Semblances
Even More Short Stories
S. P. Elledge
for my friends
The Stories
1. Translator's Foreword
2. Big Blue '62
3. The Theft
4. Love Is Love Is Love Is
5. Larger Than Life
6. White Child
7. Horses
8. How To Write
9. The Park
10. The Wreck
11. Elephant Hunt
12. The Secret Life of the World
13. Edgell and Me
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD
You have bought it, kind reader, and now this book in your hands is yours. Or maybe you stole it—pulled it surreptitiously from the clean, fluorescent-lit racks of the galleria's bookstore and slipped it under your grimy raincoat. Then again, you may have been guided by some unaccountable force to the bins in back of the used bookstore downtown (the one you never dared enter before), where you blew dust from the cover and cracked these pages open, breathing in the smell of mold and must—the smell of time. However you came by it, here I am before you now. Hello up there! No introductions necessary.
Remember, this is your book now. Go ahead and inscribe your name on the title page—cross out the former owner's if you like—and read on; I am sure we are going to become quite good friends.
You've noted the foreign name on the spine and did not recognize it—likely someone well-known in his own country, you told yourself, someone long-dead or maybe painting pots in an asylum. Now, flip back a few leaves to the title page, past the "Other Books By," the untranslatable dedication, and sundry publication data (those things will mean nothing to you)—see, there I am in the (far too) small print: "Translated By"—what does that mean, really? Are not all books translations, in a sense? Translations from the writer's unconscious language, if you will. Translations of an artificial dream. Are not all translations merely substitutions for the real thing, a bridge to communicate across, to be sure, but really of subordinate value in appraising the work? I beg to differ. I will not become lost in translation. I am not just translating our trusted foreign author, you see—I am translating yourself, as well.
Oh, stop—I hear you scoffing. Pretentious, pseudo-metaphysical, and what could I possibly mean? I know you, all right. Still, you may read on without fear. Why shouldn't a book know its reader just as surely as a reader knows his book? We are dependent upon one another. I do not exist except when you lay your eyes upon these pages; you do not exist to me except when I imagine you sitting there, thumb pressed into the bulk of the book, lamp brought down low so your head casts no shadow across these pages. Again I say, Hello up there! Yet you are my figment as much as I am yours, as much as God is ours.
Can't you just see me? Here in my dim, cluttered study, surrounded by scattered manuscripts and the peculiar original editions of our esteemed foreign author (see, even the alphabet is different, like a secret code!), a little tired from a late and greasy supper, a little hazy from the special cordials my housekeeper brought because of some forgotten, pathetic anniversary. Well, that's wrong. You'll have to try harder than that. But I see you, I see you, all right—leaning back in your uneasy chair, feet propped on a worn hassock, sipping that domestic port-wine you can't stomach but buy because it's cheap. I could go on—but why bother? I know you; we've known each other for a couple of pages now; that's more than many married couples ever discover of one another, believe me. And as for our beloved unknown famous author and his monolingual editors: They have no idea what I am really transforming this book into; they do not speak our language and their trust is in me alone. For all they know—or you know—these stories could be from first to last my own inventions. What a clever way for a frustrated writer (all translators are) to finagle himself into print! But that would be too complicated after all and not a little immoral, would it not? You'll just have to abide in me as our poor "well-known in his own country" author does. What power I have over the both of you!
And what power you, dear, kind reader, have over me—for at least half this book's readers I presume will skip this odd-looking hors d'oeuvre in their gormandizing pursuit of a more rewarding entrée, banishing me into limbo without the least bit of compunction. Certainly only now that a few of you have finished the rest of the book are you slinking back to read my careful foreword—but look at me, look at me; I exist just as solidly now as if I had been there all along guiding your thoughts... and of course I was.
"Allow me to translate." Isn't that a bit like asking to play ghost, to shun the spotlight for the sake of the star? I am supposed to be humble, to defer, to become invisible. My name is seldom—almost never!—mentioned in the reviews. There'll be no picture of me on the dust-jacket (it's gone now, is it? pity, it was quite lovely), no blurbs about my history or past triumphs, no self-satisfaction on my part—I am merely the servant, carrying in heavy dishes, these splendid stories, and I am not to interfere with master's repast. God, but you all bore me!
So you've set the book aside for a while or skipped ahead to the first story—very well, then; you've come back, anyway. That story was not quite what you expected, was it? A little on the peculiar side, a shortcut down an alley you did not really want to enter. Admit it—I fascinate you as much as if not more than any of these fabrications that follow. I am the real thing, either a joker or a lunatic. You can believe in me as you cannot Our Author's scribbled scriptures. So you return to me, come back into the fold, as it were, with a sheepish look about you; a few bitter swallows, and you've given up on those precious, hand-colored, hand-sewn little fictions, haven't you? Perhaps you will have faith in me because I know both languages—not the author's and ours alone, but that of the "real" world we share as well as our poor writer's. A go-between between worlds I am, mercurial lackey of gods and men. I am supposed to haul these uncatalogued creatures up from the depths and give them names, to put into words we both can understand what were another man's nightmares in another man's language, am I not? All this heart-wrenching labor, and you would be surprised how little I am paid.
My little girl is lame. My wife is sleeping with the next-door neighbor. I have six months to live. Have I shocked you? Have I overstepped my bounds? Do you really believe me? But aren't these statements just as valid as the ones I create on the author's behalf later? Like you I have my problems and I want someone to believe them, and in believing them, share them, and in sharing them, disperse and reduce them, make them less threatening, less real. If you are going to bring your entire history to this book why shouldn't I introduce a small part of mine to you? We have met here at last on these pages: The paths of our lives have been leading to this lonely intersection on a barren plain, and now you are my true, my trusted, my only friend! What ever you do now you cannot deny that you ever knew me between the covers of this book, and it is a great responsibility—though no less than the great responsibility I have been shouldered with in presenting our author to you. It is best we both carry the weight, and I may add, the great guilt inherent in reading a book which has already demanded so much of any author, may even indeed contribute to his or her eventual breakdown. Are not Poe's readers, for example, at least partially culpable for sending him to his death in a gutter, a few coins in his pockets? Didn't we aim that despondent playwright's gun, tighten a thousand failed poets' nooses? We demand thrilling final pages. And aren't all we who read this book's stories to blame for forcing our imaginary author to write more and more and more until (let's use our tired imaginations) he literally bled onto the pages in his madhouse? Think of any number of tragic authors, and how we are always asking for endless translations from their visions, yes, and their nightmares.
But I am not writing a critical overview of the artist's role in society; neither am I interested in delegating blame or credit like a teacher with a boxful of stars and demerits; I am merely asking you, friend, to refrain from putting this book down or returning it to the bookseller's: "Defective foreword," you might say. You owe me this much now we are friends. Instead, I want you to turn to a random page—page forty-six, for example, and reconsider this monster we have assembled from our memories and our prejudices. (Storyteller, who shall tell your story?) You'll see that the man carrying the box which he thinks contains the glazed almond cake but is really filled with nothing but straw, the man "with a questionable mustache," was described as "clean-shaven as a priest" not twenty pages back. Is this a slip on the author's part—or have I planted this land-mine waiting for you to step on it? ...All right, then, maybe you will forgive him that. But what about the "hat like an emu's flattened egg" on page sixty? Is that merely a bad description—or a bad translation? Were such mistakes intended or are all the translator's own intentions mistakes? I'll let you decide. My little girl is lame. My wife is—well, haven't I a right to be angry? Like you, I work too hard for too little. I accept my assignments and then I am expected to dissolve myself within another man's personality. I'll tell you something: I met this author of ours once. I was a graduate student in Baku or Belgrade, it does not matter; this man was on one of those panels composed of other such refined gentlemen and ladies, I was nothing, he was something. "Do you write from 'real life'?" I asked when the firing squad was aimed at me. He stared at me, eyes swimming like minnows behind aquarium-thick lenses, fists whitening on the table. "You insult me, sir!" was the first of many invectives. And then he laughed, the other esteemed ladies and gentlemen laughed, the whole room, the whole world was laughing. That night I hung myself from the pipes running through my lonely cellar room. Or maybe I drew a knife from my jerkin and went for his miserable heart.
It's for you to decide, kind, kind, most kind reader! Just as the author invents his tales, I invent him, just as he dreams me, I dream his tales, and we all try to catch one another on this carousel. Ah, but don't think I can't see you out there smirking, scratching your soft dyspeptic belly, just about to close the book! Wait, first, turn to the fifth story—that child on the street who gives the hero a tender loving frown—she is mine, all mine! And likewise that sudden passion which invades the crippled seamstress's meager thoughts in the last story, and that ball that mysteriously skips down the esplanade in another, that plum-colored sky in yet another—all over I have left my thumb prints Can you believe the liar when he tells you he lies? This translation is my prison; my god has damned me.
Hello up there! I said, Are you listening to me? Do you care? Kind reader! You may now be my enemy as much as he is mine, but read on, read on...
BIG BLUE '62
Matinee
What she'd really like to be doing, instead of sitting alone with hands folded on her lap in this movie theater in this godforsaken mall, is to be riding in the broad back seat of that big blue 1962 Saturn Esquire sedan her parents owned during their best years. The back seat was springy and plush as a couch, there were deep aluminum ashtrays in the armrests (which were better to prop feet on), recessed buttons which silently raised or lowered the windows, and two illuminated mirrors affixed to the back of the front seat—"lipstick mirrors," her mother had called them. On the way home from a drive-in, falling slowly into luxurious sleep, she watched through the fringe of her eyelashes the back of her parents' heads as they glided in their new car through the empty, starry streets of suburban Phoenix. Father's hair was Brill-Creamed blond, Mother's was V05-sprayed into a perfect bronze-highlighted wonder. (Why then does she, who once was that girl, herself have raven-black hair she has always, always worn swirled up into a sort of seashell?) Through the crack between the front seats she could see a portion of the car's futuristic dashboard, hooded over the multicolored control panel, looking just like a TV spaceship's. How did adults ever make out what all those flashing lights and spinning dials and rocking meters meant? So sophisticated and streamlined, always looking sleek and wet (which it often was, since Father washed it almost every other day), the car was a time machine, although it transported her family noiselessly and bump-free on its cushioned shocks not just through time but space as well: You set foot in it and magic seconds later you'd be in a different place and time—or so it seemed when you invariably fell asleep on its prickly gray (yet warm, comforting) upholstery. It had a glorious clear-throated radio as well—the new FM stereo—and it would be playing softly, Vic Damone or Dean Martin, in the prismatic darkness, her mother whisper-singing along between Bel-Air inhalations. Father's fingers (purple cat's-eye on left pinkie, tarnished wedding band on ring finger) spanned the thick, oversized steering wheel and spun it like a ship's captain; he might be murmuring a thing or two to his wife about the Panavision western they had just seen. The music and smoke and whispers enveloped her like soft, scented rain. And the almost imperceptibly vibrating engine would lull her to sleep on her side while she breathed in and out mother's tobacco and Avon lily-of-the-valley talc, dreaming of cowboys forty feet tall.
Desire
She wants a man who walks a big black dog. She wants a man with a crisp white shirtfront and money in the bank. She wants a man who spit-polishes his shoes and knows when and when not to say please. She wants a man who's won his wings. She wants a man who whispers sweet nothings. She wants a man who shaves with a straight-edge, drives a long quiet coupe, and who could walk a tight-rope through fire and never once stop thinking of her. She wants a man with a cool forehead. Always.
Driving
They've closed all the real big-screen theaters (no more art-deco marquees, no more balcony seats) in the whole county, so which movie, which cinema of the three or four in the city a half-hour's drive from her own town she doesn't care; she just wants to sit in the dark a couple hours, thinking of nothing. No one squeezing her hand or prodding her shoulder or offering up popcorn to the not-so-virgin goddess. No one to have to think up things to say to about the movie as he drives you home and hesitates before the door... A musical—now that might be good. The last musical she saw was an octoplex revival of Paint Your Wagon. She had seen it with her second husband before he was her husband and afterward he had taken off her shoes and told her he loved her. "OK," she had said.
The movie she sees today is How The West Was Won, in an old theater she used to love which has been remodeled, split right down the middle to show twice as many movies to half as many people. She likes How The West Was Won; it's bright and loud and filled with good-looking men and meteoric horses. She's seen it several times before, remembers almost nothing.
Dance
Every night she goes out dancing with her past. Doesn't everyone? Every night she removes the bones of all those she has known from under her bed: these are the scrambled skeletons of lovers, family, friends. It takes half the night just to separate the bones into the right piles and reassemble them. She puts on an easy-listening station, begins the dance. To "The Beautiful Blue Hills of Ohio" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" she and her silent partners waltz and two-step—those who are dead aroused by desire for life, for flesh; those who are alive elsewhere summoned by this freedom from flesh, this flight into dream. They dance until they drop in a xylophone arpeggio, a catacomb heap of ribs and skulls. When she wakes she has a migraine and remembers nothing. Doesn't everyone? She eradicates any trace of the night and the past with the bitter taste of aspirin, then coffee.
Holiday
It is, after all, Memorial Day. Day of Memories. Day of the Dead. In Mexico there would be parades of ghouls and sugared skulls and bloody, weeping statues of saints and patriarchs. (But that's another time of year there, when bronzed leaves are falling here... ) In America there are picnics, reunions, peonies. Her grandmother had always told her peonies wouldn't burst their swollen buds without help from the big black ants which crawl over them. This year their pearly heads hang heavy in her grandmother's garden, already shedding their petals on the grass. The flowers leave a stale scent in the air, like old perfume uncapped after years in the back of mother's vanity. If the wind picks up, there will soon be no more petals, too soon to go this year, as do the lilacs every year. She thinks of her grandmother as she looks out on the remnants of her grandmother's garden from her grandmother's kitchen window, what had been her grandmother's little blue heaven before it was surrounded by gray urban sprawl, here in the middle of the world, in the middle of Ohio.
Not by design is she wearing black, although these days few Americans really associate this holiday with death and dying (no need for thoughts of sad flowers, sad good-byes), but as the checkered flag waving on another summer. Surely some people do as her grandmother did, still plant their plastic wreaths, no words said, but quickly and unceremoniously as possible between barbecue and baseball game. It isn't disrespectful, it's just how everyone she'd grown up with did, too busy concentrating on life to contemplate death. Besides, everyone moves on nowadays and the graves (her own mother's and grandmother's both in Phoenix, although both called themselves Midwesterners until the end) and the memories are left behind in another state, to another time. As she supposes they should be.
Questionnaire
What do we call that bird which pierces its breast to feed its young? And the bird that sings so beautifully from within its burning nest? And the state bird? Was it my grandmother's favorite? How blue were her eyes? My mother's? Was my mother untouched by men before she married my father? How was the west really won? Is there life after Ohio? Were the citizens of Herculaneum first smothered by the ashes or asphyxiated by the smoke? Did she love him or merely come to love him? What constellations, if any, can the average suburban child identify above his or her neighborhood's streetlights? What names did mother call him, in bed, in the middle of the night? Did she cry out when she gave birth to me or was she silent? Does she love me, even now? What bird is it that abandons its eggs in the nest of another? What bird is immortal? And finally, can someone be struck by lightning and survive unharmed?
She pictures the students at their desks, heads bowed as in prayer, scritch-scratching away. Oblivious, praying not to be called. Except one girl—the one who looks like herself at that age, right down to the contemptuous eyebrows—that girl laughing to herself in a corner.
Television
Meanwhile the Jetsons are ricocheting against the curves of space in their bubble-topped space-buggies: It's the glorious future of the early 1960's. She remembers this false prophecy with an ache, a longing. When she was seven she, too, believed in the future, a time when there would be no more space on earth, but no matter when the moon is covered with apartment complexes and cars can fly and pills feed a family of six and robots serve the Tang. Time of course passed much slower then, not just the relative time of children, but adults' time as well—much much slower, although no one noticed or took advantage of this and not a lot was done and things did not change much after all. Ohio had changed, though, the PTA mothers said, but how, where? Looking out through the frame of the kitchen window, past the abandoned pump, out over her rows of young corn, out beyond the ugly new edge of town into the smoke-blue horizon, it is hard to believe time exists even as a concept—at least on a Sunday at the very end of a hot and unremarkable May. No mechanical men or beasts will ever roam this town or the skies above, no machines will plow through Main Street and its oaks, no ceaseless line of cars even to come fill up the roads. Nor clouds to mar the sun or perfection of this last day, hour, minute, everlasting second. Sunday, widow Sunday, headstone of the week, each hour a car in a long slow procession toward the ceremony at sundown... Such thoughts—such thoughts she has! wiping the dishes, rinsing the sponge, folding the dishtowels. Though it is, after all, Memorial Day.
Voices
The words he used made even your fingertips sting, as if the letter were nettles held in the hand. So you burned it up, flushed ashes down the toilet. Consider this: how can people be happy? When they have sinned Holy Roman Catholic sins? All those headaches; it's no wonder. You shouldn't have, you should have, you shouldn't, you should. Do other people ever wonder if it's all a lie, all these broken props, trick water glasses, tromp l'oeil doorways? Have you witnessed the primal scene, screamed the primal scream? When you were an infant you longed to pluck that pretty blue flower on top of the range, but it burned your pretty little fingers. Are all your favorite colors black? Can five minutes be more important than your own grandmother's, mother's, father's death? Yes, it is like... those berries dropped down a long well. Pegasus flying to heaven, to join the constellations, wreath of lilies around his neck. Your husband waving from the cockpit. You, dizzy with abandon. Light years from home, among winged astronauts and cowboys. Ashes falling like snow, children smothering. A color plate in "P-PR" in an old Brittanica. A moon like a yellow cantaloupe splitting itself open on a serrated horizon color of sandstone. Which bird is on your city's crest? Which bird never lives, never dies, is not a bird at all? Can someone hit the lights, please; we'll roll the film.
But more, more than that... giving the self up to sleep and all its mysteries, or to ether and scalpel. Saying: Here, lover, this is me; do, lover, what you will.
Father
Ohio had bored him, his wife, too—all those white wood-frame houses of their mutual childhood, and snow on the jonquils in April—but the west was not the wide-open spaces the cigarette billboards promised it to be. It was only large enough for a desk and chair in a mirror-glass office building housing one of those quasi-governmental firms, the type of place which could be anywhere, where a TV sitcom father would work (a work of irresolute nature neither intriguing nor demanding enough to ask about or be told about at home). In fact, she still casts Danny Thomas or John Forsythe in the easy-going role of her father in her memories of growing up, though her real father had metamorphosed over the years into a man bristly and sun-blistered, bald as a baby and as unpredictable, who—now that her mother was gone—spent all his days in a lounge chair by the pool, listening to a radio that always wavered between stations—a jazz program and a talk show seamed together, just unsettling enough to keep him forever on the edge of sleep but not quite asleep. When she visited, which was less and less often for shorter and shorter time periods, he was usually in that state of semi-wakefulness, conversing softly and drifting away now and then like a patient under hypnosis. She wonders if he ever woke completely after she left or if he remained in saurian stupor throughout the hot days and swift twilight rains. The prescription medicines lined up on the kitchen table seemed to breed among themselves, producing stranger and stranger combinations of tranquilizers and vitamins. Yet he was so relaxed, as happy to see her go as to see her arrive—could death be any more pleasant or still? It was possible to love that tired old man by the blue water but not in the way she had loved and missed that white-shirtfronted, gray-suited man to whom she had once said goodbye, so long daddy, goodbye forever when she had made her ultimate departure from the glimmering and lifeless suburbs of Phoenix.
Dream
Something to do with a cattle rustler or horse thief; perhaps she's a schoolmarm in a straw bonnet. He looks and sings like a young Dean Martin blended with a younger Tony Curtis. She and this rustler are in bed, an old-fashioned iron-frame one, with no mattress, and he's riding her like a bronco buster. This has been going on for some time. All the while he's singing "Goodbye Ol' Paint" in her ear. The strangest thing is how cold he feels, cold as steel, or maybe it's the bare springs pressing into her back or the silver rosary binding her wrists: there is no pleasure, only pain, only blood. He is naked but for his ten-gallon hat and holster. None of this bothers her too much, however, because at the same time he's on top of her she is on the other side of the room, mechanically pumping bullets into his back—although he doesn't die; he's still tearing her hair and biting her shoulders as they floor the accelerator, gallop fast as flight into the sunset, a painted sunset on the side of a frontier store. The dream's closing pun: How much horsepower in a '62 Saturn Esquire? If she had woken then, she would have woken laughing.
Badlands
In the Badlands of western South Dakota she discovered, at the age of fourteen, a glittering trail of dinosaur bones winding through the sandstone minarets and watchtowers and cathedral spires, as if the monsters had slowly disintegrated as they walked their final walk, falling apart bit by bit, the vertebrae slipping off their spinal columns like pearls off an enormous necklace. Nothing seemed even as real as Disneyland here. The Badlands must have always been badlands, barren as the moon, and it was easy to imagine all manner of prehistoric beasts coming here to die, like elephants to their legendary graveyard or saber-toothed lions trapped in the La Brea pits. And even today the ancient retired couples come here after somewhat the same fashion (that is, those who didn't make it to Miami or Phoenix and are vacationing from the Midwest) or so it appeared to a wry and contemptuous teenager who dared to smoke in front of her parents and call them by their Christian names. She had always despised the aged and the invalid, mostly because it was they who sapped her mother's strength in their nursing homes and care centers. Everything old but her grandmother, who held her like a doll and sang sad old funny songs but couldn't speak since her stroke. Of course these couples would be driving their Ramblers or Rumblers on toward the rejuvenating heights of the Black Hills, but why not just drop the bones here, mingle them with some more imposing figures of the past? Age is the prelude to death but death alone does not frighten obstinate fourteen-year-olds. Their bones are still green and pliant. But age, old age, meaning baldness or incontinence or, worse, loss of memory, is something repellent, something fearful. And so on, so on, so on... She followed the signposts toward a distant, sauropod Valhalla (each fragment and petrified footprint under a hard plastic bubble for tourists to identify), view ahead obstructed (all Elysian vistas get obstructed) by a violet-haired woman's wide hips in lime-green stretch slacks bobbing always ahead of her until they came to an abrupt stop… the woman was peering dubiously over a steep but inviting gorge. And though the girl could think of no reason why she should detest in particular this comic old lady, she did; she wanted to push her overboard into oblivion. And she could do it—this thought alone empowered her; no one would see or know. All about her she felt the presence of fangs, spikes, claws from millions of years before—why not do it, why not? No one would do any more than question her at most; it would look like an accident. Murder, the very word, never flashed in her mind, just as revenge never occurs to the child who swipes at the playmate who has stolen her cookie—it would be an almost innocent act, more like a game of dare, a very casual game at that. If, she contemplated, I push that woman off the edge, my life might be quite different from what it would otherwise turn out to be, not so typical, so predictable...
Trivia
The sight and sound of some adolescent girls, especially those who snap their gum and crack their finger joints, can make her wince. She owns six pairs of black patent leather shoes and none of them is the exact right fit. If truth be known, she frequently lies about her age. She has occasional strong yearnings to snitch pomegranates at the grocer's. Card-playing she considers the biggest time-waster of them all; still, there is nothing like a good game of solitaire when you are alone and lonely on a stormy day. She never prays as a good Catholic girl should. When she was twelve she kept a wasp trapped in a preserve jar until it died just because she liked the sound of its buzz. Unlike almost every other person, she is strangely satisfied with her hair and hairstyle. Once she screamed at her mother for incinerating her movie magazines. She loves above all Westerns, musicals, and Copland, "Grand Canyon Suite," that sort of thing. Her first husband looked hard but had the voice of an angel, wasted on rock and roll. For a while he said she could be an artist, and the second husband bought her expensive English watercolor paintboxes, but now she teaches history and some art when she can at the middle school, a job she says she hates but might well love. When it was still possible to talk in such a fashion, she used to say she "had a thing" for ancient Greece and Rome. She has painted a mural copied from Pompeii on the side of her grandmother's old chicken coop but admits it's no good. Her vision is one of dark towns, castles of ash, lost birds singing from the bottoms of wells.
And sometimes she would, instead of the American West, prefer to be wandering on the moor, to be swept away by a hooded shadow on a black charger, to be taken to a certain boudoir of a certain year of the eighteenth century where the scent of tea-roses which have long died and been discarded lingers on in the dusty air and the light is dappled through vines and blinds and the shadowed figure ties fine silk ribbons around each and every digit, every limb and a dozen locks of her hair, about the wrists, ankles, her softly palpitating throat ...
Moon
When they first landed she was pasting pictures of television cowboys and magazine playboys into her birthday scrapbook, not because she really idolized any of these slick-paper men but because something had to fill the scrapbook besides her charcoal drawings of a winged Boucephalos and Alexander; her fingers stuck together with the starchy white paste and her hair was a teenage mess with it. Told to come look at the moon outside, she said, yeah, it just looked like the same old empty moon to her. Besides, it was only half a moon, who could land on that—wouldn't they just fall off? A joke, mother. And, look, you could trace Kennedy's profile in the stars, his new frontier. Back to work, trying to make all the cutouts look like they were at one of those swank Hollywood parties together, except no women allowed. Told to come watch the astronauts doing their space ballet beneath the falling static, she said, yeah so it's a desert—who wants to live in a cold white desert with no horses? Then she went back to cutting and pasting, reminding herself again that life is nothing to waste time or effort trying too much to believe in.
Monologue
Here am I, Mother Mary, hard and ornate as a jewel, avoiding mirrors, stepping on all the cracks, smashing mirrors, walking under ladders, wary as the biggest black cat that ever crossed your path. Waxing, waning, this moon of my heart, treating it like nothing but a pin cushion, this brain stuffed with all these brambles and briars, senseless as a footstool. Combing my raven hair, letting the comb fall, falling to my bed of nails. Polishing memory's bones until they gleam in the starlight. The blessed actress in her widow's weeds, forgetting to laugh, laughing to forget. Drawing a thin silver line of pain down the western breeze. Speaking in that soft sibilant tongue no one taught me at college. Open your umbrella, put your hat on the bed. Here am I, blessed among women, blessed art me. My sorrows are my pearls, my peonies, enough for one hell of a dolorous rosary. All my men will henceforth wear blinders. I shall not fall from grace. My slip is showing. Mary, my mother, watch over my father of the blue grotto. Hail, hail full of grace.
Husbands
The first husband, high-school sweetheart, hometown boynextdoor, is little more than a studio photograph above the sofa, growing paler in the Ohio sunlight every day: well-remembered, however, the clothes he wore, the dark tie, the navy-blue uniform, the silver wings on his lapel. The way he bowed to remove her wet slippers when she'd run across the lawn to say goodbye one more time, the broad blue expanse of his back and the pink, tender, shaven arch of his nape which she loved so dearly to kiss. Not much more is that vivid, except for a hushed death in a desert raid on the dark side of the earth, a military blunder not much talked about then and forgotten now, although it is as real to her as a just-seen movie, as if she had been flown there to witness the burning blue ring of flames like an overseas correspondent. Strange, because she has never been provided with any Pentagon details to furnish the imagined scenario. After fifteen years, still no amount of blue hills and green leaves can compensate for the cold and empty sands of that sudden death.
The second husband looked like a cowhand or an astronaut, too, even though he talked like the city councilman he actually was. He wore oxblood loafers with dimes where the pennies should be (always was the big spender). He whispered what you might call sweet nothings but always made a big deal out of it and expected her to "perform." He liked the rarest of steaks, would probably have eaten it raw if he'd been given half a chance. He was so tall he made ceilings appear to lower with his presence, as if they might close in on you like a vise if you stayed too long in the same room with him. He was an angel to everyone but her. He bought her too many things to make up for his temper. He bought her the palomino she'd always wanted, but he was as timid as a jackrabbit before its hooves. He sold the horse one day without telling her, returned a lot of unworn dresses to the stores, liquidated his emotional assets, as it were. He agreed to the divorce before, it seemed, she had even mentioned the word. He once slapped her in anger and cried in their bedroom for hours but never asked forgiveness. He loved her madly.
Plot
Memorial Day, a small town near the H in OHIO on interstate maps. An empty Sunday to fill, as empty as that grave. And later, a summer and its heat, no respite until the air-conditioned classrooms after Labor Day. Just a day, doing dishes, watching some blurred television out of boredom, driving the car to the lake maybe. Maybe going instead to a movie, a matinee, maybe taking a walk—how will one complicate the minutes to make them go away? You could weave a strand through the day, give yourself a storyline that will hold your own interest, or you can let go the thread... Pick it up again in a room you left twenty years ago, people it with phantoms never alive and never dead. Trace the bouquets on the wallpaper with one moist tongue-licked finger. Hurtle books down the stairwell and scream. Try this: take a day, any day, in your childhood and remember everything, re-feel everything down to the most minute speck of dust, wake with yourself at dawn, walk long-forgotten hallways, greet faces out of scrapbooks; then tear it apart, warn people of their futures, set the whole world on fire...
Cemetery
There is no one she knows buried here (that veteran's flag marks an empty grave, for they never retrieved his body from the shifting, annihilating desert sands), no one anyone knows anymore on this hillock patterned with day lilies and tombstones, enclosed by a rusted fence which years ago burst from the pressure of weeds and yew roots. No histories remain in this cemetery, for low-grade granite dug from the nearest quarry, unlike the imported marble in the newer cemetery on the opposite end of town, doesn't believe in the past, prefers to let time and the elements (the same thing) erase what was once so dutifully recorded of these lives. No one, anyway, has cause to remember them, for unlike the other cemetery this one is forever unmown, unvisited—-no satin sashes, no wreaths, no urns overflowing with peonies, no toy flags save the one on his grave. She, like the granite, prefers it this way, this anonymity. When school is out within a week she can become anonymous again, too; her students will chase each other across her yard, her mail will slow to a standstill, she can spend all day watching the Jetsons travel through non-Einsteinian time if she likes. Or she can drive to the next county to watch a movie and fall fast asleep in the dark.
This is the cemetery she prefers, though her grandfather and his parents, that whole half of the family, are buried in the newer cemetery on the other side of town, the one with regulations that require those marble headstones to be flush with the sod so rider-mowers can make a clean, quick sweep of the hillside. The last time she went there was with her first husband and they got lost in the conformity, never could find her grandfather's grave, so they placed their lilies on some unknown person's grave and walked away more angry than sad. (That was why she knew he'd prefer to buried in the older cemetery, buried by proxy at least.) She was glad that when her father died he'd break tradition and be reduced to ash and bone, placed in an urn on a shelf in a suburban mausoleum next to her mother and her grandmother for an eternity she'd never have to witness. That cemetery out west was too far away, too foreign to care about or visit. As for herself, she wants to be left in the trees like an Indian, picked clean by the birds and lifted up by the branches as they grow, lifted into the heavens.
Memories
Driving her old rusted Karmann Ghia (parting gift from husband two) through the countryside, she expounds mentally on this perhaps well-worn theory: that memories really exist only in the present and not in pristine suspension in the recesses of the brain, and they may have only superficial resemblance to the actual past. As the memory is called forth—or rather, reinvented—the event or image is re-fabricated through some unknown process and hence becomes a new, unique thing in itself. Each consequential memory of the original instant is therefore altered and even eventually unrelated to the original stimuli. Thereby, no such thing as a true memory can exist, only poor reproductions and transformations of the genuine article, like photocopies of photocopies. (For instance, what I recall of that blue stoneware teakettle resting on my stove at home in my kitchen is not that kettle at all—and it is a ghost kitchen in a make-believe house.) This is true even of abstracts. Three times three equals nine but our conception of what amounts to nine of some thing or essence of a thing is as unstable as radium atoms. Well, that may not be the best example, but all pseudo-scientific or quasi-metaphysical hypotheses have their gaping loopholes, all crumble when touched, and I never made it past Philosophy 101.
All right, better perhaps is a more mundane example: I remember my father as a tall, burly man with a ready smile, thick gold rings on every finger and wiry black hair on the back of his broad hands, when in actuality (corroborated by photographic evidence and the testimonials of mutual acquaintances) he was much slimmer, fairer and moodier, with only two rings, his modest wedding band and a class token. (Or am I even wrong about that: on which points do the snapshots and anecdotes concur?) My mother, try as I might, I can only picture in her somber gray nurse's uniform, so stiffly starched it felt like cardboard, with pleats up the back of the blouse and matching steel-gray stockings that ended in a wide elastic band just below the hem of her pleated skirt. However, she wore that particular outfit only during a short stint as a private nurse to some old infirm retired couple from Omaha. Most of her life she wore only cool, clinical whites as she paced the always just-waxed halls of public nursing homes, taking smoking breaks in the restroom like a conniving middle-school girl. First husband memories grow slighter despite constant tending—shy glances at the pep rally were the start, a yellow telegram the last; second husband suits shades of charcoal to blue in a row on the closet rack, one added every six months. A doll he bought me, too, to replace one I'd mentioned losing down a well as a child, had undergone several costume changes in my mind, until now it resembled a horrible, bat-winged toad. Well, there were lots of fresher memories crowding out older ones by the second and you could catch only a few, like melting snowflakes, at a time. As for my grandmother—somehow I won't even allow myself to remember her, though I once did so vividly. It seems, in all these fallible memories, that Phoenix and all its bedroom 'burbs contained little else but shining nursing homes and that my mother never breathed without exhaling gray and blue smoke, my father was the one who wore the suits, the homeroom boy in cowboy boots never got any older. Maybe you lose memories just by conjuring them, like sins left behind in the church confessional.
Naturally these are the most elementary ideas—but here we are: the marquee, the mall, the parking lot... and the western sands await me.
Drugstore
After three days of traveling—though it was nothing but a whir and whiz of sound and vision in that time machine of a car—the family from Phoenix or thereabouts stopped in the middle of a vast dry colorless flatland (an emptiness like outer space itself), opened the sedan's solid heavy doors, and planted its feet onto the soil below like astronauts who have landed on a distant planet. The air was so dry, salty it seemed, it burnt and stung her eyes, and the sun too was dry, too hot of course, and the searing wind kept whipping one sticky tendril of hair into the corner of her mouth, which try as she like, she could not help sucking on. Inside the sprawling barn of a store an air-conditioned blizzard was raging; there was the free iced water which had been advertised for the last several hundred miles between the yellow scallops and red-winged stallions, as if cold water were a rarity in the upper Midwest (which it might possibly be; the green-and-white signs had also informed viewers of other pertinent data, such as mileage to far eastern cities in comparison to the store: "Bangkok 8347 miles, Wall Drug 208 miles") and there were gee-gaws and doo-dads and gee-whizzes of every possible invention, all stamped with "South Dakota" or "Badlands USA" though they came from places 8347 miles away like Bangkok; there were tourists, sightseers, gawkers, rubberneckers from every state and overseas country: the weary, the wounded, the wasted. And she felt the weariest of them all, as if she had walked all the way from Phoenix—an adult enervation in a teenage body that no amount of ice-cold holy water could rectify. Oddly enough, all the children of travelers looked somehow more exhausted than their parents, as if car games of "count the cemeteries" or "look for license plates from all fifty states" were as demanding as school-year homework. In the loudest and brightest corridor a crowd of rangy teenage boys in T-shirts and dungaree cut-offs was haphazardly shooting at mechanized sharpshooters, fifteen cents a round. Curious, she stopped to watch them. A tall, tow-headed kid of about sixteen smiled at her and offered her a try at Pecos Pete, an unshaven outlaw who hee-hawed like a mule and aimed his six-shooter out of a broken saloon window. She bashfully took the rifle, which pivoted on a metal post, in her hands; the boy's own queer dry and light hands—moth-wing hands—lightly spread over her own, guiding her aim. "Come 'n' get me ya yella-belly coward!" the tinny recorded voice of Pecos Pete dared, and she shot him four times in rapid succession through the heart (so fast the boy's hands fluttered off her own in surprise); Pecos Pete fell to his knees and, dying, made the guttural sputtering sound of a wind-up toy winding down.
Sex
It is at its best—this she understands—like falling (not flying), sailing over a canyon wall only to be buoyed up, like Psyche of the myth, by a strong wind smelling of catalpa blossoms after a storm. The first time, yes, with her first husband, it was like that. She'd imagine him Bellerophon, hurtled earthward from her back as she burst into the stars and caught a carousel ride on the zodiac. Other times she felt like a lone lost kite which had slipped from the shy boy's hands, singing higher and higher into an empty western sky. Letting go: that vertiginous sensation of not just falling but leaping over the precipice, diving into the deep end from the high board. Shouting into an elevator shaft, getting deliriously dizzy on the fairgrounds roller coaster as it takes its Niagara plunge, and so on for a thousand metaphors and none as true or good as the real thing. Except maybe hanging on for dearest life, like an Apache brave on a runaway stallion, to the back seat of your father's shiny new rocket-ship '62 sedan as it breaks all limits of speed and barriers of sound and vision, melting into the very substance of the night, soaring off into the metallic face of the moon.
Phoenix
Arizona, the suburbs, morning when everything glistens as if glazed with ice. And the hard gemlike shine of dew on the hoods and roofs of cars. Always the feeling of wetness and damp in the morning. Yet in the southwest it seldom rained—it must have been the lawn sprinklers left on all night—and oh how she hated being left alone in the mornings, in summer, while her mother and father drove off into the gleaming city in their gleaming car. Sometimes she would rush into the street after them, but as if they had been commanded by a catechism God, they never looked back, never said goodbye more than twice. Grandmother was here, too, but she was in a nursing home far from here where her mother was now headed. If Grandmother were still able to speak she'd have demanded to be taken back to her farm in Ohio before it was subdivided into oblivion. She liked to sit with Grandmother and play her old heavy scratchy records of the funny people, but that would have to wait till Saturday. Waiting was all the girl could do, since she was still so new to this new world and none of the kids on the block would play with her. So she would go back inside to the cartoons and crayons or more likely press her forehead against the cool plate-glass of the living room picture window, trying to forget Phoenix and the horror of what it was: its slick wet sheen in the morning, its stick-candy buildings outlined hard against the flat sky like a store display, the endless desert beyond like a vacuum ready to suck you in... and the waxy taste of grownup-lady lipstick on the lips after mother gave you a smoky kiss bye-bye, be a good girl today. She would try hardest of all to forget the dry smell of pine needles and gooey black tar for all the new driveways and car exhaust everywhere, everything adding up to heat, suffocation. Instead she tried to remember Ohio, the Ohio landscape she had left behind before she was even three, just a blue-green blur reflected across passing car windows and the soothing flavor of summer, mown grass and gravel dust above the roads, not much but enough in which to find solace. No matter how tight she squinted her eyes and pressed her head to the glass that was the most she could ever remember before everything faded into painless space, an empty land like that she crossed before her tonsillectomy—in a few moments the anxiety, the sense of abandonment would pass as it would every day and she would be content just having that blue and green bit of Ohio glowing inside her along with the belief that one day she would return—not to find happiness necessarily, but to confirm and amplify memories that lingered.
Today, in Ohio, the air seems thicker than in those dreams she had as a child, thicker and charged not with electricity but a kind of magnetic radiation, and the clouds are lower, the storms weak and sluggish, the leaves of the trees turning wrong-side-out as they always do, revealing not the silver seen elsewhere but yellow, bronzed like old paper, crackling like old paper, too. Someone had told her it was the acid rain, another the fertilizers the crop-dusters use, a third that Ohio had been this way since the dawn of time. Ohio is dying. Ohio is dead, all the PTA mothers who had grown up here and never moved away said; it's one dirty factory town merging into another, all a big parking lot for the factories of Akron and Cincinnati and Toledo and Columbus; if it's clear air and open spaces you need, try Arizona. But she can accept what Ohio gives her of a warm late spring morning, and it is a bounty. Mostly the bounty of silence. All is still for some reason but cloudless like the hiatus before a storm that never quite approaches: She feels like she is walking into the false glimmer of the real world after a movie matinee; at first colors and brightness overwhelm you and then they fade into an inferior version of Technicolor. It is a Sunday, coda of the month, and nothing really to do.
Chance
Walking to the cemetery, thinking: No, life would not have been much different after all if I had pushed that woman—no one would have suspected a model student of fourteen, and extensive analysis would have been sure to alleviate my conscience in time. Another idea—smaller, more random acts have the power to exercise a much more profound influence on the rest of private or public histories. Missing that bus by a half-minute may very well trigger a concatenation which even now might be imminently wreaking misery or bringing joy into my life, situational dominoes knocking down one after another and always me just in front, being shoved along by a kind of manufactured fate. But for that bus I may not have married a second time, but for that boiling kettle I would have stayed in Phoenix, but for an untimely letter I may have been in that four-car pile-up on the freeway. A fall of a leaf onto the wrong head may cause the downfall of a civilization (says some Greek, I suppose) and other things like that... I was up too late again last night, wasn't I?
Lust
She wants a cowboy. Not just any ol' cowpoke, but the kind who might step right out of High Noon or "Gunsmoke," knowing every trick, every trail. How to tie a knot, how to win a schoolmarm's heart. A man who can twirl a lasso and break a horse as easily as he can break that schoolmarm's heart, too. A man who can make a spittoon ring a high "C" from across the saloon. One who'll play sweet teen-angel ballads on a geetar to his horse beneath that great big prairie moon. A guy who could crush a rattler's head under his boot heel without a single good goddamn. Someone who stepped out of a cigarette ad in chaps and spurs, someone she can slap across his craggy, stubbled face. A hero, maybe, but one who wouldn't know it, a seraph who wasn't even aware of the wings.
Mother
Among the dead now, too. The cigarettes had, inhalation after exhalation after inhalation, stealthily sapped her strength over four decades and left her desiccated and curled like a November leaf in her hospital bed: like a leaf—that brief first impression had stayed with her—like a leaf that had slowly spiraled its way from treetop to earth and crumbled away. But a nurse is never as at home as in a hospital and she kept those candy-stripers busy fluffing pillows and drawing the shades and running to sneak her a pack of Bel-Airs until the hour she died. The first fragile impression must then have been wrong; she gained a second wind in that hospital room, gained weight, too, acquired that power which comes with at last realizing what it must feel like to be Head Nurse Mary, queen nurse in control of the whole hive. That was the way, at least, her father described the situation over the long-distance line, after she had returned again to her Ohio classrooms and knew she would only leave again in tears, which could be months but was only a matter of days. The second wind had been her last. Mother had always been a comfort and now, less substantial and less starchy than she had been in life, she was a warmth to pull over herself in the solace of bed on sunless days: she need only concentrate on the large, coarse but careful hands, the stiff uniform-front gone soft in death, the breath of lily-of-the-valley talc and tobacco smoke blown in her face... After musical cowboys at the drive-in, a car ride. The singing radio: "When whippoorwill cry..." The hot scarlet ring of the car's electric cigarette lighter, the illuminated mirrors, the glowing panel. The hum and whir. Sirius, eighty million light years; home, five miles.
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