NELL FREUDENBERGER
It started a few weeks after we separated for good. In this line of work, the symbolism wasn't lost on me. But to call it "flying" might be to misrepresent it. It wasn't as if I were soaring above the housetops, gliding west over the wide boulevards to see the sun setting over the Santa Monica Pier. If it was anything, it was a hovering: a little lift, when I least expected it. You'd think it would have happened when I was feeling most free. Jogging around the tar pits early on a clear morning, which is something I do to get myself out of the house on the very quiet weekends when Jack is with his father. Or even sitting at my computer, as I am now, looking at the flat roof below my window, where the wind rolls a basketball, bleached white, back and forth across a damp depression in the tar paper. But this isn't the case. Instead, it's during the times I am doing those jobs I used to complain about to Drew: cooking or laundry or sorting the recycling, tasks I had imagined would be shared in a contemporary marriage and which automatically fell to me because I was the one whose work yielded a smaller and more erratic income, and who was home all day. I was standing over the stove, a quick-cooking grain like bulgur or amaranth that requires constant stirring---something my mother would never have bothered with---when I noticed that I had to bend to reach the pot. And then that the stove seemed to be receding as well, and I remember thinking that the floor was collapsing under our feet, and that a stove that fell away would surely explode. I lunged toward Jack, who was sitting at the kitchen table, eating cheddar-cheese crackers shaped like rabbits, and my feet, without traction, simply pedaled the air before I landed with an awkward stumble. My son looked up in mild surprise---I am always asking him not to stomp because it's a duplex and there's a single woman below us---his mouth edged in brilliant orange. "Amy," he said, which is the name of the other tenant. That was the first time. IT'S TRUE THAT I'VE BEEN doing yoga for the past three years. In fact, the yoga was one of the things that bothered Drew, something about my enthusiasm for something that everyone else is enthusiastic about, too. Well? Yoga is good for your body, and it calms you down, and maybe the herd is sometimes right. On the other hand, even I have to admit that I enjoy talking about it more than I actually like doing it, and that I'm not one of the shining stars of the class---not the worst, certainly, but somewhere in the bottom third. I have trouble getting myself from chaturanga dandasana back to downward dog, and so it seems unlikely that I have learned to levitate, which rules out the only vaguely plausible explanation for the thing that started happening to me since we agreed to a divorce. I can't help feeling that other people had better reasons for their breakups than we did. (This characteristic of me, Drew would say, the way I am always comparing. How can you be happy if you're constantly measuring your life against the lives of others? And not even examining, he would say. Inventing...fictionalizing! How can you know what anyone else's life is like?) I think of Helene, a woman I used to teach with at the Y, who married a Czech architect she met on vacation in Prague. Life in the United States didn't suit him and he moved back after eighteen months. Or Drew's old friend Jim, whose wife left him for her high school boyfriend with whom she reconnected through social media soon after the birth of their second child. With Drew and me there was nothing so concrete to explain it: one night last spring we sat down in the living room after dinner, looked at each other and knew. "When was the last time you were happy?" he asked me. I was indignant. "Just this afternoon," I told him. "Jack asked if I wanted him to zip or button my jacket for me." He shook his head. "Not with Jack," he said, and it was one of those moments in an argument when you know it's very important to respond quickly, but you don't respond, and the length of the pause makes the question irrelevant. "Well, what about you," I said, and he just shook his head. One of the things I've always liked about Drew is that he doesn't have any trouble crying, and his crying then made me want to take him in my arms and promise it would be fine. I did do that, with the predictable result that we had sex, and it was so clearly the last time, even while it was happening, that I cried, too. Please see issue 207 of The Paris Review for the rest of this story. Anne Sexton
A thousand doors ago when I was a lonely kid in a big house with four garages and it was summer as long as I could remember, I lay on the lawn at night, clover wrinkling over me, the wise stars bedding over me, my mother's window a funnel of yellow heat running out, my father's window, half shut, an eye where sleepers pass, and the boards of the house were smooth and white as wax and probably a million leaves sailed on their strange stalks as the crickets ticked together and I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight. Gregory Orr
DO I DARE TO SAY MY BROTHER'S DEATH WAS A BLESSING? Who would recoil first from such a statement? A reader, unsure of its context, but instinctively uneasy with the sentiment? Or me, who knows more of the context than I sometimes think I can bear, having spent most of my life struggling with that death because I caused it? Can I keep my own nerve long enough to work my way through the strangeness of that word? In French, the verb blesser means "to wound." In English, "to bless" is to confer spiritual power on someone or something by words or gestures. When children are christened or baptized in some Christian churches, the priest or minister blesses them by sprinkling holy water on their faces. But the modern word has darker, stranger roots. It comes from the Old English bletsian which meant "to sprinkle with blood" and makes me think of ancient, grim forms of religious sacrifice where blood not water was the liquid possessing supernatural power---makes me remember standing as a boy so close to a scene of violence that the blood of it baptized me. To wound, to confer spiritual power, to sprinkle with blood. There is something about the intersection of these three meanings that pen- etrates to the heart of certain violent events of my childhood. I feel as if life itself were trying to reveal some mystery to me by making those three sources meet in my own life. To wound. To cause blood to flow out of a mortal body. To stand so near that I was spattered with the blood of it. And yet I did not die. Why was I spared? Now that I am in my fifties, I am finally brave enough to ask that aloud, although it is a question that has moved like an underground river below my whole life since that day, moved there with the steady, insistent rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the words themselves made the earth pulse through my feet. Why was I spared? I'm not sure there is any answer to my ques- tion. I know I don't expect the answer to come from anyone else. I don't even expect it to come from me. Maybe it's because I'm a poet and I've spent my adult life believing words have the power to reveal what is hidden, but I believe the answer to my question emerges from this odd word itself, this "blessing" that conceals within its history such terrible words as "wound" and "blood." Please see "The Blessing: A Memoir," published by Council Oak Books for the rest of this story. Tom Perrotta
IN A LIGHT RAIN, AT A LITTLE AFTER THREE IN THE morning, Gus Ketchell stood on his back stoop in slippers and shorty pajamas, holding a bulky cardboard box and star- ing uncertainly at his next-door neighbors' garage. Come on, he told himself. You can do this. No one would ever know. The Simmonses' house was dark, the old air conditioner wheezing away in the second-floor bedroom window. He pictured Peggy alone on the bed, snor- ing heavily, nearly comatose from the industrial-strength sleeping pills she'd been taking since Lonny's sudden death a month ago. Gus could probably break down the front door with a sledgehammer, turn on every light in the house, and make himself a ham sandwich without disturbing her. Gus's own wife, Martha, was also asleep, but even awake she wouldn't have registered his absence at this ungodly hour; aside from the occasional hotel room, they hadn't shared a bed in years. There were no longer any dogs in the immediate neighborhood to sound an alarm, either, not since Fred Di- Mello had been forced to put down his ancient, slobbering basset hound last October. Fred had buried Sadsack in his backyard, and Gus often saw him staring forlornly at the cir- cle of rocks he'd placed in the ground to mark the gravesite. So the coast was clear. But still Gus hesitated. He just didn't like the idea of trespassing---breaking and entering, to be precise---even in a place so close to home, where he'd once been welcome. It would have been so much easier---so much more civilized---if he could have rung the Simmonses' door bell in the morning and said, Hey , Peg, sorry to bother you, but I need a favor. And Peggy would have said, Sure, Gus, you name it. But why don't you sit down and have a cup of coffee first? Once upon a time, the Ketchells and the Simmonses had been those kinds of neighbors, back when everyone was young and their kids moved between the two yards as if they were all part of one big family. Lonny Simmons sometimes borrowed Gus's whellbarrow and extension ladder without asking; Gus did the same with Lonny's ratchet set and Weed- wacker. The Ketchells had an open invitation to swim in the Simmonses' built-in pool, a bona fide luxury when it was in- stalled in the early seventies, one of maybe a half dozen in the whole town. The two families barbecued together, went on camping trips, swapped babysitting, and took turns shoveling each other's sidewalk when it snowed. Somewhere along the way, though, it all went sour. Please see Nine Inches: stories, by Tom Perrotta, (St. Martin Press) for the rest of this story. Joe Weil
In my odyssey of dead end jobs, cursed by whatever gods do not console, I end up at a place that makes fake Christmas trees: thousands! some pink, some blue, one that revolves ever so slowly to the strains of Silent Night. Sometimes, out of sheer despair, I rev up its Rpms and send it spinning wildly through space-- Dorothy Hammill disguised as a Balsam fir. I run a machine that spits paint onto wire boughs, each length of bough a different shade-- color coded-- so that America will know which end fits where. This is spray paint of which I speak-- no ventilation, no safety masks, lots of poor folk speaking various broken tongues, a guy from Poland with a ruptured disk lifting fifty pound boxes of defective parts, A Haitian so damaged by police "interrogation" he flinches when you raise your arm too suddenly near, and all of us hating the job, knowing it's meaningless, yet singing, cursing, telling jokes, unentitled to anything but joy, the lurid, unreasonable joy that sometimes overwhelms you even in a hole like this. it's a joy rulers mistake for proof of "The Human Spirit." I tell you it is Kali, the great destroyer, her voice singing amidst butchery and hate. It is Rachel the inconsolable weeping for her children. It goes both over and under "The Human Spirit." It is my father crying in his sleep because he works twelve hour shifts six days a week and can't make rent. It is one hundred and ten degrees in the land of fake Christmas trees. It is Blanca Ramirez keeling over pregnant sans green card. It is a nation that has spiritualized shopping, not knowing how many lost to the greater good of retail. It is Marta the packer rubbing her crippled hands with Lourdes water and hot chilies. It is bad pay and worse diet and the minds of our children turned on the wheel of sorrow-- no langauge to leech it from the blood, no words to draw it out-- a fake Christmas tree spinning wildly in the brain, and who can stop it, who unless grief grows a hand and writes the poem? In Praise We Enter, Rain Bucket Press, 1998. Alexis Pope
In the bedroom: your pillow, a locket & a picture of a grizzly bear. Once there was a boy, but I forgot his name. It’s all so distant now and then I dream of poppies. Already sleeping in a different bedroom. A different human with the same face wakes me in the morning. I am nothing more than this cup of coffee, the rice milk, and the subterranean longing after which you fall to sleep on my belly. I am a cave with no bear to sleep inside. If a boy were here, I am sure a game of catch would happen. Sure, things are not always like this. I know there are different names to call this room. There is always a better pillow. A better way to pronounce hollow. If I could light this candle with both matches. A magic of not knowing if this is a dream or a real conversation we’ve had before. You fall a blanket over my lap. Surprising how the sunset looks different from this window. I place my hand on your head and imagine a better place to fall asleep. Phantom Limb, issue 7: spring 2013 PHILIP LEVINE
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says. The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone. Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life, and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labors, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it? All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute in silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty. In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace, for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds, wedding certificates, drivers licenses. The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares, and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face. Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it. Billy Collins
I have a feeling that it is much worse than shopping for a mattress at a mall, of greater duration without question, and there is no random pitchforking here, no licking flames to fear, only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding. Yet wandering past the jovial kinds, the more sensible queens, and the cheerless singles no scarlet sheet will ever cover, I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno, which I could fully bring to mind and recite in English or even Italian if the salesman who has been following us-- a crumpled pack of Newports visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt-- would stop insisting for a moment that we test this one, then this softer one, which we do by lying down side by side, arms rigid, figures on a tomb, powerless to imagine what it would be to like to sleep or love this way under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights, which Dante might have included had he been able to lie on his back between us here today. Horoscopes for the Dead, Random House, New York, 2011. 30. |