The Collagist

Welcome to Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist: We're very excited this month to bring you a special section titled "Mud & Fish & Brother & Woods: On Repetition and Restriction and Difference in the Fiction of Peter Markus," an online continuation of a symposium held last month at Art X Detroit, to honor 2012 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow in Literary Arts (and Dzanc author) Peter Markus. In addition to an excerpt from Markus's manuscript "In a House in a Woods," there are two poems by Sean Thomas Dougherty and essays by Blake Butler, Aaron Burch, and me, all of which were presented at the event. (David McLendon and Lynn Crawford also spoke at the symposium.) Markus is one of our favorite writers here at Dzanc and The Collagist, and we're so glad to be able to continue this celebration of his work in our space.

In fiction this month, we have new works by Evelyn Somers, Carmen Lau, and Meghan L. Dowling, plus two stories drawn from newly-published collections by former contributors: "Rabbit Fur Coat," from Happy Rock by Matthew Simmons, and the title story from Norman Lock's Love Among the Particles. We also have novel excerpts from Virginia Pye's River of Dust, Douglas Trevor's Girls I Know, and Katherine Bucknell's +1.

In poetry, we have new work by Melissa Cundieff-Pexa, Christopher Crawford, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Tiffanie Desmangles. Our book review section contains coverage of Swim for the Little One First by Noy Holland (reviewed by Michael Jauchen), All My Friends by Marie NDaiye (reviewed by Angela Woodward), All Black Everything by Weston Cutter (reviewed by Jessica Plante), and The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy (reviewed by Peter Fontaine).

As always, thanks to all of the above contributors for being a part of this issue, and thanks to you and all the rest of our readers for visiting us this month.

Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist

Contributors' Notes

TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:36:14 +0000

Issue Forty-Six: May 2013

Aaron Burch's debut collection, Backswing, is due from Queen's Ferry Press in 2014. He is the editor of Hobart: another literary journal.

Katherine Bucknell is the author of +1, as well as three previous novels, Canarino, Leninsky Prospekt, and What You Will. She is currently at work on a biography of Christopher Isherwood. She is the editor of his Diaries, in four volumes, and The Animals, letters between Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy. She also edited W.H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. She has degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Columbia Universities. Born in Saigon and raised in Washington, D.C., she now lives in London with her husband, Bob Maguire, and their three children.

Christopher Crawford was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His poetry, essays and translations have recently appeared in magazines like Agenda, The Cortland Review, RATTLE, and elsewhere. His poems have been nominated for a couple of Pushcart Prizes. He has lived in Prague since 2002 and is a founding editor at B O D Y.

Melissa Cundieff-Pexa holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Diagram, The Monarch Review, Coachella Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, Fairy Tale Review, and Weave Magazine, among other journals. She lives in Ithaca, NY with her family.

Tiffanie Desmangles enjoys a good fight. That is why she became a social worker and now a poet. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband, daughter and son. Her work can be found in the New Plains Review, The Ledge, Clapboard House and Rattle. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sean Thomas Dougherty works in a pool hall in Erie, Pennsylvania. He has written a lot of books. Most of them are full of really sad poems.

Meghan L. Dowling is a Boston-area native and a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. Her prose and poetry can or will be found in Stolen Island, Revolver, and Gigantic Sequins; she is currently at work on her first novel. You can find her in various places on the Internet, but definitely at www.mldowling.wordpress.com.

Peter Fontaine earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He currently holds a Marion L. Brittain Fellowship at Georgia Tech, and he is the new reviews editor for NANO Fiction. He lives in Atlanta.

Michael Jauchen's fiction and reviews have appeared at The Rumpus, The New York Times, Santa Monica Review, and DIAGRAM. He teaches at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire.

Carmen Lau graduated from the UC Davis MA in Creative Writing program in 2009 and has since eked out a living as an ESL teacher in Shanghai and a "full-time volunteer" for a Buddhist nonprofit in Berkeley. She currently resides in Hong Kong, teaching children the difference between the past, present and future. Her stories can be found in Gigantic, Fairy Tale Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Prick of the Spindle, Contrary, and other journals.

Peter Markus is a 2012 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow in Literary Arts. His most recent book is We Make Mud. A new book, The Fish and the Not Fish, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2014.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screen plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Kahn Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

Jessica Plante is a Massachusetts native currently living in Greensboro, NC, where she is Assistant Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. In 2009 she received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in StorySouth, The North Texas Review, Tirage Monthly, Revolution House, and Zaum. She is a recent graduate of the UNC-Greensboro MFA program. Her next stop is Tallahassee, Florida.

Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, is an Indie Next Pick for May 2013. Annie Dillard called it, "Terrific, tremendous, wonderful... a strong, beautiful, deep book." Virginia’s award-winning short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Failbetter, The Baltimore Review and Tampa Review. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, taught writing at New York University and University of Pennsylvania. In conjunction with the publication of River of Dust, her essays and interviews are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

Matthew Simmons is the author of Happy Rock, a collection of short stories available in May 2013 from Dark Coast Press. You can find out more at matthewjsimmons.com.

Evelyn Somers has been associate editor of the Missouri Review for quite a few years. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including PANK, the Georgia Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, the Florida Review, and Bloom. As a freelance book editor she has edited fiction and nonfiction in virtually all genres; books she has edited have won the Drue Heinz and the John Simmons award, among others. Her novel Preacher's House is seeking a publisher, and a new novel and stories are in progress.

Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's most recent book is Swamp Isthmus (Black Ocean, 2013). He lives in Tucson where he edits The Volta and Letter Machine Editions.

Angela Woodward is the author of the fiction collection The Human Mind (2007) and the novel End of the Fire Cult (2010), both from Ravenna Press.

The Four Love Stories of Peter Markus

TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:32:28 +0000

Matt Bell

Brother, river, mud, fish: As many of us know, these are the words Peter Markus has loved the most.

In my favorite of Peter's books, the collection We Make Mud, the word brother or brothers appears on 164 pages, out of 169. Together, they appear 1656 times.

The word river appears on only 136 pages of We Make Mud. Mud, 127. Fish, 121.

In his Art X artist's statement, Peter says that the word brother is his brother, and this is something I know is true.

Detroit appears on zero pages of We Make Mud, but another true thing I know is that Peter Markus is a Detroit writer, that despite never claiming the name the stories in We Make Mud are Detroit stories, about Detroit rivers, Detroit muds and moons, Detroit brothers. And so it is a pleasure to be in Detroit to celebrate Peter Markus, one of our own best brothers.

Asked about his long-standing affection for these words, Peter once said, "I love the way they sound when I say them, when they lift up from my tongue; I love the way they look when I look at them; I love the way they taste, and smell, and feel when I run my hands across them…. And that’s where it all begins: in that sensory place where pleasure meets up with the desire to make something out of nothing: to make love. To make something that didn’t exist until the force of my sentences called it forth. These stories that I write with these words that I love, they are to me love stories."

Brother and Brothers, River, Fish, Mud: These are the objects most loved on the pages of Peter's best-known works, these words as objects through which we know his worlds.

This is word as love story, built by repetition.

What makes these repetitions so strong, so seemingly expansive and inexhaustible? In his book Telling It Again and Again, the critic Bruce Kawin says this about the device's power: "Every day the sun comes up, stays up, goes down. We experience this cycle of light and warmth 26,000 times in an average life time, and find that not enough. What is more important for our purposes here: we do not find the cycle boring. It has rhythmic sympathy with the way we function. It is important. It is dependable. It is like us, and good and bad to us. It is not exhaustible; novelty is exhaustible. The search for novelty leads in the end to boredom. We are bored when we run of out of 'interesting' things to do, or when our own lack of vital energy disgusts us. We are not bored with our personal obsessions, our natural functions, or the periodicity of nature—no matter how familiar to us they might be... The sun comes up every day (and we receive it) in perfect attention; it does not fear that it is being repetitious, nor presumably does it remember what it has done before or consider what it will do in the future. It is the strength of assertion, the assurance of identity, that is the force of repetition; it is the apologetic consciousness squeezed between past and future, unsure of itself and its intentions, wavering, faltering, that gives the sense of repetitious to recurrence. The present is eternal, and eternity is repetition."

I. Brother

So Peter Markus is in love with the word brother—but why does he love it? In another interview, Peter told of the origins of the brothers he's spent so much of his career writing about, a story I'd never read before this week. He said, "The brothers were born some ten odd years ago when my wife and I found out that there was the seed of a boy growing inside her belly. We already had a daughter, a little girl of two or so, and I was having trouble at the time figuring out how to make room for this son. The way I figured out that I could wrap my brain and heart around it was to bring my daughter into the mix as much as we could, so at night in bed my daughter and I would talk to my wife's belly and what was there inside it. The word 'brother' for the first time in my life entered violently into my life in this way. It was brother this and brother that. It was in this way that the word brother came to own me, and it exerted a great force over my life. Out of this word brother and the way that it owned me both with its musicality and the mystery behind it I started making sentences with the word brother in it and little by little these sentences driven by the word brother became stories that then, for many years following, became the obsession of my making. I couldn't stop that word brother and the locomotive way that it wanted to be made into its own sibling world."

This is one of the love stories I can see now in Peter's books: The love of the word brother, of the character—the brother—that word demanded, and then the sibling that character the brother needed—all of these things stemming from his own love for his children, for his daughter and her brother, the brother given his station even before he was born.

I believe that, for many of us, the repetition of important beliefs or ideas is an almost unseen daily practice, something done without recognition of it having been done before and having been done before and having been done before, or at least without recognition of the effects of that repetition: For instance, this morning I told my wife I love her, as I have told her every morning for almost ten years. The act is not diminished by having been done before, and this is, perhaps, because it has not been done before, in exactly this way, although many acts much like it have been: This morning's I love you reinforced, yes, but also it added, and afterward there was no way to go back to what there was before, no way to unhear, to unknow, to unfeel this newest. And yet is it not the fear of just such unhearing, unknowing, and unfeeling that keeps us repeating, that keeps us saying again what it is we have to say, what it is we want heard?

In Peter's books, we find the acknowledgment of this kind of powerful repetition everywhere we look, starting with the words.

II. River

Other experiences, as repetitions: What is guilt but the repetition of a moment forever, one that you cannot escape, that can be recalled from memory and relived at will? What is shame but the same? What is obsession, but the unwillingness to let a thought or feeling end, unresolved? What is addiction but a transcendent moment or feeling constantly interrupted by sobriety, with its resumption and reinstatement the addict's only goal?

What is memory but an unended endless moment, the imperfect recall, the repetition of something not truly repeatable?

We remember, and so try to live again, but so often the best we can do is get close, to approximate, and as we remember we change, as we tell the story again and again it shifts beneath us, and never does it become a static thing, a truth revealed and preserved, but rather a series of almost-copies, each one a progression of moments: Peter says, "When I write the word 'river' just the word itself makes me think of a stretch of the Detroit River where as a boy I spent many a day and night." All it takes is the word river, and he is back inside a previous experience—a previous love—while also, simultaneously, experiencing it again, anew, in his mind; while also, simultaneously, creating a new world upon the page with ever rivery sentence he writes.

III. Mud

Imagine a book where the pages turn forward, front to back, left to right, but where after a certain point, the page numbers cease to advance, even as you turn the pages forward. The book advances, but it is always page 42 now, as the action rises. It is still page 42, at the climax. It is still page 42, at happily ever after, at the ride off into the sunset, at the last page of text, and then at the blank pages that come after. Even on the inside of the back cover, perhaps it is still page 42, according to the small number printed at the center of the footer. Now imagine trying to quote that book, trying to cite it: Now everything after p. 41 happens on page 42, on some page 42. Now page 42 contains not a scene, but the whole of a character's life.

Some kinds of repetition create a way of experiencing time that is not linear, or at least less so: instead, it becomes an eternal moment, a continuous present. To experience such a time is as potentially awful as it is potentially beautiful, but within its borders there exists the opportunity for more life that should fit within it, stretching and expanding the limits of the moment.

It is this time I am most concerned with in Peter's books, the time of structural and poetic repetitions, born of other effects of staging and acoustics, of love for Peter's endless words, his personal words that can never be said enough: The time of Brother, brother, brother. The time of Mud, mud, mud. The time of Fish, fish, fish. The time of River, river, river.

Imagine: the different story-time the word brothers makes, when said instead of brother.

Peter says, "To get sucked in and to be sucked in by a word is what every writer should be after. Hopefully that sucking word will then suck in other words that will be made into a sucking-in sentence. Sucking-in sentences seek out the company of other sucking-in words. And so that’s how I move through the making of a story: word by word, suck by suck, sentence by sentence."

IV. Fish

In yet another interview, Peter said that "In my world, a fish is a thing of beauty, and things of beauty sing for me on all levels (emotional, physical, lingual)… I might also add that the brothers love the fish and the river so much that it is the potency of their brotherly affection for said fish that make these otherwise songless creatures possess the ability to be acoustical objects. As a writer of sentences and of sentences that might be tuned and turned into fictions, I am always on the lookout for those acoustical objects. In other words, those lingual events that might be the genesis for conjuring up an otherwise unseen and unknown world."

To pick one bit of this and run with it, as a way of coming to an ending: Peter says that it is the brothers' love for the fish and the river that makes the fish sing, that makes them "acoustical objects" capable of conjuring worlds. I know that is Peter's love for his words that makes them powerful—that it is that these loved words were born of his love for his family, and his loves for the river of his youth, and for other loves I don't know to name—and it is by their repetition that he increases their strength, their effect, their wonder, his love. No matter what Peter reads tonight, I know you will be able to hear the love for language that defines Peter's work, and hear the love of life that generates it, and you will hear how that love, when repeated over and over, can create a world, a physical place of words as real as any other, containing a multitude of love stories.

Love Among the Particles

TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:52:59 +0000

Norman Lock

1. My Metamorphosis

I may never know why I have changed. Perhaps I'm being punished in a classical style. Or it may be that I became entangled in an astronomical event or a caprice of weather. Whatever the reason, on a morning unremarkable except for a cloud edged strangely by phosphorescence in an otherwise ordinary summer sky, I was transformed from a man in his middle age with a mustache, slouch, and an awkward gait to a collation of sentient particles of uncertain age that move with the genius possessed by all gregarious flying things to rise, turn, and settle as one.

I was anxious but had only to recall metamorphoses recounted by Bulfinch and Kafka to console myself. In truth, I had much rather be what I have become than an ass or a cockroach, regardless of its adoring sister. Such calm acceptance is uncharacteristic of a man whose personality was liable to shatter under stress like a Raku bowl or—if you prefer a metaphor drawn from the musical world—to crack like a Stradivarius sat on by an elephant. In a past as recent as the night before my metamorphosis, Bombay gin in the sapphire bottle favored by connoisseurs was my stay against nervous collapse. I have often wondered if an excess of that imperial distillate might not have encouraged my dissolution. (But how very lovely the world looked through the gin's empty blue bottle!) However the thing was done, I, who was always nervous and afraid, now approach my life with insouciance. To be frank, my carelessness may be the result of inhabiting a life-form immune to injury and the ordinary frustrations of men and women. What does a swarm of particles as impressive as a cloud of gnats know of your kind's tribulation and discontent? Oh, I, too, am human! But my humanity is of another order than yours. And much more ancient.

2. Developing a Theory of the Self

My wife—yes, until that summer morning, I had a wife—was on her knees among the phlox, singing earnest hymns to fertility, as is the prerogative of women. I don't mean modern women: My gaze is a backward one, suitable to a consciousness not exclusively animal. Regardless, it was with a sensation of, of—well, I cannot tell how it felt to look at her through the kitchen's mullioned windows, where on so many tranquil afternoons hummingbirds were to be seen gorging their jeweled throats with sugar water. As I took a last look at this kind and gentle consort of my youth and middle age, I thought in every particle of my being that she belonged now and henceforth in the life of some other man. Perhaps the man I had been before my transformation, who, for all I know, may continue in my stead. I wished her well and, bidding a mute farewell to the row of liquor bottles sparkling in a slant of morning light, drifted like a river of birds straggling above a freshly harrowed field, under the back door and out on into the new day. In time, I would learn that walls cannot discommode me: My particles pass through them and much else besides. And if in your opinion my imagery runs to extravagant lengths, it is—in my opinion!—appropriate to an essay in the marvelous.

In the garden, I was moved by the sight and sound of a swarm of bees, which had made their hive inside a rotted post of the grape arbor, whose fruit was, at this season, hard and bitter. They lived, I supposed, in anticipation, as did I now. I thought we had much in common and wondered if I could pass among them, unnoticed and unharmed. And by such speculations—some tested, others not—I assessed my new world and place within it. I was not unhappy with—let me call it my existence, in case you doubt my life. No, I was not unhappy then, as the sweet airs of morning swept lightly the garden paths and ruffled the pond with its brightly colored koi.

Indolent and with a native buoyancy enjoyed by fish, my particles had dispersed so far that I began to lose the sensation of my extremities, by which I mean the ambit or furthest limits of my self. To this day, I maintain that I have a self, if by self we mean an intelligence to regard space and to know one's place within it. Despite my present atomized condition, the world is apparent to me as I move through its four, five, or twenty-six dimensions, depending on whether you parse it according to Minkowski, Kaluza-Klein, or the string theorists. Held together by the strong force, my particles are in no danger of catastrophic divorce; however, they are subject to varying degrees of estrangement within the space of their mutual attraction. The separation is useful, but I suffer by it. At their furthest remove from one other, the communal intelligence is weakest. It is then the broken self is most vulnerable. Until I learned to keep a grip on my constituency, I was liable to become confused by the slightest movement of air or lapse in attention. Later on, when I had become master of my self and its motions, total disintegration—that is, annihilation—was no longer a concern: I could maintain a shape such as bees, birds, or fish compose in their congregations. Aware, suddenly, that I was adrift (a "wisp" of neutrinos was oscillating painfully among the roses), I intensified the strong force and succeeded in withdrawing my straying quarks and leptons from the backyard's perimeter, described by an electric wire to keep the rat terrier out of the phlox. (A dollop of my dark matter having brushed against the wire, its rude charge had no effect on me.)

Having come as close to my wife as I dared, I delighted in a sensation of fullness and in a strength that I would have called virility had I been a man in the ordinary sense. My wife rose from the flower bed with the intention of harrying me out the front door, for the time had come and gone when I should have left for work.

3. In Praise of the Digital Age

I never intended that this account of my life after the disaster that befell it should be in any way comic. To be emasculated—no, for what happened to me is worse! To be the abstract of a man, to have been reduced to bits of elemental stuff is no joking matter; it has not even the black humor of dark matter to recommend it. I am bodiless and yet not a ghost. Of this world but not in any appreciable sense. To write my story, I thought, will confirm my existence. Had I been living in the Mechanical Age, I could not have done so, lacking means to depress a typewriter's keys. But in the Digital Age, one need not be substantial to make a mark: One has only to enter a word processor via its data port and think. Don't ask how the trick was accomplished, but I found that I was able to think my words into the machine in which I—let's say "sat" so as not to be vague. It's all data, after all—words, speech, thoughts—just so many units of information waiting to ride the lightning bolt, like bodies queuing up for a roller coaster. I would shake my shoulders and crack my knuckles (figuratively speaking) and wait for my muse, clad in brightly colored data like a video image pixilated by solar flares. And when at last she had come to me, I would think and my words would stream into the processor along streets of circuitry and become the flesh of our time—immaculate, spelled-checked, and laid away in dust-scented files. Yes, even a computer's innards are prey to dust—the cloak and calling card of time.

I was not alone there. Bits of a pornographic novel, Steampunk stories, love letters, iTunes, and erotic poems kept me company in the phosphorescent dark—artifacts of the computer's owner, who was a writer, of sorts. After I had (so to speak) banged out a couple pages (how colorful the language of the Mechanical Age!), I would leave the machine the way I had come and then linger, phantomlike, in a corner of the room while the writer smoked and typed and paced and furiously compressed his hard copy into a tight ball to hurl against the corkboard, where it made only the slightest sound in evidence of his self-disgust. He was often frustrated in pursuit of his muse. But I remained in the room with him, not to distill a sympathy in which he might take comfort, but to bathe—selfishly, indulgently—in the rich and penetrating odor of his cigarette's smoke. How fortunate to be alive (if alive I am) in the Digital Age and to share it with someone who has not renounced tobacco! All the nearly numberless particles of which I am comprised relished that smoke—inhaled (as it were) and drew it into their lungs and breathed deeply their sighs of relief.

Smoking was not the sole pleasure in which I luxuriated while the writer struggled to write—his computer piercing the gloom with its intense bluish rays. When the work was going badly, or not at all, he would drag out a bottle of single malt from the closet and pour liberally into a heavy glass a drink whose delicious fumes drew me from my corner to the very surface of the smoky decoction. There, I would allow myself—that is to say, my particles—to dissolve into the whiskey as if it were a stoup of holy water. I would have much preferred the "queen's own gin," but beggars can't be choosers. And what am I now if not the most arrant beggar who ever existed? Always, we would become ecstatic, many times slipping carelessly down the man's throat with his last swallow—so utter was our communal oblivion. And when we had reassembled into me, my self, I was delighted to find that the euphoria persisted for days.

4. Circulating Through Space and Time

To talk of days or hours or any other of time's denominations is a convenience only, for time is not for me as it is for you. Mine cannot be regulated or metered by any clock. It is—how do I say what time is for me? Like an ocean—vast and seemingly shoreless, deep and subject, like the ocean itself, to storms and confusions. I am in time as swimmers are in their element, crawling easily across its tranquil surface or near to drowning in its uproar. When it comes to time, you and I are on different wavelengths (to continue in the pelagic metaphor, which is apt). Once, unable to shake off the melancholy that more and more beset me, I collected myself and, mustering the intelligence by which the collective is governed, drifted across the city, from the writer's apartment to the house in which my wife and I had lived together. To call the movement by which I transit space (and, as you shall soon see, time) drifting is also a convenience, for there is nothing at all slow or peaceable about it. It is, rather, a disturbance at the subatomic level—fierce and nearly reckless in its energy—directed by some lower drawer or subdirectory of that intelligence, whose operation eludes my understanding. That it does elude it is no doubt better; better that it should be "automatic" and second nature to me.

I traveled across town with astounding rapidity, very near the speed of light; yet because I experience time as an elastic and unpredictable construct like the Möbius strip or one of Oscar Reutersvärd's impossible objects, I did not arrive at the house instantaneously. I wobbled "awhile" in the space-time continuum. When I finally passed through the wall into those familiar rooms, my wife and dog were gone; outside, the phlox had perished and the beds were bricked over by the new householder. Glancing at a calendar on the pantry door, I realized that twenty years and more had gone by since that summer morning. But for me, it seemed no longer than a month or two since I had last seen my wife making her determined way over the flagstones to roust me from sleep.

5. "Cogito Ergo Sum," Et Cetera

What does it mean to be human? Is it merely to act as humans act, to do what they do—good or bad? I smoke cigarettes (after a fashion), I drink scotch (after a fashion), I move and sleep and dream and grow steadily toward loneliness in a way that can be said to resemble how it was for me before my breakdown (to speak of a condition with which you may be familiar). In my way, I am in the world. I perceive it, though without organs of perception. Somehow I see, hear, touch, taste, smell what surrounds me, although—I have come to realize—I do so without clarity, recognition, savor, or delight. (Scotch and cigarettes aside.) My being is too radically dispersed, I suppose, for meaningful contact. It was little better when I was all of a piece. And yet I am human if for no other reason than I am able to think and to remember and to suffer.

6. The Past and How I Got There

Space—other places—had done nothing to lessen my solitude. I visited all of them I had wished to see when I was whole—no, I am whole even now! Nothing essential has been lost of what I used to be: I have merely suffered a change in—in format, in resolution. If a person is a unit of information, as has been said, I am that unit digitized and processed for some purpose—a design and reason unknown to me. My dispersal is a kind of distraction, nothing more.

I went first to Tahiti to look for what Gauguin had painted, then to Arles, where van Gogh had been driven mad by the color and fierce light of Provence, then to Seville to listen in the torrid darkness to water chattering in the Moorish fountains, then to Venice to smell its stink and ride in a gondola rowed by a man with a monkey, striped jersey, and sneer, through fetid canals overlooked by rotting palaces. I went to Egypt to watch the ibis, sacred to Thoth, wade in the Nile on stiff legs and to the Argentine plains to see a red horse, head lifted to the sun. I went elsewhere—to Tunis and to Kampala to see where the lion had surprised Mrs. Willoughby in an olive grove and even to the roof of the world, where the ice is melting. I could feel sorrow, regret, nostalgia, but not cold or heat. I could fear the lion but feel not at all its ravening claws, which passed through me as if I were made of air. Everywhere I went was the same: One place was as good or as bad as another.

And having had my fill of the present and fearing the future, I went into the past. You don't believe me? I tell you for a man to travel in time is no more impossible for him than to be changed into a congeries of elementary particles, endued with intelligence, sensitivity, and (after a fashion) a sense of humor, however much it is dwindling. If time can be stretched—if it will, on occasion, shorten or ruck, knot or twist like a rope, then one can be displaced (or misplaced) in it. For that matter, one can find (or lose) oneself in other dimensions. I have often thought that when my wife pulled off her soiled gardening gloves, wiped her feet on the back-door mat, and went inside to hurry me up, she found me standing by the kitchen window, coffee cup raised to my lips, dressed for work, and waiting only for her customary kiss to send me on my way. She and I may be living still in that house with its dusty shelves and sparkling liquor bottles, its flagstone path and flower beds harried by a rat terrier named Malcolm. (Bodies in space and time, separated by space and time—sing it as you will.) In spite of all, I would like to see them again but know in my soul (to speak nostalgically) that I will not. No, not in this life or in any other. Alive or dead, they inhabit realms from which I am forever banished. What I begin to fear more than death is immortality. If, as I think, I am indestructible, how, then, will I die? If everything is possible for me, then life without end is possible. But how am I to endure it?

But you want to know how I managed it—how I traveled the rails of time into the past and what I did there among the dead. I packed myself—my particles—into a photon of light as you would throw clothes into a suitcase. Light is the conveyance, the superconductor, the carrier of time—streaming, in particles suspended in a wave, from the past of our universe into its future. And by mingling my particles with light's own as it passed nearby on its outbound journey into space, I rode at light's speed to a planet hidden within a Magellanic Cloud—the large one called by the Arabs al-Bakr, "the Sheep." There I found—not Paradise, not even Eden's fallen and corrupted east, but ruins and a prison that might have been drawn by Piranesi and inscribed by pantograph on that fantastically distant remove. Three centuries earlier, they had been carried there (unless I brought with me—in whatever part of myself that holds memory—those sinister dreams). And what did I find wandering among tumbled columns, clinging to iron ladders and catwalks, gnashing teeth in bleakest jails? Images. Phantoms. Specters. Things even less substantial than I! I would have been better off mingling my atoms with the bees where they swarmed under the grape arbor of my house all those—what? Years, decades, centuries ago? Or has it been only days since my self-imposed exile from the garden? I cannot tell the time—do not know anymore what to make of it. There was nothing on that inhospitable rock for me, and, suspecting that anywhere else I traveled in the fields of night would be just as vacant, I boarded a wave of earthbound light and fled back among the living (though they do not live for me).

7. Painful Acknowledgments

Once again on earth's surface, which was no longer mine to speak of as firm or blessed (not now that I no longer stand upon it), I went to the apartment where I had enjoyed the company of the writer, insofar as I could enjoy what I could not touch or speak with. The writer had fallen into the hands of mystics! With unkempt gray hair and long beard, he looked like Tolstoy. Just as before, he paced the room. But he no longer smoked, and having sent a scouting party of free quarks through the closet door, I determined that he did not drink. He appeared to have relinquished his vices, and in place of pornographic and Steampunk fiction digitized within his word processor, I found moral tracts and maxims and downloads of Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass. He still paced disconsolately, and he still wadded up his hard copy into paper balls, although instead of throwing them against the corkboard, he set them alight on a small brazier as though burnt offerings to his new muse, who was, presumably, one of the Hindu gods. My eyes (to speak familiarly) smarted, and I knew that whatever consolation was his was too narrow to share in. I spun round in space like a dervish, feeling myself shunned by even this meager, unsatisfactory society. I longed to look into the mirror and see myself there, even if my hair had turned white and I was no longer young. I wished to have an identity! But only those fated to pass away in time are granted it—or so it seemed to me as I gathered myself together and prepared to take my leave of someone who did not know that I was there.

What began as a comedy has become a fable or farce of a self pulled to pieces by strong forces and dark matters whose cause and meaning are incomprehensible. Why have I lost my composure so completely as to be no more than a cloaking mist or a dirty cloud of dust raised by a truck lumbering over an excavation site? Excavating what? Precious metals? Antiquities? Or nothing more fabulous than broken terra-cotta pipes of an ancient sewer?

In panic (call it "agitation" to remind you of my particulate state), I fled the writer's apartment by the window (open or shut, it does not matter) and hurried to the office building where I had passed so many years of my working life. On the twelfth floor, I entered the labyrinth of cubicles, illuminated at this late hour only by the tiny green and blue lights of electronic equipment—silent in their sleep mode, except for the intermittent muffled noises of background processing or the suppression of rogue data. In one cubicle, I had racked my brains at a computer monitor for headlines with which to sell all manner of useless trash. Was it this, I wonder, that had broken me? I roamed the office's subdivisions, recalling this man and that woman and seeing clearly—for the first time—how they had eluded me. I had passed among them as if I were made of air. We had spoken and, at times, touched; but of mutual contact at the depths of our separate beings, there had been none. Was it this that smashed me to smithereens, that confirmed my estrangement in space and in time past all hope of rescue? Or was it so that I might be given a second chance? How given and why, I could not even begin to imagine.

8. Consulting the Oracles

Inside a computer at a branch of the New York Public Library, I searched the Internet in order to illuminate my condition. Elementary Particles, Behavior of the Strong Force, Quantum Chromodynamics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electromagnetic Radiation, Fundamental Forces, Higgs Boson, Antiparticles, Muon and Tau, Supersymmetry, Kaluza-Klein Towers of Particles—I surfed as if on waves of light the data streams of the World Wide Web, consulting Wikipedia as in the ancient world victims of a tragic fate had consulted oracles. Many times, I was attacked by interceptors and antivirus mechanisms that sought, like antibodies, to annihilate me. The digital world is also cruel to interlopers. Whether an existence as refined and fundamental as my own can be destroyed has yet to be tested. In my despair of a possible life without end, I may have yearned to be no more; but I do not want to die at the foot of a firewall, coughing up dark matter and bitter squarks.

I no longer needed a word processor to record my story: I could think words into being without intermediary, imprinting them onto the electromagnetic field that is, I suspect, my consciousness. Saved in my own random access memory, thoughts—dark as clots or colorful as jelly beans—can be accessed whenever I wish. I can project them, at will, into another's data cloud. The gist of what you are reading here was imprinted on the mind of Norman Lock, who believes himself sole author of this eventful history. During my wanderings in space and in time (unfixed, capricious, and circular), I rested—unknown to Lock—among the Edwardian railroad timetables he collects, in order to slow the wild arrhythmia of my heart (to speak hopefully). I had overtaxed my particles in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago during a failed experiment in romance.

9. Sleeping Among Tortoises

I had gone to the Galápagos Islands to think about time in time's stillest backwater. There, among giant tortoises whose species' evolutionary history spanned five million years or more and whose individual histories, a century, I roved the desolate beaches. The ancient tortoises were like objects left over from the past: To wander among them was to feel time—know it intimately—as you might a rock that has lain in the hot sun of a garden or scarcely visible under snow: a thing familiar to your eyes and touch and smell and (should you be imaginative) to your taste; for we can, some of us, imagine the taste of rock—the very different tastes of granite, soapstone, basalt, and marble. And for me, who had been given the power of empathy raised to an extraordinary degree, my experience of time under the volcanoes on those fabulous islands was... immense. I'm sorry to be vague. But how can I be otherwise, speaking as I am trying to do of a subject forever beyond our grasp? I empathized with the tortoises, which are wise. If anything can lay claim to wisdom, it must be they. I mingled my atoms with theirs and apprehended, by sensations rich and various, what it means to be a tortoise and, therefore, what time must be—its qualities and flavors. Physicists speak of elementary particles as having flavor, although they mean by it something other than the taste of a thing in one's mouth.

I remembered how, in the middle of the night, I would wake. Perhaps the moon had come riding into the window, splashing its garish light over the room, or maybe my wife had been startled by something monstrous in her dreaming. Awake, I remembered that I must die—in time—and grew, after so many nights of waking in the dark, to fear time and to hate it. Now that I am mired inextricably in its morass, I feared death's opposite—seeing in it only an ultimate intensification of my loneliness. Stroking a tortoise's shell (the color of smoke and nothingness), I spoke to it in Tortoise (why not?) of my longing to escape time and be no more. Despondent, I wound myself into an empty chambered-nautilus shell to be reminded of what it had been like to sleep in a narrow space, pressed against another's sleeping body. Afterward, I dreamed. And of what might a swarm of particles dream? Of an orchestra playing on the sea a serenade for strings from the deck of a ship—its portholes blazing white light onto the black water, like pinpoints of illumination cast by electronic devices in a dark room. By this simile, I acknowledge—as I must—that all things have been annexed to the digital world. The night and the harrowingly beautiful music invaded the shell's small rooms and seemed to dispel, for the moment, time's appalling mystery and give me peace.

I inhabited the shell (for a moment or an age) as the mind does the inside of a skull—my thoughts' data streaming like luminous ribbons far and wide: to the cold ends of the universe as they are known to me, who is—in his makeup—their comrade and who had—as a householder and husband—watched in fascination science documentaries broadcast by PBS (and, with equally rapt attention, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai). Was it for this, I wondered, that I had been re-formed and reformatted as a swarm of particles? Was it for this that I had traveled to one of the ends of the earth to sleep among giant tortoises, where Darwin had landed and dreamed, too, in his time, about time—its grand recessional, whose origin is a protein compound in "a warm little pond"? Or was it (to speak sentimentally) to meet Marie Risset, who, like me, had been reduced to fermions, bosons, and assorted hypothetical particles whose existence (like ours) is yet to be (dis)proved?

10. Dance of the Particles (in 4/4 Time)

Commingled with the flavors of that remote place (tang of brine, pungency of tortoise and guano, the charcoal and tannin of red mangrove, the tartness of prickly pear cactus favored by iguana and tortoise) was the unique flavor of what I knew at once to be a woman. I insist that Marie Risset is a woman still! I promptly emptied the nautilus shell of my agitated particles, attracted by the intense flavor of her subatomic structure. Marie had been particularized beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, at the Large Hadron Collider while inspecting one of its superconducting magnets. (The cup of French roast she had held in her hand lent its own stimulating flavor notes to her altogether-delightful ensemble.) An immensely energetic particle beam on the order of 3.5 TeV had derailed in her vicinity. (She maintains that the accident was the result of a "magnet quench incident," subsequently covered up by CERN.) I wondered how she had managed to arrive in the Galápagos. Her answer pleased me by its frankness and by the compliment it paid to my own flavors—let me call it sex appeal for old time's sake. Not that I had possessed it. On the contrary, I was a dull and plodding lover, inclined to fall asleep during foreplay. But I now imagined myself quite other than I had been then, in this novel shape and form purged of gross matter—the "fat" of a previous sedentary life.

"I felt your attraction," she said to me in French, "across the distances of space and time."

Doubtless, you are ready to protest. And you would be right in thinking that I know no French and she, not a word of English. "Furthermore," I hear you demand of me, "how could two discrete swarms of particles—however they might be favorably disposed—converse?"

I would answer you thus: "Among the particles that comprised and created us were other energies obedient to their own rigorous constitution and government. I am speaking of letters of the alphabet—French and English, both—which constitute words governed by syntax. Parts of matter and its energies... parts of speech—the same, in that worlds may be constructed of them!"

"But you don't speak French!" you shout, your willing suspension of disbelief at an end.

I shrug my shoulders and would remind you that not everything can be explained.

So it was that Marie and I exchanged information (to speak in the new style), talking together—shyly at first—of this and that:

"These tortoises..."

"Yes?" I said.

"They live to a great age." I agreed.

"Like rocks, they seem to evolve not at all."

"Evolution," I said stupidly, "is one of the grandest of ideas."

"I have been thinking," she said after a pause that may have been of a day's duration, a week's, or an age's—it mattered not at all to me, who had all the time in the world and more at his elbow (farcically speaking)—"that we may be—who knows?—the next evolutionary thing."

She staggered me! I had believed myself to be a freak of nature considered on a cosmic scale. I had been (to be honest with you) a little ashamed, as if I were responsible for my misfortune—as if I had brought it on myself by some unclean and unwholesome act. That I could not recall having committed one did nothing to lessen the burden of my guilt.

The orchestra was once again playing its serenade upon the water. (If it was a dream, we were having it together!) Night had fallen with the suddenness of a scythe. Stars there were also that fell into the unlit ocean—their bits and particles so very similar to Marie's, I thought, and would have told her if not for the old shyness.

"Do you dream?" I asked instead.

She nodded, and a glossy wisp of dark matter fell across her breast.

"Of what are you dreaming now, Marie?"

"Of a dance—a kind of fox-trot to go with the music of the orchestra."

"Yes," said I, who had never danced well.

But that was then. Now, to the glissandos of the serenade, we moved through one another nimbly, trailing luminous clouds of energy like auroras of flame. Our particles mingled and nearly caressed in the moonlight while the tortoises on the beach regarded us stolidly. She was superb! I rejoiced in my strong force; she, in her grace and mastery of the dance's fluency.

The serenade at an end, we completed our fiery passage and drew apart. Space—cold and vacant—loomed once more between us. Marie became distracted by thoughts of the nearby Humboldt Current: its temperature and salinity. I wandered off to be by myself, dogged by the sadness that comes of knowing that we are—in the end and for all time—fated to be alone.

Excerpted from "The Broken Man's Complaint" in Love Among the Particles by Norman Lock © 2013. Published by Bellevue Literary Press, www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:30:22 +0000

All Black Everything By Weston Cutter New Michigan Press October 2012 978-1934832349

All Black Everything

By Weston Cutter

New Michigan Press
October 2012
978-1934832349

Reviewed by Jessica Plante

Weston Cutter's inventive use of syntax, imagery, and associative drift allow All Black Everything to move from subject to subject without ever getting slowed or trapped. And his poems do move. They dart between memory and real-time generating a sense of spaciousness and adventure. His way of disassembling and rearranging language and syntax as though it were Legos makes him a bit like a mad scientist retrofitting old tools for new uses. He manipulates and pushes language to create a way to more accurately measure and map the dimensions of experience, and therefore, self. Listen to Cutter's playfulness in the collection's opening poem "No Parable," "I too have spent my share of faith + the cherry picker/trucks off the highway's exit stand outstretched: we reach, craft machinery for the same methods." Here, Cutter rubs the unquantifiable against the particular, faith against cherry picking trucks, and effectively introduces us to both his search for a way to balance the intrinsically imbalanced, and his method, the mechanics of language. In other words, the inexactness of faith + the clearer purpose of the mechanical = Cutter's strategy for self-examination and awareness. Not that wonder and faith are unusual instigators in sounding one's barbaric yawp, but the odd, quasi-scientific approach to dissecting language, and therefore the experiences it investigates, challenge and disturb the inherent inexactness of language. Take, for example, "How to Be Ready For Everything," which opens:

is
to pick up yesterday + crack
its thick honey. How
to be ready is not pockets
but matches, the act
is never carry but burn or if not burn at least warm, the rote mem-
orization that is flame.

Like language, this poem promises more than it can deliver. Who wouldn't want to be ready for everything? Yet, the poem begins with a moment of disorientation and brokenness. The enjambments hack away at the playful tone on the surface and strike. We can't pick up yesterday. The poem can't deliver more than its medium, language itself. Language is inexact and has a tendency to blur edges, shy from depths, and generalize experience. All Black Everything points out why we should be suspicious of its promises.

But Cutter does not inspect language simply to expose its weaknesses and limitations; his curiosity breaks into and through language and asks if truth lies beneath. The duality of this exploration produces some of the collection's most confident and expansive moments. "Because God's neither season/nor storm and where we live the elemental word/is combine, both noun and verb, a way to fill/days and empty fields." Here Cutter manipulates several levels of concern—language, God, landscape and home—with a few swift-moving lines. Only with such an original and quirky logic can we, the reader, be pushed up against so many elements in rapid-fire succession. Cutter risks asking questions of the greatest concern: what is it that holds life together through the unrelenting, seemingly illogical shifts of experience; and is there a center to it all, a place where "the self" can feel safe.

Perhaps these questions account for Cutter's mild obsession with the concept of home, a geographic and domestic ideal, often presented in the collection as a place locked in memory: "Home was a cup of coffee, a kiss I'd recognize/from a thousand paces. The intake of breath before/my own name was whispered." An almost worshipful praise, an incantatory elevation, supplants Cutter's examination of syntax and language and provides moments of emotional tenderness, bringing out Cutter's charm. Lines like "Ellen's face is where my lips belong as between/the candlesticks is where/the salt and pepper belong," while still dealing with themes of location, dislocation, and mapping the self, have more heart, more vulnerability.

Cutter is at his best when his questions try, via faith and love, to locate the self not, as it were, as if it already existed, but as if it existed only because its depths and heights are actively being discovered. To discover the self then, one must "stand in a doorway + look out over/the flat of one's life, who knows what they saw." At its best, All Black Everything reaches for nothing less than revelation and clarity: Cutter strips away falseness by stating his own terms, and produces a poetry that sneaks up on everything just to see what's real. "I'm all empty shirt" he says, with a jubilant sense of revelation, "a wineglass held long past the last/sip."

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TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:24:31 +0000

Swim for the Little One First By Noy Holland FC2 September 2012 978-1573661690

Swim for the Little One First

By Noy Holland

FC2
September 2012
978-1573661690

Reviewed by Michael Jauchen

One can enter Noy Holland's Swim for the Little One First at any point and find astonishing sentences. Consider, for example, this short passage of description from the story "Merengue":

Now mornings after the water swept through, old men appeared in knee socks swinging their metal detectors. They worked by phalanx, like the organized blind, transistors in their shirt-front pockets. Some could walk still. Others slumped in their chairs. They found little and hoarded it fiercely.

It's an object lesson in sentence construction: the repeated long "i" in the second sentence; the way the spondees of "Some could walk still" literally trudge forward; how the alliterative "found" and "fiercely" bookend the final sentence; the suggestive shadow cast between "phalanx" and the old men's phallic metal detectors. Even divorced from their larger context—a surreal story of a young woman and her boyfriend struggling to get pregnant at a decrepit and crime-ridden oceanside retirement community—sentences this deeply considered have their own discrete appeal. You want to stop and stare at them. It's almost like they're moving.

Noy Holland once studied with Gordon Lish, so it should come as no surprise that the sentence is where the core heat of her narratives resides. This heat extends far beyond a close attention to sentence-level clarity and aims more deeply at something almost mystical in the sentence-making process. As Gary Lutz (another Lish acolyte) formulates it in "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," what Holland is pursuing is "an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words."

This linguistic intimacy assumes different forms in Swim for the Little One First: trademark Lish repetitions ("Funny, what you keep, what keeps at you."); defamiliarizing truncations ("I said I'd come. I flew across."); and deft uses of sound ("Charlie Finch was no bigger than a clothespin."). Sentences like these move forward with their own signature velocity. They feel chiseled. And even in those moments when they may only hint at the edges of conventional sense, we remain anchored and pleased by the music embedded within them.

In lesser hands, an atomic fixation on the sentence could lead to fiction marked by a forest-for-the-trees myopia, a fetishizing of language to such a degree that other, more conventional, narrative markers—character, plot, emotional depth—get relegated to the margins. In other words, the sentence level becomes the only level there is. But one of the specific strengths of this collection (and Holland's work in general) is the way her meticulous attention to language never overshadows the way her stories also work as profound, emotionally-fraught character studies. Instead, the brilliance of Holland's prose actually sharpens her ability to explore those territories of fiction—family loyalty, loss, love—that might be considered well-worn or, dare I say, conventional.

This isn't to say the stories here are easy, or that they reveal themselves completely on a first reading. Spatially, Holland's stories move all over the place. They travel so quickly through the American West, Ecuador, Pennsylvania, and the Pacific Coast, that, by the end, the disparate settings seem to congeal into a singular liminal geography. Similarly, characters and their motivations are often drawn with an acute spareness. In "Pachysandra," we know the narrator travels a great distance to care for Rose, an old woman who's fallen, but we don't know why. And is Rose the narrator's aunt? A family friend? A godmother? Questions like these proliferate throughout these stories, and Holland's answers to them always remain indirect and partial. The final result is a collection heavy in atmosphere, fiction that fosters a surreal sense of readerly disorientation.

The stories of Swim for the Little One First show Holland's deeply interested in the way words—both the things we say to each other and the way we narrate our experiences to ourselves—literally create the world for us. Again and again in these stories, Holland's characters look to language as a way to anchor themselves in space and time. Words are the tools they use to articulate and name their deepest pain and longing, to make the unspeakable manifest in the hopes of containing and mastering it. In "Today Is an Early Out," Charlie Finch's architect father fortresses his mountainside home against the elements using everything he can muster: "The stem walls are three feet thick and beefed up with miles of rebar. He's got her anchored into the bedrock with eyebolts, with braided cable as big around as a boy's arm." Language is this house for Holland's characters. It's handmade and labored, the armor to combat the aggressive reality existing outside: "Let it come, Father Finch thinks: Try me."

Aggressive reality, however, always has something unpredictable (literally: unable to be said beforehand) up its sleeve. And embedded within the security afforded by language is the knowledge that it will always remain provisional and insufficient. Father Finch's house is eventually subsumed in a mudslide, just one example of the way Holland's characters find themselves unmoored in the world. The mother in "Luckies Like Us," a medical doctor, stands dressed in her scrubs by the hospital bedside of her infant son, and there's no help she can offer. Mary, the young woman at the center of "Merengue," loses her child to a miscarriage and is then gang raped on the beach, with the rapists "cramm[ing] sand in her mouth to keep her quiet." Catastrophe finds people in this collection. Their grasp on the world around them is always contingent and slight, and they know that any attempts they make to name a fluid reality can only leave temporary marks. "Nobody gets off," notes the narrator of "Two Dot." "This wasn't news to me. Not so easy. I had it coming."

Holland's spare composition and blurring of narrative edges also affords her the chance to explore the terrain between these different pieces. While these stories aren't linked by setting, action, or overlapping characters, they attain a coherence through Holland's use of recurrent imagery, through the subtle way she makes them echo with one another. "Pachysandra" concludes with the phrase "blood country," words that show up as the title of a later piece. In "Blood Country," a horse kick turns a man amnesiac; then, seventy pages later, in "The Last Doll Never Opens," a mule kick cures another man's blindness. Blind boys appear in "Jericho" and "Love's Thousand Bees." Bees show up in the title story and, to come full circle again, in "Pachysandra." Follow these types of associations far enough, and the care that's viscerally evident at the sentence level soon expands outward into a collection whose images have the unity and design of an organic chemical compound.

I've now read Swim for the Little One First three times: first for the music, then for the sense in individual stories, and then in search of the echoes between them. It's a collection that gives itself away in pieces, its dream logic working through suggestion and partial revelation. But the feeling it ultimately creates is seductive—I'm sure readings four, five, and six will come with their own discoveries—where Holland somehow unroots you from the world, but still makes you feel like you're deep down in it.

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TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:20:08 +0000

The Invisibles By Hugh Sheehy University of Georgia Press October 2012 978-0820343297

The Invisibles

By Hugh Sheehy

University of Georgia Press
October 2012
978-0820343297

Reviewed by Peter Fontaine

I want to draw your attention to Hugh Sheehy's debut story collection, The Invisibles. It's possible this collection might slip past your notice. The characters found in these stories certainly do. That's a shame, however, and it would be a shame if you missed out on this potent and engaging look at character.

The titular story explains the conceit for the other ten stories that appear alongside it in this collection:

The invisible, a person who is unnoticeable, hence unmemorable. Mother knew all about invisibles and kept her eyes open in public. She brought home reports: a woman licking stamps at the post office, an anguished old man in line at the bank, a girl crying by a painting in the museum. The library crawling with them.

The narrator of that story, Cynthia, and her mother are both invisibles, and as such they can spot others of their ilk. It's not hard to imagine the other stories in this collection being reports brought home by Cynthia's mother, stories about a Delta ferryman who suspects his stepson might be an arsonist, about a Florida lifeguard who gets caught up with a mysterious woman, and about an amnesiac who might just be a plagiarizing literature professor. If these sound like synopses of tense, hard-boiled neo-noirs you're not far off from the truth. Like a certain author whose name is lent to the award this book won, the attention to character, to the sentence, and to pacing is that of a master stylist and craftsman, but death, catastrophe, and people at extremes are the soul and body of these stories.

From O'Connor's grotesques to Sheehy's "invisibles," these characters are all unremarkable people who often find themselves in violent and inexplicable situations. For the teenage boy in "A Difficult Age" who takes to smoking homemade crack, and for the adulterous husband and father of "The Tea Party," the fraught situations at the center of their tales are of the characters' own making, yet those characters feel powerless in the wake of consequences that follow. For other characters, like the grade school teacher Maddy in "Meat and Mouth," or the drug addict Mason in "Whiteout," they are more victims of circumstance, finding themselves in the wrong place at the right time. The truly impressive one-two combination has to be the expecting wife of "Henrik the Viking" who finds her marriage disintegrating, and the young professional of "Smiling Down at Ellie Pardo" who returns to his hometown to find the older woman he once had a crush on has been murdered in her home. These stories occur one right after the other, the first a vibrant and cutting slice of domestic fiction and the second a labyrinthine and suffocating rural noir, and the consistency and precision of Sheehy's style make both stories compelling and original. Compare this, from "Henrik,"

When they began to congratulate her on her pregnancy and ask her personal questions about her development, she deleted the pictures and closed her account. She sat in the living room feeling vaguely soiled. She feared she had been very close to turning into a crazy person on the Internet.

with this, from "Ellie Pardo":

He looked up at me. 'Nobody asked for this.' I couldn't tell him that sometimes you don't ask for what you have: a certain distance from the people, the right to be aloof. I knew this, and I also knew that philosophy is worthless just after a loss. So I told my father that he was right.

In both instances, connectivity is measured out against a major event. The pain of connection is at the center of those that we would identify as the invisibles. In the bounty of Hazel's pregnancy she can't bear her cloying friends and acquaintances, whereas Ellie Pardo's murder cannot help but be borne and suffered by the surrounding community of those acquainted with her who didn't know her well enough to be able to prevent the tragedy (which includes especially the narrator and his parents).

Those of us who read enjoy a special sort of connection to the lives of others. It's no coincidence that Cynthia tells us in the title story that the library is "crawling with them." The invisibles move through daily life unseen and unacknowledged; loneliness pushes them to find solace in books. In reading The Invisibles, we do what Cynthia implores us to, "we... call those people back, and shout, laugh, cry—produce the sounds that people make when they're together."

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TheCollagist — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:06:18 +0000

All My Friends By Marie Ndiaye Translated by Jordan Stump Two Lines Press May 2013 978-1931883238

All My Friends

By Marie Ndiaye

Translated by Jordan Stump
Two Lines Press
May 2013
978-1931883238

Reviewed by Angela Woodward

She then said, too quickly, trying to conceal her unease, her excitement:

"I don't see anything."

"You don't see anything?"

"Nothing at all," she said, trembling a little.

"You ought to see something."

These opening lines of "The Death of Claude Francois," one of the five stories in Marie NDiaye's All My Friends, lower us into the disquieting murk that constitutes NDiaye's worldview. Her orphaned, abandoned, humiliated beings suffer both blindness and uncanny vision. Here, a doctor peering at the back of an old friend can't see a wound, nor can she see that this is indeed her old friend. It may be only someone with the same name as her friend, the doctor can't be sure. A teacher screams at a former pupil, now his housemaid, that they knew each other fifteen years earlier: he lent her eight books, which she never returned. No, that wasn't me, the maid says. A boy huddles in the corner of his neighbor's dining room, watching the legs of the family as they eat at the table. They treat him as virtually invisible, and he may as well be so. NDiaye sculpts these omissions of recognition with soft putty, so that it's never settled whether these people are lying to each other—the maid was indeed once the teacher's student but won't admit it—or that the blinded characters are mentally unstable or simply mistaken, or that the supernatural is pulling its veils. NDiaye's hazy and befuddled men and women also have moments of acute perception. An aging minor film star glances up at her hotel window to find a precise younger version of herself staring down at her. The younger woman may or may not be a spirit or hallucination, but whatever she is, she mocks the older woman's loafers. Loafers! Minor film stars should not wear ugly brown flat shoes! Later, when this woman's daughter appears, her hair shorn and dyed orange, the reader can only hang in a zone of skepticism. It couldn't possibly be her real daughter. Yet the girl's nonchalant refusal to greet her mother captures unerringly the emotional isolation of the actress, and the possibly universal snottiness of teenage daughters.

NDiaye's stories leave out much more than they reveal, pushing this ratio towards the limit to which this can be done, all in quiet, rational prose. So much is unknown and unaccountable that the wisps that are left have a hallucinated clarity, full of feeling yet almost shorn of meaning. While all five of the stories that make up this slim book are masterful, "The Boys" whips the reader most mercilessly. A teenager, Rene, hangs out at his neighbor's because no one notices him at home (though the neighbors don't notice him either). One of the many strangers who visit Rene's mother after dark suddenly declares himself the boy's father. Of course he may not be Rene's father, we'll never know. When the neighbor family sells their one good-looking son to a pimp or slave trader, Rene longs to be sold also. Rene scrutinizes himself and realizes he has nothing anyone would buy:

It was true, he had [youth], all that, but was youth without beauty, without money, without talent, emaciated youth in a tin-roofed hut hemmed in almost to the threshold by endless fields of corn that did not belong to Rene's mother, was youth unnoticed by all not the equivalent of the grimmest and loneliest old age?

Rene's inward look at his misery and disgrace sears. While its emotional core is evident, his self-appraisal is nonetheless unadorned with sentimentality, scarcely with compassion. When the boy gets what he wished for, the face or identity of the person in the car with him is undisclosed, kept behind a screen by the willful author, and before we know it, the boy too has passed the perimeter of the story and it's over.

NDiaye populates All My Friends with characters in extremes of desperate longing or metallic guardedness, these two poles attracting each other. They trudge along roads or sit in buses. It is for other people to have nice clothes, elegant furniture, and carefree laughter. Even the doctor and the teacher are unsure of their bourgeois comfort, and they certainly lack what we might think of as bourgeois security. NDiaye was raised in France by her white French mother, and did not meet her Senegalese father until she was fifteen. When her novel Three Strong Women won the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award, in 2009, much was made of her being the first black woman so honored. Her writing cannot be categorized as ethnic or immigrant literature, though class, status and wealth may be the concerns that spread their anxious fog over many of her characters. Other characters have a concern with skin, but it's gone beyond or through or around skin as marker of race. The teacher in the title story compares a friend's beautifully upholstered pale green leather chair to the skin of the maid/pupil. In the same story the maid leans over a banister and drops something, which the teacher describes as a youthful human skin falling over his feet. Skin is both political, social, metaphorical, and inner, psychological, arcane. NDiaye belongs to the French tradition of Nouveau Roman, and this seems to be a bit mystifying to those who expect a certain something from her African name. Asked in an interview why she thought she won the Prix Goncourt, she replied that it was probably because of the writing, and because the stories are touching. Faced with this condescending question—did she not win the prize because her book was the best?—she answers with deadpan irony; her stories can hardly be described as touching.

All My Friends reads like one anxiety dream after another, when you've parked the car in the wrong place, your sister hates you, you've lost all your money, and the reasons for these disgraces are opaque, buried, inconclusive, or written in a script you can't make out. NDiaye creates a portable unease that slips from one story to the next, never losing its force, or its accusatory tone—You don't see anything? You ought to see something. To be so addressed does not touch the reader so much as sting or slap. And it opens our eyes, at least for that little bit, something flits across the pane of our consciousness, a boy, a car, a shoe. You ought to see something. You ought to.

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TheCollagist — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:44:03 +0000

River of Dust By Virginia Pye Unbridled Books May 2013 978-1609530938

River of Dust

By Virginia Pye

Unbridled Books
May 2013
978-1609530938

Shortly before labor began, Mai Lin offered sacrifices to the gods and the family ancestors, although her young mistress couldn't even recall her grandmother's grandmother's name. Mistress Grace moaned with miserable, slow pains for many hours. Mai Lin gave her a special mixture of teas proven to move things along faster. She made Grace alternately bear down over a metal tub and then walk back and forth along the upstairs hall to bring forth the baby inside. The mistress had several baths, although she said that doctors in her country would warn against it. Ignorant doctors like Hemingway claimed that germs could swim up the woman's canal and infect the unborn child, something that Mai Lin plainly knew was false. The baby would come down the river to be born, so what was the harm of it getting wet beforehand?

In midmorning, the Reverend poked his head into his wife's bedroom and inquired after her health. Luckily, Mistress Grace was lying down at the time, and she quickly shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep. Mai Lin had been instructed not to mention that labor had begun, so he quickly left.

Later in the afternoon, he stopped by again, and this time the situation was more difficult to hide. Grace sat upon her chaise and paused between pacing. The pungent smell of the ointment Mai Lin had rubbed onto her belly was hard to miss, but Mai Lin's mistress merely smiled between gritted teeth.

"Mistress is better today," Mai Lin said to the Reverend, which was not a lie, for her cough had improved.

"Her complexion does appear brighter," he commented.

Mai Lin thought it remarkable that he didn't guess that the sweat on her brow and over her rosy cheeks was the first strain of the birth process. But then again, the Reverend had always been blind.

"Mai Lin, see that Doc Hemingway is called immediately if she goes into labor," he said before returning to his study on the first floor.

Mai Lin knew she should obey, but her mistress's eyes flew open, and she said, "Don't you dare. This is my baby. Lock the door."

Mai Lin did as she was told, lit the lamp, and rubbed more oils on her mistress's back and belly. There was much to be done, and having a man in the room would have disturbed the effort. She lit the sacred incense to welcome a new life into the world and handed her mistress pillows to scream into, for one loud yell would carry into the courtyard, and the Reverend would be knocking in no time with Doc Hemingway at his heels.

It was a grave responsibility, but Mai Lin had birthed more babies than she could count. She concentrated with all her being on every sign given off by her mistress's body. She sensed the pain as if it were her own. As labor progressed, her own body rose and fell with the contractions, and she told herself that this would be her last birth. She was getting too old for this. Still, she kept a hand on Grace so she could judge the intensity of the spasms. When it became too much and Mai Lin couldn't stand it any longer, she shouted again for her mistress to push.

In the hour of the rooster, of the fourteenth day in the month December, in the second year of the Emperor Pu-Yi, in the reign of the Qing Dynasty, Grace finally let out a howl that echoed off the compound walls and cascaded into the dirt road and plains beyond. Mai Lin knew that the donkeys and horses in their stalls perked up their ears at the sound. Ahcho, smoking his pipe in the back alley, tipped his head to the side and offered a worried smile. The Reverend, seated at the teak desk in his library, set down the fountain pen with which he had been scribbling his Sunday sermon and finally allowed himself to grasp that his child had been born.

But at a moment like this, Mai Lin didn't have time for distracting thoughts. The baby was in her hands. She set its wet and squirming body on a soft pillow and cut the cord at the navel with a pair of pinking shears. Then she applied a special poultice of ash, mud, and dung to the umbilicus. In the way that she knew best, she lifted the child in her arms, pressed it against her shoulder, and slapped the tiny back ten times. A yowl issued forth. She wiped the infant perfunctorily, wrapped it, and placed it in her mistress's arms.

"Your daughter," she said.

Grace, as red-faced as the baby and wet with perspiration, held her child against her cheek and wept. "My girl, my precious, precious girl," she said.

Mai Lin knew this was only the beginning, for now she must help her young mistress to breast-feed, which the master did not approve of and so would take place only in private. Stupid Westerners, Mai Lin thought. The Reverend would change his mind when he understood that animal milk was virtually impossible to come by now.

After wiping the floor and tossing the birth cloths into the metal tub, Mai Lin returned to her mistress's bedside. The baby had begun to root, and Mai Lin took this for a good sign. This girl baby with her pinched and demanding face was not faint of heart.

Mai Lin took her mistress's wrist between her fingers and felt for her vital signs, which, unlike the child's, now appeared to be startlingly weak. She studied Grace's suddenly pale face. Only moments before the mother had seemed robust, but her skin was turning gray and chalky, her eyes glazed. Mai Lin pressed lightly again on her thin wrist but could not hear the strong current of life that she was seeking.

Mai Lin swooped up the baby and placed her in a bed of blankets on the floor. She pulled back the sheet that covered her mistress's lower half. A pool of blood glistened in the lamplight between her legs. Grace began to writhe in pain. After several moments of examining the expelled matter, Mai Lin did not feel all that she wanted to feel. Something wasn't right.

Grace tossed and moaned, clearly in as strong pain now as she had experienced during actual labor. Mai Lin had no choice but to clamber up onto the bed. Despite her thick, long skirts and awkward legs that had little strength anymore, she nonetheless made herself sit astride her mistress.

Grace's head was tipped back, her mouth gaping, her eyes open and apparently unseeing. She did not seem to notice that Mai Lin now sat atop her, but she would notice it in the next moment. For Mai Lin used all her tiny body's strength, all her years of accumulated wisdom and power, and thrust her weight steadily and forcefully into her open palms. She pressed down upon her mistress's engorged uterus.

Grace let out a scream that made her birth sounds seem like whispers. This was a cry of pain the likes of which Mai Lin had rarely heard before, and she had heard a great deal in her many years. Although Grace appeared terribly frail, the sound that came out of her had the fury and desperation of a tiger caught in a trap. Her mistress's weak arms flailed, and her bony fists struck Mai Lin repeatedly with surprising force. Mai Lin did not flinch or give up. She took in a second large breath and pressed all her weight down again. Grace's eyes opened wider, and she stared at Mai Lin in disbelief.

"You're trying to kill me!" she screamed.

Mai Lin shook her head at the foolish young woman but couldn't take the time to argue or explain. Instead, she reared up one final time and composed all her strength into a single long push. As Grace's screams and accusations slammed against the plaster walls and her hands battered the old woman's ribs, Mai Lin began to hear frantic pounding at the bedroom door.

The Reverend shouted, "Unhand my wife. Let me in, you old crone."

The final effort was done. Mai Lin had nothing left in her, and she hoped the same was true of her mistress. She lost her balance and fell forward onto Grace's sweat-soaked body in her simple white chemise. Mai Lin cared about the foolish girl in spite of herself. Then she regained her composure and carefully slid off the bed. She stood on unsteady legs as pain shot through her bent back, but she chose to ignore it.

Instead, she pulled the sheet away again and carefully inspected the bloody evidence, but still remained skeptical. She lifted the lamp and had no choice but to reach up inside her mistress. Mistress Grace writhed and arched her back, but Mai Lin was quick and sure. Her fingers finally grasped the cause. She pulled it out and did not flinch at the sight, nor was she made queasy, but instead, like a true scientist, Mai Lin carefully studied the proof in her hands until she felt certain she had found the offending remains of the birth sack.

The knocking on the bedroom door had continued all this time, and the Reverend's threats grew steadily more hysterical. Mai Lin heard several male voices now discussing in what manner to break down the door. She whipped her long braid off her shoulder, adjusted her many skirts and sashes and pouches. She cleaned the blood from her hands on the bedsheet and finally hobbled to the door. She opened it slowly and stepped aside.

The Reverend charged into the room, shouting and pointing at her. But at the sight of his wife lying exhausted in a pool of blood, he stopped his nonsense and threw himself forward to hug her and hold her weak hand. Doc Hemingway entered with less fanfare but more purpose. He held his stethoscope out and set down his black bag, the sight of which for some reason made Mai Lin laugh as she flopped down upon the chaise longue.

The Reverend turned to her and shouted, "What have you done to my wife?"

Mai Lin let out a sigh and pointed to the baby on the pillows. The blind Reverend had not even noticed his child. He finally grew quiet as he went to the baby and crouched beside her. Mai Lin let out a disgusted sound as she rose and went to the awkward father who didn't even know how to pick up his own offspring. She swooped up the baby in the swaddling clothes and placed her in her father's arms.

"A boy?" he asked.

She waved a hand at him, the dried blood on her fingers catching the light. "Be grateful that both your girls are alive."

Mai Lin could see a slight wash of disappointment flit over the Reverend's face before he determined to beam. She stepped away. The silly man had no idea of his good fortune.

At the bedside, she stood opposite Doc Hemingway.

"How did you save her?" he asked Mai Lin.

"The only way."

The Doctor leaned across Grace's sleeping body, waiting for more, but Mai Lin was too tired to talk to ignorant people.

"I will send over my maid to clean this up right away. You have done more than enough for one evening," the doctor said.

With the baby held in his stiff arms, the Reverend stepped forward and asked Hemingway, "Is my wife going to be all right?"

"It appears she hemorrhaged after the birth. Is that right, Mai Lin?"

Mai Lin nodded from her seat nearby and reached into one of her pouches for more betel quid.

"A very dangerous condition," Doc Hemingway explained. "I have lost several patients in this way. You are extremely lucky she had such good care."

The Reverend looked across at Mai Lin, and the man of so many words seemed to have forgotten them all. She held out her arms, and he came forward and gratefully handed her the baby.

"Your wife will be terribly weak," Doc Hemingway said as the Reverend rejoined him at bedside. "She has lost a great deal of blood, and it will take her months to recover. She will require bed rest and good sustenance, which will certainly be a challenge, but I believe Mai Lin will know best how to handle her condition."

The Reverend looked across at the old amah, and from his lips finally came an outpouring of gratitude. Mai Lin didn't care about the words that tumbled from the Reverend. As he continued to thank her, she lifted the baby to her shoulder and patted it in the only proper way.

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TheCollagist — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:39:26 +0000

Girls I Know By Douglas Trevor SixOneSeven Books May 2013 978-0983150534

Girls I Know

By Douglas Trevor

SixOneSeven Books
May 2013
978-0983150534

When Walt Steadman was six, his mother began to act a little strangely. First he noticed his grandparents noticing. Then little things began to catch his attention, although he dismissed them with the nonchalance of a child. So his mother's right eye had begun to flicker regularly, like a candle. But that was fine because it didn't seem to bother her. And then he saw her left hand on the arm of the couch one night, shaking like a branch in the wind. Well, that was weird, but so what?

One morning, while he was eating breakfast with his grandparents and his mother was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, she collapsed. Even now, twenty-three years later, he could hear the sound of her body crashing against the sink, then falling back onto the floor. He could see the look in his grandmother's face: shock and fear. His grandfather swooped up his daughter and the three of them drove her to Fletcher Allen Hospital, where she underwent a battery of tests that went on for days. Walt assumed that the tests were going to make his mom feel better. He went to school that week as he always did. But that Friday afternoon, when he stepped out of the playground and saw his grandfather standing across the street, waiting to walk home with him, he knew that his mother hadn't gotten better: that something was wrong, and his grandfather had come to tell him what it was.

The walk from Walt's elementary school to their home in South Burlington took about fifteen minutes. They passed several groves of trees, since swallowed up by housing developments, and a bunch of modest homes just like theirs: single-story, aluminum-sided residences with big American sedans parked in their driveways. As they walked, Mr. Steadman held his grandson's hand. He asked Walt if he had ever heard of something called multiple sclerosis. Walt hadn't. His grandfather explained that it was a disease that made the cells in someone's brain and spinal cord have a hard time talking to each other. "When they can't talk," Andrew Steadman added, "then your body has a hard time working right. And it seems..." And here he choked up, which was so unlike him that Walt looked up into his face with outright fear. His grandfather kept everything on an even keel at home. He had served in World War Two and sometimes at night he would tell Walt stories about the battles he had been in. In every account, when Walt asked if he had ever been afraid, his grandfather always answered yes, which confused him. "Then how did you make it through, if you were scared?" Walt would ask. And his grandfather would lean toward him, as if he were sharing a secret. "You'd be amazed, Walter, at what you can accomplish when you're scared. The thing is, you can't be afraid of being afraid, because everyone is afraid at one time or another. You have to remind yourself that it's okay to be scared of stuff, so that when you are frightened, you don't freeze up. There's no shame in being afraid, remember that."

That day, Andrew Steadman looked scared. He started over again. "And it seems that there are two kinds of multiple sclerosis. One is called relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. The other is called progressive multiple sclerosis. The doctors think your mom might have the second kind. That means, over time, she might have a hard time, using her body and even her brain. But we'll help her, won't we?" And Walt remembered nodding his head vigorously and his grandfather patting him on the back. "Of course we will. We'll help her, and we'll help each other as well."

Months went by. Marion Steadman was on medication. She was seeing a specialist. Her eye still fluttered, but her hand didn't seem to shake as much. Everything went more or less back to normal, except Walt's mom had to reduce her hours at the Fletcher Free Library, where she worked as a librarian. Then, one Saturday, they were getting ready to go have a picnic on Grand Isle and Marion Steadman called for her mother from her bedroom. She had lain down to rest and couldn't get up. They called an ambulance. The following week, the doctors changed their diagnosis; Marion had relapsing-remitting MS, marked by pronounced attacks that left permanent neurological damage. Less than a year later, after another attack, she no longer had the use of her legs.

Walt didn't remember having a direct response to his mother's illness. Instead, he remembered his reaction when his grandfather built a ramp up to the front door of their house in order to accommodate his mom's wheelchair. Walt sat in the window and watched him work, refusing to help him set the posts or nail down the boards. "The ramp is so ugly," he remembered complaining to his grandmother. "No one else has one. It isn't fair." About this time, late one afternoon, Jason Rutovski called him over from across the street. Jason was a delinquent and a bully. His clothes were two sizes too small and he always had bruises up and down his arms from his dad, who beat him sometimes with a belt in their driveway. Jason was just a year older than Walt but he towered over him. Once Walt had made his way over to his weedy yard, Jason glared down at him, his nose wrinkled in disgust, as if the whole Steadman home had begun to give off some kind of odor. "Is your mom, is she—like—retarded now?" he asked Walt. Walt didn't know if having MS and being retarded was the same thing, he feared it might be, so in response he tried to punch Jason in the face, which was a big mistake. He got the crap beaten out of him.

From then on, just as his grandfather had said would happen, the three of them cared for his mother together. They helped get her dressed in the morning. They stretched her limbs in the afternoon. They bathed her at night. And slowly, as the years went by and the light seemed to go out in Marion's eyes, they discussed her condition less and less. There was no getting better with MS. The doctors had all told them that, but it took a few years for the harsh truth of the statement to sink in. And as Marion got worse, the Steadman financial situation also declined. Eleanor retired from teaching to care for her daughter, so they were living on one high school teacher's salary instead of two. Their medical bills, what Medicaid didn't cover, were extraordinary. They had to buy a van to accommodate Marion's wheelchair. Before they had watched their spending like everyone else did in their neighborhood. Now, Walt began to sense, they were distinctly frugal. As a young boy, not having a father had struck Walt as unfair and cruel at moments, but at those moments he had always reminded himself that he had his grandfather. Now that their lack of money was palpable, Walt thought more and more about his unknown dad, but in a different way from before. What they needed more than anything was to have another breadwinner around. They needed more help than they had.

To save money, Walt lived at home the first two years that he was a student at the University of Vermont. He majored in English. His selection of a major seemed less like a choice than just a natural outgrowth of his home life, where—every evening—Walt's grandmother read poems to his mother in the living room while Walt and his grandfather played checkers or Yahtzee at the kitchen table. As a boy, he never saw himself as someone who loved verse. Instead, he saw himself as a kid with a horrible TV situation: an old set with temperamental rabbit ears that only picked up the local ABC affiliate and PBS. He read because he had no other entertainment options, and he read a lot of poems because books of poetry were everywhere in the house, especially the poetry of Robert Frost. Frost was his grandmother's favorite writer.

All through high school, Walt had been reminded again and again of just how different his family situation was from those of his friends: not just that he had a sick mom and a missing dad and that he lived with his grandparents, but that his grandfather taught at South Burlington High, where he himself was a student. It wasn't until he went to college that Walt began to realize that his fondness—what he was more likely to call at that time his comfort—with poetry wasn't the only thing that he had acquired from his unusual upbringing. As a kid, he had grown up listening to his grandfather's jazz records. At parties, he knew when a Nirvana song was playing but he didn't listen to Nirvana himself; he listened to Miles Davis. So he knew a lot about jazz. And he knew how to care for someone with MS, how to maneuver a body whose muscles had atrophied. At the same time, he didn't know how to ski or play tennis. When his junior-year roommates complained about the road trips they had been forced to take with their parents, driving to Yellowstone, to Orlando, to the Grand Canyon, Walt remained silent in his bunk bed. The farthest the Steadmans had ventured from Burlington was Willsboro Bay, on the other side of Lake Champlain. Through his childhood and early adulthood, through all the efforts he and his grandparents made to help Marion Steadman make it through her life, Walt came away believing that there wasn't much one person could do for another person to change that person's life. Granted, you could try, you could make gestures, but they were just that in the end—gestures. Of course Walt couldn't be sure, but he always suspected that his mother's condition had made him more self- involved than he might otherwise have been and a lot more fatalistic, even if his fatalism was hidden beneath a veneer of cheerfulness.

Halfway through his senior year in college, Walt decided to apply to PhD programs in English. He told the professors he approached for letters of recommendation that he wanted to continue his studies of twentieth-century American poetry, which was true, but just as much, he wanted to stay in school. College was, for him, like the Early Bird Café, the restaurant where he had breakfast each morning, before he had discovered the Early Bird Café.

He applied to more than a dozen programs, including, for the hell of it, Harvard. When his application there was actually accepted, Walt immediately jumped at the opportunity to move down to Cambridge, even though the aid package presented to him seemed a little paltry. After matriculating, he learned that his acceptance had really been intended as a gentle rejection; no one in the English Department had expected him to accept such a small stipend to study and live in such an expensive place. No one imagined just how little money a kid like him would be willing to take in order to have an excuse to leave Burlington.

So at twenty-three, he left his hometown with no intention of ever returning, except for the occasional holiday and summer vacation. And his days suddenly became all about what he wanted to do, or didn't want to do, which was wonderful. He lived on campus his first year, then up in Porter Square his second. Once his coursework and exams were completed, however, and he came face to face with the terrifying task of trying to write a dissertation, Walt took his job as a superintendent and moved across the Charles River to Boston, the city where most of his favorite poets had either lived or passed through at one time or another. Walt loved living in Boston, although with this love came more than a little guilt. By then his mother needed more help than ever. His grandfather had passed away back in 1997. There was even less money than before. And there were even more tests that his mother required: more physical therapy, more medication. His grandmother handled everything, never complaining, never asking Walt to move back home. And Walt, in return, tried not to think about Burlington. He told himself to take nothing for granted because he knew he was lucky to have what he did and that life was both very predictable and very unpredictable. On the one hand, he could collapse one morning in his bathroom and never be the same. On the other hand, at some point his grandmother would pass away—she would be eighty in a little more than a year—and then he would have to take care of his mother. So until that happened, he told himself to try to savor every day he spent as a resident of Boston.

After leaving the Early Bird that morning, Walt decided to go to the Museum of Fine Arts himself. Walt loved museums but only during the week, when they were quiet and still. He stared for a while at the Sargent painting he had mentioned to Flora in the café, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit." He looked at paintings by Matisse and Hockney and Warhol and imagined that they were being displayed not in a museum, but rather in a private home to which he had access but did not own. He imagined himself, that is, in proximity to wealth, but not in direct possession of it: that would have strained believability too much. When he picked up his dilapidated jacket at the coat check, he apologized to the girl behind the counter for taking up one of her hangers. She laughed. Then Walt headed to the Back Bay on the T, stopped by his apartment to grab his Norton Anthology of Poetry, and took a nice, roundabout walk to Floyd's Cleaners, where he sat through his five-hour shift. He chatted with the same customers he saw every few days, read poems by John Crowe Ransom and Richard Wright and John Berryman, cracked some jokes with complete strangers—some of which went over, some of which didn't—and then headed home at five.

Since he always had a good breakfast, and was on a tight budget, Walt never ate lunch, and because he never ate lunch, he was always starving in the early evening. There was a small deli across from his building and Walt usually swung by and bought a burrito and a Coke before going inside to his basement studio, but that night his routine was disrupted by the sight of a girl in the half-light, hunched over the doorknob of his building. He knew the silhouettes of all of his tenants and this girl wasn't a tenant. If she had been, he would have waited in the shadows until she had entered the building. Instead, he crossed the street and made his way toward her.

She was wearing a black wool skirt and black leggings, with big, clunky black boots on her feet. Walt noticed the boots when the girl stepped back and gave the doorknob a swift kick. The next thing he noticed was her parka, which was silver colored, puffy, and stylish. She was a good-looking girl, wearing an expensive outfit and acting miffed. In the Back Bay, she fit right in.

"Can I help you?" he called up to her.

She stepped back onto the top step of the building's entrance and turned toward him. "This lock is a piece of shit."

"Yeah, you can't put the key all the way in; if you do it won't catch." Walt skipped up the steps, slipped around her, and withdrew the key ever so slightly from the lock. Then he turned it with ease. "See?"

"Cool, thanks. One of my movers figured it out this morning but he didn't tell me the trick. The super was supposed to meet us here but he didn't show."

Walt straightened his posture. Well, this was unfortunate. He had assumed she was staying with someone, not that she was a new tenant. New tenants he avoided as much as possible, since they always had tons of questions and entirely too many logistical needs. Also, he preferred for new arrivals to discover over time that he wasn't the most responsible superintendent, by which point he hoped that his reputation as a nice, affable guy would make his flakiness more forgivable.

"That's my bad. I'm the super."

She held herself awkwardly, her head out over her neck, her torso pivoted on her hips, while she frowned at him. "Walt... Sneadman?"

"Steadman, yeah. I'm so sorry." She unwrapped a Tootsie Pop from her parka and put it in her mouth. "Didn't you get the message I left on your machine?" "The thing about my answering machine is," he ruffled his hair as he leaned back against the side of the building in an attempt to appear a little more boyish and a little less like a superintendent, "the erase button is really close to the play button and sometimes, you know... you can hit the one instead of the other." She smirked at him. "Maybe you should think about making the jump to voicemail." She held out her hand. "Ginger Newton." Walt tucked his book under his arm while they shook hands. The name meant nothing to him, at least not the first name. The last name made him think a little, because of the township. "Newton?" She nodded. Walt cleared his throat. "Whose place did you buy?"

By you he meant her parents, of course. By you he named her as rich and young, probably younger than all the other occupants in the building, but not that much younger than some of them.

"No one's. I'm staying in Blair Montgomery's apartment for the semester. That's what my message explained."

"Oh, okay." He liked how she said semester, as if the academic calendar applied to everyone. She had the whole thing down: the combination of presumptuousness and lurking displeasure, the great outfit, the tortured posture. And she was really attractive, he could see now, with the streetlight right above them, if in a more than slightly clichéd way. Her complexion was very light, her nose straight, with perfectly symmetrical, thin nostrils, and her eyes were a deep blue. She also had a mass of tangled blonde hair piled on her head and set in place by an intricate system of barrettes and pins, and a pointed chin toward which her entire face was drawn.

"You know Blair Montgomery, right?"

"Yeah, I know Blair. Good guy. He's in Brussels for a few months. He's working for Microsoft on the antitrust suit the EU has brought against them."

"Is he?" Walt nodded. "He sent me his key and said I could just show up. I didn't think I'd have a problem with the lock, or getting ahold of you." Ginger sucked her Tootsie Pop.

"How'd you swing the place? Are you and Blair related?"

She laughed. Her laugh was louder than he expected; it startled him. "Am I related to Blair Montgomery? That's hilarious. No, he's sort of a family friend. Actually I barely know him; he's, like, twice my age." Walt winced. "I decided I needed to get out of my dorm, do something a little different. I have this idea, for a project..." She stopped herself and pointed out at the street, toward a black Lexus parked in front of a fire hydrant. "Is there anywhere I can park my car?"

"Yeah, you have a spot in back."

"Cool." She bit down on the remaining candy, removed the cardboard stick from her mouth, and threw it in the bank of snow next to the stone staircase on which she stood. In the spring, Walt thought, once the snow has thawed, I'll have to pick that up.

-

TheCollagist — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:32:16 +0000

+1 By Katherine Bucknell Odyssey Editions April 2013

+1

By Katherine Bucknell

Odyssey Editions
April 2013

It was a Roman Catholic wedding. Alice felt this made it more serious, and they all knew it was more of a commitment on Leo's part. He had attended classes with Lisa, spent hours with priests in Lake Forest and in New York, and even gone to mass. Alice knew he would have agreed to anything that was asked of him in order to marry her. Rituals, disciplines, initiations.

She felt suddenly chilly as she walked with Richard into the dim, unfamiliar church. The organ was playing softly. The pews stretching in front of them were full of hats, dark suits, clean shaves, muted voices. White flowers and ribbons abounded on high brass pedestals and hung from twisted Romanesque columns. There were mosaics and richly colored paintings high up on the pale green walls; shining gold halos and wings spread onto the ceiling. The air smelled like talcum powder.

As they stood in the arched doorway, she clutched Richard's arm and looked for a sign that she could understand.

Up the aisle came Dick, in a nearly black tail coat and striped grey pants. He seemed taller and thinner than ever, his face white, his eyes flinty. His wiry black hair looked as if it had been raked and varnished. He held out his left arm to his mother, turning elegantly with his heels together, waiting. Alice thought it was like starting a figure in a square dance. She raised an eyebrow at Richard, letting go. Then Dick, with Richard following, walked her slowly all the way up to the second pew on the right where Alice saw her mother in a dark red wool dress with her diamond brooch, already seated. The front pew was empty.

Richard insisted that Alice sit on the aisle so that she would be able to see everything. He put his hands firmly on her hips and stepped past her, then slid along the polished wooden seat between her and Mrs. Thompson. When Alice sat down, he took her hand and squeezed it.

"You look really marvellous," he whispered.

"I think the boys are all hung over," she whispered back.

"They'll cope," said Richard. "They're young and they're healthy. Don't worry. Just enjoy it. This is a very special day."

She laid her little black handbag on her lap and sat up straight, eyes forward, looking at the altar. It was covered in an ornate white openwork cloth on which stood two huge, gold-colored candelabra. Just like a table being laid for a meal, she thought.

Now Gloria, Mother of the Bride, was escorted up the aisle by Lisa's twenty-year-old brother, Tim.

Tim was red-faced and smiling broadly. His skin looked pimply and chafed; there were red spots on his jaw line and flakes of white down his neck. His blonde hair looked stiff, and it shone in hard clumps, like matted straw. He swung his mother around toward her seat with enthusiasm so that she had to shuffle her tiny feet quickly.

Alice saw Gloria snatch at the pew to steady herself. Flower petals from the arrangement attached to the end of the pew drifted onto the stone floor. Gloria settled gingerly in her seat on the aisle, looking hollow-eyed and indignant. Her skin and her hair were auburn colored, and she was freckled all over with tiny mauve spots. She was wearing emerald green silk and a mink stole and hat. Heirlooms, according to Lisa.

"Supposedly, my grandmother wore them at my parents' wedding," Lisa had laughed, her thick blond hair shimmering with it. "Mom likes things to go just the way they've always gone. Otherwise, she freaks out."

Alice smiled at Gloria, hoping Gloria would smile back. For better or for worse, she thought, we're going to be connected now. To Gloria, and Ned, and Tim. Tim who seems to find all this a little boring, reflected Alice.

Tim's unbuttoned morning coat flapped open across his broad middle as he spun past her back up the aisle, and Alice thought she saw the bulge of a flask in his pants pocket.

When she looked up again, there was Leo, standing right in front of the altar. His familiar sunny smile, his glowing blue eyes, his thin golden hair all topping the white tie, the starched shirt front, the formal vest and morning coat of a man about to be married. Pinned to his left lapel was a white blossom, stephanotis, for good luck. Dick, Best Man, darker, taller, and in every way more restrained, stood beside him.

They took up an identical wide stance, shifting their feet as if to find an exact foothold, clasping their left hands in their right at the groin, lifting their chins to look out over the congregation, all the way to the back of the church.

They don't even see me here with their father, thought Alice; they are looking right past us. For what comes next. She had a sudden sensation of water running over her. She lifted her hands a little in the air thinking she could catch it. The water was time. It had already passed. I never felt it going, she thought. What should I have done? Why didn't I see? And then she thought, But it's so obvious. Now, it's so obvious that it would come to this.

The priest sailed in on a tide of altar boys like a galleon fully set. His glittering white vestments swayed as he walked, and the gold crucifix dived and plunged up the aisle before him.

Then, the organ struck up more loudly and a little faster, and Alice smiled again, unable to resist the mounting excitement. She twisted around in the pew, feeling the hard seat through her thin dress.

Tom was first up the aisle, escorting Lisa's minute red-headed cousin in luminous orange-yellow silk.

Tom's walk was stately and slow, as though someone had put weights in his shoes or he were walking under water. Alice tried not to giggle. His long brown curls were slicked back soberly. There were dark shadows under his brown eyes. His expression was deathly still. Alice caught his eye, glimmered, turned away. She knew that he had stayed up most of the night with his older brothers. All through lunch, she had wondered what they had let him drink. But she had managed not to ask.

The cousin looked like an autumn rose on Tom's arm. Her full-blown skirt rustled and swayed like a bell around her fairy calves. Her high platform sandals were gold. As they drew closer, Alice could see the wreath of miniature orange and yellow roses on her red hair.

Then came Tim and another cousin, taller than Tim, with her large, beautifully manicured hand clenched knowingly on Tim's careless forearm, guiding him, insisting.

Such different figures in the same clothes, thought Alice. And she felt that she saw the shapes and colors stretching and changing before her very eyes. A slim brown-haired boy metamorphosing into a stocky, fair young man; an elfin redhead transformed into a bold brunette. Each filled the same role, thought Alice, Member of the Wedding Party. We are all in Gloria's hands. It doesn't matter where we come from or what we go to afterwards, as long as we play our part in the ritual.

Alice's forearms prickled. She shivered. Richard silently laid his warm, black-haired hand on her thigh.

Now Lisa's college roommate, the Maid of Honor, processed step by solemn step to join the others. The bell of her orange-yellow skirt swayed just like the two bridesmaids'; the same wreath of roses bloomed on her upswept dark hair; but she carried a bigger bouquet in her hands, and she walked unescorted. It seemed to Alice like a sacrifice, walking in alone. The Maid of Honor took up her place by the altar, and turned her head, alert, as if she were ready to offer support, counsel.

Despite everything, Alice was not ready. She felt shocked when she heard the organ strike up "Here Comes the Bride." She gave a little gasp and touched her cheeks with her hands.

There was the vision at the back of the church, the veiled beauty on her father's arm, floating towards them in quivering white tulle, orchids spilling to her front hem, a train of lace behind.

Half visible through the long veil, Lisa's figure was a slender hourglass tightly cased in silk, the womanly shape that walks down the aisle forever in the wedding of so many dreams.

Watching Ned's face, Alice could see the flicker of emotion at the top of each cheek, as if tears might break free from the corners of his eyes and run riot over his robust smile.

After they passed between the front pews, Alice rounded on Gloria, unexpectedly looking her full in the face. And she saw satisfaction kindle in Gloria's spectral blue eyes.

Ned gave up his daughter to be married, then, scarlet-faced under his tuft of white hair, manoeuvred his portly figure in beside Gloria.

Alice watched it all through a haze of incense and tears. She concentrated intently on every word spoken, whispered, or sung, as if she could memorize it, as if she could make the ceremony last forever. But it ran away from her like the waters of her life. The readings. The rings. The vows. The homily.

Except when Leo and Lisa kneeled down on the embroidered pillows to pray and to be blessed.

That's marriage, Alice thought, as if she saw the institution crystallized before her eyes. That awkward, voluntary posture of humility and hope. It pierced her heart. How old-fashioned, she thought. How innocent.

Each time they kneeled, the Maid of Honor fussed over Lisa's train, pulling it away from the heels of her shoes before Leo helped Lisa up again.

Sometimes, there is nobody there to help, Alice thought. And she felt a terrible pain at the difficulties they faced. A child grows up, pairs off. But it's not a culmination. It's a beginning. Leo and Lisa have the world all before them, she thought.

Suddenly, around the church, she saw couples, some old and frail, side by side, attached to each other in the shadowy pews. Each couple is renewed by this public avowal, thought Alice. And she wanted to say to Leo and Lisa, We all have to come back here to the wedding ceremony and go through it again so that we can try to remember what we promised each other. You will have to come back, too. And kneel again.

The altar boys, like half-sized surpliced waiters, fetched and carried oil, wine, bread. The congregation filled the aisles, then silently melted away again. It was all so strange to Alice, so mysterious. She didn't take communion. She didn't know how. She watched Richard take it, or at least she watched the broad back of his smoothly fitting dark blue suit, his elbows flickering as he made the sign of the cross, the grey and black coils of his hair wandering over his brilliant white shirt collar as he bowed his head and lifted it. He remained just a little taller than any of the boys, heavier now, but still somehow glamorous, thought Alice, with his erect bearing, his precise grooming that she loved because it spoke more of duty than personal vanity, his unshakeable self-confidence. It came to Richard as easily as good manners, to smile and engage with everyone and everything, as if only good might result.

She knew that he took communion because Leo was taking it, and this made her glad. In all the years of her marriage, she had never seen Richard take communion. It was a whole world of his that she had never entered—St. Mark's Church, the Armenian sisters. Left behind long before we even met, she thought. Would I have converted to what he believed, wondered Alice, if he had asked me?

She glanced at her mother, sitting serenely alone. Everything about Mrs. Thompson's tall figure was set at an angle, the splayed joints of her hands, the razored layers of her white hair, her square, sharp-nosed face. Mom doesn't wonder what they're up to. She's separated herself completely from that kind of anxiety. She's so sure of who she is, what she believes.

How does Leo know how to take communion? Alice pictured the kitchen table at home, the five of them gathered around it at supper, after school. The center of my world, she thought. Was it the center of theirs? Was it ever?

When the priest at last permitted the bride and groom to kiss, Alice thought her knees might buckle.

"God, I'm so relieved!" she said to Richard. "The ceremony was so--scary!"

Richard turned to her in surprise, his brown eyes warm with pleasure. Then he laughed. He took her face in both his hands and gave her a quick kiss on the mouth. "You're just not used to all the incense and muttering! You like a nice clean-cut Protestant service. But look at them, just look--" and he flung a hand toward Leo and Lisa, their arms still laced around one another at the altar, their bodies softly meshed, their faces transfigured.

"That crazy intoxicated feeling," he said in a tone of playful excitement that seemed to pretend he and Alice were abetting a scandal, "allowed out in public right here in the church! Announcing itself as an official social intention. It needs a bit of ceremony, don't you think? Otherwise, it might burn us all up! You don't want to be too close to that without some religious supervision."

Alice laughed, "Is that what you think?"

"I recognize what I see in that young couple. That's love. It deserves all honors and all sacraments." He looked at Alice with a rogueish smile, as if to say, You recognize it too, don't you? Admit it.

"Yes," she said out loud, feeling suddenly shy.

"It's a beautiful thing to see. And to share." He put his arm around her waist, drawing her into an intimate, familiar posture, their flesh immediate. Then, loosening his hold only a little, he jostled her towards the end of the pew as the bride and groom now walked past them smiling, waving, followed by their wedding party, two by two.

The receiving line at the country club was the last vestige of order that Gloria managed to impose on the celebration.

Tim was hardly through the line before he began to rearrange place cards on the elaborately laid round dinner tables. Alice watched him on the far side of the dance floor. He pocketed a card or two from each table, then circled around again, replacing them according to his own design. Once or twice, he paused to study the names, then gave his pile a little shuffle. Alice stood her ground between Leo and Richard in the receiving line, smiling, holding out her hand to strangers, kissing old friends.

"You think Tim is okay?" she asked Dick when he walked up to take Lisa and Leo away for photographs.

"He's more than okay," laughed Dick. "I hope he makes it through his speech! You and Dad better come join us pretty soon. We need you in some of these pictures."

"I want a photograph of your mother in this irresistible dress," said Richard.

Dick smiled back at them as he walked away. "I'll try to care of it Dad. All the ushers think she looks totally hot."

"All the ushers?" said Alice half under her breath. "Tom and Tim? I'm older than both of them combined!"

"Well, don't forget Dick," teased Richard. "I'm sure you can count the Best Man."

After the last hand had been shaken and Alice stood beside Gloria smiling for the photographer, she leaned down close to Gloria's big pearl earring and said. "I see Tim was making some last minute changes to the seating plan."

Gloria kept smiling. "You mean at the dinner tables?"

"Well, I think so—was he doing that for you?"

"Oh, no. He wasn't doing anything for me. It's always best not to pay too much attention to anything Timothy does. He likes pranks. Boys are all the same. But then, you've got three, so I expect you know boys. A force for chaos. When I was a young mother, I used to lay down the law. Now I just leave them to it."

"Right." said Alice. There must be a master list, she thought. And someone will help people find their seats.

As they walked back toward the party, Gloria took from her navy blue silk purse a gold box the size of a fifty-cent piece. She held the box in her right hand and pressed up on the lid with the back of her dark pink thumbnail until it snapped open. "I've given up smoking," she said. "It's become socially unacceptable."

Alice suddenly recognized in her voice the smoker's rasp. That's where the gravelly sound comes from, she thought. Gloria's a smoker.

"So now I take these when I need to." Gloria pinched a little round blue pill between her long nails. It had a V cut through it. "Maybe one of the boys will get me something to wash it down with."

But she didn't wait to ask the boys. She laid the pill on her brown tongue and flicked it back between her lips like a snake. Alice saw her throat swell as she swallowed it.

"There," said Gloria. "Things are all set. It's going to be a lovely party." Gloria's mouth spread wide in a peaceful smile. She didn't show her teeth. Her eyelids spread the same way, horizontally, and her blue eyes nearly disappeared.

"You're next to Ned. And of course, I'm next to Richard. That's how we've always done it here. Don't worry about a thing."

A waiter passed with a tray of filled champagne flutes.

"Cheers," said Gloria huskily, lifting a flute slowly in the air, then quaffing deeply.

"Cheers," responded Alice, taking a glass.

Then Gloria turned and walked away before Alice could take a sip.

Alice watched her sleepwalk to her table. Gloria identified her seat without consulting any place cards. She subsided into it, slapped her purse down on her plate, and held her empty champagne glass in the air. Another waiter stopped and filled it. Alice was awed.

Better find my own seat, she thought. She pictured a life preserver rather than a chair. Then she thought, What about the kids?

She threaded her way among the tables, trying to read the opulent calligraphy on the place cards. At last, she took a sip of her champagne. Then she opened her little black bag, resolutely took out her glasses, and put them on, glancing around self-consciously.

There I am. She spotted her name almost right away. And there's Tim, she noticed, on my left. And Bill Foster. On my right.

She stood with her hands on the back of her gold filigree chair, considering. So which one of them isn't supposed to be next to me, she wondered? Gloria said, Next to Ned. Ned would have me on his right. So—Tim must have swapped his own card with his father's. Or was it Bill's card Tim had swapped?

She began to look for Ned's card. It wasn't on the table at all. Alice remembered that Tim had wandered from table to table with his trail of mischief. Maybe he moved my card from another table, she thought, rather than moving Ned's.

But as she hunted among the other tables, reading card after card, she realized that if she moved any of them, she might only be mixing things up further. I can't put anything back if I don't know where it was to begin with.

For every name to which she could attach a face, she tried to picture a tête à tête. Would these two like to spend the evening beside one another? Talking, eating, drinking, perhaps dancing together? And what about the third person, on the other side? Is that a fit, too? The names and the faces moved around inside her head, smiling, laughing, shouting, questioning.

Oh, god, she thought. Lisa and her mother and Leo must already have spent hours on this. Discussing each person. All the suitable pairings. I don't even recognize some of these names, she said to herself, even if I did stand in that receiving line.

Then she decided to take a leaf out of Gloria's book. Don't worry about a thing.

It hardly matters where anyone sits, Alice told herself. It's a wedding. Every guest is a family member or close friend. Long-known, loved, wanted. At the very least, they all have Lisa and Leo in common.

I'll just sit here, where luck has put me. Or maybe where Tim has put me. If it's really important, I can move. Ned will come and get me. Or when we're about to sit down, I'll ask Tim what he did with my place card. Maybe he'll remember.

She took off her glasses and put them back inside her purse. She laid the purse beside her plate.

It was a long time before all the wedding guests gathered at their seats. Talk filled the room and loud laughter. Again and again among the milling, buzzing crowd, Alice saw Lisa bend forward to embrace or be embraced, her veil spilling around her soft bare shoulders. Again and again, she saw Leo put out his hand for shaking, circle someone's back with his arm, slap the back fondly. The bride and groom inched around the room. Dick urged them toward their places, gesturing, exhorting. Older people began to sit down. Little plates of smoked salmon and brown bread were flung onto each place like frisbees, and the white-jacketed waiters paced around impatiently, waiting to bring the main course.

Alice eyed her salmon hungrily. She pulled a crust off the bread and nibbled it. She saw Richard standing near Gloria's chair. She waved at him but she thought that he didn't see her. He didn't wave back. He sat down and inclined his head gallantly toward Gloria's, talking. She didn't see Ned.

Tom arrived at her table, carrying a glass of champagne. He raised it toward his mother, smiling. "You got the kids' table. Cool, Mom. Lisa told me we'd have Gran."

His bridesmaid partner sat next to Tom. And Bill Foster, Dick's godfather, sat between the bridesmaid and Alice. Across the table were two other young cousins of Lisa's.

"So great of you to fly out, Bill," said Alice.

"Wouldn't miss this for anything," said Bill. "Leo and Lisa tying the knot. And you in that dress, Alice! You don't look like anybody's mother, I can tell you that!"

Alice flushed; she wasn't getting used to the compliments. "Lisa helped me choose it. How's Barbara? Where's she sitting?"

There was a little silence. Bill glanced at Tom. Tom was turned away, talking to the cousins. "Barbara didn't come, Alice."

"That's too bad. What is it—marrying off the next generation reminds her you're a decade older than she is?" Alice grinned in friendly sympathy. "I hope she didn't mind you leaving her alone for the weekend?"

"We've split, Alice. I thought you knew."

Now it was Alice who looked at Tom. Then she looked back at Bill and spoke more solemnly. "I didn't know. I'm sorry to hear it."

He shrugged. With a pale, long-fingered hand, he flipped his lank brown hair around on the top of his head and then smoothed it down again. "So that's my news. Tell me what you've been up to."

"I'm back at school."

"Oh, yeah." Bill nodded. "Richard told me. What was it—nursing?"

Alice laughed. "Nursing the psyche."

"But you did nursing before, didn't you?"

"It was something I thought about once, a long time ago."

Bill turned and looked at her more closely, peeling something away between them. "I used to know everything about you, Al. So maybe now I only remember what I used to know."

Alice smiled. "I hadn't thought about it for years," she said. "Nursing would have been good for me. I guess it was the hours. It must have looked too demanding. Or maybe that's what Dad thought."

"Remind me how you ended up in that New York job? Where you met Richard?"

"Kids. I majored in psychology. Then I went into kids' publishing. Picture books, you know?"

"So now we've covered my two worst subjects," said Bill. "Marriage and kids. How's your tennis?"

"My tennis is good."

"I saw that you're still playing for the team."

"I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest one out there now," said Alice. "Ever since my mom had to quit."

Bill guffawed. "God, your mom. I can remember her slaughtering me once or twice when I was fifteen or sixteen! I think she was trying to warn me to watch my step with her daughter! She must have been on to us, Al."

Alice laughed, brushing it aside. "Mom grew up with men like you, Bill."

"It's great that you're still in shape, Al."

"You, too. Richard says you always beat him."

"Richard's not bad. He works too hard. Doesn't play enough. But I don't have to tell you that. I'll bet you beat him, too."

"No," said Alice uncertainly. "I can't remember the last time I beat him."

Bill laughed. "You're succumbing to the slice meister. Don't let him do that to you! You have a beautiful game, strong and true and steady. If you really wanted to beat him, you would! I love Richard, but ask your boys. He spins, he slices, and his line calls are not exactly generous. Not always gentlemanly." Bill coughed. "I guess that's not a nice thing to say about someone, is it? Especially not to his wife. But it's something I've always known about Richard. Something you just have to accept."

Alice felt embarrassed.

"I guess you know?" Bill went on gently.

She didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry, Alice." He looked thoughtful. "My marriage produced absolutely nothing and now it's over. Yours produced absolutely everything, and it's still going strong. So who can argue with that? I shouldn't be raising any questions about your husband, in tennis, or in life. Tell you what. When we get home, let's hit a few like we used to. I'll give you some tips, hey? Be fun to help you out. Call me when you're done with all this. When you have time."

"Okay. Sure. I'll call you."

They were half way through the chicken and cream sauce before Tim weaved in to take his seat. He leaned heavily on the table with both hands, poising his big rump over his little gold chair and backing towards it. The table top creaked and the cutlery jumped. Bill and Tom both leaped up, gripping the table in their hands to steady it.

Tim smacked down with a sigh, waving his arms at them. "Sit down, sit down!" he cried. "Relax."

He pushed away his chicken and took two pieces of crumpled lined paper out of one of his pockets. He began to unfold the paper on the pink table cloth. "Have to finish writing my speech," he said. His hands went back into his pockets, rummaging. "Anyone have a pen?"

No one did. So Tim hoisted himself out of his chair and went in search of one.

By the time he came back again, his raspberry sorbet had made a puddle on his plate. Affectionate, crowd-pleasing toasts were being offered by the fathers of the bride and groom. Ned drew laughter with his tales of Lisa's precocious sporting talent and her love of dressing up. Richard was equally sentimental, and he only half disguised it with drier wit.

"Everything today looks like a photo spread in a magazine. I don't want to spoil the effect with embarrassing realities that might have prevented this picture perfect moment in Leo's life—romantic rejections, acne, bullying, broken ankles, lap tops dropped in swimming pools. Thank god he has an unquenchably glad disposition and a genius for happiness—they led him to Lisa and won her heart. Lisa knows how to style absolutely anything and anyone, but I think we can all agree that the physical perfection of this occasion in fact expresses an authentic interior bond, a match, as perfect and profound as love matches can be.

"Today we celebrate inner and outer worlds in harmony. John Donne wrote a very beautiful poem describing how two bodies and two souls become one, how they see the world through a single set of eyes, how they share the mysteries of the spirit and the knowledge of the flesh, as true lovers should. It's called 'The Extasie.'

Richard has read this poem to me sometimes, thought Alice, listening. How unexpected to hear it now.

"Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string…."

The poem created an atmosphere both sober and optimistic, erotic and joyful. It captured the seriousness of love, its fearfulness and intensity. And to Alice it also sounded flirtatious.

"Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke."

The wedding guests caught their breath, fell silent, exhaled.

Richard turned to the bride and groom, bowing quickly, almost imperceptibly, from the hips, smiling benevolently. "The two of you may sometimes sense, like Voltaire's Candide, that this really is not the best of all possible worlds. Yet it behooves you, in the privilege of your love and your upbringing, to live as though you innocently believe that it is. You are two of the lucky ones, because you have found each other."

He has such a gift for this kind of moment, thought Alice proudly. Finding the words. Showing how it's part of a long train of similar moments, part of something that matters. Lots of people have had the same experiences, she thought. They've thought about them, written about them. Richard knows what everyone said and what they felt; he draws on it so easily that he makes us feel as if we know, too. As if we know exactly what we are doing. That we're not just imitating what others have done. That it belongs to us. That we're creating it now, fulfilling it.

Richard raised his glass, beaming with good spirits. "And how lucky we are to share the day on which these two make a public institution of their love for one another. A voluntary bond is the strongest kind, and we are all strengthened and inspired by witnessing it and participating in it."

Chairs scraped as some of the men stood up; glasses clinked as they were lifted.

"Leo and Lisa," said Richard. It raced around the room in a syncopated relay of whispers and shouts. There was a silence as the wedding guests sipped and swallowed, then solemnity and attentiveness dissolved into a general murmuring and rustling. The band began to play.

"Can you stop the music?" Tim asked of nobody in particular.

Alice leaned toward him sympathetically. "The bride and groom are just starting their dance," she said.

Tim looked at her blankly, the lids drooping vaguely over his watery grey-blue eyes.

"So it might not be a great idea to stop the music," she explained.

"What about my toast?" asked Tim.

"Well," said Alice. "The only people who made toasts were your dad and Leo's dad. In fact, the Best Man didn't even make a toast. So—maybe you shouldn't worry about it?" She called across the table, "Tom? You and Dick aren't making toasts, are you?"

Tom shook his head. Then he narrowed his eyes at his mother, enunciating loudly and slowly. "Just the fathers, Mom. That's what was—decided. Nobody else, Mom."

Alice got it. She nodded. She gave a thumbs-up between herself and Bill so that Tom could see her and Tim couldn't.

She leaned towards Tim. "What were you going to say in your toast? I'd like to hear? Why don't you tell me?"

"Well you know the old joke, don't you?"

"Which old joke?"

"The one about faking?"

"No," said Alice. "I don't know the old joke about faking."

"So." Tim leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. He levered his beefy hands up and down in the air. "So what's the difference between a man and a woman?"

The band played "You're the Top." Leo was dancing with Gloria now, and Ned was dancing with Lisa.

Bill repeated patiently, "What's the difference between a man and a woman?"

Tim nodded confidentially at Bill. Then he smiled at him. "You know the joke?"

"Don't think so," said Bill.

"Goes like this. A woman can fake an orgasm, but a man can fake a whole relationship."

Alice laughed out loud. Nobody else did.

"She gets it," said Tim, opening a palm toward her.

Alice was very red in the face. "It's a great joke," she said. "It's very funny."

"I know," said Tim. "So why don't they stop the music?"

She put a hand on Tim's arm. "Maybe it's a little colorful, Tim, for, you know, for a wedding."

"But that's not the whole toast."

"I'm sure it isn't," said Alice.

"That's just the beginning."

Bill pushed back his chair and stood up. "Would you like to dance, Alice?"

She felt a little startled. "Okay. Thank you." But she didn't get up.

Tim said, raising his voice, "Lisa and Leo are the real thing. There's nothing fake about them."

"Hear, hear," said Bill noncommittally.

"So the point of my toast is that they will have a lot of sons. It's a toast to fertility. To the rites of love. Tonight's their night."

"Of course," said Alice. But she wasn't sure whether she really understood.

Tim said, "You know all about it Mrs. Gregory. You've got three sons. Anybody could tell just by looking at you. And how you dress and everything. Holy moly!"

Now Richard was dancing with Lisa. "The Street Where You Live." Dick was dancing with the Maid of Honor. Leo handed off Gloria to Ned and walked over to ask his mother to dance.

"Mom? You ready?" he stood by her chair, holding out his hand. Alice smiled and stood up, feeling relieved. Leo so often had that effect on her, a feeling of relief. "Sorry, Bill," she said. "I hope you won't think I'm rude? If I dance with the groom?"

"Of course not. Maybe later." Bill sat down again.

Suddenly, Tim launched himself at Leo, knocking his chair over backwards. "Sons, man, just like your dad." He flexed his first two fingers in the air and licked his lips. "You can do it, man. Real fucking. Not just with your dick, man. You make my sister happy and you'll have sons. She deserves it. She's the most beautiful girl there ever was. If you don't give her an orgasm, you're going to get all girls. And the whole world will know. We'll all be watching."

Bill was up again, angry. "That's enough, young man. You don't talk that way in front of ladies."

Leo threw his arms around Tim, hugging him, pushing him down into Alice's chair. "Okay, Tim. I think you should just sit right back down." His voice was soft and patient. "Just take it easy."

"Is there somewhere we can take him?" asked Bill, "And get him on a sofa? Or can I drive him home?"

"It's okay, Uncle Bill. We've got a driver arranged," said Leo. He looked over at Tom. "Hey, bro, can you get Dick? And tell him to find the manager, that guy Gary? Be cool. Don't rush or anything, and don't shout."

Tom walked off in a subdued hurry, like a child on a pool deck who's been ordered not to run. Alice watched him go, thinking, Tim and Tom. Chaos and order.

Leo said, "Don't let Lisa see. Mom? Make sure? Go stand near the dance floor? Please? Uncle Bill can stay here with me. Okay, Uncle Bill?"

She turned to them, trying to catch her breath. Bill was nodding gravely.

"Of course," Alice said.

"I don't want Lisa to get upset, Mom. This should be a perfect day. And we're all going to dance. That's what she wants."

"Don't worry, Leo. Everything will be fine." But she was really thinking about Tim. It sounded completely gross, what he had said, she thought. But it's love. The boy can't stand to let go of his sister, and he just wants everything to work out differently. That's why he rearranged the place cards. Deep inside, he wants to be the groom, instead of Leo. Even without her glasses on, it was perfectly clear to Alice, how much lay just beneath the surface, like some kind of mirror image.

Romance at the Abandoned Mine

TheCollagist — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:21:15 +0000

Melissa Cundieff-Pexa

Dear X,

           You and I divide in secret
like zygotes. Outside my window,
forsythia beg to catch a fledgling’s drop.
Their yellow buds poke the air with hurt,
and God exits their faces
with hurt sighs.

X,


                         Sometimes, even God wants to say yes
before he says no.

Darling X,

             I remember it this way:
Light hardened
to bone and spread our bodies
across the landscape. Pines
and ghosts welcomed us
to their winter’s stage. Even the air
smoked, unfiltered. Black
calcified branches seduced
into crossing the sky’s cold.
Every tree there, giant-tall,
gazed through us

where we walked as invisibles
down the stone altars and ruinous stairs.

Oh X:


             I would have taken my clothes off then
if you had asked me to. I would
have done almost anything for you.

And for the place, maybe, itself.
I would have even said yes
to being a ghost
if it had meant staying there, if it had meant
walking through walls
of light rigid with desire and haunting’s
old pleasure: to outlive a moment

by not leaving it.

December Light in Arizona

TheCollagist — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:19:57 +0000

Melissa Cundieff-Pexa

We were in the cemetery again,
a fever rising in us like some bright
horizon. The headstone names around us
fooled you into thinking we weren’t so
dangerously alone, filling ourselves
with red wine and the cruel, heavy sound
of truck horns. I said the highway looked
for all the world like bone, an arm outstretched
forever across the dust. Our eyes burned
from looking. The dark nooks of our ears filled
with birdsong, then silence, then, remember?
You fell into one of those empty graves
and almost broke with your perfect body
the sky’s horrendous, vacant mirror.

Impasse

TheCollagist — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:19:00 +0000

Melissa Cundieff-Pexa

Because the rain today is baptismal,
I’ll confide I’ve dreamed of sin

all the way into morning
when light opens enough
to wail the clouds. I confess also,
the dream was physical, my stirring,
godless, until my body

looked more mountain than body,
craggy as the sky’s sad queen, and gray
like water’s eyes that will
the black and tangled lines of rain
to upset their cat’s cradle.

In this dream, we were pressing ourselves
together, like bookend geodes
slaked by history’s tumult,
drunk and tipped against the weight
of the present. You touched me
where you shouldn’t have,
and regarding you,

I touched back, at first evolving
the dark air, then, our strangeness.
We found it all erotic as silhouette;
I answered your dream mouth
with my dreaming body.
The next morning, it almost seemed to me

that waking might entail the end
of us, the beginning of forgetting.

Certainly, now, you and I
have been baptized almost to drowning,
to a private storm, and this dark-irised sky

gardens the prize of our bodies:

I think of my dream’s fine, brief hell,
that, as much as I should have then,
I couldn’t forget or unlove anything
I had done and would do again.