Domestic Studies - DigiNole - Florida State University

Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2007

Domestic StudiesWilma Diane Kelley

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]

THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DOMESTIC STUDIES

By

WILMA DIANE KELLEY

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2007

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Wilma Diane Kelley defended on

November 7, 2007,

_________________________

Virgil Suarez

Professor Directing Thesis

_________________________

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Committee Member

_________________________

Ned Stuckey-French

Committee Member

Approved:

___________________________________

Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English

.

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee

members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………....... iv 1. DENNIS ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 2. WOULD YOU TAKE A QUICK LOOK AT THIS ………………………………... 14 3. COMMUNITY CENTER …………………………………………………………… 24 4. THE BRITISH ARE COMING ……………………………………...……………… 31 5. LIKE FRANKENSTEIN ……………………………………………………………. 42 6. WOMAN’S WORLD …………………………………………..…………………… 58 7. AUTO-MAN ..………………………………………………………………...……... 65 8. DOMESTIC STUDIES ………..…………………………………………………….. 75 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ………………………………………………...……...... 106

iii

ABSTRACT

My thesis consists of three essays: “Dennis,” “Would You Take a Quick Look at

This,” and “Community Center.” I also have included four short stories: “The British Are

Coming,” “Like Frankenstein,” “Woman’s World,” and “Auto-Man.” The final part of

my thesis is a novel excerpt, “Domestic Studies.”

My intention in my short stories is to show the alienation people feel within

society, especially women. The framework of my stories is one of disconnectedness and

isolation within a declining society.

My essays center on various subjects, loss of innocence being the one that stands

out the strongest. I also have a humorous essay, “Will You Take a Quick Look at This,”

that is an example of ironic self-examination.

My novel excerpt is actually the beginning of my novel. It sets the story up as one

of domestic upheaval. It is part domestic humor, part farce.

I believe I have achieved what I set out to do with this body of work.

iv

DENNIS

In 1963 the authorities found Dennis lying next to his dead brother in the back

seat of a car. Another brother and sister were several yards away, digging around in a

field on the Yakima Indian Reservation, looking for food. Dennis was newborn, wiggling

under the rags he had been covered with, his infant-pink skin beginning to take on a

lavender hue. The dead brother was a year old, blue and stiff. I think of how the deputies

must have reacted coming upon that rusty car abandoned on the side of the road.

Common, sure. Cars get left, folks seem to walk away from them as they might a

faithless lover—enough is enough. Damn car, can’t depend on it. But what did they think

when they peered into it? One blue baby, stiff as a doll, was it a doll? Its eyes open even

in its supine position. One howling infant, its umbilical cord, ragged as if bitten off in a

hurry, hanging down next to its little penis. This newborn was Dennis, my husband

Patrick’s future brother.

I imagine the deputies bumping into each other trying to open the doors. A door

handle stuck; one of the men looked down for a rock to break a window before realizing

that the car had three other doors. By the time reason returned his partner was lifting the

blue baby out of the backseat. The baby had no diaper, only a tee shirt that hung down to

his ankles. It was covered in dry feces. The officer’s fingers must have slid on the baby’s

flesh, the skin giving a bit over the thin withered pads of muscle. He would have felt the

bones, a core, a reality, of what had been life. I hear him yelling, one of those male shouts

of horror, something like “Awwshit!” His partner sees the placenta on the floorboard of

the car, gray and dry. By now the partner would’ve lifted Dennis up and tucked him

under his jacket; I have a vision of him cooing, “There now, there now,” as he patted his

back.

The other two children came up to the car; Native American, as the infants were,

a boy and girl. He was four and she only ten months younger. They hung back, watching

the officers with dull eyes. The man holding the dead baby looked at them and shouted,

“Where is your mother? How long has he been dead, damn it?” He was lost in the horror,

thinking that a four year old should have some answers for what happened here, that a

living three year old could speak. But they didn’t, only stared, their faces covered in

streaks of dirt and their thin cotton clothes grass-stained. It was late March; they stood

1

close together, a shivering tableau of wretchedness, both wanting the same thing: a drink,

a piece of sweet gum, a cracker. Anything to fill the maw their stomachs had become.

By now Dennis’s officer was on the radio in the police car. He had put the end of

his pinky finger into the infant’s mouth to hush his cries as he radioed for help, “We have

a situation here.” I imagine his words and just how he said them, low like a hum coming

from the chest and out his mouth, unusual to his ears; not the words, they were common

enough, but his cadence had changed as he felt the baby’s withering cord rubbing against

his shirt front. I see him leaning into his radio, asking for back-up. I wonder if now he

questioned his ability to be an officer; he’d been on the force less than a year: was this the

kind of shit that happened around Yakima and the Indian Reservation?

A situation: such a benign word for this roadside tragedy. But in the parlance of

officialdom, “situation” is the equivalent of The-Shit-Has-Hit-The-Fan. It served its

purpose; reinforcements arrived. I can see their cars, old black and whites, long and low

in the back with pitiful one-note sirens.

The older children were taken to the hospital in a cruiser, Dennis in an ambulance.

The dead one year-old was covered up and delivered to the medical examiner. Detectives

were called out, a crime had happened here, surely, but where was the mother? Was her

baby ripped from her by some maniac, left to shake its arms and legs, unswaddled and

howling, next to a dead one year old? And how had the baby died? Let’s not be rash, I

can imagine them saying, their voices low, but she’s probably off drunk, the kids

forgotten. The detectives saw no evidence of a kidnapping, no struggle in the hard earth

that surrounded the car. But more importantly, they saw no reason for such a crime; who

would snatch a mother, her newborn barely out of her womb? A husband or boyfriend

betrayed might be capable of doing such a thing, but would he leave the girl and boy

witness to his crime?

At the hospital in Yakima, the older children didn’t speak, weren’t able to give

their names. They ate until the nurses took away the trays; the girl had vomited after her

third carton of milk. One of the nurses got an enamel pan of warm water and began to

sponge the dirt from their faces and arms. At the nurses’ station, the medical staff had

gathered, asking questions. How often had a naked, living newborn come in, its cord

beginning to grow stiff and darken, two days old at least and no sign of the mother?

2

What about the older girl and boy, silent wisps with brown eyes, scouting the room for

more food? Medical opinions and suppositions were tabled for the skinny on the thing:

who were these children and how had they arrived at their routine hospital?

The next day the medical examiner determined that the one year old had died of a

combination of exposure and malnourishment. It seemed to be a clear-cut case of

abandonment by the mother. Some in the community were disappointed to hear this;

visions of a madman on the loose had floated around Yakima. A madman on the loose

fills a convenient blip on the arc of civilization, presents a vision of evil that satisfies at

some deep level, a place that prefers tragedies in stark black and white. A mother

abandoning her children, one dead or dying, one just born, barely separated from her

womb, and the two older ones, wandering among the cow pods and dandelions; who

could explain that? If the culprit of the tragedy on the roadside was mother, the blip is no

longer convenient; the arc becomes all smudged up with questions that have no satisfying

answers.

People who had heard about the tragedy had begun to call the police station,

naming a woman from the local reservation, heavy with pregnancy and with three other

children. They hadn’t seen her for at least three days, and then she had been drunk and

begging change for wine. A bulletin was issued, her name, age and description: drunken

Indian woman, check the bars, under bridges, the Mission.

Dennis’s cord was infected and he had pneumonia. The medical staff surmised

that his very newness to the world had been what saved him. In his mother’s womb he

had gotten most of what little nutrition she had consumed. The fetus comes first, a rule of

nature. No one knew what the dead baby’s diet had been his first year. I see pieces of

bologna dropped on the floor, the edges hardened and curled upward. A heel of bread

wedged between sofa cushions, hardened into a Pilot cracker, a teething device. He may

have been without food for days before being left in the car. The older children had been

deft enough to snatch what they could find, their skinny fingers quick while the one year

old could only watch and whimper.

At the hospital the older children began to talk, to give their names, Rose and

Tony, and to ask for their mother. “What’s her name?” and of course they said “Mama.”

They settled into a regular pattern of meals, hoarding food, but otherwise improving

3

enough to be quickly sent together to a foster home where they were later adopted. But

not before the authorities could question them. I imagine the questions didn’t make much

sense to Rose and Tony. This latest situation wasn’t so different from many in their past.

There was the new baby; they had covered him up with rags and paper found on the floor

of the car. They didn’t understand why the one year old had hushed and why they

couldn’t see him. They didn’t know where their mother had gone. They cried for her.

The mother was found within a week in a rundown house outside of town. She

was with an old man who shared his wine with her for sex, a reasonable exchange. For a

woman who would have a baby in the back seat of a car and leave him and his infant

brother in the care of a three and four year old, nothing seemed unlikely. I think about her

swelling breasts and how they must have ached to find release in Dennis’s suckle. I see

her in nylon pants, smelling of stale piss, her breasts an indictment, hanging full against

an old sweater. I wonder about her history, everything that came before the car, and how

she walked away from it, winding up at that dirt floor shack. I don’t think about her spirit

much—what is there to speculate? Considering that she was never sober long enough to

look for her children; her spirit must have deserted her long before she found the

nameless man with the gallons of wine.

Dennis stayed in the hospital for six weeks and then my husband’s family took

him in. My mother-in-law, Leona Kelley, had been a foster mother within the Catholic

Church for years, taking in babies that no one else wanted, the dying ones. I met my

husband long after she died, but I imagine she was one of those bountiful women who

children cling to. I am humbled by her capacity to love children that would ultimately die

in her care. She took Dennis in because no one else would; he wasn’t dying, her role

wouldn’t end with his demise but with her own.

The Kelley’s adopted Dennis after five years of courtroom postponements, social

workers and representatives from the Welfare department trudging down to the

courthouse, the mother showing up drunk, crying and bitter, not showing up at all. She

was never sentenced with a crime; she may have served a few days in jail, in the drunk

tank, I don’t know. The judge’s decision to take her remaining children from her was the

ultimate sentence. By this time Dennis was as much a part of the Kelley family as any

other member. When the judge finally allowed the adoption to go through, the Catholic

4

agency that handled the placement put his face on the cover of their bulletin, a poster

child for the children they had available. It was already settled that he was a Kelley and

would remain a part of my husband’s family, but the Church couldn’t resist such a

cunning chance at public relations: look at the cute children we have, just waiting for a

home. And I don’t blame them; he had an open grinning face, guileless in his good nature

and his mischievousness. What some folks call the All-American boy.

Leona died when Dennis was six, found dead by her husband, Ed, as he reached

for her the morning after Thanksgiving. I have a photograph that was taken that

Thanksgiving day; the whole family standing around the remains of the feast on their

dining table, smiling down at Dennis and Patrick. My husband was just back from Viet

Nam and is kneeling beside Dennis, their eyes locking. Leona looks as she probably

would’ve any other Thanksgiving Day: a dish towel slung over her shoulder (I imagine

this would’ve embarrassed her had she had the chance to see the photograph), a mess to

clean up. But there is a relief that I detect in the stance of her body, a letting go of

anxiety. Patrick’s older brother, Tom, had graduated college and was home for the

holiday. The only girl in the family, Kathy, was home from college and a bad romance.

Ed is on one side of Leona and her mother, Grandma Jenny, is on the other.

When Ed Kelley found his wife dead in bed the next morning he ran around in

circles, tripping over the phone, picking it up, looking at it, finally making the call. All

the children woke up that morning looking for their parents; it was unusual for Ed and

Leona to sleep late. Finally, after tapping on their bedroom door, they opened it to find

Ed sitting beside his wife on the bed, waiting for the funeral home to show up with a van.

Dennis ran to his mother, crawling up beside her, trying to get her to talk, to open her

eyes. Kathy had to pull him away, crying, as he snatched at bits of her gown. The first

days of grief were bearable only because of the business that death brings: arrangements,

visitors, the Mass, the burial.

After Tom went back to his job and Kathy to college, Patrick hit the road. Ed was

left with a little shadow that followed him around, touching Leona’s knitting, her lists on

the refrigerator door, her bedroom slippers beside the hamper in the bathroom. Leona

had been the one who took care of the house and the children; Ed had never even cooked

a meal. He bought boxed cereal for breakfast and he and Dennis took their other meals at

5

diners around town. Kathy visited, and, with Leona’s mother, Grandma Jenny, they

cleared out her belongings. Leona was the last of Jenny’s two children; Bud had died on

an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, victim to a kamikaze pilot during the war.

Dennis and Ed became a pair, a crotchety transplanted New Jerseyite (he had

come West during the depression to work at the C.C.C. camps in Washington) and a

precocious six year old, following behind him. They would spend their Saturdays visiting

yard sales all over the Yakima Valley; Ed was a collector of coins, knives, cigarette

lighters, and postcards. Ed would give Dennis some change which he rarely spent at the

sales. What kid wanted a three-wheeled truck or a play guitar missing its strings? Dennis

went where Ed went.

Dennis tanned so deeply in the summer that the kids at the local pool called him

“nigger.” Ed dealt with this as he did most things in life: straightforwardly. “Don’t take

any guff, kid; tell them at least you don’t shed your skin. And that you’re a member of

the Yakima Nation.” But when Ed took Dennis to the tribal council of the Yakima Nation

he was told that Dennis wasn’t a member, he wasn’t on the books. To get the necessary

papers signed Ed had to meet Dennis’ birth mother. He had heard that she lived deep in

the reservation, in a little town called White Dove. He didn’t want to visit her, to see her

face, to ask her for anything.

One of the questions on the form asked about the heritage of Dennis’ father.

Would she know? Ed debated for weeks whether or not to go to White Dove. Dennis had

started school where there were no Indian children. Should he bring him up without

knowledge of his heritage? Finally he drove out to White Dove and found the woman

sitting on the metal steps of her trailer. There were no children around. She was drunk,

but she signed. Yes, Dennis was her son; yes, she was a certified Yakima Indian; yes, the

father had been Yakima, but she refused to offer his name. Ed never said so, but I

imagine he gave her a bit of money for her time, maybe twenty dollars. He was the kind

of man who never expected to get something for nothing; this was business only, after he

got her signature he never wanted to see her again.

As an official member of the Yakima Nation Dennis was allowed to go to summer

camp on the reservation, to meet children whose skin was brown, and who were versed in

the lore of their heritage. He loved it. Ed spent hours driving Dennis to and from camp

6

and other functions. Often they drove past Dennis’s birth mother’s house. Sometimes she

would be lying near the stairs, or weaving around the grounds. Dennis never knew that

she was his mother; Ed just kept driving, looking straight ahead. Ed wanted Dennis to

know his heritage in the larger sense of the word. He didn’t want him to know his birth

mother.

When Dennis was fifteen he came to live with me and Patrick in Seattle. Seattle

had an Indian high school that he wanted to attend. He had started getting into trouble in

Yakima: smoking pot, stealing coins from his father, and smashing up cars that he stole

joyriding. He never made a smooth transition into the Yakima Nation; he was an

anomaly and he knew it. His nature was pretty well set by the time he was exposed to his

tribe. He was a little white boy with brown skin and Indian features. Maybe the Indian

high school in Seattle would be better; there would be Indian kids of all nations there,

some like him, brought up in Caucasian homes. He hoped to find a niche.

Dennis stayed with us for about three months. Things got worse for him. He

found some friends at school, but they were potheads, too. He began to spend most of his

time walking a few blocks from our house to buy his weed from dealers that stood on the

corner. He got ripped off several times, once coming home with a black eye. My husband

smoked occasionally, but as his big brother he couldn’t just sit down and fire one up with

him. They reached a compromise; Dennis would go down into the basement to smoke.

This arrangement worked for a while, but soon he was missing days, weeks of school; his

marks were all bad. The school had done nothing for him but introduce him to more lost

boys.

We didn’t want Dennis to go back to Yakima; there would be no compromising

with Ed, no pot at all. Patrick had felt that to forbid Dennis to smoke would have been

hypocritical on his part, and more importantly, to Patrick, the pot might smooth the edges

of Dennis’s adolescence, taking away the urge to hot wire cars, to steal. But Ed, a long

time smoker of L&Ms, didn’t feel this way. Dennis would come home and straighten up;

he would go back to school in Yakima and pull his grades up.

Ed came to get Dennis, crossing over Snoqualmie Pass on his mission to save

Dennis from himself. At first Dennis refused to go, he hid in his room and turned his

music up loud. Ed sat with me and Patrick at the kitchen table. We talked of what Dennis

7

needed: time, Patrick and I thought. Ed asked hypothetical questions: was it in the genes?

should he have been adopted by an Indian family? We argued with him, throwing out the

gene theory—“Look at him! He’s a good boy. Everyone loves him, he lights up a room.

Not a sorry bone in his body. And he doesn’t drink.” It was all true. Dennis had that

rarest of personality traits, charisma. All of my friends adored him, stopping by the house

with treats and gifts. He was one of those people that you want to please, yet he never

asked for anything. And the question of adoption by an Indian family was moot; there

were no restrictions in 1963 that gave first choice to same-race parents, and anyway, no

Indian came forward with the desire to adopt him. Ed wanted to speculate about what

might have been. He was in over his head.

The irony of it all was that Patrick had done the same things in his youth that

Dennis was doing, but worse. He had stolen and crashed cars during joy rides, stolen

alcohol, and siphoned gasoline out of a Sheriff’s car (he got caught). He had started

smoking pot at a later age, as soon as it arrived in Yakima, turning his friends on to it. He

had been kicked out of the house at seventeen; Ed wasn’t going to kick Dennis out. No

one expected him to, no one wanted him to. Patrick considered his own adolescent issues

with his father as having no bearing on the argument. This was Dennis, he wouldn’t be

kicked out. Finally Dennis came out of his room with his bags packed. He wouldn’t talk

to any of us, just walked down to Ed’s car and sat in the back seat.

The next few years of Dennis’ life got worse. He stole blatantly from his father,

smoked pot in front of the house, starting sniffing gasoline, and hung out with kids whose

parents never called to ask if anyone had seen them. He went to school sporadically,

never graduating. Ed endured his behavior (by this time Ed was in his early sixties, tired

of surly kids); their relationship became one of furious arguments spliced with long

peaceful drives throughout Washington. They both loved to camp, to build fire pits and

tramp through the woods.

Dennis would find work occasionally, but it never lasted, his absenteeism rate was

too high. He was too high. He asked to move back to Seattle with me and my husband.

We had a fifteen-month old baby, Leah, and I was afraid to have him around her. Rules

were set down. No drugs. No alcohol. Look for a job. He was nineteen and could do as he

wished, but if he was going to live with us he had to obey our rules. Ed encouraged the

8

move, he thought the bigger city might be what Dennis needed, he had made a name for

himself in Yakima, had tainted any chances he had there.

Dennis drove his souped-up Chevy around Seattle, picking up girls and riding

endlessly up and down the hills of the city. He charmed the girls; he was never surprised

by the effortlessness of his popularity. He didn’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t like him.

He played games with Leah, the kind that never end, peep-eye and patty cake; but he

would play long after Patrick and I would’ve said “enough.” He would let Leah crawl all

over him, lifting her into the air and swooping her back down. He talked to her as he

would a kid his own age. She tagged behind him, listening as if she understood his

teenage lingo. His ability to entertain her impressed me and gave me a rest. He wasn’t

smoking or drinking as far as we knew.

Dennis was with us two months or so, still without a job, when I woke one

morning to find him sitting on the sofa with his arms crossed tightly over his belly. He

was rocking back and forth in pain. He hadn’t come home the night before; I had waited

up until 1:00 before going to bed. He complained of a stomach ache. Playing with two

young women the night before at Gas Works park, he had lifted one of them up (a feat in

itself, I saw her, she outweighed him by at least forty pounds) and then stumbled down a

hill, her body falling into his. That morning, the only way he could stand was bent over at

the waist, one arm stuck out at his side. He was in pain, it was obvious, but he didn’t

make the slightest noise. I suggested 911; no, he said, it wasn’t that bad. He wanted to go

to the Indian hospital in town. I called and they predicted a four to five hour wait. I called

my doctor, who wasn’t in, but his colleague agreed to see Dennis. My husband took him

in to see him.

Patrick brought him back from the doctor with good news. Just a simple pulled

muscle; he was given pain pills and told to rest. I put him in our bed to keep a better eye

on him. His pain didn’t improve after taking two pain pills. I called the doctor back; his

pain seemed too great for a pulled muscle. The doctor told me to look over his chest and

stomach, if there was bruising it might be a torn muscle, not a pulled one (apparently, this

symptom could show up hours after the accident). If I found bruising I was to bring him

back in. But there were no bruises. The doctor recommended a hot-water bottle, saying

pulled muscles can hurt as badly as torn ones. Dennis would be okay.

9

I didn’t have a hot-water bottle so I filled an old pickle jar with hot water and laid

it on his stomach. He got some relief from this, when the water cooled I’d fill it back up

with hot water. He never yelled, moaned, cursed. He told me how bad it hurt, asked for

more pain pills. I got the bottle of pills and saw that he had taken five more within the last

two hours. Another call to the doctor; are you sure he should be in this much pain?

Irritated with me, the doctor said he wouldn’t support drug abuse if that was what Dennis

was up to.

If he had screamed as loudly as he had in the back of that old car in 1963 I

would’ve taken him to the emergency room. But he didn’t, he lay quietly on our bed,

buffeted by pillows and that damned pickle jar. The day progressed, filling the jar up,

feeding Leah, and keeping her off the bed so Dennis could rest. He dozed a bit on and

off. Maybe the doctor was right, maybe the injury wasn’t that serious. When my husband

got home from work Dennis was asking for more pills. We gave them to him and let him

rest. Patrick called Ed to let him know that Dennis was ill, but that everything would be

okay. Within hours Ed was in Seattle putting Dennis in his truck. If Dennis was ill, Ed

felt he should be with him and near his family doctor. They drove back across the

mountains to Yakima.

The next day, Saturday, we called Ed. Dennis seemed better; he had eaten a bit of

soup and was lying on the couch. Sunday evening, though, things got worse. Dennis

started vomiting, and, finally, moaning. He couldn’t walk at all. Ed got him to St.

Elizabeth’s where emergency surgery was performed. His diaphragm had been pushed up

into his lungs; his left lung was removed. His chest was gangrenous. We got the call

around five Monday morning. He wasn’t expected to live through the day.

We waited until 8:00 Monday morning to leave for Yakima. Dennis had been in

surgery most of the night before. Patrick called the doctor who saw his brother to update

him on the case. The doctors as St. Elizabeth’s had told Ed that no doctor could’ve

missed the signs of a collapsed lung: the typical walk is bent at the waist with one arm

extended. Patrick spewed into the phone, telling the doctor that Dennis wasn’t expected

to live, and yet he, the doctor, had thought it was just a pulled muscle. Maybe a torn one,

not to worry. And then to accuse this boy of drug hustling? The doctor replied, “I am

sorry to hear of your brother’s continuing health problems,” and hung up the phone. We

10

loaded Leah and the diaper bag into the car and headed for Yakima.

Dennis lived for five weeks in Intensive Care. The gangrene had taken a strong

hold on his diaphragm, spreading even as the doctors pumped him full of every antibiotic

they had. Dennis had tubes down his throat and nose and couldn’t talk. He squeezed our

hands and held on tight. We were at the hospital every weekend and any days Patrick

could get off from work. Ed left the hospital only to shower and shave. Kathy and Tom

came, giving up hours of work to be near him. Grandma Jenny sat in the corner of his

room in the Intensive Care Unit and knitted and watched. He wasn’t going to die, by

God, not because some incompetent doctor, my doctor, had misdiagnosed him.

The week before he died it seemed that a miracle was happening. The doctors

removed his gastrointestinal tube and allowed him to eat anything he wanted. He asked

for Cap’n Crunch and got it. He ate a few bites and thanked the nurses. He pulled Patrick

close to him and told him he loved him. He drew me near and told me the same. We took

this as some kind of forgiveness on his part—why hadn’t we rushed him to the

Emergency room? What were we thinking to listen to a fucking doctor over the

telephone? These were our issues, not his. He seemed to just be saying that he loved us.

The next Saturday we were preparing to leave to see Dennis—I had some

furniture I was giving to my friend Charlotte and was waiting for her to pick it up before

we left for Yakima. When the telephone rang Patrick answered. He said, “Hi Tom” and

then was silent for a long time. Dennis was dead; his heart had ruptured. I yelled and

cried, frightening Leah who started crying. Patrick got in the car and came back with an

open bottle of bourbon. It wasn’t noon yet. My friend and her husband arrived to pick up

the furniture. She came in as she always did, talking and laughing. After a moment she

said, “What’s going on? You two act like somebody died.” Patrick was drinking straight

out of the bottle and I called her into our bedroom and told her that Dennis had died. She

and her husband tried to comfort Patrick but he was closed off to all of us. They left

without the furniture.

Patrick drank throughout the day; an old friend of his, Duke, happened by and

went out for another bottle. He had known Dennis well and was shook up. As Patrick got

drunker he started planning ways to kill my doctor. I had a couple of shots and a beer.

The idea began to sound reasonable. Then we started talking about what had actually

11

caused Dennis’s injury. Gangrene so fast, within three days? The girl falling on him in

the park began to sound bogus. The doctors at St. Elizabeth’s had doubted Dennis’s

explanation of what had happened to him. They said that Dennis’s injury was worse than

some major excavation accidents they had seen—the kind where tons of dirt falls on a

man. When Dennis’s tubes were taken out, we had asked him if something else had

happened, had someone beaten him up. He denied it and stuck by his story. We had to

believe him, but now he was dead. What had happened before the doctor had sealed his

fate?

Ed opened a police investigation after Dennis’s burial. Seattle detectives visited

me and Patrick and asked questions. Who had Dennis been hanging out with? We didn’t

know the girl from the park well, but we started staking it out ourselves until we ran into

her. She burst into tears when she heard that Dennis was dead. She said she had fallen on

him, that the injury had happened just as he said it had. She had a brother with her that

day in the park, the kind of guy who looks like bad news. He was big and burly and had

acne scars on his face. He looked mean. We got her address and started staking her

apartment out where she lived with her brother. The Seattle police weren’t doing much.

They talked to the girl and got the same information we had gotten. We suggested they

look into the brother’s background but there was nothing there.

Dennis didn’t have any bruises! A beating would’ve produced bruises. He had

been playing around with a pair of num-chucks the weeks leading up to his death. We

investigated what kind of evidence a beating with such a weapon would cause and ran

into a dead end. We had to believe Dennis. We wanted so badly to find a bad guy and

hold him down and beat him until his diaphragm crushed his lung. We would sit up late

at night and talk about what we would do if we found any evidence that someone had

actually beaten Dennis. We talked of torture. We were mad.

I visited my doctor’s partner and found out that he wasn’t even a doctor; he was a

physician’s assistant. But we had asked for the doctor. He had answered to doctor. I had

talked to him on the phone and called him doctor. Weeks had passed since Dennis’s death

yet we still wanted blood. We thought of ways to kill this liar, this fraud. Patrick would

get drunk occasionally and accuse me of making the wrong choice. I blamed myself.

Why didn’t I take him to the Indian hospital? Why didn’t I take him to Harborview

12

hospital, one of the best trauma centers on the West Coast? Why didn’t I smash the pickle

jar into the physician assistant’s mother-fucking face?

As the weeks wore on Patrick and I would sit and rework the scenario. Say,

Dennis comes home sick and we immediately take him, no, no, we call 911, and the

ambulance takes him, to the hospital. Yes. We would feel a touch of relief, just the barest,

briefest relief before we were back to reality. This went on for months. One of us would

say something and off we would go. What if we had discouraged him from going out that

night? What if I had gone to the doctors with Dennis instead of Patrick? We both knew

that I was more assertive with doctors. I would’ve demanded more from him. The killer

didn’t even listen to his chest. If I had only gone.

Dennis has been dead for twenty three years and once in a while when we talk

about him we’ll get that same rush of possibility: okay, he comes home and we whisk

him off to the hospital, barging through doors, demanding that they give him a chance.

Didn’t he live for days in that old car? He made it through the worst beginning a baby

could have, why did his death have to come so soon and so horribly wrong. I think of

luck and those of us who have it and those who don’t. I think of how he entered the world

and how he left. I get angry for him. But he wasn’t angry lying in Intensive Care. He was

loving and gentle. He didn’t seem to feel that anyone was to blame for his condition. He

wanted to comfort us. He was a Brave.

13

WOULD YOU TAKE A QUICK LOOK AT THIS?

My students noticed the first week of class that I carried a small bottle of Purell

around with me. I felt I had to explain, after touching their papers and books and reaching

for the bottle, what was going on. It wasn’t them, I stressed, it was me. I am a germi-

phobe. Of course, I viewed all of them as teeming with germs, infections, viruses,

bacteria—parasites even. But it really isn’t anything personal. No one student appears

more diseased than the next, or more ready to infect me. It is my problem, I told them,

ignore it; but if you’re sick, don’t come to class. And if you are sick and come to class,

stay far away from me.

I come naturally by my hypochondria. My father was a hypochondriac, as was his

father. My father had the type of hypochondria that doesn’t strike until middle age. As his

hypochondria advanced, his symptoms became more like the ones we associate with the

elderly. He talked about his bowels a lot (he had Krohn’s Disease), his lungs (he smoked

Pall Malls up until 1975 when he switched to a pipe), and his heart. His heart symptoms

appeared around 1985 and were vague but just painful and mysterious enough to worry

him. He said his heart felt clacky and too heavy in his chest. He spoke of hearing his

heart beat very loudly in his ears, especially when lying in bed. I had experienced this all

of my life—did I have a heart disorder? I found out later that I had a murmur, but it had

nothing to do with hearing my heartbeat. The doctor said everyone hears their heart

pound if they listen. Don’t think about it, she said. This I interpreted to mean: don’t think

about it because if you do it will probably affect your murmur. I knew that wasn’t what

she meant, but in situations like this, my hypochondria overrides my good sense. My

father, being the type of hypochondriac that he was, the jealous type, didn’t want to hear

about my murmur. His condition hadn’t been diagnosed yet, and he sure wasn’t going to

listen to mine.

Finally, in 1988, my father’s doctors decided he needed a valve replacement. He

seemed relieved that the doctors were finally going to do something, that there was a

name for that uneasy feeling he would get in his chest. A bad valve. On the telephone

with him I listened to him describe the procedure to me in mechanic’s terms: “A new

valve, like in a car. You know parts don’t last forever.”

He spoke of pig valves and space-age plastic valves, a whole list of choices. And

14

here he displayed a characteristic common to his type of hypochondria: pride. “The

doctors are giving me a choice about which valve they’ll use.” Translation: “Complicated

case, not sure just what to do, let’s ask the patient!” I was disgusted by the thought of a

pig valve and mentioned trichinosis to him. He said he had already made up his mind; he

was going with a plastic valve. The pig valves only last about ten years and, “who knows,

I just might be around that long.”

There are all kinds of categories of hypochondria. There is the elderly onset, what

the public considers to be the cliché of hypochondria. Complaints, numerous doctors’

visits, and a kind of resigned dejection by the sufferers who feel no one believes them.

(The old “I told you I was sick” on the tombstone.) There is the onset at middle age, a

sudden realization that life is dangerous and full of mischief just waiting to descend (and

a shivering memory of all those eggs, that butter!). This middle-aged onset usually

resolves in one of two ways: the person grows into elderly hypochondria, or dies. There

really isn’t a way back out of hypochondria once it has taken hold. That lump on your

knee that yesterday could’ve been cancer will not be thought of today as just a knot. The

possibility of cancer always looms. My father’s hypochondria began as the typical

middle-aged kind and quickly descended into the garden variety elderly form.

Then there are all the other hypochondriacs, the ones who have particular diseases

and conditions that obsess them, who may have been hypochondriacs all of their lives. If

they weren’t actually born with the condition, they have always felt a bit unwell; it would

be hard for them to place a date on just when the hypochondria started. This is the

category I fall into. Within this category are many subcategories. One hypochondriac

who fears cancer may only worry about the cancers that invade the blood system and

lymph nodes. Another will be stuck on brain cancer with maybe a fear of Parkinson’s and

Huntington’s chorea thrown in. Some fear germs and this may edge over into Obsessive-

Compulsive Disorder. Some agonize over parasites; others, bacteria. Some visit their

doctors so frequently that they can’t avoid the stamp of hypochondria. Others rarely go to

the doctor, seeing the office as a breeding ground for disease.

One aspect of hypochondria that is obvious to all normal people is denial. Most

hypochondriacs are insulted by the tag; it makes them feel that they aren’t taken

seriously. I spent years denying that I actually suffered from hypochondria. Once I

15

admitted that I did have the disorder, I was able to talk about my affliction without

watching people tune me out. I began to preface any health-related issues with this

caveat: “Okay, I know I’m a hypochondriac, but…” This is followed by whatever is

bothering me at the time. “What does it mean if the veins in your ankle feel like they’re

on fire?” or “I was walking up the stairs and my left knee just stopped working, but only

for a step or two. Is that normal?” I find that most folks will answer honestly if you clue

them in to the fact that you realize that you might be overreacting. The only problem is

that their idea of honesty isn’t always what a hypochondriac wants to hear. “Oh, it’s

nothing, you probably just twisted your ankle” won’t suffice if your veins are on fire.

What you really need is another hypochondriac. They’ll not only take you seriously,

without the caveat, but they’ll talk as long as you want to about all the implications of

your concern; it is all an exchange of important material for them. I should mention here

that elderly hypochondriacs dominate the conversation and don’t want to share. You

should seek out any hypochondriac that hasn’t entered that whining stage of the disorder.

There is also a form of semi-hypochondria, competitive hypochondria. My sister

has it and it may not even belong to the tree of the disorder at all. It is this: she has had

everything you have had, but worse. When I called her to tell her than my bronchial tubes

had collapsed on the operating table (a simple knee operation turned into a nightmare),

well, she had actually died on the operating table. Nothing steams a hypochondriac more

than this one-upmanship. A charted testimony of our human fears that is indisputable.

Inviolate! Inconsequential, apparently, to one who has actually died and been brought

back to life. My sister, and others like her, are the thorn in the side of the already prickly

hypochondriac. They listen to our distress only as a means of topping it. And they do it so

blithely that you just know they are not hypochondriacs. They are party-poopers.

Thinking about my own hypochondria as I often do, I can’t reconcile my type

with my father’s or grandfather’s. For one thing, I don’t trust doctors. I don’t like

doctor’s offices, waiting rooms (full of germs), and certainly not hospitals. I avoid the

doctor and don’t get the tests she prescribes until my family shames me into it. I fear I

may have a chronic disease and I put off the discovery as long as possible. I depend on

friends to reassure me that I am okay. Once I am actually in the doctor’s examining room

I am able to let my hypochondriac loose. A yearly exam that might have taken one hour

16

at the most will go on for two. Every cough, cramp, mole, and funny looking thing has to

be gone over and explained. “So you mean I should completely ignore this? No big deal,

right?” I will ask for the third time. I want to know which of my bodily obsessions to

concentrate on during the next year and which to put on the backburner.

My doctor has sent me to dermatologists to have unusual spots checked for skin

cancer. Not the bad skin cancer (melanoma), true, but the other kind (basal cell) can kill

you too. I had a friend of Irish descent who grew up half-naked on the beaches of Hawaii.

She developed a little insignificant bump on the corner of her nose. It was during

adolescence, so she figured it was just a stubborn pimple. Months went by before her

mother decided they had better check it out. This mild form of skin cancer had eaten

away much of the tissue under her nose and upper lip. It was all below the surface. The

doctors had to do several operations to restore her face to normal. She told me it would

have kept going until it reached the brain. This is the kind of story that hypochondriacs

fear and thrive on. The essential elements, the urban legendesque flavor notwithstanding,

are that the only clue was an unassuming little pimple, and the diseases scoffed at by

friends can be deadly.

My father, a redhead, growing up in the heat of South Georgia, had several

cancers removed from his face and bald head in middle age. I inherited his thin skin. My

husband has assumed the role of skin-checker for me. He says he doesn’t mind doing it,

but I think it annoys him sometimes. “I don’t know if it is browner than last week. It

looks the same to me, maybe just a little more red around the edges. Have you been

scratching it?” He’ll ask. Of course I’ve been scratching it. Picking it. Pulling it.

Caressing it. Rubbing it back and forth real fast. I can’t keep my hands off my funny-

looking places. It is one of the forms in which my hypochondria is expressed. I worry

about it, talk to family and friends about it, but I don’t go to the doctor unless I am pretty

sure it is fatal.

Before the Internet we hypochondriacs had to rely on medical and nursing

journals to get the truth. When I was about eleven, had a friend whose mother was taking

nursing classes. We would slip her text books out of the bookcase as if they were porn

and sit on the floor with the books opened to the most gruesome diseases. There were

black and white pictures of women with huge growths hanging from their bellies, so big a

17

wheelbarrow was necessary to carry them around. Ovarian cyst. All of the pictures had

the heads cropped off , adding to the morbid nature of looking at them. The women in the

photographs seemed disreputable and doomed. We looked on the women as disgusting,

their bodies eating away at them, or in the case of Ovarian cyst, making more and more

of them. I would go home at night and pray that I would never wind up in a nursing

journal with my head cropped off.

The Internet is a real boon for hypochondriacs. I can type in the most obscure

disease or condition and get text and colored pictures. This allows me to narrow my

search. One look at a photograph and I can usually decide whether I need to read on.

Often, I’ll have one or two of the defining elements of a disease. This can be frustrating,

but the Internet will have other sites to visit that will help me to establish my status. I

only look further when I am really worried about a symptom that has been bothering me.

The temptation to stare at the pictures is too great otherwise. I am still the eleven year-

old, sneaking peeks at the worst of my nightmares, the child who knows the horror movie

will scare her, but can’t keep from looking.

I have had lupus, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, food poisoning, and I think I may

have a case of something right now. None of these ailments were actually verified by my

doctor; they are just a few that I am sure I experienced. I did go to the doctor for a T.B.

test; the bump on the back of my hand didn’t quite reach beyond the bubble of concern,

but was close enough for me. I had the tell-tale butterfly rash of a lupus sufferer, along

with some weird knobs on my shin bones. The doctor mentioned a lupus test before the

whole thing cleared up. But will it come back? Is it really a stubborn, underground kind

of lupus?

I got the food poisoning the last time I ate oysters in 1985. I lay on the bathroom

floor for two days in agony. I haven’t really thrown up (other than drunken benders in my

thirties) in twenty years. If I feel the least bit nauseated I turn into some kind of awful

cliché of old Southern womanhood with the vapors. I need my family around me to

reassure me that I will not vomit. I telephone friends who will tell me that I don’t have a

stomach virus, and to give me remedies for the nausea. A little Coca-Cola over ice. A

saltine cracker. I even dread the diagnosis of cancer, as anyone would, but with the added

fear that chemotherapy will cause vomiting. This seems, in itself, twisted and superficial.

18

I imagine people who have been through the misery of chemotherapy think that I should

count my blessings that I am cancer-free. And this is a completely rational and valid

point. But my hypochondria is not rational.

Minamata disease, mercury poisoning, has haunted me for years. In eighth grade

my science teacher brought a quart jar of mercury to show the class. (Just why she did

this I can’t remember. What was she doing with all that mercury?) It was in a glass

mayonnaise jar, full to the brim with the lid tightly screwed on. The teacher passed this

jar around for the class to look at. Each student looked impressed as they felt the weight

of the stuff, taking the jar from the previous student with a downward swoop, indicating

its heaviness. The jar never got to me; I looked over at Alice Singletary, one of the bad

girls in the class, as she held the jar, and watched her cock her eyebrow up. I knew what

she was going to do a second before it happened. She let the jar fall from her hands as she

pretended to pass it on to the next student.

We all sat in horror as the jar burst on the floor and mercury slid and balled

around the room. We sat silent as the teacher squawked, running around the uncatchable

element. We were mesmerized by the animal nature of the mercury; it seemed to be alive,

seeking a way out of the classroom and away from the teacher’s voice. The teacher made

us all get down on our hands and knees with pieces of notebook paper and index cards to

scoop it up. It was hilarious fun, like trying to hold a fistful of water. Only later did I

realize the deadly nature of mercury. And a quart of it! I am still waiting on the results of

that day. Did I get mercury poisoning? No, the onset would be pretty quick. But what

about a sustained, low level of poisoning that may cause other problems not normally

associated with mercury? What if the very vapors in the room that day affected my

brain? Maybe the mercury actually accentuated my hypochondria.

My grandfather’s hypochondria had a twist to it that I ascribe to his generation.

He was a hypochondriac who held on to old remedies that had long gone out of fashion

and to some that had been declared dangerous. He would swallow great globs of Vicks

Vaporub for a cold and considered turpentine a good laxative and all-around antiseptic. I

can remember cutting my foot at my grandparents’ house and my grandfather splashing a

stream of turpentine on the wound.

For a hypochondriac he expected a stoical nature in others. He didn’t coddle his

19

grandchildren; he expected them to handle illness and injury quietly. This he did, himself,

although his hypochondria was evident. All over his house were envelopes stuffed with

medical columns he would clip out of the paper. Many of them had marginal notes: “Tell

doc to run oxygen level. Remember to get sugar checked! Shingles—oatmeal?” He had

an advanced case of Congestive Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (C.O.P.D.). that should

have limited his ability to get around, but he was always going to the doctor. He enjoyed

going just to argue with him. The doctor wanted him to tote an oxygen tank around with

him which he refused to do. He smoked Camel cigarettes up until the day he died in a car

crash. My grandmother, who never smoked, died of lung cancer a few years later. The

question immediately arises, second-hand smoke? But, no, I had never seen them in the

same room together since my first memories of them, other than at Christmas or

Thanksgiving. They stayed out of each other’s way. He would stalk through the living

room where she sat crocheting and mumble something under his breath. She would

mumble back. I never understood their feud and felt my loyalties tested. I tried to spend

equal time with both of them, but my grandmother was the most interesting; she was an

old-time herb woman and would take me out into the woods with her to gather flowers,

bark, and other ingredients which she would cook down into various remedies. My

grandfather wouldn’t touch these; he relied on his own weird concoctions. He spent most

of his time out on the front porch flicking his cigarette butts into the road and grousing

about the medical profession and the state of his lungs.

When my parent got old, my mother tentatively joined in with my father to talk

about bowel problems. I noticed something remarkable about friends and relatives of

hypochondriacs. They get a bit jealous of our intimate knowledge of our bodies. My

mother would mention that she had gone that morning but not enough, and she felt

bloated. My father would ask if it was dry, medium or loose. She would get snippy, “I

don’t look at mine, like some people I know.” Well, of course he looked at his and had

done so for years, reporting back to her the exact nature of his movements. She was at the

age of complaint, but she just wasn’t a hypochondriac. Real hypochondriacs discuss their

bowels with their partners during the first year of marriage. They might have even asked

them to take a peek and see what they think.

I have a friend who shares aspects of my hypochondria. She is more concerned

20

about the parasitic diseases, while I linger over the chronic. She checks (and has me

check) red spots, blood blisters, and rashes. She’s never had a parasite invade her body

that she’s aware of, but she figures one or two have somehow squirmed their way in.

She’s from Boston and the hot, humid days of north Florida have somehow sparked this

aspect of her hypochondria. She called one day with a startling question. Had I ever had a

bowel movement that looked like pencil shavings? I hadn’t, but I thought over all the

ones that might fit into that general category. I had had stringy ones, like No 10

spaghetti—not the linguine. “No,” she said, “the color is even the same as pencil

shavings.”

We went over what she had eaten the last few days, whether she had taken any

over-the-counter medications or drunk water out of a public fountain. No, all clear. We

got on the Internet and searched all kinds of combinations. The closest we got to an

answer was a story about a toddler who had actually eaten a pencil sharpener’s container

of shavings. I asked her the one question I had neglected, the one that I knew even as I

asked it was the wrong one: had she in fact eaten pencil shavings? This is the kind of

question that drives hypochondriacs mad. “What do you think, I’m crazy? Of course I

didn’t eat pencil shavings.” We never did get to the bottom of what had caused the

unusual movement; her bowels returned to a kind of normalcy, and like me, she avoids

the doctor.

Like my friend I check my body regularly, but I am checking for lumps. I tend to

find a lump every month or so. Often it turns out to be just a bit of fat shifting around

inside, getting comfortable. In my twenties my doctor found a lump in my breast that I

hadn’t noticed. This was shocking. How could I have missed it was my first question. It

was a moment before I thought to ask about cancer. My concern about overlooking a

lump was almost as devastating as the lump itself. What had I been thinking? Where was

my caution gene? I redoubled my efforts to keep myself alert to all lumps and bumps,

having my husband go over my body with me at night, comparing projections (ribs, he

said) in size from week to week.

Another girlfriend has had to purchase medical masks to wear when she goes into

large groups. She has never had hypochondria. Hers is developing as my father’s did,

onset around middle age. She says she can see sneeze and cough droplets projecting

21

yards away from the perpetrator, settling on folks. She wants to make sure that she

doesn’t inhale any of them. It’s not just to prevent a cold, although the common cold for

the hypochondriac is never common: it’s the flu. She has heard that tuberculosis is on the

rise, and she can’t go into a public place without her mask.

To have a network of fellow hypochondriacs can be comforting in a way. They

generally believe you when you complain. Even if they get the tiniest bit jealous, they

will overlook it to address the condition. But, if you are seeking the comfort of a

convincing argument about why you don’t have a certain disease or condition,

hypochondriacs are not the ones to turn to. If you call them up with the absolute certainty

that you have diabetes (you’ve been peeing a lot), they won’t ask the usual questions an

average person might. They’ll ask have you smelled your pee. Diabetic urine has a fruity

smell, they’ll say; call me later after you pee again. Now you have to decide if the smell

is at all fruity. A bit like pineapple maybe? Certainly not apples. This can get dicey. Ask

a non-hypochondriac friend and they’ll tell you to cut back on the water. Just like that.

But still, to have a friend or two who suffers from hypochondria can turn a question of

diabetes into an all-night conference. And there’s nothing more pleasurable to my sub-

category of hypochondria than hours of talk about the disease in question.

My father died in 2001 a couple of months before his 80th birthday. It wasn’t his

heart or his Krohn’s disease that killed him. He died of C.O.P.D., the same condition his

father had suffered from. Years of smoking and working in a cotton mill (about 40 years

of breathing in cotton lint) finally did him in. A year before he died we had to put him in

a nursing home. His demands on my mother, who had heart failure, were too much. He

had a roommate, Mr. Eber, for much of his stay at the nursing home, a fellow we all liked

for his congeniality and funny stories. He had one problem, though, that we had to face

up to. Mr. Eber was a thief. He kept a suitcase packed beside his bed, waiting for his

children to come and take him home. Every two weeks or so the aides would have to

open the suitcase to find something of my father’s that was missing. He chose the oddest

things to steal: an empty tank of oxygen, a pair of slippers, a portable urine bottle.

We wanted the staff to move him from the room; he had occasional fits of temper

that resulted in a couple of fights with my father. He was the most pleasant man

otherwise, and we really hated for him to move. My father settled it for us with a

22

hypochondriac’s sensibility, saying, “He doesn’t mean anything by it; his mind isn’t quite

right. But he is good to me; can’t he stay for awhile?” And he was good to him. Mr. Eber

would reach into the bedside table for my father to give him his cough syrup. (At this

point we were bringing him five bottles of Robutussin a week, extra strength.) My

father’s hypochondria had settled into a workable arrangement of all the things he

couldn’t do without. The cough syrup, his Breathe-Right strips (Mr. Eber would put these

on for him if a nurse wasn’t around), several bags of Vicks Honey Gold cough drops (no

other kind would do), and bags of Star peppermints. The most important thing Mr. Eber

would do for him, the thing that none of us expected, and were grateful for, was to wheel

him into the bathroom and help him onto the toilet, trailing yards of oxygen tubing

behind him.

I imagine that Mr.Eber reached a breaking point occasionally; my father wasn’t

an easy man to help. I came upon them several times, his roommate trying to keep the

tubing free of the wheel of my father’s chair, and my dad railing at him, “For God’s sake,

man, can’t you push this thing? I’ve got to go now.” This would cool things off between

the two of them for a while and Mr. Eber would pick a fight to get back at my father, or

he would steal something. Somehow the arrangement worked out between the two of

them. I would come on the weekends and bring Mr. Eber cigarettes; we would smoke on

the veranda and he would tell me about his family and the farm he had run. My father

would complain about the cigarette odor Mr. Eber carried on his clothes; he had given up

tobacco completely by then. I felt that I was buying this man’s cooperation, but it was a

small price to pay.

Even though I am middle-aged, my hypochondria isn’t. It has been around too

long to ever shock me into sudden thoughts of mortality. I’ve lived most of my life with

the thought of death hanging over my head. Sometimes, when I’ve exhausted my supply

of physical worries, and can’t sleep, I’ll muse about the possible ways I might go.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I was just hit by a bus? Or fell down the stairs? Something that

the authorities might have to respond to, but no medical personnel other than the

pathologist. All those years, wasted, worrying about cancer and Alzheimer’s, and I slip

on a banana peel.

23

THE COMMUNITY CENTER

The night H. Lee stomped his wife to death my brothers and I were at the

Community Center in our village. I remember it was September because school had just

started and the Miss America Pageant was on television that night. We lived in a Cotton

Mill village--a company town. Polyester hadn’t arrived; the mill ran twenty-four hours a

day, six days a week. Many parents of the children who went to the Center were at work;

my mother was home that night watching the pageant; it was a Saturday. My father

hadn’t been home since Thursday, payday. This meant that he might be home when we

got there, drunk and maudlin or drunk and mad. He might not come home until Monday,

forcing him to go to Buddy or Frank Strickland, the owners of the mill, and beg for his

job back. He had lost his job so many times, and had to plead for another chance from the

owners, that we were used to it. We never got used to waiting for the moment he stepped

in the door, though.

Some of the parents from the village had decided to convert the old one-room

schoolhouse that had stood abandoned for years on the eastern side of the village. It had

sat empty since the county allowed the mill children into its school system. The parents

converted it into a place where the children could go on Friday and Saturday nights: a

Community Center. Many of the windows were broken out of the old school and it had

acquired that desolate look some abandoned structures hold. I think the fact that it had

once been a school added to the ghostly feel of the place. Outside, in the old schoolyard,

were parts of old play equipment, sunken low into the ground by age. These were made

out of a heavy metal and were mostly used for leaning against and sitting on. I don’t

remember that anyone played on them—the swing-set had sunk so low there was no

clearance for chains and swings.

The conversion of the school was simple; the place was painted, inside and out,

and the windows were replaced. The toilet, an ancient thing with a metal pull chain for

flushing, was exchanged for a modern one. Someone found a large counter, the kind you

might see in a restaurant or store, and hauled it into the Center. The floors were mopped.

My father, during one of his exercises in sobriety, probably took part in some of the

fixing up of the Center. He was considered handy.

I don’t remember any of this renovation; my house was one over from Poplar on

24

Sycamore Street. As a child I was a bookworm, I didn’t notice what was going on several

streets over from my house, and anyway, I was a bit of an outcast among the children of

the village; they thought I was a snob because I read too much. I did have occasional

friendships among the girls of the village; when a family moved in with a reader we

would make an instant friendship, waiting on the Bookmobile together and trading out

our books before it rolled around the next week. Our love of reading was all that was

needed to bind us together, but often the bonds were broken when the girl had to move

away with her family. I don’t remember my brothers telling me about the new

Community Center, maybe they did and I was lost in a book.

The Center had been open several weekends before H. Lee killed his wife. The

children who went to the Center seemed to want two things: music and freedom.

Chaperones eagerly volunteered, mostly older teenage girls, past the age of actually

wanting to be seen as visitors to the center, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, but

dateless and hungry for the music. They were in charge of what was played on the hi-fi.

Most of us didn’t have record players at home and were enthralled by what we heard on

the radio.

That we could play a certain song at will captivated us into lining up before the

chaperone, begging for say, “Wooly-Bully” over and over again. We wheedled for our

favorites although there couldn’t have been more than thirty records. My brother, Kenny,

only a year and a half older than me, had saved up a bit of money to buy a few records to

add to the collection, maybe others did too, I don’t know. There were some 45s that were

never touched—“This Old House” and “Tumbling Tumble Weeds.” These must have

come from a parent, parting with what they thought we might enjoy, or simply donating

the only records they had.

My brother, Bobby, was five years older than me. He had a small transistor radio

encased in a turquoise cover that he carried with him everywhere. The case was covered

with little holes in a diamond pattern and it had a strap that could be hung from the wrist.

This he never did; he leaned his head into the tinny music as if it were a form of personal

salvation. He was with me and Kenny the night Mrs. Lee died. Bobby was fifteen, a little

old for the community center; I remember that he spent most of that evening outside with

the radio nudged between his neck and his ear, humming along with songs. I realize now

25

that there was probably a girl he had his eye on, maybe one of the older ones who

commanded the record player. He was shy and he loved music; the girls may have

aggravated him with the power they wielded. He was the kind of boy who would always

take solace in music but would never be comfortable dancing.

The middle of the Center was mostly open space for dancing. There were a couple

of card tables on the sides with battered checkerboards missing many of their pieces;

Kenny and his friends found Coca-Cola and Nehi soda bottle caps to use as men for the

board. There were jigsaw puzzles stacked in the corner; as soon as we all realized that

none of the puzzles had all of their corners, they were left to gather dust. We children,

mostly ages nine through fifteen, weren’t at the center to hang our heads over a mountain

scene that would never be complete. What we wanted was action—dancing, girls with

girls mostly, a few of the bolder girls stepping across the floor to grab a boy from the

sidelines where most of them stood—action away from the dreary days of school and the

uncertainty of home. I never considered dancing with a boy a real option. I was ten and

thought of boys in a romantic, vague way, but voluntarily touching one was out of the

question. I didn’t understood why a girl would want to slow dance with a boy.

H. Lee and his wife and five children lived one road over from the Center on

Victory Drive. This was the last road in the village and contained the shabbiest houses.

Most of the people who lived on Victory Drive were itinerant—they rarely stayed more

than a few months before moving further north to another mill village. At that time, in the

60s, anyone who had worked in a cotton mill could get a job easily at another one in

Georgia. The itinerants usually left due to absenteeism or trouble with the law.

Sometimes they left for no good reason at all. The Lees had been in the same shotgun

house for years. It wasn’t a matter of ambition; H. Lee lived to drink and made sure to

show up for work. He had no reason to ask the Company for a better house, his was

situated on the last road of the village which added a bit of privacy; there was no road

behind his, no back porches from which a nosy neighbor might watch.

H. had a brother, Buddy, who lived with his wife and two sons two streets over on

Poplar. Buddy’s house was a notch or two up from H.’s; it had an extra bedroom and two

front doors (a holdover from when the mill housed its workers in duplexes).

The oldest of the Lee children was Julie, a beautiful girl who was one class under

26

me at school. We were never very close; she wasn’t allowed to go to the Center, she was

needed at home with the younger children. Her father, H., was a mean drunk who would

make instant decisions in his intoxication that held past the hangover stage. He was never

questioned about these decisions (the length of his daughters’ dresses or his hatred for the

Methodist church that stood on the edge of the village), spoken sober or drunk, they were

law. Julie favored her mother; she had lovely cheekbones that ran smoothly into her

hairline like the hand emerges from the arm. Her eyes were that kind of blue that turns

green depending on what color clothes are worn. She was self-assured and unconcerned

about what others thought of her.

Julie wore clothes the County brought out to the village children, but she had a way

of sprucing them up to make them her own. When a chewing gum chain craze swept

through school (gum wrappers were braided together in a zigzag pattern to make long

chains), Julie collected the inner foil wrappers to make her own designs. She acted as

though the other fad wasn’t even happening as she made intricate objects with the foil

that she would then wear on her dresses and in her hair. I watched her work on some of

these as we rode the bus home; some were real works of art: a bicycle, an umbrella, a

butterfly with antennae. All they needed was a small bobby pin for the back.

Julie would weave bird feathers into her hair and might wear a small fern or

wildflower on her bosom until it wilted. You never knew what to expect when you saw

her. Behind the mill was a railroad track that the trains traveled on to bring in huge bales

of cotton to be turned into what we called “mill cloth.” The trains ran twice a day, just for

the mill, bringing bales in, taking mill cloth out. Behind the railroad tracks was Sugar

Creek where most of the mill children spent summers and weekends playing. Julie would

be there, picking her way through the creek and the woods behind, looking for treasure to

add to her wardrobe. Sometimes she would really luck out; I remember that she found a

class ring back in the woods that she wore on her finger with loops of rubber bands on the

back side of the ring to keep it stable. Mostly she found old pieces of glass, green and

shiny as emeralds. She put everything to use.

On that night at the Community Center the air was just starting to change, fall was

coming. There was the merest nip to it that had the children running through the tall

weeds that surrounded the building. A pack of girls chased the boys, trying to catch them

27

(and do what with them, I wondered, as I held up my end of the pack. I wasn’t sure, but it

excited me as very few things ever have, to chase those boys through the beggar weed). It

was exhilarating to run circles around the Center, swooping and hollering, laughing at the

boys who fell down, rushing them, almost catching a shirttail, and then off they’d go.

Occasionally there was an unspoken signal that turned the girls around and then the boys

were chasing us. They weren’t really after us, though, I don’t think; they took more

pleasure in throwing clods of dirt and handfuls of grass at our bare legs and making us

squeal.

The older girls were in the Center, probably playing “Venus in Blue Jeans” or one

of the other songs we younger children didn’t like. I had veered off from the flock of girls

and run into my brother, Bobby. He grabbed my hand and asked where Kenny was.

“He’s playing checkers with Donnie Barfield, I think,” I said.

He held on to my hand and we went into the Center. By now the lights from the cop

cars and ambulance Bobby had noticed could be seen, flashing against the new panes of

window glass with a pulsing, screaming red. Bobby grabbed Kenny by the collar and

pulled him out of the Center. All of the older girls were looking out the window, calling

their younger siblings inside, trying to get order restored. The children outside were

pouring into the Center; Bobby wanted us out.

Once we had moved a few yards from the building he told us to be quiet and follow

him. We went toward the flashing lights: did he think our father had gotten into a fight on

Victory Drive? What were we going to see? We crawled down in front of the cop cars

and lay in the ditch. Up and down Victory Drive we saw people milling about. Women

stood in circles, their nipples sagging against their faded nightgowns, plucking at bits of

each other’s clothes—they couldn’t seem to keep their hands still. Men stood off to

themselves, moving close in to whisper something to each other and then back away

again. They looked ashamed. A cop was taking notes as he talked to one hysterical

woman. She kept saying, “But it can’t be, it can’t be.” Children were crying in the yard

next to H. Lee’s house. I saw the youngest Lee, Otis, being carried into the neighbor’s

house.

I looked at Bobby and asked what had happened. He hushed me with a wave of his

hand. We watched as the stretcher brought H.’s wife out of the house. She had a sheet

28

covering her body from head to toe. Her seven months pregnant belly was sticking up

against the sheet as if there might be a possibility, a lifting within toward life. The sheet

was sopping up blood, gruesome and real. In the back of a police car we saw the back of

H.’s head. He was wailing and cursing, tossing his head from side to side. Bobby grabbed

our hands and we ran back toward the Center, the red lights of the vehicles cutting

swatches across our backs. We cut through the weeds and made our way home. I had a

hard time keeping up with both of them. Bobby ran as if he was trying to get to the scene

at the Lee’s an hour before, as if he could run time backwards. He ran as if the horror

could be happening at two places that night, he ran us home.

When we got to our house the front door was open, the screen door latched. Our

mother was still watching the pageant. All was well at our house. She opened the door for

us and stood back.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

We didn’t answer. I was too out of breath to say anything and I think my brothers

were afraid to.

“Sit down, you’re sweating. What’s the matter?” she asked again.

“H. Lee is in the back of a cop car and Betty Lee is covered up with a sheet in an

ambulance,” Kenny said. He said later that he knew Betty Lee was dead then, but I think

he lied. He was always happy, looking on the bright side of things. He drove me crazy

with his happiness. He joked and clowned and made a fool of himself. He acted like

everything was always going to be all right.

“Covered up?” my mother asked, looking at Bobby. “Covered all the way up?”

“I think so. I saw some of her hair but she wasn’t moving, and there was blood”

Bobby said.

My mother sank onto the sofa. She had worked for years in the Spinning Room

with Betty and liked her. One of my mother’s sisters had a big farm and my mother

would bring vegetables to her at work. She would never go to her house—H. didn’t allow

his wife visitors.

My mother started to cry and then I cried. Bobby and Kenny went to the room they

shared and closed the door. Seeing my mother cry always made me cry. I thought of Julie

and what she was doing that minute. Were the cops talking to her? Was she in the

29

ambulance with her mother? This made me cry harder and I snuggled next to my mother

and fell asleep.

News of Betty’s death blazed through our village and by Sunday morning everyone

knew what had happened. My father still wasn’t home, who knows what he knew and

didn’t know. The Lee children had told the story of their mother’s death in hard little

sentences. He came home. He was drunk. He was mad. He thought she should’ve done

something, they couldn’t remember. One said iron, another said mop. Then he started

kicking her with his big boots. She fell down. He stomped her. They yelled and tried to

pull him off. She pleaded with him. He stomped.

Buddy Lee and his wife took the five children in and raised them with their two

sons. H. got twelve years in prison. Julie drifted farther and farther away. She ran away

from home by the time she was fourteen and I don’t know where she is now. I like to

think that she went to Maine, Hawaii, or Alaska: far, far away.

30

THE BRITISH ARE COMING

Annalee Cooper noticed her husband’s affliction soon after his fortieth birthday

when he had gotten into genealogy. That’s how he put it, “gotten into it,” but Annalee felt

he had been swept away from her by a great Atlantic tide, all the way to England. What a

dusty, old person’s habit to take up at forty. When he started researching she had teased

him, “Cooper: your ancestors made barrels; what’s to know?” Now they were

celebrating Peter’s forty-third birthday with a bar-b-que on the deck. It was August 19th

and Annalee was thinking about ways to kill him.

As she tapped a cigarette against the patio table she ran different scenarios

through her head: she could stab him in the heart with the long grill fork, and then lay his

dead body prone on the patio floor. He had certainly drunk enough Guinness for the

authorities to believe that he could have fallen on the fork. But she didn’t know exactly

where the heart was, the human body had so many ribs, and the chance of getting two

prongs in the right position seemed improbable. And what if she stuck it in the right

place and it served as a kind of hors d’oeuvre pick, holding his frame up off the planks of

the deck? Could she explain why she hadn’t tried to move him, had left him with his mid-

section curving upwards? Would she move him, touch him, after the murder?

Maybe she could poison him; she had seen lots of TV shows where women

poisoned their spouses (it was apparently the preferred way of killing a husband). Oh but

the innovations the authorities had come up with in the last twenty years; gone were the

days of simply detecting an almond odor. On all of those shows the women had been

caught. She couldn’t shoot him, they didn’t own a gun, and if she bought one, she’d have

to register it and wait long enough not to raise suspicion. Stabbing him presented the

same problem as the grill fork (his body arced above the knife)—but then if she really

plunged it in, to the hilt, that might work, but would the cops have formulas for figuring

out how deeply a knife would enter a man at a fall of four feet or so? And did she have

the strength to carry it out? It would have to be a torso stab to convince the authorities

that he had fallen, drunk, onto his fork or knife. A knife sticking out of his head or back

couldn’t be explained away.

None of this was new, it was the piling up of it all: the cheerio in the morning and

using lift for elevator. The wall of Briticisms stood between them like the Atlantic that

31

Annalee couldn’t cross. It was just last month that Annalee had discovered his obsession

was not just with the Brits—it was with a particular Brit, one who called herself faerie1

on the computer site Peter visited.

Annalee had walked into Peter’s study without knocking; he had quickly pulled

up a screen with a large weather map on it. He swung his chair around as she entered.

“God, Annalee, can’t you knock? You scared me to death.”

“Sorry. So, how’s the weather?” she asked, peering closely at the screen. At the

very bottom she could see the box for an instant message. Who was Peter IMing? She

reached past him and clicked on the box. Peter pushed her away and she pushed back.

She read: Vicman: But I want to see you there. Faerie1: Wouldn’t it be better for me to

come to the States? Peter pushed her harder and she had fallen against the easy chair he

kept in his office. She slid back into it and covered her face with her hands.

Peter didn’t say anything for awhile. Annalee looked up to see the map looming

on the computer screen, charging the room with colors that seemed radioactive, alive but

deadly.

“It’s just a group I belong to. We’re all planning a get-together,” he said, finally.

“So, where’s the rest of the group?”

“Faerie is like a moderator. You don’t understand these things, you never IM,” he

said, as if her lack of interest in chatting on the computer equaled idiocy.

Annalee sat up in the chair. “’But I want to see you there’” is what you typed. Not

y’all. Not you chaps. Not the fucking group! And she said she wanted to come to the

States. Sounds like she is moderating for one.”

She got up from the chair and went to the door. Before she closed it she leaned in

and asked, “’Vicman’? What the hell does that mean?”

Peter stared at the computer screen ignoring her. She waited, rattling the door

knob to let him know that she wasn’t giving up easily. He sighed.

“Oh, the typical beleaguered husband’s sigh. That won’t get you anywhere, you

bastard. You threw me across the room,” she said. The room was small, maybe 10x12,

but still, Annalee had felt the meanness in his hands as he had pushed her away.

“I didn’t throw you, I pushed you. I don’t snoop through your things, leave mine

alone.”

32

“Peter, Peter. It isn’t snooping if you’re watching me do it. Now, if I opened your

email and read it, yeah, that’d be snooping. But not if you are watching me do it.”

“Get the Goddamned hell out of my office!” Peter’s face was glowing red now,

like the bands on the computer that predicted the heaviest rain.

“Sure thing, Vic,” she said, and slammed the door.

That’s when she had really started thinking that his death might be the only way

out of her predicament. It had occurred to her before in random electric flashes—Peter’s

body cold, dead, lying across the bed or slumped over the dinner table. But she hadn’t

really seen the perpetrator in these fantasies. It was on this day, his birthday, that the idea

had congealed. It would be she who would have to banish this impostor, and murder was

the only way. Annalee hadn’t thought of divorce seriously, it had edged around her

thoughts as an unacceptable solution to the problem.

Peter brought the meat to the table. “Beefsteak!” he said. This was one of the

seemingly benign symptoms of his affliction, using British words in place of simple

American ones. The innocuous added up though, he had gotten to the point of actually

calling an umbrella a bumbershoot. She stood up to take the platter from his hands and

realized that he looked shorter than when she had first married him, either that or she had

somehow grown taller. She had read once that old people lose an inch or two as they age,

but Peter was only 43. She straightened her shoulders as she thought of her birthday

coming up in October. She would hit 42, what might happen to her?

“Oh, nice looking steak,” Annalee said, blowing smoke out of the corner of her

mouth and tossing her cigarette into the yard. She tried to treat his obsession as one

would a child’s syntax errors: repeating the correct word or phrase in a casual way.

Usually. Earlier that day, in the grocery store, he had actually asked her to put something

into the trolley. She rammed the cart into his thigh bones, up against the meat section of

the store, where all those beefsteaks were. He had looked at her as if she had broken wind

in front of the queen. Outrage: that was it, not the wince of pain that any other American

would have. Back from the store, he had called the trunk of the car the “boot” for the

hundredth time. She had yelled, “Fucking Wannabe!” and ran into the house, leaving the

unpacking of the groceries to him.

And it would really be a favor to Peter—never in his youth would he have wanted

33

to end up this way, saying waistcoat for vest, watching soccer matches on ESPN, and the

monthly Parliament meetings on C-SPAN. Going days without bathing. No, her Peter

would want to be saved from such a life. And faerie1 was not going to ruin his life. He’d

be better off dead.

Her own ancestry was a mix of Irish and Scottish. Maybe she could take on a

radical IRA persona, plant a bomb under Peter’s office chair. Looking at Peter now, his

pale blue eyes watery from the smoke of the grill, repulsed her. Peter’s shoulders were a

bit stooped, his chest had narrowed and his stomach had widened. He had a naturally

ruddy complexion, darkened now by the heat of the grill. His hair was that unfortunate

shade of red that doesn’t age well; what little was left on the dome of his head looked like

rusty shavings from a piece of junkyard metal. Every day he looked less like the man she

had married and more like a sit-com Brit imported twenty or thirty years after airing in

Britain. She imagined Peter on the Sunday night PBS comedies: a flustered neighbor, a

beleaguered husband, a social-climbing woman with a bird’s nest on her hair and boxy

brown shoes.

For most of their twenty-one years of marriage they had gotten along well.

Things had naturally cooled down between them in the last five years or so, but Annalee

chalked that up to the natural progression of marriage, not some encroaching auxiliary

identity that lay within Peter. Their sex life had become perfunctory; they had worked on

it, made bets that paid off in special acts in bed, intentionally surprised one another with

romantic gifts and candlelight, all of that early romance stuff. Their sex life improved

until the British Peter appeared. Annalee wouldn’t sleep with him, he smelled, and he

went back to the rolling over and yawning that had preceded the resurgence of their

marriage.

Since he had started researching his ancestry he had become an Anglophile of the

worst sort. He affected a slight accent, one a stranger couldn’t place, maybe, but their

friends had started to notice. The Coopers weren’t the type to hang flags or put political

stickers on their cars, but finally Annalee had hung an American flag from the fascia of

their porch. The next morning, there on the other side of the porch hung the British flag.

She had stomped back into the house, found Peter sitting in front of the computer and

yelled, “I’m not British, you’re not British. Get that British flag off my fucking house!”

34

Peter had looked up from the screen; Annalee saw that he was in his chat-room,

prattling on about the Prime Minister. “Fuck off, cunt, and leave me to me work,” he

roared.

“Call me that again and you’ll get the old Union Jack up your arse,” Annalee said.

“You bloody well better not touch it,” he said.

“Shit, Peter; let’s get real patriotic, what about Old Glory? We beat them over two

centuries ago,” she said. She stood looking around his office. There were posters of the

Queen, the dead Princess, and that oaf Charles. When had he put these up? Where had he

gotten them? It was so unlike Peter—even in their youth he didn’t put posters up of

Aerosmith or the Sex Pistols. He thought it was tacky. It was tacky: the royal family

looming around the room like ghosts from a defeated nation with shrunken smiles on

their faces.

“Look, I don’t hate the British, well; I didn’t use to hate the British. What about

my Irish ancestors? They are rolling in their graves with that rag hanging from our

house.” This was nonsense. Annalee didn’t think much about her ancestors. She didn’t

have to research; one set of grandparents had come from Ireland and were completely

unsentimental about the Old Country. They had lived in New Jersey and made a decent

life for themselves. They had had eight children who were all spread across the states

now. Annalee’s mother had moved to Georgia where she had gotten a scholarship to a

small Catholic college. She had met Annalee’s father and joined the Methodist church.

No, the Doyles weren’t sentimental.

Annalee’s grandfather had died before she was born, but she remembered a visit

to New Jersey when she was five, meeting her grandmother; the old woman had loved

America, the convenience of it, the privacy. She didn’t feel that the neighbors were

examining her wash that hung on the line. Not like Ireland at all. The only complaint she

had (her name was Bridget) was that Americans called her Birdie. That was it. On

Annalee’s father’s side no one talked much about their ancestors. They were all native

Georgians; their lineage probably went back at least as far as Oglethorpe. They had a

sound surname: Nickelson. That could be Scottish or British. So what?

“Don’t call the Union Jack a rag. Do you realize that my ancestors may have

come over on one of the first ships? I’m researching that right now,” Peter said. He

35

wanted her to get excited about where he had come from. As she recalled, he had grown

up in a dingy crossroads town outside of Tampa.

“Looks like you’re asking for lamb recipes to me,” Annalee said, peering over his

shoulder at the screen. Faerie1 was sharing a recipe for a lamb chop dish. Oh, now they

were trading recipes. And what did Vicman share? That Annalee had cooked for him the

last twenty years until he had insisted on beef at every meal? Peter didn’t seem upset that

she was looking at the screen. Faerie1 was going on about the lamb; apparently it was her

own recipe: she used words like tender-to-the-touch and succulent. The message ended

with the words, “at the precise moment of readiness, the lamb will give way to a poke of

the finger, revealing its surrender.” Oh and Peter would want to eat lamb, of course. It

was a dish neither of them had eaten. It was sold in the stores, but Annalee assumed

Indians and Pakistanis bought it. She had a brief but sharp vision of wringing the mouse

cord around his neck and pulling very hard and long. Here they were in Columbus,

Georgia and he wanted lamb. Oh, and he wouldn’t call it lamb either, it would be chops.

In America chops were pork. In America faeries were fairies. She left Peter to his typing.

Let him eat lamb, she’d have none of it.

And all the viscera the British ate! He had printed some recipes off of the Internet

for Annalee to try: Kidney Pie, a brain dish that mooed of Mad Cow disease, weird

names like Bubble and Squeak and Spotted Dick. She refused to take part in his quest to

be an Englishman, at first noticing glimpses of it as one might notice a particularly ornate

tombstone when driving by a cemetery. She remarked on his more pedestrian attempts to

be a solid Englishman (the garden, not the yard or lawn) by telling him to go mow it, but

mostly she kept quiet, watching her husband go through whatever it was the

psychologists might call it: a mid-life crisis, an identity disorder, a severe case of the

asshole.

Out on the patio the steak Peter had cooked did look good, but it was huge, its

fatty edges hanging over the sides of the platter. Peter tucked a napkin into his collar and

picked up his fork and knife. Annalee was a leftie, had always used her left hand to eat

with; it amused her now to see Peter struggling with his fork, changing it from right to

left, finally settling on the right.

“Some things aren’t as important as others,” he said, and dug into the steak.

36

“That’s just the point I wanted to make tonight. Some things just aren’t important.

Look, it’s your birthday! Forget all that British nonsense and let’s have a good time.”

Annalee looked longingly at him, down toward the collar where the napkin was tucked

in. A quick jerk from behind, back he’d go, she could then sit on his chest and finish it

off.

“I’m on a quest here, Annalee. Can’t you take it with more respect? I’m getting

closer every day. I was at the library the other day, looking at some old facsimiles of

shipping logs. Lots of Coopers on the early ships.” He worked at a law firm, formatting

years of dry legal documents onto hard-drives. For the last year he had been stopping off

after work to research at the local college: shipping logs, personal accounts of early

America, ephemera. Lately, he had been leaving work early, showing up late. Annalee

suspected that he didn’t want to replace those brittle papers into 21st century technology.

Didn’t he know that the British were using computers—he chatted with them on one for

god’s sake—and not dipping nibs into ink pots?

For his birthday she had invited him to Mama’s, a comfort food restaurant in

Columbus that had just opened. Peter had eaten American food up until his ego

displacement, had even enjoyed Annalee’s hours in the kitchen putting up corn and

tomatoes. He’d hang around the door and watch as she did a virtual square dance around

the kitchen, working from counter to stove to sink. Now all he seemed to want were huge

slabs of beef. He really has no imagination, Annalee thought. If she could zap him back

into nineteenth century England, she would. Let him eat mush and turnips. That was his

idea of England, guttersnipes running the streets, rosy-cheeked Oliver Twists with hidden

pasts, ready to be saved. He probably thought of himself as a Dickens’character, but

which one? What was that butler’s name in David Copperfield, Steerforth’s butler? Mr.

Dick was more like it.

He refused the invitation to Mama’s and suggested that they stay home and grill

on the patio. The restaurant was one idea she had for getting him back to his old self. She

had tried all kinds of things to remind him of his affiliation with America. She bought

large bags of Cheetos and pork skins; made him watch West Wing, and reruns of

Gunsmoke. She even whistled “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You Are My Sunshine” as

she moved around the house. Nothing had worked.

37

Peter was convinced that he would hit the jackpot: he had almost traced his

ancestors back to the Revolutionary War, the Colonial side, by the way (and why,

Annalee wondered, did he not see the contradiction in this?). He was now on a mission

to connect the Coopers (and the Johnsons, the Carters, the Bowmans, the Carltons—all of

the branches that spread backwards from Cooper like a string of buoys straight to

Plymouth) to the Mayflower. She had asked him why he didn’t just apply to join the

D.A.R. They would probably help him. She could see the old women welcoming a man

into their ranks; but the main obstacle there for Peter was not gender, it was his alliance

with the British. This would not sit well with the august members of the D.A.R. Was

there a Sons of the American Revolution? She didn’t know and really didn’t care: they’d

just kick his ass out of their meeting house.

Maybe she could’ve understood if Peter had been searching for a connection to

John Wesley; after all, Peter was a Methodist (she predicted a switch to Anglican at any

moment), and if his quest had a spiritual component to it, Wesley haunting his dreams,

shoot—even Lady Jane Grey. But it simply seemed that he had turned thoroughly,

undeniably, unfathomably, British.

Annalee and Peter were eating their first bites of the birthday steak when Peter

remembered that he had thrown two shish kabobs on the grill. He jumped up and picked

them up by the tips of their skewers and ran back to the table with them. Annalee took

hers and pushed some of the tidbits off the skewer and onto her plate. Peter had made a

minor concession to the meal. Annalee had asked him to put peppers, mushrooms, and

zucchini on the kabob sticks. She was surprised to see that he had actually followed

through with her request. She forked up bits of vegetables, enjoying the just done inside,

the charred outside. Peter was holding his wooden skewer in his mouth and pulling the

food off between his teeth.

Annalee took two packages from one of the extra chairs at the table. She handed

the first one to Peter. “Happy Birthday, I hope you like it,” she said. Throughout their

marriage they had exchanged two gifts at birthdays, a serious, thoughtful one, and an

outrageous gag gift. She handed over the gag gift first.

“Oh, and many returns of the day?” Peter asked.

“Yes, that too. Many, many more.” Annalee sat back and waited for his reaction.

38

She had bought it with the utmost care, the first gag gift she had given him that meant

something, something to impress upon him the seriousness of his delusion.

As Peter pulled his present out of the box, his eyes widened. For a moment

Annalee thought that she had hit home with the gift. But he jumped up and put the gift, a

bar-b-que apron, on immediately. He turned around so that she could see the apron from

all angles. He actually liked it. On the front of the large expanse of heavy white cotton

was this legend: Don’t Kiss Me, I’m British.

“You like it?” Annalee asked, mortified. Maybe a hired killer was the way to go.

She had saved up quite a bit of money from her job at the real estate firm.

“Like it? It’s perfect! Where in Columbus did you find it?”

“On-line, one of those do-it-yourself deals. You give them the saying and they

send the apron out. They have chef’s hats too, but I knew you wouldn’t wear one.” He’s

crazy. That’s it. But insane asylums didn’t take crazy people anymore, not unless they

were homicidal maniacs. Maybe she should check in, she thought.

“Don’t you have something else for me?” Peter asked, sitting back down to his

dinner.

“Oh, I forgot, here,” Annalee said, and handed Peter a little neatly wrapped

package.

Peter opened it and stared for several moments. It was a lovely eel skin wallet

with his initials engraved on the front flap. He seemed at a loss for words.

“Well, do you like it?” Annalee asked.

“But what about the gag gift? We always have a gag gift.” He answered, looking

for all the world like a thirsty Englishman who had been told that all the tea was really,

truly, in China.

Peter was guzzling down the beer. Annalee had decided to have just one glass of

Merlot. He was rattling on about the trip he wanted to take to England; he understood that

Annalee wouldn’t want to go. He ate big bites of his steak, yammering on about Big Ben

(god, hadn’t Roger Miller sang that to death years ago?) and rose gardens. Annalee

looked out over the backyard. It was dark but she could see the outlines of what actually

amounted to an English garden, but Peter had no clue. She liked the randomness of the

garden, clumps of lilies and hostas with spreads of delphiniums. Around the stepping

39

stones leading to the back shed she had planted herbs. Would Peter be shocked to see this

same kind of garden in England? He would probably go just to the official rose gardens

and feel that he had British horticulture down. She looked over at him, grease covering

his lips and chin.

“We really have the best roses, you know,” she said. She had pushed her plate

away and was smoking a cigarette. Peter never complained of her smoking now—the

Brits probably smoked more than the Americans.

Peter looked out into the yard. “What? All you have is the Cherokee rose along

the fence, and the thorns are as big as the roses,” he said.

“I mean we, as in Americans. We have the best roses. Maybe not the best rose

gardens, but certainly the best roses.” She flicked her cigarette out into the darkness, its

arc trailing high and landing on a paving stone.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken there, Annalee. The English are renowned for their

roses. Remember that song Elton John wrote about Lady Di?” He was sucking on the big

bone of the steak. She imagined him suddenly as a weasel or a mole, gnawing at the bone

with sharp little teeth.

“Here, I’m not going to finish this, do you want it?” She asked him, handing over

her plate. She had eaten only half of her vegetables and had left most of the steak on her

plate. Peter grabbed her shish kabob skewer and used it as a pointer. “What Elton John

has to do with roses is beyond me, by the way,” Annalee said.

“It was a global hit! The English rose, da, da, da…I forget the words. You

remember!” He was moving the shish kabob as if it were a maestro’s baton. One of his

chat rooms was devoted to the conspiracy behind Diana’s death. The chatters pretended

to be some kind of modern-day Sherlock Holmes’, throwing out theories and updating

each other with each tidbit they could glean from unsound sources. So unlike her old

Peter! In the past, had she brought a National Enquirer into the house he would’ve

pitched a fit.

Annalee leaned her head back against the patio chair and stared at the few stars

she could see. The city lights encroached on their neighborhood, dulling the night sky

into a deep gray. As she was trying to fit together a few stars in a connect-the-dots

pattern, she heard Peter begin to cough. She ignored it at first—he was always eating too

40

fast and swigging his beer in great draughts. The cough became a wheeze, a sucking-in

sound that was alarming.

She moved over to Peter and saw the shish kabob stick hanging out of his mouth.

Apparently, he had sucked a hunk of meat down his windpipe as he prattled on about

roses. His face was bright red and he had stopped gasping. Annalee patted him on the

back a couple of times but all he did was wave his arms about, pulling the skewer out of

his mouth and trying to talk. He was panicked, his movements jerky and ineffectual.

She moved in front of him and saw that his color was draining. His arms were

floppy now, no direction to them, just appendages that hung loosely by his sides. She

slapped him across the face. He didn’t respond. What was that maneuver? The Heimlich?

She got behind him and patted his back and front simultaneously, as if defying her own

sense of rhythm. His back felt like a baby’s, soft and boneless. She moved around and

squatted down to look into Peter’s eyes. They were empty of life, staring down toward

the folds of his new apron. Annalee picked the skewer up from the floor and stuck it back

into Peter’s mouth and went to call 911.

41

LIKE FRANKENSTEIN

It was Halloween and Sean sat on the porch carving pumpkins with his mother, Julia.

She sliced a crescent mouth into her jack-o’-lantern; Sean carved away the rind and flesh

to expose two long vampire fangs on his. His mother had spread newspapers under the

pumpkins; the papers had turned to a slimy mess of sticky seeds and hair-like fiber.

Sean had worried all week about whether or not he should join his friends for trick-

or-treat. Scrawny Tyler, who looked ten years old, and Josh, pudgy and baby-faced,

looked young enough to ask even the grouchiest old man for candy. But Sean was the

oddity of the three, twelve and almost six feet tall. Not that they were really going to yell

“Trick-or-Treat” or carry big bags for the candy; still, Tyler planned to bring three plastic

grocery bags in his pocket, just in case. The real idea was to run through the dark streets

and maybe egg a few houses.

Sean had told the other boys that the parents who opened doors to them would refuse

to give him any candy—last year, lots of doors were slammed in his face and he was only

about 5’9” then. He would surely look like an imposter, one of those kids that hits up

houses every year until they turned fifteen. Tyler said they could ride the wave of other

trick-or-treaters, stand with bags out amongst the mob. All three were going as vampires.

This sealed the deal for Sean; vampires were cool.

He had already put his make-up on: his mother’s eyeliner to draw dark menacing

eyebrows and rings around his eyes, and one of her bright red lipsticks to paint dribbles

of blood down from the corners of his mouth to his chin. He had thought about using

white powder on his face but all his mother had was something called “tawny beige.”

“Give me that pumpkin. What are you doing?” his mother asked, rolling the thing

toward her. “What is this thing you have for vampires? Can’t you carve a happy jack-o’-

lantern?” She took her knife and sliced off the perfect triangular fangs that Sean had

created for his pumpkin.

“You do it, you’re the expert,” Sean said, getting up from the floor of the porch to sit

on the swing. He moved his back against the cool hard edges of the swing chain and let

one leg hang out over the swing arm closest to his mother. He pushed the swing back-

and-forth with his left leg. She was so intent on creating a happy Linus fantasy. Her

whole life was a fantasy, he thought. She hadn’t left the house without an escort for the

42

last year. Her odd behavior had started out gradually, driving to the grocery store and

leaving the half-filled cart in the aisle, rushing out to the car, sitting, she said, barely able

to catch her breath. The mall and football games were now out of the question, with or

without his father, Charlie, to take her. Her best friend, Louise, would come by and coax

her with sale flyers, but she rarely went even to Wal-Mart. It was something about the

lights, she told Sean and Charlie. Too bright, sure, but they were loud too. The electricity

a monotonous string of Zs that assaulted her ears.

Sean’s father had talked to her about maybe going to a doctor but she wouldn’t hear

of it. She said she was perfectly happy staying at home, and after all, Charlie could drive

her if she really had to go somewhere. She was hunkered down in their house with her

crossword puzzle books and the T.V. Charlie did the shopping now and Sean usually

went with him. His dad could be talked into buying foods his mother never would’ve

bought in the old days before she was seized with fear of the world. Her venture onto the

porch was something she was proud of, Sean knew. It was the only reason he let her take

control over his pumpkin. He feared she would reach a point of never coming out of the

house at all, that she would be like that roach guy in the story he had just read for class.

Sean had a nice plastic set of vampire teeth in his pocket. He slipped them in his

mouth and pushed the swing forward with his foot, cocking it awkwardly toward his

mother.

“I vant to drink your blood,” he said, but it came out all wrong, like a lisp, not a

threat.

“And I vant you to wash that paint off your face,” Julia said. “I think you overdid it

with the lipstick. You’re going to scare the little children, walking around in the dark like

that.” She was using the knife to arch eyebrows on Sean’s pumpkin, giving it a perplexed

look.

“Well, at least I’m going out,” he said.

Julia looked at him and wiped her hands off with a rag. She picked up a box of long

matches from the porch and lit the jack-o’-lanterns. “Clean up this mess. I’m going to

cook supper; you need to eat before you gorge on candy. Where’s your father?”

“In the kitchen, last I saw,” said Sean, pulling his long legs out of the swing. He stood

and looked at the fibers and seeds. He remembered a dish of tripe his mother had cooked

43

once. Raw in the package it looked fibrous and alien, just as the stringy seeds and

membranes did now. He squatted down and wrapped the refuse up in the mushy

newspaper and carried it out to the garbage can.

His mother had left Sean’s pumpkin without a nose but with two perfectly round

eyes that looked spookier to him than the fangs had. They seemed to be saying, “What?

What?” He took the knife and gave each eye a small downward slant, and then he carved

two little slashes for nostrils. The big smile on the jack-o’-lantern looked ludicrous; it

reached all the way across the face of the pumpkin. He was considered extending the

smile to the very back of the pumpkin’s head but knew it would upset his mother. He

kicked the stray pumpkin seeds off the porch. Some stuck to the edges of his shoes, and

as he leaned over he heard his mother calling.

“What is it?” he shouted. He had forgotten to take his vampire teeth out and his voice

ended with a hiss of Ss and Ts.

“Get in here, it’s your father!” his mother yelled.

In the kitchen Charlie lay on the linoleum floor. His face looked pale and sweaty. His

eyes were half-closed, the right one drifted off to the side. Julia was kneeling down

beside him patting his cheeks.

“What happened?” Sean asked. How weird was this, flashed through Sean’s mind.

Here he was decked out as a vampire with his father sprawled across the kitchen floor.

He had a brief image of the cops coming in, arresting him. “Yep, it’s that vampire we’ve

been looking for,” one of them would say.

“Call 911,” his mother said. She jumped up to the sink and wet a handful of paper

towels and placed them on Charlie’s forehead.

“Dad, can you hear me?” Sean asked, jerking the fangs out of his mouth. His mother

started shaking Charlie’s shoulders, trying to get a reaction.

“911!” Julia said.

The EMTs had taken Charlie straight to the emergency room, with Julia and Sean

crammed in the back of the van. They had said only one but Sean told them their car

wasn’t working. They said no, but let it go when Sean crawled up into the ambulance

with his mother. The driver sped off and the other man began to pound on Charlie’s

chest. Sean watched the attendant crouched above his father, his knees leaning into the

44

gurney. The attendant, a small, wiry guy, pulled a green bag down from the ceiling of the

ambulance and squeezed it over Charlie’s face.

“He fainted dead away, didn’t he?” Sean’s mother asked. She was perched on a tiny

bench beside Sean clutching her handbag, rocking and jolting with the movement of the

ambulance. The driver had turned the siren and whirling light on and Sean sat in the

gleaming white ambulance, thinking, so this is an ambulance. They really do care about

you, like on T.V. The attendant worked on his father like a speeded-up mechanic,

reaching here and there for things, using his teeth to hold objects as he ripped the

wrappers off.

“We’ll be there in just a minute,” the man said to Charlie’s mother. He looked at Sean

and then back down at Charlie. By the time they got to the hospital five miles away,

Charlie had an IV in his arm and a clear plastic mask over his face.

The ambulance backed into a side door of the hospital, sort of like a loading dock at a

warehouse. Two nurses ran out and met the EMTs as they lowered the gurney onto the

ramp. They rushed through swinging doors into the emergency room and moved Charlie

from the gurney to a bed in a large room with curtains separating his bed from others like

it. The room was full of men and women standing ready to help his father. They wore

clear Darth Vader-like masks and white gloves. Sean felt relieved to hand his father over

to the staff of the hospital. Doctors and nurses were all around his father’s bed. Machines

appeared, rolled in from the hall and lowered from the ceiling. His mother was standing

at the foot of the bed with her hands on Charlie’s feet when a nurse came up and guided

Julia and Sean out of the room.

“I’m Charlie’s wife. What’s wrong, why can’t I stay?” she asked the nurse.

“They’re going to find out what’s wrong; let me take you to the waiting room,” the

nurse said.

In the waiting room his mother began to speculate about what had befallen Charlie.

At first she said it must be a bad flu, one was going around. He could be having a spell of

inner ear trouble—that would make you fall over. Sean sat next to her, listening to her

rattle on. She seemed to be covering all the things that could make you sick and avoiding

the ones that put you in an ambulance and an emergency room full of doctors and nurses.

The waiting room was full of people; some were sitting stiffly in their chairs, while

45

others leaned over, their heads resting on their knees or a partner’s lap. Two mothers

were walking around the room, murmuring to whimpering infants. A father sat with his

son who was decked out in a skeleton costume. The child’s eye was red and swollen shut.

Suddenly someone cursed—a long, loud ohhh shit that sounded like a prayer.

“Thank God Charlie’s not out here,” Julia said.

“Mom, the sickest go right back, I think.”

“Well Charlie may be sick, but he isn’t the sickest in this room,” she said, looking

over at a young man shivering and smelling of feces. The man was dripping sweat and he

was wiping snot on the back of his hand.

There was a family in the room, a thin woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail,

and several of her relatives. The relatives kept assuring the woman that everything was

going to be all right. They looked as if they had been there for awhile. Coke cans and

potato chip bags were strewn around the table where they sat. His mother looked over at

the family. She asked Sean what did he think, why were they there, what was wrong. He

looked at her, sitting on the edge of her chair, still holding her navy blue purse in her

hands.

“Somebody’s sick—this is a hospital Mom,” he said. Seeing strangers yawning, sitting

deep in the waiting room chairs, the thin woman being consoled by another woman who

looked to be her mother, all of this was interesting to her, Sean thought. He knew that his

mother secretly watched one soap opera a day. She would admit to “checking up on my

story” but never that she had an intimate knowledge of the lives of all the people in the

town of the soap opera, “The Young and the Restless.” Sean’s father would tease her

about it; ask her how so-and-so was doing, had she kicked that bum out yet. She’d swat

him away when he wrapped his arms around her and asked about the young and the

restless, as if she belonged to that tribe of trouble-burdened characters.

She was crying softly now with her hand over her eyes. It was very bright in the

waiting room. Sean wondered if the light was causing her to get one of her spells.

“Mom, do you want to go outside? We can go out for awhile, I don’t think they’re

going to call us in anytime soon.” She gave a brief shake of her head. Sean sat stiffly,

feeling the plastic fangs he had put into his pants pocket pinching him. What would he do

if she had to run away? He would have to run with her—two souls added to the hundreds

46

roaming the streets tonight. But where would they go? He imagined chasing her in a big

circle right back to the hospital.

“They know what they’re doing here. We just have to wait a while, that’s all,” he

whispered to the side of her head. Suddenly Julia raised her head up and spoke to the

older woman sitting across from her.

“My husband just came in by ambulance and they won’t tell us a thing,” Julia said,

her words floating around the family and settling on the thin woman with the ponytail.

The woman looked dazed. There were streaks of dried eye makeup down her cheeks. She

looked over at Julia.

“What? Do you know something about Jennifer?” the woman asked.

“Jennifer? No, it’s my husband, Charlie. He fell down in the kitchen.”

“Who’s this Charlie?” the woman asked her family, looking around without focusing

her eyes. Her family moved in toward her, blocking Julia and Sean’s view.

“She’s drunk,” Julia whispered to Sean, patting his knee. Sean moved a couple of

inches away from her. He didn’t want to be associated with his mother here. He could tell

the thin woman was lost in misery, waiting for an answer. The woman wasn’t going to

talk to her about Jennifer’s condition or what she might think of Charlie’s plight. Did his

mother think this was the set of a hospital and that they were all to follow her script of a

shitty day, but one that turned out to be a blessing in disguise?

“Go peek in on your father; I can’t do it,” his mother said, turning to look at him.

“And you need to get some of that paint off your face; you’ll scare everybody in the

hospital.” She reached into her purse and came up with a packet of tissues. Sean waved

them away.

“It’s Halloween, Mom. No one cares how I look.” Sean got up and moved out of the

waiting room, toward the big heavy doors that lead into the emergency room. A guard

was standing by the doors and stopped him from entering.

“You can’t just walk in there without permission,” the guard said.

“My dad’s in there; an ambulance brought him,” Sean said.

“Name?” the guard asked.

“O’Keefe, Charlie O’Keefe. He’s way down at the end of the hall.”

The guard told Sean to wait and then came back with a gummy paper tag that had

47

O’Keefe scrawled across it.

“Stick this on your shirt. You can go in, but just for a minute.”

“What about my mom? She’s in the waiting room,” Sean said.

“Give her the sticker when you get out, then she can go back,” the guard said,

opening the doors.

Sean stood in the doorway, afraid to enter the room where his father lay. The

bustle around his dad had quieted a bit. There was a doctor and two nurses fiddling with

dials and a big needle in Charlie’s arm. Machines were scattered all over the room. He

felt insulted somehow by his father’s illness, by this thing that had overtaken him,

become him. His dad had always been strong and capable, not one to lie in bed at seven

o’clock in the evening. Not someone who would let others handle him, stick needles into

his arms. His strong face still looked pale; the gray hair at his temples seemed to blend

into his skin. His features weren’t as pronounced as before the fall, the muscles seemed to

have loosened from the bone, hanging slackly.

Sean ducked his head out to gaze up and down the hall. Patients were being led into

rooms with doors, nothing like where his father was lying, in the big room with the

curtains. Nurses walked in and out of other rooms. They wore blue and green uniforms

that looked like pajamas. Sean had a fleeting thought that everyone in the hospital was

sick—nurses dragging themselves up from their own sickbeds to care for the patients.

Finally the doctor looked up and saw Sean in the doorway. He came over to him and

asked where Mrs. O’Keefe was. Sean led him down toward the waiting room. He was a

little man who didn’t look much older than the seniors in Sean’s high school. His name

tag read Dr. Fenton. He couldn’t have been more than five feet five, Sean thought. He

had sandy hair and a rumpled white coat. All of his features were small and sharp. His

nose reminded Sean of one of those pointy cartoon noses, exaggerated in its sharpness.

His mouth was a tight line with hardly any lips, just the barest smudge of a watered down

pinkish-gray above and below the slash of his mouth.

“Mrs. O’Keefe?” he asked, as Julia stood to shake his hand. He looked at her hand

and touched it quickly.

“Yes, that’s me, how’s Charlie?” His mother was quivering, tears rising up in her

eyes again. Sean looked across at the other family. They were all watching to see what

48

the outcome would be. He suddenly felt like he was a part of the family, watching his

plump mother and the little doctor standing looking at each other.

“Let’s go somewhere more private where we can talk,” the doctor said, reaching for

her elbow.

“No. I’m not leaving this room except to see Charlie. You tell me right now what’s

wrong.” She used her special voice, the one she used on Sean, the no-nonsense, do-it-

right-now voice. The doctor looked over at Sean as if for help. Sean shrugged his

shoulders and looked at his mother. She wouldn’t look back at him, just stared at the

doctor, waiting.

“Well, sit down and we’ll talk,” Dr. Fenton said, pulling a chair out of their row and

cocking it toward them.

That’s when Sean was sure it wasn’t good. Why was his mother acting like his dad

was going to come walking into the waiting room, slapping his baseball cap on his leg

and saying, “Let’s get the hell out of this joint”? Hadn’t her soap opera taught her

anything? When a doctor tells you to sit down and you aren’t the patient, it is never good.

Sean felt his own knees wobble as he reached for an arm of a chair and eased into it.

“Your husband has suffered a major heart attack. We’re keeping him down here for a

while, then he’ll get an MRI and go up to CICU,” the doctor said.

“A heart attack!” Julia said. She sat back in her chair and let out a sigh. Sean

imagined all of the other niggling illnesses she had been contemplating flying out of her

head, landing elsewhere in the hospital on unsuspecting people like the guard. She looked

over at Sean where he was sitting two chairs down from her. “Did you hear that? A heart

attack,” she said.

Sean stood up and looked down on the doctor’s head. The muscles over Dr. Fenton’s

eyes were bunching. He didn’t really have eyebrows, more like the remnants of

eyebrows. They weren’t white, exactly, more like clear nylon thread.

“Does your father have a doctor that he sees regularly?” Fenton looked up and asked

Sean.

“Dr. Rose, but he hasn’t been in a while,” Julia said, not giving Sean a chance to

respond. Good, thought Sean, I don’t know his doctor’s name. Why would I? His dad

never went to the doctor. Rose was a name he remembered vaguely from years ago.

49

“You can both come see him for just a moment,” Fenton said, leading the way out of

the waiting room.

In the room where Charlie lay, Julia leaned over the bed and grabbed his hand. “The

doctor is here, sweetheart, he’s going to help you,” she said. Charlie’s eyes were still

half-open. Why hadn’t someone closed them for him? His eyes seemed to seek Sean out;

he had the weird sensation that his father thought that he might be the doctor, not this

pale ghost with his clipboard.

“Can’t you just give him a shot or something?” Sean asked, his voice coming out

squeaky. He hadn’t talked for awhile and his throat was dry. It was just the kind of thing

he did at school; speak up, which was the hardest thing to do, and then sound like Mickey

Mouse.

“He’s never looked like this before,” Sean added. Fenton asked about Charlie’s

history and Julia filled him in. Fenton scribbled notes on his paper. Sean could see the top

of Fenton’s head where a bald spot was encroaching on the crown. Sean thought of an

albino chick, just hatching out of an egg. Was the hair going away or had it not formed

yet?

Suddenly, Charlie’s chest heaved and vomit spewed across the bed—a spew of foul-

smelling yellow stuff. Julia jumped out of the way of the spray, catching a few drops on

her sweat pants. She reached for the vomit dish that stood by the sink but Charlie seemed

to have finished..

She stood up with the bowl in her hands looking at the doctor. Sean moved over and

got paper towels from the dispenser above the sink, wet them, and wiped his father’s face

and the edge of his bed. He took the towels to the waste basket and caught sight of his

face in the mirror above the sink: the painted eyebrows and eyeliner, the bloody trail he

had drawn down his chin. He had a big nose, wide mouth, big ears; it was as if his

connective tissue hadn’t grown enough to bring his facial elements together yet. His

mother always said that he got his looks from his father. But his father’s face had a

completeness that only matched Sean’s in parts: nose, brow, and jaw. Sean thought of his

individual features as examples of parts in a textbook. When would they meet to make a

real face? And not like his father’s face now, lost and helpless on the bed.

As Sean moved back to his father’s bed, Dr. Fenton closed his father’s eyes. Maybe

50

they weirded him out too, he thought. He looked over at his mother, who stood holding

the vomit bowl toward the doctor as if it were a vessel for his knowledge.

“You’ll have to leave now, Mrs. O’Keefe,” the doctor said, moving beside her and

walking her to the door. Sean stayed behind and peered into his father’s face.

“I’ve been trying to get Charlie O’Keefe to the doctor for the last six months,” she

said. “My mother had the same symptoms—she’d get this bad heartburn and—“

“Okay, gotcha,” Fenton said, cutting her off. It sounded too casual for a doctor.

“Gotcha”? Was that a buzzword for patient’s family knows nothing? Fenton pointed

toward the waiting room and walked off. He mumbled something over his shoulder.

“What did he say?” Julia asked Sean.

“Something about taking blood.” Sean leaned over and touched his father’s arm. He

couldn’t bring himself to grab his hand. It wasn’t just that they had never been very

physical with each other—it seemed as if his father had crossed the border into another

country that Sean wasn’t allowed to visit. He squeezed his father’s arm but got no

response.

“He has to see blood to do something? We haven’t been in a car wreck. How old is

he?” His mother leaned into the room from which Fenton had banished her.

“We better go back to the waiting room,” Sean said.

“He told me to go, not you. You stay and watch over him; let me know when he

wakes up,” Julia said. Sean looked up at her standing in the doorway wearing one of her

crafty sweatshirts. This one was bright orange with little yellow triangles and crescents

placed randomly over the fabric; her attempt at floating jack-o’-lanterns. The small

triangles of yellow against the orange looked like pieces of candy corn. Sean thought of

the trick-or-treaters roaming the town with sacks heavy with sweets. They would take

their booty home and spread it out on tables and beds, eating the good stuff first, the

Snickers and Reese’s. He looked at his mother’s shirt and imagined all the bits of candy

corn left behind in the Halloween sacks. He thought of Josh and Tyler. Had they gone

trick-or-treating? Were they at his house waiting?

“I think he’s going to draw blood, take a test,” Sean said.

“Go out there and get a nurse. Tell them your father is worse. I’ll be in the waiting

room.”

51

Sean moved to the doorway and looked out. There was an old woman on a gurney

outside the door. She lay quiet, staring up at the ceiling. Her tiny body was tangled up in

a sheet. Sean imagined that if you saw her from a distance you would think she was a

complacent child, waiting for her mother. She wasn’t crying out in pain, or even

moaning. She looked as if she could wait forever for someone to roll her into a room.

“I don’t see any nurses,” he said to his mother’s departing figure.

“Well go find one. This is ridiculous. What are they waiting on? For him to have

another heart attack?” She plodded back toward the waiting room. The family that had

been in the waiting room earlier were filing through the emergency room doors, two of

the men holding the thin woman up under her arms. His mother stood back to let them

pass and tried to get one of the stragglers to speak to her. Sean imagined what she was

asking: Is it her daughter? Is she okay or…? The straggler looked at Julia with blank

eyes.

“So you want me to just go looking? Grab a nurse?” Sean called to his mother. He

thought of the nurses he had seen earlier, imagined them nestled down in hidden rooms

all over the hospital. Should he just charge down the hall, knocking on all the doors?

“Yes, grab one. Tell her to get her tail in there.” Julia looked back and Sean thought

of the jack-o’-lanterns left glowing on the porch steps, inviting trick-or-treaters, their

candles burning low now, the faces caving in.

There was a station at the entrance to the emergency room; leaning out Sean could

see a fat man lounging back in a chair chewing on a peppermint stick. He was turning the

pages of a clipboard like the one the doctor had carried. The man was wearing the same

kind of pajama top as the nurses. Sean walked down to him.

“Can you get a nurse for my dad?” he asked. Was the question too abrupt? Too weak?

There was a manner of doing things around here that he didn’t understand.

“Who’s your dad?” the man asked, slurping the peppermint stick out of his mouth

with a pop.

“Charlie O’Keefe, right down there, in eight.” Sean looked at the man whose name

tag read Tom Register. Register stuck the candy back into his mouth; it was one of those

old-fashioned peppermint sticks, the fat ones, light in weight and porous. He riffled

through a stack of forms on his desk.

52

“The doctor has orders for a blood test and an MRI. We’re waiting to see how the

patient does; someone should be in soon.” He ended this with a deep intake of the pooled

spit in his mouth, swallowing contentedly. “It’s Halloween, Dracula, we’re swamped.”

He talked around the stick of candy, rolling it from side to side. It was diminishing as

they spoke. Register looked up at him and brightened.

“Want some candy?” he asked, producing the same kind of bowl that was in his

father’s room, kidney-shaped and colored an unnatural yellow-brown. Sean wondered if

there was a name for that color: surely his mother would know. She teased him and his

father for their lack of knowledge about color; everything paler than brown they called

tan. Inside the bowl was an assortment of loose, mostly unwrapped candy. “We get it

from X-Ray, the candy the mothers don’t want their little darlings to have,” Register said,

rolling his eyes.

Sean looked at the bowl. In it were sticky Mary Janes with their wrappers half off, fat

orange Circus Peanuts, individual pieces of chewing gum, wrapped in old whitened foil.

There were lots of peppermint sticks like the one Register was sucking on, and loose

M&Ms. Peeking up from the bottom of the bowl he could see animal crackers and what

looked to be a pretzel.

“No thanks, I’d better get back in there,” he said, moving away from Register. He

turned back to see him rooting around in the bowl. “He’s going to be all right, right?”

Sean asked.

Register hunched his shoulders up in a who knows gesture. He had reduced the

peppermint to a soft gum and was chewing it up. He swallowed and said, “That’s out of

my purview; I just man the desk. We’re getting a MVA in; two DOA and one going to

surgery. One walked away and used his cell phone to call 911. Crazy, huh?”

He lifted up a handful of malted milk balls and rattled them in his palm, lifting his

eyebrows. Sean shook his head no and walked back to his father’s room. His mother had

returned, leaning over the bed, wiping Charlie’s brow.

“Mom, we better leave like the doctor said. They’re taking care of him.” He had to go

to the bathroom and had noticed one inside the waiting room. His mother followed him

out. As they passed Register’s desk, Sean noticed a doctor and a nurse digging in the

candy bowl and laughing. Sean wanted to pull their hands out of the bowl and shove the

53

two of them down to his father’s room. Why were very sick people alone in narrow beds

with machines beeping all around, while outside in the waiting room the ill were

surrounded by other sufferers?

Across from the waiting room was a set of double doors with Plexiglas windows.

Maybe Fenton had gone into this section of the hospital. Sean imagined him in a room

with an Operation game, setting off the buzzer with glee. Where was the fucking man?

Sean thought he could probably take him down if he had to. A quick twist of his arm and

he’d be howling.

Sean sat his mother down and used the bathroom. When he came out he went back

into the emergency department. The security guard wasn’t around; and he still had his

name tag, just in case anyone tried to stop him. He looked down the hall and saw the two

EMTs who had brought them to the hospital. They were pushing a gurney and the hall

was filled with nurses and doctors, scurrying around. On the stretcher was a teenage boy,

bloody and howling. The attendants rushed him into a room full of staff, just like when

his dad had come in. At least they were ready for patients, he thought. But where did they

go after diagnosing? He saw a nurse with a friendly face walking the halls, dragging an

IV pole behind her. She looked too busy to stop, but he found his voice and called out,

“Can someone see my dad? Room eight?”

“Who’s the doctor?” the nurse asked, continuing down the hall.

“Dr. Fenton. He said he’d be back. My dad needs help, a shot, something.”

“See Mr. Register at the desk, he’ll help you,” she said, moving off into the room

bustling with activity.

Sean looked down the hall where Tom Register sat. He looked busy, scooting around

on his chair and typing on a computer. His desk looked miles away down a bright tunnel.

Sean knew he couldn’t go up to his desk again and ask the same questions. Surely

Register wouldn’t say, “Oh, there you are, just the guy I’ve been looking for!” He’d

shrug his sloping shoulders and smack on a piece of Juicy Fruit. Sean started his journey

down the hall, glancing into his father’s room. His father was gone. He rushed over to

Register and interrupted his clicking nails on the keyboard.

“Where’s my dad?” he asked. The bowl of candy on Register’s counter had

diminished to a couple of licorice sticks and a few pecans.

54

Register looked up at him as if he vaguely remembered his face. It took a minute, and

then he twirled his chair around to a bank of files behind him. He was all business now.

“MRI, fourth floor. Don’t go wandering all over the hospital, right?” he said over his

shoulder.

Sean and his mother stepped off the elevator and followed a blue painted line that

lead to the X-Ray department. The halls were covered with these lines, some yellow,

others green and orange, all leading to different departments. It was an excellent system,

Sean thought. Straight to X-Ray without getting lost in the maternity section of the

hospital. He found the waiting room and sat his mother in a chair off to the side from the

other women. There were children slumped down in chairs all over the room, clutching

bags of Halloween candy. They looked as if they had gorged themselves on the sly and

were cranky yet sleepy from too much sugar.

His mother immediately began to talk to the other women across from her. How some

Dr. Fenton had diagnosed her husband with a heart attack and then disappeared. How

she hadn’t seen the doctor since he had walked out of the emergency room downstairs.

Sean sat and watched as each mother was called back with her children to have their

Halloween bags examined. His mother moved over to sit with the other women and talk

about razor blades in apples and Ecstasy in bubblegum. Sean had heard somewhere,

maybe in Science class, or maybe it was his English class—he had a kooky English

teacher who veered off the subject onto all kinds of weird topics—that there had never

been a documented case of Halloween candy tampering. He considered leaning over and

telling the mothers this.

His mother was making friends with one woman who had to continually jump up and

grab candy from her daughter’s hands. As soon as she sat down, the child would start

rooting around in the sack again.

“I’ll take it all from you if you touch one more piece, you hear me?” the woman said.

“How about my son getting us both a nice cup of coffee?” his mother asked the other

woman. Julia reached into her purse and handed Sean some ones. “You think you can

find the machines?” she asked. “Get yourself a soda.”

Sean walked back out into the hallway, looking down at the colorful lines. None of

them were designated for the snack machines. He went down the hall a bit and saw an

55

open door. Inside two doctors were looking at a lighted screen with what looked like a

messed up x-ray on it. Sean thought of x-rays as white bones, skeletons against a dark

background. These x-rays were a mushy gray. They could be anything—the surface of

Mars, the bottom of someone’s garbage can. One of the doctors, using a pointer, aimed at

a section of the blob on the screen.

“It’s all over; no way can he survive the night. Look at the frontal lobe.”

The other doctor glanced at some papers and then said, “Yeah, they had to resuscitate

him in the ambulance. Little brain function left. The wife said he’d been having heartburn

but nothing else to report. Of course he hadn’t had a check-up in years.” He clicked the

light off the machine that read the images.

“Nothing to do but admit the poor son-of-a-bitch,” the first doctor said.

Another person appeared in Sean’s vision, a nurse by the looks of her clothes. She

stood behind the doctors and made notes as they delineated all that was wrong with the

man.

“Should I move him up to CICU? He’s not conscious in the MRI, y’all don’t need

any other tests while he’s here do you?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder to

where a sign on a door read: “MRI—X-RAY in Progress.”

“No, but we need to start thinking of organ donation,” the second doctor said.

“I’ll tell his wife,” she said. “She’s in the waiting room?” She was scribbling on her

pad; the doctors ignored her question and left the room through a small hall that lead off

into a back room.

The nurse looked up from her scribbling and saw Sean. She walked out to him with

her pad against her chest. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m O’Keefe. I mean my father, Charlie, is O’Keefe too,” he said, his chest icy with

fear.

“Let’s go get your mother and we’ll find a room where we can talk,” the nurse said.

Sean led her back into the X-Ray waiting room. There were four or five children

waiting with their sacks. The mothers looked weary but excited to be a part of the

technology of the hospital, combined with a chance at finding the golden egg—the rusty

nail deep within an orange. It would make the papers, maybe even be picked up by The

Today Show.

56

Sean pointed his mother out to the nurse and she walked over to Julia and leaned

down, whispering in her ear. The other women watched and slowly moved away toward

their children. Sean stood and watched his mother collapse into tears. He took a few

breaths and thought of that teacher, yes, it was his English teacher, Mrs. Elliot, who had

explained things so well that day in class. How folks will believe what they want to

believe, how it satisfies some deep need they have for community against the monster.

Like in Frankenstein, she’d said.

He walked over to one of the children and reached into his Halloween bag. He started

opening candy, Mike & Ike’s, Kit-Kats, Starbursts, throwing the wrappers on the floor.

He jammed the candy into his own mouth, chewed and swallowed quickly.

“See? It’s okay, eat it. Eat it all, now.” He opened more treats, cramming them into

his mouth as the mothers yelled and dragged their children away. Sean caught one little

boy by the sleeve and forced an apple against his teeth, smushing it hard into the gap

between his incisors. The boy looked up at him with terrified eyes. His mother snatched

the child away and took him to a corner of the room, his trick-or-treat bag left on the

floor, spewing candy.

57

WOMAN’S WORLD

I was driving to the mall to buy school clothes when I got to thinking about

uniforms. The county had been talking about uniforms for the students—but why stop

there? Why not a uniform for the teachers? Doctors had them, nurses, bug men, cashiers.

I wanted a uniform that would take all the guess work away, something that would make

my annual shopping trip obsolete.

It was the week before school started; I pulled into the mall and took the escalator

up to the second floor. I needed a few new dresses. I picked the patterns that I liked and

bought five of them. I never wore those cutesy ones some of my colleagues favored, the

ones with yellow pencils and red apples appliquéd on; or in autumn, sweaters with

pumpkins sitting beside picket fences. Even though I taught fourth graders, I knew where

to draw the line. I had worn my teacher’s wardrobe for years—three inches below the

knee cotton or poly dresses. You know the kind: embroidered bodices letting go right

beneath the breasts to loosen into an expanse of fabric. Breezy, with lots of room to move

about. Suitable for school, easy to wash and dryer friendly. I thought of these dresses as

size-less; even though I wore a twelve, I imagined I could go up or down a size and not

really notice the difference. I’m not embarrassed about being a twelve. I am a forty-six

year-old woman, twelve sounds about right.

As the saleslady rang up the purchase (she looked maybe twenty-five and had the

exaggerated deportment of a small town modeling school graduate) she said, “Oh, a

teacher, I bet.” Her name tag said Ashlee. I had three Ashleys in my class last year. Will

this name never die? Aren’t parents aware that these little Ashleys are like the Kathys of

my childhood? They grew up to hate the name. By high school they were tired of hearing

which Kathy? Those who spelled the name with a C had an easier time of it, maybe. A bit

of distinction. That’s Cathy with a C. This Ashley would probably enjoy pointing out that

her name ended L E E not L E Y.

Anyway, I thought I detected a note of disdain in her voice, an almost pitying

touch of scorn: Around all those children day in and day out and here I am in the mall,

dressed like a million bucks, no daisies on my bodice. I was in a hurry; I could have read

it all wrong. Sometimes I imagine people are implying things. I know I do this. My

husband, Gary, says I am too sensitive. He also says that I don’t give half a damn

58

sometimes. I didn’t give a damn when she said this, I just told her, “No, guessed wrong. I

just enjoy looking like a teacher.”

Then when I got out to the car I thought maybe my retort came from being too

sensitive and that I had somehow mixed it up with my not giving half a damn mode. This

got to me. Did Ashlee think she had touched a nerve? Was she smirking behind her

register? I sat in the car for a while with the window rolled down, smoking a cigarette.

That’s one of my not give half a damn habits. Gary says I don’t want to quit because I

enjoy pissing people off. He has a point; being seen in public with a cigarette is almost

the equivalent of squatting on the courthouse lawn to pee.

When I got home I hung the dresses in my closet. When I was younger I would’ve

tried them all on, modeled them for Gary. He never had an opinion. He would tell you

that he did, but he always said, “Looks great!” in a voice that could’ve come from a little

tape implanted in his neck. Never any inflection, never caught off guard by a really bright

red or those yellow and black combos that were popular in the nineties. I tested him a few

years ago. I was putting mascara on when a blob of it landed on my cheek. I had the

bright idea to rub it around, turn it into a black smudge the size of a nickel. We were

going out to dinner; I walked into the living room and got really close to his face. I asked

him if I looked okay. “Great!” he said.

I stood still, looking him in the eye. He said, “Well, let’s get going.”

I pushed the hair back from my right cheek to give him a clear view and to draw

attention to that side of my face. He got the car keys.

I was so mad that I left the smudge on my face. By the time the waitress brought

our menus people were staring at me. I got real lovey with Gary, reaching out for his

hand and kissing him on the nose. I wanted him to be somehow complicit. Well, you’d

think he’d tell her. While we were eating he finally caught on. A couple of kids sitting in

the booth across from us kept giggling and pointing. He looked up from his plate and

said, “What’s that shit on your face?”

“It’s the same great shit I had on at the house,” I said, spearing one of his shrimp

and toasting him with it. It was around this time that he began to say that I don’t give half

a damn.

“What are you talking about? Wipe it off. Here.” And he handed me his napkin.

59

I wiped it off but noticed a trail of cocktail sauce smushed into the corner of his

napkin. I glided the napkin down my face and rubbed the sauce into my chin. “How’s

that?” I asked. He said Great and reached over and grabbed one of my scallops.

So, I hadn’t tried the dresses on. On the first day of school I reached up to write

the date on the board and the seam ripped under the arm of one of the new dresses—a teal

green cotton/poly blend with little useless buttons running down the front. The kids didn’t

notice; they were all sitting like newly minted pennies at their desks, their hands resting

on their school supplies. They are always so hopeful on the first day; even the students

who hate school seem to have that expectant shiny look. I can usually spot the

troublemakers, though. Three or four girls with ensembles of whatever the latest craze is;

backpack, pencils, and little zippered plastic envelopes that fit into their notebooks. Every

year they bring tons of this stuff: erasers shaped like flowers (that don’t erase), tiny pencil

sharpeners, Post-its done up to match Hello Kitty or whatever. When I have to tell them

that most of it doesn’t belong in the classroom (Power Puff Girls’ staplers!) and they’ll

have to leave it at home, they never forgive me. They spend the rest of the year trying to

sneak all of this nonsense back into the classroom. The majority of the other girls resent

them—they don’t have hot pink rulers that glow in the dark.

With the boys it’s different; it’s rarely about their accoutrements. It’s a fidgety,

can’t settle on one thing, darting of the eyes. Even on the first day when they are sitting

quietly, I can spot the ones with that nervy energy below the surface of their skin. These

are the ones who usually get medicated. ADD or one of the other conditions of boyhood

gets slapped on them. They come to me with a history of boisterousness. When I first

starting teaching twenty years ago, I expected to have two or three boys who couldn’t sit

still. Nowadays, it’s unacceptable; unacceptable because it’s treatable. Their parents book

conferences with me. Why can’t he seem to finish anything? They don’t want to hear any

of the advice I give them. That he’s prepubescent (in fourth grade now, most of the girls

are wearing bras), it’ll pass. I can’t say the boys improve much on the medication. Their

eyes don’t dart around as much, and they generally keep their hands to themselves, but

there is a vacancy about them that is strangely adult-like. They are two steps off—not

flying ahead like before the meds, but off to the side somewhere.

The seam ripped open as I had my arm up in the air. I spent the rest of the day

60

with my arm by my side. I considered taking my stapler to the bathroom and running a

line of staples down the seam. But Ashlee wouldn’t take the dress back if I did some kind

of Frankenstein alteration. The students didn’t seem to notice. I don’t think any of my

students have ever really noticed much about me. I’m the amorphous ladymotherteacher

who stands at the front of the class. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am the disembodied

wanh-wanh voice in the Charlie Brown cartoons, but once when I returned to teach after

being absent for a week, my kids’ only account of their substitute was, “She looked like

you.”

When I got home I checked the size of the dress, it was my usual twelve. I got the

other four dresses out of the closet and tried them all on. They were all twelves and they

were all tight in different places. I couldn’t button the top back button of one of them, and

that really got to me. It’s no big deal to leave a button or two undone on the front of a

dress or blouse, but never the back. My favorite of the five, a deep blue with a wash of

jade throughout, was too tight in the bust. The dress hadn’t ripped because I had chosen a

size ten inadvertently, or because of shoddy workmanship. I had gained a dress size. I

was a fourteen.

Realizing I had become a fourteen was some kind of pivotal moment in my

growth. When I look back on it, it seems that it was a magical rather than portentous

number. It had the effect of loosening me up. I don’t mean that I jumped up from the

edge of the bed where I sat with the dresses around me and did a jig. I didn’t. I hung them

back on the clear hangers that Ashlee had given me (“Would you like the hangers?” She

had asked, ready to toss the first one in the big cardboard bin by her station. She had

stood there holding the hanger half in and half off the dress. Calculating. This one, her

look said, will probably want everything she can get. And I did). I drove back to the mall

with the five dresses hanging from the little garment hook in the back seat.

Ashlee was there behind her register. She was totaling the purchases of a tiny

woman a few years younger than me. I’m 5’8” and this woman was a full head shorter

than me and she was wearing heels. They looked like those little Barbie heels—all in a

piece, high arch, monochrome. She looked professional, but not just in her dress. She

looked like a professional shopper. I imagined her watching QVC as one of their models

61

touted the latest horseshit to come down the pike: “Notice the piping, the delicate little

grosgrain that runs along the hem and the cuffs.” That kind of woman—an older Ashlee.

I stood off to the side a bit as Ashlee folded her purchases up, using tissue paper between

each garment. I considered the implications of tissue paper vs. plastic hangers and

wondered what this said about me.

After the woman twittered off, I laid the five dresses on Ashlee’s counter. She

looked at me and her eyelids closed in slow motion, a long click-click of recognition. She

didn’t say anything, just looked from me to the dresses.

“They don’t fit,” I said.

“Didn’t you try them on? When you bought them?” she asked.

“No, I know my size; I don’t have time to fool around with all that.” I was

determined to trade them in for fourteens; I didn’t want to have to explain my mode of

shopping like a hunter might confess how he failed to bag the big one.

“Well, if you know your size,” and here she looked me up and down, “why don’t

they fit?” Shit, she would ask the rational question.

“Because I have gained weight,” I said, expecting all movement in the store to

come to a halt. Ashlee caught her breath and stepped back from the counter. Was she

dazed or was I being sensitive?

“I see. Well. Did you wear any of them?” She picked up the teal green dress with

the burst seams. It confirmed for her what I had just said. “This one, you wore. It didn’t

leave the shop like this.”

“Fine, I wore it. Did I say I hadn’t worn it? The others, though, have hung in my

closet until this afternoon. I tried them all on but I didn’t wear them. You’ll want this.”

And I handed her my receipt.

“So what do you want, your money back?” she asked, glancing at the receipt. She

picked up the teal dress and shook it out before jamming it into a plastic bag.

”No, I want four just like those, but a size fourteen.” Was this going to be one of

those situations where she would have to call her supervisor, and then her supervisor

would go through the whole song and dance with me? And then from the underbelly of

the store, another supervisor would rise up, the one rarely seen by clerks or customers:

the Final Supervisor.

62

Suddenly I felt that rush I had gotten sitting on the bed at home. “Actually, give

me sixteens. That way, I can grow into them, so to speak.”

“Grow into them?” She backed up a bit more and touched her name tag.

“Yeah, like kids do. It’ll give me plenty of room to grow. I don’t want to take any

chances.” Okay, my don’t give half a damn was coming out—but it was tinged with this

bubbly feeling of freedom that is hard to explain. It felt like I had given myself an

antidote just in time, that I was avoiding a rampant disease.

“Wait right here,” Ashlee said, and disappeared into a door several feet away

beside the dressing room. I guess it was a stockroom, or an employee break-room. Maybe

it was the room that tunneled down to the Final Supervisor’s hold.

I went off to look through the racks. I found matches for three of the dresses, but

there were no sixteens in the blue and jade dress. I had to settle for a pale denim number

with elasticized lattice-work on the bodice. I looked around to check out the size

eighteens, just for fun, but there weren’t any in Ashlee’s section. I saw another saleslady

and asked her where the eighteens were.

“You’ll find Woman’s World downstairs,” she said, “but we should have

everything you need right in this area. You’re a ways from woman’s sizes.”

“Oh, really? What does woman’s sizes mean exactly?” I asked. They had a

section called Woman’s World in the store and I was up here in Ashlee World?

“Woman’s World is for our robust clientele. We have several exclusive lines;

Odalisque, Diva, and Rueben’s Girls to name a few.” She was a little older than me and

her name tag read Betty. Had she worked for the department store since high school?

How else could a Betty slip through?

“And they start at size eighteen?” I asked.

“Yes. Some stores start their Woman’s line at sixteen but we feel that our sixteen

girls belong up here with us.” She looked over at the register. “Are you ready to check

out? I can handle that for you.”

“Ashlee was helping me, but she went in there,” I said, pointing to the door

Ashlee had disappeared through.

“Oh! Well let me see if I can get her for you. One moment.” And off she went

behind the mysterious door. I hung around awhile and waited for her. I was hoping that

63

she’d pull Ashlee out by the ear, my Miss Betty.

I walked around looking at the blouses and sweaters. I’d need a good light

sweater soon. Should I go for an eighteen down in Woman’s World? It would probably

be comfortable with big pockets and extra long sleeves. I slipped on a soft cream sweater,

size sixteen. Over my tee shirt it felt just a wee bit binding. I walked over to a mirror and

looked at my image. Yes, it was a tad tight through the shoulders. And if I had to wear it

with anything heavy, it would never work. I spent the next ten minutes picking garments

up and putting them back down.

Where was Betty? Had Ashlee grabbed her when she entered the room? Were

they both watching me through a two-way mirror? I finally crept over to the door and

rapped lightly on it. It was very solid; it didn’t shake at all when I knocked. I gave a little

shave and a haircut knock and waited, my ear against the door. Not a sound. I tried the

handle but couldn’t get it to turn. Whatever this room was for, it sure was secure. Maybe

Ashlee had talked Betty into eating a snack with her. I imagined Betty chomping into a

tuna fish sandwich while Ashlee cut a stalk of celery into bite-sized pieces.

I moved away from the door and headed back to Ashlee’s station. I dug through

my pocketbook and found a yellow Post-It stack. I laid my four dresses on the counter

and picked up Ashlee’s pen. I spent some time thinking of how to compose the note.

Finally, I wrote, “Ashlee, I found the 16s I was looking for. I am taking them with me.

Tell Betty hi. Anna.” I reread it, looking for the slightest hint of sensitivity. I guess I

didn’t need to sign it; she would know I had written the note, but what if someone saw

me leave the store without a receipt? The signature might prove to be important. I slapped

the note down on the counter and spotted some garment bags on a little shelf behind the

register. I shook one out and slipped it over my dresses.

I took the escalator down to the basement. Back in one corner I saw a pink oval

sign: Woman’s World. I hung around the edges for a while, watching the women come

and go.

64

AUTO-MAN

Outskirts that had once denoted largely undeveloped forest and working farmland

had become a blight of leftover businesses. It was an in-between place of commerce on

the edge of extinction. There were used car dealerships full of huge 1970s sedans and

zippy little 80s coupes. Helene leaned her head against the door jamb of the car and

looked out as the car lots melded into junkyards. She thought the 70s colors looked earthy

in a sick, sad way. She remembered those colors, those years, as a kind of dull on the

outside, wild on the inside experience.

The junkyards seemed to spread out from the edge of the highway for miles, an

amusement park expanse of motoring history. Dinky establishments popped up, many

with cardboard signs announcing their purpose: Bait Tackle WORMS hung over the door

of a pink block building, the windows high and narrow. An old gas station housed what

now proclaimed itself to be Poodle Palace scrolled in fancy letters on a section of

plywood and leaning against the concrete stanchion of a denuded pump.

Off to the right a green two-story clapboard building emerged surrounded by

knee-high weeds and old patio furniture. Written against the side of the building was

Junk and Treasures. The words were pale and choppy, meeting the ends of shingles and

continuing an inch down onto the next shingle. The puce letters of the sign seemed to be

horizontally slashed with the pale green of the building. As they got closer to the building

Helene realized that the green was the unpainted portion of the shingles. She imagined a

painter puzzling over how to solve the dilemma of the recessing shingles. To fill in the

missing parts of each letter and give them a narrow-waisted look, or to let them be—a

soft green slashing through the words as if planned.

“Stop here, Jack,” Helene said, pointing ahead to the building. These old

dilapidated structures were often full of treasures. She could spend hours fingering the

linens and admiring a lost American ingenuity. Flamingos that ducked their heads down

to serve up a toothpick; sleek Deco cigarette boxes that popped open to reveal a lighter

and a little hinged ashtray that flipped out to the side. These things enchanted her; her

small decorating business thrived on the nostalgic.

“That old place? Why?” Jack asked. He was huddled behind the wheel with his

hands locked on tight. He looked like all the other commuters, trying to leave this tacky

65

afterthought of the city behind.

Jack had agreed to turn this trip into a working holiday. They were on their way to

see Jack’s sister in Memphis. They had the pickup and tarps to cover whatever Helene

found. He always argued with her choices. She’d haul old patio furniture home and spend

days repairing and painting it. She would pay a hundred dollars for a table and chairs, and

after fixing them up she would ask maybe three hundred.

Jack said she should think big. Start ordering from Atlanta, sock it to them, they

had the money. But her clients had sought her out after one of Jack’s nursery customers

visited Jack at their house and saw how Helene decorated. And she didn’t order from

New York or Atlanta. She chose what appealed to her, mostly from auctions, estate sales,

and junk shops. There seemed to be a run on nostalgia, and nostalgia was easy to find.

Helene could spend the day exploring the junk shop, finding interesting things

that her clients would go crazy over. She knew that Jack was puzzled that she had made a

go of her business. Who would want their mother’s corny furnishings? All that aqua and

pink, those weird geometric shapes; even the ashtrays had a space-age look. And the

antiques, they were nothing but old working class make-dos, revered now by her middle-

class clients.

When Helene had gotten her first client he thought it was a joke. After all, it was

his customer who had dropped by that evening after the nursery had closed to go over

some last minute details with him. She had entered the house and moved directly to an

old red and yellow ottoman that sat in the living room. She had sat on it, holding the little

tabs that extended on opposite corners, and begun to talk about the footstool her

grandmother had had in her house. How the style was the same, but the colors were blue

and green. That indestructible leatherette stuff that was so popular in the fifties. Helene

had listened as the woman began to cry, and had led her to the kitchen. More tears in the

kitchen—the wooden jadeite table brought back memories of her aunt’s farmhouse.

Helene’s collection of salt and pepper shakers that lined the window sills and shelves

were examined with the kind of awe reserved for Faberge eggs. Jack had stood in the

doorway watching them. He looked like a cop watching a suspect through a two-way

mirror—Helene just didn’t know who the guilty party was.

Helene had gotten her first client that night. It wasn’t long before word spread and

66

she was scouring the countryside in search of nostalgia. Jack saw her business as an

adjunct to his own even though she had gotten her own business license and picked up

most of her customers by word of mouth. It was that first client that did it. She had set the

tone, an inconsequential neurotic woman.

And now Jack didn’t want to stop at the first interesting shop she’d seen.

“Look, I just want to look around. I’ll drive afterwards,” she said. She hated

driving in heavy traffic. The city was spewing its workers down the highway toward the

suburbs. Helene imagined the city sucking the vitality out of the commuters, this part of

their journey simply a robotic form of finding crumbs.

“It’s too late to stop. It looks closed anyway,” Jack said, glancing in his rearview

mirror. “Get off my tail you asshole!” He snarled, looking straight ahead. “You’d think

these people were headed for the Promised Land.”

“It’s not closed, it’s just not busy. Turn around up there by that sculpture.”

A few blocks past the clapboard house stood a giant sculpture of a man. It was

between the highway and a ditch that fronted a mechanic’s shop. Across from the shop

was a divided median. It would be easy to scoot across and come back to the junk shop.

The little junk shop faded in her side mirror as Jack spotted the iron and metal

monster. He sped up, whipping the truck into the parking lot under a sign that proclaimed

Home of the Muffler Man. There was only one other car in the parking lot, a souped-up

orange GTO, parked right up near the door. Through the window Helene saw a long-

haired young man standing at the counter smoking a cigarette. He was flipping through

the pages of a magazine. Jack shut the engine off.

“What are you doing? We don’t need anything here. What about the junk shop?”

Helene asked. But Jack was leaning out his window staring up at the huge man.

“Look, it’s made of car parts! All of it. It must be twenty feet tall,” he said,

getting out of the car. He walked down into the ditch next to the monster and waved back

at Helene to join him.

The creature was indeed a conglomerate of auto parts. His spine was articulated

with tailpipes, but the rest of his body was a weird collection of cast-offs. There were gas

tanks welded together to make up its torso; each arm began with a muffler for bulk,

extending into tailpipes and ending in five old chrome gear shifts for fingers. Chrome

67

accentuated the rust of the other parts on the man, from the hooded chrome headlights

used for his eyes, to radio dials placed haphazardly throughout the structure. The

behemoth ended with brake pedals for feet. Helene laughed at the side-view mirrors the

craftsman had used for ears. She had often thought of the side-view mirrors on her own

car not as visual aids, but as homing devices, gallantly taking the wind of the speeding

car in order to help her find her way.

Jack climbed out of the ditch and pointed to the shop.

“Don’t go in. He’ll think we’re buying,” she shouted at him. She didn’t want the

boy to think they were customers, here for a muffler, or even worse, a complete muffler

system overhaul.

“I’ve got to know who made him,” Jack said, pointing at the hulking sculpture.

He was standing, dwarfed, in the shadow of one leg.

“His feet sure are tiny. They should’ve used maybe slabs of tires for them,” she

said. “But don’t go in, I’ll take a quick picture and then we can head back to that junk

shop.”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve got to know the history behind this guy,” Jack said. He

walked toward the shop and Helene got out of the truck.

“Or engines would’ve worked, heavier and bigger” she shouted at his back. He

turned, squinting in the sun, and waved his hand down, brushing her words away. He’d

be in there for thirty minutes, taking up the boy’s time. Annoying him. Probably the boy

wouldn’t even know the artisan who had crafted the giant, would’ve only heard stories

about a loony who owned the store years before. It would be an urban legend, she

thought, an Auto-Man with a vague history.

She sat on the hood of the truck and studied the man. She thought about the kind

of person who would construct such a monstrosity. He was put together with the fervor of

a convert; parts, such as the elongated fingers, were meticulous in their aptness. Other

parts, like the antenna curl, seemed to be obvious afterthoughts. She imagined a pilgrim

traveling from filling station to garage, gathering parts, a mendicant intent on building the

perfect metallic man. Was he old enough at the time (and parts of the monster shouted

late forties excess—fins, chrome grillwork) to have viewed the automobile as a Victorian

might have viewed the Iron Horse? Was the monstrosity an homage to the automobile or

68

an ironic statement of the times? She thought of it as a 20th century totem, rising up out

of the gravel and trash by the highway as some kind of masculine emblem.

She could see Jack through the plate glass window of the shop. He was leaning on

the counter watching as the boy flipped through the pages of his magazine. Now he’d

have to put up with some muscle-car talk to even get to the point about the sculpture.

Couldn’t he just appreciate the nutty giant? Why did he have to track every thing down,

verify the facts?

She dozed off lying back against the windshield, looking up at the giant. Its

immensity reminded her of the time her father had taken her to watch the carnies

dismantle the rides at the county fair when she was eight. As she slept she dreamed about

her first visit to the fair. She had gone to the fair with her parents the night before; she’d

looked forward to it for weeks, they’d never visited and her only exposure to it had been

the wide blue arc of the searchlight and the distant view of the Ferris wheel. When they

had parked she had gotten out of the car and burst into tears. The fair was too loud, too

bright, too fast. Her parents had prodded her to get in line, coaxed her with tales of horses

with hooves as big as dinner plates. Yellow plastic ducklings floating down a little stream

with numbers on their bellies: choose a duck, get a prize. None of it had worked. She had

stood, her socks drooping into her shoes, weeping amidst the crowd of jostling bodies

waiting to get their tickets.

The next day her father had taken her to see the fair in the daylight. He must’ve

thought the rides would seem less menacing; that the absence of vulgar lights and loud

music would put her at ease, put the whole thing into a daytime perspective of safety. But

the carnies themselves had frightened her. They spat tobacco juice on the trampled grass

and swore at each other. One had come up to her and tried to give her a big yellow bear.

Its torso was covered in grass stains and it was missing one of its stiff plastic ears. She

had turned from the man and plugged her ears with her fingers. Her father had accepted

the bear and whisked her back home. But she remembered the giant rides as they came

down, piece by hulking piece. Some of the bolts that held them together were as big as

her head.

. She woke to the sound of the boy clearing his throat. Jack stopped and

introduced them.

69

“Donald, this is my wife, Helene. She hates Hector,” Jack said, moving toward

the ditch.

“Hector?” Helene sat up and rubbed her face, looking into the copper brown eyes

of Donald. Her dream of the fairgrounds had thrown her off-center. It took a moment to

realize that the long-legged metal man that cast a shadow on her now was not some

bizarre carnival attraction—a grounded metallic come-on.

“I’m Donald; that’s Hector,” the boy said, pointing up at the giant. Helene slid

down from the hood of the truck and stuck her hand out. Donald took it by the fingertips

and squeezed gently. He was wiry and brown from the sun; his forearms muscled out of

proportion to his body. Veins stood out on the backs of his hands. Helene imagined him

working on his car in the sun, turning ratchets and lifting his car by the bumper.

“Who named him?” Helene asked, moving toward the ditch. Why did she care

who named him? That his name was Hector interested her—as if the thing had named

itself.

“Wish I could tell you. Your husband wants a family history on the old guy. I

can’t help him with that,” Donald said, steering Helene away from the ditch and around

to the driveway. They approached the giant head-on as they came out to the gravel beside

the road. The traffic had thinned out now, the cars whizzing by. A family in an SUV

honked a cheery two-note greeting. Donald took his cap off and waved as they passed.

As they got closer to Hector, Helene loosened the strap of her camera. While she

had dozed it had carved a red trail into her wrist. She clicked a picture of Jack standing

between Hector’s legs, looking up at his crotch. Jack looked up at the sound of the

camera’s click with round eyes, his mouth in a circle of surprise. O! his features said.

Donald snorted out a laugh and Helene joined him. As Jack’s features settled into his

normal look of impatience, the two laughed louder, children catching an adult doing

something silly.

“That would’ve been your picture,” Donald said, moving toward Jack. Jack had

his arms out, his span barely touching each of Hector’s legs.

“Ha-ha,” he said, leaning forward, his fingertips rubbing the rust of Hector’s gas-

tank legs. Helene shivered at the thought of touching so much rust—it set her teeth on

edge. Up close the Auto-Man looked silly, his chrome eyes were out of proportion to his

70

head and his outsized long legs were simply weak extensions to give him height. She had

a sudden thought of the Tin-Man, effeminate and apologetic.

Donald had gone over to Jack and was pointing out various parts of the

structure—Studebaker, Chevy, and MG parts that had gone into the whole of the thing.

Helene took another snapshot, this time with Donald and Jack, heads staring up together,

examining a piece of grillwork on the Auto-Man’s chest. Ribs? Armor? A cage for the

Auto-Man’s heart?

Helene got back into the pickup. She turned the radio on; a deejay was

humiliating a caller in his sonorous deejay voice. It was a talk radio program that Jack

often listened to—the host an intellectual gasbag. The deep tones of the deejay’s voice

seemed fit for romance, for courting. Why was he sparring with a caller over gun control?

Where had the deejays gone who introduced the songs with a bit of trivia leading into the

music? All over the radio dial people were arguing. She used to think that only shut-ins

called the radio talk shows, but many of the callers identified themselves as office

workers, computer programmers, and housewives. Did they listen to music anymore? She

finally found a Country station that was playing an old Merle Haggard tune. At the end of

the song the deejay moved smoothly into his spiel. “Ah yes, that one is for all the mamas

out there.” She was comforted by the deejay’s voice. It reminded her of feed stores and

bales of hay. She looked out the window at Jack and Donald. They were behind the Auto-

man now, examining his backside. Jack’s color had darkened; he was talking excitedly

while Donald looked on with a smile.

Helene cranked the truck up and circled out of the Muffler Man parking lot. She

stopped beside the ditch and looked over at Jack.

“Come on, let’s go,” she called out the window.

“He’s actually got a tailbone, Helene, come look,” Jack said, looking at Donald as

if he were a fellow archaeologist discussing a recent finding.

“No, I’ve got something to do. You know where to find me,” she said and pulled

out onto the highway, throwing bits of gravel onto the berm. She moved into the left-

hand lane and crossed over at the break in the median.

Junk and Treasures didn’t have a sign as she approached from the north, it could

be any old house, listing on its foundations. She pulled into the parking lot and made her

71

way to the screen door at the front. The Open sign was hanging askew but the windows

were dark. There were old pressed glass bottles and cruets lining the windowsill along

with carnival glass and bits of pottery. She knocked lightly on the screen door and

stepped back to admire it. The design was of delicate metalwork that stood out from the

screen. On the bottom half of the door was the large curving fan of a peacock, each fan

spaced to meet at the bottom in a filigree of finer metal. The top of the door had just the

barest hint of a beak and crest. She looked around at the yard that abutted the house. It

was a half acre filled with odds and ends of yard furniture. Old porch swings were spread

throughout the weeds, their chains lying useless on the slats of the seats. Stacks of

wrought iron gates leaned against orange oil drums. Metal gliders sat with missing arms

and rusted-out backs.

Helene walked around the front of the yard. The place had an odd sweet smell;

areas of black earth rolled and pitted with the evidence of past oil leaks lay in patches

across the yard. She was tempted to wander further into the side yard but stayed near the

front waiting for someone to answer. She approached the door again, rattling the loose

screen with her knock. Just as she was about to go back to her truck the door opened and

a man stuck his head out. He was a middle-aged man with slick black hair, dressed as if

going to church with a pressed white shirt and black slacks. He stared out at Helene with

his head cocked to the side.

“It says Open, I never can remember to turn it over,” he said, flipping the sign to

Sorry We’re Closed.

“I passed your shop a while ago and wanted to stop. My husband is down the

street admiring the giant metal man,” she said. Was she hoping that the sculpture was

repugnant to him, that he would commiserate and let her in? She hated pushiness when

dealing with shop owners and this man looked as if he had somewhere to be.

“Well you might as well step in, then. He’s bound to be down there awhile.” The

man opened the screen door for Helene. She entered the junk shop and took a deep

breath. The smell of linens, attics, and old books enveloped her. This was the smell she

associated with nostalgia. The shop was crammed full of old things, some just

pedestrian—an eight-track tape player, hi-fi set, coconuts decorated to look like Fijian

natives. In one corner of the shop she found a set of tea towels. Each had a little

72

anthropomorphic bumblebee embroidered on. There were towels for each day of the

week. On Monday’s towel was stitched the legend On Monday I Do the Wash with the

little bee up to her elbows in pale blue suds. She was leaning into a wooden wash bucket,

a clothesline in the distance. Saturday’s towel said On Saturday I Go To Town and

showed the bee wearing lipstick with heels and a pocketbook crooked on her arm. Helene

took the towels to the counter where the man sat reading a newspaper.

“How much for this set?” She asked. Even though the towels depicted an insect

doing her weekly chores, Helene was reminded of the Little Red Hen who made the

bread alone.

“I sold a set similar to that one a few weeks ago. Instead of a bee it had a little

squirrel going about her business. They’re cute, ain’t they?” Before Helene had time to

answer, the man stuck his hand out and introduced himself.

“Ransom McGee, pleased to meet you.” Helene squeezed his hand lightly. She

held the towels up to her bosom, imagining throwing one over her shoulder as she

puttered around in the kitchen.

“Helene Upchurch,” she said, releasing his hand. “These are just precious. How in

the world did the woman make the bee so lifelike? It’s art.”

“Is the Muffler-Man art?” Ransom asked, catching her off guard.

“Well, it sure is big,” she answered.

“So big isn’t art?” He asked.

“I didn’t say that, but there’s something repulsive about that creature to me. You

know? As if the man who built him was trying to make the biggest phony man. Like for

the Guinness World Record or something.” Helene fingered her towels, looking at

Sunday’s scene where the little bee was dressed in a bonnet for church.

“I actually knew the old man who made him. He started off with the idea of

attracting customers; he just couldn’t ever finish. He’d get just the right part for the

shoulders or whatever, but he never was satisfied. It became an obsession with him; it ran

his mind half crazy. His sons had to run the shop while he traveled around to junkyards

collecting auto parts. I don’t think the Guinness folks were around then, I don’t know.”

“So he died without completing him the way he wanted to?” Helene asked.

“Oh no. He just up and disappeared one day. Folks say they’ve seen his work

73

from here to Chicago. There’s one up in Arkansas made entirely of tires. It could be his,

who knows?” Ransom took the towels from Helene and wrapped them in a little white

bag.

“So what’s the point? Going around building giant men out of scraps?”

“What’s the point of a bee doing the wash? Or even those coconut heads? There’s

something for everybody, I’ve realized. Human nature.” He started to ring up the

purchase, stopped, and asked if $10.00 sounded about right.

“It’s a deal,” Helene said. As Ransom rang up the sale she looked out the door.

The peacock on the screen door looked even better from inside the store. The fading light

cast a muted purple to the sky that set the bird off as if it was ready to spread its fan.

74

DOMESTIC STUDIES

Chapter I

They were on their way home from the movie theater. Helene was driving; it was

just getting dark and Jack didn’t like to drive at dusk, his eyes played tricks on him.

Helene drove in her reckless way, talking about the movie, slowing down when she got

excited. Jack was quiet, listening to her recite her favorite parts. He hadn’t liked the

movie; it was too long, and unnaturally vivid. He had lost the thread of the plot early on

and had sat stupefied by the dazzling colors. As he listened to Helene he adjusted his

headrest and closed his eyes. He was a tall man, his lankiness giving way to heavy

knobs and angles His hair was thinning in front but still blond with hardly any gray to

give it that funny disreputable beach bum look that aging blonds often have.

“And when it finally started raining! Weren’t you waiting for that part?” Helene

asked, stopping at a red light, looking over at him. She had a sharp, heart-shaped face,

very pale, practically luminous in the growing darkness.

“What? Oh, yeah, the rain. Well, sure, I knew it was coming, I was just beginning

to wonder when,” Jack said. The movie had tired him as he watched it in the theater; he

had no interest in a post-mortem with Helene. He flipped the switch at the side of his seat

and leaned all the way back onto the headrest.

Helene accelerated quickly and took a left in a wide arc. Jack hated the way she

drove, like a foreigner just getting used to the streets, but not with a foreigner’s attention

to detail. They had lived in Tallahassee for twenty-two years yet she drove with a

confused absent-mindedness, leaning out the window to check street signs while waving

cars past with her thin arms. She said it was her poor sense of direction. Jack thought it

was her poor concentration, her approach to life that was too casual, too unwilling to pay

attention.

“I know you don’t like long movies, but this one was long in a good way, don’t

you think?” Helene asked. They were stuck behind a creeping car with Michigan plates.

These folks are lost, thought Jack. Now she’ll pull up beside them and offer help,

throwing all the traffic behind them into a stop. But Helene stayed in her lane, slowing

75

the car down to a crawl, following behind the Michigan car as if it were the head of a

cortege.

“Change lanes, they’re lost,” he said. But Helene continued to putter along,

waiting for him to answer her question.

“They could’ve cut out half of that movie. What was the point of extending it to a

false climax with the rain? After all, with the title, everybody knows it’s going to rain,”

he said. The position of Jack’s headrest gave him an unusual perspective of the street,

looking up at the cars flying past them, horns honking. “For God’s sake, Helene, change

lanes, we’re holding up traffic. But signal first.”

“I’ll just follow them to the next gas station, maybe they’ll pull over there. Should

I put on my flashers to let them know?”

“No. No flashers.” Jack turned his face away from the street and closed his eyes.

She couldn’t be stopped at this point. His head was throbbing and his eyes felt weak. He

thought of home as a faraway place down the end of a long, dark tunnel.

“Well, someone has got to help them,” she said.

“We’re not on the prairie. Look around you. Can they find food? Lodging? A

dirty movie, for God’s sake,” he said, his voice pulled tight with frustration. “Let them

be. I have a headache, get me home.” He was facing the roof of the car, his eyes

clenched shut. His ruddy skin had paled; the circles under his eyes stood out gray and

sickly.

Helene reached for her purse, sitting on the console between them. She rustled

around in it and came up with a bottle of aspirin. She tossed it onto Jack’s lap.

“Those dissolve in your mouth, that new kind, made for stress headaches,” she

said, and turned back to observe the Michigan car. “They have kids in the back seat,

Jack.”

“What do you want to do? Take them home with us?” Jack opened his eyes,

ignoring the aspirin.

“Yes, that’s right, take them home with us, sure. Can’t you just for once help

someone? What if we were in Michigan, lost, wandering around the capital? No one in

Detroit paying us the least attention.” Helene said, sitting up straighter in her seat.

“That would be Lansing,” Jack said, and regretted it. What was the point of this

76

absurd conversation, now off on a lecture about capital cities?

“What? Lansing? Oh, right, I’m not up on my capitals. But just think: Lansing.

Would anyone help us there? I bet Detroit would be friendlier.”

The big car in front had turned into a gas station and Helene trailed behind them,

a kind of motorist welcome wagon. Jack flipped his seat up and rolled the window down,

watching Helene as she strode over to the Michigan car. Children were piling out of it,

running into the tiny store. Helene went to the driver’s side of the car where a little man

in a flowered shirt got out. She leaned on the hood, “her mechanic’s pose,” thought Jack,

sitting in the car. He watched as a map was brought out and spread on the hood. The wife

got out of the passenger side, said something to her husband, and headed straight for the

store. She hadn’t even looked at Helene. Jack watched as Helene pointed to the map and

shook her head at the man. She began to gesture north, where the interstate was. Good,

thought Jack, she’s got that right. Put their asses on the Interstate and let’s go home.

The children came out of the store with cans of soda and candy bars. They stood

around, eating their candy and staring at Helene who had moved away from the man and

was leaning down talking to them. They looked dazed by her questions, probably just the

long car drive, Jack thought. But she did have an off-putting way with strangers. She

would go right up to them and act as if she belonged to their group, whatever it was. She

was probably telling them about all the times she had been lost. She was laughing now

and had moved back to the map. She folded it up and handed it to the man. He seemed to

be confused by her directions, and was pointing north, leaning his head in toward her.

She nodded and gave him a pat on the back. The wife emerged from the store carrying a

giant-sized bag of Doritos and clutching several strands of beef jerky. The man said

something to his wife and nodded towards Helene. The woman gave her a distracted half-

smile; the children were clamoring around her, grabbing for the Doritos. Helene suddenly

looked over to where Jack was staring out of the car window and waved him over.

“No,” he pantomimed, shaking his head and grabbing the top of it, wincing.

“Aww,” Helene mouthed back at him, her sharp face taking on the look of a consoling

parent. The man in the flowered shirt looked toward Jack and then reached out to shake

Helene’s hand. The family jumped into the car and left her standing, looking after them

as they crossed the street and turned north.

77

“Does your head hurt that bad?” she asked, getting back into the car.

“Yes. Can you take me home before any more missions of mercy? Then you can

come back out and search for lost and stupid people.”

“Home it is,” she said, merging into traffic.

Helene and Jack Upchurch’s house sat on a corner lot in one of the oldest

residential parts of the city. The houses were a mix of turn-of-the-century Victorian,

American Tudor, and neat bungalows. The Upchurch house was one of the few ranch

houses in the neighborhood. They had added a second floor to the east side, over the

kitchen, when their daughter was ten. It served as a bedroom and playroom for Jesse until

she moved out after high school graduation last year to go to Atlanta with her girlfriend.

The house with its cobbled-on upstairs addition didn’t fit in well with the neighborhood.

It was too wide; the 1950s dream of prosperity was blatant in its width, a declaration of

post-war boom times. But the Upchurchs had gotten a good deal for all the crassness: A

good neighborhood for their daughter and an escape from suburbia.

Helene had planted tea-olives leading up to the front door, and Jack felt

overwhelmed with the smell of them when he got out of the car.

“That smell will never get old to me,” Helene said, as she usually did when

walking up the path. “Tea-olive was such a better choice than gardenia. Imagine

gardenia?” Jack was a landscaper; he had his own business and brought Helene bits and

pieces of some of her favorite plants. Their yard was crowded in the spring like an

English garden with the causal look of plants placed randomly, swathes of daffodils and

corners given over to hyacinth. The idea, Jack had explained to her, was to make it look

haphazard. The real work was in achieving this. Spring would be here soon and it would

be the nicest yard on the block.

“Gardenia would swamp us out of the house. I can barely stand this tonight.”

Jack walked through the living room and into the small kitchen. In true ranch house style,

there was a cutaway between the dining room and kitchen, an area about four feet long

and two feet high; it served as a breakfast bar on the dining room side.

He leaned down to see Helene sprawled across the sofa, her purse still in her

hand. As he was reached for the aspirin Helene leaned forward and ducked her head.

“Jack. Did you have a Coke before we left?”

78

“No. Why?” He fumbled with the aspirin bottle, mashing down on the lid and

turning the bottle in a fluid motion. The lid didn’t budge. “Why do I close them?” he

muttered, shaking the bottle.

“Then who left this can here? It wasn’t here when we left,” Helene said. Jack

leaned down to peer at her. She was holding an empty can, tilting it this way and that,

holding it up to the light.

“You must’ve had one. Here, can you open this?” He walked into the living room

and handed the bottle to Helene. Jack watched as she popped it open; a magic trick

performed regularly for him—he could never get the secret move that released the catch.

“No I didn’t. I’ve been drinking Dr. Pepper. Two or three?” she asked, tilting the

aspirin bottle toward his open palm.

“Four. And leave that open, will you?” He put the aspirin into his mouth and went

back to the kitchen. He leaned over the sink and stuck his mouth under the faucet and

drank.

“Don’t drink out of the faucet. Here,” Helene said, following him and reaching for

a glass. He straightened up and waved it away. Helene replaced the glass and threw the

soda can in the garbage. She reached up into the cupboard for a dish. She brought down a

crystal nut dish, a little glass bowl that sat in a silver frame. The top of the frame curved

into a cursive V and a dainty spoon hung from the base of the V. She sat it on the counter

and emptied the aspirin bottle into it. “There,” she said, “how’s that for convenience?”

“Okay, but will they get stale?”

“I don’t think they get stale. Do they get stale?” she asked, moving back into the

living room. She sat on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her, inviting Jack to sit

down. He walked in and shook his head No, and sat in his recliner, clicking the television

on.

“I need to lean back and let the aspirin work.”

“Okay, you rest. What I need to do is brush my teeth. Popcorn.” She sat up and

dug around in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. Jack watched her peel the cellophane off

the pack and fold it a couple of times. She used this to pick at the particles of popcorn

between her teeth. She rolled little bits of popcorn around in her mouth and spit them into

her hand and then dumped them into the ashtray on the coffee table.

79

The second half of Jeopardy had begun; Alex Trebek was reading the categories. Helene

looked at Jack with a raised eyebrow. Would he take her up on a challenge? Double

Jeopardy was more fun to play, she thought. Jack said, “Okay”, and Helene dug around in

her purse.

“Here’s your clicker,” she said, tossing over a blue Bic cigarette lighter, She dug

some more and found her red lighter. The rules were simple, disregard the T.V.

opponents’ clicks, but get your answer in before they did—and more importantly, before

your spouse. They had agreed long ago to forego the “in the form of a question” rule and

to just blurt out the answer.

Helene moved to the end of the sofa to see the television better. She looked back

over her shoulder and asked, “Can you see okay?”

“Fine. Hush now, let’s see.”

Under the category “Animals” the answer came up. “These burrowing squirrels

live in vast underground tunnels.”

“PRAIRIE DOGS!” Helene clicked and yelled, slapping the side of the sofa.

“Damn, Helene, why do you have to yell? I can hear you.” Jack shot out, trying to

get his words in before Alex read the next question. The contestant got the answer right

and moved on to “Potent Potables.” “This beverage, made from the berries of the juniper

tree, is also the name of a card game.”

Jack flicked his lighter and answered, “Gin. Um, I thought this was Double

Jeopardy.” They played this way for awhile, answering the questions back and forth,

Helene usually yelling hers and Jack making fun of Alex with his air of intellectualism---

the disappointed look he got on his face when one of the contestants flubbed a question,

or stood blankly, staring at the screen. During the break for Final Jeopardy (Category:

“1960s Music”) Helene ran to their bathroom to brush her teeth and Jack used the other

bathroom off the dining room. As he washed his hands he heard the music for the Final

Jeopardy question playing in the living room. He walked in and stood in front of the TV.

The question on the bottom of the screen read: “Bob Dylan recorded The Basement Tapes

with this group who later went on to record hits of their own.” “The Band,” he thought.

Helene entered the room. “The Band!” she yelled, jumping toward Jack. Before Jack had

a chance to tell her, “Yes, I said it in my head, I didn’t see you come in,” they both lifted

80

their heads at a sound from the bottom of the stairs.

A wiry girl in overalls stood on the bottom step. She had black hair that stood up

from her head in an old-fashioned G.I. cut, one that had been allowed to grow straight

out. She looked like she had just woken up.

“Hey, you must be Ma and Pa,” she said, stepping down and walking into the

kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and brought out a Coke and a pre-wrapped slice of

cheese.

“Who are you?” Jack asked, moving toward the kitchen.

“Where’s Jesse?” Helene asked, following him. They stood in a knot at the

entrance to the kitchen next to the stairs.

“I’m Drew,” the girl said. She pulled one side of the plastic covering on the

cheese down and was using her bottom teeth to scrape the cheese away from the other

side.

“Oh! You’re Drew! Yes, yes, she’s told us,” Helene’s voice struck out shrill and

small.

Drew laid the empty plastic sheet on the counter and lifted up the container of

aspirin. “Mints?” she asked.

Jack reached out and grabbed the bowl before she could get a handful.

“Um, those are, well, aspirin. Never mind them,” he said, putting the bowl on the

stovetop. He realized how ridiculous this must seem to her, a bowl of aspirin in a mint

dish, or whatever it was.

The girl laughed and said, “Jesse didn’t exaggerate, did she?” She walked past

Helene and Jack and into the living room. She sat in the recliner and began to flip through

the channels. Jack looked at Helene expecting to see a look of vexation on her face.

Instead, she looked fascinated. “Oh brother,” he thought.

They walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. Jack thought how typical

they looked, the girls’ parents receiving the girls’ boyfriend. And Drew did look like a

boy. The only hint that she was a girl was the smooth face, slightly budding breasts, and

delicate bones. She looked like a waif from those corny pictures in the 60s, big-eyed

urchins clutching dolls, feet bare. He imagined in her get-up she probably fooled people,

though. She was wearing a navy blue grease-monkey suit with the name DeWayne

81

stitched in red on the small rise of her breast. She had on those boots that all the young

folks were wearing, the black combat boots. (Wasn’t that an insult in childhood? Your

mother wears combat boots.”) The laces didn’t reach the top of the boots; they were left

untied, strips of orange rawhide, curled stiffly against the black leather.

“Is Jesse sleeping?” Helene asked, leaning forward to block Drew’s view of the

TV. “We didn’t expect y’all. She had mentioned something about a visit next month. If I

has known you were coming I would’ve had supper ready.”

“Yeah, she’s wiped out. We ate the whole way here,” Drew said, moving her head

over to catch something on the screen.

“You did?” Jack asked, at a loss for conversation. A boy would be easier to talk

to, he thought. Better mannered in another man’s house. He wouldn’t ask a boy what he

had eaten on the drive down from Atlanta. He would ask about the car.

“Krystal burgers, a whole tub of ranch dip and chips.” She took a long swallow of

her Coke and let out a satisfied sigh.

“So, you parked in back? How’s it running?” Jack asked, getting up and walking

to the window above the kitchen sink. There sat the truck they had bought for Jesse,

parked next to the tool shed on the grass. There was an alley that ran behind their house;

all of the old streets in this part of town had dirt alleys that ran behind them. It was a

holdover from the time the slop man had come around, picking up slops for his pigs.

“Yeah, I drove the last hundred miles. Probably needs an oil check, we’ll do it

tomorrow.” She was at his elbow, peering out the window with him. She wasn’t very tall,

a bit shorter than Helene. The bristles of her hair created a roundness to her head that

didn’t exist. It was an unflattering haircut; she had a nice oval face that was dominated by

the Charlie Brown roundness of the cut. Jack wondered what she would look like with a

little more hair. Did she cut her hair to keep the boys away?

“Is Jesse going to sleep through? Helene asked from behind them. “I think I’ll go

wake her up, she’ll wish she hadn’t slept.”

Drew turned to look at her and yawned. “No, don’t do that, she was really wiped

out.” She backed up from the window and looked at Helene who had to back up from

where she stood right behind them. “I’m going for a walk,” she said, pulling a

herringbone cap from a pocket of her overalls. She sat the cap on her head at a sporty

82

angle. “I need some air.”

“Oh, come back to the living room and rest, why don’t you?” Helene asked.

“I’ve been sitting in the truck for hours, I need to stretch.” She adjusted the cap on

her head, pulling it down to cover one eye.

“Cute!” Helene said, and then backed up, embarrassed.

“Thank ye, ma’am,” said Drew, flipping the cap up with a flourish. Jack burst out

with a loud laugh, startling Helene, who was performing some kind of weird curtsy in

response to Drew’s gallantry.

After Drew left Helene crept to the top of the stairs, listening for Jesse. She

looked back down at Jack with her index finger to her lips. Jack sighed and went back to

his recliner. Drew’s open Coke sat on the coffee table. He lifted it, expecting it to be

heavy with soda, he hadn’t noticed that she had drank that much. His hand flew up with

the empty can too fast and too high. He felt silly and looked around the living room.

“Helene, come on down and let her sleep, you heard Drew,” he said in a loud

whisper. The stairs made a creaking sound. He saw Helene’s shoes, then her legs, her

torso and finally all of her, standing at the bottom of the stairs. He had a fleeting thought

of her coming down the stairs naked, revealing parts of herself, slowly.

Chapter II

Jack woke up to the smell of bacon. Helene wasn’t in bed. Since Jesse had left she

had had these flutters of domesticity, getting up early and cooking huge breakfasts. Then

he remembered, Jesse was home. He slipped into sweat pants and pulled a tee shirt over

his head. He quickly peed, brushed his teeth. When he got to the kitchen it was Jesse who

stood at the stove, one of Helene’s frilly aprons around her waist.

“Jess!” He walked over and hugged her gently, the bacon was spattering and he

didn’t want to nudge the spatula that was in her hand. She put it down and gave him a

bear hug.

“Daddy.” She tousled his hair, calling him bedhead.

“Don’t rub it too hard, I need every strand,” he joked. His receding hairline was a

joke in the family. He had been proud of his thick blond hair. Jesse had inherited the

83

color, but her hair had the wispy texture of Helene’s dark hair. She looked like a mother

from a 1950’s sitcom with the apron. She had inherited the clean, sharp lines of Helene’s

features. Somehow, Jack thought, this look had come back, that pared away, hard look to

the features—not hard, tough, hard economical.

Drew was sitting at the little table chewing a matchstick. She was wearing the

kind of cardigan that Jack had always thought of as an old man’s sweater. It was gray

with a darker gray ribbed down the front. It had baggy pockets that could be seen from

the inside, little pouches, when the sweater fell open. Under the sweater she wore a tee-

shirt with a picture of a Nascar automobile. She had on her boots again with stiff blue

jeans.

“Good morning, Drew. I can turn up the heat if you’re cold,” she said.

“He’s always cold,” Jesse said and slid over in her stocking feet to rub Drew’s

shoulders. Why did she call Drew “he”? It had confused Jack at first. Helene had thought

that Drew was a boy when Jesse first mentioned her on the phone a few months back. She

had hung up the phone, excited, and told Jack that Jesse had finally found a boy. She had

been seeing girls since 10th grade, had moved to Atlanta after a girl. When that didn’t

work out she had stayed, going from one relationship to another. Helene didn’t want to

hear about it. Drew was the first girl Jesse had officially brought home to meet them.

“Where’s your mother?” Jack asked Jesse as she poured his cup of coffee. She got

the cream out of the refrigerator and sat it by him.

“She went to the grocery store. She’s planning a big dinner tonight,” Jesse said,

taking up the eggs and bacon.

“All your favorite foods, huh? Better save some room then, Drew, Helene will

cook all day.” Drew had cut her runny fried eggs up and mixed bacon in with the mess.

She was scooping a dark piece of toast against her fork, soaking up the yolk. Jack pushed

the cream toward her.

“I take it black,” she said, looking up from her plate at him. With her dark eyes so

serious, this seemed to be some kind of symbol-laden statement. “Black coffee more

manly?” Jack thought as he looked down at his cup of caramel-colored coffee and stirred

it, sipping a bit out of the spoon, hesitating, then thinking, “To hell with it, I have the

penis to sip from a spoon.”

84

“Drew likes his coffee black, his toast burnt, and his eggs practically raw,” Jesse

said with a laugh, sitting down to her plate. She had scrambled an egg for herself and had

a juice glass filled with Coke.

“At least I take my caffeine concentrated, not like that soda you’re drinking,”

Drew croaked out. She ate with the kind of intensity that Jack associated with farm hands

or convicts, completely absorbed in getting the food to her mouth.

When Helene called them all to supper Jesse and Drew dawdled upstairs. It was

one of her pet peeves; if someone cooks for you you should be at the table when the meal

is served. She sent Jack to call them down but wished she hadn’t. He stood at the foot of

the stairs and yelled up, “Your mother’s starting to twitch down here. Come on and eat.”

Starting to twitch? She ran her hands over her arms, felt a fleck of dried batter on the

back of her hand and picked it off. Did she twitch? Like that boy who bagged groceries at

the local grocery store, the one who occasionally barked out obscene words? He had

pushed her buggy out for her this morning, his head jerking to the side muttering,

“Assballs, ballsass, ballast…” on and on. Well, she had control over her tongue, at least.

But why would Jack say she twitched, and especially in front of Drew? It was hard

enough getting the girl to even acknowledge her, and here he was letting her in on his

private wit: a sect that Helene saw growing in her mind: the guys at work, Jesse certainly.

Now Drew.

She was at the table when they all tromped in, Jesse looking smart in a little shift,

a kind of Jackie-O slip of a dress. She wore a brooch near the neckline depicting a

bucking horse and rider. Drew had changed from her jeans into what looked to be a pair

of old man’s plaid pants, polyester with checks of orange and brown. On top of this she

was wearing an orange cotton shirt with a little yellow bowtie pinned to the neck. She

had changed from the combat boots to flat black sneakers.

Jack held Jesse’s chair for her, it was a tradition that went back to her childhood

when they went out to restaurants, one that he drew on at holidays and birthdays. He put

his hand on the back of Drew’s chair but she beat him to it, pulling the chair out swiftly

and throwing her leg over the seat, straddling the chair as if it were a stool at a diner.

“You two look nice, all dressed up for supper,” Helene said, touching the little

silver cross that dangled around her neck. “Jack will you say the blessing?”

85

Jack bent his head and began intoning the family blessing, one that Jesse would

usually fill in with just a word or two. She had heard it all her life; it was so familiar that

she hardly connected it to her atheism. Like hearing a family tale that you’ve heard over

and over but don’t consider questioning. Drew sat staring at the three of them, eyes wide

and amused.

Helene looked up after the Amen to tell Drew to help herself but she had already

stabbed a chicken breast and was reaching for the mashed potatoes. “I don’t say grace as

a rule,” Drew said, pulling the crisp skin off the chicken and draping it into her mouth.

“Even the ‘Good food, good meat’ one is a little much, you know?” She looked at Jesse

who was pulling the skin off of a thigh and setting it on the edge of her plate. “Give me

that if you don’t want it,” she said to Jesse and reached over and popped it into her

mouth. “I mean, what has ‘God’” curving her greasy fingers in parentheses, “got to do

with this meal? And if there is a God, which is a ridiculous fairytale, would he give a care

about fried chicken?” She laughed, looking at Jesse to join in.

“Well, it’s just a tradition, you know. I don’t let it bother me anymore. What am I

worried about anyway, going to hell?” Both of the girls sputtered at Jesse’s joke,

avoiding Jack and Helene’s eyes. Helene looked at the two of them, plates full of the

dinner she had spent hours cooking, sopping up gravy with their biscuits.

“Humility has its place, don’t you think?” Helene said, aimed at no one, floating

the idea across the table, hoping Jack might catch it and continue.

“Right,” he said, “and you know, my parents always said the blessing but hardly

ever went to church. But they had gone through the depression; who wouldn’t be thankful

for a table full of food?” Leave it to Jack, Helene thought, to connect spirituality with

economics.

“How about, ‘Thank you dear Corporate Lord for this hormone-injected

chicken?’” Drew countered, happy to be with Jesse in their teasing of her parents.

“Ha! Or this one, ‘Thank you, you Earth-fuckers, you Global Blood-suckers,’”

Jesse added. For a moment Helene imagined that they were going to go on with this

exchange, topping one another with more and more elaborate attempts at annoying her.

She thought to herself, “How about ‘Thanks, Mama, thanks, Mrs. Upchurch, for a fine

meal?’”

86

Drew looked at Jesse and said, “Your mom really knows how to cook, though.

Thanks, Mrs. Upchurch, I was just teasing about the hormones. This chicken tastes like it

was scratching in the yard this morning.”

This sudden turnaround caught Helene by surprise and she answered too quickly,

responding to the flattery and forgetting the other things the girls had said. “Well, they do

put hormones in them, it’s true. But I’m glad you enjoy the food.” She immediately felt

as if she had played into Drew’s hands. What was this girl up to? She shook her head and

changed the subject. “Are y’all going out tonight? You look so nice, I bet there’s a good

band playing somewhere in town.” This was bland, neutral ground. They could talk for

hours about bands and dancing.

“On a Sunday night? Dream on, Mom. The only places to go are the college bars

and who wants to watch frat boys puke on each other?”

“Jesse, not at the table. Please,” Jack said. Not only was the subject revolting, but

Helene had an irrational fear of vomiting. The mention of it would put her into a

hypochondria that could last for days. She might go around asking if the food in the

refrigerator smelled okay, if he was feeling just the slightest bit queasy, would he feel her

forehead, did she have a touch of fever. She imagined that if someone, somewhere, was

known to have vomited, it was sure to come her way. This even though she was rational

enough to know that boys drinking too much beer equaled sickness. It was the word, the

image, that attacked her reason.

“Sorry, Dad, I wasn’t thinking,” she apologized, Jack being the proxy for this

kind of thing. Helene’s fear was so overwhelming that to apologize directly might even

nudge her further into a panic.

“Great! We can attack mythology, you two seem cool with that, but the cliché of

frat boys is off limits. Interesting,” Drew said, pouring more tea into her glass.

“Mom has this thing about you-know-what. Let’s drop it,” Jesse said. She

remembered telling Drew that her mom had a phobia of vomiting. It was one of the few

things that Helene couldn’t talk about. Jesse didn’t want to be questioned every hour or

so on whether her stomach felt like it had an apple core in the pit of it, or some such

ridiculous notion her mother would latch onto in her fear. Best to let it go before it

became a prowling fear that encompassed them all.

87

“Well, vomiting has never been a subject I wanted to talk much about, myself,”

Drew said. “I mean, how much can you say? There’s the awful retching that’s really

worse than the actual puking, you know? But, sure, let’s drop it.”

Jesse put her fork down and glared at Drew.

“What? Did I break a rule? I was just agreeing with you, Jess.” Drew looked up at

Helene who had pushed her chair back from the table. “I won’t talk about regurgitation,”

Drew said, “if it bothers you. Great tea by the way,” she said, lifting her glass into the air.

Helene went into the kitchen and started filling a pan with dishwater. Who had

brought this girl up anyway, bikers? Romans? Her initial pleasure at Drew’s charming

insouciance had given way to annoyance. Grabbing chicken before anyone else and going

straight for the breast. Making jokes, egging Jesse on with their mutual atheism, all an

act, she was sure, just to piss her off. Jack had tried to put a stop to that awful subject

(and there really may be a stomach virus around the campus that would find its way to

her home) but he seemed pretty at ease with Drew’s churlishness. She had thought about

the girls maybe helping her with cleaning up, but Jack should’ve suggested it. Why did

he just sit there, chomping away like a big-toothed horse? She scraped the grease from

the frying pan into a coffee can she used to collect it in. She never reused it, but would

wait until it was full and put it into the garbage can outside.

From the dining room Helene heard Jesse’s voice raised in anger. Jack was

mumbling something, a kind of drone that underlay Jesse’s outbreak. Drew was quiet;

unusual, she thought. But then again she was probably sitting there gloating over the

ruined dinner, sucking on a chicken leg. She dried her hands and went back into the

dining room.

But Drew wasn’t at the table. Jesse was in tears and Jack had pushed his chair

back and crossed his arms. Helene started to clear the table and Jack jumped up to help

her.

“Sorry, Helene. I don’t know how to talk to these girls,” he said, cutting his eyes

over to Jesse. Jesse was sniffing into her napkin, a damask one that had belonged to

Helene’s mother. Helene walked over and snatched the napkin out of her hands.

“Go get a tissue, these napkins are fifty years old and not for your snot.” Dinner

was over, Helene thought. Let’s bring out the ugly words. Her stomach was in knots and

88

she hoped that Jesse would go upstairs to cry. She was sick of listening to her.

“But you ran Drew off! He left and said he knew when families were getting

weird and that y’all were the weirdest he had ever seen. Can’t you be normal just once in

your life?” She jumped up from her chair and ran upstairs.

“Jesse! Come back down here,” Jack shouted. He had a stack of plates in his

hand. “She had no call to speak to you like that,” he said to Helene.

“Well, when her father tells her and her, um, whatever the hell she is---her friend,

that I am twitchy, what do you expect?” She carried the glasses into the kitchen and eased

them down into the dishwater. Us, a weird family? she thought.

“What are you talking about? Twitchy? I said twitchy?” He followed her into the

kitchen with the stack of plates.

“You said, and I quote, ‘Your mother is getting twitchy.’ Give me those plates;

aren’t you going to scrape them?” she asked.

“Getting twitchy is not ‘twitchy.’ It’s a whole nother thing. Everybody gets

twitchy. I get twitchy. Shit, the Dalai Lama gets twitchy. You aren’t twitchy like shaky or

strange.” He sat at the kitchen table watching her scrape the leftovers into the garbage

can, her pointy chin raised in defiance. She really was twitchy, he thought. That was the

perfect word for her. Of all the adjectives he could’ve come up with, twitchy was the

best. What if he burst out with “Let Me Call You Twitchy, You Belong to Me”?

After crying in her room Jesse had gone out looking for Drew. She came back

alone, in a black mood, and lay on the sofa. Jack had gone to bed early, the evening had

exhausted him. He fell asleep wondering how to tell Jesse that Drew would have to

straighten up (the thought made him laugh) or leave. He dozed off imagining Drew with

boxing gloves on, wiping her nose with the heavy leather and prancing around the dining

room.

Helene sat up with Jesse, trying to reconnect with her after the evening’s outburst.

She knew better than to bring up their argument directly. She had to skirt around things

with Jesse. She talked about her latest project, decorating a local businessman’s home. He

was the worst kind of client, picky but with no real sense of style. She often worked for

clients who doubted their own style but usually it was just misdirected; they had the sense

of style, the idea, they just needed someone to help them realize it. Jesse listened to her

89

mother’s complaints while staring at a music station on TV.

“So, why don’t you tell him to find another decorator?” she asked, not looking at

her mother. She didn’t even consider her mother a decorator. One of her dad’s clients had

visited and liked the décor in their house and had asked for her help. This led to other

jobs, usually for clients as weird as her mother, with an attachment to the fifties that was

more than chic. It was obsessive. She was still angry with her mother and couldn’t look

her in the eye. Her own anger was somehow an embarrassment she would carry until they

apologized to one another. The outburst at dinner hung in the air between them; it was an

entity, a force that Jesse expected her mother to dissolve. Like her father, she found

talking about her emotions difficult. They both relied on Helene to name the emotions

that ricocheted among them, to prescribe a solution, one that they would usually reject.

But at least Helene would get the ball rolling toward a truce.

“He’s willing to pay a good deal of money but I’m beginning to think he hired me

just to show off and to create some kind of pimp/bachelor pad. He has this great

collection of Japanese porcelain that he inherited from his father but you know where he

has it? In his study, stacked on shelves and bookcases, a big blur of blue and white. He

doesn’t want me to place it around the house, you know? I think he’s a hoarder and I’ve

worked with hoarders before. Even if you make some headway with them, a month later

things are back the way they were.”

“So, let him have his way. If he goes back to hoarding what do you care?” Jesse

wasn’t willing to give suggestions, she thought of the businessman uncharacteristically,

as an ally, someone on her side against her mother. She imagined him staring her mother

down and stamping his feet.

“Jess, he wants me to put leopard skin in his bedroom. Fake, of course, but I told

him pieces of his collection would look stunning in there with maybe antique white walls

and some bark-cloth curtains. I’ve got a set of cool ones with a bamboo design and a hint

of blue around the leaves. He’s not buying it. The money’s too good to turn down, but I

don’t think I can do it. What if he shows all of his business friends my work? Leopard

skin chairs, cushions, bedspreads. Rugs!” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up

towards the ceiling.

“Then they’ll ask for your number. What more do you want?” Jesse wiggled her

90

hand as if to wave the smoke from her mother’s cigarette away. It wasn’t near her but she

couldn’t resist conveying her annoyance. As a child she had loved the smell of a freshly

lit cigarette. The match smell had its own odor and then that first wave of blue smoke had

a homey fragrance. What she hated was the accumulation of cigarette butts. Her mother

would let them pile up in ashtrays, drop them in empty soda cans, wet them under the

kitchen faucet and toss them in the garbage. The smell clung to her clothes. Jesse was

surprised that her clients didn’t reject her simply from the smell.

“Oh, who knows what I want? One thing I would like,” she leaned forward to try

to catch Jesse’s eye, “would be to make up with you.”

“Mom, let’s drop that whole thing. I’m worried about Drew, he doesn’t know

Tallahassee, and he’s out walking the streets.” She was still looking at the TV---a girl

was thrusting her pelvis toward the camera, wearing what looked like a Wilma Flintstone

costume. Her voice was babyish and lisping. She was singing, “Do you want it like this

baby, or how about this?” getting down on all fours.

“You want to turn that off so we can talk?” Helene wondered where the women

were who used to march about this kind of exploitation and then realized that they were

getting old like her, tired and not able to formulate an argument against their daughters’

catchphrases of “female empowerment” and “goddess worship.”

“I’m not ready to talk.”

“Let’s give it a try. It won’t hurt.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, Mom, it will hurt. Face it, you don’t like the person

I’m in love with. It’s obvious. Drew sees it, I bet even Dad sees it.” She sat up to draw an

afghan around her feet. She looked toward her mother, in the foot or so of space that

surrounded Helene’s head.

“I don’t like Drew? Drew doesn’t like me. Come on, Jesse, get real.”

“Get real? Okay, here’s my reality. I bring the love of my life home with me. My

mother freaks out at the word “vomit.” Drew feels like a heel for upsetting you. You go

into the kitchen and start banging away in there. We’re in the dining room, listening to

your tantrum. Dad just sits there.”

“She doesn’t feel like a heel. She pushed the issue and you know it. Don’t deny

that, Jesse.”

91

“Look, mother, has it ever occurred to you that some people aren’t up on just

what isn’t allowed around you? That vomit is a word that makes you psycho? That you

expect everyone to think the way you think?”

“I bet you told her about the vomit thing,” Helene said, feeling the bit of supper

she had eaten rising in her throat.

“So, he knew. But he didn’t know it was so serious. Maybe I didn’t tell him all of

it. You’re going to blame him for that?”

“No, I won’t. But tell her that we are pretty easygoing around here. She doesn’t

have to prove anything. Okay?” After all, Drew had said Earth-fuckers and she hadn’t

flinched. Jack had even seemed to brighten at the word. She wondered if he had realized

that in Drew’s book, he might just be considered an Earth-fucker himself.

Chapter III

Jack woke to the brrr of the telephone. It nudged him awake; it was a noise that

confused him for a moment. There were so many new technological sounds—pager,

computer, cell phone, that he often mistook what it was that was calling for his attention.

In his youth telephones rang with a kind of pleading jangle that couldn’t be ignored. One

that sounded at 4:00 a.m. was like a snake, coiled to strike. He reached for the bedside

phone and swung his legs to the floor.

“What?” he answered, and his brusque voice woke Helene, who had slept through

the soft call of the telephone’s ringing.

He sat listening to the voice on the other end, hunched over on the side of the bed,

the sheet wrapped around one of his legs. Helene moved up next to him, kneeling, trying

to get her ear next to the receiver.

“Okay. I’ll be there,” he said and hung up. He stood to get dressed, Helene getting

up with him.

“What? Who was that?” She was starting to pull her clothes on, following him to

the closet where he reached in to get his shoes.

“Drew got herself picked up by the cops.”

“Picked up? For what?”

92

“Suspicion of burglary she said.”

“That was her? Is Jesse here?” She left the room, her nightgown sweeping over

the sweat pants she had pulled on.

Jack stepped into he bathroom, threw cold water on his face and rinsed his mouth.

He looked briefly into the mirror, shook his head, and went to find Helene.

Jesse was sitting up on the sofa where she had fallen asleep waiting up for Drew.

Helene was tucking her nightgown into her pants, explaining that Drew hadn’t been

arrested, surely, or there would be bail. She turned to Jack.

“Is there bail? Did she say anything about money?” Helene asked.

“First she started ranting about the jail, how they had made her take her clothes

off and get doused with some chemical,” he said, looking at his wife and daughter. They

were a tableau of worry, both of them suspended in crouching positions; Jesse rising up

from the sofa, her shoulders sharp and jutting out from her tee shirt, Helene leaning over

her, looking at Jack with raised eyebrows.

“Chemical? Burglary?” Jesse was coming awake, running her hands through her

hair.

“Suspicion, that’s all. If they thought she’d done it, I doubt she would be calling

for a ride.” He had his keys in his hand and resisted the urge to jungle them. Since the

call had come he had had the strange feeling of being awakened to get an errant son out

of trouble. It felt mildly satisfying, something he hadn’t experienced in his role of father.

“Can’t I get her?” Jesse asked, pulling her shift over her head. “Did she say you

had to come? I mean, specifically?

“No, she told me she had been picked up and I told her I’d be there.” He was

ready to go, why did these women have to know every word of a conversation? Were

there hidden meanings they thought they could ferret out, something beyond at the jail,

need a ride? And, anyway, didn’t they know that they would get a word-by-word account

of the night’s events once Drew got home? “I’ll have her back before you know it,” he

said, closing the front door behind him.

“Hey, wait!” Jesse shouted, stumbling, slipping her feet into her pumps as she ran

to the door. She opened it to see the headlights of his truck turning out of the driveway.

She looked back to Helene who was standing with her gown tucked into her pants, a

93

bulge around her waist.

On the drive to the jail Jack rolled his window down. The sky was still black but

there was a hint of steely gray around the eastern edge. The streets were empty except for

the occasional janitorial van and bread truck. He felt a strange elation; it had been years

since he had been up this early and out on the streets. The city had a lonesome look; it

needed light and bustle to come alive. He felt in sync with it, a kind of secret partnership.

He turned down Tennessee Street and headed out toward the concrete behemoth that was

the county jail.

The jail was encircled by chain-link fencing and topped with razor wire. Jack

parked in a visitor’s space and had a brief flash: who else would park at the jail? He

locked the truck, realizing he was probably in the safest neighborhood in the city. But

what if someone broke in and he was accused of leaving his valuables out to entice? He

looked back at his old truck and snorted. He had to enter the jail through a series of doors.

He was stopped by a sleepy looking officer sitting behind a desk. Next to him was a

metal detector gated over his desk and attached to the wall.

“I’m here to get a Drew. Picked up on Monroe Street?”

“You got a last name?” The officer roused himself and started looking through a

sheaf of papers.

What was her last name? Jesse had told them. He remembered it rhymed with

something, a flower or a bird. He looked above the officer’s head, concentrating on a

poster on the wall.

“Male or female?” The officer stopped his shuffling and looked suspiciously at

Jack.

“Female. A girl, but, you know these kids. Dressed kind of like for a party or

something. A bow tie?”

“Oh, her.” The officer rolled his chair back and crossed his arms. He had a barrel

chest that was edging toward fat under the arms and around the belly.

“Yes, she’s staying at my house. A friend of the family.”

“But you don’t know her last name?” the officer stood up and Jack was surprised

to see that he was only a little taller standing.

“I know her name, it’s on the tip of my tongue.” He pulled his cell phone out of

94

his jacket and held it away from him, looking at the number pad. The officer jumped and

came through the metal detector, setting off an alarm, holding his hand out like a traffic

cop.

“What are you doing?” he asked, backing away, dropping his arm when he saw

that Jack held a phone. “You’re in a jail, buddy. Got to be careful.” He went back through

the shrieking metal detector and leaned over to hit the button that quieted it.

“I was just going to call my daughter and get Drew’s name,” Jack said, “I didn’t

mean to startle you.”

“Too many crazy people around, you know?” the officer said. “Anyway, she’s got

an outstanding warrant from Atlanta. You’ll have to post bail to get her out.”

“Post bail? Can I do that here?” Jack felt like a city slicker at the rodeo. He knew

nothing about jail etiquette. The cop had thought he was pulling a weapon out of his

pocket. Jack imagined telling Drew about his brush with danger, the misunderstanding

about the phone. She would laugh that deep gravely laugh of hers and give him a

nickname. Desperado, Jack thought.

“No. Get a bondsman,” the officer said, handing Jack a sheet with Bail Bonds at

the head of a long list. Jack looked down the list, expecting to see a bunch of Italian

names. The list was mostly initials, AAA, B&B, with a few first names, Dan’s, Junior’s,

Tiny’s. Toward the middle of the list he saw Fields’ and suddenly Drew’s last name

popped into his head. Meadows.

“Meadows, Drew Meadows,” he said to the officer, “can I see her?”

“At 4:30 in the morning? Come back during visiting hours; get a bondsman.” He

picked up his papers and began putting them into order. He looked back up at Jack and

nodded toward the exit.

Walking out to his truck Jack though: Now if I was that officer would I want

someone asking questions; what’s the policy, what do I do? Or would I want someone

who breezed in as if the jail was a second home? Who knew the cops by name and had

the procedure down. If cops hated criminals so much, he thought, it wouldn’t hurt to treat

the law-abiding with a little more respect, show them that they were appreciated for not

crowding the jail.

He sat in his truck and looked at the list. Could he call them at 4:30? Did folks do

95

that, call in anytime, like you would for any other emergency? He pulled his cell phone

out of his pocket, looking around to see if there were any signs posted forbidding the use

of phones in the parking lot. He saw the big wooden signs spaced around the chain-link

fence. He dialed Field’s and got an answering machine. He listened to the woman’s voice

drone out the office hours. He would have to wait until 8:00.

He pulled out of the parking lot, feeling more free than when he had arrived--he

wasn’t in jail; and somehow less free--this world of laws and rules made him feel

reduced. One false move could’ve gotten him shot. His fantasy of a friendly fatherly chat

with Drew had evaporated with the reality of the place. The jail wasn’t a small town lock

up where father and cop looked over the head of the rebellious youngster, remembering

their own adolescence. He made a mental note to tell Jesse not to move too quickly

around cops. To answer questions calmly.

Helene and Jesse saw Jack’s headlights flash across the window and ran to the

door. Jack walked up the path, explaining as he came to meet them.

“She has bail and the bonds-man doesn’t open until 8:00. I’ll have to post bond

for her to get her out.” The women parted for him, staring at his back as he made his way

to the kitchen.

“What bond? I thought you were going to pick her up,” Jesse said, following her

father.

“Some outstanding warrant from Atlanta; know anything about that?” Jack asked,

getting a beer from the refrigerator.

“On what charge?” Helene asked, leaning through the cut-out. She watched him

open the bottle with the tail of his shirt and throw the cap across the room, into the

garbage can.

“I don’t know what charge. They didn’t tell me, they seemed to think I was some

kind of criminal for not knowing much about their whole system.” Jack sat down at the

table holding his beer.

“Did you ask what charge? I mean, they have to tell you.” Helene circled the cut-

out and paced about the kitchen, looking down at Jack and Jesse at the table.

So, he goes all the way down there, insists on going, and he doesn’t know what

the charge is. She should’ve just gone, pushed past him and driven down to the jail

96

herself. Jack wasn’t good with people. He knew that, admitted it; he used it all the time to

get out of things.

“Jesse, what charge? What did she do in Atlanta?” Helene leaned into the table

and turned her head to her daughter, dismissing Jack and whatever he might have to add.

“She mentioned she had an old charge she needed to clear up. What was it?” Jesse

fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers, pouring salt on the tabletop and adding a bit of

pepper.

“Oh, yeah. It was a criminal trespass. That’s it,” she said, tossing a bit of salt over

her shoulder.

“A criminal trespass? Who’s property? When?” Helene bent down to peer into

Jesse’s face. Did they want to get this girl out of jail? Jack seemed set on calling the

bond’s man at 8:00.

“God, Mama, I don’t know all of it. She’s got this really bitchy mother, she had

her arrested for trespassing, something about missing things. She thought Drew had been

stealing from her.”

“Stealing from her?” Jack asked.

“Her mother?” Helene drew her breath in.

Jack wanted to call the first bail-bondsman on the list, AAA. Helene thought that

T.J. Fields was a better choice; hadn’t the name leapt out at him, sparking Meadows,

Drew’s last name. Jesse grabbed the sheet while they were arguing and dialed Field’s

number.

“I need bond for my friend,” she spoke into the phone. “They picked her up last

night for nothing--” She was cut off and waited, tapping her nails on the table.

“Well suspicion of burglary. But she didn’t do it, the cops admitted that.”

Helene watched as Jesse listened to the voice on the phone. Jesse was nodding

and saying umhum. Helene wanted to grab the phone and get this taken care of quickly.

Her daughter wasn’t much better than Jack at dealing with people. They expected that

everyone would tell them all the facts, all they needed to know. Helene knew that you

had to ask the unexpected things, things like, do you take a check? And what about

Drew’s parents, shouldn’t they be notified.

“Aren’t you going to call her parents? They’ll want to know that she’s in jail and

97

they can send the money,” Helene whispered to her.

“No way, unhuh. She’d rather rot in jail than have her mother involved, believe

me,” Jesse said, holding her hand up to silence her mother as she listened to the voice on

the other end of the phone. She nodded a lot and finally said, “Okay” and hung up. She

said the bonds-woman would call back with the bail.

“T.J.’s a woman?” Jack asked, taking the sheets of bonds-men the officer at the

jail had given him. He made a note next to Fields: woman.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Jesse asked. She went over to the window

and looked out on the budding azaleas. Soon the backyard would be a mass of pinks,

reds, and whites. Her dad had wanted just one color but Helene had insisted on mixing

the colors up. She had said that a blast of one color would be nice at first, but that soon

they would long for a different one to break the monotony. Her dad had given in to avoid

an argument.

“Are you planning on telling us what’s going on with her mother? If we’re going

to pay this, we need to know,” Helene thought of Jesse in jail in Atlanta, some other

mother taking care of things, leaving her in the dark. She expected she would have to

meet Drew’s mother one day, and how would that be, the woman feeling beholding to

her.

“I think Drew should tell y’all. It’s her mother.”

“But will she? When she called she didn’t even tell us she had an outstanding

warrant. She thought Jack would just breeze into the jail and sign her out or something.”

Helene didn’t think that Drew was secretive in a smarmy way; not a slick player. She

seemed to be removed from whatever it was that had happened between her and her

mother. As if it was part of a rejected past that didn’t require explanation. And she saw

that Jesse’s loyalty to Drew had superseded her loyalty to her. She walked to the cutout

and picked her cell phone up. Jesse and Jack watched her dial the number from the Bail

Bonds sheet.

“Yes, is T.J. in? Okay,” she said, avoiding Jack and Jesse’s eyes. She waited a

moment and then began talking again. “This is Helene Upchurch. My daughter called

about Drew Meadows. Yes, right. When can you have her out? I’ve got a job to do this

morning, do you think noon would work?” She waited and then finished the call with,

98

“Sounds good, I’ll see you there.”

“They’re letting her out at noon?” Jesse asked, coming into the living room.

“Yes, the bond is five thousand, we pay five hundred. She’ll meet us at the jail.”

“Five hundred. How can we be sure she won’t leave? Isn’t that what this warrant

is all about? How she didn’t show up in court the first time?” Jack asked, coming into the

living room with Jesse.

“Well she’ll have to go back to Georgia to clear the charge up. Jesse, can we trust

her to do that?” Helene asked.

“We were actually thinking about staying here in Florida. I didn’t say anything

yet, because we weren’t sure.”

“Staying here?” Jack asked. He stood outside the pair, his wife and daughter;

Jesse hopelessly in love with Drew, and Helene on one of her missions. She had been

angry with Drew last night and now here she was ready to take charge and storm the

gates. He thought of Drew with her little yellow bowtie sitting in a cell hanging onto the

bars. He grabbed his keys and headed for the door.

“I’ve got some work to do, I’ll go by Field’s and bring Drew home. See y’all

later.” He was gone before either Jesse or her mother could respond.

Chapter VI

Jack spent the morning at his nursery on the computer, ordering seed and

responding to client’s emails. His assistant, Mike, talked with him briefly, catching up on

things and then headed out to the greenhouse. Jack had ordered heirloom tomato seeds

the month before and was checking on the order. Tomatoes had to get started in March

and there wasn’t much time to wait for delivery. He surfed the net, looking at gorgeous

plump tomatoes that “taste like the tomatoes you remember.” He was sinking a lot of

money into the seeds, if the hype was true, he should get a good return on the investment.

At 11:00 he yelled goodbye to Mike, telling him not to expect him back and to knock off

early if he wanted.

Jack drove to the bondswoman’s office near the jail. It was a little white cottage

with matte red trim. It didn’t look like a bail bond’s office.

99

I NEED TO FILL THIS SCENE IN!

When Drew got to the truck she pulled on the locked handle, “Get me the fuck

away from these goobers.” She didn’t look at Jack, her eyes were shut and her jaw

clenched. He opened the door for her and walked around and climbed in.

“Hey, now,” Jack began, gearing up for a lecture, a follow-through to the fantasy

he had had earlier, his Now son, we’ve all been in trouble rendition of father-son

communication.

“Hey, shit! Do you know what I’ve been put through this evening?” Her deep

gray eyes looked bloodshot and dry.

“Where’d they pick you up?” He wanted to stay away from tears, keep to the

facts.

“I don’t know; I was window-shopping. A frame shop? Donut place across the

street?” She unpinned her bowtie and stuck it in the pocket of her checked pants.

“Drew. That’s a block away from the police station!”

“Yeah, I found that out when they picked me up. They stopped for a minute at the

station. Bet this town doesn’t even get the irony, does it? One block away!”

“What did they say? Up against the wall, something like that?” Jack asked.

“No. The fat one said, ‘Hells Bells Loretty. Man, where’d you get that suit?’”

Drew told this in an exaggerated southern accent, her head cocked to the side, her lips

twisted up into a reluctant grin, “His partner, you know, the one who’s like the tattle-tale

in grammar school? The asshole who follows the cop rulebook, grabbed my wrist and

twisted it behind my back. He kept saying ‘Quit fighting, quit fighting,’ and I kept

saying, ‘I’m not fighting, I’m not fighting.’ This went on for awhile until he had me

cuffed.”

“They put cuffs on you?” Jack asked, looking down at Drew’s arms, thin as a

boy’s and oddly boneless looking.

“Oh yeah. Then they did that hand on top of my head, duck down into the back of

the police car thing. And, just like on TV they say, ‘Watch your head now.’ Or at least

the fat one did. The other one was looking at my driver’s license and calling me in. He

says when he gets back into the cruiser, ‘Chris-tee-nah, who are you trying to fool with

that get-up?’ I wanted to say, “Fooled your partner,’ but I saved it to tell Jesse.”

100

“Christina?” Jack asked; she was so thoroughly Drew to him now that Jack didn’t

understand the reference.

“On my driver’s license. Growing up it was Tina; hated it. A hooker name, don’t

you think?”

“Hooker name? What, Tina? But there’s Tina Louise---you wouldn’t remember

her, and Tina Turner.” Jack said. Jack wondered if there was even such a thing as a

hooker name. Candy Darling, maybe, but wasn’t she some kind of underground film star

of the sixties? He felt out of his culture, the foolishness of the sixties seemed suddenly

weak beside this girl with her artless understanding of names equaling types.

“Well, it’s best you didn’t mouth off to them. Chalk it up to experience. Cops are

curious about what brings folks out after midnight, especially on a Sunday.”

They were home and Drew stood waiting by the truck until Jack looked back at

her. “Don’t tell Jesse about the handcuffs, okay?” she said, the lids of her eyes half-

closed as if concentrating real hard.

“Sure, hey, it’s your story. I’m just the chauffeur.” He moved up the walk.

“Oh, and thanks,” he heard her mumble before he opened the door.

The women were upstairs in Jesse’s room, listening to Drew give a step-by-step

account of her evening. When Drew had walked in Jesse had thrown her arms around her

and hurried her up the stairs. Helene had followed and he could hear her outraged voice

interjecting as Drew told her story. She’ll want to call the police station, he thought, make

a complaint, the whole bit. It would probably mean officers coming out to the house,

interviewing them. What would he answer to why Drew had been out so late? That his

family was weird and she had to escape? He hoped they didn’t ask him, he’d have to say

he had just met Drew, how was he to know that she was going to roam the streets? He

imagined pulling the cop to the side and whispering, Give me some time with him, officer,

you know how boys are at this age. I’ll straighten him up.

He sat at the kitchen table fiddling with a package of matches. The whole kitchen

was decorated in the style of the fifties. Helene called it “retro” to her clients, Jack

considered it leftovers from Helene’s family home. She had her mother’s green glass

dishes stacked on top of the cupboards around the room. They were a creamy green, you

might think they were even made of some rare stone before you touched them. The

101

kitchen carried this jade green theme throughout with bits of soft yellow here and there.

She had sets of graduated mixing bowls in a pie safe in the corner, all pale yellow

with green and white stripes around them. She had made yellow checkered curtains for

the window above the sink and on the long ledge were her collection of salt and pepper

shakers. A little boxer dog with I’m Pepper and a cat with I’m Salt written on their chests

stood on their hind legs. There was a Humpty and a Dumpty, perfectly oval eggs with

etched cracks in them. There was a salt tomato with its mate, a cucumber pepper. The

collection had overrun the ledge and Helene had put other sets on the little kitchen table.

The table itself was a sturdy enamel topped contraption. It was edged in the same green

as the dishes and had a drawer that pulled out at one end and a flat piece that Helene

called a dough board, that pulled out of the other. They had eaten breakfast at this table

since they married. The furniture came with Helene, along with her old linens and hooked

rugs.

Jack heard the women laughing and went to the foot of the stairs. “Anyone want

coffee?” he called up and waited for a reply. He walked up two stairs and called again.

He didn’t want to go into her room--if it was just Jesse, that would be okay. But he had

found that going into her bedroom when Helene was with her made him uncomfortable,

as if he was entering a female-only zone, a dressing room or beauty parlor. But Drew

being there lifted the limits of the zone, opened it up to a casual entrance.

He reached the top of the stairs and listened to their voices. Drew was relating

what had happened when she was stopped by the cops.

“Yeah, I thought; okay, who’s the Barney here,” Drew was saying, met by

laughter from the other two women. From where Jack stood at the edge of the door he

could see Drew, stretched out across Jesse’s bed. He saw Jesse’s arm draped across the

bed, she would be sitting up against the pillows. All he could see of Helene was her arms

folded on the edge of the bed. She must be sitting on the floor, he thought. Drew was

smiling, the tips of her bristly hair were picking up the light from the open curtains.

“But they weren’t mean to you, were they?” Helene asked.

“Not mean, Helene, just superior, you know? ‘We don’t allow dykes in this town’

kind of thing.”

Jack walked into the room, rapping on the door facing and clearing his throat.

102

“I’m going to put a pot of coffee on, anyone interested?” he asked. Jesse looked

up, the elegant lines of her face against the pillow looked soft and drowsy. He imagined

her in an add for a sleeping pill, cuddled down as she was with her quilt around her. Drew

patted the edge of the bed for him to sit down.

“No, I’ve got to call Mike and make sure everything is okay at the nursery. I’ll put

the coffee on,” he said, unable to sit on the bed and chat with the women; it would feel

like some kind of weird sleepover the way they were laughing and cutting up.

“Sure thing pardner,” Drew said, sitting up and rubbing her hair.

Helene sprang up from her crossed leg position on the floor. She was as limber as

a girl, her body unfolded itself into a standing position without a pause. “I’ll get the

coffee, you call Mike,” she said, moving out of the room.

In the kitchen Helene began to fill the coffee machine, humming a song. She often

sang when she cooked. It sounded to Jack as if she was humming Easter Parade, but he

couldn’t be sure. Helene had aunts and uncles who sang on the gospel circuit in the south

and lots of the songs she sang carried the same tune.

“She’s calling you Helene now, I see,” he said. He felt oddly disappointed that

Helene seemed to be all made up with Drew.

“Oh, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. She hasn’t called me anything until just now,

pardner,” she said, getting cups down from the cupboard. Jack stood in the doorway that

separated the kitchen from the dining area. He seemed to be moping around in the

doorway today, watching and listening to the three women in the house. He felt uneasy

with Helene’s ability to make up so fast, and didn’t trust it. She was fickle with her

friends; she could latch on to a new one quickly and then just as fast discard them. She

never had a good explanation about what they had done to push her away.

“Yeah, I think she sees me as her partner in crime, whatever the crime is,” he said,

heading for the bathroom to shower.

This is a bit of back-story that will come in dribs and drabs later:

When Jack first saw Helene striding across campus he had halted, intrigued by the

sight of her, the total anachronistic look of her. She was wearing what looked like yards

103

of deep blue velvet stitched onto feed sacks. The other girls on campus wore dull greens,

browns, and oranges, the 70s colors. And they wore them in masculine, uniform-like

designs; jackets, pants, even ties. Badly crocheted garments that looked like his mother’s

sofa throw. It was 1976, a cultural lull--the hippies had fled from the communes to open

health food stores, co-ops, leatherworks, metalworks, glassworks. Jack had laughed at the

idea of them using a perfectly respectable word like “works” and putting a spin on it; not

your regular capitalistic metal shop, this is a cooperative movement. The 60s and early

70s radicals had joined mainstream politics---Jane Fonda had married Tom

Hayden and tall ships were in Boston Harbor.

Who was the woman in the blue velvet, so out of sync with the times? Jack

watched her for a few days before he made his approach. Each day was an awakening.

She looked like she belonged on the cover of a Richard Brautigan novel, “Chloe and the

Partisans Resurface In Bangor” or something like that. Maybe she didn’t want to be an

old-time hippie, maybe it was something different. One day she crossed his path wearing

a pink tulle ballerina’s costume that went almost to her ankles. Under it she had on a

black leotard and tights. He reached out and fingered the fabric, asking her if she was a

dance student. She pulled away and looked up at him, her dainty, serious face very pale,

flushed pink. “No. I don’t actually dance, I just like this costume, it makes me feel like I

walked out of a Degas painting,” she said in a deeply southern voice. The voice surprised

Jack, he had expected something harder, artsier, whatever that meant.

“Oh, an art student?” Jack asked. He hadn’t seen her up close before, and her

face, so unlike the other girls’ on campus, made his heart twitch. Where did this creature

come from?

“Yeah, an art student. What about you?” She moved over to the brick wall where

he was leaning and hoisted herself up onto it. She crossed her legs like a trained dancer

would, thought Jack, pointing her toes.

“Business major. I know, I know,” he said, seeing the quick pinch of distaste in

her face, “not too popular, but I think it’s what I’m cut out to do, you know?”

“What makes you think so?” She pulled an apple out of a little string purse and

offered it to him.

“No thanks. Go ahead,” Jack said, watching her lips, dark as if she had been

104

drinking red wine, cover the yellow peel of the apple. “Well my Dad has his own

business and he’ll make me a partner, but I have to get a degree first,” he said. The red of

her lips wasn’t coming off on the flesh of the apple, they were naturally dark! His

stomach lowered to a place in his abdomen that was a repository for events like this.

“What kind of business? Hey, what’s your name anyway?” Helene put the half-

eaten apple into her lap, and wiped her hands on her gown.

“Oh, sorry. Jack Upchurch.” He now had to say ‘and yours’? without sounding

like some kind of Swavey Deboner. God he hated this getting to know girls stuff. It was

like walking through a minefield blindfolded. You never knew when you’d say the wrong

thing and never see them again. Helene reached her hand out to him and said, “Helene

Register, pleased to meet you,” in her soft voice and that was that.

After their first date he was in love. He took her to see Rocky and she fell asleep

before it was halfway over. After the movie, he woke her up, annoyed that she might

think so little of him; that he was someone to take her to a dark, cool place to nap. It was

early spring in Tallahassee, but the temperatures were already reaching the mid-80s. she

rustled awake, her skin very pale and her dark eyes flying open, looking lost in the stiff

theater seat. Seeing her so alone in the dark, groping to remember just where she was,

had pulled at some hidden factor buried deep inside his chest. Falling asleep during the

number one motion picture in the country didn’t seem so odd to him anymore.

Everything she said and did suddenly seemed tinged with a helplessness that needed his

care.

Her face was the kind that elderly people would comment on; you don’t see

beauties like that anymore. Helene seemed oblivious to her looks. She didn’t wear

makeup; her brows and lashes were dark enough. Her chin was pointy, Jack thought, but

then it charmed him all the more. She would lift it up into the air to make a point and he

would try to drag her off to the nearest place to make love. Her lips didn’t need color but

her face was so pale it seemed to be luminescent at times. She blushed often enough to

bring two fierce circles to her checks. The other girls on campus were sexy in a hard,

disco kind of way. They all seemed ready to line up and do the Hustle. Helene’s sexiness

came from her mannered oddness and her original approach to clothes. She seemed to be

on to something, as if she had insight that the other girls lacked.

105

106

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Wilma Diane Kelley was born in Remerton, Georgia, a small cotton mill village

outside of Valdosta, Georgia. She worked for many years in the garment industry. After

the birth of her children she stopped working in garment factories and began cleaning

houses. This gave her more time to be with her children. She has been married for 27

years and has two children, Leah, 26, and Michael, 19. She received her A.A. from

Tallahassee Community College and her B.A. from The Florida State University. Her

main interest is reading; she is currently studying The Great Patriotic War, Russia’s

defense over German invasion in WWII.