soon, I guess I’ll leave you here.” Pause. “You sure I should go?”

“You can go. I’m okay. I just—well, I just got sick, looking at my old place, and I sort of passed out. I hit my head and passed out. I’m okay, though. You can go.”

And he does.

And I stay until he leaves. Then I get in my car and drive to the courthouse.

I walk through the metal detectors, and then over to the old, ceremonial courtroom where they hold the sheriff’s sales. I’d been here before, as my bank’s rep, telling the attorney how much to bid, how high to go. Now I just take up space in the back row, all scratched and bleeding and beat up. I wait for my house to go on the block. The bank bids its costs. Nobody else says a word. The sheriff bangs the gavel.

I don’t know what comes next.

As an attorney practicing consumer bankruptcy law in Lancaster, PA, Mitchell Sommers may be one of the few people in America to benefit from the economic policies of George Bush. Mitchell received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his law degree from Penn State Dickinson School of Law. He has had op-eds published in numerous Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has had short stories published in Ellipsis and PHASE. He is currently fiction/non-fiction editor of Tatanacho, an online literary journal, and is working on a novel. He can be reached at sommersesq@aol.com.

[img_assist|nid=880|title=Love Park|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=130|height=195]On the night before I drove Daisy Diamond home, I picked up my parents at the hospital, where they'd been visiting with a parishioner whose wife was dying of cancer.  As the man walked with my parents to the curb, his glistening bald head shone.  He wore a wrinkled corduroy sport coat, despite the heat, and loosely tied sneakers that shuffled like slippers on the concrete.  He was hunched over, less from old age, it seemed, than from grief.  But when he came into the light of the streetlamp overhead, I could see that he was smiling gloriously.  The man hugged my mother and took my father's hand.  After my mother settled into the front seat of the truck and my father followed, the man held my father's hand through the open window.  He pressed his moist lips to my father's knuckles and politely wiped them dry.  "Your parents give us peace," the man said to me, "more than the doctors."  I was nodding, speechless, as the man reached for my mother's hand and brought it to his lips.  "I love your mother and father," he said.  His eyes were brimming with liquid light.  "I do too," I choked out.  The man brought my parents' hands together and stepped back from the curb.  My parents' fingers stayed intertwined in my mother's lap, even as the truck entered our driveway and came to rest under the basketball hoop. 
Years ago, on the day my father installed that hoop, Andrew dribbled a basketball and shot at the stone wall above the garage door, announcing buzzer-beaters, while I straddled the gray metal pole in the grass, raised my worshipping fists, and cheered my big brother's heroics.  The old man was bare-chested, jabbing his shovel into the stubborn earth just off the lip of the macadam, while Stavros, the always-reliable church custodian, stirred cement with a broom handle in a red, rusted wheelbarrow.  The old man's shoulders rippled when he muscled the shovel's tip into the growing hole.  That night, under the floodlight, the old man and Andrew played HORSE, while I caught their shots before they hit the ground.  The old man sank baskets from the sidewalk and back yard, calling out swish! 
Today, when I got back from Daisy Diamond's house, I wanted to chain the pole to my truck's front end and back up until I heaved it out of the ground and off the property.  I wanted to take the stuffed paper bag from under the dashboard and set fire to it in the front yard.  
I couldn't stay here-home.  At the moment, I couldn't even get out of the truck, let alone go inside the house, this great house we lived in only because my rich grandfather had left my grandmother so he could live happily ever after with a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City.  I wondered if my father, growing up, had known about his father, if he had lain awake in bed, picturing him sipping martinis and eyeing girls in fishnet stockings strutting past the blackjack table.  Even before today, I'd wondered if I was the only one in the family, including Yiayia herself, who had any proper sense of justice-not that I hoped Papou was burning in Hell for what he'd done, but you'd think the woman would take down his photographs or at least stop wearing black like some widow whose husband deserved to be mourned.  What used to drive me nuts was less that my grandparents had never bothered to get a divorce than that, for years, my yiayia pretended the old bastard had never left her for another woman-pretended he was coming back, until the day she got word he'd keeled over on a Carnival cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean.  Yiayia's most recent self-quarantining, in fact, had been triggered by my prankish removal of Papou's large black-and-white portrait outside her bedroom, the absence of which had gone unnoticed only until I got to the kitchen, where I was too far away to make out the curses coming from the third-floor landing.  
A legacy of betrayal, I thought.  At least my grandfather had had the decency to be a public louse.  At least his whole life wasn't a lie.  
My shoulders sank, and my lungs seemed to shrink, as I realized that Daisy Diamond had dumped the secret onto me, perhaps for the same reason I wanted, now, to tell Andrew, Sophia, or anyone:  to free myself from being the only one who knew. 
As I skulked toward the sliding screen door, tip-toeing in the mulch, I could hear Sophia continuing a conversation that apparently had no end.  I sidestepped Theo's untamed pink roses and leaned against the stone wall outside the kitchen. 
"It's not just some idea, Dad.  It's a real program that Veronica's totally doing, and you don't have to be a student.  I told you at Christmas, and you've known this is my plan.  I never said I'm not going to college-just not right away." 
Sophia wasn't going to college right away because she'd spent her senior year doing God knew what with her friend Veronica, instead of meeting application deadlines.  Actually, I had a good idea of what she'd been doing with Veronica, but I told myself she was going through a phase.  She just wanted what everyone else wanted, she would say.  Did they have to name it?  They'd kissed, all right?  She admitted that much to me, after swearing me to secrecy.  A crush, I'd figured, until they went to the prom together.  Meanwhile, Veronica's dysfunctional life, unlike Sophia's, hadn't foiled her academic success:  she'd already moved out to Berkeley-Sophia's dream school.  
Through the window above my head, I could hear the kitchen-sink spigot's perpetual hum, my mother making dinner or clearing up from lunch-cleaning raw chicken or rinsing sauce from plates-while reviewing in her mind Sophia's flight itinerary.  I imagined my father, standing there, perplexed, wondering when, if ever, he'd actually approved his daughter's one-way trip to California.  Over the sound of rushing water, Andrew made a joke about Sophia's need for the heaviest-duty suntan lotion-SPF forty-lest she make herself so dark that our mother, assuming Sophia might ever return home, would once and for all mistake her daughter for an Albanian or even African refugee from one of the church's missions, as if such racial blurring weren't precisely what Sophia had in mind.  Theo blurted that she was better off not going to Berkeley after all, that she should stay home and hold out for the Ivy League.  
Apparently, Sophia had rounded up everyone to hear her final complaints before her departure the next morning.  Amid all the interruptions, she was trying to explain that she just wanted to explore for a year.  
"Explore what?" my father said. 
"Life.  The world," Sophia said, as if introducing new words to her audience.  "And I really don't appreciate that you think I'm going out there just because Veronica's out there.  I'm the one who told her about Berkeley-" 
"Nothing's been decided yet," my father said.  "I don't want you flying."  
"Flying?  I have the ticket, Dad!  It's a summer program!  I'm leaving tomorrow!  Where have you been?!" 
"Mom's already got a care package assembled," Andrew added.  
At last, with a deep breath, I shoved the screen door in its dry groove and stepped into the kitchen. 
"Peter, you made it!"  Theo sat in the old-fashioned schoolhouse desk next to the basement door, his string of gray worry beads twirling perpetually at his fingers.  His blue eyes appeared magnified by the thick glasses he wore only when he didn't want to miss something.  
"How long does it take to go to the Brew Hall?" my father asked. 
"Brew Mall," Sophia corrected him. 
I froze, wanting to lash out:  You don't get to question me anymore!  My heart was pounding.  I glanced into the foyer, the sun-drenched hallway leading to the front door and beyond. 
My mother stood off to my left, frozen for the moment, looking up from a white-capped blue bottle she'd just plucked from a cabinet converted for vitamin and medicine storage.  They all seemed to be scowling at me, except Melanie, who stood by the refrigerator in an ocean-colored dress, smiling sweetly.  Sophia and my father were in opposite corners, in standoff position, each head-to-toe in black, with a touch of silver jewelry:  against the icon-littered backdrop of the kitchen wall stood my father, in black shoes, slacks, and short-sleeve shirt open to the first button, along with his silver wedding band; to my left, between my mother and me, stood my sister, in black calf-high lace-up Doc Martens, fishnet stockings, mid-thigh skirt, and tank top, along with her silver rings pierced through the brow and both ears, a virtual Slinky of bands along the forearms, and a stud through the belly button, in full view, like an evil eye aimed at the old man. 
Andrew broke the silence.  "Why don't you just take some classes?" 
I stepped around the kitchen table toward the basement door, where Theo's worry beads clicked and smacked, vanishing in his grip and reemerging, a nervous gray blur.  
"I'm not taking classes to make anybody happy.  No class can make you an artist."  Sophia glanced at me, to acknowledge the source of her wisdom, though I wanted no credit for the effect I'd had on her. 
"You see?" my father said.  "I don't believe this.  Peter put this idea into your head.  Theo-!"  The old man glared at Theo's hands.  
Theo silenced his beads, and I stopped cold. 
"Don't blame Peter, Dad!  You can't even give me credit for the stuff I do that pisses you off!"  
"Honey," my mother said.  "That word."  She handed Sophia the bottle from the cabinet.  "Put this with the other things." 
"Pisses?  Jesus, Mom, stop censoring me.  You don't need school to be a poet.  You just need to live life!"  Sophia examined the label on the bottle.  "Petroleum suppositories?" 
I wanted to call out the Truth.  Good News, Sophia!  Dad's a fraud!  We're all free!  Then I remembered Daisy Diamond's words-your father's been trapped for years-and I thought, we're all trapped.  
"You'll be eating different foods, honey," my mother said.  "You never know how the change in diet will affect your bowels." 
"Mom!"  Sophia looked, horrified, at Melanie, who pretended, mercifully, to be distracted by the church calendar pinned to the refrigerator. 
"If you're not going to college," my father said, "you can stay home until you're ready.  Even Peter went to college."  
"Look what it got him."  Andrew grinned.  "Just kidding, Doc."  
"What does Peter have to do with anything?" Sophia said.  "This is so humiliating..." 
My theory was that this kind of verbal abuse had replaced the physical abuse we'd inflicted on each other as kids-and that all of it, then and now, disguised our brotherly, and sisterly, love.  Andrew used to seal his mouth around my little nose and exhale his hot, wet breath, which poured through my nasal passage and back out my mouth.  I would laugh and spit at the same time, in horror, then lie back on the carpet.  When Sophia was old enough to endure such torture, both Andrew and I would pin her down and tickle her until her laughing turned to crying and, at least a few times, peeing-she wet her little cotton pants and ran screaming into the kitchen.  Minutes later she would return in fresh pants, tears dried up, and spread herself on the carpet like an X.  No more, Andrew would tell her, and eventually her giggling would once again turn to sobbing.  
Sophia set the blue bottle next to a white surgical mask on the kitchen table, among the vitamins and first-aid items my mother had already collected.  I recognized the red letters on the packet of iOSAT tablets-to be used only as directed by state or local public health authorities in the event of a radiation emergency.  Months ago, Andrew had brought home a bag of surgical masks, along with the iOSAT tablets, from the hospital, announcing that he'd finally managed to confiscate the highly coveted antidote for anthrax poisoning.  His teasing had been evident to everyone but my mother, who promptly arranged the packets in prominent locations throughout the house, but only after pleading with me to wear a mask at work and inquiring if the tablets might also protect against asbestos and lead poisoning, this in spite of the countless times I'd explained that I worked only with water-based paint. 
Sophia was going on:  "I want to go somewhere.  And do something interesting and good for people.  Help homeless people.  He hasn't gone anywhere or done anything for anyone!  He lives in the basement!"  
As she went on, referring to me as a third-person pronoun as if I were not standing there in the room, I thought:  we keep coming back for more abuse.  Then I realized, it isn't so bad to be invisible, and sidestepped toward the basement door. 
"Peter," Melanie said. 
I looked up, my hand on the doorknob. 
"Andrew and I still have our announcement." 
Melanie was painfully lovely, her sandy-blond hair already, in late June, streaked with gold from the summer sun.  When Andrew had first brought her home, I'd looked up from art history books and gone dumbstruck.  By the end of the night she'd made her way back into the dimly lit kitchen, sat, and paged through one of my books, asking me about Ionic versus Doric, Impressionist versus Expressionist, and why I didn't have a girlfriend. 
"Remember," Andrew said, "Melanie and I called everyone in here for a reason before Sophia hijacked everything with her little diatribe-" 
"Fuck you, Andrew." 
A dish slipped from my mother's hands, and, as she reached out to save it, another followed, each crashing on the cold tile floor.  
"Enough with the language!" my father yelled. 
"It's just a word!" Sophia hollered.  
My mother stooped, and Melanie bent down to help.  
I crouched toward the mess, but when my mother glanced up, I stepped back, curling my hair behind my ears and searching my pockets for a rubber band.  I picked up a ceramic chip near my foot and set it on the table. 
Theo tucked his worry beads delicately into his pants pocket.  
Sophia paced in short steps by the sink, her eyes wild, her stiff, infant dreadlocks tumbling and jutting like spasmodic fingers. 
Suddenly I became sad at the sight and sound of her-of this unceasing rant-and wondered if maybe she was going crazy, as she often claimed to be. 
"...You don't say anything to Andrew and he completely insults me.  That's so American, to care more about language than common human decency..." 
Maybe this is how it happened, I thought:  your brain can't keep it all together anymore; you've gotten too smart for your own good, and you snap, right here in the kitchen, eighteen years old, the people who love you witnessing the whole fitful breakdown, your brain splintering in as many directions as there are family members; or, as I imagined Theo decades ago, you're trekking through Athens in the prime of your life, knapsack filled with your next batch of books, your mind like a diamond, perfectly carved and sizzling with condensed energy, entire histories of civilizations and whole novels and epic poems you hadn't known you'd memorized firing out from your skull into your blood and muscles and nerves and into the sun-scorched world, while your sandaled feet mount the same rocks Socrates walked upon when he envisioned his fate, and you fall to your knees and scurry like a bug to a crack, crawling, in your mind, to the nearest safe place where you can rest and gather your thoughts. 
Or maybe Sophia was the only sane one in the room-perhaps along with Theo-barely keeping it together while she watched everything around her falling apart. 
"That's deep, Sophia."  Andrew clapped. 
"I hate you."  She stormed off toward the stairs. 
We all waited for the heavy footfalls above us to stop.  
"Okay, let's hear this announcement," Theo said.  
"Sophia has to be here," Melanie said. 
"No she doesn't."  Andrew sighed and stuffed his hands into his pockets.  
"Yes she does," Melanie said.  "We have to wait."  
I turned for the basement again.  
"Peter."  My mother was still holding white ceramic triangles, like pita, in each hand. 
"What took you so long?" my father said. 
"Everything's in the yard," I said, opening the basement door.    
"We've been worried about you," my mother said.  
"Everything's fine, Mom." 
"We agreed you'd wear a rubber band," my father said. 
The fucking rubber band!-as if wearing it were the last thing I could do to maintain some dignity.  I closed the basement door and took a single deliberate step toward my father.  We didn't agree to anything, I thought, gripping my hair in a fist and then letting it fall.  The shadowy grooves in the old man's forehead deepened.  Andrew crossed his arms, offering his little brother a rare moment of deferential curiosity.  I imagined destroying all they knew of family dignity, making my own announcement, loud enough so that even Sophia could hear me up in her bedroom:  Our Father...! 
"I'm twenty-six," I said instead, and I meant what being twenty-six implied:  I was on my own now.  
My mother placed the ceramic pieces on the counter and wiped her hands on her apron.  "What is it, Peter?" 
"Nothing."  
Daisy Diamond, I wanted to say.  Just her name, to see what the old man would do. 
Sophia's silhouette-mini-skirted Medusa in combat boots-suddenly appeared in the foyer, before the Plexiglas storm door.  She'd come quietly down the stairs, I realized, and now she stood staring into the front yard, perhaps envisioning her new life in California. 
"I'm not your servant," I said to my father. 
When Sophia turned around, hearing me, I signaled to her with a squint:  Everything's cool.  I'm not insane.  
Just then the old man called out, "Sophia!" but she was already making her way into the kitchen. 
"What?" she said.  
Theo clapped and rubbed his hands together.  "And now the moment we've all been waiting for!"   
My father snapped, "Theo, skaseh!"-Shut up! 
Sophia glanced at Theo, who was securing his glasses over his ears, and then she grinned at me:  We're all crazy.  
I nodded anxiously.  
Melanie said, "We wanted to tell immediate family before anyone else showed up."  
I slid my hands into my pockets.  
My mother leaned against the kitchen counter.  "I don't think I can handle any big announcements today."  
"It's okay, Mom."  Andrew smiled.  "It's good news." 
I crossed my arms.  My mother folded her hands over the apron knot at her waist. 
"Melanie and I wanted to announce this together," Andrew said.  "We haven't even told her parents yet-" 
"But we're telling them later tonight, so..."  Melanie cupped her left hand with her right-hiding the evidence, I assumed.  
My brother had finally done it... 
"Well..."  Andrew inhaled dramatically.  "Melanie decided she's willing to convert." 
Andrew had finally won her over to our side-not that there had ever been a real contest, not that he'd ever considered donning the yarmulke.  Of course, Melanie's conversion meant marriage-a detail that, at least for Andrew, went without saying, though the look on Melanie's face suggested that the announcement had stopped short, too soon before my parents were rushing in toward the soon-to-be-converted Jew. 
"Wait-" Melanie squirmed free from my mother's hug.  "Mrs. Pappas, that's just the beginning..." 
My mother stepped back.  "Oh?"  She glanced at Melanie's belly.  
"Jesus, Mom."  Andrew laughed through his teeth. 
"Olympia-" my father gasped, as if my mother had just suggested something impossible.  
"Well, I don't know," she said. 
Melanie tucked her hands into her armpits.  "Andrew, tell them." 
My mother reached out and took Melanie's wrist gently.  "Oh, Andrew," she whispered. 
The diamond flickered like a Christmas light.  
Melanie stared at Andrew, who gave a tiny shake of his head:  Not now... 
"Will the wedding be this summer?" my mother added, Melanie's hand docile in hers. 
"Ma, it's almost July," Andrew said. 
"Mrs. Pappas, there's something else," Melanie said. 
"Melanie-"  Andrew took Melanie's hand from my mother's hand.  
"Don't grab me!" Melanie snapped.  
"What's the matter, honey?" my mother said.  "This is beautiful news." 
"This is what I hate!" Sophia cried out.  "Why is this such good news to everyone?"  
Melanie's resistance to her conversion had secretly represented, for Sophia, humanity's, or at least this family's, last hope for salvation.  
"Your brother's getting married, honey." 
"Nobody's even said that!  You're just glad she's converting!"  
"No, Sophia," my mother said.  
"It's not just that, Sophia."  Melanie crossed her arms.  "But apparently Andrew's having second thoughts." 
"About what?" my mother said.  
I had no idea.  No way was she pregnant.  
"All right, look," Andrew said.  "We're engaged.  That's what the ring means.  That's it." 
"I can't believe you."  Melanie backed up toward the refrigerator.  "You are such a coward," she huffed, and turned toward the garage. 
"Let's talk about this in private," my father said.  "Why don't you take a walk, Peter." 
"Me?" 
"With your sister."  
"No!" Sophia cried out.  "This isn't what God wants!  Melanie shouldn't have to do this!  God loves everyone!" 
"Of course He does, honey," my mother said. 
"Melanie, don't do it!  Jesus was a Jew!"  Sophia marched back into the foyer and slammed the storm door behind her.  Through the Plexiglas, I could see her black boots trudging in the grass toward the driveway, her dark-brown, braceleted arms flailing.  
"Don't let her spoil this," my father said, but Melanie had already gone into the garage through the door beyond the refrigerator.  
"Honey..." my mother said. 
"Let her go."  Andrew brought his hands to his waist. 
"Go talk to her," my mother said.  "This is an emotional time."  
"Trust me," Andrew said.  "She'll be right back." 
            My father went into the dining room and stared out the bay window.  Instead of Melanie or Sophia, four colorful figures were making their way across the front lawn.  They appeared, framed in Plexiglas, as the bell rang. 
In poked the pink pocked face and grinning bald head of Uncle Mike from Havertown.  He extended a clear bottle of booze into the foyer.  "Happy Name Days, Peters and Pauls!"  
"Hey-ay!" my father boomed, entering the foyer from the dining room.  He held the door and ushered them in.  "Ela, ela!"-Come, come!  He kissed and shooed them one by one into the kitchen, where I anticipated the roar of celebration, my mother's brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Joe, and their wives, Aunt Bess and Aunt Flo, forming a small mob of thick-strapped sundresses, bright green and orange handbags, white leather shoes and belts.  "We've got wonderful news." 
"Oh!"  The aunts shuffled over to hug Andrew.  
I lamented the predictability of the good news around here. 
"Melanie's going to convert to Greek Orthodoxy!"  My mother glowed, though her beautiful, sandy-haired daughter-in-law-to-be, who would become the mother of her grandchildren-likely her only grandchildren, if one considered how the lives of Sophia and me were taking shape-was nowhere in sight, a detail that didn't distract anyone from celebrating.  
Uncle Mike raised his gift bottle of ouzo toward the ceiling like celebration champagne.  "Let's have a drink!  Glasses!"  Glasses hung from Aunt Bess's clenched fingers.  "Ice, Paul, ice!"  He waved everyone toward the table.  "Peter!  Take this."  
I took the bottle, wanting, suddenly, to be oblivious, drunk, along with Uncle Mike, in the colorful noise of his company. 
Uncle Mike looked around.  "Where's Sophia?  Theo!  Ela!  Get us more ice!"  
I pictured the watery plastic bags in my truck bed.  
Theo was reaching out into the air before him like a blind man, his wine-colored slippers shuffling toward the freezer.  
"Theo, put your glasses on!" the old man called out.  
            "Peter, what's the matter, honey?" Aunt Bess said.  "You're quiet.  You look pale.  Look at your hair."  She set the small glasses down on the table and took my face into her warm, damp hands.  
            "He's got beautiful hair," Aunt Flo said.  
I gripped the ouzo bottle's neck. 
"You feel hot, honey," Aunt Bess said.  "Drink something.  A little ouzo." 
She pulled the chair out, and I sat down.  
Theo set the shoebox-size ice container on the table and stooped to see his own hand plucking one cube and dropping it into a glass.  
"Ice, ice!"  Uncle Mike's thick fingers scraped the inside of the container.  He called out, "Ice, Paul!" and swiped the bottle from my hand. 
My father stared into the open freezer. 
Uncle Mike plopped a filled glass into Theo's eager hand.  "Okay, Theo, wait for the toast."  
Theo jiggled his glass near his nose, watching the ice cube bouncing and turning the clear liquid cloudy. 
My father twisted a half-empty plastic ice tray above the container.  
"Ahh, bravo."  Uncle Mike scooped a handful. 
My father displayed the empty tray to me.  
"I told you," I said.  "Everything's outside."  
"What good is it melting in the grass?"  
"It's not in the grass," I said.  
"Okay, okay," Uncle Mike said.  "We have plenty of ice.  Drink, Paul, c'mon."  
Aunt Flo poked her arm through Andrew's, rehearsing for the aisle. 
I folded my arms on the table. 
My father handed me a glass. 
"I took home one of your parishioners," I said. 
"Everybody have a drink?" Uncle Mike called out. 
"Who?" my father said. 
Glasses rose, clanging amid audible smiles-"Hey-ay!  Yiasou!"  
"That's what took me so long."  I was still sitting. 
My father waited, arm raised with the rest of them. 
"Daisy Diamond."  I watched the old man's stony face. 
"To Andrew and Melanie!" Aunt Flo called out. 
My father turned his eyes to the ceiling, where clinking glasses hovered.  They all awaited the priest's blessing. 
"Stand up, Peter," Aunt Bess said. 
For a moment I made the old man wait for his apathetic, atheist son; then I inched off my chair and reached toward the chandelier of glasses-"'Atta boy," Uncle Joe said-all our necks poised to receive the drink. 
"Hronia polah!"-Many years!-Aunt Flo cheered.  
I knew the toast, which was heard at every holiday.  They all glanced at Andrew, who smiled back gratefully.  
My father pronounced joyfully, "Keh stah thikah sou!" 
I knew this one, too:  And to yours!  As in, your engagement-my engagement.  I couldn't believe my ears-or eyes:  the old man was grinning down at me, as the roomful of Greeks relished their blood-connection to Tragedy, spotlighting the poor soul whose story was most pathetic, just as they always turned their attention to the unmarried older sisters of young mothers with newborn babies, singing, "And to yours!" reminding them of their dried-up, disappointing lives, just as they were reminding me now that I was the only one in the room still unhitched, that I still hadn't found a nice Greek girl, or any girl at all.  
They all sighed, "Ahhh," and displayed their hopeful smiles.  With a unified tip of their glasses, they all leaned back, my father never flinching, and cooled their throats with sweet liquor. 
 

Excerpt is from LOVE Park (Cable Publishing, May 2009). Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park. His fiction has appeared, most recently, in the Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, and Philly Fiction, a collection of short stories featuring Philadelphia writers. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A teacher of English and creative writing, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia.

[img_assist|nid=831|title=Fern by BJ Burton © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=201]Todd steals things. He takes tips off wet diner tables, jerks the bills from underneath the water glass you purposefully placed over them.

You say, “Don’t do that,” but your voice is passive and no match for his muscles. He has worked jobs that scare you, jobs where he has shoved people out of nightclubs and menaced trees with axes. He is the only wayward art school lumberjack you have ever met, and it is your life’s mission to concoct his pancake piles.
He went by “Toad” during his cover band years. Seventeen reinterpretations of the same Quiet Riot song later, here you are. Toad’s band was The John Goodman Arachnophobia Experience. Toad likes movies where insects best humans.

“Molly,” he says, “you relax.” Your name is not Molly, but that is Todd’s definition of a little baby girl name. Molly wants an ice cream cone, don’t she? Go ahead, Molly, tell the big badass manager that our man stole an orange. You are convinced he refers to himself as “our man” to let you know there are other morons like you, who let him sleep in your bed after watching him go through your purse. You are convinced that he belongs mostly to himself, while you have the submissive misfortune of being his. What happened to your feminist theory textbooks? Todd sold them. What did he do with the money? Todd bought pills. Why did he-? Don’t question our man!

So you make do:

• -You stop keeping a diary after Todd sells it on EBay. 
• -Now at restaurants you get up to go to the bathroom before he makes a scene.
• -On the occasion you find another woman in your shower, you say, “Hey there.”
• -Your friends pity you and this makes you cry; that people think you are worthy of pity.
• -You remember that you are alive, so you work with this fact.

You are making a plan to hit yourself out of the park, like a home run, but first you need money. He keeps taking yours, and you are afraid of him. Not just because he talks to himself in the kitchen when he thinks you’re sleeping, but also because he talks to himself while hovering over your bed when he thinks you’re sleeping.
He won’t see a doctor, any kind of doctor. The only way you’ll see a doctor is if you get pregnant with Todd Junior. Yes, you are on the pill, but what if? You keep your legs closed so tightly at night your muscles ache.  

Our man is a bully. Our man is a punk. You have nowhere to go. There is a part of you that finds comfort in this: Living in the present means you have nowhere else to go. Once in a while your mind clears and you feel like a Buddhist, which is way cooler than feeling like a victim.

[img_assist|nid=844|title=Along the Canal, Manayunk by Marita McVeigh © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=122]You are not fighting back, because you are a planner. Little outbursts will have him suspecting. You don’t want to awaken his inner Toad. You pack bras and panties in small, yellow supermarket bags and toss them in the trunk of your car. Soon you will have the balls, no the breasts to pack the big-ticket items: sweaters, a pair of dress slacks.

Now he wants to get on your medical insurance. The two of you should get married. Molly, there’s nothing I wouldn’t steal for you, he says.

You thank him for his proposal, and take a deep breath. Somewhere beneath the curves of your female form, probably above the hips, is a star. It’s kind of like a soul, but a little less passive. It’s a Holy Spirit divine inner compass, and it’s telling you, get the hell out into the universe, darling! Make something of this flesh gift, this life.

[img_assist|nid=845|title=Dance With Me by Kristen Solecki © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=150|height=155]

Christina Delia received her BFA in Writing for Film and Television
from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia. Her work can be found in the
anthologies In One Year and Out The Other (Pocket books) and Random Acts of
Malice: The Best of Happy Woman Magazine. She also writes the satirical wedding advice column “Bride Dish with Mags & Dags” for Happy Woman Magazine. Christina currently resides in central New Jersey with her husband, Robert.

[img_assist|nid=843|title=Mountains of the Sun by Gregory Dolnikowski © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=201]I found the two carbonless message slips on my desk after the last patient. The first was the transplant team wanting me back to consult on Carl Lawson’s fevers. The second was an email address for Bobby Schmidt. When keystrokes failed to pull up any Schmidts I’d seen in medical records, I stared at my partner’s wilting bromeliad and reread the message; some things were as simple as water. This wasn’t Bobby Schmidt, patient, this was Robert Schmidt, old boyfriend.

I pulled on my white coat for the trip to the transplant unit and stuck the message in the pocket with my prescription pad. The late afternoon sunlight made the June day feel young; I’d do the consult tonight. Carl was a frequent flyer on the transplant service with two kidneys under his belt already. My job as infectious disease consultant was straightforward: repeat all the abnormal tests the other doctors had thought to order, spot the ones they hadn’t ordered, and make sense out of it all

Rob hadn’t believed I was going to be a doctor until he had seen The Cell on my bookcase. Before I started medical school, he was cloudy and beautiful with messy black hair and a recent drunk driving acquittal. He wondered how there could be an entire book devoted to the cell. After reading different books devoted to biochemistry, physiology, and pathology, I diagnosed alcoholism.

“Hey, doc,” Carl Lawson called from his hospital bed, “how’s it going today?”

“Same old, same old,” I replied scanning the most recent the chart notes. “What’d they put you in for this time?”

Carl shrugged the same shrug he treated me to every admission. If someone asked me how much longer Carl and I would play this game, I would have shrugged too. The fluorescent lighting did nothing for his stringy hair, nicotine-stained fingers, and the yellow-grey cast of kidney failure on his skin. Carl had a genetic disease that slowly destroyed his kidneys, but his bad boy substance abuse had landed him on dialysis before he turned thirty. For two years he managed to clean up his act and pass blood and urine tests for all sorts of illicit drugs while the transplant doctors hunted for the right donor kidney. As soon as Carl felt well enough after the transplant to start raising hell again, his kidney function deteriorated. It was back to dialysis and a second kidney transplant three years ago.

More recently, Carl developed an abscess from a nasty, resistant bacterium. Despite triple antibiotics that were damaging the transplanted kidney, his fever still raged. I was running out of suggestions. If the fevers persisted, we’d get a CT scan and see if there was anything the surgeons could drain.

I wrote a brief note on Carl and moved the message from Rob to my bag before heading home. He’d been the love of my life, but that monumental memory was a place I no longer visited. I hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and the last time he’d practically crowed about an auto accident in which he’d lost consciousness and teeth. By then, I’d known a lot of patients like Rob. Sometimes they just hurt themselves, but I’d handed out enough tissues to weeping spouses, parents, and children to know that wasn’t true. After residency, I retreated to practice a specialty that examined the dark old corners of childhood vaccinations, travel, and sexual activity. I could usually blame a virus, bacteria, or maybe even a parasite. When infectious led back to anther person, no matter how close, the correct term was vector.

[img_assist|nid=147|title=Buttons by B.J. Burton|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=307]

As contributor to his own demise, Carl should never have been given a second kidney after he burned out the first. But a commitment to a patient was a commitment, and the renal team, like forgiving parents, kept crossing their fingers and betting on Carl.

Rob, with his self-destructive habits, was no better than Carl. When we had dated, he was almost as pale and thin as Carl was now, and I could count on one hand the number of times I remembered seeing him eat. He drank in bars, at clubs, and surreptitiously on the steps of the D.C. monuments that blazed against the night sky. In my medical opinion, Rob should have been burnt out, dead, consumed by sadness, anger, and, I might once have been able to believe, by love.

On the drive home, I remembered Rob’s sweet kisses, the result of alcohol dehydrogenase metabolizing alcohol into the fruity acetaldehyde until my pager silenced the thought. The floor nurse reported that Carl had thrown his low protein/no-added salt dinner across the wall nearly hitting the woman who laid the dinner trays. I reminded the nurse that I was the consultant for Mr. Larson’s infection; she would have to call the renal service about his diet order. While she was at it, I told her she should probably call security and social services.

I ate take-out sushi with my family and checked email once more before heading to bed. Carl’s attending was scheduling a group conference to discuss the possibility of a third kidney transplant—a question of medical futility if anyone asked me. I ticked off the names of patients I knew who had died waiting for a kidney in the last five years and made a note to troll the medical literature for the rate of former addicts staying clean after transplant.

For Rob, I typed a doctor’s open question, “What’s it been, ten years?”

I found a delirious Carl on rounds in the morning. Overnight, his temperature had spiked to one-hundred-and-five. I recommended that the team request FDA permission to use an investigational antibiotic. The CT scan was scheduled for 2 o’clock. The nurse noted that Carl had been too sick to throw his breakfast tray or sneak off to the roof garden and smoke.

I didn’t get to my email until lunch. Nothing from Rob. He’d probably been drunk when he called and that would be the end of that. Carl’s transplant team conference wasn’t for another two days—if he lived that long. By dinnertime, his temperature was a little better controlled. He winked and asked why I wasn’t making quick business of this infection they way I’d cleared up “that first little problem.” I had to smile. If Carl felt well enough to bring up his gonorrhea, so be it. I warned him that even that bug was getting harder to kill with the usual antibiotics. He told me he’d keep that in mind and closed his eyes.

The face of this man with oxygen prongs in his blood-crusted nostrils and a central line in his jugular vein read pain, fatigue, anger, and hard use. The odor from his dressings was hard to ignore. Would this be how it finally ended? I’d given Carl up for gone before to spare myself work and pain. Who would be there to mourn him? I scrolled back to the social work consult in the chart that read:

Carl Lawson is a forty-two year old male well known to the transplant service with a history of polycystic kidneys, substance abuse, renal failure, dialysis and renal transplant times two. This most recent hospitalization is for a perirenal abscess with the same multi-drug resistant organism that infected his dialysis graft. Mr. Lawson lived in an apartment downtown until being readmitted. He receives disability and has limited social supports.

 

Over the years, I’d fleshed out a little more of the framework of Carl’s life—the long-dead disaffected mother, the two years of vocational school, and the long streak of boosting Hondas to support his drug habit. Carl had a sexual history a mile long, and I remembered a girlfriend floating around the hospital during his previous admission for fevers because we HIV tested them both. I couldn’t remember her name. On any given day, it was difficult to keep track of the medical information, let alone the personal.

What I didn’t know still drew me: why and when did Carl start using? How did he manage to stop for two years before the transplant? Where was the rest of his family?

That afternoon, the transplant surgeon who jealously guarded his patient survival data, took Carl back to the OR to open up the old dialysis graft site in his arm and the transplant site to debride infected tissue. We loaded Carl with IV dilantin to prevent seizures, and instead of talking about his third kidney transplant at the meeting the next day, the renal fellow jumped all over the medical student chosen to present Carl’s last electrolytes.

“Has Mr. Lawson died?” the renal fellow said.

The student, who couldn’t see where this was going, blustered, “No.”

“Then these are not his last labs. They are his most recent labs,” snapped the fellow. “You’d do well to make note of the distinction.”

The student sunk into his chair while we discussed Carl’s code status.

 

I’d had low student days too. I spent the night I got my acceptance letter for medical school drunk on the kitchen floor with Rob. I had worked so hard for so long that I only felt sadness for the mountain of work and abuse I was finally privileged to face.

Carl went on to have another forty-eight hours of lab results and fevers before there was a reply from Rob. “Sorry to call your work number,” he typed. “That’s the only information I could find for you. I saw your story on the web. Are there more? You had a gift.”

Rob was digging into that ancient time when I’d written about a teen with typhoid fever back before the lives I cared for in the hospital seemed so fictional that all fiction froze. Once I’d been as interested in the patient who had the disease as the disease that had the patient, but the last few years with my patients, the cuts from the hospital, and my family’s move, I was barely surviving from one caffeinated drink to the next.

Before any transplant, patients talked with the team psychiatrist about chronic medications and risk of rejection, but no one talked with me about the night I sat next to Rob at the top of the cold marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and he said he wouldn’t be seeing me again. I went home and would later read medical texts that offered prognoses for risk-taking males. When the pathology professor slapped a cirrhotic liver from the five-gallon canister of formaldehyde onto the lab tray, I touched the hard-knotted tissue and practiced professional distance.

Carl was one hundred-and-three and sweating and didn’t react to my gentle greeting or more robust examination the next day. The transplant team had asked social work to locate next of kin. I changed the protocol medication dose to accommodate Carl’s dwindling kidney function, and put my hand on his unbandaged one before leaving.

“Whatever chips you’ve got, Carl,” I whispered, “it’s time to call them in.”

I skipped the noon conference, went to the office, and shut the door. Dark clouds framed the hospital across the street. A thunderstorm seemed likely. Sometimes I knew when a patient was going to die. Sometimes I didn’t know, and I would go to the floor to follow up on a consult to find the bed empty and the name removed from the census board. Once I attended a morbidity and mortality conference when the disease and the patient’s initials matched a young kid I had really liked. I had rotated off service, and no one thought to tell me he died.

At the start of my residency, I kept track of the deaths. At the hospital memorial service for patients who had died my first year, I listened for names I remembered. By the second year, I sat there wondering, as the familiar names washed over me, what was more painful: watching them die or mourning their life and our failure.

Outside my window, the lightening and raindrops reminded me that summer was flashing by while I was stuck here in the hospital. It would be easier right now with one less noncompliant chronic patient. I chastised myself for being wrong about Rob, but it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t read the textbook.

I wrote Rob that I didn’t write anymore; I was a doctor.

We finally got Carl on the experimental protocol, which meant I was now responsible for assessing him three times a day. The worksheet with his vital signs and labs spilled over the edges of the table that usually held the meal trays. By the next morning, Carl looked a shade less grey. He was down to one hundred and twenty pounds but his fever had dropped below one-hundred and two.

“I’m not leaving in a box you know,” he said.

“I never said you’d be leaving in a box.”

“But you thought it,” he said.

I scanned the flow sheet. “Looks like your temperature is down, so maybe you’re going to luck out with whatever this new wonder drug is. But overall you’re on your third kidney, and I’d say you’re behind in the count.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his hand. “I’m going to walk out of here and find Jacelyn.”

“Who’s that?” I was thinking girl friend, drug dealer.

Carl rummaged in his bedside drawer before pulling out a banged-up photograph. “That’s me and Jace when she was two,” he said pointing to the little girl with corn silk blonde hair and brown eyes who sat on the grass in a rose pink dress. “We had a party at the park, and Sheila even baked a cake. Those were good times,” he gazed out the sunny window, closed his eyes, and dozed off. It was just as well, he needed the rest.

I studied the photo of Carl, smiling and proud with long brown hair and clear eyes, before turning it over. The photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago, well before the kidney failure. After all these years, who knew Carl had a daughter?

In a box somewhere I had a photograph of Rob looking calmly into the camera and affirming he was young and beautiful once, too. I was glad he hadn’t emailed back. I didn’t want to see his words, scars. He was as foreign to me as Washington D.C. had been when I was back there for a conference on emerging pathogens. In the humid July sun, the monuments blazed white hot, and I didn’t have time to sit on the marble and bear distant witness to the pain.

The hospital days traced the storyline of Carl and Sheila, Jace’s mom, who moved across the country with the baby to get away since he wouldn’t stop using. Sheila vanished, never asked for money, or sent photos. Ten years later, Carl got a letter from Jace, who wanted to visit. Carl wanted to see her too, but before she could come out, Carl had the first round of kidney trouble. He told her she’d have to put off their reunion a little longer. Then Jace wrote back that she was afraid of Sheila’s latest boyfriend.

“There I was high while this kid, my kid, was being bothered by some low grade pervert,” Carl said. “I was just about to go on dialysis, and I took the hospital social worker up on an offer to get subsidized housing and pull myself together. It wasn’t perfect, but with the little bit I got from disability and some car repair work on the side, I had us a little place.

“Jace came out, started school here, and we got acquainted,” he said. “She looked so much like her mother, but older than I expected. She got a job answering the phone at the garage after school. Those were two good years.” His voice trailed. The nurse had him up in a chair next to his bed, and he picked at the blanket covering his lap.

I asked what happened.

“She said I wasn’t letting her grow up,” he laughed, “after I made a place for her.” He shook his head and coughed. “She started acting up and hanging out with the wrong crowd. I didn’t want that for her. She was bringing the stuff home. It was too much. I started using and cheating on my drug testing.”

I thought of all the teens who had gotten high and stupid and into trouble. It was a kid’s job to treat their family the absolute worst, but Jace had gone up on flames and taken her father with her. I nodded my sympathies.

“You guys called me for the transplant right then. I was in the hospital for weeks. She never came to visit. When I got back home, she was gone. I called Sheila; she hadn’t seen her and blamed me for her running off. I was sick, and I tried so hard not to die because I wanted to find her again. I didn’t know what else to do. I blamed myself for being a lousy father, and then I blamed myself for caring. I was on so many medications; I figured a few more didn’t matter.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You think I wanted you all sitting around talking even more about what a loser I was?” he said. “Besides, Jace was a kid, and I figured someone would take her away.”

Another week went by and Carl was doing much better. I brought a simple wood frame for the picture and wished there was something else we could do. There was buzz from the new set of residents rotating on the service about putting him back on the transplant list. I tried to remember when I had stopped thinking ‘why not?’ with borderline cases.

Labor Day weekend came, and its festivities filled the hospital with trauma patients. I’d changed into scrubs and clogs to stay late for a heart transplant patient in the intensive care unit and logged on to look for the results of a spinal tap. There was another email from Rob.

“I sobered up just enough after the accident to get a construction job,” he wrote. The crew boss handed me a hammer since I looked so good at beating myself up. The lead carpenter gave me a chisel a few weeks later, and I never looked back.

“While I was drying out, I wore out sheets of sandpaper and covered everything in my apartment with this thin layer of dust. At first, they sent me home with bits and pieces: finials, the curled ends of banisters. Then I moved on to fretwork, the odd swag of fruit or roses. It’s better now. I leave the sanding at work. I love wood and want to try marble someday.

“We get hired to do restoration by expert types who can tell if the work is done by hand and not power tools. A lot of it is fire and water damage. Fire damaged the area around the altar at St. Joseph the Worker, and we’re restoring the 1890 woodwork. You can always smell when wood’s been through a fire. I have a wife and two kids. They’ve forced me to be closer to the man I want to be. You always said you were going to be a doctor. I never doubted you.”

I moused to the lab results and logged off to see the patient whose heart had been cut out and placed in a plastic pan before her rib cage was wired shut over the stranger’s heart that beat in her chest. The transplanted heart, severed from its original nerves, now driven by a pacemaker.

I felt enervated. Why tell me now he was alive and not drinking? My clogs clacked along the empty tile corridor. He had walked away from me. I had waited for him to stop. I had lacked faith and energy. I had given him up for dead.

There had been no books to teach hope in medical school, but we were required to attend an AA meeting. I remember a brittle old lady with soda bottle glasses who led me down the steep stairs from her apartment over the dicey market on 13th Street to the smoke-choked meeting room at the church around the corner. She talked about her powerlessness over alcohol, the moral inventory, the admission of flaws, and the desire for amends and improvement.

Did Rob hope to restore our warped past through a 12 step program? I drifted to the other end of the unit and ran my fingers over Carl’s wood frame. Some mind, body, history receptor, long blunted by brutal training, sleep deprivation, and the endless needs of patients, fired again with small hope: someone had made it. Someone I knew. They hadn’t made it with me, but medically, that was of little consequence. As I walked to my car, I felt the warm breeze through my thin scrubs and wondered if a world with Rob could hold Carl and Jacelyn. I would find her and tell her about Carl even if she didn’t care.

It took time to track her down. The phone was disconnected; the house sat in a bombed-out block. The soot from the fire that consumed the building next door still licked its bricks. A street lamp at the end of the block cast the only light. I knocked and explained. A woman pointed toward the basketball court where Jace played with the boys when they’d have her. She shut the door.

I drove. Patients lied, I reminded myself. What if Carl lied? Maybe Jace left because he’d been neglectful or abusive. I wouldn’t know until I heard her story. I parked and watched the local mischief play out on a court surrounded by a carpet of green and amber glass. Shapes flickered in and out of the street lap, I spotted Jace, adolescence burning immortal. With the assembled tough but ready acolytes smoking and drinking, the shadowy beauty from the old photograph wanted for nothing. Eventually she would need to use the ladies.

When she moved for home I called her name. She waved an angry hand. “Jace,” I shouted, “I’m not with the police, or juvenile, I’m one of your dad’s doctors. He’s dying.” I held out a card; she stepped toward the car and took it, her hand and wrist scarred with a homemade design. She ran.

I drove to the diner near home where I often sat to shake off medicine. Once again, I had arrived after closing. I’d done my best by Carl, and other than lying down on the operating table for the transplant surgeon to extract one rose pink kidney from a half moon incision in my flank, I could do no more. I mourned for Carl and the boy and the girl sitting late at night under the back portico of the Lincoln Memorial looking out across the dark Potomac toward the graves of Arlington.

Jace left a message with her number on my voice mail. “He needs another kidney, doesn’t he?” she said.

I called and told her he did.

“I’m too messed up and late to help,” she said.

“Your dad talks about seeing you when he’s well.”

“Could I be a match?”

“I wouldn’t know the answer until we run the tests.”

“Then let’s do them, I want to know.”

Carl’s fever returned along with the odor of his draining wounds. Jace sat at his side and told him she was keeping her kidney warm for him until the doctors took care of the infection.

She and I knew she wasn’t a match.

A few days later, Carl’s blood pressure became unstable and the surgeon took him back to debride the dead tissue, flush away the bacterial putrefaction. He died post-operatively.

I left messages for Jace. She didn’t call. I asked the pathologist to page me when someone came to sign for his remains to be removed after the autopsy.

Jace looked better than I expected. I wanted her to know that the tests showed she’d inherited the gene for her father’s kidney disease but wasn’t showing any signs of kidney failure yet. Get checked regularly, I told her. Carl would have wanted her to. She shrugged.

The colored slip in my department mailbox told me to claim a package in the mailroom. Inside the box I found a block of wood and a pack of sandpaper. Live oak, Rob wrote, was a very hard wood.

L. M. Asta has published fiction in Schuylkill and Lemniscate, and her essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and Hippocrates. A native of Bucks County, she trained at Temple University School of Medicine and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She writes and practices in northern California.

“All art is but imitation of nature.” (Seneca)

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” (Oscar Wilde)

[img_assist|nid=146|title=Blue Ribbon by B.J. Burton|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=188]

If you asked me ten years ago if I thought my life would be like this, of course I would have said no. Most likely, I’d have shown great disdain toward the idea of playing in what I would have then referred to as a “glorified cover band.”

Life is just a series of little decisions, though, and it goes from just trying to keep the dream alive until you get that legendary big break, to one day waking up and realizing that the only reason you’re still able to get paying gigs is that you’re playing someone else’s songs the exact same way they did three decades before.

It’d be different if the guys in the band we “tribute” were dead. Even if just the lead singer were dead, this whole endeavor would have more gravitas, and less of a cheap Chinese knock-off feel to it. A tribute band is more than just a cover band. But still, I wonder what I would have said about all this ten years ago.

Peeking out from backstage before the intro, I can see it’s a lighter crowd than usual tonight… I wonder why? Still, lots of familiar faces out there, and not just the friends and family, either. We encourage repeat ticket buyers by offering a frequent concertgoer discount. Hey, it’s a business, after all…

It’s easy to linger too long on the few new faces in the audience, those rare non-initiates who don’t already know the entire set list by heart. I always wonder how the new faces come to be here… and how long they’ll keep coming.

Tonight, there’s a lot on my mind, and it’s bleeding through my “tribute” persona.

I’m thinking about how I came to this point. And I’m wondering how much longer I’m going to do this.

 

*

 

Lots of people have Hollywood dreams, but I never did. I never wanted to be an actor—I wanted to be a rock star. And not “rock star” in the stupid way guys in suits use the term these days, referring to great athletes or prominent politicians or the standout salesman of the month, but the way it was in the 1970’s: real rock stars, all-out, admired for musicianship and creative credibility and yeah, maybe sometimes for the way they looked in tight jeans.

That’s what got me started—what would you call it? Envy? Jealousy? I wanted that life. I may not have seen much of the 70’s (born January 8, 1976) but I’ve got plenty of videos (bootleg and legit), plus tons of rock magazines from the era, that pretty much tell me how great it was.

My first attempts at stardom were in high school, singing and writing songs in various amateur rock bands and getting some attention from the girls, which only reinforced the dream. By graduation, I had a good band playing around me, but the Seattle scene had burned itself out and MTV seemed to play nothing but rap videos. The outlook for prospective rock stars was bleak. 
[img_assist|nid=148|title=Taking Stock by Suzanne Comer|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=193]

   All of the guys in the band went to local colleges except Wes, who became an electrician like his dad. The band trudged on, rehearsing regularly, playing gigs when we could get them. We played in front of talent scouts and agents, some of whom said to keep at it, most of who said we were wasting our time. Then, seemingly overnight, four years had passed and it was time to make a decision.

Here’s some advice: never go into business with musicians if you can avoid it. Unfortunately, it’s a tough path to circumvent when the business you want into is making music. The guys and I made a ten-year pact after college. We said we’d stick it out that long—play anywhere, do anything, shun nine to five jobs, postpone marriage and kids, live together in a van if we had to—to be able to say we gave music our best shot. If it didn’t work out after ten years, we’d be free to move on, no hard feelings. “At least we’ll have tried,” we told ourselves.

  Of course, Wes got married a year later, and even though we had specifically addressed the possibility of marriage in our pact, even though we’d all said that if any of us did get married it still wouldn’t change things, it did. It wasn’t a Yoko Ono breaking up the band thing or anything like that, Wes just started caring a lot more about buying a house and having his own car than he did about the music. Being an electrician started as his “temporary career,” then became his “backup career,” and finally just his career. He started to look at us as if we were dumb kids trying too hard to hold on to our childhoods.

Karin left me around that time, too. She wanted a “normal life,” whatever that is. I loved her, but everyone knows pursuing your dream requires sacrifices. So I marked that one down on my list of sacrifices made, having convinced myself that when the list grew long enough, the rock gods would deem me worthy of some serious good fortune to even up the scales.

[img_assist|nid=150|title=The Gold Skirt by Janine Kilty|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=183]

 Wes left the band six months later. We got another drummer, but the number of venues booking live talent was dwindling in favor of DJs and other poor man’s substitutes. At the gigs we did get, the owners would request we not play our own songs. “Nothing against you guys,” they’d say, “it’s just that people want music they know, stuff they’re comfortable with.”

I don’t remember whose idea it was to go from a band that did covers of lots of different groups’ songs, to a tribute band that focused on only one group. It wasn’t my idea, I know that. But after playing covers almost exclusively for six months, the idea of a tribute band no longer seemed repugnant. On the contrary, it seemed like sort of a higher calling. We debated which band we should focus on, based on which bands we liked, their popularity, whether they were still actively touring, who I sounded like, who we looked like, et cetera.

That’s how it started.

That was almost ten years ago. 

*

 

We take the stage and the show begins, the same way it always does. My mind begins to wander, even as I’m singing. Tonight’s another small club, and normally the size of the venue, or the audience, doesn’t affect me much because it’s never really “me” on stage. Rather, it’s me as Steve Smith, lead singer for the original—some would say real—band, a man with the poise, swagger, and feathered hair of someone who knows he’s on top of the world circa 1976, touring in support of a record that had already gone gold and showed no signs of stopping there. But tonight the transformation is incomplete, and my self-confidence is flagging.

Lack of respect is the bane of a tribute band’s existence, and unless you keep your emotional armor well oiled and polished, it can lead to these occasional crises of confidence. We in the tribute biz catch flak from both sides—the high-minded classical and jazz aficionados who believe the music we play is too unsophisticated to be taken seriously, and the rock fans who feel that if you’re not writing your own stuff, you’re not being “authentic.” A tribute band is nothing if not authentic, from using vintage, precisely tuned instruments to matching just the right colors on the stage backdrop.

Here’s my question—why do people think that being one of seventy orchestra members in black suits and starched collars playing Beethoven or Bach as interpreted through the cracked perceptions of some weird-haired conductor is a noble profession, while being one of five members of a band who play popular music nearly identically to the original performances is cause for career embarrassment? Maybe our music isn’t as intricate, but pick any five members of that orchestra and let them go head to head against us in a crowded bar, and we’ll see who the people like better.

Mine is as disciplined a vocation as any—for two hours, I respond to stimuli not as I, Larry Candela, would, but as Steve Smith did. I say nothing that he did not say to his audience. Every stutter he uttered, every outfit he fit out, it’s all been corroborated, triple-checked for accuracy. Some would call this obsessive, but I call it dedication, what the fans deserve. I’ve rehearsed every move until its part of who I am. I am channeling the being of someone else. I am becoming someone else. And the audience wants me to be Steve Smith so badly that it helps me to forget I’m not really him. It’s a mutual suspension of disbelief.

This, then, is the difference between a tribute band and a band that just does covers. To quote The Who (or one of the major Who tribute bands, The What or Who’s Best or Behind Blue Eyes): “I’m a substitute for another man.”

If I remember correctly from my college philosophy classes, Plato and Aristotle both acknowledged all art as imitation. The difference is that Plato thought this was a bad thing, while Aristotle was a little more open-minded. Sometimes during our performances, I picture Aristotle in the audience, robed and sandaled, rocking out. 

 

*

 

“Congratulations to our manager, who just tied the knot recently. In his honor, this is a song called ‘Knotty Problems.’” I hear myself make the introduction—perfectly, spot-on. The marriage in question happened almost thirty years ago, joining two people none of us knew then or now, but the reference was an integral part of that original concert, so it had to be used. 

If, for the serious music listener, discovering a new band is like falling in love (and I would say that it is), then joining a tribute band is a lot like getting married. But you’re not marrying the other members of the band—you’re marrying the music. It’s a serious commitment, a decision to focus all your energies on a finite, limited body of work. And if joining a tribute band is like getting married, you could say I’m like the kid you went to school with who got married really young.

Maintaining one band as your favorite for ten, and even twenty years is a difficult thing. You have to sort of delude yourself, put blinders on so as not to fully notice new and undiscovered music that comes across your path. Repetition has to be made comforting instead of sleep inducing. You need to constantly reassess, search for new meaning in the familiar. 

Both love and music start with infatuation, when you’ll want nothing but to listen to that one band or be around that one person. Then the sheen starts to fade, and you either discover new layers of interest or you break up and search for something better. Sometimes you’re still in the throes of infatuation when some other band (or woman) will steal your attention. But it’s normal to bounce around like this until, at some point, you become tired of bouncing around. You’re less interested in searching for new music (dating), and the work of staying informed on the latest bands gets crowded out in favor of more practical day-to-day demands. The stuff you’ve been listening to becomes very… comfortable. You can’t imagine anything better, or maybe you just can’t imagine continuing to look for something better. Finally, you settle down with one band designated as your favorite. Like marriage, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. There are the couples in the newspaper celebrating 50th and 60th wedding anniversaries, their photos positioned (not unintentionally) right between the wedding announcements on one side and the obituaries on the other. Then there are the ugly divorces—the ones that are rarely announced in the newspaper, even though that’s what people really want to read about. You get older and you change, but the music always sounds the same, perfectly recorded, perfectly…static. You grow apart. You split up. It happens all the time.

Ten years can pass in a happy blur, or it can just be the prelude to a bitter parting of the ways. But every person in a tribute band, like every married person, harbors some doubts. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if you made the right decision. Should you have waited a little longer, seen what other opportunities arose, not settled down just yet—how might things have been different?

To keep the marriage alive, sometimes you have to beat down those doubts till they recede into the dark holes where they hide. But sometimes, like tonight, it seems like a giant game of whack-a- mole, and for every uncertainty you manage to beat down, two more pop up in its place.

 

*

 

I’m off tonight. It’s shaken me, because it’s been so long since I made a mistake, but tonight’s error was so minor it’s likely no one will notice, not even the other guys in the band. See, I told the crowd “thanks,” but Steve Smith never said “thanks,” he always said “thank you.” I wonder, is that just me being lazy? Or could it be something more?

Ten years to become a rock star. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about, the only thing I’ve ever really tried for and failed.

But what’s success or failure? Aren’t those terms subject to interpretation? Does it really have to be all or nothing? Isn’t there room for small successes and minor failures?

Is discipline a bad thing, carried to this extent? Have I stifled my creativity, or simply found a different way to embrace it? Is ten years too much time to give a dream, or not enough? Who’s to decide? What if the person who has to decide doesn’t know the answers?

The keyboard solo, “Friday Night Rondo,” ends, and as we start the next song, “Reflections,” I slip back into my role easily, like a favorite concert tee. A gesture here, a wink there. The fans are eating it up. The weird thing is I really don’t care. I’ve realized I don’t do this for the fans, despite what I said earlier. That was just bravado, false nobility to conceal the truth: I need them. I require an audience, because it’s part of the rock star package—without them, the dream dies.

This all could end at any time. More than likely, it will end soon, since the fans that come to our shows are getting too old to stand at a concert for two hours. They’d rather buy one of the DVD recordings of our shows ($15 apiece) and relax on their couch at home. There are some younger people who come—curiosity seekers, or children (and grandchildren) of fans. But eventually they’ll disappear, too.

I have to make a decision, a big decision—that’s what I’ve decided. I can’t just drift along any more. I’ll either end this now on my terms, or continue, with a new understanding of why I do it. 

It’s important that I get this right… and for this, there is no script to memorize, no notes to study, no DVD to reference.

 

*

When you stop and look back like this, all of those earlier, seemingly unimportant decisions seem so natural, like this was the way it was all supposed to happen, just one moment flowing into the next, steadily moving you along like a stick in a stream.

The thing about being a stick in a narrow, twisty stream, though, is that you rarely see what’s ahead. You get knocked around, sometimes doing headers off the rocks, but you just keep moving forward. The stream could dry up a mile down the road, leaving you stuck somewhere, or it could open up to whole new, expansive body of water. You just don’t know till you get there.

“Reflections” ends. The mistake I made earlier has my head swirling, but strangely, I feel almost giddy. I grip the microphone tightly, ready to deliver the prescribed between-song banter, and I look out over the audience. No, not over the audience. At the audience.

It’s a different vibe now, a scary one, and I can feel myself tightening up. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I suspect this might be pretty similar. Do I really want to do this?

“My name is Larry Candela, and I play in a tribute band.”

Steve Smith never said that, but I just did. It may not be authentic, but it’s real.

I tell them everything, a briefer version of what I’ve said here. Some people in the crowd aren’t happy—I’ve broken the spell, violated the sacred trust between tribute performer and audience.

But soon there comes a connection, a kind I’ve never had before, like I’ve suddenly become transparent right there on stage. It’s terrifying, but at the same time liberating, freeing me of the restrictions I’ve placed on myself these past ten years. It’s a pretty magical experience. I wonder if rock stars ever get to feel something like this. Probably not.

You might think it sad that the major decision of my life thus far is to continue what some would call living someone else’s life. But in the end, it’s my dream. And somewhere between the truth of dreams and the delusion of fantasies, reality lies.

So the dream lives on, albeit in slightly altered form.

Peter Dabbene is a Hamilton, New Jersey-based writer. His poetry has been featured in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Zillah, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Apple Valley Review, and more. He has also published two story collections, Prime Movements and Glossolalia, as well as a novel, Mister Dreyfus’ Demons. He is currently writing a graphic novel, called Ark, which will be published in 2009.